Month: August 2017

LisaAnnReads > 2017 > August

Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

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The boy’s eyes flew open.
-roger bevins iii

Strange here, he said.
Not strange, said Mr. Bevins. Not really.
One gets used to it, said the Reverend.
If one belongs here, said Mr. Bevins.
Which you don’t, said the Reverand.
-hans vollman

Synopsis
Lincoln in the Bardo unfolds over the course of the night in which President Lincoln buries his beloved son, Willie. As Lincoln traverses the graveyard in his grief, the reader comes to know a myriad of souls inhabiting a second layer of the graveyard—those buried there but not yet moved on to what is next. As Lincoln’s story is told by an overlap of historical sources, the voices of the Bardo rise and fall over one another, setting out a shadowy world of pain, fear, and longing. As the night passes, the Bardo’s inhabitants come together as one—for as much as they fear the matterlightblooming phenomenon that heralds a soul’s departure from the Bardo, they know Willie, sweet, innocent Willie, does not belong in this third place.

The danger of high expectations
As with many other books, I came to Lincoln in the Bardo with exceedingly high expectations. It had been hyped by all of the snooty places I find good books—NPR, Time, The Atlantic, and my coworker Peter. While I’ve never read them, Saunders’s success with short stories made everyone go mad for his first novel before it was ever published. The cover flap uses words like “literary master” and “most original, transcendent moving work yet.”

It would likely have been impossible for any book to live up to the hype created for this one. This expectation colored my initial reaction to the book—having expected the highest highs, something less made me feel that it was awful. Having had more breathing room from the book and having flipped through it again preparing for this review, it is an excellent book–particularly in the writing if not the structure. It’s not a book I’m likely to forget anytime soon.

Structure
As to the structure, when I was younger, I used to dream up fake histories to insert into daydreams, thinking up books that blended the history with the action of my characters. In Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders has taken that structure that hasn’t worked in far less capable hands (including my own, chubby five year old hands) and somehow made it work.

To craft Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders takes excerpts from what a few quick Google searches appear to be actual historical sources and blends them together into a narrative. The narrative pieces themselves connect and read in some places like a conversation between historical sources. In the concept and on the written page, the effect is remarkable—I’m not sure Saunders tells any of his own narrative about Lincoln’s life outside of the graveyard with his own words (unless some of the sources aren’t real—admittedly, I didn’t check them all).

On audio, however, this format works significantly less well. The citations for the historical sources break up the flow of the audio so frequently but so quickly that they become confusing. After the first cite, the citation for an historical source simple becomes “Author, op. cit.” In the written book (as you can see to the right), it’s fine. The eye can skim past with little interruption. In the audio, a different voice reads the citations so that seemingly out of nowhere the voice of what sounds like a preternaturally calm flight attendant interrupts the story to say “Leech, op. cit” and before you can wrap you head around what she just said, the next reader is talking and reading the next quote. The voice is jarring enough that it can’t easily be ignored and, as a result, I’m sure I missed much of the first several chapters of the book.

And yet….the audio.
I would not, however, go so far as to say that this is a book that doesn’t work in audio. On the contrary, the alternating, non-historical sources—the voices Saunders actually wrote–make this one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to. An impressive cast of voices including Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon, Bradley Whitford, Bill Hader, Megan Mullally, Rainn Wilson, Keegan-Michael Key, Mary Karr, and Don Cheadle all voice various souls stuck in the Bardo with Willie Lincoln. It is in this conversation between these souls that the audiobook shines head and shoulders above the physical book. Almost ever voice seems perfectly chosen for its character, adding depth and dimension to the anguish and obsession experienced by those in the Bardo. Here too, where Saunders was able to stretch his creativity, the writing shines and there are moments like the quote above that made my exquisite-writing-loving-heart skip a beat.

