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| 0374282455
| 9780374282455
| 0374282455
| 4.17
| 1,625
| Nov 15, 2016
| Nov 15, 2016
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it was amazing
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Perfect nonfiction finish for the year. The best history books tell us not only what happened, but make a persuasive case for why it happened (somethi
Perfect nonfiction finish for the year. The best history books tell us not only what happened, but make a persuasive case for why it happened (something Snyder failed to do in Blood Lands). In this year of Brexit & Trump, a very relevant book. More soon.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 26, 2016
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Dec 31, 2016
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Dec 24, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1478907495
| 9781478907497
| unknown
| 4.00
| 4,744
| Oct 11, 2016
| Oct 11, 2016
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it was amazing
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Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil has been labelled Melina Marchetta's ‘adult debut’ - that sounds like a patronising put-down from a genre snob. Along
Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil has been labelled Melina Marchetta's ‘adult debut’ - that sounds like a patronising put-down from a genre snob. Along the Jellicoe Road is a superb work of fiction that exceeds the highest standards of maturity & literacy, as well of being amongst the very best novels with a school settings by a contemporary novelist. Megan Abbott’s Dare Me excels for intensity and drive, Tana French’s The Secret Place in pathos, but only Patrick Gale’s Friendly Fire matches the scope, depth, and beauty of Jellicoe and its protagonist Taylor Markham. But with TTSD Melina Marchetta moves into unfamiliar terrain, with a middle-aged English (tho’ not quite entirely English - grandfather was Egyptian and his Christian name is Bashar, hence Bish) policeman as its principal character, set in England and France (I found out that if an Englishwoman gives birth in the Channel Tunnel the child’s legal birthplace is Folkestone!) including the notorious Calais ‘Jungle’. Fear of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and its effects on innocent families is the main theme that drives the story. I’d held off writing this review because I found it so hard to get my mind around all that’s going on in this brilliantly wide-ranging book, fortunately the National Library of Australia came to my aid with this synopsis. ‘Chief Inspector Bish Ortley of the London Met, divorced and still grieving the death of his son, has been drowning his anger in Scotch. Something has to give, and he's no sooner suspended from the force than a busload of British students is subject to a deadly bomb attack across the Channel. Bish's daughter is one of those on board. Also on the bus is Violette LeBrac. Raised in Australia, Violette has a troubled background. Thirteen years ago her grandfather bombed a London supermarket, killing dozens of people. Her mother, Noor, is serving a life sentence in connection with the incident. But before Violette's part in the French tragedy can be established she disappears. Bish, who was involved in Noor LeBrac's arrest, is now compelled to question everything that happened back then. And the more he delves into the lives of the family he helped put away, the more he realises that truth wears many colours.’ Reflecting on this book after I finished, I was struck by how much it reminded me of John le Carre’s spy novels, especially Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, his greatest. Like George Smiley, Bish is a forcibly retired middle-aged officer with a bad marriage whose mode of investigation consists mostly of going about asking questions and hearing stories that ultimately reveal what really happened. Because Bish’s teenage daughter Bee (Sabina) was nearly a victim, the ‘Home Office’ (a couple of spooks named Grazier and Eliott, the latter an old school pal of Bish’s who would be out of his depth in a car-park puddle) deploy Bish to interview the parents and survivors. He encounters massive resistance and refusal to cooperate, especially from Violette, everybody’s favourite suspect, and her mother Noor, the self-confessed perpetrator of a previous atrocity. And his daughter Bee is anything but helpful to the investigation herself, not to mention Bish’s relationship with his estranged ex-wife Rachel, about to give birth to another man’s child. In one respect, tho’, TTSD shows its YA lineage. The teenage characters take all the prizes, for bravery, initiative, resourcefulness (at one point they steal a Salvation Army bus), and loyalty to their friends. They are also physically attractive and fit, especially in contrast to Bee's sodden father Bish. Bee is a junior Olympic calibre runner - that figures in the plot too - as well as speaking much better French. And Violette is even more elusive, able not only to travel from Australia to France undetected, but to remain on the run in London (with a 13 year-old accomplice) for weeks with the entire British anti-terrorist establishment searching for her. At first, because we encounter them through Bish’s eyes, we find the younger characters’ evasiveness, surliness and secretiveness annoying, but long before the book ends we’re dying of envy. The OA characters are equally well-drawn. The most striking is Noor, Violette’s mother, a confessed bomber serving a life tariff at Holloway. She was on the verge of defending her PhD thesis in molecular biology when the atrocity occurred and we discover there are strong reasons for suspecting that her confession was neither truthful nor voluntary. None the less, I found her really obnoxious. She conducts passive-aggression at the level of Blitzkrieg. She constantly whinges about bias against Muslims (“moose-slims”) and about the persecution suffered by her family. Completely understandable. When denied all other means of self-assertion, articulate inmates resort to snarkiness and sarcasm. (The inarticulate refuse to wear uniform and decorate their cells with faeces.) We have long-since learned from Tana French, Alex Marwood, and John le Carre himself (as well as some real IRA convictions) that the authorities are totally corrupt and eagerly stitch-up any likely suspect to close the case and get their solve. Yet, tho’ at times Noor sounds like a recruiting sergeant for ISIS, in this story Bish and even his ‘Home Office’ controllers are genuinely trying to discover the truth and to exonerate the innocent, so ironically we find that if both the teenagers and Noor had been more forthcoming, this book would have been shorter, tho’ not so interesting or insightful. As it turns out, the actual explanation for the bombing is quite unexpected but thoroughly prepared. The manner in which the bus bombing was carried out was subtly clued by the author, tho’ the motive unforeseeable. I must add a word about the audible. The British actor Zaqi Ismail was absolutely brilliant, with a wonderful repertoire of English and foreign dialects. I especially liked his version of Noor’s brother Jimmy (Jamail). His estuary dialect features a glottal stop so strong that ‘daughter’ comes out sounding like ‘door’. Bish’s mother, widow of a minor diplomat, speaks Posh, and Violette mostly Aussie, tho’ she can do Posh or Goth when necessary. The voice of Noor struck me as unlikely, sounding as if her first language were Arabic; I would have expected estuary but more upscale than her brother. But the narrator added hugely to the pleasure, just as did hearing Jellicoe Road with an Aussie voice. After using a huge amount of space, I still feel I’ve said almost nothing about TTSD. But I am tired and need to get this review done. Let me just close by saying that Melina Marchetta has proved she may well be the best contemporary novelist in the English language. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 19, 2016
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Oct 26, 2016
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Sep 28, 2016
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Audiobook
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| B019WVTLT8
| 3.57
| 389
| Sep 20, 2016
| Sep 20, 2016
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it was amazing
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An autobiographical memoir ought to be simplest of genres, the author is also usually the narrator & principal character, the other characters are pre
An autobiographical memoir ought to be simplest of genres, the author is also usually the narrator & principal character, the other characters are present in the author’s memory, & the plot seemingly a simple recounting of what happened in real life. But to a literary analyst, memoir is fiendishly complex. In what sense is Danielle Trussoni, a woman who once attended the University of Iowa MFA program identical with the Danielle Trussoni in this story, who lived in a castle in southern France while married to a Bulgarian novelist named Nikoli & who is telling this story? Is the 1st person narrator the same person as the writer who once wrote a novel I confess I never finished called Angelology? The narrator here mentions its publication & her American book tour, but solely for how those affected her marriage, much to my disappointment because I’d love to know where she got the idea & how she discovered the Book of Enoch & the Watchers. Should you want to fine-tune your literary theory, you can also ask about what theorists term “the implicit author”—the sort of person whose presence you feel behind the book you are actually reading. All four of them, the author, the narrator, the principal subject, & the implicit author, have in common the name Danielle Trussoni. An Amazon review wondered that Nikoli didn’t sue Danielle for slander. Which Nikoli? we wonder. The Bulgarian novelist in real life or the character in Fortress. Can a character in a story book sue the author for an unflattering portrait? I’d love to attend the trial Falstaff v. Shakespeare. There is, however a website maintained by Nikoli the novelist & ex-spouse (tho’ she’s not mentioned) of the author Danielle Trussoni. There’s a picture of him wearing a top hat like the one described in Fortress that made a line from a song by Taylor Swift come immediately to mind: “Run as fast as you can.” The two principal characters in Fortress are a crazy romantic from Wisconsin who encounters a darkly glamorous sexually magnetic Bulgarian., the Heathcliff figure every crazy romantic is eager to meet. It doesn’t matter that Danielle already had a child. (We discover later that she’s playing faster & looser with her domestic arrangements than she reveals @ 1st.) She gets pregnant & makes the mistake of going to Bulgaria to meet his parents & have the baby. (Her account of a Bulgarian L&D unit is utterly harrowing.) His dealing with the baby’s name on her birth certificate reveals straightway that he is a controlling liar. She makes the bigger mistake of marrying him, which means that under the law after they move to France, half of all their property will be his, even tho’ he contributes absolutely nothing to their finances. When @ last Danielle wises up (we are introduced to a White Knight, a handsome young Frenchman, as the start of the book), he resorts to blackmail, lying, gas-lighting, even parental abduction, & brings his parents from Bulgaria to try to torment Danielle into giving him custody of their daughter. In short, Nikoli fits every stereotype you ever had about Balkan males. Maybe it’s the effect of growing up in places that were once ruled by the Turks. (Nikoli also affects being a magician, a Buddhist mystic, & part vampire, tho’ with that “Oil Can Harry” hat, au fond he’s just the cheap shallow villain in the melodrama, but unfortunately he really does have the deed to the house. Although Fortress dragged in the middle, I found it quite enchanting, with a heroine we love & suffer with, & a villain whom we want to strangle. The last portion, especially when the White Knight’s mother, the White Queen, comes to Danielle’s aid, had me wanting to stand up & cheer. So despite many flaws, Fortress deserves the whole five stars, even tho’ I’m not quite sure which Danielle Trussoni will accept them. Maybe the author of Angelology, one of the best fantasy novels I never quite got round to finishing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 02, 2016
