Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review: The Returned by Jason Mott

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Book Review: The Returned by Jason Mott

The ReturnedThe Returned is a brand-new release by a first-time author — and fortunately for the author, it’s gotten a tremendous amount of advance buzz, perhaps in large part because it’s already been snatched up by Brad Pitt’s production company and is scheduled to debut in 2014 as a TV series (with the title Resurrection – see here for more information on the TV show).

Not a bad beginning! But is it worth the hype?

In The Returned, dead people start showing up all around the globe — not as zombies or creatures out of horror stories, but simply picking up where they left off at the time of their death. They come back, whole and healthy, and if they remember where they’ve been or know why they’re back, they’re not saying.

The Returned, as the formerly deceased are known, reappear suddenly and in random locations. In the central storyline, 8-year-old Jacob appears one day by a river in a small fishing village in China, and it is up to the Bureau — an international agency hastily funded to manage the Returned — to get Jacob back where he belongs. Where Jacob belongs is in the tiny, isolated Southern town of Arcadia with his parents Harold and Lucille, now in their 70s… who never really recovered from their son’s tragic death fifty years earlier.

What plays out in microcosm in Arcadia is happening everywhere. More and more Returned keep appearing, and what people first viewed as miraculous has now started making them nervous. Just how many are there? Will it ever stop? Where are we going to put them all? Eventually, the Bureau stops focusing on reunions and soon shifts its mission to one of containment. Before long, Returned are living in increasingly squalid camps behind wire fences and with soldiers on patrol — but as it quickly becomes apparent, no camps can ever be big enough for the never-ending flood of Returned.

In some ways, The Returned tells two very different stories. On the one hand, it’s an exploration of love, parenting, and family. We meet Harold and Lucille as two elderly, somewhat ornery but likeable folks, getting on with their lives, with their aches and pains, bickering and scolding as only a long-married couple can. As Jacob reenters their lives, they confront their losses over time, what it meant for them to lose their child, and how their lives might have been different if they’d had Jacob all along. They also must adjust to being parents of an eight-year-old at a time when they might more naturally be grandparents — and confront the inevitable question facing all families of Returned: Is this person really their son? Is he really a person? What does it mean to have him back? And is he back for good?

The chapters focusing on this fractured and then reunited family are touching in their small details — Lucille’s need to feed Jacob and check up on him whenever he’s out of arm’s reach, Harold’s resumption of the ordinary daily rituals that used to be a part of the father-son relationship, like swimming in the river and teaching him knock-knock jokes. By extension, we get to know more of the townspeople and see how the phenomenon of the Returned impacts all of them, for good or for bad, in some cases bringing up memories of horrible events, for others a longing for a lost loved one who hasn’t Returned.

On the other hand, as the book approaches its climax, the tone shifts into something a bit more action-oriented, focusing on the cramped quarters of the camp that has taken over the entire town and the enraged townsfolk who want to get rid of the Returned by any means possible. It’s a powder keg that is bound to explode, and the inevitable results are violent and sad. For me, these parts of the book reminded me in various ways of Under the Dome by Stephen King, Haters by David Moody, and The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta — and certainly , shades of Torchwood: Miracle Day (for those who appreciate the geeky side of TV). None are a perfect comparison, but bits and pieces and certain themes definitely brought these other books to mind.

Overall, I liked The Returned quite a bit, although the climax and resolution didn’t entirely work for me. The parts of the book that deal with the emotional impact of the return of lost loved ones were evocative and emotional, and I truly enjoyed the lovely little moments at play as tentative new bonds are explored between family members separated by death decades earlier. The dilemmas the characters face seem realistic for people facing impossible situations and choices, and it’s easy for the reader to sympathize with their struggles and feel invested in their lives. Yet once the narrative becomes centered on the violent outcomes of the treatment of the Returned, the book in some ways became more ordinary for me. As an action story, it isn’t much that we haven’t seen before, in one shape or another. It’s the more personal moments that set this book apart and make The Returned such an interesting read — and I only wish that the focus had remained more on the relationships rather than moving into (dare I say it?) practically a dystopian set-piece by the end.

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The details:

Title: The Returned
Author: Jason Mott
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Publication date: 2013
Genre: Fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of Harlequin MIRA via NetGalley

Book Review: Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole

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Book Review: Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole

Letters from SkyeIn this romantic look at wartime love, letters hold the key. Letters From Skye is told entirely via letters written during two different but very similar time periods. The main story follows the correspondence that blossoms between poet Elspeth Dunn, on her faraway, windswept Isle of Skye off the northern coast of Scotland, and David Graham, an impetuous American college student who has mustered the courage to write a fan letter to an author he admires. Their correspondence begins in 1912 and continues through the first World War. As Elspeth and David write letters, they come to know one another deeply and intimately, until — almost inevitably — they declare their love and seek each other in real life as well as on paper.

In parallel to this piece of the story is the correspondence of Margaret, Elspeth’s 20-ish daughter, taking place in 1940 and relating to her fiance Paul the strange circumstances of her mother’s disappearance during an air raid on Edinburgh and her discovery that her mother has kept a hidden cache of mysterious letters for over twenty years.

From Margaret’s side of the story, we learn that Elspeth has raised Margaret on her own and has never shared any information with Margaret about her father — so while we’re reading the love letters of Elspeth and David and seeing how their commitment and passion for one another grows, we’re also aware that something must have happened to separate them. The suspense in Letters From Skye comes from this contrast, knowing that these two were madly in love in the 1910s, yet knowing also that in 1940, David has not been a part of Elspeth’s life for as long as Margaret can remember.

In Letters From Skye, the romance is heightened by the urgency of war, and indeed Elspeth has warned Margaret not to rush into a wartime engagement, when sentiments are heightened and no one takes the time to think things through. Clearly, she’s speaking from experience, but are her assumptions about what took place in her own past correct?

