JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Playlist for the Dead by Michelle Falkoff

Here’s what Sam knows: There was a party. There was a fight. The next morning, his best friend, Hayden, was dead. And all he left Sam was a playlist of songs, and a suicide note: For Sam—listen and you’ll understand.

As he listens to song after song, Sam tries to face up to what happened the night Hayden killed himself. But it’s only by taking out his earbuds and opening his eyes to the people around him that he will finally be able to piece together his best friend’s story. And maybe have a chance to change his own.

I think this is the first YA novel I’ve read in a long time where the main character is male – it was refreshing. Sam is confused and hurt at the beginning of the novel. His best friend is dead, and as the novel progresses and he meets people who knew Hayden, he realises that perhaps he didn’t know his best friend as well as he thought he did.

This book is flawed, but it does build suspense well and it does intrigue the reader to want to keep reading. Sam knows more about the night before Hayden died than he tells us, so we keep reading because we too want to know why Hayden killed himself.

The songs in this book were kind of irrelevant. The playlist was supposed to help Sam understand why Hayden killed himself. But he listened to them, pondered the lyrics, and then moved on. So, you could’ve taken the songs and the playlist out of the entire story and the novel would’ve been fine, which is not a good thing.

I don’t think the playlist really helped Sam at all – the characters did. Their interactions with Hayden and their social experiences with Sam helped him understand it all and attempt to move on. That being said, the characters in this novel seemed like cardboard cut outs. Sure, I kept reading because I was curious, but I was not reading because I sympathised for the characters. I didn’t really feel anything for them, to be honest. Sam told us all about his feelings and his thoughts and his doubts, and I think that this can stop the reader from actually caring for him.

The character’s motivations seemed impulsive and without authenticity. I think that the author was so determined to construct a mystery around Hayden’s death and the three bullies that she forgot to construct a more three dimensional protagonist.

My Score: 5/10
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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State — and she would do it alone.

This non-fiction book explores self-discovery and the recapturing of one’s lost identity. Cheryl struggles after her mother dies, and despite having a seemingly perfect husband who is supportive and comforting, she feels like she can’t function. She feels lost – wild. So she treks the PCT and over the course of three months, regains her sense of self and ‘finds herself’ (that’s not meant to sound cheesy).

Cheryl weaves in and out of past and present seamlessly, and neither time period is too dominant at one point in the novel. However, the writing could be better. The sentences are quite basic, and the story is very much ‘I did this and then I did this, but then I did this, and then I went here’. It feels too much like a retelling (without emotional connection or reflection), to the point where I couldn’t read more than one chapter at a time because the story dragged. Plus, when you’re backpacking, sometimes your days seem the same, and the story weaves into one. But Cheryl met a lot of people along the way, and I liked that she slotted them into the story intermittently. They broke up the tale and sped up the story.

Cheryl presents herself in an honest way – she seems real, and she doesn’t seem ‘photoshopped’ or altered to appear desirable to the audience. She does not present herself in a way that all readers will love her. She admits her faults and her mistakes, and she doesn’t try to make excuses for why she made them. For example, why would you hike the PCT trail if you’d never even been backpacking before? Some would say that’s suicide, and it is quite frustrating in the story when Cheryl makes silly decisions because of her lack of experience. But her desire to trek the path on her own and complete it – which she does – cements her as strong and independent, and the reader comes to respect her.

I’d recommend this book to adventurers, not necessarily readers. People who like to spend their weekends surfing or hiking or bike riding will like this book.

My Score: 6/10
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A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell

How do three sisters write a single suicide note?

In the waning days of 1999, the Alter sisters—Lady, Vee, and Delph—finalize their plans to end their lives. Their reasons are not theirs alone; they are the last in a long line of Alters who have killed themselves, beginning with their great-grandmother, the wife of a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who developed the first poison gas used in World War I and the lethal agent used in Third Reich gas chambers. The chemist himself, their son Richard, and Richard’s children all followed suit.

A Reunion of Ghosts is a magnificent tale of fate and blood, sin and absolution; partly a memoir of sisters unified by a singular burden, partly an unflinching eulogy of those who have gone before, and above all a profound commentary on the events of the 20th century.

Title: A Reunion of Ghosts
Author: Judith Claire Mitchell
Publish Date: April 1st, 2015

This novel was promoted/described as being ‘like the Virgin Suicides’, and, as a huge Eugenides fan, that’s why I picked up this book. But I’ll be blunt: this is nothing like The Virgin Suicides. It’s not even close to being like it. There’s no mystery to these main characters. Everything about them is said (mostly by themselves), in a way where nothing is left to the imagination and the reader feels like they’re being talked at for 400 pages.

