Review: Maybe This Time, by Jennifer Crusie

Jennifer Crusie, formerly a romance novelist, has branched out into the supernatural with her new novel, Maybe This Time, the story of a woman whose ex-husband, North, reaches out for help when he becomes the guardian of two children after the sudden death of their aunt. The catch: the children are wild, and several nannies have already quit the job, claiming that the house is haunted. North is at his wit's end, and offers Andie a large sum of money to take on the job; Andie accepts under the premise that she has debts she wants to pay off before she becomes engaged to another man. Of course, it's no surprise that the two still have strong feelings for one another, and their suppressed emotions come to the forefront as the truth about the old house comes to light.

I will be honest: I did not pick this novel to read on my own; a representative from the publisher (St. Martin's Press) contacted me and asked if I would review an advance copy, and I agreed. Ordinarily, I would probably not have given 'Time' a second glance, and assumed it was *serious* chick-lit based on the cover which, to me, screams romance. However, I'm glad I read it; the storytelling was solid, and while there were relationship threads to the plot, they were not the main focus of the book, which stayed true to its ghostly theme, yet was not grisly or gratuitous. Crusie has written a good, old-fashioned haunting, complete with possessions and banishments, that is enough to keep the reader turning the pages into the night without causing nightmares.

Andie and the children are well-written and believable. The little girl, Alice, is particularly appealing, and as the plot unfolds Andie - and thus the reader - uncover the real roots of her near-psychosis and develop an attachment to her. Carter, her brother, is less developed as a character, but is still interesting. The only person in the story who comes across as a little flat, a little too scripted, is North, but his part of the story is minimal until the last quarter or so, which makes it not as damaging as it could have been otherwise.

All in all, Maybe This Time is an enjoyable, light read that won't leave you with that greasy, mildly guilty feeling that a lot of so-called women's literature does, because it doesn't resort to sex, violence and ridiculous stereotypes to reel readers in; the story is good, and the ending satisfies. I will be passing it on to friends.

Rating: four stars out of five. Fun, well-written, spooky entertainment.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press for providing an advance copy for my reading pleasure!

Review: Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

Cleave's second novel, Little Bee, tells the story of a sixteen year-old girl from Nigeria who has been orphaned by civil brutality.

If you focus on that first sentence closely, you will find the underlying premise of the novel. Little Bee delivers an extraordinary blow to the reader by delving into the painful truth of what happens when two regular, white, European tourists become involved in conflicts they don't understand when they blithely assume that their aura of Privilege will protect them from all that is ugly in the world during a holiday on the African continent. This misconception explodes when they meet Little Bee and her sister, fleeing from oil company soldiers, on a beach. The couple is faced with a choice; one acts, one does not, and the repercussions shower love, disaster, salvation and destruction on all present as the story moves from the Nigerian coast to the quiet suburbs of London.

One of the main themes of the novel is globalization, and the reader is left to ponder exactly what that means. What is globalization, really? Is it the action of incorporating all of humanity into one vast network, a web where we all are linked together in the striving for a better life? Or is it a disguise for colonization and commerce, the process of a powerful few taking what they want from the globe while simultaneously ridding themselves of the politically powerless who stand inconveniently in the way? Can average people have any effect at all? Cleve's focus on these silent questions, and what happens when average people try to intervene, make for a horrifying, beautiful tale that forces the reader to question his or her stance on what it means to be a human in a globally focused world.

Some of the scenes in Little Bee are quite graphic, particularly during the girl's tale of what happened on that beach after the couple, Sarah and her husband, Andrew, escape back to the resort. While awareness that these events are indicative of real horror around the world is important, readers should be ready to skim through that short chapter if necessary; those forging ahead should be prepared to be confronted with true nightmare.

Cleve tells the story through two alternating voices, those of Sarah and Little Bee, each revealing their particular perspective on events as tempered by their own cultural interpretation. Sarah is overwhelmed by guilt, regret, loss, and concern over her young son, whose own childish guilt and fear make him insist on dressing as Batman every day so he can fight off the 'baddies'. Little Bee looks at events through the lens of an outsider, one who tragically views every situation by first considering how she could kill herself should soldiers show up in the area. While Sarah is older in years, Little Bee is by far the older soul, and as the novel funnels downward, it is she who learns acceptance and ultimately acquiesces to fate, while Sarah struggles ever increasingly, like a fish caught in a net of naivete, tighter and tighter. Their ultimate return to the beach is the inevitable flowering of a poisonous plant.

Rating: SIX STARS out of five. Read this book.

Review: Jane Slayer, by Charlotte Bronte and Sherry Browning Erwin

Yet another in the genre of classic-horror stories, Jane Slayre (a clever play on words for Jane Eyre) comes to us bearing not only vampires, but zombies and werewolves as well, woven cleverly - and nearly seamlessly - into the original plot.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bronte's solo version, Jane is an orphan, adopted by a nasty aunt who already has three unpleasant children. She is sent to a private school for orphans, and eventually leaves there as an adult to work as a governess for the wealthy Mr. Rochester, with whom she falls in love and, in true romantic fashion, marries after the usual trials and tribulations. The fun differences here are that the aunt's family are vampires, there are zombies at the school, and Mr. Rochester has a very hairy secret hanging out in his attic. Jane, true to her name, is a slayer, and deals quite handily with all that come her way.

Erwin does an excellent job in maintaining Bronte's tone and affection for the characters while still giving them their edgier personas. The entire original story is still present, just with alternative explanations for events and far funnier additional subject matter. As is usual in these literary remodels, the more gory portions of the story are told in subdued ways that remain true to the language of the period, and are not for those looking for current-day horrors. They are brief, drolly amusing, and if anything, remind me slightly of (stay with me, here) the scene in the original Shrek movie, where Fiona dispenses with all of the bandits in the forest, smooths back her hair, and walks gracefully off. The characters are very laissez-faire about events, which adds to the humor while simultaneously sparing the reader the tiresome period where the characters discover that there is an infestation of some particularly unappetizing beast in their midst; they all readily accept that these creatures are among them, and act accordingly. What makes these novels so funny is that the characters will be going along, acting in their Victorian way, then suddenly bust out with swords (and heads) flying, and afterward simply tidy up the mess and continue on with their uptight lives. Normal dinner conversation entails bonnets, the neighbor's new carriage, and how best to remove stains made by the green zombie slime. No big whoop.

The one drawback to the novel is that, of course, Erwin is held to the original main plot - that of Young Girl Mooning Over Moody Older Man. However, the up side is that the addition of various unmentionables has vastly improved this sometimes tiresome theme by adding spice to what was originally a rather drawn-out dance. Also, even the original Jane had quite a bit of spunk, much more so than other women in similar novels, and these new additions supply her with different areas in which to branch out. Erwin has done her a service.

Rating: five stars. Witty, well-woven adaptation of a classic.

Review: Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, by Amanda Grange

Those of you who stop by here frequently know that I love the new genre of classic-horror hybrid novels. They're witty, wry, and a fun way to catch up on the classics without losing the real story-as-intended by the original author when used as a basis for the new story, or, when written as an entirely stand-alone entity, as Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, an entertaining way of turning history on its head.

Not this time.

Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, is indeed a tragedy, and not in the usual literary fashion. It starts out with some promise, but quickly turns into a sort of harlequin romance, with Elizabeth Bennett Darcy playing the part of the idiot heroine, a complete departure from her 'actual' generally intelligent character. Mr. Darcy is shown to be a man-with-a-secret, brooding and semi-tortured. Grange manages to reduce the entire story of their romance to the Twilight series status; indeed, the book might have been more enjoyable had I gone through the entire thing and whited-out everyone's names and replaced them with those from that lesser series! At least then I wouldn't have had my hopes up.

