Book Review: Miss Delacourt Has Her Day by Heidi Ashworth (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Miss Delacourt Has Her Day
Author: Heidi Ashworth
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy (but this book was really hard to get-- no electronic copy provided, and the book was $25 at Amazon; the library copy came in at the very last minute)
Books I've read this year: 58

Miss Delacourt Has Her Day is Heidi Ashworth's sequel to the 2009 novel Miss Delacourt Speaks Her Mind, in which Ginerva Delacourt, the daughter of an English clergyman, and Sir Anthony, her distant cousin, get waylaid by highwaymen and once they get over their initial revulsion for each other, fall madly in love. When the second novel opens, the couple is just about to announce their engagement, but due to his cousin's recent death, Sir Anthony finds himself in line to become a duke, and the current duke has reservations about the relationship and wonders if the couple is a suitable match. In Miss Delacourt Has Her Day, Ginny and Sir Anthony go through a series of misunderstandings and miscommunications (and letters thrown in haste into figgy pudding, and lots and lots and LOTS of descriptions of what everyone is wearing) before they can find their way to wedded bliss.

I think that this is a case where not reading the first book does readers a disservice, because initially I though that both Ginny and Sir Anthony were despicable-- mostly because they weren't very nice to their servants or the other people around them. Then I went back and read about the first book and realized that they were both intended to be feisty, not jerky, and that helped me as a reader. I also think that I didn't care enough about their relationship because I didn't see it blossom. So I think this book works well for people who loved the first book and want to see them brought to the altar (spoiler-- there is no altar in the second book, ha ha!), but not as well for new readers.

Finally, and I know that this is not Ashworth's fault, but Miss Delacourt Has Her Day isn't historical fiction as I define historical fiction. It's a romance novel. It would probably be considered a "Regency Romance" but it's definitely a romance, and is published by Avalon Romance, which seems to be a pretty good clue. For a book to be historical fiction, I think it has to either include historical figures (like "real" people) or else it has to be against the backdrop of historical events. And this book isn't and doesn't. While I think it would have been a decent contender in romance, I think the book was done a disservice by putting it in with the historical fiction.

And that's it, folks! I'm done! 35 for 35! I have a big long list of books I'm going to read next-- just because I WANT to read them. I feel so free!

On Sunday we will post a wrap-up of the Whitneys at Segullah. I may post my own wrap-up here too, depending on how much the marathon, the social worker, and the baby blessing take it out of me tomorrow.

Book Review: Bloodborne by Gregg Luke (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Bloodborne
Author: Gregg Luke
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 56

If you like the drama of Dan Brown (to whom Luke gives an over shout-out in the book), combined with the medical knowledge of Michael Crichton, and the suspense of Dean Koontz (who is also alluded to in the book), I think you get what Luke attempts to achieve in Bloodborne (minus any implausible romances, if I'm reading correctly that the final pages are motivated by duty/friendship instead of romance budding among the mosquitoes).

In the opening pages of Bloodborne, someone opens fire at a deli and tries to kill Dr. Erin Cross, a scientific researcher at a Lehi, Utah lab, working on vaccines for H1N1 and malaria, among other things. Within pages, someone else tries to kill her, then a co-worker gets killed and she discovers someone creeping around her house. She flees, and turns to the only person who she thinks might be able to help her, Sean Flannery, a  former special ops Marine who she met earlier at the deli. They run off to the Dixie National Forest, where Erin soon learns that Sean has a host of his own problems. Meanwhile, evil scientific researchers are unleashing deadly mosquitoes on a small Hawaiian island, testing out their new biological weapon, which will make them rich and powerful, if they can only get rid of Dr. Cross. Eventually, the two stories come together, and Cross can only avert disaster if she places her trust in the right people.

While the writing is fairly clean and the story moves quickly, it feels SO derivative.  I enjoyed Dr. Cross's character, but most of the other characters either felt wooden or problematic. This is a book to take at face value, but not one that seems to reward a deeper reading.

Book Review: Smokescreen by Traci Hunter Abramson (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Smokescreen
Author: Traci Hunter Abramson
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 53

I really didn't like Lockdown or Crossfire, Traci Hunter Abramson's books that were nominated in the Mystery/Suspense category in the last two years, so my sights were set low for Smokescreen, the fifth book in the Saint Squad series. The books in the series follow a set formula-- there's a group of LDS Navy Seals, and in each novel Abramson focuses on how one of the men in the group falls in love with a woman who happens to be at the center of an international terrorist plot. If you can look past the implausibility of the entire concept (which was a difficult thing for me, in the first two novels), then the books are actually pretty entertaining.

