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Off the Shelf – CBC Radio

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So I did my second book column on CBC Radio this morning.

Listen to it here.

Here’s what I prepared for the talk about scary books.

Literary historian J. A. Cuddon defines the horror story as “a piece of fiction which creates an eerie and frightening atmosphere. Horror is usually supernatural, though it can be non-supernatural. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.” One of the first horror novels was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 1764 – probably not going to get too many young people reading that one today.

R.L. Stine is probably the best known writer of horror novels for the middle grader. He’s the author of all the Goosebumps books and then went on to write Fear Street, a series of over 150 titles for older teens. To date he’s sold over 400 million books, so I guess the proof is in the gloopy pudding.

Teenagers love to be scared. No one knows that better than Stephen King, who’s made a career out of scaring us. King said: “horror stories allow us to safely vent our “uncivilized emotions…lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. In addition, for some young people, reading a scary story can be a rite of passage, a way of earning bragging rights: “That didn’t scare me!”

Heart-pounding, palms-sweating, doors locked, lights on – who doesn’t love a good scare? It’s like riding a rollercoaster, thrilling, scary, but ultimately safe. A really good book can creep you out way more than a movie – where the scary stuff is often in your face and you become desensitized. A good scary book can be way more unsettling.

So – in honour of Halloween, here’s a list of my favourite scary books.

I’m going to talk about some of the books in the genre geared for Young Adults – plus one.

First off – here’s a quick guide:

If you want to read a book about vampires – definitely check out Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Cold Town.

If you want to read a book about werewolves, check out NB writer Kathleen Peacock’s novel Hemlock.

If you want to read a book about zombies, I highly recommend Ilsa J Bick’s series, Ashes.

If you want to read a book about a ghost hunter, check out Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Now for a closer look at some of my recent scary reads.

Nevermore – Kelly Creagh

It sounds like your typical good girl, bad boy set up…but this book is awesome and super creepy. Isobel is a popular cheerleader who gets partnered up with Varen the goth kid (of course he’s a goth kid with a name like that!) to work on a project about Edgar Allan Poe. There’s your clue right there that things are going to take a seriously gothic turn and they do. I mean Poe’s the granddaddy of creepy and Creagh makes good use of his personal story. Fans of Poe will eat this book up, but even if you’re not a fan or know very much about him, you’ll get gooseflesh reading about the truly nightmarish world and Pinfeathers, the character who inhabits it. There’s a sequel, too, called Enshadowed.

Through the Woods – Emily Carroll

I just read this one last week. It’s a collection of short stories written by Canadian author and illustrator, Emily Carroll. I don’t know anything about art, but I can say that the art in this book is really striking, the colours are kind of menacing. Can you say that about a colour? Anyway – these are stories about dark places and strangers and people who are not whom they seem. The first story is about three girls who live with their father in the woods and one day he leaves them to go hunting and tells them, if I’m not back in three days, head to the neighbours. Of course he doesn’t come back, and then the narrator’s two sisters disappear and the ending will just give you goose bumps. You could certainly read the five stories contained in this volume in one sitting, but I think it’s the sort of book you’ll want to revisit again and again – especially at this time of year.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs

Fifteen-year-old Jake Portman has a special relationship with his grandfather, who has always been a teller of tales. Thing is, his tales are pretty fantastic and concern children who could fly or make themselves invisible. When his grandfather is killed, Jake goes to Wales to visit the orphanage that his grandfather was sent to during the war and finds out the stories might actually be true. The book is full of pretty dang creepy pictures culled from private collections, but the story itself is magical with a side of monsters.

Plus one.

I had a student a couple of years ago who insisted he’d never been frightened by a book. I promised him that I could remedy that and gave him Stephen King’s novel, It. Okay, anyone around in the 1970s will remember the miniseries starring Richard Thomas aka John Boy Walton and that clown, Pennywise. “They all float down here.” Stephen King is the king (pun intended) of making everyday things scary. He’s also really excellent at tapping into childhood fears – something all great horror fiction does – and nobody captures adolescence quite like he does. I don’t love everything King has written, but I loved It and so did my student.

Read something scary for Halloween. With the lights on, of course!

