We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (audio)

Posted on February 23, 2015 by pagesofjulia

**AVOID SPOILERS!** (There are none below.) As a commenter pointed out, there may be spoilers even on the dust jacket or other coverings for the book or audiobook itself. Proceed cautiously. Just trust me and read the book itself.

beside

This is one of those with a big reveal to it that *makes* the book. For the love of whatever you love, please, avoid all discussion of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves until you read it. Excepting this review, of course, which promises to be spoiler-free and is therefore safe, and brief.

I’m glad Liz recommended this one to me, on audio specifically, and I shall do the same. Get the audiobook, which is beautifully and feelingly narrated by Orlagh Cassidy. Our young female protagonist/narrator Rosemary is a little troubled, but likeable right from the start. She uses the unusual second-person voice, breaking down the fourth wall to talk directly to her audience: “you may have the impression from what I’ve just said, that… but here’s another thing I’d like you to know…” Her story is compelling from the beginning, and involves a number of different threads and an occasionally disjointed timeline. I don’t know what else I can tell you without giving it all away. It’s about family, self-determination, the nature of memory. Life. You will laugh and be amazed. Go out and get this book now, and don’t let anybody tell you anything about it. Oh – a little bird told me Karen Joy Fowler gave away the big secret in a book talk somewhere. She is an outstanding writer, but apparently a potentially disastrous speaker. Avoid her talks til you’ve read the book. Go read the book. That’s all.

Rating: 8 studies quoted.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Her Own Vietnam by Lynn Kanter

Posted on February 17, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

vietnam

Our protagonist, Della, was an army nurse and is only just beginning to attempt to deal with her experiences there.

Suddenly every conversation was about Vietnam. After all this time, she finally wanted her family to ask her about it, but when they did she didn’t like it, or she didn’t like the questions they asked or the way they squirmed when she answered.

So simple, this concept, despite its self-conflict; and so representative, I think. I love that in a piece of writing.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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book beginnings on Friday: Of Things Gone Astray by Janina Matthewson

Posted on February 13, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

astray

Confession: I had already finished this totally amazing book when I flipped back to the front to offer you a book beginning. And I am excited all over again by the first sentence – which, by the way, I find surprising upon a reread, based on what I now know about the character… but I’ll stop there.

Mrs. Featherby had been having pleasant dreams until she woke to discover the front of her house had vanished overnight.

Clearly I can’t contain myself. Get a copy of this startling debut novel and find out what happens to Mrs. Featherby in her frontless house.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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God Loves Haiti by Dimitry Elias Léger

Posted on February 9, 2015 by pagesofjulia

An inspired and nuanced portrayal of politics and love, with a backdrop of natural disaster.

haiti
Dimitry Elias Léger’s debut novel, God Loves Haiti, takes place in the days just before, during and after the devastating earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince in 2010. Those 35 seconds, coupled with the mayhem and aftershocks that followed, killed hundreds of thousands, but among the survivors are a politically important old man, a vibrant younger one and the woman who has recently chosen between them but still struggles with her choice. Natasha is an artist, deeply passionate about her painting, though she’s also passionate about the poet Dante, her religion and the politics and business that engross her husband and her boyfriend. All three have different relationships to the colorful Haitian community, which is epically short on resources for everyday life, let alone a disaster of these proportions. All three choose and experience different paths after the quake hits.

Asking big questions is part of Léger’s charm, but although subjects like love, religion, sin, redemption and national identity and value seem particularly weighty against this backdrop of human suffering, the novel has thoroughly winning comic moments, too. The narrative jumps around in time to visit each member of the love triangle before and after the earthquake, and to track each character’s development. The atmosphere Léger evokes manages simultaneously to be heartrendingly realistic and dreamlike: the survivors of tragedy and disturbing pain naturally operate with heightened and distorted perceptions. The irregular chronology, quick pacing and lyrical prose combine for an artistic success that is both surprising and satisfying.

This review originally ran in the January 6, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 aerial views.

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book beginnings on Friday: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (audio)

Posted on February 6, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

we are all

I have been hanging onto this audiobook for a while now, til a friend’s recommendation pushed it to the top of the list. I came in hopeful, based on that recommendation, and so far I am not disappointed. Check out these opening lines.

Those who know me now will be surprised to learn that I was a great talker as a child. We have a home movie taken when I was two years old, the old-fashioned kind with no sound track, and by now the colors have bled out – a white sky, my red sneakers a ghostly pink – but you can still see how much I used to talk.