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Oct 09, 2016
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Sep 25, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 0812996399
| 9780812996395
| 0812996399
| 3.76
| 8,116
| Jun 16, 2016
| Aug 09, 2016
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it was amazing
| A superb gothic. It will be hard to write a review & I am probably influenced by the setting because I have been so jealous of people who lived in 're A superb gothic. It will be hard to write a review & I am probably influenced by the setting because I have been so jealous of people who lived in 'real' places like Cornwall & Norfolk that I am so happy to have enjoyed a story set so close to my home. Simply setting a book in Iowa doesn’t work for me. Both Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead & Heather Gudenkauf’s The Weight of Silence tanked. But the architecture of old Mississippi River towns attracts me & so when I finished hearing the audible version of Arrowood I had to take a few hours of a bright Sunday afternoon to visit the site. As you’ll see from my blog (billkupersmith.wordpress.com), it was hardly @ all creepy & yet Laura McHugh chose an excellent setting. Like Manderley, the archetypical gothic house, Keokuk offers numerous old houses you’d both love to live in & be terrified of trying to pay to heat & maintain as a scarcely employable ex-grad student with a shrinking trust fund (even before finding some defalcations have been ongoing). I regret only that the author made the Arrowood family Catholics. Had they been Episcopalians the stunning St. John’s Episcopal Church could have been their home parish. She exaggerated the sense of decay Keokuk radiates, tho’ I enjoyed catching sight of the very same Sonic Drive-in Arden resorts to for lunch. (I also know well the truck stop in Waterloo she visits later.) Most depressing aren’t dilapidated houses abandoned to squatters (like the “sister house” on Orleans Ave. in the book) but lots on which are found contemporary suburban family dwellings - where in the last few decades some noble 19th-century mansion succumbed to the wrecking ball. Arden, narrator & principal character, is both attractive & haunted, as a gothic heroine should be & we share her uncertainty whether the unsolved-Iowa-mysteries-true-crime writer will turn out to be a creep or a white knight. Given that Arden’s recently deceased estranged father had owned a water-ski tow speed-boat named The Ruby Slipper (!!!) it wasn’t had to peg him (tho’ when you view the Keokuk Yacht Club you’ll not be surprised). Arden’s mother manages to be both totally believable & equally repulsive, now married to a sleazy evangelical pastor who oozes synthetic cheap grace. Add the seemingly friendly handy man who used to have a thing for Arden’s mother. Laura McHugh adroitly connects the secrets of several characters, including Arden herself, when the mystery of Arden’s missing sisters is finally revealed. She uses all the dramatis personae for more than red herrings, a sign of good plot construction. The story seems to drag a bit in the middle, as as we move to the denouement it tightly engages the reader. I kept forming new hypotheses, only to meet a new & better twist. The year’s not over yet, but we’ve already been so blessed with a superb British gothic in The Fire Child & now a fine American example of the genre. ...more |
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1
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Sep 08, 2016
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Sep 13, 2016
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Sep 08, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 4.15
| 37,446
| Sep 20, 2016
| Sep 20, 2016
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it was amazing
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The Female of the Species may be the best tragedy set in an American public high school that I have seen since Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. The protagonist
The Female of the Species may be the best tragedy set in an American public high school that I have seen since Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. The protagonist, Alex Craft, not only plays in the same league as Beth Cassidy, she could compete with Antigone or Electra as a spirit too big for the narrow frame of this world with its petty rules to contain. The setting in an unnamed small town in southern Ohio – almost every day I visit similar places in Iowa; the three 1st person narrators are seniors: Jack, a star athlete, Claire, the dtr. of the Lutheran pastor, known to everyone as Peekay (for “Preacher’s Kid”), & Alex herself, a loner who speaks in an idiolect derived mostly from reading. (Who else could describe figuring out how to fire a shotgun as “diagnosing”?) In the very opening chapter we know what makes Alex so different from the other students. When she was a freshman a pervert kidnapped, tortured, and cut Alex’s sister Anna into little pieces. The murderer walked. Then little sister took care of business. The perp died horribly. No one found out who did him in. Alex keeps herself very fit. She runs every day & has a hard lean body & her turn-around point is the town cemetery where her sister is buried. She is skilled @ unarmed combat. When someone tries to rape one of her friends, she rips his face off. Literally! Alex also volunteers @ the local animal shelter, where she & Peekay first become friends & they are sent to recover a bin-liner full of dead puppies (“a dump”) from the road-side. The girls’ hearts are broken but they take care of business & take them to the incinerator. I’d thought working in a hospital & @ a hospice asked a bit of me sometimes – I’ll really look up to animal shelter volunteers now. Alex & Peekay are excellently drawn characters. When I taught nonfiction writing I was sometimes amazed @ the personal stories my students shared, including several PKs & I thought Claire (Alex insists on calling her by her real name) very believable. But I found Jack the athlete a stereotype with his high scores both on the field & with the girls, esp. Branley the cheerleader (whom Beth Cassidy would have squashed like some bug.) It was a real howler when Peekay thinks dumb-bell Branley ought to go to nursing school because she maintains a C average. RNs are some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever worked with - & I’m a recovering university professor. But I was most annoyed with Jack when he vacillates (in the direction of Branley the cheerleader naturally) in his new relationship with Alex when he discovers her vocation dispensing justice where our society fails. A real man wouldn’t have had doubts. He’d have joined the army & applied for Ranger school (along with Alex?) so they could hone their skills. There was also some contrived plot. Later in the book a new pedophile predator seems shoe-horned into the story just for Jack to have the big revelation. Is it in the nature of YA to be incapable reaching the upper limits of literary excellence? I believe that every genre can achieve the highest artistic standard. (After all, if Huckleberry Finn were published now, it would be marketed as YA.) But if you compare The Female of the Species with Dare Me, you may sense where a YA author draws back from no-limit tragic spirituality. Both Beth & Alex are flat-out Nietzscheans who don’t blink when the abyss gazes back, but here the other characters do. Peekay’s father utters predicable bromides. Peekay herself says that she should have reported the rape attempt to the police. It felt we were dropping from the level of high tragedy to everyday legalisms, like suggesting to Medea she get counseling to deal with her “anger issues” (@ one point Jack mentions that Alex could “get some help” after they go to college – sounds like something Clytemnestra could say: “Electra, you really need to ‘get some help’ with your father-fixation.”) So as a tragedy, The Female of the Species doesn’t quite measure up to the level of Dare Me or The Secret Place, but it deserves the whole five stars as an excellent school story. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 27, 2016
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Sep 29, 2016
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Sep 03, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1250125863
| 9781250125866
| B01FQQMND4
| 3.90
| 1,308
| Aug 09, 2016
| Aug 09, 2016
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it was amazing
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Those addicted to Lacey Flint (Flinties?) might be tempted to skip this novella-length riverine adventure as merely a snack to whet our appetites for
Those addicted to Lacey Flint (Flinties?) might be tempted to skip this novella-length riverine adventure as merely a snack to whet our appetites for the real thing - another full-scale novel. Still, don't miss this one. It contains the event that all followers of Joesbury & Lacey have been awaiting almost since Now You See Me ended. Also when we reflect that should Lacey's chronicler Ms. Bolton tire of her (& our girl's not been around for a while), how better could Lacey & Joesbury depart the world of crime fiction in a blaze of glory than putting their own lives between a Most Important Personage & a nefarious terrorist plot? So most definitely a must read.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 27, 2016
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Sep 17, 2016
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Aug 27, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 1508215197
| 9781508215196
| 3.55
| 166,307
| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
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it was amazing
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If you have read some of my reviews, you know that I don’t have much patience with what I opprobriously label ‘post-modern flim-flam’ - such as delibe
If you have read some of my reviews, you know that I don’t have much patience with what I opprobriously label ‘post-modern flim-flam’ - such as deliberately manipulating the plot & characters to rub the readers faces in their sheer fictitiousness & to make the author’s superiority & control manifest. In short, to get us to pay the author for the privilege of making us feel stupid. Sometimes, tho’, an author can violate most of the usual rules of fiction & succeed in giving a reader an extraordinary experience, & for me I’m Thinking of Ending Things really worked. I love unreliable narrators & this one I found both very attractive & yet highly suspicious. Not to spoil anything, I’ll simply say that my suspicions were very well placed indeed. Some reviewers have said they anticipated the ending. Generally that was true here for me, but not @ all how it was executed - for that I’d been totally unprepared. As one of my GR review-friends has remarked, the last 15 minutes (if you’re listening on audio like me) are critical for the story to work. But you needn’t fear that a quarter-hour thrill is all you get. When you finish, if you loved the ending the 1st time, you will want start over @ the beginning again soon as you can. When I read for the 2nd time Jake’s description of what occurs in the lab where he said he worked, recalling a later scene in the book, I thought, OMG, he’s telling her about . . . Listening on audio was great & I loved the voice of the woman narrator. But there are interruptions by other characters @ times. In the print edition these are in italics & on audio they confused me. (Readers who can speak in italics are apparently hard to find.) So the print edition is necessary as well. To avoid wasting money, & to be safe, follow my example. Get it from the PL either on audio or in print, & if you’re as fascinated & intrigued as I am, buy it in hardcover. I still need to figure out about those messages on the narrator’s voice mail! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 07, 2016
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Sep 08, 2016
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Aug 21, 2016
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Audiobook
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| 3.34
| 6,587
| Jun 28, 2016
| Jun 28, 2016
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it was amazing
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Reflecting on this lovely book, I became aware that two subtle but major watersheds in English social history had been passed by in my adult lifetime.
