Don’t let the dystopian label on this book fool you, because this book is in no way dystopian. I have no clue why it’s labeled that way, because it’s Don’t let the dystopian label on this book fool you, because this book is in no way dystopian. I have no clue why it’s labeled that way, because it’s rather futuristic and not really a story that matches with the concept of a world filled with great suffering and injustice. Does the plot revolve around something that is allegedly meant to alleviate great suffering? Yes. But the rest of the world inside this book seems quite analogous to our world today, just that in the world inside this book there’s a company that you can pay to remove memories. That’s just something out of science and contemplative fiction. That’s not dystopic–it’s a thought experiment.
“Tell Me An Ending” is a deeply philosophical book, but the questions it asks aren’t new ones at all: do our memories shape who we are? Would we be the same people we are today if one of those life-shaping memories was scrubbed out as if we had taken an eraser to our brains? Or would the erasure of that memory, once accomplished, possibly put us on uneven enough ground we could find ourselves unable to navigate our lives without this deep-seated feeling that something is missing. Something is wrong. Something is lost. Could we look in the mirror and reconcile our reflection outside to the one outside?
I will tell you: this book is long, and it’s a mosaic of a story. It’s told in bits and pieces from different POVs until they all start to intersect with one another, and then the picture becomes clearer, but even at the end the picture still hasn’t been completely clarified. This is a book for readers that love to read and think about the big questions. It will take you time to read, that’s for sure. Is it an excellent book? Yes, I think so. It’s just not going to be a book for your average reader.
Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
There are two kinds of “thousand steps” in this novel: the very real ones of a beach located in the city of Laguna Beach, California and the metaphoriThere are two kinds of “thousand steps” in this novel: the very real ones of a beach located in the city of Laguna Beach, California and the metaphorical ones of the seemingly endless steps the main character, Matt, takes in the fervent search for his missing sister, Jazz.
If there’s one thing I thought about constantly while reading this novel it was, “If it’s hard to find a missing teenager even in the age of smart EVERYTHING, how much harder would it have been to find one in 1968, especially for a poor 16 year-old boy?”
This novel, from start to finish, is very engaging. You can’t help but keep turning the pages, wanting or needing to see what’s next or who’s going to reveal something or what’s going to happen or what’s going to go wrong? Because more goes wrong than goes right in this book, and it’s only intuition, instincts, courage, impetuousness, and indefatigability that keep Matt going even after he keeps getting knocked back, kicked down, and told no.
You can’t help but identify with and root for Matt, with his broken family, missing sister, young age, and very limited resources. Who doesn’t like an underdog story, right? At the same time, you feel angry at the adults around Matt, who neglect him, use him or try to do so, manipulate him, and lie to him. Fighting against drugs, hippies, the homeless, communism, and “the man” all seem more important to all the adults than making sure the kids are all right. And that’s precisely what allowed Matt’s sister to slip through the cracks and go missing and what leads to Matt being the only person who truly takes her disappearance seriously and the only one devoted to finding her.
In the end, the only thing that keeps this novel from getting a five-star review from me is that it’s fairly predictable. I don’t like waiting for the characters to catch up with where I’ve been since about 30% of the way through the book. But I was still happy to read, just to see what would happen in-between when I got there and when the book caught up with me. ...more
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read a book that I wanted to take my time reading because the prose was simply so beautiful and well-written I It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read a book that I wanted to take my time reading because the prose was simply so beautiful and well-written I found myself sometimes re-reading passages a couple of times (or even whole sections) simply for the joy of it.
“The High House” has a print length of only 268 pages, but it’s not a book you’ll want to plow through. It’s a book you’ll want to take your time with. It’s not that the book demands that of you, like some books do, it’s that you won’t want to read this book quickly. Greengrass knows how to weave sentences that feel like spells and paragraphs that feel like poetry instead of prose. I found myself constantly stopping to highlight sentences and sometimes whole passages just so I could come back to them for reference later.
“The High House” juggles first-person POV narrative (in the past-tense) between three of the book’s four main characters: Caro, Pauly (Caro’s half-brother), and Sally (one of the two caretakers at High House). The fourth main character is Grandy, Sally’s grandfather and the other caretaker of High House. High House is a summer home belonging to Pauly’s mother (and Caro’s stepmother) that is set up on a sloping hill on the coast of England among arable soil and near a tide pool. When our book starts, global climate change is already well on the way to its ultimate tipping point, and Pauly’s mother is one of the fiercest and foremost advocates for fighting against climate change. As we switch between Sally and Caro’s narrative viewpoints, we can see Caro battling with having to raise Pauly essentially by herself even though she hasn’t even finished her own schooling and Sally dealing with this strange woman constantly being around, conversing and working with her grandfather for days and weeks at a time before she disappears randomly again until the day she comes and tells them she is retaining them to become caretakers of High House for the foreseeable future and to help ensure her son and stepdaughter are kept safe when they someday show up. And show up they do, when an extreme weather event with no name or category for it hits the US and Pauly’s mother calls just before it hits to tell Caro to leave London first thing in the morning and go to High House.
