The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Author: Barbara Robinson

Age: Children

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get this post up before Christmas, but hopefully you will be able to keep it in mind for next Christmas. If you never read this book when you were a kid, you've been seriously missing out. For an adult reader, it's a very quick read (an hour or less) but still funny and wise and a totally worthwhile read. When my baby is a little older, I think I will start a tradition of reading it together every Christmas.

Every year, the children in our narrator's church put on the same Christmas pageant, and every year, it is dull and unimaginative. That is, until the year that the narrator's mother is put in charge of the pageant because the regular director is in the hospital. That's the year that the Herdmans decide to be in the pageant.

The Herdmans are not regular church-goers. They are six of the worst children ever--they lie, they steal, they beat people up and set things on fire. The only reason they come to church is because someone told them there was food there. But when they hear about the pageant, they volunteer for the lead roles (and terrify all the other children so that no one else auditions).

Everyone assumes the pageant will be an utter disaster. (The Virgin Mary wears big hoop earrings and smokes cigars!) But for the Herdmans, the Christmas story is fresh and new and, indeed, miraculous. They bring to their performances a spirit of wonder that was sadly lacking from the usual pageant. Seeing the story through the Herdmans' eyes, the congregation--and the reader--will rediscover what Christmas is all about.

The Trouble With Kings

Author: Sherwood Smith

Age: YA (Completely chaste romance)

I picked up this book because Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager, but for some unknown reason I'd never read anything else by her. I didn't hate this book, but I didn't love it either. I suppose it's fairly standard teen fantasy stuff, but there's nothing particularly wonderful about it. I would give it a resounding, "Meh."

I realized while I was reading it that it's been several years since I read much of this sort of fantasy. I kind of wish that I'd read it back then so I would know if it really wasn't very good in comparison to the rest of its genre, or if it just annoyed me because I've grown out of that stuff (and I really hope it's the former because the latter makes me sad). It's quite cliche...lots of horseriding through mountains and sword battles and princesses needing rescuing and diplomatic strife between various nations with funny-sounding names. The made-up fantasy names irritated me in a way they never did when I was younger...maybe because I've lived in Utah (aka Land of Most Ridiculous Made-Up Names) in the meantime. The main character's name is Flian, which is, I think, particularly bad. I'm not sure how it's meant to be pronounced, but it seems to me that the options are (1) "Fly-in" which sounds like an airplane, (2) "Flee-in" which sounds like a bank robber, or (3) "Flee-ANN," which is maybe not quite as bad, but no matter what there's an insect in there. It doesn't really conjure up the image of a beautiful heroine.

Also, the grammar is particularly bad. I read someone's Twilight-hating blog recently, and the blogger's main quibble seemed to be that Stephenie Meyer uses too many sentence fragments. Well, I hope that blogger never picks up this book, because her head would explode. And here's the thing...I'm not much for the grammar-nazi-just-for-the-sake-of-being-a-nazi sort of thing...at least not when it comes to fiction. And I don't buy the whole "e e cummings is the only writer who can break the rules of grammar, EVER" argument. A few sentence fragments are okay with me, if there's actually some logic to them. But Smith writes almost entirely in fragments, to the extent that the book is almost hard to follow. I don't know if it's just her style, or if it's her attempt at making it sound Medievalesque. But it's pretty bad. (She also uses words like "mislike" for "dislike," which made me laugh out loud.)

Well, enough complaining. On to the plot! When the book opens, Flian has fallen off a horse, hit her head, and lost her memory. While amnesiac, she is kidnapped by a succession of male nobles (only one of them is actually a king, which I found disappointing). After she recovers her memory, she realizes that her kidnappers are after her fortune, and she escapes...only to be kidnapped again. Various things happen (horserides and swordfights and whatnot, like I said before), and Flian starts to realize (as I'm sure you've already figured out) that maybe one of her kidnappers isn't so bad. The romance is highly predictable, but it's still kind of cute. Mostly I think this book lasts too long. All that kidnapping sounds fun, doesn't it...but it takes up like maybe the first 6th of the book. I found myself thinking, "Well, now I suppose everything will be neatly wrapped up" and then comparing how much I'd read to how much was left, and realizing I wasn't even halfway through.

So, what did I like? Well, like I said, the romance was kind of cute, although in stories like this I always find myself sadistically wishing that the girl would fall for an actual villain, not just an apparent villain who turns out to be grossly misunderstood and really quite wonderful--my version would be much more interesting. And as far as female fantasy characters go, Flian's not bad (if you can get past the name, of course). She is neither completely helpless nor the sort of girl who really just wants to be a man. Her main love is music, but after all her kidnappings she decides to try to learn to defend herself. She takes swordfighting lessons, but she never becomes fantastic at it. She manages to be brave and smart AND feminine, imagine that.

You may also like: Crown Duel; Tamora Pierce; Diana Wynne Jones; The Princess Bride; Ella Enchanted

 

Nicola and the Viscount

Author: Meg Cabot

Age: YA

So I read this book because ordinarily I like Meg Cabot, I really do--she's not the most fantastically literary writer ever, but what she does, which is light, fun chick lit, she does well. And I also read it because my library had it as an ebook and I don't have a kindle or anything but I've been sick lately and then recovering from being sick and just generally feeling too lazy to hold an actual book with my actual arms. I much preferred propping the laptop up on my legs and using one finger to scroll.

I think this may be the very silliest, fluffiest book I have ever read. And coming from me, that means something. Chick lit is one thing (much as I loathe the name--aren't "Chiclets" that horrible gum you used to get as birthday party favors in elementary school, with the pieces that were so tiny that if you ate just one, or even two or three, at a time, you would have so little to actually chew on that inevitably you would end up accidentally swallowing the gum and then panicking because everyone knows swallowing gum will kill you?). But this is so bad it doesn't even qualify as chick lit. This book is to chick lit like...okay, say you're PMSing, and you realize that it's chocolate time. And you turn the house upside down but you can't find chocolate to save your life--no Riesens, no peanut butter cups, no brownie mix, no chocolate chips, not even any cookies n' cream ice cream so you can try to convince your poor hormonal self that those little oreo bits count as chocolate. But you do find an old bag of leftover Halloween candy...just sugary stuff, no chocolate. "But it's candy!" you tell yourself. "That's just like chocolate! It's sweet, it's fattening, it will make me sick if I gorge myself on it as I plan to." So you eat the whole bag, and you make yourself horribly nauseous, and you're still absolutely miserable. Because it just doesn't do it for you, does it. It's JUST. NOT. CHOCOLATE.

