Tag Archives: Book Review

Beautiful Ruins – Jess Walter

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ruinsBeautiful Ruins was our last book club read before our summer hiatus. It was also the winner of ‘Best book’ or, because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings when we vote, ‘book we enjoyed reading most.’ (Thus, ‘worst’ book becomes ‘book we enjoyed reading least.’) It was a close race between Beautiful Ruins and The Children Act, but Walter’s fantastic novel won out in the end.

I think I am going to have a hard time articulating how I feel about this book because it hit a lot of my sweet spots. First of all, part of the novel is set in Italy and anyone who knows me knows that Italy is my dream place. I’ve been twice and often say that some day I will live there…even if it’s just for a few months. The other part of the novel takes place in Hollywood and, okay, I admit it – I love the movie stars. Just ask anyone who was around during the David Boreanaz days…or go further back…the Robby Benson days. Ask my students how often I work Ryan Gosling into the conversation.

Beautiful Ruins follows the fortunes of Pasquale Tursi in Porto Vergogna, a tiny village near the Cinque Terre region of Italy only “it was smaller, more remote and not as picturesque.”

Port Vergogna was a tight cluster of a dozen old whitewashed houses, an abandoned chapel, and the town’s only commercial interest – the tiny hotel and café owned by Pasquale’s family – all huddled like a herd of a sleeping goats in a crease in the sheer cliffs.

Pasquale has come back to Porto Vergogna to care for his dying mother and the Hotel Adequate View, and it is there he meets actress Dee Moray, who has come, by mistake, to the Adequate View to rest. She is in Italy to make Cleopatra, the notoriously bad film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

richard and elizabeth

The title’s phony – her job’s all assisting, no developing, and she’s nobody’s chief. She tends Michael’s whims. Answers his calls and e-mails, goes for his sandwiches and coffee.

It is not the life she dreamed of when she gave up her doctoral film studies program to make movies. Now she is on the cusp of leaving her job and going to work as a curator for a private film museum.

If you’re wondering how Walter is going to dovetail these two eras, all I can say is “masterfully.” We flip back to 1960’s Italy and recent-day Hollywood and neither story (or character) gets short-shrift. In fact Claire and Pasquale aren’t the only characters who populate this story – even minor characters are fully realized including Pasquale’s elderly aunt Valeria (who provides comic relief), Shane (a screenwriter who comes to Hollywood to pitch the story of cowboy cannibals), Alvis (the failed American writer who comes to Porto Vergogna once a year to work on his novel) and even Daryl, Claire’s hunky porn-addicted boyfriend. Even Michael Deane, slimy as he is, is fun to spend time with.

And what are these Beautiful Ruins? Well, I think that’s probably the reason everyone and their dog was praising this book when it came out in 2012. This is a great story – funny and heartbreaking in equal measure – about big ideas. The people that you meet and the choices that you make are at the very center of this book. But as Alvis says to Dee, “No one gets to tell you what your life means.”

I loved this book so much.

Highly recommended.

Jacob Have I Loved – Katherine Paterson

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jacobKatherine Peterson’s novel Jacob Have I Loved was a Newberry Medal winner in 1981. Although this book has been on my radar for many years, I was perhaps just a teensy bit too old for it when it was published in 1980, so I didn’t read it then. It is a pretty famous book though, and I figured I should read it. So I did.

The title of the book comes from the bible, Romans 9:13: “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” The quote refers to the story of siblings Jacob and Esau and the novel tells the story of siblings Sara Louise and her twin sister, Caroline. The girls live on Rass Island, off the coast of Maryland. Their father is a fisherman; their mother a former school teacher. Their crotchety paternal grandmother also lives with them.

Sara Louise, or Wheeze, is the narrator. She is an adult when the novel opens, returning to Rass Island where her mother still lives. “…it is a pure sorrow to me,” she says, “that, once my mother leaves there will be no one left with the name of Bradshaw. But there were only the two of us, my sister, Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay.”

