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| 0802128831
| 9780802128836
| 0802128831
| 3.87
| 83
| unknown
| Nov 06, 2018
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What a clever idea to amass an anthology of these various "wine reads." Here is a collection for true wine connoisseurs and novices alike, because eac
What a clever idea to amass an anthology of these various "wine reads." Here is a collection for true wine connoisseurs and novices alike, because each selection not only highlights the wine itself - so the reader gets mini wine lessons - but highlights the lives that we live around the wine pastimes we love. An excellent gift idea for wine lovers and readers both! FOLLOW ME HERE: Art + Deco Agency Book Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Art + Deco Publishing Agency ...more |
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0
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not set
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not set
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Sep 28, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0374167893
| 9780374167899
| 0374167893
| 3.46
| 167
| Nov 20, 2018
| Nov 20, 2018
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it was ok
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Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children is a collection of uncomfortable moments – stories that aim to disquiet and sometimes even hit the mark. Well, they a
Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children is a collection of uncomfortable moments – stories that aim to disquiet and sometimes even hit the mark. Well, they approach the mark, can see the mark, maybe even brush against the mark at their height, but never firmly hold the mark head on. You’ll feel the effects of these stories around the edges of your reader periphery. Some may love this disquieting quality in this short story collection, but I found it to be dry and evasive. I am not a believer that just because a work (or collection of works, in this case) is literary it can’t have soul as well. I firmly believe that the two can coexist, that they can complement and enhance each other. But Laura Adamczyk’s debut collection succeeded at “eerie” while never etching any significance and depth into the literary canon. There are moments here, but that’s it. “Wanted” and “Girls” get so close to the edge of a reader’s comfort level that they could have been thrilling. If. If Adamczyk had taken another step, colored the picture further out from the middle and closer to the boundary lines. If she’d really taken us there and completed the thought with gumption and confidence. “Girls” plays with the tricks our childhood memories can play on us – how we can never remember everything perfectly, especially if the event was traumatic, playing with the fact that we block out things that are too painful to remember head on. But, ultimately, this collection of stories always pulled back to what felt like nowhere before the big whammy could fully take hold. Admirably, the writing style in Hardly Children manages to be dry and vague, daring yet always just shy of spoken malice or descriptions that draw a full picture of said malice. These stories are told with innuendo, which is a great tactic, but I was never in love with this particular execution. In this collection, you’ll find a seemingly innocent hug between a child and a stranger, and you’ll detect a hint of malice around it. You’ll see three little girls who watch their father leave their mother and then have a shared experience that traumatizes them so much they can’t even agree, after the fact – years later – on what really happened that day. And you’ll find a city where children – well, “hardly children,” as the author describes, those that are too grown and “strutting” for their own good – get kidnapped, never to be seen again, and a man who suspends himself by hooks in his skin for artistic installations. The imagery in this collection brushes up against “beautiful” at times. There’s a straight-faced lyricism to it that does have its appeal, but the stories themselves are dry, empty shells of narration, often leading nowhere, making me feel nothing – worse than nothing: bored. It’s the kind of writing that has talent but no soul, ideas without the full range of narrative motion needed to execute them. That was disappointing, because the idea for this collection is intriguing. But, as we know, intrigue can only lead the horse to water; it can’t make it drink. ** I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Girroux, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Art + Deco Agency Book Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Art + Deco Publishing Agency ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 04, 2018
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Nov 09, 2018
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Aug 27, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0385544235
| 9780385544238
| 0385544235
| 3.66
| 305,876
| Jul 17, 2018
| Nov 20, 2018
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liked it
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Femi makes three, you know. Three, and they label you a serial killer. In case you haven't noticed, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer Femi makes three, you know. Three, and they label you a serial killer. In case you haven't noticed, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer has been taking the social media scene by storm the past few weeks. And I get it; the cover art is (pardon my pun) killer and the title exudes a certain titillation that will make a reader quickly reach for the book on the shelf. For me, My Sister, the Serial Killer, was an easy, brisk read that I mostly read in one sitting. And I was additionally excited to read it when I realized that the author and I graduated from the same university in England and likely had the same creative writing instructors! The short chapters (some only a few sentences long) created the effect of breezing through the novel at record speed, which is a plus, but it also created a few issues for this narrative. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel follows sisters Ayoola and Korede – Ayoola kills ‘em and Korede cleans ‘em up. But this isn’t just a novel about the boyfriends falling like flies; it’s a novel about the trials and bonds of sisterhood, an exploration of childhood abuse and a would-be love story all wrapped up tightly in the culture of Lagos, Nigeria. Now, that’s a lot to try to cram into 240 (not even full) pages, but it can be done; I’ve even seen it done well. Here, I wasn’t mind-blowingly impressed by the execution (again, couldn’t resist!) of My Sister, the Serial Killer. If you’re a reader who puts a lot of weight on pace, you might find that you’re in for a rather jerky ride with this novel. It flowed neither at a lyrically smooth pace nor at a heart-pounding thriller pace. It just sort of jerked from scene to scene with very little, if any, narrative connective tissue to sew the chapters seamlessly together. In short, while it a had a great plot and an ending that did manage to surprise me, it was not written with a lot of finesse. It read, to me, like a very first draft, not quite filled in enough to give us readers an entire picture. It was like a well-done sketch of artistry that hasn’t yet been filled in with color, like the structure of a building that has not yet been painted and offered windows and balconies. Now, ONWARD to the pros that you’ll find within these pages, because there are several of those. For one, it was a plus that this novel read so fast. While the plotting was jerky, the pace was quick, and that pulls you in to the story fast as you realize that you’re already so deep into it with so little time spent on it. And one of the real gems of My Sister was how Braithwaite interlaced the heart-pounding narrative of the killings themselves with the humor of said serial killer’s indifference and feigned naiveté: There is music blasting from Ayoola’s room. She is listening to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” It would be more appropriate to play Brymo or Lourde, something solemn or yearning, rather than the musical equivalent of a pack of M&Ms. This novel is fully current, with narrative tools and chapter titles like “Instagram.” Ayoola is addicted to SnapChat and Instagram, often being scolded by Korede for posting frivolous updates for her followers when she’s supposed to be mourning her missing boyfriend, whom she herself has killed. Ayoola has forgotten, just that quickly about the fallen men and goes on with her life in a way that baffles her sister – enter The Comedy. So, while I wished that My Sister, the Serial Killer was better built out as a narrative, there is merit to it as a quick, amusing little read. It all comes down to what you’re looking for on your TBR. If you’re interested in a narrative set in Nigeria, this may be a great pick for you. If you’re looking for lightness and humor, a read you can breeze through easily that still offers some suspense, then you’ve absolutely come to the right place. But, if you’re more in the market for a side of intellectual stimulation with your killer thriller, then you may want to side step this one; you want find a lot of that here. 3 stars. *** I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Doubleday, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME AT: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 14, 2018
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Nov 18, 2018
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Aug 22, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1787330419
| 9781787330412
| 1787330419
| 3.63
| 437,943
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 12, 2018
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really liked it
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I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the
I 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 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. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 22, 2018
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Aug 03, 2018
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Jul 22, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0440000785
| 9780440000785
| 0440000785
| 3.54
| 82,877
| Aug 21, 2018
| Aug 21, 2018
|
liked it
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Somewhere along the line, what was known as the Bible Belt, that swath of Southern states where religion ruled, started expanding. It morphed from bel
