Brogan’s Review: Curiosity by Joan Thomas and Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

My sister Brogan, who guest reviews on this blog on a semi-regular basis, sent me a batch of her reviews recently. Here’s the first of them...

I first heard about Mary Anning by reading a (nonfiction) children’s book with my daughter called Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon by Jeannine Atkins. Mary was a young girl in early 19th-century England who dug for fossils and sold them. She discovered a dinosaur before anyone knew what such a thing was—in fact before the word “dinosaur” was coined—and spent the better part of a year at the age of 12 uncovering an entire skeleton. She never married, and she continued to make a living by digging for fossils in her native Lyme Regis.

When I saw Curiosity by Joan Thomas on the library

shelf one day, I was immediately drawn to an adult version of the story, even though the subtitle, “a love story,” perplexed me somewhat, because Mary never married (not that love equals marriage!) and the Jeannine Atkins book suggested a quirky, possibly lonely character in Mary. Well, whatever the case, I definitely wanted to read more about this eccentric woman who was unusual for her time and place.

Before I had a chance to read Curiosity, I also came across Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. Well, then I was doubly curious, to think that 2010 brought forth two books about Mary Anning! Chevalier’s take is a little different: she offers the story of an uncommon friendship between two women of vastly different backgrounds and classes: Mary Anning, who came from a family struggling to keep clothed, fed and sheltered, and Elizabeth Philpot, who, though on the downturn of a moneyed family, needed neither to work nor to marry to live comfortably. I was just as eager to read Remarkable Creatures, since women’s friendships are an even stronger draw for me than love stories.

I started with Curiosity, which didn’t draw me in right from the start, as I found it particularly cerebral and hard to follow. But after the first hump I was really caught up in the story, its characters and its detail. I can only describe it as elegant. Joan Thomas plumbs the depths of 19th-century English classism and sexism in this novel, and renders complex characters with conflicting motivations. Here’s an early passage in Curiosity to give you an idea of the language and richness of description that Thomas achieves:

Mary sat and watched her father as he took up the second drawer and began to fit it together. He was working from the light of the window, which showed the sky in three rows of its panes, and then the sea. In the soft sawdust on the floorboards, she could see his footprints like the tracks of animals on the shore. This was a collecting cupboard he was making, with shallow drawers for the curiosities. For the rich, who could afford to hoard what the Annings must sell. It was a strange passion with the high-born, filling their drawing rooms with thunderbolts and snakestones, although they could buy all the china figurines they chose. Richard was lining up the dovetails, bracing the drawer on the workbench. He needed a helper. But he’d apprenticed [Mary’s brother] Joseph to Armstrong the upholsterer on Dorcas Lane. (Curiosity, p. 13)

Remarkable Creatures is much more accessible—there was never a point in the text when I wasn’t sure if I understood what was actually happening—but it also had a tendency towards cliché. Chevalier, it seems, never has a character hold anything back. They speak out, they speak up, they make much drama, but ultimately this is neither very believable, nor in fact very interesting. Mary is constantly in need of rescue in various forms (and always from the more-than-obliging Miss Philpot).

Chevalier misses the boat completely as far as class analysis goes and almost has her own brand of classism towards the Annings: I was irritated that Mary’s father is depicted as a carpenter of poor workmanship, when, really, how long would you last as a craftsperson in a small town if your work was of poor quality? Was it just too hard for Chevalier to imagine that economic structures of the time, and not personal failure, were to blame for the Annings’ poverty? And then when Mary sells her first big find, Miss Philpot comes and instructs Mary’s mother and older brother to invest the money in an apprenticeship for him for a trade—as though only an educated, higher-class woman would have the forethought for such decision-making—and yet the likelihood of someone of a higher class speaking of such private matters with a family seemed quite low to me.

When Lord Henley paid us £23 for the whole crocodile, I wanted lots of things. I wanted to buy so many sacks of potatoes they’d reach the ceiling if you stacked them. I wanted to buy lengths of wool and have new dresses made for Mam and me. I wanted to eat a whole dough cake every day and burn so much coal the coalman would have to come every week to refill the coal bin. That was what I wanted. I thought my family wanted those things too.

One day Miss Elizabeth come to see Mam after the deal had been done with Lord Henley and sat with her and Joe at the kitchen table. She didn’t talk of wool or coal or dough cakes, but of jobs. “I think it will benefit the family most if Joseph is apprenticed,” she said. “Now you have the money to pay the apprentice fee, you should do so. Whatever he chooses will be a steadier income than selling fossils.” (Remarkable Creatures, pp. 111-112.)

It was a strange experience to read two books with the same characters, not just Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot but a whole cast of characters in the town (with some exceptions) as well as the men who come from London to study the fossils. It’s a rare event to have two books cover so much of the same territory—I doubt both these books would have been published had they not come out nearly simultaneously, for whoever wrote the second book would surely have been accused of copying the first. (I do wonder whether Joan Thomas and Tracy Chevalier ever crossed paths in London or Lyme Regis while doing their research… that seems like a story in itself!)

I read Curiosity first, so it did feel to me like Joan Thomas raised the bar, and then Tracy Chevalier—for all that she may be the better known of the two writers—just didn’t hold a candle to Thomas’s achievement. I was interested, though, in the similarities and differences between each rendition. For example, the love story seemed so truncated in Joan Thomas’s book—were 19th-century men really so totally lacking in sexual imagination? However, when it was told in such a similar fashion in Tracy Chevalier’s book—though she chose a different character as the romantic interest—I felt more forgiving of Joan Thomas’s text. But perhaps it should just make me further question whether it’s 19th-century men who lacked imagination or rather 21st-century women writers when imagining 19th-century sex! The bigger question, of course, is about how sex is represented in literature and in our lives as women, which I can’t explain in more detail here without spoilers, but which I think deserves further exploration.

