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Book 141: The Leavers




“What a relief it had been to find him, to have someone to come home to, letting the everyday concerns take over: lesson planning at World Top English and where to go to dinner, filling myself up with tasks and conversation and possessions until there was no longer space to think about you. This is what could happen in a city like this. A woman could come from nowhere and become a new person. A woman could be arranged like a bouquet of fake flowers, bent this way and that, scrutinized from a distance, rearranged.”

Dates read: April 21-24, 2017

Rating: 5/10

A few years ago, I did 23 And Me. America is, by and large, a nation of people who came from somewhere else, and I was curious where my family came from. My dad’s side of the family, especially my grandmother’s line, has been in the country for a long time and they’ve kept good records tracing our family back to the old country. But my grandfather on that same side was the son of a Polish immigrant who had no records of his family, and my mom’s side is a big question mark since she was adopted as an infant.

In Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, Deming Guo doesn’t need any help to know where he came from. Born in the United States to Polly Guo, who had herself smuggled to America to escape a dead-end life in China, Deming was actually sent back to his mother’s home village for a few years to live with his grandfather while Polly worked endlessly to try to make some headway on her debts to the loan sharks that got her to New York City in the first place. When we meet Deming, he’s in elementary school, living with his mother, her boyfriend, the boyfriend’s sister, and her son, Michael, who’s about the same age as Deming himself. Then, suddenly, after Polly starts talking about maybe moving to Florida for a job in a restaurant instead of the crushing grind of the nail salon she’s been working in for years, she disappears. Already economically strapped, Polly’s boyfriend and his sister can’t afford to keep Deming with them for long, and he’s soon adopted by a pair of white upstate professors, where his new parents dub him “Daniel”, ostensibly to help him get along easier in the overwhelmingly white town he finds himself in.

We next catch up with Daniel in his early 20s, back in NYC and doing musician gigs after he dropped out of college because of an online poker problem. He’s crashing with his bandmate, Roland, the only other person of color that he went to school with, and trying to figure out how to avoid going back to school like his parents want him to. He’s never found out what happened to his mother, but after a chance reconnection with Michael, his curiosity is reawakened. As he starts to pursue the issue, the perspective changes and we get Polly’s story…how and why she came to have Deming, how and why she came to America, and what actually did happen when she disappeared.

I never DNF (do not finish) books, but if I did, I would have dropped this one after about the first 50 or so pages. While the way his childhood played out would give anyone emotional scars, Daniel himself is not an enjoyable character to spend time with. He’s whiny, he steals money from his friends, he’s a coward. I really did not enjoy reading about him. But when the story switched to his mother, the book took off. Polly is a dynamic, interesting character who practically springs off the page, and her story is easy to get emotionally invested in. I wish Ko had either started with more of Polly or just made her the primary focus of the book overall…starting with Daniel seems like asking to lose a decent chunk of your audience straight out the gate.

And to miss this book entirely would be a shame. Although it’s uneven, there’s really solid stuff here. Like I said, Polly’s story is a great one: she’s a fantastic character and her struggles to make it are compelling. Ko also had me cringing in recognition at the way she painted Daniel’s adoptive parents and their friends, who adopted a baby girl from China…the self-satisfied pats on their own backs for helping their children “connect with their culture” through food and dance classes, the way Deming is renamed like he’s a puppy they picked up at the pound instead of a person. By the end, Ko has developed Daniel into a more understandable character and I came around to appreciating the book, but it really makes you slog through some bad (not even just like challenging, but bad) content to get there.

Tell me, blog friends…does a bad beginning turn you off a book entirely?

One year ago, I was reading: Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Two years ago, I was reading: The Lords of Discipline

Book 139: Big Little Lies



“It was stupid for them to be fighting about this. A rational part of her mind knew this. She knew that Ed didn’t really blame Jane. She knew her husband was actually a better, nicer person than she was, and yet she couldn’t forgive him for that ‘silly girl’ comment. It somehow represented a terrible wrong. As a woman, Madeline was obliged to be angry at Ed on Jane’s behalf, and for every other ‘silly girl’, and for herself, because after all, it could have happened to her too, and even a soft little word like ‘silly’ felt like a slap.”

Dates read: April 9-13, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/Awards: New York Times Bestseller

I’m a lobbyist, and my sister is a nurse. We’re both “high achievers”, so to speak. Part of that is because of who we are, but part of that is because my mom pushed both of us to be academically successful too. On the one hand, she wanted us to always be able to support ourselves…being able to take care of not only herself but two little girls enabled her to escape a bad marriage. On the other hand, she was one of very few single mothers in the small town I grew up in and she didn’t want to have to face the patronizing pity of the stay-at-home moms who would have judged her for it if we turned out anything less than model students.

