Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

My copy of Little House in the Big Woods may be 20 years old now. I can’t remember exactly how long I’ve had it. I mean, look at this photo:

The pages of my copy have the yellow-brown tint of vintage (cough, old) books. It has begun to smell like something on my grandfather’s shelves, which are stocked with titles from the 60s and 70s.

My copy has also become delicate. Look! I chipped the lower left edge of its back cover.

The fabric tape with “Book #1” written on it remains sturdy to this day though.

Whenever I turn the pages of my Little House in the Big Woods, they make a concerning creaking noise so I was dainty in reading as I didn’t want the book to fall apart (and yet I still chipped that edge. Curses!)

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I am deeply attached to my copy and will keep it as long as I can. Little House in the Big Woods and 3 subsequent books from the series were gifted to me by my aunt’s mother-in-law (whom I shall call Grandma R) when I was a young girl spending her holidays in Seattle.

My aunt married an American and they settled near Seattle for many years. My cousins were raised in Washington state and my family would visit as I was growing up. These visits exposed me to elements of American culture I wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I remember going Halloween trick-or-treating one year.

Grandma R would visit my aunt and uncle’s Washington home too. During a visit when everyone converged (probably a Christmas holiday), Grandma R gave me the books. She must have chosen them because my aunt told her I was a little bookworm. I had zero life as a young girl: all I did was study, read, and write in diaries. Uh. To be fair, nothing has changed…

I remember Grandma R saying that she loved the books as a little girl and hoped I would too. I did not see her often and she has now sadly passed away. I treasure the remaining memories I have of her: how she wore pastel chunky sweaters, how she baked sugar cookies for me and my brother and my cousins using Pillsbury dough (is there a more American brand?), and how she loved collecting lighthouse-related paraphernalia from paintings to figurines. Most of all, I treasure these 4 Little House books. They are now my most tangible connections to her. Sometimes items outlive us, often they are less fleeting than memories. Sometimes, you live in the things you leave behind.

I remember loving the books as Grandma R hoped. On afternoons after school, I would devour them inside an air-conditioned car braving the notorious Jakarta traffic to get home. My body may be stuck in traffic congestion, but my imagination was absorbed by the wilderness of 19^th century North America.

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Rereading this at 30, I think some of the writing isn’t great: the prose doesn’t always flow well and the story is at times choppily presented. Little House in the Big Woods is slice of life – a year in the life, to be exact. It follows a year of life in the Wisconsin “Big Woods” for Laura’s family.

Life for little Laura and her family in their log house was isolated and subject to the seasons. They were hours away from the nearest town and hours away from other family members in their log houses in other areas of the “Big Woods” so they had to be self-sufficient.

We begin when winter was coming. Laura, her big sister Mary, Ma, and Pa had to cure meats to make sure they had enough food supply to last the winter. Winter was also for making maple sugar and maple syrup, spring was for making cheese, summer was for planting vegetables, and autumn was for harvest and storing food away for another winter.

Family members would visit each other for Christmas, dances, and to help each other with harvest crops. While families in the “Big Woods” were independent, there was still enough social interactions to nurture life.

As a child, I loved these descriptions of chores from a bygone era. Life, in Little House in the Big Woods, was very tactile. You churned your own butter, you made your own cheese, you created your survival. As a child getting her produce from supermarkets and her food cooked by others, there was something enchanting and exotic about Little House in the Big Woods.

As a 30-year-old, I see Little House in the Big Woods as a profoundly American product. The story it tells is the Puritan lifestyle: absolutely no work and no smiles on Sabbath day, strip yourself of all frivolity, rigid days of never-changing and never-ending chores, etc. Without this constant ethos of hard work, you would die. At times, I sensed a rejection of pleasure that I simultaneously admired and recoiled against.

This isn’t to say that life in Laura’s household was always po-faced. They had the simple joys of Pa playing his fiddle and telling stories. They sometimes went to the general store to buy pretty fabrics for dresses. They would go to grandma & grandpa’s for dances and delicious big family dinners. As an adult, however, it’s easy to see that Laura took so much pleasure in these trips because of how few and far between they were. Law of diminishing returns and all…

As a 30-year-old, Little House in the Big Woods does read like an instruction manual for the pioneer lifestyle and like an instruction manual to raise good little boys and girls. A bit didactic. At this point in my life, I prefer my stories to be subtler.

(Of course, I couldn’t help but smile a little. With all this manual labor, who’s got time to deal with an existential crisis?)

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If I were to read Little House in the Big Woods for the first time as a 30-year-old, out of curiosity for this American children’s classic, I’d leave underwhelmed. I’d be glad to have checked it off the endless list of books I would like to read before I die but I wouldn’t seek out Little House on the Prairie, the next book in the series (and the one I remember as my favorite!).

