The male protagonist's name is "Lancelot Satterwhite" and that's somehow still only the sixth most obnoxious thing about this novel.The male protagonist's name is "Lancelot Satterwhite" and that's somehow still only the sixth most obnoxious thing about this novel....more
Trying to write a book about the slums of Mumbai is a daunting task, to say the least (and please bear in mind, I say that as a white lady whose only Trying to write a book about the slums of Mumbai is a daunting task, to say the least (and please bear in mind, I say that as a white lady whose only knowledge of India comes from a few Bollywood movies and Slumdog Millionare so if you’re looking for an analysis of how well-researched or factual Katherine Boo’s book is, this is not the review for you). Katherine Boo approaches her topic by shrinking it down to one family and one single, catastrophic event – teenage garbage picker Abdul's family has a long-running feud with their neighbor, a disabled woman named Fatima. One day, following an argument between Fatima and Abdul's mother (where the latter is overheard threatening physical violence), Fatima goes into her home, pours kerosene on herself, and lights a match. She survives, barely, and names Abdul as her attacker. The book chronicles the family’s lengthy legal battle as they attempt to prove their innocence in a system overrun with corruption and indifference. Other characters come in and out of the narrative, including slumlords, scavengers, orphans, and others who make up the population of Annawadi, a tiny slum just outside the Mumbai airport.
Boo manages to keep the book from being too exploitative or misery-porn-esque, but this is still a pretty grim slog of a book. There is very little redemption to be had, and we learn very quickly that anytime a character manages to snag a little bit of good luck, it certainly won’t last long.
For me, the most redeeming thing about this book is that Katherine Boo isn’t attempting to find some moral lesson within the lives of the people she spent years interviewing, and she doesn’t try to present any solutions for fixing India’s problems. She is merely doing her job as a journalist: seeking out a group of people often overlooked by the rest of the world, letting them tell their stories, and recording them faithfully. Any lesson or moral that you take from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is one you create yourself....more
To be honest, I only read this book (okay, technically, listened to it) because I needed to find an audiobook to listen to for an upcoming car trip, aTo be honest, I only read this book (okay, technically, listened to it) because I needed to find an audiobook to listen to for an upcoming car trip, and the library didn’t have a ton of better offerings at the time. I liked Room, because everyone liked Room, but Emma Donahue’s other novel, Frog Music, didn’t impress me very much. But I had heard of this book, so I decided to give it a shot.
The story, taking place in 1859, starts when British nurse Lib Wright receives a very strange assignment. In a small village in Ireland, a family claims that their young daughter has not eaten any food in four months. Locals are insisting that it’s a miracle, and that the girl is a new saint. Lib, along with a local nun, will spend two weeks watching the girl, to either confirm that Anna O’Donnell is surviving on nothing but water, or to figure out how the deception works.
So my main problem with the book was that Donahue presents us with a very simple mystery at the core of her novel - how is Anna surviving on nothing but a few spoonfuls of water a day? What’s the trick? – and then wastes a lot of time not addressing that mystery with any real sense of urgency. The pace of this novel is sloooooow, and mostly follows the same pattern throughout: Lib gets up, goes to Anna’s house, and sits with the girl for like eight hours. Repeat. And repeat. We are expected to become invested in Lib’s relationship with Anna and her increasing inability to stay impartial and unattached, but I was mostly impatient for Donahue to just tell me how the trick was done. Too much buildup, not enough prestige.
Lib is also a frustrating protagonist, because her entire job in the novel is to just sit and watch things, which means she is very, very boring. But also, she’s charming in a weird way because she’s a) a stone-cold weirdo who reacts to people and situations as if this is the first time she’s left the house in several years, and b) manages to completely misinterpret every single conversation she has with another character.
Yes, Donahue does give us a satisfying solution to the mystery, so at least there’s that. The problem is the solution itself, which involves (view spoiler)[Anna’s mother spitting pre-chewed food into her daughter’s mouth under the pretense of a good-morning kiss. I just…I cannot. Stop and picture, really picture, what that exchange would look like. We are expected to believe that Lib never noticed anything weird for DAYS, even though apparently she was watching a mother and daughter basically Frenching each other every day. What in the actual fuck, Donahue? (hide spoiler)] ...more
This book was another result of me aimlessly browsing the available audiobook downloads from my library, and since I had read one PD James mystery (ThThis book was another result of me aimlessly browsing the available audiobook downloads from my library, and since I had read one PD James mystery (The Skull Beneath the Skin) and enjoyed it, I decided to give this a shot. This is actually James’ debut mystery, so I’m willing to forgive the more clunky aspects of the book in light of that.
The story follows your basic murder mystery formula, where we have a wealthy family in an English country manor, and muuuuuurder.
It’s a perfectly serviceable mystery, although not particularly memorable. There are some very, very obvious moments (like when one of the characters is saying that she’s sure her husband has an alibi for the night of the murder because she checked the clock when he came in, and it’s clear immediately that he adjusted the time) and I honestly can’t remember a lot of the finer details of the story. Everything gets wrapped up neatly, and the detective’s solution doesn’t have any obvious holes in it, so overall, solid three stars – no more, no less. ...more
After the disappointment of Career of Evil, I’m delighted to report that Cormoran and Robin are back, baby! No boring misogynist serial killers in thiAfter the disappointment of Career of Evil, I’m delighted to report that Cormoran and Robin are back, baby! No boring misogynist serial killers in this one; just a good old fashioned Rich People and Murder story!
The book picks up right after the last novel left off, with Strike dramatically interrupting Robin’s wedding (NOT, sadly, to confess that he’s in love with Robin and carry her off while Stupid Matthew cries at the altar, but merely to tell Robin that he caught the serial killer in the last book). We get some business-as-usual scenes around the Strike/Cunliffe office, and then they get an unexpected visitor – a mentally unbalanced man comes into the office, telling a disjointed story about how he witnessed a murder when he was a child. At the same time, Strike has been hired by a politician who claims he’s being blackmailed, and with that we’re off to the races.