To spare you from reading the thing yourself, here is a quick synopsis: right from the wedding day, Elizabeth notices that Darcy is acting strangely unhappy, and begins to feel that she herself is somehow to blame. When Darcy leaves her alone on their wedding night, and every night thereafter, she miserably writes letters to her sister, Jane, lamenting her predicament. Because the two have just married, they are on their honeymoon tour, traveling in Europe, and Darcy introduces Elizabeth to hundreds of people, all of whom have a strange, sinuous, overtly sexual presence, and who make many exclamations over their marriage, declaring that it will never work, so on and so forth, while never saying completely out loud that the problem is not Elizabeth's lack of personal fortune, as she assumes, but rather that he is a vampire. The troubles culminate when Darcy drags Elizabeth to a remote castle, on a road that is surrounded by red-eyed wolves and strange noises, to see a 'relative' who will help him with a 'personal matter'. Upon entering the castle, the staff all start screaming and carrying on in a 'strange language' because an axe falls off the wall just as the couple walk under it, almost killing them. This castle, which has no mirrors, does, however, have a painting of two men who look suspiciously like Darcy and this relative, from long ago. Within days, there is an angry mob storming the castle with torches, and the hapless Bennett, still cluelessly lamenting her virginity, is dragged through an underground tunnel, and over mountains, on a mule to escape. She STILL has no idea what's going on. Seriously. Her main role, all this time, has been to internally freak out, a la Twilight's Bella, about how to get Darcy to come into her bedchamber at night and 'make her his wife'.

I'm not going to tell you any more, because it's too depressing and, frankly, boring. The only reason I finished the book at all was so I could come here and say with honesty that it gets no better. The eventual resolution is no better than the rest. The only use for this novel would be as the basis for one of those Scary Movie series films; that would actually be pretty good. This author has written several other classic literature sequels, which I have not read, that focus on the male character's diary and seem to have been better received according to their reviews on Amazon; my thought is that she threw this particular tale out there in an attempt to cash in on the classic-horror genre as well without first thinking whether she should, or more importantly, *could*.

Rating: Bleh.

Review: Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Shilpi Gowda's first novel, Secret Daughter, is the beautiful, interwoven tale of two sides of international adoption.

Kavita, a poor Indian woman from a small rural village, gives birth in a hut at dawn with the knowledge that if this child is again a girl, it will suffer the same horrible fate at the hands of her husband, who looks only for a son, as her last child. Hours later, Kavita, her sari bloodied from her fresh birthing wounds, travels on the back of a trader's cart to distant Bombay to leave her daughter, with only a name and a small silver anklet, in the arms of an orphanage director. Thousands of miles away, Somer, an American doctor, has just suffered her third miscarriage. A year later, their lives are inextricably linked when Somer and her husband, an Indian-born doctor, adopt Kavita's baby.

Over the next twenty years, Secret Daughter is told from several points of view. At first, Kavita and Somer are the primary focus, but as daughter Asha grows into a young girl, her voice is included as well. Others, such as Somer's husband and her mother-in-law, make only a few appearances, as does Kavita's husband, but this makes them no less important; one chapter told by Jasu was, for me, the most emotionally devastating in the novel. The entire tale is at once heartbreaking and stirring, with the current of loss flowing throughout; Kavita never recovers from the loss of her two girls, while Somer struggles with feelings of inadequacy brought on by her infertility and a sense of being the outsider in her own small family, her husband's family, and the entire culture they represent. Asha struggles with the loss of her birth parents and country, and Sarla, Somer's mother-in-law, deals with the loss of her son to a foreign wife and country. All the characters suffer in silence, much to the detriment of everyone involved, and it is only when all the hurt is allowed to reach the surface that each character can let go of the past and embrace a joint future.

Gowda delves deeply into the issues of love and cross-culturalism, revealing raw truths about the difficulty of attempting to mesh different ideals and expectations. For the most part, this is done exceptionally well. The characters are believable and easy to attach to, Kavita in particular. Her agony is palpable, and over the years as her thoughts return again and again to the child she left behind the reader can feel her pain radiating out of the novel. Somer's insecurities, and Asha's yearning for the nearly unknowable about her past also reach out beyond the pages, but in a slightly flatter way. The resolution between Somer and Sarla is a bit too easy and predictable, but this is made up for by a final chapter with Jasu that simply bores its way into the soul. The novel ends with where it begins, in a beautiful revolution that binds all the characters into eternity.

Rating: Five stars. A lovely, deeply emotional work that stirs the imagination and soul.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Obviously, I cannot review Uncle Tom's Cabin; it's a literary classic that almost everyone had heard of. The best I can do is offer a few comments.

I decided to read UTC because I'd never done so before, and it seemed like something an educator should have read. In case you haven't had the chance, the basics of the plot are this; readers follow the paths of two slaves from a single plantation who are to be sold to make up the owner's debts; Eliza, who runs away with her son after hearing that he is to be sold, and Uncle Tom, who is in fact sold to a trader.

Because it was written approximately 120 years ago, the language and writing style are what we would consider now to be extremely flowery and overdone, but the story itself transcends the language. At the time Stowe was hailed as being extremely anti-slavery, and her work was used to narrate the horrors of the practice long after its writing. Of course, with the benefit of over a century of time passing, her writing makes it obvious that her concepts of black people were still incredibly racist (although obviously still far ahead of her time), but when read in context this does not overcome the importance of the work as a landmark statement against a trade that had been in place for two hundred years. Her work as an abolitionist stirred millions in the north to stand up and cry out, and infuriated the southern plantation owners. She is widely credited for bringing an understanding of the horrors of slavery to millions of people, and with providing crucial ammunition to the anti-slavery feelings of the country.

I'll be honest; at times, it was a slow read, and at almost 500 pages it took me quite awhile to get through it. Skimming some of the more flowery descriptions made the going easier. Regardless of the work it took to get through it - this is obviously not vacation reading - I would still recommend that anyone take the time to at least peruse the work and get the general feel for the story. It's an important part of American history in and of itself.

Review: The Family Man, by Elinor Lipman

Before you ask, no, this novel has *nothing* to do with the movie starring Nicolas Cage that came out several years ago.

Lipman's newest novel, The Family Man, is utterly delightful. I could not have enjoyed this book more. You don't even need to read the rest of the review, unless you really enjoy listening to me prattle on. Seriously, just go and get it.

OK, since you insist on reading more, I'll fill you in. Henry Archer is a long-divorced, recently-retired gay lawyer who lives alone in a lovely NYC townhouse. Due to his questionable decision to contact his ex-wife to express sympathy on the recent death of her husband, he becomes re-entangled in her life. When Denise drags him to her apartment, he sees a recent photo of the long-lost step-daughter that was stolen from him in the divorce and whose memory he spent years in therapy guiltily bemoaning; he recognizes her as the coat-check girl at the salon where he has his hair cut, but due to his long-held anger, he says nothing when Denise confides in him that she has no idea where the girl is, that she hasn't spoken to her since the funeral. Henry re-connects with the girl, who is (of course) a starving actress, and instantly the two bond over lunch. Within days he is caught up in her newest job - pretending to be the girlfriend of a strange young actor who needs to be 'seen'. Between somewhat reluctantly helping Denise with the odd legal entanglements of her late husband's will (her stepsons are trying to enforce a defunct pre-nup that cuts her out of her home and fortune entirely), trying to look after his newly-reacquainted step-daughter, and fielding phone calls from men who have gotten his number from Denise, Henry suddenly finds himself up to his ears in craziness. Predictable, yet delightful, hilarity ensues.