Somewhere along the line, what was known as the Bible Belt, that swath of Southern states where religion ruled, started expanding. It morphed from belt to corset, covering all but the country’s limbs—the democratic utopias of California, New England, the Pacific Northwest, DC, the southern jurisdictions of Texas and Florida—places so far on the blue end of the spectrum they seemed untouchable. But the corset turned into a full bodysuit, eventually reaching all the way to Hawaii. And we never saw it coming. Christina Dalcher’s Vox is an envisioning of what would transpire if right-wing radicals and fundamentalists were allowed to take over America. Hmmm, what a concept. I won’t point out the obvious climate in which this book was published At the beginning, a few people managed to get out. Some crossed the border into Canada; others left on boats for Cuba, Mexico, the islands. It didn’t take long for the authorities to set up checkpoints, and the wall separating Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from Mexico itself had already been built, so the egress stopped fairly quickly. “We can’t have our citizens, our families, our mothers and fathers, fleeing,” the president said in one of his early addresses. The plot of Vox is simple. Dr. Jean McClellan is one of millions of American women who didn’t get out in time. Who are trapped in America stripped of their jobs, their personal finances and their words. Once at the forefront of her field and on the verge of finding a cure for disease of the brain, she is now reduced to being confined within the four walls of her home, counting her words for the day and making dinner. “Whose fault do you think it was?” he said. I stood in my kitchen, wanting to explain, careful not to, while he told me we’d marched one too many times, written one too many letters, screamed one too many words. “You women. You need to be taught a lesson.” What I will say is that when I picked up this book and read the blurb, I thought that an examination of these things told through the eyes of a “vox” would unfold, that the oppression experienced and the country’s direction described would be allowed to evolve and transport the reader to a new place of social scrutiny, even as the plot entertained and even elicited the occasional laugh. But that didn’t really happen in the way that I’d hoped; instead, Vox seemed rather like a bipolar haircut—like a mullet: literary imagery and plot setup in the front, full-on commercial melodrama in the back. It was as if Dalcher started out with a lofty idea but could not sustain it and, instead, resorted the love affairs and gorillas (yes, gorillas) to tell the story instead. It wasn’t, however, all dreadful. (Okay, maybe that’s a strong word. Lackluster is a more accurate one.) The premise was enticing, the title is arresting, and the cover art is just enough – minimalist in a way that highlights the words snatched from these women. Those things make Dalcher’s Vox a desirable read from the moment you hold it in your hot little hand. There was an unexpected plot twist surrounding one of Dr. Jean McClellan’s sons (view spoiler)[(though it, too, eventually melted into melodramatic prose and an unlikely “tah-dah” moment) (hide spoiler)]. What I appreciated most about this novel were those few moments where Dalcher snuck in the truly disturbing and uncomfortable, mostly through moments between Jean and her six-year-old daughter, Sonia. Little girls do have that ability to pull at our heartstrings while simultaneously being the vehicle for the truly sinister moments in social commentary in literature, don’t they? And our little Sonia lived up to that duty in several satisfying moments in Vox. The ending is a jumbled (hot) mess, a series of unlikely though convenient events. I hate quickly summed-up bow-tie endings that feel rushed, like a six-year-old hurrying to tell mommy all about their day. To me, they are the ultimate cop-out and proof pudding of lack of true skill and finesse as a writer. That must be the literary slant to my mind talking, but I’m okay with that. The Goodreads description of this book made me think Vox would take more time to explore and lay out the events around the breakdown of American society to the point that women become voxes. But it wasn’t that kind of read at all. For the most part, all of the deterioration of American society has already happened at the start of the book (though we do get snippy interior commentary on it from Jean), and we follow her around watching her days as she copes with it. Christina Dalcher’s Vox ended up being a far more commercial read than I thought it would be, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. But I just wasn’t impressed by the execution of the second half of this novel. Better luck next time. 3 stars *** **I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Berkley, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 18, 2018
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Aug 22, 2018
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Jun 14, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1250185343
| 9781250185341
| 1250185343
| 3.21
| 4,583
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 10, 2018
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liked it
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Everything started going wrong after the Second Wave…They’d had the lifespan tests and predictive treatments for decades…but this was something differ
Everything started going wrong after the Second Wave…They’d had the lifespan tests and predictive treatments for decades…but this was something different. The Second Wave, it was dubbed, when a whole raft of new Medtech measures were approved for mass distribution: first-generation SmartBloodTM, an early prototype of what would later become DiamondSkinTM, the first truly functional replacements. And with the new technologies, a whole host of new Directives, aimed at keeping the Ministry’s biggest investments—lifers—safe and healthy. The Second Wave. There would be immortals by the Third. Rachel Heng’s Suicide Club reimagines a near-future America as a place where medical advancements have made immortality possible and where class lines are now redrawn by a new form of classism and ageism: the estimated length of your lifespan. Here, people are separated into groups, “lifers” and “sub-100s,” those who have the potential to live forever and those who do not. It’s a fresh and unique way to envision a new version of a system that we’re already so familiar with and to see it play out in a futurist narrative, but this novel fell flat for me in more ways than one. Lea Kirino is a “lifer” who lives life by the rules. She maintains an ultra-healthy lifestyle to upkeep her biological upgrades, has a job she’s doing well at (trading organs on a new version of Wall Street), and has the perfect lifer fiancé. But, when she sees her father, who disappeared nearly ninety years before, her entire world is turned upside down, as he unwittingly leads her to the Suicide Club—a group of individuals intent on living and dying by their own rules. The problem with this storyline, I must first point out, is that (view spoiler)[the Suicide Club doesn’t even make an appearance until around the halfway mark of this novel, not to mention Lea doesn’t get “entangled” with them until nearly three-fourths of the way through! Really, this narrative is not centered around her “involvement” with the Suicide Club until after you wade through a couple hundred pages of fluffy writing that goes nowhere and describes nothing and her own internal struggle about her situation (troubles at work, being placed on the observation list when the government thinks she’s at risk for trying to kill herself and deciding if she really wants to be with that perfect lifer fiancé of 20 years). (hide spoiler)] Heng’s Suicide Club offers up beautiful imagery, but it failed to move the story along. There are few things worse to a reader than pointless narrative that takes up space on the page simply for the sake of being pretty. I don’t know about you, but I like my narratives like I like my stilettos: pretty but still functional. But here the purple prose brimmed the pages, fluffed up like 80s hair, describing nothing that resonated or left a lasting impact. All the space of written nothingness could’ve been used to progress the actual plot. Such a wasted opportunity on the part of the author is such a source of ennui for me. I also found all the characters in Suicide Club to be un **I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Henry Holt and Co., via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 13, 2018
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Aug 18, 2018
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Jun 06, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0571268943
| 9780571268948
| 0571268943
| 3.78
| 3,828
| Jan 07, 2017
| Jan 07, 2017
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really liked it
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Prayer was all the recommendation he heard for Nigeria these days. For every crisis, eyes were shut, knees engaged, heads pointed to Mecca and backs t
Prayer was all the recommendation he heard for Nigeria these days. For every crisis, eyes were shut, knees engaged, heads pointed to Mecca and backs turned to the matter at hand. Chibundu Onuzo’s sophomore novel, Welcome to Lagos, is a novel deeply embedded in the heart and soul of Lagos, Nigeria. This is book is not meant to be a tourist's guide to the city. It is neither positive propaganda nor demonstratively negative toward the culture or the state; it is simply a snapshot in Nigerian truth. Matter of fact but witty, emotional but not melodramatic. It is a balance that any reader can enjoy. The prose drips with the Lagosian culture and the atmosphere around the characters within these pages is busy with a sense of urgency and the fervency of life that is often overlooked in comforts of first-world life. Skillfully weaving multiple storylines together, Lagos laces together a tale where the powerful meet the poor head on, where Robin Hood-like morals still exist and where the cultures of London and Lagos blend and clash as colorfully as the gorgeous cover art that wraps this. I opened these pages not knowing what to expect as someone unfamiliar with the culture but, as I’d hoped, this novel took me by the hand and showed me the way, navigating me through the gates of wealth and under the bridges of poverty with both grace and heart. Welcome to Lagos features a cast of unlikely companions who are bound together by circumstance but wield their circumstances into the bonds of a true family. When Chike and Yemi desert the Nigerian army—a capital offense—they know that they must escape down roads less traveled until they can get as far away from the Niger Delta as possible. Along the way, they meet Fineboy, a mischievous youngster with a carefully crafted American accent who dreams of becoming a radio presenter and whose scrappy street smarts they come to depend on; Isoken, a beautiful adolescent separated from her family in the fighting who’s still traumatized and guarded from an attempted rape she suspects Fineboy of being a part of; and Oma who is fleeing from the damaging fists of her abusive husband