sarah

I noticed this book on my shelf a few weeks ago and couldn't remember if I had read it or not, so I picked it up. I hadn't read it, and reading it now was one of those amazing reading experiences where one picks up the exact right book at the exact right time and it ring in one's head like a bell that has been struck. Now that I am done, I wish I hadn't read it so I could do that again. I can't believe this book is almost 30 years old, I can't believe it was a first novel, I can't believe I accidentally saved it for myself this whole time. Recommended.

Vilar is obviously very intelligent and has spent a lot of time thinking about and working on herself. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to translate that into a compelling or engaging memoir. She gives us the facts we need to understand the choices she felt compelled to make, but with so much detachment that the reader is left to feel like an outside observer. Even after Vilar has hit rock bottom and finally turned to face her feelings, the book lacks warmth and we have to take her at her (very academic) word that she is now able to bond to people emotionally. And, as other reviewers have pointed out, she doesn't do any analysis until the last chapter, so the structure of the book is 98% <i>what</i> happened followed by three paragraphs on <i>why</i> she lived the way she did.

Vilar's prose is academic and cold, and peppered with intellectual references that shed no additional light on her situation. Perhaps, with a few years more distance from her early life, she will be able to engage with her own fascinating story, and write the memoir that this ought to have been. This version, however, is not recommended.

I would say this is a three-star book that got four stars because I couldn't put it down. I read it every night until my eyes were closed and I had to open them to turn out the light. I liked that Saldin took a low-stakes plot (not a murder or a war, just some teenagers at camp) and made it into such a powerful story. I also found it rang with truth. I wonder if everyone who loved it also had to choose, at one point, between being a good friend to someone who could probably use it and being enthralled to someone who probably isn't going to treat you well in the end. I don't think I have ever read a book with this dynamic as its theme, and now I wonder, why not? Recommended.

This was a lovely bit of chick lit. Although I did not grow up in a Fundamentalist Christian culture, Dunn does a terrific job of describing her character's slow realization that mainstream dating is tricky, and doing everything right does not guarantee the outcome. As you would expect, it is a light (and sometimes funny read), and while it was a little breezy for my tastes, I can't say I didn't enjoy it.

It was nice to read this just a few books after My Brilliant Friend, so I could compare the two.

Patchett was so loving and tender in her descriptions of her friend Lucy Grealy, and she made it more than clear why she found Grealy lovable. I believed her, but I also know that a huge personality like Grealy's can be difficult to endure for a long period of time, and Patchett strikes me as the type of person who needs a long dose of calm and quiet every now and then. Wouldn't she struggle with Grealy's emotional excesses? Wouldn't there be times when she just lost her patience?

The inner conflict of close relationships is completely missing from this memoir. It's possibly that Patchett never minded being in this lopsided friendship, where Grealy gushes and takes and Patchett just gives. Grealy may really have been so charming that Patchett never tired of her. But even if she had nothing but love for Grealy, that dynamic always has a dark side: surely Grealy's overbright personality would have made the (still outstanding!) Patchett feel dull and boring by comparison. What kind of effect does that have on Patchett's view of herself, her personality, or her own writing? Does she love being around Grealy, but kind of hate herself a bit afterwards? Does Grealy inspire her to be greater, but also erode her confidence that she ever can be?

But if you want to hear about any of that, you have to read My Brilliant Friend. To be fair, I only made it about 60% through this book (on my second attempt), and it might get more fraught towards the end. Maybe Patchett gets more honest, or draws healthy boundaries, or just starts to see Grealy more realistically. There was no hint of that in the first part, so I set this book down and won't pick it up again.

There was so much I didn't like about this book. First, I couldn't decide if the characters' shtick was supposed to be actually funny, or just a sad attempt to paper over really serious situations with terrible comedic references and puns. Second, I couldn't decide if the conversations about race were supposed to be actually funny, or making a point about how every time white people gather to figure out how to help another group, they just end up arguing about white people. Third, I couldn't decide if Tassie's way of dealing with her brother's death was supposed to be funny, or just a nervous breakdown. You get the idea. Not recommended, which is something I never thought I would say about this author, whom I have loved in the past.

I loved this book. It was small and restrained, and so perfect that it's hard to even describe why it was good. Coral was an amazing character, starting out with no opinions or even preferences and ending up a more or less fully-realized person. The awkward steps she took in between were heartbreaking. Particularly when she called off the wedding because she couldn't put on her dress without help. I would have done that, at her age. She had pride, but not enough power to ask for help. The meaning that Cameron manages to communicate in these small details is beautiful. I highly recommend this book.

