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1101875046
| 9781101875049
| 1101875046
| 3.56
| 70,221
| Jun 02, 2015
| Jun 02, 2015
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really liked it
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I almost wanted to shelve this book under "historic fiction" because, technically, it qualifies: In the Unlikely Event is a fictionalized telling of r
I almost wanted to shelve this book under "historic fiction" because, technically, it qualifies: In the Unlikely Event is a fictionalized telling of real events that happened in 1951-52 in the small town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, when planes flying out of Newark Airport mysteriously experienced mechanical failures and crashed. But the plane crashes, ultimately, are only the backdrop for this story. Judy Blume is doing something very clever where she uses the plane crashes to draw the reader in, and they play a part in some of the emotional revelations of the characters, but this novel is character-driven, not plot-driven. And holy god, there are a lot of characters to follow. I would guess that it took me a good eighty pages before I felt like I had a good handle on who everyone was, and even then, I would have to flip back and remind myself how everyone was related. The cast of characters isn't quite Russian-novel-level sprawling, but it's pretty close. The closest thing we have to a protagonist is Miri Ammerman, who's fifteen during the time of the plane crashes, and we also see a few scenes of her as an adult, returning to her hometown in 1987. Then we have Miri's mother, her uncle, her grandma, her grandma's boyfriend, Miri's best friend, her dad, her mom, Miri's boyfriend, his brother, his brother's girlfriend...like I said, there are a lot of characters to keep track of. And on top of that, Judy Blume gives every character their own POV sections, and doesn't confine them to a chapter each - we get multiple POV switches in every chapter. In light of this, it makes sense that this is, at its core, just a story of a community of people reacting to what happens around them. One of the best aspects of this book is seeing how the actions and decisions of one person can have a massive ripple affect that spreads to every other character in the story, and changes the trajectory of their own plots. And the plane crashes are very, very well done - legitimately terrifying, and Blume is able to portray the terror and the carnage in an accurate, emotional way that never feels gratuitous or done merely for shock value. I knew going into this book that it was based on actual events; what I didn't know until I got to the author's note at the end was that Judy Blume actually grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and that the plane crashes happened when she was an adolescent. I always like reading those books that authors have struggled for years to find a way to tell, and it's obvious that the plane crashes have never been far from Judy Blume's mind. I'm glad that she finally found a way to tell the story of those events and how they felt, and I think the way she chose to tell it worked out well. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 2017
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not set
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Nov 14, 2017
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Hardcover
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1594747598
| 9781594747595
| 1594747598
| 3.44
| 3,048
| Jun 07, 2016
| Jun 07, 2016
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liked it
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"College grad Bailey Chen has all of the usual new-adult demons: no cash, no job offers, and a rocky relationship with Zane, the only friend still aro
"College grad Bailey Chen has all of the usual new-adult demons: no cash, no job offers, and a rocky relationship with Zane, the only friend still around when she moves back home. But her demons become a lot more literal when Zane introduces Bailey to his cadre of monster-fighting bartenders." I appreciate that the description for this novel doesn't pull any punches about how straight-up silly the premise is, and doesn't try to dress it up as something more complex than it is: this is a book about bartenders who fight demons, aided by mixing cocktails with magic liquors that give them enhanced abilities. If that's not your jam, you can move on. Krueger's heroine is Bailey Chen, who, with no other job prospects, gets hired as a barback in a Chicago bar run by her friend's uncle. One night after work, Bailey finds an unlocked cabinet of mysterious liquors and mixes herself what she assumes is an ordinary screwdriver. Walking home, she is attacked by a demon called a tremens, and fights it off because the drink she mixed gave her temporary super-strength (the magical cocktails' powers always last an hour, because it takes one hour to metabolize the alcohol in one drink - very clever, Krueger). Then Bailey's friend Zane tells her the truth: he's part of an ancient and secret society of bartenders who use mixology to help them fight demonic forces. Bailey convinces Zane to let her join up, and soon she's learning to use magical liquor to fight evil. Obviously, this is a fantastically dumb concept for a fantasy story (if only for its central concept, that alcohol enhances your abilities instead of hindering them, but I guess that's part of the joke), but that shouldn't turn you off reading it. After all, you can start with an incredibly dumb premise and make it into something great - I call it the Pacific Rim paradox. And overall, Krueger's book is fun, demon-fighting, magic-making good time. We got gruff blind mentors, awkward romantic tension, wisecracking sidekicks, scheming villains...often, the book reads like a fun episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural. I liked a lot about this book, honestly. Krueger sprinkles the book with chapters from a fictional guide to magical bartending, and they're a good mix of real cocktail information and fun made-up history. (I want an entire book about Hortense LaRue, the French amateur bartender who amazed the competitors at the first National Symposium of the Cupbears Court in 1852 by being the first person to add an orange peel to an old fashioned) The fight scenes are coherent and exciting, and the tremens are well-drawn and scary. The supporting characters, while sometimes grating (Paul Krueger's dialogue isn't nearly as funny as he thinks it is), were similarly fleshed-out and entertaining. It's not perfect, though. There's a running subplot dealing with Bailey's romantic past with Zane, and it falls flat at every opportunity because the two characters have, like, negative chemistry. I didn't even really buy them as friends, much less two people who have apparently been romantically pining for each other for years. The two of them keep dancing around a huge fight they had years ago that was a huge turning point for their friendship, but by the time we finally learn what happened in The Fight, it lacks weight and importance. Also Zane has a girlfriend for most of the book, a girl named Mona, and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to dislike her, because other women are competition, right ladies? The problem is that Mona is so goddamn cool, and I didn't want her to break up with Zane so Bailey could date him - I wanted Mona to break up with Zane because he's not good enough for her. Mona is a goddamn demon-fighting queen, and also she reminded me of Rosa Diaz on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And even though the fight scenes are good, there's a weird mental disconnect when it comes to the violence involved in slaying demons. The ways that Bailey kills demons are almost disturbingly graphic (in one scene, she kills a tremens by psychically forcing a chunk of concrete down its throat, choking it to death), but she doesn't seem affected by it at all. She's afraid of the tremens the first time she sees them; after that, she brutally kills them with an ease and detachment that rang very false for me. Remember, Bailey is brand new at this - slaying mythical monsters should not be this ho-hum for her yet! Speaking of moments that rang false - I should mention here that I'm a bartender in real life, and so I spent way too much time picking at Krueger's portrayal of the industry and looking for mistakes. I honestly can't tell if Krueger has worked as a bartender or not, because even though most of the bar scenes seemed accurate, there were a lot of little details that nagged at me. Like, in one scene Bailey is working at the bar, and it mentions that customers are ordering "drinks that Bailey barely knew how to make - shooters, twisters, Jack and Cokes..." Uh, what? She doesn't know how to make a Jack and Coke? The drink where the ingredients are literally in the name? (also apparently the one supreme all-powerful magical cocktail is...the Long Island Iced Tea. Reader, I almost spat out my drink when I read that. Long Island Iced Teas are garbage drinks for garbage people, and most bartenders I know practically wince when they have to make one.) I have to take issue with one of the core aspects of the book, when Bailey learns how being a bartender/demon hunter works. So she's expected to work at the bar serving normal drinks to normal people, and then periodically mix herself a magic cocktail and go out into the neighborhood to patrol for tremens. How does she disappear from the bar, and what is assumed to be her only job? The demon-fighting bartenders excuse themselves on the pretense of taking a smoke break. That's it. You're expected to walk around the neighborhood, locate a tremens, slay the tremens, and go back to the bar, all in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. I don't smoke (despite what my profile picture may suggest to people who don't know it's from a movie), but I've worked with enough people who do, and I can tell you that (at least in the service industry) a smoke break is fifteen minutes, max. I simply do not believe that a bartender in this universe can do everything that patrol involves, all in the space of a smoke break. And honestly, I think Krueger missed an opportunity here. What if it was the barbacks who went demon hunting, I remember thinking to myself? Wouldn't that make so much more sense? The bartender mixes the magic cocktail and gives it to the barback, and they go out slaying demons while the bartender stays behind and takes care of customers. It's perfect, because a) customers don't really notice barbacks, so they wouldn't think it was weird when one disappeared for a long period of time, and b) it fits in with the idea of barbacks being the unobtrusive but vital backup to the bartenders. I think it would have been really cool to explore that relationship in the context of demon-fighting-bartenders (similar to how Krueger establishes that coffee has healing properties, making bartenders and baristas natural allies), but oh well. Maybe in a sequel. (Note: the copy I have is an ARC that was given to me by a fellow reader, so quoted passages may be different in the final published version) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2017
|
Nov 03, 2017
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
081299860X
| 9780812998603
| 081299860X
| 3.50
| 227,714
| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
|
really liked it
|
"So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could l
"So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes." In the summer of 1968, Evie Boyd is fourteen years old, and she's lost. Her parents are recently divorced (her father remarried to the woman he was having an affair with, and her mother dating a series of gross and vaguely creepy potential stepfathers), she's in the throes of puberty with no idea how to handle it, and teen drama has alienated her from all her friends. Evie, in short, is the prime target for a cult of mysterious and charismatic free-spirited girls, who live at a ranch in rural California under the control of a man named Russell. Evie sees "the girls" in the park one day, and is immediately obsessed with them. In no time at all, Evie is spending most of her time at "the ranch" and falling deeper and deeper under the spell of Russell and his followers. The Girls is, of course, based on the real-life cult of Charles Manson and the eventual murders of seven people, carried out by Manson's female followers. If you're not familiar with the story, you should definitely take a quick break from this review to read up on the murders, and then take another break to fall down a thirty minute Wikipedia black hole and read about cults and serial murders because holy shit, guys. This book is an attempt to explore how a teenage girl could get so sucked into a cult like this, with Evie as our outsider trying to get into the inner circle. Russell, the Manson stand-in, actually plays a very small part in the story itself, and is usually operating just offscreen. His philosophies and his orders are delivered through Suzanne, one of his most loyal followers and the person Evie really joins the cult for. Russell, ultimately, is a secondary character - this book, like its title suggests, focuses almost entirely on the girls who fell into Russell's trap, and what they did. Cline, to her credit and my relief, never tries to present Russell as anything other than a predatory creep. He is never idealized, never romanticized, and Cline doesn't attempt to justify any of his actions. We know from the moment Evie first meets Russell that he is emphatically bad news, and in his first scene alone with Evie, Cline does everything except break from the narrative completely to write "hey, teen girls? This behavior that we're seeing is called grooming, and it's something that predatory older men do when they want to assault young girls. If someone does this to you, run the other way and do not stop." Russell, ultimately, doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of the book, because this is actually a twisted love story between two teenage girls. The real draw of this book is the growing tension for the reader as Cline hints at what's going to happen (and what readers know is going to happen, since they're familiar with the Manson family), and watching grown-up Evie reflect on this period of her life and try to understand how she could have willfully ignored all the danger and warning signs. In fact, there are only two things I didn't really enjoy about this book. Although I liked that the book is presented from middle-aged Evie's perspective, and I think it's important that we see scenes of her as an older woman, the parts taking place in modern day ultimately don't amount to much. There isn't much to take away from them, except the knowledge that, yep, it still really sucks to be a teenage girl. I liked seeing Evie as an adult and examining how her time with the cult influenced how she reacts to the world, but I think there could have been a more interesting way to show this. Also, as lots of other reviewers have pointed out, Cline kind of chickens out and doesn't let Evie be a participant in the actual murders. Now, there was a teenage girl who witnessed the Manson murders but didn't actually kill anyone, but Cline seems afraid to let her heroine get that close to the crime. Instead, (view spoiler)[Evie gets invited along with the others, but en route to the scene of the crime, Suzanne kicks her out of the car for no real reason other than Emma Cline not wanting Evie to be even a little bit tainted by the other characters' eventual actions. (hide spoiler)] Cline spends some of the modern-day parts teasing us about the state of Evie's mind, and her possible role in the murders, but ultimately it doesn't amount to much, and any moral ambiguity Evie might have had is ignored. Still, despite that, this was still a fascinating, tense exploration of teenage girl group-think, creepy men being creeps, and the question of where guilt and responsibility should be placed, and on whom. And of course, the concept that there's no cult quite so scary as the the cult of teenage girls. "I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to 'make it home safe.'" ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Sep 2017