Mommy wars are hardly anything new, of course. They’ve probably been going on as long as there have been moms (i.e. forever). Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies has its roots in drama between mothers, but there’s a bigger story here. It begins on the first day of kindergarten in a small seaside Australian town, drawing together a group of women who all have children starting school that day: hotheaded Madeline, her ex-husband’s serene yoga instructor wife Bonnie, her beautiful best friend Celeste, and the new arrival in town, young and insecure single mother Jane. Of these women, only Madeline is much like she seems to be on the surface.

It seems frothy, this story about the bonds between women, and in some ways it is, but there’s a lot of darkness behind the surface veneer of fun. I hope enough people have seen the HBO show or read the book by now that this won’t be considered much of a spoiler, but lovely Celeste with her perfect life and doting husband is hiding years of domestic abuse, Jane’s sweet little boy is the product of a one-night stand with a sadistic jerk, and Bonnie’s secrets are too much a part of the suspense to give away. All we know when we begin the book is that there was a death a school function, and interviews with the police frame the chapters, dropping little hints about what might have happened and to whom.

I’ll be honest…this is a genre of book that I tend to see on airport bookstore shelves and walk right past. But Big Little Lies is a great example of why it’s often a fruitful exercise to get outside my comfort zone every once in a while. I found the story of the relationships that grew (and frayed, sometimes) between the women to be well-told and emotionally resonant, which meant that by the time all is revealed at the end, the payoff was earned and carried weight. The mystery of what happened keeps the plot moving forward through character-building beats, resulting in a book that’s well-balanced between the story and the people who populate it (in other words, both plot and character lovers will find something to enjoy here).

After I finished this book, I found myself wondering why domestic drama stories are so often relegated to the pile of “chick lit” and treated as insubstantial. A book like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is entirely the story of a family and their relationships, but it’s treated as Serious Literature while something like Big Little Lies, which actually wrestles with weightier topics, is considered to be Women’s Literature, For Women Only. There’s still a great deal of institutional bias against books written by women about women: Liane Moriarty is very successful, but her work is treated as niche interest instead of relevant to everyone. If stories about men engaging in self-discovery, exploring the world around them and finding their places in it are marketed widely, why shouldn’t stories about women doing the same be given the same treatment?

Tell me, blog friends…do you turn up your nose a bit at “women’s books”?

One year ago, I was reading: Station Eleven

Two years ago, I was reading: Behave

Book 138: Moonglow



“My grandfather never would have lied to exonerate himself, make himself look good, or evade responsibility. Unlike my grandmother, he did not seem to find pleasure or release in telling lies. But while he was a family man and loved us all in his wordless way, he was also, to the core, a solitary. If there was suffering to be endured, he preferred to withstand it alone. If he made a mess, he would clean it up himself. Unlike his wife, he was uncomfortable with make-believe, but his fetish for self-reliance made him secretive. So while it was true that psychiatrists, who got paid to know such things, had instructed him over the years to keep upsetting news away from my grandmother, it was also true that this advice suited his furtive nature. She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”

Dates read: April 4-9, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Humans love to tell each other stories. It’s a tradition that dates back thousands of years. One of our favorite subjects, of course, is ourselves…we’re constantly shaping the narrative arc of our lives by telling our stories to other people. Our family, our friends, our lovers…they’re all supporting characters in the book of our lives, fading into and out of importance around our central protagonist. Sometimes I wonder how I show up in other people’s stories: am I a villain? A small but important recurring player? Or just an offhand reference at the bottom of page 147?

I’ve always been attracted to stories that are fundamentally about mostly ordinary people and their lives. Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, based in part on the actual recollections of his great uncle, is exactly that kind of story. It’s semi-autobiographical in form as well as function: the main character is a professional writer named Michael Chabon. In the book, Michael is spending time with his dying grandfather while he tells him the story of his life, which took him from the Jewish neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, to a military academy, to Nazi engineer-hunting in Europe, back to the US, to prison, and eventually to a Florida retirement community, where his life finally ended.

But the real main event of his life was his marriage to a beautiful French concentration camp survivor. By the time they met, she’d already had Michael’s mother, then just a small girl, who he raised as his own. That isn’t all that she brought into the marriage, though…she also brought mental instability, haunted by periodic breaks with reality in which she was haunted by a being she called the Skinless Horse. Presented with the opportunity to learn the truth about her life after a bout of hospitalization, Michael’s grandfather chooses to not, and instead goes on loving his wife the way he’s always known her until her premature death.

As might be expected from a book called Moonglow, the moon is a constant reference point and  plays a dominant symbolic role. For Michael’s grandfather, obsessed with rockets, it has a traditionally masculine meaning: he wants to explore and conquer it. But the moon is tied throughout history to the feminine, from Greece’s Artemis to China’s Chang’e. It’s also tied to madness, like that which haunts Michael’s grandmother. Like the fortunes of both parts of our central couple, it constantly waxes and wanes.

