Review: Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

Posted by greengeekgirl — May 19, 2013

Book: Crapalachia

Author: Scott McClanahan

Published: March 2013 by Two Dollar Radio

First Lines: “There were 13 of them. The children had names that ended in Y sounds.”

Rating: 4.25/5 calls to 911 to get the ambulance to take you to the store to buy 7-Up for your son

HOLY BALLS YOU GUYS I AM WRITING A BOOK REVIEW. Yes, yes, I actually read my ass a book and now I’m reviewing the motherfucker*.

*Apologies to Scott McClanahan and Two Dollar Radio for referring to the book as “motherfucker.” I have no evidence at all that the book fucked any mothers.

I didn’t know anything about Crapalachia when it arrived in my mailbox. I didn’t read the blurb on the back of the book. I knew two things going into it: one, that Scott McClanahan had a somewhat cheeky way of referring to Appalachia, to which I can relate, having my own roots sprawling through the same area of the world; two, as a setting, it would (or should) feature highly in the book, since the cover had “A biography of a place” as the tagline.

I have no damn idea how to sum up how I feel about this book, and that’s the truth. So, I’m not going to try to sum it up. Here are some thoughts I had about this book:

I didn’t get any sense of place from the book, even though Appalachia seemed to be intended to be present enough to be an additional character. I grew up in Kentucky and my mom lived in West Virginia (where the book takes place), so I admit I had some expectations; I didn’t really feel Appalachia in this book. Other than some brief references to coal miners and coal mining, it could have been set in a bunch of different places.
After I readjusted my brain from expecting a story about Appalachia, I thought his stories about his family were just about perfect. So much so that I actually just deleted a bunch of stuff I wrote and bumped up the star rating a half-star. No, it wasn’t the book I expected to read. But it was a book I really enjoyed reading once my brain wrapped itself around the actuality of the book.
I found McClanahan’s style a little jarring at first, but it smoothed out quickly.
People who liked Running With Scissors and/or The Perks of Being a Wallflower will probably enjoy this book. Or people who generally like books featuring fucked-up families.
I’m half-saddened, half-happy that McClanahan felt the need to add an appendix to the book to talk about what was true and what he had taken liberties with. Saddened for the obvious reason–has it really become necessary to strip away the magic of a book because some people can’t friggin’ figure out that literature is not the same thing as journalism? (Thank you, James Frey, for putting one over so hard on Oprah that this is now a Big Fucking Deal.) McClanahan, however, handled the appendix so well that it was a great addition to the book. I’ve read other books where the “confession” retroactively diminished the power of the story I’d read, but this one didn’t, and I was glad.
Reading this book directly after reading a book by Barbara Kingsolver is probably not the best idea and might have been what flummoxed my brain.

Overall: yes, I think this is a book to read. Once I stopped looking for Appalachia, the magic of the stories got under my skin and wouldn’t let go. The characters rolled off the page and tapped me on the shoulder. I laughed and I grew somber. I felt. I related. Good job, Mr. McClanahan.

Review: Double Feature by Owen King

Posted by lucysfootball — April 26, 2013

Book: Double Feature

Author: Owen King

Published: March 2013 by Scribner, 419 pages

Date Read: April 2013

First Line: ”The steel-on-steel whisk of the curtain rings scraping along the rod seemed to come from the sky, and for the last seven or eight seconds of his dream, Sam Dolan found himself turning in a circle, searching for the source of the sound, but there was no one else in the vast parking lot.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 5/5 well-known indie actors brandishing a replica of Bilbo’s sword Sting purchased from SkyMall with an (ZOMG!) actual, glow-in-the-dark blade!

Review: In 2006, I found a copy of Owen King’s We’re All in This Together on the library’s New Release shelf. It was excellent. So excellent, in fact, once I finished it, I turned right around and purchased myself a copy to own (which luckily I don’t do very often, as my bookshelves are overloaded to the breaking point and there is no room in here for even one more. Not even a TINY additional bookshelf. I’ve checked. I’ve measured. NO MORE ROOM.)

I waited patiently (fine, you guys know me, I wasn’t at all patient, I stalked his author page like a creeper) to see what King would produce next, and selfishly hoped it would be a longer work – if he’d won me over so completely with his short stories (and one haunting novella), I was eager to see what he’d do with a lengthier work.

