How to Build a Girl

Feb22 by Kinsey

moran Way back in late 2012, in a wrap-up of my favorite books of the year, I mentioned how much a I liked a book of essays by Caitlin Moran. She remains fabulous to follow on Twitter and I read her essays any time I get the chance (her weekly column is behind a paywall, and I can’t quite justify subscribing to a British newspaper just for one column, but things do show up from time to time). But for some reason I had been avoiding her debut novel. I’m not sure why exactly, maybe because I knew it was a coming-of-age story and I was worried that it would be horribly embarrassing and awkward to read about a teenage girl struggling through puberty? But I finally got around to reading it and I loooved it.

How To Build a Girl is fiction, but is obviously largely autobiographical. Moran, like the main character Johanna, was part of a large family growing up poor in 1990s Britain. And she also stumbled into a career as a music writer as a teenager, which is the story the book largely tells. Johanna is a poor, geeky, too-smart-for-her-own-good unpopular kid who decides to reinvent herself and ends up on the edges of the British music scene working as a magazine writer. As you can imagine, sometimes this goes swimmingly and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s fascinating to watch Johanna work out how to present herself, how to talk to people, how to construct a persona for herself–essentially how to be an adult. Which, you know, being an adult is hard and I think most of us are still trying to figure out how to do it. I haven’t seen many books that talk about this process as explicitly as this one does. But it manages to not be at all preachy or new-agey, but entirely practical.

I’m not sure how many of the details come directly from Moran’s life, but all of it feels very true–the family interactions, the fashion and makeup conversations, the music reviews. She and I are roughly the same age and I recognized a lot of the musicians and cultural references of the era, which was fun for me but was definitely an extra and not required to enjoy the book. And I should note that while this may sound like a YA novel, it’s not appropriate in any way. Moran does not shy away from talking about sex and drugs and bodies and crime and all the things that a teenager might encounter, and it’s pretty gritty from the very first page. And yet it didn’t feel exploitative or like Moran is grabbing for attention–it just felt real.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Snarky but touching

You might also like: Anything by Caitlin Moran is awesome. And if you haven’t read Tina Fey or Amy Poehler’s books, their stories of teenage adventure match up with Johanna’s very well. Someday, Someday, Maybe by Lauren Graham (AKA Lorelai Gilmore) is also a clearly-largely-autobiographical-novel about a young woman becoming who she wants to be, and is lovely.

Also, let me take this opportunity to shout out a couple of things that I read on my fellow blog author’s recommendations and thoroughly enjoyed. First, back in July Rebecca raved about Uprooted by Naomi Novik and she was totally right. It was a completely fabulous modern fairy tale. And Anna recently talked about The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness, which I liked as well. Ness has another recent release called A Monster Calls, which was also great. Different from The Rest of Us–while that one reminded me of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, A Monster Calls was more like Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Game–but also great.

The Man in the High Castle Book vs. Movie Showdown

Feb8 by Kinsey

It often feels like people set up book readers and movie watchers as adversaries, especially when it comes to adaptations of written works to movies (or TV). “Are you mad that they’re turning this into a movie?” “How bad will the movie be?” “If you didn’t read the book, you’re not really a fan! You can possibly appreciate the story!” And as a self-proclaimed reader who loves books, people seem to think that my loyalty will lie with books and I will be offended by any adaptation. But I actually love watching movies or TV versions of books and short stories! I find it fascinating to see how something from one medium is changed to another. What characters have to be cut or combined to make something work on screen? How does a plot need to be condensed or modified to work visually? Rather than take the changes personally, I find the adaptation process to be like watching someone work out a logic problem and I like seeing the solutions people come up with. For example, when I heard they were making a movie of the Cheryl Strayed book Wild, I just couldn’t imagine how they were going to turn that very introspective story into a movie. But the movie did a fabulous job of weaving in flashbacks while using silence to communicate Strayed’s loneliness and solitude on her hike. After I saw the movie Brokeback Mountain I went and read the source material–in that case, the movie was based on a short story, so the screenwriter had to create new material to fill out the story. If I had read the story first, I would not have believed it could be successfully expanded to a two-hour movie, but that movie is beautiful and, I think, very true to the original story. Adaptations don’t always work, of course–Little Women is one of my very favorite books of all time, and pretty much every movie version has serious problems with casting (Winona Ryder as Jo, really?) and issues with the (admittedly) serial plot. But I also once saw a stage production of Little Women that was a failure in almost every way, EXCEPT they totally fixed Professor Bhaer by making him the same age as Jo and writing him as an absent-minded young man. He instantly went from creepy to cute. My point here is, I like comparing different media versions of the same material and seeing what works and what doesn’t, but I don’t always feel like I have to rule that one is better than another.

