notanotherbookreview

Sometimes I dip into a YA book and synch with teen yearnings for a different better life--and realize I'm an adult, a fact I can easily forget in an imaginative treasure like The Time-Traveling Fashionista by Bianca Turetsky (Little Brown and Co.) I have collected vintage clothes for decades and given them on to owners they better suit, so this is a book for me. And for girls and moms who love adventure, the mysteries of time and timeless design. Louise is a skinny 7th grader with braces on her teeth, frizzy hair, and weird parents--a Brit mom who boils food in vinegar a "Stepford" lawyer dad. Her life in Connecticut is made okay by her best friend, Brook, with whom she carefully navigates the awful indignities of Middle School. These include the inept boy, who somehow can't figure out how to ask her to the dance. The last time, she scurried away, embarrassed, wishing he'd get some social skills. But she's more interested in shoping for the perfect dress and f...

In The King's Arms is published by McWitty Press and won't be out until October. It's a fun read. This book manages to be light and funny, serious and passionate and yet is wise, witty and deep. Class and identity, Oxford intellectuals and the Holocaust, theater, tradition and assimiliation are all probed here in a tale of love at first sight that actually has a satisfying happy ending. Here goes. Lily Taub is a marvel. She's academically gifted, the beautiful and articulate daughter of Holocaust survivors. She grows up in NY and is raised never to take safety or her status in life for granted. But Lily, who grew up with the devastating stories of her parents' life in the death camps, yearns for great romance, fun and frivolity, as well as respect in the world beyond the insular community of survivors. When Oxford offers her a scholarship to study, she happily escapes, savoring her new status, while fearing it will somehow be taken away, because she is a Jew. At fir...

Tales of the Mer Family Onyx: Mermaid stories on land and under the sea Susan I. Weinstein NEW EDITION completely updated with illustrations Whether male or female, virtuous or amoral, mythical Mer creatures often reflect humankind’s ambivalence about nature.  Tales of The Mer Family Onyx  explores their worlds through the magical household of Neptune and Glendora, stewards of the seas. Like L. Frank Baum’s  Oz  and E. Nesbit’s  Five Children and It , this is a “family book” for adults and mixed age groups of children. Among the Onyx clan are toddler Ruby, tween boy-girl twins, teen beauties and Pinky, a mini mermaid. When Neptune challenges his children, they discover their limits in forbidden caves, worlds out of time and at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, where an Earth boy’s dream comes true. Susan I. Weinstein is a writer, playwright, and painter.  She is the author of 3 books, THE ANARCHIST'S GIRLFRIEND, PARADISE GARDENS and TALES OF THE MER FAMILY O...

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...