Book Review: The Phantom by Jo Nesbo

Title: The Phantom
Author: Jo Nesbo
Enjoyment Rating: ***
This book would be rated: R- for lots of drug use, language, violence
Source: Library copy
Books I've read this year: 122

You know after you've read a whole bunch of books about the same character, they all start to blend together? Like it's hard to remember if the Triwizard Tournament happened in the fourth Harry Potter book or the fifth? That's how I feel about Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole books. I finished this book a few weeks ago, and it took a few minutes for me to stop and figure out the plot, because this story folds into the one before it in a way that makes it hard to separate them.

At the beginning of The Phantom we see Harry Hole returning from Hong Kong, where he has lived for the last few years after quitting the Oslo police force. But he's not coming back for a vacation (no, that's so not Hole's style), he's back because Oleg, the boy who is the son Harry never had (he's actually the son of Rakel, the love of Harry's life, but they are both too messed up to have a long-term functioning relationship), has been arrested for murder on drug charges. While he knows that Oleg's life had gone off the rails since he went to Hong Kong, Harry doesn't believe it's possible that Oleg actually murdered his friend and fellow dealer. So Harry returns to Oslo to sort things out.

The Phantom was an entertaining read that I busted through in a few days. I felt that it was more predictable than some of Nesbo's other stories (I figured out who one of the baddies was way earlier than Harry did, go me!), and it also had more pathos. But I've decided that it's hard to read so many books about someone who is emotionally kind of bankrupt, and who has opportunities to actually talk about hard things, but refuses to do so. I'm sure I'll read the next book (if there is a next one-- the ending was kind of nebulous to this story), but I feel that the books no longer pack an emotional punch for me. 

Book Review: Wonder by RJ Palacio

Title: Wonder
Author: R. J. Palacio
Enjoyment Rating: ****
This book would be rated: PG
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 121

Last year, when we were waiting for Rose, I read all of the books I could about kids with cleft lip and palate. There were quite a few boring non-fiction books, a few truly awful memoirs (shudder), and other than Precious Bane, no fiction that I could find. In Wonder, fifth-grader August Pullman has a facial deformity (including a cleft lip and palate). His parents have home schooled him, but now that he's old enough to go to middle school, the family has decided that he will attend a school nearby.

While this story could easily be sappy or depressing (and honestly, I did find the last few chapters a little sappy), what interested me about Wonder was not Auggie's story itself, but how Palacio makes him just one of a whole cast of characters. We hear from his sister, her sister's friends, the kids who bully him and the kids who learn to become his friends despite what he looks like. Annie's class was reading the book at school at the same time I was reading it at home and I think it was a great story for both of us. I know that Rose and Eli's disabilities, although evident, are as serious as Auggie's, but this book helps me see the kinds of ways that kids may react to them as they get older.

Book Review: Paper Towns by John Green

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Enjoyment Rating: ***
This book would be rated: PG-13 for teenage pranks and lots of language
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 120

It's been so long since I last reviewed books that I will undoubtedly forget some that I read. In fact, I've almost forgotten the plot of Paper Towns, and I certainly would have forgotten that I'd read it if it hadn't been for the draft here on Blogger. This has been the year of John Green for me, and now I think I might have read all of his YA novels. In Paper Towns, Quentin and Margo are high school seniors living next door to each other in suburban Orlando. Quentin has always had a thing for Margo, but she has always seemed distant-- aloof, removed, too cool. Then one night, he finds Margo at his window and she leads him on an adventure all over town-- a night he will never forget. And then, Margo disappears. The thing is, though, that Margo has disappeared in the past, so no one seems overly concerned-- in fact, her parents just want her to turn 18 so they don't have to worry about her any more. But Quentin is focused on finding her-- and he thinks she has left clues to let him know where she is.