But my relationship with Little House in the Big Woods is not purely about its content. In fact, its content matters little. The book no longer takes me to the woods of Wisconsin; it takes me to innocent childhood days of seeing firsthand life in the American suburbs, of baking Pillsbury cookies, of Grandma R’s sweaters and sweetness.

These books now embody Grandma R to me rather than a children’s story. Fiction evokes the emotional. No. Fiction is emotional.

Rereading Little House in the Big Woods also created a connection to my younger self. There were long descriptions of Pa making hunting bullets and cleaning his rifle that I forgot existed. Yet scenes and imagery of Mary churning butter and Laura’s palpable joy from receiving her first real doll for Christmas remain in my mind’s eye even to this day.

It made me smile. I was always a girly girl. Now I’m just a very feminine woman. Some things don’t change. I still had to force down boredom when reading passages about guns and hunting game. But I still devour pages about making homemade cheese and maple syrup with gusto.

It’s such a cliched takeaway, but our personal histories often eclipse the textual content of a book. The words in a book connect us to the wider world: they teach us about various fields and broaden our understanding of faraway places and people. But even without the words contained within, books embody things for us, connect us to precious memories, and become physical mementos of places and people and ourselves.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Reviews of Normal People inundated bookstagram, booktube, and the book blogosphere in late 2018 and early last year. The premise of the novel lured me, and the critical acclaim it received promised some thought-provoking (or at least debatable) insights on contemporary life.

In other words, Normal People could be my favorite type of fiction: accessible yet substantial.

[A small note: this blog is alive!! I now review some of the books I finished on my Instagram account, but for books I have a lot of thoughts about, nothing beats enthusiastic word vomit on a good old-fashioned blog post.]

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If you have even a passing interest in contemporary book releases, you’d probably have heard a bit of Normal People’s plot. Connell and Marianne go to the same high school in Sligo, a small town in Ireland. Both are academically gifted and are in the running to become class valedictorian, though Connell is thinly beating Marianne.

As individuals, they match well. Socioeconomically, it’s another story. Marianne is from a wealthy family. Her family owns what is essentially a mansion in Sligo and a holiday home in Italy. To hit home the difference of economic status between Connell and Marianne, we learn from the opening pages that Connell’s mother is employed by Marianne’s family to clean their house several times a week. Because Connell drives his mom to the mansion for the work, he and Marianne have opportunities to chat and interact with each other outside of school hours.

Connell is very popular in school. He is well-liked and a regarded school athlete. His peers want to hang out with him, the popular girls want to date him. Marianne, on the other hand, is a social outcast (or what cruel high schoolers would call a freak). She’s awkward and doesn’t fit in. Worse? She treats her peers’ bullying with insouciance and even contempt.

A romantic relationship develops between Connell and Marianne (no surprise!). Both treat the situation as a hookup, but we as readers know that strong feelings are what propel their bond.

Normal People continues to follow Connell and Marianne as university students in Trinity College, Dublin. In university, their social standing is reversed. Marianne’s gamine physique, interest in politics, and manners earn her popularity with the cool crowd. Meanwhile, Connell’s lack of style makes him socially invisible. His easygoing mien and desire to please everyone, once an advantage in high-school hierarchy, removes distinction in university. He is even at times called a “culchie” – an Irish redneck.

Connell and Marianne’s relationship changes and evolves. They are friends, they are lovers, they are no-longer-lovers-but-more-than-friends. More than an intimate peek at their bond, Normal People is the story of their challenges and growing pains in early 2010s Ireland.

Though Normal People is marketed as a romance, I am more compelled by Connell and Marianne’s coming-of-age story. Sure, the romance could be unexpectedly compelling (awkward and immature in the right places), but I wasn’t always convinced by the depth of their connection or why exactly they couldn’t stay away from each other. Read from a pure romance lens, Normal People is a pleasant read but not memorable. It’s more affecting and thoughtful as a coming-of-age tale. Connell and Marianne’s struggles to come into their own as young adults were absorbing; the focus is on their relationship simply because it is a large part of them growing up and becoming more settled in who they are.

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When I read, I’m always waiting for the phrase or moment that will make sense of the book title. In Normal People, it unfolds when Marianne tells Connell that she wants to be like normal people; maybe it will make people love her. As time passes, Marianne learns that “normal people”, those popular and sociable, aren’t always good people. Often, people who try their best to be good have a bit of an outcast or fuck up in them. I love that. That’s life, isn’t it?

People sacrifice a lot to be normal and popular and liked. Sometimes you have to ignore who you are. Sometimes you must mute your conscience. There’s a line in Normal People about bullying that encapsulates this perfectly (which I won’t spoil!)