Reflecting on this lovely book, I became aware that two subtle but major watersheds in English social history had been passed by in my adult lifetime. Our four principal characters are graduates of the University of Bristol, yet two of them go on to have very high-octane careers, one as a physicist practically on a first-name basis with the Higgs Boson & the other in the London financial sector. In Evelyn Waugh’s, or even in Kingsley Amis’s day, they would necessarily have been Oxbridge graduates, & one of them (the City trader) would not have been a woman. Also, they only discover that the father of one of them (the physicist actually) is a peer when they see the groom designated The Honourable on the invitations to his wedding. In Jane Austen’s era, or even in my youth, that would have been the first thing everyone knew about him. We follow the trajectories of our four friends over a period of two decades from entrance to uni to the threshold of middle age. They are Benedict & Evie, who are reading physics, & Sylvie, an artist, with her brother Lucien, who claims to be an entrepreneur, a euphemism for dope dealer. Evie was reared by Keith, her single-parent socialist father, & she goes against the grain by heading for Canary Wharf & the big bonuses instead of the laboratory. This book could have been a whole series of novels, like A la recherche, A Dance to the Music of Time - both of which I burnt out on fast & early - or Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion, which I mostly hugely enjoyed in my youth for its mix of militarism, academism, & cynicism. But as a single novel, Invincible Summer is a perfect epitome. It recalled for me a lot Robin Kirman’s Bradstreet Gate, but much better, tho’ Bradstreet was a solid four star. Part of my preference is an almost indefinable quality that Adams puts into her characters – except for Lucien who very much overworks the loveable scoundrel persona till it lands him where he belongs. They seem to be people I would truly like to have as personal friends. Indeed, by the time I was half-way through, I almost thought that they were. Especially Evie, who emerges as the protagonist. Adams’ account of her career as a bond trader is gripping. The only other novel I’ve read that offers the same opportunity to share vicariously the excitement & eroticism of the trading floor was Nicola Monaghan’s Starfishing. Both authors have worked in the financial sector & have a feel for the action. Best experienced audibly, the scene where Evie is trying to manage the purchase of 900 million (yes, million) Italian government bonds (BTPs) was so suspenseful I nearly crashed the car. The dangerous part is that such a huge buy order will drive the price up to the level that Evie’s firm will lose money (& her bonus & likely her job) on the transaction. The trick is to start buying slowly so the market doesn’t notice that there’s a big movement underway, then just before the market closes for the day, put in a large order to drive the price up @ the close & short the remainder of your transaction. Of course the next day lots of bond holders will take a profit @ the new high price & you can cover your short position @ a profit. But you almost feel you’re wearing Evie’s headset as she talks with her broker. ‘Graham. 95.00 bid in 10.” She’s offering to buy the first ten million @ 95 euros each. “Working that . . . .’ several minutes silence then ‘95.20 lifted, 95.20 to 95.40 following.’ Then the price @ which Evie had to buy keeps going up: ‘Forty lifted. Bid over there, seventy offer on the follow.’ I love the feature where you can get both audible & text on your reader, so I could go back & figure out just what was going on. Of course what Evie is doing is something called “Market Manipulation” & it’s a bit dodgy, tho’ we should keep in mind that in the end all that happens is 30 million euros will be transferred from one financial institution to another & so far as the rest of us are concerned it makes no difference one way or the other. As Dr. Johnson once put it so well, men are never so harmlessly occupied than in making money. Goes for women too. Before it’s all over (& we know it has to end because we are approaching 2008) Evie finds out she was swimming in a shark tank. Besides creating loveable characters, Alice Adams has a gift for felicitous phrasing: my favourite was ‘weapons-grade flirtation’. A hypercritic might complain that her minor characters are a bit flat & stereotyped – I found both Evie’s personal trainer live-in @ her Docklands ‘apartment’ (American is now upscale) boyfriend (like Lou’s in JoJo Moyes but not funny) Julian & her City mentor ‘Big Paul’ an odious fat oaf & she never quite convinced me that Benedict was really a physicist (tho’ even C. P. Snow didn’t know how to do that). Still, Benedict redeemed himself & lived up to his name by showing a real streak of spirituality. Even the child characters are affecting, especially Sylvie’s special-needs daughter. No question. Emotionally Invincible Summer will be my Me Before You for 2016. I hope it may be yours. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 25, 2016
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Aug 28, 2016
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Aug 10, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 1852424567
| 9781852424565
| 1852424567
| 3.33
| 844
| Aug 01, 2004
| Jan 01, 2004
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it was amazing
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Besides House Rules, Heather Lewis left behind two more novels; no horses, but like in House Rules very violent sexual episodes and a lot of drugs. Bo
Besides House Rules, Heather Lewis left behind two more novels; no horses, but like in House Rules very violent sexual episodes and a lot of drugs. Both offer as principal characters a wealthy couple who are addicted to sexually abusing teen-aged prostitutes. The Second Suspect is an apparent police procedural investigating the death of one of these girls. The other novel, Notice - published only after the author’s suicide - is a 1st person account by a teenaged prostitute who specializes in servicing businessmen commuters @ a suburban railway station car park. The two books are obviously closely related & artistically it makes sense to connect them. Heather Lewis was Allan Gurganus’s creative writing student @ Sarah Lawrence. That of course was also Lucy Grealy’s alma mater @ about the same time, but I’d imagine they would have hated each other cordially. But they seem so similar, except that Grealy was outwardly maimed & Lewis wore her scars on the inside. Both died @ about the same time. It’s not clear that Grealy’s death was deliberate, as if the death of a heroin user were ever anything else. Lewis hanged herself with the sash of her dressing gown. (Gurganus calls it a “silk bathrobe” but in my idiom if it’s silk, it’s a dressing gown.) According to Gurganus’s afterword, “Notice had been adjudged too dark & disturbing in its bleak sexual frontally [sic] to prove in any way commercial.” Both House Rules & Second Suspect were edited by Nan Talese. Tho’ I’ve now tried to reform & read books for pleasure only, I still know how to do literary analysis & divined what happened as that Talese got Lewis to rework the entire concept and turn it into a mystery story with a police detective Caroline Reese as the central character & the narrator of Notice morphed into a subsidiary personage. (I am grateful to Robert Nedelkoff for confirming & providing some corroborating sources for my conjecture.) The girl in Notice never tells us her name but in Second Suspect she calls herself Lyn Carver, probably an alias, but it is the name I shall use also for the narrator in Notice. In both books the wife in the sadistic couple in named Ingrid, & she calls the teenager prostitute they abuse Nina, the name of their daughter, killed by her father either purposely or from erotic strangulation that got a bit out of hand. He is nameless in Notice but in Second Suspect is called Gabriel Santerre, & is the head of a pharmaceutical empire. His favorite kink is binding women’s necks & wrists with his own belt, then penetrating them anally, tho’ he prefers to ejaculate on their face & breasts. When he wants to put the frighteners on them afterwards, whether to insure their silence or just out of sheer sadistic nastiness, he employs a couple of hench-persons who like to cut. In Notice a character carries a piece of Lyn’s flesh (probably from her labia) in a vial on a chain round his neck; in Second Suspect it’s worn by Gabriel. Notice offers us very little background detail. The narrator is a teenaged girl working as a waitress, but also as a lot lizard on the parking lot of a suburban railway station, servicing commuters in their cars. As her parents are wealthy, absent abroad & give her the run of their house & liquor cabinet, she seems to work @ the waitressing & sex trades only for independence & excitement. She agrees to go with one of her customers to his nearby mansion to play kinky games with him & his wife Ingrid. Next day he leaves her & Ingrid alone together & they form a relationship. Ingrid gives her several hundred dollars (later quite a lot more) & she leaves before Gabriel comes back. Later she goes back to working the station car park, where she is arrested by a couple of undercover vice cops who rape her & take her to jail. Apparently they were dispatched by Gabriel to teach her a lesson. Afterwards she is sent to what is supposed to be a rehab center where she is placed in “seclusion” (i.e. solitary confinement) till she is rescued by a therapist named Beth, whose husband is someone in the DA’s office. After she is released, she has relationships with both Ingrid & Beth, characterized by a pattern of extremely