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 Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther

Living in London, in a sort of exile from her Iranian girlhood, Maryam is married to an Englishman and has an adult daughter who is newly pregnant. When her late younger sister's youngest son is sent to England to live with her, his presence opens something in Maryam, a brutality and anger connected to her past. After she smacks Saeed's face and then sees Sara miscarry after she tries to console Saeed, Maryam flees to Iran to face that which she has so long ignored. The narrative splits and follows Sara as she tries to come to terms with the loss of her baby and her mother's flight and subsequent inaccessibility as well as following Maryam as she not only visits the city which she left so long ago but ultimately the tiny village where she spent so many happy summers as a child. While Sara tries to understand her mother from the things left behind, Maryam is facing the horror of her past, one which touched not only her but the love of her young life.

The writing in this is occasionally lovely and poetic but there are enough times where the narrative is unfortunately confused to counterbalance that. It often takes some doing to figure out which narrative the reader is following after abrupt jumps. There is quite a bit of potential here to say something about the immigrant experience but most of that is glossed over in favor of allowing Maryam to go home again so easily. The sense of place once Maryam returns to Iran is not as strong as it could be and the implication is that her father's rigidity and sense of right and wrong was far and away worse than society's own strictures so the idea of a universally Iranian experience is abandonned. Sara follows her mother to the tiny, remote village in an effort to understand her elusive mother but I'm not certain that that understanding ever happened. And Maryam's decisions as an older woman returned to Iran make her less sympathetic than I suspect the author intended. This novel is brimming with hurt and betrayal and people exiled from each other, from their homeland, from their heritage, from their potential. It was a bit frustrating to read but in the end was decent enough. Don't go into it looking for insight into Iranian culture. Rather take it from the perspective of a woman searching to understand and embrace her past even if that means shutting out her family.

Review: The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

There is no doubt that Salman Rushdie has a way with words. He is capable of writing devastatingly gorgeous prose, but in this offering, despite the wordsmithing, he didn't twine his narratives together well enough to have the whole hang together quite like he's capable of doing. I first read Rushdie when I was in graduate school. Midnight's Children was a complete revelation. It was stunning and impressive and made me rush right out to buy everything else he'd written to that point. Not too long after that came the fatwa over The Satanic Verses and in my usual modus operandi ("if it's causing a kerfuffle or being banned, I must buy it and support the author"), I zipped out and purchased that too despite not being terribly intrigued by the premise. I finally read it last year. And it bored me silly. So Mr. Rushdie had hit both ends of the reading experience spectrum for me, high and low. Perhaps then, it makes sense that this read was middle of the road. He's just covering all his bases.

The novel opens with a yellow-haired traveler making his way towards the great city of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Calling himself the Mogor dell'Amore, this character is the thread that will ultimately weave the seemingly disparate story lines together. There is the storyline of Akbar and his imaginary wife, the story of three boys in Florence, and the story of the eponymous Enchantress of Florence, Qara Koz. In each of the story lines, especially as they come closer and closer to converging, Rushdie is clearly playing with apparent opposites: East and West, real and imagined, history and fiction. But he is also highlighting the similarities among things so seemingly different.

Our yellow-haired stranger in his patchwork coat of many colors tells a tale to Akbar, the tale of a forgotten Mughal princess who left the East for the West and was subsequently scrubbed from history. Is his tale true and if so, what impact will it have on the court of Akbar? There are multiple side narratives threading through the recounting of Qara Koz's life and Rushdie often interrupts his own narrative with asides to pull the reader out of the haze into which our storyteller has carefully led us. These textual interruptions, and indeed the many allusions (many of which I am certain I missed) scattered throughout, bring the reader up short, always pointing to the fictional and illusory nature of both this story and the story within the story.

Somehow, even with all the dazzling sleight of hand by Rushdie, ultimately the story was a little flat. Despite Qara Koz gaining in solidity throughout the telling of her story, she never came across as a fully realized character. She remained transparent, merely showing others through the lens of her actions rather than becoming the focus herself. Was this intentional and I've missed the point? Perhaps. I enjoyed the novel while in Akbar's city far more than I did once the setting changed to Florence and the maneuverings of the Medici family. The Mughal empire was more richly evoked than Florence, at least for me. It was clever to use real, historical people in this fictional investigation into the idea of the real versus the created but perhaps the novel wandered too far and wide to entirely and successfully pull off whatever ambitious intention Rushdie had for it. An interesting read, I was left feeling a bit let down despite recognizing Rushdie's undoubted brilliance.

Review: Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

Winner of the 1973 Premio Quinto Sol national Chicano literary award, this coming of age story is told from the point of view of little Antonio Marez. He is the last of his parents' children and they are each determined that he will grow up to take after their side of the family. His father wants him to be a vaquero on the llano as he was and his mother, of farming stock, wants him to become a priest and scholar. And he himself has no idea which way his life will hew, observing everything as he does and asking difficult questions. In her old age, Ultima, a curandera or healer, moves in with his family and becomes a sort of touchstone for him in his philosophical wonderings, not least because little Antonio witnesses great evil that even the local priest seems unable to contain whereas Ultima, called a witch by so many, vanquishes it. As he grows, he reveres Ultima even as she throws some of the things he once thought were fact into question.

Anaya has captured the nature of men and their beliefs in this simple tale juxtaposing evil and good, right and wrong, Catholicism and paganism, child and man. While the novel is very pensive, Antonio as a character is far too old for his years, even if he is a child of the 1940's. His introspection and maturity are simply not that of a 7 or 8 year old child. A novel of ideas more than a novel of action, the plot bumps along slowly from one senseless, violent death to another and interspersed with long periods of tedium. This novel does give a voice to the Chicano population in northern New Mexico and showcases early magical realism and it has some sociological significance as a result. Overall the book was a slow, sometimes mesmerizing read but isn't one that I'd suggest to most readers, knowing they'd be bogged down with the pace.

Review: Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon

After losing his job and having his marriage crumble, Least Heat Moon sets off on a journey around the country, traveling slowly, along blue highways (state and local routes marked in blue on his maps), meeting the people and examining the small, forgotten places along these back roads. He drives around in a converted van he names Ghost Dancer but rather than have adventures, there's a sort of dreamy, wandering pace to his travels and his narrative. He never mocks the people he meets, listening to their thoughts and opinions respectfully, chronicalling a fast disappearing way of life.

The narrative, as would seem appropriate, is loaded with descriptions of the areas in which he is driving so the reader sees the shift in the physical landscape as Least Heat Moon loops around the country. There is also very much a personal, introspective theme running through the pages. Least Heat Moon interweaves his own Native American heritage and beliefs throughout his chronicle as well as calling attention periodically to history, both recent (at least recent at the time of his journey--1970's) and centuries past. The writing is as meandering as the trip and if the reader is in the proper frame of mind, this works. But be forewarned that only the trip itself, both physical and of self-discovery unite the various chapters. This is a quiet, contemplative sort of book but it resonates deeply long after the last page has been turned.

Review: A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird

Isabella Bird was an inveterate traveller, naturalist, and writer. This might not be an unusual description for women today but Bird was all of these things in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when women's lives were far more constrained than they are today. She chronicled many of her travels in letters home to her sister before they were published in collections.

This particular collection of letters details Bird's long journeying through the Rocky Mountains, into the heart of the land, often unaccompanied, only choosing her routes based on her preference of the moment and always willing to deviate from the plan. She wrote beautiful descirptions of a time and place much changed today, appreciating the remote wildness she found on many of her tramps. In addition to her natural writings, she also turned her eye on the people who inhabited these lonely, majestic places as well and her character depictions are delightful. She has captured the character of the folks who chose to eke out a living homesteading in the shadows and valleys of these majestic mountains, capturing the fortitude, the sometime lawlessness, the hospitality, and the suspicions of her hosts and acquaintances.

Make no mistake that this is a modern day account. It is very much rooted in its time and it takes a little adjustment to Bird's language and writing to get into the book. But once in the story, the reader will happily accompany her on her meanderings, oftentimes in awe of her determination. The writing flowed clearly and smoothly along and I'll probably try searching out more of her straightforward and appealing travelogues. I may not have to suffer the discomforts she did in traveling but the romanticism of her journey, even when she encounters difficulties, is unbeaten.

Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

What a cool concept for a book: nesting stories like Russian babushka dolls. I read a later book of Mitchell's and thoroughly enjoyed it but was still leary of this one given that I already knew that Mitchell pushed the time period of at least one (turns out it was two) of his stories into the realm of the future and I am not often happy to follow where speculative fiction leads. But this was a marvelous book that managed to keep me engaged even through the sections about which I initially worried. Mitchell takes us through the centuries and around the world in his amazingly inter-linked story novel. We start in the 1850's in the tropics reading the diary of an upstanding American notary traveling home from an assignment. The diary ends abruptly mid-sentence as we jump to letters written to a friend by a penniless English composer in the Netherlands. We leave our composer mid-story to detail a young female detective in California looking into the suspicious deaths of several people in connection with a power plant funding corporate greed and carelessness. Our detective in mortal peril, we move onto a disheartening modern day England where a small publisher fleeing the thug brothers of his most famous author is committed to an assisted living home by his brother. Onward to a Korea set in the future where bio-engineering and corporate dissimulation have reached new terrifying highs. And thence to an island in the Pacific where the remnants of civilization, starting over after an unnamed catastrophic event has almost completely decimated the human race, we come to the apex of the story. Each story ties into the previous story in inventive ways and the arc of the story, especially as it gains momentum, running back through the earlier stories and telling the tales originally left untold, is masterful. This was well worth the time I spent and once I understood and accepted the form, it moved along swimmingly.