Book Addiction

Firefly Lane - Kristin Hannah

pub. February 2008, 479 pgs.

From the book jacket -

In the summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain.  Then, to her amazement, the “coolest girl in the world” moves in across the street and wants to be her friend.  Tully Hart seems to have it all - beauty, brains, ambition.  On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be:  Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn; Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her.  They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer’s end they’ve become TullyandKate.  Inseparable.

From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world.  Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally.  She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success… and loneliness.

All Kate really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life.  In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully.  What she doesn’t know is how being a wife and mother will change her… how she’ll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted.  And how much she’ll envy her famous best friend…

For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship - jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment.  They think they’ve survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart… and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test.

My thoughts -

This is not the type of book that I would ordinarily pick up, but I had heard some good things about it from another blogger, and when I spotted a brand new copy at the library I figured I might as well try.  I’m definitely glad I did, because I enjoyed this novel far more than I expected to.  This is mainly a book about friendship, but it’s so much more than just about these two characters, Tully and Kate.  It’s about growing up, family, relationships, love, fame, motherhood, and so much more.  I think a lot of mothers will feel for both Kate and Tully - one takes the stay at home mom path, the other takes the successful, rich, and no husband/kids path, and they both end up being jealous of one another for their “road not taken”.  I have often wondered what I will do when the time comes to have children - will I continue with my career, getting the advanced degrees that I badly want and doing the work that I really feel driven to do, or will I decide to be a full-time mom, and make caring for my children and household the center of my life?  Or will I try to do it all, as we women are told we can do, but so few are actually able to?  I think this is something that every mother struggles with, and I’m sure I will too (heck, I struggle with it now, and I don’t plan on having kids for several years).  That is just one of the real life issues dealt with in this book.

The characters are very real for me in this book, and I think that’s the main reason why I enjoyed it so much.  This is not the type of book that can handle dull, lifeless characters - it is a completely character-driven story.  Of course there is plot, and lots of it, but you really have to feel that Kate, Tully, and everyone else is real to get into the story.  While I liked the way the characters were written, I actually didn’t like some of them at all.  Tully annoyed me in so many ways, as did Kate’s husband (but not as much).  I’m ok with that though - the fact that I was irritated so much by these characters’ actions meant that I cared about what was going on in the story, and that is important.

One other thing - this “betrayal” they speak of?  Well, let me just say that I was SO convinced that I knew what it would be; throughout the whole book I was positive that it was going to be this one thing, and I was going to be so mad that it was obvious to me, but then… shocker… it was something completely different from what I had expected.  Totally threw me off guard (and made me hate Tully even more than I already did, by the way).  I was VERY happy to see that my suspicions weren’t correct and the book wasn’t so predictable as I was anticipating.

So I would recommend this one.  Not my favorite book by any means, but a really good, heartfelt story, with well written characters and a moderately fast pace. 

Also reviewed by Amanda from A Patchwork of Books, Petunia from Educating Petunia, and Julie from Girls Just Reading.

The Dead and the Gone - Susan Beth Pfeffer

pub. 2008, 308 pgs.

From the book jacket -

When life as Alex Morales had known it changed forever, he was working behind the counter at Joey’s Pizza.  He was worried about getting elected to senior class president and making the grades to land him in a good college.  He never expected that an asteroid would hit the moon, knocking it closer in orbit to the earth and catastrophically altering the earth’s climate.

He never expected to be fighting just to stay alive.

Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It enthralled and devestated readers with its brutal but hopeful look at an apocalyptic event from a small-town perspective.  Now this harrowing companion novel examines the same events as they unfold in New York City, revealed through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican New Yorker.  When Alex’s parents disappear in the aftermath of tidal waves, he must care for his two younger sisters, even as Manhattan becomes a deadly wasteland.

With haunting themes of family, faith, personal change, and courage, this powerful novel explores how a young man takes on unimaginable responsibilities.

