Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

By Danielle Wood.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this book, which purports to be narrated by one Rosie Little and tells various horror stories of being a girl in the modern era.

On the one hand, Rosie Little herself is entertaining. I never noticed the "by Danielle Wood" on the cover most of the time that I was reading this, and was actually disappointed to find out Rosie's not real. I enjoyed her snarky humor and asides and interspersed commentaries.

On the other hand, I tend to be a person who'd rather read stuff with happy endings, and it was weird to go into the book knowing that every single story in it was going to end badly. (Story topics in this include losing virginity, screwing up a marriage proposal, wearing a wedding dress on an airplane, working as a reporter, getting checked out by a skanky godfather, an abusive boyfriend...you get the drift.) But that's me.

I VASTLY preferred the stories narrated by Rosie herself about things that happened to her. The stories not featuring Rosie but featuring friends and relatives she knew just weren't as snappy, and tended towards being a bit fantastical at the end. The fantastical aspects didn't really work with the tones of the Rosie-featuring stories. I think the few of those I really liked was "Elephantiasis," the story of Rosie's fat cousin Maureen who keeps getting gifted elephants when she's really not all that into them, and the story of the bride who insisted on wearing her wedding dress on a long flight (but that one is more Rosie-ish since she finishes off the narrative herself).

I'm giving it three stars.

A Version of the Truth

By Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack.

Wow, this is kinda beautiful.

Cassie Shaw is dyslexic and never graduated from high school. What makes her happy in life are animals, particularly birds. She met a jerkass and married him, and wasn't at all sad when he died. But his death did put her out of a job, and without any kind of schooling she is totally shot for getting anything other than telemarketing. What to do?

Well, lie. She gets herself a nice college office job by claiming a fake B.A. And that fake B.A. gets her into a whole new world, one where people think she's intelligent and treat her as such, and listen to her opinions, and she even finds that she can deal with taking college classes after all. She also attracts the attention of a few guys who well, are kind of iffy in their affections- or at least, seem to have other girls in the wings. What to do? And how long can her house of cards hold up before she's found out?

This book is beautiful. I am not necessarily a nature person, but this book certainly makes you feel Cassie's passion for Topanga Canyon, her pets, and her environment. And her experiences with one of her professor bosses, who's into reading about the wilderness, really helps as well.

I'm giving it four stars. Gorgeous.

Miss Julia Strikes Back

By Ann B. Ross.

I've pretty much loved the other books in this series (even if I haven't gotten around to reviewing them since I read 90% of them last year at Christmas when I didn't get online much), but when EVEN THE AMAZON RECAP points out that this book has a LOT in common with a previously written book... well, um, YEAH. Makes you wonder if the series has run out of steam.

Anyway, the plot, which is mostly the same as Miss Julia Takes Over:

1. Miss Julia, Hazel Marie, and another friend have their jewelry stolen.
2. Turns out this is part of some jewelry ring.
3. Coleman Bates makes the mistake of mentioning that this jewelry ring has something to do with Florida.
4. Miss Julia decides to hire a PI to help her find the jewelry.
5. PI does not make the best impression on her, Miss Julia spends a lot of time nagging him.
6. Miss Julia drags along Little Lloyd and in place of Hazel Marie, her friend Etta Mae to do the screwball hot girl stuff.

Now, if you are into screwball adventure, including a long period of time watching Miss Julia sober up her PI, dress herself and Etta Mae up as missionaries, Miss Julia wearing CROPPED PANTS, repetitive PI nagging...okay, it's not bad. But uh, I totally read this book before. *sigh* And for sheer rehash, I have to give it two and a half stars.

There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble

By Laurie Notaro.

I had my doubts about reading Laurie Notaro's first fiction book. I've read about everything else of hers so far, but the Idiot Girl thing was starting to get old for me a bit, and I wondered if this was just going to be a thinly veiled "fictional" rehash of her other books.

Well, it might be a thinly veiled "fictional" rehash of her current life for all I know (hey, I don't know what her life in Eugene is like, maybe it really is that weird there), but this book was a hoot. Sure, there's Idiot Girl stuff in there, but there's a lot of wacky fun and humor going on here. I was sorry to finish it.

