Category Archives: Reading

My TBR (to be read) pile, my take on my favorite reads and more

Technique, Reading

What makes you put a book down?

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So I’m undertaking a major reading project right now, since I don’t want to push myself to write in the midst of some other project. (What was it again? Oh yeah, Operation Make-Rachel-Stop-Crying. It’s a full time job.) I picked probably twenty or so books that have been nominated for various awards in my genre or published by my target presses (and that were available at my library) and have plowed my way through several.

But not all. Maybe I’ve gotten a little burnt out on reading (is that possible?), but in the last week or two, I’ve suddenly had a hard time sticking to a book. This week, I tried two novels where the writing was so bad, I had to skip half the book or more. (I still wanted to know how it ended, though that was at least partially so I’d never be tempted to pick up the book again.) Telling vs. showing was the main problem. I said it was like the author was standing in front of me, holding up a curtain as he dictated the action on the other side.

Although bad writing is always a turn off, it’s not always enough to make me give up on a book, or at least half of it. Some of the books I just couldn’t not put down lost me in character soup. In one case, the story was told from one character’s POV, but by the end of the first chapter, we’d met so many people I couldn’t remember which character that was. And I kept forgetting in subsequent chapters.

I think it all boiled down to a basic factor: I just couldn’t get involved in the characters. Something about the narration style (telling) was too distant or confusing for me to make an emotional connection and sympathize with characters. And I’m realizing that life’s too short for boring books (or boring novels, anyway), so I’m not willing to persevere through a hundred pages to see if I suddenly start liking a character.

(And since life’s too short for boring books, I’d better work twice as hard to make sure mine aren’t boring!)

What do you think? What makes you put down a book?

Photo by Wade Kelly

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Technique, Reading

The dangers of breaking genre convention

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A couple weeks ago I read devoured an award-winning mystery. (In the Woods by Tana French; it won the Edgar for Best First Novel.) I, personally, thought it was fantastic, and apparently so did the MWA (Publishers Weekly and Booklist also gave positive reviews).

inthewoodsBut not everyone agrees with us. The Amazon rating is 3 stars (oddly, very evenly distributed among each rating level); the GoodReads rating is about 3.5 stars.

There are several reasons for this, all thoroughly explained in long reviews, of course, but the most common complaint [SPOILER ALERT]: the book presents two mysteries, but never solves one of them.

This actually didn’t bother me. The book was about how the (present day) case ruined the protagonist’s life, and as his life unraveled, the story matched his psychological state. So in that sense, the ending was highly satisfying—it was completely appropriate to the book. (And the other mystery is solved, though not entirely “well.”)

But my point is: there’s no better way to upset the readers of a genre (especially ones like romance and mystery) by flouting the genre’s conventions.

What do you think? Have you seen books successfully flout the conventions of a genre?

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Reading

Am I Not a Man? The Dred Scott Story by Mark Shurtleff – Review

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You probably can’t tell this from reading this blog, but I used to teach (as a TA, but still, 3-4 classroom hours a week) a college class on American constitutional history (and political science and economics). You want to know how the Constitution came about, and how it’s evolved since then? I’m your lady.

Abolitionists (specifically William Lloyd Garrison) called the original Constitution “A compact with hell.” (He was a fiery type.) The practice of slavery was antithetical to the principles the Union was founded upon.

Mark Shurtleff’s new novel, Am I Not A Man? The Dred Scott Story, tell the story of a landmark case in constitutional support for slavery.

Dred Scott, his wife and two daughters (one of whom was born in free territory) were taken to a free territory by their master. The legal precedent at the time was “once free, always free”—if a master took a slave to a free state/territory, they were considered freed, and if they returned to a slave state, they must be released.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court reversed this decision, relegating the African Americans to the status of property, not human before the law in 1857. Although later freed (because his widowed owner remarried to a prominent abolitionist Congressman), Dred died before the beginning of the bloodiest war in American history, the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery—not the Emancipation Proclamation, folks!), and the 14th Amendment (which made former slaves full citizens—well, the men, anyway. While the 15th Amendment gave freed slaves the right to vote, women would wait another 60 years for the vote.).

Although this obviously isn’t something we should be proud of, it’s important to remember and to examine the failings in our history. The Constitution did inculcate slavery in the founding laws of our land. However, the Constitution is a flexible, living document, and it was amended to overrule the Dred Scott decision.

