Kristen Voskuil's Book Reviews

If You Lived Here

2007-08-04

This book is so good, but it was also so sad. It's difficult to evaluate such a book after reading it: was the quality of the writing and story worth the number of times I wondered if life was worth living at all?

The story is told in alternating chapters by Shelley and Mai. Shelley is trying to adopt a child despite the effect it's having on her marriage, and Mai left Vietnam decades ago under extremely sad circumstances. Shelley and Mai become friends, and their friendship is instrumental in changing the outcome of these stories. Nothing ends up super-happy, but both women are happier at the end than they were at the beginning.

I can't stand stories about sad things happening to children, and so I will warn you that something very sad happens to a child. The book doesn't dwell on it--but I did, afterward.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - NO spoilers

2007-07-25

NO spoilers in this review. Can you believe the cheeseheads who are deliberately trying to spoil it for people who don't want it spoiled? Makes me despair for human nature.

It is pointless, if you have read seven books in a series, to continue to talk about the quality of the writing. Obviously it is competent enough to carry the story, and that is what matters here. J. K. Rowling has a gift for storytelling, a gift for describing things so that you see them as if in a movie.

I don't know about you, but I've been worried that the seventh and final book would be a letdown. What if I didn't like the ending? What if it fizzled? Well, I did, and it didn't. I was satisfied. I read it and was glad. I wonder what kind of series J. K. Rowling will tackle next?

The Secret of Lost Things

2007-07-16

As I read, I thought, "If I am going to have to read all these letters written by Herman Melville, there had better be a Big Worthwhile Pay-Off at the end." There was not.

After her mother dies, 18-year-old Rosemary goes to New York City. She finds a job at The Arcade, a huge used book store. Her co-workers include Arthur (fat, and always panting over male nudes in art books), Pearl (a pre-surgery transsexual), Oscar (skittishly asexual), her boss George Pike (who refers to himself in the third person: "George Pike doesn't tolerate theft!"), and the store's manager Walter Geist (a socially-inept albino). This is a great set-up, and for a few chapters I was thinking, "I LOVE this!!" Then it fell apart into shards of ickiness, sadness, and extreme social discomfort.

My biggest complaint is the aforementioned lack of pay-off. There are mysteries right and left, and do we get satisfaction? No, we do not. A fiction author has the ability to give us the whole slice of bread, and so I am not happy with crumbs.

The Post-Birthday World

2007-07-14

The author is female. I hasten to tell you this right away, in case you share my dislike of female narrators written by male authors: so few authors can pull off writing as the opposite sex.

In chapter one, Irina goes out for dinner with a male acquaintance to celebrate his birthday. Toward the end of the chapter, she feels powerfully tempted to kiss him, even though she has been living happily with her boyfriend Lawrence for seven years. In chapter two, Irina wakes up, miserable: she feels guilty about kissing the other man, and she finds she has fallen out of love with Lawrence.

In chapter three, Irina wakes up, relieved: she is glad she resisted the temptation to kiss that other man, and she feels a renewed love for Lawrence. And voila, the author had my complete attention.

The rest of the book alternates chapters: first a chapter of the storyline in which Irina gave in to temptation, then a chapter in which she resisted it. I was interested all the way to the end, although I found I felt a little ill over all the bickering.

The Mysterious Benedict Society

2007-07-05

Perhaps you are waiting impatiently for the seventh Harry Potter book, driving everyone around you crazy with your leg-jittering and day-counting, and you need something good to read to pass the time. Perhaps you have never understood the appeal of the Harry Potter books, and you need something else to read while everyone else is busy reading the seventh book. Either way, I have just the book for you.

I suppose it must be said that you will find this book in the children's section of the library, but that is only because children may also enjoy it, not because adults won't. This story of four children recruited to help save the world is excellently written, with wonderful plot and characters. I was sad when it was over, and I am very glad to hear rumors of a sequel. Perhaps six sequels?

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

2007-07-01

Laugh? Oh dear yes. This cheerful account of Jesus's childhood has a non-mean-spirited "It's fun to laugh!" attitude that I think would keep it from offending most people. But some of you--and I think you know who you are--are far too serious-minded for this kind of hee-hee joke-fest and should give it a big pass. Here is a little test: Do you think the title is funny? If not, move along, sweet cheeks. The rest of you are in for a big treat.

Dream When You're Feeling Blue

2007-07-01

Ug! What is THIS? I go to Elizabeth Berg for books that feel like TRUTH. She has a way of writing that makes me wonder why no one else writes like that. But this! This is a book written in the hopes of reviews that say "The author makes the past come alive!"

I think we're all familiar already with the romanticized World War II era. Our boys overseas, and the homesick, send-Mom's-cookies, gee-Sally-you-sure-are-some-kind-of-pretty! letters they wrote. Our girls back home, and their painted-on stockings and factory jobs and hope chests and rationed sugar. Best of times, worst of times, everyone pulling together for the common good of the nation, greatest generation. Fathers calling their sons "Son" and giving speeches about God and country. Mothers warning their daughters about getting the milk for free. We GET it already. There is no reason to bring this alive again in the exact same way it has already been brought alive so many times before.

Dream When You're Feeling Blue is about Kitty, whose true self is nothing more than "Ooo, handsome servicemen! Ooo, pretty dresses! Ooo, I can't bear to hear about s-e-x!" The author uses Kitty like a marionette, forcing Kitty to perform the story the author has in mind, a story of familial love, romantic sacrifice, and stifling schmaltz. The story is meant to reveal a deeper side to Kitty's character, but it is clear Kitty is only being put through the motions.

Calculating God

2007-07-01

Aliens finally do visit Earth, and they bring with them scientific proof of the existence of God. Another book from Robert J. Sawyer that reminds me how much I like science fiction.

Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers

2007-06-16

After reading this book about the flower industry, I liked flowers more and also less than before. On one hand, the author pushes aside the marketed symbolism to show us the profitable product beneath--and she reveals the various poisons and unpleasant working conditions and deceptions that go into a bouquet. On the other hand, the author loves flowers, and the way she describes them makes me love them too. By the time I finished the book, I wanted more flowers in the house--and also didn't.

I had a few gripes about the sections where we are made to feel bad about the mistreatment of flower industry employees. She mentioned the salary of a worker in another country, putting the amount in U.S. dollars without saying how much that would be in the other country (clearly people are not able to pay rent and groceries on $6/day, so surely a U.S. dollar pays for more there than it does here). BUT--I so appreciated the way the author presents the point of view that the consumer is not in charge of working conditions, the employer is. A consumer might choose to take such issues into consideration when choosing where to spend money, but it is not the consumer's responsibility to puchase health insurance or police sexual harrassement.

I thought this was a great, thorough study of all the issues surrounding flowers, and I don't know how she made it so interesting considering how informative it was.

Him, Her, Him Again, The End of Him

2007-06-08

It is immediately clear that this book is written by someone who considers herself very witty indeed and has been told far too often by friends and relatives that she's so funny. The humor is forced into every line, until I wished the author would stop trying so hard and just write some plot for a change, or perhaps write a character who wasn't a highly unlikable caricature.

Night of Many Dreams

2007-06-08

Here is an unusual thing: a book I thought I liked while I was reading it--but it turned out I was mistaken.

I kept reading this book about two sisters, despite some made-for-TV dialogue ("You gave them direction, but they've had to find their own way. We all do.") and some overworked writing (too many adjectives, too many adverbs, trying too hard to use "interesting" words), because I thought I was interested in the stories of their lives. Toward the end it occurred to me we weren't going anywhere that hadn't been clear from the very beginning. And when the story ended, I wondered why it had even been written.

The Society of S

2007-05-30

If you were sitting around one day thinking to yourself, "I wonder if Kristen Voskuil likes vampire books?," my guess is that you would conclude "No." Perhaps you would be remembering my January 1998 review of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, in which I could barely stop gagging and rolling my eyes long enough to review the book. Or perhaps I've mentioned in passing that Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot is the only book I've ever read that made me seriously consider wetting the bed so I wouldn't have to walk past the dark window between me and the bathroom.

This book, however, I liked. It's a little melodramatic, but so is the whole vampire concept. There is blessed little in the way of erotic neck-sucking. In fact, this is more of a book that makes a person wonder what it might be like to be a sensible vampire with basic vampire needs in a modern, non-swishy-cape world--rather than a book that makes a person wonder what's on the other side of that dark window, or why vampires apparently lose the ability to use contractions.

Rollback

2007-05-27

I am very, very picky about science fiction. It must not have the "space butter" problem (i.e., just because it takes place in the future or on another planet doesn't mean every single object would have a future- or other-planet-related name); it must not say--even one time--"As everyone knows..." in order to set the scene; it must not be written by a man who thinks ideal human evolution includes women getting over the whole stupid monogamy/jealousy thing (Robert Heinlein, I am looking in your direction); it must not have on the cover a woman clad only in a metal-studded leather bikini and flowing knee-length red hair; it must not go on and on and ON as if it were a science textbook and not a novel.

I don't think these are unreasonable requirements, and yet it is difficult to find science fiction books that meet them. I was pleased, back in June of 2000, to read what I considered an excellent sci-fi-meets-courtroom novel by Robert J. Sawyer. I can't imagine why I didn't look for more of his books at the time. Perhaps I did and my library didn't have any, or perhaps I couldn't remember his name. In any case, I'd read nothing of his since then, and when I checked out this book it was without realizing it was by the author of Illegal Alien.

I liked this book just as much as the first one I read. Rollback is a story about successfully contacting alien life, and it's also a story about what could happen to a marriage in which one person is given a second chance at youth and the other person isn't.

I have one thing I didn't understand, and I wonder about this whenever I read a book about a correspondence that takes many years between the time a message is sent and the time that message is received: why wouldn't both parties then send many messages at regular intervals, rather than waiting for a reply before writing again? In this book, it takes 18.8 years for a message to go between Earth and the other planet, so Earth sends a message and waits 37.6 years to receive a reply and send another message. Well...wouldn't it make more sense to send a message, say, once a year? Then you'd keep receiving a message every year, and you wouldn't have so much catching up to do in each one.

Then We Came to the End

2007-05-26

The rhythm of the writing is "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"--but on and on and on for pages. Even though I was interested in reading about the employees of a marketing firm, for the first maybe fifty pages or so, I was thinking, "I can't stand it. No, I can't stand it. No, I can't read one more sentence like this." Why I kept reading is anyone's guess; it wasn't the magic of the plot. Some books just keep you reading "one more page to see if it gets better."

It did get better. The rhythmic prose got less ploddingly rhythmic and dully descriptive and turned into an actual story. The characters were fun to read about, and there was a nice assortment of them, and I found them easy to imagine. The dialogue was good. The various storylines were good.

By the time I finished the book, I was wishing there was more of it, and I was ready to recommend it. But you may need to get over the hurdle of those first pages.

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States

2007-05-18

The author is a total asshole. His only charm, if you consider this a charm and I don't, is that he is so frank about it. Every time he deliberately slams into a customer because he thinks the customer is stuck-up, pads his time sheet, or quits for no reason except that he feels like it that day, he just writes that right down. Here he is, he seems to say; rejoice with him in his solid rudeness. He lists no redeeming qualities, and apparently has none.

He seems to intend to celebrate the grand old tradition of dish-washing, and I was ready to go with this idea. It's a profession with its own rules and jargon like any other, and I can see the satisfaction to be found in doing a good job at it. But since he doesn't do a good job at it, it's hard to see what his point is. He tries to say that the way he slacks off as much as he can and then quits after a few weeks is part of the grand old tradition, and perhaps it is, but if so he is losing me on the celebration concept. He only made me feel sorry for his employers.

According to the back cover, he is eventually going to get married and change professions. I didn't get that far, and perhaps the love of a good woman is going to change him right up. But as of page 122, he's still revolting, and insufficiently entertaining about it.

The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders

2007-05-16

Perhaps this is an excellent mystery, with a creative "solved by an angel" element and an ending both satisfying and clever. I couldn't read the whole thing: it was too Southern-mother-in-law for me.

It's the sort of book where people don't say something is sad, they say it'll make you cry more'n a bucket of onions. The narrator has a gentleman friend, thinks the police officers are too young, objects to clerks having telephone conversations, and thinks her daughter-in-law exercises too much and cares too much about healthy food.

I gave it a full 100 pages because I felt as if I wanted to like it--but I didn't like it.

The Other Side of You

2007-05-11

Why oh why did I keep reading? I should have put the book down the moment I was startled to find that the narrator was supposed to be male. I'd been assuming the narrator was female for pages, and indeed, the narrator makes a very poor male. Only a few special authors are able to write in the voice of the opposite sex, and this author is mistaken in thinking she is one of them.

