Minnesota Reads

At first I didn’t like Miranda July. She seemed too precious. Her first book of short stories, contrived quirkiness. Like watching Zooey Deschanel shop for leg warmers at Goodwill. But I didn’t like Miranda July in that way that meant I’d be peeking out from behind the curtains to watch her walk down the street. I didn’t like her in a way I understood to mean that I didn’t like her right now, but that wasn’t necessarily my final verdict.

Then I loved Miranda July. It was her movie “Me You and Everyone We Know,” which she wrote and starred in. It was different. Nice. A little uncomfortable. Mostly different, with clever characters whose motivations I didn’t understand, made better for the not understanding. There was minutia, and I’m really into minutia lately. It was funny, but not obviously funny. It was an hour and a half I didn’t regret at all. And now. And now.

Miranda July tipped me over with It Chooses You, the memoir slash journalistic exercise she wrote while she was supposed to be doing something else, namely the screenplay for another movie. It’s a familiar moment she describes, and the reason why my boyfriend and I — both in the middle of other creative projects — first started a basement rock band, then started a web comic (although neither lasted long).

“The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like that person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the castle was visible. I could see tiny children waving flags on the balcony; all I had to do was walk across a field to get to them. But all of a sudden I was very, very sleepy. And the children couldn’t believe their eyes as I folded down to my knees and fell to the ground face-first with my eyes open.”

July starts contacting people who are selling things in the Penny Saver: a suitcase, a leather jacket, cats, a blowdryer. She doesn’t want their stuff, she wants to meet them and talk about stuff. She takes along a photographer, Brigitte Sire, who has her work included in this book and July’s assistant Alfred “… to protect us from rape.” She trades about $50 for a session with these people and asks them about their lives and when they were the happiest. She meets a mid-transition transsexual (selling a leather coat) and a teenager selling bullfrog tadpoles and at a house where a woman is selling a blowdryer, the woman’s daughter sings for them “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus.

And somewhere in Los Angeles, July meets Joe, an old man who has spent years writing dirty poems for his wife. Lots of “tits-and-twats” stuff. He inspires a direction shift in July’s script and then role in her movie “The Future.”

I’m not sure where a person in the book business shelves this. At our local bookstore it was with films/movies/TV. But I’d give it more of a memoir, memoir-y, memoir-ish label. She has a very favorite-blogger voice, funny and a collector of stories, circumstances and non-event events. Just kind of honest sounding. Maybe I’d even stick this book somewhere near Bird by Bird, the quintessential “How to Write Good” guide by Anne Lamott. Especially when it comes to the short personal bursts, writing “The Future” or doing anything creative, actually. She talks about her style when it comes to creating films, being grateful that she is a part of it, but:

“I was desperately trying to remind myself that there was no one way to make a good movie; I could actually write anything or cast anyone. I could cast ghosts or shadows, or a pineapple or the shadow of a pineapple.”

Just pages later she has left a copy of her script untouched. She’s trying to become unfamiliar with her main characters. She imagined it curing like ham, the longer she left it. She also tries to trick herself. She’s a snoopy housekeeper who has stumbled upon this packet of words:

“‘What have we here,’ I said to myself, peeking at the first page and then slyly glancing over my shoulder.”

How many times, how many times.

Tom Perrotta was edgy with Election, spooky with Little Children, and wry with The Abstinence Teacher With his latest, The Leftovers, he’s, um, well he’s trying, I guess.

What is good about The Leftovers is what is good about every Perrotta novel – the keenness with which he observes and details the condition of the suburb-dwelling 21st century human being. Before The Leftovers begins, millions of people across the world have mysteriously vanished in what some people consider The Rapture. Perrotta catches up with them as they struggle with the disappearance of their loved ones and try to move on in their vastly changed world.

I think part of the trouble comes from that premise. It’s decidedly more science-fictiony than anything Perrotta has done before. It’s an interesting idea, but one that falls flat at the three-quarters mark and results in an ending that feels forgettable, like he didn’t know how to wrap things up and just went with the first idea that came to him.

All in all, The Leftovers isn’t a total dud. It’s just not on par with his previous work.

Reynie is an orphan with a gift for puzzles. Kate always carries a bucket full of gadgets that help her MacGyver any hairy situation. Sticky is probably the smartest kid on the planet. Constance is just plain stubborn. Together they are the Mysterious Benedict Society.

