Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Thistle

bartleby2I know, I know. People hear “Herman Melville” and automatically want to run. I completely understand. I was forced to read Billy Budd in high school and I HATED EVERY MINUTE OF IT. I avoid Moby Dick like the plague. I had planned to never have anything to do with Melville again.

Then, for my family reading club last month, Jason asked me to read this Melville novella. He said that it is very different from any of the whaling/fishing stories and more like a precursor to Kafka’s surrealism (which I do love). If nothing else, he said, at least it’s short. It’s only 40 pages long.

Sigh. So I tried it. I read the thing. Like he said, it’s only 40 pages. But unfortunately, unlike with other classic authors that I find I can stand on second try, Melville still put a bad taste in my mouth. The first quarter of the novella was all description and 3-page-long blocks of text. I admit to skimming it. Nothing in that first quarter ever became important for me to know. Once the plot actually started – what little plot that was there, anyway – I began to read.

The plot goes like this: the narrator is a lawyer and hires scriveners (copy-lawyers) in a small firm. He tells a story about the strange people scriveners are, particularly this one named Bartleby. Bartleby is hired and at first seems to be diligent and reliable. Then, however, our narrator asks him to do a different task. Bartleby responds with, “I would prefer not to.” No matter what he’s asked to do, he refuses with that phrase. He prefers not to. At first, he simply prefers not to run errands or check the texts he’s copied out. Then he would prefer not to copy at all and instead spends all day staring at the wall. He prefers not to eat. He prefers not to leave the office. He prefers not to be dismissed for not doing his job duties. He prefers not to have any changes at all.

I can see what Jason means. There is a certain element of Kafka-like surrealism. I’m afraid, however, that I don’t really see the point to this novella. Whereas with Kafka, there are so many layers I can pick apart, I think I’m just not smart enough to grasp what Melville is trying to say. There are apparently tons of different interpretations of Bartleby’s character, from a symbol of depression to a stand against American economics to a shade of Melville himself. But even after reading all the different ways people have interpreted this novella over the years, I still don’t get it.

Sorry, Jase, but I’m afraid Melville and I will probably never be friends.

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Shine, Coconut Moon, by Neesha Meminger

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Thistle

ShineCoconutMoonSamar is Indian-American and has spent her life not knowing any of her family except her mother. When her uncle shows up a few days after the September 11th attacks, everything changes. Samar begins to question her past and wants to learn more about her family and her heritage. At the same time, suspicion increases against non-white Americans, and Samar finds herself at the center of some really awful prejudice.

I was really happy to hear about this book when Melissa reviewed it a few months ago. The discrimination against Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and “brown” people in general that popped up after 9/11 has always really bothered me. Everyone from certain parts of the world is suddenly considered a terrorist or a potential terrorist, and that really makes me angry. It makes me angry that when Nidal Malik Hasan attacked Fort Hood, he was automatically labeled a terrorist because of his nationality, before anyone even knew why he attacked, but when Andrew Joseph Stack flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, he was automatically excused of the label because he was white. If Stack hadn’t been white, our country would have automatically vilified him and tried to connect him to Al-Qaida. That’s just to give one example.

So yes. This is an issue that I pay a lot of attention to, so I knew I had to get my hands on this book as soon as I could. I finally got to read it, and loved every page.

One of the primary themes in Shine, Coconut Moon is prejudice, and that’s the theme I want to concentrate on here. Prejudice takes many different forms, and many of them are addressed in the book. I’m feeling a little brain-dead at the moment, so instead of writing them all out, I’m just going to bullet-point list examples. Forgive my laziness.

