Month: March 2018

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Three Books That Confronted My Privilege, March 2018

Three Books That Confronted My Privilege, March 2018

Posted on by lisaannreads

One of the things I have tried to do with my reading over the last year or so is to read diverse voices, particularly diverse non-fiction. I don’t want to only read books where I already agree with everything the author proposes, nor do I want to put a book down solely because it makes me uncomfortable where the thing that is making me uncomfortable is a person of color talking about their own experience. (Books like My Absolute Darling where a white man uses the c-word too much, however, are perfect examples of when I should put a book down just because it makes me uncomfortable). With that in mind, I recently finished three books by Black authors—We Were Eight Years in Power by journalist/author Ta-Nehisi Coates, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and This Will Be My Undoing by essayist Morgan Jerkins. I am not going to pretend that as a white woman I am qualified to “review” them, instead what I hope to achieve here is a summary of each so that you can decide if these are books that would challenge you and your privilege if you read them as well. All three are valuable recent books.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates’s most recent offering is a compilation of the essays he wrote for The Atlantic during the eight years of Obama’s presidency, one per year, with commentary of what was going on in his life and the life of many black Americans during each of the eight years. Because the essays were originally magazine articles, there is some repetition among them of certain points or common phrases that, if this were a book of essays, would likely have been edited to fit better. None of the thoughts or arguments that were repeated were long, so the repetition didn’t bother me as a reader, nor did it cause me to go into skim mode. It was just noticeable.   The introductions to each article were interesting in that, while the context was helpful, Coates also comments on the following article—things he wished he had done differently, whether some of his points or predictions held up, and general criticism of his work. As a reader, this was a strange device and it made me wish that the “intro” essays followed the pieces instead. His critique of his own work colored how I read the article and I wished before some of them that I had a chance to form my opinion before reading his hindsight-critique.

Though I read this book weeks ago, two of the essays in particular have stuck with me. The first and one that I didn’t expect to agree with as much as I ultimately did was his article on the Case for Reparations. I grew up in a conservative household and, until relatively recently, regurgitated arguments I’d heard growing up about the evils of affirmative action. For someone who grew up thinking affirmative action was a bad idea, reparations are essentially anathema. While I’ve come around on affirmative action, admittedly my thoughts on reparations before reading this article were generally along the lines of—we probably do owe them something but it would be impossible so why are we spending time on this? The Case for Reparations set out a history I was unfamiliar with, including the history of systemic discrimination on the part of the US government to prevent African Americans home ownership while enabling white families to purchase homes. Where homes are the most common source of wealth and wealth-building in this county, this set African Americans back generations. I found myself convinced by the end of Coates’s argument that, at a minimum, we need to actually study the feasibility of determining what is owed to whom and how that could be brought about.

The other essay that stuck with me was one I remember skimming in parts when I came out in The Atlantic but didn’t read in its entirety until this book. The Black Family In the Age of Mass Incarceration set out a history of how we find ourselves with the largest incarcerated population of any first world country, with vastly disproportionate rates of incarceration between whites and blacks with the same backgrounds. I assumed that the article was going to make a similar argument as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Coates’s argument, however, doesn’t go quite as far as Alexander’s. As with reparations, he does explain how government policies created disparate treatment between the two races that resulted in higher rates of incarceration of blacks and he explains how the current paid prison system only serves to reinforce the high rates of incarceration. (In a nutshell—when prison becomes a business, bodies become the commodities that must be obtained at high rates to keep the business open. And the bodies that draw the least criticism to consume are Black bodies.)

While many of the articles are still available online, there was a power in reading them together with Coates’s thoughts on each year of the Obama presidency, including critique of Obama’s failure to do more for African Americans who won him the presidency and the respectability politics he seemed unwilling to depart from. In some ways, the most powerful essay in the book was the prologue, written after the “black-lash” against the second Obama term that resulted in the election of what Coates calls the First White President. The compilation of all of these articles together along with the essays that introduce them and close the book, make it worth getting a copy of the book and not just re-reading the articles online. This was one of a handful of books that before I’d even finished my library copy, I’d ordered my own to keep.

Notes
Published: October 3, 2017 by One World
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Date read: February 18, 2018

When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

The focus of probably the first half of When They Call You a Terrorist was not what I expected since Khan-Cullors’s recollections seemed more about her brother’s experience with an inadequate public and prison mental health system than it did on her brother’s blackness. Which is not to say that his blackness was ignored or even that his blackness didn’t greatly affect the way the mental health and law enforcement systems responded to him. I simply didn’t know much about Khan-Cullors before listening (I think literally the only thing I could recall hearing about was her partner’s being detained trying to come into the country from Canada) and so did not expect the lengthy discussion of mental illness. Her compassion for her brother and the way the family tried to treat him and have others treat him with as little force as possible made me hurt for her. (Khan-Cullors reads the book herself, which added to the tragedy inherent in many of the sections.) Because so much of the first half of the book is simultaneously a study of being black and having a mental illness, I would go so far as to say that if you’re interested in hearing about the lived experience of trying to obtain mental health care in a broken system, this is a powerful book for that alone.

Khan-Cullors lived experience was about as diametrically opposed to mine as possible, with the idea of “organizing” being something I don’t think I had heard of in any real sense before Obama came along (and then probably in a discussion of how he wasn’t “qualified” since that was all he had done). In contrast to my privileged and sheltered life, Khan-Cullors was reared in an atmosphere of social organizing, going to a school that focused on social justice issues, and having a diverse group of friends—both racially and on the gender spectrum.

