Nonfiction | Musings of a Hollywood Mom

For my first Read Harder Challenge category, I chose the celebrity memoir because after reading some really dense Gore Vidal (more on that later), I needed something light. In selecting a book for this category, I figured there were a few ways I could go: pick a person I knew and liked, thus mostly guaranteeing enjoyment; pick someone deep, complicated, and interesting that would be impressive in dinner conversation; or pick some total fluff, like a reality star, that I cared nothing about but forced me to really branch out from what I'd normally choose.

While I toyed with the idea of selecting the fine writing of some Real Housewife of the Jersey Shore, I preserved my sanity and chose a celebrity with a slightly deeper story: Drew Barrymore.

Barrymore's Wildflower follows in the same vein as most celebrity "memoirs" these days, in that it's more a collection of essays or anecdotes—"meaningful life moments"—than a real reflection of one's life. (I mean, how much life reflection can you share when you're only 42?) In Wildflower, the actress recollects her first experience of doing laundry, living on her own at age 14. She writes odes to the people she loves—friends, husband, in-laws, children, Adam Sandler—and how their stories began. She chronicles a multi-day outward bound trek taken with her Charlie's Angels co-stars after filming wrapped, and how nature nearly got the best of her. She writes about how her three rescue dogs ushered her into a responsible adulthood and how Steven Spielberg has been an unwavering source of support since her days on the set of E.T. And of course, no celebrity "memoir" would be complete without the reflection on the life-changing do-good trip to some third-world country. (I remember Amy Poehler's feeling so forced that I nearly quit reading.)

I chose this memoir because I thought that, in the game of celebrity memoirs where every witty or popular young-ish female seems to have been given a book deal, Drew Barrymore may have something more substantial to say. Less self-indulgent. More introspective, reflective, or thought-provoking. I mean, girl's been through some stuff.

That wasn't the case. I mean, I understand not wanting to dwell on one's past, especially one so colorful that has probably been rehashed often enough when you've personally moved on. But for someone with those experiences who has so clearly learned from them and made thoughtful decisions to build a very purposeful life since, completely avoiding those topics seems like such an omission, making these words she does share seem more trivial. It seems she wants to be open, sharing the importance of some of her life's little moments. But without facing the tough moments that brought her to this current level of peace and introspection, the stories she shares end up feeling like they just skim the surface.

Ultimately, most of her recollections felt so generic, they could've been written by and about anyone. Meeting in-laws and birthing children can be monumental milestones, but I'm not reading Drew Barrymore's story for the universal experience of how having a kid changes a person; I want to read the unique stories that have built her life and made her a person worth getting this book deal. Instead, I felt like an English teacher filling the margins of a student essay with red pen critique to "dig deeper."

Book Riot's 2018 Read Harder Challenge

It's a new year and time to start a new reading challenge! (Remember when I started the 2017 Read Diverse Challenge? Yeah, that one failed; I guess I needed the extra structure.)

Back at the start of 2015, I stumbled upon and began Book Riot's annual reading challenge. Though it ended up taking me more than a year to complete (errr...try two whole years...), I absolutely loved hunting down purposeful titles for each category that often took my outside my reading comfort zone. In fact, I've designed my staple school library reading program around the same categorical reading challenge, which gives students the choice to pick the titles they want.

Categories for the Book Riot 2018 Read Harder Challenge:

1. A book published posthumously
2. A book of true crime
3. A classic of genre fiction
4. A comic written and illustrated by the same person
5. A book set in or about one of the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, or South Africa)
6. A book about nature
7. A western
8. A comic written or illustrated by a person of color
9. A book of colonial or postcolonial literature
10. A romance novel by or about a person of color
11. A children's classic published before 1980
12. A celebrity memoir
13. An Oprah Book Club selection
14. A book of social science
15. A one-sitting book
16. The first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series
17. A sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author
18. A comic that isn't published by Marvel, DC, or Image
19. A book of genre fiction in translation
20. A book with a cover you hate
21. A mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author
22. An essay anthology
23. A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60
24. An assigned book you hated (or never finished)

This time, my goal is to actually finish it within the year!

Fiction | A Classic Approach to Reading

I've long talked about Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge that I began back in 2015 and have been picking away at ever since.

Well guys, it's official: I finally finished the 2015 Read Harder Challenge!

My last remaining category for the challenge was "a book published before 1850," and I actually debated several options for this over the course of my participation. Originally, I had wanted to read something American from pre-1850, because I'm already familiar with (and had read) many of the infamous British authors from this era; that would be the easy-out. As time passed, though, I just increasingly felt that sticking to American works was too limiting. ZERO of the options inspired me, and I had, simultaneously, been inspired to read a Dickens classic since I'd only ever read Oliver Twist and that was back in high school. Of the date-qualified options, I chose David Copperfield and, with it being a chunkster and all, saved it for my final Read Harder Challenge project.

David Copperfield, like Dickens' other works, was originally published as a serial over the course of 19 months from 1849 to 1850. Facing its intimidating 800+ pages, I decided to plot out my reading and put myself in the mindset of its original audience; each day, I read a single part, following its original publication schedule of three chapters at a time. This was a fabulous decision, as it made the book's language and heft (daunting to my middle-grade mindset) feel much more manageable.

Largely considered an almost autobiographical work, David Copperfield follows its eponymous main character from his orphaned boyhood to adulthood, through love and loss, happiness and heartbreak, alongside a slew of characters that impact his journey.

Beyond this quick introduction, I think it impossible to outline this book in a succinct paragraph with any certitude. That's not the end goal of the story, to be able to quickly summarize for a friend an enjoyable tale you encountered. What Dickens does with David Copperfield, instead, is create an immersive world in which one character, one man, exists and comes of age. This immersion is achieved in part by its first-person narrative, told from the perspective of an older Copperfield. And it's not even told, as so common, as a reflection but more of a simple retelling with an occasional musing thrown in. Because of this, we the reader forget that we are reading events that have happened in the narrator's past; we are fully engaged in the events unfolding on the page, with the characters with which we interact.

