The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood

It's time to retrieve an oldie but a goodie from the vault of books that I should have read and reviewed a long time ago but didn't.  Today's selection is The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood.  Back in high school when I was making the transition from kids' books to "grown-up" books, I was way into crime fiction.  As I got a little older, I switched over to being more of a "literary" fiction fan, but there are parts of me that remember that craving for a good crime thriller, and when an offer of The Wicked Girls came across my radar, I was excited to read a good crime story that had been "literaturized" a little.  The more literary aspects of this book definitely gave me what I came for, but, much to my surprise, the mystery itself kind of disappointed.  This review is pretty much impossible to write without a light spoiler or two (that the jacket copy spoils anyway), so tread carefully, spoiler haters. ;-)

The action of The Wicked Girls starts in the seaside town of Whitmouth where Amber Gordon works as the supervisor of the third shift cleaning crew at Funnland, a beachfront amusement park.  Amber is trying to be the kind of supportive supervisor people like, helping them out when she can and turning a blind eye to their minor infractions.  Her life is pretty no frills, but her luck; finding a home with a good boyfriend, her two sweet dogs, and steady work; never ceases to surprise her.  That is, until the night when she reports to her normal cleaning duties at Innfinityland, the hall of mirrors, and discovers the body of a strangled young girl in its passages.  All the sudden, her criminal past, carefully buried and obscured by a new name and a quiet life, comes perilously close to the surface. 

As the killings continue, and the Seaside Strangler begins to make a name for himself, the press descends upon the lower-end holiday town. With it comes Kirsty Lindsay,  mother of two, hack journalist, and the incognito other half of a "criminal" duo.  Kirsty and Amber were never meant to see each other again, but the coincidence of the Whitmouth crimes drags them into each other's orbit for the first time since the fateful day when their childhoods came to an abrupt end. As the saga of the Seaside Strangler continues, the back story of the "Wicked Girls" also slowly unspools.

I actually quite enjoyed The Wicked Girls, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.  For starters, it was set on the English seaside, which for some reason, despite having read the spoilery jacket copy and whatever the publicist sent me when pitching the book to me for review, I failed to realize.  As for me, the British slang and atmosphere set this book a little apart for me and made me like it more.  Second, I was expecting more of a nailbiter when it came to identifying the Seaside Strangler. However, for anybody who has ever caught an episode of a show like Criminal Minds in their lives, spotting the Strangler was no difficult task, and I think I'd managed it before the book was half over.  Rather than giving a lot of attention to the immediate crimes at hand, the book uses them to embrace its more literary side and delve into the psyches of the now adult perpetrators of a childhood crime. 

As a character study, The Wicked Girls soars.  It asks difficult questions about what constitutes a murder, whether a killer can ever outrun the effects of their crime, and how well another person and their motives can ever truly be known.  More suspenseful than the Strangler mystery by far is the collection of flashbacks that recalls the details of the first and last day the Wicked Girls spent together and the crime, if you can call it that, that derails their futures.  Marwood does a stellar job with her two main characters.  They are are never quite positioned as wholly loveable women, but Marwood easily draws your sympathy toward them as she lays out the paths that each took to live a good life in the wake of crime and punishment, whether it was by being a devoted wife and mother or by always offering a helping hand to a friend or a co-worker in need.  When it becomes clear that what's past is never truly past, Marwood evokes a sad situation and asks her readers to consider what really makes a person wicked and whether someone with blood on their hands can ever find redemption.    

(Review copy received from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.)

Top Ten Tuesday: Books About Friendship

I actually had a lot of fun assembling my list for this week's Top Ten Tuesday because the topic is "Books About Friendship."  While I was perusing potential candidates for this list, I found a lot of great books that are so very different from each other, but all of which hinge on one type of friendship or another.  It's amazing to think about all the sorts of friendships that exist, and I think my list this week has a pretty interesting cross-section of them, and I'd be lying if I said that I designed it that way. 

1. Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett - Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, and I always surprise myself when I think about her work and come up with this memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy as one of my very favorites.  I think this book appeals to me so much because Patchett is the steady, dependable friend in the relationship, and that's me in most of my relationships.  It's obvious she loved her friend, but she doesn't skirt around the more difficult aspects of their time together.

2. Brewster by Mark Slouka - Possibly the most powerful portrait of a friendship I've ever read.  It's a great coming of age story, too.  The two main characters in Brewster step up to be each other's family when real family fails them.  It's a powerful picture of what it is to read between the lines to figure out what a friend really needs and stopping at nothing to protect them.

3. Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden - This is one of those day in the life sort of books, and Madden's narrator spends a midsummer day staying at a friend's house in her friend's absence and ruminating about the impacts her two best friends have had on her life and each other's.  And it's a much, much more interesting read than I just made it sound like...

4. Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going - Troy, the fat kid in question, is contemplating suicide when he makes friends with a budding rock star who's got some problems of his own.   Curt's a little bit larger than life, and drumming for Curt's band gives Troy a reason to be, but, turns out, Troy's not the only one who needs a little help.  Fat Kid Rules the World is a great story about two unlikely friends who turn out to be made for each other.

5. Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger - Told completely in letters, Last Days of Summer is a mostly hilarious and briefly heartbreaking story of a mouthy kid who starts writing letters to the hot-headed up-and-coming star of the New York Giants.  What starts as mail harassment soon turns into a memorable friendship.  I love this book.  Just thinking about it makes me want to read it again. 

6. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty - The main character in this one is missing her flaky friend who fled normal life to join the circus.  This is the sort of friendship where you understand why your friend is doing the crazy things they're doing, but you're also kind of bummed that they're always leaving you in the lurch.

7. Gossip by Beth Gutcheon - This book hinges on a narrator whose two best friends became each other's sworn enemies over some long past trivial slight.  The ripples of their mutual loathing are far-reaching, and it's an interesting look into the delicate balancing act that ensues when the people you love best in the world don't even like each other.

8. The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton - Then there are the "group of friends" books. I kind of expected this story about a group of women who bond when they form a writing group during the 1960s to be kind of fluffy.  Instead, it's a an intriguing story about women "coming of age" all over again, in a decade when the world is opening up for them in ways never before experienced.

9. Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister - Another great book with a group of friends.  One friend is facing a fight with cancer and inspires her group of friends to dare each other to do one fearless thing that will open up their lives to new possibilities.  What's great is following each friend through her assigned task, which may at first seem pretty innocuous, but turns out revealing each character's struggles and also the depth of their relationships with each other.

10. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson - Bridge to Terabithia is practically a classic.  You pretty much haven't lived until you've explored Jess and Leslie's imaginary kingdom and cried bucketloads of tears over a kid losing a best friend.

Turns out I really love lots of books that explore friendships.  What's your favorite?

Bout of Books Update #1

It feel like I've been reading for a long time, so it must be time to finally post a Bout of Books update.  Honestly, I'm pretty happy with my progress.  I'm sure my reading totals will pale in comparison to most people's, but in comparison to my average week, this week has been a big win so far.

Books Read:

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink (finished off the last 45 pages)
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis (56 pages of graphic novel, which really is  good for a readathon morale boost)
Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern (342 pages)

Reading Now:

Out of the Blue by S.L. Rottman (70 pages down)

All told (in case you didn't just whip out your calculator), that's about 513 pages, which isn't too shabby considering I work full time and haven't been able to get much reading time in there, spent most of Tuesday night celebrating my grandmother's birthday, and, also, I am that person who needs close to eight hours of sleep at night in order to successfully mingle with the rest of the human race.

More importantly, I'm pretty happy with how well I've been doing at keeping to my modest time management goals.  I started early (the Bout of Books is not just one week, it's a way of life, amIright?), abandoned stupid computer games/social networks I don't even like, sacrificed the overage of naps in favor of reading on the front porch, and have generally made reading more of habit instead of squeezing in a few pages before bed.  And, that, my friends, is just what I was going for.  Here's hoping I can keep it up, but even if I can't, I still count this week a success already.

What have you been reading this week?

Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

They call us guards, warders, invigilators, room keepers, gallery assistants.  We are watchmen, sentinels, but we don't polish guns, shoes or egos.  We are custodians of a national treasure, a treasure beyond value stored behind eight Corinthian columns of a neoclassical facade, the dreams of the ancients stuccoed to our building.  And our title should honor that.

Asunder is a short book, but it demands a lot of its reader.  Its main character, Marie, is a guard at the National Gallery in London where she has worked for nine years becoming intimately acquainted with the museum's many works of art and sinking into a life of days marked by routine and lack of ambition.    There is little plot to speak of, just Marie's slow dawning realization that she's allowed her life to become like one of the paintings she guards: ripe for contemplation but requiring her to maintain a safe distance.  Marie's life within Aridjis' pages is austere, marked by long days at the museum, evenings crafting delicate dioramas from egg shells, and a bizarre friendship with fellow museum-guard and poet, Daniel, a relationship that demands the following of a certain set of rules to "thrive,"  and a relationship that each fails to push beyond the realm of awkward friendship despite numerous opportunities.

