Book Review: Truth in Advertising by John Kenney

Title: Truth in Advertising
Author: John Kenney
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Library Copy
Content Alert: some swearing

Fin Dolan is a modern-day Don Draper, without the swagger, without the ladies, without the fabulous apartment, and without the genius. In other works, Fin is a hack who works in advertising. Like Don Draper, he tends to second guess himself, and looks back to a troubled childhood as the source of the problems in his adult life. Truth in Advertising feels like satire as Kenney explores the ins and outs of the advertising world, the most superficial business on the planet, but it takes a more serious turn as Dolan goes through the process of reluctantly nursing his father through his final days.

The book was fairly predictable and sweet, very readable, and pretty fun. It didn't rock my world or challenge me as a reader in any way, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Book Review: This is How We Grow by Christina Hibbert

Title: This is How We Grow: A Psychologist's Memoir of Loss, Motherhood, and Discovering Self-Worth and Joy, One Season at a Time
Author: Christina Hibbert
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Content Alert: none

Christina Hibbert was a mother of three, working as a psychologist, when her brother-in-law and sister died within months of each other. Christina and her husband became their two boys' guardians just a few weeks before she gave birth to a daughter, so the family grew from three kids to six in about a month. In This is How We Grow, Hibbert writes about the experience of how her family changed, how they processed their grief, and how they came to see themselves as joyful, whole people again.

I think This is How We Grow is a book where the strengths of the story are also some of the weaknesses. Hibbert kept a journal during this time in her life (now about six years past), and the book is largely sourced from the journal. This means that sometimes readers have to wade through the minutiae of her life. But I think that's also kind of the point. Lives are often made up of minutiae and small, seemingly insignificant moments. And the life of a stay-at-home mom of six is sometimes a mind-numbing rotation of crisis management and wiping bums. She also does enough stepping back and taking a long-view look at the experiences to make them feel relevant. However, I wish the book had a different title, because I think I would have read it a lot sooner if I had known that it would be such a good mirror for my own experience.

Like Hibbert, I've also adopted two kids. They were both abandoned as newborns and lived for about a year in an orphanage. Then we adopted them and they gained a family, but they also lost everything familiar. A lot of times, I don't think people (myself included) recognize how much loss in involved in adoption, and how much grief my little ones carry, and will have to process at some point in their lives. My experience parenting them is so different from my experience with my biological kids, and a lot of it comes from the grief and loss they have suffered. I think I highlighted more passages in this book than in any book I've read since college, and I was both pleased and surprised to find a book that recognized and reflected my own parenting experiences.

Book Review: Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman

Title: Love and Treasure
Author: Ayelet Waldman
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Library Copy
Content Alert: Some sex

When Natalie's beloved grandfather Jack is dying of pancreatic cancer, she leaps at the opportunity to escape her life in New York to help him in his final days. Just before his death, he gives her a mission-- to return a peacock necklace he stole from the Hungarian gold train when he was an Army officer at the end of World War II. Readers follow the story of the necklace from the recent past to the distant past, tracing its provenance and searching for the relative who should inherit it.

I'd never heard of the Hungarian gold train, a train filled with the spoils taken from the homes of Hungarian Jews by the Nazis. And the historical sections of the novel, which take place primarily in the 1940s and the 1910s, are fascinating. I loved reading about the feminist movement in Budapest, and psychoanalysis at the same time period. But the modern story of Natalie was not nearly as powerful as the historical stories. I've read other books by Waldman, and I don't think Love and Treasure is her best.

Book Review: The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Title: The Storied Life of AJ Fikry
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Mild language

A couple of mornings ago, I went out for a long run with nothing but my audiobook to keep me company. A couple of hours later, I found myself running up the big hill near the zoo on Sunnyside, and I looked like a maniac. Tears were streaming down my face, and I'm pretty sure I was hyperventilating. And yes, the hill is big and the wind was blowing in my face, but that wasn't why I was crying. It was because I'd come to the end of The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, a happy/sad kind of novel, and I wasn't exactly sure if I was crying because of the poignancy of the ending or because I didn't want it to be over.

When the book opens, AJ Fikry is the crank who runs Island Books, the only bookstore on Alice Island (which seems to resemble Martha's Vineyard). His typical day is to terrorize employees and publishers' reps, to snarl at customers, and to drink himself to sleep at night. All of this bad behavior is only excusable because AJ is a recent widower, but regardless of that fact, he's a jerk. Then, one night, he's robbed of his only possession worth anything, which leads him to leave the door of his bookstore unlocked, which leads to a young woman leaving him a baby to raise, which changes everything.  Fikry soon finds his life, which was once difficult and depressing, full of people and surprises, and, of course, books.

