you can do better

City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: I'm so glad that Stacey Lender finally admitted near the end of this book that there might possibly be good people living in the suburbs, because I was starting to feel very discouraged.  Actually, I was starting to feel very grateful for my own suburban mom-friends, because Lender's characters, besides being mostly interchangeable, are also all mean and petty, not to mention serial adulterers.

Our heroine Jessica finds that out the hard way when she and her family move to Suffern from Manhattan, looking for more space and a yard.  Thinking she's hit the mom-friend jackpot when it turns out that right next door is a mom with a daughter the same age as her own daughter, Jessica gets pulled into the competitive sport of volunteering and car-pool.  Jessica and her husband both enjoy the social scene at first, but when Jessica is invited to join a mom's-only beach weekend, she starts to really figure out who these new friends are.

Lender is a skilled writer and this book kept me turning the pages, even though the subject matter is nothing new.  I look forward to seeing what she writes next, and hope that she chooses material that better showcases her talents.

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

king of the run-on sentence

Aloft by Chang-Rae Lee
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Challenge: A-Z (title)
Review: I guess the point of this book is that it's kind of apathetic and just sort of drifts along with no particular direction. Which is all well and good, except that it doesn't make for a very good read. It's sort of boring and annoying. In this book, all the characters are flat, and rather unlikeable. Due to the first-person narrator, we don't even get much of a sense of the other characters; they're just sort of background-noise to the non-story being told. The effect is that we never really feel connected to the story, and don't really care about any of the characters. Also, our first-person narrator has an extreme tendency to ramble in run-on sentences. As a literary technique, I don't mind this too much, but when the character himself is boring, any little quirk in his voice becomes grating.

teenage love

That Night by Alice McDermott
Genre: fiction
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Review: I've enjoyed other books my McDermott, especially Child of My Heart. And I have no problem with a future narrator; in fact, I thought McDermott did a great job alternating the voice of the narrator as a 10-year old and as an adult. But this book lacked something, I'm not quite sure what. It's a nicely told story, but I was left asking the question, "Why was I told this story?" It sort of felt like someone started telling me a story, but lost their train of thought in the middle, or forgot why they were telling me.