Sister is a good example of why I refuse to put up my nose at genre fiction.  Billed as a mystery novel with a plot that sounds like something ripped from today's headlines, Sister is actually a novel about love and family and grieving and acceptance.

Sister follows the story of Beatrice, a British ex-living in New York, as she tries to solve the murder of her younger sister, Tess.  Free-spirited Tess, an artist living in London, is discovered in a men's toilet in Hyde Park, an apparent suicide.  Beatrice refuses to believe that her sister would have taken her own life, and begins to dig into the events surrounding the last weeks of Tess's life, looking for a key to her murderer.  Despite the fact that nearly everyone believes that her sister killed herself, and despite the fact that her quest pushes away some of the people closest to her, Beatrice eventually discovers the sinister secret at the heart of her sister's murder.

Let me say first that this is, in fact, a first rate mystery.  The plot is thoughtful and well laid out, and the story is not as formulaic as some mystery/thrillers.  But this book is so much more than just a mystery novel.  It is a love story about sisters, and a story about grief.  Every part of Beatrice's story-told as a letter to her dead sister-drips with raw, honest, sometimes painful emotion.  Every turn of phrase draws you in more deeply to Beatrice's state of mind, her regrets, her guilt, her anger, and her sorrow.  But you also begin to see Beatrice change, from the stodgy women she was quickly becoming, to someone stronger and more alive.  Her sister's death frees her from convention, allows her to become this person who makes waves, who questions authority, who is not afraid to say the hard or uncomfortable things.  Lupton's writing is almost poetic at times, giving the whole story an easy flow that draws you in and engages not just your logical, figure-out-the-mystery brain, but the part of your brain that appreciates beauty, even in sadness.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I was born in 1970.  So while my life overlaps briefly with the Viet Nam War, I have no real memory of it.  What I do remember is going to downtown Chicago with my granny, and later with my parents, and seeing the faces of the homeless vets that were begging on the streets.  Wild-eyed, or blank-stared, the memories of their faces color everything that I have heard, read, or seen about the war since.  And I have heard, read, and seen a lot.  Stories from the fathers of friends who fought in the war, lessons from school, movies like Full Metal Jacket and Platoon-from these sources I have cobbled together a picture of that hot, wet, chaotic, horrific place and time.

But I am not sure that I have truly felt that I had even the faintest understanding of what it might actually have been like.  Not, that is, until I read Tim O'Brien's stunning book The Things They Carried.  Neither entirely fact nor entirely fiction, O'Brien uses a series of short stories and vignettes to tell the tale of Alpha Company, a group of soldiers based, in part, on the real men that O'Brien served with during the war.  The stories meander from stateside to the jungles of Viet Nam, from childhood to middle age, detailing how each experience prepares or informs or explains the person that Tim was or is or may yet become.

I will admit to having some difficulty at first with the non-linear narrative, and with the fact that I was never sure what was true and what was made-up.  But the genius of this work is that you soon realize that it doesn't matter.  In fact, the way that the book is put together and the inability to tell fact from fiction ends up doing a better job describing what living through that experience was like than any straight forward telling could.  O'Brien and his fellow soldiers lived a reality that most of us will never experience, and can never truly comprehend, where time was skewed, day and night traded places, where extraordinary circumstances became ordinary, and where the ordinary world as most of us know it became a dream that you couldn't let yourself believe in.

My favorite section of the book (if favorite is even the right word) is the story of how O'Brien almost ran away to Canada rather than go to war.  Part of O'Brien's extreme talent is an ability to use words to paint not just a visual but an emotional picture for the reader, and I was able to feel how deeply terrified he was at the prospect of war.  I felt his ambivalence about running away, about choosing the possibility of death over the certainty of shame and embarrassment.  But the thing I found most stunning, and the line I would consider the most "controversial" of the whole piece, is this, "I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Viet Nam, where I was a soldier, and then home again.  I survived, but it's not a happy ending.  I was a coward. I went to war."
Given the hyper-patriotism of the US since 9-11, and our unquestioning assumption that every soldier is brave and heroic,  this simple statement stopped me dead in my tracks.  It felt almost sacrilegious.  Are we allowed to say that not going to war is more courageous than going?  What does that say about us as a society, that we are find ourselves so often in armed conflicts?  Is it bravery and strength, or is it because we don't want to be judged as wanting by the rest of the world?  What would happen if our young men and women, en masse, simply refused to go the next time we try to send them into harm's way?  Would it be courageous or cowardly?  Regardless of where any one of us comes down on that particular idea, what O'Brien's work has done is illustrate for those of us that weren't there that nothing is as simple and straightforward in war as those of us sitting at home watching it on our televisions thinks it is.

