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 City & The City, China Mieville

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I finished China Mieville’s The City & The City days ago, and to be honest, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. The novel begins as an apparent classic crime noir: a woman is found murdered in Beszel, and Inspector Tyador Borlu is called in to investigate. Evidence links the woman to neighbouring city Ul Qoma. Thing is, Beszel and Ul Qoma aren’t geographical neighbours as we are used to. Best I can understand, they overlap somehow, and residents of each city train themselves to un-see people and places from the other city, lest they be charged of Breach and taken away. Borlu’s investigation therefore isn’t so much about a murder as it is about the two cities, and the mythical third city that is rumoured to be between them.

The City & The City isn’t a fun thriller to read on the subway or before bed. The murder mystery is certainly interesting, embroiling Borlu in politics, history and legends that may turn out to be true. But it’s far from an easy read, at least for me, and I had to set aside a few hours to sit, read and work things out. My sister and I then spent even more time discussing the relationship between Beszel and Ul Qoma, and trying to figure out the implications of this relationship. The resolution to the mystery itself turns out to be fairly simple — not simplistic, by any means, but certainly nothing as mind-blowing as the political landscape Mieville depicts — and certainly, it’s possible to read this as a straightforward crime novel.

But I think it’s worth quite a bit more thought than that, a bit more of a puzzle than who the murderer is. The more I got into the way Beszel and Ul Qoma work, the more the world in this novel became familiar. My sister suggested that physically/geographically, Beszel and Ul Qoma might actually be the same city, with the distinction between them only psychological, and, more importantly, willed. The further I read, the more that made sense to me, though Mieville certainly opens the nature of these cities up to debate.

City makes you think, in much the same way as Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness makes you think. It’s a world absolutely nothing like our own, yet it’s also strangely familiar. I’m not sure if I could say I enjoyed it, but it was definitely worth the read.

Review: The Confession, John Grisham

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I grew up reading John Grisham. The Firm was the first adult novel I’d ever tried to read. I remember being fairly young, and trying to figure out how people ever kept so many characters and subplots straight. I’m still a fan of his earlier legal thrillers, but I haven’t read him in a while (Bleachers is pretty well-written, but I prefer his legal thrillers, and I haven’t really enjoyed any since The Partner). So when I saw The Confession, I decided to check it out, and see if I could recapture the excitement of the earlier thrillers.

I was absolutely disappointed. It started off interesting, with a man named Travis coming to a church in Kansas and confessing that he raped and murdered a girl in Slone, Texas about a decade ago. The pastor, Keith, is unsure whether or not to believe him, but some online research reveals that Travis has a long record of sexual crime. The veracity of Travis’ confession is especially important because Donte, a classmate of the victim, had already confessed to the crime and convicted nine years ago, and will be executed in Slone in a couple of days. Travis isn’t allowed to leave the state, yet Keith can’t let an innocent man die either. So far, a promising premise.

Unfortunately, The Confession quickly becomes an anti-death penalty manifesto rather than an actual story. We know within the first few chapters that Travis is telling the truth; we can also predict fairly early on how Keith will decide to try to save Donte. The main conflict then is a race against time to save Donte. Grisham focuses mostly on people and events in Slone — Donte’s lawyers and family, the victim’s family and the media. Because Donte is black, Slone mostly divides along racial lines, with the black community protesting Donte’s innocence and the white community calling for his blood, and race riots threatening to erupt. Still potentially exciting, but Grisham reduces his characters to stock figures. Donte’s lawyer is idealistic, and his family is just after justice. The victim’s mother is mostly after fame; the prosecutor and governor are concerned only about looking good on camera. Worse, it turns out Donte was completely screwed by the system for nine years — his confession was coerced, the prosecution’s star witness was clearly jealous of Donte, all his appeals failed despite having merit because of politics, the original trial judge was even shown to have been sleeping with the prosecutor. Such a corrupt system, such a victimized young man. We get it. Enough. And yet Grisham continues revealing injustice after injustice after injustice. It began to feel like a soap opera, where some villain was manipulating the strings to make life as difficult as possible for the poor hero.

Grisham has always advocated a clear side on issues (mostly: rich corporations = bad, pro bono lawyers = good), but it hasn’t bothered me as much as in The Confession. It’s not even that I disagree with him about the death penalty (to be honest, I haven’t really made up my mind on the issue yet). But Grisham’s other novels at least had an interesting story and likable characters to go with the soap box. By completely removing the ambiguity from the characters, Grisham presents The Confession as an argument on why the death penalty should be abolished. It can’t even be called a debate, because he refuses to make any of the pro-death penalty characters sympathetic, nor does he explain their reasons for advocating the death penalty, beyond their need to pander for votes (the governor) or the desire to be on camera (the victim’s mother).

