My Crush on Kristen Bell

Due to the fact that my phone can only hold one audiobook at a time (because of it being a classic/antiquated/having buttons), I had to put aside The Thousand Dollar Tan Line for a while after I started it, at least until I had finished The Two Towers.

Once we were back in business, though, I just listened to it pretty much straight through, lending only one ear to things like my child and traffic, and even then, only on occasion.  Short, punchy chapters, packed with action, twists, and sketchy characters--as well as old favorites.

Many familiar characters make an appearance, though a lot of them only get a cameo.  I think Weevil's drama is being saved for the next movie or something, and Logan is relegated to a couple of awkward video chats.  (I like this--that relationship is huge and messy and I feel like it would be too much to ask of the book to flesh it out, unless the personal stuff was going to be the focus.)  Dick shows up at some pivotal moments, and there are some really nice moments with Veronica and Keith and Veronica and Wallace.  Mac is present throughout, and Cliff (her dad's lawyer friend) gets a nice cameo.  Sheriff Lamb, Jr. is, of course, a major antagonist.

You can tell Rob Thomas did some real writing here, because the dialogue is SO Veronica Mars perfect.  But I give a lot of credit to Jennifer Graham (whom I haven't read), because the plot of a mystery novel has to be more complicated than a movie or episode of a TV show, but less string-alongy than a seasonal story arc.  The pacing here is just right, and I was surprised at several points in the story.  One of the investigative lines did sort of peter out in a way that I wish it hadn't, though--there was a lot of potential there.

Anyway, the best part--absolutely, hands down best--was Kristen Bell's audio performance.  Listen to the sample here, and I highly, HIGHLY recommend that you listen to this book.  Her performance is amazing.  It's like Veronica is RIGHT THERE.  I know, I know.  But her Mac, he Wallace, her Keith are all just so perfect at capturing them without imitations.  Her bit part characters are wonderfully fleshed out and distinct.  There are a few voices she doesn't quite get as dead on--Logan is one--but even those are as good as anything I've heard from another voice actor.

I love Kristen Bell--LOVE--and Veronica Mars, and I hope like anything that they'll make another movie, or a revived TV series, or webisodes.  And heck, definitely more audiobooks.  In fact, look!  The next novel, Mr. Kiss and Tell, is coming out this fall!

You can bet I'll be on Audible on release day.  Strike that--I'll be checking the website periodically until it's possible for me to preorder it. 

I love you, Kristen.  Do you wanna build a snowman?  Or feed my new pet sloth?

Skeletons in the Garden

Three Graves Full, by Jamie Mason, is the reason they invented the three star rating--though I'd give it 3 and a half if I could.  It is incredibly excellent except for the flaws.  I loved every page but had a hard time getting all the way through it.  Compelling except that it dragged.

What you've got here is a thriller. Jason Getty is a nervous little fellow with a body buried in his backyard, which jacks the nerves up a bit in and of itself.  It's not hard to keep the lawn guys away from it--unfortunately, they find another body buried in the front yard.

So now the house is swarming with cops, there are two bodies in the front yard, and Jason--who is not the confident, quick-thinking type--is trying to stay half a step ahead of the cops.  Into the mix we bring two smart detectives, Body #1's girlfriend, Body #1's husband (widower, I suppose), and the true story of how Jason of all people ended up putting a body in the ground behind the tool shed.  There's detecting, there's chasing, there's menacing, there's a con artist.  It's a thriller.

So, the good part: the writing is absolutely wonderful.  It's not so much about style or anything particularly artistic--it's straightforward great turns of phrase.  You've got clever metaphors, you've got spot-on imagery, you've got word games that turn cliches on their ear.  Literally, you can flip to any page and with one page turn max, you can find something that you want to read out loud to someone because the sentence is so great, the image is so clear, the observation is so spot on.  The language is SO good.

There just isn't quite enough story to carry it.  It's more than a short story, but the plot here is more of a novella than a full novel.  There are no twists, no real subplots, and very few revelations.  In a thriller, there needs to be some mystery, but there really isn't here--since we're following the criminal(s) as well as the cops and the victims, we know everyone's details, who did what and where the body is.  And while the chase scene contains all the "can they get away?" tension you could hope for, there's no longer, broader tension to draw you through the story.

The exception, I suppose, is the question of whether Jason will get caught.  I wanted to know the answer to that.  But I wasn't particularly invested in what the answer would be--Jason is not evil, but he is very, very pathetic, and so I didn't hold out much hope for him, or even root for him very much.  I had plenty of other people to root for, but none of them had any tension behind them.  There wasn't a romantic subplot, there was no will they-won't they, and all the sketchy pasts are outlined as back story early on. 

This also leaves you with a little less meat than you need to fill up 300 pages.  This filler is in the descriptions--the book is full of darlings, and not enough of them were bumped off in the making of the story.  Sometimes you see a good description taking up more sentences than whatever is being described is worth, just because the metaphor is so perfect.  You can't begrudge it, but it doesn't make a page turner.

So you have a really well told description of a bunch of interesting things that happen.  Which leaves me with three stars, and a suggestion that it might be worth reading just for the words, which are wonderful words. 

And I will say this: I'm absolutely and without question going to read whatever Jamie Mason writes next.

Open Flame

The first thing I want to say is that Kat? Is totally Faith Lehane, only without relying on Eliza Dushku's hit-or-miss acting skills.  And I LOVE Faith Lehane, and I LOVE Kat, with all her bluster and vulnerability and competence and doubt and eyeshadow and motorcross boots.  Love.

Mary, in my mind, is played by the girl from Fifteen (God, do you remember that show?  I didn't even watch it but I can picture the locker room.  Also, super young Ryan Reynolds!), Laura Harris, who later went on to star in the FABULOUS and DEPRESSINGLY cancelled Defying Gravity, which seriously, go watch it on Netflix and wonder why they didn't make another season.

Then you've got Lillia, who is in my mind somehow modeled on a slightly older version of Tricia Joe, who played Claudia is the movie version of The Babysitters Club.  Of course, Lillia does NOT have Claudia's fashion sense--she dresses more like Lucy Liu in my mind--but this face plus about four years is my Lillia.

So there you have my casting if I was making Jenny Han & Siobhan Vivian's Burn for Burn into a movie 15 years ago.

God I liked this book.  I liked Kat's character a lot.  I liked Mary's sketchiness, and the sense that there's something off about her.  I liked how all the voices were so different--three totally different characters, and you could pretty much tell from a random sentence which one is narrating each section.  I liked the secrets that were hidden--what Reeve did to Mary, what Nadia's up to, what's going on in Rennie's evil little brain.

I shouldn't have liked it.  I should have been turned off  by the utter high school of it all.  But there's a SENSE that this is bigger than that, and also a sense that some high school things matter more than others.  Especially in a small place like Jar Island.  Especially when class is an issue as much as it is here.

(There is a spoilery prediction in the last paragraph of this review--I warn you now so you can skip it if you choose.) 

I would like first to echo what Raych said about this book, because yes, all this. And then say that I love it when things go all the way off the damned rails.  And then also say that there's something uncanny going on?  And then also point out that I acquired Fire with Fire before I actually finished reading Burn for Burn, so yeah, this was a blast of well-executed, character-rich, emotionally affecting, slightly trashy YA crazy, and bring on some more!

