Tag: fiction

Review: Ohio

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Review for "Ohio" by Stephen Markley (2018)
Rating: none (DNF)

D to the N to the F. I repeat: DNF. Somewhere around 50%, I gave up.

This is a drag of a novel about 4 high school acquaintances all coming back to their economically stagnated, drug-ravaged hometown of New Canaan, Ohio on a random night, 10 years after graduation. All of the friends have taken different paths: Bill is an alcoholic and a druggie social activist, Stacey is an embittered graduate student coming back to meet with the mother of her ex-lover, Dan is an emotionally shattered Iraq War veteran, and Tina, an abused, fragile girl coming back to confront her abuser.

This book wasn’t good. It’s way overwritten, an absolute slog to read through. Each of the main 4 characters accounts is about a quarter of the book, which is way too long and relies heavily on flashbacks to high school. In addition to the sheer tedium of the characters’ reminiscing about events of their past so much and so often (obviously designed to reveal current plot points in the book), you wonder why all of these adults are so obsessed with their high school years anyway, something that I couldn’t relate to and what ultimately made this novel one great big eye-roll.

I didn’t stay for the Big Dramatic Conclusion because honestly I didn’t care. Perhaps this was supposed to be some kind of epic statement on the fall of the working class after the Great Recession of 2008, but this book brings no nuance, nothing new or really interesting to the table. There’s nothing here in “Ohio” that we haven’t already seen in a news report or read before.

I don’t recommend this. No stars.

Review: Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree

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Review for "Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree" by Adaobi Tricia Nwabani and Viviana Mazza (2018)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree” gives voice to one of the hundreds of Nigerian girls who have been kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram. The internet launched a campaign with the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag going viral in response to the large-scale kidnapping of girls at a government school in the Borno State of Nigeria in 2014. Although the hashtag brought awareness to the plight of the girls, what many may not know is that the 2014 kidnapping was not the first of its kind by the group, nor has it been the last. Boko Haram continues to terrorize Nigeria and its surrounding countries, and although there have been some girls released by the group, hundreds still remain captive and missing.

The narrator of the novel is an unnamed girl, later given a name that is not hers by her kidnappers. In the beginning of the novel, before the main events take place, we learn that she is passionate about her education, her family, her Christian faith, and pursuing a scholarship to achieve her dreams. This is shattered when her village is attacked by Boko Haram and most of the men are killed. The narrator and dozens of other girls are forced to go with the kidnappers into the forest. Once there, the girls are surrounded by men with guns who force them renounce their beliefs and embrace Islam. She is made to do chores, eat meager food rations, and learn passages from the Qu’ran. Those who refuse to comply with the kidnappers’ demands are severely beaten or killed. The narrator is also forced to marry a Boko Haram fighter who physically and sexually abuses her. Despite the horrors around her, the narrator remains steadfast and refuses to be brainwashed. She continues to dream of her escape and desire for education.

This is tough reading material. The novel is told in short vignettes, which I found to be helpful in allowing the content be digested more thoroughly, especially for a younger audience. We rarely get YA books about the struggles of women in non-Western context, so I definitely loved this one and recommend it to anyone.

Review: Sadie

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Review for "Sadie" by Courtney Summers (2018)

Rating: 4 out 5 stars

This book had a lot of hype surrounding it, so I listened to all of it and read it. Ultimately, I think it’s a good novel but the heaps of glowing praise is a bit premature.

Sadie is a teenager growing up in rural Colorado who has not had an easy life. She raises her younger sister Mattie through a modest job due to her mother being mostly absent and a drug addict. When Mattie turns up dead, Sadie hits the road to bring her sister’s killer to justice. Heartbroken, Sadie and Mattie’s surrogate grandmother and neighbor brings the girls’ story to a popular radio personality, West McCray, who creates his own podcast (entitled “The Girls”) to attempt to uncover the truth.

