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Sister – Rosamund Lupton – 8/10

Current Affairs, Thriller September 7, 2011 Comments: 15

Dear Rosamund,

How dare you? I can’t even start this review with a quote, I’m so furious. Sister is excellent. Magnificent. Just enough tension to be gripping without being terrifying (see my reaction to Mice). Plenty of sister-love. Lots of London-love. A nice bit of transatlantic “I wasn’t there” guilt.

And then you went and RUINED IT with that wimp of an ending. A non-ending, if you will. A coda abbandonnata. You leave it up to the reader? Seriously? Who does that? You know who? Me. In my GCSE coursework. When I was 15. I studied Physics at uni so you should understand that I am the world’s worst creative writer. Worse than Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer and every bosom-heaving, bodice-ripping, flower-despoiling romance writer there ever was. Even J.K. Rowling knew that we were not having it left up to the reader as to whether Ron and Hermione got together and had unfortunately-tressed mini-magicians, OK, she told us! In a terrible prologue which turned me off the franchise altogether, but she told us.

Do you realise that the whole book doesn’t make sense if you don’t resolve the ending? Only one half of it does? The only half only does if the ending goes one way, not the other? Because *can’t rant about why because it would be a massive spoiler* – and therefore you haven’t failed to write an ending, you’ve just forgotten to put the last 5 pages in – or not realised the logical fallacy.

OK? Have I made myself heard? I DID NOT LIKE THIS ENDING BECAUSE IT IS NOT AN ENDING, YOU LEFT OFF FIVE PAGES.

Right, now I can write the love letter to this book that I wanted to write until I got to the last page and there wasn’t another one.

I love the double thread structure – one a letter from Beatrice (Bee) to younger sister Tess, who is the titular missing sibling; the other Bee recounting everything to someone else in a professional capacity. I only realised halfway through that the fact that Bee was telling everything to someone meant that the truth was definitely down one path. The double structure is a great way to make the plot both devastatingly personal and clinically precise.

I didn’t see the ending coming at all, you pulled the old one-two on me there (I’m not ashamed, PI novel writers do it to me all the time), of course one of the most sympathetic characters turns out to be the baddie, and there’s a chilling resolution rather than a neat one with handcuffs which starts out good until YOU FORGOT FIVE PAGES *calming down again*

London London London. Hyde Park in the snow. Those dreadful subterranean flats with slippery stairs in winter and lovely elderly landlords. The tube and the smell of “burned rubber sweat”; the abundance of daffodils and the torture of hayfever sufferers; the understaffed hospitals and the underclass of single mothers, alone in this huge city in which no one should be alone and yet everyone is. You got London.

Just like you got being a big sister. The fear of not being there. The need to be organised and ruthless and trade an exciting life for safety and comfort. Just like Rose in The Weird Sisters. The memories of time before there was a littler sibling, but not many of them.

There are lots of men in this novel, and I like it all the more for it. Unlike The Women, (the dreadful 2008 film) in which no men appear at all, here they’re everywhere. There’s Bea’s fiancé, quite drippy and annoying and prejudicial but we like him anyway. There DS Finborough, a much better policeman than DI Haines, who is the embodiment of the Peter principle. There are three doctors, kind and overworked, whose personal and professional integrities waxe and wane during this tale.

I would have given you 10/10 and put you right up there with my top books for the year, except for that slip I mentioned earlier.

Yours disappointedly and also euphorically,

Yvann

Other notes:

I seem to have read huge numbers of sister books recently – or maybe they stick with me because I have a Mini-Me. Maybe books about small children will resonate more when I have some. All the sister books I have read been excellent: The Weird Sisters, The Distance Between Us, The Thirteenth Tale, The Seamstress.

Reviews by other bloggers: Petrona, Fleur Fisher, S. Krishna, NPR, JoV at Bibliojunkie, Amused By Books, It’s A Crime

Oh and here is a picture:

Additional info:

Borrowed from the library.

Publisher: Piatnik (Little Brown Group), paperback, 358 pages.

Order this from Amazon*

* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards giveaways.

The Weird Sisters – Eleanor Brown – 10/10

Comfort Reading, Fluff August 24, 2011 Comments: 12

“There is no problem a library card can’t solve”

As I mentioned a few Sundays ago, I was lucky enough to win this direct from the author herself, who was kind enough to compliment my blog name. *fetches more tea before writing rest of review* The giveaway was in honour of the UK publication, so if you are in these fair isles, do keep your eyes peeled for this one – it’s a gem.

