September 2016 Books

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jandy Nelson has written two great books; I’ve devoured both and eagerly anticipate whatever she’ll release next. Her writing is amazing! Both books deal with themes of family, death, love, and art. In other words, life.

JudeandNoah are twins; both serve as narrators, Noah at age 14 and Jude at age 16, with chapters jumping between voices/ages. They’ve suffered a tragedy which they deal with in their own ways, eventually discovering the courage to tell the truth and live more truthfully.

Sculptor/mentor Guillermo: “You will see with your hands, I promise you. Now I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, ‘Painting is a blind man’s profession’ and ‘To draw you must close your eyes and sing.’ And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now, pick up the charcoal and draw” (p. 197).

Noah: “…most of the time, I feel like I’m undercover.”
Jude: “Me too. Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people. Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.”
Noah: He grins. “Each new self standing on the last one’s shoulders until we’re these wobbly people poles?”
Jude: I die of delight. “Yes, exactly! We’re all just wobbly people poles!” (p. 354)

First Comes Love by Emily Giffin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sometimes a fluff book is just what I need, although this was fluff on serious subjects: what grief does to individuals within and family as a whole. It reminded me of Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes, with two very different sisters-one flying by the seat of her pants, the other a frustrated lawyer-taking turns to narrate how they each try to move forward from family crisis. The story got progressively better and didn’t have the exact ending I expected, but I don’t expect to be mulling this one over for long.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow.

Golden Child weds Model Girl (alternately, Devil Girl, though he never knows). His fate/her fury a perfect match of the gods.

Groff writes these characters so larger than life they are god-like and yet so completely flawed that they are simultaneously truly human. Extraordinary, and so ordinary. We admire them, we know them, we are them. We don’t ever want to be them.

This novel could have been shorter, one-sided, and it still would have been remarkable. But in its fullness it tells the story of a marriage, nay, the stories of a marriage, the two lives become one, in such fullness that it’s breathtaking.

Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I really liked Big Little Lies. Three Wishes was okay. I hear What Alice Forgot is terrific. I didn’t like Truly Madly Guilty.

One of the least guilty characters in this book describes herself as “deplorable,” and I thought, “That’s ALL of them!” The characters read like unlikable caricatures. The writing is overblown, especially at the beginning, where the ploy of moving chapter by chapter from “The Night of the Barbecue” to current day is meant to build suspense and succeeds only in being super annoying.

Well, except, I kept reading to find out what unimaginable thing happened at the barbecue…

And it’s kind of predictable, as are the character’s responses to it. I hoped for some honest soul-searching and healthy relational confrontation but didn’t find it.

Dreamology by Lucy Keating
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This isn’t a deep, discover yourself book. It’s a light and innocent YA version of a chick flick.

Sleeping Beauty, aka Alice (aptly named because she prefers Wonderland), has dreamed nightly of her prince, Max, since she was a child. When she starts a new school, she is shocked to find Max for real, the guy of her dreams in the flesh.

How is this possible? Of course it’s not, but that’s part of the fun.