Tag: Fiction

LisaAnnReads > Fiction

Review: Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  Thank you to Flatiron Books and Top Shelf Text for sending me an advance reader copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Scared? She had never wanted to admit when she was scared. Mina was never scared, or so she had believed. “I’m only scared it won’t work,” Lynet said, her throat dry from having been silent for so long. She stared straight ahead at the outlines of the dangling willow leaves. I’m scared I won’t be enough. “I’m scared that some wounds can’t be healed.”

“Some wounds never heal,” Nadia said. She shyly reached for Lynet’s right hand, turning it over so her palm was facing up. “But many do.”

Synopsis
In this feminist re-telling of the Snow White fairy tale, the kingdom is ruled by King Nicholas, still grieving his lost wife, and clinging to Lynet, the daughter who looks just like her. In the background stands Mina, the stepmother with the heart of glass crafted by her father, unable to love or to be loved. Just as Lynet is starting to discover who she is and who she wants to be, her father is gravely injured during a hunting accident. When Nicholas dies, Mina and Lynet are pitted against one another—after all, only one can be queen. Told in alternating views between Mina and Lynet, Melissa Bashardoust upends the tropes of the evil stepmother and the shrinking violet princess to bring a story of what it means to be true to oneself and to love and be loved.

Reading Level—Writing and Themes
The writing in Girls Made of Snow and Glass is simple—the reading level is 7th grade and up, yet the story is crafted well enough to hold the interest of an adult reader, even with the somewhat low reading level. The tone and pitch of the writing match classic fairy tales without erring to the side of being sing-songy in wording. The simple writing never distracts from the overall story and the pace is perfect—not too fast or too slow.

Girls Made of Snow and Glass is not a Grimm fairytale by any stretch. There is limited violence (there is one particularly violent scene almost at the end when the battle between good and evil comes to a climax, but it is not terribly graphic) and no romantic overtures beyond kissing. Thematically, Bashardoust manages to convey more complicated concepts than you would typically find in a novel written at a middle school reading level, yet she handles them in ways that feel accessible to parents and children exploring and talking about these themes.

Being at home in your own skin
Lynet, born as her mother was dying and eerily similar to the departed queen, chafes against the expectations placed on her—the requests that make her feel as if she is being forced into the mold of her mother. There are several instances where Bashardoust raises Lynet feeling this way—

Lynet was overlooking the courtyard now, but she still felt like she was running from something, and that if she stopped, it would catch her. It was a restless feeling, an itch that made her feel like her skin didn’t fit over her bones correctly. She thought that she might leap out of herself and become someone new, and then she’d be at peace.

The feelings Lynet has—of not feeling like she is herself in her own body, feeling that her forced outsides don’t match her insides—seem like they would have resonance with a teen who identifies as LGBTQ or has friends who do. Lynet feels that to embrace these feelings would be to disappoint her father, whom she loves dearly.

In other scenes, Lynet grows closer to Nadia (the newly arrived surgeon for the castle, slightly older than she), she marvels that Nadia can be a stoic surgeon in the castle and also her caring, radiant friend. Later, Lynet is put in the position of forgiving Nadia and having to decide if she trusts her. Lynet’s experiences with Nadia speak volumes about female friendship. Bashardoust avoids the trope of the Mean Girl altogether—she presents Nadia making a significant mistake, one that she had reasons to make but was still altogether an error, but owning her mistakes. The error-apology-acceptance storyline is one that isn’t often done well in literature aimed at teen girls but shines here. Bashardoust handles these revelations and lessons gently, hitting the balance between being subtle and still being clear enough that the message hits home. Ultimately, the relationship between Lynet and Nadia looks like it will become something more than just friendship—Bashardoust writes this beautifully and tenderly without unnecessary handwringing about what this might mean. Lynet and Nadia just are and the book is better for it.

Loving and being loved
While Lynet is, in many ways driven and initially defined by her relationship with her father, the main relationship in the book is between Lynet and her stepmother, Mina. Mina feels incapable of loving anyone or being loved in return. Mina’s limitations here harm and confuse them both, with Mina discounting her feelings for Lynet and Lynet feeling that her stepmother has only ill will towards her.

I never had stepparents so I give my opinions here with that caveat. Amazon classifies the book, among other options, within the subcategory of “Blended Families”—while this isn’t a category that immediately occurred to me, it’s absolutely appropriate. Mina and Lynet make mistakes—both in their expectations and desires of what they want the other to be. I don’t want to give anything away, but here too, there is so much fodder for good discussion of what it means to be family and love a family member who might not be blood-related to you.

Free will
With everything going on when you’re a teenager, it is easy to feel that you don’t have agency over your own life. Everyone from your parents and friends to society generally have expectations and labels. It sometimes feels easier to go with the flow and forget that you have choices. One of the strengths of Bashardoust’s tale is that her characters are ultimately the masters of their own destinies. This is not Snow White saved by seven (little) men. While the women in the story—Lynet and Mina in particular but Nadia as well—have to grapple with the impact caused by the actions of the men in their lives, how those choices impact them and what they do next is entirely within their control. I wanted to stand up and cheer. Bashardoust’s characters are believable—they absolutely have flaws—but they have power (figuratively and literally), they make choices, and they live with the consequences. Mothers, here are some good role models for your daughters.