The bulk of the story takes place in 1941 and the years that follow. Wheeze, 13, and her best friend, Call, 14, spend their days hunting for crabs. Their little island is isolated and days there are marked by routine – fisherman out on the water early and home late, school and church, the occasional ferry trip to the mainland. Paterson deftly creates a world that will be – for most of its young readers –  a place long ago and far away.

While readers may not recognize the time or place, they will most definitely recognize the friction between Wheeze and her sister, the beautiful and musically talented, Caroline. A sickly baby, Wheeze feels that Caroline has been coddled all her life and that in “the story of my sister’s life…I… was allowed a very minor role.”

There is a rare snapshot of the two of us sitting on the front stoop the summer we were a year and a half old. Caroline is tiny and exquisite, her blonde curls framing a face that is glowing with laughter, her arms outstretched to whoever is taking the picture. I am hunched there like a fat dark shadow, my eyes cut sideways toward Caroline, thumb in my mouth…

Wheeze is resentful and jealous, even though Caroline never really seems to give her any reason to be. It’s one of the lovely things about this book, which is remarkable in its stillness. Wheeze isn’t particularly likable, but you grow to love her just the same.

Jacob Have I Loved is without the bells and whistles that marks much of the YA fiction out there today. I would suggest that this is a book better suited to middle school readers, but I think anyone who has ever shared close quarters with a sibling would enjoy this story.

White Crow – Marcus Sedgwick

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whitecrowMarcus Sedgwick’s YA novel White Crow is not for the faint of heart, but careful readers will certainly be rewarded by this atmospheric tale. It’s a creepy story of science and obsession, of ghosts both real and imagined.

Rebecca and her policeman father move to Winterfold, a seacoast town in England. Like many other villages along Britain’s coast, Winterfold is slowly being eroded by the sea and what was once a bustling village of thousands of people is now “storm by storm, year by year” crumbling into the sea  and all that remains is “a triangle of three streets, a dozen houses, an inn, a church.”

Rebecca is none too happy about having to leave her more urban life for the much quieter Winterfold. She doesn’t quite know what to do with herself besides harbor resentment towards her father (who is, essentially, hiding out after some mishap at work) and pine for Adam, the boy who she left behind.

Then she meets Ferelith, a local girl who is, frankly, pretty strange. In fact, Rebecca notes she’s “the strangest-looking girl she’s ever seen.”

There’s something elfin about her. Everything ends in points: her nose, her eyes, her chin, her lips, her fingers, the spikes of her long tresses of black hair….her teeth, not quite a vampire’s, but not far short.

Rebecca and Ferelith don’t immediately gel, although it’s clear that Ferelith is smitten. Eventually, though, with nothing better to do, Rebecca starts to hang out with her a bit and Ferelith starts to reveal Winterfold’s somewhat sinister past.

That’s where the third narrator comes in.  Entries in a diary dated 1798, reveal the strange relationship between the writer, a Reverend, and a French doctor. The two men are fascinated with the prospect of discovering if there is life after death and their methods turn out to be – well – horrifying. He writes:

And so this young man has become our first subject, and though my hopes were high, the results were low.

I scorn myself to record it herein, but we learned nothing.

Not a single thing.

But, oh!

The blood! The blood!

White Crow is like one of those old fashioned horror movies I used to watch when I was a kid. I could almost hear the menacing music as Ferelith tours Rebecca around Winterfold, through old, decaying ruins and to the one remaining church with the missing wall. When the novel reaches its climax, it’s creepy, page-turning fun. Young readers will have to pay attention; I know I did. But the book pays off in spades.

The Little Woods – McCormick Templeman

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littlewoodsTen years after the death of her older sister, Clare,  Cally Woods gets accepted at St. Bede’s Academy, a boarding school in the Sierra region of California. It’s a big deal for Cally: her father is dead, her mother is a mostly absent drunk and Cally’s been offered a full-ride scholarship to St. Bede’s because of what happened to her sister. Seems that as a kid, Clare had visited St. Bede’s with a friend whose mother taught there and “on the third night of her visit, she and her friend had vanished from their beds. Their bodies were never found.” That’s pretty much the premise of  McCormick Templeman’s debut novel, The Little Woods.

