The never ending pages

I’m very sorry to everyone at my lack of activity as of late. I’m struggling through Hugh Cook’s Heron River currently. Unfortunately, the book is not an easy read and it’s going to take me significantly more time to read it than I had hoped. I know Hugh Cook personally and I studied some of his short stories in high school, so naturally I picked his book up at my library to read. The book is wordy and the lack of quotation marks around dialogue confuses and angers me. It’s going to take some time.

Besides the fact that Heron River is a difficult read is the fact that university requires an inordinate amount of reading. I’m reading at least 100 pages of dry textbook text each week for my classes, so I really don’t feel like reading too much fiction right now. I read Elie Wiesel’s Night for one of my classes, but I didn’t really want to review it. It’s a work of unspeakable horror. It’s non-fiction. How can I critique the writing style? He’s writing from memory about his experience in concentration camps. It’s translated from the French but it’s still an easy read. It’s really not a work of great literature and leaves very little to be said about it.

I’m also reading Life of Pi for my reading fiction class. This book has been reviewed to death and I really don’t feel like I have anything new or relevant to add to the book. I’ve found it slow so far and I’m unimpressed with Martel’s character development. That’s about it.

Hopefully I can get back on my A-game and be able to juggle class readings with fiction readings. I’m just so busy with school, and when I’m not busy, I just want to ride, watch TV or sleep. Good, brainless fun. Well riding isn’t brainless, but it’s second nature to me and doesn’t require too much effort. For now, my life sucks. I can’t wait for summer.

The Birth House

Dora Rare is the first girl born to a Rare man in five generations. Long after her aboriginal great-great-great grandfather’s cinnamon skin diluted out of the gene pool, Dora is born female and she looks like a Native-rare three times over. She’s special, she’s different. Dora isn’t sure she wants to be different. The kids make mean rhymes about her and the older women see her as a menace. Her gaze causes the pregnant to miscarry, animals and humans alike, the superstitious farmers say. Dora ignores them, happy to not be included in their petty lives of tea and silk, earth and whisky. Dora helps Miss Babineau, Acadian midwife who is not one of the small community’s socially acceptable people. Miss B helps the women with their problems and they in turn leave her bread or potatoes, or whatever they can spare. But they do not speak to her outside of her small healing hut. Dora becomes her apprentice, unwillingly at first. She is left alone to battle the doctors for the right for women to have their babies in whatever way they see fit. To fight for midwifery, to fight for freedom, in however small a way.

The Birth House is Ami McKay’s first novel, a sort of literary scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings, letters and journal entries chronicling Dora’s life. Dora is sort of a magic child. Beyond her gender and dark skin, the author mentions that on one occasion she relayed a message to her aunt from a dead relative. Many of the healing balms, salves and drinks are accompanied with a prayer to Mary, something Dora learned from Miss B. In any case, there is an element of spiritualism found in Dora that the blond haired and doe-eyed women of Scots Bay do not possess. The story follows Dora’s life from adolescence through marriage and its after-effect, and on until she discovers her true calling.

McKay is a refreshingly new Canadian voice in literature. The book was melodically written with haunting rhythms and echoes. And Dora is a refreshing heroine, completely natural, relatable and interesting. Far too often I find the main characters in books have the least personality. I quite enjoyed the book and hope to read any subsequent novels from Ami McKay. The content was not always riveting but it was interesting enough to keep me coming back for more, subtly elegant and I always found myself quite enjoying the book for no reason that I could put my finger on.

Blood Red Road

What do you get when you combine The Hunger Games with misspelled words and dusty landscape? Blood Red Road.

Blood Red Road is Moira Young’s debut novel. It is written in 1^st person narrative, from the point of view of unlikely heroine Saba. The book is post-apocalyptic, set any number of hundred years in the future. Not much history is given, but we, the past, are only referred to as the Wreckers. There are no cars, planes, hydro or large cities. Most people are scattered across the land in small pockets of families. There are a few larger towns, but they are places of crime and violence, where everyone is addicted to chaal, a plant that has strikingly similarities to tobacco or nicotine.  It seems that the mostly absent government controls the population by addicting people to chaal. They control the substance’s distribution and they have the towns eating out of their hand.

