April Is the AWESOMEST Month

My coming soon list is bursting with stuff that's coming out in April; if you let the titles that will be out on May 1 sneak into the list, you'll leave me gasping like a corseted debutante who's been waltzing with Brad Pitt.  Which is to say--entirely breathless, in a slightly dizzy and VERY tingly way.

Let's start with The Shape of Desire.  This gets all its mileage out of being a Sharon Shinn book.  I think it's about werewolves--okay, whatevs.  I ain't against 'em.  Shinn isn't perfect, but there are two sides to that.  Most of her books are really wonderful.  Beautifully constructed, meditatively paced, and solidly structured around character, these are just pleasing, charming things.  But even when she misses the mark on some of these things, I've found that all of her books have a charm, a warm-fuzzy happy ending quality that leaves me with a good taste in my mouth, even if the book was slight.  The worst I've ever had to say about her books was that they didn't have a lot of substance; this is not a devastating criticism.

Verdict: Very promising.

Glamour in Glass will be out from Mary Robinette Kowal.  Not everyone loved Shades of Milk and Honey as much as I did, but I adored it.  I think the comparisons with Jane Austen might have worked against it a little bit; it's a Regency, like so many Austen imitators, and it does a damned fine job of it--only but plus with magic.  By invoking Austen, though, you might expect the richness and depth of her work, but really it's much more like Georgette Heyer or Joan Aiken.  With magic.

Shades of Milk and Honey is on sale for the Kindle for only $3.  If you haven't read it, and this sounds even remotely entertaining to you, try it.  You won't be disappointed.  But really, the reason I love her is because of her Hugo nominated short story, "For Want of a Nail," which you can read for free here.  I will read whatever she publishes.

Verdict: Gleeful anticipation, as of knowing there is a box of Valentine's chocolates waiting for me on April 10.

Magic Under Stone is Jaclyn Dolamore's sequel to Magic Under Glass.  I'd call it long-awaited, but while that's literally true, it implies a passion that's maybe not earned.  I read the first one mostly because there was a whole dust-up about the cover.  It was good--magic, charming, and I liked the main character very much.  A little mushy around the edges, in the way that YA sometimes is now that I'm an adult, but I'll read the next one.  And hey, here it comes!

Verdict: "Oh, hey, I don't think I've ever seen this episode from the first season of How I Met Your Mother.   Cool, I guess I'll watch it."  Like that.

True Sisters, by Sandra Dallas.  Hard to discuss; I have this weird relationship with Sandra Dallas that sort of defies description.  But this one is about Mormons, so I'm all in.

Verdict: Historical fiction by a writer I generally enjoy a great deal, about Mormons.  It's like I was at a buffet and every dish looked so delicious my plate is overflowing.  I can't wait to see what it tastes like!

Okay, here's where we get sneaky and let the May 1 books in the back door.  But oh, they're the exciting ones!

I'll tell you all about N.K. Jemisin's Kingdom of Gods very soon, because I just finished it, and oh, Sieh!  Oh, poor, funny, weary Sieh--I've rarely felt that much empathy for that complicated a character.  I'm so thrilled that she apparently had several finished, unsold novels when her first series took off, because her next series is starting already! Let's all cross our fingers for The Killing Moon to be on par with the Inheritance trilogy.

Verdict: Eager, eager, eager, but so nervous!  Like a first date, or going to a high school reunion.  Such high hopes!  Such potential for torment!  An exquisite agony of anticipation!

Insurgent is Divergent number two, by Veronica Roth.  I'm actually not squirming about this one; it was a decent YA dystopia novel with a few too many worldbuilding holes.  But I'll read the next one.

Verdict: What I really want to know is whether the third book will be called Emergent.  That is my prediction; please be prepared to acknowledge my supreme naming skills when I am proven right.

And finally, last but the opposite of least: Bitterblue.  Kristin Cashore's sequel to Graceling and Fire, and I'm really anticipating this one.  Neither of those books was perfect, but they were complicated, plotty, and character-rich, and lord, but I can't wait to see what this one has in store. I am atwitter and aflutter and a-hopeful.  Can't wait.

Verdict: I will pay money for this book the day it comes out.

This is rarely the case; most of the books above I'll jump on the library list for and read them when it's my turn.  April release dates merely begin my delightful period of waiting list anticipation.  But for some--Bitterblue, Glamour in Glass, The Killing Moon--I will spend money and download the day they're released, and buying them will make me happy long before I get around to reading them.

And now, to sleep--perchance to dream.

Within Reach

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead, is one of those books that I heard rave reviews for but knew nothing--absolutely nothing--about.  It was on my to-read list for a while before I realized it was a kids' book.  I got it from the library and sat on it for a while, then started reading it when it was reviewed on things mean a lot, mostly because I like her reviews and wanted to understand what she was talking about.

I was thoroughly charmed by this book.  It can be hard to describe, because there is a thread of mystery through the story that ends up being important for the climax, but mostly, this book is about a girl, Miranda, growing up in New York City in the '70s.  The great thing is that it's really about all those things--it's about Miranda, who is smart and slightly odd (she reads all the time, but only A Wrinkle in Time), and has a single mother and not a lot of money.  It's about growing up--losing friends and making new ones, figuring out how to be honest and fair, even when you don't really want to.  And it's about New York, where some buildings have doormen and others don't, and you might live in a good neighborhood but you're still afraid of the big kids who hang around in front of the garage, or the crazy guy who sleeps with his head under the mailbox on your block.

Miranda's mother is a smart paralegal with a sweet boyfriend; I loved that her family was a solid, safe place for her in the story.  Her neighbor, Sal, has been her best friend since childhood, but suddenly he doesn't want to talk to her anymore, and she's trying to figure out why.  Her mother wants to be on the $20,000 Pyramid, and she and her new friends have a lunchtime job at a sandwich shop.  It's an engaging, really lovely story about the small facts of her life.

But there's also a thread of mysteries--notes that show up in odd places, saying even stranger things.  Miranda is confused at first, as she tries to figure out whether Wrinkle in Time-like time travel might have something to do with the odd things that are happening.

In the end, both the mystery/supernatural story and the personal story are based on the idea that cause and effect are all mixed up, and that all the parts of your life are tied together.  Your old best friend and your new best friend and your new best friend's old best friend are all bound up in a web, in a community, and that's what makes up your life, and you can never know what will lead to the next thing.  This was such a sweet story; I can't say I'll be thinking of it months from now, but it was a real pleasure to read.

Where I've Always Been

More and more lately, I've had this problem with blogging about books after I finish them.  There are two issues.  First, if I don't write a post within a few days of finishing a book--honestly, just one day if the book is only okay--I lose my passion for it.  I loved it when I was reading it, but three days later I'm into two or three new books and that passion is more of a nice memory.  You don't want your eulogy written by your high school boyfriend whom you haven't seen since graduation, even if he loved you with all his heart, because (unless he's kind of creepy), he's more wistful than mournful at your death.

