Last Month in Review: March 2018

Image found here.

March was full of so many good books, two of which I actually got around to reviewing already. Out of the nine books, two were nonfiction, one was a re-read, one was an audio, two were graphic novels, and three were by authors of color. I really liked or loved each of them, too, so all the winning for me!

1. Illegal by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano. This book was a useful reminder that I should read more graphic novels.  This one follows a young boy named Ebo in his desperate quest to leave Ghana, cross the Sahara, and make his way to Europe to keep his family together and make a better life. It’s an incredible read. Review here.

2. The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. This debut novel follows a quartet of classical musicians from their years in graduate school through adulthood, children, relationships, etc.  It’s a very good book, and one of the few books I can think of that explores the importance of work relationships and non-romantic intimacies when people’s livelihoods are intertwined. The music writing is pretty incredible, to boot.

3. Things That Make White People Uncomfortable by Michael Bennett. This is one of the two nonfiction books I read this month and the other review I happened to have written.  I had no idea who Michael Bennett was when I picked this book up to read, but it turns out that he’s a professional football player who is also an activist, and he has some pretty terrific things to say.

4. Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple.  I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I read a book that was already published, but I was in a bit of a book slump and not interested in anything I’d brought home from work to read, so I grabbed this one from the shelf.  I liked it.  It has the same wry, bordering on dark, humor that marked Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and the same kind of brilliant and neurotic protagonist, too.

5. America for Beginners by Leah Franqui.  Another debut novel, and this was the right book at the right time for me.  Featuring the widow Mrs. Sengupta from Kolkata takes a trip to the US, where she is accompanied by Ronnie Munshi, her tour guide guide, and Rebecca, her companion (for modesty’s sake). These three unlikely pilgrims make their way across the US, but Mrs. Sengupta has a hidden agenda: to find and meet the partner of her gay son, whom her husband disowned. I love road trip stories, and this one had so many rewarding moments.

6. The Wrong Heaven by Amy Bonnaffons.  This is another debut, this time a story collection that feels like it’s the love child between Kevin Wilson and Kelly Link.  Each story is dark, leading either to a dark & twisted or dark & titillating conclusion. Lee Boudreaux edited this one, and she’s my favorite editor in the industry.  I will blindly read anything she had a hand in, and a ridiculously high percentage of the time I will come away better for having encountered her books.

7. Sisters by Raina Telgemeier. I can’t remember the last time I read two graphic novels in one month, but the one arrived damaged at my bookstore -- too damaged to sell -- so I was able to take it home to read for free.  So much fun, so much truth about sibling and family dynamics! I had read and loved Telgemeier’s Drama and I’m not sure why I never got around to this one until now.  Good stuff here.

8. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. I am a bonafide fiction girl from way back, but this collection of essays just may be my favorite book by Ann Patchette.  This is maybe my third (fourth) time reading this book and this time I was listening to the audio.  Patchett reads the book herself, so hearing her voice in the car on my daily commute made me feel like I was in the company of a friend.  This book is incredibly useful and insightful if one wants to be a better writer, but I actually think it is just as useful and insightful if one wants to be a better human being. 

9. The Secrets Between Us by Thrity Umrigar.  I had the great pleasure of having dinner with Thrity and a couple dozen booksellers last week, courtesy of Harper Collins.  This is the sequel, of sorts, to The Space Between Us, which I had read years ago and enjoyed, but this book, after getting off to a somewhat slow start, became a book that I really loved. The politics of gender, class, and sexuality converge in this heartfelt tale of women and the hardships and indignities they’ve had to survive in 20th and 21st century India.

And just because I happened to have found old photos, here are pictures of Parnassus, the beautiful bookstore in Nashville that Ann Patchett co-owns with the marvelous Karen Hayes.  Wouldn’t it be great to revisit your childhood and find a place for kids that is as magical as the children’s space at this bookstore, complete with a child-sized entrance that requires passing through the pillars of the Parthenon?

Book Review: ILLEGAL by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano

Oh, graphic novels. Why don’t I read more of you?  I know the studies that tell me that reading you stimulates both hemispheres of my brain.  What’s more, I know from my own experience how rich and rewarding reading them can be, whether it’s a book that retroactively informs my own childhood (see: Roller Girl) or something that renders the unspeakable down to a distilled form so the reader can grasp at understanding the unimaginable (see: Maus). I can’t answer my own question, but every time I encounter a great graphic novel, I remind myself anew that I should read more of them, and the one that has done that most recently for me is Illegal. This is the same writing team that brought us the Artemis Fowl series, which I have not read, and if I should ever stop being a bookseller (god forbid!) and have more time to read books already published, their efforts here would certainly prompt me to pick up those books.

