I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, theI was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.
Whew! I had a surprising reaction to this novel. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation managed to catch me off guard and by surprise. Probably because – funny story – ironically, this book is about a character who does what I always say I’d like to do: have the ability to put my life on pause for just a few days to rest, to think, to recharge. Then press a magic button and the world resumes spinning, without me having lost a single second of my life. Wouldn’t that be wonderful! Well, here’s that idea with a twist: Little Miss Nameless Protagonist here does this for an entire year (while strung out on a myriad of different high-level drugs, all while juggling her semi-unwanted friendship with her best friend and her feelings about the death of her parents and the reality of her shitty boyfriend – really, he’s not even that). Set in the year 2000, our narrator decides to hibernate through a year of her life in an attempt to be a new person on the other side of that time. So, with the help of a zany and negligible psychiatrist who’s first and only line of doctoring is to pull out her prescription pad, our narrator dives deeper and deeper into the world of prescription drugs—and the psychological effects of them—in her quest to sleep away a year of her life.
My Ambien, my Rozerem, my Ativan, my Xanax, my trazodone, my lithium. Seroquel, Lunesta. Valium. I laughed. I teared up. Finally, my heart slowed. My hands started trembling a little, or maybe they’d been trembling all along. “Thank God,” I said aloud…I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien, so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground. That would be stabilizing, I thought. And maybe one more Ativan. Ativan to me felt like fresh air. A cool breeze, slightly effervescent. This was good, I thought. A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep.
Jacques Louis David’s neoclassical painting has been used as the cover, a reference to our protagonist’s “culture,” of which she is so proud and self-important, and her Art History background in college and before she quit the workforce. It’s a nice touch, offering layers of other meanings to this book. Within these pages you’ll find a slew of wholly unlikeable characters – well, unlikeable by the arbitrary standards we tend to think of as what makes a “nice” or “good” person. You won’t find those people here. Instead you’ll find the nameless narrator who knows she’s gorgeous and privileged and secretly loves the fact that her (bulimic, needy, whiny, having an intra-office affair with a married guy) best friend, Reva, is jealous of her. You’ll find the WASP mother of the nameless protagonist who can’t be bothered to mother but instead calls in the nanny and drinks herself to death in the end. The artiste who made his claim to fame by ejaculating on a blank canvas in various colors. And we shan’t forget the “boyfriend” who uses our protagonist for quick sexual trysts that work out to only his benefit and then shuns her for weeks or months until he’s ready for another one. She has become semi-dependent on him and this cycle of abuse, even as she hopes that it will one day stop and that he’ll choose her. Their relationship is twisted and not at all the storybook love affair you’re used to:
I called Trevor again. This time when he answered, I didn’t let him say a word. “If you’re not over here fucking me in the next forty-five minutes then you can call an ambulance because I’ll be here bleeding to death and I’m not gonna slit my wrists in the tub like a normal person. If you’re not here in forty-five minutes, I’m gonna slit my throat right here on the sofa. And in the meantime, I’m going to call my lawyer and tell him I’m leaving everything in the apartment to you, especially the sofa. So you can lean on Claudia or whoever when it comes time to deal with all that. She might know a good upholsterer.
I hear Moshfegh is a fan of writing about these sorts of characters – characters who need a chaser or two before they’ll go down our throats smoothly. This was my first foray into her works, and I don’t mind that. In fact, that quality is what drew me deeper into this novel once I opened the first page. Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation doesn’t shy away from the murk and unpleasantness – really, downright offensiveness – inside of us all, that we’re all capable of. In fact, her characters here seem to revel in the way their ickiness makes them better than other people while simultaneously wallowing in it until it nearly drowns them. It’s a bold and scary line for an author to walk, and to see the characters on, but that’s what we love about writers who can pull it off. We all need that shiny mirror of our own spiny imperfections staring back at us from time to time, don’t we? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is dark and obnoxious, but I loved it. Because, isn’t life that way sometimes? I love characters with bite, maybe a pinch of cruelty in them –
But did I care? I didn’t think so. If Reva’s body was hanging by the neck behind the bath curtain, I might have just gone home.
