Butter

Title: Butter

Author: Erin Jade Lange

Publisher: Bloomsbury (2012)

Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Length: 294 pages

Synopsis: Butter is defined by food.  Morbidly obese and diabetic, he knows that no one at school is ever able to see beyond his body to the person he truly is.  He finds solace only in two places: music, playing saxophone or listening to the Brass Boys, the band one of his teachers plays in, and online, where he's developed a relationship with the beautiful girl who sits ahead of him in class.  But neither of these can last.  His weight makes playing music more and more difficult, and he knows he can never reveal his true identity to the girl he wishes could be his girlfriend.  Food has gotten him into this situation, he decides at last, and food will get him out of it.  Butter resolves to eat himself to death on New Year's Eve, live online via webcast.  But as soon as the website goes live, a few weeks before Christmas, he finds himself a sudden celebrity.  People seek him out, both online and in person.  For the first time, he has something to live for, and he begins to wonder if he'll have the courage to go through with his plan, but, given the reason for his celebrity, what will happen if he doesn't?

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion: This is a terribly grim book.  With the population growing heavier and heavier, Butter is a character with unique trials to which many will relate.  But he's also very much a believable high school student. struggling with online pressure, parents, and the trials of fitting in and finding his own way.  The characters that surround him are more difficult to understand, as they sometimes seem to have few motives for their cruelty.  Of course, that's also true in the halls of high schools, unfortunately.  This is a book that opens a door for readers, offering up a chance for us to step into the shoes of another person.  It's not a happy picture, but it's one at which we should all take a look.  Butter's story is a quick read, plunging over the edge of a cliff and heading for a seemingly inexorable ending.  Though it's got a lesson to teach, that's never at the forefront of the narrative.  It's a well told story, if not a happy one, and I book I'll not soon forget.

Dragonfly In Amber

Title: Dragonfly in Amber

Author: Diana Gabaldon

Publisher: Delta Trade Paperback (2007)

Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction

Length: 743 pages

Synopsis:  Claire knows the future.  Or rather, she knows the past.  Her knowledge, however, is nothing like that of her late husband, historian Frank Randall.  More than twenty years ago, she vanished from the face of the earth for three years when she fell through the cracks of time itself and found herself in eighteenth century Scotland.  Trapped in the past, she finds the love of her life in the form of Jamie Fraser, a young Scottish lord.  When the exiled king James and his son Charles begin plotting to free Scotland from English rule, suddenly Claire's knowledge of history becomes the power to see the future, a future that ends in the bloody battle of Culloden.  As she recounts her tale to her daughter Brianna, Claire must reconcile herself to the events of the past, as well as those of the present.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion:  This second book in the Outlander series picks up a good two hundred years from where the first volume, Outlander, left off.  The preordained arc of actual history melds almost seamlessly with the far more personal story of Claire and her family.  Knowing the story ahead of time, however, leaves Gabaldon rather little wiggle room.  Her fictions seem to push against the constraints of fact, wishing for more space to grow but unable to find it.  Even more constraining is the nature of this story's telling; Claire is looking back at her past as she relives it for her daughter, so in addition to the preordained nature of history, there's a certain lack of spontaneity in knowing where the story is leading these characters on a personal level.  If there was a great deal of character development, this predictable plot wouldn't be as distracting, but Claire and Jamie's romance is well defined and there seem to be few other trials for them as people.  Neither are there many well developed secondary characters to offer an alternative source of interest.  The book reads like a good television series in its second or third season; the initial device that drives the plot has come to its natural conclusion, but somehow the full story hasn't played itself out yet.  There's more to come, but I'm not sure whether Gabaldon was able to keep the contrived feeling that nagged at this book from controlling the sequels.  I suppose I'll just have to read them and find out.

Where Things Come Back

Title: Where Things Come Back

Author: John Corey Whaley
 

Publisher: Atheneum Books (2011)

Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Length:  228 pages

Synopsis: Cullen Witter lives in Lily, Arkansas, a small town where nothing ever happens.  The highlights of his high school career include mooning over the beautiful girl of his dreams and spending time with his oddly enigmatic younger brother, Gabriel.  Until, of course, the summer the supposedly extinct Lazarus Woodpecker reappears.  Across the globe, Benton, a young missionary sets out for Africa, hoping to make a difference and earn his family's respect.  As these two stories unwind, they spiral closer together until inextricably linked.  Tiny actions lead to unimaginable consequences, and an even more tenuous force, hope, proves to be the strongest of all.

