Her Fine Eyes

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: The wonderfully distinctive voice of the main character, the well-crafted sentences, and the irresistible road trip were (for me) unfortunately overshadowed by some ableist, racist passages and a you're-not-supposed-to-think-it's-creepy-but-it-kind-of-is attraction of a college junior to a sixteen-year-old.

What happens. Mary Iris Malone has been dragged from Ashland, Ohio to Jackson, Mississippi by her dad and his new wife, Kathy. "Mim," as Mary is called by everyone except her flighty, free-thinking mother, is resentful and hurt about the move, particularly when the weekly letters from her mother dry up and then disappear. When Mim overhears in a meeting between the principal of her new school and her dad that her mother is "sick," she jumps to the conclusion that her mother is dying of a chronic illness, perhaps cancer. Impulsively, she steals Kathy's coffee can full of money and hops on a Greyhound bus to Cleveland, Ohio to find her mother and be with her. Given that Mim's aunt Isabel was mentally ill, and Mim's dad enforces a regimen of anti-schizophrenia medication for Mim, it's pretty easy for the reader to guess that Mim's mother's lack of communication is probably not Kathy hiding her letters. It's more likely that Mim's mom is struggling with her own issues--either an addiction or a mental illness. It wasn't clear to me whether David Arnold expected the reader to have figured this out or thought it would come as a twist, but it doesn't detract from the reading experience: the reader is content to anticipate Mim's discovery. (The only real twist for me was the fact that the "Isabel" Mim is writing to is her unborn sister, and that her aunt killed herself in their basement, where young Mim found the body.) In a road trip that turns out not to follow a straight line (in the tradition of all great road trips), Mim learns about herself and the world, how to open herself to real friendships, and how to be less impulsive and judgmental. Along the way she befriends and then loses an older woman named Arlene, is nearly sexually assaulted by a pedophile she calls Poncho Man (Joe), finds a homeless boy with Down Syndrome named Walt and rescues him from a boy named Caleb who may have schizophrenia, collects an AWOL college boy named Beck who grows (too quickly?) to love her and care about Walt, and passes a precious box to Arlene's son and his overweight lover. The narration alternates between Mim talking to us in real time and writing letters to Isabel in a notebook. As it turns out, Mim's mom is in rehab for mental illness, and Kathy is a decent stepmom. Mim, in a metaphor that would be heavy-handed were her condition not self-inflicted, is half blind--blind in one eye due to solar retinopathy because she subversively (impulsively) stared at the sun during an eclipse. She refers to herself as a cyclops occasionally, which I took to be Mr. Arnold doffing his hat at Homer's Odyssey.

Political incorrectness. I'm pretty generous with flawed, complicated characters. I love to see them grow and change. But I had some problems with this book that were never resolved. Since the rest of the world is giving Mr. Arnold the praise he justly deserves for the excellent writing, I feel okay in being the lone voice to express feelings about the many uncomfortable ways he handled Mim's thoughts about other people.

I get it that Mim is snarky. I get it that she's impulsive, and that she judges others too harshly. I get it that she's intolerant. But this is deliberately a coming-of-age novel, so we need to see more obvious changes happen to Mim's understanding of the world. The trick with literature is to make us see that these ableist, racist, intolerant thoughts are youthful flaws that she is steadily outgrowing. Instead, Mr. Arnold rushes, in the last pages, to have Mim address some aspects of her intolerance in a monologue of "what she learned." It's too little, too late. We needed to see her behavior change over the course of the novel--we needed to see gradual learning.

Did she really say that? Some readers on Goodreads are upset about Mim's war paint, and how it denigrates native peoples and their heritage. I haven't seen anyone mention the other things I noticed:

1. The British couple have bad teeth. Really? Are we still going there?

2. The hispanic mother and her daughter are "beautiful." Yep, that's what we say to cover that they're "other."

3. Mim: "You gotta hand it to the Chinese: they've really perfected chicken varietals." *headslap*

4. Mim says about her mother: "She never called me by my nickname. From her lips it sounded strange and guttural, like a foreigner mispronouncing some simple word." Foreigners sound strange and guttural when they try to speak our language?

5. Mim about Walt: "Yeah. He is kind of our pet, though." Of course Mim is joking here, I get that. It's a youthful joke, a tasteless one. And she has already expressed a dozen times what Walt really means to her, so we're meant to forgive the joke, or think of it as affectionate. But more subtly, notice how Walt is conveniently quietly absorbed with his Rubik's cube in the back seat of Uncle Phil (or asleep, or watching TV) whenever the plot needs to be about Mim and Beck, or their growing affection. Notice that Walt almost never causes genuine problems that interrupt their journey. He's not just a pet--sometimes he felt to me like a Giga pet.

6. Mim wishes she could be "dumb" instead of smart sometimes, because then she could not work and watch TV all day, eating cheesy snacks. 

7. Mim's habit of judging people by their first names. She writes to Isabel: "I met my first Claire this morning....And as a general rule I'm officially warning you to stay away from the lot of them. Rotten through and through." It seems like a funny quirk, and the reader assumes that after meeting different people of the same name in the course of her travels she'll revise her opinion, but she really doesn't. At the end of the book her messages on the subject are mixed: she mentions that she wants to tell her mother that her theory on Carls was corroborated by Carl, the bus driver, but at the same time she admits that Claire may be a gray character, neither all good nor all bad.

8. The hefty cashier. Why do we need to know he's "hefty" so many times? And speaking of fat shaming, is it really okay to call Ahab's overweight boyfriend a "whale?" I understand that it's supposed to resonate ironically with Moby Dick, but this novel is not magical realism. We are meant to think Ahab's boyfriend is a real human being. The coincidence that he is pale and heavy is not permission to call him a whale.

9. The male receptionist at the hospital is good looking. No, wait! He has crooked teeth when he smiles, so Mim demotes him to "mildly attractive male receptionist." 

Should we send the message that psychiatrists who prescribe meds are quacks? And the ones who don't are noble and hard working? Do we want to say that going off your meds on your own is a good idea? Does Mim make up for this deeper message by tossing out the superficial line near the end, "I know drugs are helpful for some people..."? Should we mind less because Mr. Arnold made up the medication Mim takes, so he's not really deriding any existing class of drugs?

Schizophrenia. Mim seems to think that Caleb has schizophrenia. If he does, it's not okay with me that Caleb is portrayed as "evil." I did not feel good about--let alone celebrate, as Mim did--his getting punched by Ahab to the point of unconsciousness. (Side note: this is another peeve of mine. A blow to the head that causes you to lose consciousness means it's a concussion. Concussions are serious, often highly debilitating, long-term injuries.) Mim sees some gray in Caleb's character at the end, but it's too little, too late. She still states that jail is right for him, when what he needs is psychiatric and medical care.

The age difference between Beck and Mim. Yes, Mr. Arnold is careful to have the relationship stay innocent. Nothing happens but a kiss on the forehead, and Beck's arm around Mim in bed. But that doesn't change the fact that the attraction is there. By the end, we're pretty sure Beck intends to maintain contact with Mim (he's too old for her "for now" he says pointedly), and Mim is hoping for a future together, and the reader has been steered into hoping that when Mim is of a legal age to consent, they'll have a relationship. But let's take a step back. Do you know any juniors in college? I do, and I can say unequivocally that the healthy ones are not interested in sixteen-year-old girls, no matter how intellectually precocious they are. So are we to believe that Beck is somehow emotionally stunted? If so, he needed to be drawn that way, instead of being essentially a quirky-but-perfect YA boyfriend, a Manic Pixie Dream Boy.

In an interview, Mr. Arnold explained that when he began writing, the story was about a boy named Beck:

Regarding Beck…in the earliest drafts, Mim was actually a boy named Beck. And on the road, he met a girl named Mim. And that character was largely based on Zooey Deschanel.

Oof, Zooey Deschanel: the actual definition of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. And if a college girl were to fall for a sixteen-year-old boy, that might be odd, right? Plus, it would never happen--girls like older boys! So, hey, switch the genders and it works. (She said with irony.)

Accuracy. (Another peeve.) A few things were poorly researched:

1. Caleb behaves as if he has dissociative personality disorder, not schizophrenia. The "Gollum-Gollum" discussion would not have happened if he had schizophrenia. It's a disservice to the mentally-ill to portray him that way, and to have him jailed without mentioning that he needs to receive mental health care.

2. One of the Japanese passengers on the bus needed CPR on the scene, but was then in the van going to the hotel. If you need CPR at the scene of an accident, you are going to be hospitalized.

3. There's no medical or anatomical reason that an eyelid would routinely droop or close over a blind eye (unless it's a glass prosthetic).

4. Can we talk about the human epiglottis? It folds up to let air in, and it folds down during swallowing to direct food to the esophagus rather than the trachea. There's no such thing as a displaced epiglottis. Why introduce a condition like this that the reader (or Mim, for that matter) can research online in ten seconds and discover is bogus? 

Important plot points not dealt with thoroughly enough:

1.The assault of Poncho Man on Mim. What does this event mean in the story? Mim learned that by not reporting his attack (so that she could selfishly pursue her own goal) she left him free to attack another. But sexual assault behind a locked door--even if it only results in a forced kiss--can be a traumatic experience, and probably shouldn't be solely a plot device, and here we have not one but two girls assaulted. Yes, Mim had lingering nausea when she saw a man wearing shoes similar to Poncho Man's, but otherwise how did this experience fit in her story, in this journey? In the end she tells us that two evil people--Poncho Man and Caleb--were both punished. But as I've mentioned, Caleb's outcome was not good in my opinion, and his crime shouldn't be compared with Poncho Man's crimes. Poncho Man also provided Mr. Arnold with a plot reason for Beck to be removed from the bus; but again, that's using sexual aggression to advance the plot, which runs into dangerous territory.

2. Isabel hanging herself in the basement. This is secretly at the heart of the story. It's the reason Mim's dad expects that she might come unhinged. I had a belated, cheated feeling at the end of the book that Mim's trip should have been, at its core, about Isabel's death. But really it wasn't. It was simply used as a twist, and a way to make Mim's dad's authoritarian opinion about mental health treatment more sympathetic. We know that Mim must have experienced profound emotional upset after discovering Isabel, but we don't get to explore it. Not only was Isabel a beloved aunt, but stumbling upon a violent death for a child is horrific.

3. Did Kathy show up fortuitously at the old Malone homestead, or were we to assume that Beck called her? Beck and Walt went to the gas station the evening before Kathy showed up, where they would have seen a flyer. Beck and Walt conveniently left Mim alone to search for Beck's phone before Kathy arrived at the house. The responsible thing for Beck to do--as the adult he is--would be to call the number on the flyer (particularly since he expressed concern that Mim might be misjudging her). But telling Kathy where she was would also be the sort of thing Mim would feel betrayed about. I would have liked to have known that Beck did it, and to have seen him explain to Mim why he did it. I would have liked Mr. Arnold to have complicated Beck's otherwise pixie-ish supporting role--his perfect boyfriend status.

A tiny thing, really not worth mentioning, but it bugged me. The author has Mim describe Kathy's walk in a snide list: "Her earrings jangle, her artificial curls bob, her too-tight jeans ride, her acrylic nails click, her bedazzled belt sparkles, her preggers boobs bounce..." How exactly would Mim hear Kathy's nails click while she's walking? That one needed cutting.

In sum. I really wanted to love this book. I think Mr. Arnold has the chops to write exceptional novels, and I look forward to reading more as his career develops. But I was disappointed by the way the main character makes sweeping generalizations about people and ableist/racist comments without learning from her mistakes until the very last pages. This book had great potential to show brilliant, diamond-in-the-rough Mim growing gradually, which would have been a more rewarding character arc to follow.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: The Martian is a nerdy, survivalist ride, chock full of science, mathematical calculations, suspense, and unexpected humor, but without enough exploration of psychology and trauma.

