This is one of the 3 or 4 books I read a year that aren’t remotely YA. It’s dark, complex, and thought-provoking, although it has way too much rape and abuse and torment for me to really say I “enjoyed” it.

But mostly, I’m just confused. I love non-linear storytelling and unreliable narrators, but I do like things to come together in the end. This was not at all clear, and I think set up a few paradoxes to block my attempts at clarity. I know a number of you have read it, so:

SPOILERS (Help me figure this out!)

Which stories were fiction (within the world of the book) and which weren’t? Luisa’s story (70s CA) was a novel in Cavendish’s world (nursing home), which implies that Frobisher (WWI musician) and Ewing (South Pacific ship) were also fiction as they were nested in Luisa’s story. But maybe the two future stories were meant to be the “real” future? Or maybe everything was either in Cavendish’s book or in his mind?

And if some stories were fiction and some not, what’s up with the comet-shaped birthmark? Every story had one, except Cavendish (as I recall). Are people getting (re)incarnated from fiction into reality, or something?

Do you think the story was as dark about human nature as it appeared to me? Almost everyone who retained any integrity or innocence died a horrible death. The message of the farthest future story seemed to be, “civilization is a good goal and all, but ultimately it’s never a match for the inherent human lust for power.” And since that’s the furthest we see along the human path, and a recurring theme in every story, it’s hard not to take that as the point of the entire book — a big middle finger to Adam Ewing’s starry-eyed dreams for the future in the last paragraph.

Did you have a favorite story? Were there some you wanted to return to, or some you really never wanted to hear from again? I found Cavendish’s the least engaging, which is too bad since I think he was probably the linchpin of the book. Sonmi’s dragged on, I thought, and then her parting shot was that the whole thing was a shaggy dog story anyway — there’s no revolution, I just fed you a bunch of hooey so people would hear what I have to say… that’s the one that didn’t hold together so well for me. My favorites were Frobisher’s and Luisa’s.

One of you lovely people (sorry, I forget who) recommended this for our 8th grade summer reading list a couple of years ago. I added it on the strength of the recommendation and a few reviews, but decided this year I should probably read it if I wanted to justify keeping it around, especially as it’s one of the few non-YA novels on the list and I didn’t want any phone calls.

The most inappropriate thing that happens, you’ll be relieved to know, is that Mary and Holmes spend time together unchaperoned. (This Edwardian/WWI-era setting is a fascinating one as a tipping point for technology and social mores — the Victorian Holmes, who finds it safest if he thinks of Mary as a young man, and Mary, accustomed to running about in trousers and attending Oxford in the absence of most of the male students.) The prose will be challenging for most middle schoolers, but Mary is the kind of strong, independent, clever young heroine who might pull adolescent readers through the tough bits. (If they are at all like I was… er, still am… these adolescent readers will also be all aflutter about Holmes and Mary’s not-quite-romantic relationship. It’s not creepy, I swear.)

I am not a mystery fan, a Holmes nut, or an aficionado of the era (though I’m rapidly becoming one), but I loved absolutely everything about this book. King adds further depth to Holmes while remaining solidly grounded in Conan Doyle’s canon, and his verbal and intellectual sparring with Mary is wonderful. I had to work to keep up with Holmes’ and Mary’s deductions and references, but enough was always explained that I never felt stupid or left out, despite having, of course, a vastly inferior intellect.

Spoiler alert: Don’t google the author or the series! You will learn a thing you don’t want to know yet. Just trust me that it’s the beginning of a very long series, the second is called A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and I will be checking it out from the library just as soon as it opens tomorrow. I believe my spring break will be spent in post-WWI England.

Also reviewed by: A Striped Armchair and Book Lust

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath — When I described it to him, Boyfriend S thought this sounded like Brainwashing at Home for Fun and Profit, but it’s really more about encouraging change: change in yourself (go to the gym regularly), change in your country (respect this endangered species instead of eating it, an example from the book), or change in your organization (get your students to recycle bottles properly, not that I have that problem at all). I found it utterly fascinating, and I highly recommend it if you, like me, start a lot of sentences with, “Why can’t people just…”

The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin — The subtitle gets it about right: “Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.” The Bitch Magazine article “Eat Pray Spend” lumps this book with Eat Pray Love in the category “priv-lit,” which I don’t actually think is fair. Rubin’s whole mission is to be happier in her own life, with her own job and two young kids and minor daily joys and annoyances. (I want to go off on a tangent about priv-lit here, especially as it applies to YA, but I’ll have to save that for another post.)