Wow, that metaphor got away from me.  Anyway, the other prong to the problem of waiting till I finish a book to write a review is the flip side of that--when I'm in the middle of a book, I want to talk about it.  Right now I want to talk to you about how amazing N.K. Jemisin is at writing about gods, which I thought would be impossible, and to rebut a critique I read in a random Goodreads review by someone who didn't find her treatment believable (though I couldn't even read the whole review because I haven't finished the book so didn't read the spoilers).

I would also like to discuss how Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is really not about being a Mennonite or ex-Mennonite or growing up Mennonite, not really.  It's way more about being left by your husband for a guy named Bob whom he met on Gay.com and how the marriage was pretty messed up to begin with but your family is pretty awesome even if they're kooky and religious.  They are less kooky than a lot of Baptists I've read about.

And can I mention that no one should let David Rakoff go anywhere fun?  Because he sucks the fun from things--even as he claims to find them charming.  I cannot imagine him happy; he's like Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  I love his writing--when he's talking about things outlandish (life on a movie set) or significant (Log Cabin Republicans) I enjoy his work very much.  But who let him describe staying in a nice hotel?  Who even let him into Disneyland?

Also, I want to talk about things that happen in these books.  I would really like to do a long blog post about the implications of [well, I can't tell you that, because it happens near the end and you haven't read the book yet] in The Art of Fielding, and whether you think [some people] will feel that it's sensitively portrayed.  And did you find [this character] to be fully three dimensional?  Even when he [does this]?

Do you see what I'm saying?  This all burst out of me when I sit down to write a review of Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, which was a really, really great book, and I want to encourage you to read.  I'll write that next time, I promise.  But it'll have to be soon, if I'm going to sound even close to as passionate as I felt the day before yesterday.

Book Club: The Awakening

New book club had its inaugural meeting last weekend.  No, we didn't read Kate Chopin's syllabus-haunter The Awakening.  But we came into being as a group; thus the title.

The book was The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, and the meeting was fabulous.  I've been in book clubs that were extremely literary and ones that were extremely not so.  This was perfect--we talked about the story, and how the author accomplished it.  Nobody hated it, but there was enough variation of opinion to be really interesting, and everyone else put together a lot of things I didn't notice, for a richer experience of the book.  Two big thumbs up!

It didn't hurt that this was a fabulous book.  Right here is that place where literary fiction becomes great.  The writing is understated, but absolutely masterful.  You don't really notice the writing, because it's seamless, but so much of what is done--so many allusions and hints--couldn't have been put together without careful and deliberate intent.

The story is simple, realistic (for the most part), and incredibly compelling.  Henry Scrimshander is a gifted high school baseball player without any real plans when he finds himself at Westish College, a small midwestern school where his talent can shine.  Baseball is the core of his life, and he is the core of the novel.  We also meet Owen ("I'll be your gay mulatto roommate") and Schwartz, Henry's upperclassman mentor; Guert Affenlight, the president of the college; his daughter, Pella, who would be a college senior if she hadn't married a guest lecturer at her high school.  Each of these characters is confused and flawed and loveable and trying so hard, and I enjoyed all of them immensely.

The weakest point, I think, is Owen.  In many ways he's an outsider; while he's vital to the story in so many ways, he's the only one who's never a point of view character, and whose experiences we never really share.  Owen is very much an object in the story--he's admired and worshiped, and he's often the calm center of everyone else's troubled confusion.  But he never quite feels real himself, and you're never quite sure how he really feels about anyone.  Owen is on a pedestal; the character who always knows the right thing to say, knows when to worry and when not to, keeps his cool in any situation is often fun to read about, but is rarely three dimensional.

It's one of those stories you can't really tell.  I guess you could say everyone is trying to find the meaning of life, but since they're in college, mostly they're just trying to figure out how to really live.  If they were typical college students, it might be passionately boring in the way that most of your late night dorm talks would be if you got to go back and peek in on the.  But they're not, and they're all struggling with very adult problems and fears.  It's true that I sometimes wanted to shake them, but they were forever trying to shake themselves, and I know what it feels like to know you're not thinking constructively, but to be unable to stop that thought process.

Anyway, I'm not doing a great job of selling you on the book.  I don't know if I can, especially since how the story unfolds is so important to my experience of it.  But: if you like baseball, this is a great book.  If you have ever wondered whether you'd ever make anything of yourself, this is a great book.  If you've ever learned something about yourself that shocked you, this is a great book.  If you like really good storytelling, this is a great book.  Seriously, this is just a great book.  You really should read it.

On Bookstores

I just bought an ebook from my local bookshop!  First time, and I feel quite satisfied with  myself.  Porter Square Books sells Google ebooks and uses Adobe Digital Editions, which I can manage nicely.  I'm really pleased to have the option of supporting a local bookstore with my ereader.

But the main point of this post is to show you this post at Lists of Note.  Its sister site, Letters of Note, is one of my new favorites.  But that post from Lists of Note is exactly how I feel in the bookstore, and why it's such an overwhelming experience.  And I thank the blog for sparing me from reading the entirety of If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which I've heard is excellent but intimidating.

Childhood Classic

I was a huge fan of Harriet the Spy when I was a kid.  Of course, right? There's a world full of bookish, writerly type kids who loved Harriet, Sport, and Ole Golly.  Bold, smart, blunt, independent--she was fabulous.

Someone (I wish I could remember who!) blogged about Harriet recently, saying that it's a pretty upsetting book on rereading--Harriet spends some time truly afraid that her classmates are going to kill her.  I was surprised enough to want to reread it and see what else there was to see.

It was kind of startling, actually.  From the perspective of an adult, Harriet's a really infuriating kid.  She's selfish, small, stubborn, shouty.  She thinks a lot of mean thoughts, she yells all the time.  When things turn against her, she turns super mean, shuts down.  It's kind of amazing, actually--a picture of depression in a kid, a picture of someone who's tough facing something enormous that she doesn't know what to do about.

But what's really shocking is Ole Golly.  Harriet's nanny is honest and matter-of-fact, and has a quote for every occasion.  Since Harriet's mother and father don't have much to do with her, Ole Golly is her main parent.  I remembered her as the perfect picture of an adult who treats a child like a person; I remember wanting an Ole Golly.

Rereading, though, she's kind of horrifying.  Her honesty to Harriet is great, it's true, but she never teaches the girl anything about kindness, or friendship.  She talks about truth, and being a good writer, but not how to avoid hurting people.  And when she leaves--well, it's not out of character that she is unsentimental, but her pervasive message is, "don't miss me, because I won't miss you."  This goes beyond pragmatism and into just plain lack of affection.

I felt horribly sorry for Harriet.  Not just because of her parents, and Ole Golly, or because of how her class treats her (you almost can't blame them).  She didn't seem to have a lot of the emotional equipment a person needs, even at her age, and I didn't see where she was going to get it.  Blunt honesty is the gold standard in this book, and I'm a bit taken aback by that.  I wonder now at my 12-year-old reaction to it.  Did I really want to be Harriet?  If so, thank heaven I've grown up.