Because the characters are so one-dimensional, and the conflict so straightforward, The Confession was boring. Certainly, Donte’s situation was unjust, but Grisham makes him into such a martyr that I almost wanted it to turn out that Donte really did kill the girl after all. Unfortunately, the story unfolds pretty much as expected. I can understand why Grisham would be against the death penalty; I can even understand why he’d be so angry he wanted to tell us why the death penalty should be abolished. It’s just, in a novel, I prefer to have a story as well.

Review: Sing You Home, Jodi Picoult

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In Sing You Home, Jodi Picoult explores the issue of gay parenting. Music therapist Zoe and her partner Vanessa want to have a baby, using frozen embryos from the time Zoe and her ex-husband Max tried to have their own baby. Unfortunately, since the divorce, Max has become a member of a conservative Christian church. He believes homosexuality is a sin, and would rather his and Zoe’s embryos be implanted in his sister-in-law’s womb, for her and Max’s brother to raise in a Christian household.

Picoult handles the issue well, presenting both sides fairly. Even Max, the “bad guy,” is a sympathetic character, a recovering alcoholic who has found solace and a community in church, and is genuinely trying to reconcile his newfound beliefs about morality with his knowledge that Zoe is really a good person and would become a good mother. While I can’t personally understand Max’s pastor’s position, I think Picoult shows well how thoroughly he believes what he says, and so his motivation, however misguided I think it, is primarily to provide for the spiritual welfare of the people at his church. Picoult clearly shows her belief that gay couples should be allowed as much right to parent as straight couples, and while I completely agree with her, I’m also glad she made Zoe’s lawyer as arrogant and focused on political agenda as Max’s lawyer is. Zoe and Vanessa are wonderfully developed, flawed characters, and I’m glad that Picoult chose to show characters rather than just present her take on the issue.

It was near the beginning of the book, however, where Zoe and Max were dealing with their most devastating failed pregnancy yet, that really hit home for me. Zoe recalls being called into a dying pediatric patient’s room to provide some music therapy. She starts playing a melancholy melody, to fit in with the mood of the family, but they ask her to play instead the dying child’s favourite songs, mostly upbeat nursery rhymes. She does, and the family sings along, until the child passes. Zoe remembers that, and realizes that she is incapable of playing anything for her own child, that all she can do is hold his body and while she wants to give him some music, she can’t.

My mom passed away a couple of months ago, and at her wake the night before the funeral, we had a band play her favourite songs. I remember a cousin looking at me, brows furrowed, a few moments after the band began: “Is that Barry Manilow?” Not exactly in line with the solemn, sombre mood, but it was the most we could do for Mom. The worst part is knowing how inadequate it is, and how no matter what we did, there was no way we could give Mom any more. So, reading that scene in Sing You Home took me back to that evening. Since my mom’s passing, I’ve found it difficult to read scenes of characters dealing with the death of loved ones (mostly their children, at least in the last couple of books I’ve read). That scene, in Sing You Home, was just absolutely raw, and real, and I ached with Zoe at her inability to sing to her own child.

Possibly because the beginning, with Zoe and Max dealing with death together, affected me so much, I found the transition to Max’s conversion to Christianity and Zoe’s finding a new soul mate in Vanessa abrupt, and much too convenient. It was just too obviously orchestrated; when Max, after chapters of hating it when his brother tried to convert him, suddenly has a big experience and decides to join a church earlier shown picketing against homosexuality, I just knew that Zoe, who throughout showed no inkling of ever being attracted to women, would suddenly realize she was gay. In fairness to Picoult, she builds up the Zoe/Vanessa romance gradually, but after the emotional impact of the beginning, I felt cheated when I realized the book wasn’t about the relationship (Zoe/Max, who really did seem an intriguing couple) and the issue (Zoe’s desire to be a mother) that I’ve already become so invested in. In a way, it still is about Zoe’s desire to be a mother, but that felt like a minor thread in the main plot about gay rights. While the Zoe/Vanessa romance was certainly believable, there were portions where I felt like I was reading a primer on homosexuality. Vanessa and Zoe reflect a lot on what makes homosexual relationships different from heterosexual ones, which is fine, but I felt more like Picoult was educating us rather than showing the romance develop.

The ending is disappointing, with convenient plot twists that tie everything up neatly, but I’ve come to expect this from Picoult’s books (ever since I was horribly disappointed by the neat, convenient ending of My Sister’s Keeper). So the only thing that really disappointed me here was that I thought Lucy’s story (a troubled teen undergoing music therapy with Zoe) was just left hanging. I definitely wanted to find out more about what happened to her.

Still, overall a pretty good book. Worth checking out.