I would highly recommend Curiosity, even though I know it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, as it is quite literary and brooding; and I would not recommend Remarkable Creatures. If you’re into children’s books or have a child to read to (ages 7 to 10), Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon by Jeannine Atkins is a beautiful illustrated book and introduces several interesting topics for conversation.

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Other reviews of Curiosity:

Books Under Skin • Curled Up with a Good Book and a Cup of Tea • Literary Treats • Reading the Past • The Overdecorated Bookcase

Other reviews of Remarkable Creatures:

Age 30 + . . . A Lifetime of Books • Constance Reader • Fyrefly’s Book Blog • Regular Ruminations • She Reads Novels • The Literary Omnivore • Whispering Gums

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Review: The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher

Opening lines of the book:

“The year before he joined the Reclamation, when he was still seventeen, my brother Will set a new high score at the YouToo! booth at the Gaming Center.”

Why I read it:

I’m curious about dystopian fiction and this particular future sounds all too plausible. Plus I scored a signed copy of this book at BEA last year.

What it’s about:

In a future where water is incredibly scarce, fifteen-year-old Vera and her older brother Will befriend the mysterious Kai, the son of a driller. When Kai disappears under suspicious circumstances, the siblings set off to rescue him.

What I thought:

I found the beginning of The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher quite slow, and it didn’t help that Kai rubbed me the wrong way from the start: when Vera first sees him, he spills the last remaining drops of a glass of water into the dust. In a world where water is so scarce that men will kill for it, this gesture seems both foolhardy and arrogant. The pace of the book picked up when Vera and Will went looking for Kai, but unfortunately, the story didn’t have enough tension for me. Vera and Will get themselves into some serious situations, but I never felt like they were in any real danger, which diminished my enjoyment of this book. Stracher also makes the mistake of summarizing some of the action (via Vera, who is the book’s narrator), rather than showing us what is going on.

Favourite quotes:

“When he was a boy, there were still green fields and blue lakes. Kids played sports outside, like baseball and football, that existed now only on the screens. You could lie in a tub filled with warm water for no reason except to relax. It seemed foolish and wasteful and wonderful—to live as if the sky were endless and time itself had no measure.” (p. 31)

“A new beginning, I thought. Without hunger, thirst, or war. A river could be like a time machine: Step into the same place and it was already changed. But I wondered if there could ever be enough water to start again.” (p. 33)
 
Final thoughts:

Although the world Stracher creates is all too believable, the story he tells unfortunately is not. While the book was interesting enough to keep me reading (to find out what was going to happen), I found the ending simplistic and disappointing. I can’t recommend this book.

Thank you to Sourcebooks for providing me with this book to review.
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Other reviews:

365 Days of Reading • At Home with Books • Book Chatter • Books and Literature for Teens • Daemon’s books• Linus’s Blanket • Luxury Reading • novel novice • Presenting Lenore • Reading Addict • Reading Nook • Reading with Tequila • Rhapsody in Books Weblog • Squeaky Books • thebookbind • The Future Fire • The Literary Life of the Well-Read Wife

Interview with the author: Presenting Lenore
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Review: Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Opening lines of the book:

“He clutches the worn slip of paper in his hand, trying to compare the letters written there to the red sign hanging on the door in front of him. Looking back and forth from the paper to the door several times, he is careful not to make a mistake.”

Why I read it:

It was selected by my book club and I was keen to read it because I had heard good things about it.

What it’s about:

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda is the story of Kavita, an Indian woman who gives up her baby for adoption to save the child’s life; Somer, the white American woman who adopts the baby; and Asha, their daughter. The novel is mainly told from the points of view of these three characters, but several chapters also focus on the two Indian husbands as well as Somer’s mother-in-law.

What didn’t work:

I’m starting with what didn’t work for me because I had a hard time with this book—I probably would have abandoned it had it not been a book club read. I found the characters flat and the plot predictable; Gowda also spends too much time “telling” and not enough “showing,” so I rarely felt like I could sink into the story and forget I was reading.

Several passages actually made me angry, such as this one: “By the time she reaches the age of thirty-two, she will no longer have the ability to bear children, the one thing that defines her as a woman” (p. 32). This type of thinking pervades the sections about Somer and at no point is it presented as problematic.

Worse still was this passage: “Being a woman in India is an altogether different experience. You can’t always see the power women hold, but it is there, in the firm grasp of the matriarchs who still rule most families” (p. 59). I hate this type of author intrusion in a work of fiction—Gowda is clearly addressing the Western reader directly here—but this sweeping generalization made my blood boil since it’s so obviously untrue. Some women in India may “rule” their families, but given that this novel addresses the issue of female infanticide, this is a particularly outrageous claim to make.

What worked:

I was glad in the end that I got to discuss this novel with my book club because otherwise I might not have had much of anything positive to say about it. However, our discussion made me realize that Gowda handles the evolution of Kavita’s husband well: at the beginning of the story he is presented as a despicable character, but by the end I felt compassion for him despite some of the terrible choices he had made.
 
Final thoughts:

Despite being moved by the ending of this book, I can’t recommend it. However, I am very much in the minority on this one!
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Recommended reviews:

alive on the shelves • Lindy Reads and Reviews

Other reviews:

A Bookworm’s World • A Mother’s Tonic • A Writer’s Pen • Books in the City • Caribousmom • In the Next Room • Knitting and Sundries • Library of Clean Reads • Life in the Thumb • Mommy’s Reading • Mrs O’Dell Reads • Nose in a Book • Rundpinne • S. Krishna’s Books • The Book Chick • Unputdownables • Write Meg
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Review: Hidden Wives by Claire Avery

Hidden Wives by Claire Avery is the story of half-sisters Sara and Rachel, who are members of the Blood of the Lamb polygamous community. At 15, both are of an age to be married: Sara has been promised to her uncle (as his fifth wife), while the prophet is still praying about the fate of beautiful Rachel.

