by Leah Hager Cohen, published by Norton, 2007. 302 pages
A beautiful character-driven novel about Beatrice, a teenage girl who decides to be an actor. Her grandmother is a famous actress, but has been estranged from her family for as long as Beatrice can remember. Beatrice reaches out to her grandmother for advice, and in doing so begins the long process of defining herself separately from her parents. At the same time, her parents become embroiled in a scandal stemming from accusations on her father for sexual harassment. Both internal and external pressures help Beatrice leave her home and restrictive parents.
This is a rich book. The author has a gift for language, making descriptive passages that seem so right. The book emphasizes the need for language to have real meaning, not just sound important. (Beatrice's father is a professor who often launches into lectures that sound important but aren't necessarily meaningful.) The emphasis on truth and meaning is a refreshing change from Beatrice's childhood filled with words that cloak feeling and establish boundaries.
People who like character driven books and coming of age stories would like this book.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Sunshine
by Robin McKinley, published by Berkley Books in October 2003, 389 pages
I've been meaning to review this one for quite some time now. I first read this book in early 2007, shortly after taking the class Book Lust with Nancy Pearl. (You may have heard of Nancy, she does book recommendations for NPR, and has her own action figure! Her superpower is that if you talk to her for a minute or so, she will be able to recommend the perfect book for you to read. It's really quite eerie.) For her class, we had to read at least one book from each fiction genre. I mentioned that I hadn't read one for horror yet, and she recommended this book, Sunshine.
Her recommendation was excellent. Sunshine has a perfect blend of magic, vampires, strange other things that are creepy, some nice sensual bits, and a good coming of age story (one of my weaknesses, and why I'm drawn to young adult fiction in general) for my tastes.
It's told in first person by Sunshine, a young woman who does the baking for Charlie's Bakery, who is living as simple a life as people can anymore, after the Voodoo wars that decimated the population and made certain areas of the cities unlivable. Charlie, her stepfather, has created a family around the people who work and frequent his bakery, and they all get along well, gather for movie nights every Friday, and generally get by.
Sunshine gets a little bored and cramped by all this one day, and goes for a walk by herself. She goes to the lake, which is a little too close to a Bad Area, and gets abducted by a gang of vampires. They leave her in a deserted house to tempt their enemy, a very strong and powerful vampire who they have managed to capture and chain up in the house.
An uncertain truce develops between them, and this drags Sunshine into the middle of a vampire war. She learns that vampires have gotten closer to taking over the world than any human had yet feared, and maybe by joining forces with her new vampire friend she can help to prevent it. Along the way, she also begins to discover she has some secrets of her own that might just come in handy.
This is definitely a horror book; there is plenty of gore, destruction, and scrapes with death here. There's also a bit of graphic sexuality that was actually a bit shocking (I think I've been reading too many young adult books). Plenty of vampires and other demons to keep any Buffy fan happy. In fact, there were more than a few things that reminded me of Buffy.
Something that I really appreciated was the author's ability to blend normalcy with the supernatural. One moment Sunshine is in her bakery, making cinnamon rolls "as big as your head", something she is famous for at Charlie's. The next page, she's chained up next to a vampire, dripping with blood. When Sunshine is next at home, she spends several pages (or chapters? I can't remember) trying to forget what happened and pretending everything is normal again. That resolute desire to have everything back to normal just by pretending is something I'm sure we've all felt at some point. We can even get away with it sometimes. That dread of a buried experience builds up the tension and horror in a very effective way, is maybe even scarier than being attacked by a vampire.
I don't think I've given away too much, even with this lengthy of a review. I highly recommend this book, if you are up for the horror bits. I liked it so much, I re-read it with the year, and proceeded to read everything else I could find by this author. None of her other novels come close to this one, in my opinion.
I've been meaning to review this one for quite some time now. I first read this book in early 2007, shortly after taking the class Book Lust with Nancy Pearl. (You may have heard of Nancy, she does book recommendations for NPR, and has her own action figure! Her superpower is that if you talk to her for a minute or so, she will be able to recommend the perfect book for you to read. It's really quite eerie.) For her class, we had to read at least one book from each fiction genre. I mentioned that I hadn't read one for horror yet, and she recommended this book, Sunshine.
Her recommendation was excellent. Sunshine has a perfect blend of magic, vampires, strange other things that are creepy, some nice sensual bits, and a good coming of age story (one of my weaknesses, and why I'm drawn to young adult fiction in general) for my tastes.
It's told in first person by Sunshine, a young woman who does the baking for Charlie's Bakery, who is living as simple a life as people can anymore, after the Voodoo wars that decimated the population and made certain areas of the cities unlivable. Charlie, her stepfather, has created a family around the people who work and frequent his bakery, and they all get along well, gather for movie nights every Friday, and generally get by.
Sunshine gets a little bored and cramped by all this one day, and goes for a walk by herself. She goes to the lake, which is a little too close to a Bad Area, and gets abducted by a gang of vampires. They leave her in a deserted house to tempt their enemy, a very strong and powerful vampire who they have managed to capture and chain up in the house.
An uncertain truce develops between them, and this drags Sunshine into the middle of a vampire war. She learns that vampires have gotten closer to taking over the world than any human had yet feared, and maybe by joining forces with her new vampire friend she can help to prevent it. Along the way, she also begins to discover she has some secrets of her own that might just come in handy.
This is definitely a horror book; there is plenty of gore, destruction, and scrapes with death here. There's also a bit of graphic sexuality that was actually a bit shocking (I think I've been reading too many young adult books). Plenty of vampires and other demons to keep any Buffy fan happy. In fact, there were more than a few things that reminded me of Buffy.
Something that I really appreciated was the author's ability to blend normalcy with the supernatural. One moment Sunshine is in her bakery, making cinnamon rolls "as big as your head", something she is famous for at Charlie's. The next page, she's chained up next to a vampire, dripping with blood. When Sunshine is next at home, she spends several pages (or chapters? I can't remember) trying to forget what happened and pretending everything is normal again. That resolute desire to have everything back to normal just by pretending is something I'm sure we've all felt at some point. We can even get away with it sometimes. That dread of a buried experience builds up the tension and horror in a very effective way, is maybe even scarier than being attacked by a vampire.
I don't think I've given away too much, even with this lengthy of a review. I highly recommend this book, if you are up for the horror bits. I liked it so much, I re-read it with the year, and proceeded to read everything else I could find by this author. None of her other novels come close to this one, in my opinion.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Cold Mountain
A kind of modern Odyssey, we see one main character making his way home and experiencing or escaping all sorts of adventures. Another main character learns patience and how to live in her world. Time and place are evoked in a very compelling way. Set in the closing days of the civil war, so there is plenty of violence here as well, both from self defense and from senseless lashing out. I was especially moved by the descriptions of Ada developing from a helpless girl to a self-reliant woman, learning to take control of her life and shape it to meet her needs instead of pining away when she found herself on her own.
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