|
Oct 22, 2017
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0385540353
| 9780385540353
| 0385540353
| 3.40
| 72,172
| May 2013
| Sep 29, 2015
|
it was ok
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This was one of those rare Atwood misfires* for me - I didn't hate it, but I definitely wouldn't rank it among my favorites. I ended this book without This was one of those rare Atwood misfires* for me - I didn't hate it, but I definitely wouldn't rank it among my favorites. I ended this book without any strong feelings about anything that happens, and I think that's because the story constantly felt like it was building to something much bigger, but never delivered. I wanted more development, and a better payoff, to the ideas that Atwood explores here. The worldbuilding, as usual, is one of the best parts of Atwood speculative fiction, but unlike her other sci-fi novels, she didn't seem willing to really push her concepts to their farthest possible point. Honestly, a lot of the stuff in this book seems like it would have functioned best as subplots, or even brief mentions, in her MaddAddam trilogy. *one of these misfires includes Alias Grace, which I think I need to revisit thanks to the Netflix version coming out soon - by all accounts, it's amazing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2016
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Oct 04, 2017
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Hardcover
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006232005X
| 9780062320056
| 006232005X
| 4.18
| 28,118
| Jul 15, 2014
| Jul 15, 2014
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it was ok
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"Why did you steal a Van Gogh and sell a copy to an Arab named Sam?" "Because I'm looking for a Caravaggio." "For whom?" "The Italians." "Why is an Isreal "Why did you steal a Van Gogh and sell a copy to an Arab named Sam?" "Because I'm looking for a Caravaggio." "For whom?" "The Italians." "Why is an Isreali intelligence officer looking for a painting for the Italians?" "Because he finds it hard to tell people 'no.'" So far the only major drawback of doing most of my reading via audiobooks is that I have no easy way of marking quotes to use later in my reviews, which is something I usually try to include. I listened to The Heist during my commute to work, and I want everyone to appreciate the fact that I had to rewind the above passage at least five times so I could write down the conversation on the notes app on my phone. The reason I went to so much trouble to write down this specific exchange was because it perfectly sets you up for this complex, convoluted plot, and there was no way I couldn't include it in the review. Having never read any of Daniel Silva's thrillers, I can't say if his other books require so many steps just to get to the main conflict. But holy shit, this one's a doozy. So the book starts with art dealer Julien Isherwood being called to a mansion on Lake Como, where he's supposed to pick up a painting for a colleague. Instead, he arrives to find the painting gone, and the owner of the house murdered. Isherwood calls in his friend Gabriel Allon, an art restorer and Isreali intelligence agent, to investigate the murder and clear his name. Allon soon discovers that the dead man was a former British spy who had been trading stolen artwork, and that one of those stolen pieces, now missing, is Caravaggio's famous lost Nativity painting. To recover the painting, Allon has to borrow a Van Gogh, make a forged copy, and trade that version for the Caravaggio. Oh, and the money trail for the stolen artwork leads to a bank in Germany that holds the fortune of a Middle Eastern dictator. Getting the Caravaggio back will require spying on, and stealing from, one of the most dangerous political families in the world. Like, that's a lot, right? Around the time the dictator was thrown into the mix (probably two-thirds of the way into the story), I was already tired of keeping track of the various spy shit going on, and the last thing I needed was for Silva to add yet another complication to the mix. And what a complication it is. I had been enjoying the book up until then, because there was a lot of good stuff about art theft and forgery, and Allon is a great protagonist - he won me over early in the book when he's going to the Lake Como house to investigate the murder scene, and when the cop on duty tells Allon that he has one hour, and that he'll be following Allon around the house, Allon snaps "I'll take as long as I want, and you'll wait outside." (Quote is not exact, because audiobook.) Also I mentally cast Oscar Isaac as Allon, which certainly didn't hurt. I was on board for all the art forgery stuff and tracking the thieves, but then we introduce the dictator, and Silva takes us on a chapter-long digression to explain the history of the dictator's rule. And before I knew it, my fun art heist caper was gone, and had been replaced by a dreary political thriller. Not that there's anything wrong with those kind of books, but it definitely wasn't what I signed up for, and I finished the book feeling almost like I had been the victim of a bait-and-switch. The writing is good, the plot is complex and fast-paced, and all the characters that Allon works with over the course of his assignment were interesting and well-drawn (also I could read an entire book about Allon's Italian spy wife, Chiara), but ultimately, the change from art heist to political spy thriller was too jarring, and I could never adjust. Silva's books were recommended to me by someone who has the same taste in detective novels as I do, and I don't want to discount his work based just on this one book. I'd definitely be willing to give Gabriel Allon and Silva another chance in the future; this one just wasn't quite what I was expecting. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 2017
|
Oct 01, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1583485090
| 9781583485095
| 1583485090
| 3.83
| 141,310
| Sep 1918
| 1995
|
liked it
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**spoiler alert** Like The Great Gatsby, I somehow avoided having to read this in high school, although I remember a lot of my friends reading Cather'
**spoiler alert** Like The Great Gatsby, I somehow avoided having to read this in high school, although I remember a lot of my friends reading Cather's book for Honors English while I was suffering through Summer of My German Soldier in regular people English. (Turns out, even if you're a voracious teenage reader, they still don't let you take honors classes if you spend your entire high school career constantly being one bad quiz away from straight-up flunking whatever math class you're in at the time) I don't remember my friends having much to say about My Antonia specifically, but I remember that they...didn't love it. Which isn't surprising, honestly. Cather's book is, based just on the plot description, a deeply dull story with barely any actual plot: Jim Burton looks back on his childhood in frontier America, and specifically his lifelong friendship with a Czech immigrant named Antonia. There are little bits of drama here and there, like when two Russian immigrants share the truly horrifying reason they had to leave their home country, and Antonia lives a life of quiet, constant struggle and suffering that Jim either doesn't feel the need to point out, or just doesn't notice. It's the writing that saves the book, and is the reason this is considered such a classic. Cather's prose gives us perfect descriptions of the prairie setting, and she's able to expertly use just a handful of well-chosen words to fully illustrate her characters. Antonia will stay with you long after you finish the book. So it's a real shame that the subject of the book doesn't get to tell her own story in her own words. I'm sure there's a very good reason that Cather makes Jim her narrator, and has him show the reader Antonia through his eyes (did Cather suspect that it would be hard for a woman to sell a book where a woman tells us about her own life? Ugh, probably), but this also means that Antonia can only ever exist to us as Jim saw her. At least Jim's not a bad narrator, overall. For the majority of the book I was enjoying myself, if only for the nice Little House on the Prairie nostalgia, but the story starts to nosedive around the time that Jim becomes an adolescent. Suddenly his complete inability to notice the abuse that Antonia suffers is more of a problem, as he's now old enough to be aware of these things. (Haha Jim, remember that time you found out that Antonia's employer had been planning to sneak into her room and rape her? Probably not, because no one ever talked about it after that scene) Jim starts behaving like a self-centered little shit - ie, a teenager - and it's not fun to watch Antonia's life through his eyes anymore. There's a lot of talk about the dances that are happening in town, and Jim starts going around with girls while internally griping about Antonia hanging out with the wrong boy. The worst part comes towards the end, when Jim has been away at college (and fucking around with Lena Lingard, who is both awesome and way too good for Jim), and then comes home and tells Antonia that he loves her. And then he leaves again, and doesn't come back for twenty years. Our hero really goes the extra mile to explain this to his readers, using a whopping two words to justify why he confessed his feelings to this poor girl and then didn't see her for two decades: "Life intervened." It is at this point that My Antonia turns into Lamentations of a Fuckboy by Jim Burton. He eventually learns that while he was away, Antonia got engaged to some dude who then abandoned her, leaving her pregnant and unmarried. Jim is "disappointed" in Antonia. Because Jim sucks. But she gets her life together, because Antonia is awesome, and when Jim finally comes back for a visit (he puts it off for a long time, because "I did not want to find her aged and broken"), she has a loving husband, a successful farm, and a ton of kids who adore her. All we know about adult Jim is that he's married, and the original narrator of the book doesn't like his wife. I really wish I'd gotten to read this book from Antonia's point of view. This is the story of a woman who immigrated to the United States as a child, speaking barely any English, and had to figure out how to survive with her family on the unforgiving frontier. Her father killed himself when she was young (or was maybe murdered? There's a little bit of suspicion surrounded the neighbor, and then it's dropped entirely), and she suffers abuse at the hands of her brother, her employer, and then her fiance. She has a child out of wedlock, but never tries to hide it, and bravely continues to live in her hometown with her child, ignoring the judgement and the rumors. Eventually she meets and marries a good man, who doesn't care that she already has a child, and she finally gets her farm and her family, and her happy ending. I wanted Antonia to tell me her story, not have it filtered through the perspective of her friend. And frankly, y'all, it pisses me off that this is called My Antonia. It reminds me, of all things, of an exchange from one of the Bond movies. Bond is bantering with Moneypenny and says, "Ah, Moneypenny, what would I do without you?" To which she replies, "Oh James. You've never had me." Honestly. It's like if Drake wrote a song called "My Rihanna." (no I will not apologize for that metaphor. Suck it, Honors English!) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2017
|
Sep 13, 2017
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1484709683
| 9781484709689
| 1484709683
| 4.37
| 31,971
| Sep 15, 2015
| Sep 15, 2015
|
liked it
|
Looking back at my reviews for the first two books in the Lockwood & Co series, I learn that apparently the second book (The Whispering Skull) ended o