 

 

The Blessings – Elise Juska

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blessingsWe welcomed a new member into our book club last year and she hosted the first meeting after our summer hiatus. Elise Juska’s novel The Blessings was Margo’s selection and our discussion of the book – which I didn’t particularly enjoy while I was reading it – was certainly elevated by her superior hostessing skills. Oh, and okay, listening to the other women in my group talk about the book did soften me towards it. A bit.

The Blessings is the story of a large Irish-Catholic family in Philadelphia. You’d need a chart to untangle the siblings and cousins, the spouses and parents. There’s Gran and Pop; their children, John, Margie, Ann and Patrick and then the kids. Their story – played out over twenty years – isn’t really follow a linear narrative. Instead, Juska unfolds the story, or parts of the story, by allowing us to ‘visit’ with some of the family members.

For example, when the novel opens, eighteen-year-old Abby (daughter of Ann and Dave) is home from college for Thanksgiving. Through her eyes we see her aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. She reflects that “most people did not have families like hers.”  I would counter that everyone has a variation on a family like hers. Nevertheless,

If every family has a certain kind of music, Abby’s is the murmur of sympathy around a dining room table. It starts in the pause after dinner and before dessert, when the men migrate to the living room and turn on sports, and the women surround the wreckage, spilled crumbs and crumpled napkins and stained wineglasses. They pinch lids from sugar bowls and dip teabags in hot water, break cookies in half and chew slowly. They trade stories of other people’s hardships. This is the melody, the measure , of her family: the response to sad things.

The novel moves in and out of people’s lives, allowing us glimpses of failed relationships, eating disorders, love affairs, and deaths. For me, the narrative was too broken up to allow me to feel connected to any one of the characters. Just when I settled into the rhythm of their story, the chapter would end and we’d be on to the next person. Sometimes what had been happening would be alluded to later on, but we’d be hearing about the event from a completely different perspective. The Blessings was like reading a series of connected short stories.

Matriarch Helen (Gran) sums it up best:

The truth is that life in the end – even a long life – amounts to a handful of a very few things. The longer you live, the shorter the story.

The Blessings is a quiet story about family and if you’ve got one, you can probably relate to this book in some way.

Dare Me – Megan Abbott

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daremeWe have cheerleaders at the high school where I teach, but they’re sure as hell not like the cheerleaders in Megan Abbott’s compelling YA novel, Dare Me. These girls are vicious.

Addy Hanlon is the  narrator of this sordid tale.

There I am, Addy Hanlon, sixteen years old, hair like a long taffy pull and skin tight as a rubber band. I am on the gym floor, my girl Beth beside me, our cherried smiles and spray-tanned legs, ponytails bobbing in sync.

Her ‘girl’ is Beth Cassidy, an acerbic teen who spits out insults like bullets. Beth and Addy have been besties since they were young enough to “hang on the monkey bars, hooking [their] legs round each other.” Now they rule their school, part of a cheer squad that makes boys go weak in the knees and girls run for cover when they swagger down the hall, an impenetrable mass of venom.

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something – anything – to happen.

The social order of things is thrown into disarray, though, when the squad gets a new coach.

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all the that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? Could she see past all that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators.

Colette French is demanding. On the second day she “takes a piece of Emily’s flab in her fingers” and tells her to “fix it.” The girls discover they can’t fluster her, that she is already bored with their nonsense. Then, Coach dismisses Beth as captain, saying that she doesn’t “see any need for a captain.”

Addy knows Beth’s response, when it comes, will change everything, and it does.

Dare Me is a riveting look at the world of girls on the cusp of adulthood and the woman who allows them a glimpse of what waits for them on the other side. There are no parents here, no sane adults to pull back the reins. Even Coach, who seems dazzling and perfect to the cheerleaders, is soon revealed as damaged and flawed. Addy is particularly taken with Coach and as their relationship morphs into something more intimate, Addy realizes she’s been “waiting forever, my palm raised. Waiting for someone to take my girl body and turn it out.”

I can’t express how  terrific this book is. The writing is dazzling; it was like a mouth full of pop-rocks, you know that candy that fizzes in your mouth? Watching Addy try to navigate her sixteenth year, despite the fact that the world of cheer-leading is totally alien to me, was a thing of horrible beauty.

