Second Book Syndrome

I mentioned that I really enjoyed The Crown of Embers, but what I really want to talk about is why the second book in a series so often sucks, what can be done to avoid said suckage, and how this book actually fails to avoid most of the traps but doesn't suck anyway.

Some examples?  Crossed, Insurgent, Magic Study. I liked Matched, Divergent, and Poison Study to various extents, but each of the sequels fell down, and I think in very similar ways.  So you're an unknown author (all the ones mentioned so far were), and you're writing your first book.  Trilogies sell.  If the first book is good, people will come back to read more about their favorite characters.  So you write one book, self-contained but with an open enough ending to leave you room to tell more story.

This means that to some extent or another, the first book needs to wrap up at the end and leave some open space, not just for new stories with the same character, but for more of the same story.  Is this a weak point?  Is a totally different adventure about the same characters better?  Maybe that's it, but Catching Fire didn't have that problem; it closed off the occasion of the 74th annual Hunger Games neatly, but left us with the fallout from that experience and the same larger political scenario, then introduced the 75th games and turned things upside down again.  And it did a great job with this. 

So maybe you're ending on a cliffhanger, or a moment of transition, or maybe you have a temporary peace that you know will only be a lull, or maybe you just have more room to explore the problems in your world.  The problem is that you can't build tension in a second book the same way you built it in the first.  The elements that go into the beginning of a story--setting the scene, introducing the characters, introducing the problems, foreshadowing the troubles to come--some of these have been done already, some need to be changed or skipped. The proportions are going to be very different; depending on the strengths of the writer and the reader's relationship with the book, the proportions are likely to be a bit off.

(I'm thinking this through as I write here, by the way; this is not some frequently given, thoughtfully conceived rant.)

So you're building two stories: book one, and the trilogy.  You need two sets of pacing, two arcs, two sets of character development to occur simultaneously.  But as you're writing, you really need to sell the first book.  So even if the first book ends on a cliffhanger, there's got to be some sort of emotional wrap-up, catharsis, payoff. 

Which means that when book two opens, you're starting from a new "beginning."  But you've already got your characters; likely you're going to bring in some more I've never met before.  You've pushed down the bad guy; you'll either need a new one or some renewed threat.  But wait, did you spend your best bad guy stuff in book one?  Or did you leave your main character gasping in the dust, and now you have to spend a bunch of time picking them up out of the dust, brushing them off, and pointing them in the direction of the new adventure, all without character building (which has been done) to fill the time?

In that case, you're going to have to make their situation really horrible.  Things were bad in the first book, but if this is going to be a trilogy, they're going to have to get worse.  Is there anywhere worse to go?  Better be.

I feel like there's some nugget of truth I'm not getting at here, some kernel of what makes a good and exciting book that a second book has a hard time pulling off.  What did Days of Blood and Starlight do that was so good?  I think the two conflicts--book level and series level--were present in the right proportions in the first book.  It helped that it was a big chunk of flashback--the "present day" story dealt with the mystery, and then there were revelations to the mystery that gave you all this other story that was waiting there, that you were already invested in.

Did Crown of Embers do that?  A little; winning a decisive battle leaves you at a turning point in a war that you probably haven't won yet, and also leaves you with a war-ravaged nation. 

There are also, of course, the external truths, which are not the fault of the stories, but of the world they're being read in.  First, finding a new book that you love is always surprising.  A sequel will have a much harder time surprising you than the first book did, putting it at an immediate disadvantage.  Second, a first time author probably spent some time span on the scale of years on that first book.  The second one has been coming along, but now there's a timeline.  Ravenous fans like me are salivating and you have to finish it NOW.  There's no way you're going to have as much time to sharpen book two as you did book one.

This post was not as well-structured as I hoped it would be.  A few days ago I thought I had a grasp on this elusive question, but I feel like maybe it was like one of those understandings that comes to you in a dream and then is gone.  Ah, well; they can't all be life-changing inspirations.  I hope my use of italics and caps lock has made up in conviction what I lack in coherence.  Thank you and good night.

Queen of (Sexy) Hearts

I want to think about what second book syndrome is and why it's a problem, why it's so hard to avoid.  But I also really, really want to talk about the two big problems I had with Rae Carson's Crown of Embers first.

Okay, right off the bat, I really enjoyed reading this book.  It's not fabulous or a stand-out by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a good, fast, engaging YA read, and I like Elisa.  The book actually did a very good job of minimizing the Second Book problems (they were there, but they weren't as problematic as they often are).  But there were two big glaring annoyances that I want to just get out there.