Even though, at its core, this is a very dramatic and, in many ways, very sad story, there’s so much fun stuff in the meantime. Robin gets to go undercover as not one but TWO different people, and there’s more delightful romantic tension between her and Strike. Also, for anyone who was worried that Rowling was going to have Robin’s marriage to Stupid Matthew drag on for the rest of the series, you’ll be delighted to know that by the end of the book (view spoiler)[ they’re officially done, because Stupid Matthew was cheating on Robin, OF COURSE. They have a very gratifying (for me) argument and at one point Stupid Matthew tries to physically stop Robin from leaving, and she basically laughs in his face and is like, motherfucker, I have faced down TWO psycho killers and still have the knife wound from the last one, what exactly are you gonna do? It was at this point that I wrote in my notes, “Robin employs the “if you’re feeling froggy better jump” defense, for which Matthew has no counterattack.” (hide spoiler)]
I’m very glad to see that the Cormoran Strike series has bounced back, and this makes me hopeful for the rest of the series. More detective shenanigans and romantic pining, please! ...more
“Valuable and ingenious [Stephen] might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to h“Valuable and ingenious [Stephen] might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and here, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat - a loathsome great vampire of the most poisonous kind, no doubt. ‘I should never have believed it of him: his sacred oath in the morning watch and now he stuffs the ship with vampires; and God knows what is in that bag. No doubt he was tempted, but surely he might blush for his fall?’
No blush; nothing but a look of idiot delight as he came slowly up the side, hampered by his burden and comforting it in Portuguese as he came.
‘I am happy to see that you were so successful, Dr Maturin,’ he said, looking down into the launch and the canoes, loaded with glowing heaps of oranges and shaddocks, red meat, iguanas, bananas, greenstuff. ‘But I am afraid no vampires can be allowed on board.’
‘This is a sloth,’ said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!’ The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail, and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.”
Honestly, all you need to know about this book is this: first, we get so much more Stephen Maturin angst/sadness/character-building struggle (honestly, the poor man goes through A LOT in this one, and I just want someone to give him a hug), plus more marriage-plotting shenanigans with both Jack and Stephen. Also Stephen brings a sloth on board, and it’s afraid of Jack at first, but then he gets the sloth drunk and they become friends, prompting Stephen to exclaim that Jack has “debauched my sloth!”
Three books into the Cormorant Strike (that name is so, so terrible and I’ll never be over it) series, and even though I’m still invested, this one deThree books into the Cormorant Strike (that name is so, so terrible and I’ll never be over it) series, and even though I’m still invested, this one definitely had a lot of rocky patches for me – almost enough to make me give up on the series.
My lack of enthusiasm for true crime serial killer stories revolves around the fact that serial killers are not interesting to me, because their motivations can almost always be traced back to violent misogyny. The appeal of detective stories lies in being able to immerse yourself in a world where logic and intelligence save the day, where some form of justice is always delivered and the victim is always avenged, even if that justice is delivered outside of the law. This is why I like mysteries: because you know that by the end, some form of justice will win out and everything will be wrapped up in a neat little bow. I can’t enjoy myself if the mystery I’m reading centers around the crimes of a violent misogynist. That’s not an escape for me. If I want to read about men killing women I’ll turn on the news, thanks all the same.
Career of Evil lets us know exactly what kind of book it’s going to be right off the bat, when a package addressed to Robin and containing a woman’s severed leg is delivered to Strike’s office. Robin isn’t even really the target of whoever sent the package – it’s made clear right away that whoever sent the leg is someone from Strike’s past, who is merely threatening Robin in order to get to Strike. As an added bonus, we have chapters from the perspective of the killer stalking Strike. These excerpts are mostly just tiring, because we never learn anything useful about the killer (because then we would know something Strike doesn’t and the mystery would be ruined), so instead we have to read repetitive inner monologues about how much the killer hates women (he’s living with a woman who he refers to as “it” because subtlety left these shores a long time ago) and hear his plans to murder Robin. The result is that while I’m supposed to be focusing on the mystery and enjoying reading about Strike’s investigation (and getting more Strike/Robin shipper material), instead I’m being distracted by a loudly ticking clock, reminding me that Robin will be violently attacked at some point in the book. To say that I emphatically did not want to read about this is an understatement. Again – if I want to read some guy’s manifesto about how women are responsible for everything wrong in his life, I’ll turn on the fucking news.
The four suspects in the case are virtually interchangeable – they’re all, you guessed it! Violent misogynists – and the scenes where Strike pursues one lead or another are also way too similar to be interesting, to the point where I didn’t really care which one of them had done it by the end. The only really redeeming aspect of this book is that we to see more of the growing attraction between Robin and Strike, although I’m still not sure if Rowling will ever have her characters act on those feelings. (Then again, we all remember That Epilogue, so we know that when it comes to romantic pairings, “Robert Galbraith” has a tendency to go for the easiest option) We also learn some more about Strike’s childhood – the killer taunts him by making references to his late mother – and find out what Robin’s Deep Dark Secret is. And all I’ll say about that is, well, I guess it could have been handled worse, so there’s that. (view spoiler)[Seriously, can we enact like a five-year ban on authors using rape as motivation for female characters? Come up with something new, for Christ’s sake. The fact that this revelation comes in the middle of a book already brimming with violence against women was extremely depressing. (hide spoiler)]
Stories of violent men and the women who die because of them are nothing new, and considering how bombarded we already are with these stories in real life, an author has to really do something new and innovative with the concept of a misogynistic serial killer in order to make me care. Unfortunately, Career of Evil isn’t up to the challenge. ...more
Honestly, what a relief. I liked The Fault in Our Stars, I really did! (Hell, I was at one of the performances on the releasI’ve outgrown John Green.
Honestly, what a relief. I liked The Fault in Our Stars, I really did! (Hell, I was at one of the performances on the release tour! I spoke to John and Hank Green in the signing line and they laughed politely at my joke! I was DFTBA-all-the-way for many years!) And when I heard that he had a new book coming out, I was mildly interested but then forgot to track down a copy until recently, when I was scrolling through my library’s audiobook options, and decided to give it a try.
