The Snow Child

            The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is delightful but not without faults. The novel follows the lives of Mabel and John, two Alaskan homesteaders. Their lives are hard—Alaska is barren, and they tend rough land and hunt for food. They are also childless, a fact that has created a great rift between them. Their lives are very desolate at the beginning of the novel. They have little interaction with each other or anyone else. As the novel progresses, however, they befriend their neighbors, Esther and George, and taheir sons.

           
The crux of the novel, though, is the story of little Faina, a girl who appears one night in their yard after they build a snow child on their lawn in the first flurry of the season. Faina’s story is part harsh reality, part mysticism, and the girl quickly becomes like a child to the old couple. Mabel believes she is a snow child, like that in a story she heard as a child. The girl appears to walk on snow without really sinking in; she cannot stand the heat and disappears every year at the end of winter. Remarkably, she can survive alone in the brutal Alaskan wilderness. To John, Faina appears a feral child. He knows that her father is dead, for the child lead John to her father’s lifeless body one day. As the novel progresses, Mabel and John’s opinion of Faina change and change again. The reader is left wondering: how mystical and magical is the child? And how fallibly real is she?

           
There are some great things about this novel. The story of John, Mabel, and Faina is mimetic of the tale that Mabel knew as a child—that of an old couple who builds a snow child only to have her come to life but disappear every spring. This feature is interesting, and I enjoyed some of the underlying criticism of fairy tales (they are often very cruel even though they are meant for children). The characters, although a bit stereotypical at times, are enjoyable. The portrait of Alaskan homesteading was particularly fascinating for me, since it is a part of American history I knew nothing about.

           
I spent a long time trying to figure out what was “wrong” with the novel. As I was reading it, I knew it had shortcomings but couldn’t totally pinpoint them. I think, however, it lies in the fact that at times the dialogue seemed a bit stale or halted. Sometimes I wondered if this was just supposed to be halted because of the time period of the novel and the way people spoke back then, but I am not sure. Ivey did a pretty good job with everything else. Like I said, at times the characters seemed stereotypical, but they rounded themselves out as the novel progressed, although perhaps not as fully as they could have. The final portion of the story seemed a little too rushed, and the first part a little too slow. The pacing simply needed a small shift.

          
In spite of my criticisms, I did enjoy The Snow Child. If you like fantasy novels that have mere elements of magic and not a completely transformed world, I would recommend this book. 

The Girls

I have never read a book like Lori Larsens The Girls. The novel is about a lot of the things that all novels are about: love, friendship, family, relationships. But The Girls is not any old novel, and the narrators are not your usual could-be-anybodies. At the time that they are writing their co-authored autobiography, Ruby and Rose Darlen are almost thirty, sick, and working in a library (The Girls is one of those books within a book…a fiction novel that reads like an autobiography). They are also the world’s oldest surviving craniopagus twins. That means that they are joined at the head, sharing a major vein. They can never be separated, and because of the way they are connected, they have never seen the other’s face except for in mirrors or photographs.

Rose is the academic, and the main writer of the autobiography. She is sporty and bookish at the same time, with a verbose yet poignant way of looking at the world. She weaves in her own story with that of her sister’s, her Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash—her adoptive parents.

Ruby is interested in history, and a fan of TV. Although Rose often says that Ruby is the weaker of the two, Ruby comes across strong in the chapters that she writes. Although she is clearly not as “writerly” as her sister, her chapters add simplicity to the complex narrative that Rose writes, breaking the novel up in a pleasant way.  

There are stories of lost children, pregnancies, crushes and loves, death. There are tales of magic and witches, of superstition and fact. Of crows and family. Of growing up and being a child and being different during all of that.

It took me a while to read The Girls. Rose’s chapters are very thick feeling and take some time to get through, but I think the main reason that I was so slow to finish the book was that I didn’t want it to end. This book…I will never forget this book. It is everything I love about a novel—great characters, good plotlines, fantastic language—with the added punch of being about a topic like growing up as a conjoined twin. It is unique, without feeling gimicky. If the book was just about two sisters not joined at the head, it would be still stand up as a great novel. 

