Review: Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

When my dad gave eight-year old me a red leather copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I treasured the beautiful book both for its physical appearance and for its fantastical story. As I grew older and visited Wonderland again in a kiddie lit class in college, I learned a bit about the story behind the story. Alice Liddell. The girl for whom Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. The waif in many of the decidedly un-Victorian photographs that Charles Dodgson took. A hint of impropriety. And really that is the sum total of what I knew about "the real Alice" before I started Benjamin's fascinating novelization.

Opening with an aged Alice, immediately after the sale of her original manuscript, reflecting on her life as the inspiration for the famous nursery tale. How it has been tiring to be the object of such speculation. From thence, traveling back in time, Alice narrates her life starting with her early childhood in Oxford where her family was intimately acquainted with mathematics teacher Charles Dodgson. Alice's childhood and relationship with Dodgson are drawn in shimmering, sympathetic detail. The friendship between the adult Dodgson and the child Alice starts off innocently but eventually becomes fraught and captured through innuendo, causing a shiver of distaste, worry, or foreboding to travel down the reader's spine. The break between the Liddells and Dodgson comes without explicitly speculating on the reason behind it but suggesting, as the rumors of the day did, that there was ultimately an inappropriateness to Dodgson's relationship with Alice.

Whatever the cause, Alice Liddell did not forever remain the child Dodgson immortalized but indeed grew up and lived out a life that was certainly not the stuff of fairy tales. Benjamin chronicles Alice's adult life, the disappointments and losses as well as the late dawning realization of love and what it has meant to her to be, her whole life, "that Alice."

Using what is known for certain about Alice's life and adding in reasonable speculation, Benjamin has created a nuanced and beautifully written story. Alice is a sympathetic character. Dodgson comes off as somehow both innocent and lecherous. And the tale as a whole is not only readable but fascinatingly addictive. Having Alice narrate her own life gives a poignancy, bittersweetness, and retrospective feel to the novel as it retains the Victorian sensibility that was likely a cornerstone of the real Alice Liddell's entire life. Beautifully rendered, if you've ever wondered about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, wondered what life was like on this side of the looking glass, this is the book for you.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Review: Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty

Who needs more teen angst? Certainly not me given that I am living with a teenager and a pre-teen at the moment and at any given day the sky can be falling in on one or both of them. So despite having had this on my shelf for a very long time, I kept putting it off and putting it off. But I have looked at it consistently for more than a year, intending to finally read it. I am so glad I did. Jessica Darling is good fun and this book is delightfully entertaining.

The book opens with Jessica's best friend Hope having moved away and the book is presented in journal and letter form as Jess struggles with feeling newly alone. The journal is for those things she can't even tell Hope and the letters to Hope reinforce and illuminate some of the social and personal situations at school. Hope was really her only real friend and she is now marooned with a clique of girls with whom she's grown up but whom she can't really stand. She is frustrated by her friend Scottie's ongoing crush on her and she is mildly tormented by the school's slacker druggie suddenly latching onto her and calling her out for her superficial behaviour. Jess is a straight A student and a very gifted runner but she is moody and angry, lashing out at her parents and erecting a prickly wall that few people are willing to try and break through. When a new girl moves to school, she and Jess start to hit it off but everything is not as it seems.

The first in a series, McCafferty has managed to capture the misperceptions, uncertainties, and insecurities of high school in this book. She has created a smart, likable, bull-headed, and sometimes completely self-absorbed and casually mean narrator in Jess Darling. The wonder of it is that we do still really, really like her despite all her angst, her bouts of hypocritical behaviour, and her occasional obstreperousness. Even though I wouldn't go back to high school myself on a bet, I am looking forward to joining Jess on her further adventures in later books. More than just light good fun, this is a charming coming of age novel that manages to be both true to life and serve as a reminder that high school is rough for everybody, a reinforcement I'll need a mere year from now in dealing with my crew.

Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

If you know me at all by now, you know I have a love hate relationship with highly raved about books. I feel like I need to have read them to join the conversation but I am also leery of the heaps of praise, knowing that my expectations for the book are likely to be all out of proportion, making for a cranky reading experience. So it was with a little trepidation that I picked this one up for my book club. I am happy to report that it turned out to be a better book than I anticipated and although I am the last one on the planet to read it, I am pleased I did. It is an outstanding book club book and would have kept a more focused group talking for a long time. But we were unfocused partly because we had more people at book club than we've ever had before, which is a testament to the appeal of the book, even if discussion suffered due to a group too unwieldy to be effective.

Told in various different voices, mainly those of the black help to the elite cream of white society in Jackson, Mississippi during the extremely turbulent period of the sixties, this both rings true and reminds us all of the civil rights struggles so recently fought here in the US. Aibileen is maid and child minder to a young couple and their baby girl. She is still reeling from the senseless death of her son and has come to realize in a very visceral way, the value whites placed on a black man's life and death. Her anger and bitterness (very much earned, I might add) have changed her personality and also slightly what she is willing to risk in her position. Through her eyes, we first see the young white matrons and their unmarried friend Miss Skeeter and it's not a very flattering picture. But we get small glimpses that Skeeter is not quite like the others, even if she seems complicit in their casual disregard and racist attitudes.

Skeeter is freshly home from Ole Miss and still unmarried, much to the chagrin of her mother. She has bigger dreams than just settling into the same life her mother and friends are leading but she tries to not rock the boat too badly, dating when she can. As she has yet to "take" with an eligible man, she also finds herself a job writing a homemaker's advice column. Of course, as she has never kept a home, she needs help writing her replies and she turns to Aibileen for help, hoping that one day Aibileen will also feel comfortable enough to tell her what ever happened to her family's long time maid, the woman who raised her, Constantine who disappeared not long before Skeeter graduated and came home. Through her connection to Aibileen and with her own ambitions, Skeeter starts writing a social history of the help, those black women who work for the local white families. She captures the good and the bad of Aibileen's experience and then moves on to other willing participants with Aibileen's help.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is the third narrator in the novel. She has been fired and falsely accused of stealing by the daughter of her last employer and is only hired by a woman who is so new and so far beyond the pale of polite society than she has no idea of Minny's reputation. Minny comes to be oddly protective of her seemingly indolent mistress, Celia. She tries to maintain a "proper" distance, foiled at every turn because Celia, of poor white stock who has unwittingly married into the upper crust, has no concept of where those boundaries are and is starved for kindness and friendship. Minny becomes the second maid willing to help Skeeter with her book, despite the fraught times and danger of being identified as having contributed to this rather damning piece of writing.

Stockett has created credible, very real characters here. They are sympathetic and yet flawed. None of them are too good to be true and none of them have the sorts of flaws that are really only assets in disguise. These could be real people in the 60's in Mississippi. The various plot threads wind together nicely, weaving around the main plot carefully. The tension builds as Skeeter's book forms and anxiety over whether she has done these women a disservice, laying them open to recognition increases as the pages turn. The black community too becomes more and more tightly wound as the narrative goes along and Stockett has done a great job showing that the greater civil rights movement, the murders, the disappearances and the injustices, is a cause of this as much as the incendiary book Skeeter is compiling with their compliance. The revelation of the book and the protections surrounding it are masterful and while the book's completion is not the end of the book, it certainly could be as the rest of the novel has a sort of epilogue feel to it. But even if it is an epilogue, Stockett wisely leaves some threads untied and the potential for disaster, so prevalent at the time, intact. This was certainly worth the buzz it earned last year, a quick, engrossing read, despite the length of the book. Book clubs whish haven't already done it will love it and have much to talk about. Lone readers will also devour it, taken back to a time in our recent past that we tend to want to forget. Stockett has brought not only the time but the everyday reality of it to the forefront of our memories again, for which we can only thank her.

Book Blogger Recommendation Challenge

I think many book bloggers get a lot of the books on their to be read lists from other bloggers. I know I certainly do. So the 2010 Book Blogger Recommendation Challenge seems a fitting way to pay tribute to that unceasing source of recommendations. Now, there is a list of 234 books culled from 33 blogs but for the challenge, you only need to commit to as few as 5 books (or as many as 20+). My own list looks like this:

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty
3. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
4. Love, Rosie (aka Rosie Dunne) by Cecelia Ahern
5. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

And then there are the other books I have on my to be read shelves also on the list:

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, April & Oliver by Tess Callahan, Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, Remember Me? By Sophie Kinsella, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Venus Envy by Louise Bagshawe, Blue Latitude by Tony Horwitz, A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner

Good thing there's no penalty for switching things up with no warning!