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

Update

For those of you who do not read my other blog, I haven't been posting here as regularly because I have a) started working again, as a substitute teacher, and b) gone back to school, so I'm drowning in both trig and bio this semester. In the midst of all this, I'm working on my application and portfolio for admission to a master's in teaching program at a local university (hence the extra math and science credits, required by the university here). So, unfortunately, I'm going to cancel the book club, which truthfully wasn't going well anyway, but will continue to post reviews here when I can. I have managed to read a few books, but haven't had time to post, and most of them I wasn't impressed with, anyway. I did find wo more notable selections, however, and will discuss them soon. Thanks for being patient!

Review: The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block

In his first novel, Merrill-Block tells the same painful story from opposite ends of the family spectrum. The author, who has done a significant amount of research into Alzheimer's disease, creates a fictional DNA-related strain of the very real early-onset condition to trace the disease from early England through the centuries to a Texas family separated by deceit and sorrow.

Fifteen year-old Seth Waller, a studious victim of victims in high school hierarchy, son of Jamie, who has recently been institutionalized because of the severity of her early-onset disease. For some reason, Jamie has always hidden her past from her husband and son, to the point that neither has any idea who her parents were or where she was originally from. Seth, who is used to finding answers to all problems he is presented with, breaks into the online research files of a scientist studying this strain of EOA, and obtains the names of those the sceintist has identified with the disease. Realizing he is somehow related to all the people on the list, he begins searching out those within reach of his Texas town.

Seventy year-old Abel lives alone in his decrepit home, reliving his memories of the past. Due to his disability - he is a hunchback - he never married, but lived with his brother and sister-in-law, with whom he had been desperately in love. Now, as his once expansive farm is surrounded by McMansions, he waits for his past to catch up with him.

The Story of Forgetting is told in alternating chapters by both main characters: Seth's from just before his mother is diagnosed; Abel's from his youth onward. As Abel's story stretches towards the current time, Seth's reaches both backward and forward as he attempts to connect himself with both his past and his future.

The story is enjoyable, and an amazingly sensitive and complicated first offering from an author not yet old enough to have had a family of his own. Abel's story was touching and bittersweet, while Seth was believable as a fictional child detective, although some of his interviews seemed mildly pointless in regards to the overall plot. The sections regarding the familial origin of the EOA DNA strain were a bit belabored, but the premis was entertaining and somewhat humerous.

Rating: four out of five stars: well-written interwoven tale of family, loss and regret

Review: Schulyer's Monster: A Father's Journey with his Wordless Daughter, by Robert Rummel-Hudson

In his novel, Robert Rummel-Hudson, a popular online writer, has channeled his blog of parenting a special-needs child into a very personal memoir that doesn't flinch away from the difficult, exhausting or, frankly, unflattering. His brutally honest descriptions of his own successes and failings as a husband and father, both factual and perceptual, couch his detailed discussion of his daughter, Schuyler (pronounced Skylar), and their family's struggle to understand and overcome her challenges.

Schuyler's monster, eventually diagnosed as polymicrogyria, affects the brain differently depending upon the severity of the malformation; in Schulyer's case, her ability to speak is nonexistant. This lack of speech made determining the extent of her disability extremely difficult, and most doctors and educators extrapolated that she would always be profoundly mentally disabled. However, while her MRI results showed an extreme affect on her brain, Schuyler's joyful, outgoing personage defied those assumptions and confounded her doctors. Her eventual emergence into the realm of significant communication, via speech-enabled technology, is the direct result of her parents' conviction that their little girl was not only able, but entitled, to rise above and beyond her diagnosis and prove that she was capable of much, much more.

As Rummel-Hudson details his own struggles with first denial, then despair, and finally determination, he also shares difficult details regarding a failed previous marriage, floundering career choices, and infidelity on both his and his wife's parts. These side stories reveal a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy as a person, husband and parent, but also serve to force the reader to regard the author as just another human, rather than a flawless superhero. Many writers would prefer to focus instead on their role as champion, portraying themselves as holier-than-thou. As many parents, he tends to be much more hard on himself than anyone else would be, particularly in his circumstances; his family's efforts to help Schuyler lead them across the country, through several school districts, and quite nearly to court. His gaining inner strength and confidence are evident as the story progresses. Still, through it all, Rummel-Hudson goes straight for the underbelly, and the result is a much more balanced, human side of a very human challenge.

Rating: four out of five stars: interesting, inspiring, and human

Review: Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See

Shanghai Girls is a vibrantly written novel that opens with sisters May and Pearl working as Beautiful Girls (as models were called) in 1930s Shanghai. Their status opens doors to clubs, bars, and society, while their father's riches have made their lives comfortable to an extent that many Chinese of the time could only imagine. Very quickly, however, their father reveals that he has lost all of his money through gambling, and he has sold his daughters to the man that holds all of his debts, as brides for the man's two sons, one an articulate man of about twenty, the other a fourteen year-old mentally handicapped child. They refuse to go, and as they begin to calculate a way out, Japanese bombs begin to fall on Shanghai. Penniless and homeless, the girls and their mother flee, meeting almost unmentionable horrors as they eventually make their way to America, the unwelcoming home of the husbands they must now accept to survive. As for most Asians in the US at that time, nothing is as it seems, and the girls, with their new families, must struggle each day to keep themselves alive and safe from those who would deport them. Sometimes, the sources of these dangers are from the communities, while others, the threats are from within their own walls. Regardless, the women do what they feel they must to protect the lives they have cobbled together, bringing about their own simultaneous salvation and destruction.

See is working on a sequel, which is wonderful both because her work is so tightly woven and because the ending leaves the reader hanging. May and Pearl, middle aged by the end of the book, come to a terrible, unexpected crossroads because of decisions each has made over the years, and must begin a new journey, separately, but also together. The new novel, which will hopefully be out by next year sometime, will follow them this time as parents chasing their own child's destiny.

