all the synonyms for debauchery

Cape May by Chip Cheek
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: In most books, one expects there to be some character growth.  In this book, the characters just get more and more debauched.  Our main characters, Henry and Effie, are newlyweds from Georgia on their honeymoon in Cape May, NJ.  It's September, so the summer resort community is largely empty, but soon Henry and Effie find another young couple in a house down the street.  But their new friends are neither as young nor as innocent Henry and Effie, and soon they find themselves going inexorably down the path to dissipation and lasciviousness until they both doubt whether their marriage will outlast the honeymoon.  Cheek saves most of his answers for the last chapter of the book, where the reader can trace the effects of their licentiousness.

Ultimately, this book is very readable (if you're in the mood for reading about a lot of sex) and the action (pun intended) is fairly continuous, making it feel as though things are moving along at a good pace.  The descriptions of the town and the ocean are evocative (as are the descriptions of the sex) and the characters are believable, if not very likable.  But there's not much movement in this book, either geographical or metaphysical, giving the book a somewhat stagnant feel.

Cheek shows his prowess (I just can't help myself) much more in the last chapter than in all the preceding ones, when he focuses on the emotions of a relationship more than the sex.  He shows definite promise as a novelist (certainly anyone who can write a good sex scene is a promising novelist) but hopefully his future books will focus more on the growth of his characters than on their sex lives.

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

looking back

The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: Doris Alm has lived a long and eventful life, from a poor childhood in Sweden, to modeling in Paris, to being a maid and companion to a frustrated artist.  Doris has loved, and lost, and would probably agree with Tennyson that that's better than the alternative.  But now she is concerned that when she dies, everything that has made up her life will die with her.  So she determines to write about the people she knew and the things she did.  She uses the red address book that her father gave her as a young girl as a prompt, as she looks through the pages and sees that nearly all of the names are crossed out and have the notation, "dead" written beside them.  The story alternates between these reflections and her current life, home-bound, with her only connection to the outside world being the aides who come in to help her each day and her weekly Skype sessions with her only family, her great-niece Jenny who lives in San Francisco.

This story is lovely, heartbreaking, tragic, and hopeful, all at the same time.  The writing is evocative, both the past and present sections, and beautifully translated by Alice Menzies.  Although it's slow to get into, Doris's story will sweep the reader along after the first few (short) sections.

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

just keep telling the story

The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: The first 80% of this book is really quite good.  It details the better part of the first five years of the real-life Dionne Quintuplets, through the eyes of their fictional nurse, Emma Trimpany.  Emma is 17 in 1934 when she assists the midwife at the quints' birth, and has led a fairly sheltered life until then.  As the Depression deepens and the situation is Germany gets worse and worse, Emma's focus remains resolutely on her charges, staying with them even as many other caretakers come and go.  Even naive Emma is shaken by the conflicts between the quints' medical caretakers and their parents, and she can't entirely ignore hints that some people who claim to care for the quints are really there to exploit them, a list that starts with their parents and primary doctor and goes all the way up to the Canadian government.  Told through Emma's journals, and letters she receives, as well as newspaper articles that, we are told in the author's interview, are almost entirely unedited contemporaneous sources (and Wood carefully delineates where any edits have occurred), we get a good feel for the situation.

Throughout the book we read letters sent to Emma from her would-be beau, Lewis, and at the end of the book, Wood makes the unfortunate decision to give us all of Emma's letters in return, as a way of answering a lot of the questions that have come up in the narrative.  It amounts to an info-dump, at the end of  a well-told story.  I think Emma's letters were supposed to be the "big reveal," answering some questions about what was really going on, but I wish Wood had told her story more organically, giving us Emma's and Lewis's letters together and letting the tale unfold as it happened.  The ending is satisfying, in its way, but seems very ragged compared to the rest of the book.