Accessible Feminism
(I’m going to start by saying that I generally identify as feminist. That’s a loaded word and I’m not going to unpack it here, but I do feel it’s worth saying so that the next part doesn’t come across as possibly sarcastic.)

I knew going into this book that it was a feminist re-telling of Snow White. I wasn’t sure how that would fit in with the dwarves (spoiler….there are no dwarves) or what it would mean for the evil stepmother character. I was expecting, frankly, to be a little hit over the head with the moral lessons (otherwise, why emphasize that it’s so feminist).

I was pleasantly surprised with how beautiful the story of Girls Made of Snow and Glass ultimately was. The “F” word appears nowhere in the book—there are no asides or speeches about feminism or girl power. Instead, Bashardoust simply depicts women and girls who have agency, have self-respect, and make choices that affect themselves and others. There is no fanfare over the feminism here, it just is. The book is better for not having made a fuss, but rather presented the themes and the powerful female characters as just the way things are. Because frankly, women having agency and power is/should be just the way things are.

Summary
Throughout Girls Made of Snow and Glass there are little gems that can spark great discussion between parents and children about being comfortable in your own skin, the expectations people (often unfairly) have of you, and what it means to be a friend (even when you’ve been betrayed or been the betrayer). The moral lessons never feel overbearing but are cleverly and clearly conveyed so that there is no missing the message.

Even though I am not a parent (or even close to becoming one), I adored this book. It was an empowering and fun read, well worthy of my time investment.

Notes
Published: September 5, 2017 by Flatiron Books (@flatiron_books)
Author: Melissa Bashardoust
Date read: August 19, 2017
Rating: 4 ½ Stars

Review: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

…I’ve always known on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I’ve just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it’s because of you.

Synopsis
Jason Dessen has a perfectly ordinary life as a physics professor of a middling college and comfortable relationships with his art-teacher wife and teenage son Charlie until he’s kidnapped on his way home from meeting a colleague for drinks. Plunged into an alternate reality of his life where he never married his wife and instead chose the path of professional success, Jason has to decide what he really wants—does he want the impressive but lonely life of professional acclaim or does he want his ordinary, imperfect life back? Once he chooses, can he find the world where he belongs?

Universal appeal, despite the Amazon category
I’m late to the party on this one as Dark Matter has been out for quite some time but after everyone in the MMD Book Club raved about it, I had to get my hands on a copy. Amazon classifies this book as a “Technothriller” and “Science Fiction;” however, this is one of those don’t-judge-a-book-by-it’s-Amazon-category instances. This is one of the few books that seemed universally enjoyed and is a frequent recommendation within the MMD Book Club. I think, in fact, it might be the only book that I’ve never seen anyone say they disliked. The group has a wide variety of members, including readers who steer clear of science fiction altogether who still enjoyed this book. Several of the women in the group commented that it was a book even their non-reader husbands really enjoyed.

Accessibility
In order to understand the plot in Dark Matter, you need to understand the idea of the multiverse—essentially, that the universe you are conscious of living within is but one of many universes. For each choice you make, in another universe you made a different choice. You had Life cereal this morning? In another universe you had Cheerios. In another you never ate breakfast because you actually died in a car accident last week. Dark Matter is set within this infinitely unfolding multiverse. Currently only a theory (since consciousness itself destroys the ability to prove the multiverse—you can only be aware of the universe in which you find yourself), Dark Matter places Jason squarely within a world in which the multiverse has become his reality.

Sound overly complicated? For a book about quantum physics, Dark Matter remains a remarkably accessible book. Crouch explains the concepts necessary for the reader to understand what, exactly it is that’s happening without becoming bogged down in technospeak or losing the reader. I sped through this book, gobbling it up—I even woke up an hour early one morning just to go to Starbucks so I could read it for an hour before I went to work. Despite the speed with which I was reading, I had no trouble understanding the scientific concepts—I never had to go back and re-read to understand the science (despite the degrees on my wall showing I was a humanities major in college). The physics sets the stage but the relationships between Jason and his wife, Daniela, and Jason and himself are what drive the book.

Daniela
While the story revolves around Jason and his journey through the various realities in which he could have lived, seeing Daniela through Jason’s eyes in each of her iterations was a joy (well, except for one…you’ll know which one when you read the book). Crouch manages to strike a balance with her where you see and feel how deeply she is loved, yet, she remains beautifully real. She is Jason’s ideal, yet not unfairly idealized—my favorite description of her was her tendency towards being “belligerently kind” when she’s been drinking. I want to know her, to sit on her couch and drink wine, to hang her art on my walls.

