Reviewlettes That Are Actually Short!

Often I jolly myself into thinking that I've written reviewlettes.  Unfortunately, all too often they are still too long to qualify.  Hope springs eternal, so I always just call them reviewlettes and hope that the reading public will agree.  The following may actually be short enough to qualify.  So short, in fact, that I have put all four into only one post.  Here in 2017, at the ripe old age of 33, let it be said of me that it is indeed possible for me to be concise.  Now....books!  

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan is a powerful and so incredibly plausible dystopian story for adults that takes place in a United States where prisons have been abolished in favor a society where people wear their crimes in the shade of their skin.  I was entranced by this novel that is a clever futuristic retelling of The Scarlet Letter where megachurches rule and one girl wears her sin in the bright red of her skin, and being trapped in a body turned red might just be what sets her free.

World War II set stories are among my favorites, and Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum does not disappoint.  Trudy has always been bewildered by her mother, Anna, a taciturn woman who refuses to talk about her life during the war.  During a research project meant to discover the stories of ordinary Germans who lived through the war, Trudy stumbles across the remarkable story of her own mother, a woman who saved herself and her child from certain starvation or worse, but at what cost?  An excellent addition to the genre, Blum’s novel is a haunting exploration of the inescapable moral dilemmas that riddle lives torn apart by war.

After her father’s death, Liberty “Ibby” Bell’s mother deposits her on the doorstep of her grandmother, the occasionally crazy Miss Fannie.  Dollbaby by Laura Lane McNeal is a story of a few quirky characters living in Civil Rights-era New Orleans.  McNeal’s story is filled with eccentric characters, southern charm, and the battle to de-segregate, but it seems like she’s trying to do too much.  Too many characters have too many secrets.  Too many coincidental tragedies drive the plot until it all starts to collapse under its own weight.  A lot of people liked this one a lot, but it wasn’t a big hit for me.

I'm always a little iffy on middle grade books since I'm reading them as an adult. Once in a while, I find a total gem, but most of the time I find myself underwhelmed. Unfortunately, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau didn't really light my fire (Light my fire?  Get it?  I’ll be here…sporadically throughout the next year). DuPrau's dying underground world is well conceived, and irrepressible Lina and serious Doon are certainly characters middle schoolers should have no problem rooting for. As an adult reader, however, I was disappointed with all the telling that took the place of showing, the adult characters that were mostly caricatures, and the slow plot that seems to rely too heavily on the coincidence of whatever Lina's unsupervised baby sister is getting into or gumming to death in any given chapter. Three stars because while it fell a little flat for me, I'm sure its intended audience would find it much more rewarding.

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