One of the joys of reading is immersing yourself in a book to the point where you forget you’re reading. Hidden Wives started off promisingly, hooking me with the following sentences:

“For as long as Sara could remember, she jolted awake every morning, startled to be alive. Whenever her father looked at her, she imagined him calculating the width of her neck and the degree of pressure he would have to exert in order to snap it.” (p. 11)

Unfortunately, almost immediately, Avery’s writing style tripped me up, so I felt I couldn’t get past the words into Sara and Rachel’s world. Over and over, the odd imagery took me out of the story (“It was a big, toothy grin that split his cheeks in two like a cracked egg” [pp. 11-12]; “Her arms would drip over the ends of her chair like wet diapers . . .” [p. 114]; “His teeth were a gallery of grays and yellows . . . splayed outward like badly hung paintings” [pp. 130-131]). I read the first third of the book with a notebook nearby, jotting down all the strange turns of phrases and incorrectly used words. The middle of the book picked up, and I found myself more drawn into the story, wanting to know what would happen to the sisters; however, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the book’s message—that polygamy hurts women and children, and that something should be done about it—trumped the storytelling. The clearest example of this is the subplot involving Sara’s best friend, Ruth, who appears at one point in the novel so Sara (and the reader) can learn something about the dangers of close-kin marriages; once the point has been made, Ruth promptly disappears as a character in the book. I also unfortunately anticipated many of the plot twists (several were foreshadowed only moments before they happened), and the ending struck me as wishful thinking rather than a likely outcome to this story.

There is no question that it’s shocking that the type of human rights abuses detailed in this book are tolerated in the name of religious freedom in North America today. However, if you want to learn more about polygamy, I would recommend that you read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer, The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff (read my review) or The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams instead.

I am very much in the minority in not liking this book; every single one of the reviews mentioned below is positive!

Thank you to Forge Books for sending me this book to review.
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Hidden Wives was on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in July. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Rundpinne • Luxury Reading • Novel Whore • Simply Stacie • Trisha’s Book Blog • Thoughts from an Evil Overlord • Bibliofreak • Book Club Classics • Crazy for Books • S. Krishna’s Books • It’s All about Books • All about {n} • Life in the Thumb • Scraps of Life • Stiletto Storytime • Joyfully Retired

Other reviews:

Amy’s Book Obsession • Life Is Short. Read Fast. • Lu’s Raves and Rants • Queen of Happy Endings • Reading on a Rainy Day

Interview with the authors, Michelle Poche and Mari Hilburn (who write under the pen name Claire Avery): Life Is Short. Read Fast.
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Review: Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir by Carlene Bauer

Not That Kind of Girl by Carlene Bauer is a memoir of a young woman raised in evangelical churches who decides in high school that she wants to grow up to be a writer and live in New York. Torn between her ambition and her love of God, she struggles to stay true to herself and figure out what she really believes.

I wanted to love this book—and did love parts of it—but mostly I found it hard-going, like reading Sylvia Plath’s journals or Virginia Woolf’s novels. I generally enjoy introspective writing, but I found Bauer maddeningly cryptic at times—more than once I had to reread a passage to try to understand what was actually happening (and rereading didn’t always help). Sometimes, the images Bauer paints are luminous and evocative, as when she describes the boys her sister’s friends dated: “They seemed to me like khaki-clad redwoods with girls curled up like ferns, or foxes, against their sturdy bark. There might be whole forests of them somewhere” (p. 52). However, many of her references sailed over my head (and made me feel woefully unread). For example, she says of a boy she had a crush on: “In the end [he] might be the type who’d leave girls like me up in a barn loft with a suitcase of unwanted Bibles and a bum leg with no way to get down” (p. 57). This was clearly a reference to something, but I had no idea what. (I looked it up—it appears she’s referring to a Flannery O’Connor story, “Good Country People.”) I also found that most of her friends seemed fairly interchangeable, and I had trouble keeping the men straight. (Who was Tom? Did I forget or does she not bother to tell us?) At one point she spends seven pages working up to the moment when she meets a particular man at a party, only to run through their entire relationship in less than two pages. It ends with him saying he will woo her until she marries him; by the next paragraph, he has met someone else who wants to get married immediately. I was left feeling like I was missing something. I was frustrated too that Bauer spent so long talking about and thinking about the fact that she didn’t drink and was a virgin, and then suddenly she’s drinking and having sex, and what made the difference? Her loss of faith, in the end, is nearly as inexplicable to me.

On the other hand, there are passages in Not That Kind of Girl that shine: her crank against normal girls (“To describe someone as a normal girl was our lowest blow” [p. 53]); her identification with Sylvia Plath; the moment when her story with Caroline ends; the revelation she has in her cubicle when God speaks to her through the words of Iris Murdoch. One of my favourite passages is when she describes her childhood experience of libraries (while reflecting on the loneliness she currently feels at not being able to share her love of books with the man she cares about):

“I’d kneel on the carpet to look through the books on bottom shelves, creeping around the aisles, a calm growing inside me as the pile of books on the floor grew taller—a calm like that of church, but better than church, because here I was free to roam and circle back among possibilities, to choose and reject as I like. . . . And then coming out in the sun to my mother in the car, keeping all that I’d thought to myself— . . . was it silly to visit the juvenile section to make sure the books I’d checked out years ago were still there, taking them down off the shelves to feel the grain of the mid-century paper, run my fingers over the grooves of the ink-and-pen illustrations, and sniff them the way you’d sniff a baby’s head when I thought no one was looking? And then back to our house, which had only one bookshelf, filled with study guides to the Bible and the unread biographies I’d given my parents, and up to my bedroom to splay myself out under some author’s spell until dinner.” (pp. 252-253)

