An American Marriage

An American Marriage

By Tayari Jones

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

I wasn't really looking forward to this, since I thought the subject matter would be very weighty and therefore depressing (I also considered Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder for this prompt, and maybe I will read that too anyway, since it sounds intriguing). And the subject matter was weighty, I guess, but the book is pretty easy to read and skips over a lot of the time that Roy spends in prison, so it's mostly build-up and then the three characters wringing their hands over Roy's return to freedom.

It's fine. I did spoil the ending for myself, so maybe I would have been more rapt if I hadn't know how it would turn out, but as it was, Celestial mostly annoyed with what seemed to be small cruelty in separating herself from Roy, but not actually divorcing him, thus keeping him on her line and giving him false hope. I think it would have been ameliorated if we'd seen better why she did it, i.e., was it to give him strength while he was in prison? But we don't, we just see her realization that he's in prison for a long time, she doesn't really love him as much as she ought, and then her leaning on Andre because (and for real) he's right there. Honestly, if she hadn't gotten pregnant at the end, I would have said that if Andre would up in prison, she would have left him just as she had Roy. She just doesn't seem to be deeply committed to anyone but herself. And that's fine, I suppose, for her, but it does make the book seem like less of a tragedy and more of a pity.

Meanwhile, of course, Roy is out here not appearing to take his marriage vows super seriously either, so who knows. Perhaps there's an argument that they were married longer because he was in prison than they would have been if he'd been out. I did find it funny that the first question in the "book club" questions at the end was one I had been thinking about while reading it, namely, what makes this an "American" marriage? Is it the wrongful conviction? Certainly other countries are subject to the phenomenon as well, although perhaps it's less common. Is it the racism? Is it the ways in which the characters each justified their actions? I agree that it does "feel" uniquely American somehow, like this story could only have happened in this country, but it's hard to say why.

I liked the beginning of the book much more than the end. The beginning is the love story of Roy and Celestial, as well as their communications in prison. It felt like it might be a story about handling something terrible and life-altering, something that truly is not your fault, and living through it. Something like optimism. Something like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, haha. But all the characters just wallow. For good reason, especially in Roy's case, but it never felt more than surface level.  I dunno, I just, this is the kind of book where you want to feel deeply for these characters and the loss of their hopes and dreams and the ruins of their marriage, and instead, you just wish they'd be a little more honest - with themselves first, and then with other people. And don't even get me started on the idea that Roy happens to end up in a prison cell with his biological father for five years. Now it's just hokey.

On the plus side, it was a very easy read.

48: A Book That Features A Married Couple Who Don't Live Together

Need

Need, by Carrie Jones

Zara's stepfather has died, her mother isn't capable of caring for her, and she has been sent to live with her grandmother in a small remote town in Maine. When her car spins out of control, she's rescued by sexy Nick (who turns out to be a werewolf), and something might be cooking with her overachieving classmate Ian. Too bad she's being followed by someone dark and dangerous—a pixie king. This pixie is no harmless sprite: when not mated with a queen for an unspecified amount of time, Zara learns, the pixie kings will demand young human men, who they kill after using them for their blood-hungry pleasures. Will Zara sacrifice herself to this vampire stand-in or let him destroy everything she loves?

I wanted to read this book for awhile - I put it on my to-read list, although I didn't go so far as to order it off Amazon when the library came up short. Luckily I got a free copy, because otherwise I would have been making a return trip to the store. If it hadn't been a kids book and only 300 pages long, I would have been skimming the heck out of the last two-thirds. Which is sad - this has a lot of potential, but it lost me early, and never really got it together enough to get me back by the end.

Zara comes to Maine, a snowy desolate state, and immediately makes friends, has two hot guys hitting on her, and has a pixie following her. It's not really the plot that fails (although it certainly doesn't help) but the supporting characters. As soon as we meet Issie - "Is" - I began to hate this book. Issie (I refuse to use "Is" because it's just too precious for words) is such a caricature of a person, such a complete fabrication, that I was irritated by the mere mention of her, let alone her actual presence on the page. Devyn, one of Zara's early friends, gloms onto the idea of pixies so quickly it's incredible. And admittedly, he himself is an otherworldly creature, so it might have been believable that he would know more about pixies than the normal person, but that's not the way that it's explained. Apparently, he just went online and found a page about pixies - and what? Some kid disappears in Maine and there's some weird guy wandering around and your first thought is, let's do a google search? It's just so bizarre. Bedford, Maine is apparently filthy with pixies and were-things and it hasn't occured to anyone's parents to tell their children, "Hey, the pixie king hasn't had sex in a while, you shouldn't wander around the woods (unless your coat's inside out)."? It boggles the mind. And not in a good way. The book felt simultaneously too long and not long enough. Too long, because when I have to work this hard to suspend both my disbelief and my personal hatred towards characters 300 pages is much too much, and not long enough, because there's very little set-up, very little character development. The pace is very arrival-mysterious stranger-!pixies!-plan to kick ass. Zara swallows the pixie thing pretty easily, but bizarrely takes like, twenty pages to figure out that the "dog" that magically appeared after Nick disappears is Nick himself. Because he is a werewolf. Something she literally just read was the mortal enemy of the pixie. Because sure, if there's gold dust on someone's jacket, that must mean that pixies are real, but werewolves? Whole 'nother matter. What a crock. I will allow that however much I personally find the whole idea that pixies and werewolves are mortal enemies to be so very retarded, in terms of that aspect of the plot, the book doesn't have any major issues - if only it were better done, I might have bought it. In Need, it merely adds insult to injury. Other things I'm not discussing, because I like low blood pressure: the hitting us over the head with the title of the book, because the pixie king needs these young boys, the whole let's-substitute-young-boys-for-raping-girls in the first place, and so much more.

If you manage to struggle through the immense plot holes and giant anvils in the beginning, the end isn't wholly awful. It's not good, to be sure, but it doesn't insult the readers overmuch. The ending is obviously poised for a sequel, which if I read, will be only for sheer morbid curiousity. The climax of the book contains a lot of action, but not a lot of sense. I can't really describe it, since my ability to think and express myself coherently about Need is rapidly dwindling, but rest assured it delivers on every crazy promise made in the rest of the book. I'm just so disappointed! It may be making my review harsher than it should be (probably not, though) but I just had such high hopes of this from the description. It has a mad pixie! I mean, come on, a mad pixie. How could things go so wrong, so quickly? Oh well, I wash my hands of it. I don't say this lightly, but even Twilight was better. I am so ashamed that I had to say that.


In case you were wondering, that blurb is accurate: it truly says, in the book, that when not mated for an unspecified amount of time, he needs to suck the life out of young boys. An unspecified amount of time. An unspecified amount of time. Why, may I ask, is it unspecified? Why not just say twenty years, or even just "too long"? But NO. It is AN UNSPECIFIED AMOUNT OF TIME, dammit! That may actually sum up, in five words, everything I hated about this book.