--I appreciate the layers of characters who aren’t bow-tied in shiny pink ribbons of perfection, happy and grinning stupidly with their perfect teeth and empty heads. I like a character who is…shall I say, more like a real person, imperfections and all. Honestly, I felt like this book was WASPy done well – and I don’t think I’ve ever said that before. Even as she stood at the edge of reality, possibly even the precipice of her life, I was able to forget that her feeling of ennui with her privilege annoyed me. I wanted to reach out my hand to her, hoping she’d be okay:
I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness. At some point I got up to guzzle water from the tap in the kitchen. When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest…
But this novel’s ending is what sealed the deal for me, culminating with 9/11 shortly after our protagonist wakes from her year of sleep. The towers come down, someone she knows dies, and maybe – just maybe – that last line of the novel shows that our protagonist has finally found her humanity. I highly recommend this book to readers who like their characters straight with no chaser--to readers who don't shy away from some of the darker hues of humanity. If you're uncomfortable with that notion, definitely stay away! I was glued to this novel from start to finish, and that resonating ending easily solidified the strong 4 stars I’m offering up. ****
I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Penguin, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Oh my God, it’s been a long time since I’ve suffered through a book that made me want to just BE DONE WITH IT ALREADY! But this book, Our House, by LoOh my God, it’s been a long time since I’ve suffered through a book that made me want to just BE DONE WITH IT ALREADY! But this book, Our House, by Louise Candlish, just seemed to just go on and ON. Seriously, there was NO reason for this book to be 400 pages. There were way too many asides throughout this novel, which slowed the pace greatly and contributed to the superfluous word count. Not to mention, those peanut gallery comments from the “viewers” of the crime podcast that Fiona Lawson is telling her story to (which allows for the author, Louise Candlish, to tell Fiona’s story under the guise of recounting her story to these podcast listeners) really burnt my biscuit! They were so annoying, ridiculous and distracting that I trained myself to skip them entirely whenever I encountered them.
Though it is a genre I tend to enjoy for the most part (see my reviews of Ruth Ware and Fiona Barton) this novel was everything that I hate in British cozy thrillers: centered around a meek woman who’s “gullible” and made a victim as she tries to take back the power in the end. It also was not very well-written, quite honestly. Candlish has obviously never heard of Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory,” because, for this being a thriller, she certainly didn’t trust her reader to come to any conclusions on their own, which really took all of the bite and fun out of reading this book for me.
I recently joined a Twitter discussion where a very outspoken literary agent was asserting that reviewers should NEVER tag an author with a bad review because it’s “rude” and because these authors have already had countless people critiquing them and “professional editors” editing them. (This, by the way, was rather self-righteously stated as though literary agents and editors know best and as though their stamp of approval a good book makes. As a writer, former lit agent and former publishing intern, and current book reviewer I can confidently assert in response that this is not necessarily the case.)
Here, you’ll find a fantastic example of a book that needs further editing! Literally, my mind started wandering by page 60 as I started calculating how many paragraphs of text I’d just written that really could have been removed from my life altogether.
All in all, the premise of Louise Candlish’s Our House is phenomenal, the execution is mediocre if not terrible in parts, and the aside bits nearly drove me mad. If you’re looking for a streamlined, heart-pounding thrill of a ride, don’t waste your time with this one. I really don't have much else to say about this book because I've already turned my mind to finding my next book, which will have to be GREAT to wash away the annoyance I've built up from pushing through this one.
I have a friend who read my reviews and once told me it’d be SO hilarious if I just wrote the word “TRASH” as a book review for the next truly terrible book I encounter and then just dropped the mike. I won’t do that here, but there were parts where I was honestly tempted. 2 stars for premise and premise alone -- and maybe even because I fancy the cover; it's brilliant! ;) . **
**I received an advance-read physical copy of this book from the publisher, Berkley, in exchange for an honest review.**
Mommy was only a shell of a person with nothing to give. She was like a store full of bright and tempting candies held captive behind a thick, transpaMommy was only a shell of a person with nothing to give. She was like a store full of bright and tempting candies held captive behind a thick, transparent wall. It wasn't like Hanna hadn't tried to tap on the glass and grasp what was inside.
So, it’s possible that I’m just too much of a Southerner for this book, but Baby Teeth absolutely did not work for me. (Well, that's not 100% true: I think the book's title and cover art are phenomenal.) It was just so melodramatic and implausible that I found myself doing the deepest of eye rolls on more than one occasion, and turning the page became a harder and harder task the further I got along in this novel.
The premise of this novel is very simple: A seven-year-old terrorizes her mother but puts on an innocent face for Daddy, driving a wedge between the couple and driving the mom to desperation. Think The Orphan (2009) meets We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). With that out of the way, we can move on to the merits and non-redeeming qualities of this book, shall we?
One of my pet peeves in fiction is when entire plot lines hinge on implausible circumstances. I heaved this book into that metaphorical pile pretty early on and it will remain there forever. Baby Teeth was kin to those horror movies where the pretty blonde girl is running through the night in her heels and instead of running outside of the house for safety, she runs upstairs to the collective annoyance of the audience. Like, the plot didn’t make ANY sense! Why, you may ask? Because the entire narrative would have been different if one of two SIMPLE things had happened: (view spoiler)[ If Suzette had had the common sense to a) video record her daughter’s bad behavior to show her husband as proof or b) if she’d actually tried her hand at disciplining her. *side eye glance inserted here* (hide spoiler)]. That’s why I say I must be too much of a Southerner for this book, because I don’t know anyone, of any color or creed, who would let their kid get away with the things little Hanna got away with – and then crawl and grovel on their knees for this child’s forgiveness after THEY, the PARENT, have been assaulted. Seriously, implausible. And, so weak-willed that I started to really despise Suzette's spinelessness. Spine. Less.
