Rebecca Stead's Newbery-award winning When You Reach Me is set in New York City in the late 70s. Twelve year old Miranda is a latch-key kid. Her mother drills her on safety techniques, and a creepy homeless guy ("The Laughing Man") lives outside her apartment building. She only ever reads one book, A Wrinkle in Time, and she carries it with her wherever she goes. But when her best (and only) friend, Sal, stops interacting with her altogether the day he gets randomly punched by a mysterious kid named Marcus, her world begins to open up in all sorts of unexpected ways. She makes new friends, among them someone who was formerly her enemy; she helps her mother prepare for her appearance on the $20,000 Pyramid game show; and she receives mysterious notes that accurately describe things that are going to happen in the future. The details of this small but intricate mystery are unraveled slowly, through short chapters (many of their titles are patterned after Pyramid categories: "Things that Blow Away," "Things That Turn Upside Down"), and are well worth the wait.
Grade: A-
The bulk of the story is actually autobiographical. Stead does a great job of recreating the feel of the urban landscape of her childhood: the endlessly walked route between home and school, with occasional deviations to friends' apartments; the network of adults with whom Miranda interacts; and numerous small details (mimeographs, $2 bills, Vietnam) that build a realistic tone. The discussion of time travel in which Miranda, Marcus, and Julia engage did sprain my brain for a while, but I appreciated that Stead didn't dumb it down for any reader of any age. She assumes we can keep up. The net effect of this (setting + time travel) was to remind me of books I read when I was twelve, and I found that familiarity very enjoyable.
Random Thoughts:
I listened to When You Reach Me in what seemed like the blink of an eye; it was only four discs long. I guess that's the difference between most children's books and doorstops like The Gathering Storm. The single narrator was fairly competent, although sometimes it was difficult to distinguish between her adult characters. I would probably recommend this book to kids who are reading ahead (tweens) as well as teens and adults. It doesn't feel particularly bound to one age range.
I haven't spent much time watching the $20,000 Pyramid (or any of its other, larger-denomination iterations). If I'm going to watch old game shows, I definitely prefer Match Game. Perhaps this is because I'm just not very good at the Pyramid, especially the Winner's Circle part.
Reading this really made me want to grab A Wrinkle in Time off my shelf, but that would be violating my "only read new-to-me" books rule. Most of what Miranda said about the plot was actually unfamiliar, because it's been so long, but I do remember really liking it as a child. I guess I should probably re-read it before the new movie comes out?
Dead Mother: No
Book Review Index
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Book Review: The Help [2009]
Kathryn Stockett's first novel, The Help, was the sleeper hit of 2009, and still occupies the number two spot on the best-seller lists for hardcover fiction. It still has at least a two-to-one holds ratio in our library system, and it has also been the source of some controversy. Set in Jackson, Mississippi beginning in 1962, the novel revolves around the lives of three characters: one privileged white woman and two black maids. Naive Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan has just graduated from Ole Miss and wants to be a writer, but so far has only managed to get a job writing the housekeeping column for the local newspaper under an assumed name. Since she doesn't know anything about keeping house, she asks her friend Elizabeth's maid, Aibileen, for assistance, leading to a deeper acquaintance than customary between a white lady and "the help." Aibileen is an older woman who has raised many white children and been deeply wounded each time they grow up to be just like their parents. Aibileen's friend, Minny, is an outspoken maid who manages to get herself fired and earn the enmity of Junior League President Hilly Holbrook at the beginning of the book. Hilly is the undisputed villain of the piece (well, other than the institutionalized racism that she personifies), from her proposal that all white families install separate bathrooms for their help in order to keep free of "colored diseases" to accusing Minny, and then Aibileen, of theft, to her tyrannical rule of what seems to be all of Jackson society. She may, in fact, be a little too irredeemably evil, but she is a character that everyone should love to hate. Despite Hilly's ever-watchful eye, Skeeter and Aibileen embark on a project to publish real stories from the maids of Jackson, including the ugly truth about the white women who employ them. They struggle to find interviewees (beyond the initially reluctant Minny) for a task that could easily get its black participants fired, or much worse; a palpable sense of danger hangs over much of the novel, set as it is in a time of civil unrest. However, at its heart The Help is an uplifting and ultimately optimistic story about how we aren't that different after all.
Grade: A-
Even though it has a great story, the book is perhaps a little too self-conscious about its historical time-period (you can practically hear the signposts being printed in caps lock, like a telegram: MEDGAR EVERS-(STOP)-WOOLWORTH'S COUNTER-(STOP)-MARCH ON WASHINGTON-(STOP)-KENNEDY ASSASSINATION-(STOP)-BOB DYLAN). However, within this broader context there are many small, moving, and weighty moments that make that aspect of Stockett's writing, which I guess I would call obvious contextualizing, negligible.
