Book Review: Shifting by Bethany Wiggins (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Shifting
Author: Bethany Wiggins
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 54

It's been a while since I finished reading Shifting, so it might be hard to give a great review of it. Maggie Mae is seventeen, and has been in about that many foster homes during her childhood. She has the unfortunate habit of being picked up by the police for indecent exposure. So Maggie's social worker deposits her in a town in Southern New Mexico with his mother, who promises to get Maggie out of high school and past her eighteenth birthday without mishap. However, this proves to be more difficult than either of them anticipated. People follow her. The kids at school seem to hate her. And then there's Bridger, the impossibly gorgeous guy who seems totally interested in her. Maggie isn't sure how much she can trust him or tell him about herself.

Shifting is well-written and engrossing. I definitely found myself captured by the story, and was even more impressed when I read that the paranormal stuff in the story, the Skinwalkers, come directly from Navajo legend. Wiggins does a great job setting the story against a backdrop that's rich in Navajo history. My main quibble with the story, and it's a small one, I think, is that Maggie waits so long to let readers know what exactly is going on with her. I can understand why she would want to keep the secret from her foster families and people at school, but it made me distrust her a little bit as a narrator when she didn't come right out and tell us why she was always naked in public until we saw it happen for the first time. 

Book Review: Rearview Mirror by Stephanie Black (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Rearview Mirror
Author: Stephanie Black
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic Copy
Books I've read this year: 52

New England college professor Fiona Claridge has had a successful academic career, but she's also been haunted by the car accident where she accidentally killed her BYU roommate Mia. She finds herself unable to move on or find love, and she's plagued by guilt. Adding to that guilt is a former student who is getting back at Fiona for accusing her of plagiarism by dredging up some of the more unsavory details of Mia's death. Furthermore, Fiona learns that her ex-boyfriend's mother has died and when she attends the funeral, it turns out that he's held a torch for her all these years (despite marrying someone else). And then the mother's death (and other subsequent deaths) are revealed not to be accidents, after all, and Fiona seems to be in the center of everything. Who killed the old lady? Are they working with Kimberly, the disgruntled student? Is this a mean trick or is Fiona's life in danger?

There's a lot going on in this book. I like the characters-- and particularly like that Black has the courage to create Mormon characters who are flawed, even very flawed and damaged. In years past, it seemed that many of the Whitney mystery/suspense novels shied away from having a Mormon pull the trigger/plunge the knife/shove the old bag in the water, and that isn't the case here (I think I can say that without revealing too much). The story is also interestingly complicated in many ways, with great side stories that tie into the main narrative. But the romance part of the story felt forced and didn't work too well for me. I wanted to see Fiona actually falling for James, Mia's old flame, instead of coming to him in a place of comfort and need.

Book Review: A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

Title: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter
Author: William Deresiewicz
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: I think this was in the bargain bin at Audible
Source: Audible for iPhone
Books I've read this year:50

It took me a LONG time to read this book. A really long time. I started out all gung-ho, because who wouldn't want to read a book about how reading Jane Austen changed some guy's life (yes, you read that right, a GUY's life). The first chapter was great. And then I found that I didn't like this William Deresiewicz guy all that much. He complained a whole lot-- about his dad, his apartment, his spot in an Ivy League PhD program, his love life-- everything. So I quit reading it for a month or two, and then one morning I went out for a run and picked it up again. I won't say that I absolutely loved the book, but Deresiewicz did grow on me over time. I think part of his strategy was to make himself as repugnant as possible in the early chapters so he could be redeemed as he learned and grew from what he'd read (almost like an Austen heroine?). And the book rekindled my love for Jane Austen. I have three more Whitney finalists to read, and then Persuasion is at the top of the stack on my bedside table, calling my name.

Book Review: The List by Melanie Jacobson (Whitney Finalist)

Title: The List
Author: Melanie Jacobson
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 48

When Ashley Barrett goes to spend the summer before graduate school in Southern California with her cousins, she's looking to make a little money and learn to surf; she's emphatically not looking to fall in love. She watched her two older sisters marry in their teens, and grew up aware of the fact that her parents' early marriage had made for some economic challenges, and she was not going to get married until she'd had a little fun. In fact, she made a list to of all of the fun things she wanted to do before she'd let herself fall in love. And if one of the items on that list was "have a summer fling," then that was something she could do during her California summer, no strings attached.

