The Unit

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Remarkably stunning portrait of life in a society where certain groups of people are considered dispensible to the world at large, and are harvested like a field for whatever they can offer.

Dorrit is a writer. She lives alone in her small house with her dog Jock. She walks on the beach, and reads, and writes, and is having a torrid love affair with a married man. Her life isn't perfect, but it's hers and makes her happy. Unfortunately, she is also turning 50, and in her society when you turn 50 as a woman (or 60 as a man) and are childless and without an important or caretaking job you become dispensible.

You are transferred to a unit where you'll have no worries for the rest of your brief life. You're provided with an apartment and plenty of amenities, such as a full gym, shopping centers where you never have to pay, movie theaters and art galleries. There's a library to find reading materials, and if you're an artist or writer, you'll recieve a studio or computer to work on your craft.

Most of the people in The Unit remind me of me. They're writers and artists and librarians, ladies who worked in a shoe store all their lives who kept their nose stuck in a book, and men who quietly worked a full career while writing in their spare time, their hearts broken too much to fall in love. They are people I would want to hang out with, and people I could love. They're people I could be.

The crisp briskness of the prose is startling in places, but rather amazing to read. The author doesn't coddle the reader, but forces them to face the harsh realities that a society which focuses on only tangilble contributions can create. I often had to stop reading, my eyes full of tears, because I was so affected by this novel. One night in bed, after reading about how Dorrit's lover Nils refused to write an affadavit stating that she was loved (because he would have to leave his wife - who he didn't love - and that would mean his child would grow up in a single parent home) I sobbed to my husband, making him assure me that he would write such an affadavit, stating that his love for me meant I should be saved. Yes, it truly got into my head.

And in a good way, I think, because it highlights the inherent value of the people that society sometimes puts in a corner. I feel this way sometimes as I'm not raising a child right now. People don't, on meeting me, know that I once had a child, and therefore I seem somehow less to them, somehow not connected. I have seen it in their eyes; that sense that I don't understand their life, couldn't understand, that I just don't have what makes life worthwhile. I feel pushed to the edge of conversations, where I politely smile and hope for the conversation to turn from babysitters and diapers to books or movies or somewhere I can contribute. I want to scream that there is more to life, sometimes, that there is more to them, and to please connect with me. Occasionally I'll bring up an experience from my brief time with my daughter Grace, but often that is more painful than staying silent.

The problem with staying silent is that you validate that trap of being seen as less, that trap which might lead you into a Unit, yourself.



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Bumped

Bumped by Megan McCafferty

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This interesting YA novel contemplates the lives of two twins in a society where almost no one who is over the age of 18 can become pregnant. When young wombs are marketable, and a baby can be traded for college tuition or plastic surgery (or cold hard cash by the parents of the womb-owner), what young woman wouldn't make the choice to "bump" and carry a baby as a paid surrogate? Melody, the adopted child of college professors has known for much of her life that she would be a paid surrogate, and her college professor parents have spent a majority of that time pushing her into pursuits that would raise her commodity - the price of her brand, or the fee she could command as a surrogate. Until one day, she recieves a message from a girl who is her identical twin sister.

Harmony has been raised in a religious compound which is a perversion of Amish and Hudderite groups. While they dress simply and work the land by hand, they also believe in marrying young girls by 13 so they can produce as many babies as possible for their community at large. The marriages are arranged by a council of church elders, and the girls step into their husband's bedrooms ill prepared - to say the least - for their new lives as wives.

There are some problems with this book, not the least of which is the lack of explanation for the disappearance of artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Why do the teens have to have sex together in order to procreate? They are even encouraged to take drugs to loosen up to have sex with strangers. This seems very odd to me and not like a natural progression of society at large.

I can buy the new technologies. I can accept that advertising campaigns and product placement have made it "cool" to be pregnant as a teen. I can even accept parents pushing their kids into it for money, after seeing parents push their kids into uniform to get Army recruitment bonuses, even during a bloody war in the Middle East, but I just can't believe that this new society which has so advanced the use of computers and messaging would completely abandon the science of reproduction when they've been struck with a virus that affects fertility. Maybe the YA audience the book is inteded for won't scratch their head at this one as much, but it really bothered me and dropped my rating stars because of it.





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Book Review - The Death List

The Death List by Paul Johnston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love books about writers. While I've never read anything by this Scottish author before, I grabbed the book while working at the Canmore library because it was about a mystery writer who gets caught up in the antics of a fan-turned-serial-killer. As a writer myself (okay, mostly a journalist and a wannabe author) I feel a connection with books about writers, and find them particularly fun.

The story takes place in London, and is full of fun (for me at least) slang and colloquialisms and bits of British culture. They don't detract from the story as happens sometimes, when you're trying to figure out what x means, but give it a nice richness that modern who-dun-its sometimes lack. I find it charming when oh my god - a character produces a gun!!! So shocking in England, the land of few handguns. We have very few here in Canada either, but growing up in the US gave me a jadedness about guns in crime novels that did make me laugh at this point, particularly at the shock of another character in seeing it.

I'll admit that I had the mystery accomplice figured out by a quarter of the way through the book, but that's not uncommon for me and didn't detract from the plotline either. It's rare for an author to put one over on me for very long, and I don't hold it against them. I did find the twists and turns in this book exciting and interesting, and it kept me up reading late into the night a couple of times, because I just had to know what happened next. While this book isn't anything intellecutally engaging, it's very, very entertaining.



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To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife

To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have mixed feelings about this book. I'm like the author in some ways; I work from home as a writer. I am the main "keeper" of our house. Unlike her, I don't have a cleaning woman and I wouldn't have a nanny/won't have one when we are blessed again with a child in our lives. There is something that kept me from connecting with her, though, and I got the feeling she was one of those hypocritical women I feel like you always have to watch out of the corner of your eye for the knife about to be tossed in your back. To be fair, she owns up to her own hypocrisy, admitting moments when she's been the one assisting with or wielding that knife, but that makes it even worse somehow, as though she's not ashamed of it's existance as I would be if that urge lurked inside of me.

The book begins as a sort of academic manifesto on the ways marriage - and in particular weddings - have changed over the last century or so. What once was a simple affair has become lavish, what was once an expected, tolerated committment has become rife with complicated comprimises and everyone-out-for-themselves-ness. It reads like a thesis, and if you're into reading those for pleasure, you'll appreciate the numerous quotes and historical references. Or you might get a little bored and drift.

The middle section reads as a memoir of the author's relationship with her nanny - or nannies, plural, as she went through several short term ones as well as her long term one while raising her twin boys from babyhood to pre-school age. Though she didn't work, and admits that she abandoned her writing for mothering, she marvels at how easily the nanny can do a job that exhausts her while the nanny is away. Interestingly, her nanny is also the mother of two small boys, and seems to take caretaking of children and homekeeping in stride, which is a cause for envy and stress to the author. I can understand feeling overwhelmed by the sight of your child reaching for the nanny instead of you, but when you've previously explained how you watched from a safe distance in the doorway while she earlier took care of your sick child, I find it hard to garner sympathy or any other emotion.

The last section flows from the effects of being orphaned by the deaths of her parents to the ways in which she balances her work with her motherhood, and here is where you see her claws, as she alternately puts down both working mothers and stay at home mothers.

I often see my friends struggle with the feeling that they just "can't win" - if they work they're a bad mommy, if they stay home they're a boring, bad person. While the overwhelming notion at the end of the book seems to be a glorification of her childhood and how happy a whole family is if only they have a homekeeper - male or female - in charge of making the house into a sanctuary, she equally seems to think Martha Stewart style lives are merely a fantasy rich women like to think about but not truly live. The only consensus I could draw is that the author thinks everyone should have either a mother or nanny to take care of them and their households their entire lives, but no one should ever take on this job themselves because it is demeaning, demoralizing and depressing. Unless you're being paid fairly and have your taxes and social security benefits paid by the rich chick you work for.

With all that said, the book is well-written, and the author has a turn of phrase which she admits in the afterword came to her in her bootcamp training writing at The New Yorker. I like The New Yorker, and its style, and that must be part of the appeal to me. I also found the beginning third of the book, discussing the evolution of the wedding and marriage to be enlightening, and wish that the rest of the time was spent discussing the ramifications of this on the modern woman rather than drifting into emotional memoir-ism.



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The Starter Wife

The Starter Wife by Gigi Levangie Grazer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Do you ever feel sorry for those poor, poor wives of rich men? You know, the ones who have so many awful appointments every day for getting their hair done and meeting with their personal trainers and decorators. It's so incredibly stressfull to have to look beautiful all the time. what responsibility they shoulder!



Okay, so it's pretty obvious that I don't have a lot of sympathy for their plight, and I think you kind of have to in order to read this book without rolling your eyes. The poor heroine gets dumped. And for Britney Spears no less! Yes, really, this author is all about the name dropping, which makes this book severely out of date to read just a few years after publication. The celeb couples mentioned aren't together any more, and no one thinks of Mel Gibson as a silent brooder any more. I kept reading because I thought it had to get better. There had to be an ah-hah moment where she realizes that real life is okay. But no. The "homeless" fella she falls for turns out to be a billionaire, of course.



Maybe you're better at suspending disbelief than I am, and maybe you do truly think that rich women have a tough lifestyle. If so, you'll probably relate to the intrepid former children's book author and current Wife-Of who leads this story. Or maybe you'll just cringe when she has to move out of her McMansion and stay at her best friend's Malibu vacation home when her marriage ends. Maybe you'll think indulging in pink diamond earrings is what you'd do right after a divorce. Maybe your ex would also date a famous pop star.



Maybe I would have liked this better if it was more recent. Or if I found it remotely relatable. Or if the author wasn't a cliche dropping wife-of herself (being married to producer Brian Grazer). Heck, maybe he left her once for a pop star and this is her own work of agony, who knows? But I'd skip it if I were you. Spend the time reading about people who mean something. Anything.



Or, if you want a book with a wealthy protagonist that *does* get to you, is relatable and is fascinating to read about, try "The Secret Lives of Husbands and Wives" by Josie Brown - one of my favourite reads this year.



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The Secret Life Of CeeCee Wilkes

The Secret Life Of CeeCee Wilkes by Diane Chamberlain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Many of the books I've picked up lately have been on themes of secrets and identity, and though this was a book club selection and therefore not my choice, it fit right into the current direction my reading had been headed.



CeeCee Wilkes is a teenage girl, living on her own, surviving as a waitress with a roommate who shares her single bedroom in a rooming house. A child of the 60s and 70s, she has lost her mother and never knew her father, and is adrift in the world when she is found by Tim, a handsome and charismatic graduate student whose motives are not wholly genuine, but whom CeeCee comes to love with her whole heart, and turns her world upside-down to hold onto.



At times I felt as though the character of CeeCee was a little contrived. Were girls really this naive in that era? Would they buy a story a guy gave them hook line and sinker, without ever checking a fact or even wondering if they should do so? While her naivete was crucial to the story, I feel as though the author perhaps initially wrote the story with CeeCee being perhaps 19, and was told there was no way a 19 year old would be this stupid; fix it. Instead of explaining the character's flaws, she chose to shave a few years off of her age, turning her into a minor. The problem with this is that there is no explanation of how she was emancipated from foster care before the age of 18, no explanation of how a waitress in a rooming house got a learners permit to drive with no parent around to be the supervising driver, no explanation of a lot of things that left me feeling a little bit like the author was trying to put one over on me.



The rest of the story, though, is genuine and interesting, including the struggle CeeCee goes through in her life to hide the person she used to be and justify the choices she has made in her life. We all have moments we wish we could forget, though they rarely are as pivitol in the person we become as CeeCee's are. Ineveitably, it all comes crashing down around her, and she has to face her past. The message behind it all seems to be one that love can overcome any obstacle, something I do agree with, and believe with ferocity. Overall, an interesting read with only a few trouble spots.



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Book Review - Single Wife

Single Wife by Nina Solomon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Grace's husband is prone to disappearing for short stints, so when he doesn't come home as expected, she doesn't think much of it. She is used to lying for him, and covering for him, and so she does so for a day. Then another. Then a week. Then another.

Her denial is thick enough that she can't even face the fact that people are seeing through her denial. That she continues to lie to her parents, to her friends, to herself, even when it's reached an absurd level. When do you say enough is enough? When do you admit that the lies you have been telling are more for yourself than for anyone you think you're helping or sparing?

Interesting story, though I was increasingly angry through the book with the inclusion of crochet as a theme without much knowledge or research done on the part of the writer or editors. What happened to fact checking, hm? Whoever wrote about "dropping a loop" here or there had heard a knitter talk and didn't understand that the term doesn't translate to crochet work. Also, if you work in chain stitch for hours, you don't end up with a four foot by two foot piece of crochet work. You end up with a very skinny rope.

While I liked the rest of the book, this had me so disconcerted that it dropped a full star from my rating.



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The Gathering

The Gathering by Anne Enright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Irish families, particularly large ones, are often rife with illicit secrets. I should know, I hail from one. An Irish family that is, not an illicit secret.

While the premise of this book is a good one that captured my interest and the nature of loss and family connections is explored in an intriguing way, through the wake of a brother lost too soon, the writing itself I found to be dry and a bit off-putting. Which may be why it took me three months, off and on, to finish this book.



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The Disappearance

The Disappearance by Bentley Little

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Horror novels are, to me, what trashy romance novels are to some women. They're my little bit of escapism in an ordinary day. What really lights my fire is a horror novelist who can tell a campy story with an articulate turn of phrase, which is why I love Bentley Little.

The Disappearance, as with all of his books, is satisfying in a spine-tingling, chilling way, with plenty of action and a relatable protagonist that you can root for with an honest heart.



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The Summerhouse

The Summerhouse by Jude Deveraux

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The title seemed fitting to take on as a vacation read, and so this was number two in my bag that was toted along on our trip north this year, tucked away to be read under the summer sunshine.

The Summerhouse is a light read about second chances. What would you do differently if you could have a "re-do" on the most pivotal time in your life? Could you choose a particular two weeks where your life could be altered for the better by a few different steps? And even if you could live a different life, would you trade what you have now, or who you are now, for a different you on a different path? Three friends who haven't seen one another in twenty years come together at a friend's summer house for a reunion and a run-in with a local psychic who gives them the opportunity to have a second shot at one short interval in their lives, and the choice to live the lives they have, or with the consequences of their hindsight-is-twenty-twenty choices.

This is a fun book, lighthearted, and an easy read.



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Everyone Is Beautiful

Everyone Is Beautiful by Katherine Center

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book had been on my to-read list on the library website for quite a while. I have over 100 books on there, like ripe, juicy cherries waiting to be plucked and enjoyed, and sometimes I forget why one is there. I couldn't remember when or why this one made it's way onto the list, which convinced me it'd been there too long and needed picking before it soured on the tree.

Oh, I was so glad I picked it.

Everyone is Beautiful is a story of women and how we view ourselves and one another. Have you ever made the dreadful mistake of asking a non-pregnant woman when she's due, or wondered why your gorgeous girlfriend is so hard on herself about her looks? Have you puzzled over why one friend chose a less-attractive mate or why your own mate chose you? Have you learned yet, to see the beauty in yourself that is yours to embrace not despite the flaws, but because your flaws make you real and human and beautiful on their face?

Protagonist Lanie has become lost in her family life. She cares for her husband who is chasing his own career dreams. She cares for her children, growing up in their own personalites despite her best efforts to corrall their little-boy wildness. She depends on her aging parents and the undependability of her two brothers. Her life is thrown into turmoil when she is moved across the country to a new city where she is unfamiliar with the parks, the streets, the other moms, and even with herself. In discovering where she fits into this new life, she finds a way to reinvent herself and come to terms with accepting herself as she is, even while bettering herself for her own happiness.

This is a lovely, enchanting read with one of the most poignant and "real" love stories involved that I've read in a long time. Marriage can be complicated and difficult, but choosing the love that you know can be monumentally rewarding, as the author points out when Lanie and her husband reconnect through their own growth as individuals. I recommend this book highly.



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Vanishing Acts

Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I recently grabbed this book from the library as I needed something to start just then. We had returned from vacation and I was out of reading material at the moment. Since this has been out for a few years, it was in at the library, and by a new favorite author of mine, so I decided to give it a go.

I wasn't disappointed. I only discovered Jodi Picoult recently (about two years ago), and have been reading back through many of her earlier novels. One of my favourite things about her writing is that, being based on relationships and interactions, it is fairly timeless.

Vanishing Acts focuses on missing persons cases and memory. Are we who we were "meant" to be, who we were constructed to be, or who we invented ourselves as? What is the most valid self; the self our parents imagined or that we grew into? It asks some questions about the nature of our lives that apply to everyone, whether they grew up in a stable household, suffered with a parent who wasn't always ideal, or perhaps even were taken away from their parents at a young age. The plot follows the plight of Andrew, who kidnapped his young daughter from an alcoholic custodial mother when she was barely more than a toddler, as the law catches up to him, his grown child, and his grandchild, who is now only slightly older than his daughter was when he ran with her.

Filled with emotional upheaval and courtroom intrigue, I wouldn't call this a "light" book by any means, but it isn't one you have to suffer through, either. There are plenty of light hearted and funny moments, from the making of "alternative" barbie dolls, (white trash barbie or voodoo ken anyone?) to the perils of living in a pepto-bismol tinted rental trailer, but with enough depth to the storyline and characters to satisfy the reader with an emotional give and take on par with some of the best books I've read.



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An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude

An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude by Ann Vanderhoof

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My good friend Jill recommended this book to me a while ago, and I had great plans for it. Since it was a Caribbean travel memoir, it had to be read in the summertime (so I wasn't too consumed with jealousy over the wonderful time the author was having) and preferably, it would be read on vacation.

This July finally fit the bill, and I toted An Embarrassment of Mangoes along with me on our northern camping vacation. While I was in the deep woods and the author and her husband were sailing on deep water, I still felt a kinship with them, based somewhat on my own experiences in the Carribean, and somewhat on my love of traveling with your spouse.

If you've ever wanted to leave your life behind and sail away to a tropical island where you can forget about work, stress, home ownership woes, and obligations to friends and family for a little while, you aren't alone. Ann Vanderhoof and her husband, publishing big-wigs from Toronto, felt similarly about their lives. They were tired of pollution, of a nine to five workday that got them home after dark, of Canadian cold and winter skies. They made great money but were searching for a different kind of richness in their life, which they discovered on a used sailboat and a squirreled-away savings account as they travelled together.

The book is peppered with enticing recipes, though most require items that are hard to find, if not impossibly expensive here in Canada. Still, it doesn't keep you from fantasizing about cooking your own fresh lobster and having fresh mango salsa on your plate. The book is bittersweet, and tells of their triumphs and pitfalls as first time sailors in a nostalgic memoir that takes you along their journey through the golden glow of memory, clearly seeing things as they do in their fondest thoughts of their trip. The writing style is concise, but with enough drama to keep you interested in their story. Overall, it is a perfect vacation book, best read under a bright sun on a drowsy, relaxed afternoon.



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Innocent As Sin

Innocent as Sin by Elizabeth Lowell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This was my third pick for vacation novels this year, and while the back cover and the first few lines of the first chapter intrigued me when I first picked it up, it didn't quite live up to my expectations.

Innocent as Sin is touted as a suspense novel, and it does open with a whodunit question - who killed the photographer? Unfortunately, from there it delves into the world of international banking with a different protagonist that is hard to get to know, not easy to like, and boring in her hobbies and reaction to threat and intimidation. I had to drag myself through the first three quarters of the book, waiting for the payoff of seeing the bad guy from the very first few lines of the book get his due. In retrospect, I should have put the book down. Unfortunately for me, I was on vacation at the time, and when you're camping and on your last book, it isn't so easy to toss it aside and head to the nearest bookstore or library for something fresh and new!

I found this book to drag a bit. Okay, a lot. I didn't feel compelled by the characters, I rooted for the bad guy at some points because I found the female protagonist so annoyingly boring. I wouldn't recommend it, but hey, you may have a different take; maybe I've just read so many great books this year that mediocre doesn't cut it any more!



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