Green’s heroine this time around is Aza Holmes, age sixteen. Aza, we learn pretty quickly, suffers from anxiety and obsessive thought patterns. She has a perpetual scab on her hand from picking at her skin, and constantly applies hand sanitizer because every time she thinks about it she realizes how gross the human body is. Aza is a typical teenage girl, albeit one who sometimes finds it impossible to exist in the world. So yeah – a typical teenage girl. Part of what made The Fault in Our Stars so good was the way John Green used his experience as a chaplain in a children’s hospital to realistically portray what it was like to be a child with a terminal disease, and here he gets even more personal, using his own mental health experiences to make Aza’s struggles believable and compelling.
The plot kicks into motion when a man in Aza’s community goes missing. Russell Pickett is a billionaire developer, and his teenage son, Davis, is a former childhood friend of Aza’s. With much prodding from her best friend (sidebar: why are the best friend characters in John Green’s novels always so much more interesting than his protagonists?), Aza decides to reconnect with Davis and investigate the Case of the Missing Billionaire.
Be warned: this novel isn’t really the Case of the Missing Billionaire, and that really fucking irks me. As someone who is a hardcore fan of detective novels, I haaaaaate it when an author teases readers with a mystery to get them sucked in, but then is like “but MY mystery won’t have a satisfying conclusion because that’s not REALISTIC. Now let’s enjoy three hundred pages of meditations on racism in small town America.”
Without spoilers, I will say that Green doesn’t completely ignore the disappearance that kickstarts his story, but it’s obvious that he is deeply uninterested in the case, and it functions primarily as a background plot to the main story of Aza’s mental health struggles and her tentative romance with Davis.
And it’s fine! I would argue, in fact, that it’s Green’s best novel to date, and even say how happy I am to see that he’s only getting better with age and experience. I’m just not part of his ideal demographic any more, and that’s okay.
It’s just that I found all the scenes between Aza and Davis deeply boring, partially because teenage romance no longer interests me (maybe make one of them a vampire, I dunno) and also because hello this guy’s dad VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE, maybe we should be focusing on that? I GET that the disappearance isn’t the point of the book, but it was a distraction more often than not.
(Also I figured out what happened to the dad pretty early in the story – and yes, I KNOW that figuring it out was not supposed to be the point, but the fact that I solved the mystery while the actual characters in the actual story could only be bothered to pay attention to the disappearance about half the time made for an incredibly frustrating reading experience.) ...more
When my friend recommended this book to me and said it was a zombie story, the first thing that popped into my head was Ilana from Broad City saying, When my friend recommended this book to me and said it was a zombie story, the first thing that popped into my head was Ilana from Broad City saying, "That's very cool and 2004 of you, but..."
Like seriously, the last thing I wanted to read was another zombie story. But, just like The Girl With All the Gifts, sometimes there really is an exception that proves the rule. (The fact that Dread Nation was ranked as one of the best Young Adult books of the year doesn't hurt its case, either)
In Dread Nation, Justina Ireland finds a way to put a new spin on the very worn-out zombie apocalypse story by setting it in an alternate version of United States history. In Ireland's version of events, the Civil War went exactly the way it did in our history books, except for one thing: after the battle of Gettysburg, the dead began to rise. So in the aftermath of the conflict, the United States government had to deal the reconstruction of the country, and also a zombie uprising. The solution was to take black and Native children and place them in special combat schools, where they would be trained to fight zombies and eventually assigned to protect wealthy white families. Our heroine is Jane, the biracial teenager who is taken from her home on the Rose Hill plantation and sent to Miss Preston's School of Combat to learn the fine art of zombie killing.
It’s a great premise for a Young Adult adventure story, and my only real issue with the book was that Ireland couldn’t seem to focus her plot. At first, when Jane is introduced and is showing us around her school, I thought, “oh cool, this is gonna be like a zombie-hunter girls’ boarding school novel, I’m on board.” And then Jane goes on a school outing and rescues a bunch of rich white people from a zombie attack, and I thought, “oh cool, so she’s going to get hired by a rich lady and we’ll get to see her navigating high society while also killing zombies.” And then Jane and her friends get sent to an experimental protected settlement out in the territories, and I thought, “Oh cool, we’re…doing Wild West zombies? I guess?”
So it’s weird at the beginning, because it feels kind of like Ireland wastes a lot of page space on potential stories that never get off the ground, and by the time we get to the actual central setting of the story, we’re almost halfway through the book. But pacing aside, this was a fun blend of historic fiction and zombie apocalypse story, and Jane is a great protagonist who’s perfectly capable of carrying a series. The book functions well enough as a standalone novel, although of course Ireland throws in enough of a cliffhanger to make me anxious for the second book in the series.
Still kinda disappointed that I didn’t get my zombie-hunter girls’ boarding school novel, though....more
Since I a) love cheesy melodramatic thrillers and b) get super obsessed with gymnastics every time the summer Olympics roll around and never think aboSince I a) love cheesy melodramatic thrillers and b) get super obsessed with gymnastics every time the summer Olympics roll around and never think about it otherwise, this book was the perfect blend for me. Gymnasts and (possibly) murder! Sign me the hell up (should really be the title of one of my shelves)!
The book is told from the perspective of Katie Knox, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Devon is a gifted gymnast on track to become an Olympian. The family’s entire life revolves around their daughter – weekends are spent traveling to meets, Katie and her husband Eric only spend time with other parents from the gym, and every extra money the family earns goes to Devon and gymnastics. The young athletes at the gym, their coaches, and the parents form a sort of cult community, where everyone knows everyone’s business and outsiders are not welcome, because who else could understand this kind of life?
The whole community is thrown off balance when a young man - a tumbling coach at Devon's gym - dies suddenly. Through Katie’s eyes, we go back to see the seemingly-random sequence of events that led to the death, and follow Katie’s tentative investigations into the possible crime. It’s all very dramatic and soapy, and is a lot of fun when Abbott is fully leaning into these elements of her story. At its best, this is a Pretty Little Liars-esque tale of small-town secrets and scandals, where small business owners act like mob bosses and parents are willing to do anything to protect their children (and their own interests).
