Review: The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley

I still carry baby weight from all three of my babies. Too bad they are 17, 16 and 12 years old respectively. That means it's probably not legitimate to call it baby weight anymore but that doesn't mean I don't still have hopes of it coming off, eventually. Abigail, the main character in Ellen Hawley's novel, The Divorce Diet, really can call her excess weight baby weight, and while losing the 170 pounds of lying, cheating husband is not what she had in mind when she decided to lose the weight, it is in fact what happens.

Abigail is going to start a diet to finally lose the weight she is still carrying from her pregnancy with 7 months old Rosie. She's certain this will help bring some action back into her marriage. As she cooks an amazing dinner and a decadent cake for husband Thad's birthday, she delves into her new diet book for the first time, making an alternate, plasticky meal for herself. But when Thad comes home late and only picks at the food, it is clear that something is wrong. Apparently the whole marriage thing isn't working for him and he wants out. Abigail is completely gutted. Without Thad and her marriage, she is penniless and doesn't know who she is so she takes baby Rosie, the shining sun in her world, and moves back home to her parents' house.

Unwilling to give up the diet, ahem "lifestyle plan," she's started because she doesn't want the diet to have been for Thad, she continues consulting the book and even having long conversations and discussions with the invisible diet guru she imagines to have written it. This guru keeps feeding her advice to make her the best, new, thin Abigail she can be while Abigail complains about the ghastly meals and the woe-filled life she's inadvertently come to inhabit. Before she met Thad, Abigail had worked at a gourmet kitchen store and hosted underground dinners to showcase her culinary skills. With Thad, she used only the finest ingredients and tinkered with gourmet recipes. After Thad, at her parents' house, she is faced with frozen meals and bland, flavorless, processed foods while she does the only work she can find, and even that she isn't even qualified for: being a waitress at a chain restaurant. She sees her life having taken the same disheartening trajectory and spends a lot of time wallowing in her unhappiness and vowing to change. It's only when she really examines her past life objectively and sees it for what it was rather than for what she thought it was, that she can move towards becoming the person she wants to be and to find happiness again.

This is very much a novel of reinvention. Abigail is forced to make a change she doesn't see coming nor which she wants but in weathering it, she becomes a much stronger woman. In fact, she moves from being a whiny teenager type to being a fulfilled woman in charge of her own life and directing her own destiny. Her character starts the book off with little to no self-esteem, finding her self-worth in her husband and the upwardly mobile life that they lead. Once he shatters this world for her and moves his girlfriend into Abigail's very bed, she must learn to rely on herself and to be capable on her own. Although living with her parents allows her to regress, it also gives her a bit of breathing room and a safe place in which to tentatively learn independence and self-sufficiency.

Most chapters cover one day in Abigail's life following Thad's dismissal of their marriage and are set up in a sort of diary format. Abigail records her food intake and her daily exercise as well as mocking the largely inedible recipes offered up by her diet book. Her tone is snarky and the exercise entries, in particular, are fairly entertaining. She is clearly depressed though as there is a flavoring of guilt threaded throughout the entries as well, such as when she eats half a tasteless Pop Tart and discards the other half on her passenger seat day after day after day or when she separates the clothes scattered across her floor into clean on one side and dirty on the other, unmotivated to pick them up, wash the dirties, and hang up the clean. In fact, Abigail is just treading water for much of the novel, barely keeping her head above water emotionally. She's helped in the latter by arguing with her invisible guru and by the wonderful babysitter, Dell, she finds to watch Rosie for her and who selflessly provides Abigail with a sympathetic ear and sometimes even some gentle advice every day after work.

The diary entry format of the novel is a bit choppy and can be repetitive although sometimes that repetition is intentional to highlight the joyless drudgery of Abigail's life. Abigail, as a character, is incredibly immature and naïve for a twenty-five year old woman.  Seeing the other characters only through her eyes makes them rather one dimensional. Thad is a jerk all the way around and her parents, while allowing her to move home without much conversation, are strangely uninvolved in her life, content to sit unspeaking in front of the tv every night. Dell, although providing a necessary outlet for Abigail, never becomes much of a character. And aside from being cautionary, Abigail's fellow waitresses are simply types. The majority of the novel tracks the days and weeks immediately following the breakup of the marriage but once Abigail starts to consider who she really wants to be and what would bring her happiness, the pace goes from slow to blazing fast, wrapping up a much changed Abigail's life in just a short chapter or three. There's definitely humor woven throughout Abigail's struggle, especially in reference to her weight, which helps to lighten the over all mood of the story a fair bit. A quick and easy book to read, a nice tale about change, reinvention and finding the joy in life, it was generally enjoyable although some of the repetition could have been dispensed with for the reader's sake.

For more information about Ellen Hawley and the book, take a look at her web page, follow her at Twitter, read her blog, or check out the book's Goodreads page. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Lisa from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Review: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

Savage. Brutal. Horrifying. Graphic. When you use adjectives like this to describe a book, it can be hard to convince people to read it. And when you add in the fact that there is terrible violence, repeated rape, kidnapping, and PTSD too, well, you'd be forgiven for giving the book a wide berth indeed. But do you still skip the book if it also tackles important issues of classism and inequity, entitlement and the social divide, and the reality of life in modern day Haiti?  All of this is very much what you find between the covers of Roxane Gay's debut novel, An Untamed State. It is difficult to read, jarring in the force of terrible happenings, and devastating in consequences but it is not a glorification or whitewashing of torture or poverty, nor of either America or Haiti. It is powerful and affecting and impressive.