Highly recommended.

The Reading Promise – Alice Ozma

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readingpromiseAlice Ozma’s dad, Jim,  made a promise to his daughter: he’d read to her every single night for 1000 consecutive nights. When they reached that pretty impressive goal they extended “The Steak” which, ultimately,  lasted for nine years. Nine years! Ozma shares their  story in her memoir, The Reading Promise.

“Our rules were always clear and firm: we had to read at least ten minutes (but almost always much more) per night, before midnight, with no exceptions. It should come from whatever book we were reading at the time, but if we were out of the house when midnight approached, anything from magazines to baseball programs would do. The reading should be done in person, but if the opportunity wasn’t there, over the phone would suffice. Well, just barely.”

Reading is something that Alice’s dad clearly values and is passionate about. As a librarian/teacher at an elementary school, he believes in the research that clearly shows that reading aloud is  “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading.”   But this nine-year reading “Streak” serves another very important purpose: as a single father, Jim is doing his best to spend quality time with Alice. His older daughter, Kathy, had announced when she was in grade four that she no longer wished to be read to. Alice is different.

The Reading Promise isn’t all about the books Jim and Alice shared. I found the book more interesting when Alice talked about the books, though. I laughed when Jim read Dicey’s Song to fifteen-year-old Alice, skipping over the parts he felt too embarrassed to read aloud. I admired Jim and Alice when they patched up small squabbles through reading together. Not even teenage hormones or adult frustration stymied their reading. I was as incensed as Alice was when the principals at both schools where Jim worked decided he should read no more than five minutes a day to his students, that he should, instead, teach them how to use a computer.

Ozma clearly had no notion that she’d be committing the story of “The Streak” to paper when she started her reading journey with her father. If her memoir suffers a little because of it, so what? Their commitment to reading and to each other makes for a lovely story.

Early Decision – Lacy Crawford

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Early Decision PB

Here is what was going to happen: Anne was going to wake up one morning in full possession of the authority she needed to go out and start her life.

Anne Arlington hasn’t quite figured out what to do with her life, but while she figures it out  she acts as a consultant to parents hoping their (mostly) spoiled, coddled and rich offspring make it into the Ivy League. Even Canadian readers will know that the Ivy League is comprised of eight schools considered, by reputation and name, to be  academically excellent, selective, and socially elitist. For those who need a refresher, the  schools  are Brown, Columbia,  Cornell, Dartmouth College, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale.

Early Decision‘s author, Lacy Crawford, spent fifteen years working as just such a counselor, coaching parents and high school students through the highly competitive world of college applications and entrance essays. Although the names of the schools will be familiar, the process itself will be less so to Canadian students (unless they have made applications to American schools.) No matter, there’s a little something for everyone in Early Decision.

The novel follows Anne’s interactions with five of her students and their (mostly) helicopter parents. For five grand, she all but guarantees her students will get into the school of their (parent’s) dreams.  The interesting thing about Early Decision is that  the parents often don’t have a clue what their children actually want. These children are often merely an extension of their parents’ egos.

Anne isn’t that far removed from this process herself; she’s only 27. As she coaches her students through the essay writing process, she encourages them to consider what they really want for themselves. As a high school writing teacher, I particular appreciated Anne’s attempts to get the students as close to the truth of themselves as they could, to strive for an authentic voice.

And I don’t know whether it’s these students in particular or just where Anne happens to be in her own journey, but she finally gets the courage to make a change in her own life.

tlc tour hostEarly Decision was provided to me by the folks at TLC Book Tours in exchange for my honest review. I can honestly say that this is not a book I would have ever picked up on my own, but there’s a lot of great stuff here. The writing is terrific and Anne is a character who manages to see straight into the heart of the people she deals with, yet lacks the confidence to take her own life by the horns. Although the college application process isn’t quite as onerous here in Canada, Early Decision is a great book for people who are on the cusp of adulthood, trying to figure out what they want – juggling their dreams with those of their parents – and eventually figuring out what it means to be true to themselves.