This was my first experience with Chabon, a writer I’d heard great things about, and this was a wonderful introduction to him. He created characters that felt real, especially with the grandma and grandpa (the modern-day characters who frame the story, though, Michael and his mother, feel a bit underdeveloped) and created a relationship that felt honest and lived-in. That these two would come together and stay together and have the impact on each other that they did made sense. I’ve always been a fan of the character-driven story, and this is exactly that. But there’s a decent amount of plot in there for those who prefer that, and I enjoyed the way Chabon developed his story. It’s a small detail, but I especially liked the way he left Augenbaugh’s lighter unresolved. Tying everything up with a nice little bow isn’t how life works, closure doesn’t always happen, and I liked that he left that little mystery hanging. I’ll definitely be reading more of his work, and would highly recommend this book.

Tell me, blog friends…do you like full resolution to a story or do you not mind some ambiguity?

One year ago, I was reading: Valley of the Moon

Two years ago, I was reading: The White Queen

Book 136: The Love Song of Jonny Valentine



“Even if I was way more famous, Lisa acted like she was twice my age, and I should’ve known from the beginning she’d say no to going out. It’d be like me dating a six-year-old. She’d make it as an actress and singer, because she wasn’t a normal kid. She was an adult in a kid’s body. If you were just a kid in a kid’s body, you might make it, too, as long as you had good management.”

Dates read: March 27-30, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Drew Barrymore. Miley Cyrus. Lindsay Lohan. For as long as there have been child stars, it seems, there have been child stars gone awry. How could they not? While most of us are playing and making mistakes and learning under no harsher gaze than those of school bullies, famous kids are working, oftentimes supporting at least some of their family members. So when they start to push at the boundaries and rebel like most teenagers eventually do, they’ve got further to fall…and a much more public stage to do it on.

Speaking of child stars gone awry, there’s always one of our most recent examples: Justin Bieber. And it’s not hard to see who was the inspiration behind the protagonist of Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine. A preteen singer with a trendy haircut, discovered on social media, with a mother who manages his career, Jonny is on his second nationwide tour when we meet him. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that for all his stardom, Jonny is actually very lonely: besides his mother (whose “momager” position means that her monetary interests are bound up in what’s best for Jonny’s career, not necessarily what’s best for Jonny, and who he refers to by her first name, Jane), his closest confidants are his tutor and his bodyguard.

Jane keeps a very close eye on Jonny’s access to the internet, and it’s this that kicks off the action: one night when she’s out, he sneaks into her hotel room to read about himself. And it’s there that he finds a message from a man claiming to be his long-lost father. As his tour continues, Jonny tries to figure out if the commenter is really his father (and what to do if he is), watches his mother struggle personally and professionally, has his own professional struggles, negotiates a fake date with a fellow preteen star, and breaks out of his cloistered bubble a little when a 20something rock band becomes his new opening act.

This sounds like a lot of plot, especially when you’re talking about a 300 page book, but Wayne handles it well. Part of the reason he’s successful is the way he structures his book: with sections for each day of each stop on the tour, it keeps a constant sense of propulsive motion forward, building naturally towards the climax, the final show. A bigger part of the reason the book works is the voice he creates for Jonny. Simultaneously hopelessly naive in the way that 11 year-olds should be, and cynically jaded about his career and the industry in which he works, there’s a tricky balance Wayne pulls off, making Jonny neither a complete sap nor completely bitter.

Some of the themes are handled in a way that’s a little too on-the-nose: Jonny’s coming-of-age is symbolized by his attempts to figure out how to successfully jack off, and his tutor assigns him a unit on slavery in a clear attempt to draw the parallels with Jonny’s situation to both the singer himself and, of course, the reader. And while the story is about Jonny, from his own perspective, I actually found Jane the most interesting character and wish I’d gotten more about her. But having too many interesting and well-rounded characters is a good problem for a book to have. I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it!

Tell me, blog friends…did you ever wish you were famous when you were younger? Do you still?

One year ago, I was reading: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

Two years ago, I was reading: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Book 134: Chemistry



“Ninety percent of all experiments fail. This is fact. Every scientist has proven it. But you eventually start to wonder if this high rate of failure is also you. It can’t be the chemicals’ fault, you think. They have no souls.”

Dates read: March 18-21, 2017

Rating: 7/10

When I was in middle school, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I had always been the kind of kid for whom “bad behavior” most directly translated into “mouthing off”, and I loved to play devil’s advocate, and I was stubborn like an ox. I was captain of the mock trial team in high school, and I really thought being a lawyer was exactly what I wanted. Until I got to law school, which I hated. And then started practicing, which I hated even more. Figuring out that I needed to go another way is a decision I’m constantly thankful I made.

Coming from an adult perspective, I think it’s silly that we expect 16 year olds to have any idea what they might want to do for the rest of their lives. I think of myself as being pretty smart, but it turned out what I was sure I wanted to do at 16 was incredibly wrong for me. And the protagonist (never named) of Weike Wang’s Chemistry is in kind of a similar boat. Pursuing a Ph.D. in, of course, chemistry at a prestigious New England university, she has a bit of a meltdown as her experiment fails to produce results. Although she does love the field, she begins to question her choices about everything in life as she takes time off of her program.

