Coming Home, by Rosamunde Pilcher (1995)
You've probably heard an English teacher say that there are no new plots and no new characters. An author like Maeve Binchy can take a very common plot and turn it into a story that seems new anyway. An author like Rosamunde Pilcher takes the same common plot and reminds the reader how tired and overused it is.
The gimmicks are, if possible, even more tired and boring: for example, a new character looks at himself in the mirror to inventory his appearance, and then, for the convenience of the reader, kindly thinks back over his entire childhood and the events that lead up to where he is right now.
Like many novels of this genre (one step up from the matching sets of paperbacks with interchangeable titles and characters, written by women whose choices of pen names are so gaggingly romantic that I sometimes can't tell the pen name from the title), this book puts a wearying emphasis on decor and physical appearance, and such details are repeated unnecessarily throughout the book with only slight variation: "her cornflower eyes," "her aquamarine eyes," "her azure eyes," "her cerulean eyes." Guess who got a thesaurus for Christmas. The book also relies heavily on words from my "Adjectives I Never Want to See Again" list, including such golden oldies as "raven" used to describe black hair and "sleepy" used to describe a small town. Then it swings to the opposite extreme with phrases like: "eyes dark and bright as a pair of juicy raisins." Characters are dangerously close to being caricatures, every languid "darling" another blow to interest.
I recommend this book to you only for vacations, or for when you need something mindless to read, or for times when you might not get back to the book for a long time. The author endlessly repeats herself so you'll never lose track of what's going on, and if you lose your place it doesn't matter a bit: there's nothing new here.
The Alphabet Man, by Richard Grossman (1993)
Oh, good, another book by a poet-turned-novelist who feels that the closer he gets to total gibbering stream-of-consciousness, the closer he gets to profundity. And apparently you're not really reaching the reader unless you surprise her with as many disgusting things as you can think of.
The book's main character and narrator is a poet, a self-celebratory genius, and totally bonkers. Naturally, it can all be blamed on his parents' sexual behavior. Odd, slyly-emphasized parallels between the author and his narrator do nothing to impress me, only make me want to check the book jacket to make sure I live in a different state (sorry, Californians). When I want to reach into the inner recesses of this man's mind, I'll do so in protective clothing.
Compatibility Test: Impressed by big words in meaningless patterns? Enjoy a little romp through the gutter of insanity?
New Year's Eve, by Lisa Grunwald (1998)
This is a book about the terror that comes from not knowing if there may be something wrong with your child, not knowing what to do if there is, and not being able to trust in your own judgement. Grown twin sisters, somewhat estranged, each give birth at around the same time, and the strong friendship that develops between the children draws the sisters closer. When one child is killed in an accident, the living child claims that the dead child is communicating with her. A few uncanny details convince the mourning mother than her niece is telling the truth. The mother of the living child watches with increasing dismay as the two form a strong bond, and is unable to determine how much of a role her own sibling rivalry and maternal jealousy are playing in her suspicions that all is not right.
Compatibility Test: It's a great book, but if you have a preschool-aged child I really think you'd better not read it.
The Book of Knowledge, by Doris Grumbach (1995)
What motivates a person to write a book like this? Four children grow up with every chance for happiness, and all of them end up unfulfilled and unhappy except for the one who dies, and that one is portrayed as the lucky one. (Notice how awkward the sentence structure can get when I'm trying not to give anything away with pronouns.)
Most of the book is devoted to their wonderful plans, perfectly suited to their personalities and what they want; the last few pages tell us how those plans were destroyed. The book is well-written, but it's an unrelieved tragedy from beginning to end.
Compatibility Test: In the mood for this sort of thing?
Uncertain April, by Betty Palmer Nelson (1994)
This is one of those generational books in which we flit among several women in their roles as daughter and mother and grandmother. The most interesting part of the book is getting to see the same scene from two or more points of view, and the author is good at doing this without repeating herself.
The reason I can't recommend it is that the author's purpose in writing this book seems to be to tell us that when a man cheats, it's his wife's fault. I think we've heard this theory before, usually applied to a wife who nags or henpecks. In this story, though, the wife does none of these things; in fact, from the information we're given, we know she does nothing but love and respect and encourage and support her husband in every way. However, when the husband's mistress accuses the wife of "making him a broken man," the wife hangs her head and realizes that, yes, all of his affairs can be blamed entirely on her, and she will be a complete human being only if she can win back his love....."if it's not too late."
The purportedly happy ending is her epiphany that his affairs have nothing to do with his love for her, and that he can continue to cheat without hurting their marriage, yayyyy!!! What's next, the story about how the affairs actually make him love her more? Honey, someone's been snookered.