I especially liked the little details where Abbott shows how fully invested you have to be in order to raise a future Olympian, and how thoroughly gymnastics eclipsed everything else going on in the Knox family’s life. One of the book’s best scenes shows Devon’s coach sitting down for a meeting with her parents and outlining a detailed five-year-plan that ends in the Olympics. Notably, Devon is (I think) eleven or twelve at this point, and is also not present at this meeting deciding her entire future.
The only thing I could have done without was the eventual revelation that Devon (view spoiler)[and the dead coach were having a sexual relationship. I understand that this twist serves a crucial function in the story and gives Devon a good reason for doing what she eventually does; my problem is that all of the characters – including Devon’s own mother - seem…weirdly okay with the idea of an adult man sleeping with a fifteen-year-old (who, due to the physical rigors of her training has only recently started menstruating ew ew ewwwwww)? Like they’re obviously upset, but after the initial shock the characters treat it as more of a taboo relationship, instead of an adult preying on a vulnerable child. I’m pretty sure the word “pedophile” is never used. Anyway, it seemed like Abbott was just trying to come up with a twist that had the best potential shock value, and didn’t fully consider all the implications. (hide spoiler)]...more
(warning: this review will contain spoilers for the first book in the Crazy Rich Asians series. If you haven't read it, or have just seen the movie, p(warning: this review will contain spoilers for the first book in the Crazy Rich Asians series. If you haven't read it, or have just seen the movie, proceed with caution because I am going to discuss the ending and crucial plot points for that book)
So, I'm a little baffled at the difference in my reactions to the first Crazy Rich Asians novel versus the second. The first book was a fun, fluffy romp of a story about an Everywoman's journey into Filthy Rich People Land - everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, and Kwan was adept at using brand names, luxury settings, and general wealth porn to distract me from the shallowness and mediocre prose of his debut novel. (I should probably also admit that the movie version, which is one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book, is probably making me feel more positive about the book than when I first read it)
In China Rich Girlfriend, Kwan assumes that he can stick to the formula that made his first book such a hit, and doesn't bother to deviate very far from his established pattern of "Nick and Rachel go somewhere luxurious, then we follow some other characters to similarly luxurious locations, repeat until you hit your required page count" because why should he? The first book was so well received, why bother trying anything new?
The problem is that China Rich Girlfriend didn't work for me, at all, and I'll try to use this review to figure out why.
For starters, Kwan's decision to have this book pick up two years after the events of the first book is baffling, because none of the characters have experienced any growth or change in that time. Rachel and Nick are just now getting engaged (and I had totally forgotten that the book, unlike the movie, doesn't end with Rachel accepting Nick's proposal) and in that time, they don't appear to have ever had any serious conversation about money and how their marriage will potentially be affected by Nick's wealth - Rachel remains as confounded as ever by the obscene wealth of the people she encounters in China and Singapore, and Nick continues to refuse to discuss his family finances with her in any detail. The lack of personal growth doesn't stop at Rachel and Nick, either - Nick hasn't spoken to his mother in two years, and Astrid is still married to her dirtbag husband, and is still maintaining an "I swear we're just friends" relationship with Charlie Wu. (The Astrid of the movie version, who delivered that blistering breakup speech to her husband, is nowhere to be found in this book.)
The big drama of this novel is Rachel reconnecting with her birth father, and Kwan has absolutely no idea how to handle this plot. Rachel and her father immediately get on like a house on fire, and she bonds with her newly-discovered half-brother without any issues. (Instead of having Rachel wonder why her father the billionaire politician never used his resources to try to find her and her mother, or question whether it's healthy to try to start a relationship with a family that never wanted anything to do with her, it's all "Wow, my dad sure is great!" and "Oh wow, my estranged brother and I eat our soup dumplings the same way!") At the same time, Kwan decides to do what he did at the end of Crazy Rich Asians and take a hard left turn into soap opera-level drama, when Rachel is (view spoiler)[poisoned and almost died, all because someone was afraid that she would inherit some of the money that would have gone to her brother (hide spoiler)]. It's like he doesn't know how to create drama out of people reacting normally to extremely emotional circumstances, so he has to throw crazy plots into the mix instead.
The other big issue here is that, unlike in the first book, it has become glaringly obvious that all of these people are shallow, spoiled monsters. Kwan was able to keep me reasonably distracted from this in the first book, but while I was reading China Rich Girlfriend, an intrusive thought kept ruining my reading experience: these people have too much money and it has turned them into sociopaths.
Some of them are supposed to be ridiculous, like Kitty Pong (who, by the way, I will defend to the death, and it's a major flaw of the book that we don't get to spend more time watching her My Fair Lady journey into high society) and Carlton's girlfriend, the Chinese socialite Collette Bing. But on the other hand, we have Carlton himself, who at the beginning of the book crashes his sports car into a luxury boutique, severely injuring himself and putting one passenger in a coma, and killing the other. His mother then pays to have the girl's death covered up, and Carlton never sees any consequences for his actions.
I cannot imagine how Kwan thought his readers would be capable of sympathizing with Carlton after that. Again - he put one girl in a coma, and killed another one. Oh sure, he feels super bad about it, but Kwan seems to think that that's sufficient. It was not, and in every interaction Carlton has with another character, all I could think was "a girl is dead because of you." Also, notice how I have to just keep referring to each of his victims as "the girl"? That's because they never get names. I mean, Jesus, Kwan.
Even Nick sucks in this one. There's a scene where his aunt sits down with him and bluntly tells him that he's free to continue dating Rachel if he wants, but he should wait to marry her until after his grandmother dies so she'll leave him Tyersol Park in her will. And instead of defending Rachel (you know, like he spent the first book doing?) and inviting his aunt to take a flying leap off her mega-yacht, Nick gives some non-committal non-answer, because despite knowing all the shit his family put Rachel through and even though he ultimately chose her over them, he's still not willing to risk pissing off his grandma and losing his chance to be lord of the manor one day. It was deeply disappointing, to say the least.
