Book 318: Delirium

 

"Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side."

Dates read: May 29- June 3, 2019

Rating: 5/10

In a way, I wish I'd had my first serious relationship in high school. I had some big crushes then, but didn't fall in love for the first time until I was in college. It was an often dramatic relationship, and without much experience of dating, I had no idea how to really manage my feelings. Which meant that I usually let important things, like my social life with my friends and school itself, take the hit while I was trying to figure it out. I survived, I learned, but I think having had less at stake while I was floundering around would have been a better case scenario.

There have to be more songs written about love than about anything else. Love of family, love of country, and most of all good old fashioned romance. It's a powerful force, which is why the leadership of the society in Lauren Oliver's Delirium has sought to outlaw it, defining it as a disease to be avoided and/or cured. They've developed an operation (basically a lobotomy) that divorces people from their emotions, and Lena can't wait to have it. Her mother had refused the procedure and died by her own hand when Lena and her older sister were young, leaving them alone in the world, to be raised by their aunt and uncle. Lena's sister has had the procedure, is married, has a child and a normal life...just what Lena wants for herself. She's always afraid of putting even a toe out of line and drawing negative attention, so even though her wealthy and beautiful best friend Hana rebels in small ways, Lena stays on the straight and narrow. But on the day Lena is to be evaluated to determine her future, she meets Alex, and everything changes.

Alex, it turns out, is an Invalid...he did not have the procedure performed, and though he's disguised himself so he can "pass" in normal society unsuspected, his true home is the area outside the border fence, called the Wilds. Despite her fear of falling in love and developing the deliria, Lena is drawn to Alex, and as they continue to spend time together she begins to fall for him. She tries to continue towards the normality she's always craved, but as the date of her operation draws nearer, she's less and less sure that she wants it after all. And when a secret about her family is revealed, she knows she can't stay. But how do you escape from a police state?

It often seems that teenage-girl oriented young adult lit has a pattern: a vulnerable heroine, a totalitarian regime in a dystopian future, a love story. And there's a reason for that...it's an appealing story structure! I sometimes regret a little that I grew up in a time before the real YA boom, because I would have read and relished so many of these kinds of books. As an adult, though, there starts to be a same-y quality to reading them. One of the ways Oliver sets this one apart is that the person who seems like the "typical" heroine, the high-spirited Hana, is just the best friend. Lena herself is quiet, introverted, fearful. It's not a personality type that usually gets to play a starring role, and I think that'll be appreciated by the less-assertive girls who read this and get to see themselves reflected on the page as capable of daring and bravery.

Despite some bright spots, this was still too formulaic for my personal tastes. It's engaging, though, without being especially intellectually demanding, so it would be great for a reader looking for something like a beach or airplane read, or who simply doesn't have a lot of extra mental energy for a book and just wants to be entertained. There are sequels, but I wasn't invested enough in the world Oliver created to feel like I need to pick them up despite the cliffhanger ending. If you're looking for something immersive or complex, this isn't for you. Otherwise, keep your expectations reasonable and this could be a pleasant, easy reading experience!

One year ago, I was reading: Go Went Gone

Two years ago, I was reading: Queen of Scots

Three years ago, I was reading: Astonish Me

Four years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Five years ago, I was reading: Americanah

Six years ago, I was reading: Approval Junkie

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Book 318: Delirium

Book 279: Messy

 

"On television, big, revealing statements always elicit loud gasps, and then a lot of background whispering with hands clapped to open mouths, while the truth-teller stands by looking refreshingly liberated. But TV is a dirty, dirty liar. Because there were no dramatic sound effects for Max's confession, no slow clap, nor a handy background music swell to let everyone know she'd just done something courageous. There was just silence. And then, fury."

Dates read: November 27- December 1, 2018

Rating: 6/10

As much as I aim for authenticity in this space, there's no denying that I think carefully about what I'm putting up here. Everything gets edited after drafting. There's plenty that I think that never even makes the draft. I don't have my whole name or the most pertinent personal details about myself on here, but it would probably not be at all difficult to find me if you put even a little bit of effort into it, and people that I know in my real life read it. So I have to be mindful of how I present myself, how it reflects on me and the people in my life. Thankfully, there's not much controversial about a book blog!

Curating an online presence is something basic to the life of a millennial. So when teenage wannabe starlet Brooke Berlin is trying to build her profile in Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan's Messy, she seizes on the idea of a blog. She wants it to be witty and dishy and make her seem like the kind of sassy and smart girl that people want to see onscreen. The only problem is that she's not an especially talented writer. She puts up an ad, prepared to pay a generous salary (with an action movie megastar for a father, she's got the resources to make it happen), only to find that the best applicant is her nemesis, Max McCormack...who just so happens to be her sister's best friend.

Max has no real interest in making Brooke look good, but she does need some funding for an NYU summer writing program, so OpenBrooke.com is soon up and running. In order to get the material she needs, Max is forced to spend quite a bit of time with Brooke, including on the set of the Nancy Drew movie Brooke has been cast in the lead role for. A flirty friendship develops between Max and Brady, who's been cast as Brooke's love interest, but when Brooke takes an interest in him, Max finds herself having a much harder time taking those checks and letting everyone think that Max's witty, irreverent personality is actually Brooke's.

This book is a kind of sequel/companion to Cocks and Morgan's debut, Spoiled, though that book's lead character Molly (Brooke's sister) takes a backseat in this one. While I found Spoiled a little too breezy for a book about a teenager who finds herself in the middle of celebrity LA after the death of her mother and the uprooting of her entire life, that same tone works much better here for a story without that kind of heaviness. Messy is funny, and packed with pop culture references that will delight those of us who grew up in the 90s. There's even a makeover montage! And in a nod to Cocks and Morgan's day jobs (they write GoFugYourself.com), we even get excerpts of the blog posts that go up, which are themselves a snarky treat.