Greengrass does a great job of grafting distinct narrative voices for Caro, Sally, and Pauly, so you always know whose narrative voice you’re reading. Pauly doesn’t remember a time before High House, so High House and its surrounding environs, Caro, Sally, and Grandy are all he knows. Sally is older than Caro, more set in her ways and used to everything being the way she likes it, and while it breaks her heart to see how many people are hurting in the middle of this huge climate disaster she is pragmatic enough to swallow it down and compartmentalize it for the sake of the people in her life. Caro is afraid, all the time. And when Caro isn’t afraid, she’s resentful of her stepmother or feeling guilty about having more than other people in the world have. She knows her stepmother planned this home out and how privileged that makes all of them.
This book doesn’t go by chapters. It is parsed into parts and then into the switching POVs, and then into subparts. But I think that chapters would’ve ruined the flow of the text anyway. Either that, or I wouldn’t have even noticed, given how entranced I was by the flow of the words and the elegance of the sentences.
If you’re a fan of beautiful books full of beautiful sentences, I highly recommend this book. If you’re a fan of books that feel sad, beautiful, and tragic (do not cue Taylor Swift right now), then I highly recommend this book. If you want to read a lovely, elegiac book about what life might look like after the tipping point of global climate change, then I recommend this book.
I just recommend this book. Highly. Overwhelmingly. Go read it. ...more
***Spoilers for F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” included in review, just in case***
I’m a big fan of literature that takes place in the 1920***Spoilers for F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” included in review, just in case***
I’m a big fan of literature that takes place in the 1920s and a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, “The Great Gatsby”. But, Fitzgerald was a middle-aged white guy writing about the events unfolding during the summer of 1922 in West Egg from the POV of unreliable narrator Nick Carroway… the females in Fitzgerald’s story (like most things in that book) were either inconsequential or metaphors.
“Beautiful Little Fools” takes the narrative out of the hands of the males and puts it into the hands of the female characters: Daisy, Jordan, Myrtle, and Catherine. Mixed into a switched-up first-person POV that bounces between the past and the present (and with a police detective who’s been hired off the books to find out the truth of who really killed Jay Gatsby added in to provide a devil’s advocate voice to the book), these four women all become fully fleshed-out and realized people who aren’t just metaphors or background noise in some middle-aged white male’s book.
This is definitely a character-driven novel. And I have mixed feelings about that, because I think it’s missing a lot of ambiance and atmosphere it sorely needed. The book takes place in the 20’s (for the most part), but it doesn’t feel like a novel that takes place in the 1920s. Where I felt this the most was in the dialogue. The characters, save maybe Jay Gatsby himself (with a few pithy bon mots), don’t speak in the vernacular of the 1920s. And in a dialogue-heavy novel, it really sticks out.
But the characters, oh, they work. They work so well. Seeing them whole is to see them broken. Daisy with her cold grief and emptiness, Jordan with her quiet fears and cynicism, Myrtle and her desperation, and Catherine with her unflinching pessimism and anger.
If you love all things 1920s, you might be a little put-off by the anachronisms or the lack of depth. But if you loved “The Great Gatsby” and might want another lens to look at the work through, this is a great book to read. Definitely worth the time. ...more
All of the stars in my rating for this book go to the beautiful prose of Shea Ernshaw. The writing in this book is elegiac… simply beautiful with a shAll of the stars in my rating for this book go to the beautiful prose of Shea Ernshaw. The writing in this book is elegiac… simply beautiful with a shroud of haunting cast over it.
This isn’t a quick read book. This is a book you take your time with, because it will take its time with you. That isn’t to say it’s boring. But it’s not a rollicking ride, either. This book is an atmospheric stroll through dark, creepy woods and walking on eggshells amongst an isolated, paranoid cult. There are three major characters in this both, and while they are all captivating in their own way, I found I enjoyed Bee’s story arc the most.
That being said: the turn in this book was predictable to me. Very predictable. I wasn’t counting on guessing it with less than half the book over.
But this is a beautifully-written book with themes that are, in turn, horrific and touching. And it may not end exactly how you envision. I highly recommend it. ...more
When I finished reading this book (which I tabbed more than I have ever tabbed any other book that wasn’t used for college in my entire life), I messaWhen I finished reading this book (which I tabbed more than I have ever tabbed any other book that wasn’t used for college in my entire life), I messaged my best friend in a flurry of praise and said this: “A lot Vonnegut, a little Pahalnuik, some Gabriel Garcia Marquez, some cool 4th wall breaking from the author put to great use. It's magical realism + dark satire + scathing sociopolitical commentary.”
