Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

The Heidi Chronicles, Uncommon Women and Others, and Isn't It Romantic

By Wendy Wasserstein.

After reading Wendy and the Lost Boys, I decided to do some play reading. Which will make for an odd review here, I think.

Uncommon Women and Others: This play is based off of Wendy's strange experiences at going to Mount Holyoke for college during the sexual revolution. In the midst of transition, the school was going from a place where Gracious Living was practiced to well...ladies boinking whoever they like and wearing pants. It sounded like it was a schizophrenic time in Wendy and the Lost Boys, and it comes across that way too in this play. I'll admit that uh...I had problems with relating to this play. It's just so foreign of an environment to me--and I speak as someone who's been in a college environment for a long-ass time. Somehow the weird world that these women were living in threw me off enough that I had a really hard time getting into it. Sure, there was the occasional moment of relating to the women's 21-year-old angst as to what their future plans are, but mostly I just wasn't into it.

I'll also admit that this play might make more sense if you see it staged (a la Shakespeare), because I don't really get why the play starts out with the women meeting up for lunch around 10 years after college, then spends most of the play in college, then cuts back to 10 years later and that's it. It also didn't really seem like it had much plot beyond "coming of age," really. So by itself  I'd probably give it two stars...but really, this may be just my problem and it may just be Not For Me.

Isn't It Romantic (note: it isn't!): Isn't It Romantic, on the other hand, I related to greatly. It honestly felt pretty fresh and current to me, seeing as it deals with the perennial issue of "who should I settle down with, if anyone at all?" It features Janie, a girl who starts dating a Jewish doctor. Perfect, right? And he's okay as a person...though he certainly uh, Takes Charge a lot, and suddenly decides stuff for Janie without telling her that they're moving in together and things like that. And he calls her Monkey, which ain't her favorite romantic endearment ever. The other featured girl is Harriet, a career woman who starts sleeping with her boss's boss, who unabashedly has a girlfriend at home and doesn't give a shit about her. It's obviously doomed from the getgo there.

I loved this quote on the problem: "Well, if you live with him, you won't have to wonder who'll hold you at night, what will happen if you don't pay your taxes, or even, if you want children, who you could possibly get to be the father. You won't read articles in magazines about single women and have to think of the fifty different reasons why you're different from that. You won't begin to notice younger men on the street or think I'm not really hurting a married man's wife if I have an affair with him, because if it's not me, it'll be somebody else. But Janie, how could you sleep next to a man as nice as Marty and lie to him and say I love you?" Good point.

I liked how Janie resolved things, though Harriet's resolution--a last minute engagement to a guy she's known two weeks-- is frustrating for everybody. By itself, I give it four stars.

The Heidi Chronicles: Heidi was my first introduction to Wendy Wasserstein and the only one here I've seen live. I loved it. Though I'll admit that I find it harder to get into just reading it in play form, and it seems a little wordy and weird in places. It's a play that covers the same old issue that women who never settled down with a man have all the time, and yet is really, really set in the time period (60's-80's) what with all of the political commentary and snarking. It features Heidi, a woman who becomes an art historian and who never does settle down with a guy even though other folks do. Her life fits into the feminist movement, and yet she always feels alone in her life circumstances somehow. Her best friend since high school, Susan, goes through a drastic amount of changes. Her gay best friend Peter comes out of the closet and lives life as he wants to.

She has a downright hypnotic relationship over the years with Scoop Rosenbaum, a lawyer/journalist fellow who even Heidi describes as a "charming creep." And by god, he is. He's unabashed about what you get with him--not faithfulness at all--and pops in and out of Heidi's life over the years. I'll always remember seeing the first scene between them in the theater--even though the actor playing him wasn't the hottest thing going, and indeed the fellow is being irritating when he meets Heidi at a dance--there is something THERE that grabs you. It's Scoop's line at the end of the scene that just gets me in the gut somehow and makes you root for him despite his mostly-douchiness:

"Maybe I'll remember it one day when I'm thirty-five and watching my son's performance as Johnny Appleseed. Maybe I'll look at my wife, who puts up with me, and flash on when I was editor of a crackpot liberal newspaper and thought I could fall in love with Heidi Holland, the canvassing art historian, that first snowy night in Manchester, New Hampshire, 1968."

Well, maybe it makes more sense when you watch it. But at the time I was all, DAMN, THIS ACTOR IS GOOD. So's the line, really.

Anyway, Scoop marries another woman because he'd rather settle for someone who will be his wifey-poo rather than Heidi, who'd want to be equals. And while we're told Heidi dates others over the years, somehow Scoop continues to be an off-and-on friend in her life. And Heidi seems adrift, like in her speech on "Women, Where Are We Going." She hasn't prepared a speech ahead of time, but instead talks about being in the locker room with a random assortment of women--single and hot, old ladies, moms--and feeling both worthless and superior at the same time. "It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together." Good point. You really feel for Heidi in that moment--as well as in a TV interview when the men on stage literally drown her out. Eventually Heidi figures out a way to feel less stranded. As a focus on the plight of the modern adult single woman, this play rocks. Four stars.

