Review of Speaking From Among the Bones, by Alan Bradley

Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery, Starred Review 0

Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

Delacorte Press, New York, 2013. 378 pages.
Starred Review

Hooray! Another installment in the detective novels about Flavia de Luce, eleven-year-old genius and poison aficionado.

In this book, the locals are celebrating the quincentennial of the death of Saint Tancred by opening his tomb. Along the way, they find a dead body that is not five hundred years old, but rather that of their missing organist. Naturally, Flavia ends up gathering the clues to find the murderer.

I enjoyed this book immensely. There’s another clever puzzle for Flavia to solve while bicycling around the neighborhood. This time, she and her sisters weren’t nearly as mean to each other, and I enjoyed the respite. It looks like their beloved Buckshaw will have to be sold, which pulled them together. The book did end with a bombshell regarding their family, which stresses that these books should be read in order. Those who have read so far will be delighted as I with the latest installment.

Here are a few fun sections:

Ordinarily, anyone who made such a remark to my face would go to the top of my short list for strychnine. A few grains in the victim’s lunch pail — probably mixed with the mustard in his Spam sandwich, which would neatly hide both the taste and the texture . . .

It wasn’t until I was nearly home — not, in fact, until I was sweeping past the great stone griffins that guarded the Mulford Gates — that I realized I had overlooked two very important things. The first was that business of the bat, and how it had managed to get into the church. The second was this: If the tomb in the crypt was occupied by the remains of Mr. Collicutt, where on earth, then, were the bones of Saint Tancred?

Whenever I’m a little blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.

I knew that the instant life ends, the human body begins to consume itself in a most efficient manner. Our own bacteria transform us with remarkable swiftness into gas bags containing methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and mercaptan, to name just a few. Although I had for some time been making notes toward a future work to be called De Luce on Decomposition, I had not had until that moment any real, so to speak, firsthand experience.

There you have it: An old-fashioned cozy mystery with a precocious and delightfully bloodthirsty sleuth in postwar England. Tremendous fun!

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of When I Was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson

Current Issues, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

When I Was a Child I Read Books

by Marilynne Robinson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012. 206 pages.
Starred Review

When I checked out this book, I expected a heart-warming memoir from someone I’ve been told is an outstanding writer. (I really must read her novels. I own at least one.)

Instead, I found scholarly and intellectual essays about a wide variety of things. Reading, yes, but also religion, justice, cosmology, ideology, liberalism, imagination, community, freedom. . .

I read it slowly, and the essays are on different topics, which I’m afraid is an obstacle to remembering all that was in this treasure-house of a book. But I did come back to it eagerly, and every time I dipped into it, it left me thinking deeply.

The essay I remember most distinctly, was, of all things, “The Fate of Ideas: Moses.” In it, she points out that the Mosaic Law, which we often think of as harsh, was much kinder to the poor and downtrodden than modern laws, and particularly than laws in England before America was founded.

Moses (by whom I mean the ethos and spirit of Mosaic law, however it came to be articulated) in fact does not authorize any physical punishment for crimes against property. The entire economic and social history of Christendom would have been transformed if Moses had been harkened to only in this one particular. Feudalism, not to mention early capitalism, is hardly to be imagined where such restraint was observed in defense of the rights of ownership. Anyone familiar with European history is aware of the zeal for brutal punishment, the terrible ingenuity with which the human body was tormented and insulted through the eighteenth century at least, very often to deter theft on the part of the wretched. Moses authorizes nothing of the kind, nor indeed does he countenance any oppression of the poor….

These laws would preserve those who were poor from the kind of wretchedness More describes by giving them an assured subsistence. While charity in Christendom was urged as a virtue — one that has always been unevenly aspired to — here the poor have their portion at the hand of God, and at the behest of the law. If a commandment is something in the nature of a promise (“Ten Commandments is an English imposition; in Hebrew they are called the Ten Words), then not only “you will not be stolen from” but also “you will not steal” would be in some part fulfilled, first because the poor are given the right to take what would elsewhere have been someone else’s property, and second because they are sheltered from the extreme of desperation that drives the needy to theft. The law of Moses so far values life above property that it forbids killing a thief who is breaking and entering by daylight (Exodus 22:2).

