The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

I feel like I’ve been Negative Nancy about recent book posts, so I wanted to write about a book I loved. The Weird Sisters was excellent. I picked this up as an audio book to fill my quiet drives, and it turned out to be one of the better ones I’ve ever read (but I listened to it- whatever, you get my meaning).

The story centers on 3 sisters who each have their own drama: Rosamund (Rose), Bianca (Bean), and Cordelia (Cordy). I don’t wanna say the problems because I’m afraid of spoilers, but they’re nothing too over the top. They discover that their mother has breast cancer, and they all move back in with parents in a small college town in Ohio. Their father, a Shakespeare professor, keeps the book serious and funny enough with quotes (which attract me fiercely!) and gives nods to the Brit lit fans out there.

The sisters are believable characters and, more importantly, relatable to me and my loved ones. I’m the oldest of 4 girls; Rose’s issues as an older sibling were familiar to me. I wasn’t expecting to empathize so strongly with her (I thought I’d be more like city girl Bianca or wanderer Cordy) but nevertheless I recognized Rose’s control issues within myself.

I burned the CDs for later rereading and downloaded the ebook. It was a light, comforting book that had an Alice Hoffman/Sarah Addison Allen feel to it without the supernatural elements. I liked Eleanor Brown’s Facebook page and complimented her on her good work. She’s such a cool person she took the time to respond and thank me for reading; not too many published authors do that J I can’t wait to send copies to my own sister!

This is us!

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We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

I’ll put up a couple disclaimers now: I quit the book halfway through, and I had expectations about how the book was going to go which were not met. I understand these are my failings and not the author’s. But I still didn’t like the book. Child killers are an interesting concept that needs to be developed/addressed, but not in the way Shriver attempted.

Kevin was a teen who shot up his New York high school. The book is narrated from his mother’s point of view, through a series of letters written to her estranged husband. Unfortunately, she focuses more on her husband and her feelings as opposed to Kevin. I understand that Shriver is trying to pinpoint her as the problem (or she is trying to blame herself because her husband has) but it’s exhausting to a reader, especially since Kevin and his version of the story is what I wanted to read about.

 I’ve had this morbid fascinating with mass murders and serial killers for a while now. I always have just wanted to understand their thinking; why was it okay to them that they ended someone else’s life? How could they see other people as lesser to their wants? Where did their compassion go?

I was hoping this book would be third person omniscient narrated, describing Kevin growing up and the signs of his murderous tendencies would be analyzed and dealt with by parents and experts. Essentially, I was hoping for Dexter but when the killer was still in the child stages. Yup, I know this is my fault, but I’;m being honest. First-person narrative from the mom’s perspective killed this book for me (PUNNY).

This book also hit a little close to home because her husband is putting pressure on her to have children and the horrible feeling she had during her pregnancy. I’ve had to deal with a similar situation with an ex, and it was something that killed the relationship. Reading how alien the pregnancy was for the mother and how she was too self-absorbed to be able to raise Kevin correctly poked at the fear that I once had: am I so selfish that I don’t want kids? Or was my aversion to motherhood from some other reason?

To be fair, she looks way more like a serial killer's mother than I do.

It was uncomfortable to read because I wanted to kill the husband and for her to forget about Kevin. I didn’t understand why she was punishing herself because of what her son did. In retrospect, Shriver might have been sneakily trying to make her the villain in the story, but that feels too obviously Freudian to me; it’s not always the mother’s fault. Ultimately she’s trapped herself in this scenario where her cage is her guilt and no one is there to help her through it. It might make for a good horror book, but ultimately it wasn’t fast-paced enough for me and the characters were annoying. I might watch the movie later to finish the story, but I definitely won't spend the time reading it.

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Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich

This was recommended to me by someone who likes a lot of the same books I do, but it flopped. I think I understand what Evanovich was trying to accomplish, because I appreciate good-humored supernatural books (especially with the theme of the 7 deadly sins) but this one had some definite plot issues. Basically Elizabeth, a baker in small-town Massachusetts, loves her solitary lifestyle as a baker in a creepy, old house her aunt left her. Then this guy shows up, says she has magical powers and that they need to go find these stones which embody the 7 deadly sins. Even though Lizzy doesn’t really want to change her life, she goes along with him because… I’m really not sure. I have a few problems with this book, including language, bad plot devices, and lack of background.

A lot of Goodreads people bitched that it was just like her Plum series, but worse. Since I haven't read the Plum books, I couldn't tell ya.

The author’s language could be confusing because the main character had limited understanding of the situation. Elizabeth is entering a new world and has a new identity, but has no interest in exploring either, so we’re left with a flat POV. I think we were supposed to be wow-ed by her ability to make AMAZING cupcakes, but I just got hungry and irritated with her narrow-mindedness, especially since her coworkers were uber into magic. Her coworker even tried some spells with hilarious results.

