Minnesota Reads

It’s pretty clear that my current obsession is dystopian fiction, but I recently stopped reading a handful of young adult dystopian novels. How could I read a book where love needs to be cured? Because, apparently, everything bad in our society (hate, war, etc.) is caused by love, so love is enemy number one. Please. Or a world where the dictator is a teenager? Come on. I know it’s young adult fiction so teenagers are the main characters, but in dystopian fiction I have to believe, at least a little bit, that our society could turn into the world you’re building.

But thankfully Scored by Lauren McLaughlin passed my test. I could see parents and administrators thinking that scoring teenagers, both their grades and their behaviors, to keep them in line would be a good thing. It’s SATs on crack.

In Lauren McLaughlin’s world, teenagers are under constant surveillance. Electronic “eyes,” little circular devices that are hung from ceilings, polls, wires, and trees, are placed all around the community, including in schools, parks, and businesses. These eyes follow the teenagers and everything they do affects their scores, and every month their scores are reevaluated with 100 being the highest they can receive.

High school senior Imani LeMonde has been in the 90s for awhile now, which means if she can keep her high score she will have a full ride for college, and she has to get a full ride because she is far from rich. But Imani’s world starts to crumble when her best friend, a girl in her 60s, starts having a relationship with an unscored.

There are unscored teenagers, the ones whose families rebelled against the scoring, but hanging out with them is devastating. Even though Imani wasn’t hanging out with one, since her friend was, it reflects on her. She falls from a 90 to a 60.

Imani fully believes in the score and thinks it can better society, but not everyone agrees. Imani’s history teacher, who has tenure, is constantly questioning the scores, and so is an unscored rich guy in the same class. It’s not hard to tell that Imani’s score being dropped, and the influences around her, start making her ask questions about the scores. It also doesn’t hurt that the rich unscored guy in her class is pretty cute.

This was a really good story. It’s not too far fetched an idea that students start being put under surveillance, and it’s really easy to expect that people would rebel against such an idea. It’s also not too far fetched that many scored students would go along with the idea of shunning those who do not have a score as high as they do. Don’t we already, on some level, do this in our own lives? Is it so hard to imagine that if it were mandated that we wouldn’t fall in line?

So I could buy into the idea. I don’t think everything about it is fabulous, but I could buy into it. I could also buy into Imani and the interaction she has with the rich, unscored kid. They question each other, she gets mad at him for acting superior, they both start questioning what they believe, and along the way they start to have some feelings. It’s a futuristic Tony and Maria, minus the singing and dancing.

Scored was a good, quick read and it was believable enough for me get lost in the world McLaughlin built, and it made me appreciative of not having been scored as a teen. No way would I have been in the 90s. Drinking beer does not a 90 make.

One time someone told me in a really convincing and authoritative voice that as an English major, it is really bad form that I claimed no interest in history. “All literature is history,” or maybe “All history is literature,” this person said and I shrugged and imagined maps and capitols and dates that wars ended and began and bad guys, borders and good guys, red buttons and paperwork, and blah blah blah.

This has all sort of recently changed for me. I’m getting better at understanding the defining features of individual decades, both politically and artistically and especially fashion-wise. As this is all coming into focus, my fifth grade level of history knowledge. More and more every day I realize just how ignorant it sounds to say “I’m not interested in history,” which is not to say that “All literature is history” or vice versa isn’t a sort of pretentious way to chastise someone who simply isn’t into something.

This is where I blame dozens of teachers who pitched history while I was in school, each providing a dry list of names, dates, and locations. I remember raising my hand in fifth grade and basically saying to my teacher: “I don’t really understand war. So, the teams just get in a line opposite each other and start shooting?”

“Yes, pretty much,” he said, which wasn’t a satisfying answer to me then, and it really isn’t now. There were, of course, field trips to big buildings where men with briefcases explained how government works and pointed to portraits. But mostly field trips were just a chance to wrap a can of Dr. Pepper in tinfoil and worry about who your seat mate would be on the bus. Forget about college when I had to suddenly cram a history class into my schedule and the only one left was Ancient and reminded me of grainy movies that played on Sunday afternoons, men in loin cloths and flip flops brandishing swords.

Cut to Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, a super readable, super entertaining, super funny series of road trips to even the most minute of landmarks tied to the assassination of presidents Lincoln, McKinley, and Garfield. Of all the geeky goodness. Vowell tours the land looking at chunks of brains, blood-stained tiles, visiting monuments and graves and considers the back history of the killers who were prompted by God or who otherwise assumed they would receive national glory for taking one for the team. And she pays homage to Lincoln’s son, who was either at the scene of the crime, or damn close, for each of these three murders. What a treat!

This thought actually came into my head when I finished the first hunk of the book: Aw, nuts, I’m not ready to stop reading about Lincoln’s assassination. But then there was James Garfield, done in by Charles Guiteau, renowned for being so unlikable that even when he joined a community of free love frolickers in upstate New York, he was unable to find a willing sexual partner. Vowell is a free-flow story teller who can explain the political climate at a certain latitude and longitude and then segue into which ironic T her traveling partner is wearing.

I’m not guaranteeing that I’m going to retain tons of what I read, but a few interesting facts here and there will come in handy as party tricks. Regardless, for the eight-ish hours it takes to read this book, Vowell had my full attention more than any other person who has attempted to spend eight-ish hours whispering history into my ear. I’m stoked to dig into her catalogue and see what other dead spots in my schooling that she can make interesting.

