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Book Review: Death Prefers Blondes

It seems hard to believe sometimes how recent many gay “firsts” are. Ellen Degeneres’ character Ellen Morgan became the first openly gay lead character on TV in 1997! Willow and Tara on Buffy The Vampire Slayer were the first women to have a lesbian sex scene on broadcast television in 2003! DADT was only repealed in 2010, and same-sex marriage was only legalized nationwide in 2015! The first openly gay athlete to win gold at a winter Olympics was just four years ago! The past 25 years have been a lot of change, and our world is a better place for it.

I don’t watch a ton of TV. I don’t say this to be sanctimonious, there’s just not a lot that holds my interest enough to make it worth it. I do have my favorites, though, of course, and one that I’ve always enjoyed is RuPaul’s Drag Race. As someone whose own performance of femininity is sometimes…uninspired, I love watching the queens in their gorgeous, over-the-top hair, makeup, and gowns. So when Caleb Roehrig’s Death Prefers Blondes was described as “Drag Race meets Ocean’s 8“, I was ready for it. The book centers on Margo Manning, a teenage socialite and heiress in Los Angeles whose tabloid exploits have earned her the nickname “Mad Margo”. But she has a secret: along with four friends, all drag queens, she’s also the head of an exclusive heist ring who count on the exaggeration of drag for disguise.

Margo doesn’t need the money, and donates her earnings to charity. But her friends do: Axel and Joaquin, her neighbors, are trying to keep their heads above water and support their mother after the exposure of their father’s pyramid scheme left him in jail and them dead broke. Leif has fled his religious family and small town for an exclusive (and expensive) ballet academy. And while Davon grew up loved and accepted by his parents for who he was, their deaths ended that safe world and he would up living with and supporting his drag mother, who is trapped in a cycle of addiction. For Margo and the gang, it stops being just a job when tragedy strikes her family, and the only way to ensure justice is done is to steal the evidence from facility that would seem impossible to break into.

As a person who prizes characters over plot, adventure-type narratives (I would put heists into that category) don’t tend to be for me. And while I did enjoy reading this, it didn’t have enough going on to transcend the inherent limitations of the genre and become something more, at least from my perspective. I did appreciate that the queens weren’t treated as accessories for Margo…they were given full backstories of their own, and very different ones. Indeed, the book as a whole did exceed my expectations on the character-building front…it wasn’t especially deep, but it was there, enough to make me care about what happened to all them and root for them to succeed.

At the end of the day, though, probably half of the book’s length is made up of describing the execution of elaborate heists with the assistance of Bond-esque technical gadgetry. If you get a whole movie in your head as you read, you’ll love the recounting of these thrilling exploits. But I am not that kind of reader, so while I appreciated that these sequences were easy to read (I’ve read books where these kinds of scenes can get bogged down in complexity) and moved quickly, they didn’t do much for me. Roehrig’s writing is lively, maintaining a quick pace and deploying a witty humor. I’d be interested in reading less action-packed work from him, or watching something like this as a mini-series. As a book, it was entertaining but forgettable. Good if you want something easy to pick up and put down on vacation, maybe not so much if you’re looking for something to really sink your teeth into.

Book 323: Amsterdam

“As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.”

Dates read: June 25-27, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Lists: Booker Prize, The New York Times best-seller

Few things are more satisfying than boiling hot self-righteousness. If there’s a drug that gives you that feeling of someone else being not just incorrect, but morally wrong, and being about to shove it in their face that you’re a better person than they are, please no one tell me. I will become an addict. Of course, we all know that it is almost inevitably followed by realizing that you are not quite in fact as heroic as you felt, nor is the other person the literal spawn of Satan. But it’s a heady rush while it lasts.

Even long-standing friendships aren’t immune from misunderstanding and resentments. In Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, two old friends meet at the funeral of a woman they each had loved once. But it isn’t the free-spirited Molly, now gone after a brief but terrible bout of dementia, that drives apart Vernon, the editor of a struggling London newspaper, and Clive, a respected composer. They’ve long since come to terms with that part of their lives. Neither of them can much understand what she ever saw in another one of her former lovers, who also attends the funeral: Julian, a conservative politician whose policy stances would seem to be anathema to Molly’s guiding principles of love and acceptance. Nor can they understand why she married George, who seemed bent on controlling her and molding her into conventional respectability. Like many friends, Vernon and Clive have gone through cycles of being more or less close over the years, and the funeral pushes them back into each other’s orbit. Spooked by the circumstances of Molly’s death, each promises that if the other were to be in a similar state of decline, they would help the end come quicker.