My thoughts -

While this novel is about the same events as was Life As We Knew It, The Dead and the Gone is a much different book.  It is darker, scarier, and feels more real.  Even though I really enjoyed the first one, I have to say that I think this companion is even better.  Even though it is a lot more haunting and troubling, I think it follows more closely what would actually happen if something like this did occur in real life.  Something I really liked about this book that wasn’t present in the first one is Pfeffer’s discussion of class.  The Morales family lived in an apartment building that the father maintained, but because Alex had received some sort of scholarship (I think), he went to a private Catholic high school, so the majority of his friends had plenty of money.  Therefore, many of the people he knew had no problem getting out of New York (it was stated quite explicitly that money and connections can get you anywhere), while Alex and his sisters were forced to stay behind.  Class differences aren’t often mentioned in fiction, and I definitely think that if this nightmare were to happen in real life, class differences would make a HUGE difference in whether you lived or died.  So it was nice to see Pfeffer recognize something like that.

Another blogger mentioned that he/she (can’t remember who it was…) felt that the overall premise of these two books was somewhat lacking because if this were to happen in real life, most likely some scientist somewhere would have predicted that an asteroid hitting the moon would have consequences for the earth, and precautions would have been taken before the catastrophe could occur.  I do think that blogger is correct, so I was somewhat bugged by that while reading this book, but I forced myself not to think about it and just focus on the story.  Awesome story, somewhat shaky premise, excellent writing, great characters… overall a really solid book, one that I’m happy to recommend.

8.5 stars.

Also reviewed by Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews.

We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

From the back cover –

In this gripping novel of motherhood gone awry, Lionel Shriver approaches the tragedy of a high-school massacre from the point of view of the killer’s mother.  In letters written to the boy’s father, mother Eva probes the upbringing of this more-than-difficult child and reveals herself to have been the reluctant mother of an unsavory son.  As the schisms in her family unfold, we draw closer to an unexpected climax that holds breathtaking surprises and its own hard-won redemption.  In Eva, Shriver has created a narrator who is touching, sad, funny, and reflective.  A Spellbinding read, We Need to Talk About Kevin is as original as it is timely.

 My thoughts –

This book has left me a tad bit stunned and I’m not quite sure what to say about it.  Having just finished reading it a few minutes ago, I can easily say that it is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, but at the same time I am so incredibly disturbed and upset by the content that I don’t know how to properly review it for all of you.  The character of Eva, the mother of Kevin and the narrator of the story, is SO absolutely believable and real that by the end of the book, my heart truly, truly broke for her and all that she had been through.  I’m sitting here, marveling at how a person can live through this kind of unspeakable grief that she has, only to remember that this is a novel, and Eva is only a character, not a real person.  The tragedies in this book felt so freaking real to me that I am just very, very sad right now.  Obviously, I know this is just a novel, but Shriver does do a creepily good job of highlighting all of the real school shootings that have taken place in America in the last few years, making We Need to Talk About Kevin not just disturbing in the far-off sense, but in the sense that although this particular story isn’t real, Eva could be any number of mothers in this country whose children have done the unthinkable.  Of course that’s what makes all scary stories truly scary – they have an element of truth to them that cannot be explained away.  This book is amazing – I strongly recommend it.  But don’t say I didn’t warn you – I’d be shocked by anyone not left feeling pretty upset after having read this book.

10 stars.

check out what these other bloggers had to say:  Lynne at Lynne’s Little Corner of the World, Raych at books i done read, litlove at Tales From the Reading Room, Care at Care’s Online Book Club, Lisamm at Books on the Brain, Bibliolatrist at Bibliolatry, and Dewey at The Hidden Side of a Leaf.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane

From the back cover -

While most of his contemporaries were still courting the sentimental myths of the Romantic era, Crane was exploring firsthand the New York East Side slum world of vagrants, harlots, and beggars.

His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the tale of a pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness, was such a sexually frank and realistic portrait of that world that the book had to be first privately printed.  Not until three years later was it given official publication.

Despite the snarls of reviewers, the howls of Victorian outrage, Maggie not only survived but achieved enduring greatness.

