tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32762474862592303922024-02-21T10:38:59.321-05:00Freelance Ne'er-do-wellA writer reinvents herself, yet againEllen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.comBlogger261125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-74090495382872421662018-04-04T09:48:00.001-04:002018-04-04T09:48:47.421-04:00April Book Review Club: TESS OF THE ROAD<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Three years ago <a href="https://ellenbooraem.blogspot.com/2015/04/" target="_blank">on this very blog</a>, I turned myself into a pretzel trying to convey my delight in Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina duology, a pair of fantasies about a richly multicultural human/dragon society and an inspired young woman breaking free from convention.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hartman’s at it again in TESS OF THE ROAD, set in the same world as the earlier books, and once again we’re all going nuts. (Four starred reviews!) Yet again the first book of a duology, TESS gives us another young woman held down by the stultifying conventions of Goredd, the most hidebound of nations. We watch her break free first physically, then psychologically and spiritually, on a road trip across borders and prejudices. Yet again, we are entranced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don’t think it’s necessary to have read the Seraphina books, although the events in them do predate this story and there might be some broader context missing. It’s fun recognizing old friends in the new book, but I suspect it would be just as much fun the other way around. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Tess is Seraphina’s younger stepsister, one of a pair of twins born to Seraphina’s father and a horrendous mother, intractably religious, snobby, and bigoted. The “bigoted” part mostly has to do with dragons, mathematically-minded philosophers who are able to assume a human form and co-exist uncomfortably with humans. In the first duology, the humans and dragons fell into a war, but that’s all over now. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Seventeen-year-old Tess is naturally rebellious, and has destroyed her social chances by losing her virginity (in what is essentially a date-rape) and becoming pregnant. Back home after giving birth, she becomes handmaiden to her lovely twin sister, hoping to win her a splendid court marriage that will save the family bacon. When the wedding day arrives she gets drunk and punches her new brother-in-law, so now she’s destined for the convent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Instead, prodded by the unconventional Seraphina, she finds herself dressing as a boy and taking off down the road, seeking oblivion. She runs across her childhood friend Pathka, a small, intelligent, spiritually-minded dragon called a quigutl, whose race is particularly adept at inventing and fabricating technology in an otherwise medieval land. She joins his quest, searching for a giant, mythical serpent sacred to his race, keeping body and soul together through theft, cons, and manual labor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Tess is a wonderful, difficult character, mired in self-hatred, always hearing her mother’s toxic, disapproving voice in her head. Watching her slow healing and release is a privilege and a triumph. Pathka is another marvel: tortured, loyal, irascible, brilliant. Maybe not such a great parent. (We meet his kid.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This book doesn’t have the broad political sweep of the Seraphina books, although it looks like the second book might. Seraphina had a personal quest, but also she was trying to save the world. I missed the </span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">saarantrai</span>, the exotic, conflicted dragons in human form, pursuing mathematical order despite the perplexities of human emotions. But Tess and Pathka’s quest, and what they found at the end of it, more than made up for any loss.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>(Dear FCC: I bought this book with my own money, because how could I not? Nobody cares if I review it. Hey . . . how about that Sinclair Broadcast Group? Isn’t monopoly supposed to be a bad thing?)</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-62895839310433931732018-03-07T10:44:00.003-05:002018-03-07T10:45:23.099-05:00March Book Review Club--BORN A CRIME<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>Hello. It's supposed to be almost spring but Maine has a nor'easter bearing down on us that could give us 18 inches of snow. I think the storm will have wreaked havoc for much of the East, kinda like the one we had a few days ago. Feel like putting your sense of grievance in perspective, and laughing your head off at the same time? Read on. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780399588174" target="_blank">Born a Crime</a></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">By Trevor Noah<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In 1984, when South Africa’s apartheid regime was in full clamp-down, a spirited young Xhosa woman called Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah decided she wanted to have a baby with the guy down the hall, a Swiss/German named Robert. This was a crime that could send both of them to prison and their baby to an orphanage. She went ahead and did it anyway. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The baby turned out to be comedian Trevor Noah, now the anchor of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. He opens his memoir with a reproduction of the 1927 Immorality Act, which made “carnal intercourse” illegal between a European and a “native.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Later, he describes walking down the street with his mother at age six, his father across the street pretending he didn’t know them. Because he was light-skinned, his mother had to pretend she was his nursemaid when they were out in public. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There were perks, though. When Trevor and his mom were staying in Soweto with her mother, Trevor did something “naughty” (a big word in his life) for which his cousins were punished but he was not. “I don’t know how to hit a white child,” his grandmother explained. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He never fit in anywhere: at school with the white kids or even with the “colored” kids (Indian and other nonwhite, non-black races) who looked most like him. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Noah’s remarkable mother helped him turn his oddity into an advantage. She made him speak English—the key to getting ahead in South Africa—but also Xhosa and Zulu and Sotho and Tswana and Afrikaans. Noah tended to walk on the wild side throughout his youth—“naughty” was putting it mildly—but if he was about to get beat up, he could disarm his attacker by unexpectedly speaking his language. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“I became a chameleon” he writes. “My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you like your memoirs linear, this one will drive you nuts. It’s a collection of stories, jumping back and forth in time, about the funny, harrowing, weird, horrifying experience of growing up in South Africa and doing it as Trevor Noah. The writing is wonderful, as you’d expect, and Noah can’t help being funny, or at least wry, even when he’s telling you about the time his mom almost died. It’s a total page-turner.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The day five-year-old Trevor decided to avoid the rain-soaked outhouse and do his business on a newspaper in the kitchen—leading his female relatives to think the house is demon-infested—is comedic gold. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s anger under the comedy—how could there not be? And you’re always off balance, reading this book. Because it jumps around in time, you’re always stepping back and thinking, “Okay, so this was when they lived in that suburb, right?” That’s actually a good thing—this was not a childhood in which anyone should get comfy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But possibly the weirdest thing about BORN A CRIME is the detachment of the author. We see him beaten, jailed, humiliated, and also triumphant, but none of it ever hits you in the heart and lungs. It’s entertaining as all get out, but you’re in no danger of weeping. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you were going to survive this life and become Trevor Noah, I guess you’d have to be well armored. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><i>(Dear FCC: I got this for my beloved for Christmas, or maybe his birthday, can’t remember which. They’re close together, which I believe I’ve told you before can be a real pain in the prat. I don’t recall getting any sympathy from you, though. )</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-26567943051243892992018-01-03T10:23:00.001-05:002018-01-03T10:23:34.897-05:00January Book Review Club--GLASS HOUSES<br />
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<i>Happy New Year! Big storm coming here in the East, and more grueling temperatures. (On the other hand, my friend Lilly in Australia is sitting in 122 degrees F. Count your blessings.)</i><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6CWgFcH3XKYg9O_MGHcooPMqbZZ0wJ6p5zcrvAwu2PnR1kze-8LewfFLSC_XrHyUM-YpiAW4EkmSShoqeqA3VTSlnzO-lGPsmnyIOVrBSMS_e3ah2jbvBeP9API6NKsv0avdA7DKbW9_o/s1600/glass+houses.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="263" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6CWgFcH3XKYg9O_MGHcooPMqbZZ0wJ6p5zcrvAwu2PnR1kze-8LewfFLSC_XrHyUM-YpiAW4EkmSShoqeqA3VTSlnzO-lGPsmnyIOVrBSMS_e3ah2jbvBeP9API6NKsv0avdA7DKbW9_o/s200/glass+houses.jpg" width="131" /></a></span></b></div>
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<b>By Louise Penny <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur, 20</b>17<o:p></o:p></div>
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A bitterly cold week between Christmas and New Year’s. A political fray you’re loathe to re-enter. A writing deadline, but you can’t write ALL day, can you?<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is the perfect situation for a visit to Three Pines, the mythical Québec village Louise Penny created twelve years and twelve books ago. Penny’s a master at creating characters, and Three Pines is one of them. Armand Gamache, now the chief superintendent of the Sûréte du Québec, is another. Nothing heals the soul like spending time with them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In GLASS HOUSES, which came out just too late for my August birthday but in plenty of time for Christmas, Penny is at her best. I’m going to re-read this book as a primer in building suspense. The writers among us will be not even slightly surprised to know that Penny wrote it during and after her ailing husband’s final illness. She was in touch with every nerve ending in the universe, and it shows.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Three Pines is a little like Cabot Cove in the late, appalling television series “Murder, She Wrote.” (Except for the horrendous Maine accents and the ocean on the wrong side, but I digress.) The crime rate per capita is about two-to-one. If a villager isn’t buying the farm, some beleaguered somebody from away manages to stumble there before croaking. Somehow this never seems odd. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is the thirteenth time Supt. Gamache, an accomplished, urbane, seemingly gentle man who in recent books keeps trying to retire, has followed the murders to Three Pines. At this point, he and his estimable wife, Reine-Marie, have actually moved there, looking for peace and quiet they never seem to get. They are part of the village’s fabric, along with a famous artist, a bookstore owner, a baker, a male couple who run a bistro and B&B, and a wizened, evil-tongued poet (also famous, to those with taste) who has a duck under her arm and the vocabulary of a drunken sailor. Everybody cooks well—Penny loves describing food that makes you watch the clock for dinner—and they know how to make one another comfortable even when they’re at each others’ throats. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The books are anything but comfy. Penny does not hesitate to kill or maim people you’ve come to like—you can’t trust her not to break your heart, which of course makes the suspense unbearable. She’s equally unprincipled with her characters’ psyches—there isn’t a person in Three Pines, in Gamache’s family, or among his close colleagues who isn’t deeply scarred by personal disaster. <o:p></o:p></div>
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GLASS HOUSES makes profligate use of those scars. It’s impossible to say much about the plot without spoiling the fun: The book starts with Gamache as witness for the prosecution in a murder trial with a mysteriously unidentified defendant and a prosecutor working hard to discredit his own star witness. Over time, we learn that Gamache is risking his family, his village, his reputation, and possibly his freedom for a higher end. He’s morally wrong in just about every way—upsetting, because until now he’s been your moral compass. There are physical dangers, psychic horrors, a ticking clock, and a black-cloaked figure standing still and silent on the Three Pines green, apparently there for vengeance. I tell you, this tale’s got it all. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? I promise you it isn’t. And if you want a master course in character, setting, and suspense, this is your book. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I got GLASS HOUSES for Christmas. I’d suggest you read it, but Three Pines is close to the Vermont border and I think you might be insulted by the sly references to U.S. politics. These include a warning about the vigilance required to prevent a government from turning fascist. There’s nothing about this book that isn’t chilling.) <o:p></o:p></i><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-76667178180713768612017-12-06T08:09:00.004-05:002017-12-08T23:16:54.719-05:00December Book Review Club: A Gentleman in Moscow<br />
