Book Review

Book #15 Love Stories in this Town

March 28, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

For reasons which will become obvious, I read this quickly and with one eye slightly shut to minimise the impact; it became a bit of an honour pact with myself to get through it and prove I could do, without falling apart.

Love Stories in this Town is a collection of short stories, focusing first on a set of people and then on Lola, a girl who turns gradually into a woman. As a set of stories, they are well written, tender snapshots of brief moments in the life of people. It struck me this is exactly what I might like to write – and could write. Whether I could do it well enough to get published is of course a moot point, but as a project it felt like someone starting out in writing and doing a good job of their first project. So from that point of view, very well written and worth reading. I’d go and read more of her later works based on this.

From a personal point of view though, it started with ttc, went on to miscarriage, included infertility, marriages falling apart, fear, childlessness, loneliness, lost babies and even a brain damaged one. So not really one for the babylost 🙄

I do think books should have warnings on them sometimes. I picked up one solitary book in the library last week and it was about a Frederick – even Amelie said the other day that both her current reads have Freddie’s in them.

However, an okay book. Not brilliant or unputdownable but a very solid collection of short stories to showcase an undoubted reading talent.

Book #14 Life from Scratch, Melissa Ford

March 22, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

I’m really quite cross that I liked this; I’m feeling all sucky uppy because of it. The reason? Well the author Melissa Ford, is the owner of the Stirrup Queens Blog which is possibly the absolute default (along with Glow, can you have two defaults?) places on the internet for infertility/loss/associated pregnancy crap. It’s also home of the Stirrup Queen’s Completely Anal List of Blogs That Proves That She Really Missed Her Calling as a Personal Organizer. And you know, I did know about that site and that list, even before Freddie and certainly after, because I intended to submit to her yearly round up – but didn’t. And then her book, Life from Scratch, appeared free on my Kindle one night and I downloaded it and then happened to see a tweet a few days later which meant I realised it was HER book and then I submitted my blog to the list and then I friended her on Twitter and she friended me back because she’s nice and… and… and…

And now I’ve given her book 5/5 on Amazon and I feel like I’m sucking up to the popular girl in class.

Only I’m not. I don’t give away 10/10 or 5/5 easily. To get either you have to pass the read again/have on THE shelf/ recommend to Alison and then some criteria.

Life from Scratch is actually good enough, for me, to do all those things. But it did something else too, something that a book just has to be good for, something a book doesn’t need clever language or even clever ideas for. Something that a person telling their story, or a story with all their heart and soul can do.

It just touched me.

It’s a book about someone who is sad and a little self absorbed, going through a tough time and losing everything. She’s sad because her marriage is gone, she’s sad because she isn’t sure who she is or what she can do. She’d like children, though that isn’t a major theme. She doesn’t quite fit in her family, though she loves them. She’s just a little busy with her own self and sadness and a little blind and trying really quite hard to get back on her feet and not be dumb and to try new things (and new boyfriends) and she gets up and she gets knocked down and then… well… you have to read it.

Of course it also helped that it is a book about a woman with a blog. Heavens, what’s not to like? 😉

I’m not saying this is a brilliantly clever book (sorry Mel!) but it is a brilliantly touching book, especially if you’ve ever sat on your sofa and wondered if you could BE more lonely in a house where the person you love is just across the hall. It’s a brilliantly touching book if you’ve been so sad and so empty and somehow found yourself up and moving the next day. It’s like the book equivalent of not getting out of bed till you actually hate your bed so much you’d rather hoover. it’s the book equivalent of sobbing to Pretty Woman and then getting the hell out on a coach to 5k run.

And yes, knowing enough about the author to know that when she describes the softness of the foot of a child she wishes she was mothering, it is because she has simply ached to have a child, helps. It’s good to read a book knowing the author has been in the depths of where you are instead of secretly grumbling that it ‘isn’t like that’.

It’s a book with depth, and sunken depths, and hope and enlightenment. It didn’t teach me anything new about myself but it reminded me how much I’ve grown.

I guess that makes it a feel good novel.

But it also makes it good enough that it will get out of my Kindle and on to The Shelf at some point too.

*salute*

DBM – you don’t really need to ask. You’ll cry, but with her.