If you love books like I love books, you'll love this one. The story itself, while very well-constructed and written in a way that keeps you reading, is fairly predictable. I knew who AJ would end up with by the end of the first chapter. But you'll keep reading because you'll want to inhabit a world where people love stories as much as you do-- where AJ starts the police chief reading dime-store potboilers and pretty soon he's reading The House of Sand and Fog. I love that AJ communicates with his daughter through the notes he writes her about different novels and short stories, and that the existence of his bookstore really does seem to make Alice Island as a whole a better place to be. This would be a great book club read. It's the first novel I've read by Zevin, who has formerly written mainly YA, but it won't be the last.

Book Review: Life, Animated by Ron Suskind

Title: Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism
Author: Ron Suskind
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: I don't remember anything objectionable

Owen Suskind was almost three years old when he stopped talking. Soon after that, he was diagnosed with autism, and his parents Cornelia and Ron (a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) threw themselves into helping Owen through schools and therapies. But it was the films of Walt Disney that eventually started to bring Owen out, after several years of barely speaking at all. At first, he just repeated lines from the movies, but gradually, it became evident that he was internalizing emotional truths from the films, which prepared him to meet some of the challenges in life that his parents feared he might never be capable of tackling.

I think any reader would root for Owen and his family, especially since Suskind writes about his family's experience so movingly. But as the mother of a child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, I felt like the book showed that it is possible to engage and draw kids out, and that what works for some kids might not work for others. I also love that Owen appears to be living a happy and fulfilled young adulthood. It's a feel-good story that any reader would appreciate.

Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Title: The Secret History
Author: Donna Tartt
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle
Content alert: The story takes place on a college campus, so it shouldn't be surprising that there's plenty of drug and alcohol use/abuse, allusions to an orgy or two, and swearing. Murder figures strongly too.

I think I've said before that Donna Tartt's name led me to believe she wrote romance instead of literary fiction. Consequently, I never read any of her novels until I devoured The Goldfinch in January. When I posted my review, so many people commented that they loved The Secret History, so I made it one of the first books I read as soon as I finished reading the Whitney novels. And while I wasn't captivated by it the same way I was with The Goldfinch, it was definitely worth reading.

Richard is a scholarship kid from a working-class family in a forgettable town in California who arrives as a transfer student at Hampden College (based on Tartt's alma mater, Bennington?) with not much to recommend himself other than a pretty great handle on Greek. However, the Greek program at Hampden is tiny, and all of the students are hand-selected by Professor Julian Morrow. Within a few weeks, Richard manages to ingratiate himself with the five Greek students and finds access to the program, and over the course of the year, he discovers that the students are hiding a huge secret, and they need his help if they're not going to be discovered.

While The Secret History is sometimes described as a mystery, I think it's much more a bildungsroman, or a character exploration along the lines of Dead Poets' Society or The Talented Mr. Ripley. It's an entertaining, fascinating, and sad novel, and one I'm happy that I took the time to read.

Book Review: And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass

Title: And the Dark Sacred Night
Author: Julia Glass
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: It's been a month or so since I read the book, and I can't remember anything objectionable. I'm sure there's some swearing, but no memorable sex and no violence.

Rosie, my three-year-old, is just starting to understand that she's adopted. We've told her that when she was a little baby we traveled to China to get her, and a few days ago she asked me if we traveled to China to get Maren (her older sister, who is my biological daughter) too. I told her that Maren grew in my tummy and was born when we lived in Texas, and she seemed satisfied and dropped it, but I know that this was just the first of many times when we'll talk about adoption and her parentage, about which we know exactly nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if there's resentment and searching and heartbreak down the road ahead of us.

Kit Noonan knows that his mother, Daphne, was a high school senior when he was born, but he knows nothing about his father. At forty, he's stuck in life. He's lost his job as an art history professor, his wife wants to throw him out, but instead suggests that he try to find his father. So Kit heads north to Vermont to see Jasper, the stepfather who helped raise him, and Jasper's digging eventually leads him to the Burns family, whose son Malachy, long dead of AIDS, was Daphne's summer boyfriend at music camp (Malachy also appeared in Glass's 2002 novel, The Three Junes).

In typical Glass fashion, the story shifts perspectives many times throughout the novel. We start with Kit's perspective, then move to Jasper's, then to Daphne's, then to Lucinda Burns's, then to Fenno McLeod's who was a much-loved character from The Three Junes. I loved delving into Jasper's story, but it was frustrating and disappointing that we didn't get resolution to any of the characters' stories except for Kit's. It felt like the characters became main characters for a while, then slipped back into barely supporting roles. But the story as a whole works, and I hope that the resolution to my kids' searching is as satisfying as Kit's worked out to be.

Book Review: A Circle of Wives by Alice LaPlante

Title: A Circle of Wives
Author: Alice LaPlante
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content alert: Some talk about child sex abuse, but I don't remember anything else, not even a sex scene, which surprises me in a book about a guy with a whole bunch of wives.