It's difficult to come up with negatives about this story, but if I had to, I would say that it's a little over-descriptive, and for non-history buffs the detailed information on Chinese political history may be a bit much.

I will definitely be reading more of See's work. In a comparison of Asian-fiction writers, her level of storytelling is par with one of my favorite writers, Gail Tsukiyama, and overall I am looking forward very much to seeing what the rest of her library entails.

Rating: five stars - engrossing, gorgeous, and heartbreaking

Review: Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, by Alice Mattison

Mattison's novel begins with a snippet of a young Constance's worshipful conversation on the phone with her mother's friend, Marlene. Con's overwhelming, blind dedication to Marlene echoes her own mother's emotional dependance on her friend, and foreshadows a lifetime of looking to the throaty, worldly elder woman for advice, attention and validation.

The novel then skips forward a generation. It is 1989, and Con, a lawyer, is housesitting for her mother, Gert, while Gert is visiting Marlene. Con is upset because her 16 year-old daughter, whom she had allowed to remain at home despite the fact that Con's flighty husband was away on a trip, is not answering the phone at their home. She goes to sleep, and awakes to find that the apartment has been burgled, but only her purse and a small keepsake box of her mothers were stolen, from the bedroom while she slept. Her daughter still missing, Con then receives a call from Marlene saying that after a day of visiting Marlene's personal doctor to discuss Gert's apparent early dimensia, Gert has died in her sleep. Marlene, who had been pushing Con to be given for power of attourney over the confused Gert, now insists that she is the executor of the will. Con finally finds out her daughter is with her husband on his trip, and decides that she will get a divorce.

While going through her mother's things, Con discovers many letters from Marlene to Gert saved in a drawer. She learns that Marlene has been involved with gangsters and black market dealings, and extorted money from Gert at every turn.

Flash forward to 2001. Con and Marlene are still close. Con did divorce her husband, but the two are still close. Their twentysomething daughter, Joanna, has been in and out of rehab, and is without direction. They are not close. All three are on their way to stay with Con at her apartment.

Here's the kicker: the entire premise of the story is based on the fact that Con inexplicably FORGETS everything that happened the week her mother died. She doesn't remember that her purse was stolen until it, for some reason, is sent back to her husband's address just in time for him to stay with her. She doesn't remember anything she read in the letters, either - not the extortion, not Marlene's connection with gangsters, none of it.

Puh-leeze.

The author tries to make sense of this by interjecting her own voice as Storyteller, and saying that no one remembers details for more than a few moments, but this in no way explains her huge leap into having the main character forget several jarring events, such as a break-in, robbery, and finding out that your mother's friend, whom you have worshipped all these years, is actually an extortionist. Even when presented with small reminders, such as the name of Marlene's husband (an infamous gangster), she can't remember.

This brings me to the basic problem of the novel (other than the freak amnesia thing): Constance is pathetic. She's a terrible lawyer who urges her clients to give up because the situation is hopeless, and allows her assistant to conduct what she knows are horribly inferior interviews of key clients. She doesn't have the courage to look into her daughter's recent arrest and open a case of harrassment by the arresting officers, even though Joanna begs her to. She needs constant reassurance and petting from others. She doesn't want her ex to stay with her, then sleeps with him, and decides maybe she's still in love with him. Even when presented with a sure-case summary by Joanna's daughter of what actually happened when Gert stayed with Marlene, she lacks the gumption to do anything at all. She never. does. anything.

The worst of it is, this could have been a good book. All the bones were there, but the main character was so terrible, I really couldn't do anything but despise her.

Rating: one star. Good potential, poor execution.

Review: Right of Thirst, by Frank Huyler

Charles Anderson, a cardiologist, recently helped his wife to die after a long battle with cancer. Seeking redemption, purpose, and escape, he accepts the offer of a self-proclaimed humanitarian fundraiser to become the doctor at a refugee camp in an Islamic country (whose name is never mentioned). Soon after, he finds himself in the mountains of a foreign country, waiting for refugees who never arrive, and occasionally attempting to practice medicine on locals in the valley. Who does show up, however, is the military, both local and aggressive, and all hostile towards the doctor and handful of others who have been in the camps. The result of all the turmoil and empty time is that the doctor has plenty of time on his hands to think about his own motives, and the real nature of foreign aid.

Huyler, himself a cardiologist, writes Thirst with a sincere and sober tone. He draws from experiences of his own as well as stories from others to create a unique novel. It is written very much from a man's perspective, and doesn't pull punches to make the reader more comfortable with either his perspective or with whatever the reader may be feeling. It would have benefitted from more actual interaction with people outside the camp, because all the self-reflection made, at times, for extended dry spells. Because the refugees never arrive, the main interaction in the book is between Charles, a young German woman who becomes the focus of his attentions, and the native military man assigned to, essentially, babysit them. Also, the extensive introspection grows monotonous, but in its own way points out the answers that Charles is looking for; too often, our main concern is ourselves, rather than those around us.

Rating: three stars. interesting topic, uneven application

Review: Testimony, by Anita Shreve

In her recent novel, Testimony, Anita Shreve presents a situation that is one of every parents' worst nightmares: a videotape of high school boys having group sex in their dorm with an obviously younger girl makes its way to the principal of an expensive private school, and rather than being delt with discreetly, the matter blows up in everyone's faces and makes its way to national media. Rather than delve into the act itself, Shreve takes readers through the back stories of the characters involved, utilizing a silent grad student interviewer from a local university to draw much of the story surrounding the actual incident from the students involved.

On the positive side, the characters were generally interesting and the topics involved - excessive teenage drinking, the confusion of youth sexuality and power, the role of the media in making any situation far worse than it would have otherwise been. It was easy to read, and since the chapters were short, also easy to put down for periods and pick up again without feeling lost.

