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.

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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!

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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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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Thistle

harry_potter_death_hallows_400Warning: This review necessarily contains spoilers. If you have not read this series and might one day, please don’t read any further!

We’ve come to the final installment of my Harry Potter hardback/paperback comparison. It was in finally getting the paperback version of Deathly Hallows last summer that enabled me to start work on this project in the first place. Since the third book in the series, I’ve documented changes made to the text between hardback and paperback printings (the first two didn’t have any changes). So, how did Deathly Hallows compare?

Shock. No changes at all.

Well, perhaps that’s not true. It’s true to say I found no changes. I also verified the bottoms of each page to make sure they each lined up, so there were no major changes that affected text placement. If there were little word changes that didn’t alter the pages, I’m afraid in the case of Deathly Hallows, I didn’t catch them. I’m fully aware that this is my own fault: I haven’t read the book nearly as often as the others in the series (~10 as opposed to ~25), so I don’t have the book as memorized as the others. Whereas in the other books, I will notice word differences because I’ve read them all long enough to know exactly what the phrasing should sound like, I just don’t know Deathly Hallows to that degree. So there may have been changes I missed. However, there weren’t any major changes.

This was disappointing, actually, because Deathly Hallows is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, far more than in any other book in the series.

  • Suddenly polyjuice potion doesn’t have to be taken every hour, but instead lasts longer if you take more at one time.
  • If all you have to do to get beyond a Fidelius Charm’s power is to side-along apparate in with someone, why wouldn’t Snape have brought Death Eaters to Grimmauld Place a long time ago? I’m sure V would have known about that loophole…
  • How in the world is Snape talking to Dumbledore’s portrait in the summer, well before he’s appointed Headmaster by V? Wouldn’t the other teachers have seen him and get him arrested/captured?
  • And while we’re on that subject, how does V expect Snape to continue to be well-informed after he kills Dumbledore and the Order thinks he’s a double-crosser? Wouldn’t V expect Snape to no longer be so well-informed? The fact that Snape is still bringing in information from the Order ought to be very suspicious to V.
  • The time the Potters spent in Godric’s Hollow under the Fidelius Charm is inconsistent with what’s been said in previous books. They apparently spent months there, considering Lily sent Sirius a letter right after Harry’s birthday (July 31) and V doesn’t kill them until Halloween. Harry even speculates that this is the last time Wormtail might have seen the Potters – but if that’s true, why did it take V 3 months to attack? Besides, in previous books, it said the attack came barely a week after the Fidelius Charm was performed.
  • There’s also an inconsistency in the time between the deaths of Dumbledore’s mother and sister. Most of the book seems to place it around a few months over the summer, with Mom dying at the end of the school year and Sis dying right before school began. Still, at the same time Elphias Doge says that in that time, he took the traditional year-long around the world trip. He says Sis died at the end of that year, and states he was at both funerals, but also states he completed his year’s journey.
  • The potion in the cave where the locket is kept shouldn’t have been there when Dumbledore and Harry journeyed there at the end of Half Blood Prince. Regulus drank it when he slipped the fake horcrux in there. It’s not a self-replicating potion, because when V tested it with Kreacher, he had to pour more in manually. It never says Regulus poured more in, and even if he did, Dumbledore and Harry certainly didn’t. And yet, when V goes to check on his locket, the text says he stares down at the bowl whose contents have turned clear and sees no locket under the surface.
  • V puts a taboo/jinx on his name, so that anytime anyone says it, it removes all protection around the person who said it and causes a disturbance so the Death Eaters know where to find them. That allows the Death Eaters to find Harry right after the wedding and then later in the woods. However, both Harry and Hermione say “Voldemort” multiple times while they’re living in Grimmauld Place, while the jinx was already in place. However, they are still protected and the Death Eaters don’t know where they’re at. Why?? That doesn’t make sense!
  • Harry gives the fake horcrux locket to Kreacher. A locket would be considered clothes, right? I mean, Kreacher later wears the thing! Giving a house-elf clothes should free him, but in this case, it doesn’t seem to…
  • When they evacuate Hogwarts, they send the kids into the Hog’s Head to disapparate out of the bar. However, Aberforth already said it’s impossible to apparate out of Hogsmeade at that time, plus many of those kids are well below 17 and don’t know how to apparate.
  • On page 737, Harry tells V that one of them is about to leave for good (during their last battle). V says, “One of us? You think it will be you, do you, the boy who has survived by accident, and because Dumbledore was pulling the strings?” Maybe I’m just missing something, but it seems like this sentence is all wrong. Why would V think that Harry would think Harry’s the one about to die? Why would he be jeering and laughing at him for thinking that? After three years of reading this book, I still can’t figure out what V is trying to say here…it makes me think Harry was supposed to say one of them was about to stay for good or something.