It's a story about the world we live in, with its good and bad, without delving into the world, on a large scale, itself. Rarely do we view Copperfield's place as a citizen of a larger society; rather, his experiences are all relational. He learns of the depths of humanity from the people closest to him—the warm, gregarious Peggotty clan; the unctuous Steerforth; the foolishly optimistic Micawber; the duplicitous Uriah Heep.

On of my most telling observations on this reading experience was the contrast of perspective from that of my own. In a modern world, one in which access is available at our literal fingertips, in which we are inundated with news and opinions, it is a jolt to experience a life in which one's worldview is so strongly influenced by so few people and experiences. Consider that David Copperfield's entire sense of identity and belief was derived from what we read in these pages. It's an experience that is far more personal and intimate than that of today—smaller, perhaps, but no less significant.

Another point: this book is funny! And sentimental! And the poignancy with which Dickens describes certain experiences and emotions was incredibly surprising to me. I guess I tend to view all "classics of literature" from an intellectual frame, assuming the language is straightforward and old-fashioned, lacking expression. But this passage on Copperfield's first bout of intoxication had me laughing, and I'm sure had I not been reading "all-in," focused on the subtleties of language, I would have passed it right by.

"Somebody was smoking. We were all smoking. I was smoking, and trying to suppress a rising tendency to shudder...

Somebody was leaning out of my bed-room window, refreshing his forehead against the cool strone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as 'Copperfield,' and saying, 'Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn't do it.' Now that somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair - only my hair, nothing else - looked drunk...

...We went downstairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it."

I stated in my last post that the dedication I devoted to reading David Copperfield was refreshing; I am so used to breezing through books as we breeze through everything else—news, Netflix, social media—consuming as much as possible in as little time as possible. In some regards I think we suffer from an overabundance of culture available for our consumption. When you live your life alongside the "so many books, so little time" mentality, it becomes habit to speed through one thing to move onto the other. Reading this classic reminded me that books like this were written to be savored, slowly consumed and absorbed, and perhaps that is a mentality I should adopt more often.

Nonfiction | Striving for Success in China's Factories

With only two (!!) categories remaining on my seemingly never-ending quest to finish the Read Harder Challenge I began in 2015, I was finally able to pull a title off my existing to-read list for the "book that takes place in Asia." Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China is a nonfiction exposé on the life of China's numerous (130 million, to be exact) migrant workers. The story is neither thrilling nor uncommon; instead, Chang chronicles the everyday existence of these millions of people that live a life entirely unrelatable to our Western ideals.

Set primarily in the industrial town of Dongguan, Factory Girls tells a common story - that of millions of girls who leave their rural towns for a life and job in the city. As the older generation stays planted in these small, rural towns, continuing a familial tradition of agriculture, the younger generation's future has changed due to China's modern industrialization. Children, particularly the girls, leave for the factories, becoming their families' primary breadwinners. With their migration comes a new sense of freedom and opportunity in a society where education is valued but legitimacy is not (necessarily), where success depends on street smarts, and where, it seems, anything is possible if you work hard enough and smart enough for it.

Chang is a former Wall Street Journal correspondent of Chinese descent. Unfamiliar with, and a bit wary of, her own ancestry, she explores this facet of modern Chinese society from a voyeuristic perspective through select women she follows over the course of three years. She chronicles their move from job to job, always on the lookout for something better, with little loyalty or regard to particular employers; she observes friendships and relationships that seem superficial at best, entirely artificial at worst. It's a world where better jobs often come after lying on your resume, where pyramid schemes and scams run rampant to prey on hopeful ambition, and where relationships can disappear entirely with the simple loss of a cell phone.

The strength of this book lies in Chang's straightforward way of reporting the story. It's not a dastardly tale of sweatshop work. The impression I get, in fact, is that the sweatshop horrors is the stereotype of yesteryear. Though the work is certainly more monotonous and demanding of time (6-day work weeks, for example) than we are used to, the conditions, based on Chang's telling, don't seem harsh or cruel. In this sense, it's not a story of drama and hardship; it's the story of how these migrant women are constantly working for betterment. There is no passive acceptance of life; these women strive to educate themselves for better jobs and new opportunities.

A factory run by TAL Group that makes US-brand apparel for such companies as
J. Crew and Hugo Boss; Photo via New York Times

Interspersed with the present-lives of Chang's migrant subjects is Chang's own family history as migrants to the U.S. after China's Cultural Revolution. Despite providing some context of 20th-century Chinese history, particularly in relation to Communism, this part of the narrative seemed superfluous to me; the intrigue really lies in the everyday lives of these women who have such different lifestyles and values. I am more curious about the future of these women, living in a city populated by people under 30. Do they eventually return to their rural towns? Or do they continue to live in these industrial cities, creating a new tier of the labor force, the "self-made women?" Perhaps China's industrial society still continues to evolve.

What's most remarkable about this story, as a Western reader, is our very real and legitimate connection to it. This is not a lifestyle or job contained within China's borders; rather, it's entirely a product of worldwide, and particularly U.S., demand for cheaply manufactured consumer products. These factories, and therefore these women and their choices and their lives, can attribute their very existence to our want of new iPhones. Or Nikes. Or 50" TVs. And how utterly distressing and perplexing is this?

Fiction | Falling for a Dead Man

As I've been reading broadly for the past two years for the (2015) Book Riot Read Harder Challenge, I've had to tackle some genres that I read rarely, if ever. That is, after all, the whole point of such a challenge—to read outside your comfort zone! One of my remaining categories has been the "romance novel," not because I have anything against romance novels but rather because I had a hard time deciding which sub-genre I wanted to read. Historical? Chick-lit? Do I look for personal plot appeal or go for a true classic of the genre?

I opted for the classic—something that is, according to pop culture & literature, truly representative of the romance genre. Having shelved books for years at the public library, I'm familiar with names, so I picked one from the depths of my memory - Jude Deveraux - and consulted Goodreads for what is considered her pinnacle work.

