quarterly review: my life in books

YA - tally: 6

scars by cheryl rainfield
having recently read a criticism by the wall street journal that said YA books like scars and rage were too dark for the teens crowd, i had to have a 'read' for myself :) if you'd asked me my opinion one-third through scars, my remarks would have been only slightly negative, as in: i liked having the main character as a 'cutter' because i've always been curious about the motivation to do so BUT i don't think the author does a plausible job of explaining it. and i liked that the main character was lesbian as a matter of fact, and not as a point of conflict.
i'd say these thing if i hadn't gotten further in the book... except i did finish this book. this Ridiculous book. this Silly book. this book that adds nothing to the conversation because the plot points turned so utterly nonsensical. as in: her sexual abuser is actively stalking her with threats to kill her, and she tells no one. as in: she finally flash-remembers the abuser is her father who then holds her and her mother at gun point during a police standoff. as in: her memories reveal her abuser introduced her to cutting in the first place with the added instructions for her to 'slit her throat if she ever revealed the ID of her abuser' so yes, this book was so far fetched i can't see any value in it.
but my stronger annoyance is with the subtle details. the teenage reader already feels so estranged from their family - like they will never 'get' their lives. and this author allows the mother character to be so weak, to misread the abuse signs, to be petty and jealous when a real parent would not. the author constructs an artificial family (her art teacher, her therapist, her current girlfriend and an adult friend of the mother) who provide her real support. but this grouping is temporary as best (i say at best because, with the exception of the long time friend of the mother/main character, there no real history to base trust for unconditional support). where will our main character get her support 4 years from now when the girlfriends has moved on, high school is over, and she realizes her 'bought' friendship in the form of a therapist is not sustainable? this book subtlely suggests to teen readers that their current dissatisfation with their home environments can be rectified through finding new relationships, rather than repairing the ones they already have.

sisterhood everlasting by ann brashares
read for the mother/daughter bookclub, this was a kid's story stretching itself (too thin) to be a full-fledged novel. every plot point was excrutiatingly drawn-out which might have been forgiveable if wasn't so poorly written, and the conclusions so obvious. the characters are almost 30 years old now yet they are trapped in their teens/early 20's - shallow, insecure, irresponsible, and dead (that's an attribute for each of the four - so yes, one of them dies early on in this book) the ending has the surviors all living on the same piece of farmland that the dead girl bought specifically for them to share. so yes, an extended sleepover of sorts. in case i haven't made myself clear: i hated this book

rage by jackie morse kessler
the second in a list of YA books singled out in the NY times as too dark for their audience. like it's listmate scars, the protagonist is a cutter. but i think this book did a much better job of dramatizing her life and making it slightly easier for me to understand this whole cutting business. first of all, this is more of a fantasy genre, with the 4 horsemen of the apocalyse showing up and offering her the job of War (the other horsemen are Death, Famine and Pestilence). but as War, she gets to see real trauma, real devastation... you know - War - up close and although her character never directly says her problems are minor in comparison to children in refugee camps or boy soldiers forced to kill, it is obvious that the author wants her teen readers to come to that conclusion. afterall, it is only in the rich, well-fed, and overly indulged west that teens could use self mutilation as a pasttime. in fact, this author's first book was about the Famine horseman and she is/was an anorexic - another unheard of problem in areas that suffer daily for simple survival - so i think she's got an underlining theme here.
as for the violence? yes, there was an awful lot of talking about, and wishing for, cuts to open and blood to spill. it was both repetitive (so sort of boring) and disturbing (that there was still so much rage left unplumbed) and i would definitely NOT allow pepper to read it. it's too bad because this series wants to turn teen angst and indulgence on it's head.

