Bout of Books 8.0: Sunday

This morning was a grey, dull day and impossible to wake up. A single coffee wasn't enough, and unfortunately I've been feeling and acting somewhat like a she-Hulk this morning. Sincere apologies to those who were on the receiving end. Have a Nutella cupcake as a peace offering. She-Hulk likes baking cake, apparently.

I haven't done a lot of reading, again, today, because I got stuck writing a new scene for my Rilla of Ingleside adaptation. (Actual writing, guys! Two days in a row!) Where yesterday's work involved a lot of typing up from the original work, reworking speeches and scenes, today I had to use my imagination to flesh out characters who are important in the series but don't have an awful lot of on-screen time in the novel. In particular, though this is the story of the younger generation, I wanted to make Anne and Gilbert still recognizable as the characters countless readers have fallen in love with. In Rilla, they are mostly just Doctor Blythe and his wife: wise and patient and lacking the spark that makes their personalities so, well, them. 

I'm up to the 19th century in Necropolis, which has described the shift in people's attitudes to death over the years, from pragmatic acceptance to sentimentality, from memento mori to lavish memorials. The book also, briefly, told of 23-year-old Jane Webb, author of a book

Set in 2126, in an England that had reverted to absolute monarchy, this featured prototypes for espresso machines, air-conditioning and, most prophetically, 'a communication system that permitted instant world dissemination of news.'

This chick predicted the internet. Why have we never heard of her? And they say there's no place for women in science fiction!

I don't expect to finish Necropolis tonight. I plan to watch a couple of episodes of one of my many box sets, then have an early night. (It may be a bank holiday tomorrow, but I still have to work. Here's hoping for a sunny day so that everyone'll go to the beach and let me make a start on my huge list of things to be done this week.)

All in all, it's been a good readathon. I didn't expect to read all of the books on my list - Cuckoo's Calling and Perdido Street Station are still outstanding - but my to-read pile is starting to look like it's getting under control now. I must rectify that.

Tell The Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt

Sometimes you only have to pick up a book to know it's going to be something special. I'd never heard of Carol Rifka Brunt's novel Tell The Wolves I'm Home when I found it at work the other day, and yet I knew before I even read the cover blurb that it had the potential to be a good friend. Maybe it's the wistful dreaminess of the title, or the striking, bright green cover design. I prefer to think that it was some kind of magic inside the book itself, calling out to me, knowing that it had found a kindred spirit.

I returned to look at this book several times while working in the bookshop, and when I found a shiny new copy in the library a few days later, I knew it was meant to be. Tell The Wolves I'm Home is the story of an introverted teenage girl, June, dealing with the death of her uncle Finn, who was her closest friend and confidant, from AIDS. Through her grief, she strikes up an unlikely secret friendship with Toby, Finn's partner, and gets to know her uncle better through Toby's memories. 

Tell The Wolves is a story about love and loss, but also of finding, growing up, death and life, loneliness and jealousy, but at its heart, it is a tale of family. The book brings the reader into June's family, and gradually, although the primary relationship is between June and Finn - both living and dead - it becomes clear that the bond between June and her sister Greta is as important, or, I would argue, even more so. The sisters were close as children, but in their teenage years have grown apart. Greta appears at first as that familiar figure, the mean elder sister; the grumpy, rebellious teenager who can't help but pick on her shyer younger sister. But the reader comes to realise, long before June does, that Greta is lonely too. Greta starts off as a background figure in the novel, which is how June sees her; while she is so preoccupied with the absence of Finn, she misses the sister who is right beside her, trying in a clumsy way to reach out to her. June and Greta echo the fragile and fractured relationship between Finn and their mother Danni, who was his sister. Once close, they had let secrets, jealousy and resentment come between them, never to be fully resolved. 

Finn was once a famous artist, but one who disappeared from public life some time ago. His final work is a portrait of June and Greta, which is the object at the centre of the novel. The painting lives on as Finn's legacy, and is added to by all those who loved the artist most, becoming a collaborative work containing parts of each of them. Tell The Wolves I'm Home demonstrates how each person's life touches many others, how we are formed by the relationships we make and the people we meet. After Finn's death, June discovers that many of his quirks and traits had originated from Toby, and in turn, she sees much of Finn in Toby. Perhaps because of this, I found it a bit difficult to view Toby and Finn as separate characters, and wondered whether June was looking for a substitute Finn in her new friendship with Toby, an issue that is addressed in the novel.