I was completely in the right to be anticipatory.

Double Feature is one of those books where you not only fall in love with the characters, you get to know them. They’re very real. Flaws-and-all real. I love characters that are just like people I’d meet in my own life. People in books are all too often either ALL GOOD or ALL BAD or they’re VERY VERY GOOD with ONE FATAL FLAW or they’re just A METAPHOR FOR SOMETHING ELSE or what have you, and that gets tiresome, because real live people walking around on the earth, just trying their hardest to not screw it up too badly? We’re not all good, or all bad, or a metaphor for anything. We’re a gray area. We sometimes spectacularly mess things up, to the point of not being able to fix them. We sometimes are capable of great things. And we sometimes stagnate and just go about our day-to-day and go to work and live our lives and try really hard to keep our heads above water. That’s what real people do. And that’s what the people in this book do, and oh, did I love them for it.

Sam Dolan is a young, optimistic filmmaker when we first meet him, working on his very first production: an indie piece called Who We Are. His father is Booth Dolan, an over-the-top B-movie actor who Sam has never felt close to. His mother, Allie, has recently passed away and Sam hasn’t gotten over it yet. And then something happens with his movie, and I can’t tell you what it is, because the reveal of that was so brilliantly written that I actually half-covered my face and said, “Oh. Oh, no, oh, shit, no, really? SHIT.” And may have laughed a little, because that’s what you do when something is really, really uncomfortable. (Well, it’s what I do, anyway.)

The book moves between times; to Sam’s childhood, to years after the movie situation. We meet the players in Sam’s life: his roommate Wesley, who writes a review blog for things people send him and refuses to leave the house; his ex-girlfriend Polly who hasn’t quite settled into the ex role yet and her burly Germanic baseball-player husband Jo-Jo; Sam’s bitterly brilliant half-sister Mina; his godfather Tom, who can’t stop building rooms onto his sprawling house, even though he lives there alone; and Tess, the television producer who might just be a match for Sam’s tendency to run away from anything resembling a commitment.

These people are real, and flawed, and fantastic. You want to invite them over for dinner (and maybe hide the knives before they arrive.) You want to spend time with them, talking to them and getting to know them and laughing with them and being a part of their lives. There’s a feel of Irving to these people; that same lovable misfit quality, that same fierce love you feel for them when you get to know them. The book is also very intelligent, very witty, and very wise. And at one point there’s a little poetry, and you know how that wins me over, right? (Spoiler alert in case you don’t know: it does. It very much does.)

I sped through the book this week, because I wanted to know what happened. But that meant it was going to end. And I didn’t want it to end. So I was torn between wanting to finish and never, ever wanting to finish. I suppose there are worse things to happen in the world; I just know turning the last page made me very melancholy, because it was done.

I’m lucky enough to be going to see the author read from the book tomorrow night and will be getting my (sadly, water-damaged, as I was caught in a rainstorm last week with it, stupid rainstorm) copy of the book signed tomorrow night. The characters get to live on for one more day for me, in the author’s voice, no less. I have no complaints about that. I’ll be glad to meet up with them again.

Review: selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle

Posted by lucysfootball — April 19, 2013

Book: selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee

Author: Megan Boyle

Published: November 2011 by Muumuu House, 96 pages

First Line: ”i could never be a sports writer, unless my assignment was to write ‘sports sports sports sports sports’ for three pages”

Genre/Rating: Poetry; 4/5 lists of your most embarrassing moments in life, dating back to age 5

Review: Confession: I don’t know how best to review this book.

For all of my love of poetry, I’m somewhat of a traditionalist. I like free verse (and it’s the form I use); I also can admire (and lust after, because I’m just not at all good at it) a well-rhymed poem with a more rigid structure.

I’m sure there’s a categorization for Boyle’s work. I’m sure someone’s come up with a name for it. I haven’t been able to find one online. Maybe this type of poetry is old hat, and therefore everyone assumes it doesn’t need to be categorized? Maybe they think there’s no need to categorize it? Maybe I’m just strange for my desire to put a name on it?