More along those lines are found in “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism”:

It is striking to note how protective, even tender, comparable Old Testament laws are toward debtors. This is Deuteronomy 24:10-13: “When you make your neighbor a loan of any sort, you shall not go into his house to fetch his pledge. You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you make the loan shall bring the pledge to you. And if he is a poor man, you shall not sleep in his pledge; when the sun goes down, you shall restore the pledge that he may sleep in his cloak and bless you; and it shall be righeousness to you before the Lord your God.” The Geneva Bible has a note that makes the law gentler yet. It says, “As though ye wouldst appoint what to have, but shalt receive what he may spare.” No one can read the books of Moses with any care without understanding that law can be a means of grace. Certainly this law is of one spirit with the Son of Man who says, “I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me.” This kind of worldliness entails the conferring of material benefit over and above mere equity. It means a recognition of and respect for both the intimacy of God’s compassion and the very tangible forms in which it finds expression….

The tendency to hold certain practices in ancient Israel up to idealized modern Western norms is pervasive in much that passes for scholarship, though a glance at the treatment of the great class of debtors now being evicted from their homes in America and elsewhere should make it clear that, from the point of view of graciousness or severity, an honest comparison is not always in our favor….

At present, here in what is still sometimes called our Calvinist civilization, the controversies of liberalism and conservatism come down, as always, to economics. How exclusive is our claim to what we earn, own, inherit? Are the poor among us injured by the difficulties of their lives, or are the better among them braced and stimulated by the pinch of want? Is Edwards undermining morality when he says “it is better to give to several that are not objects of charity, than to send away empty one that is”? Would we be better friends of traditional values, therefore better Christians, if we exploited the coercive potential of need on the one hand and help on the other? There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor. These phrases are all Edwards’s and there are many more like them.

Here’s a paragraph I liked from the essay “Imagination and Community”:

When definitions of “us” and “them” begin to contract, there seems to be no limit to how narrow these definitions can become. As they shrink and narrow, they are increasingly inflamed, more dangerous and inhumane. They present themselves as movements toward truer and purer community, but, as I have said, they are the destruction of community. They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowable within certain limits. I am convinced that the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.

And here’s a section from that same essay about the nature of education:

From time to time I, as a professor in a public university, receive a form from the legislature asking me to make an account of the hours I spend working. I think someone ought to send a form like that to the legislators. The comparison might be very interesting. The faculty in my acquaintance are quite literally devoted to their work, almost obsessive about it. They go on vacation to do research. Even when they retire they don’t retire. I have benefited enormously from the generosity of teachers from grade school through graduate school. They are an invaluable community who contribute as much as legislators do to sustaining civilization, and more than legislators do to equipping the people of this country with the capacity for learning and reflection, and the power that comes with that capacity. Lately we have been told and told again that our educators are not preparing American youth to be efficient workers. Workers. That language is so common among us now that an extraterrestrial might think we had actually lost the Cold War.

The intellectual model for this school and for most of the older schools in America — for all of them, given the prestige and influence of the older schools — was a religious tradition that loved the soul and the mind and was meant to encourage the exploration and refinement of both of them. I note here that recent statistics indicate American workers are the most productive in the world by a significant margin, as they have been for as long as such statistics have been ventured. If we were to retain humane learning and lose a little edge in relative productivity, I would say we had chosen the better part.

I love it when she waxes eloquent about books:

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library. I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books. But it has caused me to ponder the meaning they have for me, and the fact that to me they epitomize one great aspect of the goodness of life….

I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of — who knows it better than I? — people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility….

