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Something Like Normal by Trish Doller

Jul11

This YA novel is a relatively new book (publication date: June 19, 2012) about an old topic: how does the warrior come home from the war?

When Travis returns home from Afghanistan, his parents are fighting, his brother has stolen his girlfriend, and he keeps seeing his friend Charlie in odd places, even though Charlie died in Afghanistan. Can Travis be vulnerable enough and honest enough to build a relationship with Harper, the girl whose reputation he ruined back in middle school?

I liked the story part of this novel, but the crude and profane language and the casual attitude toward premarital sex, although realistic, made me want an expurgated version. I get it: Marines talk and act like, well, Marines. But a little of that goes a long way. And author Trish Doller didn’t really put as much profanity and crude guy talk in the book as she could have. I still could have done without.

That issue aside, Travis is, as the blurb says, a young man with an “incredible sense of honor, . . . an irresistible and eminently lovable hero.” The religious and moral ideas and choices that define Travis are questionable, but Travis is still an honorable man trying to understand himself and come to terms with his war experiences in a complicated world with very little guidance. I think there a lot of Travises coming back from Afghanistan, and this book would speak to them and to their loved ones in a very immediate way.

Thanks to the publisher, Bloomsbury, for sending me an ARC of this timely YA novel.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers

Jun24

The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a book about teen rebellion and the end of the world, and it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. The London Daily Mail called it “a wonderful evocation of teenage confusion, passion, and idealism.” I was not impressed.

Ms. Rogers says in a note in the back of the book that her influences were American Pastoral, a novel by Philip Roth, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, The Chrysalids, a science fiction classic by John Wyndham, and The Diary of Anne Frank. Because of the basic premise, a world that is dying because humans have for some reason lost the ability to reproduce, the novel most reminded me of Children of Men by P.D. James. But Children of Men was a much better book, IMHO.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb really is a depiction of teen confusion and hubris, and I can see the Anne Frank influence. However, maybe because I’m firmly entrenched in the “older generation”, I found it difficult to sympathize with the narrator, sixteen year old Jessie, and her know-it-all teen egotism. Without giving away the plot of the story, I’ll say that Jessie is out to save the world by sacrificing herself, and her parents think she’s making a huge mistake. Her parents are right. Jessie’s a fool, and the book never makes it clear that she is not a heroine, but rather a mixed-up kid who’s living in a very mixed-up world.

I’m just not a fan of teen rebellion, even though I sometimes live with it in my own house. (Oh, yes. It’s here, too.) And even though the adults in The Testament of Jessie Lamb are not much more mature or wise than Jessie is, I’m still on the side of the grown-ups. Poor Jessie could have used a few fully grown authority figures, or maybe a word from God, in her life to help her make decisions based on something besides misguided feelings and delusions of grandeur.

Ms. Rogers also says that Jessie is a sort of mirror image of the character from Greek mythology, Iphigenia, interesting because the name Iphigenia means “she who causes the birth of strong offspring,” and Iphigenia, of course, sacrifices her life for the good of her people. Wikipedia opines,

There are several possible reasons for Iphigenia’s decision. The first is that Iphigenia wants to please her father and protect the family name. Not only does Iphigenia want to please her father, but she also forgives him for making the decision to sacrifice her. The second reason is that Iphigenia sees this as a patriotic cause. Iphigenia realizes that if she dies, then the men can sail to Troy and win and protect their own women. If the men did not get to Troy to defeat the Trojans then all the Greek women would be raped and possibly killed. Thus, Iphigenia sees her death as saving hundreds of women. A third reason for Iphigenia’s choice could be a more selfish reason. Iphigenia wants to be remembered with honor through her self-sacrifice, unlike how Helen of Troy is viewed. While the concept of glory is mostly seen in the men who fight, here it is seen in Iphigenia. A final possible reason is that Iphigenia sees bad in her father and now has nothing to live for.

Almost all of Iphigenia’s possible motivations are brought up as motives for Jessie’s sacrifice, but none of them are really convincing. I came to the conclusion that Jessie was acting out of pure stubbornness, and that motivation didn’t endear her to me either.

So, my final analysis of this award-winning novel is that it’s thought-provoking but somehow lacking in warmth and appeal, with the kind of characters that made me wonder and want to be drawn in, but never really got me to snap at the bait.

Code Name: Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Jun20

I have two weeks. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.

That’s what you do to enemy agents. It’s what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine– and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer von Linden interrogating me again.

He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I’m going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France– an Allied Invasion of Two.

