The Three Weissmans of Westport--Cathleen Schine

I'm getting tired of Jane Austen homage novels, particularly ones that try to rework Sense and Sensibility. This is the second one I've read recently and I haven't liked either of them. Jane Austen mixups generally work a bit better for the YA crowd, since lack of power and self agency due to age is roughly equivalent to the lack of power women held during the early 1800s. Once one realizes how lucky one has it as a modern American women, it's hard not to want to shake characters who are just dumb or annoying.

Betty Weissman is unceremoniously evicted from the marital home, a Park Avenue apartment, when her husband of 48 years takes up with a younger woman. A relative offers her a home in a slightly winterized home in the summer colony of Westport, and her two daughters, Miranda and Annie, join her. Each has money and career troubles. Miranda is an agent whose clients have been found to have imagined their memoirs and is in bankruptcy, and Annie is bleeding money to cover life in New York and launch her own sons. She's also somewhat in love with a celebrity author (who happens to be the brother of the mistress).

Miranda is the Marianne, of course, all doing, and not thinking, and she manages to fall for an actor visiting the area. Or is it that she's more in love with his young son? Annie spends her time mooning and thinking and not doing, and is generally very annoying. The fellow she's in love with is dumb as a box of rocks. Their mom is at least mourning the loss of her marriage, although she's also completely ignoring the fact that she's getting hosed in the divorce. And then a man saves them! Sheesh. This was an annoying read that I bought based on the New York TImes' love for it. Bad choice.

Where I've Been: The Latest Reading List

more animals

I've made a bit of a genre shift into science fiction/fantasy. I had some ebooks from Tor's big giveaway last summer that I hadn't picked up and wanted to clear out the hard drive a bit by finally reading them. It was a good change for me--I have been reading fewer books because it's been hard for me to find things I can get into. While I didn't necessarily like these books, they were captivating. Or maybe because I had no tv or internet I was the captive audience. Either or.

Orphans of Chaos—John C. Wright

I thought this was going to be sort of fun, steampunky and mysterious, but no, it's more of straight fantasy but there's lots of blather about science and physics and oh, nobody cares if you do good characters as Wright mostly did. And some really creepy scenes. Eh. I'm not getting the next one in the series.

Spin—Robert Charles Wilson

The author really got drunk on his cool idea and put his tale in the hands of a very static and personally dull narrator. One night the stars and moon vanish, and Earth finds it has been put in sort of a big plastic bag to keep it safe. Tyler Dupree is a teenager when this happens; he grows up to be a doctor with his life still entwined with his best friends Jake and Diane Lawton. Diane becomes involved in an end time cult and pressed by his father Jake is the scientist/businessman whose attempts to figure out and fix the situation leads to the development of life on Mars.

The book succeeds when it looks at how people living in catastrophic times react to uncertainty and the changes that occur in societal makeup. Oh, and the Martian science bits are fun too. But Tyler is so dull and I really don't care about the twins. This book would have worked better as a thriller and less of a sprawling personal epic.

Starfish—Peter Watts

Creep me out, why not? So in order to harvest energy coming from the Earth's core out of those hot vents in the deep sea floor, we build some power generators down there and hire up people to live in stations to run things. And to live down in the deep dark it helps if you are seriously messed in the head from personal trauma. I was creeped by the descriptions of the sea creatures (gah, I am cringing just to think of them) and though the characters were a bit thin. It's definitely a novel that packages a lot of ideas and strings them together in interesting ways.

Victory of Eagles—Naomi Novik

This is the 5th in the Temeraire series. Everyone's favorite brilliant dragon and his captain are back dealing with the moral implications of committing treason in the previous novel. Oopsie. No seriously, it's a well-written entry into the series but I like these books more when Laurence and Temeraire stretch Novik's world-building skills.

Farthing & Ha'penny—Jo Walton

Holy cow. These books were masterful. I am going to write a full review once I've finished the third book in this trilogy.

