Setting the Bar

Ever since I read The Handmaid’s Tale in college , I have been a tremendous Margaret Atwood fan. I have read all of her books, multiple times and had the privilege and pleasure of meeting her at law school when she was promoting Oryx and Crake.  When I heard that she had a new book coming out, I quickly put my name on the list for the book at the library and got the book first when it came in.

The Year of the Flood begins in year 25, which is the year that the flood happens. It is, in essence, a dry flood - we learn fairly quickly and early on that the flood is an epidemic that has spread  quickly among humans and has wiped out most of them.  Very few humans remain. The nature of the disease, aside from coughing, is undescribed. We don’t know anything about the disease at all. This book is a companion novel to Oryx and Crake and we see a lot of the same characters - the God’s Gardeners play a big role in this novel. They are a religious, vegetarian sect - a cult if you will - that lives on rooftops in the urban settings. They are contrasted quite sharply with the Corporations and the communities that surround them - they actually have taken control of the government and police functions that we are familiar with in our day. All technology and science is owned by the corporation for the sole purpose of making money, not for anything benevolent.  For instance, one medical company secretly makes its own customers sick just so that they will have to continue to purchase medicine from them, creating a barbaric and disgusting cycle of violence. Genetic mutations and experiments abound, creating awful and toxic creations that serve absolutely no purpose at all.

The main characters are two women - Toby and Ren - who meet in one of the Gardener sects. Toby comes there from a fast food joint when she is saved from her sexually abusive boss. Ren is brought there by her mother and then removed back to the Corporation outpost that she was initially born in. The book takes place mostly in flashbacks held by Toby and Ren to the year Five when things were ok - they were bad but not as bad as the Year of the Flood. Toby’s boss never really stops pursuing her so she hides in a day spa after the flood. Ren defects and becomes a pole dancer.

This book tells about Ren and Toby’s life leading up to and during the Flood and is a searing critique of contemporary society and how we are ruining our world.  However, it’s also a very poignant and strong celebration of the strength of women’s friendships because Ren and Toby demonstrate their loyalty to one another and to another women throughout the entire novel. Where one wouldn’t expect the relationship to survive it does, and surpasses all bounds with flying colors. I loved Atwood’s style of writing - it’s creative and witty and far from boring. This novel entertained me on my flight from Boston to California and the parable’s warnings were something that a mere six hours was unlikely to have me forget.

RUN to get this one.

After a Church vote, 16 year old Olivia and her family are uprooted from her home and forced to move after her father loses his job as a minister in a small, Ohio town. Olivia, her much younger and oddly named sister (Callapher), her mother and father opt to relocate to West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains. When they get there, the family rents a home from their Aunt Margaret and her friend Ruby, who are affectionately known around town as the Old Maids. Olivia feels that the suffering in her and her family’s life shows that God really doesn’t exist and, if He or She does, they don’t really care because if they did, they wouldn’t have made their lives so awful. Olivia spends her days mentally calculating calories and fat grams, ignoring the hunger in her body and ignoring the fact that she’s wasting away and is anorexic. Olivia’s parents are too consumed by their own problems, rendering them unable to help her even though they realize that something awful and drastic is happening to her.

This first novel is about struggle. It’s about the struggle to accept oneself and ones own beauty and flaws and to love oneself in spite of any perceived imperfection. It’s specifically about how women struggle with body image and eating disorders and how it becomes about control in a world that seems to be descending into an uncontrollable frenzy. But even though there’s a fair amount of gloom and doom in the pages, there are also glimmers - hope, love, faith are there for Olivia too in spite of her struggle with a disorder that no one wants to admit she has, not even Olivia herself. Olivia has a new beginning, which is also what this novel is about, and somehow manages to overcome her disorder with help, counseling and, of course, Jesus Christ.

Generally, this was a pretty good book. The descriptions of the obsessions with food were very true to form and I thought that the development of the characters was also really, really good.  This was a good first novel.

