REVIEW: Small Great Things - Jodi Picoult

People ask me how I pick books to read – do I look at the Bestsellers list? Do I look at Goodreads recommendations? Do I look at what other book bloggers are spazzing over? I do all of the above, but more often than not, I refer to a short list of writers whose releases provide enough and more literary satisfaction for me and ensure I’m well fed. Picoult leads this list.

Her books compulsorily have three ingredients: a plot that mandates a tissue box by your side, a writing style that gives you the benefit of walking in the shoes of different characters to look around and judge for yourself but most importantly, characters that can’t be classified as good or evil – in the end, no one is blameless. Everyone is human.

Picoult gets in my head and confuses with my ideologies. This is also why she’s one of the writers I hate the most. Her books always tackle subjects that are to be debated over tea, (possibly) in raised voices at book clubs, and keep you up at night wondering if the characters made the wisest choices and had you been in their place, would you have done it any differently. Needless to say, when I heard she had a book coming out about racism in contemporary society, I confidently dropped big bucks without even pausing to look at what everyone had to say about it.

I hope the panda was a nice touch

Confession #1: I was in a reading slump. You can verify that by merely looking at the date of publication of my previous post on this blog. Maybe I still am in a reading slump – I’m unravelling a little at the edges. But I read this book from start to finish and I consider that an achievement.

Confession #2: I am not the best person to judge this book, and I won’t pretend to be one either. I have never stepped foot in the US, I am Indian and usually navigate in predominantly Indian circles. But, in case this is news for you, racism is not exclusive to multi-ethnic societies. You’d be surprised at how widespread, silent and invisible racial discrimination actually is and I am no stranger to it.  But, as usual, I digress.

I loved her choice of PoVs: the victim, the lawyer and the white supremacist – expected, but still commendable – because warping reality into what might make logic for a douchebag requires genius and intensive research. I dreaded reading Turd’s Turk’s PoV chapters because it felt like sliding underneath the slimy skin of a monster. This isn’t my first time: Amy in Gone Girl, and Alfred in Salt to the Sea helped me mentally steel myself against Turk’s viciousness and feel pity for the likes of him. You can never justify their actions, but you can understand them.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Ruth or Kennedy or Turk that intrigued me. It was Adisa. Adisa is such a solid character – so very real – in her blunt stubbornness, her own racist inclinations – a lot of spice with a dash of sugar. I wish Picoult wrote Book #0.5 from Adisa’s eyes – I want to know if she really sees the world in black and white or in Technicolor but pretends otherwise. I was especially impressed by how she weaved the past and the present in her narrative, not jarring against each other, but providing the other a context for us to understand better.

This book really messed with my head – I forged through the constant volley of questions thrown at me, taking breaks in between (you can’t read this at a stretch, nope) to mull over the answers and maybe pretend like I didn’t know them. And as I drew near the end, I began to dread the signature Picoult twist (usually someone you least expect and care about the most drops dead) and I wasn’t disappointed.

Another thing I love about Picoult is the copious amount of research she dedicates into her work. I despise inaccuracies or misrepresentation, especially when you’re dealing with sensitive matter, and this book wouldn’t have been easy for her to write. A white woman trying to voice the discriminated? It would have been intimidating, considering that she knows what she’s setting herself up against. But she did it, anyways.

Most of all, I loved the title. Small Great Things, is a reference to a Martin Luther King quote, like she explains in her Author’s Note. The plot is essentially a quest for a greater victory, but the actual greatness of the novel was in the small victories. When the father held his faceless newborn. When Ruth touched the baby. When Kennedy understood what racism actually means. Small great things like that.

VERDICT: Just do yourself a favour and read it please.

P.S. Miss Picoult, if you're reading this, thank you for this book. Also a huge thank you for the epilogue which restored my faith in humanity. 

Celebrating Women Everywhere | International Women's Day

I’d wanted to do this post for a long time now. Each year, March 8 would come and go, escaping my notice. FYI, I don’t live my life knowing what day today is. I deign to burden myself with such trivial information only when I’ve got no way around it. Illustrious examples include exam schedules and birthdays of best friends who are capable of burying me alive.