The Andreas Sisters (I keep wanting to write The Andrews Sisters) have reconvened at the family home to keep vigil by their cancer-stricken mother. Each sister is facing her own demons: Rose is consumed by the need for order and constancy and cannot face moving to England to be with her fiancé; Bianca has abandoned her big city dream, running from financial dishonesty; Cordelia, the free spirit, the drifter, has come home and is tight-lipped about her sudden nurturing habits.

As for Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, an extraordinary amount of hype came out of the USA for this. Unlike Goon Squad, I loved this. LOVED it. When I read “dead-tree” books and want to note down quotations, I tend to just take a photograph of the relevant page with my phone. For this one, I had 17 photos by the time I got to page 46 (I’ve shared some quotes below).

Admittedly, I have a thing for books about siblings, particularly sisters. Brown (perhaps unsurprisingly, as she is the youngest of three sisters) has captured the tugs of loyalty and love between three sisters perfectly:

“See, we love each other. We just don’t happen to like each other very much.”

“The history of this trinity is fractious – a constantly shifting dividing line, never equal, never equitable. Two against one, or three opposed, but never all together.”

The novel is written mostly in the first person plural, i.e. from the perspective of the common consciousness of the sisters, which also enables plenty of third-person omniscient. I’ve never run across this before; I found it a bit startling at first but got used to it, and actually it’s perfectly suited as a vehicle for this story. It’s only fair that sometimes they agree, sometimes it’s two telling tales on a third, and sometimes one takes the focus.

Of the three, I had most sympathy for Rose; as a control-freak older sister myself with a need to be needed, we had a lot in common. I found her a bit bossy and insensitive (no need to comment on whether that’s a similarity I might see in myself).

“It was a good thing, Rose invariably told herself… Who knows what kind of disarray they’d fall into without her?”

“She could have asked follow-up questions about our mother’s health, but she was more interested in the way Rose made it sound as if she were a vital part of the whole enterprise, when our parents had survived so long as a nation of two.”

Bianca and Cordelia (Bean and Cordy) are by no means bit parts – Bean is a brilliant, spirited, wicked woman with a sharp tongue and a wandering eye; Cordy is so dopey and ethereal and yet so loyal and beautifully happy. Other readers will love one of them more, depending on personalities. The parents don’t seem to be major characters, but we understand them well by the end, and how they shaped their daughters.

Brown is playful with the Shakespeare references (anyone with more than a passing knowledge of The Bard will enjoy spotting the provenance of each quote), and in fact with the literary environment in which the girls have been raised, recognising that life is not always as convenient as literature:

“Enthusiast, expert, obsessed – these words all thud hollow when faced with the sandstorm of Shakespeare in which we were raised. Sonnets were our nursery rhymes. The three of us were given advice and instructions in couplets.”

“Maybe she’d have a miscarriage. Heroines in novels were always having serendipitously timed miscarriages that saved them from having to make sticky decisions. And Cordy had always been awfully lucky.”

“Alone again. It seemed it was Just Her Luck to have finally found her Orlando, her perfect love, only to have him leave her. Shakespeare’s Rosalind had never had this kind of problem; she was too busy cross-dressing and frolicking around in forests with her servant. Rough life.”

I found Rose’s fiancé a bit drippy – I didn’t really understand what she saw in him (although there is one touching passage in which she pays tribute to needing someone to lean on herself), but kudos to him for one of the most romantic lines I’ve ever read:

“I wish you could see yourself through my eyes,” he said softly. “My vision is better.”

I could go on quoting – these quotes are all from the first 50 pages of the book. But save me the trouble and just go out and buy the book already.

Reviews from other bloggers: The Story Girl; Lifetime Reading Plan; Her Book Self (including author interview); You’ve GOTTA Read This; Devourer of Books; Simple Pleasures Books; Caribou’s Mom; Beth Fish Reads; She Is Too Fond of Books; Sophisticated Dorkiness and an article at NPR.

Additional info:

Copy won from author.

Publisher: HarperCollins, paperback, 353 pages.

Order this from Amazon*

* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards giveaways.

Douglas Preston – The Codex – 6/10

Fluff, Thriller January 4, 2011 Comments: 2

Summary: Mayan jungle adventure: three brothers must search the world for their father’s tomb, in which they will find their inheritance of his art collection. They’re not the only ones looking, either.

This little thriller depended hugely on the bizarre and wonderful characters it contained. The three brothers were particularly different: Philip – sartorially obsessed, sporting a briar pipe, and bristly and indignant when questioned; Vernon, the indecisive hippy; and Tom, the simple, stubborn, unflawed “good egg” and clever hero. There’s an evil private investigator (particularly evil) but he’s very clever. An insane jungle native becomes the focus of the last third of the novel and he is a brilliant creation and remarkably plausible.