Yeah, right. This is a romance novel after all.

When I picture a woman reading a romance novel, I picture either a teenager or an older, married woman. I don't picture Ashley's peers, the unmarried-but-looking twentysomethings. I guess I figure that that demographic is actually out having romances and can't be bothered reading them. But Jacobson's books feel like they would actually appeal to college students. She has the dialogue and the pacing and just the right amount of detail. She also has really likeable protagonists. I'll write more about this in my review of Not My Type (which I actually liked better), but I think that Jacobson really has her finger on the pulse of what the characters in her stories would like to read.

Book Review: A Night of Blacker Darkness by Dan Wells (Whitney Finalist)

Title: A Night of Blacker Darkness
Author: Dan Wells
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 43

I read a whole bunch of books on the way to China, and once we got there and got Rose, I didn't blog about them. Then I read more books in China, and didn't blog about them, either. Then we came home, and between the jet lag and spring break and settling in, I didn't blog about those either. And now I'm in trouble, because I feel an obligation to blog about the books I read (for you, fair reader), especially these Whitney books, because it's kind of my thing, writing about all of the books, even if I'm mostly just doing it for myself (and therefore justifying this long, rambling introduction that has nothing to do with the book so far). Anyway, I'm getting to my point, which is that after a while, all of the books started to blend together in my mind. I blame it on the fact that I read a lot, but I have a memory for plots like most people have for where they put their car in long-term parking. I can remember what I need to as long as I'm reading, but the details tend to fade away quickly. Annie keeps asking me minute details about The Hunger Games, which I read almost four years ago when it was brand new (and with the new baby I think I am probably the only person on the planet who has read all three books and not made it to the movie yet, but that's a digression on top of a digression), and then she gets mad at me when I don't remember. "Are you sure you really read that book, Mom?" I feel her rolling eyes saying to me when I tell her I can't remember who provided the poisoned berries or whether Cato was killed by wild dogs or at the hand of another kid in the arena. Anyway, my point is that while so many of the other books I read blended together, this one really stood out. And for that, I give it major props.


Frederick Whithers and his girlfriend Gwen plan to scam an old rich guy with one foot in the grave out of his fortune of 90,000 pounds, which back in the early 1800s was a lot of cash. But Frederick is in jail when the rich guy dies, and he has to find a way out. When his cellmate dies, Fred bribes the coffinmaker to bury him too. The only problem? He's spotted leaving the coffin by a bunch of vampires who believe that he is The Great One, come to save them. And it just gets crazier from there. Whithers hooks up with John Keats (yes, the poet) who speaks only in rhyming verse. Together the two work to get back at the underhanded Gwen, escape from the vampires, and secure the inheritance for themselves. Along the way they get assistance from Mary Shelley (yes, that Mary Shelley, robbing graves in the name of research), talk about Jane Austen, and leave the reader wondering if these two really deserve to come out on top at the end of the novel (they are just so goofy!)

A Night of Blacker Darkness is zany and weird and wonderful, and all of the things that make it zany and weird also make it a little bit frustrating to read. As a reader, I found myself having to suspend disbelief in a lot of ways. Well, duh, you say, it's a book in the speculative category about vampires and John Keats! But it's also written in a very twenty-first century style. In fact, it reminded me a lot of the Downey/Law incarnations of Holmes and Watson, where everything is so witty and fast-paced it feels almost anachronistic. Regardless of the anachronisms, I thought the book was great fun.

