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: 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: 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 Teeth, by Zadie Smith

White Teeth by Zadie Smith is a multi-character, inter-generational, cross-cultural study on immigration, family, religion, belonging, race, and memory that spans from 1945 to 2000.

But to me, White Teeth boils down to one pervasive, general, and complex idea: identity. What does it mean to feel as though you belong to two countries at once? How do you honor your parents’ culture and religion while growing up subsumed by a different culture and religion? What does it mean to belong to so many groups that you actually belong nowhere? How does a first-generation immigrant determine who she is, really?

 

And while it raises all of these questions, I wouldn’t say White Teeth veers into preaching answers to the reader. Instead, as the young characters grow old and the old characters grow older, they each search for the keys to their identities in different ways–some more successfully than others.

It’s hard to write a true review of White Teeth; it covers so much ground that I would rather highlight some of my favorite parts, rather than attempt to describe the entire book!

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.

Book Review: Daddy Love, by Joyce Carol Oates

In Daddy Love, by Joyce Carol Oates, a five-year-old child is violently abducted from his mother in  a mall parking lot by a serial sexual predator and murderer. We follow the mother’s struggles to live a life bereft of her son Robbie, and the boy’s transformation into the “new son” of the psychopathic “Daddy Love.” As the years pass, they have both changed immeasurable in the name of survival, and there is no telling what else Robbie (now Gideon) will be forced to do in order to stay alive.

If you know Joyce Carol Oates, you know what you’re getting into before even cracking this novella open. She has made a career out of tackling uncomfortable subjects and truly evil characters–the darkest corners of humanity. She has written from the point of view of a serial killer, a girl slowly drowning in a sinking car, a girl in the process of being kidnapped, and, oh yeah, another serial killer.

Accordingly, Daddy Love is not what I would call an easy, or even a pleasant, read. There is substantial physical and mental abuse of a young child, and while Oates uses implications and scene fades to their fullest, there are still enough descriptions of abuse to necessitate trigger warnings. (There is also an extremely upsetting scene with a dog, as if all of the child abuse isn’t stomach-churningly horrendous enough on its own.) Daddy Love himself is a no misunderstood or sympathetic villain; he is completely and unwaveringly evil, without any redeeming features. Robbie and Dinah (his biological mother) are much more nuanced. It’s especially interesting reading Robbie’s thoughts as he grows up with Daddy Love, and the ways in which his internalized abuse changes his behaviors.

Book Review: Revenge, by Yoko Ogawa

I am all about revenge lately. Or perhaps it’s better to say I’m more into revenge than usual lately, as it’s something I definitely enjoy reading about and watching. (A personality test once told me that I value justice more than mercy. Yikes!) Anyway, I’m tearing through the first season of the television show Revenge (and simultaneously chuckling at and getting engrossed in its soap opera antics) and I recently finished up two Stephen King books in which revenge is doled out to rapists and torturers (Full Dark, No Stars and Misery, respectively), so when I saw Revenge by Yoko Ogawa pop up on Netgalley, I requested it immediately. I’ve enjoyed the few Japanese novels I’ve read in the past, and a little research on Ogawa revealed that she is a prolific and well-respected author, having won the Shirley Jackson Award in 2008 and numerous other Japanese honors.

There were lots of things I liked about Revenge. As it’s subtitled Eleven Dark Tales, I was expecting a collection of scary and unrelated stories. Ogawa, however, twists our expectations of the short story format and instead allows the vignettes to build off of one another; each character is linked to another in a previous story in some significant (or insignificant) way. I really enjoyed trying to puzzle out the relationships between characters before it was revealed. I think this format allowed Ogawa to focus on the meat of each story, and to create her own closed, realistic (but slightly off) world populated by her characters. For those readers who don’t normally enjoy short stories, Revenge might be a good way to both challenge their expectations and expand their horizons!

Book Review: Tiger Lily, by Jodi Lynn Anderson

I often feel that there are two readers inside of me. One is driven by pure emotion. She loves angst and melodrama and relationships in conflict. Story is the most important thing to this reader, more important than innovative story structure or deep and thoughtful characterization. If the story is exciting and heart-wrenching, she’s happy. She’s capricious and fast, but also just completely enjoys reading and can finish a book in a day.

The other reader inside me is a close and critical reader. And I don’t mean critical in the nit-picky, grammarian sense (though I can certainly fall into that categorization as well). I mean that this reader applies a critical lens to the text. She draws on her experience in cultural competence and feminist theory and history and social justice to help provide context and meaning to books. If your book utilizes stereotypical gender roles or racist constructions–without critically examining them for some better purpose–this reader will raise her eyebrows, lower her estimation of your book, and say, “Really?”

It’s the rare book that gets my two inner readers to uniformly agree on its quality. Obviously, for me to appreciate a book, I don’t even have to achieve that agreement–some books are enjoyable for my brain, some are enjoyable for my heart, and both are important for my overall love of reading. I don’t discriminate! It does, however, make it really difficult to review books sometimes, when my heart and my mind disagree.

With that long explanation out of the way, let’s talk about Tiger Lily, by Jodi Lynn Anderson.

This book hit me right in the feels, just as I imagine it will hit the teen girl YA audience for whom it is aimed at. I got the little angst chills in my arms that I get when something is deliciously painful. Reading it made my morning and evening commutes fly by, and I didn’t want to have to put it down.

Book Review: An Object of Beauty

An Object of Beauty, by Renaissance man Steve Martin, is the tale of Lacey Yeager, an ambitious young Manhattan transplant with dreams of becoming a world-class art buyer and collector. We follow Lacey’s trajectory from unpaid intern at Sotheby’s to gallery-owner and tastemaker, and observe the emotional and professional wreckage she creates along the way. Told from the point-of-view of her college friend Daniel, we are privy to many of Lacey’s private moments and personal failings.

I generally enjoy these sorts of longitudinal character studies, but for a handful of reasons, An Object of Beauty failed to wow me. It’s one of those books that I simultaneously liked and didn’t like, averaging out to a “it was good, but not great” sort of feeling. I certainly don’t regret reading it, but I don’t think its story or writing will stick with me, the way other novels have.

Book Review: The Brides of Rollrock Island, by Margo Lanagan

If you know your Scottish and Irish folklore, you might be familiar with selkies–seals who can shed their skins to become beautiful women on land. If someone steals their sealskin, the selkie is trapped in her human form and can be taken as wife, and even become a mother…but she will never stop searching for her skin, and when she finds it, she will return to the sea. With the current focus on revised fairytales in the literary world–vampires and werewolves and mermaids, oh my!–it’s almost surprising that the selkie myth hasn’t been tackled, until now, with Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island.

In the novel, the men of Rollrock Island are overcome with a desire for seal-wives–seals turned into beautiful, captive, captivating women by the witch Misskaella–at the expense of their human wives, their families, even their connection with the outside world. The impact of the seal-wives reverberates, changing life on the island–potentially forever.

I can’t quite believe that this novel is being marketed as YA. (Which I guess is an issue with me and that way in which I conceptualize of YA.) It’s an insightful, dark, unflinching look at the relationships between men and women, and parents and children, at sex, at the lies people are willing to live with in the pursuit of happiness. Many characters face tragic endings, even the children, and many of the conclusions drawn about love and family are somewhat bleak.

If it isn’t clear yet, I absolutely loved The Brides of Rollrock Island. Totally up my alley.