jodiwilldare's reviews
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I’m not sure where to begin telling you about Cara Hoffman’s novel So Much Pretty because I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it.

I picked up the novel after reading Hoffman’s Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay. A literary thriller with a soundtrack that included Cat Power, The Violent Femmes, and Woody Guthrie? Sign me up.

I enjoyed reading the book. It intrigued me. Unlike most mysteries I’ve read, I didn’t feel like I was being played when the gotcha moment came. It felt quite natural and surprising. That was all good.

But I don’t think this is the kind of book you fall in love with. It’s a novel of ideas wrapped up in a mystery, and while intriguing it wasn’t very emotionally satisfying.

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Anya’s your typical angst-ridden American teen. She’s unhappy with her perfectly fine body; constantly dieting; has a crush on the hottie basketball star and loathes his beautiful, perfect, blonde girlfriend; she’s got one friend she’s not particularly fond of; and she likes to ditch class at her private Catholic school to go outside and smoke. What’s not typical about Anya is that she’s a recent transplant from Russia who really works at being that typical American teen. She fears being seen as “fobby” (fresh off the boat) like diminutive, nerdy Dima, a Russian boy her mother would really like her to befriend.

After a fight with her friend, Anya stomps off and while cataloging the problems of her life (a scene that artist and author Vera Brosgol draws so wonderfully, I turned back to it a few times) manages to fall into a hole in the middle of the woods. Once she gets her wits about her, down at the bottom of the hole, Anya spots a ghost perched quietly atop the ribcage of a skeleton. Turns out the ghost, Emily, belongs to the 90-year-old bones and can’t wander too far from them.

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Reading Jean Thompson’s The Year We Left Home is a little like surviving a year in the Midwest. If you come here in the late spring it’s all glorious warm days and cool nights and bursting flowers and the smell of lilacs. It makes you wonder why everyone on the planet doesn’t want to live here.

Starting this latest novel/series of linked short stories feels a little like that. The book opens in 1973 with seventeen-year-old Ryan Erikson attending his sister’s wedding. The Eriksons are a tall Norwegian breed and possess the kind of stoicism Midwesterners are known for. While they often possess the Midwestern traits that have turned us into punchlines, in Thompson’s hands they are more than the stereotype.

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If we were allowed to judge books solely on their cover, Imaginary Girls would be the most beautiful, intriguing book I’ve read all year. But books are more than that and this one doesn’t live up to the cover’s promise.

A blend of magical realism and mystery, Imaginary Girls is the story of sisters Chloe and Ruby and the sacrifices women will make for the people they love. Though Ruby is technically her half sister, (“but we don’t count by halves,” Chloe says at one point in the book which made me cheer) Chloe wholly trusts her older sister and is willing to go to any length to make her happy. In this case, that length is swimming the old reservoir one night in an attempt to prove Ruby right in front of their gang of friends. The reservoir was created after the town of Olive was flooded like 100 years ago. Ruby loves to tell stories about the people who still live in Olive, the ones who refused to leave their homes even when the waters rose. She tells Chloe fairy tales of how they grew webbed fingers and learned to breath water.

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Dana and Chaurisse are sisters growing up in Atlanta of the 1980s. Chaurisse is the plain, flute-playing one. Dana’s the beautiful scientific-minded one. Oh, and she’s also a secret. The sisters’ father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.

Dana knows she’s the secret sister. She knows that Chaurisse and her mother, Laverne, get to enjoy all the benefits of being the acknowledged family, the real family. And this knowledge eats at her and the corners of her life.

Usually when you read a novel there’s a definite protagonist and an antagonist. This isn’t the case in Tayari Jones’ engaging and wonderful Silver Sparrow.

“Writers make choices,” it’s one of those workshop cliches. It ranks right up there with your story starts on page nine, and what does the character want.

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Why are you unhappy? That’s the question thirty-something midwestern Zeke Pappas asks his subjects. He’s gathering answers for his magnum opus, a study of American Unhappiness. When the novel opens we’re nearly finished with the Bush administration, seven years after 9/11, and Zeke is hoping to figure out what it is that makes Americans unhappy, which is different from sad, he explains at one point in Dean Bakopolous’ novel My American Unhappiness. The novel is littered with the answers Zeke gets from his website. They range from hilariously mundane to serious anomie.

But while Zeke’s trying to study American unhappiness he ignores his own through a willful lack of self-awareness. Zeke’s got myriad reasons for to be unhappy. Almost too many to be believable. Here let me list a few:
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Before I started reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, I took off the book jacket and placed it on the coffee table. I didn’t want that image anywhere near my bedroom, where I was convinced it would give me nightmares. That picture is scary.

The book is scary too, but only for a little while then it evens out into a nice time-travelly tale about a bunch of strange kids. I’m glad it did too, because the creepy, crawly, suspense is not exactly my cup of tea, and some of the accompanying pictures were the stuff of nightmares. Seriously, there’s this picture of twin, dead-eyed ballerinas in Harlequin costumes that still makes me shudder in horror.

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A few weeks ago I was having a discussion with Christa where I posited that big New York Publishers like books about New York where characters just wander around in their New Yorkness being all New Yorky with the utmost New Yorkitude. My prime example: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill which tons of people loved the crap of, but I would lay wagers on the fact that at least 3/4 of that tonnage was made up of New Yorkers.

Kate Christensen’s The Astral is another example I can add to my Crackpot Theory. In this novel, fiftysomething poet Harry Quirk wanders around Brooklyn being Brooklyn-y and pining for his estranged wife, Luz. She’s kicked him out of their apartment at The Astral because she’s convinced he’s having an affair with his longtime BFF, Marion, who’s been recently widowed.

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In a Pop Matters interview Chuck Klosterman says, “It was harder to write fiction, but maybe that was only because I’d never done it before. I can’t remember if writing Fargo Rock City was hard or easy.”

The fact that he’s never written fiction before is painfully, achingly, stupefyingly, annoyingly obvious. First, there is the problem with the adverbs, which I won’t go into again.

To start off Klosterman can’t even answer the question of who is telling this story, one of the main tenets of all fiction, even the most experimental. My best guess, after finishing the book, is that it’s Chuck Klosterman himself. The mystery narrator seems to have all of Klosterman’s patented schtick down. There’s tons of weird lists, parenthetical asides, pop culture references coming at you a mile a minute, lots of repetition to really make his point in case you missed it the first three times. Sounds like Klosterman, right?

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Within the last year or so, I made a rule that if I’m not engaged in a book within the first 100 or so pages I was going to stop reading it. I bent the rule for Kafka on the Shore because it was picked by Rock and Roll Bookclub for our September read. I cursed every page past 100 where I wasn’t engaged. I wondered where the story was going and if I’d ever care.

It’s a fantastical story about a fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka, on a quest, a mysterious accident in the 40s that left a man, Nakata, mentally incapacitated, and then there are the talking cats. It was tough going. Murakami is a beautiful and majestic writer, and a demanding one at that too. He forces you to bring it when you read this book. Every time I put Kafka down I was not sure I wanted to pick it up again. I just wasn’t engaged in the story.

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