The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Set in during the Roaring Twenties, this masterful story by F. Scott Fitzgerald is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a young man who moves to Long Island and attempts to learn the bond business in New York City after the war. There, he co-mingles on Long Island with his affluent and wealthy socialite cousin Daisy Buchanan, her brute of a husband Tom, and friend Jordan Baker.

Nick's new residence sits across the bay from Daisy and Tom's house, and right next to a mysterious mansion. He begins to hear rumors of an infamous man named Gatsby who resides there. Eventually, when Gatsby learns of Nick's ties to Daisy, he extends Nick an invitation to one of his lavish parties. Gatsby's plan to court Daisy, in an attempt to revive a previous love affair, eventually bubbles to the surface and tragedy ensues.

Brief aside: Do you know how hard it is to find a reasonable description of a so-called "classic" book? Everyone just describes the accolades rather than the plot. c.f. "Amidst extravagant parties and societal excess, Fitzgerald weaves a narrative of love, betrayal, and the dark undercurrents of the Jazz Age. Through vivid prose and complex characters, the novel explores themes of disillusionment, class divide, and the relentless pursuit of an idealized past. With its timeless exploration of human desires and the consequences of unchecked ambition, ""The Great Gatsby"" remains a literary masterpiece that resonates across generations." blah blah blah.

 

As a counterpoint though, my library had this to say about the book's description, transcribed in its entirety: 

 

"Nick Carraway meets Jay Gatsby, a young millionaire with shady business connections and who is love with Daisy Buchanan, Nick's cousin." 

 

I love that this basically says: "We all know you're going to read this book regardless of what it's about, let's not pretend we have to intrigue you with jacket copy."

***

Ah, one of those classics that was written by men about the American Dream in which everything is a symbol and life is meaningless! Women are unfathomable, men are noble, or brutes, or dogs, and we all learn a Very Important Lesson, like an afternoon tv special. 

I liked the first chapter, but as we get introduced to all the characters, none of them, or it, appealed, so that by the end, Daisy's decision to stay with Tom was as boring to me as what color dress she planned to wear, and Jay's death didn't feel tragic so much as exhausting.  

As Nick, the narrator says, they're all terrible people, and not even in interesting ways. They're terrible in terribly boring ways. I can understand why the book was a failure when it came out, and why it became popular by soldiers in WWII: it appeals to a man's sense of thinking they're deeper and more philosophical than they are. It's easy enough for most people to read and understand while giving the impression of importance and intelligence when you tell people you've read it.

It's short enough to get through quickly, a mark in its favor. I was struck by how literate it was. Just the style and vocabulary that would have commonplace in the 1920s feels ornate and antiquated now, even though it would be hard to point to any one sentence and say it couldn't have been written today. It does make you feel that people, on the whole, are becoming much stupider.

 

There's a musing cadence to the story which infuriated me. Not only the dreaded navel-gazing but the absolute mush of a main character. There's absolutely no point to Nick at all, may as well have had an omniscient narrator. For all he complains about the wealthy, careless folks he meets here, he has absolutely no curiosity about any of the non-white or non-wealthy characters.

I suppose I'm glad to have read it, as now I never will have to again.  

April 9, 2025 

edited to add:

 

Since, apparently, it is also the 100th anniversary of its publication (which I was not aware of when I chose to read it, but how serendipitous!) there's a few articles being published about it. I appreciate the other perspectives and thoughts as well.  I found the theory, newly re-circulating, that Gatsby can be read as a black man passing as white to be intriguing, adding another layer of interest and subtext to the primary story. I also saw a lot of people comparing it to The White Lotus, as today's version of the rich and careless American.  I found that interesting, since I've enjoyed The White Lotus but my watch experience bears out the same lack of patience I had for the characters in The Great Gatsby: without fail, I will watch the first several episodes with interest, then find myself getting bored halfway through the season. I hate not to know what happens though, so I'll read spoilers and become interested enough to go back and watch the last episodes for the relevant story-lines and fast-forward through everything else. So at least I'm consistent.

39: A Classic You've Never Read

Mistress of Rome

Mistress of Rome
By Kate Quinn

Thea, a captive from Judaea, is a clever and determined survivor hiding behind a slave’s docile mask. Purchased as a toy for the spoiled heiress Lepida Pollia, Thea evades her mistress’s spite and hones a secret passion for music. But when Thea wins the love of Rome’s newest and most savage gladiator and dares to dream of a better life, the jealous Lepida tears the lovers apart and casts Thea out.

Rome offers many ways for the resourceful to survive, and Thea remakes herself as a singer for the Eternal ’City’s glittering aristocrats. As she struggles for success and independence, her nightingale voice attracts a dangerous new admirer: the Emperor himself. But the passions of an all-powerful man come with a heavy price, and Thea finds herself fighting for both her soul and her destiny.

Many have tried to destroy the Emperor: a vengeful gladiator, an upright senator, a tormented soldier, a Vestal Virgin. But in the end, the life of Rome’s most powerful man lies in the hands of one woman: the Emperor’s mistress.

Ah, Mistress of Rome: A Series of Unfortunate Events.  It sounds weird coming from someone who just read The Feast of the Goat, but long stretches of Mistress of Rome feel like torture porn. Or tragedy porn or whatever the name is for it when the characters go through one miserable obstacle only to find themselves in front of another, higher, one. Over and over and over.

Part of that comes from two of the worst villains to grace the pages of historical fiction : Lepida Pollida, spoiled senator's daughter who is sex and power mad, and who kicks off her career by separating our lovers and selling Thea to a dockhouse brothel and then later upping the ante by seducing her husband's son and being mean to her epileptic daughter, and Domitian, the emperor, who is introduced as a potential rescuer of Thea only to turn out to be a torturer and abuser of women and slaves, including his own niece, Julia. Domitian, obviously, was a real person, and I sure hope he was as bad as all that because otherwise Quinn has sadly maligned his character here.

Quinn's writing, is, as usual, exemplary, breathless and urgent as she takes us back thousands of years to the Roman Empire. Having just read her most recently based, Briar Club, you can tell that Quinn revels in the historical details available from whatever period she's writing in. Here, being so much more in the distant past, she's not able to bring as much of that in, but there's still a wealth of ground to cover, as the book takes us from 82 ad to 96 ad.

The early sections skip great chunks of years at a time, and those are some of the harder ones to get through- our heroes just keep getting kicked when they're down, and much of the activity is just place setting for the final confrontations that take place in 95-96. By the time our heroes emerge triumphant over the villains, I was mostly just tired and wanted it over with.

Quinn's talent shines when you consider that the whole book hinges on the relationship of a couple who have a few months together fourteen years before most of the action takes place - and the couple is separated most of that time.  We have to both believe in the relationship and care about it, and Quinn manages to do that, for me at least, although Vix, the erstwhile scamp born to Thea, mostly bugs instead of endears. He becomes a primary character later in the series, which doesn't tempt me to read them.

There's a supernatural thread running through the book as well: a soothsayer who is eerily accurate, some characters who escape certain death because of the implied favor of the gods, the mysterious healing powers of gladiator blood. It lets us suspend disbelief on some of the more unlikely plot points Quinn inserts (a gladiator who only loses ONCE in eight years?? somehow everyone keeps winding up at the same places together??).

It's odd to me, that although this and The Feast of the Goat both concern fictionalized re-tellings of famously assassinated dictators (and include invented women characters who were abused by them) they feel very different. Quinn's books are comfortable reads because although some characters do get sacrificed (I won't forget you, Hercules!) she tends to leave readers on a optimistic note: Domitian's death ushered - in real life - almost ninety years of Roman prosperity.  Our core couple, reunited at last, retires to the country. Marcus, the poor beleaguered husband, gets a new wife who likes him. Whereas in The Feast of the Goat, the assassination brings not relief but torture. Thirty years on, citizens have forgotten the horrors of the regime, and reminisce for better days. Quinn doesn't trade in that kind of punchline. But the cynic in me sometimes wishes she would.

06: A Book That Fills Your Favorite Prompt From The 2015 PS Reading Challenge [13: Set In Another Country]

The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own.

You can tell the book is written by an expert. Despite the heavy (and at times excruciating - the rape of a pre-teen seems mild in comparison to some of the horrors described) material you are kept rapt, pressing on to the inevitable conclusion. The book deals in turn with three storylines: Urania, a woman returning to the country after 35 years, who comes to reckon with the past and her family's involvement with the regime (wholly invented by Vargas Llosa), a collection of collaborationists, traitors and conspirators, waiting to assassinate the dictator (real people fictionalized), and the dictator himself, Trujillo, on what will become the last day of his life (also, obviously real but fictionalized). There's multiple flashbacks in each story-line and, especially in Urania's story-line, the text will switch abruptly between present and past conversations with no noticeable delineation. This is used more heavily in the later chapters, when we have a better understanding of all the players and plots, but it's still not an easy book to read.