Developing his cast of characters
Warning of a teeny, tiny spoiler that you find out fairly quickly in the book……
::look away now if you’re a spoiler-stickler::
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One of the particularly creative choices Saunders made with the Bardo-ians, was to have the bodies of his Bardo inhabitants be reflective of what they were obsessed with at the moment of their deaths. Nick Offerman’s character, Hans Vollman, was a gentleman who married a woman much younger than he. Rather than force himself on her, he let her slowly, slowly come to love him…unfortunately for him he died before they ever consummated their marriage. As a result, Vollman is obsessed with sex with his wife so his physical body is naked with a penis several feet long. Roger Bevins III, another character, having committed suicide but regretted it at the last moment, is many-eyed, many-nosed, and many-handed, obsessed with the sights, smells, and touch of things he can no longer experience. This choice on the part of Saunders is unlike anything I’ve seen and adds a dimension to his characters that is unexpected and, on the whole, well done.

Edgy for the sake of edge
There are, however, some choices that it seems Saunders made for no other reason than to be edgy. Vollman’s character is an excellent example. If he were naked and simply erect, this would have conveyed the same idea without Saunders repeatedly mentioning that his gigantic member is swollen and wagging around, three feet long. Similarly, a pivotal moment in the book is told from an outside perspective of four characters who are midst orgy. Telling of the event from outside makes sense and is well-done…but the characters being midst orgy feels overdone. Like it was difficult to work sex into a book about an eleven-year old boy grieving his father but, gosh darn it, you can’t have a book without sex. These random, unnecessary, adult details that serve no purpose but to shock are the result.

Reading along
I’m not sure I’ve ever thought this about a book before now, but the best way to experience Lincoln in the Bardo, at least for the first several chapters, is to listen to the audiobook while following along with the physical book. The physical book alone loses the power the impressive cast puts behind Saunders’s characters while the audio alone is incredibly hard to follow until you’ve wrapped your head around Saunders’s structure of his historical quotes with citations. Because of the odd structure, this isn’t a book I would recommend for anyone that doesn’t like books that aren’t a little frustrating—for Lincoln in the Bardo shows its genius when you push past the confusion and surrender to experiencing Saudners’s mad world-between-worlds.

Notes
Published February 14, 2017 by Random House (@randomhouse)
Author: George Saunders
Date read: May 18, 2017
Rating: 3 Stars upon initial listen, 4 Stars as I sat with the book

Hindsight / Foresight August 6, 2017

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Mark Solarski

Hindsight this Week

It’s been a busy week at work so my reading has slowed down–I managed to finish only Almost Sisters and the ARC of Reading People, both of which should be on the blog in the coming weeks.  I started The Alice Network today and am already sucked in–even though I spent the entire day today (Saturday) reading and briefing for work (and will all day Sunday as well), I can’t wait to jump back in and keep reading.  Today has affirmed that reading for work and reading for fun are two entirely different experiences.

I got two ARCs in the mail yesterday and today–Girls Made of Snow and Glass that I mentioned last week from Top Shelf Text and Trell, an ARC about a African-American man wrongly convicted of homicide written by one of the Spotlight Team reporters at the Boston Globe.  Two very different books but I’m excited about both.  They’re both being released in September, so I’ll likely post those reviews towards the very end of August or beginning of September, closer to their release days.

In other acquisitions, I picked up Woman No. 17 from the library and purchased Six of Crows, Stamped from the Beginning, and The Judgment of Richard Richter (Kindle First choice for August).  At the rate I acquire Kindle books, I’m ensuring I’ll never run out of things to read before I die.  For my Book of the Month selections I got the new John Boyne, The Heart’s Invisible Furies as well as a copy of Dark Matter as an early birthday present from Boyfriend.

Boyfriend and I are still slowly working our way through Waking Gods when we’re in the car together and I just started listening to Born a Crime by Trevor Noah.

Foresight for the coming week

I should be able to knock out The Alice Network and Priestdaddy this week.  I’ve got American Street and Fraulein M. waiting as well as my coworker’s copy of The Underground Railroad that I really need to start.  One day my TBR won’t be dictated by my library due dates…but it won’t be any time next week.