Book #13 The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan

March 22, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

Amy Tan has made it so quickly into my ‘favourite authors’ list that I’m reading her books regardless of whether that stops me from getting 60 new authors under my belt this year. I don’t want to wait till next year to read what else she has to offer, I want to read them now.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is… exquisite. The words to describe it are trite really but none the less true for it. It is moving, thought provoking, maybe life changing. As a story and as prose, it is captivating and as a description of a mother-daughter relationship that is difficult, it struck a lot of chords with me, not all of them comfortable ones.

In brief, it tells the story of Ruth, a first generation Chinese American at a pivotal point in her life. She’s not quite happy, not quite fulfilled and uncomfortably aware she is not fulfilling everything she wishes she were, while all too aware of the edges of her comfort zone. And it also tells the story of her mother, a woman slipping quickly into dementia with a history and a past from the days of 1930-1950’s China which needs to be told so her daughter understand who she is and where she came from.

The story slips between the two time periods effortlessly and the characters really do grow and alter before your eyes. So little happens, yet everything changes, in the way that is so often true of life for all of us. It is not always the wrenchingly big things that alter everything. All the characters, all their foibles and flaws, are recognisable from the teen step daughters to the mothers (many of them) who little the story.

I think it would be impossible to do justice to the book; read it, learn a little more about life in a time British school history lessons ignore, stand beside some women who watched everything change. You will not, I think, be disappointed, not least because, without tying the ends up in a pretty bow, there is a sense of something having been accomplished through communication at the end of it. All the people, imperfect as they are, make some effort and there is some reward for that.

It’s a pleasing thought.

BLM index – not bad. It has a bit of this and that in it, as life does, but nothing so terrible as to pull your heart out.

Book #9 The Observations by Jane Harris

February 19, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

Wow.

My first real riveting read of the year; the first book to make me just want to keep going until it was finished, with as few interruptions as possible. The Observations is the type of book which makes you race to reserve their whole catalogue – I was gutted to discover it is her only novel, but I savoured it all the more for it.

The story is told by Bessy, Irish girl with a murky past and a smutty turn of phrase. She’s young and we join her on the run from a past life, already clearly a young lady who knows how to handle herself. The book is set in the late 1800’s in the north of England, an Irish girl on the run from a shaky upbringing in the slums of Edinburgh/Glasgow or wherever she chooses to say she came from at the time. The complex mixture of race and place neatly avoids stereotyping either of herself or the towns while giving the whole scenario a pleasingly unreal, story world feel. Nothing feels quite real throughout the book, nor does it ever slide into the fantastic either.

Bessy finds herself working as maid for a ‘big house’ that she happens upon, where life is definitely not quite as it seems. her ‘missus’ Arabella Reid, slides quickly from aristocratic and aloof to deeply odd and Bessy finds herself sliding around in the clutches of a woman who is both completely convincingly sane and clearly utterly bonkers. Bessy, young, impressionable and confused from an abusive childhood tries her hardest to be loved and needed but is unable to resist a spiteful prank when her feelings are hurt.

The prank goes wrong and Bessy, like so many damaged children, can only see herself as the soul cause of the results and tries, inevitably, to fix it. She is jealous, loving, sassy and determined, foul mouthed and individual and the story is told cleverly through a first person narrative of her writing up her experiences.

The Observations is nearly 500 pages long; at 250 I was thinking that it was beginning to look as if it had a pleasantly interesting, but not unpredictable end in sight – I was reading it on my Kindle, which gives you less focus on how far through the book you are. When I realised I was only half way through I was slightly stunned; what on earth was left? But then, a quirky take on a ‘maid below stairs, hard luck story’ takes a dramatic and sinister turn. It becomes a thriller, a mystery, potentially a ghost story, a tale of mental health and marriage and dysfunctional lives, a story about village hierarchy and over-reaching ambition blotting out the real truths of relationships and love.

Every time I thought I had a handle on how it was all going to untwist, it took another turn; every time it seemed to be on its way to concluding, another tail end of story would worm its way back to the front. It was, in an unassuming, almost clumsy, far from over-worked cleverness way, quite brilliant.

This book passes the Alison test, it passes the recommending test. It definitely passes the “will I read it or the author again test?” I’d say it is a must read.

9/10 for everyone.

(I’d give it a very mild, you’ll probably be just fine, BabyLostMother warning.)