who knows the next time he hits her could kill her. This unlikely band of characters just trying to survive finds themselves brushing up against the law in more ways than one and changing the course of history when an unlikely intruder to their home comes a-knocking. This novel is so full of the soul and ethos of Nigeria. The dialogue drips with authenticity right down to the colorful pidgin dialogue that Onuzo skillfully weaves in, authentically portraying a culture while navigating readers who are unfamiliar with such dialogue. There are several references and language switches you may not immediately grasp unless you intimately understand this world yourself, but that makes it all the more realistic and immersive in setting. The best literature isn’t watered down for the masses. Sometimes, we have to go it. Short chapters made for a quick and jaunty pace. There’s very little, if any, fat to be trimmed on this story—just enough to create a trim and attractive figure, not bloated with unnecessary prose that should have been shaved away instead of sitting like a pot belly at the center of the narrative. Welcome to Lagos links the narratives of each character together, even introducing new characters with their own POV chapters late in the novel. It creates the effect of effortlessly swinging from vine to vine, each one a new chapter with voices that overlap then recede into the distance, reappear then recede again as another voice takes over. There’s something in this novel for everyone, whether you are familiar with the culture or not. This is a novel that addresses real issues head on while avoiding soapboxing and proselytizing. Rape, domestic abuse, war, corruption, poverty, class relations, family, and duty all play major parts in this narrative production in a way that is as poetic as it is gritty. “Say it out loud so it doesn’t have power over you again. My husband used to beat me. I only married him because I was afraid of being a spinster for the rest of my life. Say it.” The sense of place and scenery here is alive. You can feel the dust in the air and the boli on your tongue. Welcome to Lagos offers up beautiful prose and thoughtful innuendos while never shying away from real matters, hard glimpses in the mirror for both the characters and their country. “In your country, the descendants of the biggest thieves, are they not the ones making the decisions? Your House of Lords. Who made them so? Was it not by oppressing the poor, by swallowing all the land? Today, we are calling them ‘my Lord,’ calling them ‘Honorable.’ Your banks built on the slave trade, Lloyds, have they returned any compensation?” The characters here are vivid with voices that raise loudly above the noise of the city, their storylines woven together with care and utter believability. Many of the chapters are marked with newspaper excerpts, both tying together the storylines and highlighting the state of Nigeria, functioning as a back drop for the novel’s unfolding. That was a clever choice. It allowed Onuzo to fill in the circumstances of Lagos, the state of the country and its people, without having to pound it home ad nauseum in the narrative, allowing room for social commentary at its finest—biting and poetic. And for that Welcome to Lagos earned 4 stars and a high recommendation from me that you add it to your shelves! **** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me **Thank you so much to the publicity department at Catapult/Counterpoint Press for reaching out to me and sending me copies of this lovely book!** P.S. If you've never been to a Chibundu Onuzo signing, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go to one. She's hilarious and engaging, down to earth and extremely, extremely intelligent and thoughtful when she speaks. Check out my interview with her on my Instagram, and it will soon be added to my blog as well! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 2018
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May 08, 2018
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Mar 31, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0316556343
| 9780316556347
| 0316556343
| 4.23
| 1,126,021
| Apr 10, 2018
| Apr 10, 2018
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liked it
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3.5 stars
Madeline Miller’s Circe is an epic that’s sweeping the nation today. Everywhere you turn, you see that magnificent cover (honestly, that 3.5 stars Madeline Miller’s Circe is an epic that’s sweeping the nation today. Everywhere you turn, you see that magnificent cover (honestly, that cover work is DIVINE and I’ve had the MOST fun photographing it for the Bookstagram). Twitter and Instagram are as we speak packed with Circe references and Miller interviews and, within all of that, Circe has found itself wrapped in all of the fluff and buildup and publicity of a typical ultra-hyped, big-named publisher release. Let’s be serious—most of us LOVE these kinds of releases and all the hysteria involved, even if we shy away from actually reading the hyped release itself. It can be a book lover’s dream--a book with all the fanfare of a blockbuster, silver screen release. I, too, was swept up in the craze, yet another smash hit from the publisher who brought us fan favorites like Twilight and whom I once interned for in London. But, in the end, I couldn’t ride the Circe wave all the way through. Let’s get one thing clear from the very start: Madeline Miller’s follow up to The Song of Achilles is an epic in the years spanned but not necessarily in the execution. To me, it read far more like a long story than an “epic.” When I think of that four-lettered word, I think of a novel that’s monumental and moving. I think of The Odyssey and sweeping sagas like A Song of Ice and Fire, even novels that are gripping and complex, long and treacherous as a Hajj like A Little Life. But Circe did not touch me in that way. In fact, there were moments—those times when the novel resorted to recounting the tales of the mythology we all know so well rather than Circe’s life is a true saga, and Miller’s research and background in the Classics shines through in this novel and serves her well. But, there are gaps between the breadth and notoriety of the mythology she incorporated here and the skill with which the novel was actually written. There is only so far that building a modern-day epic on the backs of known names and legends could go; Miller needed to take us the rest of the way to make Circe a contemporary wonder, to make this a saga all her own. This novel didn’t quite make it across that bridge for me. Circe offered up a world full of color, a world of eternal life and leviathans, of clashing gods and witchcraft, all while tying in mythological tales that’ve been handed down for ages. Perhaps it’s only fitting, in that case, that it was overwrought with linguistic hyperbole—The sound was a piercing chaos, like a thousand dogs howling at once…She beat the cliff-side, howling her frustration. This novel was full of both drama and melodrama, only one of which is necessary for a sweeping epic. Yet, I had to appreciate the scale of story Miller told and the breadth of her knowledge in the Classics. Circe was a great story for sure, but I was never fully moved by how it was told. 3.5 stars.*** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 12, 2018
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Apr 21, 2018
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Mar 23, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1501172328
| 9781501172328
| 1501172328
| 3.42
| 300
| unknown
| May 29, 2018
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liked it
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See my EXCLUSIVE interview with the author HERE! Malcolm Hansen Chats With Me About His Debut Novel Malcolm Hansen’s debut novel They Come in All Colo See my EXCLUSIVE interview with the author HERE! Malcolm Hansen Chats With Me About His Debut Novel Malcolm Hansen’s debut novel They Come in All Colors is a satirical narrative worthy of Paul Beatty’s stamp of approval. By that I mean it’s obvious that this book was either inspired or nurtured in some way by the Man Booker Prize-winning Beatty, if not both, and his style is so evident here that there were times this novel could have been written by the same hand. (He is even thanked in Color’s acknowledgements.) For those of you who follow my reviews, you’ll recall that I couldn’t stand Beatty’s award-winning The Sellout and marked it DNF, but just because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree doesn’t mean it may not taste different. They Come in All Colors is the story of one boy’s realization that the color of his skin does make a difference one long summer when the Freedom Riders come to his small town and the status quo around him is thrown into upheaval. Meet Huey, the smart-mouthed eight-year-old son of a white peanut farmer and a “mulatto’’ woman. Because of his Caucasian features and his close relationship with his father, Huey has always been allowed to pass as white, but when racial tensions erupt, resulting in protests, sit-ins, riots and the violent death of someone close to his family, the facts of life are very quickly called into question between this couple who cannot legally wed in the South and their son who finds himself banned from the “white” swimming pool and called n*gger for the first time. One of the more effective devices used within these pages is satire. In fact, really, the entire premise of the novel is satirical, but I appreciated Hansen’s wielding of it here and found it to be far more useful and self-evident than Beatty displayed in The Sellout. Here, that humorous device had more meaning and thus resonated louder and longer for me. Case in point, Huey encounters the most ridiculous conversations with his parents as they both try to explain to him why he isn’t colored though his mother is black. They tell him he’s white with a tan – an ironic notion in and of itself in 1960s South Georgia: Huey, listen to me. Your mother’s what’s known in the scientific community as a phenotypic anomaly. Okay? Someone of unknown morphology. A racial enigma—something so new they don’t have a name for it yet. You watch Wild Kingdom, right? Well, it’s like a newly discovered animal that they haven’t figured out where to put it in the classification system yet. Okay? So it’s pointless to even bother asking. Because—well—the truth is that if people can’t agree, we might never know... At the end of the day, you’re just going to have to accept that even if she is what you think she might be—which she isn’t—her being one wouldn’t make you one. Okay? You’re just going to have to accept that you’re different. That’s all there is to it. (view spoiler)[They also lie to him about the tragic death of their family friend and field hand, whose family has worked for the Fairchilds for three generations, when he is violently beaten to death for his part in being a leading figure in the