Review: Horns by Joe Hill

I'm not usually one to get swept up in a frenzy bandwagon read, but the last time I followed the recommendations of my fellow TLs at the bookstore, I ended up reading the terrific (and now critically overlooked) The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

The six of us have fairly diverse tastes, and because we're always picking up new stuff, it's rare for any two of us to be reading the same thing around the same time, let alone three or four of us. Sure, there's always new books we're talking up, and each of us is almost always lobbying the others to read something so fantastic, so well-written, so thrilling, so entertaining, so funny.... etc. When a book takes the manager staff by storm, it deserves a little attention.

When Chris, our general manager, received several advanced copies of the upcoming Joe Hill book, she was ecstatic to hand them out to us. I took a copy not because I'm a huge Joe Hill fan - I haven't read Heart-Shaped Box, though I have enjoyed the few of his short stories I've read - but because I'm almost always willing to read anything having to do with the Devil. Also, I figured I might want to read it before Hill's appearance at our store in March. And Chris couldn't stop raving about it, so I thought it was worth having a copy on hand if the buzz continued to build.

And it did. But truthfully, being as awash in the upcoming 2010 kids' books coming out, I never would have been able to get to this book before March had it not been for one very priming factor:

I'm burned out on kids' books.

Sad but true. Finishing up the must-reads of 2009 while simultaneously tackling the first of the must-reads for 2010, as well as trying to keep up with the reading for my store-sponsored kids' book clubs and the ever pressing Shelf Awareness Reading Challenge, I've been covered in an avalanche of kids and young adult reading... and I'm still nowhere near where I want to be.

I've read so many terrific kids' books. Books entertaining, silly, sad, moving, thrilling, even frightening. I've had moments of reading this past year that have remained with me since their conception. Even now, reading a little piece of The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate or When You Reach Me or Catching Fire will send my body into pulses of goosebumps. The other day, while pitching the positives of Kate DiCamillo's latest, The Magician's Elephant, I realized that every element I attributed to the text - beauty, profound and lovely, but also equally comprised of cold and of loneliness - was absolutely true, and that this was truly a book that any reader could fall in love with.

But trying to keep up with an ever-growing supply of new, hot titles to read has numbed me a bit to the subtle charms of the recent kids' books I've picked up, and that has made me hesitant to start new reads until I recharge my enthusiasm.

I also suffer a little bit of deprivation having to do with the lack of darkness in so much of kids' lit. Every once in a while, a YA book can surprise you with its demons - The Hunger Games or The Chaos Walking Trilogy or The Graveyard Book - but mostly it steers clear of really dangerous ideas and plotlines. Sometimes what I want to read is the literary equivalent of a punch to the gut, and that doesn't happen to often in books meant for a younger audience.

Hence, Horns. Now that you've read my life story, you're probably wondering why I'd bother going into such detail about the whys of reading this fantastic new book.

Well, if I wanted a punch to the gut, I received it and more. A promising first chapter got me thinking that this would be one of those "you've just got to read this" books, in the effect that Hill could pull off a premise whose directions could vary wildly in scope, tone, and quality.

Ig Perrish wakes up with a raging hangover and a pair of horns growing out of his head. A night of hard drinking to console himself about the anniversary of his girlfriend's unsolved murder remains a mystery, as does the appearance of the horns and his sudden strange effect ont he people he comes into contact with. After a series of odd interactions where complete strangers tell him the deepest and darkest of their secret actions and desires, Ig makes a trip to his parents' house where he encounters surprising and unexpected truths from his family, including the identity of his girlfriend's murderer.

Just as every culture has their own way of understanding and interpreting "The Devil," Hill creates his own version, this one with a compassionate streak, an affinity and affection for the serpents who seek him out, a snarky sense of humor and rock'n'roll soundtrack. Hill also effectively withholds actually coming to the devil conclusion until long after his readers have made that decision for themselves, which is nice because it doesn't make the issue a forgone conclusion - after a while it would be easy to take for granted Ig's condition, but Hill's a better author than that.

What he does give us is a complex main character whose previous virtues as a human being were both innate and coincidental. It's a conclusion that doesn't come up much in high concept mysteries and thrillers - how people are as much defined by the evil they don't do, and how the line between what a person is capable of doing is never fixed, never permanent, and almost always dissolving in the murky waters of doubt, confusion and anger.

