That's Unbelievable: Reviewlettes

I wrapped 2021 up on a decidedly mediocre note, consigning one book to my DNF pile for being too unbelievable and following it up with three only slightly less unbelievable stories.

2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas, is the story of 9-year-old Madeline Altimari, her teacher Sarina, and, Francis Lorca, owner of a failing jazz club.  Madeline is a prickly, old-for-her-age kid who is mourning her recently passed mother and dreams only of singing jazz.  Sarina is trying to rekindle something with an old flame, and Lorca is just trying to save his club from police scrutiny when the three come together in an unlikely moment on Christmas Eve Eve.  This is kind of a bizarre story of found family, but Bertino's writing is an attractive mix of magical realism and poetic prose.  While her characters may not have quite come to life for me, the Philadelphia setting really did.  Ultimately, Cat's Pajamas serves as a heartfelt love note to a city that doesn't often find itself so well-captured in print.

In Let It Snow, YA heavyweight authors John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle come together with a trio of linked novellas.  The first features Jubilee "not a stripper, despite the name" Dougal, whose parents end up in jail on Christmas Eve.  Bound for her grandparents' house in Florida during a massive snowstorm, her train gets stranded, which ends in a bizarre Waffle House encounter and ultimately being way too trusting of strangers.  Meanwhile, friends Tobin, J.P. and The Duke (AKA Angie) mount a snowy expedition to the very same Waffle House, now populated by their friend Don-Keun and a gaggle of stranded cheerleaders, but the cheerleaders are not the stars of this story.  Finally, we have uber self-centered Addie whose infidelity (and also super self-centeredness!) has her heartbrokenly mourning the loss of her boyfriend, Jeb.  But maybe's he's not lost forever, maybe he's just stranded at (wait for it...) the Waffle House!

This trio of romances starts off promising with Johnson's offering which is quirkily amusing.  Green's effort is a bit of a skid with the "race to the Waffle House with Twister" plot line which reads a little like the bad fan fiction your cousin once wrote in high school but for the romance that does end up sweetening the story a bit.  Myracle's contribution is just perplexing.  Addie is a pretty whiny, unlovable character who undergoes a transformation, but one that makes no sense at all.  Turns out you have to want a happy ending for a character for the happy ending to be satisfying.  I probably should have given this one a pass.

Last but not least, Clock Dance by Anne Tyler is the story of Willa McIntyre who abandons her life in Arizona with her second husband, Peter, to care for the child of her son's ex when said ex is recovering from a gunshot wound.  Tyler's writing is well-done and her plot well-executed.  I really enjoyed the setup of the book as we get to know the forces that have shaped Willa into the accommodating, "needs to be needed" adult that she became.  She brings a working-class Baltimore neighborhood to life, including opinionated Denise (the ex/GSW victim) and her practical daughter, Cheryl, quite well.  Tyler tells a good story about a woman on the edge of a transformation, but I had trouble getting past the very incident that brought them all together in the first place.  Flying cross-country to care for a grandchild in an emergency is one thing, abandoning your life and flying cross-country to babysit the daughter of a stranger is a little too much of a reach for my suspension of disbelief.

The "I Finally Read It!" Reviewlettes

Greetings all, we interrupt the shameless over-buying of cheap books for...some reading!  No, wait.  *analyzes several teetering piles of books looming over just the desk*  Surely that can't be right.  We interrupt the continuous browsing of the Kindle deals page for...some vacationing!  Wait, no, the vacationing appears to over.  I believe this place might be my home...  Okay, one more time, we interrupt the continuous cataloging of new bookly acquisitions for...some blogging!  Ah ha!  Yes, some blogging.  I do that once or twice a month, and considering that the looming pile of books begging for bloggish attention is threatening to topple onto and destroy my computer thus severing my connection from the book blogosphere forever for a couple minutes, it's probably time to re-assume my secret book blogger identity and write about them before they rebel.

It seems that much of this year that I haven't dedicated to reading brand-spanking new books, I've been reading all the books that it seems like nary a soul has failed to read except for me.  What with how I am among the last few people on the earth to enjoy these three selections, I figured a few reviewlettes are in order, if only so I can remember the books I'm reading.  Frankly, it's surprised me how quickly being a barely there blogger has plunged me into complete inability keep the books that I'm reading in my head for more than a few minutes.  I'm all like, "Wait, what did I just read last month?"  Whoa, that's bad news.  So anyway, without further digression, reviewlettes of some books you probably have already read!