I knew some of these wouldn’t get fixed – plot developments depended on them – but I hoped at least some would get cleared up in the paperback version! These errors/inconsistencies, as well as that awful King’s Cross chapter where we all sit down to let Dumbledore explain everything that we couldn’t figure out, take a book that might otherwise be a favorite of mine and make it just meh. It’s the middle-liked book for me – I like books 3, 5, and 6 more, while liking 1, 2, and 4 less. That’s too bad, because otherwise Deathly Hallows is a beautiful and well-written book! The Prince’s Tale is my favorite chapter in the whole series, and Bathilda’s Secret is in my opinion the creepiest chapter of the whole series. I was hoping the paperback version would clear some things up, but I guess now that we were at the last volume, they decided not to make any changes this time around.

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by JK Rowling

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Thistle

hp6It’s Month 6/Book 6 of my Harry Potter hardback/paperback comparison! Half Blood Prince is one of my two favorite HP books, so I was very excited to dive into it. This is the first month where I’m reading the paperback version instead of the hardback, as it’s the first book I owned originally in hardback. It was a slightly different way of thinking – seeing how things were corrected and changed from the version I’m used to, rather than seeing what was originally there instead of the corrected version I’m used to.

Compared to Order of the Phoenix, the changes made to book #6 were very, very mild. Order of the Phoenix was INSANE in the number of changes. Half Blood Prince only had a couple very minor changes and one big change.

Be forewarned: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS HERE. It’s impossible to do this project without spoilers, so if you haven’t read Harry Potter and might do so someday, please don’t read any further!

Minor errors:

Page 100 – In the HB version, Ron says to Hermione, “And when you’ve got your eleven ‘Outstanding’ O.W.L.s…” This is wrong, because Hermione is only taking ten classes. She’s taking two different ones from Ron and Harry, but she’s also not in divination, so she’s only taking one more class than them. When I found out the HB & PB versions were different, the very first thing I did was go to the store to look up this particular mistake and make sure it was corrected in the paperback. It is. The pb version says, “And when you’ve got your ten ‘Outstanding’ O.W.L.s…”

Page 103 – Same error fixed. Ron says “Yep – ten ‘Outstanding’ and one ‘Exceeds Expectations’” in the hardback, whereas it’s “Yep – nine ‘Outstanding’ and one ‘Exceeds Expectations’” in the paperback.

Page 593 – From hardback to paperback, the second instance of “of” (bolded) is removed from the following statement: Harry could smell a powerful mixture of dirt, sweat, and, unmistakeably, of blood coming from him. It’s just parallel writing error, very minor. I only caught it at all because it changed the line endings in a section where I was paying particular attention to word placement, due to page-end changes caused by the major error mentioned below.

Major error:

This error actually involves the removal of sections on a particular paragraph that overlaps both pages 592 and 593. I’m going to write the paragraph in full, hardback version, and bold the parts that are removed in the paperback version. This is when Dumbledore is talking to Draco Malfoy when Draco has him cornered on top of the tower.

“He cannot kill you if you are already dead. Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Nobody would be surprised that you had died in your attempt to kill me – forgive me, but Lord Voldemort probably expects it. Nor would the Death Eaters be surprised that we had captured and killed your mother – it is what they would do themselves, after all. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban. . . . When the time comes, we can protect him too. Come over to the right side, Draco . . . you are not a killer. . . .”

Everything in bold was removed in the paperback text. From what I’ve heard, these sections were never actually supposed to appear in the text. Rowling removed them at the last minute, but they went to print in America before they were caught. If I remember correctly, the British version does not have them in there either. I can’t check – I only have a paperback British copy and I don’t know if the paperback and hardback British versions are different like they are in the American versions. Anyone with a hardback British version want to check that for me?

That’s it for Book 6! It was relatively tame compared to the last couple books. See you guys next month with my final installment of the Harry Potter hb/pb comparisons!

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Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Thistle

6948436This is the story of two women. Little Bee is a refugee from Nigeria in Britain. Sarah is a wife, mother, and magazine editor, also in Britain. This is the story of how their lives collide and intertwine.

I’ve seen various reviews for Little Bee around and I admit I never thought I’d read it. I never would have, except I ended up at the airport without a book on my way home from BEA. There weren’t a lot of choices in the airport bookstore, but I saw this one on the shelf and I knew a lot of people had been talking about it recently.

It was a good choice. While I doubt the book will stick with me forever, it’s a solid literary adult book about the way decisions we make will affect us for the rest of our lives. It talks in depth about the broken refugee and immigration system in Britain, and it addresses issues such as infidelity, motherhood, and the balance between home and work. The writing and characterization are both strong. I liked Little Bee (the character) but didn’t care for Sarah or her choices at all, though she was (depressingly) believable. I don’t want to say too much about the plot and give things away, but it was a satisfying read in the way it was paced and the way it ended. A good choice for me when I was in a tight spot.

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