Monthly Archives: September 2008

“You’re Not You” by Michelle Wildglen

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The Book Fairy left this in my mailbox so, not being one to monkey with fate, I read it.

What a book.  I loved it and it gave me the willies.  I laughed out loud and I choked up. Yes, I know, “ I laughed, I cried”.  I love a cliché (… and a parade – but I digress.)
I almost put it down and churlishly walked away after one risqué bit, but am glad I did not, and will explain later…
“You’re Not You” is the story of a 20-some-odd college student, Bec, who is a bit lost.  She doesn’t love school, she doesn’t love her boyfriend.  In fact, she really doesn’t love herself enough to rectify either situation.Bec just goes through the physical motions without thought for the spiritual side of life.

I don’t mean God; she tries church and it doesn’t fulfill her.  “Lent came, the season for sacrifice, and I gave up church.”  She is trying to fill the void and find the inner sense of verve you achieve by doing something inspiring and worthwhile.

Bec decides she has had enough of waitressing and becomes the care-giver to Kate.  Kate is a 30ish, vivacious woman who is also trapped.  Bec is trapped in her mind, while Kate is trapped in her rapidly deteriorating ALS-ridden body.
The literal paralysis that Kate faces is a transformative sounding board for Bec.  Both women have trials to face and they become close.
Bec watches Kate and learns from her.  She does her make-up.  She dresses her.  She develops an eye through Kate for style and decor and above all, cooking.
Bec finds dormant passions in herself that start to leak out.  As Kate deteriorates, Bec blossoms.
It is more tentative and elastic than just its chrysalis dynamic.  The emergence from the proverbial cocoon is an obvious parallel for both Kate and Bec.  Kate faces betrayals and developments too.  We are more involved with Bec as the protagonist, but Kate is unquestionably a force.
In fact, it is occasionally laugh-out-loud funny to be with Kate and Bec when they let their hair down.  Neither is timid and the honesty is buoyant.  The joy they feel when cooking together is enthralling.  The exuberance of market day and the dinners they share are tangible in their release of sadness.  One scene, in which they share buttered toast and fight over who is going to go make it, is a riot.
The progression of the story is such that the early unfamiliarity of the characters in compromising situations breeds an awkwardness that mostly disappears by the end.  When we see Bec having sex in the beginning of the book, it made me extremely uncomfortable.  I don’t enjoy reading about anyone’s demoralization and wanted to put the book away.
Consequently, it was a pleasure to see Bec’s self-confidence, and, by extension, self- respectfullness, grow.  As she spends more and more time with Kate (and Evan – the idiot), she spends more time in her own head and certain masochistic tendencies are squelched.  She takes better care of Kate and of herself.
As Kate falls into rapid decline, it is hard to read.  It was too close to home for me having been with my mother as she died, but it is well-written and almost transcending in its brutal lucidity.  It changes everything.
I hoped there was going to be this change and was relieved.  Horrified, but relieved.  By the end of, “You’re Not You,” Bec has found her spiritual side.  She has found something worth fighting for … a reason for working hard and succeeding.  A Coup de Foudre and voilá – contentment.Editor’s Note:  Email Jen with suggestions for future reviews at jpmann@sbcglobal.net

“Eclipse” and “Breaking Dawn” by Stephenie Meyer

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Eclipse, Book Three in the saga is good.  Not quite as fabulous as the first – that new car smell is hard to duplicate – but good.  It is strange how such a large book (629 pages) goes by so quickly.  Like a bowl of pistachios you sit near and then suddenly find yourself standing in a pile of shells with a wistful look on your face, unsure of what on earth just happened.

These books hold the same appeal.  You open them and find yourself in Forks in the rain. As before, I am captivated and because I read the first three so quickly and am presently enraptured with the finale, Breaking Dawn, I will spare you the extra week of tedious fawning and review them together, however far I get.
From the proverbial Twilight to the new moon to the darkness of an eclipse, we are seeing the sun rise again.  Over what it will preside for Bella and Edward, I am not yet sure.
Eclipse is engaging and encompassing, but it is only a stepping stone.  It must go by so quickly by virtue of the anguishing compulsion to have questions answered.  It is unimaginably hard to not flip to the back, just to make absolutely sure that what you want to happen happens.  What will become of Jacob?  How do he and Bella resolve their issues?  Will alliances be kept or broken and what will that mean in the future?  Who will be killed?  I look forward to re-reading it when I am calmer and have been sated by Breaking Dawn.
I am so far very surprised with the twist being taken in the culminating treatise.  I don’t want to curtail the fun, but it suffices to say that the protagonists are teens, the author went to Brigham Young, so if anyone wants hanky-panky there will be rings involved.
We leave Forks again for the brief respite, which makes us uneasy.  Somehow what is acceptable in Forks is intimidating elsewhere.
Then it gets tricky.  The one part of this quartet absent so far is disgust and real fear.  If we thought the cold ones were truly horrific and or repugnant, we could not love them.  So far we have seen no Rosemary’s Baby types, but, rest assured, it would end the fun.  Quickly.  Now I am worried.
Parts of Breaking Dawn get close to that line.  I worried that too much was changing.
To my delight, I was partially incorrect and, in actuality, Meyer is, hopefully, causing us the angst that Bella will feel when she changes.  It’s an unfathomable transformation and maybe the discomfort we feel is intentional.  What is happening?  Everything is shifting and we feel vertiginous.  Can this be possible and why is it so horrible?
I wish this were school and I could make sure everyone had read the end so I could expound relentlessly.  I so want to tell you what happens.  I itch to see your faces when you read what I read.
Restrain myself I must (and sound like Yoda), and I will only say that after a respectable amount of time has passed, I am going to start them all again.  And I am not remotely embarrassed to say so.

