If Jack’s In Love by Stephen Wetta – Book Review

Sep 292011

If Jack’s In Love by Stephen Wetta
Published by Amy Einhorn Books, an imprint of Penguin

If there’s anything worse than being a 12-year old boy, it is being a brilliant 12-year old boy born into the family that the whole town shuns. Oh, and even worse than that is having your brother suspected in the disappearance of one of the town’s most popular young men, who just happens to be the older brother of the girl you have a crush on. Actually, life as Jack Witcher is just sort of crummy in general.

If Jack’s In Love is a wonderful coming-of-age story. Jack is a compelling young man with a very interesting voice. His character was consistent with that of a 12-year old, without falling into the trap of being particularly obnoxious in an effort on Wetta’s part to prove that Jack is indeed 12.

The storyline Wetta has created is very interesting, looking at the incidents between Jack’s brother Stan and the missing boy, wondering whether or not Stan really did something dire and irreversible. The real heart of the story, however, is Jack and his reactions to the world around him, his fight to be accepted without giving up who he is at heart.

There is much discussion these days about what constitutes a young adult book, and what an adult book. Many people would likely classify If Jack’s In Love immediately as young adult, due to the age of its main character. It seems, however, that Wetta is coming at this from a distinctly more adult point of view, while still staying true to Jack. Although there is certainly cross-over appeal for teenagers, If Jack’s In Love is a bildungsroman written for an adult audience – and a good one, at that.

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.

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos – Audiobook Review

Sep 232011

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos, narrated by Jack Gantos
Published in audio by Macmillan Audio, published in print by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (BYR), both imprints of Macmillan

Synopsis:

Growing up can be difficult, especially when you live in an exceedingly quirky town called Norvelt that was originally founded by Eleanor Roosevelt that consists mostly of elderly people. It is even harder when you’re Jack Gantos and you’re grounded for the summer thanks to conflicting directions from your mom who loves Norvelt and your father who hates it. It looks like it might be a boring summer for Jack, until he is apprenticed to the town’s arthritic obit writer and medical examiner. Suddenly, being grounded has never been so interesting.

Thoughts on the story:

Quirkiness abounds! Gantos seems to have a great love for the absurd, but at times while listening, I felt that the goal was absurdity for its own sake, which I did not find particularly endearing. In fact, I was nearly halfway into Dead End in Norvelt before I determined that I would, indeed, continue through to the end and not simply abandon the book. Eventually, though, the town of Norvelt and its inhabitants grew on me and, by the end, I was even a bit sad that the book had ended.

One interesting thing about Dead End in Norvelt is the way it blends events from Gantos’s own life with those that occurred only in his imagination. I often wondered exactly where that line was.

Thoughts on the audio production:

Like the story, Gantos’s narration took some time to grow on me. He came across initially as a somewhat less funny David Sedaris. In general, though, I do think he was the best person to tell his own story, as he was able to perfectly give voice to some of the oddness contained therein.

soundbytes picture Overall:

Although I am not overly enthusiastic about Dead End in Norvelt, I do think it is worth picking up if the synopsis interests you, or if you are in the mood for a quirky listen.

Buy this book from:
Powells: Audio/Print*
Indiebound: Audio/Print*

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.

The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen – Book Review

Apr 112011

The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen
Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of Random House

Twiss and Milly may not have much, but they have one another. These days even their business of tending birds has mostly fallen by the wayside, and when people do bring birds for them to heal, they often cannot even manage to save the creatures. It hadn’t always been that way, just the two sisters on their own. At one point, they were part of a family, and Milly still believed she would one day marry and have children. It was the summer of 1947 that changed everything. In 1947, Milly was prim and Twiss was wild, but they were best friends, until their cousin showed up for the summer. Bett was older and endlessly fascinating to Twiss, and her presence would shatter their already fragile world.

The Bird Sisters is lovely and charming story. It takes place in rural Wisconsin, in a post-war world that seems to have been oddly untouched by World War II, giving the place an oddly innocent and naive feel. The story was well set up, alternating in each chapter between present day and 1947. While this constant switching did occasionally break up the flow of the story and keep me from becoming fully engrossed, the consistency of the switching did help, because the reader is never forced to guess from chapter to chapter which time period the story is in, it is simply whichever one the previous chapter was not in. This kept me from being pulled out of the story more than I already was with the switching of time periods.

