Book Club 1 Reviews 2018
Small Great Things, by Jodi Picault (reviewed 11 January 2018)
Jodi Picault's “Small Great Things” generated a lot of discussion, especially when linked to Debbie Irvine’s “Waking up White” social justice questions.
Our group really enjoyed the book and look forward to reading Jodi’s other work. Most members rated it as 4.5 out of 5, with 3 the lowest rating and 5 the highest
QUOTES FROM THE GUARDIAN BOOK REVIEW
Twenty-five years into her writing career Jodi Picault has finally seen the fruition of an idea that she had at the beginning. Some might marvel at the timeliness of Small Great Things and the mirror its storyline of racism and prejudice holds up to the turbulence of present-day politics. “What’s so shocking, honestly, is that right now, a lot of white people in my country are being horrified by something that people of colour knew has been there all along.”
This goes straight to the heart of one of the major themes of Small Great Things: the ingrained prejudice in the political and social status quo that can rapidly mutate into an explosive, uncontrollable and damaging situation. Jodi Picault weaves all sorts of other elements into the story of her protagonist,
Ruth Jefferson, a model citizen who has worked hard to build her career, to survive the death of her US army husband, killed by an IED in Afghanistan, and to bring up their son, Edison, in a small house in an affluent and largely white suburb in Connecticut. Ruth’s sister has tuned in to the reality of their lives as women of colour whilst Ruth “has believed very much that she can fly under the radar of white society and nobody would ever notice that she was there.”
Jodi Picault’s hope “is that it’s not just preaching to the choir, that it’s getting into the hands of people who perhaps have not put themselves in the shoes of those who were not born with white skin, and who are tapping into that great schism, that divide, and that empathy that they need to find to realise that their lives really have been different from people of colour in the United States; and that they will never face the micro-aggressions that people of colour face on a daily basis”.
UNQUOTE
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, (Reviewed February 8th 2018 )
Despite the tumour-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten. (quote; Penguin.co)
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love. (quote; Penguin.co)
Filled with dark humour and written with a beautiful simplicity that that draws the reader in so deeply that it's not just the twist and turns but the gently bends and curves that you feel tugging at your emotions... No doubt in the end you will cry but you will also feel that you have discovered a little something about living. (quote; Daily Express).
This was a novel that gave real pleasure to many in our group but left others unmoved. The most popular score was 5 out of 5 but we also had a 2 – another left the book unfinished on the table.
THE UNBROKEN, A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, By Laura Hillenbrand
We do not read many non-fiction books in our reading group and it was interesting that we found this World War II true account so absorbing, perhaps because we were not over-acquainted with the war in the Pacific.
Whilst there were no highest ranking reviews, only one low score was recorded and most of the group rated “Unbroken” as 3 or 4 out of 5.
“Every day more than 700 veterans of World War II die, and with each one goes a story, or dozens of them. Laura Hillenbrand reached Louis Zamperini just in the nick of time — he was in his mid-80s when she found him, - and it’s an excellent thing, for his is surely one of the most extraordinary war stories of all.
In late May 1943, the B-24 carrying the 26-year-old Zamperini went down over the Pacific. For nearly seven weeks — longer, Hillenbrand believes, than any other such instance in recorded history — Zamperini and his pilot managed to survive on a fragile raft. They travelled 2,000 miles, only to land in a series of Japanese prison camps, where, for the next two years, Zamperini underwent a whole new set of tortures. His is one of the most spectacular odysseys of this or any other war, and “odyssey” is the right word, for with its tempests and furies and monsters, many of them human,
That story encompasses an aspect of the American experience during World War II — the cruelty of the Japanese — that, in an era of Toyotas and Sonys and Hideki Matsui, has been almost entirely forgotten. (Forgotten in the United States, that is: Japanese sensitivities on the subject remain sufficiently high that Hillenbrand refuses to identify her translators there.) It’s also yet another testament to the courage and ingenuity of America’s Greatest Generation, along with its wonderful, irrepressible American-style irreverence: just hearing the nicknames — many unprintable here — that the P.O.W.’s bestowed on their guards makes you fall in love with these soldiers.”(quote from New York Times review)
Thirteen Ways of Looking, by Colum McCann, reviewed 12th April 2018
As a group we do not read many short stories and this collection divided the group. Nobody awarded it the full five marks and the modal mark was three.
