Anne of Ingleside (L.M. Montgomery)

Genre: Period fiction (takes place around 1900 in Canada)
Year Published: 1939

One of the interchangeably adorable children of Ingleside had a fancy, a brilliant, whimsical fancy. This child did not tell anyone, not the other children of Ingleside, nor the grown-ups (Mummy, Daddy, and Susan the Live-In Cook/Maid/Nanny).

Oh, the fancy of that adorable child! It was full of fairies and wonderment. Or perhaps it was full of ghosts and terror. But in any case, it truly was such a fancy as had never been heard of on all of P.E. Island.

But then the Cruel, Real World intruded upon the child's fancy. Oh, how could it be borne?? The poor little child thought the world would come falling down.

In the throes of agony, the child went to Mummy and told her all about the fancy and subsequent demolishing of said fancy. Mummy didn't laugh -- she never laughed at her dear, lovely children! -- but instead said something so understanding and kind that the child felt that the world was just after all. Ah, Mummy was the best mummy in the world.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Three thousand times.

Recommended? If you can stand the above, then by all means, go for it.

The People of Sparks (Jeanne DuPrau)

Genre: Children's literature
Year Published: 2004

Yes, I picked up The City of Ember and its sequel simultaneously at the library. What can I say? I'm a fan of sequels. (Although, to continue yesterday's analogy, I didn't much care for The Giver's sequels, Gathering Blue and Messenger. I could honestly continue the comparison, as The People of Sparks resembles Gathering Blue in some ways, but I don't want to beat that horse to death.)

The People of Sparks picks up where The City of Ember left off (so if you're interested in reading the latter, you may want to stop reading this review now): the people of Ember, having received a message from Lina and Doon aboveground, make their way to the surface as well. They wander for a few days before finding a small settlement of people who agree to take them in for a short period of time until they can get onto their own feet.

The circumstances of the world we know are made clearer in Sparks: there has, in fact, been a "Disaster" (three plagues and four wars) that has wiped out most of humanity. People are just starting to build viable settlements again, devoid of electricity, gasoline, telephones, or much understanding of the past.

The problems start immediately: there are more Emberites than Sparks people; Emberites are, on the whole, unused to manual labor; the people of Sparks begin to resent the Emberites' drain on their jealously guarded resources. Soon violence erupts, and the future of both groups of citizens is very uncertain.

It's probably a mark of how good the premise of this book is that I wished I were reading the same novel, but for adults. The possibilities floated through my mind as I read: women would prostitute themselves for more food. Inevitably, romantic entanglements between the two groups would occur. Emberites, never having been exposed to most human illnesses, would be highly susceptible to deadly diseases. The lack of privacy in the Emberites' quarters would lead to quarrels and dissatisfaction. The social customs (e.g. for marriage, childbirth, death, etc.) of the two groups would be highly disparate, and so would cause consternation among the opposite people.

But it's a children's book, and DuPrau has to navigate within those constraints. And with that in mind, she does a very good job of showing what could go wrong under those types of circumstances. My only problem with the book is that at times it feels more like a cautionary tale or parable than it should. The "violence is bad" message gets hit a little too hard at times -- although what seems blatant to an adult may seem more subtle to a child. (But I doubt it.)

Recommended? Yes. (Same age constraints as the original.)

The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau)

Genre: Children's literature
Year Published: 2003

The great dystopian children's novel is, of course, The Giver. I consider myself privileged to have been born at just the right time to read that when I was just the right age for it.

The City of Ember is similar to The Giver in many ways: in both cases, the reader is dealing with a futuristic civilization (that may or may not have been founded after some sort of apocalyptic event) that is utterly isolated and also idiosyncratic in its traditions and daily life. Both civilizations lack history, most arts, and non-human creatures. The main difference is that while The Giver is all about human life without humanity (e.g. love, sex, choice, death), The City of Ember is about human life without natural light.

If that sounds like a flimsy premise, reconsider: think about what life would be like if the only light we had access to was electric light. And Jeanne DuPrau does an excellent job of imagining a city without the sun: electric lights go on and off at preordained intervals; buildings are built low to the ground so as not to block light; anywhere outside Ember's boundaries is absolutely dark, and thus unpassable (as the people of Ember do not have "movable lights"). In the introduction to the book, we are told that 220 years after the city's founding, a box will open with instructions on how to leave the city. But within the first couple chapters, we know things have gone awry: 220 years have come and gone, the lights that create daylight are faltering, and food in Ember's storerooms is running low.

