Tag Archives: Random House

I Think I Love You, Allison Pearson

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I think I love this book. Thirteen-year-old girls Petra and Sharon are huge David Cassidy fans who love reading The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, especially the section with a letter from David himself. Alternating chapters reveal the other side of the story: Bill, a writer in his twenties, who ghostwrites David’s letters, has a musical snob for a girlfriend and sneers at the young girls who go gaga over David. Petra enters a contest for a chance to meet David Cassidy in person, and only finds out she’s won twenty-five years later.

I’ve never listened to David Cassidy myself, and in fact, when a friend told me about this book, I had to ask her who David Cassidy was. But I could definitely relate to Petra and Sharon’s obsession. Can barely even remember the titles of the magazines I read (Tiger Beat?) and under no duress will admit my personal versions of David Cassidy (okay, so I attended a recent Backstreet Boys concert and shrieked like anything). But I do remember the squealing, the dreaming, and above all, the pure girly bonding, with much affection. And that’s what I Think I Love You celebrates. With Petra, we relive our own teen idol years. Like Petra, we’ve all had a Gillian, the popular girl everyone wants to impress and befriend, and for whom we may even consider, however briefly, betraying a Sharon, the true blue yet less popular BFF. And like the adult Petra, we have become more jaded, and look back at our teenage years with nostalgia.

The chapters from Bill’s perspective lend a nice, adult POV that balances out the story. In one of my favourite scenes, Bill sees a photo of David Cassidy at his job interview and says, “Not my type. That bird there, on the cover.” Bill vacillates between contempt for teen girl fantasies and grudging affection for David Cassidy fans. As David’s ghostwriter, for all intents and purposes, Bill is the David Cassidy these fans know. And against his better judgement, against his own desire to be too cool for David Cassidy, Bill is also drawn into the world of fandom, and as an adult reader, these sections really spoke to me as well. I may poke fun at fans of Twilight and Justin Bieber, but that’s kind of like poking fun at the tween girl me who liked Sweet Valley and boy bands.

At times, I Think I Love You gets a bit too pop psychological. I get that teen idols are a non-threatening psychological transition between stuffed animals and real, adult males. I didn’t need characters in the story telling me that. Other times, adult commentary interrupts a teenaged Petra scene, which just felt like too much telling rather than showing. The action and dialogue are strong enough, and tug on the reader’s memories powerfully enough, that overt commentary just seems superfluous.

Overall, though, I love this book. When Petra gets a chance as an adult to meet David Cassidy, she realizes it won’t be the same at all – she’s not the same Petra who was in love with David, nor is David the same teen idol millions of girls had swooned over. In an especially poignant passage, Petra realizes what she really wants is to go back in time and take her thirteen-year-old self to meet David Cassidy. I Think I Love You speaks about female friendship, music fandom and the always complex, ultimately unfulfilled desire to recapture that innocence we had at thirteen, where we joined millions of other girls in believing that a celebrity was singing especially, solely, to us.

The Paris Wife, Paula McLain

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I love Ernest Hemingway. His ability to write such evocative stories with the bare minimum of words amazes me. His dialogue is crisp, witty and a lot of fun to read. So when I saw The Paris Wife, a book that depicts the relationship between Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, I was both intrigued and wary.

I know it’s not fair to compare McLain’s writing to Hemingway’s, especially since her narrator isn’t Ernest himself, but Hadley, who would understandably have a very different speaking voice. Still, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed at the dialogue. Ernest’s lines show none of the personality that shines through in his novels. Rather, it felt like reading a fairly forgettable romance novel. Take for example the following exchange:

“Do you want some wine?” He reached into his nest and pulled out a corked bottle and a teacup.
“What else have you got hidden in there?”
“Come in and find out.” His voice was light and teasing.

It’s not completely stilted in itself, but after reading so many similar conversations in the book, it finally just felt too artificial to make me care about their relationship.

The good news is that I found myself liking the story more after Ernest and Hadley’s relationship sours. When the story focuses in tight to Hadley and Ernest is in the background, the scenes seemed to flow more naturally. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t separate Ernest Hemingway the character from Ernest Hemingway the historical figure, whereas with Ernest out of the picture, I could feel like I was reading about a completely fictional woman with marriage problems and therefore allowed myself to be drawn in more.

The Guardians, Andrew Pyper

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The Guardians is an exciting, creepy small town horror story that, literally, kept me up all night. For some reason, I decided to read it late at night. I planned to read a few chapters, go to sleep and pick it up again the next evening. I ended up reading probably half the book that night, because I just kept wanting to find out what happened next. It was also past midnight, with the only sound being the wind outside my window, and part of me also really wanted to stop reading, because I didn’t want to get nightmares. The minute I got to a pause in the action, I put the book down before I could get hooked on the next chapter. It’s an absolutely engrossing read, and while it may keep you awake at night, I think reading it late at night is probably the best way to enjoy it. Bonus if you also have an empty house just outside your window.

The Guardians is about a group of boys who grew up together in a small town with an empty house locals believe to be haunted. Something happens in that house, a terrible secret the boys vow to keep. They grow up, and all move away, except for one who appoints himself “guardian” of the house, keeping his neighbours away until he eventually commits suicide. This suicide leads to the group of childhood friends going back to the small town, and delving into memories of their childhood and investigating the story behind the house. Andrew Pyper intersperses the narrative with flashbacks into their childhood, so that we learn about their childhood secret as we’re watching them deal with the house as adults. This of course makes the story much more engaging, with me eagerly following both narrative threads to find out how they end.

There are times when, as a reader, I felt manipulated. For example, the narrator Trevor has Parkinson’s disease, which felt unnecessarily dramatic, like an element introduced just to ratchet up the tension. Or a chapter would end in a cliff hanger, and I know that I’d have to get through either a flashback or a present-day scene first before finding out how the cliff hanger is resolved. Ordinarily, feeling manipulated would keep me from being completely involved in the story. Thing is, and kudos to Pyper for this, The Guardians is just so engrossing, I didn’t care that I was being manipulated. It’s like being on a roller coaster – you know they put the big loops in to scare you, but they do make the ride so much more thrilling. Plus, every element in the story is eventually revealed to be essential. Even Trevor’s Parkinson’s plays a part in a climactic scene.

What ultimately makes The Guardians work, I think, is that Pyper draws on elements that are familiar to all of us. We all had a creepy house in our neighbourhood – or at least encountered one sometime in our childhood. We all have a group of childhood friends who share a secret with us that perhaps our current friends know nothing about, and yet that still colour our lives. The flashback scenes especially capture the flavour of childhood – the dialogue, the descriptions all take me back to a time when I still believed in haunted houses. Reading Guardians, I was transported back to childhood, to ghost stories I heard back then, and to the thrill I’d thought I’d outgrown.