Aside from the sheer improbability of this story line, it also wasn’t very well-written either. And, there are very few things more unforgivable than that to an avid reader. I mean, yes, there were words strung together in a way that made sense in the English language, but I didn’t feel that there was any remarkable skill on display whatsoever. I didn't feel like I'd stumbled across anything that I would take with me for more than 4 minutes after I turned the final page of that book. It read as a first-time novel for sure, clunky and clumsily done.
I’ve seen Baby Teeth listed as a thriller; it wasn’t that at all, but it COULD have been. It probably would have been a much more enjoyable read—cringe-worthy moments in the plot and all—if it had been written from Suzette’s POV only. Then we could have seen her mounting terror and desperation and feel it in a more pure form—the way that she did. But Stage decided to try her hand at writing in a child’s voice via Hanna's chapters and it Did. Not. Work. Honestly, a terrible idea given the level of skill she displayed in this novel. Not only did it take away from the suspense to know exactly what Hanna was going to do next from her POV, but the clunky and inauthentic way in which Stage wrote Hanna made reading her chapters a real chore. Of course, I understand that Stage was attempting to speak simplistically, as a child might, but it didn’t sound anything like a seven-year-old’s way of speech and mannerisms in the slightest. Her editor would have done better to tell her to hold off on that.
I nearly didn’t finish this book. I found it to be THAT ridiculous with nothing remarkable about the writing style to keep me hooked. But, as we readers often do, I just HAD to trudge on to see if my mind would be magically changed in the end. It wasn’t, though the end result of the book was one of the better parts of the plot, so at least there’s that, right? 2 stars **
*I received an ARC of this book from the publisher, St. Martin's Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I’m relieved to have aged out of that sense that my primary obligation is to be pretty, relieved to work at a job that allows me to feel useful. Did II’m relieved to have aged out of that sense that my primary obligation is to be pretty, relieved to work at a job that allows me to feel useful. Did I used to think being pretty was my primary obligation because I was in some way delusional? Or was it that I’d absorbed the messages I was meant to absorb with the same diligence with which I’d studied?
Curtis Sittenfeld’s You Think It, I’ll Say It, is a collection for the grown woman, for the woman who still thinks back on her “youth” and college years with fondness but also with a sense of wonder – is that who I was? Is this who I have become?
This is a smart collection—one that explores the natural irony in our everyday lives. There’s a lot of wistful nostalgia and contemplation in this collection on the feat—the very fact and act—of being pretty: what it means to be “pretty” and how that affects us as adult women.
“I once heard that smart women want to be told they’re pretty and pretty women want to be told they’re smart. And the most depressing part is that I think I agree.”
An upper middle-class woman ponders the boredom and mundane quality of her routine life, only to seek out a thrill that may or may not have already been there from the start (“The World Has Many Butterflies”).
A college student at her dad’s Alma Mater who’s idolized the school for most of her life also starts to idolize one of her college friends—only to find that the friend is just an average, flawed individual like everybody else (“Vox Clamantis in Deserto”).
A young political intern with OCD snaps while volunteering at a shelter for poor urban families (“Volunteers Are Shining Stars”).
And a woman contemplates her near-hate-like jealousy for the reality lifestyle star who was her first lesbian experience way back when (“The Prairie Wife”).
Here would be a great place to say that “Plausible Deniability,” “Off the Record” and “A Regular Couple” were my other favorites. I wasn’t particularly fond of “Gender Studies,” in which a woman misplaces her license and ends up having a sexual encounter with the taxi driver she believes has found the license. I first read this one in The New Yorker in the fall of 2016. There were speculations and allusions from other bloggers that maybe Sittenfeld was offering political commentary on a nation’s identity lost! (I say in my dramatic voice) due to the (imminent) election of Trump, but I didn’t see it. I just took that story at face value and it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t a favorite either.
These are just a few of the narratives you’ll find here in this 10-story collection. There were so many times that a story would start and I’d fear it was going down the route of “Everyday Yuppie,” and I cringed. BUT, EVERY time, Sittenfeld pulled the story back from the brink with a twist of irony and humor. After the third or fourth story, I just relaxed into the read and went with it, knowing that the place I’d end up in the end wasn’t where I thought I was going in the beginning. I know I’m not alone when I say that I LOVE being able to trust an author, to trust a narrator, like that. It allows for a phenomenally smooth read and for the reader to have time to become one with the characters, no matter how short the stories are.
This collection ran a gamut of stories that wasn’t necessarily wide but did manage to convey a delightful spectrum of sentiments, emotions and lessons. “Bad Latch” was by far one of my favorite stories, hilariously Yuppie and otherworldly—these sheltered, middle-class moms who spend their days at infant swimming lessons and pregnancy yoga—then the story morphed into something so much more special and resonating:
“It wasn’t that I looked down on parents who put their kids in daycare, it wasn’t that I disapproved of them, or at least if I did disapprove, I knew enough to be embarrassed by my disapproval…Nevertheless, on Sadie’s first day at Green Valley Children’s Center, I didn’t even make it out the front door before I burst into tears. I hadn’t felt that bad about some of the things that women having babies when I did…were supposed to feel bad about—an epidural, formula—but the collapse of my carefully crafted childcare setup seemed like a failure of a different magnitude."
