Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated Books

Okay, so, today's Top Ten Tuesday theme is the "most underrated books or authors in a genre."  I wasn't sure about doing this one, because I tend to be a bad judge of when a book is actually underrated, and also I couldn't really manage to pick a genre.  I guess these all kind of fit into some sort of historical or literary fiction mold, but generally I just went with books that I read and really liked that I guessed maybe you haven't heard of...?  Maybe?  Anyhow, here's ten good books that could use a little more loving, in my very humble opinion.

1. Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan - This is a dark read by a Canadian author about a feud between two families. Superb characterization, haunting prose, great story.

2. Pied Piper by Nevil Shute - On the Beach is this author's claim to fame, but this tale of an elderly gentlemen fleeing France during the early days of its World War II occupation with a troop of children unexpectedly entrusted to his care definitely deserves sooo much more attention. 

3. The Grave of God's Daughter by Brett Ellen Block - I was surprised when I read this one that I couldn't find a single book blogger review of it on the internet.  It's a great coming of age story about a girl growing up in an impoverished Pennsylvania town that is busting at the seems with secrets.

4. Spilling Clarence by Anne Ursu - Anne Ursu writes interesting books about what would be the real life reactions to fantastic events.  In The Disapparation of James, she dissected a family's psychological meltdown when their son actually disappears during a magic show.  In Spilling Clarence, a town is "poisoned" by a drug that unleashes all their memories good, bad, and ugly upon them, minus the buffer of time and healing.  It's an interesting look at memory, both how potent and how misleading it can be.

5. Falling Under by Danielle Young-Ullman - I read this one earlier this year and liked it a lot more than I expected to.  In it, troubled artist Mara has survived her parents' acrimonious divorce and her more recent troubled past to emerge to a more comfortable, if sheltered, life as an artist.  All that changes when she meets a guy in a bar and decides to take a chance on the love she stopped believing in a long time ago.  Just about every other chapter is a flashback told in the second person which is a great plot device for getting to know a character that might appear functional on the outside, but is actually deeply damaged by her history.  Great dialogue and a love triangle that I didn't hate. 

6. Losing Clementine by Ashley Ream - In keeping with the "troubled artist" tack, this one's about another troubled artist.  At the beginning of the book, Clementine is quitting therapy because she's decided she's really going to kill herself.  First she has a bunch of loose ends to tie up.  What materializes is a story filled with deliciously dark humor and a very well-drawn character with more reasons to live than she might have imagined.

7. Black & White by Dani Shapiro - This is a refugee from my pre-blogging days, which happen to be a loooong time ago now.  The story of a daughter estranged from her artist mother who saw her as more of subject for art than a daughter.  Clara fled her unwanted fame for a quiet life, but as her mother lies on her deathbed, Clara has to revisit her past, and it's a compelling story.

8. When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale - This author's English Passengers got a lot more attention than this little book that I read in the early days of my blogging that has one of the most accurate child narrators I've ever encountered that puts a unique spin on a not-so unique story.  It rates low on Good Reads and LibraryThing, which makes me kind of sad.

9. We Sinners by Hanna Pylvainen - Whenever I try to summarize this book, it sounds kind of, well, soul-crushingly boring.  It's not!  It's a very thoughtful portrayal of the many children of a couple dedicated to a very fundamentalist sect of Christianity.  Some keep the faith, others turn away, but it all comes together to be a very thoughtful and balanced look at faith that makes for some good contemplating. 

10. Bright and Distant Shores by Dominic Smith - I read this one earlier this year but haven't managed a proper review.  Smith writes beautifully and evokes both turn of the century Chicago and the islands of the South Pacific with equal skill.  Okay, I'll admit the plot isn't the most memorable, but Smith sets scenes you can really get lost in. 

Have you read any of these?  What are some books or authors that you feel are underrated?

The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson

Okay, so, if you hang out with me at all here on ye olde blog, you probably know that I am paralyzed by making my own decisions about what to read next.  In the interests of not wasting a lot of time hemming and hawing over my next read (and also unintentionally ignoring the large swathes of my book collection that are hiding double-stacked behind other swathes of my book collection), I let LibraryThing do it for me.  Every book I own is listed there, and it now handily dandily has a "show a random book of yours" feature, so I could cut Random.org and get right into its latest choice for me, The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson.  This book has lots of buzz words that made it an obvious choice for my bookshelf.  Words like "family saga" and "sweeping" and "powerful" make my readerly heart just go pitter-pat, if you know what I'm saying.

