JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

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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Still Alice by Lisa Genova

In Lisa Genova’s extraordinary New York Times bestselling novel, an accomplished professor diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease learns that her worth is comprised of more than her ability to remember.

Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty years old she’s a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she becomes increasingly disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her lifeand her relationship with her family and the world forever.

And yet another book comes along that I noticed because of a film adaptation. The cover (film tie in edition) is intriguing, and says enough about the nature and storyline of the book. The main character, Alice, develops early onset Alzheimer’s. The book is in third person, although it’s really told from Alice’s perspective. She realises there’s something wrong quite early on in the story – she forgets certain words in a lecture and forgets to meet people or attend a dinner. It’d be easy for her to brush this off as ‘getting older’ or ‘going through menopause’, but she pushes to find the answer to what’s happening to her, even though her husband refuses to believe it.

I have mixed opinions of her husband. You can tell he’s just as heartbroken with her diagnosis as she is, but he deals with it in what I’d say is the wrong way. He ignores it, and he pretends it’s not happening. He tries to move Alice to NY, even though that would be terrible for her Alzheimer’s. She’d be alone, and she’d be terrified and away from her children and future grandchildren. Throughout the book, the reader doubts his commitment to her – he comes across as selfish and conceited. But he does love her; he’s simply struggling to come to terms with her disease and how it’s affecting their family.

This book changes how you see Alzheimer’s. It can affect people as young as 40, and Alice is a 50 year old Harvard professor. She’s extremely intelligent, but her mind deteriorates. She can’t remember where she put her copy of Moby Dick, and then she finds it in the microwave. She keeps hearing the ‘beep beep’ of the telephone, only to realise it’s actually the microwave.

Her disease is horrible for her to come to terms with because she can’t do her job anymore, and then, as the disease gets worse, she sleeps all day and she can’t remember why she’s in the bathroom. She can’t remember where she is when she goes running, and she can’t even remember that she has children.
The ending to the novel is open-ended, but that’s what this disease is. It doesn’t end, and at the moment there’s no cure. This book highlights the tragic nature of Alzheimer’s, and how difficult it is not only for the person suffering from it but for their family as well.

Lisa Genova has done such a marvellous job at being subtle. You realise Alice’s pain without Alice telling you, or without her even realising it herself. She forgets things and she misses her lectures, and she never really realises, but you – as the reader – realise. And you feel for her. Warning: this novel might come with tears. Have tissues handy.

My Score: 10/10
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The Ice Twins by S.K. Tremayne

A year after one of their identical twin daughters, Lydia, dies in an accident, Angus and Sarah Moorcraft move to the tiny Scottish island Angus inherited from his grandmother, hoping to put together the pieces of their shattered lives.

But when their surviving daughter, Kirstie, claims they have mistaken her identity – that she, in fact, is Lydia – their world comes crashing down once again.

As winter encroaches, Angus is forced to travel away from the island for work, Sarah is feeling isolated, and Kirstie (or is it Lydia?) is growing more disturbed. When a violent storm leaves Sarah and her daughter stranded, Sarah finds herself tortured by the past – what really happened on that fateful day one of her daughters died?

I heard rave reviews about this title, but I must admit that I was really disappointed. Overall, the book isn’t as ‘haunting’ or ‘gripping’ as described. I kept waiting for a twist or for a shocking scene where I’d be desperate to get to the end, but this just didn’t happen. The ‘revelation’ at the end isn’t really that shocking because most of the book is pretty predictable and I saw it coming.

The book is from the point of view of the mother, Sarah, and she’s just not a likeable character. She has too much internal dialogue and she doesn’t let the reader realise anything for themselves. She’s also really naïve and delicate, and she asks too many rhetorical questions. She comes across as slightly neurotic, and the reader doesn’t like her enough to disregard her flaws.

I quite liked the husband, Angus. He was authentic and his societal reactions were realistic and effective to the plot. You are positioned to hate him in the novel because his daughter is supposedly ‘scared of him’, but it’s quite clear that he’s not the bad guy.

The setting in the novel helps to isolate the characters and force the reader to really focus on the plot and the relations between Angus and Sarah. I think the author did well to pace the story so that it didn’t move too quickly but it didn’t move too slowly either.

I do think it was missing something – the story just didn’t grab me. Maybe it was the characters and the circumstances. Maybe it was the setting. Or maybe it was the farfetched nature of the premise that disappointed me.

My Score: 5/10
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Half the World (Shattered Sea #2) by Joe Abercrombie

Sometimes a girl is touched by Mother War.
Thorn is such a girl. Desperate to avenge her dead father, she lives to fight. But she has been named a murderer by the very man who trained her to kill.

Sometimes a woman becomes a warrior.
She finds herself caught up in the schemes of Father Yarvi, Gettland’s deeply cunning minister. Crossing half the world to find allies against the ruthless High King, she learns harsh lessons of blood and deceit.

Sometimes a warrior becomes a weapon.
Beside her on the journey is Brand, a young warrior who hates to kill, a failure in his eyes and hers, but with one chance at redemption.

And weapons are made for one purpose.
Will Thorn forever be a pawn in the hands of the powerful, or can she carve her own path?

Half the World is more interesting and less cliché than the first book, Half a King. This book isn’t told from Yarvi’s point of view anymore. Although Yarvi is in the book, the main character (Thorn) is female, which I feel is rare in fantasy fiction, and she’s a badass son of a *****. She has some witty lines, come backs, and she’s confident. Thorn matures and strengthens her skills over the course of this novel, and Joe Abercrombie has written that gradual growth effectively. At times, she’s weak, and at other times, she’s strong. This sounds like a funny thing to comment on, but it’s easy for a writer to put a strong female character in a novel who doesn’t have any weaknesses. And that’s not believable. Thorn sometimes says this she shouldn’t and sometimes she’s overconfident. At times, this sets her back, believably so.

And this is what’s great about the Shattered Sea novels – all of the characters are flawed and sometimes deformed. Yarvi is half a king, and the other main character, Brand, is the opposite of Thorn. He doubts himself and he’s not a warrior. Over the course of the novel, he develops feelings for Thorn, and at first I thought this a little strange. I didn’t sense an attraction there in the first third of the novel. And then at the end of the novel when they…you know…I seemed a little jarred from it. It didn’t seem organic to have a sex scene between them in this novel.

This book felt like a lot of travel/journey to me, and although a lot of unexpected events occurred, it definitely felt like the novel was in place just to set things up to happen in the final novel, Half a War (due out in August 2015). I think Half the World, which is 500 pages, could’ve been trimmed down a bit. It definitely jumps between the characters a little too often.

I would recommend this to fiction and fantasy lovers, but make sure you read the first in the trilogy.

My Score: 8/10
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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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