Lock and Key, by Sarah Dessen

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Thistle

lock-and-keyWhen Ruby’s mother abandons her, Ruby is sent to live with her older sister Cora, who she hasn’t seen in ten years. Life changes for her so drastically she feels like she must be dreaming. Whereas once she lived in squalor, dodging creditors, running roaches out of the house, getting high with her “friends,” she now lives in a million-dollar house and goes to a private prep school. More than anything, she wishes she could leave and go back to that independent life. But as she comes to learn more about the people around her and information about her past is revealed to her, she becomes less and less sure of her identity, and more sure who she can trust. The problem is, once she begins to reach out to others, it’s their turn to pull away.

Confession: Before reading this book, I’d always thought Sarah Dessen was pure fluff. The covers look like fluff, like chic-lit for teenage girls. I grabbed this book on a whim at ALA because Dessen was signing books, they were at a reduced price ($5), and the line was very short (it was the end of her signing time). I’d heard somewhere that Dessen wrote like Deb Caletti, which to me is a high recommendation, as Caletti is one of the most talented modern authors I know and I love her books. But still, I worried. The books look like fluff.

Random.org chose this book for me from off my shelves as part of the Random Reading Challenge. At first, when I began reading, I didn’t think I was going to make it through. That same day I’d read through the first 100 pages of Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah before deciding I didn’t care enough about the book to read another 400 pages of it, and Lock and Key had a lot of similar plotline elements. Ruby’s mother was neglectful even before abandoning her, and Ruby was therefore simultaneously responsible (she kept doing her mother’s night job for her) and immature (all the drugs and drinking). So I almost gave up. I didn’t want to read any more on that subject (Firefly Lane had expounded on a similar situation for all those 100 pages…). I knew I was in a bit of a slump, though, so I put it aside and tried it again the next day.

As it turns out, the book was really good, and just like that recommendation, the story was similar to Deb Caletti’s in style. It talked about real issues, in a real way. It didn’t skirt the truth, but it didn’t have to stick the reader’s faces into it, either. It was tactful. It was the sort of book that, while it dealt with teenagers, could be read by adults from a completely different angle. It transcended its genre. By the end, I cared about all the characters, even the no-good mother.

The book isn’t fast-paced, and it’s very character driven instead of plot oriented, but even so, I read almost all of it in a single day. I stayed up late to finish. I didn’t have to – it’s not like the book pushed me the way 13 Reasons Why or The Knife of Never Letting Go did – but I wanted to. Dessen made their world unfold for me, and I was completely sucked into it.

I can’t say how this compares to other Dessen books as it’s my first, but I can say this won’t be my last. It’s an excellent book, and I’m glad I gave it a chance.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | 1 Comment

The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa

Posted on November 10, 2009 by Thistle

Housekeeper and the ProfessorThe Professor was once a brilliant mathematician, but an accident in 1975 left his short-term memory damaged. While he is able to clearly remember events prior to the accident, his memories since then are limited to the past 80 minutes. The Housekeeper is the tenth housekeeper the Professor’s sister-in-law has hired to care for him. She comes to work for him in 1992, and soon he’s insisting she bring along her ten year old son, whom he nicknames Root because of the square root shape of his head.

This is a very quiet book, so elegant and beautifully written. I’ve seen movies before about this sort of memory loss (Momento, 50 First Dates, etc), but I’ve never seen the subject handled with this much care and precision. The Professor keeps his life afloat the best he can by writing messages to himself and clipping them all over his clothes. In the most prominent area: “My memory lasts only eighty minutes.”

Ogawa makes us see, through the eyes of this housekeeper, how difficult life is for the Professor. All he has left in the world is math, which he resorts to whenever he is nervous or uncomfortable. He opens every day by asking the Housekeeper not who she is, but for her shoe size or her birth weight or her telephone number. He finds relationships between seemingly random numbers, and is always teaching the Housekeeper and Root about math. Or baseball. Both the Professor and Root share a love for baseball, although Root avoids mentioning that the Professor’s favorite player was transferred to a new team after the accident and later retired altogether. Learning such things upsets the Professor – it reminds him how much time he’s lost. Though he knows his memory only lasts 80 minutes, he has no idea how many years has passed since that was true.

