Review: Dismantled, by Jennifer McMahon

I'm going to be quick about this: I didn't like Dismantled. If you look on Amazon, it has several great reviews by other readers, but frankly, I don't understand why they were so enthralled.

The main plot of the novel surrounds Tess and Henry, a separated couple with a creepy daughter, Emma, who hears voices and sees an invisible person she calls Danner, who does naughty things. Tess and Henry, who used to be part of a group of self-righteous college students intent on dismantling pieces of society they thought were wrong, are hiding a non-secret; one of the other members of the group, Suz, was accidentally killed during the group's final summer together, and the other members covered it up. McMahon spends 422 pages covering the unraveling of the secret, and a side plot of further deception by another former group member.

My complaints are as follows:

1. All the characters are entirely unlikable. From Tess and Henry to their daughter and her horrid friend, not one of the characters remotely resembles a protagonist to me. I had no one to root for. Even the girl wasn't endearing or intelligent.

2. The plot was obvious. Since we already know the basic story, with 400 pages to go there are only so many things that can happen, right from the start. Surprise, it involved a love triangle. Again, not terribly creative. The side deception was slightly interesting, but really, it wasn't very convincing.

3. You could cut this book in *half* and it would be a lot better. I'm not one to be critical of a novel's length unless it's unnecessary, which in this case, it is. Events are re-hashed and beaten with a stick.

4. It's just not very creative. A love triangle, a dead girl, a cover up, and trickery/blackmail. I'm not saying that a book involving those plot points can't be good, but it needs something different to spice it up. Emma's voices and visions weren't enough. Part of the problem could perhaps be traced to the author's overuse of troubled young female leads.

As I said, many people seem to have liked this novel, according to Amazon reviews. The author has had reasonable success. I, however, did not.

Rating: one star. Uninspiring, lackluster characters in an overdrawn, tired plot.

Review: The Age of Orphans, by Laleh Khadivi

Laleh Khadivi won the Whiting Writer's award for this, her first work, in 2008. That, combined with the published description of the work, placed The Age of Orphans at the top of my library request list. As it turns out, 'Orphans' is nothing at all like what that summary leads the reader to believe. What I thought was going to be a straightforward coming-of-age tale of a Kurdish boy orphaned in a war turned out instead to be the beginning of an epic story the likes of which I haven't read or seen since The Last Emperor.

As the novel begins, Reza is a ten year-old child in the Zagros Mountains, an area swathed in war between newly-founded Iran and the Kurds who have always called the land their own. Following the circumscision ceremony that bridges Reza's allotted time in childhood to that of adult life, village men hear of Iranian soliders approaching, and leave the village en masse, bringing the boy-man Reza with them. After their inevitable horrific defeat, Reza is captured and brainwashed by the Iranian soldiers, confused to the point that he betrays his own countrymen and quickly rises to leadership in the Iranian army, aquiring fame, power, and a horridly beautiful wife who mocks his heritage until Reza reaches, and then passes, his breaking point, surrounded by both sides of his countrymen.

The crux of this novel, what makes it so beautifully crafted, is that Reza is not orphaned only once, but many times, in ways that an average person might not have consider in her daily life. Khadivi reveals this to us slowly, through descriptions of Reza's emotions and experiences, rather than using a lesser novelist's path of simply spelling it out to the reader. When Reza is literally ripped from his mother's breasts, he is orphaned of his mother, for upon entering the men's sphere, he has to leave her behind forever, although he is certainly not ready. The death of his father orphans him a second, more literal time, while the loss of his identity as a Kurd, a third. This may be the most crushing blow of all, for while he is no longer allowed to think as a Kurd, he is also never fully accepted as Iranian; this is the event that truly sets Reza on his path to destruction. He is doomed to forever be a child-man who has grown only into a man-child, always searching for love, comfort, and a country he can belong to, fighting his self-loathing and yearning for something he cannot understand or admit.