In You Think It, I’ll Say It, Curtis Sittenfeld’s distinctive writing style is in full form. It’s casual and conversational, witty and makes for an easy, entertaining read. I also gave her a strong 4 stars for her novel Eligible for this same reason. I blew through about 60% of this collection in one sitting, so well did it flow and move me along with the characters and their ironic contemplative situations. Not only that, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Sittenfeld is a true master of showing her reader rather than telling her reader. I got to know so much about her characters simply by watching them in their everyday lives, and she, as the writer, trusted her reader enough to let us figure out what she was trying to say. Each story is set in a different city (all either during or referencing the 1990s) which I thought was a FANTASTIC device, creating a kind of survey of American—well, upperish middle class white American—life. That survey aspect was a real gem, because each story in this collection set up a different dilemma rooted in the same basic question—the question of Who am I, how did I get here, and am I okay with it? None of these stories takes an overly grandiose view of life. No one is living in a sci fi fantasy world of improbable circumstances and star ships. These stories all happen right here on Earth, literally, of course, but more importantly, figuratively. And for me, that’s always a breath of fresh air. A strong 4 stars ****
Pure Hollywood proved to be a collection plagued by a wide spectrum of dullness. There were moments, mostly at the start of the collection, where overPure Hollywood proved to be a collection plagued by a wide spectrum of dullness. There were moments, mostly at the start of the collection, where overwrought prose ran rampant in a way that made no sense whatsoever. It was as if the author, Christine Schutt, had her trusty Word thesaurus immediately on hand, ready to whip out at any moment to form absurd sentences instead of creating readable literature—as if her way of being “creative” was to write so evasively and nonsensically as to confuse the reader into thinking, “Damn, this MUST be the newest form of erudite art; I’ve got to HAVE it!” purely (sure, why not?—pun intended) because they don’t get it at all.
As many readers and writers know, Ernest Hemingway is famously quoted as saying: “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader … will feel those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” I’m confident that this is not what you’ll find in Schutt’s Pure Hollywood. All of the stories seemed incomplete and covered in a blanket of gray soot. They were all a bit dreary in atmosphere (I found that to be fine if that's the mood she was going for) and very unfinished. There was very little shock factor in this collection at all, and what little there was wasn’t followed-up on, so the few moments of revelation turned out to be aimless, pointless, near-powerless punches that slipped off the skin like water, non-scathing and unmemorable.
The first story in the collection took up one-third of the space of the entire anthology and had literally only one moment of pure interest. You’ll know that moment when you get to it. I left “Pure Hollywood” behind feeling that moments of my life had been squandered in reading it. But, I pressed on.
The second story in this collection, “The Hedges,” begins as such:
The woman who had just been identified as attached to Dick Hedge looked pained by the clotted, green sound of her little boy’s breathing, an unwell honk that did not blend in with the sashaying plants and beachy-wet breeze of the island.
*raising hand* Umm, did you just try to say that a woman’s son was sick on the beach? I had to read that line at least three times just to extract some meaning from that sludge of words, almost senseless when mixed in that formula. That opening line alone was enough to make me say “Pass” on that story. BUT I pressed forward again. I ended up liking “The Hedges”—the story of a strangely unhappy young couple on vacation with their fussy toddler and the events on that vacation that led to an unfortunate event—far more than I liked any of the other stories. Still, it read like an adult version of Fun with Dick and Jane (and the husband is even named Dick). If that was Schutt’s intent, it fell just short of being clever because it was somehow never fully realized. It read like an outline of a story with none of the goods filled in, and because of that I didn’t especially care about the family, particularly that toddler.
“The Duchess of Albany” was the absolute epitome of the word WASP(y) and held no interest for me whatsoever. It read easily, sometimes even jauntily, but in the end left absolutely no impact.
“Family Man” was a dull flash fiction about a dull man. Literally. That is all.
“Where You Live, When You Need Me” warranted only an annoyed side-eye glance and a curt flipping of the page. As far as I can tell, it said nothing about anything but still managed to be rather snobbishly WASPy. Are these people seriously hiring a homeless woman, whose full name they don’t even care to know, to help them out around the homes they’re renting in “the Berkshires,” then contemplating their belief in God (ironic, sure, I see it. But too haughty for me to even care)? The nerve. Nothing else to be said about this one.
“The Dot Sisters”—what for??
“Oh, the Obvious” drew me in because of the potential for irony implied in the title. There was some irony in the end that was tolerably well done.