There’s not a lot of “plot” in this book, really. The protagonist is trying to decide what to do about her long-term relationship with a fellow chemist who has proposed to her but she’s not sure she wants to marry, trying to figure out how to support herself without her graduate student stipend, being there for her best friend through pregnancy and early motherhood and marriage crises, and figuring out when and how and if to tell her Chinese immigrant parents that she’s not in school anymore. It is this last matter that most preoccupies her, and much of the book is made up of her recollections of her childhood, of her parents’ relationships with each other and with her, of the pressure she feels to succeed in the ways that they value in order to validate their sacrifices.

Stories like these illustrate the power of “own voices”: an Asian-American woman telling the story of an Asian-American woman. A lot of non-Asians look to them as a so-called “model minority”, hard workers somehow naturally gifted at math and science. Of course the reality behind that is more complicated (it’s as much a result of the kinds of immigrants that tend to leave Asia behind to travel to America as much as anything else), and Wang pulls back the curtain on what might seem like a neat little family of a scientist, a housewife, and their scientist daughter to show the internal workings that are just as messy as anyone’s home life.

That being said, evaluating Chemistry on its novelistic merits reveals a book that is good but not great, and quite obviously a debut, though a promising one. Our nameless narrator is at times rather formless, and mostly reacts to the events around her rather than being proactive. She’s very unsure of herself after breaking out a track that she found herself in more than chose, and while that’s understandable, it makes her hard to really get enough of a feel for to connect with much. But Wang’s writing is sure and emotionally true, and I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, especially to 20somethings that are wondering if they’re on the right track.

Tell me, blog friends…did you end up doing what you thought you would at 16?

One year ago, I was reading: The Year of Living Biblically

Two years ago, I was reading: Song of Achilles

Book 133: Green Girl




“She is such a trainwreck. But that’s why we like to watch. The spectacle of the unstable girl-woman. Look at her losing it in public.”

Dates read: March 15-18, 2017

Rating: 6/10

I’m a mostly pretty together person these days. I’m married to the person with whom I’ve been in a long-term relationship for years now, we have a dog, we have steady white-collar jobs. We enjoy our wine and beer, but I can count the number of hangovers I’ve had in the past year on one hand. I write a book blog, that’s how cozily normal I am. It wasn’t always so. My 32 year-old self is a much, much different person than my 22 year-old self. At 22, I was a mess. I partied often, drank more than anyone would consider reasonable, and I made some questionable decisions about who I chose to invest my energy in. I never got into any sort of actual trouble, but things were a little sloppy there for a while.

I think a lot of young women go through unanchored periods like this (and young men, for that matter). Stumbling around trying to figure out who and what we are, what we want, where we belong. Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl focuses on this exact time of life. Ruth, an American in her early 20s, is living in London and working at Harrod’s, which she’s nicknamed Horrid’s, selling perfume. Ruth’s insecurities about herself and her place in the world are reflected even in what kind of wares she hocks. She’s not assigned to the fancy prestige brands, but rather the celebrity scent of a teenage American pop star.

Ruth is recovering from the dual shocks of losing her mother and the end of an intense, damaging relationship, and is desperately lonely. She’s “friends” of sorts with a young Australian woman who lives down the hall in the rooming house she lives in. There’s little real connection between them, but at least it’s another person to spend time with. Ruth makes some hesitant stabs at new relationships, but between the two men who both treat her as an object in their own way (one by putting her on a worshipful pedestal, and the other as a muse for his own artistic ambition), she can’t actually bond with anyone. She knows she’s stuck, but has no idea how to free herself.

Green Girl is relatively simple in terms of plot, but I found it challenging in its own way. It’s not structured like a typical novel: each section (there are many, I don’t believe any are longer than 10 or so pages) is prefaced by a quotation from another author writing about young womanhood. Zambreno’s own writing is almost like prose poetry, short interlinked paragraphs that are about as much about the feeling they capture as moving the story forward. It’s not even as much a portrait of Ruth as a character as it is a portrait of what it is to be struggling into womanhood in one’s early 20s, feeling the openness of one’s potential future to be as much threat as promise.

I was initially put off by it and was glad that at least it was short so I wouldn’t be spending undue amounts of time on something I found alienating, but eventually I got used to its rhythm and once I got there it was hard to put down. Although she’s not a strongly drawn character, Ruth’s aching sadness comes across so vividly that watching her stumble and make mistakes is heart-wrenching. It’s an odd little book, and its flaws (the lack of character development and story structure) are real, but it has power. I’d recommend it if you’re down for something a little less conventional or had a messy time of it in your 20s.

Tell me, blog friends…do you prefer novels that play with form or are you a traditionalist?