Our heroine, former Phoenix reporter Maye Roberts, moves with her professor husband Charlie and their charming dog Mickey to the small hippie town of Spaulding, Washington. Spaulding is known for their being the home of the sewer pipe, and for their college, and the massive amounts of hippies there. I live in a hippie college town myself, but Spaulding certainly does go above and beyond in hippiedom. (Two words: "Styrofoam Day." Seriously, I bookmarked that page and went back several times to boggle at this concept.)

Maye tries to make friends, but between her being childless and working at home freelancing, she has a hard time getting out. The "Gothic lit" book club she joins turns out to be a strange coven, the group that befriends her in a restaurant turn out to be fervent vegetarians, the nice lady working at the bookstore gets really unpleasant while drunk, and her neighbor snoops through her trash and has a heart attack at Maye's not-100-percent-perfect recycling. Maye also ends up pissing off a lot of people inadvertently, such as the speed-racer Letter Carrier of the Year who makes her dog go to obedience school, and gets made a fool of on television (it's all in the editing). She also makes a big enemy in Rowena Spaulding, her husband's boss's wife that hates her on first sight.

How in the heck can Maye improve this situation? Someone suggests to her that she run for Sewer Pipe Queen, a talent-only competition that's guaranteed to up your status in the community. But you need to have an old queen as a sponsor, and after Maye's has a freaky death, she needs to find someone new. In the library researching queens, she stumbles across Ruby Spicer, Queen of Queens, who disappeared in mid-reign. Maye decides to track her down, and that's when things get really interesting...

It's an awesome book. A real hoot. One where you sit around reading the lines in it off to everyone and anyone around you. Four stars from me.

Signed, Mata Hari: A Novel

By Yannick Murphy.

(Disclaimer: this was sent to me by an agent.)

This is the story of Mata Hari's life- to some degree narrated by her, interspersed with her end and how it came about.

I can't claim to know much of anything about Mata Hari, the facts of her life, any of that. I don't know which elements of this are fact or fiction. But it certainly FEELS very truthful. And while it took me a long time to get into, this tale of her life and how she was mistaken for a spy and killed for it is interesting. The personality of Mata Hari definitely overshadows everyone and everything in this book- how she felt about things, how she acted the way she did. Indeed, it's quite bizarre when anyone (i.e. her husband!) isn't sucked into her spell. Her childhood and her dancing career aren't gotten into in great detail, but I was fascinated by her time spent in Java and her time in jail, and the loyalty she inspires in the women that she befriends.

My one quibble about this- and it's kind of enough to knock it down by half a star for me- was that I was not terribly thrilled with the fragmentary style of this. It's a series of vignettes, hopping back in time between Mata Hari's narration of her past and what's happening to her while she's in jail waiting for her trial and execution. And mostly, these vignettes don't go for more than five pages at a time. (The narration also wobbles a bit between first and third person for Mata Hari, and having a few others narrate here and there. I'm fine with the other people narrating, but the wobbliness of Mata Hari was a problem.) I really hate to use this phrase, but... a lot of the time it felt like I was reading a bathroom reader. Just as I've gotten into the scene, cut! New scene! I have certainly had a problem with this in the past, though, so it may be my own issue. But  I had a hard time getting into the book for the first 150 pages or so of it due to this. Eventually I got sucked in, but it was hard for me to get there.

Three and a half stars from me.

Plan B

By Jonathan Tropper.

I have to enjoy a book where the cover has the words "thirty" and "shit" on it. Yeah, baby.

Five friends from college have continued to pal around since then, despite one of them taking a drastically different career turn from the rest of them. Now that the dreaded 3-0 is upon them, it's that time of life where you realize that you're not happy with how things are, and don't know how to fix it.

Our main cast members are:

• Ben, our narrator. Is the "list guy" at Esquire who can't get his novel started. He is still in love with/pining for his ex Lindsay, even though he married another chick. The other chick's just divorced him.
• Lindsay, the ex, is still pretty close to Ben, but she's been afraid to settle down in a relationship or a career.
• Chuck's a doctor, which he's actually happy with, but he feels like he's the joke friend (these days, we'd call him the Barney, and he SO is) and nobody takes him seriously.
• Jack's become a famous actor...with a raging coke habit.
• Allison got brought up to have a perfectly white bread family life. At 30, she's still single (albeit with a good career) because she's been in love with Jack for a decade. They're close, but somehow Jack's never felt like crossing that line with her. 