I liked math in school, so it was fun to take the little problems the Professor presented to Root and figure them out before reading the solutions. When it got to the more complicated ideas, I just read along and didn’t try to understand so much. You don’t need to have a love of math to love this book, but the Professor does take math and turn it into something beautiful and poetic. Even if you don’t understand, you can see the beauty in it. Ogawa also seems to have done a lot of research on the subject. I’m not a mathematician, and maybe a real mathematician would feel differently, but I thought this book treated the subject with respect. You don’t see that very often when math and mathematicians are displayed in fiction.

One of the things I loved about this book was that the characters were nameless. Other than Root’s nickname, none of them had names. They were just the Professor, the Housekeeper, the Widow (the Professor’s sister in law), and Root. Their names didn’t matter. They could have been any people in any time in any country. Their story, just like math, is universal, and that’s exactly how this was written. It was gorgeous.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is translated from the Japanese. Normally I have a rough time with translations because a lot of the original written elegance is lost, but not so in this book. The translator, Stephen Snyder, does a marvelous job of maintaining the poetic feel that I’m sure was intended in the original. I had no complaints at all about that. Being a translation didn’t detract from the original.

My favorite lines came from early in the book, from the Professor:

Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.

This quote helped me to understand how difficult this life was for the Professor. Here was a man who had gone on uncharted expeditions and solved mathematical equations that had never been solved before. Now, because of his short memory window, he could only do 80 minutes of work at a time. He spent his days solving problems for contests in math journals, somehow adjusting for his memory, winning prizes more often than not. It was a great example of his willpower and adaptability, to be able to solve those problems, and yet, to him, this is no accomplishment – the solutions were already known by someone else, and he no longer remembered them the next day anyway. The contests were simply a way of filling his time. The numbers comforted him in his loss.

Posted in 2009, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Thistle

lifeWhen an asteroid knocks the moon out of orbit, the world goes crazy. The tides change. Volcanoes erupt that had never been active before. Electricity is no longer dependable. All commerce ceases. One family’s struggle to remain alive through this catastrophe is chronicled in 15-year-old Miranda’s journal.

I’m in two minds about this book, so I’ll start with the negative and move on to the good things afterwards. First let me tell you that I’m not sure I was in the right mood to read this. With all the stress involved in writing my own YA occult thriller, I would have done better with a comfy, quiet book. Reading it really stressed me out, so I was a bit turned off of it while I read. I’m sure that influenced the way I viewed it. It’s possible I would have loved it to pieces had I been in a different place of my life.

I think my biggest problem with the book was the diary format. I couldn’t buy it. It was like the Blair Witch Project – it’s not very realistic that she would have kept the camera rolling as she ran through the woods from a ghost, you know? Sure, the movie was creepy and all, and I’m not making fun of it, but of course the set up involves a serious suspension of disbelief and not everyone has it in them to suspend that much. The diary in this book felt the same way. Miranda would relate pages and pages of full dialog, both before and after the catastrophe. She put in a bunch of stuff that I can’t imagine anyone putting in a journal. Sometimes she was writing as major, horrifying events were happening, while she was dealing with them. Absolutely impossible. So I had a hard time suspending my disbelief. I’ve actually heard that the second book in the series is a third person account of these events and I honestly think I will like that far more. I think it will feel more honest to me, and I kind of wish this had been written that way instead of by diary entries. I think in the end it would have been more powerful for me.

Also, I had a hard time believing some of the things that happen. Or didn’t happen, to be more precise. I won’t debate about the moon and how much influence it has on our weather patterns. I don’t know enough science for that. But I will debate the reactions of people in this book. For example, not once in 10 months is the family ever in any danger of people raiding their house for food. When people die, others in the town let the family of that person have first grabs of the house. I don’t believe it. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I believe families would do everything they could to survive, and that includes stealing other peoples’ food, killing for food, etc. Maybe it’s just because I recently read In a Perfect World, which for all its faults generally had a fairly realistic portrait of the way people act when society falls apart. I would have believed this book more had I seen more of the violence that would have naturally resulted from this sort of situation.