Baby of the Family, by Tina McElroy Ansa (1989)
I don't understand what makes a person take a perfectly good story idea and let it flop around on the floor. Baby Lena is born with a caul over her face, and if you're familiar with superstitions you'll know that children born in such a way are said to have second sight, or to be able to communicate with the dead, or to have other special powers. Lena's mama thinks it's interesting but untrue; however, Lena does indeed have special powers.
Interesting premise. The author introduces it and then does nothing with it. Instead we hang on for 265 pages of anecdotes about how Lena's family spends all their time swearing and yelling, punctuated occasionally by a brief interlude in which a ghost talks to Lena about nothing relevant. I was waiting for the real fun to start, but it never did.
Compatibility Test: Don't expect magic.
Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, by Anonymous (1995)
Amusing, touching, well done. The surprise in in the afterword, when we learn that the author is not anonymous after all. I tell you this not so that you can skip ahead and ruin the surprise, but so that you will read the afterword instead of putting the book down when the story is over.
Compatibility Test: Read the title. Appealing?
The Tightwad Gazette, by Amy Dacyczyn (1992)
What I like about Amy Dacyczyn is that she gets right to what we're all dying to ask, which is "How on earth do you pronounce that last name?" In case you have to ask for this book at the library or bookstore, you should know that it's pronounced " 'decision,' as in, 'I made a decision to marry a guy of Ukrainian ancestry.' " This is a great book for anyone who would like to save some money, no matter where on the scale of Willingness To Sacrifice you fall. She lists every amazingly tightwadded thing she can think of to help, but she's laid-back about your personal implementation plan as long as it doesn't include Jell-O Pudding Snack Packs. She says that you should, ideally, be making cuts only where you don't mind making cuts or won't notice them. She also draws the line between being "cheap" (calling your mother-in-law when you know she's not home and leaving a message so she'll have to call you back) and being "a tightwad" (using money for items that are important to you, rather than squandering it on things you don't care about one way or the other), although there are places where I would have drawn the line sooner than she did. Not only will you get some good, specific ideas for saving money, you may find the motivation you need to save even more than you'd intended.
Compatibility Test: Who couldn't use a little extra money and/or discipline?
Teenage Romance, or How to Die of Embarrassment, by Delia Ephron (1981)
I was happier before I was reminded so vividly of what it was like to be a teenager. What a miserable time of life. This book is found in the humor section, but I cringed more often than I laughed.
Compatibility Test: If you're ever tempted to say something like, "Oh, geez, high school, that was The Best Time of My Life."
The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy, by Vicki Iovine (1995)
This book is not in the same league as a book like What To Expect When You're Expecting, and it's not meant to be. This is the book you read when you want to be talking to your best girlfriend about whether it's normal to burp so much when you're pregnant, but your best girlfriend lives across the country and there are daytime phone rates to consider. It's chatty, funny, light, meant to be taken with a shaker of salt.
I approve of the book and also of her disclaimers (casually but liberally applied), but I have one main quibble and it's a biggie: the woman cannot do math. She has this big beef all through the book that everyone goes around saying a pregnancy is 9 months but it's 40 weeks and to her that means 10 months. Throughout the rest of the book, every time she says nine months, she writes it "nine (ten) months." Math Wizard that I am, this drove me insane.
Let me work the math for those of you in the audience who don't get it. (Those who already get it, or those who could not care less, may skip to the end of the review.) Vicki Iovine is thinking that since a month is 4 weeks, 40 weeks of pregnancy = 10 months. But months are not all exactly four weeks long; if they were, our year would have only 48 weeks (12 months x 4 weeks). Take the 52 weeks a year actually has, divide by 12 months, and you get an average month-length of 4.333 weeks. Armed with that information, look again at the 40 week pregnancy: divide 40 weeks of pregnancy by 4.333 weeks in a month and you get 9.23 months, not 10.
But wait! There is more! Even the 9.23 months is based on the information that a pregnancy is 40 weeks, but in fact it isn't. It's 280 days (40 weeks) from the first day of the woman's last period---but 266 days from the estimated day of conception: a woman isn't actually pregnant yet for those first two weeks or so. That's 38 weeks of actually being pregnant, or 8.76 months. Vicki was not only being a big ditz about math, she was also including weeks before pregnancy occurred--and I think it's safe to say those don't count.
What I want to know is, didn't she think it was odd that everyone was going around saying it was nine months if it was actually ten? Didn't she try to figure out why that might be, before she went running around revealing a Great Male Conspiracy? The woman claims to have "law degrees," plural, yet thinks a month has 4 weeks exactly and that she can be pregnant before she has conceived.
Although these flaws are terrible enough to mean I will never own the book, I swear it's still worth reading. Mathematical accuracy is just An Issue for me.
Compatibility Test: Pregnancy and a willingness to overlook math errors.