But Saba, her twin brother Lugh, sister Emmi and father are oblivious to this fact. They live off the dying land, their father in denial of the fact that they have to move because the resources in Silver Lake are gone. Father reads the stars and insists that they must stay where they are. In an unfortunate turn of events, Lugh is kidnapped, father is killed and Saba is left in charge of young Emmi, a sister she never wanted, a sister whose life exists because her mother’s doesn’t. Saba sets off to find Lugh and the men who took him, a boy born at Midwinter eighteen years earlier. Saba doesn’t understand why they need Lugh. All she knows is she will find him, and those men will pay. The ensuing one-man justice league and too-easily predicted love story are tired elements and I wish Young had been a bit more creative in her plot line. How about a young warrior teenager who doesn’t need a man to make her feel fulfilled? Perhaps that’s too radical of a notion.

      I tended to like the scrappy Saba. She’s smart and savvy despite having little experience. And the relationship between her and her sister is all too accurate. I may or may not have a similar relationship with a younger sister of mine. The book’s format is confusing however, due to all the misspelled words, which anyone who has read Uncle Tom’s cabin will remember with twitching dread. The words are misspelled to give the reader a sense of how the words would sound when spoken by the characters. I associate these accents with uneducated people and to me it diminishes the credibility of a narrator because they seem stupid. That’s just my take on it. It annoyed me mildly, but I got over it. There is also no use of quotation marks, which can be confusing and is sloppy to me.

This is just one book in what’s sure to be the next big thing in literature: the future, not focused on lasers and jet packs, but  the disintegration of our society. The Hunger Games set the ball rolling (although Suzanne Collins stole the idea for the Hunger Games from and immensely popular Japanese book entitled Battle Royale. That’s beside the point) for post-apocalyptic fiction to make a comeback. I don’t think this particular series will be the next big fad for several reasons. Firstly, it has come way too close behind Hunger Games. The second movie isn’t even out yet, so people aren’t look for the next books-turned-movies thing. Secondly, it is too similar to the Hunger Games. It is set in the future, after our society is long gone, and the people live under a dictatorship. I think that Moira Young has a more distinct narrative voice and is more skilled at writing than Collins. Mocking Jay disappointed me in a way that no book has ever done. Collins’ plotline however, is more original. Despite this, I enjoyed Blood Red Road and hope to read the books that follow. Hopefully Moira Young’s sequels will not end on such a painfully bad literary note that Suzanne Collins’ did.

The Prodigal Good Novel

Not her best.

That went through my mind when I finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. I came to expect more of Kingsolver. The book centers on three main characters whose lives are unknowingly connected, albeit not quite intertwined.  Deanna Wolf is a divorced woman who has lived in the mountains for years, maintaining and watching the land for the forest authority. Garnett Walker is an aged widower who lives alone while trying to grow a chestnut tree resistant to the blight that wiped out the population some hundred years ago. Lusa Widener is a new and reeling widow, outcast and ostracized by her late husband’s tight-knit clan. Sex and loneliness seem to be the biggest players in the book. Deanna’s part of the story centers on sexual encounters of animals, plants and herself. Kingsolver has a way of making you see the details she does. Now all I think about when I see plants and pollen is plant procreation. The prose  isn’t trashy, just oddly innocent and somehow profound. The three storylines don’t link as fully as I think they should have. A chapter or two more could have solidified the novel, purely from a story-telling point of view.

The character development, as always, was marvellously detailed and well executed. Distinct traits of the characters came through subtly and richly, giving the story a much more real tone than others. However, as is usually the case unfortunately, incredible character development left the plot line lacking. The story was slow moving, meticulous and (gasp) a tad boring. The themes and message of the book were simpler than Kingsolver’s other books, and she hits you over the head with her point, especially in Deanna’s story. It felt a bit preachy at times, the point of view too simple to be realistic. So, because of the obscene amount of sexuality and a plot line so slow it almost went backwards, it is with regret that I do not recommend this book. Kingsolver has much better fiction out there. I got the book for free from a friend, so no harm done (aka money lost). Sadly this book is one for the shelf, never to be read by myself again. Lucky for the book, I never ever throw out books. It’s blasphemous.

