Tag Archives: Angry Young Man

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

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Synopsis:
The true story of a young man who gave up everything to live off the land in Alaska, only to die a painful death by starvation.

Review:
Into the Wild was a quick, fast-paced read that left me both satisfied and wanting to know more. Christopher McCandless’s decision to go his own iconoclastic way towards a wanton death seems crazy to most of us, yet author Jon Krakauer paints such a full picture of his personality that there doesn’t seem to be anything more to say. (But I do think the movie was better!)

Posted in American Literature | Tagged , , , , | 3 Replies

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

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Synopsis:
His true love thwarted by unfeeling family and Cathy’s callow thoughtlessness, foundling Heathcliff wreaks havoc on all who fall under his sway.

Review:
Wow, I had no idea what I was in for when I started Wuthering Heights! I knew it was a classic of Gothic romanticism, but I was expecting a florid love story of the kind I don’t usually enjoy. Instead I got a pile-on of selfish people behaving very, very badly and I loved every minute of it.

What i liked was that they were all so despicable, except for Ellen Dean, who was powerless to affect any kind of moral change. She would occasionally get fed up and scold the lot of them, but they never listened. It was awfully poignant when she said she just wanted to buy a cottage and have Cathy Linton come live with her. Secondarily, I loved the transformation of poor Hareton Earnshaw from a cussin’ kid to a gallant gentle giant.

I listened to the audio version (mostly) narrated by Janet McTeer and she wrung every last drop of satire and humor from the proceedings, without sacrificing emotion and heart. Her voice is simply beautiful to listen to and that really enhanced my enjoyment of the story.

Posted in British Literature | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Replies

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

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Synopsis:
The gunslinger steps into the lives of three different New Yorkers, and must figure out how they fit into his quest before he dies of an infection.

Review:
The contrast between The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three always astonishes me. As King puts it in his introduction, in book 2 of the Dark Tower series the story really takes off. I always spend the first few chapters mourning the elegiac tone of the first book, but soon am swept away by the power of King’s characterizations.

Eddie’s story always gets me, mostly because of the subtle poignancy of his relationship with his older brother Henry, the “great sage and eminent junkie.” Couple that with a drug deal plotline that takes Scarface to a supernatural plane and I just devour the first huge chunk of The Drawing of the Three. The shootout at Balazar’s is one of King’s finest sequences, expertly plotted and staged and visualized.

I slow down a bit when I get to Odetta/Detta, because King takes Detta to such an odious place that I need to look away. I can’t get too close to her. And because I know Jake is coming (though not until the next book), I end up rushing through the Jack Mort stuff. I love watching Roland work Jack Mort, giving the first hint of the diplomat that we’ll find in later books, but knowing that we’re not going to stay with Jack keeps me from getting too invested in that chunk. Reading it now, knowing the ending, I’m struck by how little of the Jack Mort stuff ends up figuring into the larger mythology. He’s pretty much just a plot device at best, filler at worst, a way for King to take a long time getting where he intends to go. I wouldn’t advocate cutting it, but I do wonder how those scenes would’ve played out had they been written closer together with the later books.

The Straits by Jeremy Craig

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Synopsis:
After losing his mother and his sister in a devastating hurricane, high school student Jim now faces losing the FEMA trailer he shares with his aunt, so he turns to gambling to win the money to save them.

Review:
I just had to review The Straits, because author Jeremy Craig lives in my neighborhood! A mutual friend told me about the book and it sounded right up my alley. I really enjoyed it.

The Straits refers to the trailer park where Jim and his aunt live. It’s about to be taken down because FEMA needs the trailers, but they have nowhere else to go. Jim can’t stop thinking about the night that his house collapsed with his mother and younger sister inside. He feels like it was all his fault, and the guilt is eating him alive. He used to go to a fancy private school, but had to leave in disgrace after being caught in a gambling ring. He was framed by a friend, but no one will believe him. Now Jim needs money to find a new place to live with his aunt, and gambling seems to be the only way.

Craig makes Jim’s situation eminently believable, thanks to a wealth of details about how displaced persons live. I really felt for Jim and wanted him to find a way out of his despair. The book builds to an inevitable conclusion, but Craig makes the journey really fascinating. Good YA for guys is hard to come by, but The Straits–reminiscent of Chris Crutcher’s work–fits the bill.

Posted in American Literature | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Reply

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox

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Synopsis:
Robbed of his fortune by a rival from his school days, Edward Glyver seeks vengeance and restoration under an assumed name.

