Tag: fiction

Review: The Royal We

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I found this book really hard to get through. There was a lot of story to lead up to what is really the main plot, all of which takes place in the last 50 odd pages of the book. I just wasn’t particularly invested in the story of Bex and Nick, and was way more curious about just about every other relationship. I didn’t see the plot twist coming, but that may have been more that I just didn’t care. I’m probably the wrong audience for this book because royals don’t interest me in the least. There just wasn’t a lot of meat in the story to keep me going. Now, I would 100% read a story about Lady Emma and Prince Richard, that story sounded really good.

And there’s really no resolution to the end. We don’t know if all the shenanigans paid off, or if they start a whole new problem. Is that because there is sequel in the works? Who knows. I probably won’t read it if there is.

This is one of those books that I feel bad for not liking because it was well written and the characters are decently fleshed out but I just didn’t find the story compelling. That’s the reason my rating is as high as it is, I’m sure lots of people would really enjoy this book, but it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Review: Penelope

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13490638This book includes an absurdist play (Caligula) with a demented director, and it seems like perhaps the author was going for some sort of absurdist story to go with it. Penelope is a story about a freshman’s first year at Harvard University, except it doesn’t really follow most people’s idea of what that would entail. Honestly, her experience somewhat resembles mine. Not in the details, but in the broader sense.

Penelope is cautiously optimistic when she arrives at Harvard, but since she isn’t a legacy student, she really doesn’t know what is going on. It appears that most of the orientations and things are much more important than she is lead to believe by the information packages she receives. She quickly feels like she is missing out on forging new friendships. She is reluctantly embraced by some guys in her dorm, one of which is obviously attracted to her. She begins to navigate classes and dining hall experiences with unwanted advances from her TF (teaching fellow, like a grad assistant) and her neighbor. She has a chaste affair with a European gentleman. Her roommates are not into her at all.

Aside from several men trying to aggressively court her, I can understand her loneliness and anguish at not having had the college experience that I hoped for. The part that I can’t really relate to is how she reacts to it. She seems fairly oblivious until the end when she “realizes” that she is not making any inroads in these various relationships. She barely has any sort of character arc at all. The whole thing is somewhat depressing but none of the people that she meets are nice at all, and most of them are downright awful. The academic portion is pretty unrealistic too, as are the course titles, but I feel like that was an intentional choice meant to show that Harvard academics are pretentious and not really worth anything in the real world. It’s part of why I think that the absurdist play is supposed to be a reflection of the world of this book.

There really isn’t much more to say about the  book. Apparently there is a book group discussion guide and I’m really curious to look at it and see what there is even to discuss about this book. It was not what I was expecting based on the cover art – which goes to show that you really shouldn’t base a book on its cover.

3 stars.

This book fulfills the book based entirely on its cover requirement for the challenge.

Review: Imaginary Jesus

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When I first got my Kindle, I thought the free ebooks were awesome, and I regularly scoured the free list and looked up websites that also had lists of free books, and I pretty much downloaded them indiscriminately. That is how this book came into my possession. I needed to find a book whose author had the same initials as I do for the challenge, and there were two books with MM authors, this one and another. This seemed the most interesting, but I didn’t read a synopsis or anything.

So I began the book, and within the first chapter I was completely baffled. “What have I started reading?!” was my initial thought. The book essentially starts off as a guy, eating a vegan meal in a “communist” cafe in Portland, with Jesus sitting across from him, listening to music on an iPod. So you know, already I was caught off guard. Then a burly man comes in and strikes up a conversation with them, then accuses Jesus of being imaginary. A brawl ensues, with Jesus making an escape on foot. Then, the burly man introduces himself as the Apostle Peter and they take off after the escaped Jesus. There are talking donkeys, time travel, mysteriously appearing guys on motorcycles, and reformed prostitutes. And about 100+ “imaginary Jesuses”, all depicting different stereotypes of how people envision Jesus.

I think this would have been a great book if it had not been a novel. There were some good insights about Jesus and suffering, and about compartmentalizing Jesus and removing the context of the actual time that he lived in. But the fictionalized aspects were so nutty that it made me want to dismiss the whole thing altogether. A tube race down a snowy mountain, where two Jesuses need to battle it out theologically, until one is eaten by a bear? I wish I was making that up. And the ending went soft on real insights. It makes me cringe when people literally put words into Jesus’ mouth, too. He spends a chapter or two ragging on Mohammed and the Book of Mormon, when he essentially does the same thing. Yeah, he doesn’t set up a religion, but don’t smack talk “Conversations With God” if you are going to slip into the same narrative.

“Wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a sort of semi-autobiographical novel comedy thing instead of a Sunday school lesson for once? Wouldn’t that be cool?” (Chapter 31)

Well, I guess you did it.

2 stars.

This book fulfills the book you own but have never read, and book written by an author with the same initials as you requirements for the challenge.

Review: Still Alice

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Still Alice cover

I knew that this book was about a woman who slowly descends into Alzheimer’s disease, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so profound about the meaning of life. Alice Howland discovers she has early on-set Alzheimer’s disease shortly after her 50th birthday, when she is in the prime of her career. Her children have recently moved on into adulthood and she and her husband John are empty-nesters, with prestigious careers at Harvard University. The diagnosis shakes her to her core, and John is firmly in denial throughout most of the book.

While I really enjoyed a lot of the story that centered around an understanding of what it may feel like to have Alzheimer’s (because we really won’t ever know), I think part of the story that really captivated me was the reaction from her family. Her relationships at the beginning of the book are so different from the end. Her two eldest children, Anna and Tom, are closer to Alice than Lydia, the “wayward” youngest, who has defied her mother’s expectations for her and moved to Los Angeles in order to begin a career as an actress. Alice has spent most of her life deep into higher education, and she places high importance on it. It seemed to be a personal slight to her that Lydia dismisses it out of hand. But, as Alice loses more and more of her memory and “self”, Lydia is the one that seems to deeply understand her, or at least is interested in meeting her where she is.

Alice’s relationship with John is probably the saddest part of the entire novel. At first, he rejects the diagnosis outright. He wants to meet with the doctor himself, and argues over and over. When Alice has a DNA test done and it reveals that she has a genetic mutation found in many Alzheimer’s patients, John is on a new mission to find some kind of cure or treatment. He begins researching it with as much fervor as he does with his Harvard laboratory experiments. But as Alice descends farther and farther into her disease, John retreats from her more and more. He clearly feels like her handicap is slowing him down. He can’t stand to be around her. He won’t watch her take her medications. And near the end, when she can’t remember the names of her family, or even that she is related to these people, he moves to New York City for a new job and leaves Alice behind.

One of the plot threads that runs throughout is Alice’s plan to take her own life once her symptoms become out of hand. She sets an alarm on her Blackberry to ask her every morning to answer 5 basic questions: What month is it, Where is my office, Where do I live, How many children do I have, and When is Anna’s birthday. The document instructs her to find a bottle of sleeping pills and take them all when she can no longer answer the questions. The Blackberry unfortunately meets an untimely demise in the freezer, but while poking around on her computer some time later, she happens upon the document, entitled Butterfly (an allusion to her mother’s prized necklace that she has taken to wearing). She tries to carry out the instructions in the document, but her forgetfulness (and possibly John’s removal of the pills) prevents her from completing the task.

This book is important, I think, for families that have a member who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, or even someone in the early stages of diagnosis. There is an empathy that comes from reading about this experience, even if it can never be verified that this is actually how it feels.

I checked off the box for something that scares me, because the idea of one day having Alzheimer’s, or caring for someone that does, is really frightening. It does run in my family, although I don’t think I’ll be having my DNA tested. (Like Lydia, I’d rather not know.) But somehow, this book has tempered the fear. It would still be not the most awesome outcome, but maybe it wouldn’t be that terrible.

5 stars

This book completes the a book that scares you and a book that made you cry.

Review: Sycamore Row

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The writing style between this and A Time To Kill are very similar, but Sycamore Row is so much more polished, if a little less interesting. Part of that is the overall plot is just not as attention-grabbing as the plot to A Time To Kill. It answers a lot fewer “big questions” (is it okay to take the law into your own hands, etc), and becomes mired in a somewhat boring dispute over an estate. It only begins to get interesting when there is a BIG SECRET. Several of Grisham’s writing “tics” are present here as they were in the first novel, but not as overused. One of the biggest differences I noticed was a huge lack of the n-word. It was liberally sprinkled over A Time To Kill, but Sycamore Row is much more reigned in. He engages in a lot of telling rather than showing, which is not only a good rule for visual entertainment, but is also good with books. Near the end, he actually writes “As seasoned lawyers, they should have known better than to plan the rest of the trial” which is such a huge dun dun DUNNNN.