Not long afterwards, both men find themselves in a position to have to make a moral choice. Vernon is given photographs that Molly took of Julian during their relationship…photos that his support base would find shocking. These photos would solidify Vernon’s position at the paper by boosting circulation and catapult him into the spotlight after a lifetime of toiling away in relative obscurity. Clive has received a prestigious government commission to compose a piece to celebrate the millennium, and struggles for inspiration until, when taking a hike while out of town, he sees a man attack a woman on the trail. Finding himself suddenly able to see where he wants his symphony to go, he ignores the situation and doesn’t report what he saw to the police. Clive is aghast that Vernon would even consider publishing the photos of someone else’s private, intimate moments. Vernon is insistent that Clive report what he saw and face responsibility for his failure to intervene on behalf of the woman and keeping what he witnessed from law enforcement. The two are bitterly estranged.

This book is so short as to practically be a novella. That doesn’t limit the impact of McEwan’s satire, though. If you have ever known a pompous middle-aged man, Vernon and Clive are pitch-perfect. Both ruminate on the clarity of the situation facing the other, while running themselves ragged in the mental gymnastics required to justify their own choices. Each can only see the ways in which they themselves have been good, devoted friends, while the other has taken advantage of their generosity. But that’s kind of one of the issues: character. While obviously something this brief and with this perspective isn’t out for a deep character study, Vernon and Clive are basically the same person. And George, who shows up to create havoc throughout, seems more like a plot device than a human. I never found anyone compelling enough to really care about how it would end up.

How it ends up is a little too tidy and convenient, for that matter. And the pacing is odd…it drags and feels bloated (despite its brevity) in places, but the conclusion feels rushed. It’s not without its clever moments and witty turns of phrase, but it really feels like an excellent short story concept that got padded into a decent-but-unspectacular short novel. It’s worth a try (the upside of having such a low page count is that even if it doesn’t work, it shouldn’t take long to finish), but there are sharper, funnier satires out there.

One year ago, I was reading: The Eyre Affair

Two years ago, I was reading: The Year of Reading Dangerously

Three years ago, I was reading: Daisy Jones & The Six

Four years ago, I was reading: My Name is Venus Black

Five years ago, I was reading: Nefertiti

Six years ago, I was reading: The Namesake

Book 257: Oryx and Crake

 

“How could I have been so stupid? No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked — events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate. There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.”

Dates read: August 25-29, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Becoming more aware of the world kind of sucks a little. Not being able to just laugh at the joke. Not being able to just let it go. The eye rolls and sarcasm. But once you really start thinking about it, the way the polar ice is melting at levels unseen before in the modern world, the way the waters are warming, the wildfires in the West, the way coastal cities are left vulnerable to ever-more calamitous weather and flooding, it’s hard to just put out of your mind. And that’s just global climate change, to say nothing of the countless other significant issues facing our world.

One day, something is going to be the end of the world as we know it. Superbacteria and/or a global plague. Nuclear war. Heck, maybe the zombie apocalypse. But why not climate change? In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, it’s climate that creates the void into which increasingly powerful corporations pour themselves. Soon, the divide between the haves and the have-nots becomes even more literal, with the highly-educated few retreating into city-esque complexes created and owned by business interests, while the masses are walled off into their own zones. Jimmy is born into privilege, to a mother and father who are good worker bees, and it is in the compound school that he meets Glenn, who becomes his best friend…and who ends up changing the world beyond what anyone could have imagined.

As an adult, Jimmy has renamed himself Snowman (after The Abominable), and as far as he knows, he’s the last “real” human left alive. There’s a group of genetically engineered people, the Children of Crake, but they’re not the same. He’s left alone, in a devastated world, with only his memories and his guilt over the role he played in it all. These memories make up the bulk of the book, with very little actually happening in an actual plot sense. Jimmy does venture back to the last place he lived in search of food and sunscreen and medicine, which forces him to confront what happened with Glenn, who became Crake, and the beautiful, reserved Oryx, who was involved with them both. How they died, and how the virus that wreaked havoc on the rest of the world was released.

It’s a character study as much as a work of speculative fiction, and that’s really Atwood’s strength anyways. She loves to dig into the ways our little flaws can set in motion events that spiral out of control, to take the tensions underlying society and drag them up into the open. I find it really interesting that this book was written in 2003, the year I graduated high school, because so much of it seems to apply to the kinds of debates that continue to be relevant even now: just because we have the technology or knowledge to do something, does that mean we should? How do we weigh morality? Whose morality gets weighed? The writing date of the book does mean there are some things that come off anachronistic (she posits a world focused on disc-based storage, in which email is a primary communication method), a lot of it is startlingly prescient.

