June 30, 2015

Ignoring Gravity - Sandra Danby

 

Beulah Press, 2014.








 

Two Stars



This novel was disappointing right from the start. The plot had great potential, but from page one the writing was rushed, with no clear backstory for any of the characters, making it impossible to get emotionally involved. The opening interview scene between Rose and Nick, which should have been their adorable first meeting and precursor to romance, instead felt like a poorly done rip-off of Fifty Shades of Grey. My first impression of all the main characters was that they were completely unlikeable, and because of this I just couldn’t bring myself to care what happened to them next. And really, I’m all for an unlikeable character, but they must be well-written to hold my interest.


The whole plot was filled with melodrama and unnecessary misunderstandings. Rose and her sister Lily’s mother passes away, and they find a journal in which it is clear that Rose was adopted. Instead of considering the feelings of her remaining family, such as her bumbling father and sweet grandmother, thirty-five-year-old Rose acts like a petulant child, suddenly deciding that her adoptive family was awful and they punished her by raising her with love and affection when her birth mother could not. Rose seems to make choices out of anger without any real justification or even giving us any insight into her motivations. She acts out of anger but gives the reader no information on why she is so angry.


Meanwhile, Lily is living with an emotionally abusive husband, but she seems to be okay with that. She has no real individuality, and just takes on her personality from the other characters around her. In fact, some chapters are just lists of what Lily did that day, including a list of groceries purchased. She was very two-dimensional with no information to show us who she really is.


Rose’s romance with Nick is really just a plot device so she has someone to complain to about how horrible her life is. She begins to refer to herself as an orphan, identifying with Jane Eyre and Pip from Great Expectations. It’s very dramatic and over the top, I just couldn’t take her seriously. At one point, she whines to Lily, “I didn’t ask to be adopted, it happened to me. I’m the victim here.” (Loc. 1900). Yes, it’s horrible that your adoptive parents removed you from a potentially dangerous situation with an unfit mother and raised you as part of a happy family. At this point, I completely lost interest in Rose and her story.


If Rose was fifteen instead of thirty-five and this was advertised as a young adult novel, I could maybe forgive the whiny tone and poorly written characters. As it is, Rose was completely unlikeable and unsympathetic. I’m giving this novel two stars instead of one because I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt that there is more to the story here than I was able to see. Apparently this is the first in a series, and I will not be reading more.


I received this novel from Netgalley and Beulah Press in exchange for an honest review.

June 26, 2015

Letters to the Lost - Iona Grey


St. Martin’s Press, April 2015.







Four Stars



Iona Grey’s new novel contrasts the parallel stories of two very different women who struggle with circumstance to find love. Letters to the Lost will make a great beach read this summer, with just enough twists to elevate it from the average historical romance. I found it predictable in a nice sort of way – you know it’s going to end well, so you can just turn of your brain and enjoy the unfolding love stories. However, the ending will keep you guessing for awhile.


In 2011, Jess is running from an abusive boyfriend when she stumbles into a small abandoned cottage in the back streets of London. While she hides out and tries to survive, a mysterious letter arrives, allowing her to explore the 1942 love story of Stella and Dan. This connection is a little contrived, but it’s worth it because it is a departure from what could have been a more traditional storyline. It also helps to further Jess’s character: she is lost in life, as well as being lost in the letters she finds, consumed by a love that occurred many years before.


The letters and the narrative (of both Stella and Jess) are expertly combined, with no awkward transitions. I don’t generally enjoy epistolary novels, but the way the letters were woven into the plot worked well for me. The time shift was also handled expertly – both stories were equally compelling and enhanced each other. The authentic, detailed descriptions of war-time London were contrasted with the modern day city that Jess had to navigate like a war zone, finding a way to survive with no emotional or financial support. Although the circumstances in which Stella and Jess found themselves were completely different, their struggles showed that women still must fight much harder than men to live the lives they desire.


None of the characters are perfect, physically or otherwise, which made the story much more believable. Jess is not the boring young woman who exists just to further Stella’s story with her research – she has her own unique backstory that makes her relatable and able to stand on her own. Only Charles, Stella’s husband, is a stereotype who does not develop throughout the novel – I wish he had opened up more about his own feelings of oppression as a product of his time period, but he remained true to evil form, only causing suffering for Stella. It would have been more interesting as a reader if I were forced to feel sympathy for someone so despicable.