Everything Women Always Wanted to Know About Cars* (*but didn't know who to ask), by Lesley Hazleton (1995)
The research for this book involved getting 150 women into chatty little focus groups and asking them to talk about their car-related feelings. From this we reap pages and pages of women talking about how they call their cars "Baby," or about how their husbands proposed to them in cars. For those of us who got this book hoping to find out how to fix the transmission, this is disappointing.
The text reads like a transcript from a motivational seminar: short, snappy sentences and dumb jokes. We stagger through pages and pages of side bars and insets, containing tidbits such as what percentage of those 150 women like red cars. There's so much bold and/or colored text, it's the plain kind that stands out. There are whole sections that border on insulting, describing cars as "just plain cute" or telling us how certain cars will make us look sexy, as if we're supposed to start thinking of cars as the latest must-have fashion accessory.
I ran into so many errors (she can't use percentages or statistics correctly; she misuses several economic terms and ideas; her grammar is atrocious) that I stopped trusting her. About halfway through the book we begin to touch on some useful information (though we still get regular focus group comments in the side bars), but by then it was difficult for me to know if I could accept her as a reliable source.
Compatibility Test: Because of the errors and misleading statements, I can't recommend it.
Almighty Me, by Robert Bausch (1991)
A car salesman is given all of God's power---though, it's pointed out, not His wisdom---for one year. The book is written in that unfortunate "written by a narrator reluctantly recounting his experiences" style: "Don't get me wrong" and "Perhaps I should explain" and "But I'm getting ahead of myself" and "Oh, I know what you're thinking." Lame.
The story has three main themes: the guy struggling with his God powers; the guy struggling with moral and philosophical issues brought up by the use of these powers; and the guy struggling with his disintegrating marriage. I recommend skimming all the philosophical digressions on the nature of love, goodness, etc.: he seems to feel that if you're writing on such lofty topics you're not allowed to end sentences at normal intervals, and some of his blather on for a page or more. I also recommend skipping all the marriage stuff, unless you're keen on soap operas.
The ending is so unsatisfying and unresolved, I was as frustrated as I used to get by those stories in children's magazines that get to a cliff-hanging moment and then say, "Why don't you finish the story yourself?"
I suggest that you spend some time contemplating what you would do if you had ultimate power, rather than reading someone else's poor excuse for an answer.
Compatibility Test: Not for anyone who considers sacrilegious the idea of God As Annually Elected Employee.
Parlor Games, by Mavis Cheek (1989)
Today Celia turns 40. Celia could not possibly have chosen a group more likely to cause trouble than the one she invites over for a small, intimate birthday party, and what a nerve-wracking evening they have. Her husband Alex has been irritable and distant lately, and her friend's husband Tom is pressing up against her in the kitchen as part of his ongoing attempt to seduce her. Her older sister Isabel is on year 40 of being critical and jealous, and her brother-in-law Dave tries hard to keep peace but his political views are getting some of the guests worked up. All the snapping and awkward silences began giving me a stomach ache by page 76, but did I stop reading? No, by then I was far too interested. I read all the way to the ending, which is disappointing only in that you want to know more. This book is terrific: it gives all the wicked pleasure of more popular fiction, but it does it so unusually intelligently that though you may wince at an unexpected vulgarity, you're not rolling your eyes at the cheap and---let's just come out with it---bad writing found in books by Queens of Schlock like Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins. You won't find any raven tresses or flashing violet eyes in this book, but I am going to slap a warning on it for the explicit stuff.
Compatibility Test: I wouldn't give it to your mother, but I'd give it to you.
The Savvy Woman's Guide to Cars, by Lisa Murr Chapman (1995)
I'm not sure I can adequately convey to you how much I hated the word "savvy" by the time I finished this book. I was also getting sick of "empowering" and "proactive," and I kept getting bogged down in the paragraphs and paragraphs of questionably accurate/useful statistics of the "Every 26 seconds in America..." variety.
However, with clenched teeth I persevered, and I was glad I did. Despite the author's use of the book to advertise her used car dealership a la daytime television commercial ("At my dealership, our motto is, 'We're not happy until you're happy'" and the like), this is an excellent beginner's book about cars. There are illustrated instructions for six basic car maintenance skills (pumping gas, changing a flat, checking tire pressure and adding air, jump-starting, checking and adding oil, checking the radiator and adding coolant); a list of all the items you should have in your car at all times; a chart of what a "per month" cost works out to with dealership financing; and so on.
Best of all, at least until the book is hopelessly out of date, there's a list of what you should expect to pay for various parts and services. Some of the ranges were too wide to be anything but amusing ("adjusting all valves" is $75-$600), but most have a range wide enough to be reasonable but narrow enough to be helpful.
The rest of the book contains general overviews of issues like insurance, mechanics, snow tires, gas mileage, and leasing. I recommend this as a jumping-off point for finding subjects you want to learn more about, and also as a reference guide to keep in your glove compartment or next to your dictionary.
Compatibility Test: You don't even have to be a woman. Or savvy.