(Spoilery prediction: do you think Mary's a ghost?)

Scott Chantler, My Hero

The Three Thieves is the greatest.  Just, so much fun.  Dessa is an acrobat and ragamuffin trying to find her lost twin brother.  Her circus family--Fisk, the super-strong one-headed Ettan, and Topper, the wiley pickpocket--have her back as she tracks the clues that lead her in flight from the city to the royal chamberlain's secret hideout.  The chief of the Queen's Dragons--the elite guard--are chasing them, and it's all a ripping yarn.

I've been reading these since they came out, and I wish I could remember who to thank for the recommendation; someone on the internet, I know.  The newest volume came out recently, and the next one is due in the fall, and they are both absolutely great.  Book four is The King's Dragon, and it follows the thieves' head pursuer as he starts to catch up with them, faces interference from his own guards, and flashes back to how he became the head of a questionable law enforcement body.

This is probably less of a kids' book than the other volumes, not because it's scarier or more dangerous, but because it's about looking back on your life and wondering how you went from where you were to where you are.  It's about doubting whether who you are is who you ought to be, but forging ahead anyway, because you're committed to the path.

Drake's character reminds me of no one so much as Javert from Les Misérables, who hunts Jean Valjean long after it is (or should be) clear to him that he is facing a difference between the letter of the law and the notion of justice.  While I am a huge fan of plucky, swashbuckling kid heroes, I found this volume really affecting.  I'm left with a strong faith that Chantler's going to redeem Drake before the end of the series, which I'm really, really looking forward to.

Book five is Pirates of the Silver Coast, and here we get right back to swashbuckling, and I'm even happier.  There's more Drake in this one than in others--we are now interested in his story and happy to be following him. Most of the story belongs to Dessa again, though, and there is some serious sailing going on.  When the trio hires a ship to take them to a mysterious island that no one has ever been able to find, they find themselves learning the difference between smugglers and pirates--in the most hands-on manner possible.

There are surprises, there is loyal friendship, there is day-saving and swashbuckling and acrobatic tumbling galore.  There is a Pirate King who is more than he seems, and there is a BIG REVEAL at the end of this one that makes me absolutely ITCH for the next one, because we are getting into it now, folks.

I have two quibbles with these books.  The first is pretty trivial; I really wish there was some kind of "previously in The Three Thieves" at the beginning of each one.  I read these close together, so it was fine, but it had been months since book three, and longer since they set out on their quest, so I had completely forgotten that the object of this journey is finding Dessa's long-missing twin brother, and I still can't remember the story about why he was lost to begin with.  I think, because of these lost details, I might be missing some hints to what's going on, especially in Drake's story, since he's closer to the inside of the nefarious plotting.

Second--and this was MUCH more an issue in Silver Coast than King's Dragon--I do sometimes wish there were more still moments here.  The adventures are great, but they move FAST.  I love these characters, love how they act and react and interact.  I'd like more time with them, and I'd like to spend a little more time watching them consider each other.  Believe it or not, I want more emoting here, especially in a book like Silver Coast, where so much happens that it's hard to fit it all on the page.

But if my biggest complaint is "more, please!" I think you can safely say that I love this series.  Love love love.  Can't wait till Adam's old enough that I can share it with him.

(I received ARCs of both these books from Netgalley. SO exciting!)

The Liars' Club

Reviews have been quite mixed about E. Lockhart's We Were Liars, and weirdly, I agree with all of them.  I agree that it's kind of hard to sympathize with the poor little rich girl narrator, and also that the story is poignant and heartbreaking.  I agree that the writing is gorgeous, and that the narrator's unreliability is done with a deft touch.  I agree that the "twist" is made too much The Thing about the book..

Actually, no.  I'm going to break entirely with the word on this book and say that there is no twist.  There's a reveal--a couple of reveals, actually, but the one that everyone's been calling the twist is, I would argue, quite clear from the narrative.  I definitely figured it out right away, and my feeling is that Lockhart intended me to, or at least wasn't hiding it.  (And I apologize to anyone who didn't see it coming.)

Because I'm not sure that I have coherent things to say about this, some points.

• I read this book while on vacation at an arrive-by-boat getaway spot with an old friend, whose family has been coming to this retreat for years (and sometimes sniping at each other while there).  This element was kind of surreal, and I honestly couldn't tell you if my experience/understanding/visualizations about Big Generational Family Retreats colored how I saw Cady's life on the island.


• Why were they the Liars?  There is NO indication why they were called that--she says that they always had that nickname, and it's crystal clear that the Sinclairs are all liars, that this is their family legacy.  But how did this group of teenagers get the name?  There is no hint, and that felt like a big hole to me, especially in a story where the persistence of images, of roles in a family, and of memory in shaping the present are all strong themes.


• Johnny and Mirrin kind of get short shrift compared to Gat.  I sometimes felt like they were there to flesh out the quantity, the magnitude of the group, and to explain Gat's presence, and to keep this from being Just About Love.  But Gat is the most powerful presence in the group, by far.

And this next one is super-spoilery, but I think it's the thing most worth talking about here, and it's the reason it's a tough book to blog about.

• I think the most interesting thing about the Tragedy is that it was entirely preventable.  So often, when overwhelming guilt is the narrator's problem, we have this long build up of why they feel guilty, and it ends up being that they didn't stop someone else from doing something, or that they contributed in a tiny way to something.  Essentially, it's the kind of guilt that a third party doesn't feel was justified, and we as the audience forgive our hero right away. 
  
  But this ISN'T.  Cady came up with an awful idea, got too drunk to do it properly, and then screwed it up in a horrifying way.  And while there's a little guilt to go around, it's mostly her fault.  I think the question of how someone lives with the fact that they are at fault in something terrible is so rarely addressed in fiction--probably because there's no good answer.  It's just a big ugliness that's nearly impossible to face.  It fits in with our moral ambiguity theme of earlier this year: how do you deal with these impossible questions?  

So, We Were Liars.  In the end, we're left with ugliness cleaning up after ugliness, and maybe finding some humanity underneath?  I think in the end, I could go back and forth about whether I liked the characters, or thought their growth was worth my time, or whether the reveals made sense or were kind of sloppy.  But I don't actually care about any of that, because this book was just beautiful--gorgeously written and full of so much love.  I don't mind that it's not perfect, because it's worth reading, just as it is.

Huh?

Can someone explain Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation to me?  I mean, I kind of get where it's going, but I don't understand why I'd want to go there.  And people love it so much!

The sci-fi premise is that, suddenly and inexplicably, a big chunk of the southeastern US got turned into primordial jungle.  It's full of strange, exotic, and giant plants and animals, and has weird psychological effects on people who go in.  Expeditions have been sent; the people come out strange, or not at all.  Our narrator is the biologist on the twelfth expedition.

I love this premise, but I expected something quite different.  I expected more of a mystery, I guess, an exploration.  I expected layers of revelation, about the environment, about the secrets, about the characters, maybe?  It's a strange, intriguing premise.