There’s a lot going on in this novel, making it difficult to decide whether or not it’s a straight up mystery.  (There are definitely some mystery elements; Cally is there, after all, to figure out exactly what happened to her sister. Although as the police never have it’s ridiculous to think she’ll be able to solve the whodunit on her own. Still.) Is it a coming of age stor? (It’s certainly got all the bells and whistles: mean girls and first love.) It’s peopled with a wide variety of teenage characters: the beautiful jock (“he was black with vaguely Asian features, bright eyes and the most incredible body I’d ever seen); the student body president (whom Cally catches going through her underwear drawer) and Jack (“one of those boys who make you dizzy when you look at them). You’ll recognize all the players well enough.

Cally finds it relatively easy to infiltrate the inner-circle and soon enough learns that St. Bede’s is a hot-bed of rumours and disappearances. In fact, she’s moved into the room of a girl who disappeared only a few months ago. There’s also talk about the “little woods.” Hunky Alex explains at a party:

“All due respect, but everyone knows these woods are straight-up haunted. We do this walk all the time, and there’s always some scary fucking noise that can’t be explained. Ask anyone.

…

I’ll tell you what we’re hearing…We’re hearing the lost girls.”

It is at this party that Cally discovers that her sister’s death is legend: “The woods are haunted. These two little girls were murdered out there….Seriously, you guys. They wandered off into the woods or whatever, but they were totally murdered.”

Although Cally doesn’t expose her connection to Clare, she watches and listens for any clue that will help her uncover the truth.

As far as mysteries go, The Little Woods is decent enough. The problem I had with it is that the story is bogged down by so many other things – side-plots and intrigues, that it was hard to keep the whole convoluted story straight. Doesn’t mean avid YA readers won’t eat it up, though.

Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn

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sharpMy son Connor recently purchased Sharp Objects and zipped through it in a couple days. I had the same reading experience and now I’ve read all three of Flynn’s novels. Of the three I liked Dark Places the best, though I know Flynn is most well-known known for Gone Girl. One thing I can say for sure, she sure does like damaged female protagonists.

Camille Preaker is a reporter for a third-rate Chicago paper, the Daily Post. Mostly she covers “slice-of-life” pieces, stuff her curmudgeonly editor Frank Curry hates. Then, when a young girl goes missing in Camille’s home town, Wind Gap, Missouri, Curry suggests Camille head home and see what’s the what. Camille isn’t all that fussy about going back to Wind Gap, a town she describes as “one of those crummy little towns prone to misery,” but she can’t say no to Curry, a man whose always looked out for and believed in her.

Wind Gap truly is a backwater, though, and it’s been eight years since Camille has visited. Her mother, Adora, and step-father, Alan, still live there. So does, Amma, her half-sister who is just thirteen. Then there’s the ghost of Marian, Camille’s baby sister who died many years ago.  Camille’s arrival back at the family home, “an elaborate Victorian replete with a widow’s walk, a wraparound veranda, a summer porch jutting toward the back, and a cupola arrowing out of the top” is fraught with polite tension. When Camille rings the doorbell and her mother answers, Adora actually asks if everything okay and “didn’t offer a hug at all.”

Small towns don’t change and secrets are hard to keep, but as Camille works the few connections she has in Wind Gap, another girl goes missing and Camille struggles to keep her equilibrium. Wind Gap, it seems, is filled with old ghosts, ghosts she has worked extra hard (including a stint in a psychiatric hospital) to keep at bay.

Camille is not dissimilar to the main character in Dark Places, Libby. Both are women with troubled pasts. Both are prickly and anti-social. Both are smart and resilient.  I think, ultimately, I liked the mystery in Dark Places better than the one in Sharp Objects but if you are looking for a well-written psychological page-turner, Flynn won’t disappoint, no matter which book you read.

