Review: Serenade by Emily Kiebel

I firmly believe that people can be aligned to elements in ways that feed their souls. Some people love to garden, clearly nourished by a relationship with the earth. Some people are hypnotized by a bonfire. And others fancy mercurial changes like the wind. While I love a good bonfire, I am most definitely a child of the water, at home in the water like nowhere else. I am drawn to water and find nothing so pleasing as being in it, on it, or beside it. My attraction to it would pale in comparison to some mythical creatures like mermaids, sirens, or gods and goddesses of the deep though. As Lorelei Clark, the main character in Emily Kiebel's YA novel, Serenade, discovers, when one is in fact a siren, the pull of the ocean is strong.

Lorelei is a freshman in college, having defied her mother and gone to a classical music school in Maine to major in voice performance. She has a beautiful voice and despite the estrangement with her mother that her decision caused, she feels like she is doing what she is meant to do. As the novel opens, her father is visiting her for her fall break when he is struck and killed crossing the street. Lorelei cradles his dying body, inexplicably drawn to sing for him. After his funeral, she sneaks away from her Colorado home and her mother's demands once again, returning to school. But her singing no longer has the instinctive feel to it that it once did and she reluctantly takes a leave of absence, traveling to the Cape to meet the maternal relatives she's only just heard of and to try and heal a little from the crippling grief after her father's death.

While she is getting to know her great aunt Helen and her two cousins, Calliope and Deidre, they strike her as a little bit eccentric. They run a dive salvage company and the china they eat off of is White Star Line china, ostensibly taken from the Titanic. But then she witnesses them transforming into something otherworldly in the cove outside their home one night and she is terrified. Once they calm her down, they tell her that they are real live sirens and that she is one too. This is not welcome news to her because she thinks of sirens as the mythical creatures who lure sailors to their deaths. But the Deleaux women explain to her how wrong her preconception is and they start training her to take her place in their family group. She is starting to reconcile herself to her destiny but she continues to have trouble with the idea that she will ease someone into death rather than trying to save them. And she must learn to govern her willfulness and her temper as well, no easy task.

Kiebel blends the idea of living, breathing sirens into our familiar world convincingly. And she makes them far from the horrible, murderous creatures they are in mythology so that the reader can feel sympathy for Lorelei's situation. The novel is slow to start, building an elaborate backstory for Lorelei before finally centering on her discovery and training as a siren. As this is clearly the first of a series, there are numerous dropped plot threads, such as the evil that lurks in the water, that will presumably reappear in later books and Kiebel even introduces entirely new and completely unexplained and undeveloped pieces, a Valkyrie and the Elysienne, to Lorelei's tale at the very end of the novel, which caused me some frustration.  In addition, Lorelei's deep grief at the loss of her beloved father is quickly ignored once she accepts her heritage. Despite these stumbles, Kiebel has penned an intriguing tale of family, one of right and wrong, and one that questions the idea of unbendable fate.

For more information about Emily Kiebel and the book, check out her website, her Facebook page, or connect with her on GoodReads. Take a look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Janay from Book Sparks PR and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Euphoria by Lily King
The Blessings by Elise Juska
Serenade by Emily Kiebel

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

The Geometry of Love by Jessica Levine
The Traitor's Wife by Allison Pataki

Reviews posted this week:

Betty's (Little Basement) Garden by Laurel Dewey
Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid
After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Mimi Malloy, At Last by Julia MacDonnell
The Innocent Sleep by Karen Perry
Strings Attached by Joanne Lipman and Melanie Kupchynsky
Palmerino by Melissa Pritchard
If Not For This by Pete Fromm
The Lady From Tel Aviv by Raba'i al-Madhoun
Angels Make Their Hope Here by Breena Clarke
Ishmael's Oranges by Claire Hajaj
Neverhome by Laird Hunt
Burial Rights by Hannah Kent
Losing Touch by Sandra Hunter
Euphoria by Lily King
The Blessings by Elise Juska
Serenade by Emily Kiebel

Review: After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Love is not static. It changes. It is adaptable. It can grow and it can disappear. It is amazingly special but it isn't easy. It has to be worked at. And if you don't pay attention to it, it can be hidden behind the mundanities of everyday life. When this happens, many people give up, finding it too hard to work their way back to the love they once felt. But are there other options? For Lauren and Ryan, in Taylor Jenkins Reid's newest novel, After I Do, the solution is to take a year off of their marriage to determine if what they once had, the love they once cherished, is worth saving.

