Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Summary from Goodreads:
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

I read this with my Literature by Women group.  A weird and crazy-snarky novel.  I really liked the construction of Bernadette's life and how she feels completely out-of-place in the private school world, caught between high art principles and suburban mom-hood.  Great use of the supporting "documents" and the structure of the book (also: totally a warning about using one of those "assistant" services on the web, yikes!!). Loved the section headings (Runaway Bunny!). Bee was an excellent protagonist.

But I feel that halfway through the book the author didn't quite know how to get out of her plot situation so the ending felt half-baked and a wuss-out.  Some of the secondary characters felt very cliched; not sure if that's because most of the book is told from the viewpoints of Bee and Bernadette or if the author just didn't flesh them out.

State of Wonder

Summary from Goodreads:
In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, scientific miracles, and spiritual transformations, "State of Wonder" presents a world of stunning surprise and danger, rich in emotional resonance and moral complexity.

As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness. Stirring and luminous, "State of Wonder" is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest's jeweled canopy.

I am always hazy about Ann Patchett books. I like them, like the words, the way she makes sentences, but I get an odd feeling that I was expecting something else. I can't quite put my finger on it.

The premise of State of Wonder is really interesting (even if it reminded me of the movie Medicine Man in basic outline at the beginning).  Brilliant/difficult researcher goes incommunicative while on a big R&D contract with a pharmaceutical company.  The first person to try and find her falls ill and dies prompting the company to send Dr. Marina Singh who has a lot of personal baggage to deal with (not to mention a) why the company sends two cholesterol researchers after a fertility specialist and b) Marina has been sleeping with her boss and it's a weird relationship).

There is a lot of beauty in Patchett's descriptions of the Amazonian rainforest as Marina heads deep into unknown territory and the whole thing takes on a lurid quality due to the hallucinogenic dreams induced by Marina's anti-malarial medication.  The research lab environs are meticulously created in the reader's mind, the relationship between Marina and Dr. Swenson is developed to a very fine detail.  But...there is a part of Marina that I don't quite understand and she makes some decisions that don't seem to make much sense to me.

There is a great value in the medical ethics brought up, turned over, and examined throughout the course of the book particularly in the value (or lack thereof) the "bottom line" of the pharmaceutical industry.  It's a multi-billion dollar business, very risky, and often will forgo the development of more "humanitarian" research in leiu of that which will benefit the western medical establishments who can afford the cost of questionably needed drugs.

Dear FTC: I purchased a copy of this book.

April at Literature by Women: The Weird Sisters

Please join me at Literature by Women in April - we are discussing Eleanor Brown's novel The Weird Sisters.  I read the book last year when it was first published and loved it. 

Incentive: a wee surprise may occur.  Emphasis on "may".  No promises.

September 2011 at Literature by Women

We are reading Winifred Holtby's school novel (ish?) book (now turned into Masterpiece Theatre awesomeness) South Riding.  Come join us!

DNF: Three Seconds

After slogging through about 100 pages of this as an ARC for BNBC's First Look program, I put it down.  Everytime I look at this book, it makes me heave a sigh of resigned "I really must finish this" sentiment.

Sadly, I have no desire to finish this - no sympathy for any of the characters, no identification, and I think the undercover-prisoner-drug-smuggler plot is far too nuts for my to follow.  I have so many books to read that I have to let this one go because the thought of reading it no longer brings my joy.  Just drudgery.

And that isn't very fun when I have shelves and shelves of books I would rather be reading.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Bronte often seems like the "other" Bronte sister.  Not as prolific as Charlotte, not as sweepingly Romantic as Emily.  But while we chew our nails and involve ourselves in the swirling stories of Jane and Cathy and Rochester and Heathcliff, Anne takes a different tack in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  She tells the story of Helen and Gilbert and Arthur "straight" and it's subject matter was all the more shocking to Victorian England for that reason.