Have suggestions for what I should read next? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Posted on by lisaannreads


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I open my mouth to respond. A sob comes out. Daddy is moved aside and Mama wraps her arms around me. She rubs my back and speaks in hushed tones that tell lies. “It’s alright, baby. It’s alright.”

Synopsis
The Hate U Give explores the aftermath to a girl, a family, and a community after one of their own—a black teenage boy named Khalil—is brutally murdered by a white cop. The novel follows sixteen-year old Starr, a witness and passenger in the car the night of the murder, as she struggles to find her voice and what it means for her to be a black teenager living in 2017.

Not For Me
I hesitated in writing this review—The Hate U Give isn’t about me and it isn’t for me. Even if I hated this book (which I absolutely don’t), it wouldn’t really be my place to say that anymore than it’s my place to critique “Lemonade.”

They. Weren’t. Made. For. Me.

In fact, I decided early on that if I were going to give this book any less than five stars, that I would simply refrain from rating it at all. Turns out, that wasn’t a problem.

The Hate U Give sucked me in quickly with a fast-paced narrative and a likeable main character who was easy to identify with, even as a white person who did not grow up in anything like Starr’s neighborhood. Starr is studious, funny, and athletic—she has universal appeal and it is easy for most readers to see something of themselves in her. I didn’t identify whatsoever with her love of basketball, but her studiousness and teenage worries over friends hit home for me.

There are, however, many things in the book that will likely make a white audience uncomfortable—the foremost example to me being Starr’s father’s lauding of the Nation of Islam. It is to Thomas’s credit that she wrote a book that can be so universally read; but at the end of the day this is a book for black readers. It should make you squirm a little if you’re white. That squirming can be good for you—why does this make you uncomfortable? Is the reason you’re uncomfortable about you or is what’s happening here actually wrong? (Spoiler alert: the answer is probably the former).

I do think this is a book everyone should read so (obviously, since you’re here) I went ahead with my planned review, with the recognition that there is probably a lot that went over my head and that I didn’t understand that would resonate with a black audience. It felt like the lesser of two evils to review the book and hopefully bring it more attention than to refrain. (Feel free to disagree with me in the comments.)

Title
The title “The Hate U Give” comes from a Tupac reference to “Thug Life”—The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone. The hate, the vitriol, even the malignant neglect the vast majority of white society gives to African Americans starting when they are very young ultimately comes back to effect everyone. It isn’t just the black community that is hurt by Khalil’s death in this book. Through Starr and her siblings, the effects of the murder reach into their predominantly white school. Parts of the city literally burn as riots break out.

To be sure—my point here is not “treat black people nicer so that you can have nicer things yourself, dear white person.” However, it is shockingly easy for white America to look at the problems coming from predominantly black and poor neighborhoods and blame the people that live there without ever thinking about white America’s systemic racist policies and decisions that resulted in the ghettoization of black Americans. White people are not innocent of the problems that created black ghettos; therefore, white people are not innocent of the resulting poverty and crime.

It is hard to ignore the larger societal issues at play when Thomas gives you the back story of why Khalil may have been selling drugs before his murder and why another character named DeVonte joined a gang. It’s not so easy as their making bad decisions or being bad people. Thomas doesn’t completely exculpate them, but by putting specific, likeable faces on issues like drug dealing and gang-banging, she invites her reader to question their biases to see that good people can make bad decisions for good reasons. And that these same people are far more than what a single bad decision defines them as.

Michael Brown. Philando Castile. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland.
Through the experiences of Starr, Thomas puts a face on those left behind when black people are murdered by those who are sworn to serve and protect. To be sure—each of the more than one thousand African Americans killed by cops each year has a story, a name, and people who love them. Unfortunately, with talking heads screaming at each other in the media, the story the reader gets here with Khalil is not one we get to see for the vast majority of those murdered, at least not without a lot of effort to dig and cut through the crap. We don’t see Michael Brown’s struggle to provide for his family, even though he isn’t yet a man himself. We don’t see the agony the witnesses in the Eric Garner case went through to decide whether to testify or not—and the danger of any decision to “snitch” that might result. We don’t see the impact, months later, on the family of Sandra Bland. Not like this. Not in this detail.