I would have stopped reading there or shortly after, if I had not had such an unfruitful library trip last weekend. I came home with only ONE book--this one--and so I persevered long after I would have otherwise abandoned it. I should have abandoned it anyway and watched TV instead.

The writing style is pompous and indulgent. This is the writing of someone overly impressed with the beauty and depth of her own prose and insight. An example? Why, certainly. "In all exchanges there must be one who listens and one who speaks, but there can be no revelation without someone to whom it is revealed."

More examples? "The desire to be loved is as basic a need as the desire for food or drink. But to take delight in being loved requires nerve. For where life is most ardently awakened it can be most excruciatingly extinguished and the fear of that possibility can tragically become the wet blanket which smothers the sacred flame." "Beware, beware of those who care! I, who cared so little for myself, had by way of compensation cared too much for others and they were the losers thereby."

Could you just barf all over those lines? And the love stories! So dumb. The author has to tell us repeatedly about the "congruent spirits" and "irresistible affinities" and "natural rapport," because otherwise we would never see the relationships as anything but perfectly ordinary.

By the end I was shout-thinking, "WRAP! IT! UP!" at the author. I'm not sure I officially read the last 30 pages or so, though my eyes went across them.

The Family Tree

2007-05-04

One of my very favorite kinds of book is the kind that pulls in a bunch of family members while mainly telling the story of one. This book succeeds in doing this without being a soap opera.

A Spot of Bother

2007-05-01

Normally I am not a fan of books in which a person slowly loses his or her mind. I find that kind of plot claustrophobic, the written equivalent of the camera operator playing with all the funny special effects that make things look all wonky and 1960s-ish.

This book, which does indeed include a person slowly losing his mind, knows just when to quit with that stuff. George is recently retired and going a little more than a little nutty, but we only hang around with him for short periods before having a break: we follow around his wife as she has an affair, his daughter as she wonders whether or not to marry a man I'm going to marry if she decides she doesn't want him, his son as he tries to get his boyfriend to come back to him. The grimness is cut with enough comedy--and enough other plots--to keep it from getting oppressive.

Wickett's Remedy

2007-04-29

When you read many, many books, it is fun to find one that contains something surprising and new. In this book, there are comments in the margins from The Dead. That is, you will be reading along, taking in the details from Lydia's point of view, and one of Lydia's memories will mention casually in passing a certain food brought to a party, and that it was eaten only after everyone else's foods were gone. And the maker of that food, now deceased, will interject in the margin that she is quite sure her food was eaten along with everyone else's. Very peculiar. Very appealing. After awhile I was happy whenever I saw a new margin comment coming up.

The basic story is the 1918 flu epidemic, and that can be difficult to read about. A girl named Lydia is the one we follow, and so her losses are most painful to us, but all the stories are hard. It's difficult to imagine going through one of these epidemics, with too many dead bodies for the undertakers to be able to take them, and people too sick to take care of their sick families. This isn't the sort of reading material you should take with you on vacation. I also advise against reading it when you are yourself sick in bed.

A secondary story involves a successful businessman who stole a recipe from a widow and made a fortune from it. His half-senile letters to his deceased son show that he never rested easily about this. I thought this storyline could have used a better resolution; it seemed to hang there, unsettled. True, this is the way many such things are in real life: never fully resolved, or no chance for tying up loose ends. But in fiction, I like things taken care of.

I would have enjoyed, too, hearing more about Lydia's life after the book ended. Well, "wanting more" is the kind of feeling an author would be proud to leave a reader feeling, and certainly it is better than the "enough already!" feeling. I recommend the book, but it would be wise to make sure you were in the right frame of mind to read about a deadly epidemic.

One Good Turn

2007-04-21

I'd read two books by this author, and loved one and hated one. I was interested to see where this third book would fall.

In books with lots of mysterious coincidences and connections, either I am thinking, "Oo oo oo, I am dying to see how this works out!" or else I am thinking, "Quit screwing with me and tell me what happened already." This book was the latter. I felt manipulated by the twists, as if their only purpose was to keep the momentum going for an otherwise inferior plot. And then the solution wasn't worth all the messing around: instead of a huge amazing intricate master plot revealed, there was a fizzle as things sort of wrapped up and mostly didn't.

The book has construction problems that keep it from holding together or forming a worthwhile structure.

To Serve Them All My Days

2007-04-21

At first I thought I had found the very sort of book I like to read occasionally to sluice out some of the garbage that piles up when I wade through other novels' stories of incest and molestation and nasty divorces. This story of a wounded war veteran who finds new life as a teacher at a boys' school was sweet and interesting and had the kind of innocence you don't see very often in modern novels. (It was published in 1972, but the experiences within are from earlier decades.)

After 400 pages, I'd had enough. I think this book would have been better if about half of it had been cut. Slogging through the twentieth debate about school policy and educational philosophy, or the third relationship in which the woman is eager in bed and yet also eager to give up her entire life to her husband's interests and pursuits, or the hundredth time the schoolteacher (based on the author) is praised for his exceptional talents and skills and character, my interest flagged. I felt as if I'd invested so much, I should keep going until the end--but I couldn't muster the energy.

Blankets

2007-04-21

This graphic novel starts out a little too distressing for me, but once we get past some sad childhood episodes and into sad teenager relationships, I can handle it. I enjoyed this story of a teenaged relationship, and I enjoyed the drawings.

Between, Georgia

2007-04-21

My, I'm tired of book and movie and television titles based on quirky town names, aren't you? This book is good enough for me to get over that and move on.

I am a sucker for stories of unexpected pregnancy, surprise delivery, and happy baby adoptions, and so this book is my cup of tea. Throw in twins, a love story, and another happy baby adoption, and I am all yours. Recommended.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

2007-02-10

I was so certain I'd like this book, I put it on my Christmas list based on a pair of excerpt illustrations I saw in a review. And I was right: I loved it.

Normally, I don't like graphic novels. I think of myself as liking them, but then I don't. What I like are very specific graphic novels: this one, and probably there are a few select others I haven't yet found because I can't stand to dig through the heaps and heaps of ones I don't like. Fun Home reminded me of Lynda Barry's work, which I love beyond reason but with good reason. They're both "comic strips," I guess, but they also aren't. It's a particular fusion of text and pictures that...well, I can't explain it. It's just different, and if you like Fun Home and/or Lynda Barry, and you know the kind of thing I mean, and you know where I can find more, I wish you would email me and tell me.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman

2007-02-08

I liked the parts where she complained about aging or talked about the various ways to shore it up: hair color, skin care, clothing, surgery, etc. I lost interest when she started complaining about how many tens of thousands of dollars per month her apartment cost to rent. I loved her "What I Wish I'd Known" list and the last chapter. I loved the title and the author photo (she's hiding her neck) and the whole concept for the book. I think the main problem was that she didn't have enough material for her concept, and so had to branch out into other, non-related materials. The other materials were fine, but they had nothing to do with thoughts on being a woman.

More Twisted

2007-02-08

It is difficult to complain about surprise plot twists without making the review a spoiler, but I am going to attempt it. For those of you who don't want to read anything that would even hint at what the twists are, I will say this: Twisted was better. Anyone willing to risk knowing a little too much, continue on to the next paragraph.

Here is my primary complaint: These stories are built around Big Plot Twists and surprises, but sometimes the twist doesn't make sense. In one story, an exact time of day plays a role--but there wouldn't have been any way to predict that time of day, or for anyone to know what it was in advance. In other stories, there's a huge build-up to the twist, an increasing tension of "But WHY??"--and then the reason is weak. Instead of finishing each story with amazed eyes and pounding heart, I often finished it thinking it had been a waste of the tension.

A nitpick: one story calls a character both "Gordon Wallace" and "Wallace Gordon." How did no one catch that before publication?

I guess I could have stuck to my original extra-careful review: Twisted was better. More Twisted is fine, but flawed. I still recommend it for Jeffery Deaver fans like me, but I think you should be warned that it will not be as satisfying as usual.

Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

2007-01-26

The challenge in writing a book on how to write is the same as the challenge in writing a book on how to act, or on how to paint, or on how to dance: anyone may attempt the skill, but some people are able to and some people are not, and those who are not able will not be made able by a book. This is a point I felt Anne Lamott understood well. Sometimes I read a "how to write" book by a writer, and as I'm reading I think, "She doesn't realize she has a born talent for it. She doesn't realize that her results are not reproducible by someone following these steps she lists. She thinks she is following a formula that anyone can follow." I did not have that reaction to this book. I felt the author had a firm grasp on the hard facts, and would not be the sort to tell a child the atrocious lie that he could do anything he dreamed. I myself dreamed of being a famous stage actress. I AM STILL WAITING.

I appreciated the way she wrote about writing as something worth doing for its own sake. She continually drew the emphasis away from publication and monetary success, and put the focus on writing as a hobby that enriches the writer's life even if it is never published and never earns a dime. I think this is true, and I don't think I've heard anyone say it before. Furthermore, I liked the way she applied this concept to people who want to write but are not good at it: she feels they should keep writing anyway, for the love of it. I agree, but I will caution that if these bad writers are accidentally published I will come down on their crappy novels like hell's fury.

There are the usual disparaging remarks about reviewers, of course. Evidently reviewers are meant to understand that the effort and emotion that go into writing a book exempt it from being evaluated for quality. Evidently reviewers are not themselves writers, and so they would not understand the writing process nor the emotional attachment to the result. Evidently reviewers don't know what it feels like to have their work responded to in a negative way. Pff.

The book's title refers to an anecdote: The author's brother, as a child, was working on an enormous report about birds that he was supposed to have been working on for months but had started on only the day before it was due. He was frozen by the size of the project, unable even to start on it because it was so huge and he had so little time to do it. His dad said to him, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." The author stretches this to cover all writing projects that feel insurmountably large: break them into pieces, and just work on a small piece instead of trying to tackle it as one big solid unit. Good point.

The Handmaid and the Carpenter

2007-01-22

I consider Elizabeth Berg one of my favorite authors. I hated this book. It combines the worst of uplifted-eyes, stained-glass, shallow religious speculation, with the worst of lightweight, gaggy-dialogued, stupidly-written fiction.

To remind us that what we are reading happened in ancient times, the dialogue and text are full of formal Biblical sounds: "For what reason would I lie to one I so love?" and "Yet we know that the Messiah will come from such a descendent. One of your seven children might be the one we have so long awaited!" Far from putting the reader back in time, this style is distracting and annoying, and distances the reader from the story. Also, it's crappily done and made me want to hit somebody.

The story itself is well-known, but embellished to an extent that will antagonize people who believe in the significantly shorter Biblical version, and yet not entertain people who don't. This book is a waste of time, and not even an interesting one. Really, truly craptacular.

The Keep

2007-01-20

If it hadn't been for a convincing review by someone whose opinion I value, I probably wouldn't have taken a chance on this book: a "chilling psychological landscape" involving "a childhood prank" with "devastating consequences," reenacted "with even more catastrophic results" does not sound like my bag of oats.

As I began the story, I had even more doubts: I don't generally like it when an author's narrator is not the same sex as the author, because it catches my attention (Did she-the-author feel weird writing as he-the-narrator about "f***ing" a woman?) and pulls me out of the story.

This book, however, has something going for it that overcomes many an obstacle, and that's a fresh writing style that surprised me and pleased me. Also, it's just a really great story, and I liked it very much.

The Cold Moon

2007-01-14

Excellent as usual. Bonus: Lincoln Rhymes may have found a worthy opponent, someone who is not defeated in this book and may reappear in a future book.

What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam

2007-01-13

If you're like me, you have been thinking of Islam as a scary Middle Eastern religion. Here are the things that come to your mind when you hear the word: terrorists, suicide bombings, women covered up, beards that could use a good tidying--and also your own total lack of knowledge about whether any of these things even belong with Islam or if they're just false associations like when you used to confuse Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. For that level of ignorance, I recommend this book. The entire book is in Q&A format, so you aren't expected to read it beginning to end. Nevertheless, that's how I read it, because I don't have Qs per se, just a gaping black hole of no-As.

Since I am moderately familiar with the basics of Judaism and Christianity, I appreciated the way the author compared Islam to them. All religions are weird and mystical from the outside, and exposure to a few of them makes those few seem tamer than the others; it is helpful to be reminded that the Bible contains many examples of religious wars and of men marrying multiple wives, and that Christians are still split about whether women are allowed to speak in church. Every religious group contains members who use their faith as an excuse to indulge their violent natures, and the author helpfully reminds us that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have their own histories (past and present) of aggressive "believe or die" behavior.