I give author Lori Lansens major credit for being able to write about being a craniopagus twin, when she obviously isn’t, with such clarity. She doesn’t leave out details—questions about love-relationships and being a conjoined twin were in my mind when I started reading this novel, and they get addressed because one of the twins conceives at one point in the story. She also doesn’t make the whole novel about the twins. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash’s relationship are woven beautifully into the tale, and they become fascinating with all of their flaws and perfections.

I can’t even express how much I recommend this book—if you want to read a good, different, and beautifully written novel, pick up The Girls. 

Friends Like Us

Okay, so I picked Lauren Fox’s Friends Like Us thinking it would be like watching a rom com (romantic comedy) at the movie theater but that I would get to read it. I think anyone who majored in English or creative writing sometimes feels like you shouldn’t read books that are rom coms or “lesser” fiction…like we’re supposed to sit around and read Moby Dick and A Tale of Two Cities all day. But sometimes, I just want a break. Friends Like Us was my break (not like I actually sit around and read Moby or A Tale…I haven’t picked those up since high school. I was just making a point, I guess).

Friends Like Us has a 3-star rating right now on Goodreads, and up until I got to the end of the novel, I agreed. But I think the end pushes it up to a 3.5 or 4-star rating. The premise of the story is this: Willa and Jane live together, and are the best of friends. They went to college together and are now in their mid-twenties. They work shitty jobs. They are in the transition phase, just like the rest of us post-grads. At a high school reunion, Willa reunites with her best friend from high school, Ben. He confesses to her that he had a huge crush on her in high school. They make out, but then decide that it all feels weird. They agree to go back to being friends.

Ben starts hanging around a lot at Jane and Willa’s apartment, and Willa sets them up. The plot is predictable for the most part. Willa dates a guy who is kind of a jerk, and they break up. Jane and Ben get engaged. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but in the prologue of the book you know that Jane and Willa are no longer friends. And as the end of the book nears, I knew there were a few turns the book could take. Sure enough, it took one of those. But the ending was surprisingly realistic—I thought Fox was going to wuss out and sugar-coat it. She doesn’t thought, and the characters all kind of end up where they need to be, even though it might not be as glossy of an ending as a rom com at the movie theater. For sparing us from another unrealistic end to a romance book, I commend Fox. It’s not a life changing novel, but it is good for chick lit.

There are a few problems with it. Mainly, the characters motivations need to be fleshed out a bit more. Sometimes I found myself wondering why: Why is Willa self-sabotaging? Is Ben only with Jane because she is so similar to Willa?

My favorite part of the novel was not necessarily the plot, but the dialogue. I have not read such true-to-life dialogue in a long time. Ben, Willa, and Jane talk like me, like people I know. I dog-eared page 141 where Fox writes the following passage:

“A few weeks ago, Jane sent me an e-mail (she was in her bedroom and I was in mine). Can you teach me how to talk dirty? She wrote.

            Mud! I wrote back. Motor oil!

            Seriously.

            Why do you think I know? I typed back.

            You have more experience than I do. You’re more slutty.

            Let’s roll around in a pile of sewage, baby.

            Seriously, she wrote again. I would like to know what it entails.

            Entrails!

            Julian said you’re supposed to, like, describe what you want. Jillian was a girl we knew in college who worked part-time at Hooters. She had a worldly quality about her. Like, ‘Take me from behind,’ or whatever.”

The dialogue is very natural, but also has the over-use of puns, much like an episode of the Gilmore Girls. I have to say, because of her use of funny and witty dialogue, I am probably going to read Fox’s first novel Still Life with Husband. I recommend Friends Like Us, but probably for those looking for a lighter read with some funny dialogue and not quite as glossy of a finish as When Harry Met Sally. 