(From a review in The New York Times)
The novella and three stories make up McCann’s collection of fiction, “Treaty” imagines a Maryknoll nun traveling to London to confront her Latin American torturer-rapist, 37 years after the fact. “Sh’khol,” is a harrowing tale (the collection’s best) about the agonies of an Irish single mother whose deaf child goes missing near the ocean.
“What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?” is a fascinatingly self-conscious metafiction in which a male writer composes a story about a female Marine in Afghanistan — a rebuke, witting or not, to the spate of contemporary fiction about life in the American military whose central tenet seems to be that nobody can possibly understand what it was like.
But the anchor of the book is the title novella with which it commences: the tale of an octogenarian Manhattan judge named Mendelssohn, on what we learn early will be the last day of his life. His end will not be peaceful: On a snowy afternoon he will be fatally assaulted. The implication seems to be that even a clear-cut physical encounter has multiple, sometimes hidden perspectives. The narrative crosscuts between Mendelssohn’s last day and the efforts of the police charged with solving his murder.
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The group had a ranging discussion on this book, with an overall rating of 3.5 out of 5
(Quote from the Financial Times, Helen Dunmore): Adichie uses language with relish. She infuses her English with a robust poetry.
(Quote from the Observer): The many-sided nature of conflict is graphically realised in this stunning second novel …………. It has a ramshackle freedom and exuberant ambition.
(Guardian Review): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, takes its title from the emblem for Biafra, the breakaway state in eastern Nigeria that survived for only three years, and whose name became a global byword for war by starvation. Adichie's powerful focus on war's impact on civilian life, and the trauma beyond the trenches, earns this novel a place alongside such works as Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Helen Dunmore's depiction of the Leningrad blockade, The Siege.
The novel captures horror in the details of "vaguely familiar clothes on headless bodies", or corpses' "odd skin tone - a flat, sallow grey, like a poorly wiped blackboard".
The novel's structure, moving in chunks between the late and early 60s, is not without blips but these are quibbles in a landmark novel, whose clear, undemonstrative prose can so precisely delineate nuance. There is a rare emotional truth in the sexual scenes, from Ugwu's adolescent forays and the mature couples' passions, to the ugliness of rape.
Literary reflections on the Biafra war have a long and distinguished history, from the most famous poet to have died in the war, Christopher Okigbo, to Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and Flora Nwapa. Born in 1977, Adichie is part of a new generation revisiting the history that her parents survived. She brings to it a lucid intelligence and compassion, and a heartfelt plea for memory.
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Duerr. (Reviewed 14 June 2018)
This was a book that was well-received, with a rating of 4 out of 5 being the most common score. As the book took ten years to write it might explain the 500-plus pages, which some found too long. Also, the non-chronological sequencing and the short chapters did not receive total acclaim. A recommended read, though.
The review in the Guardian said. “This novel will be a piece of luck for anyone with a long plane journey or beach holiday ahead. The story is set in Germany and France before and during the German occupation of France. Marie-Laure is a little blind French girl, motherless. Werner Pfennig and his sister Jutta are orphans in the German mining town of Zollverein, near Essen. He is a boy with a gift for science, and the intricacies of radios in particular. He can fix anything.
Werner's talent brings him to the attention of the Nazis. Marie-Laure and her father escape Paris in 1940, and take refuge in Saint Malo, on the coast of Brittany. Werner's genius is put to work tracking radio transmissions, until he is sent to Saint-Malo, where Marie Laure's great uncle Etienne uses his radio transmitter on behalf of the Resistance.
Unfortunately, Doerr's prose style is high-pitched, operatic, relentless. Short sharp sentences, echoing the static of the radios, make the first hundred pages very tiresome to read.
Nevertheless, often Doerr rises again as, entranced with the story he is telling, he lets the overwriting slip away. And his attention to detail is magnificent. Always you want to know what happens next to Marie-Laure, to her father, her great-uncle Etienne, to Werner and Jutta, and to his considerable parade of other characters.” Unquote.