violent & aggressive sexual episodes followed by scenes of tender & caring lovemaking. So she alternates between top & bottom, aggressor, victim, lover & beloved, tho’ she never uses the word love; love’s a total non-starter, persona non grata for her. Notice ends after Burt & Jeremy, who’d 1st seemed generous suppliers of free drugs but prove to be Gabriel’s minions, abuse Lyn horribly, but leave her still unwilling to kill herself out of despair. Second Suspect apparently takes place later. Gabriel & Ingrid are in a hotel room in New York with a dead teenaged girl prostitute whom Gabriel attempts to smuggle out in a golf bag, but unexpectedly Ingrid calls the cops. Gabriel, possessed of considerable political clout & a sleazy fix-it lawyer, attempts to cast the blame on his wife. Caroline, a police detective under a bit of an institutional cloud (her former partner had got a little too heavily into the drugs they were investigating & she had to kill him in self-defense), gets her lawyer BF to represent Ingrid & attempts to find out what really happened, which leads to the discovery of a number of teenaged prostitutes living in apartments owned in Ingrid’s name, as well as a girl now retired (@ about 20 too old to appeal to Gabriel & Ingrid’s sexual tastes in daughter surrogates) calling herself Lyn Carver, now living in a big house in Westchester County apparently subsidized by Gabriel with the understanding she will remain silent about her previous association with that couple. I read Second Suspect 1st, but just as soon as I began Notice it was obvious the narrator was her model, but now she’s recycled & a few years older. Artistically I have no doubt that Nan Talese’s judgement stank & that Notice is the better book & that the voice of the Lyn character in Notice is far & away more vivid & affecting than the 3rd person POV mostly from the police perspective in Second Suspect. But I honor & respect Talese. She had a job to do, publishing houses are in business to make money not to foster literary art, & an editor has to be decisive. Also, the ending to Second Suspect, when Lyn puts herself into the hands of Gabriel, would have made the superb finish that Notice fails quite to achieve. She goes in not quite totally intrepid & clean. She’s carrying a lethal dose of heroin in a bag tucked under the top of her stocking - with a sadist who loves to cut, a girl had better have a plan B. But the end turned out perfect. As an editor sometime myself, I’d love to have had the chance to try to help Heather Lewis knock these two into one terrifically moving novel. As it is, Notice lacks the beauty of House Rules; there is no possible equivalent for the erotics & grace of equestrian competition when the main character is a teen hooker. But like Lee in House Rules, however much pain Lyn endures in Notice, she never loses our admiration & respect. Always ready to plunge in, headlong, fearless, with no safe-words, working without a net. That's why I find these characters, & the story of Heather Lewis herself, so attractive & affecting. In Notice, Lyn describes a force within herself that she calls “the Leviathan” that impels her recklessly into extreme situations. She denies it is a “death wish” but I think I know what it is. To gaze unflinchingly into the abyss is the object of mystical spirituality. The drugs & violent sexuality are signs that the author & her characters wandered off the path, but they had the right intention. ...more |
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Aug 05, 2016
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Aug 13, 2016
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Aug 05, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0316393878
| 9780316393874
| 0316393878
| 3.64
| 87,962
| Sep 20, 2016
| Sep 20, 2016
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it was amazing
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Should you want to know how The Wonder compares to Emma Donoghue’s previous hit Room, I’d say there’s no comparison—The Wonder is worlds better, & not
Should you want to know how The Wonder compares to Emma Donoghue’s previous hit Room, I’d say there’s no comparison—The Wonder is worlds better, & not just because we don’t have to endure listening to a 5 year old. No question for me that The Wonder is the historical of the year. Before reading it, I made sure to swot up the real story behind Emma Donoghue’s novel, Sian Busby’s A Wonderful Little Girl: The True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl. Emma Donoghue has moved her tale one decade earlier & transferred the location from Wales to Ireland, but as with the historical Sarah Jacob, we have a committee of notables established to investigate the veracity of the remarkable tale of a little girl who seemingly lives on air, nurses hired to observe her round the clock to insure no surreptitious taking of nourishment, & the involvement of the nationalist press. In English eyes, both the Welsh & the Irish were regarded habitual scoundrels & liars. The change in location requires as well a change in religions. Sarah Jacob’s family were mostly chapel, tho’ the principal clergyman involved was Anglican. In the wonder, Anna O’Donnell & all the other characters are Roman Catholic, except for our main character the nurse Liv Wright, an Englishwoman of very sceptical opinions. In The Wonder, Catholicism provides the principal motivation for most of the characters as it exerts its baleful force impelling this 11 year old girl’s fast unto death with her parents & most of the local Catholics seemingly cheering her on. To put it a little bit facetiously, Anna believes that starving herself to death will give her recently deceased brother Michael a Get-out-of-Purgatory-Free Card! Having been reared in the same toxic variety of Roman Catholicism, I found most of the trappings – holy cards, novenas, rosaries, saccharine Mariolatry with expressions like “poor banished children of Eve” (that’s us), confession, mortal sins, the Redemptorist priests’ missions (sort of a Catholic version of a Fundamentalist tent meeting with lots of fire & brimstone preaching), & of course a nun in appropriate black habit – un-fond but vivid memories indeed. It is very hard to discern the boundaries between actual Roman Catholic dogma (what Catholics are required be accept de fide – which @ the time this book is set did not yet include Papal Infallibility), & what we might call “folk Catholicism” & out&out superstition. Particularly with the priest in this story, these popular beliefs were treated as harmless adjuncts to the true faith, tho’ we see in Anna’s case that they can be lethal. In the case of Ann’s horrible mother Rosaleen (her voice & accent on the audio are like nails scraping on a blackboard), respectability & piety matter much more than the suffering of her daughter. The audio narrator, Kate Lock, was also brilliant with the other Irish voices, especially Dr. Brearty’s, with its mixture of senility, pomposity, credulity, provincialism, snobbery, & of course masculine superiority. Generally the all-male investigating committee seem a good example of what we now term “group-think” – each of them seems to suspect that what Liv is telling them is true, but no one of them can admit that collectively they are credulous idiots. I have a few historical doubts. Could an Irish girl in Anna’s circumstances (after listening to the audio I almost heard “sarcumstances”) have so many books, including Thomas-a-Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ? She & the nun Sister Michael would not have stayed home when she was too sick to go to mass on a Holy Day & read the liturgy in a missal – it would all have been in Latin anyway. In those days Roman Catholics did not receive communion for the first time till they were about 14 (G. M. Hopkins wrote a poem about it, “The Bugler’s First Communion”), when they were confirmed. It also seems strange that a respectable Englishwoman then would have openly expressed as much religious scepticism as Liv. But quibbles aside, this is a brilliant book. There will be times when you want to strangle some of the characters; their pig-headed fideism is so infuriating. I’ll of course not give away the ending, but you will be on edge continually & just a little surprised @ how one character turns out. Emma Donoghue has given us a magnificent feat of historical reconstruction & storytelling. ...more |
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Sep 20, 2016
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Sep 27, 2016
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Aug 01, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 081299860X
| 9780812998603
| 081299860X
| 3.50
| 225,984
| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
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it was amazing
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Were this book not based on one of the most sensational crimes of the last century, I wonder if it would have garnered so much attention from its publ