In short, their story is one that seems entirely contemporary:  a young man meets a mysterious new neighbor - a widowed woman and her little boy - and grows to love her but comes to learn that she is in hiding from an abusive husband.  For us, this is a story for the newsfeeds but for Victorians it was more like rudely airing one's dirty laundry.  Women's rights, spousal abuse, and alcoholism are all brought forth over the course of the novel.  Helen refused to have sex with her husband, an act that a husband was entitled to whenever and wherever he chose

The novel sold out its first printing in six weeks, selling better than Wuthering Heights, even though the critical opinions were mixed.  Several magazines, though, warned women to avoid reading the book because of its fixation on coarse language and scenes of debauchery.  Anne wrote a Preface to the second edition - one in which she states she did not write to amuse but to tell the truth - but Charlotte suppressed further printings after Anne's death.  The precise reasons are unknown but in a letter she though Anne's subject matter poorly chosen.  (I did a great deal of research on the Brontes for a Victorian poetry course, so know most of this first-hand, but the Wikipedia article on the book sums it all up nicely, with references).

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall doesn't flow nearly as well as Jane Eyre or Shirley or Villette having a somewhat convoluted storyline like Wuthering Heights.  The book starts with a letter from Gilbert to his brother-in-law explaining how Gilbert met his wife (the "frame" of the letter gets a bit long in the tooth and we have to assume it is supposed to be multiple letters).  Gilbert's "letter" recounts his life from the time "Mrs. Graham"/Helen moved into the old Wildfell Hall until the point she gives Gilbert her old diary to explain why she can't marry him.  The "letter" proceeds to recount word-for-word the diary of a young woman swept off her feet by a dashing rake she thinks just needs a good wife to reform him.  Bollocks to that.  The diary section of the novel is quite long.  It does get a bit far-fetched when Helen's entries are pages long and contain many conversations but there aren't very many ways to give such a large backstory to the reader.  At the end of the diary pages, the letter reverts back to Gilbert's point-of-view and he finishes out his tale.

Helen is a remarkable character and for her creation during an era when married women were treated more as objects by law it says a great deal about Anne's thoughts on the matter. Gilbert is a somewhat annoying character. His pursuit of Helen begins to border on the obsessive. Arthur, as Helen's drunken rake of a husband, is the kind of dastardly character for whom comeuppance doesn't come nearly soon enough.  I quite liked the book and found it very readable.  Not as moving as Jane Eyre with respect to the actual writing nor as wildly imaginative as Wuthering Heights but an excellent realist Victorian novel.

After I finished the book I watched the 1996 BBC miniseries with Tara FitzGerald (Helen), Toby Stephens (Gilbert), and the always-yummy Rupert Graves as the reprobate Arthur.  A very good adaptation of the book, well-acted and costumed, a good costume-drama as expected from the BBC.

May 2011 at Literature by Women

Please join Literature by Women in May as we read and discuss Anne Bronte's controversial novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  We're taking five weeks for the discussion so it doesn't become too compressed.

In other news, I am the proud possessor of a new piano courtesy of a once-in-a-lifetime deal at West Music.  I love it, LOVE IT!  I can't wait to dig all my piano music out of my parents' basement (although, I'm afraid mom might have appropriated a few due to weddings, etc., and I think a few of my favorite pieces are actually hers...le sigh) and I ordered my first new book of music in fifteen years - Harry Potter!

Cranford

Cranford is a little town, a quiet village (I've been re-watching Disney's Beauty and the Beast lately) filled with quiet middle-aged ladies.

Although the ladies only appear quiet.  They are in fact very busy, visiting one another, writing letters, worrying over the proper way to address a visiting, recently-widowed Scottish baronet's wife and whether it would be proper for more middle-class ladies to visit her.

Cranford is a series of reminisces from a young lady's visits to Cranford thinly disguised as a novel.  Gaskell gives us a very good picture of the lives of upper-middle class/slightly shabby due to lack of money women in an era when gentlewomen frowned on work of any kind.  It's a household novel, full of domestic details you won't find in an Austen, although still a novel of manners in many ways.  Very sweet and a great introduction to Victorian literature.

April 2011 at Literature by Women

We'll be starting Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell on Monday, April 4!

This is a Gaskell I've never read and I'm excited to watch the recent mini-series (with Judi Dench!) since I put off watching it until I had read the book.

Jamaica Inn

Although Daphne du Maurier was a prolific writer - books, plays, memoirs - I never got around to reading anything but her Rebecca.  Creeped me out, too, considering I read it for the first time when I was twelve and never managed to shake the Mrs.-Danvers-is-watching feeling.  I read my second du Maurier with Literature by Women this month - Jamaica Inn.