No, this book isn't chick lit. It's a historical romance novel. I knew that about it before I read it, but it just didn't register. I thought it meant "historical," as in, set in a historical time period, and "romance" as in, something romantic happens. "Yay!" I thought. Nope, it means "historical romance" as in romance novel as in cheap and rushed and quite likely concocted by pushing brightly colored buttons on some primitive computer. You know, a button that says "dashing bad man" and another one that says "unexpectedly handsome good man who heroine always thought she hated but now finds herself strangely drawn to" and one that says "a dastardly plan will keep the lovers apart!" It's mostly stolen from Pride and Prejudice, with a bit of Vanity Fair tossed in, all stirred together with the heavy spoon of melodrama. "Tie me to the train tracks but I'll never sign the deed!"-style melodrama. The only thing it doesn't have is any sex. It is intended for teens and it is entirely clean. And okay, yes, clean books for teens is good, but in my opinion a romance novel should at least have a good make out scene or two.

And you know what? Even for a cheap romance novel, it's not very good. I've read my fair share of cheap romance novels and it was worse than many of them. The dialogue is AWFUL. I've done some research and it seems like most people agree that one of the cardinal rules of dialogue is "Read it out loud and see if it sounds even remotely like how people talk." Now, sometimes I come across a book with pretty lame dialogue, so I read it out loud, and if I give it the right sort of inflection I can find myself conjuring up in my imagination a person who might actually talk like that. Probably a person with whom I would limit my interactions, but a human being nonetheless. So I tried that with this book. And the only thing I could see in my imagination was Meg Cabot sitting at her primitive romance novel machine, smiling to herself and clapping her hands and going, "Ooh, that's good! That sounds so 1810!" and then rewarding herself with some horribly non-chocolate sugary treat. Meg, I've read books that were written in 1810, and those people didn't talk like that. Sure, they didn't say "LOL" all the time, and I'll give her credit for remembering to leave words like that out--but they were still sentient beings. It's not that the language sounds anachronistic, because it doesn't, but it has no flow whatsoever. Someone will say something, and someone else will respond with a total non sequitur, but not because they're the sort of person who jumps from topic to topic, just because none of it makes any sense at all and none of the characters even notice that it doesn't make any sense and I beat my head against my computer and scream, "How is this a conversation???"

I read some reviews on amazon, to see if maybe I was alone in feeling this way, that maybe I was just in a really bad mood when I read it--like I said, I usually like Meg Cabot, and I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Strangely enough, most of the reviews were positive. So I thought about the book some more and I came to the conclusion that for those reviewers this must have been the first book they ever read, and so they had nothing else (NOTHING else) to compare it to. One of them actually talked about how good and interesting and original the characters were. That's how I knew I was dealing with someone who'd never read a book before. The characters are like Pride and Prejudice paper dolls, and just that flat and flimsy. (Also, why is the main character named Nicola Sparks? It's like the author knows that if you need a romance fix you should be reading Nicholas Sparks instead, and she's trying to warn you.) Even the villains have absolutely no logical motive, and they seem to sense that and I think it makes them nervous. It read like a bad Disney movie--you know the kind--where Disney started with a decent book or a decent old film that they wanted to remake and then thought to themselves, "Nah, that's too interesting for our demographic. Let's see how far we can water this down." And what's left is a plot that doesn't make sense and a villain that's been absolutely stripped of anything remotely frightening and just turned ludicrous, but in a manner that's somehow devoid of any real humor. Disney, sometimes you rock, but sometimes I really really REALLY hate you.

All right, that's a lot of ranting. I'm going to try to be positive here for a moment. I did finish this book, and not just so I could blog about it. If I start a book and it really doesn't interest me at all, I don't finish it. So it was good enough to entertain me for a couple of hours. But I also watch The Real Housewives, so...yeah. Would the twelve-year-old on your Christmas list like this book? Quite possibly. Honestly I can't remember being twelve all that well anymore...I think I'm probably trying to block it out because I'm afraid of discovering just how silly and fluffy I was. But do that girl a favor and buy her Pride and Prejudice instead.

Other books to read instead of this one: Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Vanity Fair; Jane Eyre; A Great and Terrible Beauty; The Princess Diaries; A Countess Below Stairs; Philippa Gregory; anything else by Meg Cabot; any other romance novel

 

A Ring of Endless Light

Author: Madeleine L'Engle

Age: YA

I think this is my favorite Madeleine L'Engle, and that's not an easy choice. If you've never read any L'Engle except A Wrinkle in Time, you've been seriously missing out.

This is a book about a summer of death. If that sounds depressing, well, I'll be honest, it's pretty heavy stuff. I cried a couple times while reading it. But you can't have death without life, so it's also very much a book about life and a book with joy in it. I don't know much about L'Engle's religious background but she has a strong innate spirituality. Her religion, whatever it is, is something beautiful and something that makes sense. I've been through a summer of death and I think that makes this book mean even more to me. It really helped me through that summer, not in the sense that I read the book then--I'd read it several years before--but more that remembering the book helped me understand that death and particularly a summer of death (because deaths always seem to come in groups) is just a part of life and something that happens to everyone. And somehow knowing that, knowing that it wasn't just some strange and horrible thing that was only happening to me, made it more tolerable.

The Austin family always spends a couple weeks every summer on the Island with their grandfather. But the summer that Vicky Austin is almost sixteen is different. Grandfather has leukemia, and Vicky's dad, who's a doctor, says they'll stay for as long as he needs them. But Vicky knows her dad has to be back at work right after Labor Day, so Grandfather must not have much time left. While they're sitting around waiting for the inevitable, another death strikes first. A family friend, Commander Rodney of the Coast Guard, suffers a heart attack after rescuing a stupid rich boy who can't sail properly from drowning. So now the family has to cope with both the awfulness of the slow death that you have to watch and the horribleness of the sudden death. And there's more death to come--there always is--but no more spoilers.

I promised you there was life, too, and there is...and for a teenage girl that comes in the form of romance. There are THREE guys in Vicky's life this summer (I never understand why that happens to people in books, but I think I've ranted about it before). First, there's Leo Rodney, the oldest son of the man who just died. Vicky's known him forever but she's never been interested in him at all--but she can't just flat out reject him while he's grieving, so that's tricky. Then, there's Zachary Gray,  a gorgeous but troubled rich boy who's used to doing and getting whatever he wants. He sort of dated Vicky last summer but then didn't contact her for the rest of the year, so Vicky's not sure how to feel about him showing up again out of the blue. Zachary's got his own death issues. His mom just died, and he himself has a bit of death wish...he always has. It turns out that he was the one Commander Rodney saved from drowning. If you like that Edward Cullen dark-and-broody-and-bad-for-you thing, you must meet Zachary. I'll be honest, he filled many a teenage fantasy of mine. Last but certainly not least is Adam Eddington, a marine biology student who's spending the summer doing dolphin research on the island. He works at the same lab as Vicky's older brother, John, and he gets Vicky to help him with his dolphin project. Vicky is very attracted to Adam--for his mind as much as his body--but he doesn't seem to think of her as anything more than his friend's little sister. I'm pretty in love with both Zachary and Adam.

