Book Review: The Twelve, by Justin Cronin

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Though I didn’t find myself too impressed with The Passage, the first in Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic vampire trilogy, I ended up reading the second novel in the series, The Twelve , since my hold on a library copy finally came through. (I requested it when it came out in October 2012, so that should give you an idea of how popular the series is!) But the all-too literary treatment of vampires that The Passage offered only continued in The Twelve, with an added dose of forced spirituality and unbelievable coincidences.

This all makes it sound like I hated The Twelve, which I didn’t. It’s a solid three-star read, thanks to Cronin’s ability to inject real fear and tension into the narrative, one or two interesting and pitiable characters, and the desire to know how the heck he is going to wrap this sprawling thing up. Mostly, I think I’m just a sucker for hype. But this series is so fawned over, to the point of garnering a movie deal and getting accolades from writers like Stephen King, that I can’t quite help but feel that I’m missing something.

Book Review: Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes

I have waited a long time to read Lauren Beukes’ sophomore offering, Zoo City–it was one of my first TBR adds on Goodreads–and happily, I was not disappointed! In just a few words, Zoo City is a creative, unique, and un-put-downable entry in the urban paranormal/sci-fi thriller genre.

In a futuristic Johannesburg, South Africa, our protagonist Zinzi December is eking out a living by finding lost objects with her burden and companion Sloth by her side. Like hundreds of other people around the world, Zinzi is ‘animalled’–after an incident of wrong-doing and the ensuing guilt, an animal has appeared and has become physically and psychically linked to the offending human. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of order to the type of animal that becomes linked to each guilty person; there is a brief mention of someone in prison with a butterfly companion, for example.

Book Review: A Dual Inheritance, by Joanna Hershon

I’ve been trying to write my review of A Dual Inheritance, by Joanna Hershon, for a while. Not because I disliked the book (spoiler alert: I give it four out of five stars!), but because it spans so many characters, themes, and plots, it is hard to summarize and even harder not to spoil.

Here is the summary from Goodreads:

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963: two students meet one autumn evening during their senior year at Harvard–Ed, a Jewish kid on scholarship, and Hugh, a Boston Brahmin with the world at his feet. Ed is unapologetically ambitious and girl-crazy, while Hugh is ambivalent about everything aside from his dedicated pining for the one girl he’s ever loved. An immediate, intense friendship is sparked that night between these two opposites, which ends just as abruptly, several years later, although only one of them understands why. A Dual Inheritance follows the lives of Ed and Hugh for next several decades, as their paths-in spite of their rift, in spite of their wildly different social classes, personalities and choices-remain strangely and compellingly connected.

I’m a sucker for collegiate settings, and though we are only at Harvard briefly, I think Hershon does a commendable job using it as a backdrop to the relationship between Ed and Hugh. College is a period where people from disparate upbringings and backgrounds interact, often for the first time, and appropriately, Ed and Hugh could not be more different. However–as again often happens in college–the two become intensely close friends, each grappling with their own similar emotional ‘inheritance’ from their parents.

This section especially reminded me of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides–and I mean that as a compliment, as I enjoyed both of these books. Both have young people trying to define themselves, their relationships, and their aspirations; A Dual Inheritance focuses more on the impacts, intentional and otherwise, that parents have on their children. It also lacks the pretentiousness that some found so distasteful in The Marriage Plot; indeed, people are consistently and realistically dealing with their weaknesses.

Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger

Her Fearful Symmetry is Audrey Niffenger’s sophomore novel, following her popular take on the science fiction time travel trope, The Time Traveler’s Wife. To my mind, the two novels could not be more different–and unfortunately, Her Fearful Symmetry suffers for it. While both nicely and neatly integrate the supernatural, there is something decidedly unnatural about the choices her characters make.