Crazy Rich Asians succeeded because its core story was a universal one: the pressure of meeting your partner's family for the first time, and the anxiety that you won't be accepted. Readers loved the first book because Kwan took a very familiar, everyday experience and sprinkled it with gold dust and placed it in an exotic setting, making the humdrum "meeting the parents" scenario feel much more interesting and high-stakes.
China Rich Girlfriend could have worked in a similar way, because again, it deals with a common experience: a newly married couple trying to navigate their shared life and make their partnership succeed despite their vastly different families and upbringings. Unfortunately, Kwan has absolutely no interest in exploring this, preferring instead to stick with his old formula of repetitive scenes of rich people doing rich people things in rich people places, and he can't even do us the favor of letting us watch familiar, already-beloved characters do them - he seems to think that he can just repeat the plot of the first book with new characters and settings, and that his audience will be happy.
I read this book for one reason, and one reason only: so I would have added background information when the movie version came out. In that respect, China Rich Girlfriend delivers....more
I really don't know how I'm supposed to defend my dislike of this book? I mean, what kind of asshole says, "Man, this book about a woman's miserable cI really don't know how I'm supposed to defend my dislike of this book? I mean, what kind of asshole says, "Man, this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out, two stars"?
But for real - this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out. Like, if you read Angela's Ashes and thought it just needed more sexual assault of the pre-pubescent protagonist, then The Glass Castle is for you! There's a bit early on where the dad takes his kids to the zoo and I sure hope you enjoy it, because that's pretty much the only truly happy interaction Jeannette Walls has with her parents for the rest of the book.
And it's totally unfair of me to complain about that. Jeannette Walls owes me nothing, and she definitely isn't obligated to gloss over the uglier aspects of her (I cannot emphasize this enough) truly awful childhood just to make readers more comfortable. So honestly, it's not even the fact that this book is XXX-rated Misery Porn that bothers me. What I really don't like about this memoir is that Walls, even as she recounts stories where she and her siblings were being routinely abused by her parents, seems unwilling to look this ugliness fully in the face, and condemn her parents for the way they treated her and her siblings. She ends (no spoilers, relax) on a note of, not quite forgiveness, but acceptance of the fact that her parents were just being true to themselves, and did the best they could.
And that's somehow the most depressing thing about the book. The Glass Castle seems to frequently market itself as a story of an unconventional childhood that was tough, sure, but full of love and adventure. (Probably the movie adaptation, which made major changes in order to make the story more heartwarming, is mostly responsible for this) But in reality, The Glass Castle is just the story of an abusive childhood, written by a woman who maybe doesn't realize how truly toxic her parents really are.
Anyway. If starving kids, alcoholic fathers, dangerously narcissistic mothers, and sexual assault makes up your preferred memoir cocktail, enjoy. ...more
I checked out this audiobook on a whim when I saw that it was available, because it seemed like a quick, fun nostalgia read. I remember being assignedI checked out this audiobook on a whim when I saw that it was available, because it seemed like a quick, fun nostalgia read. I remember being assigned to read this book in fifth grade or sixth grade, and had fond memories of it as a brief, fun little puzzle of a story.
The Westing Game begins when sixteen people are called to the abandoned Westing mansion to hear the will of Sam Westing, recently deceased millionaire industrialist. In his will, Westing proposes a game: the sixteen people (his “heirs”) will be divided into teams of two and given a handful of clues, which they must use to figure out who murdered Westing. The team that wins inherits his entire fortune.
Honestly, on re-reading this, I realize that it’s basically Saw for the elementary school set: rich eccentric dude brings a group of strangers together and proceeds to psychologically torture them by a) teasing them with the chance to win an outrageous fortune and b) convincing them that someone in their group is a murderer. Plus there’s puns and puzzles based on patriotic songs!
In short, this has not aged well. Maybe people were more open to the idea of a rich guy fucking with people’s lives for shits and giggles back when the book was originally published in 1979, but reading The Westing Game in the year of our lord 2018 was a significantly different experience for me. Watching all of these people go through what was basically an elaborate parlor game to appease the whims of a rich dead asshole wasn’t very fun, at all, and it was a genuine disappointment for me when at the end (view spoiler)[it turns out that not only was Westing alive the entire time, none of the characters ever take him to task for how thoroughly he disrupted their lives for his own amusement (hide spoiler)].
And it’s not just the general plot that left a bad taste in my mouth – there are a lot of little things that I definitely didn’t realize were problematic when I read the book as a kid. A child with mental disabilities is described by a character as “a mongoloid child”; a Chinese woman’s inner thoughts are written in broken English; and the one black character wears traditional African clothing once, but those are all the details about it we get, since no country or other information about her clothes are provided, aside from a character calling her outfit “ethnic” and the narration describing her as looking like “an African princess.” Oof. Oh, and since one of the characters has Down’s Syndrome, listening to the audiobook meant having to listen to a non-disabled voice actor do an impression of a person with a speech impediment, which…was not fun for me. I mean, I don’t know how else they were supposed to do it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to listen to....more
I’ll admit it, I’m kind of burned out on WWII stories. Too often, it seems like they devolve into trite morality plays (*coughThe Boy in Striped PajamI’ll admit it, I’m kind of burned out on WWII stories. Too often, it seems like they devolve into trite morality plays (*coughThe Boy in Striped Pajamascough*) or they’re an excuse to sugar-coat the United States military as a bunch of good-hearted Captain Americas heroically defeating the Nazis and saving the world from evil (whenever you read an overly-sentimental portrayal of the Allies in WWII, just remember that as this was occurring, the United States was imprisoning their own citizens in internment camps and the French government was selling out its Jewish citizens to the Nazis. I’m not trying to argue that the Nazis were not the absolute personification of evil, I’m just pointing out that nobody’s hands are clean. Remember Tim O’Brien’s words: there is no such thing as a moral war story.) But at the same time, I also hate stuff like The Reader, where authors try to be like bUt WhAt iF tHe NaZis WeRe VicTiMs ToO? (if you ever feel like absolutely ruining your afternoon, look up the “concentration camp prisoner falls in love with a guard” romance subgenre) Basically, I think WWII was a real shitty period of history and is too fraught with moral minefields to be the setting for whatever Deeper Point an author is trying to make.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I first started hearing about All the Light We Cannot See and how great it was, I was wary for all of the above reasons, and I put off reading the book for a long time. But then I finally decided to look it up, and see what everyone was talking about.
