Review: The English American by Alison Larkin

Title: The English American

Author: Alison Larkin

Pages: 336

Source: Library

Rating: 7/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "I think everyone should be adopted."

Summary (From back of book):

Twenty-eight-year-old Pippa Dunn is a cheerfully awkward fish out of water -- an untidy redheaded bundle of energy in a posh, buttoned-up London neighborhood. She has always loved her adoptive English parents and sister, Charlotte, while knowing that she was adopted -- or, as her parents tell her, "You were chosen, darling." But not knowing where she truly comes from, Pippa starts to wonder ... who are her birth parents? Are they ebullient and creative, like Pippa? Are they rich and charismatic? Is she a long-lost Kennedy daughter?

When she learns that her mother is a free-spirited redhead (like Pippa!) living in Georgia and that her father is a politically inclined businessman in Washington, D.C., Pippa takes the plunge and crosses the pond to discover her roots. She is soon caught between two opposing cultures, two sets of parents, and two completely different men. Pippa is about to learn the real meaning of "nature versus nurture," of "culture clash" -- and of the full richness (and chaos) of her identity as an English American.

My Two Cents:

This book started out a little worrisome to me. There was just something about it that didn't catch me quite right, and I was worried that that would be the case for the book's entirety. Luckily, something just seemed to click into place about 40 pages in, and then I finished the book rather quickly.

I absolutely adored Pippa. She was smart, funny and entirely herself, regardless of the way others thought she should act. She reminded me a lot of a grown-up Anne of Green Gables or Pippi Longstocking (Not just because of the red hair!) because she just did and said whatever she felt like doing or saying instead of conforming to the conventions that everyone else did. I felt very connected to her as a character, also, and I cared about what happened to her.

Larkin's writing is good, but there's nothing really special about it. It's clear and easy-to-read. This is a book that could be powered through in a few hours, if the reader were so inclined.

The one thing I wasn't very fond of in this book was that Pippa's birth parents were just so out there it was almost a little hard to believe them. I know that Larkin was trying to show that Pippa realizes that her "real" parents are the ones who raised her for 28 years, so there had to be something "wrong" with the birth parents, but there was just a little too much villainization (Is that a word?) of the birth parents for my liking. I almost would've preferred to see that the birth parents were just *normal* people who welcomed Pippa into the fold of their lives.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I think anyone who likes books about the "odd duck" child in a family, or who was the "odd duck" in a family, could relate to and enjoy this book.

Review: Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Title: Jude the Obscure

Author: Thomas Hardy

Pages: 444

Source: Personal copy

Rating: 8/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry."

Summary (From back of book):

Jude Fawley, the stone-mason, whose academic ambitions are thwarted by poverty and the indifference of the authorities at Christminster, appears to find fulfillment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both of them have fled from previous marriages, and together they share a 'two-in-oneness' rarely matched. Ironically, when tragedy strikes it is Sue, the modern, emancipated thinker -- the last and greatest of Hardy's heroines, ranking with Emma Bovary and Anna Karenin -- who is unequal to the challenge.

Its literary qualities apart, Jude the Obscure is also a rich source of social history, accurately reflecting within its pages the encroachment of the modern, developing world on the rural traditions of England.

My Two Cents:

While this book was still good, it is my least-favorite Hardy to-date (I've read all the major Hardy's except The Mayor of Casterbridge). I think a lot of the problem I had with this was that it was so meandering most of the time -- It covered such a HUGE span of time and it took forever for Hardy to really get down to the meat of the matter. I think it would have been better if he had just focused on Jude's bid for Christminster and then showed a little of what happened after his rejection or something.


I really liked Jude as a character. I felt sorry for him through the entire book, mostly because I knew that his big dreams could come to no positive end. You have to expect, when reading Hardy, that anyone who has a dream but no money will come within sight of achieving that goal, but never quite make it. And Jude works hard, independently, to gain entry to Christminster (A fictionalized Oxford), but fails because he has neither the money or the social standing to recommend him to the dons.

I wasn't, actually, terribly fond of Sue, nor was I really impressed with her as the heroine. Sure, she bucks the tradition of rural England and runs off with Jude while she's still technically married -- One source of all the "scandal" when this book was first published -- but she just seemed kind of blah to me. She had no real spark or life that I could grab onto and say, "Yes, this is a great heroine."

Even though Hardy was a pretty critical social writer in his time and often dealt with the plight of the lower classes, this is his most socially critical work that I've read. This book, although slow at times, never failed to provide me with a rich commentary on the social mores of Jude's world. If nothing else, this book is important for that picture of a world gone by.

Review: The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens

Title: The Wife's Tale

Author: Lori Lansens

Pages: 353

Source: Library Thing Early Reviewers program

Rating: 8/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "Alone in the evenings, when the light had drained from the slate roof of her small rural home, and when her husband was working late, Mary Gooch would perform a striptease for the stars at the open bedroom window: shifting out of rumpled bottoms, slipping off blousy top, liberating breasts, peeling panties, her creamy flesh spilling forth until she was completely, exquisitely nude."

Summary (From book flap):

On the eve of their silver anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband, Jimmy -- still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school -- to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary's life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from her bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband's disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search.

She boards a plane for the first time in her life and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary learns that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she discovers fills her with an inner strength she's never felt before: perfect strangers who come to her rescue, an aging, sometimes hostile mother-in-law who needs her help, friends who enjoy her company. And through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.

My Two Cents:

At first, I wasn't sure if I was going to like this book. I'm not usually a big fan of books that focus largely on one characteristic of a character -- In this case, Mary's weight -- because it almost seems to reduce that character to a stereotype. With Mary, however, it soon becomes obvious that her weight is the outgrowth and cause of a lot of other factors in her life.

I've never had an experience with Lansens' work in the past, but I think I'll seek out her other novel. Her writing is smooth and easy to read. This book flows really well. I would sit down to read and look up after another 50 pages, surprised at how quickly the pages flew by.

I really liked Mary as a character. She is someone who, in the beginning of the book, clearly needs a change. It takes one major event to throw her out of her usual life, but she does a total 180 and becomes a whole new person. She steps outside herself and her own problems to help others, including her often abrasive mother-in-law and a woman she meets in a parking lot. I cheered for Mary through the whole book.

Lansens is great at rendering a lot of different people vividly. She has the ability to present an Israeli immigrant who drives a limousine with the same depth that she shows us Mary, and we get the same sense of a kindly bank teller that we do of Mary's husband. The minor characters are just as memorable as the major characters.

If you like stories with characters who make great changes in their lives or who get through a major crisis, or if you're a fan of non-traditional women's fiction (Is that even a category?), this book's for you.

Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Title: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Author: Lionel Shriver

Pages: 400

Source: Interlibrary loan

Rating: 8/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you."

Summary (From book flap):

That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But generalizations about genes are likely to provide cold comfort if it's your own child who just opened fire on his fellow algebra students and whose class photograph -- with its unseemly grin -- is shown on the evening news coast-to-coast.

If the question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.

In relating the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged husband, Frank, through a series of startlingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son became, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general -- and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?

My Two Cents:

I really had to take some time away from this book (at least two weeks) to figure out my thoughts on it. As it is, I have a totally different opinion of roughly the first half of the book than I do about the last half.

In the first half, I nearly stopped reading several times. I could not stand Eva for anything. She hated being a mother and it showed in how she treated Kevin, and I just wanted to scream at her, "Then why did you have a child??" I absolutely hated her, and I really hated the book at that point. Shriver's writing also got to me in the first half, as it seemed as if Eva was just using all the clever turns of phrase on thousand-dollar words in the book just to show how intelligent she was.

The second half, though, I started to read quickly to find out what happened. I knew that Eva's story basically ended up with Kevin's massacre of his classmates, but I wanted to find out if there was any one reason or if it just was part of his make-up. I wouldn't say that I enjoyed the book, or that I liked Eva any more, it's just that the second half was more compelling. The "big revelation" at the end wasn't such a big revelation -- I saw that one coming from the very beginning.

I think a lot of the problem that I had with this book is that Eva is a very unreliable narrator. We know her views of Kevin were skewed pretty much from the day she found out she was pregnant, so we don't really know if he is as evil as she made him out to be all this time. Sure, he killed his classmates, but was he really that flat and unemotional from the time he was a child?

Aside from that, though, I thought this was a very interesting look at the school-shooter phenomenon that seemed to be all over the news in the late-1990s. Whenever a student opens fire at school, the first question everyone always asks is, "Why?" In Kevin's case, as probably in others, there seems to be no real answer.

Review: Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

Title: Angelology

Author: Danielle Trussoni

Pages: 809 (Large print edition)

Source: Library

Rating: 10/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "The angelologists examined the body."

Summary (From back of book):

Sister Evangeline was just a girl when her father entrusted her to the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in upstate New York. Now, at twenty-three, her discovery of a 1943 letter from the famous philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller to the late mother superior of the Saint Rose Convent plunges Evangeline into a secret history that stretches back a thousand years: an ancient conflict between the Society of Angelologists and the monstrously beautiful descendants of angels and humans, the Nephilim.

My Two Cents:

I love books in which a whole new world is created, but that world makes sense when placed within our own. Trussoni's world of angels and angelologists is so rich and historied, and so rooted in our real history, that I easily could picture angels walking among us as the social elite.

Trussoni creates an incredible history, stretching all the way back to the fall of the angels from heaven and into present times, complete with scholars of angelology, legends, research journals and personal letters. I haven't done a lot of research as to how Trussoni wrote this book, but she either did a whole lot of theological research or she has one incredible imagination -- I'm guessing it's a combination of both. I was stunned by the depth of the world which Trussoni created, a world which made integral parts of artistic holdings of the Rockefeller family. It's really hard to explain without giving a lot away, but just suffice it to say that Trussoni's world will amaze you.

I really liked Evangeline as a character. She was contemplative and steadfast, so she made a lot of sense as a nun, but she also had enough modern characteristics to make her a little rebellious. (Side note: I grew up Catholic, so I know not all nuns are meek and mild. I'm just saying she was a good mix of what we think of as "nuns" and someone who would pursue this mystery.)

I'd love to say more about this book, but I'm afraid that anything else I say will ruin the experience for others who plan to read it. If you're even considering reading this book, go for it. This is a great book!

Review: Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet by Stephanie Cowell

Title: Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet

Author: Stephanie Cowell

Pages: 330

Source: Publisher

Rating: 7/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "Dull late-afternoon light glittered on the hanging copper pots in the kitchen where the old painter sat with his wine, smoking a cigarette, a letter angrily crumpled on the table in front of him."

Summary (From the back of the book):

In his early twenties, Claude Monet arrives in Paris determined to make his fortune as an artist. Instead, he finds poverty and obscurity but also camaraderie in a group of similarly unknown painters -- Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Bazille, Manet, and Cezanne -- who share his vision and passion. But the single-most influential person in his life is a charming and vivacious upper-class girl named Camille Doncieux, who rejects a life of privilege to be with him. He falls madly in love with Camille, and his first great success is a portrait of her in an exquisite green opera dress. The two manage to stay together through years of bitter opposition from their families, Claude's artistic failures, and wretched poverty, but adversity eventually takes its toll. Even as Monet begins to sell his work, his marriage to Camille descends into tragedy -- and Monet realizes that he has never completely known his true love and greatest muse.

My Two Cents:

I'm a big fan of not only books about real people (authors, artists, politicians, etc.), but also those which give a little (fictional) insight into the making of famous paintings. I love Susan Vreeland and Tracy Chevalier's work, so I decided to give this one a try.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book. I liked how Cowell showed the reader how much Monet struggled to become as well-known a painter as he was. I also liked that she showed the reader someone who, even according to the few accounts of her real life, had a huge impact on Monet's life and work. In her author's note, Cowell says there is not much written about Camille Doncieux, but she takes what little there is and runs with it.

For the most part, Cowell's writing is very readable, and I was able to see a lot of what she was describing. Her dialogue between the characters, however, was a little stilted at times. This isn't the biggest example of the dialogue (I really need to start putting Post-its on the pages or something), but this is a randomly chosen piece of dialogue that kind of made me raise my eyebrows:

"People died," she stammered. "I ran out when the city was burning. And it all seemed to burn. A boy died before me, shot down. I've not been very good in my life. The nuns raised me to be good, but I've not been. That bullet was perhaps meant for me, no him. I ran back here and waited for it. And it was all ashes from the burning, coming through the window, huge black things that settled everywhere." (p. 244-5 in the ARC edition - Finished copies may have different page numbers)

I also had a difficult time connecting to Monet as a character. I just didn't really feel one way or another about him, but that didn't really influence my reading of the novel, which is strange. I also didn't really connect with Camille that much, but I did feel as if she was more fleshed out and realistic than Monet was. I think I enjoyed all the more minor characters -- Bazille, Pissarro, Renoir -- that I was able to overlook the fact that I didn't really feel that much for the main characters.

If you enjoy fine art, or like reading fictionalized accounts of the lives of famous people, I think you would enjoy this book.

Review: Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

Title: Sea Glass

Author: Anita Shreve


Pages: 376

Source: The library where I work

Rating: 10/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge; 451 Challenge

First Sentence: "Honora sets the cardboard suitcase on the slab of granite."

Summary (From book flap):

It is a house on the beach. Honora doesn't mind renting -- despite its age and all its flaws, the old house is the perfect place for a new marriage. She and Sexton throw themselves into their new life together. Each morning, Honora collects sea glass washed up on the shore, each piece carrying a different story in its muted hues.

Sexton finds a way to buy the house, but his timing is perfectly wrong. The economy takes a sickening plunge, and as financial pressures mount, Honora begins to see how little she knows this man she has married -- and to realize just how threatening the world outside her front door can be.

Like those translucent shards that Honora finds on the beach, Sea Glass is layered with the textures, colors, and voices of another time. There is Vivian, an irreverent Boston socialite who becomes Honora's closest friend even as she rejects every form of convention. McDermott, a man who works in a nearby mill, presses Honora's deepest notions of trust -- even as he embroils her in a dangerous dispute. And there's Alphonse, a boy whose openness becomes the bond that holds these people together as their world is flying apart.

My Two Cents:

This was my first experience with Anita Shreve, and I can definitely say it will not be my last. Unfortunately, the rest of my book club didn't feel the same way. Of the four of us who were able to make it to the meeting, two hadn't finished it and one didn't like the book. Oh, well.

Shreve's writing is really high-caliber. She paints a picture, not only of the people about whom you're reading, but also of the times. I felt as if I was really there on the beach, at the strike rallies, etc., when she described them. On the back of my copy of the book, she's compared to Edith Wharton and Henry James. I can't speak much for the James comparison (I've read so little of his work), but when it comes to the ability to make the reader see the time period and the characters, she's on par with Wharton.

I thought that the situation in which Shreve set this novel -- on the cusp of the Great Depression and in the midst of a labor strike -- was great. It really brought together characters from all social levels, from Vivian on the top all the way down to Alphonse and McDermott on the bottom, together and showed them reacting to things they had never experienced before.

With the exception of Sexton, I can't think of a character I didn't like. I think I saw some of myself in Honora, a woman who just wants to keep her nice home and have her quiet life and her husband. Vivian made me laugh often, and I loved how she finally hits her stride and steps outside her normal experiences to get involved with the striking workers. McDermott had to grow on me a bit. I didn't like him at first, but I really came to like and admire him as a character. My favorite character, though, was Alphonse. He's the little boy that everyone wishes they knew and I felt so sorry for him. He was, as someone at my book club said, the only character who had no control over his situation. I spent the entire book hoping things would turn out well for him.

The only problem I had with this book, and it was very minor, was that the chapters flipping among all the different characters for each chapter was a little disarming at first. It's not an unusual route to take in narrating a novel, but it just took a bit longer for me to get used to it because there were so many characters who had their own chapters. But, once I got past that, it was a really easy read.

Review: Brooklyn: A Novel by Colm Toibin

Title: Brooklyn: A Novel

Author: Colm Toibin

Pages: 262

Source: The library where I work

Rating: 9/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review challenge

First Sentence: "Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work."

Summary (From book flap):

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When and Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland" -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

My Two Cents:

I absolutely loved this novel. If I hadn't had other distractions to deal with, I easily could have finished it in an afternoon. It was short, but rich in characterization and lyricism.

The central character, Eilis, is just what anyone would expect of a fairly sheltered girl moving to a big city in a foreign country. After a lifetime spent in the shadow of her sister, she doesn't know how to act when all the focus is on her. It takes Eilis some time to gain her sea legs, so to speak, and even then she struggles somewhat with the female relationships into which her boarding situation forces her.She is a woman caught between two worlds, and the reader really gets to see that struggle. As the end of the book neared, I found myself growing angry with Eilis for some of the choices she made, but I also could see that her choices grew out of the way Toibin had characterized her for the bulk of the book.

My favorite character, though, was Tony. I couldn't help but smile nearly every time he came into the action. He was funny and charming and incredibly caring. You know how everyone on the Twilight bandwagon says they want to find their Edward? Well, I would want to find my Tony. I just adored him.

Toibin's writing is beautiful. He brings both small-town Ireland and big-city New York to life on the page, and he writes a very convincing female character in Eilis. Here's an example of his writing, chosen at random:

She lay on the bed with the letters beside her. For the past few weeks, she realized, she had not really thought of home. The town had come to her in flashing pictures, such as the one that had come during the afternoon of the sale, and she had thought of course of her mother and Rose, but her own life in Enniscorthy, the life she had lost and would never have again, she had kept out of her mind. Every day she had come back to this small room in this house full of sounds and gone over everything new that had happened. Now, all that seemed like nothing compared to the picture she had of home, of her own room, the house in Friary Street, the food she had eaten there, the clothes she wore, how quiet everything was.

The only criticism I have of this book is that Eilis makes a big choice in the end, but she doesn't make that choice for the reason I would have liked her to. Was the decision in character for her? Yes. Did it make sense? Yes. But, did I like the reason behind that choice? No, I didn't.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes vivid characters, flowing prose passages and coming-of-age stories.