riots when the Freedom Riders come to town. His parents both insist that he simply fell from a ladder by accident though Huey questions this rendition of events several times. (hide spoiler)] Though the start of this book was far too similar in tone to The Sellout, which means it too almost got DNFd, I pushed through a bit further and found that Hansen showed real dexterity with the metaphors and analogies that abound in this narrative. The imagery of the South is realistic and comes off nearly as oppressive within these pages as it did in real life. One of the better metaphors comes when Huey tries to set his pet cat free after the violence in his town starts to come to a head; he makes a very clear parallel, though he himself does not know or understand it, between the release from the bondage of slavery just a few short generations before and his releasing of his pet into the wild: Having surrendered Snowflake to the bitter wild, I decided that I wanted her back. I knew in my heart that she wasn’t ready to be set free but I’d done it anyway. I could see that she wasn’t sure what to do with all that freedom, that it was too much for her little brain to comprehend. All that freedom being dumped on her all at once like that. I should probably have tested it out by giving her teaspoon-sized doses of freedom first. Perhaps let her run free in the den to start. What had I been thinking? Then, of course, there are the lovely and impactful nuggets of truth as Huey’s self-realization of his and his family’s status in the world around them continues snowballing – as he realizes that schools are segregated and that he is the “last person in town to discover the truth” about who he is. They come faster and harder in the second half of the novel as pretenses begin to be stripped away and the threshold for denial becomes shallower and shallower: When I asked Mom who in his right mind would choose to be the descendant of a slave if given a choice, she gave me a contemptuous look. You don’t have a choice. Don’t be silly. Of course I do. We all have choices. Everything is a choice. She called me, of all things, a disgrace to my race. I asked what she was referring to, precisely. Only the week before, she was peddling the idea of the whole concept of race as a sham concocted by a few eighteenth-century white men with powdered hair to more conveniently consolidate power, and now here I was, not having even had time to shit out the food I’d been eating at the time, come to find out that I was betraying it. While we’re on the topic of the second half of They Come in All Colors, now’s as good a time as any to say that the latter fourth or so of the novel offered too many holes in the narrative for me to forgive and inspired more questions for me than satisfying answers. AND while we’re on the topic of my pet peeves with this book, now’s also as good a time as any to point out the added GLARING problem that there were no quotation marks used in this novel whatsoever. Normally, this narrative tool wouldn’t be a problem, but combined with the ramblingly verbose chunks of dialogue and the use of long chapters and thick, hulking narrative blocks on every page, traditional formatting of dialogue would have been a welcome reprieve to break up the pages and make this novel seem like a faster read. By the time I got to the middle of They Come in All Colors I was honestly halfway exhausted from wading through the waters of prose and checking the page count to see how close I was to the end. (spoiler: To my dismay, I was nowhere close to it.) Yet, this novel did more good for me than it did harm. It called into question not only the lies we tell ourselves to cope but the lies adults tell children and parents tell their offspring to maintain their innocence. What good is the façade - what’s the point of holding onto a false innocence just a few weeks or months or short years longer - if the inevitable realization only hits harder and is more damaging than having understood it from the start? Because then a child must also cope with the fact that not only has their existence been a lie in some shape, form or fashion but that the adults around them are imperfect beings – who lie and cannot always be trusted to tell the truth. In Western civilization, we raise our kids with lies as a fundamental part of their upbringing – tooth fairies and Santa Clauses and excuses for the way the world is. I’ve never thought that was a productive or practical tool of parenting, and Hansen definitely manages to expose the detriment of shielding and coddling kids from what the real world holds. For that, I applauded him. While the ending of the novel was too abrupt for me to find a ton of fulfillment in it, I did appreciate the nuggets of truth that Huey grows aware enough to impart on the reader - I was being mocked and maligned on a daily basis for having the gall to use the color of my skin to gain advantage where it concerned getting into Claremont, and here people like Zuk pulled shit like that all the time and weren’t even aware of it, much less feeling pangs of guilt about it. - and that his mother, Peola, finally finds the strength to impart on him after nearly a decade of insisting to him that he was white: I’m going to tell you this once, sweetheart, and then I’m never going to tell it to you again. So listen well. Any person you know who has not had a family member enslaved is at a two-hundred-fifty-year advantage over you. Okay? Not the other way around. You must understand that one simple fact. You have ancestors—blood relatives, real people, connected to you by blood and history—who were enslaved, who had their families, language, labor, freedom, possessions, and identity taken from them by force and used to the advantage of everyone you see around you right here, right now. That is, everyone but us. So do not ever let anyone talk to you like you’re some goddamned drain on society. Ever! That would be like scorning the man who has built your house for not owning one himself. That’s just wrong. The only thing you oughta be worried about asking any of them is what the hell they have to show for the last two hundred fifty years of their advantage. And I don’t care if for those two hundred fifty years their ancestors were in Europe or Asia or Russia or on Mars or wherever, because I can guarantee you that they were not in chains. For these dazzling moments of truth and forthrightness, I forgave many of the novel’s other sins. I recommend this novel to lovers of Paul Beatty’s work. You can think of Hansen as Paul Beatty lite. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 04, 2018
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Jun 09, 2018
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Feb 27, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 4.06
| 111,258
| Mar 20, 2018
| Mar 20, 2018
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really liked it
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Idlewild was the boarding school of last resort, where parents stashed their embarrassments, their failures, and their recalcitrant girls. Hidden in t
Idlewild was the boarding school of last resort, where parents stashed their embarrassments, their failures, and their recalcitrant girls. Hidden in the backwoods of Vermont, it had only 120 students: illegitimate daughters, first wives’ daughters, servants’ daughters, immigrant girls, girls who misbehaved… The Broken Girls proved to be a breezy and exciting read in all of the best ways. The hooks were there, pulling me further and further into the story until I became one with it. Until the hours and pages flew by alike and I realized I’d finished it all in one sitting. Who isn’t intrigued by the thought of “throw away” girls from a time long ago? Simone St. James makes her own literary footsteps in shoes she fills well, for The Broken Girls is most definitely Ruth Ware meets Fiona Barton with an American Northeast twist. If that line wasn’t enough to tell you exactly what to expect here, I’ll elaborate. This novel reminded me of an equal cross between and The Widow and The Lying Game from the very start. The writing style is very similar—fluid and paced so that the read flies by breezily, tinged with intrigue. Even the theme of camaraderie among boarding school girls—their mischief, their backstories, their own haunting pasts—investigated in present-day scenes by a character who also has skin in the game, is the same. Here, you can even cozy up to the same scenery: wide open fields ringed with thickets of trees and old dirt gravel roads of the past. These novels were all cut from the same cloth, though they all told their stories in a way of their own. While so many thrillers suffer from too many ideas in the plot, The Broken Girls weaves together a handful of story lines with just the right recipe. A chase here, a haunt there—a thrilling journey to the end—all brought to a boil and served up heartily leaving me full and satisfied in the end. None of the story lines felt overpowering or underdeveloped; they all fit together hand in hand, seamlessly drawing me back and forth between two periods of time over sixty years apart. Because of this skillful flow, St. James’ Girls read at a quick pace, allowing me to immerse myself in the story without interruption. That’s half the battle with a thriller, right? I was most impressed with the handling of the ghost story here in this novel. It was brilliantly done, haunting me as it haunted those four girls—never overdone or melodramatic, relying on parlor tricks like flashing lights and other theatrics; this ghost was a leading lady all her own and deserving of the space she occupied with those pages. As is sometimes a danger with thrillers, I will say that there were a few areas that were obviously formulaic, plucked straight out of the “thriller-with-a-villain” motif and those couple of sections in the novel made me cringe enough to warrant shaving off a star. BUT, the rest of St. James’ The Broken Girls was deftly handled and intricately woven in a way that made me want to come back for more. I highly recommend this novel for anyone in need of a cozy thriller and for absolutely anyone who has read and loved Ruth Ware or Fiona Barton, because these Broken Girls served up more twists than I’d expected and more intrigue than so many novels of the same genre, scoring an easy and strong 4 stars. **** **Thanks to the publicity department at Berkley / Penguin Random House for reaching out to me to review this book!** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 2018
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Apr 02, 2018
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Feb 23, 2018
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0399591141
| 9780399591143
| 0399591141
| 3.62
| 1,924
| Jan 02, 2018
| Jan 02, 2018
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it was amazing
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See my EXCLUSIVE interview with the author, Sam Graham-Felsen here!
