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 (P)Review: Anatomy of a Miracle by Jonathan Miles

Happy New Year, everybody! I’m not much into setting resolutions for myself these days.  Or rather, the whole “New Year, New You” mentality doesn’t hold much appeal for me, but I like the idea of being open to change and growth. The year 2017 brought a lot of changes into my life, including putting myself on the job market, and one of the most difficult personal challenges for me this year was bouncing back after each interview that culminated in some variation of, “You’re pretty nifty, Runner Up Candidate.” It’s been quite a while since I failed at something so important to me, but lately I’ve been ruminating on failure and what it can mean. While it’s true that I failed to secure an offer for the three positions I interviewed for last year, I learned something about myself with each one.  I got better with each interview, and I was lucky enough to get substantive feedback from two of the hiring managers to better place myself when the next opportunity comes along -- one of whom has even offered to help me look out for other, better suited positions. So with that in mind, what I’d like for 2018 is this: to remember that while failure is an important part of growth, it does not define me, or my worth. I also want to practice more kindness, both to myself and to others. And since I remember a time in the not-too-distant past where I actually enjoyed writing about my twin passions of books and travel, I thought it might be interesting getting back to that in 2018, too.

It turns out that it’s been quite some time since my last book review, which I posted in June 2016 about Homegoing, the best novel I read that year. Eighteen months almost to the day. Please forgive my rustiness here as I ease back into the world of book reviews.

The first book I completed this year is Jonathan Miles’ Anatomy of a Miracle.  His work wasn’t new to me, as I had started both of his previous novels, Dear American Airlines and Want Not, but hadn’t finished either one (less a criticism of them than simply being an occupational hazard).  This one I picked up at the urging of my sales rep, but I hadn’t read very far before I was hooked: this guy nailed -- I mean, absolutely nailed -- the south Mississippi setting.

Call it homesickness or nostalgia on my part, but I was extremely happy to revisit the Mississippi gulf coast of my youth in these pages, seeing through the eyes of Cameron Harris, a complicated young man whose life has been marked by tragedy: abandoned by his father, losing his best friend, the death of his mother, Hurricane Katrina and subsequently losing his home. As if that weren’t bad enough, he enlists in the army, gets sent to Afghanistan, and has the misfortune of getting a little too close to an old Soviet landmine. When Cameron returns to the US, it’s in a wheelchair.  His sister Tanya, as much parent to him as sibling, gives up everything to care for her paraplegic brother.

Four years later, strange things are afoot at their neighborhood convenience store, when Cameron’s nausea doubles him over in his chair and he leans forward to relieve it. The thing is, there is only so far he can lean forward without falling, and he somehow manages to get his feet underneath himself and stands up in the parking lot of the Biz-E-Bee. Nobody can explain it -- not Cameron or Tanya, not the medical community.

As you can imagine, the Harris home quickly becomes the epicenter of a multi-ring circus. In this most religious of red states, everybody wants to claim a piece of Cameron’s miracle, whether it’s the Republican party wanting Cameron (and by extension, God, of course) on their ticket or a pre-Vatican-II Catholic priest who uses Cameron for his own multi-layered agenda. TV interviews, social media prayer circles, pilgrims to the Biz-E-Bee, and a reality tv/mockumentary crew all descend on the scene, and the whole time Cameron and Tanya are just trying to get on with their lives, wanting to know the whys and wherefores of Cameron’s miracle.

While Anatomy is told in a journalistic fashion that strongly reminded me of the brilliant nonfiction book Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, in both style and scope, what interested me most was the characters, both major and minor: Cameron and Tanya, absolutely; but I also loved the Vietnamese couple who own the convenience store, the devil’s advocate attorney working for the Vatican (literally the advocatus diaboli) , the sergeant under whom Cameron served in the army, and the VA doctor handling Cameron’s case. Mostly, I loved the subtle indictment of people who choose the superficial over substance and the way Miles calls attention to bigotry of all stripes, but above all, I loved the way the author limns each character with the myriad contradictions that comprise this human experience. Beyond that, the writing is just terrific -- it’s not lush, but it’s precise and incredibly evocative in a way that perfectly serves the wide-lens, third person, journalistic POV.

