Madeline's bookshelf: audiobook en-US Wed, 22 Jun 2022 11:19:23 -0700 60 Madeline's bookshelf: audiobook 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Madeline 1 audiobook, ugh
I don't get it!

At all!
]]> 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 1
read at: 2022/06/01
date added: 2022/06/22
shelves: audiobook, ugh
review:
I'm sorry, guys

I don't get it!

At all!

]]> <![CDATA[Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity]]> 11869272
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter - Annawadi's "most-everything girl" - will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy."

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.]]> 278 Katherine Boo 1400067553 Madeline 4 audiobook Slumdog Millionare so if you’re looking for an analysis of how well-researched or factual Katherine Boo’s book is, this is not the review for you). Katherine Boo approaches her topic by shrinking it down to one family and one single, catastrophic event � teenage garbage picker Abdul's family has a long-running feud with their neighbor, a disabled woman named Fatima. One day, following an argument between Fatima and Abdul's mother (where the latter is overheard threatening physical violence), Fatima goes into her home, pours kerosene on herself, and lights a match. She survives, barely, and names Abdul as her attacker. The book chronicles the family’s lengthy legal battle as they attempt to prove their innocence in a system overrun with corruption and indifference. Other characters come in and out of the narrative, including slumlords, scavengers, orphans, and others who make up the population of Annawadi, a tiny slum just outside the Mumbai airport.

Boo manages to keep the book from being too exploitative or misery-porn-esque, but this is still a pretty grim slog of a book. There is very little redemption to be had, and we learn very quickly that anytime a character manages to snag a little bit of good luck, it certainly won’t last long.

For me, the most redeeming thing about this book is that Katherine Boo isn’t attempting to find some moral lesson within the lives of the people she spent years interviewing, and she doesn’t try to present any solutions for fixing India’s problems. She is merely doing her job as a journalist: seeking out a group of people often overlooked by the rest of the world, letting them tell their stories, and recording them faithfully. Any lesson or moral that you take from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is one you create yourself.]]> 3.97 2012 Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
author: Katherine Boo
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/01
date added: 2022/05/03
shelves: audiobook
review:
Trying to write a book about the slums of Mumbai is a daunting task, to say the least (and please bear in mind, I say that as a white lady whose only knowledge of India comes from a few Bollywood movies and Slumdog Millionare so if you’re looking for an analysis of how well-researched or factual Katherine Boo’s book is, this is not the review for you). Katherine Boo approaches her topic by shrinking it down to one family and one single, catastrophic event � teenage garbage picker Abdul's family has a long-running feud with their neighbor, a disabled woman named Fatima. One day, following an argument between Fatima and Abdul's mother (where the latter is overheard threatening physical violence), Fatima goes into her home, pours kerosene on herself, and lights a match. She survives, barely, and names Abdul as her attacker. The book chronicles the family’s lengthy legal battle as they attempt to prove their innocence in a system overrun with corruption and indifference. Other characters come in and out of the narrative, including slumlords, scavengers, orphans, and others who make up the population of Annawadi, a tiny slum just outside the Mumbai airport.

Boo manages to keep the book from being too exploitative or misery-porn-esque, but this is still a pretty grim slog of a book. There is very little redemption to be had, and we learn very quickly that anytime a character manages to snag a little bit of good luck, it certainly won’t last long.

For me, the most redeeming thing about this book is that Katherine Boo isn’t attempting to find some moral lesson within the lives of the people she spent years interviewing, and she doesn’t try to present any solutions for fixing India’s problems. She is merely doing her job as a journalist: seeking out a group of people often overlooked by the rest of the world, letting them tell their stories, and recording them faithfully. Any lesson or moral that you take from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is one you create yourself.
]]> Fates and Furies 24612118
At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed.]]> 390 Lauren Groff 1594634475 Madeline 2 audiobook 3.55 2015 Fates and Furies
author: Lauren Groff
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2021/12/01
date added: 2021/12/10
shelves: audiobook
review:
The male protagonist's name is "Lancelot Satterwhite" and that's somehow still only the sixth most obnoxious thing about this novel.
]]> The Wonder 28449257
An educated sceptic, Lib expects to expose the fast as a hoax right away. But as she gets to know the girl she becomes more and more unsure. Is Anna a fraud, or a 'living wonder'? Or is something more sinister unfolding right before Lib's eyes?

Written with all the propulsive tension that transported readers of Room, The Wonder asks what lengths we would go to for the love of a child.]]> 291 Emma Donoghue 0316393878 Madeline 2 audiobook, historic-fiction Room, because everyone liked Room, but Emma Donahue’s other novel, Frog Music, didn’t impress me very much. But I had heard of this book, so I decided to give it a shot.

The story, taking place in 1859, starts when British nurse Lib Wright receives a very strange assignment. In a small village in Ireland, a family claims that their young daughter has not eaten any food in four months. Locals are insisting that it’s a miracle, and that the girl is a new saint. Lib, along with a local nun, will spend two weeks watching the girl, to either confirm that Anna O’Donnell is surviving on nothing but water, or to figure out how the deception works.

So my main problem with the book was that Donahue presents us with a very simple mystery at the core of her novel - how is Anna surviving on nothing but a few spoonfuls of water a day? What’s the trick? � and then wastes a lot of time not addressing that mystery with any real sense of urgency. The pace of this novel is sloooooow, and mostly follows the same pattern throughout: Lib gets up, goes to Anna’s house, and sits with the girl for like eight hours. Repeat. And repeat. We are expected to become invested in Lib’s relationship with Anna and her increasing inability to stay impartial and unattached, but I was mostly impatient for Donahue to just tell me how the trick was done. Too much buildup, not enough prestige.

Lib is also a frustrating protagonist, because her entire job in the novel is to just sit and watch things, which means she is very, very boring. But also, she’s charming in a weird way because she’s a) a stone-cold weirdo who reacts to people and situations as if this is the first time she’s left the house in several years, and b) manages to completely misinterpret every single conversation she has with another character.

Yes, Donahue does give us a satisfying solution to the mystery, so at least there’s that. The problem is the solution itself, which involves [spoilers removed]
]]> 3.60 2016 The Wonder
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2019/09/01
date added: 2019/12/19
shelves: audiobook, historic-fiction
review:
To be honest, I only read this book (okay, technically, listened to it) because I needed to find an audiobook to listen to for an upcoming car trip, and the library didn’t have a ton of better offerings at the time. I liked Room, because everyone liked Room, but Emma Donahue’s other novel, Frog Music, didn’t impress me very much. But I had heard of this book, so I decided to give it a shot.

The story, taking place in 1859, starts when British nurse Lib Wright receives a very strange assignment. In a small village in Ireland, a family claims that their young daughter has not eaten any food in four months. Locals are insisting that it’s a miracle, and that the girl is a new saint. Lib, along with a local nun, will spend two weeks watching the girl, to either confirm that Anna O’Donnell is surviving on nothing but water, or to figure out how the deception works.

So my main problem with the book was that Donahue presents us with a very simple mystery at the core of her novel - how is Anna surviving on nothing but a few spoonfuls of water a day? What’s the trick? � and then wastes a lot of time not addressing that mystery with any real sense of urgency. The pace of this novel is sloooooow, and mostly follows the same pattern throughout: Lib gets up, goes to Anna’s house, and sits with the girl for like eight hours. Repeat. And repeat. We are expected to become invested in Lib’s relationship with Anna and her increasing inability to stay impartial and unattached, but I was mostly impatient for Donahue to just tell me how the trick was done. Too much buildup, not enough prestige.

Lib is also a frustrating protagonist, because her entire job in the novel is to just sit and watch things, which means she is very, very boring. But also, she’s charming in a weird way because she’s a) a stone-cold weirdo who reacts to people and situations as if this is the first time she’s left the house in several years, and b) manages to completely misinterpret every single conversation she has with another character.

Yes, Donahue does give us a satisfying solution to the mystery, so at least there’s that. The problem is the solution itself, which involves [spoilers removed]

]]> <![CDATA[Cover Her Face (Adam Dalgliesh, #1)]]> 3832 Cover Her Face is P. D. James's electric debut novel, an ingeniously plotted mystery that immediately placed her among the masters of suspense.

]]> 250 P.D. James 0743219570 Madeline 3 detective-fiction, audiobook The Skull Beneath the Skin) and enjoyed it, I decided to give this a shot. This is actually James� debut mystery, so I’m willing to forgive the more clunky aspects of the book in light of that.

The story follows your basic murder mystery formula, where we have a wealthy family in an English country manor, and muuuuuurder.

It’s a perfectly serviceable mystery, although not particularly memorable. There are some very, very obvious moments (like when one of the characters is saying that she’s sure her husband has an alibi for the night of the murder because she checked the clock when he came in, and it’s clear immediately that he adjusted the time) and I honestly can’t remember a lot of the finer details of the story. Everything gets wrapped up neatly, and the detective’s solution doesn’t have any obvious holes in it, so overall, solid three stars � no more, no less.
]]> 3.93 1962 Cover Her Face (Adam Dalgliesh, #1)
author: P.D. James
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2019/09/01
date added: 2019/12/10
shelves: detective-fiction, audiobook
review:
This book was another result of me aimlessly browsing the available audiobook downloads from my library, and since I had read one PD James mystery (The Skull Beneath the Skin) and enjoyed it, I decided to give this a shot. This is actually James� debut mystery, so I’m willing to forgive the more clunky aspects of the book in light of that.

The story follows your basic murder mystery formula, where we have a wealthy family in an English country manor, and muuuuuurder.

It’s a perfectly serviceable mystery, although not particularly memorable. There are some very, very obvious moments (like when one of the characters is saying that she’s sure her husband has an alibi for the night of the murder because she checked the clock when he came in, and it’s clear immediately that he adjusted the time) and I honestly can’t remember a lot of the finer details of the story. Everything gets wrapped up neatly, and the detective’s solution doesn’t have any obvious holes in it, so overall, solid three stars � no more, no less.

]]> <![CDATA[Lethal White (Cormoran Strike, #4)]]> 42283287
Trying to get to the bottom of Billy's story, Strike and Robin Ellacott � once his assistant, now a partner in the agency � set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament, and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.

And during this labyrinthine investigation, Strike's own life is far from straightforward: his newfound fame as a private eye means he can no longer operate behind the scenes as he once did. Plus, his relationship with his former assistant is more fraught than it ever has been � Robin is now invaluable to Strike in the business, but their personal relationship is much, much trickier than that.

The most epic Robert Galbraith novel yet, Lethal White is both a gripping mystery and a page-turning next instalment in the ongoing story of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott.]]> 650 Robert Galbraith 0316422770 Madeline 4 audiobook, detective-fiction Career of Evil, I’m delighted to report that Cormoran and Robin are back, baby! No boring misogynist serial killers in this one; just a good old fashioned Rich People and Murder story!

The book picks up right after the last novel left off, with Strike dramatically interrupting Robin’s wedding (NOT, sadly, to confess that he’s in love with Robin and carry her off while Stupid Matthew cries at the altar, but merely to tell Robin that he caught the serial killer in the last book). We get some business-as-usual scenes around the Strike/Cunliffe office, and then they get an unexpected visitor � a mentally unbalanced man comes into the office, telling a disjointed story about how he witnessed a murder when he was a child. At the same time, Strike has been hired by a politician who claims he’s being blackmailed, and with that we’re off to the races.

Even though, at its core, this is a very dramatic and, in many ways, very sad story, there’s so much fun stuff in the meantime. Robin gets to go undercover as not one but TWO different people, and there’s more delightful romantic tension between her and Strike. Also, for anyone who was worried that Rowling was going to have Robin’s marriage to Stupid Matthew drag on for the rest of the series, you’ll be delighted to know that by the end of the book [spoilers removed]

I’m very glad to see that the Cormoran Strike series has bounced back, and this makes me hopeful for the rest of the series. More detective shenanigans and romantic pining, please!
]]> 4.22 2018 Lethal White (Cormoran Strike, #4)
author: Robert Galbraith
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/10/01
date added: 2019/12/04
shelves: audiobook, detective-fiction
review:
After the disappointment of Career of Evil, I’m delighted to report that Cormoran and Robin are back, baby! No boring misogynist serial killers in this one; just a good old fashioned Rich People and Murder story!

The book picks up right after the last novel left off, with Strike dramatically interrupting Robin’s wedding (NOT, sadly, to confess that he’s in love with Robin and carry her off while Stupid Matthew cries at the altar, but merely to tell Robin that he caught the serial killer in the last book). We get some business-as-usual scenes around the Strike/Cunliffe office, and then they get an unexpected visitor � a mentally unbalanced man comes into the office, telling a disjointed story about how he witnessed a murder when he was a child. At the same time, Strike has been hired by a politician who claims he’s being blackmailed, and with that we’re off to the races.

Even though, at its core, this is a very dramatic and, in many ways, very sad story, there’s so much fun stuff in the meantime. Robin gets to go undercover as not one but TWO different people, and there’s more delightful romantic tension between her and Strike. Also, for anyone who was worried that Rowling was going to have Robin’s marriage to Stupid Matthew drag on for the rest of the series, you’ll be delighted to know that by the end of the book [spoilers removed]

I’m very glad to see that the Cormoran Strike series has bounced back, and this makes me hopeful for the rest of the series. More detective shenanigans and romantic pining, please!

]]> <![CDATA[H.M.S. Surprise (Aubrey & Maturin #3)]]> 77427 H.M.S. Surprise, British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin face near-death and tumultuous romance in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East India Company. Tasked with ferrying a British ambassador to the Sultan of Kampong, they find themselves on a prolonged voyage aboard a Royal Navy frigate en route to the Malay Peninsula. In this new sphere, Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship against an enemy who enjoys overwhelming local superiority. But somewhere in the Indian Ocean lies the prize that could secure him a marriage to his beloved Sophie and make him rich beyond his wildest dreams: the ships sent by Napoleon to attack the China Fleet.]]> 379 Patrick O'Brian 0393307611 Madeline 4 audiobook, historic-fiction
No blush; nothing but a look of idiot delight as he came slowly up the side, hampered by his burden and comforting it in Portuguese as he came.

‘I am happy to see that you were so successful, Dr Maturin,� he said, looking down into the launch and the canoes, loaded with glowing heaps of oranges and shaddocks, red meat, iguanas, bananas, greenstuff. ‘But I am afraid no vampires can be allowed on board.�

‘This is a sloth,� said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!� The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail, and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.�

Honestly, all you need to know about this book is this: first, we get so much more Stephen Maturin angst/sadness/character-building struggle (honestly, the poor man goes through A LOT in this one, and I just want someone to give him a hug), plus more marriage-plotting shenanigans with both Jack and Stephen. Also Stephen brings a sloth on board, and it’s afraid of Jack at first, but then he gets the sloth drunk and they become friends, prompting Stephen to exclaim that Jack has “debauched my sloth!�

Quality stuff, from start to finish.
]]> 4.44 1973 H.M.S. Surprise (Aubrey & Maturin #3)
author: Patrick O'Brian
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2019/06/01
date added: 2019/09/16
shelves: audiobook, historic-fiction
review:
“Valuable and ingenious [Stephen] might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and here, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat - a loathsome great vampire of the most poisonous kind, no doubt. ‘I should never have believed it of him: his sacred oath in the morning watch and now he stuffs the ship with vampires; and God knows what is in that bag. No doubt he was tempted, but surely he might blush for his fall?�

No blush; nothing but a look of idiot delight as he came slowly up the side, hampered by his burden and comforting it in Portuguese as he came.

‘I am happy to see that you were so successful, Dr Maturin,� he said, looking down into the launch and the canoes, loaded with glowing heaps of oranges and shaddocks, red meat, iguanas, bananas, greenstuff. ‘But I am afraid no vampires can be allowed on board.�

‘This is a sloth,� said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!� The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail, and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.�

Honestly, all you need to know about this book is this: first, we get so much more Stephen Maturin angst/sadness/character-building struggle (honestly, the poor man goes through A LOT in this one, and I just want someone to give him a hug), plus more marriage-plotting shenanigans with both Jack and Stephen. Also Stephen brings a sloth on board, and it’s afraid of Jack at first, but then he gets the sloth drunk and they become friends, prompting Stephen to exclaim that Jack has “debauched my sloth!�

Quality stuff, from start to finish.

]]> <![CDATA[Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike, #3)]]> 40611999 Cormoran Strike is back, with his assistant Robin Ellacott, in a mystery based around soldiers returning from war.

When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg.

Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible � and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality.

With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike is increasingly sure is not the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them�

Career of Evil is the third in the series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott. A mystery and also a story of a man and a woman at a crossroads in their personal and professional lives.]]> 609 Robert Galbraith 0316349925 Madeline 2 audiobook, detective-fiction
My lack of enthusiasm for true crime serial killer stories revolves around the fact that serial killers are not interesting to me, because their motivations can almost always be traced back to violent misogyny. The appeal of detective stories lies in being able to immerse yourself in a world where logic and intelligence save the day, where some form of justice is always delivered and the victim is always avenged, even if that justice is delivered outside of the law. This is why I like mysteries: because you know that by the end, some form of justice will win out and everything will be wrapped up in a neat little bow. I can’t enjoy myself if the mystery I’m reading centers around the crimes of a violent misogynist. That’s not an escape for me. If I want to read about men killing women I’ll turn on the news, thanks all the same.

Career of Evil lets us know exactly what kind of book it’s going to be right off the bat, when a package addressed to Robin and containing a woman’s severed leg is delivered to Strike’s office. Robin isn’t even really the target of whoever sent the package � it’s made clear right away that whoever sent the leg is someone from Strike’s past, who is merely threatening Robin in order to get to Strike. As an added bonus, we have chapters from the perspective of the killer stalking Strike. These excerpts are mostly just tiring, because we never learn anything useful about the killer (because then we would know something Strike doesn’t and the mystery would be ruined), so instead we have to read repetitive inner monologues about how much the killer hates women (he’s living with a woman who he refers to as “it� because subtlety left these shores a long time ago) and hear his plans to murder Robin. The result is that while I’m supposed to be focusing on the mystery and enjoying reading about Strike’s investigation (and getting more Strike/Robin shipper material), instead I’m being distracted by a loudly ticking clock, reminding me that Robin will be violently attacked at some point in the book. To say that I emphatically did not want to read about this is an understatement. Again � if I want to read some guy’s manifesto about how women are responsible for everything wrong in his life, I’ll turn on the fucking news.

The four suspects in the case are virtually interchangeable � they’re all, you guessed it! Violent misogynists � and the scenes where Strike pursues one lead or another are also way too similar to be interesting, to the point where I didn’t really care which one of them had done it by the end.
The only really redeeming aspect of this book is that we to see more of the growing attraction between Robin and Strike, although I’m still not sure if Rowling will ever have her characters act on those feelings. (Then again, we all remember That Epilogue, so we know that when it comes to romantic pairings, “Robert Galbraith� has a tendency to go for the easiest option) We also learn some more about Strike’s childhood � the killer taunts him by making references to his late mother � and find out what Robin’s Deep Dark Secret is. And all I’ll say about that is, well, I guess it could have been handled worse, so there’s that. [spoilers removed]

Stories of violent men and the women who die because of them are nothing new, and considering how bombarded we already are with these stories in real life, an author has to really do something new and innovative with the concept of a misogynistic serial killer in order to make me care. Unfortunately, Career of Evil isn’t up to the challenge.
]]> 4.22 2015 Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike, #3)
author: Robert Galbraith
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2019/05/01
date added: 2019/08/15
shelves: audiobook, detective-fiction
review:
Three books into the Cormorant Strike (that name is so, so terrible and I’ll never be over it) series, and even though I’m still invested, this one definitely had a lot of rocky patches for me � almost enough to make me give up on the series.

My lack of enthusiasm for true crime serial killer stories revolves around the fact that serial killers are not interesting to me, because their motivations can almost always be traced back to violent misogyny. The appeal of detective stories lies in being able to immerse yourself in a world where logic and intelligence save the day, where some form of justice is always delivered and the victim is always avenged, even if that justice is delivered outside of the law. This is why I like mysteries: because you know that by the end, some form of justice will win out and everything will be wrapped up in a neat little bow. I can’t enjoy myself if the mystery I’m reading centers around the crimes of a violent misogynist. That’s not an escape for me. If I want to read about men killing women I’ll turn on the news, thanks all the same.

Career of Evil lets us know exactly what kind of book it’s going to be right off the bat, when a package addressed to Robin and containing a woman’s severed leg is delivered to Strike’s office. Robin isn’t even really the target of whoever sent the package � it’s made clear right away that whoever sent the leg is someone from Strike’s past, who is merely threatening Robin in order to get to Strike. As an added bonus, we have chapters from the perspective of the killer stalking Strike. These excerpts are mostly just tiring, because we never learn anything useful about the killer (because then we would know something Strike doesn’t and the mystery would be ruined), so instead we have to read repetitive inner monologues about how much the killer hates women (he’s living with a woman who he refers to as “it� because subtlety left these shores a long time ago) and hear his plans to murder Robin. The result is that while I’m supposed to be focusing on the mystery and enjoying reading about Strike’s investigation (and getting more Strike/Robin shipper material), instead I’m being distracted by a loudly ticking clock, reminding me that Robin will be violently attacked at some point in the book. To say that I emphatically did not want to read about this is an understatement. Again � if I want to read some guy’s manifesto about how women are responsible for everything wrong in his life, I’ll turn on the fucking news.

The four suspects in the case are virtually interchangeable � they’re all, you guessed it! Violent misogynists � and the scenes where Strike pursues one lead or another are also way too similar to be interesting, to the point where I didn’t really care which one of them had done it by the end.
The only really redeeming aspect of this book is that we to see more of the growing attraction between Robin and Strike, although I’m still not sure if Rowling will ever have her characters act on those feelings. (Then again, we all remember That Epilogue, so we know that when it comes to romantic pairings, “Robert Galbraith� has a tendency to go for the easiest option) We also learn some more about Strike’s childhood � the killer taunts him by making references to his late mother � and find out what Robin’s Deep Dark Secret is. And all I’ll say about that is, well, I guess it could have been handled worse, so there’s that. [spoilers removed]

Stories of violent men and the women who die because of them are nothing new, and considering how bombarded we already are with these stories in real life, an author has to really do something new and innovative with the concept of a misogynistic serial killer in order to make me care. Unfortunately, Career of Evil isn’t up to the challenge.

]]> Turtles All the Way Down 35504431
Aza Holmes never intended to pursue the disappearance of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Pickett’s son Davis.

Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.]]> 290 John Green 0525555366 Madeline 3
Honestly, what a relief. I liked The Fault in Our Stars, I really did! (Hell, I was at one of the performances on the release tour! I spoke to John and Hank Green in the signing line and they laughed politely at my joke! I was DFTBA-all-the-way for many years!) And when I heard that he had a new book coming out, I was mildly interested but then forgot to track down a copy until recently, when I was scrolling through my library’s audiobook options, and decided to give it a try.

Green’s heroine this time around is Aza Holmes, age sixteen. Aza, we learn pretty quickly, suffers from anxiety and obsessive thought patterns. She has a perpetual scab on her hand from picking at her skin, and constantly applies hand sanitizer because every time she thinks about it she realizes how gross the human body is. Aza is a typical teenage girl, albeit one who sometimes finds it impossible to exist in the world. So yeah � a typical teenage girl. Part of what made The Fault in Our Stars so good was the way John Green used his experience as a chaplain in a children’s hospital to realistically portray what it was like to be a child with a terminal disease, and here he gets even more personal, using his own mental health experiences to make Aza’s struggles believable and compelling.

The plot kicks into motion when a man in Aza’s community goes missing. Russell Pickett is a billionaire developer, and his teenage son, Davis, is a former childhood friend of Aza’s. With much prodding from her best friend (sidebar: why are the best friend characters in John Green’s novels always so much more interesting than his protagonists?), Aza decides to reconnect with Davis and investigate the Case of the Missing Billionaire.

Be warned: this novel isn’t really the Case of the Missing Billionaire, and that really fucking irks me. As someone who is a hardcore fan of detective novels, I haaaaaate it when an author teases readers with a mystery to get them sucked in, but then is like “but MY mystery won’t have a satisfying conclusion because that’s not REALISTIC. Now let’s enjoy three hundred pages of meditations on racism in small town America.�

Without spoilers, I will say that Green doesn’t completely ignore the disappearance that kickstarts his story, but it’s obvious that he is deeply uninterested in the case, and it functions primarily as a background plot to the main story of Aza’s mental health struggles and her tentative romance with Davis.

