Girl Detective

The 4th in my 15/15/15 project is Mercury, a young adult graphic novel by Hope Larson.

I picked up Mercury as soon as I saw it in the comic shop last week. I’ve liked all three of Larson’s previous books, Grey Horses, Salamander Dream,and Chiggers. As do those books, Mercury has sympathetic and emotionally complex young girls, struggling with friendship and identity with a dash of magical realism thrown in.

In modern day Nova Scotia, Tara Fraser moves back the the town she and her family used to live in, before her parents split up and their house burnt down. She stays with her aunt and cousins and is returning to 10th grade, a few years after she left. The town, her burned-down home, and the school, are all both familiar and yet new to her.

Tara’s story alternates with that of her lookalike ancestor, Josey Fraser. Josey’s family lived in 1859 on the same farm, in the same house that burned down in Tara’s life. She’s a young teen when a handsome stranger named Asa Curry comes to their farm, claiming he’s looking for gold. Asa grows close to Josey, then he and Josey’s father find gold, all under the suspicious eyes of Josey’s mother. When things go bad, a series of events unfolds that echo mystically through the years to Tara’s time.

I really enjoyed seeing the parallels and contrasts in Josey and Tara’s life, as well as learning about some of the Scottish-Canadian historical myths of the region. Larson’s story and art easily capture the wide range of emotion in a teen’s life, from joy to anxiety, and it’s easy to sympathize with her characters as they try to make peace with their mothers and find love on their own. I enjoyed the magical realism, but could see how some might argue it’s not necessary. I think it gives an additional layer and a distinction to the story that made it stand out from other young-adult coming-of-age tales.

If you’re trying to finish 15 books in 15 days with me for the 15/15/15 project, put your book and link in the comments.

On day three, I didn’t pull it off. My third book finished WILL by Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. When I finish it, which I hope will be later today. Yesterday got a bit overstuffed. Review to come!

(In my defense, I am not finding this book as fast or fun a read as I had hoped.)

M at Mental Multivitamin had a very good idea, which is to finish 15 books over the 15 days that were in progress. She wondered whether I’d “allow” that or not. Sounds good to me.

I finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss, and have to leave for the bus stop to pick up 6yo Drake in 15 minutes, so I’m going to do this quickly.

I wish Truss’ book had been more of a quick read. Her book on punctuation that exhorts “Sticklers unite!” was longer than it needed to be, e.g., 2 pages of acks + 4 pages of Foreward + 1 page Publisher’s Note + 11 pages of Preface + 34 pages of Introduction. That’s 52 pages before the book even begins! Had this book been more the size of Strunk and White’s , I would have preferred it.

She bewails the current state of punctuation ignorance, offers many examples, and then has a chapter on each major punctuation mark. There is a lot to like about the book. Truss has a good sense of humor, and I often laughed out loud. She’s done her research, much of which was fascinating, and some of which was news to me. In the end, though, I found she was sometimes preaching to the converted, because who else is going to read this book other than people who tend to be sticklers about punctuation? And while I could relate to some of her stickler-ism, at other times I wanted to back away from her slowly, as her crazy was just too much for me.

I’m going to change exactly none of my punctuation habits because of this book. I use punctuation the way I think is right, and in a way I hope conveys meaning as simply and unfussily as possible. Truss notes that much of punctuation is personal style and preference, and that writing is always in flux. Thus the main point of her book seems to be a rant against people who misuse apostrophes, and I think we’re all pretty much in agreement on that already, right?

If you’re reading along, at any pace, in the 15/15/15 project, visit when you’ve read and/or blogged the book, comment on the most recent 15/15/15 post, and include your link in the comment so others can see what you’re reading and what you think.

I’m going to try hard to reply to your comments, either in the comments, via email or at your blog, but probably can’t do them all. I _am_ however, reading them all.

And now, I’m off to read.

Want to share in the 15/15/15 reading project? I’m going to try to finish a book a day till April 30, then blog about it the next day. If you’re interested, share what you’re reading and a link to your blog post so everyone can check it out. Join late? No problem. Can’t finish a book a day? Also, no problem. It’s about the books.