Overall, I'll give this three and a half stars. I'd probably skip "Uncommon Women" in a reread, but the other two are gut punchers in a good way.

Red, White and Blue

By Susan Isaacs.

(Note: this is a fairly spoilery review and goes beyond my usual "don't say much beyond the first half" rule. Then again, it is a romance novel and you can probably guess how the end is going to go. Not a lot in the way of major twists in the plot either. Oh yeah, and the book's plot doesn't even start untli the halfway mark anyway!)

This book is Susan Isaacs's Tribute To America! Which Is A Big Deal! And emphasized everywhere she possibly can do it!

We start out with a brief prologue introducing our main characters, in kind of an odd third person tone that's kind of put on and false. We're preached at at the all-American-cowboy-ness of Our Hero, FBI agent Charlie Blair, who's from Wyoming and is a fairly handsome, old-timey dude straight out of the movies. Or would be if life and a pretty-much-over-with marriage and being abandoned by his wife and kid hadn't made him a sad panda. Then we're introduced to our heroine, Lauren, like this. You get the drift...

"...a young woman in a town called Shorehaven on Long Island in the state of New York is debating whether she should pack her Wonderbra for Wyoming. Telling you this is not meant to make her sound frivolous, for that is certainly not the case. In fact, having mentioned that Charlie Blair is a hero of this story, it is time to present our other her: Lauren Ruth Miller, the child Anne Hutchinson and George Washington never had."

Ooookay then.

Thank god the author eventually drops this annoying tone of voice, because dear god, I don't think I could have taken a whole novel like this. This is pretty much why I never bought the book when it came out and am now reading it for cheap. Turns out it is worth reading, but dear lord, does it take awhile to get to the damn plot and get past the omniscient smug tone of voice.

Anyway, after setting up the prologue--FBI agent Charlie is going undercover to infiltrate a paramilitary group in his home state, and Lauren the reporter is flying all the way out from NYC to get a story--we're told that it's Very Important To Tell You that these two share a great-great grandmother in common, something they'll never know what with genetic and geographical drift and people not keeping up with their history. So it's Very Important To Tell You their ENTIRE family history, starting with that great-great grandmother.

The first half of the book reminded me of Judith Krantz novels (which frequently start out with an "in the moment" scene and then shoot back to talking about the characters' parents for half the book), but even more so of Sweet Valley High Saga books, in which we had to find out EVERYTHING that went on with the main character's ancestors before we get to Elizabeth and Jessica. Each descendent gets a wee bit of character development before they begat a couple of kids and we move on to them. In order, we cover:

• Great-great-grandmother Dora, who got herself knocked up out of wedlock and marries the first dude who will have her. She spends the rest of her life miserable and afraid of his penis. I am not kidding. She begats Jacob and Ruthie.
• Jacob gets himself involved in crime and ends up having to flee New York City, ending up in Wyoming and changing his name because nobody in the west can comprehend "Blaustein." He shacks up with/marries/knocks up the older woman who saves him from a blizzard, and they seem happy enough, more or less. Or at least his wife Queenie gets laid a lot, even if she's always doing all the work and Jake is a periodically cheating layabout. But he's hot! They begat...
• Willie, who's completely disgusted with his dad's behavior and takes off as quickly as he can to go on his own. He'd love to have a ranch of his own. He falls in love at first sight with rich girl Lois Bryant, who turns out to have a ranch and a dying dad! Convenient! But they're actually pretty sensible folks and happy together, so that's nice. They begat...
• Chuck, who is nothing but a sleazy politician and a jackass and a cheater. He sells the family ranch and goes through women like Kleenex. He begat...
• Charlie Blair, Our Hero, who also grew up disgusted with his dad and was supremely disappointed with not getting to have his own ranch. This led him to join the FBI instead. He married a woman he was totally hot for sexually, but once they had a kid, everything petered away.

Back to Lauren's line of descent...

• Ruthie, who is very smart but very plain, marries the first guy who wants her. He turns out to be a liar and a wife-beater. Resourcefully, she runs out on him, sells her wedding ring, and goes to the nearest Catholic wayward girls' home pretending to be single and Catholic. Then outs herself as a Jewish married woman who won't give up her kid once the baby comes. Hah. You gotta admire her for that. She begat...
• Sally, who falls happily in love, but loses her husband after a few years in World War II. She's depressed for years, forcing her mother and her daughter to take charge of the family for awhile. Sally later gets a job and carries on a long-term affair with her boss. She begat...
• Barbara, who's also smart but not the hottest thing going out there. I really felt for Barbara, living the life her grandmother would have wanted (as a high school history teacher), but she still hasn't met a guy yet. She finally meets another history teacher, Jed Miller, and it's true love. Yay. They begat...
• Lauren, who's been a diehard reporter since birth and has hopped between papers trying to better her career. Finally getting fed up with life in the Midwest, she took a job with the Jewish News in NYC so she could go home, even though her family is very tokenly Jewish at this point and she has no clue on Jewish life.