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Normal People is often described as a millennial novel. While no book can comprehensively represent an entire demographic, as a millennial myself, I found Connell and Marianne’s growing pains relatable. Normal People beautifully captures what it is like to be in your early 20s, that exhilarating yet fleeting period in your life, when anything is possible and the world is your oyster. When you think you are special and you believe profoundly that you’re going to, if not change the world, provide some value to it. As a nearly-30 millennial, it made me sad for Connell and Marianne; they will not feel this way forever.

The novel is also preoccupied with the concept of social capital and how it changes and yo-yos over time. Marianne is a prime example of this: ostracized in high school yet popular in university – likely for the same reasons she was an outcast at school. Normal People comments on how quickly social standing can shift: a new location, a nasty rumor, etc. Is popularity worth chasing when it is so fickle? At the same time, is the contemporary pursuit of social capital fairer now? Any student of classic novels or history knows how fixed social standing was in the past (largely due to the lineage you are born into and the income you would likely inherit). Today, fortunes are more mutable.

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To end this review, a miniseries of Normal People produced by the BBC (of course!) and Hulu is coming soon. I’ve attached the video trailer below. It looks like it’s going to be good (to me, at least). I am surprised that the miniseries will be 6 episodes long. Normal People is a short novel, so I had expected 4 episodes would be enough to wrap up the storylines. I’m curious to see if there will be added or expanded scenes. With the book’s author Sally Rooney writing the script, I think it’s likely.

Boy in the Twilight by Yu Hua

This short story collection has the subtitle “Stories of the Hidden China” and it presents narratives of local factory workers, the working class, and urbanization of villages. The stories feel contemporary, or at least dated to the 80s and 90s – so not set in a distant past.

(As I proofread this review, I checked my edition and its original, untranslated version was first published in Beijing in 1999. So I was quite accurate. Go me!)

I started reading Boy in the Twilight in a fancy brunch spot at an upscale Jakarta mall. Boy, it was the entirely wrong background. Some of the stories here are absolutely brutal. The opening story, titled “No Name of My Own”, follows a boy with learning disabilities who is tormented by his townsfolk from youth to old age, with one particular cruelty detailed in the story’s climax. In the title story, a fruit stall owner is merciless in punishing a boy-thief.

Not all the stories here are violent, thankfully. Some of them are more about domestic absurdity, another heavy on black comedy. Yet even the humor has an undercurrent of sadness, and the sense that life is ludicrous.

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One theme that stands out in the collection is emotional repression. Many times, while reading, I thought to myself, ‘Why couldn’t these people tell the truth about what they really want?’ I counted 4 married couples whose relationships would be better off without petty tactics of saying one thing but meaning another or keeping quiet about a festering problem.

The fruit seller in the title story is repressed too. At first glance a simple story of harshly (too harshly) punishing a child, it ends with the realization that the fruit seller was expressing long-held feelings of unfairness and having been stolen from by life. Yu Hua never framed the fruit seller’s actions as excusable, but I admit to feeling a pang of sadness for this man.

I wondered if all this emotional repression is what’s meant by the “Hidden China” of the book’s subtitle. But that’s a reductive assessment. East or West, wherever the location, people generally choose to repress or ignore the unpleasantness of life. Instead, the subtitle might refer to the segment of society the collection focuses on. These are only brief glimpses of how the Chinese working class live and commute, but reading this collection, you can understand why the lives of the characters are brutal – and why the characters themselves can be so brutal.

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The subject matter may not be pleasant, but Yu Hua’s writing is reader-friendly. His prose is stripped back, with not much description to bog down the pace. I wasn’t wowed or particularly impressed when I turned the last page, but it’s a good and solid short story collection. It captures well the human experiences that feel universal and yet local at the same time.

(A succinct book review to prove that I can still write a coherent book review! Congratulate me, guys! My first blog post after 1 entire year!)

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

She sat in the airless vehicle, which was getting more stifling by the second. She could feel her heart pounding so quickly. She has just bought a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar diamond ring she didn’t much care for, a twenty-eight thousand dollar bracelet she quite liked, and a seven hundred and eighty-four thousand dollar pair of earrings that made her look like Pocahontas. For the first time in weeks, she felt bloody fantastic.

The quote above was on my mind when I saw these dramatic, near-shoulder-grazing earrings in New York City’s trendy SoHo neighborhood earlier this year. These earrings were obviously impractical, like the ones Astrid Leong of Crazy Rich Asians impulsively bought. Where was I going to wear them? How often will I wear them? I don’t really have the lifestyle for jewelry this dramatic. Most of my time is spent at work or at home or at coffee shops.