We are a sensational team.

Wow. If you like spy novels, suspense thrillers, World War II espionage, strong female characters, plot and character-driven stories, Really Good Books, read this book. I would warn that there is violence throughout, not gratuitous, but definitely too much for some people. The main character, Verity, is being “questioned” by the Gestapo for half of the novel. After that, it gets really nasty.

Yet, despite all the torture and bloodshed, this novel is really a story about a friendship between two young women. Maddie is middle class British girl who’s managed to learn to fly an airplane, almost by accident, just before World War II breaks out. And her friend, an upper class Scotswoman who grew up in a castle and was educated at finishing school and at Oxford, is a radio operator. The two girls are thrown together by the war, and the novel traces the outlines of their growing friendship and even comradeship in arms.

Code Name Verity was just what I needed after reading Palace Walk, in which all of the women were intimidated and afraid. Although Verity and Maddie are afraid, too (they spend several pages listing their top ten fears), the two young women manage to rise above their fears and perform courageous acts of heroism. Maddie’s mantra that she repeats to herself in crisis moments is, “Just fly the plane, Maddie!”

The book also has references to other literary classics, especially Peter Pan, lots of surprises, creative details that make the characters and setting come alive, and just loads of intrigue and heart. Thank you, Hyperion, for the review copy.

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

Jun17

As I began reading this story, recently made into a Steven Spielberg movie by the same title, I immediately was reminded of one of my favorite horse stories, Black Beauty. Joey, the War Horse, and Black Beauty actually have a lot in common. Both horses tell their stories in first person from the point of view of an intelligent and winsome horse. Both horses have a succession of owners and riders, both good and bad. Both horses see their friends mistreated and abused, and both are themselves injured by poor handling and by the illnesses to which neglected or overworked horses are susceptible. Both horses form bonds of affection with some of their human owners, and both are rewarded with rest after a series of adventures and misadventures.

Joey, the narrator of War Horse, is a half-thoroughbred bay horse who is trained to do farm work by his beloved first owner Albert, a teenaged farm boy. However, as World War I breaks out, Joey becomes a cavalry horse, and he is taken to France to carry an officer in the British army into battle. As wars sometimes do, the First World War brings Joey into many settings and hazards that he would never otherwise have experienced.

I thought the author got the voice just right in this story, not too intellectual; after all Joey is a horse. And still the voice was that of a clever animal capable of forming loving bonds with his human owners and keepers.

War Horse would be a wonderful introduction to World War I for the middle grade reader, and I can’t wait to see the movie now that I’ve read the book.

Where I Belong by Gillian Cross

Jun6

“There are guns and bandits in this story. And supermodels. And there’s drought and starvation, too.

Does that bother you? Are you wondering how they can all come together? Well, that’s how life is these days. Things don’t happen neatly, in separate little places. We’re all linked together by e-mails and phones and the great spider’s web of media that spans the world.

That’s where this story is set. The world. It’s the story of Abdi and Khadija and Freya (that’s me),and what happened to us because of Somalia . . . “

Gillian Cross is a prolific British children’s and young adult author. She won the 1990 Carnegie Medal for her book Wolf, and the 1992 Whitbread Children’s Book Award for her novel The Great Elephant Chase. And I had never heard of her nor of any of her books.

Her latest book, Where I Belong, is wonderful story about two Somalian immigrants in London and their encounter with the world of high fashion and supermodels. Khadija, a young Somali who has been sent to England to get and education and help her family, becomes Qarsoon the Hidden One, a model for the famous fashion designer Sandy Dexter, but Khadija, and her guardian the fourteen year old Abdi, are both unaware of how small the world has become and how events in London can impact events in Somalia almost overnight.

I like books that give me a window into other cultures and into communities that I don’t know much about, and this book does both. I got a glimpse of Somali culture and of the world of high fashion. The suspense and characterization were obviously written by a master author. I’m ready to find some more books by Ms. Cross and check this new-to-me juvenile fiction writer. Has anyone else read any of her books?

Oh, and isn’t that cover photograph fantastic?

YA Fiction You Can Skip

May17

. . . ’cause I read it for you. I know about the 50-page rule and Nancy Pearl’s addendum to it:

When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number (which, of course, gets smaller every year) is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book. As the saying goes, “Age has its privileges.”

But I still have trouble not finishing a book that I’ve started. Even if it’s a bad book, and I can tell it’s a bad book, I want to know what happens. I want to finish. It’s not a matter of guilt—it’s more curiosity. I can’t bear to not know. Did the book get better? Does it end the way I think (fear) it will? Do the characters become more or less likable? Is this book really as much of a train wreck as I think it is?

