Chat of Smoke and Bone

I started this book in a blur of wonderfulness, stalled out when the characters fell in love and got all schmoopy, and swung back in when everything became worth it.  So worth it.  So, before we get to the spoilery part way down below, let me just say that I loved this book and cannot WAIT to read the next one.  To the point where I'm reading the preview chapters of Days of Blood and Starlight while I wait for the library to tell me my reserve has come in.  Wait anxiously.

Okay, that is the general part.  Now comes the part where my friend Lianna and I had a great chat about this book and how we felt about it.  I asked if she wanted to do a joint review, where we each publish half on our blog.  Her blog is really more of a writing journal, though, so she suggested I keep the whole thing for myself.  Which makes me feel greedy, but here we are!

Major, huge, enormous spoilers below; this post is really only for people who have read the book, or who are never, ever going to read the book but for some reason really want to read about it.  Which, they exist; I love spoilery reviews of books that I'm never going to read.  Go figure.

And thank you, Lianna, for letting me share this; I think it captures a lot of interesting angles on both the best and weakest parts of this wonderful, wonderful book that you should totally read before you come back and read this review full of spoilers which start.....NOW!

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Lianna:  First of all, I have to share that every time I mention this book to my husband, he thinks it's called "My Daughter is Smokin' a Bone".

So, I FLEW through the first half of this book in a day, then slowed down a lot and took three more days to finish it. I felt that the action started getting bogged down by the love story, and that a lot of things that I loved about it-- the careful balancing of Karou's two worlds, the hallucinatory wonder of Brimstone's shop, Karou's art education, the acerbically witty best friend-- were kind of shoved aside to make room for the Instalove.

I wasn't that annoyed by the Instalove itself, partly because you had forewarned me about it, and partly because I could tell from the hints that this was a reincarnation story of sorts. So, it's Instalove based on a prior relationship. I'm basically cool with that. But THEN, when the story flashes back to Akiva and Madrigal/Karou falling in love, it's STILL Instalove! That's the point at which the love story began to annoy me to the degree of souring my opinion of the book as a whole.

Don't get me wrong-- I'm totally reading the second book. I adored the world-building, and the cliff-hanger ending hooked me good. I also appreciate that she didn't drag out the mysteries of "why was Karou was raised by demons?" and "wtf is the deal with Brimstone and the teeth?" any longer than made sense. I respect the hell out of an author who's not afraid to give answers in the first book of a trilogy.

But the love story thing has been rattling around in my mind. Here are the questions I've been pondering as I fold laundry:

1) Why does Instalove not do it for me, Romance-wise?

2) Why is Instalove so appealing to teenage readers?

3) What is the role my own personal taste in men plays in the way I judge Romance plots?

4) Is there a way to do the "our love will save the world!" plot that isn't eye-rolling to anyone over the age of 19?

And my thoughts about these questions:

1) As I said in my comments on your Instalove blog post, I am a Pride and Prejudice fan. I am just more interested in and excited by love stories in which the connection and attraction build slowly.

2) If my teenage self were reading DoSaB, she'd be alllllll over it. Mostly for the style (Blue hair! Tattoos! Prague! Chimaera demons!), but also for the love story. I think it has something to do with the intense adolescent longing for unconditional acceptance, coupled with a certain immaturity in regards to personal decisions. If your love is fated and eternal, then you don't have to struggle to catch the boy's attention or work to get to know him. No matter what you do, he'll still love you, and no matter what bad choices you make, you'll still wind up together in the end. 

As an adult, this just doesn't appeal to me, maybe because Fated, Eternal Love now seems like such a slim thread to hang a real relationship on. If love is born so effortlessly, isn't it also more likely to die without a struggle?

3) If I'm honest, I think part of my problem here is that I'm just not feelin' Akiva. He's a brooding, melodramatic sourpuss, and I do not believe I would be attracted to him if I met him in real life. I just don't see what he has going for him beyond being otherwordly-gorgeous. This is my problem with a lot of Instalove heroes; the Fated Love starts to feel lazy to me, like if the guy is really hot and really into the heroine, he doesn't need any other redeeming qualities (except perhaps a stalker-ish overprotectiveness that I am proud to say I have NEVER found appealing). 

It's not that I'm immune to male beauty, but if a guy is really that jaw-droppingly perfect (a la Edward Cullen/Christian Gray), I've always been more inclined to look at him as an amazing piece of art, rather than as a potential romantic partner. Call me reactionary, but I prefer to be prettier than the men I sleep with. And I am no jaw-dropping piece of art.

I like my romantic interests more on the beta side. I'd rather break through the facade of the wisecracking sidekick than the brooding hero.

4) The Instalove device often goes hand-in-hand with the "only our super-special love can save the world" trope. I don't like how smug this usually comes off, implying as it does that the lead couple's superiority over everyone else in their world-- not only are they more attractive than everyone else, they are nobler, wiser, braver, and the only ones capable of seeing what really matters, dammit! It rankles. 

I saw some of this in DoSaB. For example, the whole Chiro thing went over the line into Mary Sue territory for me. Chiro is ugly! And she envies Madgrial for being sooooo amazingly beautiful! But Madrigal is so awesomely above it all she doesn't even realize that she is pretty and Chiro is ugly! And so Chiro betrays her, 'cause ugly people are petty like that. Bitch, please.

Have you read Warm Bodies? I just saw the movie this weekend, and I've been trying to work out why the "teen love saves the world" thing did not bug me in that story. I think it was the sense that it wasn't so much THEIR love specifically that was curing the zombie plague as it was love in general. If it hadn't been R's resurrected ability to love that started it, it could have been someone else's. Also, while R feels Instalove, it's not the Fated, Eternal kind-- more like, "underneath my zombie-ness I am still a typically romantic and horny teenage boy, and you are cute and in immediate need of saving". And Julie feels no Instalove whatsoever; it is a completely one-sided thing for quite a while.

And those are my feelingful feelings.

Et vous? 

 

Sharon: This exactly echoes my reaction down to the details.  I flew through the first half and then, when the love story started, slowed down considerably--to the point where I'm pretty sure it's been weeks.  I did not figure out the reincarnation thing before it happened--well, when Akiva realized he knew who Karou was, I figured she was probably his dead girlfriend, but that's not much in advance.  Once I got that, I was able to let it go, though it still bugged me a bit--mostly it just bugged me that the story was ABOUT their love, instead of about Karou trying to find her family and solve her mysteries.

The Instalove between Madrigal and Akiva didn't bother me as much, because their first moment together--on the battlefield--was really more of a sensible moment in context.  They had a moment of shared humanity, and there was some intensity and attraction there, and it stayed with them as a snapshot memory.  It meant more to Akiva because he was already kind of disillusioned, and because the seraphim have more inhuman/irrational negatives about the chimaera.  

But the fact that they threw themselves at each other so aggressively was a bit of a problem.  At that point, though, I just wanted the Madrigal backstory to go fast so I could get back to Karou, so my disbelief was sacrificed to speed reading. 

Aside: I tell Adam stories at bedtime--Mike reads, I tell.  No repeats, so I often end up bowdlerizing whatever I'm reading for him.  He's been dying to hear what happens next in this book, and I can't figure out how to explain flashbacks, never mind reincarnation! 

Re:

1) Why does Instalove not do it for me, Romance-wise?

2) Why is Instalove so appealing to teenage readers?

3) What is the role my own personal taste in men plays in the way I judge Romance plots?

4) Is there a way to do the "our love will save the world!" plot that isn't eye-rolling to anyone over the age of 19?

1) is easy--I've never been someone who was all about the physical stuff.  I mean, instalove is clearly based heavily in physical attraction--at least, a reader's sympathy for it is.  And, forgive the TMI and the high-handedness, but I've never been someone who's so swept up in the FEELINGS of the moment/body that I have not known where I was.  So it just doesn't hook up with my experience in general, and I suspect that for most people, the further you get from adolescence the less familiar that sense of "lust/not thinking clearly" becomes.