Old Man's War--John Scalzi

You know how Starship Troopers is actually a pretty fun film where everyone is just killing left right and center and horrible stuff happens but after a while all the characters are just numb? That's what reading this book reminded me of. In the future, when you are 75 you can sign up to go off and fight in a war to defend Earth's colonies on other planets. John Perry signs up because he's got nothing better to do. His wife was the one who was gung ho on it, but Kathy died of a stroke and John figures why not go have an adventure? It's a leap of faith because no one knows exactly how they manage to get 75 year old recruits in fighting shape. No honestly, this is a very well balanced book with cool ideas and some great character development. A fun read, and I will be keeping an eye out for Scalzi's other books on the library shelves.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds—Cherie Priest

This was fascinating. Eden Moore has had visions of a severed hand, three sisters and a man involved with them all since she was a child. It's as much a part of her as her mysterious history--dead mother, unknown father and being raised by her her bohemian aunt and uncle in small town Georgia. In her early teens, an older boy tries to kill her and ten years later he shoots someone else trying again. This murder sends Eden into an exploration of her recent and ancient family history. Priest has written an excellently crazy Southern gothic fairy tale that's unusual in its mining of regional American history and culture to create a suspenseful mystery in the modern day with overlays of ancient human evil.

Then having watched Someone Like You I went to the original source material, Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman. Conclusions: even though it's dull, watch the movie. It has a scene of Hugh Jackman walking around in his underwear, which livens things up a bit. And I can finally articulate what it is that annoys me so much about light literature aimed at women--it trivializes women. I'm pretty serious in my factory setting, and so are most of the women I know. This chick lit stuff really assumes that women don't have a serious thought in our heads and what's more, it's female authors writing it as such. That's the problem. It also denies a sense of moral sensibility--I am pretty sure that if some guy seemed to be interested in me but whined about HIS FIANCEE who he has nothing in common with and who doesn't understand him my response would be, "Hmmmm. Well, you know where I live. Why don't you break things off with the fiance and then give me a call?" as opposed to 1) sleeping with him, 2) falling in love with him, and 3) giving up my apartment to move in with him only to have him then back out. Inside of 3 months. Yes, really.

But hey, maybe that's why I am still single.

Anyway, I am torn between writing up more bits for our audit work and settling down with Rob Thurman's Deathwish, which I found on the shelf at Borders 4 days before its release date. Decisions, decisions.

Elegance--Kathleen Tessaro

This is another book that I really like although it has got some issues in characterization and construction. Aside from the a standard chick lit plot, it's actually a book about cognitive behavioral therapy through wardrobe upgrades. So of course I love it, because my family's second motto? "If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you do better." (Accordingly, it's been hard for me to live in the Midwest.)

Louise Canova is a hot mess. A failed actress, she now works in the box office of an independent theater in London. She's married, but her husband doesn't want to have a meaningful conversation with her. Her mother-in-law is the bitchy Mona, a former model. And she's just been mistaken as pregnant at a fashion photographer's retrospective which prominently features dear Mona. At the end of her rope, Louise clings to an old copy of the book Elegance by Madame Genevieve Dariaux, a book written in the late 1950's that promises to help women develop their own style and sense of chic. And as Louise follows Mme. Dariaux's advice and starts to finally care for herself, old patterns are disrupted and her life changes in hard ways.

The characters aren't well-developed, and the villains are especially cartoonish. It often seems like Tessaro has a checklist of Lifetime movie issues into cram into Louise's psyche and explain how she wound up in her terrible situation. But there's some hilarious writing once Louise starts hanging around the British upper classes, and yes--it ends with Louise happy. So despite the flaws it's a satisfying read.

Blitzkreig Book Review, Part 2

Clubbing--Andi Watson & Josh Howard: And Minx Books is now 1::2 in the decent to crap ratio. Somebody have a word with the editor of that line, please. This book starts out with the interesting premise of Goth club girl Charlotte "Lottie" Brook getting caught with a fake id and being sent to spend 3 months with her grandparents working at their golf club in the Lake District, where she finds a little romance and a murder mystery to investigate. And then it suddenly turns into a ripoff of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode. Yes, really. I'm done with this line.

However, note to Genevieve--there is one very funny bit, a "country Goth" vs "city Goth" pissing match.

Girl Most Likely To--Poonam Sharma: This is a book that sent me on a weeklong rampage of asking the question "Do you think I'm retarded?" Because this book insults the reader by feeding her a drippy heroine, a plot that rampages through everything but the kitchen sink with the search for true love, gay friends finding love, straight friends getting a clue, thinking your one night stand taped your sex to sell on the internet, insider trading, a yoga retreat, meddling Indian parents, and a deus ex machina arrival of a career change from banking to writing. Hi, I'm the author and I'm going to distract you from the lameness and unrealistic plot of my tale and paper thin characters you care nothing about by throwing EVERYTHING at you. Then I can cross "wrote a novel" off my life to do list.