Reading this book as a new mother, I paid more attention to the parents than I ever did before. Zachary always teases Vicky that her family is old-fashioned, but it seems to me like her parents do a pretty good job...they're there for their kids when they need them, but they also trust them a lot and give them a lot of freedom. How do you strike that balance, I wonder. It doesn't seem easy. It kind of shocks me that they let Vicky go out with Zachary--he's a lot older than she is, he's proven himself to be irresponsible and dangerous, and they don't like him at all. I can't see my parents letting teenage me date Zachary. Much as I love him now, I can't really see myself letting a daughter date someone like him. But they let her make her own decisions about him...she doesn't have to sneak out or throw any fits. And--perhaps because they trust her so much--she proves herself worthy of it. Or maybe they are wrong to let her date him and they're just lucky that nothing really bad happens. I don't know. Stuff to think about when I have teenagers, I guess.

A couple other things...there's a whole series about Vicky; this is the fourth of five books. And there are some other books in a parallel series that feature Zachary and Adam. This is by far my favorite of all of them. It seems almost blasphemous to say there are L'Engle books that I don't love, because when she's good she's so good. But it's true. The others are different--most of them are sort of spy adventure stories, which is fine if you're in the mood for that, but this is the one that's the most about the real world. Of course you can read the others if you want to, but this one stands alone just fine. Also, the earlier ones in the Vicky series struck me as very juvenile. I know, you're thinking, "Beth, you love children's books!" Ok, fine, yeah I do, but this book is very definitely young adult and that's what I expected and wanted from the others. (In one of them, the main conflict involves a tough NYC gang called the "Alphabats," who I assume escaped from Sesame Street?) So, if it were up to me, I would skip the first three in the series and just read this one. You can read the one after this one, though, called Troubling a Star, if you want to hear the end of Vicky's story. Also, they made a Disney channel movie of this book, and I've only seen a tiny bit of it myself, but I read about it on wikipedia and it seems like they changed the plot entirely. I guess death is too difficult a concept for children, or something. Yeah. That's why I had to suffer through The Lion King and Bambi when I was a kid. Stupid Disney.


Recommended for readers who like: Dolphins; Madeleine L'Engle; Twilight; My Sister's Keeper; The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; A Time Apart

A Time Apart

Author: Diane Stanley

Age: Children (9-13ish)
(I think I read this book in my early teens, but it came from the children's section of the library. What can I say, when I was a teenager I read kids' books, and now that I'm an adult I read teen books.)

This is another one of those books that I read a long time ago, remembered liking, and re-read so I could tell you about it. I know it's a little young, but I still enjoyed it when I re-read it, and hopefully even if you don't like children's books you'll pass on the recommendation to kids you know. Also, fun fact: Diane Stanley is the author/illustrator of all those fun historical picture books like Cleopatra and Good Queen Bess that I loved when I was a kid. I believe this was her first novel.
















When Ginny's mom finds out she has cancer and requires immediate and intense treatment, she packs up thirteen-year-old Ginny and puts her on a plane to stay with her dad, Hugh, in London. Ginny and her mom live in Houston, and she's seen little of her dad while growing up, so she expects that living with him is going to be awkward. What she doesn't expect is for a stranger to pick her up at the London airport and take her to the university where Hugh is an archaeology professor so Hugh's boss can tell her that her dad is spending a year living on an Iron Age-style farm as an archaeological experiment. Ginny is given a hand-woven dress and taken to the farm.

Life on the farm is very different from modern life. All the families participating in the experiment live together in a large, thatched roundhouse. Everything must be done by hand, including growing the food they will eat and making the pots they will cook it in. Ginny quickly becomes popular with the group because she turns out to be a pretty decent cook (in part because, as an American, she actually uses spices). She adjusts pretty well to the new lifestyle (much better than I would have at thirteen!), making friends with seventeen-year-old Corey, a quiet boy who eventually opens up to Ginny, and five-year-old Daisy, whose parents are graduate students with little time for her and are desperately missing her nanny. Ginny even begins to understand and appreciate Hugh, whose stereotypical British reserve makes him hard to figure out at first. But all the time Ginny is missing and worrying about her mother, and finally she conceives of a daring plan to escape back to Houston.

In an author's note at the end of the book, Diane Stanley explains that she came up with the setting first. It's based on a BBC documentary about a group of people who performed this sort of experiment in the 1970s. The setting is really fascinating and is described in much detail. But the book is primarily about human relationships and about learning to let people in. As Ginny's mom seems to push her away, the people on the farm become her family. So the setting is really perfect for this, because it's about a culture in which all of the members of the community are absolutely dependent on each other for survival. Our modern lives in Western society are so isolated, and it's a revelation to everyone on the farm to learn what it means to be close to others, even the members of their own biological families.

Reading this as a mother, I tried to figure out what was going through Ginny's mom's head when she sent Ginny away. It's not like Ginny's a demanding little kid. She's a fairly self-sufficient thirteen-year-old. I would think that Ginny would be helpful and that her mom would want to keep her around. Is it a bit of selfishness on her part, a feeling of "I've spent 13 years looking after this kid and I'm sick and exhausted and it's someone else's turn"? If that's it, while it's not particularly noble, it is understandable. Is it pride, mixed with a desire to protect Ginny, so that she doesn't want Ginny to see her while she's sick? Is it mere practicality--she's going to spend a lot of time in the hospital, and Ginny can't drive, so she can't be left on her own for that long? Does it stem from the fear that she's not going to be around much longer, so she wants Ginny to start bonding with her dad? We never get a straight answer, although Ginny asks many times (after all, Ginny's mom has been her whole life up to now, and it hurts to be sent away). But from what Ginny's mom does say, it seems like she's motivated by a combination of all of these.

The one thing that bothered me about this book was that Ginny seems so naive about her mother's cancer. She's thirteen! So I tried to think back to when I was thirteen and how I would have responded. My sister had cancer when I was twelve, and actually I don't remember it worrying me that much. But hers was a transitory kind--it was supposed to go away on its own. And she never really seemed sick from it, certainly not like all the toddlers with shaved heads at the oncologist's. I felt awful for those kids. But I don't think I ever really panicked about my sister--although that could just be hindsight, because the cancer did go away and it didn't come back, so of course in retrospect it doesn't seem like that big a deal. So I don't know.

