C.A. Gray's Blog, page 27
July 7, 2022
Review of Once and For All
There was a lot I liked about this book, and a lot I didn’t care for, too. I’m still rounding up to 4 stars because it was so compulsively readable.
First of all, the cover and the title are quite misleading. I thought I was getting a romance about a couple who would eventually marry, but the protagonist, Louna, is only 17. The only real tie-in is the fact that she works for her mother, a world-class wedding planner. Her mom and her mom’s partner (business partner, who happens to be gay) are basically Louna’s parents, and both super cynical about love. They’ve passed this on to Louna, though that almost stretches belief–17 is too young to be that jaded, and her jaded years were well before the story begins, too. Because she did find love (I guess when she was 16): she met Ethan at a wedding. He was depicted as the whirlwind romance of her life, though she literally only saw him for one night (and lost her virginity to him). They conducted a long-distance relationship after that, intending to keep in touch, only he was killed in a school shooting. That, too, was weird. Timely I suppose, but information was withheld from the reader for too long, so that it came off like Louna just struggled with panic from excessive empathy whenever she heard about a school shooting… until we learn that that was how Ethan died.
Louna’s story with Ethan is interspersed in flashback with her present day, where she meets Ambrose, the wealthy son of a bride who is easily the best part of the story. He’s such a fantastically memorable character–annoying, super quirky, suave and utterly confident, and yet also thoughtful and kind. Some of these contradictions also didn’t totally work, though: Ambrose makes a point of dating multiple girls at once, leading to getting busted and having soda thrown in his face, and that sort of thing. Yet, apparently he falls for Louna pretty much immediately, and decides he wants to win her over. To that end (we learn later), he makes a bet with her: for seven weeks, he will have to find one girl and commit to a relationship, while cynical introverted Louna will have to date compulsively like he does, for the same length of time. Whichever of them calls it quits first, loses the bet–and the other one gets to choose the next person the loser has to date. It seems friendly enough, though it doesn’t quite ring true that Ambrose would go through all that just to force Louna to give him a chance. Still, if you suspend your disbelief on that point, the way it played out was well done.
The twist, of course, is that Louna never tells Ambrose what happened to her last boyfriend. He just assumes it was a bad breakup, and thus puts his foot in it. The way Louna reacts to this really made very little sense to me… but the event that brings her around in the end was SO perfectly believable and satisfying.
So… entertaining, but with a lot of flaws, I’d say.
My rating: ***1/2
Language: some, but not excessive
Violence: it discusses school shootings but without details
Sexual content: present, but only in one scene. Could’ve done without it.
Political content: pretty heavy, on the “politically correct” side
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July 1, 2022
Review of The Paris Dressmaker
It’s possible that my opinion of this book doesn’t do it justice, because I wasn’t listening closely at all. Then again, I listen to fictional audiobooks all the time, and usually either like them or lose interest and give up. This one was strangely in between… I had a vague overall impression the action without really following all the details, probably because the story didn’t grip me enough to warrant my full attention.
The story follows two Parisian women during WWII, and I never did figure out the relationship between them. I don’t think there was one–it was just a parallel story. Sandrine is married to a resistance fighter, and the couple has a little boy, Henri. Her official job as far as the Nazis are concerned is to catalog artwork confiscated from the Jews for Hitler’s collection, but she searches for information for the resistance along the way. Meanwhile, one of the high up officers takes an interest in her–and she has to put him off as best she can without outright rejection. This becomes more difficult when her husband turns up in secret, and Sandrine becomes pregnant with their second child. The Nazi officer believes she is the paramour of one of the other officers.
Lila was an apprentice to Coco Chanel, and a very talented dressmaker in her own right. Prior to the war, she fell in love with a well-to-do Jewish man named Rene, who seemed to jilt her and then vanish. Lila believed that something she said to a thoughtless friend led to his death and that of his family–and this part confused me, since it seemed like there were segments told in flashback. Again, I wasn’t paying enough attention, I suspect. Rene appears again as a member of La Resistance, and Lila’s talents as a dressmaker are turned toward helping her infiltrate the Nazi elite. But of course, this comes at great personal peril.
I’ve read so many WWII books now that I can get the overall emotion of them even without attending to all of the exact details. They’re always stories about courage, good vs evil, harrowing encounters, and focusing on what truly matters.
My rating: ***
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: it’s war, but nothing gratuitous
Political content: historical only
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The Paris Dressmaker, Kristy Cambron
Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of The Paris Dressmaker.
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June 30, 2022
Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
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June 24, 2022
Mind Management Not Time Management
This week’s podcast comes from this blog review of “Mind Management Not Time Management.”
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Review of Catching Katie
I think I picked this up on the recommendation of another author I follow. It was good as far as Christian fiction goes, and a sweet romance with a few teeth-gnashing moments that worked out all right in the end.