Monsters of Templeton

I admit it, I read this book because Stephen King wrote a blurb for the cover.  I don't usually read the cover blurbs, but when I see and author I love as much as SK has read the book I am considering, I pay attention.  That blurb was pretty much all I knew about The Monsters of Templeton before I started reading.  As a result, I was expecting a horror story...and why wouldn't I?  Stephen Freakin' King wrote a blurb.  What I actually got was something far more complex and indefinable.

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff tells the story of Willie Upton, the down and out descendent of the founder of Templeton, Marmaduke Temple.  She has fled back to her childhood home after a disastrous affair with her dissertation adviser.  Pregnant, depressed, sure she is losing her career and her life, she stumbles into town in the middle of the night.  The next morning, much to everyone's surprise, the body of a huge animal floats to the surface of Glimmerglass Lake-the fabled monster Glimmey, supposed-myth turned real.  Into the public chaos that ensues, Willie gets a little surprise of her own.  After years of believing that her father was one of three men her mother lived in a commune with in the year before her birth, she is told by her mother that her father is right there in Templeton, and has been all along.  When her mother refuses to tell her who the lucky man is, she goes on a quest to discover his identity-a quest that takes her back through her family's (and the town's) long and sordid history.

Despite the monster in the lake, and the ghost that lives in Willie's house, there is nothing scary about this book.  The true monsters of Templeton were the people who lived, loved, fought, and died there throughout the years.  In many ways, this book tells the story of a woman who is finally growing up.  Willie, who lived a fairly privileged and idyllic childhood in many ways, just was not able to get herself together out in the "real" world.  Despite the prestigious college she went to, despite her competence in her chosen field (archaeology, the symbolism of which is only now hitting me), Willie can't seem to take that last step into being responsible for herself.  Her pregnancy, her return to her hometown, her realizations about her mother, and most of all her research into her family, finally bring her to a place where she can find herself in the mess of high expectations, failed relationships, and career suicide that she left in her wake.

The story alternates between present-day Willie and characters from the past, and it is this narrative structure that shows how talented Groff really is.  She wrote sections of the novel as the journal of a 19th century woman, as letters between two 18th century women, as the son of the founder of Templeton, as a nameless Indian girl, and as the monster itself.  Each voice felt authentic, and each one revealed a little bit more about the sprawling family of which Willie was a product.  The story is intricate and multi-layered, and I think that the revelations about the various Temples, Upton, Averells, and others were well-paced.  While there is some magical realism, this novel is not really that.  While there are some historical fiction elements, it's not really that, either.  In the end, I think that this book defies any clear-cut description, which to me makes it even more intriguing and enjoyable to read.

Clash of Kings, Or Why Fantasy Novels Should Come With a Score Card

I've been a fan of fantasy since I was a kid.  I remember getting the Narnia books for Christmas and reading them all before going back to school.  I remember getting The Wishstone of Shannara for Christmas a few year later and completely losing myself in the quest to save the tree...and how I cried when the elf had to sacrifice herself at the end.  I think that this is one of the reasons that I like role playing games like Final Fantasy or Fable-they are like living in the books I read growing up.


That said, it's been a while since I have gotten into a fantasy series.  I suppose some of the reason is because after reading so many they do start to blend together and feel like the same story over and over.  I experienced a similar phenomenon after years of reading almost nothing but mysteries and thrillers.  But I think that part of it is because fantasy stories have this perception of being childish or immature somehow.  I mean, serious, literary readers don't read genre fiction like fantasy, do they?