2) goes the same way--this is something we discussed in my library science YA class.  Basically, young adults are dealing with all this stuff for the first time, and so it's way more confusing and intense to them.  It feels more REAL, because they haven't felt all excited about someone and had it mean absolutely nothing a million times the way us grown ups have.

3) I agree that Akiva did almost nothing for me, and standard hotness does pretty much nothing for me.  I mean, I'll look at the guys in the movies as much as the next lady, but what I'm going to pine for is the personality, and Akiva is definitely thin on that.  Another reason the book took a dive when he showed up.  

4) Three words: His Dark Materials.  Literally the only books I can think of that really gave me a reason why two people could actually matter that much without being the Chosen Ones (which is ludicrous), and why their relationship would matter.  I mean, I guess Adam and Eve, but they were the whole world at the time, so not a fair comparison.  For examples of this done poorly--oh, I could go on forever.  I actually love the ending of The Amber Spyglass just because that whole relationship turned that expectation--our love will Change the World!--on its head.

Okay, I'm going to bed now and haven't even finished the book; more tomorrow though.  And I'm already waiting for Days of Blood and Starlight (which title already has a dozen permutations in my head involving words like Nights of Dust and Diamonds and is starting to sound like a romance novel) from the library!

Lianna:  I guessed the reincarnation because of the way Karou kept seeing glimpses of an "other" Akiva-- smiling, with less tattoos, etc.

And yes about the book becoming about their love instead of their love being one of the things happening in the book. It's like the love story ate the rest of the book.

Sharon: I think the problem was not that the story was structured around their love story--because if you have a story about two people who defy their nations to bridge a gap of war, there are only so many kinds of bonds you can make that about.  It's that all the MEANING of the story was tied up in their love.  I definitely think it's partly a factor of being an adult that you really understand all the many variations of motivation that exist in the world.  Honestly, the relationship between Karou/Madrigal and Brimstone seemed way more compelling to me than the relationship with Akiva, but of course, the Akiva one is going to change the world.  I love the idea of Brimstone "using" her like that, and how morally ambiguous that is, but also how good and right. 

But now I'm rewriting the book, and that's not fair.  You can't judge a book on what it could have tried to be.  

I'm actually hoping the next one might be a bit more interesting, because Akiva is clearly kind of cranky and grim, but his fluctuation in his feelings about the seraphim and chimera vary so widely that I'm really hoping his trajectory gets more interesting.  But I'm also hoping that we stay with Karou a lot more.  

Akiva is now firmly in Gale territory with me--I was fine with him till he got all warlike, and then he lost me.  And he only regrets it now that she's back--boo hoo.  I kind of wish he'd turn out to be the bad guy, or a character who has to die to be redeemed.  Not likely in a romance, though.

I assume it's a trilogy.  I hope the next one doesn't fall prey to middle book syndrome!

Lianna: I'm looking forward to watching Karou get her vengeance on.

I've realized I'm doing quite a bit of complaining about a book I really enjoyed. Allow me to touch upon the Awesome again: Daughter of Smoke and Bone is smarter and grittier than most YA Fantasy I've read. Karou successfully walks the heroine line between kickass and vulnerable, and I loved the world building so much I want to jet over to Prague and wander the meandering back alleys until I come across the entrance to Brimstone's shop. And that's pretty much the highest compliment I can bestow on a work of Fantasy: it makes me wish that it was all real.

Never Should You Ever

I realize that writing straight reviews is  not my strong suit.  And writing reviews a week after I finished the book--well, I'm out of my element.  But I'm going to give it the old college try and talk a bit about The Never List, by Koethi Zan. 


This is a thriller, and if you're not someone who would read a book whose main character is a survivor of five years chained up in an evil guy's basement with three other girls, then you should just not pick this one up.  It's not terribly explicit in its violence, but the narrator here was kidnapped and tortured and this is a book about that.

Rather, it's a book about the aftermath of that, which I thought was very interesting.  It's ten years later, and the three survivors have gone in very different directions--one is living a quiet, peaceful life as a shut-in, one is a polished, shining, wealthy mom whose husband has no idea of her past, and a third is a radical feminist academic.  The fourth, Jennifer, was killed by their captor, though her body was never found.

The lack of a body means that, ten years later, Bad Guy is up for parole, and that's enough to bring Sarah out of her apartment for the first time in five years.  Jennifer had been her best friend, and Sarah wants to finally find her body and lay her memories to rest.

There are some interesting things going on here that really drew me into the book--the first part, about Jennifer and Sarah's childhoods, is told almost as though they were one person.  Everything is "we" and "us."  I almost wondered if it was going to be a story about someone with multiple personalities or some other psychological twist.  This blurring of personal boundaries comes up at other points in the story, and it's interesting when it brings characters together as a team when you might not expect them to be.

Unfortunately, some things don't hang together as well as they might.  It's another example of authorial trust--the beginning was strong and I found myself trusting the author.  But there are some major plot points here that hinge heavily on people making obviously bad moves because they feel "right" or "like something I had to do."  You do not ditch your police protection to do something incredibly dangerous just because you want to be empowered!  You take the police WITH YOU on that trip!  There is no reason at all that you should do that without a SWAT team.

The further in I got, the more of these moments there were, right up until the end, which was unfortunately predictable in its broad strokes, though the details were pretty engaging.  If I'd been willing to suspend my disbelief, or if the author had done just a bit more hand waving regarding why our Paranoid But Intrepid Heroine was doing all this stuff by herself, it might have hung together better.  As it was, I felt like it was the first half of the final draft of the book, followed by the second half of the first draft.

Sigh; Netgalley's going to hate me if I keep ripping on their stuff like this.

Pardon My French

Public Service Announcement:

http://www.gothefucktothelibrary.com/

Paroxysms of Joy

Oh, guys, I'm so excited.  A bright little world has opened up before me.

Did you know that my Kindle has speakers?  I did not know this.  I knew it had a text-to-speech feature (not using that; it's for pros), and the ability to play audiobooks.  I knew it had a headphone jack, and I even knew that it could (theoretically) sync up the ebook I'm reading with the audio version so that I can switch back and forth.

What I didn't know was that it has speakers.  I do not need headphones, earbuds, or anything else with a cord.  And this tiny revelation has changed my world.

Because when I started listening to an audiobook on here, I realized how much of a pain in the butt my iPod is.  It's great for music, but I've just never liked it for books.  You have to navigate too far to get from music to books.  The chapter divisions in the books don't make sense, and if you lose your place, you'll never find it again.  The fast forward and rewinds are not great.  It's just not ideal.

Thank you, Brenda (and Jason), for pushing The Dresden Files on me.  I'm listening to the first book right now, and aside from it being a really good book, it's read by James Marsters, who is aurally smokin hot.  (Also in other, non-audiobook-related ways, but let's stay on topic.)  His acting--at least is voice acting here--is really excellent, the characters distinct without sounding silly, and the hard-bitten detective thing really captured without overdoing it.  I'm having a lot of fun.

I have strong opinions on audiobooks.  I used to listen to a ton of them; when I worked in Back Bay, I'd add a 20 minute walk to my commute to listen to books.  I had an Audible subscription, and a very clear idea of what I was looking for in a reader.

Then there was no commute, and I can't listen to audiobooks when Adam's talking (read: when he's awake and in my presence).  I had a bus commute--good for reading, not listening.  And now I have a bike commute--except when it's raining, or when I have large things to bring to or from work.  Or when I'm not feeling well, or my bike isn't.  It's not infrequent, that drive to work, and being able to plug my Kindle--which is always at hand--into the car stereo and just press a button is so much better than wrestling my iPod out and drilling through the menus.

Guys, I might just have to reinstate my Audible membership.

Life. Changing.