I belong to the community of the written word in several ways. First, books have taught me most of what I know, and they have trained my attention and my imagination. Second, they gave me a sense of the possible, which is the great service — and too often, when it is ungenerous, the great disservice — a community performs for its members. Third, they embodied richness and refinement of language, and the artful use of language in the service of the imagination. Fourth, they gave me and still give me courage. Sometimes, when I have spent days in my study dreaming a world while the world itself shines outside my windows, forgetting to call my mother because one of my nonbeings has come up with a thought that interests me, I think, this is a very odd way to spend a life. But I have my library all around me, my cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience, who have helped me to my deepest enjoyments of it.

I didn’t intend to quote so much! But that gives you an idea of what’s found here. This isn’t light reading; it’s deep and thought-provoking. She’s coming from a Christian and intellectual perspective and I found her words stirred up ideas I’d never thought about before.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Gorgeous, by Paul Rudnik

Fairy Tale Variant, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Gorgeous

by Paul Rudnick

Scholastic Press, New York, 2013. 327 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s a light-hearted and upbeat modern fairy tale, with sly jabs at the fashion industry, celebrity culture, and popularity.

Becky Randle’s mom doesn’t go out much. She weighs almost 400 pounds and seems afraid of life. But Becky loves her fiercely.

However, on Becky’s eighteenth birthday, her mom dies and leaves Becky a phone number. When she calls the number, she’s offered a thousand dollars and a plane ticket to New York.

In New York, she’s offered a bargain from the mysterious and glamorous designer Tom Kelly.

“Let’s talk about you,” he said. “You’re eighteen years old, you’ve finished high school and you couldn’t be more ordinary. Yes, you have the tiniest hint of your mother, but don’t kid yourself. You’re nothing. You’re no one. And you look like – anyone. You don’t exist.”

I knew I should punch him or shoot him or at least disagree but I couldn’t, for one simple reason. He was right.

“So here’s my offer,” he said, sitting up straight, as if he was about to conduct serious business. “I will make you three dresses: one red, one white, and one black. And if you wear these dresses, and if you do everything I say, then you will become the most beautiful woman on earth. You will become, in fact, the most beautiful woman who has ever lived.”

She decides to try his offer. She gets poked and prodded and measured by an entire crew of people, including handmade shoes and custom jewelry. I love the part where they take a blood sample:

“This is couture,” explained Mrs. Chen, depositing the spool in a test tube. “Every garment will be custom made, only for you. You will become a part of each dress.”

When the first dress, a red one, is finally ready, Tom Kelly takes Becky out to a gala.

We passed a large framed poster, under glass, announcing the schedule for upcoming operas and concerts, and I was inches away from the glimmering reflection of a woman who was not only unthinkably beautiful, but at ease with herself and entertained by my gaping. And that was when I first suspected that the reflection, and the woman, and the miracle, might be me.

My instantaneous response was a screaming brainload of panic. I pulled my arm away from Tom and I ran down the nearest available hallway, to the ladies’ room.

Looking in the ladies’ room mirror, she sees her old self. But when someone else walks in, her reflection again shows Rebecca Randle, the most beautiful woman in the world.

And then Tom Kelly adds the kicker, another fairy-tale element:

”By the way,” said Tom Kelly; he was leaning into the room with both hands braced against the door frame, like a warm-hearted Christmas Eve dad, checking that I was tucked in and that sweet dreams were on their way.

“I should mention something. You have one year to fall in love and get married. One year, or all of this, by which I mean Rebecca, all of it disappears forever.”

So, Becky’s adventures begin as the most beautiful woman who’s ever lived. I love her sense of humor about it, as well as her friendship with the down-to-earth Rocher, from back home. She meets the teen heartthrob she’s had a crush on since childhood (Turns out, he’s gay.) and gets to star in a movie with him. She meets royalty and other celebrities. Who is she, really, under that astoundingly beautiful exterior? Is Rebecca Randle, most beautiful woman in the world, a real person at all?