There’s much to love in Letters From Skye. Jessica Brockmole succeeds exceedingly well at painting pictures of the various times and places in the novel through the characters’ letters. We get from Elspeth a great sense of what her isolated life on Skye is like, with her views of the sea and hills, the lonely winters and hard rains, the dependence on family and the judgments of the neighboring townsfolk. From David, we get a grand view of privileged American youth in its heyday, playing pranks on campus, itching to get to the glory of the battlefield without any true conception of what horrors really await in the trenches. From Margaret, we get the feeling of incredulity as German bombs fall on the homes and streets of Edinburgh and London, as well as the privations of a country living on rations and sending their children off to the relative safety of the countryside.

While Letters From Skye is primarily a love story, it also does a very effective job of conveying the experience of life in wartime, both from the perspective of the women on the homefront and through the eyes of men on the front lines. Our culture often romanticizes these wars, but Letters From Skye makes abundantly clear that while love may flourish in the pressure-cooker of war, there’s nothing romantic about war itself.

The many threads of the storyline come together nicely by the end, and we learn that there is much more to understand about the past than any of the characters had realized. Misunderstandings and the tragedies of war conspire to separate lovers, and it takes the diligent digging of Elspeth’s daughter until all the various players understand what happened and why. While some of the answers ultimately may seem a bit familiar or predictable, it works nonetheless.

Telling the story through the medium of letters is very effective here, as we readers aren’t simply reading about two people and their growing connection — we’re a part of it. As we read their letters, it’s like a peek into David and Elspeth’s inner lives, and we are privy to their most intimate thoughts and feelings. We absolutely want them together, and it’s heartbreaking for the reader to see the obstacles that separate them, seemingly forever. I felt very invested in David and Elspeth by the end of the book, and while I’ve described the events of the ending as a bit predictable, that in no way detracts from impact that the resolution had on me. I simply couldn’t rest (it was just about midnight when I finished this book) until I found out what happened and why — and what the characters could expect next in their lives.

It was worth staying up for, believe me. I enjoyed Letters From Skye, felt a great connection to the characters, and truly cared about their fates. I’d say that qualifies as a success! Letters From Skye is author Jessica Brockmole’s first novel. I hope we’ll hear much more from her in years to come.

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The details:

Title: Letters from Skye
Author: Jessica Brockmole
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publication date: 2013
Genre: Historical fiction/romance
Source: Library book

 

Book Review: The Humans by Matt Haig

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Book Review: The Humans by Matt Haig

The HumansThe Humans is full of such wonderful writing that I almost turned into one of THOSE people. You know the ones I mean. The super-annoying ones who interrupt you every five minutes to read you yet another quote from the book they claim is totally fabulous. Awful, right? Yet in this case, I would have been perfectly justified. The Humans is, in fact, fabulous — and absolutely loaded with quote-worthy lines and passages that practically beg to be read out loud to whatever audience is available.

What’s it about? In a nutshell, The Humans is the story of an alien from a world far, far away… and light-years ahead of Earth in terms of understanding technology. When an Earthling mathematician named Andrew Martin makes a startling breakthrough that could, unbeknownst to him, completely change life for humans in ways detrimental to the rest of sentient life in the universe, the Vonnadorians decide he must be stopped.

An alien impersonator is sent to assume the life of Andrew Martin, figure out how much damage has been done, and then wipe out all evidence of his progress — which means eliminating not just computer files and notes, but also his wife, son, best friend, and anyone else who may have learned of Martin’s leap forward.

Faux-Andrew (he doesn’t actually have a name) shows up in Cambridge naked as a jaybird and has but minutes to adapt to life on Earth. Almost inevitably, he ends up in a psychiatric ward diagnosed with a mental breakdown, then is sent home to recover. And it is here that complications arise. The real Andrew Martin was kind of a jerk: completely absorbed in his work, completely neglectful of his vulnerable teen-aged son Gulliver and his lovely but ignored wife Isobel. But faux-Andrew, in his quest to complete his mission, actually pays attention to the people around him as he tries to ferret out what they know and what real-Andrew has told them… and the results are interesting, touching, and not at all what the alien visitor expects.

The Humans shows us what we Earthlings look like from an outsider’s perspective, and it’s not terribly flattering, especially at first. To be frank, humans are kind of disgusting:

I was repulsed, terrified. I had never seen anything like this man. The face seemed so alien, full of unfathomable openings and protrusions. The nose, in particular, bothered me. It seemed to my innocent eyes as if there was something else inside him, pushing through.

More than appearances, it’s the humans’ behavior that confounds the alien. The emotions, the beliefs in consumerism, religion, the micro-focus on their own small worlds and concerns while ignoring the greater events of the universe — all of this is completely bewildering and leads the alien to consider humans to be devoid of any sense of values:

The news was prioritized in a way I could not understand. For instance, there was nothing on new mathematical observations or still-undiscovered polygons, but quite a bit about politics, which on this planet was essentially all about war and money. Indeed, war and money seemed to be so popular on the news, it should more accurately have been titled The War and Money Show.

However, as he spends time among humans, things start to change. Faux-Andrew starts to feel, and has to reconsider whether a world such as his own — without pain, without change, without death, and without flaw — is really the best life has to offer. When faux-Andrew starts to feel pain, he also starts to feel love, and to realize that pleasant and easy are not substitutes for the things in life that have to be fought for — like relationships with people who matter, who hurt and who can cause hurt, and for whom he’d be willing to sacrifice his own well-being if that’s what it takes to protect them.

