Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews

April & Oliver

Freshman novels. New writers. New FICTION writers. I chose April & Oliver from the list of possible review books for all of those reasons. Will it be good? I always wonder. Do first-time novelists ever make it?

Some of them do.

April & Oliver is Tess Callahan's first novel. If you like sexual tension and stories of lifelong friends, this is the read for you.

The writing is tight, tighter than the plot. I got a little lost with the nuances of how April & Oliver are connected -- there are family ties that aren't really family ties, and I think the story would've actually been stronger without the opening death of April's brother, Buddy. So many things happen in this book over such a short period of time I got lost a little. But the sentences were so lovely I got over it pretty fast.

What I didn't like about it? Somewhere along the line, I stopped identifying with April. I have this problem in my own writing -- writing from close third and drawing every other character as more complex and sympathetic than the heroine -- and so maybe I'm hypersensitive to it in other people's writing -- but it seemed to stand out here. Everyone was always saying how tough April was, and I couldn't tell if it was an act or if she really didn't care anymore. If she doesn't care, how can I care about her?

What did I like about it? The writing.

"A picture was taped to the back of the tank. At first April thought it was a landscape. Then she recognized the hills as hips, the river a seam between a woman's thighs. Her nipples were pink as pieces of coral, her hair lemon blond. The walls of the tank were stained with algae. An angel drifted, fins folded, kissing the surface for air. April wondered if fish could drown."

What else did I like? The story of April AND Oliver. The twists! The turns! The longing! THE ENDING!

The ending.

LOVED THE ENDING!

Here's to hoping Callahan is sitting at her laptop writing another novel right now.

The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents

Need a hipster baby shower gift?  Check out The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents, by Dale Hrabi.

 

Aspring helicopter parents, this is your guide. It contains:

• A color chart for poop analysis

• Charts to forecast baby's gear storage needs between now and high school graduation

• How-tos for everything, including helping your baby develop a signature stride

It's funny. It's yummy. There are cool charts and illustrations. And it did its job: It put parenting a baby into perspective in an entertaining way. I would definitely slip this book in between the Dr. Ferber and the Dr. Spock to keep your new-mommy friends from thinking they actually have any control at all over that little flesh purse of theirs.

I wouldn't buy it for someone with an older child, as it's really only for babies, and I might go so far as to say really only for first-time parents. It's a quick read, too, which is helpful for new parents.

The New Yorker Book of Mom Cartoons

Want to feel smarter?  Get yourself a copy of The New Yorker Book of Mom Cartoons.

This paperback includes cartoons from 46 cartoonists, including the more famous Roz Chast, Danny Shanahan and Leo Cullum.

It's not a book your child will enjoy, though my daughter forced me to read her the entire thing when it arrived in the mail for review. The entire book sailed over her head, and for the most part, that was a good thing. It's The New Yorker, after all, and there's very wry humor here.

Though some of the cartoons are definitely dated, I laughed out loud several times, including the cartoon in which a stick mother walks into her son's classroom and is instantly recognized from her child's drawings. You really can't beat that on a Friday afternoon.

Church of the Dog

Church of the Dog, by Kaya McLaren, was actually first published in 2000 and republished in 2008 by Penguin.  What a lovely and encouraging thing that is, that someone would rediscover a book and bring it back to life.  I understand why COTD was brought back.

It's a novel about choices and self-discovery told from disparate points of view -- Mara, an art teacher; Daniel, an orphaned transient; and Daniel's grandparents, the aging Edith and Earl.  It's often hard to tell stories in first-person narrative from different angles, but doing so helps us see the change in perspective from individual to individual over events, choices and circumstances. My favorite line:

There were times when it looked like our boat was no match for the enormous sea. I just sit there and think about floating, floating in any storm, floating through anything even when it feels so much bigger than me.

Blue Elephant DVD Winner & Sikulu and Harambe

Lorib, you've won yourself a Blue Elephant DVD!  E-mail me your mailing address at ritabiermann(at)hotmail(dot)com.  Congratulations!

Next up! Sikulu and Harambe By the Zambezi River:  An African Version of the Good Samaritan Story by Kunle Oguneye.

Sikulu is the spider and Harambe is the hippo.  They encounter an old woman who has lost the clothes she was washing in the river.  The other animals ignore the woman's pleas, but not our heroes. And I think you know how the story ends.

The illustrations are Crayola-like, and the idea of a spider and a hippo hanging out cracked me up.  The little angel gave this take on a Bible story a hearty thumbs-up.

Theft

I applaud N.S. Koenings for her reach in her short-story collection, Theft.

Each story is set in a different culture, with a different viewpoint, from a stuffy old lady to a bunch of poor psychics to tourists to I don't even know what to call the guy in the basement. 

I can feel the pain of the characters in the some of the stories, though search as I have, I can't find one particular sentence that sums it up. It's the sum of all the sentences, the good intentions bleed out through the pages, but I found myself drifting, not caring as much as I should about the characters.  I think Koenings is a talented writer who has not yet hit her stride. I can smell it on her -- she's good -- but I didn't long for these characters to achieve their goals. I found myself getting impatient with them quickly.

Still, it's good writing.  You do feel something, it's just not compassion.  I applaud any writer who can make me feel something, but I long to feel compassion for the main character, however flawed he or she may be.

I look forward to reading more Koenings. I do believe she can do it.

Still Life with Husband

So, you marry a sweet but boring guy, only to meet the fascinating writer you always dreamed of five years into your marriage. What to do, what to do?

In the second piece of fiction I've read in a month about cheating on your husband, Still Life with Husband, by Lauren Fox, does manage to make one wonder about the other fish in the sea and the choices we make in love.  Most importantly, it reminds us that just because we get married, we don't automatically cease to have feelings for other people.  What typically changes is whether or not we act on them. Except not for main character, Emily.

The problem for Emily is that her technical writer husband, Kevin, wants to move to the suburbs of Milwaukee (seriously? there are suburbs?) and have kids.  Emily wants to remain cool and hip a while longer, which she seems to act out throughout the novel.  Maybe it's just me, but I have trouble feeling sympathy for Emily, who, childless, works part-time and pretty much gets to do whatever she wants, all the while shitting all over good old Kevin.  I admit, Kevin sounds boring, but seriously, Emily -- why did you marry him in the first place?

My favorite character was David, the Other Man, who actually feels worse about their affair than Emily does. I also really liked best friend Meg, who struggles with infertility and miscarriage and seems very authentic.  I wish I liked Emily, since she is the main character, but I really wanted to put her in a cage match with Meredith from Grey's Anatomy.

Despite my hatred for Emily, author Lauren Fox is engaging, and I would definitely read her again.  This isn't really a light read, despite Fox's flippant style, due to the subject matter. Save it for a rainy day, when you really want to be mad at somebody.

Love the One You're With

I really kind of wanted to hate Emily Griffin's Love the One You're With, because I got the press release that came with it telling me the initial print run was 500,000.  That's pretty amazing, especially for someone whose first book just came out a few years ago.  Griffin became that perfect, pretty girl in school who intimidated me from the moment I read that release.

So I read this book, hoping to hate it.

And I didn't hate it.  Now I actually want to check out Griffin's other books. 

The book is the story of a New York woman married to a nice, solid Atlanta man who runs into her super hottie ex-boyfriend on the street.  He's grown and matured, she's more self-confident, and the tension can be cut with a knife.  Only problem:  She's married.  To the nice, perfect guy she started dating after Leo ditched her on New Year's Eve.

Oy.

I think everyone's had a relationship that ends without closure, and it's interesting to read about someone else processing that pain. Main character Ellen learns to see her past with Leo from a new perspective, and I think everyone grows in the process.  Part of me wanted it to end differently, just for a twist, but then of course, it would've been real life, and who wants that in fiction?

On Borrowed Wings

I just finishd On Borrowed Wings, by Chandra Prasad.  When she sent me the book a few months ago, I worried I would never get to it.  There were a lot of books on tap, some for reviews, some that friends wrote and some that I needed to read for work reasons. So it sat, and sat, and sat on my bedside table.  When I finally picked it up, it was just before the Christmas holiday.

I read it in three days.

That hasn't happened to me in quite some time, and particularly not with fiction.  I didn't expect to like this tale of a young girl who pretended to be her deceased brother so she could take his place at Yale in an age before Yale accepted women. 

The novel's main character, Adele, has a coming-of-age experience while at Yale.  I liked best reading the evolution of Adele's self-awareness, how she progresses from a teenage girl almost devoid of personality to a strong-willed and kind adult woman in the space of her freshman year.  The supporting characters were well done, particularly Adele's Yale schoolmates.  Though some of the details of how Adele avoids detection seemed far-fetched, but they weren't really important to the story. This is a novel of characters, not of plot. 

The most difficult relationship is that of Adele and her mother.  Her mother, who became pregnant with Adele's brother and was forced to marry her father, had been a privelaged "cottager" before marrying a quarryman.  I thought this description of her captured her experience so well:

"Christmas arrived without company, or cheer, or the decorations that Mother had delighted in making:  popcorn strung on string, cut-out snowflakes and angels, chains of colored paper links, candles propped in little tin cups.  These were ways of escaping a plodding, unchanged life, I understood now.  Little holiday excesses that ornamented Mother's otherwise dog-eared days."

Adele brings a fearlessness in the face of adversity I'd like to hone in my own life.  I really enjoyed this novel.

Piece of Work

I was recently sent Piece of Work by Laura Zigman.  It was one of the fastest reads I've had in a while, light, enjoyable, like lemonade.  The novel details the story of a former entertainment-publicist-turned-stay-at-home-mom who's forced to re-enter the working world after her management consultant husband gets fired.  The heroine, Julia, ends up getting a second-rate job saving the careers of has-beens. 

My favorite part of the book was the relationship between Julia and her love-bead-wearing, psychologically astute assistant.  Their friendship was the best of office relationships - the type involving two people who watch each other's backs and set each other up to succeed. 

As a working mom who has to leave her daughter (who is the exact same age as the heroine's son) every day to go to the office, I identified with the pain Julia felt. Of course, I hadn't stayed home for the little angel's whole life prior to that - I can't imagine what a switch that would be - but I do understand what it feels like to leave a little person who is clinging to your leg and begging you to stay.  In the end, I was glad to see Julia and her husband work through their gender-role switch, their control differentials and their places in the parenting social circle.  Piece of Work isn't a heavy book, but it's nice and light and refreshing - perfect for an airport ride, if you're taking one this week.