The book has an unexpected but completely satisfying ending. The last paragraph is one of my favorites ever and made me laugh out loud.

Oh, and the author has mastered the art of chapter endings that make you want to keep reading. If you don’t want to spend half the night reading this book, let me give you a hint: stop in the middle of a chapter! I didn’t, and was sorry the next day.

For a modern fairy tale about beauty and identity, with plenty of humor along the way, try Gorgeous, by Paul Rudnick.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Out of the Depths, by Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau

Biography, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Out of the Depths

The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last

by Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau

Sterling, New York, 2011. 380 pages.
Starred Review

Israel Meir Lau was one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald. His older brother was charged by their father to take care of him, and against all odds, he did.

The weight of history and the pride of his heritage rings through these pages. Here he talks about his brother:

Naphtali recalled his last conversation with Father, in which Father had counted thirty-seven generations of rabbis on both his and my mother’s sides of the family. He did this in order to demonstrate the great responsibility of whoever would be saved from the horror to continue the chain of our heritage. Father read verses from Jeremiah: There is hope for your future, the word of God, and your children will return home. He emphasized that if we escaped this inferno safely, we would know how to find our home, which was not this home or any other on this enemy land. “Your home will be in Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel], even if you have to acquire it through suffering,” he said, and Naphtali and Father cried on each other’s necks. After embracing each other tightly, Naphtali returned to his job in the ghetto. Father’s words echoed in his ears. Father had believed that I, the youngest son of the Lau family, would escape the inferno safely and pass along the heritage that the Nazis were attempting to destroy.

Israel (“Lulek”) did indeed survive, though his parents did not. He was only eight years old at the end of the war, but his brother managed to keep him safe in the camps. He and his brother made it to the land of Israel, and Lulek went on to become Chief Rabbi of Israel.

This is his story, a story of God’s protection and a story of great service back to God.

The beginning of the book, describing the war years, is the most gripping. After he gets to Israel, he doesn’t organize the material in chronological order, so the book was a little harder to follow. But throughout the book, a powerful story is told of a man who clearly has the hand of God upon his life.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Imperial Purple, by Gillian Bradshaw

Fiction Review, Historical, Old Favorites, Starred Review 0

Imperial Purple

by Gillian Bradshaw

Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1988. 324 pages.
Starred Review

Imperial Purple is the first Gillian Bradshaw book I ever read, a gift from my sister Becky many, many years ago. The book is wonderful, and is the one that started me on one of my favorite authors.

Gillian Bradshaw is fabulous at Historical Fiction. She studied classics at Cambridge and must have done vast amounts of research. Imperial Purple is set in the fifth century A.D. Demetrias is a skilled weaver in Tyre, and her husband Symeon is a purple-fisher. There in Tyre they make purple cloth that only royalty can wear.

And then Demetrias is called to the procurator and given an assignment for a purple cloak with two tapestry panels. But it is specified to be the wrong length for the emperor. And she is told to do it in complete secrecy. She knows someone is plotting treason. But what can she do about it? She is a slave of the state, and so is her husband. The prefect is clearly in on the plot. If anyone in power finds out, they won’t hesitate to torture Demetrias to find out what she knows.

Demetrias plans to finish as quickly as possible and get rid of the thing. Her husband Symeon wants to find someone powerful to entrust with the secret. But when their fears are realized, they end up thrust on their own resources.

Woven into the political intrigue and the fascinating historical details is a beautiful love story between a husband and a wife. They both face a long journey and great danger, and you will delight in the twists and turns of the tale. I love the way Gillian Bradshaw’s Author’s Note at the end explains that these events actually could have taken place. Not much is known about the time, but the main historical figures mentioned all existed and went in and out of power as in the story.

