Recommended: I lot of people adore this book with good reason. I’d suggest starting elsewhere with Willis; the books I’ve read by her are Bellwether (comedic, but tighter) and Passage (not so tight, more serious). Once you’re a devotee, and know whether you like her humor, pick this one up. And be prepared for a slow start.

First off, long silence due to finals, work, travel, other boring excuses. Onward. Short review, not much to say, been a few weeks since I read it.

I’ve tried to read this book a total of four times. The first three I got about thirty to fifty pages in before becoming frustrated and setting it aside (each time, intending to pick it back up). It finally ended up under my bathroom sink, languishing in solitude, until it came up as Calico Reaction’s book club selection. I decided to give it 100 pages this time.

And those 100 pages were a slog, I must admit. The character was confused, I was more confused, and the book seemed like a string of unconnected anecdotes and bizarre happenings. Luckily, on about page 96, Verity shows up. And she brings the plot with her.

I’ve read two of Connie Willis’ books previously, and if I hadn’t adored both of them I think I never would have finished this book. I’m glad I did. With the appearance of Verity and a sense of purpose and direction (still muddled, but now in an amusing, serves-the-story sort of way) I sank right into the voice and the madcap Victorian adventuring. I admit I still have very little idea of what happened to the bird stump and why, but by the end of the book I cared very little about the damn thing and its place in the story, and was far more concerned with the various romantic pairings history (and narrative) demanded, but I’m just a GIRL that way. In any case, I’m so woefully sloppy as a reader that if I figure things out ahead of time it’s a fair bet the mystery was incredibly obvious, so I’m generally used to being befuddled right up until the end. Willis explained things well enough at the conclusion to at least give me the illusion of understanding what the hell had been going on for four hundred or so pages, so I was satisfied.

It’s also worth noting that, unlike Calico Reaction, I love the Victorian era, which perhaps explains MY ambivalence about steampunk (I’m picky; also, I see way too much of it). I love the strict social code and all the ways it was exploited, contorted, and ignored to suit the situation. Part of this is my fascination with “social vocabulary,” which is a topic I won’t get into now. Anyhow, I’m not normally one for comedic books, but with the addition of a destination and trajectory this was right up my alley, and I do adore dogs and cats, so there’s that.

But really, and I don’t mean to harp on the same thing over and over, there’s no excuse for those first hundred pages. Unless you absolutely adore the wandering, purposeless humor from the start, and are willing to put up with utter confusion, they’re very difficult to get through. If I hadn’t known and trusted the author I would have abandoned it a fourth time, and that would have been a shame.

You can find my January list here, at my personal journal.

22. Ice by Sarah Beth Durst
23. Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell
24. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
25. Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca
26. The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan
27. If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson
28. Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier
29. Monster by Walter Dean Myers
30. Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon
31. Crashed by Robin Wasserman
31. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
32. Kindred by Octavia Butler
33. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
34. Give Up the Ghost by Megan Crewe
35. Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs

Genre breakdown:

YA contemporary fantasy/supernatural (5), YA realistic/lit fic (2), YA science fiction (1), YA Fantasy (1), Nonfiction (1), Contemporary/urban fantasy (1), Science fiction (1), Realistic/lit fic (2), Misc (1)

Now, the science fiction title is Kindred, and that classification is borderline. I put it in there mostly because it does have a speculative element and it’s Butler, who I think of as a science fiction writer regardless of what’s actually on the page. The Lovely Bones has a supernatural element but I listed it as lit/realistic because I think that’s how it’s been marketed and viewed. And Fingersmith is historical fiction, which may deserve its own category.

I have to admit I am burned out on YA. I’ve been reading tons of it because a) it’s fun, and b) it’s what I’m writing at the moment, but I’m probably going to take a break from it for a while. I have a few YA books on my TBR pile, but once those are through I’m going to focus on other things. I’m also obviously behind on some of my “reading variety” goals, so I’d like to wrangle my list a bit more in line with that.

Stand-out favorites for this month were The Lovely Bones, in part because I expected to hate it; Fingersmith, which is the book Wilkie Collins would write if he was alive today writing about the Victorian era and also a lesbian; Kindred, because yaknow, Octavia Butler, how can you go wrong; and The Demon’s Lexicon, because it was just so much damn fun.