And it’s fine! I would argue, in fact, that it’s Green’s best novel to date, and even say how happy I am to see that he’s only getting better with age and experience. I’m just not part of his ideal demographic any more, and that’s okay.

It’s just that I found all the scenes between Aza and Davis deeply boring, partially because teenage romance no longer interests me (maybe make one of them a vampire, I dunno) and also because hello this guy’s dad VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE, maybe we should be focusing on that? I GET that the disappearance isn’t the point of the book, but it was a distraction more often than not.

(Also I figured out what happened to the dad pretty early in the story � and yes, I KNOW that figuring it out was not supposed to be the point, but the fact that I solved the mystery while the actual characters in the actual story could only be bothered to pay attention to the disappearance about half the time made for an incredibly frustrating reading experience.)
]]> 3.88 2017 Turtles All the Way Down
author: John Green
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2019/04/01
date added: 2019/07/16
shelves: audiobook, kids-and-young-adult
review:
I’ve outgrown John Green.

Honestly, what a relief. I liked The Fault in Our Stars, I really did! (Hell, I was at one of the performances on the release tour! I spoke to John and Hank Green in the signing line and they laughed politely at my joke! I was DFTBA-all-the-way for many years!) And when I heard that he had a new book coming out, I was mildly interested but then forgot to track down a copy until recently, when I was scrolling through my library’s audiobook options, and decided to give it a try.

Green’s heroine this time around is Aza Holmes, age sixteen. Aza, we learn pretty quickly, suffers from anxiety and obsessive thought patterns. She has a perpetual scab on her hand from picking at her skin, and constantly applies hand sanitizer because every time she thinks about it she realizes how gross the human body is. Aza is a typical teenage girl, albeit one who sometimes finds it impossible to exist in the world. So yeah � a typical teenage girl. Part of what made The Fault in Our Stars so good was the way John Green used his experience as a chaplain in a children’s hospital to realistically portray what it was like to be a child with a terminal disease, and here he gets even more personal, using his own mental health experiences to make Aza’s struggles believable and compelling.

The plot kicks into motion when a man in Aza’s community goes missing. Russell Pickett is a billionaire developer, and his teenage son, Davis, is a former childhood friend of Aza’s. With much prodding from her best friend (sidebar: why are the best friend characters in John Green’s novels always so much more interesting than his protagonists?), Aza decides to reconnect with Davis and investigate the Case of the Missing Billionaire.

Be warned: this novel isn’t really the Case of the Missing Billionaire, and that really fucking irks me. As someone who is a hardcore fan of detective novels, I haaaaaate it when an author teases readers with a mystery to get them sucked in, but then is like “but MY mystery won’t have a satisfying conclusion because that’s not REALISTIC. Now let’s enjoy three hundred pages of meditations on racism in small town America.�

Without spoilers, I will say that Green doesn’t completely ignore the disappearance that kickstarts his story, but it’s obvious that he is deeply uninterested in the case, and it functions primarily as a background plot to the main story of Aza’s mental health struggles and her tentative romance with Davis.

And it’s fine! I would argue, in fact, that it’s Green’s best novel to date, and even say how happy I am to see that he’s only getting better with age and experience. I’m just not part of his ideal demographic any more, and that’s okay.

It’s just that I found all the scenes between Aza and Davis deeply boring, partially because teenage romance no longer interests me (maybe make one of them a vampire, I dunno) and also because hello this guy’s dad VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE, maybe we should be focusing on that? I GET that the disappearance isn’t the point of the book, but it was a distraction more often than not.

(Also I figured out what happened to the dad pretty early in the story � and yes, I KNOW that figuring it out was not supposed to be the point, but the fact that I solved the mystery while the actual characters in the actual story could only be bothered to pay attention to the disappearance about half the time made for an incredibly frustrating reading experience.)

]]> You Will Know Me 25251757 You Will Know Me is a breathless rollercoaster of a novel about the desperate limits of desire, jealousy, and ambition.]]> 345 Megan Abbott 031623107X Madeline 3 audiobook
The book is told from the perspective of Katie Knox, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Devon is a gifted gymnast on track to become an Olympian. The family’s entire life revolves around their daughter � weekends are spent traveling to meets, Katie and her husband Eric only spend time with other parents from the gym, and every extra money the family earns goes to Devon and gymnastics. The young athletes at the gym, their coaches, and the parents form a sort of cult community, where everyone knows everyone’s business and outsiders are not welcome, because who else could understand this kind of life?

The whole community is thrown off balance when a young man - a tumbling coach at Devon's gym - dies suddenly. Through Katie’s eyes, we go back to see the seemingly-random sequence of events that led to the death, and follow Katie’s tentative investigations into the possible crime. It’s all very dramatic and soapy, and is a lot of fun when Abbott is fully leaning into these elements of her story. At its best, this is a Pretty Little Liars-esque tale of small-town secrets and scandals, where small business owners act like mob bosses and parents are willing to do anything to protect their children (and their own interests).

I especially liked the little details where Abbott shows how fully invested you have to be in order to raise a future Olympian, and how thoroughly gymnastics eclipsed everything else going on in the Knox family’s life. One of the book’s best scenes shows Devon’s coach sitting down for a meeting with her parents and outlining a detailed five-year-plan that ends in the Olympics. Notably, Devon is (I think) eleven or twelve at this point, and is also not present at this meeting deciding her entire future.

The only thing I could have done without was the eventual revelation that Devon [spoilers removed]]]> 3.42 2016 You Will Know Me
author: Megan Abbott
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2018/12/01
date added: 2019/06/05
shelves: audiobook
review:
Since I a) love cheesy melodramatic thrillers and b) get super obsessed with gymnastics every time the summer Olympics roll around and never think about it otherwise, this book was the perfect blend for me. Gymnasts and (possibly) murder! Sign me the hell up (should really be the title of one of my shelves)!

The book is told from the perspective of Katie Knox, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Devon is a gifted gymnast on track to become an Olympian. The family’s entire life revolves around their daughter � weekends are spent traveling to meets, Katie and her husband Eric only spend time with other parents from the gym, and every extra money the family earns goes to Devon and gymnastics. The young athletes at the gym, their coaches, and the parents form a sort of cult community, where everyone knows everyone’s business and outsiders are not welcome, because who else could understand this kind of life?

The whole community is thrown off balance when a young man - a tumbling coach at Devon's gym - dies suddenly. Through Katie’s eyes, we go back to see the seemingly-random sequence of events that led to the death, and follow Katie’s tentative investigations into the possible crime. It’s all very dramatic and soapy, and is a lot of fun when Abbott is fully leaning into these elements of her story. At its best, this is a Pretty Little Liars-esque tale of small-town secrets and scandals, where small business owners act like mob bosses and parents are willing to do anything to protect their children (and their own interests).

I especially liked the little details where Abbott shows how fully invested you have to be in order to raise a future Olympian, and how thoroughly gymnastics eclipsed everything else going on in the Knox family’s life. One of the book’s best scenes shows Devon’s coach sitting down for a meeting with her parents and outlining a detailed five-year-plan that ends in the Olympics. Notably, Devon is (I think) eleven or twelve at this point, and is also not present at this meeting deciding her entire future.

The only thing I could have done without was the eventual revelation that Devon [spoilers removed]
]]> <![CDATA[Dread Nation (Dread Nation, #1)]]> 30223025
But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose. But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies. And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.]]> 455 Justina Ireland 0062570609 Madeline 4 Broad City saying, "That's very cool and 2004 of you, but..."

Like seriously, the last thing I wanted to read was another zombie story. But, just like The Girl With All the Gifts, sometimes there really is an exception that proves the rule. (The fact that Dread Nation was ranked as one of the best Young Adult books of the year doesn't hurt its case, either)

In Dread Nation, Justina Ireland finds a way to put a new spin on the very worn-out zombie apocalypse story by setting it in an alternate version of United States history. In Ireland's version of events, the Civil War went exactly the way it did in our history books, except for one thing: after the battle of Gettysburg, the dead began to rise. So in the aftermath of the conflict, the United States government had to deal the reconstruction of the country, and also a zombie uprising. The solution was to take black and Native children and place them in special combat schools, where they would be trained to fight zombies and eventually assigned to protect wealthy white families. Our heroine is Jane, the biracial teenager who is taken from her home on the Rose Hill plantation and sent to Miss Preston's School of Combat to learn the fine art of zombie killing.

It’s a great premise for a Young Adult adventure story, and my only real issue with the book was that Ireland couldn’t seem to focus her plot. At first, when Jane is introduced and is showing us around her school, I thought, “oh cool, this is gonna be like a zombie-hunter girls� boarding school novel, I’m on board.� And then Jane goes on a school outing and rescues a bunch of rich white people from a zombie attack, and I thought, “oh cool, so she’s going to get hired by a rich lady and we’ll get to see her navigating high society while also killing zombies.� And then Jane and her friends get sent to an experimental protected settlement out in the territories, and I thought, “Oh cool, we’re…doing Wild West zombies? I guess?�

So it’s weird at the beginning, because it feels kind of like Ireland wastes a lot of page space on potential stories that never get off the ground, and by the time we get to the actual central setting of the story, we’re almost halfway through the book. But pacing aside, this was a fun blend of historic fiction and zombie apocalypse story, and Jane is a great protagonist who’s perfectly capable of carrying a series. The book functions well enough as a standalone novel, although of course Ireland throws in enough of a cliffhanger to make me anxious for the second book in the series.

Still kinda disappointed that I didn’t get my zombie-hunter girls� boarding school novel, though.]]> 4.12 2018 Dread Nation (Dread Nation, #1)
author: Justina Ireland
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/03/01
date added: 2019/06/05
shelves: audiobook, kids-and-young-adult
review:
When my friend recommended this book to me and said it was a zombie story, the first thing that popped into my head was Ilana from Broad City saying, "That's very cool and 2004 of you, but..."

Like seriously, the last thing I wanted to read was another zombie story. But, just like The Girl With All the Gifts, sometimes there really is an exception that proves the rule. (The fact that Dread Nation was ranked as one of the best Young Adult books of the year doesn't hurt its case, either)

In Dread Nation, Justina Ireland finds a way to put a new spin on the very worn-out zombie apocalypse story by setting it in an alternate version of United States history. In Ireland's version of events, the Civil War went exactly the way it did in our history books, except for one thing: after the battle of Gettysburg, the dead began to rise. So in the aftermath of the conflict, the United States government had to deal the reconstruction of the country, and also a zombie uprising. The solution was to take black and Native children and place them in special combat schools, where they would be trained to fight zombies and eventually assigned to protect wealthy white families. Our heroine is Jane, the biracial teenager who is taken from her home on the Rose Hill plantation and sent to Miss Preston's School of Combat to learn the fine art of zombie killing.

It’s a great premise for a Young Adult adventure story, and my only real issue with the book was that Ireland couldn’t seem to focus her plot. At first, when Jane is introduced and is showing us around her school, I thought, “oh cool, this is gonna be like a zombie-hunter girls� boarding school novel, I’m on board.� And then Jane goes on a school outing and rescues a bunch of rich white people from a zombie attack, and I thought, “oh cool, so she’s going to get hired by a rich lady and we’ll get to see her navigating high society while also killing zombies.� And then Jane and her friends get sent to an experimental protected settlement out in the territories, and I thought, “Oh cool, we’re…doing Wild West zombies? I guess?�

So it’s weird at the beginning, because it feels kind of like Ireland wastes a lot of page space on potential stories that never get off the ground, and by the time we get to the actual central setting of the story, we’re almost halfway through the book. But pacing aside, this was a fun blend of historic fiction and zombie apocalypse story, and Jane is a great protagonist who’s perfectly capable of carrying a series. The book functions well enough as a standalone novel, although of course Ireland throws in enough of a cliffhanger to make me anxious for the second book in the series.

Still kinda disappointed that I didn’t get my zombie-hunter girls� boarding school novel, though.
]]> <![CDATA[China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians, #2)]]> 22674105 Kevin Kwan, bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians, is back with a wickedly funny new novel of social climbing, secret e-mails, art-world scandal, lovesick billionaires, and the outrageous story of what happens when Rachel Chu, engaged to marry Asia's most eligible bachelor, discovers her birthfather.

On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond from JAR, a wedding dress she loves more than anything found in the salons of Paris, and a fiance willing to sacrifice his entire inheritance in order to marry her. But Rachel still mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won't be able to walk her down the aisle. Until: a shocking revelation draws Rachel into a world of Shanghai splendor beyond anything she has ever imagined. Here we meet Carlton, a Ferrari-crashing bad boy known for Prince Harry-like antics; Colette, a celebrity girlfriend chased by fevered paparazzi; and the man Rachel has spent her entire life waiting to meet: her father. Meanwhile, Singapore's It Girl, Astrid Leong, is shocked to discover that there is a downside to having a newly minted tech billionaire husband. A romp through Asia's most exclusive clubs, auction houses, and estates, China Rich Girlfriend brings us into the elite circles of Mainland China, introducing a captivating cast of characters, and offering an inside glimpse at what it's like to be gloriously, crazily, China-rich.]]> 378 Kevin Kwan 0385539088 Madeline 2 audiobook, no-judgements Crazy Rich Asians series. If you haven't read it, or have just seen the movie, proceed with caution because I am going to discuss the ending and crucial plot points for that book)

So, I'm a little baffled at the difference in my reactions to the first Crazy Rich Asians novel versus the second. The first book was a fun, fluffy romp of a story about an Everywoman's journey into Filthy Rich People Land - everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, and Kwan was adept at using brand names, luxury settings, and general wealth porn to distract me from the shallowness and mediocre prose of his debut novel. (I should probably also admit that the movie version, which is one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book, is probably making me feel more positive about the book than when I first read it)

In China Rich Girlfriend, Kwan assumes that he can stick to the formula that made his first book such a hit, and doesn't bother to deviate very far from his established pattern of "Nick and Rachel go somewhere luxurious, then we follow some other characters to similarly luxurious locations, repeat until you hit your required page count" because why should he? The first book was so well received, why bother trying anything new?

The problem is that China Rich Girlfriend didn't work for me, at all, and I'll try to use this review to figure out why.

For starters, Kwan's decision to have this book pick up two years after the events of the first book is baffling, because none of the characters have experienced any growth or change in that time. Rachel and Nick are just now getting engaged (and I had totally forgotten that the book, unlike the movie, doesn't end with Rachel accepting Nick's proposal) and in that time, they don't appear to have ever had any serious conversation about money and how their marriage will potentially be affected by Nick's wealth - Rachel remains as confounded as ever by the obscene wealth of the people she encounters in China and Singapore, and Nick continues to refuse to discuss his family finances with her in any detail. The lack of personal growth doesn't stop at Rachel and Nick, either - Nick hasn't spoken to his mother in two years, and Astrid is still married to her dirtbag husband, and is still maintaining an "I swear we're just friends" relationship with Charlie Wu. (The Astrid of the movie version, who delivered that blistering breakup speech to her husband, is nowhere to be found in this book.)

The big drama of this novel is Rachel reconnecting with her birth father, and Kwan has absolutely no idea how to handle this plot. Rachel and her father immediately get on like a house on fire, and she bonds with her newly-discovered half-brother without any issues. (Instead of having Rachel wonder why her father the billionaire politician never used his resources to try to find her and her mother, or question whether it's healthy to try to start a relationship with a family that never wanted anything to do with her, it's all "Wow, my dad sure is great!" and "Oh wow, my estranged brother and I eat our soup dumplings the same way!") At the same time, Kwan decides to do what he did at the end of Crazy Rich Asians and take a hard left turn into soap opera-level drama, when Rachel is [spoilers removed]. It's like he doesn't know how to create drama out of people reacting normally to extremely emotional circumstances, so he has to throw crazy plots into the mix instead.

The other big issue here is that, unlike in the first book, it has become glaringly obvious that all of these people are shallow, spoiled monsters. Kwan was able to keep me reasonably distracted from this in the first book, but while I was reading China Rich Girlfriend, an intrusive thought kept ruining my reading experience: these people have too much money and it has turned them into sociopaths.

Some of them are supposed to be ridiculous, like Kitty Pong (who, by the way, I will defend to the death, and it's a major flaw of the book that we don't get to spend more time watching her My Fair Lady journey into high society) and Carlton's girlfriend, the Chinese socialite Collette Bing. But on the other hand, we have Carlton himself, who at the beginning of the book crashes his sports car into a luxury boutique, severely injuring himself and putting one passenger in a coma, and killing the other. His mother then pays to have the girl's death covered up, and Carlton never sees any consequences for his actions.

I cannot imagine how Kwan thought his readers would be capable of sympathizing with Carlton after that. Again - he put one girl in a coma, and killed another one. Oh sure, he feels super bad about it, but Kwan seems to think that that's sufficient. It was not, and in every interaction Carlton has with another character, all I could think was "a girl is dead because of you." Also, notice how I have to just keep referring to each of his victims as "the girl"? That's because they never get names. I mean, Jesus, Kwan.

Even Nick sucks in this one. There's a scene where his aunt sits down with him and bluntly tells him that he's free to continue dating Rachel if he wants, but he should wait to marry her until after his grandmother dies so she'll leave him Tyersol Park in her will. And instead of defending Rachel (you know, like he spent the first book doing?) and inviting his aunt to take a flying leap off her mega-yacht, Nick gives some non-committal non-answer, because despite knowing all the shit his family put Rachel through and even though he ultimately chose her over them, he's still not willing to risk pissing off his grandma and losing his chance to be lord of the manor one day. It was deeply disappointing, to say the least.

Crazy Rich Asians succeeded because its core story was a universal one: the pressure of meeting your partner's family for the first time, and the anxiety that you won't be accepted. Readers loved the first book because Kwan took a very familiar, everyday experience and sprinkled it with gold dust and placed it in an exotic setting, making the humdrum "meeting the parents" scenario feel much more interesting and high-stakes.

China Rich Girlfriend could have worked in a similar way, because again, it deals with a common experience: a newly married couple trying to navigate their shared life and make their partnership succeed despite their vastly different families and upbringings. Unfortunately, Kwan has absolutely no interest in exploring this, preferring instead to stick with his old formula of repetitive scenes of rich people doing rich people things in rich people places, and he can't even do us the favor of letting us watch familiar, already-beloved characters do them - he seems to think that he can just repeat the plot of the first book with new characters and settings, and that his audience will be happy.

I read this book for one reason, and one reason only: so I would have added background information when the movie version came out. In that respect, China Rich Girlfriend delivers.]]> 3.80 2015 China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians, #2)
author: Kevin Kwan
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2019/03/01
date added: 2019/04/17
shelves: audiobook, no-judgements
review:
(warning: this review will contain spoilers for the first book in the Crazy Rich Asians series. If you haven't read it, or have just seen the movie, proceed with caution because I am going to discuss the ending and crucial plot points for that book)

So, I'm a little baffled at the difference in my reactions to the first Crazy Rich Asians novel versus the second. The first book was a fun, fluffy romp of a story about an Everywoman's journey into Filthy Rich People Land - everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, and Kwan was adept at using brand names, luxury settings, and general wealth porn to distract me from the shallowness and mediocre prose of his debut novel. (I should probably also admit that the movie version, which is one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book, is probably making me feel more positive about the book than when I first read it)

In China Rich Girlfriend, Kwan assumes that he can stick to the formula that made his first book such a hit, and doesn't bother to deviate very far from his established pattern of "Nick and Rachel go somewhere luxurious, then we follow some other characters to similarly luxurious locations, repeat until you hit your required page count" because why should he? The first book was so well received, why bother trying anything new?

The problem is that China Rich Girlfriend didn't work for me, at all, and I'll try to use this review to figure out why.

For starters, Kwan's decision to have this book pick up two years after the events of the first book is baffling, because none of the characters have experienced any growth or change in that time. Rachel and Nick are just now getting engaged (and I had totally forgotten that the book, unlike the movie, doesn't end with Rachel accepting Nick's proposal) and in that time, they don't appear to have ever had any serious conversation about money and how their marriage will potentially be affected by Nick's wealth - Rachel remains as confounded as ever by the obscene wealth of the people she encounters in China and Singapore, and Nick continues to refuse to discuss his family finances with her in any detail. The lack of personal growth doesn't stop at Rachel and Nick, either - Nick hasn't spoken to his mother in two years, and Astrid is still married to her dirtbag husband, and is still maintaining an "I swear we're just friends" relationship with Charlie Wu. (The Astrid of the movie version, who delivered that blistering breakup speech to her husband, is nowhere to be found in this book.)

The big drama of this novel is Rachel reconnecting with her birth father, and Kwan has absolutely no idea how to handle this plot. Rachel and her father immediately get on like a house on fire, and she bonds with her newly-discovered half-brother without any issues. (Instead of having Rachel wonder why her father the billionaire politician never used his resources to try to find her and her mother, or question whether it's healthy to try to start a relationship with a family that never wanted anything to do with her, it's all "Wow, my dad sure is great!" and "Oh wow, my estranged brother and I eat our soup dumplings the same way!") At the same time, Kwan decides to do what he did at the end of Crazy Rich Asians and take a hard left turn into soap opera-level drama, when Rachel is [spoilers removed]. It's like he doesn't know how to create drama out of people reacting normally to extremely emotional circumstances, so he has to throw crazy plots into the mix instead.

The other big issue here is that, unlike in the first book, it has become glaringly obvious that all of these people are shallow, spoiled monsters. Kwan was able to keep me reasonably distracted from this in the first book, but while I was reading China Rich Girlfriend, an intrusive thought kept ruining my reading experience: these people have too much money and it has turned them into sociopaths.

Some of them are supposed to be ridiculous, like Kitty Pong (who, by the way, I will defend to the death, and it's a major flaw of the book that we don't get to spend more time watching her My Fair Lady journey into high society) and Carlton's girlfriend, the Chinese socialite Collette Bing. But on the other hand, we have Carlton himself, who at the beginning of the book crashes his sports car into a luxury boutique, severely injuring himself and putting one passenger in a coma, and killing the other. His mother then pays to have the girl's death covered up, and Carlton never sees any consequences for his actions.

I cannot imagine how Kwan thought his readers would be capable of sympathizing with Carlton after that. Again - he put one girl in a coma, and killed another one. Oh sure, he feels super bad about it, but Kwan seems to think that that's sufficient. It was not, and in every interaction Carlton has with another character, all I could think was "a girl is dead because of you." Also, notice how I have to just keep referring to each of his victims as "the girl"? That's because they never get names. I mean, Jesus, Kwan.

Even Nick sucks in this one. There's a scene where his aunt sits down with him and bluntly tells him that he's free to continue dating Rachel if he wants, but he should wait to marry her until after his grandmother dies so she'll leave him Tyersol Park in her will. And instead of defending Rachel (you know, like he spent the first book doing?) and inviting his aunt to take a flying leap off her mega-yacht, Nick gives some non-committal non-answer, because despite knowing all the shit his family put Rachel through and even though he ultimately chose her over them, he's still not willing to risk pissing off his grandma and losing his chance to be lord of the manor one day. It was deeply disappointing, to say the least.

Crazy Rich Asians succeeded because its core story was a universal one: the pressure of meeting your partner's family for the first time, and the anxiety that you won't be accepted. Readers loved the first book because Kwan took a very familiar, everyday experience and sprinkled it with gold dust and placed it in an exotic setting, making the humdrum "meeting the parents" scenario feel much more interesting and high-stakes.

China Rich Girlfriend could have worked in a similar way, because again, it deals with a common experience: a newly married couple trying to navigate their shared life and make their partnership succeed despite their vastly different families and upbringings. Unfortunately, Kwan has absolutely no interest in exploring this, preferring instead to stick with his old formula of repetitive scenes of rich people doing rich people things in rich people places, and he can't even do us the favor of letting us watch familiar, already-beloved characters do them - he seems to think that he can just repeat the plot of the first book with new characters and settings, and that his audience will be happy.

I read this book for one reason, and one reason only: so I would have added background information when the movie version came out. In that respect, China Rich Girlfriend delivers.
]]> <![CDATA[Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook]]> 7324659 Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business—and for Anthony Bourdain.

Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present. Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, and even to fatherhood, Bourdain takes no prisoners as he dissects what he's seen, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the most controversial figures in food.