But let’s backtrack. These kids didn’t know each other at the beginning of Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society, but they were all intrigued by a newspaper ad about a special test for “gifted children looking for special opportunities.” The series of tests they took were clouded in mystery, including what would happen at the end of the tests. That’s where they met Mr. Benedict.

As an adult reading this novel designed for middle school children, I was leery of Mr. Benedict. He doesn’t completely fill the children in about the tests or what he exactly wants them to do. He also doesn’t let them contact anyone. Reynie, the main character in this novel, desperately wants to contact his pseudo-mom from the orphanage, but Mr. Benedict tells him that he has contacted her and all is well. Reynie just believes him and accepts the fact that he can’t contact her. I wanted to shake him and tell him to question authority.

Luckily Mr. Benedict wasn’t lying, but he’s so shrouded in mystery that I wouldn’t have gotten past the first test. No way am I doing anything without knowing why.

After the tests the students are offered the opportunity to become undercover agents in a school for gifted children where Mr. Benedict believes the president of the school is trying to take over the world. Again this is shrouded in mystery and everything they’ll need to do isn’t exactly spelled out for them, but all of them agree to do it even though they’re told it could be dangerous.

The adult in me should probably stop being so cynical, but why would they do this?

The four kids are then enrolled in the school, which is on its own remote island, and they try to obtain the president’s secrets while still trying to obey all the crazy rules and regulations enforced by older students.

Yes, I was cynical about this story, but it really is cute and kids would have fun reading it because the four children are just so interesting. Reynie is a master at solving puzzles, solving most of them way before me, and Sticky is just way too smart for his own good. Kate and her bucket crack me up because she literally carries a bucket around to hold her stuff. One would think a backpack would work better, but Kate knows that buckets can also come in handy. Constance is the kid you want to give back because she is just so stubborn and whiny, but there is a reason for this that isn’t revealed until the end. Together they make an interesting group and made me smile throughout the story.

The story itself isn’t as entertaining as the kids, so I don’t know if I’ll continue reading any of the other Benedict Society books, but I’m not mad I read this. It was cute and I love the kids. I just don’t love them enough to keep reading.

When Rosalinda Achmetowna’s frumpy, stupid and ill-mannered daughter Sulfia gets knocked up, she can’t help but believe that it didn’t happen the traditional way. Who would sleep with Sulfia? No, it must be as Sulfia claims: Something that happened in a dream. Rosa sets out to fix it, using an arsenal of home abortion techniques and finally finds success the old fashioned way — with a knitting needle.

This seems to work, judging from the bloody sheets, but months later Sulfia still seems to be pregnant and the almost-medical professional neighbor who performed the procedure offers her explanation: Sulfia was obviously pregnant with twins, but they had only paid to rid her body of one of the fetuses. Shrug.

A baby girl is born, Aminat, a real beauty with her dark Tartar looks, and Rosa is smitten with her. She sets out to shape this little girl into something lovely and cultured, well-dressed and smart. Like her grandmother and unlike her mother.

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is a wicked little dark-humored novel by Alina Bronsky starring a Tartar family in 1970s Russia. Rosa is a witch of a woman, a strong arm demanding that things be her way. Her husband is passive against her demands, her daughter is terrified of her to the point of moving across town and taking young Aminat with her. It’s a minor hiccup for Rosa, who finds a way to get her daughter diagnosed as mentally ill and regain possession of the little girl. And so goes a power struggle, and custody battle ripe with manipulation techniques.

The quick read covers 30 years of their life, with hints to what is going on politically. The action is set around Sulfia who marries first a good looking man who meets Rosa’s approval, but has a hankering for other women. When he succumbs to that craving, Rosa steps in to raise Aminat while Sulfia is bedridden with depression. Sulfia gets pregnant again, and Rosa pulls some strings to parlay this into a proposal. When that husband decides the family should emigrate to Israel, Rosa pulls a gruesome move that results in Sulfia and Aminat staying with her, while Sulfia’s baby Lena makes the move. Then Rosa sets the stage for the big save: Sulfia must find a foreign husband who can move them out of Russia to a place with a stable economy. A place where sugar isn’t rationed and train stations don’t explode. This requires a sacrifice that is completely unforgivable.