 When I was in Memphis for Winter Institute in January earlier this year, I picked up an advance reading copy of this graphic novel in the galley room, that mystical, magical place where books are piled high on tables and booksellers walk through, helping themselves to all the free books they want. The cover was compelling, and what’s more, the advance reading copy was complete, not just a blad, and rendered in full color, so I tucked a copy away into my book bag for future reading.

Illegal is told by Ebo, a young boy from Ghana, who follows his older brother Kwame across the Sahara, who in turn has set off on a journey to find their older sister, who left Ghana years ago for Europe to try to make a better living for the family. Whether it’s the menacing human beings they encounter on their way, or the peril of survival at sea, Ibo and Kwame face danger after danger as they make their way to Tripoli across the desert, only to be launched onto a small boat little better than a life raft and set adrift in the Mediterranean.

The story is poignant and Rigano brings the story evocatively to life with his illustrations that are often bleak, but not without tenderness. Ebo intersperses his present day narrative, which begins on an overcrowded dinghy at sea, with stories of how he came to be floating on the open ocean with his brother and a group of desperate strangers.  Rigano differentiates the stories to great effect using cooler tones for the present day and a neutral palette for the past:

Authors Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin don’t pull many punches with the narrative. Young Ebo’s life is defined by constant struggle and haunted by tremendous loss, and yet there is still something indomitable in his spirit that keeps him going. The ending is more bitter than bittersweet, but it’s also not without hope, and I would love to know more about Ebo’s story. 

Jabberwocky, a division of Sourcebooks, will publish this book in August 2018. I can’t recommend this graphic novel enough.  The book says that it’s rated for ages 10 and up, but I’d suggest for readers that young that an adult read in tandem to answer the inevitable questions this book raises.  If you’re looking for a book that will build readerly empathy in your child, though, this can’t be beat. 

Book Review: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

Let me say this first: Holly Black's new novel, The Darkest Part of the Forest, is the first YA fantasy that I've read in a few years that I loved.  (Quite possibly since she published The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which I liked a lot, but didn't love quite as much as I love this book.)

Hazel Evans and her brother Ben have grown up in Fairfold, a town that is to the faerie world what Sunnydale, California, is to the vampire world. People occasionally disappear, and if they happen to be outsiders, well, then there doesn't need to be too much fuss.  The people of Fairfold know the rules and raise their children to know them, too. They've reach an uneasy détente with the Fair Folk.

In the woods just outside of town, there's a glass coffin with a boy inside -- a heartbreakingly beautiful boy with horns, locked in an enchanted sleep. It just so happens that Hazel and Ben are both in love with the boy, pouring out their secrets and desires to him as the years go by.  The others kids in Fairfold like to party 'round (and on top of) the coffin, but occasionally one of them goes too far, with unfortunate consequences.  The glass itself is unbreakable, or so they all think, since the glass coffin endures through generations of drunk kids doing their best to shatter it.

Then one day, the glass coffin lies in shards, the boy inside gone missing. That same morning, Hazel wakes up with bits of the forest covering her and her bedclothes, and she doesn't know how they got there.  Oh, and maaaaaybe there's a sword. And maaaaaybe she's been losing time and blacking out about certain things.  And did I mention that in her youth, Hazel made a rash bargain with the Faerie King and that for days she's been receiving mysteriously ominous messages regarding her promise?

In the mean time, strange things are beginning to happen in Fairfold.  The balance between the townspeople and the faerie world tips and the people need a scapegoat.  Perhaps they've found it in Jack, who is Ben's best friend and who also happens to be changeling.  Sorry, should have mentioned that bit earlier!

Here are some other bits that might be important to know: Ben has a magically-bestowed gift of music! And as a child, Hazel plays at being a brave knight while her brother sings, and together they drive off the dark spirits of the forest! But then Hazel kisses the boy her brother loves, or rather, maybe that boy kisses her (aside: Hazel kisses a lot of boys.  It's kind of her thing.). But from that day onward, Hazel and Ben's relationship changes.