And that's how I got to A Knight in Shining Armor, Deveraux's 1989 bestseller that tells the story of the lovelorn Dougless Montgomery.

Our heroine is vacationing in England on what was supposed to be a romantic getaway with her surgeon boyfriend, Robert. Forever failing at love, Dougless has convinced herself that he's a good catch, worthy of her love, though it is painfully clear to us, the reader, that Robert is entirely the wrong guy; he is manipulative, controlling, patronizing—so much so that the romantic vacation, during which Dougless was hoping for a marriage proposal, has unexpectedly turned into a family one that includes Robert's brat of a teenager daughter. Any sense of romance dies swiftly when, after a nonsensical argument, Robert jilts and abandons Dougless at a rural church where she's left wallowing in yet another romantic failure, praying for a knight in shining armor to save her from the despair.

Imagine the surprise when a handsome man suddenly, miraculously appears and introduces himself as Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck, the very name on the statue against which Dougless shed her plentiful tears. (Naturally; this is a romance!)

It's questionable who is more confused in this scenario—Dougless, whose heartbreak and frustration turn her romantic sensibilities into practical ones, assuming there's a perfectly rational explanation for this strange man suddenly appearing and claiming to be an Earl who died in the 16th century; or Nicholas, a man who heard a desperate plea for help and now finds himself in an unfamiliar world that is centuries more modern than his own.

Dougless learns of Nicholas' tragic backstory—one involving betrayal, treason, and premature death—as she helps this 16th-century earl navigate the 20th-century world. Naturally, she figures out that this impossible man is exactly who she has been praying for, and the two are inexplicably drawn together by forces that defy logical explanation and are more powerful than either can comprehend. Deveraux isn't easy on either of her main characters, forcing each of them into the time period opposite their own to continue the story and learn more of the puzzle surrounding Nicholas' sudden appearance and his tragic future. This juxtaposition of time ultimately highlights the depth of these two characters—their strengths and weaknesses. At the novel's opening, I very much found Dougless to be a major pushover but with pluck hidden somewhere underneath. As the story evolves, though, so does her character as circumstance demands a more bold, independent woman. (Though, I mean, she could still use a lot of work on the feminist front.)

So what we've got here is not only a love story but a time-traveling one—and I love time travel stories! In terms of the steamy scenes, this is definitely a romance low on that spectrum, so though yes, it's totally a romance, it feels more like an adventure based around a love story. Super fun to breeze through.

Fiction | How to Build an Intergalactic Hero

It's taken nearly two years (pathetic), but I'm closing in on completion of the Read Harder Challenge I began back in 2015. Naturally, the categories I have remaining are the ones I looked least forward to tackling, and among those was science fiction because mehhh, just not my thing.

I was reminded of Ender's Game this past spring when a student checked it out for his independent novel study project. I decided to use Orson Scott Card's classic as my sci-fi novel because a) it is a classic, and b) since I have it in my school library, it'd give me an advantage to know how to recommend it to my readers! Once chosen, though, I pretty much dreaded reading it based entirely on its genre. I rarely, if ever, read sci-fi, and I really didn't like the last one I did read. Also, I had no idea what the story was actually about; no doubt unfairly, I just lumped it into a genre I didn't care for, regardless of the details.

The story is about a 6-year-old boy named Ender Wiggin. He's the third child in his family, his family's third try at producing the commander who can defeat the alien army. Neither his brother nor sister proved to be "the one"—Peter has a sadistic streak, and Ender is pretty sure Peter'd kill him if he had the chance; Valentine is brilliant but an emotional liability. She is Ender's only source of comfort and protection from his older brother. Ender, though, is tough, masks his emotions, and brilliantly manages to get himself out of any scuffle in which he finds himself entangled. After one particularly brutal but triumphant encounter with a bully, Ender is recruited and sent to Battle School where he will train to become the hero the military needs in the next phase of the bugger war.

Ender thrives at Battle School and quickly proves himself to be leagues above his peers. He is able to see what's before him from a different perspective, throwing out the rules as they have been assumed. This trait does him well in the battle arena and at 10, skipping years of training, he is moved to Command School. Ender's leaders, though, increasingly isolate him and throw out seemingly impossible tasks to see how well he will handle each situation. The thing about Ender, though, is that his actions always surprise him. Strategically, he's brilliant, but the swiftness and almost ruthlessness with which he handles threats are never fully intended. To Ender, it makes him a monster, no better than Peter; to the military, he's a weapon and the best shot they have against the buggers.

I was pleasantly surprised by the successful balance of plot and character in Ender's story. As an adventure, the story is engrossing and easy to follow. Ender's world is definitely unlike our own, but the narrative never bogs down with description and reasoning; things simply are the way they are, and as a reader, you don't feel the need to question them. Ender is a character we care to follow. We meet him at such a young age, only six, which seems entirely implausible based on the complexity of the situations and conversations he encounters. But then again, it's Ender's world, and while Card does concede that Ender and his siblings are exceptional, it's mostly just a fact we accept without argument or coercion.

I never expected to like this book, but I ended up really enjoying it. It's an engrossing, accessible adventure for middle school and up kids. And beyond that, it's conceptually complex and full of content and commentary that can be read on a much deeper level—definitely a good one for literary analysis. I'm sure it is and has been analyzed to death by scholars and sci-fi fans, but it can easily be read and enjoyed at surface level, too.

Fiction | Life Turned Upside-Down

We all have those movies or TV shows we love to watch because they're easy entertainment—relaxing, mindless, superficial drama that we get sucked into for however long and forget about immediately after. These "guilty pleasures" aren't things we go around sharing details about [Do I really want to brag about a 3-hour Top Model binge?], but it is culture to consume, and it is enjoyable!

