Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Read Which Have Been Recommended by Maris

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books we read because other people recommended them! I'm focusing my list on one recommendation source: Maris Kreizman, who is pretty much just "Maris" in book world. Here are ten books I've read and that Maris has recommended (or rated 5 stars, which is basically the same thing as far as I'm concerned).

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine: This little coming-of-age story about a pre-teen pop star a la Justin Beiber trying to navigate his momager, fauxmances, and homeschooling during his tour wasn't quite a five star for me, but it was certainly an interesting read that raised some good questions about child entertainers.

The Line of Beauty: This is a classic of LGBTQ lit, about a young British man who becomes attached to an upper-crust family and his life as a gay man during the Thatcher years as the AIDS crisis begins. It's beautifully written and involving.

The Group: It can feel like the issues we face as women are all unique to our own time period, but this book, set in the 1950s and following a group of friends through their early post-college years shows that fitting in to the workplace, trash dudes, and trying to remain sane as a parent are timeless.

The Queen of the Night: I absolutely love this book. It is very, at times almost preposterously, dramatic but also feels rooted in emotional truth and its rich characters. 

Boy Snow Bird: I still feel uncomfortable about the ending of this one, but the way Helen Oyeyemi builds her story and uses language is remarkable.

Valley of the Dolls: This is not a "great" book by a traditional understanding of such...the prose is solid at best, and the most prominent character is pretty boring, but it delightfully trashy and is SUCH fun to read.

Cat's Eye: Female friendships are one of my favorite things to read about, and Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors, so it's no surprise I thought this book was fantastic!

Gilead: I was concerned about this because I don't tend to like faith-heavy fiction, but figured if Maris liked it, it was worth a try. It was a bit of a slow start but was one of those books I'm glad I stuck with, I found it deeply moving (and no, not too religious at all).

In The Woods: I don't usually care for mystery/thrillers. I find them formulaic and too dependent on disguising their twists to create interest, but this one hooked me with its strong characters even though the ending wasn't too hard to see coming. 

The Song of Achilles: This retelling of the events of The Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus, including an explicitly homosexual relationship (explicit in the sent of outright, rather than in the sense of obscene) with his companion Achilles, is incredibly compelling.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Read Which Have Been Recommended by Maris

Book 238: Boy, Snow, Bird

"I looked into his eyes. He couldn't return the gaze steadily, kept focusing on my left eye, then on my right. I could guess what he was thinking: that there were two of me, that was the explanation, that was why I was acting like this. I had applied this rationale to the rat-catcher the first time he punched me. First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you've done wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn't a reason, and it isn't two people you're dealing with, just one. The same one every time." 

Dates read: June 1-5, 2018

Rating: 7/10

I've always thought that being a step-parent would be a complicated situation to deal with. There are the complicated feelings people have about their exes getting into new relationships, and then on top of that there are the feelings of territoriality about one's children. If one tries to form a close bond with the kids, there are accusations of trying to "replace" the parent. But if one doesn't take an active interest in the kids, then you get the mean/bad step-parent label. It's a very fine line to walk, and it takes work and love by everyone involved to balance it out.

The wicked stepmother is one of the most fundamental tropes of the fairy tale genre, probably most famously exemplified in the stories of Cinderella and Snow White. It is the latter that is subtly retold in Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird. Boy Novak grows up in New York City with a mercurial, abusive father that she calls only "the rat-catcher", and as soon as she can figure out how, runs away as far as the bus line will take her...which turns out to be small-town Massachusetts. Having left behind her childhood sweetheart, she finds herself drawn to Arturo Whitman, a metal smith and widower with a lovely little daughter named Snow. They marry, and things look promising for a while: Boy finds her stepdaughter charming and delightful and soon falls pregnant herself. But when she gives birth, it changes everything. Her own daughter, Bird, is unmistakably of mixed race, revealing that the Whitman family are actually light-skinned African-Americans passing as white.