But I digress. (I really should make that my tagline.)

Here is a prized list of books (off the top of my head, thank you college-life) that celebrates women and shows us exactly what they are capable of.

The Help – Kathryn Stockett

Oh hell yes. I will not oblige you by giving you a description of this book. If you haven’t even heard of this book by now - ye who hath been living under a rock, rectify that mistake pronto. And for those of you who have heard of it but couldn’t be bothered to read it:

The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd

A girl whose mother died when she was little runs away with their Black maid (who’s the only mother figure she’s ever known in her life) to escape her father (and the pissed-off racists), right into the arms of a sisterhood. There she is introduced to the secret world of bees, the Black Madonna and her mother. I love this book to shreds, btw. This had so much potential to turn into yet another civil-rights drama, but it is just a backdrop to flaunt the strength of women.

The Invention of Wings – Sue Monk Kidd

It really is about the inventions of wings in America before the abolition of slavery. It’s about two sisters as abolitionists and feminists and how they plunged ahead, despite the criticism they faced, even from fellow abolitionists. Bear in mind this is a loose account of the Grimke sisters, so no sceptics, these women aren’t fictional.

Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire – Elizabeth Wein

These books are a bust for traditional tropes of delicate, fragile women. This book celebrates the power of friendship and sisterhood even under the direst of circumstances. How the love for your best friends and the love for your homeland can equip you with powers you didn’t know you could have. Fair warning – it’s a roller-coaster ride, and not for the faint-hearted.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

Two women. Two different generations. Married to the same man in a war-torn Afghanistan. The bonds between them morph between rivalry, mother-daughter, and sister-sister. The beautiful yet incredible thing about this book it shows just how much a woman is willing to sacrifice because of the love for her family. Again, I’m warning you to keep a huge box of tissues at the ready.

Sold – Patricia McCormick

A thirteen-year-old Nepali girl gets sold for 800 rupees by her stepfather into a prostitution ring in India. Lakshmi happily goes along with “Auntie” thinking about the tin roof she can buy her mother with the money she gets by working as a maid in “The City”. This novel traces her loss of innocence with a narration that doesn’t give a lot of morbid details but is still harrowing. McCormick’s accounts of the shady underworld of prostitution will leave you livid at the injustice of it, and in wonder of the women who do more than just survive through it. How they stay even when there’s a chance of escape because staying means their families get to eat.

You have to fool yourself into believing that the things described in this book don't really happen to finish reading it.

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

A book that has survived the wrath of many narrow-minded people; a book that celebrates femininity in all its glory. A book that doesn’t shy away from saying the things that have to be said.

Out of the Easy – Ruta Sepetys

Screw it. I just tried to write a three-line-pitch without making it sound synoptic. What do I love about this book? A whole brothel full of prostitutes showering love on a seventeen-year-old girl in search for some answers. I have never seen so many women of so many different shapes and personalities. But they all equal in their capacity to love.

Saving Francesca – Melina Marchetta

At first glance, this book may not seem like a prime candidate for a seating on this list. It’s about a gang of badass girls in a boys’ school and how gradually they run the place.

God, I love this book.

The Seven Realms – Cinda Williams Chima 

A fantasy world run by a matriarchal government. Plotsy, shippity, and all things addictively nice. Need I say more?

one Girl – Gillian Flynn

I am including this book in the list because the list lacked some good female psychopaths. Who ever said girls were sugar and spice and all things nice? Heads up, female psychopaths are just as bad as their male counterparts. You get on their bitch-side, heaven help you.

A Song of Ice and Fire – George R R Martin

Daenerys. Arya. Cat. Sansa. Cersei. Don’t tell me your knees won’t give in front of these women who are capable of kicking your ass.

HAIL MOTHER OF DRAGONS

REVIEW (well, sort of): Salt to the Sea - Ruta Sepetys

*COURTESY OF NETGALLEY*

I will never get tired of reading historical fiction. Just when you think you've read enough on WWII from all angles, a book like this comes along and nudges you to look even closer to see things your so-called experienced eyes have missed.