My thoughts -

To put it as simply as possible, I did not enjoy this novella.  Luckily, at just under 90 pages, I was able to read it VERY quickly.  I don’t think it was written well, I didn’t like any of the characters, and I didn’t see much point in the entire story altogether.  There were a few moments throughout the story where I began to feel for Maggie and all that she had been through at the hands of her awful family, but then the boring/terrible storyline would take over and I would just want the book to end.  I can’t really recommend this book, so read it at your own risk. (dun dun dun…)

Atonement  by Ian McEwan

From the back cover -

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant.  But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century.

My thoughts -

Ultimately, I have to say that this was a very excellent book.  I was very put off at first by the extremely slow start to it, but looking back I think McEwan had to really establish the characters and let the reader get to know them so that when the “crime” happened, it would be all the more important in the readers’ minds.  Even with the slow start, I started to enjoy the plot by about page 50 or so, which made the slowness a lot easier to get through.  I also became immersed in the incredible writing, so once I got used to the way the book was written, I was just loving and savoring every word.  I have to say that there was a chunk of the book in the middle (it has to do with Robbie, for those that haven’t read the book I’m not going to spoil anything, but for those that have, you probably know which part I’m talking about) that I was very bored by.  The whole subject matter is something I don’t ever enjoy reading about, and I didn’t feel connected to any of the minor characters in that section, which made it harder to get through.  But once that part faded out, I was back into the book, engrossed in the storyline and the characters once again.

I finished this book a few days ago and I’m still not sure how I feel about the ending.  Obviously I’m not going to say what happened, but I can’t decide if the way McEwan decided to end things was helpful to the story, it being such an open-ended way of doing things and all, or if it was kind of a cop-out, like McEwan couldn’t decide what he wanted to do with it so he chose to end it the way he did.  I’m still not sure.  I think I liked the ending but… I’m just questioning it still.

Anyways.  This was a pretty excellent book, even though I did have minor issues with it, I’m still very glad I read it, and I’ll definitely picking up more work by McEwan in the future.

8 stars.

Also reviewed by: Caribou’s mom, Thoughts of Joy, Trish’s Reading Nook, Care’s Online Book Club, Educating Petunia, Books for Breakfast, Sadie-Jean’s Book Blog, The Written Word , Lynne’s Little Corner of the World, Books and Cooks, and Musings of a Bookish Kitty.

Perfect Match by Jodi Picoult 

From the back cover -

In the course of her everyday work, career-driven assistant district attorney Nina Frost prosecutes child molesters and works determinedly to ensure that a legal system with too many loopholes keeps these criminals behind bars.  But when her own five-year-old son, Nathaniel, is traumatized by a sexual assault, Nina and her husband, Caleb, a quiet and methodical stone mason, are shattered, ripped apart by an enraging sense of helplessness in the face of a futile justice system that Nina knows all too well.  In a heartbeat, Nina’s absolute truths and convictions are turned upside down, and she hurtles toward a plan to exact her own justice for her son - no matter the consequences, whatever the sacrifice.

My thoughts -

Here’s the thing about Picoult books.  They’re not incredibly “literary”, they’re not super well written, and they are actually kind of predictable.  But they always have layered, complex, very real characters, and interesting plots that make you think about your own beliefs while reading.  Also, I am very addicted to these books.  I know that I probably have books on my shelves that are better and that I may enjoy more, but I can’t help picking up a Picoult if I have one sitting on my TBR pile.  Anyways.  On to this particular story.

This novel did satisfy me.  Recently I have read a few of hers that I haven’t been as excited about, but Perfect Match was pretty enjoyable.  I appreciated and liked most of the characters (Caleb didn’t really do it for me, but he’s not too major of a player in the novel), and there was enough suspense to keep me interested until the very last page.  One thing I was happy about in this book is that there were several plot twists that I didn’t see coming.  At least twice throughout the book, I was sure I knew how the rest of the book would turn out, only to have a shocker stuck in there that completely flipped around my ideas about what would happen.  Overall, one of her better novels, in my opinion, and I’m glad I read it, but I am starting to get a little tired of reading her books, I think Natasha is kind of right when she says they are pretty formulaic (I think it was Natasha that said that… maybe not.  Now I can’t remember).

