Willow by Julia Hoban

Seven months ago, on a rainy March night, sixteen year- old Willow's parents died in a horrible car accident. Willow was driving. Now her older brother barely speaks to her, her new classmates know her as the killer orphan girl, and Willow is blocking the pain by secretly cutting herself. But when one boy —one sensitive, soulful boy—discovers Willow's secret, it sparks an intense relationship that turns the "safe" world Willow has created for herself upside down.

Told in an extraordinary fresh voice, Willow is an unforgettable novel about one girl's struggle to cope with tragedy, and one boy's refusal to give up on her.

From Amazon.ca

My Thoughts:

This is a book that without book bloggers, I probably never would have read. Actually, this year has been made up of book-blogger inspired books. I have read more young adult fiction in the past year than I have read in all my other reading years put together. When I was a young adult, I could never find books that interested me, so I would mostly read adult novels instead. I think it is possible that book crazes like Harry Potter and Twilight have revitalized the young adult 'genre' and lead to much better books than existed even ten years ago. That is not to say there haven't always been gems hidden amongst the duds, but it seems like there are a lot more gems than there used to be. Or, maybe I am just more easy-going now. It all comes down to belonging to the library, though. If I hadn't made that decision I wouldn't have read most of the books I have read this year.

Moving on. I loved this book! I am shocked about that, actually. If you haven't noticed, most of the young adult books I have loved this year do not relate to high school. I have read some, sure, but I generally do not relate to books with that setting anymore. I have the same problem with television shows. Obviously, I did not go through what Willow went through in any capacity, but I suppose high school wasn't so long ago that I couldn't remember how hard it was to be a little different. No one even has to say anything, but if you know that there is a possibility people could look down on you for something, than you are suspicious of everyone. That's Willow's problem. Her parents are dead and she looks upon it as her fault. When people talk to her at this new school she automatically assumes they are going to ask her about it, so that is just one of the many reasons that she avoids human contact. The other reason is that she doesn't want to get close to someone again just to lose them. She has not got over the loss of her parents and is not prepared to repeat the experience.

I have to say that while I can remember what high school was like, I have never been able to understand the cutting epidemic. I actually don't know anyone that did it, but that just could be because I was never told. I suppose I understand the idea behind it, but the actual doing of it is not something that I have ever really understood. I hope that doesn't come out wrong. I am not saying that the people that resort to it do not have their reasons, I am just saying that I personally do not understand the benefits. Willow is trying to block out the pain of everything that has happened to her and that is the method that works for her. Even with that reaction, though, I thought that this book was really well-written. It is a young adult book, but I enjoyed it as an adult, too. I didn't feel like the writing was too young and even though it is about teenagers, I didn't find that I was too old to appreciate it. It will also work really well for young adults, though.

The characters were great. I felt like I really grew to know Willow, but Hoban also includes a lot of facts about the secondary characters, too. The 'guy' was really well-written. He was played in a difficult situation and I think that he was written very believably. He is like me. He knows why people do it, but doesn't really understand at the same time. He really saves Willow in many ways. This book is a bit depressing, I warn you that, but there are also a lot of happy moments mixed in. I was really surprised how much I enjoyed this book. It is not my general: 'love this book and think everyone should read it' type of read, so you know it has be good because that is my concluding opinion! Thanks to all the bloggers that brought it to my attention! I look forward to what Hoban writes next.

This was a buddy read with Heather and Melissa. I asked them this question:

Did you find the storyline relate-able even though you are an adult and the high school angst is in the past? Could you relate to the characters?

Heather said:

I did. Pain is universal; it does not discriminate age, sex, ethnicity, or anything else. We all experience pain in our lives. I have been through my share of it and the worst of it was during my youth. I never resorted to something as aggressive as cutting myself, but I did have trouble dealing with all the feelings of loss and rejection I had to deal with and, to some extent, still do. I could totally relate to the desire not to confide in someone, to refuse help, to handle it on my own - to mistakenly believe that I could handle it on my own. That is one of the most important lessons of this book; to let go, to get help, to let those who love you do just that - LOVE YOU.

Melissa said:

Hm... On the one hand, no, I couldn't relate to the characters. There was too much angst -- and not just high school angst -- for me to really connect with all of the characters. That said, I did see much of myself in Guy; I was always the stable one, the good one (still am!) who attracted broken people. So, I guess I could relate to what he was going through and feeling. Also, even though I couldn't relate, I did think it was a good portrait of addiction, and I often felt the pain that Willow was going through that drove her to her cutting. As well as the pain and healing it was going to take for her to break her addictive habits. In those ways, I think that Julia Hoban succeeded in giving us a gripping portrait.

I said:

Really, what Melissa said. Honestly! That is exactly how I feel about the question, so I won't subject you to it twice...

To read their reviews and the answers to their question, click the links above and they will take you directly there! (I am really slow. I got distracted by shiny things in the mail...)

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Any common reader will enjoy a good laugh from British playwright Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, which can be consumed in a few spare hours. But readers expecting a work as brilliant and scathing as Bennett's plays The History Boys (2004) and The Madness of King George (1991), or even his other short stories, should expect something completely different. A political and literary satire, it pokes fun at the British monarchy while revealing the lasting power of literature. Reviews suggest that The Uncommon Reader should be enjoyed like the sort of reading it espouses: casually, but with a sensitivity to serious things as well.