Book Review: Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

Title: Her Royal Spyness (Her Royal Spyness Mysteries #1)
Author: Rhys Bowen
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: The same friends who introduced me to Maisie Dobbs told me to read this
Source: Audible for iPhone
Books I've read this year: 39

What do you get when you cross Maisie Dobbs with Bridget Jones? Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, 34th in line to the British throne, penniless, and boy-crazy to the max. Georgie moves out of her brother's cold and gloomy Scottish castle to London, where she reconnects with old friends from school, gets bossed around by her great-aunt (the queen), finds a dead man in her bathtub, tries to find a suitable job, and finds herself in all kinds of trouble. Although the book's title posits Georgie as a spy, she's actually kind of an anti-spy-- she keeps getting in terrible situations and narrowly avoiding death. The actual mystery of who killed the awful man who wanted to take away the castle and then kept trying to off Georgie isn't all that suspenseful (I had him pegged from the beginning) but the writing is fun, and Georgie is a great character. I love the way that Bowen uses actual historical characters (including the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson) as significant characters in the novel. The history feels well-integrated and I didn't care too much that the mystery wasn't that mysterious. I'll keep reading these.

Book Review: Acceptable Loss by Anne Perry (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Acceptable Loss
Author: Anne Perry
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 37

I'd heard great things about Anne Perry's Victorian-era William Monk series, although I'd never read any of the books until Acceptable Loss, which is the 17th book in the series. Perry does a great job of seamlessly integrating the relevant events of the previous sixteen books, as well as setting the scene of a dark, dangerous Victorian London, in the opening chapters. While I always felt that I didn't understand the depth of the relationships between the Monks (William, the commander of the river police, and Hester, a nurse) and the Rathbones (Oliver, an attorney, and Margaret, who works with Hester at the home for former prostitutes), it was easy enough to pick up on the story.

The problem for me is that there wasn't all that much of a story. Acceptable Loss feels like a traditional whodunit, where someone (in this instance Mickey Parfitt, who owned a floating child porn boat on the Thames, a man who no one is sorry to see removed from the earth) turns up floating, strangled with a distinctive necktie. That necktie is easily identified as belonging to one man, but the whole time, everyone keeps thinking that someone else, Margaret's father, actually committed the crime. Guess who did it? I don't want to be a spoiler, but let's just say that the book ends with the Rathbone's marriage rocked to the core.

I think that a plot like this one can work well for a dedicated reader to the series, especially since I've gleaned from Acceptable Loss that Perry is interested in the long-term development of her characters, but I found it somewhat unsatisfactory to read in isolation. However, the book is rich in detail and the characters are interesting enough that I'm almost persuaded to pick up the series from here and keep on reading.

Book Review: Captive Heart by Michele Paige Holmes (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Captive Heart
Author: Michele Paige Holmes
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 33

Emmalyne is running away from her stuffy Boston upbringing and her even stuffier fiance, headed west on a train to take her first teaching job, when robbers board the train and force several women off, presumably to turn them into prostitutes for the brothels of the upper plains states. However, once Emmalyne is off the train, her captor, Thayne, turns out to have a lot more honor than she initially gave him credit for. The book recounts their journey back to his home in the Black Hills, and, yes, how they fell in love on that journey, despite all odds.

Other than the fact that Thayne is infuriatingly close-lipped about his motives and his past, and Emmalyne is more accident-prone than anyone in real life, the book was a fun adventure. I can't help but compare it with Borrowed Light, since both feature city-girl heroines who fall in love with a rugged country man with a past, and while I enjoyed Borrowed Light more, I do give Holmes props for careful research and an ability to really create a sense of place in Captive Heart.

Book Review: The Evolution of Thomas Hall by Kieth Merrill (Whitney Finalist)

Title: The Evolution of Thomas Hall
Author: Kieth Merrill
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 31

Thomas Hall is a jerk. He's a hotshot painter who never visits his aging father, refuses to get into serious romantic relationships, fires his manager on a weekly basis, and needs huge commissions to keep up with his tastes for fast boats and even faster cars. He's also a serious talent, who seems to have sold out to the Man-- banking on huge mural projects painting showgirls on the walls of hotels in Las Vegas.