But it was love at first sight. I stayed away for an hour or two to make sure I really wanted them. I did. Every time I moved away, my insides protested, anxious that someone else would snap them up. I still haven’t worn them outside the house, but whenever I take them out to admire them, I’m still as much in love. Pure joy was a good enough reason to purchase them.

Don’t worry, I didn’t spend anywhere near 784,000 dollars on them. And with that heartwarming love story out of the way, let’s get on with my review of Crazy Rich Asians.

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In Crazy Rich Asians, two young New York University professors, Rachel Chu and Nick Young have been in a romantic relationship for a good while. Nick wants to bring Rachel home to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding. Rachel accepts, hoping Nick will soon propose.

What Nick omits is that he is heir to an illustrious and impossibly wealthy Southeast Asian clan. Upon arrival, poor and oblivious Rachel must deal with the culture shock, money shock, Nick’s unreasonable mother, class snobbery, and bloodthirsty single ladies.

So far, so cliché. A plot like this has the potential to be an entertaining, Austen-esque romp. Trouble is, Nick and Rachel are quite tepid and uninteresting. Their story never lifts above a clichéd romcom, even up to the ending.

Kevin Kwan provided several subplots, mostly a collection of rich people and their silly antics. Some of the dialogue is truly hilarious (and deliciously ditzy!). Overall, though, many of the characters felt like nothing more than caricatures.

(Don’t take only my word for characterization though. A friend whose diplomat family worked in Southeast Asia and a Singaporean Instagram pal said that the characters are pretty true to life.)

A notable exception is Astrid Leong’s subplot. Astrid is Nick’s glamorous and elegant socialite cousin. Her story succeeded in conveying genuine depth and feeling. Not necessarily a rebel, she does break away from certain conventions of her exclusive milieu. She married a middle-class man forging his own career instead of old money/a high-profile politician/a royal offspring/an emerging billionaire.

But if there’s anything money can’t buy, it’s a happy marriage. Astrid’s plot feels sincere because its conflict is believable. I actually wished for Crazy Rich Asians to center its story on Astrid. Plus, she is written as a chic lady with impeccable taste and a discerning eye for style, rather than throwing money at designer labels. Come on, you have to admit she sounds a lot more fun than an everycouple.

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I was skeptical of the Crazy Rich Asians series (it’s a trilogy) when it started getting hype. The plot sounded like a typical romcom and it probably gained traction because the novel detailed a socioeconomic milieu Western readers didn’t know about. Still, I’m not immune to hype. And wasn’t it my duty as a Southeast Asian to read a novel about Southeast Asians that convinced Hollywood to feature a majority Asian cast for a film in twenty-five years?

While I didn’t find it particularly interesting, I don’t discourage anyone from reading Crazy Rich Asians. It’s fun and glossy. It may not offer anything new or particularly thoughtful, but every bibliophile needs a glossy read once in a while. It would be a good book to jumpstart your reading if you’ve been in a slump. It would be great for vacation too.

When all is said and done, however, my primary purpose in writing this review is to show off those gorgeous earrings and talk about them.

Have any of you read Crazy Rich Asians? What do you think?

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Oh look! A novel I had planned to review last year because 2017 marked its 20^th birthday. What? It’s January 2018 now? Whoops. Oh well.

The God of Small Things wasn’t the best fiction I read in 2017 (That minor honor goes to Shelter by Jung Yun, which I have yet to review), but I couldn’t get it out of my head months after finishing it.

The God of Small Things focuses on a trope I have always loved and Roy built a family saga around it. The trope in question? A noble house in decay.

Roy chose a fascinating period in the decline of an esteemed house. The God of Small Things wasn’t written in chronological order, but as our mind figures out the story’s linear timeline, we realize that the story enters at a point where the house is already in decay and losing prestige. The current generation is simultaneously in denial and attempting to stave away the inevitable.

So we turn the pages awaiting a climax, after which the house loses all standing, good name, and even its income.

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The God of Small Things starts with church rites. Sophie Mol, the nine-year-old half-British and half-Indian daughter of family heir Chacko, is dead. We know that Ammu, Chacko’s sister, and her twin children Rahel and Esthra were somehow seen as responsible for Sophie’s death. They were ostracized and pointed at during the funeral.

We are then launched into stories of various family members: the current clan and the older generation. Their backgrounds and most revealing anecdotes are told, creating fully realized characters. No one in this sprawling family is likable. In fact, the whole pack seriously needed copious therapy. All I see, page after page, is delusion, hypocrisy, petty drama, incompetence, and recklessness.

But then, is it a surprise when the man who built the family name was odious? A violent husband and an abusive father, but toadying towards the colonialists, his family cannot escape his clutches long after his death.

