Book Review: Boys and Girls Like You and Me

August 25, 2011 3 Comments

Title: Boys and Girls Like You and Me
Author: Aryn Kyle
Format: Trade Paper
Publisher: Scribner | Simon & Schuster
Pub Date: 2010; this edition: 2011
Read: Jul 2011
Source: Posman Books, Grand Central Station
Why: mostly I liked the paperback cover
Fulfills Challenge? Yes.

Review/Thoughts:
Simply put there are some good stories in here but even the good ones don’t stay with you for very long. It hasn’t even been a month since I finished the book and I can’t remember a single story save for the first one “Brides” which I read months ago. I had to revisit the book in order to write this review. I did like “Nine” though the ending was devastating. “Femme” was interesting but not really a short story. I appreciated “Sex Scenes from a Bookstore” if only because I worked at a bookstore and know how customers can be real assholes sometimes but the story itself didn’t do a whole lot for me. “Economics” seemed pointless. “Captain’s Club” was all right. “A Lot Like Fun” had its moments. “Company of Strangers” had potential and I liked the ending but not the rest of it. “Take Care” was strange and unsatisfying. For the most part, I liked “Allegiance.” And the eponymous story was quite simply “meh.” When I finished reading the collection, I gave it 3 stars because I guess I thought it was okay overall but the fact that I couldn’t really remember anything makes me question those initial feelings (it also makes me wonder whether I should write a book review immediately when everything is fresh or wait a bit for everything to settle, but that’s for another post).

Unfortunately what I do remember quite clearly from this book is this line: “Tommy stared down at her knees, white and creamy as two pieces of fruit.” I feel bad pulling that line out because Kyle’s writing for the most part is solid, but that sentence rankled and is the one thing I remember as being utterly ridiculous. I get the whole show don’t tell thing. I also get that you can sometimes try too hard to show in a way that isn’t cliche and end up with knees looking white as pieces of fruit (because creamy, white fruits are oh so common…do they look like the inside of a banana? does that qualify as white now? still shaking my head over this one).

Final Verdict:

Filed Under: book reviews Tagged With: , , ,

Book Review: The Bloody Chamber

May 10, 2011 2 Comments

Title: The Bloody Chamber
Author: Angela Carter
Format: Trade Paper
Publisher: Penguin (Ink Series)
Pub Date: 1979; this edition: 2011
Read: Apr 2011
Purchased: Shakespeare & Co.
Why: I’d always wanted to read The Bloody Chamber but couldn’t get over the crappy font of the previous edition. I hoped Penguin would eventually release a new edition and they did! Naturally I had to buy it.
Fulfills Challenge? Yes
Notes: I first read Angela Carter’s short story “The Tiger Bride” in my Fairy Tales class in college. Then I read an essay about her in Tin House’s Fantastic Women (Issue #33). So I’m definitely familiar with her and what she does.

Review/Thoughts:
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a collection of fairy tales with a feminist bent. As someone who loves fairy tales and feminism, you would think I would’ve read this a long time ago. But alas, I am a loser.

The collection opens with the eponymous story, a retelling of “Bluebeard” (a fairytale I’m unfamiliar with). I have to admit that when I first started reading it, the writing felt like a bit much. Beautiful for sure, but almost too much to handle especially having finished Ghost World (very colloquial) and Other People We Married (minimalist, simplistic) before it. But I eventually let myself be swept up in it as the first story got more interesting. That’s the other thing, it seemed to take a while for the first story to get to the point but once it did, I was completely taken in. It was thoroughly suspenseful and though I knew that these stories would have a feminist bent, I still wasn’t sure if I could breathe easy. I LOVED the ending, however, and though it started slow, “The Bloody Chamber” was my favorite story of the collection, hands down.

Both “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” are based on “Beauty and the Beast.” I did not choose to reread “The Tiger’s Bride” this time around, but I do remember it being very sensual. What I probably enjoyed most about the former story was the pun (Lyon/Lion). I enjoyed these but they didn’t stand out for me.

I almost got completely derailed in my efforts when I started reading “Puss-in-Boots.” The writing style, while entirely appropriate for the character annoyed me to no end and I found my attention drifting elsewhere. It took me days to realize that I needed to move on if I were to have any chance of finishing the collection and so I didn’t finish this one. Sorry!

In general, when a woman “comes to her senses” and realizes a man (or male creature) is actually out to destroy her then turns around and finishes him off, I’m pretty much A-OK with that. That’s all I gotta say about “The Erl-King.”

“The Snow Child,” based on “Snow White,” suffered from brevity. At a mere two pages (not even), it seemed finished before it even began. I know a lot of traditional fairy tales don’t belabor the point but this was short in a way that was detrimental to the overall story. Also I did not understand why, for the love of god, the father had sex his daughter’s corpse. A definite what the fuck? moment for me that had me rereading the story several times before I realized I didn’t care enough to continue wasting my time.

“The Lady of the House of Love” was apparently based off a radio play called “Vampirella.” I’ve never heard of this play but yes, the story is about a female vampire. It was surprisingly beautiful and I found myself jotting down so many quotes. Definitely a favorite in the collection.

“The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves,” and “Wolf-Alice” are all based on “Little Red Riding Hood” to some extent though the last also references “Alice in Wonderland.” I enjoyed all three stories though my favorite was “The Werewolf” because it came with an unexpected twist. I also loved the main character’s fearlessness in “The Company of Wolves.”