I came away feeling that I now had a nice foundation layer of knowledge about Islam, and that something I'd thought was scary and unfamiliar was only unfamiliar.

The Uses of Enchantment

2007-01-06

A teenaged girl vanishes, and appears the next month claiming to have no memory of where she's been. She toys with her psychologist until no one knows if she's been abducted or not, or if she's lying or not, or what her real problem might be. Gradually we discover--in sections entitled "What Might Have Happened," and also in getting to know the same girl fourteen years later--what probably happened, but we're never allowed to be completely certain.

In fact, that was my main complaint: I've mentioned before that I like to have loose ends tied up and everything explained by an omniscient narrator at the end, and this book failed to give satisfaction. While certainly not as bad as it could have been (at one point I wondered if we were going to have a "there are many 'truths' and none more true than the others" ending), I didn't feel quiet in my mind about it. I still wondered about motivations, and about the length of time involved in the disappearance, and about what the girl's parents thought. I recommend the book anyway, because I thought the writing and the story were excellent, and because I don't think it actually leaves the reader hanging--it's just that I like things really, really, really thoroughly explained.

The Guy Not Taken

2007-01-05

When computers are able to write fiction, this is the sort of book I will expect. The writing is competent, the plot is competent, the characters are competent. And the whole thing falls flat.

Any time a limp, tired word or image could be used, it was. Children are "scooped up," and they "shriek with delight." An old man smells like moth balls and cough drops. Two people "rattle around" in a big house.

The plots, too, fail to reach for anything fresh. A well-off suburban mother learns that someone with purple hair and leather cuffs can still be a valuable person in a loving, stable family. A woman who always wondered if another man was "the one" learns that she would prefer to be with her husband after all.

It's not that I like books that resort to stream-of-consciousness surreal imagery in an attempt to be creative, but I do like to read things that go beyond a high schooler's grasp of creative writing.

I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

2007-01-05

Fun book, fun pictures. Recipes look good, too.

Burnt Toast

2006-12-26

If you think of Teri Hatcher as a bright, insightful person with something fresh to share with the world, then it is likely you will enjoy this book. If instead you think of her as a lightweight who's lucky she got into acting because she sure wasn't going to get anywhere on the strength of her insight-a-day-calendar thoughts and ideas, you probably won't get past the introduction.

Burnt Bread and Chutney

2006-12-26

Her sister and her mother are both "stunningly beautiful." Her parents are nearly perfect in every way. Her grandmother is wise beyond belief. Her ancestors were amazing in so many ways.

It's all boring, and makes for a dull memoir. We don't need dirt, but we do need humanity: this book would make a nice anniversary present for her parents, but it's not for the general public. I made it halfway through before I couldn't read another word.

The Boleyn Inheritance

2006-12-24

I always know when I have a new Philippa Gregory book that I shouldn't plan to do anything else until I've finished reading it. I feel embarrassed that I like such fiction---but there it is, I do, and I think she's a gifted storyteller even though her tastes run to the sensational.

In theory, I don't like historical fiction: it's everything I dislike about history, plus it's usually fictionalized to the point of significant inaccuracies so you can't even use it to make yourself look smarter later on. But this series on Henry VIII (in which The Boleyn Inheritance is the most recent) is more the sort that makes a history-hater think, "Hey, maybe I like history after all."

Prep

2006-12-24

When this book was on my library's New Releases shelf, I passed it up again and again. I was assuming it was one of those mean, exaggerated, bitter, insider books exposing the nasty underbelly of an institution. I hate those. They never seem true, and their extreme venom makes me want to defend a situation I would normally be opposed to, and this makes me feel crabby.

Earlier this month, though, I read another book by Curtis Sittenfeld, and I liked it so much that I went in search of this one. Two weeks later, I'd read all the other books in my library pile but not yet Prep. I nearly returned it, I was so sure I wouldn't like it. But I have a rule: either return a book or read it, but no fair leaping ahead to the next batch from the library. So I started reading it, and there went the next two days because I did almost nothing else.

I loved it. It's not mean at all. There's no feeling that the author has an agenda against boarding schools. If anything, the book gave me a less negative impression of boarding schools: the kids may be wealthy, but the school experience overall sounded very similar to the experience I had in public high school: same basic emotions, same basic interpersonal relationships, same basic growing up. The narrator, Lee, is real and likeable, and didn't have any of the annoying precocity I dislike in fictional children. The author notes in an end-of-book interview that Lee is actually narrating from her late 20s, remembering her time in high school. Perhaps this is what keeps this from being too much of a coming-of-age story, and more of the kind of thing adults can identify with. We remember high school, too.

The Whole World Over

2006-12-10

A bad second novel after a good first novel is such an extra disappointment. Reading the first one, the good one, you think, "Oh, hooray, a new author to love! Perhaps she will write many, many wonderful books for me to read!" The second book finally arrives---and it sucks. What a crashing blow. Not only is the book a bust, so perhaps is the entire author.

Reading The Whole World Over, I was repeatedly reminded of the crappy novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo last month: when I was writing, deadline was the only thing of importance, and so plot, character, and all originality and sense were sacrificed. The Whole World Over is lame in that same way. I feel the author's deadline, the expectations to create a second novel after the great first novel. She has failed. Perhaps now the pressure will be off, and there can be hope for a third novel.

The main character is a woman nicknamed Greenie. Her husband Alan is such an unrelenting ass, I couldn't understand how they got together in the first place. Greenie is no prize herself. When Greenie falls in love with someone new, the new relationship doesn't make any more sense than the one she had with Alan, nor is her new love an appealing character. "I'm one of those people who can't stop searching my way around the world" he tells her, in between lectures on water conservation/quality and fish health.

Greenie OF COURSE has a campy gay male friend, "honey"ing and "my dear"ing all over the book, pledging undying support and making Greenie laugh so hard. Please don't even get me started on this overused and insulting device, so common to female authors of a certain age.

There is an irritating child in this book, precocious and cutesy in a cheap sitcom way. The author clearly finds him adorable. Every time he spoke, I wanted him to shut up.

After this child gets involved in a mishap (he and a friend try to free some horses into the wild, after reading too many wild-horses-run-free type books; the horses are found and everything is fine), the parents act as if he has killed someone. The child hands his father a toy horse, and the father reflects that "To hold it, now, felt like holding a toy revolver." What? The father then removes the child from the mother's care, which makes total sense to the mother: obviously she has totally failed. What? The mother lies to her son about why she won't send his toy horses with him; she says she'll give them to another child, but instead she throws them away. What? Again and again reading this book, I thought, "This makes no SENSE."

The characters are always laughing at whatever anyone else says, or waiting for someone else to laugh. Everyone is always thinking about how funny everyone else is, or about how they themselves have just made a joke, or about how funny their thoughts are, or about some great "pun" or "irony." None of it is even slightly funny. This is the author trying to tell us how funny her characters are, when she is unable to show us. "'Her name is like a sneeze,'" says the precocious and cutesy child about his nanny Consuelo; "'Oh say oh choo!'" And then? We read that "Greenie had not laughed so hard in months." Uh huh. Because it is so funny.

The characters are always being offended at other people's totally rational remarks (someone who wears his funeral suit to work "because he didn't have time to change" is outraged at the "thoughtlessness" of a customer who remarks on his spiffiness), or having ridiculous fights that don't make sense. I don't mean "fights that don't make sense" in a way that reflects real-life fights, which are often far from rational; I mean fights where, as you read them, you think "Huh?" This is exasperating, and all the adrenaline comes from frustration and confusion rather than from empathy with the warring characters

The author is so self-conscious about her writing, her characters become self-conscious too. As Walter walks along the street, he remembers his grandmother: "Voolishness, voolishness, voolishness, he heard Granna say in her small but confident voice with that shameless Wagnerian accent." Yes, I completely agree, the accent is ridiculous. If the author knows it, the right way to fix it is to leave it out, not to have her characters admit its ridiculousness.

So many little details are wrong or silly. Again, this reminded me of NaNoWriMo: the way, when speed is the most important thing, you can breeze past the details and work on them later. The important thing being that you must then work on them later. You can't leave in something like a woman finding out she's pregnant "yesterday," but then in the next paragraph revealing that she has already had a check-up, unless you are going to explain that she has been having intensive fertility treatments that meant she found out at the doctor's office and not after peeing on a stick at home. She can't, one week later, have another check-up already, with an ultrasound that reveals twins and lets them "hear two separate heartbeats," unless, again, you explain that this woman somehow has special circumstances that mean an OB will see her before she's a couple months along, or would have some reason to "suspect" twins that early. Another time, a woman walks the wrong way on a bridge. "No one questioned her going the wrong way." In the very next paragraph, someone questions her going the wrong way.

Toward the end, the author brings in the events of September 11th. My first reaction was "How DARE she." How dare she exploit that day for her own fictional, dramatic purposes. I don't know why I would feel this way: plenty of authors bring in real live horrible events such as wars. But I did feel that way, and nearly closed the book right then, even so close to the end. I didn't feel her characters were good enough to deserve this connection with something so serious and real. I didn't want to experience their poorly-drawn fictional anguish when other poorly-drawn characters were missing or in danger. Especially offensive was when the Little Mr. Shirley Temple child started asking his innocent-youth questions and explaining things in his innocent-youth way, mangling his words cutely as usual and asking about "Osaddam."

I was angry at this book. It is a waste of paper, a waste of what I had assumed was talent. It is so riddled with flaws, I don't see how it was even published.

Lost and Found

2006-12-04

I think I was only about a tenth of the way into the book when I started feeling sorry that at some point it was going to end. That is a very good sign for a book.

This is the sort of book where an assortment of people talk from their own points of view. The abundance of interesting topics for them to talk about is justified by them all having been chosen for a reality game show: each pair was chosen because they have some good secret or story. One pair is a mother-daughter pair, and the daughter recently revealed an enormous and life-changing secret to the mother. One pair is a married couple, one man and one woman, both gay but members of a group that thinks homosexuality can be cured. You'd think this would make the book all soap-opera-ish and eye-rollingly dramatic, but it's written so calmly and matter-of-factly, it comes across only as "Don't people have interesting lives!," not "Jesus, not another huge secret."

The combination of the cover art (parrots on a deep yellow map background) and the reality television backdrop made me feel like I wouldn't want to read the book, but I was completely wrong. This was a book that enthralled me with its issues and plots, without making me feel afterwards as if I'd fallen for cheap sensationalism. I did feel sad when it was over: I could have read a thousand more pages about these people, easy.

The Man of My Dreams

2006-12-02

This is exactly the sort of book I like: frank and introspective, simple and real, true and straightforward. I like it when I can wonder periodically if the book is actually autobiographical.

I feel I must point out that the author is female. The reason I must point it out is that in general I dislike female narrators written by men, and so I almost didn't check this book out: it passed the "reading the front flap" test, but then when I saw that the author's first name was Curtis, I don't know what kept me from putting it back on the shelf.

The book is about Hannah, and her experiences with men from age 14 until age 28. I liked the characters and how they were described, especially Hannah's cousin Fig.

I was not crazy about the title, which I think makes the book look like the bad kind of "chick lit," the kind that embarrasses most women with its shoe obsessions and brand-dropping. I was not crazy about the "information given in the form of a letter written to someone else" at the end, which I think is a particularly lame gimmick. But everything else---very good.

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank

2006-12-01

I was completely riveted by the idea of a "genius" sperm bank the minute I heard there ever was such a thing, so I was an easy sell for this book. What a letdown.

The author is eager to assure us of his own intellectual credentials. Whatever. Being smart doesn't mean you can write, or understand scientific concepts, or present ideas in a way that doesn't make you look foolishly biased.

Let's start with the cover. It shows a blond, blue-eyed baby, eyes so blue they practically glow. Get the Aryan/Nazi reference? Oh, yes. It runs throughout the book. Many, many times we are treated to discussions of how people looking to make any improvement in the human race at all are basically the same as Hitler. Dull point, and repetitively forced, and point not proven. Vaccines and antibiotics are Hitlerish, too, by the author's standards.

Let's go on to the writing in general, which is sloppy and hyperbolic. Relatively routine and early-level fertility treatments are described as "a nightmare." Oh, really? Do you really want to compare getting a daily shot in the butt to a NIGHTMARE? Incendiary language is used when the author wants to make it clear what the reader should think of something: "dragged them down to the asylum," "forced under the knife," "bloody-minded eugenic ideas." A regular, non-Nazi sperm bank is described as reminding the author of "the scene in the science fiction movie when the hero accidentally discovers the warehouse where the 'friendly' aliens are freezing the millions of humans they have secretly kidnapped for their terrible experiments." Nice cool objective reporting there, sport.