And now, to work.

Title: Give Up the Ghost
Author: Megan Crewe
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Year Published: 2009

Recommended: Yes, with the usual caveats about YA. This is a very high-school-centric book, so if you’re not keen to return to those dingy halls, you probably want to skip it, but otherwise it’s a short, interesting read with a sense of humor but a serious handling of some difficult issues.

Spoilers: Yes, in fairly general terms, but specific enough that if you avoid spoilers religiously, you shouldn’t go beyond the first two paragraphs (after the jump).

This conversation (mostly) occurred yesterday:

Me: So I read this book today–
Caroline: FREAK
Me: –that’s about this girl who can talk to ghosts, so she uses them as spies to get blackmail material, because admit it, that’s what you do with powers like that.
Caroline: I’d use them to get peoples’ pin numbers.
Me: I’m glad that I’m your friend, and also that you can’t actual talk to ghosts.
Caroline: *looks mysterious*

Ahem. So, I think the premise of this novel is kind of brilliant, because I may be a bad person but I would totally use ghosts as spies. Granted, Cass has the excuse of revenge—her best friend turned on her in middle school, and Cass has been a social outcast ever since. Her blackmail is as much a defense mechanism as anything else, since it’s the one thing that gives her power over her tormentors.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect heading into this story. I knew two things about it: that it involved that basic premise, and that it didn’t involve a romance. I was somewhat surprised at how “quiet” this story was; the ghosts weren’t used to make any huge revelations or uncover any mysteries or scandals (at least, not that were essential to the story). Instead, they provided a backdrop to a story about death, grieving, and what it takes to move on.

Cass’ sister, Paige, is the first ghost she was able to see; she drowned on the night of her Junior Prom, and has been hanging around since. In Crewe’s world, ghosts aren’t good at remembering things that happen after they die, and Paige is stuck as a wounded, invisible girl who can’t ever truly come to terms with the fact that her family can’t see her or hear her. She’ll always be sixteen, and now Cass is growing up past her, having the experiences she never had. If there was a major flaw I found with Give up the Ghost, it was in this storyline, or rather, in its prominence. I found Paige’s story to be the most compelling thing in the book, in parallel with Cass’; both are isolated, “invisible” people in different ways. Cass has the ability to interact with the living but chooses to talk to the dead instead; Paige longs to be alive but is stuck with just Cass. I wished this storyline was given more focus, and I wished Paige was brought to “life” just a bit more: she bordered on the pathetic and whiny at times (and at others jumped right over the border and embraced it), which grated a bit more than I was willing to forgive. But at its heart, this was the most interesting and compelling relationship in the book—for me.

This is a fairly minor quibble, though, since the “A plot” was engaging as well. One of the most popular students at school, Tim, asks Cass to talk to his dead mother for him (after guessing or hoping at her secret). Tim is lost in his grief and endangering himself in the process, and Cass is drawn reluctantly into the beginnings of a friendship with him. Being in relationship with him means that she can’t just stand by and be her usual aloof self—she has to figure out how to help him, and act like a living person herself. Along the way, she muddles through some messy lessons about high school, life, revenge, and grudges, none of which are neatly wrapped in a bow; there’s no final showdown, no teary reconciliation, just the untidy interactions of real people. I appreciated that in this book, though in another it might have seemed unsatisfying. I don’t necessarily read for a reflection of reality, but I think “lessons learned” are often too clear and sweet and obvious in YA, so this was refreshing.

I had heard that some people were bothered by the fact that no romance developed between Tim and Cass, and I admit that at first it seemed a bit artificial to never even hint at that. But by the time I got to the end, I had decided that romance would be artificial: neither of them is in a place where they can think about falling in love. Tim is too lost in grief, and Cass is still trying to figure out how to be in any sort of relationship other than “bitter, seething enmity” with someone who’s still breathing.