Choice
The choices people make and whether those choices were objectively “good” or “bad” is a pretty common theme within literature and fiction. In placing that plot point within the multiverse, Crouch flips this concept entirely on its head. Want to know how your life would have turned out if you had made a different choice—chosen the job, chosen the spouse, said something different? Within the multiverse you can. The path not taken is a doorway away within an infinite hallway of choices. Crouch reveals that choice is going to be a central part of his book from his dedication of the book “[f]or anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.”

I’m not going to say more as doing so would spoil the book; however, this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of time-bending work so well to establish a universe where a character can see how his choices affected different parts of his life and where the reader quickly understands how that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Writing
I’ve been lucky so far this year in curating books that hit the mark for me in writing. Dark Matter is another one of those books that is tightly written, with perfect turns of phrase here and there that really shine, though the book never becomes flowery. The writing is simple enough to convey complicated scientific concepts, descriptive enough to place you with Jason in each of the worlds he trips across in the multiverse, yet spare enough that the book moves forward at a quick pace without unnecessary words cluttering your path. In some ways, the prose is more impressive in a book like Dark Matter than The Heart where the focus isn’t the writing itself for the sake of writing. For the prose to be so well crafted feels like an extra gift, the cherry on top (if you like cherries…otherwise this metaphor doesn’t really work).

And if the quote at the top of this review isn’t one of the most romantic things you’ve ever read, then do you even have a heart?

Summary
Dark Matter is one of three books so far this year that upon finishing, I had to go buy my own copy because I knew I would need to re-read it and recommend it widely. (I actually took pictures of the pages where I had book darts so I could transfer them into the new book….it was a lot of pictures). Luckily for you, the book is available in paperback; alternatively, it’s still in stock as a book you can add to your monthly box on Book of the Month.

As I noted above, this is a book that people from every walk of life have enjoyed within my book club and it’s got an impressive rating on both Goodreads and Amazon. If you enjoy solidly written fiction and have even a mild tolerance of science-fiction, this is the book for you. But when you stay up all night reading, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Notes
Published: July 26, 2016 by Crown (@crownpublishing)
Author: Blake Crouch (@blakecrouch1)
Date read: June 14, 2017
Rating: 4 3/4 Stars

Review: Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  Thank you to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for sending me an advance reader copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Nostalgia is my favorite emotion. It’s like, you think you know how to deal with the passage of time, but nostalgia will prove you wrong. You’ll press your face into an old sweatshirt, or you’ll look at a familiar shade of paint on a front door, and you’ll be reminded of all the time that got away from you. If you could live it all again, you’d take a long moment to look around, to examine knees against knees. Nostalgia puts you in this dangerous re-creation something you can never have again. It’s ruthless, and for the most part, inaccurate.

 

Summary
On February 15, the town of Broomsville, Colorado awakes to find that fifteen year-old Lucinda Hayes has been murdered. As the small town swirls with grief and gossip, we follow three characters—Cameron, a neighbor who loved her and may have also stalked her; Jade, a classmate who hated her for being everything she couldn’t be; and Russ, a police officer torn between his duty to serve and his duty to protect, especially to protect Cameron. As more is slowly revealed, the book begs the questions—Who are you when no one’s watching? And can you ever really know someone if you’re only ever watching from the outside?

Classification
At first, I assumed, based on the title, that Girl in Snow was a YA book. A few chapters in, I realized that wasn’t the case. Instead, the title is a nod to the way works of art are named, as we see Lucinda, left for dead on a snowy playground, through the eyes of two classmates/neighbors and a police officer involved in the investigation.

From the first sentences on, the readers knows the central point around which the rest of the book turns is the murder of a fifteen year-old girl, but no one knows who murdered her. Ok, so this book must be a thriller/murder-mystery—indeed, a quick check of Amazon has the book categorized as “women’s fiction” and “literary fiction” and then in the sub-genres of “mystery, thriller, and suspense” within each.

Except, even this genre didn’t fit neatly, or at least, does not follow the typical structure of a mystery/thriller/suspense novel in my book. The bulk of the book follows three characters and the choices they (and others) make when they think no one is watching. Far more time is spent on character development than dropping clues, such that when the killer is identified, the resolution is swift, almost an afterthought to the other sub-stories being told about Cameron, Jade, and Russ. (Which, in the interest of #nospoilers is not say that it isn’t one of them, but simply that the focus of the book isn’t on who did it as much as how these three characters are coping with the murder and the role they have in the event and the resulting investigation).

Characters
The highlight of Kukafka’s first novel is Cameron. It’s never directly stated, but his mannerisms seemed to indicate pretty strongly to me that he is on the spectrum—making collections, storing images, intensely focused, but socially withdrawn. Cameron is obsessed with watching—he prowls the neighborhood at night, watching the inhabitants, especially watching Lucinda. Though they have had almost no actual interaction, Cameron loves the Lucinda he watches. When Lucinda’s body is found, he is immediately a suspect—though he has been careful, he’s less clever than he thinks and people know he’s been watching Lucinda. Even Cameron wonders if it might be him, as the night of her death is missing from Cameron’s memory.