One year ago, I was reading: Shattered

Two years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

Book 131: Housekeeping




“And she whited shoes and braided hair and turned back bedclothes as if re-enacting the commonplace would make it merely commonplace again, or as if she could find the chink, the flaw, in her serenely orderly and ordinary life, or discover at least some intimation that her three girls would disappear as absolutely as their father had done. So when she seemed distracted or absent-minded, it was in fact, I think, that she was aware of too many things, having no principle for selecting the more from the less important, and that her awareness could never be diminished, since it was among the things she had thought of as familiar that this disaster had taken shape.” 

Dates read: March 6-10, 2017

Rating: 5/10

Lists/Awards: Time’s All-Time 100 Novels

My husband has had the most normal life of anyone I know. He was born in North Dakota to two teachers, who moved out to Reno when he was five. They have been happily married for decades, with a wide circle of friends. They even had a Golden Retriever named Max that they adopted from the Humane Society when he was in middle school. Pretty much everything but the white picket fence. Until I met him, I didn’t know that people with such conventional lives actually existed. Where was the drama, the scandal, the love child, the secret substance abuse issue?

But, as it so happens, those Norman Rockwell childhoods do exist, and my husband had one of them. It’s a decidedly imperfect childhood, though, that’s at the center of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Ruth, and her sister Lucille, don’t have much if anything in way of memories of their father. They are raised by their mother, Helen, until one day she leaves where she’s been living and returns to Fingerbone, Idaho, where she was raised by her own single mother (her father died during her childhood when the train on which he worked derailed into the local lake). She arranges her daughters on her mother’s porch with a box of crackers and promptly drives her car off a cliff. The girls have some stability with their grandmother for a time, but then she dies. At first, grandma’s two sisters-in-law come to take care of the kids, but as longtime spinsters, they’re not quite up to the task. So then Sylvie, their aunt, comes to town. And that’s when things start to change.

Sylvie is…a drifter, to be polite. She’s actually more of a hobo. She likes the girls, loves them in her own way even, but it’s hard for her to create a stable home for them. She can’t break out of old habits: riding around in train boxcars, falling asleep with her shoes still on in case she needs to be able to move along, hoarding. While Ruth takes after her aunt, Lucille doesn’t. As the girls enter the teenage years, Lucille wants normality. She breaks away from the family, and as she talks about what’s going on back home, outside interest increases dramatically. This strains things to the breaking point and forces Ruth to make a decision about who she really is and who she really wants to be.

The more I read, the more I boil books down to three essential elements: plot, characters, and writing. A good book has two, a great book has all three. Robinson’s writing is lovely, her prose clear and insightful and strong. But the other two legs of this stool aren’t really there. Despite being told from Ruth’s perspective, we never get much of a sense of who she really is. Her sister, despite being her closest companion, doesn’t get much development either apart from wanting a more conventional life. Even Sylvie is elusive, even though you get a better sense of her than you do almost anyone else. As for the plot…despite being a coming-of-age novel, it seems almost more like a failure-to-come-of-age novel. Ruth never really grows or changes. She just…drifts along, like a leaf along a river. A rootless child, she follows her rootless aunt/guardian. Even her break with her sister, what should have been a deeply traumatic experience, feels anticlimatic and muffled, somehow. Since there was quite a long gap between this book, published in the 80s, and Robinson’s next work, Gilead, not published until the early 2000s, I’m still interested in reading more of her works. Maybe that long gap helped her develop a better sense of people or plotting? This book, though, isn’t quite good enough to recommend.

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever been interested in the life of a wanderer?

One year ago, I was reading: Mrs. Dalloway

Two years ago, I was reading: The Winged Histories

Book 124: Flowertown



“Contamination and containment became the buzzwords, replaced quickly with quarantine and treatment, all to the musical backdrop of international media and outrage as the world demanded to know who was responsible for the poisoning of seven and a half square miles of America’s heartland. There were Senate hearings and criminal investigations. Some people died and many more people suffered, but as weeks turned into months, most people outside of the Penn County spill zone went back to their jobs and their newscasts and their horror at the other atrocities available on every continent, on every channel.”

Dates read: February 6-9, 2017

Rating: 6/10

When it comes to corporate scandals, there’s little that it’s hard to believe in this day and age. The Ford Pinto incident seems especially egregious, but even the recent enormous price hikes of life-saving medication like the Epi-Pen should remind us all that for companies, the value of human life often gets lost somewhere in the cost-benefit analysis matrix. For all that mega-corporations try to create brand loyalty and convince us that they do actually care, the bottom line is that the entire point of a publicly-traded company is to maximize value for stockholders. If there is little-to-no impact on their income reports, sure, some companies will do the right thing. But when it comes down to it, nearly all the time they will chose profit over any other factor.