Really, there is so much going on here.  Holly Black plays with standard tropes, standing many on their heads and letting a few run the expected course, which constantly kept me guessing.  Which ones would she keep intact? Which ones would turn off at a 90 degree angle? And which ones would she invert altogether? Holly's writing is good and solid, never taking the reader out of the story, and she hits just the right blend of plot, character and pacing, overlaying it all with a cloak whose warp is humor and whose woof is darkness, so you can never really separate one from the other.  It's a coming of age tale, it's love and romance, it's a high quest adventure, and at the end of the day, it's also a story of loyalty and family.  It's brilliant.

My bookstore was lucky enough to host the book launch for Holly earlier this week.  Some fellow booksellers from Brookline Booksmith made the trek to our store for the launch, and we went all-out for it, dressing up in costume, serving faerie wine (drink it if you dare!), and even creating our own glass coffin so that attendees could use it for selfie photo ops. We had a grand and glorious time!  Standing room only, and a room full of fans, friends, and other great authors.

Holly, signing stock in the back.  This is
where the magic happens!

Showing a fellow bookseller how to
create my custom spiral display

Beware the faerie wine, ladies!

Here I am in the glass coffin

My amazing coworker, Hannah, who planned the
event and co-created the coffin

Holly trapped in a device of her own making
(photo courtesy of Hannah Moushabeck)

You can see authors Sarah Rees Brennan
and Cassandra Clare in the audience here. Not
pictured, but in also attendance, were Kelly Link,
Gavin Grant, and Deborah Noyes

How many booksellers can you fit into
 a glass coffin with Holly Black?

NB: Little, Brown published this book in the US on Tuesday, 13 January, and I read an advance reading copy provided by the publisher at my request several months ago. This book qualifies for my "diversify your life" label because there is one main character who is gay and a secondary character who is bi-sexual, at least by human standards.  My guess is that the fair folk don't gauge sexuality the same way we do.

Book Review: Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge is a quick read, and while I definitely was not the primary audience for it, it was also an occasionally fun read. I'm also more drawn to the cover than I should be and in my opinion it's one of the best things about this book. An architectural spiral superimposed upon a natural one, both ruled by Fibonacci, is enough to make the latent math nerd in me swoon. 

Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up (with a nod to The Princess Bride and Goodreads): "Since birth, Nyx has been betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom-all because of a foolish bargain struck by her father. And since birth, she has been in training to kill him. With no choice but to fulfill her duty, Nyx resents her family for never trying to save her and hates herself for wanting to escape her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, Nyx abandons everything she's ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, destroy his enchanted castle, and break the nine-hundred-year-old curse he put on her people. But Ignifex is not at all what Nyx expected. The strangely charming lord beguiles her, and his castle-a shifting maze of magical rooms-enthralls her."

The Beauty & the Beast parallels are obvious to even the most unaware reader, but Hodge borrows just as heavily from Greek mythology (most notably from Eros & Psyche, but also from Pandora and her terrible box), the robber bridegroom trope from all over folk & fairy tales, the alchemies of John Dee, the medieval Romance of the Rose, and T. S. Eliot's The Four Quartets. 

At first I thought that borrowing from so many traditions made for an interesting mix, but before long I grew a little weary of it.  It was less a deft melding of the various storylines and more of an authorial throw down: "Look how smart I am to incorporate elements of so many Western traditions. Aren't I clever?" To be fair, though, because Hodge had so many influences in her novel, I wasn't always able to accurately predict what direction she would take her heroine in, so that actually increased my interest level a bit. Either because the author handles the T. S. Eliot allusions more delicately, or because I am less familiar with the source material, they were the most successful borrowing in the novel. 

I can't quite decide what my final opinion is of this book, beyond a general frustration. There are parts that I thought were quite terrific, but those were more frequently overshadowed by parts that were plodding, trite, or otherwise obvious. The character of Nyx was actually pretty interesting when she wasn't  hemming and hawing over a course of action, and Ignifex was generally marvelous and reminded me nothing more than of John Milton's Lucifer in Paradise Lost.  

I think, overall, what I want from this author is to have her write a book for adults, not teens, and put all of her literary sources to bear in creating a work for more discerning readers than this book is obviously meant for.  If Hodge were to incorporate subtlety and a more streamlined approach to her subject, and couch it all in a third person narrative, I think we'd have a pretty fine piece of fantasy on our hands. 