Lovely and charming as The Bird Sisters was, something about it didn’t completely work for me. I admired Rasmussen’s writing, as well as the world and characters she created, but I was never fully engrossed in the story. It simply failed to captivate me, although it was an enjoyable read.

Take a look at The Bird Sisters, look at the storyline, go to a local physical bookstore, pick it up, read a couple of sample chapters. If you like what you see, rest assured that the same quality remains throughout the book and give it a try. Just because it wasn’t for me, doesn’t mean it isn’t for you.

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.

Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mockett – Book Review

Mar 142011

Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Matsuki Mockett
Published by Graywolf Press

Life is not easy for a single woman and her daughter in post-war Japan. Satomi and her mother are making a living, but Atsuko’s presence as a smart, engaging, unmarried woman is seen as threat to the other women in their small, rural community. As such, Atsuko and Satomi were always made to feel as outsiders, a situation that was perhaps not helped by Satomi’s status as a musical prodigy. Atsuko is determined that Satomi’s life will be richer and more fulfilling than her own has been, discouraging her from a domestic future in favor of a life that will incorporate Satomi’s artistic abilities. When the unexpected happens, however, Satomi must learn how to make a new life for herself, because the life she has known is gone. The story picks up again with Satomi’s daughter Rumi living in San Francisco, having never known the mother she believes is dead. As new people come into Rumi’s life, however, she finds herself forced to examine her past and learn about the mother who has always been notable only in her absence.

Picking Bones from Ash is a lovely story of identity, family, and fitting in, among other things. The title comes a passage – relatively early in the book, this really isn’t a spoiler – after Atsuko passes away in Satomi’s absence:

I had missed my mother’s cremation and so had not been present when Mineko, Chieko, and the rest of their family had stood around her still-hot remains to remove her bones from the ash. They would have used chopsticks to do this, culling only the most essential parts of her body and placing them inside an urn, which was then set inside a box. – p. 98

Not knowing anything about funerary practices in Japan, I found this passage both shocking and beautiful. The thought of a family gathering around the remains of a loved one and doing something so intensely personal as picking out the bones with chopsticks is somewhat mind boggling, but at the same time, what better way to reiterate the loving bond of family, that you take care of one another even after death. And yet, if this is your own mother, one who you loved dearly, how heartbreaking to have missed such a ritual, to have it attended to only by your stepsisters and their families.

The place of women in the world over the last 50 years, the relationships between mother and daughter and their effect on the relationships of the next generation, the interaction of East and West. Add these things to a compelling story and sympathetic characters and you have a great novel. You also have Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mockett. Recommended.

We will be discussing Picking Bones from Ash on March 22, 2011 at Linus’s Blanket.

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.

The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard – Book Review

Feb 242011

The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard
Published by Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins

On Halloween night, 16 year old Norah Lindell disappears. This disappearance colors the lives of the boys she left behind, her school mates, for years to come. Norah’s sister becomes suddenly tantalizing in the year following Norah’s disappearance, a product both of her own coming of age and of the boys’ fascination with all things Lindell. Even as the boys continue to grow into adulthood, they never stop thinking about Norah and what might have become of her. Of course, her fate might have been the tragic end of so many disappeared young women, violated and killed. But perhaps she left on purpose, and ended up creating a life out West. Then again, she might have traveled the world, ending up in the midst of the India in time for the bombings in Mumbai. The boys – and the reader – will never know, but that does not stop them from wondering, from imagining.

At well under 300 pages, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a slim volume that packs a huge punch. Pittard’s writing is not only lovely, but absolutely captivating. Interestingly, this is the second novel I read this year told in the first person plural (we, etc.). It is never completely clear in The Fates Will Find Their Way whether it is one boy speaking for the group, but I like to think that it is something akin to their collective memory. The boys were always more of a group than individuals, although individuals were often named. I never felt that I got a good handle on most of them as individuals, but as a group they had an amazingly strong identity that their weaker individual identities was not a stumbling block to enjoying the story.