  • Samar’s Uncle Sandeep, who wears a turban, is harassed, threatened, and insulted because of the way he looks and the clothes he wears.
  • Because Samar knows nothing about her heritage and doesn’t go out of her way to hang out with other Indian-Americans at school, they call her a coconut and discriminate against her.
  • Because the other Indian-Americans at school hang out in a single group instead of with the white kids, Samar dismisses them as potential friends.
  • Samar judges other kids based on a couple facts she knows about them, rather than getting to know them personally.
  • Samar’s grandparents are racially biased against darker Indians and prefer lighter skin. They claim they cannot change this because it is the way they grew up.
  • Samar’s mother is biased against her parents, family, and heritage for multiple reasons and refuses to give them a chance, judging them all based on things she suffered through many decades earlier.
  • A character named Balvir wishes Sikhism wasn’t lumped in with Islam, so that the discrimination against the Sikhs would stop, but is then confronted by another character, Shazia, a Muslim who asks if prejudice would be more acceptable directed only towards some innocent people instead of many.
  • There is discussion about racial prejudice used as fodder for TV shows and in the media.
  • Lastly, there is reference to governmental hysteria and the Japanese internment camps around WWII, an extreme form of blanket racial prejudice.

While not all of these forms of prejudice can realistically get better, many of the characters come to understand their own biases and discrimination. They learn and they grow in a very believable and realistic way.

Beyond prejudice, this book is also about finding yourself, learning the truth about history, the importance of family, religious growth, and friendship. I wish I could talk about all these things, particularly the limited scope of history taught in schools – Texas Board of Education, anyone? – and the balance between keeping your cultural heritage and assimilating into a new culture. If I talk about each one of them, however, this review will be far, far longer than anyone will want to read. Instead I’ll just have to encourage people to get a copy of it and read it! This is a book that itches for discussion. I expected to like it, but I didn’t expect to get so much out of it, or for it to make me think as much as it did.

Posted in 2010, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Protected: Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Thistle

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The Hundred-Foot Journey, by Richard C. Morais

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Thistle

imagesHassan Haji, a middle-aged chef, recounts his life from his boyhood in India to his current fame in the Parisian restaurant world. While fictional, this reads as a food memoir, and also discusses discrimination and conflict of heritage.

It’s hard for me to know how to review this. One the one hand, it’s well-written. On the other hand, it’s not at all what I expected, and the parts that weren’t what I expected disappointed me. I would hate to discourage others from reading it, though, based on this, so I want to give specific examples of how my expectations varied from what the book gave and why I wasn’t able to appreciate it as much as another person would. Let me stress that this is not a bad book. It just wasn’t necessarily the right book for me, despite what I thought when I agreed to review it.

What I knew about The Hundred-Foot Journey in advance was that it was the story of a man who grew up in India and later moved to France. He was a chef and made his way up through the restaurant world. He also had to deal with the conflict of his heritage and assimilation in a new country. From this description, I expected the following:

  • much food talk, particularly focused on Indian food
  • a lot of discussion about the hardships Hassan faced as an immigrant and a foreigner
  • the conflict of leaving one’s home and forming a new home in a new place
  • learning to accept one’s heritage even while in a new culture, and finding a balance between the two

Instead, the book took a different path than I was expecting. It focused far more on Hassan’s climb within the restaurant world. It discussed Indian food at the beginning, but most of the book focused on French cuisine. There is some discussion about discrimination and the hardships of being an immigrant, but Hassan mostly assimilates and leaves his old culture behind as he delves into French living.

So let me explain why this was disappointing to me, and hopefully you can see why it might not be disappointing to you.

First, I do not like to cook. At all. In fact, I loathe cooking. I knew there was going to be a lot of focus on food – I do love food! – but I didn’t realize how much was going to be on the process of making food. I have to admit, as a non-cook myself, I couldn’t get into these parts. I was never confused, but I got a bit bored during those parts because I had no mental or practical application to connect them.

Second, I do not like much French food, particularly French high cuisine. While the sections about Indian food in the beginning practically made me salivate, hearing about all the French foods (liver, partridge, oysters, fois gras…) made me shudder just a little. There were very few dishes that sounded even remotely appealing to me, and I kept wishing that Hassan would go back to cooking Indian food! Of course, those who love French food would probably salivate over those parts as much as I did over the Indian food parts.

