Book-review post!
Catching up on the book reviews! Some YA, some grown-up. Featuring eating disorders, problematic relationships, and general dysfunction.
Alyssa Sheinmel – The Stone Girl
Sethie’s turning to stone; she doesn’t want to feel, or think too hard about her quasi-relationship with a distant boy or what’s going on with her mother. It’s an interesting look at the way people will put up with certain behaviours from their partners, among other things (the protagonist is also anorexic), but the third-person viewpoint can be a little distancing at times.
Jay McInerney – Story of my Life
As with most of McInerney’s characters, you kind of want to send them off to therapy. Alison is a jaded, messed-up, privileged twenty-year-old in 1980s New York – lots of dysfunction ensues. This is a quick read, very McInerneyish. Read it before I had properly looked into the history behind it, which is possibly for the best. Liked it, though there were some moments where I questioned the female-POV.
Grace Bowman – Thin
Another eating disorder book (someone was researching…) – this time a memoir. This is well-written but at times gets too caught up in its own literariness – the subject matter is sufficiently gripping on its own. Not the best out there, but certainly worth reading if it’s a topic that is of interest.
Amanda Grace – The Truth About You & Me (via NetGalley)
I really wanted to love this. The heroine is a sixteen-year-old girl enrolled in college, on a special advanced smart-kids program, and it’s told in the form of letters to her biology professor – who is young and hot and of course they had a thing. Ah, but he didn’t know she was sixteen… and thought she was eighteen… ergo, she’s entirely to blame for ruining his life. (Except, you know, a twenty-six-year-old should still know better than to flirt with his eighteen-year-old student and to promise they will be together once the course ends but until then they must just have smouldering sexual tension… and also, also, he gives her an A when she doesn’t deserve one. Ethics! Dude!) I had many problems with the behaviour in the book, but also with some of the other elements – like the protagonist’s brother – that felt like they could be much more developed than they were. And although I am a fan of epistolary novels, this one had an awful lot of ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’, which grated after a while. So, yes. Wanted to love it a lot, ended up struggling to finish it and then being very annoyed by the end. If you’re looking for a delightfully twisted messed-up-yet-compelling student/teacher YA, I suggest trying Ilsa J Bick’s Drowning Instinct instead – a lot of the same issues come up, but they’re handled much better.
Sara Zarr – The Lucy Variations
I was really looking forward to this book, particularly as a fan of Sara’s blog and her musings on creativity and work, and it seemed like this was going to deal with a lot of those issues. It does, but it goes far beyond that. Lucy Beck-Moreau is a recovering piano prodigy, and the well-rounded story focuses on her return to the world of classical music with the help of her younger brother’s new teacher, along with an exploration of the family dynamics that led her to quit in the first place, and the friendship and school dynamics that have been affected by her former privileged position. It’s thoughtful and readable and just rather lovely. Not my favourite of hers (Story of a Girl still holds a special place in my heart) but most definitely worth reading.