He doesn't even try to back up what he asserts. He's describing how eugenicists were keen on the idea of sterilization to improve overall human wellness, and that what they wanted to do was sterilize everyone with a known disease or flaw; the problem was that they were calling things "genetic" when they weren't--so sterilization wouldn't have helped. The author then says, "And even if they had been genetic...it would have taken literally thousands of generations of mass sterilization to significantly reduce the incidence of genetic disease." Really. Thousands of generations. Literally thousands. Is that really a statement he should be following with "But eugenicists didn't stop to do the math"? Nor does he bother to explain his assertion or back it up with any actual information at all, he just moves right along. This happens time and time again throughout the book: wild assertion, no back-up for it. An example of anything happening once is used to make sweeping implications that it must have happened that way every time. If he doesn't find any research to support something he wants to say, he makes it up. The first use of a sperm donor the author has ever heard of is labeled "probably the first use of a sperm donor, period." Back it UP, buttercup.

I dog-eared dozens and dozens of pages in this book, meaning to comment negatively on every one of them, but I'm too crabby to go on. I hated this book, not only because it was sloppily written and sloppily biased, but because it was such a disappointment. I was interested in the subject and I wanted to know more, but I came away feeling as if all I knew was what David Plotz wanted me to believe.

The Discomfort Zone

2006-12-01

I tried to read The Corrections when there was so much fuss about it a number of years ago, but I couldn't manage it, and I can't now remember why. I think I will have to try it again, now that I have read this book.

I would not have expected that I would be interested in someone telling the story of how he got involved in bird-watching, but I was. I would not have expected I would be interested in reading someone's lengthy accounts of their church youth group experiences, and yet I was. This is due to the author, who is charming and interesting. Also, the cover is awesome.

Incidentally, I would like to add that I successfully finished my NaNoWriMo novel last month. I haven't even read it, because I don't want to.

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

2006-11-13

Perhaps you have been a victim of this in "real life": someone will be telling you a story they evidently feel is loaded with significance and maybe even mysticism, and you will be thinking, "Oh, uh huh," and not seeing it as anything very significant or mystical at all. And they finish telling the story and they pause, eyes wide and sparkling, waiting for you to say, "Oh, WOW!!! What an AMAZING STORY!!!," and it makes you feel depressed that they want that reaction from you. This happens so often in this book. She was explaining the word "acoustics" to her daughter, and then she realized she hadn't ripped off the page on today's word-of-the-day calender, and the word of the day was....ACOUSTICS!!! She was trying to remember the name of some guy, and two days later HE EMAILED HER!!! She has the word WOW on her wall, and her husband was creating art based on his feelings about September 11th, and he had to move the first W to make room for his amazing art, and what does that leave? OW, the very feeling we all had!!!

I do understand the concept of this book, however, and I LOVE it. The concept, I mean. The concept is that you put together a whole bunch of little snippets of things, some related and some not, in no particular order, and you end up with this treasure trove of little morsels: meaningful and whimsical, beautiful and sad, relatable and poetic. I would like to see a whole bunch more books like this, and hope that the success of this one will allow others with the same idea to more readily achieve publication.

Many of the entries in this book (the entries are alphabetical) are good, and I thought of them happily later. I really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed reading it, and I'm keeping it because I'll probably want to read it again someday.

Overall, though, I felt the author would have done better to weed out the things she found fascinating about herself. It is hard to put a finger on, but there is a world of difference between an entry about how it is a little known fact that you can make great croutons out of corn bread (interesting, gives me the impression that she is good with salads), and an entry telling me how she's known for her skills in assembling salads (boring, the kind of thing people say too often about themselves in the hopes that it will make them more interesting). A book with more of the original Pillow Book concept she describes and less "I just love words!" and "Here is a long timeline of my childhood" would have been genius. As it is, it's pretty close.

Why I'm Like This: True Stories

2006-11-12

It was a mistake to read this during NaNoWriMo month. This book is full of excellent writing, and that kind of thing is hard to read when you yourself are in the process of generating stupid, boring, lame writing. What you want at times like this is bad, bad writing, so you can snort and think, "Well, what I'm writing is no worse than this, and this got published."

It was just a few days ago I was complaining about a book that had comments printed on the cover about how funny it was and yet I never cracked a smile--and here's another book that has the same sort of comments and a similar reaction from me, and yet this book I loved. I don't know why other readers talked about how very, very funny she is, because I don't think of her as that kind of writer. Cynthia Kaplan is the kind of writer where I read her writing and I recognize her. I keep thinking about how she is writing true things. She writes like she's confiding in you, like the words come out of her naturally in that order with no censoring. She makes it look easy, but what's she's doing is hard: she's writing about her ordinary life in a way that's interesting to other people--how on earth does she do that? THAT kind of writer.

I highly recommend this book. I also highly recommend that you keep in mind that as of December 1st you're supposed to go to your URL field and remove the :8000 from this web site address and then re-bookmark it, because if you don't you'll just get one of those pages that suggests you don't know where the hell you're going.

PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives

2006-11-09

It is so fun to read other people's secrets, though of course when you know a postcard's worth, you want more of the story. This guy Frank Warren put out thousands of postcards asking people to write down a secret they'd never told anyone else, decorate the postcard, and mail it to him anonymously. He got responses that range from "I have to shave my toes (I am a woman)" to "I wish I was white" and "I started shooting heroin again" and "My sister and I explored each other sexually as children. As the older girl I feel guilty that I may have molested her."

The one that stays with me the most is "I don't wear my ring, because I don't love her. Not because I don't like rings." It adds so much to see the decorations: the one I just mentioned is decoration with a photo of a ringless man's hand, with the confession written on it in ink, ending with a little sad face. Many are little works of art.

This is a book I'm glad I own.

Everybody Into the Pool

2006-11-09

I get the feeling, reading this book, that the author has been indulged her whole life. There's this "youngest child" feel to what she says, as if she loves to be the center of attention, loves to be different, loves to shock, loves nothing as much as a story about herself. I liked the book in spite of this. As an oldest sibling, I tend towards indulgence toward the babies. I roll my eyes at their inability to pull it together and act like grown-ups, but I don't shish kabob them. Her stories are pretty entertaining, even if I don't agree with her about how charming and funny it is to always be falling apart.

Hey, remember about the address change! Take off those :8000s! Right now, take 'em off! Well, not NOW now, because then you wouldn't be able to see the site for the rest of the month. But soon!

I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

2006-11-09

I can tell this book is supposed to be funny, but I read 100 pages and didn't even smile. I know that other people find it funny, because one of my top favorite bloggers--a woman who routinely makes me snort out a lung--thought it was hilarious. Also, on the cover is a quote from The Miami Herald saying "[Notaro] may be the funniest writer in this solar system"--but perhaps that was a little friendly rib at Dave Barry's expense? or perhaps those brackets are a total, total lie? Anyway, you might find this book so funny you need a new spleen, but I didn't laugh, and eventually I gave up waiting to.

Don't forget to change your bookmarks and RSS feeds and tattoos: the new web site address will be http://www.kristenvoskuil.com, no :8000 at the end.

When I Knew

2006-11-09

As it turns out, here I am reviewing books in November, despite NaNoWriMo. It is because I am avoiding working on my crappy, crappy novel, which is so very, very crappy.

Also, I wanted to let you all know that in less than a month I'll be changing my web site address to http://www.kristenvoskuil.com ---the same as it is now, but without the ":8000" at the end. I'm going to remind you in every review for awhile, assuming I remember to do so. It'll get annoying, but not as annoying as sitting there waiting for the site to load and then seeing a message about how maybe it's your fault it won't.

Oh, the book? The book I'm reviewing here when I'm not talking about my own stuff, yes, by all means let's get on with it. It's gay people writing about when they first knew they were gay. Many of the answers are funny. Some of them are funny at the expense of answering the question; in fact, many of the answers tell an anecdote about coming out, but not about the moment of self awareness the title requires.

I found some of the answers confusing, I suppose because I'd thought it was a false stereotype that gay men preferred feminine things as children--but so very, very many of the entries mention this sort of thing: wanting to wear dresses, wanting to play with dolls, wanting purses, etc. I had thought that sexual identity and gender identity were two entirely separate things, but perhaps they go hand in hand more often than I'd thought?

Well, it doesn't matter. The book is well worth reading, and in fact I own a copy. The look of the book adds a lot: drawings, cultural scraps, photos of the contributor at the age referred to in the entry, etc.

Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories

2006-10-30

It turned out I had time for one more book before NaNoWriMo begins, and I'm so glad I did because this is the PERFECT book for you to have on hand while you are writing your crappy novel next month. There are going to be times when you want to do a little recreational reading, but you are not going to want to get involved in a long story, and this is just the thing: the length rule with these stories was that you shouldn't have to turn the page more than once.

The editors' note compares these ultra-short stories to poems, and indeed the similarities are many. Like poems, they can deliver a huge emotional slug to the gut, or they can be irritatingly obscure. And as with poems, if they were irritatingly obscure, there were times I blamed my own ability to understand, and there were times I blamed the tendency of some authors to mistake lofty nonsense for depth.

As with poems, the language is spare and has a greater impact than you'd expect. As with poems, some of them won't resonate with you, and some of them will resonate you so hard you'll be have to stop to take a breath. Some of them, I couldn't believe I'd been reading for such a short time, considering how involved I already felt, and how much I wanted to know more.

I started out intending to list my favorite stories. When the book was bristling with post-its, I thought maybe it would be quicker to list my least favorites--but there weren't enough of them for me to feel like making a fuss. With stories this short, if I didn't like it, I knew it would be over soon.

Overall, a very, very good collection; one of the best short story collections I've read in a long time.

No Plot? No Problem!

2006-10-28

If you hurry, there is still time to get your hands on a copy of this and read it before the November 1st start of NaNoWriMo. You ARE doing NaNoWriMo, right? Good. You had me worried there for a minute.

(Um, if for some reason you're NOT signed up for NaNoWriMo yet, go here to sign up now: http://www.nanowrimo.org. Hurry! Only a few days left, you slacker!)

I haven't read the entire book yet, of course, because the last four chapters are supposed to be read at the beginnings of each of the four weeks of NaNoWriMo. I am a rule-follower, and so I have not yet read them. I'll try to remember--with whatever is left of my wrung-out brain after November is over--to come back and complete the review.

You don't NEED this book to do NaNoWriMo. It's more like something to do for the last couple of days before NaNoWriMo begins, when you don't want to start a new and exciting book that you'll have to abandon. Here is what I found most valuable: the information that in the second week, many people find their enthusiasm fades, their plots plod, their characters sigh and give up---but if you persevere, things pick up in week three. Good to know.

Good luck, everybody doing NaNoWriMo with me. This might be my last review until December. Assuming I persevere through week 2, I'll be busy writing my own craptacular novel all of November.

Happiness Sold Separately

2006-10-26

I think it must be very, very difficult to write a love triangle book in which you feel sympathy and goodwill toward all three characters. This book pulls it off.

Ted and Elinor's five-year marriage has been almost completely overtaken by their attempt to have children. After the most recent failed attempt, Elinor disappears into the laundry room, and Ted disappears into the arms of Gina, his trainer at the gym. I was all set to hate Ted AND Gina, but that's not how the author writes it. By the end, I was hoping for happiness for all three people.

The Girls

2006-10-25

I passed over this book several times at the library before reading a review of it in a magazine and realizing I actually hadn't read it before. I've read at least three books (not including this one) called The Girls (though I've only reviewed two) (I mean, until this one, which makes three), and it gets confusing. I don't think it would be a bad idea to have some sort of rule about titles and how many different authors may use the same one.

This The Girls is about conjoined twins Rose and Ruby, joined at the skull and not separable. When they are 29 years old, Rose begins to write their autobiography. Ruby, saying that Rose can't write an "autobiography" for their shared life, contributes chapters.

It's a really, really, really good book, and I'm glad I didn't miss it just because of the overused title.

Hothouse Kids

2006-10-23

There is too much "according to Webster's" here. That kind of thing belongs in high school essays and never afterward.

This is a book about gifted children, and whether the methods we have of dealing with them are the "right" methods: the methods that take into account the well-being of the child, the fair development of his or her skills, the careful respect for his or her childhood, and the future use of those skills in adulthood.

