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Review | MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood

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17262203To end the trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood returns to the past in MaddAddam. That is, it continues where Year of the Flood left off, with Snowman the Jimmy in a coma and Toby left as the de facto story teller for the Crakers (an all new type of humans). One of the things I love most about The Handmaid’s Tale (by far my favourite Atwood) is its insistence on the importance of stories, of words and of the power of storytelling. MaddAddam expands upon this theme with the Crakers, who are true innocents, shielded for most of their lives from the outside world and learning about reality only through the stories first of Snowman the Jimmy and now of Toby.

There is action happening in MaddAddam – the threat of Painballer (evil men) attack is ever present, the Pigoons (mutated pigs with human intelligence) also pose a physical threat, and Toby is dealing with her feelings for Zeb and a woman named Swift Fox who threatens their relationship. There’s even a strikingly emotional subplot about a woman struggling to cope with rape and abuse and a rather disturbing subplot about human women deliberately trying to impregnate themselves with a Craker baby. I was somewhat disappointed by their desperation to become mothers, as if their life wouldn’t be complete without that, but at the same time, it does raise some interesting biological issues – what new breed of human will be formed by that, and how will the child be raised within such a society?

Still, for me, MaddAddam is primarily about story telling, and more to the point, myth making. We saw a hint of it in Jimmy’s storytelling in Oryx and Crake – how he reinterprets tangible, science fiction-ish, events into myth, turning Oryx into a god and Crake into a deified Eve figure. And it makes sense – even while we know Oryx and Crake are humans like us, to the Crakers, they certainly are the creators, and therefore a form of deity. Still, in Oryx and Crake, Atwood was mostly concerned with world building, and there was plenty within those stories to catch our eye.

With MaddAddam, the world has already been created for us, and Atwood, through the character of Toby, can relax into showing in loving detail how these stories are reinterpreted. It helps that the story of Zeb and his brother Adam (Adam One) are a bit less science fiction-like than that of Oryx, Crake and Jimmy, providing us more grounding to distinguish reality from myth. Toby herself is also dealing with threats of Painballers and Pigoons, as well as her romance with Zeb, and so we are continuously being pulled out of her storytelling, and constantly see her struggling to frame real events as myths, and re-imagining interpretations of certain events in order to fit with the mythology that Jimmy had set up. I love the depiction of Jimmy’s distaste for the mythology he himself created, especially in contrast with the desire of one of the Crakers to commit all of the stories to memory, and to learn to write so that future Crakers may know it as well. This is a society coming to form, and a sacred text being written, and for us readers, being privy to the reality behind the myth holds a particular fascination.

The big, climactic scene where it all comes to a head is striking in its narrative style. Atwood chooses to have us hear it from the perspective of a storyteller, and while, having read about these characters for so long, we can imagine the harsh tones of certain points, the story is swathed in epic, and a Pigoon, who has otherwise not been featured as an individual in the trilogy, takes a pivotal role.

MaddAddam is not my personal favourite of the trilogy – I much preferred the more glamourous unreality of Oryx and Crake. But it does bring the trilogy full circle, and ends it right on the cusp of a new tomorrow.

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

Review | The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B, Teresa Toten

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16280081The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B is an important book, yet I think it’s for the very same factors that make it important that also made it difficult for me to connect with the book. I had the pleasure of meeting Teresa at a Random House blogger event a few months ago, and she basically stole my heart by talking about Puff, the Magic Dragon and reading from Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” So I read Unlikely Hero wanting, really wanting, to love it just as much as I loved meeting its author.

Yet I didn’t, and to be fair, I find it difficult to put my finger on just why I didn’t. Because Toten does a lot of things right. Unlikely Hero is about Adam, a teenage boy with OCD, who falls in love with Robyn, a girl in his support group. The members of the group are all given superhero nicknames, and Adam, naturally, chooses to become Batman to his Robyn.

Toten has clearly done her research on OCD, and it’s heartbreaking to see how difficult Adam sometimes finds such mundane tasks as entering a door. In one particularly moving scene, he invites his support group friends to his church and realizes at the threshold that he needs to perform an elaborate, ten minute or so ritual before he can enter. The other members of the group, and Robyn herself, are sensitive enough not to make a big deal out of it, and simply walk in to wait for him. Even more striking is another scene where he worries about his mother needing urgent help, but upon reaching his own front door, realizes he is unable to pass through, again without performing an elaborate, time-consuming ritual. Toten does a great job making Adam’s struggles real for the reader – his rituals form a barrier than almost feels physical, and thanks to Toten’s gift with language, certainly feels as impenetrable to us as to Adam himself.

There’s a touching sweetness to Adam. He desperately wants to be a hero, desperately wants to help Robyn overcome her own fears, and to rescue his mother from a hateful anonymous letter writer who tells her to kill herself. Yet, try as he might, he is unable to escape his own weakness – how can Batman save the world if he can’t even enter a doorway?