I made it halfway through.  As far as I can tell, the story doesn't really go anywhere exploratory.  There are a couple of key questions I'd like answered, but I think the dreaminess of things lost me.  It's like, things didn't shock me, because nothing made any sense--the strange and inexplicable is not unraveled.  There's no revealing anything, since we start out with "this place runs people mad, and everything there is impossible," and when we get there everyone starts to run mad and there are lots of impossible things.  This deprived me of wonder, and without wonder, there wasn't much there.

The problem with a big "how did this happen?" question is that you eventually have to either answer it or admit that you're not going to.  I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this book was committed to not answering the questions; the Southern Reach (I think it's called) just is, and we'll get to explore it, but not explain it--not in this book, at least.

Not that this leaves the book with nothing--enjoyable stories are often built on something besides discovering the source of the weirdness.  But this also isn't terribly character-driven, not exactly.  The narrator (she is the biologist; the characters are all unnamed and referred to by their jobs--the surveyor, the psychologist) is a sharp, unlikeable person, and the fact that she's likely going a little bit crazy doesn't help much.  The others are no-nonsense, and the fact that you have four competent, businesslike women on an exploratory mission should be pretty interesting, except that they all get suspicious of each other right away, without actually getting access to any real perceptions about anyone.  Even our narrator is mostly scheming and fretting.  It's like watching the movie Aliens from the point of view of that guy who shouts, "That's it, man! Game over, man!"

If someone who read this would like to tell me more about it--about what, besides the admittedly lush, detailed, interesting descriptions makes this book great, or about how the ending (or the next book) make it all worthwhile--I would be really interested.  Is it the character study of the chilly, obsessed narrator?  I could see that, though it didn't catch me.  Is it about uncovering the mystery of the territory, and is there more to that than, "yeah, this is crazy, isn't it?"  Is there some level on which it's about mankind's search for understanding in an ultimately unknowable universe?  I'm taking theories--hey, even if you haven't read it, I'd love to hear yours.

Dueling Titles

The Since You've Been Gone that I just finished (by Mary Jennifer Payne) is not the Since You've Been Gone I've been seeing lately on bookstore shelves (by Morgan Matson).  I got this one as an ARC, and it's not out yet.  So when I saw that in the bookstore and thought, oh yeah, I was just about to read that--it was a different book.  Don't get confused.

The book I finished today is about a teenager, Edie, whose life has been upended yet again when she and her mother had to run from her abusive father. This time they've left Canada for London, and Edie is not thrilled.  She's the new kid again, she had to leave her friends and her cat, and the teachers at her new school are not very sympathetic.

But the real story starts when Edie's mother doesn't come home from her first shift at her new job.  Because they're on the run, she's afraid to go to the police, and she really doesn't want to end up in the social services system.  She determines to find her mother, and acquires a sidekick in her quest in the form of Jermaine, a tough guy with a sensitive side from school.

This book was fine.  For the most part it was enjoyable--I liked Edie, and her relationship with her mom, and her combination of frustration and adaptability.  It moved along briskly and kept me interested.

I think the best part was the details about the peripheral characters were really nice--every single person really came alive, even the ones who just showed up briefly and would, in many books, have been flat and stereotypical.  Precious (school bully), Imogen (shy reject), the guard at the office building, the guy selling doughnuts--all these characters seemed real, and human, and there was a real sense of depth in the London that she and Jermaine traipse through.

It was kind of cool, too, that no one's race was described.  I mean, I guessed that Jermaine was black for a few reasons, but you don't find out for sure till later in the book.  And on my Kindle, I wasn't sure that Edie was white, either.  It made some of the characterization--how Jermaine has been marked as a bad seed at school, for example--more interesting, because how race played into it was left up to me for a long time.

Ultimately, the problem with the book was with the plotting.  The scene setting, the characters, the interactions were all great.  But the plot--mom's missing, have to find her!--was pretty poorly paced.  I really have no idea how to look for someone who's missing in a big city, but I can pretty much guarantee that as soon as you walk out the door and look left and right up and down the street, you're going to realize you need a plan.  Edie did not have a plan.  Even after she got one, she didn't follow it very closely, didn't seem driven by it. 

It's actually something I've seen in other stories, where the Big Thing We Need To Do is really more of a thing that we worry and talk about instead of acting on.  Edie spends almost three days worrying before she actually takes some action.  She doesn't even call hospitals, which is the stereotypical thing you do when someone's missing--I'd think that even Edie had seen a show where someone said to their errant teenager, "I was calling the hospitals, I was so worried," and would have thought to do that.

Between that and the way-too-abrupt wrap-up at the end--way, way too abrupt--I'm left kind of flat.  This would have been a better book if it had just been about trying to fit in, build a home in a new city, or something like that.  The structure felt forced and ultimately dragged down what was initially a really good read.

The really positive thing that I'll say is that I'd definitely read another book by this author.  I think, if she'd been writing the right book for her, it would have been really excellent.

Two Thirds of the Lord of the Rings

Well, The Two Towers draws to a close.  Once again, I'd like to praise Robert Inglis's reading, and offer him a lozenge after the orc voices he had to do there at the end.

I understand the love for the LOTR movies.  They're hugely long, yes, but they're gorgeous and lush and rich with their own overblown sprawl.  They have many qualities that I want in a movie.  But I still don't understand the enduring popularity of the books.  There's a good story in there, but I just don't see what this Thing is that has touched SO many people so deeply.

I mean, there's the Everyman of Frodo, saving the world while the big-time heroes just watch his back.  That's got a satisfaction to it.  But honestly, Frodo doesn't get many good scenes.  He just trudges on with dignity while Sam gets to be clever or anxious, make decisions and worry about whether they're right.  Frodo is an object here, and Sam's deeply underrated.

There's a big British class thing going on through the whole thing.  The big people treat the hobbits with a great deal of respect, but hobbits are not fighters, nor scholars, nor much of anything that you'd expect to find on a quest, so there's this odd kind of...condescension, except not really.  The hobbits have status, but they don't have a lot of competence; maybe it's my own angle that looks to competence for status, not the characters--maybe I'm projecting.

One thing that kind of grates me, too, is the Good vs. Evil thing.  I don't know if it's my modern sensibilities or what, but the bad guys are so bad it's almost boring.  Orcs are faceless; what's their motivation? Sauron wants Power, but power to do what?  He doesn't want to rule the world, he wants to lay waste to it.  Why would anyone want to destroy the world?  It's kind of a nihilistic goal, and when it's not even directly stated--he's not threatening to destroy the world, just laying waste to what he does conquer--it doesn't have any dimension.

Also, I can't quite figure out how destroying the ring will turn the tide of anything, since the bad guys seem to be doing just fine so far without the ring.  Though of course, I'm still on the second book.  I have a feeling the return of the king in The Return of the King will make a difference there.  Although, where was the king, anyway?  I mean, it's not like Aragorn was lying around somewhere refusing to take up the mantle of leadership.  He was right there all along, doing the hard work of unglamorously saving the world.

Speaking of Aragorn, though, in a bit of an aside, check out the cover image for the next book.  Is he flashing us some thigh or what?  I kind of love this picture, even though I have to assume he's wearing some tight flesh tone leather pants, not going barelegged beneath his tunic.  Though I do love the notion of his crowning being an opportunity to show off his gams.