I have literally nothing negative to say about this book because it is her lived experience and, unlike say J.D. Vance, she doesn’t use random anecdotes from her life to cast aspersions on an entire group of people. Khan-Cullors sticks pretty closely to her own story and, in doing so, comes across as credible—one can disagree with her politics but you can’t argue that this was her life.  The audiobook features a short interview with Khan-Cullors after the book where she says that one of her goals was to write a “truth-telling, healing-justice” story. She succeeded.

Notes
Published: January 16, 2018 by St. Martin’s Press
Author: Patrice Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele
Date read: March 8, 2018

This Will Be My Undoing: Living At the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America

Admittedly, of the three books featured here, this one probably made me the most uncomfortable, but mostly because I don’t read very many books that prominently feature essays about labia and vibrators. Which, let me quickly add, were not mentioned for shock value—this wasn’t a book that I felt like I wanted to put down because it veered into the gross-Lena-Dunham-esque territory. There were just a few moments of “oh—I don’t know that I’d talk about that publicly but here we go.”  I will say, this book probably made me the most uncomfortable of the three, though it was an uncomfortable that, like Hunger, was probably good for me to sit with.

Jerkins book is, like Coates, a series of essays—this was a bit of a mixed-bag for me. Each essay stood alone which made the audiobook easier to put down and pick back up but it also meant the stories jumped around in time a bit. The vision I had of Jerkins and her experience at one point in the book was changed when she revealed some piece of her early upbringing in a later essay. I wouldn’t call this book a favorite but it is a book I’m absolutely glad that I read—as I mentioned before, I want to push the boundaries of what I find comfortable and I want to specifically read more memoirs and essays from people of color about what it is like to have lived in their shoes—as Jerkins says, at the intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in White America. I recommend this book specifically because it did make me uncomfortable and because Jerkins’s voice is like none other I’ve heard. For someone so young (oh god, the authors are starting to be younger than I am!), she has a powerful voice and I look forward to seeing what is to come from her.

Notes
Published: January 20, 2018 by Harper Perennial
Author: Morgan Jerkins
Date read: March 19, 2018

Header photo credit: Daniel Garcia

Review: I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon

Review: I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a bound galley ARC of this book from DoubledayBooks as part of a sweepstakes. I’m grateful to Doubleday for their generosity and, because I enjoyed the book, was happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

If I tell you what happened that night in Ekaterinburg I will have to unwind my memory—all the twisted coils—and lay it in your palm. It will be the gift and the curse I bestow upon you. A confession for which you may never forgive me. Are you ready for that? Can you hold this truth in your hand and not crush it like the rest of them?…But, like so many others through the years, you have asked:

Am I truly Anastasia Romanov? A beloved daughter. A revered icon. A Russian grand duchess.

Or am I an imposter? A fraud. A liar. The thief of another woman’s legacy.

That is for you to decide of course…You will have your answers. But first you must understand why the years brought me to this point and why such loss has made the journey necessary. When I am finished, and only then, will you have the right to tell me who I am.

Lawhon’s Past Work and I Was Anastasia
I was a fan of Lawhon’s last historical fiction offering, The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress—enough so that I picked up her first Flight of Dreams. Flight of Dreams, however, has not yet made it off the TBR. If you’re a bookish person, I feel like that should accurately convey my feelings about Lawhon. If that means nothing to you, suffice to say I really like Lawhon but I don’t love Lawhon. The hang-up for me, I think, was that it felt at times like Wife/Maid/Mistress dragged a tiny bit towards the end and I wanted to get moving.

I Was Anastasia was a book I wanted to move quicker, not for the writing this time, but because it was hard to wait to see what would happen next. Of the two I’ve read, this is my favorite and it’s bumped Flight of Dreams up my list.

Structure
The structure of I Was Anastasia is non-standard to say the least. The book follows Anastasia Romanov from the time of the royal family’s removal from their home in Tsarksoe Selo to the massacre in Ekaterinburg* and Anna Anderson, the most well-known (and well-accepted during her time) woman who claimed to be Anastasia Romanov. The book flips back and forth between the two with Anderson’s chapters being longer since she’s covering decades where Anastasia chapters cover approximately sixteen months from start to finish—a pity because I wanted more Anastasia but I understand this would be an impossible feat.

Anastasia’s chapters move forward in strict chronological time and typically pick up close to where the last chapter left off, where Anderson’s chapters begin in 1970 and work backwards, jumping many years in between chapters. Lawhon’s author’s note (which you absolutely should not read until the book is over) indicates that she read all of the Anderson biographies that informed her novel backwards. This backwards-telling works in Lawhon’s hands—it could have been a train wreck, but Lawhon did an excellent job at making sure that when something was introduced for the first time, whatever the reference was wasn’t jarring and then you discovered the origin of whatever it was in the immediately following Anderson chapter while it was still fresh on your mind. I particularly enjoy non-standard devices like this or like Freshwater’s stream-of-consciousness-y Ogbanje narrators so the chronology didn’t bother me.  A few other readers who received ARCs commented on Instagram that it took them a bit to get into the narrative because of this structure but those that stuck with it indicated they got used to it pretty quickly and were enjoying the book.

