Review Wednesday: Jane, the Fox and Me, by Fanny Britt

Jane, the Fox and Me by Fanny Britt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is a wonderful, fast read for any and all ages, about feeling left out, fitting in, and finding shelter where you can.

Helene is a young girl, outcast from the girls who were once her friends. Though I'd have liked to know why, that is left a mystery. However, they now call her fat, and she has begun to believe it. The book is sweet but also sad, funny, and hopeful. At one point, her mother takes her to try on swimsuits, which are too small, leading Helene to picture herself as a sausage. Who hasn't looked in a mirror and felt that way? The sad thing was that she is only a kid.

Helene takes refuge in Jane Eyre (who, she points out, would never be a sausage, even though she is poor and plain). One of the most clever aspects of the book was the masterful use of color. Helene's life is black and white, but as soon as she opens Jane Eyre, the pages are colored. When she closes the book, she's back to her own uncolored life...

Until one day while on a camping trip, she sees a fox. The fox is in color. It's such a striking contrast to the previous illustrations that you know it's important. She says, If a human looked at me with those eyes, my soul would be his.

And then a human does. She makes a friend. A few leaves are colored on the next page. She finishes Jane Eyre. It has a happy ending. She's going to lend it to her friend. The last pages of Helene's story are in color.

I can't express how special this graphic novel is. Please read it. It only took me 20 minutes and it is worth many more.

Recommended for everyone, but esp. reluctant reader girls, those who are lonely, outcast, bullied, or overweight.



View all my reviews

Review Wednesday: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book had a lot going on, and yet, somehow, nothing was ever happening. And that pretty much sums up my feelings for the book. Parts of it I loved, and I couldn't stop reading. Then parts of it...not so much. I'd stop reading with no interest in picking it up again. So, it took me almost a month to read this book, and in that time I read 3 or 4 other books.

The beginning of Rebecca was way too much information for me. I don't like books that start at the end, and then jump to the beginning. Mostly because I don't know or care about the characters when I start, so I don't really care about them waxing philosophical about fate and the past, and boring hotels, and wood pigeons, etc. Really, the entire first chapter and part of the second could have been an epilogue. And if it had been an epilogue, it would have been better, because the author could have tied up some of the hundreds of loose ends she left dangling. As it is, as a beginning chapter, she can't give away TOO much (although again, I think she goes overboard with the foreshadowing and basically gives away the ending. When she talks about the empty shell of the house, I immediately knew it had been burned, so the entire book I was expecting the ending. If I hadn't been expecting the ending, the end would have knocked my breath out. I did have a wonderful little shiver at the ending b/c the author builds suspense so well, but it would have had a much greater impact without being foretold from the very beginning.

Okay. Now that we've dealt with the beginning and end, let's talk about the middle stuff--plot, setting, characters, themes, etc. Yep, all that meat.

The setting of Mandalay was well-done, but somehow it didn't keep me interested. I wanted it to be more creepy or something. I'm sure it was described very well, but I must have drifted off during those parts because I hardly remember anything except the outdoor part of the estate--the flowers, trees, azaleas, etc. The Happy Valley. The cottage, the beach...all those are painted vividly in my mind. The house itself did not make an impression.

Although we get to know the inner thoughts and insecurities of our young heroine quite well, it annoyed me that we never learn her name or age. Maybe that's supposed to make us relate to her better (she's nameless, therefore she's me!) but it only annoyed me. Maybe I'm not romantic enough to put myself in her shoes. Also, they make her sound like she's 15 or something, and Mr. de Winter is 42, so it creeped me out a little, especially when he says stuff like "you're young enough to be my daughter...you little fool...be my wife." And I'm not a big fan of romance-novel hero types, so mean/rude/distant/self-absorbed guys really don't do it for me. Mr. de Winter was very much that, a Mr. Rochester type all the way. I eventually warmed up to him, but even then I kept wondering why he's been such an awful husband and ignored his child bride and her insecurities instead of trying to make her feel at home, or welcome, or even wanted. Especially since he's supposed to love her.

The other characters were well-done, and I liked Maxim's sister, she was such a character. So were Ms. Danvers, the cousin (SO well done!), and the aura of Rebecca that lingered, and Frank. I really wanted to know what happened to them all at the end, though. A rather big loose end.