That Bauer is a talented writer is undeniable, and I’m curious to see what she writes next, but I can’t say I recommend this book.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this book to review.
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Not That Kind of Girl is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in July and August. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Literate Housewife • Capricious Reader • The Book Nest • Drey’s Library • As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves • Knowing the Difference • Bookshipper • Life in Pink • Suko’s Notebook • A Fair Substitute for Heaven • A Certain Bent Appeal • my books. my life. • Sara’s Organized Chaos

Other reviews:

Book Reporter • Little Pink Book • Religion Dispatches • Scathing Reviews, Bitchy People (a positive review, despite the name of the blog)

Interview with the author: More Intelligent Life
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Brogan’s Review: A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy by Sara Bongiorni

I’m at Book Expo America in New York City all this week, but here’s another review from my sister Brogan:

I picked up A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy by Sara Bongiorni for possibly selfish reasons. Because I’m pregnant and thus purchasing (mostly second-hand, but nevertheless purchasing) an entire wardrobe for the very short-term usage of a few months’ wear, I have been feeling vaguely self-indulgent lately. So when I saw this book I thought it might provide me with specific reasons not to purchase Chinese goods—things I no doubt already know but wouldn’t mind being reminded of—ranging from China’s human rights record to worker safety abuses to the relative environmental costs of transporting goods halfway around the world for the use of North American consumers. I even thought Bongiorni might give me a few tips as to how best to do this, not referencing individual companies, but just providing a sort of feel-good sense of the advantages of buying from smaller shops, engaging local merchants in conversation and so on. However, I have to say my primary reaction to this book was disappointment, eventually bleeding into downright annoyance.

Bongiorni is a business journalist, who decides one Christmas holiday to boycott all Chinese goods for a year. She has two small children—aged one and four—and her partner Kevin is also brought on board. Strangely, although at various times she reaches for the reasons she is doing this, she never actually endorses any, other than it being “an experiment” “to see if it can be done,” along with some vague statements about globalization.

Because her boycott has no ideological roots, buying items made anywhere-but-China is deemed acceptable. It is not clear to me why she’s so excited about Cambodian pants or children’s trinkets made in Thailand—how different are the stories of those countries compared to the Chinese one in terms of worker exploitation and loss of local (American) jobs? In addition, she’s so scared of offending people by her boycott that she actively eliminates opportunities to talk about it to other people, thus defeating the point, ultimately, of a boycott, which is to effect change through widespread consumer reaction. And she’s constantly reassuring herself that when the year is over she can go back to buying whatever she wants, which again seems completely self-defeating.

Without enough of a reason for a boycott, Bongiorni struggles to stick with it, and it becomes difficult to sympathize with her long whines and self-pitying tirades about how she can’t find the presents her kids really want. On the other hand, for anyone not that sympathetic to such an idea in the first place, one wonders why they would even be interested in reading about such a silly exercise. Bongiorni tries to be funny but at the expense of any real depth, which ultimately makes her appear self-indulgent, even as she is attempting to do something decidedly un-self-indulgent, namely sacrifice convenience in an attempt to explore a non-mainstream approach to shopping. Because there is so little intention behind her boycott, the whole idea comes off as being about her.

Bongiorni does mention a couple of interesting things, like that items made in the USA (or other countries) often have Chinese component parts, and that in some cases the manufacturers can no longer get those component parts from anywhere else. She also makes interesting connections with people from a variety of demographic backgrounds who support the idea of boycotting Chinese goods.

However, what drove me right around the bend was her approach to parenting, which seemed to focus on buying her kids toys as her primary way of relating to them. She feels an incredible amount of guilt at not buying her son (the four-year-old) every Chinese-made trinket he desires, and bribes him—her words—with Danish-made Lego to assuage his tears when they come into conflict over it in the store. She actually discusses the question of whether she is causing him to “suffer” by not indulging his every plastic Chinese craving. In a world where children suffer so many real ills, it feels offensive to have this consumerist attitude broadcast with so little thought.

What seems particularly strange is that Bongiorno consistently confuses China-the-country with China-the-people and China-the-economic-superpower. She traces an oral history of a Chinese ancestor in her family, and then claims she feels like she’s disowning this part of herself by boycotting Chinese-made items. She also says “the idea of swearing off Chinese products forever feels like holding a perpetual grudge against 1.3 billion people” (p. 215)—which is clearly a misunderstanding of the purposes and dynamics of a boycott.

It’s possible that I’m humourless—but I really don’t think so. In fact, I really wanted to like this book. I would even say that if Bongiorno had sat down and taken the time to write this book with heart and intellectual rigour, she could have written a good book. I had the distinct impression that she was more intelligent than she let herself appear, out of a sense of hesitation to be seen as too political or serious, which possibly explains my level of aggravation with this book. I’d say give this one a miss.
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Other reviews:

Devourer of Books • Duffbert’s Random Musings • Lost Laowai • Lotus Reads • Ruby Red Books • The Novel Word • Written in the Stars

Interview with the author: The Great American Apparel Diet
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On (Not Always) Finishing Mysteries (Two Reviews of Sorts)

Because I was sick the weekend before last, I didn’t feel up to blogging and so didn’t officially sign up for the Mystery Readathon (even though I really wanted to do it). However, I did unofficially participate, finishing one mystery and reading two thirds of another.

