Fiction | Love & Race in a Modern World

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah has been on my reading queue since all its buzz during the early days of its release in 2013. Recently, though, while relaxing on the beach for Spring Break, was the perfect time to settle in with it for the "book by an author from Africa" category for the Read Harder Challenge.

Americanah tells the story of two ambitious young people, Ifemelu and Obinze, from their adolescent lives together in Lagos to their independent journeys as adults across oceans and away from their home and their shared lives.

Ifemelu is a headstrong, independent young woman. She's beautiful, yes, but she's full of ambition and has a thoughtful way of looking at the world and how it works. She has strong opinions and a stoic, sometimes judgmental, way of coping and conversing. Her way of thinking provides the meat of this story and the experiences, but she's certainly not someone you'll feel warm and fuzzy about. (To be honest, I feel like she might be a person who, in real life, would come off as a bit standoffish.)

"They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her."

Obinze is a bit more quiet, though a bit more gregarious than Ifemelu—and no less ambitious. From an early age, he's been fascinated with the United States—the books, the movies, the music—and always planned to move there. Together as teenagers and young adults, Obinze and Ifemelu discover a relationship that challenges each to be informed and outspoken, passionate and determined. When Ifemelu takes an opportunity to study and New York, she and Obinze make plans for their future together with him joining her in America. However, the insecurity of the post-9/11 world disrupts their plans, and Obinze is sent back across the Atlantic. Ifemelu builds a life in New York that becomes plagued with insecurities and uncertainties; Obinze settles for a time as an undocumented immigrant in London before being shipped back again to Nigeria. Years later, after years of silence and unanswered questions, Ifemelu and Obinze have both returned to their homeland where their lives have the potential to collide once again.

The most talked-about aspect of this book has consistently been its observations on race in America. Ifemelu is a character with an observant perspective, as an African coming to America where her identity is suddenly more defined by the color of her skin. She's learning how being black in America, specifically, seems to have its own identity—its own set of rules, stereotypes, and expectations. Coupled with this, Ifemelu and Obinze are both faced with new challenges as immigrants in a modern world.

Ifemelu finds reprieve from her personal struggles in a digital forum, authoring a blog called "Raceteenth Or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) By A Non-American Black." It is through these blog posts that the reader is best able to experience American society through Ifemelu's foreign eyes. She is observant on the intricacies of race, noting societal norms that are often unwritten or unspoken.

"At least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become."

Despite all of this, and despite the notoriety the book has received for these themes, I actually found the overall story to be much more deeply rooted in the relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze. It is one that is deeply affected by larger society, yes, but one that I think serves as the foundation to the story itself. In this regard, I read Americanah as a very contemporary, universal story of a modern romance. It is increasingly rare that a relationship will exist and evolve in isolation. Jobs change; people migrate; distances are shrinking as the world gets smaller and more connected. Americanah reflects those relationship challenges inherent in modernity.

This is the first work I've read by Adichie, and I found her to have an amazingly adept way with words when describing those intricate workings of the world.

"...the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service."

I think this must have been a daunting book to write, because it's obvious the author has much to say—but how to say those things without devolving into strictly a discourse? She deftly injects commentary into strong characters, arousing passion in the reader for both the person and the message. This is a book that will inspire thoughtful reflection and consideration—a powerful voice for our modern world.

Fiction | A Thousand Acres of Tragedy

To be honest, there have been several daunting categories in the Read Harder Challenge. I don't do self-help; romance is meh; poetry is torture. The "retelling of a classic" has been one that does NOT excite me, because, you know, if it's a classic, it means I've probably already heard it! One of the "classic" options listed was Shakespeare, and I think that's the worst. Me and Shakespeare have had a long battle of misunderstanding and boredom since high school, and also those stories have been told a thousand times before!

To try and counter-act the negative stigma I'd attached to this category, I decided to pick a story I didn't already know well. I decided on Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, which is essentially a retelling of King Lear. Set in an Iowa farm community in the 1970s, Smiley's 1992 Pulitzer Prize winner tells the story of a retiring farmer who bequeaths his prosperous land to his three daughters. Ginny and Rose, the two elder daughters, live on the land with their husbands and have spent their lives dedicated to the family and farm. However, the youngest, Caroline, lives as a lawyer in Des Moines and expresses little interest in her father's plan. It seems like such a simple response—Caroline's disinterest in a lifestyle she doesn't live—but their father sees it differently. Overwhelmed by this rejection, he cuts Caroline off entirely, and Ginny and Rose are left to suffer in the wake of his anger.

The last few weeks had shown well enough for anyone to understand that the one thing our family couldn't tolerate, that maybe no family could tolerate, was things coming into the open.

This story sounds simplistically melodramatic at its core, to the point where I didn't expect much depth or surprise beyond a predictably emotional plot. What Smiley manages to do, though, (and maybe this follows the pattern of King Lear—I don't know; I haven't read it) is create turmoil through the narrator. We hear the story from Ginny's perspective, the eldest daughter who seems the most reliable, the most responsible. As the story progresses, though, Ginny seems to fall apart at the seams. There is no big climactic episode that shifts the story, no turning point after which things will never be the same. Instead, there are many mini-episodes—conversations & situations, jealousies realized & memories unearthed—that slowly change Ginny into someone different than the woman we thought we knew at the beginning.

Though her voice, as narrator, never devolves into the emotional chaos of her character, we begin to distrust Ginny's grasp on reality as she loses stability. The same cannot be said of the plot, which seems to mirror Ginny's spiral into turmoil. The scenarios become heavy—adultery! abuse! murder!—but the narration maintains its even keel. It's almost disorienting, leading us forward with an inkling of disbelief: is this really happening?

"If Daddy got to them and hurt them in any way I would help them learn about evil and retribution. If he doesn't, then they can have the luxury of learning about mercy and benefits of the doubt."

I found this story exciting, as I was constantly calling into question who I liked and trusted. It's an odd and rare reading experience to suddenly turn against your trusted narrator. In addition, Smiley truly writes beautifully, with words that put the simplest of thoughts or feelings into a much bigger picture, calling much more into question. Though lacking the bombastic histrionics of Empire (TV's popular interpretation of King Lear), A Thousand Acres is an amazingly nuanced "retelling of a classic" that is worth reading.

Fiction | Observations of Womanhood

"There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up til now is their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals."