Decay and suffocation are themes that infuse The God of Small Things. When the timeline starts, Kerala, where the novel is set, was verdant and beautiful. When twin daughter Rahel returned as an adult woman, her hometown has become a tourist trap where water no longer supports life. The fish are dead and belly-up. The house falls, the land polluted. There is decay and there is inertia, the sense that everything stays the same, yet rot inevitably infests. There are fathers with great hopes for their sons but sons grow up to be menial men with mediocre jobs and class stays unchanged.

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The prose of The God of Small Things is famously divisive. It took me a while to finally take the plunge and read as I feared the novel required complete focus, with a dense writing style and a tangled family tree. Nah. Everything’s easy to follow.

The poetic flourishes of The God of Small Things reads childlike and excited to my eyes, rather than esoteric. Makes sense. While we are given an omnipresent view of nearly all the family members, a sizable chunk of the novel’s voice is heard from the twins Rahel and Esthra – children when the story begins, devastated adults at the novel’s end.

Overall, I took pleasure in Roy’s writing style, but the prose can and does cross the realm into being irritatingly overwritten. The God of Small Things is deeply descriptive, lyrical, and lush. Roy turned her pen and her senses to describe absolutely everything. The season’s overripe mangoes got a page’s worth of writing. It does get tiresome and The God of Small Things isn’t even a long novel. My edition is around 340 pages, but 40 pages of the book’s excessive detail could have been easily cut to produce a stronger novel: beautifully written and focused.

(Because dear god, sometimes I thought: right, can we get on with the actual story? Please?)

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Despite my quibbles with the writing style, The God of Small Things is a rich novel, full of themes to unpack and beautiful imagery.

I thought the climax and mystery surrounding Sophie Mol’s death were predictable. I guessed what happened not even a quarter into reading the book. No matter – I don’t think Roy was ever invested in the mystery either: the themes, characters, and overall story were what was emphasized.

Here’s a question: why hasn’t the BBC commissioned a miniseries on The God of Small Things? I mean, it’s got the big themes they love: class and colonialism. That alone should have gotten the agents talking.

Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo

Image courtesy of Goodreads

The inclusion of Stay with Me in the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist heightened my expectations for a highbrow literary novel. Upon finishing the novel, however, I was slightly in dismay.

I’m sure many bibliophiles have had the experience of finishing a book and thinking ‘Well, that was enjoyable. Don’t think it was particularly accomplished though.’ If you are anything like me, the thought would be followed by some guilt. No one wants to be a snob. You want to be discerning, but most definitely not a snob. Let’s hope this is a discerning review.

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We begin Stay with Me with Yejide and Akin, who have been married a few years. They are a loving and happy Nigerian couple with a modern relationship dynamic. Both work and contribute to the family finances. Their early interactions were marked by respect and reasonable discussions. #relationshipgoals basically, as the kiddos say these days.

That is, until the fateful day Yejide opened her front door to family relatives and a young woman claiming to be Akin’s second wife.

Polygamy was always something Yejide and Akin rejected. Both came from polygamous families and, Yejide especially, suffered from it. Akin’s family were beginning to be impatient for a baby, however, and Yejide had no choice but deal with the new woman’s arrival into her household.

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This is where most synopses of Stay with Me end, which was why I expected the novel to be a slow-paced domestic drama dealing with the repercussions of polygamy while providing insights on family dynamics and the larger Nigerian culture. But Stay with Me isn’t that type of family drama. This is a very action-based novel; plot twists are abundant here. I think most reviewers stop describing the plot at the second wife’s arrival to avoid spoiling the story for potential readers. I respect the discretion and have done the same.

The twists and turns in Stay with Me are relentless. They really are too much for any couple to bear, no matter how loving or happy. If your life is a constant struggle against challenges, without hope, sooner or later you’ll get exhausted and even want to give up.

I’m reasonably sure Adebayo plotted these dramatic turns and reveals as catalysts to show Yejide and Akin’s humanity. The near soap-opera plotting should be secondary to Yejide and Akin as characters. For Stay with Me to work, its two elements of excessive drama and authentic humanity needed to balance each other out – unfortunately, the elements never quite cohere together.

Sure, there were moments of sincerity in Stay with Me. A near violent argument between Yejide and Akin seemed to be happening too early in the novel, until you realize that when trust is lost and words have been treated like weapons, a loving relationship degenerates in no time.

If Stay with Me had more scenes highlighting emotional devastation and relationship cracks while paring down the gothic drama, I would love the novel so much more. My favorite line came from a rare moment of contemplation, when Akin reflected on unforeseen consequences:

[A]ll the mess of love and life that only shows up as you go along.

Stay with Me isn’t winning any prizes for poetic prose, but that disarmingly simple line is so honest and true. Life is a cocktail of variables we have no control over. All we can do is do the best we can and be the best person we can, no matter how much things hurt sometimes.