In the end, Christine Schutt’s Pure Hollywood is a collection I’m sure most people can live without. This compilation of stories added nothing to the dialogue about anything, unless you are the kind of reader who enjoys a dry read of literary content the likes of which is sure to make future readers inexperienced with the genre cringe away from it. I get the feeling that Schutt may have been going for dry, witty, ironic and possibly socially commentating fiction, but I do feel that I very well might be stretching for benefit of the doubt because it just never got there. For me, it was mostly fiction without a soul, which, I’ve noticed, is almost always what you get from Grove Atlantic/Grove Press. (This is an unfortunate, but accurate observation, in my personal opinion.) To give the best and most accurate analogy I can think of, this entire collection was written for and about extremely uptight Protestant-esque people of coin (probably family money) who would wear cardigans buttoned at the neck and drone on and on about the troubles with “the help.” Picture that person and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the audience for this short story collection. I struggled with what rating to give Pure Hollywood. In the end, 2 stars seemed fair enough, and I’ll move on with my life thinking no more about it. **
*I received an advance-read copy of the book from the publisher, Grove Atlantic, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
See my EXCLUSIVE interview with Francesca Hornak here!
Seven Days of Us is the quintessential heartwarming family novel, a quick and quaint little holiSee my EXCLUSIVE interview with Francesca Hornak here!
Seven Days of Us is the quintessential heartwarming family novel, a quick and quaint little holiday read to be devoured in one sitting. With flashes of wit, intellect and social reflection peppered in, Seven Days offers a great combination of laughter and insight, as we get to know these characters while they re-get to know each other. Imagine being stuck in your home for seven days with your family, unable to flee into the night, unable to avoid the unavoidable. To me, that sounds like the worst kind of torture! And Francesca Hornak brought that feeling to life in a meaningful way that allows the reader to identify with at least one of the characters, always a treat.
This read is not one that will bog you down, nor is it one that will stay with me, personally, for very long. Seven Days of Us is a novel that stays in its lane; it doesn't try to masquerade as something it's not, and I can respect that. I don't know that it was "sharply" anything, as the blurb implied, and the ending did hurry to a close like an urgent hand at your back. BUT, it is a read for the lovers of the quaint and cozy literary experience, a novel for anyone who loved the movie The Family Stone (2005), and a delightful treat for those on holiday to pass the time and enjoy a chuckle. If that's what you're looking for, you've found a home and a warm mug of Earl Grey within the pages of Hornak's Seven Days. 3*
**Thank you so much to Berkley Publishing who reached out to me and sent me a physical ARC of this book!
Never have I been so disappointed about not being approved for an ARC as I was about not getting approved for this novel; I’d had this novel on my radNever have I been so disappointed about not being approved for an ARC as I was about not getting approved for this novel; I’d had this novel on my radar for a while. Unfortunately, though, never have I been so disappointed about a read I’d so hyped up in my mind either. It wasn’t exactly a crash and burn, but it definitely fell from a pretty tall height in my mind at nearly whiplash inducing speeds.
Doree Shafrir’s Startup was most definitely the knock-off version of Dave Eggers' The Circle (the book, not that terrible movie version). The characters were so mono-dimensional that I literally got them confused from time to time. No, literally, thought to myself, “Wait, I thought she was doing something else last chapter. Ooh, no, that was the other chick with a personality as flimsy as a paper doll.” The characters were as shallow as a kiddie pool and had no depth of consequence whatsoever. The men were all fist-pumping-type bros with over-inflated egos and near-megalomaniacal views of themselves. Now, I can’t say that this isn’t how it is in startup culture—I have no idea—but you’d think that writing the characters like that would be, at the very least, playing into every stereotype imaginable, wouldn’t you?
However, Startup did present a really witty look at Millennial culture. Though, as a Millennial myself, I’m not sure that this is such a great read for people who are actually of this generation (is Shafrir even? Doesn't seem like it), because it tended to come off as a near-parody of our already-outrageous cultural mores. That coupled with the fact that Shafrir kept popping in like an annoying game of peek-a-boo to comment on various aspects of the startup culture gave the novel an odd mashup of: vivid, interesting facts about startup arena MEETS condescendingly parodic interpretation of this generation.
Hmm, left a taste in my mouth that’s pretty similar to unsalted potatoes: I could take it or leave it on my plate; not really adding much to my intellectual meal at all.
The first half of the novel was so description heavy, I’m convinced that word count alone must've taken up at least a quarter of the word count. So much time was spent both describing everything—South by Southwest (sigh, multiple times), yuppie office spaces, pretty, rich WASPs flitting around NYC. Shafrir painted their world as though it were a dream—a tech bubble fantasy, if you will. That aspect of the novel admittedly added humor, never taking itself too seriously, and I’m sure that plenty of readers will love that version of comedy. I never said that Startup wasn’t a lively read, full of pop culture references and characters who tried to be quirky—and I won’t take this moment to say that either—but I will note that often they came off as unlikeably entitled and pompous. Eeew.
While the main conflicts surrounding the startups themselves offered some appeal and functioned as the driving point of the novel, the internal, wholly first-world “struggles” of the characters were laughably superficial and mostly trivial (not humorously, mind you, laughably). (view spoiler)[Like, who really cares who sent who a nude selfie?? And, if that’s what’s got your world all flipped on its head, it might be time to reevaluate your life, sweetie. (hide spoiler)] Floods and floods of details filled the pages, diluting the actual story line, slowing the plot and washing out the impact that the read could have had. That space on the pages could have been put to better use for sure (view spoiler)[(like, actually wrapping up some of those loose ends maybe)? (hide spoiler)] Because of this, the tension was lackluster at best most of the time.