This was an enjoyable read. It's not one of my absolute favorites, like The Exiles. But it's pretty good. If you like children's books, you should read it. If you feel too old for them, then don't bother. But keep it in mind if you ever need to find a book for a pre-teen girl (or boy--Ginny isn't super girly).


Other books you might enjoy: historical fiction like The Royal Diaries or Ann Rinaldi; books about time travel like Both Sides of Time by Caroline B. Cooney, Voices After Midnight by Richard Peck, The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, Switching Well by Peni R. Griffin, and A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson (which is extra cool because it's set on the lake where I spent some of my childhood summers); books about girls whose lives change when their families move to a kibbutz in Israel like One More River by Lynne Reid Banks or Lydia, Queen of Palestine by Uri Orlev; books about family, divorce, and life changes like the Cousins series by Colleen O'Shaughnessy McKenna, My Crazy Cousin Courtney by Judi Miller, and The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney

Fire and Hemlock

Author: Diana Wynne Jones

Age: YA

I've been doing two things with this blog--I've been reading new books (new to me and recently published) and I've also been re-reading some of my old favorites so that I can introduce them to you. This has been really fun, because I've been reading some that I haven't read in years and years, and rediscovering what I liked about them. Fire and Hemlock is one of these books.

Polly is packing to go back to college after summer break when she gets distracted (as so often happens when one is packing) by an old book of short stories. But what's weird is that it seems like the book had different stories the first time she read it, years ago. Also, there's the photograph called "Fire and Hemlock" that's always hung on her bedroom wall--did it always look exactly like that? The more Polly thinks, the more confused she gets--why are her memories so muddled? Does she really have two different sets of memories?

As Polly struggles to remember, we travel with her into her second set of memories, back to when she was ten and accidentally crashed a neighbor's funeral on Halloween. There she met the mysterious Thomas Lynn. Over the next few years, Polly's parents divorce and her world falls apart. Mr. Lynn is one of the few constants in her life, a friend and a sort of mentor. He and Polly make up stories together about a hero named Tan Coul and his assistant, Hero. They're just having fun--until the stories start to come true. To make things even more complicated, Mr. Lynn's ex-wife, Laurel, and her new husband, Mr. Leroy, exert some strange and sinister control over him, and for some unknown reason they are desperate to keep him and Polly apart. In fact, whenever Polly and Mr. Lynn see each other, or contact each other in any way, something bad happens to one or both of them.

Back in the present, Polly realizes that Mr. Lynn does not exist in her first set of memories. How could she have forgotten someone who was so important to her? Did he really exist, or did she just imagine him? And if he is real, how can she find him again?

Diana Wynne Jones is one of my favorite authors. I didn't discover her until I was a teenager, and I'm sorry I didn't find her sooner because she mostly writes children's books and I would have loved to grow up with them. This book is rather different than her usual, however--for one thing, it's for teens, and for another, it's not her typical set-in-another-world sort of fantasy. There are some strange/magical doings sprinkled throughout this book, but for the most part it's a story about the real world, about growing up in a dysfunctional family and the horribly murky, awkward time that is early adolescence. This is one of my very favorite Jones books.

It's also one of the strangest books I've ever read--but that's not a bad thing. Jones' books are usually more complex than they appear on the surface, and they're very heavily based in myth (all sorts of myth, not just the standard Greco-Roman gods). After I finished reading this book, I found an essay of hers about this book specifically and about her literary background (which is extensive) in general. You should definitely read it (see the link at the bottom) after you finish this book, and in fact if you've ever read anything of Jones' you should read it because it will enhance your appreciation and understanding of her work.

In addition to all the mythological themes, it's also a book about memory--always a strange and ethereal thing, but even more so when it comes to childhood memories because, in addition to the passage of time, childhood memories are clouded by the fact that children do not always fully understand what's going on around them. It's always tricky to delve back into that time and try to make sense of it all from an adult perspective, even if your memories haven't been magically altered.

One more thing--(spoiler alert, except not really, because I think it's kind of obvious) if you're bothered by the sort of books where a girl ends up falling in love with an older man who she's known since she was a child (as so often happens in Tamora Pierce, for instance), then this may not be the book for you. Nothing inappropriate happens between Tom and Polly, but it is still kind of weird. Fortunately Tom is darling and Polly is darling, so you really will be rooting for them at the end. Also, the cover art is really weird. The man on the cover definitely looks like a pedophile. That is emphatically NOT what Tom looks like. Tom is very handsome. I'm not saying this solely because I have a crush on him. It says so in the book. But it takes a while to get to it (Polly doesn't think about it when she's a little kid), so I'm telling you in advance to be sure to picture him as hot the entire time.

Links to Jones' essay:
(Note: It took me a long time to find an actual working link for this, so if it stops working let me know because I've also saved the essay on my computer.)

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Recommended for readers who like: Tamora Pierce; Howl's Moving Castle; White Oleander; A Great and Terrible Beauty; Wake; mythology; books about dysfunctional families and complex mother-daughter relationships

Other good books to start with, if you're new to Jones: The Dalemark Quartet (first book Cart and Cwidder) -- these were my first introduction to her writing; The Chrestomanci series (first book Charmed Life) -- probably my favorite Jones series.

Death on the Nile

Author: Agatha Christie

Age: Adult
(Note: I've been reading Agatha Christie since my early teens. There's absolutely nothing dirty or inappropriate in her books...except for the pervasive theme of murder, of course.)

Agatha Christie is one of my very favorite authors, and this is my favorite Agatha Christie mystery. So that should give you an idea of how much I like this book. I just re-read it, and even though I knew exactly how it was going to end, reading it was still a thoroughly enjoyable experience. That's a good mystery novel, in my opinion--plots and characters that are interesting enough to stand on their own with the mystery removed.

Linnet Ridgeway is a beautiful young heiress who is used to getting exactly what she wants, when she wants it--her house, her clothes, her jewelry--even her best friend Jackie's handsome fiance, Simon Doyle. Linnet dazzles Simon, and, after a whirlwind romance, they head to Egypt for what should be a fairytale honeymoon. But the spurned and betrayed Jackie has other plans. She follows them everywhere--staying at the same hotels, taking the same tours, and generally making a nuisance of herself. In desperation, Linnet and Simon sneak away from their hotel and board a boat that's traveling up the Nile. But just when they think they're in the clear, Jackie turns up on the boat! And then Linnet is murdered. Obviously Jackie is the prime suspect--but she has an absolutely airtight alibi.