Review:
The Meaning of Night is a cunningly plotted piece of faux-Victoriana, conjuring up Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins with a soupcon of sex that doesn’t feel anachronistic at all.

Edward Glyver’s nesting-doll tale gives every character a chance to tell his or her own life story, and Cox makes each one fascinating in its own right. Despite the near-constant digressions, Cox never lets us forget that Edward is on a deadly mission, and keeps up the suspense throughout. The story opens with Edward’s murder of an innocent man but it’s not long before I came into full sympathy with his plight, despite my disdain for his wicked act.

Cox captures the Victorian tone perfectly, and I took a lot of pleasure in all the traces I found of books I love. It could be that The Meaning of Night is a little too insider-y to be enjoyed without a background in its influences, but the story is airtight and quite satisfying.

Life After Genius by M. Ann Jacoby

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Synopsis:
A math whiz blows a huge presentation just days before graduation, and now he’s haunted by the ghosts of his family’s past tragedies and the very real threat posed by his unhinged rival.

Review:
The afterword says that M. Ann Jacoby toiled at Life After Genius for years. I’m hoping it doesn’t take her as long to get the next one out because she’s got a great writing style and brings a lot of intelligence and originality to her storytelling. The book is reminiscent of the movie Rushmore, only without the cutesy factor–her characters are idiosyncratic without being quirky. The result is that Mead’s journey feels epic and important, as well as suspenseful, thanks to Jacoby’s well-engineered structure and unexpected plotting.

I was really good at math when I was younger–made it all the way to AP Calculus II, with As and everything. But it wasn’t my passion, so I didn’t pursue it at all in college, and now I’ve forgotten everything except the quadratic formula. Even so, I’m drawn to the beauty of higher math, the way that numbers dance as though they don’t need people at all. I always hated the word problems in physics–I’d get too caught up in the narrative to be able to turn it into an equation. Jacoby captures the joys of math and makes Mead’s passion come alive. She doesn’t bog the story down explaining the intricacies of the Riemann zeta function, but she’s not afraid to talk about it either. I might not know how Mead is calculating zeta zeros, or what the critical line looks like, but I liked that she trusted her readers enough to use some jargon. It made the story feel real and helped me lock into Mead and identify with him.

Mead is a boy genius, off to college just shy of his 16th birthday and scheduled to complete it by age 18. He’s surrounded by scheming academics, a jealous rival, a family of undertakers, and naked girls thanks to the dormitory’s coed showers. Fists fly, hearts break, and families disintegrate and it’s funny and poignant and edgy and real. Outstanding debut!

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

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Synopsis:
After spending time incarcerated in a secret prison after a terrorist attack, a computer-savvy teen decides to fight back in the name of the Constitution.

Review:
I am so not cool enough for Little Brother. I’ve never hacked, coded, partitioned or flashmobbed. I don’t understand crypto and I’ve never touched an Xbox. I did learn BASIC programming when I was in elementary school, and one time I spent half a day typing in commands that I got from Mad Magazine, promising to render a picture of Alfred E. Newman right there on my Apple II+. When I hit RUN, imagine how disillusioned my 9-year-old self was to see my screen fill up with green, save for one blank dot right in the middle. Oh, Mad. You so crazy. I decided to stick with reading and counted cross stitch.

Little Brother follows a technologically adept teenager who builds an underground computer network in order to get around the Department of Homeland Security’s stranglehold on civil rights. Marcus is way smart, yet he keeps on underestimating the power that he has to sway the masses. Time and again, he sees that his flash mobs are no better than the terrorists that DHS purports to fight. Yet he keeps persevering, trying to find his righteousness, continually returning to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to remind him what the fight is all about.

There’s a love story, too, and a coming of age story featuring parents who just don’t understand. And just as Moby-Dick interspersed Captain Ahab’s metaphysical quest with the minutiae of whaling (whale-penis costume, anyone?), Little Brother digresses into discourses on the history of the internet, the logistics of cryptography, and the addictive power of writing code. Somehow author Cory Doctorow manages to keep it all from feeling pedantic, mainly because he obviously shares Marcus’s passion and exuberance.

The book suffers a bit from too much speechifying, and there’s not much depth in the character development. However, it’s a fun, breezy read with a worthwhile lesson about civil liberties and the importance of freedom.

In the Woods by Tana French

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Synopsis:
A murder investigation cuts too close to the bone for a detective who was once part of a missing persons case himself.

