One Sentence Summary: A young pharmaceutical scientist heads into the heart of darkness that is the Amazonian rain forest to find her lost coworker and confront a scientist on the loose.
One Sentence Review: Anne Patchett’s beautiful writing alone is enough reason to read this book.
Why I Read It: I have a special place in my heart of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so hearing this one compared to it was enough to make me want to read it.
Book Review
I love Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale was the first book of her’s I’ve read, and I’ve been a ridiculous fangirl ever since. I also have a special place in my heart for The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. I actually really love all of that early-American, semi-Puritan nutty literature, if only because I love turning those stories into soap operas in my head.
I tell you that because those to facts make me the perfect reader for Hillary Jordan’s new book When She Woke, a sort of futuristic mash-up of those two stories where people who commit crimes have their skin dyed to match their crime as a form of punishment/entertainment.
Perrotta never makes even a passing reference to September 11 in The Leftovers, and yet that event is all I could think about as I read. I think what Perrotta does is capture the feeling of what September 11 was — an inexplicable event that, in a single instant, changed the world as we knew it — and explores it without ever given that event a name. Rather than focusing so as explicitly on the facts of the event like the first pages of The Submission does, Perrotta writes about loss and our individual response to events that we cannot explain. It’s exactly the sort of book I’ve wanted to read about September 11, even if Perotta never says that.
I’ve written a lot about my love of stunt memoirs. For our first BAND discussion, I called them the “candy in my nonfiction diet” because reading then doesn’t demand a lot out of me. They’re also my “genre kryptonite” — a type of book that I have a strange weak spot for reading. I’ve also thought that perhaps stunt memoirs are my nonfiction form of chick lit.
I grabbed this book at BEA because I have a bit of an author crush on Bill Willingham and his Fables series of graphic novels. I don’t read a lot of middle grade/young adult fiction, but the idea of Down the Mysterly River reminded of a lot of what Willingham does in Fables — play around with stories we think we know and finding ways to explore them in new ways.
On some level, I think what The Impostor’s Daughter says it is about and what the memoir actually delivers are slightly different things. I picked up the book expecting a story about a woman uncovering the truth about her father, but the book ends up being more about author Laurie Sandell finding herself in the shadow of her larger-than-life father. Luckily, Sandell’s delivery (writing and drawing) in this graphic novel more than sold the second story to me.
It’s been a weird week around here. I got a strange cold/fever thing on Monday which kicked my butt for most of the week. I still had to do everything I’m supposed to do at the newspaper, which left me with no physical or mental energy outside of work to do much except watch television and do a little reading. Getting an extra hour of sleep today was amazing.
I must be on the mend, however, because I managed to finish two books this weekend — The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write about Real Sex by Erica Jong.
This post first appeared on Book Riot on 10/20/11, which you can read here. I’m really proud of how this review turned out and really excited about the book, which is why I decided to cross-post it here today to celebrate Halloween. Enjoy!
Whether you’re over the whole zombie thing or getting ready to read the next big literary zombie novel, it’s difficult to argue that zombies haven’t made their way into our cultural conversation.
Have you ever read a review of a book that sticks with you so fully that even two years later you can still remember the title of the book and what part of the review made you want to read the book?
That’s what happened with Jonathan Carroll’s book The Ghost in Love, which first got on my radar almost exactly two years ago when a college friend, Ben, who has great tasted in all sorts of books posted a glowingly crazy-sounding review of the book.
When I was walking around Book Expo American on the first day last year, a publicist with Little Brown got my attention and asked if I wanted a copy of The Art of Fielding, a book she said they were heavily promoting at the show. I asked what it was about, and when she replied “Baseball,” I must have made some sort of face because she immediately added something to the effect of, “But it’s not really about baseball!”
