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.

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.

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

Their Eyes Were Watching God  by Zora Neale Hurston

 From the book jacket -

Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years.

This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage.  And in a powerful, mesmerizing narrative, it pays quiet tribute to a black woman, who, though constricted by the times, still demanded to be heard.

My thoughts -

To be completely honest, I just do not see what all the fuss is about with this book.  I liked the character of Janie, and parts of the storyline intrigued me, but overall I found it to be a pretty simple story where not much happened until the very end, when a lot happened.  Janie was a really great character, you could really see her progression throughout the book, and she obviously grew up a lot and changed in positive ways, especially toward the end, but the rest of the characters were extremely bland.  Nobody stood out to me - in fact, the only other character’s name I can recall is Tea Cake, probably because he was the most significant besides Janie herself.  The ending was pretty well done … just when you thought you knew exactly how it was going to end, something different happened that made the ending really work for the book and for Janie’s story (even though it was definitely a sad ending, in my opinion it was perfect).  But the majority of the story just felt like it was plodding along, nothing special was really happening, and I was kind of bored actually.  I think the only reason I stuck with it is because of how short it is (like 215 pages) and I had committed to reading it for the Novella Challenge.  If not for that, I’m pretty sure I would have put it down after 50 pages and given up.

I’m glad I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, because it is one of those timeless classics that I always feel like I SHOULD read, but I still wouldn’t really recommend it.  I think it just didn’t click with me in any sort of significant way.

6 stars.

Also reviewed by: Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews and Kristen at Book Club Classics. (any others?) 

Matrimony by Joshua Henkin

From the book jacket -

From the moment he was born, Julian Wainwright has lived a life of Waspy privilege.  The son of a Yale-educated investment banker, he grew up in a huge apartment on Sutton Place, high above the East River, and attended a tony Manhattan prep school.  But more than anything, Julian wants to get out - out from his parents’ influence, off to Graymont College in western Massachusetts, where he hopes to become a writer.

When he arrives, in the fall of 1986, Julian meets Carter Heinz, a scholarship student from California with whom he develops a strong but ambivalent friendship.  Carter’s mother, desperate to save money for his college education, used to buy him reversible clothing, figuring she was getting two items for the price of one.  Now, spending time with Julian, Carter seethes with resentment.  He swears he will grow up to be wealthy - wealthier, even, than Julian himself.

Then, one day, flipping through the college facebook, Julian and Carter see a photo of Mia Mendelsohn.  Mia from Montreal, they call her.  Beautiful, Jewish, the daughter of a physics professor at McGill, Mia is - Julian and Carter agree - dreamy, urbane, stylish, refined.

But Julian gets to Mia first, meeting her by chance in the college laundry room.  Soon they begin a love affair that - spurred on by family tragedy - will carry them to graduation and beyond, taking them through several college towns, spanning twenty years.  But when Carter reappears, working for an Internet company in California, he throws everyone’s life into turmoil; Julian’s, Mia’s, how own.

Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in the new millenium, Matrimonyis about love and friendship, money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith.  It asks what happens to a marriage when it is confronted by betrayal and the specter of mortality.  What happens when people marry younger than they’d expected to?  Can love survive the passing of time?

My thoughts -

While I can’t say that this is my favorite novel of all time, I did really enjoy and appreciate Matrimony.  The way Henkin drew out the characters and really delved into them was incredible.  I finished the book feeling like I’d just spent time getting to know new friends, that’s how much I enjoyed and understood these characters.  I sort of feel like the book lacked plot.  Obviously, I understand that this was not a plot-driven novel in any way, and at the same time there was a definite plot to the book, but there were times when I honestly just wanted a little more to actually happen.  But I guess the slight lack of happenings make this book more real… for most of us, there aren’t constant events every other day; our lives are a series of relationships, friendships, and other interactions, and rarely do we have big time “plots” in our lives.  So I suppose I’m a little torn about that; while I did want to see more of a story to the book, I appreciate how close to reality it actually was in not having such a huge story to it.

I don’t want anyone to think there’s not a story at all, though.  There definitely is, and it’s a great story, of very interesting people and what seems to be a normal, loving marriage, and what happens when family, career, education, friendship, and marriage all intersect.  It’s really a great book, it unfolds so wonderfully, and like I said, you really, truly get to know and love these characters.  I’d definitely recommend this book, but the problem is that I just know this type of novel is not for everybody.  Personally, I’m glad I read it and I’m happy to recommend it to all of you.

8.5 stars.

Read Dewey’s review here, Care’s review here, Lisa’s review here, and Julie P.’s review here.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstressby Dai Sijie

From the back cover -

In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution.  There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation.  As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

My thoughts -

I found this book to be just kind of ok.  Honestly, it really dragged for me in the beginning and if it wasn’t so short I don’t think I would have finished it.  But since it’s only 180 pages, I figured I might as well see how it ends.  I really love the concept of this book, and the description made me feel like I would just fall in love with it.  But I think perhaps it just fell flat for me - I didn’t feel close to any of the characters, and the writing style simply did not draw me in the way I need a book to do.  I finally started caring about what happened in the story when I only had about 50 pages to go, so that made it easy to finish up, but for the majority of this novel, I was pretty much underwhelmed.

5 stars.

Read Kimbofo’s review here.

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.

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

Shopgirl by Steve Martin

From Publisher’s Weekly -

Movie star Martin shone in the comic essays of last year’s Pure Drivel but can he write serious fiction? His debut novella gives fans a chance to find out. Shy, depressed, young, lonely and usually broke, Vermont-bred Mirabelle Butterfield sells gloves at the Beverly Hills Neiman Marcus (nobody ever buys); at night, she watches TV with her two cats. Martin’s slight plot follows Mirabelle’s search for love, or at least romance and companionship, with middle-aged Ray Porter, a womanizing Seattle millionaire who may, or may not, have hidden redeeming qualities. Also in and out of Mirabelle’s life are a handful of supporting characters, all of them lonely and alienated, too. There’s her father, a dysfunctional Vietnam vet; the laconic, unambitious Jeremy; and Mirabelle’s promiscuous, body-obsessed co-worker Lisa. Detractors may call Martin’s plot predictable, his characters stereotypes. Admirers may answer that - as in Douglas Coupland - these aren’t stereotypes but modern archetypes, whose lives must be streamlined if they are to represent ours. Except for its love-hate relations with L.A., little about this book sounds much like Martin; its anxious, sometimes flat prose style can be affecting or disorienting, and belongs somewhere between Coupland and literary chroniclers of depression like Lydia Davis. Martin’s first novel is finally neither a triumph nor a disaster: it’s yet another of this intelligent performer’s attempts to expand his range, and those who will buy it for the name on the cover could do a lot worse.

My thoughts -

I actually really enjoyed this novella.  For such a short book, there was a definite depth to Mirabelle that many longer books don’t have with their main characters.  I really liked her - she knew that she was a depressed person who gets lonely easily, yet she still set out from her hometown in Vermont to live on her on in Los Angeles.  Her entire relationship with Ray Porter just made me sad (if you read it, you will see why I say that) but it was written very well.  By that I mean that, unfortunately, many of us have gotten ourselves into similar types of relationships, and kept them going for far too long.  This book just really drew me in, I enjoyed most of the characters and I cared deeply about how Mirabelle would turn out in the end.  I could have finished it in an afternoon, so it’s a very quick read, but well worth it in the end.

Rating - 9/10