Review:

The other Sunday, Superfast Husband had to go to Home Depot after church, and since Superfast Toddler would certainly fall asleep in the car, I needed a book to read while listening to her dulcet snores. We stopped into the murder mystery bookshop nearby, where I asked if they could request anyone who loves Barbara Vine, and likes Ruth Rendell but not as much. Something character-based, with a lot of psychology and not too heavy on the forensics. Another customer snatched In the Woods off the shelf and the premise immediately intrigued me.

When Rob Ryan was a boy, he went by the name Adam and lost his two best friends in a missing persons case that was presumed but not proved to be murder. Rob was found with his shoes full of blood and no memory of what happened in the woods. Now, he is a detective on the murder squad and no one but his partner Cassie knows that he was once Adam. When a body is discovered in the very same woods, Rob and Cassie leap at the case, with Rob swearing up and down that his role won’t be compromised by his personal history. At least, until a possible connection emerges.

Tana French is a first-rate writer, crafting gorgeous sentences and exhibiting total mastery over her storytelling. I would rank her more Rendell than Vine, but Rendell at her finest, which is a pretty fine thing. The case itself was fairly workmanlike, once the solution was revealed, but French’s acute perceptions into the pettiness of human nature made for a fascinating read. She develops a complex and emotionally charged relationship between Cassie and Rob, the outcome of which offers just as much suspense as the whodunit angle.

The story is told by Rob in the first person, and while he’s not a standard unreliable narrator, he is fond of explaining himself in a way that both seduces and highlights the flaws in his own self-examination. I was swept away by the voice French created for Rob. He’s a figure both tragic and complicit, and my heart ached for him on every page.

Something Wicked by Alan Gratz

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Synopsis:
When his best friend Mac starts acting like a jerk after a fortune teller prophesies that he’ll be king of the Scottish games, budding investigator Horatio Wilkes thinks it’s just a bad mood, until Mac’s grandfather Duncan ends up dead.

Review:
Something Wicked is a clever, edgy young adult retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which happens to be my absolute favorite Shakespeare play. Author Alan Gratz doesn’t hew too closely to the plot of the Scottish play, taking what works, riffing on what’s memorable, and throwing out what would slow him down. In other words, don’t look for Mac’s evil girlfriend Beth to wring her hands while sleepwalking–instead, she gets angry at a dog and orders him to leave. “Out! Out! Damn Spot.” Hee.

What I enjoyed most about this book was that it was set during the Scottish Games, an event of which I am all too familiar. My father played the bagpipes when I was growing up, despite the fact that my mother’s the only one with Scotch blood (thank you, Grandma Adele Kendrick of the clan MacNaughton). Despite his lack of a geneological pedigree, my dad wailed out hits like “Annie with the Nut-Brown Hair” like he was piping for William Wallace himself, and our reward for enduring countless county fairs was the annual Highland Games in Fair Hill, Virginia. Scottie dogs, caber tosses, thistles and tartans–there’s really nothing like it. Gratz made me laugh every time he mentioned that the pipers were playing yet another round of “Amazing Grace” and made my bonny heart ache for a piping hot shepherd’s pie eaten on the peat in the fog twinkling with purple heather. Och!

The plotting in Something Wicked is quite energetic, though there’s not really much of a mystery. Horatio is an appealing protagonist whose wit and bravura are pretty sexy and fun. From the sounds of it, Horatio might be off to star in a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest next, and I’d definitely be keen to check that out, as well as his previous outing, Something Rotten, a retelling of Hamlet.

Posted in American Literature | Tagged , , , , | 6 Replies

Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

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Synopsis:
Jenna thought her childhood best friend Cameron was dead, but when he shows up at her high school 8 years later, she must confront demons long buried and deal with unresolved issues with her family.

Review:
I was very impressed with the way Sara Zarr built the suspense in Sweethearts. I was aching to find out where Cameron had been, aching for Jenna to talk to him, aching to see their childhood love burst into adolescent fruition. I could almost barely stand to read it, I hurt so much on Jenna’s behalf–and I mean that as a compliment. It gave me the same kind of heartache I used to get watching Some Kind of Wonderful over and over and over again (“where do your hands go?” “i don’t know.” “wrong. they go on her hips.”)

I really like the way Zarr handles the first person, compressing and expanding time for emotional impact, and layering exposition and backstory in so that they move the story forward. She’s also great with small details of character and with tapping into the big emotions that surge through teenagers. I think I liked this one better than Story of a Girl, Zarr’s first, and I’m looking forward to her next.

Posted in American Literature | Tagged , , , , | 6 Replies