Since it's not entirely fictional, there's a need to include certain prominent figures, even though it can complicate and confuse the reader. There's seven conspirators waiting for the car, and more who are waiting in the wings. There's multiple government officials and hangers on. All of these people are known to each other and in some cases are brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews. The sections involving Urania's story are relatively contained in comparison: her, her father, aunt, cousins, and a nurse, all of whom are made up, are the only characters in the present. Although I managed to keep most of the large cast straight, I did struggle, particularly in the last few chapters, at the culmination of the assassination, when the scope of the plan widened and the ripple effects began to be seen.

It's also interesting to note that although the beginning of the book takes each of the three story-lines in turn, around chapter 19, when we leave Urania waiting to be delivered to the belly of the beast, several chapters in a row focus more on the immediate and long term period after the assassination, and Vargas Llosa instead slots in the finale to Urania's story as the very last chapter. It's both out of order and interestingly, Urania's last chapter follows the "Balaguer chapter" which ends, somewhat optimistically, with the removal of the Trujillo family from the country and the pardoning of the living conspirators - they literally walk into Balaguer's open, welcoming arms. Balaguer's chapter is also the last chronological moment before Urania comes back to the country 35 years later, which is the start of the book. As tempting as it might have been to leave it at Balaguer, Vargas Llosa instead returns us back to the scene of one of Trujillo's final, personal, petty crimes (albeit wholly fictional one), and reminds us that no matter the events to follow, the effect of the regime cannot and should be be forgotten - and in the character of Urania, physically unable to forget, as others in the book appear to have done. 

I think Vargas Llosa does an incredible job of setting us in the time and place, and in differentiating between the various narrators, which is something that can be hard for authors to do. Here, it's immediately apparent when Urania or Trujillo is narrating, although some of the assassins are not as easily distinguishable from each other. Although we know what happens to Trujillo (he was in fact, assassinated in May 1961) you anticipate the moment as a reader with some relief of anxiety and joy. After so much detail about the degradation and horrors that Trujillo presided over, you want Trujillo to be done, you want the assassins to succeed, and you know (as someone with access to Wikipedia) that they do. I don't know whether Vargas Llosa assumes knowledge of the outcome on the reader's part. Surely, as it become more and more distant past - it's already been 23 years since the book was first published - fewer and fewer readers can be expected to be familiar with what happens next. Certainly I didn't know, and didn't "spoil" myself. This section was the hardest for me to read, perhaps because it was so immediate, perhaps because it seemed so unjust for an action which should have been celebrated (and in fact was, if only they could have lived long enough to see it).  History is written by the victors.

In the end, I am left with only two questions, both of which come from Urania's fictional story-line, and which therefore the author has even more deliberately decided not to address overtly: Who hid the memo (if, in fact it was deliberately hidden) from Trujillo about Urania's departure? One reviewer attributes the memo's disappearance to Balaguer as a nod that no action of Balaguer is ever unconsidered, and states that it is a demonstration of Vargas Llosa's appreciation for him as a politician, by showing Balaguer's compassion in that (completely fictional) moment. That's a compelling argument. I did think that Balaguer, of all the characters, was probably the hardest to write about, given his outsized importance to the country later, and the fact that, at the time the book was written, he was still living and still actively involved in politics, despite his age and health. It is hard to judge the legacy of a living person.

My second question was about the ostracization of Cabral in the first place. Was it just a loyalty test, as Trujillo seems to allude to in one chapter, or was it designed with ulterior motives in mind? I also think it's interesting that Vargas Llosa so clearly lays out the torture and consequences for those in opposition to the regime in the later chapters. It adds more layers to Cabral's decision to pimp his daughter out, in his effort to appease the Generalissimo. There are real, and not imagined, consequences for angering that type of person.  In this case, the choice was fatal not only due to Trujillo's inability to perform and further angering him, but also being ultimately pointless given his assassination weeks later. But would there be a devil on the shoulder to say that, in the absence of that foresight, Cabral's choice was unreasonable? When you live in hell, what salve to conscience can you afford? "In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime. 'The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,' he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: 'Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.' Egghead was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will."

 It is possibly the best book I never want to read again.

 

21: A Book Where A Main Character Is A Policitician

 

Dopesick

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America

By Beth Macy

In this extraordinary work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of a national drama that has unfolded over two decades. From the labs and marketing departments of big pharma to local doctor's offices; wealthy suburbs to distressed small communities in Central Appalachia; from distant cities to once-idyllic farm towns; the spread of opioid addiction follows a tortuous trajectory that illustrates how this crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched. 

Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother's question-why her only son died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy investigates the powerful forces that led America's doctors and patients to embrace a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. The unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death. 

Through unsparing, compelling, and unforgettably humane portraits of families and first responders determined to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows that one thing uniting Americans across geographic, partisan, and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But even in the midst of twin crises in drug abuse and healthcare, Macy finds reason to hope and ample signs of the spirit and tenacity that are helping the countless ordinary people ensnared by addiction build a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities.

I think that description is balderdash.  It's a much bleaker book than the blurb appears.  The "once idyllic" farm communities are actually coal mining areas, beset first by the terrible working conditions of the mines, and now by the even worse specter of no working conditions at all. Maybe they're scenic, but they were never idyllic.  There's also very little hope in the book.  Although there is greater recognition of opioids and laymen are more familiar with the dangers of Oxycontin, Macy doesn't seem to think the epidemic is slowing at all. I suppose it will burn itself out eventually, as fewer people get on the opioid track to begin with, but there's nothing promising real diversion from that track once began. 

I was wrapped up in the book; although it's fairly dense Macy manages to keep it pretty zippy and move things along.  The first section focuses on the pushed over-prescription of opioids for low-level issues, the incentives behind the American medical system for companies and individual doctors to upsell drugs and the gaps in oversight which let it happen (and the financial incentives to keep doing it this way). The second section is more about individuals who, once hooked for whatever reason, are now sliding deeper into addiction, and the third section was more about what options there are for diversion, rehab, prison, getting clean, etc. The third section felt the weakest, less focused and more self-insertion, as to what is or is not an appropriate way to treat people.  The whole fentanyl thing was also confusing - fentanyl is another opioid drug, but also, any amount included in heroin will kill you? Or is it just fake fentanyl? It felt like the topic was so big another book could have been written on it, so including just a little bit was like getting only one or two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. 

One criticism I will level is Macy's habit of introducing a character, diverting almost immediately onto another topic or segue, and then come back to the character.  It was annoying for several reasons: (a)  I couldn't keep everyone straight and that made it harder to connect who I'd already been reading about versus who was newly introduced (b) it felt like she was doing an injustice to their personal stories by leaving us on these sort of "cliffhanger" notes, like they weren't real people with heartbreaking problems, and (c) she'd sometime bring us in in the middle of an event, like an overdose, and I struggled to figure out if we'd read any background on these people or not.  Was I supposed to remember that they had been in fifth grade together? Whose mother was it that this person was relying on? Although honestly, it wasn't all that relevant, since basically anytime a mother was mentioned, they had an adult child who was addicted, and they were all helping out other parents and children.  No explanation was given as to why fathers were never involved.  Were these all single parent households? Did the fathers just not care about their children? Is any of that relevant to these kids' addiction stories? Who knows?

For all that I criticize, it is a good, engrossing, important read.  There needs to be more attention paid to the systemic problems pointed out in the book - the incentives to push drugs for profit instead of health, the bias towards jail instead of rehabilitation, the reluctance to commit resources or medicines to combat the problem, the idea that the addicted are somehow deficient, rather than victims. Although I certainly don't feel as sympathetic for teens who just took random medication at pill parties as those who were over-prescribed opiates by trusted physicians, I also don't think that anyone deserves to be reviled for a single bad decision, especially one when made at the height of peer pressure and immaturity. Like I said, it's a depressing read, but a worthwhile one. Hopefully it will help change minds and allow doors to open that create better results for the addicted than what we currently see.

31: A Book Featuring A Man-Made Disaster

 

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

By Carol Rifka Brunt

1987. The only person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus is her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can be herself only in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down.
 
But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life. At the funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail containing a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn’s apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and that this unexpected friend just might be the one she needs the most.