Hall ends up working simultaneously on two very different projects-- one an ode to Charles Darwin in the science museum in San Francisco, and one portraying Jesus performing acts of healing at a children's hospital across town. Hall initially feels more drawn to the science museum project-- he is an agnostic, after all, but museum politics interfere with the job and Thomas finds himself working for a guy who is an even bigger jerk than he is, a guy who won't stop at blackmail to get what he wants. Thomas feels unequal to the Jesus job-- he knows all about religious art, and he knows enough to know that he doesn't know Jesus enough to do his work credit, which is what the rich benefactor requires. But through the influence of his family, his manager, the kids at the hospital, and one very special hospital employee, he opens his heart.

In a lot of ways, The Evolution of Thomas Hall reminds me of the writing of The DaVinci Code, with a lot less fighting and hiding, and if Robert Langdon opened himself up for conversion. Both books real with the intersections between religion and art. Merrill's background as a filmmaker is evident-- this is a book that could be a film. It also reminds me of The DaVinci Code in the way that it's written-- it would be quick-paced if it weren't for all the details. However, there's a level of complexity to the plot and the narrative that's absent in the other General category finalists, as well as attention to detail in the editing process. This feels more professional than the other books I've read, if that makes sense.

A few more things-- The Evolution of Thomas Hall is not a Mormon book, despite being published by Shadown Mountain, a Deseret Book imprint. While many of the characters are religious, none is overtly LDS. The same is true of both The Walk: Miles to Go, and I presume it might be true of The Wedding Letters since last year's Jason Wright book was like this. As someone who writes Mormon characters and wants to make them accessible to a wider audience, I'm interested in reading works that sort of do the opposite-- Mormon authors who use non-Mormon characters for the purpose of inspiration.

The Goodreads summary of The Evolution of Thomas Hall says "he finds himself torn between illustrating a mural on the origins of man for a natural history museum--a tribute to Darwin--and illustrating the miracles of Jesus for a display inside a children's hospital called the Healing Place. A self-proclaimed agnostic, Thomas must dig deep within himself to believe beyond his doubts as he wrestles with that elusive something called faith. Then he meets a young, critically ill girl named Christina. Her haunting past and undeviating faith will test the very soul of Thomas and that of every reader." When I read that I sighed a great big sigh. I didn't want to read a book about the showdown between science and religion. I prefer to believe that my belief in both can comfortably co-exist. But I didn't find the portrayal to be as black and white as I expected (it is true, however, that the only truly bad guy in the book is the Darwinist). 


Finally, on page 419 (yes, this is a brick of a book), Thomas Hall says, "Words and pictures are very different things and art must speak for itself. For once in my life I sincerely hope what this art is about speaks louder than the art itself." I believe that Merrill feels that same way about The Evolution of Thomas Hall, and I think that it shows, both in the attention to detail the book has received and in the over message of inspiration he hopes to achieve.

Book Review: Slayers by C.J. Hill (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Slayers
Author: C.J. Hill
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 27

What if dragons really exist? What if pregnant women who come into close proximity to dragon eggs eventually bear children who grow up to become dragon slayers? C.J. Hill explores these questions in her book Slayers, where the dragon slayers, now sixteen and seventeen, gather together at summer camp so they can channel their inner powers and learn to whop some dragon booty.

I'll admit to being skeptical about Slayers. It's not a genre I typically enjoy, it's a book about dragon fighting, and the cover reminded me a lot of that open-mouthed shark that scares the crap out of my kids at the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point (random, I know, but Maren kept making me hide the cover under other books). When I sat down yesterday, I figured that this would be a book to be endured, not enjoyed. But it surprised me. The writing is tight-- probably the best writing I've come across in the Whitneys this year (whoever this C.J. Hill is-- it's a pseudonym, knows how to move a plot along and which details are relevant to a story). Even though the book is almost 400 pages long, I read it in less than a day and thoroughly enjoyed it.

That said, I'm not sure it's a book my kids would love, but I think that has more to do with my particular kids than with kids in general. I do think that young teenagers would really enjoy it. It is the first book in a series, but I'm not sure how many books are planned for the series-- it's probably the first of a trilogy, if I had to wager a guess.