I will be surrounded by dudes like this for the rest of my life. White boys and See my EXCLUSIVE interview with the author, Sam Graham-Felsen here! I will be surrounded by dudes like this for the rest of my life. White boys and white girls who grew up behind whitewashed fences, who grew up with no idea, for the rest of my life. The force preordained it: Not only will I be surrounded by them, I will become one of them, the thing I hate and can’t escape. Not a white boy or a whitey or a white b*tch, but a white person. If you’re looking for a way to start your new year out right, Green is absolutely the way to go. Prepare yourself to be transported by a distinctive voice and a story line that screams with authenticity. More than authentic—it was one that mirrored what middle school was like for me in the 90s: the same cliques, the same typecasts, the same social rules. This novel transported me back to those days, back to those vibrations in the air, to that slang on our tongues, to those priorities in our pre-teen minds and to those questions that plagued our thoughts night and day about the world around us and our place in it. Picture it (in my Estelle Getty voice): Boston, 1992. David Greenfeld is one of the only white sixth graders at Martin Luther King Middle School—the “ghetto” school—with no friends, no cool points, and no chance at getting a girl. His Harvard-educated, politically correct, granola parents don’t understand his pleas to be removed from the school, and there seems to be no end to the social torture in sight. Until. He meets Marlon Wellings, an ultra-smart, Boston Celtics-obsessed, black kid from the projects across the street whose street smarts start to rub off on Dave and who’s life in the hood and drive to get out of it spark questions in Dave’s mind he’s never contemplated before. In Green, Sam Graham-Felsen gives us a fresh look at the merging of two cultures, literally painting it is a physical intersection of neighborhoods as well as of cultural mores and rules. I couldn’t help but remember another book I’ve reviewed recently that was also a coming-of-age story with a jumping off point from the ’92 L.A. riots—and all the while, I marveled at how much better this story was told, at how much more the voice and experiences rang true. Graham-Felsen brought these characters to life on the page. He gave them hopes and made them my hopes. He made them fall, and I felt the blow myself. And he made them fail, as we all do in life sometimes. It is in those moments that this novel’s heart is most evident and that its impact slammed into me the hardest. Through Dave and Marlon, Graham-Felsen explores the color line through the eyes of adolescents still finding themselves amidst the chaos of race relations. What really set this novel apart for me is that he gave us the perspective of the white side of the fence, while still being true to both stories, to both cultures. In school the next day, Ms. Ansley shows us another installment of this long, made-for-TV movie we’ve been watching called Roots. When she introduced it, she said we needed to know our history, especially after what happened in L.A…I hear people shifting in their chairs. The violence is one thing: We all know the wounds are just makeup, the whip’s just a prop, the loud crack’s only a sound effect. But the n-word is different. Even if it’s just acting, it’s still the real n-word. I’ve heard it ten thousand times…but always with the soft ending. Hearing it with the hard er …makes my face muscles clench up even thinking about it. All that evil, all that power, packed into two tiny syllables. Then, we have ‘the force.’ As their school year progresses and confrontations are had, as Dave’s belief in religion is explored and his cross into cultures and upbringings other than his own changes his outlook on his surroundings, he begins to ponder the idea of ‘the force,’ his interpretation of race relations around him. He sees it everywhere. It peppers his every interaction with the world around him, and jolts him out of adolescence and into a more adult mindset: It seemed like the smoke of those riots spread all across the continent, all the way to Boston, like they were looking for their own Reginald Denny, because as far as I could tell they stepped for no other reason than the fact that I was white. But as I ran away…I began to wonder if maybe I was looking at them the wrong way, the same way I must have stared at the TV screen when those dudes bundled Denny—a shook and boggled look that said, You are predators—and maybe that made them want to treat me like prey. All summer, I tried to deny the force, but I felt it every time I got checked on my way past the Shaw Homes...And I felt ashamed of that…and yeah, I’ve been feeling ashamed that the force has been with me, pretty much nonstop… Green was an entertaining read and one that provoked thought. There were moments when I laughed out loud and, yes, even a moment when I cried. There’s something for everyone within these pages, because we all know at least one of these characters, from the granola do-gooders to that kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Here’s your chance now to get glimpse into their world. I wouldn’t be saying enough to say that I highly recommend this book for readers of all sizes, colors and creeds who are ready to open their minds and their outlooks. I even recommend it for all ages, because the cultural boundaries explored within Green are real and not to be ignored. The tragedies of everyday life surrounding us are real and not to be downplayed. And the line between the haves and the have nots, the clueless and the culturally aware, the predators and the prey is real and should never, ever be doubted. 4.5 stars. ***** *I received a copy of this novel from the publisher, Random House, via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me Exclusive SAM GRAHAM-FELSEN INTERVIEW: A Voice for America: Sam Graham-Felsen Speaks Candidly On Reflecting the Turbulence of American Culture Through the Eyes of Middle Schoolers ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 03, 2018
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Jan 13, 2018
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Dec 20, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0374260508
| 9780374260507
| 0374260508
| 3.75
| 70,322
| Mar 03, 2015
| 2015
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did not like it
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DNF This entire novel, especially the prologue, reminded me of the ramblings of someone’s old grandpa rocking on the front porch of his clapboard home. DNF This entire novel, especially the prologue, reminded me of the ramblings of someone’s old grandpa rocking on the front porch of his clapboard home. I can only assume this is exactly what Beatty was going for, by the direction the novel ended up taking, but I felt like I was reading—no, sifting through—a bunch of nonsense I just wanted to be done with. And a lot of this read like an ultra-liberal excuse to spout out the n-word (hard er, mind you) as both a starting point, comma and full stop to every paragraph. It was absolutely exhausting. I was looking forward to a good satire, but I don’t think I ever laughed once, because I was too distracted by trying to figure out what the hell he was even rambling about and how it fit into any possible plot line, ironic device, literary direction--hell, even a Katt Williams-like satirical skit--anything! I wanted to like this one – the first time non-Commonwealthers are allowed to be considered for the Man Booker Prize and an American—I’d be lying if I didn’t go ahead and point out—and African American wins it. I HAVE to read it; I’m so excited…I’m so confused…I’m so let down. I don’t want to take away from the win at all. Have it; keep it, Paul Beatty. But I’m not on the bandwagon. Not even a little bit. DNF. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 16, 2018
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Jan 23, 2018
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Oct 18, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 155597788X
| 9781555977887
| 155597788X
| 3.84
| 93,693
| Oct 03, 2017
| Oct 03, 2017
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liked it
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2.5 stars Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties is a collection I was so excited to read I dragged a friend in to read it with me. We hande 2.5 stars Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties is a collection I was so excited to read I dragged a friend in to read it with me. We handed off back and forth who got to pick the next story, never going in order, and found ourselves surprisingly disappointed by each one. In all honesty, I was drawn to what Machado was trying to do here, to what she was trying to say. But, she didn't say it with enough force. Some of her stories, such as "Real Women Have Bodies" and "Eight Bites" seemed to not amount to much more than a harsh whisper, if that, never fully realizing themselves. I wanted more--MORE from a voice that dared to tackle such bold topics as the female experience and psyche. And by "more" I don't mean argumentative or domineering in tone; some of my favorite short stories ever crept up on me with a gentle breeze at my neck only to bowl me over in the end with words just as gentle. Machado and Her Body didn't do that for me. In fact, what I remember most about this collection is my buddy reader's and my disappointed-mounting-to-annoyed reaction as each story was read and discussed. For such a topic that spoke to us, we both wanted to learn something, to feel something--something. This collection just fell flat in so many ways. Here's what I will say: Carmen Maria Machado clearly has something to say, though I, myself, didn't hear it loudly enough. I thoroughly enjoyed her use of Gothic elements--vaguely supernatural devices used to convey her thoughts, to tinge her messages in wonder. Yet, some of her works were too referential without adding enough to the conversation to warrant the blatant references (to "The Girl with the Ribbon Around her Neck" and Law & Order: SVU in particular). "The Husband Stitch" was my favorite story, because of the unique and haunting asides inserted into the narrative, but the ending failed to shock or move me, so even that story did not live up to the hype around this collection. Every story I read left me wishing there was more--not length but meat and substance, not words but voice and resonance. As we all know, fabulously original ideas must, too, be supported by the execution of them, and that I did not see impressively done here. 2.5* FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 08, 2017
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Dec 08, 2017
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Oct 03, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0735213186
| 9780735213180
| 0735213186
| 3.71
| 209,520
| 2018
| Jan 09, 2018
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really liked it