In S.G. Redling’s Flowertown, it’s a company called Feno Chemical that finds itself mired in controversy after a disastrous pesticide spill in a small town in Iowa. The area is quarantined by the Army as large numbers of residents begin to die from exposure to the toxin, and Feno’s pharmaceutical subsidiary develops a drug regime to try to treat them. For those who manage to survive, the drugs have a side effect: a sweet smell that emanates from those who’ve been dosed, leading to the nickname Flowertown. Even with the drugs, though, the chemicals are excreted from the body through any liquid and prove impossible to remove through filtering, so the people who remain have to stay to avoid infecting anyone else.

Ellie Caulley had just quit her job in advertising and was visiting her boyfriend’s hometown before they were to take off on a trip overseas when the accident happened. Her boyfriend and his family died, but Ellie lived, and after seven years of being trapped in the confines of Flowertown, she only manages to keep a lid on her anger by being high all the time and sleeping with one of the Army officers assigned to keep the peace. She has only two friends: her sweet-natured roommate Rachel and the hyper-paranoid Bing, who keeps her in pot. When bombs start going off, though, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the local events: who’s setting off the explosions? The local resistance movement? Feno Chemical trying to rid itself of a problem? The Army?

This is a mystery/thriller, but once events are set into motion, it’s not too hard to figure out what the deal is (I’m not good at that kind of thing at all, but I still figured it out). The character development is surprisingly decent…Redling’s Ellie is a prickly heroine who takes some warming up to but captures your sympathies. It’s not hard to imagine how awful it would be to find yourself in the situation she does, how it would drive you almost crazy with loss and regret. With most of the books in this genre that I’ve read, creating characters doesn’t seem like a big priority, but this book is less plot and more character driven, which worked for me. If you’re looking for a thriller-style book based in people and personalities, this is a solid (albeit unspectacular) read.

Tell me, blog friends…have any stories about corporate greed come out that you had an especially hard time believing?

One year ago, I was reading: Big Little Lies

Two years ago, I was reading: Dead Wake

Book 122: Marlena



“I’ve never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don’t touch anything doesn’t mean you are exempt. You might be tempted to forgive me for being just fifteen, in over my head, for not knowing what to do, for not understanding, yet, the way even the tiniest choices domino, until you’re irretrievably grown up, the person you were always going to be. Or in Marlena’s case, the person you’ll never have the chance to be. The world doesn’t care that you’re just a girl.”

Dates read: January 30- February 2, 2017

Rating: 6/10

When you think about it, we usually meet our friends for the most stupidly mundane reasons. A girl who was a friend of mine in high school was someone I’d made friends with in first grade because we were always at the end of the tallest-to-shortest line together. My friend Kailey and I became friends because I just happened to be one of the first people she met when she moved to my school district in fifth grade. One of my closest friends in college was someone who’d become close to my then-boyfriend through the Greek system and we just all started hanging out together. It’s strange to think that people who have been huge parts of my life are people I very well would never have known if not for mere accidents of geography and chance.

In Julie Buntin’s Marlena, fifteen year-old Catherine encounters the friend who will change her world forever, the titular Marlena, because she happens to move next door to Marlena’s family. A year earlier she’d been known as Cathy, a motivated student at a private high school outside of Detroit, but then her parents divorced and her mother, short on resources, moves her and her brother Jimmy to the northern Lower Peninsula to start over. Catherine decides to become Cat, and her seventeen year-old neighbor becomes her best friend. Marlena is what could be delicately described as a troubled young woman: her mother has long since vanished and her father cooks meth in the woods, she’s the closest thing her decade-younger brother has to a parent, she’s hooked on opiates and has a squicky relationship with the older man who provides her pills to her. The intense friendship that springs up between the girls draws Cat into a new world: drugs and booze and sex and cutting class. But after a year, Cat tells us, Marlena will be dead, found drowned in a shallow stream in the woods.

The story is told on two tracks: mostly the story of the year in which Marlena was a part of Cat’s life, but also Cat all grown up, working at a library in New York City, long past that time in her life. Or is she? The unhealthy relationship she developed as a teenager with alcohol is still with her, threatening to unwind her relationship and career. This is not as successful a framing mechanism as it could be: the portions in Michigan are dominant and the underdevelopment of the portions in New York render them almost superfluous. I think with some editing to balance out the narratives better, the book would have been more powerful. As it is, it’s good: the friendship between the girls rings true, and Buntin draws them and the supporting characters in ways that make them complex and interesting.

Although I am in no way trying to imply any kind of impropriety, there’s no denying that this book has distinct similarities to Emma Cline’s The Girls and it’s interesting that both came out around the same time. Both are books about young, relatively sheltered teenage girls who find themselves drawn into an intense bond with an older girl. The older girl in question in both stories draws the younger into “dark” situations: drinking, drugs, sex. Both books intersperse the story of the one-time friendship with flash-forwards to the girl all grown up, looking back on that time of her life. And since the comparison is obvious, it has to be said that for me, Cline’s is better. Buntin’s makes me excited to see how she follows up this debut, but it falls short of greatness and lacks the raw power of The Girls. I’d still recommend it, though, especially for those that enjoy stories about strong female friendships and coming-of-age stories. 