Beginning with a secret and highly illegal after-hours gathering of powerful chefs that he compares to a mafia summit, Bourdain pulls back the curtain—but never pulls his punches—on the modern gastronomical revolution, as only he can. Cutting right to the bone, Bourdain sets his sights on some of the biggest names in the foodie world, including David Chang, the young superstar chef who has radicalized the fine-dining landscape; the revered Alice Waters, whom he treats with unapologetic frankness; the Top Chef winners and losers; and many more.

And always he returns to the question "Why cook?" Or the more difficult "Why cook well?" Medium Raw is the deliciously funny and shockingly delectable journey to those answers, sure to delight philistines and gourmands alike.

]]> 281 Anthony Bourdain 0061718947 Madeline 5 memoir, audiobook, essays
Although Medium Raw isn't, technically speaking, a sequel to Anthony Bourdain's first collection of restaurant industry-related essays, it's definitely a companion volume - to the point where if you read Medium Raw without first having read Kitchen Confidential, you're not really getting the full experience. Kitchen Confidential was a brash, cranky, profanity-filled collection of essays detailing the ugly ins and outs of the restaurant industry and the people who make a living from it, and even the positive essays were still brimming with piss and vinegar. One of the most quoted essays from the book explains why you should never order fish on a Monday, so it's a good indication of how much Bourdain's worldview has changed since Kitchen Confidential. The crankiness is now tempered with weariness, and a resigned irritation (mostly directed at himself) that so many people have held him up as some kind of all-knowing expert on the restaurant industry.

If Kitchen Confidential is a bitter, ultra-boozy triple IPA, Medium Raw is a cask-aged stout - still strong, still bitter, but complex and well-aged. In fact, I think the thesis of Medium Raw can be best summed up by this single line by Bourdain: "I'm through being cool."

A lot of Medium Raw has Bourdain holding a critical lens to his previously-fast-held beliefs, and re-examining with the benefit of hindsight and decades in the industry. In addition to wearily telling his readers to just "order the fucking fish on Monday," he also spends a chapter discussing the concept of "selling out" and how it's stupid to hold yourself to some kind of high moral standard when it comes to endorsement - if selling frozen food on infomercials is what keeps your restaurant open, you do it, and you do it with a smile. Medium Raw also presents us with a Bourdain who is, if not nicer, then at least more willing to live and let live. He still has nothing but contempt for Sandra Lee, but a chapter where he endlessly snarks on Alice Waters ends with him warmly and genuinely singing her praises. (Of course, this is immediately followed by a chapter explaining why a certain food critic is, in no uncertain terms, a total douchebag. Tigers can't change their stripes)

It's not all backtracking and reflection - Bourdain also takes us through the history of the Food Network and how it's changed over time, and how the company became a profitable business model (Food Network Magazine is one of the few print magazines left that's still profitable), but did this at the expense of the chefs who founded the network. He also reflects on his career, and how he's ultimately stumbled into this career. Another really good chapter has Bourdain delving into what he tells people when they ask him whether they should go to culinary school, and it manages to be both intimidating and inspiring.

The boldest aspect of Medium Raw, however, is when Bourdain puts his ego aside entirely and admits, simply, "I am not a chef." It's true - Anthony Bourdain hasn't been in a working kitchen for decades, and he doesn't hesitate to admit that there are thousands of infinitely more talented people working in the culinary world, and that his fame is only partially built on his abilities in the kitchen.

But we don't read Anthony Bourdain's books because he's a great chef. We read his books because they're written with a clear, engaging voice, and because he knows how to tell a great story, and has plenty of great stories to tell. (Also, if you can, try doing what I did and listening to this as an audiobook - hearing Bourdain himself tell the stories in this book is half of the appeal)

Anthony Bourdain is right -he's not a chef. He's a writer. And thank goodness for that.]]> 3.75 2010 Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
author: Anthony Bourdain
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/03/26
shelves: memoir, audiobook, essays
review:
"Order the fucking fish on Monday."

Although Medium Raw isn't, technically speaking, a sequel to Anthony Bourdain's first collection of restaurant industry-related essays, it's definitely a companion volume - to the point where if you read Medium Raw without first having read Kitchen Confidential, you're not really getting the full experience. Kitchen Confidential was a brash, cranky, profanity-filled collection of essays detailing the ugly ins and outs of the restaurant industry and the people who make a living from it, and even the positive essays were still brimming with piss and vinegar. One of the most quoted essays from the book explains why you should never order fish on a Monday, so it's a good indication of how much Bourdain's worldview has changed since Kitchen Confidential. The crankiness is now tempered with weariness, and a resigned irritation (mostly directed at himself) that so many people have held him up as some kind of all-knowing expert on the restaurant industry.

If Kitchen Confidential is a bitter, ultra-boozy triple IPA, Medium Raw is a cask-aged stout - still strong, still bitter, but complex and well-aged. In fact, I think the thesis of Medium Raw can be best summed up by this single line by Bourdain: "I'm through being cool."

A lot of Medium Raw has Bourdain holding a critical lens to his previously-fast-held beliefs, and re-examining with the benefit of hindsight and decades in the industry. In addition to wearily telling his readers to just "order the fucking fish on Monday," he also spends a chapter discussing the concept of "selling out" and how it's stupid to hold yourself to some kind of high moral standard when it comes to endorsement - if selling frozen food on infomercials is what keeps your restaurant open, you do it, and you do it with a smile. Medium Raw also presents us with a Bourdain who is, if not nicer, then at least more willing to live and let live. He still has nothing but contempt for Sandra Lee, but a chapter where he endlessly snarks on Alice Waters ends with him warmly and genuinely singing her praises. (Of course, this is immediately followed by a chapter explaining why a certain food critic is, in no uncertain terms, a total douchebag. Tigers can't change their stripes)

It's not all backtracking and reflection - Bourdain also takes us through the history of the Food Network and how it's changed over time, and how the company became a profitable business model (Food Network Magazine is one of the few print magazines left that's still profitable), but did this at the expense of the chefs who founded the network. He also reflects on his career, and how he's ultimately stumbled into this career. Another really good chapter has Bourdain delving into what he tells people when they ask him whether they should go to culinary school, and it manages to be both intimidating and inspiring.

The boldest aspect of Medium Raw, however, is when Bourdain puts his ego aside entirely and admits, simply, "I am not a chef." It's true - Anthony Bourdain hasn't been in a working kitchen for decades, and he doesn't hesitate to admit that there are thousands of infinitely more talented people working in the culinary world, and that his fame is only partially built on his abilities in the kitchen.

But we don't read Anthony Bourdain's books because he's a great chef. We read his books because they're written with a clear, engaging voice, and because he knows how to tell a great story, and has plenty of great stories to tell. (Also, if you can, try doing what I did and listening to this as an audiobook - hearing Bourdain himself tell the stories in this book is half of the appeal)

Anthony Bourdain is right -he's not a chef. He's a writer. And thank goodness for that.
]]> The Glass Castle 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]> 288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X Madeline 2 audiobook, memoir bummed me out, two stars"?

But for real - this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out. Like, if you read Angela's Ashes and thought it just needed more sexual assault of the pre-pubescent protagonist, then The Glass Castle is for you! There's a bit early on where the dad takes his kids to the zoo and I sure hope you enjoy it, because that's pretty much the only truly happy interaction Jeannette Walls has with her parents for the rest of the book.

And it's totally unfair of me to complain about that. Jeannette Walls owes me nothing, and she definitely isn't obligated to gloss over the uglier aspects of her (I cannot emphasize this enough) truly awful childhood just to make readers more comfortable. So honestly, it's not even the fact that this book is XXX-rated Misery Porn that bothers me. What I really don't like about this memoir is that Walls, even as she recounts stories where she and her siblings were being routinely abused by her parents, seems unwilling to look this ugliness fully in the face, and condemn her parents for the way they treated her and her siblings. She ends (no spoilers, relax) on a note of, not quite forgiveness, but acceptance of the fact that her parents were just being true to themselves, and did the best they could.

And that's somehow the most depressing thing about the book. The Glass Castle seems to frequently market itself as a story of an unconventional childhood that was tough, sure, but full of love and adventure. (Probably the movie adaptation, which made major changes in order to make the story more heartwarming, is mostly responsible for this) But in reality, The Glass Castle is just the story of an abusive childhood, written by a woman who maybe doesn't realize how truly toxic her parents really are.

Anyway. If starving kids, alcoholic fathers, dangerously narcissistic mothers, and sexual assault makes up your preferred memoir cocktail, enjoy. ]]> 4.32 2005 The Glass Castle
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at: 2019/01/14
date added: 2019/01/14
shelves: audiobook, memoir
review:
I really don't know how I'm supposed to defend my dislike of this book? I mean, what kind of asshole says, "Man, this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out, two stars"?

But for real - this book about a woman's miserable childhood really bummed me out. Like, if you read Angela's Ashes and thought it just needed more sexual assault of the pre-pubescent protagonist, then The Glass Castle is for you! There's a bit early on where the dad takes his kids to the zoo and I sure hope you enjoy it, because that's pretty much the only truly happy interaction Jeannette Walls has with her parents for the rest of the book.

And it's totally unfair of me to complain about that. Jeannette Walls owes me nothing, and she definitely isn't obligated to gloss over the uglier aspects of her (I cannot emphasize this enough) truly awful childhood just to make readers more comfortable. So honestly, it's not even the fact that this book is XXX-rated Misery Porn that bothers me. What I really don't like about this memoir is that Walls, even as she recounts stories where she and her siblings were being routinely abused by her parents, seems unwilling to look this ugliness fully in the face, and condemn her parents for the way they treated her and her siblings. She ends (no spoilers, relax) on a note of, not quite forgiveness, but acceptance of the fact that her parents were just being true to themselves, and did the best they could.

And that's somehow the most depressing thing about the book. The Glass Castle seems to frequently market itself as a story of an unconventional childhood that was tough, sure, but full of love and adventure. (Probably the movie adaptation, which made major changes in order to make the story more heartwarming, is mostly responsible for this) But in reality, The Glass Castle is just the story of an abusive childhood, written by a woman who maybe doesn't realize how truly toxic her parents really are.

Anyway. If starving kids, alcoholic fathers, dangerously narcissistic mothers, and sexual assault makes up your preferred memoir cocktail, enjoy.
]]> The Westing Game 902 182 Ellen Raskin 014240120X Madeline 2
The Westing Game begins when sixteen people are called to the abandoned Westing mansion to hear the will of Sam Westing, recently deceased millionaire industrialist. In his will, Westing proposes a game: the sixteen people (his “heirs�) will be divided into teams of two and given a handful of clues, which they must use to figure out who murdered Westing. The team that wins inherits his entire fortune.

Honestly, on re-reading this, I realize that it’s basically Saw for the elementary school set: rich eccentric dude brings a group of strangers together and proceeds to psychologically torture them by a) teasing them with the chance to win an outrageous fortune and b) convincing them that someone in their group is a murderer. Plus there’s puns and puzzles based on patriotic songs!

In short, this has not aged well. Maybe people were more open to the idea of a rich guy fucking with people’s lives for shits and giggles back when the book was originally published in 1979, but reading The Westing Game in the year of our lord 2018 was a significantly different experience for me. Watching all of these people go through what was basically an elaborate parlor game to appease the whims of a rich dead asshole wasn’t very fun, at all, and it was a genuine disappointment for me when at the end [spoilers removed].

And it’s not just the general plot that left a bad taste in my mouth � there are a lot of little things that I definitely didn’t realize were problematic when I read the book as a kid. A child with mental disabilities is described by a character as “a mongoloid child�; a Chinese woman’s inner thoughts are written in broken English; and the one black character wears traditional African clothing once, but those are all the details about it we get, since no country or other information about her clothes are provided, aside from a character calling her outfit “ethnic� and the narration describing her as looking like “an African princess.� Oof. Oh, and since one of the characters has Down’s Syndrome, listening to the audiobook meant having to listen to a non-disabled voice actor do an impression of a person with a speech impediment, which…was not fun for me. I mean, I don’t know how else they were supposed to do it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to listen to.]]> 4.00 1978 The Westing Game
author: Ellen Raskin
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1978
rating: 2
read at: 2018/11/01
date added: 2018/12/11
shelves: audiobook, kids-and-young-adult
review:
I checked out this audiobook on a whim when I saw that it was available, because it seemed like a quick, fun nostalgia read. I remember being assigned to read this book in fifth grade or sixth grade, and had fond memories of it as a brief, fun little puzzle of a story.

The Westing Game begins when sixteen people are called to the abandoned Westing mansion to hear the will of Sam Westing, recently deceased millionaire industrialist. In his will, Westing proposes a game: the sixteen people (his “heirs�) will be divided into teams of two and given a handful of clues, which they must use to figure out who murdered Westing. The team that wins inherits his entire fortune.

Honestly, on re-reading this, I realize that it’s basically Saw for the elementary school set: rich eccentric dude brings a group of strangers together and proceeds to psychologically torture them by a) teasing them with the chance to win an outrageous fortune and b) convincing them that someone in their group is a murderer. Plus there’s puns and puzzles based on patriotic songs!

In short, this has not aged well. Maybe people were more open to the idea of a rich guy fucking with people’s lives for shits and giggles back when the book was originally published in 1979, but reading The Westing Game in the year of our lord 2018 was a significantly different experience for me. Watching all of these people go through what was basically an elaborate parlor game to appease the whims of a rich dead asshole wasn’t very fun, at all, and it was a genuine disappointment for me when at the end [spoilers removed].

And it’s not just the general plot that left a bad taste in my mouth � there are a lot of little things that I definitely didn’t realize were problematic when I read the book as a kid. A child with mental disabilities is described by a character as “a mongoloid child�; a Chinese woman’s inner thoughts are written in broken English; and the one black character wears traditional African clothing once, but those are all the details about it we get, since no country or other information about her clothes are provided, aside from a character calling her outfit “ethnic� and the narration describing her as looking like “an African princess.� Oof. Oh, and since one of the characters has Down’s Syndrome, listening to the audiobook meant having to listen to a non-disabled voice actor do an impression of a person with a speech impediment, which…was not fun for me. I mean, I don’t know how else they were supposed to do it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to listen to.
]]> All the Light We Cannot See 18143977
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here]]> 544 Anthony Doerr 1476746583 Madeline 4 historic-fiction, audiobook The Boy in Striped Pajamascough*) or they’re an excuse to sugar-coat the United States military as a bunch of good-hearted Captain Americas heroically defeating the Nazis and saving the world from evil (whenever you read an overly-sentimental portrayal of the Allies in WWII, just remember that as this was occurring, the United States was imprisoning their own citizens in internment camps and the French government was selling out its Jewish citizens to the Nazis. I’m not trying to argue that the Nazis were not the absolute personification of evil, I’m just pointing out that nobody’s hands are clean. Remember Tim O’Brien’s words: there is no such thing as a moral war story.) But at the same time, I also hate stuff like The Reader, where authors try to be like bUt WhAt iF tHe NaZis WeRe VicTiMs ToO? (if you ever feel like absolutely ruining your afternoon, look up the “concentration camp prisoner falls in love with a guard� romance subgenre) Basically, I think WWII was a real shitty period of history and is too fraught with moral minefields to be the setting for whatever Deeper Point an author is trying to make.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I first started hearing about All the Light We Cannot See and how great it was, I was wary for all of the above reasons, and I put off reading the book for a long time. But then I finally decided to look it up, and see what everyone was talking about.

Doerr’s first good move was narrowing the scope of his book, and focusing on a small group of people � All the Light We Cannot See is definitely character-driven, not plot-driven. We have Marie-Laure, who develops blindness at a young age; and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Then we have Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany who’s recruited at a young age by the Nazi party for his mechanical and mathematical talents; and Volkheimer, a Nazi official hunting a rare gemstone held in the museum where Marie-Laure’s father works.

The structure of the book is great, starting a few years into the German occupation of France, in the town of St. Malo right after the Allies have bombed it � and Marie-Laure, Werner, and Volkheimer are all in different parts of the city, each on their own separate mission. Then Doerr takes us back, giving us the backstories of each main character and working towards the moment when all of their paths will cross in the bombed-out city.

Doerr still falls into a few of the traps that authors writing in the WWII genre tend to fall into � the bad people are very bad, the good people are very good, and sometimes Marie-Laure’s blindness strays a little too close to “It’s a metaphor for society’s blindness territory. But All the Light We Cannot See sneaks up on you. For most of the book, you’re enjoying a detailed, well-written, but ultimately run-of-the-mill WWII historical fiction. But then, around the time the separate characters are drawing closer to each other and the tension is ramping up, it becomes impossible to tear yourself away, and suddenly you’re submerged in the beauty and the tragedy of these characters and their stories. I’m still not a fan of WWII fiction, but this book is a good argument in its favor.]]> 4.31 2014 All the Light We Cannot See
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2018/11/27
shelves: historic-fiction, audiobook
review:
I’ll admit it, I’m kind of burned out on WWII stories. Too often, it seems like they devolve into trite morality plays (*coughThe Boy in Striped Pajamascough*) or they’re an excuse to sugar-coat the United States military as a bunch of good-hearted Captain Americas heroically defeating the Nazis and saving the world from evil (whenever you read an overly-sentimental portrayal of the Allies in WWII, just remember that as this was occurring, the United States was imprisoning their own citizens in internment camps and the French government was selling out its Jewish citizens to the Nazis. I’m not trying to argue that the Nazis were not the absolute personification of evil, I’m just pointing out that nobody’s hands are clean. Remember Tim O’Brien’s words: there is no such thing as a moral war story.) But at the same time, I also hate stuff like The Reader, where authors try to be like bUt WhAt iF tHe NaZis WeRe VicTiMs ToO? (if you ever feel like absolutely ruining your afternoon, look up the “concentration camp prisoner falls in love with a guard� romance subgenre) Basically, I think WWII was a real shitty period of history and is too fraught with moral minefields to be the setting for whatever Deeper Point an author is trying to make.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I first started hearing about All the Light We Cannot See and how great it was, I was wary for all of the above reasons, and I put off reading the book for a long time. But then I finally decided to look it up, and see what everyone was talking about.

Doerr’s first good move was narrowing the scope of his book, and focusing on a small group of people � All the Light We Cannot See is definitely character-driven, not plot-driven. We have Marie-Laure, who develops blindness at a young age; and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Then we have Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany who’s recruited at a young age by the Nazi party for his mechanical and mathematical talents; and Volkheimer, a Nazi official hunting a rare gemstone held in the museum where Marie-Laure’s father works.

The structure of the book is great, starting a few years into the German occupation of France, in the town of St. Malo right after the Allies have bombed it � and Marie-Laure, Werner, and Volkheimer are all in different parts of the city, each on their own separate mission. Then Doerr takes us back, giving us the backstories of each main character and working towards the moment when all of their paths will cross in the bombed-out city.

Doerr still falls into a few of the traps that authors writing in the WWII genre tend to fall into � the bad people are very bad, the good people are very good, and sometimes Marie-Laure’s blindness strays a little too close to “It’s a metaphor for society’s blindness territory. But All the Light We Cannot See sneaks up on you. For most of the book, you’re enjoying a detailed, well-written, but ultimately run-of-the-mill WWII historical fiction. But then, around the time the separate characters are drawing closer to each other and the tension is ramping up, it becomes impossible to tear yourself away, and suddenly you’re submerged in the beauty and the tragedy of these characters and their stories. I’m still not a fan of WWII fiction, but this book is a good argument in its favor.
]]> The Little Stranger 7234875 512 Sarah Waters Madeline 2 audiobook The Haunting of Hill House, where you start out with that atmospheric creepiness and weird events that you can kind of rationalize, and then the tension slowly amps up until you realize that something is very, very wrong with the house. The Little Stranger has a lot of the first part, but too little of the second.

My other problem is that the only other Sarah Waters book I’ve read is Fingersmith, which features approximately a thousand plot twists. So as I read The Little Stranger, I keep waiting breathlessly for The Twist, only to be deeply let down. It’s definitely suspenseful, and Waters keeps you guessing until the end about the exact nature of what’s going on at Hundreds Hall, but if you go into this expecting the kind of twists and revelations we got in Fingersmith, you’re going to be disappointed.

I know that this book fails as a haunted house story because the most upsetting part, for me, didn’t involve haunting-related events at all. It was the part where (no spoilers) a dog has to be put down, and I actually had to skip ahead in the audiobook because I didn’t want to cry on the train. It’s well-written and definitely brings out the emotions, but it has nothing to do with the ghosts that might or might not be wandering around Hundreds Hall. (To be fair, this is probably more of a Me Problem. This is the kind of psycho I am: I can listen to a scene where a dog literally[spoilers removed] and I’m still like NOBODY BETTER HURT THAT DOG)

If you like very, very, VERY subtle ghost stories (so subtle, in fact, that you can convincingly argue that this is a ghost story without a ghost), then The Little Stranger is for you.
]]> 3.59 2009 The Little Stranger
author: Sarah Waters
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2018/08/01
date added: 2018/11/06
shelves: audiobook
review:
My main problem with this book was that I went into it thinking it was going to be another kind of story. I was hoping for something more along the lines of The Haunting of Hill House, where you start out with that atmospheric creepiness and weird events that you can kind of rationalize, and then the tension slowly amps up until you realize that something is very, very wrong with the house. The Little Stranger has a lot of the first part, but too little of the second.

My other problem is that the only other Sarah Waters book I’ve read is Fingersmith, which features approximately a thousand plot twists. So as I read The Little Stranger, I keep waiting breathlessly for The Twist, only to be deeply let down. It’s definitely suspenseful, and Waters keeps you guessing until the end about the exact nature of what’s going on at Hundreds Hall, but if you go into this expecting the kind of twists and revelations we got in Fingersmith, you’re going to be disappointed.

I know that this book fails as a haunted house story because the most upsetting part, for me, didn’t involve haunting-related events at all. It was the part where (no spoilers) a dog has to be put down, and I actually had to skip ahead in the audiobook because I didn’t want to cry on the train. It’s well-written and definitely brings out the emotions, but it has nothing to do with the ghosts that might or might not be wandering around Hundreds Hall. (To be fair, this is probably more of a Me Problem. This is the kind of psycho I am: I can listen to a scene where a dog literally[spoilers removed] and I’m still like NOBODY BETTER HURT THAT DOG)

If you like very, very, VERY subtle ghost stories (so subtle, in fact, that you can convincingly argue that this is a ghost story without a ghost), then The Little Stranger is for you.

]]> <![CDATA[Peril at End House (Hercule Poirot, #8)]]> 16424
Poirot quickly takes a particular interest in the young woman. Recently, she has narrowly escaped a series of life-threatening accidents. Something tells the Belgian sleuth that these so-called accidents are more than just mere coincidences or a spate of bad luck. Something like a bullet! It seems all too clear to him that someone is trying to do away with poor Nick, but who? And, what is the motive? In his quest for answers, Poirot must delve into the dark history of End House. The deeper he gets into his investigation, the more certain he is that the killer will soon strike again. And, this time, Nick may not escape with her life.]]> 287 Agatha Christie 0007119305 Madeline 1 audiobook, detective-fiction The Glass Castle, but at least I can always count on there being at least one Agatha Christie mystery to tide me over while I wait.

I chose Peril at End House because its premise sounded the most promising: while on vacation on the coast of England, Hercule Poirot meets Magdala “Nick� Buckly, an heiress who’s had a handful of miraculous and suspicious brushes with death. Poirot suspects that someone is trying to kill Nick, and agrees to take her case. Along for the ride is the closest thing to a Watson Poirot will ever have (Poirot’s ridiculous ego would never allow him to fully share cases and credit the way Sherlock does with Watson), Hastings. Having read a few mysteries like this one, where Poirot has a sort-of assistant on the case, I think I prefer them over the solo Poirot investigations. Agatha Christie sometimes falls into the bad mystery novel trap of having her detective withhold information from other characters (and, therefore, the reader) in order to draw out the suspense for a few more chapters. Poirot doesn’t like to explain his thought process during an investigation, preferring to do the usual theatrical Accusations in the Parlor routine at the end of the book, so it’s helpful that he has Hastings following him around and occasionally asking clarifying questions about his process. I like mystery stories where the reader can feel like they’re solving the case alongside the detective, and even though Poirot does save some big bombshells for the final reveal, there’s at least a little transparency here.

That being said, the mystery definitely isn’t as satisfying as some of Christie’s greatest hits. There’s a subplot involving an Australian couple renting a house on Nick’s land, and it honestly felt more like padding than anything else. (Also Christie does a very clumsy and very un-Christie-like thing early in the novel where she has Poirot remark that, hmm, that couple sure seems suspicious. So then I was suspicious of them for the rest of the book, and it turned out that [spoilers removed]).