So I was super pumped about this when I started, I was a few chapters in and immediately hooked.  And then... I started to hate it.  The main character, June, is supposed to be 14-15, but feels more like 11-12, she has no social or emotional maturity, is deeply and weirdly in love with her uncle Finn who is dying of AIDS (and even weirder, we find out at the end of the book that Finn's partner, Toby told Finn that he (i.e., Finn) would make her fall in love with him, like that's a normal thing to say about an uncle-niece relationship) and is really off-putting to everyone around her. 

This infatuation/all-encompassing love she has for her uncle was really what made me reluctant to keep going. If she were actually dating him (which it sounds like she wanted to do[?!]), she'd be a plethora of possessive red flags.  She's mad other people aren't as upset as she is by his death, she doesn't want to share her time with him at all, she gets mad that other people know things about him that she doesn't know (like his partner! who lived with him for years!), she's totally undone by the idea that some of the things she thought were Finn's (like a jar of guitar picks) actually turn out to be his partner's, etc., etc. Like dangerous levels of obsession here. And after Finn's death, she does the exact same thing to his partner, Toby.  Like, at one point she steals her passport so she can take Toby on a trip to England, like that's a totally normal thing for a 14 year old to suggest to this adult man who was living with her uncle, whom she has known (and known of) for probably two whole months, if that (Finn died February 5th, and the book wraps up around the end of tax season). 

I forced myself to keep going, and started to get back into around the 3/4 mark, where she starts to see her various lies beginning to unwind, and she actually has a conversation with her sister, Greta (instead of assuming the worst about her). I felt worse for the people around her than I did her.  She sounded like a petulant, ignorant child, always thinking in these totally black and white terms, like her mother is horrible for what she did to her brother, Finn (even though we find out Finn stayed longer in England because he met Toby, thus eliminating the chance for them to work as artists together), and how if people don't do things just exactly the way she has it in her mind, they must HATE HER, because SHE'S SO WEIRD. If this is meant to be a picture of someone with a social disorder, kudos.  Because like I said, I cannot imagine a 14 year old, even in 1987, who thinks it's reasonable to be a caregiver for her uncle's lover, and that said caregiving would involve a trip overseas. 

Around the 3/4 mark, as I've said, the action starts to pick up, and we spend less time mooning about how wonderful Finn and June's relationship was (despite the fact that she *GASP* never knew that Finn couldn't drive, how dare she not know that???) and how deeply she's grasping onto Toby, and there's actual action, regarding the painting she and Greta have been defacing, regarding Greta's habit of getting drunk and lying down in the woods, and Toby's illness. I did tear up a little when she rescues him from Bellevue Hospital, but I don't know if the ending saves the rest of the book. I could definitely have used less in the middle, when we spend all this time hearing about how wonderful her uncle was and how only he understood her, truly, (even though she apparently knew very little about him or his life), and how every single thing that Finn ever touched was precious, precious to her!  She does remind me a lot of Gollum, actually.  Obsessive, unpleasant to be around, always assuming the worst of people, pretends, 'oh, woe is me' even though she's pretty much 100% self interested herself.  

I know I chose this for the 1980s, and the AIDS crisis looms large, but aside from that, it just didn't feel super 80s to me.  The Sun Down Motel felt more 80s for all that the time period didn't even matter as much in that book.  

 

13: A Book Set in the 1980s

Strange the Dreamer & Muse of Nightmares

Strange the Dreamer

By Laini Taylor

 I keep wanting to call this Lazlo the Strange which makes more sense to me: "Strange" is just his last name, so the title sounds more foofaraw-y than it really is.  That's also a metaphor for the book itself. Strange the Dreamer is about a society trying to overcome its long nightmare while while the nightmares are still literally hanging over their heads.  If you didn't quite understand that, Sarai is called the Muse of Nightmares to really hammer the point home.  But long story short: this is a really interesting story, and the beginning was excellent, but the book is so long and in the middle part it's really just a lot of getting Lazlo and Sarai acquainted with what's going on in their respective spheres (and falling in love because of course) and the story drags until the very end, when there's a lot of action all at once and then we end in the middle of a scene.  Am I going to read the next one? Well, yeah, actually.  Was I planning on it up until like, the last five pages? NO.  It is what it is, but in point of fact, I do want to find out what happened to the two thousand god-babies, and see how Sarai and Lazlo will extricate themselves from Minya, Sarai's crazy sister. It's also a very picturesque book, what with the blue gods and big statue and salt flats and all, but - OH, I just remembered this: it is also very predictable.  I mean, who didn't know that Lazlo would be able to manipulate the mesarthrium, and be a god and that the kids were actually just tools of the gods themselves, and that the Godslayer and his wife would have some weird thing going on, and then Minya would control the ghost-Sarai?  It didn't really detract from the story, but again, when the readers know what's going to happen, making it not happen for hundreds of pages really makes things drag.

Muse of Nightmares

By Laini Taylor


I'm now in the unfortunate position of trying to write this review like, a year after I read the book, so it's going to be pretty vague!  That being said, I liked the second much more than I thought I would.  I wasn't even that sure I was going to read the second book after I finished the first, but I'm glad I did, even though it's not a series that I'll be buying for my shelves anytime soon.  The good news is that it did stick the landing, and things are basically resolved such that both the townies and the godkids are permanently separated, which is great, because their various traumas and PTSD made it almost a requirement.  No one can really heal while the giant alien ship of your oppressors is literally casting a permanent shadow over your town.  Did I think it made sense for the godkids to go haring off into the universe basically under the wisdom and guidance of a couple of teenagers? No, not really, but they seem like they're having a good time, so let's not dwell too much on how little any of them know about the worlds out there.  I'll just be happy that they're happy. 

Ten Second Reviews

The Tiger's Wife

By Tea Obreht

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

I liked this one alright when I thought it was going somewhere, i.e., all the stories would somehow relate to one another, but it ended up not really doing that, so for me, it kind of petered out.  It did manage to elicit heavy sadness at the end of the Tiger's Wife portion, so kudos, I suppose, but nothing else really gelled for me.  Did we ever really find out why her grandfather was tramping all over the (other) country?  He was looking for the Deathless Man (in all the right places), and couldn't just wait for like, his patients to die? Was he actually trying to meet up Natalie, also for reasons unknown? Unclear.  This made me look up like, reading guides to The Tiger's Wife, trying to figure out what the point was. It was interesting how the setting of The Tiger's Wife feels more fairy-tale like than many actual fantasy books, despite (or because of?) being based in war-torn eastern Europe. There's definitely you know, motifs and shit, about animals, and war, and medicine, and society, the kind of book you teach a class about in high school.  It was well written, but wandered too much, without sufficient payoff, to be truly great.

Magic for Liars

By Sarah Gailey

When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister—without losing herself. 

I liked the beginning of Magic for Liars, before you realize what a terrible PI Ivy is (although of course she still manages to solve multiple mysteries, so she's somewhat of an idiot savant, I guess), but then Ivy started doing that fashionable PI thing of drinking too much and sleeping with possible suspects, and also (not a small thing) telling like, everyone who asks, all about the murder case she is working on.  Even though, as she stresses at one point, the murderer is definitely someone in the school.  And yes, in case you were wondering, she does tell her sister (who by the way, committed the crime) like, every minute detail about the case, including showing her the love notes these students were passing which prove one of them got pregnant.   With almost no prompting whatsoever!  Even if her sister hadn't killed a fellow teacher, that's a huge invasion of privacy.  I liked the premise, but was disappointed by the almost deus ex machina way that Ivy ignored everything about her sister which would have pointed her in the right direction.  For someone who was a PI for fourteen years, it just seemed really sloppy and not clever.  Also, after all that, she still covered up for her sister not only accidentally murdering her lover, but also botching an abortion on a student.  Their whole relationship did not make sense to me.  It's an okay read, but sort of felt frustrating, like the plot and character actions and decisions felt less organic than it should have. 

The Mere Wife

The Mere Wife

By Maria Dahvana Headley

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings—high and gabled—and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.

For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.

I was a little sad when I realized my final post would be on November 7, rather than October 31, but we'll make do somehow.  This was a good final choice in my challenge, I think - I had deliberately set aside The Count of Monte Cristo for my trip, and just hadn't been able to get to this one before I left, but it turned out to be both well written, attention-getting, and "light" (in the sense that the chapters feel short, and even though it's like, three hundred pages, seems like it zips along pretty quickly).