I don't want to give any spoilers here, but one of the things that surprised me most about Paper Towns was that Green was willing to write a story where the ending wasn't entirely happy. He does a great job capturing teen dialogue (particularly the kind of raunchy talk that we, as parents, desperately hope our kids don't engage in). He also does a great job with characters-- I felt that both Quentin and Margo were richly drawn and complicated, and I loved Quentin's nerdy psychotherapist parents.

Book Review: The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Title: The Distant Hours
Author: Kate Morton
Enjoyment Rating: *****
This book would be rated: PG or PG-13 for adult themes
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 119

I read Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden a few years ago, and although I vaguely remember enjoying it, I hardly remember it at all. I must have read it when I was feeling preoccupied about something else. Anyway, my friend Michelle was talking about Morton on one of our early-morning runs, and I decided to download The Distant Hours, mostly because I switched my Audible subscription from two books a month to one, so I've been buying long books lately (in the past, I used to buy short books, because I could finish them quicker, therefore boosting the number of books I read in a year, but that is a subject for another post).  Anyway, I started listening to The Distant Hours and at first, I wasn't sold. Although I know that Morton is an author living in Australia and writing about England, it bugged me that the narrator, Caroline Lee, had a decidedly Australian sound to her voice when she was reading about an English story (Lee is a wonderful, gifted reader, by the way, but as an American, that inconsistency felt jarring).

Like many of Morton's stories, The Distant Hours has a modern-day protagonist who sets out to discovery a mystery from the past. In this case, Edie Burchell is an editor living in London who has a difficult relationship with her mother, Meredith. Edie discovers that her working-class mother was sent from London during the Blitz to live at Milderhurst Castle, which was inhabited by three sisters, Percy, Seraphina, and Juniper. When Edie gets lost in the countryside and finds herself at the castle, she starts to look into her mother's past, which leads her back to a Gothic murder-mystery that has overshadowed life at the castle for more than fifty years. It's a lovely book with many layers of story, and Morton is a natural storyteller--she knows just when to break away from the 1941 story to the 1991 story, always leaving readers wanting more.

Book Review: The Red House by Mark Haddon

Title: The Red House
Author: Mark Haddon
Enjoyment Rating: **
This book would be rated: R, for language, sex, and general peevishness
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 118

Oh wow, it's been a long time since I've written any book reviews, and when I was going through my draft posts, I happened on this book, which I read back in the summer but never reviewed. So take my review with a large grain of salt because it's sure to be even foggier and more outdated than the others.

I really enjoyed Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time so listening to The Red House felt like an obvious choice. The book is about two English siblings whose mother has recently died. The brother, a wealthy doctor living with his second wife and her daughter, invited his sister and her family, including three children, to stay at their vacation rental home in the countryside.The book is one of those where it feels like the author is trying to show the reader how smart he is-- while the story is chronological, it switches perspective from character to character with no notice, and we often get the stream of consciousness thoughts of characters. Basically, everyone fights, a few people have epiphanies, and the reader is left feeling entirely hopeless that any person in that family will life a happy (albeit fictional) life.

The Things I Cannot Change

Dear Eli,

When I was a little girl, we used to go to Pittsburgh to go visit my Nana several times a year. I loved going up to her bedroom and going through her jewelry, and on the dresser, near her little cup of clip-on earrings, she had a wooden sign with the Serenity Prayer written on it:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

In choosing you, there is an element of having the "courage to change the things [we] can," but that's not what I want to write about tonight. We chose you because we want you to be our son, not because we're do-gooders who are out to save the world. I don't ever want you to think that you're our service project-- you're our baby boy, and we love you just like we love your brothers and sisters. Don't ever forget that.

I've been thinking a lot lately about waiting for you and waiting for Rose. I think part of it is because we were at the same stage in our wait at exactly this time last year, and I was a bucket of nerves. I actually told my friends to stop calling me because it made me nuts every time the phone rang and it wasn't the adoption agency.