Protecting Cameron the best he can is Russ, a police officer who was Cameron’s father’s partner for years on the force before Cameron’s father was forced to leave in shame. Russ, more than the other main characters, has let what others see of him define who he actually is—with the result that he’s walking around half-alive, still consumed with his missing partner and his promise to keep his son safe.

Finally, we have Jade. I loved Kukafka’s little details with Jade—I may have cheered out loud at the reference to her listening to Box Car Racer and Dashboard Confessional (the book is set so that they are teenagers in the late 90s’/early 2000s’ when I was). Jade is that kid in school who doesn’t seem to have friends but also don’t seem to want them. It’s easier to reject someone before they reject you. She’s prickly and unattractive. And yet, like Cameron, she steals her way into your heart.

The last thing you want is for any of these three to have been involved in Lucinda’s death. Yet Jade hated her, Cameron stalked her, and Russ has hidden evidence to protect someone in Cameron’s family before.

These characters are what made Girl in Snow stand out from the typical murder mystery from me. I usually spend my entire time reading, trying to pick up clues. I can usually figure out the murderer and, often, the motive at least a few chapters before the big reveal. I didn’t find myself doing that with Girl in Snow. Kukafka made me care, desperately, more about who I hoped didn’t commit the murder than about who did. I didn’t spend my time looking for lots of clues, rather I waited for Cameron to work his way through his memory, hoping that when it came back it wouldn’t be him. I won’t say more and spoil the book, but turning this typical view of the mystery on its head was one of Kukafka’s better choices, as the book was richer than your typical mass market paperback murder mystery, though diehard mystery/thriller fans may find the ending rather abrupt with very few clues leading you as to both who the murderer was and why.

In some ways, by choosing the three characters she did, Kukafka chose the three anti-heroes. None of the three of them are likeable. Even the other significant minor characters—Ivan, Ines, and Cynthia—wouldn’t have been terribly likeable had their narrative been added. But then again, the more you find out about someone you’ve been watching, in many ways, the more unlikeable they become. Just as Cameron never got a full glimpse of Lucinda in his hours of watching her, perhaps love is coming to know someone, to find them unlikeable, and choosing them anyway.

Rating
I struggled more with rating this book than with others. As I noted, since it didn’t read like a typical mystery/thriller to me, it didn’t seem fair to judge it against others in that category I’ve enjoyed or think are well done. It was almost more of a straight literary fiction novel that happened to be set around a murder. With that in mind, I gave this book 3 ¾ stars—it’s well-written, tightly-edited, and Kukafka can turn a beautiful phrase, though it didn’t have the pop of something like This is How It Always Is or even Almost Sisters. It wasn’t as stand out as other lit-fics I’ve recently read, so that knocked it down a bit.

However, this was by no means a book that’s finding itself on my running list of “Books I should have abandoned” (looking at you Hillbilly Elegy). I was engaged, I enjoyed the story, and I thought Kukafka did well by her characters. I loved her gentleness with Cameron in particular. If you’ve read any of my other reviews, you know I can get a little heart-eyes over flowery prose—this book isn’t flowery. The prose is well done without being over the top. So while I didn’t love the prose as much as I did in something like The Heart or Exit West, I know those books also drive some readers a little nuts. If that’s you, you’ll do fine with Girl in Snow—it’s beautiful but not showy. If you generally enjoy non-standard murder mysteries and highly character-driven books, I suspect you’ll find Girl in Snow worth your time.

Notes
Published: August 1, 2017 by Simon & Schuster (@simonandschuster)
Author: Danya Kukafka (@danyakukafka)
Date read: August 15, 2017
Rating: 3 3/4 Stars

Review: The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

Sometimes in the morning, while she waited for her brother to get out of the bathroom, Meredith Oliver would stand in front of her bureau mirror, lock eyes with her reflection, and say, “This is me. This is really me. Right now. This is me. This is my real life. This is me.”

She would say these things to herself because she liked the moment when she suddenly became uncertain that those things she was saying were in fact true, liked the way it made her feel unmoored, the hole of doubt that opened inside her, and the wind the blew through that hole….And she liked equally—not more and not less, because it was just the same sensation backward—the moment she became re-certain that those things were true—this is me, this is really me—when the hole closed, and the anchor caught, and she could smell the eggs her father was scrambling downstairs.

Synopsis
On a September day punctuated only by an Algebra test, a broken pencil, and not enough time to finish graphing the asymptotes, eighth-grader Meredith suddenly finds herself on the floor of a local restaurant as a robbery becomes a kidnapping and Meredith is the one left behind.  The Fall of Lisa Bellow is the story of what happens next for Meredith and her family as they come to terms with Meredith’s being left behind while still having to move forward.

Relatability
I remember the first time I watched Gilmore Girls, I identified, unquestioningly, with Rory. Many years later, re-watching it before the recent revival, I realized at some point I was far closer in age to Lorelai in the series, and, while I remembered feeling the way Rory did at times, Lorelai’s story lines were suddenly more relevant.