Anyhow, I was mislead.  Sort of.  Imagine my crestfallen face when after reading the first two or three chapters I realized that the sweeping family saga was told entirely in interconnected short stories about the different members of an Iowa family in the waning decades of the twentieth century.  Again, if this isn't your first visit to my blog, you probably know that the term "short story" does not drum up excitement and anticipation in my heart of hearts.  But wait, here's the thing, and it took me a while to realize that while I was busy constantly toying with the idea of putting it down because, ew, short stories, I actually liked it.  Like really liked it, because here's the thing, this book manages to create a real family through its stories of its different members and their everyday struggles while at the same time actually delivering on the other promise of the jacket copy which says the book is "a moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of our national character."

Thompson does an admirable job of bringing the Erickson family of rural Iowa to life in such a way that even though the characters are often unlikable they are also sympathetic.  First, there is Anita, who, while still young, got married to a banker and tried to make herself into the perfect stay at home mom without ever giving any thought as to whether that was who she wanted to be.  Then, there's Ryan who spends his elder sister's wedding day thinking about how he doesn't what to fit into the mold his family has set out for him, marrying, having babies, having a "small" mid-western life.  He might escape, but will he like the new him that he discovers?  Younger brother Blake is living the life that Ryan dreaded, but it seems to suit him just fine.  Little sister Tori, brimming with potential, becomes a target for tragedy and is bound to her childhood home where she tries the dedication of her faithful parents.  On the fringes of the Erickson family is cousin Chip who came back from Vietnam damaged and addicted to drugs and lightly deviant behavior. 

Thompson tells bits and pieces of their stories in chapters that focus on one character at a time until she's teased out what is essentially a microcosm of the American experience in recent history.  There's the guy that came home from Vietnam with his young life turned upside down who could never seem to turn it right again.  There's the woman caught on the outer fringes of an era when being the perfect stay-at-home mom and homemaker was expected.  She thought she wanted to be that, but maybe it's time that she can be more.  There's the guy riding the dot-com bubble to wealth, and discovering that wealth can't deliver what he really needs.  These are people living hollow lives, looking for something to fulfill them.  They're looking back on older generations in the glow of memory, respecting the work they did to give the current generation the resources and the privilege to go in search of themselves.  They miss that sense of hard work and purpose that permeated the lives of their elderly aunt and uncle, but these people can't be satisfied by that kind of life anymore for better and for worse.

As the book wears on, it gets to feeling a little hopeless and sad, but then something changes.  The characters find some of what they're looking for in their striving.  They might never quite arrive, but they come to an understanding.  The Year We Left Home is a slice of life book that is over before it's truly ended, but it's got one of the best last paragraphs I think I've ever read, a paragraph that starts out cryptic but then ties Thompson's whole accomplishment together with respect for the past and hope for the future.  This book demands a little extra time and a little extra effort when it comes to empathizing with the characters, but it's got a lot of true things to say about our lives and times in these United States.  Well worth a read.

(I bought this book for myself.  And then I read it, too!  No disclaimer needed, but I do think I deserve a pat on the back.  LOL!)

The Tyrant's Daughter by J.C. Carleson

My brother is the King of Nowhere.

So starts Laila's story.  She's recently been relocated to an apartment with her mother and brother in Washington D.C. suburbia.  Her six-year-old brother is the would-be heir to power of the country they fled shortly after Laila's father was killed, and his brother assumed power by force.  Now, instead of living ensconced in a Middle Eastern palace, Laila is struggling to understand her new life and new culture as she attends her new American school.  As if that's not hard enough, her eyes are being opened to the many horrors that occurred under her father's rule, and trying to reconcile those with the loving father she knew is no easy task.  Laila is amazed at the freedom her new life affords her; a life without veils, a culture where casual kissing isn't forbidden.  At the same, though, she feels the pull of her home country, hates the treachery of her despotic uncle, and can't shake the feeling that something has to be done to discover and rectify the secrets that are buried deep in her homeland.

The Tyrant's Daughter is a story headed in two different directions, mostly because Laila herself is headed in two different directions.  There's the Laila who is striving to make friends, understand a culture that mystifies her and fit in with people whose biggest problem is a nasty break-up.  This Laila is learning to cut loose at the school dance and what it feels like to fall in love with a guy that's not chosen for her.  The other Laila is still deeply embroiled in the struggles of her home country.  A CIA agent keeps lurking around her new home, and some expatriates from her country that her family never would have associated with in her old life are visiting frequently.  She knows her devious mother is up to something, and a lot hinges on what Laila, her family's "Invisible Queen," can find out and act upon.

I loved the premise of this story but felt that the execution left a lot to be desired.  It's not difficult to imagine this scenario happening.  Laila's country is an amalgamation of several Middle Eastern nations and it's not much of leap to imagine the high-stakes politicking Laila's family becomes embroiled in.  Laila's discovery of the atrocities happening in her country and her discovery of the power her family wields even at a distance are the high points of this story.