Looking back at my reviews for the first two books in the Lockwood & Co series, I learn that apparently the second book (The Whispering Skull) ended on a massive cliffhanger. But since there was so much time between me finishing the second book and starting the third, I completely forgot what the cliffhanger even was. If it got resolved in any satisfying manner in the beginning of The Hollow Boy, I didn't notice. So that's probably not a great sign. We're at the third installation of what is at least a four-book series, and Jonathan Stroud is finally starting to deviate just a little bit from his established formula. The book still opens with a minor ghost-fighting mission that won't impact the plot in any way, and we still have a big blow-out ghost hunting scene in an appropriately dramatic setting, with the requisite "Wait! We had it wrong the whole time!" realization. But Stroud appears to be laying the groundwork for something bigger in a later book, teasing us with more information about the "Orpheus Society", hinting that one of the bigger ghost-hunting agencies is up to something nefarious, and also further developing Lucy's unusually strong psychic abilities. Even though this book didn't really blow me away, I'm still going to track down the next one in the series, if only to see how Stroud continues to develop this story. Honestly, this book isn't bad, overall. There are some great action sequences (including a haunted house with a giant open stairwell that extends from the basement all the way to the attic, and a high-stakes chase scene at a parade - this series is just begging for a film adaptation, and I think it could also make a decent TV series), the ghosts and hauntings remain genuinely scary, and the dialogue is still clever and snarky as hell. But I think it could have been so much better. Part of the book involves Lucy exploring and developing her ability to talk to ghosts, often by putting her own team at risk and having to learn lessons about keeping her friends safe despite her curiosity etc. I wanted Stroud to take this a little farther - have Lucy become more isolated and withdrawn, and explore how the Lockwood team would deal with one of their members going off the rails a little bit. There are hints here and there that Lucy is starting to lose sight of what's important, and also that Lockwood may not have the team's best interests in mind, but Stroud is either waiting for later books to develop those ideas, or he just couldn't be bothered. The time/setting is still off-putting - everything feels really steampunk-y, to the point where I had to keep reminding myself that it was taking place in modern day. Stroud even gives us a definitive time period, when he has a character establish that the Victorian era was "over a century ago." Even with this indisputable fact, I remain incapable of picturing any of this happening anywhere other than Victorian or maybe pre-WWI England. Part of this is the little details - Lucy uses the word "chambermaid" once, and also mentions that a character is wearing "petticoats", and nobody ever uses a cellphone or computer. But it's also easy to picture the story happening in some kind of steampunk universe, because the world Stroud has built is entirely devoid of pop culture for our fifteen-year-old heroes to reference. I'm not saying that you have to throw out snarky Ghostbusters jokes every few pages, Stroud, but at least give me something? What kind of music do Lucy and her friends listen to? Are there Reddit pages for ghost-hunting kids? What shows are they watching? Another big issue: we get a new addition to the Lockwood & Co team when they hire an assistant to help with cases. Her name is Holly, and if you guessed that Lucy is immediately suspicious and jealous of her, you unfortunately guessed right. Lucy, to put it bluntly, is a total asshole in this book. She's constantly rude and dismissive to Holly, who is never anything but nice to her, and even Lucy's narration couldn't make me see the feud as anything but one-sided. The whole thing is handled very badly for two reasons: first, I'm not saying that Lucy and Holly had to be besties from the moment they met, but "badass heroine who isn't like other girls" is a trope that needed to die twenty years ago, and I'm so mad at Stroud for using it. Lucy Carlisle has definitely uttered the phrase "I just get along better with guys, girls have so much drama" at some point in her life, and I hate her for it. The second reason the Holly plotline misfires is because Stroud's idea of showing us Lucy's dislike is to have her internally gripe, constantly, about how Holly sucks so much because she's so tidy and helpful and well-dressed and her skin is so nice and her hair always looks great and it's just like...Lucy. Babe. You aren't jealous of Holly, you have a crush on her. Sadly, Stroud doesn't even consider this possibility, choosing instead to feebly develop Lucy's dumb crush on Lockwood instead. Yawn. Give me ghost-hunting girlfriends who squabble about dirty socks left on the floor or give me nothing, Stroud! Also Stroud pulls the same trick he pulled in The Whispering Skull where he seems to kill a character off, prompting me to think "This is upsetting, but it's also a bold storytelling move and I'll be interested to see how the series continues without this character" only to reveal that nope, they didn't die after all! And then I get disappointed because a character didn't die, which is always a weird feeling. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2017
|
Aug 27, 2017
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0140246533
| 9780140246537
| 0140246533
| 4.01
| 3,205
| 1994
| 1995
|
really liked it
|
"In families there's always one person - almost always a woman - who is designated to be the mad one. In my circle I was the one elected, and since we
"In families there's always one person - almost always a woman - who is designated to be the mad one. In my circle I was the one elected, and since we lived our lives on the pages of the tabloid press, I became famous for it." I'm implementing a new personal rule: from now on, no more memoirs by white dude rockers (my backlog of to-write reviews includes the Moltey Cru memoir and hooooo boy, that one's gonna be a doozy). From now on, we only read rock n' roll memoirs written by the women who slept with these dudes. And Patti Smith. I'll admit freely that before I read this, I had no idea that Marianne Faithfull was a successful musician in her own right before she fell in with the Rolling Stones crowd, and became most famous as the on-and-off-again girlfriend of Mick Jagger. Which just goes to show, really, how the women who surround famous men are pushed to the side of the narrative, and only ever described in relation to the famous dudes they used to fuck. Marianne Faithfull, in telling her story in her own words, gets to give her own side of events (especially the infamous Redlands drug raid and trial, which Faithfull - fascinatingly - frames as the circumstances where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards developed their rock star personas) and show the readers that she was doing a lot more than just sleeping with a bunch of famous dudes. I mean, she also sleeps with a lot of famous dudes, but can you blame her? She fucked 1960's-era Keith Richards and turned down Bob Dylan, for Christ's sake! The woman deserves a statue! As is the norm with memoirs from this era, there are a lot of drugs. But Faithfull's memoir is in a class by itself, because Faithfull wasn't just a drug user, she was (by her own admission) a full-on junkie. Reading about drug addiction in books like Life by Keith Richards or I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell, there's something almost...performative about the way these men talk about their drug use. It sometimes reads like they're trying to prove something, to live up to their rock star image. Faithfull's memoir is unique because of how far she really fell into drug addiction, and her descriptions of drug use are some of the most interesting I've read. She also goes into the time she overdosed and went into a coma and had a near-death experience where she had an entire conversation with recently-deceased Brian Jones. It might be total bullshit, but it's fascinating. Part of what's fun about this memoir is getting to watch the crazy rollercoaster that was Faithfull's life - she careens from child of aristocrats, to pop star, to globe-trotting rock n' roll girlfriend, to housewife, to junkie, to homeless junkie, to film and stage actress...one wonders why anyone would ever bother reading a memoir by Mick Jagger or Keith Richards. I mean, all they ever did was play in a band. Marianne Faithfull has lived at least ten different lives, and what's possibly even more impressive (especially considering her near-death experiences and heroin addiction), she's still alive. There is something very powerful inside Marianne Faithfull that has enabled her to survive her own life, and the best part of the memoir is seeing her put aside her Manic Pixie Dream Girl Groupie persona and tell us about her life with unblinking, blunt honesty. I criticized the groupie memoir I'm With the Band by Pamela des Barres for its complete acceptance and forgiveness of the garbage men in her life. Des Barres's book was 100% breezy tolerance of being used and abused by various men, all for the privilege of surrounding herself with famous people. I wanted anger, and des Barres either didn't have it, or recognized that publicly airing her dirty laundry with most of the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame wasn't the smartest long-term plan. Faithfull isn't angry, exactly, but she's certainly not pulling her punches when it comes to calling out the toxic behavior of the men in her life. She's honest about her own failings, and she also sees others' motivations clearly. She describes running into Bob Dylan and happily telling him that she's off heroin, in treatment, and very happy. "He just acted as if I was lying. All I got from Bob was 'What? You? Nah!' His reaction was fairly typical of the rock contingent. They liked me better on heroin. I was much more subdued and manageable. It's very common with rock stars. They surround themselves with beautiful and often brilliant women whom they also find extremely threatening. One way out is for the women to get into drugs. This makes them compliant and easier to be with." Like I said - she's not angry at these men, exactly. But whereas Pamela des Barres was utterly uninterested in applying a critical lens to her past, Faithfull isn't afraid to question the behavior and motives of the people from her past. "It was a nightmare for Mick, the whole experience of me getting into smack. But he never did anything to stop me. The most he would say was, 'Don't you think you're doing a bit much of that stuff?' I would lie to him and tell him I was only chipping and he would believe me. Mick is the classic codependent. He gets his energy from being around drug addicts. Like Andy Warhol. He'll do drugs with addicts if he has to, to get their trust and affection. Like an undercover cop." Also, just because I couldn't resist quoting it, here's Faithfull on Keith Richards (who, it's important to note, Faithfull had a massive crush on before she agreed to start dating Mick instead): "I run into Keith a lot at airports lately. He's no longer the Byronic lad I once knew. More a Shakespearean character, a combination of Prince Hal and Falstaff. It's always very reassuring to see him. I feel, when I'm with him, as if we are the last remaining compatriots of a long-vanished kingdom who have not entirely renounced the old ways (although we do differ on the interpretation of the alchemical creed). ...Apropos of yet another casualty in our ranks, Keith volunteers, 'It's always baffling when somebody commits suicide. Not you, in Australia, of course, yours was a perfectly valid reason.' Thanks, Bud." Dear Pamela des Barres even makes a brief appearance in the book. It was pretty funny to read about her self-described passionate affair with Mick Jagger in her own memoir, and then read Marianne Faithfull's version: "Mick had been spending a lot of time in Los Angeles, where bevies of wahinis fawned over him and catered to his wildest fantasy. These girls would do anything. He was the rock star par excellence - the point was to please him. So when he came back to Cheyne Walk he quite naturally wondered whether he couldn't get some of the same stuff at home! Unfortunately for Mick, I'd only recently read Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch, from which I had discovered that the whole point was the orgasm. Mine, not his. One night shortly after he got back, Mick suggested that I start using ice cream-flavored douches. I'm not stupid. I realized that this must be the sort of thing that American chicks did. But I didn't put two and two together till I read I'm With the Band (Pamela has a whole rap about strawberry- and peach-flavored douches)." If I had to sum up the entire thesis statement of this book, and Marianne Faithfull's casual approach to her own fame and colorful past (as well as her air of total, genuine coolness), it would be this passage: "Being with Madonna is a bit like being with royalty, you know. Actually, cocktails with Princess Margaret was a little bit more relaxed. It was fun, though. especially looking back on it. Anyway, all my friends' kids were terribly impressed." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2017
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Aug 07, 2017
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Paperback
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0316126047
| 9780316126045
| 0316126047
| 4.11
| 33,028
| Aug 25, 2015
| Aug 25, 2015
|
really liked it
|
Libba Bray is one of my favorite authors, but at the same time, I will not begrudge anyone who says that they don't like her books. Like, if you insul