Sepetys says that 'stories of strength through struggle' inspire her work, especially since she's the daughter of a refugee. That's what birthed this book - a successor to her Between Shades of Gray; the book that introduced me to this phenomenon that is her. She wants the world to know and remember what layers of debris resulting from the more flamboyant historical fallout, have hidden underneath and I am very much smitten with her for it.

I admit my shameful ignorance of the Wilhelm Gustloff and thank Sepetys for remedying it. But the truth is that that's not what shocked me the most in this book. What truly horrified me was not the sheer scale of the atrocity, but the less flashy, more relatable kinds of horrors, like - 

Or this - 

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. This book follows the lives of a very interesting motley of refugees. And that of one psychopath-in-training,

Initially, I was mightily creeped out by Alfred's POV accounts and dreaded his chapters. I kept questioning its purpose throughout the book and it was only towards the end that it struck me that even he needs a voice. It's not enough psychopaths like him and Hitler roared all they liked on radios and megaphones - we need to know what really went inside their heads where they were held captives so that we can give them our pity.

But back to Joana and Florian and Emilia and the Shoe Poet and the Orphan Boy and Eva and Ingrid. This is where the book triumphs in the story it is trying to tell. When humanity shines through even when all else is lost. 

So even after I've waxed eloquent about this book, I feel like I'd be lying if I won't admit that I didn't love this book to pieces like I prophesied to myself. I had the same problem with BSoG. The endings of both books left me mildly dissatisfied. This pretty much feels like blasphemy, but I'm missing out on the magic Sepetys did with Out of the Easy. Maybe she felt a pressured need to give justice to the characters in BSoG and SttS and not offend in any way, but I sense a restraint in her writing in this book, unlike in OotE. I don't want to sound pretentious - there's a 150% chance I'm wrong - I was just going out on a limb here.

The last paragraph is a personal opinion; you probably won't find it anywhere else. There's a 150% chance you'll love this book to pieces though.

VERDICT: 4 stars

REVIEW: Tell The Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt

This is the second time I’m reading this book. The first time I read it (which I did at lightning speed – like I do for most books – because I don’t have the patience to endure the suspense of the ending), I thought all that the book had going for it was the plot and the characters – which is more than enough for me and which is everything that the blurb advertises.

My most grievous fault.

If you do a basic Google search about this book, you’ll come across numerous posts that have written odes to everything that’s beautiful about this book on the surface. The plot is set in the late 1980s, a time when America was in the grip of homophobia and AIDS was in the headlines all too often. It introduces to us a fourteen-year-old, who finds herself lost after her godfather, confidant, best friend, and uncle, Finn passes away. That’s also when she learns there’s a lot of Finn that she didn’t know about.

That’s not all. There’s Greta – the ace kid in the family – and once upon a time, together they used to be the Elbus girls. Then June learns that her mother – the boring accountant who, together with her accountant husband, orphans their kids during their tax season – has a past that June has trouble wrapping her head around.

And then there’s Toby. And then there’s Toby.

The book explores more issues than I thought it would. Apart from the obvious that you can glean from the blurb, it also delves into the realms of forbidden love and sibling estrangement.  I actually had problems with June. I will not hide my initial disgust when I realized the nature of June’s feelings for her uncle. Nor my annoyance at how flippantly June mentions her newly acquired habit of smoking and occasional drinking. Nor my anger at her decision to accept the invitation to visit an apparent stranger and go places with him.

She does a lot of stupid things. Granted. But that’s also what I liked about the book. It isn’t trying to teach lessons about Stranger Danger or Smoking is Injurious to Health or Falling in Love with Relatives and this is not the book I would recommend as the solution to any of the above. Brunt neither condones nor condemns it – she merely talks about it. That is what struck me – you can’t detect the mature adult author acting as the conscience in the morally-compromised teenage narrator. Because there isn’t. It’s up to you to decide if that’s good or bad.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the imagery. Motifs like wolves, rain, butterflies, Mozart’s Requiem, trains, woods, a beautiful Russian teapot, and negative spaces in paintings show up now and then. I didn’t know that this book was a lot of work and is thus a prime candidate for book club discussions. I didn’t know that you had to read some lines twice and thrice to understand if there was a deeper meaning to what seems on the surface. There are some that you’ll miss if you blink like Finn’s chess set, or the painting Nurse Feeding Sick Man from the Book of Days.