First, Elisa's body.  In the first book, Girl of Fire and Thorns, Elisa starts out as a very fat whiner.  Over the course of the book she becomes strong and thin.  The point is made several times that she'll never be truly thin, of course, but she's not fat anymore, so thank god for that, right?  Yeah, ugh.

But in this book, her awakening to romance is accompanied by discussions of her body, and if this book had a face I would punch it.  She talks about how she can't imagine someone being interested in seeing her body--a very sympathetic concern--and the point she cites about that is how her thighs brush together a bit while she's standing. Seriously, I hate it enough that here's the quote: "Would someone look past...the way my thighs just brush together when I stand?"

Seriously?!?  In what normal place and time is THAT the standard of a good body image?  Only here and now in America, and I am appalled that this is even in here.  The other stuff in the scene--her scars, her soft belly--either make sense or can be read to make sense (a soft belly can mean different things to different people), but that line....ugh.  (Tangentially related: see Rainbow Rowell's blog post on what it means that Eleanor in her amazing book Eleanor & Park is fat.)

The other issue is tied to this: when the romance kicks in (which you can see coming; Elisa loves Hector, I love Hector, this is all very good), but when it really starts to be a thing, it is SO CHEESY.  It is cheesier than the cheesiest romance novel than I've read.  The cliches that are used to describe her feelings, the ways he touches her, the totally macho things he says that are maybe very sexist I haven't decided yet--it's all just boring to the point of being ick.  And I LOVE a good romance.

Geez, this is already huge.  Okay, I'll finish up the review and come back to talk about Second Book Syndrome next time.  I've told you the things that drove me crazy, but seriously, we're talking about two passages of body stuff and then about thirty pages 3/4 of the way in where the romancing gets all brie and Roquefort and you just have to skim. 

Other than that, as I've said, a ripping good read.  I love Elisa's competency and uncertainty, I love that she has different kinds of relationships with all these different people in her life, and that many of those relationships change in both good ways and bad ways over the course of the book. 

I think the other positive stuff will come up soon, when I talk about why this isn't a problematic Second Book.  Stay tuned!

England: Still Classy After All These Years

I have two posts worth of things to say about The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters.  One is about the ghost story and how it's constructed, and is basically a review of the book.  The other is all about the British class system, and involves my thoughts on the book Assassin, as well.  But I've been kind of overwhelmed by all the things I want to say and not quite able to tie them all together.

But you can't put things off forever; perfection is the enemy of completion.  So I'm going with a list format, with apologies for my intellectual laziness.

1. The Little Stranger is an excellent book.  It's a ghost story, technically, but that is almost (not quite) a spoiler, because there is nothing strange going on for almost half the book.  It's about an English country doctor in the years after World War II who enters into an unlikely friendship with the impoverished but genteel family at the local estate. 

I am so against slice-of-life books and intense character studies, but the first half of the book was little more than that, and I found it intensely compelling.  The doctor is--I wouldn't call him an unreliable narrator, but he's very biased, and the more he tries to explain things fairly and with a doctor's clinical distance, the more you become aware of the lenses through which he views things.  This was marvelously executed and kept me reading.

2) Well, listening.  I had the audiobook of this from before I canceled my Audible subscription, and that's why I picked it up.  The performance is amazing.  It's told in the first person from the doctor's point of view, and the narrator, Simon Vance, did an incredible job in capturing the doctor's layers.   The variation in his accents is great, and he does an excellent job with the female characters, which is often very hard. 

What he really captured is how the doctor believes thoroughly that he's being objective, rational, and scientific at every stage, but how quickly and easily swayed he is by his feelings.  He doesn't know it, would never acknowledge it, but the clinical clarity with which he describes how his feelings change over the course of a conversation, or how someone's comments make him angry, or how he does something impulsively, is so complex but so clear. 

3) I've never read Sarah Waters before.  I hear amazing things left, right, and center, and now I believe them and will have to add books like Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet to my reading list. 

4) Now here's where I was really going with all this: class.  I know that this is a thing in English history and society, and I remember a line in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow about how if they'd had an Englishman with them they might have recognized the complexities of the caste system before it was too late.  And then you have YA books like Assassin (whose author is listed as Lady Grace Cavendish, who is the diarist-narrator, so weirdness there) where ladies in waiting don't understand why they can't be friends with laundresses and jesters, as though she was completely unable to understand the social structure she lives in.  It makes her seem stupid.