Third, I was disappointed by the fact that Hassan seemed to simply leave his culture and heritage behind, rather than keeping it with him as he journeyed upwards. This is a realistic choice, of course, but it still rather saddened me, particularly because I very much like the culture he came from. I loved his family and was disappointed when they stopped being so much in the book.

Fourth, I had a hard time connecting to Hassan personally because he and I have very different personalities. One of my faults is that I am a very stubborn person that will hold grudges, and Hassan wasn’t that way at all. While I consider that a good trait of his, sometimes I think it went too far, to the other extreme. This came up particularly in a situation which I will address next.

Fifth, there was a character named Madame Mallory that I absolutely hated. To me, she was the villain of this book. When Hassan’s family moves across the street from her, she’s biased against them and tries to pressure them out of town so her own restaurant can thrive without competition. She’s an elderly lady who is so selfish that she’s not above blackmail, threats, violence, spying, thievery, and assault to get what she wants. Now I have to say, the parts of the book where Madame Mallory faces off against the Haji family were probably my most favorite, but I still didn’t like her. I definitely wanted the Haji family to beat her down!

What I couldn’t get past here was the fact that Hassan, after Madame Mallory causes him to get badly burned all over his body, would leave his family behind and willingly go with her to learn how to cook. I don’t understand how he could have possibly let her get her way or how he could have wanted anything to do with her. I can’t fathom why Hassan’s father didn’t charge her with trespassing and assault when he called his lawyer out for everything else she did. I didn’t get why she never offered to make reparations or call off her reign of terror in exchange for Hassan coming to work for her. No. In the end, she just got everything she wanted without ever having to give anything up herself. That really bothered me. I know it happens in real life, but ugh I wanted to reach through the pages and strangle that woman! And strangle Hassan for going along with it!

But you might see, then, that the book was apparently evocative enough for me to hate this character, rather than just being meh about her. When a book is badly written, I can’t care about the characters, but this one I definitely cared about. The book might not have been my type of book in the end, because of all the things I mentioned above, but I won’t deny that I formed a weird sort of connection with it. I imagine that, had I been a slightly different person with slightly different tastes, I might have loved it.

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Notes on a Scandal, by Zoë Heller

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Thistle

notesscandal1When Sheba, a pottery teacher in London, is discovered having an affair with one of her high school students, her life is understandably torn apart. She loses her job, she splits with her husband, and she’s denied all but limited contact with her children. There is only one person who remains with her during this time, an older teacher, now retired, named Barbara, who takes care of Sheba as she mourns. Barbara is not who she first appears to be, however. As she narrates Sheba’s story – ostensibly an attempt to give the true facts about what happened between Sheba and young Steven Connolly – the reader comes to understand that this is not only Sheba’s story, but Barbara’s.

I had no idea this was a book until a few months ago when I read Lena’s review. I’d seen the movie a few years back and really enjoyed it, so when I saw that it was based on a book, I got a copy right away. I picked it up my first night on vacation and was immediately sucked into the book. The prose was fantastic! Since the whole story is narrated from Barbara’s point of view, it’s told in her voice, which is very distinctive. She is above retirement age, very proper in her way of speech, and from the very beginning, it’s apparent that something is not quite right with her.

Throughout the book, you get all of Sheba’s story, how she came to be having this affair with a boy more than 25 years younger than her, and how that affair came to suck up her life so that even now, she is devastated by the fact that Steven seems to have “broken up” with her. Sheba is a ridiculous woman, no doubt, carried away by her emotions and doing whatever comes easiest to her. She’s a pacifist and wants to please everyone, a trait that helped her get into this situation in the first place. What she has done with Steven is reprehensible, but Barbara writes the story as if it was any ordinary love affair. She gives Steven as much responsibility as Sheba, since he is the one who first flirted and made passes at his teacher, and blames Sheba only for succumbing to the affair, for not stopping it before it started.