Anyone who reads my reviews regularly knows that I hate vapid, uselessly convoluted stories, so rest assured that Lipmans' novel is neither. She manages to write a lighthearted story while still giving the characters depth, and the plot moves along effortlessly. There are no contrived arguments, no ridiculous 'no one would EVER do that' moments. The choices the characters make are realistic, even if the circumstances are slightly inflated for fiction. Most importantly, all of them are very likable; even the over-the-top Denise is ultimately someone you wouldn't mind knowing. Also - and this is always a winner with me - the ending is lovely, AND there's a bit of an afterward so you know what happens to everyone and can imagine them going forward in your mind.

I enjoyed this story so much that I would be happy to read a sequel, if one were appropriate. It is the rarest of books - a work that's amusing, light, and yet simultaneously emotionally present. As it is, I will content myself with putting Lipman's other novels on my to-read list.

Rating: five stars. Witty, charming fiction that possesses style and lighthearted substance.

Review: Brain Rules, by John Medina

I picked up Brain Rules after a session in one of my education classes about new research into how people learn. I was interested in the topic, but didn't want to get a subscription to some neurological magazine, so I got on Amazon and looked through their selection before heading off to B&N with a short-list of what to look for.

Brain Rules won *by far* in the selection process. It's not at all "sciency" in the way that makes people like me either a) run screaming for the hills or b) start snoring. It's conversational, and split into mid-length sections which are again further split into topics. Examples of section topics include Wiring, Attention, Short- and Long-Term Memory, Sleep, Stress, Sensory Integration, and Gender. There are no illustrations, charts or graphs, except for the summary sections at the end of each chapter that helpfully remind you of the key points for each topic. It's got a Discovery Channel approach to science - fun, informative, and easily digestible. Each new section starts with a personal story (either Medina's or someone else's), and anecdotes are liberally sprinkled throughout, providing both examples and comic relief for complex ideas.

This style is right out of Rule #4: Attention - We Don't Pay Attention To Boring Things. Medina discusses the fact that audiences (classes, meeting attendees, etc) check out after ten minutes, and after that point you have to recapture them with another 'hook' or major point, using something that they can relate to personally, such as an amusing story or example. He applies this technique exceptionally well in the book; just as I started to drift away, get a little tired of brain information, he drew me back in with another tale, which was then followed with details about why the brain utilizes information more efficiently when it's encased in stories that the listener can become emotionally involved in, then he explained how the pathways and information storage work, and then suddenly I was back at the story again, seeing it all get tied together.

The other most interesting and applicable sections, for me, were sensory integration (if we learn something while smelling, say, roses, we will recall that same information at a much higher rate if roses are again present), vision (the brain will see what it thinks it should see, rather than what is actually there, and we will remember what we think we saw based on that subconscious judgment), and gender. I found this great nugget - women are much more genetically diverse than men, because the X chromosome has 1500 genes, whereas the Y has less than 100; therefore, women have 3000 chromosomes, and men have 1800. Since the X chromosome has the overwhelming majority of cognitive-development chromosomes, and women have two... you can take it from there. Medina isn't inferring that the female brain is better, just that the processing is completely different, and that's important from an instructional standpoint, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of it myself, anyway.

I have to recommend this book for parents, educators, and anyone who has a part in relaying any kind of information in a formalized way. Even if you are casually interested in how you might help your brain to age better, this would be a good read for you. It might make a good Xmas gift for a boss or teacher, too, since they're notoriously hard to buy for, because it's something applicable and different (ie not a mug or potpourri). I am not a huge scientific reader, but I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It was completely painless, and most of the time actually quite enjoyable.

Rating: five stars. Educational, jovial, mainstream presentation of otherwise potentially complex material

Review: Labor Day, by Joyce Maynard

When you were a kid, did you ever feel like *nothing* ever happened to you? Like anything, anything at all, would be a huge improvement over the nothingness you are currently experiencing?

Thirteen year-old Henry, the main character of Joyce Maynard's new novel, Labor Day, has felt that way for years. After his parents' divorce, Henry's mother, Adele, transformed into quite nearly a hermit, ordering even basic necessities from catalogues, and Henry's life slowed to an isolated crawl during the summers. Just before school starts, at the beginning of a steamy Labor Day weekend in his small NH town, Henry's life changes when a bleeding man in the local big-box store asks him for help; he needs Henry and Adele to take him to their house. Hours later, sitting in their kitchen, Frank admits to being an escaped prisoner from the local penitentiary, but rather than turn him in, Adele lets him stay, and the two begin a strange and seemingly-fated relationship. Henry also takes strongly to Frank, and the house at the end of the cul-de-sac becomes a strange shangri-la for all three lost souls until Henry runs across a strange new girl in town whose paranoid outlook puts fearful ideas of abandonment in his head. It is then that Henry has to choose - does he save Frank, and his mother's newfound happiness, or does he save his own familiar life?

While the acceptance of a single woman taking a bleeding mad to her home is a bit of a stretch, I was willing to buy into it for two reasons: one, the novel takes place in the mid-80's in a small town, where people would be less paranoid about helping a stranger, and two, the town is in NH, where I grew up, so I can tell you that people tend to keep to themselves and out of other people's business. That Adele wouldn't have asked first what was wrong with Frank isn't all that surprising, particularly 20 years ago.

As long as you can accept Adele's decision, the rest of the book is an easy swallow. Right from the start, the reader roots for the scenario to somehow end well. Aside from a very few moments at the beginning when you wonder what Frank's real personality might be, it is evident that his arrival is a huge turning point for all involved. For his part, Frank almost immediately becomes the man of the house, fixing what's broken in more ways than one. Adele blooms in the newfound attention Frank showers upon her, and Henry comes into his own, out of his shell even when the inevitable occurs.

The characters are quite likable, and easy to identify with. When the stories finally begin to emerge - Adele's tale of guilt and despair that explains her hermit-like ways, and Frank's revelation of the horrifying coincidence that led to his imprisonment - it becomes apparent that the two are, in fact, fated for each other, and it's easy to see why each would be willing to bet everything on each other. Henry's unique situation - young enough to be jealous of his mother's attentions, old enough to be jealous of sexuality in his home, damaged enough to accept even this tragic figure as a father-substitute - is played very well. The young girl he meets, and her strange issues, are a little too conveniently introduced, but her exploitation is necessary to bring about the inevitably approaching storm. The epilogue ties the tale together in a very satisfying way; I was extremely happy with how things turned out, even with the initial heartbreak for all involved.

Rating: four stars: interesting premise, likable characters, heartfelt denouement

Review: Ophelia's Mom, by Nina Shandler

Nina Shandler is the mother of Sara Shandler, the nineteen year-old author of 'Ophelia Speaks', in which teenagers speak out about their lives and relationships with parents, friends, and others; Sara's book was itself a response to the widely popular Reviving Ophelia, a study of teenage girls. Nina Shandler (referred to going forward as simply Shandler) is herself a psychologist, and saw that a piece was missing from the Ophelia puzzle, that of the mothers' perspective on adolescence. Her work, Ophelia's Mom, is subtitled, 'women speak out about loving and letting go of their adolescent daughters', and that is exactly what it is.

Shandler sent out 23,000 fliers both online and on paper for mothers of teenage girls to submit thoughts and be interviewed for her book; she received only 350 responses, far less than her daughter had two years prior from the teenage contingent. Her explanation of this difference is partly that women are more secretive about family strife because they still generally bear the responsibility for running the family, and are humiliated by any perceived failure. Shandler used roughly half the responses she received in the book, but gave no information on how these particular responses were selected for use, or reasons why others would have been rejected. The responses she does use seem very homogeneous, and while I can't be certain whether this indicative of the larger response or a bias in selection of the responses for use, the copy of the invitation she used that is included in the forward could be a clue as to why; it is strongly geared towards a certain type of respondent. The wording of the invite uses fairly elevated diction, assumes that the person reading the flier has read Hamlet or at least has a working knowledge of who Ophelia is, and has either read at least one of the other two 'Ophelia' research works or knows enough about them to understand why this new work is pertinent. Although it attempts to be folksy, it's a fairly formal invitation, and not one that would appeal to very educationally or economically diverse audience.