Doerr’s first good move was narrowing the scope of his book, and focusing on a small group of people – All the Light We Cannot See is definitely character-driven, not plot-driven. We have Marie-Laure, who develops blindness at a young age; and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Then we have Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany who’s recruited at a young age by the Nazi party for his mechanical and mathematical talents; and Volkheimer, a Nazi official hunting a rare gemstone held in the museum where Marie-Laure’s father works.
The structure of the book is great, starting a few years into the German occupation of France, in the town of St. Malo right after the Allies have bombed it – and Marie-Laure, Werner, and Volkheimer are all in different parts of the city, each on their own separate mission. Then Doerr takes us back, giving us the backstories of each main character and working towards the moment when all of their paths will cross in the bombed-out city.
Doerr still falls into a few of the traps that authors writing in the WWII genre tend to fall into – the bad people are very bad, the good people are very good, and sometimes Marie-Laure’s blindness strays a little too close to “It’s a metaphor for society’s blindness territory. But All the Light We Cannot See sneaks up on you. For most of the book, you’re enjoying a detailed, well-written, but ultimately run-of-the-mill WWII historical fiction. But then, around the time the separate characters are drawing closer to each other and the tension is ramping up, it becomes impossible to tear yourself away, and suddenly you’re submerged in the beauty and the tragedy of these characters and their stories. I’m still not a fan of WWII fiction, but this book is a good argument in its favor....more
My main problem with this book was that I went into it thinking it was going to be another kind of story. I was hoping for something more along the liMy main problem with this book was that I went into it thinking it was going to be another kind of story. I was hoping for something more along the lines of The Haunting of Hill House, where you start out with that atmospheric creepiness and weird events that you can kind of rationalize, and then the tension slowly amps up until you realize that something is very, very wrong with the house. The Little Stranger has a lot of the first part, but too little of the second.
My other problem is that the only other Sarah Waters book I’ve read is Fingersmith, which features approximately a thousand plot twists. So as I read The Little Stranger, I keep waiting breathlessly for The Twist, only to be deeply let down. It’s definitely suspenseful, and Waters keeps you guessing until the end about the exact nature of what’s going on at Hundreds Hall, but if you go into this expecting the kind of twists and revelations we got in Fingersmith, you’re going to be disappointed.
I know that this book fails as a haunted house story because the most upsetting part, for me, didn’t involve haunting-related events at all. It was the part where (no spoilers) a dog has to be put down, and I actually had to skip ahead in the audiobook because I didn’t want to cry on the train. It’s well-written and definitely brings out the emotions, but it has nothing to do with the ghosts that might or might not be wandering around Hundreds Hall. (To be fair, this is probably more of a Me Problem. This is the kind of psycho I am: I can listen to a scene where a dog literally(view spoiler)[ rips a child’s face off(hide spoiler)] and I’m still like NOBODY BETTER HURT THAT DOG)
If you like very, very, VERY subtle ghost stories (so subtle, in fact, that you can convincingly argue that this is a ghost story without a ghost), then The Little Stranger is for you. ...more
Bless my library and its sporadically reliable audiobook collection. I might be in the third month of waiting for my turn to download The Glass CastleBless my library and its sporadically reliable audiobook collection. I might be in the third month of waiting for my turn to download The Glass Castle, but at least I can always count on there being at least one Agatha Christie mystery to tide me over while I wait.
I chose Peril at End House because its premise sounded the most promising: while on vacation on the coast of England, Hercule Poirot meets Magdala “Nick” Buckly, an heiress who’s had a handful of miraculous and suspicious brushes with death. Poirot suspects that someone is trying to kill Nick, and agrees to take her case. Along for the ride is the closest thing to a Watson Poirot will ever have (Poirot’s ridiculous ego would never allow him to fully share cases and credit the way Sherlock does with Watson), Hastings. Having read a few mysteries like this one, where Poirot has a sort-of assistant on the case, I think I prefer them over the solo Poirot investigations. Agatha Christie sometimes falls into the bad mystery novel trap of having her detective withhold information from other characters (and, therefore, the reader) in order to draw out the suspense for a few more chapters. Poirot doesn’t like to explain his thought process during an investigation, preferring to do the usual theatrical Accusations in the Parlor routine at the end of the book, so it’s helpful that he has Hastings following him around and occasionally asking clarifying questions about his process. I like mystery stories where the reader can feel like they’re solving the case alongside the detective, and even though Poirot does save some big bombshells for the final reveal, there’s at least a little transparency here.
That being said, the mystery definitely isn’t as satisfying as some of Christie’s greatest hits. There’s a subplot involving an Australian couple renting a house on Nick’s land, and it honestly felt more like padding than anything else. (Also Christie does a very clumsy and very un-Christie-like thing early in the novel where she has Poirot remark that, hmm, that couple sure seems suspicious. So then I was suspicious of them for the rest of the book, and it turned out that (view spoiler)[yes, they were indeed Up To Something the whole time, which I never would have noticed if Christie hadn’t drawn my attention to it in the first place (hide spoiler)]).
Also there’s a cocaine subplot, because no story of rich bored Bright Young Things would be complete without some cocaine floating around. The subplot doesn’t amount to much, which was frustrating for me – like, jeez Agatha, if you’re gonna do a cocaine smuggling subplot, do a cocaine smuggling subplot. Go big or go home.
Basically, everything in this book was half-assed. There’s cocaine, abusive husbands, con artists, sketchy servants, poisonings – and none of these plots really get the attention they deserve. The whole book, ultimately, felt very rushed, like Christie was in a hurry to just get to the end and cash her check. Also, Poirot strays just a little too far into Pompous Asshole territory in this one, and I did not care for that.
It’s been a while since I read a Hercule Poirot mystery (I re-read Murder on the Orient Express recently, but that was mainly to get the taste of that god-awful Kenneth Brannaugh version out of my memory), and I knew, going into this, that I’d always preferred Poirot over Miss Marple. But, having finished Peril at End House, I’m having a hard time remembering why. Poirot is pretty downright insufferable in this one, and also shows an unpleasantly cruel streak that I don’t remember seeing before.
