Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam

Bright Lines is the story of the Brooklyn-dwelling Saleem family that has immigrated from Bangladesh to enjoy the American dream.  However, behind the perfect facade of their restored Brooklyn home, Anwar and Hashi are struggling with secrets from the past and discontent with the present.  Their two college age daughters are stumbling their way into their futures. Much to her mother's dismay, Hashi and Anwar's biological daughter Charu seems in no hurry to make something of herself, instead choosing to wile away her time with boys and attempting to design clothes for the fashion label she dreams of.  Adopted daughter Ella is quiet and awkward but has an unparalleled way with plants.  In one transformative year, the family will have to face up to their secrets and the country of their past to learn to live again in the country of their future.

To be quite honest, I struggled with Bright Lines at the outset.  It's slow to get started, and while the characters sprang to life, occasionally the dialogue was awkward and wooden.  Anwar's dialogue in particular is sprinkled with pedantic tangents that allowed my attention to wander.

That said, Bright Lines really grew on me.  Islam has that rare talent that can render New York City into something that seems somehow magical.  The Saleems' Brooklyn house with its carefully tended oasis of a garden springs off the page.  Maya, Charu, and Ella's adventures to parties and to the beach have the New York City grit stripped away to reveal a new place with undercurrents of possibility.

Islam's characters are undeniably unique and all are fully realized.  Anwar, haunted by the war in his home country and the loss of his best friend, has become an herbal pharmacist and a shameless good-natured pothead.  Hashi, more educated by far than your average salon worker, uses her understanding of psychology to transform people's outsides to mirror their true selves when she isn't busy coiffing bridesmaids for weddings.  Charu is the pampered princess receiving all the benefits her immigrant parents have striven to give her and squandering them on boys and temper tantrums.  Ella, uncomfortable in her own skin and plagued by vivid hallucinations since the death of her parents, is still struggling to find her own identity. 

Islam renders Bangladesh with the same artful hand she uses to bring NYC to life, contrasting beautiful beaches with wretched slums.  She sets present day Bangladesh in stark contrast to the war torn state of Anwar and Hashi's youth.  In a country that endured a painful transformation, Islam expertly guides the Saleem family through a terrible transformation of their own until the scars and the rebirth of both are gently intertwined. 

Bright Lines, while not perfect, is an extremely promising debut for Tanwi Nandini Islam.  I'll be looking forward to the next novel from this author who easily draws the magical out of the ordinary.

(Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy in exchange for review consideration.)

Choose Your Own Comment Adventure! (2)

I had so much fun the first time around, and had so much glorious free time during this past long holiday weekend that I gleefully embraced the opportunity to go on another spontaneous commenting adventure.  If you haven't been watching, this is part of my plan to plug myself back into the book blogosphere, visit some old friends, and maybe even make some new ones.  The premise is, I start with the first blog in my feed reader that has a post with a comment, and then follow the comments on subsequent posts on an unpredictable journey around the book blogosphere, with only minimal cheating to avoid duplicates and/or wandering too far afield from bookish blogs.  Then I post my journey here so you can see who I discovered and what they're up to!

 

My first stop (look, if you pay attention you'll see who I've been neglecting on Feedly all this time!) on this week's adventure was It's All About Books where Suey is playing along with Jenni's Thirty Days of Books, but she's getting more bang for her buck by doing a few prompts at a time. Suey unexpectedly loved a book by one of my favorite authors - Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. My Internet Explorer is inexplicably not displaying the blogger comment box, but I will not be foiled. Happily it shows up in Firefox!

Next up is Jenni Elyse herself who is, unsurprisingly, playing along with her own Thirty Days of Books. Today's prompt is "a book you hated." Jenni hates the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia Series - The Last Battle. I didn't...hate it, that is, but Jenni's got some solid reasoning behind this choice, nonetheless.