Libba Bray is one of my favorite authors, but at the same time, I will not begrudge anyone who says that they don't like her books. Like, if you insult Margaret Atwood or Donna Tartt or Virginia Woolf to my face, then buddy you'd better pick a second because it's PISTOLS AT DAWN. But if someone told me that they gave Bray's Diviners series a try and hated it, I'd be like, "...okay, fair." The series, so far, is really really good - I don't want to undersell it. But there are a lot of things in these books that you might not love, and I went into more detail about that in my review for The Diviners by Libba Bray. Those issues ultimately didn't ruin the book for me, but I understand why they'd be dealbreakers to some people. But those people also wouldn't bother continuing with a series after disliking the first book, so I can assume we're all friends here. Let's dive in. Lair of Dreams picks up a few months after the events of the first book - after destroying the malevolent spirit Naughty John, Evie's psychic abilities have been made public, and more Diviners are starting to come out of the woodwork. Evie, in fact, has been given her own radio show (she's the Sweetheart Seer, because of course) where people give her objects to read. Meanwhile, an evil force is once again gathering power on the fringes of the story. The plot here is very Nightmare on Elm Street, 1927 - people have dreams where creepy, ghostly entities promise them everything they want, and chant "dream with me" over and over. (Have I mentioned that Libba Bray is really good at creepy? LIBBA BRAY IS REALLY GOOD AT CREEPY) If a person accepts the terms, they never wake up. The "sleeping sickness" starts in Chinatown, and is creeping throughout the city. The biggest advantage this book has over the previous installment is that it's much more of an ensemble story. Rather than focusing primarily on Evie, our former protagonist is sidelined for a lot of the story so Bray can focus on other Diviners, who are more closely connected to the current Big Bad. Some of them were briefly introduced in the first book (like the green-eyed Chinese girl), and others are surprises - turns out, Henry and Theta are Diviners too. With Sam and Memphis having powers, plus Jericho being half-machine, the only one who's still left out of the fun is poor, boring Mabel (don't worry, guys, I remain convinced that Mabel's got something really big in the chamber). Meanwhile, we also get more information about the mysterious Project Buffalo and how it ties in with Sam's missing mother, and two creepy government agents are hunting down Diviners to use their powers for...nothing good, we're quite sure. Also there's a man in a stovepipe hat, and crows, and that creepy blind homeless guy who hangs around Memphis is still Up To Something, so Bray is clearly already laying the groundwork for Book Three (I just wish that the foundations weren't so obvious). The shifting perspectives are good, because having a wide cast of characters means that we have more points of reference for the current mystery, and things get done quicker. It's also good/bad, because in the midst of all these diverse, interesting characters, Evie O'Neill suddenly becomes the most boring character in the bunch. Evie's pretty useless in this book, honestly, and you almost get the sense that Bray is getting tired of her, too - Evie's main role in this book is be an obnoxious party girl, to the point where Evie is stinking drunk during preparations to face off with the Big Bad, and the other characters are well and truly sick of her shit. Theta even threatens to punch Evie in the face, and I can't say I was mad at this. Why would I be interested in reading about Evie hosting a radio show when Henry is teaming up to go dreamwalking with the Chinese girl? Even poor boring Mabel gets to be a badass - her Communist parents instilled her with a healthy distrust of The Man, so Mabel is the only one who notices that the Feds have been trailing the group. Like I said - I firmly believe that Bray is just biding her time until she can release Mabel's full awesome, and when it happens, it'll blow your socks off. (in fact, I suspect that we have an Orange is the New Black situation here, where Evie is Piper Chapman, the pretty white girl brought in as an apparent protagonist when actually she's just there to draw viewers in, and then get them hooked on the stories of the more diverse and more interesting supporting characters) Evie's parts are also frustrating because, after spending so much time in the first book trying to convince us that Evie and Jericho would make a good couple, Bray appears to have changed her mind, and is now whole-heartedly shipping Evie and Sam. Like, I think this is a good instinct - Sam and Evie's banter has always been more interesting than bland Jericho (hell, even Jericho and Sam have a better dynamic and more chemistry than Jericho and Evie) - but the problem is that Bray overdoes it, and indulges in every overused fanfic trope in the book to convince the readers that Evie/Sam is a Thing now. I mean Jesus, they actually have to fake an engagement for entirely stupid reasons, and not tell their friends that it's fake for even stupider reasons! The only thing that's missing is a scene where Evie and Sam check into a hotel only to find that oh no, there's only one bed! The whole fake engagement plotline drags out way longer than it should, and it made me less interested in seeing Evie and Sam as a couple. But that annoying subplot aside, this book is good, creepy fun. The sleeping sickness is done so well and is so scary, but if I'm being honest, I probably should have guessed who the villain was way earlier than I did. But on the other hand, I wasn't even trying to figure out who was behind the sleeping sickness, because I was having too much fun in Gothic Flapper Ghost-hunting Funtime Land. (On that note, having protagonists other than Evie means that the amount of obnoxiously self-aware flapper slang is way lower that it was in the first book, and all I can say is thank Christ for that.) The greatest strength of this series is Bray's refusal to look at the 1920's with rose-colored glasses. Yeah, the Jazz Age had great music and fun fashion, but it also had the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the eugenics movement, and the Immigration Act. Bray doesn't shy away from any of these topics - in one of the book's more disturbing scenes, a black WWI veteran is hunted down and lynched - and isn't afraid to show her readers the racist, violent foundation that America is built on. Even Evie's flapper antics have progressed from harmless partying to warning signs of dangerous substance abuse, and Bray deserves a ton of credit for not falling into any nostalgia traps while depicting this period of American history. It's rocky, it's uneven, and there are plenty of things I could do without, but dammit, Libba Bray's Diviners series is good, scary, messy fun, and I can't wait to see where she takes the characters in Book Three. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 28, 2017
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Aug 2017
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Jul 28, 2017
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0802120644
| 9780802120649
| 0802120644
| 3.27
| 4,355
| Oct 03, 2012
| Oct 02, 2012
|
it was ok
|
I don't know why I keep doing this, I really don't. The sad truth is that I just don't like Donna Leon's books. It sucks to have to admit this, because I don't know why I keep doing this, I really don't. The sad truth is that I just don't like Donna Leon's books. It sucks to have to admit this, because I've read so many of her Guido Brunetti mystery series, plus one nonfiction book, and it feels like I wasted all of that time. In a way, I went into The Jewels of Paradise thinking that this would be the final, deciding factor that either convinced me to stick with Leon's books, or give them up as a lost cause. I thought that, because this is a standalone novel and not part of her detective series, maybe the things that bothered me about those books wouldn't be present here, and Leon would be able to branch out into something new. Sadly, this was not the case. As with all Leon mysteries, it's a good setup: Caterina Pellegrini is musicologist specializing in Baroque opera, and is called back to her native Venice for a research job. It's an unusual assignment, to say the least - two men have discovered a pair of trunks, left behind by a shared ancestor, that have not been opened for centuries. The ancestor died without children, and the trunks are full of his personal papers, written in multiple languages. Caterina has two jobs: go through the documents and figure out if any of them are valuable (the ancestor, we learn, was the Baroque composer Antonio Stefani), and read his personal papers to see if Stefani ever expressed a preference for either of the men's ancestors - they will use this information to decide who gets the items in the trunks. The books is sort of set up as a historical mystery, because Caterina finds out that the composer was involved in some murder scandal when he was working at the royal court in Germany, but the mystery itself gets figured out pretty quickly and with very little fanfare, so it ends up being kind of a nonstarter. Leon also tries to create some tension by having a mysterious man follow Caterina around for a bit, and it's such a pointless, stupid subplot because we eventually find out that (view spoiler)[the guy is the son of one of the men Caterina is working for, and he told his son to follow her around because...apparently that would motivate her to translate the documents faster? Somehow? Anyway, the entire thing ends when Caterina sends her brother-in-law to confront the guy, at which point he cracks like an egg and confesses everything. Womp womp. (hide spoiler)] Basically, this is an entire book of teased intrigue that Leon either can't be bothered to develop fully, or just drops entirely. The men who hired Caterina have a lawyer representing him, and Leon teases us with the possibility of a romance, and then apparently got bored of that. We find out that the lawyer (view spoiler)[is actually super shady, and has been reading Caterina's emails. Why? Because he went to the university that was run by the founder of Opus Dei (stick with me, it's about to get dumber) so he's some kind of Catholic fanatic, and he thinks the trunks contain religious relics. This is terrible, because a) his motivations were never fully fleshed out, and b) thanks to The da Vinci Code, any character who belongs to Opus Dei is no longer allowed to be anything less than a mass-murdering albino who wears hair shirts and whips himself. The lawyer is not nearly so interesting. (hide spoiler)] There's also an extended subplot about Caterina's sister Christina, who is a nun and helps Caterina out with her research. She's also considering leaving the church, so valuable story space is wasted exploring that non-angle. She and Caterina communicate through email, and they also have a supremely irritating habit of calling each other cutesy nicknames - "Tina-Lina" and "Kitty-Cati." The audiobook reader's simpering delivery of this robbed the nicknames of any chance of being charming, and it just made me grate my teeth every time I heard it. But mostly, I was irritated with this book because I thought of a great joke about it early on, and it distracted me for the rest of the book. Okay, so the composer was also heavily involved with the Church, and Caterina realizes early on that he was actually a castrato. There's a reference in one of his papers to his having received "the jewels of paradise," which is why everyone is convinced that the trunks contain treasure. So we have a story about a woman whose hired by two men to research their ancestor, who was castrated, and left behind trunks that may contain "the jewels of paradise." So I guess you could say they're searching for.... ...the family jewels. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 2017
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not set
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Jul 11, 2017
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
3.43
| 222,595
| Oct 08, 2013
| Oct 08, 2013
|
it was ok
|
If I had to come up with a one-sentence summary for this book, it would be this: if you've ever read one of those thinkpieces written by a smug baby b
If I had to come up with a one-sentence summary for this book, it would be this: if you've ever read one of those thinkpieces written by a smug baby boomer explaining why millinials are the worst and thought, man, I wish I had five hundred pages of this, then The Circle is for you! May Holland is a recent college graduate living sometime in the near future, when a company called the Circle has created a monopoly on all technology. The Circle has created TrueYou, a system that links a person's entire online presence - social media, email, bank accounts, etc - under one account and one name. Online anonymity is a thing of the past, and the entire world is connected by the Circle. May's friend is one of the top employees at the Circle, and through her influence, May manages to get a job at one of the world's most influential companies. (sidebar: after Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood series, I was sort of disappointed that TrueYou wasn't spelled TruYoo, and didn't have any clever double meaning, like the companies and products she makes up in her series. Just in case you needed an indication of where Dave Eggers ranks on the list of speculative fiction authors.) Dave Eggers spends a lot - and I mean a lot - of story space just showing us around the Circle campus and telling us all the cool stuff they have, to the point where it feels like the first 2/3 of the book is taking place within May's first week at work. We get introduced to the founders of the company (referred to as the three wise men, because of course they are), and May seems to spend more time going to company parties and increasing her social media presence instead of actually working. Because millennials, amirite guys! Meanwhile, a mysterious guy named Calden pops in and out of the narrative, and he has two purposes: to give us a semi-developed mystery to work on, since no one else at the Circle seems to know who he is and May can't find him anywhere in the company database (and frankly, I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to figure out that he's (view spoiler)[Ty, the third founder of the Circle. Like, good lord, Madeline, we know that there's three founders and you've only met two, law of conservation of characters, etc) (hide spoiler)]. His second purpose is to hook up with May and provide us with some truly uncomfortable sex scenes. May also has a sort-of romance with another programmer, and all I'll say about that is that he secretly films her giving him a handjob (and it's basically this Louie CK bit) and then, when she finds out, refuses to delete it. May is mad at him for about three pages, and then they're back to hanging out like nothing's wrong. I'm four paragraphs into this review and haven't even discussed May as a character. The simple fact is that there's really not much to say about May. She's 100% onboard with everything the Circle does from her first day, and the few objections she