Monday Book Recs--Love Virtually by Glattauer and The One and Only Ivan by Applegate

Love Virtually by Daniel Glattauer

This book was an international best seller. I read it in the English translation, not the German original, but I was drawn to the book because of my German roots. The idea is the kind of thing that could be done well or badly and might still end up as a best seller. It is inevitable. Someone had to do it, but Glattauer does it well. The novel is an update of the old idea of a novel in letters, but instead a novel in emails. We never get any story from the two characters' heads, only what they write in their emails to each other. This ends up having some interesting consequences. We never really know if they are telling the truth or lying to each other. We do have a final email from a different character, and I will try not to spoil the book by saying who that is.

I thought the story was well done. On the one hand, it goes the way you might expect an internet romance would. I liked that it followed my expectation there. People imagine they have more intimacy on-line than they really do and I think we humans still need touch and feel and smell to fall in real love. And lying is the way to ruin real romance, in my opinion. But it isn't done with any sense of disdain for the characters. We see why they long for love and why they are constrained to get it in this limited way. We also see their heistation, their own disbelief in love on the internet.

For me personally, because I have actually seen at least one case of romance on the internet that turned out well, there was always a sense of suspense—well, maybe it could work out. The ending was dramatic and it also fit. I recommend it. It's a quick read, but for me, it worked as a romance with new tropes and old touches. Yes, remember, it doesn't end with a HEA.

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

There is a long history of children's books about animals, but nonetheless, I wondered for the first section of this book if it was going to be a book entirely about the sad life of a gorilla in a cage. It isn't. There is a child character who absolutely rightly becomes the hero of the story, never once taking away from the heroism of Ivan the gorilla. The voice of Ivan felt so right to me. Of course, who knows what that means? Not having ever heard the thoughts of a gorilla, this is in many ways a fantasy book as much as realism. My kind of fantasy, too, since I'm always interested in animals who behave in more realistic than fantastical ways (in part because I don't like to see animals become sparkly unicorns who are there to move the plot forward and to help the humans out—not exactly what I think animals exist to do). No one is really a villain here, not even the villain. I love the kind of writing that refuses to take the easy way out and paint minor characters in broad brush strokes. Ivan uses few words, but he is fair and honest in his depictions of the humans around him. Possibly the best middle grade I've read in the last two years.