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. (Reviewed Jul '18)
Well, this was a unique book club meeting – to review a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and find that half the group did not finish the book and that, almost in unison, nearly all rated the book as 1(or below!) out of 5 marks. So different to the Guardian review:
(Quote) The book received rave reviews when it was published in the US, and for good reason: Goon Squad is a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection, in which relationships shift and recombine kaleidoscopically. It is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but something in between: a series of chapters featuring interlocking characters at different points in their lives, whose individual voices combine to a create a symphonic work. This is a difficult book to summarise, but a delight to read,
Everyone in the book is pushed around by time, circumstance and, occasionally, the ones they love, as Egan reveals with great elegance and economy the wobbly arcs of her characters' lives, their painful pasts and future disappointments. Characters who are marginal in one chapter become the focus of the next. She also shifts dramatically across times and places.
The stories circle magnetically around a few characters who recur a bit more frequently than others. Each chapter has its own distinct voice and mood, modulating from satire to farce, from melancholy to tragedy.
It is a great surprise that a PowerPoint presentation can be moving. Goon Squad becomes more fragmented, and more formally experimental, as it progresses: the penultimate chapter is written entirely as the PowerPoint slide diary.
Egan has said that the organising principle of A Visit from the Goon Squad is discontinuity; the reason the book works so well is because of the continuities she has also created: her atomised people collide, scatter and recombine in patterns that are less chaotic than they appear. (Unquote).
The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion (Reviewed Aug '18)
The “Rosie Effect” is a sequel to “The Rosie Project” and the group found it an enjoyable success, with four of us rating it three marks or less out of five and the majority awarding above four, with one five.
(Quotes from “The Guardian); the sequel finds the couple relocated to New York and working in the medical department of Columbia University when Rosie announces that she is pregnant.
Don's reaction is Donnish in the extreme: "I was happy in the way that I would be happy if the captain of an aircraft in which I was travelling announced that he had succeeded in restarting one engine after both had failed. Pleased that I would now probably survive, but shocked that the situation had arisen in the first place, and expecting a thorough investigation into the circumstances."
Simsion is circumspect when asked where Tillman might be placed on the autism spectrum, His great skill as a writer of comic fiction, however, is to engender an empathetic response to a character incapable of empathising with others. Don Tillman may be an emotional klutz, but he remains admirably self-aware:
Tillman has almost transcended the boundaries of fiction to become a geek icon, and for those who cannot get enough of his pedantic faux pas this hefty new instalment offers plenty more laugh-out-loud moments. A geneticist colleague of Tillman's observes that human beings are programmed for repetition: "If something feels good, we do it again", which suggests that a sequel was always likely to be on the cards.
But to give a purely Tillmanesque assessment of the result, one would have to conclude that it fulfils a formula familiar to many sequels of bestelling novels in that it is twice as long and only half as good. (Unquote).
The Storyteller by Judi Picoult (Reviewed Sep 2018)
This is a book that appealed to nearly of the group, with many of us scoring it above 4 out of five.
(comments below are from The Independent book review)
A Holocaust story (with a quirky vampiric twist) set in modern America and in Auschwitz, Picoult wanted to highlight the fact that a story about the Holocaust is not just a Jewish story. "There's almost a misconception that the only people who care about the Holocaust or who should care are Jews or descendants of Jews. Although six million Jews died in the Holocaust... it was not a Jewish problem. It was really a human-rights problem, and that's why I think everyone has a stake in remembering what happens when intolerance gets out of hand."
This book has inspired some of the rewarding letters that Picoult has ever received, several from Holocaust survivors and Jews – butmost also from non-believers and young Germans who have expressed their gratitude.
"In 1981, the Supreme Court said anyone who was a guard at a concentration camp was responsible for crimes against humanity, so it didn't matter if you were working in the kitchens or putting the Zyklon-B tablets in the showers. You were equally as culpable."
So how then do we move on from it? This question plays across the novel. Not just Sage but also her grandmother Minka, an Auschwitz survivor, shows how it might be possible. More than half the survivors Picoult interviewed said they forgave the Nazis, though they could never forget. She braided the experiences of four survivors to create Minka's story.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Reviewed Oct 2018)
This was another book that polarised opinion, with 4 out of 5 being the most common award but there was also a bunch of 2’s.