This story, translated from German by Tim Mohr, is secondary to the well-played characterization of Rosa. As they say, in all good there is a little bit of evil and in all evil there is a little bit of good. While she is, at her core, a self-righteous, Type A, braggy, manipulative and mean demon, sweet moments — although veiled in contempt — come into play, specifically when she nurses her daughter back to health and interupts Aminat’s spiral toward juvenile delinquency after Sulfia’s first husband leaves. And even though the other decisions she makes for her daughter aren’t necessarily what Sulfia would want for herself, Rosa does what she believes she needs to do to give her daughter a better life. Rosa moves between evil and not-so evil seamlessly and none of it ever feels false to her character. It’s only when she dangles Aminat in front of a German pedophile, luring him into a marriage with Sulfia and a new life for the ladies in Germany, that she stops earning sympathy from the reader — not to mention from Aminat.

This novel is definitely unique and has a big voice and has an interesting and complex character in Rosa.

Hello All,

Thanksgiving Break & The Big Server Move sounds like just about the most boring thing ever, doesn’t it? Well, it is. Since this week tends to bring a natural lull to both reviewing and people reading reviews, it makes perfect sense to do a lot of the behind the scenes work.

Yeah, MN Reads is switching to a new web host. It’s a lot of boring not fun work but when it’s over we’ll be on a faster, more secure, better supported platform. This change probably doesn’t matter to anyone but me.

So we’ll be on hiatus for the week, and if you happen to visit and things have disappeared or look goofy, don’t worry. It’s all planned.

Have a great Thanksgiving, and read lots of books. I have big plans to read Portnoy’s Complaint. I’m ridiculously excited about it. I’ve read a crapton of Philip Roth but never Portnoy.

When the people in Joan Didion’s life die, it’s the kind of thing that makes the news. Niece, before the release of the biggest movie she will live to make, “Poltergeist,” strangled by an ex-boyfriend. Husband dies of a heart attack, and Didion’s account of it wins a National Book Award. Her brother-in-law, bladder cancer, famous first for his career in the movie biz and later for his opinions on the crimes of the major players, makes national news when he dies.

So the whole time I'm reading Blue Nights, Didion’s memoir following the death of her daughter Quintana Roo, I’m wondering: Who is your emergency contact, Joan? And all I can see is the face of Griffin Dunne, her nephew, as his face appeared in “American Werewolf in London.” I can't separate the person from the character, so I groan. That guy, huh. That guy.

Didion addresses the matter herself in the late pages of the book: Her brother, maybe. But he lives 3,000 miles away. Griffin, as I predicted, but at the time of “In Case of Emergency” crisis, he is filming on location, close friends in New York City, though the closest now lives outside of the city limits. You don't worry about Joan Didion, 76, living alone in New York City. That's preposterous. But still.

Didion’s memoir, which follows the equally grim circumstances of her husband’s death The Year of Magical Thinking, is a short collections of memories of her daughter and Didion's realizations that the last time she sees so many people is when she visits them in the ICU.

Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne adopted Quintana Roo when she was fresh from the oven. The doctor called, said he had a baby, and they went straight to the hospital. They named her for a spot they had seen on a map once. Her childhood, like all childhoods, shows evidence of her parent's lifestyle: After a movie release, Quintana's opinion isn't “good” or “bad,” it’s that the movie is going to be a big hit. When she is five years old, she calls a film studio and asks how to be a star and calls a mental hospital and asks what to do if she thinks she's going crazy.

You can feel Didion circling the topic in the pages of this short memoir. She doesn't really get to the meat of her daughter until late. As is her strength, she continues remembering certain details: a plumeria flower tattoo that shows through her wedding dress, her hair filled with flowers. There is no “Let me tell you about my dead daughter” manipulation. Instead she writes about people — others who have died — and places — the houses where they lived, even her own health, with Quintana on the peripheral of all of it. She shoots for a goal of momentum in the aftermath, assuming that jetting off from here to there is momentum, but finds it is not.

Didion holds off on kicking readers in the cry place until the book;s final pages when The Year of Magical Thinkinghas been turned into a play starring Vanessa Redgrave. Didion spends time backstage, they make a joke of the meals she takes at a small table and call it a cafe named for her. She finds comfort in the dead being talked about, their words on the stage. On the final night of the run, she finds it hard to leave. Yowch.

