Meditation on The Attack of Confidence

Some days, I just wake up feeling too good about myself. I look in the bathroom mirror and say, "you're pretty hot," and the day just gets better from there. I walk around work and think about how great it is to be young and strong and healthy and a librarian. I feel charming. I feel like trying to charm everyone I meet, even people on the streets of Springfield, by making eye contact and smiling at them, and seeing if anything happens. I get giddy. I feel at the top of my game, in terms of my ability to make people smile. I feel like a cross between Mary Chapin Carpenter's "I Feel Lucky" and Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself":

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I know that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. Unfortunately, I am too over-full of energy to settle on any one thing to do. I really should leave work and try to take over the world or something before this feeling fades. As it will, because it always does. But in the meantime, I will grin like a madwoman and bounce around the library.

Book Review: Bite Me! [2009]

There are a lot of things to like about Bite Me!, the debut novel by Melissa Francis. First of all, the protagonist, AJ Ashe, is a high school girl who actually is a vampire, rather than being a doe-eyed girlfriend of a vampire. AJ doesn't even like being a vampire, and has spent most of her life being as perfect as she can to compensate. I also liked the basic plot: AJ's mom marries AJ's boyfriend Ryan's dad, and they are forbidden to date despite their deep deep lurve for each other. That's good stuff, people! However, things quickly get muddled with the introduction of the overall mythology of the world. See, there's something about clans of vampires, of which the Serpentines are the most evilest, and scrolls, and runes, and some group of not-vampires called the Frieceadan Druids. I have a rule when I read books for fun (most of which are fantasy books): don't name stuff using words I can't pronounce, or I will have a hard time every time I see that word. Yes, after a little internet searching, I can see that Francis is going for a whole Scottish thing with Ryan's family, but still. The way that the mythology is introduced is very clunky, with AJ discovering information through books and scrolls, and so quickly (in order to move along various plot points) that it seems forced. If you look too closely at the plot, it starts to create a lot of questions--why, if AJ's father is the one behind all the trouble in town, did he wait years to do anything? Why doesn't AJ notice how creepy her recently returned friend is acting? Why on earth don't AJ and Ryan's parents just let them date, for god's sake? They were dating first! On the plus side, at the end of the book, AJ finally chooses to embrace her heritage and kick ass, which was well worth the wait.

Francis leaves the ending open with a major cliffhanger (my copy included a teaser for the next book, Love Sucks!) that leaves the villain on the loose, AJ's vampire father apparently the mastermind, AJ's vampire mother [spoiler!] pregnant with a Frieceadan child, and AJ and Ryan still in love with each other. It might be interesting to see where this is going, but I hope the second book is more tightly edited.

Grade: C+

Book Review: Perfect Life [2009]

I keep making these forays into what I guess you might call "Literary Fiction" in an attempt to broaden my horizons, or make myself better at Reader's Advisory, or something. I read a few reviews of Perfect Life, by Jessica Shattuck, while I was doing collection development at work and impulsively placed a hold. As usually happens when I finish one of these books, I ended up somewhat disappointed. The novel is the story of four college friends (three women and one man, Neil) who attended Harvard undergrad together, and the action largely takes place in Boston (which is one of the problems, but I'll get to that momentarily). As the story begins, advertising executive Jenny is preparing for her son Colin's christening. Colin is biologically the child of Neil, who has agreed to give up his right to have knowledge of or contact with the child. So naturally, he is peering in the window of the fancy church that social-climbing Jenny has selected as an appropriate staging ground. The other friends, Laura (stay at-home mom and wife to a self-made immigrant) and Elise (lesbian and new non-bio parent), are each also prominent characters. I feel that the main difficulty with Perfect Life is that it takes on too many things. Each thirtysomething wrestles with mundane issues such parenthood and connecting with their spouse, in addition to heavier topics such as biology, inheritance, marketing, video game design, and a general crisis of faith. Jenny's husband [spoiler alert] is diagnosed with cancer, bringing her perfect world down around her ears just as she pioneers the launch of a new drug for postpartum depression. Laura, the most likeable character, struggles to find meaning in the daily routines of motherhood. Elise, a biologist, finds her partner's desire to meet other children conceived with their donor's sperm bewildering. Neil returns to Boston for reasons unknown even to himself, and it is around him (as the wild card) that the action largely turns.

In a weird way, this book is like a cousin of The Magicians, which I also read recently: a youngish group of friends struggling to find a place in the world and have angst and complicated relationships. But because Shattuck presents the narrative from the perspective of each of the four main characters, a lot of the interactions and character motivations end up feeling shallow because the reader never gets to spend enough time with one person. I lived in Boston for several years, and still don't consider myself an expert, but something about the way Shattuck dropped street, restaurant, and place names into the narrative really struck me as unnecessarily forceful, as if she was always trying to stress the location as an integral part of the story. Unfortunately, I don't feel that the location was an integral part of the story; the events could have played out anywhere. I get that Shattuck lives in Cambridge, and she wants to write what she knows--but it really was like reading one of those Gossip Girl or chick lit novels in which the names of designers and posh locales are always intruding on the plot.

I guess it probably sounds like I didn't really like this book. I'll be honest: it took me a long time to finish. I wasn't hurrying to pick it up. But it did make me think about a few things, like parenthood and friendship between adults, in a different way.

Grade: B-