Book Review: Love and Other Natural Disasters

Title: Love and Other Natural Disasters
Author: Holly Shumas
Genre: Literary Fiction
Category: Women's Fiction
Rating: B+

Summary: Eve finds out on Thanksgiving, when she's pregnant with her second child, that her husband, Jonathan, is having an emotional affair. Are emotional affairs as bad, equivalent to, or less bad than sexual affairs? Can Eve ever trust Jonathan again? (Oh, and Eve's family and friends are worth getting to know too.)

First Line: "Some years, I gaze around the Thanksgiving table and I feel almost painfully grateful for my own bounty, for the abundance that is my life, for everything that brought me to this moment, with these people, inside this light. And some years, I just eat turkey."

Review: For reasons beyond the scope of this review, let me just say that this book made me not want to be a writer. Holly Shumas does a pretty bang-up job of writing a book with a seemingly basic hook and keeping you interested. Writing a simple book and making it good is very hard to do. She's set the bar pretty high in this regard. (Perhaps higher than I would ever be able to grasp.)

This book also made me incredibly fearful to ever get married. Shumas is a marriage therapist and I think she might have been writing from some experience. Emotional affairs are no joke. And they probably happen just as often, if not more so, than physical infidelity. The questions that the affair raises in Eve's mind are questions that I'd scarcely want to answer.

A couple of things regarding the technical expertise of this book:

1. The hook came so early in this book that I was nervous for Shumas. I wasn't sure how she was going to sustain this "forgiveness" of the emotional affair for ~300 pages, but she held her own pretty well.

2. She wasn't pitch-perfect in handling this long, drawn-out turmoil in the marriage. At a couple of points I thought, "Yep, it was bad, but you need to piss or get off the pot. Just make a decision about what you're going to do with your life."

3. The climax was kind of surprising. The climax is, not surprisingly, an emotional climax. She has set up the characters of Eve and Jonathan to fit into particular boxes, and then she kind of flips the script. She kept her hand concealed so you couldn't really see "the climax" coming, but it caught me off guard. (But that wasn't all-together bad.) (Neither was it all-together good.)

It's hard to describe the book other than to say this:
1. If you're looking for clean resolutions, don't read this book.
2. If you're looking for a "fun" read, don't read this book.
3. If you don't like to read characters who complain or are "realistic," don't read this book.

Be warned: This book is not for everyone! But, if you like reading about people who live in reality (albeit, perhaps, a reality not like your own) and can take some grief and grit in reading, than this book is totally for you.

Recommendation: People looking for a better alternative to Sue Miller (see this review) will probably enjoy this book.

Book Review: Lost in the Forest

Title: Lost in the Forest
Author: Sue Miller
Genre: Literary Fiction
Category: Women's Fiction
Rating: D-

Summary: Eva is divorced from Mark with two teenaged daughters, Emily and Daisy; she's remarried to John with a toddler, Theo. John is tragically killed and the members of the family each cope in their own way. Eva and Mark start to move back toward each other, Emily grows up, Theo fantasizes, and Daisy embarks on a path of destructive behavior.

First Line: "Emily telephoned, his older daughter, 'Can you come get us?' she said. 'It's an emergency.'"

Review: This is the second of Miller's books that I've read, and I'm finding that she has some consistent patterns. Some are good patterns, things that keep you reading; some are bad patterns, things that make you want to throw the book at the wall (or at least roll your eyes hard enough to harm your vision).

The Good Pattern: She loves the theme of messy marriages. And she's right, it's not easy. I like reading about the way she writes marriages. The way she talks about the boring aspects of being married, etc., and the way that the person you've been married to for years (or decades) can still surprise you.

The Bad Pattern: She loves the theme of sexual exploration, but she's a prude about it. For example, instead of using the word "vagina," or any of its myriad slang synonyms, she calls it "sex." Like, in this book, she talks about one character's "sex" clicking when she opens her legs. Really? You called it her "sex"? That's just stupid. I'm not opposed to the idea of using sexuality as a motif or backdrop used to tell the story of discovery, but don't be so weird about it. Her writing comes off as if she wants to talk about sex, but she's embarrased. Either do it well, or don't do it all (and I'm speaking of writing here, if you know what I mean).