Ultimately, as faux-Andrew learns more and more about the people of this planet, The Humans become a meditation on what it means to be human. It’s quite lovely, actually. As voiced by a true alien, the homilies and lessons learned come across as real discoveries, not just a recitation of truisms or wisdom for the ages à la Everything I Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Even in a chapter that consists of a numbered list of faux-Andrew’s pointers to Gulliver, entitled “Advice for a Human”, the words of wisdom avoid being treacly. Instead, the advice is concise, real, bittersweet, and often funny, and sum up a view of humans that we lack the distance and perspective to see for ourselves.  Some of my favorites:

6. Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.

25. There is only one genre in fiction. The genre is called “book”.

33. You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of the humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don’t worry about it.

37. Don’t always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It’s the warm bits that matter.

47. A cow is a cow even if you call it beef.

75. Politeness is often fear. Kindness is always courage. But caring is what makes you human. Care more, become more human.

I could go on and on… see what I mean about how quote-worthy this book is? I honestly can’t stop marking pages and lines that I think are just wonderful.

So maybe that’s where I should leave this review: by saying that The Humans is a wonderful book. The writing is an amazing balance of clever, funny, and a straight-to-the-heart emotional punch. The plot is smart and creative, and our first-person narrator, the unnamed alien, is more human than most actual humans by the end of the story.

The Humans is the third book I’ve read by Matt Haig, having previously read the vampires-in-suburbia novel The Radleys and the Hamlet retelling The Dead Fathers Club (my review is here). I’ve loved all three; at this point, I can safely say that I’ll be reading more by Matt Haig — much more, I hope.

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The details:

Title: The Humans
Author: Matt Haig
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 2013
Genre: Book 🙂
Source: Library book

Book Review: The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

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Book Review: The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike, #1)OK, we all know the drama around The Cuckoo’s Calling, right? Initially released in April of this year by an  unknown author, Robert Galbraith — purportedly a veteran of the Royal Military Police — the book was later revealed to be the work of J. K. Rowling, writing under a pseudonym. I know this has raised the hackles of all sorts of folks professing outrage — but really, why the fuss? I’m just glad to have a new J. K. Rowling book to read, and I think it’s rather marvelous for her that she was able to  have fun writing something new and different without all the intense media scrutiny that accompanies her “event” books.

With that out of the way… how was the book?

Let me start by saying that I am not in general a reader of mysteries, at least not on a regular basis. Therefore, I can’t really judge how this book fits within the norms of the genre. What I can do is assess how it works as fiction — and in my opinion, it works just fine.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a murder mystery, but actually the most interesting part for me was the introduction of a fascinating main character, private investigator Cormoran Strike. Strike is an army veteran, a skilled and respected member of the Special Investigative Branch of the British military, who has rejoined civilian life after losing a leg in Afghanistan. Strike is excellent at what he does and seems to be very well connected, yet when we meet him, he has just ended a tumultuous, dysfunctional relationship, is at the end of his rope financially, and has set up a camp bed in his office rather than admitting to his friends and relatives that he has no place to live.

Fortunately for Strike, he is approached by the brother of an old school chum and asked to take on the investigation of his sister’s death. The deceased is supermodel Lula Landry, and the police inquest proved that she committed suicide by jumping from her apartment balcony. Her brother, however, is convinced that there’s more to the story, and convinces  Strike to take the case. Despite misgivings about the validity of the brother’s claims, Strike agrees to investigate — after all, the promised fees are quite high, and he needs the cash.

As Strike digs deeper, we enter the world of fashion and super-celebrity, gossip and fame, and all sorts of tawdry secrets begin to emerge. The more Strike pokes around, the more he realizes that Lula may not have ended her own life, and he becomes committed to finding the truth about what he now is sure is a case of murder.

Unraveling the events of the day and night of Lula’s death gets quite complicated, and Strike finds sources in the unlikeliest places, from the security guard on duty to the fashion designer who saw Lula as his angel, from the limo driver to the drug-addicted boyfriend to the homeless woman Lula met in rehab. All have secrets to hide as well as information to impart, and all to seem to have something at stake. For Cormoran Strike, this case may prove to be a fresh start at a revitalized PI business — but he has to survive it first.

I found The Cuckoo’s Calling fascinating, and raced through it as quickly as I could. At 450+ pages, it did take quite a bit of time — and boy, did I resent having to put it down for little things like sleep and work. It’s compelling stuff. The plot moves quickly, with so many twists and turns that it became a bit tough to keep all the details and minor players straight. No matter — piece by piece, as Strike assembles shreds of evidence, it all comes together, and the end result is startling and yet completely thought out. The details come together nicely, and J. K. Rowling has left no loose threads or contradictions to undermine the resolution of the mystery.

As always, the author excels at creating sharply defined, memorable characters. Aside from Strike, I very much enjoyed the character of Robin, a young woman assigned as a temp to Strike’s office, who finds herself drawn into his investigation and becomes devoted to assisting Strike, personally and professionally. Many of the minor characters are quite good as well, from Lula’s Valium-addled, terminally ill adoptive mother to Strike’s entirely absent celebrity rocker of a father (whom Strike has met only twice in his life, Strike being the illegitimate offspring of a renowned super-groupie).

Perhaps my main quibble with The Cuckoo’s Calling lies with J. K. Rowling’s tendency to portray morally repugnant people as physically repulsive as well. In Harry Potter, we could not read about Severus Snape without hearing about his greasy hair, sallow skin, and hooked nose. In The Cuckoo’s Calling, there are three characters who come to mind who are just awful people — nasty, out for themselves, money-grubbing — and their descriptions make clear that we should find them disgusting:

She was wearing a pink Lycra vest top under a zip-up gray hoodie, and leggings that ended inches above her bare gray-white ankles. There were grubby flip-flops on her feet and many gold rings on her fingers; her yellow hair, with its inches of graying brown root, was pulled back into a dirty toweling scrunchie.