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time."  

“Footfalls echo in the memory, 

down the passage we did not take, 

towards the door we never opened, 

into the rose garden.” 

“Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.” 

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

T. S. Eliot, various excerpts from The Four Quartets

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book provided by the publisher.  It is available now from Balzer & Bray publishers. 

Ivy and Bean meets Love Story?! A Book Review of Maybe One Day by Melissa Kantor

Warning: Ahead there be spoilers. Sort of.  If you're not at all intuitive when it comes to reading the summaries found on the jacket flap of books, that is.

What can you say about a 17-year-old who dies? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Ballanchine and Tchaikovsky. And Serge Gainsbourg. And me.

Now that would have been the perfect opening for this book, but apparently Melissa Kantor didn't want to invoke Love Story with her new YA novel, Maybe One Day.

It wasn't until I read this book that I realized that there is a serious dearth of YA novels that treat female friendship as a primary focus. The closest thing I could come up with was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, but those are less about the collective friendship and more about the individual adventures of the girl wearing said pants. So help me out here.  What are the great books about female friendship that are aimed at the teen audience? It seems that these days we're either dealing with romance (paranormal or otherwise) or we're dealing with dystopian love triangles.  All of which I'm happy to read, to varying degrees, but why aren't there more books out there that are paeans to friendship?

Because honestly, to describe this book, I either have to say that it's Ivy & Bean meets Love Story, which has a serious squick factor, or I have to be cumbersome and say that this is The Fault In Our Stars, minus the romance, the book-within-a-book subplot, and the snarkier-than-thou dialogue.

Zoe and Olivia have been best friends for ages, inseparable at school and in the corps de ballet for younger dancers at the NYBC. These girls have big dreams and big ambition to see them through. When right before junior year, they're released from the corps, they think that it is the worst thing that could happen to them.  Then a few weeks into the school year, Olivia gets diagnosed with leukemia.

This book could so easily downshift into melodrama and simply remain there until the end, but I think that Kantor handles the cancer crisis adeptly and realistically.  Zoe and Olivia have an amazing friendship, and that really upstages the cancer for much of the book.  Yes, there is certainly some melodrama, but it's entirely warranted--this is a book about teenagers, after all, and just how would you feel if your own best friend had cancer?

The writing here is solid, and so are the secondary characters.  Olivia's mom, devoutly religious and perfect stay-at-home mom that she is, could so easily have been drawn as a brittle Stepford wife, but she's not.  I also loved Stacy, the insufferably perky cheerleader who could have been terribly shallow but turned out to have surprising heart.  And Zoe's parents, who were tremendously supportive of her but never allowed her to use Olivia's illness as a crutch or excuse to behave badly. And Calvin, the hunky jerk Olivia has a crush on, but who is also best friends with her older brother and helps out the family by playing with their young twin boys.

And, of course, there's Zoe.  Zoe is one of the most realistically drawn teens I've encountered in YA. She breaks my heart.  Zoe is incredibly bright, insecure, loyal, misguided, devastated, annoying, sympathetic, emotional, and droid-like.  In other words, she's a teenager. She says smart things and does dumb things in equal measure.  She gets drunk and makes out with Olivia's crush at a party and then lies to Olivia about it, but she also plans a spectacular birthday celebration with Olivia that passes muster even for Olivia's germaphobic mother. She is fiercely protective and helpless and frustrated; she's no good at all with kids, and she's afraid to dance now, but she still winds up teaching Zoe's volunteer ballet class to inner city kids in Newark when Zoe is too sick to continue. She is complicated and overwhelmed and oh, my goodness, just read this book, will you?

I definitely cried while reading this book, but it was in an entirely satisfying way. I recommend Maybe One Day to all fans of YA and to adult readers of what my coworker calls "relationship fiction."  Or, you know, if you happen to like good books. 

NB: This book will be published in March 2014 by Harper Teen. I read an advance reading copy that was mailed to my store.

Book Review: Parallel by Lauren Miller

Book tagline: Your path changes. Your destiny doesn't.  

I picked up a copy of Lauren Miller's new YA novel, Parallel, as my airplane read on the way to Kansas City last week.  I "test-drove" the first two chapters at home just to make sure it was readable and away I went.  I can't recall precisely what it was that drew me to this book many weeks ago, other than I was hoping for a quick read and a disposable one, as it was my plan to leave the book behind in my hotel room to make room for the dozens more I would be picking up at Winter Institute.  But something in this book stayed with me and I brought it back home with me to review.