Then came Game of Thrones on HBO.  Because while I might have stopped reading much fantasy, I sure do love to watch it.  I've probably watched every Arthurian based movie and show made in the last 20 years, as well as any Robin Hood adaptation.  While I did read all of the Harry Potter series, I am just as excited about the movies coming out as I was the books (well, OK, maybe not just as excited, but you get my point).  Now, I have always been a proponent of reading the books that a series is based on.  I've scolded people for not reading the Southern Vampire books before watching True Blood, and I have waxed poetic on how much better the Temperance Brennan books are than the TV show Bones is.  So, after watching (and loving) the first season of Game of Thrones, not to mention hearing my many friends who've read the books lambast me for being a hypocrite, I gave in and downloaded the second book in the series, Clash of Kings, for my brand-spanking new Kindle.

I should have known that my friends would not steer me wrong.  George R.R. Martin has done something that most fantasy writers in my experience can't quite pull off-a grown up fantasy novel.  Clash of Kings tells the story of what happens in the Seven Kingdoms after King Robert is killed by a boar while hunting.  His "son" ascends to the throne, supported by his rich and powerful family, House Lannister.  Of course, thrones are rarely passed peacefully, especially when it is pretty apparent that the 13 year old "king" is in fact not King Robert's son, but a product of incest between his mother and her twin.  Three other men aspire to be king:  Robert's brothers, Renly and Stannis, and the murdered Eddard Stark's son, Robb.  The intrigue, violence, and betrayal that ensues are pretty much impossible to summarize, unless I want this post to be as long as the book (which at 761 pages is one of the longer books I've read this year).

The writing is smart and well-crafted, and the main characters are well-developed.  They are also fairly nuanced for a genre that lends itself to one-dimensional characters who are either wholly good or wholly evil.  I find that of my favorite characters, one is a member of that incestuous Lannister clan, despite the fact that in the arc of the story his family is pretty much completely cruel and morally bankrupt.  And this talk of character leads me to the subtitle of this post.  While I love my new Kindle, reading this book on an e-reader may not, in fact, have been the best choice.  I'm not sure that it is exaggerating to say that there are hundreds of characters mentioned in this book-both "present" day and past heroes-and not being able to flip to the maps of the pages tat listed how everyone was related to everyone else sometimes left me very confused. Short of reading with a computer next to me to look things up I was hard-pressed to keep it all straight.   In the end I decided to just go with it-after all, I'll have season two of Game of Thrones to explain whatever I missed.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, or Why I'm Glad I Wasn't Born in 19th Century China

Sometimes I am in horrified awe at the things that people have done to make women more "desirable".  As oppressive as I find the ridiculously unrealistic American beauty ideal, it is downright feminist when compared to past and present practices from around the world.  And while I realize that this novel is probably supposed to be about the power of women to create community, but I couldn't get past the foot-binding.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is the story of Lily and Snow Flower, who meet at young girls in 18th century China.  They become laotong, or friends bonded for life, at age seven at the behest of a matchmaker in the hopes that their friendship will yield better marriages for both.  Because of their families' social status, the girls have their feet bound at the age of seven.  Foot binding was practiced by all but the poorest families in China, the goal being to stop the girls feet from growing.  The smaller the feet, the better the marriage.  Lily tells the story of her friendship with Snow Flower through all of the stages of life-childhood, adolescence, womanhood-through their use of nu shu, a special written language used only by women.

Lisa See does an excellent job using the story of Lily and Snow Flower to paint a vivid picture of Chinese culture, especially women's culture.  My 21st century brain was routinely appalled by how the women were treated. But nothing was as horrifying as the description of the foot binding process.  The girls toes were bent under their foot and bound there.  They were then forced to walk on them until they broke, and the foot slowly bent under until there was only the big toe left to balance on.  Perhaps the most disturbing part was the fact that it was generally their mothers who bound their feet.  As a mother myself, I can't imagine the social pressure that a person must be under to cause that kind of pain to your own child.

It also struck me reading this novel how many times in the history of the world people have created social rules that in fact work against not just their self-interest, but their actual survival.  Forced to flee their homes due to civil unrest, many of the women died trying to walk up a mountain on their "golden lilies", as their small bound feet were called.  Purposely keeping whole classes of people illiterate also seems counterproductive, to say the least.  And of course, determining a woman's value by her physical attributes...seems like we're still working on a few of those today.

Fallen, by Karin Slaughter Review and Give Away

Welcome to Book Addict Review's first ever blog tour!  I'm excited to be a part of promoting Karin Slaughter's new book, Fallen.