Overall I really enjoyed this collection (how many times have I used the word enjoyed? ugh). My biggest criticism, aside from the two stories I didn’t like (that seems more a matter of taste anyway), is that thematically the stories seemed a bit too similar. I mean, did we really need three variants of “Little Red Riding Hood” and two variants of “Beauty and the Beast?” And though Carter does make these stories her own, their ties back to their origins are undeniable, and so at times, the collection felt repetitive. It might not be a bad idea then to read the stories over a longer stretch of time. I think they can be better appreciated with a break in between (especially the three wolf stories back to back at the end).

Final Verdict:

Filed Under: book reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Book Review: Other People We Married

April 1, 2011 3 Comments

Title: Other People We Married
Author: Emma Straub
Format: trade paperback
Publisher: Five Chapters
Pub Date: Jan 2011
Read: Mar 2011
Purchased: Jan 2011, at the Launch Party at BookCourt
Why: I first discovered Emma Straub via twitter. She is, if you didn’t already know, one of the nicest authors in the twitterverse and in real life too it would seem.
Fulfills Challenge? yes (3)
Notes: N/A
Review/Thoughts:
So here’s the deal — I wanted to like this collection a lot more than I actually did.

I feel the collection can basically be summed up in the following way: unhappy people in unhappy relationships doing very little to change their unhappy circumstances. In some ways I suppose this is a reflection of life. How often do people really do anything to change their circumstances? I can appreciate that to some extent, however, I also began to feel the stories ended too soon (perhaps because very little had changed over the course of the story). Most of them seemed to be lacking that essential moment that makes for a really good short story. The moment where our perception of the situation changes along with the character’s or a gun goes off without warning shocking the reader from their place of complacency. These stories didn’t really have much of that. This is a quiet, somewhat sullen collection of stories, most of which aren’t very memorable because there seems to be a single underlying situation in all of them (meaning they all start to blend together after a while).

Oh, that sounds so much harsher than intended. Let’s move on to some of the positives. The writing is solid, deceptively simple and straightforward. I enjoyed “Pearls” and “Fly-Over State” the most, and I was happy to see the collection end on a more positive note with “Hot Springs Eternal.” I’d be interested in seeing recurring character, Franny Gold, appear in more stories (preferably without her jerk of a husband). I also think Straub’s writing is good enough to check out future works of hers. Her novel was picked up by Riverhead Books, so we’ll probably be seeing that sometime next year. I’ll give it a go if the plot seems interesting.

Straub’s style has been compared to Lorrie Moore’s so perhaps fans of Lorrie Moore should give this a try. I haven’t actually read Moore, so I can’t properly judge. Just throwing it out there.

Final Verdict:

Filed Under: book reviews Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Book Review: Nine Stories

February 4, 2011 5 Comments

Title: Nine Stories
Author: J.D. Salinger
Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books | Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: 1953; this edition: 2001
Read: Feb 2011
Purchased: Not sure. Probably Barnes and Noble, 66th and Broadway
Why: I had heard about the short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” which piqued my curiosity
Fulfills Challenge? Yes. It is also part of my Salinger Project.
Notes: I bought this back in 2008 and read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Although I enjoyed the story, it was also the main draw of the book for me so I didn’t pick it up again for a while. I later read “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” and more recently, I read “Down at the Dinghy.” So technically speaking I’ve been reading this book for over two years. Not sure what was taking me so long, as I gobbled up the remaining stories over the course of several hours. I also almost gave away this book without finishing it but reconsidered after Salinger died last year and I realized what a mistake it would be to never finish the collection.

Review/Thoughts:
Overall, I found the collection to be strong and to have all the marks of Salinger. By that of course I mean that the stories are very much in his style, his voice, and his trademark subjects: precocious children and broken men and women coming to terms with their lives, with little or no success. I believe it was Nabokov who disliked the reliance on dialogue in fiction (or perhaps that was just for his memoirs?). Salinger is pretty much the opposite of that. His stories rely heavily on long unwieldy dialogues between characters. These conversations don’t always advance the plot (plot? what plot?), and they never quite sound natural, but they are revealing. I suppose the biggest complaint with these stories would be that they don’t really go anywhere, but I don’t really have a problem with this and I enjoyed them nonetheless (basically I’m just warning anyone who may not be familiar with Salinger’s style). I do wish a few had been turned into longer pieces (novels, perhaps?) but alas, it was not meant to be.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is my favorite of the nine but I suspect there’s some bias there. Certainly it is one of the most gut-wrenching stories I’ve ever read. The story opens with Muriel, wife of Seymour Glass (yes, of the famed Glass family) talking on the phone with her mother. During her conversation we learn that Seymour is not well psychologically, that the Army probably discharged him from the hospital too soon. In the next scene, we get to see Seymour, playing on the beach with a little girl named Sybil. He tells her the story of the bananafish, and he seems perfectly normal. This heartfelt scene is followed by a disturbing scene in the elevator, suggesting that something isn’t quite right, but before you’re really able to digest that the story ends with a startling bang. And quite frankly, I don’t think the reader ever recovers from that, much in the same way that Seymour never recovers from the war. I also really liked “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “Down at the Dinghy,” “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” I didn’t like the remaining three quite as much but I didn’t think they were bad stories. “The Laughing Man” is both a story and a story within a story. I was more interested in what was actually going on, and though I recognize the second story was meant to parallel what was happening in the main story, I still wasn’t particularly interested in it. “Teddy” is probably the most spiritual and philosophical of all the stories, and like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” has a rather startling ending, except I still don’t quite know what to make of it.

Final Verdict:

Filed Under: book reviews Tagged With: , , , , ,
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 96 other followers