Essentially, the plot is that an old man who is estranged from his family commits suicide, leaving all of his sizable estate to a black housekeeper he had only known for 3 years. His surviving family is outraged, and so they hire some big guns and take it to court. The deceased has a long-lost and presumed dead brother who is found, and tapes a shocking deposition that illuminates exactly why this man left 24 million dollars to this woman. Being able to boil it down so concisely is part of its downfall. There just wasn’t much there to fill all 447 pages.

In contrast to A Time To Kill, I felt like the racial aspects were better, although not perfect. It was still exceedingly sexist. I was somewhat bothered that Ellen Roark doesn’t exist at all in this novel, even after in the conclusion to A Time To Kill she had been brutally beaten by the KKK and left to die, and that is basically how her story ends. It would have been nice for her to even make a cameo in this novel, at least so we know that she is doing okay. (I realize that most people wouldn’t have read both stories back-to-back, but she was a major character in the first!) Jake’s secretary at the beginning of the book is just as belittled as Ethel Twitty was, except instead of being old and ugly, she’s a lazy housewife. (C’mon, John…) It’s like he wants to emphasize that he is such a moral man because he is NOT TEMPTED BY HIS SECRETARY. Because there’s no way an ugly, old, or lazy woman would ever be tempting, am I right? The stand-in for Paralegal Ellen Roark in this book is Portia Lang, the black housekeeper Lettie’s daughter, who has just returned from being abroad and in the military, and now is interested in studying the law. How cool would it have been for Portia and Ellen to work together, and learn from each other? (Ok, I’ll drop it.)

I’m sure that my declarations of the sexism in this book are being scoffed by the two people reading this. So I have a selection of excerpts to share.

“I got the impression she’s a fairly typical black woman for these parts.” […] “Is she attractive?”

Jake and Dewayne exchanged a nervous handshake while shapely Kamila watched close by.

“Tell Carla I love her and lust after her body.” “She knows it. Later.”

Portia found her to be polite, gracious, and seemingly comfortable with another black female in the house.

The last one kind of is shockingly terrible. Why on earth would a woman be uncomfortable with another woman’s presence, whether they share a skin color or not? Are they dogs, sniffing each other and growling over territory? I kind of wish I had notated some of the even more terrible lines throughout A Time To Kill. Rest assured, it can be worse.

There is some minor fallout for Jake with regards to the Hailey trial, which is referenced quite a bit. Grisham doesn’t pretend that Jake isn’t an arrogant jerk (although, supposedly a moralistic arrogant jerk), and the troubles he is having collecting the insurance money on his charboiled house is due to that. His slimey divorce lawyer pal fixes that up for him rather conveniently, but there are lingering problems with the arsonists going free and many having not been charged at all. The KKK hasn’t returned, but there are mutterings that maybe they haven’t finished with Jake and so he carries a loaded gun in his briefcase to protect himself and his family. I did appreciate that small sliver of continuity.

My takeaway from this book is that is it okay. It’s fine. Nothing special. It’s much better as a piece of writing than A Time To Kill in many ways, but part of its problems began in that book and carry over to this one. The sensibility of the town is actually pretty good, and it may be both novel’s most fully developed character.

3 stars.

This book fulfills no requirements for the challenge.

Review: During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

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I don’t really know how to review this book because I don’t know how to evaluate it. For example, I can’t even really pinpoint the climax. Was it one of the several character deaths? When Gram sold the property? The attempted suicide? The fire? I really don’t know.

The story isn’t even linear. It begins after a major event, that is later retold about 3/4ths into the novel, then ends after the beginning. So the timeline is all over the place.

Was it interesting? Fairly. Some of the characters really came alive; the setting was vivid. Lots of interesting events happened. The writing was beautiful.

But what was the point of the novel?

The preamble before the book in my edition talks about the titular Queen of Persia (the matriarch grandmother) and also about the fever dream of childhood summers. I guess you could pinpoint those, but I didn’t really get much of a sense of either of those. The book is collectively narrated by 4 cousins, two sets of sisters, as the “we”. But not only do they describe things it was unlikely for them to know (for example, Gram’s early marriage to Grandad and their sex life), but they step back and describe some cousins as apart from and yet together with the “we”. If narrating as a collective, that collection should be fixed. Instead, the people in the “we” keep changing to suit the story.

Finally, the ending is pretty abrupt and unsatisfactory. Although since I can’t pinpoint a protagonist or a climax, I’m not sure what kind of ending could possibly work. The best way I can describe this novel is as a beautiful road to nowhere.

3 stars.

This book fulfills the female author, came out in the year you were born, and an author you’ve never read before requirements for the challenge.