Still, Shandler doesn't claim to have done a scientific study, merely to have gathered a series of anecdotal tales provided by women who have had experiences in typical, general teenage parenting categories - body image, parent-teen relationships, adult relationships surrounding teen issues, and letting their daughters go to graduation and life. The stories themselves are very absorbing, and swerve between heartwarming and heartbreaking. Walking through adolescence the first time was for many women difficult at best, and going through it a second time, this time as a bystander watching a beloved child struggle, is sometimes torturous. The women's experiences are told with humor and affection, and flow well into one another. Shandler limits herself to writing short personal stories at the beginning of new sections or where appropriate to bridge gaps between others' stories, which is a major bonus to the book; she understands that her role is not to judge failings or extol virtues, but rather to report experiences in the hopes that other women will relate and find comfort in not being alone. She does this very well, and seemingly without holding back her own embarrassment.

I'm not sure about Shandler's claim about women not writing in because they were shy or embarrassed. People not having problems wouldn't have written just to say, 'hey, everything's great over here, thanks for asking', so it's still hard to support her claim. However, as she also says, there is almost nothing out there like this book, stories from mothers about parenting their daughters in adolescence, and the book's true value stems from that. It's a well-written, extremely engaging book that provides insight and, importantly, hindsight into parenting ideas and struggles, particularly for those of us who are teetering on the edge of the adolescent phase for our second time around.

Rating: four stars; Well-written, chatty, touching look into parenting girls through the most difficult part of childhood

Note

Hi There:

For those of you who don't know, I started a 12mo graduate program at the end of May that will give me my master's in education next year. We do two courses a month, so an entire semester in eight four-hour sessions per class. It's pretty intense, and I haven't had much time for anything else, reading-wise. But, I do have a little time off here and there, and there will be other books that I'll be reading for the class that I will be able to post about (such Porcupine, which I just posted, and Ophelia's Mom, which will be up in a few minutes). So, it may get a little sparse around here from time to time, but I haven't abandoned it! :)

Astarte

Review: How To Hug a Porcupine: Negotiating the Prickly Points of the Tween Years, by Julie A. Ross, M.A.

In Porcupine, Ross discusses several ways to approach common problems of adolescent behavior and its effects on the family. Her primary assertion is that parents should take a ‘relationship’ approach, because at this stage they will no longer be able to physically control him or her, and must now rely on the quality of the relationship they have with the child to provide the basis for all interaction. Parents must understand that hormones and social changes make the tween years especially sensitive, and to control their reflexive responses of anger, worry and overprotection and work towards interactions that are less reflexive and more constructive. In order to foster open communication, parents should have family meetings, avoid blocking children’s expressions via unhelpful emotional reactions or overhelping (problem solving) that displays a lack of trust or enables childish behavior. It is vital for a parent to be engaged in the child’s interests in order to have a basis for a solid relationship. Finally, a child’s self-esteem should be fostered with encouragement of the effort used rather than generic praise of an outcome, such as praising hard work rather than an easily-won good grade.

Although they were obviously fictitious, the ‘personal stories’ are helpful because they break up the advice sections and give examples of behavior in a non-clinical manner. The writing is very accessible to the average person, and doesn’t require any particular knowledge of psychology. Particularly for the less well-read parent, many of the ideas and concepts may be fairly new or different from what they have experienced or tried in the past.

While the author includes many examples of different ‘brands’ of bad behavior – defiance, moral ambiguity, slacking off at home and school – many of the examples seem much the same, just with a slightly different twist. In the ‘coffee group’ the author has created, only mothers participate, which I found to be disappointing, because that implies that only women are expected to be involved in parenting. In fact, in several examples, the father is another drag in the mother’s life, by either being non-supportive or downright blaming the mother for the child’s behavior. That seemed strangely behind the times for a book that dictates such new-age parenting. My main complaint, though, is that the author exemplifies tolerance for all but the most extreme mouthing off, which I find completely untenable; she preaches respect for the child, but yet doesn’t demand it for the parent.

Ross makes several useful points that seem obvious, but in the heat of the moment may get thrown by the wayside: self-esteem has to come from the inside; children need to be allowed to learn on their own and deal with the consequences of their actions; parents should act interested in their children’s activities even if they’re not so they can be aware and involved in their child’s life. Core nuggets of advice like these are highlighted by separate placement and font from the rest of the writing, making a skim-through easy for those looking for particular sections or a simple refresher.

Rating: 3.5 stars: a decent starting place for basic challenges of tweenage parenting problems

Review: The Last Child, by John Hart

John Hart's latest novel, The Last Child, centers around a child named Johnny Merrimon, whose sister disappeared a year earlier, and whose father vanished not long after. Far from the idyllic life he once had, Johnny and his mother now live in a rundown house owned by the violent town bigwig who now controls their lives. His mother rarely gets out of bed, and Johnny spends his days on his bike, combing neighborhoods and tracking known pedophiles in a dogged attempt to find his sister rather than attending school. When Johnny witnesses a murder, and is himself briefly grabbed by a stranger in the woods, the story of what really has happened in the town begins to unravel.

There's a lot about this story that's a rerun of other novels: the despairing mother who falls apart and turns to the violent man who abuses her child but turns a blind eye, the rebel child who rises to adult level and takes on the role of caretaker, the cop who is obsessed with the case and also, of course, is in love with the distraught mother, the lurking uber-religious mentally handicapped well-meaning felon. However, the plot itself moves along fairly quickly once it gets going, and the questions are interesting. What really did happen? Will Johnny's father return? Who killed the motorcyclist, and what does the man in the forest have to do with anything?

Hunt does a good job of concealing the answers to most of these questions until the end of the story. I was honestly surprised at some of the revelations. While this is one of those stories where you know that things are going to work out in the end for everyone, it was nice to not know exactly how it was all going to wind up until the proper time.

The use of mysticism and historical tie-ins with Johnny's ancestors was somewhat interesting, if a little heavy-handed towards the end of the story. The story's flow stutters a bit entering into the climax events because of it; while there was some foreshadowing as to its importance, it wasn't integrated into the story enough previously for there to be a seamless transition to a more mystical resolution.

Rating: three stars: Tired character stereotypes, sometimes difficult to buy into, but interesting plot

Review: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith

Do you hate history? Does nonfiction leave you sleepy? Are you bored to tears with hearing the same tired stories about our sixteenth president? Author Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has a cure for you, as he once again visits the world of historical horror fiction with his newest work, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

Smith takes a different tack with his newest work, creating something entirely original rather than choosing a previously published work to embellish. He addresses Lincoln's entire life, dividing the work into three sections - boyhood, manhood, and president - and lays the basis of Lincoln's interactions with the hungry undead early on. It turns out that Lincoln's grandfather, beloved mother, and other relatives died not from common malaise but from exposure to the blood of vampires, who attacked their family in retribution for an outstanding debt Lincoln's father owed to a bloodthirsty banker. This, it becomes clear, is the source of the animosity between Lincoln and his father, and is the beginning of Lincoln's career as a vampire hunter. Once begun, his journey brings him into the company of a vampire turncoat who advises him which of his kind need to die. Their relationship, and the alliances formed because of it, bring Abe to the highest office in the land. There, he battles slavery not only as a human evil, but for its underlying truth; southern vampires use the slave trade for food, and mean to take over all of humanity.

