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<![CDATA[Amanda added 'The Arrival']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/74488895
to: The Arrival (Hardcover)byShaun Tan bookshelves: 2009,
graphic-novels,
historical-fiction,
scifi-fantasy,
the-best
Vlog review with the whole family available here.
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<![CDATA[Amanda
is on page 496 of Ada, or Ardor: A Fam...
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http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40624947
Amanda
is on page 496 of 624 of
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
When Ruby's mother abandons her, Ruby is sent to live with her older sister Cora, who she hasn't seen in ten years. Life changes for her so drastically she feels like she must be dreaming. Whereas once she lived in squallor, dodging creditors, running roaches out of the house, getting high with her "friends," she now lives in a million-dollar house and goes to a private prep school. More than anything, she wishes she could leave and go back to that independent life. But as she comes to learn more about the people around her and information about her past is revealed to her, she becomes less and less sure of her identity, and more sure who she can trust. The problem is, once she begins to reach out to others, it's their turn to pull away.
Confession: Before reading this book, I'd always thought Sarah Dessen was pure fluff. The covers look like fluff, like chic-lit for teenage girls. I grabbed this book on a whim at ALA because Dessen was signing books, they were at a reduced price ($5), and the line was very short (it was the end of her signing time). I'd heard somewhere that Dessen wrote like Deb Caletti, which to me is a high recommendation, as Caletti is one of the most talented modern authors I know and I love her books. But still, I worried. The books look like fluff.
Random.org chose this book for me from off my shelves as part of the Random Reading Challenge. At first, when I began reading, I didn't think I was going to make it through. That same day I'd read through the first 100 pages of Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah before deciding I didn't care enough about the book to read another 400 pages of it, and Lock and Key had a lot of similar plotline elements. Ruby's mother was neglectful even before abandoning her, and Ruby was therefore simultaneously responsible (she kept doing her mother's night job for her) and immature (all the drugs and drinking). So I almost gave up. I didn't want to read any more on that subject (Firefly Lane had expounded on a similar situation for all those 100 pages...). I knew I was in a bit of a slump, though, so I put it aside and tried it again the next day.
As it turns out, the book was really good, and just like that recommendation, the story was similar to Deb Caletti's in style. It talked about real issues, in a real way. It didn't skirt the truth, but it didn't have to stick the reader's faces into it, either. It was tactful. It was the sort of book that, while it dealt with teenagers, could be read by adults from a completely different angle. It transcended its genre. By the end, I cared about all the characters, even the no-good mother.
The book isn't fast-paced, and it's very character driven instead of plot oriented, but even so, I read almost all of it in a single day. I stayed up late to finish. I didn't have to - it's not like the book pushed me the way 13 Reasons Why or The Knife of Never Letting Go did - but I wanted to. Dessen made their world unfold for me, and I was completely sucked into it.
I can't say how this compares to other Dessen books as it's my first, but I can say this won't be my last. It's an excellent book, and I'm glad I gave it a chance.
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<![CDATA[Amanda
is on page 424 of Ada, or Ardor: A Fam...
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http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40624947
Amanda
is on page 424 of 624 of
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
The Professor was once a brilliant mathematician, but an accident in 1975 left his short-term memory damaged. While he is able to clearly remember events prior to the accident, his memories since then are limited to the past 80 minutes. The Housekeeper is the tenth housekeeper the Professor's sister-in-law has hired to care for him. She comes to work for him in 1992, and soon he's insisting she bring along her ten year old son, whom he nicknames Root because of the square root shape of his head.
This is a very quiet book, so elegant and beautifully written. I've seen movies before about this sort of memory loss (Momento, 50 First Dates, etc), but I've never seen the subject handled with this much care and precision. The Professor keeps his life afloat the best he can by writing messages to himself and clipping them all over his clothes. In the most prominent area: "My memory lasts only eighty minutes."
Ogawa makes us see, through the eyes of this housekeeper, how difficult life is for the Professor. All he has left in the world is math, which he resorts to whenever he is nervous or uncomfortable. He opens every day by asking the Housekeeper not who she is, but for her shoe size or her birth weight or her telephone number. He finds relationships between seemingly random numbers, and is always teaching the Housekeeper and Root about math. Or baseball. Both the Professor and Root share a love for baseball, although Root avoids mentioning that the Professor's favorite player was transferred to a new team after the accident and later retired altogether. Learning such things upsets the Professor - it reminds him how much time he's lost. Though he knows his memory only lasts 80 minutes, he has no idea how many years has passed since that was true.
I liked math in school, so it was fun to take the little problems the Professor presented to Root and figure them out before reading the solutions. When it got to the more complicated ideas, I just read along and didn't try to understand so much. You don't need to have a love of math to love this book, but the Professor does take math and turn it into something beautiful and poetic. Even if you don't understand, you can see the beauty in it. Ogawa also seems to have done a lot of research on the subject. I'm not a mathematician, and maybe a real mathematician would feel differently, but I thought this book treated the subject with respect. You don't see that very often when math and mathematicians are displayed in fiction.