So, in conclusion, I liked this book, even if I didn’t always feel completely satisfied with it. Crewe definitely has room to write sequels, and I’d certainly give them a shot, but I don’t think this is a book that needs a sequel or even necessarily should have one. It’s an interesting little book that inspires a lot of thought, and leaves questions unanswered, and I’d prefer it stay that way.

For those that don’t know, BCS is an online magazine for secondary-world fantasy (exact guidelines here). It’s an SFWA-qualified market, which means that sales to BCS will count towards membership qualifications. So if you have something that suits, submit away!

Secondly, writing! I’m doing it. The last few months have been pretty dry on the writing front; I’ve spent a lot of time noodling with various projects, trying to figure out which one I want to work on next. And then I glanced back at my finished manuscript (following a very nice rejection), gasped, and frantically scribbled three pages of handwritten notes about things that NEEDED TO CHANGE RIGHT NOW. So, it’s not exactly forward progress, but it’s progress. The overhaul should be done within about a month (hopefully) and THEN I’ll have to decide what to work on next.

Except, of course, that I’m going to be doing a brainstorming workshop thingamajig (ok, how awesome is it that spellcheck recognizes that as a word?), for which I need a synopsis of a project. I thought I’d decided which one, and then I started to actually work on it, and then I started to hate it. So now I’m back to poking at my infinity+1 novel ideas and hoping that one transforms into a bootiful butterfly sometime in the next few days. So, I’m looking at: an Urban Fantasy (with demons! and badass grandmothers! and a girl with blue hair [who dies]!), a YA small-town fantasy/murder mystery (with a boy mc! and high school drama! and bigotry!), a fantasy (with not-Spartans! and an evil empire who might actually be the good guys! and sex with gods!), or a YA werewolf novel (with liberal arts colleges! and feminism! and brooding!). There are others, but they’re not at the point where I could do anything but “this is the concept, and then things happen but I’m not sure what” as a synopsis.

Maybe I’ll roll a die for it.

Title: SKINNED and CRASHED
Author: Robin Wasserman
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Year Published: 2008 & 2009

Recommended: There is a lot of teenage stupidity (and adult stupidity) on display, which can get frustrating, and the books hit on one of my biggest pet peeves (religious zealotry with no balancing moderates), but they’re engaging stories, and I’m excited to see where the series goes. Because of the intense teenagerness (it’s a word), I don’t think non-YA readers would really get into these, but afficianados of the psuedo-genre should be safe giving these a shot.

Spoilers: Very general spoilers, nothing that I think would diminish the experience.

The basic premise: Lia Kahn is rich, beautiful, and popular. And then she dies. Her parents opt to have her mind uploaded into a mechanical body. The process is still fairly new, and most people seem to agree that she may have Lia’s memories, she may think she’s Lia, but she’s just a machine. In SKINNED, Lia struggles to come to terms with her transformation and tries to reclaim her old life. In CRASHED, Lia lives with other mechs, working to carve out a place in the world for people like her, who may not be people at all.

I read SKINNED just after reading THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX, which has a similar theme but a much “quieter” treatment of the subject; both books are largely about a psychological struggle, but in SKINNED, Lia and everyone else are well aware of what she is, and so there is much more overt and external conflict over her transformation than in Jenna’s case (which is a different situation in other respects, but I won’t get into that, you should just read the book). I think SKINNED suffered in comparison to JENNA FOX, but as similar as the subjects are I’m not sure it’s fair to compare them. Jenna struggles with what it means to be a particular individual, while Lia struggles with what it means to be a person at all. She muddles through the question convincingly, wavering from one side to the other.

When her friends drift away from her, Lia finds companionship in another outsider, a young man named Auden who insists that she is a person, albeit a very different sort of person than she used to be. But Lia isn’t convinced, and is both intrigued and repulsed by a very different young man, Jude, who leads a group of mechs who have embraced their new state of being and separated themselves from the “organics.” Opposing Jude are the Faithers, a group of religious zealots who think that mechs are abominations, not people at all, and should be destroyed. This is the element which caused me the most trouble. There is a slight nod to the fact that not all Faithers are crazy zealots, but none of them are ever shown, only discussed in the past-tense. The Faithers come off as a monolithic, cruel, bigoted, violent organization. I get annoyed enough when Christianity is depicted as a monolithic entity. In SKINNED, it’s religion in general that’s one big seething mass of evil.

