The Burning Air by Erin Kelly: Read This If

Hello, dear readers, it's been some weeks since my last post. I finished The Burning Air by Erin Kelly some weeks ago, and just haven't been able to disseminate my thoughts on the novel adequately. The novel certainly builds suspense with a slow, steadily growing heat. It grows on the reader in the same way - what seems like a reluctant, meandering plot jumps into focus after a change in perspective. The characters are all normal, average English people who happen to cross paths with a boy who anything but normal or average, and who refuses to accept his shortcomings.

This is not a formulaic story arch. The MacBrides, the central family in the story, are actually the flattest characters of the bunch - it's the villains of the story that have a fair amount of life to them, to the point that you might find yourself rooting both for and against the main scoundrel at the same time - though in the end, you will definitely pick a side. His revenge plotting is so all-consuming that he cannot see anything beyond its realization. That alone lends the novel its most disturbing quality.

The Burning Air was a different sort of thriller for me - its pacing was much slower than the Tana French novels I managed to fly through in the earlier part of this year. It's a gradual build, but its psychological mind games and its haunting, creepy atmosphere is sure to stick with you long after you fini

You should pick up The Burning Air if:

• You like seeing your story from the perspective of the villain. 
• You crave psychological suspense in your novels. 
• Your life has just seemed too sunny and happy lately, and you need some creepiness to shake it up. 
• You can't get the song Private Eyes out of your head. (Ha! NOW you can't! You're welcome.)

You should skip this if: 

• You just had a child and might be suffering from post partum depression. You're probably not reading much at all if that's the case, so I'm not too worried.
• You are prone to anxiety and paranoia and already find most people creepy. This will just feed al
• You are in the market for a light read akin to Bridget Jones Diary (I'd suggest Wife 22 or Domestic Violets to satisfy such a mood). 
• You're looking for a more traditional fast-paced mystery.

*I received this book from the Penguin Viking in exchange for my honest review.

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma: Read This If

Kristopher Jansma's debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, is anything but unchangeable. The chameleonic narrator is about as unreliable and changeable as they come, or, at least, that's what he'd have you believe. He insists that he is a liar, a teller of tall tales, and someone other than himself. He'll never tell you his *real* name (or will he), or the names of his trio of friends - which keep changing from one chapter or story within a story to the next. He seemingly seamlessly (say that ten times fast) slides in and out of various characters, from student to writer to journalism professor to plagiarizer for hire to editor, but always he is a writer, or he would be if only he could write something he recognizes as real, and good, and true. Although, he does believe there is an art to - and a hunger for - lying:

The truth is that I actually have the greatest respect for those fantastic liars. Someday I'd like to teach a class entirely about them. "Late Great American Fakes." My humble thesis will be that America no longer desires truth, only the reasonable facsimile thereof. Like battered lovers, we're willing to settle. Our sense of values still holds us to dismiss that which we know, outright, to be blatant lies, but we avoid the truth with equal intensity. We wish to remain in the gray interregnum of half believe, when at all possible. 

Of course, as he later admits, most of his lying is really to himself, and he wonders how much he can change, and how much he has changed, if at all. He muses about such capabilities when he comes across the son of his former lover, his to-date lifelong obsession. The boy is the same age as the narrator when he wrote - and lost - his first book.

Someday he'll see that he can't have one without the other. He can't know he is the same unless everything around him has changed. It's like black spots on black fur - you can't see them, but they're there, all the same.  

He'll think he's moving in zigzags, getting anywhere but where he meant to go. But there are edges to the board, and someday he will reach one, and it is only then that life will place a true crown onto his head. It's only then that he'll be able to turn around and see for the first time a glorious path back from where he came. 

The leopard and chess motifs pepper the novel, and this quote nicely brings them all together.

I'd definitely recommend reading this if:

• You enjoy contemporary novels that play with form. 
• You don't mind it when your narrators might be lying to you. 
• You covet explorations of the hazy lines between perception, truth, fiction, and lies. 
• Your current theme song could be "You Can't Always Get What You Want." 

Don't read this if: 

• You are easily confused and believe everything the media tells you.
• You like your plots and characters to be pretty straight-forward. 
• You don't like novels that make you think about stuff.
• You love How I Met Your Mother and hate Mad Men.

A little fun bit from Viking Penguin: pictures and metions of the book in instagram, twitter and the like with the hashtag #leopardspotting. It's silly book fun! My editions:

You can see Mr. Jansma's own instagram here.

*I received this book in exchange for my honest review from NetGalley courtesy of Viking Penguin.

