My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira – Book Review

Aug 312011

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira
Published by Penguin (Non-Classics)

The best midwife in Albany – better, even, than her mother – all Mary Sutter wants is to be a surgeon. Unfortunately, the local medical school wants nothing to do with a female surgeon. When war breaks out, suddenly one of the things that the Union needs most is medical personnel. Although even Civil War is not enough to make Mary suddenly accepted as a doctor, she does have the opportunity to work as a nurse, which she seems as a stepping stone. Leaving for DC to take care of wounded soldiers, also gives Mary the excuse to leave behind a painful personal matter at home.

Oliveira suffuses My Name is Mary Sutter with a great deal of fascinating historical detail. The mid-19th century birthing and surgery scenes are horrifically realistic. Unfortunately, Mary herself was not the most engaging of characters. She was strong, she was interesting, but she didn’t capture me. The writing was strong and it was always easy to pick the book up, but it was also just as easy to put it down, primarily due to a lack of feeling for Mary.

Although I failed to connect with My Name is Mary Sutter as deeply as I had hoped, it was still a strong debut novel, and worth reading for those interested in nursing and medical care during the Civil War.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Embassytown by China Mieville – Thoughts

Aug 302011

Embassytown by China Mieville
Published by Del Ray, an imprint of Random House

I struggled with Embassytown when reading, and I’ve struggled over the past months thinking about it for a review. In lieu of a formal review, I am simply going to add a few of the thoughts that linger after all this time. For some context, here is the description from Indiebound:

In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.

When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.

The linguistics pieces were very interesting, perhaps the most intriguing part of the story. The interplay of language and truth, inability of the Ariekei to lie, or even express abstract concepts unless they had previously been made concrete was consistently interesting.
The descriptions of the more science fiction elements of the story, such as the complexities of space travel, the interstellar political systems, and the systems that kept humans alive on the Ariekei world fell flat for me. They seemed neither interesting, nor well enough explained. I am not sure if Mieville has other works set in this universe in which these things are better explained, but it didn’t work for me here.
I found Avice to be a thoroughly uninteresting and unsympathetic character. I didn’t care who she was with or what she did, and the rest of the plot was not compelling enough counteract that.
My other two experiences with Mieville have both been in audio, narrated by John Lee. I think that audio might be the best way for me to experience Mieville, because talented narrators like John Lee carry me on past these pieces that would otherwise bog me down.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Sex on Six Legs by Marlene Zuk – Book Review

Aug 292011

Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, & Language From the Insect World by Marlene Zuk
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Animals can tell us much about ourselves. We can study their gene, their reactions to stimuli, their behaviors in order to better understand the vagaries of humanity. Studying adorable mammals tends to cause anthropomorphizing, which can confuse results. Studying insects, however, does not tend to result in any romantic notions, which is part of the reason that Marlene Zuk is so fascinated by them; although she finds them captivating in their own right as well. In Sex on Six Legs, Zuk endeavors to share with the rest of us myriad things she believes make insects so worth our attention.

Insects play a special role in our use of animals to help us understand ourselves, as I argue throughout this book. Because they are rarely cared for by their parents, and usually live relatively solitary lives without the input of others, the behavior they exhibit as adults is largely controlled by their genes. -p. 143

Zuk is extremely successful both in her attempts to make insects interesting and to shed light on just what complex creatures they are, and just how much many of their behaviors mirror our own. For example, Zuk discusses in the first chapter the extremely few species that engage in true teaching, one of the hallmarks of which is that information is passed on at some cost to the teacher, simply allowing children to mimic actions is not sufficient to count. Surprisingly, none of our simian relatives meet this distinction:

That teaching happens in ants and not monkeys or apes is unsettling for the same reason I love studying insects: it’s all about getting to the same destination with different modes of transportation. -p. 33

And who knew just how complicated bee dance language is?

The length of the run is correlated with the distance of the food from the hive, while the angle of the bee’s body relative to vertical indicates the angle between the sun and the food source…. In other words, bees seem to have symbolic representations for the distance and direction of the food, which fits many if not all of the criteria for an actual language. -p. 214

Sex on Six Legs is not merely didactic, however, but entertaining as well. Zuk brings a measure of her own personality into the book, recounting her fondness for earwigs and other insects, as well as a good degree of humor.

