Book Review - The Sister Wife

The Sister Wife by Diane Noble
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Right off the top I'm going to confess something: I did not finish reading this book. Life is too short for boring books that also make you really angry. Reading the "whole thing" would not have changed my opinions on what happened early on in this book. It would only have prolonged my agony.

The Sister Wife is a tale of early Mormonism. I'm kind of fascinated by the history of the Moromons as well as their current lifestyles with plural marriage. It started with watching Big Love, progressed into memoirs of former Mormons who have left the church, and is now a guilty pleasure (Sister Wives) of reality tv and sensational novels. I thought this was going to be one of the latter.

It was not.

I have this pact I've made with myself. I require myself to put in at least 100 pages toward a book before I give up. I found myself dragging through the first 100 pages of this book. I just didn't care about the characters, I was bored by their experiences, I wasn't interested in their futures. I pressed on, because there have been times that once I gave a book a chance I wound up really enjoying it. Some books start slow. So I gave it 100 pages.

And when I got just past that part, I still was considering giving up on it, but then they put the one character I did like - Bronwyn, the nanny - in some peril. She's sort of a minor character but I had started to like her, so I kept reading. And it got kind of exciting. She had gone into pre-term labor below decks in a clipper ship during a horrible storm. And the baby was breach. I thought she might die. I thought they might not find a midwife aboard ship. I thought perhaps the baby was in danger. I read on.

And the midwife did all she could, and the situation was bleak. Then the leader of the mormons came in, and they prayed over her. And everyone could see the baby move into proper position and Bronwyn was better, because prayer fixes everything.

No. I threw the book across the room. It hit the wall - I'm not usually so mean to library books. But I was *livid*.

You want to know why? Because it's these kinds of books that encourage the tactless people who say things like "If you had prayed more, maybe your daughter would have lived." I lost my daughter. Praying wasn't going to fix her. It wasn't going to fix me. And people read garbage like this in fictional novels and then blame people for the loss of their children, because clearly if they'd been better, or prayed harder, or been higher in God's esteem, they and their child would have been fine.

No. It doesn't work that way.

I'm not saying I don't believe in the power of prayer, positive thoughts, or other influences in the universe, but I'm saying that this kind of writing pisses me off. It makes it look like some people have a hotline to Jesus, and if you're good enough he listens. If not, it's clearly your own fault.

Screw that, and screw this book. It did nothing but bore me, then tick me off more than I thought a book could.

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Book Review - The Waiting Child

The Waiting Child: How the Faith and Love of One Orphan Saved the Life of Another by Cindy Champnella
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are books that make you cry, and there are books that make you so angry at the world that you feel like throwing the book and storming off, and there are books that make you incredibly secure in your path in life. This book is all three, at least for me.

The Waiting Child is a memoir of adoption, one of many I've read along the path of our own adoption journey, and one of the most touching, as far as I was concerned. It may have been because it was about the adoption of an older child, rather than a baby, as we're adopting older as well. It may have been because Jaclyn - the small girl that they adopted - was so headstrong and had such a wonderfully strong personality. But I think really, what touched me the most, was her impatience.

Yes, really! Jaclyn was desperately impatient, once she had found a Mama to call her own, to bring "her baby" - Xiao Mei Mei, who she took care of at the orphanage - home, to find him a Mama and family to love him as well. I have dealt with more than a little impatience along our journey. Right now we're in a place where we have waited months - yes months! - for ONE small piece of paper to be signed at some beauracratic office in the US and returned to Canada. All our hopes and dreams and wishes for the future have been stalled because of one piece of paper sitting on some poor overworked social worker's desk. I'm sure he or she doesn't know how angry I get at the world because I have to wait. I'm sure they aren't being malicious, but it hurts just the same.

And so I related to Jaclyn. Oh, I related to her mom, too, and her whole family, but I understood Jaclyn somehow. I know what it's like to have the future of someone you love stuck in someone else's hands. I know how it feels to be frustrated by government. I know how unfair it can all feel sometimes.

Though this book is written by Jaclyn's adoptive mom, it is really Jaclyn's story - a little girl who was willing to move heaven and earth to get a little boy she loved a home. She was successful in the end; Xiao Mei Mei became her cousin, Lee, an all-American little boy who became vastly different from the quiet and beaten-down little orphan they all knew from China. It's a triumphant story, and a sad one. It made me want to rescue *all the children!* - something that happened to me similarly after our adoption training here.