Tell me, blog friends…did you ever have a super close friendship as a teenager?

One year ago, I was reading: The Love Song of Jonny Valentine 

Two years ago, I was reading: Yes Please

Book 119: Snow



“It wasn’t the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come- in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city’s unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city’s empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

Dates read: January 18-22, 2017

Rating: 6/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012)

When someone asks me if I like the movie Goodfellas, I never know what to say. It’s a well-directed, well-acted, well-told story, so I think it’s a laudatory work of film and I admire its accomplishments. But I didn’t actually enjoy watching it and I have no desire to do so again. It’s one of those weird things that happens sometimes for media in all forms, for me. I’ll find something to be a significant piece and worthy of praise, but that doesn’t mean I always actually like it.

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow falls into that weird, middle-ground territory for me. It’s a well-crafted tale, rich with context and layers of meaning. But I didn’t actually enjoy reading it all that much. From a third-person narrator point of view (we’ll get to that later), Snow tells the story of Ka, a Turkish poet who has spent much of his adult life in political exile in Germany, newly returned to his home country for his mother’s funeral. When he hears from an acquaintance that a beautiful former college classmate, Ipek, is freshly divorced, living in a border town called Kars, he finds himself a pretext to visit there to see her. The pretext is that there’s been a recent wave of suicides among devout Muslim young women, who have been forbidden by government policy to wear their headscarves, and he’s there to investigate.

The snow is already falling thickly when Ka arrives in Kars, and it ends up closing off the community over one long, turbulent weekend in which there are assassinations, coups, and police brutality. There are several storylines, all interwoven tightly: the community debate over headscarves, Ka’s courtship of Ipek, Ka’s suddenly rediscovered inspiration to write poetry, Ipek’s relationship with her sister Kadife, both of their ties to a wanted terrorist, the poverty and desperation of the men in Kars, the hope and idealism of the boys at the Muslim high school. The theme of the tension between the West/secularism and the East/religion is pervasive, coloring all of the events of the novel.

Which turns out to be a story within a story, as we find out that the tale of Ka’s time in Kars is being told by his friend “Orhan”, based on Ka’s own written recollections. It’s a little bothersome that although the conceit is that the story is being told by a third party, the narrator seems omniscient more often than not, but it’s not a dealbreaker. What is more bothersome is that there is none of the characters is particularly well-developed, or to me, identifiable. Ipek is the embodiment of the virgin/whore dichitomy, either idealized or compared to a porn star. The terrorist, Blue, is constantly described as compelling without much in the story to make the reader understand why. Even Ka, though he is the center of the narrative, remains at a frustrating remove. Like Turkey itself, he’s neither completely Eastern nor completely Western and vacillates between the two. He doesn’t know his own mind, and it makes him hard to get a hold of as a character.

But the writing and structure is lovely. It’s a little snowglobe of a story, and effectively creates the air of emotional claustrophobia that anyone who’s been stranded (by snow or flooding or ice) for a few days can understand. I’m not sure that the third-party narrator is as effective a device as it could be, but I got a wry, frustrated smile out of plot machinations that mean that we never actually get to read one of Ka’s inspired poems…it lets us just imagine how great the poems must have been without putting Pamuk under pressure to write something magnificent. This was a book club selection, and proved divisive for the most part: there were several people who loved it and just as many who completely hated it, with only very few (like me) falling in between. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it based on my own experience of it, but maybe you’ll completely love it like some of my book club friends?

Tell me, blog friends…do you read literature in translation often?

One year ago, I was reading: Housekeeping

Two years ago, I was reading: American Gods

Book 117: Americanah



“Ifemulu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.”

Dates read: January 10-14, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Every so often, a thread pops up on Reddit asking people who’ve come to the United States from elsewhere what surprised them most about this country when they got here. The answers are usually fairly similar: our obsession with germs and our “personal space”, our loudness, how big the country really actually is, tipping. I always enjoy reading these kinds of things because I’m always curious about how what seems very natural to us can seem bizarre to people who grew up elsewhere and I try to keep it in mind when I myself travel elsewhere: what seems odd to me probably seems perfectly normal to them. Just because I think of something as “the way things are” doesn’t mean it’s the way things are everywhere.

Ifemelu, the Nigerian-born-and-raised protagonist of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, experiences this kind of cultural whiplash twice: once, when she transfers from her university in Nigeria to a small college in Pennsylvania and then the second time, fifteen years later when she decides to return to Lagos. That Ifemelu is black and only really experiences what it’s like to be black in a predominantly white world once she gets to the United States, as well as the gap between African-Americans and Africans in America inspires her to start a blog about race, which becomes a major source of income for her and helps earn her a fellowship at Princeton. Once the fellowship is over, she shuts down her blog, leaves her longtime boyfriend, and prepares to go back to Nigeria.

