When We Were Romans

I gave up on Matthew Kneale’s novel, When We Were Romans, pretty early, about 40 pages in. The story was just beginning to get interesting, but I felt the “compelling voice” of the nine year old narrator was in desperate need of a copy editor. Although the work is not introduced as a journal or diary it reads like one, with spelling and grammar mistakes the author attributes to a nine-year-old. But knowing the misspellings and grammar errors were intentional did not make them any less distracting. If you are not bothered by the use of dialect, it might be worth a read. If like me, you are, give it a pass.

Palimpest

I gave up half-way through Catherynne Valente’s novel, Palimpest. I wanted to like it, but the intricate descriptions of invented life got boring after awhile. The characters never clicked for me and the pace was too slow.

Death, A Life

Death, a Life is without a doubt the best memoir of 2008. Are you bored with today’s memoirs that are more fiction than fact? Are the latest cancer memoirs and sexual abuse stories getting you down? Are today’s trauma memoirs not giving you the voyeuristic rush you’ve become accustomed to? Well, have I got the memoir for you. Meet Death, in all of his hellish glory and relentless existential despair. Talk about a dysfunctional family, dad’s Satan and mom’s Sin. A wardrobe more confining than a burka (he never gets to take it off!) And the billions and billions of dead he’s forced to listen to whine and try to wheedle their way out of death. Or, away from Death.

George Pendle pens the introduction and yes, it is funnier than this review.

Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament

Breather's A Zombie's Lament

The first half of S.G. Browne’s, Breathers, A Zombie Lament, is less a zombie novel and more of an extended metaphor, told from the zombie perspective, of the injustice suffered by minority groups in the United States. Like many vampire novels, Breathers deals with questions of citizenship, humanity, access to basic services and whether or not zombies are a constitutionally protected class. The opening is not without humor and does serve to “humanize” Andy and his fellow zombies at the Undead Anonymous group.

The second half of the book dips briefly into the culinary novel realm, (Recipes Included!) before diving into some old fashioned zombie gore along with a 21st century media frenzy. The book is silly and fun, and while clearly a genre novel, it’s no throwaway zombie tale. Browne does a good job creating characters we care about and presenting us with a well thought out and consistent narrative about how Undead Americans manage to survive in our society.

If you are only interested in reading about zombies feeding on brains, you may not make it to the mayhem. While dead pan humor is used through-out, Browne’s primary task is to tell the story of Andy, a typical Breather who is forced to deal with a life changing accident that led to his reanimation from the dead. If you like your zombies thoughtful and sensitive, you’ll like Andy. If amoral emotional growth is what your after this is the book for you. But be warned, if you haven’t reanimated from the dead and forced to move back in with your parents, sleep in the basement, and attend a 12 step program for the undead, then you probably wouldn’t understand.

Boneman’s Daughters

Boneman’s Daughters, by Ted Dekker,  is a fast paced, plot driven, internally consistent, albeit implausible, combination of an espionage thriller and police procedural. Ryan Evans, an intelligence analyst for the Navy on temporary duty with the Army in Iraq, is kidnapped and tortured by local insurgents. After his release, Ryan returns to Austin, Texas  with hopes of repairing his relationship with his wife and daughter only to be accused of being a serial killer whose m.o. is breaking the bones of young women. With his family caught in the middle Ryan must prove his innocence while FBI investigator, Ricki Valentine, tries to figure out who the real killer is. Ryan and his daughter, Bethany, are the only characters that go beyond stock, two-dimensionality, but this doesn’t slow the novel down. Boneman’s Daughters is at its core an action adventure novel about a father trying to save his family and will keep most readers turning the page. Recommended for libraries with popular fiction collections.

Reading Stats for 2008

Reading statistics from Jan 2008- Dec 2008. Here’s the summary (% and raw numbers) based on a total of 126 books.