The stigma of mental illness is a major theme of the novel, and many of the characters question whether love (maternal, romantic, or otherwise) can survive it. The morality of the church versus individual characters’ ethics is also explored. Ultimately Dan and Stella must put their own ethics and responsibilities before their love, and their decisions carry this novel out of the traditional romance zone. They must let go of love instead of compromising their morals, and thus experience the devastation of letting go. Jess learns from their lost opportunities in her own life with Will – as she says of Stella: “All these years, through all she’s suffered, she’s been loved. Isn’t that the most important thing, in the end? To know that you’re loved?” (Loc. 6262). In the end, the strength of these characters and their love elevates Letters to the Lost far above a typical romance novel.


I received this novel from Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.

June 24, 2015

Me, Who Dove Into the Heart of the World - Sabina Berman

Henry Holt & Company, 2012.







Five Stars



When Karen Nieto’s aunt Isabelle returns to her childhood home in Mazatlan, Mexico after the death of her sister, she finds a niece that she did not know existed. Karen grew up as a feral child with undiagnosed autism, who is finally able to communicate with others because of the love and support of her aunt. Isabelle’s parenting is far from conventional, as she allows Karen to play and work at the family’s failing tuna cannery, Consolation Tuna. Because Karen is more at home with the tuna than with other humans, she puts her savant-like skills to good use, making the cannery the first humane tuna fishery on the planet. As Karen grows and develops, her intuitive communication with nature calls into question our own ethics about how we live and what we eat.


At first I found the language awkward, and saw it as a combination of the translation and the use of an autistic voice, which wasn’t always successful. However, the author uses Karen’s innocent and literal mind to explore difficult topics in a matter-of-fact way. Sexuality, religion and ethics are all touched on, and Karen questions everything we think is factual about being human. Karen thinks of herself as “Me”, a role that no one else can take on – we all self-aggrandize, and she is just more honest about it than most. As humans, we generally see ourselves as the centre of the world, but Karen does manage to overcome this as she identifies more with the other creatures around her – she finally sees herself as a small part functioning in a great big world.


Karen’s supposed limitations – her inability to lie, her refusal to speak in metaphor when the truth is more exact – are actually strengths that allow her to see the truth in human nature. She tells the world that she has “different abilities”, and her differences from other people are equated to the difference between humans and other species. She uses coping mechanisms to function – such as hiding herself in the safety of her scuba gear – and she refuses to accept the euphemisms we use for the torture and killing of animals. She sees through the lies we construct for ourselves about being human, and forces us to acknowledge the way we treat other beings on our planet.


Philosophy and religion played a major role in this novel, but it was never tedious. Karen’s explorations of spiritual treatment of animals, such as kosher laws, as well as philosophers such as Descartes, are all handled with care and attention. Descartes most famously summed up humans by telling us “I think, therefore I am,” and his message has been used to elevate us above the animals and justify the negative ways we treat them. Karen, however, disagrees: “I, on the contrary, have never forgotten that first I existed and then, with a lot of difficulty, I learned to think… So, that’s why I’m far away from humans.” (p. 31). At the end of her life, Karen’s aunt can see this too: “In their relationship to nonhumans, civilized humans are all autistic.” (p. 209). It is up to Karen to create a new, respectful agreement between the two.


In her interactions with the tuna, Karen realizes that the miracle of spirituality will not be found in any sort of religious rapture, but in our connection, here and now, with the natural world. The miracle is the sea, and the sun, and our existence within it. She constructs for us a new way that we can strive to live: “Not to kill reality nor to let reality kill me.” (p. 238). Just existing within the natural world – that is enough.


When I started this novel, I was pretty sure it would be getting three stars, but it just got better and better, moving steadily to a solid five. I was actually surprised at the end by how much I loved it. Karen’s enjoyment of being in the world was so satisfying and filled with an authentic love for the planet. I can’t wait to read more by this author.

June 19, 2015

Longbourn - Jo Baker


Vintage Canada, 2013






Four Stars


I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never actually read Pride and Prejudice – but on the bright side, I can safely say that it is not necessary to read the Jane Austen classic in order to fully enjoy its companion novel, Longbourn. Jo Baker’s take on Pride and Prejudice puts the below-stairs servants at center stage, instead of fading into the background of the Bennet household. Elizabeth, Jane, and the rest of the Bennet family continue to dream, dance and charm potential husbands; however, now the servants have dreams and families of their own.

In her endnote, Baker tells us that the footman appears just once in the original novel. Here, he takes on a life of his own as James Smith, and his connections to Longbourn deepen as the story develops. The title of the novel is also the name of the Bennet house, and I think it also signifies that the servants are the house – it couldn’t exist without them. The servants also humanize the house: they know all the earthy secrets (smells, stains, etc. are all described in detail) of the seemingly ethereal Bennet sisters. That’s not to say that the servants don’t make secrets of their own, and James’ meeting with the maid Sarah is only the beginning.