Through fictional Khalil, Thomas brings home every name that crossed the headlines over the last few years and reminds us that each black boy and each black woman was, at the end of the day, human and loved. That it is a tragedy when any life is taken at the hands of the police.

Time Capsule Book
Because of its timeliness it is easy to see why some critics are referring to The Hate U Give as a new classic and a book with staying power. I’m not sure I agree it is a classic, largely because there are many references to things like Tumblr that are quickly going to become dated. To me, the book read like a “Time Capsule” book. By that, I mean The Hate U Give is a snapshot in time of 2017 where this real, pervasive injustice is happening far too often in modern society. This book will stand through time as representative of where we are as a country and a people now. I could certainly be wrong (and would not be disappointed if I am!); it is just difficult for me with the speed at which technology changes to see many modern books as “classics” if the technology and references in them are going to become dated and lost in a few years. I loved the Jessica Darling books as a teen myself, but they don’t hold the same appeal to the YA audience today because so many of the little situations that arise wouldn’t happen nearly the same way today with the advances in technology we’ve made since the ‘90s. Because of this, I see The Hate U Give as less likely to be studied the way we study Jane Austen now in 2217, though it absolutely deserves attention and should (and, I hope, will) stand the test of time as a powerful snapshot of society in 2017.

Things Black People Deal With But Shouldn’t Have To 101
Though this book certainly wasn’t written with a white audience in mind, Thomas is masterful at explaining things like code-switching to the audience—

I should be used to my two worlds colliding, but I never know which Starr I should be. I can use some slang, but not too much slang. Some attitude but not too much attitude, so I’m not a sassy black girl. I have to watch what I say and how I say it. But I can’t sound “white.” Shit is exhausting.

—without sounding heavy-handed to those who already know what things like code-switching are. If I did not have mixed-race friends who consciously moderate their accent based on their audience, I don’t know that I would know what code-switching is, and I certainly didn’t know what it was when I was in high school.

As a black student at a predominantly white school, Starr has to be aware of how she comes across—because black children are seen as more culpable and less innocent than white ones, because she is one of a handful of black kids in her school and therefore her actions will be imputed to all black people (but only her negative actions, of course), because she doesn’t want to affirm stereotypes. Starr thinks more about her state of being on a daily basis than most white folks likely do in a month.

This short explanation plus the extended examples of code-switching in The Hate U Give are but one example of Thomas making the book accessible to readers of all ages so that maybe those who aren’t familiar with these ideas can begin to see all of the little ways people of color experience life differently, through no fault of their own. (Thomas also expertly explores the harm of microaggressions through one of Starr’s friendships).

While we (white folks) should be doing more hard work to root out our biases and discover our blind spots, I do think books like The Hate U Give can be a good non-threatening way to begin to recognize issues like microaggressions. Regardless of whether you are beginning because you are actually a young adult for whom this book was written or whether, like me, you grew up sheltered in a predominantly white town, it is often less threatening to be confronted with something you are wrong in through narrative fiction. This doesn’t mean you get to stay in your safe fictional world forever; however, it is better to begin with something like The Hate U Give than to never begin. Reading books like The Hate U Give teaches readers empathy and I defy you to read this book and not feel for Starr, Khalil’s family, and their community, regardless of where you stand on Black Lives Matter.

Fangirling hard for Bahni Turpin
I listened to The Hate U Give on audio. I would be remiss if I did not rave about the excellent choice of narrator for Thomas’s work. Even before listening to this book, I had an audiobook voice crush on Bahni Turpin, the narrator here. I would listen to her read food ingredient labels. She also read A Piece of Cake, a memoir I read earlier in the year by Cupcake Brown, a woman who grew up in the foster system and was a heavy drug user for years before getting clean and becoming an attorney. Admittedly going from the voice of drugged-out, screaming Cupcake to having that voice also be Starr threw me a little for a loop. I had to remind myself for the first few minutes that Starr was a good girl in this story. (Case in point for my undying love of Bahni Turpin—the fact that Bahni is one of the readers is what pushed me to use my most recent audiobook credit on Hum If You Don’t Know the Words.) Bahni is genius as Starr and makes the audiobook for The Hate U Give a real standout. She is breathtaking in her voice acting as teenage Starr and moved me to tears several times.