Having said all that, let’s talk about The Man in the High Castle. In late 2015 Amazon released a ten-episode season of an original drama based on the Philip K. Dick novel. I had never read the book, so I went into the show knowing only that it was an alternate history about a world where the Axis won WWII, and the U.S. was now divided into a West Coast occupied by the Japanese, an East Coast occupied by the Nazis, and an independent, lawless Rocky Mountain region. It’s now the early 1960s and the story follows, among other characters, members of a resistance group that are working to smuggle newsreels that seem to show the Axis losing the war to a mystery “man in the high castle” who provides them anti-Axis intel in return. The show definitely has some issues. The most primary characters–young people caught up in both the resistance and a love triangle–are the dullest on the show. Things move slowly at times, and it is dark. Really dark. Like, there were several times when I thought, “Well, surely they won’t go that far.” But, they’re Nazis! Of course they will go that far! But I really enjoyed the show overall. The world building is excellent–the scenes in San Francisco show all sorts of subtle ways that Japanese culture has been woven into the American city–and Rufus Sewell is chilling as a New York-based Nazi leader. And the newsreels that seem to show the U.S. winning the war raise all sorts of interesting questions that introduce a sci-fi element to the story (Are these fake newsreels? Are they showing our world? Is some sort of time travel happening?). By episode 10, the plot was moving along at a good pace and it ended on a cliffhanger than makes me very eager to check out (the yet-to-be-announced) Season 2.

As I was watching I heard, either online or on podcasts, that the plot of the show branched off from the book very quickly, and that in the book the newsreels were actually books themselves. This kind of change–changing a book to a film so it plays better in a visual medium–is exactly the sort of thing that fascinates me, so I decided to read The Man in the High Castle and see how the book compares. WELL. Look, I know that Philip K. Dick is a highly-regarded giant of science fiction, and I’m sure there are people out there railing about how the TV show completely ruined the book. But as far as I am concerned? DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.

First of all, the plots of the two versions are wildly different, and the characters just barely even line up. The Rufus Sewell character (probably the most compelling on the show) isn’t in the book at all, and most of the other characters bear little resemblance to their TV versions. The plot does involve a mysterious book and a resistance movement, but that’s about it–it feels as if the TV writers took the basic premise of an occupied U.S. and the character names, and then went off and did their own thing. And for the most part, that new thing is more complex, with more moving parts and more people, than the book. The TV show did drop a few things that could have been interesting–in the book the Nazis are in the process of colonizing Mars–but that were presumably too complicated for TV. But overall I found the multiple plot threads of the TV show more twisty and fun. However, none of that is why I am telling you not to read this book. My issue is that the book was horribly, terribly, sexist and racist. Every female character is both stupid and mean, and Dick makes a disturbing number of “dumb, like all women” comments. And there are plenty of cases where the book will use a racial slur, and it’s obviously because that is what a particular Nazi character would say or how a white man living under Japanese occupation would feel. But there were also lots of times where it seemed pretty clear that Dick was using a slur because he himself did not realize it was a slur. It all made me feel icky and I almost gave up on the book entirely because it was so gross.

So, although I generally don’t feel the need to decide whether the book or the movie (or TV show) wins, or to tell people that one version is definitive, in this case I am clear: the TV show is better. The move down the scale of racism and sexism would be all that I needed to make that call, but I actually also thought that the TV show’s expansion of the plot and characters and the visual world building were significantly more interesting than in the book. So, as long as you have a high tolerance for darkness, I would say watch the show, and don’t feel a single bit of guilt about ignoring the book altogether.