The author wants to force a connection between the gifted child and the myth of Icarus flying too close to the sun, but it never gels. The author claims that the connection is "a failure to accept human limits," but that doesn't work: Icarus's downfall was a failure to listen to someone who knew better, and is a better tale for reminding children to obey their parents. I can see why she wanted to make the myth work: she likes the image of the gifted child "flying too high" and being damaged by its own abilities. Too bad that's not what happened in that myth.

The author's descriptions of the people she interviews are sometimes pleasingly revealing: "He tends to deliver sentences like ['I never really felt like a child'] with a certain romantic appreciation, seemingly aware that his narrative could seem as fabulous as it is sad, the story of a foiled wunderkind." And sometimes the descriptions are too peculiar: "Speech bursts from his mouth like air from a balloon." What does that mean? In a long squealing whine? In a near-silent whoosh? In a loud bang?

Many of her observations seem well-placed and intelligent (a favorite: "According to the blurry logic I described earlier, the total neglect of orphans is shown to be bad, and therefore superstimulation must be good"), but the book never hangs together. She asks many, many questions, but mostly as a device for keeping the text moving, not as a cue that she's about to provide answers. Some of the questions are silly, and out of the scope of this book: "Are these lucrative and powerful jobs, in fact, paving the way to long-term happiness?"

It seemed to me this book lacked focus. Were we talking about the kind of child who is exceptionally intelligent overall, or the kind of child who shows an unusual talent for just one thing but is otherwise normal, or the sort of child whose parent has forced him or her to take many, many "enrichment" activities? The author wants to talk about all of them, and so the book scatters in several directions. The way we discuss a child who is born significantly more intelligent than average is different than the way we discuss a child whose parent has forced a steady stream of ballet, gymnastics, violin, foreign languages, all in an attempt to MAKE the child gifted. In my opinion, the author was not able to talk about all the different kinds at once, and should either have chosen one and stuck to it, or else made more of an effort to separate the kinds. Also in my opinion, the author should not have gone for the tank-top-and-oiled-skin look for her author photograph.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

2006-10-21

This creepy story is about two sisters and their uncle living alone after the rest of the family dies from a suspicious poisoning. The story's plot does not surprise, but it unsettles nevertheless.

Plum Wine

2006-10-21

About six weeks ago, I had such a score at the library, I didn't know what I was going to do. I found about two dozen books I was interested in reading, and I've renewed them two times now and they're due today for real. The last one in the pile, the one I was least interested in, was Plum Wine.

The first half of the book surprised me: it was so absorbing and interesting, and not at all what I'd expected. Then I got involved in another project, put the book aside for a few days, and was disinclined to go back to it. With the due date looming, I nearly just took it back to the library without finishing it. But I remembered how much I'd liked the first half, and went back to it.

I should have gone with my first impulse. For all the eerie "What's going on here?" build-up, the explanation is dull and left me with a "Is THAT all??" feeling. The falseness of the romance seemed well-crafted when there was the scary feeling that someone was tricking someone else, but seemed just plain false when the trickery was explained away.

The Egg and I

2006-10-19

This little time capsule tells of a woman's experience on a mountain farm, rearing chickens with her husband. Her husband sounds like kind of an asshole (he bosses her all day as she works beside him, then at night he smokes and rests while she does the dishes, then he checks the mattress springs to make sure they're dust-free), but she compares him to the other men who are beating their wives just for fun or letting their wives do all the farming and all the housework, and decides he's better than most. (I wonder how this year's model of husband will look to the women of 60 years from now.)

You might think that reading a book about hauling water, scraping manure, and wrestling with a difficult stove would be....well, we're among friends, right? We can say "dull"? But I found it interesting to read about, and I liked the author's voice. I wasn't on the edge of my seat, but I certainly wasn't bored. I should warn you that there is some language that we now consider racist (I say "now" because I don't know what it was considered back then), but there is not a lot of it.

Rococo

2006-10-14

I partly liked this book and partly didn't. On one hand, I like Adriana Trigiani's writing, and I did read the book all the way to the end, and I enjoyed many parts of it. On the other hand, parts of it were very dull for those of us who aren't interested in interior decorating. A sample passage:

"I adjust the glass top to fit perfectly over the seams of the ottoman. I had a ball with this one, oval with simple wooden legs. I covered it with a deep blue satin brocade embroidered with a multicolored bird-of-paradise design. I used a six-inch silk fringe in pale blue from the base to the floor, then added a kicky ball fringe in gold around the top seam to give the piece movement. I covered forty-seven large buttons in cornflower-blue velvet and staggered them on the sides, giving texture to the satin."

This goes on for pages and pages, again and again throughout the book. I suppose it makes sense, since the main character is an interior decorator, but I'm not sure that kind of lengthy, detailed description makes for good fiction.

To nitpick--and what could be more interesting than that?--there's a chess metaphor that tells me the author doesn't play chess: the character talks about how the game is like salvation, in that you "do a little good, move forward; sin, go back; ignore the needs of others, stay in the same square." Perhaps the author is thinking of Candyland?

The novel wraps up in full trite mode: first some complete changes of lifelong behavior lead to abrupt reconciliations, and then there's a thoughtful overview of what's important about life. You can just hear it done for the movie in a warm, affectionate, philosophical voice-over: families have their troubles, but in the end? They're family, and that's important.

Second Honeymoon

2006-10-14

This is exactly the sort of novel I enjoy: good, realistic characters in a basic, family-issues plot, written in a way that makes normal life situations mesmerizing.

Edie and Russell Boyd have finally waved goodbye to the last of their three little nestlings. Russell is happy to get back to spending time with just Edie, but Edie can't tolerate the empty nest and the feeling that she is no longer needed. She starts romanticizing the years when her children were making constant demands on her; meanwhile, Russell is romanticizing the years before the children arrived.

Before long, Edie has managed to fill the house with more people than they originally had, and has remembered how it actually feels to have so many people needing her all the time. Each person moving in has had their own life-changing crisis or issue; as these situations are resolved, Russell and Edie get a second chance to enjoy the empty nest.

Dry

2006-09-30

It is one of the great sorrows of my life that I will never be friends with Augusten Burroughs. I have to come to terms with it periodically, rehearsing the trueness of it in in my head along with other things that are equally true: I will never be an actress. I will never be a singer. I will never be friends with Augusten Burroughs.

Oh, sure, I might one day meet him, at a book-signing or something. But then I'd be all, "OHMIGOD! Augusten! Burroughs! I am SUCH a fan!," and he'd be all, whatever he says in these circumstances, probably something like, "Oh, great, great," or whatever. And then it would be the turn for the person behind me to say "OHMIGOD!..." as I went on ahead, trying to be content with this measure of Augusten Burroughs that was all that destiny would allow me: I may look upon him briefly, and then I must move along to the cash register. He will be friends not with me but with people like Haven Kimmel, other genius writers I want badly to be friends with.

This particular work of genius is about his struggle with alcoholism. But who cares what it's about, specifically? It is by Augusten Burroughs. OHMIGOD. Augusten. Burroughs. I am SUCH a fan.

Life Laughs: The Naked Truth About Motherhood, Marriage, and Moving On

2006-09-28

I read Jenny McCarthy's book Belly Laughs, and I remember that several times I laughed so hard I nearly fractured a rib. I snorted a few times reading Life Laughs, but it wasn't the same.

The book was originally going to be titled Marriage Laughs, but while writing about marriage, Jenny McCarthy realized she didn't think hers was any good. She got a divorce and changed the title. Laughing yet? No?

Have you noticed that people who are recently divorced are not a barrel of laughs, or even a jam jar of laughs? They "make jokes," but the jokes they make are embarrassing and bitter, and they laugh too loudly and abrasively while everyone else looks away and tries not to make things worse. That is what it is like, reading this book. She makes fun of her ex-husband, and of her marriage to him, and of her ex-husband's new girlfriend, and you can tell she thinks she is being funny, but it is too soon for her to be funny about it. You're reading along and you feel the impulse to wince and look away, and maybe even stop reading so that when she's past this she won't have to worry that anyone remembers what she said. It started sounding to me like she might be sorry about the marriage ending, and covering it up with this painful attempt at derisive humor. This sort of thought process is not the result of an amusing, entertaining book.

I hated the illustrations. HATED them. They're male illustrations in a female book; not only are they ugly, it's a terrible clash.

Those of us who like Jenny McCarthy will still want to read Life Laughs for the details of why her marriage broke up, and to get a balance to all the stuff she wrote in happier days, and to learn whether she does, or does not, plan to have her anus bleached. (Hello, Googlers!)

Plainsong

2006-09-16

This is not my sort of book at all. When I saw it on the shelf, I was not drawn to it in any way. Enormous sky, grey and cloudy, with a desolate mountain range way at the bottom of the cover? "A heartstrong story of tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver"? No, thank you, dear god no. But Sundry (http://www.sundrymourning.com/) liked it. And Richard Russo (Empire Falls, Straight Man) liked it. And so I tried it. And I loved it.

I was not sucked in to the story immediately. Because the prose was not in the style of the books I usually read, it took me awhile to catch the rhythm: "After a time he put out the cigarette and went upstairs and walked past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened guest room sleeping or not and went down the hall to the glassy room over the kitchen where the two boys were." The dialogue is written without quotation marks, which gives me a funny spacy feeling, like a dream sequence. It is difficult at first to figure out what is going on: I had the feeling that I had been dropped into a story already in progress, and that the author was not going to assist me in finding my way.

Ten pages in, I was feeling like it might be worth it to keep going. One hundred pages in, I was abandoning other projects so I could keep reading. I suggest you give the book a try, even if you think, as I did, that a book "as spare and heartbreaking as an abandoned homestead cabin" won't be your thing.

He's Just Not That Into You

2006-09-15

Notice how long it took me to get around to reading this book. Do you have this problem too, this natural resistance to reading any book that has a HUGE fuss made over it? Especially a CATCH-PHRASE book? I knew what the whole book would be about, just from the title.

It's great, though. It's GREAT. I wish I'd had this book back in high school when I started dating. Even hearing the title two years ago, I had this fog-clearing feeling. After reading the book, it's such a relief to think back on things and understand what was really going on. He backed off because I was "too special" and he knew he'd be "bad for me"? I knew that was crap even at the time, but it's nice to have that well and truly confirmed. Asshole. I wasn't that into him, either.

When I first started reading, I was thinking that any book that comes with a refrain is not so much a book as a transcript of a motivational seminar, and I hate motivational seminars. In fact, you know what came to mind for the first few chapters? That Saturday Night Live sketch where David Spade and Helen Hunt are flight attendants who say "buh-bye" to each passenger, gradually upping it until they are saying really rude things such as "I'm gonna go ahead and serve you up a big ol' heapin' helpin' of BUH-BYE." (Note: Not actual quote. I am not the world's best Googler, and the transcript eluded me.) That's what a "refrain" book is like: practically every single paragraph comes back to the same point, which in this case is "He's just not that into you." And this IS a refrain book, in exactly that way, and yet it works. Why is this? Magic. It's magic, that's why. Some authors have it and some don't, and these authors do.

Here is what it taps in to: Every girl's fervent wish for a kind, handsome, cool older brother who will call her "kid" and tell her she's too good for that guy she's dating, and who will offer to beat up any guy who hurts her, and will in fact perhaps take the initiative and go do the beating up without offering first. Even girls who had actual older brothers wish for THIS kind of older brother. Greg Behrendt, handsome and tough and cool and happily married and all in black with his hoop earring and spiky bleached hair, fulfills this fantasy. Add in Liz Tuccillo in the role of the cool, sharp, understanding best girlfriend you always wanted, and you have a magical combination.

How can you resist them? They keep calling you "superfox" and "hot stuff," and telling you that you should think of yourself as a valuable, precious commodity, worthy of being chased and courted by a great guy who won't say he's not ready for a relationship or doesn't believe in marriage, and that if you break up with Loser McJerkington over there, you WILL find Princey McCharming. Who doesn't want to believe that?

The format is all these letters to Greg, who then answers every single one without fail by saying the guy in question is just not that into the girl in question. He's black-and-white on every issue: you should NOT be putting up with that guy's crap, not YOU, you succulent creature you. And then Liz writes about the grey: why it's hard to take Greg's advice even if you agree with it. It's a good balance: Liz takes away the creeping feeling that maybe we girls should not be allowing a guy to boss us around so strictly, and she provides some badly-needed empathy.

There was a big fuss about the book because it was GOOD, that's why. Sure, it's catch-phrasey; sure, it's black-and-white; sure, I can't say exactly how great it would be in application--but it's fun to read, and I really liked it. Jesus, will you just go read it already?

