Fifty Shades of Grey

by E L James

[Editor: Here’s the second perspective on Fifty Shades of Grey]

First, think Danielle Steele with an edge.

I haven’t read Danielle Steele in over 20 years, but what I remember of the genre is the redundancy of a heavily sexual plot with over-the-top beautiful characters. Fortunately for Fifty Shades of Grey, leading male character Christian Grey steps up the level of intrigue through his divergent pursuit of leading female character Anastasia Steele.

Anastasia, or Ana, is on the eve of her college graduation. Her best friend Kate is the editor for the university’s newspaper and has a high-brow interview with the 27-year-old billionaire Christian Grey, who will deliver their commencement speech. But Kate has the flu and begs Ana to stand in for her. Ana arrives at the interview knowing nothing about Christian. He of course is hot, and she of course doesn’t know how beautiful she is. She’s also unassuming and lacking confidence, and trips and falls when she enters his office. In Danielle Steele style, the electricity between them is palpable. Ana is inexperienced with men and freaked out by it. Christian, on the other hand, is a man who knows what he wants and gets what he wants. Ana has no idea what she’s in for. He lives the art of seduction, and she’s hooked.

And so is the reader. As Ana enters into his sexual world of “dominant-submissive” relationships, Christian is not so much pleasing the pants off of her (like every hour)—he’s pleasing the most devoted readers. When he takes her into his sexual play room (what Ana calls his “red room of pain”), it’s out of the ordinary, and intriguing.

Next, think a new kind of liberation for women.

Having read and discussed Fifty Shades of Grey as part of my book club, I got to thinking about it from a different angle. These days, post-women’s liberation, the lines are blurred as to who’s in charge in a relationship. Women often have the upper hand—regardless of the fact there are women’s lib issues that need balancing. But in exchange for this relatively new sense of power and freedom of choice, have women completely put their submissiveness aside? And have they inadvertently transferred too much of that submissiveness to men?

Christian is a rare species of a man. In his own deviant way, he’s both an old school gentleman and an intensely controlling character. Combined, this can actually be a turn on for readers. Why? He brings a new light to submissiveness. At the end of the day, would it be so bad to have a man open your car door, decide what you’ll have for dinner, order a nice bottle of wine, pay the bill, tell you what to wear (or what not to wear), instruct you how to wait for him in his play room as he enters with no shirt, top button of his jeans undone…

It’s not Ana’s struggle to be a modern independent woman that gets readers fired up. Nor is it her exhausting insecurity and repetitive self-monologues. It’s the intrigue into her relationship with Christian through which he teaches her to give up the need to be in control, and in the process, makes it look sensual and gratifying.

The Fifty Shades of Grey plot is purely dependent upon its erotic twist, but the Danielle Steele feel is its saving grace. It’s not all spanking, whips, and bondage (or even close)—that which is supposed to define Christian as “the dominant.” It’s actually pretty fluffy, and a love story. Yet the author knows her hook. While the play room, the backdrop for the dominant-submissive rules and regulations, does not come into play often, it leaves readers wondering how far Christian will go and why he is the way he is. Why else dive into the next two books of the trilogy?

—Christine, Guest Contributor

Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

May28 by Rebecca

This is the first of two reviews of this book. The next one will likely be somewhat more positive. So keep an eye out for another forthcoming review.

Fifty Shades of Grey
E. L. James
2012

I enjoy fanfiction, both the fact that it exists as a genre¹ as well as the genre itself. Thus, when I heard that someone had written an AU² Twilight fanfiction and then changed the names in order to publish it professionally, I decided to read it. I hadn’t enjoyed Twilight, but mostly I found it uninteresting and poorly crafted. With a different author and a different setting, this had potential.

Especially since the articles I had read about it, were mostly shocked by the fact that apparently women can like sex. Yes, even mothers! The fact that this is apparently shocking makes me mourn for the women’s movement. Given that this was the primary complaint about the book, I thought the book must be pretty good.

Alas, I was doomed to rather severe disappointment.

To a certain extent, E. L. James did fix one of the major problems I had with Twilight. The characters are well presented. The narrative descriptions match their actions. Thus, Ana is both described as shy and acts shy. Christian is both described as arrogant and acts arrogant.

Another thing the author does really well is build anticipation. What’s going to happen next?, how are these two characters going to get together?, etc. It kept me reading for about half the book.

Then I hit the first sex scene, and wow, the badness.

From there on out, as the book attempts to get more serious, it becomes something of a travesty that I had trouble slogging my way through.

It’s not clear to me that this author (or the editor for that matter) knows what sex involves or any real concept of physicality or how bodies work much less anything at all about the BDSM³ lifestyle. Given the whole plot of the book is based on the sexual awakening of a young woman and the moderate depravity of her love interest, the lack of understanding on the author’s part is a major problem.

The problem with this book is not that it was based off of another author’s work and not that it contains a lot of sex; the problem is that it’s poorly researched, poorly written, and, to an even greater extent than Twilight, it attempts to romanticize a highly dysfunctional relationship.

¹ U.S. Copyright law involves a fundamental division between idea and expression. Ideas are not considered under copyright, ever; only the expression of those ideas is protected. In the past, this was taken to literally mean the exact words. Even translations were considered to be a matter of the ideas rather than the expression. More recent legal interpretations of copyright have expanded what exactly is considered an expression to include not only translations but also events, places, and characters. However, no case of fanfiction has ever made it through the court system, and thus whether or not the genre infringes on copyright remains uncertain.

² AU in this context means “Alternate Universe.” In fanfiction, this means taking well-loved characters, relationships, and plot devices and transposing them into completely different settings and situations. In this case the Twilight characters were used in a modern setting.

³ BDSM stands for Bondage & discipline, Dominance & submission, Sadism and Masochism. (It is not to be confused with DBMS, which stands for DataBase Management Systems, with which I am somewhat more familiar.)

The rest of this review is going to involve spoilers of the R-rated variety, so I’m putting a break here. Proceed at your own risk. Continue reading →

Blood, Bones & Butter

May22 by Kinsey

I like memoirs and I read a lot of them. Some of them work better than others. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is not going to go to the very top of my list, but it a solid book and an enjoyable read. Plus, trying to figure out why I didn’t like it more than I did helped me figure out exactly why I like some memoirs better than others, which could certainly help my future book selections.

Hamilton is the very respected chef at Prune, a very respected restaurant in New York’s East Village. (I’ve never been there, but the menu sure looks good.) There are about a million and one chef’s memoirs out there, but this one at least offers a change from the standard culinary school story, since Hamilton took a much more circuitous route to restaurant ownership. She roughly divides her story into three parts that echo the title. The Blood section deals with her childhood and her family, who sound fun but wildly dysfunctional. Personally, I don’t like reading about people’s childhoods and found the first section of this book a real slog–I honestly wasn’t sure I was even going to keep reading. But Hamilton leaves homes as a teenager and moves to New York City, and things pick up from there. In Bones, she describes how she wandered through work in large-scale catering houses and through an MFA program before opening her restaurant and I found all of that fascinating. (Her stories about the catering world also explain a lot of things about the meals I ate a conference recently.) Finally, Butter deals with her marriage, kids and, in-laws. Sound pretty standard? Well, she’s a lesbian who marries an Italian man so he can get his green card (sort of?), has kids, and then falls in love with his mother and the annual trip to Italy to visit her husband’s family. So, not so standard. There were a lot of things in Butter that felt very glossed over to me–she talks in depth about the affair she had with the Italian before they married, but hardly mentions even in passing how they choose to have multiple children–but Italy sure does sound nice. I might have married the guy for those in-laws myself.

So what insight about memoirs did this book lead me to? That memoirs work better when they are structured around something very specific. My favorite two memoirs of recent years were Eat, Pray, Love and Julie & Julia. I think those work well because they both use a particular activity or time period as a framework for the story, such as Julie Powell spending a year cooking her way through one of Julia Child’s cookbooks. This prevents the memoir from falling into a patten in which the author just basically describes everything that has happened from the time they were born up until the present. In Julie & Julia, no matter what tangents she goes off on or what she chooses to discuss, I know that the book is going to come back to what she’s cooking and that it’s going to end when the year is up. In Blood, Bones & Butter, Hamilton does use the three title ingredients to create a structure, but it’s limited–I actually didn’t figure out how the sections were divided until after I had finished the book. And the real weakness of the everything-up-until-now method of writing a memoir is that things often just sort of stop when the author reaches the current day. I definitely felt that way with this book and would really like to hear the rest of Hamilton’s story. I am aware that when someone is writing the story of their life, that story may not have a classic narrative arc. That’s why I think the very explicit structure of something like Eat, Pray, Love works so well. As a reader, I want for there to be a conclusion of some sort, and putting a frame of time or concept around the story helps provide that. Blood, Bones & Butter is an interesting and well-written book–maybe it is to its credit that my main issue with it is that I wanted to hear more of the story.

Finder Library: Volume 1

May19 by Anna

By Carla Speed McNeil

Finder is my favorite graphic novel. Period.

As much as I defend graphic novels and truly believe that they can be equal to any novel, most of them aren’t. Finder, however, blows most novels out of the water. When I first stumbled across one of the graphic novels, Sin-Eater, at a library years ago, I was entranced; her stories and characters stayed with me in all the years since then, and last week, I was overjoyed to see that Dark Horse has published an anthology of her Finder novels, including Sin-Eater.

It is hard to even describe the scope of Finder. McNeil builds an entire world with a blend of futuristic technology and mysticism, and populates it with dozens of different tribes of people, many of whom borrow attributes from various real-world cultures, such as ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Native American. Our protagonist is from the tribe most like Native American, and he is a “finder” by trade, which is a bit of a cross between tracker and private detective. Through his adventures (and each book-length graphic novel follows just one) we explore the entire world, traveling to the different lands and meeting peoples of different tribes.

Every single panel of the 600+ page anthology adds details to the cultures and histories. Many of them include references to our real-world culture (though it is clearly not set in our world; or possibly our world many millenia in the future). Ones I caught included The Last Unicorn, Neil Gaiman, and Masquerade, and they were just enough for me to recognize that for each reference I caught, there were no doubt dozens that I missed.

For some of the ones I missed, McNeil has endnotes in the back (of both this anthology and the original graphic novels) in which she explains some of the references and elaborates on many of the characters and places. I had already been impressed with the expanse of the book, but the endnotes were where I really began to feel awe toward the author. She has back stories for characters that only feature in a single page and names for characters that only have a single panel!

The book is insidious, really—you pick it up thinking to read an adventure story about a lone-wolf character, but the density of it all gets in your brain and has you picking at it for days afterward, trying to unravel it all.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

May12 by Kinsey

Why did I think that The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was a feisty-woman story like The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood? Why, based on nothing but the title, did I decide that this was one of those books that would be beloved by art teachers and your mom’s friends and the women on the View? I’ve done this before, enough times that I could probably start tagging posts How My Vague and Uninformed Impressions of Books I Haven’t Read Are Completely Wrong. I have no idea where I got my Ya-Ya impression, but this is not one of those books. I avoided it for years but when I finally read it, almost by accident while trapped on a plane, I loved it.

Okay, here’s what this book is actually about: during World War II the Germans occupied the Channel Islands, which are these tiny little islands that lie between England and France. They’re part of the British Commonwealth, but not technically part of the United Kingdom–I think of them as sort of like the British Puerto Rico. Anyway, during the war the British government didn’t have the resources/chose not to defend them, so the Germans moved in early in the war and assumed that this would be their first step towards occupying England. That obviously didn’t happen, but the people who lived on the islands spent nearly five years under German rule and were not allowed to have any communication with the outside world during that time. This story takes place after the war and occupation have ended when a young London writer, looking for something new and meaningful to do, starts corresponding with a group of islanders. She encourages her new friends to tell their stories about life under the occupation, but she also gets caught up in their present-day activities and her own efforts to move on from the war.

As a WWII history nerd, I appreciated reading about a bit of the war that I didn’t know much about, and I am fascinated by the post-war period in Britain, so I liked that part as well. In the U.S. we tend to think of the late 1940s and into the 1950s as boom years, but those were very austere times in Britain. Sugar was rationed until 1953! Meat until 1954! It was a whole different world and I think this book nicely captures the mixed feeling people had at the time–thrilled that the war was over, but tired and a little overwhelmed by the rebuilding. But this isn’t really a typical WW II book–overall, it ends up being more charming than traumatic. First, since it takes place after the war has ended, you hear about what people experienced but you’re not living it with them–there’s a sense of remove. And second, the book is told in epistolary format, meaning that the whole thing is made up of letters and telegrams sent back and forth between the various characters, so it’s got this sort of delightfully chatty style. More than anything else it reminds me of 84, Charing Cross Road, another British post-WWII epistolary story. (If you’ve never read 84, Charing Cross Road, forgot all this other stuff and go read it immediately. It’s wonderful, and if nothing else it can serve as an example of how astoundingly much our world has changed in 60 years.) Look, Nazis are Nazis and there are definitely upsetting parts in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but I felt hopeful when I finished this book and that is something than can be hard to find.

Jane Slayre

May8 by Anna

By Charlotte Brontë and Sherri Browning Erwin

I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a few years ago and was not impressed. It felt like a very awkward mash-up, like just reading Pride and Prejudice, and then BOOM, ZOMBIES, and then back to Pride and Prejudice. It was very disjointed, with the inserted zombie scenes feeling unrelated and jarring in the rest of the text. Once I finished, I just wanted to read Pride and Prejudice without zombies.

Happily, Jane Slayre is significantly better. There are a number of possible reasons for this, and I can’t quite tell which ones actually apply and whether it is due to the author or myself as the reader:

Sherri Browning Erwin understands Bronte’s voice better than Seth Grahame-Smith understands Jane Austen’s.
Jane Eyre already has a gothic sentiment that lends itself better to the addition of vampires/werewolves/zombies than Jane Austen’s comedy of manners.
I don’t actually remember Jane Eyre all that well, so it was harder for me to recognize when deviating scenes started.
I also didn’t enjoy reading Jane Eyre as much as Pride and Prejudice, so wasn’t as disturbed by the added scenes, and didn’t have any inclination to reread the original.

I will say this, though: especially with the added vampires, Jane Eyre/Slayre comes across as the Twilight of 19^th century with a fairly Mary-Sue-ish young woman (she isn’t traditionally beautiful, but everyone who sees her compares her to a fairy or some other elven creature) teaching an older and extremely rude but wealthy man how to love again.

However, the Slayre part (so clearly borrowed from Joss Whedon that it could possibly be grounds for a lawsuit if he were so inclined) gives Jane some added spunk and value as a character, and makes the admiration of all around her make more sense. Erwin weaves the vampires (and zombies and werewolves) throughout Jane’s entire story, so it does become an established part of her character.

I even thought several times that the additions Erwin made were interesting enough that they could have been the basis for a quite interesting original book, if she had only taken Jane Eyre as a inspiration and hadn’t had to stay so close to the original.

—Anna

What happened to conclusions?

May4 by Rebecca

There are some traditional plot arcs out there that various authors use, re-use, re-interpret, or ignore entirely, depending on their choice. But there is one basic plot arc that I consider pretty universal: beginning, middle, end.

First there’s the beginning in which the writer starts the story and introduces the characters and the world and the problem at hand. Then there’s the middle in which stuff happens. Finally there’s the end in which the results are revealed for the stuff that happened in the beginning and the middle.

Is there some post-modern style now that considers endings to be passé? Because I have recently read two young adult books that I enjoyed right up until I realized that the last few pages weren’t actually going to involve any sort of conclusion.

There’s a difference between a book being the first in a series and just hacking a book into multiple pieces. Or so I had thought. But twice in a row, two otherwise well written books suddenly stopping like this. It feels like a conscious choice. It’s not a style that I approve of, but I’m beginning to really think it might be a stylistic thing rather than simply bad writing, especially since, aside from the lack of any conclusion, they were good books, or at least two-thirds of good books.

Hollowland
By Amanda Hocking
2010
(Free kindle edition on Amazon)

Remy King is nineteen, the world has fallen apart in a zombie apocalypse and she is going to go across country to get to her brother if she has to walk to do it, beating off zombies all the way. She is kick-ass and awesome, acquires a few companions and loses a few companions (but luckily not the lion, because I never before realized that a proper kick-ass heroine needs a lion companion, but this book convinced me), and is generally determined. This was pretty much exactly what I was in the mood for during my own finals madness.

Except for the fact that this is book #1 of The Hollows series and the plot transitions smoothly into plot #2 before the book ends, leaving me going: Seriously? That’s where you decided to break off? Seriously?

Cinder
By Marissa Meyer
2012

Cinder is a mechanic with a stall at the local market bringing in the only income her family sees. She’s also a sixteen-year-old cyborg in a world that considers cyborgs to be less than human. Her step-mother was not happy that Cinder’s adopted father had decided to adopt a cyborg and even less happy that he then proceeded to die of the plague just a few months later.

A lot of people are dying of the plague these days. Including the Emperor.

Which leaves the prince and heir to the throne in the rather unhappy position of being pressured to marry the queen of the independent moon colony. The lunar people have mind control powers and their royalty tend to use assassination and mutilation to get what they want.

This is the kind of crazy re-imaging of the Cinderella fairy-tale that I just can’t resist. It was excellent and crazy and fun… right up until the final climactic scene turned out to be less climactic and more of an introduction to a whole new plot arc with no conclusion in sight. Apparently there are four more books in the works.

So, what’s up with this?

Neither ending is really a cliff-hanger, per se. They’re just incomplete stories. For anyone who reads amateur fiction published online, it feels like I just came to the end of the posted portion of a WIP (Work in Progress). I had rather thought that the benefit of reading formally published books is that none of them are WIPs. It’s depressing to discover that’s not the case.

So, I ask again, is this really a style of writing that’s going around now: plot arcs composed of beginnings and middles, but no ends?

Wonderstruck

May2 by Kinsey

I think I’ve said here before that I don’t like graphic novels–I respect them as an art form, I respect those who read them, but no matter how I try, they’re just not for me. Wonderstruck may be an exception to the rule, partly because it’s half a graphic novel and half a regular novel. The illustrated story follows a deaf girl living in New York City in the 1930s, while the written story follows a little boy in Minnesota in the 1970s, and the narrative moves back and forth between the two. Without giving away too much, the joy of the book is watching how these stories parallel each other and move closer and closer together, until they ultimately intertwine. The drawings are fairly simple black and white pencil drawings (I think? I am so artistically-challenged that Draw Something is beyond me, so who knows what someone with art knowledge would call these) but they’re beautiful and very evocative. And a lot of the book is set is New York City and I’ve mentioned how much I like reading about New York.

Brian Selznick also wrote The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which the movie Hugo was based on, and when I was reading Wonderstruck a school librarian stopped to rave about how good it was, and how good the Hugo book was, and I how I should see the Hugo movie, etc. I feel like school librarians see lots of books, so I should listen when they say something is worth my time.

I should say here that Wonderstruck is more of a middle reader than a young adult book–it’s aimed at pretty young kids. So although the book looks giant and long, it took me less than two hours to read, so don’t go expecting something at The Hunger Games level. It’s not that complex, which is probably why I don’t have too much to say about it, but it was cute and charming and it served a a nice break from some of the heavier, Nazi-filled things I’ve been reading lately.

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

Apr29 by Anna

By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

I know I haven’t posted in a while, and it is because I’ve been hauling my way through a large and very unusual book for me—political nonfiction—so I’m writing a very long post to compensate.

I checked this book out from the library the day after seeing the HBO movie of the same name, which was just a narrow slice of the full scope of the book*. I enjoyed the movie; I knew all the public politics already, but it was fascinating seeing all the behind-the-scenes shuffling, like peering backstage at a show. I wanted to know more about it, so I checked out the book.

And very quickly realized that I did not want to know more about it. Politics isn’t a Broadway show, it’s a sausage factory**, and if I wanted to still enjoy sausage, I damn sure didn’t want to see how it is made. Now, I’m a democrat and the book reads somewhat democrat-leaning, though the authors are political correspondents and journalists who I am sure pride themselves on their unbiased stance. However, every single person comes across as single-mindedly, self-centeredly ambitious in a microcosm of politics that not only doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the rest of the nation, but seems to disdain the rest of the nation a bit. So, I guess that, at least, is something bipartisan.

I will give Game Change this: it is so minutely, exhaustively researched that it sort of boggles the mind. It is written in a narrative structure, following the various candidates like protagonists in a story. When tracking Obama in 2006, well before he was in the national consciousness, they extrapolate his frame of mind from a note he passed to another senator in a committee meeting and a hand gesture (not the one you are thinking of right now) he made in the hallway of the Capitol. I imagine the two authors scouring every building he ever set foot in and asking everybody and anybody there, “Did you ever see President Obama? What was he doing? Did he say anything—anything at all?!”

The best part is reading about the events that I actually remember from the race, but reading them in context with everything else that came between. The oddest part, though, is reading about pivotal, influential events about which I had no idea here in the midlands of America. (ex. Apparently, Maureen Dowd wrote an article in which she interviewed David Geffen about his disillusionment with the Clintons? It was a big moment where democrats felt free to criticize the Clintons and support Obama instead? I mean, I know who Maureen Dowd is, though I’ve never read anything by her. I initially thought David Geffen might be Liza Minnelli’s most recent husband, until it quickly became clear that wasn’t right.)

I guess I can kind of see where politicians get their contempt for all the rest of us, but I think that contempt comes from a very ignorant place—they have no idea how we think and how we make decisions. And because they don’t understand it, they disdain it. I imagine that it is stories like my own that drive politicians crazy: I saw the campaign ads, read articles, and still couldn’t make up my mind between Clinton and Obama. Then, I read a post on a small blog that I regularly check out where the author commented that if Clinton gets elected, two families would have been running the White House for 24 years and that is some disconcerting dynasty-building right there. And that’s what did it for me—that one post made my decision.

