Three impoverished sisters with a dead father and an absinthe-addicted mother try to survive in late 19th century France. One of the ways a girl could make money at the time was to be in the Opera ballet school and eventually perform with the ballet. Or pose for Degas.
Wolitzer gives us six friends, who met at an arts camp in the summer of 1974 when they were teenagers and follows them through their lives to middle age. The book is 468 pages long, and I didn't want it to end. The book is mature, feminist, loving, harsh, sad, privileged and privilege aware and truth telling. It's both big and small, in that in covering several characters over thirty years it's rather epic, but it's more about the passive reality of its characters lives than what happens to them.
"I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society."
"Though he hadn't been born into privilege, he too had been helped up the ladder over time, though the talent he possessed was squarely his."
"But in a lot of ways she could never leave her family drama, and I get that. The past is so tenacious. It's just as true for me. Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers."
I don't know how to talk about this novel. Plot points and themes include gang rape, weight and body image, mental health and life in a traveling circus. I appreciate the protagonist's emotional progression throughout, but I'm not sure the conceit of her imaginary "fat girl" companion really works. It's still a good book. Read it and tell me what you think.
Attempting to fill the void left by her Newsflesh Trilogy, Mira Grant gives us another near-future made dystopic by a health cure gone wrong. This first entry in the Parasitology series brings us likeable characters, a quasi-believable medical threat (though to be honest far less plausible than how she envisioned zombies), corrupt business practices, mad egomaniacal scientists, strained family relationships and two sweet dogs.
Vanessa Davis is only about ten years younger than me, but reading her memoir comics and sketches I felt like a youth culture voyeur, sort of like I did when I watched the Girls pilot, featuring characters closer to twenty years my junior. Davis was 26-32 when she drew the comics collected here, so maybe my reaction isn't too far-fetched. Anyway, that's not to say that I didn't like her work, not at all! I just felt a little distant from it. Some of the issues, feelings and experiences rang true for me, but as in "I get it," rather than "I feel that."
Ramsey, whose zine List I've long been a fan of, moves from Chicago to Philadelphia and documents her first year there in one-week chunks. I've read a fair amount of daily comics, which I also like, but I appreciate how an artist giving herself a week allows her more space and the opportunity to be more selective about what she chooses to illustrate and share.
Cover image from author's website.
Kim says this will be the final issue of her zine, which makes me sad. I've been exchanging zines and letters with her for a while now--a year or a little bit longer? I wasn't sure how I felt about her and her defensively titled zine, at first, but she came to be one of my favorite pen pals, and her ultimate zine is also one of my favorites.
Cover image from One Minute Zine Reviews.
Sort of like the movie 2 Days in New York that I watched last week, I am not sure if I admired or hated this book. The writing is good, I guess. It's sophisticated, but not showy, but the characters might be a little hard to love.
It's weird when a book takes place in a neighborhood you know incredibly well, but is in a universe you've heard about but don't recognize, populated by alcoholic, bigoted police officers. Buried on Avenue B has a second location, Sarasota, Florida, which is not far from Tampa, where I went to grad school. The people in the Publix grocery stores in Sarasota are depicted as nicer than the ones I encountered in Tampa, but there was one commonality--old men bagging groceries. De Jonge assumes they're doing it for the minimum wage. In my naivete, I want to believe it is for something to do.
Amish teen Katie is looking forward to going on Rumspringa with her boyfriend Elijah. Instead she finds herself fighting evil, as well Elijah and the community elders. If the premise sounds ridiculous, unfortunately its execution kind of is. Unless it's meant to be silly, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and books of that ilk?
I've now read the material in this book three times, once as a series of blog posts, the second time in manuscript and now as a gen-u-ine book. Three times, and each time I was dazzled by Laura's honesty, insight, generosity, kindness, love, snark and beautiful writing.
The title pretty much tells you what it's about, the non-LC subject headings give you a few more clues:
Crossett, Laura--Confessions.
Pregnant women--Mental Health.
Christian biography--United States.
Pregnancy, Unplanned--United States. [Extra fun: search your favorite library catalog for "unplanned pregnanc*" and see what subject headings your results yield.]
Wayward spinsters--Iowa--Iowa City.
Intrauterine contraceptives--FAIL.
(Disclaimer: I am friends with Laura, and I helped with the subject headings.)
Yes, I'm three books in to Pretty Little Liars. I don't even like it anymore, but I'm not sure I can stop.
I was really looking forward to reading this graphic memoir of growing up in 1980s Poland. Sowa and Savoia depict lots of surprising realities--the privations of life behind the Iron Curtain, like chewing window putty for want of gum--and life-shaking historical moments, like Solidarnosc, but maybe because Sowa was so young during the time period she's telling us about, there isn't enough nuance or engagement to make her story as compelling as I wanted it to be.
You know I love the Sookie Stackhouse series, right?, but like with so many endings to television series, the finale was a bit of a disappointment. I'm okay with who Sookie ended up with, but the whole book was a set-up for it, and there were lots of loose ends unnecessarily tied up.
One thing I appreciate is that the series doesn't attempt to drag one secret out for the entire gazillion books. In the beginning of the second Pretty Little Liars book, you find out the big deal from book one.
It's the fault of my Facebook 50 Books in 2013 group and specifically my smart, feminist, zine friend Caitlin that I powered through the first and then second books in the Pretty Little Liars series in a large, rotund hurry. I mean who could resist this tantalizing write up: "Pretty Little Liars by I forget. It's been a long time since I had so thoroughly enjoyed such an objectively terrible book."?
If you've been paying any attention at all, you know that I'm a huge Celia Perez fan. In fact I reviewed last year's issue of The Shortest Day here, most glowingly.
Thanks to Alex Wrekk, I've been watching the Canadian supernatural procedural Lost Girl. The show is about a succubus, just like, you guessed it, this second installment of Mead's Georgina Kincaid series. For those you don't know, a succubus takes a partner's life force during sex.
This novel about 19-year-old corps de ballet dancer Hannah Ward reminded me a little of the nun memoir Through the Narrow Gate because it was about the protagonist's struggle with the sacrifices required to please her god, in this case the artistic director of the "Manhattan Ballet."
I didn't sleep for even a minute on my cross-country flight, which left JFK at 9pm and landed at SFO more than six hours later at midnight and change. Most of the time I was too busy reading Frost Burned, the latest entry in the Mercy Thompson series. (Note to Loud Melissa: you really need to get started on these, now that you've caught up with The Hollows!)