However, Shreve's novels are falling into the trap of being predictable. She often uses the 'fourth-quarter shocker', springing a surprise at the last minute to bring a few plot lines together. That's getting old, and even in itself presents new questions that there isn't enough time to answer. Also, there were way too many voices in this novel, all crowding around, talking practically simultaneously. Some weren't even in the book more than once, dropping pieces of information out of an abyss, and making it difficult to keep track of who is saying what about whom. This multiplicity of characters also makes it difficult for Shreve to really delve into any one in particular, or make any real statement about any of the topics. The character I would really like to have known more about, the girl, had little in-depth analysis at all. If Shreve didn't want her to seem deeper than she really was, that could have been resolved by allowing the interviewer to either have a small voice, or close the novel with an article written by the grad student with her opinion. Because the Act had occurred before the novel really began, this was more of a character study than anything, and unfortunately, the study part wasn't there to back it up enough to make up for the lack of forward-moving plot.

I wouldn't call this novel bad; it's a relatively easy read, with a basically interesting story. Shreve has lived up to her reputation of producing perfectly acceptable middle-of-the-road fiction that is neither taxing nor enlightening. If you're going on a trip where you expect to be interrupted often, and don't want to be overly engaged or lost on reentry, this would be a good novel for you.

Rating: two out of five stars. Not boring, not overly engaging. Eeh.

Review: This Lovely Life, by Vicki Forman

What constitutes a life fully lived?

To what length should that life be required to adapt, and will one's personal strength fall short, or grow far beyond expectation?

How much is too much, and who gets the responsibility and blame for the choices made?

In her novel, This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, these questions create the perameter of Vicki Forman's existence. On July 30, 2000, Forman delivered twins at twenty-three weeks, a full seventeen weeks before their due date. The children, Evan and Ellie, each weighed less than a pound. With lungs were the size of dimes, their extreme prematurity meant that they were completely unequipped for life outside the womb. Forman and her husband were convinced that they would not live, and requested that they be allowed a peaceful passing. The hospital refused. Ultimately, Ellie did not survive, but Evan held on, tethered to this world by a web of tubing and wires.

Thus began Forman's struggle, both within herself and with representatives of seemingly every medical profession, to understand and care for Evan. Babies Evan's size are referred to as 'superpreemies', an almost absurd term considering the lengthy list of difficulties and medical disorders these children, and their families are often faced with. Evan is blind, requires oxygen and feeding tubes, and has multiple seizures a day, to name a short list. Yet, the facts of Evan's diagnoses do not even begin to encompass the dire implications for the entire family. Forman's overwhelming struggle with intense guilt, a fearful lack of control, raging fury, and hopelessness are the meat of this story. Evan is Jupiter, and his mother, father and sister are moons, circling the all-encompassing enormity of his existence.

The pull of this novel lies in Forman's frank intimacy with the reader. She pulls nothing, hides no emotion, no matter how ugly or frightening. She makes no apologies for her ambivalence about Evan's survival, for her inability to remember an entire year of her first daughter's life. Her convictions about her son's care never waver - she is interested only in what will give him the best quality of life. At first, that means allowing a dignified death, but as the situation changes, and Forman herself grows mentally and emotionally, we see her rise and morph into a strong advocate for her son on many fronts, going to any distance to seek what is best for him. She talks several times about Evan's role as a teacher, showing her what love, patience, and compassion truly are. Her growth as a mother, and a person, is astounding.

Woven into all of this is the family's coping with the death of tiny Ellie. As Forman begins to accept the cosmic lack of control, and corresponding required lack of expectations, she moves forward into acceptance of both the loss of Ellie and the reality of Evan's personhood. In the final chapter, as the discovery of the twins' birth record allows her to re-envision their birth, we see her moving forward, toward the 'well', and away from the 'but'.

This was a beautifully written account. The knowledge of Evan's death, which occured soon after it was written, made it even more poignant to read, because I knew how and when it would end, even though the author herself didn't at the time. In the epilogue, Forman writes that she wonders if Evan's death means that he was finished with her, because she was not finished with him. I think that the truth is, Evan had taught her everything he could, and so he moved on to wait for her to once again catch up.

Rating: five stars. A heartrending story from the depths of parenting.

Review: Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

I am a big of Lahiri, but had never read her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies. Published ten years ago, this initial offering offers much the same fluid embrace that her following publications do. Lahiri is skilled at welcoming readers and treating them like they belong to this culture of Indian immigrants, much the same as the characters themselves seek each other out for community in their new land.

Some of the stories beckoned to me more than others in this collection, simply because in a short story format, I find it more difficult to bond with characters who experience what seems to me to be an almost fantastically unreal experience than I would in a longer format, where I would have time to settle in and really get to know and understand them. For instance, in 'The Treatment of Bibi Haldar', the main character is a strange woman who is afflicted with some sort on undiagnosable seizure disorder; as a result, although she is accepted by the community at large, the family members that live with her shun her increasingly until they move away and abandon her entirely to live in their shed. Abruptly, she somehow becomes pregnant, gives birth, and is miraculously recovered. While I found the tale interesting, it didn't draw me in on a personal level.

My favorite story, 'A Temporary Matter', did. A couple with deep-seated marital problems is drawn closer together by regularly scheduled power outages, sharing secrets in the dark. The path of the tale was like a funnel, seeming to draw together in a small, safe zone and then dropping me out the bottom. It was shocking, telling, and very, very real. I also enjoyed 'Sexy', the story of a young woman caught up briefly as the mistress of a shallow aldulterer, and 'This Blessed House', told from the perspective of a recently arrangement-married man who moves into a house with his bride only to discover a trove of hidden Christian idols hidden everywhere; his wife is inexplicably obsessed, and his irritation grows until it pops like a bubble. As the only story told from a child's perspective (although it is actually an adult relaying the story of her experience as a child), 'When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine' offers an innocent's glimpse into the geographic politics of war and separation, as viewed on an American television with Mr. Pirzada, a Pakistani man in American on a research grant, who has lost contact with his family in the war zone. The undertones of American distance from all that is difficult to fathom, and related ideas that it is unnecessary to understand issues that don't concern us, is an endictment that is very much relevant today.