In some ways, my experience with The Fall of Lisa Bellow was similar—I felt the ache of middle school injustice and cliques and could remember how it felt to be where Meredith is (awful…it mostly felt awful), but I identified as strongly with her mother Claire as I did Meredith. I’m in the sweet spot of being able to see myself in both major characters.

In Meredith, I remember the feeling of not fitting in—not entirely sure what it was about me that made me different, just knowing that I wasn’t popular or, frankly, well-liked. Like Meredith, I missed the memo about the Titanic iceberg that is middle school and spent the rest of the time feeling like I was catching up. And yet, there is a point where we see Meredith from her mother’s eyes, talking about the mean girls with her friends. And in that moment, Meredith is one the nice-girls-become-mean in the tearing down of other girls. I see this so much in myself in hindsight. I was one of the nice girls but I was not nice. I was not kind. In seeing this in Meredith, I see this in eighth grade me. It made me feel gentler toward Meredith, knowing we shared this flaw that neither of us could or would see until we were adults, removed from thirteen by enough distance to see the landscape behind.

In the alternating chapters with Meredith’s mother, I could see parts of Claire’s parenting that felt true to me. I’m not a parent but I could see where many of the mistakes she made could easily be my mistakes in the future. The earliest glimpse of Claire’s parenting comes as she examines a patient who made fun of her first-grade son, calling him a “porker.” As an adult, Claire has power, but as a dentist, Claire welds more power than she should—and in a moment of decision deliberately inflicts just a bit of pain on her son’s bully. There’s something shockingly human in the description of this incident. Though the book is written in third person it reads like a confession, but a confession from someone who isn’t sure she’s sorry. She knows she should be, but that’s as close to remorse as she’s been able to come in the ten years since.

For Claire, the problems are now too big for dental retribution. Six months before the book opens, her son Evan catches a line drive foul ball in the eye, destroying his sight and his dreams for a baseball career. Now, with Meredith, not taken but gone somewhere Claire can’t understand, Claire has to fully accept that can’t protect her children and there isn’t always a physical monster she can bring to tears with her sterile tools.

Though there is nothing on paper that should make me identify particularly well with either of these characters, the highlight of The Fall of Lisa Bellow for me was Meredith and Claire, as well as the minor characters of the father Mark and son Evan—in their struggle through grief and loss and almost-loss and guilt for the grief—they make choices that can’t make sense because none of those emotions set the foundation for rational thinking. And yet, I can see the nonsensical choices they each made and see, exactly, how I too would wind up in a stranger’s bathtub, drunk on my own front lawn, unexpectedly in a seat at the popular kid’s table for a fleeting moment.  It is a strength of Perabo’s that though I had little to nothing outwardly in common with her characters, I identified with them so deeply as I read.

Grief
I read a book several years ago about “ambiguous loss,” a phrase made mainstream by Pauline Boss. Ambiguous losses aren’t solid, they’re like a family whose loved one has Alzheimer’s—there’s a death with a living body still walking around, so how do they mourn this non-loss? It’s a loss of expectation in some ways, but deeper than that.  It’s not a loss you can see; it’s not something that prompt the neighbors to pull out the casserole dishes and fill your freezer. Though what Meredith experienced isn’t truly an ambiguous loss—Lisa is gone and Meredith is not—the way Meredith processed what happened—that she is still here reminded me in some ways of ambiguous loss. We all grieve experiences differently, even if what would seem to be the expected emotion isn’t grief. It is in the processing of her experience and the loss of Lisa that Meredith begins to literally see Lisa, to imagine what is happening to her. How Meredith comes to terms with her own trauma, the “lesser” trauma of that day, is simultaneously completely irrational and completely identifiable. Through the ordeal and later, she fixates on a problem she ran out of time to solve in math class—she latches onto the rational problem with a finite solution that she can still solve.

For Claire, the immediate thought is that Meredith is still here—what does she or her family have to grieve? And yet, there is the almost-grief, the difference of eeny-meeny-miney-mo landing on your daughter rather than the other one in the restaurant.

After Lisa is taken within the first few chapters of the book, the rest is how Meredith comes to term with Lisa—a classmate who wasn’t a friend but, in that short moment, was as they both lay on the floor of the Deli Barn. How Claire mourns the loss of her daughter’s innocence while simultaneously struggling with the idea that she, as the parent who didn’t lose a child, shouldn’t be mourning at all.

Because I can’t not-comment on the writing
The Fall of Lisa Bellow stuck with me more than most books I’ve read recently—the larger themes had more poignancy than the other books I’ve read this summer. In this way, while the little details were the high point of the other books, here they were the matting surrounding the larger work—the work was better for the professional matting and framing job, but the work stood on its own.

The themes carried you, swimming in almost-grief and almost-guilt masquerading down the halls of eighth grade, while the word choice and details were the individual steps that got you from one end of the hall to the other. The writing didn’t smother the theme, it wasn’t over the top but it wasn’t so simplistic that it detracted. There were paragraphs to re-read for the way the characters made you feel and others to re-read for the word choice. The Fall of Lisa Bellow was balanced in a way most books rarely are.

