Three Books. . . Three Reviews

I think that most of my long time blog friends know that I love to read. In 2008 I even kept a reading log for the entire year because I had read an article on how few books the average person reads in a year and I knew that I was well above average in those statistics.

Turns out that I was right.

I read 35 books that year. If you want to read the post I did, listing each book I read along with remarks on each book you can go here.

I started to keep a log at the beginning of 2009 but for some weird reason I just couldn't get into reading much of anything last year.

I started quite a few books and just couldn't get interested enough in them to keep reading. This probably doesn't sound like a big deal to the rest of you but I consider it a problem. There are so many books I want to read, and being 52 I realize that I could be on limited time.

Geez, I sure hope not though.

I decided to get with the program this year. I've read three books that I can think of so far. It seems like I might be leaving one out but I guess if I have read a book in the last two months and can't even remember it, I must not have been too impressed.

Oh, did I make it clear that I'm going to give a few thoughts on each of the three books?

Well, I am. Here goes.

Handle With Care- Jodi Picoult

I know that a lot of women are huge Jodi Picoult fans. I was too.

At one time.

The first book of hers that I read was My Sister's Keeper. I really enjoyed it. I read a few other of her books after that first one, and unfortunately with each book I lost a bit more respect for her as an author.

I think that she's kind of a lazy writer.

Not that she doesn't do tons of research for each book. She does. I just think that she relies too heavily on textbook examples of the problems she writes about. And, because of that, she tends to write books that are too predictable, as well as way too contrived.
I also think that she uses the same literary devices over and over. If you read enough of her stuff, you will start to know how each book will go, simply because she did the same thing two books ago.

I'm not sure why i decided to read Handle With Care, feeling the way I do about her.

But I did. Sadly, I wasn't impressed this time either.

First off, I thought that the story fell together a little too conveniently. I won't give away too much, other than to say that almost the entire story hinges on an early event that in itself is utterly inconceivable.

The family goes on a vacation to Disney World.

They have a letter from a doctor explaining that their young daughter has a condition causing her bones to be extremely brittle and fragile. Obviously with a child so afflicted a letter of explanation would be extremely important to have with you at all times.

So what does the mother do, she tells her older daughter to be sure and grab the "ever so important" document to bring with them.
Why on earth doesn't the mother get it herself? Well, after all, they are in a hurry.

Uh huh.

Right.

Something that important. Something that could mean the difference between life and death. And the idiot mom leaves it to her pre-teen daughter to procure and bring it along.

Please.

Oh yeah. It gets even more far-fetched.

The dad is a cop.

Now of course Willow's parents, through an absolutely unbelievable chain of events, find themselves accused of child abuse, and have their children taken from them and put in protective custody. Now do the Florida cops do what you know they would do for a fellow officer of the law, no matter where he is from.

Nope.

Not in Jodi Picoult-land.

They treat this fellow cop as badly as they would the worst pedophile. Even, EVEN, after contacting his superior and being told that the daughter does indeed have the condition that the parents claim she has.

I also don't like how often Picoult likes to take good, healthy relationships and screw them up. I wouldn't mind if she had more realistic reasons for doing it, but she seems to do it just for the sake of ease of story telling. I don't believe for a minute that a woman could turn on one of her dearest and closest friends just because some lawyer mentions the possibility of being awarded a lot of money.

I also didn't like the way she told the story.

She had each character talking to the catalyst of the story, six year old Willow.
I found it a little disturbing that Willow's parents, as well as the other characters, would go into details of their sex lives and other messy little adult details while speaking to a child.
I also thought it made it obvious from the very start that Willow is not going to make it out of the story alive.

Another Picoult device by the way.

Picoult seems to really like including "The Forgotten Middle Type Child" in her books. Handle With Care is no exception. The older sister (I can't remember her name) was a typical Picoult "screwed up" sibling.

I won't say that I hated this book. Because I didn't. I just didn't find it the profound, earth-shaking, important book that I think she wanted it to be.

Next book:

Plainsong - Kent Haruf

I really don't get it.

This one comes with such high praise.

Go to Barnes and Noble, uh, dot-com that is.

look this one up,

read the praise heaped on it.

You would think that this book was another coming of such high literature as, say, To Kill A Mocking Bird.

Not EVEN close!

It was crude.

It was pointless.

It was endlessly wading through too many bad deeds, stupidity and just plain nastiness in exchange for way too small and brief of any kind of payoff.
I was halfway through this thing before anything even remotely good happened.
The sad thing is that the good parts, the human redemption, while way too small a part of the story, were really quite nice. The problem with this book though is that Haruf simply seems a lot more comfortable wallowing in the mud with his trashy, uncouth barely literate characters, than letting you spend quality time with the ones who are good and decent. I don't mind reading books that have unhappy themes. In fact ironically, the next book I will write about had plenty of those and I still really liked it.

I just think that if Haruf had spent more time showing the decent and rewarding side of his story and much less of the nasty, course, white trash elements, this book would have been much better and much more interesting.
For me, this book didn't come close to the ridiculous, EMPTY praise heaped on it.

Last but not least.

In fact the best of the three.

Shanghai Girls- Lisa See

I liked this one a lot.

It's funny because this one seems to me to be the book that "Plainsong" wanted to be. How interesting that through nothing more than sheer coincidence I happened to read them back to back.

The story does take a good long while to get to the happy parts.

The difference between it and the much lesser Plainsong, is that even the sad, unhappy and just plain frustrating parts of this book are so well written that you won't feel at all deprived.
The story concerns the life of two sisters. They are born into relative privilege in the Shang Hai area of China. The story follows them through their early years to mid life. They have many ups and downs, as well as several reversals of fortunes. Through it all, they not only endure but more often than not, thrive.

Like I said it is very well written.

The characters are quite complex and See does an excellent job of not only bringing them to life, but making you believe in them. Characters that you aren't at first meant to like, and for good reason, grow and change and develop into people that you come to understand and actually care about.

There is a lot of historical information folded into the story.

Not ever in a preachy or lecturey way either. It left me wanting to learn more about many aspects of, not only our own country, but that of China as well.
The only thing that I wasn't happy about is that the story is left hanging. I don't mind that too much, of course. I wish though that she would have given at least a hint that she plans to pick up the story at a later time.

I have decided to assume that she will. That will give me something to look forward to.

I hope.

Well, that is it for the three books I have read so far this year. I have a lot more that I plan to get to as soon as possible. I'll probably even write more reviews as I go along.

How about YOU?

Read anything GOOD lately?