In Smokescreen, Taylor Palmetta is an artist who comes home to Virginia after spending time in Europe and hitting it big in the art scene. The only thing missing from her life is a man, specifically Quinn, a guy her brother-in-law works with in the Navy, with whom she had a promising start at a relationship before leaving from Europe, until Quinn suddenly withdrew. Now Taylor's back, and when crazy things start happening to her (mysterious pools of blood in a hotel room in Paris, her new SUV gets broken into), Quinn becomes her protector. Taylor is a target, but she doesn't know why-- it's just her and her paintings, after all. But the Saint Squad bands together and works to avert (yet another) international crisis, all against the backdrop of Quinn and Taylor's budding love.

First of all, a small quibble. Quinn and Taylor? Please don't give both of your protagonists androgynous names! It was hard for me to keep track of who was who. Also, while the character development for Q&T was pretty good, I think it's a shame that the other characters in Abramson's books are so flat-- by this time we know everyone really well, and they can serve as more than just vehicles for the plot to move forward. Finally, Abramson chose to reveal certain details and withhold others in a way that was annoying. Quinn has a skeleton in his closet (literally, kind of) and while Abramson gives us most of the story early on in the book, she keeps other information for a reveal about halfway through, and that felt kind of like a cheap move. All in all, I was entertained and found myself rooting for Taylor not to get killed by the baddies.

Book Review: If I Should Die by Jennie Hansen (Whitney Finalist)

Title: If I Should Die
Author: Jennie Hansen
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 51

I was out running a few mornings ago. It was dark, and I was by myself, and I was listening to my iPod, when I heard branches cracking and the sound of footsteps. I pulled my earbuds out and prepared to either flee onto Wasatch Blvd or kick someone in the crotch when a deer came leaping out past me. It took me a few seconds to catch my breath, and for that I blame Jennie Hansen, whose book, If I Should Die, (spoiler alert) is about a serial killer who preys on Salt Lake's unsuspecting female runners. Awesome-- now, in addition to cars, deer, ice, and dogs, I also need to worry about serial killers.

If I Should Die is part suspense, part murder mystery, and part romance. When Kallene's running buddy Linda goes missing, police are pretty sure that Linda's soon-to-be-ex-husband did it, but Kallene isn't so sure. Over the course of the next few months (the time jumps are frustrating in this book), Kallene tries to figure out who is responsible for her friend's disappearance, while also saving the day at the office (that part of the story didn't feel integrated or relevant to the rest of the novel) and dating both the lead detective and the victim's brother. It seems that everyone in Kallene's Herriman neighborhood is a creepy potential suspect (and if I were her I think I'd move away). This book didn't quite come together for me-- first of all, it seems a little bit unlikely that Linda's killer had to come from their subdivision, and the rest of the story wasn't unified enough for me. And from now on, I'll always be looking over my shoulder when I run.

Book Review: Pride and Popularity by Jenni James (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Pride and Popularity
Author: Jenni James
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic Copy
Books I've read this year: 45

Jenni James comments on the Goodreads page for Pride and Popularity saying:

"If you are hoping to find a YA book full of paranormal beasts, sex, or teens who act much more like under-aged adults, I suggest you save your money and do not buy this book. In fact don't buy any of The Jane Austen Diaries. However, if you are looking for a clean, lighthearted, sweet romance, where teens are good and happy and normal--like all of the teens I know (including my own!) then read on."

James is exactly right. Pride and Popularity is a nice, clean, lighthearted YA novel. If you've read Pride and Prejudice or watched Clueless, you can probably imagine how James has transformed Austen's story to work in a high school setting. And it does work-- the book is cute, and light, and funny. But it's not Austen-- it lacks the subtle social criticism that is Austen's genius. Although I liked the book and can definitely imagine my own daughter enjoying it, it felt almost too light and fluffy in comparison to the other books in the category. 

Book Review: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson (Whitney Finalist)

Title: The Alloy of Law
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 42

In all fairness, it's hard to pick up reading a series right in the middle. Judging the Whitney's, that's exactly what we're often asked to do. And in terms of making the events of the previous three Mistborn books understandable to a new reader, Sanderson does a great job. His story is interesting, his prose is tight, and his steampunk world is definitely intriguing. In The Alloy of Law, Waxillium Ladrian, an otherwordly Bruce Wayne, whose superpower is his ability to manipulate metal, returns to the city after twenty years of bringing justice to the frontier when his lady love is killed, and even though he tries to get civilized, he can't help but find himself saving the world at every opportunity.