At the same time, the reader learns of Barbara’s own obsession with Sheba and the vast loneliness that the quiet, single old woman lives with. She is socially awkward, meticulous in everything she does, and has had a string of female “friendships” so intense they border on love affairs, at least in Barbara’s mind. While she never admits, up front, that her feelings are romantic, it is obvious to the reader that Barbara is completely blind to the true nature of what she feels. Her attachment to Sheba is so strong that even after she knows of the illegal affair, she doesn’t tell the authorities. She doesn’t want Sheba’s life to be destroyed, but instead wants to “help” her. This of course also leads to the unraveling of Barbara’s life, until the two women are living side by side, ostracized by everyone else.

Character is so important to this book, and Heller got it down perfect. The experience was slightly uncomfortable because I could see traits of my own in both Sheba and Barbara. Notes on a Scandal shows how easily some of our best traits – like Sheba’s desire never to hurt people’s feelings or Barbara’s loyalty – can quickly cross the line into bad ones. I imagine everyone, at one point in their lives, has been hurt by their own best intentions, or has hurt others with them. Of course not all of us will have affairs with 15-year-old boys! But for all Barbara’s slight off-ness, she really does show how easily something innocent can turn into something perverse or illegal or wrong or disturbing.

I felt sympathy for both Barbara and Sheba, despite their weaknesses and wrongdoings. Life is not easy for anyone. Neither of them did what was right. Both of them sunk into their worst passions and felt helpless once in them. But despite their issues, I still pitied both of them and loved them as people. It’s a very strange contrast, and I love that Heller was able to present the contrast so perfectly.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Thistle

gogolWhen the Classics Circuit chose to visit Imperial Russia, I knew immediately I wanted to read Dead Souls by Gogol. It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for awhile now, both for my GLBT Challenge (Gogol was gay) and because I’ve heard it’s very funny and very good. I didn’t know a thing about it (I can only attribute this to my own forgetfulness, because I know I’ve read plot summaries before!), so I’m not going to talk about the plot at all. My husband, Jason, was listening to this on audio at the same time as I read it, and he knew the whole plot in advance. It gave us very different impressions about the book, and personally I’m not sure I would have been able to get through it if I’d known in advance what sort of character the main character, Chichikov, was.

What I did know in advance was that Dead Souls was meant to be the first book in a trilogy, a retelling of sorts of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’ve only read one book of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, which corresponds to book one of Dead Souls. As book one is the only book Gogol ever completed, that actually worked out nicely for me. There are also several chapters of Book Two included in my edition of Dead Souls (I imagine most versions include them together), but they are incomplete and feel rough and unedited. Gogol struggled for the rest of his life to finish this trilogy, but was never able to.

Beginning Dead Souls, I was immediately put off by the wordiness and profuse language, which of course might just be the translation. It was easier to read than most Russian novels I’ve tried, but not by far. It wasn’t until Chichikov began to interact with people that I started enjoying the book. The conversations were hysterical! It was like Jane Austen’s irony and humor on a much thicker scale, so that it became laugh-out-loud funny instead of just smiling-funny. Also, it was easy to see how the book related to the Inferno. There was a character for Flattery, one for Gluttony, one for Cheating, one for Limbo, one for Avarice, etc. I actually pulled out Wikipedia’s list of the rings of Dante’s Hell to cross-compare!

Chichikov had a very odd business proposal for many of these people, and it’s not one I’m going to talk about in detail. It is, however, what I found most fascinating about the book, because I didn’t know in advance what his plan was. If I’d known ahead of time, I’m not sure I could have kept reading, but it was wonderful to keep feeling out the book, trying to see what could possibly come of this bizarre business. You don’t find out until the very end of Part 1/Book 1.

I admit, I lost interest at that point. There were about 200 pages more in my copy of the text, which included the first four chapters of Book 2 and a couple random drafted chapters. They are all incomplete, missing words, with a plot that’s not entirely followable, and I admit, I did a lot of skimming in this section. I no longer cared about Chichikov by this point and I didn’t really want to read about his next set of adventures. It felt like the book was starting all over again! It was only after I got to the end that I realized that indeed Part 2 was a separate book altogether. There was a reason it felt like it was starting all over.