I sound really down on the book here, and the truth is that, as I said, it's a good story.  I maintain that the pacing is really odd, and that it reminds me of nothing so much as an ancient Greek epic, but I'm glad I'm reading it.  I really do wish I knew more about the literary landscape of the time, to figure out what about this book makes it such a touchstone. 

Or maybe--and this is quite likely--I just don't get the British Walking Novel.  That is entirely possible, as well.

Not Very Bohemian

I went on vacation right after book club this month, which means I didn't get a post up about it right away, when things were fresh.  Which is too bad, because it was a great meeting--the book, Bellweather Rhapsody, by Kate Racculia, was a good read.  It wasn't the deepest book ever, but it had a lot going on and was fun.

The story is easily summarized: a high school Statewide music conference takes place in a battered old hotel in the Catskills.  The musicians, their teachers, the hotel staff, and other guests are snowed in, and there are shenanigans as well as danger afoot.

Let's see if I can remember any of my good questions about it. Caution: I don't remember most of the characters' names, but I should still be able to explain what I'm talking about.

1) Which of the various and interesting plot twists did you see coming? I don't want to give things away, but there are a number of revelations, some of which I suspected (the end of Jill's story) and some of which I didn't (the concierge's story).

2) What did you think of the tone of the book?  Did you find that starting out with Alice and Rabbit set the tone as kind of a coming of age story?  How did the aspects of real physical danger--the death and murder and physical threats--fit with the more getting-along-in-high-school elements of the story?

3) Related: the tension over the possibility of this being a ghost story was interesting.  Was it misleading, or just the right amount to keep you on your toes?

4) None of the teachers/chaperones who were featured seemed particularly attached to teaching; they were all musicians who had defaulted to teaching after giving up professional music for one reason or another.  On one hand, this seems like the kind of thing that is particularly likely to be true in music (more than it would be for, say, science teachers).  On the other, it removes the idea of sharing and teaching music from the book--only one character has any real sense that it's worth something to pass this on to the kids.  Are the connections between the kids and adults and their music realistic? Sad? Is there a cautionary tale there?

5) What do you think about the bad guy being a flat out sociopath?  Does this seem like an oversimplification?  Do you think the internal monologue of that person (the short access you get to it) seems like what that kind of person's head really sounds like?

6) Seriously, how sad is that hotel?  Don't you kind of just want to go on vacation there to throw them a little business?

7) Were the Shining references too heavy handed?  Or were they inevitable, since the reader couldn't avoid making them so the characters might as well?  (Hint: I vote the latter.)  And was the bigger, more dramatic homage at the end a bridge too far?

8) What did  you think of the chaperone's relatively unresolved plotline?  Appropriate?  How do you think things are going to end up there?

That's all for now!  Next month for book club: Code Name Verity, which I've already read but am thrilled to read again and talk about!

I Married the Bishop

No, wait, he became bishop after I married him.  Not me, I mean, Linda Walheim, the narrator, protagonist, VERY erstwhile detective, and eponymous bishop's wife of the novel The Bishop's Wife by Mette Ivie Harrison.

Okay, I go back and forth between writing a polite review about the many things this book tried to do and where it fell short and just rambling on about how I didn't like it.  The latter is more entertaining and satisfying; the former is the more generous choice in a world where an author is quite likely to find your review.  The former, however, is also not where my skill set lies.

Let's settle in between for something straightforward, because I don't want to spend a lot of time on this.  To sum it up: the reason I finished this book was because I had a distant (and shrinking) hope that it would turn out to be a complete mind-bender and that the narrator--a passive, hand-wringing waffler of a Mormon housewife--would turn out to be the murderer.  That would have been fascinating, if nothing else.  Sadly, it's not a spoiler to say, no dice.

This is a book where a rough summary is easy and a detailed one is impossible.  Short version: Linda Walheim is a good Mormon housewife whose last kid is almost out of the house and whose husband is serving as bishop, putting her in a vicarious position in the center of ward (like a parish, only Mormon) life.  A couple of the domestic dramas turn out to be complicated by disappearances that might relate to murders.

The longer version is almost illegible, because nobody's motivations make any sense.  A man and his five year old daughter report his wife mysteriously missing.  He claims she's run out on him, but her parents claim that she was escaping abuse.  Linda, who lost her only daughter at birth years ago, can't believe any mother would leave her daughter like that. (This assumption is neither backed up nor challenged.)

Linda (for some reason) inserts herself into the investigation.  Though she has almost no contact with the police, she questions people and is nosy.  Really, in many ways, the sense that she's trying to solve the mystery comes entirely from her thinking about it a lot.  There are many scenes, in fact, where she does something like sit in a chair and think vague thoughts for a long time.  Kind of assumed that she'd turn out to be mentally ill.  Nope.

Revelations roll forth, as well as other mysteries, and I won't spoil them except to say that this reads very much like a first draft.  If the original events played out the way the Big Reveal demonstrates them, it would not make sense for any of the people with things to hide to behave the way they do early in the story.  It's like the plot was made up as it went along, but nobody went back to look for continuity.

In many ways, I read it as an anthropological exercise; a book by a Mormon author in a modern Mormon setting did contain some interesting details.  But every time she got close to something (men have too much power in the Church; "family secrets" can hide violent and dangerous things; even men who are not sexist can be pretty sexist), she skirts away from it and neither explores the issue nor even gives you a comforting platitude about it.  I'd feel better about this book if it read like solidly believed dogma instead of a doubter who doesn't really want to bother with what it means to doubt.

And where the HECK were the police?  She never calls them, she keeps telling herself she can't do better than them, but when she searches the house, she finds the victim's discarded cellphone?  That the police missed somehow?  And then doesn't tell them?  But then a cop shows up and gives her a very reasonable lecture about how the police are going to help, and "they probably won't believe me" is a dumb excuse, and she agrees, and then keeps doing the exact same stuff she's doing.

I guess I was looking for a Susan Isaacs thing, where a random lady insinuates herself into a murder investigation and turns out to have some bright ideas, insights, and uncovers information--just Utah instead of New York.  But no, this is about a random lady who stands very still and watches life moving around her, thinking hard about having an opinion, but in the end not really doing much of anything at all.

Except in that one, seriously unbelievable scene with the SWAT team--oh, I just can't.  I'm sorry.  Not recommended.

(And here's where I admit that I got this book from Netgalley for an honest review.  Well it's definitely an honest review.)

Words Words Words

I'm digging into the backlist these days, trying to spread out the shiny new stuff with things that have gotten buried near the bottom of the TBR list.  A few people I know read Maxx Barry's Lexicon recently and I've been aggressively avoiding the spoilers, so I dove in.

This book!  Guys, this book.  I have been fooled by this book at absolute minimum three times, and surprised at least four more.  It's seriously packed with action, with worldbuilding, and with character development--often sketchy characters, who are hard to penetrate but flawed and fascinating. 

The premise is fairly simple: there are people who, through gifts and advanced training, can use words to affect people's neurobiology and effectively hypnotize or force them to obey ("compromise," they call it). The plot is more complicated: we are following two stories.  Wil is abducted in an airport and ends up in a major chase where he's not sure who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.  He has no idea why this is happening to him, and neither do we.