Lauren and Ryan met in college. Their relationship was charmed, the envy of friends and family. But eleven years in and six years into their marriage, all is not well in Camelot. In fact, things are downright unhappy. Lauren and Ryan don't even want to be in the same room together anymore. They snipe at each other, throwing small unkindnesses at each other, freezing each other out, cutting at each other a thousand ways. They are resentful, irritated, and annoyed with the other most of the time. Things finally come to a head when they acknowledge the state of suppressed warfare in their home and they don't know if their marriage can survive the people they've become. The spark is well and truly gone from their relationship and brutally, truthfully, they aren't in love with each other anymore. But they both remember how it used to be and don't want to let that go without at least trying to recover it. So they agree to be apart for a year, not to contact each other, to focus on what they need individually in order to remember why they fell in love in the first place. Their decision isn't an easy or conventional one but they feel as if it is their only chance to save their marriage.

Told mainly through Lauren's experiences, the novel is realistic and honest about the fading of love in the face of small daily resentment after small daily resentment. Reid captures beautifully (and painfully) the building minor aggravations that chip away at the very foundation of happiness, thoughtfulness, and love and how those aggravations ultimately grow so large that they overtake any finer feeling. As their year apart progresses, Lauren reads Ryan's written and saved but unsent emails to her and starts writing her own as well. The sporadic emails allow each of the characters to safely air their grievances, the ways they feel the other has marginalized them, and the things that are so important that they have to change if there will ever be a chance to come back together again. Lauren, with the insights of her mother, her siblings, best friend, and grandmother comes to realize the many shapes that enduring love takes and she must decide if she and Ryan are fighting for happiness and to find a way back to loving each other, as opposed to being "in love" with each other, or if this year apart means that they can and should live without each other.

The emotions are so raw and so completely unadorned and truthful here that some portions of the novel are hard to read. As Lauren works back and forth through her own desires and intentions with regard to Ryan's and her future, the reader swings through foreboding, worry, and happiness all in equal measure. Watching the characters lose themselves almost completely is painful and knowing they will be forever changed at the end of their year apart no matter what their ultimate decision is is nerve-wracking. The narrative tension is consistent and the novel is perfectly paced. This is not really a romance but it is definitely a novel about love, knowing what is worth saving, what real, messy love looks like, and the importance of nurturing it before it is gone. Relatable and instructive, it is a novel worth reading for anyone who has been through the ups and downs of marriage or long term relationship.

For more information about Taylor Jenkins Reid and the book, check out her website, her Facebook page, follow her on Twitter, or connect with her on GoodReads. Take a look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Janay from Book Sparks PR and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Review: Forever, Interrupted by Taylor Jenkins Reid

When you are young and in love, you think that it will last forever. But there are so many ways that forever gets a lot shorter. And none is so sad as that of the early and unexpected death of a loved one. Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel, Forever, Interrupted, tackles that heartbreaking scenario and how one person moves on when there's still so much life to live without their love.

Elsie and Ben have been married nine days when he heads out on his bike to pick up some cereal for Elsie. When he doesn't come home and she hears ambulance sirens, Elsie runs outside to discover that her new husband and soul mate has been hit by a truck and died instantly. At the hospital, as she starts to navigate the surreal situation, she discovers that Ben's mother Susan is still listed as his next of kin and she will have all the say in what happens with Ben's body and the funeral. As if this wasn't enough, Ben never told his mother about Elsie and Susan doesn't believe that they were married. And Elsie can't prove it because their marriage license hasn't even arrived in the mail yet. So instead of the two people who most loved Ben being able to come together and comfort each other in their grief, they are rivals at odds over what Ben wanted.

The novel follows two plot lines alternating evenly between the two of them, one moving forward from Ben's death and one telling the story of Elsie and Ben's whirlwind romance. In the present, Elsie and Susan butt heads and have difficulty accepting each other or acknowledging the love that Ben had for each of them. Part of the trouble on Susan's part is not only that she is skeptical about the importance of Elsie in Ben's life but also the fact that she, like so many people in Elsie's life, minimizes Elsie's grief because she and Ben had only been married for such a brief time. In fact, they had only known each other for a handful of months before they got married. But what others don't appreciate is that Elsie and Ben's relationship and love affair was a completely real one, not just a fairy tale created after the fact. Ben was a sweet, romantic, thoughtful man and Elsie was totally head over heels, madly in love with him. The duration of their knowing each other had no bearing on the amount of pain Elsie feels at his loss. And after all, who can really quantify love on a timeline?

This is a novel about learning to live again and to trust and appreciate those around you who also loved your love. It is a realistic, emotional, heart-wrenching read but has a surprisingly poignant amount of levity to keep it from overwhelming the reader with only intense sadness. The double stranded timeline works well here as a way to make Ben a fully rounded character and to explain why he never shared the fact of his intense and wonderful love for Elsie with his mother. Both Elsie and Susan handle their grief honestly even if very differently. And each must come to find a way to move forward and go on in the present even though they are shattered. Their gradual understanding of the depth of the other's love for Ben helps each of them grow and change. Reid has captured beautifully the range of emotions, the anger, the fear, and the wracking grief that often come in the wake of an early and unexpected death. The reader sympathizes with Elsie and comes to respect Susan's fortitude as she piles the loss of her only son on top of the loss of her husband only a couple of years prior. It is hard to keep dry-eyed when reading this but in the end it is true and hopeful and healing, if not more than a little bittersweet.

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

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Emeralds Included by Betsy Woodman. The book is being released by Henry Holt on July 8, 2014.

Amazon says this about the book: Feathers fly and cultures clash as the Jolly Grant House prepares to welcome a special delivery from Scotland

In the third installment of the Jana Bibi series, Betsy Woodman takes us back to the Jolly Grant house for the arrival of Jana’s son, Jack, from Scotland, and his Hungarian bride-to-be, Katarina Esterhazy. The whole gang is excited to welcome their international visitors—and Jana is determined to repair the house to Jack’s high standards and those of her grandfather, from whom she inherited the eccentric building. But this puts a strain on Jana, both emotionally and financially, and she risks her most prized and valuable possession—the (surprisingly real!) emeralds she got from the Treasure Emporium—to help her through it.

Jana saved the town from a government dam in Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes and foiled an international bird-smuggling ring in Love Potion Number 10, but in Emeralds Included, Jana faces her biggest challenges yet: preparing for her son’s arrival and planning a wedding in the upside-down town of Harma Nagar!

Book a day (collected)

Did you play along with the #bookaday postings in June, either on Facebook or on Twitter? I did and I thought I'd collect all of mine here for you.

June 1: Favorite book from childhood? The Fabulous Flight by Robert Lawson. This is the greatest book and it is long since out of print but it's so great my sister and I both bought copies off abebooks.com a while ago and we also have my mom's original copy at the cottage. We just wanted to make sure our kids will always have access to it.

June 2: Best bargain? This one is hard! Having worked both for a publisher and at a bookstore, I got a lot of books deeply discounted and I am always on the lookout for inexpensive books. But I think that the best deal was probably the quarter I paid for an old hardcover copy of Beverley Nichol's brilliant Laughter on the Stairs, which introduced me to a wonderful, witty author I'd never heard anyone else ever mention.

June 3: One with a blue cover? Since blue is my favorite color, I am always attracted to books with blue covers and have many, many, many to choose from. So I picked Mark Dunn's Welcome to Higby because the *whole* cover is blue.

June 4: Least favourite book by favourite author? Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. I just can't help it but I don't love Fanny Price and her moral high ground.

June 5: Doesn't belong to me? Will I be stoned for admitting that I don't have any books that don't belong to me here? I rarely borrow books because I don't like feeling an obligation to get through them and get them back to their rightful owner. And as a corollary, I can be a bit squirrelly about lending my books too. It's like sending them off to summer camp but not knowing if/when they'll return. (And no, I don't send my kids to summer camp either, despite the fact that all camps would certainly return them to me on or before a specified date.)

June 6: The one I always give as a gift? Well, I try to tailor my book gifts specifically to the person I'm gifting but if I didn't have a clue, I'd probably get them my most recent raved about books: Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler or The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. Then again, I could always fall back on two I have for a while now loved: Silk by Alessandro Barrico or Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye. And for baby gifts, I always pick up both the Newbery and Caldecott winner for the year of the baby's birth (so obviously they vary year to year).

June 7: Forgot I owned it? I have an appalling amount of books and every time I poke around my shelves, I find something I forgot I owned. Sometimes I'm bad enough to have bought them more than once as well.

June 8: Have more than one copy? Normally I return duplicates to the store (the benefits of having everything cataloged and easily accessible but I do have multiple copies of the Harry Potter series because I bought the hardcovers when they were released and I fell in love with the cover art of the more recently released slipcovered paperbacks so I bought them too.

June 9: Film or tv tie-in? I really don't like movie or tv covers on books. I prefer to keep my media separate.

June 10: Reminds me of someone I love? Our torn and battered copy of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom reminds me of my wonderful reading children who used to request that book over and over again.

June 11: A secondhand bookshop gem? The B Book by Stan and Jan Berenstain was the first book I ever read. My mother got rid of it at some point (and I haven't quite forgiven her for it) but a secondhand bookstore found it for me again when I was in high school. It had long been out of print when I was searching for it but it was reissued at some point so it's fairly easy to find now but it sure wasn't then!

June 12: I pretend to have read it? It's not a contest so I don't pretend to have read anything. I have never managed to finish Paradise Lost (twice) but I always admit that failure.

June 13: Makes me laugh? Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog is hilarious, truly laugh out loud funny.

June 14: An old favorite? I read James Michener's Hawaii one summer when I was 12 and I've had a soft spot for it ever since.

June 15: Favorite fictional father? There really aren't all that many great dads in fiction, are there? Or at least not in the fiction I read, I guess. I think I'll go with the slightly absent minded dad in The Penderwicks because while he isn't a focus of the narrative, he clearly loves his girls and allows them to have the sort of unstructured and wholesome childhood that makes the book and their adventures sing. He's kind, funny, understanding, and supportive. A peach of a dad.

June 16: Can't believe more people haven't read? Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye. I try and push this book on everyone in a tri-state area so surely by now everyone would have read it, right? Wrong! So what are you waiting for? Go read it.

June 17: Future classic? I wish I really could predict this sort of thing but since I can't, I'll say that I think that Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief will stand the test of time.

June 18: Bought on a recommendation? I bought Outlander by Diana Gabaldon after a friend raved about it. I was very reluctant to read a book so clearly marketed as a romance (I was still in my reading snob phase after school) but she really bullied me into it and since I still had a discount at the bookstore, I finally gave in. Those first four books (all that had been released at that point) sucked an entire weekend out of my life because I couldn't put them down.

June 19: Still can't stop talking about it? Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler is my rave book so far this year. I mentioned it at the WNBA National Board Meeting this past weekend and I mentioned it at book club again tonight. I suspect I'll be talking about it for a long time to come too.

June 20: Favorite cover? People who know my peccadillos well know that if a cover has water of any sort on it, I am completely sucked in. I particularly liked the hardcover version of Michael Parker's The Watery Part of the World.

June 21: Summer read? Well, this one depends on whether you tackle a big book in the summer or prefer lighter reads. When I was younger, I read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo one summer and its epic scale was wonderful for the long reading days. For a delightful, lighter, more modern read, The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion was charming.

June 22: Out of Print? Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie is kind of out of print. You can get the e-book version but not the physical version (and we all already know how I feel about e-books). It is a magnificent book though and if I didn't have it already and could only get it via e-book, I'd cave.

June 23: Made to read at school? When you go to school forever and focus on literature, there's an awful lot of books you can list for this one so I think I'll pick a much less conventional choice: Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea, which I read for my Asian American Literature class in college.

June 24: Hooked me in to reading? This would have to be The B Book by Stan and Jan Berenstain, the first book I ever read myself. I still remember the amazing feeling of reading for the first time. Nothing has ever beat it and it's why I still sink into books every chance I get.

June 25: Never finished it? Milton's Paradise Lost. Worse yet, I didn't finish it twice, once in 10th grade and once in grad school. Both times I slammed it shut muttering about how I wished Milton's daughter's hadn't written down their blind father's words and that since I knew the story of the Fall, I didn't have any need to plod onward with this brain numbingly, tiresome piece of horridness. Not that I have firm opinions on it or anything.

June 26: Should have sold more copies? Silk by Alessandro Baricco is amazing and is one that I always try to mention to people in hopes that this slim volume will sell enough to stay in print forever.

June 27: Want to be one of the characters? I don't know that there's any book where I'd happily be any and all of the characters but yes, I am cliché enough to admit I'd love to be Lizzie Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) or Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables) if I had my choice of characters within a said book. I'd also like to be Thursday Next from Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series which starts with The Eyre Affair, because who wouldn't want to live in a fictional world all the time?!

June 28: Bought at my fave independent bookshop? I bought Great Lakes Nature by Mary Blocksma at Safe Harbor Books in Cedarville, MI, a teeny, tiny bookshop up by our cottage. I try to buy as much as I can there every summer to say thanks for being there.

June 29: The one I have reread most often? If I don't count the books I read and read and read to my kids when they were small, it would have to be Pride and Prejudice, of course.

June 30: Would save if my house burned down? The family bible that dates back to my great great grandparents.

Review: Betty's (Little Basement) Garden by Laurel Dewey

When I was in college, my boyfriend and I were visiting some of his fraternity brothers in their off campus apartment. I didn't know the two guys we were visiting all that well so I was a bit uncomfortable. And as I do when I'm uncomfortable, I babbled away on topics of little to no consequence without letting anyone else get a word in edgewise. What did I latch onto while sitting with these two guys? Of course, I complimented them on the fantastically lush and gorgeous plant sitting in their window. I admitted how many houseplants I had murdered over my college dorm career and asked if they had any tips for me since they clearly had green thumbs. Obviously I didn't notice that my boyfriend and these two guys were all sitting there looking at me with their mouths open in incredulity. After we left, the boyfriend laughed uproariously over the fact that I had gushed over their marijuana plant, agreeing that I did indeed grow up in an ivory tower if I had no idea that that was what the plant was. What can I say? I was sheltered. So the whole pot culture is curious to me and I was intrigued to read Laurel Dewey's novel, Betty's (Little Basement) Garden, about a woman who starts growing marijuana in her basement.

Betty Craven is a widow in her early sixties. She is as conservative, judgmental, and Republican as it gets. She's known for her wonderful parties, her delicious homemade chocolates, her prize-winning garden, and always being put together and perfect. But all of that is a façade. Betty's marriage to her late husband was miserable; he was hateful and she lacked the courage to stand up to him. Her beloved only son, Frankie, died of an overdose, a terrible loss over which she feels crippling guilt. The gourmet chocolate shop she opened after her husband's death collapsed with the economy. And she's having to sell off antiques from her crumbling home just to make ends meet. Life is not going well for Betty. But after she signs a letter to the editor written by a friend arguing a need to limit the number of medical marijuana dispensaries allowed in her little town, her life changes 180 degrees.

One of Betty's coterie of upright, like-minded friends is dying of cancer. When she reluctantly goes to visit Peggy, she meets Peyton, Peggy's nephew, who is clearly a marijuana user. Betty is equal parts repulsed and drawn to him for his similarity to her late son and she is horrified when she discovers that he has taken the beautiful chocolates she made for Peggy, melted them down, and added cannabis to them so that Peggy will have some pain relief in her final days. But the very fact of his doing this plants a seed in Betty's mind. And before she knows it, she has applied to be a medical caregiver herself, is taking on patients, growing marijuana in her basement, starting a relationship with the owner of the Hippy Dippy Heath Food Store, and meeting the people who populate a very different social circle than the one in which she's lived her life so far.

Betty's character is clearly at a crossroads with her life falling down around her feet when she goes from horrified about the idea of legal marijuana to growing and sampling it herself. She is changing her life and outlook practically on a dime, having signed the strident letter to the editor against marijuana and the "criminal element" it brings with it to being completely immersed in the pot culture in a mere seven days. But if her turn around on the issue is quick, the story certainly isn't, taking more than 200 pages to get her there. In the chunk of the book prior to her putting her new decision into practice, there is a large amount of preachy research that does nothing to move the story along thrown at the reader. Apparently everyone Betty meets who is involved in growing or using marijuana (excuse me, cannabis) is a natural philosopher and more enlightened than Betty's narrow-minded, uptight, ignorant, Republican friends. And all of her new friends feel the need to share their life philosophy with Betty, making the book painfully repetitive. Betty remains conflicted about sharing her new life choices with her friends even as she jumps in with both feet and has the privilege of sharing the beauty of the life cycle with her patients. The cannabis activist in the novel suggests that Betty, with her classy (her caregiving business is even called The Classy Joint) and mainstream appearance, should become a vocal and visible symbol of all that is right about legalizing marijuana across the board. Apparently that's what Dewey has chosen to do here, use her character of Betty, a formerly misguided, now enlightened Republican, to further the call for legalization. And that would be fine in a political tract. In a novel, though, it was downright boring, overwhelming any plot and creating incredibly one-dimensional unrealistic characters.  I was terribly disappointed in this novel.

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