Also there’s a cocaine subplot, because no story of rich bored Bright Young Things would be complete without some cocaine floating around. The subplot doesn’t amount to much, which was frustrating for me � like, jeez Agatha, if you’re gonna do a cocaine smuggling subplot, do a cocaine smuggling subplot. Go big or go home.

Basically, everything in this book was half-assed. There’s cocaine, abusive husbands, con artists, sketchy servants, poisonings � and none of these plots really get the attention they deserve. The whole book, ultimately, felt very rushed, like Christie was in a hurry to just get to the end and cash her check. Also, Poirot strays just a little too far into Pompous Asshole territory in this one, and I did not care for that.

It’s been a while since I read a Hercule Poirot mystery (I re-read Murder on the Orient Express recently, but that was mainly to get the taste of that god-awful Kenneth Brannaugh version out of my memory), and I knew, going into this, that I’d always preferred Poirot over Miss Marple. But, having finished Peril at End House, I’m having a hard time remembering why. Poirot is pretty downright insufferable in this one, and also shows an unpleasantly cruel streak that I don’t remember seeing before.

Hastings mentions to another character at one point that actually, Poirot has had plenty of failed case, including one involving a box of chocolates, and he tells the other character that Poirot has told him that if his ego ever gets too big, all Hastings has to do is say “chocolate box� and Poirot will remember to be humble. So honestly, it’s a wonder that Hastings isn’t shouting CHOCOLATE BOX at Poirot every other page, because his ego is out of control in this one. Like, at one point he decides that Nick, who has survived multiple attempts on her life, is perfectly safe thanks to the precautions that Poirot has set up, and he and Hastings are free to hop off to London for a few days to take a break. So of course while they’re gone, someone tries to poison Nick, and Poirot is like, “Oh la la, Hastings, why did I leave? Why did I leave?� like someone else convinced him to do it. Chocolate box, Hercule.

And in possibly his worst moment in any Christie book I’ve read so far, Poirot allows the culprit [spoilers removed]

All I could think about was the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, when the criminal that Peter Wimsey caught is scheduled to be hanged. The culprit did it, stood trial, and is being appropriately punished, but Peter is still so upset by the role he played in sending this person to their death that he has to be consoled by his wife. I loved that scene, because it brought up an element of detective fiction that often gets glossed over � at the end of the day, a detective’s job is to send someone to jail, and sometimes to their execution. This takes an emotional toll on the detective, as it should.

Anyway, Hercule is like the polar opposite of that � solving mysteries has no human element whatsoever to him; they’re purely logic puzzles that he does first and foremost for his own amusement. And I don’t find that nearly as charming as I used to.]]> 4.00 1932 Peril at End House (Hercule Poirot, #8)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1932
rating: 1
read at: 2018/10/01
date added: 2018/10/31
shelves: audiobook, detective-fiction
review:
Bless my library and its sporadically reliable audiobook collection. I might be in the third month of waiting for my turn to download The Glass Castle, but at least I can always count on there being at least one Agatha Christie mystery to tide me over while I wait.

I chose Peril at End House because its premise sounded the most promising: while on vacation on the coast of England, Hercule Poirot meets Magdala “Nick� Buckly, an heiress who’s had a handful of miraculous and suspicious brushes with death. Poirot suspects that someone is trying to kill Nick, and agrees to take her case. Along for the ride is the closest thing to a Watson Poirot will ever have (Poirot’s ridiculous ego would never allow him to fully share cases and credit the way Sherlock does with Watson), Hastings. Having read a few mysteries like this one, where Poirot has a sort-of assistant on the case, I think I prefer them over the solo Poirot investigations. Agatha Christie sometimes falls into the bad mystery novel trap of having her detective withhold information from other characters (and, therefore, the reader) in order to draw out the suspense for a few more chapters. Poirot doesn’t like to explain his thought process during an investigation, preferring to do the usual theatrical Accusations in the Parlor routine at the end of the book, so it’s helpful that he has Hastings following him around and occasionally asking clarifying questions about his process. I like mystery stories where the reader can feel like they’re solving the case alongside the detective, and even though Poirot does save some big bombshells for the final reveal, there’s at least a little transparency here.

That being said, the mystery definitely isn’t as satisfying as some of Christie’s greatest hits. There’s a subplot involving an Australian couple renting a house on Nick’s land, and it honestly felt more like padding than anything else. (Also Christie does a very clumsy and very un-Christie-like thing early in the novel where she has Poirot remark that, hmm, that couple sure seems suspicious. So then I was suspicious of them for the rest of the book, and it turned out that [spoilers removed]).

Also there’s a cocaine subplot, because no story of rich bored Bright Young Things would be complete without some cocaine floating around. The subplot doesn’t amount to much, which was frustrating for me � like, jeez Agatha, if you’re gonna do a cocaine smuggling subplot, do a cocaine smuggling subplot. Go big or go home.

Basically, everything in this book was half-assed. There’s cocaine, abusive husbands, con artists, sketchy servants, poisonings � and none of these plots really get the attention they deserve. The whole book, ultimately, felt very rushed, like Christie was in a hurry to just get to the end and cash her check. Also, Poirot strays just a little too far into Pompous Asshole territory in this one, and I did not care for that.

It’s been a while since I read a Hercule Poirot mystery (I re-read Murder on the Orient Express recently, but that was mainly to get the taste of that god-awful Kenneth Brannaugh version out of my memory), and I knew, going into this, that I’d always preferred Poirot over Miss Marple. But, having finished Peril at End House, I’m having a hard time remembering why. Poirot is pretty downright insufferable in this one, and also shows an unpleasantly cruel streak that I don’t remember seeing before.

Hastings mentions to another character at one point that actually, Poirot has had plenty of failed case, including one involving a box of chocolates, and he tells the other character that Poirot has told him that if his ego ever gets too big, all Hastings has to do is say “chocolate box� and Poirot will remember to be humble. So honestly, it’s a wonder that Hastings isn’t shouting CHOCOLATE BOX at Poirot every other page, because his ego is out of control in this one. Like, at one point he decides that Nick, who has survived multiple attempts on her life, is perfectly safe thanks to the precautions that Poirot has set up, and he and Hastings are free to hop off to London for a few days to take a break. So of course while they’re gone, someone tries to poison Nick, and Poirot is like, “Oh la la, Hastings, why did I leave? Why did I leave?� like someone else convinced him to do it. Chocolate box, Hercule.

And in possibly his worst moment in any Christie book I’ve read so far, Poirot allows the culprit [spoilers removed]

All I could think about was the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, when the criminal that Peter Wimsey caught is scheduled to be hanged. The culprit did it, stood trial, and is being appropriately punished, but Peter is still so upset by the role he played in sending this person to their death that he has to be consoled by his wife. I loved that scene, because it brought up an element of detective fiction that often gets glossed over � at the end of the day, a detective’s job is to send someone to jail, and sometimes to their execution. This takes an emotional toll on the detective, as it should.

Anyway, Hercule is like the polar opposite of that � solving mysteries has no human element whatsoever to him; they’re purely logic puzzles that he does first and foremost for his own amusement. And I don’t find that nearly as charming as I used to.
]]> Today Will Be Different 28449270
Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action, life happens.

Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company. It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office -- but not Eleanor -- that he's on vacation. Just when it seems like things can't go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret.

Today Will Be Different is a hilarious, heart-filled story about reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves to truly begin living.]]> 259 Maria Semple 0316467065 Madeline 2 audiobook
Today Will be Different is, I think, an improvement on Maria Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. We have to same type of lead character � a Portland housewife with some form of anxiety/manic-depressive/bipolar disorder who is doing the best she can in strange and stressful circumstances. But where Bernadette started to tear at the seams thanks to its unsustainable format of “everything in the book is a letter or email written by one of the characters�, Today Will Be Different has a much more straightforward narration � in this one, we’re simply following the title character through one very strange, very stressful day in her life.

The action starts when Eleanor visits her husband’s office and learns two things: first, her husband has not been to work in over a week; and the office staff thinks that she’s already aware of this. From then on, Eleanor has one mission: find her husband, and find out what he’s been doing while she assumed he was at work. Along the way she gets into what I’ll refer to as sidequests, involving her son, their dog, Eleanor’s poetry teacher, and a former friend.

The action clips along at a quick and engaging pace, and Eleanor’s particular brand of manic, forced cheeriness despite an impending breakdown makes her a delightful and very relatable narrator. (Bonus points to the audiobook reader, who delivers Eleanor’s narration in a cadence that reminded me a lot of Maria Bamford’s standup. Less awesome is the way she voices Eleanor’s son, giving the kid an adnoid-stuffed whine of a voice that made me wonder why Eleanor doesn’t just scream at him to shut up every time he bleats out another petulant MOOOOOOOMMMMMM.)

The only reason this book loses points is, I freely admit, a stupid and petty reason. But I maintain that it’s justified. Semi spoilers (in that they describe what happens at the end of the book but won’t ruin the central mystery of the story) to follow:

[spoilers removed]

Anyway, my point is that the entire ending of the book was completely ruined by what I thought was an accidentally dropped plot point, and it was such a distraction that I can’t really tell you exactly what happens at the end of Today Will Be Different. Four stars for the main story, one star for that terribly-executed conclusion.
]]> 3.14 2016 Today Will Be Different
author: Maria Semple
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2017/11/01
date added: 2018/10/31
shelves: audiobook
review:
“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game with Timby. I’ll initiate sex with Joe. Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. Today I won’t swear. I won’t talk about money. Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.�

Today Will be Different is, I think, an improvement on Maria Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. We have to same type of lead character � a Portland housewife with some form of anxiety/manic-depressive/bipolar disorder who is doing the best she can in strange and stressful circumstances. But where Bernadette started to tear at the seams thanks to its unsustainable format of “everything in the book is a letter or email written by one of the characters�, Today Will Be Different has a much more straightforward narration � in this one, we’re simply following the title character through one very strange, very stressful day in her life.

The action starts when Eleanor visits her husband’s office and learns two things: first, her husband has not been to work in over a week; and the office staff thinks that she’s already aware of this. From then on, Eleanor has one mission: find her husband, and find out what he’s been doing while she assumed he was at work. Along the way she gets into what I’ll refer to as sidequests, involving her son, their dog, Eleanor’s poetry teacher, and a former friend.

The action clips along at a quick and engaging pace, and Eleanor’s particular brand of manic, forced cheeriness despite an impending breakdown makes her a delightful and very relatable narrator. (Bonus points to the audiobook reader, who delivers Eleanor’s narration in a cadence that reminded me a lot of Maria Bamford’s standup. Less awesome is the way she voices Eleanor’s son, giving the kid an adnoid-stuffed whine of a voice that made me wonder why Eleanor doesn’t just scream at him to shut up every time he bleats out another petulant MOOOOOOOMMMMMM.)

The only reason this book loses points is, I freely admit, a stupid and petty reason. But I maintain that it’s justified. Semi spoilers (in that they describe what happens at the end of the book but won’t ruin the central mystery of the story) to follow:

[spoilers removed]

Anyway, my point is that the entire ending of the book was completely ruined by what I thought was an accidentally dropped plot point, and it was such a distraction that I can’t really tell you exactly what happens at the end of Today Will Be Different. Four stars for the main story, one star for that terribly-executed conclusion.

]]> <![CDATA[Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life]]> 773858
Emmy and Grammy Award winner, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Martin has always been a writer. His memoir of his years in stand-up is candid, spectacularly amusing, and beautifully written.

At age ten Martin started his career at Disneyland, selling guidebooks in the newly opened theme park. In the decade that followed, he worked in the Disney magic shop and the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott's Berry Farm, performing his first magic/comedy act a dozen times a week. The story of these years, during which he practiced and honed his craft, is moving and revelatory. The dedication to excellence and innovation is formed at an astonishingly early age and never wavers or wanes.

Martin illuminates the sacrifice, discipline, and originality that made him an icon and informs his work to this day. To be this good, to perform so frequently, was isolating and lonely. It took Martin decades to reconnect with his parents and sister, and he tells that story with great tenderness. Martin also paints a portrait of his times-the era of free love and protests against the war in Vietnam, the heady irreverence of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late sixties, and the transformative new voice of Saturday Night Live in the seventies.

Throughout the text, Martin has placed photographs, many never seen before. Born Standing Up is a superb testament to the sheer tenacity, focus, and daring of one of the greatest and most iconoclastic comedians of all time.]]> 207 Steve Martin 1416553649 Madeline 4 audiobook, memoir Yes Please, I wrote about how the book is not really about comedy, in that Poehler never spent much time getting into the nitty-gritty of how she plans her characters, and all the work that goes into each one. This seems to be a common theme in the comedy memoirs I’ve read so far � everyone seems reluctant to discuss the work that goes into being funny, or to even acknowledge that being funny takes effort. It’s fine for comedians to spend hefty amounts of space in their memoirs talking about how hard they worked to become successful � all the years of working crappy clubs, having no money, and otherwise working long, thankless hours to eventually get where they are � but when it comes to discussing how they planned and reworked a set, there seems to be a reluctance to get into too much technical detail. Being a professional comedian is kind of like being a professional magician: it’s considered against the rules to show how the tricks are really done.

And maybe another reason this isn’t done � talking about the work that goes into being funny is, inherently, not funny at all. So it’s actually very refreshing to read Born Standing Up, a deeply impersonal, deeply straight-faced comedy memoir that shows us exactly how much work and conscious effort went into creating the persona of “Steve Martin, comedian.� It’s like no other memoir I’ve ever read.

At first, Martin adheres to the established memoir formula by taking us through his childhood. But the purpose of this is mainly to show how he got an early start as a performer by working as a salesman at Disney World, and also that he wasn’t originally interested in comedy and wanted instead to be a magician. He gives us some stories of an unhappy home life, and then reveals his real reasons for briefly getting so personal: after telling a story of how his father would fly into unexpected, violent rages, Martin writes (quote will not be exact, as I listened to this as an audiobook), “I’ve heard it said that a chaotic childhood prepares one for a life in comedy. I tell you this story about my father so you know that I am very qualified to be a comedian.�

Read aloud by Martin in his soft-spoken, matter-of-face voice, the line is a verbal gut-punch.

That’s about as close as we get to learning anything about Martin’s personal life until the very end, when he talks about his mother’s death. Other than that, Born Standing Up is entirely about the work.

Everything that Martin writes about his standup career was completely new to me, since I only know him from his movies (pretty sure my first exposure to Steve Martin was when he played in The Muppet Movie, and even back then I could recognize something genius about him). So it was fascinating to me to read about the progression from magician to comedian � back when Martin was starting out, there weren’t places solely for performing comedy acts, so he was doing his magic act alongside comedians and musicians, allowing him to incorporate comedy into his routine, and eventually become a comedian who did magic, instead of the other way around. And he thoroughly details how we went about developing his standup persona, eventually settling on playing a guy who is totally unfunny but is convinced that he’s killing it, and how he would push to see how long he could keep a bit going until the audience was laughing but didn’t even know what was funny.

It’s very interesting (and almost intimate) how Martin isn’t afraid to show how he thoughtfully and deliberately worked at his comedy, rather than letting us believe that being funny is effortless. And good for him, because that’s a dangerous myth that’s in dire need of dispelling. (I have a friend who occasionally does open-mic nights at comedy clubs, and having seen a few of those shows, let me tell you: the number of mediocre white boys who think they can get a little tipsy and then go up onstage and just, like, wing it, is too damn many.) One of the best details is when he tells us how he reworked his routine of observational comedy to make himself the focus of the stories � instead of “a guy walks into a bar� it became “I walked into a bar.� Martin says he did this because “I didn’t want audiences to think other people were crazy. I wanted them to think I was crazy.�

It’s a short book � Martin admits that he’s a very private person, so of course he’s not going to bare everything to us. But the little bit of Martin’s psyche that he’s allowed us to look at is fascinating and honest, and reveals Steve Martin as a deeply thoughtful, hardworking, and brilliant artist. (Shopgirl still sucks, but nobody’s perfect.)
]]> 3.87 2007 Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
author: Steve Martin
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2018/10/01
date added: 2018/10/23
shelves: audiobook, memoir
review:
Is it an endorsement to say that this is the most unfunny comedy memoir I’ve ever read? In my (otherwise glowing) review for Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, I wrote about how the book is not really about comedy, in that Poehler never spent much time getting into the nitty-gritty of how she plans her characters, and all the work that goes into each one. This seems to be a common theme in the comedy memoirs I’ve read so far � everyone seems reluctant to discuss the work that goes into being funny, or to even acknowledge that being funny takes effort. It’s fine for comedians to spend hefty amounts of space in their memoirs talking about how hard they worked to become successful � all the years of working crappy clubs, having no money, and otherwise working long, thankless hours to eventually get where they are � but when it comes to discussing how they planned and reworked a set, there seems to be a reluctance to get into too much technical detail. Being a professional comedian is kind of like being a professional magician: it’s considered against the rules to show how the tricks are really done.

And maybe another reason this isn’t done � talking about the work that goes into being funny is, inherently, not funny at all. So it’s actually very refreshing to read Born Standing Up, a deeply impersonal, deeply straight-faced comedy memoir that shows us exactly how much work and conscious effort went into creating the persona of “Steve Martin, comedian.� It’s like no other memoir I’ve ever read.

At first, Martin adheres to the established memoir formula by taking us through his childhood. But the purpose of this is mainly to show how he got an early start as a performer by working as a salesman at Disney World, and also that he wasn’t originally interested in comedy and wanted instead to be a magician. He gives us some stories of an unhappy home life, and then reveals his real reasons for briefly getting so personal: after telling a story of how his father would fly into unexpected, violent rages, Martin writes (quote will not be exact, as I listened to this as an audiobook), “I’ve heard it said that a chaotic childhood prepares one for a life in comedy. I tell you this story about my father so you know that I am very qualified to be a comedian.�

Read aloud by Martin in his soft-spoken, matter-of-face voice, the line is a verbal gut-punch.

That’s about as close as we get to learning anything about Martin’s personal life until the very end, when he talks about his mother’s death. Other than that, Born Standing Up is entirely about the work.

Everything that Martin writes about his standup career was completely new to me, since I only know him from his movies (pretty sure my first exposure to Steve Martin was when he played in The Muppet Movie, and even back then I could recognize something genius about him). So it was fascinating to me to read about the progression from magician to comedian � back when Martin was starting out, there weren’t places solely for performing comedy acts, so he was doing his magic act alongside comedians and musicians, allowing him to incorporate comedy into his routine, and eventually become a comedian who did magic, instead of the other way around. And he thoroughly details how we went about developing his standup persona, eventually settling on playing a guy who is totally unfunny but is convinced that he’s killing it, and how he would push to see how long he could keep a bit going until the audience was laughing but didn’t even know what was funny.

It’s very interesting (and almost intimate) how Martin isn’t afraid to show how he thoughtfully and deliberately worked at his comedy, rather than letting us believe that being funny is effortless. And good for him, because that’s a dangerous myth that’s in dire need of dispelling. (I have a friend who occasionally does open-mic nights at comedy clubs, and having seen a few of those shows, let me tell you: the number of mediocre white boys who think they can get a little tipsy and then go up onstage and just, like, wing it, is too damn many.) One of the best details is when he tells us how he reworked his routine of observational comedy to make himself the focus of the stories � instead of “a guy walks into a bar� it became “I walked into a bar.� Martin says he did this because “I didn’t want audiences to think other people were crazy. I wanted them to think I was crazy.�

It’s a short book � Martin admits that he’s a very private person, so of course he’s not going to bare everything to us. But the little bit of Martin’s psyche that he’s allowed us to look at is fascinating and honest, and reveals Steve Martin as a deeply thoughtful, hardworking, and brilliant artist. (Shopgirl still sucks, but nobody’s perfect.)

]]> Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1) 518848
With Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series, Garth Nix exploded onto the fantasy scene as a rising star, in a novel that takes readers to a world where the line between the living and the dead isn't always clear—and sometimes disappears altogether.]]> 491 Garth Nix 0064471837 Madeline 4
I’ve had a long-term project going for about five years now, where I try to hunt down and read all the YA adventure series that I was supposed to read when I was in middle school (instead, I spent those years re-reading the Prydain series, and also every single one of those Royal Diaries books � no regrets!). Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix, checks off another box on that list, although I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t even aware of these books until very recently. But I’m sure that they would have been right up thirteen-year-old Madeline’s alley � I can’t speak for the rest of the series, but Sabriel is sort of like a blend of Tamora Pierce and Lloyd Alexander, with a heavy dash of Goth elements. In short, a fun, coming-of-age adventure, featuring zombies!

The world of Sabriel reminded me a little of George RR Martin’s Westeros, because we have a country (here called Ancelstierre) that’s kept separate from the Old Kingdom � a land of magic and danger. Sabriel spent the first few years of her life in the Old Kingdom with her father, a necromancer known as “the Abhorsen�, but has lived in Ancelstierre for her entire adolescence. When Sabriel is eighteen, she receives a distress message from her father. He’s trapped somewhere in Death, and Sabriel has to use the skills she learned from him to travel back to the Old Kingdom and rescue him. Along for the ride are a cat that’s not a cat, and a man who was trapped as a wooden statue for two hundred years. Oh, and evil zombies who serve an undead demon are also tracking Sabriel.

As you can probably guess from the above description, there’s a lot of action and creepy elements in this book, as well as magic, sassy sidekicks, ghosts, and (my favorite) totally frank depictions of sexuality aimed at preteen audiences! (At one point, Sabriel considers all the implications of pursuing a sexual relationship with another character, and her mental list of Things to Deal With includes contraception! Hooray for you, Garth Nix!) Speaking of fantastic moments, I knew that Sabriel and I would get along as soon as Nix’s narration shared this tidbit with the readers: when Sabriel got her first period, she used her necromancer abilities to summon her mother’s ghost for advice. Which, frankly, why wouldn’t you?

Even though this is part of a multiple-book series, Sabriel doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, and it can easily be read as a standalone novel. However, if you’re like me, you’re going to want to continue with the series, if only to find out how Sabriel continues to explore her role as a necromancer, and what other adventures Nix has planned for his heroine.

(one more note: I listened to the audiobook version of this novel, which had two distinct advantages: first, I learned that Sabriel does not rhyme with “Gabriel�, like I assumed, but is pronounced “Sah-briel.� And second, the audiobook I found is narrated by Tim Curry. He’s not the best candidate for voicing an eighteen-year-old girl’s dialogue, but I didn’t even mind because his villain voices are on point. Voice like buttah, I’m telling you.
]]> 4.17 1995 Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1)
author: Garth Nix
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2018/06/01
date added: 2018/06/16
shelves: audiobook, fantasy, kids-and-young-adult
review:
"Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?"

I’ve had a long-term project going for about five years now, where I try to hunt down and read all the YA adventure series that I was supposed to read when I was in middle school (instead, I spent those years re-reading the Prydain series, and also every single one of those Royal Diaries books � no regrets!). Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix, checks off another box on that list, although I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t even aware of these books until very recently. But I’m sure that they would have been right up thirteen-year-old Madeline’s alley � I can’t speak for the rest of the series, but Sabriel is sort of like a blend of Tamora Pierce and Lloyd Alexander, with a heavy dash of Goth elements. In short, a fun, coming-of-age adventure, featuring zombies!

The world of Sabriel reminded me a little of George RR Martin’s Westeros, because we have a country (here called Ancelstierre) that’s kept separate from the Old Kingdom � a land of magic and danger. Sabriel spent the first few years of her life in the Old Kingdom with her father, a necromancer known as “the Abhorsen�, but has lived in Ancelstierre for her entire adolescence. When Sabriel is eighteen, she receives a distress message from her father. He’s trapped somewhere in Death, and Sabriel has to use the skills she learned from him to travel back to the Old Kingdom and rescue him. Along for the ride are a cat that’s not a cat, and a man who was trapped as a wooden statue for two hundred years. Oh, and evil zombies who serve an undead demon are also tracking Sabriel.

As you can probably guess from the above description, there’s a lot of action and creepy elements in this book, as well as magic, sassy sidekicks, ghosts, and (my favorite) totally frank depictions of sexuality aimed at preteen audiences! (At one point, Sabriel considers all the implications of pursuing a sexual relationship with another character, and her mental list of Things to Deal With includes contraception! Hooray for you, Garth Nix!) Speaking of fantastic moments, I knew that Sabriel and I would get along as soon as Nix’s narration shared this tidbit with the readers: when Sabriel got her first period, she used her necromancer abilities to summon her mother’s ghost for advice. Which, frankly, why wouldn’t you?

