JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters — beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys–commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

I finally found the time to reread this amazing book! And if you’re reading this review but haven’t read the book, hurry up and buy it. It’s beautifully written and incredibly insightful. I still can’t believe it’s been almost 25 years since it was first published. Jeffrey Eugenides understood school-aged children even back then.

This book doesn’t say more than it does say. You really have to read between the lines to understand the meaning of this story. It emphasises to the reader that suicide – and more specifically suicide pacts – don’t make sense. They affect many people, not just those involved, and the mental spiral into depression can be clear from the outside, if you’re close enough to see it. The boys in the story watched the girls very closely, and they note the restricted nature of the Lisbon mother. And the deterioration of the Lisbon house highlights how the Lisbon girls are mentally deteriorating themselves.

This book is told from the POV of a group of boys who live across the street from the Lisbon girls. All the girls kill themselves within the same year, and these boys are transfixed by the girls. The greatest stylistic element to this story is that you never fully understand the girls. You never know what they’re thinking or feeling – you only get glimpses of their world from notes or messages that they leave for other people.

The boys ask other people about their experiences with the girls, so everything feels very distanced. And because of that, you still don’t understand why the girls killed themselves. You can sit there and reread the book, but Eugenides has left out so much about the girls that they remain mysterious. And their youth transcends time until the boys are all much older and they’re still obsessing about the girls. They’re still trying to understand why the girls reached out to the boys and what they thought, and yet the reader knows that those boys will never find that out.

This book is brilliant. I recommend it to everyone.

My Score: 10/10
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The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg

Ceony Twill arrives at the cottage of Magician Emery Thane with a broken heart. Having graduated at the top of her class from the Tagis Praff School for the Magically Inclined, Ceony is assigned an apprenticeship in paper magic despite her dreams of bespelling metal. And once she’s bonded to paper, that will be her only magic… forever.

Yet the spells Ceony learns under the strange yet kind Thane turn out to be more marvelous than she could have ever imagined — animating paper creatures, bringing stories to life via ghostly images, even reading fortunes. But as she discovers these wonders, Ceony also learns of the extraordinary dangers of forbidden magic.

An Excisioner — a practitioner of dark, flesh magic — invades the cottage and rips Thane’s heart from his chest. To save her teacher’s life, Ceony must face the evil magician and embark on an unbelievable adventure that will take her into the chambers of Thane’s still-beating heart—and reveal the very soul of the man.

First of all, the cover is amazing. However, I still don’t quite know what to think of this novel. I liked the idea and I liked the magic/folding, but I don’t think the development of the story was quite what it could have been.

Let’s start off with what the positives of the novel. Ceony is insightful and mature (at most points in the novel), and the romance in the novel is very subtle. It’s not shoved down your throat like a lot of other YA/Fantasy novels. Also, the novel is set in a location that seems very excluded from the rest of the world. This is great, and it makes the protagonist seem isolated and lost. The magic in the novel is unique and interesting and the flashbacks about Magician Thane’s earlier life really add depth to his character.

About halfway through the novel, the main character becomes trapped inside Thane’s heart. I’ll admit, this is a little strange. At first I thought I’d just roll with it, but the idea of her walking through the chambers of his heart, trying to get out, is kind of creepy. And it doesn’t really make sense in relation to the rest of the novel.

I mentioned above that the romance in the novel is subtle, but there are some flaws to it. When Magician Thane first came into the story, I imagined a Dumbledore-ish man. Maybe it’s because of the magician thing, but then I realised he’s actually in his thirties and the main character (who is early twenties) falls in love with him? This didn’t seem real. She didn’t get to spend much actual, face to face time to Magician Thane, and falls in love with him too quickly. Oh and I just can’t get past one part in the novel. When Magician Thane’s heart is ripped out of his chest, Ceony is distraught, and she yells out “You’re too nice to die!”

I think I’ll leave this review at that.

I’d recommend this book to YA lovers, not fantasy lovers. This is book #1 in The Paper Magician Trilogy.

My Score: 7/10
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See How Small by Scott Blackwood

See How Small
Scott Blackwood
January 2015

It begins one summer evening in a small Texas town. Two men walk into an ice cream shop shortly before it closes. They bind the three teenager girls working behind the counter. They set fire to the shop. They disappear.

Loosely based on the 1991 Yogurt Shop Murders in Austin, Texas, See How Small explores a community’s reactions to the brutal and seemingly random murder of these three girls. It is told through the perspectives of the community’s survivors, witnesses, suspects, and yes, the deceased girls. Above everything else is the girls’ shared narration as they watch over the community during the five years following their deaths, as they attempt to comfort their town.