I struggled with very mixed feelings about Asunder.  On one hand, Aridjis's writing is compelling.  She can turn a phrase, and the way she describes the strung together episodes of Marie's life draws out the mundane life she leads as well as a few surreal, bizarre occurrences that finally set up Marie's life for a change.   On the other hand, Asunder is a very short book that took me so long to read because I ended up pausing numerous times to stare into the middle distance trying to piece together what seemed to be a collection of unrelated events into some sort of cohesively themed whole.  I always felt like I was on the verge of understanding the larger scheme of what Aridjis was trying to say but never quite getting there.  In the end, without a little more help understanding the nature of Marie's transformation, Asunder failed to make the jump from a compelling piece of artful writing to an engaging story, and I was left with the distinct impression that I was missing something, rather than the closure I was looking for in Asunder.

(Review copy provided by publisher in exchange for my honest review.)

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Almost Put Down but Didn't

It's been forever since I've done one of these great Top Ten Tuesdays hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.  Okay, it's been forever since I've done any serious blogging at all, but this week's topic captured my interest.  It's all about those books you almost put down but didn't.  Obviously, there are books that you didn't give up on that turned into major reading winners.  On the other hand, there are the books that you definitely wish you would have gone with your gut and given up on.  I've divided my list between the two.

Books I'm Glad I Didn't Put Down

1. The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson - I'm totally into the whole family saga thing, so this one reeled me right in.  Then I realized it was a bunch of interconnected short stories, which is often a dealbreaker for me since I don't find that short stories really connect into much of anything for me.  This one was different, and really worked for me - an excellent picture of a family weathering the changes of the late 20th century with an ending that's like one of those songs that starts in a minor key and then suddenly transforms to a major one in the final note.  Hopefully you're musically "educated" enough to know what I mean by that...but even if you aren't you know it when you hear it.  And read it.

2. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh - Between the rough subject matter and the written Scottish accent/dialect, Trainspotting is nothing if not challenging.  I had to read it out loud until I got the hang of it (thank goodness no one was around), but once I got it down, I could hear it in my head and surprised myself by really liking this one.

3. Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman by Minka Pradelski - The narrator of this one, and the premise of a stranger coming to the weird narrator's door to tell her stories all about her Jewish town in the run-up to World War II, is all a bit too much on the weird side, but then Mrs. Kugelman started bringing her town to life in a way that seemed to mix the mundane with legend and myth, and I was sold.  Sure, it was weird and outside the box, but it also happened to be really good.

4. We Sinners by Hanna Pylvainen - Here are those interconnected short stories again, which is apparently something I expect to hate, but don't always.  The stories from the perspectives of the many members of a large fundamentalist Christian family combine to create a picture of all the pleasure and pain of living life or leaving life steeped in religion.  I didn't realize until I wrote the review how much I admired the well-balanced, loving perspective Pylvainen brought to her story.

5. In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike - I read this book for a book group meeting, and I'll admit it was occasionally kind of a slog, not to mention that the first segment is about a minister losing his faith, which is kind of too depressing, even for me.  The book has 4 huge chapters that take on one character's life journey each, and I struggled to understand it at times.  But it was great for discussion, and I found that having discussed it and thought it over that the story and ideas Updike brought together in this book really stuck with me.

Books I Finished and Sorta Wished I'd Put Down

6. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen - In hindsight, with all the scandal and everything, I wish I had put it down.  Mortensen's was an interesting story so drawn out and dryly told that I could have put it down a dozen times. 

7. Crossing the Heart of Africa by Julian Smith - This book has a cool premise bringing together the stories of Ewart Grogan who made the first crossing of the African continent in the late 19th century, braving innumerable hazards to earn the uncle's blessing that would allow him to win the hand of his true love alongside Smith's own story of traversing the continent before marrying his wife-to-be.  Grogan's story is pretty cool.  Smith's side of the story is more about escaping marriage than embracing it, and his weird commitment-phobia and over-sharing about his own relationship look that much shallower when set against Grogan's impressive feat.

8. Enjoy Every Sandwich by Lee Lipsenthal - Interesting memoir about a doctor facing death with dignity takes a bizarre turn for the metaphysical and self-helpy. 

9. From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry -  Bizarre satire features an impossibly naive high fashion designer turned accessory to terrorism.  And, yes, it was as weird as it sounds.  And also unexpectedly...boring?

10. The Very Thought of You by Rosie Allison - I pressed on with this one because it got an Orange Prize list nod, but I wish I hadn't.  The novel is about the dissolution of a marriage during World War II while the couple hosts numerous evacuee children on their country estate.  Therefore, impressionable young Anna is on hand to witness marital drama far beyond her years.  Kind of creepy, really.

What books did you almost put down but turned out to be good?  Or do you usually wish you would have gone with your first instinct when you finish a book you thought you should've put down?