Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro 4 / 5	Published 2005 First Sentence "My name is Kathy H."
Publisher's Description: As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life, and for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special--and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Dear Reader, Well, this was my first Ishiguro (I have Remains of the Day lined up as well; I had difficulty deciding which audiobook to start with!) and I feel like there was definitely a lot of hype for it to live up to. Well-deserved hype, but...would I have loved this book just a little bit more had I stumbled across it, and not expected so much from it? Probably, yes. Because I think I DID love the book. It was charming and sentimental and I adored the conversational tone that Ishiguro wrote from Kathy H’s point of view - and I was quite impressed by the author’s ability to write young women! But. There was the expectation built in. Which really upsets me, because I enjoy reading books that people have already read & loved. It makes me feel certain that I will find something worthwhile in between the covers. (I defer often to the “wisdom of the crowd” on Goodreads!) And it does work out well that way - I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that I ended up hating that others adored. But, I have fallen into this situation several times, where too much hype makes me want more from a book than the book can give me. Le sigh! However. That is not to say I didn’t love this book! It had such a great concept (I feel as if I can’t spoil it, though! - so talking about this book will be mighty difficult). I give Ishiguro a lot of credit for taking a current trend and imagining a truly possible (and somewhat horrifying) future. I just wish I had come up with it, myself! He did a wonderful job with character development; I enjoyed how the reader grew up with the students at their private school. I wanted to befriend Kathy and I wanted to kick Ruth in the teeth for her manipulative ways. Tommy just always seemed rather...slow to me. Perhaps that was just how the reader portrayed him, but I really got the impression he was somewhat dimwitted. Maybe Ishiguro just meant to convey a feeling of innocence around that character, who knows.  And they were all so innocent of their actual futures. It was tragic, and certainly moving when they finally realized what was going on. You want desperately to believe that we, humanity, would never do such a horrific thing, but...it’s frighteningly easy to see that as one possible future for us. Man oh man.  Great slow reveal, and while the climax wasn’t terribly startling, it was a strong resolution to a long-running puzzle. I enjoyed this book and certainly look forward to more Ishiguro! Yours,  Arianna P.S. This isn’t related to the review, but wanna know one thing that really bothered me? The fake cassette tape that they sent out to promote the film adaptation looked NOTHING like Kathy H had described it. Why would they not recreate the image that the author had described, since it was his invention?!? So weird.

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Rock Angel

Rock Angel Jeanne Bogino 4 / 5	Published September 16, 2014 First Sentence "Time was running out."
Publisher's Description: Shan is young, beautiful, talented, and addicted to heroin in Rock Angel, a novel that follows her meteoric rise to guitar goddess stardom in the 90’s. She is discovered in New York by a handsome, arrogant musical genius named Quinn, and sparks fly between them when he hires her as lead guitarist of his band. Although Quinn is accustomed to bedding a different groupie every night, he can’t ignore his deepening feelings for his new band mate. From gritty Greenwich Village clubs to L.A.’s Troubadour; gigging and touring the country to the cover of Rolling Stone, Rock Angel is infused with the passionate music and intense sexual chemistry of Shan and Quinn. Shan must work out her personal demons and learn to trust Quinn enough to love him, but still remain true to the music that has always been her salvation. A hot, hard-driving story set in an intoxicating world of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, Rock Angel is the first novel by author, Jeanne Bogino.
Dear Reader, I fell in love with this book fast & hard (much like the two main characters did), although it's certainly not my usual fare. I fell in love with its nostalgic feel that brought me back to the '90s and the passion and irrationality of first love. So I couldn't put the book down (400 pages in a few days, while also juggling other stuff like my job) because I felt the draw of the electricity that connected Shan and Quinn. However, in some ways, this often felt like a romance novel to me, despite how much other content is in the book. Ultimately, it's ALL about the love between the two main characters, although the story also revolves around a bunch of their friends and loved ones, so certainly has more to it. You can tell how much the author loves music, and I was surprised to read that she actually doesn't have any real musical experience, herself! I would never have guessed, from the way she sounds completely in her element when discussing the instruments, the shows, the lifestyle. (She's actually a fellow librarian - yay!) Amber & I met her at the BEA this year, and really liked her - she is clearly passionate about her writing. And I think she is very good at it - she writes people, feelings, connections really well. Rock Angel is a book I would have DIED to read when I was in high school, when this kind of rock n' roll world thoroughly attracted me. However, the book IS quite adult, including many references to (what else?) sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. It recalls a bit of Kurt & Courtney, a bit of Sid & Nancy. The larger-than-life personalities that the band produces are often at odds, and their egos regularly jockey for top position. At the same time, there exist love, and passion, and many strong & true relationships that form over the years. Sometimes I hated Quinn, and sometimes I wanted to shake Shan for what he let him put her through - but then I remember that I've been there. I know what it is like to let someone you love hurt you again and again, and not be able to extricate yourself from the situation. (Luckily, I've moved well beyond that particular relationship, but it's not a feeling I'll ever forget.) I think that might have been part of what drew me to the book - first, the reminder of that excited feeling when two people connect in a special way, and then as you watched Quinn & Shan grow up together and face the realities of life together, the feeling of what it is to be an adult and deal with heartbreak, love, loss, and joy - sometimes all at once. Yours, Arianna