The Dred Scott Story tells the story of not only this trial, but of the slave who would take his challenge to the highest court in the land.

It’s an important story, and I think this is the fullest fictionalized treatment that the story had received. Sometimes the story was a little more concerned with telling us history than making history compelling by focusing on the characters. A few times we veered into melodrama, and occasionally Dred came off as a little too much of the “noble savage” archetype.

But it’s not hard to overlook those things (and because I received an ARC, I was probably more harsh than I would be if I had picked up the book on my own). Edited to add: the more I’ve considered this review, I realized that I wanted to add that this book really does make Dred Scott come alive. And in the end, that is how we can make history accessible, and truly learn from it, in a way no other words on a page can—through the eyes of someone who was there. (Though I really wanted there to be a historical note—I always wonder what details were real, and which ones were invented in a historical novel!)

This story is one that we should all know and understand, so that we can recognize our historical collective shortcomings, and never allow that kind of injustice to be perpetuated again.

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Reading

My Not-So-Fairy-Tale Life by Julie Wright – Review

Once again, I’m catching up with the last of the reviews for my Summer Reading Thing list. Website review tomorrow, and be sure to participate in the craft book club poll!

Suzanna Quincy has had a hard life—and, as the back cover of My Not-So-Fairy-Tale Life says, she hasn’t made it any easier on herself by turning to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of her abusive childhood. But when she finds out she’s pregnant, Suzanna knows something has to change.

mynotsocoverShe ends up moving across the country to live with her brother—a convert to the LDS church. Although Suzanna slowly acclimates to her new life, she’s still left with a lot of turmoil (and the pregnancy hormones don’t help). Kicking and screaming (sometimes literally), she slowly lets the people around her into her life. But believing in God? That might be asking a bit too much.

Suzanna also has to make a choice about her baby’s future. Can she raise a child when she thinks she’s a nobody? Or can Suzanna choose to give her child the stable family life she always wanted, even if it means adoption?

Julie wrote a guest post for us here on making readers love unlovable characters, so I was especially interested to look at the character of Suzanna in this book. Yes, she was unlovable—even she thought so. But she was still a sympathetic character—she was still someone I was rooting for, someone I wanted to see overcome the obstacles in her life (and stop putting them in her own way, too!). (Take a look at Julie’s great guest post for more on how she did this!)

The changes Suzanna made in her life were also pretty convincing, as was the emotional aftermath of Suzanna’s baby’s birth. Some of the changes, however, didn’t seem to get a full treatment, since the book spans over two years (and most of that is in the last three chapters).

What do you think? What does it take to make a 180 convincing in a character?

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Reading

Recovering Charles by Jason F. Wright – Review

Once again, I’m catching up with the last of the reviews for my Summer Reading Thing list. Website review tomorrow, and be sure to participate in the craft book club poll!

I received this book as a freebie with my registration packet at a conference I attended in April. As you might expect, for a free book I didn’t pick myself, my expectations were pretty low.

(Okay, so maybe some evil part of me secretly resented having this foisted upon me and I was hoping I wouldn’t like it. But that’s the evil part. I don’t really listen to that. That often.)

In Recovering Charles, Luke Millward has a difficult relationship with his parents. His mother descended into depression and prescription painkillers after her own mother’s death, and eventually committed suicide. His father, Charles, was also incapable of dealing with his grief and devolved into alcoholism. Luke grew up to become an award-winning freelance photographer—and have little contact with his father.

It was kind of ironic that I ended up reading this book this weekend—four years after Hurricane Katrina. In Recovering Charles, Luke receives a call in the wake of Katrina. His estranged father had settled there—and now he was missing. Luke finally resolves to go to New Orleans to recover his father’s body. But he never expected to find his father’s legacy.

The beginning was a little odd, since not a whole lot was happening in the present, and we were regularly thrown back into fragmented flashbacks. However, once Luke actually got to New Orleans, I really understood where he was coming from, and how he felt about his father (and the flashbacks stopped).

One big coincidence in the book seemed just a little too big. I’ve read before that coincidence in fiction is okay—but you really have to set it up, and usually it’s better if the coincidence doesn’t resolve a problem. But in all, I enjoyed the book. I liked learning about who Luke’s father had become and seeing Luke come to understand how people can change.

What do you think? How big of a coincidence is too big? Is coincidence better as an inciting incident or a resolution?

