Tag: book review

Review: Another Brooklyn

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Review for “Another Brooklyn” by Jacqueline Woodson (2016)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This is not just a novel. It’s poetry, it’s memory. It’s a testament to Black girlhood.

With events written in non-linear, prose style, Another Brooklyn is the story of August, a young academic who travels to her Brooklyn home to attend her father’s funeral. She runs into an old friend on a train and from there, you are transported back to specific memories of August’s childhood in the 1970’s. Brooklyn, we learn, was a place where she found the friendship of three other Black girls, each from a different home situation. There are memories of growing up without a mother, of DJ parties, of first love, and so many other things that to describe them all is to give this book away and not let you experience this great novel for yourself. My only complaint was that this book was not long enough. It’s a short (less than 200 pages), but I could have read Woodson’s gorgeous prose for another 200 pages, that’s how great this book is.

Another Brooklyn deserves all of the Top Ten lists and press it’s getting. A must read!

Review: How to Set a Fire and Why

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Review for “How to Set a Fire and Why” by Jesse Ball (2016)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Hey. It’s been a while. The fall semester has started. I’ve been reading, but for those who follow this site, I only give you my best reviews. That means if I read a book and can’t find anything to say about it or write a decent review, you’ll see nothing here.

Anywho, I think I’ve broken my dry spell with this one. This is such a nice, dark little read. I was definitely impressed.

Immediately the first thing you note about this book is that teenager Lucia Stanton has been dealt a really shitty hand in life. Her father is dead, the only memento she has of him is his Zippo lighter, which she clutches onto for dear life. Her mother is in a mental hospital with an unspecified mental illness in which she doesn’t recognize her own daughter. When the story opens, she has been expelled from her current high school for stabbing a boy with a pencil. The bright spot of this book is the relationship Lucia has with her aunt, with whom she finds acceptance, and together they squat in a tiny garage with one bed. Her aunt finds her another high school where she falls into favor with a group of kids who set fires for anarchist purposes.

The brilliance of this book is in the characterization of Lucia. She is a bundle of contradictions. She is cynical, whip smart, angry, and completely authentic. I normally don’t go for quirky, “philosophical” teen narrators (I’m probably one of the few people in the world that doesn’t find anything special about Holden Caulfield) but I LOVED Lucia’s voice. She rewrites her club’s arsonist manifesto, she plans big fires–and all of it makes perfect sense because her aunt is a proud anarchist, as was her mother. Hell-raising is one of the few things in which Lucia has as a family legacy. Lucia is self destructive, yet her unapologetic brand of self-destructiveness never grated on me or made me want to put the book down.

I feel like I can’t write enough to do this book justice. It’s engaging and smart. It’s written for adults, but I can definitely see its appeal as a YA novel.

Review: All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

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Review for “All the Ugly and Wonderful Things” by Bryn Greenwood (2016)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I can’t get behind this book. Sorry.

It starts off somewhat promising: a young girl named Wavy and her little brother growing up in an abusive household with their shitty, meth-addicted parents who casually neglect them in search of their next fix. Wavy bounces between several family members and foster homes until she meets Kellen, a tattooed biker with a shady past who works in her father’s “business,” cooking and manufacturing methamphetamine. Kellen begins to look out and care for Wavy and her brother, and they eventually form a relationship.

This book spans about 15 years in Wavy’s life. There are a lot of different perspectives from those directly and indirectly involved with the main characters (teachers, relatives, etc) and a lot of variation between first and third person narratives–some I liked, others not so much. The writing was ok, but it lacked conciseness, making it feel it was way longer than its 353 pages. There was a quite a bit of drag in this novel for that reason, so I started skimming after the halfway point. Bleh.

Lemme also say this for those who don’t know: this is a love story. A love story that happens to take place between a little girl and, in this case, a grown man. They ‘fall in love’ when Wavy is about 8, and Kellen is in his 20’s. There are cringe-worthy sexual scenes that do take place when Wavy is a kid, and for that reason I should state that this is probably not a book for everyone. Ultimately, it’s not the book for me either. I won’t psychoanalyze the author’s reason for writing this, but I just felt the relationship dynamic was too weird for me to even begin to appreciate.

[Note: This book was provided to me by NetGalley and the publisher as a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review.]

Review: Guapa

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Review for “Guapa” by Saleem Haddad (2016)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Ever since I saw this book on a Buzzfeed “Books to Read in 2016” list earlier this year, I knew I had to get a hold of this. Despite having read many Middle Eastern lit books before, I have to admit that much of this region of the world is still a mystery to me–the people, their customs, ideology, and of course, their Islamic religion–and my curiosity always calls me back to this setting to find out more. When I learned that this book had a gay character, I knew I had struck gold here with a unique character in a unique, often misunderstood setting.