It’s part confessional blog post; it’s part prose poem; it’s part list poem; it’s part letter to a friend; it’s part text message; it’s part Tweet. I don’t know how else to describe it. She writes using all lower-case letters, very little punctuation, and very few of the poems have titles, other than a date. Is it experimental? I’d say yes, but only because I’ve personally never seen anything like it. Like I said, maybe this is happening all over and I just haven’t seen it before. I’ll be the first to admit that new volumes of poetry aren’t easy to find at my library.

It’s poetry for the digital age. It’s got the confessional feel of Sexton, but with a 21st century twist. It’s got a very off-the-cuff way about it; it’s a blog, broken into line breaks and stanzas. It’s equal parts funny, relatable, and heartbreaking. The narrator – whether it’s the author, or an unnamed narrator, it’s never specified – is very much a woman of our age: in her late twenties, dealing with technology, romance, food issues, media, family, friends, pets, work, school. It’s poetry for a generation that feels alienated from poetry. I love it for that; I love it for opening up poetry for an age that might consider poetry to not be “for” them – to hold no interest for them, to be something for an older age, maybe.

Personally, I find Boyle’s poems most successful, for me, with her list poems – her “unpublished tweets” (such as “seems…hard…to care about anything…lol…” – who on Twitter doesn’t at least have a mental list of these?); her “everyone i’ve had sex with,” detailing each and every person she’s been with since she started being sexually active; her “embarrassing moments,” listing her most embarrassing moments in life, from age 5 to now – my favorite line? the last: “email from my dad saying he’s read ‘everyone i’ve had sex with’ (age 23)” – and her “lies i have told,” both listing the lies she’s told and seeming to try, in a roundabout way, to analyze why she might have told them.

When Sexton and Plath and the like started writing their confessional poetry, the critics were horrified. Women shouldn’t be talking in such a frank way about their lives, sex, their failures, their (gasp!) emotions. This book is the child of the confessional poetry movement; confessional poetry for those with a short attention span, for those who get their literature in short bursts of light from a computer screen. “most of my time on the internet is spent refreshing the same pages repeatedly,” Boyle writes. “i wonder if they’re going to tell ghost stories about social networking sites someday”. They get graphic, sometimes, sexual, personal – but we’re the babies of the internet age, we’re used to that. Aren’t we?

The only criticism I have – and it’s minor, and it’s personal – is that the book begins to feel a bit repetitive, after a while. But that may be on purpose, and a conscious choice the author made. It’s a very stream-of-consciousness style of writing, and our minds can be a repetitive place, as anyone who’s been stuck in a rut can attest.

I don’t know if this is the future of poetry, or just the direction Boyle herself has taken, but either way, it was an interesting format, and I look forward to reading more by the author. Poetry’s constant ability to change with the times makes me happy. It’s how I know it’s going to survive long after I’m gone.

Review: A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

Posted by lucysfootball — April 10, 2013

Book: A Hologram for the King

Author: Dave Eggers

Published: June 2012 by McSweeney’s, 328 pages

Date Read: March 2013

First Lines: ”Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was May 30, 2010. He had spent two days on planes to get there.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 3.75/5 bottles of moonshine, drunk alone in furtive gulps long after midnight, that make you think performing surgery on yourself is a very good idea

Review: I met Dave Eggers once.

It is true! He gave a reading at one of our local colleges, and after the reading, he did a book signing. He was very polite and very kind, even though he was there forever signing books and the line was very long. He wrote something like “your beautiful smile lit up the room” in my friend’s book, and that made her so happy she beamed like the sun. I loved that about him.

I know a lot of people think Dave Eggers is a hipster god. I think he’s fine. I like him just fine, but I like a lot of authors. I think he does a lot of good work and I like McSweeney’s a great deal and know he founded it. He works a lot with disadvantaged youth. He seems like a good guy. I think I’ve only read one of his books – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – and have had The Wild Things on my to-read shelf for ages, but haven’t read it yet. I like him just fine.

Not surprisingly, I liked this book…just fine. A tiny little bit more than just fine, I guess. Just a bit under liked-it-a-lot.

Alan Clay is a consultant for an IT firm. He’s had a string of failures – his marriage, his various businesses, his relationship with his father. He thinks he’s dying of cancer. He can’t afford to pay his daughter’s tuition for her next year of college. He arrives in Saudi Arabia with his young, dynamic team of fellow consultants to present technology to the king. If this works, he will have enough money to do what he wants, send his daughter to college, take his house off the market. But in Saudi Arabia, things don’t run as Alan plans. The timeline seems to be much slower than he expects. There is no sense of urgency. Everyone is waiting for the king – but the king, much like Godot, never seems to arrive. And Alan seems to be looking at yet another failure in a long line of failures.

