Good change-up, a grownup book for once

Naked in the Promised Land
Lillian Faderman

Excellent biography of a Jewish girl growing up with a near-crazy mother and a slightly less crazy aunt.  The two sisters fight like cats and dogs--mostly over her--but somehow hold it together to give her a loving home.  Or really, two loving homes. 

The mother works as a mannequin dresser for the smallest of wages, but somehow keeps her daughter fed, dressed and housed--in cheap rented rooms, of course.  She takes her daughter to the movies--Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer and endless other classics that were once right then and now.  Her greatest ambition is for her daughter to become a movie star and elevate them all to the easy life.

The daughter, Lillian, has a great body for pin-ups (even at fourteen), but an unfortunate nose and unfashionable, dusky hair that shuts her out of most of the real acting jobs.  It's a shame, because she seems to be a pretty good actress.  But she finds a way to make money anyway.

No more telling.  I'd almost give this a 5-star rating, but the ending was abrupt and it annoyed me.

Ho hum-ish but amusing

Will In Scarlet
by Matthew Cody

If you're not familiar with fan fiction, let me explain.  You take a published story/movie/TV show and continue the story in your own way. Or sometimes, you restart the story.  Or time travel it. Reinvent male characters as female; evil characters as good; animals as people; black as white.  Anything goes...and anywhere.

So that is this book. He retells the Robin Hood legend still another time, with Will Scarlett as the son of the Lord of Nottingham Castle and Much the Miller's Son as Much the Miller's Daughter.  (I'm not giving away the plot here--you find this out up front.)  As the the other characters of the legend, they too undergo certain interesting changes.

I was pretty disappointed in the first few chapters, but once I got into it, the story turned out pretty good.  I don't think I'd read a sequel but I might listen to it in the car on a long drive. 

To-read list item from a kids' librarian blog

The Twelve-Fingered Boy
by John Hornor Jacobs

Surprisingly good for a teenage superpower story.  Simply put, it's the tale of a mutant kid and the delinquent who befriends him.  I think the author has something significant to say about friendship, loyalty and love, but he doesn't bludgeon you over the head with it.

The book is short and full of action; impossible to describe without spoilers.  Since a lot of the action occurs in the two boys' heads, I don't think it would make a movie.  Highly recommended for pre-teens of all ages.

Do you know what "tubealloy" is?

The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan

Awesome science.  Human story, not so good.  She chose nine women to follow through the 315 pages.  That doesn't sound like too many, but I never really got to know a single one.  Possibly one, Virginia Spivey the chemist, felt a little more real than words on paper.  I'm sure the author did her research and I don't expect her to make things up...but I somehow wanted more.

I still loved it.  Imagine going to work in a secret location; not knowing what you'd be working on, and not allowed to talk about it.  And imagine being a young woman, too.  You're going to talk.


But did they?

wow

Stories from Jonestown
by  Leigh Fondakowski


Wow. Wow. Wow.

I never knew.  I was old enough to be reading newspapers in 1978 but I didn't remember a thing.  At most I remembered that a bunch of people comitted suicide and that's not even a sound bite.  I certainly didn't remember why, and maybe we didn't know why, at the time.

Some of the why is here.  It purports to be a book of stories by survivors and I expected just that, personal stories of the time after that time,  but at about the halfway point it turned into a play-by-play description of the actual incident.  It sidetracked a little into the making of a play based on the incident, but there were plenty of personal stories, mostly from people who were in San Franscisco or other places around the world at the time of the incident.  As you read them, think, "This person could have been there.  And if he had, he'd be dead now."

What I wouldn't have given for a modern day forensic team to have visited the site before they moved the bodies.

Little break in the reading cycle

Disney vacation with my little boy.  A time was had by all.

 
I thought the money suck ended when we left the theme parks...and then we had to pay two tolls to get to the airport. Do they really think anyone leaving Orlando has any cash left to pay tolls???

I just love that picture

Empty Mansions

The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark 

and the Spending of a Great American Fortune 

by Bill Dedman

Massive biography mixed with before-and-after story to make an almost complete tale.  it couldn't be complete, as you'll know when you read the last chapter.   The subject is Huguette Clark, but you hear a lot about her father the copper king and eventual--after many failed attempts--senator; her mother, who was his second wife; her sister and the various godchildren, relatives and support workers Huguette befriended.  The "after" story deals with her will and the efforts of the family (of her father's first wife) to have it thrown out.  Despite the fact that they'd already inherited a buttload of money when the old man died.