Pilgrim's Progress

Everything I knew about Hillary Jordan's When She Woke before I started reading it was that it was a futuristic Scarlet Letter, where the adulteress was dyed bright red.  This could have gone a few ways--The Scarlet Letter is a great book, but the resetting of a story that depends so heavily on the cultural mores of a moment is quite tricky.  I was afraid that the author would shape a future dystopia that looked just like Puritan New England, which seems kind of redundant and forced.

Happily, the Scarlet Letter is just a launching point for this story.  For some reason it made me think of The Handmaid's Tale, even though the world wasn't so foreign as that.  It was more the tone, the sense of sexual repression being pervasively in the air.  I also thought of Citizen Ruth, the movie with Laura Dern.  Again, one woman's body becomes a political issue.

Even more, though, I'm reminded of the way that movie went through specific phases. Ruth starts in one place, gets swept to another group of people, moves on to another life.  It seems like there ought to be a word for stories like this, where the acts are basically very different worlds that the character travels through--Watership Down, Ursula LeGuin's Powers, all kinds of books do this.  When She Woke is one of these.

It starts out all Hester Prynne--Hannah has been treated with a virus that turns all her skin bright red.  She's serving one month in a small cell.  Her crime was having an abortion, but her sentence is longer because she won't name the father.  You can guess, perhaps, who he is.  Anyway, the prison sentence is short, because the "chroming" is long--for 16 years, she will be instantly recognizable by everyone she meets as a felon. 

Her very religious family is not okay with what she's done.  To be honest, she's not, either--Hannah is a true believer in everything she's been raised to, in a future Texas where her pastor has just been named the nation's Minister of Faith.  So after prison, she goes to a halfway house.  From there she moves into other worlds, meets other groups of people with other values, other goals.  With each experience she re-examines her beliefs, and her understanding of the world is adjusted.

This is an overtly political book, and its greatest strength is in showing how a kind, generous person can hold unexamined, simply-justified beliefs that are oppressive and harmful.  Even better, we get to watch her mind change, to see which of her beliefs need to be examined.  I'm not sure if it's a bit simplistic, or if it really is a very simple process.  Either way, it's an educational journey for Hannah, and some good, creepy worldbuilding for us.

I'm not quite done, and I have to say, though, that it's getting a little extreme as we approach the end.  Things might be going off the rails a bit, in terms of Hannah becoming open minded; I'm not sure yet if it's part of her psychological journey, or if it's overkill on the author's part.  We'll see.

I love me some world building, and this one hit eerily close to home.  If only for that, I'm definitely glad I finally got around to this one.

Glut

I'm swimming in middles right now.  I keep starting, and when I get print books from the library, I have to dive in because there are time limits, you understand.  So here I am reading Daughter of Smoke and Bone, but slowly, because the last two chapters spent way too much time on instalove, but also reading Ruby Red, because everybody recommended it but then I couldn't renew it and it turned out to be pretty good.

Except--let's move into an aside here, because when I try to organize my blog posts I end up not posting for weeks at a time, so we're going to do a free-form, stream-of-consciousness thing here--that Ruby Red suffers from a problem that is right up there on my pet peeves list next to instalove, and that is unnecessary reticence.  That is, when a lot of this person's problems would be solved if they just enlisted the right ally, but they don't, because then the story would be over.  This happens a lot in YA books, because if you bring in an adult there's a good chance they could solve the whole problem.  A book has to explain to me why that won't work in a way that I'd believe it.

Gwendolyn, the main character in Ruby Red, has a cousin who's going to be a time traveler, and her whole family is waiting with bated breath for her to make her first trip.  There is no reason on earth to suspect they'll think she's crazy if she admits to time traveling herself.  This contradiction is a thin excuse for her to keep a secret that the story requires be kept, not a rational reaction on the part of the character.  I'm still reading, though, because otherwise it's quite good.

Then there's still In This House of Brede, which is long and nunnish, and I will bask in as long as I can.

And let's see, what else?  I figured out how to use audio books from Audible on my Kindle (did you know that my Kindle has speakers?!?  I can just set it next to me on the counter when I'm in the kitchen and it will read to me!) and James Marsters is reading me Jim Butcher's first Dresden Files book, Storm Front. He's doing a bang-up job, too; I could listen to him talk all day--and now I can!

Kris really liked the Wool Omnibus, and I had already gotten it from Amazon ages ago, so I poked in on that.  It's a collection of story/novella-length pieces, and I'm enjoying it.  So far it's basically another take on far future dystopia, doing something similar to Maria V. Snyder's Inside Out, but I'm hoping that the thematic stuff gets a little more complex, because I think it's going to get better and there's a lot of room to explore some cool issues about resource allocation and how the real world requires unpleasant choices.

Oh, and I can't forget When She Woke, because it's great.  In fact, I think it'll probably get a review all its own when I'm done, but for now I'll just say it's kind of like The Handmaid's Tale meets The Scarlet Letter meets Citizen Ruth.  It's very explicitly political, but the first half, at least, is so thoughtful in portraying the point of view character that it works very well as a novel in spite of that.

So, that's the run down.  I have a couple of real reviews coming up, but I really think they're not my strength as a blogger.  I do better when I babble--at least, I post more consistently!

Double Rainbow!

I have come up with so many embarrassing puns about the name Rainbow Rowell that I just couldn't bear to put in the subject line.  It's a woman's name; I don't mean to make fun, I just want to be clever.  So Rainbow Rowell, if you ever make your way here after you read the thousands of other rave reviews of your recent book, I apologize.

Everyone was telling me how good Eleanor & Park was, but I had to wait for it from the library.  Somehow, the library patrons all seem to have missed her first novel, Attachments, so I snagged it and fell in love.

Lincoln works nights in the IT department at a newspaper in 1999.  The rather paranoid owners of the paper want to ensure that their employees are not misusing their fancy new technology (like email).  Lincoln's job is to make sure the servers don't crash and read people's email.  It is, needless to say, kind of a depressing job.

Lincoln isn't exactly depressed.  He's just sort of drifting.  He's been in college for a dozen years, and now he's back living at his mom's house.  He never quite got over his first girlfriend, and he doesn't quite know what he'd like to do.

Reluctantly reading his daylight-inhabiting coworkers' emails, he gets to know Beth, whose rock star boyfriend might not be right for her, and whose best friend Jennifer isn't sure if she wants kids, or if her ambivalence will cost her marriage. Lincoln falls for Beth, with the slight complication that they've never met, and that every email he reads is a little betrayal of this woman he so wants to meet.

I loved reading this book.  Beth and Jennifer are so much fun, their emails so funny and sweet, their friendship so real--they support each other, question each other's bad choices, even get annoyed with each other.  I liked Lincoln, too, and his comfortable, laissez faire attitude was as uncomfortably familiar as anything.  Even the fact that he's reading her email didn't bother me that much--though objectively it's kind of gross--probably because a) I'm an oversharer, and b) the voyeuristic part of reading the book in the first place muted the effect for me.  I didn't feel bad for reading their emails, so it didn't feel bad that he did it, either.

This is the part of the review that I'm never sure what to do with, though.  Spoiler alert, I guess?  This is the beginning of the spoiler alert, so this is where you should stop reading if you don't want any spoiling at all.  Because I have to tell you, the end of this book kind of sucked.  Like, not unsatisfying--it's the ending you wanted.  But I couldn't figure out as I was reading how the book was going to get there fairly, resolving all the issues.

And the answer is, magic.  Well, the magic of authorial intent.  Poof, everything is resolved!  After the very real, very human build up, it was a huge letdown.

I loved it enough, though, to head straight into Eleanor & Park when my library hold came up. And let me tell you, all those other people who've already told you to read this book?  They're right.  You should read this book.  High school romance, falling for someone you just met, cool kids drama--it even takes place on the school bus, for crying out loud--and I was really expecting I would have to be bored to tears here. 

But oh, no.  Part of the whole point of the book is about putting that kind of high school bull into perspective.  Explicitly, it's about what it's like to be different--good different, okay different, bad different, hard-to-explain different--but implicitly, it's about the fact that all those other opinions both do and don't matter.  You have to live through high school, and then after that you have to live in the world that really exists.