As I read The Alloy of Law, I my main thought is that it would make a perfect video game. You have this world that's almost like ours, but not quite, and these guys who look like normal guys, except they have superpowers and can "power-up" when they get shot, and the fight. Oh how they fight. They fight and fight and fight and fight and fight. They fight for paragraphs, pages, and chapters. They fight in excruciating detail. I found myself just wanting to swoop my finger past all the fighting and get back to the story. But in this case, I think a lot of the story was the fighting. So if you're a fan of steampunk, or the other Mistborn novels, or of video games, I think you'd love this book. But for me, it was more of a challenge than the other Sanderson books I've read in previous years.

Book Review: The Wedding Letters by Jason Wright (Whitney Finalist)

Title: The Wedding Letters
Author: Jason F. Wright
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 40

This is the second year in a row that Jason Wright has had a book selected as a Whitney Finalist in the General Category. Last year's finalist, The Cross Gardener, was one of those books I wanted to chuck against a wall. If I hadn't been reading on my brand-new iPad, I very well might have chucked it. It was sappy, it was overly detailed, it had angels-- in short, it was everything I disdain as a reader. Yes, I recognize that I'm revealing my prejudices here.

And those prejudices continued into this year. I was NOT excited when I saw that another Jason Wright book was on the list of finalists this year. I purposely put off reading The Wedding Letters until I'd read all of the other General fiction finalists. But yesterday I decided I wanted to close out the category, so I picked it up. This morning, 326 pages later, I finished it.

It wasn't bad. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it.

The plot: The book is a sequel to The Wednesday Letters, but my impression is that it takes place several decades after that book, in the current day. Noah Cooper (possibly a baby in the first book, now a college senior) runs over Rachel one day while she's out on her bike. It's love at first sight. He take her home to meet his family in Western Virginia, where they run Domus Jefferson (worst B&B name, ever!) and they love her too. Noah proposes just a few months after they meet, Rachel accepts, and then she finds out some troubling information from her past, and she does a runner. Since the family (who has decided to sell the B&B) already has the weekend blocked off and the caterers booked, they transform the weekend into a celebration of the family's 40+-year history of running the inn.

Just because I'm giving the book a (grudging) thumbs up doesn't mean I don't acknowledge some problems with it. First of all, it seems to be a conscious imitation of a Nicholas Sparks novel-- an epic romance against all odds, complete with grand plot twists. Wright acknowledges this several times. I think he refers to Sparks novels at least twice. I'm not much of a reader of Nicholas Sparks either, but I have seen The Notebook, and I think that Wright needed to spend a little more time really building up the love/drama/sexual tension between Noah and Rachel so readers would really want that dramatic ending. I knew it was coming, everyone knew it was coming, but I wanted to want it more, cheesy as it may be. And the details-- I don't need to know that Noah's truck is gold or that he buys a Diet Sierra Mist and a Kit Kat when he goes to 7-11 if those details aren't relevant.

My prediction is that The Wednesday Letters will win the General category. It's definitely inspirational fiction, as are all of the novels in the bunch this year. Once I stopped trying to read the books as literary fiction and started trying to accept them for what they were, too many details and cheesy endings and all, I can see that this story in particular, is very likeable and that many readers who want a good story and don't want their ideas or their intellect challenged too much as they read will love the book.
but for what it sets out to do, it does it well.

Book Review: The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card (Whitney Finalist)

Title: The Lost Gate (Mither Mages, #1)
Author: Orson Scott Card
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 35

I need to start out my reviews of the Whitney Speculative Finalists with my customary disclaimer: I don't do adult speculative. Last year, buried under a heavy class load and teaching schedule, I bowed out of reading the category. The year before, I had saved three of the speculative books until the last week, and spent an utterly miserable week trying to learn the ropes of three separate alternate versions of our world. The weird thing is, I don't dislike youth speculative, which generally has a closer connection to our world. As I read these speculative books, I ask you two things, first, recognize that I come in with this bias, and second, take my reviews with a grain of salt because I'm certainly not an expert in this category.

That said, I have read a few of Orson Scott Card's books. I even taught Ender's Game in an Intro to Literature class at a community college about ten years ago. I really, really like Lost Boys, which I read as a teenager and was one of the first truly creepy books I'd ever read. I've read the Sarah and Rebekah books for book club.  I read a couple of the Alvin Maker books too before I got bored and gave up. And that's part of the problem of reading OSC for me-- I always feel like I'm committing myself to 2,000 pages of reading when I start the first page.