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the masterpiece that is Noah Hawley’s “Anthem”. I’m not even sure there is a manner in which I could describe what this book is, what this book means, how this book affected me, how much I want to shove it in people’s faces and beg them to read it. How I want to tell them, “This is a book about a group of teenagers, but I wouldn’t put it in the hands of teenagers unless they asked, because who really needs to read it are people over the age of 35. As a matter of fact, I think this should be required reading for anyone old enough to run for President”.
“Anthem” is a scathing indictment of the adults of America. And it’s a very virulent entreaty for the readers of this book to listen to it and to take it seriously, even if its wit and whip-sharp humor come on a barbed tongue. Everything about this book is quintessentially American, but it’s been turned dark and cheap like America has been turned dark and cheap in the eyes of the book’s main characters. To this book’s main characters, the adults of America are the problem, and the youth are the solution. It’s an opinion I happen to share in real life, but in this book there is the open civil war between the right and the left (or, as Hawley puts it, the party of truth versus the party of truth), and the much more subversive civil war, which is the old against the young.
The youth is wasted on the young? Don’t tell Noah Hawley that.
This book is not a happy book. This book is tragic. This book is dark. This book is terrifying in some ways and exultant in others. This book is as profound as it is humble. I’ve never read anything like it before and I don’t know if I will again.
But I know I will never be able to read it again for the first time… I will never be able to recapture that feeling. And that feeling of reading a perfect book is something all readers long for. I cannot recommend this book enough....more
I came into this book with high hopes. The blurb made this book sound like a fantastic story, but I was sorely disappointed by both the handling of thI came into this book with high hopes. The blurb made this book sound like a fantastic story, but I was sorely disappointed by both the handling of the book’s topic and by Janet Kelley’s writing style.
Stream-of-consciousness writing is a difficult prose style to pull off for even the most talented writers, and Kelley isn’t at that level. The central conflict in this book could’ve been a decent vehicle for first-person POV and for stream-of-consciousness prose in another author’s hands, but in Kelley’s case it comes across as immature, rambling, and fumbling.
It doesn’t help that Kelley’s main character isn’t one that I, as a reader, found sympathetic or relatable. I found her to be narcissistic and self-serving. In the end, I found her to be irredeemable. I never identified with her and her internal conflict once.
I would rate this book lower, but I feel like trying something new deserved an extra star. Maybe, with time and practice, Kelley could work herself up to writing something that can bring her aspiring prose to her interesting plot ideas. ...more
Wow. I mean… wow. I didn’t know quite what to expect going into this book. Was it going to be more horror-like? More dystopian-like? More thriller-likWow. I mean… wow. I didn’t know quite what to expect going into this book. Was it going to be more horror-like? More dystopian-like? More thriller-like? I had to throw out all preconceived notions of what this book might be pretty quick in favor of what the book actually is, which is a hauntingly sad but somehow still beautiful tale of how all humans, no matter who they are, deserve to be deserved with at least basic human decency. It’s a book that’s horribly relevant to our current lives here in America and feels so close to something that could possibly happen to some of the most vulnerable people in our population I found myself getting goosebumps at the very thought of it. And, if you’re wondering: yes, I was pretty much bawling by the end.
I appreciate Nijkamp’s serious commitment to a diverse cast of characters in this book while simultaneously trying to not take away space for the voices that might better represent what life is like in juvenile detention for POC. Our three main characters are white, but one is mute and speaks their own form of sign language and the other is nonbinary. While the ratio of white to POC characters in the book is likely close to what might be representative of a juvenile detention center in America (with its issues concerning mass incarceration at every level of the penal system), Nijkamp is careful not to exploit her POC characters for their ethnic status, which could’ve been an easy and steep slope to stumble down as an excuse to flesh out her characters. Instead, Nijkamp took the time to flesh out her characters through their experiences, backgrounds, how they react to both the circumstances of their imprisonment and the central conflict of the book, and (in the cases of some) phone calls to their friends or relatives as the events of the book proceed.
The bleak, cold, desolate setting of this book only serves as an echo of how the characters must be feeling both physiologically and psychologically. The juvenile detention center is a place where one is literally locked down, but these people–not even adults yet–have been forgotten by everyone in the midst of a nation-wide lockdown. And just how far will human decency and the notion of charity extend when it seems like the world is ending? Who is willing to go the extra mile to help others no matter the cost and who will always help themselves first? Who will own up to their mistakes and make amends and who won’t admit when they were wrong? Who has the courage and ability to lead and who will trust them to?