At some level, everyone with siblings understands the urge to murder them. -p. 167

Sex on Six Legs is an incredibly interesting and educational book, although readers do run the risk of seeming insufferable spouting off insect knowledge to anyone who will listen. Zuk succeeds in granting a new appreciation for the six-legged creatures, although it doesn’t make me want to see them in my house any more than I did before.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Publisher, via Netgalley.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Weather Guilt and Review Madness

Aug 282011

Right now a hurricane is battering the East Coast, but all is calm and lovely here in Chicago. We had a fun barbeque with friends last night and will potentially go to a picnic this afternoon. I must admit that I feel a little guilty that we have some of our nicest weather of the summer while East Coast friends get battered.

This has been a great reading week thanks to a train trip to/from downtown by myself on Sunday, plus my new reading/writing/cleaning plan. Basically I’m alternating reading, writing, and cleaning nights on the nights I’m at home, hoping that it makes me more productive in each of these things. My first reading night sure seemed productive, since it let me finish all three books I had going at the time.

I’m now actively picking things I do NOT think I will finish before the end of the month, though, because I have decided to try to be completely caught up on reviews by the end of the month, thanks to some inspiration from Jennifer at Literate Housewife. I’ve still got at least two posts/day to write to be caught up, so not finishing things keeps me from adding anymore to the too-long list. Here’s what I finished this week:

bynightfall picture sexonsixlegs picture catcherintherye picture makingwaves picture

Plugged picture howtoescapefromalepercolony picture

And here’s what I reviewed:

Who Has These Feet? – Saturday Story Spotlight

Aug 272011

Welcome to Saturday Story Spotlight, my feature where I discuss books my husband and I are reading with our son, Daniel. These are books that he, we, or all of us particularly enjoy.

Who Has These Feet? by Laura Hulbert, illustrated by Erik Brooks
Published by Henry Holt & Co, an imprint of Macmillan

Who Has These Feet? That is the question of the hour in the book by the same name. Hulbert doesn’t beat around any bushes, asking readers “Who has these feet?” on the very first page, as we are confronted with Brooks’s illustration of great, hairy, white feet. Turns out, it is a polar bear who has these feet, and it needs all that fur on the bottom so it won’t slip on the ice.

It is entirely possible that Who Has These Feet is the new favorite in our household. “Feet book!” is a constant request, and every time I read the eponymous question, Daniel responds with a little questioning shrug, “Which animal?” Daniel likes the predictive text and the interaction he has inserted into it, and I like the ability of Who Has These Feet to grow with the child reading it. Daniel is not yet ready for the explanations of why the different animals have different kinds of feet, for now it is enough to recognize and match them. However, an older child could easily be fascinated by the requirements that environment and behavior put on an animal’s feet. For these children, there is enough detail first to satisfy and later to spark an interest and further exploration. For those too young to be interested in this, though, the ‘why’ sections are brief enough to maintain the quick flow of the book.

Not only is Hulbert’s text very well balanced, but Brooks’s illustrations are absolutely charming, with great details on the cloe-ups of the animal feet.

A fun and informative book to read for toddlers on up. Highly recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Publisher
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson – Audiobook Review

Aug 262011

The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson, narrated by Kristine Ryan and Gerianne Raphael
Published in audio by Harper Audio, published in print by Harper, both imprints of HarperCollins

Synopsis:

A whirlwind romance takes sensible Eve from her life in London doing French translations of boring, mundane things such as contracts to a lovely if somewhat decrepit old house in the South of France with a loving but secretive man named Dom. As summer fades, so too does the perfect live Eve imagined that the two of them were living together. She begins to question what happened in Dom’s first marriage that has made him the way he is today, and to feel a chill in the house around her that leads her to wonder if their lovely Genevriers is haunted.

As Eve’s story unfolds, so too does a story of her house’s recent past, centered around Benedicte, a young girl who once lived in Genevriers with her troubled family.