Niffenegger’s attempt at a gothic novel concerns two sets of twins: Edie and Elsbeth, who have not spoken or seen one another in over a decade, and Edie’s children, Julia and Valentina. After Elsbeth’s death (not a spoiler, as it happens within the first few pages!), Edie and the twins discover that she has left her London flat to Julia and Valentina, with a few stipulations–the first being that they have to live there for a year before selling it, and the second that Edie and her husband Jack can never set foot inside. With that, Her Fearful Symmetry is off and running. We follow Julia and Valentina as they attempt to navigate a new country and culture, and not least of all their own identities, as twins and as separate individuals. Oh, and did I mention that Elsbeth’s flat is haunted, by Elsbeth herself? The reader is treated to Elsbeth’s slow realization of her death and her increasing powers as a spirit.

Book Review: The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck

Louise Gluck has quickly established herself as one of my favorite poets, if not my favorite of all time. Her poems are so lyrical and so dreamy that reading them is an incredibly soothing experience. If I had my way, I would have read The Wild Iris, her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, lying in a hammock in my parents’ backyard, drenched in summertime sun.  Still, even reading these poems on a crowded subway had me dreaming of flowers, August nights, and dark, rich soil. The power of her words is undeniable!

The Wild Iris consists of a set of poems written from the points-of-view of three narrators. One is a human, I assume Gluck herself. One is a series of flowers in her garden, from the rose to the witchgrass. And the third is an omniscient, omnipresent god-like force. Gluck doesn’t necessarily tell you this; it is only through reading and re-reading the poems in sequence that these narrative voices truly emerge. Each narrator has conflicted thoughts and feelings about the others, and the way in which they question, doubt, and supplicate one another.

There are lots of repeating images and themes here, from death and rebirth to identity to the responsibilities of a creator to his creations. The flower-based poems, for example, both fear death and recognize that death is not the end; their seeds will spread and spring will come for them once more. They also call out feelingly for their gardeners’ help to survive, a sentiment echoed in the poems narrated by humans and addressed to a divine force. I read somewhere that Gluck often introduces elements from the Bible, and some of those stories seem to be present here as well, when the god-narrator speaks (sometimes exasperatedly!) about the needs and fears of his inventions. While I’m not particularly religious, I did enjoy how simultaneously accessible and alien Gluck’s god sounded.

Book Review: Imperial Dreams, by Tim Gallagher

Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre, by Tim Gallagher, is an account of the author’s travels through the Sierra Madre mountain range in Mexico in search of the imperial woodpecker. Presumed extinct since the 1950s, the imperial woodpecker–the largest of its species in the world!–is a close cousin of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which Gallagher claimed to have encountered with a birding team in Arkansas. This book represents one of his many in-depth searches for a rare, possibly extinct bird.

I’m a birder (though not on Gallagher’s level), and in addition to having birded in some cool places, I’ve also been lucky enough to have traveled throughout Mexico as a result of my father’s family still living there. So really, this book seemed as though it was tailor-written for me!

However.

Book Review: Netsuke Nation: Tales of Another Japan, by Jonathan Magonet

Netsuke Nation: Tales from Another Japan, by Jonathan Magonet, is a short-story collection unlike anything you might have encountered before–unless you are familiar with netsuke, small and elaborate decorative carvings that are part of proper Japanese dress. Magonet, who has lived and taught in Japan, became enamored of netsuke and began to collect some of his own. Netsuke Nation is the result of his fascination with the carvings: partly short stories based around the imagined lives of individual figurines, and partly an ethnographic exploration of netsuke life, including politics, art, entertainment, and even sexual relationships.

As I read, I found myself wishing the Magonet had dropped the enthnography conceit entirely, and instead focused solely on the personal histories he had created surrounded his own personal netsuke. Those chapters, to me, felt the most in-depth, realistic, and creative. There are stories about a geisha cat, a pair of elderly sumo wrestlers, a fox priest, a professor, and more. They range from exploring themes of loneliness, relationships, and politics, with just a twist of magical realism, and are written with a certain detached wryness that I thought was appealing. Enough of the “other Japan” comes through in these stories, in bits and pieces that occur naturally as our characters navigate the world, as to make dedicated ethnography chapters seem flat and overly-expository. The geisha cat, for example, introduces the reader to the role of a geisha–to be a conversational, charming, objective of beauty–in addition to what her days and nights might look like, without necessarily going into a formal study of geisha culture. It probably also helps that I was the type of kid that totally believed her stuffed animals were alive, and had all sorts of fun adventures the moment my back was turned. It was very easy for me to fall under the spell of the netsuke characters!