I find it hard to have the same "guilty pleasure" connection to books, because I view any reading as good reading! And maybe it's something about the effort that goes into creating the product—even the most formulaic of novels has taken hours for an author to craft, with re-reads, edits, and re-writes. There's a purposeful effort behind it, more than just pointing a camera to see what happens.

So when I came to the "guilty pleasure" category of the Read Harder Challenge, I had to just pick something more entertaining than literary, something I read for fun rather than enlightenment. Ergo, I chose a Sarah Dessen novel I hadn't yet read, Just Listen.

In it, Annabel is beginning her junior year, but it's off to a rough start. Her ex-best friend Sophie will no longer speak to her—she's a social outcast now; and at home, Annabel is afraid of breaking her mother's heart by quitting her modeling career, and her older sister is struggling with anorexia, no doubt brought on by her own modeling career. We, the reader, discover that Annabel can trace all her bad juju to one night at the end of last school year. It was the night her life took a one-eighty and Sophie became her bully instead of her friend.

Annabel's only school savior is Owen, a boy she certainly would've never noticed before. He's tall, dark, and mysterious. He has a bad-boy reputation. Mostly he's just a music-obsessed outsider that doesn't care a thing about high school politics. Their burgeoning friendship gives Annabel the confidence to confront the issues that plague her and make peace with the events and people that turned her life around.

Dessen's books are wonderful—maybe one could say in that "guilty pleasure" way—because they're too serious to be fluff but too lighthearted to be heavy. They feature the everyday, realistic issues that teen girls face, and though each situation is entirely unique (as is every teenage girl), the resulting emotions are universal. Just Listen is actually probably the heaviest of Dessen's I've read, dealing with issues like sexual assault and slut shaming, though in a quieter, less upfront way than other teen novels covering the same topics. In my opinion, these are issues important for middle schoolers to read about, because they do, unfortunately, exist in their worlds. This book is a good entry into heavier talking points.

Nonfiction | Everyday Words on Everyday Moments

Poetry, historically, is not my thing. I think I can trace it back to my senior year of high school. I was spending a weekend at a state university as part of an Honors Program interview, and we had a seminar session on analyzing a poem. After much lengthy discussion and debate on the poet's motives, meaning, word choice, etc., our discussion leader informed us that the poem in question was not, in fact, actually a real poem but merely an amalgamation of lines from various Dr. Seuss books. Which then prompted further debate on what does constitute a poem. Needless to say, I found this exercise infuriating, and the interpretation of poetry from this analytical perspective turned me off the whole genre for years.

I've since begun, bit by bit, to appreciate poetry on a more personal level. In academic discourse, we're generally taught to approach poetry with a critical eye. We dissect poems into small pieces of words and patterns and use this analysis to speculate on the author's purpose and meaning. And to me, that kind of close reading is MISERABLE. I like to just accept poetry as is, without any interpreted attribution of the author's words. It was written with meaning by the author; it may or may not connect with each reader.

Despite my own problematic history with poetry, it's a genre I try to promote to my middle schoolers to broaden their reading. For the Read Harder Challenge's "collection of poetry" category, I chose a title I'd recently purchased for my school library, Gary Soto's A Fire in My Hands.

THIS collection I can get behind. Soto writes on small moments and memories from his childhood and adolescence in Fresno, California. The most well-known poem from this collection, "Oranges," captures the awkward, nervous elation of a first date on an ordinary gray December day. "How You Gave Up Root Beer" describes the most embarrassing moment around "the girl you like more than your own life." Soto explains the complex way of the world in juvenile terms in "How Things Work." And "Hitchhiking with a Friend" details the briefest of young adventures with a friend, feeling the exhilaration of being far from home, eyes open to "the notion of beauty" in small, unfamiliar sights.

My favorite, though, is "That Girl," a beautiful reminiscence on those early days of lust.

The public library was saying things
In so many books
And I, a Catholic boy
In a green sweater,
Was reading the same page
A hundred times...

Soto's poems lack a commanding rhythm or rhyme scheme, and they rarely feature such simile or metaphor. The words never devolve into poetic descriptors or illustrative adjectives. But they have a soothing rhythm and use simple words to evoke simple experiences. I found the best part of this collection (the revised and expanded edition, specifically) to be the inclusion of an introduction by the author as well as very brief anecdotes that precede each poem. In the introduction, Soto shares his background with poetry and his connection with the place and environment that inspired these poems. The anecdotes at the beginning of each individual poem add context that contributes to the personal appeal of the poem--which, as I stated earlier, is exactly what I'm looking for in a poem! I think this collection is easily accessible, especially to young readers and reluctant [poetry] readers, because it's the kind of poetry that makes you feel like your own small moments are unique and worthy of mention and memory.

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 | Stories of Horror & Magic

When I decided to read a collection of short stories for the Read Harder Challenge, I was happy to find I already had a couple collections waiting in my to-read queue. I chose Kelly Link's recently published (2015) collection called Get in Trouble. The blurb spoke its praise by authors such as Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon, and it piqued my interest noting this was her first collection for adults in a decade—did I already know this author as a librarian without even realizing it?? (The answer was no.)

Turns out that Get in Trouble was very different from what I expected! I guess I'm one of those people who just assumes a default about most things that can be labelled. For instance, I just assume a book is going to be realistic in story unless obviously indicated otherwise. And initially, Get in Trouble affirmed my assumptions. The collection's opening story, "The Summer People," introduces us to an adolescent named Fran who pretty much takes care of herself. Her father leaves home for undetermined amounts of time for indiscriminate reasons—seeking out a prayer meeting he found online or avoiding some trouble he started while out drinking too much. Seems like a normal, basic, realistic-enough premise. Until we begin to follow Fran's day-to-day as she cares for some mysterious people up in a mysterious house. They're called the "summer people," and their care has been handed down to Fran from her mother. They're rarely seen, but they make things and provide things their caretaker wants. It's like a fairy tale, but you're never certain if it's good magic or dark.