gods behaving badly by marie phillips
i might have enjoyed this book more if i'd read it before pepper had. there's lots of casual sex - thrust - thrown in - thrust - with 'bridget jones diary type' humor - thrust. aphrodite is a phone sex worker, and apollo thinks the morality of rape is a grey area. so yes, i was pretty mortified that my 13 yo had already read it and there was nothing i could do about that.
plot-wise it got boring about mid-way when you realized we were going to have a rehashing of the hero story where the mortal descends into the underworld to retrieve his dead beloved. too flimsy for the crux of the story, the author adds a comatose apollo, the sun going out, and the (consequent) imminent death of all living things. yeah, yawn a little. the junior fiction genre has already tackled modern versions of the greek god myths (myth-o-mania and percy jackson are just 2 successful series) so it didn't take much to reinvent that well oiled wheel. not recommended.

for the win by cory doctorow
wow. another A-Ma-Zing book from cory doctorow. again he projects the future (this is science fiction after all) while managing to educate the reader about the past. in this case, he's covering economics, the forming of unions, pyramid schemes, and the social contract - all while setting his story on the international stage: india, china, the US and indonesia. and again his book is labelled Young Adult - which is the best audience to learn some of this stuff. think of 'a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down'... his exciting plots are more like a whole candy store.
i love how this author takes his subject matter seriously. he refuses to let Apple sell his novels because he disagrees with how Apple's digital rights management hobbles their competitors in perpetuity. in fact, he's put this whole book on-line, free for anyone to read. he believes copyright is only applicable to money making endeavors - NOT a way to control distribution of a product. and when people want to donate money to him on the website that hosts his book - he encourages that donation to go to his publisher, (promoting the business that sustains authors) or to librarians (whose funding is continuously shrinking).
what's not to like about this guy?

speak by laurie halse anderson
this was an abolutely pitch perfect book. it was a finalist for the US national book award in 1999; how did it not win? how can it be written thirteen years ago and it feel so current? it should be mandatory reading for every girl entering high school.
the main character's voice was so fresh. i thought veronica mars had cornered the market for the cynical-yet-sensitive teen - but this book existed long before veronica mars was invented. and her choice of words, her sentence contruction: beautiful.   Poetry.
and imbedded in the story is highschool, and highschool english classes that teach how to identify symbolism inside books and every single reader then knows to see her as this diseased tree that needs pruning to be saved. her laying under the tree during her rape...
yes, rape. the story is a 14 yo gets raped and she tells no one. not her friends, not her family. in the process, she alienates her social group and becomes a pariah as she enters high school. so highschool is as miserable an experience as you can imagine. her depression deepens; the symptoms are obvious but instead of giving her help, she's labelled a behavior problem. you're on her side but every imaginable outcome - of revenge, of vindication, of compassion - that you're hoping for simply cannot happen. it wouldn't be a realistic ending. and doesn't the author have a responsibility to show the way through this terrible trauma without a miracle occuring?
well, she does. a simple and anomynous act that's acknowledged by others. this validates her experience. and that's all it takes to move forward. (ok, the author then adds a further conclusion that has her standing her ground against her attacker. this seems over-the-top and unnecessary to me) but the real impetus to change is in yourself, not waiting for a change in others.
the book doesn't end all sunshine and roses. bad things happen. you move on. an excellent message of resillience.

graphic novels - tally: 6

what ever happened to world of tomorrow? by brian fies
when i read last year that NASA was retiring the space shuttle and that they had no plans for a replacement, i wondered how the space program had fallen on such hard times. armstrong on the moon was a pivotal moment in american history. NASA used to be a flagship for Amercian dominance of the world, and now it seems to be petering away. well, this book did a great job of explaining the build up to the Apollo missions, and the fallout of finding no life on the moon, no life on Mars. this book made me desperately want to visit a world's fair - i wish i'd been born when montreal held it's crowning acheivement: Expo. the book describes new york's world fair of '39 - the one that inspired disney to build epcot - from a child's perspective; it's magical.
interspersed thoughout the decades of american life, a space-themed comic book evolves. from huge pixels to tightly coloured; from fantastical ideas of monsters in space to actual science. ultimately, our caped crusader has to retire - there's no more romanticism of space. the unknown becomes the known; he cannot endure.