ALVH is does not have the dry wit of Prejudice, but does possess its own dark character that grows increasingly absorbing with each chapter. Smith strays from the action of the main story occasionally, and some sections are a bit dry, but on the whole the tale is well worth reading. At times, the tale seems a bit Ann Rice-y, but the addition of the vampires to Lincoln's life, especially in the political realm, seems fairly organic. The characters themselves are well-written, and the idea of slavery being in reality a massive food supply chain for the undead is genius. Abe's personal tragedies have always seemed almost unrealistic in their scale even in their actual fact, so the weaving in of vampires as a common thread of explanation for the long trail of sorrow almost makes more sense than the real stories behind them. The forward, which slyly mirrors one that would be seen in an actual work, sets the tone of a serious work of nonfiction, which Smith maintains throughout the story. The ending, though, has really captured my imagination. I finished this book about two weeks ago, and am still thinking about it, imagining what would come next.

It did take me a few chapters to actually get into the story, and occasionally the tale was a bit slower than I would have liked, but overall, ALVH is another success for Smith. I was impressed previously with his talent for seamlessly weaving zombies into a classic, and am glad to see that he possesses the dexterity to create his own original works as well. I look forward to reading whatever he comes out with next.

Rating: four out of five stars. Very imaginative, with intriguing characterizations.

Review: Flood, by Stephen Baxter

In Stephen Baxter's Flood, a group of four scientists and military members from around the world emerges from a years-long hostage situation to find the world around them rapidly changing. Waters around the world are rising, not because of anything humankind has done but rather because of natural circumstances; the earth's plates have been hiding subterranean oceans that are finally bursting free, flooding London even as the hostages are being freed. Billionaire entrepreneur Nathan Lammockson, who had a hand in the hostage's discovery and release, entreats the former hostages to help him in his quest to conquer the new challenges humanity faces. Fraught with socio-political strife and greed, Flood tells the tale of humanity's last stand on Earth, of our final forty years on dry land.

Unfortunately, while the premise, and potential, of this concept is fascinating, Baxter's execution is not up to the task. The characters are flat, predictable caricatures of what they could be. The story alternates between dragging and flashing forward, skipping years and important character developments. The entire undertaking begins to feel like a made-for-TV movie, where there are snippets of interesting events, but really nothing to keep you from heading for the kitchen for a snack or answering the phone.

I wanted to like this book. I really did. The concept was so interesting! I stuck with it to the end, hoping for more, but the whole thing just unraveled more as time passed. I know there's a sequel, which I have to admit piques my interest just enough that I might check it out, because again, the idea had so much potential, that even if the end result wasn't what I hoped for, I at least had fodder for my own imaginings of what the world would be like and how I could have done it differently than the author, and that's worth something. Besides, even with the worst of the Lifetime movies, the action scenes can still be worth tuning in to gawk at.

Rating: two stars. Cool idea, interesting action scenes, but little more than TV-movie quality.

Review: How to Buy a Love of Reading, by Tanya Egan Gibson

Gibson's first novel, How to Buy a Love of Reading, is one that I had heard about several months ago on a radio show, before it came out. Despite wanting to read it, I promptly forgot about it after I realized that it wasn't yet available, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it on the library shelf this week.

Reading takes place in a Peyton-Place town on Long Island, where the insecure, overweight, fifteen year-old Carley Wells lives in a mansion with her nouveau riche parents, attending grandiose Sweet Sixteen bashes where artists cast molds of the guests heads as party favors. She escapes the reality of her mother's constant nagging about her weight and the other kids' nastiness towards her through her TV, her Aftermemory, where she re-creates the day's events to her own satisfaction in her mind, and, most importantly, her symbiotic friendship with the town Adonis, Hunter Cay, who is increasingly falling down the rabbit holes of Vicodin and alcohol addictions.

As the title suggests, Carley also hates books, and it is at one of the sweet sixteen parties that her father gets the idea to hire a writer to write Carley's perfect novel, both as a gift and gimmick for her sixteenth birthday. Thus arrives Bree, surly starving-artist-in-residence, and behind her follows the famous local author, Justin, who finally emerges from hiding after a crazed fan's attack years earlier. While we gradually learn the two author's backstories, their connection to each other, and also their parallel to Carley and Hunter's relationship, become painfully apparent.

The main drawback of the story, for me, was the stereotypical portrayal of the characters. It's a wealty town, thus of course everyone is sleeping with everyone else, all the kids - who are more like adults, especially Hunter, who is treated like a thirty year-old by almost everyone in the story - are constantly drinking and taking drugs, and all the women are complete and total harpies. It was a bit like a Jackie Collins novel in that regard, and Gibson conveys their practiced boredom with life so well that I myself started to buy into the idea that everything was tiresome, and was very nearly bored myself at the beginning, just by osmosis.

However, Gibson does an interesting job of portraying teenage thought in various ways, such as the difference between the worldly and somewhat inaccessible Hunter and the much less so voice of Carley. Carley's longing for acceptance, and for Hunter, is palpable; these qualities, as well as her more honest voice, make her unique and sympathetic in a way the others aren't. As Hunter descends into his addictions, becoming withdrawn and erratic, her increasingly desperate attentions to his well-being, and to their future, are dead-on to the dreams a teenage girl that age would have. The novel-in-a-novel that the damaged Bree tries to write to Carley's specifications traces the arc of the Carley and Hunter's relationship in an ironic way that is first almost invisible and then, by the end, all too real. Both of Carley's stories have two endings: the first is written by another character, but the final say is Carley's alone. It is tempting to skim over the included chapters of the commissioned novel, but to do so is to skip the ties that bind the three stories - those in the created novel, Bree and Justin, and Carley and Hunter - together, and remove a level of Gibson's story that raises it above the straightforward.

In all, it is the writing and wording that brings Reading out of the realm of the completely typical. The storyline is fairly predictable, the characters not so unusual, but still there is a tone about it that is different from the usual off-kilter Romeo and Juliet story. Gibson uses the peripheral characters for comedic relief; Carley's father, in particular, is very funny in his growing obsession with flowers, and their resulting staining of certain body parts. Overall, while some sections are somewhat belabored, and the story borrows heavily from stereotypical archetypes, the author's ironic tone and drawstring ending make it a worthwhile read.

Rating: four out of five stars.

Review: While I'm Falling, by Laura Moriarty

When I grabbed Falling off of the shelf, I expected more of a light, YA-type read; after all, it's about a college student whose parents are getting divorced. I imagined something that would clear my brain like sherbet after asian takeout, leaving it fairly clean for the next, more meaty read.

What I got was a surprisingly in-depth, mature narrative about a young woman's decent into the messiness of life. Veronica is a pre-med student at a Kansas college, when she finds out that her parents are divorcing because her father came home early from a business trip and found a man sleeping in his bed, with a note to the 'beautiful dreamer' from his wife instructing him to be gone before her husband returns. In later chapters, we find that of course, it's not that simple, but the fact remains that while Veronica is going through the messiest years of her own life - first relationships, first big mistakes, failing her first class - her parents are as well, with her father attempting to use his lawyer's training to rake her mother through the coals in court and her mother sliding into poverty and, eventually, homelessness. Veronica finds herself needing to care for her mother when she can't even fulfill her RA commitment in her dorm to assist the younger students. At the same time, her mother has to leave her own misery behind and help Veronica cope with the repercussions of her own childish mistakes.

'Falling' is a painful read at times. All of us have screwed up in ways that effect not only ourselves, but others as well, and as in real life, the truly interesting meat of the story is in how the characters move on from their mistakes and re-create their lives. Before that happens, however, the reader has to slog through every miserable moment with Veronica, and it's truly not pleasant because I, at least, could see myself in her; her actions, some of which were largely originated by circumstances out of her control, could very well have been my own at her age. Because I have already been through her phase of life, I could see where she was heading, and it was like a train wreck. Moriarty doesn't dumb-down her characters to fit into stereotypical molds, nor does she insult the reader by overkilling the details; we find out the backstories of the events, but are not forced to re-live them through each character's perception. We do eventually find out why there was a man in the bed, and how it came to that point, but it's almost as though the information is whispered to us; there is a clear feeling that Veronica and her older sister do not know all the details that we are learning, and that that is how it should be. We need them to understand how we got where things are at, and to humanize the parents.