The pitch for this book is AMAZING: Hilary Winston is in a Barnes & Noble one day and picks up a book by her ex-boyfriend, only to realize that one of the main characters in his novel is HER. That's all it took for me to 100% want to read this book.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't fully satisfy. Winston gives us dozens of short chapters, each one telling one vignette, usually about her love life. The longest parts are about "Kyle" (Chad Kultgen), the author of the instigating novel, with whom she had her longest and most seriouos relationship. Other chapters are short, and a few are just one sentence. The tension of the book is the unfinished business with Kyle, and tactfully she manages that situation right before the end of the book. I think the book would have been more engaging if it were written as one long narrative, rather than in slices.

[ETA: I now know that this is the same structure as The Average American Male, so maybe that's why she made this choice.]

I think that Hilary Winston's talent for writing for television really shows, and it occurred to me that if the book were delivered as a monologue, many of the lines would be really funny. In fact, she could probably rework the book into stand-up comedy material. Although, to be honest, I hope she is already long past the events that caused her to write it.

The book is likeable, not lovable, but in the end I'm glad I read it and not The Average American Male. I think I could be friends with Hilary Winston. And if I were, I would constantly remind her that Chad Kultgen is a vulgar hack, whereas she is smart and funny and deserves to be with someone who actually likes her.

I loved reading this book. The writing was beautiful (which requires a nod to the translator, Ann Goldstein, who made the English so natural I forgot it was a translation by the middle of the first paragraph), and the story was amazing. Elena Ferrante is ridiculously talented. She laid out the strong and conflicting emotions of childhood effortlessly, and without nostalgia or indulgence. I loved that the story was told from Elena's point of view, so we can see how Lila's natural talent causes Elena to strive for and achieve more than she would have if she hadn't known Lila. At the end of the book it seems that Elena will go on to be more successful, but Lila will always have been the smarter and prettier of the two. Does she even still love Lila? Can you love someone who is so much more special that she seems a world apart from you? Or has she just been enthralled with Lila all along? I can't wait to read the other two books in this series.

This is a difficult book to read and respond to. I'm sure that Etty Hillesum did not intend her diary to be published and read by the general public. If she knew her writing was going to be read years later by people all over the world, she might have changed what and how she wrote. So obviously any self-indulgence or lack of filtering in her style can't be seen as a shortcoming of her skill as a writer. And, despite the fact that this writing was meant to be private and without a reader, Etty is remarkably good at communicating the quality and essence of her life to the intrusive reader.

As a whole, the book moves from being fully concentrated on Etty herself to being fully concentrated on the Jews of Amsterdam. The process is slow and subtle, and extremely uncomfortable for the reader. This is one of those stories that you absolutely know the ending of and you can't stand that it is coming and you can't stop reading either. I read it frantically. Although she wasn't writing for me, she charmed me utterly.

Even at her most vexing, I easily identified with Etty. For the first half of the book, reading Etty's diary brought back my own memories of my 20s. It's so easy to like her, and her sympathetic writing made me feel like I really understood her. And, ultimately, my attachment to Etty made the last quarter of the book absolutely horrific. Despite not depicting any gore or direct violence, this was one of the most disturbing and haunting books I have read. It made me realize that I had, over time, in some way forgotten about the basic horror of the Holocaust, maybe by trying to put World War II into some sort of historical context. This book slapped me out of that uneasy comfort and reminds us that genocide has been committed against millions of individual humans, and the shock of that never eases.

I loved this book. Deeply ambivalent characters often read as cold or distant, but Anne Tyler's Charlotte is warm and immediately present, like a person sitting right next to me. Her story about becoming a housewife was so moving, even though the author keeps the tone light and breezy.

Which is probably for the best, because this portrayal of motherhood is not one we see often — or one we would now approve of (or ever admit to). We meet Charlotte while she is literally in the act of leaving her family. In telling her story, she reveals that she is neither fulfilled by them nor particularly attached to them. She feels caught by them, and while she observes their patterns of caring for each other, she fill her role without any emotional caring. She says, "So I survived. Baked their cakes. Washed their clothes. Fed their dog."

Oh Charlotte! It's true, they would be just fine without her. And so she leaves, which of course does not solve the problem.