Now, you may be wondering, as I was: Is there a point in knowing all of this backstory when reading about our main characters? The answer is: PROBABLY NOT. Some folks are more mildly interesting to read about than others (Willie and Barbara stand out), but really, they're just there to trace AMERICANNESS. And What It Is To Be American. Especially if you are Jewish, but not very Jewish, I guess? I honestly felt like I should have "America" from West Side Story playing in my head while I was reading this section.

Very eventually we get back to our main plot, "The Americans," with Charlie and Lauren going to work in Wyoming. Charlie stomachs dealing with the leader, Vern, his dumb-but-not-as-bad-as-everyone-else henchman Gus, and the super-creepy Kyle. Lauren, who's pretty dang ballsy, goes in to interview Vern, sees Charlie, and it's insta-twue-wuv for the both of them. Now, I would normally kind of have objections to the insta-love, which is darned quick, except given the circumstances, I can't really blame the author for choosing to go there. Because Charlie has a problem that few men in the world do: What do you do when you see the love of your life...and you're pretending to be a neo-Nazi? AWK-WARD!

Fortunately for him, Lauren's a snoopy girl, breaks his cover identity (isn't Charlie lucky the rednecks didn't bother), and they meet up, Charlie gives his real name and identity, and the sexy breaks on out. The insta-love continues even as the two investigate separately. There's actually a pretty good discussion in there about how these sad guys with sad jobs and not much going for them will fall into these paths of being racists and blaming it all on the government. Eventually things end a little more quickly than anyone anticipated--Lauren's ballsy enough to go looking for Gus, even though Charlie's warned her that Gus wants a date. Then the novel finally hits the question of "Oops, we live on opposite ends of the country, what do we do now?" Which is wrapped up in a Gift of the Magi-ish way, and then they live happily ever after. Ta-daaaah!

What's good about this book?

• Lauren and Charlie are good eggs, both. If they end up happy together, fine by me. Lauren has guts and I appreciate that. Charlie is a pretty sweet dude. I normally hate adultery plots, but his marriage is all over but the technicalities at this point and hell, he might as well by now.
• I think the psychology of the neo-Nazi types is gone into pretty well--I especially liked the last page commentary about it.
• The world building is done well.
• I liked the little snippets we saw of certain ancestor characters.

What's not so good?

• The annoying tone at the start of the book.
• I honestly don't think the book was massively improved by spending hundreds of pages tracing the characters' ancestry. It's not so much that that stuff is bad so much as it just did not feel that necessary. This book is nearly 600 pages. This didn't bother me so much because I speed read, but taking a long-ass time to get to the point did not help me want to purchase the book new (rather than getting it for cheap years later) originally. It's kind of a giant prequel before we even get to the novel, and I think it could have just covered Lauren and Charlie just fine without me feeling that I missed out on say, great-great-grandmother Dora and her penis fear.  Giving them some more space for romance development instead would have been beneficial.
• The "coming to America' theme is pretty much BASHED THE HELL OVER THE READER'S HEAD A LOT A LOT A LOT. Like OVERKILL. Like, geez, we GET IT ALREADY, you can tone down the "America! America!" stuff some now. I know that's your theme, but I felt like it was too forced and anvil-ish.

Overall, I'll give it three stars. It's kind of a compromise rating, there. Bottom line is that it's somewhat of a slog to get through, but if you do, it gets better. Then again, you could just read the prologue and the second half of the book if you like and do just fine, too.

 

gods in Alabama

By Joshilyn Jackson.

(Note: this book is a companion/prequel to the previously-reviewed Backseat Saints.)

When she was 15 years old, Arlene Flett killed Jim Beverly--school football stud and rapist-- by smacking him upside the head with a bottle of tequila. Miraculously, the body was never discovered. Arlene made a deal with God at the time: she'd stop having sex, stop lying, and would never return to her hometown of Possett, Alabama after graduation. Nine years later, Arlene's kept her end of the deal-- even if her boyfriend Burr is getting tired of this state of affairs, her lies have interesting technicalities to them, and her relatives are really effing pissed she hasn't shown up for any Christmasses.

