A Certain Chemistry, by Mil Millington (2003)
This comic novel about relationships and affairs managed to be both funny and insightful. I've found myself mulling over the concepts and agreeing with them.
Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner (2004)
Very, very good. The exact sort of novel I enjoy most when done right: a group of different but compatible women going through a similar experience in their own separate ways. In this case the experience is childbirth.
The Madman's Tale, by John Katzenbach (2004)
Not only does this book have a serial killer, it has a mental hospital. Very scary, totally realistic: I was completely absorbed and convinced. There are a few gory scenes, but much of the quaking comes from the psychological aspects of it.
Bloodstream, by Tess Gerritsen (1998)
This is a good, scary book with lots of good, scary scenes. However, those scenes involve violence to and by children, and this may be upsetting to some readers. Including me.
A small Maine town is having a problem with their children. One child kills his teacher and shoots several classmates; another kills his mother and tries to kill his sister. The "mystery" of why the children are behaving this way is not well-concealed, and attempts to divert the reader from the solution are only confusing. Also, like many contemporary mysteries of this sort, the explanation involves the things people are doing to the environment, so you get a little lesson with your fiction. *Yawn*
Nevertheless, a very good scary book. I read it all in one day because I had to see what happened.
My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult (2004)
I am amazed--AMAZED--that I was willing to give a Jodi Picoult book another try after my experience with the book Plain Truth. Plain Truth was excellently conceived, wonderfully written, and completely lacking in an ending. If you remember, I threw it across the room. I mean, really, why not just put a "Write the ending yourself!" page at the end, like one of those old frustrating children's magazines? Luckily for this book's spine, Jodi Picoult has managed to write an ending.
My Sister's Keeper has a killer plot. You've seen those news stories, haven't you, where a family has another child, genetically engineered to be a donor of some sort for a previous child? Anna was born so that her cord blood could be donated to her sister Kate, who has leukemia. Thirteen years later, after multiple donations of blood, platelets, and marrow, Anna has had enough. Her parents want her to donate a kidney to Kate, who will die without the kidney but will probably die even with it. Anna hires a lawyer to help her seek medical emancipation from her parents.
Anna's mother freaks. FREAKS. In fact, Anna's mother never does understand why slapping Anna and screaming at her is not the right reaction to this situation. Anna's mother continues to think that Anna is a selfish brat for not donating her entire body to keep precious Kate alive. We sympathize with Anna's mother's desperation, but it really does seem that she doesn't care much for Anna except as a source of bodily products. Anna's father, however, loves her for herself and doesn't necessarily want to risk Anna's life to save Kate's. This threatens to cause a rift between Anna's parents.
The story is told from many points of view: Anna's, the lawyer's, Anna's parents, the guardian ad litum's, etc. We change fonts each time, which is unnecessary and distracting and silly. Anna's point of view is too sophisticated for a 13-year-old: her thoughts are as organized and complex as an adult's, and she descends into philosophical meanderings too easily and too often.
In fact, all of the characters have a tendency to vomit out the dramatic line merely for the pretty sound of it. This goes hand-in-hand with the dramatic dangling ending of Plain Truth: it's a high-schoolish technique for artificially enhancing the deepness of the prose. At one point the guardian ad litum, mulling over the difficulty of making judgments, meditates upon the zebras at the zoo: "...the zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black and white." Deep, right? Until you consider there are MILLIONS of things that are black and/or white. It only sounds good until you use your brain, which is not a good selling point for literature. At least it doesn't happen often, only once or twice per chapter. I could bear it because the plot was so excellent and the storytelling so expert.
The ending is melodramatic; I'd almost call it "made for TV." But it satisfies.
Proofreading this review, it seems to me that it comes across bitter and negative. So I want to emphasize that I recommend this book; in fact, I'd say I recommend it HIGHLY. It does have its flaws (I really hated the dreamy observations people kept making), but I think it's worth it.
Can You Keep a Secret?, by Sophie Kinsella (2004)
Light, sitcomesque plot about a woman who tells all her silly little secrets (she has a Barbie bedspread, she lied to her boyfriend about liking jazz) to a stranger on an airplane, then finds out he's the head of her company. Dippily entertaining.