But then you have this book, which is so infused with class that it makes up the large part of the tension, especially in the first half.  The Ayers family is aristocracy, with an enormous house, Hundreds Hall.  Dr. Faraday's mother used to be a nursery maid at Hundreds, years ago, and he's very aware that, as a doctor, he's little more than a skilled tradesman in the family's eyes.  But they (an elderly mother and her two adult children) have no money and few friends, and he has a fascination with their house, so an odd friendship develops.

Everyone's awareness of his not quite being of their class glares from every page though it's almost never mentioned.  The house's very slow collapse, the money troubles, and the way things "used to be" all combine into the strange miasma of the place.  Someone I know said that, reading it, you picture everyone at Downton Abbey in that same time period, with no money to keep the house up.  Mrs. Ayers would be just the same age as Mary Crawley, and you can picture her going through photographs, sewing by the fire in the parlor as the ceiling sags toward the floor in the library.

It's so sad, and so poignant, and so rich.  It's delicious.  I'm eager to hear more.  You should really get the audiobook--it's 16 hours long and so worth it.

Romance Quiz the Third!

New format this time for our Romance Title Quiz.  I was feeling inspired this time out, so I came up with three of the options in each item below; one (and only one) of each is real.  I think this will be easier than my other ones, but hopefully still worth a laugh!

1. Scotsmen!
a) His Highland Touch
b) Under the Kilt
c) Sins of a Highland Devil
d) Taken in a Highland Meadow

2. Horses!
a) The Cowboy's Convenient Proposal
b) The Rancher's Revenge
c) A Cowgirl's Cowboy
d) When a Cowboy Calls Your Name

3. Dukedom! 
a) The Duke Wore Dancing Shoes
b) Deflowering the Duke
c) The Duke of Danger
d) A Duke of Her Own

4. Bad boys!
a) Ravished by a Black Sheep
b) The Rogue Steals a Bride
c) Autumn is for Rakes
d) A Pirate's Passion

5. Titled ladies!
a) This Duchess of Mine
b) Count on a Countess
c) The Bare Contessa
d) Mark of the Marquess

Everyday Hiro

"Going out in New York is never easy. It always involves construction on the 2/3 line or a samurai attack."  At least it does for Johnny Hiro, who is just the kind of guy things happen to, whether he likes it or not.

Johnny Hiro: Half Asian, All Hero, by Fred Chao, is the story of Hiro and his girlfriend Mayumi, and the ups and downs of their life in New York City.  Hiro is the busboy and right hand man of a cranky but good-hearted sushi chef and Mayumi works at a publishing house.  Their relationship is loving and supportive, even in the face of their constant struggle to make ends meet and keep from getting kidnapped by giant lizards or platoons of angry sushi chefs.

Each issue is a romp, with an over-the-top adventure, punctuated by great little cameos (Mayor Bloomberg saves the day in more than one story; Judge Judy teams up with the cast of Night Court to bring justice to New York; Alton Brown brings you the finer points of sushi fish; various hip hop artists muse on life and what's really important).

But what really makes this amazing is the depth of the characters, the sadness behind the cheer and the love behind the blustering.  When Mayumi and Hiro fight the drag of being poor in a great city by going to discount night at the opera, it's part of this lovely balance of bitter and sweet that makes this more than a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

Mayumi is my favorite character, by far.  She's so sweet and charming, and there's so much more to her than you think there is at first.  I can't say anything about her better than Aarti already has, though, so I'll leave my admiration there.  But I'll say that it's not just Mayumi--every single character here, including the mob of angry sushi chefs and the rogue samurai and Mayor Bloomberg--has a rich internal life.  As Neil Gaiman says, "Everybody has a secret world inside of them."  Chao knows this and he shows it off beautifully.

This was a sweet one, though.  If you want a laugh and love New York, and if maybe you struggle sometimes, you should pick up Johnny Hiro.  And the second volume is out in October!

Updates and Notes

Today was the big day!  Of course you realize that I didn't buy most of those books; it would be pointless to get them all at once.  But I was afraid I'd talk myself out of them entirely, and there is no reason on earth that my disposable income shouldn't go toward these authors I like so much.  So I grabbed Rose Under Fire right away, and assuming that book club and library due dates and Netgalley teasers cooperate, I'm going to read it as soon as possible!  I'm afraid that Fangirl and Unthinkable may have to wait a bit, though; I'm spread pretty thin.

I think I'm giving up pretty quickly on another one that's been on my list.  As much as I still think Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It was one of the best end-of-the-world books I've ever read, none of the sequels quite lived up to it.  The newest, the fourth in the series, has already turned me off just a few pages in.  It's called The Shade of the Moon, and it focuses on Miranda's youngest brother, Jon.

