Apologize, Apologize! by Elizabeth Kelly

Apologize, Apologize!
by Elizabeth Kelly
Knopf Canada, 2009
320 pages

This is a book that, like the family it chronicles, is a little dysfunctional. It has a severely split personality and I felt quite strongly that it got away from the author around the 3/4 mark, but she did bring it back, in the end. It's possible I was so thrown by those sections because this is not a usual kind of read for me, but despite the fact that I was a little blindsided it felt a little formulaic, too, which is a very odd juxtaposition. I saw it coming but couldn't quite believe it when it happened.

See, the thing is, a book tends to have a certain tone. And as much as explicit foreshadowing can, the tone can set the stage for what comes; the reader knows that there will be something of a certain magnitude and a certain temperament down the road. Part of an author's job is managing these expectations, I think. What happened to me as I was reading this book was that I did hit the crisis of a certain magnitude, as I expected - it was heavily (but not heavy-handedly) foreshadowed, the tone and early plot very nearly demanded it - but then rather than maintaining the level, several other events of enormous magnitude and very different temperament happened, and they felt out of place, though I understood where Kelly was trying to go with them. We veer crazily from madcap family tragicomedy to a war zone to medical malpractice before we finally come back to our senses, rather than unfolding in a way that feels both logical and emotionally true. I ended up with whiplash.

Which is not to say that this book doesn't have it's excellent moments, and I read it very quickly, almost compulsively, and I liked it, in the end.

So, the summary: Collie (yes, named after the dog) is a first-person narrator, detachedly telling us about his early life and his loudly dysfunctional, incredibly wealthy, strangely endearing (most of them) family. He sees himself as the sane one, the normal one, but he loves all of them, even his emotionally and sometimes physically abusive mother (I didn't see anything likeable about her at all; she had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, which makes her the odd one out in the book) and he spends a lot of his time wanting to crawl into a hole to die of embarrassment, attempting to contain the damage, or trying to coax some sort of order out of the chaos. He's a very sympathetic narrator, and he doesn't spare himself. Dysfunction has made him who he is and he's benefited hugely from the wealth and profile of his family, but he's also very aware (and the reader more so) of just how destructive the dysfunction he grows up around is to everyone touched by it. It's not harmless, even if it is really funny a lot of the time.

One of the blurbs compares this to a Wes Anderson film, and while I try to take those with a grain of salt, I think that one is quite apt. The madcap antics of the eccentric characters that appear harmless on the surface, the underlying melancholy, the peaceful moments, the black humour, the slow unfolding of a tragedy that seems inevitable. That's the first part of the book and it holds up as a comparison. The rest of it not so much.

Collie is the most relatable character in the book, perhaps excluding the verbose, blustering but quietly tender Uncle Tom (acting as the family's live-in maid and servant, pigeon racer, alcoholic.) But getting back to my point that the dysfuction, while amusing, is not harmless: Collie is also incredibly dysfunctional in his own way. Because of the way he has grown up and the personality he has, he is a person whom things happen to; he is at the mercy of everyone around him. He is not forceful - almost religiously not forceful - and he doesn't hold convictions, and he doesn't have any follow-through either. He's a limp fish and while he doesn't ever ask for exoneration, it is not hard to imagine him saying "really, it all had to turn out like this."  And yet somehow I still liked him.

Tonally the book is uneven, but I did enjoy it for what it was, and I'm glad I read it. Mildly recommended to fans of contemporary dysfunctional family narratives (it's a whole genre!); you won't find it a difficult read, and it's got some lovely moments.

three for the price of one!

How about a few mini-reviews to get caught up on things? In two cases because I don't have a huge amount to say, and in one it's because nymeth already said it all and better. Actually, it's kind of that way with two of them. I will get to that.

So, it's been a good month for romance over here, with two really enjoyable romance stories being ingested in an incredibly short space of time. One was a full-length novel and I ate it up the way one eats potato chips: delicious while the bag lasts and then you kind of feel a little ill because of the speed with which it disappeared. The other was a novella and I read it in two days and loved it. And the third book, unrelated to romance at all, was kind of a flop, but kind of not.

The Spymaster's Lady
by Joanna Bourne
Berkley Sensation, 2008
384 pages

This was one of those romance novels that's been on my radar for a long time; I read a number of great reviews back when I was doing a lot more blog reading than I am able to do right now. My library has it as an eBook, and I needed something fast and light, so away I went.

