notanotherbookreview

Much has been said about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrons and all of it has been unequivocably positive for it's just skirting "precious" charm and reconstruction of a place and a time at a nostalgic distance from our own. The book IS charming, the characters not just likable but admirable people of low pretension and large old-fashioned virtues. Now why this book makes me a bit uncomfortable. Everyone is basically good, even the German occupiers of bucolic Guernsey. Christian, the long-gone father of the orphaned little girl in the book, is a noble German, worthy of respect as a person. And the girl's mother, the mythic Mary McKenna, is a brave individualist. On the spot, she makes up the story about the neighbors meeting for the book society, when they were really having a festive dinner of contraband pig. Later for helping a Polish slave laborer, she ends up in a concentration camp, where she is killed because ...

I had never read Mary Karr before, though I'd heard The Liars' Club was good, because I'm not fond of memoirs or confessional writing generally unless the person had an amazing life.. When I found out LIT was about how Karr became a drunk and fought her way to recovery, I figured on giving the galley away. The whole 12 step thing has always seemed a tragic joke to me but then I heard Karr talk at Book Expo about the excruciating business of soul baring and why she had to do it--to set the record straight for her son. And she was funny talking about her pretensions as a poet newly married to another writer, an Ivy League blue-blood and about to start her own family. She congratulated herself on having escaped her mother's galloping insanity and triumphed over her soul destroying, hard scrabble childhood in Texas. Ahead of her was a life of love and achievement. But then, life brought her to her knees in more ways than one--she could have died and she had to learn to pray...

Lev Grossman's Magicians (published by Viking in August) is a truly inspired book. The author of Codex has constructed a highly believable alternative world of magic and sorcery. We see it through the eyes of Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant, though a bit neurotic, high achieving, nerd from Brooklyn. He finds himself in a familiar situation, competing for an opening in a highly selective institution of higher learning, except he's never heard of it before, doesn't know how he got there, and people disappear from the crowded exam room. Quentin, a sensitive bookish young man, is miserable enough in his personal life and sufficiently intrigued to accept his admission way off the Ivy League track. And the work is challenging, tedious and fascinating, as he learns to transform into animals and travel between dimensions of time. Just as difficult are his peers, the incredibly talented and personally reticent Alice, Penny, aggressive with his mohawk and street creed, and the enigmat...

Like a Jane Austen novel you really want to read, says the flap copy quote for this NY Times bestseller by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith. That would be a fine anti-intellectual sentiment but for those of us who, pardon me, actually liked dipping into a long-vanished world of manners and nuances, precious in the good sense of the word as rare and valuable. The zombies are a cheap distraction and a trivializing of Jane Austen's world. Except there is, I think, something more clever going on here besides a clever take-off precious in the pejorative sense. You get the idea that the zombies somehow represent the dark repressed underside of British culture--the savage cannibalisitc force of empire underneath this formal society. It's a strange virus. One bite turns a living person dead and then they develop a lust for munching brains but can be fooled into attacking a cauliflower. Very funny also to see an Elizabeth and Darcy who are trained martial arts warriors--Elizabeth vowe...