While reading Alice Munro's The Lives of Girls and Women, I made a new vow regarding my reading habits: I'm going to have to save reading any adult books for fall break, winter break, spring break, and summer break! As a middle school librarian, I'm able to give better recommendations by having read more middle grade books...and that's about all I have an attention span for during the school year. It causes me to do a great injustice to the more complex literature I very much want to read; I can rarely read 10 pages before falling asleep, causing my time spent reading a particular title to be at least 3 times longer than normal. I definitely can't keep track off the nuance or appreciate the subtleties by reading in such short spurts.

This is my big offense to a Nobel Prize-winning author and her book that speaks in small and subtle observations of human lives and emotions.

The Lives of Girls and Women centers around a young narrator named Del Jordan living in a small Canadian town in the 1940s and 50s. The world is consumed by a global war, but you don't really feel the immediacy of it in this rural atmosphere. She spends most of her time with her mother. Though she has a father and younger brother, the men of Del's life are very much in the background; they spend more time at the family-owned fox farm, and Del is surrounded, for the most part, by the women of Jubilee. It feels very much like a novel composed of short stories. Each chapter essentially serves as some musing on a monumental experience of Del's--her exploration of religion, her discovery of boys, her academic aspirations, her sexual awakening.

Del is a product of a particular time, setting, and situation. Her mother is a modern woman who is forced to find her own intellectual stimulation in a small rural town. She has a job selling encyclopedias; she doesn't depend on her husband. And though she dismisses God and rallies around birth control, she doesn't go quite so far as to believing fulfillment to be possible as an independent, childless woman. Del is very much a product of her feminist mother but, as the same time, somewhat terrified to follow in her footsteps.

"Her concern about my life, which I needed and took for granted, I could not bear to have expressed. Also I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same."

Del lives an adolescence atypical of women in her time and place; she follows an academic route and experiences a certain amount of exclusion from peers based more on experiences than feelings. We get the sense Del is somewhat of an outsider in Jubilee based on her intellect and interests, but she never begrudges the town or its people as lacking. In fact, she discovers that Jubilee is very much a part of her, as much as it is to any of its other residents. The experiences it gave created Del as a person, no better or worse or different than any one else--just entirely individual. They led her toward the truth and understanding of what it means to be human and, essentially, to just be.

Fiction | The Quiet Passion of an Academic

John Williams' Stoner has been loved and recommended by many readers whose opinions I trust. Its quiet, haunting portrait of a farm-boy-turned-academic has awed many readers with its purposeful prose, carefully revealing the everyday monotonies that define an average life.

William Stoner's life is one that begins at the end of the 19th century in Missouri. His parents are the stoic, hardened farmer type, and his upbringing was devoid of the typical small pleasures and comforts of childhood and adolescence. William enrolled in the state university on track for a degree in Agriculture to eventually take over the family farm, but his plans changed after taking one literature class, chosen simply as a way to fill his mornings.

He began to resent the time he had to spend at work on the Foote farm. Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study. Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

Time in Stoner passes quietly, mirroring the life and experiences of its main character. As William's life "settles" and his choices are cemented, we get the impression that his life is one of rather disappointment. The relationship he had with his parents (though lacking by most familial standards) is strained after his entry into a marriage with a "proper" family. His career, once full of passion and for which he abandoned all previous plans, flatlines with little hope of growth. And said wife becomes an aloof and indifferent nuisance that inhibits any prospect of joy that William may find in other aspects of his life.

By the latter part of his life, William finds himself very much alone, fated to that same quiet stoicism he tried very much to avoid. The passions that led him to make impulsive decisions—to changing his life's direction, to following his heart, to making noise instead of recoiling into silent solitude—were ultimately never very rewarding. Perhaps his passion only lasted as long as his decision-making; perhaps it was the luck of the draw; or perhaps he was destined to be his parents' child, impassively accepting what life throws his way.

It takes a passionate reader to appreciate the beauty in Williams' words because they are so gently stated. Some consider it beautiful; some may find it boring. Regardless, it's a portrait of a character that must've certainly been common in a time when options were fewer and one's actions or decisions felt unbreakable, enduring.

Thank goodness times have changed.

Fiction | A Clever Life, Deconstructed

Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley is one of those character books that goes into great length and detail on the unextraordinary. But that's not to say it's boring. With books like this, that's the beauty in their purpose—to focus so closely on one life and the little details that make it different from anyone else's. To help the reader understand that a life is more than a series of events; it's thoughts and emotions and relationships and the day-to-day mundane that are usually quickly forgotten.

The story opens with the description of one such life, that of 10-year-old Stella. She lives with her Mother; her father is supposedly dead, but she'd "found out years later" that he actually left. Thus with that language of recollection, the reader knows from the very beginning that this is going to be one girl's story as told by her future self. It's a remembrance, and everything we learn about Stella is going to be told as her older self reflects. So though we're hearing Stella's life story as a first-person narrative, it has this omniscient quality that guides us with a higher level of knowing and understanding.

The rest of the story is told through chapters that serve as vignettes of Stella's life at different points. At the beginning, her cousin has just died from a tragic accident, and Aunt Andy has come to live with Stella and her mother. To 10-year-old Stella, this is life, this interruption from what was normal at home and how it touches every other part of her life. We travel through adolescence as Stella tests boundaries, particularly physical ones as she explores the space around her and discovers what it means to be a part of the world outside her home. She gains a stepfather, finds a boyfriend, has a baby, becomes a maid. She gets political and artistic. She has another baby. Stella's choices keep her on the move, finding new homes and new relationships.

It takes a clever person to adjust to such shifts in life, to forge these kinds of moves. But we get the sense that, much of the time, Stella has never been completely sure of herself. She's smart and adaptable, but her decisions are uninspired, following, instead, the easy or reactionary path. From the narration, though, through its reflective manner, we do get the sense that Stella eventually finds her own raison d'etre, and makes a sort of peace with her past.

I was thirty at the beginning of my first year, the oldest in my cohort. This age different didn't matter, in fact it was a kind of convenience, because it set me apart from the other students' chaos of self-discovery, their hungry interest in one another. Compared to them, I felt my motivations purely: for all the three years of my degree, I seemed to see myself clearly as if from a distance, through a thick lens. It was such a relief to be clever at last. For years I had had to keep my cleverness cramped and concealed--not because it was dangerous and forbidden, but because it had no useful function in my daily life. In the wrong contexts, cleverness is just an inhibiting clumsiness.