Book thirteen of the Dresden Files series opens six months after our hero, Harry Dresden, sinks into the water after being shot through the heart while on his brother’s boat. He had just murdered the woman he loved, saved his daughter, and wiped out the entire vampire Red Court. In order to pull all of this off, Dresden was forced to call in every favor and pull every string that he had – good or evil.

So, here we are in book thirteen, Ghost Story. Rest is not on the death agenda for Mr. Dresden. Instead he is shuffled into an “in between” where he meets his old friend Carmicheal – a man that worked with Murphy and was killed by werewolves – who greets Dresden and takes him to that big precinct in the sky… literally. Harry finds he has a choice. He can go back and wrap up the loose ends of his life; specifically, find out who murdered him. Or he can hang around in the “in between” and work with the other cops on various things like helping lost souls.

Harry decides to find out who murdered him and goes back to Chicago as a ghost – without magic and without the ability to communicate directly.

What he finds is chaos and pain. His decisions leading up to the assault and ultimately the destruction of the Red Court resulted in a power void that was quickly being filled by other unworldly terrors who were raging an all out war against humanity. His friends were all changed because of what happened – some grew stronger and some were losing themselves.

The lesson Harry is faced with is the consequences of his actions. Something he had never really given much thought to in the past. We are again reminded of how powerful Harry was and the respect he commanded, even though he never seemed to realize it.

For those that have read my Dresden Reviews in the past, you might remember two things:
1) I am a die-hard Harry Dresden fan; and
2) I absolutely hated the book previous to this one because Butcher chose to kill off my beloved Harry.

It was very difficult for me to finally pick up this book and read it. I wanted to be able to read it with a clear, objective mind set.

Folks, I did my best.

Overall, I did not like this book. It was not only a “shark jumper”, but it lacked cohesiveness and there were more than a fair share of moments when I just thought to myself “what the fuck is going on here?”
I knew who had killed him the second he died in Book 12 – it wasn’t a surprise. There was no suspense there for any true fan of the series who knows the characters. What did surprise me is who ordered his death. When that was revealed, it was an “ah-ha” moment and suddenly a few puzzle pieces clicked into place.

Butcher spends most of the novel having Harry run around peeking in on old friends – Murphy, Molly, Mort, Butters, etc. But, not a whole lot of time trying to figure out his murder. The whole epic battle at the end made no sense whatsoever and was just awkward and boring. It was frustrating how people that were intricate members of the entire series – like Murphy and Thomas – were not given the sort of focus they probably deserved in this novel which was supposed to read as a final farewell from the main character.

There are the implications that a higher power has a vested interest in Dresden that never quite makes sense. And of course, we have the meddling Winter Court that just can’t seem to go away. Don’t get me wrong – this series would struggle without the fae element, but come on. Not even in Summer Knight were we able to pull together anything that made sense with this particular story line and here it gets even more annoying.

There were a few shining stars in this book. Butcher really had the tears flowing in the beginning of the book when we were meeting dead characters from books past. And he did a nice job of interlacing smaller story lines and characters from his short stories into this book. There are a few really good moments created on the pages of the book – without a doubt.

Forcing Dresden to look at the impact that he had on his world and his friends also opened the door for the impact that his death had on people. It showed that the weak were strong because of his influence; and those that were strong, were weak because of his death. The consequences of his cowboy attitude on everything and everyone he held dear was made crystal clear and I think that moving forward, Dresden will be a better wizard because of it.

I truly wanted to say good things about this book. But, I can’t. This whole life lesson could have been done as a condensed part to a longer novel. I think having your hero come back as a ghost is a clever idea, but it wasn’t executed well and just fell short for me. Butcher is a phenomenal writer and I would read a phone directory if he wrote it. But, I think some reigns need to be pulled and rather than juggling balls because they look cool, he needs to go back to the basics of this series.

I don’t know what is going to grow out of this slash-and-burned storyline that we have after books 12 and 13, but I’m hopeful and confident.

That being said, I’ve heard a rumor of a new book in the series coming out next year. I am keeping my eye on that and hoping beyond hope that it is a step back in the right direction to the good ‘ol Harry Dresden that I know and love.

If I bit it today, the obit would say I was a writer who struggled to move beyond 2,000 word blog posts about what happened this past week at Subway. Survivors include the love of her life and two naughty kitties. If I cashed in at 22, it would say I was a college graduate who designed a nonprofit’s newsletter and reported the deets of high school tennis matches, both while wearing the clothes I slept in and bravely facing the shames of having negotiated last call at the Smiling Moose the previous night. At age 6, I was getting pretty good at coloring. The key was to trace the black lines of the picture with heavy-handed Crayon-ing, then to shade in the insides using the same color. Take that, Picasso. At 40-something, who knows.

Daytripper by twin brothers Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba is a nonlinear collection of stories about Bras de Oliva Domingos, whose mere birth is the stuff of family, if not urban, legends. He’s a traveler, a kite enthusiast, an obituary writer and eventually a novelist. He falls in love a few times, has a son, and has a crippling case of daddy issues. At the beginning of each of these stories, told with lovely full-color, super detailed imagery, Bras is dropped into a new adventure, each that will prove fatal by the end of the chapter. Stops off for a drink, gets shot. Visits his father’s study hours after the old man has kicked it and while his own son is sliding down the chute, keels over. Each chapter ends with a few words, a blurb from the obituary Bras would have at that point in his life.

Even as they all end the same, each story is a slice of life and includes small moments that are actually big and big moments that are especially big. Bras is a little ho-hum emo, living in the shadow of his father’s career in literature and taking it super personally, but otherwise likable. He is surrounded by a cast of quick-hit characters who make reappearances, including his sidekick Jorge (who comes to his own startling end) and his wife (with whom he almost has a meet-cute, if not for Bras getting snuffed on the way.