I am becoming a reluctant audiobook user.  I can't bring myself to call myself an audiobook "reader", because a part of me still feels like it's cheating.  But I have found over the years that on long drives, music is no longer enough to keep my brain occupied.  It started with my favorite red-headed comedian, Kathy Griffin.  I listened to her memoir on a long drive to Michigan, and found that it made the drive much more enjoyable.  I was convinced that it was only because she's freakin' hysterical, but when the time came for my next long drive through the boring, flat landscape of the midwest, I found the longest audiobook iTunes had to offer, World Without End by Ken Follett.  So when I was approached by the publishers of Karin Slaughter's new audiobook, Fallen, I decided that I would give it a shot.  I am a fan of Slaughter's Will Trent/Faith Mitchell series, and the fact that they were sending me some give-away copies was icing on the cake.

Fallen picks up the story of GBI Agent Faith Mitchell after the birth of her daughter, Emma.  She is on her way to her mother's house to pick Emma up after a Saturday morning in-service at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.  When she arrives at her mother's house, she finds Emma locked in the shed, her mother's house in bloody disarray, and two armed men struggling in the bedroom.  Faith tries to question the men about where her mother is, but is forced to kill both men before they tell her anything.  Will Trent and her mother's best friend, Amanda Wagner, Assistant Director of the GBI, swoop in and take control of the scene.  With Faith a person of interest, and Will and Amanda not technically on the case, they have to work under the radar, and outside of standard operating procedure to find and save Faith's mother, Evelyn.  They once again call on the help of Sarah Linton, a local doctor who was drawn into a previous case and who has developed a rather strained friendship with Will.

I've decided over the course of the last few years that the reason that I like so many mystery/thriller series is because they are character driven first, and mystery-centered second.  I feel like a close personal friend of Alex Delaware, Myron Bollitar, Kay Scarpetta (more on her here), Temperance Brennan, and Pete Decker and Rina Lazarus.  But none of these characters are as interesting and well-developed as Will Trent.  An incredibly smart man with significant dyslexia, an orphan who was "raised" by the Georgia Children's Home, Will is complicated and intense and damaged and loyal and strong, and so emotionally stunted  that he has no idea how to get out of his very dysfunctional marriage and into a healthy relationship with Sarah.  The cast of characters that surround him are also memorable and complex-Faith, former cop and former teen mom; Amanda Wagner, ball-busting middle aged woman who came up through the ranks the hard way, Evelyn Mitchell, Faith's mom and former cop who may or may not have been on the take; and Angie Trent, Will's completely sociopathic wife.  In this particular book, the characters and their lives were inextricably linked to the mystery to be solved.

The story itself is compelling and well-paced.  There is enough action to be engaging, but enough character development and exposition so that things don't feel disconnected.  There were times when I would arrive at my destination and have to sit in the car waiting for a good place to stop, but really, there were no good places to stop.  Slaughter has given us another great mystery/thriller, one that will grip you and hold tight until the very end.

Thanks to AudioGo for providing me with 5 (yes, FIVE) audiobooks to give away to me readers.  If you are interested in a copy, please comment below with your email or blog address.  I will use the ol' "pull names out of a hat" trick to decide who the lucky recipients are.  No, you don't have to become a follower, or find me on Twitter, or send me a pint of blood or your first born child.  Just say hi!

City of Shadows, by Ariana Franklin

There is something about royalty that is fascinating to many of us.  If you need any evidence of this, just take a look at the enormous amount of media coverage that the recent royal wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton received.  I know that I am not the only woman who spent a good part of her girlhood wishing that she had been born a princess.

The 20th century was a bad time for royalty.  Many, many monarchies either disappeared completely or were weakened to the point of figurehead status, including the kingdom of which Prince William will one day be the king.  But perhaps no one had it as bad as the Romanovs of Russia.  The repressive political system in Russia led to tyranny, ethnic cleansing, and the exacerbation of poverty.  In response, the Bolsheviks didn't just depose the royal family-they executed them, all of them, including the children.  This is probably not a new story to most of you-the tragedy of Prince Alexei and his four sisters, the grand-duchesses.  The most famous of those little girls, of course, was Anastasia.  Years after the massacre at Ekaterinburg, a woman turned up claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia.  She convinced many many, usually wealthy, people that she was in fact the daughter of Czar Nikolas.  It is this woman, Anna Anderson, that provides the underlying structure of Ariana Franklin's City of Shadows.