Joan Didion is my Beatles and Rolling Stones, and I'm starting to, selfishly, worry about her. One moment finds here sitting in a folding chair, paralyzed, unable to get up from the chair. The words don't come as easily anymore, she admits.

Le Cirque des Reves is only open from dusk til dawn, and is filled with black and white tents housing illusions and acts that defy imagination. There’s a wishing tree, a cloud maze, a contortionist, a fortune teller, and the illusionist, a young woman who can change the color of her hair while you watch.

This mystical, magical circus provides the board for a game of wits, for lack of a better term, between Celia, that young illusionist, and Marco, the circus’ manager. From the time they were children, Marco and Celia’s “caretakers” enter them into a sort of magician’s competition. As they grow, both Marco and Celia are trained for this competition though they are never told when it will take place or how a victor is declared.

This is the basic premise of Erin Morgenstern’s much buzzed debut novel, The Night Circus, and beyond that premise you’re not going to find much more than loads and loads and loads and then a few more loads of description.

If you’re the type of reader who eats up these kinds of minute details and begs for more, run out and grab this one. If you’re the type of reader who thrives on character growth and development, approach with extreme caution. A latter type myself, initially I found Morgenstern’s excruciatingly detailed descriptions of the circus tents and the wonders inside enthralling but soon grew bored with all the fluff that seemed outside of the actual story.

I wanted to know about Celia and Marco and how they felt about this macabre competition, and how/why they fell in love. The dueling illusionists meet once, on a rainy street in Prague, and the next thing you know they’re in love. I wanted to know why Celia’s father, a great illusionist himself, and Marco’s mysterious benefactor dreamed up this entire competition and why the participants never rebelled or refused to play along despite the deadly stakes.

However, despite the holes in the story, the circus is still pretty captivating. Even though I bellyached about all the detailed descriptions of the tents, I loved learning about the inner workings of the circus and how Celia and Marco used their skills (or powers, which doesn’t feel right) to keep things running and safe.

What I really liked here, and what kept me slogging through the mountains of description, were the flame-haired twins, Poppet and Widget, born the very first night the circus opens and have a strong connection to it and the magic it holds. Whenever Poppet and Widget were front and center, I was a happy reader. Oh, I also loved that the circus develops a sort of deadheadesque cult following who call themselves the Reveurs.

But to get to these bits of goodness you have to wade through so much description it borders on masturbatory and a lot of pointless characters. It’s as though the author was creating an illusion herself, trying to distract the reader with beautiful images hoping nobody would notice that the story is full of holes and most of the characters serve no real purpose.

Regardless of age, many of us probably know the same nursery rhymes. I think I was always partial to “Three Blind Mice” and “Humpty Dumpty,” though I have no clue why I liked the idea of the poor egg not being able to be put back together again.

While designed for kids, Nursery Rhyme Comics, with fifty different cartoonists taking a stab at the beloved rhymes, is great for both young and old. The whole time I read it I was smiling, not only because the old rhymes were brought to life, but because some of the cartoonists took cute and hilarious liberties with the rhymes.

Most of the comics are just two pages long, but some of the cartoonists create great stories in those two pages. Mo Ho turned “Hush Little Baby” into a dad getting more and more frustrated that the gifts he buys his little girl never work. The frustration of the dad and mischievousness of the adorable girl, with glasses way too big for her face, is priceless.

The animals in Bob Flynn's “Little Boy Blue” get away with everything, even poker night, while little boy blue sleeps the day away. The images of the boy sprawled over the haystacks still make me smile.

The one that made me laugh out loud was James Sturm's take on “Jack Be Nimble.” Jack turns to the reader and scolds us for wanting him to jump over a candlestick. The sight of his little burnt bum as he walks away is so damn cute.

“Hickory, Dickory, Dock” by Stephanie Yue is also really cute. She turns the table on the tale of the mouse being spooked by the clock. In her version, the clock only rings because of the mouse and a mallet as big as his body.

Nursery Rhyme Comics is a sweet, cute, funny collection. It’s great to see what the cartoonists have done with the nursery rhymes and some of them have me intrigued enough that I will seek out other things they’ve created.

Coming-of-age novels come with an absolution: They don't actually have to be about-about anything. They can just be. A series of events, linked or otherwise, that start quirky and end artfully or in some combination of that.