Within the next few paragraphs that follow, we read about her “straw-like strands of hair”, “pouchy eyes” and even the fact that when she inhales on her cigarette, the lines around her mouth resemble “a cat’s anus”. Another character is “as ugly as his pictures, bull-necked and pockmarked”, “his eyes tiny between pouches of flesh, black moles sprinkled over the swarthy skin.” In a third instance, Strike observes that an obstructionist police officer “leaned back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head, revealing dried patches of sweat on the underarms of his shirt. The sharp, sour, oniony smell of BO wafted across the desk.”

Aside from this annoyance, I found the characters, major and minor, to be well-defined and developed, and much more fleshed out as real people than the characters in The Casual Vacancy, most of whom I considered rather one-dimensional types rather than fully realized personalities. I was especially intrigued by Cormoran Strike himself. His personal story leaves a lot of room for future “investigation” — his military history, his mother’s own mysterious death, his superstar father, the crazy ex-fiancee — and I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about all of these in future books.

And that’s the best news of all: J. K. Rowling has indicated that The Cuckoo’s Calling is likely to be the first in a series of books written under the Galbraith pseudonym and centering on Cormoran Strike. He’s a terrific character, and I would be happy to read much, much more about him.

Bottom line? I enjoyed this book tremendously. The plot is completely engrossing, Rowling is in fine command of the details, and the writing zips along. As I’ve said, I’m not much of a mystery reader and can’t compare The Cuckoo’s Calling to other books in the mystery genre. But taken on its own merit, as a novel with a well-drawn world, a great central problem to resolve, and strong characters, it’s a winner. Do I recommend it? Absolutely.

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The details:

Title: The Cuckoo’s Calling
Author: Robert  Galbraith (aka J. K. Rowling)
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company
Publication date: 2013
Genre: Contemporary fiction/Mystery
Source: Library book

At a Glance: Trash Can Days by Teddy Steinkellner

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Trash Can Days: A Middle School Saga

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

Jake Schwartz is not looking forward to middle school. Puberty feels light-years away; he’s not keen on the cool clothes or lingo; and he has the added pressure of preparing for his bar mitzvah. The only saving grace is that Danny Uribe, his lifelong best friend, will be by his side…

Or will he? Since Danny’s summer growth spurt, there’s been a growing distance between him and Jake. Danny is excited to explore all that junior high has to offer…especially the girls (and most notably Hannah, Jake’s older sister). But gang life has its allure, too, and he soon finds himself in over his head.

Meanwhile, Hannah is dealing with her own problems–being queen bee is not easy. The other girls are out for blood, and boys are so…exhausting. Danny surprises her with his maturity, but can Hannah’s reputation survive if she’s linked to a sevvy? And what would Jake think about her hooking up with his best friend?

Dorothy Wu could not care less about junior-high drama. She is content to stay in her bedroom and write epic stories of her adventures as a warrior mermaid maiden. But that changes when she discovers the school’s writing club. There, she meets a young lad with heroic potential and decides that life outside her fantasy world just might have some appeal.

In the course of one year at San Paulo Junior High, these four lives will intersect in unique and hilarious ways. Friendships will grow and change. Reputations will be transformed. And maybe someone will become a man.

My thoughts:

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy Trash Can Days, for two main reasons:

1) The ages just seemed… off. This is a book about 7th and 8th graders, but the tone was really off for a middle school story. Between the Hollywood producer’s kids’ privileged lives, the gang turf wars, the online cattiness, and the “slut shaming” that happens far too frequently in a relatively short period of time, I felt that the content was not believable or realistic, given the ages of the characters. Perhaps if the setting had been a high school, it might have worked better. As is, I just didn’t buy it.

2) The main events and characterizations also felt strange and off-target. Oddball character Dorothy Wu comes across as a caricature and is not credible for a second as an actual 7th grader. Her weirdness — and then sudden triumphant change to a leadership role in the school — just doesn’t work at all. And this problem is consistent throughout the book — all of the various point-of-view characters and their storylines come across as an adult’s idea of what “kids today” are like. I didn’t buy any of it — not the Hollywood princess and her boy trouble, not the uncool younger boy, and definitely not the boy lured into gang life and violence. The pieces don’t mesh together, and none of it was believable. Additionally, the book can’t seem to settle on a tone — at times it feels almost satirical; other times, it’s deadly earnest about the pressures of middle school life. The jumps between flip and serious are jarring and don’t help the story at all. The synopsis uses the word “hilarious” — and this book definitely is not.

I struggled to finish Trash Can Days, and I can’t say that I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t recommend it for middle school-age kids, as the subject matter seems much older — yet I think it’s a bit too jokey and light-weight for the young adult market. I’m not sure where this book really belongs, and that’s one of the problems.

I’d looked forward to reading Trash Can Days. Sadly, I can’t recommend it.

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The details:

Title: Trash Can Days
Author: Teddy Steinkellner
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Publication date: 2013
Genre: Middle Grade (per Amazon, ages 10 and up)
Source: Review copy courtesy of Disney-Hyperion via NetGalley

Book Review: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer

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Book Review: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

The impossible happens once to each of us.

From the very first line, author Andrew Sean Greer sets the stage for a magical, impossible, emotional journey as we follow one woman through three different lives in three very different times.

Who among us hasn’t at one time or another sighed, “I was born in the wrong era” or some similar sentiment?

In The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, we meet a woman who gets a strange and miraculous chance to experience her life not just in her current world of the mid 1980s, but also in 1918 and 1941. After being treated for severe depression with electro-convulsive therapy, Greta slips into alternative versions of her life, where the familiar and the strange collide. It’s not time travel, but rather a shift in reality, a journey to an alternate universe in which Greta and the people in her life are the same people, but facing very different choices and circumstances.