Of course, because this is a children's novel, it is two children who eventually find and believe in the instructions. And because it is children's literature, few of the grim possibilities imaginable in a city like Ember are carried out. But not everything is smooth sailing for Lina and Doon, our protagonists: as the city-dwellers' time is clearly running out, some of the more powerful adults in Ember take it upon themselves to get theirs while the getting is good -- utterly predictable, to an adult reader, but interesting to see through the children's naive eyes.

DuPrau excels in two things that very much helped this book: 1) the imagining and subsequent description of Ember, and 2) the creation of believable and evocative suspense. I often have a difficult time picturing places that are only described to me, but Ember was very clear in my mind as I read the book. And as Lina and Doon got closer to solving their puzzle, I was genuinely eager to know how all the problems were going to be resolved.

Certainly The City of Ember raises none of The Giver's existential questions, and its prose is nowhere near that level. But it's an enjoyable read, and I think that these kinds of books open up new avenues for kids' imaginations -- always a good thing.

Recommended? Yes. (Reading level: maybe third grade at the youngest, if they can get through a book with twentyish chapters, and seventh grade at the oldest, if they haven't already moved on to adult post-apocalyptic literature.)

The Toughest Indian in the World (Sherman Alexie)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 2000

I like to think of myself as a savvy shopper. I found The Toughest Indian in the World at a secondhand shop and recognized Sherman Alexie as a much-lauded poet, so I threw it into my pile of books to purchase. (My local secondhand shop is the best in Pennsylvania, so I will often come out with an armload of books and a gap in my wallet where a $20 bill used to be. When books are a buck apiece, I'm not that picky about exactly what I'm getting.) When I got home, I realized it wasn't poetry. But Alexie's opening paragraphs grabbed me, so I kept reading, assuming it was a novel.

Well, I got to the end of the first story and realized it wasn't a novel either. But it was an excellent story, so I kept reading, and I'm glad I did.

I happen to live in one of the five states in the country with the smallest percentage of the American Indian population, so I have absolutely no personal experience with Indians. That being the case, this book was, besides being entertaining, educational for me. All of Alexie's stories center around being Indian (that's his nomenclature, and I refuse to P.C.-ify the man's work) in modern-day America. Most, though not all, of his stories involve sex, and they're all about love, in their own peculiar ways. They're also about the difficulties that Indians face -- racism, interracial relationships, assimilation, enormously high death rates for Indian teens, the encroachment of Christianity, disproportionate rates of alcoholism and diabetes -- but now that I've written that whole list out, I'm afraid I've made it sound like an "issues" book that sacrifices plot for message. That's not at all the case. Alexie sketches great characters and great dialogue for those characters, and these stories are first and foremost about the characters. Indian issues are simply the backdrop for the prose.

The centerpiece of the book is a story, the longest of the bunch, called "The Sin Eaters." It is the only story in the pack that ventures past realism into a sort of sci-fi surrealism, but it is probably my favorite of the collection. As far as I'm concerned, the story is the answer to the question, "What would be the modern-day equivalent of the Trail of Tears?" (It's not a happy story, as you may have guessed.)

The other stories are much more concerned with the everyday -- especially the last, "One Good Man," the most touching one in the collection, written in the first person by a middle-aged Indian man whose father's feet are amputated because of diabetes complications. It's the only story in the bunch that reads as though it could be autobiographical -- though it's not the only one in first person -- and it's a fitting way to end the book, with this possible peek, perhaps false, into Alexie's own life.

Recommended? Yes.