 

 

 

The Birthing House – Christopher Ransom

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Birthing_HouseConrad Harrison takes a wrong turn after leaving his father’s funeral and ends up in Black Earth, Wisconsin. He stops for food, glances at the paper someone left behind, and sees a listing for a house he decides to check out. When he goes to meet the real estate agent, Conrad had to admit that the house “made his heart beat faster.”

Faster than you can say “sold,” Conrad has bought the house. Then he returns home to Los Angeles to tell his wife Joanna. Except that when he gets home he discovers that Jo is not alone.

Christopher Ransom’s debut novel The Birth House is a lot of things, but sensical ain’t one of them. Okay, yes, I get it that Conrad was itching for change and that catching his wife with another guy (although not really) could certainly be impetus for said change, but he bought a house in a hick town without consulting his wife. Was it grief over the death of his father and the fact that he had a huge insurance cheque burning a hole in his pocket? The reader will never know because we never learn very much about his relationship with his dad other than he wasn’t around much. Clearly his relationship with Jo is at a crossroads because almost as soon as they move to Black Earth, Jo is head-hunted and takes a new job which requires her to leave for eight weeks of training.

That means Conrad is all alone in the house.  (Well, not completely alone; he has his dogs.)

Cue creepiness.

First there’s the guy who used to live in the house with his wife and kids, all of whom have birth defects.

Then there’s the book of the house’s history, delivered by its former owner. The book explains that the house used to be a birthing house, a place women went to have their babies, but it freaks Conrad out so much that he burns the book in the fireplace.

Then there’s the woman who appears at night.

And something weird is happening with Conrad’s snakes. (Yes, he keeps snakes except that they seem more like a convenient plot point than an actual thing that could potentially escape and wreak havoc.)

And let’s not forget about the mind-blowing orgasms Conrad has in his…sleeps? dreams?

As if that’s not enough, Conrad has a back story involving a girl called Holly and while his wife is away he befriends the nineteen-year-old daughter of his next door neighbours who just happens to be pregnant.

Conrad just keeps getting dumber and dumber. And so does the book.

Blech.

 

 

 

Totally Joe – James Howe

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totally joeWhen Joe Bunch is given an ‘alphabiography’ as a seventh grade English project he thinks it’s lame. Joe’s teacher, Mr. Daly wants students to write about themselves from A-Z and that’s all well and good, except as Joe writes “I’m not exactly your average Joe.” But that, as it turns out, is just one of the many charms of Totally Joe by James Howe.

Howe is a prolific writer; he’s written over 70 books including the Bunnicula series. Totally Joe is also part of a series, The Misfits. Anyone who has read that book will be familiar with Joe and his friends, Addie, Skeezie, and Bobby, but you don’t need to have read it to fully appreciate Totally Joe.

It won’t take the reader very long to figure out that Joe is gay. When he meets Addie for the first time she says: “I thought you were supposed to be a boy. Why are you wearing a dress?” They were four at the time and have been fast friends ever since.

Joe is totally self-aware. It’s one of the pleasure of Totally Joe, really, that he is a person who understands and accepts himself. That doesn’t mean he’s not susceptible to the taunts of others. For instance, Kevin Hennessey who has “an IQ smaller than his neck size” has been picking on Joe forever.

“I’m not calling you a name, faggot, I’m calling you a girl, which you are.”

Somehow, though, despite the name-calling, Joe manages to rise above and he does this with the help of his parents (who are pretty awesome), his aunt Pam and even his older brother, Jeff whom despite being a “total guy-guy who’s all “yo” and “dude” and grabbing at his crotch and belching” is still decent.

Totally Joe is aimed at a 12-14 year-old audience and if Joe does, at times, sound way more mature than the average teenager it’s pretty easy to cut him some slack. He’s had time to settle into himself and he’s smart. The novel manages to be both funny and affirming and Joe even manages some sympathy for the mostly undeserving Kevin Hennessey. It would be a great middle school novel to generate discussion about what it means to be yourself, be a friend, and the positive outcome of standing up to the bullies. I really liked it.

 

1Q84 – Haruki Murakami

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I am very excited to turn this blog over to my 15-year-old son, Connor, for his review of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.

