Tag Archives: Fiction

Review | Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Maria Semple

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The email from Hachette Book Group Canada began: “Please let me know if you’re interested in receiving the book that Jonathan Franzen ‘tore through…with heedless pleasure,’” but it was Maria Semple’s book trailer (above) that hooked me. If she could make me laugh this hard with the trailer, I really wanted to see how much funnier the actual novel would be.

whered-you-goWhere’d You Go, Bernadette? is about fifteen year old Bee’s quest to find her mother, Bernadette, who has disappeared. At first, the story sounds like it would be depressing (a missing mother!) or at the very least, a literary award bait type coming of age/quest narrative (journey of a young girl, etc, cue violins). Fortunately, in Semple’s hands, the premise is comedic gold. This book had me laughing throughout — not subdued, ladylike giggles either, but rather chortling, falling off the bed in hysterics laughing.

It even has what is probably one of my favourite lines in a book, ever:

I attempted to pull Ms. Griffin off the teddy bear, which appeared to be causing her acute distress. [p. 176]

I love the format Semple chooses — instead of doing a straightforward narration of events, Semple tells her story through emails, newspaper clippings, and other pieces of research Bee uses in trying to find her mother.   Through this, we get to here Bernadette’s voice, which is hilarious, naive, and somehow also tragic. Bernadette is a compelling character, a talented architect whose work takes America by storm and yet who somehow ends up a homemaker in Seattle.

Seattle is hardly the middle of nowhere, but Bernadette is horribly displaced, and her snarky comments about Microsoft, the rain and five-way intersections are razor-sharp. She is so out of her element in fact that she outsources most of her day-to-day work, such as making travel arrangements or buying graduation presents, to a “virtual assistant from India” for 75 cents an hour. Her emails to Manjula, the virtual assistant, are chatty and free-wheeling, reminding me of Becky Bloomwood from the Shopaholic series, and just like Becky, Bernadette seems much too naive to realize when she’s over her head.

Bernadette also has to deal with “gnats,” what she calls the fussy, snobbish women in her neighbourhood. The biggest gnat of all is a woman named Audrey Griffin, who hires “a blackberry abatement specialist” to clear her yard, and who is constantly at odds with Bernadette. Without giving too much away, I had no idea something as simple as “abating” a yard of blackberries could escalate into one of the most epically comic neighbourhood battle of wills I’ve ever seen.

Given how hilarious this book is, it’s a lovely surprise, and a testament to Semple’s talent, that it never devolves into pure farce. Rather, there’s much heart in this novel. We end up really caring for Bernadette and her family. Take for example my Goodreads update on page 266:

this book has been hilarious so far, but this part might just make me cry. 😦 I really want Bee to find her mom. 😦 [Goodreads]

The book gets to you. I was muttering “gnat” whenever I saw Audrey’s name, and I was truly worried when I realized another woman had the hots for Bernadette’s adorably geeky husband. The reason Bernadette moved to Seattle in the first place is on one hand, utterly comic, yet on the other, rather heartbreaking. Bernadette is a believable, lovable figure from her very first email to Manjula, yet her pre-Seattle life adds so much more depth to her character.

The ending is a bit too neat, especially considering the utter wild abandon that characterized the comedy throughout the novel, but I was still happy with how things turned out. The narrative also slows down considerably when Semple abandons the madcap rush through bits of evidence and instead switches to straightforward narration from Bee’s perspective. The switch makes sense, story-wise, but the narrative momentum waned. Still, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is comedic gold. If that book trailer makes you giggle, be warned: the book will make you laugh, will make you gasp, and every once in a while, may even make you shed a tear or two.

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

Review | Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

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9780374214913Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is my book soulmate. Seriously, if ever a book were to combine all the elements that would make me fall in love with it, this is it.

The title alone is enough to hook me, and, I suspect, any fellow book lover. The idea of a bookstore open 24 hours sounds like heaven. And no, online retailers don’t count — sure you can download an ebook or order a print book at any time, but there’s a magic to actually being in a bricks and mortar place. And Mr. Penumbra’s store in particular has the musty, old book charm that makes me want to spend hours in it.

Even better, Penumbra’s store is an indie! Bookseller protagonist Clay is used to customers asking for book recommendations, then leaving to buy it on their e-reader. As a bookseller at an indie myself, I could relate, and the scene where author Robin Sloan creates a clever reversal of this scenario made me as baffled and overjoyed as it did Clay.

I’m an avid mystery reader, and Sloan teases his reader with a creepy, utterly compelling one: What books are in the dark stacks Clay is forbidden to read? Who are the customers who come in the dead of the night to return a book to those stacks and pick up a new one? I was definitely hooked. Where would the author take this?

To his credit, Sloan completely blindsided me. When I think of a book about an indie 24-hour bookstore, with mysterious leather-bound tomes taken out in the dead of the night, I have a certain type of storyline in mind, and I bet you do too. So it took me completely by surprise when Sloan introduced a digital element — 3D mapping, Google search capabilities, computer wizardry — and somehow managed to make it all work with the mysterious, musty atmosphere of the old-fashioned bookstore. I admit, as a total book and mystery geek who also happens to be a tech geek, all I could think was, this book was tailor made for me.

Too often, the divide between the physical and the digital, the old school and the new, is posited as a one or the other type deal. You’re either a print book person or an ebook person, someone who appreciates the handwritten card or someone who loves the 3D IMAX 42fps type movie. Obviously, reality is rarely so clearcut, but in books at least, I usually find either nostalgia for the way things were or all out Cory Doctorow-style techno-geekery. To have both so seamlessly in one book just blew me away.