Even though this is part of a multiple-book series, Sabriel doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, and it can easily be read as a standalone novel. However, if you’re like me, you’re going to want to continue with the series, if only to find out how Sabriel continues to explore her role as a necromancer, and what other adventures Nix has planned for his heroine.

(one more note: I listened to the audiobook version of this novel, which had two distinct advantages: first, I learned that Sabriel does not rhyme with “Gabriel�, like I assumed, but is pronounced “Sah-briel.� And second, the audiobook I found is narrated by Tim Curry. He’s not the best candidate for voicing an eighteen-year-old girl’s dialogue, but I didn’t even mind because his villain voices are on point. Voice like buttah, I’m telling you.

]]> <![CDATA[Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune]]> 17704903 �winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?

Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.

Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else.

The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic.

Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.

The No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Best nonfiction books of the year at ŷ, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble. One of the New York Times critic Janet Maslin's 10 favorite books of 2013.
]]> 456 Bill Dedman 0345534522 Madeline 3 audiobook, history-nonfiction Empty Mansions is the kind of journalistic-style nonfiction book that started in the best way: a writer starts with a simple question, and it leads them down a rabbit hole of sordid family history, scandal, and decades of buried secrets. In this case, the writer is Bill Dedman, and the question is this: what was the story behind a California mansion, never occupied, that was put up for sale in 2009. Who built the house, why did they never live there, and why was it being sold now?

These questions eventually led Dedman to the legal owner of the house, a 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark who, despite being worth millions, secluded herself in a hospital room and was so reclusive that she hadn't been photographed in decades. Dedman's book traces the history of Huguette and her family, who were once counted among the Rockefellers and Astors, and investigated how such a powerful and wealthy dynasty could have ended with one woman in a tiny hospital room.

The most interesting aspect of Empty Mansions was the history of the Clark family and their glory days, with Huguette and her family going on lavish vacations (and narrowly missing traveling on the Titanic), hanging out with famous historical figures, and building lavish homes that they barely lived in. Dedman traces the family's rise and fall, as the family starts to diminish and their fortunes can't keep up with the modern era. He investigates Huguette's estate and the people responsible for it, and essentially tries to figure out how the Clark family, and Huguette herself, managed to disappear from history so thoroughly.

At its best, Empty Mansions is an intriguing inside look at one of the forgotten richest families in history. But once the glory days are over, we're left with a frankly depressing story of a lonely old woman sitting on a fortune she'll never use, waiting to die alone. And there's probably some undiagnosed mental health issues on top of that - Huguette's total disinterest in romantic relationships, insistence on being essentially hospitalized despite apparent good health, and her lifelong obsession with fairy tales and other childlike interests suggest, at the very least, some pretty serious arrested development. Dedman, to his credit, doesn't get bogged down in armchair diagnoses, and that's for the best - at the end of the day, you just sort of feel sorry for Huguette, and I have to give credit to the way Dedman investigates her and her life in a way that's still respectful.

If you can, try getting this as an audiobook. In addition to some recorded phone calls with Huguette's living relatives, Dedman also includes recordings of his conversations with Huguette, which are as fascinating as they are frustrating - Huguette is literally a woman out of time, seemingly trapped in the turn of the century, and listening to her describe her incredible life is quite the experience. But at the same time, girlfriend is over a hundred years old, so understanding what she's saying is...a struggle. But still, it's worth tracking down the audiobook just so you can listen to her talk about her life.]]> 3.76 2013 Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
author: Bill Dedman
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2017/09/01
date added: 2018/05/01
shelves: audiobook, history-nonfiction
review:
Empty Mansions is the kind of journalistic-style nonfiction book that started in the best way: a writer starts with a simple question, and it leads them down a rabbit hole of sordid family history, scandal, and decades of buried secrets. In this case, the writer is Bill Dedman, and the question is this: what was the story behind a California mansion, never occupied, that was put up for sale in 2009. Who built the house, why did they never live there, and why was it being sold now?

These questions eventually led Dedman to the legal owner of the house, a 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark who, despite being worth millions, secluded herself in a hospital room and was so reclusive that she hadn't been photographed in decades. Dedman's book traces the history of Huguette and her family, who were once counted among the Rockefellers and Astors, and investigated how such a powerful and wealthy dynasty could have ended with one woman in a tiny hospital room.

The most interesting aspect of Empty Mansions was the history of the Clark family and their glory days, with Huguette and her family going on lavish vacations (and narrowly missing traveling on the Titanic), hanging out with famous historical figures, and building lavish homes that they barely lived in. Dedman traces the family's rise and fall, as the family starts to diminish and their fortunes can't keep up with the modern era. He investigates Huguette's estate and the people responsible for it, and essentially tries to figure out how the Clark family, and Huguette herself, managed to disappear from history so thoroughly.

At its best, Empty Mansions is an intriguing inside look at one of the forgotten richest families in history. But once the glory days are over, we're left with a frankly depressing story of a lonely old woman sitting on a fortune she'll never use, waiting to die alone. And there's probably some undiagnosed mental health issues on top of that - Huguette's total disinterest in romantic relationships, insistence on being essentially hospitalized despite apparent good health, and her lifelong obsession with fairy tales and other childlike interests suggest, at the very least, some pretty serious arrested development. Dedman, to his credit, doesn't get bogged down in armchair diagnoses, and that's for the best - at the end of the day, you just sort of feel sorry for Huguette, and I have to give credit to the way Dedman investigates her and her life in a way that's still respectful.

If you can, try getting this as an audiobook. In addition to some recorded phone calls with Huguette's living relatives, Dedman also includes recordings of his conversations with Huguette, which are as fascinating as they are frustrating - Huguette is literally a woman out of time, seemingly trapped in the turn of the century, and listening to her describe her incredible life is quite the experience. But at the same time, girlfriend is over a hundred years old, so understanding what she's saying is...a struggle. But still, it's worth tracking down the audiobook just so you can listen to her talk about her life.
]]> <![CDATA[The English Girl (Gabriel Allon, #13)]]> 16248078
You have seven days, or the girl dies.

Enter Gabriel Allon—master assassin, art restorer and spy—who is no stranger to dangerous assignments or political intrigue. With the clock ticking, Gabriel embarks on a desperate attempt to bring Madeline home safely. His mission takes him from the criminal underworld of Marseilles to an isolated valley in the mountains of Provence to the stately if faded corridors of power in London—and, finally, to a pulse-pounding climax in Moscow, a city of violence and spies where there is a long list of men who wish Gabriel dead.

From the novel’s opening pages until the shocking ending when the true motives behind Madeline’s disappearance are revealed, The English Girl will hold readers spellbound. It is a timely reminder that, in today’s world, money often matters more than ideology. And it proves once again why Daniel Silva has been called his generation’s finest writer of suspense and foreign intrigue.]]> 482 Daniel Silva 0062073168 Madeline 2 audiobook The Heist), I decided to give him another chance for two reasons: first, The English Girl seems to be one of Silva's most acclaimed thrillers, so it had the best chance of being good; and because when I was browsing audiobooks on my phone, this one popped up.

I was immediately at a disadvantage when I started this book, because The Heist takes place after the events of The English Girl. Even though there weren't any serious spoilers for The English Girl, there are plenty of references to the case in The Heist, so right from the beginning I had a vague idea of where the plot was headed. But Silva still manages to throw in some twists that I didn't see coming, so if you're reading the Gabriel Allon books out of sequence, you can still enjoy this one.

The plot here was definitely more coherent than The Heist, which started out as a fun art caper and then turned into a dreary political thriller two-thirds of the way in. The English Girl, luckily, has enough of a plot for Silva to stay focused for the book's considerable page count. The story starts when Madeline Hart, a minor-level employee in the British government, is kidnapped while on vacation in Corsica. A ransom video is delivered to the Prime Minister: "Seven days, then the girl dies." A possible justification for Madeline's kidnapping soon becomes clear: she and the Prime Minister were having an affair. Desperate to keep the kidnapping, and the reasons behind it, out of the news, the British government recruits Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon to find Madeline and get her back. With the help of his Israeli team, a former British soldier turned assassin, and a Corsican mafia don, Allon has six days to find the missing English girl. And of course, finding her is only the beginning.

This was a fast-paced, well written thriller, with good characters and good twists. Overall, I liked it. I liked how Silva lets us enjoy the long, careful planning that goes into even the simplest operations, and it's a nice blend of exciting shoot-em-up action scenes and more subdued passages about the bureaucratic side of espionage. Also this book features more appearances from Allon's super cool wife, Chiara, who is probably my favorite character in the series. Because Chiara is also a spy, she and Gabriel get to talk about his work honestly, instead of doing the tiresome bit where the husband has to protect his sweet innocent wife from his dangerous work by never telling her the truth about anything. I do wish that Chiara had actually gotten to do something in this book - her job in The English Girl is mainly to act as a sounding board for Gabriel, and then cook dinner for everyone and have lots of sex with her husband. Also she really wants to have a baby, and has an eye-rolling line where she describes being on a flight with a crying baby and says that the mother was "the luckiest woman in the world." Ugh.

Another unfortunate thing I noticed in this book: Gabriel Allon is not as great as Silva thinks he is. Gabriel has a lot of conversations with the assassin Christopher Keller where Silva tries, desperately and repeatedly, to show the reader that Allon somehow has the moral high ground over Keller. Look, buddy - at the end of the day, they're both hired guns. It doesn't make much difference that one works for the Israeli government and one works for criminals. All cats are grey, etc.

(speaking of uncomfortable moments, Silva's politics are definitely showing in this book. First there are the subtle and frequent anti-Muslim lines that Silva has his characters recite, and then there's a bit at the end where Allon is trying to convince a defecting spy to come to Israel and work for him because "that's what we do in Israel. We give people a home." Cue me, yelling from the balcony: "Unless you're Palestinian!")

Also there's an oh-so-charming scene where Allon is searching a female criminal for weapons and uses the opportunity to grope her, and then makes a joke about it. Jesus, say what you will about James Bond, but at least he knows he's an amoral asshole. Allon's holier-than-thou attitude and characterization really started to grate on me by the end of this book.

But the most annoying aspect of the book is the title character. Madeline Hart is set up as this brilliant, ambitious, resourceful character (who is also smokin' hot, because we can't possibly be expected to care about the kidnapping of someone who is not young, thin, and beautiful), who has so much promise and potential that she's been tapped to be groomed as a future Prime Minister. And then, after that great introduction, Madeline gets kidnapped and disappears from the narrative. Characters spend a lot of time talking about Madeline; she herself has maybe two scenes where she gets actual dialogue.

(the rest of this review will discuss the ending of The English Girl, so click only if you're okay with major spoilers)

[spoilers removed]]]> 4.10 2013 The English Girl (Gabriel Allon, #13)
author: Daniel Silva
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2018/04/01
date added: 2018/04/28
shelves: audiobook
review:
Despite not really loving the previous Daniel Silva thriller I'd read (The Heist), I decided to give him another chance for two reasons: first, The English Girl seems to be one of Silva's most acclaimed thrillers, so it had the best chance of being good; and because when I was browsing audiobooks on my phone, this one popped up.

I was immediately at a disadvantage when I started this book, because The Heist takes place after the events of The English Girl. Even though there weren't any serious spoilers for The English Girl, there are plenty of references to the case in The Heist, so right from the beginning I had a vague idea of where the plot was headed. But Silva still manages to throw in some twists that I didn't see coming, so if you're reading the Gabriel Allon books out of sequence, you can still enjoy this one.

The plot here was definitely more coherent than The Heist, which started out as a fun art caper and then turned into a dreary political thriller two-thirds of the way in. The English Girl, luckily, has enough of a plot for Silva to stay focused for the book's considerable page count. The story starts when Madeline Hart, a minor-level employee in the British government, is kidnapped while on vacation in Corsica. A ransom video is delivered to the Prime Minister: "Seven days, then the girl dies." A possible justification for Madeline's kidnapping soon becomes clear: she and the Prime Minister were having an affair. Desperate to keep the kidnapping, and the reasons behind it, out of the news, the British government recruits Israeli intelligence agent Gabriel Allon to find Madeline and get her back. With the help of his Israeli team, a former British soldier turned assassin, and a Corsican mafia don, Allon has six days to find the missing English girl. And of course, finding her is only the beginning.

This was a fast-paced, well written thriller, with good characters and good twists. Overall, I liked it. I liked how Silva lets us enjoy the long, careful planning that goes into even the simplest operations, and it's a nice blend of exciting shoot-em-up action scenes and more subdued passages about the bureaucratic side of espionage. Also this book features more appearances from Allon's super cool wife, Chiara, who is probably my favorite character in the series. Because Chiara is also a spy, she and Gabriel get to talk about his work honestly, instead of doing the tiresome bit where the husband has to protect his sweet innocent wife from his dangerous work by never telling her the truth about anything. I do wish that Chiara had actually gotten to do something in this book - her job in The English Girl is mainly to act as a sounding board for Gabriel, and then cook dinner for everyone and have lots of sex with her husband. Also she really wants to have a baby, and has an eye-rolling line where she describes being on a flight with a crying baby and says that the mother was "the luckiest woman in the world." Ugh.

Another unfortunate thing I noticed in this book: Gabriel Allon is not as great as Silva thinks he is. Gabriel has a lot of conversations with the assassin Christopher Keller where Silva tries, desperately and repeatedly, to show the reader that Allon somehow has the moral high ground over Keller. Look, buddy - at the end of the day, they're both hired guns. It doesn't make much difference that one works for the Israeli government and one works for criminals. All cats are grey, etc.

(speaking of uncomfortable moments, Silva's politics are definitely showing in this book. First there are the subtle and frequent anti-Muslim lines that Silva has his characters recite, and then there's a bit at the end where Allon is trying to convince a defecting spy to come to Israel and work for him because "that's what we do in Israel. We give people a home." Cue me, yelling from the balcony: "Unless you're Palestinian!")

Also there's an oh-so-charming scene where Allon is searching a female criminal for weapons and uses the opportunity to grope her, and then makes a joke about it. Jesus, say what you will about James Bond, but at least he knows he's an amoral asshole. Allon's holier-than-thou attitude and characterization really started to grate on me by the end of this book.

But the most annoying aspect of the book is the title character. Madeline Hart is set up as this brilliant, ambitious, resourceful character (who is also smokin' hot, because we can't possibly be expected to care about the kidnapping of someone who is not young, thin, and beautiful), who has so much promise and potential that she's been tapped to be groomed as a future Prime Minister. And then, after that great introduction, Madeline gets kidnapped and disappears from the narrative. Characters spend a lot of time talking about Madeline; she herself has maybe two scenes where she gets actual dialogue.

(the rest of this review will discuss the ending of The English Girl, so click only if you're okay with major spoilers)

[spoilers removed]
]]> Into the Water 33151805 The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train returns with Into the Water, her addictive new novel of psychological suspense.

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.]]> 386 Paula Hawkins 0735211205 Madeline 2 audiobook everything about the ending. So unless you've already read the book or have no intention of ever reading it, continue at your own risk)

Julia "Jules" Abbott is called back to her childhood town of Beckford, England, after receiving disturbing news: her older sister Nell is dead, from an apparent suicide, and Julia is now the legal guardian of Nel's teenage daughter, Lena. But there are questions surrounding Nell's death, beginning with the place where she apparently killed herself. Nell died in a place known as the Drowning Pool, a section of the river where, historically, women have drowned themselves or been drowned - including Lena's best friend, who killed herself a few months before Nell's death. Nell was in the process of writing a book about the Drowning Pool, and the stories of the women who died there, and as Julia and the police investigate Nell's death, they begin to suspect that all of these deaths are connected, and that Nell had uncovered secrets dangerous enough to make Julia question if her death was really a suicide at all.

My first mistake was listening to this as an audiobook, instead of getting a physical copy from the library. There are a lot of characters who narrate different chapters (to the point where I was two-thirds into the novel and still had trouble keeping everyone straight) and also the timeline skips around - we have the current-day chapters, the flashbacks to Julia's childhood, and the sections from Nel's book on the Drowning Pool. Listening to the novel, instead of reading it, meant that I couldn't flip back to remind myself what time period we were in, or remember how a certain narrator fit into the main plot.

And Paula Hawkins apparently decided that she needed to complicate things even more, because not only do characters get chapters written from their personal perspectives, but some chapters are in first person, and some are in third person. Julia's chapters are written as if she's addressing Nell directly, always calling her "you." I kind of get why Hawkins does this - Julia, we realize pretty quickly, has some serious Issues to work out, and other characters often notice her talking to herself, so I can see why Hawkins would want to make it seem like all of Julia's chapters are conversations that she's having with her dead sister. But it was still jarring and obnoxious. Also some of Julia's chapters are titled "Julia" while other are titled "Jules" and if anyone can explain the logic for this choice, please explain it to me because it was confounding.

Speaking of confounding, many of the characters are infuriatingly inconsistent, especially Julia and her niece, Lena. In addition to her confusingly-written chapters, Julia also does that thing that only characters in badly-written thrillers do, where she gets a desperate voicemail from her sister telling her to call her back because she has something really important to tell her (why not just tell her on the voicemail, you might be asking? shhhhhh), and Julia just rolls her eyes and is like, ugh my sister is so dramatic, and never calls her back. And then next thing you know, Nell is dead and Julia can't figure out why the cops are so annoyed with her. Julia is especially frustrating because she acts like she's in one novel, and all the other characters are in another. At the end, when Lena is missing and Julia is trying to find her, she goes to see Lena's father (who, in a disappointing lack of twist, turns out to just be Nell's ex-boyfriend. My money was on Mr. Henderson, for the record). This is a good instinct, but once Julia establishes that Lena's not there, she gets sidetracked and decides that now, in the middle of her search for her missing teenage ward, is a good time to resolve her own trauma and confront her childhood rapist. And then she goes home and walks into the river and has to be rescued by emergency services, and by the way, Lena is still missing.

And then when Lena gets home safely, Julia looks at this teenage girl, who has gone through a) the suicide of her best friend b) the death/possible murder of her mother and c) a kidnapping by a child molester and possible murderer, all in a matter of months, and Julia decides that this is a great time to sit Lena down and say, hey, want to hear the story of how your mom's boyfriend raped me when I was twelve, and I lived my entire life hating your mom because I thought she knew about it? Julia. Jesus. Read the room. She even admits that this is just for her benefit, and that "I couldn't tell you [Nell], so I told her." No one else's trauma matters except Julia's.

Lena is significantly less frustrating, but she basically functions as a misdirection machine: first she insists that her mother jumped, and then later is convinced that she was murdered. She protects the identity of the adult man who had sex with her friend, even though she hated him and wanted to see him punished, because she had promised her friend to keep the secret. Fine, whatever, just as long as it keeps the plot going for a few more chapters, right Hawkins?

And then there are the multiple plot points that get introduced and then dropped without resolution, like the diet pills and Katie's mother's weird alibi and the missing camera card and that weird incest-y vibe between Helen and Patrick, and they read less like red herrings and more like plots that Hawkins got bored with and abandoned. And, most frustrating of all, the fact that we never find out, definitively, what happened to Mr. Henderson was a weird choice, to say the least. We have chapters where we're in Lena's head - there's no reason for her to keep that information from the readers unless Hawkins was planning some kind of payoff at the end, which she obviously wasn't. Maybe Hawkins figured that the readers were smart enough to put the pieces together themselves, but that doesn't exactly work. This novel, and also The Girl on the Train, spend a significant amount of time teaching the reader that nothing should be taken for granted, whether it be the accuracy of a character's memories or the meaning behind a conversation. So for Hawkins to just leave that thread dangling and let us make assumptions about what happened without confirming it seemed sloppy and lazy, and not what I expected from her.

*breathes*

Man, that turned into way more of a rant than I intended. But apparently I was way more frustrated with this book than I realized. Anyway, long story short: frustrating, with inconsistent characterization and sloppy plotting. Give it a pass - there are better, juicier thrillers out there.

(also, I figured out that Sean did it as soon as I read the scene with him getting angry at Erin in the car, so the last few chapters were robbed of any kind of tension, and the ending line was more like a relief than a twist, because finally Hawkins came out and said it)]]> 3.59 2017 Into the Water
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2018/04/01
date added: 2018/04/13
shelves: audiobook
review:
(a quick warning: I tried to write a spoiler-free review, I really did. But I can't talk about all the stuff I want to cover without giving away the ending, so if you clicked this review thinking that "well, maybe the spoilers won't be too extensive," be warned that I am going to spoil basically everything about the ending. So unless you've already read the book or have no intention of ever reading it, continue at your own risk)

Julia "Jules" Abbott is called back to her childhood town of Beckford, England, after receiving disturbing news: her older sister Nell is dead, from an apparent suicide, and Julia is now the legal guardian of Nel's teenage daughter, Lena. But there are questions surrounding Nell's death, beginning with the place where she apparently killed herself. Nell died in a place known as the Drowning Pool, a section of the river where, historically, women have drowned themselves or been drowned - including Lena's best friend, who killed herself a few months before Nell's death. Nell was in the process of writing a book about the Drowning Pool, and the stories of the women who died there, and as Julia and the police investigate Nell's death, they begin to suspect that all of these deaths are connected, and that Nell had uncovered secrets dangerous enough to make Julia question if her death was really a suicide at all.

My first mistake was listening to this as an audiobook, instead of getting a physical copy from the library. There are a lot of characters who narrate different chapters (to the point where I was two-thirds into the novel and still had trouble keeping everyone straight) and also the timeline skips around - we have the current-day chapters, the flashbacks to Julia's childhood, and the sections from Nel's book on the Drowning Pool. Listening to the novel, instead of reading it, meant that I couldn't flip back to remind myself what time period we were in, or remember how a certain narrator fit into the main plot.

And Paula Hawkins apparently decided that she needed to complicate things even more, because not only do characters get chapters written from their personal perspectives, but some chapters are in first person, and some are in third person. Julia's chapters are written as if she's addressing Nell directly, always calling her "you." I kind of get why Hawkins does this - Julia, we realize pretty quickly, has some serious Issues to work out, and other characters often notice her talking to herself, so I can see why Hawkins would want to make it seem like all of Julia's chapters are conversations that she's having with her dead sister. But it was still jarring and obnoxious. Also some of Julia's chapters are titled "Julia" while other are titled "Jules" and if anyone can explain the logic for this choice, please explain it to me because it was confounding.

Speaking of confounding, many of the characters are infuriatingly inconsistent, especially Julia and her niece, Lena. In addition to her confusingly-written chapters, Julia also does that thing that only characters in badly-written thrillers do, where she gets a desperate voicemail from her sister telling her to call her back because she has something really important to tell her (why not just tell her on the voicemail, you might be asking? shhhhhh), and Julia just rolls her eyes and is like, ugh my sister is so dramatic, and never calls her back. And then next thing you know, Nell is dead and Julia can't figure out why the cops are so annoyed with her. Julia is especially frustrating because she acts like she's in one novel, and all the other characters are in another. At the end, when Lena is missing and Julia is trying to find her, she goes to see Lena's father (who, in a disappointing lack of twist, turns out to just be Nell's ex-boyfriend. My money was on Mr. Henderson, for the record). This is a good instinct, but once Julia establishes that Lena's not there, she gets sidetracked and decides that now, in the middle of her search for her missing teenage ward, is a good time to resolve her own trauma and confront her childhood rapist. And then she goes home and walks into the river and has to be rescued by emergency services, and by the way, Lena is still missing.

And then when Lena gets home safely, Julia looks at this teenage girl, who has gone through a) the suicide of her best friend b) the death/possible murder of her mother and c) a kidnapping by a child molester and possible murderer, all in a matter of months, and Julia decides that this is a great time to sit Lena down and say, hey, want to hear the story of how your mom's boyfriend raped me when I was twelve, and I lived my entire life hating your mom because I thought she knew about it? Julia. Jesus. Read the room. She even admits that this is just for her benefit, and that "I couldn't tell you [Nell], so I told her." No one else's trauma matters except Julia's.

Lena is significantly less frustrating, but she basically functions as a misdirection machine: first she insists that her mother jumped, and then later is convinced that she was murdered. She protects the identity of the adult man who had sex with her friend, even though she hated him and wanted to see him punished, because she had promised her friend to keep the secret. Fine, whatever, just as long as it keeps the plot going for a few more chapters, right Hawkins?