I think this is about the third time I’ve read Imperial Purple, and I fondly hope it won’t be the last.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, a gift from my sister Becky.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken, read by Lizza Aiken

Alternate History, Audiobooks, Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

by Joan Aiken
read by Lizza Aiken

Listening Library, 2012. The book was written in 1962. 5 hours on 4 compact discs.
Starred Review

Why had I never read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase before? I remember seeing it as a child, and I think I may have even checked it out once, but it looked far too dark for me. (I never have really liked dark books.) This time reading it, I was completely enchanted. Yes, the girls triumph over adversity, but I wouldn’t even call this book “dark” now that I’m an adult. I guess the Edward Gorey illustrations were too much for me.

And this 50th anniversary production is especially delightful in that it’s read by the author’s daughter. And she talks at the beginning about the writing of the book and the adversity her mother faced in her own life. Her mother had a gap of ten years in writing, and read the chapters to her children when she finally took it up again. For me, this inside information made me enjoy the story all the more.

The story is wonderful. As they point out in the introduction, we’ve got orphan girls with everyone set against them. They must figure out a way to escape and somehow set things to rights, and they do so on their own power. The sinister wolves add atmosphere and drama and probably too much darkness for the little girl I once was. But this audio production would make marvelous family listening. (If it gets too scary, you can comfort any little ones listening.)

The story is old-fashioned and melodramatic, but there’s so much to love. This classic was #57 in Betsy Bird’s Top 100 Children’s Novels Poll. I’m so glad I’ve finally read it.

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Source: This review is based on a library audiobook from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Doll Bones, by Holly Black

Adventure, Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Fantasy, Paranormal, Starred Review 0

Doll Bones

by Holly Black

Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2013. 244 pages.
Starred Review

Wow! Holly Black has surpassed herself with Doll Bones. It’s a kids-going-on-an-adventure novel, a ghost story, a growing-up tale, a story of friendships changing, and a story of coming to terms with parental expectation. And it’s all carried out beautifully.

Zach and his friends Alice and Poppy have an incredibly detailed imaginative world going. In a episode that reminded me of the ship scene in Momo, Zach leads his action figure William the Blade on a pirate ship adventure, attacked by Poppy’s mermaids and assisted by Alice’s Lady Jaye.

But Zach is twelve years old, and it’s not only other kids who think he’s too old to play with action figures. When Zach comes home from basketball practice, his Dad has thrown all of them away, saying it’s time for Zach to grow up. Zach doesn’t want to tell the girls.

That anger curdled inside his belly and crawled up his throat until it felt like it might choke him. Until he was sure that there was no way he could ever tell anyone what had happened without all of his anger spilling out and engulfing everything.

And the only way not to tell anyone was to end the game.

Not surprisingly, the girls don’t take kindly to that. Poppy tries to entice Zach back into the game by taking the creepy doll her mother owns, the doll they call The Queen, out of its glass cabinet. But when she does so, that night she has a vivid dream.

“It wasn’t like a regular dream,” Poppy said, her fingers smoothing back the Queen’s curls and her voice changing, going soft and chill as the night air…. “It wasn’t like dreaming at all. She was sitting on the end of my bed. Her hair was blond, like the doll’s, but it was tangled and dirty. She was wearing a nightdress smeared with mud. She told me I had to bury her. She said she couldn’t rest until her bones were in her own grave, and if I didn’t help her, she would make me sorry.”…

“Her bones?” he finally echoed.

“Did you know that bone china has real bones in it?” Poppy said, tapping a porcelain cheek. “Her clay was made from human bones. Little-girl bones. That hair threaded through the scalp is the little girl’s hair. And the body of the doll is filled with her leftover ashes….

“Each night she told me a little more of her story.” Illuminated by the flashlight, Poppy’s face had become strange. “She’s not going to rest until we bury her. And she’s not going to let us rest either. She promised to make us miserable unless we help her.”

So the three kids set out. Zach and Alice aren’t sure Poppy’s not making it up, until more strange things happen. Their plan is to take a bus to the gravesite up the river in East Liverpool, Ohio. But a crazy man on the bus spooks them, and they get off the bus too soon, and then must escape the attention of officials.