Greta is a twin, and her brother Felix is the center of her universe. It is Felix’s death in 1985 during the “plague years” of the AIDS epidemic that pushes Greta first into depression and then on her impossible journey into two other versions of herself. In 1985, Greta’s long-term lover Nathan has just left her after she pushed him away during Felix’s illness. In 1918, Greta is a young wife to Nathan, an army doctor away in the trenches of WWI, but she faces her own set of disappointments and fears. And in 1941, with America on the brink of war, Greta and Nathan are married with a child, but Greta has suffered the loss of her beloved aunt Ruth and is beset by worries over Felix’s own unhappiness.

As Greta moves between lives, she leaves a footprint. She becomes convinced that her purpose is to perfect the alternate lives she inhabits — but she’s not the only one. 1918 Greta and 1941 Greta are on this journey as well, so that “our” Greta finds her own world changed by the imprints left by the others as they circle through one another’s lives.

Confused yet? It is a lot to track, and at times (many times) I found myself flipping back to double-check just which version of Greta’s life I was in now, and just where we’d left off that time around.

It’s fascinating to visit New York of 1918 and 1941, to see the roles available to women — housewives, mothers, lovers — and how those changed over time. Equally fascinating, and quite touching as well, is the view into life for a gay man in those times. In 1985, Greta is destroyed by Felix’s loss . She finds him alive and well in 1918 and 1941, but living lives defined by hiding, pretending, and sublimating. Part of Greta’s quest is to help Felix be happy in the worlds left to him; in his “real” life, Felix was an exuberantly joyful man, and although he (like so many others) died too soon, he was able to live his brief life to the fullest, surrounded by friends and loved by a good man. As 1985 Greta meets Felix again and again, she pushes him to find a way to live in his world and at the same time to seek love and truth in whatever way he can.

The writing in The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is lyrical and lovely, full of moments of quiet emotion and heart-breaking truths. In Greta’s first visit to 1918, she is literally stopped in her tracks by seeing a familiar young man on the street — a man who in her own world of 1985 was but one of the many young men struck down by AIDS:

Laughing again, turning, looking around at me: familiar young men appearing in this unfamiliar world. Men who had died months or years before from the plague miraculously revived! There, in an army uniform, was the boy who made jewelry from papier-mâché beads; he died in the spring. And that one soldier, the stark blond Swede jumping from the streetcar, once sold magazines; he’d died two years before, one of the first: the cave’s canary. Who know how many more were off to war? Alive, each one, alive and more than alive — shouting, laughing, running down the street!

Of course, in the joy of seeing these young men alive once more, Greta is overlooking the fact that other perils await. There’s a war on, and although armistice is around the corner, some of these bright young men, “miraculously revived”, will not make it through the war. It was interesting to see the parallels drawn by the author between the great calamities each age: In 1918 and 1941, it was world war that took the lives of so many as such a young age; in 1985, it was the AIDS plague that seemed to wipe out a generation, so that by the time Greta attends the most recent in a string of funerals, there’s almost no one left to be mourners, all of the deceased’s friends having been taken already.

I couldn’t stop reading, once I’d started, and I probably made a mistake in gobbling it up quite so fast. The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells has an engrossing plot, but in my rush to see what happens next, I didn’t take as much time as I should have to savor the rich characters and the extraordinary use of language. This is not a long book, but it felt jam-packed — with the jumps through time, with vivid period details, with sights and smells that take you immediately into the worlds of 1918, 1941, and 1985 — so that by the time I reached the end, I felt like I’d experienced something much more than 289 pages of a fictional tale.

The simplest way for me to sum up? I was swept away by the magical possibilities of living three versions of a life, and was enchanted by Greta’s journey. Filled with fully-realized characters and given life by a unique premise, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is a reading experience to enjoy in the moment, and then to ponder for hours afterward.

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The details:

Title: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 2013
Genre: Adult Fiction
Source: Purchased

Book Review: Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg

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Book Review: Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg

Openly StraightThe main thing I want to say about Openly Straight is that I loved it. But that’s not a very helpful book review, is it?

Okay, I’ll get more specific. What’s it about and why did I love it?

Openly Straight is the story of Seamus Rafael Goldberg (but call him Rafe, unless you’re his best friend Claire Olivia, in which case “Shay Shay” is acceptable). Rafe is going into his junior year of high school and is frankly quite tired of being the gay kid. Not that he’s ashamed or wishes he was other than he is. It’s just that Rafe has grown up in Boulder, Colorado with parents who are totally loving free spirits — parents who threw him a party when he came out in 8th grade, complete with party hats that said “Yay! Rafe is Gay!” on them (I kid you not). Rafe’s mom is the president of Boulder’s PFLAG chapter, and Rafe regularly speaks at local schools about being gay, answering kids’ questions and in general being the face of “gayness”. To the extent that when the civil rights movement was discussed in history class, Rafe was asked for the “gay perspective”, and random girls at school approach Rafe to get “gay” input on current events.

Finally, Rafe decides to change his life and enrolls at the Natick School, an all-boys boarding school in Massachusetts. Tiny detail he neglects to share with his parents: At Natick, he intends to not be gay. That is, he’ll still know he’s gay, but he’s not going to tell anyone. He’s tired of being seen first and foremost as gay, rather than just as Rafe, and he’s determined to start fresh with a new school and see what it’s like to just be one of the guys.

And at first, it’s kind of brilliant. He gets invited to play football! He’s accepted by the jocks! Guys include him in their guy-talk, and he’s seen as that cool new kid from Colorado. But as Rafe forms one particularly close friendship with a truly wonderful boy, the downside of his plan becomes apparent. Can he form a real friendship — and maybe more — when he’s hiding such a key piece of himself from the world? When does not telling — a passive act of omission — turn into actively lying?