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<i>Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews. See you in the New Year . . . </i></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780670026197" target="_blank">A Gentleman in Moscow</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Amor Towles<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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In 1922, an insouciant Moscow aristocrat appears before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. As a threat to Communist ideals, he should be executed. Fortunately, he is the author of a celebrated 1913 poem many viewed as a call to revolution, so his sentence is relaxed. Instead of dying, he is ordered to spend the rest of his life in the formerly luxurious Metropol Hotel, where he has occupied a suite for the previous four years. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“Make no mistake,” the presiding officer concludes, “should you ever set foot outside of the Metropol again, you will be shot. Next matter.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The record of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s appearance before the committee, set in a utilitarian typewriter font, occupies the first three pages of A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW. Having heard little about the book, only that it was wonderful, I read this, decided the book might be depressing, and set it aside for a day when I didn’t need cheering up. (ARE there such days anymore? If you read newspapers, I mean.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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I could not have been more wrong. This book isn’t only wonderful. It’s delightful.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Everything depends on the character of Rostov: beautifully educated, well-traveled, urbane, amused, and kind. He reacts to his sentence as many of us would, welcoming it as a chance to get some reading done. Ejected from his suite and relegated to a tiny room in the attic with all his books and a few beloved bits of antique furniture, he settles down to read his father’s copy of Montaigne’s essays. We are with him intimately as he slogs through page after page, watching the clock. The book turns out to be the perfect size for propping up a wobbly chest of drawers. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Life awaits outside his attic room. Even in an era of revolutionary seediness, the Metropol’s staff manages to approximate the days of old. There’s a barber, a seamstress, kitchen staff, wait staff, concierge, and other residents, mostly party officials and their families. It’s a whole world, and we fling ourselves into it without a hint of claustrophobia. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The crux of the story arrives with Nina, the nine-year-old daughter of some commissar living in the hotel. She has a skeleton key that opens every door, but better yet she has attitude. Before long, Rostov is a partner in crime, exploring forbidden rooms in the cellars or splitting the seat of his pants to eavesdrop on a party committee. He becomes Nina’s confidant and protector, and when she is a grown-up party functionary he renders her a service that changes both their lives. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Our narrator takes us outside the Metropol occasionally, but we’re always happy to return. By the end of the book, we could find our way up the stairs and through the halls blindfolded, and we want to spend as much time as possible with Rostov and his cohabitants. There’s everything in the Metropol: quiet humor, slapstick, love, sex, friendship, intrigue, and a hidden pair of dueling pistols that wait an entire book to live up to Chekhov’s instructions. (“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.”)<o:p></o:p></div>
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A less depressing book you will never find.</div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I got this book for my birthday. Nobody cares if I review it. Now, about net neutrality . . . )</i></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-60064856246053239362017-10-04T09:52:00.001-04:002017-10-04T09:52:16.869-04:00October Book Review Club: NORSE MYTHOLOGY<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>I'm in the midst of helping to organize Word, a literary arts festival debuting in Blue Hill, Maine, October 20-22. (Check it out here: <a href="http://www.wordfestival.org/">www.wordfestival.org</a>) Life is fraught, so it's nice to settle down at night with a wolf who wants to eat the moon. Also to read about Ragnarok, which is so awful it seems churlish to complain about October's dying of the light. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Anyway, read on, and don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews. Happy Halloween! </i></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780393609097" target="_blank">Norse Mythology</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Neil Gaiman<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>W.W. Norton & Co, 2017</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For those of dinosaur mentality, Thomas Bulfinch is the go-to source for news about Thor and Odin and Loki. (Not to mention Arthur, Charlemagne, and all those Greek guys.) Forget Marvel Comics. Forget Chris Hemsworth. For us, 1881 is where it’s at. (Being a modern, can-do woman, my edition of Bulfinch dates from 1913.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That’s all changed now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For future generations, Neil Gaiman’s NORSE MYTHOLOGY may very well be the definitive version. He tells the stories straight—this is not AMERICAN GODS or ANANSI BOYS, the novels that made his name by bringing gods to life. But he’s a marvelous writer, far more graceful and giving than Bulfinch. And he knows these guys well, especially Thor and Loki, the best (maybe the only) real characters. He says he’s been obsessed with these gods since the age of seven. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He’s comfortable sharing the character insights he’s gleaned. “That was the thing about Loki,” he notes after the trickster has provided the gods with their hallmark treasures but cheated to do it. “You resented him even when you were at your most grateful, and you were grateful to him even when you hated him the most.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Where Bulfinch devotes a paragraph to the god Frey’s courtship of the beautiful giantess Gerda, Gaiman gives us nine pages, introducing the love story by telling us, charmingly, that handsome and mighty Frey “was missing something in his life , and he did not know what it was.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To win Gerda, Frey gives up his sword, a magical weapon so powerful it can fight by itself. The story ends with ominous regret. “Ragnarok is coming. When the sky splits asunder and the dark powers of Muspell march out on their war journey, Frey will wish he still had his sword.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These are fun and funny stories, but they are not cheery. They never have been. When gods have children, they’re likely to come out weird—Loki’s include the Midgard Serpent, the snake that encircles the human world; Hel, the half-girl/half-corpse who runs the underworld; and Fenrir, the giant wolf who wants to eat the sun and moon. Ragnarok, the final battle between gods and giants that will end everything in fire and fury, is always looming, although supposedly the world is reborn after the cataclysm. (Hollow reassurance, since we’ll all be dead.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Writing in <i>The Guardian</i> last March, Ursula K. Le Guin complained that, while Gaiman’s humor and fluent writing make these Norse stories suitable for children as well as adults, he minimizes the “strangeness” of the religion being depicted, with its bleak view of the world and its future. “I felt sometimes that this vigorous, robust, good-natured version of the mythos gives us everything but the very essence of it, the heart.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I can see her point from a scholar’s perspective, and I did feel a certain lack of red meat here, despite Hel the half-corpse. But I’m glad Gaiman opted for accessibility. He’s clearly written the tales to be read aloud, one at a time—he keeps repeating facts from two tales ago, in case we’re reading one a night and have forgotten who’s who. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These are wonderful stories and, with the Greek myths, form the basis for much of European culture. Gaiman is helping to keep them alive in something close to their pre-Hemsworth form. And for that I’m grateful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(Dear FCC: I borrowed this book from the Friend Memorial Public Library, Brooklin, Maine. They want it back. I have to buy my own— it’s one of those books you like to have around. It can go on top of that stack on the floor over there. If you have any spare bookshelves, FCC, please send them along.)</span></i><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-30734354289008776172017-09-07T11:50:00.000-04:002017-09-07T11:50:06.819-04:00September Book Review Club: Golden Hill<br />
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<i>We're having infrastructure issues here at Desperation Acres. Internet outage first, then a power outage this morning. The joys of rural life. Nevertheless, we persist. Here's the first review of the 2017-18 season. Don't forget to click the link for more reviews!</i></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781501163876" target="_blank">Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Francis Spufford<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Scribner (Simon & Schuster), 2016</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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If TOM JONES novelist Henry Fielding traveled from the 18<sup>th</sup> century, acquired a 21<sup>st</sup> century sensibility and approach to novel-writing, he’d try very hard to write GOLDEN HILL. It may be, though, that only Francis Spufford could actually do it. A celebrated writer of nonfiction ( I MAY BE SOME TIME and RED PLENTY, for example), he admits to having “come close to being a novelist” while turning, say, Britain’s obsession with icy places into a page-turner. Now, he says, “I’ve completed my shy, crabwise crawl towards fiction.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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GOLDEN HILL reads as an exuberant, occasionally raunchy adventure in the Manhattan of 1746, just like Fielding and friends except that the narrator doesn’t sidetrack into unrelated topics for pages and pages. Also, this novel has a very modern set of teeth in it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Our story begins when a youngish man, known to us chiefly as Mr. Smith, arrives in New York with a promissory note for a thousand pounds, which he aims to cash at a counting house run by a Mr. Lovell. Consternation ensues: Is this promissory note real, or is Smith a con man? If it is real, there’s not enough cash in all of New York to pay off the note, even if you combine the available coins (Mexican, Portugese, Dutch, Danish and so on) with the more common paper money printed by New York, Rhode Island, or any of the colonies. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Smith is charming enough to be a con man. But he’s clearly well educated and widely traveled, a man of parts who could perfectly well be a sprig of the nobility. In fact, he does agree to wait for verification of his note on the next ship from London, as an honest man would. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And off he goes into the streets of New York.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Manhattan is practically a village at this point. Dutch and English live side by side, more or less in harmony. Smith notices that people are much healthier than in London, taller, well fed, and with fewer smallpox scars. He also notices the black slaves, which seem to be more prevalent than in England.<o:p></o:p></div>
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He notices the slaves a lot. They’re important to him. We don’t find out why until the story is three-quarters done, and the full tale emerges only in the last pages. Even the narrator’s identity is a surprise left to the end. The author is canny about the way he keeps us on tenterhooks, doling out a hint here, an insight there. You know you’re being played and you love it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Being the talk of the town, Smith soon is embroiled in New York politics. He starts a romance, playing Benedick to her Beatrice. He finds out potentially fatal secrets. Is nearly killed by a mob that thinks he’s a papist. Is imprisoned for this and that, stands trial, betrays his own ethics.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In other words, he is extremely entertaining. So is this book. I hope Mr. Spufford sticks to novel- writing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: This book was a birthday present, chosen by my beloved with help from Samantha Haskell of Blue Hill Books. All hail the independent bookstore. Also beloveds.)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-6052856755892629132017-09-06T10:13:00.002-04:002017-09-06T10:13:22.612-04:00Delayed Gratification (almost entirely my own)<br />
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Unforeseen circumstances are delaying this month's review. Check back tomorrow.<br />
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Sneak preview: GOLDEN HILL, a historical novel by Francis Spufford, is a splendid confection with a good, hard center. <br />
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<br />Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-35992641905838554492017-05-10T10:05:00.000-04:002017-05-10T16:41:50.794-04:00May Book Review Club: ARABELLA OF MARS<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-book-review-club-may-2017.html" target="_blank"><img src="https://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>After a couple of months off, part of which I spent breaking a leg, I rejoin the Book Review Club for one session followed by a summer off. We'll be back in September.</i><br />
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</i> <i>Click the icon above for club members' other reviews. (<b>OOPS--the link's not working. I've appealed for help. In the meantime, take this instead: http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/</b> ) </i><br />