Rating: four out of five stars: not quite as compelling as her later works, but still well worth reading for the beauty and insight it provides.

New Book Announcement!

The next book we will be reading is Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. With 139 reviews, this collection of interwoven stories has a 4.5-star average rating on Amazon. I thought short stories might be nice, since they're smaller bites, and more compatible with a summer schedule.

For the next discussion, I would like to try to have a more discussion-friendly format, maybe using a chat room somewhere, start with a list of questions, and go from there. What would anyone think about that? Suggestions? I would like to do this around September 1.

Post if you plan to read: one randomly chosen person will get the book! Let's say, posts have to be made by the 17th.

Here's a review:

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Thirteen linked tales from Strout (Abide with Me, etc.) present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection. The opening Pharmacy focuses on terse, dry junior high-school teacher Olive Kitteridge and her gregarious pharmacist husband, Henry, both of whom have survived the loss of a psychologically damaged parent, and both of whom suffer painful attractions to co-workers. Their son, Christopher, takes center stage in A Little Burst, which describes his wedding in humorous, somewhat disturbing detail, and in Security, where Olive, in her 70s, visits Christopher and his family in New York. Strout's fiction showcases her ability to reveal through familiar details—the mother-of-the-groom's wedding dress, a grandmother's disapproving observations of how her grandchildren are raised—the seeds of tragedy. Themes of suicide, depression, bad communication, aging and love, run through these stories, none more vivid or touching than Incoming Tide, where Olive chats with former student Kevin Coulson as they watch waitress Patty Howe by the seashore, all three struggling with their own misgivings about life. Like this story, the collection is easy to read and impossible to forget. Its literary craft and emotional power will surprise readers unfamiliar with Strout. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review: The End of Overeating, by David Kessler, MD

I originally became interested in this book because of an interview with Kessler I heard on NPR. Typically, books on diet and nutrition generally aren't of specific interest to me, because I find them either trite, boring, or so over-sensationalized that they immediately turn me off. However, while listening to the interview, I decided that this particular book sounded like none of those things, and put it on my list to read.

What really reeled me in was Kessler's discussion regarding the book cover, which has a gorgeous piece of carrot cake on top, and a pile of carrots on the bottom. He talked with Diane Rehm about why the cake looked so much better, and why she thought that she wanted it. She replied with something about how it feels in her mouth, the sensations it would deliver and the expectations she had of pleasure. In a nutshell, that is what the first 2/3 of The End of Overeating is about: why we want what we want, and how companies' greed makes us want more. The second half, which is less compelling than the first, discusses ways to take control (thus the subtitle of the book, 'Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite) of what we want and move forward.

Really, I found final 1/3 of the book to be almost unnecessary after reading Part Two, The Food Industry. I was so disgusted by most of what I read, I may never eat out again just from that! Kessler goes beyond the usual, companies-are-plotting-against-you material and includes interviews with industry executives who really spell it out in a very basic, horrible way. My favorite quote, which sums up the entire issue, is this:

"If you can find that optimal point in a set of ingredients, you may well be on your way to converting that array of chemicals and physical substrates into a successful product." - Howard Moskowitz, consumer behavior expert, on companies' useage of what are basically non-foods to form a chemically-modified irresistible food product.

Doesn't that make you want to go out and grab a bag of Doritos (one of the products discussed in detail)? All I could think about at that point was the old movie 'Soylent Green', where companies used what turned out to be a boiled-down human base in foods, which people in turn found irresistible.

Other little tidbits:

- Even if you think you're getting healthy food when you eat out, you probably aren't - most 'lean meats' that have any flavoring in them are injected with the flavorings at a manufacturing plant, often including huge numbers of needle pricks with concoctions of flavoring that a) deliver fatty marinades directly into the meat and b) tenderize the meat so much that it is basically "pre-chewed", which is why it seems to melt in your mouth. Oh, did you, like me, think those meats were prepared fresh at Applebees, Friday's, etc.? Sorry. That would be a big NO.

- Want to know why you can supersize drinks so cheaply? It's because sugars and fats, particularly engineered chemical sweeteners, are so inexpensive for companies that that extra $.99 of soda only costs them $.03 to deliver. Soda companies did specific studies on how they could make you want water less, and soda more. Sip on *that* next time you get a vat of soda at the theater.

- Sugars and fats stimulate the brain so much that lab rats pushed a button 77 times to recieve chocolate Ensure a mere 14 times. They work approximately the same amount to receive CRACK. They also repeatedly walked over flooring that zapped each step, their desire was so great.

I could go on. Really, these sections on the food industry are what make the book worthwhile. The later sections, on stopping overeating by creating 'rules' for yourself, which are supposedly easier for the brain to obey than generic willpower, don't make much sense to me because you have to use willpower to get to the point where those rules will actually mean something to you. So, it really is the same, obvious message: it's hard, make a plan, stick to it, get help. The corporate studies, though, and the interviews, are extremely engrossing. It's like watching a hidden-camera show because of that 'gotcha!' quality, although it's hard to be sure who's been gotten, when you really think about it.

Rating: 3.5 stars. Great industry and nutritional breakdowns, educational and engrossing, which are way more of a deterrant than the 'food rehab' portion. Mildly repetitive in sections, occasionally a bit science-y for non-science people, but still worth a food-consumer's time.

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Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austin and Seth Grahame-Smith

Oh.

Oh, Oh, OH!

I have never read the classic version of P&P, but I can tell you, now that I've read this clever version, I probably never will. Grahame-Smith has proved himself a master at weaving in the 'zombie mayhem' into the original in such an seamless manner that I feel the story to be much improved. Far from being trashy or gratuitous, PPZ is not uber-gorey; in fact, the zombies aren't even the main plot, but rather a ongoing concern that the characters accept as a fact of life, like an unfortunate rodent infestation. The characters' nonchalance is a great part of what makes the new twist work so beautifully, and their adaptations - the entire Bennet family has been trained in China by a master warrior, and are the premier (and yet unerringly proper) fighting force in the region. Mr. Darcy, also, is an excellent fighter, and his aunt is now the master fighter of England, renound for her abilities.

