Tag Archives: Fiction

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.

Review: Dead Man’s Grip, Peter James

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Being a fan of British mysteries, I’ve had Peter James on my To Read list for a while. So when Shannon from Harper Collins Canada asked if I was interested in his new Roy Grace mystery, Dead Man’s Grip, I jumped at the chance to check him out. I had imagined Detective Superintendent Roy Grace as a thin man with a handlebar mustache and Peter James’ books as P.D. James type genteel whodunnits. Turns out Roy Grace is a Paul Newman lookalike and Dead Man’s Grip, at least, is more Jo Nesbo than P.D. James. (A quick check on IMDB reveals an actor named Roy Marsden played P.D. James’ detective Adam Dalgleish several times, which must have led to my mistake.)

Dead Man’s Grip is more a police procedural thriller than a mystery. We know who the villain is almost right away; the only question is whether or not Grace can catch him in time. A traffic accident kills the son of a member of the New York mafia. The victim’s mother, heartbroken, offers a reward for information about the identity of the other drivers involved in the accident. Grace points out that the usual wording is “information leading to the arrest and conviction of someone,” and the way this victim’s mother has phrased the offer of reward hints at vigilantism. Sure enough, the other drivers in the accident start dying, in particularly gruesome ways, and Grace fights to keep the surviving driver safe.

Expecting a genteel mystery, I was particularly affected by the gore, and it was just an exciting read throughout. James isn’t quite as explicit as Jo Nesbo or Val McDermid, whose descriptions of torture can get into horrific, excruciating detail. Rather, James relies more on the power of suggestion, which in my case at least, is just as effective. One scene in particular, of a man walking around a smoked salmon factory, absolutely freaked me out. I felt like I was watching one of those horror/suspense movies with the camera zoomed right into the actor’s face, and you know, you just know that something horrible is about to happen but you can’t see any hint of it yet onscreen. Reading that scene, I completely lost my appetite for salmon, and James hadn’t described anything gruesome yet. I love it when an author can build such an atmosphere of tension, and still withhold the source of that tension from the reader.

I also like how James fleshed out the various characters. Both Carly (one of the drivers in the accident) and Fernanda (the accident victim’s mother) are portrayed as very devoted mothers, so it’s interesting to see them up against each other. Even Tooth (killer for hire) is an interesting character, chilling in his methodical approach to murder yet still more human than the Stieg Larsson supervillain who felt no physical pain. Minor things: Carly made a really stupid decision that annoyed me even though I could somehow understand her reasoning. Also, I wish I knew what Tooth’s original master plan had been, and just how much Carly’s actions had changed it.

This is my first Roy Grace novel, and it certainly won’t be my last. Other than the gripping story, Roy Grace is an interesting character as well, with a complicated love life. His wife has been missing for ten years and his girlfriend is having complications with her pregnancy. I immediately wanted to know if we will ever find out what happened to Grace’s wife (my imagination was running wild). Now, I don’t know if her storyline has been explored in previous novels, or if the question of her fate is one that long-time Peter James fans have been dying to have resolved and I just lucked out by beginning with Dead Man’s Grip. Possible good news for long-time fans then: we find out quite a bit about her story in this book.

Even better news for Canadian fans of Peter James: I found out from his website that he’ll be coming to Toronto in September.

*EDIT*

Toronto fans:

Peter James will be doing a Q&A at Ben McNally Books (366 Bay St) on Tuesday, Sept 20th, 6:30 – 8 pm. Details at the Savvy Reader here.

Are you a fan of Harper Collins Canada on Facebook? Check out their Facebook page for details on how to meet Peter James at the HCC office on Sept 21st, 7 pm.