Were this book not based on one of the most sensational crimes of the last century, I wonder if it would have garnered so much attention from its publishers & from the reading public. For some readers it seems to be a roman a clé, a fictionalized account of the Manson cult & their murders. (To avoid libel suits? It’s hard to imagine what could cause any more damage to the reputations of Charles Manson & his followers.) Other readers see a reflection of the personal or political legacy of that period we still call, “the sixties.” I was intrigued by how a young author dealt with the historical archaeology of nearly a half-century ago. A reference to an “air travel card” brought me up short. I think it was the first “credit card” I ever saw (my father had one) & required a mammoth deposit; businessmen (they were of course nearly all men) carried them. Still, by the mid ‘60s I’m pretty sure American Express & Diner’s Club cards were fairly common, and the first bank cards as well. One change from the historic original I very much like is the switch of the geographic center of the story from Southern to Northern California. The Bay Area was the artistic & spiritual epicenter of that convulsive era. The story is told by the same narrator, Evie, @ two periods in her life, @ 14 when she becomes involved with the cult, & @ the present time where she barely gets by as a “live-in-aide”; I inferred that having experienced far too much @ an early age, Evie has somnambulated through much of her adult life. As a depiction of the anomie & bogus spirituality of the period, I thought The Girls was absolutely superb. When the 14 y/o Evie encounters Suzanne, who invites her to visit “the Ranch” we see how for the 1st time Evie feels a sense of belonging, something neither of her estranged & totally self-absorbed parents can give her. The cult leader, called Russell in this novel, delivers wonderfully plausible tho’ completely vacuous pseudo-profundities that brought back for me vivid recollections of the phony pundits & gurus that abounded from the Monterey peninsula all the way to London’s Tavistock Square. Tho’ I normally avoid historical fictionalizations, basing this story on real events made it better because I knew pretty much how it had to end, so didn’t have to worry about solving a mystery. The pleasure was that which one usually enjoys reading a book only for the 2nd time; I could concentrate entirely on the characters & the moral & spiritual aspects. We know from the start that Evie is not going to participate in the murders - she barely manages to commit even shoplifting - so our only concerns are discovering how she happens to remain uninvolved, & what the after effects of her experience will be. Here is where my verdict is mixed. The 14 y/o Evie’s account of her relationships with her parents, her previous BF, & with her new friends in the cult, especially with Suzanne, are excellent. Some of us have had the experience in early adolescence of 1st finding a friend who seems truly to understand us & to attract our admiration & even adoration - to be drawn to someone who already seems to be the person we’d aspired to become without even knowing it. If that person is genuinely virtuous, better yet even, holy, we may be put on the strait way to perfection. But if it is someone who is superficially attractive but inwardly deeply flawed & harboring dark impulses & desires, we have a guide to take us on the downward path to plumbing the depths of our own depravity. I believe it is only right that we should blame Evie’s parents & the general spiritual slackness of our culture for placing her in such danger. It interested me that tho’ she did not want to go away to boarding school, once she was there Evie actually rather liked it & got on well with her roommate. She needed & found somewhere to belong, even tho’ when Suzanne drops by, Evie is all ready to jump back onto the bus. But I found the older Evie a disappointment. In the retrospective narrative she shows a lot of evidence of having learned how the world works, but she does not seem to have developed into the mature and centered woman whom I should have hoped would have emerged annealed & purified by her youthful experiences. Having gazed deeply into the Abyss, she might have developed into a person of greater moral & spiritual stature. She seems to have graduated from the School of Experience with barely a 2.0 GPA. Fortunately she is only about 60 & believe me, that’s not too late for serious adult spiritual education. So 5 stars for the teenaged portions, but the mature Evie scarcely earns 4. Sill, for GR purposes, I’ll round off @ the whole 5 stars. Thank you all you GR friends who recommended The Girls. I’ll think about this book a lot. ...more |
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Jul 24, 2016
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Jul 29, 2016
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Jul 24, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 3.40
| 8,198
| Jan 10, 2017
| Jan 10, 2017
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it was amazing
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Personally I'd not class this as a YA (tho' highly recommend it for younger readers) because an OA like me can not only enjoy it but bring a maturity
Personally I'd not class this as a YA (tho' highly recommend it for younger readers) because an OA like me can not only enjoy it but bring a maturity & historical perspective. Back in the 1970s a delightful work of satirical fiction first appeared in Northern California as a series in a local newspaper, which was collected under the title The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County. The author was Cyra McFadden, who was later to publish a memoir of her own chaotic upbringing by nomadic & somewhat alcoholic parents. Her characters are on the cusp of middle-age, who still think like teenagers themselves even tho' they are already parents of teenaged children–who might be "living with some turkey in a yurt." McFadden's characters may belong to "the Radical Unitarian Church" & subscribe to every New Age practice & belief: EST, Rolfing, T-groups, the Eslan Institute. I found myself reflecting back on The Serial as I read The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, set @ Marin High School, because the characters in The Serial would have been the grandparents of these students. Tho' these young people enjoy every material luxury–their parents bribe them to get high grades with BMWs & unmaxable credit cards–they inhabit the moral & spiritual equivalent of a toxic waste site. The spirituality in The Serial was utterly bogus, but @ least there was a spiritual dimension in the characters lives. These students, their teachers, & their parents believe in nothing @ all except getting them into an elite college. Despite their nihilistic world, some try to behave decently. Molly Nicoll is a new English teacher from lower middle-class Fresno who wants to help her students develop. Calista Broderick is one of Molly's best students, carrying a load of guilt because when in the 8th grade she took part in online bullying a class geek into jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, riding the entire distance on his bicycle. Calista ends up befriending a group of slackers who seem to be only characters with any authenticity. Abigail Cress is seduced by another teacher, Doug Ellison. When rumors reach her parents, he cowers & she covers for him, telling him: "I wanted you to know . . . I could have told them, & I didn't, & I still could. If you ever try to talk to me again." That was for me the most chilling and revealing moment in the book. All the guilty teacher had to do to redeem his stature as an honorable man would have been to reply to Abigail: "Tell your parents & the principal the whole truth. Your respect & my honor are worth infinitely more than my marriage & my miserable career. I loved every moment we were together, & I shall never regret our relationship." I am not @ all sure that I'd have the courage to do that myself, but I know the right choice wouldn't take long -- speak three sentences. But the most painful episode for me as a former teacher was when Molly was called to the principal's office for taking too much interest in the welfare of her students. She's told: "There have been some questions raised by certain members of the staff, questions about your pattern of behavior. It seems the tone that has been set in your classroom, I mean as far as student learning objectives are concerned, has not been especially productive." That jargon-laced reprimand is bad enough, but it continues: "These are not your kids. These are your students. Last year they were someone else's, next year they'll be gone. You can't be their mother. You certainly aren't their friend. You are the person who gives them grades. And if you go on caring for them in this way you won't survive." Molly takes the lesson in professional standards to heart. When later when Caly asks for her comments on a very moving confessional essay about her part in having helped drive that student to jumping off the bridge, Molly treats it impersonally as a work of fiction & confines her comments entirely to matters of organization & style. I term what happened to her "professional deformation" & unfortunately it is the norm for "educators." The Most Dangerous Place on Earth fails to be a complete artistic success. Dividing the story among too many characters made it difficult for me to care enough about any particular one of them, so I never felt I'd really got to know how she would feel. Except for the boy who committed suicide early in the book, none of the boys captured my sympathies at all. It should have bothered me that the outstanding athlete ends up a male prostitute in Los Angeles, but it didn't. And the boy who hired a ringer to take his SAT exam was equally fatuous. (BTW, the ringer's formula for an outstanding essay wouldn't work in real life–examiners really can identify the distinctive features of anonymous essays.) But my strongest reason for recommending this book is what it tells us about American education. Why would parents be content to send their children to schools that teach them to believe in nothing except worldly success and be concerned only that they get accepted by elite universities, bribing them with expensive cars, clothes & accessories to get high grades & score well on entrance exams. Why not instead spend the money to send them to good secondary schools that would provide a moral & spiritual formation, & then let them attend a much less expensive & prestigious public college? It seems counter-intuitive. I am most grateful to PenguinRandomHouse & NetGalley for a gratis ARC. ...more |