The biggest downside here is how predictable it all is. Pretty much as soon as the plot starts to get set up, it's obvious where it's going to go. There isn't much in the way of subverted expectations, which could have elevated this from "fun fluff" to something more. That's not to say this isn't enjoyable, it very much is! But it's so light as to be almost completely forgettable. This is a perfect beach/airplane read...it doesn't require much attention and it's entertaining. If you're looking for that, you've found a great option! If you're looking for anything more, though, look elsewhere.

One year ago, I was reading: Amateur

Two years ago, I was reading: The Last Romantics

Three years ago, I was reading: Silent Spring

Four years ago, I was reading: Moonglow

Five years ago, I was reading: Suspicious Minds

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Book 279: Messy

Book 265: Flip

"If he had got away with it so far, it was only because the truth was too bizarre for any of the people in Flip's world to figure out in a million years. They might not always know what to make of this version of Flip, but to them, he was still Flip. A weird, puzzling Flip, but Flip even so. They only had to look at him to see that." 

Dates read: October 1-3, 2018

Rating: 4/10

It's easy to look at other people, people who are wealthy, attractive, skilled, popular, and think they have it made. To wonder what it would be like to go through life as them. To wish you could switch places, even if just for a day or two. Rationally, of course, everyone has problems. Appearances can be deceiving, and someone who seems to have it made could be hiding issues we could never even guess.

In Martyn Bedford's Flip, fourteen year-old Alex Gray is a nerd. He plays music and chess, not sports. He's nowhere close to having a girlfriend. His family in London is working class. It would seem like waking up one morning in the body of Phillip "Flip" Garamond, who is handsome, athletic, and popular, would be exciting. But it's six months later than Alex remembers it being and he has no idea where he is, or why he isn't himself anymore, and he's terrified. He bumbles through life as Flip while trying desperately to figure out what happened to him before making contact with a mysterious stranger called Rob...who knows exactly what's going on with Alex because he's lived through it himself. Alex has to discover if things can be made right, or if he's fated to spend the rest of his life as Flip.

The first half of this book is really solid, with a sophistication in the prose style beyond that which is typical in young adult books. For as much as it can be enjoyable to daydream about living someone else's life for the day, the reality is that waking up in someone else's body would be absolutely horrifyingly scary, and Bedford skillfully conveys Alex's terror at this turn of events. I appreciated how Bedford laid out the confusion that would suffuse every moment of trying to figure out where you are, who the strangers you live with are, what you're "supposed to" be eating for breakfast, even where school is and what classes you're supposed to be going to. His longing to return to his real life, even though it's less desirable in almost every way, is very affecting, and makes Alex someone easy to root for. 

But it's in Alex's quest for answers, and the ones Bedford devises, that everything falls apart. I'm going to throw in a spoiler alert here, because I will be discussing the ending, because it is the culminating cherry on the downward slide of the book. After looks of searching, Alex stumbles across a message board for "psychic evacuees", people whose consciousness left their body, usually at the point of death, and took over another body that was "connected" to them in some way. It is here that Alex meets Rob, who shows up to hang out and talk about the life he's been living in someone else's body for years now. They discover that Alex didn't die, but was rather in a car accident that's left him in a coma...and his parents are about to take his body off life support. Alex devises a plan to "trick" his spirit back into his body by smothering himself and honestly it's all just bonkers.

For a novel that begins so pleasantly rooted in realism, it's disappointing the way it careens into plot angles that could be charitably described as "crackpot". I was genuinely curious about how Bedford was going to explain the body-switching, because it seemed like, from the way he was writing, it would be something that seemed at least quasi-plausible. He might as well have had Alex touch a cursed amulet for all the sense it made, though. And although the novel asks us to feel for Alex, it's shockingly unsympathetic to Flip, who must have gone from minding his own business to being stuck inside a strange body that's unresponsive, which is even more awful than Alex's situation, and then finally being freed only to face the mess that Alex made of his life...not just his social situation at school, but facing criminal consequences for his behavior! It tries to handwave this away at the very end, but I didn't find it at all convincing. I don't want to write this book off entirely, because there was some very solid stuff to start it off, but the ending is too preposterous and poorly thought-out for me to honestly recommend it at all.

One year ago, I was reading: Without A Prayer

Two years ago, I was reading: The Island of the Colorblind

Three years ago, I was reading: Rebecca

Four years ago, I was a reading: The Moonlight Palace

Five years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 265: Flip

Book 232: Children of Blood and Bone

"The children of Orïsha dance like there's no tomorrow, each step praising the gods. Their mouths glorify the rapture of liberation, their hearts sing the Yoruba songs of freedom. My ears dance at the words of my language, words I once thought I'd never hear outside my head. The seem to light up the air with their delight—it's like the whole world can breathe again."

Dates read: May 7-11, 2018

Rating: 6/10

When I was a little kid, I longed constantly for a sign that I was special. Not "in all the advanced classes" special, I already knew I was smart, but actual special. Someone was going to appear in my little small town, find me, and announce to the world that there had been a terrible mix-up, and I was urgently needed elsewhere so I could fulfill my glorious destiny. Or maybe I had to prove it, had to find the magic that was surely lurking within me and I spent more time than I should admit trying to do like Matilda Wormwood and move things with my mind. It never worked. No one ever came for me, and I grew up and took myself where I wanted to go, which is as it should be anyways.

I suspect, though, that I'm not the only one who nurtured these fantasies of being suddenly wrested from my ordinary experience to have magical adventures. Hence the popularity of "chosen one" narratives, particularly in the young adult genre. Tomi Adeyemi builds on the legacy of the Percy Jacksons and Pevensie siblings that came before, but for her debut novel, Children of Blood and Bone, she grounds it thoroughly outside of the "white people in Western countries" place it has lived for so long. She creates as her world Orisha, loosely based on Nigeria and the magic in her tales comes from the mythology of the region. There used to be magicians in this world, the maji, divided into ten clans with a special connection to gods and goddesses and their representative elements. But then a cruel, autocratic king cracked down and slaughtered the maji. The adults, anyways. The children were left behind.

