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Numbby Sean Ferrell
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins
One afternoon after a sandstorm, a man walks out of the desert and into a circus. He’s wearing a bloody suit, with no memory and no feeling anywhere in his body. For lack of more information, everyone just calls him Numb. With his gift – or curse, depending on your point of view – of not feeling pain, Numb is an obvious match for the freakshow of the circus, piercing his hands with an awful lot of things. He’s relatively happy at the circus, until the manager of the circus decides to put him in a cage with the circus’ lion. At that point, Numb knows it is time to move on, and try to make his way in the world and discover what he can about his past.
What a charming, quirky story this is. I loved Numb, both the story and the character. Quite often when a character does have a real name – and very infrequently is he actually addressed as ‘Numb’ – it keeps me at a remove from them. I didn’t find this to be the case at all for Numb, however. He obviously wasn’t your typical guy, from his affliction to his dubious fame, but he had an everyman sort of feel regardless. What “Numb” was really about was identity: both finding out who you have been and figuring out who you want to be.
There is some some and language, but I think the themes and readability of “Numb” makes it great not just for adults, but for older teens as well. Recommended.
This review was done with a book received from Erica at Harper Perennial.
* 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.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.
Misquoted from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”
Living the life you’ve imagined is something that may be easier said than done, at least that is what Anna, Cami, Maeve, and Amy are finding out. Anna and Cami, best friends in high school who have grown apart as they aged, both find themselves back in Haven, Michigan at the same time. Cami’s boyfriend kicked her out after she stole from him to feed her gambling habit, sure she would use his money to win back her own money she had lost. For Anna, the return has more to do with grief than misdeeds. Her beloved mentor, August was killed in a traffic accident while she was talking to him on the phone, and her law firm insists upon bereavement leave, since she’s essentially useless anyway.
As a result of their return – and Cami’s lack of any income – the girls find themselves back in Haven and at the Nee Nance Store, the convenience store run by Maeve, Anna’s mother. Unfortunately, Haven is not one for them. They worry about the letters Maeve has recently been getting from her long-gone deadbeat husband, and the fact that her store is now slated for destruction by Amy’s fiance. As all four women’s lives get increasingly complicated, they must consider whether they are truly living the life they’ve imagined and, if not, what to do about it.
What a rich, messy, and real book Kristina Riggle has written!I was very surprised when she gave one of her characters a gambling addiction, because that isn’t something I’ve seen very often, but she pulled it off beautifully as one of Cami’s character flaws, without overdoing it and making it too seedy, it was just this glorious, real weakness she had, much like Maeve’s weakness for the husband who left her, the draw Anna had to her now-married high school boyfriend, or the formerly-heavy Amy’s fixation on appearance. And by the way, keeping Amy so relateable and giving her so much depth when she could have come across as simply very shallow? Absolutely fabulous.
I think that after “The Life You’ve Imagined” and “Real Life and Liars,” Kristina Riggle is going to be my official go-to for novels about the complications of everyday life. The tragedies that her characters experience are always so real, and never feel simply piled on, and their responses are absolutely true to life, messy, complicated life. What they experience is nothing that can’t be worked through, especially if they do it together, but neither is it something with a simply, pat answer. She leaves the reader with an ending tied up enough to satisfy, but not so much that it becomes unrealistic. Like in life, there are always a few more questions, a degree of uncertainty.
If you pick up a copy of this book, please join us on September 7th and 8th for an online book club discussion right here at Devourer of Book! I will have two copies of “Real Life and Liars” to give away to randomly chosen participants. If you review the book online, please leave a link on the Mr. Linky below.
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.
Lean on Peteby Willy Vlautin
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins
Life has been tough for Charley. His mother has been gone – not dead, but not around – for as long as he can remember, and his father is not the most reliable of parents. In addition to moving them around a lot and cutting off contact between Charley and his aunt, Charley’s father doesn’t always come home, sometimes preferring to stay out all night, or even for days at a time, with lady friends, leaving Charley short of both food and money. To fill his time before school starts, Charley begins hanging out down by the racetrack, where he picks up a job with Del, an ornery old man who treats his horses like commodities – and not very valuable ones at that. Charley, though, bonds quickly with one of Del’s horses, Lean on Pete. When his father is brutally assaulted by the husband of one of the women he is sleeping with, it is in Pete that Charley finds solace.
“Lean on Pete” was not the easiest book to read. Charley’s life was a very difficult one, and he was in a position in which no 15 year old should be placed, especially after his father was hospitalized. There was nobody around to take care of him, nobody who really even knew he needed taking care of. He found himself essentially homeless because he was too afraid to return to the scene of his father’s assault. Eventually he found himself entirely on his own. The way that Del and others around him used and abused their horses, too, was extremely difficult to read. Lean on Pete and the other horses were not living beings to Del, but instruments to make him money. He was less purposefully cruel than neglectful to the point of cruelty. It is hard to know whether or not to recommend this to horse lovers, because Charley’s connection with Pete was very moving, but a lot of horses are treated very badly throughout the book
I tried over and over while reading this to convince myself that this book was set in the past, that these sorts of things couldn’t happen in modern U.S. society, but given the discussion that Charley had with his father about possibly getting cell phones (an idea that his somewhat-paranoid father nixed) just couldn’t support this.
Vlautin matches his prose perfectly to his subject, with a high degree of realism that made me feel more that I was experiencing Charley’s story than that I was reading it. This work of fiction could easily have been memoir, for how convincingly real it was.
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.
Lake Overturnby 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.
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.
Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins
It is 1999 and Karim Issar has been brought by Schrub, a financial company, from Qatar to the U.S. to help them with their Y2K transition. Karim isn’t content with the relatively menial Y2K programming, however. He is constantly looking for a project that will both challenge him and allow him to prove his usefulness to his colleagues and superiors. And then he creates Kapitoil, a program that predicts oil prices and makes an absolute killing in the market doing so. Suddenly Karim finds himself thrown into the company of Mr. Schrub himself, but will his programming and new financial success actually bring him happiness?
“Kapitoil” is not a super easy book to get into, mostly because of Karim’s narration. Karim is a very math/science/rules-oriented person for whom English is a second language. As a result, his speech is very regimented and clinical, somewhat stilted. Of course, this is a deliberate story-telling technique by Wayne, not a fault in his writing, but I can easily see it keeping some people from fully engaging in “Kapitoil.” It did get progressively easier to follow karim’s flow as the book progressed and I became more comfortable with his narrative style.
I adored the story that Wayne told through his unique narrator, Karim. Because Karim was so out of his element in US culture, it was fascinating to watch him try to figure out people’s actions, a nice, fairly subtle means of cultural commentary. I also thought that Wayne explored what exactly it is that brings people happiness beautifully; it was so deftly done that I didn’t quite see it coming, and it didn’t come across in the obvious, clichéd manner that such a message often devolves into.
Although this won’t be for everyone, primarily because of the formal, mathematical speech that takes some getting used to, I would still definitely recommend “Kapitoil.”
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.
bermudaonion (Kathy)
Beth F
Sandy
Stephanie
Michelle
Numb by Sean Ferrell
Lean on Pete
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