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A strategy I use often to pick books, one which my mom wholeheartedly disagrees with, is by cover only. I had never heard of Murakami before (I don’t know how, he takes up nearly an entire shelf of the fiction section at the book store, and has been on the scene since the late seventies) but when I saw the cover of 1Q84, designed by Chip Kidd, I thought it was a masterpiece, and bought the book. When I told people that the Murakami I was starting with was 1Q84, his 1150 page contemporary odyssey, they were shocked and confused, wondering why I didn’t start with something modest like Norwegian Wood or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I soon found out why.

1Q84 alternates chapter by chapter between Aomame and Tengo, both 30 or so and living in Tokyo. Aomame is an isolated woman who works as a physical therapist and personal trainer for an elderly woman living in a grand estate, (though she has a second job which is… interesting, to say the least, but I won’t give anything away.)

Tengo is a struggling novelist slash cram school math teacher who is convinced by editor Komatsu to take part in a dangerous plan that will shock the literary scene. Komatsu, seeing the potential in sixteen year old Eriko Fukada’s short story, which she submitted to a contest, ropes Tengo into re-vamping it and publishing it as a novel.

These two characters share a metaphysical connection from their days spent in the same elementary school, but have since drifted very far apart. As a student, children were put off from Aomame because she was fanatically religious and from Tengo because he was the son of an aggressive, work obsessed NHK fee collector. Over the course of the novel, they are slowly drawn back together by the strange series of events, and each character’s utterly depressing past is revealed, much to the dismay of the reader.

Murakami infuses into this fantastical urban idyll themes of sexual promiscuity, aggression towards women, death, violence, and abuse, the supernatural, and memory, among other things; themes you may not expect in a novel which is primarily a speculative fiction romance. Along with this, Murakami skillfully blends every possible genre you can think of. 1Q84 is crime; it is mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction. It is drama, erotic, historical, philosophical and political. Seriously, you name it, 1Q84 has it.

1Q84The book itself is split into three parts. The first part takes place between April and June, the second between July and September, and the third between October and November. The first two parts I really loved, mostly because so much was happening and because I instantly took to both Tengo and Aomame. I regret to say that in the third part, the book crashed and burned. I can’t quite explain why without giving anything away, but let’s just say there is a violent change in pace and the density and speed (as Donna Tartt would say,) that Murakami had built up over those 600 or so pages, slows nearly to a stop. It was like a disappointing punch to the gut.

Luckily, 1Q84 has a really pretty and ever so slightly redeeming ending, enough to stop me crying about it, but just barely.

Reviewers are far too hyperbolic about this book, trashing it every chance they get. That’s ridiculous. It’s a huge book, and I have no trouble believing that it’s the magnum opus of his career. He is clearly a talented writer, and it’s clear that 1Q84 was an immensely challenging novel to write. It’s 1 000 pages long for heaven’s sake!

Recommended.

 

The Twisted Thread – Charlotte Bacon

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TwistedThread The Twisted Thread is the story of Madeline Christopher, a twenty-something teaching intern at the prestigious Armitage Academy, a New England boarding school. In the novel’s expository opening we get to hear all about Madeline’s education and lack of job prospects, her prickly relationship with her mother (who apparently suggested Madeline get some Botox), her equally prickly relationship with her older sister, Kate (an Armitage graduate and the reason Madeline has this job at all), and her thoughts about the year she’s spent at Armitage. All this while she is running during the forty-five minutes she has to herself.

Upon her return to campus, Madeline is shocked to discover the place crawling with cops and EMTs. A student in  Madeline’s dorm has died. And not just any girl: Claire Harkness, a girl whose “crystalline beauty and complete disdain for the adults around her” had awed Madeline.

There is a lot going on in this novel and several subplots which add nothing to the book’s central ‘mystery’ – which is what happened to Claire? There are also a million characters, some mentioned in passing and then recalled as essential after the fact. Teachers are called upon for their expertise in French and scrutinized for strange behaviour (of which there is a lot.) Madeline’s sister Kate shows up unannounced, refuses to answer a few questions about this secret Armitage society and then stomps off in a huff – never to be seen again.