While the sadness of Reza's story is unfolding, Khadivi surrounds it with prose that brings the Kurdish mountains to the forefront of the mind's eye. Passages like

'a dead body floats down the street, wrapped in a white gauze, the faces of the pallbearers as somber as moneylenders who deal in daemons'

fill the imagination with visions of the culture and expansive suppression of Tehran. Her words bring the streets as well as Reza's inner turmoil to life in a way that stings like sand blowing in a wind storm. The swirling thoughts and feelings leave the reader not knowing whether to root for, or against, Reza's final acceptance of one culture over the other, and which of his selves he should abandon.

Because the novel wasn't what I expected at first, it took me a short time to become engaged, particularly because of the brutality of the Kurdish village life. However, once the fighting was over, and Reza's fate became clearer, I couldn't put it down. Reza's final decision of where his life will go, and his destruction of the one person who has come to embody all that has been wrong with his life, brings a surprising calmness and sudden clarity to the internal chaos he had increasingly experienced.

'Orphans' is supposed to be the first in a trilogy; I assume the next installment will follow Reza's children, who have scattered to the winds by the end of the novel. Whenever they appear, I will be in line to read them.

Rating: five stars. Brutally honest and deeply saddening story of a man lost to family, country and self.

Review: The Household Guide to Dying, by Debra Adelaide

Before I start this review, I have to tell you that I'm writing it with a face still damp from crying through the last quarter of it. I can't remember the last time I was so connected to a novel. I have read many, many excellent books, but this got very, very much under my skin.

In The Household Guide to Dying, Adelaide explores death on many levels, the first and most obvious of which being that of the main character, Delia, who is a thirty-something mother of two girls with terminal cancer. An author of many previous household guides, Delia is not one to take anything lying down, last of all her own death. As a way of coping, and controlling the situation, she begins writing her last book, an honest how-to manual on how to die in an orderly, dignified manner. What at first seems a strange choice becomes the venue for Delia to work through her own tragic relationship with death, which the reader finds out was established long before Delia's cancer did.

After the first few chapters, the novel splits into two interwoven parts, that of Delia's current situation, and the one from her past that she drives off to face alone one morning after getting her children off to school. We soon learn of Delia's other life, where she was a pregnant teenaged runaway who, in an attempt to find the father of her baby, ended up settling in a small town populated by circus performers, where her lover's family lived. While she didn't find the father of her child, she settled there and made a home for herself and her son, and met Archie, who we know ends up being her husband. The mystery of the book lies in the fact that this boy, Sonny, is not in the present-tense.

As Adelaide brings the reader closer and closer to finding the answer to what happened to Sonny, we also are rapidly approaching the end of Delia's life. She stops writing incessant lists on everything from how to organize her funeral to what arrangements should be made for her eight year-old daughter's wedding, and becomes immersed in the present, her beloved chickens (who are named after the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice), and the preparation of a final, loving prank on her curmudgeonly neighbor. The slower Delia becomes, the more intensely she experiences the world around her, and the more we as readers are allowed to experience her.

When the reader relives Sonny's fate with Delia, it is not so much the actual event that draws one in; Delia herself is too stunned, too numb to allow herself or us to comprehend the minute details. It is the aftermath, the decisions that must be made and carried out, that are the wrenching, heartbreakingly intimate moments that settle themselves inside one's soul. These scenes are the crux of the novel, for in these few opposing chapters, Delia flips from being the immature, flighty mother of a dying child to the mature, very much in control parent who is herself the dying child of another mother. The contrast is striking, to say the least.

Despite all of the book's sorrows, Guide is not a depressing novel. Adelaide has injected her writing with enough joy and humor, and Delia with the strength, to have an extremely uplifting tone without being at the same time overly sentimental. I was in tears at Delia's ending, but because I felt as though someone I cared about was allowing me to experience her final moments, not because Adelaide was wringing them out of me with schmaltzy prose. While the novel is fully resolved, it stops, as Delia's guide does, at the final moment, and leaves the aftermath to the living.

Rating: five stars. It is reminicent what Terms of Endearment would have been had Shirly MacLaine been twenty years younger, yet more profoundly personal, because the reader is left to create the mental images and emotions herself.

