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Julie's reviews
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Julie posted a review at 2011-01-25 12:40:49 for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
(Language: English)
 
David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," set on the Dutch trading outpost of Dejima, just off the coast of Japan at the turn of the 19th century, is a much more straightforward but still masterly novel from the genius author of the puzzle novel/mind-bending "Cloud Atlas." I loved every. single. moment.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-11-03 11:18:29 for Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club).
(Language: English)
President Obama sought out an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” before its release, and I can see its allure for him: sympathetic politics, complex relationships, fine writing. I wonder if he also knew that it is downright raunchy? An intelligent but surprisingly dirty novel, I was drawn to it primarily because it was set in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the local scenery and landmarks do not disappoint. Franzen’s characters are interestingly flawed and sympathetic, and the reader feels for them even as they make mistake after mistake in their lives. It also gives a nuanced, detailed, and painfully realistic portrait of marriage and its attendant joys and heartbreaks. I loved it, often in spite of myself, and felt enormous empathy for the central characters and their struggles. The second half of the novel loses a little momentum, and the storylines involving the children aren’t nearly as compelling as those involving Walter, Patty, and their friend Richard. I can’t universally recommend it, because the graphic sexual content and liberal politics might make some readers uncomfortable, but it is a fine piece of writing with local color, and the characters are vividly real.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-09-08 09:58:35 for The Broom of the System.
(Language: English)
What a trip! Even though much of the philosophical content of DFW's "Broom of the System" just grazed me as it went over the top of my head, I completely enjoyed the humor and complexity of this novel, with outrageous character names like "Judith Prietht" and "Neil Obstat." A philosopher I am not; I have not studied Wittgenstein or read his Tractatus, around which DFW's "The Broom of the System" evidently revolves, but the ideas presented, about words and how they create and limit our realities, are meaty food for thought. The final line felt a lot like a roller coaster ride - everything dropped out from under me, and I loved it. Might just have to give this one another read.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-08-16 07:34:00 for Lucy.
(Language: English)
When the dust jacket proclaims a book is a “daring biotechnical thriller in the tradition of Mary Shelley and Michael Crichton” and then the actual science in the book amounts to about two badly written paragraphs, you know you’re in trouble. This is a dismal, prejudiced, poorly written thriller that pretends to be in love with science and nature when all it is really in love with is trying to convince the reader that all Christians are evil and all Americans are stupid and/or corrupt. In fact, the only good Christians and Americans, the author points out (repeatedly), are those that are truly ashamed of being Christians and Americans. You know what I’m ashamed of? Wasting my time on this stupid so-called novel. Complete and utter trash.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-08-12 09:25:19 for The Passage: A Novel.
(Language: English)
Don’t waste your time. This one got off to an okay start and then slowly devolved into THE WORST BOOK I’VE READ THIS YEAR. I had to skim the last 100 pages because I couldn’t waste any more of my life on it. Entertainment Weekly’s breathless, hype-generating review described it as part Stephen King’s “The Stand” and part Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” I didn’t realize they meant it literally, as in, this book feels completely cribbed from those two works. I’m still trying to figure out WHY this is the “hot book” of the summer – Stephen King himself wrote an enthusiastic blurb on the back cover. Where do I start with the many faults of “The Passage?” The author pretends that Christianity could be completely forgotten by a small colony of humans within a hundred years of the cataclysmic events that whittle the world’s population down to almost nil (the characters think Christmas was just some archaic winter festival), but these same characters still know their geography (the Eiffel tower is in Paris, France) and classic literature. One of them even references the story of Lazarus, which is IN THE BIBLE. But they forgot all about Jesus. Riiiiiight. The writing (which deteriorates as the book progresses) is infuriating, the action is often full of movie-theater clichés, the author’s smug photo (with dollar signs practically dancing in his eyes) annoys me, and in short, while I could not put this book down (once you’ve invested 400 pages in something, you kind of want to see it to end), I hated just about every minute of it. There were no moments of sublime pleasure, just fright and tension in the beginning and then increasing frustration over plot inconsistencies/lack of character development/horrible dialogue. Too long, too disorganized. Where was the editor? This man attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop??? The outraged questions continue to spill out of me. To sum up: I give The Passage a thumbs-down, and a pox on the cynical hype machine that placed this on my reading list. Fool me once… well, you know the rest.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-08-03 09:37:24 for Never Let Me Go.
