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. :-)

Author Encounter | Rachel Joyce

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I have been looking forward to Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry ever since the Random House Canada Blogger event, where the book was compared to Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. So when I received the following invitation from Chatelaine Books, I was so excited I sent in my RSVP right away.

The story of Harold Fry begins when he receives a letter from an old friend who has fallen ill. On his way to post a response, Harold instead makes the decision to walk across England to see his friend in person. I’m not much of a romantic, but the image of an elderly man painstakingly making his way across a nation just to see an old friend struck me as lovely. For some reason, Harold reminded me of Stevens, the butler from The Remains of the Day, and a character I imagined as dignified and honourable caught my interest. I still haven’t read the book, so I have no idea how accurate my impression of Harold’s character is. However accurate I turn out to be, however, this is still a testament to the power of Joyce’s concept that her story has captured my imagination so strongly even before I’ve opened the book.

Then, as if I needed even more reason to be excited, the week before the event, I learned that Harold Fry was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. So, even before I read Harold Fry and post a review, if you’re thinking about checking this book out, know that the Man Booker jury has given it a thumbs up. And yes, I have to admit, the idea of meeting a Man Booker long-listed author in person did have a thrill.

Image courtesy of The Oxley website

Thank you to Chatelaine Book Club for an awesome event. The Oxley Public House is gorgeous! When I heard the event was going to be at a pub, I was expecting a long table by the bar, or perhaps mingling around a few tables. Instead, it turns out Chatelaine booked the second floor bar, which looks like an old English drawing room.

The bartenders were really friendly. I saw one of them flipping through a copy of Harold Fry in the latter part of the event, and talking to his colleague about it. I love that they seem to be excited about the book as well, and I think I saw Chatelaine give them copies as well, which I thought was really sweet.

The food was also delicious — we had lovely fancy hors d’ouevres, but what I really remember is greasy fish and chips in paper cones. It fit in well with the British ambiance, and I at least mastered the art of eating fish and chips from one hand while still holding my martini in the other.

Rachel Joyce is just lovely in person. Laurie, the Books Editor at Chatelaine, said Harold Fry made her and her colleagues sob, literally. When Rachel read an excerpt, I had an uncomfortable feeling I’ll have a similar reaction. In the excerpt Rachel read, Harold calls the hospice where his friend Queenie is:

“Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. All she has to do is wait. Because I am going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living. Will you say that?”

[…] “I see,” said the voice slowly, as if she had picked up a pen and was jotting this down. “Walking. I’ll tell her. Should I say anything else?”

“I’m setting off right now. As long as I walk, she must live. Please tell her this time I won’t let her down.” [p. 19]

After her reading, Rachel explained how Harold’s story, originally written for radio, was inspired by her father being diagnosed with cancer. He was told it would be terminal, yet even after his operation, while lying in his hospital bed, her father would be dressed in a suit and tie, as if on his way to work. Harold Fry is Rachel’s way to honour her father’s legacy.

The book, Rachel says, has gone on a pilgrimage of its own. With each new reader, and in so many countries, Harold Fry has travelled far beyond her and her tribute to her father. I love how genuinely overwhelmed she seems at how much her book has touched so many people’s lives.

Rachel’s story about her father, along with the excerpt she read, touched me deeply. I wasn’t with my mother when she passed away, and I remember vividly the desperate plea — to god, to the universe, to whoever, really — to have her hold on at least until I arrived. I knew it was futile, even selfish, yet part of me wished I lived in a book or movie, where the big dramatic build up just makes the happy ending so much sweeter. So from Rachel’s excerpt alone, I’m rooting for Harold all the way. I don’t know if he’ll make it to Queenie in time; I don’t even know how much the race against time will play into the story. But I am rooting for him. This book has just become personal.

Thank you to Chatelaine Books and Random House Canada for the opportunity to meet Rachel, and to get together with fellow bloggers. It was a wonderful experience, and I look forward to reading the book.

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Rachel Joyce will be reading at the International Festival of Authors in October. Stay tuned to the IFOA website for updates on her schedule. Trust me: you’ll want to hear her read.

Review | Dare Me, Megan Abbott

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Megan Abbott’s Dare Me was much more chilling than I’d expected. Remember high school? Friendship is important no matter how old you are, but somehow, in high school, the status of friend took on an almost do or die quality. Friendship was a status symbol, as was the ever elusive BFF tag. This is not to diminish high school friendships — many of the deepest, most lasting friendships I have were forged in high school. Still, the thrill of having a popular classmate, the Queen Bee of whatever social group, notice you, even validate you, seems to have been strongest in high school.

Dare Me is a cheerleading novel, depicting a world Bring It On and Sweet Valley never revealed. Cheerleading in Dare Me is like ballet in Center Stage: tough, competitive, borderline physically abusive. Yet unlike Center Stage or any similar sports movie, Dare Me uses cheerleading as the backdrop for an exploration of female teenage friendship and its entrenched social hierarchy. We have passages about cheerleading, poetic descriptions of bodies knifing through the air in death defying stunts, yet these descriptions never feel romantic like, say, Chris Cleave’s depiction of cycling in Gold felt romantic. There’s anger and defiance in Abbott’s descriptions of cheerleading stunts — in the parlance of her characters, a big fuck you, bitches, watch me fly.