Now, about the "controversy" that surrounded the book, I must of course say a few words. See reviews here and here that discuss Stockett's use of heavy dialect for her black characters. In this interview, Stockett seems genuinely humble about her attempt to recreate the voices of black women in the 1960s. She actually indicated that she added the character of Skeeter "because she worried that readers wouldn’t trust her if she only wrote about black characters. 'I just didn’t think that would ever be allowed to sit on the shelf,' she said. 'So I threw Skeeter in the mix and I felt a little better about it, because I was showing a white perspective as well.'" HUH? When you're reading the book, it sometimes feels like Skeeter is a less developed and less rich character, and now that makes sense. But we have to ask ourselves why an author felt like she would be crossing such a huge line by writing solely with the voices of black women. If authors only wrote about what they knew first-hand, the selection of books would be pretty uninteresting. Are women not supposed to write from the perspective of male characters, and vice versa? Can straight authors accurately represent the thoughts and feelings of queer characters, or not? Should Stephenie Meyer have confined herself to writing about normal teenagers, because she isn't actually a vampire or a werewolf (hang on a sec, maybe that would actually be a good thing . . . Twilight crazies, I'm kidding! Please don't spam me.)? In a similar vein, if Stockett had chosen not to write Aibileen and Minny's parts using dialect, would their sections of the novel have felt as vibrant? You can't write a romance novel set in Scotland without throwing in some Scottish dialect (even if you're an American). I did, however, agree with the Christian Science Monitor, which wondered why none of the white characters were written with a similarly distinct dialect. My favorite review was actually William Boot's "Do I Have to Read The Help?" (answer: yes):
Random Thoughts:
A friend of mine (whose taste in books I trust implicitly) recommended the book to me by handing me a paper copy, but things being as they always are, I didn't have time to read it before I felt like I'd probably better release that one back out into the wild. As I often do, I ended up listening to the audio version instead, which was narrated by one actress for each main role, as well as a narrator for the strangeness that is Chapter 25 (in which Stockett inserts an omniscient narrator for the first and last time). It's possible that my feelings about the dialect would be stronger if I had seen it on the page, rather than hearing it performed by the two excellent narrators for Aibileen and Minny. Of the three, the "Miss Skeeter" was definitely the weakest link, but I thought that was true of the character as well. The omniscient narrator of the benefit scene was terrible, and clearly had no idea how to speak with a southern accent. The unexpected upside(?) of listening to the book, rather than reading it, was an unconscious desire to adopt a faux-Southern accent.
I literally cannot read or hear the word "Jackson" without thinking about Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. At least it's a good song. I also found myself humming Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" on numerous occasions as I was getting out of the car.
Especially interesting in context: This article about a black writer's conference. I wonder, do black writers feel like Stockett is co-opting their narrative space? Most of the reviews I found were by white women (like me).
Dead Mother: No, which was actually a surprise
Book Review Index
Grade: A-
Even though it has a great story, the book is perhaps a little too self-conscious about its historical time-period (you can practically hear the signposts being printed in caps lock, like a telegram: MEDGAR EVERS-(STOP)-WOOLWORTH'S COUNTER-(STOP)-MARCH ON WASHINGTON-(STOP)-KENNEDY ASSASSINATION-(STOP)-BOB DYLAN). However, within this broader context there are many small, moving, and weighty moments that make that aspect of Stockett's writing, which I guess I would call obvious contextualizing, negligible.
Now, about the "controversy" that surrounded the book, I must of course say a few words. See reviews here and here that discuss Stockett's use of heavy dialect for her black characters. In this interview, Stockett seems genuinely humble about her attempt to recreate the voices of black women in the 1960s. She actually indicated that she added the character of Skeeter "because she worried that readers wouldn’t trust her if she only wrote about black characters. 'I just didn’t think that would ever be allowed to sit on the shelf,' she said. 'So I threw Skeeter in the mix and I felt a little better about it, because I was showing a white perspective as well.'" HUH? When you're reading the book, it sometimes feels like Skeeter is a less developed and less rich character, and now that makes sense. But we have to ask ourselves why an author felt like she would be crossing such a huge line by writing solely with the voices of black women. If authors only wrote about what they knew first-hand, the selection of books would be pretty uninteresting. Are women not supposed to write from the perspective of male characters, and vice versa? Can straight authors accurately represent the thoughts and feelings of queer characters, or not? Should Stephenie Meyer have confined herself to writing about normal teenagers, because she isn't actually a vampire or a werewolf (hang on a sec, maybe that would actually be a good thing . . . Twilight crazies, I'm kidding! Please don't spam me.)? In a similar vein, if Stockett had chosen not to write Aibileen and Minny's parts using dialect, would their sections of the novel have felt as vibrant? You can't write a romance novel set in Scotland without throwing in some Scottish dialect (even if you're an American). I did, however, agree with the Christian Science Monitor, which wondered why none of the white characters were written with a similarly distinct dialect. My favorite review was actually William Boot's "Do I Have to Read The Help?" (answer: yes):
My only problem with The Help is that, in the end, it’s not really about the help. For all her assurance in sketching out the foibles of the Junior League, Stockett is shakier when it comes to the maids. They never quite come into focus—they’re more useful for what they see rather than who they are.I'm not sure I entirely agree with him, but perhaps if Stockett hadn't felt the pressure to include a white character in order to get her book "on the shelf," that wouldn't have been the case. In my opinion, the book is stronger because it has both white and black characters, and both perspectives are fully explored.
