Olga read and liked Rita's review of My Sister's Keeper:

"Spoiler Alert. This review contains spoilers.

I hated this book so much. I only kept reading it because I had to find out why Campbell, the lawyer, had a service dog, since he kept that such a secret.

I hated the clichés (J...more Spoiler Alert. This review contains spoilers.

I hated this book so much. I only kept reading it because I had to find out why Campbell, the lawyer, had a service dog, since he kept that such a secret.

I hated the clichés (Julia chose just that moment to crash through the door… Anna chose that precise moment to speak up… Rita chose this moment to gag on bad writing…).

I hated the overwrought melodrama. Everything was just so saturated with heavy-handed tear-jerking prose that the book was soggy and just about dripping. About halfway through the book, I started skimming it, looking for dialogue relevant to the plot. Brian’s metaphors about fire and Sara’s reminiscing about the kids’ childhoods and Campbell’s backflashes about Julia and Julia being pathetic in every possible way and Anna’s cluelessness just got so very dull. If I was ever to find out why Campbell had that dog, then I needed to get through the material faster. Putting the book down to groan out loud every few paragraphs was taking too long.

The characters were two-dimensional and irritating. They really were just like paper dolls, given name tags, dressed up in stereotypes and given lines to say (and melodramatic thoughts to spill out). It was like, This is the mom and she’s a big martyr who puts her children first all the time… she’s a GOOD mother, she just got blinded by trying to be too good, so she seems kind of bad now. But we’ll be on her side in the end because of her deep insight. Waggle mom paper doll and have her blah, blah, blah and then Over here is the Big Bad Lawyer doll… ooooh, he’s a ruthless go-getter with a hazy past, but he’ll have some secrets to pull out at the end so we’ll realize he’s a decent, stand up guy after all. Waggle lawyer paper doll and have him blah blah blah, and so on.

The plot was all right through all of that until the big Law and Order courtroom twist at the end. That was just a convenient trick to get out of actually trying to find a solution for such a dilemma. She worked it up to such a point that there was no way out that would sit well with an audience, there was no good way to wrap it up, so she pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Then she went a step further and did something that I guess some might find bold, but it just made me shout a stream of obscenities and then made me thankful that I had just skimmed the second half of the book and didn’t really invest in it at all. Otherwise, I would have been furious with such an ending.

This is the second Jodi Picoult book I’ve tried to read. I didn’t like the other one either (Vanishing Acts), so I guess I won’t be reading anything else by this author.

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Olga read and liked April's review of My Sister's Keeper:

"I read this for a book club I was going to join before I found a better one that meets at the library across the street. The subject and basic premise were interesting enough to keep me reading, but my god the writing was awful. AWFUL. Everytime one ...more I read this for a book club I was going to join before I found a better one that meets at the library across the street. The subject and basic premise were interesting enough to keep me reading, but my god the writing was awful. AWFUL. Everytime one character asked another a question, the answer was some corny, overly-symbolic story from the past. The whole book was one clichéd analogy after another...she even put analogies WITHIN analogies. For example:

"About five years ago a new family bought the house across the street and knocked it down, wanting to rebuild something different...[blah blah, etc etc]...You'd think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different. Nowadays I can hardly remember what that old house looked like. I walk out the front door and never recall the stretch of months that the gaping lot stood out, conspicuous in its absence, like a lost tooth. It took some time, you know, but the new owners? They did rebuild."

GAG ME.

Then, to top it all off, she ends the book with a plot twist that left me feeling cheated and manipulated as a reader. I don't care whether the ending is happy or sad, but don't get me to emotionally invest in a cause only to render it all irrelevant with some stupid chance event. Cheap.

No wonder she puts out so many books a year. Lazy writing is fast writing!

They're now making a movie out of this book. Maybe with decent screenwriters, this will be one of those times where the film actually is better than the book. Or maybe it will suck, too. At this point, I really don't give a crap.(less) "

Olga read and liked Peregrinn's review of Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War:

"My junior year american history teacher assigned this for the class, and for each chapter, we had to write a little diary entry of our reaction to the content. This is why I think everyone in my grade hated this book but me. Gee whiz, why are you ...more My junior year american history teacher assigned this for the class, and for each chapter, we had to write a little diary entry of our reaction to the content. This is why I think everyone in my grade hated this book but me. Gee whiz, why are you making us think about the effect of history on modern day? It's horrible torture, I know.

Now, it's been about four years, but from what I remember? I loved this book. I wrote pages and pages and pages in my little response-journal. (I want to dig it up but my teacher kept it because she wanted to mail it to the author, or something.) So this review is just going off of what has stuck with me through the years.

On one level, it just felt good to see a book about the South that was realistic. He neither glamorizes this aspect of Southern culture as tragically heroic and noble, or vilifies them all as ignorant hicks. The people he meets are just people. One little anecdote sticks out in my mind to this day, of Horwitz talking to this lady who was a KKK member, who is chatting about her membership and her motivations for it, while showing him pictures of her grandchildren, showing him her knitting. He never "others" anyone. Every person he profiles, from the neonazis to the weirdly obsessive Civil War re-enactors is portrayed as an actual human being. Very refreshing. I've spent most of my life thus far in south Jersey, the Pennsauken area, and the Philadelphia suburbs, and come from very Yankee blood--except for a two year stint in very rural North Carolina was I was nine and ten years old. And I mean rural--my fourth grade teacher was from Ohio, for example, and she had her dog kidnapped several times and "go home, yankee!" spraypainted on the side of her garage.

And I find that I'm always defending where I'm from to someone, you know? Being in the Philly area, people are always dumping on New Jersey, and I'm always busting heads over it. And being in the North, people always talk about the South as a caricature, endless country filled with gun-toting, trailer-dwelling, violent, illiterate racists with no teeth. And even when it's not that explicit, that's the attitude towards anything south of the Mason-Dixon line. I remember having to prove to someone a couple of years ago that the South had actually elected Democratic politicians several times, and he wouldn't believe me until I actually sent him links to webpages that showed the different Democratic senators and governors. It's just ridiculous to me. Not that there aren't such stereotypes walking around down there--I remember some classmates being absolutely flabbergasted that I lived in a house, not a trailer--but it's so convenient and easy to dismiss it all like that. But I digress.

On the other hand, Horwitz is from New England, so his perspective is definitely that of a Yankee, so dyed-in-the-wool Southerners probably won't like this book. And he never actually reaches any kind of conclusion about his experiences that I recall, but it is, I think, a portrait of the Civil War and slavery in modern day Southern culture. It's a snapshot, trying to reveal how the echoes of that war resonate through life there, and why it's such an important and ever-present fixture in the South and not so much in the North. Plus, I'm just a junkie for people's stories, and there's some absolutely fascinating little glimpses into people's lives. Like the KKK grandma mentioned above, but also a guy who peddles Confederate merchandise who's from Ohio and whose philosophy professor father named him Soren Kierkegaard, and the hardcore reenactors practicing bloating so they could look properly dead when they went down in mock battles. Talking to an African-American waitress about the Confederate flag over the Richmond, Virginia captial building. I really could go on.

I took a lot of great things away from me, and from that history course in general--the biggest one being that people, as always, are just people, and how deeply something, the Civil War for example, can shape and direct an entire culture, as well as how it can glue people together and give them solidarity and/or meaning, how history is glamorized and twisted to fit whatever your political whim happens to be. I don't know. Now I'm thinking about this book again and want to whip up some biscuits and sweet tea and reread it.

Read it: Mrs. Walker is a smart lady and this book is incredible for a reason.(less) "