I will say, it was fun learning the mystery of Rebecca and having her story slowly revealed. When Mr. de Winter tells what really happened to her, I have to say it was a shock. I laughed and decided then that I love this book. But there was so much to go, I kept wondering if she'd turn up alive at some point! I didn't really understand why she hated Maxim, though, and it seemed like a huge oversight not to give her a reason. Sure, she thought men were a big joke. But he married her, and let her have affairs, and did pretty much anything she wanted. So why was she swearing she'd take Mandalay from him? She had no reason to need to 'win' or get revenge. Also, I didn't really think Max had reason to kill her. And then the book sort of makes you root for him, so I'm wondering if the message is supposed to be that it's okay to kill your wife if she cheats but it's not okay to divorce her. And then of course Mr. de Winter is kind of a jerk up until he confesses murder, and then he's the nicest gut, loving and passionate and open about EVERYTHING even though he'd had nothing but anger/secrecy before this point. Yes, I know he's relieved his guilty conscience, but I still didn't really think he'd transform that fast.

Overall, this was a wonderful, deliciously twisted book that gave me lots of surprises and had good suspense and mystery once I got past the first half, which really dragged. The second half was exciting and wonderful, and I walked away from it laughing despite the huge holes at the end that leaves almost everything unexplained. Such as, who lit the fire? Mrs. Danvers? I thought she'd already left. And why didn't anyone put it out? Did anyone die? If not, what happened to everyone? Why didn't the de Winters rebuild the house, since the estate wasn't damaged, or it doesnt sound like it. Why are they living their lives in a hotel? Why don't they go back? Why didn't they sell the property instead of letting it go wild? Yeah. I had a lot of questions at the end, but still, when they drive over that hill and Max says, "That's Mandalay," I laughed out loud with the wonderful ending.



View all my reviews

Book Review: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Death in Venice and Other Tales by Thomas Mann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a really weird book. It was super short but full of lengthy, wordy sentences, and half of them I had to go back and reread because I forgot what the sentence was about by the end of it. I also really should have had a dictionary next to me--I didn't realize how lacking my vocabulary is!
About the story itself: the first couple chapters (and there are only 5 total) took me a few days. They were pretty dull and it def. is not a book that sucks you in right away; rather, it grows on you slowly and finishes more powerfully than it begins. I ended up really liking it although it was totally creepy and I had no idea it was a gay book, or that it was so creepy and pedophilistic (again, apologies if i’m making up words). The whole creepy old guy in love with gorgeous young boy thing was a bit different, but I thought the parts about love and obsession were right on the mark. Overall, I really liked the book despite its slow start. It's sort of like a gay Lolita, but WAY less disturbing.
I would give it a 3.5 out of 5 rating--recommended to gay men, or anyone who likes literature.


View all my reviews

Review Wednesday: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Danger! Forbidden romance! An outcast heroine! A mysterious hot guy!



Sound familiar? Yes, I know. It sounds like all the YA fantasy books out now. But wait, there's more.



A kick-ass heroine who doesn't sit around feeling sorry for herself, but does something good (and that doesn't benefit her directly--wait, it's not possible!), and stands up for herself at least sometimes, is more worried about what's right than being a rebel, and is concerned about something other than snagging a supernatural hottie. Wait, you say, something's wrong with this picture.



Actually, something is refreshingly right with this picture. This book is NOT fantasy but historical fiction, but it has a lot of the same elements. However, the similarities stop there. Written in the 'old days,' when writers cared about writing good books and good stories and not just making a buck by copying everything else, this book is still one of my favorites. Of all time. I'd gladly take it over every YA fantasy out today bundled into a huge anthology of unoriginality. Yes, this one small book is worth more than all of those books put together.



The characters are actually developed beyond their feelings for each other. The family is more than filler between the love scenes. The guy has more going for him than the fact that he's hot. And most of all, the heroine is pretty much awesome. I don't remember her ever whining, although she has plenty of reason to. She definitely never stomps into her room, slams the door, and throws herself onto her bed in a grade-A temper tantrum (although she's tempted when they take away all her pretty clothes and make her dress like a Puritan). And she never treats her friends or family like they aren't worth speaking to, even when they are awful to her. Which, incidentally, is a good thing, because if she really had been awful to them, she probably wouldn't have been saved.



I don't speak for anyone but myself here, but I'm so ready for a change in the direction YA literature is going. Please bring back books with substance. This is my plea. I don't know how many more Twilight rip-offs I can handle.



View all my reviews

Review Wednesday: The Shining by Stephen King

The Shining by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I hadn't read any Stephen King for a while, so I forgot how awesome he is. It's wonderful (and wonderfully rare) to find a writer who can maintain suspense while creating such beautifully real characters. He never sacrifices character development for plot. Which is a good thing for readers like me, who can't really care what happens at all if I don't care who it's happening to.

