The Secret Book of Flora Lea (Mini Book Review)

I was forced once again to read a historical fiction novel for book club. The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry is not the sort of novel I would naturally pick up on my own, and after the last few book club picks I’ve set my expectations quite low. Still, I figured that nothing could be as depressing as the last book I read, which was about female infanticide, and that a story about stories was bound to interest me more than one about motherhood in a labor camp. 

What’s it about?

Hazel and her younger sister Flora were sent from London out to the countryside during Operation Pied Piper. There, Hazel tells Flora stories of a secret world called Whisperwood to help her forget the horrors of the outside world. Between Whisperwood and their loving hosts, the girls are able to have a relatively idyllic summer… until Flora disappears. Focused on the war, the world determines that Flora drowned and moves on, but twenty years later Hazel stumbles across an American novel about Whisperwood. If Whisperwood is still out there, does that mean Flora is too? 

What’d I think?

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

I didn’t hate The Secret Book of Flora Lea, and I did have a good time at book club. Most of my group enjoyed the book, and we had a really good discussion about storytelling and creative ownership. A lot of The Secret Book of Flora Lea is about asking the question ‘who owns a story?’ Hazel is extremely jealous about Whisperwood, to the point that she gets angry if Flora so much as mentions it to anyone else; when the story crosses the ocean and finds its way to Peggy, she—not knowing its origins—expands it and makes it her own with her own effort and creativity. To whom, then, does the story belong? Hazel, who thought of it first? Flora, for whom it was written? Peggy, the one who took it from a formless idea to something more? Can a story really belong to anyone?

Anyone else remember “Mr. Linden’s Library?” My middle school creative writing teacher gave it to us as a writing prompt. Basically, it is a picture from a children’s book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg that shows a sleeping girl next to a book with vines growing out of it. As far as I can tell, it’s a common enough writing prompt, and the fact that Hazel’s last name is “Linden” made me wonder if Patti Callahan Smith had been inspired by it.

The discussion of story ownership was by far my favorite part of The Secret Book of Flora Lea, in large part because I didn’t particularly like the book. Oh, it’s fine. It’s even mildly entertaining. The problem with it is that it takes itself too seriously and is a bit too repetitive.

Every couple of months I get on my literary fiction soapbox and complain about it until I get distracted and move on. If you don’t feel like listening to the soapbox rant, maybe jump onto a different review. For some reason, I was less inspired to review The Secret Book of Flora Lea as an individual book and more inspired to lament genre more broadly.

Good Night, Irene (Book Rant)

I’m going to be honest: I hated Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea. If you want to read a positive or balanced review of it, you’ll have to find that elsewhere. 

What’s it about?

Based on the experiences of the author’s mother’s real service as a ‘Donut Dolly’ during World War II, Good Night, Irene follows two women who leave home to join a little-known unit of the Red Cross. Tasked with raising morale in the troops, Irene and Dorothy drive their clubmobile Rapid City from the front lines to the officers clubs to smile and flirt with the men while serving donuts and coffee. 

Why didn’t I like it?

⭐

Rating: 0.5 out of 5.

Long story short, it’s boring and doesn’t have much of a plot.

I’m not typically a tough reviewer. I’m not stingy with four- and five-star reviews, and I always feel genuinely bad when I give something a low rating, particularly when a lot of people seem to love it. Did I miss something? At least some of my complaints are matters of taste. Historical fiction is absolutely not one of my go-to genres, and I’ve read enough WWII fiction in the last few months that I’m fairly over it. That being said, I do think that most of my critiques are legitimate and that I’m not being overly, overly mean.

Or maybe I am. Very close to the start of the novel, Irene plays a game of Solitaire and there’s some narration about the joker cards. The game of Solitaire does not use jokers. I’m usually the last person on earth to catch that sort of error, and that near immediate mistake didn’t exactly prime me to be optimistic (or charitable).

I don’t want to be unrepentantly negative, so I will say this: Urrea dedicated this novel to his mother Phyllis, who was a real-life Donut Dolly. Phyllis and her real-life clubmobile companions—including Jill, whom Urrea interviewed extensively for this project—make repeated cameos. This is very cute, and in these moments I could feel the love and respect Urrea has for her. 

That doesn’t make up for the book’s many, many other flaws, though. First and foremost, as I said above, is how boring it is. I read this for book club, and while I was the only one who hated the book, I was not the only one who found it painfully slow, particularly at the beginning. Most of the others in the group felt that it picked up about halfway/two-thirds of the way through; for me it absolutely did not, but even so… the halfway point is far, far too late for the book to draw attention. I famously refuse to DNF books, but I was sorely tempted. If I’m falling asleep every few pages, don’t care about there characters, and have found no plot to speak of, what exactly am I reading to the end for? I only finished for book club, but it took me so long to get through it that I truly thought this was going to be literally the first time in my life that I didn’t finish a book club pick. I did, but barely. There is nothing propulsive about Good Night, Irene, no ‘what happens next?’ The few questions I did have never got addressed, and I wasn’t alone in feeling that the book simply lacks plot. It reads more as a collection of disconnected scenes from the war than as a cohesive narrative. 

I truly think that this would have been better if Urrea hadn’t written a novel and had instead helped Jill shape her memories into a collection of essays. True stories, especially if written as a collection of anecdotes, don’t all have to build on each other the same way a novel does. In its current form, Good Night, Irene has a lot of scenes that don’t serve any clear purpose. Why, for instance, do Dorothy and Irene choose to put on cringey fake French accents for an afternoon? Generously I could say they’re trying to break the monotony or that the pressure of the war is breaking them, but I’m not truly convinced there’s evidence in the text to support it. Lots of scenes seem constructed to carry a single joke, most of which weren’t actually funny to me. 

