Lady Eve's Last Con

Lady Eve's Last Con

By Rebecca Fraimow

Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have been small-time hustlers on the interstellar cruise lines for years. But then Jules fell in love with one of their targets, Esteban Mendez-Yuki, sole heir to the family insurance fortune. Esteban seemed to love her too, until she told him who she really was, at which point he fled without a word.

Now Ruth is set on disguised as provincial debutante Evelyn Ojukwu and set for the swanky satellite New Monte, she’s going to make Esteban fall in love with her, then break his heart and take half his fortune. At least, that's the plan. But Ruth hadn't accounted for his younger sister, Sol, a brilliant mind in a dashing suit... and much harder to fool.

Sol is hot on Ruth's tail, and as the two women learn each other’s tricks, Ruth must decide between going after the money and going after her heart.

Well, I had high hopes for this one: a madcap story in space about a con artist looking for revenge? Sign me up! But as other reviews state, the problem is that for a screwball comedy to work, you've got to be rushed along at a pace too fast to look around you. The minute the train slows down you're dead in the water, so to speak. And if you couldn't tell already, this story got slooooooow.

It's probably about a hundred pages longer than it needs to be. Every time we get some action, we spend another ten pages of Ruthi's internal monologue about the setting, or going over details about the back and forth machinations with Sol, or the local gang,  that just bog things down. 

I'm not dinging Fraimow (much) - this kind of storytelling is hard. But you've got to be much more streamlined about it than she is here. Connie Willis is the epitome of space screwball comedy and even she gets it wrong sometimes (let's not speak of her most recent effort, The Road to Roswell). But there needs to be a zingy tension that pulls the reader through it all, and instead, I found myself putting this down multiple times, having to force myself to finish it. 

It doesn't help that we spend more time with just Sol and Ruthi than we do in groups, and that they show their hands to each other in the first third of the book. Part of what's needed is more undercurrents, like conversations where Sol and Ruthi are trying to catch each other out but can't reveal their own cards in front of other people. Instead, after a big confrontation on the beach satellite, we... um, wander around the lower decks talking about frozen ducks and Sol's poor half-siblings, on a weird pseudo date.  

I think part of the problem is that it feels like Fraimow is setting this up for more installments. The classic version requires all storylines to be wrapped up tightly, preferably with all couples reunited, all bad guys punished, and all ventures successful. We don't get that. Instead Jules is in limbo, four months pregnant and refusing to marry Esteban. We don't see the result of the ruse on Alfonso at all and presumably the gang will be after them again in subsequent books. And there's no real resolution about the frickin kosher ducks, which is the whole device on which the plot spins: what the golden girl did to get herself in so deep with the mob that she's tempted to wipe her memory and it's wrapped up off-screen.

So instead of that feeling you get when you press the button on a tape measure and it all comes whizzing back into your hand and closing with a satisfying catch, it's like we threw a yoyo out and now it's just on the ground flaccid and we gotta spool it back up ourselves.

There's a lot of promise here, a lot of good things, like the characters and the setting, and the pitter patter and well, everything else is fine. It's just the pace, the tempo, but for something like this, that's everything.

 

 03: A Book About Space Tourism

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

By Jessica Pan

An introvert spends a year trying to live like an extrovert with hilarious results and advice for readers along the way.

What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs?  With the help of various extrovert mentors, the author sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much, much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Chronicling the author’s hilarious and painful year of misadventures, this book explores what happens when one introvert fights her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and sometimes fails) to be a little bit braver.

 

 I fell into this one because I loved the title, and the book didn't let me down.  I felt Pan's pain, as I, too, would rather not, and doing improv and stand-up comedy sounds like a terribly bad time.  It's funny, but also blends in both semi-science and tips/suggestions so that people looking to expand their social skills and friend groups could probably use this as a guidebook as well.  I don't know that the science adds very much - it feels a little shoehorned in, a little teach-y in a book which would otherwise work well as a straight memoir, but at least it doesn't detract much.  