I know people who can't read King because of his descriptions and development, people who think he's too slow to get to 'the good stuff.' Personally, I wish a lot more writers would take his lead and stop shoving 'the good stuff' down our throats from the first sentence to the last. Stephen King writes whole, complete novels. They have real, fully developed characters as well as action, and if he sacrifices some fast-paced action to make the characters real, it only adds depth to the story. Too many of the fantasy and suspense novels I’ve read have pretty much nothing going for the characters. They are flat, Barbie-and-Ken cutouts from magazines, with only physical description and no development past what they look like. If that’s what you’re looking for, King isyou’re your ‘cup of tea.’ His novels rarely have sequels. He says all he needs to say in one book, and it's plenty, and the endings of his books are, well, endings. Not teases for a following book. They are final, wrapped, complete. And usually good, although I didn't really care for the ending of this one.

In this book, as in many of King's novels, the hero is a child. I have come to understand King's fascination with child characters in horror novels after reading a couple of his nonfiction books. Children are more innocent, and therefore more psychically receptive than adults. They haven't quite yet internalized the impossible, and therefore, they are usually (in King's novels) the ones who figure out what's going on, and usually the ones who try to do something about it, often with the help of a receptive adult father figure. And it's a good thing the protagonist in this novel has one, because we all know what kind of man his father is.

I've heard a few people say that the father is the most tragic 'victim' in this haunted house classic, but I'm not sure I agree with that. The father was never a very likeable character for me, no matter how victimized he was. Sure, he was an addict, and trying to recover. But I never really got the sense that he loved his family as much as he loved the bottle. I thought that he was not only picked off because he was the weakest link, but also because perhaps there was something inherently evil in him, something that responded to the evil in the hotel. One of my only complaints about this book was the swiftness of Jack’s transformation. It seemed like in one chapter he’s a loving (if guilty) father and husband, struggling to put his life back together. Then suddenly in the next chapter he’s fantasizing about twisting his wife’s nipples off? It seemed too sudden for this kind of evenly-paced book. I skipped back to see if I’d missed something, or if it really was almost instantaneous. I thought the suspense of him going crazy could have been drawn out a little more.

I did thing that Stephen King did a great job capturing the emotions of the mother towards her son. I'm sure his wife helped him with that! I had a bit of a hard time relating to her white-bread personality, with how passive she was and how she could still love someone who had turned into a monster. But that was how she was supposed to be. Although I didn’t relate to (or even like) most of the characters in this book, it was still a superb read. Not one of King’s creepiest, although the hedge animals were pretty great.

Overall, this was a good book. I like King’s classics, and if you do too, this one is it.







View all my reviews

Book Review: Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Sophie's Choice by William Styron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I finished this book a while ago, but I couldn’t decide what to think of it, so I held off on writing a review. But it really deserves a review, so I’m making myself sit down to write one before I forget what I wanted to say about it. I really wanted to love this book, and I did…until about ¾ of the way through. I wish I’d hated the whole book, because that would have been better than taking an amazingly written, moving story and ruining it with a pathetic, self-indulgent ending.

First, about the writing. Styron’s writing is so luscious and delicious that sometimes I had to stop myself from actually licking the page. It was so rich and full of beautiful words and phrases that made me almost drunk with the prose. But, in the end, all that delicious richness left me with a stomach ache. It seemed like Styron fell in love with his own story and his own voice and it killed the book. Literary vomit was the end result.

I’d heard of this book and the movie a few times, but I didn’t even know what it was about before I picked it up. I knew it was supposed to be devastating and heartbreaking. What surprised me was how funny the book was. Told through the eyes of Stingo, a chronically horny twenty-two-year-old in the late forties, the humor in the book kept it from growing too dark. The protagonist’s sexual frustration and foiled attempts at getting laid made me laugh out loud. Throughout most of the book, I loved the story almost as much as the writing. There were several fifty or hundred page chapters I could have done without—long asides that did nothing to advance the plot and instead distracted from the narrative. I would have liked to hear more of Sophie’s story and less of Stingo’s.

The first part of the book was so dull I almost skipped it. I found some of it offensive or in poor taste, but I kept reading. Once Stingo meets Nathan and Sophie, the story gets better.

Nathan was brilliantly created and captivating, the best character in the book by far. Until…he has schizophrenia AND a coke addiction? It just didn’t ring true. I thought the story would have been stronger if he was just evil. Or schizophrenic, but with the good job he said he had. Once I found out that he had lied and was basically an invalid, the book just went downhill from there. It seemed inconsistent with the story, and it rang false to me. He was the best character, complex and full of rage and guilt and issues, and then Styron ruined it all by making him just some crazy guy who made up stories. I wanted his brilliance to be real, not a drug-fueled delusion.