In the Image (Dara Horn)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 2002

No cutesy intro, this time, dear readers: I loved this book, and I'd like to say that as soon as possible. I loved it for its characters, for its fluid incorporation of Jewish culture and law, for its multiple, true-to-life plot threads, but most of all, for its language. Some of the passages in In the Image forced me to put down the book and breathe for a while, just so I could bear to continue reading. Sometimes it was because Dara Horn writes beautifully, but more often it was because the words matched my own thoughts or experiences so closely that it was eerie. I feel the need to provide a few examples, so here goes:

Leora and Lauren and Melanie slept on futons, ate off of hard plastic picnic plates, hung their posters on the walls using poster gum, and lived their evenings by the light of halogen lamps. They recycled their newspapers, deleted their answering machine messages, and rarely were in the apartment at the same time. They each bought their own food and never even considered consolidating their shopping, preferring somehow the three half gallons of orange juice that clogged up the refrigerator each week. Every woman for herself. Only Lauren bothered to clean the bathroom. There were a few pots and pans, hauled in by various parents on various move-in days and duly bequeathed to the apartment at large upon move-out, but only the spaghetti pot received any kind of regular use. The vast majority of their drinking glasses were mugs embossed with the names of insurance companies. It was as if all of them had signed a secret unwritten lease stipulating that it wasn't worth buying real forks or getting things framed or having real beds, that this wasn't real life but rather some kind of dress rehearsal for it, that they wouldn't be there long.

Or, moving from the mundane to the sublime, this is the interior monologue of a man who's fallen in love with Leora (the main character):

Being with [her] . . . does not so much resemble a time as it does a place. A moment spent with Leora does not join the moments of his life alongside the other moments, sliding like a bead onto the string of his life and clicking into place next to the moment spent walking to meet her at a restaurant and followed by the moment spent squinting at the sky alone later that evening while trying to make out a star. No, a moment spent with Leora separates itself, refusing to associate with the drab neighborhood of memories around it, walling itself off like an ancient quarter of a city filled with crooked streets, where you don't need to know where you are going because you are already there.

Anyone who's ever moved out of their childhood home has experienced the first, and anyone who's been in love has experienced the second. But the language and the clarity of metaphor that Horn employs are stunning to me. Her novel reads like prose written by a particularly clear-headed poet.

The novel is about equally balanced between the present-day life of Leora, and the recounting of one Jewish family's experiences with life in America and in Europe throughout the twentieth century. The Holocaust barely figures, however; the novel is very much about individuals, and all of the people we follow closely are lucky enough to escape the Nazis' path. They are not, however, particularly lucky in other respects, and Horn catalogues mental illness, domestic abuse, cruelty, and death with the same crystal-clear voice she uses in the above passages. Only her matter-of-fact treatment makes some of the worse incidents readable, but as a reader you feel she is only being historically fair, never sadistic, in making her characters' lives difficult.

I think that this book will be easier to read and understand if you are, in fact, an American East Coast Jew of Eastern European extraction. But I don't think that non-Jews should skip over this book because all the characters are Jewish. As long as you pay attention, you will get a glimpse (or maybe more) of the interwoven symbols and themes -- Jewish and irreligious -- that populate each chapter of In the Image. Horn is careful to slip explanations of all her straightforward Jewish usages into the text, and you can appreciate the book just fine without the deeper understanding you would get from a background in the Bible. Prose this good is too precious to pass over because you don't happen to share the author's religion.

Recommended? Hell yes.

The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs) (Keith Devlin)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 2005

I'm a mathematician by training, so when the holidays roll around, I often find myself in possession of several new books that somehow incorporate math. Since mathematicians tend to be below-average writers (myself, I hope, excepted), a lot of these turn out to be well nigh unreadable. (A noteworthy exception is Fermat's Enigma, one of my all-time favorite books in any genre.)

The Math Instinct, however, is extremely readable -- not surprising, as the author is a commentator on NPR's Weekend Edition and has written many books for a general audience. In fact, at times I almost felt I was being condescended to a bit . . . but you can't trust the opinion of a mathematician on that point.

Devlin's point in writing this book is to illustrate the many ways in which complex mathematics are performed by various members of the plant and animal kingdoms, ostensibly to make math seem a little less daunting to the public, but also to showcase how natural selection can really produce some amazing results. My favorite example is that of the Tunisian desert ant that can wander far from its home in multiple directions and then walk straight home instead of retracing its path. That's a trig problem, dear readers, and while Devlin makes it clear that it's erroneous to think of an ant as doing trigonometry, you can think of its daily walk as a trig problem that nature has enabled it to solve instinctively.