Koontz.

Dean Koontz's Icebound is not really worth a full review.  A few points:

1) Turns out this is one of Koontz's earliest books, originally published under a pseudonym.  It sounds from his afterword like he basically wrote it to see if he could write a disaster-type novel.  I've read a lot of Koontz, and there's a wide range of quality.  This one is all right, but it's kind of toward the bottom of the scale.

2) If you've got a blizzard, an iceberg, and a bomb, I'm not sure you need a psycho killer, too.  I was seriously waiting for the aliens to make an appearance for the first 3/4 of the book.

3) People in books always spend first dates talking about movies, books, music, and art.  I almost buy that; my first date with my husband involved music, books, and movies.  But ART?  Who talks about art?  I mean, I'm sure some people do.  But these are two scientists, both climatologists of one sort or another (who can remember?).  You'd think they'd talk about academia, the new theories of soil erosion.  It sounds boring, but it wouldn't be boring, because these are things they're actually both passionate about.  Seriously, on your first date, did you talk about art?  Which art?

4) Koontz likes to get horror novel mileage out of phobias, which I don't think works very well.  He's written other books (Strangers and False Memory come to mind) with plotlines that rely heavily on a strong and irrational feeling of fear, and isn't that just HORRIBLE?  And you know, if you've had a phobia, maybe.  But I have a really hard time imagining a fear of ice, or cold, or gloves.  So when you try to make me feel anxious because the character does...sorry.  I've got nothing.

There wasn't much wrong with this book; there just wasn't much there there.  A bunch of scientists rig some charges to attempt the controlled creation of an iceberg.  A storm whips up and creates the iceberg for them, so now they're trapped on top of the bombs, timers set to go off in 12 hours, arctic blizzard whipping by outside, one of their small party maybe trying to kill them.  It's got all the ingredients, but that's pretty much all there is to it--it's kind of a tossed salad of a book, rather than a rich casserole.

That was an awful analogy.  I apologize.

Shades of Grey

I've heard mixed reviews of Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.  I can see how it's a book that would not appeal to every taste--atmosphere, setting, and lavish description comprise the large proportion of the book. It's a book about a deep and passionate love that springs from experiences but few words, and that changes the course of many lives, including many people besides the lovers.  Here you have a list of what are usually my pet peeves, but this was a really good book.

It's true, though, that it's not for everyone.  It's very much about atmosphere, and if you want it to get where it's going, you're going to be disappointed.  Because of this, I think listening to the audiobook was definitely the right choice for me.  I like an audiobook with lots of interesting description--not boring, but also not every word is vital to following the overall plot.  Jim Dale does an amazing job as the reader, with just the right amount of exoticism, and an amazing gift for giving each character a voice without being a ham.

It's funny, because the descriptions are so mystical and lavish that they lent magic even beyond what they were describing, if that makes sense.  Sure, it's got to be dramatic that the whole circus is decorated in black and white, but if you think about it, that could be kind of boring, visually.  You don't think that, though, when you're reading this.  It's compelling and hypnotic beyond the sum of its parts.

La Cirque des Reves is the creation of a well-known stage magician, and it is a magical place.  But what few know is that two of its many occupants are engaged in a secret contest of true magic.  Marco and Celia were both sealed to the contest as children, and now they create fantastic illusions, new attractions for the circus, as they engage in a long and complicated dance.

Really, though, Celia and Marco are almost the least interesting of the many inhabitants of this book.  I think my favorite part of the whole experience is the rich and varied cast.  So many stories forget that their secondary characters are trying to live whole lives in the background, but this book never does.  Bailey and the Murray twins, Isobel, Tsukiko, Chandresh, Mr. Barris, Herr Thiessen, the Burgess sisters: I had to look up all these names to spell them, but I remembered them all, and their details.  The twins don't get lost in each other; Isobel is not just a placeholder; Tsukiko may be enigmatic, but there is such depth to her.  Each of these people has their own small story, as each of them deserves.

It's not the book for everyone.  If you're looking for an audiobook, I definitely recommend it, and if this description sounds like your cup of tea--if you want something beautiful and magical and dreamy--then this is absolutely the book for you.

Titillating Convergences

How Thonolan is like Bingley, and why I just laughed so hard I peed a little. 

(You think I'm being hyperbolic, but I have a bad cough and already should have gone to the bathroom.)

If that first sentence doesn't mean anything to you, don't bother.

Also: I really need to keep up with the blog, because any book I finished more than three days ago is a book I no longer have an opinion about.  I remember it, I just don't really have anything to say.  Still, I'll muddle through--for you, dear readers, for you.

Realtime Responses to the Movie Version

Michael Cera is not the right choice for Nick.  Nick does not wear his puppy-dogginess on his face so obviously.  Also, Trish should be more oblivious and less actively nasty.

Norah's pretty good, and the rest of the gang--Nick's friends, Norah's friend, all the random club kids--are fabulous.

But Nick is just wrong.  He's not THAT insecure.

Edited to add verdict: the book was WAY better.  Less pat, more realistic, more passionate.

No, and Nope

A couple of surrenders this week.  I swear, it's the first sign of midlife in me.  I don't have enough years left to spend them on books that I don't care about.  My standards are getting higher and higher.  I think this must be a good sign, right?

Heist Society, by Ally Carter.  This just sounded so unbearably clever--a 17-year-old girl whose parents raised her while gallivanting around Europe stealing art, has quit the business and gone legit, conning her way into a fancy boarding school.  But when she finds out her father has been accused of stealing from the wrong guy, she comes back for one last job to save her dear old dad from a vengeful mobster.

Right?  It's like, The Sting and Leverage and How to Steal a Million, and just adorable.  Plus, look at that cover.  Doesn't it make you think of Audrey Hepburn?  How can you not want to read this book and discover the clever plans that Kat and her merry band of sexy teenaged outlaws will come up with?

Alas, no.  First, I can't remember if she's supposed to be 15 or 16, but even the most jaded, globetrotting teenager is not going to have the laser focus and front-brain activity of this girl.  Second, not a lot happened.  There was a LOT of jetting around the world just to stand around talking quietly with people.  No hijinks ensued at all in the first quarter of the book.  And third, Kat just wasn't terribly likeable.  Most of her reactions seemed kind of pat.  She hates her bimbo-esque cousin, for no particular reason I can tell.  She's constantly exasperated with her friend Hale, who hasn't done anything exasperating, and is kind of adorable.  She just takes herself way too seriously.  If Kat's not having any fun, how am I supposed to have fun?  I was promised fun!

Flip side: Ethical Wisdom, by Mark Matousek.  I've really wanted to read a good book about ethics or morality, and this one looked accessible and well-reviewed.  I can't argue with accessible--it was certainly quite readable.