So what I learned quickly from this first story what that Get in Trouble was not going to be based firmly in reality. And to be honest, that scared me off a bit. Because the thing is, though my favorite kinds of stories have always been the ones that felt the most real, the ones to which I can easily relate or understand, I can get behind fantastical worlds if the characters are vivid and developed with real reactions and emotions.

Magical realism, though, this blending the two kinds of worlds, I just cannot seem to get behind. Throughout the following eight stories in this collection, I never knew how to read it—should I focus on the characters? Or is it the unbelievable plot points and details that actually matter the most? I've tried several times, but I always end up finding magical realism to be too distracting for me. That's especially the case here, with short stories, where you have less word-count to get invested in the characters or story, and it's unclear what the "big picture" is trying to say.

I "got" some of the stories more than others. I think "The New Boyfriend" was deliciously creepy enough to make most of my middle schoolers squirm with good-horror-story pleasure. But then "Valley of the Girls," the story of what I think is some Egyptian mystic dystopia, had me so confuzzled by the premise that I could hardly follow the action and dialogue. I believe this will have its audience, but that audience is not me.

Nonfiction | Buggin', Wiggin', and Keepin' it Real

Back when we lived in New York, I hated Spring. HATED it! March was always the absolute WORST. As other, more southern parts of the country were quickly thawing, New York felt stuck in some never-ending purgatory of 50-degrees and a looming potential for one last snow storm.

As the weather started to warm up in April, though, I always got a great amount of joy from walking to my local Greenpoint branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and browsing the shelves for my next reads. It hearkened back to my high school days at the library, when I'd read whatever looked enticing (so yes, a lot of judging by the cover!). It's an entirely different approach to reading than selecting titles from my "to-read" queue to check them off the list; instead of planned, it's an opportunity to embrace the unexpected—and perhaps stumble upon a fortuitous discovery.

The temperatures have already begun to climb here in Nashville, inspiring these Springtime visits to my new neighborhood library. It was under this influence that I found on the "new" shelf Jen Chaney's As If: The Oral History of Clueless as Told By Amy Heckerling and the Cast and Crew and brought it home (and chose it as the "microhistory" for my never-ending Read Harder Challenge!).

Clueless is one of those rare, few movies that occupies a spot in both my AND Colin's top 10 list. We're always in the mood to watch it, and its quotes are a frequent part of our lexicon. Not only is it a witty, creative, self-aware teen film, it was also totally monumental in bringing back the "teen movie" to us, the kids of the 90s. Eighties kids had John Hughes to define their era; and though I was a tad young when Clueless was released in 1996 (a mere preteen at 11, to be exact), one can't deny its influence in ushering in my generation's teen movie glory days. Clueless paved the way for a resurgence in teen movies that brought dozens, from 1998's Can't Hardly Wait all the way to 2004's Mean Girls. (Any issue of the now-defunct Teen People Magazine was substantiated proof of the importance and infiltration of teen movies at the turn of the millennium.)

Chaney's history of Clueless is not your typical author-narrated history. Instead, she compiles soundbites from hundreds of interviews with Clueless's pertinent players to tell the story through the eyes of the people that experienced it firsthand. Not only do we hear from the obvious sources (writers, directors, actors), Chaney includes anecdotes from crew members, studio employees, extras, musicians, critics, professors—anyone who could share a small piece of the Clueless story.

It would be easy for this book to simply be a helter-skelter work of chaos—an onslaught of stories that serve only as reminiscence. Chaney succeeds, though, in establishing a structure, and thus significance, to this history by organizing it into chronological, themed chapters and sections. "When Emma Met Cher: Clueless and the Spirit of Jane Austen" discusses the inspiration behind the story, especially its literary roots. "The Language of Clueless" investigates the research behind its unique dialogue—much of the reason for its lasting status as an era-defining piece of pop culture. Other chapters cover the search for a cast, location scouting, wardrobe curation, music compilation, premier and press, critical response, merchandising, and ultimately, most significantly, the magnificent impact of Clueless—on its cast, its filmmakers, and on the audience that flocked to theaters to see it.

As If! is an entertaining read for fans of Clueless, but it's also a well-curated reflection on a piece of pop culture that had a significant impact on the world in which my Oregon Trail Generation grew up and consumed culture.

Fiction | Celebrating Truth in a World of Lies

It would've been easy to count any one of my random reads as the YA title in the Read Harder Challenge. I'm constantly reading books from my school library, after all. I decided to be purposeful with this choice, though, so I depended on my Goodreads "want to read" queue to provide a YA book I had probably long forgotten I wanted to read.

The one I settled upon was The Truth Commission by Susan Juby. It's organized as a book within a book (so meta)--the final Spring Special Project authored by 11th grader Normandy Pale. In this project, she relays the stories surrounding the formation of the Truth Commission, an informal group begun by Normandy and her two best friends that seeks truths from their peers.

But before I jump into that part of the story, let me give you the background...

Normandy attends Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design, a total hippie art school where students are encouraged to find their voice and express them as loudly as possible. Normandy is actually one of the quieter, less showy students there; she's exploring writing as her avenue of focus, as demonstrated by this final project of narrative nonfiction. She's also used to being secondary to her sister, the legendary Kiera Pale, a best-selling graphic novelist whose familial inspiration unfortunately doesn't portray Normandy and her parents in the best light.

So Normandy is used to the background, and she's created quite a nice little world for herself with her best friends Neil and Dusk. But one random conversation starts to shift Normandy's world off-kilter. When Neil breaks the unwritten code against directness and asks a fellow student about her very obvious plastic surgery (and it's not a totally offensive disaster), the Truth Commission is born with the mission to discourage hearsay and celebrate the beauty of openness. Normandy, though, is more hesitant to jump into the truth than her friends, especially when her truth mission involves a very touchy target—the infamous Kiera herself, who has suddenly returned home from college, seemingly traumatized by some unknown incident.

