C.A. Gray's Blog, page 72

Turtles All The Way Down by John Green

Today’s episode comes from this online review of Turtles All The Way Down by John Green.

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Review of Circe

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I enjoy mythology, but less for its own sake than for the cultural heritage it represents. Because it’s not otherwise a passion of mine, I prefer retellings to the original sources. They’re just easier to consume, and I don’t want to have to work that hard to understand what’s going on and get into the story. If that makes me lazy, so be it.

Review of Geekerella by Ashley Poston

Today’s podcast comes from this online review. 

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Review of John Adams

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Continuing with my Revolutionary War theme — I’d heard about this book for a long time, and even though I wasn’t the biggest fan of McCullough’s 1776 (it was a little dry for me), I decided to try this one because it was supposed to be more character-driven. It was certainly that, although in a decidedly historical way: that is, McCullough doesn’t take any liberties for the sake of story-telling. He only says what can be known from letters or diaries, and never ventures into the realm of re-creating a scene or writing dialogue. Still, apparently keeping a diary was part of our Founding Fathers’ culture, because it seems like everyone did it, describing their daily activities down to the smallest detail. It’s inspiring, actually—I used to do this through college, and even a few years after, but at this point my journals have become sparse indeed, and primarily limited to ideas rather than events. It means the details of my normal hours and days are simply lost, with no record that they ever were—even while John and Abigail Adams, and their children and grandchildren seem so intimately real, hundreds of years later.

This was actually what struck me the most about the story: how human they all were. I know this is obvious (what else would they be?), but history books tend to paint the past in broad strokes, rendering its biggest players as demigods rather than people like you and me. But they were ordinary. They laughed and loved, fought and grieved. And wow, did John and Abigail have a lot to grieve—death was an everyday part of existence back then, and particularly toward the end of their lives, since they outlived most of their contemporaries. Adams was a jovial, likable guy, with a wide circle of intimate friends. As he grew older, I imagined him as my own grandfather, offering the wisdom of his years to me, along with his son John Quincy. His relationship with Thomas Jefferson in later years also made me happy: the two men started out as good friends, but had a falling out over political differences. Adams’s close friend, the doctor and fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush, prayed that the two men would reconcile their differences. Once both were out of office, toward the end of their lives, they did resume a regular correspondence. Probably the most memorable part of the whole story was the fact that Adams and Jefferson finally died on the same day—a day that just happened to be the 50-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson passed away first, and with his last breath, Adams declared, “Jefferson survives!” I’ve heard this to mean he had not yet heard the news that Jefferson died first and thought he was still alive. But the way McCullough tells the story, it sounds to me more like he saw Jefferson, waiting for him on The Other Side.

I guess what I came away with more than anything else from this biography was this: life is short. And time keeps marching on. Neither revelation is particularly original or profound on its face, but it’s one thing to say them, and another to feel them to be true. This book made me feel them.

My rating: **** 1/2

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Review of Her Royal Spyness

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I’m so glad I listened to this after I’d already listened to The Matriarch, because it gave me the context to appreciate the historical aspects of the story. While technically the book is a cozy mystery set in 1930s Britain, the main character, Lady Georgiana (“Georgie”) is a fictional member of the House of Windsor, 32nd (or so) in line for the throne. But because she is technically royalty, for propriety’s sake, she’s not allowed to work a normal job, even though she’s penniless. For the first probably quarter to half of the book, this was the primary conflict: Georgie had no allowance from her brother Binky (what is with these royal names, anyway? Binky was married to Fig, and another major character was named Wiffy), so she had to come up with ways to support herself, without the Queen (Queen Mary, that is) or any of her relatives finding out. She has several misadventures along these lines, during which time the Queen summons her to tea in order to commission her to spy on the Prince of Wales, David’s mistress, Wallace Simpson. (I must say, after reading The Matriarch, I thoroughly despised Wallace Simpson, and was glad that the author chose to portray her as rude and obnoxious also.) The Queen also vacillates between marrying her off to a Russian prince whom Georgie refers to as Fish Face, and sending her to be a Lady in Waiting to the elderly Princess Beatrice in the country, who never leaves her home. This makes Georgie even more anxious to make her own way in life.