The other story follows Emily, who's a street kid hustling three card monte in San Francisco when she is discovered by the Poets and brought to their school to be educated.  She doesn't quite fit in, but she's an avid learner and boundary pusher.

These stories tie together.  These people are on a collision course.  This book is intense and clever and so much fun.  The world building is smart, and the twists are surprising and inevitable.  But the cool thing is that even the few things I guessed "early" (like, before the flat-out reveal) weren't disappointing.  The book wasn't relying on the twist, or the surprise, to keep me interested.  I felt just as delighted when I knew what was going on as when I was blindsided.

I'm not quite done yet--this is the moment of my most intense thrill when I need to blog about the book.  And I'll admit that it's not entirely without holes--at no point, for example, is the mission statement of the Poets really hinted at, even when you're among them.  I guess building a hypnotic army is enough?  Their mystique keeps you on your toes, but it seems like a bit of a blank spot.

* * * * *

Later...

Okay, I'm back from vacation and I finished the book and holy cow it was awesome.  The ending was a little confusing, but the characters all followed their own paths to the end, and it was still a supremely good read.  Seriously, every time I thought, "here's the twist, here's the way the story's going to go," I was surprised.  Way to go, Max Barry!

I Am Waiting for More

I don't know what's going on with Allen Zadoff's I Am the Weapon series.  The first one was published under Boy Nobody a while ago, and now maybe it's being republished under The Hit, I guess?  Or maybe that's overseas; I'm unclear.  Anyway, I read I Am the Weapon and got really into it--slam, bang, boom.

So now we have I Am the Mission, and again, lucky enough to get an ARC.  In fact, I was sitting there on Netgalley waiting for it to come out, and I almost peed myself with joy when I saw it, requested it, and got it, right away.  And then I gulped it down, and now all I want to know is what the next one will be called and when it will come out.

I'll admit, Mission isn't as good as Weapon.  The second in a series rarely is, and my theory is that, even when the book is great, it can never surprise you like the first one did--finding a new author/character/series to love is a big part of the thrill, and that New Series Energy is not going to be there for books two through &c.

So Mission didn't get to surprise me as much.  Also, the author challenged himself here--this time our narrator is up against a paramilitary organization, which means he's not the only guy with training in the game.  There's also some internal strife at the Program, which, given the fact that things already operate on a Really, Really Need to Know basis, means he's pretty confused and adrift, support-wise.

This time, his name is Daniel, and he's being sent in to kill the leader of a militia-style camp/cult of young people.  It's a short term job; he's to strike at a recruiting event, not to go inside the compound.  These people have already taken out one Program kid, and they're not risking Daniel.

But a plan never survives first contact, and Daniel finds himself inside, cut off, and trying to fulfill his mission and navigate the fraught politics of a paranoid military organization.  On  the way, he finds and figures out more about his own organization, and maybe even his own past.

I'm usually not one for the broader story arc, preferring the mission on the table for the day.  But honestly, the camp parts dragged--it was a lot more waiting for an opportunity than acting, and the real drama of the story wasn't there.

It was with Daniel, cut off from the Program, examining his own motivations.  I'll admit that I guessed some of the twists and turns early, but it didn't take away from them.  This is a solid middle book, and I am completely set up for the third one.  We're going to find out about Daniel's father, and the moral ambiguity of being an assassin for the good guys is going to wash out in the end.  Allen Zadoff, get writing!

Refreshed

That moment when you read a random book and LOVE it, but realize it's the first in a trilogy.

But THEN, it turns out that the next book in the series comes out TOMORROW!

(Please excuse the sentence fragments.  It pains me to write them, even for rhetorical effect.)

I noticed J. Kathleen Cheney's The Golden City on the shelf at the library, and I thought about reading it, but I didn't pick it up until I got a solid recommendation from a chat friend.  I picked it up, I started in.  Society girl is packing for an elopement in 1900s Portugal, with the help of her secretly-seria (siren) handmaiden/companion.  So right off the bat, you have some fun stuff--servants, elopements, selkies.  I'm having fun already.

The elopement goes awry, and when the society lady is murdered, Oriana--seria, spy, unemployed professional companion--is determined to find the killer and avenge her friend's death.  Her kind are forbidden in the Golden City under pain of death, and her personal and family situation is complicated.

For all the magic, though, and all the politics and selkies and seria and things, this is a flat out (alternate) historical mystery, and it's a really excellent one.  In addition to Oriana's point of view, we get that of Duilio, a gentleman scholar who works with the police on occasion and is half-selkie himself.  He's been investigating mysterious disappearances that are tied to Oriana's friend's death.

I think the best thing about this book is that there is so much going on and I understood ALL of it.  I knew who the characters were, even when there were a lot of them.  There's so much rich background detail, and it's presented in such a smooth, NON-infodumping way that you really have no idea which details are going to come back as important later and which are just rich worldbuilding.  I think that kind of smooth storytelling is better here than in pretty much any mystery I've ever read.

There's so much more to love here, too.  I can see people wanting more depth in a lot of the cool things that are touched on--like how Oriana comes from a matriarchal society, but living in a patriarchal one--but I also love how they're just neatly embedded in the rest of the story.  Like when Duilio thinks something about not minding women working (or something like that, that seems kind of condescending), but then later Oriana has a similar thought about men. 

Duilio and Oriana as a pair is probably not too surprising to anyone who's ever, you know, read a book, but this is another thing that's just done so smoothly that I loved it.  They do not fall in love, or even lust, at first sight.  They find in each other an ally in their hunt for the truth, and they team up.  There's also no faux friction, mistrust, will-they-won't-they distrust.  They get along well, come to trust each other, and work well together  And after a little while, they both start to realize that they like each other.  But they're in a busy, intense period, so they don't really do anything about it.  These are two mature adults whose potential romantic feels take a comfortable backseat to the very real and important work they're doing, and I was practically standing up and cheering the whole time.

The plot is complicated and involves spies and art and politics and society matrons and magic and all kinds of things, and there's a huge cast of characters, some friends, some enemies, some uncertain.  I love that they had allies and trusted friends--this wasn't an "only we can save the world" situation, but a pair of people who were leading an important team.

I loved, loved this book.  Excuse me while I go buy the sequel--and hope like heck that Oriana's in it more than the cover blurb implies.

There Is No Post Title That Encompasses These Two Comics

I tried really hard to think of a clever theme to tie Matt Fraction's Sex Criminals to volume3 of Spera, and god help me, I can't.  It's probably for the best.  Really, it's just that I got advance copies of both, and they're comics I've read in the past week.  So I'll just review them, if that's all right with you.

First of all, I think it's quite daring for someone to publish something that makes him the number one hit when you Google "sex criminals."  That takes some gumption, or something.  I usually go right for Matt Fraction, but the premise here had me seriously skeptical--this guy and this girl discover that they both have the power to freeze time when they have an orgasm, so they decide to rob a bank.