Jamaica Inn has the best elements of gothic fiction - mysterious comings and goings, albino vicars, villains of all stripes, isolated locations - without the over-stuffed, circuitous narration of actual eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic fiction (The Mysteries of Uldolpho, anyone?).  Long story short, country girl (but not-so-terribly-naive, she is a farmer's daughter) Mary has to come stay with her Aunt Patience and Uncle Joss at Jamaica Inn after her mother's death.  However, Jamaica Inn hasn't functioned as an inn in quite some time, Uncle Joss is a mean drunk (and up to all sorts of illegal types of activity) and Aunt Patience is a cowering mess.  Mary is stuck in an impossible situation - immediately rat out her uncle to the magistrate, and risk her aunt's life, or risk turning into a battered, abused woman like Aunt Patience?

Jamaica Inn was quite a fun book to read, thrilling and well-written.  Du Maurier tells great stories and I find I like her heroine Mary better than the unnamed Mrs. de Winter who narrates Rebecca (although Mrs. Danvers beats out just about everyone in Jamaica Inn for creepiest character, except the vicar).  Mary is spunky and tough while Mrs. de Winter is just....there.  I was hoping for a slightly different ending to the novel (after the climax, which was pretty crazy for a novel set on the moors of Cornwall) but you don't always get what you want.  I think I should read My Cousin Rachel as my next du Maurier (whenever I manage to get around to it which may not be soon).

*PS: The movie adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock has a very divergent storyline and cast of characters caused by the Hays Code and one obnoxious movie star.  Although it does have Maureen O'Hara as Mary...you win some, you lose some.

The Weird Sisters

I'm definitely a Shakespeare fangirl.  I've read all the plays at least once (the only English course I took in undergrad was a class on Shakespeare taught by the wonderful Miriam Gilbert) and some of my favorite movies are Shakespeare adaptations; I know most of the Chorus and major speeches from Henry V by heart thanks to Derek Jacobi and Kenneth Branagh.  When I saw pre-pub buzz for The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown's debut novel, all I could think of was Macbeth...who wants to read a book about the witches from "the Scottish play" because that is seriously pandering to the current vogue for paranormal/supernatural book characters.  Bleah.  But I was still interested...like I said, I like Shakespeare.  And the cover art is eye-catching in simplicity.  So I sneaked the first chapter while I was babysitting the cash register the other week and fell in love.

The Weird Sisters isn't about witches although there is magic in this story of the literate Andreas family: a Shakespearean scholar father, a mother diagnosed with breast cancer, and three sisters, all named after famous Shakespearean women.  Rose (Rosalind) is the eldest, capable, sturdy, and the neatest of everyone; Bean (Bianca) is the balls-out tough party girl; and Cordy (Cordelia) is the dreamy, free-spirit baby of the family.  The girls come back to the family home when their mother falls ill, yet, all three have terrible secrets they keep from one another; as the narration says, "See, we love one another.  We just don't happen to like one another very much."

The Weird Sisters is a family drama for people who love books.  There are books everywhere in the Andreas house, on shelves, on tables, behind jars where someone got distracted and wandered off.  At one point Bean is reading a book, "a weepy novel she had discovered half-read in the pantry"; she even talks to the book and "the book remained, unsurprisingly, silent."  Everyone just happens to have a book in their handbag when they leave the house.  These are my people, I want them for my friends.  They even seem like my family (only I have two younger brothers).  The novel does not have one climax but three as each daughter/sister realises that happiness is truly possible; you just have to make that choice (or accept your fate, as the truly weird sisters would have it - "Double, double, toil and trouble" and all that).

The sisters narrate the novel as a group - the "we" shakes its finger, nods its head.  Sometimes, it seems two speak to one, if it seems one of the sisters needs a good kick in the pants.  Shakespeare is liberally sprinkled throughout the book.  Cordy chants "Strike up the drum; cry 'Courage!' and away" (from Henry VI, part III) when shoplifting a pregnancy test at a convenience store; Bean  mutters "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly" (from Macbeth) when called into an inevitable meeting with the boss.  The family communicates in Shakespeare quotes, almost like the Socratic method in iambic pentameter.

And then there are the turns-of-phrase.  I want to wallow in them - I have added so many quotes to my little quote book.  Where to start?  "Hamlet = bat-shit crazy."  Because we all know that's true and I would fall out of my seat if an academic actually admitted to that verbatim.  I think this one shows the sisters' collective narration and voice to best advantage:

We have, while trapped in the car with our father behind the wheel, been subjected to extended remixes of the history of the word "weird" in Macbeth with a special encore set of Norse and Scottish Sources Shakespeare Used in Creating This Important Work.  These indignities we will spare you. (p 26)

There is a wonderful meditation on what it means to have a name with provenance, which is different from having a name that either you don't like or is old-fashioned.  Later in the book, Pooh's little black raincloud is mentioned.  Did I say I was in luurrrve, yet?