It just seemed so damned unfair that Rose was living in an orphanage, where she was literally tied down so she wouldn't learn to sit or roll, where she wasn't fed anything besides formula, where she was cold at night and her caregivers had to split their attention on a whole room full of babies, when she could have been here with us.

None of the steps made any sense to me, and the step that made the least amount of sense to me was the LOA wait, because I knew people who got in the short line and people who got in the long line. I'm always a little bit bitter at the grocery store when the checker in the next lane goes twice as fast as mine. The whole process felt so cruel and illogical to me that I don't think I really believed that we would get approval to go to China and they would actually hand over the baby whose photo we'd been staring at for six months.

But we did get the approval, we did get on a plane, and on a cold March afternoon, Rose was placed in our arms. My faith was tested, and proven.

So that makes the wait a little bit easier this time around. I won't say it's easy, or that we don't think about you, but it's not the same kind of agonizing drag on my heart that it was last time, and I think a large part of that is because we've seen the end from the beginning with Rose, but also because I've had to do a certain amount of accepting uncertainty in order to remain sane.

The things we cannot change:

 - The fact that when you were one day old, for reasons we can only guess at, your birth family decided that you would have a better shot at life without them. We don't know if their choice was courageous or cowardly-- we probably never will. But let's try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

- Your special need. We can do our best to give you fully functioning hands and feet, but they will never look like other people's hands and feet. It doesn't matter one bit to us, and we hope that it won't matter to you, or to the people who take the time to get to know you.

- That you will spend your first year and a half in an orphanage. We saw your photo even before it was posted to our agency's website. We decided you were our son one week later. Ever since then, we've done our part, working as quickly as we could on each step. But there are lots of steps, and not everyone in charge of those steps is your mother, so sometimes the steps take longer than they might if I were in charge. But I promise you that until we get you in our arms, we are not going to let it take one week, one day, one minute longer than we have to.

- That we are going to take you away from everything you know. We got an adorable picture of the babies in your room the other day. You're all lined up for the camera, and a bunch of the babies are tackling each other. We're going to take you away from your posse of little guys, your walker, your Chinese pop music, and everything else you know. We're going to turn your life upside down. And as excited as I am to get you in my arms, I know it might not be a comforting place for you at first.

- That you have a nasty skin thing going on. I worried so much about Rose and her eating while we were waiting for her. When we got updates from her orphanage, all I wanted to know was whether or not she was eating and gaining wait. I was a little obsessed. You probably have scabies. You're shaved bald, and you have little bumps on your hands and feet. Last year I would have schemed and hemmed and hawed about how to get you the lotion you need to get rid of it, and it would have been futile. So we'll bring the lotion and treat you when we get you. It's all we can do.

- That the phone won't ring until it rings. I'll pray and hope and cross my fingers, but really, that's all I can do. This year, I hope not to alienate my friends or tell them they can only text until I get that all-important call from Seattle. And when it comes, you bet your biscuits that I will sob just as hard as I did last year when I finally got the call about Rose.

I really think that accepting the things you cannot change, of relinquishing control, takes courage too-- the courage to change ourselves. And while I don't want to wait one more second for you, I am thankful for this waiting experience for the way it's working to transform me into becoming a better, more patient mama to you and your brothers and sisters. Of course, we're only a month into the wait, I'll probably be feeling a whole lot less serene if we haven't heard a month from now.

Love,

Mommy

I knew it would happen eventually...

Dear Eli,

Back when I was pregnant with Bryce, I wanted to fully experience every moment of my pregnancy. I couldn't wait to wear maternity clothes. I started counting down the days until my monthly doctor's appointments when the month was only halfway done. I milked the tiny bit of morning sickness I had and indulged myself in taking naps whenever the opportunity presented itself.

When he was thirteen months old, I got pregnant again. This time, I didn't even make an appointment to see a doctor until I was out of my first trimester. I tried to put off wearing maternity clothes for as long as possible. I knew exactly how long nine months of pregnancy felt, and even though I was thrilled to be having another baby, I wasn't thrilled that I had to wait for her arrival for almost a whole year. But as the second trimester rounded into the third, I found that I was just as excited for Annie's arrival as I had been for Bryce's a little less than two years earlier.