I think I'm done with Sue Miller. I've got her figured out. I don't disagree that marriage is messy. I don't disagree that sexuality is a complex part of our persona. I just don't, personally, need to read her narratives of it because it can be done better.

I didn't want to finish this book. It was going nowhere fast, but she did have a good thing going in that the perspective of Daisy is told from a bit of flash-back, and you want to know how she comes out in the end. For that, she kept me reading (begrudginly). I finished, but just barely. Hence, her D- grade.

Recommendation: I recommend that you skip this book and read other books in the category of women's fiction.

Book Review: The Senator's Wife

Title The Senator's Wife
Author Sue Miller
Genre Literary Fiction
Category Women's Fiction
Rating B

Summary Delia is the long-time wife of philandering (former) Senator Tom Naughton, and she gets new neighbors on the other half of their duplex. Meri's husband, Nathan, has moved them back to the east coast (from the Midwest) for a teaching job at a prestigious university. These two women, who have little in common, meet and their lives become inextricably linked--both for the good and the bad.

First Line "From her perch in the middle of the backseat, Meri surveys the two in front--her husband, Nathan, and Sheila, the real estate agent. There is something vulnerable about the back of the head and the neck, she thinks."

Review Sue Miller is at the top of her literary-fiction-version-of-chick-lit game. She's very deft at taking women's intersecting lives and dissecting the thoughts and external forces that influence and shape them. She's relatively free of judgement, all around, as she puts both a 70-something stay-at-home wife and mother alongside a 30-something working wife and mother. Neither is seen as perfect, nor is either seen as not being in control of her station in life.

In addition to crafting the inner lives of her characters well, Miller is good at creating supporting characters and setting. Houses and towns, streets and parties are well populated and easy to imagine.

I think, if possible, the only thing I'd like to see Miller do is get us more into the minds of the male characters in the book, perhaps through dialogue. Both of the husbands remain enigmatic throughout the book--you know that they love their wives, each in their own way, but you also know they're both complicit in some of the problems that occur during the book. And, as much as you get a peek inside of Delia and Meri's thoughts, you're always left guessing about what the guys are thinking. The women become self-contained bubbles, often speculating on what others think, but rarely taking the steps necessary to either confirm or deny their suspicions.

Of note: I did count her down because Miller did a very weird thing where, instead of referring to the vagina technically or with a relatively-contemporary pop culture slang, she called it "sex"; i.e., "my sex was swollen." What the what?

But, while we're on the subject of "sex," Miller is pretty impressive in her ability to make sex within marriage seem really hot. Kudos to her.

Recommendation Fans of other chick-lit-disguised-as-literary-fiction titles, such as The Time Traveller's Wife, will probably like this book.

Book Review: The Sign for Drowning

Title The Sign for Drowning
Author Rachel Stolzman
Genre Literary Fiction
Category Women's Fiction
Rating B+

Summary Anna's life appears to be dominated by two main events: the drowning of her five-year-old sister (when Anna was eight); and the adoption of Adrea, a five-year-old deaf girl in the foster care system, whom she met as part of her work as an ASL teacher at a Deaf & Hearing Center in New York City. How these two events twine together to bring wholeness to Anna is the story told in The Sign for Drowning.

First Line "My father and Carla towed the yellow inflatable boat carrying the girls into the water," (Prologue, Page 1).

Review I read this book with a smile on my face and a lump in my throat nearly the entire way through. Then, when I was done, I returned to the front of the book and immediately re-read some of my favorite passages. My favorite parts centered around the character of Adrea and how she touched those around her. The stories of when Adrea's adoption certificate comes, Adrea finding the African violet plants at the market, Adrea getting dressed up for the poetry reading, and Adrea making her first cow-related sounds in France were charming and moving to read.