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

2006-09-14

Penelope is an 18-year-old girl living in the 1950s. Her father died in the war, and she lives in a gigantic, freezing, debt-soaked mansion with her young, vain mother and her pop-music-obsessed brother. One day a girl named Charlotte appears out of nowhere and invites Penelope home to tea. Penelope accepts, for reasons that are not clear either to us or to herself. This sets into motion a whole series of events, as you might expect.

The events themselves are unremarkable, even predictable. The flavor of the novel is appropriately fiftiesish: young people going wild for that rock 'n' roll music, young girl not realizing that she's in love or with whom, etc. It's a sweet little story, and it's not going to offend or surprise anyone.

The author loses a point for describing Charlotte as "the sort of person one reads about in novels yet rarely meets in real life," and later on as "like a character from a favorite book come to life," which does nothing but remind me that Charlotte IS in a book--not the effect I'd be going for if I wanted someone to be getting lost in the story. The author gains points, however, for having a character look at herself in a mirror and NOT use it as an opportunity to tell us what she looks like. When she got out her compact and examined herself, I was ALL SET to rain down the scorn--but then all she notes is that her hair needs combing and that she has an ink smudge on her chin. Well, and that her eyes are flashing back at her, defiant. But at least there was no description of a freckled nose that turned up too far, and long curly red hair, and eyes the color of lavender.

So is the book good, or isn't it? It did seem good, but on the other hand it took me more than a week to read it. Whenever I wasn't reading it, I didn't feel like getting back to it. There was no suspense at all, nothing to keep me wondering what would happen next or how it would happen. I felt like I could see down to the bones of the story, and all I was doing was marking time while it played out. Perhaps this is a better way to judge a first novel: would I read this author's second attempt? Definitely I would.

18 Seconds

2006-09-04

Here is the premise of this book: A totally hot blind babe has the power to touch dead people and see their last 18 seconds of thought. This lets her assist in the solving of crimes. I was completely on board for this until they started trying to convince me that this was scientific, not mystical. Come on, you know you chose "18 seconds" because it makes a good movie title, not because it's the actual exact length of short-term memory.

In terms of quality, the novel is patchy. This is a writer who is still trying things out, with mixed success. I noticed this particularly when he was trying to establish a character: when he wrote the bad guy's thoughts about how much he hated those "rich bitches," he was losing me; but when he wrote about how the bad guy, whose job was roadkill clean-up, tossed animal ID tags into the incinerator along with the animals, when he was supposed to turn those tags in so the owners could be contacted--that gave me a real feeling for what kind of bad guy we were dealing with here. A good subtle detail like that gives a book major points.

I also noticed problems with word choice. When we meet Edward Karpovich, he is described as "A ruffled man in a long dark trench coat." "Ruffled"? If he's hanging around with his hands in his pockets, this can't mean ruffled as in harried. Does it mean he has ruffles decorating his coat? Is it supposed to be "rumpled"? This is not the kind of thing that should be stopping the story on page 2. Later, a man named Torlino "smiled and tried to roll his eyes." What was stopping him? He'd successfully rolled them two pages earlier. Later still, a prisoner named Sykes has "sallow flesh" that "sagged for lack of sun." Sun exposure is not associated with firm skin. Final example: two different guys think of a woman as "ever so hot." Who says "ever so"? Whoever it is, it shouldn't have been these guys.

We meet Miss 18 Seconds (Sherry Moore) and then lose her for a long time. It seemed as if the novel was going to be about her and her powers, but we soon switched over to Lieutenant Kelly O'Shaughnessy, a hot babe who is always being paged for right-this-second police work, but somehow never remembers to wear sensible clothing or at least bring a change of clothes in her car. When we finally see Sherry Moore again, we spend far too little time exploring her interesting power, and far too much time having everyone surprised that she's blind. Considering that all the news headlines reportedly said things like "Blind Woman Sees Dead," it should have been as much a part of her reputation as her babeliness--another overworked angle.

So you think I hate this book, right? No. I thought it was a really good idea that could have used a re-write and a good editor to make it even better. I think the author needs practice but has good stuff to work with, which is more than I can say about a lot of the authors whose books I nitpick to death. And I think the book is still worth reading despite the problems here and there.

Family Trust

2006-09-04

Here is the dilemma I face as a reviewer: When I begin a book and can tell after only a few pages that I really, really hate it, do I have to keep reading in order to accumulate enough vitriol for a review? Or can I just say I hate it and move on? This is the problem I face with this book.

I hate it. It's stupid. "Becca's dark eyes shone with the electric heat of her intelligence and joie de vivre." And two pages later: "What joie de vivre! ...His blazing blue eyes shone at the thought of a glass of wine, as the eyes of a schoolboy would shine at a fire engine." I read only 14 pages, but I had dozens and dozens of crappy samples to choose from. I'm moving on.

The Doctor's Daughter

2006-08-29

A good review is much harder to write than a bad one. What should I say? The writing was good. The characters were believable. The plot moved along. No one was named Kate. No one examined themselves in the mirror and contemplated their own fiery tresses and snapping green eyes and creamy ivory skin. No one used this speaking pattern: "I don't know, Kate. I just don't know."

Alice is a middle-aged women with three grown children. She wakes up one morning with a feeling that something is wrong, and she spends the entire book trying to discover what it is. It's a good book, and this is the good review.

You're Not You

2006-08-24

The title refers to something Kate, a woman in the late stages of ALS, says to her caregiver Bec when Bec is balking at translating words she doesn't think Kate should be saying. Kate snaps, "This is me. You're not you right now." It is one of many moments in the book when it is made clear that Kate, though paralyzed and in need of assistance for everything from peeing to speaking, is still her own person, in charge of her own decisions---no matter what Bec thinks of those decisions. This becomes even more important later on, when Kate continues to remind Bec that Bec may not call 911 in an emergency without Kate's permission, because Kate doesn't want to end up attached to a respirator in a hospital.

This is an excellent book, absorbing and thought-provoking and interesting, with highly likeable characters. My single, solitary complaint is that it features YET ANOTHER Kate. When, oh when will authors stop using "Kate"? Is it some sort of right of passage, that every author must have at least one major character named Kate? Is it some sort of pact with a publishing devil: you will be published, but in return you must name a character Kate? It is maddening.

A Good Yarn

2006-08-21

This is chick lit for the middle-aged chick: knitting and pursed lips in place of Blahniks and snark.

This particular example of the genre is of mediocre quality. Each chapter begins with a dull, perky knitting quote: "When in doubt, grab a ball of yarn and Get Creative!" The characters are boring rehashings of characters we've seen a million times before, and of course there are four of them and the chapters switch among them. The characters' inner thoughts are used to preach on the subject of credit cards ("In our day, we didn't use them"), caring for aging parents ("She took care of me, and now it's my turn"), and other topics your grandparents have already lectured you on. The dialogue is television dialogue: "Do you really think so?" "I know so," and, "Follow your heart, Mom. Follow your heart." The plots spin out with utter predictability into gagging sweetness, with everyone skipping around with the fairies and learning the true value of true friends and the deep soul-filling joy of knitting.

At any point in the novel, I could have put it down without a backward glance. The temptation to do so increased each time I encountered a passage such as this: "'Okay, okay.' He laughed and held up both hands. 'I didn't have a clue I was such a hero.' 'You are. You're my hero.' He sobered then, the laughter vanishing from his eyes. 'And you're mine.'" Oh my god, make it stop.

Baby Proof

2006-08-15

There are two kinds of "chick lit." One kind is intelligent and well-written, but is called "chick lit" to make it clear that books written by women and about women are lightweight and unimportant. The other kind is one step up from the quality of romance novels: better written, more of a plot, but genuinely lightweight and unimportant. This book falls into the latter category. Does the main character like expensive shoes and have a job in publishing? Why, yes she does! Does the author wear trendy clothes and jewelry (and, undoubtedly, expensive shoes) and pose in a uncomfortable, model-ish way, carefully tilted to show us her best angle? Why, yes she does!

A good storyteller, as I have said many, many times before, can take a basic human-existence plot such as "husband wants baby, wife doesn't" and make it sheer magic, can make it seem totally new. A mediocre storyteller takes the same plot and renders it in a way that reminds us that every story is a recycled story. There is nothing here that is new, nothing that gives the heart that little leap. Point B follows point A, and point C follows them both, and why not print the formula in the back of the book so the reader can write her own mediocre novel? The writing is fine, but the book is uninspired.

Adverbs

2006-08-12

It is a puzzle to me, why I would continue reading a book that is so firmly surreal, when I so heartily dislike surreal. Furthermore, one of the most exciting parts ends in the middle, saying "...and let's leave now. It is clear what is going to happen," which, since it is NOT clear to ME, makes me feel not only cheated but stupid. Many interesting plotlines are left hanging: what really happened here? what does this MEAN? And I hate that. So why did I read the entire book, all the way to the last sentence? I think it is because I find the author so appealing, for reasons I can't explain. I have read several of his children's books (written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket) and I found him appealing then, too.

It is hard to resist a certain kind of blatant author intrusion, where in the thick of the plot the author will say something like, "Hillary is based on a real comic artist whose work my wife hates." It is hard to resist this kind of aside: "The detective took his lazy time. 'My partner and I,' he said, and his sweeping palm said and our hats,...". It is hard to resist the unnecessary clarification in "The partner put the place mat down and spread his hands on it like he was healing the sick, which he was not doing." And how charming is it when an author says "...that's where you walk with friends and hear about their endless problems, taking secret notes all the while for a novel..."? Very charming, that's how charming.

Look, maybe you like surreal, in which case I think you should try this book. And maybe you just like Daniel Handler, in which case it's also a good bet.

A Family Daughter

2006-08-07

The last two books I read, I struggled to force myself to continue reading the loosely-structured---oh, pardon me, I mean "lyrical"---prose. What a relief to start this book and immediately see that characters were going to walk into rooms, have conversations, pursue hobbies---all in a regular, living-their-lives manner, without any stream-of-consciousness filler.

I can't tell you what the book is about, because it's the kind of book where everything happens (sex, scandal, incest, crises, unknown origin of a baby, affairs, insanity, death), and yet it's not the least bit one of those books with metallic letters on the cover: it doesn't seem invented or sensational, just a normal assortment of family problems.

The Accidental

2006-07-31

Note to self: When a book is described as "lyrical" and "whimsical" and--worst of all--"a tour de force of literary improvisation," the book will sacrifice prose in favor of poetry, meaning in favor of pretty-sounding words, the careful work of writing in favor of vomiting words mindlessly onto the page. Self, you will not enjoy that.

It is a sad, sad thing that the plot of this book is so excellent, because otherwise I could have abandoned it as soon as I saw that the author had started not with one irrelevant quote from her high school "Book of Quotes I Like!!!" notebook, but with FOUR. I could have abandoned it when I realized this was the kind of author who would show off with a word only she and I and a handful of others would be able to understand without putting the book down and looking it up in the dictionary, rather than attempting to speak clearly to her readers and immerse them in the story. I could certainly have abandoned it when I encountered the way the first chapter begins, without even a capital letter: "of things -- when is it exactly? Astrid Smart wants to know. (Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski. Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski.) 5.04 a.m. on the substandard clock radio. Because why do people always say the day starts now?" Or later when I realized each character was going to speak in his or her own voice, and that those "voices" would be defined via catch phrases, just like in a sitcom where one character always says "Yeahhhhh, whatever" and another always says "If you know what I mean." Or when, around the same time, I realized that we would be treated to the experience of living inside these people's heads, and that the way the author would attempt to achieve this would be to use extremely short sentences and lots of italics and stream-of-consciousness blather. I will give you an example: "Men are but boys grown tall. The past appears right there in the room, the woodland glade, the dead person right there in the room. You coward. You ran away when you knew the truth! Your son will never know you if I can help it. Jesus saves the blind child. Oh -- oh yes -- I think I can see the light. The Love-Light. Mary Pickford tells the nun she wants the child back. The nun shakes her head. I know, Sister Lucia, you think I'm crazy. But I'm not. The police shoot the striking miners dead. The pagan Chink gets a taste of the result of two thousand years of civilization. Lillian Gish is about to have her head cut off in the French Revolution. When a woman loves, she forgives. Constance Talmadge lives in the mountains and refuses to marry. Blue Blood and Red. The Ten Commandments. The Campbells Are Coming." And do you know what? It goes the hell ON! For PAGES!