Nothing But Flowers

"Botanical Garden" by Lori Nix

Last week I mentioned my ever growing dystoparanoid tendencies  and posted a lovely picture of a dilapidated library diorama by Lori Nix. The above, from the same gallery of photographs, was another of my favorites, one that easily brings to mind the Talking Heads song "Nothing But Flowers" (embedded below for your listening pleasure).

For the record, dear totalitarian overlords of the near future, I'm mostly okay with the sort of dystopia (utopia? eye of the beholder, I'm sure) lamented in the song, though winter probably would  beg me to differ, unless I turned out to have some sort of mad tepee-iglooing skills (unlikely). And as long as there are still books and stuff. (Also sounds unlikely.) Never mind then. As you were.

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight: Read this if

Well, that was something of an unputdownable. Reconstructing Amelia's premise may be one you'd want to keep at arm's length (busy, successful attorney mom whose teenage daughter takes a deadly fall off the roof of her fancy private school under mysterious circumstances), but once you start reading Kimberly McCreight's debut novel (but not her first!), you might not be able to do much else until you finish.

Kate Baron is your typical (but not stereotypical) high-powered, workaholic single mom, trying to juggle job responsibilities with parenting Amelia, an athletic, nerdy teenager not so popular with the cool kids. Because of her mom's job, Amelia is left to fend for herself much of the time, and Kate, like most parents, feels incredibly guilty about the time she doesn't have for her daughter and has very little idea of the crazy turn Amelia's life takes at the beginning of her sophomore year. Both Amelia and Kate come across as very real, both fully fleshed out and completely believable - people you'd probably want to know in real life. Well, if you're me, anyway.

Also, just because Amelia dies at the beginning does not mean we don't get to know her - the narrative mostly jumps between Amelia's first-person experience in the immediate past and Kate's third-person impressions of the present, all set in motion by an anonymous text to Kate: she didn't jump. The bullying Amelia suffers is absolutely heart-wrenching, making me beyond glad that texting and facebook and the internet weren't around when I was in high school - with so many tools at their disposal, kids have too many more means to a vicious end - it's just horrifying, and this book really brings that new avenue for teenage humiliation to life. The novel manages to cover all the confusion that goes along with being a teenager and discovering who you are and who you want to be as well as all the inner conflicts of trying to be everything as a parent and knowing you're just setting yourself up to fail, complete with Gossip Girl like setting. But it's not without hope, or redemption.

You should definitely read this if:

• You're looking for a fast, gripping, unputdownable novel.
• You can follow novels that jump around on a timeline.
• You're a recovering bully.
• You've been wondering what would happen on a darker version of The Gilmore Girls.
• You want to see how a novel could seamlessly combine a mystery with the intricacies of female relationships with one another, with a little law firm & private school politics thrown in. 

Don't read this if: 

• You're a very recent bullying victim.
• Anything that discusses sex or sexuality makes you queasy.
• You find minor mistakes in timelines hopelessly distracting (--> I read an uncorrected proof, and am hoping that has been resolved in the final edition or that I just read something wrong). 
• You prefer to remain blissfully ignorant of what your teenager is doing. 
• You don't like starting at the end and working your way backwards (sort of). 

*I received this book through of TLC Book Tours in exchange for my honest review. I'm not the last word - see what others had to say.

Fake Bookish Neurosis: Dystoparanoia

Dystopian Dioramas by Lori Nix

I'm currently listening to Claire Danes' narration (fantastic, btw,) of Margaret Atwood's classic The Handmaid's Tale, which I've read a few times already & am re-reading in preparation for World Book Night. If you are not familiar, a) how is this possible and b) it's about a near-future society in which a right-wing religious "cult" has overthrown the US government and re-ordered society into biblically "traditional" roles, which basically means women have been re-relegated to property, on this earth solely to procreate and serve men. Independent thought police abound. It's not so great for the men, either - they're held to strict moral codes as well. Sounds fun, right?

The most terrifying thing about speculative fiction such as The Handmaid's Tale is the relative ease with which such a society could just... well, happen. Already paranoid about all this information sharing that we do, either wittingly or unwittingly, such dystopian novels - especially this one, which shows how easily the cylons/right-wing-nuts/borgs/alien invaders basically could flip a switch and take over - only heighten this dystoparanoia. I find myself thinking, with every post I make on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or the internet at large, "Oh, here's further evidence for the future religious dictator-oppressors to use against me! But it's not like I haven't given them enough already, so what the hell."