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

plus ca change

We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction/historical fiction
Review: Reading this book is a little bit like viewing history through a kaleidoscope; as you turn the wheel, the colors shift slightly to make a different picture, but one that is made up of the same elements as the one before.  Bartels writes vividly across three storylines, each taking place in a different time.  The three time periods (1861-75, 1963-7, and modern time) blend and separate as each tell a story about racism and family.

Mary unwittingly and then wholeheartedly opens her home to escaping slaves during the Civil War.  Her granddaughter Nora must face the realities of racism when she falls in love with and marries a black photographer.  Elizabeth, Nora's great-niece, and an aspiring journalist, thinks she's found the story of a lifetime when she's given a camera to return to this aunt she's never met.  The story of each woman echoes the others as they search for the truth of themselves, their family, and its history.

Because there is a generation missing between Mary and Nora, and between Nora and Elizabeth, some of the past remains hidden, and Bartels avoids several opportunities to wrap everything up with a neat bow.  Usually, loose ends at the end of a book make me crazy, but Bartels demonstrates her gifts as a writer by making even this seem like a natural part of the story.

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

everything and the kitchen sink

The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
Rating: 2 stars (out of 5)
Genre: science fiction
Review:  Kate Mascarenhas has found an interesting approach to writing a time travel novel.  As the title indicates, she's exploring what happens to a time traveler's brain and to their personality when they move through time.  In her world, the answer is: nothing good.  Among other mental infirmities that can develop, frequent time travel can cause people to become desensitized to and crass about death.  This can be a major problem, and how to tackle that problem and make time travel psychologically safe is an interesting entre into the genre.

Unfortunately, Mascarenhas has bitten off a bit more than she can chew, in what is clearly a debut novel.  She's wrapped this question in a mystery and layered it with an enormous bureaucracy that governs everything related to time travel, travelers (sometimes the same person) coming from both directions, and a full cast of non-time travelers. The mystery gets sort of forgotton for a while in the middle while we deal with the characters, and by the time we get back to it, I don't really care about the who's or why's of it.  And I couldn't even keep track of the characters, and all their various timely incarnations, let alone care much about any of them.

Still, there are hints of Mascarenhas's strengths as a writer.  Some of the characters are quite well-written, and parts of the action really hum along.  If she chooses to write another book, perhaps she'll be able to mellow out a little and let her talents shine through.

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

two out of three ain't bad

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: science fiction
Review: Writing a time travel novel is kind of like writing a vampire novel - there are certains rules that must be followed, but other than that, the only thing an author must do is create a world with internal cohesion.  Mike Chen has definitely created a world that holds together.  His time travel agents have strict rules they must follow in order to prevent the timeline from corruption, and even the more technical explanations (of things like the "grandfather paradox") are eminently understandable.

Unfortunately, his characters and their relationships don't get the same attention.  At first, I thought the lack of depth in the future was deliberate, to reflect Kin's initial feelings of disconnect when he returns to his own time, but I didn't begin to feel more connected to those characters as he apparently did.  We're told that his feelings return for his fiancee return, but never really shown it.  On the other hand, the present-day characters felt much more fleshed out, but we don't actually have much interaction with them once Kin returns to the future.

So, it's a plus for world-building, a negative for characters, and there's another plus for the actual action of the story.  Kin's various attempts to reconnect with and then save his daughter shine through with his intensity, and Chen's determination to stay within the rules that he's created add a sense of urgency and truth to his actions.  If you do the math, world-building + action - character development = an eminently readable book, if not one of the best time travel books I've ever read.

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

what holds us together?

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: Often, when I get to the end of a book, I'm left wanting to know what happens to the characters after the last page.  Much less frequently, do I feel the need to know about what happened before the first page.  But that was how I felt with this book.  What happened to get this family into this predicament?  Some of it was ancient history, some more recent, some became very clear, but a lot stayed very hazy in my mind.  I get that the details of the past may not have been the point, but I think a little more history would have helped me to understand the characters actions and reactions and why certain things have meaning.  It is clear that Gray's characters are all very much alive in her mind, but I had trouble getting them to come alive for me.

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