Crazy, definitely.  But tasteless?  No, actually.  It's one of the most sweet and sincere books about sex and falling for someone.  Here we have two people who are both really into sex--and who both have a secret sex power.  Suzie tells the story, starting in flashbacks to her childhood, then with meeting John, which is sweet and romantic and set up to be a really great one night stand, till they find out they have more in common than they ever would have imagined.

We get two coming of age stories--Suzie's rather sad one and John's kind of standard adolescence.  We have a lot of "what would you do with your magic powers" fun scenes.  And we have a lot about the complexities of navigating the beginning of a relationship with someone you're absolutely infatuated with but don't necessarily know that well yet.  This was just such an incredibly charming read; I can't wait for the next volume.

(Also, make sure you read all the background filler--the posters in the porn shop, the signs in the library.  Absolutely hilarious; the authors have a lot of fun with how silly a lot of these things are, sex-related and not.)

Josh Tierney's Spera has reached volume 3, and I feel about the same as I did about it before.  I like Lono and Pira, two princesses on the run.  I find Yonder charming, and I find their adventures fun.  I am starting to feel, though, that I'd like a little more depth.

This volume teased it a bit--two young men from Lono's collapsed kingdom show up, enraged with their princess for abandoning her people.  But I didn't want a story about these two boys learning not to be so angry--I wanted Pira and Lono to maybe turn around and see that if adventuring is what you want, you've got an evil queen and a conquered kingdom that maybe could use your attention.

As usual, there is a different artist for each story, and I find this distracting.  I wish there was a little more harmony across the styles; I don't need them to match in look, but in tone, it would help.  At least one of them I found so muddy it was quite hard to read.  And at the end, you get a big handful of short stories, again, by different artists.  These are charming, even more so in that you don't expect the same cohesion from them.  I think I'd appreciate them a bit more if I followed the comic online instead of in book form, though.

So basically, what I want from Spira is to step up its game--turn into a more cohesive story.  I appreciate that it's a light, adventuring princesses thing, and I don't mind if they don't end up facing Pira's mother.  But I do think that the episodic snippets are starting to get in the way of character development, and I'd love to see this story do more.  It's such a great concept, and such charming characters; I think it has a lot of potential.

Dibble Dabble

I start in on a bunch of stuff and get distracted.  I won't say that my awesome streak is broken, but we're dialing it back to normal with a few duds among all the delight.  So, a quick spin through the thanks-but-no-thanks list, with a stop in charming-and-delightful land to freshen up in the middle.

Misdiagnosed: One Woman's Tour of--And Escape From--Healthcareland, by Jody Berger. Didn't get much past the first chapter of this one--the problem with a memoir is that the narrator and the protagonist and the author are generally the same person, and if you don't like them, it's not worth going there.  I rather like medical memoirs (though admittedly I've read more from the doctor's POV than the patient's), but from the very beginning the author just doesn't know how to handle the health care system.  She doesn't ask good questions, gets annoyed when she's given a tentative diagnosis instead of a real one, insists that she doesn't take drugs (as in, I won't take aspirin), and clearly has trouble prioritizing her health and her travel appropriately.  I understand that the system can be confusing, and that dealing with your health is scary, but she seems to bring the chaos with her, even by her own account.  Pass.

Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl.  Read this one out loud to Adam, and I was surprised at what a hit it was.  I've often heard Danny's dad mentioned as one of the best parents in literature, so I was a little surprised that the story turned out to be all about poaching--kinda criminal, plus hunting which is not always embraced nowadays.  I wasn't thrilled how the poaching was justified by how awful the victim was (Adam really liked saying "Mr. Victor Hazell," though), but it's true that it was a charming story, and Danny and his dad are just a great couple of characters.  This was just a lovely book, and Adam really enjoyed it.  I think he's old enough to follow Charlie & the Chocolate Factory now, and I'm excited to dive into more Dahl.

The Mind of Winter, by Laura Kesischke.  Whoa, nellie, never you mind.  Someone (Booksmugglers, maybe?) put this book on a list of anticipated releases ages ago, so when I saw it at the library I picked it up.  When I read the blurb to Mike, he shook his head sadly.  And I can see that--it's a thriller about a mom of an adopted Russian (adopted as a baby, now a teenager) who, trapped at home with her daughter in a blizzard, suddenly becomes obsessed with the idea that "something had followed them back from Russia."

Here again, though, we have a super unlikeable protagonist.  To be fair, that was her thing--the author was clearly writing an unlikeable narrator. But there's a difference between observing that someone is superstitious and asking "what's wrong with them?"  Your in-laws are not judging you every time they ask how you're doing.  If you're that paranoid, a) I don't want to hang out with you for a whole book, and b) I don't feel a lot of sympathy when you start to feel persecuted by something you can't put your finger on.  You clearly felt plenty persecuted before.

 So that's the round up of late.  More to come, though, because I also read a couple of interesting comics and a FABULOUS novel.

*Disclosure: I got a free advance copy of Misdiagnosed from the publisher. 

Little Gems

It's so often surprising where the good ones pop up from.  I mean, random shelf browsing has a pretty reliable 25-45% return rate (in my completely made up statistical experience), but when it comes to a category--nun books, Regency romance--a random choice is not necessarily the best way to get the job done. 

The world of Jane Austen follow-ups is a big one, ranging from retelling her original stories from alternate points of view to sequels or spinoffs of minor characters.  Roaming the aisles at the library, I saw something called A Visit to Highbury by Joan Austen-Leigh, and the author's name caught my eye.  The fact that it was actually Jane's great great grand-niece didn't actually promise a good book, but I liked the notion of the owner of Harriet Smith's boarding school having something to say.

And somehow, this book is incredibly charming.  At first I was waiting for it to get all modern--for one of the new characters to turn out to be a hustler of some sort.  But no, it's just a really nice little story, told in the form of two sisters who haven't seen each other in years corresponding.  Mrs. Pinkney is unhappy in London with her new husband, who is not sociable enough for her tastes, so takes up writing to Mrs. Goddard, the schoolmistress who is watching the events of Emma unfolding in her village.  Mrs. Goddard relates village gossip; Mrs. Pinkney tries to get to know her husband.  Mrs. Goddard has servant problems; Mrs. Pinkney befriends a young neighbor.  People are cranky and selfish and shy and whatever other flaws people have, but they stretch themselves and become better. 

This is just one of those books that is lovely.  Just lovely and charming and dear, in its small and domestic way.  It makes me very happy to be reading it.

The End, The Middle, and The Beginning

I didn't read Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists--I will add a 'yet' here, because at this point, I most definitely will--but I heard enough great things that I was pretty excited about The Rise & Fall of Great Powers.  The synopsis is pretty cool, too--Tooly was raised by a mysterious bunch of bohemians but hasn't seen them in years, when...

The Rise &a Fall of Great Powers hinges on a mystery, but it's not a mystery novel.  The story is told back and forth between three different times--1988, when Tooly is 10, The End; 1999, when she is 21, The Middle; and 2011, when she is in her early 30s, The Beginning.  We learn slowly about her life, which is unorthodox; her personality, which is charming; and her history, which is mysterious.

