Book Review

My last books article before I left Madison was a a combo interview and review with Erin Celello, a Madison-area author who just published her debut novel, Miracle Beach.

On the whole, Miracle Beach is a pretty good book. It’s told from three points of view — Macy, Magda, and Jack — and I was impressed with how well Celello was able to differentiate between them. I also liked that each of them was flawed, and Celello wasn’t afraid to make them behave badly when the situation warranted. Grief can make people do awful things, and the book accepts (maybe even embraces) that fact.

One Sentence Summary: An evolutionary biologist tries to apply lessons from his field in his community, opening up a wide-ranging discussion of evolution, scientific research, and the scientists who do the work.

One Sentence Review: Reading The Neighborhood Project is like sitting down for a conversation with a favorite professor, full of personal stories, research questions, gossip about other scholars, and a range of topics that are more- or less-interesting depending on the reader’s predilections.

A long while ago, I asked blog readers to give me some questions about books on my long list of unreviewed titles. I then proceeded to do nothing with those questions, posting a scant number of reviews on this here book blog. But now I’m back, so I can start in with that reviewing thing.

The first book I’m catching up with is Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá because a bunch of my nonfiction-loving compatriots and BAND-Mates (Cass, Kit, and Amy) wanted to hear some thoughts.

The Glimpse Traveler is one of those stories about an unexpected adventure with unexpected people that seems to only happen when you’re young (or if you’re a career hippie). I’ve had a couple of these in my life, although none of them even compare to the epic road trip Marianne Boruch found herself on during a spring break trip in 1971 that she writes about in The Glimpse Traveler.

Uncoupled and curious, Marianne is a relatively unobtrusive narrator in the book. The story seems more about her companions, the road, and the experience of being young and traveling than it is about any major personal revelations or traumas. I liked that about this book.

Next to Love begins in December 1941, in the months before the first American troops are sent to Europe and the Pacific to fight in World War II. It’s a frantic time — young couples getting married before they’re deployed, families saying goodbye to husbands and sons, and women being left behind to fill the jobs men used to have. By the end of 1944, soldiers are returning (or, in many cases, not returning) home, and life tries to settle back into familiar rhythms.

A Note from Kim: This review is a guest post from my friend Erin, a grad student in journalism at UW-Madison, who studied science communication in the protrack MA program. Erin says she is prone to tripping her geek alarm over all kinds of topics, including physics, astronomy, dinosaurs, evolution, and the history of science. She also blogs about the science behind things in our daily lives at her blog, Astronaut Ice Cream. Make Erin feel welcome!

Here’s basically what I thought when I saw Feathers sitting on Kim’s bookshelf:

Feathers!!!!! They are awesome!

In the midst of The Move and other big life changes, I’ve found that reading fiction is somehow easier for me. I’m not sure why, but I’m certainly grateful since it made now a great time to read The Kitchen Daughter for BookClubSandwich. I’ll admit I was a little skeptical about the premise — after her parent’s death, a woman discovers she can communicate with the dead when cooking their recipes — but ended up satisfied with the book as a whole. (If you want a more detailed summary, the one on IndieBound sums things up nicely).

Review: Let the Great World Spin starts with a moment: a man, standing 110 stories up on the edge of one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center.  Across New York, people from all walks of life are being impacted by this single event, and their connected yet separate stories are what make up the narrative of this book.

I’ve wanted to read Let the Great World Spin since I heard about it in 2009. I’m in love with interconnected narratives, so this book seemed right up my alley, and for the most part it absolutely was. I feel like reading these connected short story type narratives is a puzzle, and that it takes an active reader, reading carefully, to pull everything together.

Two Sentence Summary: The high school cafeteria can be a scary place, especially for the kids who don’t fit the traditional definition of “normal.” Luckily, high school ends, and when you’re a grown up, quirky can be cool.

One Sentence Review: Robbins’ main thesis isn’t anything especially new, but her in-depth reporting and connections with her subjects make for an engaging read.