Book Review: Letters in the Jade Dragon Box (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Letters in the Jade Dragon Box
Author: Gale Sears
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 24

I'm both delighted and a little bit surprised that this is the second book I've read this year with LDS characters and themes that takes place in Asia. And although I might not have picked this book up if it hadn't been for the Whitney Awards, I'm really glad I read it because it gave me lots of good insights about life in rural China, the ramifications of the Great Leap Forward, and some of the ways that the Chinese government destroyed family structures in the 1950s and 1960s.

Letters in the Jade Dragon Box tells the story of Chen Wen-Shan, a teenage girl living with her great-uncle in Hong Kong in the mid-1970s. One day Wen-Shan and her uncle are summoned to the home of an art dealer, who presents them with a Jade Box that contains letters from Wen-Shan's mother and paintings from her grandfather (the uncle's brother). These letters and paintings had to be smuggled out of mainland China and represent the first communication the family has had since Wen-Shan was smuggled over the border herself, ten years earlier. Over the last decade, she's built up resentment and questions about her past, and the answers to those questions are mostly answered through the letters. However, many of the answers are painful to hear.




While the primary narrative deals with Wen-Shen coming to terms with her past, there's an important secondary narrative. The great-uncle (sorry, I can't remember his name and I returned the book to the library) is one of the early converts to the LDS Church in Hong Kong, but when his wife died and Wen-Shan came to live with him, he stopped attending church. While Wen-Shan learns about her past, and she and her uncle also learn more about the Church and make an effort to reengage with it.

I found the book to be interesting, well-researched, and multi-layered. It wasn't a book to read just for the sake of saying I'd finished it, which is sometimes the case when I read for this contest. My main criticism of the book is something that is hard for me to articulate, which is that Wen-Shan felt like an American in her thoughts and ideas. Maybe Sears would account for this by saying that she was very interested in becoming "Western" (a criticism her uncle often levels at her), but her reactions didn't seem to take into account cultural differences (I don't feel like I'm explaining this well). I also thought the book would have worked better written in the first-person. However, these are small complaints, and overall, I really enjoyed Letters in the Jade Dragon Box. More importantly, I felt like I learned a lot without being preached to too much.

Book Review: Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost

Title: Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation
Author: J. Maarten Troost
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Someone on one of the adoption boards told me about it
Source: Used copy from Amazon
Books I've read this year: 14

If you've been reading the blog over the last year, you know that I've been doing a LOT of reading about adoption and China. All told, I'd say I've probably read 10 books about China and 20 about adoption (with some overlap, to be sure). When I undertake anything significant in my life, the first thing I do to prepare is to read up on it.

Ed, on the other hand, reads to relax and to prepare for exams. Since there are no adoption exams (other than physical exams, which we've already passed), he hasn't done much any reading at all about China or adoption. I figure I've read enough for both of us and he never read What to Expect When You're Expecting either. But since he's the one up at night worrying about our trip, I thought it would be a good idea for him to read a little bit about what he might experience on our travels to Nanjing and Guangzhou. Enter Lost on Planet China. Judging from the fact that Troost's previous book was called The Sex Lives of Cannibals, I figured that Lost on Planet China was a book Ed might dig. It was sure to be entertaining, at least.

Lost on Planet China is entertaining. Troost leaves his wife and two young sons at home in California and takes off for six months on a tour through "the world's most mystifying nation." He doesn't just take a tram up the great wall and then retreat to the relative comforts of Shanghai or Hong Kong, nooooo, he goes to Inner Mongolia and Tibet. He eats everything (and doesn't seem to suffer any ill-effects). He stays in hotels that most foreign travelers wouldn't dream of spending the night in, and he learns to bargain like a pro.

While Lost on Planet China is thoroughly entertaining, after reading it I had a little bit more trepidation about our upcoming journey than I did when I was blissfully ignorant about what would greet us on the other side of the world. I knew about the smoking, the crazy driving, the spitting, and the "massages" but I didn't realize how living in China for an extended period of time would really change a person like it did Troost. Two weeks probably isn't long enough for it to happen. But I still haven't given the book to Ed to read. Maybe I'll hand it over when we're on the plane and it's too late to back out.

