Book Addiction

The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids  by Alexandra Robbins

From the jacket flap -

High school isn’t what it used to be.  With record numbers of students competing fiercely to get into college, schools are no longer primarily places of learning.  They’re dog-eat-dog battlegrounds in which kids must set aside interests and passions in order to strategize over how to game the system.  In this increasingly stressful environment, kids are defined not by their character or hunger for knowledge, but by often arbitrary scores and statistics.

In The Overachievers, journalist Alexandra Robbins delivers a poignant, funny, riveting narrative that explores how our high-stakes educational culture has spiraled out of control.  During the year of her ten-year reunion, Robbins returns to her high school, where she follows students including:

• Julie, a track and academic star who is terrified she’s making the wrong choices,
• “AP” Frank, who grapples with horrifying parental pressures to succeed,
• Taylor, a soccer and lacrosse captain whose ambition threatens her popular-girl status,
• Sam, who worries his years of overachieving will be wasted if he doesn’t attend a name-brand college,
• Audrey, who struggles with perfectionism, and
• The Stealth Overachiever, a mystery junior who flies under the radar.

Robbins tackles hard-hitting issues such as the student and teacher cheating epidemic, over testing, sports rage, the black market for study drugs, and a college admissions process so cutthroat that some students are driven to depression and suicide because of a B.  Even the earliest years of schooling have become insanely competitive, as Robbins learned when she gained unprecedented access into the inner workings of a prestigious Manhattan kindergarten admissions office.

A compelling mix of fast-paced storytelling and engrossing investigative journalism, The Overachievers aims both to calm the admissions frenzy and to expose its escalating dangers.

My thoughts -

There is a LOT of truth to the issues presented in a book, and honestly, I’m glad someone decided to write about this stuff.  I experienced much of these issues myself while in high school; I did not go to an elite private school like the kids in this book, but I did go to a pretty tough public high school in a nice neighborhood where many students went on to really great, Ivy-type colleges.  I can’t say that I bought into the pressure nearly as much as most of these kids did, but I knew many students that did.  I also knew many of those students felt intense pressure from themselves, and also from their parents, to be perfect and successful in every single class and activity they did.  Robbins did some really great research for this book, she told the story in an almost novel-like way, and she really got to the heart of what most of these kids were going through.  All while exposing something that I believe will really cripple students once they get out into the “real world” and realize that perfection simply doesn’t exist.

So overall, an excellent book, and one I definitely think every parent should read.  No matter how old your kids are, either they’ll go to high school one day, or they’ve already been there, and either way, this book helps to understand a little bit better the kinds of pressures teens face on a daily basis.

The one problem I do have with this book is there’s virtually no discussion of class whatsoever.  There’s a good reason I didn’t get as crazy about grades and activities and getting into the perfect college in high school as some of my peers did:  I simply could not afford to.  I had to work 30+ hours a week in HS just to pay for everyday expenses, and I knew from day one that I was going to be paying for my college education myself, which meant a state school for sure, no matter what my grades and SAT scores said about me.  Furthermore, I wasn’t able to prep for the rat race in the years leading up to HS like other kids; no gymnastics classes, violin lessons, soccer practice, or math tutors for me - there simply wasn’t any money for extra stuff like that.  A key point that Robbins missed is what an incredible disadvantage there is for kids with lower socioeconomic status.  If the kids in this book, who had every advantage in the world, were terrified of not getting into the right college, and spent half their lives worrying and competing their brains out, where does that leave the kids like me, who simply do not have the time or money to compete in this way?  This is a critical discussion that I think would really have improved Robbins’ arguments, and I’m disappointed that she missed it.

Even so, I enjoyed the book, and highly recommend it, especially for those of you with children.

8 stars.

Madras on Rainy Days  by Samina Ali

From the back cover -

“A lyrical debut” (Asian Week) exploring the dilemma confronting Layla, a second generation Indian-American Muslim.  As a dutiful Muslim daughter and an independent young American, Layla is torn between clashing identities.  Reluctantly agreeing to her parents’ wish for her to leave America and submit to an arranged marriage, Layla enters into the closed world of tradition and ritual as the wedding preparations get under way in Hyderabad.  Set against a background of rising Hindu-Muslim violence, and taboo questions of sexuality, Samina Ali presents the complexities of life between the chador, and the story of a marriage where no one is what they seem.  In the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, Madras on Rainy Days introduces an “abundantly talented” new voice.

