Review #47: Luckiest Girl Alive, by Jessica Knoll

Boss gave me this book. He has this habit of ordering things willy-nilly without knowing too much about them, so occasionally he runs in to what he considers a dud and is kind enough to pass those duds to me. He read the first few pages, told me he couldn't stand the main character, but since he considered me pretty snarky, he thought I might enjoy it. And then told me he wanted to know what the secret was, so I had to read the book.

So I read it. And holy cow, are there a lot of secrets. (And fair warning: I'm discussing some of those secrets in this review.) Too many secrets. WAY too many secrets.

The novel opens with twenty-something Ani (formerly TifAni FaNelli (seriously?)) contemplating her upcoming nuptials to the handsome blue-blooded Luke while also envisioning stabbing him to death. Ani is obsessed with being perfect: ditching the Tif from her name (because how low-brow), taking pains to only wear the proper designers, eating pretty much nothing but the occasional Tic-Tac in order to stay a size 0. From the outset, it's hard (or, you know, impossible) to like Ani, but as the novel goes on, it's obvious that the reader is supposed to begin to sympathize with her. Because underneath the quest to be perfect, Ani is hiding a terrible secret.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Feel free to skip this paragraph.

The secret is that Ani killed a boy in high school. Brutally stabbed him to death. But she only killed him because he and another boy were shooting up the school while also setting it on fire. Which he was doing because he was gay and fat and avenging his humiliation at the hands of the kids he was shooting, and also defending Ani's honor. He considered Ani his best friend, but couldn't handle it after Ani started dating one of the boys who had humiliated him. Who just so happened to have participated in Ani's gang rape at a party six months earlier, which resulted in Ani running to a teacher, who, being young and dumb and wanting to protect his student, took her in to his apartment, helped her clean up, and then reported the rape to the school (but apparently not to the police), who didn't believe him, because not only did one of the boys come from a family that gave enough money to the school to have buildings named after them, but also because Ani denied the allegations, and then began dating one of the boys involved. So the teacher got fired, of course, under suspicious circumstances. And all of this happened because Ani's parents pulled her out of her school and put her in to this private school where she felt like she didn't fit in, and they pulled her out because she and her friends got caught smoking pot, which wouldn't have happened if her boobs weren't so big and her body wasn't so Marilyn Monroe-esque.

I swear, I'm not making this up.

***END SPOILERS***

This could have been a good book. If Ani had been just a touch more sympathetic, I could have liked her. I said this about Gone Girl, too; if they had only shown Amy playing with puppies or laughing with children, I could have gotten behind the character, but I just couldn't stand her. Or if Knoll had shown a little growth in Ani. Years later, Ani runs in to the teacher mentioned in the spoiler, and instead of apologizing, or thanking him for trying to help her, which would have gone a long way in showing Ani's road to redemption, we're treated to several chapters of her trying to seduce him, or, more accurately, her complaining about him not trying to seduce her. Yes, Ani was a victim of some pretty horrific events, but she wasn't the only victim, and she wasn't completely blameless. But if even I, who once voted for Jesse Jackson in a mock student election in 1983 because I didn't want him to feel bad for not getting any votes (and yes, that's a true story), can't muster up any sympathy for this woman, then she's truly The Worst Person Ever.

There are a lot of good YA books out there about not fitting in, about trauma, about identity, about screwing up, about grief. This is not one of them.

Review #46: The Cutting Season, by Alicia Locke

In The Cutting Season, we meet Caren Gray, a young single mother working as the manager of a crumbling Louisiana antebellum plantation that's been turned in to a wedding and banquet facility. She and her nine year old daughter live on the property, spending their days in the same buildings where Caren's mother once worked as a cook, and where her three times great grandfather was a slave. The plantation sits up against a sugar cane field, and when one of the cane workers is found in the slave quarters with her throat slit, Caren no longer feels at home at Belle Vie.

As the police investigation circles in on one of Caren's employees, Caren's own investigation circles in on the owners of the plantation, the Clancy family, and the sugar company next door. With the help of an intrepid journalist, Caren begins to uncover more than she ever expected, including a new mystery: what happened to Belle Vie's runaway slave, who just so happens to be Caren's great grandfather.

