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