This was a really odd book. I think most readers will have strong reactions to it, one way or another, and I can't say mine was totally positive. Often, if I have a negative reaction to a book, it's the characters that prevented my enjoyment. This time, it was the less common opposite—I didn't mind the main character so much; I just found the story to be lacking. And not even the story itself, because I like this premise of a "truth commission." Maybe there were too many other small factors that bothered me. Like Normandy's sister who, with her whole ridiculous story is a total UGH, like one of those terrible people you know must exist in the world but is so absurd she seems unbelievable. And her parents who are total doormats. And also the fact that the ENTIRE BOOK is littered with FOOTNOTES, which is basically the most annoying text feature ever, especially when coming from the brain of a 16ish-year-old AND when you're reading it on a Kindle and have to click back and forth and back and forth.

I don't know. I think my adulthood cynicism comes out most often with YA books. Some I love, some I hate, and I think my more negative reactions usually stem from kitschy teen tropes that I know aren't geared towards my 30-year-old self anyways but that I can't get past because I hate teens being defined and pigeonholed any certain way in the first place.

I didn't mean for this to be a whole diatribe of negativity, because really this book isn't bad, and though YA is a genre, really it's just a target demographic, and there are—and should be!—as many different styles and voices for this audience as for any other. So maybe I should just end my commentary here with a 100% personal opinion-based verdict of "good concept, didn't like the execution." But by all means, give it a try—it's got some rave reviews on Goodreads!

Fiction | This Ain't Hollywood

I picked up this next book based totally on judgment of its cover. Its retro setting and road-trip adventure plot didn't hurt, either; nor did the mission of its indie publisher. To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie by Ellen Conford was originally published in 1982 and has recently been re-released by Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint of Ig Publishing, dedicated to bringing new life to YA classics from decades past. [This is my Read Harder "indie press" category choice.]

So, I've been wanting to read this one ever since I first set eyes on this gorgeous imprint. [Its titles follow the same beautiful, retro design scheme; the type looks good; the pages feel good.] But because it's such an old book and new reprinting, NO ONE HAS IT! No public library, no school library... Finally, I bought a copy for my own school library, along with many others in the imprint, just so I could read it!

Conrad tells the story of a 15-year-old girl named Sylvie who has spent her young life hopping from one foster home to the next. She's had neither a stable or safe upbringing; her moves tend to be the result of some purposeful misbehavior, Sylvie's own found defense mechanism against creepy foster dads with wandering eyes and hands. Her only comfort is the escape to Hollywood she's been planning for the past three years. If Sylvie dresses up with the right makeup, hair, and shoes, she can pass for 18, and that's what she's counting on to get her across the country to begin her new life as a star.

After a series of unfortunate events (aka, all her money gets stolen), Sylvie finds herself stranded in middle American and dependent on a ride from a Bible salesman named Walter to take her the rest of the way. Obviously, her decisions are misguided here. Walter is fairly young and pretty charming, but he's definitely got that smarmy quality. Knowing Sylvie's past encounters with untrustworthy men, it seems somewhat surprising she'd agree to hitch a ride with this shady dude, but maybe she just figures she can handle whatever is thrown at her. Regardless of her reasons, the result is a cringe-inducing journey across the country where all we can do is sit back and hope she survives the trip.

I have to say that this daunting plot with a seedy under-belly isn't exactly what I expected for this story. It's more like an after-school special in book form. To All My Fans broaches issues like molestation and sexual assault in a way that introduces a great distrust of adults who are in positions of supposed trustworthiness. For a brief moment, I questioned whether this was "middle school appropriate" for my library, but then I decided that "middle school" doesn't need to mean watered down. This book is by no means overly graphic, nor would I consider any of the content "too mature" for kids in this age group. In fact, there are probably middle schoolers who deal with some of these issues and need to encounter stories and characters that mirror their own lives.

The story doesn't end with a big climactic situation or confrontation; rather, it peters out by bringing this plot-driven adventure back around to the main character, ending with a "checking in" (for lack of a better phrase) with Sylvie—what she's thinking and feeling, where's she's going from here. Readers looking for a simple thriller or adventure story may be disappointed, but there are substantial talking points raised for discussion.

Nonfiction | Aging, Forgetfully

Back when I committed to the Read Harder Challenge, I did a fair amount of book research and made a whole big list of the titles I was going to read for each category. For the category requiring "a book written by someone when they were over the age of 65," I had originally picked Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, because I've never read any Didion.

Well, that was a year ago that I made that selection, and at this point, I'm really not in the mood for some deep, depressing literature. So a quick browse through my library's eBook offerings led me to something shorter and sweeter—Nora Ephron's humorous observations on aging, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections.

Knowing that Ephron passed away just a couple years after this was published, this series of essays and comedic ponderings feels almost like her final reflections on the meaningful moments and serendipitous situations of her life. She talks about her early career and entry into journalism in an era during which women were relegated to lower, menial job titles for no reason other than blatant sexism and gender inequality. She jokes about her constant battles with technology, despite penning a rather successful screenplay based on just that [though funnily enough, though, her recent encounters with technology seem to be stuck in the You've Got Mail era of internet communication]. She discusses the satisfaction of professional success and the heartbreak attached to flops. 

Obviously, Ephron is an engaging, enjoyable, observant writer. This collection, though humorous, certainly has a bit of melancholy tagging alongside. Sure, she shares lots of funny anecdotes and on-point observations that inspire that chuckle of agreement, but what she's really speaking to is the act of GETTING OLD. And that's not without some small level of sadness, be it because of fear or unfulfillment or whatever. But what I think Ephron is trying to do here with this book, as with all her works, is bring a lightness to a disagreeable idea, to trigger a realization that this experience is universal, to make molehills out of the mountain of Aging.

I didn't love this. Some bits seemed more worthy of a recollection over drinks with a friend than an essay published to the masses. And I'll probably forget most of what she said by this time next month. But then again, Ephron is writing plainly, jovially here about life experiences, ones that I don't currently have but that many do. If this connects with the right reader, and brings a little humor to a daunting concept, then I guess it has served its purpose.