Like I already mentioned, the characters are not whom they seem on the surface. There are layers upon layers on them. You would have peel them off slowly and carefully, to get a look at who they are underneath all of it. And underneath all of it, you'll find that they’re just people, not some characters in a book.

This book is work. But once you get to the end, you'll just remain curled up, hugging it to your chest. 

VERDICT: 5 stars

REVIEW: Rose Under Fire - Elizabeth Wein

Elizabeth Wein is a hero. If the act of merely reading her books is sufficient enough to make me feel like I’m choking on air, I can’t even imagine what’s it like for her to conceive her books in her head and bleed life into the pages with her fingers. Code Name Verity damn near killed me. The companion novel Rose Under Fire killed me. Even though CNV is not a reading prerequisite for RUF, it will help many a haplessly clueless reader ease into unfamiliar territory.  

I completed RUF some time back. At that time, I felt I was in an emotionally compromised state to write a coherent review. Deciding to put some time between the reading and the reviewing is one of my more brilliant ideas. If this book is on your TBR pile as well, you’ll know why eventually.

Anyway, being an Ignorant American Schoolgirl gives me an open ticket to ask brazen questions, and I’d already put my foot in my mouth, so I just went on.

“What is a concentration camp, Fliss?”

Given an opportunity, I have never failed to manage to squeeze in a reminder that I love historical fiction. Consequently, I have greatly taken advantage of fiction under the backdrop of the World Wars and the Holocaust, whether in print or on screen. I thought I knew what concentration camps are. I thought I knew what went on in there. I thought I was better than Rosie.

My mistake.

Rose Justice is an ATA pilot – out of America and in England, chasing her love for planes. For her, the horrors happening in Germany and elsewhere was an abstract idea – she knew people were dying and they needed saving. For her, the real tragedy lay in Doodlebug Brides and couples getting married in haste and boys fiddling with unexploded bombs in the hopes they can defuse them. Then again, she’s just eighteen years old crazily in love with flying in the sky and writing poems.

Everywhere I go I meet people who are hunting for husbands, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, lovers, and they are all gone.

Your friend Rose has evaporated with them. I don’t know what else to tell you Maddie.

Then the horror accounts start. How they start by taking away your name and giving you a number. We hear about fleas who are in league with the SS. About 50,000 women locked inside a prison half a mile wide and a quarter of a mile across with no toilets. We learn of Rabbits. Our lives are changed forever.

When you lost hope, you turned into a schmootzich, one of the mindless beggars who were the bottom-crawlers of that entire scummy camp, or you died.

If you think this book is one of those books that preach nothing but morbidity and mortal moroseness in the name of empathy, you are dead wrong. This is not one of those books. This is that book that inspires awe. Awe at how much life and hope and dreams can thrive even in places that seem beyond despair.

It took me a long time to write ‘The Subtle Briar’, but it was translated into three languages in a day. Every time it got passed on I got another bread ration. Oh God, we needed something to cling to. We were scared.

The technical bits about bombs and planes, the poems and the characters are what sets the book apart from its peers. Many might feel the tech stuff is infodump but I lived for it. The Subtle Briar and Playing Statues are my favourites. Róza, Irina, Karolina, Lisette, Micheline, Elodie are my favourites. Even Anna. And Nick from the Nick stories. You will be rendered unable to label them fictional characters because of the sheer depth Wein has endowed them with, which is an accomplishment considering the number of characters this book is peppered with.

When you’re flying, the changing balance of lift and weight pulls you up and down. But another pair of forces pulls you forward or backwards through air: thrust and drag.

From Kite Flying: four principles of flight (by Rose Justice)

I think what made me love this book is the fact that there are no unnecessary deaths. (And by that, I am in no way claiming that the deaths that do happen were necessary.) I have noticed a disturbingly common authorial tendency to wantonly disregard fictional characters’ lives. Like they think killing off someone we love in our faces and the tears and heartbreak that inevitably follow is the price of loving a book. But Rose Under Fire does not resort to any such cheap tricks even though it could have and I love it all the more for it.