It doesn’t help that I couldn’t care less about either of the women. Some of my book club companions did like them, but for my money they’re both just empty stereotypes. Irene is a girly girl and Dorothy is a tomboy. Irene had a physically abusive fiancé and Dorothy’s brother died in the war, which is what drove them to serve. Beyond that, there’s very little to them. Worse, they very much give off men-writing-women energy. Physical descriptions are squeezed in early, at very weird times, and neither woman is at all bothered by the gross behavior they receive at the hands of the GIs.

Did Urrea not realize that even the most patriotic woman might occasionally, at least once, tire of the pawing and the flirting and the pet names? Every once in a while one of them will say “don’t call me Dolly” but it’s played like an inside joke (and the girls don’t seem to have any problem being called “doll”). 

There are even moments that sound less like they were written by a human man and more like they were written by an alien educated by a man who had never met a woman before: in one scene Irene “sensed their male presence in her general radar way, and turned to admire the abdomen of the tall one” and a few sentences later Dorothy’s boyfriend “trotted to them and crawled in Dorothy’s lap. ‘Hello, hot mama,’ he growled.” I cringed very hard. In fact, I texted my mom in I’m about to quit this book despair.

Luis Alberto Urrea is a bestselling author who has won writing awards! How? He wrote the phrase “She did a minor swoon.” How am I supposed to take any of it seriously?

Even if I hadn’t seen the name on the cover of this book, there is no universe in which I could believe Good Night, Irene was written by a woman. It’s maybe not the overexaggeratedly sexed-up writing that is so maligned online, but there is something distinctly masculine about the lack of understanding about how women occupy the world, not just in the minor moments (Urrea apparently thinks that merely brushing curly hair can make it straight) but in the major ones as well. You’re telling me that Irene was repeatedly beaten by her fiancé and it’s just the inciting incident? After Irene joins the Red Cross her past abuse is never brought up again except in passing to explain why she’s there. Aside from prompting her to leave, being beaten evidently did not change Irene at all. Neither she nor Dorothy ever feels any discomfort about being constantly surrounded by armed men who haven’t seen a woman in weeks or months and who they are being asked to flirt with constantly. I’m sorry, but that would be terrifying. They receive letters that say things like I saw you for one minute six months ago and still fantasize about you or you probably don’t remember me but you gave me a donut once and I’d like to marry you after the war and they’re charmed by it. There’s not even a passing thought about this. Irene and Dorothy walk through the world—and the war—with a confidence that they’ll be untouched that is absolutely incomprehensible.

That goes double for the actual war stuff. The stated purpose of this book is to bring awareness to this under-appreciated and little-known group of war heroes, but in actuality I don’t think the Donut Dollies come across as particularly heroic here. In theory, I understand how their presence would boost morale, but Good Night, Irene makes them come across as frivolous and pampered. We’re told that they go to the front lines, but the one time they actually do experience the horrors of war upfront they’re sent overseas for an all-expenses paid beach vacation (and their boyfriends are free to just drop by). We’re told they’re sent to boost morale for the suffering GIs, but after seeing the GIs being released from a concentration camp, Patton himself apologizes to them and says he never should have sent them to see those men. When their clubmobile is shot, Irene and Dorothy’s instinctive first response is not to be afraid. It’s to be offended. They pretty much feel that they’re invincible, and why not? They’re immediately promoted to officers so that they’re treated more nicely. They apparently have an inexhaustible source of coffee and donuts, and seem to get the red carpet rolled out at every hotel stop. You wouldn’t know there was a such thing as food shortages or rationing to read this book, because the women at least are always being treated to expensive alcohol. 

It just feels disingenuous to say you’re writing about women’s heroism in war and then to actually write about how the women got to go on sexy vacations, get pampered with gifts of chocolate and champagne, and prove their heroism by (spoiler) adopting a baby.

It’s not a sexist book, but it certainly doesn’t feel nearly as empowering as I expected it to, or as I assume Urrea meant it to. And just don’t get me started on the cheesy death fakeouts or the fact that the love interest is unironically called “The Handyman.”

What’s the verdict?

If you liked this book, more power to you. I barely made it through. I literally fell asleep on it more than one time (and not reading late at night; I didn’t do that with this book, because I’d rather just go to sleep intentionally) and truly thought it was going going to break my decade-long no-DNFs streak. Generally speaking, I think books should have plots, and if they don’t they definitely need to have at least one compelling character with some sort of development. Good Night, Irene does not. The best I can say about it is that I now know about the Donut Dollies, which I didn’t before, and Urrea dedicated this to his mother and her WWII heroism and that’s cute. Beyond that… Good Night, Irene is—at least for me—absolutely without anything to recommend it. 

What’s next?

As far as WWII fiction goes, I highly recommend The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Borrows. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr are also good. It’s not fiction, but The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel and Bret Witter may also be a good choice. I haven’t read it, but one of my fellow book clubbers enthusiastically recommended it.

For historical fiction with compelling female characters, try The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, A Clash of Steel by CB Lee, Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian, The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Kindred by Octavia Butler, Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce, or Burn by Patrick Ness. You’ll notice that not all those writers are women. Sure, women have a leg-up writing female characters, but that doesn’t mean no one else can do it well. Luis Alberto Urrea just didn’t with Good Night, Irene. 

And finally a recommendation that has nothing to do specifically with Good Night, Irene but which deserves a shout-out anyway: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orzcy, published in 1903, is often considered a predecessor to the masked superhero stories we know so well nowadays. It takes place during the Reign of Terror and tells the story of an enigmatic hero smuggling French aristocrats to safety, the agent determined to stop him, and a woman caught in the middle with an impossible choice in front of her. It’s wonderful, and doesn’t get read enough. If schools taught The Scarlet Pimpernel, more kids would grow up loving classic literature.  

