Land Girls, by Angela Huth (1994)
The organization of this book is straight Women's Book Formula. We begin with three women meeting for lunch, and we're told they're old friends who do this mostly for the fun of reminiscing about old times. After a chapter's worth of character development we flash back to when the women first met, and the bulk of the story happens then. At the end of the book we jump back to their old age to find out how the stories of their youth wrap up. The beginning and ending were awful: badly written, unoriginal, melodramatic, forced, silly. The beginning tried too hard to establish the personalities of the three women and prove to us that they'd still be getting together for lunch after all this time. The end tried too hard to wrap everything up in a dramatic way---and then went much too far by creating a horribly depressing conclusion to the book's love story. Further adding to the downer effect was the way we got to know three young sprightly girls with their whole lives ahead of them, but then we flashed so suddenly to old age that we're left with a "Life is so short---what's the use of it all?" feeling. The long part in the middle had moments of the same sorts of problems the beginning and ending had, but was otherwise good. If only the author could have given up the flashback gimmick and instead written an entire book about three girls working on a farm during a war when men were in short supply, we could have had an enthralling story. When I was reading about the milking routine or the night the lambs were born, I was as interested as I was many years ago reading in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books about how they made maple syrup candy on plates of snow.
In a Country of Mothers, by A. M. Homes (1993)
I've noticed that many of the people studying psychology have a problem or two of their own. The author must have noticed this too: the psychotherapist in her book isn't climbing the walls but she's leaning up against them and looking up towards the corners. Claire's new patient, Jody, has fewer problems: she isn't sure she wants to go to film school as much as she did when she applied, and she thinks she was adopted as a replacement for her parents' dead first child. Claire and Jody hit it off immediately, and things don't get strange until Claire finds out that Jody was adopted 24 years ago as a tiny baby. What Jody doesn't know is that Claire gave up a baby girl for adoption 24 years ago. Claire's separation from reality kicks in, and she's convinced that Jody is her daughter. Her resulting inappropriately maternal behavior draws Jody closer to her and begins to cause problems in Claire's family life. When Claire's husband insists that Claire knock it off, Claire's attempts at withdrawal push Jody over the edge. We never find out if Claire is Jody's mother; the point of the book is the way the close relationship between the two women ends up being bad for both of them. This was a terrific book: well written, fascinating topic, great character development, no jarring gimmicks. I will warn you that there are a few scenes of explicit and disturbing, er, "love making," and that the f-word is used at a movie-dialogue rate, but neither are used merely for shock value by an author who can't think of any other way to get the reader's attention, so I didn't mind them and I doubt you will either.
Other People's Dirt: A Housecleaner's Curious Adventures, by Louise Rafkin (1998)
It's true that anyone who employs a housecleaner ought to keep in mind that the housecleaner is a human being. It's also true, however, that the housecleaner ought to keep in mind that she's a paid employee who agreed to do a certain kind of work in exchange for payment. I'll go along with Louise Rafkin's gripes that employers should know their employees' names, but I can hardly believe she also wants the employers to look after her emotional well-being, allow her to have sex in their beds, and know instinctively what kind of work she would consider "cleaning" and what kind she would consider "degrading."
I found it irritating that she attributed the loss of several jobs to my-employer-is-an-idiot reasons like "I left two Cheerios in the sink" when even her side of the story revealed that she was fired for acting like a big jerk. She's a competent and interesting writer who may have picked up the idea that unapplied intelligence is worth something in the field of manual labor, but if she wants to be respected as a professional she needs to act like a professional no matter what sort of work she's in.
Aside from her glaring attitude issues, I enjoyed most of her essays. She does better with lightweight topics like how to read the clues found in a person's house; not so well with topics like how the oppressed housecleaning masses deserve better treatment by their ignorant and irrational cash-for-brains masters. People who employ housecleaners are advised to read the book if only to understand how important it is to withstand the glowers and stick around while the house is being cleaned.
The "Go Ask Alice" Book of Answers: A Guide to Good Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Health, by Columbia University's Health Education Program (1998)
I'm a little old for it now, but I would have flipped over this book in high school. There were all kinds of things then that I would have been interested in knowing about, but if you think I'd ask my mom any of them you've been out of high school too long. I could have asked friends, but friends wouldn't have known much more than I did---and there was that time I nearly had to quit school after asking at a crowded lunch table what "69" referred to. "Alice" is the name taken by a group of professional health educators as a way to answer questions they know kids would never ask them otherwise. "Alice" is calm and unshockable and would never laugh at a silly question. Because of this, kids write to "Alice" with little things like how do you kiss without bumping noses, all the way up to big things like what's really wrong with doing cocaine, what's that lump on my _____, and how do I tell my mother I think I'm gay. Parents may want to leave a copy of this book hanging around on the shelf for the kids to discover and hide in their rooms. The book would also be useful for parents trying to figure out what sorts of issues to talk to their children about and how to do it. "Alice" may at times be more laid-back than a parent would like, but that's why kids are talking to "Alice" and not to their parents.
You Have More Than You Think: The Motley Fool Guide to Investing What You Have, by David and Tom Gardner (1998)
Perhaps in the last year or so a thought such as this has crossed your mind: "If only I knew more about Wall Street, if only I knew what Nasdaq meant, if only I knew how to choose a good broker---I could have bought stock in Apple before they came out with that ugly yet profitable iMac." I don't advise ever ever ever launching into a new project on the basis of just one book, but this may be the first book of several that could send you on your way to being the kind of Savvy Joe who would currently be sitting pretty on a nice stack of Apple stock certificates and climbing out of your bed of money only to see how much more money you made that day.
In general I don't read or recommend any book that uses more than one end-of-sentence punctuation mark, asks inflammatory rhetorical questions of a conspiracy-theory/government-is-the-enemy nature, or uses strings of capital letters (e.g.,"Is this what we really want from our ELECTED OFFICIALS?!"); I also disapprove of anything that implies that being stupid and/or uneducated is superior to being smart and/or educated, especially if such a theory involves creating new meanings for words such as "foolish" which then need to be explained with every usage to remind you that now it's a good thing to be. I don't care if you put a capital F on it and keep telling me that Shakespeare's fools were the wisest of all the king's advisors, I'm not going to go around calling myself a Fool. Although this book commits all of these crimes, I believe it's a good introduction to the art and entertainment of investing.
It begins with a section about credit card debt, gambling, and savings account interest, just to make sure you know what the whole money thing is all about; then the authors walk you down Wall Street and point out which of the people wearing conservative suits can help you out and which are about to pick your pocket. The next section discusses what makes a company a good investment, and gives many excellent illustrative examples of good and bad companies.
Throughout it all are exceptionally wise (no, I won't use "wise" as a bad word the way they do) instructions about times when you should not invest, ways in which you should not invest, and things you should think about when you are ready to invest. They advise, for example, taking a full year to play Let's Pretend, choosing stocks and following their progress without actually buying any of them (they have a website where you can do this). They also discuss some of the ethical issues involved in investment, but not in an oversimplified "don't invest in anyone who cuts down trees or eats meat" way. Periodically they stop to recap what's been discussed so far, and they have a good grasp on which concepts will be the most difficult to digest. I did not find the book "wickedly funny" or "brimming with humor from start to finish" as the book jacket promised, but I was pleased with their entire approach to the subject of finances and investment and I plan to begin a game of Let's Pretend as soon as I get the Sunday paper.
Power Sleep: The Revolutionary Program That Prepares Your Mind for Peak Performance, by James B. Mass, Ph.D. (1998)
As repetitive as the sleep cycles are this author's main points: you must get enough sleep; here's what happens if you don't; here are some examples of awful things that happened as a result of insufficient sleep; here's how to tell if you aren't getting enough sleep; you must get enough sleep; here's what happens if you don't; here are some examples. . .and so on. At first I was tired of hearing the points reiterated, soon I was actually laughing out loud: "Again with the principle of 'sleep debt'?" He may be assuming that his average reader will be sleep-deprived enough to need seemingly endless cycles of the same information before it can sink in, but it's more likely that he had a nice long article and someone talked him into expanding that same information to book-length.
After a couple of chapters you'll be able to predict his solutions to every sleep problem mentioned for the rest of the book. At that point you can concentrate on his unscientific opinions on a variety of subjects: "If you run to your infant every time he or she cries, you are being trained by your demanding child"; repeated assertions that sleep loss is cumulative in the sense that losing one hour a night for a year means you must sleep all of those accumulated hours (365 in all) before you'll be fully rested again; the "do not try to awaken a sleepwalker" theory. A worthless book that will nevertheless sell to executives because of the word "power" in the title.
Wanting a Child, by Jill Bialosky and Helen Schulman (1998)
Twenty-two writers contributed stories of their quests to have children. Topics include fertility treatments, miscarriage, abortion, infant death, and adoption; many stories have painful moments but happy endings. I've mentioned before how tired I get of the way people experiencing even short-term infertility problems feel it's appropriate to lash out at people not experiencing such problems, proclaiming to one and all how much they hate seeing pregnant women in the supermarket and how they just can't face congratulating a pregnant friend; this book isn't rife with this problem but the subject does come up. I think this would be reassuring to people who were shocked at their own flashes of jealousy or hatred, but for the most part people don't seem to need encouragement to feed other people's joy into the mills of their own self-pity. Good book, though.
My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance, by Maria Flook (1997)
It's not unusual to be interested in what it is that makes some people grow up consistently making terrible choices and other people grow up consistently making good ones. There are many large and intensive studies about the effects of location, family environment, genetics, etc., and nearly any high school student is capable of spouting off an opinion or two on the subject.