My end feelings were a bit mixed. I was completely let down by the work as a whole, but before those last 200 pages, I enjoyed most of my read. I loved the comparisons to The Inferno, and I thought Gogol’s satire and wit was excellent. On the other hand, I get the impression that it would be hard to fully comprehend what Gogol wanted to say with this book without knowing his plans for Books 2 and 3. The Inferno takes Dante through Hell, and just about everyone he meets is sinful and evil. The rest of the Divine Comedy is supposed to take Dante through Purgatory and then Heaven, to see the conflict between two poles and then to the good from the world. I imagine Dead Souls was meant to be the same way, and it’s sort of a pity that the only finished book was meant to represent all the scum from Russia.

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Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Thistle

things20fall20apartjpgOkonkwo is a strong, angry man, famous and important in his tribe in Nigeria. He has three wives, many children, and a successful farm, mostly due to his relentless determination to keep everyone in his family (including himself) working harder than anyone else in the village. Okonkwo despises weakness, cowardice, and compromise. Sometimes his temper gets him in trouble with various gods and goddesses that the tribe worship, and he must pay the price for that.

Okonkwo’s part of Nigeria becomes the focus of British colonialism at a time when Okonkwo and his family are banished from their village for seven years due to a crime of accidental murder. Missionaries and a new government run by white men come into the area and start to take over. Here, quite appropriately, things fall apart.

I struggled with this book, particularly in Part 1, which takes up slightly more than half of the book. The entire focus is on Okonkwo, who is not a likable man, and the various rituals that that exist in his village. Okonkwo was horrible, beating his wives and children, shooting at them when angry, never forgiving any sign of weakness in anyone. He is angry, mean, and bullying. All during Part 1 of this book, I had this awful conflict inside. In some ways, I wanted to help those who were helpless in the village: the women and children. I didn’t want them to be treated so badly. I wanted them to be protected. On the other hand, I absolutely despise when cultures or countries come in to force their way of life on other cultures/countries.

I imagine, though, that this is the conflict I was supposed to feel, given what came in Part 2 and Part 3, when the white men and Christian missionaries came in to “help” and “civilize” the native people. This is where the book got interesting to me – to see the conflict between British law and tribal law, as well as the clash of religions. I must admit, straight out, that I hate missionary work. Not all missionary work. I don’t mind missions that go to help people who need help. In other words, I don’t mind missions that aren’t focused on religion. But missions that focus primarily on converting people to one faith or another? Hate them with a passion, and always have. Especially when they work by force, trickery, or unethical persuasion. In my eyes, it’s wrong to force one’s religion on another person, and that’s exactly what the missionaries did in Things Fall Apart.

The missionaries didn’t come in and say, “Here’s another way of life you might want to try.” They came in and said, “Your gods are false gods, only the Christian god is the true god.” They made it black and white: My god = good. Your god = bad. They treated those who didn’t convert like a lower class of people, ignorant of truth. It infuriated me.

The law portion was not much better. The tribe had their own form of justice that did not tally with British law. Neither were better than the other. Both had good points and bad points, but the British law won. It was stronger and had better weapons. It conquered.

Was it right for the British to come in and “civilize” these people? No matter how strongly I felt against Okonkwo and those like him, I would have to so no, absolutely not. To me, this is interference and the destruction of a culture. All cultures have their good and bad points. This tribe’s culture is different than ours, but that doesn’t mean it’s inferior. In many ways, we are all the same. This is illustrated most particularly in a conversation between Mr. Brown, the first missionary leader, and Akunna, a leader in the village. They talk about their two differing religions and how similar they are if you take them apart into elements. I liked that. It shows that we are all more alike than we think.

After finishing the book, I understood better why the first half was so centered on Okonkwo and the tribal religions. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think Achebe wanted to portray a man who was awful in order to make people dislike him. To make people think of him as uncivilized. Achebe could have chosen a different character, one who was kinder and less angry, but he didn’t. He showed a man who would beat his wives, bully his children, and force his family to work all the time. He showed a man who was constantly angry and lashing out.