Sophie’s character was developed well, as was Nathan’s. But again, towards the end of the book, it all started to seem hackneyed and false. Over three months she goes from beautiful, refined, and poised to this brazen lush who describes in detail how much she loves sucking cock? I doubt it. Even when she was drunk, she wasn’t the kind of person who would do that. I didn’t believe it. She was developed in a certain way, and then Styron wrote her doing all these things that her character would not have done or said.

Stingo: Although I felt for the guy and his obsession with unrequited love for Sophie, I started to lose sympathy for him at about the same time that the whole book fell apart for me. I understood that he was sexually frustrated, but it seemed like Styron kept building and building on that when he could have been focusing on something more interesting, like Sophie’s time in Auschwitz. And after a while, Stingo just seemed like a nasty pervert, so I lost sympathy. I really didn’t need to hear all about his wet dreams and such. And he was very rude to all the women in the book, which did not endear him to me. Then he takes advantage of drunken, heartbroken Sophie in a cheap hotel somewhere. Really turned me off.

From close to the beginning, I knew Stingo would probably hook up with Sophie, and I knew when he did, it would ruin the book for me. And it did. If not for that, this would have been one of the best books I’ve ever read. Now it’s a 3. It was just not believable that this beautiful, sexually insatiable thirty-year-old woman would have sex with a young guy who is only a friend and say he was a great lover. He was basically a virgin, and yet he claims his very first time he rocked her world even though she was quite experienced. Yeah, right. It felt like Styron fell in love with his own character and wanted to give him everything he ever wanted instead of telling the ‘truth’ of the story—what would have happened to those characters in that world. He based Sophie on someone he met but didn’t know—obviously someone he wanted to fuck. So he let Stingo do it for him. I just didn’t believe a virgin could rock Sophie’s world after she’d been with Nathan, her great love and lover. No way.

This book had a great story to tell, but unfortunately, it was mixed into a story that I had no desire to read. The whole book is this relentless trek towards Sophie’s choice and her demise. And then it’s all cheapened by this detailed sex scene where Stingo gets all he ever wanted and fucks her brains out. Really? Ugh. I read somewhere that Styron was accused of eroticizing the holocaust. Um, hello, because he DID. He also eroticized everything else. The book was beautiful and I devoured the sexually charged writing, but the plot lost all the momentum in the end. For me, it would have been much better if it had focused on the choice and the consequence without the completely unbelievable sex scene, which replaced the much more poignant climax of the choice. Completely ruined the book and detracted from the impact of the choice, which was what the book was supposed to be. It was called Sophie’s Choice. Not Stingo’s Fantastic Fuck.



View all my reviews

When I give a five-star rating.

Since I've been doing book reviews on here, and will continue to do so occasionally, I thought I'd shed some light on my process. Although it might seem I give extremely high ratings, I don't. However, I only post book reviews for books I love and would recommend. My other, not-so-good book reviews, stay on Goodreads. If you really want to read them, you can. But I'd rather only share and encourage the reading of great books, not talk about the ones I hated.

I hardly ever give 5-star ratings. Maybe my top 10 books of all time, and that's about it. To me, five stars means the book is perfect and I can't think of one thing wrong with it. And that's a hard thing to find!

My criteria (I think): 1. It definitely has to stay with me for a long time, not just what happened but the feeling I got when I read it has to come back, even years later.

2. Also, it has to be well-written. I admit, I'm a book snob. I can hardly read books that aren't well written, even if everyone loves them. Bad writing is a deal breaker, no matter if the writer is #1 Best Seller for ten years in a row. I majored in English and read tons of books on writing, so I can smell bad writing from a mile away. Also, beautiful writing that takes my breath away, gives me goosebumps, makes me shiver, whatever, has to be done in a subtle way, not in-your-face gross-out or steamy love scenes (those are for fun, not 5-stars.)

3. The last thing is, everything has to be vivid. I dont have to love the characters, but I have to believe them and feel I know them. I have to see the setting, the world, the people without being bogged down by flowery paragraph-long description. I have to feel the emotion, smell the smells, hear what they hear, ache when they ache.

It's a tough bill, but I'm a tough reader.

Fifteen Books Everyone Should Read

Currently Reading: Sophie's Choice, By William Styron

This is just my opinion, of course. But here are fifteen amazing books (in no particular order) that I would share with absolutely anyone, regardless of age, genre preference, or any other factor.

1. House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer
2. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
4. Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, by Louise Rennison
5. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. Tangerine, by Edward Bloor
7. His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Phillip Pulman (cheating to pick 3 books, I know, but they are all too AMAZING to pick just one).
8. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman
9. The Stand, by Stephen King
10. Jane Eyre, By Charlotte Bronte
11. The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare
12. The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd
13. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
14. The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant
15. Outside Over There, by Maurice Sendak