My country makes shameful lists:  Worst countries for women.  Worst countries for human rights.  Worst countries for press freedom.  It's never at the top, but it's often close -- it's the runner-up in a devil's beauty pageant.

However, Laila's interactions with her new American culture and struggle to fit in seemed to me to be woefully inauthentic. I never quite bought Laila's romance with Ian of the leonine eyes, and her bubbly friend Emmy seemed to be a caricature of a typical happy mostly problem-free American teenager created mostly to stand in stark relief against Laila's overburdened worldliness.  When Laila in her first person narration tosses off observations about her new culture relative to her old one, it's more like hearing Carleson's voice, not Laila's, and that voice occasionally feels just the slightest bit condescending (Like, how could you silly, pampered Americans with your #firstworldproblems possibly understand the magnitude of Laila's struggles?).  All in all, the first person narration itself wasn't quite successful.  The short chapters and the Carleson's tendency to tell much more than show left me feeling disengaged from Laila for much of the book.

The Tyrant's Daughter might prove to be a good starter book for young adults to gain a better and more meaningful understanding of the Middle East and the struggles it faces through Laila's story.  However, if you're a little older and a little more well-read on the issues and cultures of the Middle East, you might find this book to ring a little hollow, as it did for me.  Perhaps part of the problem is, yet again, that I'm reading a book that's just a little too Y for my A.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.)

Bout of Books: Wrap-Up

Wow, in terms of blogging, I had a lousy Bout of Books.  I wrote my sign-up/un-goals post and then disappeared from the blogosphere utterly.  The good news is, that's because I was actually reading.  I did a little better than I somewhat negatively predicted and read two books instead of a a mere one and I half.  I read...

Last Night at the Blue Angel by Rebecca Rotert (325 pages)

and (finally!)

Divergent by Veronica Roth  (487 pages)

That's a total of 812 pages or roughly 2 and a half times what I would read in a normal week.  Not too shabby.  Plus, both books I read were excellent, fast-reading readathon picks and all-around excellent books.

 My mom (Bonnie!) who participated along with me read all 5 books she set out to read.  They are...

The Giver by Lois Lowry (180 pages)

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (163 pages)

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan (211 pages)

Dear Zoe by Philip Beard (196 pages)

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (194 pages)

...for a total of 944 pages.  She enjoyed all five, but Bridge to Terabithia was her favorite.

All this reading has been fun, but now I have to get back to this blogging thing.  How come I can't do all these things at once??          

Bout of Books 11

Here ye, here ye - here lies my intention to participate in the Bout of Books readathon taking place this week.  Last time it helped to re-energize my reading and my blogging, too, so here's hoping it will do so yet again.  My blogging life is toddling along more or less as or better than expected, however my reading life needs a little more love just about now seeing as the TBR books are threatening to overtake the house.

Here is the blurb from their handy-dandy website.

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 18th and runs through Sunday, August 24th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure, and the only reading competition is between you and your usual number of books read in a week. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 11 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

My goal?  Well, I hate goals actually, so my goal this time is to have no goals, to put no pressure upon myself to live up to some uncertain standard all you fast readers of the world can achieve with ease.  In my life, I've found that the more goals I have, the more disappointed I become when I can't quite achieve them, and suddenly I'm on the fast track to self-loathing when I haven't read all the books/lost all the weight/done all the exercising/achieved all the career status that I planned, ergo I can't be happy with anything that I have achieved.

I intend to spend more time reading than usual, and I have already actually deleted the stupid TwoDots game off of my phone in hopes of achieving a more stress-free and reading-full coming week.  I'm not sure if I will take the plunge into the mounting pile of review copies that is looming on my desk or whether I'll eschew bloggerly responsibility to, say, inhale the whole Divergent series in one gulp so I can stop being one of the last few dystopian YA lovers of the world to have read that.

Exciting news, too, folks, my mom, who was recently overtaken by an obsession with BookTube and, consequentially, a mad scramble to buy all the brilliant YA books she's been missing all her life, is also going to take part with me this time around.  I may or may not be hoping this is an indication that I might be able to persuade her to do the next Dewey's 24 Hour thon which I am always harping on her about.  But I digress, my mom (or "Bonnie" as she insists I refer to her for the purposes of this blog post) has, like, real goals for the Bout of Books (I guess somebody has to.).  In this, her first official Bout of Books she intends to read the following:

She says, "Is that enough?"  Jeez, I hope so or she'll put my slow reading self to shame.  Also, I told her she'll probably have to budget some time for weeping.  Seriously, have you read any of these?

Here's hoping for a week of extra-excellent reading - wish us luck!