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The Residue Years

The Residue Years Mitchell S. Jackson 4.5 / 5	Published 2013 First Sentence "It's years beyond the worst of it, and it's your time, Mom, a time of head starts and new starts and starting and going and not stopping--of re-dos and fixes, of gazing at full moons and quarter-moons and seeing what before were phantasms for-reals."
Publisher's Description: Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America’s whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the ’90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that’s nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.
Dear Reader, This was a fantastic and tragic book.  I really enjoyed the effect of the two interwoven stories told by Champ and his mother Grace, both of whom end up in trouble with the law due to the surging popularity of crack in Portland, OR in the 1990s.  (This was also something I was completely unaware of, being a teenager living on the other coast, so it also taught me a lot.)  Stories like this, which show you the truly raw and human sides of people who work so hard only to fail or be torn down, make me want to weep for humanity.  We're in a really messed up world when people I want to befriend and who I grow to care for become victims of society's ills.  I hated to see the struggles which Champ and his mom kept trying so hard to overcome.  But I did love how the author presented this side of the story, how he was able to make very real and sympathetic the story that we've all heard and seen so many times before, that of the drug dealers and drug users.  Many want to simply punish those who fall prey to the drug culture in our country, as clearly it must be entirely their own fault, but it is never as black and white as all that.  The grey area of humankind is really what interests me most.  What made that man a murderer, or that woman a prostitute?  Nobody is really born into the life they ultimately end up with.  A series of events and circumstances put people in places they never expected.  You can't ever predict how things are going to turn out, can you?  I learned that lesson a long time ago: not to daydream about how things could transpire, because chances are, no matter how you imagine things will go, they never, ever do.  I think that is part of the beauty and tragedy of being human, and interacting on the level that people do.  Society has made it so that we have to work every day to interact with and understand new people, and sometimes we succeed and make great connections.  But sometimes we fail.  And that is how life goes.  That is how life went for Grace and for Champ, and all one can do is ever have hope that the next time around, things will go better.  Right? I know this wasn't really a book review, but hopefully it was enough to make you think, or even pick up Jackson's book.  It really got me pondering quite a bit - can you tell? Yours, Arianna P.S. Addendum: I did want to point out that I liked how Jackson framed the story by telling the "ending" before he laid out the circumstances leading up to that.  I thought that worked really well for this book.

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The Drowning House

The Drowning House Elizabeth Black 2013 3/5	First Sentences "If there was a sign, I missed it.  But I knew I was in Texas when I swerved to avoid a shape by the side of the road."
Publisher's Description: A gripping suspense story about a woman who returns to Galveston, Texas after a personal tragedy and is irresistibly drawn into the insular world she’s struggled to leave. Photographer Clare Porterfield's once-happy marriage is coming apart, unraveling under the strain of a family tragedy. When she receives an invitation to direct an exhibition in her hometown of Galveston, Texas, she jumps at the chance to escape her grief and reconnect with the island she hasn't seen for ten years. There Clare will have the time and space to search for answers about her troubled past and her family's complicated relationship with the wealthy and influential Carraday family. Soon she finds herself drawn into a century-old mystery involving Stella Carraday. Local legend has it that Stella drowned in her family's house during the Great Hurricane of 1900, hanged by her long hair from the drawing room chandelier. Could Stella have been saved? What is the true nature of Clare's family's involvement? The questions grow like the wildflower vines that climb up the walls and fences of the island. And the closer Clare gets to the answers, the darker and more disturbing the truth becomes. Steeped in the rich local history of Galveston, The Drowning House portrays two families, inextricably linked by tragedy and time.
Dear Reader, Wow. This book was nothing like I expected. I thought it was going to be a story about the history of a girl who had drowned during a hurricane, he hair entwined in a chandelier. That is what the book’s description led me to believe! However, it was NOTHING of the sort. It was a story about a woman who had lost her young child, and of her journey through finding understanding regarding the rest of her life, particularly her rather messy childhood. I have to admit, I didn’t particularly like the reader of this book (I was audiobooking it via Overdrive, from my local library). That probably didn’t help endear me to the protagonist. However, I also kept being constantly surprised by this novel, and not in a good way. I kept expecting things to happen that didn’t, and I felt a complete lack of empathy throughout the story, even after finding out the Truth. While I might have felt bad for the protagonist, I certainly didn’t feel much sympathy. It sucked what happened to her, but she was not terribly likable and certainly the story itself was paced in such a way that I kept waiting for things to happen, but when they did, it was kind of a let-down. While ultimately I liked the idea of the story, I didn’t particularly love the execution of it. The narrator basically let things happen TO her, which is understandable in the long run, but doesn’t make you like her much as she relates her tale. Additionally, I couldn’t relate to her reactions to things, nor to her discoveries themselves - they never seemed quite completed, and while they should have perhaps been obvious, the clues felt too muddied, to me. (A bit like this review! - I’m not quite sure what I’m even trying to say.) I did love the setting of this book: the intriguing island of Galveston, TX. I wanted to visit there, to become one of the looked-down-upon tourists who the narrator and other B.O.I. (Born On the Island) barely tolerate. But the author made the island sound so enticing, despite its decline from its heyday. I want to experience the place, particularly its vivid history which seems to linger long after it’s happened. Overall, my impression of the book was that it felt somewhat unfinished, which is weird because there were several times when I kept thinking that the story hadn’t even yet started. I wanted to know more about Clare’s photography exhibit, for one thing. And about where she went and what she did after her visit: what happened to her marriage, where did she live? I felt the author was vague and therefore distant regarding these details, ones which I found the most important. Perhaps that just means I was looking at the story the wrong way entirely. Yours, Arianna P.S. By the way?  GREAT first sentence of the novel, though!!!  I loved it.