Bad books and impatience

I slack. I swear my brain goes into another state of lower consciousness once summer starts and school stops. I am currently suffering through a book a friend of mine told me to read and it is quite frankly, awful. It’s a Randy Alcorn novel, so I suppose it’s my own fault. I doubt I’ll ever finish it or review it. It’s just that bad. The first person narrative is forcibly candid, and the author thinks he’s being clever, but is just untalented. The dialogue is painfully unrealistic and his characters are stereotypical with a few one-dimensional quirks that don’t add to the storyline. His message comes out so overtly through character dialogue that it’s ridiculous and comes off as preachy. I just don’t like it at all. His style or lack thereof drives me nuts. I can’t handle it anymore. I’m waiting for a book to come in at my library however, so I don’t have much choice. I am always reading a book. To not have a book on the go is contrary to my nature. So I have a dilemma. Keep reading the book, or find another. Another that I won’t finish before my new library book comes in. Seriously, every time I read a portion of the book I hear Gru’s voice from Despicable Me saying “You like this garbage?” Insert overly stressed Russian accent. “ You call this literature?” It’s the only thing funny about the sad excuse for a book. Sorry Alcorn. Three strikes and your out. This is strike two. (I tried to unsuccessfully read one other of his books) And you’re out anyways. I’m just that sick of it. I am excited for Blood Red Road to come in at the library. I’ve been in line for close to three months. Hurry up people! Patience is not one of my talents. However, cynicism is. And I’m getting fed up with bad books. Anybody have any good ones for me to read?

More Book Reviews

Sorry to those of you who are looking for my book reviews. I’m absolutely swamped with homework. I’m in the process of reading 2 books: Deception by Randy Alcorn and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I forgot Deception at my church, so I am focusing on The Night Circus. And so far, it is really, really good. Stay posted! I’ll finish it and review it soon enough.

Pigs in Heaven

Pigs in Heaven was not what I had expected it to be. To be honest I’m not sure what I expected, but this book wasn’t it. And that’s okay. I enjoy being surprised.  While I found the message and implications of this book less than The Bean Trees, it was still a good read. The themes center on cultural identity and compromise, but they weren’t as well-developed or profound as some of her other books (cough, cough, The Poisonwood Bible)

             The title (as always) is incredibly clever and has a double meaning. In the first chapter, there are pigs in Alice’s garden, eating her produce. Alice lives in a town called Heaven. But the story also revolves around the Cherokee myth of the six pigs that were banished to live as stars in the heavens. Nicely played, Kingsolver.

I found the dialogue in this book marvelously fresh and addictively funny. I wish all authors had a knack for dialogue as Barbara Kingsolver does. The conversations between Jax, Taylor and Turtle are hysterical but endearing. I kind of want to marry Jax after Kingsolver developed his personality so incredibly well. I’m not entirely sure if someone as awesome as Jax exists, but I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt. One criticism I had about the dialogue was what Turtle says. She is only six years old, but she sound much older in the book. No six-year-old puts together sentences like Turtle does. Turtle didn’t talk until well beyond three years of age, so there is no way her sentence structures would be so advanced at six.

I enjoyed the new characters that were introduced, but I also missed some of the old ones, like Lou Ann and Maddy, but I guess that’s just how it goes. The story, I felt, was a bit too drawn out and some characters, such as Barbie, didn’t enhance the story line and only made it unnecessarily longer. The ending of the book is satisfactory, although too abrupt for my taste. Some of the loose ends weren’t wrapped up, which I do enjoy sometimes, but it just felt like a cop-out to me.

The next Barbara Kingsolver book for me? Prodigal Summer. Library also doesn’t have it. Lucky for me, my boss owns this one too. Good thing she enjoys sharing.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

The Hunger Games has been reviewed to death. But I read all 3 of the books and my aim is to review all the books that I read in 2012, so here it goes. I’m not going to review each book individually, but the trilogy as a whole.

In the somewhat distant yet surprisingly near future, the country of Panem sits on what used to be North America. The Capitol lies at the center, surrounded by twelve districts. Actually thirteen, but district thirteen was nuclear bombed 75 years ago. In order to exercise its iron grip on the people, the Capitol holds the annual Hunger Games- a televised gladiator-like event. One male and one female are selected at random from each district at the Reaping. Katniss Everdeen’s sister Primrose has been selected. But Katniss can’t let Prim go. She would dead in the first 10 minutes. So Katniss volunteers and she is whisked away to the Capitol to undergo training for the Games. Enter Peeta, a boy she never spoke to but who saved her and her family’s life years earlier. In order to survive she must kill the other 23 tributes. Including Peeta.