As a rule, I like books like this – a man pushed to the limit, at the end of his rope, a man who has to make a change or end up a casualty of life. I like them because I like to see what actions the character takes to get themselves out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. I like to see the activity. What I didn’t like about this is there was very little activity. Which is, I suppose, more realistic – life, at times, seems to be all about inactivity – but I don’t know that I want to read about inactivity.

Alan didn’t do much. He was given opportunities to grab life by the balls and didn’t even make a snatch at it. He just let things pass him by. He seemed beaten, weary, depressed, down. And I know, this is realism. I know that. But I wanted him to fight. I wanted him to say, no, not today, I’m going to win this. And every time I thought he might – nope. Same old nothing.

That being said, the writing was beautiful. Eggers’ prose is haunting and spare and evocative. I love his words. I liked the characters, and I did appreciate the realism (even if I was wishing for a little more optimism in there.) I liked reading about Saudi Arabia – I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything about that area before.

Overall, not a book I’d unequivocably recommend, but not a book I’d steer people away from, either. It was good read, a solid one, and not a waste of time. And Dave Eggers, thank you for being so kind at the book signing. I will always remember that. We waited a very long time in line and you could have been an asshat, but you totally grinned like we were the only ones in the room.

Mine says “Do not turn away from the light!” This is a signed copy of “Giraffes? Giraffes!” which he didn’t write, but it’s a McSweeney’s book, so he signed it anyway. Also, read it, because it will make you laugh so hard you have a coughing fit.

You should read this: História, História by Eleanor Stanford

Posted by greengeekgirl — April 6, 2013

Book: História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands

Author: Eleanor Stanford

Published: March 2013 by CCLaP

First Lines: ”We landed on the island of Sal on a July afternoon. We had been flying over unbroken ocean for hours, and suddenly we were descending, despite the fact that there was no land in view.”

Rating: 4.5/5 songs about sodadi, or deep longing

Before I even start this review, I want to point out something awesome about this book, and apparently this applies to all books put out in ebook format by CCLaP (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography): you can download e-copies of this book directly from their website for free. Not just a pdf, but also a MOBI or an ePub. Free. If you like it, you can pay voluntarily, any amount that you choose. So, if you think you’d like the book, go here and download it for your e-reader. Please also consider donating to CCLaP if you read the book, because this ebook policy? is fantastic.

História, História is a memoir in essay form, sort of like David Sedaris’s books (although not similar in writing style)–the essays are separate but also form a whole work when put together, rather than being fragmented. Eleanor Stanford tells the story of her time volunteering in the Peace Corps, during which she was stationed in Cape Verde, islands off the coast of Africa that were settled by the Portuguese. She talks about the language, which isn’t Portuguese but a derivative called Creole (Kriolu); she talks about the people, curiously neither African nor Portuguese, and not fitting in with either; she talks about her marriage, trembling on ever-shakier ground.

Stanford’s prose is vivid; I could feel Cape Verde around me. To me, it felt like our travels through Mexico, especially the times we drove past the tourist areas and into small towns where the roads were dusty and unpaved. I could put myself there, and I could feel her love for the people, the culture, and the language. Her prose is also lovely, but without being flowery or affected. Stanford has a knack for including details that illuminate and nixing details that would bog down the story.

I loved the way that Stanford intertwined her personal journey and the culture of the islands, but I was initially disturbed when Stanford turned her observational skills on herself; twenty-two at the time that the events were taking place, the girl in the book was . . . well, a bit whiny. Several pages after my thinking that, though, Stanford demonstrated that she has keen hindsight vision: “Later, I would want to shake that twenty-two year old girl, to tell her to get over herself, to stop being so serious”. I saw then that Stanford had deliberately and perfectly encapsulated that state of being twenty-two, not quite a full adult but certainly no longer a child. If it made me uncomfortable for book-Ellie, it’s because I remember all too well being in that state; I would also love to go back and shake some sense into myself.