Hogarth, a division of Penguin Random House, will publish this book in March, and I predict that this is the book that will make Jonathan Miles a household name, at least among those households with avid readers of literary fiction. I read an advance review copy provided by the publisher. 

Best Books of 2017

via GIPHY

I read so much good stuff in 2017.  SO MUCH. I wouldn’t say that my reading mojo is completely back from my pre-divorce days-- I’m not going to hit 100 books read for the year, after all.  But I’ll probably finish somewhere in the 80s, and that’s not shabby.

To say that I haven’t blogged much this year would be to indulge in careless understatement. It hasn’t seemed as urgent to me, what with the political scene and human rights fiascos everywhere I turn. (It’s been much easier to lose myself in watching The Office, or The Crown, or The Wire.)

The thing is, though, most of my favorite books this year speak to the horrifying things that have left me feeling, if not precisely hopeless, then at least hopeless-adjacent; yet each book made me feel a little bit better after finishing it. Thus I’m summoning up what energy I have on a Saturday in December to pay tribute to these books, and if you have ever worked retail during the holidays, then you will know how much this is a labor of love.

First, the stats: I completed 79 books this year. Here’s how they break down. Numbers may add up a bit wonkily because many books qualify for multiple categories.

Fiction: 67
Nonfiction: 12
Female authors: 59
Male authors: 20
Audio: 8
Re-Reads: 13
Books for Young Readers: 19
Diversity challenge: 22
Books in translation: 3
Fan fiction: 4
Short story collections: 2

Curiously, three writers count for almost half of the reading I did by male authors this year: David Sedaris, Bill Bryson, and Frederick Backmann (who incidentally was the author of all three books I read in translation). I had rather more re-reads in 2017, as I often turn to my lifetime favorites of Harry Potter or any of the various Anne of Green Gables novels when in need of a comfort read, and I will not include any of those for my top ten list.

Thus, my top books of the year, in chronological order of my reading them, are:

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Definitely the most important novel published this fall, possibly the most important novel published this year.  I was lucky enough to read an early copy of this in the spring and ever since then I’ve been telling everybody who will listen to read it.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid would be the other novel published this year that could vie for most important of 2017.  Where Jesmyn Ward’s prose is searing, Mohsin Hamid’s is taut. They’re both nearly perfect. I remain disappointed that this book did not win the Booker prize this year.

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire lured me in with descriptions of the part of Massachusetts I currently called home, only to quickly take on greater import on a more global scale. She is compassionate and generous with her characters, who grapple with politics, family, immigration, and fundamentalism.

Local writer Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince is one of only two YA books on my list this year. I pick up Holly’s books to read when I want an escape, since her world building is utterly immersive, but then I remember how sharp an eye she has for politics that transcend the human realm and how much reading her books can inform my current world.

Wiley Cash is one the most gracious authors I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and The Last Ballad brings all of his storytelling powers to bear. Here he plays with the intersection of workers right with the racism and sexism of the era, bringing the story of real-life Ella Mae Wiggins to modern readers.

The author of the Orange-prize winning Song of Achilles returns to the classics with Circe, spanning the centuries-long life of the eponymous witch-goddess who was not content to play by the laws of the Olympians. I debated including it here simply because it will not publish until April 2018, but I liked it too much to exclude it.

Angie Thomas’s debut novel is the other YA book on my list, and it’s probably the most important book published in the world of young adult literature for 2017.  Powerful and emotional, and likely more effective in putting a human face on the Black Lives Matter movement than any work of nonfiction could be. 