My second book for this project was Nick Hornby’s Shakespeare Wrote for Money. I picked it up because of the title, but, leafing through, I became enamored enough to buy it. It’s the third and final collection of book columns Hornby (author of High Fidelity and About a Boy) wrote for the Believer magazine. He begins by listing the books he’s acquired that month, then the books he’s actually read. Sometimes there’s a high correlation between the two, sometimes there’s not, as for the month of the World Cup finals.

Hornby is a clever, funny, likable guy, and reading his columns was like having a good chat about books with a friend who has far-reaching interests. The critique credo of the Believer is to say nice things about works or nothing at all. He mentions books he’s read and didn’t like, but only names names when he has good things to say. The columns are from 2006 to 2008, and I liked this prescient comment in his take on The Blind Side by Michael Lewis:

There is even a cheesy, never-say-die heroine, Oher’s adopted mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy, whose extraordinary determination to look after a boy not her own is Christian in the sense too rarely associated with the American South. It would make a great movie, althought you’d need a lot of CGI to convince an audience of Michael Oher’s speed and size.

Other than predicting the popular success of the movie based on Lewis’ book and perhaps even Sandra Bullock’s Oscar, Hornby had another connection to a Best Picture contender this year; he wrote the screenplay for An Education, which he seems to hint at in one of the later essays.

One of my favorite parts of these essays was when he “discovered” young-adult fiction after he wrote a book for young adults. He was nicely abashed at all the good books he hadn’t known existed, and now championed:

I’ve discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that’s filled with masterpieces I’ve never heard of.

I would definitely read the previous collections of this column, and am sad that it’s no longer going on. At least I got to be in on the end, however belatedly.

Finished on Friday, blogging for Saturday 4/16, this is the first of 15 books I hope to read over the next 15 days, or 15/15/15 for short. Post a comment on what you read, and a link if you have it.

Hailed by many as one of the best books of last year (Publishers Weekly, TIME, New Statesman, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, and The Economist), Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, had a long wait at the library. I was surprised when it didn’t make the short list for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. Having read it, I suspect it was excluded because it was tonally similar to one of the other contenders, Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged Everything Burned, which I read and admired, though can’t say I enjoyed. I feel similarly about this book.

Mueenuddin has written a collection of slightly linked short stories, each connecting in some way to the Harouni family in Pakistan. The stories focus on a wide range of characters: the wealthy Harounis, friends of theirs, servants of theirs, and others. Without exception the stories are beautifully written, with evocative language and complex characters.

That winter she had been in London for a wedding, not a close friend but the wedding of the season, the daughter of some bureaucrat who made a crooked pile on the privatization of a steel mill and couldn’t return to Pakistan because of cases against him in the National Accounyability Bureau–”nabbed,” as they called it, almost a mark of distinction. Late at night, after the mehndi, riding through London in someone’s hilarious car, she’d been in a bad accident. She woke at down in the hospital, severely concussed, and watched a rare snowfall from her bed, a thin drift on the sill, perceptibly gathering as the large flakes settled out of the gray first light and pressed against the window. She couldn’t remember anything at first, where she was, why she was there, sleeping all through the day, until it began to come back, but changed, the experiences of another person.

Also without exception, they are filled with tragedy and human cruelty, often with corruption mixed in as well. Any story that begins happily will take a turn. Most often, the turn occurs when one person acts wrongly toward another. The stories are an intricate portrait of a country in transition from feudalism to modernism. The growing pains are wrenching. I appreciate having read about Pakistan and spent some time in the minds of others, but am glad to be finished with the book. The wonders of the title are all too fleeting in the lives of the book’s characters.

ETA: If you don’t already, visit today’s Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon, a wonderful gathering of readers.

OK, my attempt at 15 books in 15 days starts today. I will read a book, then blog about it tomorrow.

FULL RAMBLING DISCLOSURE: My husband G. Grod and friend Blogenheimer thought it was lame and kind of cheating if any of my 15 were going to be graphic novels. SOME of my 15 are going to be GNs that I have had sitting about for a while. BUT I’ll try to read 7 or fewer GNs, and 8 or more “real” books (which can include YA and longer kid chapter books, heck whatever, who’s the police on this? Well, apparently it’s G. Grod and Blogenheimer. Who don’t seem to want to participate, just critique. Sigh. )

My attempt to read 15 books in 15 days and review them in 15 blog posts begins tomorrow, since you may have had to spend today wrangling with your taxes. How serious am I about this? I turned down a friend’s offer of Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

Tomorrow, Friday April 16, 2010: read a book

Saturday, April 17, 2010: blog about it, then come here to the entry for the day and post your link in the comments.

Lather, rinse, repeat for the next 15 days, finishing last book on 4/30, blogging about it on 5/1.

Reposting with its own entry:

I want to read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle this summer. Quicksilver, The Confusion and System of the World are about 900 pages each.

With an average of 20 pages a day, we could get through the first two. With thirty pages a day, we’d get through them all from June to August. But 30 pp a day plus other reading is a big commitment, I know.

I had a great time reading Infinite Jest with a group last summer, and enjoyed the accomplishment of tackling such a big project. But that was only 74 pp a week plus footnotes, not 210, so it’s a big difference, though my husband G. Grod assures me the BC is a much faster read than IJ (unsurprising, right?)

What do you think?

Reposting with its own entry:

In honor of the woman profiled in the New York Times last year, who read a book a day for a year and blogged each one, I propose reading a book a day from your shelf starting Friday, April 16 (the day after US taxes are due, so you should have a little more time plus be in a frugal mindset) till April 30, 2010 and blogging a review, however brief, the next day, starting Saturday, the 17th.

I would post my entries the night before, so you could link each day starting the 17th in the comments, through May 1, 2010.

Does this sound good to anyone?

I’m afraid coming up with a logo, spreading the word far and wide, and setting up a group on a site like Good Reads is just too much for me, now, though I’m happy to take advice or help on these from more seasoned book challenge folks.

So here’s what’s been rattling around in my head:

For now:

15 books, 15 days, 15 blogs: In honor of the woman profiled in the New York Times last year, who read a book a day for a year and blogged each one, I propose reading a book a day from your shelf starting April 16 (the day after US taxes are due, so you should have a little more time plus be in a frugal mindset) till April 30, 2010 and blogging a review, however brief, the next day.

I would post my entries the night before, so you could link each day starting the 17th in the comments, through May 1, 2010.

Does this sound good to anyone?

I’m afraid coming up with a logo, spreading the word far and wide, and setting up a group on a site like Good Reads is just too much for me, now, though I’m happy to take advice or help on these from more seasoned book challenge folks. I know this is last minute, but that’s me–always running on the ragged edge of disaster. OK, perhaps that’s an exaggeration.

For later:

Call me crazy, but I had a blast last summer reading Infinite Jest, and was thinking of doing something similar: reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, or at least the first two, Quicksilver and The Confusion. They’re each about 900 pages, but so was Cryptonomicon and I loved that and read it at a brisk pace.

Anyone else interested in a Baroque Summer? I’ll probably do it in any case, but it would be way more fun (as Infinite Summer was) with a gang.

My husband G. Grod recommended Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz to me several years ago. M, who blogs at Mental Multivitamin, read it within the past year or so (ha! in 2005, actually. I have a long memory, I guess.) and recommended it, then a review at Semicolon intrigued me, so it crept up my to-read list. After my recent reading and appreciating of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, I moved it to the top of the list. (Bonus for us book geeks–it’s a shelf sitter, so I’m reading a book from home, rather than a new purchase or one from the library.)