Before the Jackie situation, Linnet believed herself to be universally adored. But, as the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (fortuitously touring Egypt on the same boat) discovers, almost all of the other passengers have their own reasons to want Linnet dead. Among the seemingly pleasant group of upper-class tourists who have spent the past week together, there are, among others, a jewel thief, an embezzler, a blackmailer, and a known killer with a price on his head. The question is--who actually did it?

There are several things I love about Agatha Christie. First, the mysteries themselves are great--the solution isn't obvious, but she does give you enough clues to figure it out yourself if you really, really think. (That said, I've only figured out the solution to one of her mysteries before the reveal maybe twice in all the time I've been reading them.) And even though she's written dozens, the murders are always unique and full of twists and turns. And she's good at changing things up now and then. You read a few, and you start to think you know which sorts of people turn out to be murders and which don't, and then all of a sudden she totally surprises you. Second, the characters are always interesting--all of them. And there are usually a lot of them, because there are lots of suspects in every case. I read a review recently that said even her minor characters have a lot of work put into them. I would argue that, in fact, there aren't really minor characters in an Agatha Christie--there's more of an ensemble cast. Third, there's always a little romance--not a lot, just enough to be darling. As a female writer, Christie understands that the most satisfying ending is one in which the killer is caught AND the right couple ends up together.

Christie wrote for several decades, but I especially love the 1930s tourist stories, like this one. The settings--time and place--are so Indiana Jones. Maybe it's escapism on my part--a leisure class, traveling to exotic places where they're pampered (no hostels for these guys)--but it thrills me. Plus you know their clothes are fantastic.

So, why is this my favorite Christie? Well, it has my favorite setting, my favorite murder, my favorite characters, and my favorite romance. If you haven't read any Christie, this is a good place to start. And if you have, but you haven't read this one yet, you need to remedy that right away.

Other books and movies you might enjoy: Midsommer Murders; Rex Stout (author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries); Murder on the Orient Express; Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (also published as The Boomerang Clue); Evil Under the Sun; And Then There Were None; Murder in Mesopotamia

The Exiles

Author: Hilary McKay

Age: Children

I'm the sort of person who usually has a hard time answering questions about my "favorite" book or my "favorite" author; I love too much and there are too many and I'm just not very decisive. But Hilary McKay is absolutely and undoubtedly my very favorite children's book author. (And by children's books I mean juvenile chapter books, not picture books. This book is probably for 8-12 year olds.) I have read her books over and over and over again, from the time I was the age they're written for until now, and no matter how many times I've read them before or how old I get, they never cease to delight me. So, if you're the sort of person that still enjoys reading a good kids' book now and then, you MUST read this. Otherwise you must ensure that your own children read it at some point.

The exiles are the four Conroy sisters--Ruth, 13; Naomi, 11; Rachel, 8; and Phoebe, 6--who have been sent away to spend the summer with horrible Big Grandma in Cumbria while their parents waste an unexpected inheritance (which could have been spent on books and ponies) remodeling the house. The girls LIVE for reading. Books are very nearly all they think about. They don't like Big Grandma. She's loud and mannish and a bit scary, and she doesn't seem to like them at all either. Big Grandma thinks the girls are spoiled and that reading is bad for them. So, this summer, they won't find any books in her house. Instead, they will be forced to find other ways to amuse themselves--hiking, gardening, picnics on the beach, fresh air and exercise. Ruth decides to become a natural historian, and starts a bone collection, but has trouble getting the flesh off the carcasses she collects. Early in the summer, without really meaning to, Naomi devours the last of the strawberries in the garden, and is guilted into hours and hours of yardwork to atone. Rachel keeps a diary of everything she eats. Phoebe invents fishing in a bucket of water--all the peace of the sport with none of the stress of actually trying to catch anything. But the girls are stubborn. Even as they begin to develop new hobbies, they never give up their relentless quest for something--anything--to read.

I know this is a bit of a cliche, but this book will honest-to-goodness make you laugh out loud, and it will also make you cry. The Conroy sisters are a bit like the brothers from Malcolm in the Middle, except they're obsessed with reading, not destruction (in the girls' case, any wreckage is inadvertent). The book is full of scheming and adventures and sibling rivalry (no perpetually and preternaturally well-behaved Boxcar children here). McKay excels at capturing the world as it appears to children, and she's a master of subtle humor.


Recommended for readers who like: Zilpha Keatley Snyder (The Headless Cupid); Nancy K. Robinson (Oh Honestly, Angela!); Colleen O'Shaughnessy McKenna (Too Many Murphys); Barbara Park (Skinnybones; My Mother Got Married...and Other Disasters); Barbara Robinson (The Best Christmas Pageant Ever)

A Reliable Wife

Author: Robert Goolrick

Age: Adult

As promised, I've been working on reading actual adult books. Unfortunately, this one is the sort of strange and depressing adult book that reminds me why I generally prefer the ones for teens. But just because I didn't like it very much doesn't necessarily mean you wouldn't...it may be more a matter of personal taste than anything actually wrong with the book itself.

Ralph Truitt is a very wealthy businessman living alone in a small town in Wisconsin in 1907. He's in his fifties and has kept to himself for several decades, following multiple personal tragedies. But now at last he is ready for a change, so he's placed an ad in a newspaper for "a reliable wife."

Catherine Land is the woman who answers the ad. She, too, has had a miserable life, but she also has big plans to change that--she is going to marry Truitt and then slowly poison him, so that she will be left alone to enjoy his wealth.

Tony Moretti is a prodigal and lascivious young pianist. He is beautiful, poor, and bitter. And he may be Truitt's long-lost son.

These three lives intertwine in a "Desire Under the Elms" fashion. Each has their own agenda. Truitt wants redemption. Tony wants revenge. And Catherine wants love and money, but if she can only have one, she'll settle for money.

Okay, here's what I didn't like about this book. Number one: All the characters, especially Truitt, think about sex ALL THE TIME. Which is okay. I have nothing against sex. But the author doesn't have to tell us SO much about it. After the first five or ten pages of semi-graphic description of Truitt's thoughts, I get the point. I can grasp that Truitt thinks of nothing but sex and flesh and touching naked flesh and oh that lovely naked flesh. I can remember that. The story can thus progress without me needing to be reminded on every single page.

Number two: It is just so dang depressing. When I first started to read it, I hoped that the characters would find some happiness. They seem like people who ought to finally be able to reach each other and move beyond the horribleness of their previous lives. But as the book progressed, I realized that they're all such truly awful, awful people that it's hard to wish them any good or really to relate to them at all.

Number three: Apparently this is a psychological thriller, which is not the same thing as a regular thriller. A psychological thriller is, apparently, a book in which people spend a lot of time thinking and not a ton happens. For a book about three people who want to kill each other, it's not really a page-turner.