All in all, Startup was the chick-lit version of a techy person’s dream read. There was little substance, nothing substantial or memorable about it beyond the occasional head-nod-inducing riff or mildly humorous commentary. I’d recommend it for Tina Fey lovers and tech-minded folks in need of some mental reprieve. It’s a fun, mindless read that won’t change or rock your world but may entertain you for the few hours it takes to get through it. 3 stars ***
I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Henry Holt & Co., via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Boy, was I looking I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Henry Holt & Co., via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Boy, was I looking forward to reading this one! With its attractive cover promising intrigue, social commentary and references to Wharton, I was sold like a new car and eagerly clicked ‘Request’ on NetGalley the moment I came across it. But upon reading it, I came away with a mixed bag of emotions toward it that left me a bit dissatisfied. What I liked about Puig’s A Wife of Noble Character was that it didn’t follow the trajectory I thought it would, and that’s always a plus. I had an idea in my head of how it would all play out when I first met all of the characters. And, yes, while this is a self-proclaimed “classic love story,” (a label which basically lets you know how the story will end) the twists and turns that happened to get to that point were often surprising. The biggest plus of A Wife for me, by far, was the last 20% of the read, which pulled this novel back from the abyss for me. Without giving anything away, one of the pivotal turning points in the novel did make me respect, if not like, Vivienne a little more.
Vivienne is a character who is considered by all in her sphere to be beautiful. All she has ever been—or accomplished—in life is being “beautiful,” thus her aspirations in life go hand-in-hand with that. She struggles against this internally, but it’s not as deep as it sounds. Really, she’s trying to decide if being a Texas gold-digger is really her calling—though she still hasn’t settled on whether or not she would consider herself to be such. Enter her gentlemen callers--the men in her life who have similar views on her shown in polarizing ways but who end up shaping the way that she views herself and what she wants from her own life.
Now, I must say that in reviewing A Wife of Noble Character, I realized that the problem I had with it was the packaging. It all began and ended, so to speak, with the packaging! Reading it, I wanted it to be more; I wanted it to live up to the lovely wrapping that it was dressed and presented in, but it didn’t—not for me. This wasn’t some poignant and charmingly funny Edith Wharton spin-off—some modernized version that still had some intellectual bite. No, this was pure chick lit, highlighted by the fact that the protagonist, Vivienne, seemed to want sympathy and commiseration for the everyday life hardships that she experienced, as if she were somehow exempt from real-world issues. Oh my God, you poor thing--you have bills? You have to figure out how to get a job? Oh, I'm so sorry for you! Or not. (Enter borderline shopaholic heroine who frets over whether or not to flat iron her hair. Oh Lord, there's nothing more annoying than a whiny and entitled protagonist!!) Aggrivating, but often true of chick lit, which is why had I known that this was behind door #1, I would’ve run in the other direction for sure. More importantly, I can’t imagine that this won’t be an issue for this novel to some extent in the future. How are readers of chick lit who might really enjoy this read to know that they’ve found their match if it isn’t packaged correctly? And how many readers will be annoyed to no end (raising hand now) once they figure out that they’ve been duped by a literarily slanted book flap and cover?
Meanwhile, this one started out in one of the strangest manners I’ve come across in a while. It just dropped the reader in, right in the middle of a college campus quad, not knowing who the characters were or where their motivations lay. I felt like I’d stumbled into the middle of something and had a hard time getting into the swing of things in those first few chapters, because I kept feeling that maybe I’d missed something—that the format of the first chapter had been purposeful and not just awkwardly done. Character entrances like that can work well and make the reader feel that they’re really in the middle of the action! But this just felt like I’d started the read in the middle of chapter 2.
All in all, if you’re looking for glimpses of Edith Wharton, you won’t find her here. That I can promise you (if you’re like me and you think something like "Afterward" [1910] when you think Wharton). Nevertheless, the writing was energetic and buoyant in its WASPiness—in the same vein as other recent releases The Nest and Eligible. Of course, it exploited every cliché of Texas life you’ve ever heard—trust me, I know, being born and raised in Texas. But clichés are clichés for a reason, so sometimes they work well when re-examined, re-purposed, re-done, re-imagined, but I didn’t see much of that here. If pushed just a tad further it could’ve been satire in some areas, but it fell a little short in that department too. I felt like I knew these characters and understood them, because their motives were simple. But I never felt for them or rooted for them. Really, I was just watching them and their drama play out but never felt a part of it, never felt invested in the outcome.
So, between the light-heartedness of the narrative and the mild feeling of being duped, A Wife grabbed herself 3 stars that would’ve been shaky at best if not for the pivot it took toward the end. 3 stars ***
Eligible is the witty and modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Here you will find the Bennett sisters in the 21st century, complete Eligible is the witty and modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Here you will find the Bennett sisters in the 21st century, complete with artificial insemination, yoga, and fad workout obsessions among other more raucous taboos. Here you will also find nearly 200 chapters—oh my goodness, those chapters; more on those below—and a page count a bit gratuitous for such a read. HOWEVER, within that excessive page count you will also find, sharply entertaining dialogue that’s convincingly witty and shockingly blunt that will keep you laughing along with the Bennett family throughout.