I felt similarly this summer when we started our wait for you. I'd just waited for a baby for a whole year, and those hard months when I spent the days willing the phone to ring were still so fresh in my mind. So we said yes to you, but even as I was going through the steps we needed to accomplish to bring you home, I kept a little piece of my heart locked away. If I gave myself over completely, the way I had when we were expecting Bryce and Rose, I was afraid I might not have the energy to get through the next eight or nine months with my sanity intact.

We've now had your picture written in our hearts for almost four months and on our kitchen wall for three. In fact, the kitchen wall is full of you-- there are about forty pictures of your sweet bald head and your big brown eyes. On Monday, we got the news that our dossier has gone "in process" which, to the best of my understanding, means that it has been translated and that sometime in the next few weeks, the Chinese government will officially approve you to become our son. Last time we waited for more than six weeks for this step to take place, and this time, we were only logged in a little more than three weeks before we got the word. So it looks like one of my biggest fears, that your file would get lost on some bureaucrat's desk, where it would wait for 160 days, is not going to come to pass. With any luck, we'll have our LOA by the first of the year. But me, silly, impatient me, can't help but hope it's here for Christmas, or better yet, by December 15th, which is when we got Rose's LOA last year.

Now that we only have about four months until we travel (fingers crossed), I'm starting to feel a hint of excitement. I'm thinking about the trip, and medical specialists, and baby clothes, and double strollers. While I couldn't be emotionally invested in the process for eight or nine months, I think I'm giving myself permission to be emotionally invested for four. When I look at your face, I feel a stirring in my heart. I'm getting excited, even for the prospect of two crazy toddlers who will run me ragged. Before we know it, I'll be your Mama.

On toddlers

Your sister, amidst the havoc she has wrought

Dear Eli,

On Sunday you turned thirteen months. You're probably not walking yet, since I have photographic evidence to prove that you spend most of your day in a pink and yellow walker, but I have no doubt that you will be running around the house like a maniac shortly after we get you home. Just writing that wears me out, because your big sister runs me ragged on a daily basis on her manic pursuits of garbage cans to dig in, bookshelves to empty, crayons to eat, and anything below a height of four feet to break.

I love babies. But toddlers, man, they wear me out.

Rosie had surgery last week to close her soft palate, and while she came through it like a champ, she has been anxious and clingy and ornery since. She will demand food, and then throw it on the floor, then scream for more. She won't let me out of her sight, but she's likely to hit and scratch me when I pick her up. But just when I'm ready to hand her over to Daddy the minute he walks through the door (which both of them would love), she will do something so adorable that all, or at least most, of my frustrations are forgotten. It's a darn good thing she's cute.

Although I haven't heard the official word from China yet, my guess is that we have now moved into the LOA wait, which is the most grueling part of the adoption process. Last year, I think I went three-quarters of the way to crazy during the 63 days we waited. The problem isn't the length of the wait. If I knew I had to wait 63 days, I wouldn't like it, because that would be 63 days where I couldn't be with you, but I'd be fine with it. The problem is that nobody knows how long the wait will be. Right now, it seems that an average wait is around 55 days, but the average could easily be as few as 35 or as many as 80 by the time they get around to issuing ours. I know of someone who recently got their LOA in eight days, and I also know of someone who got theirs after waiting for 165 days. And there seems to be little rhyme or reason for whose paperwork gets pushed through quickly and whose takes a long time. So during the wait the last time, my angst wasn't triggered by wondering if I'd wait 60 or 70 days-- it was triggered by fear that I'd be the one to wait 165.

