Tag: book review

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Book Snap #110

Title: A Nearly Normal Family

Author: M. T. Edvardsson

Dtae Read: July 19, 2021

Two snaps.

A great recommendation from my friend and former colleague, Janet Sloan. Eighteeen year-old Stella Sandell is accused of murder, and that changes everything.

The story is divided into three parts: the first told by the father, a pastor, who believes his daughter can only be innocent. The second part reveals the story from her mother’s view, a defense attorney, who believes no one is telling the truth. And finally from the perspective of Stella herself. Each shift in perspective is jarring–just when you think you understand these characters, the way others view them opens up new understandings of their skewed sense of reality. What lies will they tell (or believe?) to just be a normal, ordinary family again? Two snaps. 

I believe this is deeply human. There's no understanding it if you've never experienced a direct and serious threat to yourself and your loved ones. You make irrational decisions and overstep boundaries as you never would otherwise. A person who can no longer flee must fight.
(Edvardsson, A Nearly Normal Family)
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Book Snap #109

Title: West With Giraffes

Author: Linda Rutledge

Date Read: July 16, 2021

Two snaps.

Another wonderful recommendation, this one from my colleague Catherine Tait.

Woodrow (Woody) Nickel takes us along for his journey of a lifetime to deliver two traumatized giraffes saved from a tumultous Atlantic crossing in New York to the San Diego zoo. Our 105 year-old narrator takes us back through the twelve-day journey that ever changed his life.

It opens…

...I'm older than dirt.

And when you're older than dirt, you can get lost in time, in memory, even in space.

I'm inside my tiny four-walled room with the feeling that I've been... gone. I'm not even sure how long I've been sitting here. All night I think, stirring from my foggy mind to find myself surrounded by other old farts staring at a fancy TV. I remember the man on the screen talking about the last giraffess on earth and rushing over in my wheelchair to punch him. I remember being pushed back here quick and a nurse bandaging my bleeding knuckles. 

Then I remember an orderly making me take a calm-down pill I didn't want to take.

But that's the last time I'll be doing that. Because right now, pencil in this shaky hand, I aim to write down one singular memory.

Fast as I can. 

I could spend what I feel in my bones is my life's last clear hours to tell you of the Dust Bowl. Or the War. Or the French peonies. Or my wives, so many wives. Or the graves, so many graves. Or the goodbyes, so many goodbyes. Those memories come and go here at the end, if they come at all anymore. But not this memory. This memory is always with me, always alive, always within reach, and always in technicolor from deadly start to bittersweet finish, no matter how old I keep getting. And-- Red, Old Man, sweet Wild Boy and Girl-- oh, how I miss you.

All I have to do is close my worn-out eyes for the smallest of moments.

And it begins.
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Book Snap #108

Title: The House in the Cerulean Sea

Author: TJ Klune

Date Read: July 8, 2021

Two (loud) snaps.

I loved this book! The quote on the cover reads: “It’s like being wrapped up in a big gay blanket. Simply perfect.”

Reccommended to me by my colleague, Gabrielle Maillet, she said it gave her Schitt’s Creek vibes— and I ran with that! (Love me some Rose Motel feel goodery.) It did not disappoint.

Linus Baker is rule-following case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He’s tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is a beautiful story with fantastical characters (a sort of blobby slug want-to-be-hotel porter; a bearded female gardening gnome; a fairy sprite; a wyvern; a werewolf crossed Pomeranian and the purported son of Satan, nicknamed Lucy.) They live on a beautiful, secluded island where the inhabitants outwardly hate them, make up stories and rumours about them, and hang signs that say: “If you see something, say something.” Arthur arrives determined to do his job and report back on the intricacies of the orphanage, the children and Arthur– but he is taken up by the magic of the island and the love of a family. A saccharine-sweet cotton-candy-novel. Love wins. 

Humanity is so weird. If we're not laughing, we're  crying or running for our lives because monsters are trying to eat us. And they don't even have to be real monsters. They could be the ones we make up in our heads. Don't you think that's weird?
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Book Snap #107

Title: On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

Author: Ocean Vuong

Date Read: July 4, 2021

Two snaps.

A compassionate and unflinching queer coming-of-age story. Little Dog writes a series of letters to his mother in order to make sense of his place in the world. She cannot read a word of it. Vuong is a daring writer– he goes where the hurt is, creating a novel saturated with yearning and ache. He stares down the violence, trauma, and pain and somehow uncovers the innocence, compassion and tenderness. Loved every minute of this story. 

In that room, among the Star Wars poster (Empire Strikes Back) peeling above his unmade bed, among the empty root beer cans, the twenty-pound dumbbell, one half of a broken skateboard, the desk covered with loose change, empty gum packets, gas station receipts, weed crumbs, fentanyl patches and empty dime bags, coffee mugs ringed brown with old water and joint roaches, a copy of Of Mice and Men, empty shell casings from a Smith & Wesson, there were no questions. (Vuong, p.110)

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Book Snap #106

Title: The Pisces

Author: Melissa Broder

Date Read: July 1, 2021

Oh Snap!

Ummm. This one was weird. Really weird. It’s hard to write about why I struggled with it. Suffice it to say, I felt weird reading it and wanted to hide it from my son when he looked over my shoulder while I was reading. The main character is relatably flawed, awkwardly vulnerable, and at a white-wine- guzzling-rock-bottom when her boyfriend leaves her and she uproots to house and dog sit in Venice Beach. She is terrible to her sister’s dog, I hated that part. She is cutting and pointed in her observations and summations about others. Again, made me uncomfortable, but okay. But the merman erotica? Just couldn’t get into it. 

Broder is best known as the woman behind the Twitter account @sosadtoday, which has six hundred and forty-nine thousand followers. Recent tweets include “in a threesome with anxiety and depression” and “unfortunately i’m very self-aware.” On her personal Twitter account, @melissabroder, she offers similar sentiments: “i’m gifted at finding ways to never seem like enough,” she wrote last month. She has also written four books of poetry, most recently “Last Sext.” In 2016, she published a collection of personal essays called “So Sad Today,” in which she grounded the universalized Internet sadness of her Twitter presence in concrete individual experience. She was twelve when she started dreaming about her family burning up in a house fire, thirteen when she started obsessing about the Holocaust. During adolescence, she could only orgasm when she imagined people vomiting. (The New Yorker, 2018.)