5 posts tagged “book review”
Ha! Could I have picked more disparate books to read?
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton is a book I've been trying to read for 10 years, literally. It is a fantastic book -- exciting, heartfelt, intelligent -- but there was something star-crossed about my relationship with this book. I first started reading it when I was pregnant with my son. I was loving the book, taking it everywhere with me, and somehow I left it at someone's house. When I attempted to retrieve it, my friend was already reading it and I agreed to leave it for a while. Needless to say, I never got it back. 6 months ago, there I was in a thrift store, perusing the used books, and I saw copy of Lidie Newton on the rack for $2. Hooray! I took it home, ran a hot bath, and started reading. I forgot the book when I went to get my pajamas, and when I came back, my two new puppies had eaten the entire middle half of the book. :( So, flash forward to Christmas, when my daughter bought me a new copy of the book. And thankfully, I got to finish this one! And it's still in one piece!
Lidie Newton is the story of a woman who marries an abolitionist and moves to Kansas at the height of hostilities between the pro-slavery and abolitionist movements. Lidie Newton is a true historical fiction piece, but with a strong emphasis on the history. Set in Lawrence, KS, just before Quantrill's Raid, Lidie Newton features characters and places that are familiar to anyone familiar with Kansas history, but it's also a love story (of a sort) and an adventure story, featuring a strong female protagonist. Jane Smiley, the author, is a product of the renowed Iowa Writer's Workshop and the winner of the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, and she shows clearly her acumen in the midwest aesthetic. She gets the voices right, she gets the emotions right. This book, even though it's set 150 years in the past, feels as honest as any contemporary story. I couldn't recommend this book more!
Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk, is another book I've been trying to read for a long long while. I think I can wholeheartedly attest that Palahniuk's books are the most often-thieved tomes in any college library, maybe any library. I've searched high and low for library copies of any of Palahniuk's books, and come up empty each time. Whenever I find them second-hand, since that's how I buy most of my books, I buy them. This year, also for Christmas, my son bought me my very own copy of Fight Club, and it was well worth the wait. This book was familiar, as I have heard Chuck reading the short story that eventually became the novel, but of course, there was a lot more of it. Palahniuk's voice, as always, as I've come to expect, is fragmented, sarcastic, ironic, but always unforgettable. I find the more of Chuck I read, the more I want to read.
Although I liked Fight Club, I still have to count Diary as my favorite book of Palahniuk's. But that's like saying "Billy Budd" is my 2nd favorite Herman Melville :)
Wow. Just wow. I stumbled across a copy of Cormac McCarthy's latest book in a used bookstore the other day. $1. I didn't even hesitate; how can you go wrong for a buck? Did I ever get my dollar's worth! I went in to take a bath, took the bath, and came out 3 hours later, prune-fingered and goosebumped and wrapped in my flannel robe, and sat down to start The Road over again.
Let me just say, first off, that I'm an aficionado of apocolypse stories. It all began with The Stand the summer before I started high school. Stephen King created a world that was so horrible, so alien, and an antigen-shifting virus that killed 99.4% everyone in the world. It was also a really bad time to come down with a summer cold, because I was sure that I too had Captain Tripps, but, luckily I lived. However, King let us see five chapters of life as we knew it: rock stars indulging in excess, college kids on summer break, military snafus. It isn't until we realize the nature of those snafus that we realize the horror that's about to be visited upon the United States.
McCarthy's book is different. The world to which McCarthy delivers us can only be described as scorched earth. Plants and trees are dead and black; water is thick with ash; the sky is gray and the sun ineffective; snow falls to the earth gray. From the first page, a reader wonders "What happened?!?" and that reader is still wondering on the last page. We never even know if this was a man-made calamity or an environmental problem gone spectacularly wrong, and perhaps it's best that we not know. This book is, above all else, about going on; does it matter if this was a war or a forest fire?
While King's book featured two groups of survivors, one basically good and one basically bad, McCarthy's survivors are harder to classify. His two main protagonists, a father and son, are basically good, even referring to themselves as "The Good Guys." However, McCarthy also portrays characters that are basically good but steal, characters whom we just never know well enough to classify, and characters who are so hideous in behavior that it's difficult to even consider them human. One particular scene, which I will let you discover for yourself, is revolting, and I say that as a person who is not easily sickened. What sets this book apart is the beauty of the writing and the tale-telling, and as sickening as some scenes are, the writing brings them back, over and over, even after I've put the book down.
King's book, written in the late 70s, ends on a positive note. The guys in the white hats win out in the end, and it seems as though the world will find a way to right itself. McCarthy doesn't let us off that easy. The ending of The Road is not completely without hope, but it never gives us that sense of euphoria, that "Yes! They're gonna be okay!" moment that some readers may want. Far from it. In fact, throughout the book, the situation is so bleak that the mere finding of a windfall apple seems like a triumph.
However, in spite of what may seem a real downer subject, this book is inspiring in its simplicity and its goodness. The writing is absolutely delicious. One particular phrase that I have to share describes the relationship between the boy and his father; they are "each the other's world entire." Now that is beautiful.