Guapa follows twenty-four hours in the life of Rasa, a young, twenty-something gay man in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. He lives with his domineering grandmother and works for a small company that provides language translation services to Westerners. At the beginning of this story, Rasa’s grandmother catches him in bed with his lover, Taymour, and Rasa flees the apartment he shares with her in shame. From a series of flashbacks and present-day storytelling, we learn about the numerous conflicts Rasa deals with: his mother’s abandonment when he was a child, his father’s death, his time in America and the beginnings of his political activism, various social upheavals in his home country. We also get a glimpse into his relationship with Maj, a politically aware drag queen who performs at a local underground gay bar. The story also examines Rasa’s coming to terms with his own sexuality at a young age, and finally, his relationship with Taymour.

This story is split into three parts. The first part deals with Rasa’s present, the second part goes back to his past. There was some momentum lost with the second part and a lot of boring details, although the upper hand was quickly gained again in the third and last section. I won’t tell you what the third part consists of (it’s too spoiler-y), other than to say that it brought the entire book into perspective.

I highly recommend this book, especially if you have an interest in how marginalized characters discover their identity in the face of cultural taboos. Not bad for a first time author. At all.

Review: Into the Forest

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Review for “Into the Forest” by Jean Hegland (1998)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is a beautiful book. I haven’t seen the movie yet with Evan Rachel Wood and Ellen Page, but I know I’ll have to, because this one is full of Win, folks.

Into the Forest is the story of two teenaged sisters, Nell and Eva, who live in a house with their parents on a large plot of land deep in the redwood forests of California. They are several miles from their nearest neighbor, and 30 miles from the closest town. The sisters live an idyllic, sheltered existence–both are home schooled and allowed to explore the forest as they please. Eva practices ballet dancing, while Nell retreats into a world of books, hoping to get into Harvard.

Eventually, things begin to change. The power goes out, along with family’s phone and all other methods of communication. Gas and food become scarce. Stores and banks close. Mail delivery stops. People in town begin dying of illnesses, and antibiotics are ineffective. There are rumors of war and riots in the larger cities, and rumors, rumors of danger everywhere. The exact reason for society’s collapse is never completely explained, but the story arc of what’s happening around this family is certainly compelling, as I found myself over and over thinking: wow, this really could happen. Although we’re told these events are taking place in a ‘not so distant future,’ I couldn’t shake the feeling like all of this could happen tomorrow, and all it would take is a large-scale power grid collapse. It’s the perfect post-apocalyptic scenario, but with a non post-apocalyptic feel. Now the nerd in me would have enjoyed a little more info about the means to the world’s end, but this family was already isolated before all the bad stuff happened anyway. With this, you skip a lot of the post-apocalyptic hubbub and get more of a family drama, along with the brilliantly complicated relationship of these two sisters.

Some time after the outage, both of the girls’ parents die and the sisters are left to fend for themselves in their forest home. This section of the book is what made it 4 instead of 5 stars for me. There are a lot of technical details about plants and animals and gardening that honestly did not hold my attention, and I found myself skipping page after page. I completely understand the author’s need to make the story believable, as well as set up the narrative of how the girls survived with limited resources…but multiple paragraphs on squash harvesting and how to hunt and skin a wild boar? Umm, no thanks. But if I’m ever stuck in a redwood forest with nothing to eat, I’ll reach for this book…

Overall, I love how lyrical this book was. I never lost the imagery of a lush, green forest with huge trees and two girls going at it alone. The story is told by Nell through a journal and there are no chapter breaks, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t bothered by the open ending either. There was one scene that was kinda icky, but I’ll let it go for now. Hopefully it won’t be in the movie. Hopefully.

If you’re going to see the movie, please read this book. If you’re not going to see the movie, read this book anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me while I binge watch episodes of Doomsday Preppers…

Review: Loving Donovan

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Review for “Loving Donovan” by Bernice McFadden (2015)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is a male-female love story with a unique structure–a section for “Her” that follows the female character, Campbell, from childhood to young adulthood; another for “Him” that follows the male character, Donovan, for roughly the same period in his life, and finally a section for “Them,” that documents Campbell and Donovan’s romance.