I don't know what Amy Einhorn puts in the water at her imprint, but she's picked another wonderful book.  I want to read The Weird Sisters again and again, savor the little bits that I missed the first time because I really wanted to see what Rose would do, if Bean could turn a new leaf, if Cordy could stop her rootless roaming.  I will probably buy the audiobook so I can "read" and drive at the same time.

The rest of you, go to, go to.  Get thee to a bookstore (which is a far, far better place than a nunnery).  Other bloggers who loved the The Weird Sisters are Swapna, Beth Fish (host of the Amy Einhorn Perpetual Challenge), Meg, and Jenn.

*ETA: I was inspired to read another Shakespeare-infused novel, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet, a middle-grade novel about, you guessed it, a girl named Hamlet who has Shakespeare-obsessed professor parents.  Read my review here.

Shirley

Shirley is the first Charlotte Bronte novel to grace "Literature by Women" at BNBC (we read Emily's Wuthering Heights in 2007 and Anne's Agnes Grey in 2008, but no Charlotte until now).  I'm a huge Jane Eyre fan (it's a "desert island" book) and I am interested in reading some of Charlotte's other novels so Shirley was an excellent choice (although I can't remember who nominated it for the group); I'm halfway through Villette, too.

Shirley is set during the Napoleonic wars, where an embargo on trade with the continent has hurt the textile manufacturers of England.  Mill owners are already unable to pay workers and some, like Robert Moore, have decided to mechanize mill operations bringing them into conflict with poor laborers (and Luddites).  The focus of the novel is on the relationship between Moore, his (unmarried) cousin Caroline Helstone, and Moore's wealthy (unmarried) landlord Shirley Keeldar. 

You can see where this is going.  The narrator/Charlotte does come right out at the beginning of Shirley and states that this book is not a romance novel (understandable, given the runaway success of Jane Eyre). The narration even starts by following three curates as they greedily partake of supper and then are herded out onto the moors to Moore's mill where there is trouble brewing over the delivery of new machinery.  The next day we are introduced to Caroline as she comes for her French lesson with Moore's sister, Hortense.  Then Caroline is forbidden to visit the Moore's when her uncle/guardian disagrees with Moore's politics.  Moore pursues prosecution of those who damaged his equipment and Caroline sinks into a depression.

All that action takes the first ten chapters, so where is Shirley Keeldar?  Well, Shirley appears at that point as the wealthy, young, unmarried, female owner of Fieldhead and Moore's landlord.  Caroline and Shirley become friends and even, at one point, learn of a plot to attack Moore's mill and attempt to warn him (they instead wind up hiding in the bushes because they are too late, but Moore defeats the attackers anyway).  So the love triangle is set - the community assumes Moore and Shirley will marry (he needs an heiress to sustain his business and they seem to get along) but we're not sure if Shirley really loves him while Caroline is pretty much dying because she loves Moore.

So much for the "this is not a romance novel" thing.  The marriage plot is very central to Shirley - without it we would be treated to long descriptions of curates and their bad habits and descriptions of the hardships endured by those in the textile industry, both employers and employees.  However, this novel has a very different feel from Jane Eyre.  The omniscient narrator of Shirley distances us from the characters whereas the first person narration of Jane Eyre gets us up-close to Jane's thoughts and feelings without any sort of filter between her and the reader.  I feel more for Jane than I do for Shirley or Caroline.  I can empathise with Shirley - a rich, independent woman who is tired of all the speculation about her accepting an "appropriate" marriage proposal - and Caroline - rather poor and completely beholden to her uncle for her daily sustenance - but I don't really feel invested in their characters they way I do for Jane.

The narration in Shirley isn't quite as tight as Jane Eyre, either.  The narrator in Shirley wanders off down odd paths that interrupt the main action - I didn't need to know all about young Martin Yorke's thoughts on women, etc. interesting as those were.  Charlotte Bronte does not ascribe to the authors' maxim "Murder your darlings" and the novel does bog down in places because of all the narrator's wanderings.  I was surprised at the wandering narration - I expect it more in a serialized novel because of the need to "fill" pages for each installment.