The Book of Strange New Things

Feb3 by Anna

By Michel Faber

The_Book_of_Strange Whew, this book. I’ve been reading The Book of Strange New Things off and on now for the past two months. The very basic, ridiculous-sounding premise is that a minister is sent to a newly established human colony on Mars in order to bring Christianity to the native martians. I had thought that this interesting combination of science fiction and religion might be a good Christmas present for my dad, who is interested in both, but I also thought that I better read it myself first since I’ve had bad luck in the past giving unread books to people.

I went back and forth several times on whether to save this as a gift. One the one hand, it really is an interesting look at the role religion plays in people and their relationships and how that translates to a literally alien setting. (For instance, how do you explain both The Good Shepherd and The Lamb of God to beings that have no concept of sheep, or even any grazing animal?) On the other hand:

Women in general don’t come off great, though that is something that almost every reader of science fiction has to build a tolerance for. (By the end, though, the men weren’t coming off all that great, either, and I was struggling to find a sympathetic character at all.)
There were multiple descriptions of non-Christians and people of color that made me uncomfortable, while not being overtly racist.
In the end, there were just way too many random and gratuitous mentions of male genitalia than I felt comfortable giving to my dad. (Clearly, he is an adult and would be fine reading it, but maybe just not coming from me.)

After trying to weigh the balance between a really thoughtful overarching premise and problematic details, I finally just decided that any book that takes me two months (with frequent breaks) to get through is not a strong recommendation.

—Anna

Why Are They Angry With Us?

Jan23 by Anna

By Larry E. Davis

This is a short book of autobiographical essays on race by a colleague of my mother’s. I picked up her copy while visiting over Christmas, so I have no idea how widely available it is, but I highly recommend it. Davis has a fascinating way of breaking down extremely complex and emotionally-charged issues of race into underlying theories of causes that can be more directly addressed. He calmly and clearly lays out factual counter-arguments to many of the arguments that, per the title of this book, attempt to blame black people for their own social inequality.

The title comes from a question that struck the author as a young boy: if we (himself and other black people) were the slaves, then why are they (white people) angry with us? This led him through decades of studies in psychology and sociology. His central hypothesis in this book is that it mostly comes down to cognitive dissonance. Basically, people want their way of thinking and their behavior to align with each other, so much so that they will force one or the other to change in order to align, if necessary. So, if your way of life depends on exploiting others, but you still very much want to consider yourself a decent person, then you begin to think that the exploited person somehow deserves it, which then leads to all sorts of racist stereotypes.

The encouraging aspect of this is that it seems to work both ways: if you can successfully change either the behavior or the thinking, the other will eventually change, too, in order to stay aligned. His example of that is when the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate based on race, behavior (slowly) changed to follow the law, and then thinking changed afterwards (even more slowly). It reminded me of something that the host from one of my favorite podcasts, Yo, Is This Racist?, said (paraphrasing): “I don’t think I can stop people from having racist thoughts; I just want to make it unacceptable to ever verbalize these thoughts.” According to Davis’ theory, making racist talk culturally unacceptable could go a long way toward making racist thought disappear as well.

—Anna

Bone Gap

Jan13 by Kinsey

I first heard about Bone Gap, written by Laura Ruby, on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast as part of their round-up of National Book Award winners and I planned to write a post recommending from just about the minute I started it. So the fact that it just this week won the 2016 Printz Award for excellence in literature for young adults this week makes this a very timely review (a rarity for me!).

Bone Gap tells the story of Finn, a teenage boy who lives with his older brother in a tiny, Midwestern farm town. Finn has a reputation as being a bit slow or spacey, and things have only gotten worse since the disappearance of Roza, a young woman who was living with them. Finn was the only witness to her kidnapping, but he hasn’t been able to describe the kidnapper and everyone in town (including his brother) has been looking at him askance ever since. Aaaand that’s about all I want to say.

I went in to this book knowing that it included elements of magic realism, and I’m going to tell you that much because I think our readers here more likely to pick this up if it’s got a bit of magic to it (Biblio-therapy readers are a fanciful lot). However, I also read the book summary on the inside of the cover and it gave me some details that I wish I hadn’t known. This story and its magic and its central mystery unfold so slowly and naturally that I think part of the joy of reading this is letting the story take you along at it’s own pace.

So, don’t read any online reviews, just trust me on this. Bone Gap is sweet and mysterious and sometimes dark and scary and sometimes small-town claustrophobic, and just all around interesting. It’s a book that cast a spell on me.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Magical small-town mystery

You might also like: I almost hate to make recommendations here, since anything I suggest is going to telegraph the ultimate tone of Bone Gap. But I can’t stop myself from telling people what to read, so, Alice Hoffman and Francesca Lia Block are two authors that do magic realism well. I like them both, although Hoffman’s books tend to tip towards middle-aged women and Block’s really speak to angsty 14-year-olds. Another option is Please Ignore Vera Dietz, by A.S. King, a book with an element of magic that splits the difference and would appeal to a wide range of folks.

The Night Circus

Jan13 by Anna

By Erin Morgenstern

Night_Circus This book should have been everything to me – a spooky circus and a sorcerous battle set in the Victorian Era – but it was just so damn boring. It started strong with the hoary old magicians selecting unaware students to continue their contest of skills, and then building the titular circus to serve as the staging ground. Once the circus is up and running with the young magicians showing off their respective skills in increasingly elaborate exhibits, the novel really bogged down in endless descriptions of amazing and whimsical spectacle.

I really wanted to like this book because it has shown up on so many people’s best book guides, but the vast majority of the book is physical descriptions of settings both in the circus and out, and I find those extremely tiresome. Kinsey, who has read and enjoyed it, recommended approaching it like a poem, but I mostly don’t enjoy poetry either. There was just enough intrigue to keep me from giving up on the book entirely, though I kept interrupting it in order to read other books, and the action finally begins in the final 20% of the book.

I will say that the end is very good, but I just don’t think it was worth quite the level of build-up it got. While I sure would like to actually visit the night circus and see it all for myself, reading about it got old really fast.

—Anna

The Shamer’s Daughter

Jan9 by Rebecca

The Shamer’s Daughter
By Lene Kaaberbol
2006

This was a good little book although it was a bit on the young side of YA for me. In an unrelated note, it’s actually really interesting how young the main character was. The main character, Dina, is old enough to be well into the age of reason but nowhere near pubescent so there’s absolutely no romantic plotline. I appreciated that.

I also hadn’t realized this book was the first part in a series so I thought the ending was particularly interesting as it resolved the immediate problem while leaving a much larger problem still there. While I now know that it was setting up for a sequel, at the first read, I assumed it was an aspect of Dina being young and focused on the immediate situation.

Over all, the book reminded me a lot of Sharon Shinn’s series with The Safe-Keeper’s Secret, The Truth-Teller’s Tale, and The Dream-Maker’s Magic. Like those books, The Shamer’s Daughter is set in a world in which some people are born with semi-magical talents that give them careers even as it sets them apart from society at large.

Dina, the titular Shamer’s daughter, has inherited her mother’s skill of being able to see (and force others to see) everything that they are ashamed of by looking into their eyes. No one really wants a Shamer as a neighbor, but they have a social role in identifying criminals.

As one might expect, when a crime involves the death of the ruling family of a kingdom and competing heirs to the throne, being a Shamer who can actually see the truth is a bit fraught. Especially since the ability is built on shame and thus doesn’t work on people who don’t feel shame.

While this book simplifies the world and the complexities of people’s emotions in general, it still does a really good job of presenting some very clear answers to traditionally complex questions about guilt and responsibility and the strength to do what’s right.

Also, apparently there’s a movie, but it doesn’t look good.

The Best Books of 2015 (according to the world’s coolest 12-year-old)

Jan5 by Kinsey

Happy 2016, everyone! In late December/early January I typically write a post highlighting the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past year. But I’ve already posted on most of the things I’d want to talk about (Station Eleven, The Martian, Carry On), so let’s do something a bit different. Anna and I were lucky enough to spend New Year’s Eve with some dear friends and their children. I’m sure this won’t come as any surprise, but our friends are also bookish sorts, so we’re always talking about what we’re reading and trading around/gifting each other favorite books. One of the fun parts about watching our friends’ kids get older is seeing them become bookish and getting to introduce them to books we loved as children. But the oldest of the kids is twelve now and it’s become clear that she doesn’t need us to recommend books to her–she can find great things on her own and we should probably start taking recommendations from her. She kindly agreed to contribute a guest blog for us, so here are her top three books of 2015 (all of which are now on my library list):

1) The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton. “I love how this book tells the story of many generations of Lavenders. I also love the fact that Ava is actually born with wings!”

2) Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead. “This book tells about a girl who has been through a terrible accident and all of her friends. I feel like you can really connect with them, because they do things that real 2015 teenagers do.” [Note: we’ve talked about Rebecca Stead here on the blog before and my love for her now feels validated.]

3) Kid Lawyer (part of the Theodore Boone series) by John Grisham. “I love that this kid, Theo, is not afraid to stand up to adults. He is a junior lawyer who knows a lot and stands up for his beliefs. I love reading about his adventures and how he always helps everyone out.”

Everything Everything

Jan2 by Anna

By Nicola Yoon

Everything_Everything I would never have picked up this book except that one of my favorite blogs, bitches gotta eat, decided to start an online reading club, of sorts, and chose this as the first ‘assignment.’ Samantha was totally upfront about how this so-called ‘book club’ was basically the books she wants to read and she will post the titles and that’s about it – there will be no discussion, no question-and-answers, no nothing; we can just read the books and take whatever comfort we want that perhaps other people are also reading it. I didn’t quite believe her and I didn’t want to be left out of any subsequent blog posts, so I put a hold on the book and then forgot about it per usual.

True to her word, though, Samantha didn’t follow up on the book at all, and a month later simply wrote that now she would be reading Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. I had actually just then finished reading Carry On, per Kinsey’s recommendation, and completely adored it, so when Everything Everything finally came in at the library, I had residual good feelings toward Samantha’s picks.

Everything Everything is narrated by 18-year-old Madeline, who was diagnosed with SCID as an infant and has lived in her hermetically-sealed house for her entire life. An attractive boy her age moves next door and her interest in him opens her to the rest of the world that she has been cut off from. Sounds terrible, right? I hate romantic coming-of-age stories and I hate rare disease stories, and the only thing that tempted me to even crack the cover is that the narrative creatively includes IMs, emails, diary entries, and illustrations, and I do appreciate multimedia storytelling.

You guys, maybe I’m turning into a big softy, but I absolutely loved it! Madeline is so smart and funny and personable that her voice really carries the novel. Olly, the boy next door, is interesting and nuanced, and I quickly started to care about his story, as well. Additionally, the premise, with this life cut off from all outside human contact, discusses what life actually means, and how different people all cope, either well or poorly, with different kinds of loss, and how to still build a life worth living, which is definitely something that I find personally relevant right now.

—Anna

The Rest of Us Just Live Here

Dec27 by Anna

By Patrick Ness

The_Rest_of_Us This book is like if we got the stories of some of Buffy’s classmates at Sunnydale High – there are terrible, supernatural things happening, but there’s nothing they can do about it, so it is mostly in the background of their everyday lives. I don’t normally like stories about non-fantasy teenagers (even when I was a teenager I couldn’t really relate), but this novel is just so well written!

Each chapter opens with a short paragraph summarizing the large-scale supernatural events being battled by the various chosen ones. The rest of the book is narrated by a high school senior stressed out over prom, graduating, leaving for college, and battling varying levels of OCD. He and his friends very occasionally witness the periphery of the larger battles, but somehow the author is able to use this to emphasize how equally important the everyday struggles are.

So, I was initially attracted to the book by the interesting and unusual premise, but two specific attributes of the novel really made it stand out for me. Ness writes with a really nice, light touch on diversity — it becomes apparent that characters are different ethnicities only way after their more important individual character traits are established. Ness keeps it true to life, as well, with their cultural backgrounds being an important part of who they are, but certainly not their primary defining characteristic.

Secondly, Ness does a truly spectacular job of addressing dealing with various mental illnesses. Our main character has occasional bouts of pretty severe OCD, while his sister is recovering from anorexia. Again, Ness shows how these are not insignificant in the characters’ lives, but they are also just one aspect of the many, many traits that make people so individual. This book would have done me a world of good in high school, quite frankly.

—Anna