First off, there are no secrets in this book. We know from the first page that this is a couple that’s doomed and ultimately not going to work out. This is not the story of what happens in the end, but how and why each character gets there. Each in their 30’s, both characters are wounded, hurt, and just plain wrong for one another. Both have had lives full of disappointment–abuse, adultery, divorce–and each character’s family and friends’ lives don’t fare much better. It’s a uniquely African American story about a circle of dysfunction; a generational curse. It’s a reminder that each of us carries around a personal history,’ghosts’ from the past, that ultimately influences the success or failure of future romantic relationships.

It’s an engrossing story, but I wish it had gone a little more in-depth. The ending felt kinda rushed and another 30 pages of detail would not have spoiled this book in the least. It’s a decent book, which never stopped moving from start to finish. As I’ve said in some other reviews I’ll be publishing here soon, Bernice McFadden is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. This book doesn’t disappoint.

Review: Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose

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Review for “Dear Nobody: The True Diary of Mary Rose” by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil (2014)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Dear Nobody was published after the 1999 death of the author, a girl named Mary Rose, who reportedly kept a 600+ page journal. This condensed version of her diaries chronicle roughly about 3 years of her life in harrowing detail as she struggles with low self esteem, drug addiction, sexual assaults, and living with cystic fibrosis. As a writer I was impressed with her ideas, the complicated pattern of her thoughts, the intricate way she expressed them. There’s not much of a narrative flow here, but that’s ok. I came into this fully expecting for Mary Rose to be happy one moment, and completely subdued in the next. Welcome to adolescence, folks…

With that said, this journal had a lot of extremely disturbing content. Mary Rose had a shitty home life, shitty parents, and no one to talk to about it. For 75% of the book, she’s either drunk or thinking about drinking, high or under the influence of some other drug. Her addiction is sad to watch. You watch her move from tragedy to tragedy in an increasing fog of drugs and alcohol and in the company of people (including her own family) who could have cared less about her. In between all of the drama she’s constantly in and out the hospital, fighting infections and just plain fighting for her life. You desperately want to hug her, to help her, to stop her from falling into an abyss. Whew.

I felt like the book was realistic, but I’m not quite sure if I believe that what’s presented here is exactly as she wrote it. The spelling is perfect, there’s no typos. Although the collaborators who put the book together claim that not a single word of text was changed, I have a hard time believing that it wasn’t touched by an editor in some form or another. If she was in the impaired mental state that she constantly refers to being in, I’m sure there’s a hiccup somewhere. But I’ll digress…

Anyway, do read this. This book is the Go Ask Alice for all of us who laughed and rolled our eyes 25 years ago at the end of that book and were still waiting for a real journal to happen out there. Look no further.

Review: The Summer that Melted Everything

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Review for “The Summer that Melted Everything” by Tiffany McDaniel (to be published on 7.26.16)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Fascinating, incredible book. In her first novel, I must say that Tiffany McDaniel hits this one right out of the park. It reads like a classic with all of the quirks of Flannery O’Connor with a twist of Shirley Jackson to match.

The story follows the eccentric Bliss family who live in the fictional small town of Breathed, Ohio. The year is 1984. Autopsy Bliss (I love their names!), the patriarch of the family, writes an ad in the local paper inviting the devil into town. Several days later, a green eyed, 13-year-old black boy calling himself Sal (“the beginning of Satan and the first step into Lucifer, Sa-L”) appears to Fielding Bliss, the youngest of the family, claiming to be the devil himself. Although the book never explicitly confirms that Sal is who he claims to be, he certainly carries an air of mystery and wisdom far beyond his years, speaking in strange parables and telling lengthy stories about God, Heaven, and Hell. Despite his shocking proclamation, Sal is taken into the Bliss family’s home and the two boys become best friends. In the midst of a record heat wave, accidents begin to happen and the townspeople eventually come to blame Sal, the ‘devil’ who has come to live amongst them. I won’t tell you any more to avoid spoiling this novel, but I will say that it involves flashbacks, with Fielding telling us this story from 70 years into the future, the events of this particular time stealing his innocence and ultimately turning him into a broken, bitter man.

The friendship between Sal and Fielding is the foundation of this novel, upon which a complicated, layered narrative is built. Even though the story is set in Ohio, there’s a strong hint of the southern Gothic element here. There’s also thought-provoking, well placed quotes from Milton’s Paradise Lost, along with powerful meditations on the meaning of family, racism, homophobia, religion, and mob mentality. I loved how this book never felt as if it were addressing some predetermined ‘checklist’ of issues, it just focused on the characters and the story in rich, beautiful language without being preachy or sounding false.