At the same time, Achebe took care to discuss all the aspects of their religion that are different from the Christianity that existed in most of the Western world at that time. He told about things we would consider horrible, like how they deposited twins in the Evil Forest and left them to die, or how they mutilated babies after a mother goes through a long cycle of birthing babies who die in their infancy.

I think he wanted Western readers to think of this tribe’s culture as barbaric as possible, both culturally and religiously, so that when he introduced the “civilizing” white men, there would be a larger contrast and conflict within us. The white men are not civil. They murder whole tribes when they feel threatened. They show no respect for tribal customs or religion. They blackmail citizens. They starve and beat criminals in jail. The white men and their religion are no better than the black men and their religion. Both can be equally good. Both can be equally nasty.

And if they are both equal, then what right does one have to take over and destroy the other? For me, that’s what Things Fall Apart was truly about.

Posted in 2010, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Of All the Stupid Things, by Alexandra Diaz

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Thistle

6450021Tara, Whitney Blaire, and Pinkie have been best friends forever, but can their friendship survive when Tara suddenly becomes attracted to the new girl at school, Riley?

In setup, Of All the Stupid Things is very similar to The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson, except that Tara falls in love with a girl outside their triangle, rather than two girls in the triangle falling in love with each other. The situation is complicated by an on-and-off boyfriend who may or may not be having a side-relationship with one of the male cheerleaders, plus the fact that Riley and Whitney Blaire are pretty much enemies at first sight. This book tackles full-on issues such as friendship, rejection, abandonment, death, insecurity, love, differing family circumstance, and of course homosexuality. Seems like a lot to pack into this little book, but it doesn’t feel that way. This all comes across perfectly natural as each characters’ story is revealed bit by bit.

At first when I began to read Of All the Stupid Things, I was worried. The story began very light and surface-level, and I was afraid it would be shallow. I was particularly afraid because I met Alexandra Diaz at BEA and spent a long time talking to her about GLBT issues. She was so nice and I hated the thought of disliking, or even just being indifferent to, her book. What I discovered as I read was that Diaz did an excellent job with her characters. All three members of the triangle got their own chapters, alternating, all from first person POV. The characters not only sounded completely distinct and unique, but they fit their third-person personas from the other chapters. As a writer, I can say that this is extremely difficult to pull off, but Diaz does it well. It was obvious she knows her characters intimately.

Because the three voices were so perfect for the three characters, everything else in the book came together. I believed the emotional progress that every character – not just the triangle – went through. The romance between Tara and Riley was easy and believable. The reactions of people around Tara were also believable. Each character dealt with a myriad of different problems in their lives, not a single focus, which made the book even more interesting to me.

By the end, my only complaint was that the ending itself feels too abrupt. I didn’t feel like all the loose ends were tied up. Of course, that’s perfectly realistic, but it left me wanting just a few more chapters to know what would happen next. I turned the last page and said, No! It can’t be over! I suppose this is a good problem to have, right? To leave your readers wanting more? But still, it left me a tiny bit unsettled and uneasy. It made me want to start right over from the beginning and read the book all over again. I’m hoping there will be something more in the future to clear up some of the storylines!

Posted in 2010, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged | Leave a comment

Devilish, by Maureen Johnson

Posted on June 6, 2010 by Thistle

devilishJane goes to an all-girl Catholic high school, where she’s a smart, punky outcast. Her best friend is Allison is unpopular and anxious, and Jane would do anything for her. Anything. Including selling her soul to a devil’s minion in order to win back Allison’s soul.

This is one book by Maureen Johnson that I’d never really thought about reading before, but then at the Book Blogger Convention, where Johnson was the keynote speaker, she talked a lot about her experiences at an all-girl Catholic high school. The stories were absolutely hilarious, and she said Devilish is based loosely on that time of her life. I knew immediately that I had to read this book. I put it on hold from the library as soon as I got home.