A note from the author at the end of the book explains that the inspiration for the story came from a non-fiction book called Wisconsin Death Trip, which I have not read, but a google search reveals that it's a book of photographs and news stories about crime, murder, and death in rural Wisconsin at the turn of the century. So this book seems to be mostly about the madness brought on by lengthy and miserable winters. And I can relate to that and it is an interesting premise.

So. I didn't really like it. It's not awful. It's certainly not badly written. (No wading through the "Um, like, yeah." "Um, like, nuh-uh." that's in some of the teen books.) If you like tales of tragedy and striving for redemption and people who think about sex constantly, then you will probably like it. For me personally, I'm going to look for something happier to read next.


Other books you might like: Desire Under the Elms; Les Miserables; My Antonia; The Devil in the White City; Marie, Dancing (Note: With the exception of Desire Under the Elms, I did really like the other books listed here. So if you read this book and like it, you should definitely read the others. If you read this description and it kind of interests you, except for all the things I didn't like about it, then you should read the others.)

Up the Down Staircase

Author: Bel Kaufman

Age: Adult

Everyone who's ever been a teacher, or been married to a teacher, should read this book. In fact, everyone who's ever had a teacher should read it, too. It's funny, poignant, and a fairly quick read.

The book chronicles Sylvia Barrett's first semester of teaching English at a NYC public high school in the 1960s. Miss Barrett is young, pretty, and, at the beginning of September, enthusiastic. As the semester progresses she deals with dozens of problems and frustrations--some petty, and some much more serious. There are never enough desks, books, or red pencils to go around. The administration is over-bearing and unsympathetic. Other teachers hate the children. And the children have their own problems--unrequited love, abortion, suicide, poverty, homelessness, truancy, delinquency, and no sense of self-worth. Miss Barrett begins to wonder if she's really cut out to be a public school teacher in a big city, or if she would find more happiness and fulfillment as a professor at the small private college that has offered her a position, along with promises of a beautiful campus, enthusiastic students, and the chance to teach an entire course on her beloved Chaucer.

It's written an interesting format, and each chapter is different...dialogue, students' essays, bulletins from the administration, notes passed between harried teachers, excerpts from a student's notebook, student suggestions from Miss Barrett's suggestion box, letters from Miss Barrett to her best friend, and even scraps of paper from the trash can. It's rather interactive, because only the letters from Miss Barrett to her friend provide any clear commentary or narrative from her perspective. The rest of the time, the reader is left to experience the notes, suggestions, and administrative mandates as Miss Barrett would experience them, and draw his or her (when, oh, when will "their" be acceptable as third person sexually-ambiguous singular?) own conclusions.

I know my summary above makes it sound sad, but it's really quite funny through the sadness. It's a book that makes you laugh a lot and think just enough. The most depressing aspect is probably that absolutely nothing about the public school system has changed in the past 50 years. So. Read it. Laugh. Think about education reform. And then spend some time thinking about how grateful you are to your teachers--the ones you had, and the ones who are teaching or will teach your kids. Because it's a hard job.

The best quotes from reviewers:

"A rib tickler and an eye-opener."
"Witty, wise...seldom has a humorous novel been at the same time as important."
"It is the kind of 'funny' that hurts."


Recommended for readers who like: At the moment I'm having a hard time coming up with other books that are quite like it. But there are dozens of movies in this teacher-who-makes-a-difference genre: Mona Lisa Smile, Freedom Writers, Remember the Titans, Stand and Deliver. If you like any of these movies I'm sure you'll like this book. And even if you don't like the movies, well, the book isn't quite like them. It's more humor and less dripping poignancy. And, without giving too much away, it's more about the little ways people can be changed than about big dramatic revolutions. But perhaps the little changes are just as worthwhile, in the end.

Mockingjay

Author: Suzanne Collins

Age: YA

This is the third and final book in the Hunger Games trilogy. If you haven't already read The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, don't read this review! There may be spoilers!

This book, like the other two, was very vivid. I finished it Sunday evening, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I dreamed about it that night and I woke up thinking about it the next morning. If you've read the first two, which you should have, then you know what they're like...exciting, entertaining, thrilling. It's more of the same. Some people have said that it's slower than the first two, and maybe it is at the beginning, but with these books "slow" is a relative term, and it certainly doesn't equate to "boring." And the finale is as heart-racing and un-put-downable as ever. I have come up with a cunning plan, and it is this: I am going to make my husband read these books, and then when he gets down to the last 60 pages or so I am going to start nagging him incessantly about making dinner. 

When the book opens, Katniss is in District Thirteen, where the local government wants her to become the face of the rebellion. She has mixed feelings about this, and she's not sure who to trust. Meanwhile, Peeta is still in the hands of the Capitol, and they're trying to use him against her. Et cetera, et cetera, lots of things blow up. I really enjoyed this trilogy. I felt like every book contributed to the story and there was very little of the filler that you get in some trilogies--you know, the kind where the second book just seems absolutely useless.

I really like Katniss. She's heroic, but she's not a superhero. In fact, she seems to spend most of this book in the hospital, recovering from various adventures. This isn't one of those stories where someone gets shot in a battle scene but they wrap a t-shirt around it and grit their teeth and fight through the pain, and then the next time you see them they're totally fine and if someone mentions it they're all "Oh yeah, haha, I got shot. How silly!" Actions have consequences in this story. And that makes it more...realistic, I guess...at least inasmuch as a sci-fi adventure story can be. Also, it makes you see how much their cause really means to them, and how far they're willing to go for it.

I like all of Katniss's conflictedness, too. She's so self-doubting and self-deprecating. Kind of like Bella Swan, except with Bella it's the sort of self-doubt that comes from not really thinking very much of your self, for no real reason other than that you're a teenage girl, and wondering what on earth any boy--let alone a boy you really like because you can see how fantastic he is--would see in you. And that's okay; in my opinion it's believable because I've been there. But with Katniss it's more complex than that. What she doesn't like about herself is that she's KILLED PEOPLE. A LOT of people. But at the same time, when she wonders what all these gorgeous boys see in her, well, we readers know what they see in her. She's actually a really good person who does awesome things all the time. I think she's what we all secretly hope we are when we're having our own self-doubting moments. Silly of us, isn't it, to sit there and think to ourselves, "Gosh, I really suck," but then behind that we're thinking, "I bet I only think I do but I'm actually really cool. Just like Katniss." Or maybe that's just me.