All of this turned out to be just a setup for Georgie’s character and circumstances, though; the real plot began when the dastardly Gaston de Movil shows up at her house and tells her that he’d won her family’s home off of her father in a bet. Binky comes to London to visit, and shortly thereafter, Georgie discovers de Movil’s body, drowned in their bathtub–and Binky is nowhere to be found. Since Binky fled the scene and has such an excellent motive for murder, the police naturally presume that he did it; but Georgie knows that Binky faints at the sight of blood. There’s no way’s guilty. The rest of the story is her private sleuthing to determine the real killer, and his or her motive. Along the way, Georgie herself is targeted as well. And, of course, there’s a love interest: the dashing Irish royal (but equally penniless) Darcy Amara. He turns up to alternately help, hinder, or sweep her off her feet at several key moments.

It’s a fun read, particularly because Queen Mary, David, and Wallace Simpson are so spot-on, character-wise, from what I read in the Matriarch. Nothing super ground-breaking, but it’s a fun read. I understand this is a series, but not a chronological one—though Her Royal Spyness was the first. Georgie, I suspect, becomes an amateur detective a la Nancy Drew in all the others. I’ll probably listen to at least a few more.

My rating: *** 1/2

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Review of Gregor the Overlander

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I LOVED The Hunger Games trilogy (I mean, who didn’t?!), but it took me years to get around to listening to some of Suzanne Collins’s backlist. Someone in the Barnes and Noble YA section told me she actually liked this book better. I started reading the e-book version of it a long time ago, and while I liked it, it just didn’t grip me enough to keep going at the time. But I have a longer attention span when listening than when reading, so I thought I’d give it another go.

While The Hunger Games is YA, Gregor the Overlander feels more like a middle grade novel. The main character is eleven, and the story is set in a fantastical underground world with enormous bats, roaches, rats, and spiders. It’s not as creepy as that makes it sound, though—the narrative voice and description is whimsical in a way that makes me feel like I’m in elementary school again. The plot itself is pretty standard: Gregor’s father disappears, and while he is believed dead, Gregor has never quite managed to let go of him. Since his mom is now a single parent of three, Gregor, the oldest, has to watch his two year old sister Boots. They are home alone together when Boots tumbles headlong into a shaft that opens up from their laundry room to the Underland. They first encounter the giant roaches, who speak in inverted sentence structure and practically worship Boots because of the smell of her dirty diapers (ha, ha). Presently they encounter other humans, too, with an entire class structure including servants and royalty. Gregor learns that his father did indeed tumble into the Underworld also, but he’s now being held captive by the villainous rats—and Gregor must rescue him. Of course, Gregor learns about a prophecy of the Overlander who will protect the Underlanders from the rats (three guesses who that refers to!). Gregor is a reluctant hero for much of the story, but he fulfills most of the prophecy on accident until he finally accepts his role.

It’s a common story (in fact, it’s very much like my first trilogy!), but Collins does a good job of creating a unique fantasy world to make it her own. She wrote for Nickelodeon before she became famous, so I can see why she’d write for kids before she tried her hand at an older target audience. My mind wandered a decent amount during the story, though. Probably this was because the story was so predictable, and the characters (to me) weren’t especially compelling. For those reasons, I don’t plan to continue the series. But if I were in elementary to middle school (or if I had a kid that age), I think I would have loved it.

My rating: *** 1/2

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Review of Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor

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I got this one on one of Audible’s Daily Deals — it wasn’t something I otherwise would have searched for, as I don’t even know where to begin when listening to history. But it was fantastic—if often sad. The reality of royalty is definitely not like the fairy tales.