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<i>Click the book title below for the ARABELLA OF MARS Indiebound page. </i><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780765382818" target="_blank">Arabella of Mars</a><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">By David D. Levine<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Tor, 2016</span></b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Get your willing suspension of disbelief primed. Turns out interplanetary space has blue skies and thunderstorms. And asteroids grow oak trees.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m a stick-in-the-mud, so as I read ARABELLA OF MARS I wasted valuable breath grumping and moaning about blue skies on the way to Mars, not to mention breathable atmosphere. I kept thinking how much more I would have respected author David D. Levine if the steam-punk space travelers had confronted a vacuum. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Levine salvaged my good opinion by writing a good ol’-fashioned Yarn, befitting a well-regarded writer of short fantasy and sci-fi. (This is his first novel.) Better still, he thought up a feisty heroine.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s 1812, and mankind has been traveling in space since the late 1600s. (Isaac Newton had something to do with it.) Arabella Ashby grew up on Mars, which has been colonized by the British in raj-like fashion. At 16, she is accustomed to rampaging around the red planet with her brother, schooled in hunting and other unladylike pursuits by her nanny, a female Martian warrior with eye-stalks and a carapace. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But it’s 1812. Arabella’s mother is determined that her daughter should act like a lady and, what’s more, should do so back where there are marriagable men and nobody has eye-stalks. She drags Arabella and two younger daughters back to England, leaving her husband and son behind to run the family estate.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A year later, word comes that Arabella’s beloved father has died. Sent to the country to grieve, she discovers a cousin’s dastardly plot to travel to Mars, kill her even more beloved brother, and inherit everything. Space travel notwithstanding, English estates still don’t descend to women. Arabella, her mother, and her sisters will be out on the street. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Arabella to the rescue. Ridding herself of proper female attire bit by bit en route, she makes it to London to sign on as captain’s boy on the Mars Trading Company ship <i>Diana</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Apart from the above-mentioned annoyances of atmosphere and oak trees, the voyage is ingenious. Interstellar ships are more or less round, propelled by three sails catching the breeze generated by space storms or a coal-fired furnace. In a pinch, the crew descends into a hell-hole to pedal for hours. Everything else aboard ship is Patrick O’Brian down to the grog and seabiscuit.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Adding to the fun, although also to my stick-in-the-mud annoyance, is the fact that everyone is weightless. Oh sure, do away with the pesky vacuum but make everything float because it’s a hoot. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I have to admit, it <i>is</i> a hoot. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Levine does confront the pesky fact that the British colonizers are every bit as objectionable on Mars as they were in India. Nobody thinks the Martians could possibly be anything but savages and servants—my dear, they have <i>shells</i>—and British attitudes eventually trigger an uprising. Arabella’s close relationship with her Martian nanny comes in handy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On her way to Mars, Arabella experiences a shoot-out with a French war ship (Napoleon being on the rampage in space, too) and a mutiny. Having shared with her father a love for automatons, she masters the ship captain’s pet navigation device, a highly intelligent machine called Aadim. Conveniently, the captain himself is a figure of romance.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is a fun book, and there’s a sequel coming in July. I will be reading it, grumping and moaning. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I got this book from the library. Actually, a friend did, and passed it along to me because she figured I’d like it. As always, nobody cares whether I’m reviewing it or not. Most of us do care about net neutrality, so devote your attention to that, please.)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-69988555580907984142017-02-01T10:36:00.001-05:002018-01-03T10:32:10.503-05:00February Book Review Club: HOMEGOING<br />
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<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-book-review-club-february-2017.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>We skipped January, so Happy New Year! If you need a break from the news (and who doesn't?) lots of good books to choose from. Click the icon above for reviews. And click the book title below if you're moved to buy the book. </i><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101947135" target="_blank">Homegoing</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Yaa Gyasi<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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In the late 1700s a pair of half sisters, who don’t know each other, are experiencing opposite floors of the Cape Coast slave castle in Ghana, then known as The Gold Coast. Effia, an Asante, lives on the top floor as wife of the castle’s British overlord. She tries not to acknowledge what’s happening in the dungeon, where her Fante half-sister, Esi, is packed literally like a sardine into a cell whose floor is feet deep in human waste. In time, Esi is loaded onto a ship headed for an American slave mart.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Born in Ghana but raised in Alabama, Yaa Gyasi makes use of her dual experience in following Effia’s and Esi’s descendents as they navigate European dominance and vileness over two centuries on two sides of the Atlantic. On both sides, there is captivity. <br />
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The book alternates between Ghana and the U.S., one representative from each of seven generations. This is fascinating but a little frustrating because the book is relatively slim—you feel you’re just getting to know a character when it’s time to move on to the next generation. You never get the chance to sink in. Still, an absorbing read.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Possibly because of her background, Gyasi could be fearless in examining the involvement of Gold Coast tribes in rounding up their enemies for the European slave traders. (Effia’s son, uneasy but complient, follows his father’s lead in rounding up slaves for the castle’s maw.) She finds more fertile ground in the Gold Coast and modern Ghana than in the U.S., where she almost seems to tick off boxes—emancipation, Jim Crow, ghetto life, jazz, the demoralization of African-American men, drugs, fatherless children. The Ghanaian chapters are more character-driven and richer.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"><i>The Door of No Return at the Elmina slave castle in Ghana, </i></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">which </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">I </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">visited a few years ago. </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">This castle was run by the Dutch, </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">while</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> nearby </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Cape Coast Castle was British. </span></i></div>
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Effia and Esi’s mother left each of them a black stone pendant, but Esi lost hers in the mire of her Cape Coast dungeon. Effia’s gets handed down the generations. This is an obvious but still potent symbol: African-Americans lost a critical part of their heritage when their ancestors were herded out the Door of No Return in one slave castle after another. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Effia’s great-great-granddaughter Akua, plagued by dreams of a fire woman who has made her burn her own children, takes the necklace to a fetish man to see if there’s any way to undo whatever evil is dogging her family. “. . . Sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home,” she tells her son, Yaw. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“When someone does wrong,” she adds, “whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Although it’s not perfect, I highly recommend this book. It’s heartfelt, talented, and brave, essential qualities in this awful time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I got this book for Christmas and nobody cares if I review it. I’m sure you have better things to concentrate on just now.)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-36956105698320420392016-12-07T09:58:00.001-05:002016-12-07T09:58:02.122-05:00December Book Review Club: GOODBYE STRANGER<br />
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<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-book-review-club-december-2016.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>Jingle, jingle. Also, ho. Not feeling the holiday spirit yet, possibly because it's dark and it keeps raining when I want to put the spirit-saving lights on the maple tree out front. And I've about had it with 2016.</i><br />
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<i>Enough whining. If there's a middle-schooler on your gift list, read on and get out the credit card. If, like me, you're a middle-schooler at heart, time to buy yourself a present. </i><br />
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<i>Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews. And Happy Holidays! </i><br />
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<a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385743174" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Goodbye Stranger</b></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>By Rebecca Stead<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Wendy Lamb Books, 2015</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Let’s say you want to stay in a character’s head while she subjects her own motives to brutal analysis, meanwhile remaining cagey about who that character actually is. Turns out second-person narration is just the ticket. Who knew?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rebecca Stead knew, or anyway she figured it out. GOODBYE STRANGER, a brilliant excursion into the minds of (mostly) seventh graders, intersperses brief chapters in which a mysterious character plays hooky for a day, addressing herself in second person as her situation and identity gradually unfold. Also interspersed are a boy named Sherm’s letters to his grandfather, unmailed because he’s ticked Nonno Gio walked out on Nonna after fifty years of marriage. <o:p></o:p></div>
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These are not gimmicks. They are paint brushes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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They’re also not the book’s chief beauty. Every now and then, an author displays her (or his) unerring memory of the hell that is middle school, when everything changes, ready or not. Stead tapped into those memories in this book, even more so than in WHEN YOU REACH ME, the only other book of hers that I’ve read. (Going to correct that in a hurry.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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Set in Manhattan, GOODBYE STRANGER offers a full pallette of seventh-grade wonders and horrors. Friends change into strangers, strangers unexpectedly become friends, mistakes bring public humiliations, teachers and parents are oblivious except when they surprise you with understanding, support, and moments of beauty. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Our protagonist is Bridget, who has now decided her name is Bridge. She missed third grade while she recovered from horrendous injuries she incurred rollerskating into traffic. Her survival was a miracle, and now she keeps wondering what that nurse meant when she said “You must have been put on this earth for a reason, little girl.” She freezes up sometimes at crosswalks. This year, she’s decided to wear cat ears on her head—even she can’t explain why. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Meanwhile, one of Bridge’s two best friends has suddenly acquired “a body,” to the extent that she’s now the toast of the eighth grade in-crowd: a treacherous accomplishment, it transpires. The third member of the trio has become “kind of a know-it-all.” Sherm has unaccountably become yet another best friend—not, not, not a boyfriend, thank you very much. Bridge discovers that she can be quite a looker herself if she spends time on hair and make-up. A sensible kid, she decides she probably won’t bother. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Some things are stable, keeping Bridge on her feet. She and her brother continue their long-held tradition of quoting lines from the animated movie “Frosty the Snowman.” Bridge’s mother, a cellist with her own rich life, knows just how to calm her daughter down after her recurring nightmare of being bandaged like a mummy, immobilized. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Middle school is complicated, requiring more than one perspective. The wonder of this book is its ensemble cast of characters, each one a brush stroke. Bridge is our focus, certainly, but her friends and family have their own lives and concerns that illuminate hers. The mysterious You-narrator, who’s clearly older, offers glimpses of what may lie in store for Bridge and friends—high school can be its own kind of hell. <o:p></o:p></div>
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All of this is accomplished smoothly, masterfully, painterly, from the heart as much as the head. No writer could ask for more.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I read this book because I was going to a conference at which the author was a speaker. I bought it with my own money. Never met the author, and if I had I would’ve gushed like a fan-girl. Middle school lives on.)</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-92192446582441859982016-11-02T10:28:00.002-04:002018-01-03T10:37:49.959-05:00November Book Review Club: THE DREAMHUNTER DUET<br />
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<i>If ever we needed to escape into a good book, now's the time. I'm seriously considering spending the next week under the covers with a flashlight. Hey, it worked when I was ten, why not now?</i><br />
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<i>Anyway, here's a possibility. Don't forget to click the link above for more reviews!</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI0ePvOOYiKDuJPRVOxwHdqj2tmbHoucC6uCnzkCdkskEg6YnBWwbvaD4LPOM-TKuqofQuj1qYwTqZy8stkelvS2k_OS6t9O5LE_yY61NwqYqhhoE0QZpRXRWZzzwOjBNYKWVcO7XPNdpg/s1600/dreamhunter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI0ePvOOYiKDuJPRVOxwHdqj2tmbHoucC6uCnzkCdkskEg6YnBWwbvaD4LPOM-TKuqofQuj1qYwTqZy8stkelvS2k_OS6t9O5LE_yY61NwqYqhhoE0QZpRXRWZzzwOjBNYKWVcO7XPNdpg/s200/dreamhunter.jpg" width="141" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOocbzRlvqckNDqhBVRZjWLpmg8e9Kzxk4zLLG50vRgbizGsLgYJL5VzK-3dE_Fve7S-xFyn704h4W7IBHMdSzI0D1xJr0YREoiovaH889KROXk_XH4H3zUFP2jN5Czu9ER9Vzw0l8yeD5/s1600/dreamquake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOocbzRlvqckNDqhBVRZjWLpmg8e9Kzxk4zLLG50vRgbizGsLgYJL5VzK-3dE_Fve7S-xFyn704h4W7IBHMdSzI0D1xJr0YREoiovaH889KROXk_XH4H3zUFP2jN5Czu9ER9Vzw0l8yeD5/s200/dreamquake.jpg" width="142" /></a><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Dreamhunter Duet</span></b><br />