I would have been able to give this book five stars if it had been longer, and if Charlotte hadn't just gone back to her family at the end! Honestly I was probably too emotionally invested in Charlotte by the time the kidnapping wrapped up, but I really really really did not want her to go back to her messy house with her messy kids and the messy dog and the messy strangers who keep coming to live with her. Is she going to just cook and clean up after them for the rest of her life? That's not what she wants! This broke my heart. Did anyone else have their heart broken by the end of this book?

Highly recommended, especially if you love ambivalent characters or women in their 30s who make a break for it.

The description of the book (as well as some glowing reviews) led me to believe that I would love it. Unfortunately, I found it impossible to even like it after the first chapter.

The first chapter was gripping, tragic, and utterly compelling. I congratulated myself on finding such a great book and settled in for the rest. Unfortunately, after re-establishing Guy, the main character, after the events of chapter one, the novel begins to switch back and forth between what is happening in the story and what is happening in a completely different story that Guy is writing within the novel. Both stories are written in the same tense and in the same voice, which is a bit confusing — and, worse, super frustrating.

I have a pet peeve about fiction-within-fiction: I do not want to read about your character's sleeping dreams any more than I want to read about your own, unless they are supernatural and contributing directly to the plot. In this book, Guy's fiction does not have any bearing on the novel's plot, so the reader is just passing back and forth between two separate and unconnected novels at whim. If I wanted to do that, I would set up a timer and force myself to switch between two different books whenever the buzzer went off. I wouldn't do that, though, because it is not an enjoyable way to read a book.

After Guy's fictional wife started flirting with his fictional band-mate (at this time we might have been in the past rather than the alternate fiction I really stopped caring), I tried just skipping the fiction-within-fiction parts. Doing that, I found I stopped caring about Guy and his involvement with those two women on the other boat at all. Honestly, he has a few interesting facts, but not much of a personality. So, at about half way through, I just set this book down and moved onto a better one.

Not recommended.

I don't remember how this book made it onto my bookshelves, but it was clearly under a misunderstanding because I had it in with memoirs. So when I picked it up, I was surprised to learn it was YA fiction. But I kept with it because Micah, the main character, is very compelling. So many things about her are fluid or mixed: her gender, her race, her love, and, above all, the truth. Because she is so skilled at depicting herself as something other than her true self, each revelation in her story is surprising and gives the reader an opportunity to think back and reevaluate the story at it has been told up to that point. And the central conflict is a murder mystery, which kept me engaged in the story.

Most reviewers have been put off by Micah's duplicity, which is condescending at times, and especially by the ending. I agree that the author should have committed more on both accounts. The ending is what kept me from giving it 4 or 5 stars. I'm looking forward to Larbalestier's next book, which will be published next month and which has so far been getting much less equivocally positive reviews.

Wow, this book has more polarized reviews (so many one-star "I hated this book" reviews!) than most. I love the review that says that Beatrice, the main character, "commits multiple acts of murder, participates in very creepy incest, and betrays people who love her" and "has no redeeming qualities". I'm going to just say it: if you can't imagine yourself falling in love with a main character whose redeeming qualities are murder, incest, and betrayal, then you are not going to like this book.

I didn't have a lot of expectations for this book (historical accuracy, meh) so I just jumped right in, and Gregory did not disappoint. There is nothing more satisfying than an antihero with a legitimate grudge. Yes, Beatrice, you deserve Wideacre more!!! You should definitely plot to...um, oh, that's extreme, but okay, well maybe you can fix it by, oh, wow Beatrice, are you sure about that? Yikes! Unputdownable! You have to love a girl who sticks to her principles even when they lead her into really really awful consequences. And, being the person I am, I also have to love a girl who feels that living the comfortable but inconsequential life of a rich woman in Georgian England would be WORSE consequences. Beatrice is fabulous. HIGHLY recommended.

Recommended to me by <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/05/wideacre-philippa-gregory">Nicole Cliffe</a>, who is the best.

This was a good read. No surprises, but solid storytelling. The main character, Cole (whose name is a little too on the nose for most readers), is a likeable underdog who is doing well for himself with small-time illegal drug trading in a fast-decaying rural town. He is too smart to ignore the twin lurking disasters in his life: the environmental and social damage caused by the growing coal business, and his inevitable arrest as the local police start a crack-down on drug dealers.

The book is melancholy but hopeful, which should really be its own genre because I seem to eat it up with a spoon. Recommended.