The strange thing about the mystery is that she's living it, but seems incurious about it; for the longest time I couldn't figure out if she knew more than I did (it didn't seem like it) or if it was a part of her character, a part of her story.  At The Beginning, she's running a failing bookshop in a small Welsh town, skimming along on the surface of things.  Her past is in the past and her present barely exists; it's like she's waiting for something.  And she is, I suppose, because she gets a Facebook message out of the past, and she ventures off to see what's going on.

At The Beginning, Tooly is ten, and she's living a life on the move.  She and Paul--fastidious, awkward, upright Paul--move to a new city each year--Sydney, Bangkok, Jakarta--for his IT job.  It's clear that her existnce is a secret, that he has no idea what to do with a child, and that there is nothing untoward about their relationship.  We are left to wonder.

And in The Middle, Tooly is turning 21 in Manhattan, wandering around, scoping people out, looking for opportunities to take to Venn.  It's unclear if she's a burglar, a con artist, a great observer of humanity, or all three, but when she talks her way into a random apartment and meets law student Duncan and his roommates, she has an encounter with "normalcy" that she's not quite sure what to do with.

I can't say for sure that I loved this book as I was reading it--I liked it a lot, and I found it compelling, definitely.  There were moments when it felt very much like a Minute Observations book, but it was saved from my distaste for that genre by a few things--1) Tooly is quite lovable, in naively cynical way; 2) the full cast of characters in each period and the burning question of how they relate to each other; 3) more "aha" moments of observation than I've literally ever read in a book.

Seriously, I don't highlight except for book club, and I was highlighting all over the place here.  The language is deceptively simple--it's not about flowery phrasing, but rather about observations that are exactly how I've thought of things but never heard them expressed.

Fogg formed opinions as he spoke them, or perhaps afterward, requiring him to ramble at length to grasp what he believed.  This made speech an act of discovery for him; others did not necessarily share this view."  Dude, that's me!  Sarah suffered from "the intractable lifelong argument between what [she] knew and what [she] felt."  Yes, I know that!  And have you seen my house?  I need to be reminded that, "eventually, you must do things with things."  Not only is that distressingly true, but the context of the phrase in the story bears all the same weight that it does in my mind--things, almost no matter how trivial, have people and memories and implications attached to them, and so doing things with them, or not, is fraught.  Or at least, to a clutterbug like me.

Anyway, the point is that this book is full of feelings I recognize, a lot, and a straightforward way of discussing them.  And so, if there are long passages in which someone putters around their apartment thinking about life and what to eat, I'm with them, because eventually I'll figure out what Sarah has to do with Humphrey, or where Venn went.

Is the ending too pat?  I don't know.  I like an ending with some hope and some completion; I'm more likely to be frustrated if something isn't neat enough than if it ties up too neatly.  But I think it's important that Tooly figure out the things that I've figured out, and so I'm glad she comes to where she did.  There's enough sorrow here for me, and even enough unresolved bits.

Finally, one other point in its favor that I'd like to point out: I tend to be really fussy about male writers with female POV characters.  This is really, really impressive.  Tooly felt like a woman to me,  not like a "person who happens to be a woman."  She is naive and tough and odd, perhaps childish, but not specifically because of her femininity.  I think you could have convincingly written her character as a male, though the implications would have been different, which says to me that she's not naive because she's a girl.  In some places, her "female speak" might have been a bit stilted--started comments with "I think" is definitely something women do, but it felt very noticeable in some places--but in most places, she just talks like someone I believe is a real person, a real woman.

So yeah, highly, highly recommended. 

(Oh, yes, Netgalley.  Got it free from Netgalley.  Sorry, disclosure!)

The Highest of High Fantasy

Is there anything more seminal than Tolkien?  Is there anything more definitive, watersheddy, than The Lord of the Rings?  I've seen the movies, I've read The Hobbit, I've tried to read the series before.  But this time--this time I am taking it on!

Today I finished The Fellowship of the Ring, an audiobook version read by Rob Inglis.  It was a great performance--a mellifluous voice, distinct characters, and he even sang the songs!  I'm incredibly glad to have done it this way--there's a lot of rambling, and I'm a bad skimmer, so I get more out of having a reader's performance to bring some drama to the more pedestrian--in this case, literally--parts of a story.

So, some observations from a LOTR newbie--well, a newbie who knows the whole plot from the movies.

(You'll have to forgive all my list-based posts lately; it's just so much easier than trying to organize my thoughts coherently.)

1) While I understand why they cut him from the movies, I was quite fond of Tom Bombadil.  I actually really liked how he spoke in verse, even when he wasn't singing.  Also, his songs are the ones Inglis performed best.  And those poor, put-upon hobbits needed a break just then, needed someone to help them out. 

2) The whole "whoops, the ring slipped on my finger in my pocket by accident" thing could have been prevented if they'd taken a cue from Lyra in The Golden Compass and welded it shut in some sort of tin.  Honestly, all they needed to do was put it in some kind of box, or tie it up tight in a handkerchief.  Anything so it couldn't be put on impulsively or "accidentally." 

3) OMG so much walking.  I could almost tell you which days they crossed hedgerows and when they turned right to go uphill and follow the ridgeline, versus turning away east to go across a small river and then back up along a lane around a blackberry hedge.

4) Related, I think this is less an adventure novel than a travelogue.  I'm picturing Bill Bryson as, say, Pippin Took, and how he would have written about the journey.  Tolkien clearly had this world fleshed out, and he was mostly looking for an excuse to walk through it.  And to tell us the words for a lot of different places in several languages.  Let it never be said that this man needed to get a hobby--dude had one.

5) Is there anything an elf can't do?  I mean, seriously, why do other races even exist except possibly to admire the cloaks and boats and armor and weapons and archery and music and magic and beauty and dignity and longevity and delicious cooking and restorative beverages and woodlore and probably their cleaning products and the aroma of their morning breath and their advanced basket weaving skills?  How are the elves not invincible?  Seriously, it sounds like it must be boring to be an elf, just wandering around being perfect.

6) OMG, so many songs.  I have been wondering if the tunes that the reader used were canonical from somewhere or interpretations that he and/or his production team came up with.  That seems like some pretty cool prepwork.  Some of them are actually quite lovely, and some are just forgettable and interminable. 

I will always have lots of patience for them, though, because of the music from Rankin/Bass's animated version of The Hobbit.  Many, if not all, of the songs are directly from the book, and I can still sing pretty much all of them by heart.  I'm pretty sure my singing is better than the incredibly cheesy orchestrations, but still--there are some things that will live on in your heart.

Anyway, I'm diving into The Two Towers as soon as I get it downloaded to my phone.  19 hours down--34 to go!

Book Club: Transatlantic

Dateline: book club, June, 2014.  After several months of wobbly meetings in which book discussion was low, the streak was broken with an excellent meeting around a book that garnered mixed reviews from our membership: Colum McCann's TransAtlantic. 

Before we get into the questions, let's first cover my own pervasive ignorance.  Colum McCann is not (as I initially thought) Cormac McCarthy, so this book is nothing like The Road.  Nor is he (as I think though), Colson Whitehead, so this book is nothing like Zone One. It also isn't, as kept accidentally telling people, Transamerica, which is an excellent and completely unrelated movie starring Felicity Huffman as a MTF transsexual woman on a road trip.  Totally unrelated to any of these things.  So my expectations were--well, all over the map, which turned out to be the wrong map.