After Jack makes a spectacular mess of Lindsay's birthday party and has some public incidents, the other four decide that he needs an intervention. They try it. It doesn't go over well. This leads them to decide to go to extreme measures- which is to say, they kidnap him, take him to Allison's parents' house out in the country, and keep him locked up until the coke leaves his system. This goes about as well as you might expect, both with legal consequences and how well Jack takes to the idea. And while they're at this, everyone tries to figure out what the hell they're going to do with themselves.

I'm making this sound crappy, I fear, but it's a really good read. Let me just quote you the opening paragraph:

"Jack was a movie star, which meant he was granted some latitude in the outrageous behavior department. Nevertheless, when he showed up sweaty and stoned to Lindsay's thirtieth birthday party, punched the overly solicitous maitre d' in the nose, and vomited into the potted gladioluses lining Torre's knee-high windowsills before passing out into a chair at the table, no one was amused. Not Lindsay, who said, "Screw this," and walked over to the bar for another shot of vodka. Not Chuck, who tossed the ice from his drink and mine into his napkin and, cursing Jack under his breath, ran into the kitchen to tend to the maitre d'. Not Alison, who jumped out of her seat and anxiously began trying to revive Jack by gently slapping his face and applying a wet cloth to his forehead, urgently saying over and over, "Oh my god, Jack, wake up." And not I, who, lacking any other positive course of action, got up from the table and walked through the disapproving hush of well-dressed diners to join Lindsay at the bar."

Good lord, that's about the best set-up to a book I have ever seen, all in one paragraph. Nails everything. Awesome. Likeable characters, sympathy, fun. I'm down with that.

Four stars from me.

Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas

By Rick Moody.

(Disclaimer: this was sent to me by an agent.)

Reading a book of novellas or short stories is always kind of dicey when it comes to reviewing. You have to really review each separately, and as a whole...and that's tricky when the quality varies from story to story. Hence my dilemma in reviewing this book...

Novella #1: "The Omega Force" features a rich, snobby, pampered white guy, Dr. Jamie Van Deusen, who lives on a lovely little island enclave of rich people and has one of the most amusing pompous voices I've ever read. In real life, you probably couldn't stand this guy, but as a narrator, he was frequently cracking me up (and I was getting asked what I was laughing about at the bus stop).
The good doctor has been reading a pulp novel, "Omega Force: Code White," and that novel, combined with some alcohol and some other medical things happening to him (to be honest, I was never clear what. Stroke? Seizure?), leads him to think that "dark-complected foreign nationals" are trying to invade his island. Despite later ending up with crutches/walker and/or speech impediment and/or AA meetings to go to, he doggedly pursues his task of trying to thwart the bad guys. While this eventually devolves into a "watching a person go insane, Yellow-Wallpaper-style" tale and peters out at the end, it's mostly pretty amusing and ludicrous. The contrast between Dr. Van Deusen's narration and how he doesn't quite realize (most of the time) what effect he's having on others is great.

I have to give you a sampling of what I'm talking about here:

"To reiterate: my plan was to take my message of immediate peril into the community. It is true that I was, at the moment, a man wearing only red poplin shorts, beige socks, and the shoe popularly known as the Docksider....My style of dress should not have made it impossible for me to carry my message to my townsfolk. I would begin at the golf clubhouse."

The maitre d', Brittany, wife of the fellow who looks after the golf greens, came over to tell me how terrific I was going to look in one of the new cardigan sweaters the club was hawking this summer... It was incredibly generous of Brittany to offer me this cardigan sweater and even to volunteer to find me a pair of matching golf slacks. Yet I take a dim view of excessive matching of colors, so I was fine with my poplin shorts, even if they looked a little worse for wear. I would accept the sweater only because it was coming on sweater weather."

By itself, I'd give this novella a solid three and a half stars or so.

Novella #2: "K and K", alas, is much less amusing. It tells the story of a young, lonely, nerdy office manager named Ellie who's in charge of the suggestion box at her small firm. Her entire life is work, and the only excitement she gets  is when she starts getting snotty (OMG THE F-BOMB WAS DROPPED!!) suggestions in the suggestion box.  She analyzes the entire office staff, pondering who did it. However, as the staff members quit their jobs and the suggestions escalate, this becomes... Well. Let's just say that it's fairly easy to figure out whodunit, and in case you're really dumb, the author puts a big red arrow at the end to make sure you know.