Clever Girl follows the same vein as Emily Perkins' The Forrests or Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. This is another one of those books that I think needs a particular type of reader, one that is comfortable with the slow progression of character development. It's not the event happening that matters, rather how it affects the story's protagonist—how this character evolved because of the same ordinary events that are exceptionally common in everyday lives.

Fiction | One Life, Many Stories

The Forrests by Emily Perkins is another novel by a New Zealand author I added to my 'to-read' shelf back when we were in NZ, and once again (like with Tamar), it wasn't really what I expected.

But this time was better!

The Forrests follows one family recently transplanted to New Zealand from New York. There are four children: Evelyn, Dorothy, Michael, and Ruth; and their parents, Lee and Frank—upon whom the names "Mom" and "Dad" were never bestowed by the Forrest children. This family is sort of odd, and you realize they probably came to New Zealand to escape utter failure by American standards. They spend some time on a commune; they all-but-officially adopt a young neighbor, Daniel. You get the impression that Lee and Frank aren't exactly the most doting or involved parents, but somehow the four Forrest kids survive into adulthood.

That's what The Forrests does—it spans this family through the decades, mostly though the eyes of Dorothy. As a child, Dorothy has a strong sensory awareness of the world; these feelings build her memories and are later her tools of nostalgia as the years progress. We follow Dorothy through adolescent relationships, marriage, kids, and the slow passage into old age, and family is the constant that ties the loose ends of her life together—that bridges one extreme to another.

I think the most spectacular thing about this book is the way the story is told; it's really a series of short vignettes, and it takes a while to realize that Dorothy is our main connection to the lives we're seeing. The chapters generally cover a single incident or occurrence; sometimes it's years spanning between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, sometimes it's hours. With this loose timeline, it's easy to lose yourself in the characters and their lives. It feels rather symbolic of real life experiences; some are monumental and alter time and place, while some slip by subtly. Suddenly, you find yourself years down the road with a life you never expected, that you may not recognize, about which you may wonder, "How did I get here?"

While at times, this family is frustratingly dysfunctional, that's ultimately not the point of the story at all. And the fact that it takes place in New Zealand is really inconsequential—it could be anytime and anywhere. (Here's where it defied my expectations, as mentioned in the beginning; not really a New Zealand story!) I found myself drawn to the characters in this family, wondering what happened in those gaps of time left out between chapters. I think it's a wonderful portrait of how lives and opinions and situations can change drastically over the years, and I think its beauty and message lies in this, between the lines of the actions that take place on the page.

Reading Roundup: The End of Summer Reading*, Part 1

It has happened—after a nice seven month vacation, I've gone back to work with the new school year. I can't even describe how full my head is with new tasks and to-do lists. In an effort to whittle my "to-post-about" queue down before the chaos really begins, I'm going to be quick in talking about what I've read as my vacation neared its end.

I took a picture of Deborah Challinor's Tamar on a "New Zealand Authors" shelf back when we were in New Zealand, and I was looking forward to reading it when we got home. A trilogy of historical fiction sounded right up my alley. And because my public library didn't have it, nor would they get it through Inter-library Loan, it became my inaugural eBook purchase as well.

Tamar chronicles the journey of the eponymous main character, a young woman who emigrates from England to New Zealand near the end of the 19th century. Initially seeming rather meek and naive, Tamar surprises the reader as her strength and resilience are revealed during a long, arduous journey across oceans and as she navigates her way through a rough new home. An unconventional friendship is what gives Tamar much of her strength—on the passage from England she befriends Myrna MacTaggart who is moving to Auckland to establish the finest brothel in New Zealand. Myrna provides comfort and guidance to Tamar as she finds herself a place to live and work, settles into a new homeland, and eventually escapes from a disastrous marriage.

So, I was really looking forward to this sweeping trilogy of historical fiction on a place I recently visited. But truth be told, it was so much more ROMANCE-Y than I had expected. Like, I sort of felt duped. If we're classifying by genre, this is definitely Romance and definitely not Historical Fiction. Tamar is a sympathetic character, and the plot of this is definitely detailed enough to provide some level of substance. Overall, though, I was expecting and hoping to read a series that was dependent on its physical and historical setting, and this ended up being much more about characters who could've existed anywhere. I'm not criticizing the book itself, and I would recommend it to a reader that seems interested, but it disappointed me based on my own expectations.

Ok, I won't lie. I put Tom Drury's Pacific on my 'to-read' list because I really just liked the cover and title. Simple. Brief. It gave me a good vibe. And overall, I can't totally contradict that, though my final opinion is a little lacking.

The story follows (somewhat) a 14-year-old named Micah who is moving across the country to Los Angeles to live with his long-absent mother. But the narrative doesn't just focus on Micah. In fact, it doesn't actually focus on him more than any other character. Instead, it gives brief snippets on all these other people connected to Micah—his impetuous actress mother; his petty thief of a father back home; his half-sister; an ex-con antique salesman; a troubled mystic; and the retired sheriff turned detective. Their stories barely overlap, yet they're all still connected and they all exist; Drury has fleshed them each out with enough of a life that the reader can imagine how they will each proceed. They're a rather pathetic lot with their own flaws, but they all have hope of something good coming down the road towards them.

Drury's writing is solid—descriptive, engaging, succinct. The characters are all interesting, and I was invested in them. But ultimately, this is a snapshot of lives and...that's it; they fade after your encounter with this book, because you didn't know enough or see enough about each of them to really remember them. It's a brief collection of unique lives, brief encounters with people you'll never hear about again. Though I was invested while reading, for a reader like me that wants a deeper connection, it ultimately felt incomplete.



* Just because my summer vacation is over doesn't actually mean it's the end of summer. We've still got plenty of days of heat and sun, and I've still got plenty of Pilcher to get me through days by the pool!

Fiction | Uncertain Questions, Uncertain Answers

At a late night birthday party, I took The Magus by John Fowles off a friend's shelf, and her quick review and summary was something along the lines of: "This book is weird, like Natalie Wood drowning on a boat and her husband doesn't seem innocent and why was Christopher Walken there too? It all creeps me out."

Now, neither of us are really too sure where the Natalie Wood reference came from (it may have been fueled by other things that night) but that general gist is still kinda accurate: this book is weird. And it's a little bit creepy. And something doesn't seem right. And you don't really know what to believe.