Roomies by Sara Zarr & Tara Altebrando

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roomiesMaybe it’s because my daughter is graduating from high school in a few weeks and heading off to university or maybe it’s because, just lately, I have been feeling unsettled and nostalgic, but whatever the reason: I LOVED Roomies. Co-written by Sara Zarr (Story of a Girl) and Tara Altebrando, Roomies‘ narrative is comprised of the back and forth e-mail communication between Elizabeth (EB) and Lauren (Lo), who have been assigned a room together at UC Berkley, as well as their first person narrative of events during that pivotal summer between high school and what comes next.

EB lives with her single mother in a condo on the Jersey Shore (but she doesn’t sound like a character from the reality show of the same name.) Her first e-mail to Lauren is a rant of epic proportions: she’s just had a fight with her mother and she’s already counting the days until she can leave the nest and fly across country.

Lauren has five younger siblings. They are so much younger, in fact, that she’s more like another mother than an older sister. She loves her family, but she has been dreaming about a single room for a while and so the first note from EB comes as something of a disappointment. She imagines writing a reply to EB that says:

I requested a single. All I’ve wanted for the last decade is a room of my own. Some privacy. A place to be alone with my thoughts where they are not constantly interrupted by someone else making some kind of racket, or even just someone else just quietly trying to exist in the same space as me…A “roomie” is really not what I had in mind. Really not what I had in mind at all.

Of course, this is not the note Lauren sends. Her actual reply is much less personal and honest. Nevertheless, despite the awkward beginning, the email exchange between EB and Lauren slowly morphs into something special as each girl tries to navigate that tricky period between “childhood” and “adulthood”.

I remember that summer between high school and university as a very transitional time. I wasn’t actually going away to school; my parents couldn’t afford it. Most of my best friends did go away, though. And so did the boy I fell in love with that summer. I wanted to be someone different – desperately. (Funny, that – almost forty years later, I still often want to be someone different.) Zarr and Altebrando capture that yearning ache so perfectly that I felt myself magically transported back to that long ago summer. Everything was funnier or sadder or profoundly important then.

When you go off to university (which I did the following year) you get to reinvent yourself. The person you were in high school can be magically shed like an old skin; there is no one around who “knew you when” and there’s something pretty amazing (albeit terrifying) in that. But there is also something pretty amazing about being with the people who have known you through all those formative years – people who know your flaws and love you anyway.  I appreciated the way Zarr and Altebrando handled those high school relationships – the push and pull that comes from preparing to make the break and also desperately holding on to something that is important.

Lauren writes:  “There’s this party on Saturday with kids from our high school and she (Lauren’s best friend, Zoe) wants to go and wants me to go with her. I don’t know. I just feel like high school is over…”

EB writes: “Lately my friends don’t talk about anything I find interesting. I’m not sure when that started.”

Over the course of the summer, the correspondence between EB and Lauren becomes more personal as they share details about their last summer at home. I loved each girl’s voice and story. I loved the secondary characters: parents and boyfriends. I loved how EB in particular comes to a deeper understanding of her mother. Perhaps some day my own daughter will understand me a little bit better, too.

Although I would love to follow EB and Lauren through their first year as roomies, I am glad that Zarr and Altebrando decided to end their story where they did. I haven’t read a YA book I have loved as much as this one in a long time.

As my daughter prepares to embark on her own journey I am both elated and terrified. I hope she makes friends like EB and Lauren. I hope she becomes the person she wants to be.

Highly recommended.

Pushing the Limits – Katie McGarry

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pushingThe only limit Katie McGarry’s YA novel Pushing the Limits pushed was my patience. It took me forever to get through this brick of a novel which was, by my estimation, about 200 pages too long. And it pains me to say this because if there’s one thing I love it’s a bad boy/good girl.

Pushing the Limits is told in the alternating voices of high school seniors Noah and Echo (and oh, how her name grated). We meet them (separately) in the office of Mrs Collins, “Eastwood High’s new clinical social worker.” We meet Echo first. She’s in the office with her father and pregnant stepmother (slash former babysitter, that’s right, the dad married the babysitter). She’s there because “after the incident, Child Protective Services had “strongly encouraged” therapy.” Echo is reluctant to talk and desperate to know more about “the incident”, an event that left her with horrible scars on her arms.