So those are my main issues. There were good things, too. Especially in the last third of the book, I really started to care about the characters. I didn’t want them to die. I felt terrible when anyone died, minor or major character. I could feel the spiral of disintegration. I stopped caring so much about the things above that I said irritated me, forgot that I was reading a diary, and really felt the horror of what was happening to this family. I even dreamed about the end, about finding solutions to counteract the moon’s nearness (my dreams involved very strong magnets buried deep in places around the world, backwards so that they pushed backwards against the moon’s force, which somehow created balance…).

It was family that I really felt strongly. One of the worst things in this book involved Miranda’s father. This might be a minor spoiler, but it’s really not anything huge. Miranda’s parents are divorced. Her dad is remarried and his wife is pregnant when the moon gets too close to Earth. She’s frantic about her parents and wants to drive to Colorado to find them. Miranda’s family lives in Pennsylvania. Dad and his wife come to visit them for a week on their way to Colorado, and Dad is devastated when he leaves. He cries and his wife drives the car. They all know they’ll probably never see each other again. Miranda’s brother, Matt, is extremely angry at Dad because he left them there.

That really made me think. I mean, if his wife wasn’t pregnant, I think the choice would have been easy – he may love his wife, but he should stay to take care of his children and make sure they survive. But she’s pregnant with his child, too, so where should he go? He can’t expect his wife to abandon her family, either. It’s a tough choice, and it really made me think a lot about divorce and remarriages and priorities. I don’t know that I have an answer.

I loved the end. Technically, it was a bit deus ex machina, but in my present mood, something life-affirming was exactly what I needed. I’m not saying everything ends up peachy roses and the moon goes back where it belongs or anything, but I’m glad it didn’t end with, say, Miranda’s diary simply stopping because you know she’s died. I don’t think I could have taken that right now.

I will look forward to reading the sequel, which I think I will like more than this one. But I won’t read it right away. I think I need to take a break and read something quiet.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Gregor the Overlander, by Suzanne Collins

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Thistle

gregorBefore I describe the plot of this book, I want to say that it sounds really, really cheesy when summarized. Please bear with me. I’ll keep it short.

Gregor and his two-year-old sister, Boots (nickname), are doing laundry in their apartment complex’s basement when they investigate an air draft coming through a grate and end up falling hundreds of feet into the Underland. The Underland is an underground world filled with giant cockroaches, spiders, and rats, as well as humans who are so pale they’re translucent. Because of a prophecy written by the original explorer who brought humans to the Underland hundreds of years ago, the rats begin a war against the rest of the creatures, and Gregor finds himself leading a quest to try to save their world.

Okay. Yeah. Yes, it sounds cheesy. When Morrigan picked this book for me to read for our family book club, I was not particularly happy. Giant rats and cockroaches? Underground society? Mm. Sounded too much like a sewer-version of Narnia to me, and I didn’t like Narnia to start with. The only thing this book had going for it was the author: Suzanne Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games, which I loved.

As it turned out, though, this book was far from cheesy. Actually, it was quite wonderful, much different than I expected. Despite the fact that many of the characters are non-human, I felt the same toward them as I did the human characters. They had voices and personalities. And Collins tackled so many issues in this book:

  • She advocated peace whenever possible, fighting only in defense or to save those we love from harm.
  • She talked about loyalty and trust.
  • She touched on the longlasting grief caused in children who have lost parents, as well as the importance of family in general.
  • She addressed understanding others in so many different ways. Gregor was constantly reevaluating the way he saw people (and creatures) based on learning more about them. People he judged badly at one point, he came to understand by the end of the book, even if he never particularly liked them.
  • Beyond that, Gregor was the character who most tried to understand the non-humans, and pushed everyone else to cooperate and understand each other as well. He was almost a poster-boy against discrimination and prejudice.
  • As well as understanding, there were lessons about forgiveness and mercy.
  • Lastly, Collins pushed for hope. Hope for harmonious and cooperative living, hope for peace in the Underland, hope for the lives in the Overland (our world).

I loved it. I can’t say it was without problems – there were a few parts that felt a little forced, as if she directed the plot just a little too heavily – but for the most part, it ran smoothly. It was easy to read in snatches in between writing my NaNo book. Not too difficult to put down, but very easy to pick back up, too. The ending is not a cliffhanger even though it’s the first book in a series – it could be read as a standalone book. That’s a big plus for me.

