Tag Archives: *LOVE!!

Faithful Place by Tana French

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Synopsis:
When the body of his first love is discovered 22 years after she failed to show up and elope to England, undercover detective Frank Mackey is sucked back into his dysfunctional and dangerous family.

Review:
Faithful Place is yet another perfect read from Tana French. As Frank navigates the crime scene, even after being ordered to stay away from the case, his grief, nostalgia, and brokenness threaten to consume him. Nobody does bittersweet regret like Tana French. My heart ached for all these poor lost characters, whose dreams were all thwarted by the accident of birth and the ties of family.

I did guess the murderer’s identity pretty early on, but I think that was the point, to place us completely in Frank’s point of view. He missed it, even if I didn’t, and that says volumes about who he is. A romantic to the end, when he says that he and Rosie Daly lost the chance to be the happiest two people on earth, you believe him utterly.

I also have to give props to Tana French for her exquisitely musical dialogue. Her use of slang, profanity, and imagery perfectly limns the subtle class distinctions between her characters, which is another huge part of the story.

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The Help by Kathryn Stockett

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Synopsis:
A white woman writes the lives of the black women who work for her and her friends in early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi.

Review:
After having a half a dozen people recommend The Help, and then not being able to find it at the library, I decided to take the plunge and buy myself a shiny new hardcover copy. I went in with low expectations, because more often than not I’m disappointed by these kinds of books. Thank goodness I listened to my very smart friends because this was one of the best reads I’ve ever had. I was crying at the end–and I don’t think it was just postpartum hormones.

Aibileen and Minnie are black maids working in deeply segregated Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter Phelan is a white spinster, member of the Junior League and bridge club regular, who is starting to wish things could be different. The Help is told from all of their points of view as Skeeter embarks on an interview project that will let the maids tell their stories in their own words.

Stockett brings this world to life brilliantly. The relationships between the characters are diamond-sharp, and each person is so unique and specific that every word was a joy to read. She also brings to life the tension of life in the segregated south and shows the struggles faced by Aibileen and Minnie and their friends and family, without being patronizing or handwringingly melodramatic.

I loved this book and I want everyone I know to read it!

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

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Synopsis:
A professional “carer” recalls her idyllic school days, which mask a horror that she and her friends “know but don’t know.”

Review:
Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite all-time books, and this is the third time I’ve read it. Big life upheavals, like having a baby, always send me back to books I know I’ll enjoy, as a way to comfort myself through a major life transition. If you’ve read it, you’ll know that it’s a strange one to read while holding a brand new baby–and I hope that’s enough to tantalize anyone who hasn’t had a chance to read it.

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The Hungry Season by T. Greenwood

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Synopsis:
Stricken with writers’ block after the death of a loved one, a writer moves his family to a remote New England cabin to try to rebuild, while a fan makes her way across the country to realize her dream of being with him.

Review:
I’m a longtime fan of T. Greenwood‘s nuanced character portraits and sticky situations, and The Hungry Season is her best yet.

I really can’t say enough good things about this book, which takes an excruciating look at the breakup of a family. I desperately wanted Sam and Mena and Finn to figure it out and become a family again, and found myself turning pages as if I were reading a crime novel. The stalker plotline does add some external suspense–her books don’t usually have a ticking clock per se–but the emotional drama was what kept me so heavily invested.

I loved the bravery Greenwood showed in portraying her characters as flawed without reveling in their dysfunction. She invests everyone with a dignity and humanity that made me see a little bit of myself in each of them.

Highly recommending this one to anyone who wants a good, solid read that will keep you up at night without giving you indigestion.

Many thanks to Kensington and T. Greenwood for the review copy.

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Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

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Synopsis:
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

Review:
This is my third time reading JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed it more. I’ve been following along with The Tolkien Professor’s podcasted course, and the background I got from finally reading and actually comprehending The Silmarillion really enhanced the depth of pleasure I received once diving back into Frodo’s familiar world.

Now, I’m not going to attempt to do justice to this massive work in just a short posting. Call these impressions, and I hope they inspire you to as satisfying a re-read (or first read) as I have just had.

The darkness
I hadn’t remembered such an abundance of scenes of pure horror. I think my mind sanitized Tolkien, since my last read was almost 7 years ago. But there is so much darkness in here. Tolkien doesn’t shy away from giving us evil in all its ugliness. It’s not graphic, in that it doesn’t wallow in scenes of torture or depravity. But it’s pretty darn scary, particularly in scenes such as Shelob’s lair and the Mouth of Sauron.

The goodness
Even so, I found myself far more drawn in by the courage, and bravery of the characters. Sam’s unabashed loyalty to his master, where his innate servanthood is the only means by which he has to resist the power of the Ring. Eowyn’s courage on the battlefield. Frodo’s suffering and perseverance. Aragorn’s majesty. All these qualities were so compelling, so beautiful, and so riveting that I craved more and more. I think that’s the hardest thing for a writer to do–to make goodness compelling and attractive.

