veryshortbookreviews-blog

[veryshortbookreviews-blog]

‘Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town’ by Jon Krakauer 18/52

I hope that this book attracts a large readership - and given that the author is Jon Krakauer it no doubt will - because I believe it has the power to change minds. 

Krakauer provides the reader with detailed first person accounts from rape survivors, examining the crime itself and the devastating and lasting impact it has on their lives. By focusing on one small college town - not coincidentally, a town whose identity and pride is in large part drawn from the success of its college football team - he is able to zero in on the myriad ways our society and the criminal justice system serves victims of rape very poorly, too often effectively giving a free pass to men who rape. 

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‘Dare Me’ by Megan Abbott 17/52

Set in the claustrophobic world of a high school cheerleading team, the atmosphere is taut and tense. We know in the first pages that something terrible has taken place but have to wait until almost the end to find out the who, what and why. This is a fast, fun and compulsive read.

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‘Family Life’ by Akhil Sharma 16/52

‘Family Life’, recent winner of the Folio Prize, is the tender story of one immigrant Indian family whose dream of a better American life for their children is destroyed by a freak accident. Sharma skillfully documents the fallout from the accident on all members of the family, injecting both humor and compassion into a story that could easily have been overwhelmingly bleak. A must read.

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‘The Half Brother’ by Holly LeCraw 15/52

Set in a New England boarding school, this is a love story that is shaped by the complicated relationships and intertwined histories of two sets of families, including but not limited to the relationship between the narrator Charlie and his half-brother Nicky. Surprisingly, perhaps the most impressive portion of the novel for me was the drawn out death scene that occurs over a period of days towards the end. A gripping read whose atmosphere is best described as southern gothic.

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‘Hausfrau’ by Jill Alexander Essbaum 14/52

An American expat in Switzerland. A very unhappy expat named Anna (and yes, that name is of significance), wife, mother and serial adulterer who lies not only to her husband but also to her psychoanalyst. Once I got to the second half of this novel I did not look up. A gripping, and at times gut wrenching, read. 

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‘The End of Days’ by Jenny Erpendeck 13/52

A gorgeous novel whose central conceit will be familiar to readers of Kate Atkinson’s ‘Life After Life’:

“If she’d gone downstairs just five minutes later, she’d have missed the entrance to the underworld, which would have trundled on its way, offering its open hole to someone else instead; or if she’d taken that step with her right foot instead of her left, she wouldn’t have lost her footing; or if she’d been thinking not about this and that but about that and this, she’d have seen the steps instead of not seeing them.”

The novel begins with a grieving mother “everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up”; and ends with a grieving son: “he will weep bitterly as he has never wept before, and still, as his nose runs and he swallows his own tears, he will ask himself whether these strange sounds and spasms are really all that humankind has been given to mourn with.”

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, the reader follows one woman’s life (lives) across 20th century Eastern Europe. Highly recommended.

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‘All My Puny Sorrows’ by Miriam Toews 12/52

Now that I have finished ‘All My Puny Sorrows’ I will be tracking down everything Miriam Toews has written and goes on to write. The novel is darkly comic, political and so very smart; it made me snort with laughter far more often than one would expect from a novel whose focus is the mission of one sister to successfully commit suicide, told from the point of view of the other sister, the one whose job it is to stop her.

Read it now, thank me later.

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'The Miniaturist' by Jessie Burton 11/52

'The Miniaturist', the breakout debut novel by London actor and now author Jessie Burton, kept me engaged until the end. Focused on the household of Johannes Brandt, as experienced by his new wife Nella - who soon demonstrates that there is far more to her than the naive country girl she is presumed to be - Burton provides readers with not only a rich story full of plot twists and intrigue about one particular family, but also a snapshot into the peculiarities of life in 17th century Amsterdam.

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'Olive Kitteridge' by Elizabeth Strout 10/52

'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece. It is that simple. 

Strout writes about the complex inner-lives of 'ordinary' people with extraordinary insight and empathy but not a hint of sentimentality.

The subject of this novel, told as a series of connected stories, is best summed up by Olive herself:

"Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became." 

It is no surprise that Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for this, her finest work to date, or that it has been made into an acclaimed HBO mini-series. I have yet to see the series, but for those who have, I recommend that you also read the book.