PPZ is very entertaining, and extremely funny, in a droll, NPR kind of way. Because Grahame-Smith has been careful to preserve the integrity and bones of the original story, the reader does have to be willing to read the novel in it's old english format, but he has also added several double-entendres and poked quiet fun at the conventions of the era while inserting bothersome events such as the entire waitstaff being attacked by zombies in the kitchen during a dinner party. All characters benefit from this new, added dimension of extreme physicality and concern for personal honor via the warrior's code, rather than dress code.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Brilliant, funny, and expertly done.

Review: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, by Joshilyn Jackson

She sees dead people.

Laurel Hawthorne, whose mother managed to escape from defunct mining town DeLop, AL (think X-Files scary) via marriage, is an improbably well-off young mother living in a beautiful gated community, where everyone has perfect lawns and pools. The only chinks in her life are her hot-and-cold relationship with her sister, Thalia, and the ghost of her dead uncle, which she hasn't seen in many years. Her husband is an extremely well-paid game developer, and she designs artistically unique quilts with hidden pockets and, we later learn, hidden meanings. Even her teenaged daughter, Shelby, is lovely. Laurel assuages her mild guilt over being so fortunate while many relatives reside in the emotional and financial squalor of DeLop by bringing Bet Clemens, her daughter's vaguely-related pen pal from De Lop, to stay with them for a few weeks each summer, and then returns to her tidy life.

Things are seemingly perfect until Molly, Shelby's best friend, wakes Laurel in the middle of the night. Molly has drowned in the Hawthorne's pool, and her ghost seeks Laurel's help in uncovering the truth of her tragic end. This event, horrible as it is, is the beginning of the end of Laurel's painstakingly created facade of perfection. With her conviction that Molly's death wasn't an accident, Laurel reaches out to her currently-estranged theater-actress sister, and the story of what actually happened, as well as what really happened with their uncle's death, come to light amongst Thalia's accusations and worming insinuations reagarding Laurel's marriage and family. As chapters pass, we learn, via Laurel's awakening, the hidden truth about the quilts, her uncle, her mother, Bet, Molly's death, and the realization that the title refers not only to Molly.

The beginning of The Girl... is slow, so much so that I actually considered walking away from it altogether. I didn't find Laurel to be incredibly engrossing, and the whole situation began to seem like a typical dysfunctional-relationship piece of chick-lit. For some reason, I picked it up again the next day, and skimmed through a few chapters, only to find myself drawn pretty deeply in once Thalia's character becomes involved, and the story began to unravel. One of the plot points I liked the most is that the reader only follows Laurel's piont of view, so as her ideas of what is actually happening twist and turn, we are brought along with her, rather than the reader's knowing what has happened and waiting for her to figure it out. The final few chapters in particular are real page-turners, starting from about the point where questions begin to arise about the solidity of Laurel's marriage, and I couldn't put it down after that. The ending was very exciting, although again improbably resolved, and although the afterward was a tiny bit trite, it didn't take away from the rest of the novel.

Rating: three out of five stars - not as good as I'd hoped, but still a decent, quick summer read

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Question 5

Who do you think was the more ridiculous character - Lydia or Mrs. Bennett?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Question 4

Why do you think that no one noticed Charlotte's decent into Zombiedom (other than Elizabeth and, perhaps, Lady Catherine, if she was telling the truth)? Would you have chosen as she did, or simply asked Elizabeth to off you at once?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Question 3

Elizabeth Bennet, lover, or Elizabeth Bennett, zombie killer - which do you think is the most dominant part of her personality? Which would you prefer to be?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Question 2

Have any of you read (or seen) the original PaP? How does this compare in terms of truthfulness to the original text?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Question 1

What did you think? Did zombies improve the romance of Miss Bennett and Mr. Darcy?

Review: The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

If Beatrix Potter wrote mysteries, or family drama, the result would probably be much like Kate Morton's second novel, 'The Forgotten Garden'.

The expansive story opens in 1913 London, where a small girl is crouched alone, hiding on an ocean liner per the instructions of someone she knows only as 'The Authoress'. When the woman does not return as promised, the four year-old is forced to make the sea voyage alone, winding up in Australia without a clue as to who she is or why she's alone. She is adopted by a childless couple and named Nell, and forgets the issue entirely until the night of her twenty-first birthday, when her adoptive father makes the fateful decision, against the will of his deceased wife, to divulge the secret that her past is really a mystery to them all. Nell, feeling completely abandoned by both her perception of reality and her trust and faith in the concept of family, withdraws from her adoptive family and begins an entirely new life. Years later, when the man she had thought was her father dies, she receives a suitcase from his estate; it is the suitcase she had arrived with so long ago, and in it a path to her past. Nell then begins in earnest the search for her real past, a search which is eventually handed down to her granddaughter, Cassandra. The mystery takes them each back to London, to an estate and a family cursed with illness, paranoia, and murderous darkness.

The Forgotten Garden is a rich, enticing story told by several different people, in a multitude of times and places. Initially, this made it difficult for me to follow, but once new characters stopped being intruduced, and when the story took up a set cadence, it was easier for me to manage the ever-changing perspective, although keeping events and people straight in my head was still a slight challenge. Also peppered throughout the novel are short fairy tales, written by The Authoress, in which are woven the sad and sometimes frightening realities of her life, and which serve as clues for Nell, Cassandra, and the reader as we all try to close the circle of curiosities.

I liked ...Garden quite a bit. Not only is it a very satisfying mystery, but it moves along at a good pace and involves a good balance of good and evil; Morton does an excellent job of making the characters multi-dimensional, and trusts the reader to incorporate new character developments without either hitting you over the head with heavy-handed black-and-white descriptions of their personalities or rushing to solve things for you. I think that one of the signs of a good writer is the novelist's ability to restrain his- or herself and allow the readers time to figure out what's going on on their own before dealing the final blow, and Morton does this very well. She also does an excellent job of creating a mystery that reveals itself in layers, so even if you figure out the answer to one thing fairly early on, there are still so many other questions that you don't lose interest.