As usual for a novel of this type, there are frequent and numerous brushes with death, which I tend to skim over these days. I found this novel to be much more character driven than most of the novels of this type that I read in 2010 (e.g. Hunt For Atlantis, The Kremlin Device, The Sky is Falling, A Faithful Spy and The Charlemagne Pursuit)

The Codex was very enjoyable and I would definitely recommend it to those who enjoy this sort of book.

Poppy Adams – The Behaviour of Moths – 6/10

Current Affairs December 28, 2010 Comments: 2

Summary: Ginny Stone awaits the return of her sister Vivien to their family home, four decades after she left it. Ginny has long been the sole inhabitant of the crumbling mansion and sole keeper of the family’s moth collection. We revisit the past through Ginny’s eyes: her emotionally absent lepidopterist father, from whom she inherits a profession; her emotionally abusive mother’s last days; a childhood accident and a young marriage. Vivien’s return will turn Ginny’s world, so carefully maintained for decades, upside-down.

Firstly, this provides a brief but efficient lay person’s introduction to lepidoptery (which is an excellent word).

Characters are thoughtfully examined – all have very different personalities and are well-represented. Clive is absent, confused, once brilliant but degrades to stumbling through middle-aged mediocrity. Maud was also once brilliant and beautiful, but she descends to drunken abuse. Ginny is calculated and calm, but not unfeeling. Her future was determined by her mother, unlike Vivien, who is as delicate and flighty as the moths of the title – gregarious, impulsive, fragile and yet terribly demanding. No one in the family recovers from Vivi’s demand that Ginny act as a surrogate mother for her.

The flashback structure works – it is linear and insertions are made at appropriate intervals (unlike in Nina Todd Has Gone). I did find the twist at the end rather strange – there appeared to be no reason for it beyond revenge for disturbed memories.

Certainly an engrossing read.

Reviews from other blogs: The Independent, The Bookseller, The Book Bag, Farm Lane Books, Book Snob

The Distance Between Us – Maggie O’Farrell – 9/10

Current Affairs October 15, 2010 1 Comment

Summary: Stella runs away from her life in London to work at a Scottish hotel. Jake survives a crowd crush in Hong Kong, finds himself in the wrong life in England, and goes in search of his father in Scotland. Stella’s sister Nina has never coped well without Stella, and Stella’s Italian-Scottish family isn’t thrilled about her new life choices either…

I loved this. The bond between the sisters was so strong and real, and O’Farrell seems to have the knack of coming up with seemingly insignificant anecdotes which touch on the core of what she’s trying to convey – in this case, the protectiveness of a bigger (though younger) sister, teenage rebellion, different attitudes to life and love and yet that unswerving loyalty to one another.

Like in The Hand That First Held Mine, we have Europeans living in Britain, learning to be bicultural, touches of another language thrown in haphazardly – which appeals to me so much because it’s exactly what I have lived. According to Wikipedia, a stint working in Hong Kong (which she draws on in this novel) is O’Farrell’s only “foreign” experience, so I wonder where she got this bilingual slant from. Anyway, I think it’s fabulous.

Also as in THTFHM, there was a sort of mystery to be solved, or an undisclosed event which was revealed towards the end and had a transformative effect on the characters’ lives, but finding it out wasn’t really the aim of the book, which was quite pleasant. The deed in question was pretty clearly signposted but I didn’t think that detracted from it.

The reason this doesn’t get 10/10 is because the ending was a bit disappointing and twee – too neatly wrapped up. But I guess that’s a matter of personal taste.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter – Kim Edwards – 7/10

Fluff July 30, 2010 Leave a comment

While this was historically interesting (to examine the attitudes towards Down’s Syndrome changing, and also the concept that a woman could be pregnant with twins and not know it) and certainly emotionally charged, I came away thinking it could have been better.

The story (no spoilers here – it’s all in the blurb) is of a doctor who delivers his own twins. The boy is born healthy, the girl has Down’s syndrome. This being 1964 and Down’s Syndrome being an early death sentence and an enormous hardship for families and/or an automatic committal to an institution (disclaimer: having zero experience of Down’s Syndrome, I don’t know how different things are now), he convinces a nurse to take her to an institution, and tells his wife that the girl died during birth. The novel then follows the parallel stories of the twins.

I thought the characters were well-moulded – the doctor and his wife, the nurse, and the two twins being the main characters here – they are credible yet flawed, and the time progression is managed convincingly. Not being familiar with Kentucky, I couldn’t really judge whether the landscape was faithfully represented, but there was certainly plenty of effort put into describing it accurately.

What I struggled with was the characters’ occasional strange choices. Why the wife became a travel agent and the doctor a photographer, when there was no previous inclination in those directions. As a result, the plot felt a little forced into unusual directions.

Entry at Powell’s Books (synopsis and reviews) here.