offers to their practices are feeble at best. She has a lot of scenes with one of the founders of the Circle, so he can patronizingly dismiss all of her concerns and offer up some of the worst pseudo-intelligent arguments I've ever heard - there's a scene where May goes kayaking and doesn't live-stream it on her social media feed, and the founder finds out about it and basically shames her for not sharing it with all her followers. He tells her that he has a son who's disabled and, I shit you not, tells her that by not sharing a video of her stupid kayaking trip, she's denying his poor wheelchair-bound son the chance to experience what he can never do in real life. May's total acceptance of the Circle's creepy practices is supposed to unnerve us, and it does, but I just couldn't connect with it. I'm a millennial, for god's sake, and even on May's first day at the Circle, she was being shown around and a million alarm bells were going off in my head. But nothing seems off to May, and she hands over her privacy without a second thought. I think Dave Eggers wanted May's total conversion to Circle-think to be gradual, so the audience thinks it's okay at first, and then she slowly gives up more and more until it's too late. He's trying to live up to that line from The Handmaid's Tale, about how in a gradually-heating bathtub you'd boil yourself to death and never notice. In The Circle, May jumps headfirst into a boiling tub and Dave Eggers thinks it's believable. (I realize that this is my second Atwood comparison so far - if you take one thing away from this review, it's that Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction makes The Circle look like a toddler's crayon drawing) But the ending is the most disappointing thing. It felt like the entire book was building to something much bigger and more sinister, and I kept waiting, until the very last page, for the other shoe to drop. But it never really does, and there was never any secret, super-evil motive behind the Circle - just the usual, banal Facebook and Google style of evil, which is too realistic to be interesting. Buried deep within this book is a well-written exploration of how people can be inducted into a cult-like mentality without even realizing it, and at its best, The Circle reads like an origin story for all those teenage dystopia worlds - if you've ever wondered how a society like we see in The Hunger Games or Divergent could ever have happened, The Circle shows you exactly how it could have seemed like a good idea at the beginning. But overall, those good ideas and concepts are just drowned under unlikeable characters, absurd plot points, and endless smug preaching about the evils of technology. (Reviewer's note: I listened to this as an audiobook, and hated the reader for two reasons - first, they have a man doing the reading, even though the book is told from a woman's perspective; and also the multi-cultural staff of the Circle means the reader has to do a lot of accents, and they're...not great. So the poor listening experience might have made me dislike this book a little bit more than it deserved. Only a little bit, though.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2017
|
Jul 04, 2017
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||||
1101057025
| 9781101057025
| 1101057025
| 4.02
| 110,668
| Oct 01, 2002
| Oct 01, 2002
|
really liked it
|
“I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.” Sue Trinder is an orphan living a Dickensian- “I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.” Sue Trinder is an orphan living a Dickensian-like life in 19th century London - her mother was hanged as a murderer when Sue was a baby, leaving Sue to be raised by Mrs. Sucksby in a "baby farm" in the slums of London. Sue grows up surrounded by thieves and pickpockets ("fingersmiths"), learning to counterfeit coins and commit petty crimes, and then one day she's offered a chance at a much bigger job. A con man known as Gentleman has a plan to trick an heiress out of her fortune by seducing and marrying her (and then dumping the girl in an insane asylum once he has the money), and he needs Sue to pose as the girl's maid and spy on her. But as in all good crime stories, the job isn't as simple as it sounds, and everyone has their own agenda. And it turns out that Sue's target, the innocent heiress Maud Lilly, has secrets of her own that Sue will discover...(Homer Simpson voice) with sexy results. Here's an indication of how good Fingersmith is, and how well it hooks you - I read this book six months ago, but I can still remember every great plot twist and betrayal that happens. It sticks with you, is what I'm saying. The book is divided into sections based on character perspective. First we're in Sue's head, learning the details of the job and going to the Lilly mansion to pull off the con. Just as soon as we feel comfortable, and are confident that we know what's going on, Waters yanks the rug out from under us. The con, we learn, is not what we thought it was, and then, in the next section, we get to read the same scenes again - but from Maud's perspective this time. And Waters isn't done! After that, we get another section, just to drive home the point that every time we thought we had the whole story, we were wrong. Con men (and women), romance, revenge, skullduggery, betrayals on top of betrayals! What's not to love? AND NOW A NOTE ON THE MOVIE: The Handmaiden, Park Chan-Wook's adaption of Fingersmith, is fascinating for a lot of reasons. First, changing the setting to 1930's Korea works really, really well, and the movie sets just the right beautiful but vaguely suspicious tone that the novel requires. The changing perspectives are handled well too, and as a bonus, the romance elements are lovely and charming and sexy. (fun fact: I saw this movie in theaters, and let me tell you, it is quite an experience to sit in a room full of people all maintaining mature, thoughtful silence while we watch two women [redacted because of spoilers and children present]) Also, if you saw the movie but didn't read the book, man you are missing out, because The Handmaiden cuts off Waters' story about two thirds of the way in, because they just didn't have enough time to explore all the plot twists from the original. So if you liked the movie, please go read the book, because there are some major, major bombshells that you still need to know about. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Aug 2016
not set
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Jun 14, 2017
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ebook
| |||||||||||||||
0385536976
| 9780385536974
| 0385536976
| 3.91
| 512,738
| Jun 11, 2013
| Jun 11, 2013
|
liked it
|
After being briefly obsessed with the Gossip Girl book series in high school, and then the show a few years later (and then abandoning it once Georgin
After being briefly obsessed with the Gossip Girl book series in high school, and then the show a few years later (and then abandoning it once Georgina reappeared with Dan's baby god that show was trash and I loved it), this seemed like the next logical step. Crazy Rich Asians is Kevin Kwan trying his hand at the ever-popular genre that can best be summed up as "hey look, rich people!" The fact that the rich people featured here are all based in Singapore, rather than America or Europe, gave the book an interesting dimension and gives Kwan a chance to (briefly) touch on deeper issues of prejudice and toxic social norms within the rich Singaporean community. Our heroine is Rachel Chu, an economics professor who gets invited to spend a few months in Singapore with her boyfriend of two years, Nicholas Young. It seems to be a perfectly normal trip: Nick's best friend is getting married, and he wants to bring Rachel home to attend the wedding and meet his family. Once the couple arrives, however, Rachel gradually realizes that Nick hasn't been completely honest about the circumstances of their trip - Nick, it turns out, is part of one of the richest families in Asia, and the wedding they're attending is going to be one of the most expensive events in recent memory. Also Nick's grandmother lives in an estate (that's hidden even on Google maps) where she's waited on by two lady's maids and protected by armed guards. This is a world where women get together for Bible study to trade stock tips and compare their latest jewelry purchases, where Nick's cousin takes a trip to Paris every year to buy herself a new couture wardrobe, and a bachelorette weekend involves jetting off to a private island in Indonesia owned by the bride's mother. In short: wealth porn. Dirty, nasty, xxx wealth porn. At his best, Kwan is giving us a poor man's Bride and Prejudice (the movie that is, itself, a poor man's Pride and Prejudice) - in short, a cheap knockoff of a cheap knockoff. He's trying very hard for an Austen-like feel, in all the scenes where Rachel is scrutinized and gossiped about by everyone in Nick's family, who are all determined not to let him get further involved with someone they think is beneath him. One of the best scenes, that comes closest to the kind of story I think Kwan is trying to write, has Rachel listening in awe as a group of women kindly tell their friend that it's not even worth her time to marry a man worth only a few millions - and then they proceed to itemize all of her future expenses, from country club fees to private school tuition, to illustrate why this millionaire is too poor to support her lifestyle. Moments like these, that provide realistic glimpses into the world of the super-rich, are the best part of the book, but there aren't many of them. This story got repetitive very quickly. First, Kwan's descriptions of the luxury Rachel witnesses don't vary much, so you end up reading a lot of lines about "the most delicious dessert Rachel had ever eaten" and "the biggest house Rachel had ever seen" and "the most luxurious this" and "the most expensive that." After a while, your eyes just sort of glaze over. Another problem was that I quickly realized that there are only three kinds of scenes in this book, and Kwan just keeps repeating them with different characters and settings. Scene 1: Rachel and/or Nick go to some fancy location so the reader can gawk at the luxury along with the characters. Scene 2: Characters talk about how awful Rachel is, and trade gossip we've already heard. Scene 3: a side character has a scene unrelated to Rachel, Nick, or the main plot. Two of Nick's cousins each have their own subplot in this book, and both storylines don't really go anywhere interesting - but I guess that's what the sequels are for. The ending was kind of jarring, too, because it was a completely different tone from the rest of the book. While most of Crazy Rich Asians is a fluffy romp through Rich People Land, with some fun backstabbing and gossip to keep things interesting, the last few chapters take a hard left turn into Harrowing Family Dramaville, and it suddenly turns into a bad Joy Luck Club knockoff. And it happens way, way too late in the story, so the book is over before we get a chance to adjust to the new tone - it never worked for me, and I suspect Kwan did it because he couldn't think of another way to end the book. So overall, I was lukewarm on this one. But apparently there's going to be a movie version, and I'm excited about it for two reasons. First, I read somewhere that Constance Wu from Fresh Off the Boat is going to play Rachel, which is perfect - Rachel is kind of dull in the book, but she has flashes of sass and strength that Wu will be able to bring out. No idea who they're getting to play Nick, but he'd better be just oozing charisma, because Book Nick is basically a cardboard cutout that character tote around and prop up during scenes. I'm also really excited to see this movie because I think this story is much more suited to a visual format - if we can just see the exotic, luxurious locations, that's better than having to sit through Kwan's dull descriptions. Plus, this book is so light on actual plot that they could probably condense it down to ninety minutes and wouldn't lose much. ...more |
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1
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not set
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May 2017
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Jun 09, 2017
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Hardcover
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0307408841
| 9780307408846
| 0307408841
| 3.88
| 207,751
| May 10, 2011
| May 10, 2011
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really liked it
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A few months ago, I finally figured out how to borrow audiobooks from the library and listen to them on my phone, which has been great for both my com