I think this is an awfully effective way to get me curious. A quiet person, or a talkative person, would be one thing; but someone who has undergone such a change, and describes the juxtaposition portrayed on an old video called “ghostly,” well, there’s something there to pique the attention. Well done, Karen Joy. I continue hopeful.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Screenplay by MacDonald Harris

Posted on January 22, 2015 by pagesofjulia

An enthralling, time-traveling version of Alice, in dual wonderlands of 20th-century Hollywood.

screenplay

Originally published in 1982, Screenplay by MacDonald Harris (The Balloonist) exhibits remarkable sleight of hand with two parallel versions of Los Angeles. Alys was raised in the late 20th century by fabulously wealthy, unconventional parents and orphaned at age 18. With no personal connections and unlimited money to burn, he amuses himself with unusual old books and music and soulless sexual liaisons. An odd old man shows up at his doorstep and requests to rent a room–though no room has been advertised. He introduces himself as Nesselrode, a film producer, and says he can get Alys into pictures.

Soon Alys’s tenuous link to modern 1980s L.A. falters as he steps through a screen into black-and-white 1920s Hollywood with Nesselrode as a surly, time-obsessed guide. In this alternate world, he falls in love with a beautiful starlet, but can they make a life together in her time? Or in his?

In addition to the unmistakable overarching reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Harris’s novel recalls the moral questions of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Alys himself could have stepped from the pages of The Great Gatsby. Even with such classics for comparison, Screenplay is a masterpiece of darkly playful cunning. Harris’s evocative prose, in Alys’s disturbingly clinical, coldly self-indulgent first-person narrative, is both intoxicating and disquieting; the altered reality here is more sinister and sensual, even erotic, than in Carroll’s Wonderland. The tension in this memorable and singular dreamscape builds with perfect pacing to an ending that raises more questions than it answers.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the December 30, 2014 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 toasters.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Death Comes for the Deconstructionist by Daniel Taylor

Posted on January 20, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

deconstructionist

There is a lot to recommend this funny little book, a novel about mental illness, academia and philosophy, with a murder mystery thrown in. For example, you know I couldn’t resist this:

So much information in one library, mountain ranges of information, Mariana Trenches of it. Earthly metaphors are insufficient; one has to go galactic to find adequate imagery for the near infinitude of what there is to know – even in this single word palace – and the heartbreaking finitude of my one little brain.

I like a good celebration of libraries, of course, and the imagery used here. Stick around…

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Offcomer by Jo Baker

Posted on January 15, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A delicately wrought debut novel about self-identity in a big, rough-edged world.

offcomer

Published in the United States for the first time, Offcomer is the striking first novel by Jo Baker (Longbourn). In Belfast, Claire Thomas is struggling with a messy relationship with an overstressed and self-important academic; a degrading, beer-stained job in a second-rate pub; loneliness; and self-harming. Baker presents Claire’s story in disjointed chronology, beginning mid-crisis, jumping back to when she meets her troublesome philosopher boyfriend, Alan, for the first time, then forward to the aftermath of a minor breakdown, as she travels home to confront her mother about the misrepresented mysteries of their shared past.

Claire, a recent college graduate floundering through early adulthood, is looking for an identity, a place in her world. In the dialect of Lancashire, an “offcomer” is an outsider or a nonlocal. Her family history is shadowy, fractured and geographically unstable; true to her family’s offcomer status, she can’t get comfortable, can’t decide who she is: “Claire saw herself reflected in a hundred different ways, distorted, fragmented, multiplicitous…. She couldn’t begin to resolve… discarded, throw-away ideas of Claire.” One of Offcomer‘s artistic feats is that of perspective. By shifting slightly from Claire’s point of view to Alan’s, for example, Baker subtly asks questions about the truth and nature of their self-images. Claire’s specific trials and disconnected family history are a vital part of her coming-of-age; her story is a universal one made fresh in Baker’s creative hands. Thoughtful, somber and perceptive, Offcomer will resonate with all who have searched for home.

This review originally ran in the December 23, 2014 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 bags.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Sweetheart by Angelina Mirabella

Posted on December 19, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

sweetheart
Two beginnings today from a new novel about which I know little. The Prologue begins:

The Turnip and I have a history.

Many decades ago, when he was a little boy and his folks were newly split, my sister left him with our parents and came to Memphis to live with me for a short while. It was only two months and just the medicine she needed, quite frankly, but he has held it against me ever since.

It’s intriguing, if not particularly revealing. (It actually took me a few paragraphs to figure out where we were and what we were up to.)

And chapter 1:

You want to be somebody else. You don’t know who this person might be; all you know is that she should be confident, beautiful, beloved.

More clear, at least, and the second person is somewhat unusual. I shall proceed…

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Teaser Tuesdays: God Loves Haiti by Dimitry Elias Léger

Posted on December 16, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

haiti

God Loves Haiti is a novel set in the 2010 earthquake suffered by that country, and is peopled by some striking characters – for example, the one in these lines:

…The moment, this dream-concretizing climax, felt ephemeral. Like she was about to wake up where she was born, in a roofless orphanage, naked, afraid, hungry, but pugnacious.

There is shock value to learning her roots, yes, but I love that string of adjectives for more than its shock value: how about that pugnacity, hm? Stay tuned.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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