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If I were to say Stay with Me is a great novel to take on a red eye flight, is that backhanded praise?

In no way do I advocate reading only esoteric writing. My favorite reads are books that beautifully balance the accessible and the meaty. Alas, while I am sure that was the author’s intention – Stay with Me ended up lacking enough meat to carry the raucous surface.

Despite all my caveats, I await Adebayo’s next fiction endeavor with interest. Adobayo is young, not even 30, and Stay with Me is her debut. I think she set out to write my favorite type of novel, where the readable and the thoughtful blend seamlessly together, but fell a bit short. But Stay with Me displays potential and I am optimistic she has the chops to perfect her craft.

Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

Image courtesy of Goodreads

Suicide, depression, love, sexuality, crushes, cliques of popular, manipulative peers – the whole gamut of teen life is explored in this literary graphic masterpiece.

Above is the blurb for young adult graphic novel Skim. A bold claim, to be sure. But is it accurate?

I agree with the blurb – to an extent. Skim never delved deeply into any of the promised themes. They are all within the pages, but don’t expect a thorough examination.

My evaluation may not sound enthusiastic, but I think it was the right approach for the story. Whenever suicide, depression, or falling in love touches our lives – whether directly or through others, whether as teenagers or as adults who should know better, we are left with far more questions than answers. Worse, our sense of self and established beliefs are often shaken.

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The year is 1993. “Skim” is the nickname of Kimberly Keiko Cameron, a Canadian high school student with estranged parents. She lives with her mother, but the relationship is distant. She is into tarot cards, Wicca, and astrology. She’s starting to have differences with her best friend Lisa. She’s a misfit at school. And she’s falling in love for the first time.

Yet her story is essentially a subplot. Katie Matthews is one of the popular girls, whose outgoing and athletic ex-boyfriend committed suicide. The overarching narrative of Skim centers on the aftermath of this boy’s suicide.

The students at Skim’s high school don’t know Katie’s ex-boyfriend (they go to different schools), but everyone has a response. From insensitivity to ignorance (teenagers, eh?) to eye rolling at the random hysteria, everyone has a response.

What Skim captured well is the voice and reactions of teenagers. A lot of stupid ideas are executed with (likely) good intentions.

Skim is wonderfully realized. She is the way teen misfits usually are. Smarter, sharper, and wiser than the expectations of those around her, but not as wise and smart as she wishes she is.

I so love the page where the concerned but bungling school counselor pulled Skim into her office. Girls like Skim, with their gothic ways and “depressing stimuli”, were “very fragile.” In other words, girls like Skim were more prone to suicide.

To which Skim snarkily thought: “Truthfully I am always a little depressed but that is just because I am sixteen and everyone is stupid […] I doubt it has anything to do with being a goth.” Oh, and “John Reddear was on the volleyball team and he was the one who committed suicide.” I chuckled. Then cringed. Skim’s inner thoughts were close to those of my teenage self, though I was never a goth and always a humanities nerd.

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So ends my adventures into Groundwood Books’ graphic novels. I’ve read four so far (I’ve also read A Year without Mom, Harvey, and Jane, the Fox, and Me). All the graphic novels are quiet, slice-of-life stories of innocence’s transition into mature realization after one central event, and Skim is definitely my favorite. It’s the grittiest one I’ve read, which makes sense as the other three are targeted at much younger audiences.

Despite my reluctance to read young adult fiction as I often find the characters’ interests too shallow and juvenile, Skim is a winner. Sensitive topics are treated unflinchingly (though never deeply) yet with restraint and understanding. The characters and their reactions ring genuine, especially those of Skim and Katie.

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I know there’s very little chance anyone from Groundwood Books would read this, but it is thanks to them that I could read these graphic novels. During the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair, their representatives very kindly let me take the books I was interested in off their stand free of charge as they didn’t want to take them back to Canada. It sounds like a win-win situation, but the reps were generous. Other publishers got rid of their books by selling them at a discount. Yet one of the Groundwood reps said she is more than happy if someone took the books to a welcoming home.

The publishing world is a business like any other. But stories like the one I experienced reminded me that book lovers are united in something wonderful. Loving books is often a personal matter, but the community created is tangible and passionate.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham (Review and Book/Movie Comparison)

Read and reviewed as part of my Classics Club Challenge

Hahaha, the last book review on this blog was uploaded in early July. I hope I’m not too rusty.

(Although the fact that I finished The Painted Veil in early July also does not bode well).

Having read this novel nearly four months ago means that I have forgotten the finer details. Overall, however, I really liked it, in spite of my inability to create neat conclusions of its message and/or themes. Yet, in a way, the lack of absolute coherence in The Painted Veil added to its charm. Especially as the novel tackles some topics that, in real life, defies easy categorization, such as: the irrationality of romantic feeling and the influence on religion on one’s character.