Like the other books, this book also has the whole "controlling the media = controlling the world" motif, only this time it's more about news stories than reality TV shows. I think about that sometimes. Everything we get from the media about politics seems to be SO much one extreme or the other that I wonder if any of it is real at all, if our government is really doing or not doing anything they say they are, or if they're actually doing something completely different and having a good laugh at us.

The other thing I mused about while reading it was the strange situation in which Katniss finds herself, where she's surrounded by all these other people whose sole aim is to keep her alive, even if they have to give their own lives for it. I've always thought that would be really weird. You know, to be the president of a country or something and have all these bodyguards, all these people who exist just to take a bullet for you. I mean, what makes one person's life more valuable than another's? Does anyone really believe that they, single-handedly, are the only ones who can run everything and fix the world's problems, that no one else could step up and take their place and do an okay job, if they needed to? I guess it's an especially weird thing to think about in the U.S., where we change our leadership every 4-8 years anyway. But after reading this book I think I understand it better. Some people and some positions have symbolic value that may be completely unrelated to capability, but is still actually a really big deal.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to talk about. The romance thing. I just don't get the standard literary contrivance in which a girl is always finding herself having to choose between two, or more, gorgeous men. Does this really happen to anyone ever? If so, I would like to hear about it. I've always felt lucky just to have one guy at a time who was into me. But I guess it works as far as making a story more interesting. We've got this (sort of silly) idea in our entertainment culture that the only part of a love story that's entertaining is the part BEFORE the characters are for sure in love with each other. After that, I guess it's all just toilet seats up and down and lids on toothpaste, or something. Because dating people or married people NEVER have any real conflict ever again. Uh-huh. But anyway, that's how it's supposed to work in books and TV shows, so the hard part for writers who write for longer than one book or one season is how to keep two people perpetually in the state of a not fully defined relationship. And what Collins does with Katniss and Peeta in Book Three is certainly an interesting and unusual twist. That's all I'll say.

Those are my musings. If you've read the first two, you're dying to read this book anyway. I don't have to tell you to. If you haven't started the trilogy yet, well, you're not supposed to be reading this review. But just in case...you should read them. They're well-written, the characters are interesting, and the stories will both entertain you and make you think.

See my The Hunger Games review for book recommendations.

Another Faust

Author: Daniel and Dina Nayeri

Age: YA

This is the other YA book that I checked out on my last library trip. I went there specifically to get Ophelia, and I just happened to pick this up too. I'm glad I did. I haven't read the original Faust, so unfortunately I can't compare it to that. But it's the same basic selling-your-soul-to-the-devil story, only set at a modern Upper East Side high school. It's Gossip Girl meets the Cullen family from Twilight with some Screwtape Letters stirred into the mix. The Faust children are five teenagers who live with their strange and beautiful governess, Madame Vileroy. They are boldly ambitious, seeking wealth, fame, power, and beauty, and Madame Vileroy gives them special gifts to help them achieve their goals. They're what Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass would be like if they had superpowers.

Christian, the athlete, can steal...by touching another person, he can take some of their energy...their strength, their coordination. He makes himself stronger by simultaneously weakening his opponent. Valentin, the writer, can lie...he can rewind time and start a scene over if it doesn't play out to his liking. He can experiment with dozens of possible futures and choose the one that works to his advantage. Victoria, the perfect student, can cheat...she can read people's minds. She manipulates conversations in order to make the other person think about what they don't want to say out loud...and then she hears it anyway. Belle is beautiful. Everyone who sees her is drawn to her. But when they get too close, they are repelled by her scent...she smells like cheap perfume covering up something rotten. Bice' is Belle's twin sister. She's different from the others. Bice' can hide. She can freeze time. And while everyone else is frozen, Bice' studies...and studies and studies. She seems to be trying to learn every language in the world.

The teenagers have sold their souls to the devil for these skills, and as the book progresses, Madame Vileroy gives them additional gifts, making them more powerful. But pesky little shreds of humanity keep poking up...hints of love and guilt. Have they all made their deals willingly, or were some of them tricked? And if they could do it all over, would they make the same choices?

I enjoyed this book. I think I read it in a day (it's been a long day, and I can't remember now if I started it this morning or last night). In my book-reading week, it's sort of the yin to Ophelia's yang. It's not as well written (in terms of diction and dialogue) but the story is more interesting. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much about the dialogue; it is intended for teens, after all, and I guess that's what they sound like. "Um, like, don't you think he's like hot?" "Um, like, no, that's like totally gross." But if you can get past that, the story will draw you in. And it's got a moral, which isn't something you generally find in the post-Twilight sexy darkness and evil genre. Occasionally the moralizing is a bit heavy-handed, but for the most part it's sufficiently subtle. It's a book that I think teens would benefit from reading...especially teens who go to the sort of fiercely competitive high schools where being the most beautiful or the most athletic or having the highest GPA are the only things that matter.

Recommended for readers who like: Twilight (for the fun powers, not the love story...this isn't really a romance); Gossip Girl; The Screwtape Letters; City of Bones; A Great and Terrible Beauty; Diana Wynne Jones; the Daughters of the Moon series

Ophelia

Author: Lisa Klein

Age: YA

I know, it seems like all I've reviewed lately have been young adult books. I was thinking about this when I went to the library a couple days ago, but I came home with two YA books anyway. It just seems like adult books are so often about one of two types--boring 20somethings with boring office jobs, or bitter menopausal divorcees. I've lived through the first one, and I quit that job, thanks...and as far as the second one goes, I'd rather just cross that bridge if or when I come to it. But I know that's not really ALL that's out there...so I'll try to come up with some good adult books to review soon.

Ok, here goes...Ophelia. Honestly, it was a bit of a disappointment. Not that there was anything too wrong with the book itself...it's just that I've always found Ophelia intriguing, and the book wasn't exactly what I was expecting, or hoping for, I guess. But it was pretty standard historical fiction, well-written (at least gramatically, if not necessarily in terms of plot...but more on that below), and if you like Shakespeare and/or Shakespearean-era historical fiction, you'll probably like it.

It wasn't as dramatic or as tragic as I would have expected from a book about a play about a tragedy. For starters, Ophelia doesn't kill herself...she pulls a Juliet and fakes her own death. That's not a spoiler; it's on the first page. According to the author blurb, Lisa Klein is a former professor of English who "has always been dissatisfied with interpretations of Ophelia and, since Shakespeare is not alive today to write stronger female characters, she has taken it upon herself to breathe new life into Ophelia's story." I take issue with several points here. For one, the implication that Shakespeare didn't write "strong women." Okay, if by a "strong woman" you mean a woman who pays her own rent, runs her own business, and still finds time to squeeze in a half hour on the treadmill every day...then no, Shakespeare didn't write strong women. But he certainly wrote vivid female characters. After all, if Ophelia wasn't interesting in her own right to begin with, no one would have written this book, would they. Second, all right, I can see that maybe committing suicide when your dad gets murdered by the love of your life, who also happens to have gone crazy, may not be the strong woman answer. But real women still do it, even in this enlightened era of property-owning and treadmills. But I can see that in a book for teens it's probably better NOT to write something that romanticizes suicide after your boyfriend ditches you. (Although that begs the question of why Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are taught to teenagers at all.) Third, if the strong woman answer is, apparently, to fake your own death using a poison that makes you appear to be asleep, well, that's what Juliet tried, isn't it. And who wrote Juliet? Oh yeah, Shakespeare.