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green - I know, right?  Not only had I not gotten around to reading this until this summer,  this is also the first book I've read by John Green.  Oh, the multitude of reading sins being atoned for with just this one book!  Anyhow, if you've been living in a nuclear fallout bunker or something for the last year, I should probably mention that this is the book about the teenagers with the cancer, and I loved it as much as all the people who love it loved it.  Green's terminal teens, Hazel and Gus, are almost unrealistically precocious in a way that I just ate up.  The Fault In Our Stars is full of lovable characters, romance, intelligent unpreachy contemplations of mortality, an exploration of how there is plenty of truth to be gleaned from fiction, and also, sadness.  Of course, sadness.  I had to practically speed read the last third of the book on a Monday night so that I wouldn't be caught weeping at my cafeteria table at work on Tuesday afternoon.  Rather, I wept embarrassingly much from the safety of my own home.  I laughed, I cried, I loved it.  I've already recommended it to a few real life friends who are also behind the times, and I recommend it also to you, last person on the earth to read The Fault In Our Stars!

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson  - Can I just say that I think the problem with my reading last year is that for some infernal and unexplainable reason I pretty much just abandoned YA fiction?  Truly, I swear, my love for YA grows with every year I grow to be less of a, well, young adult.  There is something about charging through a good piece of YA that is totally refreshing to my readerly soul, and it's not because I have a craving for something simple because YA these days is smart, just in a different way than "grown-up" fiction is smart.  Anywhoodle, The Adoration of Jenna Fox.  I didn't love this like I loved The Fault In Our Stars, but I'm glad I finally got around to reading it just the same.  Again, in case you yourself are just emerging from a coma that might have prevented you from reading this book before me, this one's about a girl who wakes up from a coma in a decidedly more technologically advanced future, and as she tries to recall who she was before a tragic accident, begins to discover that she's not quite all of the person she used to be.   Jenna Fox's world is interesting because it seems like just a mildly tweaked version of the world today wherein bio-ethically questionable technological advances have led us into both the miraculous and the catastrophic.  As Jenna unravels the secrets behind her post-accident life, Pearson gets to present a lot of very interesting bio-ethical quandaries involving life and death and where the true essence of a person lies.  The Adoration of Jenna Fox is an excellently paced and compelling story of how much you would do to save someone you love.


The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey - Last but not least, a book which has an intended audience of...adults!  I grabbed a copy of this at BEA the last time I was there, and I was sure I would love it.  Then all the bloggers started saying fantastic things about it, and I was doubly sure I would love it.  After all, I'm sad to report that despite pretty much every review I've read of this book being unrelentingly positive, I was disappointed.  The problem here, and the reason I've waited so long to say anything about The Snow Child is that I can't quite pinpoint why I was disappointed.  Okay, if you're returning from a lengthy undersea holiday, this book is about an older couple who decide to try their hand homesteading in the wilds of Alaska.  Mabel is unable to have a child and is crushed by the loneliness of long winters in the wilderness.  Jack is crumbling under the crushing demands of carving a farm out of a very challenging landscape.  On the night of the first snow, the two find unexpected joy in building a child out of snow.  The next day the snow child is missing, but a real child has appeared in her place. 

Honestly, I'd like a do-over on this one.  I read it over Christmas-time when things were hectic and I was busy trying to save kittens from dying and a lot of stuff was going on, and I couldn't give myself to this book like I might normally.  It's got all good ingredients - excellent characters, incredible descriptions of the dangerously beautiful Alaska wilderness, the sort of magical realism I'd normally just go bananas for, but it somehow it didn't all quite come together for me.  Faina, the snow child, always seemed more magical than real to me, and her not being quite "real enough" in my mind made it difficult for me to get emotionally involved with the latter half of the book.  I'd still happily recommend it, especially to readers who like a good dose of magical realism, but I can't say I loved it, at least, not upon my first (admittedly flawed) read.

And that's three books off my teetering pile, not to mention my overburdened shelves! 

(Oh, and by way of disclaimer, The Snow Child is the only one of these three provided by a publisher.)

Surely, you've read at least one if not all of these, what did you think?  Or perhaps you'd like to reassure me that I was not the last person in the world to, say, read a book by John Green?  ;-)