The story is narrated by Addy, lifelong lieutenant of cheerleading captain Beth, until Coach French takes over the cheerleading squad, and wins Addy over. In some ways, Coach French is the kind of inspirational leader/mentor young people long for — she believes in the squad’s competitive potential, and has the ability to make the members exceed their limitations. She also takes her role too far, demanding both athletic excellence and eating disorder level diets from her squad.

What makes Coach French truly creepy however, is that she is a Mean Girl that never grew up. She clashes immediately with Beth, mostly because there can be only one Queen Bee, and the whole idea of a woman in her late twenties waging war against a high schooler for clique supremacy shows just how lonely and messed up Coach French is. She tells Addy that Beth’s scheming is amateur, yet ironically, her own tactics are very high school. For example, to cut Beth down to size, she fires her as cheerleading captain (even removes the role completely) and assigns Flyer (the star in squad routines) to a girl Beth always picks on. This could have been an empowering move by an adult, but Coach French’s glee in seeing Beth’s frustration keeps her just as immature as her adversary.

Beth is hardly a character that evokes sympathy — she’s bitchy and manipulative, and she tears down other girls just to win the battle against Coach French. Yet, buried deep inside is a touching vulnerability, most clearly seen in her friendship with Addy. At several points in the story, she calls Addy stone cold, tough, a fox. “It was always you,” she says. Addy may have been Beth’s second-in-command, but we see how much the power dynamic is really reversed from Beth’s point of view. Even though Addy doesn’t realize it, Beth really craves her approval, her validation, above all, her friendship. So when Addy, like the rest of the squad, becomes enthralled with Coach French, Beth’s battle against the coach becomes personal — much more than supremacy over a cheerleading squad, it’s a battle to be Addy’s BFF. Dare Me dares to explore just how far some girls will go to win such a battle, and kudos to Abbott for not holding back.

Dare Me is ultimately Addy’s story, however. At the centre of Coach French and Beth’s power struggle, Addy is embroiled in a lot of seriously messed up events, and when everything seems to be about power dynamics, she is unsure who she can trust. Addy is in a state of flux, both uninterested in going above her lieutenant role and secretly yearning to be the Flyer on the squad, the Queen Bee as it were. Well, why not me? she asks. Why not, indeed?

Dare Me didn’t blow me away. It started off slow for me, possibly because Abbott’s language sometimes slipped into Virgin Suicides-style philosophizing and navel gazing, e.g. an early rumination on how long it takes to wash off the glitter after a game. The whole cheerleading-as-metaphor angle also seemed overdone at times — at one point, a former squad member comments that being a spectator rather than a participant for the first time made her realize that the cheerleaders looked like they were killing themselves, literally. The comment was just overly dramatic, and the message far too hammered home.

However, Dare Me definitely exceeded my expectations. A dark and twisted take on friendship and cheerleading as blood sport, Dare Me thrills and disturbs.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for a finished copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker

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What a lovely, lovely book! Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles takes a terrifying science fiction idea and turns it into a touching coming of age story. When the Earth’s rotation begins to slow, eleven year old Julia barely even notices. Some people were terrified about the end of the world, but when the entire world is affected, where can you run? The effects are slow but inexorable, and even as a reader, panic turns to horror and, eventually, to resignation. Julia’s world is ending, and Bruce Willis isn’t about to launch a spaceship to save it.

This then is where the power of Walker’s story lies: when you can’t prevent the end of the world, what else is left but to live your life as best you can? Walker creates a complex world, and offers social commentary. Society, for example, is divided into those using clock time (following the 24-hour clock despite the schedule of daylight) and those using real time. “I’ve never liked her lifestyle,” Julia’s mother sniffs, speaking of real time user Sylvia. “It’s not our business how she chooses to live her life,” Julia’s father responds. This type of conversation sounds familiar, eh? The world stops spinning, people will go on being judgmental. Another real time user tells Julia’s family:

You probably think we’re a bunch of pipe dreamers out here […] but it’s just the opposite. We’re not the ones in denial. […] We’re the realists. You’re the dreamers. [p. 214]

Indeed, the clock time users are dreamers, desperately clinging on to a world that no longer exists. Ostensibly about something as quotidian as telling time, Walker creates a powerful metaphor here, a searing portrait of our own society.

Even more potent perhaps is the deeply personal thread to this story. In an especially poignant scene, Julia decides to buy herself a training bra. This insistence on a ritual of growing up, even in the face of the world ending, is a lovely fist pump against circumstances. It also stands out as one of the few times Julia, an all-around good girl who hesitates to cut class even with the world going topsy turvy, deliberately defies her mother. It’s that important to her. And that’s why it’s utterly heartbreaking when she gets home and realizes the bra is much uglier than it seemed at the store:

One of the seams was already coming loose. Even worse was the way the cups rippled unsexily across my chest, like two empty water balloons waiting to be filled. [p. 155]

It’s a young girl’s heartache, and a deeply moving reminder that she may never have the chance to fill those cups. Julia’s concerns about family, friendship and friendship are all rendered even more poignant by the urgency, and inevitable futility, of her situation.

The ending, the final chapter in particular, is absolutely beautiful.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a finished copy of this book as a prize in the Random Reader Challenge: John Irving. I read this book as part of Random House’s Random Reader Challenge: Debut Novels.