walking dead: too far gone by the usual guy
since the library's collection stopped at book 5 (volumes 9&10), i jumped ahead to volume 13. looks like dale, one of my fav characters died. but wait. i'm getting the series mixed up with the comic book. i liked dale on TV...

sweet tooth: out of the deep woods by jeff lemire
in a post apocalyptic world (think mc carthy's the road) everyone is either dead or dying except these hybrids of children/animals. felt alot like walking dead in that danger is everywhere and noone can be trusted (oh, and there was lots and lots of blood). this is an ongoing series, so i'll get out the next couple to see if it goes someplace original or interesting. otherwise, the boy with antlers on his head isn't enough to keep me coming back.

sweet tooth: in captivity by jeff lemine
the story's dark overtones of humanity turning on itself is still reminiscent of the walking dead, but the artwork is striking and makes me want more. in a scene where the hybrid boy is hypnotized, he walks along his own antlers as he regresses into the past. at some point he enters his own ear canal for comfort - hinting at the lies/stories we tell ourselves in order to get through a trauma.

fables: book one by bill willingham
here are the first 10 comics (of a very popular series) bundled into book form, but my impression was only so-so. perhaps it's the date of publication (10 years ago)or that i've seen plenty of coy and/or humourous treatments of the well-known fairy tales, but i found the plots predictable and lifeless. the sisters grimm, in particular, is an excellent series for the junior fiction crowd that is much more charming than this series. and it has the added bonus of NOT containing so much violence and sex. most of the actual gore was superfluous to the story; it felt like it was meant to titillate and shock the people sitting next to the reader. i'd rather an author play to me.

unwritten: dead man's knock by mike carey
still loving this series. now the scope of literature widen to incorporate the choose-your-own-adventure. and now i remember how and why they worked as books - there were 2 or 3 key plots that weaved through them - even though you chose your destiny, there was a limited destiny available. so with this limited outcome, you CAN read the pages out of order to get a semblance of the narrative. which is what this volume of unwritten does - disjointed scenes, but still a fluidity of plot. really, a clever device.

novels and short stories - tally: 10

this cake is for the party by sarah selecky
a dark assembly of short stories, these characters are sad and often empty of direction. their inertia mostly bothered me (although "where are you coming from, sweetheart?" really tugged at my heart). i fear this author has had too much exposure to loss and mental illness in her short life.

the year we left home by jean thompson
my first time reading this author and she is Fa-Bu-Lous. like an unknown (to me) alice munroe. this book is considered a novel, but each chapter could stand alone as a short story. although it's advertised as 'fiercely american' (the aftermath of the vietmam war, the farm crisis, the boom of the tech sector) all these events were felt in canada too. the author's iowa could well be our prairies, her seattle, our halifax - even the way she writes the geography feels so canadian to me:
city of brutal and wayward temperatures, of horizontal snow and lashing rains, city of instant potholes and blackened slush.

extremely loud and incredibly close by jonathan safran foer
after getting a heads-up about this book at girl detective, i put this book on hold at the library months ago. when it finally showed up and i saw the cover, i realized why it was in such demand: it's a movie! in fact it's an oscar-nominated movie.
the first 2 pages are funny and then it goes to sad and stays there. the story has left me with mixed feelings. from the start, it hooked me and so i read about two-thirds of it over the weekend, but then i put it down and the urgency simply disappeared. i realized i didn't care all that much about the main character and whether he came to terms with his father's death on 9-11. and then i thought about how easy and cheap it is to set your story with 9-11 as the background - a whole emotional well to pull from without having to do the heavy lifting of creating that drama on the page. same thing with referencing the dresden fire bombings without actually bringing them to life on the page. characters seemed to have good lines (for a movie?) but didn't have compatible philosophies described.
lastly, i don't want to read about old people having sex using the same type of descriptions and vocabulary as is used with young people. or maybe i just don't want it described by a father in a letter to his son. (pretty sure the son wouldn't want to hear it / read it either)