And it was fast and light, and a great deal of fun. This book is well-written, and the humour is funny, the danger is real, and the chemistry between the mains is palpable. Actually, in this case, I felt like the chemistry was actually more exciting than the inevitable payoff, but because some of the other stuff was so enjoyable I didn't mind so much.

This is a book with multiple perspectives - we get the heroine's version, the hero's, and the villain's (there may be others, I can't remember and I should have taken better notes, but those are the three main ones.) They're each likable or rabidly dislikable in the appropriate ways. Annique is a French spy, on the run after a task gone wrong has seen her run afoul of both her own countrymen and the English during the Napoleonic Wars. Grey is an English spy who helps her escape a predicament, but determines to capture her himself and bring her back to London for England's gain. Of course, the course of true love and serious spy games never did run smooth.

The villain POV stuff is always a tricky one for me and it rarely works; here it didn't either, and I felt it added nothing, nor moved the plot along. The villain is a bit overdone overall, but over the top doesn't feel out of place in a romp like this. There were a few things that stretched credulity for me for some reason, but there was also a nice couple of twists and a satisfyingly happy ending.

The Governess Affair
by Courtney Milan
Courtney Milan, 2012
101 pages

It is possible that I didn't love The Spymaster's Lady quite as much as I might have because I chased it with this absolutely fantastic little nugget of romance writing. I am not sure this is the best romance story I've ever read - I am still very fond of some of Julia Quinn's books - but ... but it's really close. The writing sparkles and the story and characters - well, I'll point you at Ana's discussion of this piece, because even if she's coming at it from a very different angle from me, she's hit on why this is an excellent little piece.

It is a novella, so some of the character development seems a bit speedy - particularly the attraction between the two mains, Hugo and Serena. But within the conventions of the genre, Milan has written something that feels both plausible and sweet, working with the time period she has chosen (mid-1800s.) This story goes down really easily and yet makes one think, which is a lovely thing. Maybe it was just the length (I certainly don't think so) but I didn't end up feeling overstuffed at the end of this one despite the fact that I read it in less than 24 hours. In fact, I plan to dive right in to the first book in the Brothers Sinister series, to which The Governess Affair is a prequel. I'll be curious to see if Milan can pull off the full length as well as she's pulled off this novella. Really looking forward to it. Also, go read Ana's bit, serious. A feel-good story that made me feel happy after I'd read it.

Rooftoppers
by Katherine Rundell
Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2013
278 pages

Well, this was interesting. Again, I have Ana to thank for drawing this book to my attention, and while it didn't work out for me in the end, she kind of warned about that too. Interestingly, I think it maybe didn't work for me for different reasons. What happened to me was similar, though. Started with great promise, and then kind of lost steam. I loved the beginning, and the relationship that Sophie, our protagonist, has with her guardian, a scholar named Charles. It's charming and it's strangely believable, and if it's a bit over-the-top and a bit whimsical, I was on board.

Rundell has a proficiency with description and one-liners that is dynamite to read. Some of the language is beautiful and her writing is both funny and joyful, and that can usually carry a book for me. But. My problem is that Sophie is fixated, from the beginning, on something, to the point where nearly everything else is eclipsed. She recklessly endangers others she has grown to care about, and herself, in her quest, and this doesn't seem to have consequences. Maybe this is just a personal nitpick, but I don't find that sort of thing believable at all. In the end, it made me very lukewarm on a character I was otherwise disposed to adore. I'll read more Rundell because I think there's great potential here, and it is quite possible that middle-grade readers will enjoy this book more than I did.

Venetia by Georgette Heyer

Venetia
by Georgette Heyer (read by Richard Armitage)
Naxos AudioBooks, 2010 (originally published in 1958)
4 discs, abridged

Let us just be clear: I would far prefer to have read this unabridged than listen to it abridged, except that this Regency romance classic is narrated by King Thorin. So I let my standards slip a bit and chose to listen to the abridgement anyway.

And you know what? There were a few points where I think I missed out, and if I noticed I was missing out I'm sure there were more points where I missed out and didn't notice. That bugs me. But overall this abridgement works, and the narration, though weird to get used to at first (Richard Armitage does a good job with voices, but slightly less so with Venetia's voice) works really well, and the whole story is just a lot of fun.

