Station Eleven (Review by AmberBug)

Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel 5/5	Published September 2014 First Sentence "The King stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored."
Publisher's Description: An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly acclaimed previous novels. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
Dear Reader, Love, love, loved this... and you will too (I hope). This is yet another story that happens to be post-apocalyptic, but to my surprise also features pre-apocalyptic and present day (we get to see it all go down). The main focus isn't on the tragic events but more importantly, on the characters brought to the stage. Yes, stage! Much of the plot centers around acting and more importantly, Shakespeare! This gives a little more of a whimsical side to the doom and gloom of an apocalyptic world. We travel back and forth in time, a technique that I love (but only if done right). One of the characters we meet, Arthur, is an actor with three ex-wives. Two of the exes are interwoven into the story as well as his best friend Clark. We also get introduced to Kirsten (I think it's Kirsten and not Kristen but please, let me know if I got that wrong), whom was but a small child when the "flu" came and wiped out 99% of the population, she knew Arthur through the "King Lear" play they both acted in. As we follow her into the future, we see her grown-up and grouped up with a traveling symphony that puts on Shakespeare and plays classical music to the towns they pass. The group is tight knit and quirky. At first, I didn't think I'd like reading the chapters that involved them because I'm not that into "Shakespeare", "acting" and "symphonies", but the story flows so well, those parts became some of my favorite ones. Mandel has given us a fully imagined world that you can easily picture yourself in. She also includes SO many references to our present day society but she uses them in the "past" sense because the world is left without novelty items, such as comic books. Speaking of comic books, I fell in love with the character, Miranda, who ends up writing this very intricate sci-fi comic that survives the apocalypse and keeps popping up among the future. I loved everything about those bits and I really hope the publisher or Author comes out with a "comic" side project to bring these to life? I'm sure anyone who falls in love with this book would agree. We want a Station Eleven comic, pretty please?! What else can I say that'll convince you to read this one? This story isn't like any other doomsday novel you've read before. The writing is beautiful. The characters are brilliant. The settings are done so real you feel yourself pulled into the story. You start wanting a "reset" to the life we currently live in, you can imagine yourself without all those distracting "extras". I think that might be enough reasons... don't you? Run out and get this one when it comes out, it's not to be missed. Happy Reading, AmberBug

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In One Person

In One Person John Irving 4/5	Published 2012 First Sentence "I'm going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost."
Publisher's Description: "His most daringly political, sexually transgressive, and moving novel in well over a decade" (Vanity Fair).   Winner of a 2013 Lambda Literary Award   A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of "terminal cases," The World According to Garp.
Dear Reader, John Irving has done it again! If you've read Irving before, you know what to expect and this didn't disappoint. Irving brings us a little closer to sexuality with this one, it's a little more "in your face" without hiding it within. He tells the story from the perspective of Billy, a bisexual growing up in Vermont during that time when sexuality was being questioned more than ever. Billy attends an all male school with a step father who teaches the drama class there. His Grandfather is a somewhat closeted cross-dresser (mostly cross-dressing in the Shakespeare plays the school puts on). All around him he has signs that his family is inclined to be somewhat "different" and during this time he starts figuring out his own bisexuality. Apparently, Irving has openly admitted to having crushes on his male schoolmates and this is where the idea of the book came from. I've always wondered what Irving's sexuality was like since he focuses his books on many controversial sexual related topics. He doesn't state outright that he is bisexual, he does live with his wife in one of his three homes of Toronto, Vermont and Pointe au Baril. I love that he writes what he knows and uses his own experiences in his books. He has a creative mind but the realistic characters come out so vividly, they must be modeled from people he has known. Getting back to the story, we follow Billy to New York City during the AIDS epidemic and this section of the book was extremely upsetting and sad. During the 80's, AIDS became so prevalent that sometimes you didn't know someone was LGBT until they started dying from the disease (THIS is when they would or had to come out of the closet). I can't imagine what it would have been like to have all your close friends dropping off like flies from this virus. The main character, Billy, even emotes how awful he feels when people ask if he is sick and he has to reply that he isn't. To feel guilt from not catching the virus, that thought amazed me but when I put myself in his shoes... I started to realize that I would have felt the same way. I think the title of this book is a reflection on how people can have more than "one" person inside of us. How one person can be so many things, why must we narrow it down? Why can't we love people for people and not for what gender they are. Why must we classify ourselves as female or male? Isn't it true that we have characteristics of both, how many times have you heard someone say that they are "Metro" or a "Tom Boy"? This is only a step or two from dressing a different way or trying out a different style. I'm happy we've come this far but this book just made me want to scream at how far we have to go. If you take away anything from this book... take this... Love people or don't love people but don't hate those who love people. Enough said! Happy Reading, AmberBug