And your internal life, your wants and goals, they're big and important and they mean a lot, but they don't exist in a vacuum.  Your parents, your classmates, your friends and even enemies, they all shape your life and they matter.  Eleanor & Park shows you that we don't exist in a vacuum, however much we might think that's better.  And really, in the end, it's not.

Also?  Best love story.  Best.  And I'd like to point out that the overly-self-conscious blurb of dialogue that's on the back of the book--about Jerry Lee Lewis and Bono and Romeo and Juliet?  That was precious and it put me off the book, but that's not what the book is like.  These are NOT ironic, tough, too-smart kids bluffing their way through.  These are sensitive, skittish kids, somehow, magically, finding each other.

In short, Eleanor & Park--go read this book right now.

Advance Reader Reviews

It occurs to me that most of the reviews I do of the books I get from Netgalley are very positive, and that this might seem a little sketchy.  What you don't see are all the books I get from Netgalley, read two pages of, and groan out loud.  I don't finish them, dear reader, and I can't in good conscience review a book that I read two pages of and said, "My eyes! Get it away!"

So, let me give you a quick no-title run-down of some of my advance reader experiences that I have been sparing you.

• Girl meets boy, girl loves boy, boy turns out to be AMISH, girl gives up her iPhone to join the Amish people for her boy.  This book used the phrases "that fateful day" and "couldn't imagine a world without him" in the first two pages.  It hurt my eyes, ladies and gentlemen.  In spite of its Amishness, because of the instalove problem, I put it down.
• A comic book adaptation of a traditional fairy tale turned out to be ALL BREASTS, ALL THE TIME. The images were practically writhing on the page, people.  I had to avert my eyes.
• Nuns!  I love nuns. I even love nonfiction about nuns. And this one started out good--when did they start convents here?  Who were those first sisters? What did they do, how were they received?  There's a good chapter on that at the beginning.  And then--AND THEN--begins the litany of each chapter that was founded, and where, and who financed it, and which nuns worked there, and whether it ran a school or a hospital.  It was brutally, unforgivingly boring.  It was as bad as that anthropology class in college that was just about teeth.  (Do any of my college friends read this blog?  I'm pretty sure Emily, Kaiva, and Noah were all in that class.  It was the worst class I ever took, bar none.)

So this is what I've given up on lately.  Looking back, though, I can see that I've given some lukewarm reviews, mostly of books I've just about forgotten (The Tragedy Paper, anyone?  One Step Too Far?).  I guess maybe I don't look as biased as I was feeling.  Well, I already wrote the post, so what the heck--we'll leave it here for you.

And I'll add a discussion question; right now, I post reviews  here and on Goodreads.  Should I start reviewing books on Amazon?  That seems like a whole other ball of fish (kettle of wax?), and I'm a little intimidated. I feel like I might want to write tighter reviews for that, and I'm worried about the time commitment.  Anyone have any thoughts?  Anyone?

Bueller?

Cults!

I love cults!  Sects and cults, totally my thing.  I mean, I'll take Catholic nuns, Hasidic Jews, Mormons, or the Amish, but I'm also up for a juicy Scientologist, a Jonestown, or, in Gated, the good folks of Mandrodage Meadows.

Lyla and her family live in the Community, which is mostly a back-to-the-earth, simple-living group who follow their charismatic leader, Pioneer, and raise their own food in their gated community.  Less widely known is the fact that they believe that the Brethren are going to destroy the Earth soon, but that the Community will survive this in their underground bunker and later be transported to a new world by these powerful Brethren.  Pioneer communicates with them, so everything should be fine.

(Let me put in the disclaimer here, that I got this free for review from Netgalley.)

Straight-up YA here, with a definite high school target audience, and I respect that.  This is really well-constructed; it's just what I want a book like this to be.  The whole point is to get into Lyla's head and to really understand how these crazy beliefs can make sense to her.  And you do--Pioneer is so loving, and her parents believe this (there's a really intense story about Lyla's kidnapped older sister and the panic of 9/11 to make even that more understandable), and all her friends do.  Her family has been happy at Mandrodage Meadows, and her life is good, and if things are a little rigid and there's target practice and talk of the evil of outsiders, well, it really does seem perfectly natural.

Then Lyla meets an outsider boy, and she goes all gaga.  This, too, is really well-handled--she doesn't do anything stupid (by my standards or her own), but she wants to, and this starts her thinking.  And these small mental rebellions open the way for bigger ones, as the pressure increases from both inside and out.

It occurred to me to wish for a more emotionally complicated end game--no spoilers, but at the end of the book, the good guys/bad guys thing is very black and white.  And I couldn't help thinking it would have been more messy and human if that had stayed gray all the way to the end, as it was so convincingly at the beginning.  But if you think about Jonestown, and Koresh, and any number of other examples, you'll realize that a big, ugly meltdown isn't unrealistic or sensational.  One kind of person starts a cult, and another kind joins one, and who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?  

I'm not going to universally recommend this as a YA book that transcends its intended audience and should be read by everyone.  But when I was a teenager, I would have gobbled this book up, and I'll admit that as an adult, I kind of did, too.  It was a quick, fun read, with some good, thoughtful psychology going on, which is more than I can say for a lot of cult books.  I'm really glad I picked this up.

Instalove

One of the reasons I don't read a lot of high school YA (which is to say, YA that takes place in an actual high school, as opposed to fantasy, science fiction, or generally speculative YA) is because of the predominance of romance plots.  I generally find straight-out romance to be a pretty tedious basis for a story, though it makes delightful subtext, fun B-story, and generally great background content.  But even my romance novels need some other pretty serious conflict going on--even if it's all personal/emotional--if I'm going to tolerate it.

High school stories, especially, also run the risk of the instalove problem, which is where two characters meet and are immediately in a romantic entanglement.  As in, there's no getting to know each other, no reaction besides attraction and affection and desire, and their feelings take on the same weight of importance as other, actually weighty things in the real world.

And example of this is Every Day, by David Levithan, which I loved, but which, it was pointed out in my book club, really rides on the fact that A and what's-her-name are meant to be together, and that they both feel instant, life altering feelings (and not just pants-feelings). At least that book was entirely about the life of this one person; the things that changed and were considered important because of this instalove were the things that are actually affected by being in love--your motivations, your life choices, whether you should try to date them.  Too often, instalove is also supposed to Change the World.

And oh, here's why Daughter of Smoke and Bone has ceased to charm me as much as it did when I started it. The first half is about Karou and her unusal life, her at school and wishes and friends and dangers and it's wonderful.  There's the mystery of what's going on with Brimstone, and the strange handprints and the ominous angels, and it's just really coming together.

And then Karou and Akiva make eye contact, and they are in LURVE.  And after almost no conversation, they know that they need each other, and they trust each other, and they're considering (one more than the other) giving up everything for each other.  And the story becomes about what's more important, your love or  your family, and UGH.  There's a promising undertone of what happens when your morals don't align with those of your loved ones, but it's muted by OMG HE'S SO GORGEOUS and you're so impressive, let's just be together. 

It's to the point where I'm almost disgusted, although really, it's just a chunk.  I think if could just get past the insta- part and take the -love as given--pretend the drama had been earned--I might be able to get back to enjoying the story, like what's up with Brimstone and what are Akiva's siblings going to do, exactly?  But oh, how his manly soul aches for her, and I can really hardly bear it.

Now, I just read another book, Gated, which had a much more appropriate use of the immediate infatuation thing.  First, it was very clear that the attraction was mostly physical--it was very much a 16 year old girl realizing that looking at this boy was just really, really enjoyable, and she'd REALLY like to look at him more, to the point where she makes what she would normally consider some bad decisions.  This is entirely reasonable and realistic--I'm not pretending teenagers don't get crazy over lust-crushes.  I'm just pointing out that I, the reader, am going to think they're being idiots if they treat them like life partnerships.