Until her high school classmate Rose Mae Lolley, Jim's girlfriend back in the day, tracks down Arlene while she's trying to find Jim. And she says she's going back down to the olde hometowne to go looking. This freaks Arlene right the hell out. And Burr is saying that he's about ready to break up with her if this relationship doesn't progress somehow-- for example, meeting Arlene's relatives would be good, even if Burr is black, Arlene is white, and her family is full of racists. Between being about to lose Burr, the threat of Rose, and suddenly feeling like God just broke their deal, Arlene caves in and agrees to go back to Possett for her uncle's retirement party.

Interspersed with the present-day action are Arlene's flashbacks to growing up. After her dad died and her mother mentally vacated the building, she got essentially raised by her aunt Florence and grew up being close to her perfect cousin Clarice. A bad double-date led to Arlene making shocking life choices such as relieving the male half of her entire high school class (except for Clarice's boyfriend) of their virginities once they turned 16. In between Arlene trying to protect Burr from her relatives (his comments upon meeting them are pretty subtly funny) and dealing with her aunt's pissiness about her leaving, she debates on whether or not to tell Burr what happened, and if so, how.

It's an interesting book. Like the other books of hers I've read, I love the narrative voice and it's totally compelling. Arlene and Burr's relationship is very sweet, especially their car games. I also have to give points to the "Aunt Florence and Phoebe" story. Let's just say, HOLY SHIT, THIS WOMAN IS SCARY and keep your pets away from her. (Note: folks who are sensitive about pets may not want to read this.). So it's a good and entertaining read for the most part, that I whipped right through.

I will say, however, that there are twists to this story. Which is to say that (a) Arlene's holding something back from readers for most of the narrative, and (b) some things happened that she is unaware of. I'll get into that below the spoiler cut. I felt like the stuff Arlene didn't know about worked in the novel, but the other thing, not so much. Or at least, it just sat weirdly to me. Don't get me wrong, the author foreshadows all of that stuff, so it's not 100% out of the blue. But I'm not fond of being misled, and some of Arlene and Clarice's life choices just seem really off when you have to look at them later. It makes things kind of weird.

Three and a half stars.

Backseat Saints

By Joshilyn Jackson.

Note: this is the sequel/companion novel to gods in Alabama, which I have not read. I assume I am missing some things here and there due to that. (Update: read it, review is over here.)

Anyway: Ro Grandee has a run-in with a gypsy fortune teller at the airport, in which she gets a tarot reading (Tower, 2 of Swords, Hanged Man) and is told that either her husband will kill her or she will have to kill him. No exceptions. As it turns out, the gypsy is disturbingly familiar, and Ro realizes later that was her mother, who took off and left young Rose with her abusive dad when Rose was 8. Her mother also leaves behind a secret message for her at Cadillac Ranch(!), and Ro steals a library book off of her, revealing that her mother is in California.

Ro knows that the fortunetelling is true-- her husband Thom has been beating her for  five years. Every time his jerkass dad picks on him, Thom comes home and beats on Ro. (God, I hate it when abuse goes down the chain of screaming.) I will admit that I felt sorry for Thom whenever his dad started in on him, but  that certainly doesn't excuse a damn thing. The marriage is somewhat bearable--the sex is, anyway. However, when Ro starts off the book trying to shoot her husband, despite her years of experience with a gun and working in a gun store, she freaks out, loses her aim, and can't do it. Hell, she shoots her own dog's paw off by mistake. So she tries to reconcile herself to the marriage, maybe ponder having a baby...but after Thom's next run-in with his dad, she's in the hospital and realizing that the gypsy was right.

Ro goes through identity crises in the novel, between being (a) Ro Grandee, abused wife, (b) Rose Mae Lolley, her old high school self with spunk and fire and well, still being attracted to abusive men, and (c) Ivy Rose Wheeler, the identity she borrows from her neighbor's dead granddaughter so she can get away from Thom. It can get a little confusing.

Since Ro/se can't seem to pull off shooting Thom herself, her next idea is to go search for Jim Beverly, her high school boyfriend, the one she really loved and he only beat her up once. Jim offered to kill her dad once, and maybe if she can find him, he'll kill someone else for her. This doesn't seem like the world's most brilliant logic ever, especially since Jim hasn't been seen whatsoever since he ran out of town at age 18. However, Ro/se tracks down the other girl Jim was probably boffing back then, Arlene, and sneaks off to Chicago while Thom's out of town to see if she can find Jim. Without getting much into the action that seems to have gone down in gods in Alabama, let's just say she doesn't find him, Arlene seems traumatized as hell, and apparently Jim was just as much of an abusive fuckwad as every other man Ro/se has known in her life.

Ro/se comes home, followed shortly by Thom, who figured out she had been gone for a few days and...now he's gonna kill her. Grabbing her dog and running, Ro/se flees back to her old hometown in hopes that maybe her drunk abusive daddy's willing to kill Thom for her, but her dad is in no shape to do so. (He's also in AA and making amends.) After that, she runs all the way out to California...and I'll leave it at that due to spoilers and things getting rather surprising.