I have never read Heyer. I would like to, but there is a lot I would like to read, and I can't remember when Venetia hit the top of the list as far as which Heyer I wanted to try first. Probably Aarti convinced me, because she made Venetia herself sound so fantastic. (Though it occurs to me too, re-reading Aarti's musings on this book, that perhaps I didn't miss so much in the abridgement, after all.)

Venetia Lanyon has led an incredibly sheltered life, by anyone's standards, for the first twenty-five years of her life. Her mother died when she was young, and her father closeted himself up and, by neglect, refused his children any emotional or practical support outside of feeding, sheltering, and clothing them. Venetia never went to London for a Season, and aside from being a bit wistful about the damage this has done to her prospects, she doesn't particularly feel the lack. Her elder brother is off in the army fighting Napoleon and her younger brother, whom she is close to, occupies himself with his studies, and Venetia manages the household, reads, walks, visits the neighbours, and generally enjoys herself. She has a couple of suitors - neither particularly suitable in her mind, but neither completely objectionable either - and some vague plans for the future, for it's fairly certain that her elder brother will eventually come home and marry, and she will be without a home.

Enter Lord Damerel, who is as worldly and rascally as Venetia is sheltered and good. Damerel isn't some rake-with-a-golden-heart, either, which is a trope I don't usually mind if done well but tends to be pretty stereotyped if not. He's thoroughly debauched, with the debts and the trail of women, and he's not terribly repentant, either. But when Venetia and Damerel meet, sparks fly, and something changes for both of them when they let themselves do the unwisest of things: they become friends.

There is a lot to like here, but I think what I liked best was how honest the leading couple is with each other. Damerel doesn't pretend to be something he's not (virtuous or wounded/damaged, being the two tropes that come to mind) and Venetia is pretty clear with him - and herself - as to her feelings and expectations on that front (she's mostly quite entertained by his stories). She might be sheltered but she's not stupid. And I loved that while everyone else is concerned about her reputation - that all-important currency for a woman in the period Heyer is writing about - Venetia really doesn't give a fig, as long as she gets what she wants. What she wants is Damerel. This particular character point, the carelessness of her own reputation and her willingness to court scandal, is supported by her sheltered upbringing and the fact that she's practically on the shelf without any serious prospects that she can stomach, not to mention that everyone in her life has worked very hard to keep her ignorant of some rather important bits of information. One can't really blame her for happily scheming to thwart all of them, especially since she's not thwarting them out of some sort of revenge or malicious impulse. It's just that their good opinion of her ceases to really matter.

What this comes out to is a light, highly entertaining Regency romance where the characters are all very believable (even the awful ones are believably awful) and the motives and means don't seem to be imposed from a different time, which is an achievement given how strong-willed and carefree Venetia is. The plot isn't terribly exciting or ground-shaking but it's solid and has enough turns to keep one's attention. The dialogue is funny, Venetia is fantastic, and the audio abridgement might have left me feeling like things were a tad rushed but overall still worked out really well. I think this was a great introduction to the Heyer canon for me and I'm absolutely looking forward to the next.

Shadows by Robin McKinley

Shadows
by Robin McKinley
Nancy Paulsen Books, 2013
356 pages

Before I go too far with this review, I think it would be helpful to explain a bit about my relationship with Robin McKinley's writing. McKinley was the first fantasy author I read outside of Tolkien, and that book - The Hero and the Crown - made a huge and lasting impression on me. The lead character was female, she was an outcast, she was determined and kind and confused and smart. I devoured that book, and turned back to the beginning and devoured it again, and I have never stopped loving it, though the related book The Blue Sword is the one I love more and has become one of the books I've read the most over the years. I've also read Deerskin (and holy shit was that ever an eye opener when I read it as a young teen - it's not an easy book to read, subject-matter-wise), a number of her short stories, Beauty, The Outlaws of Sherwood, Chalice, and Sunshine - which is also my favourite McKinley book and one of my top three books of all time. I do fully intend to read her entire backlist at some point, with either Spindle's End or Rose Daughter being next on the list.