The story begins when Queen Victoria is on the throne, and follows Princess May of Teck: she is the prim daughter of distant royals who are constantly overspending their budgets, requiring the Queen to bail them out. May is not very attractive and doesn’t have a lot of marriage prospects. The Queen, for her part, needs to marry off her grandson Edward… but scandal follows Eddie wherever he goes. He’s also homely, unintelligent, and shaping up to make a terrible king when the time comes. (There was even speculation that Eddie was Jack the Ripper!) But May’s well-meaning and ebullient mother, Princess Mary Adelaide, dreams of putting her daughter on the throne, while Queen Victoria sees that May might be just the ticket to keep Eddie in line. The match is made… but Eddie dies before the wedding day. (His death is also somewhat mysterious… supposedly he died from pneumonia, but the rapidity of his demise implied to some that there might have been foul play involved. Was it possible that someone thought he needed to be removed from the line of succession?) The public mourns with Princess May, who had become a favorite during their short engagement. But Queen Victoria still needs to marry off her younger grandson George, and May has earned the Queen’s esteem. George and May fall in love, and wed about a year later.

Unfortunately, George and his mother, Princess Alexandra, have a seriously codependent relationship, and Princess Alexandra becomes the mother-in-law from hell. Meanwhile, it was an open secret that George’s father, who would later become King Edward VII, kept a mistress, Alice Keppel. He’d had many others, but she became a fixture in his life, and eventually Alexandra came to accept her (largely because she wasn’t as pretty as the others!)

And so it goes… the interpersonal intrigues make the story a fascinating one, combined with the historical context of two World Wars. While Princess May, later Queen Mary, is a terrific sovereign and lovable to her subjects and friends, she’s a pretty dreadful mother. I felt especially sorry for poor Bertie (King George VI), her stuttering second son who was forced to wear the crown after his brother David abdicated so that he could marry the smug American twice-divorced Wallace Simpson. (She wasn’t divorced when he met her, though. David had three women in his life, and all of them were married at the time. Mistresses were apparently a common thing among royalty.) Bertie, timid and in poor health most of his life, had never been prepared to be king—yet suddenly found himself the reigning monarch during World War II. No wonder he died of cancer not long afterwards. Then again, David ended up rather pitiful as well: his family never forgave him for his abdication, and he wasn’t even invited to his mother’s funeral. He’d longed all his life for the approval of a mother who was monarch first, and parent only a very distant second.

I hadn’t gotten all that into the Netflix series “The Crown” before, but it picks up almost right where this book leaves off, with Bertie’s death and his 25-year old daughter Lilibet’s coronation as Queen Elizabeth. Now that I have more context, I think I’ll try it again!

My rating: **** 1/2

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Review of The Language of Thorns

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I had a hard time working out how I felt about this book. It intrigued me enough to buy the audio version after reading the sample, as a very descriptive and imaginative collection of short, original fairy tales. They sounded very much like Grimm’s fairy tales, but with more coherence (a lot of the original Grimm’s tales make absolutely no sense, and don’t even seem to have a point.) But as I listened, my mind wandered most of the time, and I had a hard time paying attention to the story or caring about what happened to the characters. This review is mostly my attempt to figure out why that was.

First, I think short stories might be hard to get into in general, because there’s not enough time to really develop a character or care about them. It’s rare for me to immediately connect with a protagonist—it happens on rare occasion, but like in real life, deeper connections generally take time to build.

Second, fairy tales tend to be heavy on description, because they’re set in fantastical worlds, I suppose. Some of this is fine, but I guess I’m a “less is more” kind of a girl. Give me a few details, and my imagination can fill in the rest. If a writer goes into great detail, I get bored. Get on with the action already.

Third, in a fairy tale world, by definition, anything can happen with no explanation. I get this, and I go into them willing to suspend my disbelief… but I think someone like me still needs a set of foundational rules that I have to accept, within which framework everything else should still make sense. If ANYTHING can happen at any time, I suppose it is so different from the world in which I live that I can’t identify with the characters or put myself in their shoes. This means I don’t care what happens to them, because I’m so aware the whole time that it’s not real. (This might sound silly, but when I’m immersed in a really good story, I forget that it’s not real!)

That said, for what they were, I can’t imagine that the stories could have been any better. If you like fairy tales that are a little on the darker side and don’t necessarily have a “happily ever after,” you’ll probably love this collection.