On the whole, though, Shirley is an excellent novel to read because it captures the unrest felt during the transition into mechanised labor during the nineteenth-century.  Charlotte Bronte also has a very shrewd eye, far more than shown in Jane Eyre, and she applies it ruthlessly to the characters who populate her novel.  Shirley was an interesting book to read and I recommend it for those reading widely in Victorian literature.

Bye, bye 2010! Recapping the reading

2010 was a crazy year what with the stress of trying nearly the whole year to sell my house.  In my attempt to "declutter" and "stage" my house for potential buyers I wound up packing up books that I was intending to read!  More stress!

According to Goodreads stats (far more accurate than my count-your-reading-journal-pages method), I read 91 books this year , 9 more than last year, but I only read 28,809 pages compared with 29,709 pages last year.  This probably reflects my attempts to infuse a little young adult into my reading repertoire.  I had intended to try and break the 100 book barrier but the craziness of December put the kibosh on that.  If I had to choose my favorite book from the year it would be a tie between Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (an author I have an obvious favorable bias towards) and Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak; I read both at the beginning of the year and they are still with me.  Least favorite book was Vixen; it wasn't so bad I wanted to light it on fire, but it really got under my skin with the cliches and seemingly poor research.

I participated in a few challenges this year.  The Women Unbound Challenge was the one I completed, even reading one book beyond what I'd planned.  Sadly, I didn't get the Complete Booker Challenge 2010 finished; I got three of six Booker-winning novels read but just never got to the other three (I did read one Booker short-list, so not a complete bust).  I'm going to have to think on the future of challenges in 2011.

My Nostalgia Project stalled out with its initial subject - Flowers in the Attic.  Too intense.  The Booker Project and Newbery Project are coming along swimmingly, the Newbery especially, but the Best American Project had to go on hold when I had to pack all my Best American books in order to how the house.  I didn't make much reading progress on the Nobel Project but I did acquire more books to help me in the endeavor (and I can't quite decide with Vargas Llosa to read...too many good choices there).

In honor of the International Year of Chemistry in 2011, I started a blog specifically for reading chemistry-related books (readingchemistry.blogspot.com).  I cross-posted a few science/chemistry posts from this blog and will probably continue to cross-post in the future.

This year I also made my first foray into requesting review copies...which added a whole new level of stress because now I feel obligated to read and finish the book I've requested.  Thank goodness I didn't go nuts and ask for many more review copies - packing and moving has gotten me far, far behind on the ones I have right now!

That's it for 2010 - bye, bye and so long!

3 Mini-reviews: Ponder-ing Much About Flops

Due to the insanity of moving house during the holidays, meaning I have even less free time than normal (into the negative numbers, if such a thing is possible) and I have packed nearly everything I own, I'm going to compress three reviews into one post and save what's left of my sanity.

#1: The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty

Read as the December pick for Literature by Women at BNBC, this was the first Eudora Welty book for me.  Compared to last December's choice, The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (masterful Southern Gothic but too much all at one time during the holidays), this is a chatty, gossipy family dramedy.  It's a short novel - nearly a novella - and Miss Enda Earle Ponder will tell you all about her dotty Uncle Daniel and the Ponder heart.

#2: Don't Know Much About History (audio) by Kenneth C. Davis

I was looking for a new audio book for my 10 minute commute every day (this is quite handy since network radio is the pits anymore these days and I can get about 20+ minutes of an audiobook listened to while driving) and thought I'd give one of the Don't Know Much About books a try.  I quite liked this one - I learned or re-remembered things from history class (such as the Alger Hiss trial which was one where the name was familiar but couldn't remember why).  I think I like this more because of the audio format - it was quite easy to digest - but I think I would have gotten bored while reading the book because of the repetition in format.  I also think that Davis was very balanced in his assessment of US History; I have read some reviews which called this a "liberal propaganda" piece, but I don't think there's anything conservative or liberal in reporting the facts as they are, particularly when the facts say the US government has behaved less than honorably at times.