My only complaints are as follows: I would have liked more on both Nell's and Cassandra's relationship with Nell's daughter/Cassandra's mother. We hear from everyone's persepective but hers, and I think something more from or about her would have been interesting. Some of the descriptions were a little long, but skimmable, as were the fairy tales. Also, the introduction of Christian, the gardener, to Cassandra was a little convenient and seemed beneath the rest of the book.

Rating: 4.5 out of five stars - very good plot and characters, emotionally absorbing, a little over-descriptive

Review: Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

If anyone you know has alzheimer's disease, is currently suffering from it, or may at some point be afflicted either personally or tangentally, you should read this book.

That would be everyone.

Beautiful, touching and very, very sad, Still Alice is told from the perspective of Alice Howland, a fifty year-old psychology professor at Harvard who is diagnosed with early-onset alzheimers at the height of her career. Soon, rather than travelling the country making symposium speeches and conducting world-renowned research, she is struggling to remember her children's names and getting lost on her way home. Eventually, she has to leave her job, and must learn to define her worth as a person, without her life's work as a guide.

As the novel, and the disease, progress, the reader also is faced with questions, such as what it means to be 'of sound mind'. Alice, while still in possession of most of her faculties, writes herself a letter on her computer with instructions on how to find and take an overdose of sleeping pills when she can no longer remember the answers to five important questions, because she doesn't feel that she wants to live to be a burdensome shadow of herself. Her husband feels that he should continue to pursue his career, because she would have wanted him to when she was mentally clearer. As Alice becomes more confused, both of those things become untrue in her present-tense, so which opinions and feelings should have more weight - her 'sane' past self, or her present 'demented' self? Which should take prescedence, rational thought or emotional need? Where does our humanity lie?

Genova, a neuroscientist herself, takes the more painful route by writing the novel in Alice's own rapidly changing perspective to the end. As a result, the reader feels her confusion, and not only observes but experiences her increasing dementia. It would have been emotionally easier to read the second half of the story from the family's point of view, but this is infinitely more worthwhile. We do, however, see the couple's children's struggle with acceptance and coping, and even more intimiately that of her husband, John, who cannot cope with this ultimate upheaval in his life's plans. On the one hand, it would be easy to write John off as an uncaring, emotionally detached, scientist-first kind of person, but on the other, who among us would be able to deal easily with the destruction of our current lives, hopes and future by a disease that doesn't typically occur until life has been almost fully lived? Alice's heartbreak over the thievery of their marriage, and the loss of the many things the future should have held for her, is one of the most compelling plot lines in the book. My one complaint, that I'm not exactly sure what happened at the ending, is bittersweet; the reason *I* am fuzzy on the events is because Alice herself is.

'Alice' is a quick read, even at 320 pages. The chapters are short, and really, you won't notice them going by. I'm so glad I read this book.

Rating: five out of five stars. Beautiful, important, and, ironically, memorable.

Review: The Music Teacher, by Barbara Hall

I'm not going to sugar coat this - The Music Teacher was not for me. But, since it might be for *you*, here's a go at a discussion.

Main character Pearl Swain has achieved nothing of note in her life. Her musical career is non-existent, her marriage has failed, she lives in a trailer, and works as a music teacher / sales clerk in a pretentious music store in LA. As the only woman in the store, several of the other employees are either interested in her or hiding that they are, but in typical geek fashion, this is played out in a strange dance of insecurity and pretended indifference.

The plot of the story circles around the arrival of Hallie Bolaris, a gifted violin student who has been orphaned and now lives with her seemingly dysfunctional aunt and uncle's family. Hallie's talent and family life slowly alter Pearl's perspective on life and emotional attachment, and she begins to take interest in more than the pain and self-pity that she has wallowed in since the demise of her marriage.

I believe what makes this first-person narrative unattractive to me may make it more so to others; this is very much the kind of behavior that goes on in the small, insular cliques of art or literary geeks, and I find it unappealing. However, if you are someone who takes part in that culture, you may find Pearl's story more appealing. Personally, I found the characters to be unlikable in any real way. The story was choppy, and Hallie was too contrived. Pearl's turnaround was too abrupt. Nothing about any of the characters really grabbed me, and even at the end, not too much had changed. I was looking for more novel and less mundane real life, and I didn't find it here. I think Hall could have written a more engaging novel, or at least one that would have engaged *me* more, but didn't.

In short, this is a very tightly-focused character study on an everyday woman whose life is a realistically small part of the universe. If that's your cup of tea, this is your book. It was not mine.

Rating: one out of five stars - flat, mildly depressing, and too narrow

Review: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

I have rarely come by a novel that took on the topic of Japanese concentration camps in the US. It's a topic that our country is rightly ashamed of, and I think it gets swept under the rug too often. Ford pulls the reader into the topic like an olympic diver into a pool - swiftly, seamlessly, and beautifully - in his first novel, Hotel on the corner of Bitter and Sweet.

The story moves back and forth between present day, with main character Henry Lee as a middle-aged widower, and the 1940s, when Henry was a chinese-american 'scholarshipping' student at an all-white private school in Seattle. As an outcast in his chinese community for being at a the exculsive white school, and at the school for being chinese, Henry is even alone at his home, with parents who insist he speak only 'american', even while they themselves can only speak cantonese. Henry's solitary existence is broken only by interactions with Sheldon, a black streetcorner saxaphone player until Keiko, a Japanese-american student, enrolls at his school. Her arrival is a definite turning point in his life, and we see through his eyes and heart the changing American politial scene as the Japanese are first discriminated against and then, finally, rounded up and sent away to camps as WWII reaches its highest pitch.