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<b>(<a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374318536" target="_blank">Dreamhunter</a> & <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374318543" target="_blank">Dreamquake</a>) <o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Elizabeth Knox<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006 & 2007</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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When you’re head-over-heels in love, you overlook a person’s flaws. In time, they either become endearing or you pack up and leave, snarling about toilet seats left up or the way he chews a cheeseburger. <o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s how I feel about Elizabeth Knox’s DREAMHUNTER books. The premise, characters, and world-building are marvelous, breath-taking, the writing evocative yet urgent. I couldn’t stop reading. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I also couldn’t stop griping, especially at the end of the second book. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is a young-adult alternate history set in Southland (Knox’s native New Zealand) c. 1905. Our teen protagonists are Laura Hame and her cousin, Rose Tiebold, children of the rich and famous. Laura’s father, Tziga, stumbled as a young man into the Place, a separate dimension tied to the “real” world at various geographical points. He returned having “caught” a dream that he shared with others during sleep—this proved to be a source of solace and therapy, especially in hospitals, but also entertainment. Before long, others learned to enter the Place to catch dreams, and an industry grew up, with dreamhunters selling their dreams to those who needed them for therapy or just wanted the entertainment. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Not everyone can enter the Place, and not everyone who gets in can catch a dream. Tziga’s exceptional talent has made him rich. Ditto Grace Tiebold, Rose’s mother and the wife of Tziga’s brother-in-law and best friend: She is the darling of the Dream Palace, where customers in ornate sleepwear occupy sumptuous bedrooms to share a sleeping hunter’s dream. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Tziga and Grace have constructed a unique family unit. His wife, Laura’s mother, died of cancer, so the families joined households. The two dreamhunters are the breadwinners, but have to spend so much time in the Place that they are hardly ever around to parent and run a household. Those responsibilities are lovingly discharged by Grace’s husband, Chorley, a house-husband who makes films on the side. Laura and Rose are more sisters than cousins, inseparably bonded.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Everybody wants to grow up to be a dreamhunter. When the time comes for Laura and Rose to try, Laura enters the Place but Rose cannot. If you’ve read any YA at all, you see this coming a mile off, simply because Rose wants it so much and Laura doesn’t care. And of course Laura ends up with exceptional dreamhunting talent, inherited mystical abilities, and a hopeless, possibly illegal quest that will uncover hidden evil and throw her and her family into the teeth of danger. Familiar tropes, yes, but so winningly carried out that you’re too breathless to care. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Far less familiar to the YA reader is an omniscient point of view that puts us in the heads of adults, not teens, about 60 percent of the time. This is very, very odd for YA, but I was never in any doubt that the Laura and Rose were the story’s focus. Getting to know the adults so well only added to the richness of the story. My only trouble with the characterization was the way these two feisty, capable girls ended up wimping out at the end—no amount of self-analysis will tell me whether that’s legitimate literary criticism or just me wanting a happy ending. Probably the latter, so take it with a grain of salt.<o:p></o:p><br />
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As you read, your brain will keep prodding you for metaphysical logic. You have to ignore your brain because there ain’t none, especially when All Is Revealed at the end of the second book. The time paradoxes alone could kill you. Up to you whether that’s a problem. <o:p></o:p></div>
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A far more serious breach, in my view, is the fact that the Hames and the Tiebolds and the other original European settlers apparently happened upon a completely empty variant of New Zealand: No Maori or other indigenous people. I’m surprised there wasn’t an outcry about this, as there certainly was when an American YA author did much the same thing right around the time these books came out. Political correctness aside, it seems to me that the presence of indigenous people would have enriched the book.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m ashamed to say that this didn’t occur to me until about halfway through, but now it’s making me sad. I wish a book with so many wonders in it could have done better. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: These books were on the reading list for next week’s Children’s Literature New England symposium on Passages of Hope, intended to examine whether it’s possible in this day and age to write authentic stories that also offer hope. This’ll be an interesting discussion, FCC. Drop by if you have minute.)</i><o:p></o:p><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-57611996099666116672016-09-07T09:27:00.000-04:002016-09-07T09:27:43.937-04:00September Book Review Club: THE BURIED GIANT<br />
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<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-book-review-club-september-2016.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>The Book Review Club is back and ready to read! Hope the summer was splendid but you got more rain than we did. No high hopes for the apple harvest.</i></div>
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<i>On the other hand, a new crop of books! Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews. </i></div>
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<a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307455796" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Buried Giant</b></span></a></div>
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<b>By Kazuo Ishiguro<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Hardcover: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015<o:p></o:p></b><br />
<b>Paperback: Vintage International, 2016</b></div>
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King Arthur is dead and buried. The wars between Britons and Saxons have dwindled to an unsettled truce. And so, the elderly couple Axl and Beatrice feel it’s reasonably safe to travel from their settlement, a warren dug into a hill, to find their son in a distant village.<o:p></o:p></div>
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They don’t exactly remember details about their son. Why are they living apart? Do they really know the way to his village? Not sure.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Blame it on the mist—that’s what everyone calls the odd loss of memory that’s settled on England in recent years. Like a fog, it comes and goes—one minute you don’t remember anything older than a few months, but then the gloom lifts long enough for a dim memory to return. Only to fade again hours later. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Axl and Beatrice are devoted to each other, but they don’t exactly remember how or why they fell in love, or much about their years together. Is this a good thing, this living in the moment? Or are they missing the real beauty of their lives?<o:p></o:p></div>
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THE BURIED GIANT is flat-toned, written in amber. There are no sharp colors, no thrills or real moments of tension, just a vague sense of unease and a gradual awakening. Its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, is adept at characters who don’t reveal all—the Booker Prize-winning THE REMAINS OF THE DAY is one of his books. In this case, the characters’ secrets are hidden from themselves as well as from us.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It sounds like a complete bore, and yet I found this book hard to put down. The characters are just so <i>dear</i>—especially Axl, our primary narrator. His focus is on Beatrice, how to keep her safe and happy, how to deal with that worrying pain she has in her side. And yet we (and he) keep getting hints that he lived a bolder life at one time, a warrior and a trusted emissary. <o:p></o:p></div>
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He and Beatrice have plenty of adventures on their way to find their son. They meet Saxons, Britons, upright knights, bad monks, pixies, ogres, and eventually a dragon. Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew and trusted lieutenant, wanders in and out as a decrepit, befuddled relic of bygone glory. Merlin had his hand in things, long ago. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s all told in that flat tone. At one point a potentially thrilling scene even is told in retrospect, all danger over. This should be a buzz-kill but . . . then there are those mysteries. What IS the source of the mist? Who IS Axl? <o:p></o:p></div>
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What does memory do for us? What if we forgot we were at war?<o:p></o:p></div>
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This probably won’t be your book of the year—it’s a tad too muted for that. There’s a feeling that it never really digs down, just skims the surface of things. The mysteries are solved, but the forces behind them remain vague. Nevertheless, it’s a lovely read and will stay with you. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Autumnal, in fact. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: This was a birthday present, suggested to my beloved by the wizards at Blue Hill Books. Nobody paid me to review it or even cares that I did. Autumnal indeed.)</i><o:p></o:p><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-59558539321639342502016-06-01T10:02:00.001-04:002016-06-01T10:03:05.407-04:00June Book Review Club: SLADE HOUSE<br />
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<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-book-review-club-june-2016.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>It's spring even in Maine now, and a slim book is just what you need: easy to carry in your beach satchel, quick to read in between bouts of gardening. I'm not entirely enthusiastic about this one, but if you've enjoyed earlier books by David Mitchell you might like it fine. </i><br />
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<i>The Book Review Club is taking July and August off. Click the icon above for more reviews, and see you in September!</i><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780812998689" target="_blank">Slade House</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>by David Mitchell<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Random House, 2015</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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A lesson to us all, that’s what SLADE HOUSE is. Up to now, I’ve occasionally pondered whether the absolute necessity for a character to be the agent of his own fate was just a kidlit/YA thing. If you were writing for adults, could you get away with a <i>deus ex machina</i>, medieval drama’s god-figure descending to solve everything?<o:p></o:p></div>
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In SLADE HOUSE, David Mitchell answers that question. No, you can’t. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Mitchell is the author of THE CLOUD ATLAS, which I haven’t read, and THE BONE CLOCKS, which I liked a lot. Most—if not all—of his novels take place in a universe that contains “atemporals,” immortals who jigger about with time and with us. There are bad guys, the vampiric Anchorites who suck our souls to stay alive, and there are good guys, the Horologists who try to save us. The books aren’t sequential (they couldn’t be, messing with time as they do) but familiar characters reappear. In SLADE HOUSE, there’s a reference to “bone clocks” (that would be us) and the <i>deus ex machina</i> is a Horologist called Marinus, known to us from the previous book.<br />
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There’s a lot to love about SLADE HOUSE, and Mitchell’s universe is intriguing as hell. (I may mean that literally.) The central characters in this round are a set of twins who’ve become Anchorites. They inhabit a very cool London mansion called Slade House, and keep themselves and the house going by imbibing the soul of an “engifted” human every nine years. (I’m not sure what “engifted” means—psychic, maybe. The term may originate from THE CLOUD ATLAS.) Mitchell can be an entrancing writer, and he's having fun here, which is endearing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is a slim volume with five sections, one for each soul under attack, set every nine years starting in 1979 and ending in 2015. (The first section apparently debuted on Mitchell's Twitter feed. Huh.) Four sections are told from the point of view of an imbibee, while one of the evil twins narrates the last one. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Therein lies the problem. The evil twins are just evil, not at all compelling as characters, and they're the ones we're visiting the most. The victims are more fun to hang out with, but we get to know them a-a-a-almost enough to care about them and then they’re gone and we’re off to the next case. Each victim appears once more as a vague, ghostly residue trying to warn a successor, but otherwise none of the humans takes any lasting action. It’s up to Marinus the immortal to swoop in at the end, out of nowhere except the previous book. The human reader closes this book feeling flat and cheated. At least I did.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It doesn’t help that I read this just after Salman Rushdie’s TWO YEARS, EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS, in which warring jinn bring their battles to earth with humans as either pawns or allies. The contrast was telling. We know the heroine jinnia very well, having followed her through the book. Her human allies are well known to us and instrumental in their own salvation. It’s a masterful, soul-filling tale. SLADE HOUSE, taken by itself, is not.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now, here’s the thing. In a multi-course meal, SLADE HOUSE may be intended only as a garnish. THE BONE CLOCKS, although it had its faults, was a far more substantial and satisfying experience, and I have every intention of reading THE CLOUD ATLAS to make sure I’m prepared for the future. A few books from now, we may be sitting back, loosening our belts, and calling for a toothpick. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I bought this book for my beloved. It was either for Christmas or his birthday, which is exactly one month before Christmas and a total pain in the prat for the gift-giver. Do something about that, would you?)<o:p></o:p></i><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-38703997239107945962016-05-04T09:43:00.002-04:002016-05-04T09:58:15.677-04:00May Book Review Club: INSTEAD OF THREE WISHES<br />
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<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-book-review-club-may-2016.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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@Barrie Summy</div>
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<i>It's supposed to be spring, and for most of you it probably is. Here in Maine, the window shows us budding trees, we dance out the door, and we freeze in place. This is why they call it "climate change" rather than "global warming."</i><br />
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<i>On the plus side, more wood stove time. Here's a lovely bit of escapism that would work just as well on a beach if you don't live in The Land the Sun Forgot. Yes, I'm whining.</i><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060842314" target="_blank">Instead of Three Wishes</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Megan Whalen Turner<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Greenwillow Books, 1995</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Guilty secret: Every now and then, I google “Megan Whalen Turner Book Five,” grasping for news on the promised sequel to the four Queen’s Thief novels. So far, the series consists of THE THIEF, THE QUEEN OF ATTOLIA, THE KING OF ATTOLIA, and A CONSPIRACY OF KINGS, each better than the one before. Which is saying something, considering that THE THIEF won a Newbery honor.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The last book came out in 2010, and Turner has said there would be two more in the series. If that's not true, I will turn into a heap of disappointed dust on the floor.</div>
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Last time I guiltily googled, I was reminded that Turner’s first book actually was INSTEAD OF THREE WISHES, a collection of short stories. “Why haven’t I read these?” I muttered, scrambling for the “buy” button. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Why indeed. Unlike the Queen’s Thief books, which are set in a fantasy realm, most of these stories are in my favorite sub-genre, fantasy set in the real world. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> What's more, they're blessed with the dry, wry, understated sense of humor best served up when the supernatural meets the humdrum. Example: Having watched a Cinderella-esque coach-and-four appear and disappear in her front yard, a protagonist's mother says calmly, “It's a good thing we don't have many neighbors. They'd wonder.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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The stories don't have the literary heft of the novels, but lordy they're fun. My favorite, I think, is the title tale (quoted above), in which a high school student named Selene unwittingly earns the gratitude of an elf prince who grants her three wishes she doesn't really want. One after another, she rejects the coach, a palace, and a charming but dimwitted prince with matrimony on his mind, until the desperate elf turns up on the doorstep pretending to be a history professor who needs to rent a room. (Mom, a historian herself, finds it odd that he's never heard of the Battle of Hastings.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The conundrum's solution is both neat and heart-warming.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In other stories, a New Hampshire town withstands a leprechaun sighting and onslaught of tourists, a kid goes back in time to rid a Viking settlement of its cockroaches, and a fledgling punk suffers nightmares in which he sees what other people think of him. Ghosts are addicted to reading. A young king masquerades as a baker. <o:p></o:p></div>
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My second-favorite story, the one whose complex texture most resembles Turner's novels, is “Aunt Charlotte and the NGA Portraits.” An elderly aunt enthralls her niece with the tale of a girlhood summer on the North Carolina shore, when she helped a strange but beloved neighbor solve a series of art-related puzzles and challenges. I quibbled a bit with the storytelling aunt device—couldn't see why it was necessary. But the story itself was marvelous. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Elements of this collection took me back to the ironic, deliciously weird short stories that got me through my teen years, written around the turn of the last century by journalist H.H. Munro under the pen-name “Saki.” (If you've never read <a href="http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/OpeWin.shtml">“The Open Window”</a> or <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/sk-vashtar.html">“Sredni Vashtar,”</a> correct this gap in your education immediately.) (None of Turner's stories is as bloody as "Sredni Vashtar," I hasten to add.)<br />
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I would love to know if Turner ever read Saki. She has claimed Diana Wynne Jones as an inspiration, so that’s almost as good.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For those of us who are Turner-deprived, these stories do ease the ache. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Also, Ms. Turner, hurry up.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: Do you not recognize the addiction here? Think I’d wait for someone to pay me or otherwise incite this review? In short, I bought this book and no one cares what I say about it.)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-69952729820785699442016-04-06T10:49:00.001-04:002016-04-07T11:14:45.044-04:00April Book Review Club: Grayling's Song<div style="color: #212121; font-family: wf_segoe-ui_normal,'Segoe UI','Segoe WP',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;">
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<i>Well, it's a good thing there are books, because winter has returned to Maine with freezing temperatures and breathtaking wind. Far from dashing outside and dancing in the sunshine, we're pulling up our socks and huddling by the woodstove, sick of the sight of one another. Time to grab a blanket and turn on the reading light.</i></div>
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<i>I was greatly cheered by this book, and I hope you will be too. Don't forget to click on the icon above for more reviews!</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780544301801" target="_blank">Grayling’s Song </a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">Advance Reading Copy<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">By Karen Cushman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Clarion Books, June 7, 2016</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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I do love it when a girl learns to sing her own song. Especially when she’s got that familiar inner voice telling her she can’t do it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Such is the charm of GRAYLING’S SONG, Karen Cushman’s latest, due out in June. This is Cushman’s first fantasy, although the medieval/renaissance setting will be delightfully familiar to fans of her historical novels (<i>Catherine, Called Birdy</i>; <i>The Midwife’s Apprentice</i>; <i>Alchemy & Meggy Swann</i>, to name a few).<o:p></o:p></div>
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As in many middle-grade fantasies, magic provides the Big Challenge our heroine must overcome, but her success depends less on her mystical powers than on her ability to conquer her inner demons. Magic is all very well, we learn, but courage, wit, insight, and kindness are a person's most powerful weapons.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Grayling is the daughter of a cunning woman, the aptly named Hannah Strong, who serves her neighborhood as healer and counselor. When we meet the two it’s clear that the daughter reveres her talented, fierce-minded mother to the point of feeling utterly inadequate herself. Almost immediately, however, Hannah Strong needs help—some evil force of “smoke and shadow” burns down their cottage and roots Hannah to the ground for a slow transformation into a tree. </div>
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Worst of all, the force has spirited away Hannah’s grimoire, the recipe-book for her craft.</div>
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It’s up to Grayling to get help, ideally by rescuing the grimoire. Setting off reluctantly, she discovers that most other magical folk also have lost their grimoires and been turned into trees. But she finds that if she sings her mother’s grimoire will answer her, drawing her to it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Following the grimoire’s song across the countryside, Grayling collects a motley band of helpers: a talking, shape-shifting mouse, a sorceress who ensnares the unwary with her beauty, an elderly magician with a mule, an even more elderly “weather witch” and her sullen apprentice.</div>
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Everybody knows more than Grayling does. And yet she finds to her astonishment that she’s always the leader. As the quest goes on, she finds in herself an unsuspected level of intelligence, bravery, and, yes, even what she might call “magic.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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You’ll be purring as you read. At least, I was.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I ransacked the internet to see if there’s going to be sequel to GRAYLING’S SONG, but there’s no hint of that yet. I’m concerned because there seem to me to be loose ends in this book. The first chapter tells us that Grayling’s country is plagued by battling warlords, vastly unequal distribution of wealth (sound familiar?), and drifts of homeless people (“edge dwellers”). We meet a warlord and some edge dwellers, but they don’t contribute much to the plot. I want to know more about them, and I want comeuppance for the person who caused the “smoke and shadow” situation, which I don’t feel I got. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Grayling, moreover, seems ripe for further adventures at the end of the book. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Surely, Ms. Cushman, there will be more?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I read an Advance Reading Copy of GRAYLING’S SONG, which I got as a free ebook through NetGalley. I signed up for it because I knew I’d love it, which does seem like cheating. But I’m sure you have bigger fish to fry.)</i><o:p></o:p><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-25779369959475155762016-03-02T09:32:00.001-05:002016-03-03T10:11:11.185-05:00March Book Review Club: Honeydew<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316297226" target="_blank">Honeydew</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Short stories by Edith Pearlman<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Little, Brown & Co., 2015</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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In a reader’s guide at the end of HONEYDEW, an interview with author Edith Pearlman tells us that each of her stories has originated from “a character <i>and</i> a situation—a dilemma, a conflict, a wish—and a wisp of a hint about the solution or resolution or gratification or disappointment that results.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Don’t you love author interviews? Especially when you agree with them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Being a megalomaniac, I insist that my student writers in the local school start their stories the way I do, by learning as much as they can about the main character. “The best stories,” I intone, “start with a character who has a problem.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s probably why I wallowed so joyfully in this collection by Pearlman, a much-admired writer to whom I’d paid no attention up to now because in addition to being a megalomaniac I’m also an idiot. (If you are too, know that she’s a former computer programmer whose first collection of stories was published in 1996 when she was 60. This is her fifth. She’s won big prizes right along, but her last collection, BINOCULAR VISION, won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the National Book Award.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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These are complex, rich stories whose “situations” are interesting (love triangles, obsession, impending death) almost to the point of gimmickry. What saves them is the fullness of the characters and the deft way their author handles them. You’re hooked from the first description.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Chosen at random:<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Like many long-married people they looked like siblings—both short, both with fine thin hair the color of Vaseline, both with a wardrobe of ancient tweeds and sand-colored cashmere sweaters.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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“As for his head, he had brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“She had performed a solo at the high school graduation two years ago, her long limbs making chaste love to the cello.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Many of the stories take place in Godolphin, a Boston suburb a lot like Brookline, where the author lives. A high-end antiques store figures in several of them. I loved this—sometimes, the tragedy of short stories is that you feel you’re leaving too soon. It was lovely to stick around, seeing the town and Rennie the shop-owner from this angle and that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At times there's a touch of magic realism. A worker in a homeless center, for example, may or may not employ a pair of gerbils in a successful exorcism. Even when they seem strictly real, there’s something otherworldly about these stories. If a girls’ school headmistress finds herself pregnant, would marrying an unrelated groundskeeper really keep her from losing her job? In another universe, the answer would be, “No, and what is this author trying to foist on us?” <o:p></o:p></div>
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For Pearlman it works, mostly. In the rare instances when it doesn’t you just move on, eager to meet more characters. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Dear FCC: Got this for Christmas (partly thanks to worthy advisers at Blue Hill Books, Blue Hill, Maine). Now I’m going to read BINOCULAR VISION by the same author. I’ll probably buy that with my own money. Considering the state of my finances, this is the height of honest praise.<o:p></o:p></i><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-15527377843122095632016-02-03T10:32:00.001-05:002016-02-03T10:32:43.185-05:00February Book Review Club: THE DOOR<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781590177716" target="_blank">The Door</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Magda Szabo<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>New York Review of Books, 2015</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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All hail the independent bookstore. The Man and I have a books-only rule for Christmas and birthdays, so Blue Hill Books knows our tastes pretty well by now. Bookstore co-founder Nick Sichterman thrust this book into the Man’s hands during his frantic, last-minute December shopping spree, and told him I’d love it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nick was right. But I can’t imagine how he figured that out—on the surface, this is the kind of book I’d have trouble getting into: Its characters seem unlikeable at first, and the plot is sedentary. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I was instantly enthralled. Now I’m baffled.<o:p></o:p></div>
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THE DOOR is one of Magda Szabo’s last works, published in Hungarian in 1987. Judging by the brief bio in the paperback I now treasure, it has strong autobiographical elements. Born in 1917, Szabo was an exquisitely educated woman who worked as a teacher during her country’s German and Soviet occupations. She published two books of poetry right after the war and won the 1949 Baumgartner Prize before falling into disrepute with Hungary’s Communist rulers. She re-emerged as a novelist ten years later, winning her country’s most prestigious literary prize, and had a highly successful career during which she also wrote plays, short stories, and children’s verse. Szabo died in 2007. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Like her author, THE DOOR’s unnamed narrator is a successful writer who ran afoul of the government, but now has emerged from isolation to become a monumental success. Needing somebody to cook and clean her big new apartment so that she and her husband can concentrate on work, she arranges an interview with an elderly neighbor, Emerence, who is renowned for her energy and abilities. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Turns out the narrator is not the one conducting the interview—Emerence is checking the two writers out to make sure they pass muster. “I don’t wash just anyone’s dirty laundry,” the old woman proclaims. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Before long, “the lady writer” and her husband are utterly reliant on Emerence, although employing her requires superhuman flexibility and an even temper. The narrator is far from flexible and even-tempered. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In time, she and the old woman come to share an intense love colored by mutual annoyance, bafflement, and frustration. Neither can give the other what she really needs: the narrator desperately wants Emerence’s approval, never forthcoming. And the one time Emerence really needs help, the narrator lets her down. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Here’s how the relationship starts: “No formal agreement dictated the number of hours Emerence spent in our house, or the precise times of her arrival. We might conceivably see nothing of her all day. Then, at eleven at night, she would appear, not in the inner rooms, but in the kitchen or the pantry, which she would scrub until dawn. It might happen that for a day and a half we would be unable to use the bathroom because she had rugs soaking in the tub.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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When she’s not working for the writers, the old lady sweeps the streets and tends to the building in which she has a ground-floor flat, within sight of her employers’ windows. Work is her life.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Emerence has a penchant for unexpected gifts—food, service, a stuffed falcon, an old army boot—and flies into a rage if they aren’t properly appreciated. She will accept no gifts herself, seldom takes orders. The door to her flat is always closed—no one is allowed inside, nor is there any explanation for the strong smell of disinfectant wafting under the door. Deeply secretive about her past, Emerence occasionally tells the narrator some harrowing tale about her childhood, or makes some oblique revelation about a former employer. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As we piece it together by the end, her history and the character it created are weird, rich, and entrancing. I guess that’s why I loved this book so much. Go figure.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The translation by Len Rix seems to be lovely. (How can you tell?) It won the Oxford-Weidenfield Translation Prize in 2006.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The New York Review of Books will publish another of Szabo’s novels, 1963’s IZA’S BALLAD, in 2017. I’ll be waiting for it at Blue Hill Books.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Dear FCC: As stated above, this book was a Christmas gift, and I legitimately loved it. So sue me.<o:p></o:p></i><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-45860414989278713182016-01-09T11:23:00.003-05:002016-01-09T11:23:54.045-05:00There will be a slight delayHello and happy new year! The Book Review Club is not dead. I was unable to write a review in December, and we all took January off for various reasons. But we're all reading like maniacs and will be back with reviews the first Wednesday in February. See you then!Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-65963989163205223292015-11-04T10:43:00.000-05:002015-11-04T10:43:03.656-05:00November Book Review Club: THE BOOK OF SPECULATION<br />
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<i>We have exactly one tree left with leaves on it, so I guess it's time to admit that the Reading Season is upon us. Not to mention the Festive Holiday Madness. Here's a possibility for either or both, although with some reservations. </i><br />
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<i>Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews!</i><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250054807" target="_blank">The Book of Speculation: A Novel</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Erika Swyler<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>St. Martin’s Press, 2015</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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First-person narration can be a risky business. The narrator has to do more than just tell the story—he has to share bits of himself along the way, endear himself to us even if he’s a villain. A reader has to be willing to invest a chunk of time in this person. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Never in all my days did I expect to enjoy a novel with an essentially bland protagonist/narrator who learns next to nothing from events. THE BOOK OF SPECULATION is just such a novel—rife with good stuff that I really loved, but a struggle to get through at times because the narrator was just so colorless. <o:p></o:p></div>
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My man bought it for my birthday, having listened to it on tape while painting. “This is what you would write if you wrote for adults,” he told me. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Thank you, schnookums. I think. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In many, many ways, this is a fascinating, beautifully written book. When we meet Simon Watson, he’s a lonely reference librarian in a small town far out on Long Island. He’s about to lose his job and erosion is about to send his lifelong home tumbling into Long Island Sound. He is stymied, unwilling to move because the house is the only place his younger sister, an emotionally unstable itinerant circus performer, can really call home. But he can’t afford to shore up the bluff and save the place.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Out of the blue, an antiquities dealer in Iowa sends him a 200-year-old book, the diary/financial ledger of a traveling circus owner called Hermilius Peabody. Written in it is the name of Simon’s grandmother, a circus performer who apparently had the book in her possession for a while. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Simon’s curious but not that fascinated until he sees the 1816 notation of a woman’s drowning—on July 24, the exact date when his mother left her children in the bluff-top house and walked into the Sound, never to return. </div>
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Curiosity becomes obsession, and we follow Simon as he does what a research librarian does best, tracking down names and dates and making connections between them. We learn that the women in his family have always had an uncanny ability to hold their breath under water, and for generations have worked as water-tank “mermaids,” sideshow attractions in traveling circuses. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Simon’s mother was a mermaid when his father fell in love with her. He and his sister, Enola, inherited the ability. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Enola works as a fortune-teller rather than a mermaid. Nevertheless, Simon is horrified when she unaccountably is drawn to revisit their seaside home in July. He finds evidence of more drownings on the 24th. The clock starts ticking—can he figure out what’s going on before the fateful date?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The book alternates Simon’s narrative with the tale of Hermilius Peabody and his circus, told in third person. Hand-drawn tarot cards come into play, along with infestations of horseshoe crabs and weird meteorological events. The metaphysical logic never gets spelled out, but who cares. It’s marvelous.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Here’s the thing: I found myself heaving a resigned sigh whenever Simon took back the narration. The chapters set in the 1800s are as textured and richly colored as a Persian rug. The modern chapters are beige vinyl floor tiles. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There are stirring events all over the place, and Simon’s modern situation gets worse and worse in lively fashion. He tells us he’s upset and worried about it all, but we never feel it, or at least I didn’t. He does stuff, but his actions seem vague and indirect, never precise in their attack. As a result, even the July 24 situation lacks the suspense it should have.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The other characters in Simon’s life are interesting, especially his sister and her circus boyfriend, who can turn lightbulbs on by touching them. But you never get deep enough, or even glean enough facts, to understand them or root for them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In the 1800s, I rooted for everyone—I kept wishing the whole novel was back there. Swyler may be more comfortable and interested writing about the past. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I hope her next novel stays there.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: As stated above, I got this book for my birthday. For the record, I don't actually call the man "schnookums".) </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-10684848056588408512015-10-14T10:26:00.000-04:002015-10-14T10:48:32.903-04:00October Book Review Club: THE NIGHT GARDENER<br />
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<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-book-review-club-october-2015.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>I just spent a fun and funny week touring Oklahoma and Arkansas with Book Review Club members Barrie Summy, Jody Feldman, and Stacy Nyikos. And, boy, was it a hoot! (Pix are <a href="https://www.facebook.com/EllenBooraemBooks/posts/879393208817360" target="_blank">here</a>.) </i></div>
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<i>Now I'm home, the leaves are turning, and Halloween's around the corner. Here's a book to scare you silly.</i></div>
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<b><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781419711442" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">The Night Gardener</span></a><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Jonathan Auxier<o:p></o:p></b><br />
<b>Amulet Books, 2014</b><br />
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First sign of a stellar middle-grade novel: You find yourself wanting to reach in and give the main character a good shake. “Wise up!” you whisper, hoping she hears.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m looking at you, Molly. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In Jonathan Auxier’s amazing THE NIGHT GARDENER, red-haired Irish waif Molly and her younger brother Kit have lost their parents at sea, stolen a fish cart and a horse called Gallileo, and set off across cold, wet rural England seeking employment. Molly is fourteen, but has lied about her age to get a referral to the Windsor household. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We learn on page one that the Windsors live in a place called “the sour woods,” and that everyone has been telling the waifs that they’re “riding to their deaths.” We feel this might be ominous. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But Auxier instantly establishes Molly as A Girl Who Handles Things. Her younger brother is sick and they’re both starving. Despite the elaborate kidnapping tale Molly tells Kit, their parents are almost certainly dead. They need this job to survive, and Molly’s more than a match for any evil influence. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Or so we think.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Windsor mansion proves to be a sagging wreck covered in black moss, with a giant, ill-favored tree growing right into its walls. The denizens—Constance, Bertrand, and their children Penny and Alistair—have dull, dark hair, pale skin, and dead-soul eyes. Constance has to be strong-armed into hiring Molly and Kit—“This house is no place for you,” she says—and in the end she insists that Kit, at least, will sleep in the stable rather than the house. Is she being snooty, or does she have their best interests at heart? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Well, let’s see. There’s an ominous locked door at the top of the stairs which proves to have one of the tree’s knots imbedded in the wall. Every morning, muddy footprints and dead leaves cover the house—Molly wakes from a nightmare to find them in her room. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The nightmares plague her every night. If she wakes up, she hears the moans of the house’s other sleepers, trapped in their own torments. Also thudding footsteps.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hey, is her red hair getting darker and duller?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Molly! Wise UP!<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is one of the creepiest books I’ve read in a while. But it’s also lovely, dark, and deep, examining the nature of greed, the benefits of death, what stories do for us, and the difference between stories and lies. “A story helps folks face the world, even when it frightens ’em,” Molly figures out. “And a lie does the opposite. It helps you hide.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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I got a little tired of Molly and Kit’s constant droppin’ of terminal “g’s,” and I could take or leave the fact that they’re Irish immigrants—it seems like an extraneous detail, inserted here and there for no particular reason. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Otherwise, this is a near-perfect book, the kind of rich reading experience that makes me glad there are middle-grade novelists like Auxier. I never read his first book, PETER NIMBLE AND HIS FANTASTIC EYES, and now I plan to. You should too.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Dear FCC: I got this book out of the Blue Hill Public Library. I had to reserve it, because people in Blue Hill, Maine, still are clamoring to read THE NIGHT GARDENER even though it’s been out for more than a year. Nobody paid me to read it. In fact, I bet somebody would have bribed me for my place in line. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-43711018747711810372015-06-17T12:02:00.003-04:002015-06-17T12:04:37.369-04:00June Book Review Club: One Crazy Summer<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-book-review-club-june-2015.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>The only thing crazy about summer this year is how long it's taken to arrive, at least here in Maine. Ah, but 1968--that was a summer. Reading about it has eased the wait. </i><br />
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<i>Speaking of summer, the Book Review Club is taking a couple of months off. See you in September, and have a sane one. (Unless you'd prefer otherwise.)</i><br />
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<i>Don't forget to click the icon above for more review</i>s!<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780060760885" target="_blank">One Crazy Summer</a></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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By Rita Williams-Garcia<o:p></o:p></div>
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Harper Collins/Amistad, 2010<o:p></o:p></div>
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The year after it came out, ONE CRAZY SUMMER won a National Book Award Nomination and three of the American Library Association’s top awards: A Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King Award, and the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This gives rise to two questions: 1. Is the book worth all the hoopla? And 2. When did my teen years turn into historical fiction?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Answers: Yes, and I’m going back to bed now.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When I was a kid in New England, somebody said “Black Panthers” and you thought of a raised fist. In recent years, starting (for me) with Kekla Magoon’s THE ROCK AND THE RIVER, the Panthers have gotten more credit for the community service work that went hand-in-hand with their political activism. ONE CRAZY SUMMER is welcome in that respect, but it’s a gem because of its story and its richly varied cast of characters.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Our narrator, eleven-year-old Delphine Gaither, is the oldest of three girls. She’s the only one who has even hazy memories of their mother, Cecile, who walked out on her Brooklyn, NY, family just after the birth of Fern, now seven, and when nine-year-old Vonetta was a toddler. Supposedly, Cecile was upset that she wasn’t allowed to name Fern “Afua”—at least, that’s the family mythology. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Names are important in this book. Delphine is disturbed that she doesn’t really know where hers came from. Her story makes it clear that you can always choose your own. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In the summer of 1968, over his live-in mother’s objections, Delphine’s father decides that his three girls should get to know their mother, a poet who now lives in Oakland, CA. Mindful of her grandmother’s strictures, Delphine does her best to make sure her young sisters behave well on the plane—white territory—lest they disgrace their entire race.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Cecile, it turns out, has no desire to get to know her daughters and certainly no desire to behave well. Grudgingly leading them from the airport with her “man-sized strides,” she takes them home to an empty house whose kitchen is off limits to everyone except her. Sent out to buy Chinese take-out, the kids eat on the floor and next morning are bundled out the door to find their own way to the Black Panthers’ community center, where they and other kids get fed and learn about the Panthers’ philosophy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Delphine is her mother’s match. One day, worried about her sisters’ health, she uses the take-out money to buy chicken and vegetables, and barges into her mother’s kitchen to make a real dinner. She finds a kitchen table covered with printing equipment—Cecile, known to the Panthers as “Nzila,” is their printer as well as a poet. The police have their eye on her, and the situation is about to become even more uneasy for the three girls.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Delphine is an observant, sometimes lyrical yet cool-eyed narrator, only occasionally losing her sang-froid. She has all a young girl’s preoccupations and fears—even a charming little crush—and doesn’t completely understand everything she’s told. Her rendition of her little sisters is a wonderful meld of annoyance, love, and insight—those two little girls are lucky to have her looking out for them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We only learn at the end of the book how much Delphine has yearned for the mother whose toughness she inherited.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Cecile is not a nice mother, and if you’re hoping she becomes one you should read something else. She’s tough for good reason, and she had good reasons for leaving her family, although a nice mother might have ignored them. Her daughters, especially Delphine, have not fallen far from the tree—each has her own version of Cecile’s stiff back. And yet by the end of the story they begin to look into one another’s eyes. And that’s more than enough. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The one bumpy spot (for me) is the moment when seven-year-old Fern takes the mike at a “free Huey Newton” rally to recite a poem she wrote outing Crazy Kelvin, an unpleasant Panther she saw hobnobbing with the police. I had trouble believing a seven-year-old would have that kind of political insight, although maybe I just don’t hang around enough seven-year-olds who’ve spent weeks being schooled in politics. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I did love the poem, though. Here’s my favorite line: “The policeman says, ‘Good puppy.’/Crazy Kelvin says ‘Arf. Arf.’”<o:p></o:p></div>
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ONE CRAZY SUMMER now has two much-celebrated sequels: P.S. BE ELEVEN (2013) and GONE CRAZY IN ALABAMA (2015). I can’t wait to catch up with the Gaither girls. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Dear FCC: I got sick of not having read this book. So I bought it. Nobody cares. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-35573121027027201342015-05-06T09:41:00.001-04:002015-05-06T09:41:31.285-04:00May Book Review Club: The Silkworm<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: center;">
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<i>I'm sure the rest of you are outside soaking in the sun, but here in Maine we're only just starting to think about retiring the storm door and putting up the screens. Nevertheless, it's never too early to think about beach reading. So here's a likely candidate.</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316206877" target="_blank">The Silkworm</a></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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By Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mulholland Books, Little Brown & Co, 2014<o:p></o:p></div>
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No matter what she calls herself, J.K. Rowling knows how to write a page-turner. She can wield a stiletto, too. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Even back in the Harry Potter years, it was clear Rowling had no use for the press. (Looking at you, Rita Skeeter.) She made that clear yet again in THE CUCKOO’S CALLING, the first crime novel she wrote as Robert Galbraith. This time around, she skewers the publishing industry—with humor and perhaps a <i>tad</i> more fondness. Perhaps. A tad.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Like all her other books, THE SILKWORM is rich in intriguing, compelling characters, starting with the protagonist, private detective Cormoran Strike. An Afghanistan vet who lost half a leg to an IED, he is the illegitimate (but acknowledged) son of a mega-rock-star and lives in a low-rent but scrupulously tidy room over his office. He’s tormented by his ex-girlfriend, a gorgeous party girl who’s about to marry a lord. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s not exactly groundbreaking for a crime novel to feature a crusty, damaged, slightly soggy gumshoe who’s perpetually short of cash. The thing is, though, Strike’s a nice guy. Despite its best efforts, life has made him only a skeptic, not a cynic. He fires clients because they’re creeps, takes them on because they need him. He’s a terrible businessman. I’d have a beer with him in a heartbeat. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Nor is it unusual for a gumshoe to have an admiring gal-Friday. But Cormoran’s sidekick, Robin, is as endearing as he is. Taken on as an office temp in the first book, she succumbs to a lifelong, latent fascination with crime detection and stays on for good. This time around, she’s trying to persuade Strike and her unpleasant fiancé that she should be less of a secretary and more of an assistant detective. She’s a marvelous combination of clear-eyed realist (except about the fiancé) and pie-eyed enthusiast.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course, there’s romantic tension between Strike and Robin. Part of you knows how cheesy that is. The rest of you is on tenterhooks.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Populating the rest of the book is a rogue’s gallery of waspish publishers, editors, writers, and agents, each of them happiest when someone else gets a miserable review. Our corpse is one of them—Owen Quine, a formerly ground-breaking novelist looking for a comeback with a satire on his industry, his disagreeable characters standing in for real rivals, friends, and lovers. Quine’s murder reflects the bizarre fate of his protagonist, and since the novel isn’t published yet that narrows the field of suspects to those who might have seen the manuscript. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The book’s title is <i>Bombyx Mori</i>, after a silkworm that is boiled alive in its cocoon in order to produce silk. (Side note: I’m never buying silk again.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The police arrest Mrs. Quine, who already had hired Strike to find her missing husband. Our man feels sorry for her and her mentally disabled daughter, so sets out to prove her innocent.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the best tradition of crime novels, huge complications end in satisfying simplicity. The murderer’s revelation is a surprise (at least to me, and I have to admit I’m easy), yet makes perfect sense afterwards. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With beach-reading season coming on, this one belongs in your sandy satchel.</div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: This was a Christmas present. Sadly, J.K. Rowling doesn’t give two hoots what I think of her book.)<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-45778624103785539852015-04-01T10:44:00.000-04:002018-04-04T08:12:15.217-04:00Book Review Club: April 2015<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375866227" target="_blank">Seraphina</a><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375866579" target="_blank">Shadow Scale</a></b></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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By Rachel Hartman<o:p></o:p></div>
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The cover of SERAPHINA has been haunting me ever since the book came out in July 2012. A wood-block print in oddly lovely colors! With a gracefully swooping dragon! And a medieval-looking city! What was stopping me?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Time, inertia, and brain-cramp, apparently. Also good luck, because if I’d read it in 2012 I would have had to wait two and a half years for the sequel. A couple of weeks ago, someone reminded me of SERAPHINA just as I was feeling mournful about not having an all-absorbing fantasy to read. When I finished it, mournful yet again, I discovered that the sequel came out this very month. <o:p></o:p></div>
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SHADOW SCALE came to a conclusive end for Seraphina, so now I'm worried that there won't be another book set in this world. Talk about mournful.<br />
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To state it plainly, I adored these books. I'm not alone: SERAPHINA earned a gazillion starred reviews, won YALSA's Morris Award for best debut novel, was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal, and was a finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award (the author is Canadian).<o:p></o:p><br />
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Trouble with reviewing the two books is that the surprises emerge early and often. Watching them unfold is such a tremendous pleasure that I don't want to spoil it for anyone. So I’ll be vague.</div>
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The first book is set in the nation of Goredd, which has a decades-long but uneasy truce with the dragons of Tanamoot, the mountainous country just to the north. The dragons have learned to assume human form, and some of them live side-by-side with the humans in Goredd. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Factions in both human and draconic society are trying to undermine the peace, and human-shaped dragons (called saarantrai) often are harassed in Goredd. They're made to wear bells so the natural humans can tell the difference. (Brrr. )<o:p></o:p></div>
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Our heroine, Seraphina, is an extraordinarily gifted musician, assistant to the court composer in Goredd's capital city. She has a dangerous secret, which we learn early on so we can suffer with her as she tries to keep it under wraps. After a member of the royal family is killed, apparently by a dragon, she becomes enmired in the effort both to find the murderer and to save the human-draconic treaty. <o:p></o:p></div>
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SHADOW SCALE takes Seraphina out of Goredd to explore neighboring states—I won't say why—in a magnificent feat of world-building. This world is diverse in every way I can think of: Various skin colors, religions, and sexual preferences, various national penchants for racism, tolerance, gloom, joy, math or music. <o:p></o:p></div>
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My favorite state, Porphyria, has six genders in its language: naive masculine and feminine, emergent masculine and feminine, cosmic neuter, and point neuter. (Cosmic neuter is for gods, eggplant, and strangers.) (Yes, there’s humor.) At one point, we meet a woman who started life as a man, requiring Seraphina to follow Porphyrian custom and ask “How may I pronoun you?” Emergent feminine, she's told. I want to live in Porphyria. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On the other hand, gays in Goredd are called Daanites, after a saint who was martyred for that reason, along with his lover. They're not closeted, but they're not entirely accepted, either. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Inhabiting this complex, exciting world are characters to match, starting with Seraphina herself. She’s necessarily cautious and secretive, but also feisty and smart, with an inner life complicated and enriched by the demands of her Big Secret. She makes big mistakes. She has an unwise love interest. But her spirit and courage keep her moving forward anyway.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Her music tutor, a dragon, is a gorgeous character (as are all dragons, actually). Dragons are analytical and emotionless in their natural form, but when they’re human they’re subject to human tastes and emotions, which upsets and fascinates them. Obviously there’s comic potential here, but also the potential for insight: What is emotion, other than an inconvenience? What is its function in our lives?<o:p></o:p></div>
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A further insight: The villain who controls minds is far more terrifying than any monster that threatens us physically. I will say no more. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Because you gotta read these books.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>(Dear FCC: I bought these books with my own money. You should, too.)</i> </div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-91286218797293647862015-03-04T09:27:00.000-05:002015-03-04T09:27:27.733-05:00Book Review Club: March 2015<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: center;">
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<i>Sorry I missed last month--there was the small matter of a slip on the ice and a broken hip. This month, feet up, my only recreation is reading. There are worse fates. </i><br />
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<i>Don't forget to click the icon above for the rest of the reviews!</i></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780399252518" target="_blank">Brown Girl Dreaming</a></span><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>By Jacqueline Woodson<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b>Ages 10 and up</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Whatever you do, don't tell a potential young reader that BROWN GIRL DREAMING is a book in verse. (WHY do so many of us think poetry will be boring?) If the kid picks up the book and freaks out at the unusual amount of white space, say “Just read one page.” You'll probably end up with a poetry fan on your hands. <o:p></o:p></div>
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From page one:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>I am born not long from the time<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>or far from the place<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>my great-great-grandparents <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>worked the deep rich land<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>unfree<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>dawn till dusk<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>unpaid<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>drank cool water from scooped out gourds<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>looked up and followed<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>the sky's mirrored constellation<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>to freedom</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>I am born as the South explodes ….</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Seriously, kid, how can you resist? Give this book a chance.<o:p></o:p></div>
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BROWN GIRL DREAMING won the National Book Award and a Newbery honor—with good reason. It's gem-like, heartwarming, funny, sad, sneaky, inspiring, and addictive. You may very well read it in one sitting, although you'll want to re-read it. These poems live and breathe.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Full disclosure: There's not a lot of action, and as I read I kept wondering if I would have objected to that at age 10. (I <i>so</i> hope I wouldn’t have.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nor is this a polemic on race relations in the '60s and beyond, although it certainly offers insights. (Most chilling: If you were leaving South Carolina and your skin was brown, you had to go at night to avoid being stopped and beaten.) I’m praying the book's title won’t relegate it to the sixth grade civil rights unit—kids should be free to love it in its own right.<o:p></o:p></div>
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BROWN GIRL DREAMING is the epitome of “show don't tell”—not so much a factual memoir as a direct experience of American girlhood, regardless of race and almost regardless of era. Being sketched in verse somehow heightens the impact. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It's got everything: sibling rivalry, hair, school troubles, an uncomfortable religion, the pros and cons of a dominant family, the death of a beloved grandfather, the fear that your best friend has found someone she likes better. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Also a mother sneaking out in white gloves to sit at a segregated lunch counter. But the best friend makes more of an impression. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The first controversy in young Jackie's life is that her father wants to name her “Jack,” after him. “<i>Name a girl Jack/and people will look at her twice,</i> my father said.” (To his annoyance, the women insist on Jacqueline.) Also, she's the family's second daughter: “... My older brother takes one look/ inside the pink blanket, says,/ <i>Take her back. We already have one of those.” </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Later, when mother and children have gone to live with the South Carolina grandparents, leaving Jack behind in Ohio, the father's absence is “like a bubble in my older brother's life,/ that pops again and again/into a whole lot of tiny bubbles/of memory.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The South Carolina poems are idyllic—breezes are fragrant, the family so strong that its members simply rise above the fact that it's not safe to shop at Woolworth's or ride in the front of the bus, regardless of the law. When the scene shifts to Brooklyn, Jackie begins to experience universal growing pains: difficulties in school (especially following a brilliant older sister), a mother who's just a tad stricter than most, a church (Jehovah's Witnesses) that makes the Woodson kids walk out on birthday celebrations at school. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But also there are joys: A Puerto Rican best friend whose family absorbs Jackie and feeds her arroz con pollo; the dawning realization that, despite her school troubles, she is destined to be a writer.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sprinkled in between the longer poems are numbered three-liners called “How to Listen.” Here's #9: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Under the back porch<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>there's an alone place I go<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>writing all I've heard.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Thank heavens for that alone place, and for this beautiful book. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Dear FCC: I got an autographed copy of this book because I donated to We Need Diverse Books. Which we do. </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3276247486259230392.post-79053905626447836672015-01-07T09:58:00.000-05:002015-01-07T15:12:20.133-05:00Book Review Club: January 2015<br />
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<a href="http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-book-review-club-january-2015.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk225/goofygirldesign2/BookReviewClub-Button.gif" /></a></div>
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<i>Happy New Year! Barrie Summy, fearless leader of the Book Review Club, reports that as a group we published NINETY reviews last year. If you're looking for a good book to while away the winter nights, click the icon above and all will be well.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLYi-wql2YtvAzPQzvVqexh5ni2-Q4DQ4O6VzUb8wb8RJ3pwF3b5__NVUOIFNYtqHNKUjMf13rlhNc8Xjkz-khwhnWaOJBmmF0l9-OkRTN1MElwCROTUnGih3hWU0GNhTx0HEPbqjnGzNd/s1600/orphan+train.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLYi-wql2YtvAzPQzvVqexh5ni2-Q4DQ4O6VzUb8wb8RJ3pwF3b5__NVUOIFNYtqHNKUjMf13rlhNc8Xjkz-khwhnWaOJBmmF0l9-OkRTN1MElwCROTUnGih3hWU0GNhTx0HEPbqjnGzNd/s1600/orphan+train.jpg" height="200" width="134" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780061950728" target="_blank">Orphan Train</a></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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By Christina Baker Kline<o:p></o:p></div>
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William Morrow, 2013<o:p></o:p></div>
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The past leaves its taint, but it can offer redemption.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Also, move over David Copperfield.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Tough call, which of my Christmas books to read first. I ended up going with ORPHAN TRAIN simply because I’d been seeing it around for a full year and it had been nagging at me. It was the right choice for post-holiday recovery—absorbing, harrowing in its quiet way, not GAME OF THRONES but not—praise heaven—“It’s a Wonderful Life.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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Molly Ayer, 17, a prickly goth, has gotten used to being abandoned on the rock-hard face of the world. A serial foster child, her father dead and her mother a drug addict, she’s now in the Spruce Harbor, Maine, home of Ralph and Dina, who argue loudly about whether to keep her. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Vivian Daly, 91, also knows the world’s rocky face. An Irish immigrant, she lost her impoverished family to a New York tenement fire in 1929, and was sent west on a train full of orphans to be handed over to anyone who wanted them. Her future, like that of her fellow travelers, was a craps shoot: Maybe she’d find a nice family who treated her like a child, or maybe she’d be a nine-year-old hired hand, over-worked, unloved, barely kept alive. She lost the bet at first, facing first a sweat shop, then a desperately poor, abusive household before finally finding a safe (if constrictive) home.</div>
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Having attempted to steal the local library’s third and most ragged copy of <span style="text-transform: uppercase;">Jane Eyre</span>, Molly has been assigned to fifty hours of community service. Her boyfriend gets her a gig with Vivian, his mother’s employer. After school and on weekends, Molly will help Vivian sort through the eighty years’ worth of memorabilia in her attic. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The story alternates between third person for Molly’s story and first person for Vivian’s recollections, which dominate and horrify. For all the sadness and mistreatment Molly has experienced, her troubles pale before the often Dickensian fate of an orphan in the 1930s. Like David Copperfield, Vivian sees humanity in all its cruelty and degradation before finally landing in a caring home, where a change of name signals a new destiny.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Vivian’s troubles are not over, however. Scarred and numbed by her past, she can’t embrace life. Like Molly, she’s built walls that protect but also isolate.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We benefit from her tale, and so does Molly. The book’s ending is a bit tidy for my taste: Loose ends tied up, everyone is content. But there’s a great deal of satisfaction in seeing two damaged women find solace. Kline gave us the ending we wanted, despite our better judgment. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Dear FCC: Ho ho ho.</i> <o:p></o:p><br />
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Ellen Booraemhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12751047743172852013noreply@blogger.com10