(Language: English)
Kazuo Ishiguro portrays an exquisitely detailed and emotionally controlled alternate world which simmers with existential questions in the haunting, delicate, and horrific “Never Let Me Go.” While the book imagines a world where cancer has been cured at a terrible price, I have read that the most basic question raised by this novel is this: In what ways are the lives we are living constrained by our inability to imagine something else? Ishiguro’s characters, who we meet as children at boarding school, are by turns loving, capricious, fair-minded, shallow… in other words, they are just kids, struggling to discover who they are. Their humanity only enhances the nagging feeling that this placid world Ishiguro has created was born out of something deeply unholy. Is this a cautionary tale? I’m not certain. Whatever it is, it is a lovely piece of very literate pseudo-science fiction that leaves one troubled for days.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-07-26 08:55:24 for Cloud Atlas.
(Language: English)
I am dumbstruck with love for this novel. In a way, "Cloud Atlas" may have ruined recreational reading for me, because it feels as if I have been reading the same books over and over and have finally struck upon something completely new and daring. And where will I find more of this kind of writing? Obviously I plan to consume everything David Mitchell has ever written. The structure of "Cloud Atlas" is of six nested novellas, each interrupted midway to proceed with the next, and each character in some way consuming the previous narrative - it is like candy for the mind. Exploring the take-home themes, that stronger groups enslave and unleash cruelty upon weaker ones, is tough going, but the final sentences brim with so much hope for mankind (or am I being naive? Was it a naieve hope?), I finished this book and pressed it to my lips for a kiss. Magnificent.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-07-14 10:16:31 for The Lonely Polygamist.
(Language: English)
Entertainment Weekly bills Brady Udall’s “The Lonely Polygamist” as “The Novel You Must Read This Summer,” and their rave review – which suggests that the premise for HBO’s “Big Love” may have been lifted from an article Udall had published in Esquire magazine, exploring his own experiences as the child of a polygamist family – convinced me. It was a long book, and it was not very complex (I hate to say that the timing and blatancy of certain lines of dialogue seemed fit for a bad TV sitcom), but the characters were charming, well fleshed-out, and my heartstrings were certainly tugged by some of the hardships they endured. Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to 28 children, and the “Lonely Polygamist” himself, is often difficult to sympathize with and sometimes cartoonishly depicted. The unsung star of the book, of course, is Golden’s son Rusty. This forlorn boy’s particular triumphs and tragedies as an unhappy child looking for someone to pay attention to him are the most amazing, heartbreaking, and nuanced parts of this novel. “The Lonely Polygamist” is a good but not great novel, but it was an entertaining summer read, to be sure.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-06-22 08:40:09 for Olive Kitteridge: Fiction.
(Language: English)
I love short story collections, especially collections of connected short stories, and while Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge” is a fine specimen that packs a series of emotional gut-punches (“Security” hit me hardest), it left me wanting. I think the interconnectedness of these lives could have been crafted more carefully (I’m thinking of some of the other fine fiction in this vein that I’ve read recently, most notably “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann), and while Olive Kitteridge is an interesting character, and Strout explores the nuances of relationship with dexterity, I don’t necessarily feel that I have come away from this book a changed person. Does a book need to change a person? No, but I have so little time to read these days and there is such a wealth of truly mind-blowing fiction out there that my expectations are, perhaps, skewed high. I read “Olive Kitteridge” because it won the Pulitzer, and I kept wondering to myself – why this book? The reader’s notes in the back were preposterously cutesy, with the author and the main character pretending to be interviewed by the publisher of the book. It was appalling. Is this Pulitzer-prize winning fiction? I guess Strout is lucky that I wasn’t one of the judges, because this reader says no, not quite.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-06-08 11:38:20 for Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel.