CRASHED started to redeem itself in this regard, not by making the Faithers more nuanced (if anything, they got more cacklingly [also a real word] evil), but by acknowledging some of the similarities between Jude’s mechs and the organization they oppose. Fortunately, Lia’s journey to a new identity as Lia-the-mech is engaging enough to (mostly) overcome this issue. There are real and sometimes tragic consequences to her actions, and most of the essential characters are bundles of contradictions, insecurities, convictions, and emotions that pull off the handy trick of being complicated enough to avoid stereotype while avoiding becoming so muddled that you can’t put your finger on who they are and how they’ll react to the situations Wasserman throws at them.

SKINNED and CRASHED both focus on Lia’s psychological struggles, but CRASHED takes her struggle and puts it in the context of the external, societal struggle with how the orgs should treat the mechs and how the mechs should protect themselves from the orgs. The extra layer of action and meaning keeps the momentum going on and prevents the series from retreading the same ground. In short, YA-friendly SF readers and SF-friendly YA readers should give these a shot. Surgeon General’s Warning: Contains angst.

Title: The Demon’s Lexicon
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year Published: 2009

Recommended: Most certainly, to those who can stand a little angst and are interested in the concept/genre. If you don’t tend to like urban fantasy (or, to a lesser extent, YA) this isn’t going to be the book to astound all genre expectations, but I don’t see that as a problem. I’ve heard enough about “transcending the genre” to last a lifetime.

Spoilers: I avoid them, I really do I swear. Mostly. I’m bad at this, aren’t I? But I won’t give away the ending.

I think perhaps I should surrender myself to the fact that whatever else I read in between, it’s the YA that I want to review, or at least that I feel most qualified to comment on.

The Demon’s Lexicon has been buzzing around my brain for a while, annoying me into reading it. I heard about it ages ago, before it actually came out, and then I started to see its eye-searing cover (oh god the colors oh god) at the book store. (There will apparently be a new cover released, which while still not my cup of tea at least looks like it hasn’t been stained by the guts of evil clowns.) Then I wandered over to the author’s blog, and found her sense of humor right up my alley, chuckled my way through some of her reviews (which contributed no little amount to my insane library stack) and finally succumbed and put the Demon’s Lexicon on hold at Ye Olde Splorg.*

The basic premise: Nick travels around with his older brother Alan and his mother. Dear old mum, who hates and fears Nick, used to be a human-sacrificing, demon-summoning magician, and now the trio are on the run from a bunch of other magicians, who like to kill people and cause lots of property damage. Meanwhile, the fairly innocent Mae and Jamie are looking for help after Jaime has been marked by a demon, priming him for possession. They go to Nick and Alan for help just as a magician shows up, and what with the dead body on the floor and all it’s a bit hard for the boys to pretend they have no idea what Mae and Jaime are talking about. Cue hijinks.

Apologies for being more blather-y than usual, it’s the schoolwork.

Nick is a bad-boy, unlovable and violent. Alan is a sensitive sort, an academic, but with great aim and the usual demon-hunting arsenal. The book is entirely from Nick’s perspective, which sometimes worked and sometimes drove me up the wall. Nick, you see, is full of angst. Sometimes, that angst made me, in turn, angst for him, and those times it worked. I like angsting with characters, I admit. I relish a good brood. But other times, Nick’s unpleasantness was just too much to stomach or sympathize with, and I spent a goodly amount of time wishing we could hop to someone else’s head.

Nick is unpleasant enough that despite the hints of possible romances, I rather pitied anyone who tried to get involved with him. I figured that Nick had some secrets, things even he didn’t know about himself, and while I didn’t put the pieces together precisely by the end, I was pretty close. This revelation, which I will not spoil I swear I’m trying so hard, is very well done, with well-detailed hints woven into the worldbuilding, but ultimately it just made me want even more to leave Nick behind and follow some of the other characters. Which I think is actually happening in the next book.

