Booklog

[sholio]

I haven't posted about books in awhile, so let's do that, then! Most of what I've been reading lately has been nonfiction (history, mainly), but on the fiction end of things, here are a smattering:

Libby on Wednesday by Zilpha Keatley Snyder - I think I might've read about this one on rachelmanija's blog. (Yep, here's that post.) It's YA and can basically be described as a rather nerdier version of The Breakfast Club. I loved it. Quiet, bright, socially awkward Libby was homeschooled until her parents decided to send her to school to get "socialized". She ends up in a creative writing class with a bunch of other social misfits, all of whom hate each other ... at first. It's not like you can't figure out exactly where the story is going, but I really like that particular trope anyway, and the characters (as well as Libby's big, weird, nontraditional family) are well-drawn and easy to love. I'll probably be looking for more books by this author, since I noticed when I picked this one up that the library has a bunch more.

Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult - Okay, so ... I really enjoyed 95% of this book, and then loathed the ending so thoroughly that I never intend to read another book by this author again (especially after going on Amazon, reading some reviews and discovering that this kind of WTF!ending is sort of a thing of hers). Which makes it difficult to write anything else about the book! But, basically, it's about a family torn apart by the mother's "wrongful birth" lawsuit on behalf of her disabled daughter (i.e. if she'd known her daughter would be disabled, she would not have chosen to give birth to her). Having been a disabled child myself, with a disability very similar to the girl in the book, and also kinda-mostly pro-choice, this was a really interesting topic to me -- the ease of slipping myself into the daughter's position made it a deeply uncomfortable book to read at times, but in a good way -- and I thought the author did a pretty good job balancing the different moral positions in the book without demonizing anybody. It wasn't flawless, but I liked it right up until that dreadful cop-out of an ending, which I'm still mildly bitter about, as you can probably tell. *g* ETA: This book is now thoroughly spoiled in the LJ comments.

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells - I wanted to love this book so much more than I did. The world-building is just wonderful: it's set in a somewhat post-apocalyptic fantasy world with no humans, just many different races of strange, alien, vaguely humanoid beings. The main character, Moon, is a winged shapeshifter who's not really sure what he is, never having met another person like himself until an incident at the start of the book. The big problem I had with this book is that, first of all, what I thought it was going to be about (Moon's search for his people), is only the first couple of chapters and then it almost immediately falls into a slow-moving political plot that turns out to be the main plot thread in the book. I never really bonded with most of the characters -- with a couple of exceptions, I found them likable but bland; there were simply too many of them and not enough to distinguish between them. Still, others' mileage may vary. I can definitely tell that I would have been ALL OVER this book at a different time in my life; I've become a reader who is most drawn to character, but at certain times in the past I've been more enamored of world-building, and I think I would have loved this book if I'd happened to hit it at the right time for me.

The Devil You Know by Mike Carey - This is the first book in an urban fantasy series about an exorcist in a London infested with the ghosts of the restless dead, as well as an odd demon or two. It's pretty good: there's a rich sense of place, good character voices and an overall air of film-noir about it, and it's nice to see urban fantasy that's focused on something other than vampires and werewolves. Also, there's a twist at the end (actually a couple of them) that I absolutely loved. Still, it didn't really leave me wildly enthusiastic to seek out the rest of the series for some reason. I think I'll see if the library has them and give the next one a try. I think this series could draw me in over time, but right now it's kind of middle-of-the-road: enjoyable to read, but it was a book that I could pick up or put down, not stay up 'til the middle of the night finishing.

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/347659.html with comments.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a book I read a while ago (Promise the Moon by Elizabeth Arnold), which is about a woman and her children dealing with the suicide of her soldier husband. And for most of the book, it's this incredibly gritty, conflicted thing--it alternates between the perspectives of the mom and the older child and actually manages to capture the voice of a child realistically, and you could see how both of them were hurting each other over and over by trying to shield each other from pain.

And then at the end the woman "solves" the mystery of her husband's suicide, and that's the end of the cycle of grief. It's like A+B+C=husband kills himself, well, that's totally reasonable then, guess I can't blame him for it. And this is just ??? The one suicide I knew, I had to finally accept that there was no reasonable explanation because suicide isn't reasonable. That even if I found out every little detail about what was going on with him, as I wanted to do, that still would not explain it. So to come to the end of this emotional journey and find that...

I guess this is a problem with authors who want to deal with really messy complicated issues? Because those things don't ever actually resolve in reality, but the book has to stop at some point?

[brightknightie.livejournal.com]

>"...but the book has to stop at some point?"

On reflection, this makes me feel more kindly toward the "and it haunted her the rest of her life" nineteenth-century-esque sort of ending.