Tension
One of the elements that made this structure work so well was the tale’s naturally increasing tension and Lawhon’s skillful exploitation of this tension. As Anderson moves backwards we come closer and closer to finding what it was that made her jump off a bridge in 1920—the act that set her on course to be identified as Grand Duchess Anastasia—and what exactly happened at Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. Anna’s story becomes more dramatic the farther back in time you go with her, including being institutionalized in a psychiatric institution twice so her story has its own tension. You also know that the entire royal family (maybe including Anastasia, maybe not) is going to be brutally murdered at the end of the book where the stories come together—you dread this intersection and yet you can’t wait for it to happen.

Ignorance was helpful
Though I was a history major with a focus on eastern Europe, I managed to somehow escape taking Russian history (I can tell you some stuff about Poland and the former Czechoslovakia tho.) So while I had heard of Anastasia (most likely from the animated 1997 movie featuring the voices of Meg Ryan, Angela Lansbury, John Cusack, and Kelsey Grammer), I had no clue whether she actually did or didn’t survive and, if not, whether her body had been found. If you have a similarly convenient hole in your knowledge, I would encourage you to refrain from filling it before reading I Was Anastasia. This is one of the few times I would ever say this, but not knowing if Anderson was Anastasia or not (or even if the question had been completely settled) increased the tension of the book. Lawhon does tell you the truth and where she took liberties in her Author’s Note so have no fear that you will have the wrong information once the book concludes.

Problems?
Reading I Was Anastasia made me interested in the real Romanovs and, fortuitously, Anne Bogel did a “book flight” match up last week saying that if you enjoyed I Was Anastasia, you could check out The Romanov Sisters from by Helen Rappaport (she also suggested reading Dreamland Burning along with Killers of the Flower Moon. What can I say—great minds think alike.) I’ve started The Romanov Sisters and I’m enjoying it so far. However, I’ve also strayed a little beyond Rappaport since the repeated references to Nicholas II (Anastasia’s father) as “Nicholas the Bloody” left me with some questions that weren’t answered in I Was Anastasia and, thus far, haven’t really been addressed in Rappaport.

Apparently, Nicholas II earned this apt nickname by putting down political protest (Bloody Sunday in January 1905, the resulting attempted Russian Revolution of 1905, executions of political opponents) and instituting anti-Semitic pogroms. It is unlikely that Anastasia, as a seventeen year old girl, would have had any involvement in anything political her father did. It would have been bizarre to incorporate any of this into the story about a seventeen year old girl, but…it’s also hard to ignore this side of a minor character with significance to Anastasia that went completely unaddressed.

Ultimately, I Was Anastasia raises questions for me about what stories we tell and what we chose to say about them. Because Nicholas the Bloody was merely “Papa” to Anastasia, he’s presented as a doting father (probably true based on the correspondence quoted thus far in The Romanov Sisters) and victim of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. These things can be true but since people are not ever just one thing, it can also be true that he was violently anti-Semitic and caused the deaths of scores of his own people as well as scores of Japanese during the ill-advised Russo-Japanese War. If I have any significant criticism of this book, it is that this reality should arguably have been included in the author’s note. It wasn’t directly relevant to the book (though it goes at least part of the way to explain why the revolution and resulting massacres happened) but if white authors do not at least acknowledge the atrocities committed by historical figures like this, then the result is white audiences left with the sense of Nicholas as a victim, a problematic conclusion.

Recommended
I recommend I Was Anastasia for fans of historical fiction or “women’s fiction.” (Ugh, again, for that category title.) The characters are compelling and the structure is different but not so unusual that it should be a turn-off. By telling the story the way she does, Lawhon makes you feel for Anderson, makes you want her to be Anastasia. I appreciate a skillful author who can make you feel for someone who may not be innocent.

Notes
Published: March 27, 2018 by Doubleday Books (@DoubledayBooks) available for pre-order now
Author: Ariel Lawhon (@ariel.lawhon)
Date read: March 17, 2018
Rating: 3 3/4 stars

*Because Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and there’s no one accepted transliteration for many of the letters, there are many different ways to spell many of the Russian names, places, and words used in I Was Anastasia. I typically stuck with those chosen by Lawhon, though as I’m reading The Romanov Sisters, they aren’t necessarily the ones chosen by Rappaport. (Highlighting the continued disagreements.)

Review: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

Review: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

Posted on by lisaannreads

Freshwater is going to be one of those books that draws a strong reaction from people—the viewpoint is non-standard, the structure unusual, and the content will be blasphemous for some. I adored it.

Synopsis
As a side note, I often write the synopsis last and usually struggle. It’s not my favorite part of this process but I assume people want at least a basic plot summary at the beginning. I have never struggled this much to summarize a book in a way that does it justice.

Freshwater is ultimately the story of Ada, beginning with her time as an embryo when she is first inhabited by the Ogbanje* spirits that will come to define her life. We follow Ada from birth through young adulthood, experiencing her life as it is described largely by the Ogbanje themselves. Her life is never easy—constantly at the whims of the spirits that embody her—and yet, perhaps because she is so full of spirits, her life has been more full than that experienced by others.

Viewpoints

I don’t even have a mouth to tell this story. I’m so tired most of the time. Besides, whatever they say will be the truest version of it, since they are the truest version of me….In many ways, you see, I am not even real. –Ada

She named me this name, Asughara, complete with that gritty slide of the throat halfway through. I hope it scrapes your mouth bloody to say it. When you name something, it comes into existence—did you know that? -Asughara

Freshwater is told in alternating viewpoints, though the viewpoints don’t share equal time, nor do they alternate in any particular order. The majority of the story is told from the viewpoint of the simmering, unnamed We—constantly in motion, constantly swirling around in Ada. She is subject to their whims in the sense that she can be querulous and divided in her attentions and wants. They are not of this world and they embody Ada such that she isn’t entirely either. The We open the book, describing Ada’s childhood in Nigeria as a middle child with a physically absent mother and an emotionally absent father. They return periodically, the Greek chorus filling in the audience, if the Greek chorus were the inner workings of a major character’s mind.