Recommended for….
This is a book that drew some strong reactions in the MMD book club—some of us loved it, but I think we may have been in the slight minority. The action happens in the left over parts with the left behind people. It doesn’t move quickly and some of the choices the characters make just aren’t rational—if you’re not in a place where you’re also inhabiting those characters with Perabo, then I can see how those choices, those words, that character’s tone would drive you to pull out your eyelashes waiting for something to happen. Despite the kidnapping plot, this is not a mystery/thriller. The focus is never on the girl who was taken but the girl who was left.

With that said, I loved this book and devoured it in days. If you enjoy well written, traditional literary fiction and character-driven books, The Fall of Lisa Bellow was a highlight of my summer reading and I highly recommend it. This is another book I’ll be acquiring my own copy of for my shelves to lend and re-read in the future.

Notes
Published: March 14, 2017 by Simon & Schuster (@simonandschuster)
Author: Susan Perabo
Date read: June 12, 2017
Rating: 4 ½ Stars

Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

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::
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
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

Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

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

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

“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

Review: The Sisters Chase by Sarah Healy

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

The Chase girls were always happiest in those brief moments of in-between, when neither of them was sacrificing, neither of them being sacrificed.

Synopsis
When their mother dies, the Chase girls are on their own and homeless, with fiercely protective Mary at the helm. The Sisters Chase unfolds over the following ten years as Mary and Hannah (“Bunny”) crisscross the country as nomads, never staying long enough for people to start asking questions, never staying long enough to have to answer for the lengths Mary will go to protect Hannah and her own heart.

Sitting and Stewing
When I finished this book, I commented on Instagram that I thought I would like it more the longer it sat with me. I agree with this original assessment…I still can’t put my finger on what exactly it is about the book and the characters, but the longer it stews, the better I think it is.   I find that a mark of a book that resonates is often the author’s ability to make me care about and empathize with someone unlike me. Perhaps this is it—perhaps Mary and the mark she leaves behind is what has made The Sister’s Chase a book that sticks to the bones—nourishment for the reader soul.

Indeed, the title may be the The Sisters Chase but the action is driven by the eldest sister Mary—complicated, fierce, feral Mary. Mary is, above almost all else, a master manipulator—reading people quickly (especially men) and using her beauty to get her way. She’s simultaneously impressive and, frankly, a little scary—not quite Amy in Gone Girl scary, but you can see how she’d get there, if protecting her Bunny, her younger sister Hannah, required it. Because she manipulates anyone and everyone around her, from strangers to her own mother, it’s initially hard to pick up that the one person she won’t manipulate is her sister, Hannah. She manipulates for Hannah, but never manipulates her.

Nature vs. Nurture
The range of tiny, daily manipulations of Mary’s life to her more extreme, long-game manipulations left me debating the question throughout the book of nature versus nurture. How much of Mary’s devotion and dedication to her sister above all else could be explained by nature and biology and how much of it was their mother responsible for? Her mother became pregnant with Mary far too young and, with the realities of working two jobs to provide for the family, was little able to supervise, leaving Mary to raise and tame herself.

As a result, Mary is ill-suited to modern society, better able to survive as a nomad, camping and living in swamps and on beaches, without others. Perhaps the sisters were doomed from the start, headed for tragedy, for how could someone as feral as Mary ever live domesticated, even where Hannah was involved? And if this is true—was Mary doomed by biology or a mother who didn’t have sufficient time to tame her?

Word Choice
While I can get gushy over lush descriptions, I also appreciate more spare descriptions when they’re accurate and apt. The writing and word choice in The Sisters Chase fit the story. Healy’s prose is straightforward and un-flowery, befitting a story of two girls constantly on the move, leaving behind everything that doesn’t fit into their knapsacks. Healy does occasionally stray into cliché and does have one moment where an overweight woman is compared to a walrus (too far in my opinion) but these transgressions are rare and the book is otherwise tightly crafted.

Overall
The Sisters Chase as a whole skews a rather dark—this is not a fluffy read that sits well. I will give a moderate trigger warning for adultery—if you are very sensitive to that particularl plot line, while it is small in this book, it features prominently in one section and this is a book you should skip.

The Sisters Chase is solidly written lit-fic, though not one that shows off in the vein of Exit West or The Heart. While she does have redeeming qualities, Mary is the type of character that can be deeply unlikeable. As you know from the first page, by the end of the book, Mary is no longer in the picture—if you require a book with happy endings, this is not that book. Indeed, the tragedy of the last two chapters is that I kept thinking that the book didn’t need to end this way. Any small number of things could have changed and this book could have ended happily. Or maybe it never could—maybe Mary was fated for unhappiness from the beginning.