But I try to be pretty careful with books like this.  I often find myself convinced of any argument made with apparent logic, supporting data, and a confident tone.  The less I feel I know about a subject--and the more I think it might matter to me--the more careful I find myself being.  And this book rang a lot of alarm bells for me near the beginning.  From using cloning as an obvious example of something that's morally wrong, to citing and basing a substantial conclusion on a single study that sounds a little sketchy (infants deprived of their mother's gaze wind up insecure and emotionally damaged), this book looks less like something well-researched and more like some thoughts the author had that he backed up with some Googling and wrote down.

Now, I don't actually think he did that.  There's a lot of science cited in here, good science--mirror neurons, primate studies.  But the conclusions, the material that tied them together, doesn't read like good science or good philosophy.  It reads like a magazine article.  Right now, I'm looking for something a little better than that.

So if you have any suggestions for a good book on ethics, send them my way.  I think I'm going to go with Sophie's World at some point soon--I've heard it's a good, basic introduction to philosophy, which I haven't read any of since college.  Seriously, how did the expect us to get all this huge stuff when we were 19?  I'm much more ready to think about ideas like this now.

Then again, I had a lot more time to read back then.

Exaggerated Sigh

I want to issue a somewhat exasperated sigh about this book: Point of Honour, by Madeleine Robins.  It would be an ironic sigh, though, because the frustration I'm venting is that of someone who's found herself with yet another really excellent series of novels that she wants to instantly devour.  What a terrible burden a long and exciting reading list can be!

Sarah Tolerance is a fallen woman; she left her wealthy, honorable home with her brother's fencing master and never looked back.  Years later, her family has disowned her and she's on her own in London.  Unlike other ladies of her position (including many of her acquaintance), she hasn't become a prostitute--rather, she's invented a new role for herself: private investigator.

It's London in the early 1800s, with enough of the historical details altered to make political questions and danger to the nation a real source of tension in the story.  Queen Charlotte has long been the regent for mad King George, and each of their children has potential to inherit the throne.  Miss Tolerance is hired for a routine investigation--retrieve an object that was given by a wealthy man to his mistress many years ago and which may cause trouble for the family if it comes to light.  The search takes her on a tour of London's pleasure houses, high and low, and you learn a lot about the different things that happen to fallen women, the best and worst of life in a pleasure house, and how retirement treats them.

The mystery gets political, and there are personal involvements, and I won't bother with the plot of the story, because, although it was engaging and thrilling and really great, the mystery is not what makes a mystery.  A mystery is made by its atmosphere, its characters, its twists, its research.  And the clothes, the clubs, the friendships, the dangers--I want to read more of this book, right now.  I already bought the next one, Petty Treason, and will read it as soon as is reasonable.

I think one of the strongest things I can say about Point of Honour is that, in many ways, it's what I had wanted Maisie Dobbs to be.  I've read the first four or five Maisie books, and I wanted to like them all a lot more than I actually did.  They did a tremendous job of giving you a sense of the time and place, and how England was ravaged by the Great War, but the more time you spend with Maisie herself, the more you realize that she's not just stiff on the outside--she's actually a cold fish.  Even her relationship with her father is characterized by more good intentions than actual feelings.

Miss Tolerance, on the other hand, seems to be the type of person I wanted Maisie to be.  She is guarded, analytical, and bold, but she's also passionate.  She knows how to laugh, even if her life doesn't give her a lot to laugh at.  Maisie was in love once, but even when you're reading about it, you really don't believe it.  Miss Tolerance was in love once, too, and you can tell, even without details, that she was truly happy back then.

I think that, when you have a solemn or cranky character, one of the only ways to really like them is to be able to imagine them happy.  What would their perfect day look like, what makes them smile, what would their dream life be?  Miss Tolerance was happy teaching fencing on the Continent.  Knowing that about her, and being able to imagine that, completely made this book for me.

In Praise

I have no personal stake in the world of adoption, and I don't presume to understand a lot of the complexities that go on in that world.  But a few of the bloggers I read and people I know from online are adoptive parents, so I've learned a little about adoption issues in the past few years.  And I'd heard passionate mixed reviews for Sam Simon's Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other, so I really wanted to read it.  I'm not even sure I can explain my opinion of the book, except to say that the subtitle says it all: In Praise of Adoption.

At first, I was sure that the book wasn't technically apologetics, since it didn't address the most of the most controversial issues that I was aware of: the wide space international adoption leaves for abuse; the potential emotional complexities of interracial adoption; anything about open adoption at all.  In fact, most of the families here are the product of good ol' closed adoptions, most conducted long enough ago that the children involved are adults now.  It wasn't taking these issues on; the book was just giving sweet anecdotes of loving families populated by fabulous children and passionate parents (mostly writers) who were brought together by adoption.  Lovely!

But you know, enough of those stories and the apologetics start to creep in.  The repeated dismissal of the notion that one might be curious about one's birth mother.  ("I don't know, maybe someday I'll be interested, but I have such a great family, why would I care?")  The frequently repeated insistence that no one has ever said anything insensitive about race or adoption to anyone he interviewed.  (Only once has anyone ever said anything to his Chinese daughter, which was when a 10 year old asked "what are you?"  But not in a mean way.)  The fabulous stories about strangers charmed by his adorable (also has he mentioned they're charming?) daughters. 

This book is really a love letter from an over-the-moon parent to his daughters, explaining how anything bad that anyone says about adoption is irrelevant, because their family is so happy.  I don't mean that to sound snide--it's just the right message for a father to give his daughters, especially when they're little.  "This may be a big, complicated issue in the world, but here in our family, no one can dismiss the love we feel for each other."  But my god, is this dismissive of others' experiences. 

There are two birth mothers in this book.  One is the ideal story; a teenaged mom gives up her baby and then makes contact when he's 30 and she's 45.  They like each other, he meets his half-siblings, and they develop an aunt-nephew type of relationship that brings everyone a lot of love and joy. 

The other story comes first, though.  A family with four adopted children produces three superstars and one druggie who decides as a teenager she wants to seek her birth mom.  Turns out birth mom's a druggie, too, and eventually the daughter dies of an overdose.  In case you miss it, the book makes the connection very clear; the birth mother was out of her life for a reason, and if she hadn't gone looking for her, maybe this tragedy wouldn't have happened.  The story is told with compassion (for the adoptive parents, mostly) and in relatively neutral language, but the point is laid out quite clearly: adoption creates wholesome, loving, upper-middle-class families.

I'm really not qualified to talk about this in any detail.  And for the record, a ton of parents I know who are really savvy, thoughtful, and devoted to adoption reform love this book.  I think, on a subject with so much murkiness and controversy around it, it can be really reassuring to be reminded that, hey, this isn't all murk and separating babies from their first mothers and ugly privilege.  This is also families who cherish each other and produce awesome kids, just like any other families.  There is a place for this story, an important one.  I just feel like it's really, really important to remember all the other stories that are out there, too.