Arturo's mysterious sister appears, having been sent away as a child when she turned out dark and threatened the family's secret, and offers to take Bird. But Boy doesn't want to part from her own child. Instead, she finds herself increasingly haunted by the adoration lavished on fair-complected Snow by everyone, including the Whitman family, compared to the treatment Bird receives...so Snow is sent away instead. As Bird grows up, she and her sister begin a correspondence, and a piece of Boy's past, long since left behind, draws nearer with revelations which could threaten the life she's built for herself.

I'd previously read Oyeyemi's short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and very much enjoyed the way she played with themes, the multiple levels she was operating on at the same time, her richly evocative language. I found many of the same qualities in this novel, and thought Oyeyemi's take on the pervasive issue of race in America was interesting, as she's a black woman but not American. I appreciated the way she subverted expectations by building to what you think is going to be the moment where Boy turns against her stepdaughter by having her inflict the emotional cruelty of exile rather than the usual depiction of verbal and physical abuse. Oyeyemi is a skilled storyteller, and ably walks the line between a story that's interesting and pleasurable to read without sacrificing richer layers of meaning that push you to think. But that ending was...woah.

I'll usually drop some minor spoilers in my reviews if it's critical to my reaction to the book, but even though the ending of this one had a huge impact on my response to it as a whole, I don't feel like it's appropriate to reveal it. But I also can't avoid talking about it, because it honestly made me think less of the book as a whole because of the way it played out. Oyeyemi places a huge, game-changing detail about a character in the last 5-10 pages of the book, barely giving the others time to react to it. The elicited reaction by the other characters doesn't feel quite earned, but the way that this reveal is made, and the details surrounding it are what really bothered me. In particular, I thought it played into some problematic stereotypes about a marginalized community (though I doubt that was the intention). Either way it was a major plot development and placing it where she did in the book was not effective. I thought I'd be able to recommend this book enthusiastically, but while I do still think it's a good book and worth reading, I'm not quite as sure about it as I might have been.

One year ago, I was reading: The Coming Plague (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Sloppy Firsts

Three years ago, I was reading: Spoiled

Four years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

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Book 238: Boy, Snow, Bird

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Retellings/Folklore-Inspired Tales

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a freebie, so I decided to highlight one of my favorite subgenres...retellings! There is so much potential in taking a look at stories we already know and changing the perspective on them.

Wicked: Gregory Maguire has made a career of retellings, but his first was this take on the Wicked Witch that is so much deeper and richer than the musical (which is also fantastic in its own way). 

The Bear and the Nightingale: There's a kind of vague Cinderella aspect to this, but the real treat is the Russian folklore, alongside an incredible heroine and a wonderful story that continues over two sequels.

Polite Society: I just recently read this take on Emma, transported to modern day India, and found it really enjoyable, striking a great balance between the broad strokes of the original while still telling its own story.

Ella Enchanted: Teenage me loved this YA spin on Cinderella where she's cursed to always be obedient.

The Song of Achilles: I did not especially enjoy reading The Iliad. But I did enjoy reading this take on it that posits Achilles and Patroclus as a long-term, committed couple.

Boy, Snow, Bird: I did not love one of the concluding "twists" of this book, inspired by Snow White, but until then had found it complicated and rich and interesting.

The Red Tent: Dinah, only daughter of the biblical Jacob, is barely a footnote in the Bible, but this book takes her portrayal there and fleshes it out with life and love and sorrow and joy.

Lamb: This is another retelling of a Bible story, but takes on a much more prominent character...Jesus himself, given a dumbass best friend called Biff, who narrates the "real" story of the Son of God. 

Bridget Jones's Diary: It's a pretty loose take on Pride and Prejudice, but I love this book. So few "funny" books actually work for me and it's hilarious.

The King Must Die: I super loved Greek mythology growing up, and the religious aspects of this retelling of the story of Theseus made for a fascinating read.

American Gods: Neil Gaiman's vivid imagination brings together the spirits of mythological tradition from all over the world to face off with "the new gods" to which society has dedicated itself (media, technology, etc).