There's no real easy way to artfully describe the intricacies of the plot, so brevity will have to take precedence. The premise follows Nicholas Urfe, a fairly wayward young Englishman bored with the lifelessness he finds in England. Hungry for stimulation, he accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island. There, Nicolas becomes entangled in the game of a millionaire recluse, Mr. Conchis. As Conchis shares with Nicholas his ponderings on life and philosophy, he also manipulates reality, creating a sort of theatrical show—a series of masques—that causes Nicholas to question what's real and what's part of the game.

There is so much to this book.

Right off, the writing is fantastic. It's quick-witted and sarcastic. Throughout a novel that gets increasingly complex and philosophical, the writing keeps it fanciful so that its 600+ pages fly by much faster than you'd expect. Nicholas isn't the most likable character, but we're drawn into his mind and depend on his actions and reactions to tell us what's real and what's not. He's clearly a distinct product of his time and situation, which brings me to another notable part of this book: the setting. It's entirely contingent on the time period. World War II has ended, and now it's far enough in the past for the aftermath to have materialized. It's past immediate recovery; now we see the change in the way people think and do, the way society reorganizes itself and gets moving again. And this is perhaps what Fowles attempts to explore the deepest with The Magus.

"He had simply guessed that for me freedom meant the freedom to satisfy personal desire, private ambition. Against that he set a freedom that must be responsible for its actions; something much older than the existentialist freedom, I suspected - a moral imperative, an almost Christian concept, certainly not a political or democratic one. I thought back over the last few years of my life, the striving for individuality that had obsessed all my generation after the limiting and conforming years of the war, our retreat from society, nation, into self."

Conchis' psychoanalysis of Nicholas has some sort of goal, we must believe, but what that goal is constantly eludes both Nicholas and us, the reader. On the surface, The Magus is a deliciously seductive thriller, steeped in mystery. Deeper, it's a poignant statement of human emotion and psyche, an exploration of freedom, identity, modernity, and society.

I feel, after writing this much, that there is nothing left to say as a summary and initial review, but that I've also barely scratched the surface. There is so much here, so much to uncover, that The Magus is worth many re-readings.

Fiction | The Battle Between Faith and Doubt

Pop culture just loves to pick on the Mormons. Our cultural oeuvre is full of exaggerated tales of this group that dramatize stereotypes and controversy: Big Love, Sister Wives, David Ebershoff's bestseller The 19th Wife, and Carol Lynch Williams' YA thriller The Chosen One. Of all the many portrayals of the Mormon church out there in the realm of literature, Ryan McIlvain's debut novel, Elders, is probably the tamest. His is a refreshing perspective that focuses on its characters rather than controversy.

Elder McLeod and Elder Passos have been paired together as they near the end of their two-year mission in Brazil. They're pretty much nothing alike. Elder McLeod is American, outspoken, emotional; Elder Passos is Brazilian, obedient, and devout. As they spend their days spreading the word throughout their community, knocking on door after door, their beliefs and behaviors often clash. They finally find common ground--and start to actually get along—when a beautiful woman and her dubious husband agree to listen to the Elders' message. As they confront the couple's questions, though, the Elders have to face their own conflicts and doubts.

The two characters in this book are very well drawn. They contrast off each other perfectly, but McIlvain gives enough detail and history to each that the reader is given insight into the reasons for their opinions and actions. There are a lot of factors in play in this story; McIlvain addresses several themes and sources of conflict.

First, we have religion and McLeod's and Passos' own reasons for belief or doubt. Passos lost his mother as a teenager; religion was his source of comfort and guidance during his formative years—the place he found answers and the reassurance that his family would one day be reunited. McLeod grew up in a religious household; his father is a priest [is that the correct term?], and the religious path was expected of him, rather than one he found for his own reasons.

Then we have culture, and here McIlvain adds a compelling deeper dimension to the story of these two missionaries. Set in 2003, just as the US as invaded Iraq, Elder McLeod encounters the harsh anti-American sentiment felt strongly outside US borders. And Elder Passos, on the other hand, serves as that critical eye on that heritage and worldview that comprises much of Elder McLeod's identity.

McIlvain presses these heavy themes on his young characters that are already questioning their place in the world as they mature from boys to men. I think the writing was excellent, and the author's ability to affect his characters with both internal and external influences was mastery level. Overall, I thought this book was written very well with just an okay story. I didn't really like either of the characters, but I appreciated the non-issue approach of the subject matter. Go here for superlative writing, but don't expect a gripping plot.

Fiction | The Quietest Most Eventful Summer

Gail Godwin's Flora is a quiet book. There's no climactic plot line, no gut-wrenching relationships, nor any other real dramatic element. However, this is a book filled with tension simmering to the brim, told eloquently by our precocious 10-year-old narrator, Helen.

Helen is going through one of the rougher patches of her short life—her grandmother and main caregiver Nonie has just passed away and her dad is spending the summer in Oak Ridge doing important war work as WWII draws to a close. While he's gone, he's left Helen in the charge of her long-deceased mother's cousin, Flora. And the personality differences between these two could not be greater.

Describing Helen simply as "precocious" is not nearly descriptive enough. She's incredibly smart but also intuitive and confident and possesses a haughty attitude more typical of a smart-aleck 16-year-old than of someone her age. She's mirrored Nonie's perspectives and attitudes and experiences the world with a more mature level of cynicism, as if she already knows how it all works; she's realistic and reads people for (what she believes) they are rather than how they appear. Flora, on the other hand, is bubbly and outgoing, but her personality is usually just a mask for her lack of self-confidence. She's constantly questioning her own thoughts and actions and desperately needs someone to guide her through young adulthood. Channeling a Nonie-level of knowledge and life experience, Helen immediately considers herself superior to the anxious and inexperienced Flora.

With our two conflicting protagonists isolated in Helen's crumbling old house, Flora explores these clashes of personality between two characters who are each at a poignant moment in their adolescent development and who each desperately need the guidance that Nonie once provided.

I describe this as a "quiet" book, because in this long and uneventful summer is where the meat of the story lies; as the reader, we are constantly assessing and re-assessing the interactions between Helen and Flora with consideration to each's perspective. Helen is remarkably astute for her age, but we as the reader are able to see that the world according to Helen is still skewed with an immature misunderstanding. These are brilliantly crafted characters that allow a lot to be read between the lines. It doesn't feel particularly complex as you read, but the story has depth; these characters—their differences, their misunderstandings, their flaws—will stick with you.