I ate it up, every bit.  What's not to enjoy about the making and spending of a very large amount of money?  It's sad to think what lawyer's fees and inheritance taxes are going to eat up. And who knows if the unpaid gift taxes will ever get worked out.  Huguette was supposed to pay them when she gave a large sums of money to a person, but her lawyers didn't remind her of it.  Or if they did, not often enough to matter.

Toward the end, I began to wonder if the book was written by a member of the family, possibly even by someone hoping to inherit under her will.  It was pretty obvious that the story was written by someone biased in her favor.  Not in a bad way--he told both sides of the story--but seemed to dwell on "her" side.  Given the evidence, I'd have done the same thing.  It's hard to take the opposition seriously--they kept trying to claim she was mentally deficient or unstable even when the evidence showed she was clearly not.  What was their evidence?  Family rumors and millions of dollars of incentive.

And I was happy to learn that the author was not financially motivated.  He was simply telling the facts.

Why did everyone like this so much? I feel stupid.

 Benjamin Franklin's Bastard

by Sally Cabot

I'm going to look up the story behind the story later, but here's what I thought.  She took the facts, probably did a good bit of research, then set out to write the story as fiction.  My guess is that the facts didn't include the name of the girl who bore Franklin's illegitimate child; her lifestyle and habits and thoughts; the many people who befriended or took advantage of her; her family; even her medical issues.  The mental instability of Franklin's wife may have been fact or deduction, but her private behavior at home would not be on record.  The facts may have included the name and occupation of Franklin's son's mistress and something about the birth of his son's son; they would certainly include his posting as Royal Governor of New Jersey, but probably not the jeers and taunts from the citizens of the revolution.  Those details had to be made up.

The people she invented were all interesting, well detailed, imminently believable.  They could very much be real.  It makes me a little uneasy to think that such well-crafted fiction might be confused for fact someday.  I mean, think about it--how many teenagers of today think that Abraham Lincoln's mother was killed by a vampire bite?

But what bugs me is that the author stuck to the plot defined in history, so she couldn't write a real novel.  Real novels have a punch line.  They have some mystery in them, some puzzle to keep them alive.  The closest thing to mystery this novel had was the constantly recurring question of whether Anna would tell her son that she was his mother, and if so, how would he react to her.

I would have liked this a thousand times better if it had been 100% fiction.  There's plenty of really exciting works of history out there--I don't see the need to make stuff up if you can't make up a new plot, too.  Or unless it's vampires.

I failed to grok

Every Waking Hour
by Paisley Smith


I screened this several times before I bought a copy, but somehow my brain duped itself into thinking that this was a historical novel with some LGBT romance thrown in.  Not so--it was an LGBT historical romance novel.  Which is all my fault. I'm not really into romance novels these days--never was, not even in the days when romance meant romance, not sex, explicit, rough and often. I'm not a prude about it and I thought the sex was pretty well done, but, enough already.

By the way, when did "I love you" become a synonym for "we had good sex and I want to go on having more sex with you"?  Maybe it's always meant that and I just didn't get it.  (I'm not criticizing the book here, just making fun of the human race.)

Anyway, back to the book. It reads fast.  It has some intriguing things to say about guilt and fairness and deep south lifestyles in the 1950s. If the author didn't have an annoying habit of throwing in deeply, profoundly introspective one-liners at odd moments, I might have given it three stars.   The "show, don't tell" rule is made to be broken, but not with phrases like, "In love.  With a woman.  Could she possibly be?"  Boring.

The future of graphic novels--I hope

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel

I had to sit on the library hold queue for a while to get this--it's been made into a Broadway Musical.  I don't see how--it's just a short graphic novel of episodes in the life of a girl, growing up that usual whack-job sort of a family that seems to turn on supreme creativity.   I've lamented before how sad it is that people often seem to have kids without really considering the alternative. (The mother was Catholic which may be part of it.) 

In my generation--and race and religion and income level--couples make a decision about if and when to have a baby.  They usually don't know what they're getting into, but they're expected to think about it first.  The three kids here seem to be accidents happening along the way as two lives diverge.  They're not expected to have likes and dislikes of their own.

Enough preaching--what about the book?  The drawing seemed very good; in any event, I didn't notice it much and it seemed to tell about half of the story.  Not like Manga, where oftentimes, the drawing IS the story.  And the story is unfolds like a memory, oftentimes in reverse.  It's not so much told as shared, and you feel it too.