This is a re-telling of Beowulf, which I first (and last) read when the much-lauded Seamus Heaney version came out (I was fifteen, can you tell I was a nerd?), and I did enjoy it quite a bit, although I don't remember much of it now.  I am pretty sure there's some departures from the Beowulf version though, especially in regards to the "kidnapping" of Willa's son Dill, and his later return to Herot Hall and intervention in the fight between Dana and Ben Woolf.

What Headley's accomplished though, is the feel of a modern day monster/fairy tale.  The allusions to Gren's fur and claws (which may, or may not be, as we discover when Gren grows up and Dana begins to realize her experiences shortly after she was released as a prisoner may not be reliable) and the contrast of Willa's stepford wife life with the creeping intrusions made on suburbia by creatures living in a hole in the mountain, gives you the sense of falling into an inevitable dark dream.

It does suffer a little bit from what happens when you use the dream style to narrate your books, which is a case of what happened-ism: like, is diving into the lake a metaphor, or did they actually pilot the whole train into a body of water that drowned everyone? Questions for a closer read than I really care to do!

Anyway, it's been real, PopSugar.  Let's do it again sometime.

12 - A Book Inspired By Mythology, Legend Or Folklore

Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If — doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell. The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigue and paints a vision of France — a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France — that has become immortal.

This was the only book on the list that I've read before, because the prompt explicitly required it.  Although I have other, shorter, favorite books, I'd happened to have recently re-read those when the list came out, and I knew I'd have two weeks traveling that I could spend on a nice thick doorstopper.  I've read Count a few times already, and I was really looking forward to re-reading it.  Well, this time, I got five chapters in and had to put it away.  Even though I knew what was coming, and it wasn't a surprise in any way, for some reason the destruction of all of Edmond's hopes on his wedding day just really upset me.  I had to switch to Sherlock Holmes for a few days before I had the strength to continue.

I know this sounds incredibly snotty, but I do get new things out of it every time I re-read it.  Partly because it's so fucking long, there's probably like whole pages I've skipped and never noticed.  Last time I remember thinking that we spent a lot of time going over Benedetto's storyline, which I barely noticed this time around.  This reading had me way focused on the Count's bizarre belief that God was guiding him (because God loves REVENGE too? Actually it probably does) and this whole thing he had about people "deserving" happiness, depending on whether they had suffered a lot.  Also, my perennial gripe about how long we spend on Albert and Franz and the Rome saga, which I ALWAYS find boring and out of place, as a very long meander through a (frankly uninteresting) side character's perspective.  Come on, we have REVENGE waiting!

I also ended up re-watching the 2002 movie version, which does a yeoman's job compressing a thousand page book into a comprehensible two and a half hour movie, and ends up squashing the Haydee, Mercedes, and Albert stories, so Haydee disappears, Albert becomes the Count's biological son and Mercedes reunites with the Count, with all three sailing off into the sunset.  A dramatic departure, but on the extras the director is like, "I stand by that.  It's the only way the story even makes sense" and I kind of get where he's coming from.  As nice as it is to see the wicked punished, and as necessary as it may be for the Count to realize that the innocent by proximity, have also been punished in his mad schemes, it feels oddly unsatisfying for Mercedes (by all accounts a real stand up woman) to end her days poor and living off whatever money her son makes as a soldier (and what kind of future would the son of a now infamous traitor have in the army anyway?).  And the last scene we have with Mercedes we leave on a weird, uncertain note, basically - she won't accept help, so who knows how she'll live!

Maybe I'm softening in my old age.  Although maybe not, because I definitely forgot how Danglars' story ended and when I got to it, I was like, "This is it?! He keeps $50,000 livres and goes on his merry way?? This is bull#$%!" For real though, what the fuck.  Danglars basically engineered the whole damn thing, and he has no conscience, so appealing to one is a wasted effort.  I think the Count just ran out of steam there.  To be fair, Villefort's madness would leave a real bad taste in your mouth, but again, nothing that happened to these people was anything other than the result of their own evils, all brought home to roost. Yes, they could have lived undamaged lives if not for the Count, but simply because you are not caught being bad does not make you a good person.

 I also was paying much closer attention to the lesbian storyline this time around because last time I was kind of like, "Huh, that's kind of gay" and this time, I was like, "I'm pretty sure Dumas knew what the fuck he was doing with those two women."  If not, then, I mean, he's really good at writing lesbians accidentally.  

I read this while sailing around Greenland, which was great, because I had both plenty of time, and also (as a book I'd previously read) not so much invested in it that I wasn't able to do other things on the ship.  Honestly, I said I always get new things out of it each time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because I get the same things out of it too: entertainment, drama, REVENGE, guilt, sorrow, love, and epic-ness.  Whatever else Dumas may have been, he was a hell of a story-teller. 


07: A Re-read Of A Favorite Book

Salt to the Sea

Salt to the Sea

By Ruta Sepetys

Winter 1945. WWII. Four refugees. Four stories.

Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies, war. As thousands desperately flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom. But not all promises can be kept . .

I was under a mistaken impression of this book.  I thought it was going to be like All the Light We Cannot See, but it's actually marked "YA" and was very short and easy to read.  Not like, short-short, but all the chapters are like, two pages each.  There's a lot of blank space in the book.  I finished it in less than two hours.  Salt to the Sea takes the viewpoints of four characters: a fifteen year old pregnant Polish girl, a repatriating Lithuanian nurse, a Nazi forger fleeing with treasure, and a budding young sociopath.  

As children's books about WWII go, it's not really breaking much new ground in the ideas that war is hell, Nazis were awful, and crimes against humanity were committed on a massive scale.  Where it does excel is in covering a geographic area and event that doesn't get much press: the sinking (spoiler!) of the Wilhem Gustlof off the coast of what is now Poland. It also focuses more on the shrinking eastern front of the war, as the Russians approached, sowing devastation and rape indiscriminately on whichever women were in their path.  There's also no shying away from the mass rapes committed by the Russians in their march west, as it plays a vital role in Emilia's story.

We spend a lot of time with the refugees just trying to get on to the boat, and relatively little on board, which makes sense, since the ship's journey was only supposed to take two days, and they were sunk ten hours into the trip.  It's a fascinating and engrossing look at the event, but obviously a KYA book can't be all things at once: there's a lot of side plot about Florian stealing bits from the Amber Room which his Nazi mentor hid away, which adds more subplot about another WWII mystery that I don't think the book necessarily needs (especially as Sepetys' tying it in this way is complete speculation), and it cuts what is perhaps the saddest note about the sinking: because it carried some Nazi officials, the boat was not marked as a hospital ship, so under the "rules of war" (what an oxymoron) the sinking of thousands of refugees and civilians was not a war crime.  Not that I think that thousands of women and children fleeing an encroaching army should shield Nazis, but it's such an ironic and poignant detail, I'm sorry that Sepetys wasn't able to work it in somehow.

It's fairly well written, all the parts with Alfred made my skin crawl (intentionally so) although I did kind of love that Hannelore's last proclamation to him was her Jewishness, a last "Fuck you" to the ultimate fuckboy.  The multiple narrators actually worked well for this, as we got both a variety of viewpoints and didn't spend too much time on any one person. 


19: A Book Told From Multiple POVs

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

By Seth Dickinson

Baru Cormorant believes any price is worth paying to liberate her people-even her soul.
When the Empire of Masks conquers her island home, overwrites her culture, criminalizes her customs, and murders one of her fathers, Baru vows to swallow her hate, join the Empire's civil service, and claw her way high enough to set her people free.

Sent as an Imperial agent to distant Aurdwynn, another conquered country, Baru discovers it's on the brink of rebellion. Drawn by the intriguing duchess Tain Hu into a circle of seditious dukes, Baru may be able to use her position to help. As she pursues a precarious balance between the rebels and a shadowy cabal within the Empire, she orchestrates a do-or-die gambit with freedom as the prize.

But the cost of winning the long game of saving her people may be far greater than Baru imagines.

I don't know what I can or should say about Traitor: I liked it well enough, but I did find it losing my attention as I tried to track names, characters, backstories, action.  There are thirteen duchies in Aurdwynn, and even despite the map at the beginning, I wasn't like, super on top of who was who.  Also, and here's the thing: in any book that revolves around betrayals (not any more a spoiler than the title, come on) there's going to be that plots-within-plots feeling that is a little bit expected and a little bit exhausting. Although it's not a surprise to the reader that Baru betrays the rebellion (or, it shouldn't be - if you've picked up on any of the hints, or read the fucking title of the book) Dickinson does a pretty good job still making you feel bad about it.