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Reading

Tower of Strength by Annette Lyon – Review

Once again, I’m catching up with the last of the reviews for my Summer Reading Thing list. Website review tomorrow, and be sure to participate in the craft book club poll!

I bought Tower of Strength back in March, when I first met Annette Lyon (the author). It’s the latest of her series on books centered around the old LDS temples built in Utah.

In Tower of Strength, Tabitha married young, became pregnant almost immediately—and is widowed just two months after her wedding. She spends the next six years hundreds of miles away, building a life for herself and her son. When her hometown’s newspaper owner offers Tabitha the Sanpitch Sentinel, she decides to return home.

But things aren’t easy for her there. She has to see her bitter former mother-in-law regularly, she faces opposition to a woman owning the paper as well as the stories she’s printing, and she undertakes breaking a wild horse. Meanwhile, she develops feelings for the newly-widowed Samuel Barnett—but she struggles to let herself rely on anyone else after her first husband’s death left her abandoned. Samuel, too, has to work through his own problems as he learns a whole new trade with unpredictable animals—and finds himself falling in love only months after losing his beloved wife.

The characters in Tower of Strength are complex and well-rounded. I think the only thing that detracted for me in the book was the fact that I didn’t really “feel” like Samuel was English. He “sounded” just as Western as the other characters—though maybe if I’d read his passages in an English accent, he might have sounded more accurate 😉 . It could also be a time period thing.

What do you think? How many little speech patterns does it take to convey a character is from another culture? How much is too much?

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Reading

Spires of Stone by Annette Lyon – Review

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I’m catching up on my Summer Reading Thing reviews today, and we’ll be back on the website reviews soon!

Spires of Stone is a retelling of Much Ado about Nothing—a story of false accusations, slander, verbal sparring, making amends and forgiveness.

I was most surprised by how much I remembered of Much Ado—Annette used not only the plot lines (though she did change them slightly and eliminated a few characters), but also the actual lines from the play. (I’ve seen the play live once, six years ago I think, and the Kenneth Brannagh movie maybe three times in my life—had no idea I’d remember all that! Oh, and I think I might’ve seen the opera Beatrice and Benedick. . . . Maybe it’s not so surprising after all.)

My favorite parts were the scenes where Claude (Claudio) and Phillip (Don Pedro) are conspiring to trick Ben (Benedick) into admitting his feelings for Bethany (Beatrice) (and Hannah (Hero) and Marie (Margaret/Ursula, here) conspiring to do the same favor for Bethany). I especially loved how Benedick’s and Beatrice’s lines from those scenes translated into their internal monologue.

In all, I thought this was a good adaptation of a classic. Of course, Annette changed some of the plot for her characters—notably, they don’t pretend Hannah is dead just to make Claude pay. I was thinking maybe this wouldn’t work in fiction anyway—after all, in a play, there’s a lot less suspension of disbelief. You don’t have to stop and think, “Would someone really believe a falsely-accused woman could die of shame?” because it’s happening right before your eyes—and not even on a TV or movie screen, but with real people (even though you know it’s not real, there’s some evidence that our brains aren’t quite smart enough to differentiate between simulated reality and reality).

What do you think? Does fiction have to be more “believable” than drama, especially live-acted drama?

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Reading

Having Hope by Terri Ferran – Review

I’m catching up on my Summer Reading Thing reviews today, and we’ll be back on the website reviews soon!

I won this book in a drawing at my bookstore in March, and now I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. In Having Hope by Terri Ferran, Kit Matthews has the guy of her dreams—but she wants to do something to contribute to the world. When she finds out about an opportunity to work with orphans in Romania, Kit feels like she should go, even though everything seems to be conspiring against her going. But once she’s in Romania, things get worse. Her parents decide to get a divorce, she’s far from her home and boyfriend, and a handsome Romanian starts pursuing her.

I loved the section in Romania although overall, the picture of the Romanian people didn’t always come off as flattering. But “experiencing” a new culture was fun, especially since I’ve known a few Romanians. I laughed out loud at some of their encounters in this book, and their experiences kept me turning pages.

However, I didn’t find the end of the book satisfying. Ultimately, I think that I didn’t see the character change enough. Yeah, she’d been through these neat experiences that could have really changed her life. I wasn’t expecting her to do a 180, but it just seemed like the middle section of the book had no impact on who the character was at the end.

What do you think? How much does a character have to change to make the end of the book satisfying?

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