In The Lost Gate, the world looks like modern-day rural Virginia, if modern-day rural Virginia were populated by a family of mages-- basically like wizards or people with magical powers. Once the rulers of western Europe, the family now has only a shadow of their former power, in part because they've lost the ability to make gates to the past, which would restore their powers. And then Danny comes along. For years, his relatives think he has no power at all, but then it turns out that he's the greatest mage the family has seen in more than a thousand years-- he has the power to gate from place to place and possibly also in time and space. So, of course, they want to kill him, and he goes on the run.

There's nothing at all wrong with this book-- Card knows how to write, and the plot works, he gives an appropriate amount of detail. But change the mages to battle room instructors or frontiersmen and you basically have Ender's Game or Seventh Son. If I didn't know the plots of Card's other books, this might not bug me, but I do, and it does. I also really, really dislike a book that doesn't have a satisfying ending in and of itself but merely sets up the action of the next book. I know that's an accepted convention in speculative fiction, but it does tinge my enjoyment of the novel.

Book Review: Daughter of Helaman (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Daughter of Helaman
Author: Misty Moncur
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 29

It's a story almost as old as time, or at least as old as Joan of Arc. A girl yearns for the same kind of adventure she sees her brothers enjoying. People tell her she should remain content with her lot in life. She cuts her hair/dresses like a boy/learns to fight/stows away on a ship until she gets the respect she deserves. Here's that story set in Book of Mormon times, where Keturah wants nothing more than to fight with her teenage brothers in Helaman's army. Lots of people tell her no, and then eventually, they let her (no haircuts or breast-binding required).

What to say about this book? It's very readable. I think there are probably lots of readers out there who would enjoy it a lot. It seems to end right at the point where the action starts (does that mean there will be a sequel? Noooooo!). I've decided I am not a big fan of Book of Mormon "historicals" because there is so much about the history of the Book of Mormon that is not known, and all of the books seem to have a modern, American sensibility to them, but I'm not sure how that kind of situation could be remedied. I'm not holding this against the book in any way, but I've decided that I'm not a huge fan of the size of the Covenant/Bonneville books. The pages are big and there's not a lot of white space, and I think I find the amount of type on one page to be overwhelming. I know it's probably cheaper that way, but in the age of the iPad, long blocks of type feel especially fatiguing.

Book Review: Before I Say Goodbye by Rachel Ann Nunes (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Before I Say Goodbye
Author: Rachel Ann Nunes
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 26

Back in the day, Rikki and Dante were best friends growing up in Spanish Fork, Utah, dragging Main on Friday nights (Nunes doesn't actually say this, but I imagine that every high school kid in SF has done this at least once, especially wild-child Rikki). They were drawn to each other because they both grew up in dysfunctional households, which set them apart from all the perfect they saw around them. But when Dante decided to go on a mission, Rikki skipped town and didn't come back for 20 years.

When she did come back she had two kids and a brain tumor. You might say that I'm ruining the book for you, but I could tell by the end of the first chapter that she was sick (she takes pills by the handful and mysteriously talks about "not being around" for her kids). So she's come home to reconnect with Dante (now the Bishop, married to a nearly-perfect woman with four kids), and find a place for her children to go once she's gone.

There were a lot of things to like about Before I Say Goodbye. First of all, I think Nunes does a nice job telling the story from multiple points of view. There are times when it feels like some of the characters sound too much alike, but in general, she differentiates between them nicely. Secondly, the Mormons in the book aren't necessarily cookie-cutter Mormons. The kids fight. Dante and Becca's relationship isn't perfect. But they do ultimately make good decisions, even heroic ones.

On the other hand, Dante and Becca sometimes bugged me. I felt that they were stifling as parents, with their constant threats to ground their kids, and everyone did, ultimately make the heroic choices. I also felt that there was no surprises with the plot. From the beginning of the book, I knew what would happen, and it did happen.

Book Review: Miles from Ordinary by Carol Lynch Williams (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Miles from Ordinary
Author: Carol Lynch Williams
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 21

Carol Lynch Williams is a master at presenting the tough, dark parts of life, the ones we'd rather leave untouched. In Glimpse, her protagonists were forced into prostitution. In The Chosen One, we read of a young girl who escapes polygamy. And in Miles from Ordinary, Williams tells the story of thirteen-year-old Lacey, who hopes to have a normal summer working at the library, if her Mom will let her.