The governing body of Magical People Who Are Given a Weird Title sent a guy to help her out. Diesel (crap name) is always trying to get in Lizzy’s pants, but can’t, cuz both of them could lose their powers, or some such bullshit; it was a terrible and poorly disguised plot device. It seemed like Diesel was trying to copy Matthew McConaughey’s rogue-ish adorableness but failed utterly.  

In addition, Evanovich doesn’t give a lot of background. who Diesel is or what the agency he works for is trying to do is never fully explained; neither is the cat that came to the house or Lizzy’s aunt’s true identity (we’re meant to suspect she was magical). I know writing backstory can be tedious, but it’s necessary for the readers to be able to follow along with the story. If I were Diesel and was trying to persuade someone that this whole other world exists, I would give the full history of it and the stones they’re searching for instead of just trying to build up enough sexual tension without the expectation of release.

But the worst aspect was that the mystery of the stones and why they’re important isn’t explained at all. She’s blindly sent to look for ‘em because she has a fake, poorly developed power that never woulda flown in the X-men universe.

This guy was a mutant whose skin could stretch to whatever length, which is gross and pretty useless. His abilities were still better than Lizzy's.

She also has no idea what the bad guy’s purpose in finding them was. I mean I got most of the way in to the book and still have no idea why they're so important.

One plus: Evanovich interpreted what “gluttony” was in interesting and creative ways, but it still was not enough for me to recommend the book to anyone. I had to dig into my Kim Harrison series to restore my faith in supernatural books. 

I prefer Wrath, anyway.

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Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

This book is the fake diary of Bridget Jones: British, professional, single woman who struggles with all issues women do. She feels she's overweight, codependent, and has the worst family and silliest job ever. I looked forward to this book because I appreciate new twists on classic books. I felt like it would make me not so serious about Pride & Prejudice, and I like British humor in embarrassing situations. I found the book to be okay as opposed to great, though, mostly because of my own expectations.

She wrote in the style of Louise Rennison whom I ABSOLUTELY love, but with more adult situations. I liked the twist in the mom character, who turned out into a complete child and flipped the story around on her immature daughter. Her friends were awesome characters and Darcy was a good take on Mr. Darcy.

Colin Firth double-dipped into the Darcy character.

Overall, I found it funny and worth the read.

HOWEVER, the genre had been wearing on me of late and I don’t like it as an adaption of P&P. Bridget didn’t have siblings to contend with, she’s not a capable woman like Lizzy Bennet, and, aside from her love interests, the plot isn't at all similar to P&P. This is not necessarily a fault of the book, but it should be noted for those like me who looked forward to a spin on a classic.

In addition, the film is pretty crap, especially after having read the book. Aside from the fact that I hate Renee Zellwegger, the plot was changed to make her admirable, and her parents’ situation was completely changed.

No one needs to see that.

Finally, I would recommend it, but I don’t need to read the whole series.

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House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Sorry horror fans, this book is not getting a good grade from me. My book club picked it initially because it had rave reviews for its deep layers of meaning and subtle scariness. Everything in the book including the formatting was supposed to make a reader feel claustrophobic, but it fell flat for me (I’m an obvious kind of person). I barely made it into the second chapter. It was a lot less disorienting than White Is for Witching, but it was so slow and unsatisfying as it went that we got impatient with it and dropped it.

The opening had a guy saying he was a crazy hermit because of a book (or a movie? a book about a movie?) and how its subject didn’t exist. Obviously he was meant to be an unreliable narrator, and the bait to get the readers interested in the novel. However, because he didn’t even know what he was talking about, the bait was unappealing.

Once we started reading The Navidson Record (the book which drove him crazy), it describes a film about a family with interesting backstories; I kind of found the backstories to be done already in movies like Paranormal Activity where the mom was a supermodel turned housewife and had all the frustrations that went along with that transition, and Dad was a director trying to settle down and “get away from it all” and so they bought a creepy house. However, the plot was too slow to get me interested in the movie the book was describing.

Also, this formatting. Wtf.

The plot was so slow I finally looked up the ending to see if it would be interesting to keep going on. For me, it wasn’t; I’m not telling you to look up spoilers, but I’m just saying that it saved me a lot of time. When I read a book like that, I don’t care about spoilers and surprise endings, but I do care about how well the author twists the novel to make the surprise ending worth it. For example, (and here’s an old spoiler here that I presume you’ve heard of but don’t read on if you care) in The Sixth Sense, I knew the ending before I saw the actual movie, but I still wanted to see it because I wanted to evaluate how well M. Night Shyamalan hid the fact that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. 

Other 'surprise' endings just feel flat to me, like the writers threw it in just to end the story. An example is The Forgotten. God, I hated that movie.

Don't recommend that, either.

While I don’t think House of Leaves was like that (the author definitely had that ending in mind when he was writing it) I still don’t think the ending was worth going reading all that confusing crap to get to it. 

In conclusion, I quit House of Leaves because I was bored and confused. I would not recommend it. If someone feels otherwise and gave it the time, I'd appreciate hearing why they loved it! 

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