She’s full of little tricks and Lifehacks for greater happiness/sanity. (A particular favorite of mine is the One-Minute Rule: if it can be done in less than a minute — recycling the junk mail, putting the dishes in the sink — do it right away.) Rubin’s approach to happiness is not everyone’s, but you might find the book interesting even if you do not, like me, believe that “happiness” is synonymous with “organization, productivity, and lists.” Thanks for the rec, Jaime!


Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder — Moving out of the self-help realm here… this is the gripping biography of Deo, a Burundian med student who escaped the Burundian/Rwandan genocide and worked his way up from a homeless New York grocery delivery man with only a few words of English to a major player in Partners in Health (and now, a med student again). “Overcoming all odds” books are not usually my cup of tea (er, my Three Cups of Tea?), but Kidder is an excellent writer and I couldn’t help but like Deo. Kidder is speaking at my school this fall, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

The Power of Half, by Kevin Salwen and Hannah Salwen — Driven by the inspiration of their teenage daughter Hannah, the Salwens decide to downgrade from a huge house to a more moderate one and donate half the proceeds to charity. I suggested this as a faculty summer reading book this year, but I ended up being disappointed in it. For a journalist, Kevin is a facile writer, too often going for the easy joke or obvious characterization. I was frustrated with all the sanctimonious comparisons between his family and others’ (that family treats their son to a steak dinner when he hits a lot of home runs, but we have family bonding time at a cheap diner over how to save the world).

I wanted more philosophical wrestling with the problems of “How much can we do without sacrificing too much?” and “Why Africa, rather than our own community?” The family clearly has a lot of financial privilege, but rather than dealing with that honestly, Kevin often sidesteps it and tries to cast them as Everyfamily. The book couldn’t seem to decide what it wanted to be — family autobiography? manual for how you too can implement the “power of half”? discussion of the problems with charitable giving in the developing world? — and it ended up doing none of those things very well. (That said, I do think it has a fantastic cover: eye-catching and evoking the coziness of a smaller family home over the sacrifice.)

On one level, this is a rocking adventure, complete with shark attacks, cannibals, and a duel. On another level, it’s a gorgeously philosophical exploration of religion, science, and colonialism:

“Hah, you fall silent,” said the priest. “You are a good child, the women say, and you do good things, but the difference between the trousermen and the Raiders is that sooner or later the cannibals go away!”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” said Daphne hotly. “We don’t eat people!”
“There are different ways to eat people, girl, and you are clever, oh yes, clever enough to know it. And sometimes the people don’t realize it’s happened until they hear the belch!”

It has some touches of Pratchett’s trademark nonsense, just enough to keep things light, but this is not a silly book. It is a brilliant book that I’m going to be thinking about for awhile, and you should all go read it so you can think about it with me.

It doesn’t hurt that it speaks to one of my literary kinks. You know I have a thing about fantasies in which people defy their destinies, and this is the ultimate anti-destiny book. Mau’s entire character arc has to do with discovering who he is when he can’t be what the culture of his people expected. He left his boy’s soul behind, but he never had the ceremony to give him a man’s soul. So who is he? His people’s gods and revered Grandfathers are always speaking in his head, ordering him to recreate the Nation as it was. Much of the book is about Mau learning to ignore those voices and think for himself, while still appreciating the value of ritual and tradition.

Read-alikes: Honestly, this reminds me of nothing so much as The Princess Bride. The His Dark Materials trilogy and Kenneth Oppel’s Airborne have a similar feel as well (self-reliant girls bucking society’s expectations; a magical touch of new science), and of course you can’t beat Bloody Jack for 18th century high seas adventure.

Also reviewed at: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Teen Reads.

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My Antonia is the story of a sort of pioneer Magical Mystery Girl, as told through the eyes of Jim, a boy who travels from Virginia to frontier Nebraska to live with his grandparents after his parents die. A “Bohemian” (Czech?) family shows up to homestead the same day he does, and he befriends their eponymous daughter.

My favorite part of this book? Hands-down the frontier porn: ooh, baby, tell me more about canning those cherries! (Thank you, Fine Lines, for assuring me that I am not alone in my love of frontier porn.)

Other than that… it was largely interesting as a historical piece. It’s valuable to force myself to suspend my modern sensibilities every so often, I think. (Read the part about the blind Negro pianist, or the dirty old man who sexually assaults his live-in “hired girls.” Yikes.) The story stops and starts and skips years in odd places, and characters wander in and out without ever sharing the end of their tales. But Jim’s and Antonia’s lives are fascinating as a slice of history.