I was really surprised to read the back of this book and learn that the author, Rachel Keener , was a law student. I think that law school, for me, was about learning how to think and write like a lawyer, which didn’t always mean exciting.

Anyways, The Killing Tree introduces us to Mercy Heron the summer after she has graduated from high school. She is 18, working at a diner, not going to college and living in her tiny, rural town in Appalachia.  She lives with her grandfather (Father Heron) and Mama Rutha, her grandmother and they are the mirror opposites of one another. Father Heron is domineering and seemingly cold, always worried about how the family will be viewed in the community and in the Church. Mama Rutha is a free spirit, what some in the town call crazy. They take care of Mercy, because her mother (their daughter), died giving birth to her under the apple tree in the backyard, after Father Heron refused to admit her to the home or get her help. She spends her days working and hanging out with Della and never considers leaving her home, until she meets Trout, a migrant worker, with whom she falls in love with. They end up keeping their relationship a secret, until she no longer can, and then she realizes that Father Heron will do everything in his power to make sure that she isn’t happy and that the family name is protected.

For a first book, this was amazing. It exposed me to “mining country.”  While I have lived in rural areas, I don’t think that they’re all the same in their character. I have never lived in Appalachia, so this opened my eyes up to some extent to the culture associated with that and with the migrant culture.  Keener did a masterful job in drawing her characters and developing, and didn’t indulge in stereotyping, which would have been easy to do (think Deliverance, the movie).  Keener also did a really good job in developing her themes, including the battle between socio-economic classes and the struggles that youth face in breaking away and becoming independent. I really enjoyed it and look forward for more from this author.

Promises is a documentary filmed in between 1997 and 2000 by Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg and Carlos Bolado.

This documentary was filmed during a period of relative calm in Israeli/Palestinian relations.  B.Z. Goldberg, who was born in New York but grew up in Jerusalem, returns to Israel where he travels to Jerusalem, a Palestinian refugee camp and an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. During his travels, he meets with 7 children of various descent - some Israelis and some Palestinians. Even though the children live within 20 minutes of each other, they exist in completely different spheres. One girl has never been to Jerusalem, even though it is ten miles from where she lives. The children were followed from the time they were 9 until the time that they were 12. They include:

1. Yarko and Daniel - secular, Israeli twin boys living in Jerusalem;
2. Faraj. A Palestinian refugee boy living in the Deheishe Refugee Camp in the West Bank:
3. Sanabel, a Palestinian refugee girl also living in the Deheishe Refugee Camp;
4. Shlomo. An ultra-orthodox Jewish boy in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.
   
5. Mahmoud. A Palestinian boy living in East Jerusalem.
6. Moishe & sister Raheli live in the Beit El Settlement in the West Bank.

Pictures of the Deheishe Camp can be found here .

The children,  express what each side has been through and all the distrust each side has for the other; but, at least, by talking about it on camera and by meeting each other briefly, it gives peace some chance–in the Middle East even something as small as that little hope is indeed welcome news.  In some ways, it was really disturbing, to hear the beliefs coming from the mouths of babes. In some ways, I had hoped that the new generations would be able to bring change - my belief that there is hope in the younger people.  At the time that this was filmed, there also was much hope.  These children were brought together by the filmakers, who also brought interpreters, and they were able to sit the children all down, face to face, to discuss the problems.  They children also were able to run around and play together and their laughter was healing.

The children were beautiful and smart. But I still felt a lot of uneasiness in my stomach. These children were so well-spoken and yet, some of the things that came out of their mouths were things that seemed to be indoctrinated prejudice. Now, I’m coming at this as someone that was brought up in the Catholic faith and who, at this point in her life, doesn’t put a whole lot into religion or the Bible or any religious text, really.  So, take it with a grain of salt. But it seemed so disturbing that children, the people that will carry on the world, were being so ably indoctrinated and trained to carry on their parents’ anguish, hate and sadness.  Yes, both sides have done awful, awful things to each other and are doing so to this day, but aren’t we supposed to break the chain? Anyways, this movie did a magnificent job in showing this unsettling picture.

I also appreciated that the filmakers went out of their way to make sure that varying points of view were represented. I felt that they did a wonderful job in making sure that diverse voices were represented. I also thought that it did a wonderful job in presenting what childhood in a war zone is really like. These children, regardless of where they live, are constantly in fear of bombs or gunfights. The twins worry that the bus that they ride to school each day will be bombed by a suicide bomber - they expect it in fact and look for people that may be the bombers as they ride to school. They worry because a bus on their route was bombed not too long before the shooting of this video.  Another of the young boys was involved in the most recent Intifada . He and his friends and family members threw rocks at the Israeli soldiers because those were the only weapons that they had and he saw several of his friends shot dead. A NINE YEAR OLD, folks, not some military guy shooting at another military guy.

This film is important and should be seen by everyone, especially in light of the recent struggles in the Middle East.

I don’t know why I do it to myself. Really, I don’t.  Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe it’s because cynicism hasn’t completely and utterly killed the tiniest bit of hope that I have that an author can successfully navigate and cross over into different genres. Maybe I’m just plain dumb.  Patterson’s book, Sundays at Tiffany’s was just plain awful. They seriously shouldn’t let authors that have a demonstrated track record in being awful at writing in a certain genre continue to write in that genre, especially where they’ve had so much success in another genre, specifically mystery/thriller.

Anyways, at the beginning of the novel, we meet 8 year old June Margaux, the only child of a chic, wealthy and successful Broadway producer named Vivianne. Since her mother is so busy at work and her father is so busy vacationing with his new wife, June, who is the slightly chubby little girl in the background, spends most of her time on her own. Her imaginary friend, Michael, is always with her, entertaining her and helping her to see how absolutely wonderful she is inside. What June doesn’t know is that Michael has to play by the imaginary friend rules and leave her when she’s nine, even though she won’t want him to and he doesn’t want her to.  He manages to live with himself by saying that she’ll forget him immediately, and leaves her at her ninth birthday party. But that isn’t quite the case - she doesn’t forget him. She even creates a Broadway production and a movie about him. Twenty-three years later, he sees Jane again and her life is still somewhat of a mess - controlling mom, jerk of a boyfriend, no self esteem and nostalgia for an imaginary friend that she can’t quite forget as easily as she was led to believe.

I had to suspend a lot of disbelief for this novel. And I found that I couldn’t bear the saccharine love story either.  An imaginary friend that somehow comes to life and falls in love with the little girl (now adult) that he was a friend to? Um, no.  Just doesn’t quite cut it for me. I didn’t quite grasp the rules of being an imaginary friend - do you age or not? Do you have the ordinary physical needs of a human being? The role wasn’t really defined and distracted from the utterly predictable story. Oh wait, that distraction actually made a mindless, awful book that much easier to get through! At least the writing style was such that the novel moved quickly because if I had to read anymore of that book, I think that I would have wanted my eyes to be gouged out with a spoon.

Leave this one off of your list!

Book 64/100

I haven’t ever read a book by Alice Hoffman before. I’m not quite sure why - she’s fairly well known and pretty well respected.  Anyways, I decided to pick this one up because the story sounded really interesting and pretty unique. Some might even have thought the premise odd and that’s why I picked it up.

This book is about a solitary librarian from New Jersey whose name we never learn and whose favorite book is a book about different ways to commit suicide. At age 8, she and her older brother are orphaned after she wishes that her mother were dead as her mother is leaving to go out for her birthday. Her further wishes also bring nothing but pain - she wishes that she is struck by lightening and she is, causing her life to change forever. Not only does her body change (her heart becomes arrhythmic), but she can feel a storm coming hours before there is any sign of it and she becomes colorblind - she can no longer see shades of red. Fire is ice - reds are shades of gray or white.  Absolutely frosty. Her fascination with death, always morbid, becomes even more of an obsession and even more morbid. Her title of the Ice Queen is surprisingly appropriate.