This is important, for while Falling is largely focused on Veronica, it is also the larger story of family and relationships, and how real people can fall off of their pedestals and create new lives for themselves. The painful mistakes are worth the read, because the ways the characters accept their blame and move forward are honest. While the final chapter is slightly too tied-up-with-a-bow, I have to admit to occasionally liking that kind of thing, so I was good with it.

Rating: four stars. Real, adult look at life mistakes, consequences, and redemptions.

Review: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!, by Jonathan Goldstein

I decided to read this humorous collection of short stories, which is based (very) loosely on those of biblical characters, after hearing the Goldstein read the first story, Adam and Eve, on NPR's This American Life. The combination of the snide humor and his dry voice was irresistible, and I went out of my way to order it from inter-library loan.

When I say that the shorts on this book are loosely based on the tales surrounding each character's situation in the Bible (and, actually, the Torah, since it only deals with the Old Testament), I mean to say that these stories are to the original work what Dennis Rodman was to basketball: a much flashier, more intensely-imagined figment that gives depth where you weren't even originally aware that you needed any. For instance, the story that drew me in, Adam and Eve, is cleverly told by the beguiling snake's point of view; in between learning what an undeserving schlemiel Adam was, and how leggy and earthily sexy Eve was, the reader also gets a glimpse into what could very well have been the snake's motives for enticing the pair towards the apples - jealousy, frustration, an inflated sense of self-worth.

My other favorite story was that of Jacob and Esau, the brothers whose mother favors the younger brother so much that she has him disguise himself as his brother to fool his ailing father into giving him his all-important dying blessing. The original Bible is not a work that discusses the inner feelings of its characters, and Goldstein fleshes out the brothers and their mother, poking into the rotten recesses of Rebekah's brain to expose her almost (reverse) Oedipal complex, and allows Jacob the voice to express his own guilty anguish at having to endure the forced agenda his mother has in place for him.

The other stories - particularly that of David - weren't as compelling to me, and in fact the book gets a bit stale as the chapters go on. Goldstein uses the same formula to humanize each tale; this works fine in several of the stories where there are two main characters to carry the plot, because the two together provide enough material for there to be a decent amount of play between them. However, in the stories where only on character is the main focus, such as The Golden Calf (which focuses on Moses), or, again, David (which is also waaay too long for what it is), Goldstein increasingly uses lowbrow humor - repeated foul language, bodily functions, and sexual acts - to try and create material. While I have no problem with any of these things on their own, the problem with their predictable repetition is that the entire work begins to come off as having been done by a middle school boy bored in Sunday school.

I attempted to download the book from audible.com, thinking that perhaps it needed his vocal interpretation to really make the final stories palatable, but alas, it is not offered there (which surprises me). Hearing him read it aloud in his wry voice may in fact downplay some of the childishness of the later chapters. As the book stands alone, however, I would recommend either getting it from the library, or checking out the This American Life podcasts where Goldstein reads selections from the book aloud. You can stream Cain and Abel here, and Adam and Eve here. I really recommend listening to Adam and Eve; it's really quite witty and interesting, and is only about ten minutes long.

Rating: three stars; Several witty interpretations scattered among lesser-quality boyish humor

Review: Committed: a Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, by Elizabeth Gilbert

After reading Eat, Pray, Love, I had very high hopes for Elizabeth Gilbert's next novel. While EPL had slow moments, on the most part I felt that it was an amazing book. When I heard that Committed was about to be released, I reserved my copy at the library waaaay in advance.

I hate to say this, but I might as well admit it: I can't get through it.

That's not exactly true; of course, I could get through it, if I wanted to. It's not written in Klingon. I just have lost steam to the point where I'm finding myself avoiding reading it, which means that all the great stuff have in line behind it to devour is collecting dust while I resist admitting defeat. Now, after resorting to skipping pages today, I am ready to throw in the proverbial towel. I will not be reading this one cover-to-cover, word-for-word.

Both the title and the book jacket lead the reader to believe that this will be a novel about Gilbert's inner struggles regarding marriage, which is being literally thrust upon her and her non-American sig other when he is turned away by customs after 9/11 for overusing his visa. It is a marriage, a breakup, or deportation. While the two wait for the visa papers to be straightened out so they can marry in the US (oddly, if they marry in another country, the American govt will be even more suspicious that theirs is a marriage of convenience and deny entry), they travel the globe, and Gilbert decides to investigate the customs of marriage, turning it inside-out, looking at it from all angles, in an attempt to find a more comfortable perspective than that she has internalized from American culture. The title and summary are very misleading, for this is not the story of discovery within their interpersonal relationship, but rather Gilbert's reaction to the relationship solely, which for her leads to investigative reporting.

It's not that the book is hugely boring, per se, but rather that Gilbert takes every. single. point and beats it to a pulp; what starts out as an interesting point after five pages of deliberation and examination becomes very tiresome. She interviews individuals from several Asian countries she visits, she reads great volumes of written work on the topic, including statistical studies done by large universities, she argues for and against various religious-based perspectives, and regurgitates all of the information she collects in what begins to feel like a giant college term paper. There is little of the inner Gilbert that we were privy to in EPL, which is what made that particular work, also non-fiction and full of research, speak to so many women around the world. Even though this work was supposed to be about her working through her feelings about marriage vis-a-vis her relationship with Felipe, there is precious little in this book about their actual relationship. While she includes a scant few conversations here and there as a jump-off point for discussing more research, Committed is a far less endearing novel, quite an irony for a book about love.

One thing that might have helped would have been to have Felipe's voice more present; as it is, he has no part at all other than in the third person. Since the relationship crisis involves them both, having him participate more, perhaps by writing small asides or even footnotes might have been a bonus. Had she been more concise, or used (several pages' worth) fewer examples, her points, which generally had interesting and/or thought-provoking kernels, would be more readable. Finally, Gilbert seems to go around in circles, examining the same points several times over, and it becomes exhausting.

I started skipping pages when I was about halfway through, and by the final third of the book, I was skimming, looking for something that had anything to do with why I was reading the book - namely, a connection with Gilbert. It really wasn't to be found. I found even their eventual wedding, which isn't discussed in great detail, left me apathetic. If you are looking for a dissertation on marriage customs and theories from around the world, this is the book for you. If you're looking for the human connection that made EPL so readable and informative on a more emotional level, you'll be sorely disappointed.

Rating: two stars. well-informed research paper on marriage, lacking in personal connection

Review: June Bug, by Chris Fabry

In this character-titled story, June Bug and her father live a bohemian life, travelling the country in an RV. Though they have no set address, and no friends or family, JB has always felt secure in her life with her father - until she sees her own photo on the wall of Missing Children at the Walmart where their RV is parked, awaiting repair parts. While surprisingly composed about her discovery, it does spur her desire to learn about her own mother, or at least to find a suitable substitute, and when a lonely Walmart employee offers to let JB and her father stay with her while their RV is repaired, she jumps what she feels is her chance to somehow cobble together a family for herself. Her father, a lonely, haunted man, realizes what she is trying to do, and is forced to make a decision about what their future will be. Meanwhile, across the country, June Bug / Natalie's grandmother has never given up hope of finding her, and clues to the eight year-old crime are literally surfacing in the town she's from.