Random Thoughts:
A friend of mine (whose taste in books I trust implicitly) recommended the book to me by handing me a paper copy, but things being as they always are, I didn't have time to read it before I felt like I'd probably better release that one back out into the wild. As I often do, I ended up listening to the audio version instead, which was narrated by one actress for each main role, as well as a narrator for the strangeness that is Chapter 25 (in which Stockett inserts an omniscient narrator for the first and last time). It's possible that my feelings about the dialect would be stronger if I had seen it on the page, rather than hearing it performed by the two excellent narrators for Aibileen and Minny. Of the three, the "Miss Skeeter" was definitely the weakest link, but I thought that was true of the character as well. The omniscient narrator of the benefit scene was terrible, and clearly had no idea how to speak with a southern accent. The unexpected upside(?) of listening to the book, rather than reading it, was an unconscious desire to adopt a faux-Southern accent.
I literally cannot read or hear the word "Jackson" without thinking about Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. At least it's a good song. I also found myself humming Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" on numerous occasions as I was getting out of the car.
Especially interesting in context: This article about a black writer's conference. I wonder, do black writers feel like Stockett is co-opting their narrative space? Most of the reviews I found were by white women (like me).
Dead Mother: No, which was actually a surprise
Book Review Index
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Book Review: Black Magic Sanction [2010]
Black Magic Sanction is the eighth book in Kim Harrison's series about the witch Rachel Morgan and her thoroughly complicated life with Jenks, her pixie backup, and Ivy, her living vampire roommate/potential love interest. Having recently survived a banshee while solving the mystery of her vampire boyfriend's death, Rachel now finds herself violently pursued by the witches of Coven of Moral and Ethical Standards, who have somehow discovered that Rachel has the ability to give birth to demon children and want to lobotomize her or imprison her for life. That may sound like a far-fetched premise, but Harrison makes it work well within the fully realized universe of The Hollows, which she has carefully expanded over the course of the previous books. Throw in Rachel's demon tutor, her nasty, thieving ex-boyfriend Nick, and Trent (the elf with political ambitions), and you have a thoroughly entertaining story. Black Magic Sanction has healthy amounts of action, humor, pathos, and even (gasp!) character development. In fact, it has everything that I was looking for (but not finding) in Divine Misdemeanors.
Rachel finally admits to herself that she is something more than a witch, but she still clings to a moral code that will not allow her to harm others, even to protect her loved ones. At the same time, she struggles with the ease of using black magic when its only cost is to herself. This book also marks the commencement of her romantic relationship with Pierce, the recently re-incarnated male witch/demon-hunter, who speaks in what is possibly the most irritating dialect I have ever read. Kim Harrison, I am begging you: Please please please transition Pierce to a normal way of speaking by the time the next book comes out! Either that, or remove him from the picture entirely; I'm not picky. After devouring this book, I am eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the story of Rachel and her friends.
Grade: A- (mostly because of Pierce's stupid dialect!)
Dead Mother: No
Book Review Index
Rachel finally admits to herself that she is something more than a witch, but she still clings to a moral code that will not allow her to harm others, even to protect her loved ones. At the same time, she struggles with the ease of using black magic when its only cost is to herself. This book also marks the commencement of her romantic relationship with Pierce, the recently re-incarnated male witch/demon-hunter, who speaks in what is possibly the most irritating dialect I have ever read. Kim Harrison, I am begging you: Please please please transition Pierce to a normal way of speaking by the time the next book comes out! Either that, or remove him from the picture entirely; I'm not picky. After devouring this book, I am eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the story of Rachel and her friends.
Grade: A- (mostly because of Pierce's stupid dialect!)
Dead Mother: No
Book Review Index
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