I do recommend this book, especially if you like middle-grade fiction. I’ve read quite a bit of middle-grade fiction in the last year, and this has been one of my favorites. Plus, it just has so many good messages, so many good things I’d want my kids to learn, that I would have no trouble giving it to younger readers. I’m happy that Morrigan has read the whole series. I used to suspect they were violent books, but they aren’t. I won’t claim there is no violence at all, but none of it is gratuitous, and it is both tactfully handled by the author and regretted by most of the characters.

Posted in 2009, Children's, Prose | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Gray Horses, by Hope Larson

Posted on October 29, 2009 by Thistle

imagesNoemie is a French exchange student in Onion City. She goes through the usual adjustments to a new culture and a new language, and makes a new friend named Anna. At the same time, she’s followed by a photography student who seems to have a crush on her. Honestly, I don’t know if this had so much of a plot as just an impressionist-like journal of Noemie’s start in America. It was cute. I’ve been an exchange student in France, so I know how confusing the beginning of an exchange program can be – and I was part of a group! I couldn’t imagine doing it alone.

The artwork is gorgeous. I particularly liked the thematic dreams that Noemie has while she’s trying to get through her first nights of jet lag. This is a simple, relatable tale, plus I loved all the French scattered throughout (it was translated, though, so you don’t have to worry about not understanding if you don’t speak French). Very enjoyable.

Posted in 2009, Visual, Young Adult | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Haunted Hotel, by Wilkie Collins

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Thistle

hauntedLord Montbarry decides to leave his fiance, Agnes Lockwood, in order to marry the mysterious Countess Narona. Agnes is devastated but forgiving, while the rest of society looks on the whole affair as a scandal. They all believe the Countess is an evil woman with nothing but money in her mind, and their thoughts are confirmed when Lord Montbarry dies shortly after the wedding, while on holiday in Venice. On the outside, his death looks natural, but as his siblings become invested in a new hotel opening in Venice, a hotel converted from the old palace in which Lord Montbarry died, they are haunted by the spirit of their brother and begin to think maybe not everything is as straightforward as it seems.

This is my second experience with Wilkie Collins, after The Woman in White. The Haunted Hotel is a much shorter book, and written later in Collins’ life. It was good, but I can’t say it was as good as The Woman in White. Then again, TWIW is a masterpiece, and I imagine it would be difficult to live up to!

The things I loved about this book:

It got straight into the plot. No gratuitous Victorian rambling in here! The Countess Narona was a very interesting character that I don’t believe the reader every fully gets to see – it makes me wonder what this whole affair looked like from her point of view. The book is far creepier and more gruesome than The Woman in White – it had some startling passages, and I cringed when the hotel manager reached into the discovered hidden vault to find…what he found. The hauntings themselves were fascinating, and I loved how it affected everyone differently. Plus, I just love Venice as a setting for a book!

Things I didn’t love as much:

Honestly, I think my biggest problem with this book is that it was too short! Collins seemed to cram too much in, and I wish he’d drawn it out and taken his time with it. I wouldn’t have minded a bit more Victorian rambling in order to develop the plot and characters more. Towards the middle, there were a couple of heavyhanded lines at the ends of chapters, and the ending was a little too easily resolved. While the characters were wonderful, they felt less round – again, probably because it was such a short book (for Collins, at least).

All in all, the book was great, and it lived up to my expectations for the most part. Somehow I’d heard this was a collection of short stories, and it isn’t. I’m glad it isn’t. While I like short stories, I like them individually and not as collections. I would gladly read more Collins in the future, and I’d recommend this one for those intimidated by his longer works.

Posted in 2009, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Readathon: Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Thistle

LeviathanScottWesterfeldAlek, son of the assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, is on the run for his life as war stirs in Europe. Along with his tutor and fencing master, 15-yr-old Alek treks across Europe in a steam-powered Stormwalker in an attempt to reach the safe grounds of neutral Switzerland.

Deryn Sharp is a 15-yr-old commoner from Britain who wants nothing more than to become an airman and fly on the Darwinist fabricated animal-machines. The problem: she’s a girl, and only boys are allowed to become airmen. Under the false identity of Dylan Sharp, she finds her way onto the Leviathan – a giant whale-ship that’s the crown of the British military.

