Boy Snow Bird

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved this enigmatic retelling of Snow White. It is a book that probably needs to be read more than once. Nothing is quite as it seems, and people don't always react the way you think they would. There are mirrors and mimics, and snakes, step-mothers and badly treated children. The ultimate take away I guess is that we do treat people differently, even subconsciously, based on how they look, even if that image is not who they truly are. There are some threads that I felt were left hanging, and characters (particularly Boy after part 1) that I wanted to know more about. Beautifully written.

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The Witch of Lime Street

The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I did not know anything about the Spiritualism movement during the 1910-1930. I had no idea Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a huge promoter of it in Europe and America, that Houdini felt it was his duty to debunk mediums, or that Scientific American ran a contest to find an authentic medium. That being said, this history does tend to drag on a bit long, and can be somewhat confusing--the medium was in a closet, but could move things around with her head? There are a lot of characters and the author's choice to sometimes conceal who he is talking about at the beginning of chapters made it more confusing. Also, some of the parts that seemed especially intriguing, a hit and run with the victim found in his doorway, kids disappearing, affairs between judges and the medium--were not investigated very deeply. I don't know if there was a lack of documentation, but after about the 50th description of seances, I was ready to discover something real.

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the inventor said that "the time will come when science will be able to prove all the essentials of what faith has asserted."

The Dutch House

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ann Patchett can do very little wrong in my book. I liked it even better after book club discussion. It raises a lot of questions, without giving a lot of answers. Themes of class, priorities, judgement, forgiveness, and parenting. And of course, brilliantly written.

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"In truth, I don't think he was particularly interested in Andrea.  I just don't think he had the means to deal with her tenacity."

"But we overlay the present onto the past.  We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered."

"The point is that it's true.  At the time I didn't hate her, so why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, ore even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?" The point, I wanted to say, was that we shouldn't still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street.

That's the way it goes, I thought, admiring my own maturity.  I would rather have kept the one Saturday a month with the two of us together in the car but I would take his trust instead.  That was what it meant to grow up.

Love Dishonor Marry Die Cherish Perish

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, a book written in blank verse--who can resist right? It was an interesting little story, although too many of the verses felt forced, like he was just trying to find something to rhyme and so had to include a random and inexplicable detail. But then there are some truly transcendent verses, especially about life and death, which makes sense because Rakoff died shortly after finishing this book. It was an interesting read that unfortunately maybe didn't get all the edits it needed.

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He used on what looked like a brick of pink soap 
The color of dawn, the exact shade of hope

and leaned near the surface and took in a breath 
Of almonds and ether, of freedom and death

The plum-colored smudge, a sloe slowly blooming,
 Seemed barely worth noticing; small, unassuming, 
As if trying to belie all the terrible harm it 
Could do, it stayed hidden, just under his armpit. 
But soon it branched out, making siblings and cousins
 His lesions were legion, from just one to dozens.
 Despite all his nursing, the tears and the dramas
 Of friends, when he woke up to find his pajamas 
As wet through with sweat as if dunked in the sea
 He still briefly asked, What is happening to me? 
He’d loved Touch of Evil, when la Dietrich tells 
The fortune of corpulent, vile Orson Welles: “
Your future’s all used up.” So funny and grim
. But now that the same could be spoken of him 
It was sadness that gripped him, far more than the fear
 That, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year. 
When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”
 Become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.
 A new, fierce attachment to all of this world 
Now pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurled
 Lightning bolt lancing him, sent from above, 
him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love. 
He’d thought of himself as uniquely proficient 
At seeing, but now that sense felt insufficient. 
He wanted to grab, to possess, to devour 
To eat with his eyes, how he needed that power.

The Power

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This won't be up everyone's alley, but Alderman does a remarkable thing by turning the power structure of man and woman on its head. By letting women have the power to conceivably kill with a touch, she unmasks all the subtle ways men currently have power over women by being physically domineering--physically, sexually, socially, politically. I have to admit I felt it wouldn't be such a bad thing to have men be subconsciously fearful of me. To have that kind of power would definitely demand the kind of respect and power that seems so hard-won for women today. But Alderman's premise isn't just feminist--she shows that power corrupts women as surely as it has men. Although I wasn't a fan of the "correspondence" at the beginning and the end (just tell the story, man), i loved how they theorize that women are the more powerful of the two sexes because they have to defend their young, while men get to be more nurturing. Anyway, hands down the most thought-provoking (and exciting) treatment of the power play between men and women. (But forewarning you, there can't be a discussion of power and gender without talk about sex and sex and power, so there are some scenes that may not be for everyone).

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Circe

Circe by Madeline Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I admit I am a sucker for all things Greek mythology, but I thought this was a beautiful retelling of the legends from Circe's point of view. She teaches us that what gives us power is not the gifts we were born with (immortality being one of hers) but our own creativity and knowledge and our deep love for others. It may not be a perfect book, there were some parts that lagged, but the ending was so satisfying I felt like I had just eaten a gourmet meal.

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"Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities.  We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves.  That word, nymph, paced out the length and breath of our futures.  In our language, it meant not just goddess, but bride."

"And what is in that shell? A snail?"
"Nothing," I said.  "Air."
"Those are not the same, " he said.  "Nothing is empty void, while air is what fills all else.  It is breath and life and spirit, the words we speak."

"I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging and can hold nothing in their hands."