So, I finished the following YA novels, but you don’t have to read them. They really are not worth the time, unless there’s nothing else in the house to read or you’ve already started on one of these and have the same compulsion I have to finish.

Someone Else’s Life by Katie Dale. Such a soap opera, with a fictional soap opera actress thrown in as a minor character. Rosie’s mother dies of Huntington’s Disease, but Rosie finds out that her mom wasn’t her mom at all. Rosie and another baby were switched at birth! And that’s not a spoiler because that surprise revelation drops on page 46. But oh my goodness, there are many more confessions, and admissions, and drama-filled disclosures still to come—one about every forty or fifty pages in this 445 page tear-jerker. But I wasn’t crying because the roller coaster ride of emotional reunions and spectacular crises left me feeling . . . nothing much. It was all too, too much, and I just had enough curiosity to read to the end to see who would find out what next, and how many fireworks could be stuffed into one overly long book.

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet. I really enjoyed reading two other books by award-winning author Mal Peet, Exposure, a novel set in South America and based on Shakespeare’s Othello, and Tamar, a book about World War II spies in Holland. However, this latest YA novel by Mr. Peet was a clumsy amalgam of two stories. In 1962,two British teenagers, Clem and Frankie, from different sides of the cultural divide, muddle their way toward a sexual liaison while world leaders Krushchev, Castro, and JFK blunder their way toward World War III in what later became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. These two events, the sex and the world crisis, are supposed to have something to do with each other, but I never saw the connection. At the point of connection, there is an actual explosion, and then at the end of the book another explosion (9-11) is supposed to lend irony to the entire mish-mash. But it doesn’t really. The novel was a disappointment with way too much graphic sex.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

May8

When I was growing up as a kid of a girl in West Texas, all of my friends loved horses. They were all planning to grow up to be veterinarians. Not I.

I think my horse-loving friends would have liked The Scorpio Races, a fantasy horse novel for young adults that’s been all the rage over the past several months. I’ve seen lots of positive reviews. And I can see why. However, I had trouble getting into the book, partly because of all the horses. And there are not only lots of horses, but they’re sort of monster horses, called capaill uisce, that eat raw meat and drink blood. The horses come from the sea, and they’re killers. Either that idea is intriguing to you or it’s repellent. I’ll let you guess which category I fall into.

So, if you’re in the “more horses, please” camp, check out the reviews linked below. If you’re just not sure, I will say that the story was good, based on Irish and Scots legends of kelpies and water horses. I do like novels based on fairy tales and legends, and the writing was evocative of a wild setting for wild hearts. It’s just that this one in particular was a little too horsey for my tastes.

The Allure of Books: “The island becomes a living breathing thing – perhaps the strongest of the characters. I felt pulled into the magic of the capall uisce, the deadly horses from the sea.”

Rhapsody in Books: “This enchanting tale spun from Irish mythology puts you right beside the sea, tasting the salt water in the air and the honeyed goodness of ‘November cakes,’ feeling the grit of sand on your feet, and seeing dark shapes in the crashing surf.”

A Patchwork of Books: “Wildly exciting, yet beautifully written. I was completely enthralled with both Puck’s and Sean’s stories, frantically flipping pages in order to learn what would happen next. The mythical aspect was woven into the story without pause and left me wanting to research more on these water horses.”

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

May4

Dystopian fiction. Matt Alacron was not born; he was harvested. He’s a clone with DNA from El Patron, druglord of a country between Mexico and the U.S. called Opium, where other clones called “eejits” work the poppy fields in mindless obedience and slavery. But Matt is different; El Patron wanted Matt to retain his intelligence and his ability to choose, for some reason.

The House of the Scorpion won the National Book for Young People’s Literature in 2002 and was a Newbery Honor Book in 2003. I was fascinated by Matt’s fight for survival and by his oddly familiar world in which drug lords rule and people are enslaved by power-hungry dictators who long for riches and immortality. Would that all of those people who gain a little power would, rather than seeking after more and more, pray the prayer of Solomon:

God: “Ask! What shall I give you?”
Solomon: “Therefore give to Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, that I may discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?”
God: “See, I have given you a wise and understanding heart, so that there has not been anyone like you before you, nor shall any like you arise after you. I have also given you what you have not asked: both riches and honor, so that there shall not be anyone like you among the kings all your days.”
I Kings 3

There is a God, and I am not He. To fear Him is the beginning of wisdom, and the characters in The House of the Scorpion needed desperately to hear and understand that lesson.