Onward to more 30 Days of Books with Laura at Blue Eye Books who is sharing her favorite classic, The Great Gatsby, which is one of those classics I should really read again now that I'm not being required to read it for 9th grade English.

Guess what's next? More Thirty Days of Books with Jenny at Alternate Readality! Jenny's packing multiple prompts into one post like Suey. Jenny chose Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge for her "book you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving." Cruel Beauty is a Beauty and the Beast retelling that is languishing on my Kindle, where cheap e-book deals go to die. Sounds like I'd better get to reading it!

My streak of Thirty Days of Books ends at Bookmark Dragon. The first thing I notice is Melissa's awesome header graphic, but once I get done with being distracted by shiny things, I'm wooed into putting both The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty and Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff onto my wish list.

I may or may not have paused my journey for the night before continuing on to Literary Exploration where Anna is spotlighting YA novel Outrun the Moon by Stacey Lee which happens to have a beautiful cover. I think I'll enter her giveaway for a signed copy.  Wish me luck!

Renee at Two Peas in a Pod is Waiting on Wednesday. She's looking forward to The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa coming out in October, and now I am too!

Leeanna at leeanna.me is reviewing If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo, a book about a trans teen trying to fit in at a new high school. The author is also trans which makes this book that much more attractive for its authenticity. Wish list! In other news, I'm the first comment on the post (I kind of love being the first comment), so I'm bouncing to an older post to pick up the next link in my comment adventure...

Things are a little less than lighthearted over at Happy Indulgence where Aila is imploring people to pause before they rashly ruin friendships with something so trivial as a difference of opinion about a book on social media. While I may not know the whole story from just one post, I know that posting a thoughtful, respectful negative review should never be grounds for personal backlash.  Again I find myself glad to not be involved Twitter drama.  Yuck.

And last on today's journey is In Love with Handmade where Pili is sharing her unboxing of May's Illumicrate, a UK based quarterly bookish subscription box. Looks like the box contains one book and lots of other bookish goodies. Fun!

Thanks all for your support of my venture, and as ever, I invite you to join in the game for a good commenting time.  Graphic is free for the borrowing, and I'd love to hear about it if you go on a comment adventure of your own!

What's one great blog post you read today?

Series Worth Reading: Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne

I made a choice not too long ago to only read series when they were completed, and I had all the books in my possession.  What a good choice.  Instead of reading one book and then forgetting it and trying to get back into the series a year later, I can read them all within weeks of each other.  I usually intersperse standalones between books but not so many that I lose track of the series.  This has turned series reading into a welcome event instead of an exercise in frustration.  Happily, there are oodles and tons of complete YA series that are out there ripe for the reading (and reviewing...with only light spoilers!).

Monument 14 is one such series.  I'm an easy target for a good post-apocalyptic/dystopian series, and this one was great.

Book one wastes no time getting right into the nitty gritty of the apocalypse.  Dean and his brother Alex are running to catch their school buses little knowing that their lives as they knew them are about to be over.  Between home and school the buses are caught in a treacherous hail storm.  Dean's bus wrecks, but, quick thinker Mrs. Wooly, the elementary school bus driver plows her bus into a Greenway super store.  Unfortunately, the hail storm is only the beginning, and soon the group of unsupervised kids has taken more permanent shelter inside the store while the world outside endures catastrophe after catastrophe.

Monument 14 is cleverly conceived as both a post-apocalyptic thriller and a sort of social experiment that brings together average, slightly nerdy Dean with Jake the jock and Niko, a boy scout always prepared type, and a herd of scared and/or bratty elementary school kids.  While the world outside is crumbling under freak weather events and the release of a military grade toxin that interacts with certain blood types to produce dangerous effects, a motley assortment of grade schoolers is learning to rely on each other to survive.  It's interesting to see how long the normal high school social construct holds up before it becomes apparent that it's becoming a thing of the past.

