4 stars

Review Roundup!

I’ve been reading up a storm, but life has been kinda life-y. So I thought a little review roundup was in order.

Zorrie by Laird Hunt. Short, spare, quietly powerful. In just 159 pages, Hunt economically and sparingly tells the entire life story of Zorrie, a tough woman from Indiana farm country. Orphaned young, Zorrie walks the land looking for work. Her curiosity takes her west to a Radium processing plant, her heart brings her back to Indiana. If you are looking for action, adventure, and bright lights, this isn’t it (well, except for the Radium glowing from Zorrie and her friends). It is quiet telling of a quiet life of a strong woman with a connection to her land and her community. If you are a fan of Kent Haruf, I definitely recommend you pick it up. FOUR STARS

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. I read Jones’ American Marriage a couple of years ago and loved it, knowing I would read more by her. Silver Sparrow is centered around James Witherspoon and his two separate families — his public one and his private one. While you my think this to be a tale of polygamy set in the way way back, you would be wrong. All the secrecy and living-a-double-life shenanigans are happening in Atlanta in the 1980s. More juicy? The story is told in two parts, the first half from the secret daughter, the second from the public-facing daughter. #DANG Two strong narrators make the audio version worth checking out. FOUR STARS

When We Believed In Mermaids by Barbara O’Neal. There’s mystery and secret at the heart of When We Believed in Mermaids, but it’s no thriller. As a book club friend pointed out, the peachy cover with turquoise lettering should have been the giveaway. Kit, a doctor, is watching the news when a tragedy in New Zealand airs and she sees her sister on the screen. Her sister that was supposed to be dead. Trotting the globe, Kit learns that her sister Josie, now living as Mari, has a new semi-charmed life and a lot of explaining to do. This is comfortably couched in the beach read category for me. Good escapist chick lit. THREE STARS

She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sara Smarsh. This is a collection of essays that were originally published in 2016 as a four-part series for the journal of root music No Depression. While there’s information about Dolly (all of which can be found in other publications), Smarsh aims to bring light to the plight of poor women, the women not benefiting from the strides their middle and upper-middle-class counterparts have benefited from over the years. If this is of interest to you, you might like the collection. If it’s not, you probably won’t. THREE STARS

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book is just on the verge of being outside of my comfort zone. Science fiction is not my jam. Artificial Intelligence hovers on that sci-fi line. If you’re wondering why I chose it? I didn’t. I have one of my book clubs to blame. But that’s also the reason I love book clubs. Klara is an artificial friend, and AF, to Josie (not to be confused with Josie in the mermaid book previously mentioned. Purchased at a place reminiscent of an Apple store, but solely to by AFs (how AF is that?), Klara is teenage Josie’s constant companion and a motive for Klara’s mother to be more. Ishiguro entertains topics of loneliness, climate change, artificial intelligence, human emotions and more. I have the feeling I am going to like talking about this one more than reading it. FOUR AND A HALF STARS

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour. This book is brilliant. And different. And not like anything I have read before. My thoughts will be shared in greater detail when I talk about it with my Snotty Literati writing partner. So stay tuned, or just trust me.

The Alice Network

The Alice Network is historical fiction beautifully told between alternating chapters that focus on Charlie St. Clair, an unwed pregnant woman in 1947 New York who is looking for her lost cousin Rose who has disappeared while living in Nazi-occupied France; and Eve Gardiner, who in 1915 was living in France while fighting the Germans as one of very few female spies in the Alice Network.

In 1947, Eve is drunk and bitter, and she’s Charlie’s best help in finding Rose. But can Charlie convince Eve drop drop her hibernation act and put down the booze?

Great storytelling. Super compelling. I really couldn’t put it down. Plus there’s handsome Finn. Better than a lot of historical World War I/World War II fiction out there. Oh, and the audio version c’est magnifique!

4/5 Stars

The Sympathizer

I’m not a typical fan of Pulitzer winners… but I went ahead and read The Sympathizer and reviewed it for my side gig, Snotty Literati. Here’s what we thought.

Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl, a PhD-level Neurologist and Psychiatrist, spent three years in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He survived that harrowing experience, not by any force of luck, but rather through knowing he had a purpose in this life. That purpose bred hope, and that hope sustained him until he could safely emerge on the other side of hate and continue living a life of meaning that he chronicles in his memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning. I am super late to this book and decided now—in a time when so many of us are hanging onto hope—was as good a time as any to read this book. My friend, and fellow Book Babe Jill, joined me in reading it and we decided an actual conversation was absolutely necessary. I was all, okay, twist my arm… and here we are.

Lara: So, I was trying to figure out how I have missed this book for so long and I came to an embarrassing realization. I kept thinking it was over 1,000 pages (do I dare admit I was confusing him with Victor Hugo and Les Misérables?) and it also sounded super philosophical and scholarly (not that there’s nothing wrong with that).

Man’s Search for Meaning covers a miserable period in world history and it is a bit philosophical. But it’s way more accessible and impactful than I ever expected. Ever. And, it’s under 200 pages! What did you think? Can you believe you hadn’t read it until now?

Jill: I will see your embarrassing realization and raise you by one unit of mortification. I hadn’t even heard of the book before you told me about it! That said, how did I miss it? It’s superb!

The Holocaust is indeed one of the darkest, saddest periods in all human history. While Frankl does lean towards the philosophical and his work is grounded in psychiatry and logotherapy (psst…go off and research this on your own…fascinating!), he humanizes what could be very dry theories through the telling of his own concentration camp stories. It’s short, accessible, and deeply impactful for these troubled times we now find ourselves in.

Lara: The premise of Frankl’s memoir is simple and profound:

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘how’.”

This hit me. Hard. And I totally agree.
Jill: My first life and business mentor taught me the phrase, “Put the what before the how.” My life motto btw. In Frankl’s case, the “why” and the “what” are the same concept. It’s the focus on a person or a goal that is much bigger than ourselves that keeps us moving forward through the most difficult of times. The thought of our children, for example, can push us to do things we never thought we were capable of. I think what Frankl proposes so beautifully is that it’s not about what you would die for. It’s about what/who you will live for.

Lara: Exactly! And what I love about his explanation is that what is meaningful to us is as unique as we are. He shared the story of the fellow prisoner whose sole purpose for staying alive was to get back to his scientific research. He had spent his life dedicated to research and all of his findings were documented back home in his journals. That meaning kept him going. For someone else, it was returning to his family as he felt his life’s purpose was to be a husband and father.

Here’s the other thing Frankl is onto. We need to have purpose in our lives, no matter where we are in our lives. In fact, the sooner we determine our purpose, the better, because that is what will carry us through uncertain or challenging times.

 Jill: Yes! Each of us finding our purpose, our “why”, is what keeps us going. The tough thing is that it usually takes us many years into adulthood to figure out what gives our lives meaning. We play at stuff, and check things out, but very few of us settle right into lives that bring us joy and fulfillment.

Lara: I totally agree with this. Imagine how much better off we would all be—and the world would be—if we all uncovered our purpose in the first half of our lives.

Jill: If we could figure it out sooner, we’d have more happy people living lives on purpose. There is a great deal of suffering in the world, particularly in the US where we have so many options, around figuring out what we want to “be when we grow up”…what our ultimate “why” is. I loved that Frankl helped his fellow prisoners learn their “why” for survival through conversation and visioning of their future. And, it was a win-win for him. He helped them AND kept his research going, thereby finding his own “why”. As you said, so simple, yet so profound.

Lara: It reminded me a lot of Louis Zamperini, whose story is told in the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. Zamperini was an Olympic runner who fought in WWII. His plane was shot down and he spent a mind-boggling 47 days afloat a raft in the Pacific Ocean. He was captured by the Japanese and survived three years in prison camps. Zamperini could always see himself alive and on the other side. Always. Just as Frankl could. That ability to know we have a role in this life, beyond this interruption (be it a prison camp, or a simple set back) is crucial to our ability to endure.