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Retellings/Folklore-Inspired Tales

A Month In The Life: June 2018

And as of today, we're halfway through 2018! These first six months have had their challenges, but for the most part it's been a positive year and I'm really looking forward to the rest of it. Especially since we'll finally be doing more of the "getting out of town" bit...we've been squirreling away our vacation days and we've got some trips coming up that'll hopefully be fun! This month, though, was mostly pretty calm.

In Books...

• The Sky Is Yours: First of all, this book is intensely weird. Dragons are only the beginning of it in this story of a far-future New York City menaced by the scaly beasts that's been winnowed down to the very rich and the very poor holding out. Weird is usually alienating to me, and indeed I never quite bought all the way into it, but damn if it wasn't well-written, entertaining, and compulsively readable. A very promising debut.
• Boy, Snow, Bird: A fresh and powerful take on the classic Snow White fairy tale, Oyeyemi plays with race, surface appearances, identity, and mirrors. Up until the end, I found it compelling and thought-provoking, but there's a twist that felt...off, and kind of derailed the whole thing. 
• Motherless Brooklyn: I was intrigued when this was selected for book club, since I'd had it on my TBR a while ago and then actually taken it off later because I decided I probably wouldn't like it. Was I right to add it or delete it then? The latter. I hated it. I never got involved in the mystery or cared about anyone involved. 
• The Girl With All The Gifts: I bought this on a Kindle sale whim and was unsure about it before I started reading it...horror can be very hit or miss for me. But it's really good, twisting the zombie story to give us a tale about an unexpected bond and what it really means to be human after all.
• Love Medicine: This book is more like intertwined short stories than a novel, but it's beautifully written and an interesting look at the lives of modern Native Americans and explores the rich variety of complications that love and family bring. I'm definitely interested in continuing the series!
• Sloppy Firsts: I don't know how I missed this series when I was a teenager myself, because I would eaten it up. As it is, even 32 year-old me really enjoyed this story of a misanthropic high school girl trying to make it through the endless sea of high school b.s., which took me back in the best possible way. This is another series I'll be continuing. 
• The Completionist: Feminist dystopian fiction is having a bit of a moment, but to be honest this was not a shining example of the genre. It's set in a future where there's been disaster resulting in a virtual vanishing of water and a growing crisis of fertility, leading to increasing restrictions on women who've managed to get pregnant. A young ex-Marine and his older, pregnant sister search for their other sister, a Completionist (basically a midwife) who's gone missing. I loved the character of the pregnant sister, but the book as a whole fell apart under scrutiny.
• The Feast of Love: This Ann Arbor-set book had seeds of greatness (the prose is amazing, and the characters are vivid) but I couldn't get over how falsely the portions of the book written from the perspective of a young woman rang. It completely undermined the book for me. 

In Life...

• Primary elections: Our client that had a primary made it through, so now we've got that race and a couple other to get ready for in November! Campaigns are hard work but they're always interesting and I'm fortunate in that I've gotten to work with amazing candidates that I really believe in. Anyone who doesn't think their votes count should be there as local candidates watch numbers come in, every one matters!
• Our second wedding anniversary: Two years of married life down, forever to go! We celebrated with an ice cream cake (an annual tradition now!) on Father's Day, and then our favorite Italian place for the day-of, and I am a very lucky lady. 

One Thing:

That some people have made blogging a lucrative full-time career should no longer be a surprise. We've all heard about the thousands of dollars a Kardashian can command for a single Instagram post, and the reality is that there are people whose reach and dedicated following in their fields (travel, fashion, parenting, etc) are valuable enough to be worth a substantial amount to marketers. But by and large, this doesn't extend to book bloggers. Laura at What's Hot? has a very interesting piece about why the bookternet should be getting paid. My own following and engagement is small enough that I'd never be able to turn pro at this, but for those who do have it and whose work leads to sales for publishers, they should be compensated!