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'Barracuda' by Christos Tsiolkas 9/52

With the arrival of ‘The Slap’ on American television screens this year now seems like a good time to highlight the writing of Christos Tsiolkas, Australian author of the excellent novel on which the miniseries is based. Like ‘The Slap’, ‘Barracuda’ is based in Melbourne and explores issues of class, race, national identity, masculinity and sexuality all while telling a compelling - and often harrowing - story. Dan/ny Kelly, Greek-Scots-Irish and working class, is a champion swimmer who wins a scholarship spot at an elite private boys school. He is desperate to prove himself in this alien world and destined to remain an outsider. The novel goes back and forth in time and place, revealing from the start that the promise of Danny is never fulfilled and eventually unveiling the extent of his downfall. Despite warnings that this was a novel without likable characters, I found myself caring deeply about the fate of the troubled (and very human) protagonist of ‘Barracuda’. Go read it!

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'Vanessa and Her Sister' by Priya Parmar 8/52

The Vanessa of the title is Vanessa Bell, talented artist in her own right and sister to Virginia Woolf. Parmar recreates the world of the Bloomsbury Group through the fictional diary entries of Vanessa, along with letters (predominantly between Lytton Strachey and Virginia Stephens eventual husband) and telegrams. The cast of characters is large and it took me awhile to wrap my head around - I was heavily reliant on the handy guide at the front - but once I did, I found myself completely immersed in the personal lives and relationships between some of the greatest intellectuals and artists of this (or any) time. 

Parmar succeeds brilliantly in her characterization of Vanessa, and paints a less than flattering picture of the always interesting and brilliant but also demanding, possessive and selfish Virginia. This is a fictional work but, built as it is on in-depth research, it has the ring of truth. Highly recommended. 

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'The Goldfinch' by Donna Tartt 7/52

There has already been so much written about this book and such divided opinion that I approached The Goldfinch with some trepidation. And now that I have made it to the end, all 771 pages, I am happy to report that I loved it.

[veryshortbookreviews-blog]

'The Goldfinch' by Donna Tartt 7/52

There has already been so much written about this book and such divided opinion that I approached The Goldfinch with some trepidation. And now that I have made it to the end, all 771 pages, I am happy to report that I loved it.

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'We the Animals' by Justin Torres 6/52

Three brothers who acted as one, being raised by their often brutal Puerto Rican father and dysfunctional American mother "this Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth, those mornings when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet". Torres' writing is fierce, urgent, poetic; he perfectly captures the voice and perspective of the youngest brother who by the end will no longer be one of three. 

At 94 pages this is a fast read that left me wanting more from this talented young writer.

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'The Rosie Project' by Graeme Simsion 5/52

It is impossible not to be charmed by The Rosie Project, but even as I found myself racing to the end, cheering on the unlikely romantic lead, I was irritated by aspects of the story (and possibly even irritated by my irritation because this was a book that I really just wanted to enjoy). The main character, Don Tillman, is a professor of genetics with a clear cut case of Aspergers. And while it was wonderful to see Aspergers painted in a positive light, to me Don Tillman felt like a bit of a caricature, a composite of amusing traits that we associate with spectrum disorders (including genius, an obsession with rigid routines and scheduling, and in Don’s case ‘health’ which meant we got a summation of every character’s BMI status *yawn*). I was also not in love with what I sensed was the authors attitude towards the (no doubt humourless) feminists that populate academia. 

Perhaps I was expecting too much from what other reviewers have categorized as a rom-com. Will I read the sequel? Quite possibly. And watch the movie? Probably. Did I enjoy the book? Yes, but with reservations.  

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'Wild' by Cheryl Strayed 4/52

Wild is a memoir about family, loss and regeneration as much as it is an account of one woman's incredible journey - for which she is woefully unprepared - along the Pacific Northwest Trail. The memoir begins with the death of Strayed's mother and subsequent unravelling; we then follow Strayed - literally step by step - as she takes on the incredible physical and mental challenge of what is an epic solo hike. The writing is gorgeous and more than once I found myself on the edge of my admittedly very comfortable seat. Strayed is unflinchingly honest and the insights that she gains into her own psyche and life choices are hard won.  

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'Station Eleven' by Emily St. John Mandel 3/52

Reading Station Eleven and California (see previous post) back to back was interesting, both for their differences and similarities. Both envision a post-apocalyptic world where all forms of government have broken down - along with electricity and *gasp* the internet - and in both we look on as our protagonists attempt to find meaning beyond mere survival, although survival alone in these circumstances seems miraculous if not entirely desirable. Station Eleven is intricately and meticulously plotted, moving back and forth between the time before and the time after a flu pandemic that has wiped out 99% of the population. We follow several characters and story arcs that are impressively tied together by the end, and St. John Mandel succeeds in making the reader care deeply about the fate of not only her characters but the brutal, strange and, at times,  surprisingly beautiful world she has created. Station Eleven is a book I predict will make it into my Top 10 reads of 2015, a bold call to make during the first week of January.