Review: Bound South by Susan Rebecca White

Southern fiction is always high on my list of appealing reads. I love the eccentric characters, the enticing settings, and that indefinable something that marks them undeniably as southern. Combined with the cheery and colorful cover, this guaranteed that I would be buying this book for myself. And I am pleased to say that I was not disappointed in it.

Mostly told in the three alternating voices of Louise, her daughter Caroline, and her maid's daughter Missy, this enchanting novel details three very different examples of Southern womanhood.

Louise is a wife and mother struggling with her relationship with her difficult daughter. She is creative and has quite an eye but no outlet for that creativity. She takes on the problems of all of those around her, cantankerous mother-in-law, divorcing friend, and gay son. Over the course of the ten years of the narrative, she learns her own worth and how to best be there for others while still being true to herself.

Caroline is not the typical southern deb in waiting. She is an actress, one who disdains the others at her high school, one who wants to make a difference, one who cannot relate to the mother she finds overly conventional. Like her mother, Caroline learns much about herself throughout the novel, even if she runs away from the south and all that it represents in order to discover it.

Missy is a born again evengelical Christian whose father ran out on her mother and her when she was small. Waiting for him to come back for her and dissatisfied with her life as it is, she looks for her own good works to do. She decides that helping Charles, Louise's son, overcome his homosexuality will be the thing that changes her life. And it is, but not because she succeeds and certainly not in the ways that she expects.

The three main characters will draw the reader in and keep them reading along. The humor made me chuckle repeatedly. And yet White doesn't shy away from controversial topics, treating them fairly and sometimes slyly satirically. This is well written and entertaining and while the ending just tapers off, it is overall a fun slice of southern reading.

Review: Number 6 Fumbles by Rachel Solar-Tuttle

Do you remember your college days? Do you remember the soul searching and the agonizing over things that end up having no relevance to your life but seemed so important at the time? Are there bits you'd really rather forget or at least never tell your kids about? This novel is that bit of college.

Beck is the life of the party, the cute, perky one who keeps everyone upbeat and connected. So what happens when she has a breakdown of sorts, falling into and existential funk after watching the eponymous Number 6 on Penn's football team fumble an important play? She wonders how he goes on, owning this mistake made in front of so many, and as she wonders, she spirals downwards herself. Continuing to bar-hop with her friends, she drinks herself into oblivion and randomly hooks up with guys she meets in the bars, even as she manages to pull off stellar grades by writitng last minute treatises of the genius variety.

The sexual escapades, including longing for the guy who is emotionally unavailable to her, and the aimless bar scene might be entertaining for those still in college or just out but those of us who are further past this angst filled time of our lives, visiting again in this novel is painful and wearying. Solar-Tuttle has captured the experience of many college students and the feelings shared by so many as well (even if they were not the partying good-time girl that Beck is) but that doesn't mean that the book is appealing or meaningful. It was quick, light, a tad depressing, and ultimately empty. I can see late teens enjoying this but anyone else probably doesn't want to be reminded of their younger selves, wallowing in self-pity and random, meaninglessness.

Sunday Salon: School reading

About the only thing better than fresh, new notebooks this time of year are the reading lists that my children bring home. They are not, to my sorrow, the readers that I am. And so instead of doing leaps and spins over the reading list, they drag in disconsolately, moaning about the reading they'll have to do for the year. And I humor them because when all is said and done, they are not only quite good readers, but they enjoy it far more than they realize when they are in the midst of it. And really, who cares about them when I so thoroughly love scanning through their lists, collecting up the books, and reading them too! (Yes, I do actually care about them but sometimes I have to just wallow in pleasure and ignore their ridiculous, off-base whining.) Sometimes it makes them fuss about how quickly I read compared to them but in general I think they are pleased I care enough about them to see what they are reading (plus if they have questions on assignments, it comes in handy if I've read the book too). A few gentle leading questions never hurt anyone, right?

So this year I will be diving into Code Talkers by Joseph Bruchac (7th grade) and The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood (6th grade) very shortly in order to be able to look over their summer reading assignments. Once I've made my way through those, I will be re-reading The Call of the Wild, reading Crispin, Freak the Mighty, Holes, and the second in the Lightning Thief series (I read the first one last year with the boy and instead of re-reading with the girl, I thought I'd head to book two instead. Such are the pleasures of sixth grade reading. Seventh grade will have me reading The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, The Jungle Book, and Tangerine, and re-reading The Pearl. I don't have an eighth grader but their list is less interesting to me as I've read almost all of them already. Wonder if I can put in my requests with the eighth grade Language Arts teachers now so they choose more appealing things for next year?

