Category: books

Review: Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth

Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth, by Sandra Dutton

I was so excited when I saw the reviews of this book. Someone wrote a novel for kids about science and religion? AWESOME. I know a number of kids who feel tension between what their parents believe and what they learn in school – how great to have a novel where the protagonist is dealing with exactly that issue!

The good news is that Mary Mae competently tackles this problem. Mary Mae is a pleasant, relatable protagonist who is curious about her teacher’s world while remaining respectful of her family’s beliefs. The people she encounters in church, at home, and at school are, to a one, good and reasonable people with Mary Mae’s best interests at heart – they just have different ideas about what’s best. The conclusion Mary Mae eventually reaches is age-appropriate (i.e. she doesn’t suddenly launch into some lengthy, deep philosophical diatribe) and, again, respectful of her religious beliefs while remaining open to the possibilities of science.

So this book is a success, in that sense. BUT – and this is a big, important but – every sentence sounds like this: “But there’s this little crab a-setting in the corner all by hisself.” (Other examples: “Some of them pages is real old,” “His wife is a-setting off to the side,” “Don’t want nobody in the class to know I been crying.”)

I cannot tell you how incredibly distracting the dialect (Appalachian, I guess? What other dialects are there in southern Ohio?) is. If it were only present in the dialogue, or otherwise scattered throughout the text, I could have dealt with it. I might’ve even found it charming. But when every single sentence has multiple folksy-isms, it actually makes the book difficult to read. There were sentences I had to work pretty hard to parse – so how am I going to pass this off to a nine-year-old? Are they really going to have the patience to wade through the irritating writing to reach the book’s message? I don’t know. I barely did.

In short: This book is sort of a mixed bag. I like that it grapples with the tension between science and religion, and I like Mary Mae, but the dialect made reading the book feel like a chore.

News from the outside world

1. Dora the Explorer celebrated her 10th birthday yesterday, to great fanfare. We’re celebrating here with a Dora book display and, of course, some very adorable Dora coloring pages.

2. It turns out that the adults-who-read-YA book club I’m in here is not as unique as I thought! There are lots and lots of adult women (and men!) reading and enjoying young adult literature. And no wonder:

“A lot of adult literature is all art and no heart,” [Amanda] Foreman, who is currently working on a book about British involvement in the American Civil War, said. “But good Y.A. is like good television. There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging. Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or ­disappointed people.”

Review: A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, by Emily Horner

This is one of those books that I wish had come out a decade ago, because I could really have used it back then. I saw a lot myself and the people I knew in high school in this book, and I suspect it will resonate with a number of teenagers I know today. Don’t get scared off by the beginning, which is sort of weird and irritating – the rest of the book is great.

Cass’s best friend Julia dies in a car accident, and A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend follows Cass and her friends as they attempt to pick up the pieces, move on, and memorialize Julia as best they can. Cass memorializes her dead best friend in two ways: she takes the trip out west that she and Julia had planned, and she participates in the production of the musical Julia had been working on before her death. The road trip takes place during summer break, and the play is staged early on in the school year. The novel skips back and forth between the two stories, which normally bothers me, but here, the stories just work better this way.

The great thing is that both stories are equally engaging. I love road trip novels, and I really love Route 66, so I enjoyed the chapters about Cass’s struggle to bike from Chicago to Los Angeles. Watching Cass return to the “real world” and attempt to navigate her changed relationships with Julia’s friends – and enemies – is equally compelling. Horner’s portrayal of this gang of grieving teenagers rings true for me – I know plenty of kids, especially theatre kids, who watch a lot of obscure horror movies and would do anything for their friends.

I never got any real sense of what Julia was like – for all that the novel happens because of her death, we don’t know very much about her life. She liked theatre, was really into her boyfriend, was great at writing music…that’s about all we know. And that’s okay. This book is so not about Julia, and I like that. Instead, we get a smart, sympathetic portrait of smart, sympathetic Cass as she works through her grief by making mistakes, getting in trouble, and maybe even falling in love.

Review: Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman

I’ve never been a huge fan of Neil Gaiman, to be honest. I read this for a book club, and was surprised by how much I liked it. I really like Gaiman’s writing – it’s straightforward without sacrificing style. And I liked Richard quite a bit, really, but–

Richard, like pretty much everyone else in this book, wasn’t fleshed out very well. I felt like I “got” the Marquis better than anyone. Door? I had no idea at all. She was a blank slate who occasionally showed off some interesting powers. But she had no real personality traits, and I never got a sense that she and Richard developed a friendship, except that Gaiman told us that they had. Whatever.

The other problem is that once you get to the end, you get the distinct impression that you’ve just read the less interesting half of Richard and Door’s story. The plot part of this book doesn’t make all that much sense, once you start to think about it. Nothing really happened. But stuff is totally going to happen…right after the end of the book.

I did like it, though. This book gets major points for the good writing and the really thoroughly developed, fascinating world Gaiman created. But I just kept expecting more: more characterization, more plot, and at least like ten more chapters to really finish the story.

Review: The Line, by Teri Hall

The Line, Teri Hall

This is yet another YA dystopian fiction novel. This one takes place near some border (pretty sure it’s Canadian). It is the first in a series, and I will definitely not be reading the rest. Also, YA authors, I’m tired of series. Is it that hard to write one good stand-alone book?

In short: It’s not like there was anything wrong with this book. There just wasn’t anything right, either. The writing is really clunky (I am pretty sure some of these paragraphs were “what not to do” examples in my high school creative writing textbooks). The characters are flat and boring. Plus, Hall does that annoying thing where she unnecessarily makes up words to sound more sci-fi (“digim” for “picture,” “creds” for “dollars”) – Star Wars novels do this a lot, but they’re Star Wars novels, you know? Made-up words do not create an interesting world all by themselves. Overall, the world was not particularly well-developed or believable – when is this set? How is it possible that all of these countries have different names? How is the government simultaneously so tyrannical and so incompetent? And WHY did all of the “world-building” happen in the form of a pop quiz? The other big problem is that this book requires the reader to be concerned about the characters, which is impossible because a) we know nothing about any of them, nor believe anything they say because they are all painfully insincere, and b) you never believe that their world is actually dangerous. Oh no, they might have to wear jumpsuits? Ugh. Add to that the predictable ending and the lazy dialogue, and you’re in for a real treat. I might have liked it in middle school, though, because I was a big “X-Files” fan and would have loved the over-the-top paranoia about the government.