Review: Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger

As a huge fan of The Time Traveller's Wife, I have been waiting with bated breath for Audrey Niffenegger's second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. I particularly was looking forward to another carefully crafted literary maze; TTW was a beautiful catacomb of human relationships. I put my name on the waiting list at the local library as soon as I knew the release date, and was the first to receive a copy.

I'm not going to drag this out: I am disappointed. I think part of the problem is that Niffenegger set the bar very high with her first book, and having such an achievement as a first novel is difficult to match with the second.

In Symmetry, Niffenegger again creates a reality where the division of various realms is more of a porous membrane rather than a wall. The novel opens with the sad, early death of Elspeth, a forty-something year old woman, from leukemia. She leaves her husband, Robert, who works at a historic cemetary near their home, all of her personal effects, but wills the twenty year-old twin daughters of her own estranged twin sister the deed to the flat downstairs, given that they live in it for a year before selling it. The twins arrive a year later, carrying a great deal of baggage both inside and out, to a seemingly empty apartment, but of course, it is not empty; Elspeth is still there, unable to leave, but growing stronger by the day. As her ability to communicate with the living increases, so intensifies the strange relationship brewing between the girls, Robert, and Elspeth until a horrific turn of events forces each to reconcile their own desires with what it means to be human.

I can boil my disappointment down to a few points. First, I knew exactly what the Big Secret was within a few chapters. Second, the relationship between the girls as well as that between the two of them and Robert had an almost V.C. Andrews feel to it which I found mildly disgusting. Third, it was just typical and predictable. By the time The Secret comes out, the ending is inevitable. If I hadn't known she was capable of more, I might have been satisfied despite these things, but I do, and she is, and I'm not. I especially felt that the ending could have been better.

WARNING ** PLOT GIVEAWAY ** SKIP TO BELOW IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT YET!
After everything that had happened, Robert left Elspeth/Edie with the baby?! After she'd already abandoned her own babies, allowed one to kill herself, and then not helped her come back to life, she used her reanimated daughter's body to have a baby with her husband, and he left it with her when he took off? Yuck.

OK, YOU CAN COME BACK NOW************

Hopefully, Niffenegger's third novel will return to a more positive, expansive plot rather than a rehashing of family-ghost-with-a-secret tales. Her writing style is still lovely, but the material was lacking in this one.

Rating: two out of five stars: Creepy, and not in a good way.

Review: All the Living, by C.E. Morgan

All The Living, novelist C. E. Morgan's first offering, presents a familiar story - that of coming of age - in an unfamiliar way. Aloma, who was orphaned as a child, is working at the Kentucky school she attended when she meets Orren, whose family has recently been killed in an auto accident. The two are instantly drawn to each other on a very primal level, both mentally and physically, as their shared pain and loneliness are assuaged by youthful lust. When Orren asks Aloma to move with him to the small-town farm he has inherited, she accepts, imagining a settled, routine life she has experienced only in her mind.

Once Aloma arrives at the farm, however, it is to live in a run-down shack on the property with no running water, because Orren cannot bear to live in the larger, modern home a few acres away where his family had lived. As lust diffuses into daily life, the two must face their reality: Orren with his deep-seated grief and insecurity, Aloma with the emptiness she had expected Orren to fill. When Orren does not, as her domestic fantasy had led her to expect, ask her to marry him, her fantasy evolves into seething petulance. Disenchanted, she applies to play the organ at a local church as a way to escape the farm, and meets a young pastor, who is himself searching for something. From there, Aloma must decide what her life will be, and where she will decide to go.

Although it may sound like one, this is not a romance novel. Rather, it is an investigation of how the human soul copes with difficulty, and the unanticipated repercussions of choices we make, especially the naiive choices of the young. One of the best qualities of this book is its tone, which is very true to its Kentucky farm roots, with the spare speech and practicality of the midwest giving an honest portrayal of two humans grasping at their surroundings to forge together some kind of concrete basis for existance.