I was constantly grateful for the three non-viewpoint main characters, Alan, Mae, and Jamie, who all managed to alleviate Nick’s assholery in various ways. Alan, the self-sacrificing older brother, has some major secrets and an infuriating (to Nick) tendency to be nice to people, and put himself in danger for them. This tendency is why Mae (who flits between the brothers romantically, and will hopefully get some fun out of Bad Boy Nick and then do the smart thing and fall for Not a Jackass Alan) and Jamie (who is adorable and awkward and panics and needs a smexy boy of his own in the next book because it’s not fair that Mae gets all the attention) end up as semi-permanent fixtures in Nick and Alan’s household. The three have great chemistry with each other, and even though the brother-sister pair don’t exactly get along with Nick (and he despises them), they have some great exchanges with him. Poor Jamie keeps getting hauled along on Nick’s team whenever Nick and Mae are on the outs, to amusing results.

One of the impressive things about this book is the world-building. The rules of magic and demons and so on were intricate, consistent, and set up perfectly so that the surprises at the end flowed naturally from the world. I always appreciate that in a story. The magicians, the “Goblin Market,” and all the various bit characters had their place, and there was only one bit that seemed like a glaring set-up for future plotlines without any real current relevance (a character was included whose impact on the story was itsy bitsy in proportion to the attention spent on her. She’s on the cover of the next book, so obviously she’ll be important later, but this sort of thing often seems off to me). The villains had lovely, normal names like Gerald, and yet were properly frightening, and even if the demons themselves didn’t inspire me overmuch, everything around them, from summoning them and containing them to using their power to cast spells, was great fun.

This is the sort of book that inspires fangirlish devotion (not from ME, just in GENERAL, I most certainly do not fangirl thank you very much, don’tyoudaresayanythinghelen). The potential for romantic pairings, the bad boy versus the sensitive soul, etc. In my usual contrary way, that makes me want to dislike this book, but I can’t. It’s fun, it’s well-written, the worldbuilding is just unique enough to make it stand out from the pack. With the caveat of the angst, it’s easy to recommend this to anyone with an enjoyment of the genre.

*The Seattle Public Library’s website is spl.org, and I have never been able to think of it as anything but “splorg.”

Title: ICE

Author: Sarah Beth Durst

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Year Published: 2009

Recommended: This is difficult. I had some big problems with this book that kept me from enjoying it, but if those things don’t bother you, it’s otherwise an engaging read. And the only way to explain those problems is through some spoilers.

Spoilers: Er, yes. Quite a few. Although as with Ash, knowledge of the source tale pretty much makes ‘spoilers’ irrelevent, since it follows the basics pretty closely (curse, trolls, etc).

I only finished this book last night, so I don’t have a great deal of perspective on it, but I wanted to get everything down while it’s fresh in my mind. When I was a wee lass, one of my favorite movies was The Polar Bear King, which is an adaptation of the same fairy tale ICE is based on. A princess is wed to a polar bear who becomes a man at night, but because of the nature of his curse she can never see his face. When she disobeys this command, he is whisked away from her to wed a troll princess, and she must rescue him. The fairy tale is in turn a version of the Psyche myth, which always appealed to me because in the end, the princess rescues the prince, even if it was her mistake that got him into trouble in the first place–but really, if she hadn’t broken the rules, she wouldn’t have been able to break the curse either.

In ICE, Cassie’s mother is supposedly dead, but her grandmother tells a story about the daughter of the north wind, and there’s something complicated about a curse and reasons for refusal to marry the polar bear, and promising her daughter, and being kidnapped and taken to a troll castle, etc. It’s been a while since I read the actual fairy tale, and the compressed version presented in ICE never stuck with me, so I’m still not sure quite what was going on. But the idea is that Cassie’s now supposed to marry the polar bear, and since she lives in the arctic at a research station it’s pretty easy for him to show up to claim her. She agrees to marry him if he will rescue her mother from the trolls, because extortion is the best beginning to any healthy relationship.