(Language: English)
I'm pretty sure I know what Lily Casey Smith would think of the fact that I broke down in tears at certain points of her granddaughter Jeannette Walls' masterful "true life novel," but that doesn't diminish my admiration this amazing woman and her amazing life as spellbindingly recounted in "Half Broke Horses." A fitting companion piece to "The Glass Castle," Walls' incredible story of her childhood, and a satisfying and appropriately complex answer to the question many of us had after reading it - what made these people behave this way? We have our answer, even if Lily might scoff at it.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-05-19 11:55:48 for The Surrendered.
(Language: English)
Chang-Rae Lee’s “The Surrendered” tells the story of June, a painfully resilient woman who was orphaned during the Korean war and is now in the process of selling her antique shop in New York so that she can track down her only son, who has disappeared into Europe, leaving only a trail of postcards. June forever alters the lives of those she touches, often in unexpected and terrible ways. My heart was wounded by the shattering opening chapter, when as a young child June and her siblings become wartime refugees, and as this book continued to unfold into larger and larger portraits of tragedy and despair, all swirling around the endurance of its vivid central characters, I found myself falling in love with the mournful souls who try to help June along the way. This is the kind of book that makes me ache for the friends I met and lost in its pages. A long book with a uniquely challenging central character, but a very worthy read.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-04-19 08:48:01 for Bloodroot.
(Language: English)
Amy Greene’s “Bloodroot” is a book firmly fixed in a place – Appalachia – and she has painted it in such beautiful and bewitching ways, it honestly makes me long to live there. Greene has created – or re-created - a magical world so different from the electronic hamster wheel I often feel I’m stuck in, and so close to the landscape of my childhood, spent running and exploring the bluffs of the Willow River which I lived on, or crawling around the hot thorny woods and creeks of Missouri where we vacationed often while my dad hunted for wild turkeys. Greene’s novel explores the complicated dance between drawing close to and pulling away from our mothers and our families, the patience and self-fulfillment of curses, the power of love to drive one to make decisions that put your very life in peril, and the siren song of beauty. Loved this one! But read it at your peril. You might fall under the spell of Myra Odom, her family, and her lovely Bloodroot Mountain too.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-03-31 07:14:13 for Push: A Novel (Paperback).
(Language: English)
I cracked this book open at 10 pm last night, read the first paragraph, and pretty much knew I was going to finish it before I slept again. At 1 am I closed it and settled down to a fitful sleep, strewn with nightmares. A deeply disturbing, graphic, and unsettling portrait of a beautiful girl assembling hope and a life for herself out of less than nothing. An authentic, innovative, spellbinding narrative, but not for the faint of heart. Frankly, I can only recommend this if you have a thick skin and the ability to shake off disturbing imagery easily. I cannot, and the sickening abuse detailed in this book will haunt me for a long time. I may just skip the movie. I’ll hold on to the message of hope, but I need to scrub these dark and evil images from my mind.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-03-25 02:51:46 for The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition).
(Language: English)
What is there to say about this masterpiece? It won the Pulitzer Prize, and yet that feels like insufficient recognition. The Road left me shattered and dumbstruck and, strangely, feeling utterly hopeful for humanity’s future. Breathtaking.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-03-15 07:48:47 for Let the Great World Spin.
(Language: English)
I flat-out fell in love with this novel. Heartbreakingly authentic and fully realized characters, brilliantly threaded together, their secrets and desires deftly revealed to us against the filthy and gorgeous backdrop of New York City, glancing against Phillipe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers, all of it crafted in a dizzying and delightful song of love and loss. I read a copy on loan from the Ramsey County library, and returned it last night with a quiet blessing for the next reader who picks it up and wires it into their own heart. That I will purchase my own copy is a given, because “Let the Great World Spin” is the kind of book I want forever on my shelf, Colum McCann is the kind of author I want to learn to write from, this is the kind of work that, to me, really matters.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-03-01 11:12:23 for Zeitoun (Voice of Witness).
(Language: English)
“Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers was an eye-opener in terms of the terrifying abuses of power committed by law enforcement in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant and trusted New Orleans businessman with an unrelenting work ethic, stays behind to tend his properties and several clients’ homes while his family evacuates just before Katrina hits New Orleans. A tale of familial love, heartbreak, religious intolerance (Zeitoun is Muslim), and the devastation that was Hurricane Katrina. Not as phenomenal as I expected from the reviews I’d read, but pretty darn good.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-02-22 08:27:39 for A Gate at the Stairs.