I actually really appreciated the arc of herself as a character; she unfolded her troubles subtly, without beating the reader about the head with them. I worried that it would become a work of first-world self-indulgence, a risk that we always take when we read about Americans going to less-privileged areas of the world. Stanford wrote about herself candidly, without inviting pity but allowing us to be compassionate for the girl she was; she wrote about Cape Verde in the same way. I have a lot of respect for Stanford showing us her life from that time, at an age that many of us would love to forget ever existed.

I only wish I could have been reading this in San Quintín, where it’s too windy to fish and the beach is made of dunes. I definitely understand the feeling of sodadi, a kriolu word that Stanford explains means something like an aching longing. (Can you tell I’m a little heartsick for Mexico lately?) I really enjoyed this book, even if it stirred up a lot of longing feels. I hope you give it a shot, as well (especially since you can read the ebook for free. FREE YOU GUYS).

Reviews: 8 Pounds and Dead Letters by Chris F. Holm

Posted by lucysfootball — April 3, 2013

Books: 8 Pounds: Eight Tales of Crime, Horror and Suspense and Dead Letters: Stories of Murder and Mayhem

Author: Chris F. Holm

Published: October 2010, 94 pages (8 Pounds) and February 2013, 116 pages (Dead Letters) by Poisonville Press

First Lines: ”It was bound to happen, I suppose. There was a time, of course, when I didn’t think so. We were too smart, I thought. Too careful. But there’s men’s plans and then there’s God’s plans, and it looks for damn sure like God didn’t think much of mine.” “Seven Days of Rain” from 8 Pounds

“First time I met Chip McRae, I thought he was a god.” “The Putdown,” from Dead Letters

Genre/Rating: Short stories (crime/horror); 4.5/5 young girls with a horrific hunger in their eyes (8 Pounds); 4.5/5 voices muttering evil truths from the laundry room (Dead Letters)

Review: When sj tells me to read a book, I listen.

I’m sure you have friends like this. At least, I hope you do. If you don’t, you need to find some. Friends who know your taste well enough to know when they run across a book that’s perfect for you, they say, “You need to read this.” And if you’re smart, you pay attention.

sj’s review of 8 Pounds made me sit up and take notice. I’m not a huge crime fiction fan, let’s be honest about this, but I love short horror fiction. She promised me I’d love all of the stories, even the crime fiction, because Holm was just that good.

She was right. I inhaled 8 Pounds and immediately purchased Dead Letters (which she also loved – what can I say, we have similar taste) because I wanted more of his short fiction as soon as possible.

And even though I’m not a crime fiction fan, I’m officially a Holm fan. The man can write. Oh, can the man write. His mind is a twisty place, a dark one, and it’s quicksilver-fast. I couldn’t get enough. He can do in just a few words what some authors attempt (and fail) in an entire novel. He’s talented and he’s wryly funny and he’s very intelligent. If he can manage to make me forget my dislike of crime fiction? Well, he’s a talented man.

The standouts for me? In 8 Pounds, they were “A Better Life” (the terrors that lurk when you think you’re at your safest), “8 Pounds” (friendship, passion, and betrayal), and “The Well.” I can’t tell you about “The Well.” It’s brief, and I want you to go into it knowing nothing about it. Just know you aren’t going to be able to forget it once you read it. It’s…dark. And it’s terrifying. And it’s the perfect little horror story in fewer words than most people use in an inter-office memo.

In Dead Letters, written only a couple of years later, the ones that stood out far outnumber the ones that didn’t work as well for me – a sign, for me, the author is getting better. And since he was already so very, very good – well, this is a good sign. Such a good sign. “The Putdown,” about how the past continues to shape the present. “A Night at the Royale” and “Action,” as good as any Tarantino movie. “The Final Bough,” an homage to a Christmas classic in a way you’ve never imagined. “The Hitter,” a surprisingly tender story about a contract killer – well, a killer of contract killers. “Green,” where family ties come out of nowhere - and tie you tighter than you thought.

And “One Man’s Muse.” Oh, this story. I don’t even have the words. If you’re a Stephen King fan, you must read this story. It’s an homage to King, but also a perfect story on its own. I can tell you, without ruining too much – it’s about the trailer King lived in when he wrote his first books, before he was able to move somewhere a little less run-down. Think about that trailer. What might still reside there, in the trailer where Carrie and ‘salem’s Lot were written? How could such a place be benign?

Short fiction is very easy to get wrong. You’d think it was easy – it’s shorter, right? Therefore, easier? No. It’s a lot easier to screw something up that has to be perfect in just a few words. In longer work, you have more time to hook someone. In shorter work, you have limited time to win over your reader.

Holm wins us over easily, seemingly without even trying. I’ll be watching him in the future – I’m going to want to read more of his work. Especially if he keeps getting better as time passes.

Review: A Million Heavens by John Brandon

Posted by lucysfootball — March 24, 2013

Book: A Million Heavens

Author: John Brandon

Published: July 2012 by McSweeney’s, 272 pages

First Line: ”The nighttime clouds were slipping across the sky as if summoned.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 3/5 songs, written by the man you loved who died, filling your mind until you can think of nothing else

Review: I am an unabashed John Brandon fan.

His Citrus County was one of my favorite books of last year, and I’m still looking to get my hands on his Arkansas (my library isn’t the best at stocking indie-published novels, and the price tag is still a little steep for my Kindle, but I’m going to break down one of these days. I’m a terrible impulse-buyer when it comes to the Kindle.)

(Also, can we just marvel over this cover? Gorgeous. McSweeney’s really excels at cover art.)

I was so looking forward to A Million Heavens, and after a few initial disappointing chapters, I thought, “it will get better. It just has to hit its stride.”

Unfortunately, it never really did.

Set in New Mexico, it follows, in small, somewhat strange chapters, the events that happen to various townsfolk over a bleak winter. A young prodigy lies in a coma while his father sits by his bedside, helpless. People sit outside in vigil, for various reasons. A woman on the run from her life attempts a new start with a man with a checkered past. A lost young musician mourns the death of the man she loved, which is proving to also be the death of her muse. The mayor of the town tries to find himself through his love for a woman who is possibly off-limits. And a wolf travels through the town, trying in vain to retain his wildness in a town that’s becoming increasingly industrialized and filled with the mystery of humans.

The problem I had was that I cared about very few of the stories/characters. I found myself waiting, somewhat impatiently, for the chapters involving Cecelia, the musician, and her departed love, Reggie (who actually gets a voice and a storyline from the beyond.) They were the two characters who seemed the most fleshed-out, whose fates and outcomes I actually cared about. The rest of them, although not poorly written (Brandon couldn’t write clunky prose if he tried; the man writes beautifully) were…somewhat cardboard. Uninteresting. I was not invested in their stories, in their fates. I was reading to see what happened to Cecelia; if she would redeem herself, if she would find what she was looking for under the New Mexico stars, in the damage she found herself drawn to cause. I was reading to see if Reggie would be able to finally communicate his love for her from beyond, because he’d missed his chance when he was on earth.

I’m not flat-out panning the book. Brandon’s prose is leaps and bounds better than most people’s I read, and I will continue to read his work, and eagerly await what he publishes next. But after the wonder and mystery and magic of Citrus County, I found myself disappointed by this one. I know he’s capable of more and of better. I appreciate that he was trying something different and outside the box, and I like that he’s attempting to evolve; I just don’t think this book worked on all levels.

Review: Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Posted by lucysfootball — February 24, 2013

Book: Tell the Wolves I’m Home

Author: Carol Rifka Brunt

Published: June 2012 by The Dial Press, 368 pages

First Line: ”My sister, Greta, and I were having our portrait painted by our uncle Finn that morning because he knew he was dying.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 5/5 teenage girls who dream of becoming falconers so they can learn how to keep those they love from flying away

Review: I have a love for beautiful cover art. This is some sincerely beautiful cover art. However, we all know that, as they say, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and I’m sure you’ve all been led astray by some flashy cover art (or a person with a rakish smile hiding a wolfish heart.)

Tell the Wolves I’m Home is one of the best books I’ve read in…weeks. Months. Possibly almost a year. I don’t know that anything I can say about this book can do it justice, but I knew I couldn’t not review it, because I want you all to read it. Immediately. As soon as you can get your hands on it. It’s just that good. It’s absolutely luminous. Is there such a thing as a perfect book? Probably not. Nothing’s perfect. But this one comes about as close as anything does.

June Elbus is thirteen. In the throes of awkwardness. Lumbering where the rest of her family is willowy and perfect. The only person that understands her, truly understands her, is her uncle Finn: a kindred spirit, a kind soul, her godfather, an artist who lives in a jewel of an apartment in New York City. It is 1986 and Uncle Finn is dying from a new disease that no one knows much about, other than it’s scary and communicable: AIDS. And when he goes, June is left alone, adrift, with no one to talk to, no one to share things with, no one who sees the real person behind her eyes. She worries no one ever will come close. “…once you had a friend like Finn, it was almost impossible to find someone…who came anywhere close. Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close,” June muses. And with those words, she had my heart. I’ve lost people like this. I’m still looking for them. I still miss them.

Once Finn dies, the truth starts coming out. Who Finn really was. Who he really loved. Why June’s mother was so conflicted. Why June’s sister Greta has become so distant, so cruel. Who the tall man with the sad eyes was, banned from Finn’s funeral. How you can keep going, even though your heart is broken. How deep our capacity for love is, how our hearts are so vast, so filled with forgiveness and humanity and kindness and secrets that we keep for the good of all that are involved. How there are infinite different types of love in the world, and how they are all valid. How they are all to be honored, all to be repected.

I devoured this book in two days while working the light booth for a play at my theater. I wept almost every third page at some discovered beauty, at some poetic turn of phrase, at a beautiful idea or creative turn Brunt took with the narrative. I loved the characters. I felt their pain. I wanted to lift them, whole-cloth, from the words and put them safely in my pockets.

“Maybe you could read something else,” the director of the play asked me the second night, worried because of the previous night’s tears, when I put out my book and a supply of Kleenex in preparation for finishing the novel. “I need to know what happens,” I said. “I can’t pick up anything else until I know.” He smiled and laughed and nodded. (He’s currently reading The Dark Tower series; he’s deep into Roland and his ka-tet. He understands needing to know what happens.)

This book rightly was given high accolades last year; it deserved every one. I lost count of the passages I marked and wrote down to peruse later. I lost count of the times I dissolved into tears over something that rang so true with me it was like I was the bell and the book was the clapper. It’s early in the year; I’m sure I’ll find something this beautiful before 2013 peters out on us in a fine haze of glitter and confetti and fireworks. But for the time being, I’m going to let this one resonate for a while. I’m going to let June’s wolves howl in my heart as long as they want.

Review: Fakes Anthology, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

Posted by greengeekgirl — February 6, 2013

Book: Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

Editors: David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

Published: October 2012 by W.W. Norton, 368 pages

First line: “Disclaimer: nothing in this story is true.”

Rating: 3.75/5 fonts not used in this edition overall, but with some 5/5 apology poems from William Carlos Williams pieces in the book

(cracks knuckles) Well, I think I remember how to do this review thing, so let’s dive in, shall we?

This anthology caught my eye because of a review I read in the LARB (and by “read,” I mostly mean skimmed). The concept of the book revolves around the “fraudulent artifacts” in the title; it reminds me of a cross among blogs like Letters of Note, which contains real artifacts giving us fascinating peeks at people and situations via correspondence, pieces from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and fake Amazon reviews, the writing of which has become an art form unto itself. (The reviews for Looking For … the Best by David Hasselhoff kept me entertained for literally hours. Also, the three wolf moon shirt.)

The “artifacts” in the anthology range from an irate letter from William Carlos Williams’ “roommate” (“Will, you are a dick. You’re goddamn right I was saving those plums for breakfast”), to an essay from Lorrie Moore on how to become a writer (“First, try to be something, anything, else”), to reviews of Chris Bachelder’s beard, to a series of police reports that unfold a more personal story. Many of the stories have elements of humor, which is to be expected, given the playfulness of the idea of a false artifact; some of the stories also deeply move the reader. My breath caught more than once.

The anthology goes deeply enough into its concept that many of the usual bits of an anthology (acknowledgements, fonts used in this edition, the index, end notes, etc.) were also fakes. Some of these were good, others I found to be a bit tedious. I also had the feeling that the book was actually two separate books, if that makes any sense; continuing the fakes was a neat idea, but it also gave me the feeling that I was in a theatre still watching a play after all of the house lights had come up and people were starting to leave.