Eligible and I had a bit of a tug-of-war over my reader feelings for the first few chapters, I’ll admit. The dialogue struck me as funny, yes, even ingenious, but also superficial and surface-deep, if that. Initially, the characters struck me as two-dimensional chalk outlines that just happened to speak with droll absurdity that worked. Ah, but then I got to know the Bennett sisters a little better! If Sittenfeld was aiming for jaunty and clever, she certainly hit the nail on the head and was able to keep it consistent throughout. The writing was anecdotal, sometimes to its detriment and at times to its credit, but highly entertaining most of the time.
I must say that I’d be completely misleading you if I didn’t prepare soon-to-be readers for that chapter formatting, though. Some will love it, because it made the read feel that it was moving along faster—helpful when you’re holding almost 500 pages of what is essentially light-read chick lit in your hand—but for those of you who want to be profoundly engrossed and deeply invested in your characters, you may find this to be a bother. I straddled this line. There were times when I was practically dizzy with all of the vignette-type chapters sprawled out here, several of them less than a page long (that goes for pages on your phone, Kindle, iPad—less than a page anywhere, on any reading medium, really). I felt inundated by 200 flash fictions, which just happened to link together into a full-length story. At times I found it to be slightly annoying; sometimes I loved it because it seemed to make the read feel lightning fast, and sometimes it made me feel disconnected from the characters and their world because there wasn’t enough there in the chapter to pull me in. In the end, I think both sides canceled each other out for me, and it was fine.
Eligible definitely could’ve been cut down though. I don’t believe for a second that the editor didn’t notice those superfluous chapters that led nowhere—anecdotes about the past and random streams of consciousness—which should’ve been yanked out, because that definitely contributed to the relatively high page count and my antsyness toward the end. But aside from that last round of edits that went undone, this was a really funny and entertaining read. In the end, I did end up caring about the characters once I settled in—Darcy was my favorite, by far. Sittenfeld gets extra kudos for the way that this one came full circle. If you’ve ever read Austen’s classic on which this one is based, you basically knew how it would end, but Sittenfeld managed to toss in plenty of surprises along the way. I also liked the way that the title was used as a double entendre throughout this novel. Well done.
All in all, I found Eligible to be a jaunty little read that smacked of WASPy delights. It would make for a brilliant movie, likely better than it read, though I enjoyed it on a whole. The characters had wit and flair that would translate well on the silver screen. And, I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention my appreciation for the way that Sittenfeld handled Mrs. Bennetts’ casual xenophobia, cooly admonishing her as ridiculous, foolish and behind the times with just the right hint of “just the way it is.” That aspect added an extra layer of funny in a way that could have easily fallen flat or warranted an eye roll (like its counterpart The Nest, which I have also reviewed. If you’re a chick-lit lover, or even curious about the retelling of an Austen classic, this one will really work for you. Indeed, if you were a fan of The Nest, Eligible will work for you as well, because this one is definitely its much prettier younger cousin that you’ll be glad you chose instead).
So, keeping in mind that this was light-read material not intended to be the next Harper Lee brainchild, I give this one an easily attained 4 stars. ****
The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney did absolutely nothing for me. (I clearly seem to be of the minority here, but I’m fine with that.) I had high hopThe Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney did absolutely nothing for me. (I clearly seem to be of the minority here, but I’m fine with that.) I had high hopes for this one going in—another brilliantly written cover flap did the trick—but my expectations were never met, and by mid-way, I stopped hoping and assuming that they eventually would be. In fact, this one almost didn’t get finished; sheer perseverance pushed me through.
The Nest is about the Plumb siblings, four middle-agers whose lives are thrown into tumult when the eldest, Leo, gets himself into trouble yet again—drugs, a Porsche and a pretty young thing complete the cliché—and their mother nearly depletes “the nest,” their trust fund, which they are all expecting to inherit soon, to get him out of this bind. His siblings, Jack, Bea, and Melody are outraged and anxiety-filled, worrying about their personal financial situations, which have escalated to the point of emergency because they assumed they’d have the nest to bail them out, and now it’s nearly gone. Leo and his siblings struggle to find a way out of the mess he started, and isn’t sure how to remedy, while dealing with the intricacies of their own lives.
The problem with The Nest is that this novel could’ve been written by ANYONE. I saw no extraordinary skill, no ambition, no originality, no nothing. Even the endings were all hastily done, formulaic bow ties fit for day-time TV. In short, I was not impressed. The Nest fell so flat for me that there was nearly an audible "splat" sound ringing in my ears throughout the entire reading process. The writing was mediocre, at times hitting on pithy narrative prose that occurred so infrequently that I have to believe they were flukes, one-offs:
"Maybe she would slip Melody some cash, enough for some Botox or a facial or something to brighten her pallor. She was the youngest and somehow the most faded, as if the Plumb DNA had thinned with each conception, strong and robust with Leo and each child after being—a little less.”