I loved both the stories of Henry as a child and the shorter, interwoven tale of how his adult life has unfolded, with his own son and his fiancee. I loved the journey from silence to redemption, which is precipitated by the discovery of some hidden japanese articles that were hidden in an old hotel when the community was cast away. I loved this book.

Make time for this one, definitely. I genuinely loved the characters, and the story of childhood love and loss.

Rating: five out of five stars - touching, smooth and engrossing

Review: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Here's another run-out-and-read-it for you.

Kathryn Stockett's The Help is a beautifully and honestly written tale of african-american servitude in the 1960s south, and one journalist-hopeful's documentation of it.

One of the things I loved about this novel was its varying viewpoint, which rotated between 22 year-old Skeeter, a well-off white girl who had just returned home from college with a mind full of plans but a reality full of nothing much, and several of the domestic servants she comes to know and who slowly share their lives with her as she writes down their stories into an extremely subversive narrative of what it is like to be a black domestic in the deep south. Through Skeeter's voice we hear of her struggles to cope with her increasingly strained friendships with the other young elite of Jackson, most of whom have stepped in to hold the reins of oppression where their parents left off, and their eventual ostrasization of her from society. Through Abiline, Minny, and others, we hear what they dealt with both as 'free' help, raising white children while their own children were cared for by relatives or given away, navigating segregation and the dangerous waters of unwritten social rules that could change at any moment. The danger that they and Skeeter are in as they undertake this project, and the slow, painful road to trust, are tense and lovely.

I could see these people in my mind as I read the book. Stockett's care with detail is such that it was very like having a movie playing in my mind, and the picture was complete. I wanted the book to continue past its ending, which was satisfying and appropriate in itself, so I could continue to follow these women as they went through desegregation and the strife of the future.

Rating: five stars. Excellent reading.

Review: My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor. PhD

At 37, Taylor was in what most consider to be the prime of her life. She had a very successful career as a brain scientist and professor at Harvard Medical School, and had many friends and close colleagues. Yet in her memoir, My Stroke of Insight, Tayler herself argues that her life really began one early morning in 1996, when she had a massive stroke due to a blood clot in her brain, and observed herself lose her speech, mobility, and various other capacities one by one, understanding as only one in her profession could exactly what was happening to her.

'Insight' is written in three sections: first, there is a background discussion of the brain and how it functions. While somewhat interesting to the neophyte, it isn't necessary to understand the rest of the novel, and I myself skimmed it, as what I was really interested in began in section two. (The author herself discusses the various sections in the prologue, and recommends starting points in the book depending on what you're looking for, which I thought was reflective of her post-stroke zen outlook. It's not often that an author gives a reader permission to skip entire sections of a book.) This next part is where Taylor details the events of the morning of her stroke, and it's fascinating. The story of how she saved herself once she understood what was happening, by using her training and determination, is compelling. She discusses her experiences in the hospital, and her perceptions and feelings regarding not only her family and friends but the hospital's staff as they worked either with her or on her, depending upon the mood in which the staffer entered the room, and how they affected her recovery process.

Also in segment two, Taylor talks about how, as her stroke was in her left brain, all sense of her own ego and personal space had vanished, along with her abilities to feel negativity, such as anger or jealousy. She realized that since she had to work to regain her abilities in her right brain, she would also do her best *not* to work on regaining her ability to feel these things, and to maintain some sense of the 'nirvana', as she calls it, that she achieved during her stroke. Section three is a discussion of how we non-stroke-victims can work to achieve the same effects.

While I was interested in Taylor's personal story, including her miraculous eight-year road to full recovery, I did find myself skimming through section three as well. It grew repetitive, and was a little too new-agey for me. I do believe that it's important to focus on the positive, but section three was very much like a self help book, and I was only so interested in that. Taylor speaks of wanting to retain her child-like joy and views, and I believe that the success she achieved in that is what made the final section what it was. Interestingly enough, her diction remains quite high, so even as her child-like qualities come across, they do so in a very adultified way. It's a little strange, actually, but not in a bad way.

Overall, I'm glad I read it. I did take away both an interesting story and some reminders on how to seek my own inner peace, and that was enough.

Rating: three out of five stars. Interesting, but somewhat repetitive and new-agey.

Review: A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

What motivates people to find each other, to join hands and try to travel the road together? While even the constant connection of technology can sometimes hide the truth of partners' true motivations, a century ago it was not uncommon for people to order spouses from catalogues, or to simply place an ad in newspapers around the country, and wait to see who showed up. Could you imagine agreeing to spend your life with someone that you only knew through a few letters, giving up your possessions, friends and locale, and moving across the country to find... who knew what, really? Would you be ready to deal with whatever you found?

Catherine Land and Ralph Truitt do just that in Goolrick's A Reliable Wife. Truitt, a wealthy, heartbroken, emotionally stunted widower, places an ad in a paper looking for a steady, sturdy partner, and he believes he has found one in Catherine, who professes to be the simple daughter of a missionary. Both have ulterior motives, and more baggage than any train could carry.

This is a great, great book, one that is difficult to put down. Just when I thought I had an idea of what was coming, the entire story would change tracks and go in a completely different direction! It was wonderful to read a novel that could surprise me, and be so beautifully written that I found the characters, ugly or pathetic as they were at times, redeeming and human and lush. Even the ending is immensely satisfying. Goolrick's uses of imagery and quiet, almost silent foreshadowing make the story extremely realistic and multi-dimensional while allowing the reader to discover the truths of these people in his or her own time, and to then realize that the path had of course been leading there all along.

Rating: five stars. Excellent, absorbing, mysterious read.

Review: The Good Book, by David Plotz

The Good Book, which is completely titled, The Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible (but which was too long to fit in the title section), was quite amusing. As with The Year of Living Biblically, where the semi-secular author decides to try and live every rule in the bible, while objectively critiquing it, so Plotz, a non-practicing Jew, provides Cliff notes, if you will, to the Old Testament / Torah / Jewish Bible.