The premise here is very different from the other three; instead of trying to survive in a world with no society, we now get an enclave, a society where there's plenty of food, but a major line between haves and have-nots.  Instead of being about physical and interpersonal survival in a world where society is just gone, you get an overly repressive society, complete with bad-guy haves who not only mock the have-nots, but consider them disgusting.

Aside from everything else--how much more often this story has been told, how little personality the "oppressor" types seem to have in the first few pages--there's a scene near the beginning where a bunch of the rich fancy clavers (enclave kids) are warning Jon away from the new girl.  I know this is a whole new world and all, but it's only been three years since the old world.  There is not enough distance between the old and the new for some of the prejudices these kids have to make sense.  I mean, this kid talks about his grandfather was sent out of the enclave in the same sentence that he's calling the non-clavers "disgusting."  Most of these kids probably have relatives, or at least acquaintances, who are out there. 

I do understand the whole mentality of looking down on the less fortunate to make your own position seem safe and all.  And it's not fair to judge after just the 10 or 20 pages I've read.  But the truth is, this book shone brightest where it was a family against nature.  A boy against society is not a book I need to read again.

Woman of the Wild West

I never got on the very well-populated Catherynne Valente bandwagon.  I picked up The Girl Who Navigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, but didn't get beyond the first chapter; I can see why they love it, but it was definitely not for me.

I can't say that Six Gun Snow White is so very different, and I would call this a middling review that I'm about to give.  I finished it, because it was short and I wanted to understand a bit more of what the author was doing.  And I can't say it wasn't good--I think it was beautiful, and I think it might even be important.  This book is a poem--that's not quite a metaphor, I'm pretty sure there are definitions in which this book is a poem--and I struggled with it in the same way that I often struggle with poetry.

Snow White is the daughter of a rich white man, a very successful miner, and the Crow woman he coveted and bought/stole/took.  She's raised as his ward and maybe pet, until he marries again and her new stepmother tries...well, it's hard to explain.  It's the Old West, and there is magic, and a magic mirror.  The fairy tale is told in its setting, and things fit in lovely images into their places--the huntsman is a Pinkerton who is sent after Snow White; there are seven outlaw women who take her in and save her; there are apples and hearts aplenty.

Is there any place, any time, that is more intensely masculine than the Old West?  Anyplace with less space for women?  Knights had their ladies, and soldier are tended by nurses, write home to their girlfriends.  There is no place here for a woman, and certainly no place to see what a woman could be, what the good, healthy life that other folks are living looks like. There is  no sense of what is real and what is not, because everything is real and unreal at the same time here.  It's strange and like a fairy tale.

But this creates so much distance, I can't get close to the characters.  Snow White is in pain, but I can't tell you what choices she's making, what options she has.  If you think of it as the story of a half breed, with all the ugly exclusion and loneliness implied by that, you get a glimpse of it.  But this is about Snow White as a legend, as Coyote.

It's a poem, is what it is.  It might even be a good poem.  I hate it when people say "I don't really get that kind of book, so I'm not going to talk about it."  But I read this book, and I didn't get it.  I saw the feminism and the ideas of mothers and daughters, of whiteness and otherness, of womanhood crowded out by manhood.  I saw those ideas, those themes, couched in beautiful imagery.  But I don't know what the book was saying about these things.  I didn't get it.

I think it was a lovely poem.

Not Your Mom's Escaping-a-Cult Novel

If you put a cult in your book, I'll give it a shot.  Netgalley gave me Escape from Eden, by Elisa Nader, and hey, cult book!  Let's roll with it.

And roll we did, on a freaking coaster.  This was NOT what you expect from a book about a cult.  And while I can only give it a 2 for plausibility, I'll give it a 5 for avoiding cliches, and a solid 4 around the teenaged lust/romance (which is EXCELLENT; I'm hard to impress with teenaged romance).  In the afterword, first-time author Nader refers to writing the afterword to your own novel as "crazypants crazy."  I have only to add: yes, that pretty much sums it up.

Mia lives on a compound in the South American jungle where the Flock has followed their leader, the Reverend.  From page one, Mia knows this place is messed up and wants out--right away we're off script from my experience with cult books.  You've got the Leaving Fishers variety that shows you how someone gets sucked in, and you've got the Gated variety (very good book, by the way) that shows you how someone realizes that their bucolic community is really a mess.  Right away, though, you have to throw those paradigms out the window; Mia seems to be the only one who notices that the Reverend is a disgusting, self-righteous creature, but she wants out.