Madeline is desperate to figure out what happened to Claire. While comforting a hysterical student in clear view of Claire’s dead and naked body, Madeline realized something was not quite normal with Claire. “It was her breasts. They were full and rigid with veins…” Claire, Madeline figures, has recently given birth. OMG! Where’s the baby!?

The Twisted Thread is an okay book. The back cover calls it a “gripping and suspenseful story in the tradition of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History,” but I respectfully disagree. Although it’s been twenty years since I read The Secret History, that’s a book that has stayed with me. My 15-year-old son just finished reading it and called it “the best book he’s ever read.”  I think The Twisted Thread  desperately wants to be more than the sum of its parts, but at the end of the day it’s only just a pleasant enough beach read. I doubt anyone will be talking about it twenty years from now.

Painting Juliana – Martha Louise Hunter

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Painting Juliana My children are avid readers and we often share and discuss the books we read. My son, Connor, in particular, always wants to know what I am currently reading and what it’s about and whether or not I like it. More often than not, I feel relatively ‘meh’ about a book. The books I really love are few and far between, a fact which makes Con roll his eyes. “You never love any books, Mom,” he says.

It’s not true, of course. I love lots of books. I read constantly and I’m always ready to be wowed by a book. I want it to be the book that makes me shout from this blog: you MUST read this book. I have a whole list of books like that here.

So that brings me to Painting Juliana, the debut novel by Texan writer Martha Louise Hunter.  About thirty pages into the book I thought to myself, I can’t read this.  Then I thought, Am I missing something? I went off to read other reviews – most of which were glowing. So, I attacked the book again. I eventually settled into the book, but I have to admit that this one falls into the decidedly ‘meh’ category for me.

Painting Juliana is the story of Juliana Morrissey née Birdsong. She’s married to Oliver, a big-shot lawyer, and mother to thirteen-year-old twins Lindsey and Adam. When the novel opens, she’s just been told (while at a marriage counselling session, no less) that Oliver is divorcing her. It’s apparent pretty early on that Oliver is a total asshat, but Juliana is absolutely floored by the news that he’s kicking her to the curb. She has twenty minutes to pack her bags and get out of the family home. Oh, and the kids are staying put.

Juliana has no place to go and she has more problems than just dealing with Oliver and her fractured family. She’s got a rocky relationship with her gay brother, Richard, and her father has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Plus, she has no skills. She was going to go to law school, but she got married instead. Now all she has are  designer bags and a lot of debt.  Also, there are some unresolved mommy issues and mysterious paintings that come to life.

Painting Juliana is the story of  a woman  reinventing herself and that’s a story that I can get behind. Having recently gone through a divorce myself, I empathized with her predicament and there were some moments when I felt as though Hunter got it just about right.

Where the book didn’t work for me, though, was some of the dialogue. For example, when Oliver and Juliana meet for a supposed conciliatory lunch, Oliver dismisses the waiter by loudly announcing: “Be gone with you, Jim. I must make out with my wife now” to which Juliana replies, “Unhand me, sir! I’m a married woman.”

At lunch with her friend, Kimberley, the women are interrupted by a man in his mid-forties who says: “I hear you’re in real estate now…I’ve been wanting to get into some real estate…preferably between your legs.” Do grown people really speak this way?

Another friend says to Juliana,”You’ve always gotten what you wanted, Juliana. The successful husband, the decked-out house, great car, the best clothes and jewelry. Plus you’re gorgeous with a smoking bod.” Seriously. Are we thirteen?

Moments like this – and there are many of them – made me cringe. The dialogue often felt clunky and expository and not at all the way people actually speak.

I also felt that perhaps Hunter tried to pack too much into this novel – as though the story of a woman trying to find herself post divorce wasn’t enough. There’s enough material in here for at least another novel and a half. I do think that some of the subplots were simply distracting and the novel might have benefitted from some judicious editing.

When, at the end of the day, I don’t feel strongly about a book one way or the other – it falls into the ‘meh’ category for me, and Painting Juliana is that kind of book. However, it appears that my feelings about the novel are eclipsed by readers who felt the novel is amazing, so let’s chalk my feelings about it to my own book snobbery.

tlc tour hostPainting Juliana was provided to me by TLC Book Tours in exchange for my review. Thanks to them for the opportunity.