It’s quite the dilemma. When Rafe finally tells his parents and Claire Olivia what he’s doing, they’re appalled and question him about going back in the closet. Rafe states that he’s not back in the closet; he knows who he is, but he chooses to keep it private — but is he just fooling himself? On the one hand, it’s easy to see the appeal for Rafe. Finally, he’s able to make friends and go through school without labels. He’s just the new kid, a decent soccer player, pretty fun to hang around, but not especially different than the rest of the gang. Rafe is careful to keep his head down. Despite his interest in writing, he declines to join the literary magazine for fear of drawing the jocks’ attention to his non-jock-like interests. And yet, as the school year progresses, Rafe comes up against more and more situations that make him uncomfortable, and the lies start piling up.

There’s a love story at the heart of Openly Straight, and it’s beautifully told, from the first moments when the eye contact lasts longer than Rafe expects, through the soul-baring late night conversations between two friends. Rafe’s love interest is a straight (until now) boy who has a heart of gold, and eventually it’s clear to both of them that their friendship has moved beyond brotherhood into some new and unknown territory.  Except, of course, it’s not really unknown to Rafe, and because he started off school “openly straight”, the other boy believes that they’re exploring something new together while Rafe knows that for him, it’s not just exploration — it’s something he’s sure of. Heartbreak is inevitable, and boy, when it comes, it’s devastating.

Rafe is a smart, wonderful, lovable main character. Through his first-person narration, we can easily understand why he makes the choices that he makes, even as we wonder whether those choices will come back to bite him. (Obviously, they do). What’s wonderful about Openly Straight is that Rafe really struggles to do right. He doesn’t want to deceive, and he refuses to feel shame. But he can’t avoid the question — and neither can we as readers — whether anything he does and any connections he makes are actually real if he’s only sharing a part of who he is.

There aren’t any easy answers for Rafe. The deeper he gets, the more he realizes that he’s trapped himself in a situation that can only go badly. No matter how much he wants to fix things, some hurts and deceptions leave permanent marks. Does Rafe learn from his choices and his mistakes? Absolutely. But there are still consequences, and I suppose part of growing up is learning that good intentions don’t necessarily override damage done.

Openly Straight makes some great points without ever feeling heavy-handed, as when a boy in English class claims that Natick is a “tolerant” place, and the teacher questions the intention of the words “tolerate” and “accept”:

I thought about that. It reminded me of the excerpt from Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story that Mr. Scarborough had assigned us. White had talked about the strange sort of tolerance his roommates had had for him back at his boarding school in the 1950s. I remembered underlining the word tolerance. I mean, if you accept something, you take it for what it is. Tolerance is different. Less. So is acceptance at the top of the pyramid? Is that what everyone wants in the best of all possible worlds? Acceptance? I rolled the idea around in my head. It didn’t feel right, somehow.

For Rafe, part of his growth in the story is coming to the realization that acceptance isn’t enough; it’s being welcomed and celebrated for yourself — all parts of who you are and what makes you you — that really is the goal. And while he’s been comfortable being out for years, Rafe has to wonder whether he’s been accepting who he is all along without fully celebrating his own self. By the book’s end, Rafe is taking definite strides toward a new way of being open and being who he is — with less worry about how others see him, and a new commitment to interacting with the world while showing his real self.

Openly Straight is a lovely, funny, sweet book that moves along quickly yet gives its characters room to breathe and live. I felt like I really knew Rafe (and I often wanted to hug him and tell that everything would work out). With relatable characters and a unique premise, this book challenges the reader in very interesting ways. Many books in the YA market today tell a version of the coming-out tale; what makes this book so special is that it deals with life after coming out. Rafe’s journey is relevant to anyone, gay or straight, who’s had to deal with fitting in, wondering how others see them, and figuring out just how they want to be seen.

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The details:

Title: Openly Straight
Author: Bill Konigsberg
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books
Publication date: June 2013
Genre: Young Adult
Source: Well, it’s kind of a funny story. I was approved to read a review copy of this book, but was unable to access it. (Thank you anyway to NetGalley and the publisher!). In the end, I borrowed this book from the library. So it goes. And given how much I loved the book, I’m sure I’ll end up buying it one of these days!

Book Review: When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney

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Book Review: When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney

When You Were HereThe death of a parent hits hard in this moving young adult novel by Daisy Whitney. Danny Kellerman, high school senior and class valedictorian, watched his mother slip away from him after a five-year battle with cancer. Despite telling Danny that she was holding on for his graduation, she passed away two months before the big event, and Danny has been walking through life in a fog ever since. He’s financially well-provided for, but that’s about the only thing going right for him. Danny’s father died in a sudden accident years earlier, and his older sister Laini walked away from the family soon after that. Even the love of Danny’s life, girl-next-door Holland who promised to love him forever, dumped him abruptly a month after she started college. Danny’s only source of comfort is his loyal dog Sandy Koufax, but it’s not enough. After blowing up on stage at graduation, smashing a car, and watching his friends celebrate life while he views it all from a haze of numbness, Danny knows something has to give. When he receives a letter from the caretaker of his family’s Tokyo apartment, hinting at a secret life his mother lived during trips to Japan for medical treatments, Danny decides that a summer in Tokyo might be just what he needs to get himself back on track and figure out what he has left.

Secrets abound in Tokyo. Why did everyone who encountered his mom remember her as being so happy? What did the mysterious doctor prescribe for her that gave her so much hope? And why, once he arrives in Tokyo, does Danny keep uncovering bits and pieces of his mom’s life there that make no sense to him?

As Danny explains to Kana, the girl who seems to have insight into his mother’s time in Japan:

“And I guess, most of all, I want to understand why nothing’s working for me. Why she was the happy one when she was dying, and I just can’t seem to manage anything when I’m living.”