The loss of her mother in the raid that ended magic haunts teenage Zelie even years later. She takes after her mother in that she's a Diviner, born with the distinctive white hair that marks her as a potential maji and therefore subjected to discrimination. Her brother Tzain, though, is "normal" like their father, who's never recovered from the loss of his wife. Their lives are forever changed when one day Zelie heads to the capital city to go to the market, and runs into Amari, the country's princess, fleeing her father and the palace with a powerfully important scroll. That scroll, along with other artifacts, has the power to bring magic back to Orisha. Zelie, Amari, and Tzain find themselves on the run from the King and his son, Amari's brother Inan, who discovers much to his dismay that he's not as dissimilar from the Diviners he hates as he'd like. An unexpected connection between Zelie and Inan could be what saves them all...or what dooms them.

This is not my usual type of book: I don't read YA particularly often, and it focuses heavily on plot over characterization and prose. Nevertheless, that plot moved forward so relentlessly that it was impossible to resist getting swept up in it, even when it veered toward the ridiculous. From nearly the second we meet them, our characters are under threat, and no sooner does one danger pass than another arises. Even as the story zooms, Adeyemi does some quality world-building, introducing the reader to a deeply earth-rooted system of magic in a way that gave enough detail to be intriguing without gratuitous information-dumping. It's refreshing to read a story that doesn't rely on the same familiar Christian and/or Eurocentric myths for inspiration.

That being said, while the details of the story are fresh, many of the beats are eye-rollingly familiar: enemies to friends, hate to love, capture and rescue. There are serious, serious deficiencies in character development...no one feels like more than a set of keywords and relationships that the readers are clearly supposed to get deeply invested in are so thinly sketched that the "payoff" barely registers. Prose quality that might elevate the more rote elements is absent...the writing isn't at all bad, but neither is it ever more than serviceable. The book doesn't feel like it's meant to be taken in and of itself, but rather as a springboard: for a movie, for sequels. While it's compelling and compulsively readable while it's in your hands, it loses a lot when it's over and you have time to think about it. I maintain only a vague sort of "if it's on the Kindle for less than $5" interest in continuing the series. If you're into this genre and these kinds of stories, you'll probably very much enjoy this book. If you're looking for something to keep you entertained on the airplane, this is a solid choice. If this isn't the kind of story you're predisposed to like, though, this is skippable.

One year ago, I was reading: Battleborn

Two years ago, I was reading: This!

Three years ago, I was reading: Friday Night Lights

Four years ago I was reading: Vinegar Girl

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Book 232: Children of Blood and Bone

Book 209: My Name Is Venus Black

"In time, he'd discover that I'm not unlike the planet I'm named for. At a great distance, Venus is beautiful, the brightest of stars in the sky. But what NASA discovered when they orbited her is that she's actually an inhospitable planet, a boiling cauldron of poisonous gases. Come too close and you'd fry."

Dates read: February 15-19, 2018

Rating: 3/10

When my sister was only a month or two old, I tried to throw her away. True story! I announced to my mom that she was useless because she wouldn't stop crying, and tried to bargain that if we couldn't throw her away, couldn't we at least return her to the hospital? We fought like crazy growing up, but once I went to college we started to get along better and she's one of my best friends now. There's nothing quite like the bond between siblings.

Of course, this isn't everyone's experience (although it is the experience of quite a few people I know with brothers and sisters). Some people become estranged. Some are just never close with their siblings. And others have been close their whole lives. Venus Black, eponymous heroine of Heather Lloyd's My Name Is Venus Black, falls into the last category. Though her brother Leo is six years her junior and is autistic (since the book is set in the 80s, he's described as having "special needs", but he's clearly on the spectrum), and is only technically her half-brother, Venus adores him and nurtures him. But her ability to take care of him is forever changed when, at 13, she commits a serious crime. We're not sure what it is at first, the book opens in medias res while Venus is confronting her mother at the police station, being interviewed after it happens. It becomes clear pretty quickly that "it" is that she's shot and killed her stepfather. Why, though, takes a long time to come out.

Only shortly after Venus commits the murder, Leo is kidnapped by his small-time-crook of an uncle out of the backyard of a friend of his mother's. Venus is devastated when she hears that he's gone, even trying to flee from pre-trial detention to look for him. But her escape attempt is foiled, and she's sent to juvenile lock-up until she's an adult. When she gets out, she wants to just take on a new identity and keep her head down and try to figure out a way to get her brother back. She gets a job as a waitress under an assumed name, rents a room, and is trying to save up to go to California. But she can't really escape her past...a promising flirtation becomes risky when she finds out he's a cop and might be able to discover who she really is, and eventually her mother tracks her down too. When they get a lead on Leo, though, everything changes.

By the time this review goes live, this book will have been out for well over a year, so I don't feel bad about the fact that I'm about to "spoil" the "why-dunnit". If you'd like to remain in the dark, stop reading. I'm mostly going to spill it because the book builds up to it like it's some kind of revelation and honestly it is not at all: Venus killed her stepdad because he was peeping at her though a hole in the wall. She tells her mother, and her mother does nothing about it. It makes the rage she feels at her mother feel justified and there's absolutely no reason it needs to be hidden in the back third of the book. It's a terrible plotting decision to bury it, but that's only one in a series of bad decisions Lloyd makes in her debut novel. The characters she draws are paper-thin (with the exception of Leo, who I'll get to next) and feel not-at-all real. Venus and Leo's mother is a terrible person, but Lloyd makes her a struggling alcoholic in a way that feels like it's supposed to give her sympathy (it fails, she's still a shitty parent). There's some weird religious overtones that come out of nowhere in the end of the book and it feels shoehorned and unearned. And the ethnicity of a supporting character is constantly referenced in a way that makes it feel almost fetishistic.