Don’t get me wrong, the writing here is quite nice. I also loved how the story was told through podcasts (I’m a self-confessed podcast junkie) and Sadie’s POV in alternate chapters. But even with this, it took a long time for me to get into this book. When it did get going for me after about the first 150 pages or so, I still couldn’t quite “get” into Sadie’s POV. The podcast sections definitely held more interest for me, but even after a while I found myself fighting sleep. Perhaps it’s because what was just relayed via Sadie’s POV is retold through the podcast chapters, just from a different perspective. And while I liked the idea of this one, I just didn’t love it.

There’s also mad trigger warnings for things like pedophilia, rape, and murder. I wasn’t expecting all of that, but it’s definitely a major theme in this book.

Definitely more than 3 stars, so I’ll go for 4 here. This book was just not my cup of proverbial cup of tea.

Review: Cherry

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Review for "Cherry" by Nico Walker (2018)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I admit that I, like a lot of people, was probably attracted to this book for all the wrong reasons. We know that “Cherry” was written entirely in prison, and the author is currently an inmate, serving an 11 year sentence for bank robbery. Even though the author says this story isn’t true, you know from the first couple of pages that the prior declaration is BS. This is the tale of exactly how Mr. Walker got to be behind bars, complete with all kinds of expletives, debauchery, and straight up honesty. Anyway, I liked this book.

The unnamed narrator of “Cherry” begins as a college student in Ohio, casually drinking and questioning his existence. He eventually flunks out of school. He meets a girl named Emily and they fall for each other. They marry. The narrator joins the Army and receives training as a combat medic and from there he goes to Iraq, where he witnesses all of the full-blown horrors of war. He also begins a drug habit overseas, mostly huffing computer duster and taking pills. When he returns to his home he continues to flourish in his addictions, eventually going from Oxycontin abuse to heroin. After depleting all of his money and hooking up with shady characters, the narrator begins robbing banks. The book stops just short of his capture because uhh, the book really isn’t about all of that. The crime is clearly the focus here, not the punishment.

The writing here is not sophisticated or complex. There’s a really flat, kinda matter-of-fact tone that catches you immediately, because you realize that there really aren’t any pretensions here. Some of the descriptions are also quite hilarious:

“Drill Sergeant Cole punched me in the penis for no reason. You’d have that though. You just had to remember it was all make-believe. The drill sergeants were just pretending to be drill sergeants. We were pretending to be soldiers. The Army was pretending to be the Army.” 

The only thing I didn’t like was how ridiculously dull the middle of this book was. The narrator’s Iraq experiences are described with a lot of military jargon and he assumes we all know what he’s talking about (or, at least that we know what an FOB, IED, and Kevlar wings are). I didn’t understand a lot of this stuff and could not follow this section of the novel to save my life. I get the point though. He went to war and he was mostly a grunt, doing grunt work. I get it.

I do recommend this book, however. A portion of the proceeds from this book are going toward Mr. Walker’s restitution fees, and he will get out of prison in 2020. Despite the lip service we give to the notion of “debts paid to society,” the fact remains that unless you’re Lil Wayne, chances are that a felony on one’s record won’t transfer to a good post-prison life. So my reasons for reading and supporting this book is all for the better, in my opinion.

Four stars. Umm hmm…

Review: Finding Yvonne

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Review for "Finding Yvonne" by Brandy Colbert (2018)
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Another YA book I luv’d. Let me count the ways:

“Finding Yvonne” is a complicated, beautiful novel that explores race, the uncertainty of the future, family dynamics, and perceptions of the choices we make. It focuses on Yvonne, a Black 18-year-old Los Angeles teen, raised by a single father. She attends private school and plays violin, yet feels that she has lately lost much of her passion for the instrument. Her father smokes weed regularly and runs a successful restaurant. Yvonne is currently in a relationship with Warren, one of the young men employed as a sous chef at her dad’s restaurant. Despite the fact that Yvonne and Warren have chemistry, they have a very complex romance which leads Yvonne into a messy affair with a street musician. After sexual encounters with both men, Yvonne unexpectedly finds herself pregnant.

I won’t tell you the rest of the story for fear of spoiling it. However, this story is less about the pregnancy of the main character and more about her passions and the day to day struggles of her life, which is brilliantly written about here. Yvonne was always fresh and real to me, and even though she made choices that I disagreed with, I understood her. I never stopped rooting for Yvonne and wanting to see her win. Also refreshing was the sex positivity here, the portrayal of Yvonne as a person capable of making her own decisions about her body and not as a pariah.

Definitely worth the read.

Review: The Perfume Burned His Eyes

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Review for "The Perfume Burned His Eyes" by Michael Imperioli (2018)

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Ok, ok…I admit I read this book because Michael Imperioli’s name was on it. I’m a big fan of HBO’s “The Sopranos” and couldn’t resist.

This book, however, was just ok for me. It’s about a 16-year-old named Matthew who moves from Queens to Manhattan with his mother to start a new life after his grandfather dies and leaves them with a large sum of money. Matthew is very insecure and hopes that maybe the move will bring him confidence, which, after getting a delivery job at a local deli, happens. Not long after he begins working, Matthew meets Lou Reed. Yes, THAT Lou Reed (musician, rock god). Reed plays quirky neighbor and the two form a very unusual bond. Matthew begins to come out of his shell a bit. At the same time, Matthew becomes enchanted by a mysterious girl at school named Veronica. I never got a sense of what the exact nature of their relationship was, but Matthew learns a lot about the world from her as well.

All in all, an ok book. It’s clear that the point here is a youth’s coming of age, but honestly, that’s about it. Some parts go on longer than normal and other parts had way too much dialogue, but it’s a fast paced story and one that I guess I’ll recommend, depending on your personal tastes.

Meanwhile, I’m going to declare a personal moratorium on reading books by celebrities. I don’t know why I expect literary greatness, as if they aren’t cut from the same cloth as the rest of us who may (occasionally) produce ho-hum material.

*sigh*

Review: Katerina

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Review for "Katerina" by James Frey (2018)
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

NO NO NO NO NO NO….*slams book on the table with each successive NO*

This book’s terrible. It reads like a bad Tumblr poetry, awful teen fan fiction. Choppy lines, run on sentences, and magnetic poetry kit lines masquerading as style. “Katerina” is the story of Jay, a whiny brat of a dude who goes to live in Paris in the 90’s. All he does in the City of Lights is eat bread, get drunk, vomit, snort coke, sleep, have sex, and share his opinions on the superiority of French culture and art, which I really don’t care about. Somewhere in the middle of all this he tries to establish himself as a writer, though I don’t care about this either. He falls in love with a Norwegian model named Katerina, who is equally as shallow and as horny as Jay is. We suffer through dozens of their awkwardly written sex scenes (trust me, they’re not titillating at all) until they finally have enough of each other and break up. Jay returns to America shortly thereafter and starts smoking crack.

Fast forward to present day and Jay is a nouveau-riche writer and still a douchebag. He is married and making tons of money writing, though he hates himself for doing so. He’s contacted by Katerina and they begin chatting online. The present-day scenes are interpersed throughout the text with ones from the past, and are eerily reminiscent of his James Frey’s current life, including his “Million Little Pieces” controversy. For the third time, I don’t care about this. I’ve never read his first book and never will. I do care about how bad this book is though. Ugh.

Every now and then the book manages to say something interesting, but most of it is so ridiculously shallow and self-indulgent it’s not impossible to wonder how it managed to get published, though the author’s notoriety is probably a good reason. Anyway, skip this. Please.

Review: Brother

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Review of "Brother" by David Chariandy (2018)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

A short, well written novel that behaves like a much longer book. Believable characters, relatable plot.

“Brother” is the tale of Michael, a young man living with his elderly mother in the public housing sector of Scarborough, a working class borough of Toronto, Ontario. At the beginning of the story, we learn that Michael has lost his older brother Francis in an act of violence 10 years before, though we’re not told much more than that. The story follows Michael as he opens his home to Aisha, a young neighborhood woman from his past, to the drudgery of his dead end job at a grocery store, to the agony of keeping track of his mother so she won’t wander off in the streets (no doubt, the beginning of a probable case of dementia).