Her obsession with death leads her to Lazarus Jones, so named because he was struck by lightening and died and then rose from the dead forty minutes later. In him, she finds her soul mate and her polar opposite - where everything she touches turns cold, everything he turns blisters with heat and burns. In order for them to be intimate, they must have sex in a full bathtub.

Hoffman’s book was beautiful.  Somehow, using absolutely sparse, spare language, she takes on redemption, death and love.  Somehow, Hoffman manages to stuff so much into less then 300 pages. Her characters leave me breathless.  There is so much that each character learns and there is so much to each character, that the reader can spend hours, days and weeks with these characters and not get bored. Hoffman’s narrative voice is unpretentious - it’s almost as if you’re sitting in a room with the narrator taking her oral history because her prose flows that smoothly and believably.  I left certain parts just feeling lonely and sad for the characters in the book.

If I had my way, I would have spent an entire day on my couch just reading this novel because it was powerful, gripping and beautiful.

Book 63/100

I read Stefanie’s first book, Sippy Cups are Not for Chardonnay, when I was home on maternity leave, right after having Nate and struggling with Post Partum Depression.  And it made me laugh, even when I was in the depths and thinking that I was NEVER ever going to see the light of day (or the ground) again. It was the doldrums of one of the worst winters that New Hampshire had ever seen and there were literally feet and feet of snow on the ground. And I wrote on my (then) newly formed mommy blog how much her book had meant to me, so she was sweet enough to send me this book also.  I held off on reading it until I had gotten through a few of the milestones in the toddler years, so that I could fully appreciate this book and I surely did and am glad that I waited to read it.

This book is comprised of short chapters that are, seemingly, perfect length for the busy parent, which are actually more of essays that could be read stand alone, as opposed to a story or novella.  The topics range from everything from potty training to playdates to super moms. What I truly appreciated about Ms. Wilder-Taylor’s essays, in addition to the fact that they had me laughing and nodding for pretty much the entire time that I was reading her book, was her “what you see is what you get” attitude. That sort of honesty was refreshing and I really liked that she didn’t apologize for her parenting style (or her child’s television viewing predilections/habits) because, quite frankly, she shouldn’t have to - it’s none of our business!

I’m so glad that I read and have a copy of this book because it reaffirms that I, myself, am a decent parent even if I plop Nate down in front of Sesame Street (TiVo’ed of course - if you don’t have one, get one!) the afternoons when I get home from daycare/work with him so that I can cook him dinner before we play with cars.  And I cannot wait to read her latest !

I heard about this book because I read the blog Devourer of Books and I find that we usually have the same tastes in books, so I went ahead and requested it from the local library.  Erica Eisdorfer somehow managed to burst into the limelight with this one in a wonderful way.  She literally came out of nowhere with this piece of historical fiction.

Susan Rose is the protagonist of this novel, set in Victorian England.  Susan is a loveable, scheming and shrewd woman, who finds herself pregnant two times, by two different men. Instead of letting this get her down, though, she manages to turn it into a boon by becoming a wet nurse and making more in a month than her family might have seen in half a year. Susan’s downfall is her big heart.  It is tremendous! And I felt bad for Susan - her life hadn’t been easy to that point. She grew up in a poor household that was tremendous - I lost track of how many siblings she had - to a mother that worked until the bones showed in her fingers and to an alcoholic father, who drank away any money that was brought in. However, Susan doesn’t let this get her down. She takes every advantage that she can and uses it.

Most of the book was dedicated to Susan and her story. However there were a few pages at the end of each chapter that detailed a different family’s story and their reasoning for hiring a wet nurse instead of attempting to breastfeed their children themselves.  And those short entries were absolutely fascinating.  Some of the women obviously did it because they were privileged but others hired wet nurses for tragic reasons - disease and illness, mental health and psychiatric breakdowns that resulted in hospitalizations of mothers and death.  It was just really interesting and offered a little window into the society, psyche and culture of wet nurses in Victorian England.  I actually found myself enjoying those excerpts, at times, more than Susan’s story.

I sometimes found this book difficult to read, not because the writing was horrendous or boring or anything like that. It was quite the opposite actually. The writing was so good and so powerful that, when Susan’s children were lost or kidnapped or something happened to them or Susan described her feelings as she breastfed her own babies and the babies of her employers, I found myself thinking of my son and feeding him and my feelings to him. And it got somewhat emotional. This book was pretty interesting but, quite frankly, a little slow to get started. All in all, though I thought it was pretty interesting!

Book 61/100

I was really, really excited to hear about this book. I actually read about it in the New York Times Book Review and got excited because it was about a quartet of women that meet and become friends while they are all students at Smith College . And it totally appealed to me because I went to a rival women’s college and I really, really wanted to experience it again.

The girls come from very, very diverse backgrounds, but were all very recognizable. April was the girl that had dreadlocks and was involved in every single club on campus that espoused radical activism.  But her past included a single, emotionally absent mother and abuse that no one, not even her best friends, knew about.  Celia was the well-rounded, somewhat moderate one who came to school with no real issues, aside from being away from home for the first time in her life. Sally came to school having just lost her mother and Bree was a Southern girl engaged to be married, who then broke it off and fell in love with a woman, “even though she wasn’t a lesbian” (according to her reasoning in the book!).  The plot was somewhat predictable as far as the ending goes, but I particularly LOVED the character studies and the studies of the friendships that were made and which endured, in spite of horrific plots and crimes and fights and changes in life circumstances.

I also really enjoyed Sullivan’s take on being a lesbian until graduation and how Bree struggled to deal with being “out” to her family, even though she was in a serious, committed relationship with a woman for close to 8 or 9 years before she reconciled with her family. Is Bree really not a lesbian or is she just in denial?  How fluid is sexuality and who defines what is and isn’t homosexuality?

I loved the writing style and I really thought the characters were very realistic and believable, although some of the situations they get themselves into (particularly April’s predicament) were just unbelievable.  Sullivan also has a really good knack of building tension by alternating between Smith College and modern life experiences.   She makes it work and the transitions are really, really smooth which was refreshing and pleasing. I love the fact that the philosophical and political viewpoints of many revered feminists are quoted throughout the book. Sullivan assumes you know who she’s talking about, and I appreciate greatly that she figured most of her readers could handle it. It’s yet another vein of gold that wraps itself throughout the intricately interwoven lives of these very true-to-life characters.

LOVED this book.

Book 60/100

I admit it, I am a huge dork.  I am a gamer and play World of Warcraft. I have a blog where I review blogs for crying out loud! So when I heard about The Guild starring and written by Felicia Day . And it didn’t disappoint at all!

The Guild is a web-based series that was created by Felicia (who was also in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog , where she apparently acquired a cult like following)  and which portrays a group of gamers that participate in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).  It’s obviously based on World of Warcraft, even though the name of the game is never really mentioned. I loved this show.  It was witty and funny and I got a lot of good laughs out of it. It also serves it purpose of disabusing all of the people out there that have these preconceived notions of online gamers as the fat, overweight, pimply basement dwellers. However, it does replace them with 6 other stereotypes, that are more likealbe then the one mentioned.  For me, this was part of the humor and the charm of the Guild, because there are definitely people that fit the stereotypes (I mean, I hate to say it, but stereotypes exist for a reason right?!).   This is very diversionary - it is easy to get distracted by watching this flippant series.  It doesn’t really push you to the limits or really seek to educate the viewer very much.  It’s pure, sugar coated enjoyment at its best.

This show is endearing and entertaining and is recommended to all.