Technically it was not published this year, but I was slow to pick up Amor Towles’ towering work of humanism because I had not been enamored of his previous novel, Rules of Civility. More the fool, me. It did flag for me around the 3/4 mark, but overall this meaty novel was immensely satisfying.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably the most important voice on the topic of race today, and in this collection of essays, one written for each year president Obama was in office, he probes the political underbelly in the US in clear and persuasive prose.

Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir is the second piece of nonfiction to make my list this year, despite its technical pub date for spring of 2018.  Each of her seventeen brushes with death is the jumping off point for an essay that examines life. Her writing is luminous and soul-searching, whether she’s recounting her childhood or reflecting on adulthood. 

Book Review: The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora

I read this book very quickly over the course of a couple of days, and it's just SO GOOD.  I don't read many short story collections, but this one is a bit different in that the stories are interconnected.  Less like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (which I liked a lot) and more like Frederick Reiken's Day For Night (which I loved).  So maybe this is a novel in stories.

Anyway, author Lauren Acampora grew up in a wealthy Connecticut suburb and couldn't wait to move away for college.  When circumstances demanded that she move back to her hometown, she kept her sanity by imagining the dark, inner lives of her friends and neighbors, and thus The Wonder Garden was born.

Acampora clearly has an eye for the bizarre and a taste that runs to the twisted side, and I had the feeling that I would love this book from reading the first story. The characters drop in and out, the point of view shifts for each chapter, and what the reader ends up with is a brilliant cross section of the dark underbelly of suburbia.

For example, in one story, a man is the house inspector for a young couple moving to this rarified and historic Connecticut town from New York City. The inspector turns up in a later story, as do the young couple, but now the husband has become a shaman and the wife takes a job in an antiques shop. There's a wealthy business man who bribes a brain surgeon to let him touch his wife's brain during a procedure, and all three show up one way or another in other chapters. There's the matron who is so dedicated to preserving her historical pre-revolutionary home that she can't understand why her children would rather go off to college to learn about post-colonial Africa than to stay home and learn how to make furniture by hand.  One of those children in a later chapter then attends a sort of love-in where the shaman has attained guru status. A wealthy couple become patrons of an art installation that infuriates the entire town, and pieces of the installation later find themselves at an antique shop for sale.

And so on.  While these myriad characters skim by on the surface, Acampora deftly exposes their secrets that writhe in the murky depths, stalking them from below.  Her overall vision of suburbia is masterful, occasionally verging on brilliant.  If you had David Sedaris take on the work of Edith Wharton, and if you added in a pinch of the madness from Where'd You Go Bernadette, you might have a good sense of The Wonder Garden.

I had the good fortune of meeting Lauren Acampora at Winter Institute a couple of weeks ago and attending a dinner hosted by Grove.  I was so taken with her description of her book and how it came to be that I read it as soon as it arrived home -- I flew home from the conference, but the books I collected in Asheville were shipped back via slow boat. Grove Atlantic will be publishing the book in May.  I happen to love the cover, which Acampora told me that her husband designed. He's a miniaturist and he created the scale model used in the photograph.

Book Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

It is a worldwide major publishing event when Japanese writer Haruki Murakami puts out a new book, and even bookstores in the US, a country not precisely exalted for either its love of literature or celebration of other cultures, hold midnight release parties for his books.

This is the story of Tsukuru, who narrates this story as a bachelor in his thirties but spends a lot of time exploring memories from his high school days when he was part of a group of five friends.  Best friends, to be exact, though Tsukuru always had a bit of a complex about his place in that circle.  His lack of self confidence leads him to think of himself as metaphorically "colorless, " a term derived from the names of his friends: each of them has a color in their name except for him.

Tsukuru is the only one who leaves Nagoya to attend university in Tokyo, and after his first year in college, he comes home one weekend, only to be informed, categorically, that none of his friends want to be friends any more.  Tsukuru isn't to call them or contact them in any way, and once the truth sinks in, his descends into a malestrom of depression from which he barely emerges. His friends' rejection of him colors (pun intended) all of his future relationships, or lack thereof.  He is unable to form emotional attachments or lasting relationships of any kind.

Sara, a woman he is dating, encourages him to track down these four friends and confront them with their desertion, to demand why they abandoned him so cruelly, and the second half of the book is dedicated to Tsukuru's efforts to do just that.

While I am glad that I read this novel, because I think it's important to read works in translation and because  I think Murakami is one of the world's most important novelists, I can't pretend that I really understood it. In fact, I've concluded that there is just too wide a chasm of cultural disconnect for me to "get" Murakami at all.  This is the third novel of his that I've read (not including a fourth novel that I never finished), and I don't think I'm any closer to an appreciation than I was before. To me, his dialogue is completely stilted, the depiction of suicide as both prolific and mundane is countercultural to the way most Americans approach or understand it, and the sex scenes are so overtly lacking in anything remotely erotic that I wonder why they're even present.  In fact, they read more like a technical manual.  They are the unsexiest sex scenes I have ever read. Those are just three generic examples from this book of how it didn't work for me as a reader, but I felt that away about the two previous novels of his that I've read, too. This is not, I hasten to add, because I think the American approach to suicide, sex, etc is the correct way and Murakami's is the wrong way; it's just that the American culture is what I know.  I just don't "get" him.

In fact, I feel about Murakami the same way I felt when I was studying French in college and trying to read a short story by Guy de Maupassant or a poem by Rimbaud. I was trying so hard to grasp the surface meaning in a language I was trying to learn that all of the substance underneath utterly slipped by.  That's how I feel about Murakami, except, of course, that here I'm reading an English translation. I'm absolutely convinced that I'm missing a world of meaning in his novels. Still, I'm glad that I put in the effort to read it, and I hope that one of my internet friends will share with me the genius that they see in his work.

My review wouldn't be complete without giving a nod to Chip Kidd for the fascinating design of this book, and a nod to Knopf for the beautiful production values.  Before I saw the actual book, the cover design didn't do much for me, but the physical book is very interesting and well put together. Tsukuru, represented by the "thumb" of the cover design, is shown as a map of subway or train lines (fitting, since he is a designer of train stations, and also for some spoilery reasons), while the fingers are the colors of his high school friends.

The four lines of the fingers are repeated on the tope of each page, and curiously, the pagination is printed in black with the exception of the number four, which is always printed in white. I have a half-cocked theory about this, but it might be a little spoilery to get into. Also, the endpapers in the book are all different colors: red and blue in the front, black and white in the back. Printing in the various colors, putting together a book like in general, is a very expensive proposition, so extra kudos to Knopf for undertaking it. Be sure to check it out--a lot of thought went into this design, more so than most novels and the book, at least the US edition, is worth seeing in person (for which read: worth buying in the physical format, not as an e-book).

The two front endpapers

Most page numbers looked like this except... 

...All of the pages with a four had the "4" printed in white, not black.

Caitlin Moran Readalong: Introductory Post

Hi, y'all, and welcome to the pre-publication readalong for Caitlin Moran's novel, How to Build a Girl! I'd like to extend a thank you to Harper Collins for sponsoring our fun; if you're following along and think you'd like to read the book, you can pre-order it here. 

This week we're introducing ourselves before diving into the discussion.  My name is Emily and I'm an independent bookseller by trade, and my blog, which is in its sixth year (egads--I had to look that up just now), is split more or less evenly between books and travel. Hence, my alter-ego Crowe both Flies and Reads. 

Now here's a little confession -- I've never read Caitlin Moran before. In fact, I only recently learned how to pronounce her name: Cat-lin.  But as an independent bookseller, I've sold lots of her books, and as a blogger and a feminist, I've read lots of rave reviews of her earlier books. Many of those reviews are from bloggers participating in this readalong, including What Red Read, Devouring Texts, Reading the Bricks, Reading Rambo, Nylon Admiral, and others.  Mostly I just want to read her because she gets that sexism is one of the hidden "-isms" of this world and I think she's funny and smart and wants all women (and men, too) to realize that feminism is neither a bad word nor an outmoded worldview.

Caitlin Moran herself might be checking in every now and then as we're discussing How to Build a Girl, and she sent me an email conveying her enthusiasm for what we're doing: 

 "...I just want to kiss you from here, because my three hobbies are long country walks, sexual activity and THE REVOLUTION, and every time another woman gets it - when they nod and go "I know what you're trying to do, dude. I'm with you" - it thrills my mascara-stained heart to bits and back.

So yes - thank you: endlessly, properly, and in an oddly un-British way. I hope you like the new book, How To Build A Girl - I wrote it with all the love I could, and I cried like a psychopath writing loads of it. "I'm moving me!" I wept. "I am mining my guts! I must stop talking to me in the third person!" And if you don't like it, let's just pretend it never happened, and move onto the next one. That's even better. It's called How To Be Famous..."

I can't wait to delve into our discussion.  So without further ado, here is the readalong schedule.  This is a comparatively short book, so we should be able to get a lot of mileage out of each section and it shouldn't be too difficult to complete each week's reading.  I'm trying to get something straightened out with the Linky folks, so until the linky appears, please leave a link to your post in the comments instead.  

July 7: intro
July 14: pp. 1-58 (part one)
July 21:pp. 61-128 ( chapters 5-10)
July 28: pp. 128-190(chapters 11-15)
Aug 4: 190-246 (chapters 16-20)
Aug 11: section #3 sends wrap-up

Reprise: Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

I'm off to Nashville, y'all. Home of the imitation Parthenon, country music and my husband's extended family, among other things. I'm trying really hard to post twice a week to the blog, so what follows is my original review of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, which I first read book back in August 2012.  I'm updating this review to include some information about the audio book, which I have recently listened to.  When I first read Bernadette, which I really liked, I claimed that it was the right book for me at the right time. Now, however, I might go so far as to say that it was simply the right book, full stop.  A book that I liked a couple of years ago has now become one of my favorite audio book experiences.  I absolutely loved it and I had several moments where I lingered in my car long after reaching my destination, just to stay immersed in the story.

Summary (from Goodreads): Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. 
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Oddly enough, I don't think this summary does much for the book, but two of the blurbs on it really work for me. Garth Stein says that it is "a compassionate look at family dysfunction, the paralysis of genius, and good old-fashioned parental love" and Jonathan Franzen "tore through this book with heedless pleasure." I had just finished reading a slew of YA books, I was hungry for some adult fare, and I had just a big enough gap of time to let myself indulge in some bookseller's guilt. That's right. I read a book that was already published, albeit recently (two weeks ago). 

Structurally the book is cobbled together, ostensibly by 15 year old Bee, from various emails, letters, and notes, with occasional first-person interjections from Bee to give a sense of cohesion. Usually I hate this kind of narrative structure, but the informality of the novel makes for a surprisingly good pairing. The epistolary excerpts are all written to, from, or are tangentially related to Bernadette, and my favorite parts were either those written by the heinous Audrey Griffin, Bernadette's neighbor and gnat-nemesis, or the ones Bernadette herself writes to Manjula Kapoor, the woman in India whom she hires to be her outsourced personal assistant.

You know how sometimes a book can come to you at just the right time and you really click with it?  And that same book, if you'd read it a month ago or a year in the future, might not have resonated with you at all?  That's how I feel about Where'd You Go, Bernadette. For whatever reason, I read this book at the right time and had so much fun doing it, but I also had the sense while reading it that if I'd come at it another time I would have simply put it down, unfinished.  Parts of it are incredibly funny, and I loved the send-up of the Seattle scene, that certain brand of parenting characterized by the "gnats," east coast elitism, Microsoft, the MacArthur genius grant, people's deep earnestness to be PC and inclusive, and everything else.

Is it realistic? Heavens, no! But I can forgive a book a good many things if it makes me laugh. There were lots of parts that I enjoyed but oddly enough I only dogeared one section. It's from a letter Bernadette has written to Manjula, asking her to make a Thanksgiving dinner reservation for her family. Clearly Bernadette realizes that it's pretty outlandish to email a person in India to call a restaurant in her own neighborhood for a reservations, so she gives equally outlandish reasons for doing so:

"There's always this guy who answers the phone...and he always says it in this friendly, flat Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don't like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they're interchangeable because they're both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn't be more mistaken.

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass--anything and everything--the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that....To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with a talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated accordingly. 

Yes, I'm done (26-27)."

Bernadette is full of rants just like that. I kind of love her, and I kind of want to slap her, but I don't see those things as being mutually exclusive. This book is both wry and funny with a postmodern, sly humor. I can't think of any truly great comps, but it falls somewhere along the spectrum of Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang, Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, and Rachel DeWoskin's Big Girl Small. It's not a book that has tremendous lasting power, and I'm a little surprised that it clicked so strongly with me in the moment, but like the Stones said, if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

(end of original review)

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The audio book is read by Kathleen Wilhoite, and I'll be honest with you: I didn't like her at first. Not at all.  By the time I came to the end, however, I was very impressed with Ms Wilhoite's rendering of the various characters (a few New Zealanders not withstanding). I laughed out loud so many times when listening to this book, which I expected since I laughed many times while reading it.  What I wasn't prepared for, however, was the number of times I wanted to cry while listening to it, since the book didn't have that effect on me at all. I was also completely caught up in Bee's excitement over things, and with Bernadette's anguish over the Twenty Mile House (you'll just have to read/listen to know what I mean) and the sheer ridiculosity, for lack of a better word, that just keeps on building and building until that particular bubble bursts. 

Seriously, I ended up loving this book on audio, to the point where I actually gave it a 5-star rating on Goodreads. I rarely do that. Hachette has recently lowered the price on the unabridged audio to just $14.99, so I bought one for myself and I encourage everybody who loves audio books to rush out now and buy it for yourself at that price. 

The only caveat I have for the audio is that if you're listening to it without having read it first, you will have to really pay attention to the epistolary parts: in other words, who is writing to whom. I occasionally skimmed over that in the book and had to go back to look things up, which is clearly more difficult to do with an audio.  

So, I'm curious.  Any of you readers have different experiences when reading vs listening to a book?  I know I read differently when I'm reading an e-book vs a physical book, so I guess it shouldn't come as quite the surprise to me that listening and reading engage different parts of the mind. 

Three Mini Reviews: Literary Fiction

Well, I had three lovely mini-reviews all written out to my satisfaction.  I had them saved and ready to post on Monday morning. And now they're all gone.  I am supremely unhappy with Blogger and Google. To say that I am feeling quite put out would be to engage in careless understatement.  But I will try to retrieve them from my memory, if not from my bloody computer, and re-create them for you.

The whole reason I was doing three mini-reviews is because of how little time I have left in March: I have to go to Boston on Sunday for the Boston Gift Show for work, I have to drive to Albany on Tuesday to talk about books on the radio with the good folks at WAMC, and then on Wednesday I leave for Nashville for four nights with my husband to visit Vanderbilt, Ann Patchett, Parnassus Books, and my husband's nephews, not necessarily in that order.

Boy Snow Bird by Helen Oyeyemi is one heckuva novel.  I started reading it back in January during Tika's minithon and became enthralled. Oyeyemi takes the Snow White fairy tale as a jumping off point for exploring a small 1950s town in Massachusetts. Boy, our narrator, has just escaped a terrible living situation in New York City and has gone off to seek her fortune on the train. Her narrative voice reminded me quite a bit of Katey Kontent's from Rules of Civility. In other words, she is self-assured, a little less worldly than she'd like her readers to think, bright, a little grating, a wee bit unreliable, and perhaps just the tiniest bit on the make.

Boy marries a man and becomes stepmother to Snow, a beautiful child. But when Boy has a daughter of her own, Bird is born with dark skin and it becomes clear to Boy that her husband and step daughter are Passing for White. This revelation unleashes the inner wicked step-mother in Boy, and the rest is mostly history. Oyeyemi stands things on their heads, the entire time stunning the reader with peerless prose. What is identity? What is beauty? What does it mean to be the fairest of them all?

I was so impressed with this book that it became my store's March selection for its signed First Editions Club.  But don't just take our word for it: read this review from the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review and see why other readers can see the rising international literary star that is Helen Oyeyemi.

I feel similar warmth towards Dinaw Mengestu's new novel, All Our Names, which I also first started reading at the same minithon as Boy, Snow Bird. Before I say anything about the novel, I first have to quote from The Millions: "A MacArthur genius, a 5 Under 35 awardee, and a 20 Under 40 recipient all walk into a bar and take a single seat because it's one person and his name is Dinaw Mengestu." Seriously, why aren't you reading him?  He is, without a doubt, the hottest ticket writing in the English language today.

Isaac (which may or may not be his real name), an immigrant from Ethiopia, by way of Uganda, and Helen, his social worker in a small unnamed college town in the American midwest of the early 1970s, are our two narrators.  They may or may not be in love; they are certainly a couple, but being in love implies a passion that neither one is really capable of showing, at least not there, at least not then. Isaac may or may not have been involved with the government overthrown in Uganda; Helen may or may not be deluding herself that life is satisfactory for her and that she and Isaac have a future together.  Very little is what it seems on the surface of this novel, and that's the brilliant subtlety of Mengestu's writing. He writes between the spoken and the unspoken. His characters live between present and the past. And their lives are haunted by the living and the dead.

I didn't pick up on this as I was reading the novel, but when Mengestu was at my store last week, he touched on the parallels between America and much of Africa during the early 1970s.  Both places had just undergone periods of major upheaval in the previous decade--the Civil Rights era of the US, the anti-colonial movement in much of Africa--and yet those years were also marked by hope and idealism. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the hope had given way to disillusionment in both places.

Mengestu's new novel is also a pick for my store's signed First Editions Club.  I couldn't have been prouder to welcome him to South Hadley.

I first requested a copy of Violet Kupersmith's short story collectionn, The Frangipani Hotel, when I heard that the author was a 2011 graduate of Mount Holyoke College. My interest stayed piqued, however, once I delved into the stories themselves. Kupersmith takes traditional ghost stories of Vietnam and re-creates them in a modern setting.The blend of supernatural lore and the country's history wouldn't be complete without the presence of that other, all-pervasive specter: the Vietnam war.

Most of the stories take place in Vietnam, either the countryside or in Ho Chi Minh city, and while the ghosts take many forms, they seem comfortable interacting with Vietnamese and visitors alike. The blend of creepiness and whimsy is balanced perfectly, and I love what publisher Cindy Spiegel writes in the note to the reader at the front of my advance reading copy: the spirits are "as ordinary as the neighbor next door, and yet they carry with them the weight of history in the Vietnamese immigrant experiences and are informed by a rich storytelling tradition."

I don't read much horror, and this isn't Horror with a Capital H anyway, but the more subtle, slowly-get-under-your-skin variety. If you've read the excellent story collection by Yoko Ogawa called Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, you'll have an idea of what to expect, but whereas those stories weren't really rooted in the specific culture of Japan, Kupersmith's are richly evocative of the atmosphere of Vietnam.

NB: I read all three of these books in advance reading copy form, which were provided upon my request from the publishers: Viking, Knopf, and Spiegel & Grau, respectively. The first two books are available now and the last one will be published on April 1, 2014. No foolin'. 

Vacation Reading and Some Book Reviews

My physical book pile.

