teach your children well

Hap & Hazard and the End of the World by Diane DeSanders
Rating: 2 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: Hap and Hazard don't really have anything much to do with this story.  They're the family dogs.  The end of the world seem to factor into it much either.  This is the story of an unnamed girl, eldest of three daughters, as she tries to navigate being eight (give or take).  No-one will answer her questions about anything important, and she lives in a world of unexplained things (her father's short temper, her grandparents' various idiosyncrasies, whether there really is a Santa Claus, is there actually something wrong with her, and on and on).  While realistic perhaps, the method of relating a child's experience of the world around her with no explanations about what is really going on is predictably challenging and unfortunately, not very rewarding.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

not subtle, but not preachy

The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: When he is 11 years old, Deming's mother goes to work one day, and never returns.  Deming is soon put into foster care and then adopted.  We meet Deming again 10 years later, and struggling with an identity crisis.  Does he want to try to be the academic his academic adoptive parents want him to be, or does he want to follow his own love of music and try to make it as a musician?  Ko is more than a little heavy-handed in making the reader understand that this is something of a stand-in for his mixed feelings about being an American-born Chinese who spent half of his life in a lily-white upstate New York college town.

This character-driven story will appeal both to readers who enjoy books about immigrants, as well as those about characters searching for their own personal identity.  Told through the point of view of Deming (in the third person) and his mother (in the first person), the full story of what happened to Deming's mother, both how she came to America and what happened the day she disappeared, is gradually revealed.  This is a grim, but ultimately hopeful and redemptive novel that lays out the difficulties of immigration and assimilation without being overly preachy.

breadth not depth

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review:  In 1969, the four Gold siblings visit a supposedly mystical woman who can tell the date on which someone will die.  The oldest sibling, Varya, is 13 when they receive the prophecy, and learns that she will live to 88.  Simon, the youngest sibling at 7, learns that he will die at 20.

Benjamin chooses to tell the siblings' stories consecutively, in order of their death, which took a lot of the suspense out of the question of whether the prophecies were ultimately true, leading me to understand that the driving questions of this book is actually, "Does knowing the date of your death become a self-fulfilling prophecy?"  Benjamin seems to take it for granted that we can accept the legitimacy of the prophecy but is so heavy-handed in answering the question of self-fulfillment that the stories of what happen to the siblings seems very shallow.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.