More on Gated soon; it was a lot of fun.  I really hope that, by the end of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, I can say that about this.

Deconstructing Fusion Literature

Book club time again, kids!  We read Reconstructing Amelia, by Kimberly McCreight.  My nutshell opinion: eh, probably don't bother.

If I say that the book is Gossip Girl meets Gone Girl, that will make it sound much better than it is.  I think it's more like it's trying to be that kind of one-two punch. High-powered lawyer and loving single mother Kate is called to come pick up her daughter at school, and when she arrives, Amelia has fallen from the school roof to her death.  Why would this down-to-earth, bookish girl do such a thing?  Kate can't imagine, and as she emerges from her grief, she decides to find out.

Two stories unfold--Kate's investigation into Amelia's death, and Amelia's account of the last few months of her life.  There are text conversations, Facebook updates, and posts from an anonymous gossip blog at Amelia's elite private school.  There are secret clubs, sexual awakenings, and Bar Association scandals.  The two stories--high school drama (crushes, clubs, love, friendship) and investigation of a tragedy (motives, anonymous texts, bribery, lies)--play out on pretty different levels. 

To be honest, the high school story worked better for me, which was surprising.  Each step Amelia takes makes sense to me.  When she chooses not to tell her mom or her teacher something, it seems like, if not a good decision, at least an understandable one.  They're teenagers, they're smart, but they want teenaged things and react in dumb, teenaged ways.  It was very human, and very believable.

The investigation, though?  Was daytime TV-worthy.  X was sleeping with Y, who was secretly the father of Z!  Did the principal know?  Did the cop get paid off?  Those texts were sent from where? By whom?  Wow, seriously?  Who was Amelia's father?  Woah, did we see that coming?  Yes, actually, we kind of did--so how come the characters didn't?  And since when does Lennie Briscoe let the grieving mom accompany him to interrogate witnesses? 

Another peeve--Kate.  Willfully blind, painted as a loving-if-overextended mom, she's not there for her kid.  When your kid is trying to talk to you and your phone rings, you don't say "I'll talk to you if it's important, but if not I'll take this call."  You weren't talking about what to watch on TV--she was trying to tell you something.  I could see that, even before we got the same scene from the daughter's point of view.  Kids don't beg for help--they need you to be standing there extending a hand before they reluctantly take it.  Even I know that.

So all her self-blame that I feel like the book wanted me to brush away--no, of course it's not your fault, there was nothing you could have done--kind of seemed reasonable to me.  Yeah, you weren't the great mom you thought you were.  Absent with good intentions is still absent.  And I'm not sure how much redemption you get for your pursuit of the truth after she's dead.  It's great and probably all you've got, but it would have been better to be there before.  Jeez, I'm mad at Kate--I generally don't like guilt-inducing pile-ons, but I feel like the book wanted me to dismiss her as a player in Amelia's tragedy, which she was not.

Ultimately, the tangled web was pretty messy, and the twists were so twisty as to be a little silly.  Did it keep me reading?  Sure.  Did I want desperately to know what had happened?  Absolutely.  Do I think you should pick it up because you're missing something cool?  No, not really.  Read Gillian Flynn for twists and Eleanor & Park for intense high school experiences; give this one a pass.

Uncaught Up

I was really expecting to use my vacation this weekend to catch up on some blogging.  Note to self: next time, double check to make sure the hotel has internet access.

I'm also finding that photos I took with my computer can't be located (which is a problem with Windows 8--everything is an "app" instead of an application, and it's frequently non-transparent with no visible Help.  So I can't show you the delightful photo I just took of my newest library book--suffice it to say that I love library bindings with those plain covers and white block letter imprinted titles on the spine.

I finished a couple of really good books in the past few days, which was kind of overwhelmingly satisfying.  I've been feeling slow as molasses lately, and I've finally figured out why; I lost a huge chunk of my reading time when I stopped taking the bus.  That was a full hour a day, probably more than half of my reading time--even more since the office moved and my commute is now a bus to a train.

Now, that's morphed into biking time most days, which is good for me and really enjoyable.  But it's completely changed my reading life, and that gap has become seriously noticeable.  Without that dedicated time, a lot of my reading is snatched in brief moments, and I get a lot less submerged in my books.  It's changing my brain, and I don't love it.

The question is what to do.  Any suggestions?  How do you fit reading time into a busy life?

Me vs. Book Club

As part of our "folks with funny names series," I present you with the heroine of Barbara Kingsolver's newest novel, Flight Behavior: Dellarobia Turnbow.  That's about all the mockery I have for the book, but I have to say that almost every time her name was mentioned, I was startled again by how weird it is.  It's meant to make you see how it would be hard to take her seriously, and I can't argue with that.

My book club considered this a 2-to-3 star book.  They thought it was slow and heavy-handed in its Message about Global Warming.  I can't argue too much with their specific points, but my feelings about the book were very different; I really enjoyed it, as I almost always enjoy Kingsolver's books.

First, I love the way she writes about rural people.  They are frequently poor, uneducated, stubborn, and hard, and their worlds contain all of the ugliness that poverty and ignorance can result in.  But they are not unintelligent, not evil, not some foreign, less-than "others."  The characters--Cub, Hester, Dellarobia, Bear, even their neighbors and friends--are individuals with their own histories and motivations, and their virtues are not just the "noble savage" virtues that a lot of "positive" images of rural people display.  I feel like she acknowledges their humanity without sugarcoating the difficulty and even brutality that can be a factor of living in rural poverty. 

The story in this book is about a flock of migrating monarch butterflies that end up in the wrong place for the winter.  Instead of a comfortable mountain in Mexico, they're in Tennessee, which is too cold for them.  They're discovered by Dellarobia, a somewhat dissatisfied farm wife, and become a scientific, local, and national phenomenon.  The monarchs' visit to the Turnbow forest stirs up a lot of issues--Dellarobia's crush on the scientist who comes to study them, her growing intellectual life and how that conflicts with the path she's been on, the small town vs. wider world thing, money troubles and logging rights, etc.  But over all of this, driven home and home and home again, is climate change.

The winter is wet and rainy and strange.  The butterflies are off course, when we don't even know how they ever kept their course.  The world is going to hell in an ecological handbasket, and the red states won't listen!  This is hammered home explicitly by angry rants, patient explanations, heated arguments.  Climate change is real and urgent and bad, and Kingsolver is letting you know that in no uncertain terms.  Repeatedly.  And this--justifiably, I think--detracted from the enjoyment most of my book club found here.

For me, though, I felt like climate change was the setting on which the personal story played out.  I didn't feel preached to, maybe because I've read enough other Kingsolver books (The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams, The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--wow, that's kind of a lot) to feel comfortable with her sermon-like way of telling a story.  I feel like she writes like she's lecturing even when she's not, and I like that--her certainty, her firmness, her earnest conviction.  Honestly, the hardest part for me is that she does love nature and lavish descriptions thereof; sometimes she can get going on natural description and leave me in the dust.

I do think that part of my reaction here was around the setting and the people.  The town I grew up in was nothing like the town here, but I grew up on a farm that my parents ran with my grandparents, and my grandparents were rigid people in many ways.  Dellarobia's relationship with and perceptions of Hester and Bear were very familiar to me, and reading especially about Dellarobia and Hester was quite poignant for me.

I really liked the book.  It was long, and took a long time to read, but I enjoyed every minute.  I guess this one is for Kingsolver fans--and I guess I'm a big one.

So Much Reading

You know how sometimes a blogger will disappear for a while, and then they'll come back and say "sorry, guys, but there was SO much going on in my personal life that was rough/awesome/in defiance of the laws of physics, but now I'm back and I'm not going to talk about that" and then never tells you what was going on?

Well, you're lucky, because guys, there was SO much going on in my reading life that was rough and awesome and in defiance of the laws of good taste, but I am SO going to subject you to all of it.  The only problem I have is that there are so many thoughts they are having trouble coming together to form coherent posts. 