My rating: ***

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Review of Steelheart

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In general I think superhero stories have been beaten to death lately. It’s hard to come up with a truly new concept within that genre, but I think Sanderson’s Reckoners trilogy managed to do it. He blends the dystopian genre with superheroes, creating a world ruled by supervillains called Epics. Sanderson incorporates a lot of classic features of the superhero story: that is, they gained their powers by an unexplained cosmic event (called Calamity); each Epic’s powers are unique to them, and each Epic has a weakness that doesn’t necessarily make sense, nor does it try to—it just is what it is. But I think the defining feature for this trilogy that made it original was the initial premise that Epics lose all sense of morality when they gain their powers, as well as the incredibly creative world-building.

The story is set in Newcago (formerly Chicago), and is controlled by the high Epic called Steelheart. He can turn any substance into steel, so the entire city is made of steel. It’s otherwise an authoritarian government like any other dystopian universe, and this sparks some thought-provoking political conversations between characters. The Reckoners are the resistance against the Epics, the small band of humans run by Jonathan Phaedrus (“Prof”). Main character David Charleston has idolized them ever since Steelheart killed his father when he was eight. In that same encounter, David saw Steelheart bleed: the only clue any living person has ever gained to his weakness, even though David doesn’t know what it means. For years, David has spent all his free time amassing data on each Epic, trying to determine what their weaknesses might be in hopes that he might be allowed to join the Reckoners to help bring them down. When David more or less forces the Reckoners’ hand, they do accept him, and he and Prof concoct a bold plan to try to take Steelheart down.

The story moves fast, and the characters are good, if occasionally over-the-top. There’s the drop-dead gorgeous ice princess, Megan (whom David of course becomes obsessed with), the wisecracker Cody who won’t shut up about how Scottish he is even though he has a Southern accent, the brilliant Prof, the former rocket scientist Tia (who was dating Prof, but this doesn’t really factor in too much), and David himself, who has the self-effacing narrative voice typical of a YA protagonist. He’s also (intentionally) absolutely terrible at metaphors, but he nevertheless uses them all the time. He is pretty funny.

In a way, this review is cheating, because I’ve already finished the entire Reckoners trilogy.

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There are lots of plot twists throughout the series that I didn’t see coming. While some of them felt a little forced, and I wished there weren’t quite so many aspects that required a suspension of disbelief, overall I really enjoyed the whole series and plowed through it in a few weeks. Highly recommended.

My rating: *****

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Review of 1776

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I’m on a Revolutionary War kick—probably because I listened to Alexander Hamilton: Revolutionary and I’m fast on my way to memorizing the musical “Alexander Hamilton.” So I picked up 1776, hoping to round out my understanding of the war a little bit more. (I did learn all this in high school, but who remembers back that far?)

Truthfully, I was a little disappointed. I think I was expecting more of an historical drama, but it read more like a really detailed textbook. If McCullough had humanized the facts a little more by following specific characters from an omniscient narrator point of view, I’d have cared far more. He did do this a little bit, with George Washington, and those were the most engaging parts of the book—I learned what Washington looked like, his reputation with the men, and that while he came off quite stoic, in private letters he was discouraged for the majority of 1776. He’d vent his feelings in these letters, but he’d also find an outlet in writing the caretakers at Mount Vernon about the modifications he wanted on his home. He was very particular, but it struck me as escapism. He didn’t want to be on the battlefield in what looked like a hopeless fight, so instead he’d close his eyes and go somewhere else. He was very much the reluctant leader—reluctant to be the Commander in Chief, and later reluctant to be the first President. But it almost seems like his very reluctance was part of what made him so perfect for the job. He was humble, he knew his limitations, and he wasn’t power-hungry. (I also thought it was interesting that the reason he had money to do what he did for the country when none of the men were getting salaries for quite some time was because he married a wealthy widow, Martha Washington. The money came from her!)

There were some remarkable, almost miraculous stories, though—cloud cover at just the right moments so that the British couldn’t see what the rebels were doing, freak storms that altered both armies’ plans, and the like. For much of 1776, Washington had good reason to be discouraged, as their cause certainly appeared quite hopeless. I assumed the book would cover the entire war and just start in 1776, although the title should have told me otherwise. Indeed, the book ends rather abruptly after 1776, simply summarizing the rest of the war from that point on. But I suppose if he’d covered the entire war with the same level of detail, it would have been way too tedious.

My rating: *** 1/2

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