I have created quite the case against myself. That thing I just posted making fun of young anti-marriage equality people for their intolerance and lack of spelling ability? Yeah. The New Genesian Republic won't stand for such positions in a person's history. (That is, assuming I still have the status of "person.") The stuff I post speaking out against rape culture and for women's bodily autonomy? I'm sure I've violated several somethings in the Book of Leviticus, which would no doubt used against me at my "trial." I mean, maybe they wouldn't even go to such efforts, since merely being a woman will be a crime of some kind. Or women wouldn't have any rights to violate anyway. That video of the sneezing panda? Evidence of my lack of proscribed compassion, obviously. Raising money for rescue animals? Not a counter to the hilarious cat antics posts, no. Clearly I should have been focusing on human needs instead.

After that, my dystoparanoia takes a lovely turn, nightmaring about the future in which not only are we ruled by alien/cylon/borg/extremist-nut-job overlords, but, of course, the devastation we have wreaked upon the planet will be no longer deniable, except that it will be interpreted as some god's way of punishing human deviance and immorality, further supporting the authoritarian cause, instead of as what is the obvious, inevitable result of previous generations of consumerism and corporate greed.

Ironically, I slept quite well last night.

Anyone else suffer from this side-effect of dystopian fiction?

THE TALE OF LUCIA GRANDI: THE EARLY YEARS - Read This If

The premise of The Tale of Lucia Grandi: The Early Years by Susan Speranza sounded incredibly promising: a 110-year-old centenarian recounts the details of her life to a biographer. The book begins with an eager, young graduate student wanting to record a biography of Lucia's life - excellent, I thought, that could be interesting, a biographer's insights and observations, but the story is told in Lucia's first person, not the biographer's. In fact, the biographer disappears completely after the prologue. Lucia also warns us at the very beginning that maybe she'll "just make it all up," which made me wonder if unreliable narrator issues would come into play - but no, that is dropped as well. Also, Lucia is 110 at the beginning of the novel, but was born in 1951. Why is she so old? Why are we getting her story from 2061? How does that color her perception of the 1950s and 60s? What's the world like 5o years from now? What does that add to the story? It seems to have no bearing on the rest of the novel, though, so the choice seems a little arbitrary, unless it is to become evident in later volumes of Lucia's life.

What the reader is left with is a somewhat disjointed telling of all Lucia's sufferings, and sometimes the sufferings of older family members whose sad stories are recounted incompletely before they disappear completely from the narrative. Pretty much everyone in the novel is horrible and/or is made to suffer horribly. The victimy mentality was a little much to take - I mean, I get it. Lots of people have super horrible lives. Suburbia was and is no idyllic land of merriment. But I need a reason to keep reading, and more awful things happening isn't a compelling one for me.

Lucia did remind me a little of Sally Draper on Mad Men, if her father was a police officer instead of an ad exec, and if they lived out on Long Island instead of in Westchester. I kept longing for a similar tone or narrative flow, but it was not to be. Where Mad Men succeeds in its melancholic disenchantment, with flawed, searching characters and glimmers of hope and growth, Lucia Grandi fails. Many of the characters (with, of course, the exception of Lucia, and the few people she likes), particularly the parents, are not merely flawed, they're just awful. Their humanity is missing.

This book is still not without potential. Despite her inability to find much joy, Lucia's life was interesting, and I did want to know what happened to her, and if she'd ever overcome all her hardships. I think the novel might have worked a little better if it had been told in the third person - no 5-year-old does that much naval-gazing on her own, but we all can find reasons for things we did as children once we have the perspective and experience as adults - or perhaps as a conversation between biographer and subject, similar to The Thirteenth Tale - where the reliability of the narrator can be toyed with. I was disappointed that that little kernel never reappeared.

To sum up, you should read Lucia Grandi if:

• You love the literary realists and enjoyed Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser. 
• You like your characters to suffer. It's character-building.
• You've been missing your time spent with the strict nuns in Catholic school.
• You don't mind a few caricatures for characters. 

Don't read Lucia Grandi if:

• You're looking for a fast, light read. 
• You like a little hope and redemption in your novels. 
• You like all reasons for narrative choices to be self-evident.
• You believe every character should contribute to the overall narrative in some way.

*I received this book through of TLC Book Tours in exchange for my honest review. I'm not the last word - see what others had to say. 

WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE by Maria Semple: Read This If

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple has been popping up everywhere I look for the past several months. When I read a little about the author and discovered that she used to write for Arrested Development (and Mad About You and Ellen), well, I knew I had to read this immediately.

This book is hilarious. And slightly sad, and definitely heartfelt, and, well, real, despite the absurdities and caricature nature of the characters. I'm no McArthur genius, but I could definitely relate to Bernadette's antisocial tendencies (minus giving all my banking info to a virtual assistant) and sarcasm and sense of failure. Her daughter Bee's adorableness shines through the pages as well. In a family of quirky smartypants (her dad Elgin is a Microsoft guru), she's probably the most down-to-earth and adult character in the book, though her dad has many words of wisdom, such as:

It's for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn't smell a predator. That's why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It's literally a matter of survival. 

and

When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain releases endorphins. It's the same as a runner's high. These days, we all spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us. It's a nice change.  

Bernadette had a bit of a breakdown after a scoundrel neighbor destroyed one of her greatest accomplishments. That's why she's a little loony  seizing on all the bad and seeing obstacles where there really are none. She moved her family (before Bee was born) to Seattle to escape her failure, in a sense, but she continuously finds reasons to distance and disassociate herself with anyone around her:

People are born here, they grow up here, they go to the University of Washington, they work here, they die here. Nobody has any desire to leave. You ask them, "What is it again that you love so much about Seattle?" and they answer, "We have everything. The mountains and the water." This is their explanation, mountains and water.

She is so snobby it's painful, but in a funny, clueless way, not in a snide, mean way. She feels superior because she is superior, but no one knows she's a genius because of her refusal to engage with anyone. She calls all the moms from her daughters school 'gnats' because they are constantly pestering her to get involved in school community stuff. Because she's a mom and that's what moms do. She's Chandler, Monica and Phoebe all wrapped into one, with a super high IQ on top, or, bottom, really, since it might be hard to find that bit.

Anyway, you should totally read this if:

• You found Arrested Development hilarious (though this isn't nearly as absurd as many of the plotlines in AD). 
• You have a child in school and have sometimes found dealing with other parents...challenging. 
• You've ever felt like a failure but seen the absurdity of identifying with it.
• You're looking for a quick, funny read with a lot of substance. 
• You appreciate character development - this is definitely character driven. 

Don't read this if: 

• You are humorless and many would describe you as "no fun."
• You truly believe yourself to be faultless parent of the year. You will just find this book offensive.
• You're looking for a dark and gloomy read.
• You're totally clueless. But then, if you were totally clueless, you'd probably lack the self awareness to know so. 
• You hate Antarctica. And you can't stand penguins.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS by Marisha Pessl: Read This If

How could you not be compelled to pick up a novel entitled Special Topics in Calamity Physics? That's definitely what first peaked my interest. STCP (I seem to have a strong penchant for acronymizing all long titles lately, for brevity's sake, of which, of course, I've just defeated the purpose with this wickedly long parenthetical) by Marisha Pessl is one of the cleverest books I've read in a while, which both bolstered and hindered my overall enjoyment of the story. Sometimes the cleverness just took on a life - and trajectory - of its own, wandering through mazes of tangential paths of wit and whimsy without a a mere thought of finding its way back to a narrative flow.

It must be noted that I listened to the audio for this one, which was delightfully performed by Emily Janice Card - she managed to breathe much life into the (often annotated) asides and clever comparisons that conspicuously peppered the narrative, but obviously, that makes it hard to skim over the (what some might consider) somewhat superfluous text, and even if I had been reading with my eyes and not my ears, such skimming would lead to confusion because sandwiched in the middle of the random book titles and oddball similes, an important plot point inevitably could be found.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy the story - I did, in fact, in the end, appreciate much of what amused me in the beginning and annoyed me in the middle. Blue van Meer made for quite the quirky, smartypants heroine, with an equally quirky upbringing and smartypants father. After moving around the country every semester or two, they settle - for a whole 8 months - in a small town in North Carolina for Blue's senior year, where she is thrust unwittingly and unwillingly into a strange group of misfits (she - or the entire population of the school - calls them the Bluebloods) by an idiosyncratic teacher she meets in the grocery store. Many of the eccentricities later come into play after a series of mysterious events culminate in Part 3 - the partial wrapping together of these elements without tying them together with a neat little bow more than made up for the meandering nature of Parts 1 and 2.

You really should check out STCP if:

• You've been longing for a story of the high school experience told with the nuance and insight of a John Hughes movie.
• You like a little mystery to go with your high school shenanigans.
• You don't mind a book that sticks the song "Somebody's Watching Me" in your head on autorepeat.
• You like clever. No, you lurvvve clever.
• You like big books and you cannot lie.
• You want to torture or confound (or spark much discussion in) your book club.

You should take a pass on STCP if:

• You're not a fan of lots of references you may or may not get.
• You like your plots to move quickly, without fluff.
• You really do need your plots wrapped together in the end with a shiny bow, no crinkles or loose threads to speak of. 
• You value brevity over feats of literary (and often long-winded) wit.
• You have the attention span of a gnat.

If anyone's read this & feels like discussing at all, let me know. It's definitely a discussion-worthy one.