In the end, Bras becomes an old man, terminally ill, who finds some final words from his father that make everything clear: Only when you accept that one day you will die will you be able to let go and thoroughly enjoy life. This is a nice collection with plenty of dips and dives and dekes and great art.

“This is a story about madness.” So begins the delightful insanity of The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. Ronson, a self-proclaimed sufferer of severe anxiety, admits that he is an odd choice for a renegade psychopath hunter, but his sense of humor and occasionally bizarre behavior make him perfect for the job of writing about it. He begins his quest after becoming involved in a curious mystery: a strange manuscript, sent to academics around the world, calling out to the universe’s most revered brains to crack its code.

Ronson’s attempt to solve the mystery eventually results in him investigating a variety of subjects, from Scientologists to asylums to the homes of CEOs. One of the most interesting and catalyzing portions of the book is Bob Hare’s psychopath test. Ronson attends a training and learns how to score people on the twenty-point test. It’s impossible not to run through the test for yourself and your friends. Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom- well, I do get antsy when I’m still for too long. . . Item 15: Irresponsibility- I have been putting off doing my laundry. . . This ends up being part of Ronson’s point: as we as a culture attempt to delineate crazy, we all have to fight to convince ourselves that we are “normal” (amusingly, he cites reality TV as one way that we maintain our feeling of personal normalcy; I must really need convincing).

This argument builds as Ronson meets Tony, a man who claims to have pretended that he was a psychopath so well that he was locked up in an insane asylum for a decade. Tony’s story is so interesting because it illustrates some central problems with diagnosing someone as a psychopath: who gets to do the diagnosing, and how is it possible that acting normal can actually prove that you are abnormal? The book contained more “normal” craziness than full-on psychopath. I was expecting more characters like The Joker from Batman, but the true threat comes from Hare’s assertion that psychopaths are all around us (1% of the population!) and difficult to identify.

By the last quarter of the book, Ronson got, well, maybe too rational, and the shocking details trailed off a bit, making it less exhilarating than the exclaim-worthy beginning. However, as a whole, this book successfully navigates the thin line between crazy and genius, and by the end of it I felt more like a crazy genius myself, making the read well worth it.

The last time you saw Heather Donahue she had a camera pointed up her nostrils, flared and leaking, and she was delivering her “Goodbye cruel world!” speech in one of the final scenes of “The Blair Witch Project.”

In the decade plus since that movie she has had a few roles here and there — nothing she wants to brag about — but most notably spent time in northern California growing weed. Her memoir Growgirl: How My Life After ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Went to Pot is a years-worth of planting, trimming, romantic frustrations, starting a band, and living in the hippie-dippy community of fellow growers who unflinchingly use the word “Goddess” in casual convos.

For a reader whose only background with the weed-growing industry is limited to how cute Mary Louise Parker is with her flippy skirts and empty Starbucks cup, Donahue’s actual details of planting, tending, encouraging, cloning, killing mites, and trimming are a little bit like white noise. But the rest of it, oh lo the rest of it, is a good old fashioned laugh riot.

Donahue is at a getaway retreat, fresh from burning the keepsakes of a long relationship, when she meets Judah, falls for him, and then ultimately moves to Nuggettown where he is a grower. She’s enough into this sudden love to leave Los Angeles, but wary enough of relationships to eschew the patterns set by the women who have come before her: Fall in love, move in, raise grow boy’s child part time while maintaining a friendly relationship with grow boy’s ex and anyone new she brings to the table, never get married, prepare to be replaced.

Donahue does it on her terms. She sets up her own shop at the end of a long road. She starts her own little farm including a garden with traditional foods like tomatoes and kale, chickens and a puppy. Meanwhile she’s taken on some small time weed growing inside the house and in the garage as well as a small patch in the garden. She’s not going to be Judah’s “Grow Wife,” the term for the women whose version of feminism involves the ultimate in home cooked domestication. She’s going to be a Grow Girl, pretty much independent, save for the pot tutors who help her with newbie grower issues. Wise move. Things with Judah last about five more minutes, an ending she telegraphs when he pops a bone dog while admiring her naked friend during hot tub time. (People are frequently naked and frequently in hot tubs in Nuggettown).

Donahue might not have been able to convince directors she was more than an improv artist in the post-Blair Witch job hunt. But she is so funny, self-deprecating, and likable — even when your stomach sinks and you think “Oh no, Heather. Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Oh, Heather. You did that” — and it all makes for fun writing and storytelling. Consider an early scene, when she meets up with Judah at the hot springs.

“When we arrived at the hot springs, I dipped into a pinkish layer of awkward on discovering that it was clothing-optional. I dipped into a pinker layer of awkward when in the undressing room I discovered a tit whisker under my left nipple. I tried to yank the hair with my fingernails. It curled like the ribbon on a birthday gift, or a pube.”

And so it goes. A year’s worth of versions of that, pitted with new life blisters and the paranoia of breaking a federal law. Totally entertaining.

There was a span of time in the early to mid-aughts where I would buy every man I was romantically interested in a copy of An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender. I probably hold the record for buying the most copies of this book. I could probably write a memoir called Books I Used to Unsuccessfully Woo Men in My Life. There must have been something about this compulsive book giving. Some sign of my own I was trying to show the men I wanted to love me, but I have no idea what it was.

Maybe it’s just that I really love this strange, quirky novel and I thought men who could appreciate it would be worthy? Who knows. The real question is, would An Invisible Sign of My Own hold up to further scrutiny, a re-reading nearly a decade after I first read it?