June is a thoughtful girl and mature for her age, so it would come as a bit of a shock whenever I was reminded that after all, she is still very young. Fourteen is a strange age when one is part child, part adult, and sometimes the two parts don't sit well together at all. The busyness of June's parents make it easier for her to take the train from the suburbs into New York City without their knowledge, and a couple of times I wondered why the secrecy? Surely it would be better to discuss Toby, Finn and all the unresolved issues between the families as adults, though they may have to get through some unpleasantness first? And then I remembered that they aren't all adults. I remembered how powerless you are at fourteen. If adults say no, they won't discuss something, then you can't make them. They can stop you seeing someone, going somewhere, doing anything. Finn (and later Toby) was the exception in treating June as an equal.

Tell The Wolves I'm Home touched me close to the heart. June reminded me of myself as a teenager - shy and always an outsider, though I think that despite her quietness she had more confidence in herself as a person than I did at her age. The story, too, reminded me of the stories I would write in my teens - which is not in itself a recommendation, as I was inclined towards the sentimental and the morbid. Carol Rifka Brunt avoids crossing the line into sentimentality with her lyrical prose and strong characters and relationships. Tell The Wolves I'm Home is a very beautiful, very human story, and I closed the book with reluctance. The best new book I've read this year so far. I will be buying my own copy of this book, and it will take its place on my "favourites" shelf.

If you enjoyed this, you might like:

When God was a Rabbit - Sarah Winman
A Place of Secrets - Rachel Hore
Paper Towns - John Green

Eve Green - Susan Fletcher
The Earth Hums in B Flat - Mari Strachan

Mini-review: The Fault In Our Stars, John Green

 Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never beenanything 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. (cover blurb) 

The Fault in Our Stars is one of those intensely human books that make you laugh even while your eyes are full of tears and you can't read any further. Hazel and Augustus are clever, witty teenagers, quirky thinkers that you can't help loving immediately. Their relationship is fun and natural, and made me really believe in love again. By 200 pages in, I just couldn''t imagine the world without them. But this book is about both life and death, with two teenage cancer sufferers falling in love even while facing their own mortality, and it's not fair.

How can any single book be so funny, so uplifting and so heartbreaking all at once? I guess that's what life is. With a few, well-chosen words in the right order, John Green makes poetry of simple prose and helps to bring understanding of the incomprehensible almost within reach. Green is without doubt one of the cleverest writers for teens out there. He knows.

Special kudos to Green for his correct identification, use and strategic abuse of the word "literally," and for his understanding of what star-crossed lovers really are.

Artichoke Hearts, Sita Brahmachari

Mira Levenson has just turned twelve and her world is becoming a strange and unrecogniseable place. Her Nana Josie, always so artistic, passionate and full of life, is dying; she can't stop thinking about Jidé Jackson, whose confident, joky manner hides a tragic history and a sensitive soul. Mira is changing. Sometimes she catches her mouth saying what she didn't intend to say, speaking out when she's always been so shy, or alternatively keeping secrets to herself. Nothing particularly drastic, she just doesn't feel like sharing everything with everybody.

There are a lot of books for teenagers that deal with the aftermath of the death of a loved one. Artichoke Hearts actually seemed to be targetted at the younger end of the Young Adult range (11+) but is unusual in exploring a terminal illness, and the feelings of helplessness of those who can only watch as a relative approaches death, and Brahmachari writes this with simplicity but a great deal of maturity. Nana Josie is early on established as a vivacious, artistic woman, a former hippy and passionate protester. Early on, there is a moment of dark, uncomfortable humour, as she embarks on her big artistic project: to paint her own coffin. It is heartbreaking to watch such a lively person fade.

The artichoke of the title refer to a charm given to Mira by Nana Josie, a symbol of the human heart, and how with age and experience, a heart which may seem to break grows tough layers to protect it, like the layers of an artichoke. The novel is a sweet, beautiful coming-of-age story, showing a child starting to learn who she is. Mira is a quiet girl, artistic and thoughtful, but through the sadness of seeing her grandmother die, the strangeness of early adolescence and the sweetness of a first romance, she grows in confidence and self-awareness. The characters are all very-well rounded individuals, and I think that Jidé Jackson is one of the loveliest boyfriends I've encountered in a kids' or teen book for a long time - and he's only twelve.

Read for the Support Your Local
Library Challenge 2011

One way that Mira grows in her understanding is in her extracurricular creative writing class, which is led by writer Miss Pat Print, and consists of herself, her best friend Millie, Jidé and his friend Ben Gbemi.  In the classes, Miss Print (an unfortunate name for a writer!) helps the children to understand themselves and their world through writing. The novel is written as being Mira's diary, in the present tense which itself is highlighted early on as helping reader and writer feel the immediacy of the narrative. On occasion, after a short writing exercise, the children start to feel empathy for others in a way that they hadn't before. I found these writing sessions fascinating, and they summed up what is, to me, why literature is so important: Fiction (or poetry, theatre, film, TV) helps to make sense of the world and cultivates understanding of other people.