There is so much to this little book that it is difficult to do it justice. Suffice it to say that I think you should read it. Highly recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound | Amazon*

Source: Publisher, via a trade show.
* 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.

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi – Book Review

Jan 132011

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari
Published by Other Press

Kabul, 1979. It is the early days of the Soviet invasion, but for Farhad life does not yet seem particularly different. This happy naivete does not last long, however. Something happens while Farhad is out carousing with a friend preparing to flee to Pakistan, and the young man is severely beaten. When Farhad finally awakes, grievously injured, he finds himself in the house of a young widow – a woman whose life has already been greatly impacted by the presence of the Soviet soldiers.

Typically when I read, I like big meaty paragraphs, with lots of words to latch onto. Spare pages make me a bit nervous; “can this author really impart enough in these few words?” I wonder. Oftentimes, the answer is no. However, with “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear,” the answer is yes. Some rudimentary knowledge of the situation in Afghanistan in the late 1970s is necessary to understand what is going on, but even knowing something so simple as the fact the Soviets invaded is, really, sufficient. With that firmly in mind, the atmosphere of a country at war is incredibly evident as Farhad drifts in and out of consciousness, as well as the reality he finds in the young widow’s house when he wakes up.

The prose is simply gorgeous, and incredibly evocative. This is all the more stunning as “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear” is a translation. Maguire and Yari are very skilled indeed, to take Rahimi’s stark, poetic prose and render it lovely in English, without losing the sense of place and import.

This may not be a book for every reader, but for those who revel in writing and the power of language to evoke emotion, as well as those interested in feeling what it might be like to live in an occupied country, I highly recommend “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear.”

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

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.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781590513613?&PID=34002

The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez – Book Review

Oct 202010

The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez
Published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin

During her sophomore year of college, when her mother begins succumbing to early onset Alzheimers, Miraflores makes a discovery that changes the majority of what she has always believed about her life. Although Mira is half Panamanian, she was raised exclusively in the United States by her American mother and she has always been led to believe that her father was not interested in being a part of her or her mother’s lives. The letters that she finds give lie to everything she has been told. Now Mira must discover the truth about her life and her family for her own sanity, so she is heading to Panama to search for the father she never really knew.

I know this must have been a good reading month, because I’m a little scared that you are all going to roll your eyes as I get all gushy about yet another book.

“The World in Half” is an absolutely beautiful book. The prose is just lovely, but this is not simply a book with beautiful language. Not a sentence is wasted, every word serves to support the story that Henriquez is telling and the development of her characters. In some ways, “The World in Half” is a family mystery, as Mira attempts to track down her father, but what was even more interesting was Mira’s journey to discover herself and her relationship with her mother.

Yet “The World in Half” is not simply the same old literary fiction story of coming of age and discovering one’s true identity, there are many aspects of the book that set is apart from others with similar classifications. Panama as a setting, of course, is not very widely used – in fact to my knowledge this is the first book I have ever read which has any portion of the book set in Panama. Henriquez did a fantastic job giving a sense of place to those of us who have been and may never go to Panama, I felt that I got a good feel for the national psyche, at least in the cities.

What made this book truly special, though, was Mira’s love for geology and geography, which she was studying in college. Sometimes when a character has some quirky trait – like talking about geology and geography whenever it fits even a little bit – it seems forced or quirky for quirky’s sake. Not so in “The World in Half.” Henriquez’s characterization of Mira was so well thought out and fleshed out that such comments seemed to be no more than a logical extension of exactly who Mira was. I never wondered why she would bother to say something like that, it always made complete sense and was completely in character. In addition, it almost always added something to my understand of how Mira sees and approaches the world. It was very well done and really took this book to another level.

Very, very highly recommended. I lurved it.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

4866515992 41b02a5de1 m picture Cristina Henriquez’s website

Other Books by Cristina Henriquez:
“Come Together, Fall Apart” (stories)

This review was done with a book I purchased myself.
* 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.