Plotz' summaries are simple, well-worded, and work well due to several important factors. One, he skips over the boring parts, aka the 'begats', reiterations, and plain boring stuff. Two, he includes rational questions when confronted with obvious contradictions in text or events that he feels make no sense based on other sections or books. Three, he does this in a breezy, snarky manner that makes the whole thing fairly easy to read, or at least a heck of a lot easier than the actual book itself.

Why would someone read this, rather than the Bible itself? Let's face it, the Bible is looooong. Even the Torah, which I had to read in college, is looooong, and difficult to get through, especially considering the time, cultural, and linguistic differences. Plotz gives the casual reader, say, someone who recognizes the continual biblical allusions in everything from Shakespeare to The Matrix as such, but doesn't know the significance of the linkage, the opportunity to make the connection without having to plod through a thousand pages and potentially difficult-to-parse wording to find out. Also, because the bible as a piece of literature is culturally significant, it's not a bad idea to have a working knowledge of its basic contents. Finally, for anyone actually willing to read the bible itself, beginning here with a plainly written outline isn't a bad idea.

Even so, getting through even Plotz' humorous translation was work, and took me almost a week, whereas I would usually finish a book of this length in about two days. It was worthwhile, and when I finished I had the sense of actually Completing Something, but it was still work.

And besides, the next time I watch The Matrix, I'm going to know where all the seemingly-random names come from.

Rating: five stars out of five. Cleverly worded and well-paced, this is a good basic education in common references and stories, as well as an interesting discussion of questions posed.

New Book Announcement! for July 1!

I can't believe that we'll be into July already! I want to give people plenty of time to finish up The Book Thief and get started on this next book, which is...

(drumroll, please)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

I know, this is a big departure from what we've been reading, but after a few months' worth of Heaviness, I thought it might be fun to read something totally different. If we all hate it, we'll still have learned something... right????

Let me know what you think. If there's a general outcry, we can always find something else. :)

Book Thief Discussion Question #5 - Opinion

What did you think of The Book Thief? How did you feel while you read it? Who was your favorite character, and why? Are there any passages that have stayed with you?

Book Thief Discussion Question #4- Narration

How did having Death as the narrator of the novel change the tone of the story for you? Was it a welcome departure from the normal, or an unsettling intrusion?

Book Thief Discussion Question #3- Thievery

Leisel's thievery of books throughout the novel can be seen as a euphanism for stealing for one's life; Leisel's books enable her survival, both mentally and, during the bombing, when her love of the written word saves her life. Think of other ways that the characters steal pieces of life from the death around them in order to make lives for themselves.

Book Thief Discussion Question #2- Beauty and Brutality

Near the end of the novel, as Leisel's life is at an end, Death says that he wants to share with her the beauty and brutality of humanity, but she has already lived it. How do you think this story shows the beautiful side of brutality? Can one exist without the other?

Book Thief Discussion Question #1- Bravery

All of the characters in this novel display tremendous bravery in the face of terrible situations. Pick one that was particularly meaningful to you and discuss.

Review: Crazy Love, by Leslie Morgan Steiner

Sometimes, people who seem to have it all on the outside really have almost nothing to hold onto on the inside. In fact, their very affluence and intelligence act as a shield hiding their actual situations from the world. This can lead to deadly consequences, as it almost did in Steiner's case.

Crazy Love is the memoir of a woman who grew up with every financial benefit. Her family lived in affluence, in a high-class part of the country, with a summer home and trips to foreign countries to perfect accents. Unfortunately, underneath it all was a mother who had succumbed to the family trait of alcoholism and a father who rarely was away from his high-profile job. Steiner herself was an exceptionally odd combination of drinker and A-student, a girl who had sex for drugs, whose mother would call her The Washington Whore. Even more exceptionally, Steiner graduated, got into Harvard, overcame her addictions, and graduated to move to NYC as a writer and editor for Seventeen magazine.

Steiner protected her new life carefully, never forgetting for a moment her past and her ideas of people's opinions of her, which swirled in her mind as she carefully crafted her conversations with her friends and family. Even at this level of success, she still internalized her mother's words, and her fears of what others thought of her. She stayed away from men, celibate for four years, and kept her nose down. It was this combination of destructive internal monologue and successful-girl-from-good-family that made her a perfect target for Conor, who was in much the same situation. The difference between them was, his anger and fear of his past destroyed his ability to be safely close to women, a secret that Steiner learned painfully at his hands increasingly over the years.

In her memoir, Steiner explains how Conor separated her from her friends and family, extracted her from her beloved city and career, and literally beat her into submission. As many abusers do, he carefully played on her insecurities, and her desperate desire to have make a family where she could be loved and safe. He lured her in, and once she had nowhere to go, the beatings and threats began, continuing for years, until one night when the intervention of a neighbor during one of Conor's rages was the only thing that saved her life. Steiner picked herself up and left, not without looking back multiple times, and not without losing even members of her own family in the process.

Her strength is obvious, even during the worst of the situation, and that's what makes her tale so incredible. She very successfully debunks the idea of the beaten woman as uneducated or unintelligent, and shows how even the smartest, most determined women can be pulled in. Her story is extremely absorbing.

While I think it's inappropriate to comment too far on a memoir like this, where the author is working through what happened to her, I can say that I wish there had been more of some things and less of others. Steiner goes into a lot of detail, which sometimes was skimmable, but leaves out parts of the end of the story that would have been interesting to know, such as whether she has been able to restore any relationship with the family that betrayed her during her divorce, or how the settlement itself ended up - there was a potential for her having to support him rather significantly, and of his getting part of her family's property; did that happen?

While I can't say I enjoyed the book, because you can't enjoy reading a tale like this, I can say that it was very, very well-told, and I read it in one day. Every time I put it down, I was thinking about what was coming, and hurrying to get back. The back story on her family, and her subsequent realizations about her actual relationships with them, were extremely interesting. Steiner herself has since remarried and had a family, and her remarkable story will stay with me for a long, long time.

Review: four out of five stars - incredible story of the fight to survive, both mentally and physically