The problem is that Lacey's mom is sick, apparently with schizophrenia or some kind of related disorder. Lacey has found her a part-time job, and the book takes place on the day that Lacey and her mom are due to report to work. In the first part of the book we see Lacey getting her mom ready for work. We get some of the backstory about the dead grandfather who "talks" to Lacey's mom. We learn that Lacey's Aunt Linda, who used to work at the library and helped create a sense of normalcy in the house, left last year after an enormous fight with Lacey's increasingly unstable mom.  We see Lacey at work and on the bus with a cute boy, but not all that much happens. In the last third of the book, the action picks up. But the book also takes a departure-- until this point, I felt like I'd been reading realistic fiction, but Lacey sees things that leave a reader wondering how realistic this fiction is. Williams has either introduced supernatural elements (heretofore absent from the plot) or she's suggesting that Lacey too is becoming unstable. However, she seems too young to be falling prey to the same illness that her mother has (schizophrenia usually manifests in women in their mid- to late twenties. Despite these flaws, Williams's prose is lovely, as it always is.

I applaud Williams from not shirking the hard stories. Lacey's struggles with her mom reminded me a lot of Cynthia Voight's Dicey's Song, which was one of my favorite books when I was a kid. But I think that the execution is less successful in this case than it has been in some of her previous novels.

Book Review: Chasing China by Kay Bratt

Title: Chasing China: A Daughter's Quest for Truth
Author: Kay Bratt
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: I read Kay Bratt's Silent Tears and heard about this book from her Facebook page
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 6

I've read a lot of romance novels for the Whitney Awards over the last few years, and even though Chasing China takes place in (wait for it) China and the protagonists aren't LDS, the book reminds me so much of an LDS romance novel. It's clean and innocent, and although the romance is prominent there are other plot elements that make the story interesting enough to keep reading.  Mia is a college student from the Pacific Northwest, adopted from China in the early 90s as a preschooler. She returns to Suzhou, where her orphanage was located, in order to find some answers about her past. But no one wants to answer her questions, and officials from the orphanage seem intent on blocking her ability to find those answers. Along the way, she meets up with another handsome Asian college student, Jax, who provides the romance and drives the escape moped.

While I was very interested in Mia's story, which was very heartfelt, the writing was overly dramatic at times, too didactic in some places, and shifted points of view inconsistently. I do think that stories like Mia's should be written, and I think that Bratt has the ideas and the knowledge she needs to write them, but I also think that she could benefit from working with an editor who can guide her on some of the details that get readers like me hung up.

Book Review: The Year of the Boar by Anneke Majors

Title: The Year of the Boar
Author: Anneke Majors
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: I saw that there will be a review in the upcoming issue of Irreantum and decided to read it
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 3

I was so excited to read The Year of the Boar because it combines my love of "serious" LDS literature with a bunch of stories about Chinese people. We always talk about how we're a world church, but so many of our stories take place in the mountain west, and I loved the idea that there was a book that didn't just take the story out of Utah, but it took much of it out of the United States. I was also intrigued when I heard that the book worked as sort of a fiction/nonfiction hybrid, because I'm really interested in genre-blending.

Majors has set an ambitious goal for herself in juggling the elements of story and a setting all over the world (there are scenes in Texas, Montana, China, Japan, France, and Africa, and I don't think that list is complete). I think her writing is clear and concise throughout, but I ultimately found the stories very hard to follow. If I'd read them as individual vignettes, I think my expectations would have been different, but I was expecting the stories to tie together, to be more novelistic, and I think there's enough evidence that there is supposed to be some kind of cohesive message from the piece as a whole, but it was hard for me to glean what it was. As a very well-written series of family stories, I think the piece succeeds (although I'm not sure the final chapter works, much as I would like to see Majors's vision come to fruition), but as a novel with appeal beyond a small audience, I think the connections between the sections need to be a little clearer. Even a list of characters on the opening pages would have helped me immensely.

I hope this isn't seen as a negative review, because I really, really applaud Majors for choosing to tackle a Mormon history that isn't a Utah history. I love the places that this book points in our shared future as Mormon writers, and for that reason I think it's an important book.

Book Review: The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Title: The Family Fang
Author: Kevin Wilson
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: This kept popping up in "recommended for you" in Amazon and Audible
Source: Audible for iPhone
Books I've read this year: 159

I know that every child feels that their parents messed up in some way or another. My daughter, sitting at the piano right this minute, just cursed me for making her practice. My son has been in tears working with his dad on a Christmas break science project (now who thought that was a good idea?) due at school tomorrow. But Caleb and Camille Fang messed up their kids more than most, and The Family Fang is basically the book of their therapy, of coming to terms with their childhood and deciding how it will or won't affect the rest of their lives.

Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists (because visual art is dead and boring, Caleb would say). They set up elaborate events in public places (sort of like Improv Everywhere, a group who famously cheered on a band for what they thought would be the best gig of their lives on a 2005 episode of This American Life). Anyway, Caleb and Camille feared that their art was dead when Camille unexpectedly got pregnant, but they soon learned that Child A and Child B (aka Annie and Buster) were actually their secret weapons. Their involvement in all of the art made Caleb and Camille famous and successful artists. However, Annie and Buster tired of their work, and after C&C set up a scenario in which the two would have to kiss in front of their whole school, Annie decided she'd had enough of her parents. She became an actress, and Buster became a writer, and the two floundered through their twenties. Then, going through rough times in their lives, they returned home, and soon after that, Caleb and Camille disappeared.

The book includes a forward-moving narrative (as Annie and Buster decide whether or not to try to find their parents and how to go about it) and a series of flashbacks highlighting the art they grew up participating in. I think the book is well written, and all of the weird extraneous little details come together well, but it was uncomfortable to listen to at times. Caleb and Camille were too cruel, too clueless and ultimately too heartless to be parents. So while I think the book may deserve a higher rating based on the writing skills, the story was too weird and sad to be enjoyable.

Book Review: The Kingdom of Childhood by Rebecca Coleman

Title: The Kingdom of Childhood
Author: Rebecca Coleman
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Source: Kindle for iPad
Referral: My friend Sara/crazywomancreek said it was a must read
Books I've read this year: 160!

There are a lot of things I want to say about The Kingdom of Childhood, but if I talk about the thing that is most interesting about this novel, then I'll ruin it for anyone who wants to read it. I'll just say that we generally start off with certain assumptions about a narrator-- that the narrator is a decent, stable sort of person who is trying to tell a story honestly, and when that gets twisted around, like it does in The Kingdom of Childhood, that provides some potential conflicts that can be really interesting.

I'm getting ahead of myself. The Kingdom of Childhood is the story of Judy, a kindergarten teacher at a Waldorf School in the DC suburbs. The story takes place in 1999, in the waning months of the Bill Clinton scandals. Judy looks like everything you'd expect from a kindergarten teacher-- she wears jumpers and talks in a gentle voice, but she's also experiencing a deep malaise-- her kids don't like her much, her husband is outright hostile to her when he's around, and her best friend recently died of cancer. So she copes with the problems in her life by seeking out sex, first in a one-night stand with another choir trip chaperone, and later with a junior in the upper school, one of her son's friends.

While the story itself is uncomfortable (as we see Judy and Zach's relationship get more and more dysfunctional), I found myself torn between enjoying the richness of the details of the story and being put off by the style of the narration. Most of the book is Judy in the first person (which has its own problematic elements and requires some reading between the lines on the part of the reader) but we also get Zach's actions in the third person, and it feels like Judy is observing Zach in these scenes, although it's evident that she couldn't actually be observing him, despite her stalkerish tendencies. Furthermore, we also get a third-person view of Judy as a child, and some of those passages are unclear-- was she abused by Rudy? Did she develop pyromania? Is she as troubled as her mother was? I feel that while the book is supposed to feel unsettling, the narrative strategy reflected that unsettled feeling a little too well.

Overall, I feel that The Kingdom of Childhood was a rich, multi-layered, interesting story about a difficult subject. Coleman knows her stuff. But the book was too troubling for it to be an enjoyable read.

Book Review: Crossed by Ally Condie

Title: Crossed
Author: Ally Condie
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: I read Matched, and I liked it enough to give this one a go
Source: Ordered new from Amazon (mostly for Annie's sake)
Books I've read this year: 146

When I'm reviewing books, I sometimes feel torn. When I've met an author and really like him or her, I want to write a glowing review. But I also feel like it's my moral obligation to be honest. Here's me being honest.

I had food poisoning over the weekend and spent all day Saturday sleeping on and off. I was cranky, and in the moments when I wasn't sleeping, I read Crossed. I could use the state of my intestinal tract and my tired brain to explain why this book didn't really do it for me, but then I think back to when I read Matched last year, and I was underwhelmed by that too.

Really, I don't think it has a lot to do with the writing. I think Condie writes beautifully, and I was impressed by the way she adapted the Southern Utah landscape of her childhood to a dystopian novel. I also love, love, love the way she interweaves great classic poems into her texts. On those two points alone, I want my kids to read this book. I also love the way she includes the cave paintings into this one. The details are fantastic.