“Full Moon” by Stephenie Meyer

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Sometimes its so very hard to be a truly fabulous, much admired book reviewer.  It is hypocritically sanctimonious to say, “Oh, you must read Kafka and Sartre,” when I don’t want to … at least, not right now.

I believe I called attention last week to this problem that I’m having, but we’ll call it the literary equivalent of throwing away the tofu and getting out the Hostess Cupcakes.  This will be my cross to bear and they really are very good cupcakes.

I can not bring myself to pick up, “Pope Joan”, “Travels with Alice”, or any of the other myriad pieces of more “respected” literature that taunt me from my shelves.

Believe me, I want to, but the desperate urge to binge on Stephenie Meyer is not yet squelched.  (I have also just finished 11 of Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity books, but can’t really write about those either.  Suffice it to say they are very cozy, well-penned, appealing mysteries, and that’s about it.)

I must have dragooned the poor reader of the Lyme Library’s copy of “New Moon” into returning it, because, after last week’s review, it was quickly returned and presented to me.  The only thing I did not enjoy about “New Moon” was that it flew by.  I was done and staring starry-eyed at the kids again before I knew it.  I do pay attention to my wonderful children, honestly.  Mostly I read at night, so their childhood is not as dickensian as it sounds.
The appealing commodity of a lengthy saga is the promise of more.  Starting New Moon knowing it was but an interlude in the bigger picture makes it tantalizing and tolerable concurrently.  Edward and Bella are together at the onset, and then it takes a grueling, wrenching, teenage angst-ridden twist.
Oh, the drama.  Being a girl, and, frankly, just being me, I am a slightly dramatic person*.  I could feel Bella’s heart breaking.  “Mom, why are you whimpering?”  She tries to survive and barely can.  Anyone who has been unceremoniously jettisoned from a relationship wants to behave as Bella does.  Nothing exists for her but Edward.
Her friendship with the Quileute boy Jacob Black keeps her tethered to her life, but just barely.  The dangers are more resolute and she more vulnerable.  Her quest for destruction (and its for her) is tangible.
The introduction of the Italian Vampire Contingency is equally unnerving, also prodigious.  As is the fact that Jacob Black is apparently no longer human.  Every comment about these books makes me want to roll my own eyes. T hey sound so incredibly hokey.  Werewolves too?  Vengeful females?  Bloody tourists?  Come on.
I still stand by them.  What should be a silly TV show (like the gory, too-sexed-up vampire saga just launching on HBO) … is not.  I can not quite put my finger on why not, but my guess would be that in her books Ms. Meyer so perfectly describes the characters that we are, rather than ones we watch.  It doesn’t occur to us to poke fun or be skeptical, because it is about us.  We are not reading about pain and fear and temptation, rather, we are feeling pain and fear and temptation.
Probably I oversimplify, but as I watch the mailbox for the Amazon delivery of the next two installments, we can all be sure of one thing.  I will have more to say on this matter.
I should apologize in advance … but I simply can’t.
* Husband in background, “Slightly?  Slightly?!” 

“Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer

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By now I am sure you have noticed I am a bit capricious in my literary fervor.  I happily vacillate between the serious* and the popular.  There is, I believe, a very important place for both.  “Twilight” falls into the latter category and I am willing to lay my credibility on the line with my swooning enthusiasm for this book.

As with the response to Harry Potter, there are many people who embrace the wildly enthusiastic opinion of the masses and many who remain sceptical because it is mainstream. I love Harry Potter and have been seriously rankled by the comments of a few people who dislike the books and dimiss them as commercial twaddle.
“Twilight” is not twaddle, although it is hugely popular.  There are four books and a soon-to-be released movie.  Vampires, werewolves and teenagers are a very tumultuously romantic and natural fit.
“Twilight” is not an adult book, but I don’t see why not.  It has all the angst and romantic power of a grown-up situation. Bella, a 17-year-old from Phoenix has moved back to deep, dark, rainy Forks, Wash., to live with her father.  She has no interest in either boys or high school’s popularity games.  She reads “Macbeth” and prefers classical music.  She loves her beat-up truck and eschews the typical teenage girls’ dramas.
Edward Cullen and his family also eschew the normal for different reasons.  They also are well-educated, insightful, compassionate and unconcerned with the mundane.
Edward and Bella’s romance is new for both of them.  As their love changes, so do they.  Edward has been 17 for a very long time and, in Bella, he finds something he can neither resist nor live without.
Bella is older than her 17 years in a different, but equally disparate way.  As with great romances, we are encapsulated in their private world and the suddenly immaterial milieu in which they orbit.
Bella’s world may have become Edward, but that world is increasingly exotic and deadly.
Edward is a vampire.

Not a pedestrian vampire, but a creature who is wholly deserving of her love.

Why are we not supposed to love these books?  Should we be embarrassed to remember that heady lasciviousness that young hormones usher in?  Who in their right mind wants to forget that feeling?  Edward is that feeling.
Edward is mesmerizing and both Bella and the reader fall prey.  “Twilight” is a juggernaut of activity and visceral emotion.  It was with great disappointment that I left the Lyme Library yesterday upon finding its sequel “New Moon” already checked out.  After that, I will snatch up “Eclipse”, “Breaking Dawn” and “Midnight Sun.”  Each thankfully large and chock-full of promise.
Twaddle or Solzhenitsyn – I do not give a hoot.  I love them and am counting the days until I can reenter the world that Stephenie Meyer has created … and I don’t care who knows it.
* Who is to say which is which anyhow?  Reading Shakespeare makes people say, “Oooo”, but it is just older popular material.