Noah doesn’t want to spend any time with Mrs. Collins, either. “Look,” he tells her at their first meeting, “I already have a social worker and she’s enough of a pain in my ass. Tell your bosses you don’t need to waste your time on me.” Of course, Mrs. Collins sees straight through the tough-guy façade to the cream puff that lives underneath. No question, Noah is a “bad boy” but he’s been dealt a crap hand: his parents were killed in a house fire and his two younger brothers are in foster care, but not in the same foster home as he is. He’s barely allowed to see them because of his “anger” issues.

Mrs. Collins figures that Echo and Noah would make good study partners and it doesn’t take long before the two of them are concentrating more on each other than on calculus.

And seriously, this exchange (before they are even ‘dating’) just made me cringe:

I smacked my lips like a cartoon character and bit into the succulent burger. When the juicy meat touched my tongue, I closed my eyes and moaned.

“I thought girls only looked like that when they orgasmed.”

Trust me, there’s more where that came from.

I can’t quite decide why Pushing the Limits didn’t work for me.  I started to get irritated by the number of times Noah called Echo “baby” or reminded me of her silken red curls and cinnamon smell. The central mystery (if you can even call it that) of what happened to Echo is revealed ever…so…slowly and when the truth finally makes its way into the light, it’s a bit of a bummer. There was something shrill about these characters and the way they fumbled through their story towards their happily ever after.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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aristotle_and_dante Aristotle (Ari for short) is a 15-year-old Mexican American living in Texas in 1987. He’s bored and miserable and pretty much hates his life.

Dante is also 15, and also Mexican-American, but he’s “funny and focused and fierce.” Ari says “there wasn’t anything mean about him. I didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?”

Aristotle and Dante meet at the local pool where Dante offers to teach Ari how to swim. “All that summer, we swam and read comics and read books and argued about them.” It’s the beginning of beautiful friendship, something that Ari seems to desperately need.

Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a part of me liked doing that. Maybe it had something to do with my birth order. You know, I think that was part of it. I didn’t like the fact that I was a pseudo only child. I didn’t know how else to think of myself. I was an only child without actually being one. That sucked.

Ari has older twin sisters and an older brother who is in prison. He was born after his father returned from serving in Vietnam.

Sometimes I think my father has all these scars. On his heart. In his head. All over. It’s not such an easy thing to be the son of a man who’s been to war.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a coming of age story. It’s a story about fathers and sons and mothers and sons. It’s about sacrifice and loyalty. It’s a story about friendship.

I wanted to tell them that I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn’t have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. “Dante’s my friend.

It’s a love story.

I was the age of these characters somewhere around 1976. I didn’t know anyone who was gay. Okay, looking back – of course I did, but we didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t acknowledged. As far as I know, they weren’t out. I am profoundly grateful as a teacher and a parent, just as a human being, that books like this exist. Alire Sáenz has written a story about boys who are smart and fragile and flawed. I admit it – I got teary a few times reading this book.

What are the secrets of the universe? As Ari discovers “we all fight our own private wars.”

This is a beautiful book and I highly recommend it.

Bird Box – Josh Malerman

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birdboxIt seemed like everyone was talking about Josh Malerman’s debut novel, Bird Box, but it was still a surprise when it was chosen as our April read for book club. In the 15 years we’ve been together we’ve never read anything even resembling a horror story. I was really looking forward to this one because I love a scary book.

Malorie lives alone in a house in a Detroit suburb with two children she calls Boy and Girl. The house used to be nice but now she notices the “rusted utensils and cracked dishes. The cardboard box used as a garbage can. The chairs, some held together by twine.” Clearly, it’s not situation normal and Malorie’s musings allude to “older stains,”  for which there are “no chemicals in the house to help clean.”