The problem for me is probably my own, and it's a lot more basic. First of all, I think that the romance that drives the books gets old. The romance more than the life situation seems to be the driving force in both of the books so far, at least for Cassia, the seventeen-year-old protagonist. Okay, I'll admit that when I was seventeen I was pretty boy crazy myself, and there was no expectation that I should be matched off or married at that age, so I guess it makes sense. The thing that I'm having a hard time reconciling in this series is that I think Cassia is going for the wrong guy. Maybe lots of girls (Cassia, Taylor Swift, Demi Moore) want the bad boy instead of the one who is plodding along within the system (or is he?) but I fell hard for Xander, probably because he reminds me so much of my own lifelong match, that every time she talks about her love for Ky, I want to shake her and tell her to rethink her options.

Does this mean I'm getting old?

Book Review: Why Fairy Tales Stick by Jack Zipes

Title: Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre
Author: Jack Zipes
Usefulness rating: 6/10
Referral: I picked it for a book review required by my fairy tale films class because I'm writing a paper about how one particular tale has evolved
Source: Borrowed from the BYU library
Books I've read this year: 143

This is the review I wrote for my class:

In the early chapters of Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, Jack Zipes seems to set up a pattern for what he’ll do in the rest of the book. In the first chapter, he lays the groundwork for how fairy tales became a genre in the first place. He shows how there needed to be a critical mass of people, reading and writing in the vernacular, before the oral folk and fairy tales which had been circulating for centuries could be written down. While we can’t see how stories changed in the oral tradition, Zipes attempts to demonstrate how the tales have changed in the years when they have become part of the print and mass-media culture. While Zipes deals primarily with the history of language in the first chapter, his focus shifts to the history of fairy tales as a whole in the second chapter. The most surprising part of these first two chapters may be Zipes’ definition of a fairy tale, which is broader than many others I’ve read. While many other fairy tale scholars keep the definition narrow because they consider all tales that are fairy tales to come from the oral tradition, Zipes includes Barrie, Wilde, Andersen, Baum, Tolkien, Salman Rushdie, and even the creators of X-Men as authors of fairy tale. Zipes says, “The institutionalization of a genre means that a certain process of production, distribution, and reception had become fully accepted within the public sphere of a society and plays a role in forming and maintaining the cultural heritage of that society. Without such institutionalization, any genre would perish” (89). It seems logical that Zipes, who argues that the fairy tale is alive and evolving in the 21^st century, would keep the definition broad, because if the traditional tales fail to speak to those in the future, there will undoubtedly be other tales to take their place.

Based on these first two chapters, I expected that Zipes would continue to look at the genre as a whole, perhaps looking at the evolution of various issues or linguistic elements in Western European tales. However, Zipes seems to change the scope of his work quite dramatically as the book progresses past the first two chapters. In the next four chapters Zipes looks at various tales (Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, and Bluebeard) and show how each tale has departed from the traditional literary versions in the retellings that have been written over the last two or three centuries. He finds trends in the patterns of retellings (Bluebeard characters after World War II seems to represent some of the anxieties and feelings of emasculation that men felt after the end of the war, Cinderellas in the late 20^th century show trends toward multiculturalism) and attempts to draw some conclusions about what those patterns may say about particular periods of time. Zipes seems to feel that the Aarne-Thompson classification index is a too categorical and formulaic to be useful in the modern era, but his book works best as an extension of that index. It would be particularly useful to anyone studying a traditional tale and its many retellings, since he provides exhaustive lists of retellings as well as more in-depth summaries and analysis of particular retellings which seem to highlight a certain moment in history.

When I chose this book to review, I was surprised at just how ubiquitous Jack Zipes seems to be in the world of fairy tale studies. I wondered how he could possibly write all of the books and articles he does. In reading Why Fairy Tales Stick, I think I found some of the answer—he reuses significant portions of his material. This book is only seven chapters long, and at least one of the chapters is a condensation of previously published work (in this case, a study of Little Red Riding Hood). If other chapters function in the same way, that might explain some of Zipes’s ability to be prolific in his publishing, but I’m not sure how it reflects on his academic work as a whole. Zipes is at his least successful when he’s catty. He goes on for several paragraphs about Ruth Bottigheimer’s argument that print culture was responsible for the dissemination of the fairy tale, and the attack was so mean-spirited that it seemed to veer from the academic into the personal. Ultimately, while Zipes’s book can be useful for researchers who want to find retellings for their own research, I think that because he never announces his intentions to look at patterns individual fairy tales rather than continuing to look at evolution more broadly, those reading the book feel somewhat unsatisfied when the book takes that direction. 