The Weird Sisters

The Weird Sisters is one of those novels that you think about a lot while you read it. The premise involves three sisters—Rose (Rosalinda), Bean (Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia)—who move in with their parents because of their own various failures and problems. However, they all make the transition back to the nest under the guise of helping their mother who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The book doesn’t leave you in the time between when you are reading and when you are not. I found myself thinking about the novel throughout the day: Which sister was I the most like? Responsible, homebody Rose? Sneaky, party-girl Bean? Free, gypsy-esq Cordy? 

All of the girls move home with secrets—Rose is too afraid to leave her hometown and move to England with her fiancé, Johnathan. She uses the excuse of her mother’s cancer as a reason to move back in with her parents and avoid following Johnathan to his new, one-year job in London. Cordy is pregnant and returns to her parents’ house where she tries to keep her situation hidden. Bean has just been caught stealing from her job in New York. Penniless and indebted to her former employer, she trots back to Ohio.

This book isn’t heavily plot driven—most of the plot points are a bit predictable. However, the interesting part of the novel is watching how the three sisters grow as individuals and as a family. The nature of the novel constantly comes back to questions of identity: Is it possible to define yourself and your personality in a vacuum? Does your role in your family play a part in your self-definition?  For example, Bean is often left feeling self-conscious because she is neither the responsible Rose nor the loveable Cordy. Similarly, Cordy has always been the baby of the family and has a hard time seeing herself as an adult who is about to have her own child. The girls come to realize that they can be defined separately from their family while still having a connection to their roots. 

Brown also discusses the nature of hometowns—how they can be hard to leave and hard to come back to. The duality of hometowns is something that has always been a favorite topic of mine in my own writing, and I really admired Brown’s discussion of the subject. Each sister represents a stance on their hometown of Barney: Rose never wanted to leave. Bean moved somewhere else and made that her home. Cordy never wanted to have a home at all and lived a wanderer’s life. However, by the end of the book, the sisters’ views on hometowns/homes shift. At one point Cordy says, "We all want to become something better than Barney, but we won't" (313).

The together/separateness of the characters in the novel is mirrored by the point of view in which Brown writes. I have never read a book with this exact style. It is told in the first-person plural (think The Virgin Suicides), with the sentences focused around the sisters as the collective “we.” However, much of the book breaks away from the collective mentality and focuses on a specific sister with the third-person voice. The book will discuss just what Cordy is doing at the moment, for instance.

The book is aware of its own literary prowess. The characters often talk in lines of Shakespeare, because of the sisters’ father being a scholar on good ole Bill’s work. The Weird Sisters are a reference to Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth and the girls are individually named after characters in various plays.

The Weird Sisters is great for two kinds of readers: those who enjoy a unique point-of view narration and literary allusions, and those who like stories about people going through changes and transitions. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it. 

High Fidelity

Rob is an asshole, or as British author Nick Hornby writes in High Fidelity, an arsehole. I’ve seen the movie High Fidelity before, with John Cusack playing lead character Rob, and move-Rob is an asshole too. But book-Rob is definitely more of a jerk.

High Fidelity is about record store owner, music enthusiast Rob and his lawyer girlfriend/ex-girlfriend Laura. The two split up, and then Rob is left trying to make sense of the break-up, of Laura going to live with someone named Ray. He is also left trying to figure out his life, his career direction, and what to do about his floundering record store. He contemplates death. He sleeps with an American singer-songwriter. This book is all about a man in transition, trying to figure out his life, so naturally I could relate to Rob a bit. Rob is sort of what would happen if a mid-twenty something was actually a mid-thirty something. He is still directionless, immature, and self-centered. His closest friends, Dick and Barry, are similar.

But there is something sympathetic about Rob, and admirable too. He has impeccable music taste. Rob reminds me of the jerky boys I put up with in high school because they had good taste in music. And at the end of the day though, he ends up being the kind of character you have a soft spot for, although I still can’t figure out why. He isn’t completely horrible, I’ll give him that, but he is still a real big jerk.