A few months ago, I finally figured out how to borrow audiobooks from the library and listen to them on my phone, which has been great for both my commute and my to-read list (lately I don't seem to have the time or inclination to sit down and read books for long periods of time, so this is helping me feel less useless). Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts was one of the first books I downloaded, and I listened to it in February of 2017. Listening to a book detailing the slow rise of a fascist dictarship in 1930's Germany while living in the early days of the Trump presidency was...an experience. I wish I'd had a physical copy of the book with me so I could mark quotations, because every few pages I came across a line that gave me actual chills, it was so resonant and familiar. One line that struck me the most: Larson explains that even though Hitler and his associates dialed back their extremist rhetoric in the weeks immediately following Hitler's election as chancellor, by then the majority of the country had already been swept up in a wave of hatred and violence, and there was no stopping it. So, yeah. It's an illuminating book, to say the least, but listening to it was the opposite of relaxing. "Panic sweat-inducing" is how I'd phrase it. Like he did with Devil in the White City, Larson explores a broad topic by narrowing his focus on a handful of influencial people. However, while Devil could never quite make a convincing connection between murdered HH Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair, In the Garden of Beasts is much more cohesive and focused. Our guides into the early days of Nazi Germany are the Dodd family, who moved to Berlin in 1933 when William Dodd, a professor from Chicago, was appointed as the American ambassador to Germany. He brought along his wife and their two adult children, Bill and Martha, and the family found themselves in the middle of a new and frightening government. Dodd and his daughter Martha get most of Larson's attention in this book (so much attention, in fact, that Dodd's son Bill is almost never mentioned at all, and I have no idea how he kept himself occupied when the family was living in Berlin). Dodd, obviously, is our eye into the politics of the time, and I liked that Larson never let Dodd, or the United States, off the hook when discussing America's complacency in the face of Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism was just as rampant in the United States as it was in Germany, and Martha Dodd even admitted in her memoirs that the German government's treatment of Jews didn't bother her or her family very much at the time, because "we didn't really like Jews." For much of book, William Dodd doesn't do very much, and mostly just acts as a witness to current events without influencing them. Gradually, he becomes aware that something very, very bad is happening in Germany, and his efforts to warn the US government about Hitler are as tragic as they are futile. Martha Dodd kept herself pretty busy in Berlin while her father was stationed there, and the book chronicles her friendships and relationships with various key players in the SS. She also had a serious boyfriend who was a Russian Soviet, and apparently he was assigned to recruit her as a spy for the Soviets. Sadly, nothing ever comes of this. Martha, as Larson presents her, is a complicated person who didn't really notice or care what was going on around her, and continued happily skipping around Berlin with her Nazi boyfriends. I suppose the goal here was to make the readers see that these were all human beings, and not evil cartoon monsters - Larson does his best to make us understand that most of the people working for Hitler's regime were normal people with good intentions, who genuinely thought that they were doing the right thing. Maybe if I had read this book a few years ago, I would have been more sympathetic to this viewpoint. But that's not the world we're living in right now, is it? So in conclusion, thank you, Erik Larson, for trying to make me understand that the people responsible for Hitler's rise to power were ordinary people who got swept up into something they didn't realize was wrong until it was too late. I get it, I do. But also, fuck the Nazis. ...more |
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2
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not set
not set
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Feb 2017
not set
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May 10, 2017
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Hardcover
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1476789630
| 9781476789637
| 1476789630
| 3.54
| 246,384
| May 12, 2015
| May 12, 2015
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liked it
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Ani FaNelli has the perfect life. She works for a fashion magazine, is thin and beautiful, has thin and beautiful friends, and once she marries her Ne
Ani FaNelli has the perfect life. She works for a fashion magazine, is thin and beautiful, has thin and beautiful friends, and once she marries her New York blue-blood fiance, she'll become Ani Harrison and will have gotten everything she wants. Ani's life is a carefully crafted performance - everything she does and says is specifically engineered to project the kind of persona she wants, and hide the person she used to be. As a teenager, Ani was TifAni FaNelli (does the name make you grate your teeth? Then Jessica Knoll did her job), a middle-class girl living in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia who, through unusual circumstances and luck, got herself enrolled in the prestigious Bradley School. Her desperation to fit in with and be friends with her rich classmates created a sequence of events that led to a horrifying night - one that Ani is desperate to forget. But this night had further consequences, and culminated in an Incident at the school. Now, a documentary crew is making a movie about the Incident and what is being called "the Bradley Five" and they want to interview Ani to get her side of the story. Finally, Ani will have to tell the truth about what happened, and what she knows about the people involved. Real talk, guys: I should have known what I was in for as soon as I started scanning the publisher's blurbs at the beginning of this book and saw no less than five that went "If you're a fan of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train..." That should have been a warning that what I was about to get was nothing like either of those books, but vaguely similar enough to make the publishers sprint behind the bandwagon, frantically waving Jessica Knoll's book. Remember in The Devil Wears Prada, when Meryl Streep gives that amazing monologue about cerulean? (It's here, for those of you who don't have it committed to memory like me) I'm going to adopt her metphor because I think it applies perfectly to how you should approach Luckiest Girl Alive. Gone Girl is the Oscar de la Renta cerulean gowns, The Girl on the Train is the Yves St. Laurent cerulean military jackets, and Luckiest Girl Alive is the lumpy blue sweater that Andy fished out of some clearance bin. That's honestly the best way I can describe this book and its appeal to potential readers. And for what it's worth, I think Andy's sweater was cute. ...more |
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1
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Apr 2017
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not set
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Apr 19, 2017
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Hardcover
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0062190857
| 9780062190857
| 0062190857
| 3.62
| 2,345
| Mar 12, 2013
| Mar 12, 2013
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liked it
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Although Richard Hell was heavily involved in the punk movement, starting several influential bands and appearing regularly in the glory days of CBGB'
Although Richard Hell was heavily involved in the punk movement, starting several influential bands and appearing regularly in the glory days of CBGB's, he never managed to achieve the same level of fame as other punk icons like Johnny Rotten, the Clash, or the Ramones. But when you look at the history of punk rock, Richard Hell's fingerprints are all over it. He wasn't the founder, by any means, but he was definitely one of the early pioneers of the entire punk movement. I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is Hell's story of those early days, and his experiences within that culture. For a memoir, this book is pretty slim, both literally and metaphorically. Hell spends way too much time telling you about his childhood, and the only real information of interest in this section is the fact that Hell grew up in the perfect cliche of a happy 1950's household. Parents wanting to save their children from a life of drugs and rock n' roll, beware - Keith Richards was a boy scout, Mick Jagger was a choir boy, and Richard Hell was raised in a lovely safe suburb in the Midwest. The book finally gets good once Hell gets to New York with Tom Verlaine and they start getting into music, and I liked this section for two reasons. First, because of the clear-eyed and unsentimental descriptions of the punk music scene in New York, when it was just a bunch of hungry struggling kids trying to make a statement about something, anything. The honesty and the clarity of Hell's writing makes up for the fact that we are also subjected to a laundry list of women he slept with during this period and why it didn't work out, but frankly I was just happy that he didn't sneer at them and refer to all the women as "chicks" like Keith Richards did in his memoir. I also liked the fact that Hell presents his music career with honesty and a lack of pretension. He doesn't claim to be called to music, or give us boring lectures on chord progressions. He got into music because it seemed fun, and a good way to get girls, and couldn't even be bothered to practice all that much (to the frequent annoyance of everyone who tried to form a band with him, it turns out that Richard Hell didn't really enjoy being in a band). This frankness was refreshing, but sometimes it feels like self-depreciation, like this excerpt where Hell, one of the coolest people on the planet, tries to claim that he's really super lame: "All my career I've been described as quintessentially 'cool' or 'hip.' I suppose I've fostered this, on levels, in order to seem desirable to girls and to avoid standard hypocrisy and routine consumer life, but I am not cool. I'm cranky under pressure, I'm a mediocre athlete, I get obsessed with women, I usually want to be liked, and I'm not especially street-smart." Seriously, that excerpt reads like an actress on the red carpet insisting that no, she looks just terrible and she ate a cheeseburger in the limo and honestly, she's just gross. *pose* Hell spends a lot of time discussing his long periods of drug addiction, and honestly, if you've read any other rock n' roll memoir, there's not really anything new here. At least Hell's writing makes up for the fact that this is, essentially, just a remix of the same song you hear in every single music memoir: "Addiction is lonely. ...Once the drug use has replaced everything else, life becomes purely a lie, since in order to keep any self-respect, the junkie has to delude himself that use is by choice. That's the worst loneliness - the isolation, even from oneself, in that lie. In the meantime the original physical pleasure becomes merely dull relief from the threat of withdrawal, from the horror of real life. The user will add any other drugs available, especially stimulants, like methedrine or cocaine, to try to make it interesting again. Eventually, I happened to survive long enough to reach a place where I couldn't kid myself anymore that it was all on purpose, and the despair and physical torment of my failed attempts to stop became my entire reality. I found a way to quit, with help. It was luck that I lived that long." The book really started to lose me, though, once I became aware of an undercurrent of bitterness running through the entire memoir. Whenever Hell is discussing bands like the Ramones or Johnny Rotten, he's always either hinting or full-out stating that they sold out once they became famous, and you get the impression that Hell believes that his lack of real fame makes him the only true surviving punk. He's also weirdly fixated on Patti Smith, and she appears in the narrative frequently (in her introduction, Hell makes sure to inform the reader that she had amazing boobs. Rock n' roll dudes are and always will be the worst). I don't know if Hell is just angry because Smith never slept with him, but it sure reads that way. The funniest part of all of this is that I read Just Kids by Patti Smith, and I'm not sure she mentioned Richard Hell even once. Clearly, one of them had a much greater effect than the other. By the end, there isn't really any clear point to this book. Richard Hell grows up, starts playing music, battles an addiction, and...that's pretty much it. There's no central idea or point at the center of this memoir, no goal that Hell's writing is working towards. It's just a sort of linear description of a period in his life, nothing more. This is a detailed, clear-eyed description of the early days of a music movement, with cameos by famous and not-so-famous figures from the era, so the memoir is worth it for anyone wanting an insider perspective on that time period. But ultimately, Richard Hell doesn't actually have much to say. ...more |
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1
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not set
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May 2016
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Aug 11, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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0393302318
| 9780393302318
| 0393302318
| 4.07
| 975
| 1983
| May 17, 1985
|
liked it
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"Yet for all her freewheeling and independence, Sylvia Beach was a woman for others. ...Although she had no pretensions to literary talent herself, sh