When Ada leaves Nigeria for college in the United States, she is shortly beset upon by one of the Ogbanje that becomes dominant enough to earn a name—Asughara.* Asughara is blood-thirsty and bent on destruction—others mostly, though her actions while embodying Ada will drive Ada to her limit. She is almost solely self-centered (Asughara-centered over Ada-centered) at the cost of all others, though she also protects Ada in some ways from experiencing violence, particularly sexual violence.

Very, very rarely Ada herself does speak, giving the reader the sense (mostly) of the agony of being beset upon by these gods, constantly at their mercy, constantly pulled in different directions that ultimately seem only to point to her destruction—a destruction that will free the Ogbanje back to the brothersisters.

There is one other viewpoint that is dominant enough to be named but does not, that I can recall, have any chapters directly from his viewpoint. When Asughara wanes, her opposite is St. Vincent. A male Ogbanje striking for his gentleness and yet no less fully encompassing of Ada’s self than Asughara.

Trigger Warning / Cautions
There are setting events that cause some of Ada’s Ogbanje/personalities to become dominant at different points in time. As you might expect, one of these things is a rape—while it is not described in excessive detail, its impact on Ada is and so this deserves a trigger warning. There are also a series of unhealthy relationships that at times include some elements of physical violence that may make some readers uncomfortable. This is something that I usually prefer to avoid; however, because the viewpoints describe the actions happening to Ada in a removed sense, these weren’t as triggering to me personally as they could have been—i.e. Ada doesn’t describe the violence to her body, Ashughara or the We/Ogbanje chorus do at a level removed. The removal itself indicates Ada’s own detachment from the trauma but in some ways, this device also made it easier for me to read.

While not something that deserves a trigger warning in the usual sense of the phrase, when St. Vincent embodies Ada, he doesn’t feel at home in her feminine body such that she starts wearing a binder and even has reduction surgery to be more masculine or, at least, more androgynous. I am not versed in the best ways to sensitively approach this topic. While Emezi seems to use it to show how Ada was at the mercy of the competing whims of the Ogbanje, I can also see the idea that her “trans personality” (for lack of another way to name it) is the result of some whim of the gods being an offensive way to explain why someone might not feel at home in their body—it isn’t Ada that wants to be more masculine but rather St. Vincent when he is forefront among the Ogbanje.

Writing
The writing—the word choice, cadence, and sentence structure—is loosely narrative in a sprawling, serpentine sense. This isn’t a Faulknerian stream of consciousness structure, but this is also not straight narrative. The spirits speak as they want and they rarely want to report what is directly happening. You have to read between the lines of what the Ogbanje describe they are doing to understand what this means for Ada—what this manifestation means for her body as it moves through the world. The writing felt fresh and original, never overdone for me, though it will absolutely drive away some readers. I would encourage you, dear reader, to push through several chapters before you give up on this one if it doesn’t seem immediately for you. Because the writing is so unlike most of what is readily out there for Western audiences to easily consume, it can take a few chapters to settle into the way the Ogbanje narrate but the investment is worth it. If the topics aren’t for you then that’s not something I can likely change but I propose that the writing is something you can get used to and this book is worth the investment, particularly if reading diversely is something you value.

Blasphemy
Jesus—the god of the white man—is presented as essentially another Ogbanje. He isn’t truly in the sense that he isn’t African and the Ogbanje are the Igbo spirits; however, he interacts with Ada in much the same way as the other spirits. He rarely answers Ada when she seeks his help and he is no more holy and no more a god than the others. If this is going to bother you, this isn’t a book you should start.

Mental Illness

We’ve wondered in the years since then what she would have been without us, if she would have still gone mad. What if we had stayed asleep? What if she had remained locked in those years when she belonged to herself?….The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin. -We

Inaccurate and/or lazy descriptions of mental illness are something I can’t abide in a book and yet…I had no problem with Freshwater. The manifestation of the Ogbanje through Ada is pretty clearly interpreted by people around Ada as the manifestation of mental illness—she dissociates into the various personalities, she can be manically hedonistic when in Asughara’s hands and is self-harming to the point of a suicide attempt.

On the one hand, the idea that mental illness is caused by the possession of evil spirits is an offensive proposition. And yet, I don’t think Emezi’s point was that Ogbanje are the source of all mental illness. Rather, while the outside word might interpret Ada’s actions as those of someone with mental illness, she isn’t one. Her actions have another cause but this doesn’t mean that all individuals with mental illness are also at the mercy of the Ogbanje. Because Emezi doesn’t present the Ogbanje as a universal experience outside of the Igbo people, I didn’t read Freshwater as really being a book about mental illness at all. Rather, mental illness was the periphery, an explanation others had for Ada but not the explanation for her at all.