Malerman doesn’t waste any time with preamble. That’s probably a good thing because Bird Box relies on a heavy dose of the unknown to make it tick. Something has happened to the world. The “Internet has blown up with a story people are calling ‘the Russia Report.'” People are behaving monstrously, attacking strangers and family members in gruesome ways (a mother buries her children alive) before ending their own lives. It’s a “the whole world’s going crazy” scenario, but it spreads from Russia to North America (and who knows where else) like wildfire. The only way to prevent doing harm to others and yourself is to prevent yourself from seeing whatever is out there. People hole up in their houses, windows covered, and if they must venture outside, they wear a blindfold.

Bird Box bounces between Malorie’s perilous journey down the river in a boat (she’s heard that there is a safe community and after four years alone, she longs for something more for herself and her children who she laments “have never seen the sky. Have never looked out a window.” ) and her time in the house with a group of strangers she discovered through an advertisement in the paper.

I can’t say I was fussy about the beginning or the ending of Bird Box, but I was seriously creeped out in the middle. There’s a scene when members of the house have to go out into the backyard to get water from the well. They have to be blindfolded, of course, and a rope is tied around their waist. The person whose job it is to go to the well must make the journey three times. On this occasion, it’s Felix’s turn. On the third and final trip from the house to the well he hears a sound.

But now he can tell where it is coming from.

It is coming from inside the well.

He releases the crank and steps back. The bucket falls, crashing against the stone, before splashing below.

Something moved. Something moved in the water.

It’s moments like these when Bird Box is at its best. Like Malerman’s characters, we are blind and we realize that the scariest thing in the world is what we can’t see.

 

 

 

Give a Boy a Gun – Todd Strasser

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gun

Todd Strasser’s topical novel Give a Boy a Gun  tackles a difficult and potentially divisive topic with a great deal of care and concern for all parties involved. As both a mother and a teacher, I found the book horrifying and troubling. Canada doesn’t have a gun culture per se. Sure, we own guns, but rifles for hunting mostly. In fact, “there are just two categories of individuals who are allowed an authorization to carry [handguns]: those who require one because of their occupations and those who need one for the “protection of life.” They need to get an authorization from the chief firearms officer for their province or territory. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/who-may-carry-handguns-in-canada-1.1135084)

Strasser’s story is framed as an investigation by Journalism student, Denise Shipley. She hears about the death of Gary Searle in the gymnasium of Middletown High, her alma mater, and she heads home to investigate. She says, “I spoke to everyone who would speak to me. In addition I studied everything I could find on the many similar incidents that occurred in other schools around our country in the past thirty years.” The story of Middletown is fiction, but the notes found at the bottom of many of the pages, are not. The facts and figures lend an air of authenticity to the story Denise discovers about Gary.

As classmates, teachers, parents and bystanders weigh in, a horrible picture begins to emerge of a student who is bullied and who finds a friend in another outsider, Brendan Lawlor. Brendan’s best friend Brett describes him as “smart and funny and a pretty good athlete.” While Brendan lived in Springfield he was ” a really cool kid. Popular too.” But things change when he moves with his parents to Middletown and he starts high school.

I am not so naïve as to think that there isn’t a pecking order in high school. I would like to believe that at the high school where I teach (on the East coast of Canada) it is not quite so pronounced as the school Brendan and Gary attend. There, they are openly picked on and the teachers and administration ignore it.

Brendan and Gary got picked on. That’s a fact. We all did. Little guys; fat guys; skinny, gangly, zit-riddled guys like me. Anyone who wasn’t big and strong and on a team got it. You’d even see big guys on the football team push around some of the smaller players. Middletown High is big and crowded, and you’ve got ten dillion kids in the hall at once. Maybe if it’s an all-out, knock-down-drag-out fight, some teacher will notice and try to stop it. But if it’s just some big jerk shoving you into a locker, who’s gonna see?

I believe we work very hard (with more success than failure) to cultivate an atmosphere of acceptance here, but it doesn’t take very long for the reader to see how the daily abuse that comes from being perceived as “different” affects Brendan and Gary. The novel clips along to its inevitable conclusion and although it makes for grim reading, I also think it’s an important topic and one that would certainly generate lively discussion.