Dear Dewey,

While the circumstances for this reviewing method are anything but cheerful, I have came to the conclusion that I quite like this idea of mine. I think you will have many letters from me throughout the coming year. That's a good thing, though, right? I am trying to read books that you read that are already on my TBR pile (this book is an exception), so with every letter that I write, I am cleaning one more book off the shelves. You are agreeing with me that it is an excellent idea, right? I thought so! (There will probably be lots of exceptions, I know what you are thinking, but we are going to ignore that and just keep our eyes on my halo, okay?)

Moving on... I am going to try and review a book that is just barely over 100 pages. That is not an easy thing to do, you know. You told the story of how the book came into your hands (and then later noticed that you had two copies). My story is not that impressive, I am afraid. I just wanted a new book tonight, so I went to the bookstore and bought this with my gift card. I have plenty of books coming in the mail, but that was the future and I was concentrating on the present... I wanted instant gratification instead of waiting. I have never been very good at waiting!

This was a fun book. As a resident of Canada, the queen is technically still the leader of my country, so it was kind of fun to poke fun at a political system that my country is still a part of. It is amazing how much the author gets into such a short book. He really has a grand ole time poking fun of the British monarchy, and it is things that I could totally see, even if I have never really voiced them aloud! I am too busy paying attention to my own prime minister, as in many ways the queen is just a figurehead nowadays. I am not sure if I liked this book as much as you did, you liked it enough to keep it, so you had to really like it! I am not as picky with the books I keep (though I really should be), so saying I am going to keep it is not the same as you saying you will. I do believe I will read this book again, though, and since I only say that about books that I really really like; I think I have come pretty close to you in terms of my enjoyment level.

It is really too bad that you never had the chance to read this book again... I keep going back to that thought in my head, and I am sorry to be depressing, but I had to mention it. Even though it cannot have very many words in it, I still think it is a book you can read a couple times and keep seeing different things! The book also reminded me that I really should read more classics, but I am going to ignore that insight for the time being. You won't tell anyone, will you?

Until next time...

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist

A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

This is the first book that I read for Dewey's Books Reading Challenge. I have some great taste, there. Let's make the first book I read incredibly depressing! Anyway, after a lot of deliberating I think I am going to write these reviews in letter format. Let's see how this goes, okay?

Dear Dewey,

I have had this book since it was made an Oprah book. I know this because of the snazzy sticker that graces the front of my book. While I have wanted to read Cormac McCarthy for years, this is the first time that I have actually done so. I guess it took the events of the last few weeks to finally interest me in some hidden treasures found on my TBR... mountain. While I have read many of the books that you read, there are still many others that I own and just have never got to.

I just read your review of this book to brainstorm just what I was going to say and it made me a little sad, but I was sad upon completion of this novel anyway! To get over this you had some chocolate chocolate chip Haagen-Dasz and watched an episode of Family Guy, so maybe I will have to do something similar. I was happy to see that we had some of the same ideas about this book. I also was often caught up with atrocious punctuation. Sometimes, I would get reading along and then there would be so many things wrong with a sentence that I would just have to stop and try and figure out what he was thinking! When I think about it, though, I am caught up in the idea that this is showing the energy that the characters had when they were speaking. The better things were going for them; the more words that they uttered. I actually loved the whole idea of this, but like you, it took me until they found the supplies to get caught up in the story. For a while, I was just reading the book to finish it and try and understand why people enjoyed it so much!

You had three things that you were wondering about in the course of the book:

1. How old is this boy?
2. What the hell happened to the world to make it
this way?
3. How did these two survive when most people are dead?

I found myself wondering about these same things. The boy would be talking or his father would be reflecting on something and I would find myself trying to picture him in my head. You came to the conclusion that he was about seven, while I was thinking about eight, so we were both on the same wavelength. I also have to admit that I found myself wondering what their names were. Especially at the end when the little boy says his father's name three times. I wondered what it was that he was saying. Not necessarily anything important to the story, just something to satisfy my own curiousity.

I am happy that I am not the only one that wasn't super fond of the ending. I will just leave it at that because there are still some people, I would think, that haven't read this book! Anyway, Dewey, thanks for reading this book and leading me to it. While I didn't love it, I didn't hate it, and I am glad that with this letter we have sort of shared the reading of it.

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

From Marie Phillips, hailed by the Guardian Unlimited website as a “hot author” destined to “break through” in 2007, comes a highly entertaining novel set in North London, where the Greek gods have been living in obscurity since the seventeenth century.

Being immortal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Life’s hard for a Greek god in the twenty-first century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn’t respect you, and you’re stuck in a dilapidated hovel in North London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there’s no way out… until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives and turn the world upside down.

Gods Behaving Badly is that rare thing, a charming, funny, utterly original novel that satisfies the head and the heart.

This was such a fun book! It might weigh a bit on the 'chick-lit' side, which is not usually my sort of read, but I took a chance on it and I am very happy that I did! As many people that read my blog know, I like history. This is a book about the Greek gods set in a modern age! It was a perfect read for me. While mythology is a very broad area of study that I have never researched in depth, it has always interested me. Here we have a book where the author takes all of the powers that the gods and goddesses were believed to possess and writes a book where they take the fore-front. It was really quite a good idea.

The gods are quite the dysfunctional family. People today don't believe in them anymore and they are just bored. Their hold on humanity has been slowly slipping, so they find that they don't seem to have a use anymore. So, they burn off their energy in other pursuits. Plus, it helps pay the bills! Artemis, the goddess of hunting and chastity, is a dog-walker. She has to work off her lust somehow, right? Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, is a telephone sex operator. It is pretty entertaining, I must say! The scenes where she are talking on the phone couldn't help but bring a smile to your face. The other god that figures predominately in this book is Apollo, the god of the sun. Conceited, sex-crazed, and unappreciated... That's Apollo in a nut shell. Other gods and goddesses are in the book, but these three are the main characters.