Kitty, a pretty and frivolous English debutante, missed her prospects in the marriage market. In a panic, she accepts the proposal of Walter Fane, a dull bacteriologist due to sail to Crown Colony Hong Kong for his post. They quickly marry and settle in the colony, where Kitty meets Charlie Townsend, a handsome, suave, and married British government official. Kitty and Charlie fall into an affair and The Painted Veil enters at the point when Walter discovers the infidelity.

At first, Kitty and Charlie dismiss Walter. He is Charlie’s inferior in the job ladder. He is far too besotted with Kitty. Instead, Walter pushed an ultimatum to Kitty: he will either file for divorce and humiliate her, or she must follow him to the cholera-infested Chinese interior, risking death. Charlie shows his true colors: craven and unsympathetic. Kitty has no option but follow Walter to the mainland.

The Painted Veil, at least the novel version, is the story of Kitty’s introspection and self-improvement. It is not a love story, which the 2006 film adaptation starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts might lead you to believe.

While I liked the film version for what it was, I much preferred the novel. The novel’s outlook on life is far less simple. Love, and the blossoming of romantic love, is never simple. In the film, Kitty sees Walter’s virtues: his devotion to patients, his kindness, his morals, learns the error of her ways and falls in love with him. Kitty’s book counterpart, however, never falls in love with her husband despite seeing and acknowledging his qualities. She grows to admire him, but eros does not strike.

I appreciated the book’s touch. The film, in a way, pushed a simplistic message: “women, be less foolish and frivolous and just fall in love with the nice guy, will ya?” Never mind the fact that one must wonder at Walter’s supposed kindness when he insisted on bringing Kitty to a region that may spell death.

(I inwardly applauded “That’s my girl!” when book-Kitty exclaimed, “It’s not my fault you were an ass!” at Walter’s misguided punishment)

Kitty’s journey towards self-betterment, almost a coming of age, really, is believable because of the missteps she makes along the way. No one can ever say that Kitty attained perfection. Despite maturing throughout The Painted Veil, she falls short again and again. But she does learn after every debacle. She becomes stronger, wiser. Yet even stronger and wiser, Kitty can still make dreadful decisions – with a particular error close to the novel’s end. But Kitty learns from that too.

At the start of this review, I wrote that I couldn’t eke out the message of The Painted Veil. But perhaps it is simply this: that we make horrible mistakes in life, then we learn and get stronger. We slip up again. But we survive.

Maybe it’s trite. But that’s the point of fiction, no? To make clichéd bumper sticker phrases fresh and true all over again.

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

I read Hotel Iris, my first Yoko Ogawa, last year (full-length review here) and had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I loved the prose: pure, pristine, and clear. But the story leaves something to be desired – its ending was rushed, abrupt, and anticlimactic. I loved Ogawa’s writing style enough to try again though, so here we are with a review of her short story collection Revenge.

Folks, I love Revenge. The collection is subtitled “Eleven Dark Tales” and it’s no joke. I was left feeling a bit grim post-reading. But if you wanted serial killers and vampires, Revenge isn’t for you. Revenge is more eerie than scream-inducing, its horror lies in atmosphere rather than bombast. And I do think Ogawa’s almost-surgical prose lends an iciness that adds to the creepy atmosphere of Revenge.

How to describe the stories in unison? Sometimes it feels as though they had a touch of magical realism. In “Old Mrs. J,” a murdered husband is buried in a garden patch, resulting in carrots shaped like human hands. In “Sewing for the Heart,” a nightclub singer’s heart is attached to her outer chest. Yet you can read all the stories as part of the realism genre. The heart condition can be waved off as a health anomaly, the weird carrots can be attributed to the seeds or the soil. But always there is an underlying sense of the uncanny.

Revenge plays into my favorite horror thematic: that the scariest actions aren’t caused by supernatural beings, but by the awful side of human nature. This is a short story collection about being lonely and adrift – and the horrifying things people do to feel a little less lonely and adrift. Misery loves company and if you can’t be a little less miserable, why not drag others into a state of misery?

***

I’m separated from my copy of Revenge as I write this review and I couldn’t find the full story list online, even Revenge’s Wikipedia page only noted eight stories. Surprisingly though, after some reminiscing, I remember the full list along with the general plot of each story. The incident speaks more of a strong short story collection than a superlative memory, sadly.

In case anyone is looking for Revenge’s story list, here it is in order: “Afternoon at the Bakery,” “Fruit Juice,” “Old Mrs. J,” “The Little Dustman,” “Lab Coats,” “Sewing for the Heart,” “Welcome to the Museum of Torture,” “The Man Who Sold Braces,” “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger,” “Tomatoes and the Full Moon,” and “Poison Plants.”