The Pull of the Stars (Mini Book Review)

There are two types of people: those who are more likely to read plague fiction during a pandemic, and those who are less likely to do so. Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars—which depicts a maternity ward in a grippe-plagued hospital in 1918—was pushed quickly to publication to capitalize on the former group. I’m definitely a member of the latter. I read enough about COVID-19 that I know as much as possible about how to keep myself and the people around me safe, but that’s the extent of my interaction. I’m too stressed out and prone to anxiety to want to read fiction about deadly diseases. I read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood as this was breaking out and it was extremely mentally taxing on me.

If it were up to me, I would not have read The Pull of the Stars. From a mental health standpoint, a book about a pandemic was not my best choice. Also, as I’ve said many times on this blog, I have no interest storylines about pregnancy. When I found out this was the book I had to read for book club, I resigned myself to struggling with it. It was both better and worse than I expected.

Book Club: The Pull of the Stars

It’s been a little bit since I’ve had book club, because–like everything else in the world–COVID-19 threw a wrench into it. But my club is meeting for the first time since all the shutdowns (virtually, for the first time ever!) and that means that it’s time to dig into another book. This time, the book is The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. I’m planning to post a standard review of it some time in the near future; this post is for discussion prompts only.

Update: here’s that review

As always, please feel free to use these questions in your own book clubs, and be aware that they do include spoilers.

Discussion Starters for The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

All You Wanna Do is Watch Musicals

It’s Musical Monday, and this week I’m focusing on three musicals loosely based on history. I haven’t seen them, but hopefully I will someday!

Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

Which cast recordings have I heard, and which is my favorite? There are actually two recordings available, which I didn’t know until I sat down to write this post. There’s the original Broadway cast recording with Josh Groban, which is the one I listened to. There’s an earlier recording as well, but I haven’t heard it. Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 is a great musical but it never really got off the ground because of some shaky stuff going on behind the scenes regarding cast changes. Also, being up against Dear Evan Hansen at the Tonys didn’t help.

Are there any good YouTube-available clips? Yeah, a few. The cast performed “Balaga” and “The Abduction” here, “Prologue” and “Pierre” on GMA, and a medley at the Tonys.

What’s it about? This musical stages one of the most action-packed sections of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It’s a proportionately infinitesimal section of the book—maybe a hundred pages or so—and basically tells the story a naïve young woman who nearly elopes with a scoundrel while her fiancé is away at war.

What’s so good about it? The score is absolutely unlike anything I’ve heard before. It’s very, very Russian and it’s very, very wild. At times there are intentionally dissonant harmonies and extremely exuberant dancing. The cast plays instruments onstage in addition to singing. There are slow, beautiful, traditional ballads and chaotic uptempo numbers. From the little bit that I’ve seen and from what I’ve heard, the performances are immersive; the cast actually goes into the audience and interacts with them directly, which sounds like a potentially stressful but very exciting/entertaining experience. War and Peace is a bit of a slog, but this musical brings its characters to life and it was very helpful to me as I was reading because it allowed me to get a better sense of the characters and their relationships.

My favorite songs: “Dust and Ashes,” “The Abduction,” and “Pierre”

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Evita

Which cast recordings have I heard, and which is my favorite? Okay, so technically I have watched the movie with Madonna, but I didn’t follow it particularly well, but I’ve listened to the musical many, many times so when I think of Evita I think of it as one that I’ve heard more than one that I’ve seen. I have listened to both the original 1979 cast and the 2012 revival cast recording. This seems to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don’t love Patti LuPone’s version but absolutely adore Elena Roger and chose the revival every time I’m in the mood for Evita.

I am Not Throwing Away My Shot (to Rave about Hamilton)

As you may or may not have noticed, I took a week off from Musical Mondays. There’s only so much writing I can do a week, and NaNoWriMo has me somewhat maxed out at the moment. I’m sure no one missed me that much! A relaxed schedule, at least for the time being, suits me better so until further notice Musical Mondays are going to become a biweekly thing.

This week, I’m focusing on the musical that’s on everyone’s mind: Hamilton!

Hamilton, you guys. Like the rest of the world, I watched it on July 3 and loved it. It was absolutely spectacular, and somehow managed to live up to my exceptionally high expectations. If you’ve read any of my previous musical posts, you probably know that musicals are almost singlehandedly keeping me sane during this pandemic and that I’m heartbroken because I had tickets to see Hamilton’s touring company in June, but it got cancelled for obvious reasons. So Lin-Manuel Miranda and Disney+ releasing the proshot with the original main cast was both an event and a balm for me.

I was actually a little late to the Hamilton party. You hear about it bringing rap and hip-hop fans to the theatre, but I may be one of the rare fans for whom Hamilton made rap and hip hop more accessible. I’ve always been a pop and showtunes person, and while that’s still true, Hamilton definitely helped me appreciate more music genres (and it taught me about history!).

My brother told me about Hamilton, and I initially listened to it just so I could tell him that I did, and now I’m obsessed. I remember reading an interview with Lin Manuel-Miranda years ago in which he said that they’d professionally recorded the show with the original main cast (although not the original ensemble) and I was hyped then and even more hyped when I realized that the release was imminent.

It so lived up to the hype. Even though I’ve listened to the cast recording countless times and read the full libretto, seeing the show was still more exciting and more powerful than I expected. A very small part of me worried that I would know Hamilton too well, since it’s a sung-through musical and—with the exception of the heartbreaking Laurens Interlude—the whole thing is on the recording. I was so wrong, because the acting is amazing and moments of the show that didn’t particularly stand out to me in the recording absolutely do with the visual.