No, this is a book about...well, I'm not sure what it was about.  I can tell you what happens--two pilots fly from Canada to Ireland at the dawn of human flight, before the Great War.  Frederick Douglass visits Ireland to lecture on slavery and raise money for the cause of abolition.  A modern politician brokers peace in Ireland.  An Irish maid makes her way to America and starts a new life.  An American woman becomes a reporter, and her daughter a photographer, and they report on that trans-Atlantic flight we mentioned before.  A young man is killed in the Troubles, and later his mother mourns him. 

These stories are tied together by characters who move through their lives--the reporter's mother was the maid, and her great grandson, long after her death, was the murdered young man.  The photographer daughter meets the modern politician; the maid met Douglass.  You can't say they're not "tied together."

And there are other ties--you kind of want them to be themes, but they're really motifs.  You want the book to be about Ireland, about the character of the country, its politics, its division, it struggles, but really, it's just there.  There's a lot of telling, and there's even a decent amount of showing when it comes to the streets and the buildings and the bushes and...just, stuff.  But I can't say I felt shown anything about the people, where the anger comes from, why the fight is going on.  The strokes were all too broad.

Almost all of the women in this book had children out of wedlock--not all, but many.  Given the time periods covered, this wasn't a coincidence.  Motherhood?  A woman dividing her life between her personal goals and her parenting?  Losing a child?  I mean, all of these happen repeatedly, but I'm not sure if anything is being said about them here.

So--either this book succeeds only on the level of observing its immediately environs with pretty, pointed language, or I don't get it.  On to the questions!

1) Two of the stories focus on characters who are/were real people.  One of them, George Mitchell, is still alive; the other, Frederick Douglass, is a well known historical figure.  What do you think about how their stories were addressed?  Did you find them convincing?  Presumptuous? Authoritative?  Bonus points if you know enough about Douglass or Mitchell to see places that are particularly accurate or questionable.

2) As I said, there are plenty of motifs in the book; parenthood, the loss of a child, race, the Ireland-American connection.  But what do you think the theme of the book was?  What points was it trying to make?  Why did the author choose to tell these stories?  How was his point (whatever that was) strengthened by the connections between the characters?

3) What was up with that letter?  Did that seem overblown to you?  I mean, a letter from a random person TO a famous person can be very meaningful for the writer, but I don't think the addressee's importance necessarily makes the letter historical, do you?  Or was there something else there that I missed?

4) Many of the central characters in this book were women, and they were all directly descended from each other.  I'm kind of impressed to see that from a male author (which seems pretty condescending of me, but there you are), but I'm not completely sure how I feel about how this was done.  All three of the main male characters are Big, Important Men who do Big, Important Things, while the women are mostly living their low-key lives.  How do you feel about the handling of female characters in this book?  Do you think the men being Historical Figures vs. the women being Just Folks is deliberate?  Significant?

It's possible that if I'd understood the book better, I'd have more questions for you.  So I guess question 5 would be: what questions would you ask about this book?  Good questions are often better than answers in situations like this one.

Twelve Is a LOT of Princesses

Fairy tale retellings are somewhere between tempting and anathema to me, and for the same reason--fairy tales rarely make normal human sense.  People do seemingly nonsensical, random things, answers fall out of the sky, and I never understand--can't even imagine--what the characters are thinking or feeling.  So I'm simultaneously skeptical and eager when someone claims or attempts to wrap an emotionally accessible narrative around one of these structures.

For some reason, the Twelve Dancing Princesses is one of my favorites.  It's probably just because my sister and I used to act it out for our little brother, repeating all our actions until each move--sleeping, dancing, sneaking--had been done twelve times.  But there's also something particularly impenetrable about this one that I think makes it very hard to tell.  I read Heather Dixon's Entwined ages ago, and in spite of its flaws I really enjoyed it. 

And so my path was crossed by Genevieve Valentine's The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, and I had to jump on it.  Twelve Dancing Princesses in '20s NYC?  Entwined meets The Rules of Civility? Sign me up!  Twelve sisters sequestered at home by their father (who had been waiting impatiently for a male heir), and their only joy or freedom is sneaking out to go dancing.  They live trapped in an oppressive house, and dancing is their only freedom. 

Okay, first I want to say that this was just such a good read.  Now that I'm at the end, especially, it's absolutely thrilling and heartbreaking and satisfying.  And if the rest of this post ends up talking about all the things that are hard about retelling the Twelve Dancing Princesses story, please believe that it reads that way because this book made me think and feel--about everything from the structure of the story to the lives of women in the '20s.

I think the weakest point of the book can be stated up front--the domineering, oppressive father is not set up as thoroughly as he needed to be.  The sense of being trapped is caught perfectly, and oppression comes through on every page.  But for the first half of the book, I could not have told you what was at stake, what was the risk.  An intimidating man, sure, but what do these trapped girls have to lose?  What's so bad about his anger? 

I can explain this--there is a big moment in the second half of the book where we become aware of what his anger really means--but I think the first half needed that impact.  We need to understand why these girls are trapped, especially as they grow older, more impatient, and more competent.  One thing the book does very well is explore the prisoner mindset--Jo, who takes care of her sisters, but at the expense of being seen as a collaborator, even by herself; Lou, whose longing to be free is stronger than the others, and more dangerous; Lily and Rose, who barely know themselves or each other--but I think it would have helped to be a bit more explicit about how many of the limitations on their options were truly external, and how many had grown only around a lifetime of being trapped.

Really, this is a story about women's secret rebellion; the story only works because the princesses are locked up.  If they were dancing publicly, legitimately, it wouldn't be an issue.  Constructing that prison is one of the big tasks of telling this story.  The Kingfisher girls' prison was well constructed, but I wasn't able to see it clearly for too long.

The other really hard part about telling this story, I think, is that twelve is really just too many sisters.  When you have twelve characters, they're a crowd, a gang.  Each one may have a name and a personality, but the fact is that a couple of them have adventures, and the rest of them are along for the ride.  This is Jo's story, which I think was a major strength.  Jo is their General, and they are obedient, but is she using her power toward the right goals?  Is she doing more harm than good?  And what has it cost her--oh, the answer to that one is long.  Really, the summary can be boiled down to that: what does it cost Jo to protect her sisters?

I'm quite impressed at how well they are all portrayed.  Right now, I can name all twelve sisters and describe their personalities--not just traits, but characteristics.  Araminta is haughty, because it protects her from her fear.  Rebecca is practical, and smart. Hattie and Mattie have each other, and that makes them both fearless and careless of people, but Hattie might be a little less fearless than her twin.  There's a wonderful point near the end where the narrative splits and follows different sisters, and this brings so much together--they cease to be a gang and become the owners of their own stories.  It's lovely to watch.

I think what I'm saying, as I write all this out, is that the second half of the book is much stronger than the first.  Really, I enjoyed the whole thing, but what it comes down to is that the second half hangs together, delivers a combination of writing and characterization and story and setting, that makes me absolutely swoon.  For the first half, I was reading a good book; by the end I was reading one I loved.