The sole bright spot, really, is the portion of the story around Leo. Lloyd's ability to convey both Leo's intelligence and his limitations, the way he does love the people in his life but has a hard time expressing it in a way that they understand, is deft and well-realized. Unfortunately, that's literally the only thing that worked for me in this book. The plot is uneven, the prose competent but uninspired, the characters mostly don't work. It's not even a matter of needing a better editor...there's a story here that could be interesting, but nearly everything would need to be completely revamped to give it the telling it would need to really connect. This is a poor quality book and I don't recommend it to anyone.

One year ago, I was reading: Messy

Two years ago, I was reading: The Hate U Give

Three years ago, I was reading: Freakonomics

Four years ago, I was reading: All The King's Men

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Book 209: My Name Is Venus Black

Book 195: The Girl In The Tower

"A woman married. Or she became a nun. Or she died. That was what being a woman meant. What, then, was she?"

Dates read: December 11-15, 2017

Rating: 9/10

Sometimes I find myself longingly wondering what life would be like as a man, even just for a while. I'd be able to walk the dog when it's dark without feeling apprehensive. No one would question my ambition. No one would assume that I'm my boss's side piece (this was an actual thing that happened at my lawyer job, not this one thank goodness). I wouldn't have to worry about crossing my legs at the ankle instead of the knee. No one would shout out commentary about my appearance at me. Must be nice!

And I live in a time that's among the freest and safest for women there's ever been! It's no wonder that Vasya, heroine of Katherine Arden's The Girl in the Tower, finds herself forced into disguise as a man in order to move freely and safely through her medieval Russian world. The book picks up more or less right where The Bear and the Nightingale left off...Vasya has fled the rural village she grew up in after her father was killed and she herself was labeled a witch. Knowing full well what that means for her life expectancy, she sets out to explore the world, ignoring the advice of frost demon Morozko who warns her that the world is not kind to young women alone. She discovers very quickly that he is correct, and presents herself thereafter as a boy...it helps that her nickname, Vasya, like many Russian nicknames, is gender neutral and could therefore stand for Vasily as well as Vasilisa.

In pursuit of a mysterious group of bandits that has been stealing children, Vasya finds herself unexpectedly reunited with her brother Sasha and the Crown Prince of Moscow to whom he is sworn in service, Dmitrii. When she gets back to Moscow with them, she's also reconnected with her older sister Olga, now the wife of an important nobleman, and meets Olga's daughter, Marya, who seems to share Vasya's unusual ability of seeing things beyond the ordinary. Vasya's trying to keep her masculine identity intact until she can get on her way while also enjoying the ability to express her naturally bold personality...and then, of course, disaster strikes and the family finds themselves fighting supernatural forces to stay alive.

The Bear and the Nightingale was one of my favorite reads of 2017, and this sequel (the second in a trilogy) did not disappoint. I will say that I'd recommend reading it shortly after the first book, or while it's still relatively fresh in your mind...there's very little of the kind of "catching the reader up" exposition that many sequels have, and I wish I'd known that going in because I'd read the first nearly a year prior so the details were a little fuzzy. But the magic is still there! Arden's prose and storytelling remain deft, she expands further into the realm of Slavic folklore, and I love how she grows the seeds of romance she planted in The Bear and The Nightingale between Vasya and Morozko. I found myself rooting for them even though Arden never lets you forget the inherent power imbalance between an immortal creature and a teenage girl. It's refreshing to see a romantic plotline with a young woman who won't apologize for her desire to finish becoming herself.

While there are many books I read that I enjoy, it's pretty rare that something really grabs me and keeps me up late at night and makes me want to buy extra copies to give to people and force them to read it (honestly, I have a really hard time recommending books to people in real life because so much about whether a person will enjoy a book depends on taste). This series makes it into that group, for me. They're just flat-out great storytelling. I can't wait to get my hands on the final book in the trilogy, and I'd highly recommend the Winternight books to all readers!

One year ago, I was reading: Life After Life 

Two years ago, I was reading: Stoner

Three years ago, I was reading: The Last One

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Book 195: The Girl In The Tower

Book 192: The Hate U Give

"WebMD calls it a stage of grief—anger. But I doubt I'll ever get to the other stages. This one slices me into millions of pieces. Every time I'm whole and back to normal, something happens to tear me apart, and I'm forced to start all over again."

Dates read: November 26-29, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Growing up as a white girl in an overwhelmingly white small town, I was always taught that police were the good guys. The police are there to help you if something bad happens. They are trustworthy. And I continued to, for the most part, believe that through when I graduated from college. Sure, some police were corrupt or abused their power. But there are assholes in every line of work. I don't think I really started to understand how systemically rotten policing can be, even if individual officers are often good people, until I took criminal law in law school and read about the wide variety of misbehavior they perpetrated from a position of trust. I don't think all police are bad, or villains, but I think it's a profession that can be very appealing to exactly the people who shouldn't be in it: the type who want to have the ability to control the lives of others and enact state-sanctioned violence when that control is questioned.

Starr Turner, the teenage heroine of Angie Thomas' debut novel The Hate U Give, has a pretty neutral perspective on cops when the book begins: her beloved uncle Carlos is a police officer, and she's been taught by him and her parents to behave in a threat-neutralizing way if she interacts with them: be polite, follow orders, don't make sudden movements. And she's never had any trouble. But then one night, when she's getting a ride home from a party from her long-time friend Khalil, they're pulled over on a pretext by a white cop, and he's shot to death, right there in front of Starr. It changes everything about her life and how she sees the world.