As with most books that study the human condition and questions of morals and ethics, what you take away from it will be up to you as a reader. I came away with a profound feeling of grief, and I saw the philosophy behind it as being the kind of optimistic I can get behind with a dose of the pragmatic I tend to believe in. But I really think every reader will take away something different. It’s that kind of book. And I highly recommend it. ...more
I’m looking at other reviews for this book on various sites and I’m seeing that my rating–and even my interpretation and reading of this book–is very I’m looking at other reviews for this book on various sites and I’m seeing that my rating–and even my interpretation and reading of this book–is very different from most others. Mainly in that I loved every single bit of this book and totally understood every choice the author made.
It started out a little rough in the first 10% or so, as I tried to get my bearings and figure out what exactly was going on and why the author chose the narrative and prose styles used. Once I had that down I totally tucked into this beautifully-written, tragic, and yet triumphant book.
Some readers will have an issue with the prose and narrative in this novel, and that’s understandable. It’s a mix of lyrical prose, a touch of freeform poetry, and an ephemeral time-stream-of-consciousness. It’s definitely experimental, but devastatingly beautiful and perfect for this book (unlike some other books with experimental writing I’ve read this year so far).
There are just so many layers and themes in this book: misogyny, halcyon summers, how there are some places where you are always your authentic self to the exclusion of all others, and how there are some people you can only be your authentic self around without worrying about the eyes of the world outside judging you and holding you to certain expectations.
I especially loved the constant references to the term “naiad”. Naiads, in mythology, are female guardians of still waters. They can be deadly (look at what happened to poor Hylas), and the waters they inhabit have the ability to heal. In Greek mythology, boys and girls cut off a lock of their hair and tossed it into the local spring inhabited by their naiad at their coming-of-age ceremony. Once you read the book you’ll see why the double-meaning of naiads (both in an etymological way and an unmentioned mythological way) makes a stunning amount of sense in a macabre and beautiful manner.
Also, There’s a poem mentioned, quoted, and repeated in parts by Emily Dickonson called “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun”, which is about keeping women silent–about taking away their voices. And this theme looms very large in the book.
I was entranced by this stunning book, written so carefully and gorgeous I couldn’t stop reading. I knew what was going to happen. I knew what was happening. But that was absolutely okay with me because it let me get lost in the words… and those words were worth the entire trip.
Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Books for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
Even when just reading the first few pages of this book I knew I had been absolutely correct in how interesting, moving, and excellent it would be. ItEven when just reading the first few pages of this book I knew I had been absolutely correct in how interesting, moving, and excellent it would be. It sucked me right in and I was swept away by the compelling stories of the diverse characters and what not only happened to them on the day humans became incapable of physically harming one another, but also how each responded to those events and how they came out on the other side.
This book is labeled as dystopian when it’s anything but. It’s also listed as thriller and/or mystery, and it’s neither of those either. This is pure speculative fiction with a hefty side dose of philosophy and terrific prose. It proposes a thought experiment and then lets stories unfold, almost as if the author had started out with these different characters and their origins and then let the chips fall where they may. Will the two immigrant children make it to America? Will dictator-led countries fall apart? What will happen to the brother of the last known victim of gun violence?
But it also asks us, in the spirit of the book’s title: what about the damage already done? How does it feel to all of a sudden be free of a domestic abuser’s fists? How does a domestic terrorist come to terms with not being able to terrorize anymore? Who is already so broken down by violence worldwide that this new world seems not only confusing, but almost horrifying? Can we even still harm our fellow man anymore? Will those intent on doing harm find a way, somehow?
The book is a page-turner with lovely writing and compelling scenarios, which keeps you wanting to read and read because there’s just another victim or perpetrator on the next page willing you to read their story. You just can’t help but read on and on, waiting to see how it all turns out at the end.
Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review. ...more
This book was one of the books I was looking forward to reading most this year. I was waiting practically on tenterhooks for over 6 months because I lThis book was one of the books I was looking forward to reading most this year. I was waiting practically on tenterhooks for over 6 months because I love ballet, I love ballerinas, and I love books and movies about them. I had read Meg Abbott’s “The Turnout” earlier in the year and I had adored it, so I was hoping I would love this book just as much.
But I ended up being so disappointed when this book didn’t even come close to meeting any of my expectations. Despite the buzz and hype surrounding it, it wasn’t anything like Black Swan or reminiscent of Meg Abbott’s writing. There was so much potential in this book and I feel it was wasted.
The biggest issue I had with this book was the pacing. The frequent switching between past and present until the past caught up to present caused the pacing of the book to stutter and stop. It slowed down the pacing so much I kept looking at how far into the book I was and going, “Really? I’m only that far in?” Flashbacks are a sloppy storytelling device in the first place, and if you’re going to use them you need to use them as a condiment, not as almost 50% of the food on your plate.
And for all the bravado of how us readers won’t see the twists coming, I saw it telegraphed a mile away. I just waited for the characters in the book to get there.
It was an okay book, but not great. I just wish it had lived up to what it could have been. ...more
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