So today is our second full day in Anguilla and I'm already a little panicky: I have finished reading my third book.  What if I run out of things to read? As always, my husband and I check a suitcase full of books and gifts when we travel here, and this year I even loaded up my Kobo with e-galleys to be on the safe side.  But this afternoon I just finished my third book, so I'm starting to get a little antsy. I have 15 physical books and 13 e-books and 13 days left of my vacation, so I'm sure I won't actually run out of books to read, but I still fret.

Please be aware that some spoilers lie ahead.

Choosing one's airplane read is even more important than choosing one's vacation reads, which is why I test-drove every physical book that earned a place in my suitcase/backpack. This year I struck gold by taking Holly Black's forthcoming The Coldest Girl in Coldtown for my plane read.  It's immediately engaging and well-written, and clearly this is not your daughter's vampire novel.  True, it's a young adult book, but Holly wrote this book in homage to the great vampire works she read growing up.  If you think vampire books begin and end with Twilight and thus haven't given them a fair shake, give this one a go.

Tana lives in a slightly futuristic world where a rogue vampire decided to break all of the ritualist rules of Vampire Secrecy by infecting hundreds and hundreds of people with the Cold, and they, in turn, infected thousands and thousands and so on. This created worldwide havoc, but at least in the US there are a handful of Coldtowns, where vampires and humans live side by side in an uneasy alliance: humans allow vamps to feed on them just a little via IV tubes rather than by biting (which spreads the Coldness), and therefore the vamps' food source doesn't dry up (literally) and the humans can keep on being human and not Cold.

One day, Tana wakes up from an all night party to discover she is the only partygoer left alive from a mass vampire attack. When she discovers Aidan, an exboyfriend infected with the Cold, and Gavriel, a mysterious but insane vampire, chained up in a bedroom, her split decision to try to rescue them both by driving to the nearest Coldtown changes all of their lives. You'll find no romanticized notion of vampires, no helpless heroine, and no love triangles here.  Instead, you'll get a moral-but-complicated-heroine who often doesn't know what the right thing to do is, plus a vampire who is unhinged, secretive, and seductive. In other words, this book is thoroughly fun and refreshing.

NoViolet Bulawayo's debut novel, We Need New Names is decidedly not fun and refreshing.  Unless by "fun and refreshing" you mean "dark and disturbing, with a side of bleak." It's the story of a girl named Darling who grows up in Zimbabwe but later moves to America to live with her aunt. No matter where she lives, she is longing for the other country and unable to confront that longing head-on.

She and her best friends, Chipo, Bastard, Godknows, and Sbho, are only around 10-11 when the book opens, but already they inhabit dual worlds of innocence and worldliness that juxtapose sinisterly.  A scene in which the kids are sneaking off to Budapest (a wealthy neighborhood far from their shantytown) to steal guavas to assuage their hunger pangs but joking about breaking into the houses to steal other things, is echoed later in the book when an angry mob on a rampage destroys a house, drop-kicks a dog to its death, and drives away the wealthy white occupants--the kids watch in terror and then  pour into the emptied house to make their own brand of mischief.

Or when Darling, Sbho, and a new neighbor want to re-enact a scene from ER because they want to emulate the beautiful and successful doctors on TV, only to come dangerously close to inflicting real harm to pregnant Chipo with their wire hanger and herbs mixed with urine as abortants. Not to mention the scene when Chipo breaks her voluntary muteness to finally tell Darling how she got pregnant (raped by a family member), and Darling's response: "I watch her and she has this look I have never seen before, this look of pain. I want to laugh that her voice is back, but her face confuses me and I can also see she wants me to say something, something maybe important, so I say, Do you want to go and steal guavas?"

In other words, Bulawayo breaks your heart with these characters while she makes you want yell and scream at them, and then you remember that they're only children and your heart breaks all over again.  This is a strong debut but not a comfortable read. I definitely recommend it.

NB:  I read advance reading copies of each of these books, which were provided upon my request by my sales reps.  We Need New Names was published by Little, Brown in May 2013 and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown will be published in September 2013. 

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.