Gratuitous Pug Photo:

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A Month In The Life: June 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Haven't Read Yet, But Want To Because Of Their Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Since I talked about my favorite covers of books I've read fairly recently, I decided to take a slightly different tack and look at books on my TBR with especially intriguing cover art! So here are ten of my favorite book covers from my upcoming reads.

The Sense of an Ending: There's something very evocative about the image of dandelion seeds blowing.

In the Woods: I've heard this is actually the weakest of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series, but the cover art creates a foreboding, spooky mood on sight.

Stiff: This I just find delightfully clever, using the toe tag as a place for the title of the book

Boy, Snow, Bird: That image of the snake winding among greenery is a subtle biblical allusion and is eye-catching besides.

Life After Life: The simple image of a double sided rose is striking and intriguing.

The Luminaries: I love the way this cover moves through the phases of the moon.

The Goldfinch: The little 3D-esque effect, with the painting being "revealed", is neat and I'm super excited about getting around to reading this after all the praise.

Wild: The dirty, crusty, broken boot speaks to the central hiking/breakdown and self-discovery narrative of this memoir.

The Vacationers: The vivid aqua of this cover is unusual and it creates a sense of intrigue about what will happen to those floating people.

Dear Thief: The broken face of the bust, combined with the title, immediately makes me ask a bunch of questions, which makes me want to read the book.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Haven't Read Yet, But Want To Because Of Their Covers

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I've Added To My TBR On Recommendation

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is books that ended up on the TBR pile based on recommendations from others. This is a tricky one...for most of my life, I've tended to chose to my own reading for my own reasons, only very infrequently seeking or taking recommendations. But since I started to get involved with book blogs (a while before I started my own), I read about the great things you all are reading and I want in! So here are books that have gotten added to the long and growing list because they've been recommended to me. 



You Will Know Me: I'd never read Abbott before, but I've heard great things about her work around the bookish internet. And I've long been interested in women's gymnastics, so when I started hearing good things from people who had the ARC, I picked up a copy of my own when it went on Kindle sale recently!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: I remember seeing this on a list somewhere (Buzzfeed? Book Riot? Pajiba?) of best books and having generally heard good things about Michael Chabon, it ended up on my TBR.

Boy, Snow, Bird: The bookternet definitely was how I got introduced to Helen Oyeymi and when I found this at my local SPCA thrift store (where paperbacks are 50 cents and hardcovers a dollar...can't beat those prices) I definitely yanked it off the shelf and now it's at home.

Station Eleven: I've always had a fondness for post-apocalyptic literature and it seems like everyone ever on the internet loved this, so it's on my Kindle until I get to it!

Over-Dressed: This was a recommendation from Adina at Blue Collar Red Lipstick, whose blog is totally worth reading for its primary style content alone, but she's also a reader (and author!) who does the odd post about what she enjoys. I read Deluxe based on her rec and got a lot of food for thought out of it, so I picked up this one she recommended as well. 

Fangirl: Probably not a surprise that lots of book bloggers enjoy a book about a young woman who spends a lot of time writing for the internet, but Rainbow Rowell's books are generally well-liked and so I've added them to my TBR! 

The Sense of an Ending: This was one of the personal recs...my good friend Kailey recommended it quite some time ago and when I saw a secondhand copy, I remembered her talking about how much she liked it and picked it up. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Another Kailey recommendation...she's a genetic counselor, so the subject area is particularly compelling to her, but she made it clear that it's broader than just a book for science nerds (not that a book for science nerds is a bad thing!) and I've got it on my Kindle. 

Ghost Wars: Another personal rec! This was actually a favorite of my college boyfriend and as I've gotten more interested in global political affairs over the years, I decided to snag it!

The Lace Reader: My coworker is a writer and editor, and when she mentioned this was her favorite book, it got added to my list! It went on Kindle sale not long after she mentioned it to me so it's safely on my e-reader and waiting to be read.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I've Added To My TBR On Recommendation