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 | The Music Stops, Time Goes On

I've been putting off writing about this book for a while. I read Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as my award-winning book from the past decade (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2011) for the Read Harder Challenge. I read it back before Labor Day which, being a hectic time of year with school starting, combined with not really liking it that much, I have to admit I remember next to nothing about it.

Sorry, Egan, for doing you this disservice. (Your book got enough praise anyway; you don't need me.) This post is going to be less reflective and meaningful, more just writing to mark it off the list. But thank goodness for the library's eBook checkouts, providing a quick refresher so I can write this with some level of credibility!

The novel's first two chapters introduce us to Sasha and Bennie, the latter an aging record executive, the former is young assistant. For this reason alone, their sequential placement in the novel, I have to consider them the main focus of this story (as does every synopsis written of this book), though we read many perspectives and meet many new people.

Chapter three knocks us to Bennie's past, as a high school student, a musician in a rock band, as the 1970s draw to a close. A group of friends—Scotty, Jocelyn, and Alice—are the key players in this historical interlude, the subjects of late adolescent friendships and relationships that strive for the complex gravitas of adulthood.

Subsequent chapters hop around, focusing on one figure or another that has been previously mentioned or introduced. Music is the most common theme. Relationships are also a frequent conflict. The finale circles back to Bennie and Alex, a guy we met along the way through, aptly, Sasha.

I think the whole point to this rigmarole is something about, simply, time and that things change and people change and lives go on and the past can end up unrecognizable. But the fact that I can't even remember the poignancy of this conclusion indicates that it wasn't too successful in reaching me. People adore this book and clearly so do award committee members and/or critics, meaning that someone has clearly found significance in this work. And normally this is a format that I adore, the shifting perspective to share a wide-angle view of a story. But with these people I just didn't care, because I didn't like them, and I didn't care about their music, and I didn't care about their lives. So maybe there was some meaning in there, amidst this unlikable lot; I just didn't care enough to look for it.

Fiction | Field Notes on Ritual, Culture, Love

The same wonderful lady that, eons ago, recommended Gloria to my wee 19-year-old self recently recommended to me Lily King's Euphoria, which makes this my Reader Harder Challenge pick for the "recommended to you" category.

This story unfolded much differently than I expected.

It centers around three young anthropologists in the 1930s studying river tribes in New Guinea. Nell Stone is a well-known American woman, controversial thanks to her published reports on the sex lives of tribal children and youth. Her husband is Fen, a capricious Australian with uncertain and unstable motivations for his work. After abandoning their study on a particular aggressive tribe, Nell and Fen cross paths with Andrew Bankson, an English anthropologist who has established himself in the area for the past several years. Despite his stability with study, Bankson has been suffering from hauntings of his past—his father's death, a brother's death, another's suicide—and is tempted to end his own life until he meets Nell and Fen.

An agreeable new post of study brings Nell and Fen closer to Bankson along the riverbank. They take up residence amongst the Tam, a female-dominated society with plenty of art and culture to discover. Nell is quick to assimilate into the community, constantly establishing connections and conversations, observing and note-taking on all she learns. Fen, on the other hand, just seems to want to be a member of the Tam, and Nell is frequently frustrated by his lack of record-keeping and purposeful interactions.

Nell and Fen provide the action of the narrative; their perspectives lend a sense of wanderlust to the story as we experience the daily life of an anthropologist in this particular place and time. Bankson, though, provides the emotion and introspection. While he is certainly an observer of experiences, his voice goes below the surface and reflects on meaning and interaction.

The narrative voice jumps frequently chapter to chapter, shifting perspective as mentioned above. What we're left with has me feeling rather puzzled, or maybe disconnected. I found Nell and Fen to be fairly static characters, and though we read much of the story through their immediate experience, I feel quite distant from their emotional one. Bankson is the emotional core of this story, and we sort of only known Nell and Fen, on a personal level, through his recounting of their shared time.

Throughout my reading, I felt there was a wall that the reader could not pass. Partly, it's the use of textual clues, hinting to a future that is already certain, defined; partly, it's the distance we're kept from Nell and Fen, unable to feel the impact of experience. To me, it prevented a full emotional investment in the story. That's not to say, though, it lacks meaning. There is great reflection on motive and perception among individuals and communities. This book is a simple read on the surface but has clearly been carefully crafted. The writing is excellent, and there is certainly poignancy here that gives great dimension to personal histories and cultural varieties.

And sidenote: most synopses of this book describe a "passionate love triangle" or "romantic firestorm" which I think is terribly misleading, because I don't think that's the author's main focus—or point—at all.

Fiction | A Vision Quest Through Time

When I saw the Read Harder challenge required a book "that is by or about someone from an indigenous culture," I knew immediately that I'd be picking a Sherman Alexie book. American Indian history, culture, & society is one of my favorite nonfiction topics, but I don't often read the fiction that represents this group. My only other encounters with Alexie have been either YA (The Absolutely True Diary...) or short stories (The Lone Ranger and Tonto...), so I decided to experience just some general fiction through one of his more recent titles, Flight.

Flight is a small little book that packs some wallop quite quickly. Chapter One, sentence one introduces us to Zits, a half-Irish, half-Indian 15-year-old boy whose nickname, unfortunately, comes from the state of his face. His dad left before he can even remember. His mom died of cancer when he was six. He's been living in foster homes ever since, usually with people who care more about the welfare check he brings than providing a stable, loving home. Zits often gets in trouble with the law, but things get worse once he meets a white kid called Justice who inspires all sorts of query and rebellion, including a particularly hostile act of open fire in a bank that leaves several dead, including Zits.

It's not the end of Zits, though. When he wakes up, he finds himself in the body of a racist FBI agent in the 1970s in Red River, Idaho, the epicenter of the Indigenous Rights Now! movement and ensuing conflict.

And then it's another day, another new world—this time as a young boy living on an actual Indian settlement on the cusp of obliteration by US Calvary forces at Little Bighorn. And next time, on the opposite side of battle, as an old man tasked with wiping out the Indians.