Mireille, her husband Michael, and their baby Christophe have come to Haiti to visit Miri's extraordinarily wealthy parents. The small family is heading out for a day at the beach when Miri is snatched from their car and held for a million dollar ransom. Her initial concern is for her baby and her husband, assuming that she will be held relatively unscathed and eventually returned to her family. But when her father, a self-made man who will not relinquish his moral values for anything, refuses to pay the ransom and Miri herself disobeys her captors, mouthing off and refusing to tell her father she is being mistreated, hell on earth is released. Miri is beaten, gang raped, cut, burned with cigarettes, and tortured repeatedly to the point that she must mentally detach from her physical self, completely disassociating from herself in order to survive. For thirteen days, Miri endures, only because she must and because her body refuses to die like her mind has already done. And once she is returned to her family, her suffering is not at an end. She will live with the horror for her whole life.

The bulk of the novel is told in the first person by Mireille, giving the reader an inside view of the evil being done to her. But she also offers tidbits of her past life, her childhood with a loving but driven father, her genesis of her relationship with her Midwestern farmer's son husband, their misunderstandings and his passionate refusal to give up on her, and her brusque relationship with her mother-in-law. This backstory builds Miri's character beyond the broken and unstable women who survives unspeakable acts of violence, highlighting the ways in which she is indelibly marked by a malevolent Haiti she's never before experienced, cocooned in affluence as her family has always been in Miri's lifetime. The brief respite every now and again from the constant brutality is striking but it doesn't necessarily paint a very positive picture of Mireille. She comes across as volatile, contrary, and rather spoiled. Despite it seeming as if she is constantly testing Michael to see if he's good enough for her and the various way she is an unlikeable character, there is no question that she doesn't deserve to experience what she is forced to endure; no one does.  In addition, there are a few short third person chapters that take the focus from Miri and give the reader a glimpse of how her family, both her Haitian born parents and her American husband, are handling her kidnapping, completely ignorant of what she is actually experiencing.

Fully two thirds of the novel centers on the thirteen days in which Miri was captive with the final third detailing her difficulties afterwards. Those first two thirds are incredibly difficult to read, horror piling on top of horror to the point that the reader almost disassociates from the violence just as Miri does. But even the final third is painful to read as Miri tries to climb out of the dark and terrible place she has pushed her consciousness in order to survive. None of the characters come off well, not the wealthy and not the poor. The Commander, the leader of the kidnappers, is warped and evil. TiPierre, another of the kidnappers, desperately poor, offers Miri gentleness only because he wants her compliant and willing, enslaved to him because of his grotesque kindness to her. Miri's father is cold and uncaring, turning a blind eye not only to Miri's plight but to his extended family and the greater world around him in Haiti. Michael is ineffectual and suffering in his own way in this very foreign place. Interestingly, despite Mireille being angered by Michael's negative perception of Haiti having been formed solely by the US news, the book as a whole reinforces and strengthens this impression of Haiti as a terrible, lawless, and desperate place, a conclusion that Gay might not have fully intended. The prose is direct, the images confrontational and bald.  In the end, this was a book that I had to set down and walk away from, only coming back to it to read it through in a rush to get to the end and away from the brutality and brokenness, ultimately following it with a read as different as possible from it as an antidote to the lingering horror of the story. This wild and frightening, untamed state is definitely not for everyone.

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

Lost and Found by Brooke Davis. The book is being released by Dutton Adult on January 27, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: An irresistible debut novel about the wisdom of the very young, the mischief of the very old, and the magic that happens when no one else is looking

Millie Bird, seven years old and ever hopeful, always wears red gumboots to match her curly hair. Her struggling mother, grieving the death of Millie’s father, leaves her in the big ladies’ underwear department of a local store and never returns.

Agatha Pantha, eighty-two, has not left her house—or spoken to another human being—since she was widowed seven years ago. She fills the silence by yelling at passersby, watching loud static on TV, and maintaining a strict daily schedule.

Karl the Touch Typist, eighty-seven, once used his fingers to type out love notes on his wife’s skin. Now that she’s gone, he types his words out into the air as he speaks. Karl’s been committed to a nursing home, but in a moment of clarity and joy, he escapes. Now he’s on the lam.

Brought together at a fateful moment, the three embark upon a road trip across Western Australia to find Millie’s mother. Along the way, Karl wants to find out how to be a man again; Agatha just wants everything to go back to how it was.

Together they will discover that old age is not the same as death, that the young can be wise, and that letting yourself feel sad once in a while just might be the key to a happy life.

Review: A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

I have a weakness for quiet books set in England that shine a light--a piercing light for all the quietness of the text--on society. Luckily there are a number of authors through the years who have done this: Jane Austen, Angela Thirkell, and Barbara Pym, among others. This half a century old first novel of Margaret Drabble's fits in this same tradition of socially revealing character driven novels infused with moments of sly wit.

Sarah is recently graduated from Oxford and living in Paris as an English tutor when she is summoned home to act as a bridesmaid for her stunning older sister Louise's wedding. Sarah does not understand how her sister can be marrying Stephen, even if he is rich and a semi-famous author. He is snobbish and unappealing but Louise is determined to marry him, accepting the reality of a rather cold-blooded, loveless marriage. After the wedding, Sarah continues to drift along in her own life, taking an uninspired job, living with a friend who is getting divorced, and occasionally running into people who report back to her about her sister's apparent loneliness in her new marriage. And then she sees Louise again herself and witnesses what people have been whispering all along, that Louise married Stephen for money and keeps his best friend, a famous theater actor, on the side for fulfillment.  As she watches her sister, Sarah wonders what shape her own life will take.

Sarah is perceived by others as a bubbly bon vivant of sorts but that's a very superficial view of her character. She is casually and thoughtlessly intelligent, well-educated and a member of the socially advantageous middle class. She's acerbic and astute about the society around her, even if she is a card-carrying member of it as well. Neither she nor Louise seem particularly happy and the pervading feeling of the novel is of a mild dissatisfaction with life. The social dynamic is changing, allowing more opportunity for women but it hasn't quite gotten there entirely by the time the novel opens in early 1960s London and the questioning of the limited choices available to women was still not terribly common. Sarah tells the novel in the first person, giving the reader her perspective of not only the strained relationship between the sisters but also her mocking, yet envious, derision of Louise and Stephen's pretentious affluence as well as about her own weary and unfulfilled days. There is a thread of existential angst that runs through the narrative and a sharp social commentary as well. This is an astute character study, both literate and literary. There's not much of a plot running through it so those looking for action will be better served elsewhere. As I already knew from later works, Drabble writes beautifully and she has captured the idle beauty of a certain class of women trying to find her best path in life.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
The Wednesday Daughters by Meg Waite Clayton
The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley
The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane by Elizabeth Boyle

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers
The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott

Reviews posted this week:

Animal Madness by Laurel Braitman
Wild by Cheryl Strayed

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

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
The Wednesday Daughters by Meg Waite Clayton
The Divorce Diet by Ellen Hawley
The Viscount Who Lived Down the Lane by Elizabeth Boyle

Monday Mailbox

A delightful looking pair of novels hit my house this week. I must already be teeing up for Valentine's Day or something. Then again, so are the stores and I did already buy my husband his Valentine's card the other day. (Shhh! Don't tell him.) This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Love Book by Nina Solomon came from Kaylie Jones Books and LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

If you found a book that directed you on a search for a soul mate, wouldn't you give it a whirl? This novel about a single mom journalist and friends who discover a book that promises just that, even as it sends them in unexpected directions, is incredibly appealing to me.

Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach came from The Overlook Press for a blog tour.

About a ladies man who needs to fill his slightly tired B&B in rural Wales and the collection of beaten down by love guests that arrive to inhabit the place, this sounds like a delightful and wonderful romantic, comedic read.

If you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday Salon: The Turning of the Year Makes Me Crazy (As Usual)

We're more than a week into the new year now and if you made resolutions (I don't), you might have already broken them. You might, also, have stuck them out so far. There is, of course, the usual weight loss resolution that sees gyms fill up beyond capacity these first few weeks of the year. And while I want to lose weight (again), I never make it a resolution. Bookish people like me like to set forth the idea that they will read more in the coming year or wider diversity or, or, or. Again, I don't. This isn't to say that I am complacent or unaffected by the change of date. Because I am. I think there must be something in our very souls that thrills to specific, outside of ourselves, starting points. And I am not immune to that thrill at all. But rather than resolutions, I tend to find strange little projects that pique my interest and embark on those. So far this year, I have turned all of the hangers in my closet backwards so that I can figure out which clothes I actually wear during the year and donate the rest. It's a delayed closet purge. I've organized all of the recipes I've torn out of magazine to try over the years. I grabbed folders that were still in decent shape after my children finished with them for school, labeled them with categories that work for me, and filed all untried recipes accordingly. I took a toothpick and ran it under the rim of my stove where all sorts of tiny crumby cooking detritus manages to fester throughout the year. (I don't necessarily recommend this gross option, by the way.). I have other mini projects like this that I'd love to accomplish before the motivation of the first leaves me (and it will). One of those is to finish rearranging my bookshelves so that all of the books I've bought over the past year will fit in. I'm not holding out much hope though. That's okay though. In the meantime, I'll just read.

This week my reading journey took me to Haiti with a kidnapped woman, to the English Lake District with three women who are struggling with love in their lives, to the guest room in a character's parents house after her husband leaves her, and to Regency London where a meddling next door neighbor and her mangy cat pull a reclusive former soldier out of the self-imposed prison he's created. I'm also visiting Chartres with a woman who cleans the cathedral and becomes indispensable to several of the people around the area and Lowell, Massachusetts with factory girls. Where have your reading journeys taken you this past week?