The contrast in courtship above and below stairs could not be clearer. While the gentlemen upstairs require a wife who is “biddable” and “amiable” (p. 111), James’ love of Sarah is pure, and he only wishes for her to be happy without dragging her into his own mysterious troubles. Sarah, meanwhile, values her independence and has no wish to rely on a husband: “To live so entirely at the mercy of other people’s whims and fancies was, she thought, no way to live at all” (p. 168). In this desire at least, she is more fortunate than the Bennet girls – she will have to work hard, but she does have the option to make her own life, with or without James.

Because Sarah realizes that she can control her own destiny, her path veers from the maternal housekeeper, Mrs. Hill. For a while it seems Sarah is doomed to repeat Mrs. Hill’s mistakes, in which she sacrificed too much for her employers and realizes it too late: “It had been a dreadful miscalculation, she saw that now: that all of them should be unhappy so that he [Mr. Bennet] should not be disgraced” (p. 223). Instead, Sarah makes her own decisions, regardless of the risk. Although she finally accepts her place at Longbourn, she also fully understands Heraclitus’ words and Mr. Bennet’s advice that you can’t step into the same river twice. Longbourn is the Bennets’ house, but for the family of servants below-stairs, it is also home.

Four stars for a solidly-written story filled with some great unexpected twists, which stands on its own beside the original. Now I may finally have to read Pride and Prejudice!

June 16, 2015

Lamp Black, Wolf Grey - Paula Brackston


St. Martin’s Press, August 2015






Three Stars


I realize this is a book about the legend of the wizard Merlin, and thus I should have been expecting fantasy, but I was still hoping for more of a psychological twist. However, I was disappointed. Even so, I could have dealt with fantasy, if the fantastical elements had made any sense. Legendary characters came out of nowhere, claimed to be the soul mate of a human character based on a few conversations, then disappeared. The intensity of the various love stories was completely out of line with the development of the characters – their emotions had no back story to make them in any way plausible.

 

Lamp Black, Wolf Grey attempts to bring together parallel timelines, but the link between them is tenuous. The only commonality was the setting of Wales – and it was beautifully described, without reverting to clichés – and Merlin’s brief appearances in both timelines. To Megan in the 13th century and to Laura in the 21st, Merlin appears to be charming and handsome – although we must take the author’s word for it, as we don’t learn enough about him to make our own judgement. I felt embarrassed for the female characters, especially Laura, as she fell in love quickly and repeatedly, with no self-respect or even self-preservation. She doesn’t seem at all concerned with how her poor decisions affect those she cares about.

 

Laura lost credibility with me for jumping from man to man, and not just sexually – with each man, she is completely, obsessively in love. Other minor characters appear briefly, then disappear, and we never really learn if they have significance to the story. In fact, none of the characters were developed in depth, least of all Merlin, who should have been the highlight of the novel. He could have been vivid and commanding – if you’re going to do magic, embrace it and go big! – but instead he faded into the shadows. Likewise, I was expecting the link between Laura and Megan to be developed more fully, but aside from their home, no connection between the two is convincingly made.

 

The ending especially was a cop out – the threat to Laura conveniently disappears into the woods, and she carries on with her charming life. I would have preferred if the novel could have veered more into the realm of the psychological, or at least left the reader wondering what was real and what was delusion. Instead, everything was laid out too clearly, without much substance. This story certainly had potential, but neither the plot nor the characters were developed fully, and I left it feeling unsatisfied. It still gets three stars however, for the lush, atmospheric setting, and the fact that others will enjoy this as an escapist summer read.

 

 

I received this book for free through St. Martin’s Press and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

June 12, 2015

The Museum of Extraordinary Things - Alice Hoffman

Scribner, 2014.






Five Stars


Many prolific authors tell the same story over and over again – they have a formula, and it works, but it gets monotonous. What I love about Alice Hoffman is that each of her novels is a new idea with a new voice, and The Museum of Extraordinary Things is no exception. Stories with a circus/freakshow theme are very on trend right now, but Museum goes beyond the trend. It has a depth of feeling that brings the characters to the forefront, with their freakishness being a minor detail.

Professor Sardie appears to love his daughter Coralie, but he loves fame and fortune more. Although he is exploiting human beings – Coralie among them – for profit, he has truly convinced himself that his museum of natural curiousities is higher class than the others on Coney Island: it is “a true museum, a place of edification” (p. 28). The professor treats Coralie as a disappointment, unless she is playing her role as mermaid, swimming in her tank. Because of this, Coralie repeatedly refers to herself as worthless, hiding her true feelings underwater.