Devlin catalogues this sort of mathematical behavior in all sorts of animals, and this is interesting, if it's the sort of thing you're into. (It is for me, but again, as a mathematician, I don't feel I can really speak for the general public at this point.) Where the book really gets intriguing, though, is towards the end (Chapter 10 out of 13 total), when Devlin takes on the idea of mathematics as an innate process.

He cites fascinating studies that show, for example, that young Brazilian street vendors are able to mentally perform complicated arithmetic problems, but are utterly unable to reproduce those results on math exams, because of the dichotomy of "street math" versus "school math." Devlin comes to conclusions about math education that I think would be very interesting and informative for anyone who's in the education field, as well as anyone who feels that they're a smart person, but just "doesn't get" math.

Recommended? Sure! It's fun, it's easy, and people will think you're smart if they see you reading it on the subway.

Anne's House of Dreams (L.M. Montgomery)

Genre: Period fiction (takes place around 1890 in Canada)
Year Published: 1917

Upon completing the latest book in the Anne of Green Gables sequence, my first impulse was to look up L.M. Montgomery on Wikipedia to ascertain, as I thought was clear, that she had actually written this book -- which covers the first two years of Anne's marriage -- before she herself had gotten married or had children. However, I was wrong; while Montgomery's first two Anne books were written while she was single, she'd already married and had all three of her children by the time Anne's House of Dreams was published.

Why did this surprise me? Well, because this book reads like it was written by someone who had no concept of marriage. Montgomery goes out of her way to avoid writing any scenes in which Anne and her husband Gilbert are just . . . being married people. I'm not talking about sex, I mean you never see them just sitting and enjoying each other's company; you never seem them co-parenting the little boy they have by the end of the novel; you never see them making any decisions together. On the last count, there are a handful of decisions that are made throughout the book, but Gilbert makes up his mind and informs Anne afterwards -- sometimes she struggles against him a bit, but always capitulates in the end.

If that doesn't sound quite like the kind of husband Gilbert Blythe would make, or the kind of wife Anne Shirley would be, you're not alone in that opinion. I know that my discomfort springs mostly from my feminist, twenty-first century ideals, but it also comes partly from knowing these characters as well as a reader can.

So if the book isn't really about Anne and Gilbert's marriage, what is it about? Well, disregarding entirely the "show, don't tell" maxim of fiction, Montgomery allows her book to be dominated by the dialogue of two boilerplate characters, Miss Cornelia Bryant and Captain Jim Boyd. Miss Cornelia blames men for everything, and Captain Jim is a good-hearted hero. That's about all you need to know about them, as they're never really fleshed out beyond that. (One other character, Mrs. Leslie Moore, rounds out the cast -- more about her later.) From the amount of visiting each other Anne, Miss Cornelia, and Captain Jim do, you'd think they literally had nothing else to do. Wasn't life in the Victorian period complicated? They had to make and mend their own clothes, make all their food, write long letters . . . I find it hard to believe they could stand around jawing all day. And yet the book relies almost entirely on dialogue, with the occasional descriptive passage about the beauty of their little seaside town.

The aforementioned Mrs. Moore forms the requisite "fixer-upper" plot of the Anne series, and once again, it just screams deus ex machina. Montgomery's problem on this score is simply that she likes her main characters and will simply not allow them to do anything she might consider immoral or unethical. So while there would have been an intellectually honest, relatively true-to-life way to resolve Mrs. Moore's B-plot, Montgomery shunts this solution aside so Mrs. Moore can remain utterly blameless, a virtuous model of womanhood. Instead, Montgomery invents a ridiculous "out" for Mrs. Moore, all the while having her characters explain that it's "it wasn't one of those [occurrences] you read of in novels." If you need to have your characters say that, you're in trouble.

Recommended? No. So far, the only Anne books I can recommend are the first three. I'll read all of them in their turn and let you all know if any others are worth salvaging.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (Neil Gaiman)

Genre: Short stories (with the occasional poem)
Year Published: 2006

Congratulations to the inimitable Neil Gaiman for being the first male author here at The Bluestocking's Blog. I do want to bring the spotlight to women as much as possible, but I couldn't pass up Gaiman's new book, Fragile Things. I let myself read it as an antidote, if you will, to Possession. (Not that I didn't like Possession immensely . . . but after 555 pages of thick prose and Victorian-style poetry, some clear-headed short stories feel like an oasis.) So as you read this review, keep in mind that I'm a Gaiman addict (I've even seen him in person and waited for ages to get him to sign books).