The three books follow the group of kids from their safe haven in the super store out into the destroyed world, starting with Dean as the narrator and branching out to other points of view as circumstances change.  The post-apocalyptic world Laybourne presents is terrifying, filled with people desperate to get by and people who are wreaking havoc unaware thanks to the chemical weapon leak.  The pace is quick, with the kids dodging near disasters of all kinds as they seek a more permanent kind of safety than the Greenway has to offer.  Despite the abundance of characters presented, Laybourne doesn't scrimp on the character development, and each kid young and old(er) has a personality all their own.

The Monument 14 books are can't-put-them-down thrillers that read fast and have you longing for a happy ending for the "family" of kids who were unexpectedly thrown together in the Greenway on one fateful day.  

Choose Your Own Comment Adventure! (1)

Today's the day that I bring my comment crusade to life.  If you were reading yesterday, you'll know I've decided to make a feature out of my going on commenting escapades wherein I follow the comments from blog to blog, meet some new folks, pop in on old friends, you get the idea.  Basically, I started with the first post in my feed reader that had comment, left a comment there, then visited the first commenter leaving a comment on their most recent post, and onward like so for 10 blogs, with a minimum of backtracking and cheating to avoid duplicates and/or leaving the book blogosphere completely.      

In honor of the event, I made the above wretched graphic.  It just felt like it needed a picture to be a real feature.  Unfortunately, I have no real photo editing skills, in case you didn't take note of that already.  Oh well, bear with me anyway.  Here's where I went on my commenting adventure! (Full disclosure: I actually went on my "adventure" on Saturday morning, so these aren't the most recent posts anymore!)

I started off at Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking post, all about cookbooks and foodie non-fiction she discovered on her trip to BEA.  I duly added one of the spotlighted books to my wishlist - Pancakes in Paris by Craig Carlson (coming in September).

It didn't take me long to discover a new (to me) blog with another Weekend Cooking post.  Tina at Novel Meals reviewed the 14th Inspector Banks novel from Peter Robinson, Close To Home.  In the process, she spotlighted a few delicious food references from the book that made me hungry!  Series mystery/thrillers aren't usually for me, but drawing the inner foodie out of a not food related book totally is!

Uh oh, I fell out of the book blogosphere.  Jackie's blog, Junkboat Travels, is a lovely travel blog with a beautiful cover image that makes this a detour well worth taking. However, I think I'll step back to the next comment on the last blog to stay on a book bloggerly track...

Joy at Joy's Book Blog is also linked up to Weekend Cooking, but just my luck, she's also got some Saturday Snapshot action going.  Joy's post features some beautiful shots from her trip to Cuba and a bowl of tasty looking squash soup.

The next post I visited was from Christine at The Book Trunk Blog whose post is also linked up to Saturday Snapshot.  Christine shared some lovely photos of resurgent wildflowers called snake's head fritallaries.  Along with the pictures, Christine summarizes some really interesting background on these unique looking flowers.

I'm starting to get off the bookish track again (because memes), so I backtrack a little and end up in a familiar place.  Kathy at BermudaOnion's Weblog reviewed one of my favorite books from recent years - The Book Thief.  Good news, she loved it as much as I did!

Elizabeth at Silver's Reviews is celebrating her niece Elizabeth's (who is named after her!) graduation today.  Congrats, other Elizabeth!

Maria at A Night's Dream of Books responded to the Book Blogger Hop prompt, "Do you keep a blog roll list?" Spoiler alert: she gave up on hers because of the overwhelming amount of blogs she was following.  I can relate!

Kim at Bookworm Book Reviews featured a pair of Friday memes.  She shared the beginning and a blurb from My Sister's Grave by Robert Dugoni, which sounds like a very interesting mystery/thriller.

Lauren at Always Me loves time travel books and shared a tempting teaser excerpt from her current (much anticipated!) read, Future Shock by Elizabeth Briggs.

