Coal to Diamonds

Feb23 by Anna

By Beth Ditto with Michelle Tea

Sigh. One would think that I would eventually learn my lesson, and not go off completely half-cocked, but I never do learn and I actually do this far more often than one would think.

So, when I first saw the Dior perfume commercial with Charlize Theron juxtaposed with Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe, I was promptly hugely offended because I vaguely remembered that Theron had once said something derogatory about Monroe’s size years ago, and didn’t think that she should then profit by the juxtaposition. But, of course, once I actually double-checked before writing this review (at the very least, I have learned to do that, on occasion), it was actually Elizabeth Hurley who said that (in my defense, I had forgotten that Elizabeth Hurley was even a thing).

Anyway, in this one case, my own misinformation actually worked in my favor, because it made me pay more attention to the commercial, which made me realize how very catchy the song is. I downloaded* the song and added it to my current mix of music, and then didn’t think much more about it.

A couple months later, I read Buzzfeed’s Best YA Books of 2013, and decided that I wanted to read Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea. My library system doesn’t have that book (I requested that they buy it), but they did have a memoir she helped Ditto write. I wasn’t sold right away because I don’t really like memoirs to begin with, and Ditto seems awfully young to have one anyway, but my curiosity got the best of me.

It is quite short, only about 150 pages, which makes sense given that Ditto is only now in her early 30s. But, what I was kind of banking on, her life has been chock full of crazy. Her childhood in rural Arkansas is so retrograde that I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. It was a truly terrible place to grow up and truly terrible things happened to her, but Ditto (and Tea) has such an incorrigibly upbeat voice that the story never gets bogged down in the grimness.

So, that was pretty much the first half, and I was quite pleased with both Ditto and Tea as authors, feeling that this was a surprisingly lighthearted memoir about an upbringing of poverty, neglect and abuse. However, the second half surprised me by being quite educational. I like listening to music a lot, but I don’t really know anything about it, and I don’t really like punk music at all. I have always been a little in awe of the punk movement, though: I would have loved to be a punk sort of person, but I’m really not, and I don’t even really understand the movement. Ditto does understand it, however, or at the very least, has her own strong interpretation of what punk means. She does an excellent job of describing what drew her to the late-90s punk scene coming out of Washington in the aftermath of the grunge movement.

I was fascinated and also a little embarrassed at my ignorance. Ditto and the band Gossip had a fairly meteoric rise for an indie punk group, and I only hear about them from a television commercial. One doesn’t get much less punk than that, I think. They even toured with Sleater-Kinney, which I had heard of, but only through an interview with Carrie Brownstein about Portlandia.

The vast majority of the short book takes place before Ditto’s big success, with the last few pages zipping through her gold, and then platinum, records, her television appearances, and her clothing line. The pacing seems to reflect her own experience of everything suddenly coming together at once, but after reading so much about the titular “coal,” I would have liked to spend some more time on the “diamonds.”

—Anna

* Downloaded legally, though I also didn’t pay anything. Rebecca introduced me to Freegal Music, a music downloading service through a network of libraries. They have a kind of random selection of music, but someone there is a apparently a big Gossip fan.

Between Shades of Gray

Feb17 by Anna

By Ruta Sepetys

I enjoyed Out of the Easy so much that I quickly checked out Sepetys’ first novel, Between Shades of Gray. By a horrible coincidence, it was actually released on the very same day as Fifty Shades of Grey, and so a wonderful and very worthwhile read got buried in the ensuing mania. They couldn’t be more different, either. Seriously.

Between Shades of Gray is a fictional but historically-based story of a Lithuanian family arrested by the Russian police under Stalin’s occupation of the Baltic countries and deported to work camps in the Arctic. Russia’s treatment of these political prisoners (artists and academics charged with “anti-Soviet” activity, among others) was only marginally better than the German’s treatment of theirs, and ultimately resulted in the death of about a third of the populations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as the disappearance of the countries themselves for decades.

The novel is narrated by Lina, a fifteen-year-old girl, who is arrested, with her mother and younger brother, on the first page of the book. For the rest of the book, and for over a year, they are driven across the entire Asian continent to a work camp in the North Pole. It is a very personal look through the eyes of a single girl, and is both heart-breaking and inspiring all at once, and impossible to put down. Lina and her story feel very real, which is a testament to the amount of research Sepetys put into it.

Sepetys dedicates the book to her father, a Lithuanian refugee who escaped the gulags with his family as a child, but left many family members behind to be imprisoned and deported. She traveled to Lithuania to interview family members and many other survivors and composites their stories in this novel. In the afterward, she writes that she wanted to bring awareness to the horrors that got overshadowed by even worse atrocities committed in World War II, and it just kills me that this book promptly got overshadowed by escapist erotica. (Although, actually, the author herself kind of appreciates the confusion because it is introducing new, initially confused readers to the issues of the Baltic genocides.)

On a brief personal note, this week has been a bit trying. We got 7 inches of snow, and I had to shovel my driveway three different days, and load and unload firewood. I hated every minute of it, and then felt especially spoiled since this was exactly the kind of “lighter” work given to the children in the work camps for days in sub-zero conditions on food rations of 3 grams of stale bread a day.

—Anna

The Selection by Kiera Cass

Feb13 by Rebecca

The Selection
by Kiera Cass
2012

I stumbled across this book on Pinterest. As you may have noticed, I enjoy fanfiction, but I also enjoy fanpics, ie, fan-created artwork and illustrations. It’s for this that I started following Book Nerd’s Pinterest boards. But s/he also has a Books too read : D board, and in that board was The Selection.

You know how you’re told not to judge a book by it’s cover? I’ve never been particularly good at following that advice–I regularly judge books by their covers. And this one is pretty much exactly what it’s cover lead me to expect. Which is good, because I really needed a bit of frivolous fun with societal angst and fancy settings. The last few weeks have been intense, and a dystopian Cinderella story for young adults was just what I needed, with the right mixture of fluff and emo, and pretty much no tension at all.

The premise reminded me of Sherwood Smith’s A Posse of Princesses, while the over-all feel of the book and the dystopian setting reminded me of Maria V. Snyder’s Poison Study. Those were also some fun relaxing reads, although quite different from each other. Alternately, it’s bit like if The Hunger Games universe featured a show like The Bachelor rather than, well, the hunger games.

The thing is, that I don’t actually have much to say about The Selection. It was enjoyable. I read it in an evening. It’s a nice balance of fairy-tale and individual empowerment, touches on a great many issues of social injustice and inequalities, but doesn’t particularly linger.

I liked it, and I’ll probably check out the second book (The Elite) and possibly even the third book (The One) when it is released. There’s not actually a whole lot of tension, though: the first chapter of the first book explains what the Selection is, at which point the titles of the other two books become spoilers. However, like any fairytale, it’s nice to just relax into a well-recognized story.

Nonfiction Graphic Novels: Serial Killers

Feb8 by Anna

Uh, these are not really in my normal reading sphere. I don’t like true crime stories—they scare me like no supernatural stories do. However, I’d run across raving reviews of both of these, and I guess my curiosity just got the best of me. I agree that the idea of graphic novels about real serial killers sounds just awful since graphic novels often seem to celebrate over-the-top violence, but these both had personal approaches that caught my attention.

My Friend Dahmer

By Derf Backderf

Author Derf Backderf actually grew up and went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer, and while Dahmer wasn’t his closest friend, he was one of Dahmer’s very few friends. I can’t even imagine what a strange feeling that must be, looking back in hindsight, though Backderf does a very good job of putting it into words and pictures. It is thoughtful, and sad, and calm; pretty much exactly the opposite of what I would have expected from a graphic novel about Jeffrey Dahmer.

As the story got closer to the end, though, I started getting increasingly nervous. The first half is set in junior high, far before any of the gruesome murders, but I’m not actually all that familiar with the case, so I wasn’t completely sure when the murders started, and Dahmer’s unraveling throughout high school amid all the oblivious authority figures is agonizing to even just read. It is one thing to enjoy a violent thriller, but it is very much another thing when it is nonfiction. The author turns out to be extremely sensitive to this, one might even say surprisingly sensitive, given that he grew up in the same environment that produced Dahmer. He alludes to Dahmer’s increasing perversions but does not illustrate or describe them outright.

In fact, that’s not what this book is about. As Backderf writes in the intro:

This is a tragic tale, one that has lost none of its emotional power after two decades. It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent. Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends. He could have turned himself in after that first murder. He could have put a gun to his head. Instead he, and he alone, chose to become a serial killer and spread misery to countless people. There are a surprising number out there who view Jeffrey Dahmer as some kind of anti-hero, a bullied kid who lashed back at the society that rejected him. This is nonsense. Dahmer was a twisted wretch whose depravity was almost beyond comprehension. Pity him, but don’t empathize with him.

It is an extremely insightful look at the society that created Dahmer, from an insider’s point of view. It took Backderf years and several different tries to write this book, and he did an enormous amount of research to fact-check his own recollections. He writes that he has accepted that he has no responsibility in Dahmer’s fate, and I would bet that this book probably helped him find that acceptance.

A quick word of caution: when reading the book itself, I was quite impressed with the author’s restraint and sensitivity with the subject matter, so I was perhaps a little too blasé as a reader. I had trouble afterwards getting it out of my head, and it wasn’t nightmare-causing, exactly, but it wasn’t comfortable, either.

Green River Killer: A True Detective Story

By Jeff Jensen

I was a little nervous about this one, since the prologue illustrates the killer’s first murder right off the bat, and that of a child to boot, but I have to say that after My Friend Dahmer, and after the shocking intro, Green River Killer was a bit of a cake walk.

I first heard about this graphic novel on NPR’s RadioLab in an interview with the author, the son of the main detective in charge of this case. As a quick aside, can I say how much I enjoy RadioLab? It feels a bit like This American Life, but doesn’t leave me crying in my driveway nearly as much. The interview is particularly interesting because they actually play snippets of the police interviews with Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, responsible for the death of over 40 and possibly over 75 women throughout the 1980s in Seattle. (It’s also very possible that having already heard some of the details in the killer’s own voice made the graphic novel less disturbing in the end.)

Jensen’s father had dedicated the majority of his career to this one case, but tried to shelter his family from it as much as possible. When the recordings of the interviews were made public, his son, a writer for Entertainment Weekly, used them to help recreate his father’s career. It is a very loving look at his father’s dedication to a truly grim job. And, I think that’s what made it relatively easier to read: the focus is on the father and the police work rather than the psyche of the killer. Which makes sense, because in both the interviews and the graphic novel, there’s really not much of a reveal into Ridgway’s psyche, nothing like Backderf is able to do for Dahmer. While they were able to get enough facts for a solid conviction, they were never able to satisfactorily get a motive or really any sort of explanation.

This is actually the biggest frustration for Detective Jensen, but he is also so professional that even his moment of emotional crisis is quite contained, which is both understandable and admirable, but is difficult to communicate on paper. Jensen successfully focuses instead on the contrast of the loving relationship between his mother and father and both of them toward their children with the cypher of Gary Ridgway. The subtitle, “A True Detective Story,” is quite accurate: this is very much more about the lead detective and the toll police work can take on a person than the perpetrator.

—Anna

Americanah

Feb4 by Kinsey

I was sick for most of January, and when I’m sick I tend to reach for both comfort foods and comfort books. So I haven’t had much to talk about here, since I’ve mostly been rereading Anne of Green Gables and Sharon Shinn books. But I’ve rejoined the land of the living with Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which was just stunning, and it reminded me what an impact a good novel can have. (On a related note, did you see this study about how reading novels improves brain function for days afterwards?)

