Devourer of Books » Publisher: Random House

The Smart One by Jennifer Close – Book Review

May 152013

The Smart One by Jennifer Close
Published by Knopf, an imprint of Random House

Okay, so, I love Jennifer Close’s The Smart One. In fact, it was my Bloggers Recommend pick for April. First, a little about the book (from the publisher):

Weezy Coffey’s parents had always told her she was the smart one, while her sister was the pretty one. “Maureen will marry well,” their mother said, but instead it was Weezy who married well, to a kind man and good father. Weezy often wonders if she did this on purpose—thwarting expectations just to prove her parents wrong.

But now that Weezy’s own children are adults, they haven’t exactly been meeting her expectations either. Her oldest child, Martha, is thirty and living in her childhood bedroom after a spectacular career flameout. Martha now works at J.Crew, folding pants with whales embroidered on them and complaining bitterly about it. Weezy’s middle child, Claire, has broken up with her fiancé, canceled her wedding, and locked herself in her New York apartment—leaving Weezy to deal with the caterer and florist. And her youngest, Max, is dating a college classmate named Cleo, a girl so beautiful and confident she wears her swimsuit to family dinner, leaving other members of the Coffey household blushing and stammering into their plates.

As the Coffey children’s various missteps drive them back to their childhood home, Weezy suddenly finds her empty nest crowded and her children in full-scale regression. Martha is moping like a teenager, Claire is stumbling home drunk in the wee hours, and Max and Cleo are skulking around the basement, guarding a secret of their own. With radiant style and a generous spirit, The Smart One is a story about the ways in which we never really grow up, and the place where we return when things go drastically awry: home.

And here’s what I had to say about it:

Weezy’s parents always said that she was “the smart one,” but it is hard to feel brilliant when all three of your adult children have returned to live at home. In her sophomore novel, Jennifer Close creates a vivid and realistic portrait of a not always functional, but still loving, family and explores both the parent–child relationship and adult sibling rivalries.
Jennifer Karsbaek, Devourer of Books
Pre-order now: Indiebound | Amazon

Editor’s Pick – I just love Close’s ability to insert laugh-out-loud moments in a book otherwise filled with some very serious life events. It is this balance that makes her work truly special. – Jen

A few additional thoughts:

As someone who also loved Close’s debut novel, Girls in White Dresses, one of the appeals of The Smart One for me was that it seemed to be the next step in adulthood. In Girls, everyone was pretty much young and single and out on her own. In The Smart One, Claire starts in this place, but ends up taking a step that many would consider backwards: moving back in with her parents.
Weezy’s mother is wonderful and horrible at the same time. She says some pretty terrible things, but she is totally the elderly relative that you either have in your own family or have met at a friend’s family dinners. She is so life-like that you can’t help but laugh in recognition.
If you read Girls in White Dresses, know that this is a bit more of a conventional style. The point of view switches from character to character, but in a more traditional way, less jumping around.

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.

Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss – Audiobook Review

Apr 192013

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss, narrated by Scott Brick
Published in audio by Random House Audio, published in print by Random House

Synopsis (partial synopsis from the publisher):

Moss takes us inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the “bliss point” of sugary beverages or enhance the “mouthfeel” of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He unearths marketing campaigns designed—in a technique adapted from tobacco companies—to redirect concerns about the health risks of their products: Dial back on one ingredient, pump up the other two, and tout the new line as “fat-free” or “low-salt.” He talks to concerned executives who confess that they could never produce truly healthy alternatives to their products even if serious regulation became a reality. Simply put: The industry itself would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat. Just as millions of “heavy users”—as the companies refer to their most ardent customers—are addicted to this seductive trio, so too are the companies that peddle them. You will never look at a nutrition label the same way again.

Thoughts on the story:

The one thing I’m really still stuck on from Salt, Sugar, Fat is the part where Coca Cola refers to people who consume a lot of its product as “heavy users.” The drug analogy continues throughout much of the book, as Moss explores our physiological and cultural addictions to the titular ingredients. Moss does a fabulous job covering exactly how we got to where we are and just why it is so problematic. I was continually astounded by the prominence of Moss’s sources in the food industry; he clearly did his research and it is evident in the wealth of very well-presented information in the book. There was only one thing I did not love about Salt Sugar Fat, and that was how much my OCD self was bothered by the fact that these building blocks of processed food are discussed in a different order than the title: sugar, fat, then salt instead of salt, sugar, then fat. It drove me a little crazy, particularly during section changes, but Moss’s astounding work still sucked me back in immediately

Thoughts on the audio production:

Scott Brick, I have finally listened to you! Besides Simon Vance, Scott Brick is the only audiobook narrator I know who has his very own superfan. Audible has close to 500 results for Scott Brick’s name, but despite the number of audiobooks I have listened to over the last few years, I have never heard him until now. Nonfiction narration is generally not what inspires superfandom, but Brick does a wonderful job with Salt Sugar Fat. Because Moss inserts himself in his research from time to time, the book often has an almost conversational quality (if you have conversations with REALLY SMART people who know an awful lot about nutrition and food science), and Brick translates this wonderfully straight into the listener’s ear. He does that thing where you forget that you are listening to a narrator speak someone else’s words and tricks you into believing that he is the author and he knows ALL THESE THINGS AND MORE. Really top-notch.

soundbytes picture Overall:

General nonfiction caveats apply here: if you want to really study the material and be able to easily go back and reference things, you are probably best served either with print or a combination of print and audio. However, if you just want to be exposed to Moss’s research, the audio production of Salt Sugar Fat is wonderful and one I highly recommend.

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

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.

Sound Bytes is a meme that occurs every Friday! I encourage you to review your audiobooks 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.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout – Book Review

Apr 032013

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
Published by Random House

The Burgess siblings are close and yet far apart at the same time. The boys, Jim and Bob, live mere blocks from one another, but emotionally they are light years apart – although closer both literally and metaphorically than either of them is to Bob’s twin sister Susan, who still lives in the small Maine town in which they all grew up. Bob dogs his brother’s steps, but it seems that nothing would make Jim happier than to deny everything about his early life, including his siblings.

When Susan’s son Zach throws a pig’s head into a mosque during Ramadan, though, the family is forced back into a semblance of togetherness. Jim, a high profile attorney, knows that he has the skills to help get his nephew out of this. Not that this is an entirely selfless act; Jim is a big shot and and his nephew committing what seems to be a hate crime tarnishes his reputation.

I haven’t yet read Olive Kitteridge so I have very little to compare it to, but I loved The Burgess Boys. Jim and Susan are a bit hard to side with, but Bob is drawn in a way that makes it incredibly easy to empathize with him, and he seemed the key to the entire situation. I assumed, when I learned what the act was that this book hinges on, that I would have a very difficult time caring what happened to Zach, but I found myself caring about Bob enough that I could have an open mind about Zach’s motivations, and ultimately have my heart break nearly as much for him as for the victims of his crime.

There are a lot of things going on with each and every one of Strout’s characters, all this subplots would feel overly busy in the hands of a lesser novelist, but Strout puts all the pieces together beautifully and creates a book which can envelope its reader. 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.

Quiet by Susan Cain – Book Review

Mar 182013

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
Published by Broadway, an imprint of Random House

America is the land of the extroverts, or so our national mythology goes. In truth, some 1/3 of Americans are introverts, and the number is even higher in other countries. In Quiet, Susan Cain addresses both the problem of how introverts can succeed in a world that values extroversion, and the ways that introverted leadership benefits companies, as well as the issue of introverted students in schools that value participation and group work.

Quiet is an absolutely fascinating book. Cain quite ably makes the case for the value of introverted leadership, and the problems that come from shutting it out (such as some of the behaviors that led to the most recent economic crash). Perhaps what is most valuable is the explanation of how we got to this place. The American population is already more extroverted than many (perhaps due to immigration patterns), but we have not always been as enamored as the extrovert ideal as we are now.

This is a well-reasoned and informative book. If you aren’t an introvert yourself, you likely have one in your close family or one close to you at work, and Quiet can help you understand the way that (or those) introvert(s) can contribute. Highly recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Library.
* 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.

Eighty Days by Matthew Goodman – Audiobook Review

Mar 012013

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman, narrated by Kathe Mazur
Published in audio by Random House Audio, published in print by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, both imprints of Random House

Synopsis:

November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly set off to travel around the world in less than eighty days, an attempt to break the record set by Jules Verne’s fictional character Phileas Fogg from the novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly’s travel was paid for by the paper she worked for, Joseph Pulitzer’s World paper in New York. Although the idea originated with her, by the end of the day Nellie Bly was not the only young woman traveling around the world. The publishers of The Cosmopolitan decided to send Elizabeth Bisland, who wrote a books column for the magazine, on her own journey heading west instead of east, in at attempt to beat not only Phileas Fogg, but Nellie Bly as well.

Thoughts on the story:

I love it when authors find fascinating historical events about which I know nothing and tell it really well. I knew a bit about Nellie Bly before Eighty Days, but interestingly not about her race around the world. My knowledge was limited to her expose on the insane asylum on Blackwell Island, a reference it is possible I learned from my massive The West Wing marathon earlier this year. Goodman lays his story out very clearly, alternating between the two women’s stories in a way that is faithful to the timeline while still maintaining a good flow. While the book itself is rather long, it has a good pace and is continually interesting.