The mysteries themselves aren't that difficult to solve, but they aren't really the point of the novel. Locke uses them as a way to explore race relations, the class system that still exists in this country, and the way that the South often tries to soften the edges of its sometimes brutal history. I love books set in the South, but very few of them - or at least very few of the ones I've read - have explored the uglier side of the region, and even fewer explore it from the point of view of someone who is affected by those uglier sides. And, too, this book is an interesting look at the way that race relations aren't always about the black/white divide. There is a larger statement in here about the way we treat immigrants, both legal and illegal, and this book makes me realize that the days of us welcoming the huddled masses are probably over for good. 

When Dennis Lehane chooses your novel as the first one he publishes under his new imprint, you've got to make sure you get it right. Attica Locke certainly did. This is her second novel; her first is on my TBR list. 

Review #45: The Matchmaker, by Elin Hilderbrand

Note: There will be spoilers in this review.

In general, I like Elin Hilderbrand. Sometimes she's a little schlocky and a little too saccharine, and I feel like all her characters probably wear Lily Pulitzer all the time, but overall, I consider her a pretty good writer. If I see something of hers haven't read, I usually pick it up, because she's generally a sure thing. Except this one. I just couldn't fall in love with it.

Set on the island of Nantucket, The Matchmaker tells the story of Dabney Kimball Beech, who runs the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce (I think? Maybe it's the visitor's center. I honestly can't remember) and is Miss Nantucket. She's a pillar of the community, someone that everyone admires, and as if that weren't enough, she's apparently an awesome matchmaker, and not like the Patty Stanger kind, but the kind that just knows how to put couples together. She's got 42 happy couples under her belt, and is working on more. (And somehow nobody hates this woman? I feel like surely there's a cadre of Nantucket women who don't like her and her perfect headband and pearls. Where are the mean girls? Grown up mean girls are the worst.)

Dabney's perfect little life is rolling along quite nicely. Her husband John, a celebrated economist who works in the city four days a week, is doing well at work, the chamber is hopping, and her daughter Agnes has come back home for the summer to figure out whether she really wants to marry the dolt she's engaged to. But then Clendenin Hughes, Dabney's first love, comes back in to town, and his arrival rocks Dabney to the core. She hasn't seen him since he left when she was eighteen, and his presence back in her town tilts her world on its axis.

Of course, they begin an affair. They can't help it. They're in love. They always have been. It's their second chance, don't you see? It's meant to be. 

Um, no.

This is where Hildebrand lost me. 

I'm not one of those women who can't read about affairs. Admittedly, it took me a little while to be able to stomach it after my own personal experience with a spouse with a wandering eye and wandering pants, but there's a way to write about affairs, and this just wasn't it. Or maybe I just didn't like Dabney. I don't know. What I do know is that I couldn't get on the Dabney + Clen 4eva train, and that left me feeling cold and more than a little duped, because I was supposed to like Dabney and Clem, and supposed to root for them, and I just couldn't stand them. And that left me wondering what was wrong with me, and while a good book should make you think, it shouldn't make you feel the way I felt when I was done reading this one.

Reviews #42 - 44: Manhunt, Smitten, & Back to the Bedroom

I love Stephanie Plum, and sometimes I go back and read Janet Evanovich's earlier works. It's fun to see where she started out, and her "red-hot screwball comedies" are fluff in the purest form. And sometimes, between science projects and history projects and volleyball games and basketball practice and, you know, my stuff too, this mama needs some mindless fluff.

Manhunt finds us in the wilds of Alaska in a tiny town outside of Fairbanks, where Alexandra Scott, her giant dog Bruno, and her tiny little two door convertible have just arrived. Alex has left behind her high powered job in New York, trading her starkly modern condo for a rustic cabin in the woods. The cabin's a little more rustic than she anticipates, though, and her tiny car can't handle the unpaved driveway, and she doesn't know how to chop firewood. Enter her neighbor, the handsome but prickly Michael Casey, who is a bush pilot, and, as near as I could tell, is independently wealthy.