How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson – Audiobook Review

Aug 202010

How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson, narrated by Renee Raudman
Published in Audio by Tantor Audio
Published in Print by Plue, an imprint of Penguin

Synopsis:

Carley Wells doesn’t have a whole lot going for her. She’s heavy, not particularly good at school, and not exactly popular in rich and chic Fox Glen. Eager to make her shine for her 16th birthday: they are going to commission an author to write a novel to coordinate with her birthday party theme. The author, Bree McEnroy, has been tasked with writing a book that Carley will love, but as Carley doesn’t think much of books and reading, this may be a more difficult commission than Bree bargained for. Hunter Kay is another complicating factor. As Carley’s best friend and a huge fan of the written word he initially spends a good deal of time helping Bree and Carley’s creative process along, but it becomes increasingly apparent that Hunter’s use of alcohol and prescription drugs is a much bigger problem than he wants to let on – a revelation that has great impact on all of the people around him.

Thoughts on the story:

I am completely amazed that I didn’t absolutely hate each and every character. Everyone, with the exception of the author, Bree McEnroy, had entirely too much money for his or her own good, to the point where frivolous purchasing what the name of the game. I mean, for pete’s sake, Carley’s parents basically bought her a novelist in order to impress their friends and make her look better for colleges. What could be more ridiculous than that? Then there’s the fact that the only things most of the kids in Fox Glen seemed to care about were drugs and sex – maybe being popular and fitting in as well. Really, not much could sound less appealing to me.

And yet, Egan Gibson managed to humanize her main characters to a degree I would not expect, given their most prominent qualities. In fact, I was really impressed with how, not only did I not completely hate the characters, I actually felt sympathy for most of them. And that’s really saying something, because ‘poor little rich girl’ doesn’t usually elicit much sympathy from me. That, in my opinion, is an impressive quality in an author.

Thoughts on the audio production:

I very much enjoyed Renee Raudman’s work narrating “How to Buy a Love of Reading.” I thought that she was well cast in the part, and she gave both life and depth to her characters. And, praises be, she did not interpret them as whiny, as she might have most annoyingly done. Her narration certainly helped keep Egan Gibson’s characters in the realm of surprisingly sympathetic, instead of simply obnoxious spoiled brats.

Overall:

I was definitely nervous during the first part of this book that I was going to hate the characters so much that I wouldn’t be able to finish it, but I was pleasantly surprised by the depth introduced by Egan Gibson and the way that Raudman’s narration supported the story. Recommended.

Note: although the chief protagonist of the story is a high school girl, “How to Buy a Love of Reading” doesn’t come across as a YA book. I believe that adults, as well as older teens, would enjoy this story.

4909013259 51a8f4edb5 m picture The audiobook has a similar cover design as the hardcover, but “How to Buy a Love of Reading” was recently released in paperback, with this new cover.

Buy this book from:
Powells: Audio/Print*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound: Audio/Print*
Amazon: Audio/Print*

This review was done with a book received from the Tantor audio.
* 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.

Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre – Book Review

Aug 112010

Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins

Eula, Idaho may be a small town, but there’s a whole lot going on. Enrique and his friend Gene (who most likely has undiagnosed Aspergers’) are working on a science project devoted to the mystery of what happened in Cameroon to kill every person and animal around Lake Nyos, something scientists suspect has to do with lake overturn. Enrique is also struggling with his fantasies of touching and being touched by other boys, at the same time that his mother Lina is falling into an affair with a married man whose wife is dying. Gene’s mother Connie – a very straight-laced and religious woman – is becoming increasingly enamored with a missionary in town from Africa to raise support, until she begins to see some of his imperfections. Coop, the driver of the bus that takes Gene and Enrique to school, is still taking care of the alcoholic uncle he believes killed his father, and Coop’s prescription drug-addicted sister Wanda is determined to get clean and act as a surrogate for a childless couple from Portland.