The answer is a resounding YES. I re-read Bender’s debut novel as part of my re-evaluation of personal artifacts project, and it really does hold up.

The story? Mona Gray is a twenty-year-old whose beloved dad was struck by a mystery illness that may or may not be real when she was ten. Dad’s sickness puts the fear of death into Mona and turns her into a serial quitter and knocker on wood. She quits everything she loves: piano, running, sex. She knocks on wood whenever she gets anxious, sometimes spending hours knocking until her knuckles bleed.

Mona’s kind of humdrumming it through life when she’s asked to become the math teacher to a group of second graders. Here Mona discovers she’s kind of good at teaching math but in an unusual way. She introduces the children to Numbers and Materials, where they find numbers out in the world. One girl brings in an IV tube from her near-death mother’s hospital room as a zero. Another kid brings in his dad’s severed arm as a seven.

Meanwhile Mona’s developing a thing for the new science and health teacher who intermittently intrigues and infuriates her. It’s good.

Oh and then there’s the mysterious neighbor who used to be Mona’s math teacher but instead goes into the hardware business. Mr. Jones is a wearer of necklaces. These necklaces are made of wax numbers and denote the day he’s having. An eight is not so great, a twenty is pretty damn good. Mona is, of course, obsessed with Mr. Jones and his numbering system, even though she’s kind of pissed at him for not taking any notice when her dad fell ill.

Okay, this probably sounds like entirely more quirk than one novel can sustain, but it’s not. In fact, in Bender’s sure hands it all rings emotionally honest and genuine. There isn’t a single point in the book where Mona’s tics seem forced or like some sort of affectation adopted for the sake of being unique. Instead, this is Mona’s reality and the novel follows her trying to figure it all out — her fear of death and her overwhelming anxiety and her need for love and companionship.

It’s such a beautiful book and I’m so glad that it has held up to a re-reading. I’m also pretty glad to keep on my list of most beloved personal pop cultural artifacts.

A few years ago Jodi asked me, like she has asked so many people on this website, what book I wanted to read before I died. I eschewed the Russians, the bible, all sorts of weighty tomes for this: Underworld by Don Delillo.

Underworld was published when I was in college, a part time bookseller who touched so many books in the course of a day, shelving new fiction, shelving classics, shelving How-To manuals and graphic novels and dictionaries. Underworld was something else, much buzzed about, a grey image of the World Trade Center buildings bisected with a church steeple. I directed many-a customer to its spot in the store and set it into hands. That’s one of the rules of bookselling: Make the customer hold the book.

By the time it came out in Trade Paper, I was a frothy mess of curiosity. I had to read it. I dug in. The prologue is about 60 pages of the Giants v. the Dodgers, Branca v. Thompson. The shot heard around the world. A young kid skips school to jump a turnstile and watch the game. It is expertly drawn from different perspectives: This kid, Cotter, who loves baseball. The response of the crowd, littering the outfield with strips of paper, receipts, pieces of magazines, debris. J. Edgar Hoover as part of a foursome that includes Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and Toots Shor. The buildup to the key moment in New York City baseball history and the way Cotter eventually oozes through the crowd for the game-winning baseball, giving a man a snake bite to relinquish his grip, Jackie Gleason barfing up hot dogs and drinks and the splatters landing in the cuffs of Sinatra’s pants.

This scene is famous, well, as famous as a scene from a book can be. It has been republished in Best Sports Writing of the Century, among a handful of other places where I have stumbled upon it. It’s great. It is detailed. It is exciting and funny and super visual. But it is the reason I’ve spent the past decade and a half failing to read this book.

Step One: Begin reading Underworld, including it’s massive prologue. Step Two: Continue reading into the introduction of garbage administrator Nick Shay, his suspicions about his wife’s infidelity, his handful of big-drinking work friends, a reconnection with the artist Klara Sax he banged when he was a teenager. Step Three: Feel the weight of this book, all 800 plus pages and these vignettes that are getting introductory treatment. Feel mind wander. Step Four: Set down Underworld just a few too many days in a row. Until the book opens automatically to the place where it has been left sprawled face down. Step Five: Retain curiosity about the book, read others by Don Delillo. Step Six: Resolve to read Underworld, but come to resent the prologue, THE PROLOGUE, so long, so baseball, read so many times you could one-act play it at an after bar probably. But know that you cannot read Underworld without revisiting that prologue. It’s part of the book and it’s necessary. Step Seven: Think about how much you want to read Underworld, but just don’t. Step Seven: Repeat upward of seven, eight times.

At exactly 1 p.m. Central Time on January 14, 2012, I finished Underworld. It took two weeks. It took re-reading the prologue (again) but reading it in a new way. It was interesting again. Mind blowing in its attention to detail. Delillo painting mini figurines that require a magnifying glass to shade the laugh lines with his Lilliputian brush.

It spans about four decades in America, starting with the famous baseball game, then jumping between periods. At its center is Nick Shay, who now believes he owns the game-winning ball, though who can know for sure. He keeps it as a memento of failure, since his team lost that day and forever erased his interest in baseball. Shay has a muddied past. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in NYC and his life took a seedy lean where people steal and connive and cruise around in a stolen car. There are hints that despite his relatively normal life as a middle aged man, he once killed a man. He also once got hot and heavy with the wife of his brother’s chess coach. These bits of bio are dropped, little nuggets, and the stories are brought back into play in a measured way as the story progresses.

There are whole chunks on Shay’s brother, a former chess whiz, who struggles socially. The artist Klara Sax, who spends a summer struggling to find a reason to paint, a mysterious young girl who forages through garbage cans and lives on the street, an expert graffiti artist who stains the subways with his wildstyle creations. J Edgar Hoover attends Truman Capote’s party, but first spends time with his assistant and chaste romantic interest, a nun, Cotter’s wheelin’ and dealin’ for a dime father.