Good points:

(a) Ro/se's voice in this is very compelling. Even though she makes decisions that bother me/are kind of stupid at times, I was definitely compelled to keep reading and find out what the hell was going to happen to her. She's an interesting character with personality.

(b) The author does abusive relationships and the cycle of them very well. You can see those good moments in Thom before he goes homicidal, and like I said, I actually felt very sorry for him every time he went up against his dad and failed. The scene right before Thom puts Ro in the hospital (after a very brutal conversation with his dad about wanting a raise) is so dreamy and hopeful that hell, I was rooting for them, and I hate abusive fuckwads. But...yeah.

(c) The twists in the book, particularly in the third section in California, kept shocking the heck out of me even though I probably should have figured out it was going in that direction. Dang! Anyway, the resolution of the book, and the explanations (when given) of what was going on work out.

Iffy points:

(a) Ro/se is ah...well, she's not so good at making decisions at times when it comes to men. Thinking that a guy she hasn't seen since she was 18 (and she has no idea how to find) is going to protect her? Thinking that her dad who used to beat her up is going to protect her? I know you're desperate and out of options, but...argh. Also, when you know your husband is chasing you, heading straight to your hometown should seem like an amazingly bad idea to you, because that's where he'll look.

(b) I realize now this book is meant to be read after gods in Alabama, but let's just say there's some "one, two, skip a few" moments going on between sections 2 and 3 of this book that I felt rather disconcerted about missing. Because those bits are in the first book, duh.

Not-so-good execution:

(a) Ro/se frequently slips into flashbacks about her sex life with Jim and other moments. I really wish those had been put in sections or italics or some way to separate more that this action wasn't going on in the present time. I frequently was doing "wait, what? who's this? what's going on now?" for a page or two every time the author did that, and it was disconcerting and confusing. I seriously had to go back and reread certain sections because I missed details and was confused as to what had gone on.

(b) I was confused as to what the hell was going on with Ro/se's mother, and it took me awhile and going back and rereading to figure out what was going on. At first I thought she was crazy for suddenly being all "That was my mom!" after the airport run-in, especially when I was thinking, "You haven't seen your mom since you were 8, how would you know?" I think I just didn't get that this was actually going somewhere and wasn't part of Rose's imagination until part 3. Or maybe that's just me. 

I'll give it three and a half stars overall. It'd be four, but for issues of confusion--and well, a bit of frustration over Ro/se's life choices-- I'm giving it a wee bit less. Good read, though.

Her Fearful Symmetry

By Audrey Niffenegger.

I don't think I've ever had a experience of reading a book quite like this. I went through the following stages while reading it:

• Hm, this is starting kinda slow...
• Hm, this is kinda sweet actually.
• I'm really getting into this.
• Uh...that doesn't sound good.
• Wait, what? No, seriously, THAT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA.
• Holy SHITFUCK, the TWIST. The REVELATION. The revelation on top of that!
• The...oh crap, you really went there. Oh my god.
• Oh dear god, the ending.

I haven't the faintest idea how to put this into a star system. The writing is good, the book starts out pretty good (even if I can't say I was madly in love with any of the characters), and then about halfway through the book the plot goes off the rails into hell.

Here's the plot, about as far as I can go without spoiling. I'll be putting tons and tons of spoiler information below the cut/with stars, and the first half of the book review is going to be a little more hinty than usual because you need to at least have a vague idea of what you are getting into before you read this.

Once upon a time, there were two English twins, Edie and Elspeth. Edie made off with Elspeth's fiance Jack and moved to America with him and had her own set of twin girls, Elspeth never talked to any of them even when she was dying. Now that she's just died of cancer, she left her flat and her millions (note: being a used book dealer makes you milions?) to the nieces she never met. There's a few rules: they can't inherit until they turn 21, they have to live there for a year before they can sell it, and Edie and Jack aren't allowed into the flat or anywhere near Elspeth's stuff. Okay, whatever.

Julia and Valentina turn 21 and move on into the flat, adopt a kitten (The Kitten of Death! No, really, that's what they call it), putter around London not doing much of anything, and develop feelings for their neighbors. The twins have dropped out of several colleges and never actually do much of anything. Julia is the dominant twin who likes to boss her sister around, but insists they must always be together. They're still virgins (and are frequently mistaken for teenagers due to their lack of maturity) because that would involve them doing something with some other guy and not each other at the same time. Valentina actually has some school and career goals/interests, but hasn't acted on them because of Julia insisting they do the same job together, whatever that is. Julia calls her "Mouse." Constantly.