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Jun 06, 2016
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Jun 10, 2016
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Jun 06, 2016
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| B013XULI22
| 3.57
| 6,709
| Jun 16, 2016
| Jun 16, 2016
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it was amazing
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Most of the of progeny of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca bear the same resemblance to the original as those “Rolexes” you can buy in Hong Kong. Not The F
Most of the of progeny of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca bear the same resemblance to the original as those “Rolexes” you can buy in Hong Kong. Not The Fire Child. It is a genuine Patek Philippe: the best contemporary gothic I have ever read. Mysterious haunting ruins are a staple of the gothic, & the remaining towers of the abandoned tin mines on the wild Cornish coast one of the best & most moving sights in England. (The Cornish aren’t really English, but their language, akin to Welsh, died out early in the 19th century, tho’ some enthusiasts have tried to revive it.) The ruined towers were situated on the coast so the mine shafts could stretch out under the ocean. The thought of the toil, danger, hardship & care the miners endured so that the family of the mine owner could live over them in a mansion (with 78 bedrooms!) makes one understand why people turned Bolshevik. (The old photographs, along with some new ones by the author, add an especially spooky touch - the one of the niners on p. 354 really got me.) Following the traditional formula, Rachel, a working-class almost-30 woman from a very dysfunctional family in South London, has married David, the scion of the mining aristocracy, tho’ the family fortune is gone & David is trying to restore Carnhallow (our Manderley knockoff) by overworking himself in London as a City solicitor. (How, we wonder, does her preserve his ‘muscular’ body Rachel loves with a 12-hour desk job fuelled by alcohol?)The previous chatelaine, Nina, perished mysteriously by falling down a mine shaft - leaving an 8 y/o boy Jamie, for whom his new stepmother experiences an immediate attraction. But Jamie seems obsessed with the memory of his mother, who has a grave site in a churchyard, tho’ no body was ever recovered. There is also a grandmother, Juliet, who serves as a communal memory like Mrs. Danvers, tho’ unlike Danvers, Juliet is an attractive character & her memory seemingly impaired by the onset of dementia. Is it possible that Nina could still be alive? Rachel thinks she caught a vision of her on a bus. Could Rachel be going insane? Is she slated for the role of madwoman in the attic? The same turn occurred in Judy Finnigan’s Eloise. All the traditional elements of gothic fiction are present in The Fire Child, but they are prepared with fresh & delicious ingredients & presented with a brilliant twist that is both ancient (King Oedipus & Tom Jones are classic prototypes) & up-to-the moment. Personally, I find our fascination with plot twists in fiction overdone. ‘I never saw that one coming’ is a frequent term of praise in reviews, but I think more is required for the real literary pleasure that comes only on a 2nd reading. I like a twist that raises what has already been an acceptable but seemingly routine plot to a new artistic level. It is less important for me that I didn’t see the twist coming but that it makes all the elements of the plot come together seamlessly & suddenly. Also, the twist should not depend too much on mere coincidence or accident, but feel inevitable & right, what in hindsight must happen. In The Fire Child, the author achieves both brilliantly. I loved The Ice Twins, but find The Fire Child even better. It is completely faithful to the settings, characters & plot elements of the traditional gothic, & yet strikingly new & original. ...more |
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Jul 18, 2016
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Jul 21, 2016
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May 29, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 1594633169
| 9781594633164
| 1594633169
| 3.30
| 9,405
| May 17, 2016
| May 17, 2016
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it was amazing
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Sir Walter Scott knew that a best setting for a historical was 60 years back, long ago enough to belong to another world, but still within living memo
Sir Walter Scott knew that a best setting for a historical was 60 years back, long ago enough to belong to another world, but still within living memory. In the case of The After Party, that living memory is mine. I lived in the very place & time the story is set = the River Oaks area of Houston, Texas in the 1950s. When the narrator Cici mentioned Troon Road I thought, OMG, we could have been neighbors. That’s only one block away; when my brother or I were out late & our mother, lying awake, heard the Morgan’s motor rev as we downshifted for the turn onto Chilton, she knew she could stop worrying and go to sleep. If the principal characters, Joan & Cici, had younger siblings, they might have been belonged to the same group of teenaged friends I belonged to that formed in the summer of 1957; over the following yearswe were to live our own private Secret History. Like her characters, my family bought clothes @ Battelstein’s & Sakowitz’s (when I went to prep school in New England my clothes-snob roommate made fun of the labels; I labeled him “the littlest Brooks Brother”!) Just as soon as the Shamrock Hotel opened, my parents joined the Cork Club & I can well-remember that huge pool with that terribly high diving board (I only dared go off the board @ mid level), & went to deb parties there when I was an undergrad. Reading this book, I felt like a T-Rex visiting a natural history museum. For moments it almost felt like I was back in Texas then. Anton DiSclafani's The Yonahlosee Riding Camp for Girls is one of the best school stories that I have ever read. The After Party belongs to the next generation; Joan & Cici are living out as 20-somethings the kind of life Yonahlosee girls were being prepared for: “good” marriages (@ least in Cici’s case) to men who worked for oil companies (3 of my friends fathers were with Humble Oil), membership in the Junior League & the River Oaks Country Club. In real life girls like Joan & Cici did @ least try college: Texas - “The University” - pledging Pi Phis or Kappas & perhaps marrying a Kappa Alpha, or Hollins or Sweetbriar, majoring in playing bridge & dating boys from W&L or UVA majoring in alcoholism. Joan & Cici would have had more of a cultural life too - going to plays @ the Alley Theatre & hearing the Houston Symphony Orchestra, which was already trying to become respectable. Actually, Houston CC was the snob club & not everybody was a nouveau riche parvenu like Glenn McCarthy. There was some “old money” (Galveston before the hurricane) like the Andersons & the Claytons. But I am utterly overwhelmed by how much research Anton DiSclafani must have put into this book. did she unearth a huge cache of ancient issues of the River Oaks Times? I even caught the bartender’s reference to the Fortiers’ locker @ the Cork Club - the Byzantine Texas liquor laws made club membership imperative if you wanted to entertain. I’m not sure the author quite got the liquor laws right either (there was also something called a “liquor pool” - quite appropo for these characters!) Of course then I was too young to drink - legally that is. I got too caught up in the nostalgia & historical reconstructions to pay all that much attention to the plot or the characters. The narrator Cici is intended as Joan’s fidus Achates living in the shadow of her glamorous but mysterious friend. Had I listened more carefully I should have figured out the story behind the disappearance of the teenaged Joan (something similar would happen with one of us). Neither of them quite reached the tragic level of Thea Atwell in Yonahlossee. (Which reminds me - the Fortiers certainly would have owed a ranch, with horses - maybe cattle - & nobody ever called “the Fat Stock Show” - pronounced as a cretic - “the Houston Fat”!) But my GR friends can do the criticizing. I loved this book for the memories. Next time I read a story set in one of my favorite historical periods such as England in the ‘40s, I’ll be aware of how close an author can get to reconstructing what it was really like to live in that time in the place. So close, but not quite. Thank you Anton DiSclafani for all your hard work. You got it almost perfect! ...more |
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May 24, 2016
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May 26, 2016
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May 24, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1909490989
| 9781909490987
| 1909490989
| 3.90
| 4,286
| Apr 24, 2015
| Apr 24, 2015
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it was amazing
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Absolutely love Jennifer Knight & found when a character used the word 'praeternatural' I wanted to squeal with delight. Need a little time to compose
Absolutely love Jennifer Knight & found when a character used the word 'praeternatural' I wanted to squeal with delight. Need a little time to compose my thoughts to write an adequate review but clearly a marvellous new series for imaginative & spiritually conscious readers.