The first mystery I read was Too Many Questions (also published under the title Flynn) by Lesley Grant-Adamson. Unfortunately, this was one of those books that I mostly finished just to say I had: I was sick and couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed to pick out another book, plus I was hoping that a satisfying ending would make up for the somewhat lacklustre plot. The story revolves around two main mysteries. First, what happened to private investigator Laura Flynn’s client? Fashion designer Kate Mullery hired Laura to look into a possible business connection and then disappeared without paying her. Second, what happened to Laura’s father, who walked out on her family when she was four? Add to those the odd coincidence that both Laura and Kate were receiving threatening anonymous phone calls. My problems with the book were twofold:
(1) The ways the mysteries connected (or didn’t) seemed contrived and unconvincing, and (2) much of the plot revolved around real estate deals rather than emotional connections between people, so in the end I didn’t really care. I picked up the book because I’d enjoyed The Dangerous Edge by the same author. I recommend reading that one instead.

The second book I started was Until It’s Over by Nicci French and I was immediately engrossed in it. The story is about Astrid Bell, a bicycle courier who lives with six other people in a big house in a somewhat seedy part of London. Astrid is bad luck to the people around her: first she is one of the last people to see her neighbour alive before the woman is found bludgeoned to death, and then she shows up at a wealthy client’s house to pick up a package, only to find the woman murdered.

The set-up of this mystery reminded me of other great mysteries written by UK writers (A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine and The Likeness by Tana French both come to mind) who also mine the creepiness potential of having a group of youngish people who may or may not know each other very well living together in a big house.

[Warning: I reveal something about the structure of the this book in the next paragraph, which is plot-related.]

I don’t know why but it took me a long time to figure out that this was a psychopath / serial killer story. I’ve mentioned before (perhaps ad nauseam) that I don’t enjoy reading such books, but I’ve never explained why. Generally, a good mystery keeps me up half the night and may creep me out a bit but when I’m done reading it, I can close the book and leave that world behind. Unfortunately, psychopaths tend to follow me out of the book, and I get to thinking about the possibility of running into one of these people in real life. (After all, they supposedly make up 1% of the population.) I start to look at the people around me on the subway with suspicion. I feel nervous when walking home alone at night. Mysteries are supposed to be escapist, not to scare me for real. Having said that, when I do stumble into a book inhabited by a psychopath, I generally find it’s better to finish reading the book—that knowing what happens in the end (and in most mysteries, the killer is caught) helps me leave the story behind when I’m done. Until It’s Over has an unusual structure in that two thirds of the way in, the killer is apprehended. (Or is he?) I stopped reading at this point because I realized that part 2 of the book is written from the killer’s point of view. I’m tempted to read the rest—I have this irrational feeling that Astrid remains in danger as long as I don’t finish the book (and it is an engrossing read!). But do I want to delve into the mind of a psychopath? Will it be worth it just to know what happens in the end? I’m not sure.

Have you ever started a mystery and felt like you needed to finish it even though it was either not that interesting or scaring you? What would you do in my shoes?

To read other (less spoilerish) reviews of Until It’s Over, visit these blogs:
Euro Crime • Reading Matters

I bought Too Many Questions by Lesley Grant-Adamson. Thank you to Donna at BookBound for giving me Until It’s Over by Nicci French.

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve (a review)

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve is the story of newlywed Margaret, who follows her husband Patrick to Kenya shortly after their marriage. Once there, they meet a British couple, Arthur and Diana, who invite them to join a climbing expedition up Mount Kenya with another couple. The trip ends in tragedy, which causes Margaret to reevaluate her life and her marriage.

Last year, I read Testimony, Shreve’s previous novel, and was quite disappointed to find myself not enjoying it because I consider Shreve to be one of my favourite authors (read my review). Unfortunately, I felt the same way about this novel: the story failed to engage me. Although Margaret is a sympathetic character, I never connected with her. It seemed to me that Shreve kept her at arm’s length; I wanted to get into her head more. And the tragedy unfortunately struck me as a bit ridiculous—I felt impatient with the character who felt responsible for what happened, when it seemed clear to me that responsibility lay elsewhere (how’s that for not giving anything away?). Worse still, despite the liberal sprinkling of African words throughout the novel (so much so that I wished there was a glossary included in the book) and despite the fact that Shreve actually lived in Kenya for several years, the country never really came alive for me. Instead, the subplot involving Arthur and Diana’s servants felt predictable and forced. Overall, I wish I’d followed my own advice (which I mentioned in my review of Testimony): skip the latest Shreve book and read one of her earlier ones instead.

To read other reviews (many of them more favourable than mine), head over to these blogs:
A Novel Menagerie • Bibliophile by the Sea • Book Nook Club • Foreign Circus Library • Jo-Jo Loves to Read • Laura’s Reviews • Luxury Reading • Presenting Lenore • S. Krishna’s Books

Thank you to Hachette for sending me this book to review.

Chiggers by Hope Larson (a review)

Chiggers by Hope Larson is the story of Abby, who goes back to the same camp she’s been going to every summer, only to find everything is different this year. Her friend Rose is a cabin assistant and doesn’t have much time for her, and her other friends don’t like the new girl she’s been asked to show around. My main problem with this graphic novel was that, although I like Larson’s crisp drawing style, some of the characters looked so similar that I had trouble telling them apart (even on second reading). I also found that I didn’t “get” parts of the story. For example, it wasn’t clear to me why Abby’s friends disliked Shasta so much. (They say she’s annoying, but I didn’t really see why.) I also didn’t understand the significance of what happened at the very end of the story. I did enjoy the fact that the book included the rules of a card game played by the characters as well as instructions on how to make a friendship bracelet. I also thought the magic realism elements of the story were intriguing, but unfortunately not fully developed. I can’t recommend this one, although lots of other folks enjoyed it.