It's not that easy, of course.  She's lived here for six years, since she was 10, and her only family, her mother and brother, live here and are determined to stay.  Plus, they're in the middle of the jungle on a guarded compound.  So mostly Mia looks for opportunities, makes plans, works in the kitchen, sneaks time with her drawing pad, waits to get called to the elite Prayer Circle, and considers how she feels about courting with Octavio, her friend Juanita's brother.  You know, business as usual for your modern cult teen.

Then a new family shows up, and the hot 17-year-old son, Gabriel, refuses to bend to the ways of the Flock.  He's vocal and angry and very sexy, and Mia's drawn to him.  Right here is where the book could have lost me, but didn't.  I mean, Mia's 16 and there's a  hot boy who's an outsider like she feels, and she does appropriate things with that.  But her mother, her brother, her friends, and hey, the whole escaping the cult thing are much more real than the buzz she gets from talking to Gabriel.  SO glad to hear that.

Now, I can't tell you too much about the plot, because like I said, it gets all CRAZYPANTS.  And yeah, it's implausible, but so are all those TV shows I watch.  There's way more than meets the eye going on in the cult, and Mia's task becomes not to escape, but to save the whole Flock--her family, her community--who don't want to be saved.  (If I was a gif sort of person there would be a gif of a roller coaster here.  I've never used one and I'm afraid of the intellectual property implications.  Use your imaginations, kids.)

So there's so many twists, and a car chase in the jungle, and drugs that modern pharmacology has yet to imagine, and just enough pauses for breathing room, and my GOD it's hot in the jungle--absolutely oppressive.  I won't promise you that this book will move you, or change your life.  But I will say that I didn't see it coming, and I didn't know where it would go.  As close as I will ever come to actually riding on a roller coaster.

(Also?  I pictured Gabe looking like Logan Echolls from Veronica Mars, which I am currently gulping down (the show, not Logan Echolls.  Get your mind out of the gutter).  But yeah, that was nice.  Now, go watch Veronica Mars.  Go on, right now.  Go.)

Been Doing It Wrong

Apparently I've been doing something wrong for the past couple of weeks, because after a month in which I managed to squeeze out only about five non-comics, I suddenly find myself sweeping briskly through the one I picked up this morning.

Then again, it may be the fact that Lady Drusilla's Road to Ruin is a Harlequin Historical romance.  I love these.  I love knowing that the couple will have sex for the first time between pages 170 and 190 (the book will be between 280 and 320 pages long in total, which means somewhere around 60% on the Kindle).  I love how much time they spend admiring each other's calves and the convenient ways the author finds to force them to cuddle (she doesn't have a sidesaddle, so she has no choice but to sit in front of him on his saddle).  And I love that the sex is neither risky nor chaste.  There are places for both; Harlequin Historicals are neither.

I'm not done the book, not by a long shot.  But I can already tell you that I'm going to read both the one before it and the one after it in Christine Merrill's Ladies in Disgrace series. In this one, John is running from his unrequited love for the heroine of the first book in the series.  Drusilla is chasing her sister (heroine of the third book) to prevent an elopement that would ruin the reputation of the family.  The two fall in together and go on a long hunt for the eloping couple, gradually falling for each other, etc. etc. 

I doubt that I'm going to end up reviewing this when I'm done; unless the end is really bizarre, I can tell you that this is a story about two smart, charming people who are attracted to each other but take a little while to admit it because of misunderstandings and maybe the need to be told that they're not second best.  I can tell you already that I love it.

Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You!

September is going to be a very exciting month for new books!  Especially books that I learned about through Netgalley but couldn't get my hands on there.

First, foremost, and up front, we have Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein, a companion book to the absolutely lovely Code Name Verity.  It's another story of a woman pilot in World War II, with, I gather, some more being captured by the Germans in there.  Verity was so different, so wonderful--still able to bring tears to my eyes when I think of that one line that Verity shouts at the end--I'm not going to be able to wait a minute for this one.  This is one I'll buy when it hits the market, immediately.

 Usually, Netgalley won't give you any preview of the book--you're going in blind.  For All Our Yesterdays, by Cristin Terrill, though, they gave us a teaser of about 30 pages.  Which I read.  Which was AWESOME.  And now, even though they didn't give me a galley, I want to read the darned book so bad--so bad!  I'm not sure what's going on--there's time travel and a prison and a lot of death defying.  It's time travel where you can change the future, I guess, or something--I'm sort of reminded of Ruby Red only much less teen angst and more trapped in prison and might die at any moment angst, which is in my opinion better angst.

Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell.  I've told you what I think of the Rainbow Rowell books that I've already read, and I cannot wait to read this one.  I have no idea what it's about (besides the basic idea of the story that's implied in the title), but Rowell's ability to charm me is pretty well proven by now, and her ability to put some meat on those bones is also well established.  And if, yeah, there was a creepy element to Attachments, the fact that the book was so charming AROUND that element speaks volumes to me.

After Impossible, which took the strange and supernatural and made it warm and practical, comes Unthinkable, by Nancy Werlin.  This is a sequel, but promises to be very different, as it takes place in the land of faerie and the title character is the enchanted several-greats-grandmother of the previous book's heroine.  I won't say I love every Nancy Werlin book, but she does things differently, and I can't wait to see what she's going to do here.

From Gene Luen Yang, author of the excellent American Born Chinese (which, how did I not review that?) come Boxers and Saints, two graphic novels about the Boxer Rebellion.  I don't know nearly enough about this part of history, and the structure intrigues me. Both books tell the stories of Chinese youth caught up in the Boxer Rebellion; one is a converted Christian, the other has joined the rebels.  I love the idea of the author taking on both sides of the story like this; it's so easy, when we look at a conflict like this from the distance of time and neutrality, to feel like everyone should just get along, and I can't wait to see what he does with the fear and turmoil that are involved in living through an event like this.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, by Holly Black.  I know nearly nothing about this one, except what one of my Goodreads friends said: "Keep hearing that vampires are over but this is how they should have been done all along."  Must read now.

And guys, that's just September!  In fact, that's pretty much all September 10!  I CANNOT WAIT.  I will not get into what's coming in October (at least until a future post). 

I do think it's interesting that almost every one of these (except the Yang) is something I wanted from Netgalley but didn't get, presumably mostly because of my small (but dedicated! and brilliant!) readership.  All I'm saying is that if nothing else, Netgalley is an effective way to market books to me. Well played, Netgalley, well played.

Bernadette at Book Club

Get it?  'Cause the title of the book is Where'd You Go, Bernadette?  (By Maria Semple, just to sneak that useful information in there.)

Poor Bee; her mother has disappeared.  The novel is composed of a collection of documents--mostly emails and letters from Bee's school, from Bernadette to her new personal assistant in India, from her neighbor to the blackberry abatement specialist.  The portrait that emerges is an unflattering one of a brittle and neurotic Bernadette.  The other players don't fare much better, from the overearnest parents at the school to the absolutely nutballs neighbor/parent who hates her.

The first time I picked the book up, I put it down after 30 pages.  I hated pretty much all the characters, and I was pretty sure the author hated them, too, and wanted me to laugh at them with her.  They were all just so sad, though, I stopped reading.

But when I read it for book club, my opinion changed.  I loved this book, and Maria Semple loved her characters.  She saw how they screwed up, but she also saw how much screwing up doesn't make you a bad person, even when you do it repeatedly and over a long period of time.  You could say the big message here is that it's never too late, and my word do I like hearing that sometimes.

Unfortunately, this book being so all-around enjoyable meant that our discussion at book club was not as spirited as usual.  It's also not as rich in questions for future book clubbers in need of a reader's guide.  (By the way, there was a reader's guide in the back of my copy.  I was not terribly impressed.)

Anyway,  here's what we thought was worth talking about.

1) Answer the title question.  At the point in the middle of the narrative where (is this a spoiler?) an actual disappearance takes place, what zany ideas did you come up with?  I had a whole bunch, and they're really cool, but they're very spoiley, and I'm not sure how to keep spoilers from showing up in an RSS reader, so I will put those theories in a paragraph at the very end of the review.  That's where the spoilers live.

2) Talk to me about religion.  How did religion fit in with Audrey's character arc?  With Bee's?  Were there undercurrents besides the obvious "religious" things, or did the religion thing seem tacked on?  By the characters (tacked onto their lives) or by the author (tacked onto the story)?

3) What do you see going on with gender relations in this book?  There are some really interesting subquestions and ways to look at things here--Elgie's vs. Bernadette's roles in their marriage vs. the expectations of those roles; Elgie as kind of the token man in the story overall; Bernadette's career and subsequent collapse are all very "feminine" in both cool and not-cool ways.

4) Talk about mothers.  Bernadette's relationship with Bee, Bernadette's history with trying to get pregnant, the other mothers at the school and their relations to each other, other kids' reactions to Bernadette, Audrey as a mom, Soo-Lin as a parent.  Is Bernadette a good mother?  Is she a better mother than she might appear to be?  Appear to whom?  And hey, what about Elgie--is he a good father?