This book also wanders through the past. We witness Michael’s perspective of him and his brother’s upbringing as first-generation immigrants from Trinidad. We also watch the rejection of their father and their acclimation to life in Scarborough’s streets, hanging with friends listening to hip hop and their run-ins with local cops. The cause of Francis’ death is revealed in the end, but it wasn’t a buzz kill to the book. It’s a natural progression of events, the missing piece that finally puts the story together. I won’t tell you to avoid spoiling it, but it all gives the book a sense of purpose.

Even though the novel’s setting is Canada, I never got the sense that it absolutely needed to take place there. This story could have been in the U.S., in Britain, in Europe, in South Africa–anywhere where there’s a system of stratification in which social inequalities still exist. The backstreets and the ghettos of this book are anywhere and everywhere.

The writing here is quite beautiful. Even though it’s less than 200 pages, it took me a while to read it because I wanted to really read and savor it.

Five stars, my friends.

Review: How Are You Going to Save Yourself

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Review for "How Are You Going to Save Yourself" by JM Holmes (2018)

Rating: none (DNF)

Hey babes! I’m back! I know ya’ll missed me…*plants kiss on your forehead*

Anywho, lemme get to the book. ‘Issa’ NO for me. I tried, but I couldn’t finish it. I’m not going to rate this. I DNF’d this about 60% through.

This is a coming of age story about four men of color (Dub, Gio, Rolls, and Rye) growing up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The book is told through short stories mostly narrated by Gio, though you occasionally hear from the other three main characters. Gio, the son of a White mother and a Black father, struggles with racial identity as he goes back and forth between living with his father in Washington state and his mother in Rhode Island. The other main characters grapple with identity as well, mostly through the power that society affords them by way of their masculinity. The masculinity here is toxic and disturbing, with detailed accounts of female sexual conquests, violence, and drug use, mostly marijuana.

I couldn’t get with this, though. While I can understand wanting to explore toxic masculinity, the misogyny in this book was too gratuitous for my taste. The author writes about his male characters engaging in sexist behavior with laser precision, yet the female perspectives remain largely unexplored. Case in point, the story “Be Good to Me,” in which a late adolescent Rolls seduces a high school sophomore named Tayla. He coerces her into having sex with him and eventually, he and two other main characters gang rape the young woman in a dark basement. The rape is presented rather matter-of-factly, with a kind of “boys will be boys” nonchalance. I longed for some hint of Tayla’s voice, but it didn’t really exist. Other female characters were mostly hollow and one-dimensional–the long suffering, ride or die girlfriend, ghetto stepmothers.

Also, the narration was confusing. We know the main characters’ names, but each of their voices sounded pretty much the same with very little that distinguished one from another. As I moved from chapter to chapter, I kept having to mentally go back to place the character with their back story from another part of the book. Essentially, I kept forgetting who was who from one story to the next. Forgetting a character shouldn’t happen in good fiction.

I hate giving this a bad review, but I just didn’t like this at all. I feel really bad because I actually won a pristine copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway and I will probably never open it again. Maybe I’ll donate it to the library or do a giveaway here. Either way, I wouldn’t read this.

Review: Any Man

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Review for "Any Man" by Amber Tamblyn (2018)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

That’s it. I’m just going to give this five stars.

I’m not really even a fan of Amber Tamblyn’s movies. I just liked her book that much.

This is a very brutal book. It weaves together letters, tv and radio interviews, and Twitter posts to showcase the crimes of a violent female serial rapist named Maude, who cris-crosses several states to prey upon male victims. As she claims victim after victim, all of the usual suspects in this kind of crime get involved: the media frenzy, the court of public opinion which blame the victims, the cops who can’t seem to catch the perpetrator, and the families, which suffer as well. Maude never gives a clear reason for her crimes, but as you continue to read you begin to realize that whatever her motives are, they don’t really matter. It’s the voice of the victims that are front and center here.

As I said before, this is a violent story. I imagine that the author had to make it that way to get the full scope of its point across. What is the emotional and physical aftermath of a sexual assault? There is an incredible amount of insight here into that question, and the result is a tremendous sense of empathy for every single person, female and male, that has ever been violated.

This book hits you hard and fast. I recommend reading it in as few sittings as possible and letting it wash over you all at once