"Yet for all her freewheeling and independence, Sylvia Beach was a woman for others. ...Although she had no pretensions to literary talent herself, she lived her life among books, trusted her own literary judgement, and helped those artists she believed in. Indeed, she vicariously shared the joy of their success. She possessed an outgoing and vivacious personality; a nervous, restive energy; and a witty unsentimental intelligence. Occasionally she used the flattery and disarming diplomacy of the parson's daughter, but was as wise as Machiavelli. She retained her identity in a crowd of dominant personalities." Shakespeare & Co was more than a bookstore. It was a lending library, performance venue, post office, hotel, and meeting space for some of the biggest names in the art scene of 1920's Paris. The store's legacy continues to this day - Shakespeare & Co is still operating (and I think it's owned by a direct descendant of Sylvia Beach, but I could be wrong about that) and they have a program that provides free room and board for aspiring writers. Shakespeare & Co - not just the store itself, but everything it stands for and the people it affected - exists thanks to the efforts of two women. One was Adrienne Monnier, a French bookstore owner. The other was Sylvia Beach, an American woman who came to Paris in the beginning of the 20th century and stayed in France for the rest of her life. She became the close friend of numerous artists, and kept her bookstore alive through the the 1920's, saved the books from the Nazis, and kept the shop afloat even when she was drowning in debt. She was also instrumental in getting Ulysses published, and having it smuggled into the United States when it was initially banned. As other reviewers have pointed out, the main focus of this book is Beach's relationship with James Joyce. I knew that this would be heavily emphasized before I bought the book - flipping through it in the store, every single random page I turned to mentioned Joyce's name - but even then, there is a lot of Joyce in here. Like, this book should have been called Slyvia Beach and James Joyce. Other famous 1920's artists and authors make appearances, but it's clear that Fitch is most interested in exploring the Beach/Joyce dynamic. Which, ugh. I don't like James Joyce's writing, and I definitely don't like James Joyce the person (a dislike that was only confirmed by the stories in this book - Slyvia Beach, despite barely keeping the bookstore in business, would frequently give Joyce money for food and rent, and he would frequently stop by the store and help himself to cash from the register). But honestly, even fans of James Joyce don't really like James Joyce. Here's what Fitch says about Joyce's efforts to make the publication and reading of his work the biggest goddamn headache for everyone involved: "He did not merely correct or change words and phrases, he added to the copy, always complicating the material with interrelated details. He told Jaques Benoist-Mechin, 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.' His statement proved to be more than jest. Joyce has become the favorite of exegetes the world over." Translation: James Joyce was a dick. The pacing of this book is meandering, as Fitch sort of wanders from one anecdote to the other. When the book is good, it's very good, like when she's discussing Beach's efforts to keep the bookstore open during the Nazi occupation (at a time when, I might add, Gertrude Stein was busy taking vacations and helping the Vichy government) or telling stories about the artistic scene in the 1920s. One of my favorite stories was about George Antheil and his plan to drum up publicity for a performance of his Ballet Mecanique: he went into hiding while his friends fed a story to the newspapers that Antheil had gone off to Africa, and then disappeared. The plan was for Antheil to make a miraculous return to Paris, but while he was "missing" Antheil proposed to his girlfriend, and they were on their way to Budapest to get married when Sylvia Beach sent him this telegram: "FOR GOODNESS SAKE GEORGE COME BACK TO PARIS IMMEDIATELY AND DENY THIS IDIOTIC NEWSPAPER STORY LIONS ATE YOU IN AFRICA OR ELSE YOUR NAME WILL BE MUD FOREVER STOP TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE STOP SYLVIA BEACH." I also enjoyed all of the subtle shots that Fitch takes at Gertrude Stein and her (carefully cultivated) reputation as the queen of literary Paris. Stien, as far as Fitch was concerned, ain't shit. "Gertrude Stein's declaration that 'America is my country, but Paris is my home' more accurately described Sylvia Beach than Stein. Unlike Gertrude, Sylvia knew the language well and made her closest friendships among the French. ...On the one hand, she never attempted to deny her American heritage by embracing a national identity that was not hers by birth. She did not embrace all things French with uncritical enthusiasm. Nor did she, at the other extreme, choose to live within an American community in Paris, avoiding the French people and customs." Ultimately, this was a frustrating read, not just because of the (over)emphasis on Joyce, but also because Fitch can't seem to find a narrative to focus on. It's just a collection of anecdotes, and even though some of them are very good anecdotes and give the reader a clear picture of life in 1920's Paris, it doesn't make up for the book's larger faults. Sylvia Beach was cool as hell, though. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Apr 2016
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Aug 02, 2016
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Paperback
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3.92
| 1,298,547
| Jun 07, 2011
| Jun 07, 2011
|
it was ok
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It was...fine? I liked the inclusion of old, weird photographs throughout the book, especially the way they were placed - you would read an offhand des It was...fine? I liked the inclusion of old, weird photographs throughout the book, especially the way they were placed - you would read an offhand description of something odd, turn the page, and there was the photo showing exactly that. I liked that part, and the photos were always a pleasant surprise, even though I spent way too much time trying to figure out how they had been faked. But there were just too many stumbling blocks for me to really enjoy this book. The biggest and most obvious issue is the whole concept of "time loops", which enable the peculiar children of the novel to remain hidden from the larger world. Time travel as a narrative device is extremely tricky to pull off, because of all the potential plot holes that spring up - it's expert-level, black diamond stuff, and Riggs isn't at the level where he can successfully navigate it. And Jacob, our hero, was a problem. He had almost no discernible personality (probably because he's intended to be a stand-in for the reader, so we can project our own personalities onto him) and had wildly inconsistent characterization. It starts out really well, because in the early chapters, we see Jacob dealing with the fact that he witnessed his grandfather's violent death. Riggs shows us how damaging that can be, and doesn't spare us the details of Jacob's PTSD (one detail I especially loved: for a few months, Jacob can only sleep in a pile of blankets in the laundry room, because it's the only room in his house "with no windows and also a door that locked from the inside"). I was really excited that Riggs was doing this, because it's very rare for YA supernatural adventure lit like this to acknowledge that, hey, regular exposure to stuff like this is actually really really traumatizing. But then Jacob's anxiety and PTSD just kind of...go away. Throughout the story, we see him in confined spaces, witnessing violence, and encountering the same kind of terrifying situations that sent him into intensive therapy at the beginning of the book, and he just brushes them off like it's no big deal. It was like Riggs started out thinking he was going to realistically depict the traumatic aftermath of violent, scary situations, but then got bored and decided to just ignore all of Jacob's previously-established mental issues. But honestly, the biggest problem I had was this: I wanted to read this same story, but from another character's perspective and written by another author. Okay, so because Jacob is a minor, his father accompanies him to the island and then just hangs around in the background, quietly having a total mental breakdown that Jacob can't be bothered to notice. Because here's what's so interesting to me: while Jacob has mostly positive memories of his grandfather, the dad remembers him as an emotionally distant father who was never around and may have been having an affair. Then Jacob learns that, no, his grandpa was always traveling because he was busy hunting demons. Fine, but imagine this story from the dad's perspective: an adult man, dealing with the death of his father, learns that he had an entire separate life as a hunter of monsters, and the man has to resume the work his father started while also working through their complicated relationship. Forget the precocious Harry Potter-lite teenage hero; I wanted to read an emotionally complex story of a man reconciling his relationship with his complicated father while also learning to hunt demons. Long story short: this is the first book in a trilogy, but I have no interest in continuing the series. ...more |
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jul 08, 2016
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Hardcover
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0062372106
| 9780062372109
| B01BITGENS
| 3.55
| 47,396
| Jun 23, 2015
| Jun 23, 2015
|
it was amazing
|
Or, as I called the book in my head, Everyone is a Whore Except Me and Here's Why. Better yet: The Truth About Kettle: An Autobiography by Pot. Look, Or, as I called the book in my head, Everyone is a Whore Except Me and Here's Why. Better yet: The Truth About Kettle: An Autobiography by Pot. Look, I'm not going to pretend that I had any good reason to read this book. Underneath the surface, this is a scathing indictment of unfair beauty standards, the fear of female sexuality, and the entire goddamn patriarchy (and Madison, delightfully, seems blissfully unaware of the deeper implications of some of her observations about the unfairness of life at the Playboy Mansion - she's just mad that all these girls were so mean to her). But that's not why I read it. I read it because "behind-the-scenes look at trashy reality show" is one of my favorite memoir styles, and I've always been weirdly fascinated by mistresses, harems, harem culture, and the whole "what men think women do when they're not around vs. what women actually do" issue. But mostly I just wanted dirt on Hugh Hefner, the weird atmosphere of the Playboy Mansion, and the women who were paid to have sex with Hefner under the guise of "girlfriends." I wanted dirt, and hoooooly shit, readers, does Holly Madison deliver the dirt. It's hilarious that the cover photo shows Madison holding a finger to her lips, because she is holding nothing back here. A more honest picture would be Madison shouting at the reader. Reading this book is sort of like sitting down for coffee with a casual acquaintance right after she's broken up with her boyfriend, and you have to sit there and listen politely while she unloads every complaint and annoyance she ever had while they were dating. In short, Holly Madison has some things to get off her chest, and god damn was I here for that. I read this book in two and a half days. So, some background: Holly Madison spent seven years living in the Playboy Mansion as one of Hugh Hefner's "girlfriends." In the early years, she was one of a larger group of girls (who are always referred to by Holly's hilariously oblivious narration as "the mean girls"), but later the girlfriends shrank to three members: Madison, Bridgette Marquette, and Kendra Wilkinson. The women gained fame when they starred in a reality show based around the Playboy Mansion, and then eventually moved on to get their own shows once they left the mansion. Sidebar: there are a ton of The Girls Next Door episodes on YouTube right now, and there are worse ways to waste an afternoon. Madison's memoir is an incredible portrait of a total lack of self-awareness. She spends most of this book desperately trying to convince the reader that she is somehow different than all the other women who "dated" Hugh Hefner and posed in his magazine. See, those other girls were dumb bimbos, but not Holly! She only pretended to be dumb! The other girls were cookie-cutter blondes who all looked like clones of each other, but not Holly! Sure, she bleached her hair and got plastic surgery, but only because she wanted to fit in! It's totally different! And the other girls were opportunistic sluts who only used Hef to gain fame! Not Holly! Sure, she left the mansion and got her own reality show, and went on Dancing With the Stars, and starred in a Vegas show, but she accomplished all of that on her own! The fact that each of these projects made direct references to her history with Playboy is just a coincidence! It is stunningly absurd that, for all the time Madison spends insisting that she's built a career on her own and has completely escaped the shadow of Playboy, she can never convince the reader that she's become famous in her own right. I mean, for God's sake, the subtitle of this book makes sure to mention that Madison is "a former Playboy bunny" because like it or not, that is Madison's sole claim to fame. Of course, to hear Madison tell it, she was just playing the game, and was trying to get out all along. She never loved Hef, and had to pretend otherwise because it suited his cultivated image. She merely played along, Madison insists, until she was able to escape. The idea that other women may have had the exact same strategy has not occurred to Madsion, and she remains blissfully unaware of her own hypocrisy. One of the many, many bits of vengeful gossip Madison gives us is that Kendra's signature loud laugh is completely faked, and that Kendra only started doing it to distinguish herself from the other women. This, readers, is the dictionary definition of "pretty fucking rich" because have you ever heard Holly Madison's laugh? She just bleats "ha ha ha ha" in a monotone, like someone who mispronounces a word because they've only ever seen it written down. And for all her railing against "the mean girls" of the mansion, Holly Madison is like the most petty and passive-agressive person I've ever read about. After detailing her breakup with Vegas magician Criss Angel (Vegas. Magician. Criss. Angel.) Madison gleefully quotes, at length, all of the negative reviews his show received. I'm pretty sure that Peep Show, Madison's own Vegas show, wasn't exactly showered in positive reviews, but as far as she's concerned, it was a massive hit and everyone loved her and her lifelike, nuanced acting. And Madison makes sure we know that after she left The Girls Next Door, the show was a failure without her and was quickly canceled. When Madison's own reality show is canceled after two seasons, she explains that this was right after a new president came on at E!, who wanted to move away from Playboy-related content. The implication is that, if it wasn't for this change in management, Holly's show would still be running today. When she is accused of starting a twitter fight with Hefner's new girlfriend by claiming she stole her look (a look which, remember, Madison adopted in order to fit in with all the other bleached, surgically enhanced blondes at the Mansion), Madison is adamant that she did no such thing, and only posted a generic tweet about hating copycats. I see you, Madison. You ain't slick. And of course Holly Madison feels a personal affinity with Marilyn Monroe, unwilling patron saint of vapid starlets who want to appear complex. Here's one of the book's more rage-inducing