I've been deeply immersed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer this year. I watched the entire series through the course of several snow-day binges and a few weeks of a very tolerant husband letting me do my two-episodes-a-night thing.  It was almost unhealthy, how into it I got.  But guys, it's a really, really good show.  The acting is great, the balance between the personal and the adventurous is excellent, and of course the writing.  I mean, if you're not already a fan of Joss Whedon--well, I'm not sure why you're reading my blog, because I can't imagine our tastes overlap much.

When I ran out of episodes, I tried to watch Angel, but that kind of sucked.  I suspect it's mostly just that the first season sucks, but honestly, I don't like Angel very much.  Tortured doesn't do much for me.  I might try some more when I'm desperate, but for now, I've turned instead to the comics.

Now, here I'm going to go about things a bit backward.  Again, I am so intensely immersed in this experience that I can't really sort out my feelings, so I'm just going to start in the middle, somewhere I can explain what I'm thinking: Angel & Faith.

So the Buffy comics start with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, which I'm not ready to talk about yet, but will be shortly, don't you fret. (Seussed!)  Sufficient for now is that it's deeply flawed, but also full of all those characters I loved and missed so much.  And at the end of that series (mildest of spoilers) Angel is a mess and Faith is taking care of him.

Thus begins the spinoff, Angel & Faith, which is part of the Buffyverse Season 9.  It takes place at the same time as the Buffy Season 9 stories, but they don't share any characters or story elements (yet). (Caution: things get more spoily as we go on.  No direct giveaways, but if you know the characters you might end up figuring some things out.)

Okay, so all that is the backstory of my reading life that has kept me from writing this post for so long.  Anyway, here's the thing about this series.  Buffy Season 8 was kind of a mess, plotwise.  It read very much like a bunch of people passing the story around between them--major plot elements fell out of the sky (sometimes literally), Important Truths about the Nature of Magic that had been previously unknown to everyone were revealed and then messed with.  It was story whiplash.  Here, in the first book of Season 9, you're watching a gifted writer, Christos Gage, dig his way out.

He does an admirable job, really.  He takes some of the prepostrosities (a word that I just made up, thank you, and am quite proud of) that he was left with, runs with them in the only reasonable (albeit ridiculous) direction, and then has someone in-story say, "wait a minute, this is kind of nuts."  And then suddenly it's not badly written nuts, but just post-traumatic vampire nuts.  He pulls things back from the edge quite admirably, and for that I am grateful.

Now, Eliza Dushku is as convincing an actress as a three year old with a mouthful of cookies.  I have always kind of liked Faith for her badassness, but Mike can't stand her, even in the comics, because he reads her dialogue with her stiff delivery.  I personally think Faith is the only role for Dushku--like Keanu Reeves in Speed, she'd be fine if she just stayed typecast--so I'm cool with that.  And her voice, of course, is captured full of its slang and catchphrases.

The problem--the whole problem--is Angel, in the long and short term.  As I said, I've never cared for him; he jerked Buffy around (mostly motivated by wanting a spinoff, but still), he turned into Angelus at the drop of a hat, and he actively shunned happiness because he thought pain made him sharper.  Sounds like a 23 year old living in a garret and writing his memoirs to me--not someone I want to know.

Here again, you have him actively facing his own suffering and refusing to come to terms with it.  I'm not against atonement, or even the notion that he needs his powers to do the good that constitutes that atonement.  It's all the little ways that he could be less-than-miserable while doing these things that don't make sense.  It's his totally counter-Buddhist insistence on focusing on the past at the expense of the present or the future. 

And see, that's something (Buddhism again) causes EVERYONE'S suffering.  Mine too--I do that!  But I know that trying to undo the past--as opposed to make the best future possible--is pointless.  I know it intellectually, even as I struggle to live it day to day.  Lots of people do.  But in a fantasy universe, you can get away with trying to undo things that can't be undone for a lot longer, and it's hard to tell a denial-like character flaw from a virtuous determination to right a cosmic wrong.  (Sorry to be vague; I'm actively Not Spoiling.)

Anyway, this was a problem with his TV show (to the extent that I watched it), as well.  I'm never quite on board with his logic, and I'm never quite sure if the writer wants me to be.  Am I supposed to admire his determination, or wonder if maybe he's a little, you know, insane?  On TV, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to admire him.  In the comic, though, Faith frequently steps up to say what I'm thinking--"Maybe this isn't such a good idea."

Angel doesn't give up (of course), but neither is faith seduced into his world of Sisyphean struggle.  This makes the overarching tension one I'm really digging--the comic is looking askance at the same things I am!  My sensibilities, are being honored!  I'm all over this!

At least in volume one.  Halfway through volume two, we're pushing the other side of this balance a little; one's understanding of mythology allows one to recognize the bad guys and prevents one from siding with them, even when the good guys aren't making as much sense as you'd like them to.  It's like the X-Men problem--Magneto's politics seem way closer to justice and pragmatism than Xavier's.  When the Big Bad is making sense to me, I start to worry that the writer is going to a) try to make me change my mind, or b) duck out the back door with the logic and bring a convenient deus in from the machina to wrap everything up without addressing the real issues.

See how much I have to say here?  And this is just the SPINOFF series.  I haven't even begun to discuss Buffy, seasons 8 OR 9.  I'm exhausted just thinking about it.  Can you forgive me for taking so many weeks to post this? 

And, to begin a little overarching theme in these upcoming posts: what kind of name is Buffy, anyway?

Let's Rant

Wow, it's been a while.  Spring is a busy time, and I started a bunch of books and then put them aside to read for book club.  So it's been a while since I finished something.  Also, I have some Big Things I want to talk about--Buffy! Comics!--some vast, sweeping subjects that have been quite intimidating when I sit down to them.

So let's start out with a little rant.  Lianna, this one's for you.

I read this book about three years ago.  I'm going to give away the entire plot, so I'm not going to give the title of the book, but it's got enough searchable keywords that you'll have no problem finding it if you want to.  I can't believe, looking back, that I gave it two stars--it speaks to something that it made enough sense at the time that I gave it the benefit of the doubt. 

But last week, I suddenly thought of this book, and I started laughing.  For two days, every few hours I'd belt out a laugh at how ludicrous the whole damned thing was.  A girl is at a gas station and she sees a guy in a full-on rabbit costume kidnap a kid from the back of a car where she's waiting for her mom.  Now, it turns out that this girl just HAPPENS to have a traumatic childhood memory that is at least loosely associated with a man in a full-on rabbit costume, as well as a best friend from childhood who disappeared when she was young.  So this is a mind-blowing experience for her, and she gets involved in the investigation.

First off, let's think about how preposterous that is.  I mean, on one hand, if you're going to kidnap a kid, there's no better way to hide your appearance than a complete body costume.  On the other, in a small town, how hard can it be to track down the guy who owns or rents a rabbit costume?  And then, I'll point out that the fact that the witness is childhood-bunny-memory-girl is a complete coincidence, not some sort of gaslighting psychological torture on the poor girl.  So, this small town is pretty messed up, right?

Okay, so that's one level of ridiculous.  Now let me tell you the big reveal at the end.  Because when it's revealed as a twist, it's kind of shocking, but when you think about it as something that was lived through, you're like, WHAT?!?

So the wife of the convenience store owner had a best friend who disappeared when she was a small child.  Apparently, this messed her up royally because now, 40 years later, she felt the burning psychological need to get involved in a missing person investigation. So she had her nephew come kidnap a kid as a harmless prank.  All in good fun, right?  Why did he wear the rabbit suit?  Well, because kidnapping a kid in a rabbit suit is a good plan.

Now, he was supposed to just take her across town and hide her at a campsite for a day or so.  Then auntie could come out as the hero.  But the kid panics in the car and there's a kerfuffle that ends with her falling out of the car on the highway and DYING.  Because apparently kidnapping someone for kicks is not as frigging foolproof as you might think.  So the dude hides the body and then shows up to help with the search like nothing happened.