Total 126 Books

38% Fiction/Literature 48
33% Mystery 41
12% Science Fiction 15
6% Comics 8
3% Non-fiction 4
1% YA 1

59% Women 74
40% Men 50
1% anthologies or collections (includes both genders)
9% translations 11

Bulgarian 1
French 1
Icelandic 2
German 1
Portuguese 1
Spanish 5

71% liked 89
22% ambivalent 28
5% disliked 8
21% would recommend 27
5% reviewed 6

A Week in October

Elizabeth Subercaseaux’s novel, A Week in October, is the story of a death. Clara has been diagnosed with cancer and at her husband’s suggestion has begun to keep a journal during her final months. Her husband, Lionel, discovers the notebook and despite feelings of guilt, reads it behind Clara’s back. What makes the novel so compelling is neither the husband nor the novel’s readers can be sure if the journal is a true diary or a novel Clara is writing.

Subercaseaux’s novel alternates between the text of the notebook and Lionel’s response to Clara’s writing. He can’t figure out if it is true or not and the notebook is littered with clues that it may be false, although much of it is proven to be true. The line between fact and fiction in the notebook is never truly resolved and it forces Lionel to rethink not just the last year of his wife’s life (the subject of the notebook) but what it says about their entire life together.

The story that makes up the notebook is fascinating as is the confusion around fact and fiction. Clara’s tale is interesting in a way contemporary memoirs are not. The notebook is intentionally fictitious while posing as a diary in contrast to memoirs published in the US that pretend to be true stories, and are increasingly revealed to be fictions. This evasion, and Lionel’s inability to distinguish what is true or not in the notebook, make this a brief but effective read. The story told in the notebook is interesting, and the husband’s reading of it adds emotional depth to Subercaseaux’s highly recommended novel.

Translated from Spanish by Marina Harss

Through a Glass, Deadly

I don’t normally review the many cozy mysteries I read, but today I am making an exception. Instead of discussing it as a success or failure as a mystery (failure, btw) this review focuses on the location. It is set in Tucson, AZ and I am left wondering two-thirds of the way in if the author ever lived in Tucson. I lived in Tucson and it is unrecognizable. She mentions the name of the city repeatedly instead of providing descriptions as if the name itself will conjure up a real sense of place. It doesn’t.

We obviously do not share the same Tucson. Reading this book, can you tell this city is 45 minutes straight up the highway from the Arizona-Mexico border? That there is a significant hispanic population? That yes, you will see the border patrol in downtown/midtown. I’m not even sure what time of year the book occurs in. Is it the dread days of summer or have the students and winter visitors invaded? This should matter since the plot takes place at glass studio, heavily dependent on winter season tourists.

The House at Midnight

Lucie Whitehouse’s novel, The House at Midnight is not worth your time. The writing is unbearable. I apologize for reviewing a book I didn’t finish, but I could no longer justify wasting my time reading it. The shallow, flat characters were boring and the plot weak, but it was the author’s writing style that did the work in. I couldn’t face anymore of the horrible similes such as, “[a] jealous flower unfolded little petals in my gut.” Enough already with the muscular flowing river. And I swear there was a passage comparing flowers to fried eggs. Yes! Fried Eggs! Why oh why did her editor let her get away with that? It’s as if the entire novel consists of the snarky/boring passages from Cold Comfort Farm.

The Flowers

I was disappointed with Dagoberto Gilb’s The Flowers. I’ve enjoyed a number of Gilb’s short stories, but I kept getting bogged down in the novel. The Flowers is narrated by Sonny, a teenage boy who has just moved to a new apartment complex with his mother and step-father. The set up is quite contrived, while doing odd jobs for his step-father, Cloyd, who owns the apartment complex, Sonny gets involved in the lives of his neighbors. Unfortunately, I didn’t care about any of the characters, not Sonny, not his mom, the neighbors or his jerk of a step- father Cloyd. I put the book down numerous times and only kept reading so I could write this review in good faith.

The novel is at its best as a standard coming of age novel. The first half reminded me of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, but with more sex and less success. I had difficulty with Mitchell’s work as well and wonder if it may be that I am the wrong audience for these books, as I am not and never have been a teenage boy. That said, Mitchell’s narrator had a strong and unique voice and his development over the length of the novel was clearly articulated. This is not true of The Flowers. The more I read, the less I cared. While Sonny has a distinct voice, and Gilb does a decent job interweaving Spanish, English and teenage slang, it is not enough to overcome the novel’s weak plot and character development. The teenage slang and speech patterns are not distracting, but we don’t really learn anything from the use of language. The perspective is too limited to Sonny. He lacks the vocabulary and the depth of character to make his point of view interesting as the only hook to hang the story on.