Adichie is a young, female Nigerian writer who has written a couple of other very well-regarded books–Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun–that I enjoyed, but this one really hit home for me. I’m about 90% sure that this is because a lot of this book is set in the U.S., which probably speaks poorly of my ability to empathize with people in other situations. But whatever the reason, the characters in this book felt so real to me it’s like they were walking around next to me and I was just eavesdropping on their lives. Summaries of the book tend to describe it as a love story spanning the years as two teenagers meet in Lagos, drift apart, and meet up again in the present day. And it is that. But it’s also an immigrant story–Ifemelu (the female half of the couple) ends up in the U.S., while Obinze goes to England, and the stories show different sides of the immigrant experience. And it’s about race–in the U.S., in the U.K., and in Nigeria.

I feel like this might make the book sound heavy, and it’s not a romantic comedy, that’s for sure. But again, Ifemelu and Obinze are both such layered, complicated people that I felt like I knew them, and I was interested in finding out what happened to them in the same way I’m interested in my friends’ lives. And it seemed like Adichie felt the same–I felt as if the author really liked these characters and was treating them with respect, even when bad things might be happening.

Also, I originally picked this book up because one of my favorite people online was raving about it. Bim Adewunmi (@bimadew) is a British journalist who is completely hilarious and awesome on Twitter, talking about everything from politics to pop culture. She basically live-tweeted sobbing her way through Eleanor and Park, and when she recommends something I listen. A highly recommended Twitter follow.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Dense, thoughtful, and kind.

You might also like: Adichie’s other books are wonderful, but other good immigrant stories also could include The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, or even A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

Out of the Easy

Jan31 by Anna

By Ruta Sepetys

This book is so good, you guys! You know when you read a string of pretty good books, and you’re happy enough with them, but then you read a really good book and all of a sudden those other books really pale in comparison? That’s how I feel right now: I don’t redact anything I said about Girl of Nightmares and Being Henry David, but I maybe don’t recommend them quite so highly anymore. I definitely recommend Out of the Easy, though.

It starts out fairly light but very engaging, introducing Josie, the daughter of a prostitute in 1950s New Orleans trying to escape the lifestyle she was born into. A wealthy man that she meets in the bookstore she helps run is found dead later than night, and the book is ostensibly about the investigation into the suspicious circumstances. As the book progresses, though, the mystery takes the backseat while it focuses more on Josie’s desperate attempts to improve her circumstances. This is not a criticism at all, though, because Josie, the world around her, the people in her life (including madams, prostitutes, johns, and gangsters) are fascinating, and her struggles are heartbreaking and gripping.

—Anna

Shadows by Robin McKinley

Jan27 by Rebecca

Shadows
by Robin McKinley
2013

I have a complex relationship with Robin McKinley’s books. I love The Blue Sword and Beauty. They were wonderful. I thought she was doing something interesting with Rose Daughter, since it was a second rewrite of the story of Beauty and the Beast, and yet quite different from her first version, Beauty. And then she wrote Sunshine, which is really in contention for being the best book ever, and won her (in my mind) a life time achievement award: she was thereby a favorite author and I loved her writing.

Where it gets problematic is that I don’t actually care for many of her other books. I found Deerskin unpleasant, Chalice seemed more like a semi-written outline for a book rather than a complete book in and of itself, and I never even managed to get past the first chapter of Pegasus due to the extreme level of twee.

So I’d mostly decided that I would love her intensely and pretend that she wasn’t writing anything anymore. And yet, when her newest book came out, I checked it out from the library.

And I liked it a lot.

The first chapter or so made me wince with the over use of made-up slang and general teenage fraughtness but then it settled into the plot and I discovered that I actually really enjoyed it. The characters and the character interactions and the world they live in are all fun. However, much like how, with Rose Daughter, McKinley had apparently decided that she wanted to try a variation on Beauty, Shadows reads a like McKinley decided she wanted to try a variation on Sunshine. (Even the titles parallel each other!)

Sunshine is so fabulously good that it can definitely support a knock off. In fact, a knock off of Sunshine is a whole lot better than many originals. But, it does add an odd quality of double vision to reading it, see how the characters, plots, and descriptions in the two books map to each other.

One useful distinction, though, is that Sunshine is intended for an adult audience, while Shadows is a teen reader. By this, I mean that the romantic relationships in the two books as well as the level of gore are variably age-appropriate. But they both look at magic and reality and perspective and hope and determination and making due with what you have.

Anyway, I definitely recommend this book, but it doesn’t do much to resolve my issues with McKinley, since now I can’t even rely on her writing books that I don’t want to read. (I also find it somewhat irritating that she really doesn’t like fanfiction and is one of those authors who has their attorneys send cease-and-desist letters. Which is particularly questionable of her given that she apparently writes AUs of her own stories.) Also, just as with Sunshine, I would love to see a sequel of Shadows, or a prequel, or anything else further exploring the world contained within.

Being Henry David

Jan25 by Anna

By Cal Armistead

I ran across BuzzFeed’s list of The 21 Best YA Books of 2013, and had only read two (both courtesy of Kinsey). So, I read through all of the descriptions and a bunch of them held no interest for me (there is nothing for me in a story about an outcast teenage girl who finds herself through DJ-ing), but several promptly got added to my to-read list. Being Henry David was the only one immediately available at my library, so it has come first.

The premise is extremely basic, which I like: a teenaged boy wakes up in New York City’s Penn Station with no knowledge of who he is or how he got there or anything about his past. His only possession is a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and for lack of any better clues, he decides to go to Walden Pond and see if anything there can bring back his memories. Since he doesn’t know his real name, he gives his name as Henry David whenever asked. “Hank” is very engaging, and the various characters he meets are equally interesting.

The mystery is quite enthralling and kept me guessing for the majority of the book: Is he a government super-soldier a la Bourne? Is he running away from the massacre of his family a la Dark Places? Could he possibly be Thoreau himself brought forward in time?! The ending wasn’t quite as interesting as some of my admittedly farfetched imaginings, but was still quite satisfying. It occasionally got a little too teenage-angst for me, but I have a lower-than-average tolerance for that, so that criticism is more due to that I am not really the intended audience for this type of book than any sort of flaw in the story. I was overall quite pleased.

I additionally enjoyed the occasional discussions about Thoreau and Walden Pond because I read Walden in high school and did not relate to it at all (I am really very much not an outdoorsy person). So, I liked reading about how other people, even fictional characters, took inspiration from it. (I had also initially thought that that I was getting a somewhat unusual, for me, story about a male character by a male author, since I primarily read female characters and authors, but then I double-checked and author Cal Armistead is a woman, so not too off the beaten path – haha, Walden!)

Can I also indulge in a quick graphic design exercise? I thought the cover to the book sucked – it was generic, discordant, and missed several different opportunities. I mulled over this throughout the several days of reading it, and so threw together a quick fan-art cover instead, courtesy of the great M.C. Escher.

The other books I’m waiting on from the list are Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea (#9), Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (#15), and Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys (#21), so hopefully those reviews will be coming up, too, though I’m interspersing my YA reading with graphic novels, so those will be sprinkled throughout, as well.

—Anna

Girl of Nightmares

Jan21 by Anna

By Kendare Blake

Girl of Nightmares is the sequel to Anna Dressed in Blood, which I enjoyed as my palette cleanser after a brutal few months with Atlas Shrugged. Anna Dressed in Blood was an awesome way to recover from Ayn Rand, but wasn’t so engaging that I was intending to read the sequel. However, I was looking for casual reading over the holidays, so I picked it up on a whim at the library, figuring it would be a fun distraction.