To read other reviews, check out these blogs:
Bookworm Readers • Comicsgirl • Comics Worth Reading • Eva’s Book Addiction • In the Tower • Maw Books • Miss Shortskirt • Parenthetical.net • Read about Comics • Things Mean a Lot • under the covers • Welcome to My Tweendom

You can also read interviews with the author:
Comic Book Resources • Newsarama

I read a library copy of this book.

Beautiful Lies and A Likeness in Stone: Thoughts on two books outside my comfort zone

I recently read two books that fall outside my usual comfort zone: Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger and A Likeness in Stone by Julia Wallis Martin. For different reasons, both books unfortunately didn’t work for me.

Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger is the story of Ridley Jones, who, after appearing on television for an act of heroism, receives a mysterious package that indicates she may not be who she thinks she is. I don’t usually read thrillers and unfortunately reading this one hasn’t changed my opinion that this genre isn’t for me. While the novel was fast-paced and intriguing enough to keep me reading until the end, there were a few plot points that really bugged me:

How is it possible that a relatively well-adjusted and seemingly normal person like Ridley doesn’t have a single friend in the world except her creepy ex-boyfriend and his strange mother?

Why would her parents, no matter what their issues, not tell her what they knew when it became obvious that by keeping her in the dark they were endangering her life?

I guess the bottom line for me was that I was unable to suspend my disbelief enough to really enjoy this novel. There were too many coincidences, too many things that didn’t make sense and I also found the main character whiny.

To read other reviews of this book, visit these blogs:
Book Chase • Confessions of a Bibliophile • Reading without Restraint • Ticket to Anywhere

Thank you to Donna at BookBound for giving me this book to read.

A Likeness in Stone by Julia Wallis Martin is a mystery, a genre I do read and love; however, as I’ve mentioned before, my taste in mysteries is fairly limited. I picked up this book because the author was recommended by Elizabeth George, one of my favourite mystery writers. (I found her recommendations on the Fantastic Fiction site.*) I completely ignored the fact that this novel was compared to those of Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters, two authors I carefully avoid as they don’t fit my rule of “no psychopaths or serial killers, no terror and no blow-by-blow descriptions of murder or its results.”

In the first chapter, divers find a corpse in a wardrobe in a submerged house—the dead woman turns out to be Helena Warner, an Oxford student who disappeared some 20 years before. This reopens a case that had remained unsolved despite the fact that the homicide detective in charge at the time was sure he knew who did it. There is no question that Martin writes well and if you enjoy Rendell’s or Walters’ mysteries, then you will undoubtedly enjoy this atmospheric (and creepy) novel as well. Despite the small cast of characters, the story kept me guessing until the very end and completely sucked me in—I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it. However, it was too creepy for me (it definitely broke the above-mentioned rule), so unfortunately I’ll be staying away from this author in the future too.

A Likeness in Stone was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1999.

*George actually recommends The Long Close Call, Wallis Martin’s third book, but I wanted to start with her first, which may have been my mistake.

The G[r]ift by Debra Ginsberg (a review)

Grift – n. A group of methods used for obtaining money falsely through the use of swindles, frauds, etc.

Gift – n. A special ability or capacity*

I love the premise of The Grift by Debra Ginsberg: Marina, a woman who has been working as a psychic for years (and a good one at that), suddenly becomes psychic for real, to the dismay of her clients. Ginsberg convincingly portrays Marina’s transformation from fake psychic to real one; in my opinion, this is the most interesting part of the book. Unfortunately, the secondary characters are too two-dimensional for my taste. For one thing, I had trouble believing so many of Marina’s clients would be nearly murderous with rage; it felt like a device used to confuse the reader rather than an organic part of the plot. I disliked the shifting points of view for the same reason—none of the other characters were developed enough to justify focusing on each of them in turn. Finally, the final confrontation was too outrageous to be believable. Ironically, it isn’t Marina’s newfound psychic ability that stretched my disbelief, but rather the rest of the story. In the end, I liked the idea of this book much better than its execution.

Other reviews by bloggers who enjoyed the book more than I did:
A Bookworm’s World • A Lovely Shore Breeze • BookBound • Books and Movies • Muse Books Reviews • Pop Culture Junkie • Presenting Lenore • Reader for Life

The Grift was also reviewed in The New York Times. (It was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2008.)

You can also read the first chapter of the book at The New York Times site.

Thank you to Random House for sending me this book to read and review.

*The definitions are from the beginning of the book.

Testimony by Anita Shreve (a review)

First off, I must say right away that Anita Shreve is one of my favourite authors. Although I have only read half of her 14 novels so far, the ones I had read before Testimony fall into two categories: those I loved, own and will probably reread at some point (The Pilot’s Wife, The Weight of Water, Fortune’s Rocks and The Last Time They Met) and those I enjoyed but probably wouldn’t read again and therefore don’t own (All He Ever Wanted and Light on Snow). Unfortunately, Testimony fits into a new and disappointing category of its own, as it is the first Shreve novel I haven’t enjoyed.

Testimony begins with a headmaster at a private school in Vermont viewing a videotape of sexual acts involving four students: three young men of 18 or 19 and a 14-year old girl. The story is told in a multiplicity of voices, from the students involved to their parents, teachers and various other members of the community. It felt like the first half of the book circled around and around the event, jumping from one character to the next as well as back and forth through time without actually getting any closer to the specifics of what had happened that fateful night or why. I found this part of the book hard to get into and sometimes confusing. None of the characters came across as very sympathetic, or rather the revolving narration kept me at arms’ length from all of them. About 150 pages in, I seriously contemplated abandoning the book. However, something shifted around that point. From then on, all the narratives seemed to zero in on the videotaped event in a much more linear fashion and a couple of the characters clearly emerged as sympathetic. My favourite passages are those written from Noelle’s point of view; her descriptions of her evolving relationship with Silas are tender and moving. The ending of the book was satisfying up to a point, but I was still left feeling a bit cold about the whole thing.