When You Were Here is less about death and dying than about life and living. I found it very sad to read about Danny’s pain and loneliness — and yet I was also filled with admiration for this boy who held his home together while the most important person in his life was suffering. Danny makes no pretense about his love for his mother, and yes, the circumstances are extraordinary (how many teen-aged boys take their mothers to chemo treatments and clean up when they’re sick?), but it’s still quite touching to read his unembarrassed statements about her role in his life.

Likewise, Danny’s love for Holland is strong and true , despite the pain he experiences over what he sees as her desertion. Again, he is refreshingly honest about his feelings when it comes to Holland, and that’s a nice treat in a book about a boy of that age.

I did feel that the book veered a bit close to preachiness in parts, as Danny comes to certain realizations about his mother. The takeaway message that gets hammered home is that what counts is how you live your life, not how long you live, and that we need to find happiness in our small moments rather than focus on sorrow. That’s valid, but at times it did feel a bit heavy-handed.

That’s a minor quibble, however. Ultimately, by digging into his mother’s secrets, Danny is able to reconnect with feeling — feeling anything, both joy and sadness — rather than walking through life numb and alone. As Danny opens himself back up to emotions, he makes important discoveries about his mother, his sister, Holland, and himself, and finds a path forward past mourning and into a new future for himself.

When You Were Here is not a long book, but it is lovingly written and full of honesty and depth. Danny is a smart, likeable character, and it’s hard not to ache for him as we read about how much he’s already had to go through at such a young age. When You Were Here presents a portrait of a teen in a unique situation, and shows the power of love in all its varieties and shades to heal unfathomable hurts and to forge connections that might seem impossible. Don’t miss it.

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The details:

Title: When You Were Here
Author: Daisy Whitney
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication date: June 2013
Genre: Young Adult
Source: Won in a giveaway! (with thanks to The Perpetual Page-Turner)

Book Review: The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer

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Book Review: The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer

The Shade of the Moon (The Last Survivors, #4)

The Shade of the Moon is a continuation of Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Last Survivors series, which began with Life As We Knew It, The Dead and the Gone, and This World We Live In.

In the first three books in the series, the Evans family is the primary focus as they live through a horrific global disaster. When an asteroid strikes the moon and knocks it closer to Earth, “life as we knew it” comes to an end, as the changed gravitational forces lead to tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions — which in turn lead to an ash layer blocking the sun and causing world-wide winter. Agriculture fails, civilization begins to fall apart, and day-to-day survival is constantly a struggle.

The Shade of the Moon picks up four years after the original asteroid strike, and three years after the end of the original trilogy of books. The first three books revolved around teen daughter Miranda; in The Shade of the Moon, Miranda is a background character as the focus is now on her younger brother Jon. Jon was always the baby of the family, but as the story opens, he is now 17 years old, living in an enclave of the privileged — people deemed so important to the future of mankind that they live in guarded communities with access to food, clean air, nice homes, and health care. The not-so-fortunate live outside the enclave but work as laborers — although the “clavers” refer to the laborer population as “grubs”, which gives you a pretty good idea of the esteem in which they hold them.

Jon is a “claver” because he is a “slip” — through a connection, he was able to get a pass to live in the enclave, even though he doesn’t come from an important family or have the status of true clavers. Because he’s a slip, he has to constantly be on guard not to mess up, not to go against the grain. Protesting the treatment of grubs, especially as a slip, is a sure way to get himself, and probably his loved ones too, thrown out of the enclave and sent to the mines, or worse.

My question as I began reading The Shade of the Moon was: When did my disaster book turn into a dystopian novel?? This was not exactly what I’d expected, and not really what I was looking for. What I found so compelling in the first three books was the story of a family’s struggle for survival. It was quite a human story, with parents sacrificing for their children, children forced to grow up too quickly, people coming together in adversity and wondering whether a future would exist for any of them.

In The Shade of the Moon, life has moved on, but the survivors now live in a caste-based society in which human life has little or no value, at least if the humans in question are grubs. Claver boys are encouraged to go raise hell in the grubber town — and it’s clear that their version of fun involves random beatings, arson, and even rape. Clavers debate whether the grubs should have a clinic in their town — why waste resources on them? The grubs may have had lives of note before (Jon’s housekeeper is a former professor of philosophy), but that doesn’t matter. Clavers have domestics to manage their households, and domestics can be beaten, starved, and mistreated in myriad ways, so long as their productivity isn’t compromised.

In reading the Last Survivors books, I accepted the premise even if I wasn’t sure whether the science of the global disaster was at all realistic. In The Shade of the Moon, it’s not the science, but the sociology, that has me puzzled. I’ve certainly read plenty of books set in dystopian societies; that’s not the problem. The issue for me in The Shade of the Moon is how quickly this new dystopia has become the norm. It’s only been four years since the initial disaster, and less than that since the enclaves were set up and developed. Frankly, that just doesn’t seem like enough time for such a dramatic change in beliefs and attitudes to have become so strongly internalized by the people in this world. The members of the enclave don’t just enforce the caste system as a means of self-preservation — they truly believe that “grubs” are less, are not fully human, and are not worthy of adequate food or even a decent burial. Ultimately, I didn’t buy it, and my inability to suspend my disbelief was a constant distraction from the story itself.

That said, The Shade of the Moon is fast-paced, and once I got past the early chapters, it was compelling enough to make me keep going and to want to know how it would all turn out. Author Susan Beth Pfeffer doesn’t pull any punches, and she certainly isn’t kind to the characters we come to care about. The members of the extended Evans family are all wonderful and rich characters, but that doesn’t protect them from the very bad things that come their way in this book. I understand that young adult fiction needs a teen lead character, but Jon is less interesting to me than the rest of his family — and after spending the previous books with Miranda, I missed her throughout The Shade of the Moon, in which she’s older and therefore only relevant to the story as she relates to Jon and his struggles. The Shade of the Moon is also yet another YA book that features an “insta-love” relationship, and I just didn’t buy that either.