Pregnancy Sucks, by Joanne Kimes (2004)
The title alone is worth the price of the book.
The focus of the book is, naturally, the ways in which pregnancy sucks. Little irritations are listed, as are big scary things--but the intention is to commiserate, not to alarm. There are some tips on how to deal with some of the problems of pregnancy, and some more tips on what things are big problems and need a doctor's input. The tone is chatty and friendly and funny.
Bet Me, by Jennifer Crusie (2004)
This book's plot is based on a misunderstanding, which in my opinion is a very poor basis for a book. Min, who is "fat" (it seems clear that what we're talking about here is something like a size 10/12) overhears gorgeous perfect Cal taking a bet that he can get her into bed in under a month. Naturally, it was a misunderstanding, and Cal did not make that bet. We have to wait the whole month before this is brought to light. Meanwhile, Min and Cal begin a relationship based on Cal thinking Min is a difficult bitch and Min thinking Cal is a playboy jerk. What a lark.
Here's the thing, though. If you like racy romances but you want them smarter than those mass paperbacks, no one does it better than Jennifer Crusie. She has all the elements you want from a paperback: the couple that doesn't like each other but gets turned on by all the flashing eyes and sassy backtalk; the bad boy who's a good boy at heart; the intelligent woman who is loved for herself; and of course the escalating sex scenes. But she writes it in a way that is not utterly insulting to your intelligence and the intelligence of all women. There's good snappy dialogue, characters you can get to know, situations that seem real, a romance that seems plausible. You could do a whole lot worse than Jennifer Crusie, and I'm not sure you could do better in this genre.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris (2004)
I heartily enjoyed this collection of essays, except that it reminds me I can't write. I can't write good essays like these, and I can't even write a review that communicates to you what they're like. They're personal and funny, they pin the author and his family members to a board so we can examine them in perfect living detail, and they point out the most compelling details of every situation. In addition, they're unusual: how many essays have YOU read that are first-person accounts of cleaning an apartment where the owner is under the mistaken impression that he has hired erotic male maid service?
Being Committed, by Anna Maxted (2004)
In many ways, this is a good novel, but it works too hard to be "comic." The characters are drawn so intentionally funny that they begin to lack dimension. Jason is Hannah's boyfriend of 5 years, and is supposed to be a genuinely good guy who would have continued to be Hannah's boyfriend indefinitely had she not turned down his marriage proposal. But when Hannah tries to get him back, the author works so hard to show us they're not right for each other that after awhile the original relationship stops making sense: Jason stops seeming like a good guy and starts seeming like nothing but a prissy bag of weird. Funny is fine, but the plot has to continue to make sense.
Actually, the plot was a problem at several points. Another is that Hannah is supposed to think her father is a god and her mother is the devil, but we can see in about 5 seconds that that's not the situation, and Hannah should have been able to see it, too, without the big revelation she's forced to have. Her father is an a**hole, and the good-guy veneer he's supposedly been displaying is unconvincing, Daddy Issues or no. Hannah is over 30 years old and would not have been so completely fooled for so long. Asking us to believe she would be is really stretching it.
Then there is Hannah's relationship with Jack, which might as well be a cheap sitcom. Every other chapter they have this huge stupid misunderstanding: one of them thinks something has happened which hasn't, and the other one is so angry at the first one's misunderstanding that he/she refuses to clear it up. Once, okay, but do we have to do it again and again and again? It's not funny, it's just lame.
Without the dumb misunderstandings, though, the remaining relationship between Hannah and Jack is pleasing, and we root for them. We also root for Hannah's brother and his wife Gabrielle, and we root for Hannah's relationship with her mother. It's just that we'd root harder if the situations made more sense.
The Amateur Marriage, by Anne Tyler (2004)
A common thought for me, at the end of a book, is: "All right, but what happened NEXT?" So I like books that span a long time, because I get more satisfaction on that score: babies grow up and become adults and then they get married or they don't, and they have children or they don't, and either way I get to see it.
It's never enough, though. Even a nice full book like this one, which follows Michael and Pauline from the time they meet until 60 or so years later, only spoils me. If I got to see Michael and Pauline's children grow up, and I get to see those children's children grow up, then I want to see how the next generation grows up as well, and I want to know how everyone dies. But this book does give a nice overflowing measure: lots of dramatic events, lots of "She died several years ago," lots of "She grew up to be a lawyer," lots of "He married a bossy woman and had a baby."