Jill: I haven’t read this book yet, but it now must go to a higher place in my TBR stack. The book that I read most recently that holds a similar ideology is The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau. Guillebeau submits that pursuing happiness isn’t the game. The real happiness is in the pursuit itself. Frankl noted this about pursuing success and happiness:

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

Lara: I love that sentiment. We need to quit thinking of happiness as an end goal… I will be happy once I lose that weight/get that job/find my soul mate. Shawn Achor’s book The Happiness Advantage also dives into this concept. It’s really good stuff.

Were you as surprised as I was to find that there were moments—very brief moments—of humor and art and music Frankl and the other prisoners were able to create or experience while in the camps?

Jill: This actually didn’t surprise me. There is so much research that supports how art and music can be used to heal. Did you see the story going around on social media for a while about the 90-year-old man in a nursing home that had barely spoken in years, but one day when a piano arrived at the home, he started playing jazz and talking about his days in a band? I mean…amazing, right?

 Lara:  I did see that! And was amazed. And cried and all that. I am also a firm believer that humor is essential to our health. Even in the smallest doses. I think of what a little levity can bring to a challenging work project or tense negotiation. I can only imagine the sense of hope a smile or laugh can bring to someone experiencing something as horrific as imprisonment. That said, it can’t be easy; but it’s essential to survival.

Let’s talk about another big theme in the book: Love. Frankl writes:

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”

I know this had to resonate with you.

Jill: It did. Especially the bit about seeing potential not yet actualized in another, and using love to help enable the other person to actualize potentialities. That is an overwhelming thought to me. That I have the power to enable people through love. Another great passage and one of the most beautiful sentences I have ever read lies in the last line of this quote:

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

This is where Frankl got me. When we make the choice to do everything through love and in love…for ourselves, each other, our fellow humans, all sentient beings…what can be achieved (and endured) is remarkable.

Lara: The other day I saw the coolest print. It declared Kind is the New Cool. This is exactly what Frankl and others before and after him have been saying and proving is vital to our survival as humans and a human race. We need more love, acceptance, appreciation, and respect.

Jill: This is where it gets really tricky for many of us. There can be true evil in the world. We experience it daily by watching the news. How do we extend love to those that are unlovable? His quote is simply the best:

“Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”

Lara: What I take from that quote, is that to be able to find the kindness and the humanity, we have to break down the group connect on an individual level. It’s only at that one-on-one level that we can truly break through barriers of difference and achieve common ground.

Jill: Yes, it feels like something very crucial, very basic is missing in our world right now. We need human connection and kindness now, more than ever.

Lara: Thanks for chatting this really important book up with me. It’s a worthy read now, and really any time. We hope you will check it out!

The Girls by Emma Cline

The GirlsHere’s some free advice: When you meet an author that wrote a book you love, love, loved and you ask him what book he recommends you should read next… read it… next. I am talking about Bill Clegg, author of last year’s NBA Finalist Did You Ever Have a Family, and the book he recommended I read, Emma Cline’s debut, The Girls.

It would also be good to make sure you have six uninterrupted hours, because The Girls will pull you in about as quickly as the book’s charismatic cult leader Russell Hadrick seduces our lost and impressionable protagonist, Evie Boyd. But, I am getting a bit ahead of myself here.

It’s 1969 in northern California and 14-year old Evie Boyd is bored, directionless, and seeking attention anywhere she can find it. Lazy summer days lead Evie to the park where one day she sees them. The Girls. Evie cannot take her eyes off of them, their dresses, their hair, and their utter insouciance–especially, the dark-haired girl Suzanne. Evie continues to see these strange and alluring older girls and quickly and naively assimilates with the group.

Evie finds herself on a black school bus riding out to “the ranch”, the next devotee of child molester, pimp, and cult leader Russell Hadrick (picture Charles Manson). Despite the rancid property and feral inhabitants, Evie can’t get enough. For the first time in her short life, she feels like she belongs. Cline does an exceptional job showcasing the vulnerability of young girls and the desperation that can lead to short-sighted choices with unimaginable consequences. The writing is exquisite, although a little heavy handed in the beginning chapters. Cline quickly finds her groove and keeps you invested in this literary page turner that is likely to be the hit of the summer.