I didn’t have much of a problem with this set-up. I figured they’d eventually fall in love; what I didn’t understand is why it had to be Cassie that married him, and why Bear was so in love with her from the beginning, and expected her to love him in return. He bargains with her, agreeing to answer a question for every day she stays with him in his castle. She ends up staying for months instead, hanging out with this mystical polar bear, never mind that she left the research station without telling any one and hasn’t sent word back, so they basically think she’s dead. WHAT A CHARMER. On the other hand, despite Bear’s general over-devotion and the fact that I could never picture him as a bear (he just didn’t strike me as bear-like in some fundamental way), their growing friendship was fun and mostly believable.

Now, apart from the personality issues with Cassie, I started to have real problems logistically when Bear explains what he is. He is the spirit responsible for taking care of the souls of polar bears; there are such spirits for all species, sometimes many spirits for a single species, and newborns aren’t given souls unless they’re around to do it. There are a finite number of souls, though they can be put into any species, so one creature most die in order for another to live. While this is not all that unusual a spiritual belief, making it reality in a story that also involves arctic research stations and satellites and GPS has me scratching my head and wondering if there are statistics on the total number of living things in the world and whether it’s increased over time. In a purely magical setting, it wouldn’t have been a problem. In this modern blend of science and magic, it was extremely distracting.

Eventually, Cassie goes home and meets her mother for the first time in a sequence which was wonderful and over far too quickly. She’s never met her mother, and the blend of longing and fear and awkwardness was great. I wished a lot more of the book could be spent grappling with that relationship, but after a week at home Cassie sneaks away again to continue hanging out with Bear, who she’s now in love with and starts to have sex with. So far, so good: their romance was mostly off-stage, but sweet (if you can forget that he blackmailed her into marriage, that is). But right here is where the book took a sharp turn and left me by the roadside. Bear, with his magical matter-manipulating powers, “fixes” the chemical imbalance Cassie’s birth control creates in her body (without telling her or asking her), and gets her pregnant. This is passed off as okay because a) he really, really wants kids, b) he told her when he married her that she was expected to bear his children (which makes the whole setup creepier, imho), and c) he claims he didn’t know she had altered herself intentionally. Cassie immediately feels betrayed and asks that he undo it. He refuses, saying that this was the purpose of the marriage all along and he’s not about to kill his child (who, according to the mythology, does not have a soul yet).

And all of a sudden I’m imagining being out in the middle of nowhere with a mate so powerful he could kill me with a touch, when my survival depends entirely on him, who decides that I should have a child without consulting me and then blocks my ability to end my pregnancy. Abortion debate aside, this level of control is scary. It’s not romantic. It’s not okay. And agreeing to have kids at some point in the future (under duress) does not sign over the control of your body to someone else.

Add to this the fact that Bear just stated, flat out, that he wants her for her baby-producing capabilities; consider that he’s been “in love” with her from the moment he came for her, and I cease to be able to see this as a sweet romance, an uncomplicated story that I can fall into. These are Serious Issues. This is trust, and control, and personal agency, and power.

At least Cassie was upset. This is the impetus to look at her husband’s face at night, rather than being goaded by her family as in the source tale. The weird thing is that I can’t remember Bear specifically warning her not to look; he asks her not to turn around once when he’s in human form behind her, and they always make love in the dark, but he doesn’t lay out the prohibition and the fairy tale is so muddled in the book that I can’t remember if it stated that he’d have to go marry the troll princess if she did this.

Anyway, so he’s off to the troll castle, and Cassie has to go rescue him. Throughout her journey, the constant theme is other people trying to control her reproductive destiny. They don’t want her to risk the baby. They go so far as to restrain her and keep her captive for MONTHS so that she’ll have that baby safely and not cause any trouble. At least this time, they’re presented as villains and obstacles. Cassie doesn’t think much about the pregnancy except as the reason she can’t go save Bear.