In my mind, there are two kinds of short stories: satisfying short stories, and New Yorker short stories. Deep down, I know this is an oversimplification of the matter, but stay with me: the stories that are published in places like the New Yorker are always character studies about ennui and/or divorce and/or seedy sex. (My favorite example of this is a Murakami story in which a man spends a year eating noodles and not returning his ex-roommate's ex-girlfriend's phone calls -- I acknowledge the man's genius, but good gravy.) You feel sort of empty at the end, and like you didn't really want this window into these poor people's lives.

Gaiman's short stories, on the other hand, fall into the "satisfying" camp, though perhaps not for the most obvious of reasons. Each story incorporates some element of the fantastical, though I don't think you could label any of them as a "ghost story" or "zombie story" or the like. They are, first and foremost, real works of literary merit. If the main character happens to be the archetypal Harlequin, or if the setting is Hell, well . . . the point is believing in the story, not believing the story is comprised of facts.

The stories are not satisfying because they end happily (quite the contrary, in fact); they are satisfying because Gaiman always provides a real narrative with tricky questions that are at least partially answered by story's end. He does not deliberately deceive his readers, though he may play with misdirection from time to time. His two objectives seem to be 1) to make your skin crawl and 2) to give you a beginning, middle, and end that do not leave you feeling cheated.

As for the negatives, well . . . to be honest, I'm not much of a horror fan, and many of his stories stray strongly in that direction. My favorite tales in this collection are the ones that are eerie, but not so gory: "A Study in Emerald" (a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu Mythos crossover, believe it or not), "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" (a Gothic satire), "The Problem of Susan" (a peek into Susan of Narnia's future), and "Goliath" (a story in the Matrix universe). There are others that, while I appreciate their brilliance as stories, I simply can't declare any affection for (the one about the witch who devours live animals and people bit by bit, the one about the boys who disappear into a shed and are never seen again, etc.)

There is also some poetry in here, but it's not really worth mentioning. It's entertaining enough, but it's not . . . poetry. It's prose with line breaks.

In short, Gaiman is a magnificent writer, but this should not be the first thing of his that you read. He seems to exorcise his demons via short story; for lighter fare, try Anansi Boys; for more profound, try the Sandman collection; for something approximating regular old literature, try American Gods. Attempt this collection only after trying -- and liking -- one or more of the above.

(Sidenote for those who've already read American Gods: the cap on this collection is a novella set two years after it ends. "The Monarch of the Glen," as it is titled, was nice inasmuch as it let us get a little more time with Shadow, but I didn't love it. Maybe a better background in Norse mythology would have helped me out, but while Gaiman usually stays just this side of the line between "mysterious" and "confounding," "The Monarch of the Glen" was . . . confounding, sadly. In a regular short story about a nameless narrator, I wouldn't have minded, but I want more exposition when I'm dealing with a character I'm quite attached to.)

Recommended? Yes, though I wouldn't necessarily spring for the hardback. Wait for it to come out in paperback; read a story or two in the store; see if you want to own it. Unless you're a Gaiman completist, like me, you may feel more than satisfied with taking it out of the library.

Possession (A.S. Byatt)

Genre: Literary fiction (though with generous snippets of poetry, epistles, and period flashbacks)
Year Published: 1990

Sexual frustration finds its outlet differently in different people. (As for myself, dear readers, I will admit to having once scrubbed my bathtub so vigorously in the immediate aftermath of a late lamented relationship that I nearly gave myself bloody knuckles.) I feel no shame in admitting that about halfway through Possession, I was banging my paperback copy against the nearest solid surface in order to dissipate the secondhand sexual frustration that permeates this entire book.

Possession is about sex, sort of, and love, definitely, and English academics and Britain and feminism and textual study and greed and legalities and shame and desire and letters and memorabilia and memory and Poetry, intentionally Capitalized. Byatt did an enormous amount of work for this book: she invented two Victorian poets (Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte), then proceeded to write their letters and poetry in the Victorian style, and to invent academic courses and professors to study the two of them (though many more study Ash, of course, him being the Great Male Poet). The premise of the book is that Ash and LaMotte had an affair that was never known to anyone beyond their immediate circle, and it is discovered by minor Ash scholar Roland Michell in 1986. He shares this discovery with one person, and one person only: Maud Bailey, a LaMotte scholar and a distant relation of same. The two of them echo the Victorian couple in many ways, but in many ways are their own people; while they race other scholars in their "Quest" (again, Capitalized) to determine just what happened between LaMotte and Ash, they are also profoundly changed by what they learn, and in whose company they learn those things.

This book will frustrate you if you choose to read it, I promise you that. It is 555 pages long (and not the teensy mass market pages, but the huge regular edition pages), which means that even if you want to, you cannot plow through this novel. You will want nothing more than to know what becomes of LaMotte and Ash, and what becomes of Michell and Bailey (therein lies, as you may well imagine, the sexual frustration), but because Byatt is a cagey plotter, you will not be awarded until you reach the end.

And the path to the end is a formidable one. Firstly, Byatt knows academia, and for those of us (like myself) who are unfamiliar with deep textual study, there will be a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts that can't simply be looked up in a dictionary. Secondly, Byatt has incorporated massive amounts of LaMotte and Ash's invented poetry into the manuscript, so that an entire chapter may be an excerpt from an epic poem about a Norse or Roman myth. As evidenced on this very blog, I am a devout reader and writer of poetry; however, when one is swept up in the power of a narrative, a thorny, difficult poem about a fairy is just about the last thing one wants to encounter. Thirdly, Byatt has created a wonderful ensemble cast of characters, each wonderfully drawn, and she utilizes them all, often to the frustration (there's that word again!) of the reader. In the most astonishing display of this tendency, the ostensible villain of the piece, an American scholar, has several pages devoted to his imagined autobiography.

All these stumbling-blocks, though, do reinforce the idea that the reader is in the midst of an epic, a novel that encompasses huge ideas and large swaths of land and time. This book is big in about every way possible, and that has its own attraction.

I should also add that while the frustration (sexual and otherwise) is difficult to swallow, Byatt at least sews up all her loose ends by the completion of the novel. And she does not do it cruelly; she is not ruthless with her characters, whom she seems to love and know very well. There is sorrow within the covers of the book, but the plot is not needlessly tragic. The prospective reader can feel well assured that any time spent reading stanza upon stanza of iambic pentameter will be well worth it.

Recommended? Yes, but as with other epic novels (e.g. The Count of Monte Cristo, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), you absolutely must block out time for it. This isn't one that you can do in the "a chapter a night right before bed" style.

A Deed to the Light (Jeanne Murray Walker)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2004

Although I read a good deal of poetry (and write a good deal as well), poetry often seems like a chore to me. I usually approach an unfamiliar volume of poetry with my trusty mechanical pencil in hand, ready to underline phrases or bracket passages that jump out at me. Because it can be so dense and confusing, some of the joy is often lost for me -- W.S. Merwin's The Second Four Book of Poems, which I still have not yet managed to struggle all the way through, is an excellent example of this.

I sat down with A Deed to the Light several nights ago, ready to go at it with my pencil, and found after a few pages that it was completely unnecessary. It is not that her poetry is simplistic; rather, it is that she paints her images and metaphors with such clarity that I didn't need the academic concentration to get through it. For the first time in a long time, I found myself simply enjoying a book of poetry, taking it in, empathizing with the poet, all without the intense scrutiny that so much poetry requires.

Some people may not enjoy her clear, concise, autobiographical style. There are many poets and readers of poetry who prefer poetry that is as far removed from prose as possible. I myself choose accessibility over opacity any day. Walker's style is the sort of style I aspire to as a poet.

A lot of her poems struck a chord with me, but this is the one that resonated most strongly as I read (probably because of the New Year's party I recently attended).

Dinner Party

We lounge amid the wreckage of this lovely evening,
next to little pelts of scooped-out cantaloupe
on blue Spanish plates, while Billie Holliday
drifts through us like fog through trees.
We have almost made it together inside loneliness,
almost reached that perfect shadowy place
where it doesn't matter what we say, the others
grasp it. We are chords in a new progression
into stillness, a new rendition of "All of Me,"
though none of us, if asked, could tell
what taught us such love was possible.

And then suddenly we're back in history,
as if a gust of gravity had swept in. Or
the rubber band snapped. And we're pulling on
our coats, reaching for polite good-bye phrases
like rain hats, remembering there's happiness
at home, too, and a Posturepedic mattress
and a dog to walk. We look plain again,
standing around like extras in a movie.
What happened among us may be true and secret.
It may be everything. But the night won't talk,
and none of us can find the word to loosen
its tongue. It was fun, we say later. It was fun.

Recommended? Yes. If you haven't made the leap as a reader into modern poetry, make this book your training wheels.

Sunshine (Robin McKinley)

Genre: Fantasy
Year Published: 2003

Robin McKinley usually disappoints me. My mother bought me The Blue Sword when I was young so I could read a good book about a great heroine. I got about twenty pages in before I had to put it down. For some reason or another, it was one of those fantasy books that I simply couldn't stomach (there have been a lot of them over the years -- any Robert Jordan, any Marion Zimmer Bradley, any Tolkien -- in fact I'd say I fail to read much more fantasy than I actually end up reading).

Later in life, I picked up Beauty, and I was blown away by this simple, beautiful little tale. It had its faults, but they seemed to be honest faults, as if McKinley knew they were there and decided they belonged. So I tried her other two fairy-tale rewrites, Rose Daughter and Spindle's End, and was both annoyed and disappointed with both of them. Both books twisted the original tales in ways I wasn't comfortable with, and McKinley seemed all too happy to natter on about the minutiae of the end results of her world-building exercises -- I mean, really, the amount of castle description in Rose Daughter alone! -- without ever really advancing a compelling plot.

So it would take a miracle for me to pick up McKinley again, it seemed -- until Neil Gaiman (who has never faltered, in my opinion, in either his own writing or recommending others' writing) posted in his blog a few years ago about McKinley's new effort, Sunshine. I finally got it over the holidays and opened it up about a day and a half ago.

Talk about a pageturner. Sunshine weighs in at a little over 400 pages, but I blew through it in only a little more than twenty-four hours. Part of this is because McKinley begins in medias res -- not at all her usual style, by the way -- and so for at least the first fifty pages, you're just trying to get your bearings. She very cleverly introduces the fantastical elements of the story one by one, so the reader isn't overwhelmed ("Wait, vampires? Wait, demons? Wait, magic? SLOW DOWN!!") and begins with a picture of our world in mind before more and more details are supplanted by McKinley's ideas about magic and "Others" (i.e. nonhumans).

McKinley seems to have done a 180 in terms of her ratio of description to plot; while we do get a good deal of explanation of otherworldly features of Sunshine's universe, we never have much of an idea of what anyone looks like, what our heroine's concoctions taste like (she's a baker by trade), or what the world outside our heroine's town is like. But the book is so plot-driven that I found it difficult to care that I had to make all these things up for myself. And the plot is good: those who are fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer may find it derivative, but as I am not, I came to the table relatively free of expectations regarding the modern vampire tale.

My problems with the book were mostly peripheral, but I'll speak to them anyway: our heroine is not a social creature by nature, so I understood that McKinley kept the non-plot-related interactions to a minimum for good reason. However, the main character did have a family, and it was too much for me to suspend my disbelief that she would not speak to her mother (who works with her) once over the course of five months (about the span of the book). I don't think we get a single line of dialogue from the mother, which strikes me as ridiculous. Similarly, her younger brothers are barely there, just sort of hyperactive, teenager-cliche props. When McKinley busts her ass on characterization -- which she does for her main two characters -- they come to life. When she punks out, they fall completely flat. There is a middle ground, occupied by about four or five characters (the boyfriend, the stepfather, the landlady, the "good cop," maybe the best friend), but it's tenuous, and a little more work from her would have really brought them to a different level.

The book leaves ample room for a sequel, though on McKinley's website (which is rather frightening, and reinforces for me that you really mustn't put artists up on a pedestal when you admire their art, because they will only disappoint you) she categorically states that she will only write one if the idea "hit[s] the inside of the back of [her] skull," which in my opinion does not bode well for any of us left hanging -- by which I mean, all of us who read the book. McKinley leaves a lot of questions unanswered, far more than I'm normally comfortable with in such a long book. In reading, I didn't feel that she left information out because of laziness, but merely because of time and space constraints -- perfect territory for a sequel, the average person might say, but McKinley is emphatically not saying.

Recommended? Absolutely. Be prepared to be glued to it, though, and be prepared to be left wanting more -- much, much more.

Anne of Windy Poplars (L.M. Montgomery)

Genre: Period fiction (takes place around 1890 in Canada)
Year Published: 1936

I suppose it speaks volumes about me that, flush with tons of new books from the holidays, I zero in on one series to read straight through. My personal faults notwithstanding, I must say I was rather disappointed with Anne of Windy Poplars. Looking at the Wikipedia entry on Anne of Green Gables, I see that this was written years later as an insert between Anne of the Island and Anne's House of Dreams, so maybe that accounts for the distinct lack of characters from previous books. (That is, maybe Montgomery wrote in the beginning of House of Dreams that Anne hadn't spoken to them all in three years or something, and so essentially tied her own hands.)

I have several other problems with this book, though. First of all, much of it is written in the epistolary style, which I rarely have patience for. Secondly, in those letters, Montgomery is exceedingly coy; whenever Anne starts to write what could be construed as a "love letter," Montgomery just writes, "Several paragraphs omitted." It's really quite irritating.

Perhaps the most egregious problem with the book, though, is how focused it is on Anne solving the problems of near-total strangers while completely ignoring the realities of her day-to-day life. It is written that she goes home to Green Gables probably half a dozen times before we actually read about one of her trips in detail, and the only reason we get to come along on that narrative jaunt is because Anne is transforming her fellow teacher with the love that lives at Green Gables. We don't get to see her teaching at all. I don't believe Gilbert gets a single line of dialogue throughout the entire book. Meanwhile, Montgomery introduces the entire population of Summerside, a town we've never seen before and will probably never see again; Anne goes through and makes sure all the unmarried couples become engaged, finds a little girl's father, gives a woman her first night off from her tyrant mother, transforms the aforementioned teacher's life . . . lather, rinse, repeat.

Amusingly enough, Anne actually thinks to herself when one of her "fixes" goes wrong (perhaps the first, last, and only time this will ever happen), "Admit that you liked the idea of being a sort of dea ex machina." It's not a good thing when I think to myself, "You'd better like it, or you're out of a job!"

I have a feeling I will be much more fond of the books that were written earlier in Montgomery's career. We'll find out soon enough, I suppose, though I hope my next book will veer off this path a bit.

Recommend? Not really. If you're a diehard Anne Shirley fan, I'm sure you'll get a kick out of it, but I don't think the events chronicled are at all vital to the continuity of the series, and you'll be left feeling somewhat cheated.

Anne of the Island (L.M. Montgomery)

Genre: Period fiction (takes place around 1885 in Canada)
Year Published: 1915

Today I finished Anne of the Island, the third book in the Anne of Green Gables sequence. I will admit to having been totally entranced by Anne Shirley and her little world, even as it sometimes annoys me. I am somewhat unusual in that I only picked up Anne of Green Gables for the first time a few months ago, having never read it as a young girl. But I fell for Anne as so many have done before me.

This series has its faults; the one that I think is most glaring, that Montgomery tends to introduce problems for Anne merely to solve them two pages later, is probably more pronounced in Island than it has been in the previous two books. However, I was much more involved with the plot of Island than that of Anne of Avonlea (the second book). Anne's about my age for the last bit of Island, and she's finally old enough to resolve the question of where her relationship with Gilbert Blythe is going. I was definitely clutching the poor cover pretty hard toward the end when she finally has to face up to the fact that friendship has ceased to be enough on at least one of their parts. (I won't spoil it completely!) So on an emotional level, it hit me harder than the previous two books. And it should speak for itself that I went and picked up Anne of Windy Poplars (the next book) today at the secondhand shop.

Recommend? Yes, though this is not a series you can jump into at any point; you really have to start with Anne of Green Gables.