One of the things I loved about this book was that the characters were nameless. Other than Root's nickname, none of them had names. They were just the Professor, the Housekeeper, the Widow (the Professor's sister in law), and Root. Their names didn't matter. They could have been any people in any time in any country. Their story, just like math, is universal, and that's exactly how this was written. It was gorgeous.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is translated from the Japanese. Normally I have a rough time with translations because a lot of the original written elegance is lost, but not so in this book. The translator, Stephen Snyder, does a marvelous job of maintaining the poetic feel that I'm sure was intended in the original. I had no complaints at all about that. Being a translation didn't detract from the original.
My favorite lines came from early in the book, from the Professor:
Solving a problem for which you know there's an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it's not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.
This quote helped me to understand how difficult this life was for the Professor. Here was a man who had gone on uncharted expeditions and solved mathematical equations that had never been solved before. Now, because of his short memory window, he could only do 80 minutes of work at a time. He spent his days solving problems for contests in math journals, somehow adjusting for his memory, winning prizes more often than not. It was a great example of his willpower and adaptability, to be able to solve those problems, and yet, to him, this is no accomplishment - the solutions were already known by someone else, and he no longer remembered them the next day anyway. The contests were simply a way of filling his time. The numbers comforted him in his loss.
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<![CDATA[Amanda added 'Life As We Knew It']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45855725
to: Life As We Knew It (Moon, #1)bySusan Beth Pfeffer bookshelves: 2009,
dystopia,
ya-and-younger
(3.5 stars)
When an asteroid knocks the moon out of orbit, the world goes crazy. The tides change. Volcanoes erupt that had never been active before. Electricity is no longer dependable. All commerce ceases. One family's struggle to remain alive through this catastrophe is chronicled in 15-year-old Miranda's journal.
I'm in two minds about this book, so I'll start with the negative and move on to the good things afterwards. First let me tell you that I'm not sure I was in the right mood to read this. With all the stress involved in writing my own YA occult thriller, I would have done better with a comfy, quiet book. Reading it really stressed me out, so I was a bit turned off of it while I read. I'm sure that influenced the way I viewed it. It's possible I would have loved it to pieces had I been in a different place of my life.
I think my biggest problem with the book was the diary format. I couldn't buy it. It was like the Blair Witch Project - it's not very realistic that she would have kept the camera rolling as she ran through the woods from a ghost, you know? Sure, the movie was creepy and all, and I'm not making fun of it, but of course the set up involves a serious suspension of disbelief and not everyone has it in them to suspend that much. The diary in this book felt the same way. Miranda would relate pages and pages of full dialog, both before and after the catastrophe. She put in a bunch of stuff that I can't imagine anyone putting in a journal. Sometimes she was writing as major, horrifying events were happening, while she was dealing with them. Absolutely impossible. So I had a hard time suspending my disbelief. I've actually heard that the second book in the series is a third person account of these events and I honestly think I will like that far more. I think it will feel more honest to me, and I kind of wish this had been written that way instead of by diary entries. I think in the end it would have been more powerful for me.
Also, I had a hard time believing some of the things that happen. Or didn't happen, to be more precise. I won't debate about the moon and how much influence it has on our weather patterns. I don't know enough science for that. But I will debate the reactions of people in this book. For example, not once in 10 months is the family ever in any danger of people raiding their house for food. When people die, others in the town let the family of that person have first grabs of the house. I don't believe it. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I believe families would do everything they could to survive, and that includes stealing other peoples' food, killing for food, etc. Maybe it's just because I recently read In a Perfect World, which for all its faults generally had a fairly realistic portrait of the way people act when society falls apart. I would have believed this book more had I seen more of the violence that would have naturally resulted from this sort of situation.
So those are my main issues. There were good things, too. Especially in the last third of the book, I really started to care about the characters. I didn't want them to die. I felt terrible when anyone died, minor or major character. I could feel the spiral of disentegration. I stopped caring so much about the things above that I said irritated me, forgot that I was reading a diary, and really felt the horror of what was happening to this family. I even dreamed about the end, about finding solutions to counteract the moon's nearness (my dreams involved very strong magnets buried deep in places around the world, backwards so that they pushed backwards against the moon's force, which somehow created balance...).
It was family that I really felt strongly. One of the worst things in this book involved Miranda's father. This might be a minor spoiler, but it's really not anything huge. Miranda's parents are divorced. Her dad is remarried and his wife is pregnant when the moon gets too close to Earth. She's frantic about her parents and wants to drive to Colorado to find them. Miranda's family lives in Pennsylvania. Dad and his wife come to visit them for a week on their way to Colorado, and Dad is devastated when he leaves. He cries and his wife drives the car. They all know they'll probably never see each other again. Miranda's brother, Matt, is extremely angry at Dad because he left them there.