Because this book is a little tricky to summarize, I'll commandeer the publisher's promo copy: 

Abby Barnes had a plan. Get into a great college, major in journalism, and land her dream job at a major newspaper. But on the eve of her 18th birthday, she's stuck on a Hollywood movie set instead, wishing she could rewind her life. But the next morning, she’s in a dorm room at Yale, with no memory of how she got there. A collision of parallel worlds has left Abby living a new reality every time her younger parallel self makes a new decision. Forced to live out the consequences of a path she didn't choose, Abby must let go on her plans for the future and learn to focus on the present, without losing sight of who she is, the boy who might just be her soul mate, and the destiny that’s finally in reach. 

I'm probably dating myself, but this book reminded strongly of the movie Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, in which the main character's life splits into two futures for the audience: what would have happened if Gwyneth's character had reached the subway train in time on a particular day and what would have happened if she hadn't. The movie hints that the end result would have been the same, at least in terms of her career and relationship, but one path was filled with more heartache and trouble than the other. 

Fact, they should be called The Fetals.

With Abby, it comes down to colliding parallel worlds.  [Cue INXS's Two Worlds Collided].  One day in her senior year in high school there is an earthquake that rocks the entire world, not just her immediate area of Atlanta, GA. Turns out that those tremors felt 'round the world was an instance of two parallel universes touching each other, and her life from that moment onward takes two drastically different directions: in one life she lands in college, but in another life she's the ingenue of a big blockbuster film. THANK GOODNESS in one of her lives, she lands in the astronomy class taught by a world-reknown theoretical physicist who was laughed out of the Ivies for his ridiculous theories of parallel universes.  AM I RIGHT?!  The catch is that, unlike everybody else she knows, Abby seems to be the only person living in the new parallel world who has memories, no matter how vague, of her old life. 

What I thought would turn out to be a simple equation of Chapter Odd Number = This World, Chapter Even Number = That World ended up being a bit more complicated than that, which means the reader really has to pay attention to each chapter header to see when and where Abby is waking up each morning.  You see, instead of having a linear storyline in one world or the other, everything that happens to Abby in World X has an effect on her in World Y, but one year later.  Complicated, no?  There's a reason for this, and it has to do with the earthquakes, but frankly I didn't pay all that much attention to it.  Like books with time travel subplots (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Time Between Us, The Time Traveler's Wife, etc), I tend to just accept it at face value and move on without thinking about it too much, because inevitably the moment I stop to really contemplate the paradoxes, those books fall apart for me. 

I was actually really taken with this book.  It's not high literature or grand adventure, but it's a good story about high school and college, about the choices that we make, and how the repercussions of those choices may stick with us far longer than we anticipated.  It's friendship and jealousy and angst and first love.  It's about what happens when we let go and let God let parallel universes show us that despite their very different outcomes, we are essentially the same person. 

This book was a lot of fun. I can't pretend that it changed my life, but it made a day of travel and one night in a hotel room a lot more enjoyable than they otherwise would have been. The writing was neither so beautiful nor so terrible that it took me out of the story, but there was one point that made me snort, so I'm including it here. The scene: Abby wakes up in bed with the hot college boy she has had a few dates with:

"You're still wearing your shoes," he says, pointing. I am indeed still wearing my shoes. And every other article of clothing I came with, including my jacket and scarf. I think my purse is in the bed somewhere, too. "Were you afraid I'd get the wrong idea?" he asks. I look down at his bare chest and am instantly flustered. Holy pecs.  

"It wasn't that," I say quickly. "It's just ..." Every excuse I can think of is creepier than the real reason. "Okay, yeah, I didn't want you to think that just because I was sleeping over, it meant that you and I would ..." Heat creeps up my neck. I can't even say the word without blushing. 

"Well, in the future, if you'd like to remove your outerwear before sleeping, I won't take it as a signal that you're asking for sex." 

I squirm under his gaze, suddenly very uncomfortable with all the sex talk. If you can't handle the sex talk, probably not ready for sex (pp. 274-275).

NB: This book will be published on May 14, 2013, by HarperTeen.  I received a free ARC upon request from my sales rep.