The book opens in the 26th or 27th century. A novice monk, Brother Francis, is doing a Lenten hermitage in the desert, when he encounters a wanderer, and then comes across an archeologic find from before the Flame Deluge that took place in the 20th century. Francis’ order is of Leibowitz, a 20th century scientist and martyr whom they’re trying to have canonized. The book is divided into three sections, which I won’t detail as it might spoil an event I found truly shocking and moving. But the central question is whether history must repeat itself:

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne, and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America–burned into the oblivion of the centures. And again and again and again. (245)

This is a satire of Catholicism, while making the monks and abbots of Leibowitz sympathetic, conflicted and complicated. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, as well as a theological and philosophical one. I’m off to review the legend of the “wandering Jew,” which might have enriched my reading experience if I’d had it in my mind from the beginning. This book made me feel, made me think, and continues to make me think. While we’re fortunate to have avoided a nuclear war in the 20th century, this novel retains a timeless quality as the threat remains, still, and other questions, like the ethics of euthanasia and the dangers and benefits of progress, remain relevant today.

At The Morning News, they’ve published the short list of 16 novels for the literary March Madness Tournament of books.

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood
The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker
Fever Chart, by Bill Cotter
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis
The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Big Machine, by Victor Lavalle
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun
That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
Lowboy, by John Wray

The long list had some puzzling exclusions, like Jeff in Venice; Death in Vanasi, and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, both of which were on my to-read list from last year. The jump from long to short has me puzzled as well. I’m disappointed these didn’t make the cut: Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon, Trouble, Kate Christensen, The Believers, Zoe Heller, Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem, The City & The City, China Mieville, Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips, This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper, and The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters. All these sounded promising to me when they came out last year.

Further, I’m stymied by the inclusion of these: Fever Chart, Bill Cotter, The Book of Night Women, Marlon James, Miles from Nowhere, Nami Mun, and Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie. These, over the ones in the previous paragraph?

Finally, I’m not thrilled to see either Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs or Russo’s That Old Cape Magic. Neither are supposed to be the writer at the top of her/his game, so I can’t get excited to read them.

That said, I AM excited to try and read as many as I can of these, all of which I’ve heard good things about: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Big Machine by Victor Lavalle, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (also a selection of Books and Bars), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (which lit friends Amy R and Kate F both liked), The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, and Lowboy by John Wray.

I’m off to put some books in my queue at the library. Who’s going to be joining the fray?

At The Believer, Chris Batchelder writes:

the vivid surprises of child-rearing seem so similar to the vivid surprises of good literature.

(Link from The Morning News.)

and offers examples. Recently, I was reading The Very Busy Spider to 3yo Guppy, for what may have been the gazillionth time. As happened to Batchelder, though, my kid surprised me when I least expected I could be surprised.

In the book, a spider spins a web and a series of farm animals ask if she wants to do something else with them, e.g. Want to roll in the mud, said the pig? After I read one of those questions, Guppy said, “But spiders don’t do that.” It took me a moment to put together that not only was the spider ignoring the questions as she spun her web, but Guppy had just crystallized that what they were asking her to do weren’t things a spider could or would do, until the very end when the rooster asks if she wants to catch a pesky fly. I’d read this book hundreds of times, and Guppy’s statement revealed a whole new facet of the book to me.

We traveled around the holiday this year, something I usually avoid. But the flight east was easy, then we met family for lunch before driving south in time for a real barbecue supper. The boys played well together, and were affectionate with family, especially their great-grandmother, recovering from hip surgery at 93. The feast came together, as did family we didn’t think we’d see because of a timely improvement for an unexpected illness. The weather was good, beautiful for our drive back to the airport. We met more family again for lunch, arrived early to our gate, and 30 minutes early home to Minnesota. I read four books in five days (Odd and the Frost Giants, Olive Kitteridge, The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel Pie Society, and The Good Thief), all of which I enjoyed.

It was a family visit with countless logistics, yet it came together seamlessly with joyful reunions, and quiet time to read and relax. I often remark that family visits are not the same as vacations, but this one, this rare perfect one, actually was. I was and am thankful for it.