Girl And God Get In a Spat

Ah, Lauren Winner.  Author of one of my favorite love-to-hate books, Girl Meets God.  Smuggish, brilliant, passionate, I love reading her books, even though they're memoirs and I don't really like her very much.  It's very much about the experience of reading for me.  So her new book, Still: Notes on A Mid-Faith Crisis, got me really, really, really excited.

I feel like I understand more and more about Winner the more of her books I read.  She talks about writing memoirs as a way of hiding in plain sight, and you can see that throughout her writing.  Her straightforward, chagrined descriptions of her own flaws and neuroses are rendered with a poetry and distance that makes this morning's freak-out sound like a memory from her distant past.  She's writing the moving story of someone with a lot of problems, and she herself is moved by the story--which is different from living it.

I think she is more direct about her flaws in this book, which I appreciate greatly.  In her previous book, she treated some of her actions as perfectly normal that seemed kind of on the edge to me--acquiring or throwing out dozens or hundreds of books with her change of faith, literally wallpapering her room with images of Jesus.  But there was a literary remove made me feel like Winner-the-author assumed I would be right on board with all the behaviors of Winner-the-character, and that disconnect really turned me off.

In this book, she's much more blunt about presenting her life as flawed.  This is partially because she's talking about a sense of distance from God, and her thesis is that, while not unnatural, this distance is problematic, where in the previous book her odd behaviors are related to her passion and therefore meet with her own approval.  This focus between my view of her and her own makes it easier for me to see her actual behavior more objectively. 

I'm not being flip or funny when I say that I see a lot of bipolar qualities in her, or at least a lot of OCD behaviors.  She admits to the latter, to checking her wallet repeatedly during a single car trip to make sure she didn't forget her ID.  At one point (in the afterword), she points out that she's still struggling with what it means to say you believe in the authority of scripture and yet to leave your husband, something scripture expressly forbids.  Her awareness of these contradictions, and the fact that she's in still wrestling with these questions, gives the book a more authentic feel to me.

I have so much to say about this book, and that's because it speaks to me.  It's not entirely her faith, though that is part of it--even having that certainty to drift from, wonder about, orbit around, reach toward, is interesting to me.  But on page after page there are ideas she presents, vignettes, parables, quotes from historians or religious thinkers that have me reacting, thinking, asking myself questions.  A Saul Bellow quote about sloth--"sloth is really a busy condition, hyperactive.....[the slothful] labor because rest terrifies them"--had me looking at my life and mind in a way that really doesn't belong in a book blog.  These moments are on every other page--poems presented in a context that makes me see the meaning in them easily, movingly, even if I don't hold the same feelings as the author.  Anecdotes that are presented without a tying thread, but that are beautifully rendered observations, literary gems, that make points I don't agree with about every human being's need for God.

I could go on and on about this, and I haven't even finished the book yet.  I don't know if I recommend it; if what she's talking about doesn't mean anything to you, if you don't find faith journeys compelling, I don't know how much you'd get from it.   But you might still get something, because damn, the girl can write.

Enormous Volumes of Fantasy

I have somehow missed Robin Hobb till now.  I'd never heard of her till pretty recently, and then suddenly she's everywhere.  So I got Assassin's Apprentice from the library.  Luckily, it's on the Kindle, so I couldn't tell how long it was, because I'm pretty sure it was enormously long.  It might have intimidated me in hardback, but I read it.  And it was awesome.

I'm always surprised by how many of these are out there--enormous fantasy novels.  I suppose you might call them epic, but it doesn't span generations, characters, high passion.  It's the story of one boy who finds himself a member of the royal household.  As the bastard son of the heir to the kingdom, he's hated, yet bound to the family.  The king puts him in training as a spy and assassin.

A bunch of stuff happens--enemies attacking the coast, the king's youngest son jockeying for power--but most of the book is about Fitz growing up, learning about royal life, and trying to do his part to hold the kingdom together.  He makes the occasional friend, but mostly he's a solitary kid with a gift for communicating with animals.

Does this sound like not much?  Most of my favorite books do.  I thought this book would be boring when I started it, but that was out the window pretty quickly.  Mostly, though, it's the story of a boy growing up kind of lonely and becoming extremely competent at things like intrigue and poisons.  Did I ever mention how much I love books about people just being competent at things?

Can't wait to read the next one.  And there are heaps more Robin Hobb books out there!  Lord, I'm never going to finish reading.  Well, back to it, I guess.

Pants Afire

I had no idea what to expect from Liar, by Justine Larbalestier.  Actually, that's not exactly true.  I had expectations, but they were unfounded, because for some reason I thought the author of this book was Laurie Halse Anderson.

I'd read one book each from Anderson and Larbalestier.  Anderson writes about high school students with complicated, challenging emotional struggles; I read Wintergirls, about anorexia.  Larbalestier wrote the Magic Lessons series that I recently started reading.  Based on the cover blurb about a high school student whose life is full of lies, and my vague memories of reading about Anderson's Speak, I rolled this book into Anderson's work.

It's not.  And I tell this whole convoluted story right off the bat because I don't want to spoil the book, so I'm going to tell you very little of what happens.  But I will say that, as unreliable narrators go, Micah is a doozie.  She's smart, winning, and tortured.  She's a teenaged New Yorker who admits to being a liar, and is something of an exile in high school.  When a classmate is found dead, her lies begin to peel away.

Now, the thing about this book is that you don't know what kind of book you're reading.  There are hints, mysteries, layers, and each one that's revealed is complicated by the question of whether it's true.  Are the hints misleading you, or are there outright lies?  And every layer that's revealed introduces a new set of questions, right up to the end. 

So at the beginning, I thought I was reading an Anderson book, about teens with emotional problems.  But as things built up, I realized I was reading a Larbalestier book, about a girl with much bigger problems than that. 

I hate to be cryptic, but untangling Micah's lies is the main point of reading the book.  She's an amazing character--blunt, brutal, needy, angry, practical, strange, envious.  Her relationships with her parents and her classmates, her perceptions of the world she lives in--she's an alienated teenager, and more.  I wouldn't like her in person, but she might be one of the best protagonists I've read about in a long time.

Fascinating, I think, is the word for this book.  And for Micah.  She's a page-turner.

Lesson Learned

When I resolve to review every book I read, I also need to resolve to post occasionally when I haven't finished anything. 

I just finished Liar, though, and I'm about to finish Assassin's Apprentice, so look for some posts very soon!

Memento

Amnesia: long the staple of daytime soap operas and wacky sitcom hijinks.  And, apparently, current novels.  To-read example: What Alice Forgot, about a woman who wakes up with no memory of her last ten years and finds that her suburban mom life looks lonely and miserable when you jump right into it.  That's up next.