Stay With Me
Shortly before I read Freshwater, I read Adebayo’s Stay With Me. Adebayo is also Nigerian (Emezi grew up in Nigeria and is Igbo, one of the larger people groups found in Nigeria). In Stay With Me one of the beliefs that the characters discuss is the idea that malevolent spirits can be born to a mother, only to die and then repeat this cycle. In order to prevent the malevolent spirit from returning—so that, in essence, a real child can be born to the mother—the body the malevolent spirit inhabited must be mutilated and the object they use as their tether to this world and this family must be found and destroyed. I don’t recall Adebayo using the word Ogbanje (I could definitely be wrong) but these are the same spirits that embody Ada in Freshwater, except the spirits in Freshwater didn’t cause Ada to die as a child. Where Stay With Me peripherally explains what the Ogbanje often cause, Freshwater explains what happens when they stay and the havoc they can wreck. If you read Freshwater and enjoy it, you may enjoy Stay With Me. If you enjoyed Stay With Me and are wiling to go a step further down the path into the beliefs espoused by some of the minor characters in Stay With Me, then check out Freshwater.

Notes
Published: February 13, 2018 by Grove Atlantic (@groveatlantic)
Author: Akwaeke Emezi (@azemezi)
Date read: March 8, 2018
Rating: 4 ¼ stars

*While the Microsoft Word symbols have a plethora of symbols/letters for other languages, the “O” in Ogbanje and the “u” in Asughara actually have a dot under them in (what I believe is) Igbo based on the Author’s dual ethnicity as Igbo and Tamil. Word, not terribly surprisingly, doesn’t have this symbol.

Review: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

Review: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

Posted on by lisaannreads

There are no lessons in it. There’s just this harsh, horrible world touched with beautiful magic, where shity things happen. And they don’t happen for a reason, or in threes, or in a way that looks like justice. They’re set in a place that has no rules and doesn’t want any. And the author’s voice –your grandmother’s voice—is perfectly pitiless. She’s like a war reporter who doesn’t give a fuck.
-Ellery Finch on The Tales from the Hinterland

Synopsis
For as long as she can remember, Alice and her mother have been running, running from bad luck, running from recognition. Until one day they can’t run far enough and Ella is taken, leaving no clues except the warning to “Stay Away from the Hazel Wood,” the estate of Alice’s reclusive fairytale-telling grandmother. As one would expect, Alice promptly sets out for The Hazel Wood in search of her mother, only to find truths about herself instead.

Darkness
I came to The Hazel Wood with some anticipation. I loved Girls Made of Snow and Glass and this was recommended as an up-and-coming book for fans who enjoyed Girls. With that said, the books are very different. Even having read the description, I didn’t anticipate how dark The Hazel Wood would be. The Hazel Wood is more Grimm Brothers than it is Hans Christian Anderson.

At the heart of The Hazel Wood is a fictional book—Tales From The Hinterland—written by Alice’s grandmother. Several of the stories are retold as vignettes in The Hazel Wood and others’ characters assert themselves into the narrative often enough for me to draw the conclusion that absolutely none of them end happily and not usually for any particular point. There is no allegory to the Hinterland Tales. Just usually misery. With these tales as the backbone of The Hazel Woods’ narrative, it’s not surprising the book starts pretty dark and only gets darker. (Which is not to say the narrative doesn’t have a satisfying resolution—there isn’t darkness for darkness sake and the characters do each have arcs that resolve, even if everything isn’t Happily Ever After.)

Characters
The main character Alice was someone designed to have the reader identify with her—she isn’t in the popular crowd, she’s a little weird, and she feels disconnected from people around her. In this way Alice is the EveryGirl of YA books and could easily have felt a bit like a trope of the damaged teen girl with shades of Alice in Wonderland (though the author says this name-nod isn’t a choice to give the Alice in Wonderland tale any more weight than any other fairytale reference). Despite this beginning, as Albert spun The Hazel Wood, I grew quickly more connected to Alice and invested in her story. Alice didn’t feel overwrought or like a recycled character but her own person. Indeed, through Alice, Albert introduces themes of agency in one’s story that felt all the more powerful with the parallels to fairytale Alice, who had little control over her story in Wonderland. Alice did strike other reviewers as unnecessarily rude, self-centered, and prone to violence; however, this aspect of Alice’s character is explained as you learn more about who she is—these characteristics are part of the overall larger point about agency in one’s story and even in one’s person. I didn’t find these to detract and, in my reading, they served a purpose. With that said, if you can’t get into this story after about fifty pages and Alice is your hangup, this isn’t the book for you.

The other two significant characters (in terms of their impact on Alice and/or time in the narrative) are Ellery Finch and Ella, Alice’s mother.  Ellery is a bit of a fairy godmother, if one’s fairy godmother were a teenage boy with an unlimited charge card. His money took the place of the godmother’s wand and made what would have been otherwise expensively impossible leaps in the story more plausible (to the extent that its plausible to have a friend with this kind of money—although, fairytales aren’t usually known for their plausibility so it works.) He is, to an extent, a love interest for Alice though that never goes deeper than a crush and awkward request for a first date that doesn’t really happen (unless you count going on an epic quest where someone might be killed a date. Then there’s one date.) Romance isn’t the point of the book and Albert doesn’t go there just to go there, which I appreciated. When there comes a point at which it looks like Alice might need rescuing, her rescuer isn’t Ellery alone—he’s not the Prince Charming in this book, nor does Alice need one. A potentially problematic point raised by other reviewers is Alice’s description of Ellery as someone she doesn’t find attractive—I didn’t particularly pay attention to this, interpreting it as Albert’s way of making it clear this wasn’t a romance and Alice doesn’t need a man. With that said, Ellery is also the only character described as being black/bi-racial so having the only character of color be someone the narrator specifically mentions she isn’t attracted to is understandably problematic. If Albert’s point what was I interpreted it as, she needed more characters of color so that this didn’t stick out.

