Oh my. Fantasy romance. Liked a lot of it but thought some of the references to pop culture seemed a little out of tone / popped me out of the storyline (and there didn’t seem to be as many in the first half so they seemed to come a bit out of nowhere).
Wow. Really good. Really.
Is this being marketed as YA though? Both the sex and the violence are, I would say, significantly more graphic than anything in, for example, the Carrie Ryan books, or the Hunger Games or Twilight.
I thought it was great but I did find myself pondering whether it could be recommended to my future 6th graders, who could read all of those others mentioned.
EDITED TO ADD: Steph assures me this is being marketed as adult. And who doesn’t want an adult version of all the dystopian YA that’s out there now? Go read it. 🙂
(The Berrybender Narratives, Book 1)
Spoiled Brits try to take on the American West.
Really, really hilarious. One of those comedy of errors books where most of the time the characters don’t think things are as funny as you the reader do.
Bought:
The Golden Compass, The Amber Spyglass and The Subtle Knife. Our August 2010 challenge book. Re-reads for both of us.
SPOILERS BELOW. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.
It was such a joy to re-read these. They’re all splendid novels in their own right, as well as building on each other in really great ways. Neither one of us could put them down. We were also both happy to find so much fresh about them–so many little things that we had forgotten and thus could enjoy anew–apparently we had left just the right amount of time between re-reads!
DadReaction: I couldn’t put it down. I loved the way he played off the three books, tacking a different tack each time, especially saving our world for the middle one.
GirlReaction: Yeah there were so many cool ideas in each one. I was surprised at how much I had forgotten in the third book.
DadReaction: Yeah those two angels–I had blanked those guys out completely and really forgotten about some of the supernatural stuff. Loved the witches. Lee Scoresby’s death is just so wild. It’s funny how fantasty can just take you down as bad as anything. Even when his rabbit daemon dies…OW. It’s like your dog dying. Or when Lyra leaves Pan on the Wharf? That was almost enough to make me pitch the book out the window!
GirlReaction: Ugh, those scenes were horrible. But how amazing is just the idea of the daemon? How perfect it seems, and how after reading them, you wish you had one, you wonder what yours would be, you think about that bit of yourself that the daemons represent.
DadReaction: Yeah like when she meets Will and he doesn’t have one…but then they switch worlds and he does. And there’s the the fact that you could actually have a conversation with the daemon, that other part of yourself. Also very cool how he works in the idea that they solidify their form later: as you become your real self. They’re something beneath who you think you might want to be, and it becomes a real partnership.
They’re really novels of curiosity: Lyra, Will, the Scientists, everybody experimenting and discovering. And how spooky were the parents? I really liked how complex they were: not just bad or good. They sort of act for good in the end, after letting loose all this mayhem. So much is the kids trying to understand them, and getting foiled by both of them really.
I had forgotten that whole journey through the underworld–kind of like Dante in Hell. I did, however, remember that horrifying part where the teacher got lost in the other world. You know, I really hate abandonment stories, or stories where people can’t get home, so the first read that was really harrowing for me–like watching Alice in Wonderland. I was able to enjoy those people a lot more this time around because I knew she would get out of there.
GirlReaction: Oh and how cool are those animals with the wheels? Pullman has so many ideas around the edges of this story that could be entire fantasy worlds in and of themselves.
DadReaction: Yeah I also loved those little waspy spies!
Two thumbs way up. 🙂
Our July 2010 challenge book. A re-read for both of us.
GirlReaction: I only got partway through before I had to set it aside (I was in the middle of summer classes) but of course Dad finished. My thoughts were really that I did not remember at all how hilariously funny some of the beginning is.
DadReaction: I can’t wait to read it again! To setout after the Pequod with crazy captain Ahab. You get bogged down a bit in the middle, with ALL the detail about how to actually kill whales, slice them up, et cetera…but at the end, you feel like you know what these guys do all the time.
There was a critic, Hugh Kenner maybe?, who had a quote about how all great American novels are really like instruction manuals. Hemingway: how to order a drink, what to look for in a bullfight, how to fish. Moby Dick: how to kill a whale.
But at the end, it really takes off. And the hunt when they actually spot Moby Dick, just sweeps you up.
GirlReaction: In one of my summer classes, there was a girl with the last name Melville, and EVERY WEEK during attendance, the professor would make some cracks about Moby Dick. Usually something along the lines of “They call it the greatest American novel. I don’t know if it’s the greatest, but it was really the first.” I wasn’t sure that was really true though.
DadReaction: You could probably call it the first American novel of stature.
Then we wandered off topic a bit and landed on the subject of Sir Walter Scott (thanks, I think, to Michelle’s blog post) and on to Last of the Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper, which while a romantic novel, and of less stature, was around before Melville.
DadReaction: The thing about Last of the Mohicans is people think of it along the lines of the movies. But the screenplay from the ’30s really streamlined a bad book with lots of idiot characters. The movies make him into more of a Hemingway-type hero.
And then somehow we came around again to Moby Dick and a bonus recommendation…
DadReaction: Did you ever read “The Great American Novel by Philip Roth? It’s about baseball, but based on Moby Dick (“Call me Smitty.” is the first line). There’s a pitcher named Gilgamesh who never loses a game, but then one day he throws a ball right at the ump’s throat. There’s a team in it called the Ruppert Mundys who have to play 163 away games. The league is so rift with problems that they just write it out of baseball history and all the towns that were in the league change their names. Hilarious.
Bought:
*All in the same trip to Women & Children First. I blame Natalie for suggesting we go to the bookstore. I can’t be going to bookstores! Books are irresistible! Especially in bookstores!
“You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will. You recognize how much is hidden behind the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence. Deep sorrow and traces of great loss run through everyone’s lives, and yet they let others step into the elevator first, wave them ahead in a line of traffic, smile and greet their children and inquire about their lives, and never let on for a second that they, too, have lain awake at night in longing and regret, that they, too, have cried until it seemed impossible that one person could hold so many tears, that they, too, keep a picture of someone locked in their heart and bring it out in quiet, solitary moments to caress and remember.
Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.”
-Rosanne Cash, from her memoir Composed, a birthday gift from Cinnamon.
Bought:
“She wonders whether the sentences go out looking for people to utter them, or whether it’s just the opposite and the sentences simply wait for someone to come along and make use of them, and at the same time she wonders if she really doesn’t have anything better to do than wonder about such things, what silliness, she thinks, and then she remembered that she doesn’t have anything better to do….
Probably, she thinks, the sentences all get overtaken sooner or later and are spoken by someone or other, somewhere or other….”
-from Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Susan Bernofsky)