The plot felt a lot like Red Rising: child of the oppressed somehow infiltrates the ruling class and ends up in a competition/test to prove themselves while also gathering enough power to bring the ruling class down from within.   Traitor deals a lot more with the sticky political things: colonialism, and germ warfare, and economic subrogation, and religious tyranny.  It doesn't want to be an action/thriller, it wants to get at the idea of becoming the very thing you swore to destroy.  What if, in seeking to undo the crime done to you, you commit those very crimes against someone else? What good is revenge when you have already killed everything you meant to save?

The pace of the first section is pretty quick, as Baru makes it from island to school to posting to uncovering and imploding a rebel plot fairly quickly, but we spend more time in the later sections, where Baru first infiltrates the (newest) rebellion and then helps to win it, which I felt started to drag a little, if only because of the aforementioned need to remember names, backstories, action, and plots.  It's possible some of the convolution will pay off in later installments.  It can be so tricky to review firsts in a series that way.  I still remember JK Rowling promising big payoffs and answers to mysteries raised in the first couple of books that kind of fizzled out by the time she finished the seventh (i.e. why does Harry Potter have so much money in his vault, and I am so unsatisfied by the answer.  We waited ten years to find out his dad is just rich, really?).

I read the whole thing in one go, but a few days out, I'm just not feeling the need to read the sequel right now, which is a bad sign for me finishing the (forthcoming) quartet.  I think you get back to this idea of: how much time do you want to spend in a mind that is this unhappy, and in a world which is this difficult and unpleasant?  Even Baru's successes were in service to a greater tragedy, and there's a point at which it's just not that fun.  I enjoy a good revenge story - I'm very excited to be re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo for my final book - but Baru so far is unrelenting misery, and the reviews for The Monster Baru Cormorant sound like more of the same.  When are we going to get REVENGEEEEE?? Would I practice revenge in real life? No.  Do I want a revenge fantasy while Baru seems hell-bent on a realistic look at what revenge does to a person? YES.


One of the things I didn't like about Wonder Woman when it came out was this scene where they're trying to hold a war council and talking about sacrificing a town, and Diana's like, "How can you not try to save absolutely everyone?" which is such an unrealistic attitude to have in war.  Contrast that with The Imitation Game, which I just watched yesterday, when they realize they have to lie about cracking Enigma in order to prevent the Germans from changing their cipher, thereby sacrificing loads of people they could have saved for the greater good.  I appreciated that as being both a more realistic and a harder (and therefore more heartfelt) choice.  It's easy to just indiscriminately help people, it's harder when you have to decide who you will let die.  Here, Baru takes the stance that everyone is worth sacrificing, which I think tips the spectrum too far in the other direction - too easy when you only have one thing you want to save, you know it will always win. Baru is sort of like the anti-Wonder Woman in that respect.

We'll see how I go - I might end up waiting until the whole series is published and trying again then.

25: A Debut Novel

Five Days at Memorial

Five Days at Memorial

By Sheri Fink

This was an incredibly gripping book on the doctors, nurses, and patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent investigation into the numerous deaths there and accusations that patients were being euthanized (just as rescue helicopters were evacuating people again).  It's less concerned about pointing fingers or assigning blame than it is in warning how American social mores and patient care practices can break down in less than five days and how it might be prevented (or likely to occur) in the future.

Do I think that Dr. Anna Pou and her two assistants murdered at least nine and potentially eighteen patients? Yes.  Am I going to second guess her actions? Probably not.  However, although I was sympathetic to the conditions in Memorial (and in fact, all over the city, as this was not the only facility facing "suspicious" concentrations of morphine and midazolam in the bodies left behind), and I understand that the potential murder charges hang over her head, what I most aggrieved by was the complete lack of remorse, guilt, or doubt expressed by them and by their supporters after the fact.  Yes, you did what you thought was right at the time, and I don't doubt that you were despairing, after five days in post-Katrina conditions, fear, rumors, and foul smells, but when you left that hospital and realized that help had been available, that not everyone descended into chaos and death, I think that should have given you pause.  You made a mistake.  And it was life or death, and you chose poorly.  Face it.

It was only as we near the end of the book and you realize that not only did she have tunnel vision at the time, she's become entrenched into her position that I lost my sympathy for her.  Maybe it's a defensive mechanism to avoid having to examine her own actions more closely, but Fink's argument that this attitude of refusing other perspectives in end-of-life decisions can cause more harm than it purports to solve is a fairly persuasive one. There's a good argument that doctors, unfortunately, are human like the rest of us - (over)confident in their own skills, brought low by disaster, unending work and stress, and, while willing to make the "hard" decisions, unwilling to open that decision to criticism.  Of course, other actors in the justice process fucked up too, and maybe it could have been an opportunity for a discussion, but instead the whole indictment just screwed everybody over. This review is a bit longer than intended, and the book is no novella either, but it's worth a read.

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

This is a tough one to review, because this book has been exhaustively picked over - the edition I read came with like, ten mini-essays in the back, PLUS a foreword PLUS like, Ray Bradbury's notes on everything.  Let me start by saying that I was already very familiar with the story (who isn't, at this point) but not like, the "plot".  I put that in quotation marks because the plot is definitely not the main attraction for Bradbury.  Neil Gaiman wrote the intro on my copy, and he basically said, readers today have to recreate a past that created a future, which was good warning, because they are super casual about atom bombs in Fahrenheit 451 and that is because they didn't really know that they were making radioactive hellscapes and so being like, hey, let's walk back to the city makes a lot more sense.

I was... not super impressed? It's that weird hurky jerky style where people can only speak in deeply meaningful abrupt phrases, which resembles actual human conversation not at all, and Bradbury can be super flowery it at points, especially in the beginning.  This is page 3:

"The autumn leaves blew over the pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and leaves carry her forward.  Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves.  Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting."

He also has a white fixation that was distracting, honestly: Clarisse was white, his wife was white, the books were white, stones were white, if there's any color described ever, it's white. Snow white, milk white, moon white, pale white, on and on and on.

It's interesting that part of the underlying premise of Fahrenheit is that the onset of special interest groups leads to the destruction of books, because each group finds something objectionable and censors it until eventually there is nothing left.  Interesting, because I feel like that has become such a popular position to take nowadays, that "political correctness is ruining free speech" and yet no one has brought Bradbury in on their side.  Probably because the people arguing it are not really here for fine literature.  And ironic because the people arguing it are those most likely to advocate for a prison society. 

I thought of a great way to end this review, but it was late at night and I was going to bed and didn't write it down.  You'll just have to imagine it.  Also, and not to sidetrack the issue, I just realized I've been imagining the world of Fahrenheit 451 as completely pastel colored, and I have no idea why.  Maybe because the whole thing strikes me as suburbia gone wild, and I have this weird association of suburbia and pastel colors since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Gosh, I wish I knew how brains worked. Aaand we've come full circle for discussion of nuclear bombs!  Excellent! (let's ignore the fact that I just re-watched that scene and it is not pastel at all.  What the hell am I thinking of, then? Gosh darn it, it should be pastel! And I just looked up Stromae's music video for Papaoutai, which I ALSO thought was pastel, and it...only sort of is, and I'm out of ideas, so who knows where I came up with that, but it sure makes Fahrenheit 451 less spooky.  I'd love living in a pastel neighborhood.  It would almost make up for living in a dystopic version of the future.)

*No, I am not thinking of Edward Scissorhands, I've only seen parts of that movie, and that had to have been at least twenty years ago. Or am I? Isn't that a horrible thought, that something I saw only a glimpse of a lifetime ago would continue to distort every recollection I have?  Now, let's write a book based on that nightmare.

05 - A Book With At Least One Million Ratings On Goodreads

The Hunger

The Hunger

By Alma Katsu

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape tragedy...or the feelings that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it's a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history.

As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.

What was incredibly startling to me was how little of The Hunger was made up.  There was so much bad shit going on with that wagon train from Day 1, a supernatural explanation was practically required. Mysterious deaths, fraudulent trail blazers, literal SIGNS telling you to go back?  Honestly, this book is spooky in all the right ways; I had nightmares after reading it.

The Hunger may not be completely surprising (I mean, I did have to tell my thirty-three year old boyfriend what happened to the Donner Party, but I think that's because he emo'd his way through grade school and didn't pay attention in class) but it incorporates real events and horror very seamlessly.  There's a lot of characters involved (there were around 80 members of the Party) but Katsu wisely focuses on just a few narrators.  Some of the ominous forebodings do turn out to be red herrings - Stanton's early dalliance with Tamsen Donner and subsequent significant looks winds up having no bearing on any of the action later.  Nor, in fact, does anything have to do with Tamsen's supposed witchcraft.

