Author: Brief Book Reviews

Avid reader, book pusher, kid wrangler // formerly a publishing nerd + indie bookseller

#54 The Windfall by Diksha Basu

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32569560Diksha Basu’s debut novel The Windfall is light and funny, a quick read after my last book, The Name of the Wind.

Set in Delhi and New York, the story follows the newly rich Mr. and Mrs. Jha as they move from the housing complex where they’ve lived for years in East Delhi to the exclusive part of the city where everyone belongs to the Luxury Recreation Club and the neighbors constantly attempt to one-up each other. We’re also privy to the failings of their son who is secretly dating a white woman while at university in America, and their lonely widowed neighbor, the beautiful Mrs. Ray, as she searches for companionship.

Basu is a great writer of dialogue. The conversations between the characters are hilarious and sometimes cringe-worthy, and cleverly reveal the desires, expectations, fears, and inadequacies of the characters themselves.

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#53 The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

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2495567About a month ago my husband asked what I like about fantasy books and, in all seriousness, I told him: “I just love magic.” He laughed. Loudly.

If you’ve been reading this blog since the beginning of the year, you’ll know that I am new to the genre and am now on the hunt for well-written epic/high historical fantasy books with plenty of, yep, magic… preferably with a great cover treatment, which is surprisingly hard to find in that section of the bookstore.

So after reading about Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, praised by beloved fantasy writers like Ursula Le Guin and Terry Brooks, as well as genre aficionados, I was excited because MAGIC.

The coming-of-age story is a familiar one. A brilliant young boy named Kvothe, raised amid a band of traveling players, escapes death, endures loss, poverty and hunger, attends wizard university, gains some enemies, falls in love. There is conflict, longing, heartbreak, adventure, and some wizardly magic.

It’s a huge 700+ page book that took me 200 hundred pages to get into and a long week to get through. With a heavy edit and a greater focus on world-building it could have been fast-paced and intensely readable. As it was, my interest flagged towards boredom at various points, and I could never fully picture the characters or the world they inhabited.

#52 The Leavers by Lisa Ko

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30753987Debut novel The Leavers by Lisa Ko tackles the Chinese immigrant experience in America from the perspectives of Deming Guo and his undocumented mother Peilan/Polly.

When Polly disappears one day, leaving eleven-year-old Deming in New York without explanation, money, or hope, her friends are forced to put him up for adoption. He is adopted by two white academics and renamed Daniel. Deming/Daniel’s adopted parents are well-meaning but emotionally clueless and culturally ignorant, unwilling or unable to recognize Deming’s old life, his fragile emotional state, and the unresolved loss of his birth mother.

Most of the relationships in this book are borderline uncomfortable and fraught, the characters hold each other at arm’s length and are divided by miscommunications and unspoken assumptions; they are unable to truly connect. While I understand the way this emotional divide gives voice to the immigrant experience, shows a cultural identity and character arc in flux, and explores a “them” and “us” dynamic, I ultimately felt sadly indifferent about the characters, couldn’t fully comprehend their decisions, and was left feeling lackluster about the story by the end of the book.

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#51 The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

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22609485My book club mostly reads contemporary fiction but this month we decided to read and discuss Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus. Despite being a National Book Award finalist and receiving praise and accolades from multiple media outlets, we didn’t love the book.

Montgomery structures her narrative around visits to the New England Aquarium where she meets and interacts with a few different Octopuses and profiles the folks who care for them, and includes a basic overview of the body/brain of the octopus and some historical and cultural references. Overall the book is very repetitive (if I had to read one more paragraph about the author sticking her hand into the octopus tank I might gouge my eyes out) and I kept wishing Montgomery would focus less on her general awe of the octopus, and more on the octopus itself.

Meh.

#50 The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

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29936927#50!! And just like that I’m halfway to my goal to read 100 books by the end of the year…

One of the things I appreciated about Berkeley-based Thi Bui’s gorgeously illustrated graphic memoir The Best We Could Do, is that she opens her book with an intense birth. She is in labor with her son, and, by way of her lovely illustrations, we are in the moment with her. I couldn’t help but find a parallel between the “birth” of the book, the creative impulse, and Bui’s labor, the creation of life; the book opens, she opens, the story unfolds, a life is brought forth.