Starr's already living a fairly unusual life...she lives with her family in the inner city, but goes to a private, overwhelmingly white high school in the suburbs, where she has mostly white friends and dates a white classmate. She's always found herself living half in each world, but what happens that night really blows up her burgeoning racial consciousness. Her relationships with her friends and family shift and change as she tries to navigate the legal system and get justice for Khalil, and she discovers more and more who she is and who she wants to be.

This book had been hyped for months before I got to it...glowing reviews all over the internet, movie rights sold before it was even published. I always try to temper my expectations with any kind of media that's been all the rage, but sometimes it doesn't work. And honestly, I think it contributed towards the way I felt about this book: it's very good, and I probably would have thought it was amazing if it hadn't been sold as life-changing and mind-blowing, but it didn't quite measure up to those enormous accolades for me. There's a compelling story, solid writing with both emotion and humor, and great characterization. But as a reader, there just was never that moment where it really went into hyperdrive and became more than the sum of its parts.

Like I said, though, it does everything it's trying to do very well: Starr practically jumps off the page and feels very real, and her family is also beautifully, warmly drawn. Even though Khalil is barely alive during the novel, the way that Starr thinks about him as she processes what happened to him is touchingly rendered and makes the reader really feel his loss. Thomas also does an excellent job of balancing the heavy topic at the center of her book with lightness...there were parts that literally made me laugh out loud, but she never either undercuts the seriousness of police violence or gets too ponderous. But the characters of Starr's school friends, and especially her boyfriend, seem underdeveloped for the significance that the narrative places on them. And a decision Starr makes near the end of the book seems out of place, in a way that was jarring.

At the end of the day, I'd recommend it to just about everyone, honestly. It's written as YA (and as a primarily non-YA reader, I'd say it doesn't read as typical for the genre but does have some markings of it), so it's appropriate for younger readers, but it didn't feel dumbed-down to me, someone who loves a gigantic tome of literary fiction. Obviously the focus on police violence will be difficult for some, but it's a well-crafted, enjoyable book that will likely inspire you to examine your own pre-existing opinions. I highly recommend it!

One year ago, I was reading: Shantaram 

Two years ago, I was reading: Notes on a Scandal

Three years ago, I was reading: The White Tiger

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Book 192: The Hate U Give

Book 187: La Belle Sauvage

"The steamy, noisy kitchen was the safest place in the world, it seemed to him. Safety had never been anything to think about before; it was something you took for granted, like his mother's endless, effortless, generous food, and the fact that there would always be hot plates ready to serve it on."

Dates read: November 2-6, 2017

Rating: 8/10

I tend to think that it's the books we read as adolescents that often end up making the biggest impact on us. It's an age where we're still impressionable, but able to handle sophisticated concepts, and a book that makes the right connection with you can totally blow your mind in a way that you just don't experience much (if ever) with books you read later in life. And I've found that even if I read those books again later and objectively maybe they're not especially good, it doesn't really matter. I still love them.

One series of books that has held up spectacularly well, even from an objective standpoint, is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. I recently revisited them as audiobooks and they remain just wonderful. There's always a tension I feel when a beloved book gets revisited by its author after a long time for any sort of companion piece...what if it's just not as great? So I was both excited and wary when Pullman announced a new trilogy, The Book of Dust, set in the same world as the original one, and then again when I finally held a copy of the first volume, La Belle Sauvage, in my hands.

La Belle Sauvage is a prequel, as original heroine Lyra Belacqua is just a baby in this one. Our new protagonist is Malcolm Polstead, a relatively normal preteen boy who goes to school, helps out in his parents' pub, likes to explore on the local river in his boat, and sometimes helps out at the nunnery down the road. Two events happen in a short period of time that change his life: the first is the arrival of baby Lyra at the nunnery, and the second is an assassination he sees while boating. Both of these bring the outside world and its rapidly changing politics much closer to home, and soon even school isn't safe. And then, as an epic flood rages, Malcolm, along with Alice, the older girl who works for his parents, find themselves racing to protect Lyra from danger.

This book does a great job of introducing its world (an alternate universe England known as Brytain, which I think is the first time I've seen it given a name, but I haven't read the novellas yet) to a first-timer, as well as providing backstory on characters and situations that returning readers already know: the rise of the power of the Church, Farder Coram, althieometers, Lord Asriel and Marisa Coulter. And while Malcolm is about the same age as Lyra was at the beginning of The Golden Compass, and they both go on an adventure over the course of the book, they're not especially similar characters: while Lyra was high-spirited and bold, Malcolm is quieter and more solitary. He's got a decent amount of pluck, though, and makes an engaging hero that you get emotionally invested in.

I can't really evaluate this book from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the original series yet, but because of the way that the series is structured (this book is first in time, and then the original series, and then apparently the next book in this series will be a sequel to the original series), I'm going to go ahead and recommend it as a good starting place for people who are intrigued by it. The book is appropriate for older kids, but the series eventually takes a strong theological bent which may go over the heads of less mature ones, and may prompt discussions that parents should be ready for. If I'm being perfectly honest, I didn't think this book was as strong as The Golden Compass (I think that one did a better job of world-building), it might not be a fair comparison because that's one of my favorite books of all time. That being said, this is a very good book and an engaging adventure that has me longing for the next one already!

One year ago, I was reading: Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

Two years ago, I was reading: The Good German

Three years ago, I was reading: Missing, Presumed

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Book 187: La Belle Sauvage

Book 185: The Book Thief

"Although something inside her told her that this was a crime—after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned—she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn't help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate."

Dates read: October 25-30, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Over the past several months (writing from the end of 2017), there's been no small amount of debate over what it means to be complicit. Ivanka Trump asserted that she's not complicit in her father's presidency, which she wouldn't necessarily be as a daughter, but she pretty clearly is as a senior advisor in his administration. There's a growing awareness that to be privileged in a system that's beneficial to you, whether or not you are an active architect or proponent of it, without taking action for marginalized people also flirts with the line of complicity. No one likes to feel complicit, so we try to find ways to weasel out of it, to find people more actively involved with whatever it is, point the finger at them.