But! The plot, it is good. A woman shows up at a family's vacation home. She apologizes for being late, and everyone assumes she's there for someone else. They invite her to dinner, and to stay the night, and before long she has moved in. She is nothing-to-lose frank with them, saying things that are absolutely true but are assumed to be jokes because no one would typically say such things. Soon the entire family is in love with her and can't imagine what their lives were like before her. But who IS she? Where did she come from? And wait until you find out what she ends up doing to them.

Here is my second note to self: If a book is lyrical and blathery, it will not wrap up the loose ends in a satisfying way. Still, I maintain that the plot is good, and good to read. I was willing to wade through everything I hated in order to pick out the bits that were genuine plot, but I will understand if you are not willing to make that same sacrifice.

The Memory Artists

2006-07-26

It took me such a long time to plow through this book, and it was not even worth it. I persevered because the subject matter (synaesthete genius son works to save Alzheimer's Disease-ridden mother) was so intriguing, but the book itself was so cluttered and self-conscious and lecturing and contrived and expositional, I could hardly stand it--and now I wish I hadn't tried. It pretends to be a true story, complete with newspaper articles, diary entries, and endnotes. Dialogue was leaden, laborious and boring, sometimes nothing more than awkwardly posed Q&A sessions intended to inform the reader of pertinent background information. The "diaries" are just as bad, and sessions where Noel (the synaesthete) demonstrates his ability to remember practically everything are deadly.

Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home

2006-07-21

This is a non-fiction book about what it is like to be a writer. Or, rather, it is about what it is like to be a writer like Lynn Freed. Have you read many books written by authors about writing? No, neither have I, but the few I've read always go the same way: a combination of "here's how to do it" and "you can't learn to do it" and "critics suck." As with anything that requires born talent to do it correctly, writing is something that can't quite be explained: there is the way the writer feels as if she does it, and there is the basic genetic ability, and who knows what strings are pulled by what?

As I was reading this book, I kept meaning to stop reading it. I would find I'd moved my eyes across a whole page without absorbing any information, and I'd think, "This is not interesting enough to keep reading; I will read something else." But then I'd keep reading it. Partly I was entranced by the photo on the cover of the author as a younger woman, and by the photo on the back flap of the author today; she is striking-looking, and hard to stop looking at. Partly I guess the book was interesting enough after all.

Broken for You

2006-07-13

I am reluctant to read books selected by famous book clubs, aren't you? I don't like getting sucked into that massive marketing tool, and I'll bet you don't, either. But you and I are just going to have to get over it, because this book is terrific. If possible, get a copy that has only a book club sticker (as opposed to a cover printed with the hype right on it), and peel the sticker off. In fact, just remove the whole book jacket so no one thinks you're one of those people who only reads what the television tells you to. There, that's better.

I would need a word stronger than "reluctant" to describe my attitude toward fiction books written by actresses. However, I notice that Stephanie Kallos is not on IMDb, so we're not talking Meg Tilly here, and it shows in the quality of the writing, which is good. (See what I did there? Subtle!)

I recommend skipping the prologue, which is so, so lame: silly, pompous, and overblown. Go right to the good stuff, which starts in chapter one and continues to the end of the book.

The plot seems like it would be depressing: an old woman with a brain tumor takes in as a boarder a young woman who is obsessively seeking the man who dumped her, and the two of them live in an enormous house filled with antiques. The more we learn, the more you'd think you'd be brought down: someone's parents deserted her, someone's parents were bad in various ways, someone can't get over something, someone can't stop crying. And yet, no! It is uplifting! Happy! As I read, I often had that feeling of triumph that in a movie would be accompanied by swelling music. Other times I was touched, but warmly so. Really, I must insist that you try this book!

A Dirty Job

2006-06-17

I loved this silly book. The author is like a U.S. Terry Pratchett. Some of the jokes are self-conscious ("Look, I'm saying something funny!"), but overall the book is funny and interesting and good.

It starts out sad, with the main character unexpectedly losing someone he loves. Soon he discovers (via a picture book entitled The Great Big Book of Death) that he has been recruited to take the souls of other people who die. Complications--including the inevitable battle against the forces of the Underworld--ensue.

The Night Watch

2006-06-10

I'd read two of Sarah Waters's other books, Affinity and Fingersmith, and had found them utterly mesmerizing, full of twists and surprises. What a disappointment, then, to be 150 pages into The Night Watch without a single twist or surprise. I nearly put the book aside, but persevered because of those first two books: I'd loved them so much that the sight of a new Sarah Waters book on the shelf had given me a jolt of adrenaline.

After 150 pages, a gimmick is revealed: we are going to go backwards with this plot. So far, we have met characters in 1947. For the next 250 pages, we see what happened before that, in 1944. For the last 45 pages, we see what happened before THAT, in 1941. Pretty good, right? I mean, good secrets revealed and so forth. Not really. I don't want to give away any of the "thrilling twists" (as they're advertised on the book jacket), but it's things of this sort: in 1947, we meet a couple; in 1944 we find out that one of them USED TO DATE SOMEONE ELSE. And in 1941, we find out HOW HE MET THAT OTHER PERSON!!! Meh. Not exactly scintillating. It's as if the book were just a regular book, written on a regular time line, and then someone said, "This is boring. Let's see if we can make it interesting with a LAME GIMMICK!"

The Ha-Ha

2006-06-03

I was so drawn into this book about a man who can neither talk nor read nor write. I liked reading about the various ways Howard was able to cope: having a boarder live with him free in exchange for handling his paperwork; having cards that explained his condition; etc. Partway through the book, however, I began to question the premise. I understood that he couldn't speak or write--but if he could gesture, couldn't he use sign language? My interest in the story began to wane.

Howard has a selfish boring bitch of a friend named Sylvia, and Sylvia has a 9-year-old son, Ryan. When Sylvia checks herself into rehab, she leaves Ryan with Howard--a seriously stupid idea, but Sylvia, though none too bright, is cannily aware of which people will take her crap and beg for more. The relationship Ryan and Howard form, and the effect it has on Howard's life, is the main focus of the book.

It is a good book, but I would like to point out that the author is male, and therefore you are more likely to run into mentions of ball rearranging and body odor, nicknames such as "Fartin' Martin," and expressions such as "The world takes a shit in your mouth, and you swallow it whole." Revolting.

She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana

2006-05-30

I've read two other books by Haven Kimmel, and loved both. Perhaps because I loved those so much, and went into this one so happily, it took me a little while to get into it. Once I did, though, I was as delighted with it as I was with the first two. I don't think I should tell you much about the book, because as soon as I started to say "small-town coming-of-age memoir" you'd abandon the whole idea. (In a preface, the author says how sick she herself is of such things, which endeared her to me even more.) It really ISN'T that, anyway. You know what it is? It's a book of essays, some funny and some moving, with the feeling of fiction because it doesn't seem like anyone's real life should be so interestingly and amusingly written about.

26a

2006-05-27

I don't like books written from the point of view of someone going crazy.

My Latest Grievance

2006-05-21

I loved this entertaining book about an intelligent, smart-mouthed teenaged girl and her intellectual professor parents living on a college campus in the dorm's "housemother" apartment. When a vivacious-to-the-point-of-mental-instability former flame of the girl's father appears on campus, everything gets in a scandelous uproar--but the family continues to discuss the nuances of every single word and action. My kind of folks.

Possible Side Effects

2006-05-19

I loved it. He's so funny. He seems like he must be an impossibly difficult, neurotic, damaged person, but his writing makes that seem....cute.

Which Brings Me to You

2006-05-13

Here is what I notice about these two people we're supposed to assume are soulmates. That when they first meet, they get along only when they are all hot and heavy. That when they continue their relationship by letter, they get along only when each person is talking about himself/herself. That when they meet in person again, they don't get along until they start getting hot and heavy again. (I'm sorry, is "hot and heavy" an eye-rollingly outdated term? Please substitute "hooking up.")

I am not, in general, in favor of "gimmick" books. This one's gimmick is that most of it takes place in letters, including postmarks. I admit that as I got into each letter, and got past the point where it felt like a letter and into the part where it felt like a story, I was absorbed and interested. But I cared not one teensy whit for either of these two people, with all their "why do we say disheveled and never sheveled"-style cleverness, and their dumb obvious puns, and their irritating salutations, and their belief that somehow pure ugly honesty of the tell-it-all variety is going to make their relationship work beautifully as opposed to coming back to bite them both in the butts after the sexual chemistry dies down a little and each one of them flings out things like, "Oh yeah? Well YOU'RE the one who had feelings for your SISTER, you PERV!!"

Both John and Jane (gimmicky names alert) have good stories to tell, and tell them well. As soon as they start mooning around about honesty, and "being real," and about how damaged they are, and about how bad they've been, and about how relationships work, and about how you and I have something that doesn't come along every day, I just want to slap them and then throw up on them.

Also, a nitpick: if your car's brakes aren't working because you're sliding on ice, the emergency brake will not help. The emergency brake is for if your brakes fail for some other reason, like they malfunction or a tennis ball gets stuck under the pedal. I speak from bitter experience.

Digging to America

2006-05-10

If you like the same Anne Tyler books I like, you will like this one as well. It is the type that has interesting character studies and an overall uplifting story, as opposed to the type that makes me feel as if life is not worth living.

Torch

2006-05-08

By the time 38-year-old Teresa Wood learns she has cancer, she has only 7 weeks left to live. This is not really a story about her final weeks or her eventual death, but rather about the changes her death brings to her family: her "we don't need a piece of paper to be married" partner, Bruce; her college-age daughter, Claire; her high-school-age son, Joshua. It's a sad and satisfying book, the kind where sometimes you want to kick the characters in the face for being such dumbheads, but mostly you just feel sorry for them and wish they wouldn't keep going in that direction, or else glad that they seem to be pulling it together. I guess I'm not in a big rush to recommend it to all my friends, but certainly it is a quality book.

Meridon

2006-05-04

It was a relief to finally finish this, the third book in the Wideacre trilogy. All three books are what reviewers are forced at knifepoint to refer to as "page-turners," but the plots are so CRAZY. People are always being manipulated by bad people into doing things they would never want to do--and then they try to fix it and end up digging themselves way deeper. And often they have this weak, listless reaction to all of it, like they're powerless even to say the word "no," let alone take out a horse whip and kick some evil ass.

At least in this third book, there is less rhapsodizing about The Land, The LAND, the glorious land unlike any other. I couldn't identify with that feeling that a bunch of grass and dirt and bugs was somehow superior to everyone else's bunches of grass and dirt and bugs.

I can't say much about the plot without dropping spoilers about the first and second books. If you've read the first and second books, you know what this book is about: it's about Sarah, and where she ends up, and what she does about Wideacre. And if you haven't read the first and second books, you have to read those before this one anyway, so what do you need a plot summary for?

The ending of this long story is satisfying if predictable--and I would have felt cheated by an unpredicted ending.

Goodnight Nobody

2006-05-03

Oh, no she didn't. No, she did not name her protagonist "Kate" when fully HALF THE AUTHORS IN THE WORLD have already done so. Surely not.

A common comment for me to make about a book is that I enjoyed it whenever I was actively reading it, but that if I put it down I had no urge to get back to it. This book was the opposite: I was always eager to get back to it, but as soon as I started reading I was disappointed afresh. Variations of the verb "to schlep" are used more than once. There is so much boring description of what characters are wearing: slouchy boots, boot-cut wool pants, suede EVERYTHING. There are well-intentioned but nevertheless grating generalizations about stay-at-home moms: they are either freakily perfect slim/highlighted Stepfordesque creatures who completely sublimate their own personalities beneath a layer of crafty-crafts and tofu snacks, or else they're sweatpants-wearing hapless slatterns, bored and frantic for diversion, making slapstick social errors. We are meant to identify with the latter, which is hardly flattering.

The plot takes turns being either too bizarre or too formulaic: it never hits that sweet spot of surprise and believability. Oh, shall I tell you what the plot IS? It is that a bored homemaker, Kate, is the one to find the murdered body of a fellow homemaker. Because Kate is so unstimulated in her homemaker environment, she gets involved in trying to solve the case. If you're going to read a Jennifer Weiner book, try In Her Shoes or Little Earthquakes instead.

In the Company of the Courtesan

2006-04-27

When my eyes were actually on the pages of In the Company of the Courtesan, I enjoyed it. But when I was away from it, I never felt like returning to it.

The story follows Fiammetta, a Roman courtesan, and her dwarf pimp Bucino, as they leave the wreckage of Rome and start a new life in Venice. Fiammetta's famous long hair has been cut off by the invaders, and it will not grow back; she enlists the help of "La Draga," a wise woman in Venice who can produce love potions, herbal remedies, and "late periods," among other things. Bucino and La Draga, both devoted to and loved by Fiammetta, have an immediate and pervasive distrust and dislike of each other. As La Draga coaxes Fiammetta's hair to grow, and Fiammetta gets back to business, Bucino gradually realizes his feelings for La Draga are more complicated than he'd thought.