The Thanksgiving table:

Creamed spinach from Smitten Kitchen:

Savory Corn Pudding, from Cook’s Country:

Savory Corn Pudding, serves 8 to 10
1 tablespoon unsalted butter , softened, for greasing casserole dish
Table salt
6 cups frozen corn
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
6 large eggs , lightly beaten
1 1/2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 2-quart casserole dish with butter. Bring large kettle of water to boil for water bath. Bring 2 quarts water to boil in large saucepan for corn.

2. Add 1 tablespoon salt and corn to boiling water and cook for 1 minute. Drain in colander and dry with paper towels. Pulse 4 cups corn in food processor until rough puree forms, about ten 1-second pulses. Transfer to large bowl and stir in remaining whole corn, 1 teaspoon salt, cream, eggs, cheese, sugar, cayenne, and basil until combined.

3. Pour corn mixture into casserole and transfer dish to roasting pan. Pour boiling water from kettle into roasting pan until it comes halfway up sides of casserole dish. Place roasting pan in oven and bake until pudding is set and a few brown spots appear around edges, 40 to 45 minutes. Remove casserole from water bath, transfer to wire rack, and let set for 5 to 10 minutes before serving.

Make Ahead:

The corn can be cooked, processed, and mixed with the whole corn, salt, cream, cheese, sugar, and cayenne up to 2 days in advance. Refrigerate until ready to use, then stir in the eggs and basil when ready to cook.

Grandmother’s Famous Cranberry Bread, from childhood favorite of mine, and now the boys, Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin

English Toffee Pecan Pie, recipe by Marjorie Johnson (The Minnesota Blue-Ribbon baking lady), and winner of Martha Stewart’s first pie contest.

At the New York Times, Nina Sankovitch is profiled as she nears her goal of reading a book a day for a year. She began last year on her birthday, with The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (a book I want to read but haven’t, yet.) She posted a review the next day and kept going.

Ms. Sankovitch claims not to be a Type A maniac and does seem pretty normal. A non-reading indulgence, she says, is watching “NCIS” while folding laundry. Still, to make this work she’s cut out a lot – the garden, The New Yorker, wasting time online, ambitious cooking, clothes shopping, coffee with friends.

In addition, the family is comfortably off, and she has two older kids, 11 and 14, both readers. I’m glad the piece included the details of how she made it work. And her story has struck a chord with readers. I followed the link from The Morning News, but later saw it at Pages Turned, and other book blogs.

I like the idea of Sankovitch’s goal even if it wouldn’t fit with my life and I’m not sure I’d want to do a whole year even if it did. There are so many books I want to read that simply wouldn’t fit into a day even if I could read for the entirety of it.

But a week? A fortnight? A month? Any of those would sure go a long way toward reading what I own, rather than buying or borrowing new stuff. I’m pondering it. Maybe I start with a week, and see how it goes.

What does everyone else think?

I read online using Google reader, through which I subscribe to sites I like so I receive posts when they’re updated. I read through when I’m able, and rarely have a zero balance.

Certain posts and links tend to accumulate, like long articles and videos. I took tonight to catch up, and so watched a tremendous melange: the mean Joe Green video, Kate DiCamillo reading from her new book, a Freaks and Geeks retrospective (link from Sepinwall), a film on synesthesia and another on visual hallucinations (link from Bookslut).

I have been well entertained, and feel suitably well informed.

Regular readers know, I have a LOT of unread books. I write about them often. I read them less often. I fret and make vows, then break them, and fret some more after the book-buy buzz has worn off. I don’t think I’m alone. A reader suggested recently that I made a from-the-shelves challenge. I got inspired, so here are two related shelf challenges for the new year.

Who’s with me? Ideas? Suggestions? If you think these sound good, spread the word to the book-blogging community, and I’ll firm up details to launch at the new year.

2010 Balance the Books Challenge

I buy and borrow new books more often than I read books on my shelf. Often, the newly purchased books gather dust, and become old books. Next year, in 2010, I want to balance my reading. For the year, I’d like to read a third new books, a third borrowed books, and a third books from my shelf, whether first or re-reads.

I hope to get a color chart to track the progress with red/yellow/blue for each category. My ideal is to read as many shelf books as I borrow or buy new. I’ll do a post on or about the end of each month so readers can post progress reports.