If you have read a review of Revenge, any review of Revenge, you’ll know that the stories are loosely connected. The eponymous man who sold braces, for instance, is also the curator of the Museum of Torture. But you can treat each story as a standalone piece.

I didn’t structure this review well, sorry, so I’ll just talk about some of my favorite stories in Revenge.

Of all the stories, “Old Mrs. J” has the most traditional Gothic horror feel. There’s a creepy old lady, there’s a grisly murder, and there’s some, shall we say, odd-looking harvest. Now, I love Gothic horror a lot, a lot, but when I got to “Sewing for the Heart,” I knew Revenge was something special. In fact, all the stories following “Sewing for the Heart” are excellent.

In “Sewing for the Heart,” a bagmaker is asked to create a bag to hold the heart of a young woman who suffers a health condition – her heart is attached to her outer chest. Only the best of horror stories can create such a building sense of dread and trepidation. You are helpless to keep on turning the pages as the bagmaker’s obsession grows and grows, as tensions twist and knot to a climax. The bagmaker’s dastardly decision at the end is grisly but unsurprising, and the fact that Ogawa conveyed such a perfectly-contained story in under twenty pages is astonishing.

“The Man Who Sold Braces” is a character study first, and what a great one it is. Somehow Ogawa, in her unflinching, unsentimental, and unclouded prose, managed to make the eponymous man, despite his endless list of failures and misdeeds, sympathetic.

Prior, I wrote that in Revenge, people will perform dark deeds to be a little less lonely and adrift. But “Tomatoes and the Full Moon,” a quieter story than its predecessors, is an inversion. It turns out, people will also abandon self-preservation in their desperation to connect with another. People will go to extreme lengths, either way, to feel less unmoored in life, it seems.

The concluding story “Poison Plants” is also a quiet tale, with an unrelenting sadness rendered in Ogawa’s icy touch. This story made me fearful of aging, seeing how pathetic it made our narrator.

***

Bottom line: Revenge is an excellent collection, even if horror is not to your taste. Most of the horror is borne from a dark look at human nature, so I’d say Revenge is great for fans of literary fiction. It’s certainly one of this literary fiction devotee’s favorite reads of the year so far.

Jane, the Fox and Me by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault

Translated from French by Cristelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou

At this point, I’ve read three of Groundwood Books’ graphic novels for children. Organized by reading order and incidentally, from least to most adored: A Year without Mom by Dasha Tolstikova, Harvey by Herve Bouchard and Janice Nadeau, and now, Jane, the Fox and Me. I’m sensing a pattern here: the artwork is always superlative, the stories quiet, gentle, and tender. So quiet, gentle, and tender are they – that all of them are a tad forgettable.

That’s not to say that Groundwood Books choose stinkers. Far from it. These are good graphic novels with some excellent qualities. To me personally, they just don’t have that special something that would push me to rate them higher. And in fact, I respect Groundwood Books for choosing subdued atmosphere over dramatic bombast. One of the elements I appreciate from these graphic novels is how precisely they capture a child’s innocence/self-centeredness. Political havoc in A Year without Mom matters not to little Dasha. She’s more concerned about her first crush and how her school friends treat her. A parent’s death is unreal to the titular protagonist of Harvey – he spends the night thinking of an old movie he once saw.

Jane, the Fox and Me similarly tells of a young child’s tribulations. Helene is not living in a war-torn country. She is not dealing with abusive parents. But she is struggling all the same. Girls who were once her friends are bullying her at school. Her mother, although loving, is too tired raising three children alone to notice. Helene finds solace in reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. She identifies with Jane, from her plainness to her mettle. But when Helene’s class leaves for a two-week nature camp, will Jane Eyre alone save her from the cruelty of other kids?

I’m not the first reviewer who has noticed that Helene’s world is drawn in black-and-white yet moments when she is recounting Jane Eyre are fully colored. A clever and beautiful touch, I think. Not to mention, long-term bibliophiles would relate – As a child, school is too mundane and gray to be real, fictional worlds were brighter and felt more corporeal to me.

So to conclude, I was mildly disappointed because I had heard such lovely things about Jane, the Fox and Me on booktube. Perhaps the hype ruined it for me even though there was nothing particularly wrong with Jane, the Fox and Me. Britt and Arsenault really captured Helene’s isolation and loneliness exceptionally well. You can really feel Helene and her perspective of the world.

Of course, the artwork is simply beautiful – I expect no less from anything Groundwood Books publish at this point. Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki is the final unread Groundwood graphic novel I own and I’m looking forward to it.