Book Review: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Title: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them
Author: Francine Prose
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: I think that my friend Angela told me about this one
Source: It's been sitting on my shelf for a long time
Books I've read this year: 7

I really like the concept behind this book, which is basically that good readers can become good writers through emulating the characteristics they see in the (good) books they read. There are entirely too many goods in that sentence, and that's intentional. Because Prose's premise is based on the assumption that writers are "good" readers, close readers, thoughtful readers. I'm not one. If I'm not taking a class or writing a review, books go in one side of my brain and out the other like water. So the most essential thing for me, if I want to glean any skills from the great writers out there, is to be a better reader. Once you've got that down, it's easy to follow where Prose (isn't Prose the best name for a writer, by the way?) will go with the rest of the book-- she looks at various elements important in crafting fiction by taking examples from great books. It's not a revolutionary concept, and I think the book functions as a how-to book for people who might not necessarily see themselves as writers when they pick it up.

Book Review: Flunking Sainthood by Jana Riess

Title: Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor
Author: Jana Riess
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Source: Ordered new from Amazon
Referral: I've heard about this all over the Bloggernacle
Books I've read this year: 158

I've read a lot of books over the last few years where an author devotes a year to a goal, breaks it down into twelve month-long mini-goals, and then writes a memoir about he or she did or did not reach those goals, on both a micro and a macro level. Gretchen Rubin did this in The Happiness Project, and AJ Jacobs has done it multiple times, most notably in his book The Year of Living Biblically, which resembles Flunking Sainthood in many respects. In fact, I couldn't help but compare the two books almost constantly as I read Flunking Sainthood.

While AJ Jacobs sets out to accomplish his goal of growing his beard or not having sex or whatever he had to do for a month, I always felt as a reader that Jacobs was looking for the weird and quirky things that happened to him so he could tell funny stories about it. He wanted to entertain us. Riess is also funny, but it's a wry sort of funniness. The humor comes out of her analysis of the situation, not out of the weirdness of the situation itself. Most of all, Riess is earnest-- almost painfully so at times. I found the title of the book, Flunking Sainthood, to be a little bit disingenuous. Riess sets the bar too high for herself at times. If she only prays the matins 40% of the time, she considers that a failure. At one point, while she's trying to keep the orthodox Jewish sabbath, she comments that she's broken it twice in the first three minutes of her morning and is therefore a failure. By the end of the year, Riess has established lasting spiritual practices and had some important epiphanies, but she chooses to see the experience as a failure because she hasn't accomplished all that she hoped to. Jacobs, on the other hand, would have called the experience an unqualified success if he'd been the one writing about it.

Flunking Sainthood is also a book that I think would have benefited from an introduction. Just a few basic things like-- I'm Jana, I live in Cincinnati with my husband and daughter, and we decided to embark on this experiment for _____ reason. Instead, I had to intuit some of that information in the first few chapters and I felt a little bit unmoored as I worked to figure everything out.

As a Mormon reader, possibly the most interesting and curious part of the book is that Riess doesn't own up to her own Mormonism. I can understand why she would do this-- the book has a larger reach if she doesn't pigeonhole herself as a Mormon, and some readers might feel that she has more credibility if she doesn't self-identify. Furthermore, as a convert with degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD from Columbia, she might not be the person you'd pick out of a lineup and say "She's the Mormon." But it was interesting to read a book written by a Mormon that doesn't allude to that fact, especially since she talks about attending church and fasting with her congregation and all that stuff, and we as Mormons tend to be publicly proclaiming our Mormonness from billboards lately. I kept wondering how her experiments were colored by her specific faith, but the book was written to address faith more generally.

Overall, Flunking Sainthood was an interesting read, and a thoughtful approach to a format I generally don't like in books (the one goal per month memoir). At times, I found myself wishing that her chapters were longer, and I definitely wanted her to go give herself more credit for the things she did accomplish, but the end result is a thoughtful and thought-provoking read that has made me want to test out certain facets of spirituality in my own life.