[MINOR SPOILER]
Besides the structure of the book, what disappointed me the most about this novel is that Shreve failed to explore the girl’s motivations or back story in any way. Instead, she is basically portrayed as the anonymous catalyst for the ruin of many other lives. It didn’t feel like her life—what little we knew of it—was changed very drastically by this otherwise momentous event.
[END OF MINOR SPOILER]

Overall, I felt very meh about this book. I highly recommend you pick up one of Shreve’s earlier novels instead.

I realize that in not liking this novel I am very much in the minority. It has been (almost) universally praised on book blogs. To read much more favourable reviews, visit the following sites:
At Home with Books • Bermudaonion’s Weblog • Bookfan • Booking Mama • Books and Cooks • Breaking the Spine • Caribousmom • Linus’s Blanket • Peeking Between the Pages • Reader for Life • Redlady’s Reading Room • Today’s Adventure

The only other review I could find that comes close to expressing my feelings about this novel was published in The Los Angeles Times. Be forewarned, however, that it contains spoilers.

Another less-than-favourable review (though for different reasons) can be found on Kim’s blog, I Smell Books.

Edited to add other less-than-favourable reviews:
Book Addiction • BooksPlease • Diary of an Eccentric • Feminist Review • Girls Just Reading

Thank you to Hachette for sending me this book to review.

The Richest Season by Maryann McFadden (a review)

The Richest Season by Maryann McFadden is the story of Joanne, a corporate wife who has moved over a dozen times in 25 years of marriage. When her husband gets promoted again and doesn’t even discuss it with her, she decides to leave him. The story is told from the alternating points of view of the three main characters: Joanne, her husband Paul and Grace, the woman Joanne eventually lives with.

Ironically, one of the first things that stood out for me early on in the novel is that Joanne and Grace don’t immediately take to each other. It seems to me that conflict between women is too rarely explored in fiction, so I found this refreshing and was interested to see where the author would go from there. Unfortunately, the conflict between Joanne and Grace is almost the only conflict that occurs in the novel (other than between Joanne and her husband, obviously). Although the story has potential, in the end everything comes too easily to Joanne and her family, which makes the novel far too predictable (not to mention unbelievable). Similarly, I found Paul’s flashes of insight early in the novel jarring, as they seemed too out of character. Here is a man who is used to getting what he wants and who has spent years ignoring his wife’s feelings, yet within a couple of weeks of her leaving, he comes to the realization that “He was little more than a rat ... working its way through an expensive, beautifully decorated maze” (p. 44). I had trouble believing he would be that self-aware that soon in the story.

Despite all this, this is a sweet story and there are a couple of touching scenes near the end of the book that I loved. If you are in the mood for something light and you don’t mind a predictable plot, this might be for you.

Other, more favourable reviews can be found here:
Feminist Review • Jenn’s Bookshelf • medieval bookworm • Smoky Mountain Family Historian

Reviews more in line with mine can be found here:
a lovely shore breeze • Feminist Review (yup, they reviewed this book twice!) • Reader for Life • Traci’s Book Bag

The News & Observer published an interesting article about this book and The Lace Reader (both of which were originally self-published).

Thank you to Hyperion Books for sending me this book to review.

The Nettle Spinner by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer (a review)

The Nettle Spinner by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the story of Alma, a treeplanter who has found refuge in a ghost town in northern Ontario with a man who claims he was a stowaway on the Titanic. Interwoven with this present tale are flashbacks to Alma’s last summer of treeplanting as well as a Flemish folktale about a nettle spinner.

My sister spent years treeplanting and Mr. B, my partner, planted for one summer, so I’m familiar—from a distance—with this world. However, Kuitenbrouwer’s descriptions of life in a treeplanting camp transported me there—these segments of the book were my favourite by far. Kuitenbrouwer draws the transplanting crew with a sure hand: her cast of quirky characters could easily have become caricatures but instead their eccentricities are what make them feel real. And Alma’s scathing critique of so-called forest management practices makes for compelling reading.

My favourite scene is Alma’s encounter with a bear—part rant about the craziness of what she’s doing, part comedy of errors, part philosophical musing about the nature of right and wrong, this is possibly the best woman-meets-beast scene I’ve ever read—complete with a Janis Joplin soundtrack no less.

However, my enjoyment of this segment of the book didn’t carry over to the rest of it. The nettle spinner’s tale is a grim story of a peasant girl who catches the fancy of the local landowner, a cruel man who is used to taking what he wants. The story in the present is disturbing and almost hallucinatory in parts—on more than one occasion I wondered if Alma was imagining what was going on. I was also dismayed by how the women in this book are portrayed as acquiescing/participating in the violence perpetrated against them. And after all the build-up, the end of the book feels anticlimactic: as Alma says herself, “the great anticlimax.”

The blurb on the front cover of The Nettle Spinner calls Kuitenbrouwer “a brawny and gifted writer” (this is according to Jonathan Bennett). I wouldn’t disagree. I just didn’t care for where this story went.

Thank you to Mini Book Expo and Goose Lane for sending me this book to review.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld (a review)

When I requested American Wife, I had no idea it was a fictionalized account of Laura Bush’s life. All I knew was that it had been written by Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep, which I first read about in an article in The New York Times about the making of a bestseller. My curiosity was piqued, so when I heard about Sittenfeld’s latest book, I wanted to read it.