Pan begins the book bemoaning her lack of social life, but more importantly, her loneliness.  As someone who would certainly qualify as an introvert, I sympathized strongly with both the desire for close friendships and support, but also the anxiety that comes with trying to find those people and the effort of putting yourself out there to strangers over and over.  

For all that it dealt with social anxiety and trying to overcome loneliness, it's pretty funny. Bits like this made me laugh:

When I tell other people I'm going to try stand-up comedy, they always touch my arm, furrow their brow, and say, "You are so brave," followed by, "That is my worst nightmare," just in case I was considering making them do it, too.

As far as using the book like a self-help book, I felt pretty good about myself for the first part of it. I don't have a problem talking to strangers or making presentations (although I choose not to; I'm definitely guilty of pretending not to speak English when confronted by a friendly stranger in a foreign country, but honestly? I like being alone. This is how my husband and I are different: when he comes home,  he tells me about random people he meets in bars and on planes and at races, and I am like, "That sounds awful." but he enjoys it.  He still calls himself an introvert, a term I took exception to, until reading this book.  Apparently he would qualify as a gregarious introvert or "grintrovert". I am happily still a shintrovert.) and I have less than no interest in doing either improv or stand-up comedy. It is a bit wistful though, I mean, it sounds like for all that it does sound unpleasant, Pan has a good time, in the end.  And if not a good time, then at least a good story. You have to respect someone who so boldy faces their (and my) worst fears.

And I appreciate anyone who is game for a scenario like this:

Kate goes through the order list. Vivian volunteers to go first. And then there's silence. Kate studies the rest of us.

"I need the people  who brought a lot of friends to perform last so that their friends stay the entire time. Who has no friends? I want you to go in the first half."

I put my hand up.

30: A Book with the Name of a Board Game in the Title

Shrill

Shrill

By Lindy West

Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible -- like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you -- writer and humoristLindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but.

From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jokes; to her struggle to convince herself, and then the world, that fat people have value; to her accidental activism and never-ending battle royale with Internet trolls, Lindy narrates her life with a blend of humor and pathos that manages to make a trip to the abortion clinic funny and wring tears out of a story about diarrhea.

With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss, and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.

Hand to god, I read The Witches are Coming last year (or the year before??) and had no idea that this was written by the same person.  I have no idea where my mind is.  Now, admittedly that is because after reading The Witches are Coming I was not interested in reading more from West, but that's not because it wasn't good.  It was good.  It just made me really depressed.  In fact, I typed that last sentence just now before re-reading my review, and had completely forgotten about the "GODDAMN DEPRESSING" exclamation.  At least I'm consistent!  

But this was different in a couple of important ways: 

(1) It wasn't as funny. 

This felt more like memoir than TWAC, which makes sense, because it kind of is.  It tracks West's "up-and-coming" years, when she got famous and got slammed and made her mark.  Shrill is the book which got developed into the TV show.  TWAC is the book that was written after she went so mainstream even I had heard of her.  Not that I'm living under a rock.  I just don't follow the comedy scene (for reasons very clearly laid out in Shrill) and I noped myself off of Jezebel when they changed their commenting rules, although now, in the distant fog of time, I can't remember what it was that I didn't like, since I never commented anyway.  I was definitely part of the Great Exodus though, which took me to Hairpin, which took me to Billfold, which took me to Ask a Manager, only dipping my toes into the Toast occasionally but not becoming a fanatic, and now that I've dredged up all that, some internet archaeologist can probably tell you my exact age and identifying details.*  Anyway, all of that is to say, I'm definitely in West's demographic but hadn't really known much of her biography until reading Shrill.  So I was a bit surprised that it was more biography than comedy, since "comedian" was my only frame of reference for her.  