I didn’t get quite enough of Ellery or of Ella, frankly. We spend very little time with Ella and only come to care for her by rooting for Alice and coming to love what (and who) she loves. Both of them were present enough for me to think I liked them but I don’t feel like I have enough information. What I’d like is a novella from each—Ellery of his experience of the same events told in The Hazel Wood and Ella as a prequel to the events that laid the foundation for the events in The Hazel Wood. (If someone knows Melissa Albert and would like to make that happen, thanks in advance.)

Easter Eggs
You’d be hard-pressed to catch every fairy tale, fandom, or feminist reference here. I’m pretty sure at one point there’s a nod to The Yellow Wallpaper and Harry Potter references abound. Outside of the narrative, these were fun little easter eggs, though some of the obvious ones that came in clusters here and there felt a touch like namedropping or trying to hard to curry favor with the fandom crowd. The annoyance I felt over this was more the feeling that these clusters that caught my attention pulled me out of the narrative, forcing me to surface when I had been deep in the story up to that point. The best books are the ones where you’re so immersed you forget you’re reading and not living the story. The Hazel Wood had this quality at points, though when these references were clustered and about fandoms (as opposed to about fairytales), it detracted a bit. With that said, if you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years, you won’t miss anything if you miss each and every reference. While they mostly add detail to the narrative, they aren’t necessary to any part of the plot or character development such that you’d miss anything if you missed them all.

Recommended
The book read a bit like an older YA book in themes and style. Unless an adult reader has a particular interest in either YA or fairytales, this one will likely miss the mark for an adult reader who doesn’t usually read YA. For actual young adults and adult readers of YA, I do think this is a book that will worth the time investment of reading.

Alice as a protagonist is strong and capable and the twists in the plot felt original. I’m a sucker for books that raise the issue of agency and the control we have over each of our stories, so that stood out for me as a strength. The book is plot-driven enough that if you’re looking for a fun diversion (as opposed to something that will force you to ponder the secrets of the universe and the meaning of life), I do think this book will still be engaging and worth your time (though you may find it drags a bit through the last chapters as time passes differently and the plot literally slows down). If you do prefer to ponder the meaning of life, there’s also substance in this fractured fairytale for you.

Notes
Published: January 30, 2018 by Flatiron Books (@flatiron_books)
Author: Melissa Albert (@melissaalbertauthor)
Date read: March 11, 2018
Rating: 3 ¾ stars

MMD February 2018: This Must Be The Place and Interpreter of Maladies

MMD February 2018: This Must Be The Place and Interpreter of Maladies

Posted on by lisaannreads

For February 2018, Anne Bogel chose Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be The Place as the main book to read with Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies as the flight pick.  I loved This Must Be The Place and now have a new author whose backlist I need to explore.

This Must Be The Place

What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.

Synopsis
In deciding how to describe this book, I pulled up Amazon to see how it was summarized. I don’t recommend you do this. This book gets billed as a love story—which I suppose it is, but if that’s your thing, This Must Be The Place will disappoint. At its heart, This Must Be The Place isn’t a love story so much as it’s a relationship story—a story of the relationship between two sets of children and their father, between a husband and wife, a son and his father, a man and the world around him that drives him to his knees.

Daniel, disappointed and alienated from his children, finds himself in Ireland retrieving his grandfather’s ashes when he stumbles upon Claudette Wells—THE Claudette Wells—famous actress/writer/producer turned recluse. As the two begin a relationship, the narrative travels back and forth in time, revealing what drove Claudette and Daniel to that back road in Ireland and what will ultimately drive them forward.

Structure & Writing
I adored This Must Be The Place. The chapters bounce around in time and viewpoint—most are straight narrative but some are correspondence, interview transcription, or auction lot descriptions. In many ways, the book reads as a series of interconnected short stories—this isn’t quite accurate since each of the chapters can’t stand entirely on their own, though many of them probably could. Because the story is being told in bits and afterthoughts from several characters introducing you to Claudette and Daniel from the side rather than head-on, the book is long. Many of the chapters had lengthy set up for what seemed perhaps like a minor payoff—some small part of Claudette revealed. And yet it was searching for these little payoffs—wondering how this chapter about adopting a child from China was going to introduce me to a piece of Claudette or Daniel’s life—that made the book so engaging for me. I searched for clues amidst the words. And yet, the writing was strong enough and the side-characters largely engaging enough that I didn’t mind the extra work. I enjoyed the ride. The comparison isn’t perfect since, as I noted, This Must Be The Place, isn’t truly a book of stories that can all stand on their own, but I found myself thinking of Olive Kitteridge. Some of the stories in Strout’s book feature Olive prominently and you learn quite a bit about her in one story. In others, she is the briefest of side characters and you read twenty pages to learn very little new about her. This is how some of the chapters were in The Must Be The Place.

This structure, however, is something that drove other readers in the MMD Book Club a little nuts. O’Farrell uses this technique well but it makes the book on long, non-standard-narrative and the payoff in some of the chapters is small. If this kind of device isn’t usually your thing, you may find This Must Be The Place to be meandering in a way that loses you. If this doesn’t usually bother you, then I highly recommend you give This Must Be The Place a try.

