the right way out

The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Essie's preacher father is the head of both his megachurch and his family, but it's Essie's mother who really runs the show.  Literally.  Essie's family stars in "Six for Hicks" a popular reality tv show focusing on their family and ministry.  Essie's life has always come with cameras and production assistants.  But her life isn't what millions of viewers might assume, and when a pregnancy test comes back positive, it's time for Essie to put in motion the plan she's been hatching for years to get herself out of the spotlight.

Essie is a great character.  She's both determined and vulnerable, strong and nervous.  She narrates her own story with a clear and convincing voice.  Roarke, whose help she needs to get out, is also a great character, and his voice helps to make Essie's story fuller and more believable.  On the other hand, Liberty Bell, the reporter to whom Essie entrusts her story, could have been the main character of her own book, but cramming her story into Essie's doesn't quite work, and she reads as more of a plot device than a fully-fleshed out character.  Her presence is necessary, helping to illuminate parts of Essie's story that she couldn't give us on her own, but a simpler character, with less of a backstory might actually have served the novel as a whole better.

Still, with Essie's voice as the driving force of the narrative, this book is a success.  I was rooting for Essie, and then for Essie and Roarke together, and was fully invested in their search to find the "right" path in a challenging situation.

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

the last one sees clearly

The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Triplets Lewyn, Sally, and Harrison are the much-wanted product of their mother's IVF.  Johanna, their mother, dotes on them, but is oblivious to them as actual people.  She insists that they love each other, and doesn't seem to notice that they prefer not to be in each other's company.  Salo, their father, is largely uninterested (although not unloving), preferring to spend his time with his art collection, and, eventually, his mistress, until he is killed on 9/11.  As the triplets are about to move out, Johanna decides that she wants one last chance at motherhood, and has the fourth embryo of the bunch implanted.  Enter Pheobe, who, at 17,  is the only member of the family able to see things (more or less) clearly.

After much excellent exposition setting up the family dynamic, the crux of the matter becomes apparent.  The details would spoil the experience, but suffice it to say that Pheobe must overcome her siblings' old resentments and her mother's hang-ups, all formed long before she was born.  Naturally, she'll uncover old secrets and learn a few things about herself along the way.  But Phoebe is quite determined and not about to let her family members hide behind their usual evasive tricks.

Phoebe's narrative voice makes this book worth reading, even if, for most of the book.  A strong and surprising young woman, you may find yourself wishing that she would bring her considerable talents and persistence to solve the problems in your life.

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

#mashup

The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: If you put A Man Called Ove, The Authenticity Project, and any book that purports to tell you about the books you must read before you die into a quantum accelerator and spun them until they became a single book, The Reading List is what you would get.  Except I would definitely recommend just reading the individual books instead.

I can't fault Adams for her book list, as it includes some of my favorites, and I do appreciate how the characters used what they found in the books to improve their own lives and relationships.  But the pace of the book is too slow for the premise, and some of the text-to-life connections to the books seemed a bit forced.

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

the language of feminism

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Genre: historical fiction

Review: Esme received her introduction to language literally at the feet of the men putting together the Oxford English Dictionary.  Her father was one of them, and as a child, she would hide under their worktable and play with the word slips that fell to the ground.  She starts her own collection of forgotten slips, and begins to notice that many of them deal with things that refer only to women.  As she grows, she starts to deliberately seek out words that will never find there way into such a straight-laced piece of formality as the OED.  Collecting these "lost words" will prove an education in itself for Esme, one very different from what she receives in her formal schooling, or as she begins to work on the dictionary herself.

Esme is a believable and sympathetic character and her quest to have women's words, particularly those of the lower classes recognized is realistically written.  Any reader who's interested in the intersection of feminism and language will be intrigued by this book.

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

essays of self

Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman by Eileen Pollack

Rating: 2 stars (out of 5)

Genre: essays/memoir

Review: In this collection of essays, the author exhibits three modes: being preachy, self-pity, and navel-gazing.  Not being particularly interested in any of these, I found very little to appreciate about this collection of essays, well-written though they were.

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

intertwining ammonites

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction, historical fiction, science fiction

Review: Reading this book felt like doing a puzzle with beautiful, imaginatively drawn pieces.  You don't know what the final picture will be, but you know it's got to be something fantastic.  The book requires some close attention to recognize all the puzzle pieces, but your patience and attention are well worth it, as it all comes together to form an intricate and unexpected picture.

Made up of three stories from different time periods that intertwine and spiral together, each story contains elements of homecoming, identity, and searching.  Anna and Omeir are on opposite sides of the siege of Constantinople in 1453.  Seymore and Xeno are on opposite sides of an accidental hostage situation at a library in Idaho in 2020.  Konstance is the only survivor on a generation ship in 2145 (or so she thinks).  Wrapping around and running through each separate story is the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fictional ancient Greek comedy that is found and lost and found again throughout history.

Anna finds a codex in a ruin on which is written the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land, in which Diogenes tells the tale of his attempt to find the mystical world of the birds.  Anna keeps the codex safe, and it disappears until it is next discovered some 500 years later in the vaults of the Vatican.  It is very degraded, but Xeno attempts to translate it as the pages are scanned in and released to the public.  He tells the story to a group of children, who decide to create a play based on the story.  Konstance is told the story by her father, one of the few members of the generation ship crew who remember Earth, which has become an environmental disaster.  When the rest of the crew is killed by a plague, she pieces the story together on scraps of fabric, and ultimately pieces together the reality of her world.  It is primarily Xeno's and Konstance's stories that weave together, but no part of any of the stories could exist without the rest.

This is truly one of the most creative and intricate books I've ever read.  Doerr puts all the pieces together very well.  And not only does he keep the whole puzzle together in his head, he writes lines like:

    (on learning Greek) "Boil the words you already know down to their bones, and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, starting back up."

    (describing the frozen north) "...it was so cold that when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said."

better a shed than a library

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: Approaching her 40th birthday, Alice is devoted to her father, who raised her alone after he mother left.  Alice finds watching her father waste away in the hospital to be unbearable.  So when she discovers a portal that allows her to relive the day of her 16th birthday, she is determined figure out how to change his life so that he doesn't get sick.  What she discovers as she lives though many iterations of the day is that perhaps quality is a lot more important than quantity.

Fans of The Midnight Library will appreciate this more realistic (in terms of human emotions, not in terms of time travel) exploration of choices and consequences and what it means to be happy.

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