She’s nervous about going back, not so much because she doesn’t have anything lined up there but because it means she’ll be back in the same place as Obinze, the man she loved in high school and college but is no longer in touch with. Adichie uses one of my favorite framing devices to structure her novel: she begins with Ifemelu just before she leaves the US, shows us how she got there through flashbacks, and then proceeds forward. I love getting some information but not all of it right up front: it makes me intensely curious to find out how the situation we first encountered came to be. I hate mystery-style books where all the “answers” are backloaded…it makes the rest of the book feel like it’s treading water before the payoff at the end. Those just leave me annoyed by the time I get to the end, but unwrapping the narrative layers one by one keeps me hooked. And Americanah had me like a fish on a hook.

Not only is her story structure one that I personally respond well to, but Adichie’s writing is absolutely magnificent. I marked what feels like half of the book because she has a such a knack for taking feelings that you have or you recognize and phrasing it in a way that hits you right in the gut because it’s so dead on and perfect and you never thought about it like that before. And I loved the way she wrote Ifemelu and Obinze’s relationship, from their charmed young love to the reason for their separation and that Adichie isn’t afraid to give them new partners, partners they experience happiness with even. There’s context and nuance, not just to their relationship, but to their lives. The whole book explores shades of gray, no one is either a saint or a villain. They’re people, trying hard and messing up and trying again. I think one of the most important things about reading is its potential to increase empathy, to see people outside of the ones like you as having the same kinds of hopes and dreams and fears as you even if their experiences don’t look exactly the same. This book is a beautifully written examplar of that exact principle. It’s completely fantastic and I totally loved every second of reading it and I recommend it highly.

One year ago, I was reading: The Bear and the Nightingale

Two years ago, I was reading: The Twentieth Wife

Book 114: Where’d You Go, Bernadette?




“Mom disappears into thin air two days before Christmas without telling me? Of course it’s complicated. Just because it’s complicated, just because you think you can’t ever know everything about another person, it doesn’t mean you can’t try. It doesn’t mean I can’t try.”

Dates read: December 30, 2016- January 2, 2017

Rating: 3/10

I’m big into both the page (obviously) and the screen. Some things work beautifully in one medium, but not nearly as well in the other. Some, like Game of Thrones, manage to be fantastic both ways, but those are relatively few and far between. There’s a reason The Great Gatsby has had such a hard time being adapted well as a movie…the story isn’t hard, but that elegant expressed feeling of longing and loss is hard to depict visually. And the madcap antics of Arrested Development are so dependent on amazing cast chemistry and perfect comic timing that in another format that another format would likely collapse that souffle.

Arrested Development is a perfect one to mention here, since the author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple, previously wrote for that show. In Bernadette, she uses the same kind of absurdist humor lens to tell the story of Bernadette Fox, a deeply unhappy wife and mother living in Seattle with her Microsoft-rockstar husband, Elgin Branch, and their daughter, fiercely intelligent and independent Bee. Bee was promised whatever she wanted if she achieved perfect grades at her private school, and she claims as her prize a family trip to Antarctica.

This is a problem for Berndadette, whose anxiety and depression has manifested as intense agoraphobia. In an effort to make her daughter happy, though, she engages an Indian virtual assistant to help her both prepare for, and as the trip grows nearer and her fear of it grows, avoid the trip. Her decompensation, including a feud with the busybody mother of one of Bee’s classmates, finally breaks through her husband’s workaholic fog and he prepares an intervention to confront her, from which she escapes, prompting Bee’s search for her (and the title, of course).

It’s a satire of the original tech bubble scene, Seattle, complete with a prep school consultant engaged to attract the “Mercedes parents” to the school, a self-help group called “Victims Against Victimhood”, and Elgin’s status as a TED talk celebrity. And I know a lot of people who loved this book and found it outrageously funny. But the central family story is where it failed hard for me. I think we’re supposed to be giggling at Bernadette’s “antics” and her clueless husband’s attempts to “deal with” them. But all I saw was a story about a tightly wound woman whose deepening unhappiness with the environment in which she found herself should have long since been noticed by her husband and dealt with as a family. Instead, he’s spent years ignoring her worsening problems to bask in workplace glory and develops an inappropriate relationship with his secretary, who he tries to bring to his wife’s mental health intervention? What? This is supposed to be funny?

Then again, Arrested Development on paper would probably rub me all wrong, too. After finishing it, I actually found myself wishing I’d seen it as a movie first, because I think the right cast could mine real comedy gold from it. But as it was, I thought it was playing a genuine, understandably developed mental health crisis as being the sufferer’s fault, laughing at her rather than with her. I don’t think that was the intention, at all, but I couldn’t shake that reading. If you like Arrested Development-esque zany humor, you’ll probably love this book…I’m honestly the only person I know who didn’t. But it wasn’t for me and I can’t in good faith recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends…did you like Arrested Development?

One year ago, I was reading: Marlena

Two years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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