June Bug has been fairly extensively compared to Les Miserables, the massively popular classic-turned-musical story of a young girl saved and then raised by a pseudo criminal on the run. This is a fair comparison, although whether Fabry intended the parallel or not I'm not sure. I was actually more intrigued with the novel because of this; the entire time I was reading, I was not only interested in the story, but also in matching up the two plots and characters. For their part, the characters were very well crafted, and I was almost equally drawn to all of them as they told their own stories in alternating chapters: the hurt and hopeful grandmother; the town sheriff; June Bug's father; Sheila, the woman who takes them to her home; and of course June Bug herself. The only character who remains silent is June Bug's mother - her story, which is the lynchpin of the entire plot, the reader has to piece together in tantalizing tidbits until the very end of the novel.

Like many works, JB slows somewhat in the third quarter of the story, but Fabry does an excellent job in keeping the reader guessing on the many questions he poses - what happened the night June Bug disappeared? Is her mother telling the truth? Was June Bug's father - if he even is her father - somehow criminally involved? If he wasn't, how did he wind up with the little girl? Why have they been on the run for so long? The suspense builds in many ways; on the one hand, June Bug's father is very likable and seems honorable, so you want them to be able to stay together, but on the other, her grandmother has been pining for her for years, and it's pretty obvious that this is a one-or-the-other situation. Which will it be? I will be honest: I cried when all the questions were finally answered. I am not a big crier, and worse, I was in public when I finished the novel. The ending is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

The small parts of the plot that are far-fetched are far outweighed by the endearing realism of the characters. The plot's similarities to Les Miserable were in the end, I think, somewhat minor, but it was definitely interesting and fun to compare as I read along. It should be noted that the author is fairly well-known for YA religous fiction, and while this is not a religous novel, several of the characters are. It wasn't too obtrusive or preachy, more just an aspect of their lives, particularly due to the part of the country the characters are from, and it could easily be skimmed or even skipped if the reader is really horrified by that kind of thing because it's not a part of the plot. (In addition, this book is perfectly appropriate for YA as well, and my daughter read it before I did, thinking because of the girl on the cover that I had gotten it for her.) I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this novel pop up on TV at some point as a movie, probably unfortunately on Lifetime since they're the ones who seem to do that kind of thing. If that happens, hopefully whatever network produces the film would manage to convey the heartfelt depth that Fabry has given each of the characters and respect the story for itself, and not attempt to shoehorn the LM connection too much.

Rating: four out of five stars - lovely characters, suspenseful mystery, satisfying ending

Review: The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly

Unlike Connolly's The Gates, which I recently reviewed, The Book of Lost Things is not meant to share with children. I had fully intended upon reading it with my daughter, as I had Gates, but after a few chapters was glad I had decided to go through it myself first.

At first, Things, which takes place in 1940s England, seems innocuous. Following the death of his mother, with whom he shared a love of fairy tales, twelve year-old David begins hearing voices from the books in his room. In fact, he begins to hear voices from every book he comes in contact with. Very shortly, David's father begins to date, Rose, an administrator from the respite care facility where his mother spent her last days, and it is then that David has his first 'attack' - an almost seizure-like episode where he can see a distant land with his mind's eye. By the time David's father reveals to him that Rose is pregnant, and they will be getting married, David has learned to control his attacks, but now there is something new; a Crooked Man has crossed over from the land of fantasy into David's world, and David has begun to hear his mother's voice calling to him from the woods behind the house, pleading with him to follow her voice and help her. One inevitable night, David finally follows the voice, and winds up in the Crooked Man's world, where animals want to be men, and nightmarish monsters roam free. The spoiled and unhappy David must journey to find the King, travelling at times with others, but always relying on himself to solve the puzzle of this place.

The Book of Lost Things once again brings to mind a Stephen King novel, this time The Dark Tower series. In fact, one of the characters David travels with is named Roland, and he is a gunslinger of sorts on a quest to a dark tower. Many other works of fiction are mentioned / appear in Book, as well, including several grotesque retellings of popular fairy tales that relate to the world in which David finds himself. The tales are told by various characters David runs into as either explanations of creatures or allegories for the events and transformations that David himself is experiencing. These references are at turns interesting and disgusting, and are integral parts of the story. It is these stories, along with the deeper social commentary, that make the novel inappropriate for younger readers.

While the novel seemed to briefly lose forward motion in the middle, the beginning and endings make it still well worth the read. The characters and events, which are at first deceptively straightforward, are by the end an obvious tapestry of foreshadowing and deeper workings. It was not the typical read, and that in itself makes it a good choice, since much of what is out there at the moment seems to be firmly in one groove or another. The social and morality tales of the story are definitely there for the ingestion, but aren't presented in a hit-you-over-the-head kind of way. There were plans to turn the novel into a film, and rights were purchased by John Moore, who did the new Omen film, but that seems to have tanked. I think this is just as well, since books like this, to me, are better left to the imagination where gore can't overtake the actual meat of the story.

Rating: four stars. Interesting blend of ideas, loses steam briefly before a stellar ending.

Review: The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb

I picked up The Hour I First Believed for two reasons: one, I liked Lamb's first novel, She's Come Undone, very much when it came out years ago (he has written other novels since, but that was the last one I read) and was looking for more of the same, and two, it discusses the events at Columbine High School from an inside vantage point, which I found interesting. What I got wasn't quite what I expected.

Lamb's emotionally closed-off main character, Caelum, is a middle-aged high school teacher who is working on his third marriage, to Maureen, the school nurse. Although from the east coast originally, the two move to Columbine, CO to escape the memories of Maureen's infidelity and Caelum's resulting violence on both her and her lover. Their attempt to start anew puts them directly in the path of the runaway nightmare train that two students brought down upon the school; while Caelum is away at his aunt's funeral, Maureen is trapped in the Columbine school library, hiding in a cabinet, listening to the shooting and waiting to die. The overwhelming PTSD Maureen suffers as a result of the events leads them back to the east coast, to live in Caelum's aunt's home and try, again, to restart their lives. Unfortunately, like an unwinding top, events spin ever further out of control, and their lives go into freefall. No one will hire Caelum for a teaching position at a high school because of his previous actions, and when Maureen is finally able to work once again, her choices bring their own unhappy consequences.

Within this story, there is another, far less interesting, mostly unrelated one regarding Caelum's family history. Much is made of the local women's prison that his grandmother used to run, and in the last third of the book many many pages are used detailing the information the woman who is renting the upstairs of Caelum's house finds in the many boxes of papers left by his aunt. These papers, in their convoluted way, lead Caelum around the mulberry bush as to who his mother, who had died years before, really was.

This plot line, if it can be called that, is one of the major things I didn't like about this novel. Ironically, even Caelum himself comments that he couldn't get through the research papers his renter writes based on her findings; if Lamb didn't think that his own character would be interested in his own history, then for heaven's sake, why would he think the readers would be?! It was some pretty seriously boring stuff, and had nothing to do with the real plot of the book. In addition, there were several other, smaller side plots that were half-developed, and really only served to distract the reader.

The other major hurdle of the story is the fact that the characters were entirely unlikeable. I mean, entirely. Caelum is a dissociated, detached wife-abuser / violent offender who couldn't even summon enough emotion over the death of the woman who raised him to shed a tear. Maureen is an adulterous, argumentative woman whose behavior after the shootings, while understandable with PTSD, certainly didn't make her any more likeable. I'm not sure why they stayed married, frankly, especially since Caelum referred to her as his 'three-strikes-and-you're-out wife'.

Lamb obviously did a great deal of research on the events at Columbine, and the descriptions of the scene in the library, as well as the publication of the writings of the killers, were chilling. Maureen's PTSD was very aptly described, and again, it was plain that Lamb had done his work well. However, in his attempt to make the characters human, Lamb forgot that some people are so awful that really, no one would want to spend time with them; his characters are this way, and the fact that I spent several hours reading about them, and letting them into my mind, isn't something I feel great about. Yes, there are people this messed up and unpleasant out there, and that's reality; most people, somewhere, also have redeeming qualities, and certainly all great literary heroes do. These characters really didn't.