Katie is a women’s suffrage advocate at the turn of the century. She went off to college at a time when almost no women did so, and bought one of the first automobiles, though it’s always breaking down. She grew up with Ben Rafferty, her best friend, but she hadn’t seen him in four years because she was so far away and travel wasn’t easy back then. It was unclear why she felt “called” by God to go back to her small hometown when she loved the big cities so much and never intended to remain in the town she grew up in, but she did go back, intending to spread her message of the importance of suffrage. Ben, stunned that she grew up to be so beautiful, fell in love with her quickly given that and their shared history. But he knew Katie had no intention of ever marrying, dedicated to her cause and believing that marriage and family were incompatible with it, for a woman. For her part, Katie saw the change in her old friend and fell for him too, jealous of the woman he’d been rumored to be courting. For about the first half of the book, the tension is split between the hornet’s nest Katie stirs with her radical ideas and her passionate and less than tactful means of expressing it, and the romantic tension between her and Ben.
Meanwhile, there’s an interesting old schoolmarm character named Blanche who seems to be a feminist, but really she’s just bitter against men and over the way her life has turned out. She at first is all about Katie, but then grows jealous of her and bitter over the fact that she doesn’t eschew all men, as Blanche believes she should if she were truly dedicated to her cause. Blanche’s bitterness becomes hatred over the course of the story… which leads to an interesting but compelling twist ending that I wasn’t expecting in a story like this.
There’s one segment toward the end of the book that almost made me quit reading, because I was so sure it would turn out a particular way and I knew it was going to make me angry. While overly feminist books irritate me on one hand, many Christian books tend to err on the other side, making it seem like a woman’s place is primarily at home with her children, and she should subjugate all other desires to that. I thought it was going there… but it didn’t. It actually ended perfectly, and exactly the way I hoped it would.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Sexual content: none
Violence: minor
Political content: not really
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June 17, 2022
Imposters by Scott Westerfeld
This week’s podcast comes from this blog review of Imposters.
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June 13, 2022
Review of Mind Management, Not Time Management
Thought-provoking for any of us who identify with Kadavy’s self-description of constantly finding ways to do more and more things in less and less time. I smiled a little as he described his pursuits to this effect: they definitely sound like me, and he’s absolutely right that at a certain point, there are diminishing returns. So he shifted his paradigm, focusing instead on when to do which tasks to maximum effect, based upon his mental state at the time.
I’m also already doing most of what he described in the book, though I hadn’t thought of it in so many words. Any new venture requires all of my mental focus, but then once I have it down, I can shift it to “back burner”–which for me means essentially auto pilot (I’m thinking of editing podcasts and then uploading them for distribution while listening to audiobooks or CMEs, or doing the same with newsletters). My best creative time, like his, is first thing in the morning, so that’s my Bible study and writing time four days per week. My workouts come next, and I’ve learned that I can listen to non-fiction audiobooks or learning-based YouTube videos during that time and retain the information reasonably well. Analytical tasks work better later in the day, and that’s when I do the rest of my work. By the end of the day when I’m doing administrative tasks, I have to listen to fiction–I don’t have the mental capacity for learning anything new.
The most interesting part of the book, or at least the part I found most original, was the segment on clock time vs event time. Kadavy moved to Colombia from the US. I also lived in Mexico for a time, and recall that the emphasis on the clock culturally doesn’t apply there, which was a hard transition for an American. But “event time” is what happens when you’re engrossed in what you’re doing, when you’re in “flow.” It also has the effect of making time seem to expand. It’s interesting how whatever you focus on in an attempt to maximize it has a tendency to slip away, as Viktor Frankl would say. Happiness is like that, too, and sleep–if you fixate upon either one, they will forever elude you. But place your focus on purpose, and happiness will arrive. Let your mind wander, and you’ll eventually drift off to sleep. Be fully immersed in the moment, and it will seem as though time expands.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Violence: none (nonfiction)
Sexual content: none
Political content: I think there was some, but it didn’t smack me in the face or anything
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June 12, 2022
Review of Imposters
An intriguing concept, but ultimately the story devolved into the same dystopian tropes we’ve read a hundred times.
The main character is Fray, twin sister to “first daughter” Rafia, international celebrity. Only, no one knows that Rafia has a twin. Before the twins were born, their brother was kidnapped and never seen again for political reasons. Their father hates to lose and hates to be vulnerable… so as his wife lay dying, he harvested her eggs and engineered identical twin daughters. One, he raised to actually be his daughter. The other, he raised to be her body double, to take a bullet in her twin’s place if necessary. Fray was raised to kill from the time of seven, and to have no identity of her own. She’s carted out in public venues where Rafi would be at risk, and otherwise hidden in the shadows.
But when Fray is sent to a neighboring city, ostensibly to court their first son Cole (who thinks she’s her bubble-headed sister and hates her at first), her father initiates a military strike that sends her and Cole on the run to join the rebels. From this point, the story follows the usual pattern, more or less. Fray’s predicament is unusual initially, but once the war starts, it’s just a question of whose family is still alive or on the run, how they fight, how they survive, and oh, by the way, they’re also teenagers falling in love with each other too.
The story ends at a cliffhanger, but I’m not intrigued enough by the characters or the plot to keep reading.
My rating: **1/2
Language: none
Violence: plenty but nothing gratuitous
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
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June 10, 2022
Take a Chance on Me by Beth Moran
This week’s podcast comes from this blog review of Take a Chance on Me, by Beth Moran.
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