Suffice to say, I am fairly well-versed in McKinley's works. And while I like some of her books and stories better than I like others, I always respect her work, if that makes sense. She has really excellent characters, and very detailed, realistically flawed worlds, and she rarely wraps all the bits up by the end of the book, but she doesn't write sequels. Sometimes I don't love her endings, but unlike some books, when a McKinley ending doesn't quite work for me it doesn't generally ruin what came before (Chalice might be a slight exception to this rule; I really disliked the ending of that one, enough that I haven't read it since my first reading.) And another thing about McKinley is that each book is different; though there are common threads running through her body of work, the narrative voice is often wildly different between stories.

It's the narrative voice of the titular character that makes Sunshine such a hit for me, and it's that same voice that turns a lot of fans of her other books off that particular one too, I find. It's very unusual, a first person perspective that is almost, but not quite, given stream-of-consciousness rein. I love Sunshine. I love her, and I love the way I can almost become her when I'm reading that book. I love the way some of her expressions, idiosyncratic and odd as they are, bleed into my own personal stream-of-consciousness narrative when I'm reading that book and often for weeks after. I love her turn of phrase, I love the way she thinks. She, more than any other fictional character I have encountered, feels like a friend.

This is key to my feeling about Shadows, because Shadows is pretty much in the same vein. Maggie, the main character in Shadows, is younger and lives in a very different world from Sunshine (maybe?) but that next-to-stream-of-consciousness narration is there in full force. We are right there, inside Maggie's teenage head, as she's telling us the story, and she takes us on her tangents (some of which circle back to be important, and some of which are just flavour) and she flashes back and she uses a lot of slang.

By which I mean to say that I really, really liked this book, and it's probably not for everyone.

Maggie is seventeen years old, and her mother has just remarried after her first husband, the father of her two kids, was killed by a drunk driver seven years previous. Maggie feels she would probably be predisposed to dislike the guy - she's fair-minded that way - but she outright hates him, because he's not normal. He is an immigrant from Oldworld, where magic is still common, which is bad enough. In Newworld, where Maggie and her family live, magic isn't just not practiced, it's illegal. Anyone who shows any sign of being genetically predisposed to magic has their magic gene removed as a kid, and anything that seems odd is reported to the authorities immediately. There are still breaks in reality, completely unpreventable, but the army deals with those using advanced technology. Magic isn't necessary and it's destabilizing and unsafe. But Maggie's new stepfather, Val, has strange shadows that follow him everywhere and seem to move on their own, and Maggie can see them, and they terrify her.

There is a lot going on in Shadows, and part of what I love about it is that it's so easy to read anyway. We have a coming-of-age story. We have a society that might almost be a dystopia, but it's not, not quite, because there are some safeguards against completely authoritarian rule. But it's close, and over the course of the book we see how easy it might be for ordinary people (and even the not-so-ordinary ones) to just accept what they are told as truth, and how easy it might be for those who mean well to step over the line into despotism. What we have, in short, is a world that's unsettlingly familiar, in all its political chicanery and popular intellectual laziness.

We have a love story, but it's fairly secondary. We have a female friendship, between Maggie and her lifelong best friend Jill, that is realistically and beautifully portrayed; they're not catty, they're not mean to each other, they get each other, and sometimes they argue. We have a lot of diversity - Maggie is white, Jill is black, one of the love interests is Eastern European, and another of their good friends is Asian. We have a lot of parallels to our world - certain countries we recognize exist, like Japan, and there are cellphones and drunk drivers and pizza parlours and animal shelters and cliquey, slang-spouting teenagers muddling their way through high school and life. It's also absolutely not a world we live in, with its regularly occurring breaks in reality ("cohesion breaks" or cobeys) and magical gene splicing and "physics of the worlds" departments in local universities and a big army structure designed to clamp down on magic.

We also have a plot that develops surprisingly quickly and smoothly, given the roundabout narration, and that then proceeds with inevitable speed. This book moves once it gets going, and everything slots into its place, and while one's disbelief has to get suspended at one or two points, it mostly works. The end is a bit cheesy. But I've seen far worse.

Oh, and the book is funny.

I don't think this book is for everyone. Some of the slang is a bit overdone (for me, the parts where it worked amazingly well far outweighed the parts where it didn't) and as above, the ending didn't quite fit. But the detail of the world, and the enjoyment I got out of living in Maggie's head, and the fact that all the pieces don't always get explained (there's a bit about Val, the stepfather, that we never learn more about and it's BIG), and the fact that I used the word "cobey" in conversation without realizing in that moment that it wasn't actually a real thing that happens... You should read this, I think. It's not your ordinary young adult novel. It's not your ordinary adult novel. It's something McKinley does well, which is write something entirely, completely new, using bits and pieces of old, and throwing in a strong, vital, honest, and realistic female lead as a bonus.