Ezekiel is also a disappointment to his father, but instead of self-recrimination, he responds with rage. He separates himself from his past and recreates himself as Eddie, photographing the world around him and seeing truth only through his camera lens. Eddie’s compulsion to document tragedy is similar to Sardie’s need to collect and display it; however, Eddie’s hobby is much
less sinister. He is there to bear witness. Through his journalism, we see amazing period details of New York in the early twentieth century – the historical facts are rich and wonderful, not dry at all. I felt like I was right there witnessing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which begins the chain of events that lead Eddie and Coralie together, as well as foreshadowing their ending.

The plot thickens with Hoffman’s signature magic realism. Eddie and Coralie meet and fall in love, which seems sudden, but it is developed in their dreams of each other – and somehow Hoffman makes this seem perfectly natural and believable. As Coralie begins to separate herself from her father and his museum, she refers to Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic, bringing up gothic elements and the theme of wildness vs. captivity. Coralie must envision herself as free before she can escape the professor’s cage.

Meanwhile, Eddie becomes part of a hard-boiled detective story in which he must solve a missing person case before he can rescue his damsel in distress. Somehow all of these elements and themes come together, as we see how deformities and disfigurement can change people – sometimes bringing out the goodness within the most unlikely characters.

As the story accelerates to its climax, the italic sections in which Coralie and Eddie reflect on their pasts also speed up, colliding with the present. Their worlds merge together as they find a way to balance freedom and captivity, fire and water. As usual, Hoffman brings everything together with just enough magic in this extraordinary novel.

June 09, 2015

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac - Gabrielle Zevin

 

Square Fish (MacMillan), 2007.


 




Three Stars


 

I picked up this book because The Storied Life of A J Fikry is on my to-read list, and I thought I’d try this one by the same author in the meantime. For some reason, I had no idea Zevin wrote young adult novels – I guess I should have been tipped off by the “teenage” of the title. Regardless, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac was funny and quirky, although definitely targeted to a young adult audience.

 

Zevin uses the somewhat predictable trope of amnesia as a tool to explore who we really are, especially during the murky and changeable teen years. Sixteen-year-old Naomi Porter falls down a flight of stairs and loses the last four years of her life, causing her to re-learn and re-experience all of the events and relationships she has forged – or destroyed – in those years. She is alienated from her former self as well as her friends and family.

 

Meanwhile, she discovers that she might not like who she has become: “I wondered if the former Naomi Porter had been, in all likelihood, a complete and total jerk, someone that I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to know” (p. 45). Her self-doubt raises the question of what the "self" really is – is the real Naomi the one looking in at a life she doesn’t recognize, or the jerk who has been living her life? Recovering from amnesia is just as much a re-creation as a rediscovery of the self. Naomi is a blank slate, with no preconceived notions or censorship of her feelings – she is working purely on instinct to remake herself.

 

Naomi uses literature, and specifically drama, to explore her newly discovered self. Her English class reads Waiting for Godot, an absurdist piece of existentialism in which reality has no objective value. She performs in Hamlet, as Hamlet, which emphasizes the elements of role-playing in discovering the self, as well as her crisis of identity. Her best friend’s mother comments that the general madness and confusion of events is Shakespearean in its  misdirection, which is used to add drama to the plot - a fairly accurate summary of Naomi’s adventures.

 

The dialogue is fun and authentic, drawing the reader into the world of highschool drama. Strong emotions are based on uncertainty, as Naomi learns how easy it is to fall in and out of love as a teenager. She is able to take risks while still being able to rely on the safety net of family and home. I liked that the multiple love stories were sweet yet practical – Naomi does make some bad decisions, but she ultimately takes care of herself. There are too many young adult stories where teens are madly in love and committed for life, which is pretty hard to take seriously. Naomi uses her romantic relationships to learn more about herself, instead of changing herself to make it work.

 

Instead of worrying about the future, especially a romantic future, highschool should be about experiences, living in the moment, which Naomi-as-amnesiac is able to do without memories to hold her back. Naomi’s father explains it well: “You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned…You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before…And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations – even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away…You forget all of them. Even the [people] you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.” (p. 259-260)

 

I think this novel sends a great message about the importance of knowing yourself before you worry about loving someone else. I would highly recommend this to the teen girl crowd – much more enlightening than the vampire romance epidemic. While difficult to rate, I have to give this three stars for my own preference, although it’s a solid four stars within the young adult genre.

June 06, 2015

Pretty Is - Maggie Mitchell

 

Henry Holt & Co., 2015.


