JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

February 2016 Wrap Up

This is my first monthly wrap up for Jess Just Reads, after an extensive overhaul of the website and complete revamping, including a new layout, structure, feature images, information, and new sections of the website (this wrap up section, for example, and also the giveaway section). Firstly, let me run through all the books I bought/borrowed in February 2016.


1. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’ve borrowed this book off a friend to read, and I’m currently about half way through it. I loved Never Let Me Go (you can read the review of that HERE) and I’ve been dying to read another Ishiguro book ever since I finished that one. The Buried Giant is about a couple who leave their small village and travel to see their son, who left quite some time earlier. The book blends fantastical elements with reality, which is what initially intrigued me about it. Plus the cover of the book is stunning. Unfortunately, I might not be able to finish this one – it’s a little slow, and I’m really struggling. But we’ll see!


2. The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

I heard so much about this book when it came out last year – Charlotte did a lot of events and signings and I heard rave reviews about how fantastic this book is. And now that I’ve read it (you can read my review by clicking on the title above), I can say that it really does deserve all the praise and all the awards. It says so much about modern society and it is so perfectly written. A masterpiece, actually.


3. When We Collided by Emery Lloyd

As a YA fan, I couldn’t pass up to opportunity to read this one. A blogger friend has lent me the proof of this book and I’m really excited to delve into it.


4. Torch by Cheryl Strayed

I loved reading Wild last year (you can read my review HERE), so I picked up Torch at the bookstore a few weeks back.


5. This Shattered World by Amie Kauffman and Meagan Spooner

This Shattered World is the sequel to a fantastic science fiction YA novel called These Broken Stars, which I finished reading a couple of weeks ago. The first book was fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing where Amie and Meagan take the series.

 

So those are the books that I acquired in the month of February, and here’s a brief list of the various books I read in both January and February (and am in the process of writing reviews for at the moment):

Books I read in January and February:

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo

Eat the Sky Drink the Ocean (a collection of short stories by many different Australian authors)

The Stars at Oktober Bend by Glenda Millard

Lost & Found by Brooke Davis

These Broken Stars by Amie Kauffman and Meagan Spooner

Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

 

 

Not My Father’s Son: A Family Memoir by Alan Cumming

A beloved star of stage, television, and film, Alan Cumming is a successful artist whose diversity and fearlessness is unparalleled. His success masks a painful childhood growing up under the heavy rule of an emotionally and physically abusive father—a relationship that tormented him long into adulthood.

With ribald humor, wit, and incredible insight, Alan seamlessly moves back and forth in time, integrating stories from his childhood in Scotland and his experiences today as a film, television, and theater star. At times suspenseful, deeply moving, and wickedly funny, Not My Father’s Son will make readers laugh even as it breaks their hearts.

This is a very unique memoir because it is anchored by Alan’s father. This memoir is not about his fame or his filmography or his aspirations. This memoir is about how Alan’s father shaped who he became as an adult, and how his father greatly affected him throughout his entire life. Usually, celebrity memoirs are very much ‘this is what I did when I was 6, and this is what I did when I was 13, and when I was 17, this happened, etc etc’, and although it’s fascinating if you’re a fan, there’s no core theme. There’s no anchor. There’s no angle.The anchor/angle in Alan Cumming’s memoir is his physically and mentally abusive father.

There seem to be a few parallel storylines in this memoir. Alan uses flashbacks to tell stories about how his father would physically abuse him and torment him and make him feel worthless and useless. Alan’s father seems psychotic and perhaps mentally ill. These flashbacks are heartbreaking to read, but they also make you respect Alan Cumming even more than you already did, because he grew up and he worked really hard to understand his childhood and understand his non-existent relationship with his father.

The other storyline in the book is Alan in around 2010, when he was asked to be on the show Who do you think you are? Alan agrees, and this opens up a family mystery involving his grandfather, who died under suspicious circumstances in the early 1950s. Throughout the memoir, Alan, with the help of the show, finds out what happened to his grandfather almost 50 years earlier.

Another part of Alan’s life that is explored in this memoir is his relationship with his father in the present (around 2010-2011, when Alan started writing the memoir). His father continues to mentally torment Alan, almost unknowingly. Alan finds out that his father is not his real father, and that his mother had an affair. This parallels the flashback chapters where Alan talks about all the affairs his father had while his parents were still married.

Alan’s childhood seemed tragic. Despite having a loving relationship with his mother and his brother, he lived in fear because of his father’s abuse. He was made to feel useless and his father always set him impossible tasks and then yelled at him when he couldn’t complete them. Alan’s traumatic childhood greatly affected him later in life, but as the reader can sense upon completing the memoir, Alan does the best he can to live his life without the shadow of his father looming over him.