TWAC reads more like a series of riffs on various topics. I mentioned the Adam Sandler one in my previous review, but her page-long screed about her husband's trumpet playing is also pretty amazing. Shrill is more raw, more personal (and therefore not necessarily amusing) and although it is funny, feels more like the goal was to explain, than entertain. 

(2) It wasn't as depressing.

This helped a lot.  Honestly, although I found parts of TWAC to be hilarious, Shrill felt more cathartic.  It started sort of slowly for me, but once the chapters start becoming closer, chronologically, it felt like it really picked up steam.  The last quarter or so of the book, with the sections on the trolls and the break up and her dad's death, and the remorseful troll, felt more hopeful to me than anything in TWAC.  Maybe it was good I read this one second, because it made me optimistic.  Reading TWAC now I feel like I would just get bombarded with everything that hasn't changed since Shrill. In writing this, I went down a few rabbit holes of feminist websites and writers from the early-mid two thousands, and I really miss those kinds of sites - I can't really think of any that have adequately replaced what is now defunct.  They were a haven, in many ways, from the misogyny and dick-swinging that categorized most of the rest of the internet.  I hope that there will be something to replace it for our younger generations. 

*I totally high-fived myself for remembering all that without looking it up, but turns out I have just as terrible a memory as I claim to: I think The Awl was somewhere in there too, and who knows what detritus of other short-lived but beloved sites.  The whole thing has come full circle though, since both founding members of The Hairpin now write advice columns for Slate, which I started reading long before they joined (although why I was reading it I have no idea. That one must have been a random recommendation).

Ten Second Reviews

Cut to the Quick

By Kate Ross

Julian Kestrel is the walking definition of a Regency-era dandy. He cares about little beyond the perfection of his tailoring, he lives for the bon mot, and his life has the specific gravity and the fleeting charm of a soap-bubble. At least that's what he'd like you to think. In fact, it rather suits Kestrel to be perpetually underestimated, particularly when as in this instance his weekend at a glamorous country estate is spoiled by a dead girl's body being found in his bed.

I did like this one - it was a nice break from modern day thrillers, which can be so overwrought.  This one is much more of a classic mystery, with interrogations and secrets discovered, although there is still the confrontation of the murderer, here, it's with the guise of an actual magistrate's duty.  It feels like a pretty chunky book - there's a lot to the back story, which comes out in pieces (and more than a few coincidences, but they aren't the most egregious), so it took me a while to get through it.  Overall, I enjoyed the Regency setting, and the characters, enough to look into the sequel.  Onward and upward!

Comics for a Strange World: A Book of Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

 

This follow up in the Poorly Drawn Lines series was not nearly as good as the first, for some reason.  Possibly because it felt like it focused more on robots and technology than absurdist humor.  So-so, but I would get the first book and skip this one.

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie

By Kathryn Harkup

 

This is an alphabetically arranged examination of the poisons used in Agatha Christie's books (funny: you'd never know it from the title).  I really liked this one - first of all, I never realized that Christie was a chemist, and that she kept her poison use really factual and close to reality.  Maybe this is a little embarrassing, but I barely noticed the actual murder weapon when I was reading  - it almost felt superfluous sometimes, since motive seemed so much more important (and Christie always made sure multiple suspects would have been capable of the means).  Harkup goes into detail not only in how Christie used the poison in a particular book/story, but also into the poison itself, famous real life murders, effects on the body, etc.  I have just one complaint, which is that Harkup gets into the chemical properties of the poisons more than is really necessary for most laypeople (and geez, I hope all of her readers are laypeople and not budding young poisoners looking for tips) so I tended to skim the passages about enzymes and receptors and molecules.  But the rest is highly enjoyable, although I would recommend against reading it while sitting with a dying relative receiving morphine, because it will give you bad dreams.

Ten Second Reviews

Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

This is a collection of short panel comics by Farazmand, who got his start online (and is still there, I assume).  These are mostly 4-6 panels apiece, with some longer ones mixed in.  They've got that off-the-wall humor which I enjoy, talking animals and inanimate objects, birds judging how well you sing, aliens who just want friendship bracelets, thirty-seven year-old babies with beards, weirdly tall frogs, robots who suck.  It's got a bit of that Far Side influence, but it feels a bit more Dada-esque (yeah, I know shit).  One thing I didn't like was the formatting - if you have a four-panel page, but a six panel comic, for the love of god, just make it smaller and put it on one page!  It makes it weirdly hard to figure out if the small panel is a continuation of the previous page or a new comic.  Same for the eight (or more) panel comics.  When stuff is online first, you don't have the same space restrictions you'd get if they were published in the newspaper.  So they're all different lengths.  But you gotta solve that problem when you publish - and I don't think they've quite cracked the code yet.  But overall, a fun diversion, and a good gift for someone with that absurd sense of humor.

Through The Woods

By Emily Carroll

 

This is sort of the antithesis to Poorly Drawn Lines: short stories instead of panels, arty illustrations instead of block characters, horror instead of comedy, confusing instead of straightforward.  I got this because I wanted some spooky stuff to read, and they were definitely - atmospheric - but I felt like a lot of them were kind of ended the same way: you have a set up with a spooky premise (I killed my brother but he's standing right there drinking, a lady is hearing a chilling song in the floorboards, my friend has a cloud thing that has arteries over her head, my mother warned me about the piano-teeth monster, etc), and then the character takes further action (goes down a hole to follow a monster [in several stories, actually, they should probably stop doing that], cracks open the walls and finds body parts, discovers someone is missing, etc) there's maybe like a little more explanation or clues about what's going on, but mostly not, and then we end with, like an ominous close up (of the monster, of the piano teeth, of the beating heart cloud, etc) but honestly, some of it (most of it) is so confusing, I can't figure out enough of what's going on to be scared.    For example, in the piano teeth one, Emily follows Rebecca down a hole and see her face come off into red worms, and then she leaves and hits her head and comes to back at the house, where she talks Rebecca out of using her body as a sack for Rebecca's red worm babies.  But then at the end, we find out Emily has piano teeth too.  So..... is she already a red worm monster? Did Rebecca change her mind and use her body anyway? It's so weirdly obtuse.  And the one where the brother is killed and then comes back, the narrator follows him down a hole he's been digging, and then sees... someone sleeping on the ground? The wolf the brother killed earlier? The brother is the wolf? Totally unclear. Anyway, beautifully illustrated, but a bit obtuse for me.   

Ten Second Reviews

Fleishman is in Trouble

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

A satiric novel about a disintegrating marriage was probably not the best choice for a post-nuptial read.  I appreciate the wit and social commentary, but the general and specific unpleasantness of the marriage and the people in it were Too Much.  I didn't find it enjoyable, more like a duty.  After getting through husband Toby's two hundred plus pages of narcissism, sex, and whining, I really wanted to read Rachel's POV, but was disappointed to find it was only like sixty pages long, and consisted mostly of her accepting shitty behavior from everyone around her until she eventually has a full on mental breakdown.  Uplifting? No. I felt like this book ends with the equivalent of a winking-face emoji, as our erstwhile semi-narrator Libby decides she'll write about the end of a marriage, but leave it on a cliffhanger, because...? I'm not actually invested in whether these characters manage to get together at all, they clearly have fault lines going all the way down.  I just, sort of like, wanted bad things to happen to Toby and just wanted Rachel to stop giving a shit, and well, there's an audience for everything, I suppose, but not me for this.

The Egg and I

By Betty MacDonald

As all the reviews make clear, for a pretty racist semi-autobiographical version of a young wife living out on a chicken ranch in the upper Northwest, this is a real entertaining book. There's definitely some things I bet MacDonald's family regrets her putting in print now (like, for example, that she thinks taking the land away from the American Indians was a good thing because they're just lazy good for nothing drunks) but when she focuses on herself and the day to day indignities of life, like neighbors visiting at 7 the one day she's still in her pyjamas, or how her tropical plants are dying while her husband's very practical garden is blooming, she's wonderfully funny and wry.  She's aslo amusing when talking about her neighbors, including Mrs. Kettle, who lives in basically a pigsty, but keeps one room locked up and pristine for visitors.  MacDonald may have a sharp pen, but she isn't shy about her own failures and shortcoming, so it doesn't come off that mean spirited - except for all the really racist bits.   I really enjoyed this although I have to say that this is one book that censorship would likely improve my experience. 

Be Prepared

Be Prepared

By Vera Brosgol

All Vera wants to do is fit in―but that’s not easy for a Russian girl in the suburbs. Her friends live in fancy houses and their parents can afford to send them to the best summer camps. Vera’s single mother can’t afford that sort of luxury, but there's one summer camp in her price range―Russian summer camp.

Vera is sure she's found the one place she can fit in, but camp is far from what she imagined. And nothing could prepare her for all the "cool girl" drama, endless Russian history lessons, and outhouses straight out of nightmares!

This is a middle-school readers semi-autobiographical graphic novel about nine year old Vera, who, finding herself not fitting in amongst her (non-Russian) schoolmates after a disastrous sleepover, begs her mom to send her and her brother to Russian scout camp - where she unhappily discovers that there's just never a guaranteed way of fitting in and making friends.

This was going to be a Ten Second Review but - as you'll notice - I got a little expressive and the review got a little lengthy.

I really loved this book. It's beautifully illustrated, with muted colors and expressive faces, but more than that, it really gets to the heart of a common pre-teen girl (and boy) experience: beginning to compare yourself and your family to others and feeling awkward or embarrassed or just plain uncool.

I remember myself the pain of having to leave a slumber party early (god, ALL the slumber party shit.  Why do I still love the idea of slumber parties when all of my memories are of like, extreme embarrassment? WHAT PYJAMAS YOU WEAR DETERMINES YOUR SOCIAL STATUS FOR LIFE AND LET'S NOT EVEN TALK ABOUT THE DELICATE ART OF GIFT-GIVING), and the like, social minefield that is your pre-teens and early teens. Why no, I haven't been scarred at all by events that happened decades ago and I definitely don't still remember the excruciating details of another twelve year old making fun of me (with what is, in retrospect, not even good sarcasm).

And I - OH MY GOD I just remembered how much I hated bringing my sleeping bag  - which was flannel and super bulky and had to be wrapped up with elastics tied together because they had worn out and snapped - when my friend had, like, the speedo of sleeping bags - shiny, tiny, with its own cover bag to stuff it into. It was teal and hi-tech and shaped like a coffin, not a rectangle (remember that I don't make the rules about what is cool, I just know that coffin shaped sleeping bags are cooler than rectangles, or at least they were back in the mid-90s) and so fucking cool and everything my sleeping bag wasn't and I bet you my friend had not one clue that I was dying inside about her sleeping bag. She's happily married now with a really cute baby girl who slept on me for like an hour during dinner once, which was amazing and I highly recommend, and I really hope I have enough willpower not to message her and be like, "REMEMBER YOUR SLEEPING BAG FROM TWENTY YEARS AGO? I think I'm finally working out my feelings about it!"

I'm going to move on from my own traumas for like, one hot second, to reiterate that Be Prepared makes me want to, like, go back and relive my youth except now, I would be able to unclench and actually enjoy it more, having learned the hard lesson that is growing up and becoming (and loving) your own self.  Be Prepared achieves the hard balance of getting to the heart of these seemingly insurmountable embarrassments and cruelties (which are in hindsight pretty minor) without actually wallowing in it or becoming too schadenfreude-y.  This is not cringe-kink (ew, gross, I hate this word I just made up and will never use it again). 


I will definitely be reading more from Brosgol (I already have Anya's Ghost waiting for me at the library), and if you want to relive your youth, without actually, you know, reliving it, please pick this book up.  

Ironically, the girl whose slumber party I left early now leads hiking expeditions into the wilderness for young women. What a wonderful world.

Ten Second Reviews

Force of Nature

By Jane Harper

Five women hike into the wilderness on an executive camping retreat.  When only four return, investigator Aaron Falk is concerned that the disappearance of the fifth woman - Alice - may have something to do with her connection to him: she was about to hand over documents as a whistleblower which would have taken the company - and several people hiking with her - down.  This was my least favorite of the Jane Harper books, by a long shot.  As she's done in her other books, the narrative has two tracks: one is the timeline following the discovery of the disappearance, the other the events leading up to it.  Only at the end of both do we know what happened.  Here, the action is just super slow.  We know that Alice doesn't disappear until early Sunday morning, so following everybody from Thursday onward feels really sluggish - especially when we find out - SPOILERS! - that ultimately, the accident had nothing more to do with any ulterior motivations then that Alice was kind of a bitch and everybody was really on edge.  Plus, nothing about Beth's (or Bree's?) subsequent hiding of the body made any sense.  You thought your twin killed someone, so you hauled a corpse twenty feet off the path? That's more or less my two main complaints: very slow paced, and the ultimate solution to the mystery disappointed.  But, as ever, these are well written and Harper does a great sense of place.

The Rosie Result

By Graeme Simsion

This, like Force of Nature, was also the third of sorts, and not my favorite of the bunch.  I did like it, generally, on its own though, so in that respect it's not so similar.  It's the continuation of the The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect, which told more or less the meeting, and eventual coupling up, of the titular Rosie, and narrator Don, who is (by the end of the third, determinedly so) autistic.   The Rosie Result sort of tracks Don and Rosie's son's progress through a new school, and the question about whether he should be tested for autism/is autistic.  It's not as funny as the first installment, not as sad as the second.  It ends, as the others did, on a very hopeful note.  Don and Rosie's relationship is sturdy and I do think it suffers from the focus being on son Hudson, who is sort of a cypher to Don (and to readers) and not as much on Rosie, who is more down to earth and whose interactions with the more literal Don create the best moments in the series. Overall, nice for completists.

I suppose this is my "Australia" reading day - I hadn't even noticed until I started putting the labels on.  These could not be two more different pieces set in Australia - one is a social comedy about current views on health, disabilities, political correctness and parenting, set in and around the suburbs, the other is a murder/crime thriller set in the bush. 

Ten Second Reviews

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

By Cary Elwes and Jay Layden

Essentially Cary Elwes' behind-the-scenes look at his role and interactions in The Princess Bride, and, although it certainly has the benefit of a built-in, forgiving audience, it also manages to tread the same fine line of the movie, that is: it's sweet without being sappy, funny without being mean, and gentle without being weak.  It gives you the same "This world may be populated with fundamentally good people after all" feeling that The Great British Bake-Off does.  It makes you nostalgic, and definitely in the mood to re-watch the movie.  Even though it's not "juicy", there's plenty to make you feel like you were there during filming, and you do get a sense of the various personalities on set.  A lovely, nostalgic, easy read.

The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone

By Jaclyn Moriarty

Ten year-old Bronte receives the news that her mostly absent adventurous parents have been killed by pirates - and that their Last Will and Testament requires her (under pain of her town collapsing) to visit her father's ten aunts and deliver gifts to them.  But as she visits orange orchards, dragon hospitals, cruise ships, water sprites and musical kingdoms, she begins to realize there's more going on that she originally suspected. This one was delightfully plotted - although the generous hints throughout the book mean that you'll probably guess what's happening long before we get to the reveal (except one where I was completely surprised - happily so) there are so many strings and sub-plots that it's never boring.  Plus, in addition to the book-long narrative, each aunt is like a mini-adventure, including a crime puzzle, an avalanche, tidying up for depressed people, fleeing pirates, saving babies, and learning magic.  It's a real confection of a book, as Bronte's instructions include many restaurant recommendations along with travel tips, and the master spell reads like a recipe.  There's some darker points as well, which, although it makes sense there would be, given that the book is about events set in motion by the murder of her parents, does feel a little off sometimes, given the upbeat and candy-colored attitude the rest of the book has.  Given the large cast of characters, it also doesn't get confusing or crowded, and it's a pleasant and ultimately feel-good way to spend an afternoon. 

A Man Called Ove

A Man Called Ove

By Fredrik Backman

Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him “the bitter neighbor from hell.” But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?
Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.

This one has shades of Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine and The Rosie Project, books about people who simply have trouble connecting with other people, and (of course, I mean, these aren't tragedies here, although a lot is sad in all three books) the eventual connections and friendships they find in spite of it, by the end.

I was charmed by Ove, even though the writing style for me was hard to get into.  It might have been the translation (although I doubt it) but it had both a very staccato feel as well as a kind of sing-songy rhythm/ child's verse sentence structure in parts.  Like, "Here is a man who looks angrily at the cat.  The cat looks unaffected by the anger." (That's a made up example).

Ove definitely has been through a lot, as we find out in the course of the book that his mother died when he was young, his father died in an accident when Ove was sixteen, he gets fired from his beloved train job from a false theft accusation, his house burns down, the insurance he had on it was fraudulent, his wife loses their child and the use of her legs in a bus accident, his wife gets cancer and dies a week before he's let go from his job (I think - the timeline of those last two is hinky, since at points he goes to his wife's grave, which already has a gravestone up.  I happen to know it can take a while, sometimes months and months for a gravestone to be done, unless somehow Ove has harassed the stone cutters into doing it overnight [not a real stretch, considering]).  Even so, he was incredibly rude and grumpy, and there were definitely points that felt like the book took kind of a magical realism approach to how anyone in real life would be completely turned off by his attitude.

The book did read a little sit-commy at times, like during arguments between the pregnant woman and her husband.  It swung between that and just, like, treacle-y heartbreak in the flashback chapters.  I think the author was going for more black comedy, particularly in the present day chapters as Ove tries again and again to kill himself, but it sheer amount of terrible things that happened to him as a young adult were like, ridiculous after a point.  It was jarring to bounce between them, I guess. 

In fact, all the timelines were hinky - we find out that his neighbor has dementia and his wife can't care for him anymore, but his neighbor can't be that much older than Ove, since their wives were pregnant at the same time. Plus, we find out in the last chapter that after all this, Ove dies in his sleep four years later, like, whaaat? In this day and age, and with modern medicine being what it is, seems kinda strange that at least three people have died or become completely incapacitated by age 65 in this subdivision.  Seems to me like they should be investigating the water around there.  And what kind of place is Sweden where they just take people away for having dementia?  Does this actually happen, because if so, it's both horrifying and tempting. In the US they do as little as possible to care for people so you generally stay at home until you start leaving the house in the middle of the night and then get into car accidents from trying to drive to your accountant's office at 4 in the morning for a non-existent meeting, at which time the family will just take away your car keys and call it good and you STILL won't be forcibly removed from your home.

I'm kind of grumpy myself.  I've just started the next book and I'm already unhappy. Is there going to be a day that we can eliminate UNNECESSARY RAPE as character shorthand for female trauma? I did read that Rapunzel book, and there was definitely some there which I did get through, and I don't know if I've just already reached my rape quota for the year, or if it just felt extremely and unpleasantly gratuitous, but Paolo Bacigalupi, you are on my shit list.


23: A Book Set in Scandanavia

Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.

On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers.

Two days in and I'm already burned out on book reviewing!  This is going to be rough year.  Only 363 days left!  I actually saw the movie last year when it came out, and it was charming - full of attractive people wearing expensive clothes and steely-eyed ladies discarding men like last week's clothes.  Or yesterday's clothes.  However long you wear clothes.  No judgment here!

I hate to be this person, but my impression of the book definitely suffers from comparison with the movie. The movie consolidates people and storylines, cuts down on the cartoon-y villainy and grounds the story more.  And stylistically, the footnotes, while a fun commentary in the beginning, kinda dragged as you kept going.  I didn't need the Malay/Mandarin/Hokkein translations when it was perfectly understandable from context, and I actually skipped some of them since I didn't realize they were footnotes.  But I didn't want to skip the footnotes completely, since some of them were context as well.

The other style issue I had with the book, which is maybe resolved in the later books, is that because the chapters skip around with viewpoints, it feels a little bit like multiple stories are going on, but some of them get (extremely) short shrift.  The Nick/Rachel is obviously the main line, but Astrid's ongoing problems with her husband also come up frequently, and I know they're a big part of the next books, but they impact Nick and Rachel not at all (and see my paragraph down below for why that feels particularly egregious).  Rachel's friend Peik Lin and Nick's cousin Eddie also have viewpoint chapters, but they also feel weirdly unresolved, like there's a build-up but no climax.  I mean, we visit with an elderly doctor friend who tells Peik Lin and her father who James Young is, but it feels weirdly tacked on, not to mention how unrealistic it is that Peik Lin's father, who is a real estate developer himself, has no idea there are fifty missing acres in the middle of town.  Fifty acres is a lot, y'all.  There is no way that people are just like, ho hum, a giant private parkland here in Singapore, who cares, when the entire book is telling us how real estate crazy the place is. 

I'm sorry, but I have just beef with this book.  So the secondary story is about Nick's cousin, Astrid, who discovers that her husband faked an affair to give him an excuse to leave the family that he feels so judged and looked-down by.  And frankly, he's right.  They're all assholes to him.  Just like, in fact, they're assholes to Rachel.  How are we supposed to have any confidence that the exact same thing isn't going to happen to Nick and Rachel?? There's a throwaway line about how joining the family as an attractive man is so much harder than marrying in as a beautiful woman, but how is that comforting in any way?  To show us how difficult an "outsider" has it, five years in, and then to present us with an ending that seems to say, but everything has been resolved happily for THIS outsider is so confusing.  I guess I just didn't get a sense that Nick and Rachel have any stronger of a relationship than Astrid and Michael.  To be fair, yes, A/M's viewpoints tell us constantly that their main spark was sexual attraction.  But over the course of Crazy Rich Asians, Nick goes from not contemplating marriage to proposing, and for insight, all we have is his mother's viewpoint, which is that whoever Nick was with when he's about the age to get married is who he'd propose to.  I mean, I'll take it with a grain of salt, but I didn't get the feeling that Nick and Rachel have anything special that would overcome the obstacles, and maybe that's the most damning criticism I have. I got no sense, at the end of the book, that any problems with Nick's family had actually been resolved.  At most, Rachel's relationship with her mother was repaired, and her relationship with Nick was not in the complete crapper. Maybe it's a wink to a more realistic ending than insta-love, marriage, and babies by book one's epilogue. All I know is, nothing at the end would explain Rachel's willingness to continue to involve herself with a family which is not only insane, but also clearly incapable of leaving Nick's romantic affairs alone.

Not to mention, I'm not sure if we were supposed to be titillated by all the namebrand dropping and excesses, but it was exhausting and I think some depth and character gets sacrificed for it.  But I do have to say, despite all that, it's not a bad book, just not one that has inspired me to keep reading.  I'll re-watch the movie, which in my opinion takes the best of the book and moulds it into a more palatable romance and tip my hat to Kevin Kwan, who, if nothing else, has definitely gotten Singapore culture a wider audience, all while costuming it as gaudy escapist fantasy. 



Prompt 35: A book by an author whose first and last names start with the same letter.
Jan 1.