This book will be published on June 14, 2016. Many thanks to Random House and NetGalley.com for making this book available to read and review prior to publication. 

Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan

Green-IslandIn the opening pages of Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island, we are transported to 1947 Taiwan, a county overtaken by violence and fear as it succumbs to Martial Law. Here we meet Dr. Tsai and his wife, confined to their home as she’s laboring with their fourth child. Shortly after their daughter’s birth, Dr. Tsai is heard speaking out against the Chinese Nationalists. This public dissent results in his arrest and imprisonment on Green Island for more than a decade. He returns a shell of the man he once was, to a family that is struggling to embrace him.

Green Island, narrated by Dr. Tsai’s youngest, and unnamed, child, is an epic journey of historical fiction and political unrest spanning 60 years and two continents. I was hooked immediately and found myself angry, saddened, and frustrated by the horrific events at the hands of power-hungry, fear-mongering people. Ryan has crafted a truly engaging story of family bonds and betrayals that will keep you turning the pages and thinking long after the last page is read.

4 Stars

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

f5b0e41325260a2b830f6a706700852bEarlier this month, I snagged a deal on Living Social that got me a three-month Audible.com membership for just $8.00 per month. Normally, a membership runs $14.95 per month, so it was kind of a no brainer: a discount involving books that I could read while I drove to work when I couldn’t normally read? Uhm, okay. Sign me up.

I downloaded Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls, as my first “read”. I thought a mystery would be a good pick for an audio book, because I wanted something that would keep my attention and have enough action to keep me engaged in this consumption format. Well, let me tell you what. Pretty Girls was a perfect audio pick; and I realized this when I had to pull over at one point to catch my breath. Yeah, that really happened.

Pretty Girls centers around sisters Claire and Lydia, sisters whose lives were irrevocably changed when their older sister Julia was kidnapped and never found. Fast forward 20 years and the sisters don’t speak and live vastly different lives: Claire is married to one of Atlanta’s most successful businessmen, and Lydia is working to maintain sobriety while raising a daughter on her own.

It was the tragedy of their sister’s disappearance that drove them apart and the murder of Claire’s husband that brings them together. The reunion is hardly welcome, and the two women must now navigate life with old wounds ripped open and new secrets as Claire learns her husband’s murder was not a simple random act of violence.

Pretty Girls is not for the faint of heart. It’s gritty, gristly, and gruesome. It will make your heart race and plummet. If you are new to audio books, I highly recommend listening to voice actor Kathleen Early read this dark and twisted story that will stay with you long after the last word is spoken.

4 Stars

 

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

Signs Preceding the End of the WorldEvery year, I try to read a handful of books I might not normally read. These aren’t books that are “out of my comfort zone” like zombie apocalypse, vampire YA stuff… but books that can expand my reach and reading experience. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera is the perfect kind of book to do this.

Signs, written in Herrera’s native Spanish and translated by Lisa Dillman, tells the story of Makina, a young Mexican woman making the dangerous trek across the U.S./Mexican Border to deliver an unmarked package and find her brother. Marina’s brother crossed over a year ago, with the sketchy promise of land acquisition.

In just 107 pages, Herrara give us a glimpse into a world many of us don’t know, but may talk–or even argue–a lot about. It’s a world of many unknowns and uncertainties; and one that delivers a solemn punch about the realities of how humans choose to treat one another.

4 Stars

Soppy: A Love Story

So, I am a sucker for a sweet story. And one with cute little drawings too? Sign me up!

Soppy is the totes adorbs collection of Rice’s web comics that are based on real-life interactions with her boyfriend. The book will only take you a few minutes to read, but it will bring a smile to your face and put an “awwwwwwww” in your throat. I mean, look at these images. Am I right?

Soppy

I mean, right?

Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories by Aryn Kyle

Snap 2014-05-28 at 19.25.34Around May 21ish I learned it was Short Story Month. As a sucker for just about anything book related, I decided I would fit a collection in before month’s end, in between book club, Book Bingo, Snotty Literati and all the other book commitments I have made. Somehow, some way, I would do it. But what would I read?

Fortunately, the speed at which I purchase books far exceeds the speed at which I read them, so there’s always something on hand. Enter, Aryn Kyle’s collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me. I picked up a mint-condition, used copy of it at a favorite independent book store a few years ago for a steal and I remembered liking her debut novel that my book club had read a few years back. So that made things easy. It also didn’t hurt that this collection features written stories of women and girls messily making their way through life and love. And before you start doing the math and thinking that women/girls + drama + love + sex = dumbed down, porny, chick lit. You are wrong. Try again.

Boys and Girls Like You and Me features 11 stories, all of which tackle topics we have all faced: love, loss, betrayal, despair. Rather than being overdramatic, Kyle shares the awkwardness, pain, and humor that so many relationships experience, wether involving a parent and child, friends, siblings, lovers, or even acquaintances. In the collection’s opener, “Brides”, Grace loses her virginity and her best friend Dilly after the friendship of convenience experiences an irrevocable breach of trust.

The first man I slept with kept his eyes closed the whole time. We did it in a prop room of my high school theater on the leather sofa my parents had donated to help me get a part in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It would have been better if my mother could have sewn costumes or if my father could have built scenery. But since my mother didn’t sew and and my father said he would rather drive a nail through his tongue than building cardboard shrubbery, they gave the theater department two hundred dollars and the sofa we’d kept in the garage since our dog chewed through the arm rest. And voila. Townsperson Number. I had a line too: Somebody get the pastor!

Grace and Dilly aren’t boiled down to catty caricatures, rather they make choices that girls their age make. While they may not be the choices all high school girls would make, they are highly probable ones and certainly not out of character.

Kyle captures character well, presenting each stories’ protagonist with perspective changing moment. For 12-year old Tommy, the heart of “Captain’s Club”, it’s the night he sees an uncommon Blood Red Moon while on an unlikely Spring Break cruise and his first time away from home.

But when, at last, Tommy began to cry, it was not because of fear or loneliness or disappointment, but because there was so much beauty, too much beauty for his small body to hold, because some people, most people–his mother and sisters and sweet, pretty, Tree, who would never, ever love him, people he had not yet met and strangers he would never know, his father–would live their whole lives and never see this moon, because here he was, only twelve, and already he had seen it.

My favorite of the collection is the title story. Haven’t we all stayed too long in a job that didn’t challenge us, with a partner who couldn’t appreciate us, in a house that wasn’t right for us? And how did we break out of that funk? When it has been my rut, it has always been a break in the monotony or drama or whatever through which a sliver of light illuminated something completely unexpected. That’s what happens when the unnamed protagonist, who is in a dead-end relationship with a married man, working in a job where she writes term papers for students, living in a shitty apartment’s life changes when she meets Iris.

The girl working the register is the teenage vampire from my apartment building, and when I set the movie on the counter, she looks down without touching it. She is pale and razor-thin, with dark, frightening eye makeup and dyed black hair that falls over her face like a hood. “Have you seen this move?” she asks, and I say that I have. “This movie’s fucked-up.”

She runs one hand through her hair, and when it lifts away from her face, I realize that she’s younger than I thought–fourteen, fifteen at most. This surprises me because I have more than once seen her drunk outside the apartment building kissing her boyfriend and, on one occasion, puking in the bushes.

When she pushes the video across the counter at me, her nails are short and jagged, her cuticles raw. I should make sure to return the the movie by Friday, she tells me. The late fees here are ridiculous.

The video is not returned on time, fees are racked up and the two seemingly different characters’ lives become shockingly similar. Much to the dismay of the narrator, she is forced into a situation where she must help Iris. It’s this moment, the break in the chaos that shakes things up, breaks up the chaos and changes her perspective and trajectory.

This is a solid debut collection, and one where each of the stories has a clear beginning, middle, and end. This genre is a tough one and tough to do well. Kyle has proven in her first attempt that she’s a talented storyteller and one I hope we see more from in the future.

AMENDMENT! So, when you purchase faster than you read and you read all the live long day, you don’t even catch that you already read a short story collection this month! Thankfully, both were delights; even though I forgot about the other one. Read my review of the other one. It really was good. Promise.