The gods and goddesses have been around for a long time, and they are frankly bored and old. There are times in the book where they even talk about what it would be like to just die! Then, a prank has unanticipated results and life for them changes very drastically. Enter a very meek, perfectionist cleaner and her sort of boyfriend and things start to happen. I really love that for as smart as this couple is, they never really wonder why the entire family is named after Greek gods. We witness their thoughts, so I figured that somewhere in there they would be wondering what the parents were on when they named the kids, but it never happens.

So, what we have here is some all-powerful gods that are losing their powers, some unsuspecting mortals, a falling apart house in London, some sex, some romance, incest, fighting, a trip to the underworld, and so much more all in one book! So, yes, I enjoyed this book and I do hope that if she writes another book she makes it a sequel of sorts. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for what happens next!

Thanks to Random House for both bringing this book to my attention and kindly sending me a copy!

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time.

On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizophrenic sculptress on the lam from the psych ward upstairs, who insists that she knows him – that she has known him, in fact, for seven hundred years. She remembers vividly when they met, in another hospital ward at a convent in medieval Germany, when she was a nun and he was a wounded mercenary left to die. If he has forgotten this, he is not to worry: she will prove it to him.

And so Marianne Engel begins to tell him their story, carving away his disbelief and slowly drawing him into the orbit and power of a word he'd never uttered: love.

Okay, I will admit it, when this book first came out, I read the description and automatically decided that it was not something that I would like. Romance in novels is fine, but I am not the sort that reads books that are marketed as romance. So, I never expected to find myself reading this book. It was a combination of positive reviews and retellings of the synopsis that made me decide to give the book a chance, and I am so glad that I did! I loved it! It was different than anything I had read before, really, and once I got caught up in the pages I found that I had a very hard time putting it down! And, to think, I almost didn't read it at all!

It really surprises me that this is Andrew Davidson's first novel. It is so refreshing and the writing so well-done, you would think you were reading a later novel. It is the story of love, like the book synopsis lead me to believe, but it is so much more! It has two very interesting main characters: A man that has been nearly burned to death in a fire and a woman that lives in what most people believe is a fantasy world. They come together, though, and create a story that I would happily read again right now! The story changes through different time periods, so it is not just set in stone. It covers medieval England and then moves closer to modern day. Marianne is a story-teller, and as I was reading the words I could picture her sitting beside me telling them. She was such a vibrant character she jumped off the pages!

Now, to be honest, I didn't know until the end how much I loved the book. I think since it was a bit different than my usual reading that I was resistant to it, but by the last 150 pages, I was glued to it! This book is seeing a lot of blogging activity, so it seems rather pointless to rehash the plot when so many other people already have, but it such a worthwhile read! Will everyone love it? Probably not. We are talking about a former porn star and a former nun falling in love. It is not exactly a story that will sit well with everyone who comes across it, but Davidson writes in such a way that even the unusual seems believable. You find yourself wanting to believe that everything that is written is entirely plausible, even if it seems like the craziest thing possible.

All I can say is I cannot wait until he writes something else, but it will be very difficult to follow this book! I am really surprised I liked this book as much as I did, though. It is a keeper for sure and I recommend it strongly!

My thanks to Random House for this book! It is also counts towards The Second Canadian Challenge, Eh! The Kelley Armstrong book I read the other day could too, I just thought of. I am going to have to count and see where I stand, I think I am almost done!

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Every gift has a price . . .

Every piece of lace has a secret . . .

My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time. . . .

Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.

The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it's nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, "There are no accidents."

I don't know what it is about this book! I really liked it, but every time I sit down to write a review of it, I cannot seem to figure out what to say! I am not sure why that is, really. I like the whole idea behind the book, so when I had a chance to read it, I was very excited. It will likely be one of my favourite reads of the year... not that it is has much competition! Barry wrote a very readable book, and while not everything that happened in it was all that surprising, I found myself turning the pages to see what was going to happen next!

Towner is not exactly a loveable character. She has quite a wall around her and you never really feel like you get to know who she really is by the end of the book, but she is a very interesting character! The whole idea of being able to read lace interests me. I would love to be able to do something 'different' like that. Mind you, if I could, I probably wouldn't want to, but since I can't, I can think about things like that. The characters in this book are very colourful, though, so it does read like a very different sort of book, even if the lace reading wasn't included. Towner is not exactly the girl next door and her family does not really fit to a 'normal' mould. This makes them much more readable. For me, anyway.

The book also throws in some witches, which was perfect for Halloween. When I first heard about the book I assumed it was historical fiction, so I was surprised when it turned out to be set in a modern period. Good ole mixture of religion against witches! Sad to think things like that still happen.... Think we would learn from the past, huh? Anyway, I really enjoyed this book. When I got to the end, I was very happy that I had read it and I imagine it is a book I will happily read again someday!

My thanks to Harper Collins!

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

I need a dog. Since Sandy died last year, I find myself never wanting to be home. In many ways I am over the loss of her, but my house still seems so empty without her. You know, my reading has not really recovered from that month. I read very little at the end of the year and it has not improved since. I am not sure if that is because of not really being over Sandy, or if it is because I never want to be at my house, so I do not sit around and read anymore. It is very hard to say. All I know is that reading this book just made me sad. I have always had a dog. There has never been a moment in my life where I didn't have one, so I really notice the difference.

Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television and by listening closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming racecar driver. Through Denny, Enzo has gained insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn’t just about going fast. Using the techniques of the race track, dogs—and human beings—can learn to navigate life’s hairpin turns.
On the night before his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through: the sacrifices Denny has made to succeed professionally; the unexpected loss of Eve, Denny’s wife; the three-year battle for custody of their daughter, Zoë. In the end, despite what he sees as his own limitations, Enzo comes through heroically to preserve the Swift family, holding in his heart the dream that Denny will become a racing champion with Zoë at his side. Having learned what it takes to be a compassionate and successful person, the wise canine can barely wait until his next lifetime, when he is sure he will return as a man.
A poignant love story and a moving tale of redemption, The Art of Racing in the Rain—for which rights have been sold around the world—is an unconventional, captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could see them.

I really liked this book. A book narrated by a dog can be a bit tricky, but this one was done in such a way that it did not seem like a fairy tale. It really seemed like I was inside Enzo's head. I used to look at my dogs and wonder what they were thinking, and it would be nice to think that they had intelligent thoughts like Enzo did. Whether or not they did or not, though, is hard to say. All I know is that Enzo gives a canine interpretation on the life of his family, and he does it very well. As Sara Gruen says on the front cover: "The Art of Racing in the Rain has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger and-best of all-the canine narrator, Enzo." I totally agree with this.

On the night before Enzo goes to the vet for the very last time, he tells his story. By telling his story, he tells the story of the family that raised him from a puppy. He goes back that far to, to the days when his owner was single to when he has a family to raise and Enzo is getting older. Denny lives a rough life during this book, and Enzo is there for all of it. If Denny had told the same story, I am not sure I would have liked this book that much, but Enzo is a very good narrator. He wants nothing more than to come back in his next life as a man, and so, as a result, he is obsessed with the human world. I am jealous, he even got to go in a race car! I am a human and I haven't even had that chance!

The title comes from the fact that Denny is an aspiring racecar driver, so Enzo has grown up around race tracks and racing cars. Denny does not always have the best luck, having suffered through the loss of his wife and a custody battle for his daughter, but he knows how to keep going. Enzo helps, of course. I loved the end of this book. It was the perfect way to end it, and I found myself sitting there with the last page open for a while afterwards considering how perfect it was. If you ever wanted a dogs-eye view of the world, this is the book for you. I love dogs, that is why I picked it up, but it is more than a dogs story. You will be glad that you read that this book. I know that I am, and these are not my usual type of novels.

To learn more about this book, click here. My thanks to Harper Collins for the Advanced Reading Copy!

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Date Completed: September 23, 2007
Pages: 272
Publication Year: 2007
Received from Random House.

Reason for Reading: Short-listed for the 2007 Booker Prize.

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s island, only one white person stays behind. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens.

For Matilda, Dickens’s hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Watts’s book begins to inflame the children’s imaginations with dreams about Dickens’s London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip?

Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Jones’s breathtaking novel shows what magic a child’s imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.

When this book was first put on the long-list for the Bookers, I was not sure if it was going to be something that I want to read, but I really like Great Expectations, so I thought I should see what I thought about this book. I am so glad that I did. There were a few moments during the book that I was not really sure about, but they all came together into one of the best books that I have read this year. I have only read one other Booker book, On Chesil Beach, so I am not in any place to judge this in the grand scheme of things, but if this book won I think it would deserve it.

Set on a South Pacific Island, civil war comes to play with a blockade that keeps the people on the island isolated from the outside world. For many people, this is how life is anyways, they do not go anywhere. With the blockade, the teachers have left the island, so the children are left with no schooling. There is one white man left on the island, he met an islander when she was in Australia and ended up coming to the island with her after she goes through some difficult periods in her life. He becomes the island teacher. Life is hard for these children, but when they are in the classroom with their teacher he transports them to Victorian England through the pages of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. These children are transformed, they are so captured by the novel that they think of Pip as a friend that they know.

Set during a war, there is a lot more than just a class reading a novel going on, and I think that Lloyd James does a wonderful job combining several themes. Told by an islander named Matilda, she captures an isolated world through the eyes of a young black girl that. until she is older, has never stepped off an island. Race issues are also at play during this novel.

This book was really good!

Now For All the Things I Wanted to Say Last Night

After posting about the death of Robert Jordan, I decided that was enough for last night, but now I do have a few things I was planning on saying. Three more days until the official start of the Four-Legged Friends Reading Challenge. Do remember that if you decide to start after the 20th, you are very welcome!

Did anyone watch the Emmys last night? I thought it was alright, but the people I wanted to win did not win. And, where was CSI? Being a fan of that show, one of few shows I really enjoy, I was shocked that there were was no nominations for it last night! I hope this does not mean it is going to be going off the air after this year because I really like that show. And, can I just say that I thought Sally Field's speech was wonderful, she really is a great actress! I heard it was censored in some places, it was not here, so I got to hear the whole thing. The Sopranos man at the end of the show also made mention of it, though whether it was meant to be taken seriously or not I am not sure.

The Giller long-list was announced today. I am planning on trying and reading most of them. I have only read Helpless by Barbara Gowdy, so hopefully I can get through several of them between now and the 9th of October when the short-list is announced. I generally like Giller books, so I am excited with this undertaking. I should read more Canadian authors, anyways.

