Category Archives: Book Review Blog

My book reviews and fun bookish news as a book blogger. All about other people’s books, and not my own. :-)

Review | The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris

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19547815At its heart, Eve Harris’ The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is a love story. 19 year old Chani Kaufman has never had a boyfriend but must now marry a man she barely knows. Fortunately, she and future husband Baruch are actually attracted to each other, and the conflict has more to do with his disapproving mother and both characters’ apprehension about the wedding night, rather than with any actual distaste for the marriage. Parallel to this story is that of the rabbi’s wife Rivka, who is charged with training Chani how to become a Jewish wife and yet who begins questioning her own decision to leave behind her own relaxed religious background and adhere to the strict rules of her husband’s. Can Chani and Baruch overcome both his mother and their nervousness about sex and relationships to find true love? Can Rivka reconcile her love for her husband with her growing discomfort with his way of life?

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman was referred to by its publisher as an Orthodox Jewish Pride and Prejudice, and while Chani and Baruch never actually went through the will they/won’t they love/hate cycles that made Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s romance so popular, they still face opposition from family due to class differences. Both books also take a somewhat bemused perspective of their characters’ societies, employing sharp wit and gentle humour to present the foibles of various social traditions. One big difference though, and the reason Chani Kaufman perhaps falls short, is that while Austen seemed fully immersed in her society and her pointed jabs at its conventions still reflect the exasperated affection of an insider, Harris’ narration sounds like it’s coming from the outside looking in.

To be honest, I am completely unfamiliar with Orthodox Judaism and its customs, and as someone who has taught at an Orthodox Jewish school, the author is certainly far more familiar with this society than I am. So I’ll take her word that all the customs she describes and all the details she includes are accurate.

That being said, there’s an almost gossipy tone in the descriptions that, to my ear, present the customs and traditions as exotic and at points almost absurd, which seems at odds with the insider’s perspective the book purports to present. While reading, I had a strong sense of the characters wanting to break away from tradition, but little sense behind the desire for these traditions in the first place. Characters like the rabbi and ultra-Orthodox neighbours are presented as one-dimensional and unreasonable, clinging on to outdated notions and deaf to any thought beyond their rules.

I grew up Catholic, and while there are many Church teachings I disagree with and certain traditions I’d be hard-pressed to explain to non-Catholics or even to non-Filipino Catholics, part of me will always find a sense of beauty in the intention behind these traditions. It is this sense of beauty that I found lacking in Harris’ novel — traditions were presented with amusement and at times annoyance, but rarely with affection or understanding.

The book is an enjoyable, amusing read, a broad-strokes comedy and light-hearted romance with a nice parallel story of a woman looking for a change in her life’s direction. My only hesitation is that Harris gives the impression of eagerness in presenting Orthodox Jewish culture, a task I fully support, and yet I don’t think she quite pulls it off. It may well be accurate, but I wish it had been presented with more nuance.

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Thank you to House of Anansi for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

 

Review | The Body on the T, Mike Martin

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17913594A corpse washes up on a beach in the small town of Grand Bank, Newfoundland and Sgt. Winston Windflower, an RCMP officer and a Cree from Northern Alberta is called in to investigate. In The Body on the T, the second book in the Sgt. Windflower series, Mike Martin strikes a balance between the police procedural and the cozy mystery genre, and presents a small town whodunnit.

With the best cozy mysteries, the place itself becomes a character, and the reader loses themselves in the protagonist’s world. Donna Leon’s Brunetti, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Martin Walker’s Bruno — in all these series, reading the mystery feels like escaping into a different world for a few hundred pages. We get to know the series protagonist — they seem almost a friend, and figuring out whodunnit alongside them becomes a comforting ritual.

Mike Martin makes a pretty solid attempt at creating such a world, and yet falls short. We get interesting anecdotes such as a moose crossing the road and almost causing an accident, and a lovely romance with a coffee shop owner that later has its own dramatic subplot. We get series characters to cheer for — Sgt. Windflower is a duty-bound RCMP officer, his girlfriend Sheila is likeable, and I like the mentor/protege relationship he has with his deputy, Tizzard. There is a welcome touch of diversity in a genre all too often lacking in PoC characters — we get descriptions of Sgt. Windflower’s smudging ritual, and he and the coroner, Dr. Sanjay, have a weekly samosas and Scotch evening, an interesting combination.

Unfortunately, while the characters are likeable, none are particularly memorable. Thus, when a major event puts one of the characters in grave danger, I wasn’t invested enough in that character for it to affect me much beyond wondering what, if anything, this had to do with the case.

Martin also takes his love for detail too far, with, for example, a step by step description of Windflower getting up in the morning. There are also numerous descriptions of meals, lots of delicious smoked cod, but the descriptions lack the mouth-watering flair of Donna Leon’s Paola Brunetti or even Carolyn Keene’s Hannah Gruen.

The mystery itself was a solid whodunnit. There are the usual skirmishes with other departments trying to take over the case and some potential suspects actually being more interesting characters than the series ones. The pacing is slow, which is in line with the cozy mystery genre, yet there aren’t enough other details to keep me hooked in the meantime.

I like the idea of a mystery series set in small town Canada and featuring an RCMP officer. I particularly like the author’s attempts to include details about Cree rituals and small town wildlife, without resorting to tokenism — these details are in the story organically, and I don’t get the impression that he’s checking off a list on showcasing diversity. Still, overall, the story and its characters fell flat for me — not bad, but not particularly compelling or memorable either.

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Thank you to the author for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Girls from Corona del Mar, Rufi Thorpe

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Why did Lorrie Ann look so graceful in beat-up Keds and shorts a bit too small for her? Why was it charming when she snorted from laughing too hard? Yes, we were jealous of her, and yet we did not hate her. She was never so much as teased by us, we roaming and bratty girls of Corona del Mar, thieves of corn nuts and orange soda, abusers of lip gloss and foul language. (pp 6 – 7)

We’ve all known that girl. The one so perfect you want to hate her, and yet so nice that you just can’t. Maybe that girl was even your friend, and maybe, like Mia in Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls from Corona del Mar, you chose to become wholly imperfect rather than even attempt to compete.

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In the very first page, Mia asks Lorrie Ann to break one of her toes, because “it made a lot of intuitive symbolic sense to force the beautiful, pure, and good Lorrie Ann to break my toe and punish me for my abortion” (p 3). Almost immediately, Thorpe establishes the girls’ friendship: Mia is the purported bad girl who gets pregnant at fifteen and Lorrie Ann is so “pure and good” that she is almost an angel, vested with an almost divine right to dispense judgement.

The adult in us knows this can’t be accurate. No one can be as perfect as Lorrie Ann appears to be, and a young girl should not face corporal punishment for having made a difficult decision. Yet Thorpe does a great job in taking us back into the psyche of youth. We see the world through Mia’s eyes, and while we may believe her wrong to be the “bad twin” to Lorrie Ann’s good, we likely understand all too well the feelings of inadequacy that led to that.

We follow the girls as they grow up, and Mia inevitably not only becomes disillusioned by Lorrie Ann, but begins to realize she may never have understood her friend as much as she thought she did in the first place. The story is about Mia growing up, and coming into her own beyond the shadow of Lorrie Ann, or rather of Mia’s memories of her. And Mia is a richly developed character — slowly realizing her worth and freedom to define herself beyond the good twin/bad twin binary.

Yet it is Lorrie Ann who steals the show — given Mia’s idealized image of her, we never really get to know the woman behind the image. Mia describes Lorrie Ann’s story as a series of bad luck, and Lorrie Ann as a naive young woman struggling to keep her inherent goodness while coping with everything. Yet it isn’t until later that we hear a bit of Lorrie Ann’s own perspective and realize how much richer a character she is than we have known. This woman is compelled to be with broken men, yet unable to cope with the brokenness of her own child. She goes through a lot of bad and good things as an adult, as try as Mia might to explain her behaviour, the “real” Lorrie Ann remains elusive, to Mia and therefore also to the reader. A message near the end brings a harsh dose of reality, yet it absolutely needed to be said.

This story could easily have turned into a simplistic fable about growing up, and it is a testament to Thorpe’s talent that both Mia and Lorrie Ann emerge as such rich, vivid, complex characters. Thorpe resists the easy moral at every turn, and therefore makes the reader see how futile it would be to reduce the story and its characters into anything neat. Like real life, this book is messy. It’s confusing, and characters make unexpected choices, yet it all feels real.

There are things in the story that strain credulity — the episodes in Lorrie Ann’s life could be a soap opera, and the ending of her tale makes sense only if the reader remembers a minor detail mentioned once near the beginning and never brought up again. In contrast, Mia’s life appears almost too good to be true, as if the contrast between them that Mia set up as a teenager fully reversed in their adulthood. It’s a bit of apparent oversimplification that’s disappointing mostly because it stands in stark contrast to the richness of the character development.

Still, it’s a really good book overall, a wonderful exploration of the power of female friendship, such that one forged in childhood can have such a lasting effect even on your adult life. This is Thorpe’s first novel, and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for her next.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.