5) There's a really cool conversation to be had if anyone reading this book knows anything about: Seattle; intense, participatory schools for crunchy, high-achieving families; working at big, exciting, cult-like organizations.  5b) If you read this and Mr. Penumbra, compare the latter's depictions of Google with Bernadette's depictions of Microsoft.

Okay, that's all the questions.  Now the next paragraph has my spoilers of Theories I Had In the Middle of the Book about Were Bernadette Actually Was.  Don't read it if you haven't read the book!

I thought she might be: hiding out in the desert with Audrey; trading identities with Audrey and hiding out in the desert answering Soo-Lin's emails; down in Los Angeles wreaking vengeance on the reality TV dude who ruined her house; building a new house somewhere weirdly under their noses in Seattle; building a house in Antarctica.

Was I right?  Well, read the book!

Einstein Tensor Tattoo

I've read way too many YA books that all look the same; there are a ton of red flags that stop me in my tracks (instalove, hot guy who changes the main character in the first five minutes, boring teenagers).  Relativity, by Cristin Bishara, dodged pretty much all of them; it started out fresh and smart and kept it up pretty much all the way through.

Start with Ruby, who kicks butt. She's smart, independent, well-read, and rational.  She has a tattoo on her neck and  a crush on her best friend, and is incredibly frustrated that she's had to move from LA to Nowhere, Ohio, because her dad got married in a whirlwind romance.  And her new stepsister, Kandy, is pretty awful.

Through one thing and another, she finds herself wandering through different universes--places where history has gone very differently than it has for her.  Her new family, the loss of her mother when she was young--what does life look like with these factors changed?  Or if Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb?

I won't say that the science was unassailable; there's definitely some fate stuff happening here.  But there's some good science discussion, some nice handwaving bits about how the multiverse might work.  More importantly, though, when Ruby has a phenomenon to investigate, she grabs a notebook and a digital camera, goes to the library to do background research, and works hard to figure things out.  The girl is THINKING. When she does make less-than-stellar decisions, it's in situations where I don't blame her--stress, panic, and the sheer bewilderment of what she's learning--heck, I wouldn't have done as well as she did.

Anyway, I had a blast with this book.  Definitely among the best straight YA I've read in a while.

(Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley for a review.  If you think this is why I'm giving it four stars, you should check out my other ARC reviews.  I am not that easy.)

Audio Renaissance

My commute to work now consists of two options: biking and driving.  I can't bring myself to take public transportation that involves a connection.  Well, it's not just the connection—it's that the second leg involves catching a very occasional bus at its busiest stop.  There's just no way for that to be comfortable, and a very strong chance of having a long, uncomfortable wait that makes me late for day care pickup.  (I will admit that day care pickup is the non-selfish-sounding reason I use to justify the fact that I hate that commute.  Day care is pretty flexible since my normal pickup is not at closing time. Full disclosure, you know.)

It's actually a lovely little Hobson's choice, if I'm using the phrase correctly, in that both options are quite nice.  In good weather, I ride my bike, get some great exercise, and generally have a very pleasant trip.  The only downside is that I have no access to any kind of books on my bike ride (yes, I really and truly think that way, it's not just facetiously put on for my book blog).

In poor weather, I take the car.  This is slightly faster, and has the bonus of my newly reinvigorated love of audiobooks. I was discussing The Dresden Files recently, which I was enjoying, but I've put them down.  Brenda pointed out that she hated the Murphy character, and I didn't agree in the first book, but halfway into the second one, I do.  Harry's kind of a sad sack, which was making me gloomy, but it doesn't help that every time something bad or scary happens, his best friends jump to the conclusion that it's his fault.  Poor Harry doesn't know the difference between a friend and an acquaintance who feels sorry for you.

God, I'm making myself sad just thinking about it.

So I switched over to Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger.  I've been wanting to read Waters for a while, having heard many glowing reviews; she writes a lot of historical fiction with lesbian characters.  This one is not quite in her usual realm, in that it's billed as a more standard ghost story.  20% of the way in we're just starting to get hints of what might be the ghosts, but I don't mind at all.  We've got the crumbling local manor, and the very class-conscious doctor who's befriended the genteelly (spell check says I can say that) impoverished widow and her two grown children who live there. 