I have a firm favorite character in most works, but Hamilton is so perfectly cast and has such strength across the board that it would be absolutely impossible to pick a favorite. I was a fan of Jonathan Groff before I knew anything about Hamilton (Jesse St. James was one of my favorite characters on Glee), but the rest of them were new to me. I’ve since seen a lot of them in other things (Okieriete Onaodowan is on Station 19; Renée Elise Goldsberry was in a proshot of RENT; Leslie Odom, Jr. guest starred on Supernatural and is a recurring character on Smash (which I’m watching now); Daveed Diggs is in Wonder; and of course Lin-Manuel Miranda and Christopher Jackson teamed up again for Moana). I’m so glad that they’re all continuing to succeed, because they’re all spectacular.

At the Water’s Edge (Book Review)

Sara Gruen is a relatively well-known author, and her novel Water for Elephants is deservedly popular. It’s been years since I read Water for Elephants, but I remembered that I liked it, so I figured I’d like At the Water’s Edge as well.

What’s it about?

In the middle of WWII, Maddie’s wealthy and irresponsible husband Ellis drags her to the Scottish Highlands to search for the Loch Ness Monster. After Ellis and his best friend Hank were deemed unable to serve in the war, Ellis’ father cuts him off and Ellis determines that finding Nessie is the only way to prove his masculinity and get back into his father’s good graces. While Ellis and Hank search for the beast, Maddie spends her time at a small inn and gets to know the locals.

What’d I think?

I discuss several spoilers in depth in this review. I don’t hit every major twist, and I don’t talk about the absolute end, but still… be aware.

Have you ever read a book and been frustrated because, while you’re bored with the book you’re actually reading, you can sense a different story just beneath the surface? That’s how I felt reading At the Water’s Edge. It wants so badly to be a swoony Scottish love story that it bypasses some potentially more rewarding storylines to get there. I’ve seen lots of reviews on Goodreads that compare At the Water’s Edge to Outlander, and while I can’t speak to that (I haven’t read Outlander yet, but it is rapidly approaching the top of my to-read list), I can say that it misses the mark as a romance for one simple but inescapable reason:

The Boleyn Inheritance (Book Review)

When I was raiding my mom’s bookshelves for something to read while in home isolation, I came across The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory. I read its prequel The Other Boleyn Girl about a year ago, and while I liked it, it wasn’t one that sent me sprinting for the sequel. However, in the interim between then and now, I’ve become a big fan of the musical Six (through its soundtrack; I haven’t seen it), which retells the stories of Henry VIII’s six wives through pop music. The Boleyn Inheritance takes a look at the two queens least known by history: Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard.

Also, there are some spoilers in this review. They’re all minor except a few that are historical facts that most people probably already know.

It’s probably not surprising that The Boleyn Inheritance is very similar to The Other Boleyn Girl. I’m glad I read it when I did: close enough together to remember what happened but far enough apart that I wasn’t defeated by repetition. I enjoyed both books, but they’re both sorely in need of a more ruthless editor. Some of this, admittedly, is not Philippa Gregory’s fault. When you’re writing historical fiction, you have to go where history takes you, and there is no escaping the fact that any woman living in King Henry VIII’s court would suffer through the same cycle of pressure and fear. The men of the court flung their female relations in the path of the king in the hopes that it would bring them wealth and power, and then everyone would panic when the queen didn’t immediately produce an heir and when the king’s favor shifted. By the time Anne of Cleves shows up on the scene, Henry has been doing his thing for a long time, and by that point everyone knows what his thing is. So it makes sense that everyone would lie in fear of his whims and would bend over backwards to lie to him if it meant keeping his favor.

Kindred (Book Review)

Since I failed to get to the library before everything shut down, I’m making do with books that are already in my house. That means I’m rereading ones I already own and borrowing some from people in my family. My genre ratios are going to be very different in the upcoming weeks.

My sister lent me Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, which is—according to Goodreads—the first science fiction novel written by a Black woman. It’s about Dana, a Black woman from the ’70s who unexpectedly time travels back to the antebellum south in time to save the life of a white boy. Dana discovers that the boy, Rufus, is her ancestor… and a slaveowner. Over the course of a few days, Dana travels to Rufus’ time to save him at various points in his life, and by so doing ends up spending prolonged periods of time as a slave.

When I first started Kindred, I was dubious. While I don’t blanket-statement dislike all books of any genre, I’m not generally a fan of historical fiction. I also don’t have the best track record with sci-fi. Thankfully, Kindred is excellent. It’s very deserving of its classic status.

War and Peace (Book Review)

Well, I finally did it. It took me thirty-two days and an honest-to-goodness reading schedule to do it, but I finally finished Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It has been on my to-read list for a very, very long time but it never quite made it to the top because it is so intimidatingly huge. I read quickly and love long books, and War and Peace still scared me. I can’t imagine how daunting it must be for people who only have limited reading time or who aren’t used to books clocking in at over a thousand pages. Still, I did it!

What’s it about?

War and Peace tells the intertwined stories of several families—the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Bezukhovs—during the Napoleonic wars. War campaigns and love affairs together paint a picture of a world controlled as much by fate as by the actions of any one individual, however grand, making his mark on the grand stage.

What’d I think?

Even though I liked War and Peace, my main takeaway after reading it is “I am so relieved to finally be finished” instead of “what literary mastery!” I would be very interested to know what people would say about War and Peace if it were stripped of its highly venerated place in the literary canon. Personally, I have a hard time with grappling with criticizing the classics. Intellectually, I don’t think that any novel should be above criticism and that no criticism should be dismissed merely because the reviewer is without fame or accolades. Still, a classic is a classic for a reason, and I feel uncomfortable saying that I think a classic is bad (even though I’m willing to do it if I think it’s that bad). There are things that I very much disliked in War and Peace, but at the same time… who am I to criticize one of the best writers who ever lived?

But let me say this very clearly: I don’t think War and Peace is bad. I think it’s mostly excellent, minus a few parts that bored me and which don’t appeal to my personal preferences. I think there are better classics out there, but obviously the whole world is never going to agree on one novel as the supreme best novel ever. For some people, War and Peace might have that crown. It’s not in the running for me, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve its acclaim.

The Bad: Pacing

I mean… the pacing is honestly bizarre. The Broadway show Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 is based on War and Peace. Kind of. It comes from a short section that’s only about 5% of the original novel. Two hours worth of action takes place in that 5%. A lot happens, and that’s not the only section of the novel with frenzied, condensed activity. But there are also long, long sections in which literally nothing happens. The two-part epilogue is more than a hundred pages, and literally no characters appear in the second half. It’s just Tolstoy waxing poetic about free will. It might’ve worked as an essay or something, but in a novel it feels anticlimactic. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with an ending that makes less of an impact. There are two modes in War and Peace: full throttle and standstill.

Did editors not exist back in the day? Did Tolstoy seriously not have a single friend who could pull him aside and say, “Leo, you’ve written a great book, but do we really need all this preaching about how it is impossible to explain why anything happens historically? I think you covered it more than sufficiently.”

The Bad: Painfully Regressive Attitudes about Women and Marriage

And then there are issues that arise from my being a modern reader. There are some parts of War and Peace that have really, really not aged well, particularly in regards to women, like when Tolstoy writes,

“As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of time without male society, on Anatole’s appearance all the three women […] felt that their life had not been real till then.”

or

“There were then, as there are now, conversations and discussions about women’s rights, the relations of husband and wife, and their freedom and rights, though these themes were not yet termed questions as they are now; but these topics were not merely uninteresting to Natasha, she positively did not understand them. Those questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies in the family.”

Maybe I just don’t understand the significance of the family, but it’s a little disheartening to me, as a woman, to read that my life is fake when there’s no guy around and that my rights would infringe upon what a family unit ought to be. Thanks, Tolstoy. I really appreciate that. Maybe all women, like Natasha, can dream of the day when we give up all our previous hobbies and friendships and let ourselves go to the point that we place ourselves “in the position of a slave to her husband.”

Book Club: Inland (+Review)

I read Téa Obreht’s sophomore novel Inland for book club. Going in, I was tentatively optimistic. Though I’ve never read The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht’s first novel, I’ve heard good things about it and Obreht, and the synopsis of Inland intrigued me. I enjoyed parts of the novel, but others dragged and overall I’d say my reading experience was mostly neutral but overall more negative than positive. I’ve been in a reading slump, and while Inland isn’t the worst book I’ve read this month, it certainly didn’t pull me out of the slump.

What’s it about?

Inland tells two nebulously connected stories that take place in the Arizona Territory in 1893. Nora is a frontierswoman whose husband and eldest two sons are missing. Lurie is an outlaw who joined the camel corps and is traveling across the desert with supplies. The novel straddles a number of genres: it is part western, part historical fiction, part magical realism, and part mystery.

What’d I think?

I suspect that Inland is a divisive book. Much of what I disliked comes down to preference: Obreht is bold with her writing, and while I’m not a big fan of many of her choices, that doesn’t make them bad.

The narration style is interesting, to say the least. Nora’s sections, which are thankfully longer than Lurie’s, are comprised largely of flashbacks. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a novel before that is set so near the end of its story, and I’ve definitely never read one that spends so much time is such a static period. Nora is waiting. She waits for her husband Emmett to return with water. She waits for her sons, who disappeared without word or warning. She waits to discover the long-term effects of her youngest son’s brain injury. But before the novel’s beginning, she was more active. In the many flashbacks, the reader experiences the highs and the lows of Nora’s life. Everything comes to a head when Nora’s waiting comes to an end, yes, but the circular, meandering way that Obreht chose to tell Nora’s story is peculiar. I’m used to flashbacks setting up the story, and I kept expecting them to end so that the real story could begin. I was more than halfway through Inland before I realized, no, the flashbacks are the story. The flashbacks don’t end until the novel does. It takes either a very good or a very bad writer to structure a novel like this. I think that Obreht is probably the former, even though it didn’t work for me. I did find Nora’s chapters generally interesting, though, which is more than can be said for Lurie’s.

Lurie’s sections drag the novel down. I’ve read the whole darn thing and I couldn’t tell you what the point of Lurie is. He adds very, very little to the plot (the connection between the stories, at least in my opinion, is profoundly underwhelming) and is deeply uninteresting. Also, his narration is in first person and addressed directly to his camel, Burke. Lurie is weirdly obsessed with Burke, and I see no reason why his story is in first person rather than third, like Nora’s. Nora is a much more interesting character and she has a lot more going on in her head. Lurie is kind of a blank slate minus his camel obsession and supposedly ghost-inspired kleptomania.

My response to all Lurie’s chapters

The novel’s magical realism is also quite weird. Many characters profess to see ghosts, but it’s never confirmed whether the ghosts are actual paranormal apparitions or if they exist only in the minds of those seeing them. Personally, I read them more as psychosomatic manifestations of guilt and regret more than anything magical. There’s something to be said for ambiguity, but sometimes ambiguity feels like pretentiousness. Maybe I was just in a weird mood when I read Inland, but it seemed to have a self-impressed undercurrent, like every sentence was written not to tell a strong story or to create characters, but to prove Obreht’s cleverness and technical writing prowess.

What’s the verdict?

Inland is simply not my kind of book. I’ve never liked westerns or survival stories, so a western survival story was never going to be my jam. Still, I did enjoy half the story; when the novel focuses on Nora, I kept reading and wanted to know more. Any time Lurie and his camel took center stage, though, I had to fight against myself to keep from setting the book aside because no matter how much I tried, I could not care about them. It didn’t help that I found the resolution of the novel, when the two storylines finally come together, singularly disappointing. I read 367 pages expecting that, eventually, Lurie’s presence in Inland would be warranted; in my opinion, it never was, and Obreht could have saved her time and mine by scrapping his half entirely.

C/⭐⭐⭐

Discussion Starters:

That Inevitable Victorian Thing (Book Review)

Between Thanksgiving, applying for jobs, and NaNoWriMo, my reading has taken a hit lately. It has been so long since I wrote a review that I’m almost afraid that I’ve forgotten how to do it. I read That Inevitable Victorian Thing by E.K. Johnston mostly because the premise is interesting. I’ve read one of Johnston’s novels before. I read Exit, Pursued by a Bear and gave it a B. Ultimately, I think that That Inevitable Victorian Thing is pretty much the same deal: great title, interesting concept, but a slightly messy result because of the attempt to do too much.

Summary: What’s it about?

In an alternate timeline to our own, royals and other world leaders made better decisions that resulted in a world that is a mishmash of Victorian traditions and modern technology. This world is more accepting, more racially diverse, and generally less -ist and -phobic (although not entirely). Margaret is the crown princess, and she is permitted one summer of freedom before taking on a bigger mantle of responsibility. During this summer, she falls in with Helena and August, a young couple who is all but engaged and who each have their own secrets.

Review: What’d I think?

 

There is so much going on in this novel. Even if you just isolate the setting, or the characters, it’s hard to keep track of everything. I never got a good grasp of the society. There is a lot of political matchmaking to presumably make the kingdom stronger, but even something as straightforward as that is needlessly convoluted. To be completely honest, I can’t say for sure if Margaret is the crown princess of England, Canada, both, or some other country entirely because the specifics are either incredibly waffly or incredibly unnecessary.

I’m also confused about the timeline. Some of the excerpts I thought were from ancient texts are apparently pretty recent. At times it comes across like this world is entirely progressive and globalism has come hugely into style and anything else is ridiculous, but at other times everything is weirdly regressive. The precise combination of modern and antique found here is simply more confusing than compelling.

There are a lot of extraneous characters, and the decision to use first names for the protagonists’ parents strikes me as odd, as it just muddies the water even more. August has entirely too many siblings who never contribute anything to the story. To be fair, I might be predisposed against August’s siblings because I think August is extraneous. For me, he is the least interesting character by a wide margin. His problems are entirely of his own making, he basically only has two personality traits, and he is dug out of his problems too easily by people who shouldn’t owe him anything. He gets one easy pass after another and he is eternally let off the hook for things he absolutely should have had to make personal reparations for. I had to write a spoilery, ranty section about August’s unearned triumphs, but for the sake of making this review readable for people who haven’t read the book yet, I’ll stick that at the end.

Some books can balance a million ideas and make it look easy. This isn’t one of them. It tries to do too much and ends up shortchanging everything. That Inevitable Victorian Thing tries to rewrite history, tell the story of a young royal strapped with responsibility, create a new and more progressive Church, chronicle a romance that grows from childhood, explore the plight of a young woman who learns unexpectedly that she’s intersex and doesn’t know how to tell the people around her, present an atypical love triangle, and a lot more. At a certain point, I was just like, “Okay, but do we really need pirates on top of all this?” I would argue that no, we don’t need the pirates, let alone the somewhat underdeveloped idea that the pirates are Americans and the American republic is a crumbling, primitive country left because it never got on board with everyone else. It’s an interesting idea, and one that certainly warrants exploring, but it’s one that needs more than just the word ‘pirates’ tacked onto it.

I wish that the POV didn’t switch quite as erratically. It sometimes jumps from Margaret to Helena to August and back within the space of a single scene. It makes everything feel a little messy, a little unfinished, like it needs a few more rounds of revision. The novel would have been better served if it picked one perspective and stuck to it. Helena is the most central character, so she probably would’ve been the best bet from a plot standpoint, but Margaret is the most compelling character. Even if Johnston had done nothing but reduced August’s role and removed the pirate plotline, the novel would be more streamlined and much better.

Did you notice that I don’t like the pirate subplot? Just checking.

Ultimately, That Inevitable Victorian Thing is simply too ambitious. It takes place in a universe that would need a whole series at least to do justice to. The Victorian elements and the technological elements unfortunately don’t mesh well as written, and some of the contradictions undercut the main story. Is this a world where diversity is celebrated and necessary, or it is a society that requires its princess to wear a wig because her natural, black hair isn’t good enough for royalty? Is it a world that has moved beyond homo- and transphobia and aversion to same-sex relationships, or is it one that values marriage matches purely for the genetics they will pass to offspring and doesn’t even recognize gender neutral names (Helena, because she has a Y chromosome, is forced to enter a male name on the –gnet)?

It’s frustrating, because the novel can never really settle into anything. The tone isn’t consistent because sometimes it’s a romance and sometimes it’s a bildungsroman and sometimes it’s a weird pirate adventure and sometimes it’s about dynastic politics.

What’s the verdict?

That Inevitable Victorian Thing is a weird book. It’s fun enough, and Margaret is a lovely character, but at the end of the day I don’t feel that I can recommend it because I never had that moment where I felt I had to keep reading or I had to put off everything else to read. I didn’t dislike the book or dread reading it, but I did find myself getting distracted by memes and Pinterest in the middle of a chapter, which is rare for me. That being said, this novel does approach things differently, so for that reason it’s an interesting read, if not a great one. Report card: C

Let’s talk about August.

Moloka’i (Book Review)

I am not a person who cares much for setting. I’m actually a remarkably un-aesthetic person. Great views don’t do much for me in real life. Prettiness ranks really low on my list of important things. When I read books, I pay absolutely no attention to where it takes place. Long descriptions bore me. So I figured that Moloka’i by Alan Brennert wouldn’t be my cup of tea. That being said, I do live in Hawaii (though I have never been to Moloka’i), and I haven’t read any Hawaiian literature, which is probably a failure of culture. Moloka’i is pretty much exactly what I thought it’d be, though. Weirdly, though, every other person I’ve talked to about it has loved it.

What’s it about?

Moloka’i follows Rachel Kalama, a girl who is diagnosed with leprosy at age six and sent to the leper colony on Moloka’i at age seven, from 1891-1970. Rachel Forrest Gumps her way through Hawaiian history. The few events that happen at times or in places where she couldn’t have been—like Father Damien’s ministry or the attack at Pearl Harbor—are tied to her as much as is possible by other characters. Mostly, the book is an overview of Hawaiian history and the treatment of lepers that uses Rachel as a narrative tool to tie it all together.

Why didn’t I like it?

As hard as I tried to muster up an emotional response to Rachel or any of the other characters, I couldn’t. The novel skips a ton of time in order to hit as many significant events as possible, and when you only see isolated scenes in a person’s life without the journey, it’s hard to get attached. I couldn’t get invested in any of Rachel’s relationships because, with only one or two exceptions, all her friends die before they can make a big impact. There are a few characters who show promise early, but a time jump moves the story quickly away from them, curtailing any potential storylines. After a while, I stopped expecting characters to be actual characters and simply read them as trivia points. Moloka’i had trans people! Japanese Americans had it rough after the attack at Pearl Harbor! Jack London visited Moloka’i!

The novel has some good ideas, but they just aren’t executed well. One theme that is mostly kept throughout the novel is that of native Hawaiian culture versus the encroaching white/American culture. Traditional Hawaiian spirituality is pitted against white Christianity. The annexation of Hawaii is addressed. The Hawaiian susceptibility to white illness (like leprosy) is an important point. It does passably provide a thematic continuity for the story, but it does not really ever come to anything. There is no resolution even for the characters. I can see why there wouldn’t be a universal reconciliation since there is still some uneasiness in Hawaii about it, but it seems to me that Rachel as an individual should have found a personal balance. The clash sort of creates tension, but I feel like I caught onto that tension more because I knew it should’ve been there. Moloka’i is all fact, no feeling. I could identify moments where I ought to have felt this emotion or that emotion, but the novel is simply not very evocative.

One major reason the emotions don’t come through, aside from the time jumps and history hopping, is because the writing is bad. It’s clinical at times, and to be honest, Brennert lacks a basic grasp of comma usage. The gerunds are particularly offensive. I’m sure there are people out there who don’t have strong feelings about commas, but I’m not one of them (I once debated with someone about the usefulness of the Oxford comma for half an hour), and grievous comma misuse sours me, at least a little, on books I like to begin with; it tipped Moloka’i from eh to nah.

The motherhood storyline was lazy and clichéd. I feel like Brennert wanted me to feel really invested in Rachel’s relationship with her mother. If he’d dived more deeply into that relationship in all its messiness it might have been fascinating. Instead, he did the bare minimum and expects his readers to be affected by the conclusion of the relationship. I was not affected. I may have audibly groaned.

It also really, really bothered me that Rachel remained beautiful despite her leprosy. Everyone else became crippled and disfigured, but aside from a few minor ailments in her feet towards the end of her life, Rachel keeps her strength and beauty. Did Brennert think that his readers wouldn’t root for a leper who looks like a leper? PSA: There’s nothing wrong with protagonists who aren’t attractive.

What did everyone else think?

Most people like the book a lot. Everyone I’ve talked to (my coworkers and library patrons) has admitted that the story starts really slowly. They say it picks up for them when Rachel reaches Moloka’i. Most of them did feel for Rachel; I was told that Rachel’s story is one heartbreak after another. They noticed the bad writing, but were not too put off by it.

What’s the verdict?

Moloka’i is a poorly written novel that follows a group of weakly characterized characters across nearly a hundred years. If you want to read a good novel, you should skip it. If you look at it as narrative nonfiction or a general history of Hawaii, it is pretty good. I was able to mostly enjoy it when I stopped expecting character development or any sort of continuity over time and just reveled in the history lesson, which is something that the book does do well. So… would I recommend? No. Am I the only one who wouldn’t recommend? Apparently yes.

Report card.

Writing: D               Characters: D                 Plot: C

Themes: C                     Fun: C                         Final: C

 

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Book Club: Through My Eyes

Discussion Starters for Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges. Please feel free to use these and/or to respond in the comments.

1. Through My Eyes depicts true events that occurred in 1960. Ruby Bridges is still alive; many people who were alive in 1960 are still alive. Discuss the changes that have been made in a single lifetime. What progress has been made for racial equality? What progress still needs to be made? How easy/difficult was it for you to realize that the violent, openly hateful protests presented in Bridges’ book happened only sixty years ago? Does this sort of thing still happen? Consider Bridges’ remark that “The kids are being segregated all over again” (58). In what ways is racism and/or segregation still a concern today?

   

   Remember the controversy in 2012 when Amandla Stenberg, a black actress, was cast to play Rue, a black character, in The Hunger Games? Ugh.

2. Discuss race. How has your race impacted your life? Consider the following:
   1. How often have you been the only member of your race in a room or a group?
   2. Have you ever been asked to speak on behalf of your whole race?
   3. Have you ever been reduced to a stereotype because of your race?
   4. Have you ever been racially profiled?
   5. How often do you see people who look like you depicted in television/movies/books?
   6. Have you ever been the target of direct racism?
   7. Have you ever been the target of indirect racism?
   8. In what ways have your experiences differed from those experienced by your peers of another race?
3. Bridges writes, “Young children never know about racism at the start. It’s we adults who teach it” (4). Much of the information in Through My Eyes is provided by an adult Ruby providing a context for her earlier experiences; young Ruby did not fully understand what was happening or why it was happening. Mrs. Henry had to explain to her what integration was, and Ruby even taught some of her black friends to hopscotch to a rhyme in favor of segregation because she did not realize what it meant (44, 20). Why and how do adults teach hate? At what point do children learn to be racist (or any other sort of hateful –ist)? Consider the boy Ruby meets whose mother forbade him from playing with Ruby (50).

   1. 

      I can’t be the only one singing “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” from South Pacific. Lyrics found here.

      Some people are taught to hate; others are taught how to survive being hated. Consider Bridges’ lamentation over her lost childhood: “I sometimes feel I lost something that year. I feel as if I lost my childhood. It seems that I have always had to deal with some adult issues” (56). Most people would agree that first graders should not have to deal with the fear and hatred Ruby did. If they are going to experience discrimination, at what point should they be made aware of it? Should parents warn their children that they will grow up with disadvantages due to unfair discrimination from bigots? If so, why? When? If not, why not? Why do disadvantaged groups have to adapt their behavior to live in a world with bigots rather than having bigots adapt their behavior?

4. Discuss the systematic unfairness that Ruby faced. In particular, discuss the tests that were structured to benefit white students and which would have been used to validate segregation (11). Also consider the argument Mrs. Henry had with the principal about Ruby’s grades when he wanted to lower them because of the one-on-one education Ruby got (50). Discuss the ways in which the deck is stacked against some groups and in favor of others. Why did some people want black children to perform poorly in school?
5. Discuss the famous people who were impacted by and who contributed to Ruby’s story. How do people like Norman Rockwell, John Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, John Steinbeck, and Martin Luther King, Jr. figured into the story?
6. Discuss the cruelty directed towards white people who approved desegregation. Consider the threats toward J. Skelly Wright, the protests against the white children who continued to attend integrated schools, and Mrs. Henry’s fear of telling people where she worked.
7. Bridges says, “It’s odd how misfortune can bring on new blessings” (57). Discuss this in the context of the book, but also generally. Do you agree or disagree?

King Richard III (Play Review) + How to Read Shakespeare

I like Shakespeare a lot, but it has been a long time since I read him. Diving into King Richard III was a challenge, since it is definitely one of the more challenging of his plays that I’ve read.

King Richard III is about the rise and fall of the villainous Duke of Glouchester. It is full of murder, double-crossing, woe, and famous quotes that most people would recognize even without having read the play, such as

GLOUCHESTER: Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer…

and

KING RICHARD: March on, join bravely, let us to ‘t pell-mell;/ If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell

and

KING RICHARD: A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

As a person more inclined to comedy than tragedy, more to fiction than fact, this is not a personal favorite; my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays are Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I prefer Iago’s sinister machinations in Othello to Richard III’s. However, Richard III is still a very compelling read, and I would happily recommend it.

But Shakespeare is too hard!

No! No, he isn’t. Sure, reading Shakespeare is a little trickier than the average contemporary novel, but is is not too hard. Anyone can read Shakespeare. There are a few tricks for reading Shakespeare if you’re not accustomed to it. As a person who has read and studied many of the bard’s plays, but who is by no means an amazing Shakespeare scholar, let me offer a few tips:

• Don’t go into it with the mindset that it’s going to be too hard. If you expect it to be too hard for you, it will be.
• If possible, set aside long blocks of time to read. It’s a lot easier to dive in and stay in. If you keep stepping away and coming back it will be harder to get immersed in the language, which is essential.
• If you have a hard time with the language, read summaries (but not analysis) of the scenes you’re reading in advance. It’s a lot easier to follow along if you have a general idea of the framework of the scene.
• Don’t read No Fear Shakespeare or any other straightforward translations in lieu of the actual text. If you want to read them in addition to the real deal, go ahead. But don’t read them instead of. Shakespeare is still read because of his language, not his stories (he stole most of those). You have to read his actual words. Believe me, it’s worth it. The sequence in Richard III where Queen Elizabeth tears Richard apart for like three pages is phenomenal, and it is a prime example of why nothing can match the original.
• If you’re reading a history (like Richard III) take some time to acquaint yourself with the historical period before you start. I didn’t do that and spent most of the first three acts of Richard III saying, “who’s that?” every time a new character popped up or an old king was referenced. Having a family tree to consult is really helpful, and there are lots of them out there. Just Google for it and you’ll find something. This is especially helpful when there are multiple characters with the same name:

QUEEN MARGARET: I had an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him;/ I had a Harry, till a Richard kill’d him:/ Though hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him;/ Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill’d him

• If you’re an auditory person, read out loud! Doing so forces you to slow down, and it also lets you hear the words being said. If you want to take it up a level… My sister and I used to pull out our childhood Barbies and use them to act the plays out. It’s easier to keep track of characters if you can put a face to them.
• Be aware that Shakespeare is not as highbrow as people would have you believe. If you read something that sounds like a dirty joke or a sick burn… yeah, it probably was. There’s a reason Shakespeare was and is so popular… he’s funny!

KING RICHARD: Stay, madam; I must speak a word with you.

QUEEN ELIZABETH: I have no moe sons of the royal blood/ For thee to murder

• Watch the movie when you’re done! There are tons of movie adaptations out there, and Shakespeare’s plays are, well, plays. They’re meant to be seen, not read. It’s much easier (and let’s be real: more fun) to watch the plays than to read them. Don’t watch the movie instead of reading the play, since you’ll miss a lot, but it’s always a good way to reward yourself and clarify any broad-plot questions you might have.

Do you read Shakespeare? What are your techniques?

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