Notes
Published: June 27, 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (@hmhbooks)
Author: Sarah Healy (@healyesarah)
Date read: June 30, 2017
Rating: 3 ½ Stars
Source: Book of the Month
Notable Reviews: The New York Times

Review: When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

…Ritu auntie only waved her off, as if she thought Dimple were being demure—who on earth went to college with anything but the aspiration of landing a marriageable partner? Dimple thought of Insomnia Con., of Jenny Lindt, of SFSU, of Stanford. Of all the things she’d jeopardize if she called Ritu auntie a backward, anti-feminist blight on democratic society…

Synopsis
Dimple just needs to get out of the house, with her mother constantly foisting eyeliner and dreams of the IIH (Ideal Indian Husband) on her, to InsomniaCon., a six week coding conference where the winning final project gets to work with Dimple’s idol, Jenny Lindt, to develop and market an app. Rishi is also going to Insomnia Con…to meet Dimple, the girl their parents have arranged to be his wife (a fact about which Dimple is completely unaware). As the novel comes to a head, Dimple has to choose between following her passion for coding and web development and a growing passion for Rishi….or does she?

Representation
Representation matters and Sandhya Menon knocks it out of the park with When Dimple Met Rishi. While I’m by no stretch of the imagination a connoisseur of YA books, I can’t easily name any others with two Indian-American characters who feature prominently. (There probably are some but I think we can agree not enough given their statistical representation in the population.) I loved that Dimple defies old stereotypes of the demure Indian girl. Dimple wants nothing to do with boys, clothes, or makeup. She lives, eats, and breathes web coding and app development and damned if anything or anyone is going to stand in her way. I love that Dimple’s passion is technology and coding and love that Menon created an idol/mentor for her in Jenny Lindt (a fictional, successful app developer). Silicon Valley does horribly by women—more needs to be written (fiction and non-fiction) about women kicking ass and taking names in this field.

Menon goes further and generally defies stereotypes of the conservative Indian community, without minimizing or losing the power of the family. Dimple is a feminist and damn proud of it. Dimple isn’t strident but she also isn’t going to take your bullshit.   Even Rishi—who wants nothing more than to marry Dimple and live the happy life he has seen in his parents is a feminist and supports Dimple without constraining her. I wanted to stand on my couch and cheer. Yes. More female and male feminist role models in YA books. (Or in books period). I. Am. Here. For. It.

Dimple + Rishi
I loved this book for its portrayal of a teenager being comfortable enough in who she is and what she loves to refuse to play the stupid games. Makeup is fine if you’re Celia, her roommate, but it’s not Dimple’s thing and that’s totally ok. And not only is that ok, but you can have friends and even a boyfriend who loves that about you and still finds you beautiful. You don’t have to change to be happy or to get the guy—in fact, changing those things will typically only break your heart (a la Dimple’s roommate, Celia). We need more of this message in YA books, please.

Dimple’s character development and choices over the course of the book feel real. She thought she couldn’t have a relationship—she had to pick and choose. As a result she does some stupid things—she isn’t perfect. We’re all rooting for her, largely because she’s relatable (even if you aren’t, even a little bit, a techie).

In may ways it is Rishi, the male protagonist, who became the stereotypical “girl” character of the book—having to give up things he loves and his dreams in order to please others. He’s made himself (mostly) comfortable with these choices, even coming to accept them as his own. While I am not Indian-American, I was briefly married to one who voiced things very similar to what Rishi said here. When he went to college he would have loved to study other subjects, but had to study business because as the first-born son of Indian immigrants, he was expected to support the family and could not waste time on things like art or history.  This rang true in my limited experience and was a flip of the usual scenario.

The pace of the relationship—from Dimple meeting/hating Rishi to head-over-heels in three weeks felt a little silly and far-fetched….and then I remembered (cringingly) the pace of high school relationships. The timing is probably about right. My absolute favorite chapter was Dimple and Rishi’s first date at a book café where you eat while browsing and reading. That chapter could serve as a primer for the date planner on how to plan an excellent date, even for an adult. (Though in retrospect, this might not be the best first date for me unless you want to be talking to the top of my head while I read all night.)

NSF-School
Speaking of the relationship, this book does have a fair amount of sex for a YA book. The intended audience skews towards older teenagers though the main “limit” here wouldn’t be a hard age-line (in my opinion) but rather whether or not the teen reader understands sex and is beginning to understand when one should and shouldn’t have it. I’m not sure I’ve ever said this about a YA book (or any book) but—I appreciated the way Menon used sex in this book. There are characters who love each other, who think the decision through, and have sex because it is the right choice for them. Menon goes into enough detail in this scene for you to know what’s happening and that it’s a good thing for these two characters. It does get a tad steamy but I didn’t feel like it pushed over into being gratuitous, even for a YA audience. This scene is contrasted with another character who is having sex with someone she’s trying to impress and who doesn’t love her. By having both, Menon not only sets up a contrast and highlights the goodness and badness of these choices but also provides opportunity for good dialogue about these choices and when one knows sex is or isn’t right. I thought Menon handled these scenes deftly and delicately—they’re some of the best sex scenes I’ve read in a YA book.