...more
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May 13, 2016
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May 19, 2016
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May 13, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1852424133
| 9781852424138
| 1852424133
| 3.52
| 212
| Mar 01, 1994
| Oct 01, 1995
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it was amazing
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In some ways Natalie Scott’s Rules for Riders, Anton Disclafani’s The Yonahloosee Riding Camp for Girls, and this book, Heather Lewis’s House Rules, s
In some ways Natalie Scott’s Rules for Riders, Anton Disclafani’s The Yonahloosee Riding Camp for Girls, and this book, Heather Lewis’s House Rules, seem different versions of the same basic story - a young equestrienne’s discovery of the real world. If they were films, Scott’s might be PG13 light romance & Disclafani’s an epic rated R. Lewis’s: Unrated & full-frontal - no certificate, no cuts, & no concessions to the censors. Like Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, House Rules struck me as achieving tragic status, tho’ whether you should read it as a full-scale tragedy depends on how believable you find Lee’s situation @ the end. My experience with hunters & jumpers is entirely second hand. My world was sailing; but both riding and yachting satisfy some of our highest aspirations, demanding skill, intense competitiveness, dedication, physical endurance, & courage in the face of danger. In both we adapt to the demands of beautiful, unpredictable, & often expensive, @ the top echelon extremely expensive indeed, partners - horses or yachts. Which makes riding and sailing traditional pursuits for the rich. But by no means exclusively. Horses need riders & yachts need crew & both require a lot of maintenance & there are many young people in particular who would offer their whole lives to riding or to sailing - whose entire net wealth fits into a duffle bag. If that choice of life ever appealed when you were young (I’m gazing wistfully @ my old yellow seabag), you’ll find you share a lot with Lee. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, we enjoy good representations in fiction of things we would not enjoy at all in real life, whether Oedipus stabbing himself in the eyeballs, or in Lee’s case, what it would feel like to mount a horse after being fisted. I cannot imagine wanting to be a bottom, but can see in being a sexual passive a form of misplaced spirituality, a wrong turn in the path to what Ignatius designated as the third level of humility - perfect identification with Jesus’ suffering. But tho’ some of the blurb descriptions of this book make it sound like a work of Lesbian S/M erotica, I did not find that @ all. The sex scenes seemed more descriptions of extreme unarmed combat or OTT hazing @ a very bad fraternity or military school. The very heavy drug use in the novel represents a Dionysiac spirituality, as in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. (I’d known from my hospital experience the Dilaudid was the good stuff, but now I know why & that you can use it to control both horses & riders.) Like some other favorite characters, Lee is both extremely tough and very vulnerable. She doesn’t know how to recognize or repay generosity, yet she has an enormous capacity to endure abuse while retaining her personal dignity. But tho’ the sex in House Rules is not all that erotic, this book excels other novels about young athletes in the erotics of extreme competition. You can almost feel you’re in the saddle with Lee & smell the horse lather. Amber Dermont hadn’t a clue how to do that with dingy sailing in The Starboard Sea. Even Yonahloosee Riding Camp - tho’ belonging to a higher level of literature - doesn’t take you over the jumps with Thea Atwell as Heather Lewis lets you ride with Lee. The only thing I’ve read recently that matches this in sheer intensity is the chapter in Dare Me where the Sutton Grove cheer squad elevate Beth Cassidy for what is expected to be the culminating 2-2-1. (Beth, we recall, was also an equestrienne as well as a cheer captain.) I read House Rules shortly after Pamela Moore’s Chocolates for Breakfast, & of course am haunted by the similarities not only with their main characters, but by the fates of their authors (who join Lucy Grealy & Judee Sill in my pantheon of martyrs to misplaced spirituality.) Artistically, the fate of the author shouldn’t affect our estimate of the meaning & quality of her work, but of course it does. Heather Lewis left behind a couple more novels about teenaged girls who suffer a lot of abuse. They may be too OTT even for me, but I expect I’ll eventually try one of them, when I’m ready to revisit the wilder shores. For now tho’ it’s back to cozier books featuring mere serial killers & such. ...more |
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1
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Apr 19, 2016
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Apr 25, 2016
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Apr 19, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1408707128
| 9781408707128
| B010RGSET0
| 3.35
| 12,008
| May 17, 2016
| May 05, 2016
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it was amazing
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Imagine John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club remade by Quintain Tarantino with a soundtrack by Nirvana instead of Simple Minds & R-rated for nudity, sex,
Imagine John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club remade by Quintain Tarantino with a soundtrack by Nirvana instead of Simple Minds & R-rated for nudity, sex, violence & language. That’s how I envision a movie version of Girls on Fire. The setting is “the butt crack of western Pennsylvania”--an imaginary rust-belt town called Battle Creek somewhere near Pittsburgh, Bruce Springsteen country. The plot involves discovering what happened to the high-school athlete Craig Ellison, an apparent suicide by gunshot, & a struggle for the soul of Hannah Dexter, a junior @ the school. Her BF, the grunge-girl wild-child worshipper of Kurt Cobain, Lacey Champlain, wants to turn “Dex” into a goth-girl; their frenemy, teen-princess Nikki Drummond, would transform “Hannah” into a Monongahela Valley Girl. In fiction these days it is the teens who are resourceful & knowledgable & the adults who are helpless & clueless. That is not surprising when the parents themselves think that they are still teenagers, exemplified by Dex’s father Jimmy, whose mid-life crisis he would resolve by restarting his old garage band & fumbling with Lacey in the darkened movie theater where he barely manages to hold down a job. Of course real teenagers are much better @ being teenagers than are 40-somethings. Setting in the early ‘90s is both realistic & somewhat overdone. Battle Creek seems overrun with “Christian” fundamentalists obsessed with Satanism. There was a scare about devil worshippers @ that time, but I think it centered more on day-care facilities than on high schools. I’d prefer to believe that even @ that time & place Hannah would have been recognized & treated as a rape victim rather than as a Satanic bad girl after what happened to her in the aftermath of Nikki’s foreclosure party. Perhaps fortunately, Lacey’s horrible stepfather--“the Bastard”--seemed too OTT as well, tho’ Lacy’s experience @ the “Christian” reform school was wonderfully harrowing, if gratuitous. I felt the author had to pad the narrative, the year that elapses after Craig’s death: the plot needed the economy, concentration & punch that Megan Abbott might have given it. This book needs toning, less sag & tighter story. The ‘90s setting was probably chosen less for the ambience of the period (tho’ we get an allusion to that very middle-aged teenager Bill Clinton) than that Kurt Cobain needed to still be alive. I loved the main characters Dex & Lacey, & even Nikki attracted me despite herself. But I found the very end of the story deflated & boring, as if the author simply gave up instead of devising a conclusion appropriate to the characters, unless like another Hannah, Arendt, Robin Wasserman wanted to portray the banality of evil. Morally tho’, I have reflect a lot more on Dex’s choice. Unlike in The Secret History, here the question of how far you should go for someone you love is much harder to answer. Committing a crime to save a friend & wanting to implicate a friend to share your guilt may be the same legally, but morally they are world’s apart. With Girls on Fire, Robin Wasserman belongs on the level with Megan Abbott, but more the Abbott of Fever than of Dare Me. I intend to read parts of this one again (wonderful to have both Kindle & audio), but probably not all the way through. So five stars--but one’s a bit dim. ...more |
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1
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May 22, 2016
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May 23, 2016
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Apr 11, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 4.24
| 17,233
| Mar 03, 2016
| Jun 07, 2016
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it was amazing
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At the Existentialist Cafe was an almost ideal nonfiction travel audio book, a marvellous example of what the French call haute vulgarisation, which
At the Existentialist Cafe was an almost ideal nonfiction travel audio book, a marvellous example of what the French call haute vulgarisation, which means not upper-class swearing, but writing about complicated technical subjects in a style that even someone as thick as myself can follow. This book is a great introduction to the thought of Martin Heidegger, @ least for me, whose previous knowledge of Heidegger was a picture of an old fellow in funny clothes sitting on a bench in a forest. Finally too I think I understand where Husserl fits into the history of philosophy & why he is important. Like Sarah Bakewell, I discovered Existentialism while still @ school, but unlike her I also learned early on that I had no philosophic mind. What appealed to me about Existentialism was the fantasy of hanging about on the rive gauche with girls in black tights whilst wearing a black roll neck jersey. My BF @ school was an even bigger fan than I; when Albert Camus was killed in a car smash (not just a car smash, a Facel-Vega smash!), he wore a black necktie in mourning. Still, by the time of the evenements of '68, it felt like JPS had passed his sell-by date. So for me this book was less a history of a philosophic movement than a chance to revisit the world of my teenage self. But it also gave me @ least some idea of what my grad-student friends were talking about then. One had DASEIN on his licence plates. A young woman friend recommended de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, tho' given my tendency to fall in love with women whom I knew to be smarter than I, it wasn't exactly eye opening. Sarah Bakewell seems to consider that book the most important product of the entire Existentialist programme, & given its huge presence in the feminist movement, she may well be right. But it still feels to me very much an autobiographic memoir by a woman who had been an upper-middle-class jeune fille in the early 20th century, not all that applicable to American women even in the '60s. But who am I, a male, to comment? Having no capacity for strenuous thought, I feel equally out of my depth commenting on the other Existentialists, but Levinas, Jaspers & Marcel felt like the most worthwhile & morally & spiritually rewarding. I can also see why Merleau-Ponty's ideas would be attractive to film makers. As for JPS himself, I'm still inclined to think him essentially (yes, I had to use the dreaded 'E-word') a fraud, but one who truly believed his own fabrications. All of his own idols turned out to have clay feet, the Soviet Union, China, l'Indochine, Algerie algerienne. Now that Castro is gone, how soon will Cuba succumb to capitalism like China & Vietnam. It was as if Sartre spent his career in search of the cause du jour, to find where the crowd was going next so he could get in front of it. From April 1940 to August 1944, the period of the German occupation & probably the worst in Europe since the Black Death, Existentialism was perhaps the only thing going for a decent human being & given the total failure of the Roman Catholic Church under Pius XII, atheism was the only viable form of belief, except in the extreme forms of Christianity to which martyrs such as Simone Weil & Edith Stein were willing to go. I'm still inclined to the view that Existentialism belongs more to the history of culture (maybe even as in my case, the history of fashion--Bakewell is great on the jeunesse's passion for American lumberjack shirts) than to the history of philosophy. But as another recent adventure in time travel, The Existentialist Cafe is an absolute delight.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 12, 2016
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Dec 20, 2016
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Apr 09, 2016
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Audible Audio