Leaving aside for a moment the Laura Bush connection, American Wife is an intimate portrait of Alice “Lindy” Blackwell (nee Lindgren), from her childhood in Riley, Wisconsin, in the 40s to her life in the White House as First Lady. Despite several rather dramatic turns of events over the course of her life, this is a quiet story about a quiet woman who is thrust into the public eye by her love for a man who is her polar opposite. The novel is a straightforward first-person narrative in the form of a memoir; the writing style is plain and easy to read. Alice Blackwell comes across as a very likeable and believable character. Although her story felt too intimate in parts—was it really necessary to describe in great detail how she clogged the toilet on her first visit to Charlie’s family?—overall this novel is an enjoyable read. Sittenfeld asks some provocative questions about personal responsibility: How much are we responsible for the actions of the people we love? What does it mean to love someone who is fundamentally different from us? Unfortunately, the last section of the book (once Alice becomes First Lady) is the least interesting. It felt as if Sittenfeld couldn’t quite figure out how her Alice could still be in this marriage, despite the fact that she had to be, since Laura Bush is. In the end, Sittenfeld failed to convince me: ultimately, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

This book is big and fairly controversial, so it’s been reviewed in lots of places. For some other blogger reviews, visit these sites:
Arch Thinking • Books and Cooks • Boston Bibliophile • Devourer of Books • Literary Menagerie • nomadreader • Pop Culture Junkie • Rat’s Corner • Wearing Stilettos and Living on a Farm • Zoe’s Mom

Gayle also wrote a summary of a Q&A with Curtis Sittenfeld on her blog, Everyday I Write the Book Blog.

Finally, you can also read Joyce Carol Oates’ review in The New York Times.

Thank you to Random House for sending me this book to review.

Aberrations by Penelope Przekop (a review)

Aberrations by Penelope Przekop is the story of Angel Duet, a young woman who suffers from narcolepsy, a sleep disorder, and who has spent her entire life mourning her mother who died giving birth to her. As I read about Angel’s struggle to stay awake and uncover her family’s history, I struggled in turn to maintain an interest in this story. It’s not that the story itself isn’t interesting, but rather that the writing style just didn’t work for me. Angel’s voice is too odd, full of confusing and overly dramatic ramblings that seemed to have little bearing on the plot such as: “Unlike those perfect people like Carla whom I sometimes wished to disembowel, Christian had no bowels. While the others stored reality, proof of their imperfection, deep within carefully constructed façades, he sported an empty compartment, clean and hollowed out” (p. 86). Plus the Southern dialect felt forced to me, an afterthought, as if peppering “ordinary” dialogue with “cain’ts” and “thangs” was enough to make it Southern—it distracted me rather than adding anything to the story. Since pretty much every single review I’ve seen of this book raves about it, I was disappointed when I realized I probably wouldn’t have finished reading Aberrations if it wasn’t for the fact that I was expected to review it. In the end, however, I’m glad I did, because I was able to better appreciate what Przekop was doing—how in fact some of her strange imagery fit together. I especially liked the multilayered meanings she attached to the cloud pictures taken by Angel’s mother. And there is no question that this book has the best book cover I’ve seen in a long time, both because it is beautiful in itself and because it works so well as a snapshot of this book.

I feel bad giving this book a bad review, in part because I’ve so enjoyed reading Penelope Przekop’s blog, Aberration Nation. However, what makes this blog one of my favourites is Przekop’s honesty and courage, so I can only hope she won’t fault me too much for being honest in this review.

Although this book wasn’t for me, lots of other people enjoyed it. For much more positive reviews of this book, head over to the following blogs:
BCF Book Reviews • Bookish Ruth • Kathleen’s Book Reviews • Pop Culture Junkie • Random Wonder • The Literate Housewife • Traci’s Book Bag

Przekop’s site also has a fascinating Q&A with the author. (Be warned, however, that the discussion contains some spoilers.)

Thank you to Mini Book Expo, Emerald Book Company and Planned Television Arts for sending me this book to review.

So Long at the Fair by Christina Schwarz (a review)

So Long at the Fair by Christina Schwarz is a virtuoso performance, a masterfully told tale of deception and self-delusion set in a small Midwestern town. Schwarz writes beautifully, using unusual imagery such as in this sentence: “He’d not, he recalled, even uttered ‘Excuse me’ the time he’d accidentally bumped her with his lunch tray, the contact between the orange plastic and the green wool of her sweater so intimate, so electric it had instantly closed his throat and jump-started his heart.” She also expertly juggles two time frames (plus flashbacks) and seven points of view smoothly and without confusion.

Reading So Long at the Fair is a bit like being a fly on the wall inside a car hurtling along at breakneck speed—you know someone is going to get hurt, you just don’t know who or how badly. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say there are several cars all hurtling towards each other and you the reader are inside each one in turn, kept on the edge of your seat as you admire the breathtaking view and dread the inevitable crash.

So I should have loved this book, right? There is no doubt that Schwarz is a talented writer and this book kept me up half the night (literally), so how can I not love it? But I didn’t. Maybe because ultimately adultery is not a subject matter that interests me that much. Or maybe because just about every single one of her characters is self-deluded and there’s not much evidence that any of them (with one exception) grows very much over the course of this novel. Mostly I think it’s because almost all of her characters seemed unsympathetic* to me. The world she paints is not one I would care to revisit. But reading the book was still one hell of a ride!

To read what others thought of this book, head over to these blogs:
Breaking the Spine • Everyday I Write the Book Blog • Many A Quaint and Curious Volume • Reader for Life

You can read the first chapter on The New York Times site.

Thank you to Doubleday for sending me this book to review.

*Interestingly enough, in an interview quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Schwarz apparently said that So Long at the Fair was based on the idea that “all the parties involved in an adulterous relationship could be sympathetic.” Note that if you haven’t read the book yet, this review gives too much of the plot away, in my opinion.