The prologue threw me off. I didn’t understand a word of the first few paragraphs. There were so many references to things I would only understand as I read the book. It was almost enough to make me say never mind, but I pushed on. I’m glad I did. At the end, I went back and reread the prologue and it made a million times more sense to me. I give this as a warning to others who may be completely baffled by the first two pages of the book. No, it won’t make sense for quite some time.

This is my fourth read by Maureen Johnson, after 13 Little Blue Envelopes, The Bermudez Triangle, and Suite Scarlett, and I’d say it ranks third in the list. Better than Suite Scarlett, which I didn’t like, but not as good as the other two. There were issues in the writing that bothered me, places where the prose would get choppy and the focus would change very fast, leaving me bewildered and floundering. For example, there’s this one moment when Jane’s dog looks at her in a dream, and then someone begins speaking. It sounds like it’s the dog speaking, but it’s not. It’s the other guy in the dream with her. But there’s some pronoun confusion, saying “he said” when she’s just mentioned the way the dog is looking at Jane, without ever mentioning the human companion in between. Things like that. They confused me and pulled me out of the story, so that I had to try to unravel who was saying what, where characters were at, that sort of thing. It felt sloppier than other Johnson books I’ve read.

On the flip side, it’s a wonderful plot and all the little details are laid out one by one in perfect pacing. Devilish is extremely funny, slightly creepy, and very fun to read through. Having grown up Catholic myself, I love the tongue and cheek digs at religious doctrine, Satanism, devil worshipping, and the general creepiness of Catholic ideas about the afterlife. Nuns and priests do battle against preppy high school girls who work for the devil. Corporations build their company hierarchies based on the organization of Hell. I love it.

This was a fun read, great for a relaxing afternoon. It’s the sort of book I could see myself loving to pieces at about 15 years old, and I wish it had been around back then.

Note: After time passed, this came to be one of my favorite Maureen Johnson books, the one that stuck around most in my memory.

Posted in 2010, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Gardener, by SA Bodeen

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Thistle

7173435I’m sort of puzzled how to review this book, because everything about it is a spoiler. The cover, the tagline on the cover, the back-of-the-book description – all spoilers. If you look at that picture, you can tell exactly what this book is going to be about: a garden that grows human beings. Perhaps creatures that are human/plant hybrids. Then the back of the book tells you every other main plot point of the book. Which would be fine, except that in the climax, all the “secrets” are revealed as if they were meant to be secret. This seems like bad marketing to me and makes me feel really sorry for the author. I know this is by no means her fault. She doesn’t control marketing.

My friend Brittany got an ARC of this book at TLA this year. She brought it and a couple others over to my house, thinking I might enjoy them. I honestly thought this would be the one I’d be least interested in reading, because I’m not a real big sci-fi person, but when I tried reading the first ten pages of all three of them, this is the one that caught my eyes. The plotline didn’t sound like me, but the writing was really well done. I was hooked right away.

That makes the contrast here even more difficult for me, because all the way through the last page, the writing is really, really good! I was completely wrapped up in this book, even though the secrets were less than secret for me. I liked the characters and I liked the adventure they went on. But because I knew everything in advance, the book ended up falling flat for me, which makes me sad.

I don’t know. How do you review something that you came into backwards? Maybe if I hadn’t known anything up front, I would have liked it better. The book had a strong political bent, all militant environmentalism, which isn’t my favorite thing even if I agree with some of those particular political stances. There was a bit too much heavy-handed strong-arming in The Gardener. If a novel is going to have political messages, I like them to be more subtle. But still, even with that going against it, I think the writing would have been enough to make up for the politics – if only I hadn’t known the entire plotline in advance.

I’m not sure what else to say. If you do decide to read this, please don’t read the back of the book. You can’t go in completely blind – the cover and tagline on the cover already give away several revelations – but you can go in more blind than I did and hopefully that will make this a better experience for you.

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