A couple of other things that I didn’t love about the volume. One was the introduction, which goes into the whole process of writing a fraudulent artifact (I like reading introductions… but not this one, I found it dry and I didn’t want to peek behind that curtain). The second thing, and perhaps this is just me, is that I felt a few of the pieces were far too long, considering they were written as concept pieces. One early piece, “From Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to my Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood” (yeah, you can already see in the title, it’s a bit wordy), had me a tad frustrated–because I liked the piece, but when you’re reading a piece in an affected style, it can be mentally taxing if it’s overlong.

But hey, that’s one of the good things about anthologies–if a piece doesn’t suit your fancy, skip it.

I definitely recommend picking up this anthology, especially if you’re the kind of person who reads any of those sites I linked above. While I did have a few issues with it, I know that I will dip into it again and again to read the many pieces that I did like, because they were outstanding.

Review: Inukshuk by Gregory Spatz

Posted by lucysfootball — January 29, 2013

Book: Inukshuk

Author: Gregory Spatz

Published: June 2012 by Bellevue Literary Press, 220 pages

Date Read: January 2013

First Line: ”He was on lunch duty when it happened, jacketless because of the Chinook wind and composing in his head a line or two about the color of the sky reflected in the wet school-yard pavement, the ice-rimmed, quickly vanishing puddles, clouds whipping past upside down…sun oil water.”

Genre/Rating: Literary fiction; 1.5/5 teeth falling out of one’s gums due to scurvy (arrr, matey)

(Copy provided by the publisher)

Review: This book was on my “I am currently reading this” list on Goodreads for six months. SIX MONTHS.

To be fair, I was only really reading it for about a week of those six months. The rest of the time I was sighing, deeply, thinking about having to read it.

Yes, it’s true. The life of a book reviewer is not always fun and games, kiddos. Sometimes we take books to review that hook us with a fascinating blurb and we read them only to find out they just aren’t for us. Some reviewers have a rule for this: if they don’t like the book, they won’t review it. I don’t have any such rule. If I took a book, I feel like I need to review it. (That means, people who sent me books like six months or so ago before my free time dwindled away to nothing, that yes, I will be reading and reviewing your books. Eventually. I promise. You will probably have moved onto your next novel by then and my review will mean nothing to you, but I will get to them.)

Inukshuk (the title refers to a stone landmark or cairn built by the Native tribes of the Arctic; they were used for navigation purposes, or to possibly mark sacred places. Sadly, this is the most poetic thing in the entire novel, and one of the characters? IS A POET) is about John and Thomas, a father and son who have moved to a barren Canadian town after Jane, John’s wife, Thomas’ mother, left them to pursue her work-related dream. John teaches; Thomas is an outcast at the school. John dreams of writing and giving his life meaning again, either through said writing or through a newly-rekindled connection with an old flame; Thomas only has passion about two things, convincing the girl he’s fooling around with after school to have sex with him, and writing a book about men attempting to discover the Northwest passage. In order to truly live the life of the men in his book, Thomas decides to give himself scurvy. John doesn’t notice this, as mired in his own life as he is.

This is truly all that happens in this book.

I didn’t care for any of the characters. There was no one I rooted for. John was whiny; Thomas was unparented, so I could see why he was acting the way he did; Thomas’ girlfriend had such abysmal self-esteem I just wanted to sit her down and give her a talking-to; John’s wife was so flighty I wanted to scream at her that once you reach a certain age, you had RESPONSIBILITIES, dammit, and the book Thomas was writing, which would sometimes begin to take over entire chapters, bored me to tears.

The writing wasn’t terrible. The author knows his way around sentence structure and grammar. I think it was the subject matter and the characters. No one had a character arc I was rooting for, and no one truly DID anything. Everyone was stagnant. In cases like this, you are not compelled to pick up the book and keep reading. Hence the reason I, myself, was stagnant, and sat glaring at the book for six months, hating that I had to finish it.

Other reviews for the book online were a lot more gracious than mine; perhaps it’s a taste thing, and others like books like this. I’m willing to accept that my tastemaker is broken. It would explain why I live on a diet of Crystal Light and chicken fingers.

However, I don’t think I can take too many more books that take me six months to read. I’m not getting any younger, you guys, seriously.