Zits continues through a journey into the past, seeing different sides to history and the varying perspectives of its people. It's an easy story, though one that's actually pretty layered with theme and deep in allegory. It doesn't take much analysis or heavy thinking, but it still feels substantial. It's commendable to the author that though the story flows through time and into different people, the voice remains the same. It's Zits that guides us through the story, and we never lose our grip on him.

Fiction | Drowning in Eternity

Having a penchant for both sweeping sagas and New York City history, I have kept my husband's copy of Pete Hamill's Forever on my actual, physical to-read shelf through multiple moves across states and storage units. It's always been one of those "I'll get to it eventually" books, so when I had to read a book written by a male author ("a book by a person whose gender is different than yours") for the Read Harder Challenge, this was finally the opportunity.

To sum it up briefly, Forever is the story of an Irishman named Cormac O'Connor who gains immortality to avenge the death of his parents by ending the family line of his father's murderer. But Forever goes into a bit more detail than that and spreads the story out over about 600 pages.

The first 100 or so of them take place in Ireland, setting the stage for Cormac's eventual move to America. Our protagonist is a young man growing up under English rule but secretly learning historic Gaelic religion and myth under his father's tutelage. The pivotal year is 1741 when Cormac's father is thoughtlessly murdered by thugs of the Earl of Warren—a man with no regard for the lives and troubles of others. Cormac had already lost his mother, and this same man was kind of to blame; it was the wheels of the Earl's carriage that ran her over in the streets. So basically, Cormac has a serious vendetta against the Earl of Warren, and, lucky for Cormac, a man from those secret Gaelic rituals bestows upon him the gift of immortality—and with it the opportunity to get revenge.

This quest for revenge brings Cormac to New York City as he follows the Earl to this settlement that is barely a town. —Oh, and that's a criterion of his immortality; he lives forever as long as he doesn't leave the island of Manhattan.— During this quest, we see New York grow from a tiny settlement to a turbulent city torn by war (twice), and a booming metropolis run by questionable characters like Boss Tweed.

I've been excited to read this book for so long because I expected a story that was deeply intertwined with NYC history. In Edward Rutherfurd's New York: The Novel, the city is certainly the main character; we see its evolution through the characters, but they're really secondary to the setting. In Forever, we started with a strong character heavily driven by plot and conflict; then he becomes enmeshed with this other huge character, the city; and once that happens, it loses focus. The timeline jumps around with such huge gaps that it's too inconsistent to be a story about New York; yet it also mostly abandons the main character's initial conflict and motivations, so it loses that thread as well.

The most annoying part of this book is the final section that occurs around 9/11. I've read this tidbit several times, and my husband heard the same from the author himself during a college class visit: The story basically goes that Hamill completed his manuscript, and then 9/11 happened, inspiring him to go back and edit to include this event that would clearly be a defining, monumental piece of the city's history. Valid point, but that's exactly how it feels in reading this book—like a section tagged on at the end that never meshes with the rest of the story and its concept.

Ultimately, I think Forever suffers from a lack of focus; it's trying to do too many things at once, to tell too many stories, when the author needed to just pick a direction and stick with it. I finished this book with the belief that Cormac's story was incomplete and the portrait of the evolving city Hamill was trying to paint, using this theme of immortality, was disappointingly inadequate.

Fiction | Highly Unlikely & Utterly Unbelievable

When I heard early in the spring that Judy Blume was releasing a new adult book this year, I immediately decided it would be my "book published this year" for the Read Harder Challenge. And I'm not even a die-hard Judy Blume fan. Sure, I read lots of her stuff as a kid and enjoyed it, but I like her even more for her nonstop devotion to the library and literacy cause. Truth be told, I forgot she wrote an adult book once, because I never read it.

It was fated, then, that a friend works for Knopf, and one day this summer I found In the Unlikely Event sitting on my doorstop. I got to enjoy this puppy while soaking up sun on my pizza-shaped pool float and in between cat naps. (This school-schedule summer vacation really is the best.)

The premise of In the Unlikely Event is awesome, in a bit of a sadistic kind of way. Though the narrative alternates its focus between several characters, our main point of contact in this story is Miri Ammerman, a teenager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the early 1950s. This particular winter, when Miri is fifteen and first finding herself in love, a series of plane crashes, in very short succession, rocks her town and everyone in it. This setting is based on Blume's own experiences as a teenager in shoes very similar to Miri's—at least in terms of time and place. These three plane crashes are actual events from the winter of 1951 that nearly closed Newark Airport for good. Sixty years later, it's still an unbelievable sequence of events.

That's about all the summary I need to share about this book, because that's really what the story hinges on. It's about particular people, yes, but these aren't people that are universal, able to exist in any time or place. This novel is their story in relation to these monumental, unfathomable events happening around them. At some points it feels like life is completely different for them than from before crash number one or number two; at other points, it feels like these crashes are events they witness from a distance and barely internalize, as if it happened in another place to other people. In this regard, it's difficult to really pinpoint what exactly the message is here that Blume is trying to share. Not that it needs a message, per se—perhaps it's just a portrait of an experience; but can we go so far as to call it Miri's coming-of-age, or is it just a snapshot of her life, along with so many others?

What the author was good at here was immersing the reader in the setting with details and ambiance. You can sense Blume's personal connection with the time and place, because she writes with a sense of nostalgia. The story itself opens and closes 30+ years later than the plane crashes, when characters are reuniting to commemorate the events of that terrible winter; and perhaps this contributes to the nostalgic tone—the story, within itself, is somewhat being told as a recollection. I very much enjoyed that we did get to see this peek into the future, to see how these characters turned out. It lent a "full-circle" theme to this story that ultimately just reminds us that life goes on. And while I don't believe this book is a monumental achievement, it's easy and enjoyable enough—with a unique premise that will probably inspire much Google searching—to entertain for an afternoon or two.


Disclaimer: Readers with a fear of flying should perhaps avoid this one.