(review from The Observer)
Buried in the back streets of Barcelona lies the Cemetery of Lost Books - a mausoleum for out-of-print works, salvaged by the bibliophiles of the city. There, 10-year-old Daniel Sempere discovers a book called The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax.
Daniel is a believably awkward teenager - compassionate (he rescues a former prisoner, Fermín Romero de Torres, from life on the streets), but naive and romantically inept..
Zafón convincingly conjures two worlds here. The main setting is Daniel's Barcelona, grumbling its way through the postwar dictatorship.
Fittingly for such a celebration of the imagination, the translation is provided by Robert Graves's daughter Lucia (in Spain Zafón's original has been rapturously received). To her credit, the language and mood remain intricate and beguiling - there is no awkwardness in translation. In fact, everything about The Shadow of the Wind is smooth. The language purrs along, while the plot twists and unravels with languid grace.
Yet despite these strengths it still feels that there is something missing from this book. The medley of genres (mildly supernatural thriller, against-the-odds love story and period coming-of-age saga) never quite fuses into a satisfying whole.
Having been tantalised with hints of Julián's life, we suddenly receive the full story through a deus ex machina (a post mortem letter of credibility stretching length), which removes all of the mystery and much of the suspense. Zafón's novel is atmospheric, beguiling and thoroughly readable, but ultimately lacks the magic its early chapters promise.
Billy Lynns Long Half-time Walk, by Ben Fountain
This was a book which failed to impress many in our group, with a number of people failing to reach the end, or indeed getting past the beginning. It was well-received by the newspaper critics upon its publication.
(Comments below from the Guardian)
“Ben Fountain's blinder of a first novel has been a long time coming. His full-length debut has finally emerged – a fierce, exhilarating novel about the Iraq war. As Karl Marlantes, the Vietnam veteran and novelist who dubbed it "the Catch-22 of the Iraq war", explained, it is a book about "the American way of watching war". And it is terrific, in that it deals with a heavily mediated reality. Bravo squad aren't even called Bravo squad, but that was what the "Fox embed" christened them. They hear their story being spun in real time: "Carl, what can I say?" says Albert, the movie producer, on the phone. "It's a war picture – not everybody gets out alive."
Billy Lynn is eloquent and angry, funny and poignant. Bravo squad are heroes. For the eight soldiers, the trip is an ambiguous experience, to say the least, since they also lost one of their men during the fight.The novel is niftily perfect. The plot strands holding the set pieces together are thin: Billy's flirtation with a cheerleader is "the sort of delusion a desperate soldier would dream up".
Fountain has a marvellous ear for dialogue; Billy Lynn is written in a sharp, profane language that makes UK English sound terminally dull. Billy Lynn is an exhilarating read and convincingly damning of Bush's America.
The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry
This was a book that the whole group enjoyed, with 4 marks out of 5 being the almost unanimous judgement.
(Quotes from the Guardian)
InSarah Perry’s second novel, 1890s London is mad about the sciences, especially palaeontology. Every six months someone publishes a paper “setting out ways and places extinct animals might live on”, while smart women collect ammonites or wear necklaces of fossil teeth set in silver. New widow Cora Seagrave, accompanied by her socialist companion Martha and her autistic son Francis, leaves the capital for the wilds of Essex. There, she hears of the Essex Serpent, a folktale apparently come to life; and meets its spiritual adversary, the rector of Aldwinter, William Ransome, with whom she is soon entangled in a relationship of voluble opposition and unspoken attraction.
The Essex Serpent is fully acted out. Fertile, open, vocal about its own origins and passions, crammed with incident, characters and plot, it is a novel of ideas. Narrative and voice coil together until it is very difficult to stop reading, very difficult to avoid being dragged into Aldwinter’s dark and sometimes darkly comic waters.
Inadvertent emotional damage is the novel’s other major theme. “What use,” Francis the autistic child asks at one point, crawling out from under the table, “to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no more fixed than the wind.”
Perry extends her considerable generosity not just to her characters but to the whole late Victorian period, with its fears for the present and curious faith in the future; at the same time she is asking clearly, how do we do better than that?
(unquote)