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.