Hastings mentions to another character at one point that actually, Poirot has had plenty of failed case, including one involving a box of chocolates, and he tells the other character that Poirot has told him that if his ego ever gets too big, all Hastings has to do is say “chocolate box” and Poirot will remember to be humble. So honestly, it’s a wonder that Hastings isn’t shouting CHOCOLATE BOX at Poirot every other page, because his ego is out of control in this one. Like, at one point he decides that Nick, who has survived multiple attempts on her life, is perfectly safe thanks to the precautions that Poirot has set up, and he and Hastings are free to hop off to London for a few days to take a break. So of course while they’re gone, someone tries to poison Nick, and Poirot is like, “Oh la la, Hastings, why did I leave? Why did I leave?” like someone else convinced him to do it. Chocolate box, Hercule.
And in possibly his worst moment in any Christie book I’ve read so far, Poirot allows the culprit (view spoiler)[to commit suicide after being caught. So the person gets caught and leaves the room (they killed somebody but whatevs, nobody needs to like restrain them or call the police or anything, this is England and we don’t make a fuss about murder, dammit) and then another character is like, my god! They have enough cocaine with them to overdose! And Poirot basically shrugs and does nothing to stop it. (hide spoiler)]
All I could think about was the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, when the criminal that Peter Wimsey caught is scheduled to be hanged. The culprit did it, stood trial, and is being appropriately punished, but Peter is still so upset by the role he played in sending this person to their death that he has to be consoled by his wife. I loved that scene, because it brought up an element of detective fiction that often gets glossed over – at the end of the day, a detective’s job is to send someone to jail, and sometimes to their execution. This takes an emotional toll on the detective, as it should.
Anyway, Hercule is like the polar opposite of that – solving mysteries has no human element whatsoever to him; they’re purely logic puzzles that he does first and foremost for his own amusement. And I don’t find that nearly as charming as I used to....more
“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board ga“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game with Timby. I’ll initiate sex with Joe. Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. Today I won’t swear. I won’t talk about money. Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.”
Today Will be Different is, I think, an improvement on Maria Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. We have to same type of lead character – a Portland housewife with some form of anxiety/manic-depressive/bipolar disorder who is doing the best she can in strange and stressful circumstances. But where Bernadette started to tear at the seams thanks to its unsustainable format of “everything in the book is a letter or email written by one of the characters”, Today Will Be Different has a much more straightforward narration – in this one, we’re simply following the title character through one very strange, very stressful day in her life.
The action starts when Eleanor visits her husband’s office and learns two things: first, her husband has not been to work in over a week; and the office staff thinks that she’s already aware of this. From then on, Eleanor has one mission: find her husband, and find out what he’s been doing while she assumed he was at work. Along the way she gets into what I’ll refer to as sidequests, involving her son, their dog, Eleanor’s poetry teacher, and a former friend.
The action clips along at a quick and engaging pace, and Eleanor’s particular brand of manic, forced cheeriness despite an impending breakdown makes her a delightful and very relatable narrator. (Bonus points to the audiobook reader, who delivers Eleanor’s narration in a cadence that reminded me a lot of Maria Bamford’s standup. Less awesome is the way she voices Eleanor’s son, giving the kid an adnoid-stuffed whine of a voice that made me wonder why Eleanor doesn’t just scream at him to shut up every time he bleats out another petulant MOOOOOOOMMMMMM.)
The only reason this book loses points is, I freely admit, a stupid and petty reason. But I maintain that it’s justified. Semi spoilers (in that they describe what happens at the end of the book but won’t ruin the central mystery of the story) to follow:
(view spoiler)[ So for most of Eleanor’s trek across the city, she’s accompanied by her son and their dog. Towards the end, as the action is ramping up and Eleanor is becoming more frantic in her search, she has to duck into a Home Depot, and leaves the dog tied up outside. She completes her errand, leaves the store, and the story continues. Here’s the problem: she never collects the dog.
At first, as the story just kept going with no mention of the dog, I wondered if it had been an honest mistake. Had Semple’s narration just skipped the bit where Eleanor gets the dog outside the store, I wondered? Is that something an editor let slip, or did Semple just assume that we’d understand that Eleanor has the dog and it doesn’t need to be spelled out? But the story barreled on, and I realized: yep, that dog is definitely still tied up outside Home Depot, and I think Maria Semple was counting on me being so wrapped up in the story that I wouldn’t remember the dog until the moment the characters realize that he’d been forgotten at the store.
LOL, Semple, you underestimate me and my weird infantile relationship with animals in fiction. I always notice the dog, and am hyper-attuned to any danger the dog might be in. So for the last couple chapters of the book, when I should have been paying attention to the story and its conclusion, I was unable to focus. I distinctly remember listening to the audiobook in my car and not even being able to process the narration because I was shouting out loud like a lunatic YOU FORGOT THE DOG SOMEBODY GO BACK AND GET THE GODDAMN DOG. (Don’t worry, they do eventually remember the dog, and when they go back to the store, he’s sitting right where they left him. Because he’s a good boy. But it’s literally the last line in the book and was NOT WORTH all the stress it put me through.) (hide spoiler)]
Anyway, my point is that the entire ending of the book was completely ruined by what I thought was an accidentally dropped plot point, and it was such a distraction that I can’t really tell you exactly what happens at the end of Today Will Be Different. Four stars for the main story, one star for that terribly-executed conclusion. ...more
Is it an endorsement to say that this is the most unfunny comedy memoir I’ve ever read? In my (otherwise glowing) review for Amy Poehler’s Yes Please,Is it an endorsement to say that this is the most unfunny comedy memoir I’ve ever read? In my (otherwise glowing) review for Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, I wrote about how the book is not really about comedy, in that Poehler never spent much time getting into the nitty-gritty of how she plans her characters, and all the work that goes into each one. This seems to be a common theme in the comedy memoirs I’ve read so far – everyone seems reluctant to discuss the work that goes into being funny, or to even acknowledge that being funny takes effort. It’s fine for comedians to spend hefty amounts of space in their memoirs talking about how hard they worked to become successful – all the years of working crappy clubs, having no money, and otherwise working long, thankless hours to eventually get where they are – but when it comes to discussing how they planned and reworked a set, there seems to be a reluctance to get into too much technical detail. Being a professional comedian is kind of like being a professional magician: it’s considered against the rules to show how the tricks are really done.