Artichoke Hearts is a pensive, sometimes sad read, but ultimately it left me feeling uplifted, a celebration of life, youth, a loving family and good friends. I would recommend it for Judy Blume fans and older readers of Jacqueline Wilson, who are maybe looking for something a bit more grown-up. So far, Artichoke Hearts has quietly slipped onto the bookshop shelves with little fanfare, but it deserves to be widely read and talked about.

A Gate At The Stairs, Lorrie Moore

Twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin yearns to escape her provincial home. She moves to the college town of Troy to start university and takes a job as a part-time nanny to a glamorous couple. Tassie is drawn into their life and that of their newly adopted toddler. As the household reveals its complications, Tassie is forced out of her naivety, and the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways.

I’d had my eye on this book for quite a while, after seeing it on a display stand for some literary award or other. I’d read passages at random, and was intrigued enough to eventually buy a copy. The reviews on the front and back covers declared it to be “the novel of the year” and the author to be “one of the very best American writers working today.” Sometimes you read a popular book and disagree with the general consensus. For me, A Gate at the Stairs left me wondering not only whether I was reading the same book as the blurb-writers and award panel, but whether I was reading the same book every time I picked it up.

Right from the start I found it difficult to concentrate on this book for more than a few pages. Maybe it didn’t help that I came to this book with its six long chapters stuffed with description, from Poppy Shakespeare which was written in London colloquial language, quickly-flowing with chapters of only a few pages. But what really kept me from enjoying the book was its incessantly bleak atmosphere. First of all I likened the writing style to that of Dickens, where you really felt the griminess. There was a sense of foreboding from the start, where little things that weren’t quite right, like the absence of the adoptive father through many important processes, or Tassie’s college roommate who seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Tassie’s employer Sarah seemed a very unlikely adoptive mother. Like a wealthy Victorian mother, it seemed as though she employed Tassie in order to ensure that she saw as little of the child, Mary-Emma better known as Emmie, as possible, which led to me wondering why she was adopting at all.

But there wasn’t the natural humour of Dickens. Moore attempted regular jokes and wordplay, but they felt forced and uncomfortable. A writer, especially a literary author, sets the work’s tone by the description. Moore, through her narrator Tassie, regularly commented on the ugliness of nature, or neutral nature in ugly terms, with special mentions of dead birds and squirrels, and the amount of mould throughout the novel verged on the ridiculous. Added to this, I never sensed I could know the characters. Not only did Moore emphasise the “phoniness” of people, but they seemed to change, not by character development, but as if they were arbitrarily replaced by people with the same name and different personality. All in all, I found that a sense of depression and hopelessness pervaded the novel, and did not want to live in Tassie’s world. To quote my sister when describing a gloomy train guard, Tassie’s world sounded like “the worst place imaginable, where the sun never shines and everyone is dead.”

Not a lot happened, plot-wise, for the first two thirds of the novel, and when plot did begin, it was very disjointed and unlikely. One criticism you can’t make of this book is predictability. Of the three major, dramatic plot twists, two came without any warning, out of the blue and then ended just as abruptly. The third involved Tassie’s family, who were featured briefly at the beginning and then, again briefly, about halfway through, as if Moore had forgotten all about them, before playing their crucial part in the last few pages of the book. And when the story happened, it happened all at once and was so melodramatic and relentlessly miserable that I revised my description of the work from "Dickens without the natural humour" to "Hardy - Jude The Obscure era."

Aside from the story, it also felt as though Moore was trying to tackle some major issues: race, parenting, family, identity and politics, but despite sometimes almost putting in arrows to say “Look! This is an important issue!” and having some scenes of unlabelled dialogue reeling off snippets of opinion, these were never really explored enough to call them “themes.” I found myself at a loss as to what Moore was trying to say, which wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if this was a story-based book. But story, here, takes a back seat amongst the issue-highlighting and the mould.

Liar, Justine Larbalestier

Hi everyone! Sorry about the lack of updates in the last week or so. Life has been so busy in the run-up to Christmas that I haven't even had much time for reading. There have been carol services, Christmas parties, musical rehearsals and a heap of overtime at work that have kept me from my beloved books. But I aten't dead* - although for the second Christmas in a row I've had my worst cold of the year - and hopefully there will be regular updates again from now on. I've also merged this blog with my film and TV review site, because I didn't update that one often enough to justify having a separate blog.

I preordered the paperback of Liar on Amazon a couple of months ago, and it turned up at home on Christmas Eve, by which time I'd all but forgotten about it, so it really was a surprise Christmas present from myself to me.

Micah is a compulsive liar, always has been. When she started high school she passed for a boy for a little while, with a boy's name, short hair and underdeveloped figure. Lies lead to more lies until no one knows what to believe about her. But when her sort-of boyfriend dies suddenly, it is time for her to tell her story. The truth. Or at least her truth.