Other novels about human clones and cloning:
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson.
Double Identity by Margaret Peterson Haddix.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin.
Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames.

Scrawl by Mark Shulman

May3

Autobiography of a bully. Autobiography of an intelligent, articulate, overweight, and poverty-stricken bully.

Tod Munn has excuses for his behavior. He has, if not a “heart of gold”, at least, redeeming qualities. The voice in this first person novel, which mostly consists of the notebook that Tod must “scrawl” during detention, is the real attraction for the story. It’s a classic story of a bully tamed by self-examination and the love of a good woman. Well, love may be a strong word, but friendship anyway.

“Call me Tod.
Okay, no, I’m just kidding. That’s the first line from Moby Dick, all right? I always wanted to start a book like that. This is my first book, and I’m writing it for one reason only. Not for history and not for scientific research and definitely not to let out my inner demons. I’m doing it so I don’t have to pick up trash in the school courtyard like certain deviant so-called friends of mine who also got caught.
I am being reformed.”

Melissa at Here in the Bonny Glen suggested I read this YA novel; a long time ago she did, she did, and it was on the Cybils shortlist for YA fiction in 2011. I just got around to it in March while I was on blog break, and it was definitely a good read. I’m think it might be good to compare Tod Munn and Scrawl to Gary Schmidt’s Doug Swieteck in Okay for Now. I think liked the Gary Schmidt book better, but I didn’t read them at the same time. Both books were great reads and would appeal to boys in particular. In fact, now that I think about it, maybe I’ll buy copies of both and leave them around the house for Karate Kid to find. He needs to be reading something, and I find it difficult to capture his interest. One of these books might do the trick.

Amnesia Is In

Apr26

What Alice Forgot by Lianne Moriarty

Alice Love is twenty-nine years old and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband Nick are deeply in love and very excited about their soon-to-be-born child. Alice’s older sister Elizabeth is her best friend, and life is good. The year is 1998.

But when Alice falls at gym and hits her head, something strange happens. She wakes up, not pregnant and not in 1998. It’s 2008, and Alice has lost the memory of the past ten years of her life. I liked the way this book, essentially chick-lit, ended. The ending was unexpected, and I was pleased with the choices the author made about her characters and their choices.

Of course, this novel made me think about memories, good and bad. Who are we without our memories?

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

In this amnesiac novel, Christine has lost more than twenty years of her life. She, too, was involved in an accident that caused her to lose her memory, but for Christine her ability to form and retain memories is impaired. She can remember what’s happened to her today, but when she goes to sleep and wakes up the next morning, her memories are all gone. Each day is a clean slate in which Christine starts out believing that she is still a twenty-something or even a child rather than a forty-five year old wife and mother. Christine’s husband, Ben, must remind her every morning who she is, where she is, and who he is.

“I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of recollection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not a accumulation of our memories?”

This second book is more of a thriller: Christine’s memory loss puts her in a situation that is not what it seems to be, and by the end of the book Christine is in serious danger of losing her life if she cannot find a way to access the memories that will enable her to distinguish between truth and lies.

I thought both of these were worthwhile, if you’re at all interested in the premise. I also found a couple of books at Amazon that would make good nonfiction companion reads to these two novels. I haven’t read these, but I would like to do so soon.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. “Foer . . . draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author’s own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.”

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel. “Driven by vibrant curiosity, Kandel’s personal quest to understand memory is threaded throughout this absorbing history. Beginning with his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, In Search of Memory chronicles Kandel’s outstanding career from his initial fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize.”

And here are some fictional “amnesia books” that I have read and can recommend:
The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan. YA fiction. Semicolon review here. Sequels are The Long Way Home, The Truth of the Matter, and The Final Hour.

Random Harvest by James Hilton. Semicolon review here.

A Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan. Semicolon review here.

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey. Not exactly an amnesia story, but it reminds me of Hilton’s style somehow. Semicolon review here.

The Professor and the Housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa. Semicolon review here. Engineer Husband is reading this one right now, and it’s one of my favorites. Math and memory loss.

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin. More modern and young adult-ish. Semicolon review here.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson. Also YA and more of a twenty-first century feel. Semicolon review here.

Anne Perry’s William Monk detective series features Mr. Monk as a late nineteenth century private detective suffering from amnesia. His assistant/love interest/foil is a nurse named Hester.

Any more amnesiac selections that you can remember?