What happens. This might be the easiest summary I've ever written. Mark Watney is one of six crew members on the third Ares mission to Mars. The crew is on the surface when a powerful dust storm with high winds forces them to abort the mission. Mark is impaled by a flying antenna, the rest of the crew sees that his bio monitor readout indicates he's dead, and after a frantic search for him they give up and take their MAV back to the orbiting ship, the "Hermes." But, through a series of technological accidents (having mostly to do with how his space suit behaves after being breached), Mark is alive. He can't communicate either with Earth or with Hermes, since the wind storm destroyed the communications antenna. For all anyone knows, he's dead. His only hope is to figure out a way to communicate--for some sort of future rescue that he can't even imagine--or live long enough to make his way thousands of kilometers to the Ares 4 landing site, equipped with inadequate maps, where in four years another mission will arrive. Aside from depending on an oxygenator to make his air and a water reclaimer to conserve water--neither of which was designed with a longevity of four years in mind--Watney will not have enough food, even with the rest of the crew's fifty-days of meals available, and even if he eats 3/4 rations. But Mark is both an engineer with MacGyver ingenuity, and a botanist. And thanks to six convenient potatoes aboard (unlikely), he embarks on farming in his "habitat," the Hab, in pods, on lab tables, and anywhere else he can cultivate both a bio-rich soil (using his own feces as fertilizer) and potatoes. He also takes an arduous experimental trip in his rover to see if and how he'll manage the even longer journey to the Ares 4 site, which will take ninety days, and picks up Pathfinder along the way, allowing him to communicate with Earth...for a time. Eventually he fatally short-circuits the Pathfinder by leaning a drill against the wrong surface, and he's on his own again. He has to make it to Schiaparelli Crater, with no help from Venkat Kapoor, Bruce Ng or any of the other minds at NASA and JPL. There's a surprisingly large cast of characters, including the other five crewmates (Captain Lewis, communications Johanssen, the German Vogel, Doctor Beck, the pilot Martinez), and people on the ground (Annie the media-relations person, Mitch Henderson the head of NASA, Teddy Sanders the head of the project, Cathy of CNN's "Mark Watney Report," and Mindy Park, the PhD in charge of reading the satellite imagery of Mark's movements).  

"This will make a great movie." That's what you think, the whole time you're reading. And yes, when Matt Damon is in the theaters as Mark Watney, I'll be in line with a ticket in my hand. But unless the screenwriters add some pathos, or unless Damon conveys an extraordinary amount of internal feeling to the audience on his own, this won't be one of those deep, complex stories of survival. It'll be cinematic, probably suspenseful, and satisfying. And it will make a ton of money. But Watney's victory will be a hollow triumph. You know the little undercurrent that made Tom Hanks's "Castaway" such a classic? It was watching him come to terms with his situation emotionally. It was seeing him grow from a person who has bought into the fallacy of a successful contemporary life, who is bound by the clock, to a man stripped to a primitive state--able to care for himself and be alone with himself. He gains his strength, and with it, a kind of inevitable vulnerability of never belonging. That's interesting. Mark Watney, on the other hand, was born with strength. He never loses it, never waivers, never has a moment of redemption. He solves every problem, and moves on to the next, wisecracking as he goes.

Paradoxically, we needed more Mark Watney. I liked his dark quips. I liked his geeky humor. I liked the fact that he never gave up--that he was such a problem-solver. But it wasn't enough. Most stories are about growth, in one way or another. And the truth is, there isn't a single human being ever, anywhere, even an astronaut, who wouldn't have moments of depression, panic, or hopelessness in Watney's situation--who wouldn't struggle not only with the logistics and the technology and the math, but also with the oppressive feeling of "aloneness" on an unpopulated planet, and with the greater probability of failure (death) than success (rescue). Yes, astronauts are trained to think on their feet in emergencies. ("Work the problem," Captain Lewis admonishes on Hermes when her crew realizes with dismay that they're off course.) But there was in fact a lot of down time for Watney in this book--a lot of time to ponder his situation, and the meaning of life. I wanted to dig deep enough to see that his humor was part coping mechanism. I wanted to hear more than just lip service to the loneliness that makes him say, "I haven't spoken to anyone in X days, and I miss talking to people."

In fact, the lack of growth extends to other characters in the book. We spend a fair amount of time with people in NASA, and the only one who shows any change is Mindy Park, who starts out a bit meek and becomes slightly more outspoken (but ineffectually so). There's some superficial talk about Captain Lewis's anguish over leaving Mark on Mars, but it's more like hanging clothing on a mannequin in a window: Lewis is the one with the commander badge on her jacket. She doesn't grow, but she does decide to embark on an unauthorized mission to retrieve him.

Andy Weir gave a Google book talk, and an audience member asked whether he was sending some sort of message by having a main character who's so "resourceful and optimistic in such a bad situation." Weir's response reveals a lot about him as a (fledgling) writer:

"I tried to make it a pretty upbeat book. It could have been really dark, and depressing, right? It's like the guy is trapped alone; he could be just having this crippling psychological problems of loneliness and all these other things that most people would face. I figure I can buy my way out of that by saying he's an astronaut. Astronauts are a cut above. And so he doesn't sink into depression, he just goes into problem-solving mode. And I made him this really flippant, smart-ass personality because I had to tell a whole story. If I'd done just blank narration, just like omniscient narration even, it would have just seemed like a technical manual or a really dry sequence of events. I needed something in the narration itself that would keep the user [sic] interested. And so having it told by a self-effacing, smart-ass seemed like a good idea." --Andy Weir [emphasis mine].

Let's analyze this comment. Loneliness is something "that most people would face." Exactly. And in fact, that's what literature is: examining the human condition, finding emotions that are universal and exploring them. As much as readers enjoy a character who has more skill than they do, as much as they root for him or her, they want to empathize. And by not showing any of Watney's internal life, Weir is in fact not telling "a whole story." Weir actually risks telling a "dry sequence of events" much more by omitting Watney's psychological issues than he would if he hadn't made him funny. The lack of an internal conflict in this novel can't be papered over with smart-ass Watney comments. His slip up in calling readers "users" indicates how much his brain is wired toward the technological. In fact, Weir repeats several times in the Google talk that "It was really important to me was that everything be as scientifically accurate as possible."

One sign of how little internal life there was in this book is the fact that the reader doesn't sense the passage of time. Watney spends eighteen months alone, but to us it felt only like a serious of solved problems. The "arc" of this book is: astronaut is stranded, he solves problems--some are thrown at him, and some result from his own actions in solving previous problems--and he's rescued.

The triumph is in the hard science. What Weir set out with determination to do, he did incredibly well. Everything seems plausible, with the exception of two things. One he admits to: a dust storm would not blow objects around on Mars, because the atmosphere is too thin (and the soil is too powdery to "sand-blast" anything). The other is the plot device of the potatoes. I may be entirely wrong about this, but I doubt NASA would send six raw potatoes up to space for the astronauts to bake for Thanksgiving dinner. Pre-cooked, vaccum-sealed, yes. But raw, with sproutable eyes? Nevertheless, everything else is lovingly researched. Weir even programmed his own simulation of orbital mechanics--basically what Rich Purcell must have worked on--to predict and follow the orbits of Earth, Mars, and Hermes. This program also allows Weir to know exactly what date it is on Mars and on Earth, and what the light distance is between them, and the transmission lag, all of which he included to create the timeline. Some of the equipment eluded me visually: I didn't have a sense of how big the rovers are, what the oxygenator looks like, and so forth. But how they function is clear, and how they break down and are repaired and are cannibalized by Watney in his repairs, too. Mars could have been a second character, but it's not visually explored much. Weir's strength is not in descriptive prose.

When you close the book, you're happy but...there's something missing. Weir tacks on a nice little soliloquy by Watney, noting how inherently caring human beings are, and how millions of people rallied for him, a single person, and how the Chinese gave up their own scientific aspirations for him, a stranger. But even this theme would have been so much more powerful if we'd seen more evidence of initial selfishness, and obliviousness--if we'd seen the growth (yes, there's that word again) of sentiment on earth. The rallying wasn't as moving as it could have been. Only Mitch Henderson tried to make the unpopular decision of balancing the safety of the Hermes crew against the possibility of rescuing Mark, and so there was little dramatic tension to show the inherent goodness of humanity.  

One final note about the movie: I see in the cast list that Mindy Park is played by someone named Mackenzie Davis. Seriously? Andy Weir works in Mountain View CA for a tech company writing programs for androids. He has made an effort to have lots of strong women in this novel, and several ethnicities. There's no doubt in my mind--given the diversity he experiences in silicon valley--that Mindy Park is supposed to be Korean-American.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: this isn't just another WWII novel; this is a novel about people and relationships--about what it takes to be a moral human being, about choices (good ones, bad ones, and lack of action), about hands being tied, and how interconnected we all are.

What happens. All the Light We Cannot See is like a double bildungsroman. It follows little Marie-Laure LeBlanc in France, and little Werner Pfennig in Germany from before the war reaches France in the 1930s to the present (2014). They meet in person for only a day in the novel, but from the earliest pages we know that they're interconnected through a web that Mr. Doerr weaves with the grace that only Charlotte has mastered before him. As Madame Manec comments prophetically, "My God, there are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together." (In a small example of how well researched this book is, Doerr slips this expression to us without any fanfare or showing off. It's likely that the French version Mme. Manec is quoting is Il n'y a que les montagnes qui ne se rencontrent jamais, which translates literally to "Only mountains never meet each other." Attention to this sort of detail explains how it took Mr. Doerr a decade to write the book.)

As a six-year old, Marie-Laure goes blind from bilateral cataracts. Her father, who lost his wife when she gave birth to Marie, is a locksmith at the Natural History Museum in Paris. During the day he keeps the museum's keys, fashions its locks and cases for the collection, and makes repairs. Marie-Laure entertains herself in the museum and learns at the hands of kind botanists and scientists who populate the research backrooms. She has a particular interest in mollusks, which she can identify and classify by touch. In the evening, her Papa creates an intricate model of their neighborhood in Paris, coaxing Marie to learn to navigate the city by memorizing this 3-D "map." For her birthday each year he makes a unique puzzle box with a tiny gift or chocolate inside, and gives her a braille novel--once, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which ties in nicely, if somewhat heavy-handedly, with themes of the ocean and sea creatures.

Meanwhile in Germany, Werner Pfennig and his sister, Jutte, are orphans, cared for by a kind Alsatian house mistress who alternately speaks French and German to them. Werner is mechanically gifted and interested in math and engineering, but when he turns fifteen, he is slated to work in the the same coal mine that killed his father. Jutte is a bright girl who sees through the Nazi propaganda even in its earliest days, when the SS members are just a group of brown-shirted thugs. Werner repairs a radio that he and Jutte have found, and they listen to broadcasts from all over Europe. When they're supposed to be sleeping, they occasionally find the broadcasts of a French "professor" whose wonder at science speaks directly to Werner's heart:

 "Open your eyes," the professor said, "and see what you can before they close forever."

Marie-Laure's father is turned in to the occupying forces by a Nazi-colluding neighbor, who spies on him as he measures and sketches streets and buildings to create the 3-D model of Saint-Malo for Marie. From his labor camp, after only a few exaggeratedly positive letters to Marie, Papa is essentially "disappeared." Marie discovers that he has left the diamond inside the tiny version of her uncle's home in the 3-D map, locked inside of it like one of his tiny wooden puzzles. Madame Manec, the woman who cares for Marie's uncle, breaks the rules and takes Marie to the ocean. She also breaks bigger rules and helps the local resistance, with brave Marie acting as the courier.   