But from the just-read pile, we have the psychological thriller Before I Go To Sleep, by S.J. Watson.  This book is a great example of why I like to write reviews while I'm in the middle of a book--I felt a lot more passionately about it while I was reading it.  It's also a good example of why I shouldn't do that--my opinion of the end of the book was very different from how I felt about the middle.

Christine wakes up confused in a bed she doesn't know, next to a man she doesn't recognize.  Every morning.  She doesn't recognize the face in the mirror, either.  Christine has amnesia--she can retain memories for a day, but when she falls asleep every night, it all slips away.  She's been this way for years; she was in a hospital for a long time, but now her husband, Ben, cares for her at home.

As the day goes on, she learns more; she's seeing a therapist, keeping a journal that Ben doesn't know about.  She finds clues about her life, makes guesses, has doubts.  Watson does an excellent job with the unreliable narrator.  Christine catches her husband in lies, some larger and some smaller.  But are they lies of convenience, or something more sinister?  Why is she keeping her journal from him?  And her memory isn't perfect--things slip.  Her theories and reactions range from reasonable to inappropriate, and she's not always sure what's going on.  And every day, she has to learn all this again by reading her journal.

The tension between the facts and Christine's emotions, the mysteries and the lies, all of this is very well executed, and I was never sure who to trust or how clearly Christine was thinking. I can't say that I didn't guess the ending, but that's mostly because, at one point or another, every possible ending occurred to me.

Now, I'm not going to spoil anything, but I'll admit that the ending really didn't live up to the rest of the book for me.  The resolution to the story was a little Hollywood, a little pat, but it was also pretty clunky in its execution.  The same events could have been written in a less melodramatic way--less of a Dramatic Confrontation, fewer characters making illogical choices, less conveniently wrapped up in a tidy little package, and heaven help us, building up more gradually.  The last 25 pages or so of the book were a fast-moving "and then this happened and then that happened and then there was a big confrontation and then it was all over the end" chunk of brick.

It's a shame, because the psychological tension, the confusion, and the doubts that I had in the narrator made for a really enthralling read up until that point.  I still suggest reading it--as I said, the ending wasn't unsatisfying--but my positive review does come with a caveat.  Enter at your own risk.

Laundering

Al Capone Does My Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko, has been on my radar for a very long time.  Mrs. N at Between These Pages reviewed it and liked it. Though I had heard the title before, that was when I realized that it was about autism, specifically a boy living with his autistic sister in the '30s on--you guessed it--Alcatraz.

Moose is a great kid, likeable, good with his sister, but no more patient than he should be.  All the characters are exactly as flawed as they should be.  Natalie changes over time, but she is never magically cured.  Moose's mother is a fierce advocate for her daughter, but her strength is brittle bravado.  His father sees things clearly, but tries not to push anything out of the balance.

This is definitely a kids' book, but it was thoughtful and complex enough to keep me really interested.  There was just enough tension from the troublemaking neighbor, just enough anxiety about what was going to happen, and just enough historical flavor from the cons on the Rock.  I don't have a million things to say about this book, but I really enjoyed it, and I really can't wait to read the sequel, Al Capone Shines My Shoes.

Un-Comical

Craig Thompson's Habibi is an excellent example of why the name "comic books" is kind of useless as a descriptor.  There's pretty much no level on which the word "comic" applies here.  I suppose that's why we have the term graphic novel, though sometimes that seems inadequate, too.

This was one of those books that is hard to give stars to, or even to say whether I enjoyed it.  I can list off its qualities, though--the art is incredible, simple and expressive.  The long passages about Islamic numerology are beautifully rendered but somewhat confusing.  It shouldn't have surprised me that this was a fairly explicit sexual coming of age story (given that the author's previous book was Blankets), but the sexuality, the explicitness, and the complexity of some of the relationships was actually pretty shocking.

The time period and the historical context are a little confusing--the desert, sultan's palace, and city all feel like timeless places, so the occasional glimpse of a motorcycle or pickup truck are jarring.  It spans many years, too--Zam is three at the beginning of the story and about 19 at the end.  Dodola is a little girl when she's sold in marriage, and not yet a teenager when her husband is killed and she's sold into slavery.  She takes Zam under her wing and becomes his mother, his older sister, and his protector. 

They are each other's only family and whole world, and as they grown up in close quarters and all alone, sex takes on a strange aspect of their relationship.  So many harsh elements of sexuality are touched on here--rape, concubinage, prostitution, castration--and those studies are probably what I find most successful about the book. 

Considering the heavy influence of Islamic mysticism in the story, I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more explicit discussion of sex in Islam.  All of those elements were symbols, metaphors, and analogies, which I'm not usually very good at.  I think I could have used a study guide for those parts; I'm not even sure what the stories meant to the characters, except to the extent that storytelling itself was an escape, a power, and a connection between the characters.

This was a beautiful book in a lot of ways.  It was also shocking, harsh, confusing, and challenging.  A real work of art, I think.

Super-Sequel

Again with a non-disappointing second book!  The Thirteenth Child was the first in Patricia C. Wrede's new Frontier Magic trilogy, which takes place in the 19th century as the United States of Columbia expands past the Great Barrier River and into the frontier.  The river and the spells that guard it protect the eastern united States from the wildlife—both natural and magical—that populate the west, but pioneers are finding ways to survive in such a dangerous land.

Across the Great Barrier follows the same heroine from the first book, Eff Rothmer, as she begins to find her place in the world.  The first book followed her growing up in a western college town, learning that being the thirteenth child didn't mean she was cursed, and figuring out how to listen to herself in a world where she's overshadowed by her large family and accomplished twin brother.  In this book, we get a new set of challenges as Eff learns more about her own brand of magic and gets more opportunities to spend time on the frontier.

A lot of the charm of these books is in their portrayal of this alternate frontier.  Something I noticed this time, though, is that the success of world building here isn't just centered around the magical alternate reality that the author created.  Rather, the historical sense of expansion, the newness, eagerness, and change that infect everyone around Eff are really the most fun part of the book.  The tightly woven alternate reality is a bonus on top of this.

These are not books in which major things happen.  Minor incidents are related not only because they are important in the greater story, but because they build a picture of Eff's life.  The realism of this approach and the opportunity to follow Eff through her days—whether hunting magical animals beyond the Great Barrier or sharpening her skills on basic housekeeping spells—are really what made me love this book. 

And I do love it.  It reads very much like an extension of the first one, almost seamlessly.  But it's got its own arc, its own flavor.  Eff isn't afraid anymore—the first book was about her fear, but this book is about her discovery of herself, and learning.  Watching Eff—and the people around her—change through time is another thing that Wrede does a lot better than other authors.  I really can't wait to read more.

Also, I'd really like to see an ice dragon someday. 

From a distance, of course. 

The Kindle Problem

I can't imagine there are many people out there who aren't finding that their e-reader is increasing the amount they spend on books.  A lot of people defray the cost by choosing some of their books from the many free options available.  I just can't do that--my to-read list is already more than 500 books long (that's the A-list, mind you; I also have a B-list of over 400 books).  I'm trying NOT to find more books to read.