I finished this book a few days ahead of schedule because I couldn’t stop reading it. There is a lot of emotion packed in here and the ending was just the tip of that iceberg. Just when I found myself thanking God I didn’t live in a small town in Ohio, I read this and contemplated its message (along with present day’s headlines) and realized that “normal” people become monsters everyday and that not much has changed. This novel functions as more of a modern parable, an old-fashioned morality tale that’s been updated for today’s day and age.

I was emotionally exhausted after reading this, because it was THAT deep. The writing here hovers somewhere between fantasy and reality, so be prepared to suspend your disbelief. There’s a lot of thinking that comes with this book, so I will not say that this a novel for everyone. I do, however, wholeheartedly recommend that people read this, because you will definitely fall in love with it, like I did.

[Note: Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Tiffany McDaniel for a free digital copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.]

Review: Uses for Boys

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Review for “Uses for Boys” by Erica Lorraine Scheidt (2013)

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Yo, this book is pure shite….

Everything about this book is a disappointment, a trainwreck, a failure. Even the cover is an utter disgrace, because it’s awkward and has nothing to do with the words inside.

The story is told by Anna, the neglected child of a single mother who’s way too busy chasing men and money to have any kind of meaningful relationship with her daughter. After going through several of her mother’s failed marriages as a child, Anna enters her teenage years with all of the wrong ideas on how to get attention from the boys around her. She develops a reputation among her peers and she eventually drops out of school. I won’t tell any more of the plot here, but I will say Anna goes further and further down a dark path and that her mother remains just distant enough to continue not to care. It doesn’t end well for her.

The worst part about this book is that I actually DO get it. I understand the author’s intention to write about a neglected girl who uses meaningless, empty sex with losers as a source of comfort. I also came into this book knowing that it would have a large amount of *mature* content, so that’s not my criticism here. My problem is that there is no compelling message here, no theme, just a bunch of sex scenes with a supposed teenage girl narrator and not much else.

And the writing here is effin’ terrible, ya’ll. Choppy and uninspiring. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author took a bunch of Post it notes, strung them together, and spat out this book. The chapters and sentences are short, but this only seems to make sense with the beginning, with the 7-year-old voice of Anna. The problem here is that her voice never ages nor changes throughout the novel. It’s flat and monotone, the only indication that Anna is getting older is an occasional sentence where she states her age (“I’m thirteen,” “I’m fifteen.”).

Case in point:
“I’m fourteen. I go to school. I dress the way all the other kids dress. I wear my Levi’s with expensive twill shirts. I wear the right tennis shoes, the white leather ones with the green stripes. But the outfit buys me nothing. Everyone has heard how I let Desmond Dreyfus feel around under my shirt while Carl Drier and Michael Cox watched. Everyone knows about Joey. The boys make V signs when they look at me and tongue the crack between their fingers. The girls call me a slut.”

And because the whole novel is in the unchanging voice of a 7-year-old, the sex scenes take on a icky, perverse kinda quality. Judge for yourself.

“I angle my body, arm outstretched, and stuff my right breast into the warm depression under his arm. His ribs press against mine. I penetrate him with my breast. We’re boob fucking. It’s awkward and mysterious. Fulfilling.”

It’s rare when I’m so negative with a review, but I’m still trying to figure out what the point of this book was. Steer clear of this one, don’t bother.

Review: Problems

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Review for “Problems” by Jade Sharma (2016)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Jade Sharma’s literary debut follows the life of Maya, a twenty something married graduate student living in New York City who cheats on her husband, does heroin, and occasionally ponders what she wants out of life. It’s a cautionary tale of heroin abuse (I noticed a lot of parallels between this and Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream”), but more for a modern, hip craigslist era.

There’s not a lot that happens in this book. Events come and go, the POV shifts from 1st to 2nd person. There is a plot, but it’s pretty thin. It’s more of a documentation of Maya’s inner thoughts as her situation gets more and more desperate and she goes from bad to worse, to the very worst, and back again to just plain bad. No thought is really off limits either. There’s a lot of sex here–but it’s not fun to read about. We experience Maya’s self loathing, dope-sickness, degrading sex adventures, and bowel movements all in equal degree. She’s also an immensely unlikeable character, but I suspect that that’s exactly the way the author intended her to be. The discomfort goes on for pages and pages, but I was compelled to continue reading just to witness Maya pull herself together. It’s a short book (only 186 pages), yet for the reasons above it took me almost a week to read this. Had it been 10 pages longer, I don’t know if I’d still be giving it four stars.

If you can get past your squeamishness, there are some jewels here. Despite its bleakness, there’s loads of dark humor, with occasional nuggets of greatness that kept me underlining passages in my Kindle device. I’d definitely give this book a try.