My thoughts -

This book sounded really interesting to me when I originally heard about it and mooched it.  I have loved pretty much every novel I’ve read that centers around Indian culture (A Fine Balance, The Namesake, The Space Between Us, etc.), so I assumed I would enjoy this one too.  Unfortunately, it simply did not live up to my expectations.  The plot was interesting enough - in fact, I think that’s what kept me reading, the plot that kept having drama after drama, I was always interested to find out what would happen next.  But I didn’t particularly enjoy any of the characters, they all fell a little flat for me.  Even Layla, the main character and narrator, I didn’t feel like I really knew her or cared about her situation at all.  I also think that Ali’s writing style didn’t quite do it for me… I hate when that happens, because I do not have a good explanation as to what I didn’t like about it, but I just didn’t connect with the story in the way that I expected to.  I think other people might still enjoy this book, though, because the plot was really interesting and very good, so I’d still recommend giving this book a try, even though it wasn’t my favorite.

5 stars.

Interpreter of Maladies  by Jhumpa Lahiri

From the back cover -

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this stunning debut collection unerringly charts the emotional journey of characters seeking love beyond the barrier of nations and generations.  “A writer of uncommon sensitivity and restraint… Ms. Lahiri expertly captures the out-of-context lives of immigrants, expatriates, and first-generation Americans” (Wall Street Journal).  In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.  Honored as “Debut of the Year” by The New Yorker and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, Interpreter of Maladies introduces a young writer of astonishing maturity and insight who “breathes unpredictable life into the page” (New York Times).

My thoughts -

I typically do not go for short story collections, but I picked this one up because I absolutely fell in love with Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake (read this book, people… it’s really good).  I was pleasantly surprised at how much I truly enjoyed (most of) the stories in this little book.  Lahiri truly writes characters that a person can care about… even in a 15-page story, I found myself becoming so immersed in these characters’ lives, and really caring about the issues they were dealing with.  Some of my favorite stories in this collection were “A Temporary Matter”, in which a young Indian-American couple is dealing with the heartbreaking aftermath of a stillborn baby and the deterioration of their relationship because of that, “Sexy”, which reminded me of an Indian version of the book Shopgirl by Steve Martin, and “This Blessed House”, in which an Indian-American couple, married for only four months and just getting to know each other as their union was the result of an arranged marriage, entertaines some friends for a housewarming party.  Some of the other stories I didn’t enjoy as much, but I was still able to appreciate the characters in every one.  I highly recommend this collection, and am looking forward to reading Lahiri’s latest book, Unaccustomed Earth.

9 stars.

Also reviewed by: A Devoted Reader, Raych at books i done read, Nymeth at Things Mean A Lot, and Lisa at Books on the Brain

‘Tis by Frank McCourt

From the book jacket -

Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat.  He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this “classless country” and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports.  It is Frank’s incomparable voice - his uncanny humor and his astonishing ear for dialogue - that renders these experiences spellbinding.

When Frank returns to America in 1953, he works on the docks, always resisting what everyone tells him, that men and women who have dreamed and toiled for years to get to America should “stick to their own kind” once they arrive.  Somehow, Frank knows that he should be getting an education, and though he left school at fourteen, he talks his way into New York University.  There, he falls in love with the quintessential Yankee, long-legged and blond, and tries to live his dream.  But it is not until he starts to teach - and to write - that Frank finds his place in the world.  The same vulnerable but invincible spirit that captured the hearts of readers in Angela’s Ashes comes of age.

My thoughts -

As many of you probably know, ‘Tis is the sequel to Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s first memoir about growing up poor in Ireland.  While I liked this continuation of McCourt’s life, it didn’t come anywhere close to living up to his first memoir.  AA was just amazing, I fell completely in love with that book and reading about McCourt’s family and his life completely captivated me.  With ‘Tis… well not so much with the captivation this time.  I mean, I was definitely interested to find out what happened to him after he left Ireland, so it was especially enjoyable to read about all the good that happened in his life.  And McCourt definitely has a way of writing his life that makes it read like a novel; he can obviously understand and relate to all types of people, which is why he can write the characters in his own life so well.  So this is not a bad memoir, by any means, it’s just difficult to live up to something as magnificent as AA and do as great a job.  Just didn’t quite get there, in my opinion.

6.5 stars.