The clue is there in the title: Liar. Micah vows again and again to tell the truth in her story, and then contradicts herself: okay, that was a lie but everything I say from here on is true. Well... except that bit. Oh, and that.

I wanted to see if you would buy it. And you did.
You buy everything, don't you?
You make it too easy.

You find yourself wondering what, if anything, you have been told is the "truth" - and what, after all is the true version of a work of fiction? The narrator's account, even if she is a pathological liar? After all, Micah is the only narrator we have. Are we supposed to read between the lines to understand what the author wants us to believe really happened? Many works of literature give you clues towards an alternative interpretation, but Larbalestier doesn't give us anything to go by except Micah's words, and as we have established, these can't be trusted. Instead, the reader has to draw their own conclusions, so that the book has as many meanings as it has readers.

It seems straight-forward enough at first, a contemporary crime story set among New York high school students. Halfway through, there is a sudden shift in genre which led me to think, "this is ridiculous! Surely we're not meant to believe that in this story?" It seems clear, at first, when Micah is telling the truth and when she is lying, then everything is shaken up and you're not sure what's what any more. Micah argues that she lies because we wouldn't believe the truth, and "maybe I lie because the world is better the way I tell it." We're left with a choice. We can accept her final version of her story, discard the parts she's confessed to be untrue and accept her story at face value. Or we can wonder, speculate and come to our own conclusions. I think I know my version of events, but to say more would be straying into spoiler territory.

A very intelligent read that will end up asking more questions than it answers.

*Terry Pratchett

Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher

I'll be honest, I didn't want to read this book, but there was something about it that pulled me in against my will. I couldn't tell you what that "something" was. Not the cover in all its greyness, and I felt very uncomfortable about the story premise: a suicide note recorded on thirteen sides of cassette tapes and posted to the people indirectly responsible for the girl's death. It seemed unspeakably cruel. And yet part of me, a morbidly curious twinge in my mind wanted to know. It must have been the cassette idea, the thirteen different sides to the story, that struck me as original and intriguing, but I recoiled somewhat from the subject matter and resisted reading this book.

Obviously, I didn't resist forever, as proven by the existance of this blog post. I was encouraged to read Thirteen Reasons Why after seeing several other reviewers reassuring their readers that this book was worthwhile.

After Hold Still, Thirteen Reasons Why was the second book I read this month that contained a teenage suicide and its effect on those left behind, but this time the book concentrated on the events that drove Hannah to take her life. The events seem small enough at first: a few words, a rumour, and some of the people involved protest, "Surely she didn't do this because of that!" But through her tapes, Hannah demonstrates how small events trigger reactions the instigators couldn't forsee, and how they chip away at her: her trust in people, her sense of security, her self-worth and even her innermost thoughts. By the end of the book, I dare anyone to say that Hannah's reasons are petty and insignificant!

There are two narrators of this book, by necessity: Hannah, in her recorded messages, and her classmate Clay, who hears them and responds to them. At first I found this a little distracting and found it difficult to follow the rapid switching between voices, and for a while I wished that we could just hear Hannah's side of the story (while simultaneously feeling disgusted with myself for being so nosy about such a dark subject. But through Clay, the reader is given someone else to identify with, and we feel an extra layer of suspense, wondering what is coming next and where he fits into this story. As Clay listens to the tapes on a stolen borrowed Walkman, he visits the locations of some of Hannah's traumatic experiences. Seeing the places through two different sets of eyes gives an extra layer of realism to the story. And Hannah's story challenges Clay to think of how he relates to others around him, and how he can learn from his mistakes regarding Hannah.

My first impression of the story was that it was cruel, and at first I could not shake this off. Hannah's voice in the first few tapes has a thin veneer of cheerfulness over a lot of anger and bitterness. The chirpy tones at the beginning are all the harsher due to the knowledge of her intentions at the time of recording. It really feels like this is her revenge: to make her tormentors live forever with the knowledge of what they've done. As the book progresses, and the incidents become not just one-offs but part of a bigger snowball effect, you sense her despair and it seems more like a warning: we can't know how our actions will affect others, what is going on beneath the surface.

Despite in one respect being an easy read, Thirteen Reasons Why is an uncomfortable book, and it took me a while to shake off the feelings of guilt as if I was a voyeur into someone's - even a fictional character' - misery. However, it is extremely thought-provoking and informative. The book demonstrates through an incident in a Peer Communications class that depression and suicide are still taboo subjects, and where a subject is not spoken about, then it cannot be acted upon. Thirteen Reasons Why gives information on the signs to look out for, which tragically went unobserved in Hannah's case.

One of those Really Important Books.

Now for a BBC moment:
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this book, you can contact the Samaritans (UK and Republic of Ireland) details here.
If you live outside the UK and Ireland, you can find details of helplines for your country through the Befrienders' website here.