All the Living is not exciting, or mysterious. It is quiet, sneaking up on the reader, who all of a sudden realizes that she is actually interested in these two people, and is not just tagging along. Its very quietness is what enables it to slip into the brain unnoticed, nestling down and nagging at you to follow Aloma as she decides which parts of herself to hold onto, and which to wash away. Some sections are more engrossing than others, and none of the characters are perfectly endearing, but that's what makes the book real. The ending is very well-written, and I didn't realize that it was what I had been hoping for all along until it actually happened.

Review: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars: Well-crafted, slightly subdued, honest

Review: Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan

Hillary Jordan won the Bellwether Prize for fiction from author Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Prodigal Summer, among many others), in recognition of literary merit and the novel's attention to social issues. TO be honest, this is the reason I decided to read it, because Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors of all time.

In Mudbound, Jordan explores the sharecropping south of the 1940's, a time of incredible paradox in the american south. One the one hand, regiments of african americans were fighting in WWII, fighting and dying alongside white soldiers to save the oppressed and hunted jewish (white) people. On the other, they themselves were oppressed, hunted people who returned to America to find their own status as unchanged. Even those who returned as decorated military veterans who had gained the respect and trust of their white european counterparts as human beings were still considered as animals in their own country.

Jordan highlights this paradox through a full-bodied cast of characters. Henry McAllen, a white military veteran, decides to act on a life-long desire to aquire a farm, to the shock of his wife Laura, who has never lived anywhere but the city. The shack and seemingly endless acres of mud, come with several families of sharecroppers, including the african-american Jackson family, whose son, Ronsel, is serving as a fighter pilot in the war. The arrival of Henry's charming brother, Jamie, at first appears to brighten the farm and counter the presence of the men's father, Pappy, whose heavy-handed attitude towards women and blatent racist hatred cast a blight on the entire family. When Ronsel returns from the war, however, Jamie's egalitarian attitude, coupled with his lure towards the furiously lonely Laura, ignite the powderkeg the farm has become, revealing an ugly truth and resulting in inevitable horror.

Jordan builds her story slowly, taking the time to flesh out each character's strengths as well as their less attactive hidden selves. Nothing is hidden, and in fact the different perspectives give the reader the ability to understand, if not accept, each person's motives and underlying insecurities. No one is blameless, and each bears the weight of the ultimate conclusion which, though not unexpected, is not for the faint of heart. As the characters are not spared from truth, neither is the reader.

This is an amazing debut novel, and it will be worth waiting to see what else Jordan is capable of.

Rating: five out of five stars; a vividly honest portrayal of an ugly part of American history

Review: Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson

In Atkinson's fourth novel, main character and police officer-turned private detective Jackson Brodie investigates three London crimes while simultaneously trying to cope with the mystery his own life has become. His first case, involving the decades-old question of a missing preschooler, brings him into contact with the missing girl's three sisters, each one seemingly crazier and more emotionally warped than the next. The second, the unsolved murder of a local college student working her first day in her father's office, brought to him by a lonely and morbidly obese father obsessed with his youngest daughter's fate. His third job is more peripheral, involving a woman looking for her neice, whose mother is her convicted-murderer sister, and seems at first minor, but in the end provides a link tying the entire group together into one ugly package.

I don't usually read mystery fiction, partly because I'm impatient, and partly because it's rare that a novel can keep its cards close at hand enough for me to not know what's happening halfway through the book. Both instances leave me frustrated and annoyed. Case Histories, however, does manage to keep many of its secrets hidden until the last few chapters, and one in particular is a doozy. The reader knows from the beginning that, of course, these cases will be linked in some manner, so the discovery of the common thread isn't a surprise, and is in fact fairly obvious about 2/3 of the way through; it's the revelation of what happened to little Olivia, and the final take on the missing-neice situation, which has nothing to do with the neice at all, that are really the main attactions of the book.

Aside from the secrecy, another reason to enjoy the book is its partially-unsolved ending. There are a few strings left dangling, one in particular that could potentially come back to bite Bodie at a time when we are not there to learn of it. This left me thinking, considering what may come.

Luckily, there is another novel - One Good Turn - that will perhaps resolve the dangling pieces from Histories, in addition to introducing more.

Rating: four out of five stars - Increasingly interesting and likable characters, compelling secrets