One of the biggest open questions of complicity in the last century is that of the German population under the Third Reich. I suspect, like most things, it fell in some sort of bell curve...some citizens were opposed, some were supporters, and most fell somewhere in between, trying to survive by keeping their heads down. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief takes us to a small village in Germany during World War II and lets us see that spectrum play out. A young girl named Liesel and her brother are brought by their mother to foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, because their mother can no longer afford to keep them with her. On the way, though, her brother dies, and this is what brings Liesel to the attention of Death.

Death is our narrator, and when the illiterate Liesel snatches a book off the ground as her brother is buried, he (it?) dubs her "the book thief". Liesel doesn't actually steal very many books during the course of the story, but it fits well enough. For a while, as Liesel grows to know and love her rough-edged, foul-mouthed foster mother and gentle, patient foster father who teaches her to read, and makes friends with her neighbor Rudy, their little town is isolated from larger events. But the real world can't be avoided forever, and World War II sweeps over the Hubermann household, bringing a Jewish man into their basement to hide and constant danger lurking everywhere.

The villagers' attitudes toward Nazism range from passionate true believers to the Hubermanns, who resist joining the Party and hide a Jew for months. Many of their neighbors go along as far as they need to to keep out of trouble. I don't think this is a perspective we see very often, looking at the ordinary people who exist in these regimes, and so I found it interesting to read. Zusak's characterizations of everyone who populates the village are a highlight...Liesel herself is probably the least well-developed character, but Hans, Rosa, Rudy, and several of Liesel's other classmates make vivid impressions and linger in the memory even after the book is closed.

But even though this book tends to get rapturous praise, there were some places where it fell flat, too. I think the Death-as-narrator trick worked less well than it could have...it just struck me as more gimmicky than meaningful and never really developed. I think the constant interjections into the text as "explainers" by Death were overused, and I think Zusak's writing is sometimes overly focused on going for "wow" instead of letting itself flow. As a whole, though, these are minor quibbles. The book is very good, with vivid and developed characters living in a well-drawn community, and the ending has a big (and earned!) emotional impact. It's well-worth reading and I'd recommend it widely, to everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: Love Medicine

Two years ago, I was reading: The Man Without A Face

Three years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

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Book 185: The Book Thief

Book 153: Spoiled

"Brooke closed her eyes and exhaled. It was bad enough that Ginevra's pleasantly nasty little shoe-related blind item had been canceled out by Molly's popular appearance in the latest issue of Hey! Between the fact that her actors were operating at straight-to-DVD levels and all the gushy comments she'd heard lately about Molly's eyes, or her clothes, or that heinous backpack, Brooke's nerves were as frayed as a pair of tights on Taylor Momsen. She'd even been seen eating chips in public. Like a commoner."

Dates read: June 18-21, 2017

Rating: 6/10

My sister is one of my best friends. But it wasn't always that way. When I first found out I was getting a sister, I was...not excited. As a pathological attention seeker from the very beginning, I was perfectly happy to be an only child thank you very much. Not too long after she was born, my mom saw me carrying my sister toward the kitchen. When she asked me where I was going, I told her I was going to throw Amelia in the garbage can because she cried too much. Informed that this was not an option, I argued for a return to the hospital. The presiding judge/my mom ruled against me. It didn't get a lot better until I went to college and we were out of each other's hair and then we realized we actually rather liked each other and though of course we still fight because we're sisters and I've never been one to let someone be wrong without making sure they know they are, she's a deeply important part of my life.

If normal circumstances like mine lead to sibling rivalry, finding out when you're already 16 that you have a sister you never knew about, who's the same age as you, would be rough. In Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan's debut novel, Spoiled, they introduce us to Brooke Berlin, only daughter of Hollywood mega-star Brick Berlin. Brooke longs to be an actor and see her face in all the magazines like her dad and is gleefully planning the Sweet 16 party that will be her social debut...when she finds out that she's not actually Brick's only daughter. Right before he met and married Brooke's mother, Kelly, he had a fling with Laurel, a costume designer on a movie set, and only found out about her pregnancy after Kelly was pregnant too. Laurel went back to Indiana and raised her daughter, Molly, to believe that her father was a military man who died before she was born. But Molly finds out the truth just before Laurel passes away, and finds herself on her way to Los Angeles to live the father and sister she never knew.

That all probably makes this sound kind of heavy, but it's really not. What transpires from there is straight out of 90s/00s high school movie mashup heaven...Brooke and Molly squabble, and Molly finds herself in the middle of a long-standing rivalry between her spoiled brat of a sister and Shelby, the daughter of a tabloid king. She also finds herself torn between her long-time, on-again-off-again hometown boyfriend and the cute boy at her tony new prep school. All this set against the sisters being forced to work together on a production of My Fair Lady. The drama!

I've been a longtime reader and fan of Cocks and Morgan, who write one of my favorite blogs on the internet: Go Fug Yourself. They're very steeped in Hollywood and fashion, given that they write about those things literally every day, and have developed an irreverent, snarky-without-being-mean tone that worked perfectly for this little snack of a YA novel. There are all kinds of little details that are delightful: that Brooke's best friend is named Arugula, Brick's dim-bulb bon mots, a daft football player and his perky blonde girlfriend that are obviously heavily inspired by Kevin and Brittany from Daria. Coming off of reading two heavily-fact-based nonfiction books about Serious Issues, the breeziness of Spoiled really hit the spot. It's kind of like a candy bar: tasty and gone quickly and not especially memorable.