Clear The Shelves Challenge (2010 and Beyond!)

In an effort to chip away at the nearly 200 books I own but haven’t read (and want to!), I challenge other readers to read at least 25 books a year that have been on your shelf for over a year. I’ll do quarterly posts for readers to post progress reports. At the end of the year, we could chip in for a gift certificate for the reader with the most shelf books read.

At the Sun Times (link from Morning News), Roger Ebert remembers wondering, as a student:

What do I really need that isn’t here in this room? Its dimensions are a little more than twice as wide and deep as I am tall. I don’t know, maybe 150 square feet? Here I have the padded wood chair in which I sit tilted against the wall, my feet braced on my straight desk chair. I am holding the three-inch-thick Paul Hamlyn edition of Shaw’s complete plays. This room contains: A wood single bed, an African blanket covering it, a wood desk and its gooseneck lamp, a small dresser with a mirror over it, my portable typewriter, a small wardrobe containing my clothes, a steamer trunk serving as a coffee table, and two bookcases, filled to overflowing. What more do I actually need?

I enjoyed reading Ebert’s description of his book collection and office, and his admission–only toward the end!–that he’d miss his wife. I am a reader, but also a weeder of books. This has led to moments of regret, though few compared to the number of volumes I’ve gotten rid of. My husband G. Grod is more of Ebert’s stripe. Given his druthers, he’d never get rid of a book. (Alas, we are not the king and queen of infinite space. Or many bookshelves.)

I was thinking along the same lines as Ebert just this morning, as I worked in my office, organized books on our shelves, and spent time in our back bedroom and porch. Those three spaces–bedroom, porch, “office” (aka closet) are about all I’d need in a living space. They comprise my fortress of solitude, for whatever scant time I spend there to read, write and rest. Food and company I find elsewhere. (The latter, in the form of my two boys, usually finds me, first.)

Once upon a time, I dated a smart, dark-haired computer guy. We got engaged, set a date. I bought a dress and planned a ceremony and reception. As the wedding date approached, the relationship got worse. He said if I didn’t convert to Judaism, he wouldn’t go through with it. If I didn’t agree to having a kid right away, it was a deal breaker. He asked me to lie to my employer and say I wasn’t leaving after I was accepted to grad school. We fought. We said mean things. We cried and yelled a lot. Things got so bad he moved out and we postponed the wedding. Then, a surprising thing happened.

People kept asking us when we were moving back in. People kept asking if we’d set a new date. Not one person asked how we were doing, or if we needed help, or if canceling the date had maybe been a sign. Everyone knew things had been rocky, though not the extent or the details. The only person who didn’t encourage us to move ahead with the wedding was my psychotherapist, who waited patiently for me to figure things out on my own. It took me a few months, but I did. The relationship was over, only no one wanted to acknowledge it. Not him, not me, not family or friends. Instead of noticing the disintegrating relationship, everyone obsessed about the wedding.

I thought about my “postponed” wedding a lot last week as I read Heather McElhatton’s clever and surprising Jennifer Johnson is Sick of Being Single. Jennifer is single and miserable. Her sister and her ex are getting married, both on Valentine’s Day, to twist the knife a little deeper. She’s in an unfulfilling cubicle job, and the only dates she gets are so bad they’re almost surreal. Then she meets Brad–handsome, rich Brad, who asks her out. And keeps asking her out. As their relationship unfolds, it’s not great, but not entirely terrible, either. But the hope of a pretty, shiny wedding is very alluring to Jennifer, as well as to her family, Brad’s family and co-workers. The pressure for their relationship to succeed is tremendous. As many couples would, Jennifer and Brad begin to buckle beneath the weight of all those expectations.

McElhatton does an exceptional job of skewering the soap bubble that is the wedding dream. She unveils the process for what it is: a machine-like industry, meant for couples to go in, get bounced about and homogenized, then sent out into marriage with nary a clue. The book wonders, again and again, what happens when people get what they think they want. Weddings are just one example of how characters in the book distract themselves from the realities and unpleasantries of everyday life.