And then there are the multiple plot points that get introduced and then dropped without resolution, like the diet pills and Katie's mother's weird alibi and the missing camera card and that weird incest-y vibe between Helen and Patrick, and they read less like red herrings and more like plots that Hawkins got bored with and abandoned. And, most frustrating of all, the fact that we never find out, definitively, what happened to Mr. Henderson was a weird choice, to say the least. We have chapters where we're in Lena's head - there's no reason for her to keep that information from the readers unless Hawkins was planning some kind of payoff at the end, which she obviously wasn't. Maybe Hawkins figured that the readers were smart enough to put the pieces together themselves, but that doesn't exactly work. This novel, and also The Girl on the Train, spend a significant amount of time teaching the reader that nothing should be taken for granted, whether it be the accuracy of a character's memories or the meaning behind a conversation. So for Hawkins to just leave that thread dangling and let us make assumptions about what happened without confirming it seemed sloppy and lazy, and not what I expected from her.

*breathes*

Man, that turned into way more of a rant than I intended. But apparently I was way more frustrated with this book than I realized. Anyway, long story short: frustrating, with inconsistent characterization and sloppy plotting. Give it a pass - there are better, juicier thrillers out there.

(also, I figured out that Sean did it as soon as I read the scene with him getting angry at Erin in the car, so the last few chapters were robbed of any kind of tension, and the ending line was more like a relief than a twist, because finally Hawkins came out and said it)
]]> The Jewels of Paradise 13591693
Caterina Pellegrini is a native Venetian, and like so many of them, she’s had to leave home to pursue her career. With a doctorate in baroque opera from Vienna, she lands in Manchester, England. Manchester, however, is no Venice. When Caterina gets word of a position back home, she jumps at the opportunity.

The job is an unusual one. After nearly three centuries, two locked trunks, believed to contain the papers of a baroque composer have been discovered. Deeply-connected in religious and political circles, the composer died childless; now two Venetians, descendants of his cousins, each claim inheritance. Caterina’s job is to examine any enclosed papers to discover the “testamentary disposition� of the composer. But when her research takes her in unexpected directions she begins to wonder just what secrets these trunks may hold. From a masterful writer, The Jewels of Paradise is a superb novel, a gripping tale of intrigue, music, history and greed.
]]> 244 Donna Leon 0802120644 Madeline 2 audiobook, detective-fiction
The sad truth is that I just don't like Donna Leon's books. It sucks to have to admit this, because I've read so many of her Guido Brunetti mystery series, plus one nonfiction book, and it feels like I wasted all of that time. In a way, I went into The Jewels of Paradise thinking that this would be the final, deciding factor that either convinced me to stick with Leon's books, or give them up as a lost cause. I thought that, because this is a standalone novel and not part of her detective series, maybe the things that bothered me about those books wouldn't be present here, and Leon would be able to branch out into something new. Sadly, this was not the case.

As with all Leon mysteries, it's a good setup: Caterina Pellegrini is musicologist specializing in Baroque opera, and is called back to her native Venice for a research job. It's an unusual assignment, to say the least - two men have discovered a pair of trunks, left behind by a shared ancestor, that have not been opened for centuries. The ancestor died without children, and the trunks are full of his personal papers, written in multiple languages. Caterina has two jobs: go through the documents and figure out if any of them are valuable (the ancestor, we learn, was the Baroque composer Antonio Stefani), and read his personal papers to see if Stefani ever expressed a preference for either of the men's ancestors - they will use this information to decide who gets the items in the trunks.

The books is sort of set up as a historical mystery, because Caterina finds out that the composer was involved in some murder scandal when he was working at the royal court in Germany, but the mystery itself gets figured out pretty quickly and with very little fanfare, so it ends up being kind of a nonstarter. Leon also tries to create some tension by having a mysterious man follow Caterina around for a bit, and it's such a pointless, stupid subplot because we eventually find out that [spoilers removed]

Basically, this is an entire book of teased intrigue that Leon either can't be bothered to develop fully, or just drops entirely. The men who hired Caterina have a lawyer representing him, and Leon teases us with the possibility of a romance, and then apparently got bored of that. We find out that the lawyer [spoilers removed]

There's also an extended subplot about Caterina's sister Christina, who is a nun and helps Caterina out with her research. She's also considering leaving the church, so valuable story space is wasted exploring that non-angle. She and Caterina communicate through email, and they also have a supremely irritating habit of calling each other cutesy nicknames - "Tina-Lina" and "Kitty-Cati." The audiobook reader's simpering delivery of this robbed the nicknames of any chance of being charming, and it just made me grate my teeth every time I heard it.

But mostly, I was irritated with this book because I thought of a great joke about it early on, and it distracted me for the rest of the book. Okay, so the composer was also heavily involved with the Church, and Caterina realizes early on that he was actually a castrato. There's a reference in one of his papers to his having received "the jewels of paradise," which is why everyone is convinced that the trunks contain treasure.

So we have a story about a woman whose hired by two men to research their ancestor, who was castrated, and left behind trunks that may contain "the jewels of paradise." So I guess you could say they're searching for....

...the family jewels.]]> 3.09 2012 The Jewels of Paradise
author: Donna Leon
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2018/03/14
shelves: audiobook, detective-fiction
review:
I don't know why I keep doing this, I really don't.

The sad truth is that I just don't like Donna Leon's books. It sucks to have to admit this, because I've read so many of her Guido Brunetti mystery series, plus one nonfiction book, and it feels like I wasted all of that time. In a way, I went into The Jewels of Paradise thinking that this would be the final, deciding factor that either convinced me to stick with Leon's books, or give them up as a lost cause. I thought that, because this is a standalone novel and not part of her detective series, maybe the things that bothered me about those books wouldn't be present here, and Leon would be able to branch out into something new. Sadly, this was not the case.

As with all Leon mysteries, it's a good setup: Caterina Pellegrini is musicologist specializing in Baroque opera, and is called back to her native Venice for a research job. It's an unusual assignment, to say the least - two men have discovered a pair of trunks, left behind by a shared ancestor, that have not been opened for centuries. The ancestor died without children, and the trunks are full of his personal papers, written in multiple languages. Caterina has two jobs: go through the documents and figure out if any of them are valuable (the ancestor, we learn, was the Baroque composer Antonio Stefani), and read his personal papers to see if Stefani ever expressed a preference for either of the men's ancestors - they will use this information to decide who gets the items in the trunks.

The books is sort of set up as a historical mystery, because Caterina finds out that the composer was involved in some murder scandal when he was working at the royal court in Germany, but the mystery itself gets figured out pretty quickly and with very little fanfare, so it ends up being kind of a nonstarter. Leon also tries to create some tension by having a mysterious man follow Caterina around for a bit, and it's such a pointless, stupid subplot because we eventually find out that [spoilers removed]

Basically, this is an entire book of teased intrigue that Leon either can't be bothered to develop fully, or just drops entirely. The men who hired Caterina have a lawyer representing him, and Leon teases us with the possibility of a romance, and then apparently got bored of that. We find out that the lawyer [spoilers removed]

There's also an extended subplot about Caterina's sister Christina, who is a nun and helps Caterina out with her research. She's also considering leaving the church, so valuable story space is wasted exploring that non-angle. She and Caterina communicate through email, and they also have a supremely irritating habit of calling each other cutesy nicknames - "Tina-Lina" and "Kitty-Cati." The audiobook reader's simpering delivery of this robbed the nicknames of any chance of being charming, and it just made me grate my teeth every time I heard it.

But mostly, I was irritated with this book because I thought of a great joke about it early on, and it distracted me for the rest of the book. Okay, so the composer was also heavily involved with the Church, and Caterina realizes early on that he was actually a castrato. There's a reference in one of his papers to his having received "the jewels of paradise," which is why everyone is convinced that the trunks contain treasure.

So we have a story about a woman whose hired by two men to research their ancestor, who was castrated, and left behind trunks that may contain "the jewels of paradise." So I guess you could say they're searching for....

...the family jewels.
]]> Dark Places 5886881
Since then, she has been drifting. But when she is contacted by a group who are convinced of Ben's innocence, Libby starts to ask questions she never dared to before. Was the voice she heard her brother's? Ben was a misfit in their small town, but was he capable of murder? Are there secrets to uncover at the family farm or is Libby deluding herself because she wants her brother back?

She begins to realise that everyone in her family had something to hide that day... especially Ben. Now, twenty-four years later, the truth is going to be even harder to find.

Who did massacre the Day family?]]> 424 Gillian Flynn 0307341569 Madeline 3 audiobook
Dark Places follows two timelines - we see adult Libby in the present, grudgingly going along with the true-crime club's investigation, and we also see flashbacks showing us what happened, hour by hour, on the day of the murders, told through the perspectives of Libby's mother and brother.

I'll say this for the book - at least its solution wasn't quite as bonkers as Sharp Objects. It's close, though. I guessed the solution to the murders pretty early (and, after guessing it, immediately laughed to myself and though, no, that's way too stupid. But I forgot that this is a Gillian Flynn novel, where stupid plot twists have no limit), but Flynn was still able to throw out some twists along the way that kept me invested.

This book joins Sharp Objects and Gone Girl in Gillian Flynn's "Bitches Be Crazy, Amirite?" anthology. I was reminded of The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates, where Oates told short stories exploring the evil and violent impulses of women; and The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, where Atwood experimented with creating a female villain. Flynn seems to be attempting something similar in her books, but while Oates and Atwood are working with fine chisels, Flynn is armed only with a sledgehammer.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, really. If Flynn's books guarantee anything, it's that you're in for one exciting ride full of ludicrous twists and bizarre character motivations. It's clumsy and silly, and it sure as hell ain't pretty, but it's a lot of fun.]]> 3.95 2009 Dark Places
author: Gillian Flynn
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2018/01/05
shelves: audiobook
review:
At age seven, Libby Day was the only survivor of "the Satan Sacrifice," a massacre that left her mother and two sisters dead. Based on Libby's testimony, her fifteen-year-old brother Ben was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life in prison. The events surrounding the killing left Libby with physical and psychological damage, causing her to grow into a fantastically maladjusted adult. Libby is unable to hold a job or form meaningful relationships, and she survives on money collected from well-wishers and charities familiar with her story. But the money is starting to dry up, so when Libby is contacted by a member of a true-crime fan club and asked to come share her story about the murders, she agrees - for a fee. The members of the club, it turns out, believe that Ben didn't commit the murders, and are obsessed with figuring out who the real killer is. Against her better judgement, Libby finds herself getting drawn into the investigation, and starts revisiting the buried memories from her past.

Dark Places follows two timelines - we see adult Libby in the present, grudgingly going along with the true-crime club's investigation, and we also see flashbacks showing us what happened, hour by hour, on the day of the murders, told through the perspectives of Libby's mother and brother.

I'll say this for the book - at least its solution wasn't quite as bonkers as Sharp Objects. It's close, though. I guessed the solution to the murders pretty early (and, after guessing it, immediately laughed to myself and though, no, that's way too stupid. But I forgot that this is a Gillian Flynn novel, where stupid plot twists have no limit), but Flynn was still able to throw out some twists along the way that kept me invested.

This book joins Sharp Objects and Gone Girl in Gillian Flynn's "Bitches Be Crazy, Amirite?" anthology. I was reminded of The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates, where Oates told short stories exploring the evil and violent impulses of women; and The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, where Atwood experimented with creating a female villain. Flynn seems to be attempting something similar in her books, but while Oates and Atwood are working with fine chisels, Flynn is armed only with a sledgehammer.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, really. If Flynn's books guarantee anything, it's that you're in for one exciting ride full of ludicrous twists and bizarre character motivations. It's clumsy and silly, and it sure as hell ain't pretty, but it's a lot of fun.
]]> We Were Liars 16143347 A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.]]> 242 E. Lockhart 0385741278 Madeline 2 audiobook
As many, many other readers have pointed out in their reviews of this book, it's very tricky to market your novel based mainly on the fact that there's a huge, shocking twist at the end. I mean, it works - I got this audiobook from the library because I too wanted to find out what the twist was - but at the same time, it backfires so easily. I knew there was a twist at the end, so every little clue that Lockhart dropped, which might have otherwise gone unnoticed, might as well have been written in bright neon letters. At least I only guessed the first big reveal, and not the second. (Although I didn't realize how close I was to figuring the whole thing out - when I guessed that [spoilers removed], I remember thinking, "oh, this is similar to that horror movie [spoilers removed] and it turns out that I was way more right than I realized. If you've seen that movie, you already know what happens in We Were Liars)

So there was the fact that I semi-guessed the ending, which then robbed its eventual reveal of all drama, because while the characters are like, "GASP! I just figured out the truth!" I'm rolling my eyes and saying YEAH NO SHIT because I figured it out fifty pages ago. And also Lockhart went to the well of Played Out Plot Devices and decided that it was a good idea to have her novel's tension revolve around the main character having amnesia. Because Cadence cannot remember what happened after her accident, Lockhart is able to prolong the tension and keep the reader guessing about what might have happened. But it also means that she has to account for why none of the characters can just come out and tell Cadence, so as a solution she tells us that characters have told Cadence the truth, but because of her brain injury, she forgets the conversation happened. And we also get this conversation, repeated multiple times:

Cadence: Hey, can you tell me what happened last summer?
Other Character: No, I can't tell you.
Cadence: Why not?
Other Character: Because then this book would be twenty pages long.

(Early in the novel, Cadence does a very sensible thing where she gets her mother to tell her what happened, and writes it down so she can refer to it whenever she can't remember. But Lockhart doesn't actually tell us what Cadence writes down, and it's never mentioned again.)

And of course there's the romance element, between Cadence and her one-wedding-shy-of-being-a-legal-relative, Gat. We, as the readers, are expected to believe the characters when they assure us, desperately and repeatedly, that Cadence and Gat's love is the most powerful romance ever experienced, and the threat of being broken up is supposed to be a reasonable motivation for their actions later in the story. This didn't work for me - Cadence and Gat didn't seem to have any chemistry at all, and their romance felt more lukewarm than anything else. Also Gat at one point hilariously compares himself to Heathcliff. Sir, I know Heathcliff. I read about Heathcliff. In my review of Wuthering Heights, I expressed a strong need to see him beaten to death with a baseball bat. You, sir, are no Heathcliff.

I don't understand why this story couldn't just be told in a linear way. Maybe have [spoilers removed] as the prologue and then go back to the start of the summer, but otherwise just tell the story as it happened! I imagined Lockhart slowly ramping up the tension as the arguments over the inheritance get more and more heated, and the grandfather becomes more controlling, until it almost feels like a horror movie, with the characters trapped on an island with no way to escape. The amnesia aspect was completely unnecessary, and was just an obvious way to excuse the reliance on a big twist. Think about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I think Lockhart was trying (and failing) to imitate - in that book, the tension is twofold. We want to find out what happened to Mary Katherine's family, but we're also trying to figure out what she's going to do next. We Were Liars has the first part, but not the second, and that's why it falls flat. Once you figure out where the book is headed, there's nothing left to keep your interest.]]> 3.66 2014 We Were Liars
author: E. Lockhart
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2017/12/21
shelves: audiobook
review:
"We are Sinclairs. Beautiful. Privileged. Damaged. Liar. We live, at least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. Perhaps that is all you need to know."

As many, many other readers have pointed out in their reviews of this book, it's very tricky to market your novel based mainly on the fact that there's a huge, shocking twist at the end. I mean, it works - I got this audiobook from the library because I too wanted to find out what the twist was - but at the same time, it backfires so easily. I knew there was a twist at the end, so every little clue that Lockhart dropped, which might have otherwise gone unnoticed, might as well have been written in bright neon letters. At least I only guessed the first big reveal, and not the second. (Although I didn't realize how close I was to figuring the whole thing out - when I guessed that [spoilers removed], I remember thinking, "oh, this is similar to that horror movie [spoilers removed] and it turns out that I was way more right than I realized. If you've seen that movie, you already know what happens in We Were Liars)

So there was the fact that I semi-guessed the ending, which then robbed its eventual reveal of all drama, because while the characters are like, "GASP! I just figured out the truth!" I'm rolling my eyes and saying YEAH NO SHIT because I figured it out fifty pages ago. And also Lockhart went to the well of Played Out Plot Devices and decided that it was a good idea to have her novel's tension revolve around the main character having amnesia. Because Cadence cannot remember what happened after her accident, Lockhart is able to prolong the tension and keep the reader guessing about what might have happened. But it also means that she has to account for why none of the characters can just come out and tell Cadence, so as a solution she tells us that characters have told Cadence the truth, but because of her brain injury, she forgets the conversation happened. And we also get this conversation, repeated multiple times:

Cadence: Hey, can you tell me what happened last summer?
Other Character: No, I can't tell you.
Cadence: Why not?
Other Character: Because then this book would be twenty pages long.

(Early in the novel, Cadence does a very sensible thing where she gets her mother to tell her what happened, and writes it down so she can refer to it whenever she can't remember. But Lockhart doesn't actually tell us what Cadence writes down, and it's never mentioned again.)

And of course there's the romance element, between Cadence and her one-wedding-shy-of-being-a-legal-relative, Gat. We, as the readers, are expected to believe the characters when they assure us, desperately and repeatedly, that Cadence and Gat's love is the most powerful romance ever experienced, and the threat of being broken up is supposed to be a reasonable motivation for their actions later in the story. This didn't work for me - Cadence and Gat didn't seem to have any chemistry at all, and their romance felt more lukewarm than anything else. Also Gat at one point hilariously compares himself to Heathcliff. Sir, I know Heathcliff. I read about Heathcliff. In my review of Wuthering Heights, I expressed a strong need to see him beaten to death with a baseball bat. You, sir, are no Heathcliff.

I don't understand why this story couldn't just be told in a linear way. Maybe have [spoilers removed] as the prologue and then go back to the start of the summer, but otherwise just tell the story as it happened! I imagined Lockhart slowly ramping up the tension as the arguments over the inheritance get more and more heated, and the grandfather becomes more controlling, until it almost feels like a horror movie, with the characters trapped on an island with no way to escape. The amnesia aspect was completely unnecessary, and was just an obvious way to excuse the reliance on a big twist. Think about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I think Lockhart was trying (and failing) to imitate - in that book, the tension is twofold. We want to find out what happened to Mary Katherine's family, but we're also trying to figure out what she's going to do next. We Were Liars has the first part, but not the second, and that's why it falls flat. Once you figure out where the book is headed, there's nothing left to keep your interest.
]]> The Nest 25781157 A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs� joint trust fund, “The Nest,� which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.

Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can’t seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the future they’ve envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.

This is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down. In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love.]]> 353 Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney 0062414216 Madeline 3 audiobook
The book opens with Beatrice, Jack, and Melody preparing to meet Leo for lunch after he gets out of rehab, where they intend to work out a plan for Leo to repay the money he took out of the trust. Leo promises to have the money by the time the inheritance is available, and the rest of the book follows the four Plum siblings, as well as the people in their immediate orbit, as they try to come up with a solution for the individual problems they've created for themselves.

At its best, The Nest is a prime example of a character-driven novel. Aside from the car accident that kickstarts the plot, there really aren't many huge dramatic moments in this story. For the most part, we're just watching a group of people stumble around, trying to fix their lives and, more often than not, making things worse for themselves. The four Plum siblings, as well as the supporting characters, are all well-drawn and interesting to watch. I do wish that Sweeney hadn't confined the siblings to their own separate story lines for the majority of the novel, since their dynamic was one of the most interesting parts of the story, and I would have liked to have more scenes of the four of them, or even a pair of them, interacting.

Each sibling gets chapters from their perspective, and we also get to be inside the head of a select few side characters. This is confusing at first, especially when we find ourselves reading from the perspective of Leo's girlfriend's downstairs neighbor, or the family friend of the girl who was injured in the car crash. Sweeney's goal here is a detailed tapestry of a novel, where every little detail and every side character all come together beautifully at the end, showing us the larger pattern. She is...somewhat successful.

The best example of this plan is the storyline with Matilda, the waitress; and Tommy, the downstairs neighbor. Their two stories, which stay completely separate for the majority of the story, finally come together in a really nice way, and you understand why Sweeney spent so much time developing their stories. The only problem is that the Plum siblings have nothing to do with this, in any way. Sure, Leo is the reason Matilda got hurt, and Jack has a slight connection with Tommy, but that's about the extent of their involvement. And more importantly, the resolution to Matilda and Tommy's arcs have no effect on the stories of the Plum siblings, even though the novel is supposed to center around them. Other subplots, like the one about Melody's teen daughters, don't seem to really matter in the grand scheme of things. In fact, the sections written from the perspective of Melody's daughters feel like they belong in a different novel entirely.

I wanted a more tightly-constructed story, something where all of these side characters and subplots are revealed to be crucial to the overarching story of the Plum siblings. Like I said, it sort of works, but not as well as I think Sweeney wanted it to.

Similarly, the way the story wraps up was way too easy. We spend the book being reminded, over and over, that the siblings are on the brink of financial ruin and that things are very, very dire. And then at the end, Beatrice is like, well, I don't really need my share, since I own my apartment and live alone, so why don't Jack and Melody just split it? So they do, and everything works out fine. Yes, Melody's daughter has to go to state school and they sell their house, but even that ends up being much less of a tragedy than its set up to be.

And Leo, whose motivations and actions were interesting for the majority of the novel, suddenly gets dropped by the story while Sweeney focuses on her other plots, and his resolution is quick, unsatisfying, and honestly not much of a resolution. He vanishes and eventually gets tracked down, but instead of a confrontation, the character who finds him just...walks away. Leo is forgotten by the story and the characters, and it was a letdown.

I dunno, this one was mostly just fine for me. If you want a character-driven book about a small group of peoples' lives intersecting in interesting and unexpected ways, Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda already did that, and did it better.]]> 3.37 2016 The Nest
author: Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2017/12/09
shelves: audiobook
review:
The four Plum siblings - Leo, Beatrice, Jack, and Melody - have grown up with the assurance that when Melody, the youngest, turns forty, all four siblings will inherit the trust that their father set up for them before his death. The trust, referred to by the siblings as "the nest," was intended to be a modest amount, just a little extra money to help them out, but thanks to savvy investing, the trust has grown beyond expectations, and now the four adult siblings stand to inherit millions. But then, just a few months away from the deadline, Leo leaves a wedding with a nineteen-year-old waitress and drunkenly crashes his car. To pay off the settlement to the girl's family, Leo's mother opts to dip into the nest, and now Leo's siblings suddenly find themselves all facing potential financial crises, and their safety net gone.

The book opens with Beatrice, Jack, and Melody preparing to meet Leo for lunch after he gets out of rehab, where they intend to work out a plan for Leo to repay the money he took out of the trust. Leo promises to have the money by the time the inheritance is available, and the rest of the book follows the four Plum siblings, as well as the people in their immediate orbit, as they try to come up with a solution for the individual problems they've created for themselves.

At its best, The Nest is a prime example of a character-driven novel. Aside from the car accident that kickstarts the plot, there really aren't many huge dramatic moments in this story. For the most part, we're just watching a group of people stumble around, trying to fix their lives and, more often than not, making things worse for themselves. The four Plum siblings, as well as the supporting characters, are all well-drawn and interesting to watch. I do wish that Sweeney hadn't confined the siblings to their own separate story lines for the majority of the novel, since their dynamic was one of the most interesting parts of the story, and I would have liked to have more scenes of the four of them, or even a pair of them, interacting.

Each sibling gets chapters from their perspective, and we also get to be inside the head of a select few side characters. This is confusing at first, especially when we find ourselves reading from the perspective of Leo's girlfriend's downstairs neighbor, or the family friend of the girl who was injured in the car crash. Sweeney's goal here is a detailed tapestry of a novel, where every little detail and every side character all come together beautifully at the end, showing us the larger pattern. She is...somewhat successful.

The best example of this plan is the storyline with Matilda, the waitress; and Tommy, the downstairs neighbor. Their two stories, which stay completely separate for the majority of the story, finally come together in a really nice way, and you understand why Sweeney spent so much time developing their stories. The only problem is that the Plum siblings have nothing to do with this, in any way. Sure, Leo is the reason Matilda got hurt, and Jack has a slight connection with Tommy, but that's about the extent of their involvement. And more importantly, the resolution to Matilda and Tommy's arcs have no effect on the stories of the Plum siblings, even though the novel is supposed to center around them. Other subplots, like the one about Melody's teen daughters, don't seem to really matter in the grand scheme of things. In fact, the sections written from the perspective of Melody's daughters feel like they belong in a different novel entirely.