Dilemma of the century.

In the following second and third books, Katniss (What?! She survived? Who saw that coming? Spoiler alert!) becomes the symbol of rebellion against the Capitol. She’s not sure she wants to but she seems to have little choice. The ball is in motion.   The fire is catching. Katniss must lead the rebellion, or be burned in the encroaching fire of the uprising.

I was a terrible person and watched the Hunger Games before I read the book. Bad Ashley.  So, to be honest, I liked the movie better than the book. The writing in the book was surprisingly simple. I had expected better. It was easy to read and honestly, it took me about 3 hours of reading per book. The first book was great, the second book was good and I hated the third book. Unfortunately, that’s what happens all too often. The third book was long and drawn out, and there was no real climax. I don’t know why they intend to split the third book into two movies. If anything, you’d need to do that to the second book as it has more content.

Anyways, the books were good. Read them. But don’t expect a good ending. Of course, there is a team Gale and a team Peeta. That’s what we do when there’s a love triangle- we pick sides. So one of those camps will be severely disappointed. I was. Her choice didn’t make sense to me, and Peeta and Gale’s choices made even less sense. Plus way too many people die in the third book. It’s majorly depressing. I was hoping that the rebellion would bring about lasting peace and happiness. But Katniss is not happy. The country is hardly better off. Which makes me sad. I was hoping for something a little more uplifting, but that’s probably my fault. The books started out wonderfully, but for me they fell kind of flat, and I lost interest during the third book.  That doesn’t mean that I’m sorry I read them; I’m not. I guess I just expected more from an author whose first book started out so well.

Water for Elephants

I had desperately hoped that the library would send me one of the original copies of Water for Elephants. You know, one without a picture of Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon on the front. Alas, it was not to be and the copy I received has the two of them nestled in each other’s arms. Not off to a great start, as I really don’t have much appreciation for either actors. Anyways, cover art aside, Water for Elephants was a very interesting read. Although the characters were a little clichéd, I found that the atmosphere of a 1930s carnival came alive in the novel.

Jacob Janowski is an honour student, attending Cornell to become a veterinarian. He is days away from writing his final exams when his parents are tragically killed. He has no money, no home and nothing to live for. He jumps on a moving train on a whim and ends up on the Benzini Brothers’ Most Spectacular Show on Earth’s train. And soon Jacob becomes the resident veterinarian for the crumbling circus. Jacob wants no trouble, but he finds himself falling in love with Marlena, a star performer who is married to the cruel animal handler August. Jacob must give everything he has to try and escape the imploding show alive before it’s too late.

The entire story about Jacob working for the circus is one big flashback told by Jacob as he, now in his 90s, lives in an old age home. The parts that tell Jacob’s life in the present are touching and they really give us an understanding of what the elderly must feel, sitting alone day after day. Jacob’s character is strong, albeit somewhat predictable. I would have liked to see more character development in Marlena however. I got the feeling that I didn’t know Marlena at all, nor why Jacob is so desperately in love with her.  Many of the minor characters are what you would expect: cranky, fake Uncle Al leading the show, the working men who are rough around the edges and underpaid, the performers who want nothing to do with the working men, and so on. They are quite stereotypical but stereotypes come from truth, so perhaps it’s an accurate portrait of the workers. I enjoyed the fact that the book is not centered on romance. There is romance, obviously, but the main plot of the book has little to do with love until the very end. I was pleasantly surprised.

  The plot moved at a steady pace, with interesting (although not unexpected) twists and turns. Sara Gruen does a marvelous job of building the suspense as the story reaches its climax. One thing that I found disappointing was the bad language. The book is riddled with vulgar words and swearing. This is probably realistic, given the setting, but at some points it made me uncomfortable how easily such depraved words and phrases were thrown around. The end of the book was quite happy, and it left me smiling. I had fallen in love with 90-year-old Jacob Janowski, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with how his life progressed.