This book is insanely imagined. Who the heck is Don Delillo and can I get a copy of his brain scan? How did he do this? He weaves fact and fiction, binds it so tightly, that the seams aren’t even visible. Consider a section in which Klara Sax goes to see lost film footage by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Delillo actually describes this footage in pretty great detail, staying true to the filmmaker and what kind of lost footage he might have collected at this period in his life. In the same book, Delillo successfully gets into the head of a graffiti artist, the best around, walking the walk, talking the talk and embracing the lingo and the fears and the moment of pride when a train he has painted emerges from a tunnel.

I’ve said before that this or that book is about “everything” and now I fear that I’ve wasted that descriptor on things that weren’t about “everything” compared to the way Underworld is about everything. So, fresh slate. Underworld is now the official about everything book. And, nearly 15 years after I first tried to read it, I’m going to make my grand claim that this is the best book I’ve ever read. I’m also going to use the battle cry of virgins everywhere and say I’m glad I waited. The me of 1997 wouldn’t have gotten as much out of it as the me of 2012. I knew nothing about street art back then and was certainly short on J. Edgar Hoover facts.

Doug Swieteck has an abusive father, passive mother, a jerk for an older brother, and he and his family just moved to stupid Marysville, New York, where the library is only open on Saturdays and everyone assumes Doug is as much of a troublemaker as his brother. Things aren’t so great for poor Doug. That is until he meets a fiery girl name Lil and Mr. Powell, an awesome librarian.

Lil and Doug didn’t start off as friends. I mean, really, why would Lil want to be friends with someone who can’t even drink a Coke correctly on a hot summer day? And why would Doug want to be friends with the stuck-up girl who told him that he had probably never even been in a library? Which he hadn’t, but it’s not like she knew that.

But they did become friends, and library buddies, which is where they met Mr. Powell. Doug didn’t like Mr. Powell right away either. Why would he like someone who kept trying to get him to draw the birds from John James Audubon’s bird book? Doug told him over and over that he doesn’t draw. Only chumps draw, of course. But when Doug and Lil kept going back to the library and some paper and pencils were just lying there next to the Audubon book, he might as well try, right?

I can’t even begin to tell you how charmed I was by Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt. A companion to Schmidt’s award-winning The Wednesday Wars, which I haven’t read, Okay for Now stands on its own as a charming, sometimes heartbreaking, story told by Doug, a Yankees fan growing up in the late 1960s.

Doug does have a hard life, and he reminds us again and again that things never go right just when you’re starting to feel good. He actually speaks to the reader to tell us this, and when characters speak to readers, I usually love it if done correctly. This is done beautifully. He speaks to the reader when something important happens that we should’ve noticed, like:

• “You know how that feels?” when he felt proud of himself for earning money or when someone made fun of him.
• “I was smiling like all get-out. If you were paying attention back there you’d know why.” after he figured out how to correctly draw a bird’s foot.
• “Remember how I said that when things start to go pretty good, something usually happens to turn everything bad?” when his prized Joe Pepitone-signed jacket goes missing.

The statements and questions directed at the reader are perfect. They make the whole thing feel like Doug is sitting right next to me, telling a story.

And it doesn’t hurt that Doug is an extremely strong, well-written character. When he felt happy, I was smiling, and when someone teased him or his dad let him down again, I felt like I was kicked in the gutt. I just loved this. I loved it so damn much.

Hearing that a story involved an abusive father, Audubon bird panels, someone returning from the Vietnam War, and Jane Eyre, all told from the perspective of a young, poor kid living in the 1960s, I probably would’ve cringed. How could it all work together? But it did. Gary D. Schmidt has beautifully woven all of these things into a compelling, charming tale. I love Doug, Lil, and Mr. Powell, and I could feel the good and bad times with them. This is a really wonderful book.

In Anne Ursu’s Breadcrumbs Minnesota is a magical place covered in glittery snow and shiny ice. You remember when winter used to be like that, don’t you? As I write this review in January there’s no snow to be found, and because I’ve read Breadcrumbs I’m convinced our usually snowy state is in the thrall of some sort of enchanted Heat Miser who abhors snow.

It’s hard not to be enchanted by the fairy tale aspects of Breadcrumbs that mix so wonderfully with the mundane world. Here we have Hazel, an eleven-year-old girl, who doesn’t quite fit in. Her parents have recently divorced and her dad is a bit MIA, wrapped up in his new life. Hazel’s mom is struggling to provide Hazel with stability and implores her daughter to get her head in the game so to speak.

See Hazel, and her best friend/next door neighbor Jack, are prone to delicious flights of fancy. Hazel’s imagination often gets the better of her and while she believes she should give up her babyish whimsical ideals, she doesn’t really want to.

As she straddles that line between being a child and being an adolescent, Jack begins to grow colder and indifferent to Hazel. One day he disappears, allegedly to visit an aunt, but Hazel learns he’s been spirited away by the Snow Queen.

Knowing her friend is in danger, Hazel sets out into the cold, snowy woods to save him. This is when the story really gets kicking. I know this a book meant for young kids, but come on, is there really anything better than enchanted woods? Even as an alleged grown-up, I was totally enthralled by all the fairy tale creatures and people Hazel meets on her search for the Snow Queen.