middlesex by jeffrey eugenides
a book about a hermaphrodite might have difficulty getting traction if that's all it did, but this well researched novel puts that theme of 'either/or' throughout. whether it's the nature vs nurture debate, or the immigrant experience of choosing where you call home, or a new convert to islam abandoning their slave name. it's all about identity.
i think, where the author really suceeded, was as the multiple voices of his main character as he/she goes from young girl to teen boy to refined man. there are also many moments of the narrator refering to herself in the third person, a natural reaction to viewing your past with newly-coloured lenses.
the book was full of historical details i found fascinating: the point system real estate agents used to allow or disallow immigrant families into the neighborhoods, the birth islam in america, the biology behind different type of sexual disorder, the detroit riots... i never knew about the antagonism between turks and greeks before; it's made me curious to read more about the history of their conflict

secret daughter by shilpi somaya gowda
i'd sum up this book as: jodi picoult does india. or maybe that's insulting jodi picoult b/c she usually she's got a one-two punch of plot twist at the end to go along with her mediocre writing. this book didn't finish with a bang like that.
my biggest complaint lies in the author's or editor's error of reporting that there are 950 girls born for every 1000 boys to back-up a character's comment that women are a minority in india. big deal. that rate is actually the natural birth rate as reported in a 2002 study, plus it's a much better rate than india's current rate (2011) of 914 girls per 1000 boys. i noticed other spots where the editor failed again.
but you can still find a gem hidden in the muck. this line alone made the book worth it for me: sometimes one's actions must preceed the emotions one hopes to feel.

notes on a scandal by zoe heller
wow. i loved this to bits. laugh-out-loud in spots, and so perceptive in others, it's worth reading a second and third time. the main character is so juvenile in her actions but here is a book that intelligently expresses how she can to be so arrested in her development, AND lays out perfectly the "why now?" of the plot (just as her own daughter is moving into the age of competition). i thought the whole thing was a breath of fresh air - so honest.
i didn't know the movie was based on a book but i'll be viewing it again as soon as i can. then likely read the book again. maybe Atonement will finally have a companion on my list of movies that are as good (if not better) than the book.

the sisters brothers by patrick dewitt
2 psychopathic killers on the loose during the california gold rush. told in first person narrative, this character is unlike any i've inhabited. you're inclined to like him; he can be quite nice. and he is insisting this will be his last 'job'. but he's still a killer and his recent change of heart, or his explaining how the dark rage comes over him, doesn't erase his past.
it's his brother you identify as a cold blooded killer. yet all his power is removed from him by the end and you don't know how to feel.
i think this author is incredibly talented to write from this somewhat-but-not-totally detached point of view. i know it was good because i'd like some more

small island by andrea levy
read for bookclub, i started this one with trepidation: yet another war book. ho hum. but it grew on me. the characters start off unlikeable but then slowly bring you 'round. i especially like how the author allowed the story to deepend by introducing new narrators that were integral to the plot (as opposed to having all of them narrate sections right from the beginning). although there were only 4 points of view - easy for a reader to keep track of - each new narrator wasn't introducted until our curiosity about him/her was sufficient.
i had never linked my war reading to the partition of india before, yet this concept seemed obvious once this book connected the dots for me. historical fiction really does a great job identifying all those filaments in a way that straightforward timelines just can't do.
the ending was unsatisfactory, but i've come to see that most endings are. we are still living history, after all. no outcome will ever satisfy all of us.

cool water by dianne warren
one town and one day; this book follows the minutia of numerous characters in the sleepy village of juliet, saskatchewan. it was fairly well done, the story anchored by the loss of a horse and it's finder riding that horse the livelong day - naturally reflecting on his past as travels, and meeting up with other town dwellers. it very much reminded me of 'the year we left home', with it's bleak landscape and financial hardship. the major theme seemed to be longing - whether for a roommate to return your quiet love, or to know the identity of your mother, or to be young again, or even for a break in the weather - most characters were in a holding pattern of malaise.