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| 0008119082
| 9780008119089
| 0008119082
| 3.75
| 10,793
| Apr 07, 2016
| Apr 07, 2016
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it was amazing
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In The Ashes of London, Andrew Taylor continues to demonstrate that he is England's most outstanding creator of historical mystery thrillers. In his t
In The Ashes of London, Andrew Taylor continues to demonstrate that he is England's most outstanding creator of historical mystery thrillers. In his three most recent novels his settings have been New York in the War of American Independence, France & England in the early days of the French Revolution, & now Restoration London in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666. For purely personal reasons, I found this last was the slowest, but then I used to pass for a student of Restoration & 18th-century English literature & this is a very familiar patch I had to re-examine carefully - every time we entered a coffee house I expected to encounter Mr. Dryden or Mr. Pepys. (It wasn’t too early for Lord Rochester or Nell Gwyn, either.) But our sole famous contemporary personage is Dr. (later Sir Christopher) Wren (tho 'Master Chaffinch' - pronounced Chaffin - was indeed a real person even worse than Taylor presents him.) But except for some passages in Bleeding Heart Square, I don't believe Taylor has created such vivid descriptions before, especially the account of London burning - with the lead melting & the rats literally cooking - & the thriller denouement in the night atop the ruins of old St. Paul's high over London. I must mention the writing because the dialogue offered the greatest obstacle for me. Tho’ linguistic scholars date the inception of Modern English from about 1500, the Restoration is the earliest period when today’s English was spoken. Here is an except from Dryden, writing about Shakespeare: ‘He was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look'd inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his Comick wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is alwayes great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the Poets,’ ‘You more than see it, you feel it too.’ Could appear in an online movie review today. Modernise the spelling & capitalisation & there’s nothing archaic about the passage, tho’ you’d have to warn readers today “wit” means ‘imagination’, not just funny stuff. So whilst I back the decision to let the characters speak current English, Taylor might easily avoided obvious anachronisms, such a character describing someone as ‘between a rock & a hard place’ (I thought that expression sounded illiterate and comical when I 1st heard it in Texas in the 1950s), ‘loaned’ for ‘lent’ & describing himself as ‘nauseous’ when he didn’t mean he was so disgusting he made others want to vomit. I also thought Taylor over used the clue that a dog didn’t bark. He should be embarrassed (yes, when you know the canine’s name you’ll see a ‘clench’) to repeat an allusion several times (ending with ‘the dog did nothing’!) that any mystery story reader in world should catch the 1st time. Yes, I am being what Dryden would call a ‘hyper-critick’ but as the co-captain (with my GR & real life friend Jan) of the Andrew Taylor Cheer Squad (North American Branch), I want him to write even better next time. (Given a fortnight, I’ll volunteer as a beta reader.) Otherwise I rank this one alongside The Scent of Death & slightly ahead of The Silent Boy amongst five-star historicals. If you want to learn all about Roundhead religious fanaticks - this is your painless guide. The character Catherine Lovett is extremely brave & attractive, & tho’ she doesn’t deserve some of the bad things that happen to her, I love the suggestion @ the end of her future accomplishments. I’ll never look @ the ‘new’ Saint Paul’s cathedral in quite the same way again. Si puellae monumentum requires . . . &c. ...more |
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1
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Apr 16, 2016
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May 15, 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0316300284
| 9780316300285
| 0316300284
| 3.57
| 14,543
| Apr 04, 2016
| Apr 05, 2016
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it was amazing
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Heroin addict Jessica Moulson receives a life tariff for starting a fire that causes the death of a small boy. She had no intention of harming the boy
Heroin addict Jessica Moulson receives a life tariff for starting a fire that causes the death of a small boy. She had no intention of harming the boy Alex - didn’t know that he was even in the building. But the prosecution claimed that she did intend to kill her fellow addict boyfriend & she was convicted on his testimony, which legally makes her a child killer. At 1st sight that seems unfair, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Suppose I’m in the zebra crossing along with your ex, whom you try to run over with your motor car, only the ex jumps safely out of the way & you obliterate me instead. You’ve certainly murdered me even tho’ you never so intended. If you’ve read books like Alex Marwood’s The Wicked Girls, you know what public fury & media frenzy those convicted of murdering innocent children arouse, & prison inmates are as judgemental as most of us, so we’re not surprised that Jess will become an object of opprobrium & a target for bullying. Which logically & morally is senseless in her case, but brings out the distinction between legal guilt & moral responsibility. She is only supposed to have tired to kill the druggie boyfriend, so whilst legally she is guilty for the death of the child, morally she is blameworthy only for encompassing death of boyfriend. Even before we learn a lot more about him in this book, we’d hardly see his demise worthy public outrage. Thinking about that paradox was only the beginning of the moral & spiritual issues you’ll find yourself facing in Fellside. I think M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts was a better executed story, but Fellside is on a higher artistic level. Both are quest stories. Girl with All the Gifts a journey quest whose progenitors are The Odyssey, the Anabasis, the Morte d’Arthur, Pilgrim’s Progress, Journal of the Plague Year & The Lord of the Rings. These recount journeys by a group of friends trying to find their way to a safe haven through many dangerous adventures. The present story is a katabasis, a descensus Averno, like the sixth book of the Aeneid, the gospel of Nicodemus, & Dante's Inferno. H.M. Prison Fellside is supposed to be in the Yorkshire moors geographically; spiritually it is directly over the pit of Hell. Normally on such a quest the pilgrim voyager is accompanied by a spirit-guide: Aeneas by his father Anchises, Dante by Virgil. Jess’s spirit-guide is apparently the ghost of the dead boy Alex who perished in the fire she was convicted of starting. Jess initially attempts to starve herself till as she approaches death she meets this spirit in her dreams who leads her to choosing life, even life in prison. Slowly Jess develops her spiritual powers & her friendship with this spirit, who gradually reveals yet another identity. You may read other reviewers who were disappointed by Fellside, because they loved The Girl with All the Gifts & wanted another adventure story, or maybe a mystery story, or a supernatural horror story. There are all of these elements in Fellside, but spiritually it’s much more elevated. As an example of one of those standard fictional genres, Carey could have ended this book 60 pages earlier than he did - & I would happily have given it four stars & it could have had an HEA epilogue as well. When I heard where Jessica stood up in the appeals court after the verdict to make a personal statement & I sensed the direction the book was taking, I wanted to stop the car & scream ‘Jess, Don’t do it!’ But of course she had to do it. This is a story of redemption. Now that we’ve been redeemed, what do we do about it? We don’t want anything bad to happen to anybody. But when it does, we want to be there. So we ask to be posted back to the front line, to the trauma unit, to the mission outpost, to the entrance to the dark cave concealing the downward path leading straight to . . . . As long as there’s unfinished business to take care of, we don’t leave anyone behind. In this book M. R. Carey chooses to have his hero Jess go for full-blown tragedy: unnecessary, excessive, cruel, but also inevitable & right - & very beautiful. ...more |
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Jun 03, 2016
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Jun 17, 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Dec 31, 2016
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Dec 24, 2016
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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Oct 26, 2016
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Sep 28, 2016
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| 3.57
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it was amazing
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Oct 09, 2016
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Sep 25, 2016
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| 3.76
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it was amazing
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Sep 13, 2016
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Sep 08, 2016
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Sep 29, 2016
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Sep 03, 2016
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Sep 17, 2016
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Aug 27, 2016
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| 3.55
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it was amazing
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Sep 08, 2016
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Aug 21, 2016
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| 3.34
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it was amazing
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Aug 28, 2016
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Aug 10, 2016
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| 3.33
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it was amazing
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Aug 13, 2016
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Aug 05, 2016
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| 3.64
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it was amazing
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Sep 27, 2016
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Aug 01, 2016
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| 3.50
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it was amazing
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Jul 29, 2016
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Jul 24, 2016
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| 3.40
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it was amazing
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Jun 10, 2016
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Jun 06, 2016
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| 3.57
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it was amazing
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Jul 21, 2016
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May 29, 2016
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| 3.30
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it was amazing
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May 26, 2016
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May 24, 2016
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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May 19, 2016
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May 13, 2016
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| 3.52
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it was amazing
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Apr 25, 2016
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Apr 19, 2016
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| 3.35
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2016
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Apr 11, 2016
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| 4.24
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it was amazing
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Dec 20, 2016
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Apr 09, 2016
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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May 15, 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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| 3.57
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it was amazing
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Jun 17, 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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