Tag Archives: Coming of Age

Lucretia and the Kroons by Victor LaValle

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Synopsis:
Lucretia, a 12-year-old girl living in the projects in Queens, just wants to spend her birthday with her best friend, but the boarded up apartment on the top floor might be inhabited by people who have a different plan for the girls.

Review:
Scary, smart, beautiful, haunting, powerful, resonant–can I please have a few more adjectives of praise to apply to this fabulous novella? Victor LaValle might be the most exciting contemporary writer I can think of. He is endlessly imaginative, a brave writer who really doesn’t seem to care about trends or cool or hipster credibility. I loved Lucretia and the Kroons and just can’t wait until his next novel comes out in August.

The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (Dark Tower, Book 4.5)

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Synopsis:
On their way to Calla Bryn Sturgis, Roland and his ka-tet take shelter from a starkblast, and Roland tells the story of his first quest after killing his mother, and within it tells a fairy tale about a brave boy who tangles with a demonic trickster.

Review:
Oh, my, and it was good to hear Roland’s voice again, you say true and I say thankya. With the series complete, King didn’t need to add to his Dark Tower saga, but The Wind Through the Keyhole feels like it’s been there the whole time.

The framing story follows Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy the billy-bumbler as they leave the Emerald City and follow the Path of the Beam towards the Dark Tower. Caught in a sudden, immense freezing storm called a starkblast, the ka-tet finds shelter. To pass the time, Roland volunteers a story in which he tells a story about a fictional starkblast and a boy named Tim Stoutheart.

In Roland’s story, he goes back to the time just after he killed his mother, when is father sent him out to a remote mining town where a skin-man is performing brutal murders in the form of an animal. One survivor holds the key to trapping the vicious monster, but Roland is inexperienced and may not have what it takes to bring peace to the town.

To wait out a terrifying night with the witness, a terrified young boy, Roland tells him a story that his mother used to tell him. Tim Stoutheart loses his father and his mother remarries. Her new husband is a brute, and when the Covenant Man comes to town, he gives Tim a token that unlocks a devastating series of events for Tim and his family. Tim, just a boy, must gather all his courage to take a magical journey into a forest populated by dragons, bad fairies, venomous pythons, mud people, and a wizard out of mythology.

Much has been made of the changes that happen offscreen between Wizard and Glass and The Wolves of the Calla (my personal favorite). Eddie, Susannah, and Jake become true gunslingers and we don’t really see how it happens. This is King’s answer. Becoming a gunslinger, in the end, simply means choosing to be a gunslinger. That’s how Roland and Tim Stoutheart survive their tales. It’s like they put on an identity, and when they succeed, it’s like they’ve never not been gunslingers. And that’s what Jake, Susannah, and Eddie will have to do.

The three stories are deftly embedded and the whole thing moves and I just didn’t want it to end.

The Adults by Alison Espach

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Synopsis:
After witnessing an awful tragedy, a young woman becomes obsessed with a teacher at her school and never quite gets her life where she thinks it needs to be.

Review:
Listen, you don’t pick up a book like The Adults because of the plot synopsis. You pick it up because you’re hoping that the author has figured out a new way to say old things. And in the case of Alison Espach, you would be absolutely correct.

The title is a deliberately misleading one. The adults in the story act like children, while the children and teenagers seem to be expected to have a maturity beyond their years. Espach gives us a coming-of-age story and then continues to tease it out well into Emily’s adulthood, so that cause and effect lose their psychoanalytic power and we realize that you can’t fully understand a person simply because you can list the important events in her life.

I’m forgetting myself. The best part about the book is Espach’s clever writing. Here’s my favorite passage:

Janice called. Over the phone, Janice and I laughed about all the things the Other Girls had said that week, and I welcomed the relief from my mother. “Brittany told Mr. Basketball that she was worried about him because he had such an amazing body,” Janice said, and when I laughed, she added, “I’d die without you.” I agreed, even though I knew I was not the kind of person who would die from grief. I was the kind of person who would sit with grief on the couch until grief died, who would watch reruns of game shows while grief guessed the price of a can of green beans. Seventy-nine cents! Grief was always right. Grief went to the supermarket a lot.

And my second favorite:

My father and I didn’t get to spend that much time alone together, except when he took me out to dinner on Wednesdays, and when he ordered Shiraz, he always said, ‘Let’s celebrate,’ like Happy Wednesday, Daughter, hope it was better than Tuesday, though I hope your Tuesday was great too, and I never asked what people clapped about during the middle of the week and he never held out his glass to toast anything. We just liked to say things: “Hi, Father,” I said with a grin. “I’m your daughter Emily and we just like to say things.”

The writing is witty and funny but the story is deep and dark. I wish Emily were real so we could go out for drinks. She’s my kind of girl. I’ll have to settle for recommending this to some well-read women I admire in real life.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

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Synopsis:
Plucked from Brooklyn to attend an elite college for magicians, Quentin hopes that his life will be an adventure like those he read about as a kid, but the drama of real life and his own penchant for melancholia keep getting in the way.

Review:
The Magicians was almost crazy-making thanks to Lev Grossman’s unmatched talent for letting emotional suspense simmer behind the already awesome plot. I was so caught up in the drama of Quentin’s love life and friendships that I wanted as much of that as I did of the magical elements.