(From Amazon) "British author Franklin (the pseudonym of a veteran historical fiction writer) makes the most of an original premise in this engrossing thriller that opens in 1922 Berlin. The German government is in crisis, inflation is staggering, anti-Semitism is rife, citizens are starving and Hitler has begun his rise to power. Horribly scarred Esther Solonomova works as a secretary for fake Russian nobleman Prince Nick, the owner of several Berlin nightclubs (think Cabaret) catering to the rich, the foreign and the deviant. Nick finds an inmate in a local asylum who claims to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, sole survivor of the slaughter of Russia's royal family. Prince Nick renames the inmate Anna Anderson, installs her in an apartment with Esther and sets in motion plans to get his hands on the money and jewels that Anna will claim as the heir to the Russian throne. But a mysterious Nazi is trying to murder Anna, and those near her begin to die."

I read and enjoyed Ariana Franklin's historical mystery series about Adelia, a Salerno-trained doctor solving crimes during the reign of Henry II of England, so I had high hopes for this novel, and it delivered.  Rich characters were a big part of its appeal-Esther is a woman with a painful past, the detective who investigates the murders, Seigfried Schmidt, is decent and driven by the horrors he witnessed during the war.  But what really made the book for me was the evocative way that Franklin wrote about Germany between the big wars.  Reading about the rise of Hitler was a little bit like seeing a horrific accident happen and being unable to stop it.  You really get the sense of how an entire country was taken in by this charismatic leader who played on their fears and promised to get the country out from under the yoke of the "Jewish bankers" who were ruining the lives of good, hard-working Germans.  The "is she or isn't she?" subplot worked well as a framework for this story, and Franklin did something that not too many mystery writers are able to do anymore-she completely surprised me with the ending.  All in all I'd say that if you are looking for a mystery with a little more substance than is usual in today's world of books, then you would enjoy this one.

100 Books in 2010

Last year, in honor of my first full year of blogging, I participated in the 100+ Book Challenge hosted by The Home Girl's Book Blog.  I've been averaging between 60 and 75 books a year, so I figured that getting up to 100 was a way to improve my close personal relationship with my to-be-read shelves.

Yesterday, with two hours and 39 minutes to spare, I finished my 100th book.  I had to read 5 young adult novels in two days to make it happen, but I did it.  I completed the challenge.  And guess what-today, if I'm keeping a yearly total, I'm back to zero, zip, zilch, nada, none.  The euphoria of completing last year's challenge is replaced by a sense of emptiness and despair...

OK, not really, but here's what I learned from participating in this challenge in 2010-I don't like reading on someone else's schedule.  Yes, I know I signed up of my own free will, but as the year progressed I found myself more focused on quantity rather than quality, on accumulating titles rather than knowledge or literary wisdom.  I found myself choosing my books not by their topic or my interests, but by their length.  Satanic Verses-too long for 2010.  Under the Dome by Stephen King-sorry, you'll have to wait.  Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin-so sorry, I know my friend recommended you to me last winter, but you just have too many pages for me.  I passed over books I really wanted to read by Diana Gabaldon, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates simply because I thought they would take too long.

Constant Reader, I hear you saying, "Why not just give up on the challenge?  It's not like you win money for finishing, or get punished if you don't."  But one of the things about myself that I am generally proud of is my stick-to-it-iveness, my commitment to finishing what I start.  And it wasn't all bad-I did enjoy watching my numbers climb.  At the end my friends even got into the act, cheering me on with Facebook messages as I rushed to finish the last several titles.  But when I saw the post for the 2011 100+Book Challenge, I clicked the back button.  And the first book I picked up off my shelf today-Under the Dome, the 1000+ page tome that has been sitting on my TBR pile for far too long, given how much I love reading my Uncle Stevie!  My challenge this year?  To read what I want, when I want, and try to keep my Goodreads Bookswap addiction under control.  And if I get to the end of 2011 having had a full year of literary goodness, I will consider the year a raving success.