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: Vital Signs, Tessa McWatt

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Tessa McWatt’s Vital Signs begins with an image of the narrator’s wife Anna wearing an electrode cap. She has a brain aneurysm that causes her to mangle her sentences and that endangers her life. The narrator Mike is devastated by his wife’s condition and guilt-ridden over an affair he’d had years ago. He wants to confess.

When I started reading Vital Signs, all I could think of was, this is such a depressing book. I ached for Anna and her inability to express herself. I found the opening scene with Anna wearing the electrode cap and speaking about hummingbirds very painful, and for a book to begin with that image should’ve warned me that this book was just going to get even more depressing.

Still, it’s sadness with sweetness as well. I love hearing about Mike and Anna’s love story, and how their family deals with Anna’s condition. In one of my favourite passages, Mike thinks that perhaps Anna’s nonsensical sentences are her way of exerting control, of perhaps playing a game with her doctors. It’s false hope, of course, but I was moved by his all too palpable need to grasp any bit of hope he can.

I cared about Mike, Anna and their children. The entire time, I wanted more than anything for Mike to decide not to confess his affair. Seriously, with what his wife is going through, what would his confession achieve other than salving his own conscience? If Anna were to be trapped in a world where she can communicate only to herself, I wanted her to hold on to the wonderful memories she’s had with Mike, and not have to deal with the less-than-wonderful truth. I cheered their daughter Charlotte on when Mike sensed she didn’t want him to tell. I wanted Anna to get better, and worried with her family whether surgery was an acceptable risk.

That is why I was so let down by the plot twist near the end of the book. Without giving any details about it, all I can say is that I felt cheated. I felt like it just provided an easy resolution to what was, till then, a gripping plot point. Other than that, I thought Vital Signs is a good book, with a fitting overall ending. It’s a short book, but by no means an easy read.

Review: Sand Queen, Helen Benedict

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What a powerful book! Also somewhat depressing, so definitely not something to read if you’re in the mood for something light. Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen tells the stories of nineteen-year-old American soldier Kate Brady and Iraqi medical student Naema Jassim in Iraq in 2003. I don’t usually enjoy war novels, so I wasn’t sure how much I’d like this one, but I quickly found myself engrossed in the tales of both women.

Kate is assigned to an American prison in Iraq, where Naema’s father and thirteen-year-old brother have been unjustly detained. The first thing that struck me about this novel is the less than heroic portrayal of the American military. Seen through Naema’s eyes, American soldiers are bullies, much less brutal than Saddam’s soldiers, but still picking on innocent Iraqis like her brother. I like how Benedict shows this, and also shows the other side’s perspective. For example, Kate notices how the Iraqi prisoners are actually getting better food and accommodations than the American soldiers.

I like the scene where Naema tells Kate that she’s a medical student, and Kate admits she thought Iraqi girls “weren’t allowed to do anything except get married.” “Do you know nothing of my country?” Naema asks, and they chat a bit about their families.  I love that bit of cross-cultural interaction, and the idea that, even in the very midst of the war, an American and an Iraqi can discover common ground and become friends.

Naema’s story started out emotionally gripping. We see her enjoying a quiet dinner with her family, her father and brother being arrested, and her outrage and desperation in trying to find out about them. However, I found Kate’s story much more engrossing, and shortly after Naema and Kate’s initial interactions, I found myself skimming over the Naema chapters.

Kate’s story is just very disturbing. As a young, female soldier, she routinely gets harassed by her fellow soldiers and by prisoners. In Sand Queen, Benedict uses the real life stories of female soldiers in Iraq that she had researched for her earlier, non-fiction book The Lonely Solder: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, and perhaps it’s because of this source material that Sand Queen ends up feeling much more like Kate’s story than like Kate and Naema’s stories.

The level of harassment and sexism that Kate and her fellow female soldiers face is horrific, and it was difficult but felt utterly real, to see her turn from a somewhat innocent girl just trying to do her job to a rage-filled, hurting woman capable of kicking a bound man and grinding his face into the ground. We see glimpses of Kate’s life after the war, and we understand how she got there — after all she’s been through, who wouldn’t be broken? There’s a sweet romance with a fellow soldier who tries to protect her from a rapist, and I was cheering on that romance all the way. With so much horror everywhere else, that friendship and developing love stood out as the potential for hope.

