More than a Picture Book

The Princess's Blankets, written by Carol Ann Duffy and illustrated by Catherine Hyde, is the only book that I've ever bought simply for the pictures. There's not much more to say. The story is a throwback to classic fairy tales. Written with an almost poetic sense of rhythm, it details the life of a princess who has been cold her entire life. Try as she (and her entire kingdom) might, she cannot be warm. Then a stranger with "hard, gray eyes like polished stones" comes to the kingdom and gives the princess rather peculiar blankets in an attempt to make her warm.

While I appreciate the story and its surprising nuances, the real pleasure of this book is in the illustrations. They are simply beautiful. This is the sort of art that you want to frame and hang in your living room. It's a book very, very worth purchasing just for the sake of taking long looks at the pictures. And that isn't something I can say about many books.

Deafening

Deafening by Frances Itani is one of the better novels I have read in a long while. Although not particularly mind-blowing, it's written with a quiet thoughtfulness and an understated loveliness that (I think) is rather rare in contemporary fiction.

Deafening--set in World War I era Canada--is the story of several people, but largely it is about Grania, a young deaf woman who loses her hearing at the age of five. The novel begins directly after her loss of hearing, and follows her through years of struggling to adapt to a now-silent world. She must learn how to communicate with those around her. She must learn how to meaningfully engage the world when she is cut off from nearly all spoken language. Itani artfully explores themes of communication, the nature of language, and mostly the nature of silence.

About halfway through the novel, Jim--Grania's (hearing) fiance--appears on the scene. This is where Itani's focus seems to shift, and the novel makes a somewhat strange digression. Shortly after their marriage, Jim enters the war as a stretcher bearer, which launches the novel into entirely different thematic territory: the war and its losses and ramifications. Some of the themes--namely those of language and silence--continue into the latter half of the novel, but for the most part its entire focus shifts. Where before we'd been following Grania and her experiences as a deaf woman, halfway through the novel we begin to follow Jim through his experiences as a stretcher bearer. And while Itani's writing is good as ever, and Jim's character is sympathetic, the novel seems to lose something. I felt as though I could've been reading any other war novel (with the notable exception that Jim is a stretcher bearer and not a soldier). The originality of the premise and the ideas implicit within it peter out as the war totally takes over the plot.

Don't get me wrong, I find "war novels" fascinating when they thoughtfully explore the phenomenon of war (see The Things They Carried, The Killer Angels, etc.), and Itani does, to some degree, pose interesting questions about the impact of war on the individual, and the way in which the individual might cope (which ties in nicely with the theme of internal silence). But, her exploration of war wasn't insightful enough to make me forget the loose, loose threads from the first half of the novel. The shift in focus is too abrupt, and I was left wanting better development of both Grania, Jim, and their relationship in general.

The characters of the novel are compelling, and the writing is lovely, which is its saving grace. It's worth reading (probably even worth rereading), but it's a bit incohesive.

"Magic is born in death."

Okay, I openly admit that I bought Mira, Mirror by Mette Ivie Harrison solely on the name and art. I’m a fan of lovely hand drawn book covers and retelling of classic fairy tales. Who isn’t?!* Though, for sooth, Snow White is not one of my favorites.

The story is very German/Brother’s Grimm-ish. A bit gruesome at time, filled with dark forests and grim peasant villages. A true telling of fairy tales has to be a bit gruesome to stay canon. Especially the Snow White one. It was vaguely disturbing as a Disney cartoon. Really? Cut out Snow White’s heart?! Really?! What was she doing? What, what was she doing??

But this story isn’t about the beauteous red lipped wonder. It’s about two sisters, both apprentices to a witch. One is destined to be a wicked queen, and the other to be her instrument: Mira Mirror. Even someone with the gentlest personality can be tainted by evil if they come in contact with it for hundreds of years. How can you redeem yourself?

I really enjoyed this story for the most part. Especially the gradual change in all of the characters. It has one or two scenes of disturbing violence, but you mostly expect it. The story style is a bit choppy, seen through the eyes of a mirror being toted around by a teenage girl. But overall I’d give it a 7/8 out of ten.

A must for lovers of fairy tales.

*Ummm...losers is the correct answer to that.

Louisa May Alcott: Uplifting Writer of Children's Books or Lurid Romance Author?

She would be both, actually. As seen in her autobiographical work, Little Women, Alcott wrote passionate stories for monthly publication in magazines.

"It comes as a shock to discover that Louisa May Alcott disdained the moral standards she developed in her children's books and was , in fact, a strikingly independent, strong willed, and ambitious woman who held her public and private lives in such separate spheres that the dichotomy was irreconcilable. In her private persona, Alcott allowed herself the freedom to write as she wished, and her anonymously and pseudonymously published works reveal a women whose interests and aspirations far overstepped the bounds of Victorian propriety"

-Octavia Davis, from the "Introduction" to A Modern Mephistopheles

One such book that she wrote was rejected by the likes of "The Weekly Volcano" and lurked around personal libraries until it was published in 1995.

A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott

"I tell you, I cannot bear it! I shall do something desperate if this life is not changed soon. It gets worse and worse, and I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom."

So begins the adventures of our protagonist, Rosamond Vivian, the granddaughter of a wealthy mysterious man who lives on an unnamed island. This statement will continue to haunt the rest of the book, and is a giant foreshadow, but that's the kind of book this is.

Rosamond is soon swept away by an older man. She spends a year of blissful ignorance with him, when suddenly *lightening crash* he is revealed a cad! She, being of upstanding will and impeccable moral character, flees for the safety of her soul. A chase ensues through the rest of the story which keeps you on the edge of your seat. (Cliche phrase aside, it really is quite suspenseful.)