So I've had a two-pronged approach of a) mining the library's ebooks for all they're worth, and b) sticking with about half paper books.  So I'm still using the library extensively, which is pretty great.  Sure, my book buying has increased, but I actually feel pretty good about the idea of spending some of my disposable income sending money at some of the authors I like, especially the ones who aren't rich and famous yet.


But then I run up against a conundrum like Tomorrow Girls. I've heard great things, and it's a kids' series, so the books are a little cheaper.  I figured what the heck and bought the first one, Behind the Gates.  It turned out to be a lot of fun--in a future America (points!) where resources are scarce and the nation is at war, Louisa's parents are lucky to have enough money to send her and her best friend Maddie to boarding school (points!), where they'll be safe. 

Louisa's having a great time learning outdoor skills, making friends, and impressing her teachers.  But the school doesn't quite make sense--if there's no reception, why were their cellphones taken away?  Why do they need to learn survival skills?  There are plenty of interesting secrets to uncover.

I really enjoyed this--a fun, quick middle grade read that moved quickly and kept me guessing without being confusing.  For a middle grade book, it was really impressively accessible as an adult.  I want to read the next one--in fact, there are already four of them, and I'm not sure how many there will be total.

And herein lies my problem.  I bought the first book for $8.  While I really love this book, I'm not sure if I want to run out and spend almost $24 on the next three.  But--BIZARRELY--the BPL doesn't have any copies of these.  I might be able to find them through the Minuteman network, but even they only have a few copies and it's not clear if they have the second one. 

I guess $24 ($32 total) isn't that much in the greater scheme of things.  I've got some gift certificates to spend and things.  Still, though, I have a terrible time with things like this.  The Kindle puts this conundrum--is this worth my money?--in front of me significantly more often than the library ever did.  Surprise!

The Gods Must Be Crazy

Remember how I was talking about sequels, and second book syndrome?  Baby, I've found the cure.  The Broken Kingdoms is an awesome book that just got better and better as I went along, until, two chapters from the end, I bought the third book because I didn't want to wait five more minutes to read more.  N.K. Jemisin is a great author, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

Not perfect, but I can't even generate a whole paragraph on that subject.  Basically, I wasn't sure where the book was going for the first 60 pages or so.  I enjoyed meeting the characters and the worldbuilding, but I couldn't figure out which details were going to be relevant to the bigger story, or which direction it was going to go in.

But when it started rolling, nothing held it back.  Oree is a blind artist who lives in the city of Shadow, under the World Tree and the hovering palace-city of Sky, where the powerful Arameri live.  This is a city where godlings live beside mortals and magic is mostly illegal and not uncommon.  Oree finds a silent vagrant in her trashbin and takes him into her home, and the story begins.  Godlings are being murdered, the balance of power in the world is shifting, and Oree finds herself at the center of the struggle. 

It's so much harder to enumerate what you like about a book than what goes wrong.  The naturalism of complicated emotions, bad luck, and bad decisions is handled effortlessly, which is often something I find awkward in books.  The worldbuilding is elegant and seamless, which is astounding with a mythology like this--the implications of the interactions of gods, mortals, and godlings are consistent and believable, but not invasive.

I wish I was a better reviewer, because I loved this book and I think you should read it.  I suppose that's the best I can do.  I'm so excited for the next one!

Life Is a Dryer Full of Socks

This'll be quick, because the book was quick.  The Everafter, by Amy Huntley,  is not a book I'd call light, fun, or fluffy, but that's mostly because it's about death.  And it's not silly, or at all cheesy.


But it's a puff piece on death. This book isn't about mining any of the darkness.  The main character died at 17, but it's not even about being cut down so young, the way Before I Fall was.  It's kind of a meditation on loss, I guess?  Or really, on lost opportunities.  But in a sweet way, not a painful one. 

Maddy finds herself formless and alone, floating in a void with almost no memories.  She shares the void with random objects--a shoe, a rubber band, a set of keys, a cell phone.  These things are everything she's ever lost, and when she touches something, she is taken back to the moment when it was lost.  As she lives more moments in her life, she regains more and more memories, and begins to circle in on the question of how she died.

The question of who killed her is treated nicely--it's not the point of the book, but curiosity keeps you interested in the story.  The real point of the book, though, is about the things that slip away.  It seems kind of odd to have a book for teens that is about memory and wistful regret, but it's balanced with how self-doubt in one moment becomes regret in another.  Maddy can change her past, but the memories that she overwrites slip away, and she can never really compare now with then.

I've read a lot of young adult books for many years, but lately I've started to notice that some things have started to get on my nerves--earth-shattering teen romances, entire books whose tension revolves around people not saying what they think.  But this book puts a lot of "stereotypically" teen moments--tongue-tied by your crush, panicking over lost homework--in just the right perspective, simultaneously the biggest problem ever and just a mote of dust drifting away.

This is a short book, dreamy, easy to read.  I don't know if I'll be thinking about it next week, but it was well worth the few hours I spent with it.

The Society Strikes Back

Ah, second book syndrome. Has any trilogy escaped it? You start with a standalone story of fighting for survival against all odds. At the end, success--with a strong hint that there are bigger battles to be fought.

Then we get the sophomore slump, where little battles are fought and the Really Big Battle is set up for us.  Things don't really let loose till the final book, where there are showdowns and world changes and a neat little wrap up.


I'm really looking forward to that third book in Ally Condie's Matched series.  The second, Crossed, was good, kept me reading, no problems, but the Society wasn't really in it at all, except as whispers in the background.  And come on, this is all about Man--well, Teenaged Girl--vs. Society.

The story, in general, is that Cassia sets out to find Ky, who's been basically deported to the Outer Provinces.  We also get alternating chapters from Ky's point of view, where the role of the "colonists" in the Outer Provinces is one giant step below cannon fodder.  Ky and Cassia both end up on the run through nature (there are canyons--I'm thinking American Southwest), looking for each other, afraid of the Society, trying to learn more about the folks who live outside it--the Rising, the Farmers.

We learn a bit more about Ky's history.  We learn a LOT about how True Love makes you pine for your beloved, and how being with them makes everything feel right, and how remembering hard things makes you feel, and hoping makes you feel, and wondering makes you feel, and thinking makes you feel.  There's a lot of feeling, is what I'm saying.

What there's very little of is any real driver.  The characters keep running because they're so afraid of being caught, but as far as I can tell pretty much nobody is looking for them.  There are occasional dead bodies to imply that the ante is being upped, but I don't quite get where they came from.  Ky's fears, while probably normal, seem kind of lame to me.  Cassia's attempts to stop thinking like a Citizen are worth something, but there just aren't that many of them.

What the book did is set a lot of expectations for the next one.  The whole book was about getting elements into place--the movements and characters and expectations.  The stage is now set for the third book to be action packed, either with explosions and running or with delicate political maneuvering.  I'll take either one, because I just spent a lot more time than I needed to on the setup.