I tried, but honestly, I could not find this subject matter remotely as interesting as the author did. Maybe I'm not massively amused by office humor, or lame deception, enough to be intrigued, but I found myself counting the pages of this story (49) and wondering why he bothered to even write it. It's not badly written...but on the other hand, I was not fascinated by this character either.

By itself, I'd give "K&K" two stars.

Novella #3: "The Albertine Notes," on the other hand, is pretty freaking brilliant.

This story takes place after half of New York City has been blown up, and the remaining population has become addicted to a new drug called Albertine. Albertine has you relive memories, and people are trying to relive their memories of life before the bomb. Unfortunately, Albertine (a) doesn't let you pick what memories to relive, good or bad, (b) has a collective effect on the population, and (c) one can, by using Albertine to backtrack through their own memories, go back in time and kill people.

Our narrator , Kevin Lee, is a reporter who's been assigned to write a history of Albertine. He meets a "oracle" Albertine addict named Cassandra who leads him to her boyfriend, the guy in charge of the whole Albertine racket. That fellow, Eduardo, has used Albertine to go back in time and kill "Addict Number One," the first guy who got addicted to the drug. He shoots up Kevin with Albertine and wants to make him write that history of the drug for him personally. After that point, things get quite tangled in the narrative (as you'd expect given the subject matter, really). And yet, somehow I mostly managed to follow things pretty well. I will just say that Kevin is more involved with Albertine than even he knows...

That one alone gets four stars. Pretty intriguing stuff here.

Overall average for this book is three stars.

Free Food for Millionaires

By Min Jin Lee.

(Disclaimer: this was sent to me by an agent.)

When we first meet her, Casey Han is just out of college and trying to figure out what to do with her life. After getting in a fight with her abusive father, she gets disowned from her family, packs her bags, and runs off to her boyfriend Jay's house...only to find him in a threesome.

Way to start with a bang, eh?

After that, Casey flounders around trying to find a place to stay and spending money she can't afford (she's a shopaholic), until she runs into a girl she knows from church, Ella Shim. While Casey's always been intimidated by Ella's perfect-seeming life (i.e. her family has money), this time Ella invites Casey to stay with her, and they become friends. Ella's engaged to be married to her first boyfriend, Ted....who's not as perfect as he seems and kind of a dick to boot, even though he helps Casey get a job.

And so, Casey goes through her life, trying to figure stuff out, especially when it comes to money. She deals with her family as well as she can after being disowned, she gets jobs, she loves hat making and takes classes at it even though it's a dying art, and she eventually ends up dating Ella's cousin Umu, a nice fellow who's got his own issues. She has a relationship with a mentor, Sabine, and wonders if she wants to follow in Sabine's footsteps. Meanwhile, Ella's marriage takes a turn for the worse, and Casey's mother acquires admirers she's not up to handling.

The writing of this is excellent, and you get a sense of everyone's points of view very well, even the less sympathetic characters. There are no easy answers or resolutions here- it's a woman's journey, trying to figure out how to work an adult life in New York. And god knows, it's difficult! Everyone's got their good and bad points in this one, and it works well.

My one quibble is that...well, it's a very long book, and things could have been shortened/summarized in places. While the subject matter is good, I'm not sure if it really needed to cover nearly 600 pages.

Four stars from me.

Volk's Game: A Novel

By Brent Ghelfi.

(Disclaimer: this was sent to me by an agent.)

I had a hard time following this book. Maybe it's because (and I hate to say this, but...) I'm a girl and might not be so great on the macho stuff involving guns and killing. I want to freely admit bias here, because this novel may very well come off better to those who are not me. The writing is good and the most prominent main characters kept me interested. But when it came to the plot, I was mostly just confused and dizzy reading it- or just plain trying to keep up.  Hell, I've had to crib from the back of the book and Amazon just to come up with a coherent plot summary to put here, because without those I have a hard time making sense of what went on.

Alexei Volkovoy (Volk, obviously) is a criminal and former military officer due to an amputated leg- but really, he's still in the Russian military covertly, bouncing between both sides. He gets hired to steal a long-lost da Vinci painting- "Leda and the Swan"- that's supposed to have another version of the "Last Supper" hidden as well.
But Volk and his girlfriend Valya get betrayed and double-crossed- a LOT- and from then on, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. New characters pop in and out and double-cross each other at dizzying speeds in this one and the ones that didn't have outstanding personalities, well, I kept mixing them all up. At one point Valya is held hostage and has her own foot amputated in order to force Volk to go after the painting(s), and he travels around trying to do so before her leg can't be repaired again.