Further solidifying this short novel as a sheer pleasure to read was Stolzman's prose. Her background as a poet came through in her wonderful turns of phrases. From the beginning scenes that gripped you, as Anna watched her family frantically realize that her sister was drowning, the language of this book worms its way into your heart and mind.

But lest I give you the impression that this book was perfect, let me justify my rating of a B+.

First, as I read this book of a child adopted out of foster care, my mind immediately went to the young people I work with each summer who are part of the foster care system (check out Royal Family Kids Camp for details on this organization), and I was surprised by the language development of Adrea. Most of our children are delayed in their speech and reading skills because they haven't been in a supportive, nurturing environment that will develop those skills, but Adrea actually had exceptional communication skills. Her understanding of abstract concepts exceeded what I have learned in my educational theory classes is standard for a five-year-old. I ran this discontinuity past my stepmother, who is an ASL interpreter, and she was surprised at the idea of a deaf child being in a foster home that wasn't with deaf foster parents from the age of 15 months to 5 years (as is the case with Adrea in this story). She said that in most major cities, it holds true for Indianapolis and she imagined it would be the same in NYC, that the deaf community takes great pains to work with the CPS system to make sure that all deaf children are placed into deaf foster homes. Maybe it's not that way in NYC, but it was just a little detail that seemed out of place--in all actuality, a big detail, but nonetheless. On a side note, when Adrea is going to be left in her Parisian class by herself for the first time (page 108) and she regresses to gripping her hands--that detail was heart-breaking and beautifully written (inconsistencies about language development aside).

Another detail that I discussed with my step mom: On page 58 the narrator says, "There isn't a sign for 'drowning,'" which I asked about and my step mom said, "Sure there is," and she performed a sign that clearly looked to me like somebody drowning. She then did point out her typical ASL-related caveat--sometimes signs are regional and just because in the Midwest there is a commonly-accepted sign for a word, doesn't mean that's true in the East. I'll say this: ASL has to be a very difficult language to learn. I'll also say this: My step mom concurred that there is not a word for "suicide," as the narrator points out on page 160, you tell how the person killed themselves (shot themselves, took pills, etc.), so that detail was consistent. All that to say that sign language is a complex and variegated language that probably shouldn't be overly-scrutinized (I didn't really lower the literary rating for this book because of these language-related questions).

I did lower the grade because of the ending. Now, I'll be honest, I try to review books critically, not personally, so even if an ending isn't what I wanted or expected, it can still be good. And this ending was good, but it definitely could have been better. The first reason I think it could have been better was from an editing standpoint: On page 191 the author writes a beautiful line, "For this moment all things were well placed," and then she continues on for another seven paragraphs. The actual ending line of the book is, "I would clap [my hands] together so fast that they sang, and that they made a new shape, that they threw sparks." The last line, as the way it's written, doesn't have the finality of the "... well placed," line. I felt the book should have ended with the realization of the placement of things--not with the swimming and on and on. All this would have required is moving the paragraph with the "... well placed" line to the end of the book. This would have made a monumental difference.

But here is what, in my opinion, would have moved the ending to the category of phenomenal: All throughout the book we've been looking at how the two events--the childhood death and the adoption--were correlated and I think this should have been shown in the ending. I think that the ending should have been some kind of epilogue or post script about Anna coming home, with everything "well placed" to manifest that in her external relationships. In her relationship with Adrea at least (but there's also a dad and a boyfriend and friends where this could have been shown). One additional scene of closure for the other half of the book--the entire storyline of mother/daughter bonding--would have moved this book into realm of awesomeness. It might have made my top ten of books with that additional piece.

Don't get me wrong, it's still good, probably top 50 books. But just a little lacking in the very final scene, in the place where I got my last taste.

Recommendation Lovers of literary fiction (think Jane Smiley and Anne Tyler) will love this in-depth look at family dynamics.