Synopsis:
A childless couple contracts with a lonely drifter to carry their sole remaining embryo, but little do they know that the baggage she brings includes criminal connections and demonic possession.
Review:
The Surrogate was simply terrible. Cardboard characters, overstuffed plotting, and an implausible storyline just really got on my nerves.
Synopsis:
Subtitled “New Thinking About Children,” shows how some of the new paradigms in education and childrearing are not supported by research data.
Review:
I had already read some of NurtureShock, since several of the chapters began as articles in “New York” magazine. It’s pretty fun to watch the authors pick apart some current sacred cows, like the purported virtues of educational baby DVDs, or the merits of testing kindergarteners to track them into gifted programs, or the benefits of teaching thankfulness. As a parent myself, I was really gratified to see that I’m not the only one who gets paralyzed by all the mixed messages. The book affirmed that you have to treat your kids like individuals, not generalizations.
Synopsis:
When a yoga-loving vegetarian gets knocked up by her deadbeat boyfriend, her cruise ship hostess mother moves on in, and hilarity ensues.
Review:
Stretch Marks was cute enough, but it wasn’t the most original take on the subject I’ve ever read. I liked Mia well enough, but at many points I felt like her struggles were genuine enough. It also bugged me how blind she was to her ex-boyfriend Lars’s shenanigans. It’s not like my expectations were that high, but I was hoping for a little more than I got.
Synopsis:
An examination of the science of sex differences.
Review:
Apart from some outdated and irresponsible advice about breastfeeding (says the LLL leader), I got a lot out of Why Gender Matters, which I listened to on audiobook.
Dr. Sax talks about how the neurological differences between men and women, and how that influences how we perceive the world and the choices we make. He applies it to teaching and to childrearing. In short, his argument is that gender blind education is harmful because it ignores biological hardwiring. Girls can excel in math and boys can excel in art, but they need to be taught these subjects differently. They can get to the same place, but by following different paths.
Interestingly, he says that sexuality has nothing to do with it. A gay man’s brain is still much more similar to a heterosexual man’s brain than it is to a woman’s brain.
Some examples:
The eyes of boys are dominated by the cells that perceive motion and direction. The eyes of girls are dominated by the cells that perceive color, shape, and texture. (Rods & cones, can’t remember which.) A girl will draw a picture with a wide array of colors, because she can see more color diversity than her boy classmate. She will draw faces, because they have lots of inherent variation. A boy will reach for black, silver, and gray crayons, and might just scribble a blur. When asked, he’ll say it’s a rocket or a car or something like that. The girl will be praised because her teacher has been trained to teach children to move towards using colors and detail. The boy will get the message that he is not good at art, and that art is for girls.
Boys and girls use different parts of the brain when thinking about abstract concepts. Girls use the cerebral cortex, meaning that these abstract concepts are unified with everything else they could be thinking about. Boys use the hippocampus, which is isolated from the rest of the brain. So when teaching about numbers, it’s useful to use different pedagogical methods. He uses a fascinating example using Fibonacci numbers that I can’t do justice to, but basically the boys get excited by pure numbers, and then are led to see their application in the wider world. Girls start with the wider world, and then are led back to number theory.
Girls have sharper hearing than boys, so a boy in the back of classroom may appear inattentive when really he just can’t hear his female teacher. A girl sitting in the front of the classroom may think her male teacher is yelling at her.
Synopsis:
The true story of 39-year-old film critic who has a one-night stand that leaves her Knocked Up.
Review:
Accidentally on Purpose is heartwarming, honest, and achingly real. Mary F. Pols is a fantastic writer and she managed to avoid many of the pitfalls of the autobiography by just letting the story tell itself. I was most interested in her relationship with Matt, her 29-year-old unemployed, directionless baby daddy. In many ways she tried to parent him, too, only to have to let go and let him make his own mistakes and build his own life. It’s a fun book that most moms would enjoy reading.
Synopsis:
A tight-knit group of 4 couples must deal with the sudden and suspicious deaths of two of their own.
Review:
The Castaways put me off at first because it reminded me of The Big Chill, a movie I’ve never liked. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why, except I know it has something to do with Glenn Close’s smug smile throughout. Perhaps it was because although they were ostensibly reuniting because of a death, they were so solipsistic in their mourning. I found some of that in The Castaways, with motherly Andrea taking the Glenn Close role as the most annoying among them.