The book recalled my fumbled first wedding attempt all those years ago (more than fourteen, now.) I was in a flawed relationship; planning the wedding created more pressure than it could bear. The wedding, its details and particularly its fripperies, were like anesthesia. They were distractions from the relationship, rather than accessories to celebrate it. Once I realized that, I was done. I broke the engagement and ended the relationship. He moved out and away, and I moved on.

A few months later, I met a cute, smart, dark-haired guy into computers. We dated. We got engaged. We got married. We moved to Minnesota. Several years after that, when I combined our comic book collections, he said he finally felt like maybe he wasn’t just the rebound guy. (NB: I organized the comics AFTER we had our first child.) My second engagement, and the second wedding I planned, were very different from the first time around. This time, I knew to focus on the relationship, not the wedding. McElhatton, in Jennifer Johnson is Sick of Being Single, advocates the same thing. In an interview with The Onion AV Club, she said:

This book is a sleeper cell. I know it’s going to end up on the chick lit tables. I know it’s going to be packaged that way. I’m slipping one in there. I’m really hoping this breaks up some weddings.

It might sound mean spirited, but speaking from experience, I think she’s onto something. Had I gone through with the first wedding, I doubt the marriage would have lasted very long. This weekend, my husband and I will celebrate 11 years of being married. I’m glad I got it right the second time.

Frank Portman, author of Andromeda Klein (which I reviewed here) in an interview at Gothamist:

I just found out today that one of my school visits here (in Portland) was canceled because of parental worries about the occult elements in Andromeda Klein. It’s the first time I’ve ever been banned, and they’re worried about the occult.

I knew as I read Andromeda Klein that the centrality of the occult tradition to the book and its importance to the main character would be a problem for a lot of parents. Andromeda reads tarot cards, studies mysticism, tattoos herself with symbols, and performs rituals for privacy and other things. Andromeda’s interest and knowledge of the occult are thorough, and the depiction is presented realistically; some of the rituals produce results, and Andromeda has conversations in her head and in her dreams that are too relevant to be random. I’m not surprised this has ruffled some parental feathers. On the surface, at least, it comes across as pretty subversive.

I’d argue otherwise, though. Andromeda is an outsider–a skinny, clumsy girl with bad hair and worse hearing. It’s natural she’d gravitate to something off the beaten track, and something she could immerse herself in the study and practice of while on her own. While there are mentions of demons and Satan in the book, these are details of the historical tradition. Andromeda doesn’t worship or pursue demons or Satan. Instead, she uses the occult tradition to try to figure out and make sense of the world, especially because her outcast status means it’s senseless and cruel a lot of the time: she’s trying to come to terms with a friend’s death and an ex-boyfriend, while trying to deal with a crazy friend, a boy who admires her occult acumen, a clueless depressed dad and an intrusive insensitive mom. For Andromeda, the occult is a tradition of knowledge and ritual. She studies and practices to learn and grow. Other kids do the same with more mainstream things, like religion, sports, or academia. If Andromeda were interested in one of those, I doubt the book would set off any alarms.

I’m likely preaching to the converted and singing to the choir, here, but just in case: Andromeda’s interest in the occult might put off some readers, but I’d encourage them to actually READ the book, and consider how the occult tradition, as it’s practiced and studied by Andromeda, compares and contrasts to other traditions. Andromeda tattoos herself? I saw more than one teen swim teacher at the pool this summer sporting a Christian tattoo. Andromeda burns incense and asks questions, then “hears” advice in her head or in her dreams. Religious practitioners call this prayer and meditation. Andromeda reads a variety of books, many of which she disagrees with and all of which she tries to learn from. All traditions have some sort of sanctioned and recommended reading, as well as heretical texts that can help one “know thine enemy.”

Andromeda Klein is an interesting, thoughtful book with a wonderful, complex main character. It would be a shame if it were banned and people missed it based on prejudice. Tolerance of difference is a theme of the book, but it can also be applied TO the book.