Sand Queen is a powerful and, quite frankly, depressing novel. It’s wonderfully written; even with such heavy subject matter, the story moves really quickly. It’s an eye opener, both to the lives of Iraqis during the war and to the experiences of female soldiers. Not a breezy read, but definitely worth reading.

An amusing yet also somewhat insulting incident at Chapters/Indigo

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In complete fairness, the Indigo employee was trying to provide exceptional customer service to me; it just happened to come at the expense of customer service to my sister.

My sister and I dropped by Indigo last night on our way to a movie. They had a Buy 3, Get the 4th Free sale on, so after Jess found a couple of books she wanted, we went around looking for a couple more just to get the free book deal. (Note to Indigo: that marketing plan does work.) I went to pay for the books, and when Jess wanted to buy a magazine, she went to another cashier to purchase it.

The Indigo employee was thrilled to find that I had an irewards card (“even better than plum points!” he said), and was processing my sale when Jess comes up to me. “Look,” she says, “I just got a plum points card!” She reads from the receipt: “Ooh, I already have 160 points on it… Next rewards level is 2500 points…”

I ask the bookseller what 2500 points gets you. He tells me $5 off your purchase. I had asked earlier when my irewards was due to expire, so I guess he was worried I was planning to switch to plum points. He started talking up irewards to me: “But you save so much more on irewards!” He looked at my purchase and said, “I bet you read a lot. Do you read a lot of books?” I said yes, and I agreed with his point, which is that with all the books I buy, it’s probably worth renewing the irewards card rather than switching to plum points.

That would have been fine, and I completely agreed with him, except he decided to keep going. “For serious readers like you, irewards is definitely worth it. Plum points are just, you know, for people who buy a magazine every now and then. Then at some point, yay, they get a free magazine.” He glances at my sister with her magazine, turns to me, rolls his eyes and smiles, like, yeah, that’s not us.

At this point, my sister, who’d been standing right there the whole time, was looking glumly at her brand new plum points card and the magazine she’d just bought. “She (the other cashier) recommended plum points,” Jess said. The Indigo employee ignored her, completely focused on me as he kept talking about how since I read so much and I wasn’t just a magazine reader, I would definitely not want the plum points card. It was mostly his dismissive tone of plum points card holders that struck me.

Honestly, I was mostly amused then at the irony. After all, three of the books that had so impressed this employee were my sister’s, and if I were to renew my irewards, it’ll be worth it mostly because of the amount of books my sister buys from them. But I also felt bad for Jess — if I were in her shoes, I’d be feeling pretty insulted that I wasn’t considered enough of a reader to be offered an irewards card instead of “just” a plum points card.

So I appreciate that Indigo employee’s enthusiasm for the irewards program, and I appreciate his eagerness to chat with customers. I also appreciate his desire to explain to me why irewards will be a better option for me than plum points. It’s just that, if someone had just gotten plum points, is obviously excited about it and is standing right there, please don’t dismiss them as a non-serious reader. It may not be true, for one thing, but more importantly, it creates the impression that plum points card holders aren’t as valuable as irewards card holders. Good customer service to one shouldn’t come at the expense of another, and I definitely think that employee could have sold me on irewards without putting down plum points.

EDIT, SEPTEMBER 27TH

Upon Sally’s recommendation (in the comments), I emailed Indigo customer service about this incident. As she pointed out, even though my sister is completely over it by now, it may still be beneficial for Indigo to be made aware of the incident.

Indigo customer service emailed me back fairly quickly, but, more importantly, the store manager sent me an email as well, thanking me for my feedback and addressing my concerns.

So I just wanted to say thanks to that manager, for taking the time to reach out personally and show me and my sister that all Indigo customers are, indeed, valued. Thanks as well to Sally for suggesting I bring this to the manager’s attention.