I give this book eight out of ten awesome-read points, and would recommend it to you even if you were not of the Little Women persuasion. You really would never be able to put the two books together. This book deals with sex, suicide, murder, stalking... All the dark elements that make people morbidly interested in things. Yet, the story has enough light elements in it that you don't leave manically depressed.

It's as Victorian thriller that you could probably give the label pulp fiction to, but the writing is good enough that you could compare bits of it to Jane Eyre. Give it a read.

Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes With Which to Sorrow It.

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the reader is confronted with an alien world. Post-Apocalyptic and utterly devastated, the world as we know it is gone. The new world is hostile, some might say fallen -- it is a place veiled, always, in the pall of ash and dirt, where no plants or animals can even hope to live, and the human population fares little better. Those who haven't killed themselves turn to their only other viable option -- cannibalism. In a world where no one is friend and every solitary day is a struggle for survival, what do morals--love thy number, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not eat thy neighbor's face--even mean?

Turns out, a lot -- at least to the nameless narrator and his son. The book follows the nameless man and his child as they try to survive another day in a world that doesn't bear survival. Through their struggles to find food, shelter, and ever more ingenuous ways to avoid being captured and eaten by other survivors, they are faced with questions that seem unanswerable: are there things more important than survival? What are they? And in a world like this, does any of it matter?

He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

Yet the man and the boy come to find that, perhaps, it is those fragile beliefs that keep them human, keep them utterly different from the cannibals that have thrown all aside in favor of physical survival. Perhaps the world they are in isn't worth their struggle, but those other things are.

McCarthy's writing is both rich and sparse: passages of breathtaking, metaphorical prose are integrated and juxtaposed with simple, terse description of actions and events. Despite the radical premise of the story, the action-arc isn't explosive -- it's basic, realistic (whatever that means in a place like that) descriptions of every day actions necessary for survival.

What I found remarkable about the book was that despite its radical, nearly unimaginable setting, it still forced me to think about the same questions the narrator posed. Those aren't questions purely reserved for a post-Apocalyptic world, they are for the here, now, and everyday. There were certainly sections in the story that made me cringe and turned my stomach (hi, People Pantry?), sections that felt slightly gratuitous in their shock-value, so I would definitely advise caution for the weak of stomach. But overall I recommend it as a really interesting read with some beautiful writing and thought-provoking questions.

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

Fun Home: A Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel is graphic -- literally. Probably one of the only graphic novels I've ever read that I would consider literature, it's the autobiography of a young woman--Alison Bechdel--viewing her childhood through the lens of adult hindsight. Through a combination of text and images, Bechdel examines the shape of her life. The richness of her narrative and the images she chooses to pair with it almost tell parallel stories -- when the text is not reinforcing the pictures, or vice versa, it almost seems that there are two separate narratives, narrowing down to the same focus. One of the things that surprised me the most about this novel was the depth of Bechdel's prose, and the plethora of literary references that made me feel as unread as a five year old.

Fun Home is fairly daring in content and style. Bechdel doesn't spare details to save the reader comfort. That's not what she's concerned with. She's telling her story as honestly as she can, and she's doing it, it seems, for more than the sake of telling a story -- it's a mode of clarification, a way of working through the tangles of her past that will allow her to follow individual threads, and reach an understanding that has thus far alluded her. One of those threads is Bruce Bechdel -- the husband, the father, the homosexual man repressing his sexuality for the sake of a socially acceptable image, and the man who, eventually, ends his own life. Bruce Bechdel, as Alison puts it, is a master of artifice. Stoic, aloof, and an aesthete to the highest degree, he loves to shape, mold, and construct things to make them beautiful -- or, rather, perfect. This drive to create perfection doesn't end at molding inanimate objects, however. He does it to his family as well. There is a notable gap between Bruce and the rest of the family, and yet he is the force that directs their lives, for better or worse.

Another thread that Alison follows through the novel is the development of her own sexuality, and the ways in which her father may have prefigured that, too. Alison's gender confusion, sexual discovery, and life as a lesbian woman in a family and culture that is repressive--in more ways than one--is told (and shown) in a genuine and understated way. She does not deal in cliches or melodramatics. Honesty and self-clarification are her purpose.

I would highly recommend this, even to those who might not be particularly interested in the self-discovery of a lesbian woman. I had my own set of reservations in starting it, but found, the further I read, that I very much enjoyed and, in some ways, connected with Bechdel's voice. The style most certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea (though I highly enjoyed the novelty of it), but Bechdel is a skilled raconteur, and her story is worth reading. To me, it wasn't really about politics -- it got right down to the nitty gritty of human experience. Whatever one's opinion on homosexuality may be (positive, negative, or somewhere in between), it can only be beneficial to try to understand another's life through their eyes, respectfully and sympathetically.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine the impact of a novel with both.

Edward Cullen Can Eat My Shorts

Twilight, oh Twilight. What is there to say about this series?

I had promised a good friend of mine that I would read the first book. We had a deal -- if I read Twilight, then she would have to read Little Women. I was feeling pretty damn sneaky, considering Twilight is a teen book I could probably get through in a day, and Little Women is a sizable novel that, in my opinion, is a pure classic. So I borrowed the book from my friend, sat down one Saturday afternoon, and began reading.

I made it through about eight chapters before I had to put it aside. I haven't picked it up since. And I'm sitting here, trying to think of what I could possibly say that hasn't been said already -- the quality of Stephanie Meyer's writing (poor), the plot line (dull), the characters (duller than the plot) -- and I've decided that someone else has said it better than I possibly could. For those who have any sort of Twilight-curiosity, THIS is pretty much all you need to know about the series.

Enjoy the review, it sure gave me a laugh.