And maybe another reason this isn’t done – talking about the work that goes into being funny is, inherently, not funny at all. So it’s actually very refreshing to read Born Standing Up, a deeply impersonal, deeply straight-faced comedy memoir that shows us exactly how much work and conscious effort went into creating the persona of “Steve Martin, comedian.” It’s like no other memoir I’ve ever read.
At first, Martin adheres to the established memoir formula by taking us through his childhood. But the purpose of this is mainly to show how he got an early start as a performer by working as a salesman at Disney World, and also that he wasn’t originally interested in comedy and wanted instead to be a magician. He gives us some stories of an unhappy home life, and then reveals his real reasons for briefly getting so personal: after telling a story of how his father would fly into unexpected, violent rages, Martin writes (quote will not be exact, as I listened to this as an audiobook), “I’ve heard it said that a chaotic childhood prepares one for a life in comedy. I tell you this story about my father so you know that I am very qualified to be a comedian.”
Read aloud by Martin in his soft-spoken, matter-of-face voice, the line is a verbal gut-punch.
That’s about as close as we get to learning anything about Martin’s personal life until the very end, when he talks about his mother’s death. Other than that, Born Standing Up is entirely about the work.
Everything that Martin writes about his standup career was completely new to me, since I only know him from his movies (pretty sure my first exposure to Steve Martin was when he played the waiter in The Muppet Movie, and even back then I could recognize something genius about him). So it was fascinating to me to read about the progression from magician to comedian – back when Martin was starting out, there weren’t places solely for performing comedy acts, so he was doing his magic act alongside comedians and musicians, allowing him to incorporate comedy into his routine, and eventually become a comedian who did magic, instead of the other way around. And he thoroughly details how we went about developing his standup persona, eventually settling on playing a guy who is totally unfunny but is convinced that he’s killing it, and how he would push to see how long he could keep a bit going until the audience was laughing but didn’t even know what was funny.
It’s very interesting (and almost intimate) how Martin isn’t afraid to show how he thoughtfully and deliberately worked at his comedy, rather than letting us believe that being funny is effortless. And good for him, because that’s a dangerous myth that’s in dire need of dispelling. (I have a friend who occasionally does open-mic nights at comedy clubs, and having seen a few of those shows, let me tell you: the number of mediocre white boys who think they can get a little tipsy and then go up onstage and just, like, wing it, is too damn many.) One of the best details is when he tells us how he reworked his routine of observational comedy to make himself the focus of the stories – instead of “a guy walks into a bar” it became “I walked into a bar.” Martin says he did this because “I didn’t want audiences to think other people were crazy. I wanted them to think I was crazy.”
It’s a short book – Martin admits that he’s a very private person, so of course he’s not going to bare everything to us. But the little bit of Martin’s psyche that he’s allowed us to look at is fascinating and honest, and reveals Steve Martin as a deeply thoughtful, hardworking, and brilliant artist. (Shopgirl still sucks, but nobody’s perfect.) ...more
"Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?"
I’ve had a long-term project going for about five years now, where I try to hunt down and re"Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?"
I’ve had a long-term project going for about five years now, where I try to hunt down and read all the YA adventure series that I was supposed to read when I was in middle school (instead, I spent those years re-reading the Prydain series, and also every single one of those Royal Diaries books – no regrets!). Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix, checks off another box on that list, although I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t even aware of these books until very recently. But I’m sure that they would have been right up thirteen-year-old Madeline’s alley – I can’t speak for the rest of the series, but Sabriel is sort of like a blend of Tamora Pierce and Lloyd Alexander, with a heavy dash of Goth elements. In short, a fun, coming-of-age adventure, featuring zombies!
The world of Sabriel reminded me a little of George RR Martin’s Westeros, because we have a country (here called Ancelstierre) that’s kept separate from the Old Kingdom – a land of magic and danger. Sabriel spent the first few years of her life in the Old Kingdom with her father, a necromancer known as “the Abhorsen”, but has lived in Ancelstierre for her entire adolescence. When Sabriel is eighteen, she receives a distress message from her father. He’s trapped somewhere in Death, and Sabriel has to use the skills she learned from him to travel back to the Old Kingdom and rescue him. Along for the ride are a cat that’s not a cat, and a man who was trapped as a wooden statue for two hundred years. Oh, and evil zombies who serve an undead demon are also tracking Sabriel.
As you can probably guess from the above description, there’s a lot of action and creepy elements in this book, as well as magic, sassy sidekicks, ghosts, and (my favorite) totally frank depictions of sexuality aimed at preteen audiences! (At one point, Sabriel considers all the implications of pursuing a sexual relationship with another character, and her mental list of Things to Deal With includes contraception! Hooray for you, Garth Nix!) Speaking of fantastic moments, I knew that Sabriel and I would get along as soon as Nix’s narration shared this tidbit with the readers: when Sabriel got her first period, she used her necromancer abilities to summon her mother’s ghost for advice. Which, frankly, why wouldn’t you?
Even though this is part of a multiple-book series, Sabriel doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, and it can easily be read as a standalone novel. However, if you’re like me, you’re going to want to continue with the series, if only to find out how Sabriel continues to explore her role as a necromancer, and what other adventures Nix has planned for his heroine.
(one more note: I listened to the audiobook version of this novel, which had two distinct advantages: first, I learned that Sabriel does not rhyme with “Gabriel”, like I assumed, but is pronounced “Sah-briel.” And second, the audiobook I found is narrated by Tim Curry. He’s not the best candidate for voicing an eighteen-year-old girl’s dialogue, but I didn’t even mind because his villain voices are on point. Voice like buttah, I’m telling you. ...more
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