stick to the fictional

Up With the Sun by Thomas Mallon

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction

Review: Mallon, author of such previous gems as Bandbox and Dewey Defeats Truman, seems to be confusing writing with name-dropping lately.  In his loosely connected Republican Apologist trilogy, the names are members of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 43 administrations.  Here, the names are from show business in the 1950s-1970s.  And while I appreciate that one of the names he drops is that of my own cousin, The Last of the Red Hot Mamas, Sophie Tucker, I know that most people these days have never heard of her, nor of many of the other players who come and go through this book.

The story centers around the life and murder of Dick Kallman, a never-star of stage and screen, who most people have also never heard of, and, harsh as it sounds to say this, probably won't care much about.  Mallon portrays him as a shallow, callow, unethical, and more to the point for the main character of a novel, uninteresting.

The more interesting character is the purely fictional Matt Liannetto, who knew Dick sporadically through his acting career, and who was one of the last people to see him alive.  Through him, we see the both the law and the order aspect of bringing Dick's killers to justice, which is somewhat compelling, in a macabre way.  Matt himself is just a more interesting character, and I wish Mallon had just written a book about him, and made Dick Kallman a footnote to his story.

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

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.

wish come true

Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: This is a stunning book. Part of me wanted there to be more of it because it was so good, but of course the sparseness of the prose is part of what makes this book so beautiful. There is no character like Weetzie anywhere else in literature, and you can't help but love her.