Clearly I liked it, but it was not without failings. The biggest, for me, was its lack of developed female characters. Jimmy’s mother is intriguing, but we see relatively little of her and through mostly his eyes, reflecting on the way her choices impacted him. Oryx remains to the reader just as mystifying as she largely is to Jimmy, and while I could see Atwood intending this as a statement of how men tend to project their own stories only the women they claim to love (Jimmy is convinced he knows parts of Oryx’s past, which she herself denies), I wish we’d gotten more of her perspective. And as much as I enjoy character-driven novels, I wish it had been structured differently, so that it was taking place in the present rather than largely in the past. These are relatively minor issues, though. On the whole, this book is fascinating and thought-provoking and one I’d recommend widely (though maybe not younger/less sophisticated teenagers).

One year ago, I was reading: Patron Saints of Nothing

Two years ago, I was reading: Seduction

Three years ago, I was reading: The Book Thief

Four years ago, I was reading: The Confessions of St. Augustine

Five years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

Book 242: Sloppy Firsts

“I told my parents not to even dare throwing me a Sweet Sixteen party. The very thought of ice-cream cake and pink crepe paper makes me want to hurl. Not to mention the fact that I can’t even imagine who would be on the guest list since I hate all my other friends. I know my parents think I’m being ridiculous. But if the one person I want to be there can’t be there, I’d rather just stay home. And mope. Or sleep.” 

Dates read: June 16-19, 2018

Rating: 7/10

I have to admit I’m a little jealous of today’s bookish teenagers. The absolute explosion in the number of books targeted toward young adults, which seemed to start to grow in the wake of Harry Potter and then skyrocket after The Hunger Games, means that they have so many books meant to appeal to them to chose from! I remember the YA section of the library when I was growing up having a lot of Sweet Valley High, and Fear Street, and Louise Duncan (all of which I read, of course) and not a ton else, so I started reading more adult literary fiction early. As much as that’s been a good thing for me, by and large, I wish I’d gotten to experience the kind of peak YA that seems to be happening now.

Since I did like to read quality YA when I got my hands on it, I’m astonished that I managed to miss Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts until now! The first in a five-book series, it focuses on New Jersey teenager Jessica Darling, deeply miserable now that her best friend Hope has moved away. Jessica’s left with the rest of her honors-classes friend group, none of whom she actually likes very much and who she refers to as the Clueless Crew in her head. Her dad drives her crazy trying to home coach her through track, and her mother and older sister Bethany are too wrapped up in planning Bethany’s wedding to pay Jessica too much mind (not that she wants them to anyways). She’s nursing a desperate crush on a senior who probably doesn’t even know she exists. How is a girl to deal with her sophomore year in high school like this?

With snark, of course. She writes to Hope every month, filling her in on all the new drama…the girl from Manhattan who moves to town but isn’t quite who she seems to be, the pressure she feels to date a guy friend that she doesn’t like that way just to have a boyfriend, how torn she feels when she finds out someone’s boyfriend is cheating on her but she’s supposed to keep it secret. What Jessica doesn’t tell Hope about is the growing connection she has with Marcus Flutie, who’d been best friends and drug buddies with Hope’s brother before his death by overdose prompted Hope’s family to leave town. The closer Jessica and Marcus get, the worse she feels about hiding it from Hope, and the more confused she is by what she wants out of it at all. Add in the family conflicts and it’s no wonder Jessica’s overwhelmed.

Jessica is the kind of character I would have loved as a teenager, and looking back someone who reminds me of myself at that age. She’s smart enough to know that she should buy into “the game” if she wants to fit in more (not to mention please her mother), but too stubborn to actually do it. She wants desperately to feel understood even though she doesn’t even really understand herself. She feels trapped in high school, but the taste of the more adult world she gets working at the Shore during the summer doesn’t exactly thrill her. The life McCafferty gives her, and the issues she presents her with, feel pitch-perfect for a sixteen year-old in the year 2000, which, given that I was myself just a year or two younger, also took me back on a wave of nostalgia. I was worried I would be a little too old for this book at literally twice the age of the main character, but I was completely charmed.

I wonder if the cultural references, which hit home for me, will read as hopelessly dated to today’s teens. They probably do, but we all have easy access to Google these days so I won’t let that stop me from giving a wholehearted recommendation, for adults both young and well, not-young, and particularly of the lady variety (though don’t think there’s any reason a guy couldn’t enjoy this, let’s be real, it’s written for a female audience). It’s easy to read, written with wit and verve, but doesn’t shy away from the heavier issues that high schoolers deal with, like sex and drugs. It neither treats these with kid gloves like Very Special Episodes nor glosses over them entirely, but presents them as just very much a part of life about which decisions need to be made. If the interior lives of teenage girls aren’t compelling to you for whatever reason, this likely won’t be for you. Otherwise, though, it’s an enjoyable read!

One year ago, I was reading: The Man in the High Castle (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: My Own Words

Three years ago, I was reading: Crazy Rich Asians

Four years ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

Book 186: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

“The joy made him feel like a drunken man. To teach and exhort and explain to his people—and to have them understand. That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.”

Dates read: October 30- November 2, 2017

Rating: 7/10

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

A lot of people, including myself, talk about how hard it is to make friends as adults. And it is, for lots of understandable reasons, mostly centered around only meeting new people in relatively small numbers after a certain point. But we also tend to be less open and vulnerable as we get older, and that makes it harder to make a real connection. Our old friends, we feel like we can tell them anything, and that’s such an important thing to have in our lives. Everyone wants to feel understood.

Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter takes place in small-town Georgia, but it could take place in a small town anywhere. Our main character is John Singer, a Deaf man who works as a silversmith (he’s continually referred to as “deaf-mute”, or “mute”, because this book was written in 1940 and they weren’t great about sensitivity training back then). At the very beginning, he’s living with a fellow Deaf man, Antonopolous, as his roommate, and they speak to each other in sign language. While Singer is otherwise typical apart from his deafness, Anton clearly has more profound issues…he seems to have some sort of intellectual disability as well as health problems. After a medical episode, his brother (the local grocer) takes him to an institution to be cared for, leaving Singer in need of a new place to go.

He ends up in the boarding house run by the Kelly family, and it’s here that he attracts one of what turns out to be a small but devoted group of…well, followers is the best way to describe it. Mick Kelly, the musically-inclined daughter of the not-well-off family, comes often to Singer’s room to talk to him (he can read lips and will occasionally respond in writing) and listen to the radio. At the local cafe, Singer attracts the lonely owner, Biff, who has a bad marriage even before he’s widowed, and Jake, a traveling labor organizer trying to inspire the locals to band together. And then he also manages to meet and attract the attention of Dr. Benedict Copeland, the only black doctor in town, whose children (including the maid for the Kelly family) have refused to follow in his footsteps. While he moves through all of these people’s lives at the center of their obsession, though, he maintains his own obsession with his friend and former roommate, regularly visiting him and bringing him expensive gifts.

I’ll be honest…when I first started reading this, I was concerned that it was going to be a “sad lonely people being sad and lonely” story. Unless they’re particularly well-written, those types of stories don’t tend to appeal to me. But what I actually found here was a beautifully realized tale of the desperate human need to connect and feel like someone understands you. Each of the people drawn to John is estranged from most social connections: Mick, because her sensitivity and love for music makes her an oddball among her family and most of her peers, Biff, because he and his wife, who he was estranged from, never had the family he craved, Jake, because he’s an actual outsider to the community whose efforts to organize them only alienate them instead, and Dr. Copeland because his education and pride separate him from his children as well as his community. In John, who can only listen and doesn’t talk and is kind-hearted, they find the acceptance they covet. For John, though, the only person in his life who can understand him and he can communicate with in sign is Antonopolous, and it therefore it is this bond that John prizes above all others.

It’s such an insightful look into the human condition that it’s hard to believe Carson McCullers was only 23 when she wrote it. We’re a social species, humans. We want to be members of the group. Feeling outside of it, especially when we’re teenagers like Mick, is difficult to bear. For the most part, the characters McCullers creates feel real and sympathetic…John himself is really the least plausible character, to so patiently bear the demands on his time and emotional energy that his acolytes demand from him. I found myself wondering why he didn’t literally shut the door on them once in a while to get some time to recharge. This novel would be best for fans of character-driven rather than plot-driven stories, because quite little actually “happens” besides the emotional journeys of the people involved. But if you’re down for a slower, quieter book, this is really very lovely.

One year ago, I was reading: The Completionist

Two years ago, I was reading: Spoiled

Three years ago, I was reading: The Song of Achilles

Book 176: Valley of the Dolls



“She stumbled out of bed and changed her pajamas. Dr. Mitchell was right—she was building up a tolerance to the pills. Maybe one more yellow…No, then she’d be groggy and hungover in the morning, and she had to learn those lyrics. Jesus. Today she had needed three green dolls just to get through the morning shooting. She poured a full glass of Scotch. Maybe one more red pill…yeah, they wore off faster. She swallowed it quickly. And she wouldn’t drink all this Scotch, just sip at it until the pills worked.”   

Dates read: September 9-15, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: The New York Times bestseller

Every once in a while, I realize I’m drinking just to drink. Having a drink after work just because. Or on the weekend, getting to the point where I have a happy little buzz going and then having another drink or two just because it’s there. So I’ll knock it off for a while, because the slope between substance use and substance abuse is slippery and I want to stay on the good side of it. Well, unless the substance is caffeine. I am 100% addicted to it and I am 100% okay with that.

As long as there have been drugs, there have been people who’ve gotten hooked on them. Right now, it’s opioids that are the hot topic and big area of concern, but back in the day, it was barbiturates. In Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, there are two ways to take the title. In one sense, “dolls” has long referred to women, and the book tells the story of three of them. But throughout the novel, the characters refer to their pills as “dolls” as well. The book tells the story of three young women who are briefly roommates at the beginning of their careers: Anne, Neely, and Jennifer. Anne is a lovely, well-bred New Englander who flees her hometown because she’s terrified of getting stuck in a passionless marriage and never accomplishing anything besides raising children. She goes to New York City, where she finds work in the office of a well-known entertainment lawyer/talent manager. Neely has been on the vaudeville circuit since she was a small child, and is trying to break into Broadway with a group act. When the dancers get cast in a show starring one of Anne’s company’s clients but Neely gets cut, Anne manages to score her a new spot. And Jennifer is a stunningly beautiful but not especially talented actress cast in the chorus.

The women’s stories all take different directions from there: Anne breaks off a relationship with a rich man who wants to marry her to pursue a relationship with Lyon, her boss’s protegee, a veteran who’s returned from war but thinks he maybe wants to be a writer instead of getting back into the rat race. She’s crazy about him, but he’s proud and doesn’t want to marry her unless he can support her even though she’s well-off enough for both of them. When they break up, she goes on to date an older cosmetics executive and becomes a TV spokesmodel. Neely goes to Hollywood to make it in the movies, where she’s put on uppers so she can handle long song-and-dance rehearsals while skipping meals to lose weight, and gets herself onto downers so she can sleep. She becomes a huge star and wins an Oscar, but also turns into an addict. And Jennifer, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, chases a marriage with a successful lounge singer to lock in a source of support for her and her family…only to discover her beloved isn’t who she thinks he is and winds up making “art films” overseas. She finally finds real love and security with a politican, but she also finds a lump in her breast.

On the one hand, this is delightfully campy melodrama: Anne’s terror of being “frigid” and desperate desire for Lyon, Lyon’s refusal to be a “kept man”, Neely’s marriages and pill popping and downward spiral into addiction, Jennifer’s secret white trash past and doomed marriage and soft-core porn career. Y’all, there is an actual scene in which a wig is snatched and flushed down the toilet. I found myself actually giggling out loud while reading it. But there’s also a very real story there about how the entertainment industry chews women up and spits them out. Two of the three major characters are clearly based on real people: Neely’s story has too many similarities to Judy Garland’s to be mere coincidence, and Jennifer’s is less clear but still obviously reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe. All three women are scared of aging, terrified of losing their looks and therefore their value.

While Anne is the main character (the book begins and ends with “her” sections), perspective switches to Neely and Jennifer often enough to keep things interesting. The characters aren’t necessarily super deep, but they are each flawed in their own way and so are at least well-rounded and generally sympathetic (although Neely takes a turn towards villainy near the end). There’s definitely plenty of fluff, like I talked about above, but there’s enough reality and pathos to balance it out so it doesn’t feel like the book equivalent of a Twinkie. It’s an entertaining, enjoyable read, and I’d recommend it…particularly to those interested in the entertainment industry and classic Broadway/Hollywood.  

One year ago, I was reading: The Color of Water

Two years ago, I was reading: Big Little Lies

Three years ago, I was reading: Dead Wake

Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Make Me Pick Up a Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about things that make a book jump out and say “pick me!” when we’re browsing, so here are ten things that help a book find its way into my hands.

Royalty: I’m a sucker for anyone with a crown, both in fiction and nonfiction.

Sisters: As a sister myself, I’m always ready for books about the relationships between them!

Friends Over Time: I love a book that follows a group of friends over time as they grow and change and their bonds get weaker and stronger.

Based on Folklore: I love folk and fairy tales, so if I find out a book is based on myth/legend, I’m intrigued!

True Crime: I started with Ann Rule anthologies in high school, and I’ve still got a weak spot for a book telling me about the investigation of a crime.

A Historical Event: Either fictional or real, I enjoy reading accounts of major parts of history that give me more context or a new perspective for understanding.

Trusted Author: If I’ve read and liked work from a writer before, I’m much more likely to pick up something else by them, either a new one or a backlist selection.

Connection To A Place I Love/Have Lived In: If a book is about Michigan, Tuscaloosa, Reno, Florence…I’m automatically curious to see how it’s depicted.

Coming-of-Age: Even though I’m well on my way to my mid-30s, books about teenagers growing up still get me right in the feels.

Boarding School: Either high school or dorm life in college, a group of inevitably very different people thrown into a tightly packed living arrangement makes for the kind of drama I usually like reading about!

Book 164: Notes On A Scandal



“People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her handwriting was the best thing about her. But about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters.”

Dates read: July 29- August 2, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Arbitrary age guidelines are…well, arbitrary. A person isn’t suddenly mature and responsible enough to drive a car the day of their sixteenth birthday if they weren’t the day before. They don’t suddenly understand all the implications of a contract they sign the day they turn eighteen if they didn’t previously. There’s no magic power to being able to handle your liquor at 21. But since it’s enormously impractical to examine these kinds of milestones on a case-by-case basis, we develop a shorthand. Most 16 year olds are in a better headspace to drive than those younger than them. By the time someone hits 18, they’re more mature and responsible than they were even a few years ago, more able to make adult decisions. And your brain is more developed by the time you get to 21, better able to absorb the impact of alcohol.

One of the more controversial age guidelines (and one that tends to vary depending on place and circumstance) is the age of consent. In the US, it tends to vary between 16-18. Europe skews slightly younger, with most between 14-16. Again, there’s no hard and fast way to assess if someone is “ready” to give knowledgeable consent, so you just have to set a standard and go with it. What is always inappropriate and often illegal is exploiting a relationship of power. So when Sheba Hart, an art teacher at an English school in Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal, begins a relationship with 15 year-old student Steven, she’s clearly in the wrong. Sheba’s story is told through the voice of fellow teacher Barbara Covett, as a manuscript that Barbara is writing in the wake of Sheba’s deeds becoming public. At the beginning of the events that the book recounts, she’s a bitter, lonely older woman who has had no real bonds with anyone besides her cat. When Sheba, lovely and ditzy, makes her teaching debut at St. George’s, Barbara sets out to befriend the soon-overwhelmed younger woman.

Well, befriend isn’t really the right word. She wants to become a necessary part of her life, the way she’d been closely enmeshed with a different younger woman years earlier who got married and will no longer speak to her. There’s an implication that Barbara’s interest is more than platonic, but I think making too much of a “repressed lesbian” angle is overstating the case. As I read it, Barbara’s not trying to get into Sheba’s pants, she’s trying to get into her head and exert control over her. And the way Heller writes it (through Barbara’s not-exactly-unbiased narrative voice), Sheba isn’t exactly in control of her affair with Steven, either. The deeper Sheba gets in, the more he pulls away until he eventually ends it. And then it all comes tumbling down, leaving Sheba cast off from her family with no one to stand by her side. No one, that is, besides Barbara.

Heller has written a book with a lot of moral complexity. Barbara is certainly manipulative, but she’s also desperately lonely, and is understandably very hurt when Sheba throws her over after she’s had to put her cat down to go cavort with Steven. Fundamentally, she wants to be important to another person, which is something most of us want (although most of us aren’t as manipulative as Barbara). Sheba is the one crossing the boundary with Steven, but she met her much-older husband when he was her professor in college, when she was only a few years older than her teenage lover, and Steven proves to be the party less emotionally invested in their relationship. Both women are predators, but neither is purely evil.

It’s a book that may prove difficult for some people to read as it deals heavily with a adult-teenager, teacher-student relationship. Barbara, for all that Heller has given her some sympathetic qualities, is a negative character and given that the book is told from her perspective, I’d classify it as “dark” in tone. But it’s undeniably compelling. Even though I watched the movie (years ago, when it came out) and remembered the “twist”, as it were, I still found it interesting and enjoyable, in its own way, to read. I’d recommend it for people prepared for the subject matter.

One year ago, I was reading: An Untamed State

Two years ago, I was reading: The Wars of the Roses

Three years ago, I was reading: The Woman Who Would Be King

Book 163: Station Eleven



“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps humanity would soon flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?”

Dates read: July 23-29, 2017

Rating: 9/10

Honestly, I would not survive the end of the world. I have no survival skills. I’m not strong, or a good shot, or a person who knows things about plants that you can eat. I’m a stress-crier and I don’t think anyone want to deal with that trying to stay one step ahead of the zombies. My ability to perform critical analysis and produce a pop culture reference for every situation is not going to be valuable. So my fingers are crossed that the apocalypse happens (if ever) after I’m already gone.

There are some end-of-the-world scenarios, however, that don’t discriminate between the heroes and not-heroes among us. Like disease. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, the world is devastated, like 99%-of-the-population-gone devastated, by a mutated flu that gets into the global transportation system. In Toronto, the events kick off when an actor, Arthur Leander, collapses while playing the title role in a production of King Lear. An EMT-in-training, Jeevan, leaps onto stage to try to help, while a young actress, Kirsten, playing a child version of one of the daughters watches it play out in front of her. Within weeks, the world as we know it has ceased to exist. No more internet. Shit, no more electricity. Some people are immune and survive, but are they the lucky ones?

The primary thread of the story follows Kirsten fifteen years later, as she and the other actors and musicians who make up The Travelling Symphony journey through coastal southwest Michigan. Small communities have sprung up along the shores of the Great Lakes, and the ragtag crew that makes up the Symphony continually loop around them, performing, taking their inspiration from a line from Star Trek: “survival is insufficient”. The group is excited to return to one particular town, where one of their members left them to settle down, but when they arrive they find their friend gone and things much changed. The town is now controlled by a cult leader known as The Prophet. When a stowaway pops up after the troupe has fled, trouble follows.

There are a lot of time jumps in this book. So much so that it seems almost unfair to call it entirely a post-apocalyptic novel, since a decent chunk of the narrative actually takes place before the flu hits. It goes from Kirsten in her present, to Arthur in his early years, to an interview taking place after the flu but before the principal timeline, and so on and so forth. It sounds confusing, but the way that Mandel writes it it’s actually pretty easy to follow. It’s a tricky thing to pull off, a narrative that moves around in time as much as hers does, but Mandel is a talented writer and, for my money, makes the emotional impact even stronger by doing it.

This is a wonderful book, y’all. Not only does Mandel handle her narrative masterfully, she also draws characters that resonate. You care about them, even knowing that some of them are going to meet their end when the virus happens. It’s not a book like The Road about despair and sorrow. It’s a book about people, and the connections that are made and fractured between them. There are certainly dark moments, but the atmosphere she creates is overall one of poignancy and bittersweetness. I loved reading it and am planning on purchasing a hard copy (I read this on my Kindle) so I can have it on my bookshelves to re-read on paper. I recommend it to literally anyone who likes to read.

One year ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Two years ago, I was reading: Americanah

Three years ago, I was reading: Mr. Splitfoot

Book 157: My Antonia



“Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

Dates read: July 1-4, 2017

Rating: 5/10

There’s something very powerful about childhood friendships. My best friends are still two girls that I’ve been friends with since elementary school, even though I live on the other side of the country from them…there’s a special-ness to having history that’s shared from the time you were really young, the way you got to know each other’s parents at sleepovers, the field trips and dances and first relationships you were there for each other for. I feel like I know them, and they know me, in a way that would be almost impossible to replicate for people we’ve met later in our lives. We’ve been there with each other as we became adult people, through the fits and starts and steps backward and forward and sideways. It’s a strong bond.

In Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia, Jim Burden recounts his memories of Antonia Schimerda, the dearest friend of his youth. They arrive in rural Nebraska on the same train: orphaned ten year-old Jim going to live with his grandparents, fourteen year-old Antonia as part of her immigrant Bohemian (Czech) family. They tread similar but not identical tracks…while Jim’s family is prosperous and steady, the Schimerdas quickly find themselves mired in poverty and struggle to make ends meet. But they live close to each other (by pioneer standards, anyways) and the two become close. Even when the Burdens move into town, Antonia’s there before long, as a “hired girl” to do housekeeping. When Jim goes off to college, Antonia stays, and even so they easily pick up where they left off when they reconnect almost a decade later.

There’s not much of a traditional story structure here. It’s presented as an adult Jim’s recollections of his friend, so it takes a loose and kind of winding way of presenting its narrative. I didn’t take much issue with that, since the book is pretty short, honestly, and not super textually rich so it’s not like it gets bogged down for the lack of standard-issue “rising action”. Where I found myself losing interest was in the last third or so of the book, in which the lively Antonia largely vanishes and we’re left mostly with Jim, who is pretty boring and whose straightforward path doesn’t have any real tension. We see the world of the novel through Jim’s eyes, but it’s Antonia who gives it its animating force. I’d argue that Cather’s strength isn’t so much her prose, which didn’t do much for me, but her characterizations. She imbues even relatively minor characters, like Otto the hired farmhand, or Antonia’s mother, or fellow young immigrant woman Lena with a verve that makes them memorable. Too bad she couldn’t do the same for her ostensible main character.

I will say that I’m glad this book was something I read as an adult instead of in high school. Teenage me would have HATED it because it’s kind of boring, and while adult me would agree on the boring part, I was able to bring more life experience to bear that improved the reading of it, for me. I’m able to appreciate the way a significant friendship can loom large in your nostalgic reflections of childhood, and the hesitancy you can feel about reaching out even when you really want to reconnect. And one thing I did really enjoy and think still is criminally underrepresented in literature is the depiction of a genuine mixed gender friendship. As someone who’s had strong, completely nonromantic friendships with men that I’ve really cherished, I feel like so often you only see those depicted as part of a family relationship or one of the two parties is gay, like there has to be some obstacle to “explain” why a man and a woman who enjoy spending time with each other would not want to sleep together. To see an actual friendship between a boy and a girl depicted as just that, in a novel published literally a century ago, is refreshing.

Tell me, blog friends…do you believe that men and women can be just friends?

One year ago, I was reading: The Lady Elizabeth

Two years ago, I was reading: Freakonomics

Three years ago, I was reading: All The King’s Men

Book 146: If We Were Villains



“Ten years of trying to explain Dellecher, in all its misguided magnificence, to men in beige jumpsuits who never went to college or never even finished high school has made me realize what I as a student was willfully blind to: that Dellecher was less an academic institution than a cult. When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses.”

Dates read: May 15-20, 2017

Rating: 7/10

For someone who’s been dead for over 500 years, William Shakespeare’s still pretty damn popular. It seems like there’s at least one major screen adaptation every year. And everyone reads at least one of his plays at some point in high school, right? They’re probably the only plays which most people have actually read all the way through in their lives (I include myself in this number, I don’t particularly care for reading plays). While some people hate his stuff and most feel more-or-less indifferent, there are also some people who REALLY love it. I’m not one of those people, but I do have a favorite of his works (Much Ado About Nothing) and still regret that I didn’t get a chance to take a course focused on Shakespeare in college from a legendary professor.

It’s a group of people who are super duper into Shakespeare that is the focus of M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains. The book mostly follows seven Shakespearean acting students in their senior year at an exclusive arts college. We know something big and bad happened, because the book opens with one of the seven (Oliver, our protagonist) being released from prison after a decade. He agrees to return to his alma mater and speak to the detective who put him behind bars to finally reveal the true story of what happened all those years ago.

Based on the length of sentence alone, it shouldn’t be surprising that what happened was that someone died. The who and the how I’ll leave for the reading of it, because the bigger issue is what happened after that person died. The way the remaining members of the group deal with the death, and how it changes their relationships with each other, both on and off the stage. They’d each developed a little niche over their years together (the king, the femme fatale, the good guy, the ingenue, the villain, etc), and the removal of one of the spokes of the wheel renders the structure unstable.

If you’ve read The Secret History, a lot of that will sound pretty familiar to you. Indeed, it’s pretty obvious that Donna Tartt’s debut novel was a significant source of inspiration for Rio for her own. And that’s fine, Tartt doesn’t own the concept of a tight-knit group of students studying an obscure subject at an exclusive private college dealing with the fallout from the death of one of their own. But here’s the thing: if you’re going to write a book with strong parallels to a novel that’s been consistently popular since it was published 25 years ago, you have do it at least as well or better. And although I want to make it clear that I did enjoy reading If We Were Villains (I did love The Secret History, after all), Rio didn’t quite hit that mark.

The characters fall a little too neatly into the roles they fill onstage: Richard, the king-type, really is a raging egomaniac; Meredith the femme fatale really is a sexpot; Wren the ingenue really is demure and sweet, etc etc. Where this fails most problematically is that the “background player” types are kind of underdeveloped, and that’s Oliver and Filippa. Oliver, you’ll remember, is the main character and while it’s not unusual for a reader-insert-character protagonist to be kind of bland, Oliver never really captured or held interest for me. Filippa is the only other member of the group that doesn’t come from privilege and the small peeks we get at who she is make her easily the most potentially interesting character, and it’s frustrating that she’s given the short shrift. The plot developments, too, weren’t handled especially deftly. I’m generally not good at anticipating plot twists, but I called nearly all of the major ones easily. Rio’s prose is solid, though, and I’d definitely be open to reading more from her in the future. I’d recommend this to people who loved The Secret History and want to read something similar, but if you haven’t read that book yet, it’s better than this one.

Tell me, blog friends…are there “if you liked that, you’ll love this” books that you feel pulled off being better than the inspiration?

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

Two years ago, I was reading: Smoke

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

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