The book is studded with photographs from the journey of adoption this family followed, which are touching and strike straight to the heart. It was hard for me to imagine that this little girl, in words and pictures - was now a teenager and almost an adult. Her story, however, is timeless and poignant.

If you're following your own adoption path, I think it's likely you'll love this book. In fact, if you have a heart at all, I think it's likely you'll like it quite a bit.

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Book Review - The 500

The 500 by Matthew Quirk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

No one has an equal shot in life. Some kids have it particularly tough. When your dad loses his business and turns to the life of a con man to try to keep a roof over your family's head, only to wind up in prison when you're still young. When your older brother follows in his footsteps and winds up so heartless he's only interested in using his little brother for what he can get out of him. When your mom dies of cancer when you're still young, and you don't have insurance to get her proper care, and she still leaves behind such a mountain of hospital bills that it seems like you'll never be able to scale that mountain. When you're smart and determined enough to work your way through Harvard law as a bartender only to get rejected by potential employers because of your checkered past.

When you've got all of that hanging over your head, is it any wonder that when someone comes along and promises you the good life that you've always wanted, you'd jump at the chance? You wouldn't investigate too closely the job you'll be doing or the man you'll be working for, because the promises are so incredibly dear - the high class job that gets you respect, the home in the nice neighbourhood, the beautiful, intelligent, upper-class girlfriend, the chance to rebuild a relationship with your dad by getting him a wished-for parole after 16 years in prison. You wouldn't worry about what goes on behind the curtain, until it reaches that point where you just can't ignore it any more.

And when it gets to be too much for your newly minted morality and you cross that powerful boss of yours? You'd better get ready to fight, and run. You'd better be ready to not trust anyone in your life and you'd better be ready to lose everything you had, and more.

The 500 refers to the 500 most powerful people in Washington, D.C. - the men who wield the power that actually runs the country. The ones with the dirtiest secrets and the most to lose, who have the power to bury you if you cross them. This book takes you on a full-throttle action ride through navigating through those people, and trying to come out the other side alive.

Big recommend - a fast read and a fun, nicely-paced adventure to lose yourself in.

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Book Review - Firefly Lane

Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I feel as if I've aged about oh, forty years while reading this book.

Firefly Lane is the story of two girls, best friends "no matter what" who meet in the mid-70's. They're 14, both troubled in their own ways, one the product of a traditional, happy home, one the product of a nonconformist woman of the 60's who cared more about drugs and having a great time than caring for her child. They meet when starting high school, a troubling time for most girls, and certainly that for both of them. Though they seem like unlikely friends at first - tough, cool, fashionable Tully who isn't afraid of anything and geeky, uncertain, less-mature Katie with her unruly brows and shy disposition - they soon discover that there couldn't be a more natural pairing.

I haven't had a friendship like Tully and Katie's in my life. I have had no one singular friend with me through all my journeys. But while reading this book? Honestly, I'm okay with that. Sure, I was jealous sometimes of having someone around who knew you that well, but at other times, it broke my heart how harshly they managed to skewer one another's hearts.

I haven't read a fiction book that tugged this hard on my heartstrings in a while. Oh, I've had books make me cry (which, to be honest, isn't so hard to do. I cry at commercials, cute puppies, and cat head-bonks too). But I haven't had them haunt me while I was reading them the way this book did. I felt every triumph, every heartbreak, every soaring emotion and crumbling defeat in their lives. It hurt me when they were angry with one another. It shattered me when the man one of them loved loved the other of them. It made me ache inside when I thought they would never be able to forgive one another.

This book is an emotional roller coaster. It is full of funny musical references - I was a little young for most of them to have affected me in quite the same ways, but remembered them from childhood and adolescence all the same - and ripe with cultural icons of every era from the 70's onward. It's an intimate look at the lives of women; how they intersect and affect one another, and the lives of mothers and daughters, and what a huge toll they can have on one another as well.

I loved this book. Sometimes I hated it for playing with my feelings, but mostly I loved it. I loved Katie, and Tully, and Johnny. Especially Johnny I think. You'll probably love it if you're anything like me.

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Book Review - Becoming Sister Wives

Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage by Kody Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a few "guilty pleasures" that have to do with reality tv, which my husband thinks is mind-numbing and should be banned. One of those pleasures is The Bachelor. The other, I'll admit it, is Sister Wives, a TLC production about a family from a polygamous Mormon sect in the western US. This book is purported to tell the history of that family and explain some of the background that the TV show does not.

The problem is, the book reads a lot less like a memoir than it does a therapy session where each member of the family is writing apologies and explanations to the others. There's a lot of "it's my fault my sister wife was mad at me for X though I didn't know it would make her mad at the time and gee I wish we could make up now". And there's some "I saw that this emotional reaction was stemming from X but there was nothing I could do to stop it, and I'm sorry that I let us all explode." And other stuff of that nature.

And when that's not going on, there's a lot of repetitiveness. I get it, the basis of the book is for each of the women to tell the story of their background, their relationships, and their launch to fame in their own words. Cool. But you know what? When they tell the same stories in only very slightly different ways I get bored. And I wonder what was wrong with their editor, that they couldn't scrape out some of the different versions of the same scene for something even slightly different and more interesting.

Those are the bad parts.

The good parts are that you can clearly hear the voices you are familiar with from the show in their written words. You learn a little bit more about their history. I've seen probably 75% of the shows that have aired in the series, and already knew about 50 - 60% of the material in the book. If you follow the show, you'll have the same issue. But that means that almost half or so is new stuff, and some of that gave me some insight into the family that had been severely lacking when I was watching the show. Yeah, I already knew about Christine's blow up over the Robyn's-wedding-dress issue, but didn't know she'd walked off set for three days. I already knew that they'd courted others in the past, but didn't know one was only 17 (Granted, Meri and Kody were young then, too!) since they are so against underage brides. So yeah, there's some dirt. There's some interesting stuff.

But you probably aren't going to be all that interested unless you're already a fan. There's not enough drama for an audience who isn't already invested in this story. It's okay for fans. It's a very fast, light read. I did enjoy it in more places than I didn't, I think, so if you are curious give it a go, but be prepared to skim sections that get slow.

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Book Review - Escape

Escape by Barbara Delinsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Makin' your way in the world today takes everything you got. Takin' a break from all your worries sure would help a lot. Wouldn't you like to get away? Sometimes you gotta go where everybody knows your name.... Emily needed a Cheers. I'm just sayin'. I kept singing the theme song to myself while I read the book.

From the outside, it looks like Emily has it all. She's got the gorgeous husband, the expensive home, the high-paying job at the top-notch law firm. But New York hasn't been kind to Emily. She feels lost and forgotten - don't we all sometimes? She realizes that she doesn't have one good friend she can turn to, one person who will understand her, one shoulder she can lean on. She actually hates her job, where she doesn't get to use her excellent skills as an attorney, instead having become a glorified data entry clerk, taking calls from potential clients who are having the most devastating time in their lives due to corporate negligence. She thinks her husband may be having an affair, and even her book group, that barely sees each other for an hour a month, isn't an escape, everyone busy on their phones or with their lives and never really connecting.

So Emily escapes to the small town she stayed in the summer between college and law school, drawn back by dreams of a coyote she saw in the woods once upon a time, by a long-neglected friendship with the one woman in her life as close as a sister, and by the lure of possibly seeing her first love, Jude, one more time.

I really enjoyed Escape. I think everyone has had a moment or two when they've wanted to just walk out of their job and not look back, get in their car and drive somewhere beautiful, where you don't have responsibilities or stress. I could relate to Emily and her struggles, her disappointments in life, and the way she managed to put the pieces back together again after walking away and shattering the image of a happy life.

This isn't high literature, but it's a departure from some Delinsky novels style wise, in that while it had romantic elements, the primary storyline of the book was a search for oneself. It isn't a heavy read, but there are definitely moments that make you contemplate your own life. I like books that make me think a bit, and I wasn't expecting this one to do that, but it certainly delivered on the consider-your-outcome angle.

I would also like to take a moment to say that Delinsky's sex scenes? Yeah, I actually like them. I usually skip them in books, honestly, because I find them either boring or distasteful (No, I'm not secretly an 11 year old prude, I just prefer doing to reading about - hah!). I found the ones in Escape, as I have in other Delinsky books - to be lovely, romantic, not over-the-top but still very sensual. I don't know how she does it, but she manages to create an incredible sensual atmosphere without being overly graphic or cliched.

Overall, this was a great late summer/early fall read. Much of it was read lounging on the deck on crisp afternoons with a cup of tea, and it was ridiculously perfect for that. An excellent "get away" book when you can't take off yourself.

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