I know they were trying to ground their story in real emotions, but that the whole story takes off from Molly's mother's relatively sudden death from cancer doesn't really work. That this is very much a secondary plot point kind of strains credulity. A 16 year-old just mostly moving on from the death of her only parent without much in the way of emotional trauma? Although it's their feelings about their missing mothers (Brooke's mother has had no contact with her daughter at all in the years since her divorce from Brick) that ultimately forms the glue that bonds Molly and Brooke together in the end (spoiler, but not really because if you can see their reunification coming right from the beginning of their feud), I wish they'd found another way to force Molly out to California because it's jarring every time you're reminded of it. It's a significant false note in what's otherwise a catchy little ditty. Otherwise, this is a fun, silly, light book perfect for when you need an easy read.

One year ago, I was reading: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Two years ago, I was reading: The Queen of the Night

Three years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

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Book 153: Spoiled

Book 80: Lights Out In The Reptile House

"He turned from the sill, and his father sighed and eased up and down in his chair. He had a hernia, which had been aggravated when he'd been taken into custody. He refused to say how. He had disappeared for three days and then had been returned. He refused to talk about any of it. One of the policemen had jingled coins in his trouser pockets while waiting for him to get dressed. It occurred to Karel, standing there, that his father was always intentionally and unintentionally creating absences or leaving them behind him."

Rating: 4/10

Dates Read: August 20-22, 2016

Growing up, I loved dystopian stories. Nowadays, with the YA boom and the runaway popularity of The Hunger Games, you can't swing a stick without hitting a dystopian story written for teenagers. Back when I was that age, though, I lost myself in books like 1984 and A Brave New World. I still to this day reference 1984 what feels like at least once a month.

For the most part, though, the books I read focused on adults, even if they were on the younger end of adulthood. Childhood in a dystopian-esque environment wasn't really touched on in these classics of the genre, but Jim Shepard's Lights Out In The Reptile House puts young teenagers front and center. Set in an unnamed country, it's less of an active dystopia than a totalitarian state, but there are definite parallels with the world of 1984. There's a single Party that controls everything, there's a love story, there are sudden disappearances, there's a close relationship that springs up between the protagonist and a Party official. The protagonist in question is Karel Roeder, a shy loner who's about 14 or 15 years old. His mother has long since been gone, so he's being raised by his perpetually unemployed father. He works at the local zoo, at the reptile house, and nurses a desperate crush on his neighbor and classmate, Lina.

Karel wants nothing more than to be left alone, outside of politics and the machinations of the real world, to work with lizards and long for Lina. But the world won't let him be: his father disappears, he's there when a neighbor is dragged away by the secret police, both his crush and his boss at the reptile house are involved in the resistance, and then suddenly a mysterious party official, Kehr, takes over Karel's home. From there, it's a battle for Karel's metaphorical soul between Kehr and the resistance forces, and a destructive fire at the zoo pushes Karel towards his fate.

As difficult as I imagine it would be to exist as an adult in a highly-surveilled police state, I don't know that I'd ever thought of what it might be like to grow up like that. To know no other normal but the one where your neighbors or even your own family members vanish and don't return, where you're afraid almost in equal measure to inform or to not inform, knowing that if it were to be known that you didn't inform when you should have, there could be consequences for you and your loved ones. It's not hard to imagine that it would create teenagers like Karel, who keep their heads down and try to escape unnoticed. But it's also understandable that it would create teenagers like Lina, whose natural rebellious instinct and high spirits draw her inexorably towards the resistance movement. And who is right? Is it better to keep to yourself and try to stay safe or to fight back, potentially risking the lives of your loved ones as well as your own?

Despite the interesting thoughts and questions the book raises, though, it ultimately just wasn't anything special in and of itself. The prose and characterizations were adequate but nothing more than that, and the plot moved in fits and starts, with long periods of time waiting for something to happen, and then it would pick up, and then slow back down. This may apply especially for the squeamish, like me, but the graphic depiction of torture, especially at the end, was just stomach-turning. I didn't particularly enjoy the experience of reading it, and although I think it's supposed to be pitched to the YA market, I wouldn't recommend it to a teenager, either. Just not worth the time. Read 1984 instead.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your most-referenced book?

One year ago, I was reading: The Name of the Rose

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Book 80: Lights Out In The Reptile House

Book 39: A Great and Terrible Beauty

 

"The vicar, whose name is Reverend Waite, leads us in prayers that all begin with 'O Lord' and end with our somehow not being worthy- sinners who have always been sinners and will forever more be sinners until we die. It isn't the most optimistic outlook I've ever heard. But we're encouraged to keep trying anyway."

Dates read: April 2-3, 2016

Rating: 4/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

I love secondhand shopping. Part of it is that I'm cheap: I don't like paying more for something I could pay less for. My clothes are only new the very first time I wear them. As long as something is in good repair, why not pay $7 for a pre-worn-but-great-condition cherry red cardigan instead of finding it new for $45? As I've lived in apartments my entire adult life and bought furniture that I've always intended to be temporary, why not just buy a table someone's served dinner on before? And books...well, I've already talked about my fondness for secondhand books, but this is something I will always repeat: I love secondhand books. As thrilling as it can be to score a book you've been looking for at the used bookstore, there's also a chance to browse through the shelves and see what catches your eye that you might be willing to take on flyer on for $2.

Which is how I picked up Libba Bray's A Great And Terrible Beauty. The cover art is striking, and the back promised a mix of the supernatural, girls boarding school drama, and a touch of gothic horror. While none of those things is a Must Read for me in and of itself, the combination sounded intriguing. And so, two American dollars later, I had my copy in my hot little hands. The book follows 16 year-old Gemma, who has been living in India with her parents for virtually her entire life and wants desperately to go live in England. But when she has a mystical vision of her mother's gruesome death, which comes true, she finds her wish granted in the worst possible way. To England she goes, sent straight off to boarding school at gloomy Spence Academy. She doesn't quite fit in with the other girls...until she catches queen bee Felicity in a compromising position and bribes her way into the inner circle. Gemma's power grows, and there's a secret diary that the girls read and use to find their way into a whole other world...where, of course, danger lurks.