I’ve said in other reviews that I don’t normally enjoy creepy stories. But this one is done beautifully. I should say that there’s a lot more scary dread than anything that actually happens to the kids. But I think it’s fair. The doll gets upset when they get sidetracked from their mission, but she has no reason to be upset as they near the goal.

Readers also might fault it for how nicely all the emotional threads tie up in the end. But I loved it. The different emotional threads are woven into the story with a delicate touch, and even though they tie up nicely, it never feels too good to be true.

This book is excellent on so many levels. The friendship between the kids changing on the cusp of adolescence feels real, with all the touchiness inherent in those changes. The quest is in the classic tradition of The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The kids aren’t well-prepared, and they argue along the way, but they follow their quest to a tremendously satisfying conclusion.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/doll_bones.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Historical, Romance, Starred Review 0

Eleanor & Park

by Rainbow Rowell

read by Rebecca Lowman and Sunil Malhotra

Listening Library, 2013. 9 hours on 7 compact discs.
Starred Review
2013 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Winner

Sigh. I didn’t want this book to end. I hated going to work today, having to stop in the middle of the last CD. When I got home, I didn’t even think for a moment of leaving the CD in the car. (And I’d done the same thing on CD 5, finishing it in the house.)

I’ve always liked slow-burn romance, romance that shows the characters, slowly, realistically, falling in love over time, rather than just looking at someone and suddenly falling for them. This book is a realistic, slow, beautiful, exquisite love story.

I loved listening to the story. I liked the way you’d hear what one character was thinking, and then it would jump to the other character’s viewpoint. However, now that I’m writing the review, I wish I had the print book to share good bits with you.

I did *not* like the ending. However, considering that the Eleanor & Park were studying Romeo & Juliet in school (Eleanor being contemptuous that it’s called tragedy), and considering the parallel nature of the title, and that this was also a teenage love story between teens from very different backgrounds — well, it could have ended much worse. I was afraid all along this would end as badly as Romeo & Juliet. This isn’t too big a spoiler: Nobody dies.

But I hated the ambiguity of the very end. And there are many secondary characters whose fates I really want to know about. The author gave us so much detail along the way, is it too much to ask for a little bit of detail at the end? (Apparently it is.) I want to know more!

So you’ve been warned about the ending. But the journey is totally worth it. It starts toward the beginning of the school year when a new girl — Eleanor — gets on the school bus, and no one will let her have a seat. Park finally scoots over and gives her half of his seat, but they don’t even speak to one another for weeks. The back-and-forth narration shows us each one starting to wonder about the silent person on the bus. Then Eleanor starts reading Park’s comics over his shoulder. They still don’t speak.

Meanwhile Eleanor’s dealing with bullying in gym class and an awful situation at home, with four little brothers and sisters to worry about as well. Park’s problems are more along the lines of his Dad making him learn to drive a stick before he’ll let him get his license. As things progress, Eleanor cannot let her family find out about Park.

There were so many little things that rang so true. I liked the way neither would admit they were boyfriend and girlfriend until well after Park had gotten in a fight over something said to Eleanor.

The audio was wonderful and had me driving to and from work almost in a trance. It’s not family listening, though. It’s a love story, and their feelings do grow in passion, which could be quite embarrassing for younger listeners. (I love the way they each marvel separately over how amazing it feels to hold hands. Things do progress from there, but this doesn’t jump straight to making out without giving the small steps along the way their due.) I was listening in the car by myself, so I didn’t have to worry about embarrassment, but the descriptions struck just the right note of wonder and passion, without feeling trite.

If you’re ever in the mood for a love story, I highly recommend this one.

listeninglibrary.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker

Fantasy, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Golem and the Jinni

by Helene Wecker

Harper, 2013. 486 pages.
Starred Review

I had brought this book back to the library, figuring I’d never get around to reading it, so I should give other people a chance. I made the mistake of looking inside to get the flavor of it — and was instantly hooked. I brought it back home and bypassed all of my plans and made it the next novel I read.