That was one of the better lines of this novel (in addition to the 9/11 nationalism sarcasm), but unfortunately it also sums up how I felt about this one—strong and robust packaging and selling of this novel only for each chapter to impress me less and less. The characters here were so uninteresting, so unremarkable, that I could hardly keep them straight. They were all either blah, like Melody, or cliché—oh, the clichés here!
I can’t even really fully discuss the glaring rudimentary stereotypes running rampant in this one. There was the drunken, ice queen of a matriarch who dressed in a sexy robe for her daughter’s 12th birthday (one of the more interesting characters, whom we hardly saw, but the cliché smacked me in the face). Then there was Matilda Rodriguez, the naïve Hispanic girl who “called everyone Mami or Papi” despite their age—cliché, yawn—and Simone, the supposedly cool, urban, street smart black girl (honestly, already the shallow cliché in this novel’s setting) who says, “That's tight” a lot. Tight? REALLY? Tight? What decade is this, please? This one was absolutely deserving of the eye-roll, that she would stake her novel on such underdeveloped outlines of overdone stereotypes (and that it would then be praised as great writing really confounded me). Then we shan’t forget the cliché of the gay sibling who wanted lots of random, casual sex in sleazy nightclubs (I literally forgot his name and had to look above to write it here, Jack) who marveled at his luck at dodging AIDS (really?), and the list actually does go on. There were so many clichés thrown into this one that it was like the literary equivalent of Scary Movie. This element in and of itself revealed that Sweeney is as out of touch with the real world as her characters are, and that made the read unenjoyable—in fact, a chore. It wasn’t nearly pushed far enough to be satire; this is really the world she wanted to paint, which would have been fine, possibly even funny, as a satire but nothing more than that.
The Nest also had too many superfluous characters and story lines! (I’m looking at you Robohook man, and the guy from the 9/11 towers--and his daughters, and his dog, and his deceased wife, oh my!) This one had the makings of a good read and it even had a few glimmers of entertainment value (but they weren't nearly enough to up the number of stars). (view spoiler)[This novel wasn't even really ABOUT "the nest." It stopped even being about that about 1/3 of the way through, and I nearly forgot what the commotion of the plot line was all about in the first place. (hide spoiler)]
If you want to read about WASPy yacht problems (1st world problems that no one cares about other than the self-absorbed people experiencing them), endless whining about not receiving a large, undeserved amount of money, and story lines that suffered because of the sheer number of them squeezed in here, you’ve come to the right place. I definitely would not recommend this novel to anyone who would even remotely consider themselves a Millennial (whether by age or by temperament). I started to give this one 2 stars, because I finished it, but then realized that that was my own accomplishment, not this novel’s. 1 star. *
This novel was a trumped up work packaged and sold as the must-read of summer 2015. Of course, publishing houses are very good at packaging and sellinThis novel was a trumped up work packaged and sold as the must-read of summer 2015. Of course, publishing houses are very good at packaging and selling—that’s what they do—but this one must’ve had the PR agent from heaven! When it appeared on the NYT with its fashionable blurb, I instantly reached for it (all hail the power of sales), but upon reading it, I quickly found it to be an awkward collision between The Devil Wears Prada (though quite the lesser, copy-cat sort of version of it) and Columbine. Yes, try for a moment to imagine that!
The writing was immature, though there were moments where it managed the humorous tone that it was seeking: No man feels very much compelled to rip your clothes off after you inform him, bitchily, that he left one lone turd floating in the toilet is an example of both, offered fairly early in the novel. However, the juxtaposition between her old life and new was fairly amateurishly handled, and while Knoll tried to paint the picture of “girl with rough past makes it big,” the main character, Ani, really came off as whiny and spoiled and eye-roll-promptingly annoying. Unfortunately, there’s enough to read out there about the privileged WASPy female, so while I have no qualms reading it when done right, generally, no one needs another whiny heroine who fawns over Choo pumps and pink nail polish.
I will give it this nod though, the Columbine-esque overture was handled decently—that entire sequence did prompt page turning, and TifAni’s past sexual experiences were relatable to female readers, I’m sure. We all know of someone who’s encountered something similar (and for similar reasons). In that way, TifAni’s school-age character came off a little of a cliché, but it was a cliché worth exploring because she exists for a reason. And the way that TifAni's choices played out allowed Knoll to reach out and touch an audience that was wide enough, it seems, to propel this novel onto the NYT Bestseller List. In fact, the “past” chapters carried the novel much farther than the “present-day” chapters ever could have.
With that in mind, this one would have been much better if she’d been able to carry that tone throughout because, in a lot of ways, TifAni’s voice was more mature than Ani’s, a regression in tone that irked me to no end, proffered only a snarky tone that often missed the mark and whininess that made her character the utmost annoying and hard to read, let alone like. ** 2.5 stars
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