High Fidelity is great because it is an in depth study of Rob’s character and of his relationship with Laura as well as an amazing commentary on long-term relationships. However, it is also a book about music. Rarely can a book about music and a book about relationships be combined so brilliantly, so that each of the themes is equally expressed. Usually one theme overshadows the other.

Written in the first person, some of Rob’s music-musings really hit home for me. Rob, Dick, and Barry constantly list their top fives (favorite singles, best songs about death), so you can easily get an insight into everything these well-versed characters enjoy. In my favorite music-music, Rob is discussing some of his top favorite songs, most of which are sad (“Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Neil Young, “Last Night I Dreamed Somebody Loved Me” by the Smiths, etc.), “Some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?” (Hornby 25). 

So, whether miserable or happy, here is a playlist of some of Rob’s favorite songs:  

High Fidelity playlist--On Youtube1. Let’s Get it On—Marvin Gaye
2. Last Night I Dreamed Somebody Loved Me|
3. Janie Jones—The Clash
4. Thunder Road—Bruce Springsteen
5. Got to Get You Off My Mind—Soloman Burke
6. The Look of Love—Dusty Springfield
7. This is the House that Jack Build—Aretha Franklin
8. Baby Let’s Play House—Elvis Presley
9. Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag—James Brown
10. Back in the USA—Chuck Berry
11. So tired of Being Alone—Al Greene                 

A Song For You

When I reviewed Patti Smith’s Just Kids, I discussed the nature of the relationship she had with artist Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1960s-70s. Smith achieved great notoriety since those prior decades and Mapplethorpe—although less well-known—did achieve some fame as well.

Just Kids reminded me of a book I read last summer, A Song for You by Kathy West. The book is another merging of creative non-fiction, autobiography, and memoir—much like Smith’s book—and also follows the era of the 60s and 70s through the lens of music and art, as well as transitions from young adulthood to adulthood. Unlike Smith and Mapplethorpe, writer West and her lover and friend Rick Philp ended up pushed to the side of musical history, left out of the mainstream tales the 60’s—although their story is just as important as Smith’s.

West’s writing style is different from the romanticism and thick imagery offered in Just Kids, although it has the same slow but thorough pace. Unlike Just Kids, A Song for You offers more of a colloquial retelling of West's life and relationship with Philp through concise prose instead of poetic language.

Philp joins a garage band called the Myddle Class as the lead guitarist. They headline for the Velvet Underground before anyone cared about the band, back when Al Aronowitz, the blacklisted journalist, was their manager (not the legendary Andy Warhol). They tour and meet Jimi Hendrix. The band and 

West befriend Carole King and Gerry Goffin. West continues to have a friendship with King and Goffin through most of the book. Just as Smith did in Just Kids, A Song for You offers an intimate portrait into the lives of the 60s most well-known names.


West’s friendship and romance with Philp changes throughout the years and throughout the book. Things begin to take a grim turn as Philp’s friendship with his roommate, a man nicknamed Dog, begins to get possessive and terrifying. Dog seems to believe he has some type of control over Philp—Dog resents West and other women for their closeness to Philp. One night, Dog brutally murders Philp. The Myddle Class disbands and Philp and West’s story becomes buried in the past. Their names disappear from the limelight for decades, until West decided to publish this book. 

A Song for You is surely to be of great use to anyone who wishes to learn more about the garage rock scene from an inside perspective. The book serves as an entranceway into the lost tales of the 1960s and 70s. Where as Smith achieved her success as a musician, Philp's was unfairly and violently cut short. The Myddle Class is band that represents transition, for they will be forever cemented in the phase between a promising start and major fame.