#3: My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin

Last year I read The Big Rewind and found Rabin's AV Club posts so I was eager to read My Year of Flops when it came out in book form.  My Year of Flops takes its name from Rabin's AV Club column and the nice thing, unlike other blog-inspired books, is that the book isn't a simple repetition of the MYoF blog.  Instead, Rabin curated his blog posts, grouping his favorites/best posts by theme, and added some "book only" Flops and interviews.  I especially enjoyed the interview with Roberto Benigni about Pinocchio, a movie I've had the misfortune of seeing (I saw the subtitled original Italian, not the dubbed-in-English-by-Breckin-Meyer one, so I'm sure it was better than the theatrical dubbed release but it was still creepy with a 50-year-old Italian man-child playing a bratty wooden puppet). Some of the movies are, yes, bad movies that result from spectacularly poor judgement on the part of directors/stars/studios/writers/producers (like The Conqueror, The Scarlet Letter, and Exit to Eden not to mention Waterworld) but some of the movies Rabin reviews are secretly quite enjoyable (The Rocketeer is one, and I'm surprised that it was considered a flop because my little brothers watched it all the time).  At the end, there is a very, very funny minute-by-minute review of Waterworld, agreeably one of the worst flops in cinematic history, aside from being a terrible movie on its own.  My Year of Flops was a great distraction from the mess of moving and I very much enjoyed Rabin's style.

Vixen

Vixen seemed like another run-of-the-mill, bland teen romance novel of the racier variety, with a 1920s Chicago society flapper setting overlaid, when I hit a glaring anachronism.

I'm not talking about why a Harvard graduate bothers with high school girls.

I'm talking about Lady Chatterley's Lover - a book not published until 1928 from a firm in Italy, then Knopf in a censored edition in the US in 1928. In one scene, Lorraine mentions her father's first edition of LCL but Vixen is set in 1922 (evidence: Gloria mentions the Volstead Act was passed in 1919 when she was 14, she is now 17 in the novel making the setting 1922). How does a book become valuable enough to collect 6 years before publication? Very, very glaring.

I have an advanced edition, so if this shows up in the final edition....in a book that already already strikes me as "unimpressive" it's an elementary mistake.  Consider, also, that this is a teen novel and it feels like an insult, like it's expected that a teen would recognize the title and overlook the anachronism through ignorance.

Definitely not a book I would recommend; too many "main" characters, too many secrets, too many backstories, not enough "meat".  Read F. Scott Fitzgerald instead.

Dear FTC: I received a copy of this novel as part of an advanced reading group.

Purge

Until Sofi Oksanen's Purge was put forth as a Literature by Women selection, I had always assumed the novel was about eating disorders or something like that.  The US edition has a woman in an apron and kerchief (the cover cuts her off just below the eyes) standing before a table and a lump of dough.  So, food and not eating/purging oneself of food.  Well, not so.  Purge tells the story of the elderly Aliide Truu, an Estonian woman, and Zara, a Russian girl Aliide finds sleeping in her front garden.  Both women have mysterious pasts, both have something to share and something to hide.

Purge is a critically-acclaimed novel in Finland and Scandinavia, winning major literary prizes and making Oksanen one of the youngest acclaimed writers in the region.  Rather than tell the story from beginning to end as an omniscient narrator, Oksanen uses an alternating narrative to move the book forward, switching points-of-view between Aliide - distrustful of strangers after the horrors of World War II and the Soviet occupation - and Zara - distrustful of nearly everyone after a disastrous "new start" in Western Europe - to tell a story about human trafficking in "civilized" modern Europe.  As the story unfolds, and each woman thinks of her past, only the reader is aware of Aliide and Zara's shared history.  However, the reader can never be sure how much each woman has realized she knows about the other.  After a heart-stopping climax, the reader is left with more questions than answers.

*Sorry for the brief review - I'm trying to catch the back-log as quickly as I can.

The Wake of Forgiveness

Bruce Marchart's The Wake of Forgiveness is the September First Look selection at Barnes and Noble Book Clubs.  This is Marchart's first novel; set among the Czech settlers who are determined to bend the tough Texas ground to their will, The Wake of Forgiveness evokes comparions with Ken Haruf and Cormac McCarthy.  The story follows Karel, the youngest of four motherless brothers who all share the same acquired trait: their necks are deformed, kinked out to one side, from pulling their father's plow as a team. 

The reader sees Karel as an infant, a man, and a young boy as the narrative moves between time periods.  His mother dies during his birth and he is nursed by a neighbor.  Karel is a talented horse-rider but his father takes away that pleasure when he loses a race, tying his family's future to that of the mysterious Villasenor.  He is a successful farmer and dutiful father and husband but is far from ideal.  He makes a very serious error in judgement that brings tensions between Karel and his brothers to a head.  Karel is most definitely a flawed human being, as is every other character in the novel, and it makes him a more compelling central character as he changes over the course of the novel.