Water for Elephants was an interesting book, and I’ll bet the movie is too, although I doubt it will be very true to the story. Hollywood loves romantic stories, and I think the essence of Jacob’s life will be lost. They will, undoubtedly, focus entirely on Jacob and Marlena’s relationship. The movie will be filed in my mind as one of those ‘hey, I should watch that sometime’ movies and then I’ll never end up renting it. Which is probably just as well because I don’t need the poor choice of language repeated, this time, out loud.

 

All The Flowers in Shanghai

Feng has to marry her sister’s fiancée. Sister died, leaving the powerful Sang family without a wife for their up-and-coming son and heir. Sister was older and vivacious, cunning and the epitome of a vixen. Feng is just a simple girl who is not ready to marry. Sister had been groomed her whole life for this- Feng was never supposed to marry.  She was the second daughter. All time, effort and money went into Sister, leaving Feng to shrink in Sister’s cold shadow. But Sister died and now Feng must marry Xiong Fa, leaving behind her childish romance with the peasant, Bi. She must learn to sink or swim in the Sang family’s unforgiving household. With a gentle poetic tone reminiscent of old China, All the Flower’s in Shanghai is a beautiful novel that follows one woman’s struggle to reclaim the life she once knew.

Set in China in the 1920s and 1930s, the novel is a portrait of what traditional China looked like before it was swallowed up in Communism.  There is a simple beauty in Duncan Jepson’s writing. A lilting narrative voice almost feels like it has been translated from Mandarin, which helps give the book an authentic feel. I enjoyed reading about Feng, and could sympathize with her coming of age, being thrown into a life that was not supposed to be hers. As she desperately tries to fill Sister’s shoes, she comes to a great realization: Sister wasn’t mean because she was born that way. All the pampering and attention made her that way. In some ways Jepson is right- spoiling a person makes them selfish. But Jepson’s tone implies that we are all born good and nurture turns us, but I prefer a different interpretation: we are all capable of becoming evil. It is our nature, but certain treatments can allow us to indulge more easily into this sin.

The theme throughout the book revolves around forgiveness and regret. Feng must forgive her parents, the Sang family, and herself. The greatest tragedy perhaps is that she never does. Feng started out as an innocent, sweet girl, but her new life made her bitter and cold. In the end she is sorry. She wants her daughter to live a better life than she did. But she never stops blaming herself and everyone instead of making the best of her circumstances. Although Feng is loveable, some of her character flaws made me dislike her. I don’t know it that was Jepson’s intention, but when Feng attempts to explain (through 1^st person narration) why she did what she did, I ended up disliking her even more. But maybe that’s my problem, not Jepson’s.

Feng hates those who are weak: Xiong Fa, her grandfather, and maybe even herself. Xiong Fa only did what his parents expected of him, whether it hurt Feng or not. And Feng’s grandfather knew young Feng would be sold out to marry Xiong Fa but he did nothing. He didn’t act on his convictions his whole life and wasn’t about to start then. Feng herself can be accused of the same thing. She had the power to refuse, to say no, to run away. But she didn’t. Towards the end of the book, she does run away from her life, desperately trying to return to her life as a child. But she cannot. She lives out the last ten years of her life almost starving to death, working for the communist revolution. Although the book was marketed as being set in the revolution during China, it was really only covered in the last few chapters.

Another thing that bothered me was how much time elapsed in the book. It covers forty to fifty years, with some chapters chronicling one day and others ten years. I wanted a little more consistency from Jepson. He seemed to have bit off more than he could chew in trying to cover Feng’s entire life.

To me, the end of the story was desperately depressing. Maybe I expected an idealized version of life, but I felt that in the end, the novel held no meaning. The last page is entirely unnecessary, consisting of a letter to Feng’s daughter spelling out exactly what I thought the book was trying to say. It was just silly. Don’t write something saying “Don’t live like I did, make good choices,”.  A good ending to me, is profound and leaves the reader thinking about the implications of the book and the message. Let me do some of the work Jepson! You spelled it out way too clearly. The book was a good first novel, and many of the elements came together beautifully. The ending to me was disappointing however, which is most unfortunate because those last words are the ones the reader remembers most of all. They convey the final sense of the novel. It was a shame that the end of the book left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.