or, Book Reviews: What a Lot of Feelings Edition. Part of learning to write better/easier reviews as been to make them ever shorter—I used to write repetitious mini-essays; one paragraph is much better. But I don't think it's beneficial to pare complicated or contradictory feelings down to an arbitrary one paragraph, nonetheleast because the time spent making line-edits could also be ... spent reading.... And I would rather argue through a book than make a definitive but unsubstantiated final judgement. Still, three long reviews in a row is a feat! And deceptive, because I read
Tess of the Road in May, but was for a while too intimidated by my feelings to write any review at all.
Title: Tess of the Road
Author: Rachel Hartman
Narrator: Katharine McEwan
Published: Penguin Random House Audio, 2018
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 545
Total Page Count: 319,675
Text Number: 1119
Read Because: recommended by
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chthonic_cassandra, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: After years performing penance for her fall from grace, Tess reaches her breaking point and runs away from home. This is a book about journey, self-discovery, and trauma recovery, and I kept waiting for it to make a decline into preachy or hamfisted (especially as I read it just after Foz Meadow's Manifold World series, which is thematically similar and constantly caught out by its tone). But it never does. It's not a flawless book: the end is neat, too many supporting characters undergo positive development (everyone is too
nice), and the thesis statements are aggressively made clear. But it's nuanced, organic, dynamic, contradicting, and so much greater than those flaws. There's a balance between the grounded, concrete, gradual work of life and of recovery and the sweeping emotional appeal of epiphanies, ineffabilities, and faith, and this balance—the stunning realizations; the practical work of actualizing them—particularly combined with the vibrant world and voice, builds a narrative which refuses sanctimony and simplification while still being ridiculously affecting. TL;DR: I cried a lot but did not cringe, and that's not easy for this sort of story to achieve.
I thought
Seraphina was fine when I read it, but don't remember much of it now. I'm wasn't compelled to read the sequel, and rarely read YA at all these days. So I wouldn't have come to
Tess of the Road if I hadn't been told that it stands alone and is a book of a different type, but it is. Being familiar with the sibling works is helpful but not necessary, and this is more complex and tonally modulated than I find in most YA.
( A quote. )Title: Mrs. Dalloway
Author: Virginia Woolf
Published: 1925
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 190
Total Page Count: 319,865
Text Number: 1120
Read Because: personal enjoyment
Review: I worried for the first two thirds that I'd end up writing a tiresome "if a reader bounces off of a classic, is it because the Esteemed Novel is actually bad (and the Esteemed Reader knows better than canon), or because reading taste is arbitrary, or because the work was too difficult for the Un-Esteemed Reader, or because canon is a construct that indicates historical importance but not quality or pleasure?" review.
But this is a slow burn of a book. The stream of consciousness narrative skips between only loosely connected thoughts and characters—some threads are more appealing than others, and I kept wanting to return to the PTSD narrative; there's so many threads that I found it difficult to track, especially the character names. But the climax is greater than the sum of these parts. The act of internalizing, paralleling, and appropriating another person's suffering is subtle, profound, and deceptively large—and because so much of the ending exists in contrasts, in the reader's view of the metanarrative (as opposed to Clarissa's blinkered view of her story), the disparate plots become inextricable counterbalances. It's technically successful but not slave to technique: the ending—"She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away."—that exploration of how we internalize another's experience, fail to understand it, still respect it, find in it a universal but specific truth—that ending is bigger than a narrative device. The answer to the question of canon is generally "yes, all of the above," and I had some corresponding troubles while reading; but it was more than worthwhile.
Title: Dicey's Song (Tillerman Cycle Book 2)
Author: Cynthia Voigt
Published: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2012 (1982)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 270
Total Page Count: 320,135
Text Number: 1121
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The Tillerman children struggle to settle into their new home. The first book in this series (
Homecoming) was, like most books about children surviving on their own, insular and quietly escapist; their reintegration into normal life doesn't have that indulgent tone—but both books hinge on Dicey's ability to know, love, and benevolently manipulate her family members, and that competency and problem-solving is satisfying. There are some clunky conflicts in the middle third between Dicey and authority figures, but the protracted conflict of overcoming trauma to establish bonds of trust is more nuanced and engaging.
Then the book takes a turn in the final third when
Dicey's mother dies. I found this ridiculously affecting, and that's partially because of the counterbalance of mundane moments, but honestly it's mostly because I recently lost a parent. And it smack of Newberry-style tragedy: more dramatic to write her out, and narratively easier than writing her in and figuring out how the family would come to terms with her mother's presence. (There's a particularly egregious pair of scenes where Dicey wonders, "Why? How? How could someone die of just being crazy, the kind of sad, faraway craziness that Momma had?" and where James tells her, "It's better this way, Dicey ... I read about it, at the library. Almost nobody recovers, when they're as far gone as Momma was." which illustrated how unsubstantiated and dramatized and borderline offensive-as-hell is this character death.) The ending worked for me as much as didn't, but still drags down my final impression of an otherwise compelling, quiet novel with a cogent central theme.