VERDICT: Freaking Five Stars

AUTHOR BINGE: Melina Marchetta

Melina Marchetta was born in Sydney Australia. Her first novel, Looking For Alibrandi was awarded the Children's Book Council of Australia award in 1993 and her second novel, Saving Francesca won the same award in 2004. Looking For Alibrandi was made into a major film in 2000 and won the Australian Film Institute Award for best Film and best adapted screen play, also written by the author. On the Jellicoe Road was released in 2006 and won the WAYRBA voted by teenagers in Western Australia in 2008. It also won the US Printz Medal in 2009 for excellence in YA literature. This was followed up by Finnikin of the Rock in 2008 which won the Aurealis Award for YA fantasy, The Piper's Son in 2010 which was shortlisted for the Qld Premier's Lit Award, NSW Premier's Lit Award, Prime Minister's Literary Awards, CBC awards and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her follow up to Finnikin, Froi of the Exiles will be released in Australia in October and the US in March 2012.

My introduction to the phenomenon that is Melina Marchetta was not a smooth one. It was not even a respectable introduction. Dammit, my first impression of Jellicoe Road was – what the fuck was happening? Who the fuck are all these people? I had thought this book was going to be another one of those high school coming-of-age cliché novels and I was wholly unprepared when the book flung me headlong into open fire.

I slammed the book close and forgot all about it. I later spied upon it and decided to give it another try, especially since everyone on Goodreads was raving about it. I laboured up to a tenth of the book, at which point I promptly abandoned it again.

I opened the book a third time, determined to understand what the fuck was happening. I read slowly, at a rate of a third of a page per minute. I laboured up to a tenth of the book, was sucked into it by a third of the book, fell in love midway and wept shamelessly at the end, cradling the book against me.

Marchetta writes her characters with a zeal that leaves you breathless. Her books begin with an explosion of characters who don’t wait to give you an introduction – the moment you open the book, you’ve been inserted to a frame in their lives, and it’s up to you to make sense of the story they want to say. Her characters ooze life. Even though we’re seeing the other characters through the narrator’s eyes, somehow Marchetta is able to give us the power to judge the characters ourselves, by showing their many sides. Every time I reach the end, I get overwhelmed by the feeling of love that supersedes every other feeling. She always manages to integrate the unconditional love of blood with the love woven in bonds of friendship. Bonds usually forged in the unlikeliest of places.

My GR reviews of her books that I've read:

Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I should have known.

I should have fucking known that this book would tread down the path to breaking my heart with its coming-of-age wisdom and reflections of a seventeen year old girl who tries to fit in but never could. I should have known that Jacob Coote will forever have himself imprinted on me and that John Barton will be that boy whose memory will always make me weep. I should have known that I could never bring myself to hate Michael Andretti and that I would end up feeling sorry for all the Nonna Katias and Marcus Sandfords in this world. And that I will forever worship Christina Alibrandi.

And if I had known all that prior to my reading this book, I probably wouldn't have had to deal with the emotional mess I'm in right now or the splitting headache because of clogged sinuses.

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THERE'S A MOVIE. THERE'S A MOVIE ALREADY. AND I HAVEN'T SEEN IT.

Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"What did you like best about this book?"

"You mean apart from a plot that sucks you right in, and characters that come off as people with as much depth and as many faces real people do, and how every time I turn a page I have to mentally prepare myself for that feeling like there's something in my eye?"

"Yeah, apart from all that."

"No pretensions. No big words. No trying to wrap something that's raw and honest in beautiful lyrical lines or anything. No trying to come across like something more than it is."

God, I love this book to bits.

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THERE'S A COMPANION NOVEL TO THIS ONE. THAT'S THE NEXT BOOK I'M GOING TO READ.

And there's Jellicoe Road. I've read it twice already. For some reason, I find myself shelving off the inevitable review post on my blog citing lack of enough rereading. For now, I'll sign off this post by saying this book, THIS is my favourite Marchetta ever.