Sarah Winman's debut novel When God was a Rabbit takes advantage of this convention. Technically it’s about a brother and sister; that sister and her best friend; that brother and his best friend with benefits. It has no plot line that looms, waiting to be solved, fixed, redeemed, or rectified, instead it has episodes that must be handled before the next episode or just after.

The story centers on Elly, a sassafrass little missy who auditions for the Christmas pageant with a monologue that references booze and abortions, lands the role of an innkeeper, then spontaneously changes the Christmas story mid-performance by assuring Mary and Joseph that there is plenty of room at the Inn, not to mention a view. She also has some thoughts on the illegitimate child.

When a life-changing incident occurs, and Elly mentions it to her older brother Joe in an off-handed way, he handles it the best he can and then gives her a gift, a rabbit that she names God. God talks to her, not in the obnoxious way of, say, TV’s Wilfred. Just a sentence or two that provides direction either from his mouth or her imagination.

Elly becomes best friends with Jenny Penny, a schoolmate with wild hair and a wilder mother. Jenny Penny is a little bit of a seer, as tamed and subtle in her art as the talking rabbit. Jenny Penny finds stability at Elly's home and the two develop a thick bond that is severed when Elly's father wins the lottery and moves the family far away to the country, to a house that looks like it belongs to rich people and will eventually double as a B&B. Elly keeps in phone contact, but eventually loses touch with her friend when Jenny Penny's mom has them scrambling for new identities and no forwarding address. Meanwhile, Joe goes off to school and later to New York and Elly is left to wander in the woods, delve further and further into herself and just get weird.

There is a cast of characters who are taken in by the family: An elderly man with a host of wild stories from his past and a woman who croons showtunes and is most comfortable with a feather boa.

In the second half of the book, lost characters return and characters become lost.

Winman is super skilled in the art of subtlety. A lot of the biggest reveals in the book are unraveled either without words or backward. Young Elly doesn't tell Joe that she was molested by the next-door neighbor, rather she explains that she knows the difference between circumcised and not and her brother fills in the blanks. Two characters are missing, one calls, it takes half a page to figure out who is on the phone with Elly.

And in a fun moment that epitomizes her control with language: Winman writes a chaos scene, a party in which Jenny Penny's mom is out front monitoring traffic and the girls are singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” along with a record. Eventually Jenny Penny's mom's lines sync up to the record and it is done so well and is so aural and visual that it's fantastically exhausting and perfect.

This was a good book, a quick read, and a nice introduction to a new writer.

I haven't found a book that I love in months. It has been a dark time and all I did was scour the library looking for a book I could love. I walked through life crossing my fingers hoping I would find the perfect book that I would read in a matter of days and want to read over and over again. I found this book. This book happens to be Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling. I do not have one bad thing to say about it.

My expectations for this book were unknown. I didn't know what to expect from Kaling, I knew she was funny and talented but that was where it ended. After I started reading I couldn't stop, I was actually laughing out loud. I brought the book to work with me, just in case I had some free time to read. I completely devoured it, making me add Kaling to the list of most hilarious people.

Kaling approaches this book in an essay format and gives the reader what they want. She talks about her childhood when she was the chubby girl, how she was the girl with the androgynous haircut and clothing, even talking about how she was the girl that played Ben Affleck. Kaling tells the reader everything, from her first writing gig to “The Office” and a guest writer spot on “Saturday Night Live.” Kaling is a self-admitted gossip and this book is the best people who will listen to her.

Kaling walks the line of self-deprecation and hilarity. When she talks about being the chubby girl who looked like a boy you feel like you're laughing along with her, not feeling sorry for her. (I mean, look at what this woman has done, no one should feel sorry for her.) Kaling is quite frank and honest about her experiences writing and producing for “The Office” dishing on who she argues with the most and what they argue about.

“Writer fights are always exciting and traumatic, and I get into them all the time. I am a confident writer, a hothead, and have a very thin skin for any criticism. This charming combination of personality traits makes me an argument machine on our staff. A halfway compliment my friend and “The Office” showrunner Paul Lieberstein once paid me was that ‘it’s a good thing you turn in good drafts, because you are impossible to rewrite.’ Thanks Paul! All I heard was ‘Mindy, you’re the best writer we've ever had. I cherish you. We all do.’

Kaling also makes fun of her over the top girlish ways, the way she loves to shop, that she has her credit card number memorized just in case of online shopping emergencies. My favorite aspects of the book are the college years of Mindy Kaling, when she talks about living in a cramped New York apartment with her two best friends. There she comes up with a play with her roommate and they star, write, and direct the entire thing because they can’t afford to pay anyone. The play is “Matt & Ben” which is about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s friendship, it is what lands Kaling her gig writing for “The Office.”

Kaling tells her story with such ease and humor that you’ll really believe that it wasn’t so hard for her to accomplish what she did. Plus, she tells her stories in such a way that you like her, you don’t hate her for bragging about how awesome and how lucky she has been, you cheer her on and want to call her for late night chats about celebrity couples. Kaling's book is hilarious and a delight to read. This book is going to join the likes of Tina Fey's Bossypants with honesty and hilarity.

Thank you Mindy, you saved me from my reading dry spell.

If you don't like gushing, stop reading this right now and start reading Wonderstruck. If you don't mind gushing, read this first, then start reading Wonderstruck.

Wonderstruck is the follow-up to Brian Selznick's Caldecott Medal-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabaret. This novel is truly a work of art. It alternates between two stories, one told with words, the other told with pictures. The two stories unfold in a delightful series of parallels and discoveries. It would be tragic to spoil any of these for you — suffice it to say that I gasped and smiled with each new page.

I don't know much about what makes a technically sound drawing, but I do know that the pictures in Wonderstruck evoke a powerful emotional response. They are generally clear and quite simple-with the exception of some delightful, whimsical details-but convey deep, human messages that even a novice graphic novel reader can understand. By interchanging the pictures with words, Selznick demands all of the reader's attention, and I was only too happy to give it to him. The real genius for me was Selznick's incorporation of deaf characters. This elevates the medium of a graphic novel, as the reader, like the characters, does not always have words to help them communicate. Selznick turns this into a gift, not a limitation, imbuing his characters and pictures with poignancy, significance, and grace.

Much of the joy of reading this novel comes through the deft interplay of innocence and experience. Written for younger readers, Wonderstruck builds on an ostensibly simple story, adding layers with academic explorations, complex settings, and adult themes. The characters struggle through issues of death, loneliness, friendship, loyalty, disability, and survival. By the end of the book, the different story strands tie together beautifully. I would warn more cynical readers that Wonderstruck does have a sentimentality verging on too sweet, but I found that the clever twists, practical characters, and serious obstacles made it more than palatable.

In one nod to the romantic, Ben, one of the main characters, collects meaningful items and keeps them in a special box. Early in the story, he is introduced to a more formal version of this: Cabinets of Wonders, pieces of furniture used to store similar memorabilia. Ben reads a description of these cabinets:

“The viewer was indeed supposed to feel a kind of ‘wonder’ and awe. . . If you've ever stood beneath the skeleton of a dinosaur, or gazed at a giant diamond, or come upon something beautiful in nature. . . you know this feeling of wonder (109).”

By this definition, Wonderstruck itself is a cabinet, leaving the viewer full of wonder and awe.

In the beginning, I was a little annoyed with Rakhee Singh, the main character in Kamala Nair’s debut novel, The Girl in the Garden. She leaves her fiance with “no warning, no explanation, no good-bye; only this story, the ring, and an address in India where you can find me.” What kind of drama queen leaves her fiance with no explanation?

Yet, as the novel progressed, I forgot all that. The Girl in the Garden flashes back to tell Rakhee's story from age ten. Born of Indian parents and raised in Minnesota, she feels like an alien among “most of the other kids at Plainfield Elementary with their blue eyes, hardy frames, and Lutheran church whose vaulted ceiling soared above their golden heads every Sunday morning.” Her father is a well-known cardiologist at the Plainfield (think Mayo) Clinic. Her mother tends to both a beautiful garden and her family, but becomes increasingly emotionally disturbed for reasons that are unclear to Rakhee. Eventually, her mother uproots her from Minnesota and takes her to visit her family in India, where she feels equally alien and out of place.

There, she meets her relatives for the first time, people who have a pile of family secrets as high as the Taj Mahal. A lush jungle lies beyond the house but the family forbids her to go there which, of course, makes it irresistibly appealing. The story unfolds at a rapid pace as Rakhee visits a mysterious walled garden in the jungle and begins to unravel the tangle of family secrets.

Like her heroine, Nair spent much of her youth in Minnesota where her father is a physician at the Mayo Clinic. I met her at a book launch party in the Twin Cities. Her whole family was there, too, and her mother brought along fabulous Indian food. (In contrast to the family of the novel, they seem like a happy and supportive group.) Nair has made her own journeys to India in search of her cultural heritage. We discussed the fact that she works with some of the same themes in The Girl in the Garden as Pulitzer prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri covers in works such as The Namesake. Both writers explore the difficulties of people who are strangers in a strange land, trying to find a bridge between Indian and American cultures. Yet, as Nair pointed out, The Girl in the Garden, focuses on an American trying to fit into the Indian culture, while The Namesake primarily portrays the life of a young Indian man trying to find his place in America.

While Nair artfully describes the lush beauty of India and the complexities of bridging two cultures, it's ultimately the story line that makes The Girl in the Garden a success. Occasionally at the limits of credibility, a tiny bit over dramatic at points, it is nonetheless a well-woven story and too gripping to put down.

We spend a lot of time and money trying to extend our lives and the effects of aging: health care, fitness clubs, anti-aging creme, botox, etc. You name it; we do it. Just look at the wax figurines on the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

But what if we didn't have to worry about aging? What if there was a cure? That's the premise in Drew Magary's The Postmortal.

The Postmortal begins at the end with the text files of John Farrell, a man who recorded the story of his life during the cure, being found in a government facility. The date is 2093 and the reader is told that the following book highlights what was found in Farrell's journal and showcases why the cure should never again be given. The book then jumps to the journal and 2019, the year the cure was found.

The cure really does end aging, but at the beginning it was outlawed by the government, though that didn't stop the black market cures. That's how Farrell, a jackass 29-year-old, gets his cure. Farrell describes in detail the way the cure is given, the national protests to allow it, and the anti-cure rebels.

The rest of the journal outlines when the cure was finally approved by the government and its effect on the world. Since we’re told at the beginning that the cure should never be given again, it’s clear that things don’t go well, but there are some funny moments. Married men everywhere start applying for divorce. It turns out death do us part doesn’t seem like such a good idea when they could potentially live hundreds or thousands of years.

This book had great potential. The premise was interesting and the way society reacted to an aging cure seemed plausible. What made me not love this book was the lead character. I can't stand John Farrell. He's portrayed as the kind of guy who would wax his chest, swoon over Megan Fox, drive a really douchey sports car, and read Maxim. I had these thoughts before I read the author bio, and the author actually writes for Maxim. Note to self: read author bios first.

What's sad is that John Farrell has interesting family members and I wish we could've gotten more perspectives from them. His dad, still mourning the loss of his wife, gets the cure and almost immediately regrets it because it will keep him from her longer. He starts taking on every bad habit you can think of to give himself a disease so he can die. That would've been a much more interesting character to follow, but sadly we only see his dad from time to time through conversations Farrell has with him.

The Postmortal isn't bad; it's just not great. If you like Steff from “Pretty in Pink,” this book is for you. If you're more a Ducky person, steer clear.

In August I read an essay by Alexandra Styron that partly recounted the first time she tried to read her father's most famous work. Sophie's Choice�by William Styron was still in galley form, and I suppose, symbolically, so was she. Alexandra made it about as far as the narrator's erotic dream before she worried about barfing on her loafers. Then, despite the hullabaloo that surrounded the movie and the fact that she, herself, became a writer, she didn't double back until she was in her 30s and curious about the man she remembers as less hands on and more Great Male Artist.

In reading it, she meets young Stingo, the young writer her father was when he first moved to Brooklyn in the 1940s.

“The experience was, well, death-defying. Thrilling and nausea-inducing � and I communed with my father in the full bloom of youth. Not Stingo, but Daddy, so vivid and living so close I felt I could turn around and touch him back through the years.”

And that's how a writer I'd never heard of sold me on reading a book I'd only heard of.

Sophie's Choice stars Stingo, a reluctant virgin who has moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn with plans to write his debut novel. His first two experiences with his upstairs neighbors include a domestic bloodletting and a wicked ceiling shaker of a sex scene. He meets Sophie, a Polish immigrant with a tell-tale tattoo from time spent in a concentration camp — though she is not Jewish, and Nathan, who is. Nathan is also a commanding presence, smart and dramatic. Stingo falls in love with the former and craves affirmations from the latter. They become a friends-forever threesome, hanging out at the bar, traveling to Coney Island — when things are good. But Nathan is prone to sudden bursts of paranoid fury that always end in snot and tears. And when he darts out into the night, hurling insults and vowing its over between all of them, Stingo and Sophie nurse each other and talk about her chilling background.

Huge chunks of the book flash back to Auschwitz, where Sophie and her children are taken when she is discovered illegally carrying meat. She describes the sights, sounds, starvation, and smells — and the survival tactics that haunt her. Then Nathan will cool down, return to the scene, and everything is like Paris in the 20s all over again.

The characters are so complete, between the balance of likability and flaw. Stingo is naive and a people-pleaser, guilty about his Southern upbringing. So resentful of his virginity that he goes from Mr. Nice Guy to a Chaffed Loin Jerk every time he feels like he has paid his dues at first base and is ready to take a lady to a grand slam land. Sophie is sad and the more she talks, the more Stingo realizes she has actually told him less. She has a bare bones version of the truth. Then there is the truth. Then there is the whole, whole truth. The one that plagues her (and has become a metaphor for people who must choose between two impossible things). Nathan is just crazy. From day to day he might stir his friends into a frothy lather of happiness, or whip them into shells of their former selves, stripping them of any sense of self worth.

In one of my favorite parts of Alexandra Styron's essay, she writes about answering the phone at her childhood home and taking messages from a series of accented women from around the country, each claiming to be Sophie.

It’s ironic that a book about bullying can be so full of cruel, negative stereotypes that it verges on bullying itself.

Lucky Linderman, the teenage protagonist of A.S. King’s young adult novel Everybody Sees the Ants, has been routinely bullied by an asshole named Nader McMillan since he was seven years old. Nader’s antics grow ever more cruel until, one day at the pool, he uses Lucky’s face to try to erase the cement.

With a giant wound in the shape of Ohio on his cheek, Lucky’s mom packs them up and heads to Arizona to the safe confines of her brother and sister-in-law. They leave behind Lucky’s father a chef who can only cope with his falling apart family by disappearing into work.

Once they land in Arizona things aren’t too ducky either. Aunt Jodi is convinced Lucky’s suicidally-depressed which he and his mom say is ludicrous even though Lucky got into quite a bit of trouble over a school project that involved asking his classmates how they’d commit suicide if they wanted to die.

Lucky, the son of two escapists (his mom swims compulsively claiming she’s part squid and his dad to the restaurant), escapes into his dreams where he’s on a mission to find his POW/MIA grandfather, Harry. He believes this is his life’s mission, because his grandmother mentioned it on her deathbed. Through these dreams which have weird endings, Lucky is trying to work out the crap in his life.

The book is engaging, Lucky’s a smart kid who is struggling with some real issues and A.S. King is an excellent writer. That cannot be argued. I’d have probably loved this book if it weren’t for the awful, offensive treatment of Aunt Jodi.

See Aunt Jodi is fat, and Lucky tells us this right off. Fat Aunt Jodi then proceeds to (and I’m not exaggerating, she’s described using these exact words) flop, plop, glop, slop, and waddle all over the narrative. She eats too much processed, high-calorie food, she finishes other people’s meals, she talks with her mouth full, and food flies from her gaping maw landing on other people. At one point when someone tells Aunt Jodi that if she ate less and exercised more she would lose weight, and she acts as though this is brand new information she’s never heard before even though it’s made abundantly clear that Aunt Jodi spends a lot of time reading celebrity tabloids which, if you’ve ever seen one, are filled with hot Hollywood diet secrets of the stars.

Are you kidding me?

I’m not entirely sure what Aunt Jodi’s weight problems have to do with Lucky’s story. Are they there to show that Lucky, though the bullied victim, can be an asshole too? Or is she supposed to be an unlikeable character that shows how magnanimous Lucky is when he takes pity on her and starts to cook real food?

It’s unclear to me. What I do know is that if the stereotypes heaped on Aunt Jodi were of a racial or LGBTQ nature, readers would be outraged and there’d be many a hand-wringing blog post about the offensiveness. But since Aunt Jodi is fat, and it’s still okay to bully and berate fat people, it’s all okey-dokey. This is a damn shame because fat kids are so often the victims of all kinds of bullying and instead of finding solace and strength in Lucky’s story they will only be shamed and shown that even as adults the bullying never ends.