Book Review: Variant by Robison Wells (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Variant
Author: Robison Wells
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: I'd heard about it several times but decided to buy it after Emily Milner talked about it at Segullah
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 155

When Variant starts, seventeen-year-old Benson Fisher arrives at a boarding school in New Mexico, feeling like it will be the first place he will ever be able to call home. He's a foster kid who has lived in too many places to count, and when he gets the opportunity to apply for a scholarship at Maxfield Academy, he jumps at the chance to have a place to belong.

However, it becomes evident even before Benson crosses the threshold of the school that something is seriously messed up at Maxfield. There are no teachers, no adults of any kind. In order to keep a Lord of the Flies-style anarchy from erupting, the students have broken up into three groups, and Benson has to choose which one to join on the first day (he joins the Vs, or the Variants). While the school has only four rules, no one seems able to tell him what it means to be sent to "detention" (the punishment for breaking the rules). Benson decides it's high time to leave, but he soon realizes that escape will be more difficult than he imagined.

I hesitate to call Variant a dystopian novel, because it's not immediately apparent that anything dystopian is going on. Benson's world appears to be like our world. And even when he gets to the school, it seems pretty draconian, but not necessarily out of the realm of possibility. It's not until three quarters of the way through the book that the dystopian elements emerge, so I can't decide if it's a card well played or if Wells is messing with our expectations as readers. While the story really picks up at the end, the middle third is slow-- we see a lot of paintball, and not much else. I also think that the budding love stories should be built up more to justify Benson's reactions to them.

I'll say this for Variant-- it didn't feel like a trilogy, or even like a "stand alone book with series potential" even after I finished it. I was a little bit confused by the ending, and by the potential love triangle it opened up, but it never felt like it was working its way toward more books. So I'm intrigued that Wells (like his brother Dan, whose first Monster book didn't feel like part of a trilogy) has two more books in the works.

Book Review: Troll's Eye View by Datlow/Windling

Title: Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales
Editors: Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: Annie said I should read it and I thought it might inspire me to write another retelling for my Fairy Tales Class
Source: Our bookshelf-- someone gave it to Annie for Christmas last year, I think
Books I've read this year: 145

I wrote some fairy tale retellings for my short story class this semester, and I've been flirting with the idea of writing another for my fairy tale class final, so when Annie suggested that I read this book, I hopped right on it. I'll admit now that I didn't read every page, but the stories I did read were pretty entertaining. Like the story of Hansel and Gretel from the POV of the witch, who not only lives in a house made out of sugar, but she's made out of sugar too. A lot of the heavy hitters in YA and fairy tale fantasy are included in this collection (Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire and Neil Gaiman, to name a few), and it simultaneously inspired me to think differently about fairy tale retellings and depressed me because my attempts are so pathetic compared with some of these.

Book Review: Your Cleft-Affected Child by Carrie Gruman-Trinker

Title: Your Cleft-Affected Child: The Complete Book of Information, Resources, and Hope
Author: Carrie Gruman-Trinker
Usefulness Rating: 7/10
Referral: Found on Amazon
Source: Ordered used from Amazon
Books I've read this year: 136

While A Parent's Guide to Cleft Lip and Palate was a more useful book from a medical perspective, there were things I really liked about Carrie Gruman-Trinker's Your Cleft-Affected Child. Gruman-Trinker's son Aidan (the fifth child in her family) was born with pretty serious bilateral cleft lip and palate, and the book is part memoir, part information resource, and part cheerleader. One of the things I like best about the book is the short set of profiles of other people who were born with clefts (including Tom Brokaw, Jesse Jackson and Joaquin Phoenix). I also appreciated reading about her experiences with Aidan.

However, Aidan was still a preschooler at the time the book was published, and I'd love to hear how a cleft lip and palate affects a child as she grows. Part of the reason why I'm interested in that is because I'm making this research do double duty. In my fiction class we were assigned to write a short story that we had to do some research to write about effectively, and since we got our referral of Rose shortly after we got the assignment, it seemed natural to write about cleft lip and palate. I don't want to write the story from the point of view of a young child, and I'm finding it hard to get information on the lasting effects of this birth defect (is birth defect a p.c. term? Gruman-Trinker uses it in this book). It served my purposes as the mother of a child, (but only hand-in-hand with the more technical books about cleft lip/palate) but not my purposes as a writer. 