Reading Breadcrumbs reminded me of all the things I really loved about reading fairy tales, there’s that definite you don’t know what’s going to happen nextness, and the whole nobody is who they appear to be. Folks, this is a good one. Don’t let the fact that it’s written for kids fool you. This book is beautiful, both to read and to look at. Ursu, to her credit, never “writes down” to the reader. The language here is spectacular, which is good because it does justice to Erin McQuire’s beautiful art.

The beginning of Breadcrumbs where the stage is set and the real world is established was a little slow for me, but only because I knew that enchanted woods was coming and I couldn’t wait to get in there. The reward for getting there is well worth it. I loved it. I loved each character Hazel meets along the way more than the last.

There’s one scene where Hazel meets a nice couple who want to protect her, feed her, and keep her safe. While resting in their home they keep talking about the garden, the garden, Hazel must see the garden. When Hazel does, it is amazing. I loved when the flowers begin to whisper to Hazel warnings about the couple. But what I love more, and most about the book, is throughout the journey Hazel learns to trust herself and her instincts.

Historical fiction is, essentially, literary fan fiction. It’s the literary part that gives it more cred than “Friday Night Lights” superfans hanging out on a bulletin board dreamily considering what if Julie Taylor came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her lips flushed and red, her skin dewy, and found Tim Riggins, primed, and sweating Red Stripe from his pores into her duvet. But at it’s core it is still fan fiction, with a high percentage of words spelled correctly and void of emoticons and poorly-written sex scenes.

With The Last Nude Ellis Avery considers the subject of 1920s art deco artist Tamara De Lempicka’s six-painting Rafaela series. The portraits star a heavy-lidded woman with soft rounds of flesh, all red scarves and lipsticks and shading. She was one of many women De Lempicka painted and, of course, with whom the artist got all deep sighs and panty. The novel is about their blip of a relationship set in the edgy, ex-pat heavy, Jazz Era in Paris and features cameos from some the eras major players including Violette Morris, a female boxer turned Nazi informer, and Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Company, publishers of Ulysses.

Rafaela is an American girl who is en route to Italy for an arranged marriage when she jumps ship with a creeper to forge a life for herself in Paris instead. She is intrigued by a Coco Chanel dress she saw once and resorts to doling out sexual favors in exchange for a new life. She goes a bit wild-child, dancing on tables and diddling married men with her roommate Gin. De Lempicka finds the girl in a seedy prostitute hangout park. Rafaela is looking for a friend; De Lempicka is looking for a model. At first Rafaela is a substitute for a similarly shaped model, a commission who has left town. But De Lempicka moves on to Rafaela as a subject and the work knocks the socks off art patrons.

The story, told mostly from Rafaela’s perspective, is gripping-ish. Lots of lounging and grape eating, followed by messing up the sheets. After spending sexual energy as almost a job or a way of staying afloat, Rafaela finds someone she enjoys screwing and falls hard for the artist, 10 years her senior. Unfortunately, artists. De Lempicka might be walking the walk of love, but she is looking out for numero uno and pitting patron versus patron, with Rafaela as a pawn. The last fourth of the book shifts voices in a way that feels like staying a bit too long at the party. The now aged artist considers her past and has her say on what it all meant.

What worked in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” — monologues by Hemingway, glimpses of Salvador Dali — comes across as hokey and distracting. Rafaela’s new found friend, and eventual savior, is a character named Anson. He’s a sportswriter turned go-fer for a private investigator. He is shades of Hemingway. He is dissing F. Scott Fitzgerald and fending off Rafaela’s advances with a vague medical situation caused in the war. A wife and a girlfriend. It’s all kind of blerg. Paula McLain did it better with her account of Hadley Richardson in the novel The Paris Wife.

On the other hand, The Last Nude is a good way to dig into the work of De Lempicka and inspires the same artistic curiosity as Steve Martin’s novel An Object of Beauty. It’s always fun to consider Paris in the 1920s, when the world seemed on its way to being a better, more accepting and artistic place. That alone makes this a worthwhile read.

I was looking for a big juicy well-written novel to start out my 2012. This wasn’t it.
My first impressions were hopeful: big, yes, at 609 pages. Juicy? Yes – female lead character who starts as a humble seamstress ends up a spy. Well-written? Not so much. It could be the translation, but by the end pages the melodrama was so broad I could imagine it as a Univision telanova.

With Morocco and Spain in the late 1930s as backdrop, a place and time I’m not that familiar with, the descriptions of street life and smells and tastes should have been jumping off the page. Instead they were rote by rote. Even the line rhythm was the same, paragraph after paragraph. The descriptions of Morocco had me picturing that Indiana Jones movie with the monkey.

The plot moves back and forth from Morocco and Spain following Sira Quiroga’s life. First a seamstress, she falls into misfortune after a bad romance (cue Gaga – very appropriate) in Tetouan. Most of her activities are prompted by relationships with men throughout the book which made the feminist in me bristle. Not surprisingly, she conveniently falls into espionage as a couturier for important men’s wives in Morocco during the Spanish Civil War.

As the rumblings of WWII begin, Sira returns to Madrid on a mission. She takes on a new identity, under the Moroccan moniker Arish Agoruiq – her name backwards. You would think the Germans would have figured that one out. After awhile she takes on an even more dangerous role, travelling to Lisbon working as a spy for the allies. Of course, she predictably runs into many from her past but has to ignore them under her new identity, creating intrigue. Predictable intrigue. Colorful characters populate her life thru-out the book – a rich father she never knew, a mother silenced by pride, a crazy lady who runs a boarding house who becomes a close friend, a sickly British beauty of influence, helpful maids – you get the picture.

In the beginning and in my head I compared this novel to something like The Count of Monte Cristo but regrettably it ended up like a J.D. Robb mystery. Not camp enough to be good, it was just okay. The author’s note at the end was the most unpredictable writing in the whole book. These characters were based on real people! Huh. Well at least I learned something about the Spanish Civil War then. This reading experience wasn’t completely worthless.

Eleanor Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints starts with a condensed version of the one-crazy-night premise from which entire films are built.

It’s a lazy New Year’s Eve day of smoking, huffing, drinking, and snorting for Teddy and Jude. The inseparable teen-aged besties are skateboarders with next to no social currency. Teddy’s mom has skipped town and he’s probably been lied to that his dad is dead. Jude was adopted and lives with his hippie mom, who is a glassblower, and his kind of bitchy barely-younger sister. His adoptive father ditched out years ago and lives in New York City, where he is hot and heavy with a former ballerina who has a cocaine-curious high-school aged daughter, Eliza. Eliza is planning her first visit to the boys’ small Vermont town to meet the not-quite step brother.

The trio ends up at a party where Jude’s mouth gets him in trouble with some older kids. While he’s getting bound and urine-stained, Teddy is in the bathroom having his first go-round with both Coke and sex. Later that night he will take a few puffs off something poisonous, following Jude’s lead, and die. Meanwhile, somewhere in Eliza’s lady parts, sperm meets egg.

Jude goes a little crazy, first drowning himself in weed, then pissing off a dealer and high-tailing it for New York City, finding Teddy’s older brother and adopting a straight-edge lifestyle complete with a homemade X tattoo on his hand. Preggers Eliza joins the threesome and develops a faux relationship with one of the boys. This all turns into a portrait of NYC’s straight-edge scene, the vegan, no-drugs, no-drinking, no-caffeine group that is making its way through this subset of the rock ‘n’ roll scene while also touching on the topic of AIDS.

This book is … okay-ish. It’s a lot of back and forth — from Vermont to New York and back to Vermont and then New York. Travel always seems so unnecessary in novels, just something to do to characters to throw them into a new situation. Plus there are some weird turns. Jude learns he might have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome — though it doesn’t play into anything. The band goes on a half-assed tour. Teddy’s older brother takes up the issue of New York City’s proposed curfew. And in the first pages of the book it’s super hard to tell the two boys apart and keep their somewhat similar-somewhat different back stories apart. I don’t know. I’d watch this movie on a lazy Saturday afternoon and it wouldn’t result in self-loathing over the wasted day. But mostly it was just okay.

It’s not a surprise that I like young adult novels; half of the novels I read and review are YA. Here are some of the YA novels on my radar for 2012.

January

Cinder by Marissa Meyer: A dystopian retelling of the Cinderella story where Cinder is a cyborg in a world where humans, androids, and cyborgs interact. Throw in the plague and potential attacks from a group of lunar people, and this fairytale retelling could be really interesting.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green: Hazel is sixteen and has terminal cancer, but when she meets Augustus in a kids-with-cancer support group, maybe her future isn’t so bleak. Like other books by Green, I’m sure this one will have the potential of making me laugh and cry.

Incarnate by Jodi Meadows: Souls are tracked in this future sci-fi/fantasy, but when Ana was born a soul went missing, making people believe Ana has no soul and is dangerous. Thus begins her journey to try to find a soul and make things right again.

Article 5 by Kristen Simmons: There is no New York, L.A., or D.C., the Bill of Rights has been replaced by the Moral Statutes, and soldiers have replaced the police. Ember remembers what it used to be like, but to survive now she just keeps a low profile, until her mother breaks Article 5 of the Moral Statutes.

February

BZRK by Michael Grant: Set in the not-too-distant future, The Armstrong Fancy Gift Corporation is out to create a utopian world by attacking unsuspecting people, but a guerrilla resistance group, BZRK, is out to stop them.

Dead to You by Lisa McMann: Ethan was abducted at the age of seven and at sixteen was returned to his family, but his memory of the years he was missing is gone and something about being back home just doesn’t feel right. I have a feeling this will be a mix of drama and psychological thriller.

March

Wonder Show by Hannah Barnaby: After escaping McGreavey’s Home for Wayward Girls to search for the last member of her family, Portia enters the Wonder Show, a circus attraction with gypsies and other curiosities. The description of this book reminded me of a mix between Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and Kate Milford’s The Boneshaker, so I think it has a lot of potential.

April

172 Hours on the Moon by Johan Harstad: Three teens get the opportunity of a lifetime – setting foot on the moon. They all have different reasons for wanting to go, but none of them expected the trouble they would run into on the dark side of the moon.

The Chosen Ones by Tiffany Truitt: In the future in which Tess lives, the government creates Chosen Ones, artificial beings who are beautiful, strong, and deadly. When Tess starts working at a Chosen Ones training facility, she meets James and they start to uncover the dangers of the Chosen Ones.

June

For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund: Inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion, For Darkness Shows the Stars follows Elliot who struggles with believing the world in which she lives, where most technology is outlawed, versus the ideas of her childhood love.

Fall

False Memory by Dan Krokos: A girl wakes up with no memory and discovers she is a genetically modified deadly weapon. Part action, suspense, and sci-fi, this is bound to be good.

The Diviners by Libba Bray: I don’t know much about this other than it’s a supernatural story set in the Jazz Age, and Bray has described the heroine as a mix between Zelda Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker. She had me at Dorothy Parker.

Sequels and companions

There are a lot of sequels and companions coming out on 2012, and the ones I’m most interested in are:

The Broken Lands by Kate Milford: I loved Milford’s The Boneshaker, and this is supposed to be a companion to it, but I don’t know much more than that.

Legend #2 by Marie Lu: I’m not sure what the title will actually be of the second Legend book, but it’s scheduled to come out sometime in the fall and I’m excited to see what will happen next to June and Day.

Shadow by Ilsa J. Bick: This is a sequel to Ashes and since we were left with such a big cliffhanger at the end of Ashes, I can’t wait to see what will happen.

Insurgent by Veronica Roth: Okay, I admit, I still haven’t read the first in this series, Divergent, but everyone says I’ll like it so I’m going to try to read both of them this year.

Matched #3 by Allyson Condie: I’ve been meaning to read the Matched books, and I sometimes like to wait until all the books in a series are out, so since this is the last, this year they’ll be on my list.

The Kill Order by James Dashner: This is a prequel to Dashner’s Maze Runner trilogy, a trilogy that I’ve been recommending to people but that I still haven’t read. They’re all on my to-read list this year.

Now I just have to try to fit in all of these books. We’ll see how that goes since I’m still working on some of my anticipated reads for 2010 and 2011!

My fantasy year started with the Summer of Harry, which called for re-reading all seven of the Harry Potter books. Very good prep for the Books & Bars HP meeting in July, the MPR HP Trivia game at the State Fair, and the final movie, HP 7.2.

But that wasn’t all. The year held sequels to a couple of series, and I have discovered a couple more that, to my delight, took off where Harry Potter ended. Or maybe ran parallel. Or diverged wildly. You be the judge.

I started the series by Lev Grossman, aptly called The Magicians, with The Magicians last summer. This was followed in August 2011 by The Magician King. This was my eagerly-awaited book for the summer. The series is Harry Potter for adults, Candy Land on steroids, you name it. The second book had that same melancholy undertone as the first one – after all, you know that life isn’t fair, and we are all going to die some day. The part of the book that I thought was most interesting was the backstory of Julia, and what happened to her during the whole time that the other guys were at Brakebills.

A friend of mine said that the ending of this was very depressing, but I beg to differ. After all, tomorrow is another day (oh wait, that’s another tome). But Quentin will make do, he’s a survivor, and he can make new friends, can’t he? I will definitely look for book three – because yes, though I don’t know when, I’m sure it’s coming. However, the inside scoop (from my Brakebills Alumni newsletter) says that it will be called The Magician’s Land.

I discovered a series this year based on Nicholas Flamel. You may recall the name, dimly. It is the name of the alchemist in the first Harry Potter book, the one mentioned on the back of Dumbledore’s Chocolate Frog card, who creates and possesses that darned Philosopher’s Stone. He is, therefore, immortal.

The series is The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott. There are six books, The Alchemyst, The Magician, The Sorceress, The Necromancer, The Warlock, and The Enchantress I’ve read the first two so far, and they are intriguing enough to a) keep me up well into the late night or early morning and b) send me rocketing to the library for the next one in the series.

I’ve read mixed reviews on these. They are not as sophisticated as Harry Potter, and there is a lot of repetition to get the reader up to date on the story. I am only hoping that this diminishes as the series goes on, rather than increases. After all, the writer should hope that anyone reading book four has already got at least a couple of the others under their belt. This series seems to be written for a younger audience than say, Harry Potter. But there is enough going on to keep my attention, so far.

Another series I have devoured (heh heh) is the Wolves of Mercy Falls by Maggie Stiefvater, which wrapped up in 2011. Yes, it’s not enough that we have vampires and wizards. We must have werewolves, too. Expect these are not your garden variety werewolves. They are really just wolves, which start out as normal kids. I have enjoyed the whole run of this series, with the latest released this past July. They are Shiver, Linger, and Forever. These are romantic, suspenseful and well-written. She also has another series (Books of Faerie) and a couple stand-alone books, which I may check out.

Deborah Harkness Reading
7 p.m., Wed., Jan 18
Central Park Amphitheater
8595 Central Park Place
Woodbury, MN

More information.

And I read and liked the much-hyped A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harness. There was such a huge pot of fantasy to read this year, I only just got to it. I didn’t know until I was more than halfway through that this was a series. Apparently it is called The All Souls’ Trilogy. I like that, nice and neat. Now I just have to sit back and wait for book two.

Also, in the past year, another installment of one of my all-time favorite series was released – Thursday Next by Jasper Fforde. Fforde is like a nicer version of Gregory Maguire – literature run amuck, without the crazy sexual escapades. While this is fantasy-slash-science fiction-slash crime thriller, it certainly does well in the fantasy realm. Fforde’s sense of humor and quirky imagination will keep you guessing to the end. I love Thursday Next, and I am looking forward to reading my signed copy of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing very soon. This is the sixth Thursday Next novel – but will it be the last?

Not to leave out Gregory Maguire, whose series The Wicked Years has a new entrant, Out of Oz, which I have sitting here waiting for me. I am a big fan of this series, starting with Wicked, which I recommend to anyone who I think can get past the deviant sexual encounters early on in the book. I also loved Son of a Witch, but I was not that crazy about A Lion Among Men. For my money, there are other characters in the Oz oeuvre that could have been better fodder for an entire book. This is the final book in the series, and I’m curious to see how it will all turn out.

And finally, what do you think would be the perfect capstone to a year of fantasy? I am salivating to see the film version of The Hobbit, directed once again by Peter Jackson, whose eye for scenery takes my breath away. Who else could make a slog through an infested swamp entertaining? To refresh my memory and to get me in the mood, I will be re-reading The Hobbit starting this weekend. I haven’t read it in years, so I am really looking forward to this one. A rather nice end to the year 2011. Too bad I have to wait a year for the movie.