I also have some predictions about the Enemy that I won't make explicitly, but that I want credit for calling as early as the first book, thank you.

Basically, while I don't regret reading it, most of what I have to say about this book is that there's no there there.  It's an opening act.  I'm waiting for the headliner.

Snazzy

Like the new design?  I hadn't realized Blogger had so many new layouts and features.  I feel very modern and jazz hands.


I accidentally started reading Neal Stephenson's Reamde (which I think is pronounced Read Me, but I always read as Reamed, but isn't he clever, it could also be read as Remade).  I got it and set it aside for when I had time, but I glanced at the first few pages.  Which was a really interesting account of a guy at his family reunion in Iowa, only he's sort of--well, not the black sheep, but he has a Wikipedia entry and people are glancing at him sideways.  And so I read a little more to find out what was going on....

And now I'm into it.  And it's really just so engaging as a story of how to set up a good MMORPG, with some other pretty interesting anecdotes thrown in.  It's not like it's driving along like a rollercoaster, but it's a string of really engaging scenes and anecdotes and I'm going to read the whole thing.

Except that I have no clear idea what it's about yet.  The blurb implies that there will be chasing and thriller elements, but I have no clear ideas yet.  I'm 5% of the way in, but this is a Neal Stephenson book, so that's about 50 pages out of presumably a thousand or so.

Thank heaven it's really, really good.  And that I have Tomorrow Girls--which is dystopian AND girls boarding school all in one--to balance it out.

Growing Up '80s

I was drawn to Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones, by the first line: "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist."  Well, now, there's something you don't see every day--I was hooked.

It goes on to describe his meeting with the narrator's mother, ten years into his first marriage.  Good choice; at this point, how this bigamy came to pass is what's keeping me interested.  How do Gwen and James meet, fall in love, and end up married?  By the time this background story is told, the narrator's voice has you, and you're on board for the rest.

Dana Yarboro (she doesn't have his name) knows she's the secret daughter.  She sees her father once a week, shares her  mother's obsession with his other family, and has to give up opportunities again and again to protect his secret.  Her uncle Raleigh is the only person in her father's life who knows his secret, and he's at least half in love with Gwen himself.  Dana's loneliness bearing this long secret, her relationship with her mother, who walks the line between doing her best and obsessed, and her attempts to figure out where she fits in the world when she's not even sure where she fits in her family comprise the structure of the story, although a lot of it is just about growing up Black in lower-middle class Atlanta in the early '80s. 

(I have to say here, I loved the early '80s stuff.  It's a period that you don't see in fiction much without a lot of ironic layers and distant social observation.  If only as the story of a Black teenager in Atlanta, this was really good.  It felt very personal and familiar--there was no feeling of distance from the time, either intentionally or unintentionally by the author.)

But then--oh, then--halfway through the book, the point of view shifts, and we learn of another mother's courtship with James Witherspoon, and another daughter's life with her mother, her father, her friends and neighbors, her place in the world.  Chaurisse is the legitimate daughter, the acknowledged on, the one whose perfect life Dana is protecting.  It's not all that perfect--her parents were married very young due to a pregnancy that ended with stillbirth.  Chaurisse is not beautiful or brilliant, doesn't have close friends, but has a happy, solid family life.  She doesn't know or even suspect her father's secret.

I won't spoil the events in the book, but for the most part, the events aren't what matters.  This book is all about relationships, and about trying to figure out what to do with the cards you're dealt, how to navigate a world you can't control, and how to make the best of a tough situation.  In that respect--in portraying these two young women and their strengths and vulnerabilities, and above all confusion--Silver Sparrow really shines.

In fact, I think the book's biggest flaw is that it is a bit too casual with the plot.  The ending is rushed, and a lot of emotional fallout is left of the page, which is kind of unsatisfying.  Because the decisions of adults--especially men--are almost always enigmatic, a lot of situations the girls face feel just a little sudden and contrived.  It's not entirely a failure, but it pulled me out of the story more than I would have liked.

I think my favorite element of the story, though, is the way we get to see each character through two sets of eyes.  Dana's mother--glamorous, self-sufficient, desperate--and Chaurisse's--comfortable, maternal, emotional--are both observed by each daughter, through the lenses of love, fear, innocence, and too much knowledge.  Whether the chain of events fits together at every link, Silver Sparrow is a perceptive character study that kept me reading.

A New Task

Not a resolution, or anything, but let's see what happens when I try to blog every book I finish, instead of just the highlights.

First up, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares.  Another outing from Rachel Cohen and David Levithan of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist fame.  I liked that book a lot, but I think I like this one even more.  But they're hard to compare, because while there are some major similarities (alternating point-of-view chapters, a scavenger hunt-like journey through New York City), the characters and mood are so very different.

Nick & Norah was one long, intense, pounding night in the city.  That was the glory of it, and it worked really well.  Dash and Lily spend a week roaming around, never meeting, trying to figure themselves out through the lens of the mysterious pen pals they are to each other.  Nick was the sweet, sincere boy with a guitar of so many girls' dreams, Norah the smart, determined young woman that most girls become four years later after college.  But Dash is a snarly, ironic, bookish hipster, while Lily is a too-sincere, family-centered free spirit.

When you meet Dash and Lily, you despair of them ever liking each other--it's not that Lily isn't smart enough for Dash, or that he's not warm enough for her.  It's that they each embody not just the opposite of the other, but the fundamental elements that the other is missing, and maybe most afraid of.  And maybe you start out thinking Dash is a snob and Lily a freak, but you live inside their head and come to love them--and the things they love--and you just want to meet them and read about them and see them both happy.

I really enjoyed this book.  It didn't zip by as fast as Nick & Norah, but that's okay.  It didn't need the driving pulse or urgency.  It had its own introverted, tentative charm that drew me in and made me--ME, mind you, who is in many ways the opposite of a New Yorker--want to see the Big Apple at Christmas.  I think that alone says all you need to know.

My People

I have been looking around the internets for book blogs that I could love.  I have a few favorites from people I already know well--Between These Pages for kids' books, Unshelved Book Club for comic reviews--but I've been looking for more and more. I found a lot that I didn't--romance blogs with great writing but that I'll never read the books, and a lot of blogs that do all the same theme days: Tuesday, a random line from a random page; Friday, a title from your to-read pile.  Not bad, but just not for me.

But I've finally lucked into a couple of great reads.  Fun, thoughtful writing, books right up my alley (fantasy, historical fiction), and reviews, reviews, reviews.  I'm constantly being reminded that reviews are what people want to read from book bloggers, including me.  I will endeavor to provide, gentle readers.

In the meantime, check out my two new imaginary sisters, Books I Done Read and Aarti Chapati's BookLust.  Not to be confused with Nancy Pearl's Book Lust, which I would love if she ever updated.