The second I finished this book I went online to read other reviews of it. I thought, surely I’ve missed something here? But no, it appears everyone else was just as confused as I was after finishing it.

The first few pages really grab the reader, and I can imagine it grabbed the publisher as well. But then the pace starts to really slow. I thought the dead girls would be more involved in the story, because the blurb mentions that they live on in spirit form and watch over the people who have been left behind. However, they really only appear in a few chapters.

There are too many characters in this book. There were even some sections that I think I could’ve skipped and I still would’ve understood the book, and a reader should never be able to say that about a novel. The book jumped around way too much, and some chapters were just too short. As a result, I couldn’t sympathise for any of the characters because I didn’t really care about them.

I must say that the writing is beautiful and evocative, and Scott Blackwood is a very lyrical writer. His vocabulary and the smooth flow of his sentences painted an enriching and engaging story for the reader. It’s just a shame that the story itself wasn’t fleshed out as well as it could’ve been. The story was too non-linear, and flicked back and forth in time. Some chapters were about the time right after the murders, and sometimes the chapters went forward five years. And even though this is a spoiler, I’m going to say it anyway. There’s no resolution to this novel. None. And who wants that in a crime novel?

My Score: 5/10
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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel

One of Britain’s most accomplished, acclaimed, and garlanded writers, Hilary Mantel delivers a brilliant collection of contemporary short stories that demonstrate what modern England has become

In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel’s trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display.

Her classic wicked humor in each story—which range from a ghost story to a vampire story to near-memoir to mini-sagas of family and social fracture—brilliantly unsettles the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way.

Mantel brutally and acutely writes about gender, marriage, class, family, and sex, cutting to the core of human experience. Unpredictable, diverse, and even shockingly unexpected, each story grabs you by the throat within a couple of sentences. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers.

I shouldn’t have read this so soon after reading Stone Mattress – you just can’t top Margaret Atwood’s short stories. Nevertheless, I’ve done my best to give it a non-biased review.

Hilary Mantel is a great literary writer, and most of these short stories have been written before and won various awards. Each protagonist has layer upon layer of diverse characterisation that reaches into the reader’s psychosis to draw them into the story. Most of these stories are directed in a way that is different to what I was expecting. The title story is particularly amazing in its ability to confuse you and satisfy you at the same time.

These stories are also a good length – they range between 20-40 pages, and you can get through one or two stories in one sitting, which is easy to do on a lunch break or on the commute to and from work. The Heart Fails Without Warning is my favourite story, and is about the continuous decline of a young anorexic from the point of view of her horrendously rude and unsympathetic sister.

Okay, so there were a couple of faults. Sometime there was too much characterisation. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but in a short story, you have fewer words to get the story told, and sometimes characterisation can bog it down. Sure, in a novel it’s wonderful, but in a short story, I felt myself skipping a couple of paragraphs because it wasn’t moving along quickly enough.

Also, some of the short stories were a little drab. They weren’t as engaging or interesting, and they didn’t capture human society quite like the other stories did. Also, I don’t think the stories particularly blended well together. They were written at different times, and Hilary Mantel never wrote them with the intent that they’d all be put together in a novel. Usually a collection of stories hold a similar theme or underlying exploration of character, but the stories in this novel seemed a little too diverse.

I would recommend this only to a reader who is familiar with literary works.

My Score: 6/10
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Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood

A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet’s syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly-formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. And a crime committed long-ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion year old stromatalite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle.

I just read the most amazing comment on Goodreads: “I would read IKEA assembly instructions if Margaret Atwood wrote them.” Margaret Atwood couldn’t ruin anything she wrote. Her stories are ripe with societal insight and character development that all other writers are envious of.

Each short story seems to include a different level of loss and despair. Some of the stories relate to each other (the first three, for example), whilst others are standalone. The first three stories seem to make up a trilogy, in the loose sense that Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Maddadam make up a trilogy. There’s long paragraphs about the characters, which would usually deter me and cause me to skip ahead, but Margaret Atwood describes her characters using flashbacks or tangents, and it makes the piece flow easily. Her dialogue is always believable and her characters’ reactions to their situations are plausible and realistic to that character.

I will point out that the last couple of stories aren’t as good as the start of Stone Mattress. They aren’t bad; they just don’t seem to have that same feeling resonating with the reader at the end of the story. You usually read a Margaret Atwood short story and you know that you got all of the information necessary to understanding it, but you still have so many questions. Margaret is the queen of giving the reader only what they need to know and nothing more.

My Score: 9/10
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