Did I guess who the evildoer was?  Um, not really, even though it was perfectly clear from the prologue.  Again, the facts aligned so easily, I'm not even sure how you explain his actions and survival in a non-supernatural way.  That being said, Katsu's job had to have been incredibly hard, to interweave the truth and fiction as well as she did. Although I imagine it helped to have a truth stranger-than-fiction. 

I very much enjoyed it, although for whatever reason I didn't find the last half as quietly engrossing and unsettling as the first half - perhaps because I anticipated death, perhaps because the monster you see is not always as frightening as the one you imagine. There's also relatively little gore, it seems like a lot of it takes place off-page.  All-in-all a very engrossing and semi-unusual horror story, given the setting and characters.  Five (severed and eaten) thumbs up!


38: A Novel Based On A True Story

The Brides of Rollrock Island

The Brides of Rollrock Island, by Margo Lanagan

On remote Rollrock Island, men make their living - and fetch their wives - from the sea.  The witch Misskaella knows how to find the girl at the heart of a seal.  She'll coax a beauty from the beast for any man, for a price.  And what man wouldn't want a sea-wife, to have and to hold, and to keep by his side forever?

But though he may tell himself that he is the master, one look in his new bride's eyes will transform him just as much as it changes her.  Both will be ensnared - and the witch will look on, laughing. 

I've re-started this review, like, five times, and you all are damn lucky that I did because this morning I was high on some fabulous music, and that never turns out well.  A whole lotta shakin' goin' on.  I've gotten pretty far from the mood I was in when I finished this book, a week ago.  I definitely thought that more time would assist in my writing a "review" but clearly that was a wash. 

Moving on:  So TBoRI, henceforth to be abbreviated to. . . Bride Island.  Because nothing says appreciation like being too lazy to fully type out a title.  And I did appreciate this book!  Actually, I had bypassed it in the library because the description and the cover (I know, I know, never judge a book by its cover, what up) kinda said "melodramatic teen girl dramaz" and I was not in the mood for it.  But my momma recommended it, and momma says, baby do. 

The book starts with a brief vignette, before going back in time to Misskaella's youth - the constant teasing and comments from her siblings and townsfolk, condemning her for her otherness (apparently, the entire island is redheaded and kinky, except for Misskaella, which begs the question of how closely related they all are that a recessive gene is town gossip). So anyhow, Misskaella doesn't really fit in, and people give her crap all the time about how she is shaped like a seal, which means that when she is left without financial support, she doesn't really care two hoots about the probable negative consequences to creating human ladies out of seals for the horny menfolk.  (This review is getting out of hand, y'all. BUT I CAN'T STOP).

Okay, the good part of this book is that things will happen, and you'll kinda go, "How are we going to extricate ourselves from this sitch?" Because each step in this path just gets more and more untenable.  From drawing brides out of the seals, to the women abandoning their former husbands on the island, to the sealbaby hybrids growing up and there being no daughters and and and.  It's just not a workable long term plan is what I'm saying.  And yet each new development comes naturally, and never at any point do you go, Well, If I had a deus ex machina, I could get away with some crazy shit too.  It's of a piece.  There is not one false note, one piece which removes you from the story and makes you question it.  To be awfully maudlin, you are wrapped up in the tale as much as the mams are wrapped up in skins. 

TBoRI is an interesting look at gender politics.  I maintain that the reason the men were so transfixed by the selkies is that there was witch magic involved as well, but my mother thinks that the men were simply weak willed.  The difference between an optimist and a pessimist, I think.  It's hard to forget that horrifying scene wherein the men begin bringing back the selkies wholesale, and the father reveals that he's been stashing this selkie in a small back shed next to the house where his wife and children live.  It definitely hearkens to those awful sex slavery cases in real life, and Connie Willis' All My Darling Daughters, where you're sacrificing a creature not fully human to sexual abuse and base desires. Some people complain that of all the perspectives in the narrative (variously the witch, a child, and a man) there is none which comes from the brides themselves.  I think it's well done, because the brides themselves are so wholly disenfranchised, so completely without recourse or a voice in the chain of events which occur.  One of the only times we see a selkie taking her own initiative, she is running into the sea, killing herself over her heartbreak. 

When you finish, you feel as though you've learned something, but it's hard to say exactly what that is - be kinder, perhaps, to the ones around you, don't hold onto to something so hard that you choke the life out of it - if you love something, set it free.  Even after the great pied piper migration, after things begin re-setting themselves, you wonder at whether things have really changed. It's clear that some men are still so hard as to be glad that their former brides are being hunted as animals and rendered down, as Lanagan puts it. 

The book is balanced such that it's poetical enough to seem a dream, but real enough to stick with you after you close it.  It's the mark of a well-written book that a simple, toss-away phrase in the first page strikes you so much that you hold it in mind for the rest of the book.  When I was looking for it again, I almost couldn't find it, it was so wrapped up in a paragraph.  It's a far cry from some books which are only keeping me half interested, skimming and skipping over the prose. You feel salted afterwards, so real is the sea breeze.

So, TBoRI is a wonder, sure enough, though as I expressed to my mother, it did not make me sob, and therefore, was not close to catching Jellicoe Road in my heart.  It is hard enough to forget, that's for sure.  And certainly not a teen melodrama at all. And let that be a lesson to you: listen to your mama, and if she yearns for the sea, let her be.

Code Name: Verity

Codename: Verity, by Elizabeth Wein 

Oct. 11th, 1943—A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.

When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.

As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage and failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy? 

Happy New Year!  I've decided to celebrate a day off in the middle of the week by reading about young female spies getting tortured in World War II.  I think I've talked before about the overabundance of WWII kid's fic out there, but Codename Verity is a worthy addition to any collection.  My mother, bless her heart, read it before giving it to me with her recommendation, but I wasn't feeling it the last time I picked it up, several months ago.  It was one of those things where I'd heard too much about the book, and had gotten the impression that there was some "twist" to it, and I was taking everything with such grains of salt I couldn't concentrate on the story.

Which is: a plane with two travelers is shot and crashes, but not before one passenger parachutes out: Verity, an English (Scottish) spy, meant to join up with the French Resistance on a secret mission,  gets discovered not more than a week after she lands, captured and unable to talk her way out of it without the necessary faked papers, which were accidentally switched with that of her pilot and best friend, Maddie Brodatt. The first half of the book is the story of the two girls' (I keep saying girls, even though they're clearly old enough to have excelled at their respective dirty jobs) mutual history to the fatal crash-landing.

This is where I got tripped up: the idea that this Verity character would be writing the truth for the Germans was so implausible, that I was really strung out thinking - was this a lie? Was this?  In fact, I was pretty sure throughout most of that first section, that Verity was not Queenie, but Maddie herself, pretending to be the other girl for some unknown reason.  Lest you be led astray as I was, let me reassure you: Maddie is Maddie and Verity is Queenie (aka Julie).  I was also ticked off by the leniency with which Verity was (apparently) given to write her story: she goes off on a lot of tangents, most of which serve no purpose other than (as we discover later) as coded messages to the Resistance.  Given that Verity could not have reasonably expected the papers to make it back to the Resistance (at least, not with any real confidence, especially in the beginning), it seems odd that she would have (and could have) written her papers with two such disparate audiences in mind.  I suppose she was hopeful on the off chance they could get smuggled out, but then why did the Germans permit it?  Very odd.

Because I didn't see much point in anything Verity wrote, I was therefore less impressed at her repression of more relevant facts relating to the secret mission.  Since she clearly had to have known more than just what was in the record, it's hard for me to say that she did a great job not telling any of that.  Well, obviously, she was tortured.  But they kept her alive for weeks, ostensibly for the purpose of this written record of key information, and they don't even attempt to get the basis for her mission in France?  Not that it would have mattered in the long run, since she would have lied about it, but it hurts the story, I think, for the reader not to be convinced along with the Germans, of a cover story.  Most of what Verity writes is true, but useless (and the parts that aren't true I found pointless - lies about it being a Beaufort plane, not a Lysander one - eh?).  I was expecting relevant lies.

What is impressive is how well Ms. Wein manages to convey the friendship between Maddie and Verity, even though they aren't together for most of the book: they meet, train up in separate locations, then spend a few missions traveling together before their final fateful trek to France, whereupon they are immediately separated. However, they share a boundless love for each other, which comes across clearly in each narration in the book.  Maddie's final sacrifice is heart-breaking, and I will confess, I did start crying, though the book continues for so much longer that I was quite dry-eyed by the last page.  It is refreshing that this is not just another one of those teen love-triangle books, of which there are far too many (girl falls in love with boy, but they cannot be together due to: a dystopian society/sudden onset lycanthropy/he's actually 300 years older than her and that's super creepy, stop acting like it's not).

