Phew. That last post was more popular than I knew what to do with. My blog hasn’t gotten that many hits since that one time with the famous people and the stuff. (You know, the one that never happened.) I should express my feelings on education more often. Except that I find it hard to be upset about people’s ignorant responses to home-schooling more than once or twice a year, which is probably good.
I’ve been reading. Four books in the last week or so. Startling, I know. Two of them I read because they were brought up in reviews I read of Tethered and I was interested in how the could be so different, yet both reminiscent of the same book. (Do you see now how clever my post title is? Seriously, I think that if y’all analyzed the music choices as portrayed by my post titles, I would get laughed out of the room…they’re a terrible mix, leaning heavily on Snow Patrol, because I heart them like a high school girl hearts vampires.)
Um. Where was I? Oh. Right. Two very different books.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn is like Tethered without a heart. Everyone in it is broken. Worse, everyone is demolished. Destroyed. Pulverized. The basics: Broken woman/girl. Check. Camille Preaker is not just broken, she’s shattered, by a screwed up childhood and an inability to equate intimacy with anything except sex. Inner struggle to understand childhood. Check. Although, while reporting on two murders of little girls, Camille’s daily interaction with her childhood is especially disturbing because she does it by living in her childhood home with her mother, stepfather and sociopath teenage half-sister. Standard good cop, who doesn’t seem all that good, or even a little gentle, as this character generally is. Still a check. Standard lapse of judgment between cop and broken woman/girl. Check. In this case, the tension this expected plot device causes does not get resolved, but instead is broken further in the sweeping and deeply unsettling climax of the novel. Don’t read this book. It hurt my soul. It lacked the redemption that crime stories need in order to set our hearts back in order.
Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey was a completely different feel. It was more an exploration of the paranormal found in Tethered. I’ve read some of Livesey’s work before (The Missing World and The House on Fortune Street) and was impressed with this one. I think it was the best of her stuff that I’ve read. Livesey has the unnerving tendency to throw in details that sound like they should refer to an earlier discussion but that actually don’t, which leaves the reader scrambling through the pages already read, trying to figure out why that sounds important when it isn’t. I don’t like this. However, after the darkness of the last book, the short concise story of Eva, who grows up with two invisible companions who guide and mold her future, is calming. We follow Eva as she tests the boundaries of her companion’s abilities, tries to abandon them and then comes to a coexistence that is almost peaceful. This wasn’t a book to write home about, but it was satisfying.
After those two, I branched back out of the paranormal/crime genres and landed in the middle of the Young Adult section. Jellicoe Road is by the Australian Melina Marchetta is a story that spends what feels like an inordinate amount of time in set-up. For the first 120 pages of the 300, I internally debated whether to keep reading about every other page. There’s so much information, so many side plots, so many bunny trails and it’s very hard to figure out what is the present and what is the past. And then, you hit the middle running and can’t stop.
I’ve never read any of Marchetta’s other work, which I hear has a completely different feel than this. Jellicoe Road is about friendship and the bonds of family that extend through situations that are less than perfect. Taylor Markham is the leader of a group of boarding school kids who every year have a war with the Cadet boys who camp near them for the summer and the Townies. What starts off as hostility, with deep undercurrents of hatred between Taylor and the enigmatic leader of the Cadets, Griggs, and her tenuous relationships with her second-in-commands turns into a exploration of a friendship that brought Taylor to where she is. This book is like an YA version of the deeply disturbing The Secret History or the calmer The Likeness with respect to its exploration of family by choice rather than blood. I’m not sure I can whole-heartedly endorse it to teenagers, but as an adult, I think that it was well-written and sticks with you.
From here, I’m moving on to attempt to finish some of the books sitting on my bookshelves and maybe some Stephen King, since I’m pretty sure I have only read The Gunslinger, and I found the paperback of The Drawing of the Three in my paperback cupboard the other night while dusting. (I know. I can’t even dust without getting distracted by books.) We’ll see, though. I’m hanging out with Buffy at my parents for a while this weekend, so maybe I will get to borrow some gems from her…
The traffic on your previous post was largely my fault. I really liked it, and I knew a bunch of my friends would appreciate it, especially the ones with little kids who still harbor some secret fears about Socialization. So I put a link to your post on my blog and on my homeschool email list. :-)
That explains it. I suddenly had more hits in one day than I’d had in weeks. :-)
Every time mom links to me, my hit count skyrockets. Mum’s basically a celebrity in the Lutheran-Homeschooler segment of the population.
Have you picked any yet?
I picked four. You’ll have to wait and see…