In the meantime, in a startling demonstration of Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, he spends a couple hundred pages being a love interest for the girl who was traumatized by a guy in a rabbit suit years ago.  If only there was a layer of meaning about how she's being haunted by the rabbit suit.  If only it made any sense at all!

If only.

Anyway, I got a laugh out of that book, many years later.  But I somehow can't bear to put the title, and I really think it's because I'm afraid the author will Google herself and find this and be really hurt.  That's a pretty thin protection I'm leaving, isn't it?  Eh, well.  It's not a very good book.

Those Magic Words (and Some Musings)

IN TRANSIT.  As in the library system is sending the books I want in my direction.  Calloo-callay! 

I'm sorry about the dearth of posts.  I have about four half-written, but spring has impinged on my time, and I'm busy being a social butterfly.  But I'm planning to write a rant later tonight--watch for it!

Also, I just spotted this in an old post at Jenny's Books, which I think is very useful.  I don't know why I didn't recognize it--I've read that post twice--but somehow today it struck me.

"I like books in which principles and values are challenged by a changing reality in interesting ways and the holders of those values have to figure out what to do about it. This is a pretty broad scope of things....It’s also why I do not enjoy books about how stifling the status quo is and the search for meaning within a routine world. Boring! Boring! Boring! Have some new situation for your characters to confront and then we can talk."

I'm aggressively not reading her recent review of Days of Blood and Starlight, because I'm only halfway through Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  And oh, I so love it!

My Soapbox

Many thanks to Sarah for this link:

30 Things to Tell a Book Snob

I had a great conversation with someone in the writing world recently about how literary writers talk about the demise of the reader, but a) it doesn't exactly exist, and b) to the extent that it does, that's because so many literary writers consider their audience to be other writers.  The reader is a different person than a writer, and when the writer forgets that--when s/he writes for him/herself and his/her MFA classmates--then yes, their audience does get smaller.  Go figure.

But this article goes way beyond my usual lit fic bashing and genre defense.  It's not just about types of writing--it's full of good tidbits.  And I don't know who Martin Amis is, but I hate him already!

(Brenda, don't let the Beatles and Shakespeare references defeat the point.  They are actually very good entertainers!)
------------------
Editing, because this is TOO good not to share, and thanks again to Sarah.  The Wikipedia entry on Martin Amis begins:

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness".^[4] Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father, Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style...that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.

Right!?  I'm going to start a magazine called The New Unpleasantness.

Structural Integrity

Another book from Netgalley--One Step Too Far, by Tina Seskis.  If this book was a house, you would be sitting in your well-appointed living room enjoying a glass of white wine and listening to Mozart when you feel something weird and shaky happen, and you realize that the whole house has shifted a foot to the left.  You call the contractor and he's like, seriously, dude, you have to move out--the foundation is a COMPLETE MESS.

Because this book has some lovely writing and some incredibly cool scenes about how you leave your life and everything you've ever known behind, but there are some serious structural flaws that get worse and worse over the course of the book till it falls completely apart in the epilogue.  At the beginning, I was intrigued.  Emily Coleman is on a train, speeding away from her husband and her house and her life and everything she's ever known to start a new life, because of something horrible and unnamed.  The story proceeds in the presence as she finds herself in a new city with no plan, no friends, just a relatively small stash of money, while flashbacks in parallel tell about Emily's childhood, her marriage, her family, until the two stories converge at the end.

I suspected pretty early that I had guessed what the big reveal would be; I ended up being wrong.  That's good. But I think it wasn't actually as impressive as it needed to me--the tone was, I think, a bit of an issue here.  Or maybe tone isn't the right word, but intensity?  People's emotional reactions and the narrator's sense of intensity did not always match the objective circumstances as I perceived them.  In some places, there's clear "I just have a lot going on!" going on, and you can see it as being appropriately inappropriate, but in others, it just reads wrong.

I'm not sure if this is actually a Writing Error or more of my pet peeve, but if you aren't Virginia Woolf, don't change third person limited viewpoint characters in the middle of a paragraph.  If we know what Bill is thinking (he's so surprised he can't think of anything to say), don't tell me what Jane thinks of his reaction (she's surprised by his silence).  This is either a super-basic error or an attempt at super-advanced writing; if we can't tell, it didn't work out.

Also, if you're telling the current story in the first person present tense and then flashing back to the character's past in the third person, it's okay to interpose some chapters from the point of view of her family, sure.  You get a better picture of her life this way.  It is not okay to do very, very occasional flashbacks into the history of a secondary character.  This will imply that this character's past will tie together with your main character's past in some way, rather than just that you made up a really cool back story for the roommate and couldn't bear to cut it out of the book.

I feel so whiny, I'm going to stop.  The problem is that I liked the beginning so much, I'm kind of heartbroken that the end turned out to be not just a letdown but an actual mess.  (Also, what's up with Caroline?  How random is pretty much everything about her?)

God, I suck at ARCs.  I feel like I should apologize to Tina Seskis, who clearly had some great ideas and some great chunks of book but was trying to write something much more ambitious and ended up trimming it in a lot of awkward places.  Watching Emily turn herself into Cat--Emily, who is like me into Cat who is someone I'm kind of afraid of (and for)--is a really wonderful story.  It's the coming back to Emily that is messy.

What's Love Got to Do with It?

I think I capitalized that right; I really hate the headline capitalization rules, since I find they frequently look wrong when they're right and vice versa.

I am not a frequent reader of romances, but I'm not in any way opposed to them.  As with any section of the bookstore, there's a lot of chaff in with the wheat, and I don't have the kind of context or network I need to find the good stuff easily.  Interesting characters, a compelling story, clever dialog--I have some favorite romances.  So when I see an interesting recommendation or a good premise outlined in a Netgalley blurb, I'll jump on it.

The Spinster's Secret, by Emily Larkin, had the latter going for it.  Mattie is a spinster living in her uncle's dreary house.  To earn money and her freedom, she writes salacious novels under the pen name Cherie.  When her uncle commissions her late cousin's friend to find out who's been writing the dirty books and run them out of town, Mattie is torn between her career and her heart.

Sort of.  I mean, that's not a very good description I'm giving there--she's not very torn at all.  No one is here--there's really nothing keeping the hero and heroine apart.  Which is fine, I think--the big strength of this book is that it's a very nice, pleasant story of two people meeting and becoming friends.  I like them both very much, and they're pitted against the cartoonishly miserly and uptight uncle, which makes them positively heroic.

Isn't that cover awful, by the way?  Okay, so a big point of the story is that they're neither of them very attractive people.  She's six feet tall and muscular--normal-pretty, but mocked for her proportions.  They spend a lot of time talking about her deep bosom and wide hips--and also how shapeless and ugly her clothes are (not that the descriptions are any more pleasing when she's out of them).  He's a huge man who has been terribly scarred in battle--scarred face, limp, lost part of a hand and an ear.  Does the cover above reflect this?  Aside from his being pale in an unhealthy way, I don't think those people fit the description.

So I really liked the first half of this book, in a meandering, story of a relationship kind of way.  Then you get to the love scenes, and ugh.  It's just dry.  I mean, I don't get worked up by romance sex at the best of times, but at least I like to get the impression that the characters are.  These people are dutiful and plodding to the end.  They enjoy having sex with each other--and that description right there is about as exciting as it gets.  The sex scenes in the book-within-the-book are almost better, and they're cleaned up.

I would have given this book four stars at the halfway point, but it comes in at three in the end.  I don't require hot-and-bothered, but warm-and-energetic, at least, please.

Netguilty

I was reading this post at Jenny's Books about a Netgalley themed anxiety dream and I felt that it encapsulated a problem I've had for a few weeks now, which is duty reading.  Specifically, I have no self control when it comes to browsing, especially when there's no money involved.  This is why I never come home from the library with fewer then five books (frequently more like 15), and why I have way too many advanced reader's copies to finish in any kind of reasonable amount of time.