I even remember some of the things I read at their ages. I still have my copy of Lord of the Flies from eighth grade on my shelves. Not that I have ever been able to re-read it, having the horror of Piggy's glasses in the surf assault me every time I've opened it again to try and re-read it. I also still have my ancient copy of Great Expectations from seventh grade. I fell in love with Pip that year (probably helped by the fact that the class ahead of us read it and turned the scene with Pip first meeting Magwich it into a short play--the boy playing Pip was really cute). But cute thespian or not, I have loved all the Dickens I've read since then. Speaking of plays, seventh grade was my first experience of Shakespeare too. As You Like It is still the comedy for which I have the softest spot, even if I didn't get to play Rosalind (which part I did play is long lost in the mists of memory). I have an unabridged Scholastic books copy, from sixth grade, of Jane Eyre sitting on my shelf too. I read that one on my own but since I got it through that wonderful school handout, I'm counting it! I know there were others too during my late elementary, early junior high school years that played an important part not only in my education but in turning me into the person I am today. What more can you ask for from school reading? So my reading is about to take a wild turn back in time with my kids. And I hope that we all run into books that change us, enchant us, teach us, and just generally find enjoyable enough that thirty years from now, my kids will be remembering them as fondly as I remember my old school reading.

Review: Heart of Courage by Kat Martin

A murderer is stalking prostitutes in Regency England but until Lindsey's brother is accused, this doesn't touch her at all, despite the fact that she is a gossip columnist crusading for higher moral standards at a local newspaper. When her wastrel brother admits that he was with two of the women before they were killed and that he has no alibi for when they actually died, Lindsey springs into action, deciding to use her investigative skills to ferret out the real killer and exonerate her brother. But what she is getting involved in is dangerous. And so her employer and friend asks her strong, silent brother-in-law Thor to watch over Lindsey. Thor is a Viking from a northern island who has very definite ideas about the kind of woman with whom he will eventually settle down. Of course, he and Lindsey already have a relationship marked by acute awareness to each other as well as acute antagonism. Thor definitely doesn't approve of Lindsey's investigations. He thinks he's proved his point when he rescues her from an attempted rape. Not so, of course. As Lindsey comes closer to the killer, she and Thor give in to their mutual attraction but they are still not on the same path for the future. Will they get there before the killer strikes at Lindsey?

Lindsey as a character is a mix of exasperatingly stubborn and naive. She instinctively goes to bat for her brother despite not knowing him terribly well. And her insistence on making excuses for him did get a little old. Certainly she had to maintain her belief in his innocence, but it was overdone here. Thor was fairly stereotypical: strong, silent, muscle-bound, good in bed, etc. There was very little to explain why Lindsey might fall for him beyond the physical, especially as she didn't bother to get to know him before they tumbled into bed together. Just having characters ache to be in each others' arms is not enough. Perhaps the premise was overdone. Perhaps I was just in the wrong mood when I read it, but this book didn't do much for me. Overall, not one I can recommend even for readers of the genre.

Review: Mr. Darcy's Daughters by Elizabeth Aston

As Pride and Prejudice fans the world over know, there is only one Jane Austen and she did not write a follow-up to her beloved novel. So we are left with modern authors trying to take pen in hand (keyboard in fingers just doesn't sound as good, does it?) and explore the world so many of us are loathe to leave once the last page is turned.

This isn't properly a sequel really as it takes on a whole raft of new characters in the persons of Darcy and Lizzie's five daughters but it does include some of the characters from the original. Wait, you say. You think you've read something before about five unmarried daughters, some of whom get into scandals or scrapes. Yes, Aston has tried to mimic the form of the original. However, she has done this to the detriment of the original Austen characters. Darcy and Lizzie have left for a diplomatic posting in Constantinople, leaving the chaperonage of their five daughters to Colonel Fitzwilliam and his wife. This diplomatic posting means that we don't get to see our favorite hero and heroine at all. And amazingly, the Darcy daughters are as silly or flighty or rigid as the Bennet sisters were. Colonel Fitzwilliam is nothing like his character in the original, nor are the other Austen creations.

As an entry into the "following in Austen's footsteps" canon, this is a disappointment. However, if you can read this without connecting it to Pride and Prejudice, this is rather an entertaining story. The Regency setting is well-researched and generally a favorite historical time of mine. The girls are perhaps a bit risque for genteel society but many other Regency-set stories use this same convention to point up the rigidity and hypocrisy of the age. There are some obvious deviations from the parallels to Pride and Prejudice, in the unravelings and outcomes of the scandals but they are generally acceptable and only a little far-fetched. Although I am certainly no Jane Austen purist, I still don't think this will satisfy fans unless they can read this purely as a novel set some 20 years after the setting of Pride and Prejudice and really unrelated in most every way from it.

Review: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

The third of the books for my summer book club this summer, I can't even think back to when and where I first heard about this book. It was probably sitting on my desk as a new purchase when I was trying to determine the books and it looked like a likely candidate, having much of what I strive to find in books for the group: not particularly well heard of, looking to contain enough issues to keep us talking for a while, intriguing writing structure, and the added bonus of being about a temporary immigrant from China to Britain. My specialty in graduate school was immigrant literature with a focus on Asian-American lit. And while this is not exactly that beast, it is a kissing cousin of sorts and so I thought it would be perfect to inflict on my unsuspecting group.

Written in the form of dictionary entries musing on unfamiliar English words by Zhuang (call her Z), a young Chinese woman who has come to London to study English for a year, this is tells of immigrant alienation, misunderstandings, and the small and large cultural differences that govern relationships between people from very different countries. Z's sadness and longing for human connection echo throughout her early entries as she tries to understand this very different place in which she finds herself living. She can't even communicate with the Cantonese family living on the other floor of the cheap, marginalized house where she finds a flat.

Then a chance conversation with the man seated next to her at a movie theater leads her to move in with the much older man, eventually falling in love with him. Her English improves and her dictionary entry musings become less pidgeon English and more properly colloquial but the disconnect between cultures remains and perhaps even widens as she comes directly up against the gulf that separates a more open and communal China and the privacy-obsessed, individually focused England. She stops relying on her little Concise Chinese-English Dictionary when she discovers that it lacks so much of what she wants to look up. But no dictionary can possibly detail and explain adequately all the freight of so much of what she learns.

Her English lover remains enigmatic to the reader, as he seems to to Z as well although we Western readers understand him at least slightly better than Z, seeing clearly how her year must end long before she does. His absence as a meaningful character makes Z's lonliness and sense of alienation even greater and her melancholic sorrow is oftentimes palpable during the novel. There are comedic instances to offset the pervading air of sadness though, such as when Z is completely baffled by the inappropriateness of buying and displaying pornographic magazines at her lover's home and when she disinterestedly continues feeding coins into the peep show slot in order to watch more and more of a graphic sex show.

Naive or just culturally unaware, Z doesn't come across as a victim, except, perhaps, during the beginning of her European tour, but she is an excellent tour guide to life as an outsider, one who doesn't speak the language well, doesn't understand the cultural context of things, and has no community to fold into for safety, companionship, and happiness. Her excursions outside the English language institute point out not only attitudes that we take for granted but also shine a non-judgmental but accurate light on those parts of our culture that we allow to flourish only in the seedy alleys and back streets.

I really enjoyed the structure of this novel, finding it to be more than a gimmick. And Guo's mastery in presenting the evolution of Z's language and vocabulary was nothing short of impressive. Z was the only character to receive a thorough handling but that helped to highlight her solitariness, even when living with her aimless lover. There was a feeling of emotional distance in this that is generally less marked in books written by Westerners but which seems in keeping with other Chinese authors I've read (Ha Jin comes to mind as a comparison in tone), even in those who spend time in the West as Guo herself does. I found this a thoughtful book, slow moving and serious, so it may not be for everyone. But as a look at cultural misunderstandings and relationship drift, I thought this was a good read.

You like me. You really, really like me. (Or I like me.)

I just opened an e-mail telling me that this blog had been nominated for Most Eclectic Taste for Book Blogger Appreciation Week. My initial response was, "Well, that's about right." My second response was, "Was this the category in which I nominated myself?" The answer is probably. I'm not sure I have a big enough following to have garnered any nominations from others but I'm going with it anyway because I do indeed have wildly eclectic taste. And if I want to delude myself into thinking that someone else out there threw my name into the hat as well, I'm not hurting anyone, right? I don't have any illusions about making the short list for final voting (but be assured I vote for myself every day of the week and twice on Sunday given half a chance!) but it was kind of fun trying to decide which five posts are most representative of my blog and my reading. I know what I came up with. I wonder what you all would have chosen. Don't worry, you can tell me and it's too late to change my picks. So, if you've been reading me for any length of time, what post or posts would you have sent the judges?