One Thousand White Women is a 1998 novel by Jim Fergus, known most for his writing world for Sports Afield magazine and other sporting life. In his preface, Fergus explains the how his novel was born:
However, Fergus doesn't give himself adequate credit in this summary. Not only does this novel address the disgusting treatment of the Native Americans at the hands of the United States government, but an even more overt theme deals with the role of women in the society of the time. The women who sign up as "volunteers" to be brides begin as a rag-tag collection of society's outcasts, but by the end, most of the women have become friends, the bonds forged between them only strengthened by the hardships they face together on the plains.In 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world -- a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native American clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyenne's request was not well received by the white authorities -- the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do.
The book is written as a collection of journals and letters written by a woman named May Dodd, the daughter of a well-to-do industrialist in Chicago, who is unlucky enough to find the love of her life in a common laborer named Harry Ames. Since her wealthy family will never hear of a mismatched marriage of this type, she simply moves in with Harry, taking factory work herself and giving birth to two children. For this very public disobedience, May's father has her committed to an asylum. Her disease: promiscuity.
When given a chance at earning her freedom through the "Brides for Indians" program, May leaps to sign up, and on the journey to Laramie the reader is introduced to a group of "brides" that includes fallen Confederate debutantes, common criminals, immigrants, artists, religious zealots, orphans, a runaway slave, and genuinely ill mental inmates. Throughout, Fergus uses a plain-spoken, yet rarely crude, conversational tone, perfectly adapted to the letters and journal entries of an educated but irreverent and independent woman with nothing to lose. Characters are sketched subtly but vividly over the course of the book, especially through the use of phonetic renderings of language, leaving the reader, near the end, with the desire not only to know, "What happened to May?" but really to know, "What happened to all of them?"
While this book, because of the nature of the plot and the well-known outcome of Indian/Cavalry relations, certainly will have no sequel, I can still remain hopeful that Jim Fergus has or will publish more. His knowledge of and obvious affection for the Great Plains and all her species, both four- and two-legged, makes his prose a joy to read.
I have to admit that I was, and remain, slightly skeptical of Meyer's portrayal of Edward, because he is simply too good to be believed. He has impeccable manners, blistering intelligence, and, of course, he oozes sex appeal. Or at least he does if you like your men tall, pale, and cold. In spite of his to-die-for good points, Meyer does, in all fairness, give Edward a fiery temper and, well, he is a vampire, who oddly struggles at times with his ideas about faith. Huh??? I don't remember LeStat quibbling over his soul.
Meyer creates a great character in Bella, her narrator. At once charming, willful, intelligent, and easy to anger, Bella won me over within a chapter of the first book. If forced to name a flaw in this character, like Edward, I would be forced to say that she is, at times, too good to be true. Her unswerving loyalty drives the plot in both New Moon and Eclipse. Torn between her werewolf best friend, Jacob, and her vampire boyfriend, Edward, Bella struggles to bridge the gap between the two feuding factions. Who knew that werewolves and vampires were motal enemies?
In Eclipse, Bella and Edward are preparing to graduate from high school and go to college. Or at least that's Edward's plan. Bella intends to graduate and then be bitten by Edward's adoptive father, turning her into a vampire and making her part of the clan, and, hopefully, ensuring her safety. Did I fail to mention that Bella is still being hunted by Victoria the rogue vampire and the Volturi, the Italian vampire mafia? Well, she is, and she also has to decide whether to go to Prom, and there's this one backstabbing little brat at school who needs her hash settled . . .
As expected, Meyer delivers an action-filled, titillating teenage vampire novel that young adults will love. Boys might skip over some of Edward's more heartfelt yearnings for Bella, but you can be sure that any teenage girl with a pulse will wear holes in the pages with rereading.
But I can't. There is something so lifelike and so . . . so damn normal about these characters that I cannot help rooting for them, cannot help wanting to know how their lives turn out, cannot help hoping that Harry would finally get laid or something. Okay, okay, being a young adult's book, I suppose that I'm insinuating my adult taste for the risque into a more innocent narrative. But I digress . . .
Deathly Hallows continues where the sixth book left off, with Harry nearing the end of his protective charms and Voldemort quickly closing in. Advance readers warned of "how to deal with all the deaths in the new book," and, I have to admit, I was a scoffer. How many could there be? Wellll, I was surprised! There really were quite a lot, and some of them were shocking. The first happened quickly and without any kind of forewarning. The unexpectedness of it caught me off guard. From there on, I expected a death at every turn, and, even so, the next major death made me cry. Now, for those of you who don't know me, I can be emotional, but I usually can disengage from a character enough to keep from crying in public. Not this time! There I was, bawling my eyes out in a parking lot while my daughter bought eyeliner, for Pete's sake!
Once again, Rowling's knack for effortlessly weaving in backstory helps immensely, as small forgettable aspects from earlier books were crucial to the plot. One really nice thing in Deathly Hallows is that Harry and company have noticeably aged. No longer are they concerned merely with school and their own affairs; now, with the death of Dumbledore in the sixth book, Harry and his friends are forced to confront the larger issue of "What is Best for the Wizarding World?" as they approach the problems in the seventh book. They even swear, albeit in a mild form.
Overall, Deathly Hallows was a wonderful way to wind up the series. Full of action, emotion, and then more action, Rowling ties up the threads from the previous six books neatly and, seemingly, effortlessly. And frankly, I wonder if this isn't what draws so much of the criticism from those who quickly dismiss Rowling as a commercial success. She makes it look sooooo easy, and we're all jealous. Deep down, we all want to be the next Rowling, and then we won't be bitching about the commercial success.
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