The narrator is the doctor, and the voice is provided by Simon Vance, who does an absolutely wonderful job with it.  His lower class girls are a bit of a struggle, but everyone else just shines.  This is a case where hearing the audio does this lovely job of polishing up the unreliable narrator for you—his voice is so solid and trustworthy that it comes as quite shocking when he says something that reveals his bitterness at his working-class origins.  I think in a lesser book, I would be struggling with this, because I have a real problem with picking out unreliable narrators, but this is really well crafted, and the subtext is clear without being explicit.  I don't need to be talked down to, but I do need to be confident when I'm drawing conclusions.

(God, I remember the time I was talking to someone about how I didn't like the movie The Hours because everyone was just so gloomy and the person I was talking to said, "Wow, you really don't have a lot of sympathy for people suffering from depression, do you?"  And I cannot tell you how embarrassed I still am to say that I didn't realize the story was about depression till that very moment.  I'm dim, is what I'm saying, and I like my art representational and my themes well-constructed.  Also, in my defense, that lunch was very awkward even before we started discussing The Hours.)

I'm rambling.  I was talking about The Little Stranger, and how I'm not very far in but I'm very much enjoying it.  And I don't care if it rains tomorrow or if the sun is shining; my commute will be lovely either way.

Betweentime

I'm casting about for the next thing right now, and that makes me frighteningly acquisitional (acquisitive? My spell checker says acquisitive).  I have more library books (like, the hard kind, with paper) than I have since I got my Kindle.  I'm flipping through all the Kindle books I've acquired for the ones I most coveted when I acquired them (and then never got around to reading).

Luckily, book club is keeping me focused; next week's meeting is about the red hot Where'd You Go Bernadette? by Maria Semple.  Now, this is a prime example of what I was discussing last time—I picked this book up a few months ago and then gave it up as "not for me." But so many people loved it, and I so wanted something perky and funny for book club this month, I was thrilled when we chose it.  And you know, now that I'm reading it on purpose, without any sense that I'm deciding whether or not to stick it out, I admit it's growing on me.

Of course, Bernadette will get its own post after the book club meeting.  Given the huge pile of library books and my embarrassing addiction to Netgalley, I'm trying to stick firmly with choosing from those lists, rather than from my big electronic pile of "things I have that have looked good for ages."  Things like The Scoripo Races, The Woman Who Wouldn't Die, The Crown of Embers, Finnikin of the Rock, The Curse of the Chalion, Chime.  Every time I'm reminded of something I was SO EXCITED about a while back, I move it to the top of my Kindle list.  And then the next one moves up, and I'm up to three pages of super-exciting urgent reads—none of which I'm reading, because there are books on paper that I should be reading! 

It's a lovely problem to have.  Even better would be a couple of hours trapped in a comfortably air conditioned elevator just after a trip to the bathroom during which to put a dent in a few of these things.

Book Snob? Me?

Well, maybe I am a snob.  There are so many ways to be a snob, after all.  Then again, I always think of a snob as someone who judges people by their taste, which I don't think I do, even with books.  I mean, I don't mind when people don't like my favorite books, and I don't feel that embarrassed when I don't click with theirs.  And when someone tells me that Twilight is their absolute fave, I mostly feel a kinship, because they have an absolute favorite book that they want to talk to me about.  That makes them part of the family, and I can say with a straight face that vampires aren't really my thing; I'm more into zombies.

So by that definition, I really don't think I'm a snob.  But of course, I do judge the books themselves, and there are definitely books that aren't good enough for me.  I no longer feel a compulsion to finish the ones I don't care about, so I go through a lot more stops and starts than I used to. 

These days, a lot of those come from Netgalley. This is mostly because it's the only place I get books where there's no way to read even a sample before you get the book.  You get a cover and a blurb, and that's about it.  You do know the name of the publisher, which can be a clue—the self-published ones are not as good a bet.  (Wait, is that snobbish?  I don't think so—prejudiced, maybe, but the fact that something's been through the screening process that is professional publishing seems like an inevitable sign of some baseline quality, right?)

I picked one up recently that had a neat premise—a housemaid as a spy in the castle—but I'm finding I just can't go on with it.  The weird thing is, though, that it's not BAD.  I don't hate it.  It's just not quite good enough.  It's got characters, but they're stock characters, and there are way too many of them; it's got detail, but it's clichéd detail, straight out of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.  There's a plot, but I'm not sure where it's going.  

I can think of five authors who, if they had written this story, I would be reading it right now.  I kind of want to recommend the book to someone, because I feel bad for not liking it, but I don't.  It's like breaking up with someone after the third date, not because they're not nice, but because they're nothing more than nice.  I want to set it up with someone, but probably not my best friend or my sister.

Sorry, Tale of Maddy Biddle.  Not my cup of tea.