Parenthetical

These are book discussions, so there will obviously be spoilers – but I won’t give away any plot twists for anything I think you should bother reading. The books are Never Let Me Go, I Am the Messenger, House of the Scorpion, and How I Paid for College. Continue at your own risk…

In order of when I finished them (going back a few months):

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro – I had to read this because it’s, like, science fiction! By a literary author! Science fiction being accepted by literature snobs is a “thing” of mine as a librarian and longtime geek, so I’d hung a lot of hopes on this book. I knew beforehand that it was about clones being raised in a boarding school (which means I knew that they were for organ donation, because that’s what clones are always for), but you figure all that out pretty quickly anyway: this is not a book with plot twists. The book is narrated by Kathy, an English clone, and the other two legs of her high school love triangle, Ruth (her best friend) and Tommy (Ruth’s boyfriend with whom Kathy is in love, even if neither will admit it). They grow up in Hailsham, a privileged boarding school where the only odd thing is that the best of their artwork is regularly removed by the mysterious Madame for her Gallery.

This is a perfect set-up for either a YA or an adult novel. If it were a YA novel (the excellent YA equivalent of this book is House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer), the kids would slowly uncover the horrible secret of their existence, and then they would rebel in some way that would likely be successful for them, if not for all of clonekind. As DK and I discussed at some point, in YA novels, the protagonists take action.

But this is an adult novel, and in adult novels (far too many for my taste, anyway), the protagonists exist in their relationships and in the status quo state of affairs, and you the reader are asked to exist in it with them. Kathy was almost an unreliable narrator in the way that she blandly chronicled her awful situation – and by the end of the book, she knew all the details – without noticing that it was awful. I kept waiting to find out that the clones were brain-damaged to make them placid, but nope: she was just that dull. I read a lot of reviews that thought that Kathy’s obliviousness intensified the horror, but all it did for me is make me not care about her. Caveat: a lot of people whose opinions I respect, including the aforementioned DK, loved this book. So even more than usual, your mileage may vary.

I Am the Messenger, Markus Zusak – Ed Kennedy lives a slacker existence in Australia, driving a cab and playing cards with his friends and watching his life go nowhere fast. Then one day he starts receiving cards in the mail with addresses on them; some mysterious behind-the-scenes puppeteer expects him to go to those addresses and solve a problem in the residents’ lives, almost Quantum Leap-style.

I adored this book. I will say up front that the ending is dumb; the author wrote himself into a corner regarding the identity of the person sending the cards, and the answer was preachy and disappointing. But it totally doesn’t matter, because I haven’t read such an inspiring book in a long time. What can one person do about the problems of the world? Why is it more compelling if someone tells you someone else needs help than if you see it for yourself?

It’s also a novel with a fantastic sense of place, which I always love. You really get to know Ed’s town as he builds himself a community out of the people at the different addresses. And hell – it’s set in Australia! Who doesn’t love reading about Christmas as a sweltering backyard barbeque?

How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater, Marc Acito – If you’re looking for something lightweight and hilarious, with characters so real I think I actually did go to high school with them, this is the best book ever. The plot is fairly irrelevant, but it consists of a group of friends’ increasingly crazy attempts to force Ed’s (yes, another Ed) newly remarried father to pay for Juilliard. Oh, and they have sex with each other a lot too, both straight and gay – while retaining both their physical and emotional health! Imagine! Other books are good because of plot, or interesting ideas – this book is good because it is just amazingly well-written, and I don’t feel that way about books very often.