The complexity
The struggle that various characters have with the Ring shows the depth and complexity of Tolkien’s moral vision. There is no black and white here–just human beings whose individuality brings a multitude of reactions to the temptations of the Ring. Tolkien deftly shows how we justify our misdeeds, call evil good, and fall prey to our own desires–even when those desires have goodness in them. The Silmarillion contains a more expansive treatment of Tolkien’s conception of evil, showing always how evil begins within and leads to its own destruction. “Love not too well the works of your hands,” indeed.

The influencesI’ve always loved the two noticeable references to Macbeth (the forest on the move, Eowyn’s defiance of a foretelling), and the podcast has helped me understand some of Tolkien’s medieval influences. But this time around, I felt keenly the influence of the biblical book of Isaiah. I have no idea whether or not I’m right in believing that Tolkien studied Isaiah in depth, but my hunch is that he did. I’m studying Isaiah right now with my moms’ group, and I see echoes of Isaiah everywhere in Tolkien, most particularly in the way both treat the temptation of power. Now, Tolkien’s theology for Middle Earth doesn’t involve a God who intercedes directly, or even really speaks to his people, but the sense of retaining hope when all else fails, “here at the end of all things” is the kind of thing that Isaiah kept reminding the beleaguered Israelites. I think Isaiah and Gandalf would’ve really liked each other.

The poetry
I read it this time–well, most of it. Again, the podcast deepened my appreciation for what Tolkien achieved in the verse he created for various characters to speak. It’s not filler or excess. It actually moves the story along and offers more facets to the interplay between characters and to the story at large. I always thought it indulgent and even somewhat embarrassing, but the poetry is a key part of the story he’s telling and well worth slowing down to absorb and ponder.

The end
I’m so sad it’s over. I always feel this way about beloved books, but perhaps most keenly with The Lord of the Rings. Has a better story ever been told? The richness of imagination, the range of emotion, the fullness of drama, and the completeness of conception–I mean, there’s nothing like it. Reading number 3 may just have cemented its position as my favorite book of all time. I get more and more out of it each time I read it, and I can’t wait until Superfast Toddler is old enough to enjoy it with me.

Lost to the West by Lars Brownworth

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Synopsis:
Subtitled: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization.

Review:
I was first introduced to Lars Brownworth’s Lost to the West thanks to his outstanding podcast 12 Byzantine Rulers. He presented tangled, complicated history so compellingly that I just had to read the book.

The book is a fantastic read. The history is clearly presented with an eye to both the big picture and the little details that bring it all to life. The way he tells it, Byzantine history casts new light on everything I ever learned about British history and European history. I wondered why I never knew anything about the centuries of Constantinople’s dominance over huge swaths of Europe, Asia, and Africa, other than Justinian and the Hagia Sophia. In these pages, I met the brilliant general Belisarius, ruthless empress Irene, conniving eunuch Narses, and the loyal Varingian guard, who were given royal fiat to raid the treasury whenever the current emperor died. Given that most Byzantine emperors lasted only a few years (a whopping 88 rulers in 1000 years!), many of them retired as wealthy men.

Despite the fact that most successions of power involved assassinations, blindings, torture, usurpation, and just about any type of ambitious chicanery you can think of, the Byzantine empire managed to hold onto vast territories well into the 2nd millennium, gaining and losing ground on the peripheries in Italy and eastern Europe. Even though we say that Rome fell in 476 AD, the rulers and people of Byzantium considered themselves the Roman empire, only with the capital moved to Constantinople. It took several centuries for the infamous split between the Catholic pope and the leaders of the eastern church to occur, and the Byzantine emperors seemed infused with the sense that they were to protect or reclaim (depending on the current shape of the map) both Rome and Jerusalem. The celebrated first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, only came to power because the current Pope wanted to seize power for himself. He used the fact that the throne in Constantinople was occupied by a woman (the empress Irene) to say that there was no emperor at all, since Paul said he prohibited a woman to lead. He quickly crowned Charlemagne, claiming for himself the right to make kings and establishing the supremacy of church over state.

The tragic fall of Constantinople and ruin of the Byzantine empire may have happened at the hands of the Turks, but they were not the first to sack and pillage the famously luxe city. After a series of backdoor machinations on the part of some wily politicians, the fourth Crusade became an attack against Constantinople. The so-called holy warriors of Christendom sacked the city, looting, pillaging, and raping their way into the destruction of the noble capital. The Byzantines had historically opposed the premise of the Crusades, that a man could earn salvation by killing infidels, but were committed to stemming the Muslim tide, and in fact stood as a bulwark between the rest of Europe and invaders from Muslim lands. It seems that the fatal blow struck by the Crusaders weakened the city to the point where the Turks were able to subdue it completely. I was heartbroken to read how the Hagia Sophia was defiled, with rapes of women and children happening on the altars where the priests once served the Eucharist–and really, how much farther is this, morally, from raping women and children in the streets? The flag of Turkey still bears a waning moon as a reminder that the moon waned the night that Constantinople fell.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history. I loved it!

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Just An Ordinary Day by Shirley Jackson

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Synopsis:
A collection of unpublished and previously uncollected short stories by the reigning queen of gothic Americana.

