Lower East Side Librarian

To my memory I’d never read a SVH book before, nor really desired to. While on zine tour my concentration was quite poor, so I took Celia up on her offer to lend me the first in the SVH series. It was about all I could take--both reading concentration wise and SVH wise. I can’t entirely decide if it’s good-bad or bad-bad, but my lack of interest in number two leads me to believe it’s the latter.

I picked this up from a leave one/take one shelf at a cafe in Alabama, and was super excited about it, forgetting that V.C. Andrews® books are no longer written by V.C. Andrews. I normally don’t trash books here, but this installment of the “V.C. Andrews” Shooting Stars miniseries is just awful. It has V.C. Andrews themes of religious repression, incest, artistically gifted young girls, and first lusts. It seems like it’s aimed at a younger audience than Flowers in the Attic and the non-® V.C. Andrews admittedly trashy books were. The 1st person narrator, about to graduate from high school, refers to her parents as Mommy and Daddy throughout. I assume the author (or computer) won’t be insulted if he/she/it reads this review, because clearly this is one of those things that you laugh at while you’re writing it. That’s not to say that some people won’t enjoy reading it, with the same guilty pleasure as one watches the worst reality television.

I can’t remember how I found this book--review in Bust? It seems like a Bust type of book--but I know I was interested because the author was a zinester in the 90s. (Mystery date : one gal's guide to good stuff Zines P4755m) It reads like a long magazine article on the history of women’s office support work: typing, stenography, secretaryship, written in a personal tone, through a feminist lens, and with enough endnotes to convince you of its authority. It is accompanied by lots of sidebars and historical photos and ads and a lengthy index (♥).

I believe I might be a bit of a prude. Gloeckner’s well-drawn graphic memoir of sexual abuse, drug abuse, and bad parenting is a little overly graphic for me, as is R. Crumb’s icky introduction. I’m sure it’s quite brilliant, but it’s not for me. It is pretty funny reading it on the subway, though, with all its nudity, especially when you board the train in a religious neighborhood.

At first I was dazzled by Toews’ clever and funny language and her decreasingly subtle but accurate depiction of adolescent depression. Eventually it started to wear on me, though. It’s the same thing that annoys me about Jasper Fforde: the cleverness is relentless. But, I still think this book will appeal to people who like reading about religious sects (the protagonist comes from a Mennonite family and town), enjoy women coming-of-age stories, or who can handle a lot of clever. Also--Look at the cover closely; it’s as perfect a match to a novel’s contents as I’ve ever seen. Kudos to Kelly Hill, designer.

At this training thing I went to I met a guy who worked for Harlequin, and he mentioned in his intro that Harlequin was getting into nonfiction. Of course I was like “What does that mean?” He told me about this diabetic ballerina’s memoir, and I was like “Oh, that makes sense.” and “I want to read it!”

Comprised of Skurnick and a few other writers’ Fine Lines columns from Jezebel, Shelf Discovery really brings a book-junkie adult back to her book-junkie youth.