More interesting but also more baffling are individual stories: when it isn't a matter of finding a trend in 5,000 families, it's more difficult to trace the problem. This is a true story written by Maria about her family and especially about her sister Karen. When Maria was twelve and Karen was fourteen, Karen walked out the door and didn't come back for two years. To hear Maria tell it, this event launched both girls on a lifetime of drugs, prostitution, abusive men, mental institutions, unplanned pregnancies, and other severely stupid decisions.
I believe the point of the book is that the parents were to blame, though it's hard to see why. The father may have been a little too submissive to his wife, the mother may have been narcissistic at cost to her children, but I didn't get a feeling that these girls grew up in an environment so awful that they could easily shake the blame from their own small shoulders. What makes a fourteen-year-old, already promiscuous, leave town with a 50-year-old man and casually begin turning tricks? Surely not the way her mother kept putting her on diets. What makes a grown woman with a small baby stay with a man who throws her against walls so hard he ruptures her eardrum, who brings friends over to fire guns randomly until the woman has to jump off a second-story balcony with her baby in her arms? Surely not the way her father wouldn't confront her mother about parenting decisions.
The book is disturbing enough that I'm hesitant to recommend it: the wince factor can be very, very high. Not only are there many sexually explicit scenes, there are many scenes I found much harder to handle involving dead/suffering animals. Most are told with no warning, no literary equivalent of a swell of scary music that would let you know it's time to start letting your eyes touch only briefly on the next paragraph to make sure it's safe before you proceed.
Even more upsetting is the way things just get worse and worse and worse. When the girls were young I kept imagining that things would be better for them when they were older and more mature, but instead they continue making stupid choices until their lives are so unpleasant I don't even want to hear about them anymore. I'd pinned high hopes on the epilogue, wishing for something like, "Even though in our forties we were still behaving like ignorant street trash, in our early fifties we turned our lives around and found happiness." Instead the epilogue is a follow-up on some ship that was wrecked; the girls had had tickets for one of the rooms but had had to cancel at the last minute. Yes, I got a little chill up my spine, but I hardly think that Almost Being On a Shipwrecked Boat ties in to forty years of bad choices.
Despite the disturbing subject material, the writing is exceptionally well-done and I appreciated the way I had to guess at where blame was being cast rather than having it rubbed in my face on every page. The book is surprisingly unbitter, told in a straightforward narrative manner difficult to find in any book about a less-than-perfect life. It won't leave you with a fresh happy outlook on life, but it's an absorbing read.
The Safety of Objects, by A. M. Homes (1990)
I read many book jackets that say something very similar to what's printed on this one: "Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank outspoken times, we don't talk about"---and yet somehow the things the authors are praised for Bringing Out Into the Open are things I've read about many dozens or hundreds of times. Oh wow, another story about a man spiraling pointlessly into mental illness. Oh my, another story about the kinky sexual habits of an adolescent. No surprises, just a feeling of "Why do we keep dwelling on this stuff?" There isn't anything wrong with a story exploring the darker/private side of people, but it's silly to do it just for the shock value when there isn't any shock left; sillier still for reviewers to hand out praise for breaking boundaries that have long since been trampled into dust by all the crossing traffic.
The Patron Saint of Unmarried Women, by Karl Ackerman (1994)
It has been a long time since I've enjoyed a fiction book this much. The author makes the typical mistake of going heavy on the sitcomesque repartee, but at least he chose a funny sitcom. Jack and Nina are dating, and then they're not. They split up and date other people, but then they get back together. Such a simple plot; such wonderful characters; such amusing dialogue. I was sorry when it was over.
Painting on Glass, by Jessica Auerbach (1988)
Fiction doesn't get any cuter than this. Two families live on the same lake. One family has a boy named Jacob; the other family has a girl named Rachel. The two children are approximately the same age, look very much alike, and are called Jake and Rake. They grow up together like brother and sister, but both sets of parents are clearly hoping for a marriage later on. Jake and Rachel make an attempt at romance but end up seeing other people and considering themselves best friends. Then Rachel has a crisis and runs to Jake for help. They end up together at the end of the book; can you stand it?
Mother Love, by Laurali R. Wright (1995)
I heaved a satisfied sigh as I finished this book, yet as I try to write a review I realize there are some big gaping problems to deal with. A woman leaves her husband and daughter suddenly one day and returns seven years later to swap one startled glance with her daughter before both run off in their own panics; the next day, the woman is found beaten to death. It will not surprise you to find that this raises questions in the minds of all involved. Lucky us, we get to go back in time and find out what happened right before the woman disappeared. Unfortunately, now that I think of it, her disappearance is still inadequately accounted for. I guess I could understand it if she'd checked herself into an institution for a couple of weeks, but the way she ran off doesn't make sense considering the information we're given. You'll know what I mean, I think, if you read the book, and I do recommend reading it despite the problems.