If you’ve read the first three books, should you read The Shade of the Moon? Mixed feelings on this question. This new book isn’t so much a continuation of the previous story as a new direction entirely. You’re not necessarily missing out if you don’t continue — but if dystopian settings appeal to you, then you might want to give The Shade of the Moon a try.

In fact, The Shade of the Moon may even work (possibly better) as a stand-alone. Once you understand the backstory, it can be read as a novel of a dystopian world, and while the family connections may not be as clear or powerful, the plot itself works along the lines of all the other “dystopians” in the market — a cruel, divided society with harsh rules, a courageous young person or two willing to risk their own safety in order to make a stand, and hey, even a love story!

It was unclear to me at the end whether there will be more books in the series, although I suspect that there will be. I suppose I’d like to know what happens to the characters and whether their lives improve, but I’m not sure that I’d feel all that compelled to continue. I’d recommend The Shade of the Moon for those who particularly enjoy the dystopian society genre — but if “dystopians” aren’t your thing, I’d say this one is not a must-read.

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The details:

Title: The Shade of the Moon
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers
Publication date: August 13, 2013
Source: Review copy courtesy of Edelweiss, in exchange for my honest review.

Book Review: Out Of The Easy by Ruta Sepetys

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Book Review: Out Of The Easy by Ruta Sepetys

Out of the Easy

In New Orleans in 1950, being the daughter of a prostitute is a guarantee that you’ll never amount to much. But 17-year-old Josie Moraine intends to change her fate. Raised more by the tough-but-loving brothel madam Willie than by her own careless mother, Josie is whip-smart and determined. A hard worker, Josie cleans the brothel each morning, brings Willie all the miscellaneous objects she finds along the way, then works in a bookshop alongside handsome Patrick before retiring to her small bedroom upstairs in the store.

Josie sailed through school, mostly friendless due to constant mocking and disdain about her mother, and is saving up for a college education, even though she realizes that the odds of actually attending college are not in her favor. Meanwhile, Josie knows everyone in the French Quarter and everyone seems to know her.

When two strangers enter Josie’s world, her life suddenly changes as she realizes that people can see the good in her and treat her with respect and kindness. But as Josie sets new goals for herself and starts planning an escape, her old life seems to hold her more and more tightly, and no matter how she struggles, she keeps getting sucked back down into the dirt and squalor of life in the Quarter.

The plot of Out of the Easy follows Josie’s fight to claim a new life for herself, as she deals with a murder investigation, abandonment, threats, and betrayal, extortion, loss, illicit propositions, and the glimmer of a chance at love.

That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

This is definitely not your typical young adult novel. Josie does not live in a world of black-and-white morals, and she doesn’t always make the best decisions. She’s dealing with the life she was dealt, and she really does pretty well for herself. How many seventeen-year-olds could live on their own, make their own way, deal with corruption every day without succumbing to it, and still dream of a better life?

The essence of life in the Quarter is sharply painted through the author’s descriptions of the sights, the smells, the sounds. There’s a grittiness and joy amidst the decadence and dirt, and the people in Josie’s world know how to live their lives to the fullest. Along the way, we meet servants, prostitutes, “information men”, and johns, and most are well-developed characters in their own right, making Josie’s world feel very lived in and real. Madam Willie is especially memorable, if a bit stereotypical, as the sharp-tongued, sharp-nailed businesswoman who scolds Josie yet loves her dearly and makes sure her destiny does not lie within the walls of a whorehouse.

Unfortunately, while I enjoyed the plot and the characters, the writing style got in the way quite a bit. For me, it came down to the old writing advice of “show, don’t tell” — and I felt that there was just too much “telling” going on in Out of the Easy. The sentence structure throughout was repetitive, with declarative sentences telling events in line after line:

I took a deep breath and stepped back. I started humming. Charlie stopped bucking. I continued humming and once again picked the towel up off the floor. I walked behind Charlie… I applied pressure to his forehead… I heard the key in the lock…

Those are lines from a page chosen at random, but I can literally open to any page and find the same pattern of noun/verb, noun/verb, noun/verb throughout the entire book. And yet, despite the focus on action sentences, much of the action happens “off-screen” or is resolved within a page or two. We find out through other characters’ conversations about a key development with Josie’s mother; we are introduced to a major threat to Josie — and then see it easily resolved within a chapter. Something about the writing style just left me feeling unsatisfied — it felt more like reading a journal about a set of events rather than being allowed to enter a fictional world and be swept away by it.

And yet, there are some lovely smaller moments. Early on, Josie goes to a rich-people’s party Uptown, and notices a table filled with family photos in sterling frames:

I stared at the pictures. If someone meant something to you, you put their photo in a silver frame and displayed it, like these. I had never seen anything like it. Willie didn’t have any framed photos. Neither did Mother.

Toward the end of the story, it’s significant that Josie does at that point finally have a few cherished photos in frames of their own. It’s a small moment, one presented without much fuss, but it gives a hint at the power of the story and the writer’s ability to create emotions and impact out of a few low-key details.

Overall, I enjoyed Out of the Easy and have no hesitation about recommending it. Still, I felt that there was a certain momentum lacking in the story and in the depth of the characters. I found the setting unusual and interesting, and the characters are a memorable and flavorful bunch, but there was something in the writing that kept me at a distance from the heart of the story throughout the book — so that ultimately, although I was interested, I walked away feeling unsatisfied. I suppose I expected more; what I got was fine, but it just wasn’t as strong or as deep as I’d hoped.