 




Four Stars


 

I knew nothing about Maggie Mitchell’s debut novel, Pretty Is, before I started reading, and I was caught up in the story right from the first sentence, anxious to find out what would happen next. The story is told from the alternating perspectives of two women who were kidnapped when they were twelve, as they now deal with the aftermath of the abduction as adults. The parallel voices are so strong yet so different, and the story unfolds only as they choose to tell it, leaving the reader with the mystery of uncertainty.

 

Lois, one of the women, has written a thinly veiled fictional account of the abduction, as a way of coping with the experience, and her novel takes up most of Part Two. Because the girls were kept in relative safety and comfort, and released without harm, their families did not know how to treat them upon their return – there is a feeling that the girls were complicit in their own kidnapping. Although the girls were not physically harmed, the emotional scars live within them. Lois’ novel-within-the-novel adds layers of metafiction, as we try to piece together what really happened to the girls; the truth is further muddied when Chloe, the other woman, disagrees with Lois’ account.

 

Further confusing fact and fiction is Lois’s relationship with a sinister student who threatens to expose her history as kidnap victim. Both Lois and Chloe have created alter egos for themselves in adulthood, in order to separate themselves from their past trauma. While Chloe at first seems to be the more unstable of the two – she is a washed up actress with a tendency to drink too much and make bad decisions – Lois’ mental stability later comes under question as she interacts with her student in inappropriate ways. He becomes a construct of her mind yet he acts out in very real ways: as she uses him for inspiration for her second novel, he uses her to fulfill his escalating violent fantasy world.

 

Lois describes her novel as genre fiction that must fit certain conventions: it is a thriller, and thus must be chilling and suspenseful with limited emotional content. I think Pretty Is has defied this genre pigeonhole, with its added psychological elements. As the story unfolds, we realize that the girls were willing participants in their abductor’s experiment. They wish to please him, and their fear of abandonment bleeds into their adult lives as well. I loved that we are led to believe Lois is rational and reliable, while Chloe seems unbalanced – but their roles may or may not reverse as they reach the climax of their story.

 

My only complaint was the rushed ending, where everything was tied up in only a few pages. The slowly unravelling psychological drama sped up too quickly in Part Four, and pulled Pretty Is back into the traditional thriller genre. However, the first three parts of the novel were enough to make me want to read more by this author.

 

I received this book from Henry Holt & Co. and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

June 03, 2015

Orphan Train - Christina Baker Kline

HarperCollins, 2013.






Three Stars



Orphan Train is the parallel story of two very different women: 17-year-old Molly, a victim of the foster care system in the present day, and 91-year-old Vivian, who has a hidden past as a rider of the so-called orphan trains of the 1920s. More than 200,000 children were collected from New York by Children’s Aid, herded onto trains and deposited in the Midwest. Ostensibly offered for adoption, these orphans were more often treated as servants and farm hands, with no supervision from Children’s Aid. Some children did find loving families, but others were physically and mentally abused, without being given a chance to attend school or improve their lives in any way. While it is easy to look back and criticize these aspects of Vivian’s story, it is Molly’s job to remind us that children are still falling through the cracks of the foster care system.

 

I picked this novel up just to read the back cover, and ended up devouring half of the book. I knew a little bit about the orphan trains from reading The Chaperone, and my interest in the historical aspects distracted me from the questionable writing. It wasn’t exactly bad, I just felt misled that this was classified as literary fiction instead of young adult. I still enjoyed reading it, but it seemed to be targeted to a much younger audience.

 

Part of the reason this seems like a young adult novel are the oversimplified characterizations of certain literary tropes: the evil foster mother, the hapless husband, the kind couple who takes in the poor orphan, the trusting old lady who rescues the delinquent teenager when no one else could. Not to mention that the community service plot device that brings Vivian and Molly together is completely contrived and really makes no sense. Who gets threatened with juvie for “stealing” a library book, then is able to complete her community service hours by cleaning out an attic that just happens to be filled with wonderful stories of the past?

 

The historical sections – Vivian’s story – are much more readable than the present. The history of the orphan trains is so rich with detail and emotion that it is hard not to get drawn in, and I wish Molly’s issues had been treated with the same care. Molly’s speaking voice was authentic, but overall her actions felt forced. It seemed like she only existed as a plot device to allow Vivian to tell her story.

 

The writing was not perfect, but the storyline was still compelling and evocative, although the ending was a little rushed – once again, I would have liked to read more about what Molly does next. I think the main problem was that the author was trying to make the symbolism between the two stories match up exactly, and it felt unnatural. It was as if she didn’t trust the reader to make the connection between Molly and Vivian, and that’s ultimately why this novel read as YA. However, the historical facts certainly make Orphan Train worth the read.