This is a great memoir, and readers who don’t usually read non-fiction will love it. I also recommend this memoir to people who are a fan of Alan Cumming. Although he doesn’t mention his acting and his movie experiences in this memoir as much as I would’ve wanted, it is still interesting reading about this other side to him that I assume very few people in his life were aware of.

My Score: 8/10

The Anti-Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland

Rosie Waterland has never been cool. Growing up in a housing commission, Rosie was cursed with a near-perfect, beautiful older sister who dressed like Mariah Carey on a Best & Less budget while Rosie was still struggling with various toilet mishaps. She soon realised that she was the Doug Pitt to her sister’s Brad, and that cool was not going to be her currency in this life.

But that was only one of the problems Rosie faced. With two addicts for parents, she grew up amidst rehab stays, AA meetings, overdoses, narrow escapes from drug dealers and a merry-go-round of dodgy boyfriends in her mother’s life. Rosie watched as her dad passed out/was arrested/vomited, and had to talk her mum out of killing herself.

As an adult, trying to come to grips with her less than conventional childhood, Rosie navigated her way through eating disorders, nude acting roles, mental health issues and awkward Tinder dates. Then she had an epiphany: to stop pretending to be who she wasn’t and embrace her true self – a girl who loved drinking wine in her underpants on Sunday nights – and become an Anti-Cool Girl.

An irrepressible, blackly comic memoir, Rosie Waterland’s story is a clarion call for Anti-Cool Girls everywhere.

I don’t usually read a lot of memoirs, and that’s not because I don’t like them. When done well, memoirs can be inspirational, motivational, and eye-opening. A good example of this is Anna Bligh’s April 2015 memoir Through the Wall. And another example is Rosie Waterland’s The Anti-Cool Girl.

Rosie is most known for her hilarious television recaps of the Australian series of The Bachelor. Her reviews are witty and sarcastic and they get thousands and thousands of views each night. But I didn’t start reading these recaps until this year, and then I went back and read all of her recaps from all of the previous seasons. You don’t even need to watch the show to enjoy the recaps.

Fast forward a couple of years to 2015, and Rosie is publishing her memoir about her troubled childhood. Rosie’s parents were flaky and unreliable, and they were not role models to her. But Rosie doesn’t paint them this way. She simply tells the facts of her life, but with interspersed humorous lines and quick-witted observations. You don’t really feel sorry for Rosie when you’re reading this book (except for a couple of heartbreaking chapters), you are actually mesmerised that she got through all of this.

It’s quite clear that Rosie is trying to paint her parents in the most positive light, and she reflects on her earlier years (and her years since) with surprising positivity. She doesn’t want you to feel sorry for her — she wants you to understand her.

This memoir is about who Rosie is. She doesn’t make excuses for her actions, and she doesn’t apologise. She doesn’t try to be what society wants from her, and she doesn’t change her actions to suit anybody else. And she’s fine with that, and the reader is too, after they devour her fantastic memoir in one sitting.

My Score: 9/10

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
Buy at BOOKTOPIA or BOOKWORLD

Seriously…I’m Kidding by Ellen Degeneres

“Sometimes the greatest things are the most embarrassing.” Ellen Degeneres’ winning, upbeat candor has made her show one of the most popular, resilient and honored daytime shows on the air. (To date, it has won no fewer than 31 Emmys.) Seriously… I’m Kidding, Degeneres’ first book in eight years, brings us up to date about the life of a kindhearted woman who bowed out of American Idol because she didn’t want to be mean.

I really wanted to love this book because I watch Ellen’s show all the time and I think she’s hilarious. But this book just didn’t work for me. The first few chapters are very clever and funny, but then it lacks for the remainder of the book.

Each chapter focuses on something different, but it all seems to be surface level. You don’t complete the novel feeling like you know anything more about Ellen. This is a book where she picks random topics and gives you her opinion on them. And that’s fun at first, but it gets old.

I wish Ellen wrote on a more personal level, so that there was a balance between humour and seriousness. Lena Dunham’s book does this perfectly. But I do understand that Ellen’s book probably never intended to achieve what Lena’s did. Seriously…I’m Kidding is designed to make people laugh, and it does, but there needs to be something propelling the story forward. If there are only jokes, then the reader gets a little bored. Also, I could skip chapters that bored me and it wouldn’t matter. And even in non-fiction, a reader shouldn’t want to do this.

This book may ‘bring us up to date’ on Ellen’s life, but it doesn’t really delve deep into who Ellen is behind her comedic front. I’d only recommend this book to people who are Ellen fans.

My Score: 4/10
Buy at BOOKTOPIA or BOOKWORLD