And the worst part is, some of them are only mildly interesting to me.  I mean, there are so many books I want to be reading RIGHT NOW, and most of the ARCs I have from Netgalley look interesting, but are things I've never heard of, by authors I've never heard of. 

Can you believe I haven't read Black Powder War yet?  I mean, how did I not race through all the Temeraire books already?  Well, it's because I haven't come anywhere near reading all the Miles Vorkosigan books yet, either.  But I can't start those, because now I'm really excited to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which I was so excited about when I got it for Christmas.

In the past couple of years, I've gotten really good at putting down a book that's not doing anything for me in the first few chapters.  Life is getting shorter, the list is getting longer, we've got to keep this thing moving.  But I have way more trouble doing that with Netgalley titles.  I need to get my reviewed percentage up, just so I don't feel like I'm stealing.  I think I need to shoot for 30%.  Right now I'm at something abysmal like 15%.  Maybe even worse.

I've been thinking I should post some Amazon reviews, too.  My blog posts don't translate very well to actual "reviews," so when I do a review on Goodreads it's usually completely separate from the blog.  But there's no reason not to put it on Amazon.  Though I'm not sure if I'm just heaping more work on my shoulders for no particular reason.  ARCs are great and all, but darn it, all this is cutting into my reading time.

In fact, what am I doing here?  Later, suckers--the heroine in this romance novel is about to get some action.

Don't Hate the Game, Hate the Player

I can't stand Hayden Christensen, and I've made no secret of this.  The only movie I ever liked him in was Shattered Glass, and even in that his performance was somewhere between wooden and melodramatic.  (You should totally see that movie, though.)

So I never watched the movie Jumper, even though the premise sounded great, because the movie looked horrible.  And by all accounts, it's a very, very bad movie.  So why, exactly, did I pick up the book?  Even more startling, why did I pay money for it?  I honestly can't remember--it was definitely a review somewhere, but I'm pretty sure not on one of the blogs I read regularly (though I apologize if I'm misremembering that).  It's the first book in a while that I was really sold on by the free Kindle sample from Amazon, so way to market, guys.

The novel Jumper is by Steven Gould, and you should ignore the cover you see over there.  None of the covers are actually very good.  The book, however, is so much better than you'd expect. 

First, ignore the blurb for the movie, because while the premise may be the same (17-year-old guy suddenly discovers he can teleport), the plot is totally different.  There's no ancient war between his people and their enemies, no secret cabal dedicated to his destruction.  There's no complicated underworld he enters.  That's the best part of the book, really--a large portion of it is just about what you do when you suddenly discover you have a superpower.  It's very much like the beginning of Spider-Man. 

Davy's father is beating the tar out of him for the millionth time when he suddenly finds himself at the library.  He assumes he had some sort of blackout, but soon he realizes that he has the ability to teleport, or jump, to anyplace he's ever been.  He learns to control the power, escapes from his father, and sets out to build himself a life.  Some things are easy (transportation), some things are morally tough for a kid on his own (he can't get a job without a Social Security card), and some things are just as hard for Davy as they would be for anyone else.

There's a lot of great how-to and worldbuilding here--where does Davy go when he can go anywhere?  If money doesn't matter, how do you live, and why?  The first half of the book is just this wonderful accretion of figuring out how this thing works and what to do with it.  In the second half of the book, (action hero voice) things get personal, and Davy takes on terrorism, the NSA, and ghosts from his own past.  But can he find his way to a future?

There are flaws here--there's a girl who's very much his strong, nurturing woman friend.  But really, this book is a bit of a thought experiment in the emotional and social effects of teleportation, and that is kind of my favorite kind of book.  I'm not going to say you should run right out and read it, but I do wish there were more books like this on my to-read list.

Behind the Book

I'm usually not a fan of author readings.  Really, I'm not a big fan of getting to know the people behind most works I enjoy--I don't want to know more about actors or directors or writers.  Statistically speaking, I'm going to dislike some of the people involved in my favorite books and movies.  Almost as bad, I'm going to be really fond of the author of something awful, and that will just be uncomfortable.  I'd much rather deal with the work than with the people behind it.

But I hereby make an exception for Mary Roach, who is welcome to be my new best friend or my honorary aunt or just to come to karaoke this weekend, because I really just want to hang out with her.

Roach is starting up a tour for her new book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.  I've read a bunch of her previous books (Spook, Stiff, Bonk, Packing for Mars; here's my review of Spook, which I think is my favorite).  I love people who do in-depth research and then tell me about the fun bits; this is what I'm looking for in nonfiction, and Mary Roach is the Sarah Vowell of science (as Sarah Vowell is the Mary Roach of history).  Her books are fun and irreverent and interesting and thoughtful. 

And then I saw her speak, and she is ALL THOSE THINGS!  It was thrilling!  Interestingly, the format of the talk was a conversation between her and Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of Cooks Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen.  I have no particular position on Christopher Kimball, because I find CI and ATK to be way too involved and complicated, and I'm just not up for doing 75% more cooking for a 10% better product.  But my good friend Kris, who sat next to me during the talk, hates him with a passion, and by the end of the discussion I was right there with her.

Mary Roach would be funny, and Christopher Kimball would try to be funnier, but end up being not funny.  In asking her to tell an anecdote, he would basically tell the anecdote, leaving her to come up with something else to talk about.  He kept bringing up quotes from her previous books--this is not a rock show.  I already read that book. 

But Mary, she was delightful.  She was sly and clever and smart and interested.  There's so much to be said for a childlike sense of wonder, and that irreverent wink she seems to be giving you in her books shines through when she talks.  She really does find all this stuff absolutely fascinating, and she's really happy to share it with you.  I highly recommend going to see her, if you can.  And I'm going to buy a copy of Gulp, just as soon as I finish three of the eight books I'm reading right now. 

Or maybe two. I'm not made of stone.

Midpoint Commentary

True to my quirky, offbeat, charming (I'm charming, right?  RIGHT?) format, I feel the need to write about a book I'm smack in the middle of.  I honestly don't quite understand waiting till you're done with a book to want to talk about it--I mean, now is when I'm chewing it over in my head, right?  So I seize the moment.

It's called One Step Too Far, by Tina Seskis.  I've never read or heard of the author before--I was drawn to the blurb, picked it up somewhat randomly, and the premise is quite intriguing.  It opens with Emily on a train, speeding away from her husband, child, home, and life with the contents of her duffel.  She's clearly in a bad place--they'll be better off without her, she needs to just get away and start over cleanly.  But there's no real information on what she's escaping from.

The story flips back and forth between the present--Emily calls herself Cat, finds a room, looks for a job--and flashbacks.  Childhood, meeting her husband, her relationship with her sister.  Good, compelling snippets that are fitting together to show a nice life and hint at the darkness that's coming.  I'm having a good time with the book.

But here's where the authorial trust thing comes in.  There are some slightly risky things going on here, and I don't know Tina Seskis at all.  I have no idea if these choices she's making--the frequent switches of viewpoint character in the flashbacks; the very broad showing-not-telling descriptions of Emily's early childhood--are fumbles or solid choices. 

I won't know till we get to the end.  Honestly, this is more of a nailbiter for me in a book than actual will-they-won't-they questions about spies getting caught or characters hooking up--is the author giving me a flashback to this secondary character's childhood for a reason?  Or just because they thought it was interesting character building?  Are we going to delve into everyone's past as we go on, or was that one non-Emily history a one-off?  The tension, it's killing me. 

So far, though, there's some great stuff going on here.  I love detailed how-tos, and there's some great "how to walk out of your life" stuff here (it helps that she has valid ID with her maiden name on it), and the vignettes from the past and the present are well-drawn, frequently touching, and sympathetic.

Of course, a lot of the success of this book is going to hinge on what I presume is the Big Reveal.  I'll let you know how that turns out.