The ideas of forgiveness and family are at the heart of this novel.  How should we act when we should forgive?  How does one act when one refuses to forgive?  Should we hold somene accountable for an event that was beyond his or her control?  Where should one place blame?  How do you define your family relative to the woman who gave birth to you or to the woman who nursed you?

The Wake of Forgiveness is a very atmospheric novel.  The heat of a dance hall, the smell of a barn, the steam rising from a horse in the rain.  The settings are very tangible but not over-described.  I found it very hard to put this book down because I could never find a very good place to stop reading.  Do I choose the chapter break when Villasenor and his daughters first appear?  How about the chapter from the hawk's perspective?  The scene in the barn after the dance hall or the horse race?  The morning after the twins' rampage?  No chapter ever had a "cliff-hanger" but the story flowed so well, even between sections from different time periods, that I really just wanted to see what happened next..and next...and next...and then the book was done. 

The Wake of Forgiveness will be available in hardcover and ebook in late October. 

The Falls

The Falls was the selection for Literature by Women in August.  I'd never read a Joyce Carol Oates novel (even though I've acquired a few at library sales) so I went into the month with an open mind.  I also started a week behind because I was at Conclave the first week of August.

The Falls is a very meandering novel and I'm still not sure what exactly is the central narrative plot.  Is it Ariah's life and experiences near Niagara Falls?  Is it the area of the Falls themselves?  Can a novel be setting-driven as opposed to character- or plot-driven?  I'm not quite sure because the focus of the novel moves from Ariah as the "Widow Bride of the Falls" (after her new husband jumps to his death the morning after their wedding) to the fate of Ariah's second family during the Love Canal crisis.  There are many links to the treacherous and seductive Niagara Falls throughout the narrative.

Oates contributes further to the meandering quality by changing narrative points-of-view and even the narrator.  There's an "I" that appears every once in a while and it takes a bit to figure out which character is the "I" (sometimes it seems like a different character, too).  The description is exquisite at times, particularly in the first chapter in describing the Falls on the morning of Gilbert's suicide.

The characters themselves are irritating at times, particularly Ariah in her ostrich-like way of ignoring the outside world.  Juliet is bothersome to be in that she's burdened with one of the most famous literary names in history (and very nearly shares her fate).  The research into Love Canal is extensive and while I don't think all the information is necessary for the reader to believe in the rights of the plaintiffs (it's pretty obvious that the big shots were completely at fault and completely without morals) it does seem necessary for the characters to have everything spelled out for them in order for them to believe in the validity of the case.

I am glad that The Falls was put forward for Literature by Women and that I was finally able to read some JCO.  I just wish I had been prepared for the meandering quality of the novel.  Although, I should have guessed from the length of the book that is wasn't going to be too terribly compact as far as plot.

*FTC Disclosure: I received a review copy of this from BNBC.

Children of the New World

Children of the New World by Assia Djebar took me to a new area of the world - Algeria - and a new setting - Algeria's war for independence from France.  It's a guerilla war, uncertain, with freedom fighters hiding out in the hills, shelled by a French-backed military.  The lives Djebar chooses to show the reader are those of ordinary Algerians, women, children, men, revolutionaries.  It's like a slice of life only this slice of life is liable to open with a bomb that lands in the courtyard, killing someone's mother-in-law.

Children of the New World is more than a feminist novel.  The interconnected stories of a single day in a provincial Algerian town show how the inhabitants live under the constant thread of detention and death.  Although many of the main characters are women, younger, more educated than their mothers, and walking the line between seclusion and freedom in a Muslim world, Children of the New World is a nationalist novel - it's about the right to be recognized and live freely in your own town and country.  The people of Blida represent those ordinary men and women who risk their lives, even in so simple a gesture as crossing the town unaccompanied to warn a husband, in a war of independence.  This is a novel to be read for it's point-of-view and Djebar's beautiful writing.

*FTC Disclosure: I recieved a review copy of this from BNBC [And I apologize, this reveiw is about 6 weeks late]

The Falls and a Reading Schedule

The readers have spoken and the new fall/winter schedule at Literature by Women is:

September: Purge by Sofi Oksanen
October: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
November: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
December: The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty
January: Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
February: Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

In the meantime, drop by in August to join us for The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates!