Review: Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

Title: Belong to Me

Author: Marisa de los Santos

Pages: 388

Source: Library

Rating: 6/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "My fall from suburban grace, or, more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace from which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only fairly quirky remark about Armand Assante."

Summary (From book flap):

A devoted city dweller, Cornelia Brown surprised no one more than herself when she was gripped by the sudden, inescapable desire to leave urban life behind and head for an idyllic suburb. Though she knows she and her beloved husband, Teo, have made the right move, she approaches her new life with trepidation and struggles to forge friendships in her new home. Cornelia's mettle is quickly tested by judgmental neighbor Piper Truitt. Perfectly manicured, impeccably dressed, and possessing impossible standards, Piper is the embodiment of everything Cornelia feared she would find in suburbia. A saving grace soon appears in the form of Lake. Over a shared love of literature and old movies, Cornelia develops an instant bond with this warm yet elusive woman who has also recently arrived in town, ostensibly to send her perceptive and brilliant son, Dev, to a school for the gifted.

My Two Cents:

I go pretty back-and-forth as to whether or not I liked this book. Sometimes, I think I liked it well enough to give a fully positive review. Other times, I think there only were a few pieces of the whole I liked. This book came at a somewhat difficult time for me personally, so there was a lot in here, especially regarding Cornelia, that I just would have preferred not to have to read about.

De los Santos' writing is solid, but it's nothing particularly special. She's straightforward enough that you don't have to figure out what she's trying to say, but she does possess enough wit that you can laugh out loud occasionally.

My favorite character was, without a doubt, Dev. I wasn't quite as alienated from my peers as he was, but I still identified a lot with him. I wanted everything to turn out well for him, and, thankfully, it did in the end. My one issue is (And this goes for a lot of authors) that writing him as a precocious, smart kid is almost a cop-out to avoid having to write anything "teenagerish." Sure, Dev's got some teen angst (Although, unless related to Clare, it's not typical teen angst) that is dealt with well, but he reads much more like an adult than a teen. Not a big deal.

I was never quite sure how I felt about Cornelia. For the supposedly central character, I was ambivalent toward her at best. She just didn't have that much life or spark to her. She was kind of boring. I don't know if that was my own personal life creeping into my reading of the things she deals with or not, but I just wasn't fond of her.

I know a lot of people have really liked this book and de los Santos' other works, but this just didn't stand out for me as anything spectacular.

Review: The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen

Title: The Sugar Queen

Author: Sarah Addison Allen

Pages: 276

Source: Personal library

Rating: 9/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "When Josey woke up and saw the feathery frost on her windowpane, she smiled."

Summary (From back of book):

Josey Cirrini is sure of three things: winter is her favorite season, she's a sorry excuse for a Southern belle, and sweets are best eaten in the privacy of her closet. For while Josey has settled into an uneventful life in her mother's house, her one consolation is the stockpile of sugary treats and paperback romances she escapes to each night.... Until she finds her closet harboring Della Lee Baker, a local waitress who is one part nemesis -- and two parts fairy godmother. With Della Lee's tough love, Josey's narrow existence quickly expands. She even bonds with Chloe Finley, a young woman who is hounded by books that inexplicably appear when she needs them -- and who has a close connection with Josey's long-time crush. Soon Josey is living in a world where the color red has startling powers, and passion can make eggs fry in their cartons. And that's just for starters.

My Two Cents:

This was yet another home-run hit from Sarah Addison Allen. Her books are always sweet little stories (With some underlying darkness) that have some magic thrown in. I didn't like this one quite as well as I liked The Girl Who Chased the Moon, but it's pretty close up there as my favorite of her books.

Josey is a character with whom a lot of people can identify. She's somewhat overweight (Although we're never really sure if that's true or if it's just her perception of herself); she's unhappy in the life she leads, but she stays put out of a sense of obligation; she's got big dreams that she allows herself to think of only in the privacy of her own room. She's meek, especially when face-to-face with her mother, but she's got a little bit of sass that shows itself when necessary. I really liked her as a character.

Della Lee was also another great character. She's so out there that you can almost imagine her as one of those off-beat waitresses who works at greasy spoon diners. The darkest storyline in the book surrounds her, but it is so secondary to the rest of the story that the darkness doesn't intrude. I liked that Allen was able to put something a little more sinister into the book without it overpowering the rest of the story.

As always, Allen peoples her book with a host of other great, memorable characters. If I were to talk about each and every one of them, this review would be at least half as long as the book. Suffice it to say that you will not want for a likeable, fun character when reading this book.

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.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?: Apri 26, 2010

Hosted by Sheila at One Person's Journey Through a World of Books, It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a weekly bookish meme whereby bloggers share their reading for the past week.


This week, I read:

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall

The Flesh Statue by U.L. Harper

My Ridiculous, Romantic Obsessions by Becca Wilhite

This week, I reviewed:

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens

Fang (Maximum Ride #6) by James Patterson

The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall

This week, I'm reading:

Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Elf of Luxembourg by Tom Weston

This week, I hope to begin reading:

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This One Is Mine by Maria Semple

Burned (House of Night Boook 7) by P.C. and Kristin Cast

What are you reading this week?

Review: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall

Title: The Wind Done Gone

Author: Alice Randall

Pages: 208

Source: Interlibrary loan

Rating: 4/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "Today is the anniversary of my birth."

Summary (From book flap):

In a brilliant rejoinder and an inspired act of literary invention, Alice Randall explodes the world created in Margaret Mitchell's famous 1936 novel, the work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Imagine simply that the black characters peopling that world were completely different, not egregious, one-dimensional stereotypes but fully alive, complex human beings. And then imagine, quite plausibly, that at the center of this world moves an illegitimate mulatto woman, and that this woman, Cynara, Cinnamon, or Cindy -- beautiful and brown -- gets to tell her story.

Cindy is born into a world in which she is unacknowledged by her plantation-owning father and passed over by her mother in favor of her white charges. Sold off like so much used furniture, she eventually makes her way back to Atlanta to take up with a prominent white businessman, only to leave him for an aspiring politician of her own color. Moving from the Deep South to the exhilarating freedom of Reconstruction Washington, with its thriving black citizenry of statesmen, professionals, and strivers of every persuasion, Cindy experiences firsthand the promise of the new era at its dizzying peak, just before it begins to slip away.

My Two Cents:

I understood what Randall was going for in this book, I really did, but I think it could have been accomplished another way. I know the characters in Gone With the Wind were incredibly flat and simplistic. I know we never actually saw the evil side of slavery. I know, in real life, there were many illegitimate children born to slave mothers and white fathers. But the point of Gone With the Wind was not to show these things; it was to explore Scarlett and the changes to the Old South.

What I most disliked is that Randall imagined a completely different personality for Gerald O'Hara. Sure, imagining is an author's right and an author's job, but I guess I just didn't at all see the need to make him into one of those plantation owners who would have an affair with a slave and not recognize an illegitimate child. Why does he need to be seen as the worst kind of slave owner? In my mind, he doesn't. I just was not a fan of her imagining that history for Gerald.

Cynara is a fairly interesting character, but I didn't even like her. She's more well-educated than a lot of former slaves, so she's able to put pen to paper and form a solid story. She has an interesting history, and an interesting present. I just didn't like her. I can't exactly put a finger on why; I just didn't.

A lot of people really liked this book and say that the way it re-imagines the world Margaret Mitchell created is provocative, and I can see where people would like this book. It just was not a book I'd ever read again, and it was a struggle for me to finish.

Review: Fang (Maximum Ride #6) by James Patterson

Title: Fang (Maximum Ride #6)

Author: James Patterson

Pages: 309

Source: The library where I work

Rating: 7/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "I'm a girl of extremes."

Summary (From book flap):

Fang will be the first to die.

Maximum Ride is used to living desperately on the run from evil forces sabotaging her quest to save the world -- but nothing has ever come as close to destroying her as this horrifying prophetic message. Fang is Max's best friend, her soul mate, her partner in the leadership of her flock of winged children. A life without Fang is a life unimaginable.

But there will be another...

When a newly created winged boy, the magnificent Dylan, is introduced into the flock, their world is upended yet again. Raised in a lab like the others, Dylan exists for only one reason: he was designed to be Max's perfect other half.

To replace Fang

Thus unfolds the battle of perfection versus passion that terrifies, twists, and turns ... and meanwhile, THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING.

My Two Cents:

I am not, as you know, a James Patterson fan, but I like his young adult series. I've been waiting for this book since reading the last in the Maximum Ride series last year.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Fang, though. It's got all the snap and snark of the first five books, a quality that I loved, but there just doesn't seem to be that much going on here. There's all kinds of action and intrigue in the first five books, and that's just not really present here. Sure, things happen, but it just isn't enough, I guess.

I also liked that this section of the series shied away from the "global-warming-is-bad-let's-all-save-the-world" bent the last couple books of the series have been taking. That direction was getting a little old, so I'm glad that we didn't get beaten over the head by the Save the World Stick this time.

Overall, I liked the book, mostly because good points of the rest of the series were present, but it's definitely not my favorite.

Unless you've read the previous five books in the series (and they're really quick reads), I wouldn't recommend giving this one a go.

Short Review: The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens

Title: The Cricket on the Hearth

Author: Charles Dickens

Pages: 182

Source: Personal library

Rating: 8/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "The kettle began it!"

Summary (From Amazon):

"The Cricket on the Hearth" is Charles Dickens 1845 novella, which marks the third of five Christmas books written by the author between 1843 and 1847. It is the story of John Peerybingle and his family who are visited by a guardian angel in the form of a cricket who is constantly chirping on their hearth.

My Two Cents:

There's really not too much to say about this one except it's a Charles Dickens, so the writing is superb as always.


I really liked John Peerybingle as a character. He's a hard worker who provides for his family. He loves his wife even though she seems to be lying to him. John is also very kind to others, even the curmudgeonly Tackleton.

If you're looking for a nice little fairy tale-type story, give this one a go.