Fiction | How Olive Sees It

I picked up another one that's been on my shelf a while... (Are you sensing a trend? There is a reason; more later) ...Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer winner Oliver Kitteridge. Despite the notoriety of this book, I really didn't have much idea of what it was about. All I knew was that my mother-in-law "couldn't get into it," which probably contributed to why it sat on my shelf unread for so long.

Olive Kitteridge is more of a collection of stories that are tied together by, yes, a woman named Olive Kitteridge. The setting is a small town in rural Maine, the kind of town where everyone not only knows each other but knows each other's business. While some of the stories focus on Olive and her life with husband Henry and grown son Chris, many of them feature other members of the town, and Olive is just a small background character.

The first is Denise, a meek sort of plain-Jane assistant at Henry's pharmacy. He's taken with her in a protective sort of way, but Olive just finds her insufferably naive and boring. Another is Angie O'Meara, an alcoholic lounge performer who seems trapped by her past relationships. Then there's Harmon, the owner of the hardware store who is having an affair with a woman that accompanies Henry Kitteridge to church (because his wife refuses), because his own wife Bonnie has gotten rather cold and indifferent in the marriage.

These stories introduce you to a number of characters, and that's what these people are—characters. It's a wonderful look at the overlapping lives of neighbors and the intimate details probably unseen by one another. Olive is the stand-out character—if that wasn't going to be apparently with the title—and she's an odd one. She's prickly and a little ornery and very set in her ways, but she's also got this sympathetic side that is revealed through her interactions with others, mostly her son Chris. You realize she can read other people well but is lost when it comes to herself, like one of those people that can't seem to take their own good advice.

This isn't a plot-driven book, but it's also not too "literary" to feel intimidating. Mostly, it feels honest. And if nothing else, it's got that Pulitzer Prize stamp on the cover, so you can participate and contribute to culturally astute literary conversation once you've read it.

The Idlewild Discussion on an Anthropological Botswanan Journey That's Really a Love Story

I've talked about all the light reads I've been working my way through this fall, but my October book club choice was the opposite of a light read. Take one look at Mating by Norman Rush and everything about it says heavy read. It's almost 500 pages; those pages are nearly transparent; even the cover makes you think, "...Oh, this is definitely literary."

These surface judgments were only half accurate. If a book can be both dense and easy to read at the same time, then this one does that. Let me explain: the narrative isn't told in a hard-to-understand way; the language is fairly conversational, and there is a plot there—it's not just musings. But it's actually this casual language that makes this book take a lot longer to read than most. (To give you an example, I had 200 pages left on the Thursday before our meeting, and that night I read from about 6pm to 11:30 pm, minus about 45 minutes, to finish those 200 pages. It took that long. My usual approximate 1 pg/min rate did not apply here.) Dialogue punctuation is non-existent, so you really have to get in the flow of what's happening to follow. (Not a book that can be read in short little 10 min subway commute chunks.) Also, the language is sort of stream of consciousness but not in a totally rambling way. More of a, this is how I would say it if I were talking to a person, with interrupting clauses and without correct sentence structure, way. 

So now that I've given this great rundown on how this book is written, you probably want to know what it's actually about. The year is somewhere around 1980. Our unnamed narrator (and she remains unnamed throughout the entire novel—a fact I didn't realize until our discussion) is an American anthropologist in Botswana. She's around 32, highly intellectual, highly independent, and also incredibly curious about people. Specifically, her relationships with people. We gather early on that this narrative is a recollection; she's telling us, from the beginning, about her relationship with one Nelson Denoon, the fascinating but mysterious founder of an alleged utopian society out in the desert. Denoon becomes our narrator's obsession, as she is bound and determined to venture to this settlement and make herself part of Denoon's life.

While this book is somewhat plot-driven, what's most interesting is the story running below the surface. At the basic level, you have this woman on her own in Botswana, seeking out a man out of curiosity. A bit deeper, though, Mating is about this woman and how she makes decisions, and this relationship and how these two people interact. The setting alone could be its own story, but Mating isn't really about the setting so much. It's more about our narrator and Denoon, their lives simply set against an interesting backdrop. Our narrator is a unique character in a unique setting. Perhaps it's this quality and this quality alone that made her feel like a somewhat distant character, unrelatable to a degree. But Mating also felt very much like a product of its 1980s time, and maybe 32 in 1980 is very different than 32 in 2013. (E.g. At 28, I'm at the point where I related more to 30 than 20, but I felt nothing in common with our narrator.)

To be honest, I expected to get a lot more out of our discussion. And maybe we did dig deeper, but I had two glasses of wine at our meeting and then stayed up way too late...so I could just be forgetting all our ground-breaking points of discussion! Either way, I did enjoy this book and it felt good to stretch my heavy duty reading muscles for a change. To me, reading serves one or two purposes, sometimes both at the same time: it provides entertainment and it, in some way, educates. Sometimes one trumps the other when you choose a book off the shelf, but both are fabulous.

Reading Roundup: Tales from Across the Pond

According to my "recently read" shelf, I unintentionally took a literary trip across the pond, hopping from Scotland to England for these two imports. They're not exactly Jane Austen, but at least they still serve afternoon tea.

The incomparable Maisie Dobbs—do you know how difficult it is to get a hold of this book from the NYPL? I was on the wait list for an embarrassingly long amount of time! I first tuned into this series after seeing some promotional pieces in a publisher's booth at a library conference (can't remember which one). I love a good series, so I immediately put myself on the hold list, having no idea it would take so long. (At this rate, I will move out of New York before even getting to book 3.)

At the story's opening, we learn that it's London in 1929, and Maisie Dobbs has set herself up as a private investigator, following in the footsteps of her beloved, and retired, mentor. Most of this book, though, tells Maisie's backstory—her humble beginnings as a housemaid, her unconventional education, and her nursing experience during WWI. Though the series has fallen into the Mystery genre, this one was more historical than mystery, as Winspear painted an elaborate backstory to the character we'll follow for many more books down the road. You get a good grasp of English society post-WWI and come to understand how unique Maisie is as a woman with a profession. I think this will be a fun, light series. I probably won't remember them all in detail, but I'll enjoy reading them.

Jane Gardam's Old Filth—not about a dirty old man, instead an old lawyer who Failed In London, Try Hong Kong; our protagonist has lived quite the international life. Old Filth (a nickname, of course) was born to an Englishman in the Eastern Empire, turned "Raj" orphan once his mother died, but "saved" by a missionary and shipped back to England. There, he jumps from place to place, never fully connected to a family but funded by his absent father. University leads to law; law leads to Hong Kong; retirement leads back to England, where Old Filth never feels fully settled.