Hill pulls off his big concept, although not without faults. The book is divided into sections each following their own narrative thought - a section telling the story of Ig as a fifteen year-old, meeting his best friend, Lee, and his future girlfriend, Merrin, as well as exploring the relationship between him and his older brother, Terry. A later section changes course entirely, inhabiting the mind and memories of another character, and it is in this section that Hill gets some of his best and slowest moments - while it is key to telling the story, the section drags, especially as placed so close to the concluding action of the primary plot. I found myself fighting the urge to skim longer paragraphs of description, as if they represented walls of distraction obstructing the course to the answers and actions I wanted most to reach.

Of course this is, truly, a minor complaint. If a storyteller has so captivated you to the point of irritation in not being delivered answers straight away, then he's obviously doing many, many things right. Hill gets points for using explicit violence and language effectively, naturally enough to be the part of everyday vernacular and extraordinary circumstances, but not so much as to be distractingly crass or off-puttingly vulgar. One could be off put by the rampant misogyny, but in a tale exploring the hidden natures of good and evil lying within everyone, issues between genders are inevitably going to occur, and in volatile expressions of hate, disgust, and desire.

It's a relief to read a thriller about morality that doesn't pretend to fully comprehend or espouse its theories. Notions of good and evil are just that - elements of thought, some layered one upon another upon another, roughly resembling something like religion, spirituality, morality, evilness or goodness.

While my co-worker, Maureen, said it gave her nightmares, I didn't find the text dauntingly frightening. It messes with you, certainly - any good fantastical tale of good and evil really should screw with your mind - but I see this more as a potboiler with thriller elements than a straightforward horror. Or perhaps a horror for mystery lovers. Or a horror for those who love religious metaphors and themes.

Whether it's a horror, mystery, thriller, religious parable, I like mine dark humored, violent, and more than a little gritty. I needed to get my reading hands a little dirty, and this novel did the trick.

Review: Split by Swati Avasthi

No matter how much young adult literature I read, it's still sometimes difficult to deal with the matter of expectations. I'm not of the mindset that you have to lower your expectations when reading children's literature. Actually, I often experience the opposite: I appreciate a well written adult book, but when a work of literature intended for a young audience really works, I find myself even more inspired by it than its possible adult counterparts.

Maybe it's because so many people underestimate the intelligence of young readers, underestimate their abilities to discern quality from what they read, that when a children's book holds such complexities and depth of story and character, I'm relieved that not only was the writer talented and creative enough of a storyteller to give a young audience something it really deserves, something it really needs, but that there was a publisher that saw the potential in the book, that there were other people behind the book, pushing it forward, paving the road to its eventual audience. I'm relieved that there are people out there that really give a damn about what children are reading and want to provide them with the very best that kids' lit can offer.

But expectations... they can still be trouble. Whereas my expectations as far as quality of writing hardly ever differ between literature intended for adults or literature intended for children, sometimes I have to accept that the way information is conveyed to an audience may depend on the age of the target demographic. When young adult books focus on a serious topic, there must be some acceptance of the fact that this will probably be handled in a way that is going to teach a lesson. It's just a matter of fact in YA lit. But serious topics are usually met with eventual preachiness or life-building, lesson learning coming-of-age.

There are sophisticated ways that this is done, of course. I recently had the joy of reading Sherman Alexie's excellent, National Book Award - winning YA book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and I was really impressed by how well Alexie works in the life lessons learned by Arnold Spirit. The way the book weaves flooring moments of crushing reality with exuberant bursts of friendship, love, hope, and humor, so much humor, often all of it within pages of another, and yet, nothing feels disconnected or haltingly incongruous. And yes, the main character learns life lessons. A lot of them, actually. But the novel doesn't seem to screech to halt every time Arnold has an epiphany of one kind or another.

