Second Book Selection

Allright now, don't panic

But it's time to pick our next read!  Don't worry if you haven't finished Little Bee.  This is a no pressure club remember!  But please weigh in on the next choice so that it will be something you're interested in.  I got some great feedback on choices so thank you all for your input!  Please cast your vote at the very bottom of the page.

 

 The other top pick from last time.

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time. --Lynette Mong

  The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

When Margaret Lea opened the door to the past, what she confronted was her destiny.
All children mythologize their birth...So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist.The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself -- all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.
As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire.
Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life.

The 19th Wife

by David Eberschoff

From The New Yorker

This ambitious third novel tells two parallel stories of polygamy. The first recounts Brigham Young's expulsion of one of his wives, Ann Eliza, from the Mormon Church; the second is a modern-day murder mystery set in a polygamous compound in Utah. Unfolding through an impressive variety of narrative forms—Wikipedia entries, academic research papers, newspaper opinion pieces—the stories include fascinating historical details. We are told, for instance, of Brigham Young's ban on dramas that romanticized monogamous love at his community theatre; as one of Young's followers says, "I ain't sitting through no play where a man makes such a cussed fuss over one woman." Ebershoff demonstrates abundant virtuosity, as he convincingly inhabits the voices of both a nineteenth-century Mormon wife and a contemporary gay youth excommunicated from the church, while also managing to say something about the mysterious power of faith.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

 Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

"So exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. . . . An epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. . . . Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

Bonus:  If you don't make it through this one, there is a movie which got good reviews.  You could always watch that and then review it on the blog :)

Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

Amazon.com Review

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison. Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.
The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

All Book Reviews from either bookmovement.com or amazon.com

Hi lovely ladies!

I am thrilled to be included in such a beautiful little group! I have placed a hold on Little Bee from the library and hope I get selected soon! I might be a little behind, but promise to read like the wind once its in my possession.

Looking forward to connecting with you all!

Happy reading,
Heather

I recommend we read the nineteenth wife. I heard that it was a great read but I'm up for whatever is the group consensus.

moved, angry, bewildered, and lost

hi gals,
look, I loved this book at the beginning and through the middle but by the end of it I wanted to throw the book across the room. It was bewildering to me that Cleave could have such a grasp of Little Bee, and write with such profound "knowing" of what her experience was growing up in Nigeria and the atrocities she lived through and he developed the exact horror of how it would be for Little Bee to can go on living after such atrocities. for instance, when he writes "yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. I realized I had killed myself back to life."
But then Cleave creates a character like Sarah, why? A women who was callous, insipid, foolish, naive, and down right stupid, all I could take away from that was Cleave personally has issues with women or has very little regard for women or he has had no relationships with women or he hated his mother (okay, I'm just being silly) but it was very difficult to understand. actually, the book started to fall apart midway through and it was as if Cleave didn't know where to go after Little Bee's story and he cobbled together an ending that did not do the character of Little Bee justice. with that said these are the parts of the book I liked the best. "maybe there are stories written on the ceiling that go something like "the-men-came-and-they-brought-us-colored-dresses-fetched-wood-for-the-fire. . ." I cried a little reading that part. it was so moving after reading about what had truly happened and I wished it could be true for Little Bee and all the refugees. I loved all the analogies about being a refugee. and how one could be a refuge from oneself! great writing.
I loved charlie as batman and the line "it was the kind of summer where no one took their costumes." I loved Yvette and the girl in the yellow sari with her see through bag of yellow.
I'm glad I read most of the book but it really did make me angry, bewildered, and disappointed by the end.

The Baddies Win Again

Spoiler Alert!

I just finished reading Little Bee and put it down a little disappointed.

First I will recount the things I found beautiful and special about this book.  The beginning of the book when Little Bee is with the three other women was my favorite part of the book.  Like Mollie, I really loved the piece about scars.  I also found Yvette engaging and funny.  This part of the book rang true to me as he was recounting how Little Bee copes with the terror in her heart by finding a way to kill herself in every situation she is in.

Charlie was my favorite character.  I recently listened to part of an interview that Chris Cleave gave and the article that he writes for The Guardian is an article about his experiences with children.  This explained how he got Charlie's character so RIGHT!  You could tell that this author really understood children.  Charlie was the heart of the book for me.  The Batman suit, the baddies (especially the naughty Puffin), how he relates to Little Bee, and how he illuminates that we are all in our Batman suits all the time fighting the naughty Penguin and Puffin in our own ways.