Thoughts on the story:

Initially the story of The Lantern unfolds slowly, it is well past the halfway mark before the reader has any idea what is meant by the title or how the stories of the two women will intersect. Luckily, the slower plot has Lawrenson’s lovely writing to fall back on. Aside from seducing the reader with beautiful language, Lawrenson is taking the first half of the book to fully develop Eve and Benedicte’s characters, as well as the secondary characters around them, giving the reader a stake in their lives when the tension begins to build in the second half the novel. And build it does. By the time I reached the halfway mark, I hesitated to leave the story, so drawn in was I; Lawrenson does a wonderful job building both investment and interest. And although I won’t spoil the ending, I will say that I found the wrap-up and explanations particularly satisfying.

Thoughts on the audio production:

As tends to be the case with books produced by Harper Audio, the audio production – and particularly the narration – was wonderfully done in The Lantern. Both Ryan and Raphael are talented narrators, but I was particularly impressed by Ryan. The character she was portraying, Eve, was a French-educated American women who at the beginning of the novel had been living in London for years, but who moved early in the book to the south of France. Certainly a narrator could have decided to work with only one or two of these linguistic heritages, but Ryan had me wondering if she had the exact same background as her character. At the base of her speech was a standard American accent, but there was a definite British inflection, with a French accent that rose and fell, depending on what exactly she was saying. It was absolutely perfectly done, more than just believable, she completely lived into her character.

soundbytes picture Overall:

Although there is somewhat of a slow start, sticking with The Lantern is a decision that pays off completely. I am confident that Lawrenson’s lovely book would stand up quite well in print, but Ryan and Raphael’s masterful narration adds an extra degree of wonder that is well-worth experiencing.

Buy this book from:
Powells: Print*
Indiebound: Print*
Audible.com:

I’m launching a brand-new meme every Friday! I encourage you to review any audiobooks you review on Fridays and include the link here. If you have reviewed an audiobook earlier in the week, please feel free to link that review as well. Thanks to Pam for creating the button.

Source: .
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Rules of Civility by Amore Towles – Book Review

Aug 252011

Rules of Civility by Amore Towles
Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin

This review will also be known as the one where I fail to fall for the book everyone else is head over heels in love with.

The main character of Rules of Civility is the upwardly mobile Katey Kontent who, despite her name, is not actually a stripper. The story focuses primarily on Katey and her best friend and roommate Eve, who meet a dashing young man named Tinker in a bar on New Year’s Eve 1937, when they’ve already blown their drink money while the night is still young. Both Katey and Eve have something of a thing for Tinker, but he has secrets that have the potential to impact all of their relationships.

Rules of Civility had an incredibly promising start, with an almost heartbreakingly beautiful preface. Towles is certainly a talented writer and has quite a skill with prose, something that remained true throughout the book. However, Towles also commits a crime of punctuation that I find incredibly distracting: the failure to use quotation marks. Instead, dashes were used to indicate dialog, and every time anyone spoke it distracted me and took me right out of the story.

In addition, I simply didn’t care about any of the characters except for Katey, and even her I wasn’t crazy about. Another reader mentioned that she found the characters somewhat aimless but found this to be realistic for the time period. I would tend to agree, but the aimlessness was very unappealing to me because the characters were not developed in a way that let me understand the reasons for their aimlessness.

Perhaps the real problem for Rules of Civility was simply that it fell victim to my as-yet undiagnosed general dissatisfaction with historical fiction based in America, despite my love for American history. It is possible that between this distaste and the lack of quotation marks Rules of Civility never stood a chance, lovely writing notwithstanding.

Don’t take my word as gospel on this, I seem to be in the extreme minority. However, I never managed to get into Rules of Civility, despite giving it the fairest shake I could.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Publisher, via Netgalley.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey – Book Review

Aug 242011

Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey
Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House

Marie Antoinette is likely the best known, or at least most notorious, of all French queens. She is often reviled as an out-of-touch aristocrat who would flippantly tell her starving subjects to simply eat cake; she absolutely did not say this, by the way, Rousseau recorded them as being spoken by a ‘great princess’ when she was the nine-year-old Maria Antonia, Archduchess of Austria.