Alternating storylines every couple chapters until the two collide, Westerfeld retells the events which led up to WWI in an alternate reality that pits steam-powered technology against genetic engineering.

I’m writing this buddy review with Kelly of The Written World.

Kelly: I always thought that book blogs were a bad influence, but Twitter has quickly became a close second! I was going to be good and get this from the library, but then everyone seemed to be talking about it when it came out and suddenly I found myself at the bookstore buying a copy. It was impossible not to once I saw it. It has a gorgeous cover and end pages. Then, there is the wonderful illustrations inside. It looks so wonderful on my shelf! The fact that I own none of his other books and still have several to read did not matter! I think the best way to start this is by me asking you if this book stood up to his other novels? It is obvious why you bought it because I read your blog.

Amanda: I’ve loved just about everything Westerfeld’s written, and yes, Leviathan stands up to that. On the one hand, it was a fun adventure story that pulled me along at a comfortable pace but didn’t make me feel tired. On the other, it taught me a little about history – I love Westerfeld’s end notes with what was fact and fiction – and had a great message about peace, tolerance, and cooperation. One of my favorite things about Westerfeld is the depth and richness of his books. It’s obvious he does a lot of research for each one, and it shows. I’ve become increasingly jaded about a lot of YA lately, because much of what I’ve read just doesn’t have much substance, but Westerfeld is different. Leviathan had a classic feel in a brand new genre.

Kelly: I am still a newbie to Westerfeld, so I will take your word for it! Everything I have read by him, though, I have read this year, so that is saying something. This is classified as a ‘steampunk’ novel. I have never really understood what that meant, so I could have read lots of them in the past and never thought of it that way. What did you think of the steampunk classification? Had you read much steampunk in the past? I recently read The Hunchback Assignment by Arthur Slade, which is also classified as steampunk. I think I liked this book better, though. History is one of my favourite subjects, so even though this was rewritten a bit I am still glad to learn more about a period of history. I agree with you on the addition of the end notes. They were very helpful!

Amanda: I know next to nothing about steampunk, but have been told that it’s alternate history assuming that Charles Babbage actually produced a functional difference engine – that’s what my husband says anyway. I actually have no idea what a functional difference engine is… but I sort of get the impression that steampunk is like taking mechanical technology back 100 years. Of course, Westerfeld also develops the “organic” steampunk idea in Leviathan with the idea that Darwin discovered DNA – what did you think about all the new species, and what they were used for?

Kelly: Yeah, I don’t know what a functional difference engine is either, but it sounds really smart! The idea of the difference species was actually very interesting. I think, like anything, it was a taken a bit too far at times, but the idea of flying vessels being alive was a very cool one. I also like the contrast between the two civilizations, so to speak. One was all about the Darwin inventions, but the other had gone an entirely different way and built fantastic machines. It makes you wonder if we had the technology today to alter DNA so drastically, would we? It would be an entirely different world if it was possible, that’s for sure. What did you think about it?

Amanda: Honestly, I kind of felt the same way as the Clankers did – while the idea of living machine-creatures is interesting, it sounds dangerous and unnatural to me. It’s like cloning in today’s world – and I’m not getting political here, I honestly don’t have opinion on the moral implications of cloning – it just creeps me out personally. The “beasties” did that to me, too. And beyond that, they just seemed really inefficient: when they broke, there wasn’t much could be done. While the Clanker’s machines also seemed inefficient (I smirked at the line that made fun of driving tanks on treads), they felt much more stable and less dangerous. To their owners, at least. But one of my favorite lines from the books came from the merging of the two technologies, when Deryn says, “We’re something different now…A little of us and a little of them.” That sort of wrapped up the whole message of the book for me – that cooperation and two sides contributing to a greater, better technology is the only way to survive and grow. What did you feel like Westerfeld was trying to say?

Kelly: I agree with you that the message was about cooperation being important for survival. I think that will continue to be an important part of the series. I also like to think he was saying that just because the technology is available to do something doesn’t mean that we have to do it. I think it is an important message. What did you think about the characters? Were they believable?