**To continue with Weekly Geeks, if anyone has read and reviewed this book (or any others that I’ve reviewed, including Speak!) please send me your links and I will post them on this page.**

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

From amazon.com -

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. “To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.” Forty years later the stories and history continue.  With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

My thoughts -

I enjoyed this book immensely.  The portions told by the mothers about their lives growing up in China were fascinating, because Tan crafted a remarkable story for each mother about love, loss and sacrifices back in China.  All four of the mothers had such high hopes for their daughters, that they wouldn’t have to deal with any of the tragedies they themselves survived in their childhoods.  It was so interesting, then, to read about these mothers through their daughters’ eyes - what they thought of their mothers’ old-fashioned, old school Chinese ways, how they felt they could never live up to their mothers’ high expectations, and how they both loved and hated their mothers, creating incredible internal conflicts for all four daughters.  Amy Tan’s writing is fluid and very accessible, this is the first book of hers that I have read, and I really enjoyed the way she wrote it.  The only gripe I have about this novel is that I feel like I didn’t get to know the characters as much as I wanted to.  Perhaps if the book was longer there would have been more substance to each woman, or maybe if Tan focused on two mother-daughter relationships instead of four.  Having said that, I still really loved this book and am happy to recommend it.

Rating: 9/10

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

From Kirkus Reviews -

A vivid, deeply felt, and meticulously researched account of the disastrous encounter between two disparate cultures: Western medicine and Eastern spirituality, in this case, of Hmong immigrants from Laos. Fadiman, a columnist for Civilization and the new editor of the American Scholar, met the Lees, a Hmong refugee family in Merced, Calif., in 1988, when their daughter Lia was already seven years old and, in the eyes of her American doctors, brain dead. In the Lees’ view, Lia’s soul had fled her body and become lost. At age three months Lia had had her first epileptic seizure–as the Lees put it, “the spirit catches you and you fall down.” Lia’s treatment was complex–her anticonvulsant prescriptions changed 23 times in four years–and the Lees were sure the medicines were bad for their daughter. Believing that the family’s failure to comply with his instructions constituted child abuse, Lia’s doctor had her placed in foster care. A few months after returning home, Lia was hospitalized with a massive seizure that effectively destroyed her brain. With death believed to be imminent, the Lees were permitted to take her home. Two years later, Fadiman found Lia being lovingly cared for by her parents. Still hoping to reunite her soul with her body, they arranged for a Hmong shaman to perform a healing ceremony featuring the sacrifice of a live pig in their apartment. Into this heart-wrenching story, Fadiman weaves an account of Hmong history from ancient times to the present, including their work for the CIA in Laos and their resettlement in the US, their culture, spiritual beliefs, ethics, and etiquette. While Fadiman is keenly aware of the frustrations of doctors striving to provide medical care to those with such a radically different worldview, she urges that physicians at least acknowledge their patients’ realities. A brilliant study in cross-cultural medicine.

My thoughts -

This book utterly and completely fascinated me.  Fadiman did SUCH an excellent job with her incredibly diligent research about the Hmong culture, the Lee family, every single doctor or hospital that ever treated Lia, and medicine in general.  I was actually a little nervous that I wouldn’t enjoy this, because my best friend who is a nurse lent it to me and I assumed she enjoyed it so much because she works in the medical field… and of course, I was all wrong.  I was engrossed in the story up until the very last page.  Fadiman spent a few chapters on the history of the Hmong culture (Hmong people are from Laos, but because of an American sponsored war which they fought for us, they were kicked out of their home country), and those chapters were very enlightening because previously I had no knowledge of the Hmong people and their distinctly interesting culture.  The main focus of the book was the collision of the two cultures - how different Western medicine is from the Hmong’s traditional beliefs about healing - and how these differences can, or should, get resolved in order to treat Hmong people.  In this case, the gap between the two cultures was more like an ocean and for Lia, cultural understanding by her doctors and social workers came too late.  After reading the book, I found myself really thinking about who was right in all this.  Obviously, living in the United States, we are huge fans of our doctors, hospitals, medicines, and general ability to cure diseases and ailments, we believe in all of these things deeply.  But I found myself imagining how I would feel if I went to a country like Laos and they wanted to cure my children using herbal remedies and shamen when I know that what my kid really needs is a cast on his arm or some pain medication.  Thinking about that, I can only feel perhaps a tenth of the frustration and anger the Lees must have felt when their daughter’s doctors did not try to understand their cultural ways of healing and treatment, and continued to give Lia medical treatments and drugs even among her parents’ protests.  But on the other hand, doctors take an oath to save lives no matter what, so in treating Lia they were simply doing their jobs to the best of their abilities.  This book really, really made me think about these questions as well as many others, and I’d highly recommend reading it.

Rating: 10/10

Read Andi’s review here.

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

From amazon.com:

Lalita Tademy’s riveting family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable “bleaching of the line” as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area’s white French planters. In many cases these children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them to inherit wealth or property, a fact that gives Cane River much of its narrative drive.

The author makes it clear exactly where these prohibitions came from. Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical, after all, particularly on the heels of the Civil War and the economic hardships that came with Reconstruction. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive, and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way. In the wake of a visit from the 1880 census taker, the aged Elisabeth reflects on how far they had come.

When the census taker looked at them, he saw colored first, asking questions like single or married, trying to introduce shame where there was none. He took what he saw and foolishly put those things down on a list for others to study. Could he even understand the pride in being able to say that Emily could read and write? They could ask whatever they wanted, but what he should have been marking in the book was family, and landholder, and educated, each generation gathering momentum, adding something special to the brew.

In her introduction, Tademy explains that as a young woman, she failed to appreciate the love and reverence with which her mother and her four uncles spoke of their lively Grandma ‘Tite (short for “Mademoiselle Petite”). She resented her great-grandmother’s skin-color biases, which were as much a part of Tademy’s memory as were her great-grandmother’s trademark dance moves. But the old stories haunted the author, and armed with a couple of pages of history compiled by a distant Louisiana cousin, she began to piece together a genealogy. The result? Tademy eventually left her position as vice president of a Fortune 500 company and set to work on Cane River, in which she has deftly and movingly reconstructed the world of her ancestors.

My thoughts:

Typically, I do not enjoy family saga type stories.  Every one I have read just seemed too long and drawn out, I never end up liking the characters, and it seems like everyone I pick up I fail to enjoy the writing style of the author as well (two good examples - Fall on  Your Knees and We Were the Mulvaneys).  And honestly, this book fell into all those categories too.  It simply was not my type of book.  I tried to like it, and some parts I breezed through, finding myself caring about the characters and curious about what would happen to them, but generally I was not overly impressed with it.  The cool thing is, however, that I didn’t realize until midway through the book that Tademy wrote this about her actualfamily lineage.  The last third of the book is the story of Tademy’s great grandmother.  When I understood the painstaking work that must have gone into her research about her own family to put the book together, I appreciated Tademy a lot more.  I still didn’t love the book, but I think it’s pretty amazing how much work went into it (and probably crazy emotions, can you imagine learning actual facts about ancestors that were slaves?).  I do think this book was very good, it just was not my cup of tea personally.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Read Eva’s review here.

   A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Afghan-American novelist Hosseini follows up his bestselling The Kite Runner with another searing epic of Afghanistan in turmoil. The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal as she fails to produce a child. Eighteen later, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or starvation. Against a backdrop of unending war, Mariam and Laila become allies in an asymmetrical battle with Rasheed, whose violent misogyny—”There was no cursing, no screaming, no pleading, no surprised yelps, only the systematic business of beating and being beaten”—is endorsed by custom and law. Hosseini gives a forceful but nuanced portrait of a patriarchal despotism where women are agonizingly dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their sole path to social status. His tale is a powerful, harrowing depiction of Afghanistan, but also a lyrical evocation of the lives and enduring hopes of its resilient characters.

I think I may have found my new favorite author in Hosseini.  I truly did not think he could write something as good as The Kite Runner the second time around, but wow he truly did.  His style has not changed; the characters are deep and incredibly fleshed-out, and his prose is simple but perfect.  I fell in love with this book from page 1 and pretty much couldn’t stop until the end.  Miriam and Laila are both exceptional women, and as I was reading I could really feel their struggles and joys as if they were my own.  I surmised real anger for Rasheed, their husband, and also for Jalil, Miriam’s father.  Even through that anger, though, Hosseini managed to make both these despicable men seem human, and there were times when I felt for both of them as well.  The book also traced Afghanistan’s history up til 2003 and it made me feel severely sad for the women there.  I have to be honest; I’m not that good with international news and I really do not know what the current situation is in Afghanistan.  I remember hearing maybe a year ago that the Taliban were sort of coming back to power, and thinking of that now just breaks my heart.  I am inspired to learn more about that country, it’s people, and it’s government, because I feel incredible sadness knowing that women are treated this way and there is nothing that can be done to change it.  I realize that in many countries, this is the norm for women, but it’s so incredibly heartbreaking, especially after reading this book and seeing that way of life through two women’s eyes in a personal matter (although it is fiction, obviously Hosseini is writing about a true sequence of historical events in a real country).  I encourage everyone to pick up this book, it is a marvelous story and at this point, there is nothing I can say negative about it.  I just truly loved A Thousand Splendid Suns.