(Don’t worry, I’ll soon be reading and reviewing the other two Picoult books I have on my shelf anyway… I really can’t seem to stay away, I simply gravitate toward them.)

8 stars.

For One More Day by Mitch Albom

From the book jacket -

As a child, Charlie Benetto is told by his father, “You can be a mama’s boy or you can be a daddy’s boy, but you can’t be both.”  So he chooses his father, and he worships him - right up to the day the man disappears.  An eleven-year-old Charley must then turn to his mother, who bravely raises him on her own, despite Charley’s embarassment and yearnings for a complete family.

Decades later, Charley is a broken man.  His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret.  He loses his job.  He leaves his family.  He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding.

And he decides to take his own life.

He makes a midnight run to his small hometown, with plans to do himself in.  But upon failing even to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to make an astonishing discovery.  His mother - who died eight years earlier - is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened. 

What follows is the one “ordinary” day so many of us yearn for, a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain family secrets, and to seek forgiveness.  Somewhere between this life and the next, Charley learns the things he never knew about his mother and her sacrifices.  And he tries, with her tender guidance, to put the crumbled pieces of his life back together.

My thoughts -

So call me a super sap, but I enjoyed the first two Albom books immensely, The Five People You Meet in Heaven slightly more than Tuesdays With Morrie, but I was very happy with both of them, and of course I cried buckets with both books.  This third installment from Albom was decent, but did not live up to his previous two novels.  I liked the premise of this book, that you could spend just one day with that person who you lost too early and need to say so much more to, but the story kind of fell flat for me.  I think it was just too short; there was plenty of detail about Charley’s time growing up and why he needed to spend more time with his mother, but not enough description of the actual “day” that he got with her.  I wanted to know so much more about the two of them, but their day together felt rushed and nothing was really explained that I wanted to be explained.

I’m still happy I picked this book up, it did rouse emotions for me, as his books never fail to do, and in any case I read it in one evening so it was a nice short book to add to my list.  A decent book, but definitely not one of my favorites, and not exactly what I had expected.

6.5 stars

Belong to Me  by Marisa de los Santos

From the book jacket -

In Belong to Me, we meet charming, insightful Cornelia Brown as she struggles to forge friendships with the women in her new town and discovers that even the most joyful marriage can encounter unexpected, and sometimes frightening, hurdles.  Across the street lives Piper Truitt, a blond, imperious queen bee whose complex inner self breaks to the surface of her picture-perfect life as she cares for her best friend, recently diagnosed with cancer.  And then there is Lake, the feisty mother of sensitive, whip-smart Dev, who has moved to Cornelia’s town so her son can attend a school for gifted students, but who actually harbors a deeper motive.  As their stories unfold, these characters become entangled in a web of trust, betrayal, love, and loss that challenges them in ways they never imagined and that ultimately teaches them what it means for one human being to belong to another.  With wit and charm, de los Santos explores the accidents both big and small that magically converge to make up a life, delivering to us a wonderfully luminous and enchanting story.

My thoughts -

As many of you know, I recently read de los Santos’ first novel, Love Walked In, and fell completely in love with it.  Well this novel was no different in my reaction, I LOVED it.  I loved how my favorite characters from the first novel starred in this one too, and I loved how de los Santos incorporated new characters so seamlessly it felt like they truly belonged from page one.  The woman has a way of writing about people’s lives that is so incredibly spot-on, she writes thoughts exactly the way people think them, and she writes interactions between characters exactly they way they would happen in real life.  Not only that, but her characters are so darn REAL.  Definitely with flaws, but nothing so crazy out of the ordinary that it doesn’t really occur in real life.  I don’t know really what else to say, except to say read these books.  Like I said before, they are not the most literary or elegant books ever, but they are touching, sweet stories, told from very realistic characters’ points of view.  Highly recommended.

10 stars.

Read 3M’s review here.

What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg

From Publisher’s Weekly -

“I don’t like my mother. She’s not a good person.” So declares Ginny Young on a trip to California to visit her mother, Marion, whom she hasn’t seen in 35 years. Ginny is only making the trip as a favor to her sister, Sharla, who has called to say she’s awaiting the results of a cancer test. In flashback, Berg (Talk Before Sleep) revisits the events of the girls’ childhood and the moments when their mother’s problems began to reveal themselves. One night, Ginny and Sharla overhear their mother screaming at their father about her unhappiness and telling him that she never wanted children. Then she walks out with no explanations, returning briefly a few months later to explain that she’s not coming back. The following years bring occasional visits that are impossibly painful for all concerned and so full of buried anger that the girls decide to curtail them altogether. When Sharla meets Ginny (now a mother herself) at the airport, and the two see their mother again, there are surprises in store, but not especially shocking ones. The reader, in fact, may feel there is less here than meets the eye: Marion’s flight is never made psychologically credible. Berg’s customary skill in rendering domestic details is intact, but the story seems stitched together. Crucial scenes feel highlighted rather than fleshed out, and Ginny’s bitterness disappears into thin air as she reaches a facile, sentimental conclusion about her mother’s needs.

My thoughts -

Well I am not quite sure what to say about this book.  The first third is a build up to what really happened to Ginny and Sharla’s mother; Ginny makes plenty of references to the fact that her mother is a horrible person, but why she is so horrible is not explained until about a third of the way through.  When that finally surfaces (the fact that she walked out on Ginny, Sharla, and their father without a reasonable explanation for a few days when they were children, and subsequently was no longer allowed in the girls’ lives by their own choice for the next 35 years), it is not shocking in any way, nor is it the least bit understandable why the girls couldn’t accept the fact that their mother was a human being with needs just like them.  I mean, I realize this was probably the 1950’s, but seriously, they were like twelve years old and they couldn’t have SOME compassion for their mom’s needing just a little break from housewifery?  It honestly just annoyed me that they shunned their mother for the rest of their lives because of this one small “mistake” she made. 

When the girls (now adult women now, in their forties) finally reunite with their mother, it is somewhat anticlimactic.  I won’t give anything away, because there are a few small (but predictable) surprises here, but the way the three of them interact after so many years apart is hard for me to accept.  The whole book just didn’t seem all that believable to me, even though I was sucked into the story and was very interested in finding out what REALLY happened to make their mother leave so suddenly, and what would happen when they finally saw each other again.

6 stars.

Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos

From the book jacket -

When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever.  Charming and debonair, the spitting image of Cary Grant, Martin sweeps Cornelia off her feet, but, as it turns out, Martin Grace is more the harbinger of change than the change itself…

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, eleven year old Clare Hobbes must learn to fend for herself after her increasingly unstable mother has a breakdown and disappears.  Taking inspiration from famous orphans (Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, and even Harry Potter), Clare musters the courage to seek out her estranged father.  When the two of them show up at Cornelia’s cafe, Cornelia and Clare form a bond as unlikely as it is deep.  Together, they face difficult choices and discover that knowing what you love and why is as real as life gets.

My thoughts -

I absolutely loved this book.  The first chapter reads like chick lit, which made me very wary of what was to come, but once Clare came into the picture, everything started to make sense and the book had a life of its own.  The story really got to me, I mean I sobbed during several of the scenes.  And I just loved how de los Santos drew the story out slowly, making you fall in love with the characters before you really understood anything about their lives, so that when important things happened, you cared so much about what would happen to the characters involved.  I also liked how it ended (obviously, I won’t give it away) - not exactly what you hope for, but if it was somebody’s actual life, it couldn’t have ended in a better way.  Even though this may not be the best written or most literary book out there, it has plenty of value and is an incredibly touching story that will stay with you for awhile (I finished it last week, and am still thinking about it).

9.5 stars