Amanda: Now first I should qualify my answer – I read this book in the middle of the night during Readathon – but I personally found the characters very believable. Alek, the fumbling, sheltered 15-yr-old son of an Archduke trying to prove himself in the real world but mucking everything up. Deryn, a 15 yr old tomboy pretending to be Dylan, a 16 yr old midshipman applicant, fumbling with her attempts to act boyish when all she really wants to do is fly. And then there’s the count and Dr. Barlow and all the rest – they all felt round and intricate, as if Westerfeld knew them personally. But I’ve always liked the way Westerfeld creates his characters. I think that’s one of his strong points, as well as language play. I read in one of his books, I believe Bogus to Bubbly, that he refines his alternate-world slang by using it himself to make sure it sounds natural. It’s so much fun to imagine him walking around saying, “Blisters!” when he swears or using words like “boffin” and “clart.” Had you heard that?

Kelly: Yes, I believe it was in Bogus to Bubbly because I have read about that, too, and I read that book at some point this year. I think it is really great that he tries things out. There isn’t really very much I want to say about the characters that you haven’t all ready touched on. I thought they were written really well. I found myself, though, talking to them in my head because they really do some things that you know something bad is going to happen, but I think it is a mark of a good character when the reader gets caught up in the story so much that they are very invested in what happens to the characters. I look forward to future books to see what happens to them next and how their tentative friendship works out. Is there anything else that you want to talk about?

Amanda: Nope, I think that pretty much covers everything. I can’t wait for Behemoth to come out next year. Supposedly it will be released in October. At the same time, though, I liked where this book ended – a cliff-hanger, but a mild one. You aren’t automatically itching for the next one, like with The Knife of Never Letting Go. It works well as a standalone book, too. But yes, that’s all. I love Westerfeld, and I think he did a magnificent job as usual for this book.

Kelly: Oh, good to know when the second book comes out. I haven’t thought that far ahead to look into it! I am looking forward to it, too, but I don’t have to rush out read it. I can wait. I much prefer that, actually. A promised sequel but not a huge book that is not wrapped up at all and then you have to wait a year to find out what happens next. Hopefully we will both still be blogging next year and then maybe we can review the sequel together, too! Thanks for reviewing this book with me. I look forward to next time!

Amanda: That’s an excellent idea! I look forward to it, too.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Readathon: My Heartbeat, by Garret Freymann-Weyr

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Thistle

myheartbeatEllen is very close to her brother, Link, and his best friend, James. When she begins to question the nature of Link and James’ relationship, however, the delicate balance of friendship, love, and family ties unravels.

I’m actually not sure what to say about this book. I really enjoyed it. I could empathize with each character in the way they dealt with Link’s uncertain sexuality (or didn’t deal with it). There were a lot of good messages about identity and what makes a person gay as opposed to straight or bisexual, and how each person has a different criteria for what they believe makes up homosexuality. For some, the acts themselves make a person gay. For others, the temptation. For others, an entirely different idea altogether.

The book was published in 2002, when it was even harder than today for a teenager to come out to his/her family. Each year that passes, as society becomes less and less homophobic and laws are created to protect the gay community and hopefully one day give them equal rights, it becomes easier for people to accept themselves for who they are. The book is written about a very transitional period. Ellen doesn’t care at all if her brother’s gay, but she doesn’t really understand it, either. Mom only wants Link to be happy with himself. Dad is willing to bribe Link to act straight, afraid that Link will be shunned or marginalized all his life if he “decides” to be gay. Link himself avoids the question at any cost, but also rebels against his father’s attitude. The whole thing is a big, messy pot with a bunch of elements stirred in, none of which are resolved. Not completely, anyway.

Rather than focusing on Link and his problems, however, My Heartbeat chooses to focus more on Ellen. She is the character that brings the question of Link’s sexuality into the open. She talks with her mom, and later admonishes her dad for his ignorance and homophobia. She’s hurt when she loses her close friendship with Link because of her curiosity, but has no idea how to patch things up between them. She’s less dealing with the idea of her brother coming out and more with being shut out because he doesn’t want to deal with the issue at all. Beyond that, she’s never known anyone gay, and has no idea what defines homosexuality. She’s young – 15 – and the normal adolescent complications of life apply less for her, as these more pressing issues come up. And then to top it all off, she’s always been in love with James, and has to figure out if their growing-closer relationship has more to do with Link than with each other.