And of course, I loved the language. Willa Cather is so lyrical about a part of the country that most of us coastal types tend think of as boring (true, much of it is covered with strip malls and big-agribusiness monoculture in a way that it wasn’t in Cather’s day):

The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it. …I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

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A Grown-Up Table diversion into comics… Y is over. (Well, it’s been over for awhile, but I wait for the trade paperback compilations of the issues, and I just recently picked up the last one.) It’s one of the first series I fell in love with, and the end did not disappoint — I was bawling like a slightly manipulated baby.

The premise: Yorick Brown, twentysomething slacker everyman, and his pet monkey Ampersand are the only survivors of a mysterious plague that instantly wipes out all male mammals on earth. Yorick’s only thought is to find Beth, his girlfriend, who is studying abroad in Australia. But as the last man on earth, he’s too important to be allowed to follow his own agenda. He hooks up with Dr. Alison Mann, a geneticist, and Agent 355 of the mysterious Culper Ring, who is assigned to protect him until Dr. Mann can figure out what allowed him to survive. The trio travel across continents, pursued by (among others) politicians, the armies of several countries, and radical feminists known as Amazons, while the world falls apart and is rebuilt again by women.

Slightly spoilery

By the end, the “scientific” “explanations” get a little hand-wavy, and there is a Joss Whedon Moment (that actually made me shout, “Fuck you, Joss!” before I remembered that he didn’t write it this time). But the characters and their emotions are true, and the brilliant world-building remains solid.

I could say a lot about the gender, race, and sexuality commentary throughout the series (which I think is pretty genius, most of the time), but others already have.* So I’ll just say that I loved it, and I’m so sad it ended, in the same way I was sad when Buffy ended. RIP Y: they saved the world a lot, in spite of themselves.

This ARC* randomly found its way into my life, and I picked it from my “haven’t read yet” shelf to take on a recent camping trip to Acadia National Park because it takes place in Maine, and I’m a sucker for reading a book while surrounded by its setting. The plot: Aslaug was raised by her possibly unhinged, ailing mother in an isolated cabin in the Maine woods, with virtually no contact with the outside world. When her mother dies, she goes on a search for her father, and finds her mother’s sister Sara, Sara’s teenage son and daughter, and the Charismatic church Sara founded. The chapters alternate between Aslaug’s life as she spirals into ever-creepier relationships with her aunt and cousins, and transcripts of her trial for their murder.

Apparently I’m the only person in the world who wasn’t so impressed. (Click that link, by the way, if for no other reason than to drool over one of the most gorgeous author sites I’ve ever seen.) I found it to be overly taken with its own intelligence, one of those books that puffs itself up all, “I am so wise, and lyrical, and full of Deep Thoughts! Fall under my spell!” A sample:

I am Aslaug Datter, daughter of Maren. I am a reflection of who Mother was, and who Mother was is a reflection of her life before me. I am closing the circle, bringing the end back to the beginning, back to Sara, the sister of Maren, a person the preacher now must exhume.

The whole book is like that. Only with more obscure information about wild plants. The author clearly did a lot of research about plants, and she wants to make sure you know it.

In a “Dear Reader” at the beginning of the ARC (it may or may not be in the published version), Meldrum wrote:

I remember that part-dream state in which Aslaug…was birthed: a state that seemed a bridge between the natural world and the supernatural, where my rational mind and my unconscious merged…. My hope is that I have somehow captured that in-between space where religion and science meet.

Slightly spoilery

I’m sorry to say that I think she actually got tangled up in the line between the two. The mysteries of the book could have had spiritual explanations, and that would have been cool with me. Instead they had logical, real-world explanations, which would also have been cool with me if she’d left them as such (except that none of them came as a surprise to me in the slightest, even though I felt like they were supposed to be shocking revelations). But to provide obvious logical explanations and yet insist on hanging on to the supernatural atmosphere? That’s just silly. “Ooooh, but she could still be a magical virgin birth!” …No she couldn’t; she just got a DNA test.

Basically, the back cover seduced me with its promise of non-linear chronology, plant lore, and creepy familial mystery (I read way too much V. C. Andrews as a kid, clearly), and then totally failed to deliver anything actually engaging. I skimmed to the end to find out the answers to the mysteries — only to discover that they were exactly what I expected all along. Meh.