Here’s the first paragraph:

The Golem’s life began in the hold of a steamship. The year was 1899; the ship was the Baltika, crossing from Danzig to New York. The Golem’s master, a man named Otto Rotfeld, had smuggled her aboard in a crate and hidden her among the luggage.

The beginning talks about how Rotfeld decided he wanted a wife and turned to Schaalman, a disgraced rabbi who dabbled in the Kabbalistic arts. Here’s a warning Schaalman gives to Rotfeld:

“The results may not be as precise as you might wish. One can only do so much with clay.” Then his face darkened. “But remember this. A creature can only be altered so far from its basic nature. She’ll still be a golem. She’ll have the strength of a dozen men. She’ll protect you without thinking, and she’ll harm others to do it. No golem has ever existed that did not eventually run amok. You must be prepared to destroy her.”

But Rotfeld dies during the passage to America, shortly after waking the Golem. With no master, she hears the desires and wishes of everyone around her. Terribly distracted in New York City, she meets a rabbi who knows what she is and helps her pass for human.

Nearby, in the neighborhood of Lower Manhattan called Little Syria, a tinsmith is working to repair an old flask and releases a jinni. The Jinni doesn’t remember the last several hundred years. Last he knew, he was in the Syrian desert, paying more attention to humans than other jinn said was good for him.

The Jinni, too, must pass for human in New York City. He works for the tinsmith who released him. Made of fire, he can heat and mold metal with his bare hands. But he’s not willing to merely stay in the shop.

Both the Golem and the Jinni become restless, since, after all, they don’t have to spend their nights sleeping like the humans around them. They both can instantly see that the other is not the human they are pretending to be.

Even though it’s a very different story, this book reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, with a world so much like ours, but with these magical deviations. As in that book, the characters are deeply explored and all the implications of the world built are lived out.

The Golem lives among Jews and the Jinni among Syrians, but they find each other and change each other’s lives and outlook. Eventually, they discover a surprising connection between them, a connection that could mean their destruction.

This book captivated me all the way along. It explores what it means to be human, as we look at these two creatures passing as human: one made of clay, and one made of fire.

harpercollins.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/golem_and_the_jinni.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of The Cup and the Crown, by Diane Stanley

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

The Cup and the Crown

by Diane Stanley

Harper, 2012. 344 pages.
Starred Review

Molly’s back! The Molly who saved the kingdom in The Silver Bowl with the help of her strange powers, seeing visions in a silver bowl, has now been made a Lady. But the king has a commission for her. She is to go find a Loving Cup, made by her grandfather, with the power to bind two people together. He needs it for an important alliance. And since Molly has been having nightly visions about such a cup, she agrees to go.

In this volume, we find out much more about the source of Molly’s magic and her family history. I think you could read it without having read the first book, but I almost want to say you shouldn’t read it without reading whatever’s coming next. I’ll simply say about the ending that it annoyed me. I’m hoping Diane Stanley can write a third book that will reconcile me to those events.

But right up until the annoying ending (and that may be a personal quirk that I didn’t like it), I thoroughly enjoyed this journey. I was a little disappointed to discover Molly has noble blood — it was refreshing to have a character in a medieval fantasy who was a commoner — but I don’t think that’s a flaw. And it did emphasize her strong magical gift.

I like the slowly blooming romance between Molly and Tobias, and what they were willing to do for each other. Yet we still have a certain amount of doubt that they will really end up together (because of that annoying ending. I’ll say no more).

What started with a very unusual magical world — with magical visions in a silver bowl — has become unusual in other ways, including a secret kingdom where magic is revered. Only can Molly and Tobias ever get out again?

dianestanley.com
harpercollinschildrens.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/cup_and_the_crown.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!