Julia likes to hang out with Martin, a nice man with a whopping case of OCD. Martin's still in love with his wife Marijke and she still loves him, but after 25 years she's way burned out on the OCD and has moved back home to the Netherlands so she can do things like walk where she wants and have a cat. Then there's Robert, who was Elspeth's longtime boyfriend. He avoids the twins for awhile, but once he starts hanging out with them, he develops feelings for Valentina. Meanwhile, the ghost of Elspeth still haunts the apartment, trying to make herself known to her relatives and Robert. Eventually she figures out a method of communication with them all. Valentina is finally hitting her limit on dealing with Julia and just wants to split up already. And then she gets the worst fucking idea of all time as to how to do it--let's just say it's reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, EXCEPT EVEN WORSE*. And despite all signs saying "this is not a good idea," the plot goes to the place of Gothic crazy tragedy.

I don't think any of these characters are stupid idiots. However, the main female characters in this book make some FUCKING HORRENDOUS life decisions that you cannot believe that anyone would go along with, or encourage anyone else to do, or put up with. It's seriously brutal and nasty what these folks do to those they claim to love. That's really the most horrifying part of all, that anyone would think that what they did is a good idea and to go through with it.

I'm not sure what Martin and Marijke's story is doing in this book. It's sweet to watch Martin slowly recover from his OCD (with Julia's help), but one wonders what the heck their plot has to do with the rest of this because it's pretty tangential. As you go on, you figure out that the guy with whopping OCD is the sanest one in the book.

There are several tropes in this I must call your attention to:

Replacement Love Interest: So very, very much of this. Anyone else find it creepy that Robert now has a thing for his girlfriend's young relative? Uh, I sure do. They make it clear that Robert's in his late thirties and Elspeth was older around this point, but that really doesn't make it any less weird. Especially when the twins may be of legal age, but they don't really come off as that mature and it kind of seems a little bit illegal in feeling, if not in reality. Julia gets her own similar replacement goldfish situation toward the end that is similarly freaking weird***. And then there's the part where we are dealing with a book about twins and ghosts...and it gets EVEN WEIRDER.

Also, anyone want to explain to me why two hot 21-year-olds who roam all over London can't find any friends or hot boys their own age to hang out with and pursue? They really can't find anyone else to associate with other than their older male neighbors?

Idle Rich: Seriously, does anyone work here? Robert has tons of money and mostly just diddles about the local cemetery and works on his thesis. Nobody's bothering Julia and Valentina to go back to college (and stick to one this time) and get jobs and a life, clearly. Ironically, Martin, the agoraphobic OCD guy, is the one who actually does work.

Idiot Plot (both averted and played straight): Early-ish on in the book, after Martin tells Julia that part of his disease is that he doesn't want to get help, Julia plucks out her eyebrows and goes to a doctor to get herself a prescription for OCD meds, which she then gives to Martin claiming they are vitamins. Martin is not an idiot, he's taken those drugs before, plus he can read what's on the pills. But he takes them anyway-- hey, whatever works to get him to take the medication. It's a sweet moment, but to me it foreshadowed a much worse revelation in the novel, in which you find out that someone has been aware of a truly fucked up situation.** I cannot comprehend why that person would go along with this situation. Not to mention the whole Juliet plot. For Niffenegger's proving that people are not as easy to snow as her characters seem to think they are, it's all the more horrible that they would agree to be snowed like this and not like, SAY ANYTHING. What the hell?

It also wraps up rather quickly. I guess this is the author's attempt at having Happy Endings for the more uh, deserving characters, but it's a little too fast. Much as I'm pleased to see Martin's improvements, it's a little fast-forwardy. Julia's status at the end of the book is even more so and really improbable given how the character was set up.*** It's just all VERY AGGRAVATING.

Look, it's an interesting story. The writing is done well. For a book that doesn't have a whole lot of swinging plot for the first half of it, I stayed interested in reading it. The Martin story is sweet. If you are into literary, depressing, or Gothic books, this is probably right up your alley. I won't be pitching it against the wall for utter suckitude. But the sheer amount of stupid (and mean) decisions made in this will make you want to slam your head against a wall. I am putting it down as a three star book (recommended with reservations) because despite the stupid decision making it's still somehow done well. But yeah, the second half of the book is freaking infuriating and really, I should be giving this a 2 or something. I can't really explain why I am not.

The Robber Bride

By Margaret Atwood.

This is one of those books that seems to be generally regarded as good. I finally got around to reading it, and... I don't know.

The plot: Zenia is an evil, evil woman. She sweeps into your life, befriends you, tells you lies, finds some way to screw you, steals your man, and then throws him back like a bad fish. Tony, Charis, and Roz went to college with Zenia and over the last few decades, all of them have been screwed by her in one way or another, and they became friends over it. When they heard that Zenia had been blown up, they all went to her funeral and quietly celebrated. Then as they're having lunch in a place called The Toxique (note: don't go to ANYWHERE with a name like this!), Zenia swans in, clearly not freaking dead.

What do you do now?

Now, overall, this isn't a bad plot idea. However, I kind of have issues with how the book was structured.

For example: we start out the book telling about Tony's tedious life and day, slowly, ending with her sighting of Zenia at The Toxique. Then we backtrack and do the same damn thing for Charis's day, ending with the sighting of Zenia at The Toxique. Then Roz. This is how the first 118 pages or so goes. And it's BORING. I don't know these women yet, and I'm not interested enough in their tedious daily life yet to even care. And I don't like how the sighting of Zenia had to be rehashed three times. If I hadn't been on vacation in the desert with not a lot going on at the moment in time I was reading it, I probably wouldn't have kept on reading. Hell, if I'd bothered to flip through it at the bookstore before buying it, I wouldn't have due to that deadly start.

The book actually starts 118ish pages in, when we go back in time and find out exactly how Tony was screwed in college,  followed by Charis, followed by Roz. That's where the novel gets interesting. I finally cared about the characters during that section, rather than not caring at the start. Also, some of Zenia's methods are darned clever, such as... well, check the spoiler cut.*

And then at the end, when everyone knows that Zenia's around again, they're faced with the question of "What do I do now?" and "Is Zenia going to screw me again?"** I'm mostly pleased at how the women react this time around.

However, in addition to the weak beginning (and the author does insist on rehashing everything three times in the same style, like how and when she does childhood flashbacks and confrontations), this is one of those books where you are all, "Is there any motivation to Zenia beyond "I'm just evil and screwing people is what I do?" And well, the author doesn't give any. You find out VERY few true facts about the woman***, and she's just Pure Evil. I wish there had been some more damn depth to this beyond "Evil woman screws people." Plenty of books have that sort of plot, and from what I hear (plus the one book of hers I already read), this author seems like she could do better than that.

I'm going to give it three stars. It's at least a fairly interesting read. Eventually. If you skip ahead and go to the "Black Enamel" section where the victimization acts start, anyway.

One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing

By Jasper Fforde.

This one takes a different twist than the previous Thursday Next books (most recent one here*), in that it entirely features the fictional/BookWorld Thursday Next from the ghostwritten books about Thursday in their world. She's the one who's called a "tree-hugging hippie" compared to her sex-and-violence predecessor. She tries very hard to keep the books having a sense of personal integrity... which means that they're not getting read very much. The other characters in the book don't like her much, the dodo is a pain in the ass, and her understudy seems to have a goblin fetish. Written Thursday would love to be an awesome detective just like her progenitor (predecessor? original to her copy?), but she's kind of a washout. She also pines for Landen Parke-Laine because she's written that way, but she wasn't written with a husband in the series... which makes it a bit complicated for her to figure out dating anyone else.

Then Written Thursday starts to figure out that Original Recipe Thursday must be missing, both from the BookWorld and the RealWorld. She ends up with Real Thursday's Jurisfiction badge and starts sneaking around doing an investigation... one that clearly nobody thought she'd actually manage to solve. Her journey takes her all over the BookWorld, she acquires a robot butler, and she even gets real, all while on a giant search for the missing Thursday.

Following Written Thursday is an interesting journey, and one has to admire the author's ingenuity in continuing to write these books and the sheer wackiness that is the BookWorld. How he juggles it all, I don't know. But he kept my interest, and I enjoyed Written Thursday's journey to try to become a bit more (but not totally!) like the original.

Four stars.

The Devil, The Lovers, and Me: My Life In Tarot

By Kimberlee Auerbach.

I'm not sure what to make of this book, which is sort of a memoir and sorta who-knows-what. I would best describe it as the individual stories sound relatively not made up, but the framing device definitely is. Maybe it's more of an excuse to write down short stories of her life? I'm not sure.

Anyhoo: the conceit is that at age 33, Kimberlee goes to a tarot reader for the first time, a woman named Iris. She hates her job working in the Fox News basement, she loves her boyfriend but she wants to get married and he's still not ready yet, and really, she just wants to hear that her future is going to be okay. Iris, on the other hand, does not do that sort of thing and is into analyzing the past instead.

The story is framed as a tarot reading: for every card drawn, Kimberlee tells a story of her life related to the card. The Devil was about the time she tried to be free-wheeling and slept with an Argentinian artist who gave her crabs, the Fool was running for vice president in high school and accidentally having a dirty-minded slogan (she didn't win, but people thought she was cool anyway), the Lovers was about her first love, the Sun is about her current boyfriend, the Tower was about 9/11 and finally breaking up with a bad boyfriend, Justice is about her sibling rivalry with her younger brother who had childhood cancer. The stories are pretty entertaining, especially as they go on.

However, I am still not sure what to make of it. (I started writing this oh, weeks ago and it has been sitting in draft for all that time.) I don't know how to feel about it or how to regard it. It's not exactly memoir and yet not quite ficiton either... so... yeah. Entertaining in its own way, but beyond that, I don't think I ever really got a handle on it.

Three stars, I guess.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun

By Christopher Moore.

I gotta say: this is the least favorite book of his I have ever read. Man, did it ever fall flat for me.

Through a series of unfortunate events involving drunkenness and a pink plane, pilot Tucker Case ends up with the only job he can get: living on a random island, flying back and forth to Japan, and he doesn't know what's going on. Eventually he figures out that his employers, Dr. Sebastian Curtis and his hot slutty nurse/wife Beth are using the entire island population (the Shark People) as living organ donors. The Curtises are doing this by having Beth dress up as the "Sky Princess" and tell them what their personal god, Vincent, wants them to do. See, Vincent was this pilot during WWII who landed on the island in his plane, the Sky Princess, and planned on coming back before he got killed. But now he's a god to these people, and he's got some godly powers to use to manipulate Tucker into saving his people...

Frankly, I nearly put the book down through all of section one. Then came section 2, in which we had some flashbacks (and flash-aboves) and got to meet Vincent. This is what he's like:

"I'm higher than chief," Vincent said. "I'm Captain Vincent Fuckin' Bennidetti, Bad-ass of Brooklyn, High Emperor of the Allied Forces, Pilot of the Magic Sky Princess, Swinging Dick of the Free Fuckin' World, and Protector of the Innocent."

I loved him immediately. Too bad he's not in the book much (for well, obvious reasons). That's the kind of character I expect out of Christopher Moore: ones with personality and fun. Unfortunately, the dead guy was the most fun character in the book. The various Shark People and Kimi the navigator are somewhat kooky, but none of them stood out to me massively in the way that Vincent did. It's supposed to be funny (oh look, Kimi is a transvestite! Isn't that wacky!?!), but mostly it was all falling flat to me.  Most of the action centers on Tucker and the evil hoor Beth (ugh) and the "good" doctor. Tucker, alas, doesn't have much in the way of personality besides mostly thinking about his dick a lot. Even if his backstory is THE ENTIRE PLOT OF HAMLET (seriously, and this is dealt with in two pages and mostly forgotten afterwards, just for kicks). Late in the novel he starts to get a clue and grow up, which is nice, but that can only make up for me being bored-ish (and pondering putting the book down a whole lot) so much. It's not a very fun book to read, and the plot itself is kind of weird, and while it ends nice, mostly I just dragged through reading it and wished I was reading Coyote Blue instead. It's clearly Trying To Be Wacky, but somehow didn't manage to work for me into actually being wacky.

A couple of linguistic quirks I wonder about:

(a) why, on their own time, are the doctor and Beth calling themselves/being referred to as "the Sorcerer" and "the Sky Princess?"

(b) I'd like to know WHO THE HELL IS THE SEQUINED LOVE NUN. There are no sequins on this island. I assume "love nun" is some kind of code for "hoor" and it's probably supposed to be referring to Beth (there are only three females in this book, most of them of the slutty variety), but this never comes up in the book. I don't know why they didn't just call this one "Island of the Sky Princess" already. 

Anyway... I'm giving it two and a half stars. The half being for Vincent.

Then She Found Me

By Elinor Lipman.

April is a 36-year-old Latin teacher, who's a little Vulcan-ish and detached and chill, living a normal life. Oh yeah, and she happens to have been adopted. A few years after her parents died, her biological mother, talk show host Bernice, comes looking for her. April never had any curiosity about her biological parents before this, and upon meeting her mother*, would have been quite happy not to have. Because man, the lady has screws loose. If not for the physical resemblance, you wouldn't buy it. And when Bernice tells April that her biological father was Jack Kennedy...uh, yeah, RIGHT.

April, no dumb bunny, gets the school librarian to research the possibility of this to prove Bernice wrong, and ends up getting involved with him. And Dwight is a pretty adorable guy deep down, with quiet snark. He also has the right attitude to take towards Bernice, i.e. "grab your popcorn and watch the crazy show." April keeps on tolerating Bernice, and quizzing her about who her father actually was--"uh, some other guy named Jack..." and quietly dealing with a three-ring circus lady invading her life.

And then April talks to her mother's friend Sonia and finds out there's a lot more to the baby daddy story--and her adoption--than she thought....

This is a sweet, quietly fun little story. Like Dwight, you find that taking Bernice in as a form of entertainment (as best you can) is the right attitude to take. April loosens up and becomes more fun, and finds a way to resolve all the strangeness that her life is now. I liked it quite a bit. Four stars.

* for purposes of writing this review, assume I mean "bio-mom" every time I say that, but given Bernice's attitude of coming in and taking up the motherhood mantle again, it seems relevant to refer to her as such too, even though she's not the mom who raised April.