David Chariandy for his novel Soucouyant, Arsenal Pulp Press
		Sharon English for her collection of short stories Zero Gravity, The Porcupine’s Quill
		Barbara Gowdy for her novel Helpless, HarperCollins Canada
		Elizabeth Hay for her novel Late Nights on Air, McClelland & Stewart
		Lawrence Hill for his novel The Book of Negroes, HarperCollins Canada
		Paulette Jiles for her novel Stormy Weather, HarperCollins Canada
		D.R. MacDonald for his novel Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, HarperCollins Canada
		Claire Mulligan for her novel The Reckoning of Boston Jim, Brindle & Glass Publishing
		Mary Novik for her novel Conceit, Doubleday Canada
		Michael Ondaatje for his novel Divisadero, McClelland & Stewart
		Daniel Poliquin for his novel A Secret Between Us, trans. Donald Winkler, Douglas & McIntyre
		M.G. Vassanji for his novel The Assassin’s Song, Doubleday Canada
		Michael Winter for his novel The Architects Are Here, Penguin Books Canada
		Richard Wright for his novel October, HarperCollins Canada, a Phyllis Bruce Book
		Alissa York for her novel Effigy, Random House Canada

Dear John by Nicholas Sparks

Completion Date: July 2007
Pages: 276
Publication Year: 2006
Owned Prior to 2007

Reason for Reading: Nicholas Sparks is the author that I pick up when I want something light and uncomplicated.

When Savannah Lynn Curtis comes into his life, John Tyree knows he is ready to turn over a new leaf. An angry rebel, he had enlisted in the army after high school, not knowing what else to do. Then, during a furlough, he meets the girl of his dreams. Savannah Lynn Curtis is attending college in North Carolina,
working for Habitat for Humanity, and totally unprepared for the passionate attraction she feels for John Tyree. The attraction is mutual and quickly grows into the kind of love that leaves Savannah vowing to wait for John while he finishes his tour of duty, and John realizing that he's ready to settle down with the young woman who has captured his heart. Neither can foresee that 9/11 is about to change the world and will force John to risk every hope and dream that he's ever had. Like so many proud men and women, John must choose between love and country. And like all those left behind, Savannah must decide to wait
or move on. How do we choose wisely? How can we face loss-without giving up on love? Now, when he finally returns to North Carolina, John will discover that loving Savannah will force him to make the hardest decision of his life. An extraordinary, moving story, Dear John explores the complexities of love -- how it survives time and heartbreak, and how it transforms us forever.

It is always weird to even me that I read Nicholas Sparks. He is not my normal read at all, and even though I like some of his books, he is not an author that I can say that I love. I just enjoy reading a book from him once in a while. I only started reading him when The Notebook came to theatres. I really liked the movie, so I bought the book, and then I read all his backlog soon after. I still have to read True Believer and At First Sight, and he has a new book coming out in September, The Choice. Of all the books that I have read by him, though, I do not think anything will beat The Notebook, although I also really liked The Guardian and The Wedding. Those are my three favourite Nicholas Spark novels.

Anyways, I have not been super impressed with the last few books by Sparks. I used to like his books because they had a story outside the romance and he wrote less conventional romance novels, but the last few have been rather dull. This one was okay, but nothing like his earlier sort of writing. The storyline was pretty basic. Guy meets girl, guy and girl fall in love, bad things happen, and nothing that they dream will happen, happens. I think it is very valiant to work in the army, but this book made me think should love of country come so strongly above your family and your own happiness. It's a difficult line to walk and more a rhetorical question than anything else.

So, an okay read, but not by far the best thing I read this month. I also say that there are better Nicholas Sparks books so if you want to read him and are looking for a good start, go back to his earlier stuff. He also has a book about himself growing up and a trip he took with his brother that is very worthwhile.

Just in case you want to know: I posted a review of The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey on Historical Tapestry. (Click here).

The Ladies' Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer

Completion Date: June 2007
Pages:
Publication Year: 2007
Received from Harper Collins in 2007

Reason for Reading: This book is one of Harper Collins recommended summer reads, and I can see it being a very popular book for the beach.

In the summer of 1963, the year of the release of Cleopatra, the most sensational movie ever made, the women of Kalyna Beach prepare for their annual end-of season party. Sonia Martyn and her four daughters are part of a group of first generation Ukrainian Canadians, newly minted middle-class families claiming their small part of the cottage-country dream. With their husbands away in the city all week, the women's days are ruled by the predictable rhythms of children and chores, lightened by the 'racy' books they trade amongst themselves and by their Friday afternoon gatherings for gin and gossip, heightened by their obsession with the deliciously scandalous love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Their tightly bound world is straining with its own dramas and secrets. Sonia, a former fashion model, mourns the death of her mother and fights with her difficult eldest daughter. Elusive Nadia, the wife of a millionaire, longs for a life she cannot have. Sharp-tongued, sophisticated Sasha plays a dangerous game in both challenging and shoring-up the traditional Ukrainian community and its defining values. And for adolescent Laura, her sisters and their friends, the rifts and fissures that appear in the once impregnable 'world of the mothers' will unleash a startling series of betrayals and discoveries. For this is the summer when everything will change for the girls and women of Kalyna Beach, as innocence is exchanged for a new understanding of the possibilities open to them all. In setting her characters against the backdrop of the turbulent sixties, Janice Kulyk Keefer creates a radiant portrait of women caught between countries, cultures and aspirations. Richly evocative, beautifully told, The Ladies' Lending Library will resonate with more than women and book club members; it's a story for anyone who has longed for the sweet and heady days of bygone summers and the risky promises of change.