“Lake Overturn” is one of those novels with a millions plot lines for the reader to follow. Quite often in novels such as this, plot is king, to the point where the individual characters get lost, under-developed, serving only to move along the happenings of the book. How are you supposed to care about so many characters (including many more secondary characters I didn’t mention in my plot summary)? If you don’t believe that a book with so many plot lines can have incredibly well written and fleshed out characters, I challenge you to read “Lake Overturn” and see exactly how Vestal McIntrye makes the improbable happen.

McIntyre’s characters get anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pages to tell their story before he moves on to another one of his creations, forcing the character through whose point of view we had been viewing “Lake Overturn” to wait his or her turn to continue narrating. Instead of making all of the characters seem shallow, as I thought it would, this technique kept characters coming back often enough that I couldn’t forget what was happening in their storyline after reading chapters and chapters about what was happening to everyone else. Because of this, I was able to continually to build on my ideas of who the characters were and what drove them to do what they did. It really worked spectacularly well. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that McIntrye is a spectacular writer, with a very evocative sense. Tell me that this passage, found on page 236, doesn’t give you a wonderful idea of what kind of place Eula is:

Back in Eula, winter was announced, not buy a blanket of white snow, but by an old man who lived on the boulevard, rising after his Thanksgiving dinner, walking outside, flipping open the rusted metal cover that guarded the outlet near the front porch, and plugging in the cord that dangled nearby. The multicolored lights that he had left up all year turned on, then off…on, then off…all in unison. He had used a staple gun to put them up, and feared that, given the chewed-up state of the boards, if he pulled the lights down, the gutter would come with them.

I don’t often mark passages when I read, but I absolutely had to dog-ear that one, because I thought it summed up Eula perfectly.

“Lake Overturn” was both a Washington Post ‘Best Book of the Year’ and a New York Times Book Review ‘Editors’ Choice’ in hardcover, and it isn’t difficult to see why. Highly recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from the 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 Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy – Book Review

Aug 042010

The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy
Published by Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House

It is 1961, and Verdita is starting to strain against the realities of her small mountain town in Puerto Rico. She is 11 and not yet a seniorita, but at the same time, Verdita feels very much like she is growing up and needs a degree of freedom and change she cannot find where she is. The most oppressive figure in Verdita’s life is her mother, not for her mother’s actions, but for what she represents. Unlike Verdita’s father, her mother speaks no English, and is more than content in their small town, wanting nothing more than to be with her family. Verdita, by contrast, longs for the excitement of San Juan or, better yet, America. In truth, Verdita dreams of America, especially after interacting with her cousin who moved there and his American friend, back in Puerto Rico for a visit.

“The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico” is a lovely coming of age story of a young girl dreaming of a life different from her own. McCoy did a wonderful job getting into the head of an eleven year old; it definitely seemed a capricious pre-teen was narrating, not an adult. This did make some of the narration and reasoning a bit choppy at times, but it absolutely seemed intentional, or at least a by-product of the voice being used.

I really loved the details about Verdita’s life in Puerto Rico, particularly the section about John F. Kennedy’s visit to the country, and the edges of what Verdita came to understand about the internal conflict in Puerto Rico whether to remain connected to the United States or assert independence. This provided a nice mirror to Verdita’s own struggles with to what extent she wanted to maintain ties to her home or become increasingly independent. McCoy’s childhood spent visiting relatives in Puerto Rico really added a depth and vibrancy to her descriptions and story.

At just over 200 pages, this is a rather short book. And if I have one real criticism, it is that I would have liked to see some elements of Verdita’s life and internal monologue expanded and fleshed out a little more, making it a little bit longer book. It was perhaps a little too brief for me.

This would be a great books for book clubs: it has great themes for discussion, is not too long (for those of you with book club members who shy away from books over 300 pages), is now out in paperback, and even includes a discussion guide in the back.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from the author.
* 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.

Older Entries

Devourer of Books

If Jack’s In Love by Stephen Wetta – Book Review

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos – Audiobook Review

The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen – Book Review

Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mockett – Book Review

The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard – Book Review

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by Atiq Rahimi – Book Review

The World in Half by Cristina Henriquez – Book Review

How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson – Audiobook Review

Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre – Book Review

The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy – Book Review

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