A Time to Dance

A Time to Dance by Padma Venkatraman

Read: 10/17/15-10/24/15
This review mostly written on: 2/17/16

Beautiful, moving book in verse, a YA novel about a girl in India. For those looking for diverse books to read, this one fits the bill in multiple ways. I'm not going to tell you about one of the most important ways, however, as it's a little bit of a spoiler. The majority of the book is about it, but if you want to read those first 30 pages without knowing... Also, if you don't want that spoiler, be very careful to avoid the cover blurb, and don't read any of the Library of Congress classifications on the copyright page.

Or other reviews. Though many of them are better and more in-depth than mine, they do almost all have The Spoiler, so be warned.

I will say that I haven't read many books from a Hindu perspective, and I found it fascinating. I'd like to read more, as it's, um. Kind of a huge thing in our world.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Installment #6 in the Book Reviews for Melanie series.

"I remember my own childhood vividly ... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." -Maurice Sendak, quoted in the epigraph

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Read: 8/11/13-8/12/13
This review mostly written on: 5/22/14

"She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty. She winked at me. ...

Home

averagecats.com: Individuality

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Read: 4/20/10-5/2/10

LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Family, Dysfunction, Grace, SLOBS

This book wasn't quite satisfying to me, but I decided to share about it anyway because of a couple compelling features: first, it's one of the only books I can think of about people from a big family -- after the kids are all grown up. An obvious hole in the existing literature, for people like me... not that there are many of us, but still. I thought it might interest my siblings. In Home they're all dispersed, the book is only really about three of the family members, but the large family still changes things, affects their memories and so on.

Second, the father in this book is... growing at least a little senile. I related to that too, although I feel funny saying much about it on my blog. But for those who don't know, I, being the next-to-youngest in a very large family, have older parents than people would expect for someone of my age. Like Glory, the main character in Home (although she's actually the youngest, and there were only... eight in the family, I think). My mother... seems to be losing some of her memory.

It was weird, seeing things I've never even put into words, skillfully and even lovingly portrayed in a fictional character completely unconnected to my family. To see in someone else's character some of the things I think odd about my mother in particular, apparently a possible general feature of someone growing old, even where it's only a more extreme version of a trait that was already there. Sorry, it's not easy to be more specific.

It was a hard book to read, but I liked it; or at least some of the time I liked it. I still want to read Gilead before I come to a final verdict -- the book jacket claimed Home is an "entirely independent" work, but I'm not sure I trust it. The father in Home is the best friend of the main character in Gilead. Apparently.

Oh, by the way, as to what the book's really about, as opposed to what I personally identified with about it -- it's about a son who fills the prodigal son and rebellious preacher's kid roles, but not exactly; it's about a father and retired preacher who loves him, but is sometimes horrible; and about a grown woman who has come back home because her own dreams have fallen down around her, watching the father-son relationship, wanting to be important somehow to her big older brother she's always admired but... Um. She's not the narrator, it's in third person, but it's still from her perspective. The book's not really about her, but it is. Yeah, a helpful description, I know. Anyway. And, of course, it's about home, in all its glory or lack thereof. So many things about home. Marilynne Robinson is very, very good (in this novel, at least) at showing the ambiguities and complexities of human relationships. There aren't a lot of dramatic, earth-shattering events in Home, but she makes even a person over-analyzing a situation totally engaging. She packs a lot of emotion into very simple sentences and scenes. So yeah, I think I liked it.

"'It is an oddly patient beast, my carnal self. I call it Snowflake. For, you know, its intractable whiteness. Among other things.'"

Heart's Blood

Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier
Read: 1/7/10-1/27/10 (but only in about three sittings -- around 50 pages one day, the rest of it a few weeks later)
LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Fantasy, Romance, Fairy Tale, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval, Family, Fear... and a couple other tags I won't include this time just in case it'd spoil things for a couple of you.

Perhaps the best way to introduce this book is with the author's own words (I will link to it only with the warning that the page includes spoilers, but I don't think the part I've copied here really spoils anything, unless you just don't want to know what a book is about at all before you read it, in which case, why are you here?):

"Beauty and the Beast has always been one of my favourite fairy tales, and readers will recognise the bones of it in Heart’s Blood: a mysterious house with an alienated, disfigured master, a priceless plant growing in a forbidden garden, magic mirrors and unusual household retainers. The story of my novel has the same general shape as that of Beauty and the Beast.

However, this is far from a fairy tale retelling. It’s not even a close reinterpretation of the traditional tale. Heart’s Blood is a love story, a... [Marcy just now realized one of the descriptions she uses could be a big spoiler to the right kind of brain and cut it] ...a family saga, a story about people overcoming their difficulties, and a little slice of Irish history, as well as a homage to a favourite fairy tale."

Aside from the magic mirrors and one other spoiler aspect, there isn't a great deal of the fantastic in this book, especially when one has "Beauty and the Beast" in mind while reading it. It had a gothic feel to me (although I'm not widely read in gothic literature), even more so than some of the traditional retellings, which seems a little odd now that I think of it. I suppose when there's already a beast in an isolated castle you don't want to make the tale too dark, or the happy ending begins to feel implausible. And I suppose it made particular sense for Heart's Blood, because one of the main themes concerns facing your fears, so a dark, frightening mood lends itself to the theme.

And now you're going to think it's horror or something. Not so much. It's fantasy, romance, and historical fiction; in that order, I think. Maybe more romance than fantasy, but not enough that you would ever want to shelve it there. Heavens, no. For starters, fantasy readers don't like going into the romance section, whereas the reverse is not true. Romance is one of those things... any genre can have a pretty huge dose of it without necessarily offending its readership or moving it in the bookstore. Anywho.

As for the historical fiction, it's set in western Ireland, Connacht, in the twelfth century. Dang it, I started a new paragraph, but that's really all I have to say about that. Huh. I mean, I could say more about the period, but I don't really need to for my purposes, and I'd risk spoilers. So meh. You can read more about it (on the author's page, or elsewhere) after you finish the book.

I didn't like it quite as much as some of her other books, but that isn't saying much, as Daughter of the Forest and Wildwood Dancing are among my favorites. I'm not quite sure why I didn't like it as much. It was certainly well written and enjoyable. It just didn't have that extra something those two did, to flabbergast and amaze me. Maybe the themes and characters didn't speak to me as much? And yet, I did like and relate to them; the hero not as much as other characters, perhaps, maybe that's it. Maybe I stayed too busy thinking about the book instead of living it. I'm really not sure. It was very good. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if other readers fell in love with it.

Fire

Fire by Kristin Cashore
Read: 10/31/09-11/1/09
LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Fantasy, YA, Romance, Beauty, Family, Dysfunction, Sonderbook (click here for Sondy's review)

This is a companion to Graceling, and can be read before or after, although it seems to me one mystery in Graceling would be a touch easier to solve after reading Fire. The ease of solving that particular mystery isn't integral to the enjoyment of Graceling anyway.

They take place in the same world, but Fire is set in the Dells, which are separated by almost impassable mountains from the countries in Graceling, so the culture and world are rather different. Most importantly, instead of Gracelings, the Dells have monsters. "Monster" has a very specific meaning in this world. "It was their unusual coloration that identified them as monsters, because in every other physical particular they were like normal Dellian animals. They had the shape of Dellian horses, Dellian turtles, mountain lions, raptors, dragonflies, bears; but they were ranges of fuchsia, turquoise, bronze, iridescent green. A dappled gray horse in the Dells was a horse. A sunset orange horse was a monster." The herbiverous monsters, the mouse and rabbit monsters, are harmless; but the carniverous ones are much more dangerous than their animal counterparts. "They craved human flesh, and for the flesh of other monsters they were positively frantic." In addition, monsters are so beautiful that they have the power to stun and control the minds of those without the experience and training to resist them. Monsters come from monsters. They can breed with the non-monsters of their species, but the babies are always monsters.

The main character, Fire, is the last known remaining human monster (with bright hair and eyes), with all of the baggage that suggests. She may be gorgeous, but she has to deal with people loving her for that instead of for who she is, or wanting to possess her, or just out and out hating her for it. Monsters are a bigger threat and danger to her than to anyone else, since they're crazy for the flesh of other monsters. And she has to figure out how to deal with her power. Her first impulse is not to use it at all, because Fire's father was a monster--both in the Dellian sense of the word and in the more metaphorical sense. As you might guess, that's an important theme to the book.

As my sister pointed out in her review, there's quite a lot of casual sex in the book; not on camera, but still, be warned. While there certainly are some issues with that, and I think the consequences would sometimes be different than what Cashore portrays (affairs can actually be quite traumatic for those cheated on, something I almost forgot until I read Sondy's review, since it's not a side of things much explored in Fire), it makes some sense for the story, too, as the book concerns at least three bad fathers and the legacy they leave their children, including how their sons and daughters deal as they grow with love, sex and parenting children of their own. So, although not all of the extra-marital sex is portrayed as a Bad Thing, not all of it is portrayed as Good, either. And some of it is mixed, which fits with themes about the mixed nature of good and evil people, that none of them are all good or all bad (although some are certainly more evil than others!).

So with that caveat, Fire is, like Graceling, powerful, heart-breaking, beautiful, entertaining, thought-provoking and romantic. Enjoy!

“The city folk adorned themselves with even more monster trappings than the court folk, and with much less concern for the aesthetic integration of the whole. Feathers jammed randomly into buttonholes; jewelry, quite stunning really, necklaces and earrings made of monster shells, worn by a baker woman over her mixing bowl and covered in flour dust. A woman wearing a blue-violet wig from the fur of some silky monster beast, a rabbit or a dog, the hair short and uneven and sticking out in spikes. And the woman’s face underneath quite plain, the overall effect tending to an odd caricature of Fire herself; but still, there was no denying she had something lovely atop her head.”

A Live Coal in the Sea

A Live Coal In The Sea by Madeleine L'Engle
Read: 5/25/09-6/1/09
LibraryThing tags: Identity, Redemption, Grace, Family, Dysfunction, Suffering, SLOBS

Madeleine L'Engle was born in 1918 and this book was published in 1996, making her 78 years old at the time (or 77 more likely -- she was born late in the year, like me), and it shows -- in a good way. I have never before read a book that dealt with so much family melodrama, dysfunction, and pain in such a calm, level-headed, mature way. It was truly impressive. It's contemporary adult fiction by the way, a little rare for her. But unlike most contemporary adult non-genre fiction I've read, it's actually worth reading! It's easy to tell from what I've read of A Circle of Quiet and what I've heard about Madeleine L'Engle from other people that there are large autobiographical elements, although it's certainly fiction still. The wisdom and experience of her 77 years (or however many when she was actually writing it) permeate the pages. I noticed some of the reviewers on LibraryThing didn't like the ending, which irked me a bit, since I thought it was beautiful and the book would probably have become meaningless without it. I can sort of see why some people might not -- one element, or at least the foreshadowing and preparation for one element, seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. But in general it was masterfully done.

I loved the title. Don't read this part if you're a stickler about any kind of spoiler, because you don't discover the meaning of the title until 167 pages in. On the other hand, it is the title, it's from a fifteenth-century quotation, and if it were me, I probably would have placed the quotation as an epigraph at the very beginning of the book. But the process of discovery of the meaning of the book is certainly interesting too, so I can see why it's on page 167, and maybe you shouldn't read this. You decide; here it is, quoted from William Langland: "But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea." Isn't that beautiful?