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See my exclusive interview with Chloe Benjamin about her novel The Immortalists here! “There are two major theories about how to stop aging…” “…It sound See my exclusive interview with Chloe Benjamin about her novel The Immortalists here! “There are two major theories about how to stop aging…” “…It sounds like you’re saying we can choose to live. Or we can choose to survive.” Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists is a thoughtfully executed novel written in simple, yet often poetic, prose that allowed the characters’ voices at their most forceful to shine on their own past the narrative itself. More than that, it is a novel crafted around a question we all ask ourselves more often than we’d care to admit: “Is it more important to truly live or to survive? To dare to dream at our grandest or to play it safe?” And, if you knew the exact day on which you’d die, would you live your life any differently than you would without that hateful knowledge? In their youth, the Gold siblings follow a rumor to the home of a Gypsy fortune teller who gives them the knowledge they seek: the exact dates of their deaths. These prophecies propel them forward for the rest of their lives, influencing their decisions, changing the courses of their lives and plunging the question into the forefront of their minds forever: Was the fortune teller right, and, if so, can they change the course of their own fates? It’s an intriguing idea, we must all admit. A scary one. A downright chilling one. And the leitmotif Benjamin poses to her reader manifests itself throughout the novel with compelling force, from the exploration of God and country’s place within our existence, to what the prophecy of one’s own death does to such beliefs. Do we cling to such notions and ingrained dogmas all the way to the end, cowering under them safely like warm, childhood blankets, or using them to fortify us in our resolve and everyday decisions—or, do we slough off and away such religious and secular beliefs and become our own reason for living, our own life force, whether to our own detriment or benefit? The Immortalists bounds along a timeline spanning five decades, trotting through the start of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco— “You weren’t terrified?” “No, not then…When doctors said we should be celibate, it didn’t feel like they were telling us to choose between sex and death. It felt like they were asking us to choose between death and life. And no one who worked that hard to live life authentically, to have sex authentically, was willing to give it up.” ¬–toward Las Vegas in the 80s and into the early years of this century, tackling tough questions, such as the logistics behind increasing the human lifespan—and the politics of attempting such a thing. For readers who enjoy novels of sweeping timelines, they’re sure to find a treat in Benjamin’s latest novel. The period settings weren’t quite as immersive as I’d hoped—the societal and technological differences in backdrop between the decades were noted but not submerging in a way that allowed me to really feel I was moving from decade to decade with true authenticity. However, what I did take from this book were lessons to carry with me, delivered by poignant phrasing that outshone the actual stories of the four siblings’ lives. And that resonated loudly enough to forgive such specifics. I had an interesting relationship with this novel as I continued my reader’s affair with it. I could not relate specifically to any one of the characters in this book. I would not have been friends with any of them in real life, and I did feel that some of the plotlines were predictable. BUT, I learned a lesson from every single one of the siblings that I took with me until the end, and each of those moments of recognition were special. What do you want?...and if [she] answered him honestly she would have said this: To go back to the beginning. She would tell her thirteen-year-old self not to visit the woman. To her twenty-five-year old self: Find Simon, forgive him…She’d tell herself she would die, she would die, they all would…She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying…” This is a novel with a strong core and a big heart, with a moral and a central theme to tie all the threads together. Chloe Benjamin’s second novel continued her thus-far-established trend of exploring existential questions in our everyday lives, creating a brand for her that is sure to glimmer and shine, attracting new readers from far and wide. 4 stars **** *I received a copy of this novel from the publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons, via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me Exclusive CHLOE BENJAMIN INTERVIEW: Magic Meets Humanity, Resilience Meets Reality – Chloe Benjamin Tackles the Ultimate Life Question: How We Handle Mortality ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 14, 2017
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Dec 24, 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0802127355
| 9780802127358
| 0802127355
| 4.02
| 33,129
| Feb 13, 2018
| Feb 13, 2018
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liked it
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It’s not easy to persuade a human to end their life – they’re very attached to it, even when it makes them miserable, and Ada was no different. But it
It’s not easy to persuade a human to end their life – they’re very attached to it, even when it makes them miserable, and Ada was no different. But it’s not the decision to cross back that’s difficult; it’s the crossing itself. Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater is a novel of layers that do not always nicely overlap; in fact, the pieces often seem to not fit together at all. It is a novel born from trauma and emotional paroxysms, a read that erupts with them throughout. You have to peel back the layers to get to what Emezi has laid underneath, to find the gems, to find the hidden well of pain and sentiment offered here, and that may not be a satisfying journey for many readers. Freshwater is the story of Ada, a young Nigerian woman with a fractured self, or multiple personalities, due to the gods who have mistakenly taken root in her body and mind. It is a dark novel portraying the malevolence within us – that darkness at the very deepest depths of us that we hope to never have to witness of ourselves or in others. It is a novel that portrays the psychological effects of such darkness and emotional violence. When Ada comes into adulthood and leaves her splintered home for a new existence in a Virginia college, a traumatic sexual experience further shatters her mind and her multiple personalities are born. Ada fights a battle between herself, her other selves and her God she left behind, a battle to regain her equilibrium that veers her onto a dangerous course of self-destructive behavior. A path of bloodshed, tears and an equal dose of sexual trauma and exploration. Ada fights with herself, realizing something is wrong. She wants a change but her other personalities refuse to let her go. Let me tell you now, I loved her because in the moment of her devastation, the moment she lost her mind, that girl reached for me so hard that she went completely mad, and I loved her because when I flooded through, she spread herself open and took me in without hesitation, bawling and broken, she absorbed me fiercely, all the way; she denied me nothing. I loved her because she gave me a name. Freshwater was a novel that took a lot of patience for me to read. If you’re a reader who clings to continuity, who needs progressive character development to follow the path a protagonist’s life, or a reader who is in the least bit squeamish, this will likely prove to be a difficult read for you. Not an unworthy read – but a difficult one. The narrative leapt back and forth in time with new personalities and overlapping stories already told being retold differently. This book was a collage, a kaleidoscope, a reflection of a splintered self. Given the subject matter, the shattered quality of the narrative is understandable but at times arduous to read. It was hard for me to fully connect with Freshwater when the moments of truth, heartbreak and the demise of entire relationships in Ada’s life were narrated, not fully shown in action. Emezi’s debut novel is more about the relationship between Ada and her other selves –internally—than it is about her outward experiences in the world. (view spoiler)[(For example, though we follow her through college and beyond, I have no idea what career she worked or if she even held a job at all. There was little to no mention of these small intricacies that paint a broader picture of the narrative for the reader.) This was not always a convincing examination or an immersive portrayal of the events in Ada’s life. Whole story lines just ended, never to be resolved. (hide spoiler)] It wasn’t enough for me, though some parts of the novel were absolutely gripping, and there were some lovely lines scattered throughout. He wanted to pretend he was somehow better than he knew he was; he wasn’t ready to throw himself into sin. Humans find it easier to just lie and lie to themselves. However, in those neglected moments (which is probably why the book is relatively short) the novel loses its soul and misses opportunities. Other qualms: The quote headings at the start of each chapter made no sense to me in the context of the story. Often, they made no sense to me at all though I got the feeling that they were Nigerian sayings. And I had too many WTF moments here because of the haphazard way life events and realizations were thrown into the narrative, no build-up, just dumped. I found myself reading whole passages and thinking, Where did this come from – outta thin air? That was the main issue I had with this novel: there was no real character development aside from Ada and Ewan, just a series of narrations and events. I also never understood the title of the book. There was a reference to it at the end of the novel, but I found it to be too cryptic and unclear, so I still have no idea what it was trying to convey, why it was the namesake of the book. Because of this, I had the noteworthy experience of loving and hating Freshwater. There were moments where I couldn’t wait to turn the page and others where I skimmed past the incoherence of the We. Because of that, Freshwater’s dazzling and dreadful moments condensed down into a grade of 3 stars overall. *** *I received an advance-read copy of the book from the publisher, Grove Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 02, 2018
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Feb 10, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0802126553
| 9780802126559
| 0802126553
| 3.74
| 1,504
| Mar 13, 2018
| Mar 13, 2018
|
really liked it
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A solid 4 stars! O sing of the American student body, glorious and young. We are the future!...Everyone on a university campus is equally young. We are A solid 4 stars! O sing of the American student body, glorious and young. We are the future!...Everyone on a university campus is equally young. We are all the same social class…We all wear the same clothes and listen to the same music…We are all giddy and hyperventilating in the superoxygenated atmosphere of attention and information and privilege and power. We all thought we were different but we weren’t. We all thought we were resisting something but we weren’t. We all thought that life would be like this forever but it wouldn’t. We were going to spend the rest of our lives trying and failing to re-create this feeling of urgency, of specialness, of being smack at the epicenter of everything important and real happening in the world. For the rest of our lives we would yearn for this feeling of exigency and belonging and fullness and passion. From here on in, it would be nostalgia. Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word pulsates with the tangible feel of a truly undergraduate experience – in many ways, my experience anyway. From the scraping of coins together for packets of Ramen noodles to the dogged debates in the library over Starbucks on the merits of feminist ideology and the next paper due. All of the key players are present here: the “butch” ultra-feminist, the foreigner, the erudite professor whom all the smart girls look up to and yearn to be like, the frat boys, the rich kids, the students holding down part-time jobs and the free-spirited girls who make kissy-faces at taxi drivers then call them assholes and walk away; they’re all here. If you lived this undergraduate experience, you’ll feel at home here, wrapped in a Snuggie of, yeah, “nostalgia.” You’ll understand the references and won’t be shocked at how often the words “smoke” or “condom” or “rights” come up. The above quote is a fantastic summation of this novel in all the best ways. The Red Word is about a year in the lives of a group of undergraduate women, and the catastrophes they catalyzed, exacerbated and lived within their “superoxygenated atmosphere of attention and information and privilege and power.” At the center of this story is Karen, a Canadian student on an American Ivy League campus her sophomore year. When Karen moves into “Raghurst,” a student house where a group of lesbian radical feminists live, and simultaneously starts dating a frat boy from GBC (better known as “Gang Bang Central” on campus), it is the spark that ignites the subsequent events; she is straddling a dangerous line between two houses who go to war over women’s rights versus patriarchal “brotherhood” – a war of the greater society as a whole. It’s about their year of learning, of trauma, of sexual exploration and viewing the world around them through their stanch lens of feminism. "Frat boys like to share. You have to watch your back." Far beyond just being an ode to campus life, The Red Word explores the crevices of rape culture on college campuses and in society as a whole. It reaches into the nooks and crannies of words like “consent” and “consensual” and shows it all to us through the eyes of a group of young women so far from home, so close and yet so far from finding themselves. Sarah Henstra’s debut is intelligently done, intellectual, and very often witty. It is biting and often cringe-worthy, both theoretically and physically. But keep watching; keep reading. Never look away from this mirror. This novel puts the reader right in the midst of the Crog-wearing, Iliad-quoting erudites of a women-centric viewpoint (They’d hate me for saying that, wouldn’t they?), right in the middle of their bloom of self-awareness. It did tend toward melodrama in areas, but doesn’t the college experience itself? Toward the end I was thinking, If I see one more melodramatic, theatrical proclamation, I’ll scream. (Oh Dyann, how you would splinter the spears and batter the bright shields! Stay, oh stay with me.) And yet, the subject matter here was so worthy of exploration. Frat culture and pack mentalities. The ethics of “victim blaming” – *spoken in an existential cadence If a girl goes into a frat party and gets herself drunk, does she deserve to be gang raped? (view spoiler)[And if, after being raped, she goes back into that frat and parties to drunkenness again, does she deserve to be blamed? (hide spoiler)] * The politics of single parenthood for the woman – is she weak for “succumbing” to her circumstances, being “trampled by patriarchy,” for letting her parents pull her out of school, for embarking on single-parenthood of an unwanted baby? Or, is there another worthy argument at play here as well? You be the judge. The Red Word was a fantastic debut novel from Henstra, which I would highly recommend to anyone, particularly college-aged females. If there was ever a novel to sit around and discuss ad nauseam, it's this one. It raised brave questions and turned the *I received an advance-read copy of the book from the publisher, Grove Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 2018
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Mar 09, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0802127614
| 9780802127617
| 0802127614
| 2.99
| 660
| Mar 13, 2018
| Mar 13, 2018
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it was ok
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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 over
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 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, 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. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 13, 2018
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Mar 15, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1501156004
| 9781501156007
| 1501156004
| 3.53
| 192,133
| Jun 15, 2017
| Jul 25, 2017
|
really liked it
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“…years on, people round here still use your names as a kind of salacious cautionary tale…” It’s rare that I stumble upon a read as gripping and as raw “…years on, people round here still use your names as a kind of salacious cautionary tale…” It’s rare that I stumble upon a read as gripping and as raw as this one was. And, it was not an outright or vulgar kind of raw—no, that wouldn’t really be the English way, now would it?—but Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game was something arguably so much better, because it didn’t lean on outright shock, melodrama and over-the-top confrontations. No, here the rawness is in the imagery, a true reader’s delight, because it pulled at the senses and plucked at our moral strings in unpredictable ways, in ways that were altogether unexpected when I picked up this novel. Here, the reader will peep behind the closed doors of a partially secluded English home at the edge of a reach, a place where the water laps at the very door of the home in high tide just as danger and uncertainty laps at their feet from the moment they receive Kate’s SOS text: I need you. Once a place of refuge and harbor, the Reach has turned into a silent stomping ground for their greatest fears and will forever be a magnet of both dread and longing for each of the women in this sisterhood. Kate, Thea, Fatima and Isa share a secret that bonds them together tighter than blood ever could. And it starts and ends with the Reach. The gentle suspense here was wonderful, but even it was heightened and magnified like a fly under a magnifying glass by the camaraderie that held these four unlikely friends together nearly 20 years after that fateful night—you could feel their anxieties, mistrust and the burn of their lies scorching your very skin as you read on. Ware swirled so much unexpected goodness into these pages that I was amazed at her deftness and insight. This glimpse into their world was so much more than just that—it was the peeling back of the layers of humanity within ourselves and at the lengths that we will go to protect one of our own. The very act of peeling seemed to be almost a metaphorical foundation: the peeling away of clothes wet from the waters of the Reach, of skin around ragged fingernails chewed nearly to the quick, of secrets from the truth they’d all stood on as their foundation for years. And, too, within these pages you’ll find other hidden nuggets, like a subtle commentary on the cultural insensitivity Muslims face every day (“What do you think it means? If you think it means that she’s using that head scarf as a bandage, then yes, that’s what I mean. It’s great that Allah’s forgiven you…but I doubt the police will take that as a plea bargain.”) the bond of family—blood and otherwise—and a true sense of setting and surroundings: It gives the whole place a melancholy air, like those sultry southern American towns, where the Spanish moss hangs thick from the trees, swaying in the wind. The town of Salten was embedded in true English culture, making the characters all leap to life on the pages, the values of this tight-knit society playing an important role in the unfolding of events. The Lying Game managed to be about so much more than lying—though those moments of actual “game play” were delightful, fun, frisky and filled with all of the carefreeness of youth that we all remember, that we all yearn to hold on to even now. It was also about the grip of a parent’s love and protection of their children, small town scandal and the whisper of child sexual abuse. How dare you judge me? I do what I have to do to sleep at night. So do you, apparently. How about you respect my coping mechanisms and I’ll respect yours? Ruth Ware gave her readers a phenomenal roller coaster of twists and turns. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and would be happy to read more from this author any day! The setting was palpable, the sisterhood and kinship of these women SO relatable. These women felt real; their faults and growth felt real and it made me want to follow them throughout these 300+ pages. The camaraderie was palpable, lifelike, believable and touching. There was no bow-tie happy ending here and I respected that, yearned for that, in fact. Ware had the guts to not put a ribbon on it for us, and her readers can only revere her for that. I loved every moment of reading this novel and I'm definitely a Ruth Ware fan from here on out. The Lying Game easily earned itself a very strong 4 stars. **** (I've downgraded this review from a 5* to a very strong 4* read, because the 5* nagged at me. I reserve that for the absolutely breath-taking works of writing, and this was not quite that, though it was exceptionally well done!) **I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Gallery/Scout Press, via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Jul 04, 2017
not set
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Jul 24, 2017
not set
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May 23, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0399592806
| 9780399592805
| 0399592806
| 3.67
| 10,365
| Sep 05, 2017
| 2017
|
really liked it
|
4.5 stars
Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, The Golden House, plays out as a Shakespearean drama re-imagined in the eyes of a postmodernist and set in t 4.5 stars Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel, The Golden House, plays out as a Shakespearean drama re-imagined in the eyes of a postmodernist and set in the Obama era of ultra-riche Manhattan. And here you have it. Sit back and imagine this: The Golden House trots along the Obama era years, from his inauguration on January 20, 2009, up to the election that gave us our 45th president. This political period is the mirror against which these characters see their lives unfolding, crumbling and transforming. Nero Golden and his household of three sons, of which he is the godlike patriarch, are expatriates of an unnamed country (which is eventually named) after a terrorist tragedy takes the life of their matriarch and shady financial deals finish them off in their homeland, sending the family to New York to rebuild their lives with the help of their obscene and conspicuous wealth by way of the American Dream. They move into a mega-mansion in an affluent neighborhood in Manhattan, where all 22 homes of the community back into a luxurious garden oasis that the families all collectively enjoy. It is in this near-utopian communal setting where lives begin to cross and our narrator, René, is met by the leading family. We follow him on his journey to infiltrate, observe and ultimately document the Golden lives in a film he’s been longing to make but isn’t really sure of how to go about doing. Along the way, characters come and go. As the modern-day “Julio-Claudian” drama unfolds, death occurs. Birth occurs. Marriage occurs. The saga of their lives unfolds, shatters, melts down and repairs—never in that order. If you’re looking for a single word to describe this novel, a good starting place would be dense though I cannot argue that it is unnecessarily so, and the read certainly wouldn’t have been the same without this aspect. Literary allusions—call me Ishmael— abound on every page here and, quite honestly, you might want to have a digital encyclopedia on hand for quick reference through some of these passages— Chinese hexagrams of divination, for example? But I loved that, reveled in it for the most part, in fact, because this enlightened display of narrative talent played with so many forms of storytelling, from conventional narrative formatting to scenes written as screenplays, from the use of quotations marks to the use of not-a-one, and back again. It was a journey, but at least it was a ride too, crossing the lines of contemporary fiction, postmodernism and metafiction. Here you’ll find wry social commentary that crackles and pops with dry irony, heaped on in healthy doses so that no culture—past or present, Eastern or Western—is safe from the scrutinizing eye—though, with the backdrop of this novel being set specifically against the Obama era, much of the commentary hits hard on American culture, smashing up against it forcefully and knocking down our perception of it, knocking down the barriers around talking about it, from Black Lives Matter to the collapse of the housing market to transgender transformation and everywhere in between: "Once upon a time…if a boy liked pink and dolls his parents would be afraid he was homosexual and try to interest him in boy stuff…they might have doubts about his orientation but it wouldn’t occur to them to question his gender. Now it seems you go to the other extreme. Instead of saying the kid’s a pansy you start trying to persuade him he’s a girl." “What is American culture?” This novel dares to seriously ask—often pokes fun at—and ultimately explores—no, turns inside out—this beloved cliché we and the world over cling to called the American