Book Review: Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

It happens a few times a year: a publisher sends me a comp copy of an audio book that I would otherwise never pick up to read of my own accord, and in the process of listening to it I become terrifically surprised.  Such is the case when my Penguin sales rep, Karl, sent me the unabridged audio of Liane Moriarty's new novel, Big Little Lies, a couple of weeks ago.

I hadn't thought of reading this book, but I'm always willing to listen to books that I wouldn't dream of reading, as I enjoy listening to the audios in my car on my commute each day.  Little did I know just how enamored of this book I would become.

On the surface, the book seems like it could be a mystery: "Pirriwee Public’s annual school Trivia Night has ended in a shocking riot. One parent is dead. The school principal is horrified. As police investigate what appears to have been a tragic accident, signs begin to indicate that this devastating death might have been cold-blooded murder." 

Really, though, it's the story of female friendship amidst the perils and politics of modern parenting.

Also, it's Australian. I didn't know the author was Australian until I looked her up.  At first I just thought that the casting of an Australian reader for the audio was a quirky directional choice. Anyway, we've got Madeline, Celeste, and Jane, who are all mothers of children entering the kindergarten class at Pirowee Public, and the novel centers around them, telling their stories in a third person narrative that flits about from one to the other.

Madeline is in her forties, on her second marriage and third child.  She works part time and is that rare bird in this particular Sydney suburb: she is neither a Career Woman nor a Career Mom. She's funny, a little brash, obsessed with clothing and looking good, but she's also extremely loyal and passionate, and it takes the smallest thing to make her outraged. Her kindergarten daughter Chloe is feisty, kind, and imperious in fairly equal measure.

Celeste is a quiet woman who happens to be gorgeous -- not run of the mill gorgeous, but other-people-trip-up-walking-down-the-street-to-do-a-double-take gorgeous.  She's also introspective and a little distracted, unsure of her true worth, and amazed that a vivacious woman like Madeline would want to be friends with someone like her.  It eventually becomes clear just why it is so convenient that her husband travels out of the country frequently for his career, and in the meantime, her hands are full raising their twin boys full time.

Jane is single and the newcomer to Pirriwee, and a good 10-15 years younger than all of the other mothers.  She's hiding a secret about the identity of her boy Ziggy's father, and she's unsure whether to let herself be drawn into a friendship with Celeste or Madeline.  When Ziggy is accused on the first day of kindergarten orientation of choking a little girl, Jane and her son get off to a rocky start with all of the other parents and children.  If it weren't for Madeline championing her the whole way, life would be very lonely and difficult, indeed.

Moriarty positively nails the type of helicopter parent that has made a bad name for parents in this country, and via the character of Madeline she takes delight in skewering them. If this doesn't sound funny and interesting, then I'm just not doing a good job of telling it, because this book is both.  In spades.  In fact, I got so frustrated with the slow pace of listening to the audio that I borrowed the physical book to take home and read instead.  There are lots of clichés in this book, but Moriarty either turns them on their head or paints them in a new light through her humor and wry observations.  I loved the friendship that develops among Jane, Celeste, and Madeline, and I love the come-uppance that happens in the end. The reader, Caroline Lee, is great and she voices Madeline particularly well with a sexy voice and a husky, breathy tone.

 Nobody is more surprised than I am that this book resonated with me the way it did.  It's a light and very fast read that occasionally gives way to darker material. Material so dark, in fact, that it might bog down and change the tone of any other book.  In that sense, the book puts me in mind of Joshilyn Jackson's novel, Someone Else's Love Story.   

A little Valentine's Day book fun: The Rosie Project and Words for Worms

Despite my intentions to blog at least once a week, it's been difficult to keep up with it this year and we're only in February! I'm about 50-100 pages into more than a dozen novels and thus not ready to review anything, and I've already posted about Rosie here, so today I am going to take the easy way out by participating in a group book survey for The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, sponsored by Words for Worms. I'd never heard of that blog before, but I saw that Sarah Says Read participated in it and that inspired me to check it out. Warning: ahead there be spoilers!

1. Pop culture question here: did anybody get a serious Sheldon Cooper vibe out of Don? Well, after I looked up who Sheldon Cooper was, I can say, quite definitively, no. I've only watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory and didn't think it was particularly funny or good.  But when the author was at my bookstore last fall, he said that he gets questioned about that all the time. To me, Sheldon Cooper came off less a quirky genius and more of an asshole, and Don Tillman, awkward though he may be, is no asshole.

2. Don's social interactions are awkward at best, but his logic and adherence to routine give him some interesting habits. What's your favorite Don-ism? Oh, so many of them. I laughed so many times at his rigorous adherence to punctuality, timing everything in his life down to 30-second increments.  His anti-vegetarian stance. His learning to dance by watching videos and practicing with a skeleton. His learning to have sex by reading the Kama Sutra and practicing with a skeleton. I could go on and on, but I won't.

3. Don's "Wife Project" involves an elaborate questionnaire designed to weed out unsuitable matches. Have you ever made a list of qualities that are important to you for a potential partner? Do you think it's realistic to expect one person to live up to all of them? When I was a teenager I probably did compile actual lists with my friends for things I wanted in my boyfriends. Looking back on my various romantic affairs, I can see that I don't have a physical type, but I do most certainly have a type: smart, can make me laugh, and with a creative bent (musicians, writers, and artists). Now that I'm older and have a better idea of what works in a mature and lasting relationship, I can add some more must-have qualities to my mental list: emotionally available, supportive, and generous-spirited. Luckily my husband qualifies on all of those counts. While I don't think it's realistic to expect one's romantic partner to fulfill every need one has, I do think it's realistic (and healthy) to expect emotional availability, support, and a generous spirit from one's romantic partner.