Greg and Tess have always been the golden couple in their group of eight, but when they go out for an anniversary sail from their home in Nantucket to nearby Martha’s Vineyard, their boat ends up capsized and both Greg and Tess are killed. The rest of the group shatters in grief, particularly Addison, who had been having a love affair with Tess, though he cannot share his particular grief with anyone. Andrea, Tess’s older sister, anoints herself the most devastated and takes immediate custody of Greg and Tess’s two children. This hurts Delilah deeply, because she knows that the kids would rather live with her–and would be better off as well. Meanwhile, their spouses follow their own journeys of grief while struggling to repair their rapidly shattering marriages.
Elin Hilderbrand is expert at limning the details of relationships, making choices for her characters that are subtle and unexpected. The Castaways‘s complex twin geographies of mourning and sexual attraction held my interest even though the only character I really connected with was Delilah. While it’s not one I am jumping up and down for, I would recommend it to someone looking for a meaty book about relationships, one with more substance than the usual beach read and with a story rich in emotions and character.
Synopsis:
It started out as just another car insurance problem, but for call center worker Mina, the conversation with Peter just might turn wonderfully personal.
Review:
Crossed Wires is a sweet, gentle, tender book. The sole bit of edge is provided by Mina’s wayward teenage sister, but she spends most of her time offscreen (so to speak) where she can’t wreak too much havoc.
The romance between Mina and Peter unfolds quietly and organically. Author Rosy Thornton doesn’t try to make things too cutesy, which I liked. I was with the book until one plot point that felt a bit too contrived to me, since it mirrored something that had already happened in the story. However, the rest of Crossed Wires was so lovely that I couldn’t find it in me to hold it against the book.
Synopsis:
A Princeton admissions officer faces a long-buried secret in the height of application season.
Review:
The college application process, shrouded in secrecy and constructed with fuzzy logic, proved quite fascinating in Admission. Watching Portia speak to prospective students, looking over her shoulder as she read through applications, and hearing her defend a process most believe inherently unfair and corrupt perked up a book with an otherwise unimpressive plot.
Portia and her long-time boyfriend Mark have reached a crisis in their relationship, just as Portia finds herself facing the consequences of a choice made long ago. Her angst and sorrow color all her interactions and ultimately shape her outlook when choosing which students deserve Princeton.
I liked the insider’s look at the college application process, and felt that Korelitz handled tricky material well. Though it got a little preachy at times, Korelitz usually managed to bring it back to the drama at hand. However, her structuring of Portia’s emotional journey wasn’t well thought out, and by the time her secret came out I’d guessed it a million times over. Korelitz backloads too large a chunk of the story, lessening its impact when all is finally revealed. I would have liked to have seen her integrate her revelations more consistently throughout the book.
Despite my criticisms, I found Admission to be eminently readable. I’m a character junkie, and between the snippets of applications essays opening each chapter, to the students Portia encounters while touring New England, and to the central figures in the story, I was thrilled with the variety and depth of the people Korelitz created.
Synopsis:
After the suicide of his troubled daughter, a British journalist heads out to recuperate in Mexico and flee the ghosts that still linger even after he was acquitted of the murder of his wife.
Review:
Everything You Know is a much better book than its title would indicate. Author Zoe Heller is well-known for Notes on a Scandal, which became a great movie with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. Everything You Know lacks that book’s tawdrily catchy premise, but goes much deeper into its exploration of human nature.
Willy once stood trial for the murder of his wife Oona. Though not found guilty, his daughters Sophie and Sadie severed all ties with him. Sadie has recently committed suicide and sent Willy her diary, which he is reading while convalescing in Puerto Vallarta after a heart attack. Willy’s career has flourished, but his personal life has not, and he’s increasingly unable to account for the creeping despair that inflects his every interaction.
This is a character portrait of a man who has no redeeming qualities, no charm or charisma, and no passions, yet Heller makes Willy utterly fascinating in his quest to figure out why he feels so guilty when he’s convinced he’s done nothing wrong. Heller is a fantastic writer and I look forward to her next effort.
Synopsis:
A bereft woman’s mother’s desperate act triggers a violent spiral affecting a whole community.
Review:
The Tree of Hands was lesser Ruth Rendell. It dates back to 1986 and she’s really grown as a writer since then. It definitely has her trademark nuanced characterizations but the story wasn’t as gripping as later works like The Rottweiler have been.