Summary
If this weren’t already abundantly clear, I think this is a book everyone should read. Because of some language and violence, the book skews a little older YA than most of its genre-mates but still has a strong appeal and well-developed narrative for adult readers.

Notes
Author: Angie Thomas (@angiethomas)
Publisher: Balzer + Bray (@balzerandbray) (imprint of HarperCollins @harpercollinsus)
Audiobook narrator: Bahni Turpin (@prospertunia)
Date Published: February 28, 2017
Date Read: July 9, 2017
Rating: 5 stars

Review: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

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“You know lily of the valley is poisonous, right?”
“So don’t eat it. At least not until you’ve finished speaking. Or if the crowd turns on you.”
 
Synopsis
Set on the eve of the German invasion of Poland, Lilac Girls tells the little-known story of the Rabbits of Ravensbruk–women who were the subject of cruel Nazi medical experiments.  Told in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of a Nazi doctor, a Polish teenager involved in the underground, and an American socialite dedicated to helping those less fortunate, Lilac Girls spans twenty years, exploring the long-lasting effects of both cruelty and hope on the human spirit.

Writing Style and Scope
I usually love WWII literature.  I studied history in undergrad and took every course I could on WWII and the immediate post-war years in Eastern Europe.  I adore All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale.  I read Mischling earlier this year and thought it was fantastic.  I came to Lilac Girls with high expectations, and that may have been part of the problem.

Overall, Kelly’s writing style completely missed the mark for me. There are witty moments (like the quote above); however, the entire book isn’t quite so snappily written. On the whole, Kelly’s word choice and writing style is pedestrian. There isn’t anything particularly unique or beautiful about the way that Kelly writes.

I do say this with the caveat that Kelly has accomplished something most people haven’t—she’s published an actual book. I have friends who are authors and I have seen the grueling work that goes into writing a book so I do not say this as if just anyone could write a book. It is an accomplishment that Kelly wrote a book like Lilac Girls and it was a worthy effort of her time to tell this particular story. There are many women in my online book club who read and enjoyed it and many people on Goodreads have rated it highly. My enjoyment of a book, however, is very tied to the language and so, for me, Lilac Girls fell flat.

I actually struggled a bit to find the selection I wanted to use as the quote for the book above in keeping with my usual format. There were a few witticisms here and there and there was an extended passage when one of the Rabbits goes to her death that was the only truly beautiful passage that made me pause—but it was far too long to quote.

In scope, Kelly was ambitious—the novel covers something like twenty years in under 500 pages. This passage of time does odd things to the pace and the narrative skips ahead several months at a time consistently. I do not think the book needed to be any longer by any means; however, the passage of time was not always clear (time was marked with years alone) so it was sometimes strange to see how much a character, place, or season had changed since the last chapter. I was constantly flipping back and forth, trying to determine where the character had left off last in time and approximately how much time it seemed had passed since then. Passing time this way made the book read unevenly.

Related to the swift and somewhat uneven passage of time, there were also a handful of asides when Kelly seemed to think she needed to throw in a bit of background note that read oddly, as if the characters were suddenly hitting pause and turning to the reader to explain some bit of history. Because Kelly didn’t have time or space to flesh the events out more evenly or naturally, she has to stop here and there and stage whisper to the reader the background of some event that happened in the intervening time between chapters. If this writing choice were more consistently used throughout the book, it might be one thing, but it seemed to be a device Kelly used infrequently and jarringly when she couldn’t think of another way to convey a piece of information.