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The Bookman's Tale

The Bookman's Tale:  A Novel of Obsession Charlie Lovett 4.5 / 5	Published 2013 First Sentence "Wales could be cold in February."
Publisher's Description: A mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller’s search through time and the works of Shakespeare for his lost love. Guaranteed to capture the hearts of everyone who truly loves books, The Bookman’s Tale is a former bookseller’s sparkling novel and a delightful exploration of one of literature’s most tantalizing mysteries with echoes of Shadow of the Wind and A.S. Byatt's Possession. Hay-on-Wye, 1995. Peter Byerly isn’t sure what drew him into this particular bookshop. Nine months earlier, the death of his beloved wife, Amanda, had left him shattered. The young antiquarian bookseller relocated from North Carolina to the English countryside, hoping to rediscover the joy he once took in collecting and restoring rare books. But upon opening an eighteenth-century study of Shakespeare forgeries, Peter is shocked when a portrait of Amanda tumbles out of its pages. Of course, it isn’t really her. The watercolor is clearly Victorian. Yet the resemblance is uncanny, and Peter becomes obsessed with learning the picture’s origins. As he follows the trail back first to the Victorian era and then to Shakespeare’s time, Peter communes with Amanda’s spirit, learns the truth about his own past, and discovers a book that might definitively prove Shakespeare was, indeed, the author of all his plays.
Dear Reader, Apparently, I have a thing for books about books.  I find I've been reading a LOT of them recently, and I've got a few more queued up, as well!  I don't know what it is - perhaps I just really enjoy the feeling of reading about something I love so much.  And seeing how much others love books, too.  The authors pour so much of themselves into these novels. This one was especially good: evidenced by the fact that I stayed up FAR too late on a school night (technically, a work night, but I do work at a university, so...) to finish it up.  While it was an intriguing story right from the get-go, the action really picked up towards the end, and I could not put it down without resolving the mystery.  I have to admit, the last bit of the book reminded me quite a bit of a Robert Langdon novel, which shouldn't be too much of a surprise, because I did just finish reading one.  Also, I have a very limited knowledge of adventure-mystery books (what genre are they, really?) and therefore, that's really one of the few "detective" stories to which I can relate this book - due to my own narrow experience, though, and perhaps not that it was truly Dan Brown-esque in nature. This story begins with that of a very recent widower named Peter, who is struggling to live again after the blow of losing his one true love, his college sweetheart.  Peter has social anxiety, and Amanda used to be his rock, the one who could make everything out in the world all right.  So his loss is manyfold: he must struggle not only to recover from losing Amanda, but also to return to the world at large, one that he would much prefer to hide from.  Peter is a rare book dealer, so luckily he can lose himself between the pages of an ancient text - usually.  However, he is startled from his quiet existence when he stumbles across an image of his dead wife...that was painted hundreds of years ago. Desperate to solve the mysery of the painting, Peter begins a hunt which brings him in contact with a special rare book, one which may hold the answer to whether Shakespeare actually wrote the many plays attributed to him (an academic argument that has had scholars taking sides for years).  As he delves deeper into the mystery, he begins to see how the book and painting tie together - and how they might both be very, very dangerous items to possess. Overall, a very interesting and engaging book.  The novel goes back and forth between Peter's present and the story of how he met Amanda, and the reader sees as the book progresses that many things which once seemed disparate are in fact woven closely together.  You won't want to stop reading until you figure out what the real story is! Yours, Arianna

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