My book club read this over a year ago, and I had purchased the book but was unable to attend the meeting. The Book Club Member Whose Opinion I Trust really liked this book and thought I would, too...but I found it just ok. I liked the overall structure of the story, in that it was like storytelling on why this part of his life affected that part of it and affected who he is now. I keep reading how the story is very Dickensian, though, and based on my limited experience with both this book and Dickens, I would have to agree. Normally, I really like character-driven stories, but maybe my tastes are changing a bit; I find it hard to really like such a book if I don't have very strong feelings for the character in it. And that's how I felt about our Old Eddie Feathers; he was just kinda there. I chuckled at some incidents and sympathized with him at others, but overall, I wasn't head-over-heels compelled by his story. But many many others disagree with me, so maybe it's just me. The Man in the Wooden Hat is Gardam's follow-up—which I have that on my shelf—so maybe I'll try that one out, too.

Reading Roundup: Hook, Line, and Sinker

I mentioned that my class commute really ups my reading numbers—I'm certainly reading faster than I can write. I breezed through all three of these last month, and I can only attribute ample free time as part of the reason; each of these captured my attention so strongly that I didn't want to put them down. They all have very different styles, but the stories were each equally as compelling.

The Go-Between by L.P Hartley was my book club's March selection. It's the story of a 12-year-old schoolboy, Leo, who spends summer vacation on a friend's grand English estate and gets caught up, unknowingly, as the messenger in an illicit love affair by the friend's beautiful older sister. The setting is very Downton-esque with strong class distinctions, but perhaps a little less grandeur, because I can't imagine our Lady Mary swimming in a lake. The story is essentially about Leo's coming-of-age and loss of innocence as he begins to consider the feelings of others and not just himself. The author tells this story in from a first-person retrospective, which allows more reflection and depth than if told in real-time. This reminded me a bit of Atonement but without so much melodrama. I think it was universally enjoyed in book club, but it was a fairly easy discussion.

Emily St. John Mandel's Last Night in Montreal has been sitting on my shelf for years, and I've intended to read it since I enjoyed her second novel, The Singer's Gun. Last Night in Montreal is her first book, and it's a thriller of sorts. The story focuses on Lilia but it begins with Eli. Lilia has just run out on Eli, abandoning their Brooklyn apartment and, essentially, disappearing. Eli's quest to find her leads to Montreal where he discovers a lot about Lilia's past—that she's been moving cities, changing identities her entire life. What's interesting about this story is that we experience it through Eli's perspective in real-time, and learn Lilia's past through flashbacks, but we never hear from Lilia in real-time. To us, the reader, she has also just disappeared. It's not all plot-driven though; Mandel creates a highly thematic story with complex characters. The Singer's Gun taught me that her endings aren't trite and predictable, so you'll be hooked to find out how the story ends.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is probably not one that needs much introduction; it made the book blog rounds and best seller lists a couple years ago and is pretty well known. In fact, it's been sitting on my shelf since I won it in a giveaway around that time, and I just now picked it up. I didn't realize that this story is told entirely through letters, so that was sort of a fun surprise. The premise of this book (real quick) is an author receives a letter from a stranger in Guernsey, which introduces her (and us) to the story of Guernsey during German occupation in World War II. The story moves quickly, and the conversational tone really lends itself to being an engrossing read. The relationships and friendships formed through the letters are heart-warming, while some of the stories from the war are heart-breaking. This is the kind of book I recommend to my mom because it has some depth but can still be categorized as a light read.

Reading Roundup: A Collection of So-So Characters

In a, once again, frantic attempt to catch up on all the books I'm reading, I'm posting a reading round-up. In this case, it is especially necessary because I found all these books to be just "meh" and I don't have too much to say about them. What made them "meh?" Their characters.

Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries is supposedly a modern classic, winning the Pulitzer in 1995. It's the story of Daisy Goodwill Flett, from her birth in 1905 through marriage, children, middle age, and to her death towards the end of the century. What's so interesting about this story is the perspective. You can never really get a grasp on who is telling the story. Sometimes, it's Daisy; sometimes friends; sometimes children; sometimes it feels like an omniscient, unknown narrator. This perspective, however many of them there are, provides a broader look at Daisy, allows the reader to approach her from different angles and see, perhaps, what tiny part of her influenced a decision or a behavior.

Well, as much as we learn about Daisy, I never really liked her. She just seemed so emotionless and indifferent. I never felt she actively participated in the life about which we were reading, which was a life full of emotional events. Never seeing her emotions led me to find her a little cold and distant and therefore unrelatable as a main character. I think this would be a good book to read with a group for a discussion but reading alone left me flat.

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The Cradle by Patrick Somerville is essentially a short little book about a crazy pregnant wife sending demanding crazy things from her husband because of a pregnant whim. I'm certain the author intended a deeper message, but that's how it appears in a nutshell to me. The pregnant Marissa sends her husband, Matthew, on a quest for a Civil War era cradle she once slept in that disappeared when Marissa's own mother disappeared when Marissa was a teenager. Matthew's quest takes him throughout the midwest like a scavenger hunt, meeting really weird, terrible people along the way. In another story and a decade later, a teenager boy is shipping off to Iraq, and his mother, Renee, is having a hard time facing it. Renee's got issues of her own, though, as memories of her own tragic past are starting to surface.

Now, obviously these two stories are going to connect to create a bigger message about love, family, etc etc. I think the writing was very good, and I'm grateful that the author knew how to pace and how much to write, so the story did not unnecessarily go on for another hundred pages (as often happens). However, once again, I didn't much care for the characters. Marissa just seemed a little crazy and demanding because Somerville didn't throw in any redeeming qualities. I may have sympathized with her more had she been more fully fleshed out to appear a more normal person just going through a crazy hormonal time. As a result, Matthew just seemed whipped. He had issues of his own which explained much of his mentality, but there was just something missing. I didn't dislike him, but I also didn't overly like him. Actually, that's pretty a pretty good summation of how I felt about all the characters.

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Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife has been a bestseller (so the cover says), and I think this is why: America was just turned on by it. Holy Batman, this book had a lot of sex in it. A lot of detailed sex that I was not expecting. This is the story of a man in the early 1900s who places an ad in a newspaper for a reliable wife and gets a response from a "simple, honest woman." Now, this is a thriller, so obviously she is anything but, and his intentions weren't so pure either. Many of you probably already know about this plot, so I won't go into anymore depth, but unsurprisingly, the plot thickens as deceit is revealed and love becomes a game-changer.