Palo Alto doesn't see many murders. Detective Samantha Adams is far more accustomed to looking into bike theft than solving violent crimes. But there's the dead body of John Taylor, a renowned plastic surgeon, on the floor of his room at the Westin, and everyone's conception of the do-gooder surgeon, who takes on difficult cases with disfigured children, changes abruptly when it's revealed that his widow, Deborah, is really only one of three women who called John their husband (not to mention the one who called him her fiance). But which one killed him?

I loved Alice LaPlante's novel, Turn of Mind, when I read it a few years ago, so I was eager to get my hands on this story too. I think Circle of Wives works well as an exploration into the characters of Adams and the three wives, but as a murder mystery it fell a little flat. I read the story on my kindle and couldn't believe that the end was actually the end of the story-- it felt like there were lots of loose ends that weren't tied up, and there wasn't much resolution with Adams, the PoV character for much of the novel.

Book Review: Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

Title: Frog Music
Author: Emma Donoghue
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: Graphic and highly creative sex scenes, language, violence

It's the unseasonably hot summer of 1876 in San Francisco, where Blanche Beunon is a former circus performer, a burlesque dancer and sometimes whore, has just made her first girl friend, Jenny Bonnet, a fellow French immigrant who wears pants and catches frogs for a living. Meeting Jenny is a turning point in Blanche's life-- she's no longer complacent about the "farm" her lover sent their one-year-old son to live on when she was so sick after his birth. In fact, she's no longer so sure that she event wants to be with her mooching lover or his best friend (they're kind of a package deal). In the course of a few weeks, she regains her son, then loses her lover, then loses her son (literally, not through death), and loses the building she has bought, and then, hiding out on the outskirts of town, Jenny dies from a bullet she's pretty sure was intended for her.

The narrative structure of the book is a bit frenetic, with lots of jumping back and forth in time, and the afterword to the story is heartbreaking (the story is, if you can believe it, based in fact-- both Jenny and Blanche were real people). And there is lots, and lots, and lots of sex of every imaginable variety of pairings. For me, the most unbelievable part of the story was Blanche's command of English-- for someone who didn't speak the language at all a year earlier when she arrived in America, she had mastered the language well. Maybe all of that pillow talk was a great way to learn. This is only the second novel I've read by Donoghue (whose novel, Room, was a fascinating, shocking read a few years ago). I read somewhere that she has a PhD in gender studies (or maybe it's women's studies), and it feels a bit like she tries to tackle a different women's issue in each of her novels. As an exploration of female sexuality and friendship, this one works, but I'm not so sure about how some of the smaller details come together.

Book Review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Title: Doctor Sleep
Author: Stephen King
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content alert: It's scary enough to keep readers up turning pages because they're too scared to sleep. Rough language, violence, drug use, a sex scene ir two, descriptions of child sex abuse

A couple of years ago, I read my first Stephen King novel, 11/22/63. It had been heavily hyped, and despite my reservations (I always thought that Stephen King novels were mostly read by nerdy boys with heavy metal t-shirts and greasy hair), I loved it. But it wasn't a horror novel, and so I thought it was an anomaly-- a step outside of King's regular genre to appeal to readers like me. But a few months ago, I kept seeing Doctor Sleep show up in my "Recommended for You" feeds. I knew that it was a sequel to The Shining (which I had neither read nor seen as a film), and you all know how I feel about reading the second book in a series before I've read the first book in a series. But finally, in a moment of weakness, when I had plenty of Audible credits and wanted to get something long to maximize the bang for the buck factor, I bought this one.

It was a few more weeks before I delved into the story of Dan Torrance, who King's fans probably recognize as the five-year-old protagonist of The Shining. In Doctor Sleep, Danny is all grown up, and sort of washed up. He's bounced around from city to city in an alcoholic haze, and done some things he's not proud of. But eventually, he ends up in a small town in New Hampshire, where he gets his act together and works in a CNA-type job at a hospice. He's known around the place as "Doctor Sleep," because he has an uncanny ability to help dying patients make their final journey in peace. The power of second sight, "the shining" which was so potent within him when he was a child, has dulled a bit, but it still has its uses.

And then Dan meets Abra Stone, a young girl who also has the shining, although hers is so strong that it has attracted the attention of the True Knot, a group of vampire-like creatures who have managed to extend their lives by capturing children with the shining and feeding off their essences (think Mother Gothel in Tangled). Dan and Abra join forces to outsmart the True Knot, which allows Dan to confront some of the demons of his past, as well.

Once again, I was totally wowed by Stephen King. This book lies solidly within his genre, and now I'm forced to recant my former snobbery and say that he tells a darn good story and he is a darn fine writer. The audiobook is fantastic, and even though the story is about a million hours long (20 or so, in actuality), I finished it in less than a week, because I was so eager to find a resolution to the story. And I'm reading The Shining now, so I guess that makes me a true Stephen King fan. I guess I should go to Hot Topic and find myself a Metallica t-shirt so I fit in.