Dream, from the viewpoint of the transplant, from the viewpoint of those ultimately in search of themselves in the whirlwind that is our lives in our culture today. “…I could feel it, the anger of the unjustly dead, the young men shot for walking in a stairwell while black, the young child shot for playing with a plastic gun in a playground while black, all the daily black death of America, screaming out that they deserved to live, and I could feel, too, the fury of white America at having to put up with a black man in a white house, and the frothing hatred of the homophobes…the blue-collar anger of everyone who had been Fannie Mae’d and Freddie Mac’d by the housing calamity, all the discontent of a furiously divided country, everyone believing they were right…” Rushdie’s insightful narrative is at times chilling in its acute accuracy about our cultural climate and our 45th president—“…the Joker shrieked…in that bubble…gun murderers were exercising their constitutional rights but the parents of murdered children were un-American…mass deportations would be a good thing; and women reporters would be seen to be unreliable because they had blood coming out of their whatevers…"— and made The Golden House a complete package, which managed to be both entertaining and at times mildly surreal, with the help of a wink toward a more avant-garde formatting technique and a nod toward the “magically real.” I navigated this novel with the sense of one at their grandfather’s knee, he with brandy and cigar in hand, hearing a tale that was often fascinating in its baroqueness. The Golden House is chocked full of so many things we love in reads—solid plotting, whimsy and intellectual stimuli—which made the ornate density of this novel worth persevering through in the end—and that both stirred and excited my reader soul, like a hearty helping of literary gumbo you have to close your eyes and smile to enjoy, adding depth to the layers of the pages, of these words. And, that was easily enough for 4.5 stars. **** **I received a copy of this novel from the publisher, Random House, via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
Aug 10, 2017
|
Aug 20, 2017
|
May 15, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 9781781090312
| 1781090319
| 3.49
| 9,049
| May 2017
| May 11, 2017
|
liked it
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Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy is a bravely re-imagined work of Hogarth Shakespearean fiction. Reset in the 1970s on an elementary school playground, Othel
Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy is a bravely re-imagined work of Hogarth Shakespearean fiction. Reset in the 1970s on an elementary school playground, Othello’s racial tensions and treachery are re-imagined here in a unique new format. When Osei arrives at his fourth school in as many cities, he is squarely familiar with not only the sensation of being the "new boy" but of being the only black boy as well. A product of an educated, diplomatic Ghanaian family, he is bright and sharply intelligent. He knows what to expect in this all-white atmosphere that he has once again been implanted into, but, to his surprise, becomes friends with the Golden Girl of the sixth-grade class on his very first day. Yet, when jealousies and tempers flare, the prejudice toward the school’s lone black student propelling hateful words and malicious deeds forward, the students’ lives are forever changed in this one day at school. Admittedly, this is a highly imaginative setting for these characters, yet I can’t really imagine this novel as an adult read. With that being said, I am grading it as (high-brow) YA, in the similar vein of vocabulary and maturity as Ransom Riggs’ Peculiar Children series. Here, I enjoyed the witty wink toward the original with Chevalier's use of derivatives of the original characters' names: Othello became Osei; Desdemona became Dee; Iago became Ian, and so forth. William Shakespeare’s Othello has long been one of my absolute favorites of his works—what can I say? I’m more partial to his tragedies. Tracy Chevalier’s adaptation of it is a work of short literary form—under 200 pages—that read quickly but not necessarily immersively. For the majority of the read, I felt that I was sitting on the surface of it all, the contrived situations and melodramatic plot fitting for YA, I suppose, but wasn’t immersive for me as an adult reader until the last fifth or so of the novel. There, the plot picked up speed and the threads of action began to pull together. As a YA read, Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy functions as a relatable, lesson-teaching book with easily identifiable characters—the new kid, the mean kid, the popular boy, the skanky girl, the sidekick, and the “weird” girl. All of the typical players you’d need for a playground drama exist here, and that makes this a great read for middle schoolers and early high schoolers. Also, the subject matter, and the way that Chevalier tackles it here, is also expertly handled for that age group, where it will read as not only relatable but shocking simultaneously. However. I definitely had some issues with this read, which is part of the reason why I just can’t label it as adult fiction and why I could not give it a higher rating: (view spoiler)[1) The drama turned to melodrama pretty quickly, because of the unlikeliness of this plot line. Of course, we can argue that Shakespeare often gravitated toward the melodramatic—his plays were for theater, after all—but New Boy was often delivered as a string of events that all culminated into the ending, rather than a plausible story line that I could get behind. (hide spoiler)] (view spoiler)[2) One of Osei’s (the reimagined Othello’s) main characteristics at the start of the novel was that he was experienced in not only being new, but in being the only black student as well. His older sister is a “rebellious” teenager who holds her fist in the air, an Afro proudly atop her head, and ends all of her correspondences with the phrase Black is Beautiful. From the perspective of an African American, I would argue that Osei’s reactions to what happened on that day at school are highly unlikely and poorly imagined. In short, they read as if they were written by someone who has no experience themselves with such feelings, which left me feeling that there were several practical elements of New Boy that were poorly handled, certainly too poorly handled to pass or function as an adult read. (hide spoiler)] Chevalier’s New Boy tried to take us there—to that place at the crossroads of “coming of age” and “discovering oneself.” At times, it worked and rang true, and at other times it failed and crumbled flatly to the floor. While I applaud her attempt at re-imagining this classic work, at giving a voice to that little black boy in the 70s in his bewildering surroundings faced with confusing decisions, it didn’t always work for me, and I’ve seen Hogarth Shakespeare done better. So, Chevalier pulled away from this one with a solid 3 stars. *** Also, I thought I'd go ahead and throw in that I give 2 big thumbs up for all of the COVER ART done for this novel! That'll get you to pick this one up if a review won't! *I received this ARC from the publisher, Hogarth, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 08, 2017
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May 09, 2017
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May 05, 2017
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.87
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not set
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Sep 28, 2018
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| 3.46
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it was ok
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Nov 09, 2018
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Aug 27, 2018
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| 3.66
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liked it
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Nov 18, 2018
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Aug 22, 2018
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| 3.63
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really liked it
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Aug 03, 2018
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Jul 22, 2018
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| 3.54
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liked it
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Aug 22, 2018
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Jun 14, 2018
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| 3.21
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liked it
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Aug 18, 2018
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Jun 06, 2018
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| 3.78
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really liked it
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May 08, 2018
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Mar 31, 2018
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| 4.23
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liked it
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Apr 21, 2018
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Mar 23, 2018
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| 3.42
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liked it
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Jun 09, 2018
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Feb 27, 2018
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| 4.06
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really liked it
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Apr 02, 2018
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Feb 23, 2018
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| 3.62
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it was amazing
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Jan 13, 2018
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Dec 20, 2017
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| 3.75
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did not like it
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Jan 23, 2018
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Oct 18, 2017
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| 3.84
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liked it
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Dec 08, 2017
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Oct 03, 2017
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| 3.71
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really liked it
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Dec 24, 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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| 4.02
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liked it
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Feb 10, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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| 3.74
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really liked it
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Mar 09, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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| 2.99
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it was ok
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Mar 15, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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| 3.53
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really liked it
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Jul 24, 2017
not set
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May 23, 2017
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Aug 20, 2017
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May 15, 2017
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| 3.49
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liked it
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May 09, 2017
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May 05, 2017
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