I read the second half of this on a bus to DC, so I have to say, uninterrupted, I couldn't put it down. But that doesn't necessarily mean I liked it a lot. Once again, the characters were just bleh. I couldn't really connect with them, and though I was racing through to find out how the story ends, that's all I cared about: the end. I didn't care how it ended, nor what happened to any of the characters. I enjoyed this one the most of these three books, but it was still a rather dark story.

Reading Roundup: Not What I Expected, Part 2

As I mentioned last week, I've recently read a couple of books that ended up a complete 180 than what they had begun. The first was Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which started off boring and convoluted but I ended up really liking. Sadly, Part 2 does not have such a happy conclusion. This commentary will probably be a little spoiler-y, so read with caution.

Karen Russell's Swamplandia! has seen a lot of list placement lately, including a spot on the New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2011. I discovered it on a book blog (can't remember where) and it was one of those books I immediately thought I would love, and hoped that sentiment would be confirmed.

The premise of this book just sounds so great. Set deep in Florida's Everglades, Swamplandia! introduces us to Ava Bigtree, the youngest of an alligator-wrestling dynasty. Swamplandia, an old-fashioned tourist attraction, is the Bigtrees' livelihood. Ava's mother is the park's headliner, but she's just died and the theme park is dying with her. Ava's father, Chief Bigtree, has headed back to the mainland on "business" while a mountain of debt threatens the family's home; older brother Kiwi has run off to the mainland, partly out of frustration and partly to earn money for his family; and older sister, Osceola, has lost herself in the world of the occult, chasing after a ghost boyfriend. Left alone, Ava embarks on an adventure with new friend, the Bird Man, to find her sister before she gets lost in the Underworld.

There were just so many things I liked about this book in the beginning.

1. The setting: I grew up vacationing in Florida, and those tourist-trap sideshows are just so quintessentially Florida and have always piqued my interest. Who runs those? Do people actually visit them? 
2. The plot: A little bit quirky, a little bit weird, a little bit of magical realism to create a tone oozing creativity and intrigue. 
3. The main character: As an eleven-year-old Ava is just on the cusp of understanding things in the adult world. She shifts from having the perspective of an adult to the perspective of a kid, and it's exciting to see how these perspectives influence her actions. 
4. The writing style: Once the characters have been separated in the story, Russell focuses on Kiwi and Ava in alternating chapters. However, Ava's chapters are written in her first-person perspective, so we experience Ava's story as she is.

So, for the first 200 pages or so, I absolutely loved this book and was certain I would love it in the end. Then we're hit with a major WTF plot point that was totally out of sync with the story and completely unnecessary. And to me, it just sort of lost its sparkle after that. The story had just seemed to be building up and building up, and after the WTF moment, I realized that in the end, the awesome beginning was never really going anywhere in the first place—a case of high expectations that fell flat. I can't even remember how it ends now, because it just felt so unfulfilling. That BIG AWFUL THING signaled the end of the magical realism as we suddenly saw Ava's story in the harsh light of adulthood instead of the muddle ambiguity of immaturity. Unfortunately, it also signaled the end of the story's magic for me. So while I think it was intentional, I found it very disappointing.

I did so enjoy about 80% of this book, but I so SO wish it had ended on a more satisfying note as a whole.

Reading Roundup: Not What I Expected, Part 1

This is going to be a story of two books I recently read and how they turned out to be entirely different than what I had expected at the beginning. I can't honestly say that happens very often in my reading adventures; I guess I'm usually just a pretty good early judge of my opinion, but these both surprised me.
 

The first was last month's book club selection, The Known World by Edward P. Jones. At first encounter, I thought, "Oh boy, it's a book about slavery. What an upper." And then I saw it won the Pulitzer, and I thought, "Oh boy, it's gonna be boring, too." And yes, it was. For a bit. The structure is non-linear and there's about a billion characters, which requires some time and dedication to fully grasp and get into. But somewhere just past a third of the way in, I got into it, and it turned out to be really stunning.

So yes, The Known World is about slavery, which I unfairly judge as a boring topic I've encountered one too many times, thanks to high school English. But, it's not really about the white vs. black theme of slavery predominant in American literature; it's about free blacks (specifically, a freed slave) owning slaves. The man around which all revolves, Henry Townsend, has had his freedom since he was a boy, when his free parents bought Henry's freedom from his master, William Robbins. Henry had an atypical upbringing as a slave under Robbins, who took Henry under his wing, made sure he was educated, and treated him more like a son than property. As a result, Henry adopted Robbin's belief system as an adult, which caused conflict between his parents, his plantation, and the Virginian society directly outside his realm of reign.

In this Virginia town that upheld slavery as an acceptable institution in society, free blacks owning slaves contradicted how things "were supposed to be." What Jones did—he made slavery less about race and more about class, invalidating all the rules from slavery that put blacks below whites. Naturally, this caused chaos that slowly, but surely, caused the town to essentially implode, as the rules of society and morality were called into question.

Jones' characters are complex with all the grey areas left open to explore. A single action can quickly shift your opinion, because no one is ever fully good or fully bad enough to have warranted permanent placement on either end of the spectrum. On a similar note, the scattered, time-jumping structure of the story can leave you wishing for more on some characters while other important ones reach their fate abruptly. The Known World keeps you on your toes, and you need focus while reading it. As I learned, it's not a book to be read in short snippets on your morning and evening subway commute. But it is very satisfying by the end, when you feel like you were plopped down in this specific place and time with these people and rules and you watch it all unfold and figure out what it all means.

By the way, there's a list of characters at the END of the book. Yeah, no one in book club realized that one until it was too late, either.


For brevity's sake, I'll post my second review at a later date. That turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, and I don't want to bore you to death...

World Party: An Uninspired Conclusion...

Well folks, September has come and gone, which means that the 2010-2011 World Reading Challenge has officially come to a close. I am proud to say I kept up with this challenge all year! Except for....now. At the end. Right at the last month.

I sorta failed.

September's month was India, and I chose to read Salman Rushdie's well-known Midnight's Children. Originally published in 1980, it won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993 (a special award celebrating 25 years of the Booker Prize), and the Best of the Booker in 2008, celebrating the Booker's 40th. I'd never read Rushdie and I had nothing else in mind for India, so why not go with something so prestigious? (Plus, it was available as an eBook through the Brooklyn PL, once again saving me a physical trip to the library.)

