Tag: book

Review: The Vegetarian

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Review for “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang (2016)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This book is bananas…

To tell you too much about it is to spoil it, which I’ve decided not to do for the purposes of this review. However, this was a very well-written, eloquent story. I enjoyed reading Han’s words even if I didn’t really completely get the plot just because they invoked that kind of beauty.

The story centers on a typical Korean housewife, Yeong-hye, who, after having a series of violent dreams, decides that she is not going to eat meat anymore. Her husband, Mr. Cheong, is shocked at this revelation and does not know what he is going to do with her. From this point, there is a brewing conflict in their home which ultimately reaches into Yeong-hye’s immediate family and she goes into a downward spiral of madness and starvation (and a few more things I won’t reveal here) as a result.

This book is interesting in that it is split into three novella-length parts, and Yeong-hye is not the primary narrator of any of them. The first part is told by her husband, Mr. Cheong, the second by her brother in law, J, and the third by her sister (and J’s wife) In-hye. Only during the first section does Yeong-hye occasionally interject, but only to tell of the disturbing content of her dreams that lead her to give up meat. Each narrator has their own agenda, and the reader only knows of Yeong-hye though their lens.

This book is extremely short (less than 200 pages), but there was a LOT here. This is a book that ultimately I will probably end up reading again to fully understand, just because the plot was THAT heavy in symbolism and meaning. In here there’s brutal violence juxtaposed with beauty, complacency alongside action, and an reprehensible act involving a dog that truly gave me nightmares. I think this book grasps at a much larger message: how trauma in one person’s life ultimately creates ripples in a metaphorical pond that affects other people.

I must say though that now Han Kang is a writer that is on my radar. She has another book she’s written that is not available in the States that I am desperately trying to get a hold of now, and I eagerly anticipate more of her work to be translated into English.

Review: Mosquitoland

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Review for “Mosquitoland” by David Arnold (2015)

Rating: 1.25 out of 5 stars

Meh.

I didn’t like this book. I read about 100 pages, put it down for a week, and still just…meh. The last 100 pages I skimmed through, I gave no fucks…

Anyway, “Mosquitoland” is the story of Mim (an acronym for Mary Iris Malone), a 16 year old girl living in Jackson, Mississippi with her newly-remarried father and stepmother. Her mother, the reader quickly learns, is reportedly sick and living in Ohio. Mim overhears her father and stepmother discussing her mother’s illness and proceeds to take a stash of cash and catch a Greyhound bus to her mom in Ohio. What follows as Mim goes on an almost 1,000 mile journey is a series of misadventures that I won’t go into for fear of spoiling the book, but she does meet several people along the way–some nice, some not so nice–and somehow manage to reach her destination. In the end she learns a lot about herself and the meaning of family.

The book would have been mildly enjoyable if it had not been for Mim herself. Mental illness is alluded to as the source of Mim’s problem, but it’s never definitively confirmed. She is sarcastic, but she’s so overwhelmingly negative about everything (her parents, her life, the people around her, etc.) that her particular brand of sarcasm never grew on me. Mim is very much like that bratty grade school kid you all know (only ten years older) who has no filter: many times in the story she was just plain obnoxious towards the people around her or just flat out rude altogether. I understood that living with her dad and stepmom in country bumpkin-ville wasn’t her cup of tea…but sooo many times in the story I wanted to roll my eyes and yell at her to get over herself. Sheesh.

Plotwise, this book is all over the place. In addition to the road trip, a large portion of the story is letters she writes in her journal and general retellings of past events. Honestly I was done with Mim’s (aka the author’s) Holden Caulfield-esque posturing in the first 50 pages. I kept reading because, in the end, I guess I just wanted someone remotely likable here. Pfffft.

Apparently, I am in the minority with not liking this book. It is currently receiving overwhelming praise by readers on Goodreads and has received a “Best Of 2015” nomination there. I can certainly understand why this is, Mim is somewhat of a manic pixie dream girl character with a hell of a story. In the end, it’s just not MY kind of story. I generally don’t care for road trip novels and this one was no exception.

The cover art is stunning, however. I’ve always wanted to climb on top of a moving vehicle and write. Yassss!

Review: Everything, Everything

  
Review for “Everything, Everything” by Nicola Yoon (to be released in September 2015)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This book is damn near close to perfect.

I am in awe of first time author Nicola Yoon and her extraordinary talent. It is rare I find a YA book that I truly like, and this was one of those books. From the time I began reading this, I could not put it down. The main character we follow is Madeline, a teenage girl with an extremely rare disease (SCID, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency) that makes her allergic to everything in the outside world. She has lived completely indoors since she was young in a kind of artificial, “bubble-like” existence: filtered air, specially cooked foods, and no outside visitors. The only people she communicates with are her mother, her doctor, and Carla, her nurse. Madeline has resigned herself to her housebound fate until she glances out of her window one day and discovers a family moving in next door. She is immediately drawn to the teenage boy living there, Olly, and from there her entire world changes.

I won’t say any more about the plot here because this book will not be released until September 2015 and some of you have to wait for it. But I will say that this book was throughly engaging for me. The romance wasn’t cheesy like a lot of YA books, but completely organic and it fit perfectly in the story. There are also charts, graphs, and illustrations that added a certain special touch to the book that teens will enjoy. 

I’m giving this five stars. It’s not often that I do this, but I actually stayed up until 3:20 am on a school night finishing this, and I don’t regret a moment of it. Beautiful, beautiful book!

[I received this advanced publisher’s copy from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.]