*Advance Reader’s Copy

I totally got more than I bargained for, though. This ain’t a book for the faint of heart (or stomach). If you are easily squicked — or even not-so-easily — run fast, run far. But if you don’t mind the horror, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here. The main characters are practitioners (willing and not, light and dark) of Caribbean spirit magic, so the book is full of magical tropes with which I was almost entirely unfamiliar. Not to mention the dialect of the characters — I had to read a lot of it out loud to myself because I loved the rhythm of the speech so much:

“Think about it little more, sweetheart. You nah see the power I did give [she]? Knife couldn’t cut she, blows couldn’t lick she, love couldn’t leave she, heart couldn’t hurt she. She coulda go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.”

I love when science fiction is about culture, and especially when it’s about cultures not my own. SF often assumes that the future has erased cultural differences and old traditions, so it makes me happy to find books like this.

Read-alikes: City of Darkness by Ben Bova (a childhood favorite that totally doesn’t hold up) for the blockaded city left to its own devices; Mockingbird by Sean Stewart for the voodoun/santeria/spirit possession (and for the awesome).

Octavia E. Butler would be an obvious choice to list here, except that the Xenogenesis trilogy didn’t feel rooted in a specific culture so much as “just” science fiction that doesn’t star a white guy. (The “just” is in quotes because there’s shamefully little of that, and Butler is an excellent and important writer.) Hilari Bell’s Songs of Power tries to do this with Inuit religion, except it so persistently beats you over the head with the contrast between religion and science that I hesitate to recommend it in this context.

Find me some more science fiction about traditional cultures!

For my first meal at the grown-up table, I picked The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta (author of Election, among other things).

Ruth is a divorced mother of two and teacher of human sexuality at a small-town public school. Despite her own depressing lack of a sex life, her personal credo is that “pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power” — so you can imagine the kind of sex ed she teaches, and have probably already guessed where her career will end up by the last chapter.

Tim is a divorced father of one, a recovering alcoholic and sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n roll-er, and a recently born-again Christian. He’s a member of the Tabernacle, the new fundamentalist church in town, which is shocked — shocked! — by Ruth’s assertion that “some people enjoy oral sex,” and convince the school board to force her to teach a pre-packaged abstinence curriculum.

Tim also happens to coach Ruth’s daughter’s soccer team, and one day he feels moved to lead the team in prayer. Ruth gets predictably pissed…and off the plot goes from there. (Perrotta is good about not portraying the Christians as whackjobs, by the way — though maybe I just think that because I have more stake in Ruth’s portrayal than in the Tabernacle’s. Christians who’ve read it, please weigh in!)

It’s a book about honesty, really — how to figure out who you are and live a life that’s true to both your morality and your identity. Unfortunately, the end didn’t provide satisfying answers to those questions for the main characters. As they made their last choices, were they content with them? Maybe it’s just that I liked the characters so much I wanted more time with them.

The moment that underscored the biggest difference for me between this and YA had nothing to do with any of the sex or parenting or big choices. It was a throwaway line, from a character you only meet once. Ruth is trying to convince a fellow soccer parent, a Muslim, to support her in her official complaint about Tim’s prayer session:

“Do you know what my name is?” he inquired, pulling a paper towel from the dispenser. “My first name?”

“It’s Hussein, isn’t it?”

The doctor smiled sadly. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Ramsey, I think my family and I will sit this one out.”

And that’s the end of the scene. No, “Hey, you know, because of September 11th and all! With the persecution!” The book assumes that we, as reasonably intelligent adults who’ve occasionally read the news in the last seven years, get it. Obviously there are plenty of adult books in which you can’t turn a page without getting bonked with another anvil, and there are plenty of YA books that do expect a lot from their readers. But in general, you can’t expect as much ability to infer from young adults; they just aren’t there yet.* It was cool to read a book that assumed I had a grown-up brain.

* I remember a passage in The Night Journey, by Kathryn Lasky, which I adored as a kid. A Jewish family is escaping early 20th century Russia, and they’ve enlisted the help of a haunted old man whose family was killed in the pogroms. The young protagonist, Rachel, is dying to find out what the old man’s deal is — what, exactly, happened to him to make him so hollow and disturbed? One day she finds him looking at a dead, mangled squirrel family, and he says, “The father fled.” That drove me crazy — wtf, he was that fucked up because he saw some dead squirrels?? It took me years of re-readings to figure out that it was a metaphor, duh.