random connections

Lucky Us by Amy Bloom
Genre: historical fiction
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Review: Reading this book felt a little like watching a silent movie: some jerky, indistinct action, interspersed with text that's supposed to illuminate the dialogue you can't hear, but doesn't necessarily help bring the story into focus.

The story begins as Eva's mother takes her to her father's house for the first time, where she meets her half-sister Iris, and is in for some nasty surprises about her father.  Eva and Iris escape to Hollywood, where Iris has some initial success in becoming a starlet, before she is black-balled by the industry.  Beginning to widen the cast of characters, Eva and Iris move to New York where the bulk of the action takes place.  But why do people choose to go with them?  Why do others join the little group in New York?  Explanation of motivation is sorely lacking in the narrative.  Instead, we are asked to accept, for example, that someone with a long and successful career as a make-up artist in Hollywood would just give that up to join two girls he hardly knows on a cross-country trip.  Ok, yes, he felt bad about what happened to Iris, but I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.

I also felt like the narrative followed the wrong character.  Eva just isn't very interesting.  I'm not sure that I would have found Iris to be all that more compelling, as she comes across as shallow and self-involved, but at least she has agency in her own life.  Eva just sort of drifts along, and seems to almost willfully not understand what's going on around her.

And yet, by the end of the book, I understood where the title came from, and what Bloom was trying to do.  It was a satisfying ending, if not a satisfying beginning or middle.

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

teach passionately

American Teacher: Heroes in the Classroom by Katrina Fried
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: non-fiction
Review: Anyone who's been lucky enough to have a really good teacher knows how inspiring they can be and what a gift it is to be in their classroom.  So I expected a book that collects the stories of 50 "extraordinary" teachers to be similarly inspiring.  Unfortunately, this book didn't exactly inspire me.  Each teacher gets 3 or 4 pages in which to tell their story, and they are all informative in their own way, but it's clear that simple words on a page aren't the best medium for most of these teachers.  This should come as no surprise, as it's their dynamic natures and imaginative thinking that have earned them their "extraordinary" label.  Most of the teachers couldn't be clearer in their belief that you must teach to the student, and not to the test, and meeting the needs of each student in their classroom requires more energy and enthusiasm than can be demonstrated between the pages of a book.  But there is one thing that they all communicated clearly: the best teachers are the ones who have a passion for the profession, and every person included in this book has that passion in spades.

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

make it real

Life After Life by Jill McCorkle
Rating: 3 stars (out of five)
Genre: fiction
Review: It must be very difficult to write a book from multiple perspectives.  The characters must come together in some meaningful way so one cohesive story is told, rather than several intersecting stories.  Having said that, it should come as no surprise that I think the lack of a cohesive story is one of this book's major flaws.  The characters all live in close proximity in a small town, and all either live in, or have some connection to, the local retirement center.  But, for the most part, their stories don't really impact each other.

Another major flaw is that the narrative is interrupted by journal entries by one of the characters.  If these journal entries had given us any insight into this character that would have been one thing, but they are her write-ups of the dying moments of her clients.  Some of them are of characters we have already met at the retirement center, but many of them are people she met in her life prior to returning to the small town where the book is set.  If they had been about people we had met, giving some closure to a life we had read about, or even if they had helped us see her character learn and grow, that would have been one thing.  But, by and large, they are neither related to the story nor relevant to it.

In a "Conversation with the Author" published in the back of the ARC I received, McCorkle states that she knew all along how one character's story would end, and she chooses to end the book there as well.  This is all well and good, except that I felt like she hadn't given me enough about the character throughout the book to earn this ending.  Contrast this with other characters, who get more page-time, if not much more development, whose stories are left unresolved.

For all that, there are many good things about this book.  Each character's story has something to offer, and I wish McCorkle had chosen to write a book of related short stories rather than try to put it all together as one novel.

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

2014 Everything YA Reading Challenge

Who could resist?  Keep an eye here, where I'll keep track of all my YA reading for 2014.

busy standing still

Perfect by Rachel Joyce
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: Any writer who can write a sentence like "If Byron ever tried to hug [his father], and sometimes he wished he could, the embrace ran away at the last minute and became a handshake," as though it just flowed off her pen in the first 50 pages of a book sets up high expectations in her readers.  Not only is this a beautiful sentence to read, but it also tells us everything we need to know about Byron's relationship with his father.

Joyce's language does not disappoint throughout the book, but the pacing does.  There's a lot of tension in this book, which is interesting because it doesn't feel like a lot actually happens.  Most of the energy seems to come from the collective inability of all the characters to get beyond their own anxieties and actually fix the situations in which they find themselves.  And that's just not something I have any patience for, either in print, or in real life.

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

why do we do the things we do?

Portrait by Christina Ann Gordan
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: There are lots of good things about this book.  The main character, Sarah, is incredibly well drawn.  Anybody who has ever been in a similar situation of people are being mean for no apparent reason will understand exactly how she feels, and Gordan captures it very well (I expect the same is true for the abuse situation). Gordan also gives us several excellent twists toward the end of the story, making it well worth the read.

Unfortunately, there are also some serious flaws, the biggest of which was that I was never able to figure out the motivation of Sarah's employers.  Is there such a huge stigma against single mothers in Australia that would explain how mean they were to Sarah?  That seems to be what Gordan suggests throughout the book.  Or perhaps we're meant to understand that there's something fishy going on with the new management?  I kept getting the feeling that there was supposed to be more.  I thought there would be some revelation of bribery or kick-backs or something, but the answer seems to have been simply that all the people who worked there (with one exception) were just nasty people who enjoyed making Sarah's life miserable.  The motivation of every character doesn't have to be crystal clear, but the treatment Sarah receives at the hands of her employers and "colleagues" forms a large part of the story, and not being able to understand why they were acting as they were was very frustrating.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this e-book free from the author in exchange for this review.

what makes you special?

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fantasy
Review: This book is a wonderful mix of the fantastic and the mundane.  It's an ordinary world, but some people have "peculiarities" - invisibility, the ability to levitate, or create and control a ball of fire, and the like.

Although the premise of ordinary-kid-finds-out-he-has-extraordinary-powers is a bit worn-out these days, Riggs manages to turn it into something new.  I don't know whether it's the somewhat-disturbing photos that are sprinkled through the book that keep it grounded, or the fact that Jacob's "peculiarity" doesn't seem all that phenomenal, but whatever it is, it makes this book read more like fiction than fantasy.  I'll take either, and don't mean to make a judgment-call about fiction over fantasy here.  I only mean to say that Riggs has a very deft touch as a writer.

Unfortunately, his touch his not so deft when it comes to explaining the idea of a "loop".  The idea is that the "peculiarity" exhibited by some people is that they can create a loop of time that continuously resets itself as long as its creator can maintain control over it.  I get that, and I can even wrap my head around the seeming-inconsistency that, although the people outside the loop are completely unaware of it, what happens to people inside the loop is permanent (everyone inside the loop remembers everything, if someone dies, they stay dead, even after the loop resets, etc.).  What I couldn't make square was that people from both inside and outside the loop can enter and leave at will, as long as they know where the entrance is, without there being any impact on the loop itself.  There are going to be more books about the peculiar children, so perhaps this will be explained, or perhaps I just need to take it on faith, but as it stands it detracted from an otherwise very enjoyable, and subtle, story.

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