how to build a family

No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: memoir
Challenge: 100 Book Challenge 2011
Review: It may be a cliche to say that you laughed so hard you cried, except that I did while reading this book.  Several times.  Greene tells the story of how her family created itself with such wonderful humor that you can't help but fall in love with them all.

Of course, a book like this can't be all sunshine and smiles, and Greene doesn't pull her punches when relating stories of family tribulation.  Nor does she leave us in any doubt that children around the world face horrifying poverty and hunger every day.

If this book has a flaw, it's that it's a little uneven.  In the midst of discussing the process of adopting one child, the narrative jumps back to relate an anecdote involving an older child, or Green's own childhood.  These leaps never detract from the overall story, but the transitions are sometimes jarring.

Another cliche: this book is both hysterical and heartbreaking.  But mostly it is about how family bonds are about love and effort more than blood.

did I miss something?

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Challenge: 100 Book Challenge 2011
Review: The action in this story, what there is of it, moves very slowly. For the first half of the book, nothing really happens at all. But then, suddenly, things start happening and connections start being made, and I couldn't help but feel that I missed some sort of catalyst in the narrative. It is entirely possible that I did miss some important bit, but since I'm pretty sure that I actually read every page, it seems more likely that Frazier decided that his readers would take a bit of the action on faith.  In something like the reverse of dramatic irony, characters are suddenly referring to conversations and relationships of which the reader is unaware.

This kind of storytelling leaves me scratching my head and flipping back through the book to see if I missed something. (It also has me wondering whether the author chose to relate action to the reader in this way because he couldn't figure out how to actually write the scene where the critical interactions occur.) Frazier is talented enough to pull off these sudden transitions in a way that's not as aggravating as it might be, but I did still feel cheated out of critical parts of an otherwise beautifully told story.

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

the light and the dark

Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction, children's
Challenges: 100 Book Challenge 2011, 2011 Page to Screen Reading Challenge
Review: In this book, Michelle Magorian has written what is essentially a very sweet story of an abused boy (William) who finds love and happiness.  But while most of the book is taken up with William's recovery (both mental and physical), Magorian is not afraid to show us what happened to him.  It is a true mark of her skill as a writer that our brief glimpse into this darker side of the story is done with a very light touch, making it completely believable, but not at all overwhelming.  Readers of all ages will be moved.

a verb, Senator!

The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Challenges: 100 Book Challenge 2011, 2011 Page to Screen Reading Challenge
Review: This is an engaging, believable story, and one that is well-told.  My only real problem with it is Proulx's choice to occasionally leave out the verbs or pronouns from her prose.  I understand this as a stylistic choice, but I'm a fan using all the parts of speech we have at our disposal, and I find it frustrating when authors deliberately make their work hard to read in order to have a distinctive "voice".

funeral train brought to life

The Train of Small Mercies by David Rowell
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Challenge: 100 Book Challenge 2011
Review: With the passage of Robert Kennedy's funeral train from New York to Washington as a framework, David Rowell fills this book with small details that make the stories come alive.  Rowell creates six stories from the hundreds of thousands of people who watched RFK's funeral train pass by (or, in one case, were on the train), and gives us a glimpse into a day in the lives of ordinary (fictional) Americans who were touched in ways large and small by his life and death.  This book is definitely not about RFK, though.  It's about these six sets of characters that Rowell has so realistically created.

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

bad on either count

Love Lies Bleeding by Jess McConkey
Rating: 1 star (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Challenge: 100 Book Challenge 2011
Review: A simply-told tale can be a good thing.  A simplistically told story, on the other hand, is usually not a good thing, and that, unfortunately, is what we have here.  The language is simplistic.  The characterization is simplistic.  The dialogue is simplistic.  The plot is simplistic!  It felt more like reading a comic book without the drawings than reading a novel.

Add to that was the question of what kind of book this book was supposed to be.  Was it supposed to be an attack-recovery story (in which case it was too pat to be convincing) or a thriller (in which case it was not at all thrilling)?  Making it even harder to figure out was that there was no believable connection between the two parts of the story.  I wish I could say that McConkey would have done better to decide what kind of book this was supposed to be and stuck with that, but since neither part was very good, I don't think it would have helped.

narrative by implication

When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Challenge: 100 Book Challenge 2011
Review: There is a lot of sex in the beginning of this book, most of it witnessed, which is good (or at least better than the alternative) since the main character, Elly, is a young girl.  Other sex is implied, making it difficult to know what actually happened.  I found this to be a very frustrating way of story-telling, since so much of Elly's character is supposedly shaped by this implied sex.  This is not the only piece of the story that is told through implication.  Elly's relationship with another character takes on importance in adulthood that is does not seem justified by what is revealed to the reader in her childhood.  I almost felt as though a critical scene has been edited out of the book which would explain how Elly came to be so close to this character later in life.  In the end, this book required too much guesswork for me.

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