Book Review: Fairy Tale Films by Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Ann Matrix

Title: Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity
Author: Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Ann Matrix
Usefulness Rating: 6/10
Referral: Required reading for my fairy tale folklore class
Source: Ordered from Amazon
Books I've read this year: 142

I took away two things from reading this book. First of all, pretty much any story can be seen as a fairy tale narrative. Greenhill and Matrix selected essays in which Eyes Wide Shut, Harry Potter, and Edward Scissorhands are considered fairy tales. Secondly, it's almost impossible to talk about fairy tales without talking about gender. While reading these essays was sometimes interesting, I think it would have been a more interesting read if we actually watched some of the films discussed in the chapters. Reading the secondary sources without watching the primary sources was ultimately unfulfilling.

Book Review: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

Title: The Sociopath Next Door
Author: Martha Stout
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: I found it browsing a sale at Audible
Source: Audible for iPhone
Books I've read this year 139

I'll admit now that Martha Stout may be right. She asserts early in The Sociopath Next Door that 4% of the population is sociopathic, and she repeats that fact at least once (and probably more like three times) each chapter. But each time the narrator said "one in 25 people is a sociopath" I had the same reaction-- disbelief. Is it really possible that four people in one hundred doesn't have a fully-formed conscience that Stout describes as the hallmark of sociopathy? The DSM-IV suggests that sociopathy is one of several antisocial personality disorders, and that the prevalence of all antisocial personality disorders is approximately 3% of men and 1% of women. Maybe I recoil at Stout's figures because she does such a good job of presenting people who are sociopaths (several of her chapters are stories about sociopaths) and it's creepy to think that if Stout's figures hold, there's a sociopath in each of my kids' classes, three in our Primary, and half a dozen in my ward. It's also a little freaky when she says that most people who aren't sociopaths can't recognize sociopathy in others. I'm also reluctant to buy her numbers because she doesn't seem to present any possibilities for redemption for these people-- the book wants to show that they are devoid of conscience, that they are manipulative, and that you should avoid them. She never talks about how someone can develop a conscience who was not born with one or whose conscience was lost due to traumatic events in early childhood.

Reading The Sociopath Next Door made me think a lot about Dexter. Dexter asserts early on in the show that he is a sociopath, possibly due to genetics, but likely due to early childhood trauma. He only feels whole when he kills. In the first season, he doesn't know how to love, he fakes emotion, he doesn't like sex, and he goes through the motions of all of these emotional aspects of life because he needs to fit in. Most of the villains he encounters in each season are also sociopaths-- his brother, Lila (possibly the best example), Jimmy Smits (Stout says that sociopaths do well in politics, and the Smits character resembles one of Stout's examples quite a bit) and the John Lithgow character. Lumen (in season five) has to turn away from him because she eventually recognizes that she is not a sociopath, but the guy who locked her up definitely was. So if you look at Dexter as a show where a recovering sociopath (that's how I would characterize Dexter, even though Stout doesn't seem to think recovery is possible) encounters other sociopaths. For that insight alone, reading the book was worthwhile.

Book Review: Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

Title: Girl in Translation
Author: Jean Kwok
Enjoyment Rating: 6/10
Referral: I saw it on several friends' Goodreads lists
Source: Audible for iPhone
Books I've read this year: 138

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." That's how I'd characterize Jean Kwok's Girl in Translation. On the one hand, Ah Kim and her mother have it hard. They exchange a relatively comfortable life in Hong Kong, where Kim's mother was a music teacher, for a life living in an unheated, rat- and cockroach-infested hovel in Brooklyn, for a job that pays a penny per skirt, for choices determined by Kim's bitter aunt, the one who found them the apartment and the job and feels inclined to keep them in a state of destitution.

On the other hand, Kim has brains. She knows how to work hard. And after a rough start at her public elementary school with an almost criminally unfeeling teacher, her brains are recognized. She goes straight from one of the worst public schools in NYC to one of the best private schools. Still, culture and language continue to make Kim feel foreign. I think that Kwok does a nice job portraying Kim's inner struggles, but the book would have worked better for me if it had been a little more nuanced. Instead, Kim comes off as some kind of Greek goddess, a character where only the best or the worst things happen to her and nothing in between. In the last few pages, I get a sense that Kim might see her overarching ambition as something that has its drawbacks, but her perspective is so singularly focused during the first 90% of the book, that this maturity seems a little out of place.

This next part is a spoiler, so don't read it if you think you might want to read the book. While I know it is possible to get pregnant the first and only time a couple has sex, even if that couple has sex with a condom, it seems like every time a teenager in a book has sex, she will definitely get pregnant. That's a trope that we need to give up. Please promise me that if I ever include a character who gets pregnant after a single sexual encounter, you will shoot me or something. Yuck.