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

Around the World in 80 Days (Extraordinary Voyages 11)
by Jules Verne, translated by Michael Glencross
Penguin Classics, 2004 (originally published in French in 1872)
248 pages

I feel kind of guilty, because a) I haven't been blogging, and b) I am cribbing a bunch of these notes from my book club notes and so am kind of not really blogging again. But at least there's some new material up here. It's not that I haven't been reading - I have - but more that I haven't been finishing much, and I have started quite a bit and either given it up for good or given it up for an indefinite period of time. It's also probably something to do with having a two-year-old who wants us to read and read and read, and who goes to bed late, and it's something to do with work changes that have been happening (good!) and spring! is! here! So we're spending lots of time outdoors and birdwatching and gardening and... not blogging.

Anyhow. So Jules Verne. This is the first thing I've ever read by him, though I recall that Journey to the Centre of the Earth was one of my favourite movies as a kid. The little bits of 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea that I used to catch while it was playing on repeat on one of the three t.v. channels we got when I was a kid used to scare the complete pants off me, so I never have seen the full thing. And I have somehow escaped seeing any of the adaptations of Around the World in 80 Days at all. Verne is a bit of a gap in my reading, being as he is often considered the grand-père of science fiction. Perfect, therefore, for my genre book club.

Around the World in 80 Days was originally published in 1872 as a serial in France, and collected into a novel edition in 1873. It is considered one of Verne's best works, though it contains none of the speculative technology that Verne employed in other works, and therefore can't really be considered science fiction. That said, it is speculative, in that no one had actually accomplished the feat (the first person to do so, in 1889, was Nellie Bly), and employs the best factual information Verne could get at the time; so it skims very close to science fiction. It is considered a classic of modern adventure fiction. The main character is Phileas Fogg, a rigidly eccentric, very wealthy British gentleman who takes a bet at his club one evening that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. He drags his newly employed French valet Passepartout along for the ride (Passepartout, it could be argued, is the real hero of the story.) Along the way they rescue a maiden in distress, purchase an elephant, take a wind-powered sledge across the frozen prairies, are attacked by Sioux warriors and waylaid by an enormous herd of bison, arrested, and finally resort to piracy on the high seas to get where they are going on time.

I didn't really love it but I certainly didn't hate it either, and I'm quite glad I read it. I think the big hurdle for me (aside from some of the cringe-worthy and unhappily predictable racist bits, particularly in the section where the train across the American prairies is attacked by Sioux warriors) was Verne's pedantic style, and his habit of getting sidetracked by... uh, "interesting" technical details. He spent more time describing the shortcomings of the P&O ships than the rescue of Passepartout from the Sioux.

The characters were placeholders and occasionally totally inexplicable, and clearly there to serve the plot, though I will admit that this does leave the reader's imagination entirely free to fill in whatever gaps they would like, and mine generally did. It was interesting to read the portrayal of Phileas Fogg compared to Passepartout, knowing that certain French/British rivalries were still very much in force at the time of the book's writing: Fogg is completely unreachable; Passepartout, while more relatable, is often rather a puppy-dog-like dufus, though a very brave and agile one.

One piece of criticism I read suggested that none of the English translations available really do Verne's writing justice, which could be part of the problem, though part of me doubts that the translators can do much when he chooses to spend a bunch of time elaborating on the genius of American railway engineering instead of the inner life of his characters. If I had the patience I could see trying a different translation, and perhaps I will some day, but I thought Michael Glencross did quite a serviceable job with the material he had.

As an interesting side note: I had to see if wind-powered ice sledges actually existed, because I was pretty much thinking that was an invention straight out of Verne's very creative, very speculative, and very scientific mind. Apparently not. Right around the time Verne was writing this book they were making headlines for racing trains and beating them.

All in all, glad I read it, would recommend it to the right person (interested in historical adventure, perhaps, and in a light, quick read.) Not going to be considered one of my favourite books, but I do feel like Verne is part of the consciousness of our culture, and now I have a better background understanding of why. Would probably try Verne again, most likely Journey or 20 000 Leagues, though I'll admit Five Weeks in a Balloon rather tickles my fancy too.