And it was! It was actually even better than the first book! My one complaint about Anna Dressed in Blood was awfully vague, just that the pace of the plotting seemed odd to me in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Well, I’ve figured out what the plotting issue was because Girl of Nightmares doesn’t have it at all. So, here’s the thing, I like a very linear storyline: protagonist has a problem, works towards a solutions, and finally succeeds. It is a little simple, perhaps, but that’s how I like it. Anna Dressed in Blood had a lot of red herrings as the protagonist and supporting characters tried to figure out what challenge they were facing and then how to solve it, but this book is more straight-forward.

Girl of Nightmares starts just a couple of months after the end of Anna Dressed in Blood, and picks up the same story, so is definitely not a standalone. I can’t really describe the plot at all without spoiling Anna Dressed in Blood, so I’m not going to do that, beyond saying that the other thing I really like is that this book is sort of the flipside of the first book. The first book follows the protagonist Cas as he hunts murderous ghosts and sends them to the afterlife; in Girl of Nightmares, Cas is trying to bring a ghost back from the afterlife. I just love that kind of mirror-image reversal treatment in sequels!

Cas also travels to London to meet with a group that sounds very similar to the Watcher Council, and any similarity to Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a-okay with me!

—Anna

The Fall of Ile-Rien

Jan17 by Rebecca

The Fall of Ile-Rien
by Martha Wells

The Wizard Hunters
2003

The Ships of Air
2004

The Gate of Gods
2005

So, it’s possible that I overdosed slightly on Martha Wells. After reading all three of The Books of the Raksura, I went immediately to the library and got Wheel of the Infinite, and after reading that, I went back and got all three books of The Fall of Ile-Rien. I loved each and every one of these books, but by The Gate of Gods, I was flagging a bit and needed a break.

However! It’s still really good and I want to read the prequels, The Element of Fire and Death of a Necromancer. I’m just aware that it’s probably a good thing that the library doesn’t have them and I’ll have to take a break to figure out how to get them through inter-library loan.

Anyway, this series starts off with a ludicrous mess of a plot that I wouldn’t have bothered reading by an unknown author. However, as I’ve mentioned before, Wells has an amazing ability to bring new life to old tropes and she does it extremely well here.

There’s a lot going on in these books: the kingdom of Ile-Rein is sort of like a magical version of a 1920s Europe, but is currently being attacked by (and losing to) an invading army that appears to come from nowhere. Tremaine Valiarde, our heroine, is from this world. It turns out the bad guys, though, are invading from a different world, although tracking exactly how is a main plotline for the series. Ilias is from a more agrarian society in an entirely different world. Also his society is a matriarchy, which allows Wells to be delightful in her exploration of gender norms and social expectations.

Normally, the thing that most attracts me to a book is the world building, but while the world building here is excellent, it’s really the characters who shine. Both Tremaine and Ilias are broken in their own ways, but also too strong to let that stop them. And while they’re not outcasts from their respective societies, neither of them quite fit in at home. Wells does an amazing job of showing how out of sync both of them are, even with their friends and family, and yet those same idiosyncrasies allow them to fit together in a way they don’t with anyone else.

Plus, I just really love how Wells approaches bringing them together. Some things simply appear impossible: there’s a war going on, there’s no time for relationships. Other things are so easy and without angst for much the same reason: there’s a war going on, no need for unnecessary waffling.

But for all that Tremaine is clearly set up as the central character, the real main character is the war itself. It is ever-present and affects everything that happens. There is a large cast of characters who are all struggling to do their best to achieve their goals, because the war doesn’t effect just one person and can’t be fought by just one person. There are dozens of main characters, all working, either together or in opposition, but all with the knowledge that something needs to be done and no one has the option to sit out these events.

I really liked this series a great deal. I think I might have a new favorite author, as well.