Michael feels like he needs to help Alex, but Alex is stubborn and wants to do it herself. Soon, though, she succumbs to the temptation of his coffee and indoor plumbing, and before she knows it, she's succumbing to the temptation of Michael himself.

Smitten is the story of Lizabeth Kane, the newly single mother of two rambunctious young boys. Recently divorced from her husband, who sounds like a real peach, by the way, she is setting up camp in a ramshackle old house and desperate for a job that lets her stay close to the boys. She finds that job with contractor Matt Hallahan, who reluctantly takes her on as a carpenter's assistant in a house he's rehabbing. Lizabeth proves pretty handy with a hammer, though, and before long, she's not only proved herself a better than average carpenter, she's also organized Matt's pigsty of an office, and Matt's fallen head over heels for her. Throw in a weird guy who flashes the neighbors in the dark of night and Lizabeth's Aunt Elsie, who is definitely an early version of Grandma Mazur, and you've got vintage Evanovich.

In Back to the Bedroom, we have David Dodd, a self-described big kid who loves gadgets, toys, and comic books, and Kathryn Finn, a professional cellist with an extreme type A personality. When a piece of a helicopter falls through Kate's roof, she finally meets David, and the two could not be more different. David offers to help Kate - she needs a place to stay as it's raining and there's a giant hole in her roof - and Kate reluctantly agrees. Of course, they butt heads and kind of can't stand each other, but when strange things begin happening at Kate's house and David realizes she's in danger, he goes in to full protective mode. Then Kate's ex shows up, further complicating things, and there's also a missing cat, several replacement cats, a broken leg, and a gun-toting old lady.

None of these are groundbreaking stories, and they're not as good as Evanovich's later efforts with Stephanie, Ranger, and Morelli, or her series with Diesel and Lizzy, but it's fun to see her trying out different characters and recognizing early versions of the ones we've come to know and love. Worth a $1.99 download or a check out from the library for sure.

Review #41: Remember Me LIke This, by Bret Anthony Johnston

Sometimes I look at parents who have missing children and I wonder how they can continue. How can you sit at your desk, answering the phone or dealing with a client or paying the bills when you have no idea where your child is? How can you take seriously the complaint of your co-worker that someone is stinking up the kitchen when you don't know if your child is hungry somewhere? How can you plan, work, drive, eat, sleep - do anything - when that part of you is missing?

And yet, these parents go on. They have jobs, they have other children, families that need tending, grass that needs cutting, groceries that need to be bought, and laundry that needs to be folded. The Campbell family is one such family. Justin disappeared without a trace four years ago when he was twelve. He just didn't come home. At first, they thought he was playing around, hiding, playing a joke. His younger brother Griff was convinced that it was because they'd had a fight, that Justin was staying away to teach him a lesson. But as one day turned in to two, two turned in to seven, and seven turned in to a thousand, Justin's family had to figure out the New Normal and come to some sort of acceptance. And so father Eric goes back to teaching, mother Laura goes back to her job at the dry cleaners, his grandfather goes back to his pawn shop, and Griff returns to school and skateboarding and discovers girls.

But every night, Eric and his father go out and look for Justin, driving aimlessly, hanging flyers, passing the billboard with his face shining down on them, digitally changed to show age progression. Looking for Justin, looking for his body, a clue, a trace of him, anything at all.

And then one day Eric gets a call. "Come to the police station," the man on the other end of the phone says. "That's all I can tell you." Eric and Laura have been through this before. They've had to look at dead boys in the coroner's office and say, "That's not my son," relief mixed with the disappointment of still not knowing. Imagine the horror of realizing the feeling of disappointment over not finding your son dead. It's unfathomable. So Eric and Laura have very little hope - or at least try to have very little hope - that this call will end in anything other than relief and disappointment and horror.

But when they walk in to the police department, Justin is there, in the interview room. And it's not just his body on a slab at the morgue, he's actually standing in front of them, alive. Bigger, taller, grown in to a man - boys change an awful lot between the ages of twelve and sixteen - but it's still Justin.  And so this is the point where they should all live happily ever after.