Some experiments work out well. Some don't. This was a miss for me. It's the first of a trilogy, and it's usually been my experience that the first entry in a series is the best one in terms of a standalone story. Not so here...the entire idea of the realms and The Order and the Rakshana feels like Bray herself doesn't really understand how it all works and where she's trying to go with it, but figures she can get to it in the sequels. Same with Gemma and her friends...they're still sketches, their characters are very thin. I think YA can be a great genre, and some of the YA books I've read are still among my favorites. But I think it's often the home of some lazy writing and mistaking stereotypes and/or tropes for actual characters, and this book falls into the proverbial chaff rather than the proverbial wheat for me.

Tell me, blog friends...what's your favorite genre to read?

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Book 39: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Book 15: The Serpent King

"If he could be still enough, all the world's motions would cease. The orbit of the earth. The dance of tides. The march of rivers to the sea. Blood in veins. And all would become nothing but her perfect and temporary thereness. Hold this moment. Keep it. Until the next train whistle in the distance pierces the stillness."

Dates read: January 5-7, 2016

Rating: 10/10

The town I grew up in was just this side of rural by the time I hit high school: they put up the first full stoplight (not just a blinking red or yellow) when I was in eighth grade. Our first McDonald's came that year too, or the year after. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if we'd had the internet in high school. The internet was around when I was in high school, of course (I graduated in 2003). Everyone had an email address, and (more importantly) an AIM screen name. But the internet was dial-up, and unless you had two phone lines at your house, you couldn't be constantly online or no one would be able to make calls. What I mean was if we'd had the internet like today, constant availability and access. I used books and movies to escape the limits of my experience as a high schooler, but if I were in high school today, I have to imagine I'd have been an active blog reader and probably a blogger myself.

Which is why I think I connected so hard with Lydia, one of the three rural Tennessee high school students at the heart of The Serpent King. Lydia reminds me of myself in high school...that feeling that you were destined for something greater than what Belle in Beauty and the Beast referred to as "this provincial life" (Belle's kind of a snob when I think back to that movie). Thinking that you were smarter than the people around you, and that somehow made you better than them. While I had a little bit of a hard time buying that Lydia wouldn't have at least some social interest from her peers solely by virtue of her fashion-blogger access to fancy things, she was such a well-drawn character and her emotional truth resonated enough to make this merely a quibble.

Her two best friends and fellow outcasts: Dill, the son of a Pentecostal minister serving time for possession of child pornography, and Travis, a hulking, gentle soul who immerses himself in a Song of Fire and Ice-esque fantasy series, are trying to navigate their senior year. Senior year of high school is such an emotionally-charged time of life, where you start really thinking about The Future in a real way for the first time. The K-12 schooling that has been your entire life since you can remember is about to be over, and the future can feel both overwhelmingly wide and incredibly narrow at the same time. Everything is tinged with a kind of premature nostalgia because you know it's ending. The Serpent King captures the feeling of senior year with such assuredness and beauty that it took me straight back there mentally...I found myself pondering what senior-year me would think about the life I've ended up with, what I would have been like as a senior if I graduated ten years later, trying to figure out what ever became of people that I haven't even thought about in ages.

This is the best high-school experience novel I've read since The Perks Of Being A Wallflower. Chbosky's novel has become a modern-day classic, and I don't see any reason why The Serpent King shouldn't do the same. Strong characters and a beautifully-told, powerful story. A must-read.

Tell me, blog friends...what did you think your life would be when you were a senior in high school? How differently did it turn out?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 15: The Serpent King

Book 4: Gilded

“We are given moments, and we must choose what to do with them. This is your moment.”

Dates read: October 18-20, 2015

Rating: 2/10

I'm a sucker for young adult lit, and young adult fantasy in particular has a soft spot in my heart (Tamora Pierce's Wild Magic books, for example, are such favorites of mine that I recently replaced my long-lost childhood copies). So when I was shopping through the Kindle sale section and saw Gilded, I thought it seemed like a great fit for my tastes.

And it promised to be based in mythology! I'm a big mythology nerd and have been since I was a kid (my mom got me this book called Greek Myths for Young Children and it was my favorite thing and I still remember it fondly to this day), but I've never been exposed to the Korean mythology background indicated as a basis for the story, so I thought it would be a good chance to learn about that too.

As the rating shows, though, it was a huge disappointment. The book follows the story of teenage Jae Hwa, a Korean girl raised for most of her life in the United States and recently returned to Korea after the death of her mother. Her grandfather is very unhappy to see her, which she assumes to be because he doesn't like his Americanized granddaughter, but turns out to be because as a female born into her father's family, she will be ruthlessly pursued by a demigod until he can pull her into his dimension and imprison her for all eternity.

There's good stuff to work with her: grief for her mother, being torn between cultures, an exciting adventure in another world...and that's on top of the usual high-school plotlines (first love, friendships, coming of age, etc ) that have driven plenty of YA novels for ages. But nothing really works. The loss of her mother and her dual cultural identities are referenced often, but without any real exploration of them...she just notes that she's sad, or that she's confused, and it completely vanishes until she sees fit to mention it again. Her love interest has two identifying traits: he's cute, and he's really smart/education/good at everything. Of course he likes her too, so their only stumbling block is that she's constantly shoving him away because she wants to protect him from getting caught up in her destiny. Which is noble enough the first time, but gets tiresome long before the end of the book. As do her constant interactions with her divine pursuer, who keeps pulling her into his world to remind her he's going to do so permanently...and then she escapes. Again. And again. I was relieved when I got to the end. The book feels like a first draft of something better.

Tell me, blog friends...what did you read recently that was disappointing?

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Book 4: Gilded