Rating: one star - massively disappointing, scattered with stray underdeveloped subplots

Review: Half Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls

After Glass Castles, one of the most absorbing and well-written books I have ever read, I couldn't wait to hear more from Jeannette Walls. I was thrilled to see that she had published a prequel to Castle, and immediately requested it from the library. Once again, I was completely captivated. Not only was the novel, a work of historical fiction because Walls' grandmother passed away when Walls was eight, interesting in its own right, but knowing what the future would bring had me even more engaged, looking for clues to what was to bring on the craziness and misery that was to follow in the next generation.

In Half Broke Horses, Walls tells the story of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, an incredibly ingenius woman from birth. The story begins with Lily saving herself and her siblings from a flash flood by pulling them into a tree at the last minute; she kept the three of them alive by making sure everyone stayed awake all night, until the waters receded and they could slog their way home. She managed the family ranch and the employees from age eleven on, because her father had a speech impediment that prevented him from communicating with the ranch hands and buyers. At a time when women were still supposed to be subservient, throughout her life she worked constantly and proudly, beating men in horseracing and poker, selling beer out of her kitchen during prohibition, and learning first to drive and then to fly. Her talent of breaking wild horses is a theme that runs through the book.

As impressive as Lily was, I could also see where some of the family's later misfortune came from. Lily was changed dramatically by her discovery that her first husband was actually a con artist with another family, and later by the suicide of her pregnant sister. She became intolerant of any sentimentality, and hardened towards others, never fully trusting another person again. Her second marriage was a partnership rather than a love affair and, because she blamed her sister's death on a combination of a lack of inner strength and emotional weakness brought on by all the favor she received because of her beauty, her children were raised with an eye towards teaching them to withstand hardship. Her daughter, who went on to become Walls' mother, was a replica of her aunt, and was particularly affected by her mother's lack of emotional attention and understanding. This made an obvious, and sad, correlation to her later behavior - as that of wild horse half broken, just as Lily herself had been half-broken by the emotional tragedy of her early life.

While Walls states at the end of the novel that she cannot call it a biography, she was able to verify many of the events and stories that had been passed down through the generations through local media and oral histories. Thus, though the work is technically a type of historical fiction due to conversations and emotional insights that could not be verified, its flavor is definitely that of a well-crafted biography. The story of her tough-as-nails grandmother is just as interesting as that of her parents, in its own right as well as in an anticipating-a-trainwreck kind fo way.

Rating: five of five stars. A must for Glass Castle readers, and anyone interested in biographical fiction.

Review: The Generosity of Women, by Courtney Eldridge

Reading The Generosity of Women was like trying to keep track of a whirlwind. The novel's main concept is to follow a chain of events through the prospect of six different women, who are all connected by one main strand that the reader doesn't get clued in on until the last quarter of the book.

What is at first problematic - following the six women through rapid-fire chapter / voice changes - becomes surprisingly monotonous towards the end of the story. I actually started wondering if I had accidentally opened the book in the wrong section, because several of the perspectives were very similar, and with such similar voices it became difficult to tell them apart. To make things even more difficult, a few of the characters had similar names, and several of them knew each other. I quite nearly had to make a chart to keep track of everyone and their relationships to the other characters. Because there were so many characters, it was difficult to connect to any of them, because there wasn't time to get deeply into any of them. The one I enjoyed the most was also the youngest, Jordan, but her perspective was a little thin.

While it took me a few chapters to get into the story, after awhile I found that I was enjoying most parts of it. However, by the final quarter, I was skimming some sections, because hearing the same story over and over and over was getting a little old, and the final chapters were entirely predictable. I was fairly disgusted with several of the characters by the time I was done, as they became more and more caricatures of themselves.

The book isn't poorly written, per se, in that I could see what Eldridge was trying to do, and it might have worked if she hadn't taken it to the nth degree. I haven't read anything else by her, so I have nothing to compare it to, but if she had chosen only three or four characters, and developed them more, it might have been a higher-quality read. As it is, it was a mostly-enjoyable piece of chick lit, nothing more.

Rating: two out of five stars. Confusing beginning, interesting middle, boring ending.

Review: The Gates, A Novel, by John Connolly

If any of you have ever read Stephen King's only foray into children's literature, The Eyes of the Dragon (and if you haven't, Do So Right Away, it's wonderful), and Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (again, go to the store NOW and get it if you haven't), imagine taking them both and putting them into a literary blender. Sprinkle them with a smidge of 'Men in Black'. The lumpy goodness that you would pour out would be John Connolly's The Gates (of Hell Are About to Open).

This wry and witty novel centers around Samuel Johnson, a brainy eleven year-old British boy who accidentally witnesses the opening of a portal to Hell while peeking through a neighbor's window. The unfortunate neighbors, who were merely bored suburbanites looking for a little thrill, are having a seance in their basement when an interesting malfunction occurs many miles away during a routine operation of the Hadron collider (a machine that attempts to create tiny black holes for scientific study); the two simultaneous events lead to their being possessed by four demons, much like the farmer in Men in Black is worn like a cheap suit by the cockroach alien. The leader, whose job it is to prepare the way for Satan to escape from Hell, senses little Samuel Johnson (and his little dog too!) and sets about trying to capture him.

Her pursuit of Samuel leads to what is undoubtedly the funniest aspect of the book; the intrduction of several entirely inept demons, such as The Thing Under The Bed, who is new to the job and can't begin to imagine how to frighten anyone, and Nurd, The Scourge of Five Deities, who initially is transported accidentally to earth, only to have his illusions of grandeur (and his body) abruptly squashed by a vacuum. His later appearances grow increasingly hilarious as he becomes entangled in the plot to send the evil demons back to hell, saving the earth. It is in the final scenes of the novel, however, that Connolly pulls out all the stops, with zombie-fighting vicars, accidentally-drunken demons, and the shovel-bearing man who singlehandedly beats several demons into the ground for messing with his rosebushes.

It is impossible to convey the wittiness and snarky glee with which these events occur. The oddity in itself would be interesting, but Connolly's genius lies both in his crafty turns of phrase and in his ability to weave the deadpan British humor into the fantastical goings-on that Samuel is dealing with. By having a child as the main character, the author disposes with the potential problems of disbelief and fear of insanity that an adult character would have in the same situation, thus making him able to pull the reader right into the meat of the story.

In addition, the book is enjoyable on many levels, and its lack of gore or foul language (again, a benefit of having a child as a main character) combined with widely-appealing material makes it appropriate for anyone above the age of ten. As soon as I finished it, I immediately read it with my daughter, who is almost eleven, and while she didn't get all of the more adult references Connolly sneaks in, the silliness of a confused and embarrassed Underbed Monster and a demon named Nurd who ends up in increasingly ridiculous situations (teleported into a sewer! smooshed like the road runner in front of a truck! arrested by clueless police for massive speeding in his new love, the Porsche!) were more than enough to bring her along for the ride. Some of the more adult references I explained to her, such as puns on popular culture, and others I let sail over her head, laughing to myself.

I cannot reccomend this book strongly enough. It's funny without being condescending, innocent and yet wickedly witty. The brave Samuel and his friends, including Nurd, are endearing and entirely realistic (yes, even the insecure Nurd) in their upside-down world. There are the occasional slower chapters, particularaly those describing the Hadron collider in detail, but even those have snarky footnotes to liven them up. The ending leaves an obvious opening for a sequel, and I have all ten fingers crossed that there will indeed be another chapter in the book of Samuel.

Rating: five out of five stars. Smart, witty, kooky and fun romp through the ridiculous.