Honey, it's okay to be an underachiever if you do it well.

How Nancy Drew Saved My Life--Lauren Baratz-Logsted: Another book that insults the reader's intelligence, this time by giving us paper thin characters and a plot stolen directly from Jane Eyre. And no wink-nudge-nudge to let us know the author is doing something deft with that stolen plot. Nope, it's a lame naive heroine with a habit of sleeping with her employer, which is tragically trite when you're the nanny and a former child actress with AWOL parents and minimal education. Well, that explains her stupidity at least. And why she doesn't realize she's playing Jane Eyre.

And that title? Total bait and switch. Nancy Drew, her awesomeness and the real life lessons you can pick up from her books barely figure into the story. It's a case of a catchy title duping you into picking up the book, only to find there are barely words to describe its awfulness. Non-scatalogical words at least.

I realize not everything can be great, but there's no shame in being just good. This is just crap. I got the feeling Baratz-Logsted owed the publisher a book and just churned this puppy out to meet the deadline. If I had paid money for it, I do not know what I would have done. Thank you, CPL!

For Matrimonial Purposes--Kavita Daswani

You all know that I read a lot more than I review here on the site, right? I read like some people drink--as a daily form of escapism. And while I may churn out some decent sentences, for me to sit down and write is kind of like treating guinea worm disease. Long slow torture of pulling something out of your body, involving frequent rests to get your head together and forget the pain, plus screaming. So a book really has to spark some feeling for me to bother. Otherwise, it just gets filed into a category called Things I Don't Care About. It's a vast category.

This is a book that sparks frustration for me, because it has a good idea but Daswani makes so many poor choices in the telling of her tale that the novel is just mediocre. I have to ask, did she not have an editor or friend read it before publishing and give her critical feedback? Because she cuts her own narrative off at the knees at so many points that she completely lessens the effect of the tale. And the writing and secondary characters clearly show she's got some ideas and skill, and with a little refining this could have been a very, very good novel.

Anju comes from a wealthy Bombay family in the jewelry business, and as befits her social station she's expected to marry a fellow Indian of a good family and have children. Nothing more, and nothing less. Anju has a different path in mind, and persuades her parents to allow her to work and continue her education, first in Bombay and later in the US. She's very picky about her potential husbands when she's younger, but at age 30 she finds that herself in an uncomfortable place. She'd like to get married, but she's considered too old and too independent, if not actually slutty, by most suitors. Anju is faced with questions and doubts--did she make the wrong choices? Has she let her family down? Will she ever meet a nice fellow and fall in love?

The problems I have with this story center on the character of Anju. Her story is told as a first person flashback, so it's essentially a data dump. Classically lazy tell, not show. Then there is the fact that we are supposed to believe that Anju is spirited and ambitious, but she's not shown to be such. She's drab. Her one bit of spark comes when she bribes a fortuneteller to lie to her mother and say that her horoscope does not show her marrying until at least her late 20's so that her parents will be persuaded to let her go to America. We're told she's successful at her job as a "fashion publicist" but there are no details about what she likes about it, or how she goes about her job, or what makes her good at it. She enjoys Western life, but there's no detail about how she struggles to maintain her Indian identity and values. I mean, she doesn't date and she's a virgin! She lives in a bubble in Bombay, and then secrets herself in a bubble in NY. The only difference is that she lives alone in a studio apartment. She's a static, dull character with no voice, and to have her narrate a novel that is supposed to deal with her life and personal struggles--it's just not worth reading.

Then there is a question of the website. At one point, when Anju ramps up her marriage hunt, she takes a last-minute flight to a dinner party where an eligable man who might be interested is supposed to be. She later finds out that there's a website devoted to her attempts to find a husband. But this is never followed up on. It is the equivalent of that old bit of advice credited to Chekhov, that if you put a gun in the first act, it had better go off by the third. How can you put such a detail, ripe with dramatic possibilities, in a story, and not follow up on it? Anju doesn't Google herself to find fellow members of the Indian diaspora making fun of her? Sheesh!

There were a lot of possibilities in this novel, but it's ultimately unsatisfying. I like exploring Indian culture through fiction, and this story conveys the culture well, but the central character drove me nuts.