See? It’s a very difficult book to discuss. There isn’t a point A to point B plot thread, but more of a sifting of emotions. It’s a short glimpse into the life of one family, a portrait frozen in time. Definitely well worth reading, and it deserves its Printz Honor.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Readathon: 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Thistle

84charing84, Charing Cross Road is a collection of letters between Helene Hanff and a group of people in London. The bulk of the letters are to Frank Doel, one of the proprietors of the bookshop at that address. However, there are letters to other employees at the shop, plus members of Frank’s family as well. The letters start in October 1949 and go through October 1969.

When I received this book, it was a lot shorter than I expected. I’d only discovered recently that it was nonfiction rather than fiction, and that it was in epistolary format. I admit, at first I wasn’t thrilled with the book when I began to read it. I kept forgetting to look at the dates, so time would pass more quickly than I’d realized and I’d have to go back. Plus, I really didn’t understand Helene’s voice. She came across as brash and strange to me, the worst sort of American. Towards the middle, however, I realized it was a joking voice, and that I’d been taking her too seriously. Once again, I’m sure this was a problem with me reading so fast during readathon. This is a book I definitely want to revisit, though I probably wouldn’t have except for the end.

Spoilers going forward, so please skip if you don’t want to know.

The reason this book really struck a chord with me instead of being forgettable was the abrupt end to it. Somehow, though I hadn’t thought I’d cared much about these people at all – I hadn’t gotten to know them well enough through letters – when the sudden letter came that Frank had died, I had a jolt of tears come to my eyes. I hadn’t realized their correspondence stopped because of death! I should have, but I didn’t. For twenty years, these two people wrote back and forth, never meeting, never talking about much other than books, and yet they formed this longterm friendship that devastated me with its end. I hadn’t realized how powerful the book was. It crept up on me. I want to go back and read this more slowly, paying more attention to the dates and the side characters that only got a letter or two dedicated to them. I want to understand more about these lives.

Posted in 2009, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Readathon: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Thistle

graveyardA mysterious man sneaks into a certain house and kills all the family members except the youngest – an 18m old toddler whose name is never known – who manages to escape into a nearby graveyard. The ghosts there adopt him, name him Nobody (or “Bod” for short), and raise him the best they know how. Because Bod is adopted by spirits, he walks the line between the living and the dead, and can see things that most living creatures can’t see. As he grows up, he starts to realize his life is anything but normal, but when he tries to interact with the world outside the graveyard, he discovers danger beyond the cemetery’s borders. The man who tried to kill him as a baby is still out there, and time is running out.

I loved it. Just loved it! This is my new favorite Gaiman book, topping Stardust, which I read during April’s readathon. It was so much fun to read, the illustrations were gorgeous, and all the various plotlines were well tied up at the end. One of the qualms I tend to have with Gaiman’s books is that the endings are too neat, or too easy for the characters. The obstacles they have to overcome are rarely hard ones, at least in the books I’ve read. But I didn’t feel like that in The Graveyard Book. Bod has to battle some pretty scary monsters/people, he has to learn about himself and grow while he does so, and he loses some important things in the process. It’s balanced and fair.

What an excellent book! So good that after I was done reading, I immediately handed it over to my 9 year old so he could read it before I had to take it back from the library. Of course, one might wonder about my parenting skills when I hand off a book dealing with murder, ghosts, and monsters to my young children. However, there was nothing morbid, gory, or terribly scary about The Graveyard Book. It wasn’t cutesy by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely a children’s book. It had just the right atmosphere for Halloween, fun and adventurous without me having to worry about giving my son nightmares (like Coraline did).

Last year, I decided I was very on the fence about Gaiman. I enjoyed Coraline (the first thing I read by him) but hated American Gods (read right afterwards). I didn’t try him again until Stardust, which was excellent. Now, I love The Graveyard Book. For awhile I thought maybe I just enjoyed his young adult and younger books, but I think I’ve gained enough confidence now to go try Anansi Boys. Hopefully my second experience with his adult books will squash the bad experience with American Gods!

Posted in 2009, Children's, Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment