A Company of Swans - Eva Ibbotson

This is hands down one of my favorite books. I read it quite a while ago, and until recently could only remember that it had something to do with the River Sea, a wealthy man in the Amazon, and an English girl who somehow found herself in his company long enough to fall in love before she was whisked back to her dreary English home and half starved for being so bold as to have ruined herself. She vows to remember her time in the Amazon, but one day cannot remember the precise pattern of her lover's carpet, and her spirit finally breaks. Of course, at the last minute he finds her and they marry and everyone lives happily ever after.

Actually that's a pretty good summary, but wasn't good enough for me to find the book with any search engines. By some stroke of sheer luck, however, I found a copy in a used bookstore in Hyderabad and the back looked interesting enough to convince me to buy it. It was only halfway through the book that I realized it was the one I had been looking for for so long! It's things that this that made me start this blog.

Ibbotson shows her great love for music and tiny heroines here. Harriet Morton is a ballerina and she sneaks away to the Amazon to perform with a company there, which is where she meets Rom. Rom turns out to be the denounced half brother of a man whose young son Harriet is quite fond of. Her father and aunt do not approve of her behavior in the Amazon and drag her back home, but not before Rom has the chance to confuse Harriet's affections for the young son with his hated brother, who it turns out has blown his brains out due to enormous debts. His widow, Rom's first love (so complicated!), when she hears of Rom's enormous wealth, sets out to find him, and so Harriet does not struggle against the fact that she must lose him and when her family essentially kidnaps her she hardly struggles.

In the end, Rom and Harriet marry and her family is appeased because he turns out to be of notable lineage, and the widow is put in her place but not unkindly. It's such a satisfying a lovely story.

Rom and Harriet's relationship is given ample development, as are the characters of her father, aunt, and initial fiance. The imagery of the Amazon show's Ibbotson's love of nature as well - it almost makes me want to go there - almost - and then I remember all the insects in Peru. Harriet Morton is made of stronger stuff than I.

Cranberry Queen - Kathleen DeMarco

Read this while I was in Kerala at an extremely boring Ayurvedic treatment center. The premise is that the protagonist's  mother, father, and brother die in a car accident leaving her with no immediate family. She quits her job, stops bathing, etc etc - all normal responses, if you ask me. Then one day her aunt, uncle and best friend stage an intervention, trying to force her to go a therapist for depression. Instead, she chooses to flee into the Connecticut countryside, and meet a bunch of people who randomly take her in for a few days.

The majority of the book focuses on these few days in the countryside. She meets and falls for a man who ends up being her host's long lost lover of sorts, but he ends up being engaged to someone else so they both lose out anyway. A short, unattractive man hits on her relentlessly despite her rebuffs. And her host's grandmother is diagnosed with a terminal disease.

Ultimately, she reveals the death of her family to her host, and she goes back to her home in New York to face the people she ran away from. I believe she pulls herself together and soon after that the terminally ill grandmother passes away. And the long lost lover breaks off his engagement and sends her a vague postcard.

The whole thing is written in a very odd way and I did not enjoy it. I can't even remember any of the characters' names and I read it two months ago. It's not a bad book, but the plot was very strange and the style was even stranger.

There Is No Dog - Meg Rosoff

Just finished reading this. I'm in Kerala, where there's basically nothing to do, so I read the entire thing in a day.

It was very odd.

The book jacket gives away the plot almost completely:

"What if God were a teenaged boy? 

In the beginning, Bob created the heavens and the earth and the beasts of the field and the creatures of the sea, and twenty-five million other species (including lots of cute girls). But mostly he prefers eating junk food and leaving his dirty clothes in a heap at the side of his bed. 

Every time he falls in love, Earth erupts in natural disasters, and it's usually Bob's beleaguered assistant, Mr. B., who is left cleaning up the mess. So humankind is going to be very sorry indeed that Bob ever ran into a beautiful, completely irresistible girl called Lucy . . ."