I think this book would make a wonderful summer read, but it did not work for me. I do not think it was necessarily the book, it was me, I just had read so many bad books around it that I just could not get into this one. I think lots of people will like it, and read it on the beach, but not me! The big thing is that I just read it last week or so and I cannot remember much that happened in this book. The introduction was promising, a book about books was revealed, but as the story unfolded I just lost interest. The story was dull, I could not relate to the characters. I think by the introduction I was expecting a different sort of book than the one that I ended up with.

There is not much else I can say, it just did nt attract me at all.

Sounder by William Armstrong and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

So, the other day I got all the books that I have read and was not a big fan of together and off to the second hand store I went. This means that I no longer have these books handy, and I really did not like them, so they are not really fresh in my mind any longer. Sounder won a Newbery Award, and it was a cute book, but I just could not find the big attraction with it. It is likely more reflective of the time it was released in than anything. Not liking Speak surprised me because I had heard really good things about it. I just could not get into it at all, and I think part of it was the writing style.

So, I will just leave you with the book descriptions and you can make your own decisions about whether or not you want to read them.

Speak description:

The first ten lies they tell you in high school

"Speak up for yourself - we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows that this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and is is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In this powerful novel, an utterly believeable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself.

I am wondering if this book did not work for me because I am not a teen anymore... not sure.

Description for Sounder:

A landmark in children's literature, winner of the 1970 Newbery Medal, and the basis of an acclaimed film, Sounder traces the keen sorrow and the abiding faith of a poor African-American boy in the 19th century South. The boy's father is a sharecropper, struggling to feed his family in hard times. Night after night, he and his great coon dog, Sounder, return to the cabin empty-handed. Then, one morning, almost like a miracle, a sweet-smelling ham is cooking in the family's kitchen. At last the family will have a good meal. But that night, an angry sheriff and deputies come, and the boy's life will never be the same.

Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland

Completion Date: June 20, 2007
Publication Year: 2006 (from Harper Collins)
Pages: 344
Received from Harper Collins in 2007.

Reason for Reading: Shortlisted for last years Booker Award.

Eleven-year-old John Egan has an unusual talent: he can tell when people are lying. John hopes that one day his gift will guarantee his entry into the Guinness Book of World Records. Until then, he must navigate the powerful and destructive undercurrents of his loving but fragile family.

When John and his parents move to the council-flat slums of Dublin, John finds himself in a perilous world. Even his relationship with his mother—a bond that is peculiarly close—begins to break down. Amid the confusion of shifting landscapes and loyalties, he can rely only on his ability to detect lies. But John’s obsession for discerning the truth becomes a violent and frightening fixation.

As she did in her internationally acclaimed debut, How the Light Gets In, M. J. Hyland introduces us to a character whose voice is immediate, compelling and real. Simply told and beautifully written, Carry Me Down is a singular tale of disturbed love.

I have come to the conclusion over the years that books with children as the main characters and narrators are very hit or miss for me. The writer has to capture the child in just a certain way, or I find myself losing interest. John, the eleven-year-old narrator, annoyed me. Some people say that if you feel something for the characters it means that the book is speaking to you. I seem to miss out on that idea, though, because if I find the main character annoying, the book loses part of its appeal for me. Take Water for Elephants, the book was interesting and had a good subject matter, but I found the main character so annoying that it took away from the book for me. The same thing happened with this book.

That being said, the subject matter of this book was something that was interesting, and even though John annoyed me, there were other aspects of the book that made up for it. I personally do not think it would have been worthy of the Booker, should it have won, because there are so many other good books out there. That is not to say it was a bad book, just not what I think of when I think of award-winning. Taking place with a family that is on the brink of destruction, John has a rather disturbing relationship with his mother. He is rather tall for his age, a boy caught in a man's body, and his thought processes can be rather disturbing. Some of the events that happen in the book you have to sit there and remember that he is only 11, so it might not make sense to an adult mind, but it is perfectly acceptable to a mind on the brink of maturity.

The mother is a very odd character, it is very likely safe to say that she has undiagnosed depression and it might be from her that her son gets some of his strange tendancies. The father, on the other hand, is distant from John. He has dreams that he wishes to fulfill, but I do not believe that he has the drive to succeed with them. These are the three main characters, with a few others appearing from time to time including a gambling grandmother, a book-selling aunt, her reclusive husband, some cousins, and a few other characters here and there. John is also obsessed with breaking world records and he believes that he is a human lie detector.

Parting Thoughts: Overall, for me, just an average book. It was not bad, I read it the first day that I got it, but it was not great either. Hyland has a lot of things going on, though, and while I think she is a great writer, I just could not get passed my annoyance with the main character.

Totally Not Important, but I am telling you Anyways: I just finished a wonderful historical fiction book set in Iran. It was totally a different sort of historical fiction than I am used to reading. I will review it either tomorrow or later in the week. I am currently reading Wit'ch Fire by James Clemens. It is actually another pen name for James Rollins, so I will be interested to see if this book is as good as his non-fantasy writing. It is book one in The Banned and Banished series. Then, I plan to read Icehunt by James Rollins or a book by Margaret Weis, as she is author of the month on Twisted Kingdom this month. (Speaking of Twisted Kingdom, where are all my Colleen Gleason book pictures? I like to think that more than one person in the world had a camera!) Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to sneak myself upstairs and away from the large group of girls that are currently taking over my house!

Anyone reading anything good that they feel like sharing? Hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters by Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution

Completion Date: June 20, 2007
Publication Year: 2003
Pages: 368
Received from Harper Collins in 2007

Reason for Reading: I love both of Wally Lamb's books, so when I heard about this one I decided that I had to read it one of these days. Then, I got it in the mail, and here we are.

In a stunning work of insight and hope, New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb once again reveals his unmatched talent for finding humanity in the lost and lonely and celebrates the transforming power of the written word.

For several years, Lamb has taught writing to a group of women prisoners at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. In this unforgettable collection, the women of York describe in their own words how they were imprisoned by abuse, rejection, and their own self-destructive impulses long before they entered the criminal justice system. Yet these are powerful stories of hope and healing, told by writers who have left victimhood behind.

In his moving introduction, Lamb describes the incredible journey of expression and self-awareness the women took through their writing and shares how they challenged him as a teacher and as a fellow author. Couldn't Keep It to Myself is a true testament to the process of finding oneself and working toward a better day.

This book can open up lots of discussion. I know that when I finished it I found myself talking to the other person who was in the room with me at the time, and we have very different opinions on how a person should be treated after they commit a crime. I really want that person to read this book because it is very eye-opening, and I think that it helps people see the other side of the bars in a way that has never been explored before. I remember there was a Canadian woman who challenged the early jail system for whipping the inmates. She was ridiculed because she was a woman, but no one could call such harsh treatment appropriate and normal.

I will say it right now, the reason that I likely find myself relating to these women is because I know parts of their stories because they are not so different from my own. I can very easily see how they were treated as children can relate to who they become as adults, especially when the other parent is working to support the family and cannot always be there the way that a child needs. I was not horrified by the people that these women have become, I was gladdened by the fact that they seem to know where they came from, and by understanding the past you can make changes for the future.

These stories capture a small percentage of the women locked up in institutions across the United States. These women tell you very plainly about the abuse, struggles, and abandonment that they faced as adults and children. You hear the stories that no one else tells, the stories of how they really are people and they really do have their own lives. They are not the crimes that they have committed, they are people. Wally Lamb has put together a collection that puts faces to the statistics, it makes them more than numbers. Each story is very powerful and you can see how hard it would be to tell the world what you faced in your life. All of these women are very brave, and while we may not all agree with how people are treated in these institutions, it would be nice if people could remember these people as more than just faceless masses.

Parting Thoughts: I was very moved by this collection of short stories. I, like many others, think of convicted felons by their crimes and forget sometimes that they are real people who have faced real hardships (well, not all the time) and have made a big mistake in life. I am always amazed by the people that were the victims of terrible crimes and can tell the person that did it to them that they forgive them. Wally Lamb just made sure that people saw the people behind the crimes, and while this does not necessarily represent everyone convicted of a crime, it gives readers a chance to see some of the stories. I strongly recommend this book, not just for the powerful stories, but for the stories that show women working towards a better day.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Completion Date: June 11, 2007
Publication Year: 2004
Pages: 544
Owned Prior to 2007

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.

This book won the Pulitizer Prize and is the newest Oprah Book Club pick. It has been sitting on my to be read pile for a couple years now. I did not read it because was the Oprah summer pick, but more because I have wanted to read it for a while and was just really slow getting around to it. I really enjoyed The Virgin Suicides by him, but I think I liked this book better. It took a while to come out, and you can see the research put into it.

This book does a very good job of covering gender identity. Calliope was born, and because of a quick glance, believed to be a normal, healthy baby girl. It was her teenage years before the doctor discovered he had made a mistake, she spent many years as a girl and then learned that this might not be the right thing for her. Instead of just talking about Callope Stephanides as the 41-year-old narrator, Cal tells the story of the grandparents that started the genes moving towards her, of her parents that carried the family genes that were together for the first time and could thus be passed on to her. Engenides creates the history and the background for why Cal was born the way that he was.

There are some great characters in this book. The story is told from Cal's point of view as him writing his memoirs, so we get a taste of him as both a child and a few glimpses into his current adult life. Through his eyes, we learn what it is like to be a hermaphodite and the struggles that creates for a person. Eugenides decides to have the child that was raised as a girl become a man when they learn the truth of what they are. Cal, if they had a good doctor, would have been marked as a boy from the start, but the doctor did not look closely enough and so she was raised as a girl. Despite the fact that they feel compelled to change to a different gender, Cal says that he was comfortable when he was a girl and not so comfortable as a male. Gender identity is a very fluid thing that is more inspired by your up-bringing than anything else. There are rules as to what it is to be male or female.

Desdemona, Cal's grandmother is a very interesting character to read about. She feels that what happens to Cal is punishment for the sins that she has committed and worried about since she was a young woman. She was expecting something bad to happen, but when Cal was thought to have been born fine, she thought that the danger had passed. She comes from a small place that was very common for intermarriage, and thus often had cases of babies being born one sex and discovering they were another when they were older. I find that while her husband, Lefty was in the novel, the story relied more on the female side of the relationship. I feel I got to know Desdemona better than Lefty.

Other characters include Cal's brother, Chapter Eleven, which I had hoped to learn the name origin for, but it was never revealed. He got off slightly okay, his cousins had names like Plato and Cleopatra. I do not find that the parents were covered as much as the grandparents, but we get to see how they met and how their relationship played out, as well as a few other glimpses throughout the novel. I just found myself wondering how they could have overlooked Cal's complete lack of development for so long and what they did notice, consider normal.

My only problem with this book were there were a few spots where the book dragged a bit and I found myself skimming. Overall, though, it was a very good read. I recommend this book! It's very different than the normal fiction covering the shelves.

Sula by Toni Morrison

Sula by Toni Morrison

Books Read: 34
Completion Date: February, 2007
Publication Year: 2002 (reprint)
Pages: 192
Purchased for University in 2007

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written--as John Leonard said in The New York Times--in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry."

Her new novel has the same power, the same beauty.

At its center--a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel--both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town--meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes.

Through their girlhood years they share everything--perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime--until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.

Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks--where you deal with evil by surviving it.

Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance)...that a child drowned in the river years ago...that there was a plague of robins when she first returned...

In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.

This is one of those authors that everyone loves, her books have won the Noble Prize, and I just find myself, well, unfulfilled when I read her. I have read another book by her, and I cannot even remember the title anymore. She is an author that I would love to say that I like because she really does write on good subject matters that should be interesting, but she always falls flat for me. I always planned to read her again after my first attempt to see if it was just the book choice, and I had to read this one for school, so it worked out. I still do not like her.

This book is about many things, most of all the friendship between Sula and Nel, the treatment of Black people in this time period, and the superstitious nature of people. There are a lot of interesting instances in this book, a lot of scenes where I laughed or was surprised, but overall, I just could not get into this book. It also talks about how hard it was to be a single woman at this time, capturing it with the crazy (to us) methods that one woman went to in order to feed her children.

It really is a short book, only 192 pages, and in the course of there is love, life, laughter, and death. And, I am afraid that it is not very fresh in my memory anymore, so that is all I am going to say.

3/5

This is the second time I have read this author.

Authors Gender:
Female: 27
Males: 7

Children of My Heart by Gabrielle Roy

Books Completed: 33
Completion Date: February 28, 2007
Publication Year: 2000 (Reprint)
Pages: 176
Received from Random House in 2007
First Canadian Read Completed

Set in the prairies in the 1930s, and rich with the author’s own memories of her time there as a young woman, this is a powerful story of an impressionable and passionate young teacher and the pupils, from impoverished immigrant families, whose lives she touches. Children of My Heart bears unforgettable testimony to the healing power love exerts on the wounds of loneliness and poverty.

I am rather embarassed to say that this is the first time I have ever read Gabrielle Roy. At the beginning of the year I said that I was going to read all the books for the Canadian Reads for 2007, but I have not been making much progress. Then, at the end of February, I got this in the mail and I read it in a matter of hours. So, that is one of the books down, now to find time to read the others!

It is interesting to read historical fiction books of sorts about Canada. This book takes place in the Praires, the other side of the country than where I live, in the 1930s. It is an interesting look at a young teacher who has decided to be a teacher. The book is broken into small section and each section represents one of the early years of her teaching career. It is interesting that in the course of this book she does not make it out of her teens, but yet she teaches for a few years before it is over. It just shows you how different things were not even a hundred years than now. Most people are in their thirties before they have their careers all planned out.

The Praires are suffering in the '30's. Many of the children in her classes do not have very much money or are immigrants from other countries. She very realistically shows how hard it is to be a stranger in a new land, but she also shows how important it was for these parents to have a better future for their children. Education, no matter how little, was everything because parents wanted their children to at least have a better understanding of the world around them. With the early sections, most of the activity takes place in the classroom, but in the last section the teacher finds herself in a different situation with a student. She is not all that much older than him, and he is a considerable amount taller than her. In different situations it might have been a crush, but that would be unappropriate in this setting. Watching the teacher deal with this situation, though, showed me just how young she really was!

It is a very short piece of work, but I thought it was very well-written. I really like to read about my own country, and I do not read enough Candian authors anymore. I used to read a lot more, but reading tastes change I guess.

My special thanks to McClelland and Stewart (a division of Random House) for sending me this book!

4/5

This is the first time I have read this author, but I hope to read more!

Authors Gender:
Male: 6
Female: 27

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

Quote of the Day:
"The biggest mistake you can make is to believe that you work for someone else.
- Unknown

Book Completed: 7
Completion Date: January 19, 2007
Publication Year: 1999
Pages: 274
Owned Prior to 2007


From Amazon.ca:

Hailed by critics as the debut of a major literary, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing has dazzled and delighted readers and topped bestseller lists nationwide. Generous-hearted and wickedly insightful, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships, and the treacherous waters of the workplace. With an unforgettable comic spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it's like to be a young woman coming of age in America today.

I had heard lots about this book before buying it one day at a second hand store. Since I bought it, I totally forgot what it was about, but I knew that it had been on the to be read pile for quite some time. I remember buying it, I just don't remember what year it was in.

I think this book was appropriate after completing Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, because both novels are a collection of interconnected short stories. In the process of this book, Jane Rosenal goes from a child to an adult, but not in a coherant story pattern. Sometimes the next short story happens before the one before it, one time the story is told by Jane's neighbour, but it is not confusing to follow.

The novel is really a coming of age book. This is not a book that I would have seen in a store and picked up, as it is not something I necessarily drawn to. It is the sort of book I read more because of reputation. I do not read very many short story collections, either, so it was a branch off in a different direction that way as well. I think the reason I did not mind this book is because Jane is relatable. She is not a character that I cannot see at least a little bit of myself in. She is struggling to figure out who she is, trying out different avenues in the hopes that it will lead her where she wants to be, and falling in and out of love.

My favourite story in this one was the last one, "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing". At the end of the book, Jane has lost hope with all the methods that she has tried before, and decides that she needs to read a survival guide on relationships to get what she wants. It is a comical story, and actually, I find most of the book funny. It is not a serious read, by any stretch of the imagination, but serious things do happen in it.

I enjoyed this book.

3.5/5

Author Gender:
Female: 6
Male: 1

This author was new to me.