To some extent, this is the story of Michael and Pauline's marriage, which probably never should have happened. Pauline is so irrepressible, so likely to break dishes when angry and get lost driving home; and Michael is so conservative and stable, so likely to disapprove of...well, of anything Pauline does. More than that, though, the story is of Michael and of Pauline, separately, in and out of their marriage. Neither of them seem like they'd be good to be married to, though all that does is make us wonder how good any of us would look if we were written into a novel. Their fights seem so strange, showing just how incompatible they are because they don't understand each other even slightly---but then over time, we start wondering if they were truly incompatible or if they just needed a little work.
It's a good story for reflecting on human beings and their relationships with each other, but more than that it's just a good story.
No Ordinary Matter, by Jenny McPhee (2004)
Some authors take an everyday sort of plot and still manage to make it seem unrealistic. Jenny McPhee takes her plot right from soap operas and makes it seem completely possible.
Things get off on the wrong foot with a small, unimportant error that sent me searching back through the first few pages to see what I'd missed. Veronica and Lillian, sisters, meet the first Monday of each month at a coffee shop; but in the opening scene, one of them mentions that it's Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day being on the 14th, there's no way it could be the first Monday of the month. I know, it's no big deal, but it threw me out of the story and made me worry that the whole book would be poorly edited. Fortunately, this fear proved to be groundless.
And it HAD to be Valentine's Day, to introduce the plotline of their father's death 25 years earlier, and to introduce Lillian's belief that there is no such thing as coincidence--a belief that will be sorely tested throughout this book.
Here is the sort of thing you can expect. Lillian is a neurologist. The man she uses as an involuntary sperm donor gets a job playing a neurologist on the soap opera Veronica writes for. When that man tries to find his biological family, he discovers that his father was a neurologist. The private detective Lillian and Veronica consult likes to pretend to be a neurologist. And that is not the end of the neurologist thing.
I greatly enjoyed the whole book. Even though I LIKE mundane plots dealing with, for example, the ups and downs of an ordinary marriage, it was super-keen to get something more along the lines of long-lost siblings, people back from the dead, accidental incest, mistaken paternity, and so forth.
The Big Love, by Sarah Dunn (2004)
This is the kind of book that rings so true, by the end of it you feel you love the author and want to be friends with her. I even started to think she had a great name: Sarah Dunn.
So I started assuming that Sarah Dunn was in fact the narrator, when there is every possibility that she isn't, but she sure has a convincing voice. The actual narrator is Alison Hopkins, whose boyfriend went out to get mustard for their dinner party, but then called her from a pay phone to say he was in love with someone else and would not in fact be bringing that mustard, or himself, home. Alison's party is ruined, of course, and she's also mightily pissed because the girl Tom is in love with is Kate Pearce, the old college girlfriend Tom claimed he could never have real feelings for even though they were having lunch regularly and she made him a lasagna. Worse, Kate is one of those frail slender women. And here's Alison, over 30 and eggs growing staler by the day.
Throughout the book, Alison tells us her feelings about growing up as an evangelical Christian but not being one anymore. Her insights are perceptive and interesting, and will be satisfying to anyone who has tried to disentangle themselves from the organized religion of their formative years.
Excellent book, really well done.
The Love Wife, by Gish Jen (2004)
I was discouraged after finishing this book, discouraged and sad: No one is really happy. No one really knows anyone else. No one really knows where they're from, or who their family is.
(I'm sorry to use that singular "no one" with the plural they/their. But geez, if I'm going to write in English, we're stuck here. I'm not going to say "one's family," okay? And "his or her family" isn't any good either.)
The format is interesting, like a transcript of one of those TV shows where various people are telling the same story, their faces turned toward an off-camera interviewer, their sentences spliced with cuts to other talking people. One character talks for a bit; another character interjects a comment; then we're back to the first character. Interesting as it was, this works better with visuals.
I can't recommend the book. It's written well, it has a good plot, but I didn't ENJOY it. I didn't LIKE it. I wasn't eager to get back to reading it; I felt like I needed to get through it.