Thoughts on the audio production:

Kathe Mazur does a wonderful job narrating. Like Goodman’s writing itself, she maintains a good pace and, while she doesn’t do much vocal differentiation between the stories, it isn’t really necessary or called for here, and there is no problem keeping the narrative straight.

For more, please see my review for Audiofile Magazine.

soundbytes picture Overall:

A long book, but well worth the read. Fascinating and highly recommended.

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

Source: Audiofile Magazine.
* 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.

Sound Bytes is a meme that occurs every Friday! I encourage you to review your audiobooks 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.

Sticks and Stones by Emily Bazelon – Book Review

Feb 182013

Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon
Published by Random House

The big bad wolf in the raising of teenagers today is cyber bullying. If you believe Emily Bazelon, however, cyber bullying is not a new thing. It is, she claims, essentially nothing more than plain old bullying, moved to a new venue. What, then, is bullying? In Sticks and Stones, Bazelon unpacks the issue of bullying through three case studies, discussing interventions, suicide, and, of course, the role of the internet.

Honestly, I’m not sure I would have ever picked this one up had I not been interviewing Bazelon about it for the SheKnows Book Lounge. I expected Sticks and Stones to either be self-help-y or to be a dry recitation of the facts of bullying. Happily, it is neither. Instead, Sticks and Stones is a book that realistically delves into a difficult and complex issue. The case studies bring real people and real faces to the problem of bullying, and on both sides of the issue. It helps her unpack the school cultures that contribute to bullying, as well as what, if anything, can help in such situations.

Beyond being a well organized informative book, Sticks and Stones is also simply a compelling read. Bazelon has a great style, and knows exactly how much she can insert herself in the story without detracting from the facts she hopes to impart. Even without any current personal vested interested in precisely what goes on in high schools, I did not want to put Sticks and Stones down. Between Bazelon’s engaging prose and her ability to get to the heart of why exactly this issue is important, she had me hooked.

Very highly recommended.

For more, see my interview with Emily Bazelon in the SheKnows Book Lounge.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Author’s publicist.
* 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.

Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio – Audiobook Review

Feb 152013

Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio, narrated by Leslie Carroll
Published in audio by Random House Audio, published in print by Doubleday, both imprints of Random House

Synopsis:

Of course it would end like this, with May on trial for extortion. After all, she has been named the “Most Dangerous Woman” by the Pinkerton Detective Agency and one Pinkerton in particular seems to be trailing her. All May has ever wanted was to provide for her family and get out of her small Michigan town. Chicago had promise, and was so close to home, but that damned Pinkerton Reed Doherty first targeted her there, necessitating a life on the move, always looking for the place she could settle down and be secure.

Thoughts on the story:

Love!

May is a fabulous, if possibly unreliable, main narrator. She’s smart, sly, and self-assured and her story is an absolutely fascinating one. Biaggio leads her readers all over Europe and the continental United States at the turn of the 20th century. Is May really a con woman? Does she just want a good and secure life? Both? Neither? Biaggio has a great sense of pacing, moving back and forth deftly between the trial and the years leading up to it, never losing her reader’s interest. This is the whole package: lovely writing, great story, amazing characters, and vivid settings.

Thoughts on the audio production:

If you pick up the audio, you actually get the whole package plus, because Leslie Carroll’s narration captures May beautifully. Like Biaggio, she has great pacing, and the voices she creates for the secondary and tertiary characters bring listeners even more fully into May’s story.

For more please see my review for Audiofile Magazine.

soundbytes picture Overall:

Such a fabulous book and, as good as I’m sure it is in print, the audio production adds that extra je ne sais quoi. I adored it, very highly recommended.

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

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 Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin – Book Review

Jan 142013

The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin
Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House

Charles Lindbergh made the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Charles Lindbergh associated at one point with Nazi Germany. The Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. Charles, Charles, the Lindberghs. It is Charles who is in the history books, time and time again. His wife, Anne, is often little more than a footnote, and then only in the discussion of the kidnapping, but Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a fascinating woman in her own right. Daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, she is a shy and literary-minded college senior when she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh. Over the next few years, Anne and Charles embark on whirlwind life together, with Anne becoming the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States. Despite her significant accomplishments, Anne remains squarely in her husband’s shadow.

More than just a fictional biography, The Aviator’s Wife is the story of a woman finding herself and finding her voice. Benjamin fully subsumes the reader in Anne’s psyche. Anne’s head isn’t always a comfortable place to be in the early and middle years of her marriage to Charles, as she struggles to keep her own identity as she orbits her insanely famous husband. Still, Anne was a real woman, and Benjamin makes her live once again between the covers of The Aviator’s Wife. Despite her unique problems as a woman in the spotlight, her general struggles with balancing children, husband, and self will be familiar to many women.