I think a reader would benefit from multiple readings: Verity's narration, in particular, contains multitudes, which I could not begin to unpick today.  It also contains quite a lot of mechanical talk about airplanes, especially at first.  It's like the whale chapters in Moby Dick - you just have to get through them, but lordy are they ever a drag.  The author is a pilot herself, and it does show.  Stylistically, I think it would also benefit from not underlining certain sentences about the Gestapo headquarters - you'll see what I mean.  It does make things jump out at you (as it's intended to), but given that we're treated to a run-down of it all later anyway, I think it would be doing more of a service to readers to make them go back to find it themselves. 

I thought it was a good book, a worthwhile book, but the feeling of being manipulated was not worth the pay-off of finding out what Verity was lying about.  Perhaps when I'm feeling less raw about it, I'll return to it.  Because that's the thing: this book does kick you in the stomach.  I'm still reeling from it.  It's not a very comfortable read, but I do sort of feel like finding an online discussion of it, sort of like joining a support group: CNV Survivors, we'll get t-shirts made. 

John Green Double Header Sunday

I just want you all to know, before we begin, that I am in the midst of day 4 of what is going to be a twelve day streak of unbearably hot and muggy weather, and that I am sitting on the floor on a pile of cushions (I've always doubted the fact that heat rises, since I've never felt any difference, but apparently it has to be roughly as hot as Tatooine before there's a measurable benefit to sitting on the floor), typing away while the thermostat slowly creeps higher and higher.  Actually, what I really want to do is complain about my utility bills and my hatred of air conditioner window units, but since that's neither relevant nor interesting, I suppose I will talk about these books. 


The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

Despite a tumor shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis.  But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.

Let's get the elephant out of room right off the bat, okay?  How many of you were shocked, shocked, that the book did not end in the midst of a sentence?  I know, right?  I had the experience of reading this entire book in increments while in the bathroom, so, as you can imagine, it took me awhile (I was going alright, until it got warm enough that I had to open my bathroom window for the breeze to get in, and then I stopped turning on the light when I was in there because I didn't want to neighbors to see in, and it's pretty hard to read in the dark).  So anyway, in the months between when I first read that section about how An Imperial Affliction ends, and the end of this book, I totally built it up in my head that this one was going to go out in the middle of a sentence, and I have to tell you, I was super excited about it.  Like, at first, yes, I hate open-ended books (see below), but you know, when you have a few weeks to prepare yourself for it, you kind of get a little disappointed when it turns out to end on a period.

I told you about the bathroom thing in part because of that, but also to explain why I didn't cry at the end, they way you're supposed to.  It's like that scene in The Princess Bride (and how sad is it that I had to look up whether it was "a" princess bride or "the" princess bride, like, yeah, there's a bunch of 'em roaming around, can't throw a stone without hitting one) where Westley dies, and our narrator has to build a wall around his heart before he can go on with the story, except with this book, the ratio of heartbreaking stuff to time to prepare for it was super one-sided, and I definitely had time to clear each hurdle before the next one popped up, although I gotta say, my grinch-like heart did twinge a few times.

It is a sad book, I mean, it's at the crossroads of, books where kids die, and books where your true love goes away, plus like, books where your hero turns out to be a humbug, times cancer, so you know it's not going to end well.  But, obviously (or at least, obviously to me), it's about the fact that there's more underneath the surface, and even though they might end up being that kid who died of cancer, that's not who they were.  The other thing that stuck out to me was their wish to leave a mark, to make a difference in the world.  It's a theme that's somewhat echoed in An Abundance of Katherines, but it makes more sense here, where they know that there's only a little time to make that mark.  I don't remember thinking about that at all when I was growing up, but it is something that's on my mind more and more; this idea that you want people to remember you, you want to have done something, accomplished something, lived life like an adventure and not just a routine.  And it's true, though, that you could do none of those things, and still leave grief behind you when you go.  You don't have to have created something wondrous to be an important person.

This whole book is basically that line in the poem, "Tis better to have loved and lost/than never to have loved at all." (Tennyson, bitches).  It's also that movie French Kiss, which isn't quite as literary as Tennyson, but is vastly more enjoyable, where Meg Ryan goes on about how you can't protect yourself from getting hurt - "There's no home safe enough, there's no country nice enough, there's no relationship secure enough. You're just setting yourself up for an even bigger fall, and having an incredibly boring time in the process."  You are going to be hurt, but as Augustus Waters says, you can choose who hurts you.

Yay, let's move on to characters: they were pretty cool, yo.  I appreciated the wit in this story, the facility each person had with language.  It's not realistic, really, but it's similar to the way scripted television approximates life (and here I'm thinking more Buffy than, say Pretty Little Liars), an approximation, but a funny one, one that you wish you could be half as cool as.  It was interesting to me (as a person who does not have cancer, nor knows any one younger than sixty who has had cancer) to see that Hazel was about as irritated by the schmaltzy stuff as I would have been.  Possibly even more so, since I would have tried at least to have some reverence for people who are in imminent danger of dying.  I guess though, that's the thing - once you're the one doing the dying, you don't feel the same urge to give them leeway in being ridiculous.

One thing I did not appreciate was the return of Peter Van Houten.  I really enjoyed the way he was a complete asshole to these kids, but I thought the fact that he had secret pain and that's why he was a big old jerk was just too convenient.  Or, well, not convenient, but coincidental, I guess.  But not that either, more like a weird mix of those plus . . . . okay, I have to pause this, because a fly is swimming in my cherry water/vanilla ice cream float remnants.  Well, not so much swimming as "drowning" I think, since it keeps sitting up and then just sort of flailing.  I have to go take care of this.  The only thing worse than a hardened residue of ice cream at the bottom of a glass is a hardened residue of ice cream and a dead fly at the bottom of a glass. 

I don't want to sound cruel or anything, but that fly did not take long at all to die. 

Moving on, I did like the book, but even though it discussed a lot of meaningful things, I still felt like it only brushed the surface, maybe even because it discussed these things.  Sometimes, it's felt more deeply when there are no words to use, and that did happen here as well, and I understand that part of the point was that they had to use humor and words to cover up the fear and pain, or go mad, but sometimes you just want a good breakdown.  I guess my problem was the same from the very beginning: I wanted a sudden shock of half-written sentence, not the slow realization of a goodbye note. 

But it's still very good, and funny, and not at all forgettable or hard to keep track of from one page to the next, which is essential in a book that you're reading in two minute increments, I've come to find.



An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type is girls named Katherine.  And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped.  Nineteen times, to be exact.  On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and on over-weight Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun - but no Katherines.  Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and may finally win him the girl.

The weirdest thing about this book, is the way that all of Hassan's dialogue, I heard with Aasif Mandvi's accent, which is terrible, since I know that Mr. Mandvi has to deal with "brown-typing" (I put that in quotes, not trying to imply that I don't believe it happens, just that I'm not sure whether that's a real word or one I made up, but even if it is made up, I think it gets the idea across pretty well).  Although now that I think about it, that's not a weird thing about the book so much as it is a weird thing about me.

I found myself vaguely dissatisfied with this book.  Unlike The Fault in Our Stars, I read it all in one day, today, in fact, so it was a much brisker experience.

[PSA: It has now reached the late afternoon/early evening portion of the day, in which everything just sort of heats up like an oven, especially the room where the computer is, and literally every pore on my body is emitting sweat, so what I'm basically trying to say is that if there are typos in this section, fuck you, man, I'm not staying up here any longer than I have to. Forewarned is forearmed.]

The thing about these books that I'm reading, apparently, is that I want them to be one thing, and then they turn out to be something else, and then I get pissy about it.  For example, I wanted this book to be a hilarious road trip book about Colin and Hassan, where they travel the country and meet weird people and see weird places and then wind up back in Chicago and go to college.  Instead, they have a one-chapter road trip, and wind up staying in Tennessee for the rest of the book, which is okay, I guess.  I dunno, maybe if Colin hadn't ended up with Lindsey?  I just want him to realize that he doesn't have to be in a relationship, with a Katherine or without.  I'm all, power to Hassan, because he seems like someone who isn't hung up on himself.  Unlike Colin, who is worried he's already peaked at age thirteen.  I just didn't finish the book with any faith that this relationship is going to be any better than his previous ones, besides the fact that she's named Lindsey, not Katherine.  Also, he's apparently going to school at Northwestern, and she's going to go be a paramedic, so they're basically going to be breaking up as soon as he goes back home anyway, right?