4. What is is about Rosie that manages to break down Don's defenses? Do you think that love requires a certain abandonment of logic? Funny, but I didn't see that Rosie broke down anything about Don.  She was perceptive enough to understand that he was different and smart enough to value his differences as much as she valued his more obvious gifts. For his part, Don had to unlearn what he thought was required for love: identical doesn't always mean compatible.

5. What was your favorite scene in The Rosie Project? I have a few favorite scenes: the ice cream debacle on his first date in the beginning of the book, echoed near the end playing out a similar ice cream scene with Rosie; his argument with the maitre d' about the superiority of his outerwear jacket over a dinner jacket; the bartending scene with Rosie, where his quirks turn out to be his strongest selling points; giving a lecture to the Aspie kids and describing himself without realizing it. Really, there are so many.

What about you, gentle reader?  Have you read The Rosie Project?  Did you love it like I did? 

Funniest Book I've Read This Year: The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Like most book bloggers and/or booksellers, I read quite a bit.  My tastes tend towards the literary fiction end of the spectrum, sprinkled with good books from a variety of other genres, but mostly, I enjoy a dark read as much as the next person; Cormac McCarthy's The Road was my idea of beach reading the year it was published.  However, I'm frequently asked by customers for recommendations on the lighter end of the scale, but sometimes the request is for light but not frivolous, or for funny without raunchy, and these questions stump me.

More precisely, I should say they used to stump me. Now, however,  I have The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion and it will pretty much be the answer to every adult looking for a novel this holiday season. I read it over vacation in June and roared with laughter. In public.  There may even have been a snort or two.  (There were.) Seriously, this is the funniest book I've read this year, and it's certainly the funniest book I've read in recent memory, including humorist writing like Tina Fey's Bossypants or Ellen DeGeneres's Seriously, I'm Kidding. I liked it so much that I read it again four months later in preparation for the author's appearance at my store. Now it hangs out in the kitchen and I read it over breakfast or while my husband is making dinner, dipping into it here and there, and you know what?  It's still funny.

Here's the 4-1-1: Don Tillman is a professor of genetics at an Australian university. He's brilliant, loyal, and longing for a life partner.  You see, Don Tillman gets a lot of first dates but he's never been on a second one due to a wide range of behavioral quirks. He's got Aspberger's, but you wouldn't say he suffers from it--more like he triumphs from it.  He creates a multi-page questionnaire to weed out unlikely candidates for a wife, sincere but misguided in the belief that scientific method will prevail when more traditional outlets for dating have failed him.

Enter Rosie, sent to Don by his colleague in the psych department, looking for help discovering her birth father. Don thinks his colleague has sent Rosie as part of The Wife Project and is dismayed by this  boisterous, loud, bold, drinking, smoking, and habitually late young woman, yet oddly drawn to her.  To top that off, she also wears jewelry and too much makeup, dyes her hair,  is mathematically incompetent and works in a bar--she is clearly unsuitable for Don, failing the questionnaire spectacularly.

A genetics-inspired helix display for the author

Graeme Simsion with me

You don't have to be a genius to know how the book will end, but you cannot possibly predict the uproarious and delightful scenarios--and the occasional poignant one-- you will pass through to get there. This book has stood the test of all sorts of readers I know, ranging from a couple of 20-somethings up to my nearly-octogenarian mother. Three coworkers, the boyfriend of one of them, my husband, and even a hospital patient who said it was worth the extra pain brought on by her laughter because this book took her mind off of where she was. Like me, she liked it enough that she picked it up again to read as soon as she finished.

There are moments where it flags a bit, but these are rare and fleeting in a generally streamlined and tight novel. And it's no surprise, considering that this novel started off as a screenplay.  This book is funny in a very smart way, and in my experience, that's difficult to do well.  For every When Harry Met Sally in existence, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of bad rom-coms.

I wish I could excerpt a few passages, but the scenes that are so funny are big, and need too much build-up, so it's not really worth doing. Here's one paragraph that might give an idea of Don's habit of being sincere-but-misguided: the one woman who ticked all the right boxes on the questionnaire has also demanded that her partner be a good dancer.  Fair enough, Don thinks (he really is quite fair). He's aware he's being particular and it's reasonable to expect her to be particular, too.  He doesn't know how to dance, but how hard can it be? He watches movies and YouTube videos, practicing with a skeleton in his office. Here's what happens when he and his partner hit the dance floor at a faculty ball on their first date:

"I took her in the standard jive hold that I had practiced on the skeleton and immediately felt the awkwardness, approaching revulsion, that I feel when forced into intimate contact with another human. I had mentally prepared for this, but not for a more serious problem. I had not practiced with music. I am sure I executed the steps accurately, but not at precisely the correct speed, and not at the same time as the beat...Bianca tried to lead, but I had no experience with a living partner, let alone one who was trying to be in control."

Just the phrase "standard jive hold"makes me want to giggle. If you know me in real life, and if we usually exchange Christmas presents, then be forewarned: do not buy yourself a copy of this book.  If you know me in real life and we don't normally exchange Christmas presents, well, you just might get one this year.  That's how much I love this book and want everybody I know to read it, too.  It will make you laugh in all the right ways.

If you don't want to take my word for it, take the word of the acquiring editors the world over who have bought the rights to The Rosie Project in their countries; the number was more than three dozen and counting the last I looked. And naturally since it began as a screen play it will end as one, too.  No word on casting, but I confided to the author that I think he'd do well to court Benedict Cumberbatch for the role of Don Tillman, who was in agreement. He's had a bit of experience playing the brilliant, gorgeous, socially awkward, probably-Aspbergian genius who maybe-just-maybe longs for love: