The Book of Air and Shadows

I started reading The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber a couple days ago.  But I'm done.  I only got about forty pages into it.  It was alright, but it wasn't good and life is finite.

My first warning sign was in a blurb on the back which touted it as being better than The DaVinci Code.  I didn't really want to read anything that it would make sense to compare to The DaVinci Code.  But I started it anyway.  I'm not even 100% sure what it was about.  It started as a tale told by a man hiding out from some bad people, explaining how he got into the situation.  It's made clear an old, rare book was involved.

In the next chapter the perspective jumped to a man named Crosetti, a web manager for a rare book shop in Manhattan.  This was the chapter with the damning sentence, the one that made me set down the book for good.

"Crosetti was working on a particularly tricky bit of hypertext markup language at the same time as he was thinking these amusing thoughts."

No one on Earth says "hypertext markup language"!!!  It's HTML, and furthermore, it's not even used as much anymore.  And this book is only a couple years old.  The sentence just looks like the result of a non-computer-programming author googling "what language is the internet in?" or something.  Actually no, I just googled that question after typing it, and it doesn't produce any useful results.  But you get my point.  His non-expert status is so obvious, and it shouldn't be, when the character is meant to be a programmer.

I may run out to Borders tomorrow.  There's one in the area that's still open, I think.

Swamplandia!

The exclamation point is in the title of the book, but I think I would've put it there regardless.  I just finished Swamplandia! by Karen Russell yesterday morning.  It was excellent.

Ava Bigtree is thirteen.  She lives on an island in Florida where her family runs the Swamplandia! theme park.  Ava's a budding alligator wrestler, like her parents and brother, and her mom Hilola is the star of the diving show.  Ava and her brother Kiwi and sister Osceola (Ossie) have grown up on the island, home schooled, rarely on the mainland.  The tourists seem like they're part of a different culture to them.

Ava's mother's death from cancer starts out the book.  It leads to Ossie's obsession with ghosts and seances, and to Kiwi's fixation with giving up the struggling theme park and moving to the mainland.  Ava tries to deal with both of them, and with her father, Chief Bigtree, who refuses to recognize the financial trouble the family is in.

Kiwi leaves, and gets a job at a rival theme park on the mainland.  After that, every other chapter is from his point of view, as he learns to deal with his teenage mainland coworkers and tries to save money to help his family.

Then Chief Bigtree leaves, on a business trip.  Once Ava and Ossie are alone on the island, Ossie's stories of her ghost boyfriends grow more all-encompassing, and more frightening.

Ava's situation on the island once her and Ossie are alone makes up the bulk of the book, minus Kiwi's mainland chapters.  It's riveting and intense.  Sometimes I resented the intrusion of the chapters telling about Kiwi's job as a janitor, his misadventures and social problems.  But I think the book needs them.  To have the intensity of Ava's story unadulturated would've been rough.  This way, when I read it before bed, I could make sure to end on a Kiwi chapter, so I wouldn't be too scared.  (One night I didn't, and started to wonder if perhaps my boyfriend was himself a ghost.  You can't be too sure...)

Should you read it?  If it sounds at all appealing, yes.  Karen Russell is a fantastic author.  I can't wait for her next book.

Sunnyside

I finished Sunnyside by Glen David Gold a couple days ago.  I expected to love it, since I loved his first novel, Carter Beats The Devil.  But surprisingly, I didn't like it for the exact opposite reasons that I did like Carter.  Gold made Carter the Great seem like a real human being, fallible but likable and ultimately a good man.  Gold's treatment of his three protagonists in Sunnyside is a little cruel, I thought.  The bad things that happen to them seem like they're done for a larger narrative point being made, rather than being things that could actually happen which in a certain context have additional meaning.  Also, two out of the three men (an army private and Charlie Chaplin) are not good people.  By the end of the book, they have had little or no development into better human beings.  I didn't like spending time with them.

Finishing it was a slog, but I didn't hate it. Lee Duncan, the third protagonist, also an army private, was actually a character I liked.  He was kind of naive, and a little obsessed with fame, but he was interesting and I could care about him.

Oh yeah, and the author's note at the end of the book ends with a reference to climate change.  Climate change references depress me.  I do what I can.  I'm aware it's a problem.  Having it sprung on me in an unexpected place like that got on my nerves.  Maybe the note will make some people more aware, make them change their behavior.  Or maybe not.

Anyway, I'm done with it.  Should you read it?  I've read a lot of good reviews of it, but I'd stay stick with Carter and then wait for his next one.

Broken Glass Park

I read Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky last week.  It was translated from German, and is about a teenage girl, Sacha, whose family moved to Berlin from Russia.  Her mother's ex-husband, Vadim, murdered her mom and her mom's current boyfriend about a year before the beginning of the novel.  Sacha has two goals: to write a book about her mother's life, and to murder Vadim.

Vadim is currently in prison for the murder, but she makes plans and is ready to wait till he gets released.  When a local paper publishes a sympathetic interview with him, Sacha goes to the office to speak with the writer.  This leads to her introduction to the editor of the paper, a complicated man named Volker, and brings more changes into her life, some bad and some good.

Sacha and her brothers and sisters live in a tenement apartment, with a distant cousin as a guardian.  Sacha is intelligent, sharp and sarcastic, but clearly in pain, fighting the overwhelm and horror in her life.  I wish she could be friends with Doria, the protagonist of Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faiza Guene.  They seem like kindred spirits.  Doria is a teenaged Moroccan immigrant in a Paris tenement, living with her mother.  Her father has left them for a second wife back in Morocco, and she's dealing with that abandonment along with larger issues of racism, classism, and sexism.  Both girls are wounded but fighting, not accepting of their situations.

If I were eight (and for some reason these books were appropriate for eight-year-olds) I would totally have me and a friend pretend to be Sacha and Doria, and we'd go off and have adventures.