I guess I'm just confused.  What was the end result of the book?  Besides the realization that you cannot actually chart a relationship (which, if Colin honestly did need to come to that realization, then that is just plain sad) I guess the point is that even if Colin wasn't the dumpee in all those relationships, the important thing was that he had believed he was. I could definitely have done without that sub-plot.  It just baffled me that Lindsey found Colin in any way attractive, although we are talking about the same girl who wanted to date a guy who gave her dog food as a valentine.

Even though I was bored by all the Lindsey/Colin scenes, I did enjoy most everything else, especially the pig-hunt. Every one loves a feral pig, amirite?  This one had the same snappy dialogue as The Fault in Our Stars, but the central character and relationship was not as entertaining, like I said.  Plus, you got me all upset because it just ends while they're all in Tennessee still, like, is Hollis going to pay them $1,000 a week now that they know the factory is going under (and why would she offer such an exorbitant rate anyway?), and is The Other Colin still intent on beating them up, and what the the relationship theorem say about Hassan and Katrina's short-lived fling?   

 I do think this would be a visually entertaining book (as The Fault in Our Stars could be; they're both very cinematic) so if, as the notes say, it is going to be made into a movie, I think it could be delightful.  It's not a bad way to spend a hot Sunday afternoon, that's for sure.

Hush

Hush, by"Eishes Chayil"

Inside the closed community of Borough Park, where Brooklyn's Chassidim live, the rules of life - everything from how to dress to whom to marry - are very clear, determined to the last detail by an ancient script written thousands of years before. Then young Gittel witnesses an unspeakable act of violence against her best friend, Devory, an act that goes against everything she's been taught as a Jew. For the first time in her life, there are no guidelines to tell her what to do, so she remains silent. But even inaction has consequences, and sometimes they are deadly.

Now a teenager, Gittel is racked with guilt over the choices she made and those that were forced upon her by the community she once trusted. She must question everything about herself - her own innocence, her memories of the past, and the beliefs of her sect - to find peace for Devory and for herself.

Hush bears a lot of similarities to Fox Girl - starting with the opening narration. In Fox Girl, Hyun Jin dreams of her friend Sookie, from years past; in Hush, Gittel speaks to her best friend, Devory, whom we are told is dead. I really enjoyed Hush, and I hope that anyone reading this will not be dissuaded from picking it up when I say it resembles Fox Girl once again, as it deals with child sexual abuse, albeit in a radically different setting. Hush is set in a Jewish Orthodox community in New York in 2008, although it could easily have taken place anytime in the last fifty years, as the readers realize how little this community has changed, and indeed how they make this immutability a canon of their religious and social lives. The particular Chassidim (perhaps more commonly known as Hasidic Jews) in Hush are fictionalized (as is the author's name - Eishes Chayil is a pseudonym meaning Woman of Valor), but that a large pocket of such people live in Borough Park in Brooklyn is not. In fact, if you watch The Daily Show, you may recall an episode about the erection of an eruv in Westhampton Beach in March of this year, which is a boundary line enclosing a Chassidic community space. They also made the news last month, in much sadder circumstances, when a young Chassidic boy was found dismembered after a two-day long search after he missing on his way home from school. And now that I've made you all depressed, time to talk about Hush!

Besides being a moving book about child abuse and trauma, it's also an engrossing peek into an entirely different kind of world (at least for me, and I dunno about you all, but I doubt very much I have a large, or even existent, Hasidic readership. Feel free to lambast me about it in the comments). It is a world so divorced from my own experiences, I did doubt at times that it was even possible. How could one maintain such ignorance and such isolation in this period of over-sharing and intrusiveness? Gittel, to us, has only a child's knowledge of the world - she doesn't know facts about the human body that I learned by the time I was ten - and one of craziest (and most hilarious) scenes in the book is when she gets into an argument with her husband about the fact that she has breasts. Cause, you know, he's never seen 'em on a Chassidish woman before. At last, the bra's true purpose of destroying the very fabric of society is revealed!

Hush is actually two halves - the first is set in 2008 and flashes back to 1999, when Devory and Gittel are nine years old. The second half takes place entirely in the present, from 2008 to 2010. Hush concerns itself more with the aftereffects of the trauma than the trauma itself. We see the terrible burden that being the survivor has placed on Gittel. The problem here is not that no one cares about what is being done to their children, but that in a community which prides itself on adherence to rules they have been following for thousands of years, and a vast gulf between their world and the outside world, there is no outlet for this situation. It is a shameful secret which brings more condemnation on those who tell their stories and rock the boat than on those who commit the assault. These things are hushed up, not to protect the perpetrators, but to protect the innocent.

The results are predictably catastrophic. With no way to comprehend what she has seen, and no outlet for her questions and her story, Gittel turns all her guilt inward. Even though she was only a child, and even though she did her best to speak for Devory, she winds up blaming herself for not doing more, for not bringing the wrath of the community down on her, if it would have saved her friend. One thing I particularly liked about this book was the loving relationship Gittel had with her own family, especially her father. Her parents don't repress her out of malice, but out of love, out of the knowledge that Gittel's future will be forever stained if the truth comes out. And even though you shrink from a community which has such beliefs that they would punish the victim over the abuser, by the end of the book, you realize that this isn't because of any ill-motive, but because they see this as one more threat to their way of life, a way of life that they have all fought hard to maintain. It is the great irony of the book that such terrible actions come from a place of love. I've tagged this entry as "tragedy" but it isn't, really, because by the end of the book, Gittel has spoken, and she has opened a light into this world, and it has not destroyed them all.

The first half of the book is Gittel coming to terms herself with what happened, and finally being able to name it as rape. I liked the second half better, since it had more humor, but this part was compelling and necessary to realize the impact that it had on her, years later. Gittel was in the position of seeing Devory's cries for help, but being unable to do anything about them. You feel though her not only the trauma of having seen this horror, but having everyone pretend that it did not happen, which compounds the original horror tenfold. It is only through her goyim (non-Jewish) neighbor that she gathers the courage to speak to a social worker about it.

The second half deals with Gittel's marriage, and her publication of the truth. I will admit, I cried a bit when Gittel wrote her public letter to Devory. Which is the greater crime, the rape of a nine-year old child, or the systematic repression of the truth? I can only hope that a similar sea change is sweeping the Orthodox community, as it is only with knowledge and openness that such crimes can be combated.

I was incredibly fascinated with all the details of Gittel's life - the ban on pets and televisions, the one-track future for the girls, the ritualized cleaning, the expensive hats, the arranged marriages, and the pressure to bear children. Gittel and her husband are two perfectly reasonable, nice people, and yet the rigid guidelines of their lives put them so much at odds. The only thing keeping them together is this common faith, and yet that same faith prohibits even a comforting touch, or a frank discussion. It's a wonder to think that more people don't go round the twist.

Hush is certainly eye-opening, and it's an incredible account simply of what it means to be a Hasidic girl in New York. It also manages to make the Chassidim sympthetic, which is harder than it sounds, given that they have allowed child sexual abuse to flourish under their watch, out of fear. Gittel is also a charming narrator, and you get a feel for her character - stubborn and just as difficult as any adolescent going through puberty, and yet godly and strong in her faith. I was exceptionally pleased for her when her husband turned out to be such a stand up fellow. There is such a danger of abuse, given that this faith and community rests on the fragile pact each member has made to abide by the rules, which are obviously not designed for slackers.

The author has the ability to find the humor in the odd situations her characters' background puts them in, like when Gittel and her parents get so excited about a possible match they forget to ask his name or even if he speaks English, or when Gittel gets into a debate with her cousin about which sect is holier, the litvish or the Chassidish, and it devolves into an argument about whether a husband ought to help his wife with the dishes. As it turns out, nine year-olds are nine year-olds and teenagers are teenagers no matter if they grow up to get married at eighteen, or go on to a co-ed dormitory in college. Everyone has had that experience of accidentally turning out the lights on Shabbos, and everyone has sulked about the resultant scolding.

At last, we end on a message of forgiveness and hope, and of a bright future for Gittel, in which the memory of Devory has finally been sapped of its bitterness. Gittel says that the day of marriage is when a Jew is reborn, but it seems to me that Gittel gets reborn the day she's finally able to say goodbye to Devory.





And a final note to apologize if I screwed up any of them tenses of terms - I'm not sure about the endings on some of the words, so I sort of went with what made sense at the time.