Later, it occurred to me that this phenomena kind of highlights how insular the political world is, at least for the active players. For myself, only the largest of political events break into my brain space that is otherwise occupied with my daily office work, what I’m making for dinner, how to balance this month’s budget, etc. For the people in this book, though, this is their entire life.

When the HBO movie came out, Palin understandable objected to it, and HBO tried to argue that it wasn’t necessarily an unflattering portrait, which of course it is. The book is not truly flattering either, but it is a lot more balanced in assigning blame equally on McCain’s people.

The vast majority of the book is spent on the democratic primaries, to the point where it gets a little bogged down, but then it rushes through the general race at breakneck speed, making me feel like I was missing things that they simply weren’t discussing.

This is perhaps the best compliment: Game Change already has me looking at the 2012 race in a different light.

A couple of random concluding thoughts:

The book does a great job of humanizing the politicians. It is a little embarrassing to admit, but it had not occurred to me that politicians could actually be sad or get their feelings hurt while on the campaign. I guess I just thought that so much of the discourse was overblown wind-bagging, that it all was. I was kind of shocked how many of them break down into tears at one point or another.
Hillary Clinton’s political career so far could almost be a Greek play (I’m not sure yet whether a tragedy or comedy): her husband is the one that initially gives her the political clout and name-recognition to run for president, but he was also her biggest obstacle in the campaign and probably the strongest reason she lost.

—Anna

__________________________________________

*A VERY narrow slice – the book breaks down as follows:

Pages 1-267: the race for the Democratic nomination, focusing on the Obama and Clinton campaigns, with some discussion of Edwards (which has been very informative in light of the current trial)
Pages 268-319: the race for the Republican nomination, focusing almost entirely on McCain with a few pages about Giuliani
Pages 320-436: the general election (the events of the HBO movie are all contained within pages 353-416)

**The 12-year-old in me says, “YEAH, it is!” (sorry)

The Hare with the Amber Eyes

Apr24 by Kinsey

I can’t believe that I haven’t already written about The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss. I loved it so much I was sure that I had written a review of it, but it must have slipped between the cracks, which I cannot allow to happen. This book has been all over the place lately so I know I’m not exactly letting you in on a secret with this recommendation, but sometimes books are popular for a good reason. This is a non-fiction family memoir written by an English ceramics artist whose family was one of the richest, most powerful Jewish banking families in Europe in the 19th century. He traces the history of his family as they climbed to the top of European society, and then were devastated by two World Wars and the anti-Semitism that was always waiting just under the surface of polite society. (As I said to my sister when I was about 2/3rds of the way through the book, “This has been really enjoyable so far, but now it’s 1930 and they’re Jews in Austria. I feel like things are about to take a turn.”)

There are plenty of WWII memoirs out there–what makes this one stand out is that the story is all told in the context of the family’s art. Specifically, de Waal traces a collection of small Japanese carvings known as netsuke–how his family obtained them, how they fit into the rest of the family’s collection, and how they survived the twists and turns of history to end up in his possession. Political events are a major part of the story, but even those are filtered through the lens of how they affected the family’s patronage and collection of art. The book is more art history than history, and it makes what is a familiar story feel fresh and interesting. One thing did puzzle me: the book did not include any pictures of the netsuke. Lengthy, lengthy descriptions of the tiny carvings and pictures of the family, but no pictures of the carvings themselves. That seems like it must be a deliberate decision, to make sure that the readers’ focus is on the family and the people instead of on the things, even though the fate of the netsuke is the hook the entire book is based around. I ended up going to Wikipedia to find out what these things actually looked like, and then falling down an internet-rabbit hole about Japanese art. If you’d like to see some very detailed pictures of netsuke, let me recommend JapaneseNetsuke as a starting point.

Also, although I linked to the Amazon page, I would recommend not reading the reviews there before you read the book, because they give away some of the major twists. I’m not someone who gets overly concerned about spoilers, but I went into this book blind and I think that especially well. I knew that the netsuke collection survived the wars, but I learned how that happened as the author did, and I think that made the experience more powerful. It can be hard when reading history to remember that the things that happened in the past were not inevitable or destined, but that life at those moment in the past was just as fluid and unpredictable for the people living it as our lives feel today. Having only a general sense of what was going to happen made following the story of this one family, and this one collection of tiny objects, feel like a thriller.