Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is from Yeats's poem "The Second Coming". Fifty years after Chinua Achebe wrote this deceptively simple Nigerian tragedy, Things Fall Apart has never been out of print. It's hailed as Africa's best known work of literature and I can easily see why.

At the heart of the story is a strong man, Okonkwo, with an overwhelming need to prove himself--to himself and his tribe; he must overcome the bad reputation of his drunkard ne'er-do-well father. Although Okonkwo can easily defeat enemies he can wrestle, chop or kill; his stubborn pride and anger collide with and fail to overcome those aspects of life which he cannot so readily tackle: providence, family and tribal laws.

So much of the appeal of Things -- for me at least -- is watching Okonkwo encounter a traditional village. I was fascinated (and repulsed) by its customs, mores, and overall precarious harmony. The appropriateness of the title is in the extreme delicacy of that tribal balance which is rocked to the core by the arrival of the English missionaries. All that was as Okonkwo understood the world to be, changes with the introduction of Christianity and Western civilization. It is both a clash of one individual against his own society and a foreign power, as well as the collision of two diametrically opposed cultures. You don't often find so much carefully-contained conflict in a book of this size. Truly incredible!

Chinua Achebe wrote this masterpiece before most of the African nations had declared their independence. Since that time, the Dark Continent has been washed in rivers of blood. One wonders when, and prays for an end to, all the suffering. Such a sacred place and beautiful people; in many ways so like the Garden of Eden. Long live Africa! 

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The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain

The Paris Wife: A Novel





The PARIS WIFE is a mesmerizing novel about Paris in the 1920’s featuring the bohemian “Lost Generation”. It is the touching and heartbreaking story of the love affair and marriage of literature’s original “bad boy” Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson Hemingway.
Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding , the deeply in love couple sail to Paris where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
The Hemingway’s are ill prepared for the hard drinking, fast living life of Jazz Age Paris. They are surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos. Written in Hadley’s voice that is so well drawn and lyrical it manages to captures the spectacle of the man becoming the legend. She draws the twenty year old Hemingway as a handsome, magnetic, passionate, sensitive man full of dreams.
This portrayal of their marriage is so tender, so poignant that is an utterly absorbing novel. 

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Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans

Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25


I heard a talk show host talk about this book being the next great "Harry Potter". I loved Harry Potter so I was anxious to get this book. I was captivated by the story. I enjoyed reading it, but I don't think it is the next great book like Harry Potter. First off, we have a boy living with his mother who finds himself in trouble at school a lot. His only friend is a really smart kid and then he meets up with the all popular cheerleader. (Interesting how the cheerleader is always the one that the boys want) In this book, we find that these children have special capabilities that evil people want to exploit. Does this sound like X-Men? Yup, it is very much the same story line. The book has some syrupy sweetness going on how the 'good' kids value home, family, and wrestle with the idea of worldly values: being able to buy anything you want and having no regard for people with no abilities or realizing that hurting others is just plain wrong. The problem is that this premise that the 'good' kids felt was a little overlooked when it came time for them to break out of the Elgen Academy and hurt those that had hurt them. The bad people are really cruel in this book. They kill family members, kidnap them to force the glows (the gifted children)to do their dirty work, and they manipulate these children by giving them great worldly goods and make them feel like they were ungrateful if they didn't do what was asked. A lot of mind playing tricks. They get away in the end and Michael's mother is still missing, so the book will continue and we as readers want Michael to succeed because he seems like the good guy. What will he do with his powers? Will he turn bad like the other children? Will he be able to find his mom before she is killed? The book is interesting enough to want to read the sequel, but the writing is not as good as Harry Potter.

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Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue

Room: A Novel By Emma Donoghue(A)/Michal Friedman(N) [Audiobook]

Wow. A book hasn't swallowed me whole like that in a long time. This one will be haunting be for awhile. I wish I could tell you what it's about, but I wish I hadn't read the back cover 30 pages or so into and changed my own perception. It's best to figure it out along with the story.

I will say that it's about a 5-year-old boy who has never left the room where he lives. His whole world is Room and Bed and Rug. It's a little jarring to read from his point of view in the beginning and I was worried I wasn't going to be able to get into his story, but once I became accustomed to his voice, I couldn't put his story down. And his story wouldn't have the power it does without his perspective. We think about these type of stories from other perspectives, but never from his. Never from the child who is comfortable in his world that we know is all wrong. The child that never wants to leave his strange circumstances when we understand why he should.

Most of the time his naivete was right one, but there were occasions where Donoghue used his voice to explain something that I didn't buy into him understanding. I wish she would have trusted her reader more to see the discord of reality and his perception instead of using Jack to interpret his mother's emotions or the sequence of events. I loved the juxtaposition of reality and his interpretation and would have liked more of them. There were also some plot twists (view spoiler) that didn't ring entirely true, but I so believed Jack that in the end it didn't matter. There is one point where the plot takes a turn in a different direction from Jack's perception (view spoiler) but Jacks' reality is so real, you don't even consider other options. That's when I knew I'd follow Jack anywhere.

Maybe it's the unusual perspective or the strong voice. Maybe it's that I know what it's like for a child to change your world. Maybe it's that right now I feel trapped in my own room with my own baby. Maybe it's that Jack's relationship with his mother is so different from own experience and I was both shocked and saddened by their bond. Or maybe it's that Donoghue made me think about the world in a way I never have before. But whatever it is, this book grabbed my attention and wouldn't let it go. I related to Jack's story when I couldn't possibly know what his life is like. It's difficult to make the humdrum of ordinary life day in and day out inside an 11x11 room exciting, but Donoghue manages to keep my intense attention. (view spoiler)

While some of the events in the book are disturbing, I don't think they're too disturbing. Jack's innocent voice saves us from the horror that this story could be. It's not about all the things lost in Outside. It's about wanting to stay in and safe. And it's about the power of maternal love. Because of that, the story has redemption and hope and happiness.

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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children



Peculiar indeed...

The title and the cover decided things for me, and between the two of those, I was half convinced this would read like one of those YA historicals ala-Vixen or Luxe (given the cover) or one of those Series of Unfortunate Tales (given the title.) Wrong on both counts.

The Good:

Pictures. Everything Jacob said when describing those portraits were accurate: creepy, formal and yeah, creepy. They remind me of my grandparent's portraits hung in the house my mother grew up in. Both those portraits are black and white, with them posed all very formal and serious. The peculiar part is how their eyes just seemed to follow everywhere I'd go, comforting and creepy all at once. Nah, just creepy. It is from my brother that I've learned to pay close attention to where the portraits' eyes go (or stay.) To this day, those pictures get my hair standing on end. The very same feeling I got as I looked upon the many varied, creepy pictures in this book.

And to think that most of them are real, not manufactured for the sole purpose of the book! Me thought that was just cool... and creepy.

Time travelling. Now this is time travelling that I can get behind: the last one I read *cough* Hourglass*cough*was too pat, too easy. This one had loops and Ms. Peregrine types, and there were consequences that made sense. To say that its version was different, is quite true.

His devotion. Unlike his father, our MC had really close relationship with his grandfather. Sure, he'd had grown up and consequently doubted his grandfather's stories, but he cared for the old guy. The old guy really was his hero. It was this devotion that eventually got him on his adventure.

The Bad:

See that last sentence there? The one that says eventually? Well, "eventually" was almost half the novel. The first half had a lot of the funny parts, though: a priveleged teenage boy trying to get fired; a priveleged teenage boy who wasn't so popular with but one friend. BUT it got tedious, I tell you. The first half read like a YA contemp with some scary camp story thrown in. To be honest, the first half was so different from the second that I thought there were two novels in there. The first bit was him lost, drugged up just to cope and mourning. The second half was him and the Peculiars; you can guess which half I preferred.

And the... WTF?:

As with most YA's, there's a requisite love. In Jacob's case it's Emma. Jacob had voiced my concern early on in their relationship. It's not the instant love connection that I frequently complain of because there was no such thing here; the icky bit (kind of) comes in if you consider Emma and her history, (view spoiler)

Given all that ~ the good, the bad and the WTF, I'd say give this one a shot. It's got so many things going for it.

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