Book Review: Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

In Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc follows the lives of a Dominican-American family living and growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s and 1990s. Jessica, her brother Cesar, and Cesar’s girlfriend Coco face poverty, drugs, children, abuse, and incarceration over the course of a decade or so, and all of it is faithfully reported by LeBlanc. Much like Always Running (review here), Random Family is a sometimes- unpleasant read, but an important one. For many Americans, the effects of extreme, generational poverty are invisible. LeBlanc forces you to look–to care.

First, I very much appreciated that LeBlanc kept herself out of the narrative. I think the tendency to insert oneself into stories like this can be tempting, especially when you are following the same individuals for years, becoming enmeshed in their lives. LeBlanc wisely realized that this book was not about her, but rather, about the lives of Jessica, Coco, and their families. Readers will already recognize that LeBlanc is an outsider to this neighborhood and this culture, and any attempts to include herself more firmly in the narrative would have only highlighted the contrast even more.

The world of Random Family is fascinating–morbidly so. The Bronx of the ’80s and ’90s depicted in this book is, in many respects, an unforgiving place. Gang violence is prevalent, as is gun ownership. Drug use and dealing is merely a way of survival. The cycle of poverty appears unending. Parents are either absent, addicts, abusive, or incarcerated. Everyone suffers. It will weigh very, very heavily on your mind, and you will cheer every time Coco, Jessica, or Cesar make the slightest bit of headway against such overwhelming odds. LeBlanc does a commendable job in making the environment painfully real, even to readers who have never been to the Bronx.

Book Review: Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King

Published in 1975 as the young Stephen King’s second novel, Salem’s Lot occasionally betrays its age. Many of its themes are still pertinent today–for example, the lament for small-town America, slowly fading into obscurity as the elderly pass away and the young flee for more opportunities, applies as much in 2013 as it did during the time of King’s writing. So too does the mundanity of evil. While there are actual vampires haunting the shadows of the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, the reader knows that a more common breed of monster has been there all along. The rapacious, the envious, the duplicitous. Child abusers, alcoholics, cheating spouses, malicious gossips, wife beaters.

When the evils of the everyday become subsumed by an ancient, supernatural Evil, it’s actually a fairly smooth transition–and that might be the scariest thing of all, King seems to say.

Despite the well-written and enduring truths that King has tapped into, some of the language and characterization used in Salem’s Lot is, to modern sensibilities, old-fashioned.

It was impossible to ignore the use of the derogatory “f-word” as a constant insult for perceived weakness  or potential homosexuality. Though the argument could be made that King was simply using it as a way to characterize the townspeople as bigoted or behind the more-progressive times, it didn’t come across that way to me. There was never any pushback to characters saying that word; it felt normalized and careless. Regardless of King’s intentions behind using the “f-word”, it was still very jarring and uncomfortable to see it in print so often.

King was also still growing into writing fully-realized female characters. Susan Norton, the heroine of Salem’s Lot, seems to exist in the novel only to give hero Ben Mears the excuse for a love scene and an impetus for revenge. Though she has some agency, when compared to the other main (male) characters, Susan is weak, flighty, and contributes very little. On the basis of her character alone, Salem’s Lot would fail the Bechdel Test.

Book Review: White Horse, by Alex Adams

Alex Adams’ White Horse came galloping out of the herd of dystopian fiction earlier this year, accompanied by lots of positive reviews and buzz. I took a bet on it, but unfortunately, for me, what I had taken for a White Horse was, in actuality, a bob-tailed nag.

(Okay, okay…no more horse puns.)

While it initially seemed like a promising example of a post-apocalypse novel, I ended up finishing White Horse solely for the reveals. Even when reading something that I don’t entirely enjoy for various reasons, if there are unanswered questions and the twists come fast and furious, I’ll still read it. This was the case with White Horse, where though I could tell within the first 75 or so pages that this wasn’t going to be a favorite of mine, there were tons of twists.