Predictably, she saves Bear and has the baby, having completely forgiven her husband and become willing to give up everything for her child. The problem with this isn’t that she decides she wants the baby. It’s that she has no other choice. Her active choice to NOT have a child was overridden; her attempts to decide her own fate, child and all, were overridden. I couldn’t look past that to the adventure, as much as I wanted to. If only Cassie had made a mistake with her birth control, or not been taking it at all, the fact that the issues of forced marriage and forced pregnancy were treated so lightly wouldn’t really have manifested.
On many levels, this is a wonderful story. The arctic setting, a lot of the magic, Cassie’s ingenuity in her mission to save Bear, much of the friendship/romance-building (particularly love when Cassie skates around the ice castle in socks), and the awkward reunion with Cassie’s mother were all great. But I just couldn’t sit back and enjoy the romance when all I could think was “run.”

I picked up most of these yesterday, and I finished the first one last night. I’ll keep you posted on the rest.

Title: THE MEMORY KEEPER’S DAUGHTER
Author: Kim Edwards
Publisher: Penguin
Year Published: 2006

Recommended: No. I know plenty of people love it, but I found very, very little to appreciate in this novel, and given its length (400 dense pages with obese paragraphs) it’s quite an investment for so little pay-off.

Spoilers: In the second-to-last paragraph, although I don’t think knowing some of the basics of the ending makes that much of a difference to the story.

As part of a personal challenge to myself, I am making an effort this year to read more literary/realistic fiction–somewhat loosely defined, as I’m including YA fiction that qualifies, where I normally keep YA in its own, separate category. I’m trying to keep the proportion at about 25%–one in four. I hit book number four and realized I didn’t have a lit fic book out from the library, so I did the rare shelf-scrounge and came up with something lent to my mother: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

I was predisposed to dislike this book, mainly because of the title. The ______’s Daughter or The ________’s Wife, etc, was used originally to title folk tales because the women had no names; their characters were defined by their relations, usually men. The popularity of this scheme is troubling to me for that reason; the central characters are not defined by themselves, but rather by the men (and sometimes women) in their lives. When’s the last time you saw The ________’s Son, or The _______’s Husband? I can’t think of a single such title, though I’m sure there are a few. Men define themselves. Women must be defined in relation to others.

But titles are often not within the control of the author, and even if they are I’m willing to cut a book some slack. There are some truly abysmal titles attached to some wonderful books out there. So I dove in.

The opening of the book is intense and gripping–mostly. Even knowing the eventual outcome of the night (revealed in the cover copy), I was engaged in the emotional and rational processes spinning through the minds of the two people involved in the central conspiracy; a father who recognizes that his daughter has Down Syndrome and orders her taken to an institution, telling his wife that the child was stillborn, and a nurse who can’t bear to leave the child in such a place and instead takes her to raise as her own child.

Even in these opening pages, though, I felt like I was drowning in details; time skips back and forth with unnecessary flashbacks, and descriptions are so dense and intricate that the thread of the story gets lost. This trend never lets up, to the point where I found myself skimming for the last 300 pages of the book; there’s simply too much on the page, which might be pretty but doesn’t move the story forward. Some small details, seemingly mundane, can indeed lend psychological depth to a story, but overall MKD just seems to be trying to hard, creating the illusion of depth but only achieving muddiness.

The story covers a full quarter-century, necessitating quite a bit of skipping around. I found the choices of what to summarize and what to detail very puzzling–such as a page to describe a decade-long battle for disability rights and equal education, and then a full chapter devoted to mundane daily tasks. The time jumps themselves were formatted oddly; a section would start with a year (such as 1988) on a page of its own, and then the first chapter would have a full date–March 13, 1988 or something of the sort. But chapter two in the 1988 section might be an entirely different year, and the reader won’t find out until someone’s death or divorce is mentioned in passing. When the central secret of the novel is finally revealed, the secret-keeper has been dead for a year, and all is resolved with tears and hugs and moving to France. The story seemed to all happen off-stage.

I only finished the book out of sheer stubbornness and my need to keep my 25% in tact. Otherwise, I probably would have stopped before the halfway mark. Perhaps around the time that I learned that the titular “Memory Keeper” is the brand-name of a camera. A camera which is only truly important as an annoying hobby. I felt all along the story was insisting that the photos had deep symbolic meaning, but I never bought it; they were lost in a sea of detail that was all, I’m sure, intended to be deeply meaningful, and in the end they were just pictures. And really? A brand-name? There’s no poetry in that.