To be honest, the reason behind the mysterious customers disappointed me at first. On one hand, it would’ve been really difficult for any author to come up with an explanation impressive enough to live up to amazing build up, but then again, it also made me feel like Sloan settled for safe, overdone Dan Brown territory. Not a spoiler — Mr. Penumbra has nothing to do with Mary Magdalene, but the customers are using the books to search for something, and the object of their search disappointed me. Sloan reverts to a classic trope, and after having build such an exciting, esoteric world, the familiar was a letdown.

But then, again Sloan surprises me. And again, it’s with his masterful integration of the digital with the physical. The object of the customers’ search may be overdone (in my view, at least), but the combination of ways in which Sloan makes his various characters conduct this search is highly original. The final answer is highly original as well, and quite frankly, brilliant. Bravo, Mr. Sloan — you’ve blown me away.

I am in love with this story. I love that it manages to bring together so many things I love, including science fiction and fantasy, an absolutely awesome romance, even typography and design! My copy is filled with underlined text, marginal notations, and at the very end:

Posted on Instagram 26 Sept 2012

Sometimes, words aren’t enough.

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Thank you to Harper Collins Canada for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Note: If you live in the US, your edition of Penumbra has a glow-in-the-dark cover!]

Review | Son (The Giver #4), Lois Lowry

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lowry23cutI can’t even begin to explain how much this book means to me. Lois Lowry’s The Giver changed my life when I was 14 (see story here), and reading Son feels like coming full circle. One of the reasons The Giver resonated so much with me is that I read it when I was fairly close to the age of its protagonist Jonas. So you can imagine the chill I got when, reading Son at 29, I realized that I must again be fairly close to the age of Jonas in this story. I’ve grown up with these books, and reaching the end of this series feels, in many ways, like ending a chapter in my own life. Son is a far more adult, far more sombre book than The Giver, or perhaps I have just grown up. [Minor warning: there will be spoilers about The Giver in this review.]

Son brought me to tears. From the very first line: “The young girl cringed when they buckled the eyeless leather mask around the upper half of her face and blinded her,” Son transported me right back into Lowry’s world, but a much darker, more frightening one than what I remember from The Giver. The “young girl” is Claire, fourteen years old, assigned to be a Birthmother. I can’t imagine being a mother at fourteen; worse, I don’t even want to imagine being twelve and being told that the only thing I have left to do in life is create a set number of babies, then retire.

Despite its title, Son is really about a mother, Claire. Her son is Gabe, the baby in The Giver who wasn’t performing at par with his age group and so had to be “released” (killed). At the end of The Giver, however, Jonas takes Gabe with him when he leaves town. Here’s the thing: as Gabe’s Birthmother, Claire isn’t supposed to see him again after birth — she wasn’t allowed to hold him, or even know his gender. Instead, she’s supposed to take pills to numb the pain of loss.

I’m not a mother, and I can’t even begin to imagine how that would feel. I have, however, lost my own mother recently, and that may be partly why Claire’s story resonated so strongly with me. I almost cried, and I also wanted to cheer, at the Claire’s resolution not to take the pills: “She would rather die, Claire realized, before she would give up the love she felt for her son” [page 116]. When Jonas takes Gabe away with him, Claire follows, and her quest, even though it’s just to a simple fishing village, felt powerful. Lowry’s way with words is nothing short of magic, making Claire’s journey feel as epic as a Tolkien narrative. Take for example the following conversation:

“It will be a long time,” he told her, “to make you ready.”

“I know.”

“Not days or weeks,” he said.

“I know.”

“Mayhap it will take years,” he told her. “For me, it was years.”

“Years?”

He nodded.

“How do I start?” Claire asked. [p. 209]

The language is that of fairy tales and legends. Lowry takes something as ordinary as the love of a mother for her son, and reveals just how extraordinary it really is.

In her speech at Book Expo America 2012 about Son, Lowry says that she wrote The Giver as a response to a question from her own son, a soldier who died in battle, who’d asked her why evil exists in the world. She had no answer. But evil does exist in Son, and while Claire faces evil, it will ultimately be up to her son Gabe to defeat it.

Evil, in Son, takes the form of the Taskmaster, who promises to fulfill a wish, but will require payment of your most valuable asset. In some people, payment will take the form of their kindness, in others, youth. And generally, whatever they receive turns out not to be worth what they gave up. The Taskmaster is a classic figure in literature, and with her simple, lovely language, Lowry makes us feel just how much is at stake here.

We do meet Jonas again; he is an adult now, and his new perspective of the world reminds me of just how much I’ve grown myself since I first began these stories. Son feels both epic and personal, and reading it is just an overwhelming experience. We want the Taskmaster to be defeated because, even though we know it’s fiction, even though we know evil will always exist in the real world, Lowry has immersed us so much in her world that whatever the outcome there is, it matters. Call it superstition, call it sentimentality, but I couldn’t help feeling that if only Gabe defeats the Taskmaster, perhaps a bit of the evil in the real world can also be defeated. Unrealistic yes, but Lowry’s words have a way of bringing out the child in her readers, the child that still believes in hope.

Son is probably one of the most powerful books I’ve read all year. The Giver changed my life as a child. Son brought me back to who I was — and in many ways, felt like the end of a chapter in my own life. Has reading Son changed me as an adult? Possibly, but unlike my experience with The Giver, I can’t even begin to tell you how.

Lois Lowry’s amazing, heartbreaking speech at Book Expo America 2012:

Evil does exist, it has always existed, and we will fight it again and again. And in every generation, it is the young who come forward and try to bring an end to it. It’s fiction, of course, the happy ending… [But] young people, young readers believe they can fix the world.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen Ltd for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[All quotes and page numbers from Son in this review are from the Advance Reading Copy.]