This book made me search my soul in regards to how my own sense of humanity would stand up in the face of such horror.  Would I be able to cut off my finger to save Little Bee?  Of course in my heart the answer is yes.  But I think that time after time the world shows us that there are more Andrews in this world then there are Sarahs.  In order for atrocities like genocide to exist, it takes a passive majority who does nothing.  I think Andrew's response, of self-preservation and anger and fear and to freeze in the face of terror, is probably the natural response in the beach scene.  I would like to think of myself as a Sarah.

In the end, I did not connect to Sarah's character at all.  I found her shallow, silly and careless.  I thought her behavior on the beach was out of character, although it is in times of trial that we find out who we really are, so I could stretch my belief on that part.  She seemed really out of her body and out of touch with herself, evidenced by her affair, her job, and her interactions with Clarissa and Lawrence.  I thought it was ridiculous that he ended the novel that way, with Sarah and Charlie (What mother in her right mind???) returning to Nigeria with Little Bee.  The appearance of Andrew's manuscript was ill-conceived for me, because if this was to be his pathway to salvation and redemption, then why did the arrival of Little Bee drive him to suicide instead of him enlisting her help in his endeavor? ( I get it..the drugs, etc. but still)  So, the baddies win again and Little Bee meets her fate which she managed to elude for 2+ years.  I thought it was a hurried ending, losing the power of Little Bee's life force with every page.

For more information on the Niger-Delta Oil Conflict check out:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_in_the_Niger_Delta

I'm glad we read it, but I'm looking forward to the next book.  I have three suggestions for our next book.  Does anyone have two more?

Another Book Choice

Hello Beautiful Book Club Members,

Happy Sunday! I just ordered the Little Bee, and I will post once I read it. Also, I have heard wonderful things about The Thirteenth Tale. Is anyone interested?

XO,

Mar

Those pesky baddies....

Hello ladies!

I am not sure if you will get a notification once I post this, but consider this to be your spoiler alert. Odds are I will ruin parts of the book for you if you read this before you are finished! Let me start off by saying that this is the book I voted for and one I have been looking forward to reading for quite some time.

That being said, it was definitely different than what I expected it to be; mostly in a good way. I read it in the span of three days so I obviously found it engaging and easy to read. I enjoyed the way the book was written from the perspectives of both women. I am always surprised when male authors are able to accurately and realistically portray the female perspective. I found his writing style engaging and thought provoking. Especially the way that he made Little Bee's experience as a refugee seem more universal. I think that as a society we like to "Otherize" the people whose lifestyles and experiences are foreign to ours. This barrier is one that harms both sides and I appreciated how Cleave successfully turned that separation on its head and made it appear as foolish as it actually is.

One of my favorite parts in the book was when he talked about scars and they way that they are beautiful instead of shameful. The part where Little Bee has to turn away from the beauty of the scar on the neck of the girl in the sari nearly took my breath away. It was such a strong and powerful image, one I am sure will stay with me and I am grateful for that. I think that by starting out the story with this perspective, Cleave made the more difficult portions easier to get through. It effectively created a new lens through which to view struggles.

As is evidenced in the title of this post, I also fell in love with the character of Charlie. Cleave used this young character beautifully to shed light onto some of the more nuanced and poignant messages of the book (how difficult it is to tell right from wrong no matter how badly you want to, how we all want and strive for protection; a mask to hide behind).

I appreciated how this struggle is also reflected in the adult characters as well. How Little Bee is shown to be complicated and possessing of both good and bad sides. The same being true for Sarah and her willingness to cut off her own finger to save a stranger but her unwillingness to do the same to save her own husband.

One of my least favorite parts about the book was the ending. After all that had come before I really found it hard to believe that the police would have been called so soon, that Little Bee would have been the one to receive them, and that she really would have been so unable to come up with a lie to save herself (after she had been so crafty with Lawrence) I also really felt as though Sarah and Charlie being in Nigeria with Little Bee fell into the cliche for me. I also disliked how they ended up on the same beach but this time with a different ending. I thought that it was attempting to be too metaphorical and it rang false instead. Perhaps I am missing a bigger message or failing to grasp something...if any of you disagree with my assessment please let me know!

All in all I feel as though this book was a great start to this book club. I look forward to hearing what you all thought of the book and the characters that Cleave created.

Happy new year!