The ancestors’ history was somewhat interesting, but they seemed bland and lacking dimension. Their actions seemed unmotivated – they dragged along in their respective chapters. Also, there didn’t seem to be enough of an emotional connection between the three main characters and their ancestors. They seemed too separate.

The three main characters – Lady, Vee, and Delph – seemed like cardboard cut outs. They’re interesting at first and their lives seem to be a comedy of errors. But then they bored me so much that finishing this book was a real struggle. There didn’t seem to be anything about these women that I could relate to – they seemed sad and desperate, but with no redeeming qualities. At times they were funny, but that was it.

The setting in this novel was Manhattan, but it lost (or perhaps never really had) any real vibrancy. The author did nothing to use setting to the character’s advantage. In some ways, the setting was just as depressing as the three main characters.

My Score: 4/10
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The Book of Lost and Found by Lucy Foley

HERTFORDSHIRE, 1928
The paths of Tom and Alice collide against a haze of youthful, carefree exuberance. There’s champagne and excitement, but above all there’s the beginning of a love story that finds its feet by a lake one silvery moonlit evening.

PARIS, 1939
Alice is living in the city of light, but the pain of the last decade has already left its mark. Against the shadow that sweeps across Europe, she and Thomas Stafford – now a world famous artist – meet once more…

LONDON, 1986
Bestowed with an old charcoal portrait from her grandmother, Kate Darling can’t possibly imagine the secrets that have been lost to time. Kate’s journey takes her to Corsica, Paris and beyond, and as time melts away she is catapulted into the heart of a love story as epic as it is life changing…

I was reluctant to start this book because I really dislike the cover – it doesn’t scream LITERARY FICTION to me. But everyone else seemed to like the cover, so I’ll just move right along.

The first 100 pages are slow and hard to understand. There’s two different time periods, but for the same characters. And then there’s another time period more in the future, featuring completely different characters. It’s not until you get one third of the way through the story before you realise how the storylines connect. But, it’s worth it.

Lucy Foley captures Kate’s curiosity well. She wants to find out what happened to her maternal grandmother, but isn’t unrealistically too eager about it. And in this circumstance, her behaviour is believable. Her relationship with Thomas Stafford and his son is fleeting and polite, and her brief fling with his son is unresolved. I liked that. It makes the reader fill in the gaps left deliberately by Lucy Foley, and the reader knows that relationship never would’ve lasted anyway. It gives the relationship immortality and youth, and it gives the reader room for reverence.

I recommend this book to literary lovers – the writing is poignant, flowing, and descriptively imaginative.

My Score: 8/10
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Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny

Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover’s wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, and in these eleven sublime stories they are grappling with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and all manner of love, secrets, and betrayal.

In “Cranberry Relish” Josie’s ex—a man she met on Facebook—has a new girlfriend he found on Twitter. In “Blue Heron Bridge” Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living in her garage will hear her kids swearing than about his finding out that she’s sleeping with her running partner. And in “The Rhett Butlers” a teenager loses her virginity to her history teacher and then outgrows him.

Single, Carefree, Mellow is a collection of short stories about love, deceit, and betrayal. In fact, every short story (except for one) involves a couple where the female in the relationship is having an affair. And it’s usually introduced in the opening sentence. One particular cheater is the main character in three of the short stories. That’s a lot of betrayal for one book. I didn’t actually realise this before reading it, but then got to about the third or fourth short story and started to notice a trend.

And coincidentally, the one short story I didn’t like was the one where there was no affair. I’m going to assume it’s because without the cheating and scheming that I had grown accustomed to reading from the other stories, I found this particular short story a little boring. Even though it was about this mother’s struggling need to make her son’s birthday party a success, despite the trivial scenario, it dragged on and was quite unnecessarily detailed and started to bore me.

Katherine Heiny is a skilled short story writer – she opens her stories with a reflective, but morally-challenging paragraph that draws the reader in. And then she finishes her story with enough of a conclusion that the reader is satisfied, but they’re still hoping that character turns up in a later story. It was lovely that Maya’s story returned in two other stories – it helped me follow her story through.

Katherine Heiny’s writing style is quite reflective and the characters are unapologetically flawed. I enjoyed reading them and recommend this to fiction and romance readers, even you don’t normally read short stories.

My Score: 8/10
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