There can be downsides to being so invested in a character’s life, of course. The pages leading up to the kidnapping of Charles and Anne’s first child were so suspenseful and heart-stopping as to be almost torturous, especially to a parent of small children. Still, the paralyzing fear aside, that passage made me realize just how much I had been brought into Anne’s world, how authentically human she was to me.

The Aviator’s Wife is a fascinating book about a fascinating woman. 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 Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell – Book Review

Jan 092013

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House

So, everyone’s all, “Jesuits in space! How can you not love The Sparrow?” Here’s my problem, every time I ever heard anyone mention Jesuits in space all I heard in my head was “Jesuits…. In…. Spaaaaace…” like that old pigs in space sketch from The Muppet Show. As a result, it seems that I imagined that The Sparrow was going to be a comedy.

Uh, yeah, no. That assumption got pretty awkward pretty fast. The Sparrow alternates between two time periods, the first is leading up to and during the mission to Rakhat – a recently planet recently discovered to have intelligent life – and the second is after the return to Earth of Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz, sole survivor. Almost immediately the reader learns that things went very, very wrong on Rakhat. Not only did the entire rest of the crew die, but Sandoz has been accused of something heinous – and initially fairly vague – by the secular mission from Earth to Rakhat that rescued him.

There is a lot going on in The Sparrow and it took me some time to find my way into the story, although this might have been partially because I was expecting something quite different than what I was actually going to get. Once I became fully immersed in Russell’s story – and it didn’t take very long – I was completely hooked. You might think that knowing from the get-go that these characters with whom you are connecting will not make it back from Rakhat would detract from the suspense and the sense of urgency of the novel, but this turns out not to be the case at all. Despite the fact I knew I was going to lose these characters, Russell still made me care about them, and as the mission arrived on Rakhat I began to get very nervous for all of them, wondering when exactly the other shoe was going to drop.

It is difficult to believe that The Sparrow was Mary Doria Russell’s debut novel, because she teases out the story of Emilio Sandoz and what happened to him and his friends on Rakhat with absolute mastery. She also does not default to the easy, cliche themes and conclusions, either. Everything is complex and realistically messy. The Sparrow is a wonderful novel, and one I can definitely recommend.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Personal.
* 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 Start of Everything by Emily Winslow – Book Review

Jan 072013

The Start of Everything by Emily Winslow
Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House

Outside of Cambridge, the body of a young woman is found in the sluice gates after the spring thaw. There is little left to go on besides the clothes she is wearing and some hairs found stuck to them; her body is so badly decomposed there is no hope of DNA, nor are there any hairs even left on her head. This does not allow much in the ways of leads for detectives Chloe Frohmann and Morris Keene, but they are determined that they will solve this case. At the very least they must identify the victim and notify her family so they are not always wondering.

At the same time, Mathilde Oliver is scouring Cambridge for a girl named Katja. Mathilde works in Cambridge’s post office and is one of the people tasked with following up on incomplete addresses. Katja has been receiving increasingly desperate letters from a young man named Stephen, addressed with only her first name and the college, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone by the name of Katja at Cambridge, at least not anyone who matches the description in the letters.

Before long, it begins to seem that there is some connection between the mysterious Katja and the unidentified – and certainly murdered – body. To discover the true story, however, Frohmann and Keene must sort through secrets, mistaken identities, and their own personal weaknesses.

Like Winslow’s The Whole World, The Start of Everything would likely best be described as a literary mystery. Although there are detectives and a heinous crime that must be solved, the reader’s focus falls primarily on the individual characters and the ways they are developed. And Winslow is certainly talented at creating unique and believable voices for her characters. I initially misread Mathilde’s name as Matthew and was slightly confused as I read her first section, because I thought I had seen a masculine name, but I was certain that this character must be female, just by the way Winslow wrote her. Similarly, I was able to discern between Frohmann and Keene’s sections almost immediately even without reading their names, because they both have such distinctive voices that they are impossible to confuse.

At its heart, The Start of Everything is comprised of a series of misunderstandings – many things must go wrong to create the situations Winslow’s characters find themselves in – but Winslow weaves them together such as that they seem much more plausible than perhaps they should. This results in a mystery with just enough twists to keep the reader on her toes, but not so many that it all seems unlikely, aka the perfect mystery.

Whether you’re a fan of mysteries, literary fiction, or both you’ll find something to love in The Start of Everything. Very 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.

Older Entries