Rabbits of Ravensbruk & Narrator Development
I commented on Instagram when I finished that I probably should have quit reading the book when I was 100 pages in and was feeling like the book was becoming a bit of a slog. The only thing that actually kept me reading was the Author’s Note. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the Rabbits themselves were real, though I hadn’t heard of this particular atrocity at Ravensbruk before, but was fascinated to hear that Herta Oberheuser and Caroline Ferriday were both real characters. (Well…that and book-quitter-guilt. But I’m working on overcoming that!) The pull to find out whether or not Herta would get her just desserts and what happened to Caroline were the only things that kept me reading. I didn’t particularly care about them as fictional characters but knowing they were real gave me enough motivation to keep going.

I searched Amazon after finishing and was a tad disappointed to see that there doesn’t appear to be a biography of Caroline Ferriday—I’d like to know her real story, and not just this fictionalized one. She was a fascinating woman—a former Broadway actress and socialite who used her connections, money, and social capital to enormously charitable ends, working to bring the Rabbits to the US for medical treatment for their lasting injuries after Ravensbruk and working to get them reparations from the German government.

I did find Kelly’s choice of character viewpoints to tell the story of the Rabbits interesting. Caroline and Kasia are whom you would expect for narrators in this kind of story.  I did, however, struggle a bit with Kasia’s voice. Kasia ages from sixteen when the book starts to forty. I would expect her voice to mature but there were moments—like when Kasia describes the medical “examination”/violation when she arrived at Ravensbruk—when Kasia’s teenager voice sounded way too old if it was supposed to be contemporary, teen Kasia talking and not adult Kasia looking back.

For the third narrator—Herta Oberheuser—to be a villain gave it a slightly unexpected twist. It always felt icky (as it absolutely should!) to read her section. She was an unrepentant Aryan-supremacist and her chapters read like it. I don’t say this to complain—Kelly gave Herta a few moments where we could see some internal struggle but didn’t apologize or temper her anti-Semitism. You do not like Herta and you aren’t supposed to. There is no apologist writing here.

American Evils
Kelly also deserves kudos for presenting the United States accurately, rather than sugar-coating our own misdoings. When I learned about WWII in school (which, admittedly, is becoming longer and longer ago), the United States was pretty consistently always presented as the White Knight. I applaud Kelly for using her characters to challenge this perception. In particular regarding immigration caps during the war, Kelly indicts Roosevelt and others for having knowledge of Hitler’s Final Solution including knowledge of the death camps, yet still turning away hundreds of thousands of refugees, essentially condemning them to certain death. In particular, she mentions the MS St. Louis—a ship of 900 German Jews turned away from our border in 1939. Over a quarter of them wound up dying in death camps after being forced to return to Europe.

Kelly also makes a point during a scene of the Nuremberg trials to mention American experiments on unwilling participants as well. Indeed, American doctors throughout history have also wrongfully tested various medications and treatments on prisoners and people of color without their informed consent, the most recent and well known being the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies which only ended in 1972.

Kelly could easily have left out these details as they had no bearing on the overall plot of the book. Many readers would have been none the wiser. It is to her credit that she did make a point several times to raise American complicity in medical testing on involuntary subjects and our government’s turning its back on refugees during the war. We may have won the war, but there were certainly moments where we could have acted more honorably to save many more lives.

Conclusion
While I would probably never personally recommend this book to anyone, I do see its general appeal. To the extent that a novel about atrocities committed in Hitler’s death camps can ever be considered “beachy reading,” that’s what it seems to me. It’s a book you buy in paperback, dog-ear the corners, splash some pool water on by accident, and then throw on a shelf when you’re done. The language is easy to digest and no one is tripping over three-dollar words.

The thing is, I like my three-dollar words. If the writing style and word choice aren’t important to you, the underlying story here and the character of Caroline Ferriday are compelling enough for the book to be enjoyable. For me, I found myself wishing the same story had been told by a more skilled hand.

Notes
Published: Ballantine Books
Author: Martha Hall Kelly (Instagram: @marthahallkelly)
Date Read: July 28, 2017
Rating: 2 stars