Well...this is not a quick read. The story focuses on Saleem Sinai, born at midnight on August 15, 1947, his birth coinciding with the birth of a new, independent India. Rushdie's novel is divided into three "books," and Saleem is the narrator of the story. The first book serves as an introduction to Saleem's own life—stories of his grandparents and parents, of a prophecy made about him before his birth. Then narrator Saleem slowly introduces his own birth and childhood, interactions with family and peers, with the spectacle of India's independence happening all the while in the background. Most notable about Saleem is his "special power" that allows him to enter the mind of all the other thousand "midnight's children."

I know that Midnight's Children is notable for its unique use of language, an Indian perspective on the English language. Likewise, it contains elements of magical realism and is often compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude. So language, structure, and flow may or may not be to blame here when I let you know that I DID NOT FINISH either of these books.

It is extremely rare that I start and book and put it down without finishing it. I can only think of one other book I've done that with in the past decade, and that, coincidentally (or not?), is Marquez's classic, which I started and gave up on about two years ago. But this is what happened with Midnight's Children: I was about 250 pages in with over 300 left to go, my eBook check-out expired today, and I just was not into the story enough to dedicate another week or more to this book. The structure of the story takes time; the language has a specific style and pace, one which takes focus. I've got a busy schedule and list of exciting things I want to read, and frankly, I decided this wasn't worth my time struggling. Maybe I'll come back to it someday, but for now...sorry, India. I let you down in this challenge.

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I am very pleased I chose to follow this challenge over the past year. It's actually something I have told many people about and have promoted as a good way to broaden your reading horizons. For the most part, I am happy with my reading choices. I chose some because I felt like I should read them and some because they were easily accessible. Persepolis and The Reluctant Fundamentalist were my favorites; Three Cups of Tea was inspiring at the time but has had interesting developments since I read it; and some (read: Wolf Hall) were just too smart for me. I'd like to do a similar challenge again someday, but for now I'm going to take a bit of a break from a reading schedule!

The World Reading Challenge Year-In-Review:

• October – Afghanistan — Three Cups of Tea (2)
• November – Turkey — The Towers of Trebizond
• December – Greece — Zorba the Greek
• January – Iran — Persepolis
• February – England — Wolf Hall
• March – Ireland — The Outside Boy
• April – Jamaica — The Long Song
• May – Pakistan — The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• June – Russia — Travels in Siberia
• July – Spain — The Sun Also Rises
• August – Thailand — Sightseeing
• September – India — Midnight's Children

What is the internet??

The February pick for the Idlewild bookclub was Tom Rachman's best-seller, The Imperfectionists—a welcome change of pace from last month's philosophical textbook.

This was an interesting book club choice. At first, I didn't think there would be much to discuss, but it turned out to be a good one. The story is about an English-language newspaper in Rome that, after fifty years of publication, is struggling to stay afloat in the changing landscape of news media. While this is the overarching plot, this book is really a collection of vignettes, each focusing on a different employee of the newspaper, in which their personal lives and work lives are interwoven.

The thing about the characters is...none of them are likable and each is flawed. (The one exception, in my opinion, is the lady who collected the newspapers, the one character not an employee.) I felt sympathy for some characters, was disgusted by others, but each of them were journalists, or exhibited what we decided could be described as typical "journalistic behavior"—somewhat cold, ambitious to the point of conniving. The women all seemed horrible, and I'm fully convinced Rachman has some serious woman issues that he was projecting. Despite disliking most of the characters, I was hungry to read each story, and they each deserved to be dissected. However, Rachman has this tendency to write an interesting character study and then slam a sentence onto the very end to indicate complete hopelessness for these characters. I found this trait very obvious, but I'm not sure anyone else at book club found it to be as poignant as I did!

Naturally our discussion led to technology and media and how the newspaper is nearly obsolete. How many people under the age of 30 currently subscribe to the daily print version of a newspaper? Not very many. I'm a lover of print, but realistically, technology allows a faster, easier look at the news. It's not difficult to see where the newspaper world is heading, but it's fascinating to see where it and technology have gone in just the past ten years.

To illustrate my point, watch the video below from 1994.

World Party: The "Pat" situation as it appears in Trebizond

November's country in the World Reading Challenge was Turkey. I decided to search NYRB's collection, because I figured I could depend on them for some authentic world lit. So, one stroll over to Idlewild and I walked out with a copy of Rose Macauley's The Towers of Trebizond.

This is one of those books that I feel a review can't do it justice. Not because it blew me away with out-of-this-world amazingness but because it has so many angles to it. It's serious. It's religious. It's a statement. And it's actually quite funny.


Laurie is the narrator, traveling through the back country of Turkey—from Istanbul to Trebizond—with quite an eclectic English group. Aunt Dot, the middle-aged Anglican free spirit with a camel, out to reform middle Eastern views of women; Father Chantry-Pigg, traveling entirely to convert Muslims to Anglicanism; and occasionally Halide, an independent Turkish woman reformed from Islam yet preparing to marry a Muslim man. Throughout their journey, they come across many policemen who think they are spies and Billy Graham on tour with Southern evangelists. Quite the adventure.

It took a bit to fully get in engrossed its pace and language, because the writing has the quality of someone verbally telling a story. Lots of sentences full of commas that just seem to keep going, like the narrator suddenly remembered something else to say. It allows for a great subtle sense of humor, present in what-would-be the narrator's "under his/her breath" comments.

If you picked up on my ambiguity around the name "Laurie," that was intentional. Because to be honest, I STILL don't know the gender of the narrator. I read the entire book assuming it was a man. Laurie could certainly be a manly English name (c'mon, Hugh Laurie!) and the life Laurie leads is definitely not something I would expect of a 1950s English woman—traveling alone, socializing with men, drinking, training monkeys (yes, training monkeys). Yet, Laurie has a lover—a man—which came as a surprise to me at the end, particularly because that would mean this was 1950s English gay literature and it would seem far ahead of its time. But then I am reading other Goodreads comments on this book and people are using that same surprising ending to determine Laurie is, in fact, a woman. So I have no idea, and I'd rather leave it at that right now than research it. I gotta give props to the author for creating so ambiguous of a character! But like I said, this book has a lot to offer and could stand for a good second read down the road.