Book Review: Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Title: Sarah's Key
Author: Tatiana de Rosnay
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Referral: I saw it on enough of my friends' Goodreads lists to decide to tackle it myself.
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 126
 
I read Sarah's Key in one evening. When I read a book in one sitting, I usually have this feeling that the book was completely enjoyable but didn't challenge me as a reader very much, and I feel the same way about Sarah's Key. And it's not because the story was light, because Sarah's Key starts out as two stories-- an American journalist living in Paris in 2002 with a daughter and a troubled marriage to a Frenchman, and a ten-year-old Jewish girl whose family is split apart when the French police shows up at their door and carts them off to an internment camp. Eventually, these two stories become one. De Rosnay handles the parallel stories skillfully, and I was very caught up in the plight of both women, so I'm not really sure why I feel like I wasn't challenged as a reader. Maybe it's just my own growing prejudice that good books should be hard in some way. Regardless, I enjoyed the book. In fact, I think it would be a great selection for book clubs-- it's an easy, quick, short read, but it also has some meat for discussion.

Book Review: Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear (Maisie Dobbs, Book 4)

Title: Messenger of Truth
Author: Jacqueline Winspear
Enjoyment Rating: 7/10
Source: Audible for iPhone
Referral: the next one in this series
Books I've read this year: 121

By the time I've read three books in a series, I'm usually so sick of them that I need a break before reading another. My sister had digital copies of all of the Maisie Dobbs books, and even though I have a plan with Audible where I can pick out two books a month, I've listened to nothing but Jilly's Maisie Dobbs books since I started them a month or so ago. They're relatively long books-- probably 12 or 14 hours apiece, but I listen to them for several hours a day while I'm running, driving, or doing stuff around the house, and so far I'm not giving them up. I think that Orlagh Cassidy, who narrates the books, deserves much of the credit-- she is fantastic! Her ability to modulate her voice to do all of the different genders and accents is impressive. When I finally finish Maisie Dobbs (and I'll be sad!) I'll do my Audible searches based on Orlagh Cassidy. If we could get her to do an audio reading of the Book of Mormon, I'd probably be much better at getting my scripture reading done.

Back to the book. In this story, Maisie needs to decide if a suspicious death was a suicide or a murder or an accident. She's drawn into the life of a dynamic, wealthy family of artists, and the book focuses on the nature of art, smuggling, and being forced into situations by one small wrongdoing. Like the other MD books, there's a big focus on class difference in England in the 1930s, as well as on the poverty of the London slums. It felt a little bit preachier than some of the other novels, but I definitely enjoyed it.

Book Review: The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

Title: The Magic Barrel
Author: Bernard Malamud
Enjoyment Rating: Some stories 9/10, others 5/10, overall 7/10
Source: Ordered used from Amazon
Referral: Required reading for Creative Writing workshop
Books I've read this year: 119

I'm a little bit embarrassed that I've come this far in life without reading Malamud (I've been too busy reading Maisie Dobbs, I guess). I know he's considered important and he won all kinds of big awards in his day, so I should have had the internal motivation to tackle one of his novels earlier, but I didn't. Now I've been compelled by my professor to read Malamud, and despite my prejudice against the short story, I have to say that I'm finding this book delightful. Malamud has kind of a stock thing in these stories-- they're all about some guy (usually either Jewish or Italian), living in New York (I imagine them in the Brooklyn of the 1950s and 1960s), and they're all impotent in some way. They have dreams that they can't seem to rise above. Sometimes bad luck holds them down, but more often they just can't get their stuff together. And now that I've read about a dozen of these guys, I have a soft spot in my heart growing for them. Malamud's writing is also really engaging-- mostly simple, straightforward sentences, a great ear for voices, and occasionally these zingers of an image that really stand out. While Malamud does some zany things (the black Jewish angel, for instance), I love that his stories seem to focus on conflict and character rather than impressing an audience with his bag of tricks.