There you have it - my maiden voyage in serendipitous blog commenting.  If you need more commenting (and serendipity) in your life, give it a try yourself!  There are no rules except the ones you make.  Of course, I'm more than happy to lend you my delightful graphic...if anybody else would dare to besmirch their blog with that poor thing.  ;-)



A Cure for What Ails the Disconnected Book Blogger

Greetings all and welcome to my fair and neglected blog!

I've been having blogger guilt lately, but not the usual blogger guilt. You know, the guilt that says, "You should write more book reviews! You should have clever features and pretty pictures and stop planning to do bloggy community things and then failing to follow through!" I know if I applied myself, and sacrificed some Netflix time, I could fill this blog with lovely content. What's been bothering me lately isn't that I'm not really doing a stellar job of blogging but more that I'm doing an even worse job of commenting. I might be able to fire a post or two off into the void every now and then, but I've been dreadful about commenting back, meeting new people, everything except fulfilling the bare obligation to breathe life into my languishing blog once in a while.  Happily I have a few stalwart commenters that despite my considerable lack as a blogger, don't leave me alone to shout about books into nothingness. (Thanks, guys!!)

Anyhow, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in this boat.  It seems like half the blogs I visit have so few comments these days. I sometimes feel like we (er...I?) traded in book blogging community for shouting into the emptiness in the name of getting a few new books. That or we're so overwhelmed by the wealth of social media that we've traded in trying to have meaningful blog exchanges with each other for 140 character chatter or that perfectly posed coffee and a book picture on Instagram.

This was nowhere more apparent to me than when the decision was made to no longer cheerlead on blogs for the 24 Hour Readathon and only do the cheering on Twitter.  There's nothing wrong with Twitter cheerleading (I've done it, it's fun, especially late in the evening when everybody's getting punchy), and I mean no offense to the organizers who do such a great job of wrangling such a large event into submission. Alas, when I saw that, a part of me felt like a little bit of the heart fell out of the Readathon.  It was too time consuming, too difficult for us to engage one another on the very social media that spawned the Dewey's Readathon to begin with....blogs.  Book blogs. 

I wish I could say I handled myself maturely, but the most maturity I could muster was to not sign up to cheer and if I couldn't say something nice, I decided I would say nothing at all.  Today I was all ready to whip up some primo content (read: a few clumsily worded book reviews), and I said to myself as I too often do these days..."Self, what's the point of writing these reviews if you're going to carry on being such a half-assed member of the book blogging community?" 

At that point, instead of dejectedly going to clean the bathroom or some other only marginally rewarding domestic chore that I claim takes up so much of my time that I can hardly spare the time to write blog posts....instead of that, I had an idea.  I daresay it may even be a good idea.  In fact, this post was supposed to actually embody the fruit of that idea, but it's already grown too long under the weight of my musings, so you may have to wait a day or two to see....Choose Your Own (Commenting) Adventure!  A way for me to plug myself back into the book blogosphere, put a fire under my butt to comment more, and have content for my blog!

Instead of being constrained by the dutiful emptying of my Feedly, another place where blogging fun becomes a joyless obligation, I decided to leave a comment on the first post in my reader this morning that had a comment, then visit the first commenter on that post and so on until I had visited 10 blogs linked by their commenters.  Admittedly, I cheated a bit to keep my journey in the book blogosphere and out of niches where I genuinely didn't have much to say. 

Tomorrow or the next day, I plan to write up my short adventure around the blogosphere in that old "blog carnival" style.  Just a little link and a blurb for everyone I visited (in addition to my comments on their actual blogs).  It was great fun - I really read people's posts instead of just skimming them on my phone.  I thought of something at least semi-worthwhile to say to each.  I found a bunch of new to me blogs and stopped by a few old friends.  With any luck, it's something I'll start doing and writing about on a regular basis.  With any luck, maybe a few folks will join me in choosing their own commenting adventure.

What do you think?  Is commenting and feeling like a part of the larger book blogging community something you struggle with?