I wanted a more tightly-constructed story, something where all of these side characters and subplots are revealed to be crucial to the overarching story of the Plum siblings. Like I said, it sort of works, but not as well as I think Sweeney wanted it to.

Similarly, the way the story wraps up was way too easy. We spend the book being reminded, over and over, that the siblings are on the brink of financial ruin and that things are very, very dire. And then at the end, Beatrice is like, well, I don't really need my share, since I own my apartment and live alone, so why don't Jack and Melody just split it? So they do, and everything works out fine. Yes, Melody's daughter has to go to state school and they sell their house, but even that ends up being much less of a tragedy than its set up to be.

And Leo, whose motivations and actions were interesting for the majority of the novel, suddenly gets dropped by the story while Sweeney focuses on her other plots, and his resolution is quick, unsatisfying, and honestly not much of a resolution. He vanishes and eventually gets tracked down, but instead of a confrontation, the character who finds him just...walks away. Leo is forgotten by the story and the characters, and it was a letdown.

I dunno, this one was mostly just fine for me. If you want a character-driven book about a small group of peoples' lives intersecting in interesting and unexpected ways, Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda already did that, and did it better.
]]> The Girls 26893819 355 Emma Cline 081299860X Madeline 4 audiobook
In the summer of 1968, Evie Boyd is fourteen years old, and she's lost. Her parents are recently divorced (her father remarried to the woman he was having an affair with, and her mother dating a series of gross and vaguely creepy potential stepfathers), she's in the throes of puberty with no idea how to handle it, and teen drama has alienated her from all her friends. Evie, in short, is the prime target for a cult of mysterious and charismatic free-spirited girls, who live at a ranch in rural California under the control of a man named Russell. Evie sees "the girls" in the park one day, and is immediately obsessed with them. In no time at all, Evie is spending most of her time at "the ranch" and falling deeper and deeper under the spell of Russell and his followers.

The Girls is, of course, based on the real-life cult of Charles Manson and the eventual murders of seven people, carried out by Manson's female followers. If you're not familiar with the story, you should definitely take a quick break from this review to read up on the murders, and then take another break to fall down a thirty minute Wikipedia black hole and read about cults and serial murders because holy shit, guys.

This book is an attempt to explore how a teenage girl could get so sucked into a cult like this, with Evie as our outsider trying to get into the inner circle. Russell, the Manson stand-in, actually plays a very small part in the story itself, and is usually operating just offscreen. His philosophies and his orders are delivered through Suzanne, one of his most loyal followers and the person Evie really joins the cult for. Russell, ultimately, is a secondary character - this book, like its title suggests, focuses almost entirely on the girls who fell into Russell's trap, and what they did.

Cline, to her credit and my relief, never tries to present Russell as anything other than a predatory creep. He is never idealized, never romanticized, and Cline doesn't attempt to justify any of his actions. We know from the moment Evie first meets Russell that he is emphatically bad news, and in his first scene alone with Evie, Cline does everything except break from the narrative completely to write "hey, teen girls? This behavior that we're seeing is called grooming, and it's something that predatory older men do when they want to assault young girls. If someone does this to you, run the other way and do not stop."

Russell, ultimately, doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of the book, because this is actually a twisted love story between two teenage girls. The real draw of this book is the growing tension for the reader as Cline hints at what's going to happen (and what readers know is going to happen, since they're familiar with the Manson family), and watching grown-up Evie reflect on this period of her life and try to understand how she could have willfully ignored all the danger and warning signs.

In fact, there are only two things I didn't really enjoy about this book. Although I liked that the book is presented from middle-aged Evie's perspective, and I think it's important that we see scenes of her as an older woman, the parts taking place in modern day ultimately don't amount to much. There isn't much to take away from them, except the knowledge that, yep, it still really sucks to be a teenage girl. I liked seeing Evie as an adult and examining how her time with the cult influenced how she reacts to the world, but I think there could have been a more interesting way to show this.

Also, as lots of other reviewers have pointed out, Cline kind of chickens out and doesn't let Evie be a participant in the actual murders. Now, there was a teenage girl who witnessed the Manson murders but didn't actually kill anyone, but Cline seems afraid to let her heroine get that close to the crime. Instead, [spoilers removed] Cline spends some of the modern-day parts teasing us about the state of Evie's mind, and her possible role in the murders, but ultimately it doesn't amount to much, and any moral ambiguity Evie might have had is ignored.

Still, despite that, this was still a fascinating, tense exploration of teenage girl group-think, creepy men being creeps, and the question of where guilt and responsibility should be placed, and on whom. And of course, the concept that there's no cult quite so scary as the the cult of teenage girls.

"I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to 'make it home safe.'"]]> 3.48 2016 The Girls
author: Emma Cline
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/09/01
date added: 2017/11/07
shelves: audiobook
review:
"So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes."

In the summer of 1968, Evie Boyd is fourteen years old, and she's lost. Her parents are recently divorced (her father remarried to the woman he was having an affair with, and her mother dating a series of gross and vaguely creepy potential stepfathers), she's in the throes of puberty with no idea how to handle it, and teen drama has alienated her from all her friends. Evie, in short, is the prime target for a cult of mysterious and charismatic free-spirited girls, who live at a ranch in rural California under the control of a man named Russell. Evie sees "the girls" in the park one day, and is immediately obsessed with them. In no time at all, Evie is spending most of her time at "the ranch" and falling deeper and deeper under the spell of Russell and his followers.

The Girls is, of course, based on the real-life cult of Charles Manson and the eventual murders of seven people, carried out by Manson's female followers. If you're not familiar with the story, you should definitely take a quick break from this review to read up on the murders, and then take another break to fall down a thirty minute Wikipedia black hole and read about cults and serial murders because holy shit, guys.

This book is an attempt to explore how a teenage girl could get so sucked into a cult like this, with Evie as our outsider trying to get into the inner circle. Russell, the Manson stand-in, actually plays a very small part in the story itself, and is usually operating just offscreen. His philosophies and his orders are delivered through Suzanne, one of his most loyal followers and the person Evie really joins the cult for. Russell, ultimately, is a secondary character - this book, like its title suggests, focuses almost entirely on the girls who fell into Russell's trap, and what they did.

Cline, to her credit and my relief, never tries to present Russell as anything other than a predatory creep. He is never idealized, never romanticized, and Cline doesn't attempt to justify any of his actions. We know from the moment Evie first meets Russell that he is emphatically bad news, and in his first scene alone with Evie, Cline does everything except break from the narrative completely to write "hey, teen girls? This behavior that we're seeing is called grooming, and it's something that predatory older men do when they want to assault young girls. If someone does this to you, run the other way and do not stop."

Russell, ultimately, doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of the book, because this is actually a twisted love story between two teenage girls. The real draw of this book is the growing tension for the reader as Cline hints at what's going to happen (and what readers know is going to happen, since they're familiar with the Manson family), and watching grown-up Evie reflect on this period of her life and try to understand how she could have willfully ignored all the danger and warning signs.

In fact, there are only two things I didn't really enjoy about this book. Although I liked that the book is presented from middle-aged Evie's perspective, and I think it's important that we see scenes of her as an older woman, the parts taking place in modern day ultimately don't amount to much. There isn't much to take away from them, except the knowledge that, yep, it still really sucks to be a teenage girl. I liked seeing Evie as an adult and examining how her time with the cult influenced how she reacts to the world, but I think there could have been a more interesting way to show this.

Also, as lots of other reviewers have pointed out, Cline kind of chickens out and doesn't let Evie be a participant in the actual murders. Now, there was a teenage girl who witnessed the Manson murders but didn't actually kill anyone, but Cline seems afraid to let her heroine get that close to the crime. Instead, [spoilers removed] Cline spends some of the modern-day parts teasing us about the state of Evie's mind, and her possible role in the murders, but ultimately it doesn't amount to much, and any moral ambiguity Evie might have had is ignored.

Still, despite that, this was still a fascinating, tense exploration of teenage girl group-think, creepy men being creeps, and the question of where guilt and responsibility should be placed, and on whom. And of course, the concept that there's no cult quite so scary as the the cult of teenage girls.

"I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to 'make it home safe.'"
]]> <![CDATA[The Heist (Gabriel Allon, #14)]]> 18730158 Gabriel Allon � art restorer and legendary spy � is in Venice when he receives an urgent call from the Italian police. The art dealer Justin Isherwood has stumbled upon a chilling murder scene, and is being held as a suspect.

The dead man is a fallen spy with a secret � a trafficker in stolen artwork, sold to a mysterious collector. To save his friend, Gabriel must track down the world’s most iconic missing painting: Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.

Gabriel’s mission takes him on exhilarating hunt from Marseilles and Corsica, to Paris and Geneva, and, finally, to a private bank in Austria, where a dangerous man stands guard over the ill-gotten wealth of one of the world’s most brutal dictators�

]]> 467 Daniel Silva 006232005X Madeline 2 detective-fiction, audiobook "Because I'm looking for a Caravaggio."
"For whom?"
"The Italians."
"Why is an Isreali intelligence officer looking for a painting for the Italians?"
"Because he finds it hard to tell people 'no.'"

So far the only major drawback of doing most of my reading via audiobooks is that I have no easy way of marking quotes to use later in my reviews, which is something I usually try to include. I listened to The Heist during my commute to work, and I want everyone to appreciate the fact that I had to rewind the above passage at least five times so I could write down the conversation on the notes app on my phone. The reason I went to so much trouble to write down this specific exchange was because it perfectly sets you up for this complex, convoluted plot, and there was no way I couldn't include it in the review.

Having never read any of Daniel Silva's thrillers, I can't say if his other books require so many steps just to get to the main conflict. But holy shit, this one's a doozy.

So the book starts with art dealer Julien Isherwood being called to a mansion on Lake Como, where he's supposed to pick up a painting for a colleague. Instead, he arrives to find the painting gone, and the owner of the house murdered. Isherwood calls in his friend Gabriel Allon, an art restorer and Isreali intelligence agent, to investigate the murder and clear his name. Allon soon discovers that the dead man was a former British spy who had been trading stolen artwork, and that one of those stolen pieces, now missing, is Caravaggio's famous lost Nativity painting. To recover the painting, Allon has to borrow a Van Gogh, make a forged copy, and trade that version for the Caravaggio. Oh, and the money trail for the stolen artwork leads to a bank in Germany that holds the fortune of a Middle Eastern dictator. Getting the Caravaggio back will require spying on, and stealing from, one of the most dangerous political families in the world.

Like, that's a lot, right? Around the time the dictator was thrown into the mix (probably two-thirds of the way into the story), I was already tired of keeping track of the various spy shit going on, and the last thing I needed was for Silva to add yet another complication to the mix. And what a complication it is. I had been enjoying the book up until then, because there was a lot of good stuff about art theft and forgery, and Allon is a great protagonist - he won me over early in the book when he's going to the Lake Como house to investigate the murder scene, and when the cop on duty tells Allon that he has one hour, and that he'll be following Allon around the house, Allon snaps "I'll take as long as I want, and you'll wait outside." (Quote is not exact, because audiobook.) Also I mentally cast Oscar Isaac as Allon, which certainly didn't hurt.

I was on board for all the art forgery stuff and tracking the thieves, but then we introduce the dictator, and Silva takes us on a chapter-long digression to explain the history of the dictator's rule. And before I knew it, my fun art heist caper was gone, and had been replaced by a dreary political thriller. Not that there's anything wrong with those kind of books, but it definitely wasn't what I signed up for, and I finished the book feeling almost like I had been the victim of a bait-and-switch.

The writing is good, the plot is complex and fast-paced, and all the characters that Allon works with over the course of his assignment were interesting and well-drawn (also I could read an entire book about Allon's Italian spy wife, Chiara), but ultimately, the change from art heist to political spy thriller was too jarring, and I could never adjust. Silva's books were recommended to me by someone who has the same taste in detective novels as I do, and I don't want to discount his work based just on this one book. I'd definitely be willing to give Gabriel Allon and Silva another chance in the future; this one just wasn't quite what I was expecting. ]]> 4.07 2014 The Heist (Gabriel Allon, #14)
author: Daniel Silva
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2017/05/01
date added: 2017/10/01
shelves: detective-fiction, audiobook
review:
"Why did you steal a Van Gogh and sell a copy to an Arab named Sam?"
"Because I'm looking for a Caravaggio."
"For whom?"
"The Italians."
"Why is an Isreali intelligence officer looking for a painting for the Italians?"
"Because he finds it hard to tell people 'no.'"

So far the only major drawback of doing most of my reading via audiobooks is that I have no easy way of marking quotes to use later in my reviews, which is something I usually try to include. I listened to The Heist during my commute to work, and I want everyone to appreciate the fact that I had to rewind the above passage at least five times so I could write down the conversation on the notes app on my phone. The reason I went to so much trouble to write down this specific exchange was because it perfectly sets you up for this complex, convoluted plot, and there was no way I couldn't include it in the review.

Having never read any of Daniel Silva's thrillers, I can't say if his other books require so many steps just to get to the main conflict. But holy shit, this one's a doozy.

So the book starts with art dealer Julien Isherwood being called to a mansion on Lake Como, where he's supposed to pick up a painting for a colleague. Instead, he arrives to find the painting gone, and the owner of the house murdered. Isherwood calls in his friend Gabriel Allon, an art restorer and Isreali intelligence agent, to investigate the murder and clear his name. Allon soon discovers that the dead man was a former British spy who had been trading stolen artwork, and that one of those stolen pieces, now missing, is Caravaggio's famous lost Nativity painting. To recover the painting, Allon has to borrow a Van Gogh, make a forged copy, and trade that version for the Caravaggio. Oh, and the money trail for the stolen artwork leads to a bank in Germany that holds the fortune of a Middle Eastern dictator. Getting the Caravaggio back will require spying on, and stealing from, one of the most dangerous political families in the world.

Like, that's a lot, right? Around the time the dictator was thrown into the mix (probably two-thirds of the way into the story), I was already tired of keeping track of the various spy shit going on, and the last thing I needed was for Silva to add yet another complication to the mix. And what a complication it is. I had been enjoying the book up until then, because there was a lot of good stuff about art theft and forgery, and Allon is a great protagonist - he won me over early in the book when he's going to the Lake Como house to investigate the murder scene, and when the cop on duty tells Allon that he has one hour, and that he'll be following Allon around the house, Allon snaps "I'll take as long as I want, and you'll wait outside." (Quote is not exact, because audiobook.) Also I mentally cast Oscar Isaac as Allon, which certainly didn't hurt.

I was on board for all the art forgery stuff and tracking the thieves, but then we introduce the dictator, and Silva takes us on a chapter-long digression to explain the history of the dictator's rule. And before I knew it, my fun art heist caper was gone, and had been replaced by a dreary political thriller. Not that there's anything wrong with those kind of books, but it definitely wasn't what I signed up for, and I finished the book feeling almost like I had been the victim of a bait-and-switch.

The writing is good, the plot is complex and fast-paced, and all the characters that Allon works with over the course of his assignment were interesting and well-drawn (also I could read an entire book about Allon's Italian spy wife, Chiara), but ultimately, the change from art heist to political spy thriller was too jarring, and I could never adjust. Silva's books were recommended to me by someone who has the same taste in detective novels as I do, and I don't want to discount his work based just on this one book. I'd definitely be willing to give Gabriel Allon and Silva another chance in the future; this one just wasn't quite what I was expecting.
]]> My Ántonia 17150 219 Willa Cather 1583485090 Madeline 3 audiobook The Great Gatsby, I somehow avoided having to read this in high school, although I remember a lot of my friends reading Cather's book for Honors English while I was suffering through Summer of My German Soldier in regular people English. (Turns out, even if you're a voracious teenage reader, they still don't let you take honors classes if you spend your entire high school career constantly being one bad quiz away from straight-up flunking whatever math class you're in at the time) I don't remember my friends having much to say about My Antonia specifically, but I remember that they...didn't love it.

Which isn't surprising, honestly. Cather's book is, based just on the plot description, a deeply dull story with barely any actual plot: Jim Burton looks back on his childhood in frontier America, and specifically his lifelong friendship with a Czech immigrant named Antonia. There are little bits of drama here and there, like when two Russian immigrants share the truly horrifying reason they had to leave their home country, and Antonia lives a life of quiet, constant struggle and suffering that Jim either doesn't feel the need to point out, or just doesn't notice.

It's the writing that saves the book, and is the reason this is considered such a classic. Cather's prose gives us perfect descriptions of the prairie setting, and she's able to expertly use just a handful of well-chosen words to fully illustrate her characters. Antonia will stay with you long after you finish the book.

So it's a real shame that the subject of the book doesn't get to tell her own story in her own words. I'm sure there's a very good reason that Cather makes Jim her narrator, and has him show the reader Antonia through his eyes (did Cather suspect that it would be hard for a woman to sell a book where a woman tells us about her own life? Ugh, probably), but this also means that Antonia can only ever exist to us as Jim saw her.

At least Jim's not a bad narrator, overall. For the majority of the book I was enjoying myself, if only for the nice Little House on the Prairie nostalgia, but the story starts to nosedive around the time that Jim becomes an adolescent. Suddenly his complete inability to notice the abuse that Antonia suffers is more of a problem, as he's now old enough to be aware of these things. (Haha Jim, remember that time you found out that Antonia's employer had been planning to sneak into her room and rape her? Probably not, because no one ever talked about it after that scene) Jim starts behaving like a self-centered little shit - ie, a teenager - and it's not fun to watch Antonia's life through his eyes anymore. There's a lot of talk about the dances that are happening in town, and Jim starts going around with girls while internally griping about Antonia hanging out with the wrong boy.

The worst part comes towards the end, when Jim has been away at college (and fucking around with Lena Lingard, who is both awesome and way too good for Jim), and then comes home and tells Antonia that he loves her.

And then he leaves again, and doesn't come back for twenty years. Our hero really goes the extra mile to explain this to his readers, using a whopping two words to justify why he confessed his feelings to this poor girl and then didn't see her for two decades: "Life intervened."

It is at this point that My Antonia turns into Lamentations of a Fuckboy by Jim Burton. He eventually learns that while he was away, Antonia got engaged to some dude who then abandoned her, leaving her pregnant and unmarried. Jim is "disappointed" in Antonia. Because Jim sucks.

But she gets her life together, because Antonia is awesome, and when Jim finally comes back for a visit (he puts it off for a long time, because "I did not want to find her aged and broken"), she has a loving husband, a successful farm, and a ton of kids who adore her. All we know about adult Jim is that he's married, and the original narrator of the book doesn't like his wife.

I really wish I'd gotten to read this book from Antonia's point of view. This is the story of a woman who immigrated to the United States as a child, speaking barely any English, and had to figure out how to survive with her family on the unforgiving frontier. Her father killed himself when she was young (or was maybe murdered? There's a little bit of suspicion surrounded the neighbor, and then it's dropped entirely), and she suffers abuse at the hands of her brother, her employer, and then her fiance. She has a child out of wedlock, but never tries to hide it, and bravely continues to live in her hometown with her child, ignoring the judgement and the rumors. Eventually she meets and marries a good man, who doesn't care that she already has a child, and she finally gets her farm and her family, and her happy ending. I wanted Antonia to tell me her story, not have it filtered through the perspective of her friend.

And frankly, y'all, it pisses me off that this is called My Antonia. It reminds me, of all things, of an exchange from one of the Bond movies. Bond is bantering with Moneypenny and says, "Ah, Moneypenny, what would I do without you?" To which she replies, "Oh James. You've never had me."

Honestly. It's like if Drake wrote a song called "My Rihanna."

(no I will not apologize for that metaphor. Suck it, Honors English!)]]> 3.82 1918 My Ántonia
author: Willa Cather
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1918
rating: 3
read at: 2017/09/01
date added: 2017/09/13
shelves: audiobook
review:
Like The Great Gatsby, I somehow avoided having to read this in high school, although I remember a lot of my friends reading Cather's book for Honors English while I was suffering through Summer of My German Soldier in regular people English. (Turns out, even if you're a voracious teenage reader, they still don't let you take honors classes if you spend your entire high school career constantly being one bad quiz away from straight-up flunking whatever math class you're in at the time) I don't remember my friends having much to say about My Antonia specifically, but I remember that they...didn't love it.

Which isn't surprising, honestly. Cather's book is, based just on the plot description, a deeply dull story with barely any actual plot: Jim Burton looks back on his childhood in frontier America, and specifically his lifelong friendship with a Czech immigrant named Antonia. There are little bits of drama here and there, like when two Russian immigrants share the truly horrifying reason they had to leave their home country, and Antonia lives a life of quiet, constant struggle and suffering that Jim either doesn't feel the need to point out, or just doesn't notice.

It's the writing that saves the book, and is the reason this is considered such a classic. Cather's prose gives us perfect descriptions of the prairie setting, and she's able to expertly use just a handful of well-chosen words to fully illustrate her characters. Antonia will stay with you long after you finish the book.

So it's a real shame that the subject of the book doesn't get to tell her own story in her own words. I'm sure there's a very good reason that Cather makes Jim her narrator, and has him show the reader Antonia through his eyes (did Cather suspect that it would be hard for a woman to sell a book where a woman tells us about her own life? Ugh, probably), but this also means that Antonia can only ever exist to us as Jim saw her.

At least Jim's not a bad narrator, overall. For the majority of the book I was enjoying myself, if only for the nice Little House on the Prairie nostalgia, but the story starts to nosedive around the time that Jim becomes an adolescent. Suddenly his complete inability to notice the abuse that Antonia suffers is more of a problem, as he's now old enough to be aware of these things. (Haha Jim, remember that time you found out that Antonia's employer had been planning to sneak into her room and rape her? Probably not, because no one ever talked about it after that scene) Jim starts behaving like a self-centered little shit - ie, a teenager - and it's not fun to watch Antonia's life through his eyes anymore. There's a lot of talk about the dances that are happening in town, and Jim starts going around with girls while internally griping about Antonia hanging out with the wrong boy.

The worst part comes towards the end, when Jim has been away at college (and fucking around with Lena Lingard, who is both awesome and way too good for Jim), and then comes home and tells Antonia that he loves her.

And then he leaves again, and doesn't come back for twenty years. Our hero really goes the extra mile to explain this to his readers, using a whopping two words to justify why he confessed his feelings to this poor girl and then didn't see her for two decades: "Life intervened."

It is at this point that My Antonia turns into Lamentations of a Fuckboy by Jim Burton. He eventually learns that while he was away, Antonia got engaged to some dude who then abandoned her, leaving her pregnant and unmarried. Jim is "disappointed" in Antonia. Because Jim sucks.

But she gets her life together, because Antonia is awesome, and when Jim finally comes back for a visit (he puts it off for a long time, because "I did not want to find her aged and broken"), she has a loving husband, a successful farm, and a ton of kids who adore her. All we know about adult Jim is that he's married, and the original narrator of the book doesn't like his wife.

I really wish I'd gotten to read this book from Antonia's point of view. This is the story of a woman who immigrated to the United States as a child, speaking barely any English, and had to figure out how to survive with her family on the unforgiving frontier. Her father killed himself when she was young (or was maybe murdered? There's a little bit of suspicion surrounded the neighbor, and then it's dropped entirely), and she suffers abuse at the hands of her brother, her employer, and then her fiance. She has a child out of wedlock, but never tries to hide it, and bravely continues to live in her hometown with her child, ignoring the judgement and the rumors. Eventually she meets and marries a good man, who doesn't care that she already has a child, and she finally gets her farm and her family, and her happy ending. I wanted Antonia to tell me her story, not have it filtered through the perspective of her friend.

And frankly, y'all, it pisses me off that this is called My Antonia. It reminds me, of all things, of an exchange from one of the Bond movies. Bond is bantering with Moneypenny and says, "Ah, Moneypenny, what would I do without you?" To which she replies, "Oh James. You've never had me."

Honestly. It's like if Drake wrote a song called "My Rihanna."

(no I will not apologize for that metaphor. Suck it, Honors English!)
]]> <![CDATA[The Hollow Boy (Lockwood & Co., #3)]]> 24397043
Meanwhile, there are reports of many new hauntings, including a house where bloody footprints are appearing, and a department store full of strange sounds and shadowy figures. But ghosts seem to be the least of Lockwood & Co.'s concerns when assassins attack during a carnival in the center of the city. Can the team get past their personal issues to save the day on all fronts, or will bad feelings attract yet more trouble?