Review:
Short stories are not usually my cup of tea, because they’re over far too quickly. But I’ll read anything that Shirley Jackson writes, and I really enjoyed the stories found in Just An Ordinary Day, which I’ve been reading in fits and starts for several months.

Oddly enough, my favorites were among the unpublished pieces. In particular, I greatly enjoyed “My Recollections of S.B. Fairchild,” about a mail order department store purchase gone terribly wrong. There’s nothing unheimich about the story; rather, it’s a sharply conceived, tightly executed piece of American satire whose quotidian-ness is an asset, not a liability.

What I admire most about Jackson is her precision. I really don’t know if any modern writer as prolific as Jackson also produces such relentlessly perfect prose.

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Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines

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Synopsis:
After the death of her mother’s seventh husband in the gladiatorial arena, a teenage girl finds herself betrothed to his killer–unless she can fight her way out of it.

Review:
When I first picked up Girl in the Arena, I was expecting some kind of Hunger Games ripoff. That’s not a bad thing, per se–I love those kinds of books. But my expectations weren’t that high, and so I was more than pleasantly surprised when I discovered how original, complex, and downright literary Girl in the Arena was.

Lyn’s world is insular and rule-driven. Her first father was one of the first Gladiators, back when the movement was still underground, and after he died, her mother Allison went on marrying Gladiator after Gladiator. Now on her seventh husband, Gladiator rules dictate that should he die, she will not be allowed to remarry.

Allison has always defined herself as a Glad wife, and hopes that Lyn will follow in her footsteps. So when Tommy is slain in the ring by young fighter Uber and, in a quirk of Glad rules Lyn ends up engaged to her father’s killer, Allison wants Lyn to go along with it. But Lyn has no intention of being another Glad wife–until the GSA invokes an obscure rule and threatens to take away their home and institutionalize her autistic brother. Now Lyn seems trapped, until she concocts a plan to fight for her freedom–to the death.

Girl in the Arena is a heartbreakingly sad book, filled with poignant emotions that are so human, despite the absurd premise. I really bought Lyn’s dilemma, thanks to Haines’s skillful characterizations. Haines plays against type and conjures up a finale that is suspenseful, scary, tragic, and inspiring all at once. Honestly, this is the kind of YA I’d like to see a whole lot more of–imaginative yet grounded in reality, genre-based but not derivative. Love it!

Check out the other bloggers on the tour!

The 160 Acre Woods
A Patchwork of Books
All About Children’s Books
Becky’s Book Reviews
Fireside Musings
Homeschool Book Buzz
KidzBookBuzz.com
Maw Books Blog
My Own Little Corner of the World
Reading is My Superpower
Through a Child’s Eyes

Thanks to Bloomsbury USA for generously providing me with an ARC of this book for review.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

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I’m giving away 3 copies of Hunger Games–check out this post for rules & to enter!

Synopsis:
After winning the Hunger Games, underdog Katniss Everdeen finds herself caught up in political intrigue as rebellion foments in other districts, and when the president himself makes a game-changing move, Katniss must choose between love and freedom.

Review:
I was totally and completely sucked in and swept away by Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins’s sequel to last year’s it novel Hunger Games. The series is starting to remind me a bit of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, both in terms of the themes it addresses (the sicknesses of the media age), and the sheer addictive power of the action-packed narrative.

I don’t like to read reviews before I’ve read a book, but I ended up reading the review in Entertainment Weekly. I couldn’t disagree more, and feel like the reviewer did the series a real disservice by comparing it with Twilight–as if that book is the standard by which all YA books should be judged. Just because the reviewer is writing for a mass audience doesn’t mean she has to pander and pretend like YA is this monolithic entity of similar books. YA has genres, too. Twilight is a romance (and a badly written one at that), and the Hunger Games books are action-fantasy. Different genres, different audiences, different reviewing criteria. Very lazy work on the reviewer’s part.

Anyway, I was thrilled with the plot twists that Collins came up with for this middle book. Some of them I should’ve seen coming, but when I’m caught up in a book I tend not to try to predict what’s happening next. I love to lose myself like that in a story–it’s what I’m always hoping for when I pick up a book.

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

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Synopsis:
A princess who can talk to animals sent to marry a foreign prince is replaced by her lady-in-waiting in a nefarious plot, and ends up caring for geese while she figures out a plan.

Review:
The Goose Girl was simply wonderful. Shannon Hale’s writing is poetic, subtle, and complex, and she really knows how to spin a good yarn. You won’t find any feisty foot-stamping redheads or skinnily sinister villains or gushily girly love interests.

Ani’s lady-in-waiting Selia used the fact that Ani was betrothed sight unseen to the prince of a land a six months’ journey away. Selia won all of the guards to her favor, and kicked Ani to the curb, then showed up at court declaring herself princess. Now Ani is living in the forest, fearing for her life, and trying to stop Selia, whose wicked plans have only just begun.

I loved this book. Superfast Toddler’s babysitter loaned it to me, and I am so grateful! Now to track down on Bookmooch to add to the permanent collection.

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