(Language: English)
Lorrie Moore’s wit and humor is so distinctive that it is difficult to me to hear her character’s voices as their own: I find myself thinking “this is a college student as Lorrie Moore sees her,” or “this is a middle-aged restaurant owner as Lorrie Moore sees her,” and as a result I hated the first quarter of “The Gate at the Stairs,” and it felt busy and false to me. I wanted Moore to shut up and let her characters speak and live their own lives, and stop dressing them up with her puns and her puns and her puns. The fictional college town of Troy is Madison, plain and simple, and I resented Moore’s attempts to create a fictional carbon copy of a place both of us know very well. I decided, however, that if I was going to finish this book I had to surrender to some small suspension of disbelief, and that’s when I fell in love with Tassie and Mary, the toddler in her charge. There is a song out right now called “The Field” by Mason Jennings which sends me into convulsive crying fits every time I hear it and its tender longing of a parent for his child killed in the war, and yet I cannot seem to NOT listen to it when it comes on the radio. This book is the literary equivalent of that song for me. I was up half the night finishing it, unable to put it down, and up the other half weeping for the loss and sadness that Tassie and other characters in this (finally brilliant) novel experience on its densely packed and lyrical pages. In the middle of the night I found myself clutching my two-year old son desperately, pressing my lips to his hair, relieved in his steady presence and love in my life. “Go to sleep, Mommy,” he told me. And I smiled in the dark through my still-streaming tears. I don’t know if I can recommend this book, but if you can handle the heartbreak, it’s worth your time.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-02-09 08:51:43 for Columbine.
(Language: English)
If all you know about the Columbine shootings came from mainstream media sources in the first few months following, it is likely that most everything you know about this tragic incident is false. Dave Cullen’s “Columbine” was a shocking read for me, not because the details of the “basement tapes” and the killers’ journals were more disturbing than I had imagined, but because my media-informed assumptions about their motives (I have always believed that these boys were relentlessly bullied and lashed out in homicidal violence after being pushed too far) were completely wrong. Eric Harris was a classic psychopath and Dylan Klebold was suicidally depressed. They came together to hatch a plot to satisfy Eric’s desire to kill those whom he saw as inferior to himself and Dylan’s intense desire to end his own suffering. The boys were very plain about their motives and left extensive journals and videos explaining themselves and their actions, which were deliberately planned over the course of a year. The distortions which were broadcast by the media originated with the Jefferson County Sheriff, who made wild conjectures about motive without consulting the facts before him. The Sheriff’s department delayed releasing their full report on the incident until almost a full year had passed, primarily because they were covering up their failure to act on several previously reported threats from the killers. A gripping depiction of this tragic event and an eye-opener for anyone who thinks they have an understanding of the motives behind the killers’ actions, because – guess what – you’re probably wrong.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-02-08 08:53:30 for Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.
(Language: English)
I don’t know how many times I guffawed, chortled, and flat-out laughed at Mary Roach’s hilarious footnotes and wry asides in “Spook,” but it was more than once. Her search for scientific proof of the afterlife is merely an excuse for exercising her funny bone, and while some of the findings and studies seem to suggest or hint at life after death, none do so definitively, which is as it should be for those of us who walk by faith, as they say, and not by sight. Getting a peek into the real life of Alison Dubois (from the TV show “Medium,” one of my faves) was a special treat for me. I do wonder why Mary Roach is so willfully ignorant of the faith in which she was raised, but that seems to be the fashion with former Catholics. Regardless, a funny, breezy, easy read. And not spooky in the least.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-01-25 08:52:33 for Too Much Happiness: Stories.
(Language: English)
One of the reasons that the short story is such a powerful art form is its ability to pack a punch: a carefully crafted, searingly honest and compelling short story can just stop you in your tracks. Alice Munro has written a number of these, and “Child’s Play,” from her collection “Too Much Happiness,” is one. This was a bit of an odd collection for me, because the title story (which is last) is a disappointment. Granted, I am not a fan of the “historical fiction” genre, but “Too Much Happiness” felt completely disconnected from and vastly inferior to the rest of these fine stories, especially when set against a masterpiece like “Child’s Play,” which was a stunner.