paragraphs: "Like me, Marilyn had suffered at the hands of some not very nice men. She was used, underappreciated, and struggled to find herself. She worked her way up in Hollywood with stars in her eyes and a kind heart, but found that Hollywood wasn't always as kind in return. She may have been publicly adored, idolized, and lusted after, but she often felt alone and trapped. Those dark demons eventually got the best of Marilyn. Part of me knows that could have easily been my fate had I not chosen to take care of myself. I only wish poor Marilyn could have done the same." Wow. Wooooooow. I love this paragraph, because it reveals so much more about Madison's character than she realizes. She puts herself in the same category as Marilyn Monroe, one of the most famous and most talented women of her generation, and did everyone catch the way she subtlely blames Monroe for her own suicide? Gee, if only Monroe had "chosen" to take care of herself, she might still be alive! If only Holly Madison had been around to show her the way! Underneath the drama and the fluff and the gossip, Madison is (perhaps unintentionally) exposing something much darker and far-reaching than a bunch of backstabbing mean girls. The real fascination of this memoir is watching Madison explore how she was brainwashed and virtually imprisoned, and how she went about the process of slowly undoing the damage she incurred at the Playboy mansion - a process that is still ongoing. Simply put, Holly Madison is a survivor of domestic abuse, although she doesn't yet have the emotional vocabulary to articulate this. You only have to read a few paragraphs about Hugh Hefner's intense control issues (he apparently hates red lipstick on women, and once screamed at Madison when she dared to wear it) and the way he pits the women against each other to realize that you're reading a description of a textbook abuser. When Madison is describing the steps she took to leave the mansion (saving money, making an escape plan), she sounds exactly like everyone who ever had to go through the process of escaping an abusive partner. It's going to be easy for reviewers to demonize Holly Madison for her choices (and as you can see from the many, many paragraphs above, it's hard not to) because, as I said in my review of Pamela Des Barres's memoir of her time as a groupie, Madison is merely a symptom of a bigger disease. The real villain of this story is not backstabbing opportunistic women, but the man who orchestrated their struggles, and encouraged fighting among them so they would forget who the real enemy was. But Madison didn't forget, and she's at her best when her writing is full of righteous fury and frustration at Hugh Hefner, the man who kept her a virtual prisoner and destroyed her self-esteem so thoroughly that she contemplated suicide. Sure, Holly Madison is awful human being, but Hefner is the Dr. Frankenstein, while Madison is merely the monster that all the villagers go after with pitchforks. In conclusion: fuck you, Hugh Hefner. You're a bad person, I'm glad your entire empire is crumbling, and I hope whatever barely-legal girl you marry next smothers you in your sleep. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jun 27, 2016
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Paperback
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0618663029
| 9780618663026
| 0618663029
| 3.43
| 11,984
| Feb 02, 2016
| Feb 02, 2016
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it was ok
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Well. That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to. I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to Well. That didn't go AT ALL like I was expecting it to. I saw some reviews of this floating around on Goodreads a few weeks ago, and when I decided to look up a plot description, it sounded like everything I wanted from a novel. The story begins with Lilliet Berne, star soprano of the Paris Opera, being offered an original role in a new opera. But as she reads the story, she realizes that the opera is based on her own life, and exposes secrets from her past that she wants to stay buried. There are only four people who know Lilliet's secrets, and she decides to find out who's working behind the scenes to expose her. As she does, the reader follows her on her journey and learns how Lilliet went from orphan farm girl, to circus equestrian, to courtesan, to imperial spy, and ended as an opera singer. Based on that description, this book should have been my absolute jam. Opera singers! Belle Epoque Paris! Intrigue! Affairs! Courtesans! These are all things that I love, yet I did not enjoy a single page of The Queen of the Night, and I still can't figure out why. Nothing in this book worked for me. Other reviews praised Lilliet as an awesome heroine; I found her dull. Sure, it was impressive the way she was consistently wiggled her way out of one scrape after another (her best escape is stolen directly from The Count of Monte Cristo, and I'll forgive the absurdity of it because I love a good Dumas homage), but there didn't seem to be any spark to her - it was just five hundred pages of "oh, now I have to deal with this. Well, that was a close one." Maybe the problem was Chee's prose, which struck me as very dry and removed - I wanted narration that threw itself whole-heartedly into the fantastical aspects of this story, and was willing to have a little fun with it. Chee's writing takes itself way too seriously, and as a result, I couldn't commit myself to what should have been a melodramatic adventure story. The other major problem was the antagonist. At the beginning of Lilliet's career as a courtesan, she is purchased (literally purchased) by a man she refers to only as "the tenor." But he might as well be named "the patriarchy" because his job is to remind the reader of how thoroughly it sucked to be a woman in the 19th century. Sure, fine, I can get behind a malevolent john character when Lilliet is starting out. But then the tenor refuses to go away. Every time Lilliet escapes him, he just reappears a few chapters later, and she's back where she started, and by the time this had happened three times, I was beyond bored with the tenor. He has nothing to redeem himself to the reader, but isn't evil enough to be a compelling villain. When Lilliet finally (view spoiler)[kills him, it happens about three hundred pages too late. Chee should have killed the tenor off way earlier in the story, so he could be another skeleton in Lilliet's closet, and made up a better villain to take his place. (Also, the murder itself is so fucking easy there's no reason she couldn't have done it literally years ago. And it's stupidly absurd - she stabs him, which, yay! But then she breathes fire at him and it's pointless and I'm just glad that Chee resisted the urge to write SUITABLE FOR FILM ADAPTATION at the bottom of the page, because that's clearly what he was thinking when he wrote the scene) (hide spoiler)] But the biggest problem is Lilliet herself, and the role she plays in this story. It's disheartening that, in a 500-page novel, our supposed heroine never really gets to be anything other than a victim. She's a victim of the tenor, she's a victim of her employers - Lilliet is early Sansa Stark, and it was frustrating. Like, I get that this is 19th century France and we can't exactly have her charging around with pistols or whatever, but give her some goddamn agency, for Christ's sake! Lilliet is reactive rather than proactive, and it makes her a lame excuse for a heroine. She never really gets to be in control, in a book that is supposed to be her story. Instead, she just bounces from one terrible scenario to another, constantly being manipulated and controlled by others. Oh! And I almost forgot to talk about the romance element, which elicited only eye-rolling from me. So when Lilliet is working as a servant (and spy) in the Emperor's household, she meets "the composer." (He gets a name later on, but not before I got my history mixed up and thought he was supposed to be Mozart, so for most of the book I was sitting there laughing and thinking did Chee really just...?) She sees him playing, they have A Moment, then they fuck in the garden and poof! It's true love. I never, for one second, found this romance interesting or believable, and having to read about Lilliet mooning over the composer every few pages just made me resist it more. I never saw any reason for these two to be so in love, and had no idea why they liked each other so much, which made their affair boring and perplexing. Also a major time waste - why was Lilliet wasting her time sneaking around with the composer, I wondered, when we could be doing something more useful, like, I don't know, trying to escape her horrible circumstances or murdering the tenor? It also REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS, readers, that in a story where our heroine is constantly abused, raped, and victimized by men, the thing that finally motivates her to take control of her own life is the healing power of yet another man's love. Eye rolling for days. (oh, and the opera that was going to reveal all of Lilliet's secrets and ruin her life? Total fucking MacGuffin. Thanks a lot, Chee.) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jun 09, 2016
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3.56
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really liked it
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not set
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Nov 14, 2017
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3.44
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liked it
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Feb 2017
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Nov 03, 2017
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3.50
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really liked it
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Sep 2017
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Oct 22, 2017
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3.40
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it was ok
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Oct 2016
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Oct 04, 2017
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4.18
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it was ok
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May 2017
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Oct 01, 2017
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||||||
3.83
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liked it
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Sep 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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4.37
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liked it
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Aug 2017
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Aug 27, 2017
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4.01
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really liked it
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Jul 2017
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Aug 07, 2017
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||||||
4.11
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really liked it
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Aug 2017
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Jul 28, 2017
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||||||
3.27
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it was ok
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not set
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Jul 11, 2017
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3.43
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it was ok
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Apr 2017
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Jul 04, 2017
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||||||
4.02
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really liked it
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Aug 2016
not set
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Jun 14, 2017
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||||||
3.91
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liked it
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May 2017
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Jun 09, 2017
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||||||
3.88
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really liked it
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Feb 2017
not set
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May 10, 2017
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||||||
3.54
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liked it
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not set
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Apr 19, 2017
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||||||
3.62
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liked it
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May 2016
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Aug 11, 2016
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||||||
4.07
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liked it
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Apr 2016
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Aug 02, 2016
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||||||
3.92
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it was ok
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not set
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Jul 08, 2016
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||||||
3.55
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it was amazing
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not set
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Jun 27, 2016
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||||||
3.43
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it was ok
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not set
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Jun 09, 2016
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