Better Luck Next Time

So, I totally agree with Lindsey's assessment of the book (although I do not know if I would be so harsh about Jacob, although that might be because I was just picturing Robert Pattinson the whole time and therefore I wasn't thinking straight). Anyways, I totally think this book will make a better movie than a book (and I plan to go see it when it comes out in a couple of weeks).

I think that the best parts of the story are so very visual and aural (the sound of the train, the animals, the music). I felt as though the idea was a good one but that it got a bit too cliche at points. I am a bit more understanding of Jacob and Marlena's fear of August and their reluctance to stand up to him (especially since it was the Depression and there were not very many options for a woman who gave away her virtue and a man with no family or money).

The elephant was great and I loved how she was sassy and stood up for herself in her own way. But again I feel like the connection would be stronger if it were visual. I HATED the story of Jacob in the nursing home. I did not understand why that was even necessary, and she wrote it so horribly. Every time it would switch back to that part it would completely take me out of the real story and I found that quite frustrating. And the ending was silly, not knowing how to end a book seems to be a theme thus far.

All in all I appreciated the detail and work the author put in to make this story seem authentic in its setting. It was a great mindless read that helped me escape from my boring school work which was what I was looking for. I am excited to hear what the next choices will be, I have another recommendation that will hopefully be more successful than this one!

<3 Mollie

The Elephant Stole the Show

Spoiler Alert!

     

   Sara Gruen's novel, Water for Elephants, begins with a who-dunnit murder mystery and ends with the fantastic conclusion to that cliff hanger.  For me Rosie was the true heroine of this novel.  I loved her personality.  I loved that she was smart and constantly out witted August and the rest of her handlers (I especially loved the case of the missing lemonade).   I loved that she only understood Polish.  The strength of this novel lay in Gruen's meticulous portrait of circus life, drawing a vivid picture of what went on behind the scenes and using circus jargon in a realistic way.  I liked the grittiness of the worker characters, like Camel, and the freaks, like Kinko.  She did a great job creating the realities of working during the Great Depression and the cruelties of life on a railroad circus, like red-lighting and going without pay.  For me, I think this book would almost make a better screenplay because what she writes about is such a visual experience.  Despite the fact that the movie looks like a typical Hollywood blockbuster, I am almost looking forward to seeing the circus come to life in a more visceral way.  

   Jacob's character was a naive, spineless and asinine boy.  He rarely stood up against August throughout the book, allowing both Marlena and Rosie to bear the brunt of his moods.  He was not a character I could believe in, he was weak.  In a protagonist I like someone I can admire and root for; I could not root for Jacob.  I was constantly hoping he would get red-lighted (oops).  The love story between him and Marlena felt flat and lifeless with no passion and no true risk.  As book reviewer, Elizabeth Judd, wrote: 

 

But Gruen's prose is merely serviceable, and she hurtles 

through cataclysmic events, overstuffing her whiplash narrative with drama 

(there's an animal stampede, two murders and countless fights). 

She also asserts a grand passion between Jacob and Marlena 

that's never convincingly demonstrated. 

 

   I loathed the ninety-year old Jacob even more.  I hated that she included this plot-twist in the book.  The way she turned carrying water for elephants into something common, that old men boast about constantly in his nursing home was outlandish and never explained.  It's the title of the book for God's sake!  I also thought the ending was really out there where he is allowed to join the circus again.  It seemed like she was grasping for a happy ending.

 

 

 

   Marlena's character was witless, immature and vacant.  There was no depth to her character.  She was inconsistent throughout the novel.   She was brave enough to run away with the circus, but not to stand up to August until she had another man there to save her.  She was a brillant performer with a sixth sense with horses and elephants, yet failed to protect any of her animals from harm (except at the very end when somehow they manage to save half the menagerie and make off with the most prized animals).

 

  All in all I really loved learning about the circus world through Sara Gruen's obvious research into circus life in the 1930's.  However, Katherine Dunn's, Geek Love,  is a more exciting tale of the weird and freakish side to a carnival -involving parents purposefully mutating their offspring to create their own freaks- and it's better written.  (Heather- do you remember having to read this wildly inappropriate book in Miss.Abrahm's class in high school?)  I also really really loved Rosie.  In the end, the characters felt too childish for me to really connect with their stories.  

 

  I'm looking forward to hearing what you all though about the book! And don't forget- you can still post about Little Bee once you've finished that one too!

 

The Second Book

Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen
 

With its spotlight on elephants, Gruen's romantic page-turner hinges on the human-animal bonds that drove her debut and its sequel (Riding Lessons and Flying Changes)—but without the mass appeal that horses hold. The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures[...] He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for. Despite her often clichéd prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book.   -Bookmovement.com

 

Definitely excited for our second book choice!  Especially since the movie is coming out in April and looks pretty fantastic! (To watch the trailer:    http://www.hulu.com/watch/201524/movie-trailers-water-for-elephants)

So I believe that some of us have already read this book.  I would suggest that you pick the book that you voted for and read that and then review it for us on the blog.  We would also love to hear what you thought about this book too!  Or you can take a little reading vacation and pick up 

later on with the next book. 


As for Little Bee please let us know what you thought when/if you finish it.  Technically there is no deadline, so read on!

Here is the link to download the Itunes audiobook:  http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAudiobook?id=315593222&s=143441

And here is the link to a reading discussion guide that might get you thinking about themes that you could write about:  http://www.bookmovement.com/app/readingguide/view.php?ratings&readingGuideID=1079

 Let's set an end date of March 15th.

Just finished Little Bee. Like everyone else, I loved it but was left disappointed. This story was so gripping and the language really made the characters real, individual and unusual but I wanted the story to go on. It felt unfinished.

I don't want to spoil it for Heather because she hasn't read it yet. I'd still recommend any one read it.

Can't wait for the next book. I already read Water for Elephants so i'd be excited to ready any of the others.

Lisa

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