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Julie posted a review at 2010-01-12 02:21:08 for Await Your Reply: A Novel.
(Language: English)
The dust jacket for Dan Chaon’s “Await Your Reply” states that it is “a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller,” and I agree with one of those assertions – it certainly has a propulsive plot involving identity theft and the interconnected lives of three strangers, and the writing is quite good, but “literary masterwork” is pushing it. I relished Chaon’s ability to toy with the reader’s expectations, and he can twist a plot with the best of them. Unfortunately, some major plot points hinge on improbable conditions which strain the reader’s suspension of disbelief, some of the details are niggling, and the fact that Chaon is a creative writing professor at Oberlin college sets this reader’s expectations (too?) high. An enjoyable and intriguing read, but not quite the knock-me-out-of-my-chair mind-blower that I thought it might be.
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Julie posted a review at 2009-12-31 07:45:22 for The Glass Castle A Memoir.
(Language: English)
A jaw-dropping memoir of a hardscrabble childhood lived in startling poverty and upheaval. My heart alternately broke and sang for the lives Jeanette Walls and her siblings cobbled together for themselves around the impoverished chaos their parents seemed to prefer. Walls has an amazing story to tell, and I absolutely loved every single page.
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Julie posted a review at 2009-12-29 07:58:59 for Blame: A Novel.
(Language: English)
Huneven’s novel about a woman in recovery who struggles to assuage her guilt and regain her sense of self after being convicted of killing two people while drinking and spending time in prison is a classic 12-step cautionary tale: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Indeed, most of the main characters are members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the brief glimpses into the rooms of AA are realistic and honest. Some of the action drags, and I found the beginning of the novel (told from a minor character’s perspective) a bit baffling, but on the whole I found “Blame” to be a thoughtful and compelling picture of how one tragic, irreversible mistake can change the path of one’s life. Not sure if this would be a less interesting novel to someone who has never been in recovery themselves, but that element certainly kept this reader engaged to the end.
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Julie posted a review at 2009-12-11 09:32:22 for The Kids Are All Right: A Memoir.
(Language: English)
I loved this terrific memoir, written by four siblings who were separated after their parents died when they were just kids (the oldest was 19, the youngest was 8). Written with wit and intelligence, each short chapter is written by a different sibling, sometimes reinforcing the others’ viewpoints, sometimes contradicting the mutable memories each has of what transpired. These were tough kids dealing with extraordinary loss and grief– they got into trouble, made mistakes: they weren’t perfect. They held on to their parents’ extraordinary love and sense of family even when they were scattered and bounced around to different homes. The youngest, Diana Welch, serves up the most heartbreaking and haunting recollections in the book, after she found herself in the care of a family who provided her a wealthy lifestyle and physical comforts but starved her of love, emotionally and verbally abused her, and kept her away from her siblings for years on end. A satisfying and heartwarming story of the Welch’s struggle to reunite their fractured family and keep the memory of their mother and father alive.
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Julie posted a review at 2009-11-24 12:13:31 for Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home.
(Language: English)
“I am the type of person who invariably finishes a book, no matter how much I have grown to hate it,” Rhoda Janzen writes in Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Unfortunately, I feel the same way, and when I considered all the other fine books on my reading list, finishing this trifling “memoir” took a Herculean effort. Janzen has a clear disdain for the “undereducated” and the spiritual among us, particularly Christians, whose witness of faith she finds embarrassing. She plumbs her Mennonite family’s quirks and food preferences for laughs, but neglects to give the reader what she wants – an answer to the question “well, what is a Mennonite?” – until the end of the book, and only then in brief. Considering my expectations going in (rave reviews failed to mention the anti-Christian bile it contains), this was a huge disappointment. Janzen uses the word “Mennonite” to refer to herself in the same way that a non-practicing Jew still refers to herself as Jewish: it has nothing to do with a religious practice, but rather, with genetics. Or in Janzen’s case, food. My new Least Favorite Book of 2009.
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