I think it’s this sweetness that, ironically, eventually sours me to Adam. He seems too earnest, his sweetness almost cloying, and he seems too close to perfect to be real. It’s not that he has no weaknesses – the source of his personal struggle is all too real – but the depiction of his heroic nature seems almost heavy handed, and I found myself searching for a character flaw.

Even the constant reference to other group members by their chosen superhero names – regardless of how realistic this may be – felt cutesy after a while, and I found it difficult to see them as real people. They serve mostly as a foil to Adam – we see their own OCD quirks, and see how they respond to Adam as an inspiration – but never really come into their own as characters.

Robyn, in particular, since we’re seeing her mostly through Adam’s eyes, appears a dream girl – yes vulnerable, yes struggling with OCD tendencies – but ultimately unreal.

As I said, this is an important book, mostly because of how much it plunges the reader into the experience of having OCD. I just wish the characters had a bit more of an edge to their personalities.

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

Review | Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, Matthew Quick

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How can I even begin to describe what an emotional wallop this book is? Ever since the success of We Need to Talk About Kevin, other authors have tried their hand at school shooter stories, and stories of teenagers who don’t fit in are a dime a dozen. Matthew Quick’s Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock however stands out — not only does the author succeed in portraying a despair so deep one actually feels what drives Leonard Peacock to take a gun to school, but he also manages to keep Leonard fully, vulnerably, human.

When we think of school shooters, we imagine either complete psychopaths like Kevin, or emotional wrecks who can’t take it anymore. Instead, Quick creates a quiet, troubled young man whose motivations for committing murder-suicide are far more complex than simply his pain at being an outcast. The book works because of its subtlety and humour; its very restraint creates emotional impact.

It is Leonard Peacock’s eighteenth birthday and he will be taking his grandfather’s P-38 WWII Nazi handgun to school so he can kill his best friend and then himself. As the novel begins, the handgun lies beside Leonard’s bowl of oatmeal “like some weird steampunk utensil anachronism.” He takes a photo with his iPhone, “thinking it could be both evidence and modern art.” Then, he tells us,

I laugh my ass off looking at it on the mini screen, because modern art is such bullshit.

I mean, a bowl of oatmeal and a a P-38 set next to it like a spoon — that arrangement photographed can be modern art, right?

Bullshit.

But funny too. [p. 1]

In the space of its first few paragraphs, the book already manages to convey so much. The horror of the handgun is set beside a bowl of oatmeal, possibly one of the most innocuous objects in the world. The incongruence is troubling, and Leonard’s amusement at the image reflects his bleak outlook. His thoughts on the modern art being bullshit hint at a larger disenfranchisement with the world, and even though he laughs, one already begins to wonder at the pain beneath his words.

Before Leonard shoots his best friend, however, he plans to give gifts to four very special people in his life — his Humphrey Bogart-obsessed neighbour Walt, his classmate Baback who is a talented violin player, the Christian homeschooler Lauren whom Leonard has a crush on, and high school teacher on the Holocaust Herr Silverman. Even more than his plan to shoot, it is Leonard’s interactions with these four that form the heart of the book. Each encounter holds the potential for Leonard’s salvation — not in a religious sense, but certainly in an emotional, somewhat spiritual one. Each time Leonard gives a gift, even though he tells us it’s only so they can remember him after his death, we feel his need for connection, and we sense that he’s yearning for something from each of these friends that he may not be able to define, but if received, may make him change his mind.

These scenes therefore become more painful, because we initially see the relationships only through Leonard’s eyes, and it is only when he offers his gifts that we — along with Leonard himself — are treated to the reality of how each of these friends sees him. While some may offer some hope for actual connection, others spurn him, in a way that almost seems cruel until we realize how Leonard’s actions must seem from their point of view. Quick immerses us into Leonard’s psyche, but not so deep that we can’t see the reality of who he is to other people, and while we sympathize with him, we can’t help but sympathize as well with those who maintain their distance.

The major standout in this book is Herr Silverman. Everyone should have an Herr Silverman in their lives. Here is a teacher who goes far beyond the call of duty for his students; here is a man who genuinely cares about other people, and is willing to go out of his way to make sure you are all right. His story made me cry, and as for his scene with Leonard near the end… It moved me. I can’t even express how emotional I got reading that scene, partly I think because I have become so embedded within Leonard’s psyche, but also because I realize how much the world needs more Herr Silvermans in it, and how much everyone should be so lucky as to encounter a Herr Silverman at least once in their own lives. In a book where the protagonist has built such rigid walls of defence, to the point that he can look at a handgun and laugh, Herr Silverman’s presence is a welcome reminder that no matter how bad the world seems, it will never be all bad.

Reading this book is a profoundly moving experience. I rarely say this, but I already wish there was a movie adaptation, with Ezra Miller playing Leonard Peacock, because he’s the only actor in that age group I can think of who has the ability to portray both Leonard’s darkness and vulnerability. I tweeted my wish for a movie, and Matthew Quick himself responded that one is already in the works:

I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

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