But this time around, if I'm being 100% honest, while I am still terrified about waiting 165 days, I'm also a little bit terrified about having two toddlers to chase, wrestle, feed, diaper, wrangle, and get in and out of car seats 20 times a day to drive your older siblings places. Rose is the greatest blessing I never thought I'd have (so far-- oh gosh, am I inspiring competition before you're even home?), but I fall into bed exhausted every single day. How, oh how, am I going to manage with two of you?

I'm sure we'll find our groove. We're going to bring her to China with us, so you'll have a chance to know your baby buddy before you get introduced to the rest of the clan. But I hope you'll be forgiving of me if I don't do everything right over the next few years. I promise I'll do my best. I guess the good thing is that you probably won't remember my mistakes.

Love,

Mommy

Book Review: The Unlikely Gift of Treasure Blume by Lisa Rumsey Harris

Title: The Unlikely Gift of Treasure Blume
Author: Lisa Rumsey Harris
Enjoyment Rating: ****
This book would be rated: PG
Source: Review Copy
Books I've read this year: 117

The Unlikely Gift of Treasure Blume, by Lisa Rumsey Harris, whose 2006 essay “Honor in the Ordinary” won Segullah’s Heather Campbell essay contest. Treasure Blume, to be published tomorrow by Cedar Fort, is the kind of book I’d buy for my mom or my sister, or really for anyone who I think could lose themselves in Harris’s story, which is sweet without being saccharine, uplifting without preaching, and just downright funny. Treasure is a first-year elementary school teacher living in Las Vegas who has the curse (or the gift?) of rubbing all adults the wrong way when she meets them (maybe it’s the embroidered sweater sets, the polyester, or the poodle perm, or maybe it’s something that goes deeper. It’s no accident that it took her 44 interviews to land a job and was finally hired by a truly desperate principal.


Because Treasure has been aware of her effect on people ever since her Granny Blume pointed it out to her when she was a teenager, she’s spent the last decade making up for it, finding ways around it, and never using it as an excuse (which is what Granny, cursed with the same family “gift”) did for most of her life. Little kids and old people have no problem with Treasure’s quirks, and if her peers spend their time getting to know her, they learn to appreciate her too. So when Dennis Cameron, Mr. Lunch Lady at Treasure’s school and the father of one of her students, enters the picture, it’s not too much of a surprise what will happen. I appreciate that Harris complicates her characters and makes them feel three- dimensional, but not at the expense of keeping the story fun and light. I read the book in one sitting yesterday afternoon, and with the snow falling outside and the story to keep me entertained, it was a perfect day.

Book Review: iPlates by Carter and Atwood

Title: iPlates
Authors: Stephen Carter and Jett Atwood (illustrator)
Enjoyment Rating: me ***, Isaac (my eight-year-old) *****
This book would be rated: PG for flying arms
Source: review copy
Books I've read this year: 116

I also wanted to take a look at iPlates by Stephen Carter (author) and Jett Atwood (illustrator) and published by Leicester Bay. I went into it without knowing much about comic books, but I liked what I saw– basically Carter and Atwood turn the Zeniff/Abinadi/King Noah/Alma cycle (with some Ammon thrown in for good measure) into a story a prepubescent boy would love, with plenty of blood and piles of arms and made up Nephite curse replacements. I can’t really comment on how the book works as a comic book, because I know next to nothing about that, but as entertainment/a gentle push toward doctrinal stories for a Mormon? I think it succeeds.

My eight-year-old has the day off school today, and he came and found me curled up in bed, reading iPlates. He pulled the iPad out of my hand and tilted it toward him, and we sat next to each other in my bed, reading together. After he finished, he said, “Wow, that was cool.” I’m pretty sure that he will make sure that the iPad makes its way into the church bag from now on.

A few weeks ago, my mom and I went into Deseret Book, searching for a gift she could give to the aforementioned eight-year-old. There was plenty of girly jewelry and books explaining the concept of baptism, books which would, truth be told, probably sit on a shelf and go unread. But iPlates would be the perfect baptism gift for an eight-year-old boy.