Werner has been plucked out of coal-mining obscurity because of his talent with radios, and is accepted into an elite Nazi school that will groom him to be a special operations officer. As part of their routine training, the cadets are forced to do unspeakable things--things that his best friend, Frederick, resists (for which he is nearly beaten to death until he has brain damage). It's a blow to Werner--one that he never seems to recover from--knowing that he was unable to act against what he knew was wrong. It is also, however, what leads him on a selfless quest to save the girl who is trapped in her attic, broadcasting from her radio, and hunted by a Nazi officer in the bedroom below her.

There is a German Sergeant-major, von Rumpel, on the hunt for the Sea of Flames (initially for the Fuhrer's glorious museum, and then because of his own desperate desire to cure his terminal cancer), and a thrilling section when von Rumpel is in the house for days while Marie hides in the attic with only two cans of food and nothing to drink.

There is a ruthless, obedient, but also oddly bighearted staff sergeant, Frank Volkheimer--practically a child himself--who is somehow able to viciously kill people and also have intensely warm feelings and respect and admiration for the pale, gentle radio operator (Werner) he works with and protects.  

This book is never one thing: for a moment I thought it was the classiest Raiders of the Lost Arc ever: the Nazis seek a jewel that the Museum of Natural History owns, the Sergeant-major metaphorically melts of the physical and moral cancer inside of him. For a moment you feel that Marie-Laure is Anne Frank, hiding in the attic, but with a radio transmitter at her disposal. For a very long stretch, it's a love story between a father and daughter:

There is pride, too, though. Pride that he has done it alone, that his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful. As if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair. As though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

But this book is much more than a single thing. It's an examination of hope and desolation, strength and frailty, of destiny and self-determination, and the kitchen sink to boot.

The theme of light and vision abounds. The French professor has a radio segment that resonates with Werner and Jutte in which he discusses how the brain--encased in absolute darkness--can see light. Even Marie-Laure, who is blind, understands the power of light for human beings:

This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

In sum: a truly beautiful work, haunting in the way it doesn't flinch from showing how unrecoverable war is, for both the dead and the survivors, and how we're so interconnected that--politics aside--no one unequivocally "wins" in the end.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: a post-apocalyptic story with blessedly little action/adventure, a well-fleshed out ensemble cast, and interesting commentaries on human existence.

Perhaps one of the best compliments I can give Station Eleven is that it snuck into my thoughts over and over again after I finished it, during those quiet moments of the day--as I was falling asleep, on an early-morning run, or putting dinner together.

The best of YA. This is an adult book, but it would be perfect for ALA's Alex Awards (books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults). It's what I hope for every time I open a YA novel of speculative fiction--a careful piece of work, trying to mine important themes, and not rushed sloppily to press because it has a great hook. 

The author, Emily St. John Mandel, prefers to think of Station Eleven as literary fiction, but it's not really. I mean, yes, it's not a straight-to-paperback-"USA-today-best-seller!" It's not the literary equivalent of potato chips. But it's not exceptionally beautifully written, and appropriately so: the language perfectly suits the story. It's verging on eloquent, but is more serviceable and less wordy; it's not quite spare, but is thoughtful and direct. It doesn't spend much time navel-gazing, because the business of survival doesn't allow that. This is about as pretty as Ms. Mandel allows herself to get: 

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

Brief recap, mostly for myself. The books begin with the death of Arthur Leander on a stage in Toronto. He has had three failed marriages--Miranda, Elizabeth, and Lydia--and is in a new relationship with the young woman who wrangles the child actresses in his production of King Lear. A young man named Jeevan, who used to be a paparazzo, but is now training to be an EMT, leaps onto the stage to perform CPR. Arthur dies, and one of the child actresses, Kirsten, sees it happen. Arthur has been nice to her, including giving her a copy of the first two issues of Miranda's nearly one-of-a-kind comics, Station Eleven. Before he dies, we learn much later in the novel, he had been planning to move to Israel to be with his son, Tyler, who was taken there by Elizabeth. He has one last phone call in which he tells Tyler he loves him. They have a closer-than-usual conversation when Arthur engages Tyler on the topic of Station Eleven. When Jeevan leaves the theater, his best friend Hua calls and tells him a virulent flu has been introduced via a flight from Russia. Jeevan buys seven grocery carts full of food and supplies and wheels them one by one through the snow to his disabled brother's apartment, where they barricade themselves in, waiting out the pandemic. Meanwhile, Arthur's best friend, Clark, has been tasked to call Arthur's ex-wives to let them know about his death. Clark used to be a student actor with Arthur, and was a free-spirit who shaved one half of his head and dyed the other half, but now he consults for corporations, making over the professional behavior of slightly dysfunctional managers. On his way to Arthur's funeral, Clark is stranded in the Severn City airport with Elizabeth, Tyler, and dozens of other passengers. It becomes a small town of its own, and Clark tends to a "Museum of Civilization" to pass the time. Elizabeth and Tyler leave the compound with a cult after four years, Tyler already seeming a bit touched in the head. The book flashes forward and back to several dates, but most of the time we're in Year 25: the twenty-fifth year after the flu, following The Traveling Symphony, which includes Kirsten, her best friend August, her former lover, Sayid, several musicians, and a leader named The Conductor. They go to a town called St. Deborah by the Lake to collect two members of their symphony, Charlie and Jeremy, who stayed behind two years ago to have their baby. But the town has changed and is in the hands of the prophet. The symphony gets in trouble with this zealot, leaves, is followed, and some of them are ambushed. The prophet's dog, Luli, is mysteriously named for Dr. Eleven's comic-book Pomeranian. The symphony makes its way to Severn City, where it is reunited with Charlie, Jeremy, and their baby Annabelle.

Some themes explored: 

1.How important is art in our human lives? Un-subtly, Ms. Mandel has her caravan of musicians and actors emblazon their vehicle with the Star-Trek phrase, "Because survival is insufficient." But more subtly, art is everywhere. The towns they visit want to see productions of Shakespeare; music and theater are viable ways of supporting yourself after the apocalypse. Clark's museum curation is not just concerned with artifacts, it has become art--that's what red stiletto heels become when the world has collapsed. Miranda creates her comics in the absence of an audience, for the sake of doing art:

“What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?”

“It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.”

A testament to the purity of art: Miranda doesn't even sign her work, using her initials, "M.C." instead. And a quarter of a century after Miranda's death, Kirsten and Tyler are still captivated by her art.

2. The ephemeral nature of existence. There are only hours between when Miranda learns of Arthur's death--the man she "once thought she'd spend the rest of her life with"--and she herself is dead. 

3. The illusion of control. Expiring on a lounge chair on the beach, Miranda imagines the ships off shore have not been infected--the crew might live. But we know from seeing the web of deaths that survival isn't something you can plan on. Clark's entire existence highlights what is important in life: his job is rendered completely meaningless by the collapse. (Almost as a relic for his museum, he completes the last "360" report he was hired to write--about a man who is surely dead, for bosses who are dead, and a company that no longer functions.) His museum collection is the definition of obsolescence. His private thoughts are spent on Robert, his boyfriend who has probably died. Similarly, Arthur's existence, even though it pre-dates the flu, was spent burdened with fame when it turned out it was really love he was after.

4. The impermanence of life. Arthur explains his desire to become an actor: “First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.” But we readers have seen 99.9% of the population disappear, and all the mechanisms for remembering them are gone.

5. The importance of relationships, and the essential goodness of human beings. We can't live without each other, but love always leads to loss ("What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you've lost."). Sigrid Nunez's review of Station Eleven in The New York Times complained that the future wasn't bleak enough in this book ("readers may wonder why few bad guys have made it to year 20....the hairs never rose on the back of my neck"), but that's missing the point of the novel. This is Year 25 (not 20), and the survivors have mostly figured out how to live and let live. The worst is behind them. It's never portrayed as easy: Jeevan hears gunshots from the apartment in the first weeks of the pandemic; every town has a sentry; everyone carries a weapon; people on the road sleep in shifts; Kirsten has killed four people. But Ms. Nunez should do the math: the virus killed 99.9% of the population, which means not many people even survived the pandemic, and fewer still survived the violence afterward. For instance, if there are 300 million people in the United States, that means only 300,000 survived the Georgia flu. How many bad guys do you want to have in a population that small and that spread out? I think Ms. Mandel is saying that when everything is wiped out, the population distills into small pockets of brutality among the otherwise essential goodness of humanity. That sounds about right to me.

We're comfortable watching characters die. I was surprised by the fact that I was okay with watching important characters die. Part of this is due to the pervasiveness of those themes above: the world is an impermanent place, and as a reader you get used to that fact. But part of it is the structure of the novel. Arthur is a main character, and he dies on the first page. We've got that out of the way; we've lost him before we care about him. Then we grow to care about him later. This is true of many of the characters: we know ahead of time that they're gone. The implication is that the "getting there" (to their deaths) is what life is about.

We're comfortable not knowing what happened to characters. We're also okay with not knowing everything about everyone. It fits with the the blackout of information that the characters experience, and also with those themes of loss of control and impermanence. We see a whole group from the Severn City airport fly off to L.A., never to be heard from again. We see people on the hillside to the south of the airport who have figured out electricity again, but we don't know who they are or whether Kirsten will find them. There is a lack knowing how Elizabeth (the prophet's mom) died. We're comfortable not knowing what Kirsten has forgotten from her childhood: watching her brother die of an infected nail-puncture in his foot is enough of a hint that we can guess her amnesia covers something much worse. We don't mind not knowing who the other two tattooed knives represent on Kirsten's wrist. We don't care that we've never met Victoria of "Dear V" fame.

Some things I admired:

1. The small things, like seeing Kirsten as a nearly translucent blond waif as a child, someone Miranda judges will become a groomed, perfect, pampered adult. But we know that she has become a battle-weary young woman, missing teeth, and tattooed with symbols representing the people she has been forced to kill. We also learn of the cast's diversity almost incidentally.

2. I enjoyed the way the chapters had little reverence for time and chronology, and "gave away" past and future information: we read chapter openings like, "three weeks before X died, he was in a hotel lobby..." This technique gave a sense that people are both alive and dead at all times, which ties in nicely with the notion that memories are all that preserve us after we're gone.

3. Pieces of this book pop into my head at random moments, which always means there's more fodder there than at first glance. I awoke this morning thinking, "How did Jeevan help his brother to die?" And "What was Ms. Mandel trying to say with the dust-free child's tea set?" The fact of Arthur being on the cusp of reaching out to Tyler before he died--the reader knowing that Tyler may have grown up entirely differently--is more poignant on reflection.

4. I like the way we quickly see that many of the characters will be linked somehow. But they're not overtly linked, just delicately intertwined. It's a nod to the web of human relationships across the globe. Ms. Mandel doesn't stress the connections. I found myself hoping for Clark and Kirsten to figure out their mutual attachment to Arthur (and I was worried Clark would die before they had their talk the next morning), but Ms. Mandel saw no need to show us that conversation, and I admire that. We just know, later, that they've planned that Kirsten will always leave one rotating Doctor Eleven comic with Clark for his Museum of Civilization as she passes in and out of Severn City. 

5. I appreciated the way the prophet died, with no giant, bad-guy climax. Like most everyone else in the world, he died in a way he (and we) least expected.

In sum: This book hits the sweet spot for me--speculative fiction and a strong hook, but with thoughtful attention to writing and themes. This is what I want more YA novels to be like. A favorite of 2015.

***Note: This review assumes that you've read the book.***

(I know it seems unnecessary to warn you about spoilers--how can they exist in a story about the life of Elizabeth I, a well-documented royal?--but in fact, the book deviates from history.)

One-sentence summary: this not-so-beautifully-written book should nevertheless be required reading for high school political science classes, if only to show why hereditary monarchy is a disastrous governmental system, and (with a few exceptions) doomed to put dolts in charge.