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion:  This was an unexpectedly delightful book.  I'm not sure why the delight was unexpected, as this is a Printz award winner, but it took a few pages to get into, particularly when the story began shifting between Arkansas and Africa.  The slow drawing together of these disparate plot lines was elegant.  The voices of the characters were almost achingly compelling, with moments of bright humor and happiness alternating with grim disappointment and loss.  This is not a plot driven book; as in Lily, Arkansas, not much happens.  This is not a flaw, but I imagine that despite the critical acclaim, some young readers will find this book requires a major adjustment from the typical high-octane plots of other YA fiction.  But for readers willing to put a little extra thought into the stories that unfold in this book, they'll find a poignant commentary on the world around us, a transient world wherein the actions of one person can have lasting effects on others, and where what we give to the world almost always comes back to us, in one form or another. 

On the Foibles of Technology

If anyone out there follows this blog on a regular basis, you've likely noticed that your beloved past-time has been somewhat less delightful of late.  It's not, I assure you, for lack of reading, but rather for lack of cooperation on the part of more advanced technologies.

I worked this summer as an administrator at one of the country's largest fine arts summer camps.  I worked an average of 15 hours a day and absolutely loved every minute of it.  This was not, however, conducive to posting reviews of the books I read by flashlight each evening.  Internet access is hard to come by in the midst of picturesque wilderness.  Go figure.  I kept writing the reviews, keeping them stashed as a document on my flash drive, waiting for the opportune moment to snag a WiFi signal.  This past week, I finally got that opportunity, only to discover that my flash drive has gone the way of the word "tirled".... which is to say, of course, it's obsolete.  Defunct.  Kaput.  No longer functional or useful in any way.  Actually, that's not fair to tirled, which is a verb meaning to rotate or twirl, or, alternately, to make a noise by such motion.  Tirled can still be used, though it's likely that no one (except your fellow blog followers) will know what it means.  My flash drive won't even make a decent paperweight.

Now I face the odious task of trying to remember which books I read (and listened to!) this summer and precisely how I felt about all of them.  It's odious only because I feel that now I'll be doing all these books and authors a disservice, trying to recapture the feelings they evoked without holding the book in my hands.  So many of them were borrowed and have since been returned, and though I don't need to re-read them to provide my opinion, I like to write my opinions down with the book sitting next to me, the very sight of it helping to spark memories of the best, or worst, traits of the story.

Here I could take the opportunity to segue into the merits of digital book formats and the relative pros and cons of paper versus digital.  Let me just sum it up here: people will read what they like to read how they like to read it.  I've found that a combination of both paper and pixels works for me, my lifestyle, and my budget, and while I'm certain that there are purists on both sides, the introduction of new reading technology is a matter of personal preference.  There's no right or wrong way to read a book, which is one of the reasons I've started reviewing the audiobooks I listen to as well.  Technology is great, and so is tradition.  Maybe I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm away from my WiFi tether and keep a paper copy of all my reviews!

Books for Boys

Supposedly, boys are pickier readers than girls are... I'm not sure where that assumption came from, nor do I have any statistics to back it up.  I do, however, have quite a few friends and family members who are English and Language Arts teachers, and they report a certain luke-warm attitude toward reading among their male students.  I, of course, believe that everyone is a reader, and if someone claims not to be, he (or she!) just hasn't found the right book yet.  That being said, here are a few suggestions that might appeal to the gentlemen:


Historical Fiction:
       The King Raven Trilogy by Stephen Lawhead
       Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold
       The Song of Albion Trilogy by Stephen Lawhead
    
Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror:
       Abarat by Clive Barker
       Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
       American Gods by Neil Gaiman
       The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
       The Myth Hunters by Christopher Golden
       The Magicians by Lev Grossman
       A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
       The Road by Cormac McCarthy
       The Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix
       The Matt Cruse Trilogy by Kenneth Oppel
       The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
       Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
       Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn
       Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies
       Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
       Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
       The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
       Unwind by Neal Schusterman
       The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
       Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
       Feed by M. T. Anderson
       The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
       From a Buick 8 by Stephen King


Mysteries/Thrillers:
       The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
       Thr3e by Ted Dekker
       The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson
       The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
       Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
       Acceleration by Graham McNamee
       The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez
      

Nonfiction/Memoir/Biography:
       Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
       The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
       The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston
       A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
       Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
       Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northerners by Gary Paulsen