A Song for You playlist--Listen on Youtube playlist--Listen on Youtube

1. Don't Let Me Sleep Too Long--The Myddle Class (This video was created by author West herself)

2. All Along the Watchtower--The Jimi Hendrix Experience 

3. Gates of Eden--Myddle Class

4. So Far Away--Carole King

5. Wind Chime Laughter--The Myddle Class

6. Sweet Jane--The Velvet Underground 

7. Free at the Wind--Myddle Class

8. Up on the Roof--Carole King 

9. Mr. Tambourine Man--Bob Dylan 

Just Kids

My dad gave me Patti Smith’s Just Kids for Christmas earlier this year, but I took forever to get around to reading it. As a Writing and Politics double major in college, I always had mountains of books to read for school and found that time to read for pleasure often just didn’t exist. After I turned in my very last final paper of my college career, I immediately plucked Just Kids off of my bookshelf and dove in.

I didn’t know very much about Patti Smith’s life, although I had been a fan of her music for quite sometime. I knew she dated Tom Verlaine of Television, who coincidentally looks like a male Patti Smith. I knew she grew up in my home state of New Jersey and lived in the city like many other artists of her era. But I didn’t know much about Smith’s relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Their relationship is the focal point of Just Kids, the lens through which Smith sees the 1960s and 70s. When Smith embarks into New York City for the first time, she scrambles around trying to find jobs. Eventually, she meets Robert Mapplethorpe, a young artist and the two join together, kindred lost souls on the streets of New York City.

The two strike up a romance, one that morphs over time. More important than their romance, however, is the artistic space and spirit that Smith and Mapplethorpe nurture between them. They—especially Mapplethorpe—are constantly creating. Smith writes poetry, records songs, paints. Mapplethorpe takes photos, paints, and always tries to push the envelope with by depicting things like S&M imagery. Smith musical inspiration—Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground—and her love for poet Rimbaud inspire her work. Mapplethorpe’s never-dying admiration of Andy Warhol plays a significant role in shaping his art.

A cast of 1960s/70s artists weave in and out of their lives and the pages of the book. Mapplethorpe and Smith stay at the famous Chelsea Hotel for a period of time where they meet Janis Joplin. Hendrix makes an appearance later on. Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, the punk poet, are there as well.
An important narrative in the book is how Smith and Mapplethorpe remain tied in different ways until the end of his life. The art they create in the shared space of their trust for one another carries them from lovers, to friends. It helps them through Mapplethorpe’s battle with defining his sexuality and his later struggle with AIDs. And it helps them through the inevitable poverty that comes with being a young artist.

Beautifully crafted, Just Friends is a long, articulate portrait of the 60’s and Smith and Mapplethorpe’s world. Patti Smith has proven herself not only as a musician and a poet, but a wonderful crafter of long-form creative non-fiction, autobiography, and memoir. My only complaint is that the book can be slow-paced at times, but even when it is slow the language is consistently rich.

While reading the book though, I couldn’t help but think how different the world was at that time—
their room at the Chelsea was $50/week, for example. Smith has said herself that the East Village is no longer hospitable to young artists like her and Mapplethorpe. Even Brooklyn, which served as the artists’ haven only a few years ago, is now a pretty pricey place to live. The world has changed since the 60s into a place where the room and ability for the young artist to grow has gone from challenging to near impossible. 

That isn't saying that Smith and Mapplethorpe had it easy. In one part of the story, Mapplethorpe is so malnourished that he gets horribly ill and contracts trench mouth. If anything, Smith also disproves the notion that it was easy for people to go to the city and become an artist without any struggle. She illuminates just how hard things could be, even if at the end of the day 1960s East Village was a better scene for the starving artist than it is today. 

Just Kids playlist--listen on Youtube
1. Gloria--Patti Smith 
2. Me and Bobby McGee--Janis Joplin 
3. Marquee Moon--Television 
4. Because the Night--Patti Smith
5. Blank Geneartion--Richard Hell and the Voidoids 
6. Hey Joe--Patti Smith
7. Touch Me--The Doors
8. Voodoo Child--Jimi Hendrix
9. Piss Factory--Patti Smith 
10. Heroine--The Velvet Underground