I made the mistake of thinking of La Draga as an old woman--I suppose because she is blind, crippled, and wise. She is not in fact old. I would have been less confused by the story if I had realized this sooner.

I would not call the ending "happy." It made me think of a Dickens novel (I won't pretend to a literary inclination: I read him in high school just like everybody else, and then never again), in that there was resolution but not a happy sigh.

The Favored Child

2006-04-10

I suppose this ought to be called historical fiction, and so it is with all its estates and bread riots and squires and horse-drawn carriages. But let's call it historical horror, because it read as scary as any Stephen King novel: my heart pounded, I was sickened and mesmerized, I was actually HORRIFIED--and I try not to use that word much, considering how often it's used by people who write in to small-town newspapers to say how they feel about the new cell phone tower.

Philippa Gregory is, as I believe I've said before and possibly more than once, a masterful storyteller. Truly, she's got the gift. But her stories can be so awful, it's hard for me to know if I should recommend her to you or not. On one hand, if you're looking for a book that will take you right away from the piles of laundry and the horrible day at work and the boyfriend who dumped you, here you have it: there is no way your day is worse than the day Julia Lacey of Wideacre is having.

Just for starters, she's female in a time when women were lower than livestock. She's the joint heir to an estate totally run into the ground by her aunt Beatrice--and you can read about that mess in the first book of this trilogy, Wideacre. She's being raised with her cousin Richard, who has some kind of sick power over her with his kick-you-kiss-you tactics. And then, just as she starts to come into her own--good boyfriend, good attitude, good work on the land, and learning to, um, channel her dead aunt's spirit--she starts giving away what little power she has, left and right, until she is this broken wreck. Then she does something truly regrettable. The end.

Do you really need that kind of adrenaline in your life? Read Stephen King instead: at least there's a satisfying ending. Me, I'm stuck reading the third book in the triology just to find out what happened. Hey, join me if you like: I can't deny these books are gripping.

The Full Cleveland

2006-03-31

It's too bad so MANY people have to write books described as "coming of age," but so many of us DO come of age, and it's a dramatic time, and so it makes for rich veins of novel material, and so we're stuck with it. This particular novel is also described as "smart" and "sexy," but I'll only commit to "smart." I liked it and thought it was fun to read.

I am Legend

2006-03-31

This short book is exactly the kind of scary I like: apocalyptic, but not a lot of gratuitous gore. It's the sort of book that later has you thinking, "Hmm, if _I_ were one of the last few survivors on earth, I'd be able to walk to the grocery store to get canned goods, and I could get a wheelbarrow from Agway, but if I needed something from a major department store I'd be stuck."

The apocalyptic event is an illness that turns people into vampires. One man, Robert Neville, seems immune. He spends his nights holed up in his house as vampires try to break in to get him, and he spends his days reinforcing the defenses around his house. Eventually something's got to change, right? And it does. I recommend the book for a good plot, a good resolution, and not too much grossness.

The Hatbox Letters

2006-03-26

I was so certain I liked this book, it took me 150 pages to realize I didn't.

It's about a woman, widowed suddenly in her 50s, contemplating her life. I LIKE contemplation. She is sorting through a box of old family letters, discovering secrets. I LIKE old family letters, I LIKE secrets. But I grew tired of reading the book. The letters seemed manufactured, not real, and what the woman "discovers" is mostly imaginary: she learns, for example, that her grandfather's sister died as a little girl, and so she imagines this whole dramatic death scene--but it's not like she discovered that was the way it happened, and so it feels irrelevant rather than revealing.

The writing style is pleasing and interesting, and another reader might revel in it. There is the occasional misfire ("[The osprey's cry] is savage and yet sweet, like the memory of consolation"--which stopped me short, wondering if the memory of consolation was in fact savage and yet sweet), but mostly the language is appealingly evocative and expressive and insightful. The lead character examines a photo of the grandfather's sister who died: "This little girl, Kate thinks, with the pity of omniscience, has only four more months to live." The pity of omniscience. That's good stuff. Or when she is home after a failure of a date: "As she walks down the hall, she listens, thinking that emptiness is less the absence of sound than it is the absence of the possibility of sound. The air is filled with what is, rather than what might be. No one will cough, or rustle paper or open a closet door."

Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood for contemplative. Spring is coming, and contemplation works better when it's warm inside and stormy outside.

The Bourne Identity

2006-03-26

I have seen the movie, and I have read the book, and I am about to say something I rarely say, so pay attention: I preferred the movie. I preferred the MOVIE, okay?

This guy is dragged out of the ocean half-dead, and when he regains consciousness he doesn't know who he is. All he has to guide him is a Swiss bank account number that was surgically implanted under his skin, removed by the doctor who saved him. The movie made this seem so exciting and interesting, I was dying to know what was going on. The book was sometimes exciting, sometimes more like a Senate hearing: men in suits, interchangeable but it was important to keep them straight, discussing things cryptically and at length.

I'll say this, also: it is a LOT more exciting to WATCH a man spring into action with killer moves he didn't realize he possessed, than to READ that same springing. Still, the movie does leave out so much information. Well, perhaps what I really want to say is this: that the movie is so different from the book, you will probably like both in different ways.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

2006-02-09

After all the hype, the relentless relentless hype, I had expected more of this book than another "ten children in a poor family with a drunk father and a scrappy resourceful mother" memoir. Thinking back on it, I don't know why I did.

The only thing that sets this book apart from all the other books of this sort is the insertion of all the little rhymes and jingles and slogans the mother of the family writes for contests. Since I hate this kind of thing ("Dial is wonderful--'s fact, gals, absorb it! YOUR satellite can cling closely in orbit"), this book and I were not a good match. It was like watching a made-for-television oppressed-woman movie--with tons of low-budget commercials.

Cell

2006-02-07

Another pretty good horror novel from Stephen King, but it felt like he was just phoning it in.

HA! Oh my god, I kill myself. PHONING IT IN! Do you get it? Because it's about CELL PHONES!

Have all the other reviewers been making that joke already? I'll bet they have, haven't they? And do you know, I haven't even finished the book yet. I just wanted to get the joke in. Fine, I'll go finish reading it. FINE. Humorless jerks.

Later:

I have finished the book and will review it for real now. If I had not known that Stephen King hated cell phones, I would have thought he got the idea from under the bed: here's a common object, what if it were EEEEEE-VILLLLLLL??? Knowing, though, that he hates cell phones, the story seemed bitter and pointed--like some old man telling you not to buy any car manufactured by "the Japs." The "we hate people with cell phones" thing--like the old "we hate people with answering machines" thing--is officially over now that pretty much everyone has one. It is time to start hating something else, such as people who DON'T have cell phones; that's how we handled the answering machine situation, if you recall. Let's pretend he DID dig this idea out from the usual Scary vault, rather than from the I'm Trying To Make a Prissy Point vault, and it will go better for all of us.

It's no spoiler to say that what happens is that everyone who uses a cell phone goes berserk. There are some horrible violent scenes to get you involved right away. It was unnatural, though, how quickly everyone figured out it was the cell phones to blame. Basically it went like this: "That woman went berserk and ripped out another woman's jugular with her teeth. Hey, she was talking on a cell phone right before that! I'll bet it was THE CELL PHONE!!! ESCHEW ALL CELL PHONES!!! " Still, you'll feel the creeping awfulness: in such an emergency, where people were suddenly doing violent things, would you or would you not reach for your cell phone to call the police, find out if your family was safe, etc.? So it makes sense how fast the problem spreads.

This brings us to the next step in an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it novel: the band of travellers. Trying to stay safe from "phone crazies," trying to find supplies in abandoned houses/shops, and coming upon revolting scenes left and right, our band of "people to emotionally invest in" forms: Clay, whose wife and son are in the next state; Tom, a gay and therefore unusually tidy man with a cat; and Alice, a teenager they rescue. And I would like to pause her to fervently--FERVENTLY--thank Stephen King for merely tiptoeing gently around the subject of why there are so few babies and young children around, rather than spelling it out with visual aids. In gratitude, I take back the word "prissy," above.

Our gang is headed to find out what happened to Clay's wife and son, but they are also being herded to the town of Kashwak, where it appears all the "normals" will meet up and perhaps form a new society after all the violent lunatics die, kill each other, or are killed off. And is it that simple? Of course you know it is not, don't be a baby. The violent animals formerly known as humans begin to MUTATE.

I read every new Stephen King book because I LIKE Stephen King books, so I'm not going to sit here and complain. Much longer. I will say, though, that it has always grated on me how a main character will get something silly in his head (in this case a "panic rat") and keep thinking it. It's as if this is supposed to get us inside the head of someone experiencing it. Just tell us the story: the fearful empathy will instill itself.

Missing Mom

2006-01-20

When Nikki is in her early 30s, treating her mother with that special early-30s blend of love and dismissive exasperation, her mother dies. This book is about Nikki dealing with that unexpected death, but also about her memories of her mother and how those match up with what other people tell her about her mother's life. It's "How well do we ever really know another person?" combined with "It's so hard to appreciate what you have until you lose it," with a teeny touch of "Make sure you say 'I love you' whenever you say good-bye, in case you never see that person again."

Nikki is a dull person. She thinks of almost nothing exept her thin legs and her pale feet and her pretty shoes, and whether men are looking at her, and whether other women are too fat and/or jealous of her. The tragedy is supposed to deepen her and give her perspective, and it does a little, but I didn't care. I felt like her grief was (and I hesitate to say something so cold, but this is a fictional character we're talking about) attention-seeking. "Look at me, so beautiful and pale, grieving so hard. Poor me, losing my mother, look at how sad I am, and how lovely in my sadness." She was written as such a shallow person, it diminished the sadness of what happened to her. When her attractive desolation resulted in a new boyfriend to help her through her loss via a little reclined therapy, I was not surprised.

Nikki's older sister Clare is one-dimensional and consistently irrational, and it doesn't ring true. It's the way a character is sometimes written when an author has a grudge against someone and wants to make them look bad in a fictional setting. She's just there to attack Nikki and raise the reader's adrenaline.

The mother is a more pleasing blend. I recognized her cheery, dim-seeming, fluttery self, and I continued to feel like she made sense even when more of her inner life was revealed. The surprises were well-spaced to keep interest up.

I liked the book, I liked it a great deal, but I was also frequently annoyed by it.

The Good Wife

2006-01-20

I was cheesed that the inside of the book jacket gives away pretty much the entire plot of the book. Don't read that, okay? I'll try to give you a summary that leaves you with some suspense.

In the beginning, we have a pregnant woman lying in bed, waiting for her husband to come home. Instead, she gets a phone call: he's been involved in a crime, and he's in jail. I WILL tell you that he loses his trial and ends up staying in jail, because that's the point of the book: how his wife lives while he's in jail. But here's what I'm NOT going to tell you: How long he ends up staying in jail. Whether he wins any appeals. Whether his wife sticks by him. It made me crabby indeed to be reading along, get to a suspenseful part, and know exactly how it was going to turn out.

The book left me with a low, smudgy feeling. I thought it was well-written (I particularly admire a man who can write from a woman's point of view without making her think about shoes and chocolate all the time) and on an intriguing subject, but the subject itself is sad and dismal, so you shouldn't expect to feel all upbeat afterward. On the other hand, the resolution is satisfying and realistic, and the "life is short and people do stupid things" feeling is counteracted by the chin-of-dignity "you do what you can with what you get" feeling.

Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family

2006-01-20

I love this book so much, it is safe to say I want to marry it. I read it in a big slurp, knowing I should slow down and appreciate each word, DRAW it out a little--but unable to, knowing I would have to catch it on the re-read. Then I discovered that the author writes online columns, and so I read 178 of them, one after another. I'm not sure I remembered to shower, eat, etc.

Catherine and Michael have one child, Ben, nearly 3 years old, when they discover they are expecting an unexpected second child. This book is like a journal of that time, starting with the discovery and ending about a year later. The columns start at the same time, but continue to the present.

Doesn't that sound dull? Couldn't you just SCREAM before you have to read even ONE MORE BOOK about a mother's experience with motherhood? But I swear to you, this book is better, different, and fully worth it. I laughed so hard I practically had to be slapped. The way she describes the passion and fury and terror of motherhood is so right-on, it's an excellent primer for anyone considering it. Normally I am a library-book person, but I bought my own copy of this one.