Pace
When Dimple Met Rishi is a sizeable book, slightly on the longer end for both YA and a general contemporary fiction work. With that said, toward the end I felt like the narrative rushed. I appreciate that the overall length of the book was right—much longer and it would have needed some editing. At the same time, Insomnia Con is supposed to be a six-week conference and the entire last three weeks essentially pass in one sentence. I’m not sure ultimately that this was a bad thing or should be changed—I don’t know what before this point Menon should or could have cut to make room for the last three weeks in the narrative—so maybe this choice was fine. It was momentarily jarring in the sense that I re-read the sentence to make sure three weeks had just passed, shrugged, and moved on to find out what happened to Dimple and Rishi.

Conclusion
While I thought the book was incredibly well done, it is still a YA book. If YA isn’t your thing, this likely isn’t going to be the book for you. It has the shine of a YA book where things are a little too glossy and characters compare their feelings to bubbles at least once. If you love, or even just like, YA then this book is a recent stand out and definitely worth your time.

Notes
Published May 30, 2017 by Simon & Schuster (@simonandschuster)
Author: Sandhya Menon (@sandhyamenonbooks)
Date read: July 5, 2017
Rating: 3  1/2 Stars

Review: The Stars Are Fire by Anita Shreve

Posted on by lisaannreads


rawpixel.com

“The fire runs underground?” Grace asks.
“Yep.”
She imagines secret fires tunneling beneath the house. “But how? There’s no oxygen.”
“There’s oxygen in peat and dead vegetation,” Gene explains. The fires move solely beneath the surface, he adds, burning enough to bring more oxygen into the soil. They can burn, undetected, for months, for years.

In October 1947, coastal Maine was ravaged by devastating fires. Sixteen people were killed and more than twenty separate fires burned throughout the state. Against this backdrop, Shreve introduces us to Grace, a housewife whose surface life is everything she thought she always wanted—two children and a successful husband who comes home to her every night. Its only as the fires take everything from Grace that she is faced with deciding what she really wants and, in turn, who that makes her.

Grace as a Survivor

I struggled with this review more than with others, simply because it is difficult to talk abut the evolution of Grace without giving away major plot points that, like a new shoot of growth, she must grow around or risk dying out. As I thought through writing this review, the thought I kept circling back to is that this is the story of surviving a violent relationship, yet most readers will not see it as such. Grace’s husband Gene, in his callousness, his entitlement, stifles and chokes Grace, nearly extinguishing her, yet almost never places his hands on her. Even in those moments, because of the way Shreve has developed the story, because of how familiar Grace’s unhappiness in her marriage feels, the reader is disinclined to jump to recognizing the violence—both emotional and physical—for what it is. Let me disillusion you. From working with survivors of violence and being one myself, this is what a violent relationship looks like. It is not all hits and slaps. It is the contempt Gene feels for Grace. The attempts to isolate. The gas-lighting. Grace is what it looks like to be a survivor.

The violent marital relationship, however, is not the main point of the book. Grace is not defined by Gene—a fact she has to come to realize herself as the fire, having burned away almost everything she thought she knew and held dear, instead gives her room to breathe for the first time. Just as some forests cannot live until the underbrush choking the tender new growth is burned away, so Grace cannot live until the fire burns away everything she knows.

“Classic” Anita Shreve

Admittedly, I have only read one other Anita Shreve and that was quite some time ago; however, this book has much of what I think of as Shrevian characteristics. Her language sizzles and smokes. Shreve writes in juxtapositions, highlighting the brightest whites with the inkiest blacks. Maine first goes through a wet season—so wet that once a dry day finally comes the white laundry flaps on the lines so that “it looked as though an entire town of women had surrendered.” The town, having nearly been destroyed by flood must now contend (or fall) to an all-consuming fire.

Her descriptions are neither lush nor spare, striking the right balance that leaves the reader well acquainted with their new surroundings in Grace’s world in Maine without feeling overwhelmed or slowed by strings of adjectives. There’s a more sex than I typically prefer in my reading; however, nothing that becomes gratuitous. No one is mistaking this book for a Harlequin anytime soon.

Her main character is a female who initially comes across as a shrinking violet before being faced with a series of plot twists that force Grace to either stand or fall on her own. The relationships among women are paramount, with Rosie being Grace’s anchor and safe place to land.

The Friendships of Women

Shreve shines with Rosie. The initial impression is that she’s a bit of a mess—her house is always cluttered, Grace has to save her and her children from the fire—and yet, Rosie is happy. Rosie is fulfilled and loved in her relationships and, as a result, Grace is drawn to her and to what she doesn’t have. I loved Rosie and hope that I can be the kind of friend she was to Grace. Without giving away more, I was pleased with Shreve’s use of Rosie and glad she stayed a part of the story for Grace despite their physical distance after the fire.

Notes
Published: April 18, 2017 by Knopf (@aaknopf)
Author: Anita Shreve
Date read: July 2, 2017
Rating: 3.5 stars