I've read a couple of Rosoff's books before and been absolutely blown away by her genius, which is the primary reason I bought this book.

Also there was a limited selection at the used bookstore I stopped at on the way to Kerala.

I'm not disappointed with it, exactly. Bob is a typical teenage boy - selfish, lazy, obsessed with getting laid. And Lucy is described as no less than perfect - full figured, delicate features, fiercely upbeat (don't we all wish we were Lucy?). Bob does, indeed, fall in love with Lucy, and it does result in disaster for Earth. Not that he cares at all. It is a Mr. B who is the real caretaker of Earth, the one who deals with diseases and landslides and rape. Mr. B is Bob's keeper of sorts - he is described as "more than a personal assistant, less than a father figure—a fixer, perhaps, facilitator, amanuensis.*" Other characters include Mona, Bob's mother who is even more selfish and irresponsible than he is, somehow, and Estelle, a goddess who actually has her morals in order. Can't help liking her. And my favorite is Eck - Bob's pet, a penguiny creature with a long nose and soft gray fur, who can't talk but seems to understand human speech perfectly and manages to communicate with gestures and noises. I need this kind of pet in my life. My rabbit just stares at me when I talk to her. Which isn't often, or anything.

I really loved how Rosoff described humans and the earth. She struck the perfect balance between viewing human catastrophe as a pain, simply something to be dealt with by someone else (Bob's view) and the knowledge that there are an infinite number of petitions, of prayers that will go unanswered. Bob's view is unfortunately often our own, I think, though few will admit it - how many of us have thrown away a letter from March of Dimes, or PETA, assuming someone else will donate that day? That it's not our responsibility? 

Without getting into hairy questions of religion and morality, Rosoff based the creation story loosely on the Bible, poking fun at it in the most lighthearted of ways - " "All of this was created in just six days. Six days! No wonder Earth is such a mess." Hahaha. There's probably some truth in that. And to top it off humans are created in God's image - Bob's in this case. "Complete with all [his] tragic flaws and an infinite chocolate box selection of tragic outcomes." 

Compared with her other books, I had two main qualms with this one. One, I couldn't identify a strong plotline. Many things seemed to be happening in parallel - Eck was gambled away to be eaten, Bob scheming to have sex with Lucy, Estelle looking for a job. In the end when all the subplots converged I couldn't help feeling like the whole book came together too tidily. Too contrived. Of course all stories are contrived to some extent, I suppose - but in this case it read almost like Rosoff had started writing with no end in mind and when the manuscript reached novel length she decided to tie everything together quickly with some flimsy cotton thread. Not even kite string.

The second qualm was that there was no sense of urgency, something which has lent Rosoff's other books that I-can't-put-this-down quality. I did in fact put this book down many times for no specific reason. Although she had every kind of conceivable disaster to choose from - literally - the book sidled along with no real force. You would think countries flooding and people dying and whales on the verge of extinction would harry you a bit, but it really didn't. I found myself responding to the whole situation much like Bob would be expected too. Possibly because the book approached earthly problems with a bit of a resigned air. Which is maybe the most brilliant insight - we are beyond salvation at this point and just waiting for a meteor to destroy us all.

*which means, by the way, one employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript

Sources:

http://www.shmoop.com/there-is-no-dog/mr-b.html

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amanuensis

http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/books/there-is-no-dog/

Indigo - Alice Hoffman

This book was really terrible. It read like a children's book, but it was in the adult section at my library. It was written too vaguely for a child to understand, so I suppose it was meant for adults, but oh man. Never read this. If you do, it will only take about ten minutes because it's very short, but you can never. Get. That. Time. Back.


Indigo is about two orphan boys who have a curious affinity for all things ocean-related. They're adopted, ironically, by a couple who lives in a landlocked town terrified of water. One day the boys decide to run away to the ocean with their friend Martha, but the town floods the day they leave, wreaking havoc on everything and eventually forcing them to go back home because Martha breaks her arm. The two boys then "save" the town by diving underwater and destroying the wall that is holding the water in. In doing so, they miraculously remember that their mother is a mermaid. Their adopted parents decide to move to the ocean, accepting that it is a part of who the boys are. And Martha's father, who has been seeing a heinous woman named Hildy since his wife died, decides to leave her and he goes from clinically depressed to sunshine and daisies happy in a matter of minutes.

This might seem an unnecessarily harsh summary, but the book is written in a very similar fashion. The true tragedy is that the story has all the potential to be awesome. If Hoffman had made this a novel or even a literary short story, she could have given it a depth and subtlety it decidedly lacks.

It is books like this that give me hope that my work will one day be published. The bar is obviously set very low.

The Trylle Trilogy - Amanda Hocking

You know when you read a noun in a book and you pronounce it a certain way, and then at the very end you realize you've been saying it wrong all along? That's what happened to me with the Trylle Trilogy. For some reason, I thought it should be pronounced "Try-elle," as if there was an extra 'e' in there. At the end of the book, I found a glossary that informed me in no uncertain terms that Trylle is pronounced "trill." Oops.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

I absolutely loved the books. So much so that I finished all three in about three days. The main plot line is that Wendy, the protagonist and narrator, is a troll changeling placed with a human family at birth. Now I know what you're thinking - but trolls turn out to be humans 2.0 - more beautiful than a normal human with some kind of superpower, be it control over the elements, telekinesis, psychokinesis, you name it. When Wendy is seventeen, she is taken back to her real family, where she learns that she is Princess and future Queen of the Trylle people. Throughout the three books, she falls in love with a "tracker," basically an indentured servant lowest on the social ladder, then the Prince of the Vittra (another troll tribe whose King wants to kill Wendy and take over the Trylle kingdom), loses her mother, and kills her father. Sorry if I just ruined it for you.

The Trylle Trilogy is your quintessential fantasy fairy tale set amidst unsuspecting normal humans. The characters are hilarious and lovable, the world Hocking paints gorgeous and appealing. The men are beautiful. Need I say more? When I put down the last book I was almost depressed. Thank god Hocking has more books I can read.

Each book includes a short bonus story, which is kind of exciting. It gives you some background and it's great to go back to when you're wringing your hands in despair because you've finished all the books.

Hocking has self published a few books, which I think is terrifically cool, given how popular she's become. Just saying.

Sundown, Yellow Moon - Larry Watson

I started reading this because I took a few classes with the author when I was in school and he is AMAZING. Dr. Watson is an incredibly insightful man. My own writing improved so much during my time learning from him that I decided to read all of his books.

Sundown, Yellow Moon is very interesting so far. I don't know what to make of it. The protagonist's best friend's father murders a senator and then commits suicide and noone really knows why. This novel is the after story: the protagonist, a writer, reflects on the events of that day nearly forty years later, trying to piece together what  happened, and why, and the aftermath of the tragedy. A review in Esquire compares it to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I haven't read fully, so I can't comment, but the review does make me want to read more Dostoevsky, if that's any indication of how I feel about this novel. It's ridiculously well-written, but it's a different style than what I am used to reading. I'm going to make a big assumption and say that's because Dr. Watson is much older than I am. His writing, and his plot, reflect an America that I have never experienced. I'm about halfway through, and I have a good feeling about this.

Sundown, Yellow Moon reminds me of The Body of Christopher Creed a little bit. In the latter, a boy named Christopher Creed (surprise, surprise) mysteriously disappears and noone knows what to make of it. Throughout the book, the narrator explores different reasons for his disappearance, and ultimately it comes to haunt him constantly. I don't remember what happens at the end - I'm going to have to read it again at some point.

Books to Read

Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
Some Great Thing - Colin McAdam
A Beautiful Truth - Colin McAdam
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Torrents of Spring - Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
Across the River and into the Trees - Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Islands in the Stream  - Ernest Hemingway
The Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway
Anna Karenina
Lolita
Basically everything by Marian Keyes