I feared that this book would be just a novelty–Harry Potter with cursing and threeways–but thankfully Grossman delivers the fantasy aspect as well. He does not back away from anything and I was truly impressed by the twists and turns the story took.

More than anything, it reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, only with magic. So fabulous. I’ve already started the sequel!

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

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Synopsis:
A coming of age story about a girl growing up in Williamsburg in the first half of the 20th Century.

Review:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of the most wonderful books of all time. It’s almost too perfect in its humor, poignancy, and wisdom. I’ve read it countless times since I was a bookish kid like Francie Nolan, wishing I could buy penny candy and sleep in the front room on a cool fall night. My heart broke for her all over again watching Johnny’s descent, and this time I found myself admiring Katie’s strength and dignity. Plus now that I know Williamsburg better it’s fun to know that my kids have played in the same park that Francie once did.

This time around I listened to the audio version, narrated by Kate Burton, who gave Francie the most wonderful Brooklyn accent I’ve ever heard. Top notch production.

Try to Remember by Iris Gomez

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Synopsis:
When her father’s behavior begins to deteriorate, Colombian immigrant Gabriela tries to hold her family together as best she can.

Review:
Try to Remember has a lot going for it. Gabi is an appealing protagonist caught in a intense situation, afraid that her father’s increasingly erratic behavior will get them all deported. Iris Gomez’s sharp observations of culture and psychology didn’t go unnoticed by, even though ultimately I never totally engaged with this story. I kind of feel guilty that I got bored with it, because the writing is so strong and the subject matter so dramatic, but I did. I’m sorry…

Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card (Tales of Alvin Maker)

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Synopsis:
As Alvin Maker heads out for his apprenticeship, the French conspire to rouse the Reds against the Whites for a war that will win all of an alternate America for Napoleon.

Review:
I am a big fan of how Orson Scott Card has created an American history that encompasses just enough of our reality to feel authentic, but then skewed to include magic and mysticism. In Red Prophet, Card turns Tecumseh into Ta-Kumsaw, and gives him a brother named Lolla-Wossiky whose transformation will affect young Alvin Maker’s life and destiny.

If my computer weren’t jumping my cursor around inexplicably, I’d write more, but I don’t have the patience. Further explication will be forthcoming when I read book three.

My Father’s Moon by Elizabeth Jolley

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Synopsis:
An unwed mother tries working in an impoverished boarding school and finds herself yearning for the nurse she fell in love with back when both were working in a military hospital in England during WWII.

Review:
My Father’s Moon is the first of three books in The Vera Wright Trilogy, an autobiographical series that has long been out-of-print. Highly praised in its time, Elizabeth Jolley‘s work wasn’t widely known outside of her native Australia until now.

Based on My Father’s Moon, I daresay Ms. Jolley’s reputation at home deserves to be expanded abroad. Her writing combines an elliptically modernist structure with classically rigorous character work, and I suppose she bears comparison to Virginia Woolf in that regard.

Vera is an oddly slippery character, in that it’s hard to understand her motivations and choices. I’m not saying this as a criticism; rather, it’s a result of the way that Jolley has chosen to tell the story, using flashbacks that are sometimes indistinguishable from the main action. She links the different times together using Vera’s invocation of the name Ramsden, the last name of the woman she loved. It’s a powerful technique, evoking longing and regret in equal measure.

I was quite impressed by Jolley and glad for the opportunity to be exposed to her work.

Many thanks to Persea for the review copy.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman

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Synopsis:
Two college friends decide to circumnavigate the globe in 1986, starting in Communist China, unaware that one is on the brink of mental collapse.

Review:
I generally find memoirs to be self-indulgent, solipsistic, and narcissistic. Very rarely do the people with good stories also end up with the writing skills to engage the reader beyond the titillating details that sold the book proposal and turn their personal story into something that has actual resonance, meaning and importance.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven has a great story, but author Susan Jane Gilman has the literary chops to take readers beyond the merely therapeutic, telling what turns out to be a very big story about two very lost girls in one very confusing Communist country.

Plotwise, the book has an “Amazing Race” quality to it. Lots of deprivation, some racing around, squabbling between Susan and “Claire,” her traveling companion. There’s onscreen romance and offscreen sex, and hints of big drama to come on every page. That alone would make it a fun read, but Gilman invests her telling with a strong sense of history and place, as well as psychological perspicuity in her character building. It becomes clear very quickly that her primary goal is to tell a ripping good yarn. Too many memoirists forget this, becoming lost in a form of self-therapy. Gilman discusses her state of mind, but she’s quick to tie her emotional state into bigger questions of American and female identity. She’s not begging me to “relate” to her–she’s asking me to sit back and listen. And then she goes ahead and makes it very worth my while.

I totally want all my friends to read this book so we can talk about it. I was riveted by every page and weeping at the end. I loved it!

Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

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Synopsis:
A quartet of unlikely best friends deal with a post-feminist, post-grad life out of Smith College.

Review:
The appeal of Commencement is in its depiction of Smith College, caught between poles of conservative femininity and radical lesbianism. Each of the four protagonists deals with life issues that have something to do with the plight of the modern women. Their struggles are portrayed with nuance and pathos, but I wondered if the story would have resonated had it been set in a less idiosyncratic place. Only one of the characters–April–really differentiated herself from the other three, who, apart from their differing circumstances, didn’t seem to be all that different. I enjoyed the read but it didn’t blow me away.