Split by Swati Avasthi is not quite as skillfully handled. The story of two brothers, reconnecting after years of separation due to the physical and emotional abuse inflicted upon them by their father, never goes into full on After-School Special mode, but it also falls flat on its mild attempts at wryness or humor. Jace, the younger brother, is kicked out of his house after physically challenging his father, and he gets into his car and drives thousands of miles to his brother's apartment in Albuquerque. He's carrying with him almost nothing except the address to his brother's place, the little bit of money his mother could sneak him, and the revolving wheel of tormenting memories, recollections of his father's abuse on him, his mother, his older brother, and Jace's subsequent destructive relationship with his high school girlfriend, Lauren.

Jace's older brother hesitantly welcomes him, and from then on, it's the slow-moving transformation between an almost-man, desperately trying to ignore what he ran away from, and his teenage brother who can't shake lose what he only just left behind.

To the credit of the author: So many YA books about abuse border on exploitive. It's something I deplore so much about these books that purport to be doing something cautionary, even important, but are simultaneously reveling in the "how bad it can be" scenario. Split never gets overly graphic or needlessly specific. It doesn't overwhelm with the dirty details. Avasthi allows the small details to compensate in the large spans where there are no major revelations, and this allows the reader to process the information gradually, in the same way Jace reluctantly allows himself to remember or dwell on the memories of his life back in Chicago. His brother is even slower to admit to certain details, but as the siblings go beyond living civilly together, they allow themselves to divulge long-hidden details of the abuse and subsequent escapes.

Avasthi also does well in examining how a family's tradition of abuse can lead to long-term problems with physical violence and aggression in the children of the abusers. Jace is running from this violence, but it lives within him, and the prospect of him becoming his father is even more terrifying than the original monster himself.

What drags the novel down are stretches of stiff dialogue. The awkward tension between Jace and his brother is understandable, expected, and natural in its restrictiveness... but it makes for some fairly dull passages. The problem recurs in almost every conversation in the book, whether it's between Jace and his brother, Jace and his brother's girlfriend, social worker/teacher/den mother Miriam, or Jace and his would-be love interest, Dakota. Whether he's talking through his problems, actively avoiding talking about his problems, or even flirting with a girl he likes, Avasthi never really gives Jace a credible voice. For how interesting his inner thought process can be, Jace, personality-wise, is a bit flat. He's good at soccer. He's naturally charming with girls. He's intelligent, seemingly, likes to take photos... He's a lot of details with a big backstory, something overbearingly awful to overcome. As much as find out about the character, he never quite comes alive.

Because these characters never quite go beyond the archetypes they're inhabiting - victim, survivor, caretaker, motivating beautiful girl -any emotional catharsis is reached in a series of almost maddeningly stiff dialogue. It seems to be Avasthi's limitation as a storyteller and not necessarily the limitations of the story chosen to tell - there is a wealth of interest in Split, but it's mishandled in a series of slight ways, all of which add up to an imperfect, but readable, piece of debut YA fiction.

Review: If You Follow Me

While I was really underwhelmed by the one upcoming Perennial title, Everything Here is the Best Ever, that I picked up at Pub Rep several weeks back, my time has been redeemed: the wasted hour and a half spent with the short story collection has been exchanged by the splendid several hours of reading I had with Malena Watrous's upcoming debut novel, If You Follow Me. So, Harper Perennial, good work. You're still my favorite paperback line from one of my favorite publishers.

A year after her father's suicide, following graduation from college, Marina follows her girlfriend, Carolyn, to Japan to teach English to the students of Shika, a rural Japanese town. Expecting the cliches of urban Japanese life, the two women are surprised by the positives and negatives of living in a Japanese small town. Much of the book is framed around Marina (and Carolyn) consistently failing to follow gomi law, or Japanese garbage law. After each garbage slight against their neighborhood, Marina receives notes from her supervisor, Hiro Miyoshi, who despite his disappointment in her failure to quickly acclimate to the rules of the village, understands her need for defiance and companionship. As the relationship between Marina and Caroyln evolves, collapses, and falls apart, the forces of a foreign land lay their claims to both women, and the culture that was locked out of their two-person house encampment becomes a refuge for Marina, a chance to come to terms with the recent past, the troubling present, and the unknown future.

Whenever I pick up a book about Westerners in Japan, I am usually prepared to put it back down. These "fish out of water" stories are so often flimsy excuses for cultural prejudice and gleaning laughs out of foreign cliche. Japan is the biggest target of them all - it seems that the more vivid a culture, the more likely it is to be skewered and parodied by the Western world. There is, of course, nasty historical reasons why the Japanese have so often been caricatured for American and European nations: mean-spirited propaganda dressed up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon was considered a point scored for Uncle Sam.

I get the historical reasons why such horrible representations exist, but the fact that it so often appears in present day Western pop culture is abhorrent. I was not the only one made uncomfortable by the race relations of Lost in Translation, where one of the protagonists is a recently graduated intellectual American girl, in Japan for an extended stay while her photographer husband travels around for work. Marina and Charlotte (of the movie) have a bit in common - they are similar strangers in similar strange land, except that Marina's perspective on Japan is of a small, rural village, while Lost in Translation bombards its characters with all that is bright and strange and frenzied of Tokyo urban life. I suppose encountering an after-school karaoke club and learning the many terms of gomi law is not quite as an exuberant as what urban Japan would offer, but the real difference between perspectives is that Marina, while striving to do better and frustrated when she does worse, lacks the malaised contempt that seems to drive the characters in Lost in Translastion. While they are careful to be separate entities - the Westerners in Tokyo, Americans traveling abroad - Marina and Carolyn face a a cultural challenge with a genuine attempt at fitting in.

The novel doesn't make easy jokes of its foreign subjects. Marina, quietly giggling at a superior's English pronunciation, still reminds herself that after all the time she's spent in Japan, "I shouldn't still think this is funny."

Gomi law becomes much more than an obstacle for Marina to overcome. It becomes the overwhelming point of her year in Japan - What is to be thrown away? What is to be kept? Where do you put your discarded things? Why do we put them there? What should we do with what is no longer of use to us?

I can recommend If You Follow Me for both its coming of age story and its cultural fairness. I don't strive to make political correctness a requirement in what I read, but in this case, being fair helps to elevate what could have been an episodic tale of Americans in Japan into a heartfelt document of a young woman attempting to get the most out of the new world around her.

Review: A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper

Preface: I don't usually gush like this, but I am a) a bit sleep deprived, and b) totally and completely in love with this book.

I’m trying to be literate about this book, but it’s very difficult. My enthusiasm keeps reducing me to babble. Suffice to say, I loved A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper. Rather, I fell in love with the book. Last night, with about thirty pages to go, I inadvertently fell asleep mid-page. When my early alarm went off, I sprung awake and instantly grabbed for the book to finish. I was late leaving for work, but it was absolutely worth it.

It’s the kind of book that seems so effortless, it could have only come from an immense writing talent. Sophie’s voice is rendered in such exquisite simplicity – she is both incredibly naïve and extremely observant, and the reader is rewarded for following her train of thought by moments of pure epiphany, when the truth of things is suddenly apparent to her young mind.

The evolving adolescent mind is the center of this novel. Sophie starts off the novel a romantic, reading Bronte and Austen and Shakespeare, quick to take to flights of fancy, dramatic and, at times, contradictory. She confesses her crush on the housekeeper’s son, Simon, while also reminding herself that he is not of royal class, and therefore, she should not feel so intimidated being around him. The dynamic between Sophie and her intellectual cousin, Veronica, is the perfect propulsive binary – Sophie’s open minded naïveté mixes well with Veronica’s weary academic perspective as the story has important uses for both mindsets. While it is Sophie’s coming-of-age, every character is shaped by the turn of events, and by the end of the book, no character is left formed quite the same that they were at the beginning of Sophie’s chronicles.

The mysteries of the novel unfold with such remarkable timing – minor details return as echoes in major revelations. A muddled family history becomes less confusing, but much, much more complicated. At times, the book read as a true history of a royal family, complete with betrayals, disappearances, love affairs, and even murder. How these factors tie into the present-day context of the book is the true revelation – somehow events that have long been in the shadows reveal their true significance in the face of present dangers, deepening the truth of both the now and the then.

I wanted to follow the book right off the page and into the world of the characters. What will become of their beloved island? Who will ascend to the throne, and does that even matter? What will become of Veronica and her brilliant mind? And Sophie, dear Sophie, whose voice became like a sister’s in my mind. I read so much, it is unusual to really absorb the thoughts of a character, even when that character is the narrator and protagonist. But I liked her so much, and Cooper instills so much intimacy in the way Sophie writes to her journal and, by extension, us, the readers, that what can we do but claim her as our own?

Nancy Siscoe, who sent me A Brief History of Montmaray, called the book “a gift” to us booksellers, and I cannot disagree. I feel incredibly rewarded having been given this book to read, to spend time with, to absorb, to wake up with by my side, and of course, to lend (with caution, of course, as I naturally do not want to lose my copy) to other book lovers who I know will have all the same feelings for this book that I felt.

Review: Impossible by Nancy Werlin

It is suitable that I fell in love with Impossible by Nancy Werlin - after all, the book is about the redemptive power of true love against extraordinary odds, about how believing in love is the ultimate leap of faith, and how that faith can bring remarkable strength for even unfathomable tasks. But the novel doesn't beg or plead for your love - it doesn't need to. Rather, like its main characters, it enraptures the reader, capturing, enchanting the reader. Picking up this book was like sustaining a hypnotic state that I didn't want to shake.

Lucy Scarborough grows up in a loving home amongst a supportive foster family and enduring friendships, but she is haunted by the recurring presence of her mother, Miranda, a frequently disappearing vagrant whose reappearances are marked by obscure, hostile remarks, inexplicable actions, and a version of the folk song "Scarborough Faire." For most of Lucy's life, Miranda's appearances are simply a disruption - a blight on an otherwise idyllic upbringing with two open-minded, understanding foster parents.

At seventeen, however, Lucy learns of the true background of Miranda's illness - a family curse, placed by the Elvin Knight after being spurned by a human woman, Fenella. The Elvin Knight arranges for each daughter of Scarborough to be impregnated by eighteen, then burdens themwith the three impossible tasks from the song "Scarborough Faire" - if they can achieve each impossible task by the time the baby is born, the curse will be broken. Otherwise, they will go insane and the curse will repeat its pattern on the next generation.

As Lucy begins to understand the curse, its implications on her, her mother, and her family history, she sets to accomplishing the three impossible tasks before the birth of her own daughter. Unlike her mother, however, Lucy has the love and helpful support of her parents and longtime friend, Zach Greenfield - but will it be enough to save her sanity and that of her unborn daughter's?

To tell more than that is to give away significant portions of the text, which would be a shame because Werlin builds an intensity so subtle, 100 pages passed without notice, then another 100 pages. The use of "Scarborough Faire" as setup is an ingenious move - the song, often thought of as beautiful and loving, can also be read in very sinister terms, with the protagonist asking the impossible of a possible "true love," insisting that if these tasks are not completed, then she is not a true love of his - but without an excellent execution, Werlin's device would have come off as a novelty.

Werlin's a better writer than that. The touch of magic inhabits almost every character and plot action, but she never overdoes it. She lets the vibe carry through the story, but doesn't pushes by filling her plot with an overabundance of magical characters, strange happenings, or fantastical occurrence. The magic comes in bits and pieces - a character's devotion to another, an implicit understanding, a family bond, a lucky coincidence, an odd presence - and the characters realistically respond to out of the ordinary things.

Werlin crafts an excellent protagonist in Lucy. She's smart and strong, but fallible, and by midway through, the reader's affection for her is on par with that of the supporting characters of the novel. There always seems to be a purpose to her choices, even when her decisions are confusing or counter-productive, and it is to Werlin's credit as an author that while the love story set up for Lucy is pushed along rather quickly, it matches the tone of inevitability coursing through the book.

Good versus evil looms large, but inevitability is also a core concept - how inevitable is Lucy's fate? In the long line of Scarborough daughters, not one has managed to break the curse on the family. In her journal, eighteen year-old Miranda confesses that she could not even accomplish the easiest of the three tasks. She fears for her sanity each day closer to the birth of her daughter, the inevitable turn that will happen after the baby is born, after each Scarborough baby was born.

But Miranda's situation is unlike the others before her, and also that of Lucy's. While the others suffered in predictable loneliness and despair, Lucy has the abounding resolution of her family around her. She is supported by something much stronger than the crushing compounding doom of the looming family curse. What has been inevitable may not be once the impossible is achieved.

This is a YA novel for any age, a fairy tale for all audiences, a beautiful and beautifully written story.