Dear Reflections: I read this book because of your excellent review of The Marriage Game by Alison Weir. It made me want to try one of Ms. Weir's books. Unfortunately, The Marriage Game is only available as a physical book, and I had space in my reading schedule for an audiobook, so I chose The Lady Elizabeth instead. I'm glad I listened to it, but I can't admit to being a Weir fan...yet.

Any work of historical fiction is something of a triumph. Let me start by saying that I admire this book, in the sense that I admire any attempt to capture a swath of important history in an engaging, fictional format. It's not easy, and Ms. Weir does a respectable job of research. 

But Wolf Hall this book is not. Where Hilary Mantel completely immersed us in the politics and multiple interpersonal relationships of the time, and truly inhabited Thomas Cromwell (her own version of him, but a thoroughly fleshed-out version nonetheless), Ms. Weir avoids telling us about essentially anything outside of Elizabeth's home life or the politics of succession, and has created a bright but, I found, distant protagonist. Elizabeth was brilliant as a child, and quite educated, but we get no sense of her following the political crises of the time, and of her forming her own opinion about global affairs.

To hear this book tell it, women--even important women--spend all their time hoping for masques, getting fitted for beautiful gowns, playing hide and seek in the garden, and eating cold chicken and wine. They spend a lot of time nervously clasping their hands over their stomachers and mopping up clots of blood during their monthly courses.

Ms. Weir does do a good job of showing Elizabeth's growing attachment to the idea of being queen, as it becomes clearer that it could happen, but other than her private religious leanings (how they are feared by some and celebrated by others, and the stirrings of her eventual moderate policies concerning religion from observing her brother, Edward's, and her sister, Mary's, intolerance), we have no sense of her sense of geopolitics. Instead, an interminable amount of time is spent watching an invented pregnancy, which has the effect of keeping the reader far away from any real goings-on in England. There is the occasional mention of how Cicero is Elizabeth's favorite ancient author, and her tutors marvel at her understanding of the old Greek and Roman political philosophies, but it's lip service. We never see her forming opinions on current events--unless the current event has to do with Thomas Seymour's dark good looks or Mary Tudor's false pregnancy.

To be fair to Ms. Weir, even books about Henry VIII are obsessed with personal issues--his inability to produce an male heir, and his six wives--rather than the real politics of the time (the conflict with Spain, Rome, and the Emperor Charles V). While you can argue that these "personal" problems are political because they impact succession issues and government stability, I just hoped for a more in-depth view of an educated woman taking power against all odds.

This book makes you want to scream, "See? This is why we can't have monarchies as institutions!" Any human being who grows up spoiled and sheltered in a court has no idea what the real world is like; the children of even brilliant people are usually quite average; heredity is no guarantee of political acumen. If you grow up in the line of succession, you're most likely a very poor candidate to be actually in charge.

Did the editor tell Ms. Weir to make this book sensational? If so, that advice was a huge disservice to its value of it as a teaching document. The entire pregnancy story line undermines the strength of her protagonist's character, not to mention the real Elizabeth's actual strength. We see an infatuation with an older man, a flirtation getting wildly out of control, Catherine Parr's inability to rein her husband in, Elizabeth's mooning obsession, her innocent agreement to a sexual encounter, her subsequent rape (she wants to tell him no), her difficult pregnancy, and a traumatizing miscarriage. This, we're told, is why she swears off men: because she has experienced first-hand the pain of sex and childbearing. Yes, yes, she also remembers that her mother essentially went to the block because of sex and childbearing, and sees that her sister Mary loses political power to Philip of Spain by marrying. But those observations feel almost incidental to the visceral response we see Elizabeth have to the bodily harms of conceiving and delivering children--to the blood and pain. Inventing this lost baby as a formative experience for her diminishes the shrewd decision-making of the historical Elizabeth. 

As a reader on goodreads puts it so well:

For me, the fascinating thing about Elizabeth I was her resolution to trust in her own judgement for the good of her people. This is remarkable. Where did she find the strength to resist all demands she marry? How did she come to this conclusion? What forces were at work in her psychologically? She not only claimed power, she wielded it masterfully. Weir gives us no psychological insight into how that woman developed and flowered at a time when everything was working against her.

In my opinion, the book that answers these excellent questions will be the book that delves into Elizabeth's education and intellect. Ms. Weir aptly shows Elizabeth's intellect in only one area: the cunning to stay alive, even through tight scrapes in which others think she is a either a real or symbolic threat to the throne. 

Has any rape been more limply dealt with by an author? Throughout the rest of the novel, even after Thomas Seymour's plot to marry Elizabeth in order to become king is revealed, even years after his execution, Elizabeth still moons over him. She never once ruminates over his lack of tenderness or love when he impregnated her (well, she thinks about it once, but then waxes on about his charm); she never thinks privately of that forced act as a violation. I think Ms. Weir would argue that a sheltered, 16th-century girl couldn't understand such "feminist" issues, but I don't believe it. As a girl who has been raised to equate "virtue" with political value, and later, as a grown woman who understands sex, she would see it for what it was. Furthermore, was Elizabeth ever, ever likely to have been left on her own for one minute, except when she was actually urinating or defecating in one of Chelsea's privies? No. Kat would simply not have gone to chapel that morning, especially if Elizabeth was feeling poorly.

Historical inaccuracy: I was also disappointed by the other myths that are promoted in the book, many of which historians not longer subscribe to: that Anne Boleyn had a sixth finger on one hand; that Jane Grey was abused by her parents; that every woman we encounter tolerates sex without even an inkling that it can be pleasurable. But mostly I'm irritated that in this fake history, Kat is a gossipy, useless woman who lets her own crush on Thomas Seymour endanger her charge. The real Kat tutored Elizabeth in four languages, history, philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics. They were friends for life. Kat's uselessness is unfair, and only there out of expediency: to further the fake plot of Elizabeth's pregnancy.

The writing. I was disappointed that anything remotely political was "reported" to us via another character, in a vague passive tense, as if from a textbook.

Echoes of the public outcry against the burnings soon reached Woodstock. "The people are angry," Sir Henry said. "There have been widespread protests, and seditious writings against the Queen and the Council. Many offenders have been caught and put in the pillory." With the country in ferment, and increasing numbers being sent to the stake, news and rumors flew fast. There were terrible stories of the sufferings of protestant martyrs, for such they were now being called.

In sum: While I do think I got an accurate view of court life in the 16th-century--full of back-stabbing, and colossal wastes of time and tax money--I don't think I got inside Elizabeth herself with this novel. I was disappointed that Ms. Weir reached for a bodice-ripper plot point that even she admits in the author's note she doesn't believe, as a historian. I wanted to understand a growing brilliant mind, and the evolution of a political philosophy, wrapped up in the unlikely package of a very young woman--a young woman who eventually had the confidence and savvy to want to rule alone.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: a long build-up to a very short actual race, with Ms. Stiefvater focused laser-like on character and setting, while losing track of plot and pacing again.

Plot summary (so I don't forget). The book starts with a flashback: little Sean Kendrick watches his father get killed on the beach at the Scorpio races. His dad is riding Corr, one of the capaill uisce--sea horses that have been snatched from the water and barely tamed, and are famed for their speed and murderous unpredictability. Before the race, young Sean whispers to Corr not to eat his dad, and Corr technically obliges him.

In the present day, Sean Kendrick has grown up into a talented, hunky stable hand, and a four-time winner of the Scorpio Races. He longs to buy Corr, having a special bond with the horse, but his boss, Benjamin Malvern (think Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life) won't sell him. Malvern makes Sean live in a tiny room above the stables, but even so, he likes Sean better than his own spoiled, useless son, Matthew (Mutt). Mutt resents Sean so badly, his anger escalates from peeing in Sean's boots to trying to kill him.

Puck Connely decides to ride in the Scorpio Races, too. At first she wants to do it to keep her brother Gabe from moving to the mainland for a few weeks longer (he can't leave without watching that she comes through safely, can he?), but soon she's hoping to actually win, in order to pay off the mortgage on their house, which Malvern is calling due. Puck didn't know Malvern was her family's mortgage lender, but that's okay because neither did we.

Puck is not going to ride a water horse, she's going to ride her beloved Dove, an ordinary but devoted palfrey. When it's clear that the male islanders and riders hate the idea of a woman in the race, Puck and Sean begin to train together. Corr is relatively polite to Dove, and might even fancy her, which is unusual for a water horse. And Dove might actually have a chance at winning, because she can run in a straight line without trying to kill things or leap into the water. Nevertheless, her posted odds are 45 to 1. Sean and Puck decide that on race day she'll take a path through the water, where the other riders are afraid to go, and Sean will protect her flank. 

An American customer of Malvern, George Holly, would like to hire Sean away, but Sean won't leave Corr. Sean eventually bargains with Malvern to let him buy Corr if he wins the race one more time.

On race day, Mutt threatens Puck, knowing that Sean cares about her. Mutt's water horse, Skata, attacks Dove. Sean and Corr drive him into the sea, where he's never heard from again. Sean falls off Corr, and is in danger of being trampled to death by the other horses. Corr stands over him, protecting him, but has such a badly wounded leg, he'll never run again. Puck and Dove win the race. 

Puck has earned enough to buy back her house, but there's not enough left over to buy Corr. Luckily, Puck's younger brother, Finn, reveals that he has used some of the money from selling his car to bet on Puck, and at 45:1 odds, the winnings turn out to be a hefty sum. Puck meets with Benjamin Malvern to pay off the house and buy Corr for Sean. She also demands a job at the stables.

At the end, while George Holly and Puck watch, Sean tries to release Corr back into the sea, where his wounded leg won't bother him. (We are supposed to take that as fact, but don't water horses depend on their legs to swim?) Corr refuses to leave, gimping along after him toward land. Awww.

Hot damn, Ms. Stiefvater's writing is enjoyable. The words on each page expertly evoke the deliberately-vague period (1910-ish, because it's the era of the women's suffrage movement), the place (the UK, an island, north), and the magic (killer sea horses). As with the Raven Cycle, I accept that fantastical beings exist in our own world without question, because the writing closes around me and lulls me into believing. This island is a worthy sister to the one in Margo Lanagan's The Brides of Rollrock Island, which is saying something.  

The romance. I'm okay that there are no fireworks, and you should be, too. To begin with, The Scorpio Races contains one of the most romantic interactions I've ever read (the Sean-taking-Puck's-pulse moment). And the novel is a bit like a Japanese manga in that you ship the characters hard, even though they barely get to kissing. Let's face it, hesitancy is more satisfying than gushing protestations of love or explicit erotica. In fact, the slow romance is one of the great things about this novel. It means that Puck's conflict and Sean's conflict take center stage. It means they're deep and trusting friends before they get together intimately (which we never get to see, but surmise to be something like what George Holly crassly predicts: "I'll come back next year and you'll have a nest of horses outside your window and Puck Connely in your bed and I'll buy from you instead of Malvern"). Additionally, it suits the characters themselves to have this slow build: they are both excruciatingly reserved and fiercely independent--not the mooning Bella and Edward types.

Does Ms. Stiefvater hold herself to a word count every day? There seems to be a lot of rambling filler that should have been sculpted or removed in subsequent drafts. Or perhaps the author adds ordinary scenes in between climax scenes to try to get the pacing right, and actually damages it. In Chapter 48, for example, Puck comes home after riding wild Corr on the cliff, and Finn has nervously scrubbed the house from top to bottom. We see that Puffin has (against all odds) survived the attack of the capaill near the shed. Finn and Puck fret yet again about whether Puck will get hurt in the race and whether they'll lose the house, and Finn pulls his mattress into her bedroom to sleep, like he did as a young boy. What was the purpose of this chapter? It's almost as if Ms. Stiefvater thinks we need to decompress after the romance and tension of a training scene, and wants us to understand how long Puck and Finn have to live with their anxieties before the race, so she inserts a scene of "troubled domestic life" for good measure. There are a fair number of complaints on goodreads that this book is long, dull, and not enough happens until the race, and this sort of chapter is partly to blame. Ms. Stiefvater enjoys character--and in this book, setting--more than she cares about pacing and plot.

Plot holes. Well, "holes" is a strong word. In this category I also include, "the introduction of unnecessary material that doesn't have any real reason to be there."

--The entire character of George Holly, maybe. He's just there to show us things: that Sean is a talented worker; that Sean is opening up to friendships. He's that guy who tells our main characters they're in love. Ms. Stiefvater keeps looking for things for Holly to do, to justify his existence (hence the oddball, out-of-place romance with Annie).

--Mr. Malvern doesn't blink at Mutt's death. (Puck implies that this is a delayed reaction because the body hasn't been recovered and there's nothing to mourn. But would any father, even a negligent one, put his missing son so quickly out of his mind?)

--What is the point of bringing a capaill uisce to the shed...just to force Finn, Puck, and Gabe to the butcher's house to see what Gabe has been up to? And am I mis-reading, or in chapter 38 does Ms. Stiefvater imply that Gabe and Peg Gratton have been having an affair, and that's the reason Gabe has to leave the island? Gabe is in a relatively intimate position, standing close behind her at the sink, speaking to her in a low voice about "not having the strength..." Did anyone else wonder why that moment was in there?

--Did Sean get the shell? Did we ever actually see it handed from from the horse-witch-lady to him? This was one of those sections where the mystical-Maggie writing that I usually love trod over the line into becoming obfuscating and confusing.

--Dory Maude and Elizabeth try to get George Holly to marry their blind sister, Annie. Huh? This comes from out of the blue. And why do the sisters send Holly off with Puck for breakfast? How does that help their cause? It seems like it's just a chance for Holly to be alone with Puck so he can say the line, "I hope you won't wait for Sean Kendrick to realize he's lonely."

--Tommy Falk is introduced just to kill him off. We know he's one of the young men who plans to move to the mainland, and we see him help Puck and Finn escape from the capaill uisce in the shed. But his biggest scene is in chapter 52 for the dinner with Sean at the Connely house, where we're supposed to remember he's such a dear friend of the family, and then a mere three chapters later he's a goner. To boot, we have no idea why Puck was looking for him on the beach when she found him dead.

Screeching POV changes. This happens pretty frequently in Stiefvater's work. For instance, Chapter 26 starts out in Puck's POV on the cliff, watching Sean ride bareback, and switches to Sean's head, racing the mare against Dove (the mare that jumped unexpectedly into the sea).

Redshirt deaths. When you promise killer horses from the sea, you have to deliver on some gore. But it's hard to kill the characters you love. Heck, Ms. Stiefvater can't even kill the barn cat. So instead she invents peripheral characters we don't really know, kills them, and hopes we'll internalize how dangerous the races are from that. Wah, some stranger named Prince has died. Wah, supposed-dear-friend Tommy Falk has died (and yet even Tommy's father says that his move to the mainland would have been the same as dying for his family, so, whatever, light the pyre). 

In sum. Ms. Stiefvater is becoming masterful at character, atmospheric writing, and setting. If she can tighten up her pacing and plot, she'll be a force to be reckoned with. 

Halfway Home is an utterly charming, very slim, self-published graphic novel. The author-illustrator, Christine Mari Inzer, a senior in high school, was just shy of sixteen when she spent eight weeks with her maternal grandparents in a small city outside of Tokyo. Because it's more travel-diary than memoir, this would be an excellent book to give to a young person visiting Japan for the first time.

Chock full of loving drawings of food, clothing, and tourist destinations, Inzer perfectly captures what it's like to be a teenager in a new place--a place she feels both connected to and foreign in. The beauty here is in her ability to home in on adolescent minutiae that an adult might mistakenly gloss over, but which reveal the subtly observant way teens understand the world around them...by analyzing their own immediate reaction to it, and their place in it, as if they were as important as the scenery itself. Thus, for example, most of her time at the Zen garden of the temple of Ryoan-ji--a spot that's supposed to allow you to transcend the physical world and achieve a more enlightened level--is spent worrying about how distractible her mind is, and how she must be meditating wrong, how she can only find thirteen of the fifteen rocks (you're supposed to be able to see fourteen from any given angle), and "What language are those tourists speaking? It must be French." This is a bright, funny, and engaged girl, experiencing new kinds of beauty, joy, and loneliness for the first time, and letting us tag along with her.

Am I cutting her some slack for being a teenager? Yes, of course (but only a little is necessary, since this book is great for what it is). The art in Halfway Home is sweet and accurate and at times confident, but somewhat primitive, and there are moments when she unnecessarily explicates themes that we can already see in the text and illustrations. In the hand-written introduction, for example, she says, "The title refers to my somewhat feeling half at home in both Japan and America, being born to parents of both countries," perhaps not trusting that the entire book already conveys that idea. A photo of a vending machine on the verso faces her illustration of a similar vending machine on the recto, making the photo unnecessary. (This happens a few times, for instance with the Temple of the Golden Pavilion and the Gate of Asakusa, which her drawings render well enough without including photos. However, in some instances the photographs enhance the drawings and make a curious event more real, like the Condomania building and the pillar at Nara.) The book is also kinda slight for eleven bucks. 

But then she draws herself on the subway in a page called "The Problem With Japanese Boys," growing comically desperate to catch a handsome boy's eye (LOOK I'M CUTE) while he plays endlessly with his phone, and her beginner mistakes are entirely forgiven. Ms. Inzer already displays the sparks of a sensitive writer, a keen observer, and an artist who knows how to make us feel included. 

Whaaaat just happened?

Seriously, only Julia Whelan's talented narration could make this rambling, pointless, didactic story sound at all cohesive. It seems to be about how the steadfastness, honesty, and pure love of the little girl (Gerda) served her well for years in her quest to rescue her best friend (Kai) from the snowy North. Unfortunately Mr. Andersen tries to throw a Hail Mary pass at the end, telling us the point is "always stay childlike at heart." Wikepedia says this is one of Andersen's most acclaimed fairy tales, but by today's literary standards I think it's a mess.

(The Snow Queen was Audible's free holiday gift this year, and it was a pleasure to hear Ms. Whelan's voice again.)

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: While I love both ideas in this novel--a protagonist who wants to be an artist despite the fact that it's socially discouraged, and historical fiction about women's rights--the title of this book should have been A Mad, Wicked Series of Convenient Coincidences: Everybody Wins.

Caveat: I'm very close to a person who has trained as an Old Master painter in a four-year atelier. Thus, in terms of this one aspect of the plot, almost no depiction of how classically-trained artists think or work will satisfy me. 

The writing. The language is quite good: it's old-fashioned enough to feel period-appropriate, but casual enough to be accessible to young people. Sharon Biggs Waller lived in England for six years, so her grasp of the British dialect feels authentic. 

The concept. In 1909, Victoria Darling is at a French finishing school, but secretly attending an artist atelier on the side. When she's caught modeling nude for her fellow students on a day that the real model didn't show up, she is expelled from her school and sent home to her parents, precariously close to disgrace. In order to salvage her reputation, Vicky's parents encourage her to accept betrothal to Edmund Carrick-Humphrey, a young man with his own youthful indiscretions to patch over, who seems willing to give her free reign in their marriage. Vicky decides to accept the proposal, hoping that Edmund will allow her to attend the Royal College of Art (RCA), and pay her tuition. But Vicky stumbles on the suffragette movement and a hot police constable, William Fletcher, and she walks a tightrope between finagling what she wants from those around her by seeming to be compliant, while also dabbling in the women's movement and spending too much alone-time with Will. 

The main character. For crying out loud, people on Goodreads, stop flipping out about how unlikable Victoria is! She's young, she's manipulative of the people around her, but that's central to her growth and development as a character. Of course the author knew she was making Victoria "use" the people around her.  

Coincidences. The writing is fairly sophisticated, so here is where the story felt a bit "debut" and unpolished to me: the plot moves along via convenient coincidences.

For example, in the very beginning, even Victoria's conflict is orchestrated without a hitch: the atelier model doesn't show up for work, and the male students refuse to substitute for her, having all taken turns posing before. Etienne, the cause of the model's absence, vomits because of his hangover, so he's out, even though by rights he ought to be the model that day. Pierre disrespects Vicky, so she volunteers to pose, in order to be an equal colleague. In a quick reversal, Pierre does respect her because of this decision, and immediately she's invited out by "the boys" to the inn for drinks after their drawing session, where, again immediately, they seek out her opinion on art. Oops, as soon as she leaves the inn, her friend Lily is waiting to inform her that the gossipy girl at their finishing school chose that very day to peer through the atelier window, and saw Vicky in the buff in a room full of men. Vicky is on the next boat out of France. 

This too-smooth unfolding of the plot continues to happen later: the very first day she slips out of her house through the window to sketch in the city, she ends up at a suffragette rally. At this very first rally, she gets arrested. (Can't we see her drawing a few days first?) And lo and behold, she has been arrested for assaulting a police officer--she happens to have been shoved against the one-and-only hunky, good-guy cop assigned to the suffragette rally (P.C. Fletcher), a young man we instantly know will become a love interest.

At the very end of the novel, after weeks of planning (and seeing only a glimpse of Will Fletcher in all that time), Vicky and her suffragette pals happen to hang political posters precisely on P.C. Fletcher's patrol route, while he's walking the beat. Those ominous footsteps of a constable that we hear pounding behind her as she tries to escape? By now we know they're going to be--coincidence!--P.C. Fletcher, the man who will not only let her go free, but will hide her bicycle in the bushes and also feed her insider information about which beats won't be staffed by the cops in the future, so she can continue her poster-hanging subversion.

And how about the fact that the cop she falls in love with happens to be an aspiring writer, whose two-penny novelettes require illustrations? We know right away, practically the moment we hear he's a writer, that one potential happy ending is for her to make money by partnering with Will. (Really, how likely is it that the big-hearted cop is a writer at all in this period?) How likely is it that her chaperon, Sophie, happens to be a secret suffragette, making all of Vicky's freedom possible--to draw Will in the nude, and to meet his family in the country, for example. In the end, Victoria gets everything she wants, with no gray areas or sacrifice: the likelihood of a spot in the RCA whenever she next applies; a poor, noble, devoted (and handsome) constable as her mate; her parents' eventual acceptance; a money-making career in illustration. This book should be all about sacrifice, but it's not, it's happy-endings all around.

Not challenging Victoria enough. The end result of these coincidences is that Vicky is not genuinely challenged in this novel. We're told that she's struggling to achieve her goals, and we do see her working on her portfolio, but at every step the solutions to her problems seem to fall into place for her. Even her betrothed, Edmund, is a reasonably kind, laissez-faire future husband--one who is willing to use his money to pay for her art education. (Edmund has to be sullied in some other way for us not to "ship" him, so we eventually see him being superficial in his character, and limp in standing up to his father: Edmund is poisoned by his wealth, whereas Will's salt-of-the-earth, country background makes him noble and strong.) Some of the readers' complaints that Vicky is spoiled and manipulative are, I think, a misdirected observation that she gets what she needs without trying. Vicky's last line of the novel is "Opportunity is nothing if you don't grab it with both hands." I would add: especially when your opportunity is such low-hanging fruit.

"Aren't you terrified of marrying a scandalous woman?"

 

Although Edmund had besmirched his own name, it was easier for a single man to recover from scandal than a woman. But because a married man was thought to be responsible for his wife's behavior, a husband was often painted with his wife's tarry brush. 

 

But truly, Edmund didn't seem to care a whit.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: Ms. Stiefvater lost a bit of organizational steam in this installment, which doesn't advance the overall four-book story enough, cramming what little action there is into the very last pages.

Where's the plot, Maggie? While Blue Lily has all of the same wonderful qualities that I loved in The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves--namely, moments of beautiful language, tons of witty banter, and meaningful interpersonal relationships--it's just plain missing a clear narrative arc. Laura James of the blog "Love is Not a Triangle" found these two tweets by Ms. Stiefvater, which I think hint at the problem:

"I suspect my preference for not finishing a book rather than skimming is because I read for prose & character, not for plot." (Maggie Stiefvater, Twitter, October 14, 2014.)

 

"I don't care what happens in a book; I care why it happens." (Ibid.)

These sentiments are fine for her taste as a reader, but great books need prose, character, and plot. Many people have given Blue Lily, Lily Blue a pass in the plot department because it's part of a "cycle," but I believe each book in a series should stand somewhat on its own, and this one felt a bit like a meandering Act Three in a four-act play. Had Ms. Stiefvater's manuscript been a standalone, it would either not have sold or it would have been ruthlessly edited to have a cohesive arc. All along, the Raven Cycle has been plagued with loose threads that readers have good-naturedly ignored, knowing that all will eventually be revealed, but this is the first book to be missing a clear story. The best you can say is this: Maura was missing at the beginning; Maura is found at the end. To be fair, there are also incremental advances in each character's quest (except for poor Noah, whose role in this installment is to be possessed by the ley line at random moments), but it all happens with no architecture.

Here are ten things that happen in Blue Lily, Lily Blue that do not a story arc make:

1. We start out with Colin Greenmantle taking over the Defense Against the Dark Arts Class--oops, I mean Latin class--and Blue's mother trapped in an underground cave in a sort of time vortex. Greenmantle is the former (evil) employer of hit-man Mr. Gray, and is still after the Graywarren (which is not a thing, but is a boy, Ronan). 

2. Colin has brought his wife, Piper, along on his search and she turns out to be noticeably more remorseless than he is, and fully invested in the project (although we never learn why).

3. Malory flies over from the UK, in one of the most pointless physical introductions of a character ever. It seems that Ms. Stiefvater doesn't really know what to do with him, now that she has flown him across the Pond, and so she puts him in Gansey's SUV and has him roam around investigating the ley line in ways we never hear about later. The service dog feels like a way of "painting character" rather than really giving him character. We learn that he's magical, too: he can sense the auras of the people around him (Blue's aura is blue), and when he's in a crowd, that awareness is overwhelming and causes him anxiety.

4. There are many more instances of the ley line messing with Gansey's mind, introducing the sensation of hordes of bees or hornets or wasps (buzzing in his ears, wings brushing his face).

5. We learn that Ronan's little brother looks a lot like his mom and is an airhead because he's also a dream creature, fabricated by Ronan, in fact, and Ronan is determined to save him from her fate by being able to pull them into the real world with a powerful little globe of magic that will undoubtedly become pivotal in the fourth book.

6. Blue pines for Gansey, Gansey pines for Blue. They fake-kiss and surreptitiously hold hands and have regular nighttime accidental phone calls and it's all pretty sweet.

7. We learn that Blue's face is woven (painted?) multiple times on an ancient Welsh banner, and she's depicted with blood-red hands (red hands means something important in the lore, but now I've forgotten).

8. Adam sues for emancipation from his dad and has to face him in court, and is surprised that Blue and his Raven boyfriends show up to support him. This is the book in which Adam is learning to accept help without feeling like he's a loser who will be indebted to them. (Hence, we see him try to enter the state park alone without enough cash, and he grumbles about how Gansey would have paid and made him feel miserable. But the second time he tries to enter, he accepts Blue's $5 contribution without any self-loathing.)

9. A local man named Jesse Dittley owns a cursed cave that has killed his father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great-great grandfather. Don't get too attached to Jesse Dittley, even though he's lovable. After all, we're told right up front that he's a redshirt, because Blue remembers his name from the night she was in the cemetery recording the names of the dead. (Which reminds me: I want to go back to that scene in The Raven Boys to see how she could have thought he was a woman ("Jessie"), given that his voice is described as being so deep and booming.)

10. In the end: Persephone dies. Maura is found, along with Buttercup, Blue's dad, who is an ancient Welsh soldier guarding Glyndwr. Jesse dies trying to defend the cave from Piper and her two caricature cronies. Blue's fame-hungry Aunt Neve shows up in the cave and with Piper's help wakes the third sleeper who should not be awakened.

New characters are caricatures. Side characters are an area of weakness in this novel, and the way they are caricatures may be endemic in the series. Remember how superficially fleshed-out Kavinsky was in The Dream Thieves? Other than our core group of characters--Gansey, Blue, Adam, Noah, Ronan, Mr. Gray, and the women of 300 Fox Way--the secondary characters are colorful but not terribly real. Colin and Piper, for example, have a fun hate-love repartee, and are given personal tics that make them "unique" (think: Colin's love of cheese and crackers), but as one reviewer on goodreads hilariously remarked, "I felt almost as if I was dealing with Boris and Natasha and their latest dastardly plot against Moose and Squirrel." Malory is given a dog and a snobby attitude about tea (British cliche, much?) which makes him colorful but not real to me. Of all the new characters, Jesse Dittley felt the most real to me, and yet I knew from the moment we met him that he was disposable.

The hand of the author. This is the first book in the series that occasionally shows Ms. Stiefvater's planning. For instance, I can see that she wanted Adam to make strides in his acceptance of love and help. So she sends him to the state park alone, with not enough cash, so that he can think about (and resent) how Gansey would have stepped in to pay the parking fee. Thus, this event feels like it's there to set up the future scenes in which 1. Blue helps pay for the entry fee and Adam graciously accepts it, and 2. Gansey and friends show up at his emancipation trial and Gansey uses his political clout to help Adam's cause. Yet it seemed that the author worried about the scene feeling entirely pointless to the readers before they reach #1 and #2, so she also gives him a fleeting vision of Colin Greenmantle (perhaps) arriving at the state park with ley-line surveying equipment. Unfortunately, this last vision itself isn't very helpful to the plot either, other than showing that the ley line can instill visions, and that Adam is receptive to visions, so we're left feeling like this whole state park scene has been filler. Later, we realize it was a "set-up" to show Adam's growth.

Malory, and Henry Cheng. Just what was the point of forcing the readers to meet Malory? Was it that Ms. Stiefvater (via Gansey) had referred to him often enough that she thought she'd be derelict in her duty not to make him real to us? Or will his physical presence be important in the fourth book--will we all travel to the UK for the end of the adventure? If the latter, why not just meet him then? The fact that I'm wondering about his importance just shows how unsatisfying these loose threads can be when the book is not a standalone. For now Malory the person (rather than Malory, the faceless long-distance research associate of Gansey) feels pointless to us. Similarly, Henry Cheng, the boy who wants Gansey to sign his petition, is both too present and not important enough in this installment. If I search the Internet, I find evidence that Ms. Stiefvater has told her fans Henry will appear in Book Four. But should I have to look that up? Shouldn't he pull his own weight in this book? Without that advanced knowledge he seems to be there simply to provide a venue for the falling construction brick pile that doesn't kill Adam.

My prediction is still on track. I'm glad that my prediction still seems to be coming true: that Gansey is some sort of incarnation of Glyndwr, the "sleeping" king. Blue Lily, Lily Blue makes me think (although I'm much less sure about this) that Blue might be some sort of incarnation of Glyndwr's wife, and that (in a soul-seeks-soul way), they are drawn to each other for that reason. Perhaps Glyndwr's wife was even called Jane.

Anyway, I'm still on board, Maggie. And I'm truly enjoying the ride. Bring on Book Four.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: A reasonably strong debut, The Sea of Tranquility is fatally wounded by its ending, and is ultimately outclassed by the less-well-known 2014 young-adult novel, Perfectly Good White Boy, by Carrie Mesrobian.

Adult or YA? Although the book was sold as adult, it's YA. I have no idea why the agent/editor/publisher thought differently...or was it all a strategy on the publisher's part to win an Alex Award from the American Library Association? (The Alex is given every year to ten books written for adults with special appeal to teens.) If so, the tactic worked: Tranquility won an Alex, despite the fact that there were better YA novels published in 2012 that didn't win any ALA/YALSA awards, and despite the fact that Ms. Millay actually violated a few important ethical tenets of YA that I think YA editors would have caught. (More on that below.)

The ending. For me, the attempted rape of Nastya by Kevin Leonard marked the deterioration of the story into a slightly melodramatic, cliched ghost of the first, stronger half. What was the purpose of that assault? As with many moments in this novel in the latter half, if you look carefully you can see the author's hand--you can see her using characters as puppets rather than letting them behave and react as real human beings. Kevin's assault was orchestrated so that Nastya could realize in the middle of a bad decision that she wasn't ruined by her near murder at age fifteen, and that although she had suffered the loss of her identity as a daughter and pianist, she wanted to survive, to eventually get well, and to not come totally apart. It's disappointing to have this happen via a rape scene, though, because rapes aren't plot devices. In addition, Nastya hasn't shown destructive behavior at all until this point--other than the contrived no-talking rule, and dressing in a way that elicits unwanted attention from boys. She has spent a good deal of time learning how to thwart aggressive attacks, and teaching her friends how to do it. So abandoning control of her body to tell us that she's self-loathing feels forced here, when all of her behavior has been purposeful until now. But more than that, Kevin's attack is downright brutal in its depiction, but because his assault was not really what was important to Ms. Millay in that scene, she gives Kevin a pass, and has characters essentially brush off the incident later, when it becomes inconvenient to the forward momentum of the story. 

Further melodrama: why did Nastya disappear, other than to introduce a last climax in the final act, where everyone who loves her is panicked and despondent? 

Unsatisfying (in terms of serious literature) Happily Ever After: After five short weeks of therapy and being with her family, Ms. Millay hastily wraps up Emilia's healing process. Emilia returns to Josh's garage and the two broken but hopeful characters slowly help to mend each other at the end. Which brings me to...

Passionate pursuits, and finding fulfillment when they're lost. I thought this is what the book was going to be about, but nope. Fundamentally, Nastya is rescued by a boy, no matter how hard the author tries to massage the narrative to say that she isn't. (Well, to Ms. Millay's credit, Nastya is also partly rescued by Drew's family, and in the end, her own.) What had broken Emilia was losing her identity and having the thing she loved (playing the piano competitively) ripped away from her. She was on a quest to find a way to matter again to herself, and I wanted that to come from her--to come from discovering that she could channel her passion into another area, and find fulfillment despite her loss. Sure, it's great she discovers that her family is there for her. (Actually, Nastya gets to have two devoted families, despite not saying a word to any of them.) I wanted the ending to be more ambiguous: if Emilia tells us there's a chance that as they get healthier, she and Josh might grow apart, I want to be left with that wonder and that worry. I don't want an epilogue that says, "Gotcha! They lived happily ever after!" A satisfying, realistic ending would have been for the reader to see Emilia working on her own healing, alone. I wanted to see her baking, talking again, living with her family, and getting therapy. Yes, that's exactly what happens for five weeks, but that's not long enough before she's back in Josh's garage. In fact, we learn that--in a moment of unexpected magical realism--she saw Josh's garage when she died, the way Josh's grandfather saw the red brick house and swing of his future bride when his heart briefly stopped after a construction accident. This isn't a joke on Emilia's part, since the reader remembers the odd reaction she had to seeing Josh's garage on her first run (she had seen this place before; she knew she must return to see it again). As retroactively "meet cute" as this is, it severely damages the growth of the main character, to have it preordained that Josh was the love of her life, the person who would save her.

YA ethical violations: As I mentioned, YA authors and editors are careful with issues of sexual violence and violence, and how they're treated. How did this book get a pass from  progressive readers on the following issues? 1. Drew wonders aloud why the boy who beat Emilia nearly to death didn't rape her, because she's so beautiful. Does this really not make sense to him? What sort of caveman rock has he been living under? Meanwhile, Josh doesn't disabuse him of the notion that rape is violence, not sex, and is unrelated to how beautiful the victim is. (Josh does get angry at this point, and my reading partner thought Josh was arguing that point, but if you look closely the source of his anger is his misunderstanding that Drew is making an awful, inappropriate joke about how sexy Nastya is). In YA, you can't have a good guy (Drew) talk about rape incorrectly to another good guy (Josh) and not somehow impart the important point that rape has nothing to do with looks or the victim and everything to do with violence and the perpetrator. 2. As I mentioned, Nastya is saved by Josh in the end, even though the author tries to make you think she isn't.  3. The author provides an "excuse" for Aidan's attack on Emilia (he thought she was someone else--his brother's ex-girlfriend, whom he blamed for his brother's suicide, and he had a psychotic break). Why does Ms. Millay do this? By not allowing the attack to be a senseless act, by trying to humanize a boy who beat a girl nearly to death, by adding this information without showing anything about the boy's psychological state over the last three years (do people have psychotic breaks and then go on to win art contests, with no apparent therapy?), Ms. Millay veers too close to squicky territory. Although the boy turns himself in and will be sentenced, we're left with this queer feeling that there is something "forgivable" in what he did. 4. Kevin Leonard tries to rape Nastya and there are no repercussions. Instead, Ms. Millay hastily dispatches him from the plot line by having him attempt to apologize in class, whereupon Josh kicks his chair. That's Kevin's punishment? 

Red Herrings and lost threads: I think a lot of the red herrings and lost threads come from the way Ms. Millay uses objects and people as plot devices. When they've served their purpose they disappear. Thus, the gift of the camera and Nastya's brief interest in photography could have led to a new hobby for her, but then the camera disappears and we realize it was just a device to give us one moment of reconciliation with her mom. I also thought the strength Nastya was building up in her hand by sanding Josh's pieces could have led her to the realization that she might someday enjoy playing piano for herself, though not professionally. (And there's even a piano in Josh's house!) But no, we only see that she can now frost cakes without her hand stuttering. Which in turn led me to believe that maybe her talent at baking would allow that to become her passion, replacing the piano. I envisioned her opening a bakery or catering baked goods (as Mrs. Leighton sort of suggested) by the end of the book (Emilia is eighteen and no one in this book has talked about college, after all). But no, baking is just a cute thing she does, and a device to allow her to interact with mothers who might otherwise think she's just a silent, scantily-clad, glaring teenager. Another lost thread: why is Nastya uncomfortable with loud rooms and loud environments? When we finally learn her secret, there's no link there. Also, why did Nastya collect names? Unfortunately it seemed like a convenient way for the author to"tell" us what the names Josh and Nastya mean at the end.

The main character who hides information from the reader. I don't mind when a narrator doesn't tell me something because she doesn't know it herself. I don't mind unraveling the mystery of what happened to her alongside her. But it's sort of an irritating commercial trick to have a knowledgable main character dangle the promise of learning The Big Secret as a way to keep me reading.

The not-talking decision. What is the point of this? Aren't there plenty of children who are survivors of horror who refuse to talk about what they've been through? It's too flimsy to attribute Nastya's vow of silence to the fact that she knows she's a bad liar, and she knew she'd have to tell her family everything, but she wasn't ready. If she's traumatized, wouldn't she never speak (as in Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak)? When Nastya chatted to herself in the shower, to "practice using her voice so she wouldn't lose it," the whole concept broke down for me. 

Pretty early on, Ms. Millay had to allow Nastya to talk to Josh and Drew, because otherwise their relationship would go nowhere. The author recognizes the genuine impossibility of a silent person in a social world: human beings cannot relate without communication (Nastya won't even write notes, unless they are simple memos, for instance giving someone an address). But then why is Nastya fawned all over in school? She quickly gathers the most interesting kids as her allies, whereas in real life she would be ignored: an oddity, a nothing. Something about her (please, not her beauty, but I fear so) is strongly compelling, and these very unusual/talented kids make friends with her and protect her. The not-speaking begins to feel like a "hook" when the other characters are not allowed to react realistically and appropriately to it. 

Contrived plot devices, giant coincidences. I don't think Ms. Millay intended for this book to be magical realism. If she had, perhaps some of the following items could have been mysteriously or mystically true. But in general the contrivances and coincidences were surrounded by such heavy material ("Everyone I've ever loved has died, so I'll never love again"), I'm inclined to think they're instead a result of her wrangling her plot into position. 1. parental figures are entirely removed: Aunt Margot, who is acting as her guardian, works the night hospital shift; Josh has no family to get in the way of the narrative; 2. the boy who nearly killed her, Aidan, happens to be a finalist in the very same art contest that Nastya's dear friend Clay Whitaker is in; 3. She doesn't tell anyone that she remembers her attacker because "she's not ready," but actually it feels to the reader that the author wants to control the moment she meets him, three years later; 4. The poem in English class is about second chances, right after Nastya and Josh break up (P.S. is the author related to Edna St. Vincent Millay?); 5. Nastya goes jogging late at night and ends up at Josh's house by accident on the first night. (Again, this one event may be magical realism, especially as it ties in with the ending line.)

Why did Nastya have sex with Josh and then leave him? It was completely out of character that she did it to "ruin" herself. Her relationship with him was comfortable and intimate, and she mentioned several times that his kisses were an invitation she wouldn't say no to forever. She wasn't a prude about drinking or language, or anyone else's sexual lives. It felt, again, like a contrivance designed to separate them for the sake of the plot. If she wanted to self-destruct, there were a lot of real ways Ms. Millay could have shown that--through drugs, drinking, promiscuous unprotected sex--but instead she defines the last straw in her "ruination" as having sex with someone she loves? And while we're on the subject of their sexual encounter, can he really tell that her hymen is intact, which is what Ms. Millay implies? (And further, would it still be intact after being kicked repeatedly in the vagina?)

Not killing your darlings. Ms. Millay seems unable to make her characters less than perfect. Every important character in this book is stunningly beautiful, handsome, talented, or all three. She makes Nastya dress like a "slut" (this is the word used by her classmates, and it's hugely problematic to me that it's never addressed) yet Nastya is also the Good Girl, the virgin. Meanwhile Josh sleeps with a girl he doesn't love, but readers are supposed to think it's okay because he's a good guy, and his hook-up partner (Leigh) is not committed to him either. Why is there an implied double standard? Why not allow Nastya sleep around--to truly make her self-destructive? Another way to kill her darlings for the sake of literature would have been an ambiguous ending. I was disappointed the author didn't trust her readers to handle the nuance of a realistic ending--one in which Nastya is healing, not being saved, and the happily-ever-after may or may not happen.

In sum: You should read Perfectly Good White Boy instead. Seriously, it's another contemporary, realistic book with a plot that seems to move slowly, where not much seems to happen except personal growth. Like Tranquility, Perfectly Good White Boy has a long, slow, deeply intimate relationship between a girl and a boy without sex. Unlike Tranquility, the main character is so incredibly real, so raw, you'll follow him anywhere just to hear him talk to you, while you desperately hope he'll learn to feel valuable to himself, and safe and loved by others.

I've delayed writing a review of The Emperor of All Maladies because the scope of the book is so sweeping I knew that I couldn't do it justice. So I'll just jot a few notes here.

I believe all oncologists and cancer surgeons should read this book, to understand their place in the history of discoveries (and incidentally of suffering) surrounding this ancient disease. If I were a cancer researcher, this book would be a combination Bible and road map for me--albeit a map that shows only how we got where we are, and not necessarily where we go from here. In fact, I wish a book just like it were written in every medical specialty. Someone needs to write the biography of obstetrics-gynecology, the biography of hematology, the biography of orthopedics, etc.

Suffice it to say, this is how I like my non-fiction. Mukherjee presents a rigorous, thorough "biography" of cancer from Egypt in 1600 BCE (the first recorded cancer, a breast cancer) to the present day. He delves into every aspect of the disease--historical, political, social, clinical, scientific, cultural--but he does it all fluidly, keeping a fairly straight chronology of the disease and science through time.

I learned so much. Which is to say, in the course of the book I came to realize how little I know--how little we as human beings know--about cancer. It's hard not to feel a bit hopeless at the task that faces us. Every cancer is unique in its genetics; in each case we have to know which of the many switches in the cell's DNA is the accelerator that's stuck, and which is the brake that's missing? And every cancer is unique in how it spreads in the body. For instance, I had always assumed, as many early researchers apparently did (hence the popularity of ever more disfiguring radical mastectomies in the 1970s), that breast cancer spreads somewhat radially before it leaps to lymph nodes. I used to proclaim, "If I get breast cancer, I'll choose a mastectomy just to be safe." I was surprised at how fundamentally impaired that logic is. Lumpectomies finally make sense to me in Mukherjee's hands: if a cancer is the type that stays relatively contained, a lumpectomy does the job of removing it. If a cancer is the type that spreads through the lymphatic system, a mastectomy--no matter how radical--might not help.

I learned about how the "War on Cancer" legislated by Richard Nixon was doomed, given that when it was launched in the early 70s, the science of cancer was still in its infancy. The mechanisms of a healthy cell becoming malignant, the genetics, and the methods of metastasis were as yet undiscovered. The goal of eradicating cancer was based on a lack of understanding of the scope of the problem: there is no single cure, the way penicillin was the cure for infection--each cancer must be understood on its own, and the treatment tailored to it.

I was unaware of just how much the early history of chemotherapy was characterized by a sort of trial-and-error science. With advances in genetics, some recent drugs have been developed by predicting the effect they'll have on the biology of the tumor, but many of the initial drugs came from a "flood it with poison and see if it works" methodology (first in the petri dish and then in the human body).

The evidence against smoking. This was one of the most riveting parts of the book for me: the scientific, political, and cultural connections drawn through the decades between cigarettes and cancer. He does a good job of discussing the propaganda campaigns of the tobacco companies, the lawsuits, and the obfuscation of what should have been overwhelming health data. While I knew that my mother's generation smoked more than mine did, I had no idea that in 1953 the average American smoked ten cigarettes a day. Every single pre-teen needs to be taught the science and statistics behind cigarette-induced cancer in the powerful way that Mukherjee describes them. Cancer rates of all kinds (not just cancer of the lungs) along with heart disease are so unequivocally tied to cigarette use, it's incredible to me that anyone still smokes. Mukherjee presents data that shows the education of young people is beginning to fail again, as the number of teen smokers has climbed in the last decade. With increased smoking in this generation, the statistical gains in health will diminish again to pre-1970s levels.

A lot of the book focuses on Dr. Sidney Farber, an awkward, formal man who made the political war on cancer possible, along with the wealthy socialite and medical philanthropist Mary Lasker, through their high-visibility "Jimmy Fund." I wasn't sure to what extent Farber was overrepresented in the book; Mukherjee received his training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and it's there that he conceived of the idea of a biography about cancer. (The book seems to have been a catharsis for him--a way of relieving the daily strain of such an emotionally difficult career.) Certainly Farber was an important figure in the popularization of the cause, and made advances in acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but a lot of words are devoted to him, and relatively fewer to more recent researchers who have figured out pathbreaking genetic sequences and other molecular details (Harold Varmus, Bert Vogelstein, and others)--people who have changed the level of sophistication of our attack on cancer, who will make non "trial-and-error" successes possible. 

In sum. Remember how disappointed I was with the scientific flimsiness of Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts, and the lack of thoroughness and ambition of Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes? Well, Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies is the standard-bearer for adult non-fiction for me now.

DNF: I can't do it. I can't finish this book.

I'd heard a lot of good things about Quiet from people in the publishing industry. In fact, many authors and editors consider themselves to be introverted, so perhaps that's why this book sang to them.

I made it a little over 50% through.

The science is flimsy, and the terms "introvert" and "extrovert" are actually never defined in any rigorous way (Cain gropes a lot, and she implies a lot). I had to call it quits after the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt chapter, which was so annoying in claiming that introverts have more empathy for suffering, on the basis of a flawed fMRI study that involved showing people photos of crying faces and car accidents. I consider myself something of an introvert and I was offended on behalf of all extroverts! I half expected her to say democrats are introverts and republicans are extroverts. Later, Cain drops the classic justification lines: "I'm married to an extrovert, so I'm not being prejudiced. I have lots of extroverted friends." 

I found a couple of things engaging. The book made me think about how workplaces and schools are mostly geared toward gregarious people, and how parents link that trait with future success for their kids; I liked reading about the different ways in which all these traits manifest themselves--for instance, the way it's possible to be talented in social situations and a good public speaker but to find those situations exhausting, and to not want to seek them out. In fact, I was more interested in the wide array of traits that people can have, and how they interact with each other to form that person's unique social makeup, whereas Cain seemed determined to label people as one thing or another.

The book was more like an astrology reading than scientific: you could search for traits that sang to you, that made you feel certain that yes, you're an introvert, and this explains so much of what you've experienced socially and professionally in your life, ignoring the parts that don't fit. But psychology is complex, and so many personality traits make up being "introverted" or "extroverted" that the analysis ultimately felt wishy-washy to me. More, I felt that the entire book was her navel-gazing foray into "Why am I the way I am?" and that she chose anecdotes and studies that fed her own view of herself and her skills, rather than allowing ambiguity or even data that disagreed with her self-image. I just couldn't stand the thesis anymore--the shoehorning of psychology into these two labels. 

Not nuanced, not thorough...not finishing.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: slightly imperfect, but ever so charming in its quirks, and just--well, totally lovable.

Where has Diana Wynne-Jones been all my life? This book makes me want to devour whatever else she wrote before her death in 2011. (I think I own Witch Week, if I dig through my shelves deeply enough, and her Tough Guide to Fantasyland was somehow our bathroom reading for a couple of months.)

What's delightful, besides everything: Wynne-Jones is one of those rare authors who remembers what it's like to be young and writes with a freedom that rivals a child's imagination. At the same time, she maturely maneuvers the reader through her story, mostly in full control the whole time. Howl's Moving Castle is one of those books that deeply engages your imagination without frantically overstimulating you--a book that you look forward to picking up every night in bed so that you can fall into another world and forget the current one for a while.

Characters. Nearly all of the main characters are fully realized. Sure, the minor ones like Fanny (Sophie's stepmother), Martha (her half-sister), and Lettie (her full sister), are less fleshed out, but they're not flat. 

Setting. Like Megan Whalen Turner, it's clear that Wynne-Jones has a map in her mind while she's writing--complete with terrain and climate.

Themes. No middle-grade or young-adult book can become a classic if it isn't complex enough to have themes, and this one is chock full of 'em. For instance, fate versus self-determination: I love the way Sophie is resigned to her lot in life, as if fate has already determined its course, until the Witch's curse pushes her out of the house and makes moving forward her only option. Stuck in an old body, she loses her inhibitions and is freed to own the strength that she already possesses. There are a lot of questions of self-determination here: is it true that eldest children are doomed to dull, average lives? Meanwhile Howl's "slithering out" of obligations is his way of trying to be the master of his own path, and yet he moves inexorably toward the realization of the Witch's curse no matter what he does, almost in the same way that Greek heroes can't escape the prophecy of an oracle. The notions of home and family are powerful here, too. So many characters (Sophie, her sisters, Michael Fisher, the dog-man, the scarecrow) are essentially orphans, searching for home. So many surrogate families form: Mrs. Fairfax with Lettie, Sophie and Michael with Howl and Calcifer

I love the imagery. There are doors everywhere on the castle--they open for some people, close for others, and lead into and out of momentous stages in the characters' lives. The castle's movement is so symbolic of both Howl's restlessness and also his cowardice. 

It's not perfectly polished. Here's where the quirkiness comes in. And to be honest, I didn't mind any of these flaws that much, because the ride was so joyful.

1. The pacing is off: we spend a long time building up to a fast denouement in the end, so that the details of how the plot is resolved whiz by. It turns out that a lot happened behind the scenes, and we're told about it at the end, rather than experiencing it.

2. Little tidbits are not explained, sometimes to the point of being red herrings. For instance, why does the Witch of the Waste mention that Suliman (or was it Prince Justin) went up north and she had to trick him into coming back--how does that help the story? And by having both Howl and Mrs. Pentstemmon surmise that Sophie clearly wanted to be disguised as a crone (when they couldn't break the spell on her), we were led to think that perhaps she did have some control over her appearance, when in fact the strength of the curse had to be weakened by killing the Witch before Calcifer could break it. The blue and silver suit Sophie cuts into triangles and then sews back together doesn't come to much--she and Michael (over)enlarge it, Howl dyes it black, and there's some worry on Sophie's part that he may have instead dyed the gray suit that is charmed. But we watched too much sewing and worrying, only to have nothing come of it. 

3. How and when did Howl happen to buy Ben Sullivan's skull and guitar from the Witch? We're distracted by wondering.

4. How did Gaston teach the Witch of the Waste about Wales, so that she could threaten Howl's family? How did Lily Angorian get into Wales to become the school teacher? How does the Witch of the Waste's fire demon live outside of the chimney-pot mansion, whereas Calcifer is confined to the hearth of the moving castle?

5. Miss Angorian is introduced far too late to be such an important villain. 

6. I had to flip back and forth between pages to follow the order of events in the abduction of Suliman and Prince Justin. It's kind of a jumble: the Witch captures Suliman and decapitates him, selling off his skull and guitar (why does she do that?), but Suliman has put all his magic into a scarecrow (which is somehow enough of "him" to steer the finding spells toward the scarecrow and not just the skull); Prince Justin buys "finding spells" from both Mrs. Fairfax and Howl (via Michael), and Fairfax seems to have been fooled by his disguise while Howl recognized him but was just happy to be left out of the search. Justin is captured by the Witch and decapitated, too. Parts from Suliman and Justin make up the body that's waiting for Howl's head, and remaining parts become Gaston/Percival/the dog-man. When Suliman is put back together again, he loves Lettie and she might have feelings for him, yet given that no part of him was Suliman's head when he was the dog-man, what exactly has she grown fond of?

7. In general it's a bit meandering, in a fun, childish way, with things tying up so quickly that it seems like Wynne-Jones wrote it by the seat of her pants, with the slimmest of outlines, and barely managed to get it all to fit together at the end, by pulling and massaging at the dialogue to "explicate" the plot. 

8. Sophie's gift of "talking life into things" is supposed to be the secret behind how she can separate Calcifer from Howl's heart and still have him live. It feels a bit flimsy, though, since we haven't fully appreciated her skill until the end. Since it's important that Calcifer identified this talent when he allowed her to enter the castle, we should have been "clued in" by having Calcifer show excessive curiosity about her walking stick, rather than telling us at the very end that he had identified her magical ability. In general, one of Wynne-Jones's weaknesses seems to be not going back during the revision process and planting necessary information sooner. And while we're speaking of flimsy, the reason the Witch cursed Sophie is a bit forced: Howl had taken interest in Lettie, and the Witch was jealous, mistaking Sophie for Lettie when she visited the shop. Really? We learn later that Howl was visiting Lettie at Mrs. Fairfax's, and that Howl had never been to the hat shop before. Lettie is black-haired and beautiful, while Sophie has red-gold hair and is merely pretty. How could the Witch have made that mistake? It feels convenient, like Wynne-Jones got the plot going with the curse, and then went back to think of a reason later, but was careless about how believable she was making it.

In sum: one of the funnest books I've read in a long time. Howl, Sophie, and Calcifer are all gloriously flawed, which makes it even more delightful. This is sweet YA that feels almost middle-grade in its innocence and imagination, but is deceptively subtle and loaded with worthy themes.

One-sentence review: A lovely little starter book from Caitlin Doughty, gently introducing readers to some of her thoughts about death culture and the American death industry by talking about the evolution of her own thoughts on the subject; but I hope a more in-depth (non-memoir), researched volume will arrive someday, pressing her points with data, biology, and examples. 

I follow Doughty online. I love the mission that she's on: to get Americans to talk about death, to live with it, and to understand it, so that it's a part of their lives. A point she's careful to make in the book is that life is more beautiful because we die, and I believe that's true. It gives life meaning, purpose, and an urgency that's essential to creativity. A corollary to this is the fact that fear of death prevents us from understanding our lives. Americans have removed themselves from death so thoroughly, we're often at the point of not quite accepting that we will inevitably all die. Most have never even seen a dead body in its natural state, which is almost inconceivable given that everyone dies. Instead, we shunt our sick to hospitals, stuff our elderly in nursing homes, and flood ourselves with horror movies and Halloween gore, trying to satiate those deeper questions we have, titillating our fear, and dancing around more meaningful thoughts about mortality.

This isn't Doughty's "green-burial revolution" book, which I mistakenly thought it would be. But she does include most of the important points she covers on her website, "The Order of the Good Death," and in her YouTube series, "Ask a Mortician." Namely: family and friends should know to ask for "witness" cremations, where they view the body burning and even push the button; bodies don't need embalming unless they're going to be shipped overseas; families can wash and shroud the body themselves; the body is the family's quasi-property (no one can force you to do anything you don't want with it); other than in the case of Ebola, corpses are not health hazards, even when they decompose; you have to see death up close to grow comfortable with it.

What she neglected to cover. There are so many persuasive facts Doughty failed to talk about while discussing what we erroneously call "traditional burials"--that is, burials with an embalmed body, a gasket-sealed metal casket, and a steel or concrete vault surrounding the body in the ground. The millions of gallons of eco-unfriendly formaldehyde-based chemicals that go in the bodies, down the drain, and into the ground; the energy wasted in producing caskets and vaults that ultimately do nothing to preserve the body; and more. I wanted statistics and comparisons and examples. I wanted to hear about how an embalmed corpse decomposes (versus a natural corpse). I wanted to hear about the chemistry of "liquid cremation" and what exactly gets handed back to the family. (Are the bones still all that's left, and are they crushed? Where does the used [lye-like] liquid go, and why is it safe for the environment? How many times can you reuse the liquid?) My friend read the book at the same time I did, and pointed out that too much depth, too many facts, too much "non-fiction" might have scared away Doughty's target audience. Instead, she argued, this is a personable, warm account of Doughty's first year as a crematory operator, and her experiences in mortuary school, with the message tucked away as stories, not as data. That is, just enough to get the hipsters interested in her cause, without scaring them away with morbid prose; just enough to get her some professional "cred," while the funeral industry studiously ignores her. My friend may be right, this is probably a better opening literary gambit than what I wanted: a dry, revolutionary, be-all, end-all "green burial" tome from an expert in the field.

But thirty is perhaps too young for a memoir. I loved the personal observations in Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking, but I think it was because he was old enough to have something to say. With Doughty, you get the sense that her own feelings about death are not quite settled. She admits to having been afraid--before her job in the crematory inured her--of her body being "scattered" after death. But while she wants to believe she has overcome that fear, her slight disdain for some of the uses for bodies donated to science betrays a lack of comfort with her claim that our "borrowed" bodies return to the earth one way or the other. The notion of cosmetic surgeons practicing on decapitated cadaver heads, or bodies being tossed out of planes to test parachutes, does not seem to please her, knowing that the dead person probably hoped to enrich other areas of science. But doesn't this ignore the point that the dead body doesn't care? Finally, while I was interested in her near-suicide story, I wasn't sure how it advanced the cause of the book. (It did fascinate me that, like so many people in their twenties, even this dynamic, intelligent, pretty person was a bit adrift, trying to find her place in the world and to find people [other than her devoted family] who would love her.)

Neither here nor there. I thought these books, in displays near each other, were cute doppelgangers.