That really made me think. I mean, if his wife wasn't pregnant, I think the choice would have been easy - he may love his wife, but he should stay to take care of his children and make sure they survive. But she's pregnant with his child, too, so where should he go? He can't expect his wife to abandon her family, either. It's a tough choice, and it really made me think a lot about divorce and remarriages and priorities. I don't know that I have an answer.
I loved the end. Technically, it was a bit deus ex machina, but in my present mood, something life affirming was exactly what I needed. I'm not saying everything ends up peachy roses and the moon goes back where it belongs or anything, but I'm glad it didn't end with, say, Miranda's diary simply stopping because you know she's died. I don't think I could have taken that right now.
I will look forward to reading the sequel, which I think I will like more than this one. But I won't read it right away. I think I need to take a break and read something quiet.
PS - I managed to find a picture online of the cover I have, which apparently was only available on the book fair copy or something. I personally find it very flippant for the tone of the book, and like the other cover much more. Anyway, I just wanted to show everyone what a weird cover my copy has. :D
***Update: I wrote this review right after I finished the book, back on the 8th or 9th of the month. Since then, I've come to realize that despite my mind being distracted by all my NaNo-ing, this book really must have made an impression on me because at least once a week, I dream about it. Particularly about the end. I don't usually dream about a single book over and over like this, especially after I've finished it. Normally I dream about it while I'm still reading it. But this one has invaded my dreams, so it must have pierced me well.
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<![CDATA[Amanda added 'Wicked Lovely']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/56952617
to: Wicked Lovely (Wicked Lovely, #1)byMelissa Marr bookshelves: 2009,
scifi-fantasy,
ya-and-younger
(4.5 stars rounded up)
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<![CDATA[Amanda added 'Mathilda']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78757553
Mathilda (Hardcover)
byMary Shelley bookshelves: classics,
to-read
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<![CDATA[Amanda added 'Gregor the Overlander']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76342164
to: Gregor the Overlander (Underland Chronicles, #1)bySuzanne Collins bookshelves: 2009,
scifi-fantasy,
ya-and-younger
Original review here.
Before I describe the plot of this book, I want to say that it sounds really, really cheesy when summarized. Please bear with me. I'll keep it short.
Gregor and his two year old sister, Boots (nickname), are doing laundry in their apartment complex's basement when they investigate a air draft coming through a grate and end up falling hundreds of feet into the Underland. The Underland is an underground world filled with giants cockroaches, spiders, and rats, as well as humans who are so pale they're transluscent. Because of a prophecy written by the original explorer who brought humans to the Underland hundreds of years ago, the rats begin a war against the rest of the creatures, and Gregor finds himself leading a quest to try to save their world.
Okay. Yeah. Yes, it sounds cheesy. When Morrigan picked this book for me to read for our family book club, I was not particularly happy. Giant rats and cockroaches? Underground society? Mm. Sounded too much like a sewer-version of Narnia to me, and I didn't like Narnia to start with. The only thing this book had going for it was the author: Suzanne Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games, which I loved.
As it turned out, though, this book was far from cheesy. Actually, it was quite wonderful, much different than I expected. Despite the fact that many of the characters are non-human, I felt the same toward them as I did the human characters. They had voices and personalities. And Collins tackled so many issues in this book:
- She advocated peace whenever possible, fighting only in defense or to save those we love from harm.
- She talked about loyalty and trust.
- She touched on the longlasting grief caused in children who have lost parents, as well as the importance of family in general.
- She addressed understanding others in so many different ways. Gregor was constantly reevaluating the way he saw people (and creatures) based on learning more about them. People he judged badly at one point, he came to understand by the end of the book, even if he never particularly liked them.
- Beyond that, Gregor was the character who most tried to understand the non-humans, and pushed everyone else to cooperate and understand each other as well. He was almost a poster-boy against discrimination and prejudice.
- As well as understanding, there were lessons about forgiveness and mercy.
- Lastly, Collins pushed for hope. Hope for harmonious and cooperative living, hope for peace in the Underland, hope for the lives in the Overland (our world).
I loved it. I can't say it was without problems - there were a few parts that felt a little forced, as if she directed the plot just a little too heavily - but for the most part, it ran smoothly. It was easy to read in snatches in between writing my NaNo book. Not too difficult to put down, but very easy to pick back up, too. The ending is not a cliffhanger even though it's the first book in a series - it could be read as a standalone book. That's a big plus for me.
I do recommend this book, especially if you like middle-grade fiction. I've read quite a bit of middle-grade fiction in the last year, and this has been one of my favorites. Plus, it just has so many good messages, so many good things I'd want my kids to learn, that I would have no trouble giving it to younger readers. I'm happy that Morrigan has read the whole series. I used to suspect they were violent and useless books, but they aren't. I won't claim there is no violence at all, but none of it is gratuitous, and it is both tactfully handled by the author and regretted by most of the characters.
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<![CDATA[Amanda added 'The Untelling']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78520638
The Untelling (Paperback)
byTayari Jones bookshelves: to-read
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