Characters
As I noted, the two main characters are Claudette—a famous actress who suddenly disappeared from public view one day—and Daniel, a somewhat ordinary man who stumbles upon her hiding place and becomes her husband. At first blush, it’s hard to feel sorry for Claudette—she’s a famous actress who could seemingly do no wrong in her writing and acting, beloved the world over. How hard could her life be? And yet, the farther you go, you see that the life Claudette fled was never the life she intended and it was far lonelier than it appeared on the outside. Her eccentricities are, in many ways, things she needed to do to feel a semblance of normalcy after her life grew out of her control.

Daniel seems to be the sympathetic character, the reasonable character, the character you want to cheer for. And yet, there comes a point towards the back third of the book when you realize that maybe you didn’t know him nearly as well as you thought you did. That there are things about his personality that call into question some of the earlier things he told the reader. It was a masterful change—one that was surprising and yet utterly not once the cards were on the table.

In Sum
I said it already—I adored this book. I’m glad I snapped up a copy when it was on sale on Kindle and I plan to go back into O’Farrell’s back list and read more of her work. Her writing was smart, at times funny and others pulling at my heartstrings, but never saccharine. If you know the narrative structure won’t be a distraction for you and you have time for a slightly longer (400 pages) book, give This Must Be The Place a read.

Interpreter of Maladies

…there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Short Stories
When Anne Bogel chose Interpreter of Maladies as her flight pick for This Must Be The Place, I was pleased. I’ve owned this book and hadn’t had a chance to read it yet (#storyofmylife) and really enjoyed The Namesake when I read it several years ago. I’m glad I read Interpreter of Maladies, though I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to.

While it’s billed as a series of loosely connected stories, Interpreter of Maladies is really a series of totally unconnected stories. The common thread—spider-silk thin—seems only to be that each character has been touched (some much more so than other) by the separation of Bengal (now Bangladesh) from India and Pakistan. Otherwise, there are no common characters and the stories are set in different times and places.

Short stories aren’t usually a genre I love—they’re usually too short to get me connected to a character and then just long enough for me to find them tedious since I don’t connect with anyone in what I’m reading. I would have told you I really disliked them before reading Strout’s Olive Kitteridge or Anything Is Possible last year. In some ways those stories are like reading This Must Be The Place—I’m getting glimpses here and there of the same character or characters and so the disconnect I usually feel with short stories is absent since I’m getting more common-character-payoff.   The connection was ultimately too loose for me to feel about Interpreter the way I feel about Strout’s short stories.

I can recognize that Interpreter of Maladies is incredibly written—even though I don’t usually connect with short story characters, Interpreter had more pull than I usually find, such that I cared what happened to some of the characters more than I usually do in this form. The stories are descriptive without being gushy with compelling characters whose tragedies (because…it’s almost all little tragedies when the partition of India-Pakistan-Bangladesh is concerned) pull at your senses of what is right and fair. If short stories are your thing, this is a beautiful collection and I can see why it won the Pulitzer. I’d glad I read it and I may even read some of her other short stories to see if I like them as much or better, but this isn’t going on my top-ten list for 2018.

Featured image credit: Ferdinand Stöhr

February 2018 Wrap-Up

February 2018 Wrap-Up

Posted on by lisaannreads

The Books
I finished several excellent books this month—while I didn’t read exclusively from Black authors, I did try to include more of them this month than usual (I always try to make sure at least one of my books is from a POC each month) which pushed some books on my TBR closer to the top, though some of these bled into March since I didn’t finish them before the 28th. I did wind up reviewing most of the books I finished in February (or reviews are pending) so I have fewer books this month to briefly mention than I did last month.  I finished We Were Eight Years In Power, This Must Be the Place, Interpreter of Maladies, Left Neglected, Caleb and Kit, An American Marriage, This Impossible Light, The Burning Girl, Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk, He Said/She Said, We are Okay, and Hunger.

Hunger
Hunger is Roxane Gay’s most recent work—a series of essays of varying lengths about food, her body, and hunger—for what she can and can’t have. Unlike Bad Feminist, Gay reads Hunger herself—an addition that made the audiobook more powerful than the text alone and why I went ahead and used the Audible credit. This is a book I think I will need to revisit a few times to really experience Gay’s writing and argument, largely because of the power and nuance here. I don’t want to assume I got everything out of this book the first time.

I loved Gay’s Bad Feminist so I knew I enjoyed her voice and writing. From Bad Feminist, I knew she had been raped and that had likely contributed to her current weight—a weight she clearly labels in Hunger as morbid obesity per the medical profession. Hunger made me feel conflicted—as a feminist with friends of all shapes and body types and with histories of disordered eating, I try my hardest not to judge people by their sizes. As someone who works with people who are involuntarily institutionalized, very little drives me as crazy as fighting with ten people trying to put my client on a diet she doesn’t want “for her health” while all of them are also as big as she is. I recognize marketing to women’s insecurities over their sizes while at the same time buying it—like knowing candy is bad and buying it anyway, I feel the pull of weight-shame marketing. Like Gay, I too was sucked into the myth of The Biggest Loser and wanted it all to be real. If I’m honest, I make snap judgments about people I don’t know while at the same time trying to espouse body-positivity and loving my friends who don’t meet America’s definition of “skinny.” (Full disclosure, I have a body type that many would consider “skinny” or “thin,” though I don’t consider myself skinny….thanks weight-shame marketing).