Except Johnston turns the missing kid theme on its head, and continues on past the reunion. He looks at the way that families rebuild after such a devastating incident, how a mother can relate to a son she hasn't seen in four years, how parents can forgive themselves for picking up the threads of their lives while their son was gone, how siblings can still communicate wordlessly, how Justin can miss his captor, and how raw the human experience really is. What impressed me the most about this book wasn't the story - although it was certainly well done - but that I've rarely read such perfectly drawn characters. Johnston captures everything about his cast with superb accuracy; it's hard to believe that this is his first novel. His prose is spare and beautiful and delicate, and I'm interested to see what else he'll do.

"The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all."

Review #40: Heat Wave, by Jill Marie Landis

I'm 87% sure that I read this book once before, but it doesn't appear as though I reviewed it so I'm counting it. Also? There are approximately eleventy billion books out there called "Heat Wave". It took me like, five pages on the Amazon search to find this. I feel like we can come up with a more unique title, kids.

Kat Vargas is a private investigator living in California by way of Hawaii. She's tiny, tough, and she's built a wall around her heart following the loss of her unborn baby to a car accident and her jackass surfer fiancé to a supermodel. Ty Chandler is a semi-retired entrepreneur who just sold his adventure business in Alaska and moved to California, and he's enlisted Kat's help to find the daughter he never knew he had.  Kat's attracted to Ty from the start and knows that she's putting her heart at risk, but she reluctantly agrees to take his case.

In no time, Kat finds Ty's missing daughter Sunny, who is living in LA with her baby and a hodgepodge of sketchy characters. Ty is thrilled, but Kat realizes that Sunny's in over her head with some car guys, and when Sunny and the baby disappear, it's up to Kat to find them and save them.

Heat Wave is okay. It's kind of halfway between a Harlequin romance and a Nora Roberts kind of romance. The B story with Sunny and her gang was a little bit jarringly out of place, but it worked well enough within the structure of the story. The C story of Sunny's sort of/kind of romance with Ty's best friend was weird, and Landis kind of dropped it mid-way, which I found even more strange. I also wanted to shake Kat; for being such a hotshot PI, you'd think she'd be a little bit smarter about her safety. And Ty was a smidge too perfect and earnest for me. 

Huh. Interesting. I thought I was pretty neutral about this book, but writing this review, it seems like I'm irritated with all the characters. I think this one will go in the donation pile.

Review # 39: The Undomestic Goddess, by Sophia Kinsella

I confessed earlier that I'm not a fan of the Shopaholic books, but I read Can You Keep a Secret? and realized that it wasn't so bad, so I thought I'd give Kinsella another shot, and picked up The Undomestic Goddess from a pile at my sister's. 

And then I remembered why I didn't really like her.

Samantha Sweeting is a high powered London attorney who makes a big mistake at work on the eve of her partnership. The mistake is gigantic - like, millions of dollars gigantic - and Samantha walks out of the office in a daze, boards a train, and winds up in the English countryside with only her dreaded Blackberry for company. She knocks on the first door she can find, and the lady of the house mistakes her for the new housekeeper. 

For some insane reason, Samantha goes along with it, despite not even being able to make toast, let alone knowing how to actually keep house. But Trish and Eddie Geiger, the nouveau riche lords of the manor, might possibly be the dimmest bulbs in all of England, so they don't catch on.  The gorgeous gardener Nathaniel does, though, and, feeling sorry for Samantha, he enlists the help of his mother to teach Samantha how to cook.

Of course, the ruse can't last forever, and when Samantha uncovers some dirty secrets at her firm and then the press gets wind of where she's been all this time, everything gets blown wide open. Samantha is offered everything she always thought she wanted, but suddenly she isn't sure that's the right path for her.

There wasn't anything wrong with this book, per se. The writing was fine and the structure was done competently enough, but the story was a little (a lot) outside the realm of plausibility. And normally I can handle a little bit of that, but you can't tell me that a highly educated woman has managed to get to the age of 30 without figuring out how to wash her clothes or make a sandwich. I think what did me in more than the story was the characters. I couldn't get behind a single one of them. They weren't bad, exactly, but there wasn't any quality in any character that made me want to root for them. I can't even remember how the story ends, to be honest, which tells you that I didn't care about the players.