All of this is leading to a big old Beth rant. It really irritates me when historians try to impose modern values and ideas on past civilizations. I'm annoyed by the standard historical fiction/fantasy heroine...the one who's better educated than anyone else she knows, who loves to climb trees and wrestle boys and hates to be indoors, who's abyssmal at needlepoint, who's always disguising herself as a knight in order to have adventures, and whose only friends are males because women are just too stupid and petty and don't understand her or appreciate her! Oh feminist writers, don't you see what a disservice you're doing us, under the guise of telling the heretofore untold stories of womankind? What you're saying is that only women who live like men have stories that are worth telling. How is that different from saying that only stories about the lives of men are worth telling? And all right, many royal women did receive educations similar to those received by men. So if you're writing about one of those women, then it's factual and I won't complain. But why do you think that we modern readers will only be able to relate to stories about women who can read and do math? Why don't you ever give us a chance to relate to them because they, like us, try to live up to their parents' expectations, argue with their siblings, fall in and out of love, and bear children? Don't you think there were ANY interesting women in all of history who actually liked sewing? And the whole all-other-women-hate-me-because-I'm-beautiful-and-interesting thing...where does that come from? Yes, we women are a petty, gossipy, jealous group. But we usually manage to make a few female friends anyway. My theory is that writers, lacking sufficient creativity, are copying Scarlett O'Hara. But here's the thing...girls didn't hate Scarlett because they were jealous and dumb...they hated Scarlett because Scarlett wasn't very nice! (Remember when she stole her sister's fiance?) And men didn't love Scarlett because they were somehow more enlightened...they loved her because she was hot. And one more thing...I don't really think that women in history spent nearly as much time bemoaning their lot as historical fiction writers would have us believe. If they all really hated their lives THAT much, don't you think they would have revolted sooner? And it's just so heavy handed. Sure, you can show us that this girl has to marry this nasty old man her father has chosen, and we, as modern, enlightened women, can think to ourselves, "Oh, that sucks, glad that's not me!" You don't have to go on and TELL us, "She beat her breast and tore her hair and cried out to the night sky, 'Why must I be bound to do as my father orders? Why are women not free like men? Why, oh why, don't I get to live in some future wonderful enlightened era where I could marry or not marry as I pleased?'"

Now that I've got that out of my system, I will say, to be fair, that this book doesn't do quite as much of the above as I initially feared. Ophelia ends up at a convent where she meets lots of honest-to-goodness, in-any-century strong women, and she finds some good friends and some good role models. So that's cool.

As I mentioned before, Klein was an English teacher, and that's very apparent. The dialogue is all very Shakespearean. I can't make up my mind about whether it's contrived or clever, but either way she is very good at it...puns and double entendres and whatnot. It's clear that she's spent a lot of time reading Shakespeare.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is Ophelia's life before all the tragic stuff happens, her childhood and how she falls in love with Hamlet, which is sweet. The second part details the events covered by the play. The third part is what happens after, which is that she ends up at a convent. Not a spoiler...like I said, it comes up on the first page of the story. I liked the first part okay and the third part the best. Those are the parts where Klein makes up her own story. I wasn't really a fan of the middle part. Klein pretty much just copies out the play, word for word, without really shedding much more light on what happened and why. She doesn't even attempt to explain Hamlet's or Gertrude's motivation. And I can see that to the audience, and to Hamlet himself, Gertrude's actions are supposed to be a bit of a mystery. Does she really love Claudius? Was she overcome with lust? Is she in league with Claudius, or does she honestly believe he's innocent? Is he holding something over her, keeping her in line because she's terrified of him? Is she making a personal sacrifice, marrying a man she doesn't love because she thinks it is best for her country? Interesting questions to ponder, at least according to my high school English teacher...and, okay, to me too. But I feel like if you're going to write the backstory to the play, and you're going to write about Gertrude, then you need to pick one. You at least need to make it seem like Gertrude has some reason to do what she's doing. And Klein doesn't do that.

I also have problems with how the Hamlet-and-Ophelia story progresses. It's like, they're both totally in love, and then all of a sudden they have the whole "Get thee to a nunnery" scene, and Ophelia gives up on him. He's yelling at her, and she turns into one of my high school classmates--"What's he SAYING? I don't get it!"--even though two chapters ago they were doing the double-meaning banter and loving it. I personally wouldn't class myself much higher than moderately strong, on the strong woman scale, but if the love of my life apparently went crazy, I would fight a little harder. I wouldn't just go, "Oh, that's it then, better fake my own death." I would seek him out and at least try to have one more conversation. And okay, he's crazy and he's not paying any attention to her anymore, so she's done with him, I can see that. Or they're both still in love but he's bent on revenge and he knows it's a dangerous path, so he breaks it off with her, I can see that. But not just, oh, I'm confused, I guess I won't ever talk to him again because it isn't in the play. I can't see that.

The thing is, it kind of fails as a tragedy because not one of the characters to whom tragic things happen ends up being all that likable. Ophelia's actually pretty likable, but she survives. And that's okay, I guess...I'm a fan of happy endings. But even if the author's going to give her a happy ending, she can still make the middle part sad. And it's hard to feel that, to really feel any grief for Hamlet, because it seems like Ophelia's done with him anyway, and like he's not really good enough for her.

But I did really like the third part of the book, where Ophelia's at the convent. I'm not a historical expert, but from what I do know of the era I like the depictions of both court life and convent life. Also, Ophelia goes through this whole "How have I sinned to bring this tragedy upon everyone I've loved?" soul-searching phase, and I like that. It seems like a much more believable response for a girl of her society than the "hating needlepoint, why must men define me" thing. Plus there's even some strange visions and stigmata incidents.

So there you have it. Lots of ranting, I know. It might seem like I hated it, but I don't think I did. I didn't love it. But I am still interested in seeking out Klein's other books and reading them. So it wasn't all that bad.

Recommended for readers who like: The Royal Diaries series; Hamlet; Philippa Gregory