Gay’s set up left me feeling the pull of conflicting conclusions—something it seems Gay is perhaps herself left with. Part of Gay’s weight stems, as I noted above, from her rape. She wasn’t overweight and then she was literally gang-raped as a tween (I wouldn’t call it graphic but all the trigger warnings for this section). And then she became big—so big that maybe this flesh would become a fortress that would give her back the sense of safety she lost as a child. On the one hand she clearly recognizes that her weight was and remains to an extent, a holdover from her trauma. That when she starts to lose weight as she has several times, there reaches a point where she can’t be smaller, where the loss no longer feels safe and so she self-sabotages and gains the weight back. She acknowledges this and yet she also argues that her weight should not be viewed as a problem.

It is hard to reconcile Gay’s arguments that people should accept and accommodate her body because it is what it is and others have no right to judge it with her acknowledging that her size stems from a problem, from her trauma—a trauma that doesn’t seem like it’s fully healed (if it can be). And yet—perhaps this is the point. The sense of conflict comes from the tug of wanting to judge Gay for not addressing the source of her weight—if she did she could finally be thinner!—while at the same time knowing how hard that is in my own life. This pull to judge and not to judge ultimately leaves me with only one conclusion—Gay’s weight isn’t my problem. The person next to me on the airplane’s weight isn’t my problem. Whether they can help their size or not, whether choices have been made that led them here or not—they are not my problem. Indeed, it isn’t even my problem whether they think their weight is or isn’t a problem. Gay knows she has trauma. How she chooses to address it is up to her—and since her trauma isn’t affecting me, it isn’t on me to judge how she chooses to wear her flesh or, even, how her body makes choices for her.

For a purely practical takeaway, I had honestly never before paid attention to how the world is set up against larger people. Even with a boyfriend that tops six feet and two hundred pounds, I have had the thin-privilege of never paying attention to it. It never occurred me to that chairs with arms would be painful and turn dining from a pleasant meal with friends into a torturous evening that results in bruises. While my work has trained me to see more accessibility issues than I did before, I don’t really see weight as a disability and so I wouldn’t see a one-foot step onto a stage to be an issue for someone without a disability-related mobility impairment. I have been blind to the ways the world is set up against people who are large, to ensure the comfort of the thin and punish (yes—punish) those who aren’t. If I remember nothing else from this book several months from now, I hope that I can remember the sense of shame I felt for being blind to this. That I can keep my eyes open to ensure that those around me who are larger are still able to be comfortable in the places we chose to eat or spend time.

Hunger is a bit of a difficult read—not for the writing which is Gay’s usual excellent work—but for the topics. And yet, it is one that I do think is a must-listen, especially for those of us who navigate the world without thinking about our thin-privilege.

The Burning Girl
The other book I read but didn’t plan to fully review this month was Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl. The Burning Girl is the story of childhood best-friends Julia and Cassie in the years between late middle school and early high school or, rather, it’s the story of how Julia and Cassie fall apart. Of how growing up can often be the fracturing of the “forever” you thought as an essential and automatic part of the BFF moniker.

It’s hard to find something in particular to say about The Burning Girl. This is a book I should have liked more than I did, that I even want to like more as I sit here to write about it. It feels like it has the hallmarks of a book I usually would like—a “good girl” narrator whose friends all seem to be maturing faster than she is (story of my high-school life) and a slow-burn of a plot. But…something about this one fell flat for me. There was one section that grabbed me—about how the experience of growing up as a girl feels like learning to be afraid—that the older you get the more you realize how dangerous the world is for women, that the dangers aren’t all strangers. This section of several pages I read over and even copied to keep—but besides this section, this mini-essay essentially, in the center of the book…there isn’t anything for me to point to for why anyone else should or shouldn’t read this book. This book probably epitomizes what I would rate a 3—this is a good book. Not great, not bad. Some will like it, some will love it or hate it based on the plot or characters but the writing and editing are strong enough that I’m not trying to figure out who on earth thought publishing this one was a good idea (see e.g., Lilac Girls). If you like coming of age novels set in small towns, this one may be worth picking up to see how you like it.

The Numbers
If you’ve hung with me this far, I’ll try to keep this part brief. I find it interesting but am not self-centered enough to think you will. I finished twelve books in February—eight physical books and four audiobooks for a total of 2519 pages and 34 hours, 11 minutes of audiobooks. For the year, we’re at 6033 words, 84 hours and 8 minutes.

Only three of the books I read this month were ones I owned, though I found We Were Eight Years In Power so powerful that I did buy my own copy after finishing the library book. It totally counts for The Unread Shelf if I buy the book after I read it, right?

Marching On (Sorry…I have a thing for puns and cheesy wordplay)
I’ve picked another ten books for March, though a bunch of books I was excited about came in at the library so I’m just barely paying lip service to #theunreadshelfproject this month. I have already finished Stay With Me (MMD March pick) and Force of Nature, the second Aaron Falk mystery from Jane Harper and its only the fifth, so the month is starting off strong. I also hope to finish Freshwater, Lab Girl (DBC), My Life On the Road (audio), I Was Anastasia, Priestdaddy, Oliver Loving, and The Hazel Wood.  Of those, I own only My Life On the Road, I Was Anastasia, and Priestdaddy.  I’ve also got Finding Wonders as the Middle Grade pick for DBC, though with Middle Grade being hit-or-miss for me, I’ve picked up Home Fire, the April MMD book, to start early if I finish all those or wind up DNF-ing Finding Wonders. The other MMD pick this month is Americanah which I listened to last year on audio and thought was lovely, but wasn’t going to re-read so soon.

What are you reading this month? Anything I should check out? <3

Photo credit:  freestocks.org