Danger abounds, tensions escalate, and new loyalties form in this third delightfully terrifying adventure in the critically acclaimed Lockwood & Co. series.]]> 374 Jonathan Stroud 1484709683 Madeline 3 The Whispering Skull) ended on a massive cliffhanger. But since there was so much time between me finishing the second book and starting the third, I completely forgot what the cliffhanger even was. If it got resolved in any satisfying manner in the beginning of The Hollow Boy, I didn't notice. So that's probably not a great sign.

We're at the third installation of what is at least a four-book series, and Jonathan Stroud is finally starting to deviate just a little bit from his established formula. The book still opens with a minor ghost-fighting mission that won't impact the plot in any way, and we still have a big blow-out ghost hunting scene in an appropriately dramatic setting, with the requisite "Wait! We had it wrong the whole time!" realization. But Stroud appears to be laying the groundwork for something bigger in a later book, teasing us with more information about the "Orpheus Society", hinting that one of the bigger ghost-hunting agencies is up to something nefarious, and also further developing Lucy's unusually strong psychic abilities. Even though this book didn't really blow me away, I'm still going to track down the next one in the series, if only to see how Stroud continues to develop this story.

Honestly, this book isn't bad, overall. There are some great action sequences (including a haunted house with a giant open stairwell that extends from the basement all the way to the attic, and a high-stakes chase scene at a parade - this series is just begging for a film adaptation, and I think it could also make a decent TV series), the ghosts and hauntings remain genuinely scary, and the dialogue is still clever and snarky as hell.

But I think it could have been so much better. Part of the book involves Lucy exploring and developing her ability to talk to ghosts, often by putting her own team at risk and having to learn lessons about keeping her friends safe despite her curiosity etc. I wanted Stroud to take this a little farther - have Lucy become more isolated and withdrawn, and explore how the Lockwood team would deal with one of their members going off the rails a little bit. There are hints here and there that Lucy is starting to lose sight of what's important, and also that Lockwood may not have the team's best interests in mind, but Stroud is either waiting for later books to develop those ideas, or he just couldn't be bothered.

The time/setting is still off-putting - everything feels really steampunk-y, to the point where I had to keep reminding myself that it was taking place in modern day. Stroud even gives us a definitive time period, when he has a character establish that the Victorian era was "over a century ago." Even with this indisputable fact, I remain incapable of picturing any of this happening anywhere other than Victorian or maybe pre-WWI England. Part of this is the little details - Lucy uses the word "chambermaid" once, and also mentions that a character is wearing "petticoats", and nobody ever uses a cellphone or computer. But it's also easy to picture the story happening in some kind of steampunk universe, because the world Stroud has built is entirely devoid of pop culture for our fifteen-year-old heroes to reference. I'm not saying that you have to throw out snarky Ghostbusters jokes every few pages, Stroud, but at least give me something? What kind of music do Lucy and her friends listen to? Are there Reddit pages for ghost-hunting kids? What shows are they watching?

Another big issue: we get a new addition to the Lockwood & Co team when they hire an assistant to help with cases. Her name is Holly, and if you guessed that Lucy is immediately suspicious and jealous of her, you unfortunately guessed right. Lucy, to put it bluntly, is a total asshole in this book. She's constantly rude and dismissive to Holly, who is never anything but nice to her, and even Lucy's narration couldn't make me see the feud as anything but one-sided.

The whole thing is handled very badly for two reasons: first, I'm not saying that Lucy and Holly had to be besties from the moment they met, but "badass heroine who isn't like other girls" is a trope that needed to die twenty years ago, and I'm so mad at Stroud for using it. Lucy Carlisle has definitely uttered the phrase "I just get along better with guys, girls have so much drama" at some point in her life, and I hate her for it. The second reason the Holly plotline misfires is because Stroud's idea of showing us Lucy's dislike is to have her internally gripe, constantly, about how Holly sucks so much because she's so tidy and helpful and well-dressed and her skin is so nice and her hair always looks great and it's just like...Lucy. Babe. You aren't jealous of Holly, you have a crush on her. Sadly, Stroud doesn't even consider this possibility, choosing instead to feebly develop Lucy's dumb crush on Lockwood instead. Yawn. Give me ghost-hunting girlfriends who squabble about dirty socks left on the floor or give me nothing, Stroud!

Also Stroud pulls the same trick he pulled in The Whispering Skull where he seems to kill a character off, prompting me to think "This is upsetting, but it's also a bold storytelling move and I'll be interested to see how the series continues without this character" only to reveal that nope, they didn't die after all! And then I get disappointed because a character didn't die, which is always a weird feeling.]]> 4.36 2015 The Hollow Boy (Lockwood & Co., #3)
author: Jonathan Stroud
name: Madeline
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2017/08/01
date added: 2017/08/27
shelves: audiobook, kids-and-young-adult
review:
Looking back at my reviews for the first two books in the Lockwood & Co series, I learn that apparently the second book (The Whispering Skull) ended on a massive cliffhanger. But since there was so much time between me finishing the second book and starting the third, I completely forgot what the cliffhanger even was. If it got resolved in any satisfying manner in the beginning of The Hollow Boy, I didn't notice. So that's probably not a great sign.

We're at the third installation of what is at least a four-book series, and Jonathan Stroud is finally starting to deviate just a little bit from his established formula. The book still opens with a minor ghost-fighting mission that won't impact the plot in any way, and we still have a big blow-out ghost hunting scene in an appropriately dramatic setting, with the requisite "Wait! We had it wrong the whole time!" realization. But Stroud appears to be laying the groundwork for something bigger in a later book, teasing us with more information about the "Orpheus Society", hinting that one of the bigger ghost-hunting agencies is up to something nefarious, and also further developing Lucy's unusually strong psychic abilities. Even though this book didn't really blow me away, I'm still going to track down the next one in the series, if only to see how Stroud continues to develop this story.

Honestly, this book isn't bad, overall. There are some great action sequences (including a haunted house with a giant open stairwell that extends from the basement all the way to the attic, and a high-stakes chase scene at a parade - this series is just begging for a film adaptation, and I think it could also make a decent TV series), the ghosts and hauntings remain genuinely scary, and the dialogue is still clever and snarky as hell.

But I think it could have been so much better. Part of the book involves Lucy exploring and developing her ability to talk to ghosts, often by putting her own team at risk and having to learn lessons about keeping her friends safe despite her curiosity etc. I wanted Stroud to take this a little farther - have Lucy become more isolated and withdrawn, and explore how the Lockwood team would deal with one of their members going off the rails a little bit. There are hints here and there that Lucy is starting to lose sight of what's important, and also that Lockwood may not have the team's best interests in mind, but Stroud is either waiting for later books to develop those ideas, or he just couldn't be bothered.

The time/setting is still off-putting - everything feels really steampunk-y, to the point where I had to keep reminding myself that it was taking place in modern day. Stroud even gives us a definitive time period, when he has a character establish that the Victorian era was "over a century ago." Even with this indisputable fact, I remain incapable of picturing any of this happening anywhere other than Victorian or maybe pre-WWI England. Part of this is the little details - Lucy uses the word "chambermaid" once, and also mentions that a character is wearing "petticoats", and nobody ever uses a cellphone or computer. But it's also easy to picture the story happening in some kind of steampunk universe, because the world Stroud has built is entirely devoid of pop culture for our fifteen-year-old heroes to reference. I'm not saying that you have to throw out snarky Ghostbusters jokes every few pages, Stroud, but at least give me something? What kind of music do Lucy and her friends listen to? Are there Reddit pages for ghost-hunting kids? What shows are they watching?

Another big issue: we get a new addition to the Lockwood & Co team when they hire an assistant to help with cases. Her name is Holly, and if you guessed that Lucy is immediately suspicious and jealous of her, you unfortunately guessed right. Lucy, to put it bluntly, is a total asshole in this book. She's constantly rude and dismissive to Holly, who is never anything but nice to her, and even Lucy's narration couldn't make me see the feud as anything but one-sided.

The whole thing is handled very badly for two reasons: first, I'm not saying that Lucy and Holly had to be besties from the moment they met, but "badass heroine who isn't like other girls" is a trope that needed to die twenty years ago, and I'm so mad at Stroud for using it. Lucy Carlisle has definitely uttered the phrase "I just get along better with guys, girls have so much drama" at some point in her life, and I hate her for it. The second reason the Holly plotline misfires is because Stroud's idea of showing us Lucy's dislike is to have her internally gripe, constantly, about how Holly sucks so much because she's so tidy and helpful and well-dressed and her skin is so nice and her hair always looks great and it's just like...Lucy. Babe. You aren't jealous of Holly, you have a crush on her. Sadly, Stroud doesn't even consider this possibility, choosing instead to feebly develop Lucy's dumb crush on Lockwood instead. Yawn. Give me ghost-hunting girlfriends who squabble about dirty socks left on the floor or give me nothing, Stroud!

Also Stroud pulls the same trick he pulled in The Whispering Skull where he seems to kill a character off, prompting me to think "This is upsetting, but it's also a bold storytelling move and I'll be interested to see how the series continues without this character" only to reveal that nope, they didn't die after all! And then I get disappointed because a character didn't die, which is always a weird feeling.
]]> The Circle (The Circle, #1) 18302455 alternate cover for ISBN 9780385351393

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users� personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO.

Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public.

What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.]]> 493 Dave Eggers Madeline 2 ugh, audiobook The Circle is for you!

May Holland is a recent college graduate living sometime in the near future, when a company called the Circle has created a monopoly on all technology. The Circle has created TrueYou, a system that links a person's entire online presence - social media, email, bank accounts, etc - under one account and one name. Online anonymity is a thing of the past, and the entire world is connected by the Circle. May's friend is one of the top employees at the Circle, and through her influence, May manages to get a job at one of the world's most influential companies.

(sidebar: after Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood series, I was sort of disappointed that TrueYou wasn't spelled TruYoo, and didn't have any clever double meaning, like the companies and products she makes up in her series. Just in case you needed an indication of where Dave Eggers ranks on the list of speculative fiction authors.)

Dave Eggers spends a lot - and I mean a lot - of story space just showing us around the Circle campus and telling us all the cool stuff they have, to the point where it feels like the first 2/3 of the book is taking place within May's first week at work. We get introduced to the founders of the company (referred to as the three wise men, because of course they are), and May seems to spend more time going to company parties and increasing her social media presence instead of actually working. Because millennials, amirite guys! Meanwhile, a mysterious guy named Calden pops in and out of the narrative, and he has two purposes: to give us a semi-developed mystery to work on, since no one else at the Circle seems to know who he is and May can't find him anywhere in the company database (and frankly, I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to figure out that he's [spoilers removed]. His second purpose is to hook up with May and provide us with some truly uncomfortable sex scenes. May also has a sort-of romance with another programmer, and all I'll say about that is that he secretly films her giving him a handjob (and it's basically Louie CK bit) and then, when she finds out, refuses to delete it. May is mad at him for about three pages, and then they're back to hanging out like nothing's wrong.

I'm four paragraphs into this review and haven't even discussed May as a character. The simple fact is that there's really not much to say about May. She's 100% onboard with everything the Circle does from her first day, and the few objections she offers to their practices are feeble at best. She has a lot of scenes with one of the founders of the Circle, so he can patronizingly dismiss all of her concerns and offer up some of the worst pseudo-intelligent arguments I've ever heard - there's a scene where May goes kayaking and doesn't live-stream it on her social media feed, and the founder finds out about it and basically shames her for not sharing it with all her followers. He tells her that he has a son who's disabled and, I shit you not, tells her that by not sharing a video of her stupid kayaking trip, she's denying his poor wheelchair-bound son the chance to experience what he can never do in real life.

May's total acceptance of the Circle's creepy practices is supposed to unnerve us, and it does, but I just couldn't connect with it. I'm a millennial, for god's sake, and even on May's first day at the Circle, she was being shown around and a million alarm bells were going off in my head. But nothing seems off to May, and she hands over her privacy without a second thought. I think Dave Eggers wanted May's total conversion to Circle-think to be gradual, so the audience thinks it's okay at first, and then she slowly gives up more and more until it's too late. He's trying to live up to that line from The Handmaid's Tale, about how in a gradually-heating bathtub you'd boil yourself to death and never notice. In The Circle, May jumps headfirst into a boiling tub and Dave Eggers thinks it's believable.

(I realize that this is my second Atwood comparison so far - if you take one thing away from this review, it's that Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction makes The Circle look like a toddler's crayon drawing)

But the ending is the most disappointing thing. It felt like the entire book was building to something much bigger and more sinister, and I kept waiting, until the very last page, for the other shoe to drop. But it never really does, and there was never any secret, super-evil motive behind the Circle - just the usual, banal Facebook and Google style of evil, which is too realistic to be interesting.

Buried deep within this book is a well-written exploration of how people can be inducted into a cult-like mentality without even realizing it, and at its best, The Circle reads like an origin story for all those teenage dystopia worlds - if you've ever wondered how a society like we see in The Hunger Games or Divergent could ever have happened, The Circle shows you exactly how it could have seemed like a good idea at the beginning. But overall, those good ideas and concepts are just drowned under unlikeable characters, absurd plot points, and endless smug preaching about the evils of technology.

(Reviewer's note: I listened to this as an audiobook, and hated the reader for two reasons - first, they have a man doing the reading, even though the book is told from a woman's perspective; and also the multi-cultural staff of the Circle means the reader has to do a lot of accents, and they're...not great. So the poor listening experience might have made me dislike this book a little bit more than it deserved. Only a little bit, though.)]]> 3.41 2013 The Circle (The Circle, #1)
author: Dave Eggers
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2017/04/01
date added: 2017/07/04
shelves: ugh, audiobook
review:
If I had to come up with a one-sentence summary for this book, it would be this: if you've ever read one of those thinkpieces written by a smug baby boomer explaining why millinials are the worst and thought, man, I wish I had five hundred pages of this, then The Circle is for you!

May Holland is a recent college graduate living sometime in the near future, when a company called the Circle has created a monopoly on all technology. The Circle has created TrueYou, a system that links a person's entire online presence - social media, email, bank accounts, etc - under one account and one name. Online anonymity is a thing of the past, and the entire world is connected by the Circle. May's friend is one of the top employees at the Circle, and through her influence, May manages to get a job at one of the world's most influential companies.

(sidebar: after Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood series, I was sort of disappointed that TrueYou wasn't spelled TruYoo, and didn't have any clever double meaning, like the companies and products she makes up in her series. Just in case you needed an indication of where Dave Eggers ranks on the list of speculative fiction authors.)

Dave Eggers spends a lot - and I mean a lot - of story space just showing us around the Circle campus and telling us all the cool stuff they have, to the point where it feels like the first 2/3 of the book is taking place within May's first week at work. We get introduced to the founders of the company (referred to as the three wise men, because of course they are), and May seems to spend more time going to company parties and increasing her social media presence instead of actually working. Because millennials, amirite guys! Meanwhile, a mysterious guy named Calden pops in and out of the narrative, and he has two purposes: to give us a semi-developed mystery to work on, since no one else at the Circle seems to know who he is and May can't find him anywhere in the company database (and frankly, I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to figure out that he's [spoilers removed]. His second purpose is to hook up with May and provide us with some truly uncomfortable sex scenes. May also has a sort-of romance with another programmer, and all I'll say about that is that he secretly films her giving him a handjob (and it's basically Louie CK bit) and then, when she finds out, refuses to delete it. May is mad at him for about three pages, and then they're back to hanging out like nothing's wrong.

I'm four paragraphs into this review and haven't even discussed May as a character. The simple fact is that there's really not much to say about May. She's 100% onboard with everything the Circle does from her first day, and the few objections she offers to their practices are feeble at best. She has a lot of scenes with one of the founders of the Circle, so he can patronizingly dismiss all of her concerns and offer up some of the worst pseudo-intelligent arguments I've ever heard - there's a scene where May goes kayaking and doesn't live-stream it on her social media feed, and the founder finds out about it and basically shames her for not sharing it with all her followers. He tells her that he has a son who's disabled and, I shit you not, tells her that by not sharing a video of her stupid kayaking trip, she's denying his poor wheelchair-bound son the chance to experience what he can never do in real life.

May's total acceptance of the Circle's creepy practices is supposed to unnerve us, and it does, but I just couldn't connect with it. I'm a millennial, for god's sake, and even on May's first day at the Circle, she was being shown around and a million alarm bells were going off in my head. But nothing seems off to May, and she hands over her privacy without a second thought. I think Dave Eggers wanted May's total conversion to Circle-think to be gradual, so the audience thinks it's okay at first, and then she slowly gives up more and more until it's too late. He's trying to live up to that line from The Handmaid's Tale, about how in a gradually-heating bathtub you'd boil yourself to death and never notice. In The Circle, May jumps headfirst into a boiling tub and Dave Eggers thinks it's believable.

(I realize that this is my second Atwood comparison so far - if you take one thing away from this review, it's that Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction makes The Circle look like a toddler's crayon drawing)

But the ending is the most disappointing thing. It felt like the entire book was building to something much bigger and more sinister, and I kept waiting, until the very last page, for the other shoe to drop. But it never really does, and there was never any secret, super-evil motive behind the Circle - just the usual, banal Facebook and Google style of evil, which is too realistic to be interesting.

Buried deep within this book is a well-written exploration of how people can be inducted into a cult-like mentality without even realizing it, and at its best, The Circle reads like an origin story for all those teenage dystopia worlds - if you've ever wondered how a society like we see in The Hunger Games or Divergent could ever have happened, The Circle shows you exactly how it could have seemed like a good idea at the beginning. But overall, those good ideas and concepts are just drowned under unlikeable characters, absurd plot points, and endless smug preaching about the evils of technology.

(Reviewer's note: I listened to this as an audiobook, and hated the reader for two reasons - first, they have a man doing the reading, even though the book is told from a woman's perspective; and also the multi-cultural staff of the Circle means the reader has to do a lot of accents, and they're...not great. So the poor listening experience might have made me dislike this book a little bit more than it deserved. Only a little bit, though.)
]]> <![CDATA[In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin]]> 9938498
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.]]> 448 Erik Larson 0307408841 Madeline 4 history-nonfiction, audiobook In the Garden of Beasts was one of the first books I downloaded, and I listened to it in February of 2017.

Listening to a book detailing the slow rise of a fascist dictarship in 1930's Germany while living in the early days of the Trump presidency was...an experience. I wish I'd had a physical copy of the book with me so I could mark quotations, because every few pages I came across a line that gave me actual chills, it was so resonant and familiar. One line that struck me the most: Larson explains that even though Hitler and his associates dialed back their extremist rhetoric in the weeks immediately following Hitler's election as chancellor, by then the majority of the country had already been swept up in a wave of hatred and violence, and there was no stopping it.

So, yeah. It's an illuminating book, to say the least, but listening to it was the opposite of relaxing. "Panic sweat-inducing" is how I'd phrase it.

Like he did with Devil in the White City, Larson explores a broad topic by narrowing his focus on a handful of influencial people. However, while Devil could never quite make a convincing connection between murdered HH Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair, In the Garden of Beasts is much more cohesive and focused.

Our guides into the early days of Nazi Germany are the Dodd family, who moved to Berlin in 1933 when William Dodd, a professor from Chicago, was appointed as the American ambassador to Germany. He brought along his wife and their two adult children, Bill and Martha, and the family found themselves in the middle of a new and frightening government.

Dodd and his daughter Martha get most of Larson's attention in this book (so much attention, in fact, that Dodd's son Bill is almost never mentioned at all, and I have no idea how he kept himself occupied when the family was living in Berlin). Dodd, obviously, is our eye into the politics of the time, and I liked that Larson never let Dodd, or the United States, off the hook when discussing America's complacency in the face of Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism was just as rampant in the United States as it was in Germany, and Martha Dodd even admitted in her memoirs that the German government's treatment of Jews didn't bother her or her family very much at the time, because "we didn't really like Jews."

For much of book, William Dodd doesn't do very much, and mostly just acts as a witness to current events without influencing them. Gradually, he becomes aware that something very, very bad is happening in Germany, and his efforts to warn the US government about Hitler are as tragic as they are futile.

Martha Dodd kept herself pretty busy in Berlin while her father was stationed there, and the book chronicles her friendships and relationships with various key players in the SS. She also had a serious boyfriend who was a Russian Soviet, and apparently he was assigned to recruit her as a spy for the Soviets. Sadly, nothing ever comes of this. Martha, as Larson presents her, is a complicated person who didn't really notice or care what was going on around her, and continued happily skipping around Berlin with her Nazi boyfriends. I suppose the goal here was to make the readers see that these were all human beings, and not evil cartoon monsters - Larson does his best to make us understand that most of the people working for Hitler's regime were normal people with good intentions, who genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing. Maybe if I had read this book a few years ago, I would have been more sympathetic to this viewpoint.

But that's not the world we're living in right now, is it? So in conclusion, thank you, Erik Larson, for trying to make me understand that the people responsible for Hitler's rise to power were ordinary people who got swept up into something they didn't realize was wrong until it was too late. I get it, I do. But also, fuck the Nazis. ]]> 3.87 2011 In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
author: Erik Larson
name: Madeline
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2017/02/01
date added: 2017/05/10
shelves: history-nonfiction, audiobook
review:
A few months ago, I finally figured out how to borrow audiobooks from the library and listen to them on my phone, which has been great for both my commute and my to-read list (lately I don't seem to have the time or inclination to sit down and read books for long periods of time, so this is helping me feel less useless). Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts was one of the first books I downloaded, and I listened to it in February of 2017.

Listening to a book detailing the slow rise of a fascist dictarship in 1930's Germany while living in the early days of the Trump presidency was...an experience. I wish I'd had a physical copy of the book with me so I could mark quotations, because every few pages I came across a line that gave me actual chills, it was so resonant and familiar. One line that struck me the most: Larson explains that even though Hitler and his associates dialed back their extremist rhetoric in the weeks immediately following Hitler's election as chancellor, by then the majority of the country had already been swept up in a wave of hatred and violence, and there was no stopping it.

So, yeah. It's an illuminating book, to say the least, but listening to it was the opposite of relaxing. "Panic sweat-inducing" is how I'd phrase it.

Like he did with Devil in the White City, Larson explores a broad topic by narrowing his focus on a handful of influencial people. However, while Devil could never quite make a convincing connection between murdered HH Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair, In the Garden of Beasts is much more cohesive and focused.

Our guides into the early days of Nazi Germany are the Dodd family, who moved to Berlin in 1933 when William Dodd, a professor from Chicago, was appointed as the American ambassador to Germany. He brought along his wife and their two adult children, Bill and Martha, and the family found themselves in the middle of a new and frightening government.

Dodd and his daughter Martha get most of Larson's attention in this book (so much attention, in fact, that Dodd's son Bill is almost never mentioned at all, and I have no idea how he kept himself occupied when the family was living in Berlin). Dodd, obviously, is our eye into the politics of the time, and I liked that Larson never let Dodd, or the United States, off the hook when discussing America's complacency in the face of Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism was just as rampant in the United States as it was in Germany, and Martha Dodd even admitted in her memoirs that the German government's treatment of Jews didn't bother her or her family very much at the time, because "we didn't really like Jews."

For much of book, William Dodd doesn't do very much, and mostly just acts as a witness to current events without influencing them. Gradually, he becomes aware that something very, very bad is happening in Germany, and his efforts to warn the US government about Hitler are as tragic as they are futile.

Martha Dodd kept herself pretty busy in Berlin while her father was stationed there, and the book chronicles her friendships and relationships with various key players in the SS. She also had a serious boyfriend who was a Russian Soviet, and apparently he was assigned to recruit her as a spy for the Soviets. Sadly, nothing ever comes of this. Martha, as Larson presents her, is a complicated person who didn't really notice or care what was going on around her, and continued happily skipping around Berlin with her Nazi boyfriends. I suppose the goal here was to make the readers see that these were all human beings, and not evil cartoon monsters - Larson does his best to make us understand that most of the people working for Hitler's regime were normal people with good intentions, who genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing. Maybe if I had read this book a few years ago, I would have been more sympathetic to this viewpoint.

But that's not the world we're living in right now, is it? So in conclusion, thank you, Erik Larson, for trying to make me understand that the people responsible for Hitler's rise to power were ordinary people who got swept up into something they didn't realize was wrong until it was too late. I get it, I do. But also, fuck the Nazis.
]]>