The Best We Could Do is a story of life and survival, of family and identity. Bui tells the story of growing up between two cultures, the story of her parents – where they grew up in Vietnam, how they met, the dreams of their youths, the realities of adulthood. It is the story of a country and a people torn apart, by colonization, by the Vietnam War. It is the story of refugees. It is powerful and memorable, a fascinating and evocative read.

#49 Hourglass by Dani Shapiro

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31522007 Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass is intimate and insightful and achingly beautiful and I loved it.

Hourglass is a stunner, a deftly braided memoir peppered with old journal entries, and rich with memories, observations, and realizations. In it Shapiro excavates the girl she was, examines the woman – mother and wife and writer – she is now, and speculates about the woman she is constantly becoming as her life inches closer, ever closer, towards death. Shapiro has packed so much into this slim book, the fast abandon of youth, the intense love and weight of years of marriage, the anxiety and joys of parenthood, the sweet sting of memory, of aging.

This:

“How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes? Near the end of her life Grace Paley once remarked that the decades between fifty and eighty feel not like minutes but seconds. I don’t know yet if this is the case, but I do know this: the decades that separate that young mother making her lists from the middle-aged woman discovering them feel like the membrane of a giant floating bubble. A pinprick and I’m back there. But is she here? How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?”

Looking for a great Mother’s Day gift? Buy this.

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#48 My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman

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23604559Swedish author Fredrik Backman is a master storyteller. His novels, full of idiosyncratic characters and expertly-crafted dialogue, are heartwarming and entertaining, hypnotizing and transporting.

Where A Man Called Ove, which I read and loved back in January, centers on old cantankerous Ove and his fraught relationship with the world, the main character in My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry is Elsa, age 7. Her best and only friend is her quirky grandmother who weaves a world of fairy tales for Elsa, regularly stirs up trouble, and who dies suddenly leaving Elsa a task: to deliver apology letters to the folks she’s wronged and left behind. Backman’s characters  leap off the page, they come to life fully flawed and perfectly odd, in a wonderful story that is funny and poignant, and rich with imagination. Another great read.

#47 The Chimes by Anna Smaill

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25474336.jpgThe dystopian world in Anna Smaill’s The Chimes is set to music. In this indeterminate future London, where the written word is a lost code and metal is a precious commodity, Smaill’s characters walk lento and run presto, they sing directions, recognize strangers by their song, and they attune their ears daily to the Chimes, the beautiful music played across London that erases memories and keeps the inhabitants in line.

The novel follows young Simon, recently arrived in London after the death of his parents, with a bag of objectmemories and a message in the form of a song from his mother to a woman named Netty. As the days pass and the Chimes create gaps in his perception and fog his past, he must find a way to remember his purpose, deliver his message, and retain his memories if he is to survive the stifling by those in charge, a set of Oxford elites known as The Order.

After reading and loving V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series over the last few months, I’ve been on the hunt for entertaining, well-written fantasy, which is why I picked up The Chimes. While I liked the novel, I wished for less musical prose and more world-building; there were sections where I couldn’t envision the scene fully because the musicality of the writing muddled the plot and overshadowed the visual elements of the setting.

#46 All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

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30901606Do you listen to The Moth? It’s one of my favorite weekly podcasts. The true stories amuse, delight, and move me to tears every single time I listen.

There were a number of pieces in the new collection from The Moth, All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown, which I’d heard and loved before. Reading these felt like visiting old friends, the voices of the storytellers ringing through clear and memorable.

What a treat to discover stories I’d somehow missed. Some new favorites included comedian Tig Notaro’s “R2, Where Are You” about finding understanding and acceptance with her step father, Kate Tellers’ brave look at her mother’s death in “But Also Bring Cheese,” Ishmael Beah’s “Unusual Normality” about his trajectory from child soldier in Sierra Leone to to playing paintball at a party in upstate New York, Carl Pillitteri’s harrowing end-times experience inside the Fukushima Nuclear generating station during the 2011 earthquake in Japan in “Fog of Disbelief,” and Cathy Olkin’s “On Approach to Pluto” about her decade of work on NASA’s New Horizons Mission to Pluto, among others.

In addition to all the excellent stories and a foreword by Neil Gaiman, the book itself is beautiful, a hardback with a midnight blue matte cover and gold foil. This would be a perfect graduation gift.

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