Many novels about Marie Antoinette begin at the moment she leaves Austria for France, some even include that tragic moment where she is forced to leave her little dog Mops is taken from her because he is not French. Becoming Marie Antoinette, is, however, the first historical novel I have come across that gives readers a good picture of her life as Maria Antonia of Austria. Seeing Maria in her native land in the time immediately leading up to her travel to France is extremely instructive for those who wish to understand her later actions as Dauphine of France. In fact, Grey is able to give much more attention to questions of motivation and politics than many historical novels due to her structuring of Marie Antoinette’s story in a trilogy. Many readers bemoan the prevalence of series and trilogies, the fact that little seems to stand alone these days, but in this case, it enhances the story being told.

That is not to say that Becoming Marie Antoinette is a perfect historical read. At times our heroine’s voice is somewhat overly modern, particularly towards the beginning of the book. Before long, however, the voice either evens out, the story becomes so engaging that modernity doesn’t matter, or some combination of the two. The chapter headers remain somewhat modern, for example Chapter 8 is titled “The Really Hard Work Begins,” but that isn’t terribly intrusive. Aside from these minor issues, however, Grey seems to have really done her homework with Becoming Marie Antoinette, and presents to her readers an engaging and historically faithful novel.

Overall, a fabulous treatment of Marie Antoinette. I recommend it and personally cannot wait for the sequel.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Publisher, via Netgalley.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham – Book Review

Aug 232011

By Nightfallby Michael Cunningham
Published by Picador, an imprint of Macmillan

Peter Harris’s life looks great on the surface. He has a smart, lovely wife, a grown daughter, and a relatively successful art gallery. Of course, his gallery is stuck around relatively successful, unable to break free. Plus, his relationship with his wife Rebecca has grown strained of late, and his daughter will barely speak to him. Into this barely held together veneer comes Mizzie. Mizzie, whose nickname is appropriately short for “mistake,” is Rebecca’s much younger brother, a brilliant but wild young man whose presence disrupts the fragile balance of Peter and Rebecca’s lives.

By Nightfall is a very complex book, one well-suited to discuss with a book club. I’m not sure I really understood Peter and his motivations, and I’m not sure I can without taking it through with other people. The reader is very much inside Peter’s head, which male in such a way that it became almost entirely foreign to me. Because Peter had lost any real connection with Rebecca – or any of the women in the book – there was no female viewpoint, no matter how miniscule, until the absolute end. This made for a novel that I had a difficult time accessing. It was quite readable, technically well-written, but I failed to truly engage, because I failed to truly empathize with Peter.

I suspect I will have more complete thoughts after discussing this with BOOK CLUB today, but for now I leave you with these somewhat unformed thoughts.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Publisher, for BOOK CLUB.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Cool Down with Agatha Christie – Ordeal by Innocence discussion

Aug 222011

This is part of the Cool Down With Agatha Christie summer extravaganza. Three participants in today’s discussion will win an Agatha Christie mystery prize pack.

ordealbyinnocence picture

According to the courts, Jacko Argyle bludgeoned his mother to death with a poker. The sentence was life imprisonment. But when Dr. Arthur Calgary arrives with the proof that confirms Jacko’s innocence, it is too late—Jacko died behind bars following a bout of pneumonia. Worse still, the doctor’s revelations reopen old wounds in the family, increasing the likelihood that the real murderer will strike again.

What were your general impressions of the book?
Like Endless Night, Ordeal by Innocence has a bit of a different structure than many of Christie’s books. In this case, the central murder occurred well before the book started. What did you think of this plot structure?
Did you feel the same level of engagement and suspense in Ordeal by Innocence as in other Christie books, even though the murder occurred before the book started?
Were you able to predict the identity of the murderer?
Other thoughts?

Thanks for participating in Cool Down with Agatha Christie this summer!

This post was written as part of my participation in Cool Down with Agatha Christie, sponsored by HarperCollins.

Older Entries

Devourer of Books

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira – Book Review

Embassytown by China Mieville – Thoughts

Sex on Six Legs by Marlene Zuk – Book Review

Weather Guilt and Review Madness

Who Has These Feet? – Saturday Story Spotlight

The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson – Audiobook Review

Rules of Civility by Amore Towles – Book Review

Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey – Book Review

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham – Book Review

Cool Down with Agatha Christie – Ordeal by Innocence discussion

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