the family fang by kevin wilson
a neat enough concept: two children born into a performance art family are expected/cajoled/manipulated to participate in whatever hairbrained piece of 'art' their parents come up with. after they grow up, one sees it as an expression of love, family and belonging, while the other is rightfully angered at her lost childhood. but the effort fell flat once the author pulled out all his tricks. or maybe i found the parents behaviour so revolting that i couldn't like a book about them. me, i'd want revenge, or to at least regain control by exposing their final piece before it was ready.

non-fiction - tally: 3

stop dressing your six-year old like a skank (and other words of delicate southern wisdom) by celia rivenbark
allelulia! this woman is preaching to the choir - so much of what she has to say has been said by me before. the difference? she's actually FUNNY while doing it. on top of child rearing issues, she takes aim at celebrity baby bumps, reality tv, celebrities writing children's books (arggh! another pet peeve of mine) and 'huzzzbands'. the essays are a bit dated - talking about the simple life with paris hilton, queer eye for the straight guy, ebay, and hillary duff - but work for me in that it's about the same time frame that i, too, had to walk across the aisle from the sweet 4-6X clothes to the g-r-o-s-s and taudry styles of the 7 &ups. i ended up buying most of my daughter's clothes from value village - where you could find practically new handmade clothes (probably lovingly sewed by grandma, and quickly ditched by fashion savy 7 and 8 year olds)

the art of friendship by sally and roger horchow
at first this how-to bugged me - sounding too much like a business manual with its emphasis on how to make connections (lots of ways which seemed insincere. and what's the point of faking yourself in order to get a friend? that's not a real friend)
this father and daughter team seem to enjoy name dropping and they dropped alot. they've produced broadway plays, have worked for steven speilberg, and know folks in the white house... so maybe they owe their extensive list of friends to their backgrounds. they do sound gosh-darn exciting. heck, their friend malcolm gladwell furnished a foreword to the book! man, i'd love to sit next to him at a dinner party...
so the new thing is 'hiving' - the social answer to nesting - where you invite people with common interests to your home to explore a lecture series, or movies, or games. you know i'm an introvert when the thought of organizing an event like this makes me a nervous wreck! but, on the opposite side of that, they also emphasized the deep satisfaction of one-on-one friendships, and gave ideas of how to keep older relationships fresh.
mostly i was awakened to how money plays into maintaining friendships: dinners or lunches, movies or broadway shows, yearly visits to far-flung friends, little gifts (but gifts just the same). no one seemed to just walk in the park, or heck! hang out at the mall. isn't that how we did it on the cheap when we were in our teens? reflecting on the money issue, i can recall many invitations i turned down over money concerns. who knew they were disguised friendship requests?

would it kill you to stop doing that? a modern guide to manners by henry alford
manners are more important than laws. or at least we are more affected by these small indignities (or acts of grace if it goes the other way) than what we are or aren't allowed - legally - to do. so with that in mind, here are some mannerly things i plan to employ:
* never lower the communication tools used, as in: don't reply to a phone call with an email, or reply to an email with a facepost post. however, it is ok to go up a step
* shushing someone is louder than their actual noise, so bring a penlight to shine on the offending yacker in the movie theatre to get a quick & quiet response
* don't ask someone where they are staying when they mention travel. they might be embarrassed to admit their 'value' choice so asking which neighborhood gives you helpful information without putting their bank account on the spot
* it's ok, and even recommended, to make a list of conversation topics in advance of a party where you know few people. also, being on the receiving end of questions is fine, but you should make an effort too and inquire things of your conversation partner
* at a dinner party, it's rude to talk about any food that is not the food in front of you
* japanese toilets are chockfull of buttons: one for bidet feature, one for warming the seat, one for air drying, and even one for a flushing sound to mask embarrassing noises (ok, i don't plan to employ that one but it was interesting to learn)
i enjoyed the heavy sprinkling of humor in this book, such as when the author decides to answer the miss manners column without actually sending the replies, or when he volunteers to be a manners mentor for his FB friends (6 took him up on the offer). he also came up with a great way to get an older woman to stop wearing (and displaying) her thong by implying the grossest person they knew was defending her choice and said how he loved how 'hip, raunchy,and always up for it' she looked :)