While Volk isn't exactly a pleasant fellow to have around- the amount of killing he does is Baueresque- you certainly get that all of that had to come from what had been done to him before. I like that the author hints/barely says what happened to him and Valya, all things considered, and mostly focuses on their actions in the present instead of psychoanalyzing why they behave the way they do. And I liked his relationship with her, as well as with Masha (a fairly minor character). The Peter/Yelena dynamics also worked well within the novel- both characters aren't "onscreen" all that much but definitely leave their marks on the plot and characters.

But on the other hand...man, I had a hard time keeping track of what the heck was going on. I suspect others (who are probably more of the intended audience than me) will have less issues with that, though.

Three stars. Solid work, even if I don't quite get it.

Wandering Hearts

By Donna J. Grisanti.

(Disclaimer: this was sent to me by an agent.)

I loved this book. It's long, but don't let that intimidate you- it's worth it.

It's 1941, and Raine Foster is up shit creek without a paddle. Her family's mostly gone and dead broke, and her grandmother has lost her mind and is dying. And she's just received an offer that she literally CAN'T refuse- a marriage proposal from the richest, meanest, drunkest man in town. If she said no, he'd probably have her killed. So Raine accepts- then starts planning her escape (and to fake her own death) after her grandmother dies. This plan hits a bit of a snag when two orphaned distant cousins of hers, Ben and Charlotte, show up on her doorstep. Raine ends up planning fake deaths for three, and manages to get away.
While on the way out of there, which is very dangerous, they meet up with a kind fellow named Touhy, who ends up "adopting" them, and after Raine is brutalized by a hobo, protects them all the way to their new town of Riverview. The Foster family (plus Touhy, who they claim is a cousin) make friends with Eula and Dewey O. Martin, who work for the richest family in town, the Walters, and the O. Martins find them jobs working on the nearby orchard farm of Chen Yao Gao (known as "China Joe" until the Fosters start using his real name). Touhy plans on leaving, but Chen refuses to keep the rest of the family on unless there's a man working for him.

The Walters family has fallen on emotional hard times. The parents died ages ago, and their son Arlen has become, well...a racist, drunk, controlling asshole. As for his sister Mayleen, she's a sweetheart of a girl with spunk and spirit...and she's also got a bad heart and lungs and will probably die the next time she gets a bad case of pneumonia. Mayleen is determined to "kick up her heels" before she dies, and she also wants a boyfriend- namely, Chen (who loves her back). Even if they can't get married, she still wants to see him, and she figures out that starting a doll-making business with Raine is a good way to do it. The O. Martins, who have vowed to stay employed by Arlen until after Mayleen dies, are willing to help her do whatever she wants. Adding to the complications, the local doctor has taken up alcoholism after the death of his wife and son, and Arlen's got a grudge against him (as well as anyone else that has contact with Mayleen, really).

Then World War II starts, Touhy enlists, racial tensions mount, and Raine can't be left alone with a single man on the farm, so...she ends up in another forced engagement, and a marriage that she has to go through. And yet, it works. She knows that Chen and Mayleen love each other and does her best to help facilitate her friends' secret relationship.

I could go on from here, but I'll let you read the rest. It's a good story that I kept eagerly reading whenever I could (even though I must admit, holding a 600+ page paperback in your hand while walking down the street is a bit heavy). While it covers "small" dramas, in a sense, it's fascinating. I enjoyed the various relationships and feelings people had for each other. It's very heartwarming. I especially enjoyed the various romances- I don't think I've ever seen a book that emphasized friendship-as-romantic-relationship before, and that's a healthy thing to see.

I only had a few plot quibbles:

(a) I had a horrible time telling the two pastors apart. One is white and one is black, but they're both friends. While I really appreciated that aspect of the story, and understood that they were supposed to kind of be read as "twins" in a sense, I kept forgetting which one was which because they sounded so alike. Adding in some kind of verbal ticks or quirks or favorite phrases for one or both of them might have helped for me to tell them apart, seeing as I couldn't exactly go on The Big Difference of Skin Color while reading.

(b) I can't go into this one without spoiling the end, so this comment will go below the spoiler cut.

(c) I think what happened on the last page of the book could have used some more foreshadowing (again, see below spoiler cut).

Other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Four and a half stars from me.