Novel – Page 2 – …on the B.L.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

February 20, 2020 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 406
Quick Review Delving into magical realism and familiar themes of justice, humanity, freedom, and equality, the era of slavery is raging in Ta-Nehisi Coates debut novel.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Galveston, Texas | Dress |

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writes incredible essays and nonfiction, which are entertaining and thought provoking. I couldn’t wait to see what Coates would do in a world he created himself. Set in pre-Civil War Virginia, The Water Dancer is an impressive piece of fiction.

Hiram Walker is the son of a slave and the Lockless plantation owner. His mother was sold when he was young, and he was taken in and raised by another slave on the plantation. The community is made up of Quality, slave/land owners, the Tasked, slaves, and classless whites. Hiram is an exceptional human because of his photogenic memory, but he also possesses the gift of conduction, the ability to travel across great distance through waterways. He eventually travels to Philadelphia through the Underground Railroad, where he meets Moses, a legendary Underground member.

One of my favorite parts about the story is the way it is framed and told. Coates introduces Hiram in a death scene in chapter one. It captures the readers’ attention and holds it. There are also breaks in the narrative, where Hiram speaks as an older wiser man reminiscing about his younger years and even to speak directly to the reader. There is a lot of dependence on mysticism and suspension of reality. Coates shows the evils of slavery through the eyes of a slave. He also shows the entire society was trapped in the horrific cycle. Everyone suffered. No one was free.

Story wise, it’s very interesting, well thought out, and thoroughly researched. Honestly, it’s rather forgettable. I’m having a hard time writing a decent or even remotely in depth review because it did not sweep me along. I read it and had to make myself keep reading. It’s not a novel I just had to know what happened. I remember the beginning far more than the ending.

The Water Dancer is a combination of intriguing, boring, and well done. To be honest, it’s really hard calling, the beloved writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ prose boring, but it was. I thought it dragged on and on at times. Maybe part of it is that I don’t really like fantasy. I’ve never been a huge fan, and this is very much a fantasy novel. Although, I don’t think that has much to do with it. The fantasy bits were interesting and did not overwhelm the plot.

Memorable Quotes
“She’d gone from that warm quilt of memory to the cold library of fact.”
“I was a man well regarded in slavery, which is to say I was never regarded as a man at all.”

bisous und обьятий,
RaeAnna

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Title: The Water Dancer
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: One World
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780399590597

Books, Fiction

Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe by Melissa de la Cruz

December 3, 2019December 3, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Meh
Length 240
Quick Review Darcy Fitzwilliam returns to Pemberley, Ohio for Christmas when her mother gets sick and meets her childhood nemesis Luke Bennet.

Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe | Skirt | Top | Cardigan | Headband | Watch

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has provided inspiration for readers and authors alike, inspiring retellings and fanfiction. Melissa de la Cruz joins numerous others in reworking the classic to fit into the modern world for a contemporary audience. Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe is a unique adaptiation.

Darcy Fitzwilliams comes from money, but she made her own when she took on New York City. After eight years away, she returns home to Pemberley at Christmas time after her mother has a heart attack. There’s family and romantic drama galore.

de la Cruz is inventive with character names, genders, and sexualities, which adds diversity to the classic. Instead of focusing on the traditional Elizabeth Bennet character, it is told from the Darcy perspective, who is now an influential business woman with a gay best friend, cue Bingley.

I like the reinvention happening in Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe, but it falls into the same traps many retellings do. Insult to injury, all the problems plaguing Christmas Hallmark movies are seen within the pages. Mistletoe is completely devoid of societal critique let alone the sharp with Austen is known for. It waters down a classic romance to nothing more than a shallow love story. The narrative can’t even rely on clever language; at the best of times, the syntax is clunky and highly repetitive. de la Cruz is spoon feeding emotions, plots, personalities, and how-to-feels to the reader like a Christmassy treacle.

Darcy is supposed to be a strong independent woman but plummets into the anti-feminist and problematic ideology of “boys will be boys, and they’re mean to girls they like.” I don’t believe a woman with her drive, career, and education would act or react in any of the ways the character does in Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe. They’re unrealistic throughout, but the last quarter is bullshit. In the original, Darcy never leads anyone on, where as this version leads on a genuinely decent man, and she’s just mean.

Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe was made into a Hallmark movie, and I can see why. It supplies all the romance people love to see during the holidays without any real substance.

Memorable Quotes
n/a

bisous und обьятий,
RaeAnna

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Title: Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe
Author: Melissa de la Cruz
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9781250189462

Books, Fiction

Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva

November 21, 2019November 20, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 271
Quick Review Charles Dickens is having a midlife crisis at Christmas time, and his publishers are demanding a Christmas novel when everything in his life is falling apart.

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Silva bases her novel, Mr. Dickens and His Carol, off a real winter of Dickens’ life but reimagines and reorders facts and people to make an interesting novel. I’ve read a fair few Christmas novels, and this is far from the worst.

Charles Dickens should be feeling joy welcoming another child into the world before Christmas, but instead he’s feeling everything but. His latest book was a disaster, his family’s debts are piling up, his wife takes the children and leaves him, and his publishers are demanding a Christmas book. A usually jolly and kind man, Dickens becomes a morose grump searching for a muse when he stumbles on inspiration.

Ebenezer Scrooge’s journey is paralleled with Charles Dickens’ character development throughout the plot of Mr. Dickens and His Carol. It’s a sweet story full of Christmas spirit and a little mystery. Silva gets three points for using “defenestration” in a sentence – not a word that normally comes up.

The style can be a little much for the story. Silva has a tendency to become overly descriptive in an attempt to mimic the real Dickens but with less success. When Silva is not decorating the page with her verbosity, she tells a pretty good story about Dickens’ internal struggle to be a good father, husband, citizen, and writer while not giving in to the whims of publishing or depression. The character development is solid and interesting if not predictable.

Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a great easy read for the whole family this Christmas season. It will warm the heart and make you wish you could be in London listening to the real Dickens tell his carol.

Memorable Quotes
“His father was north of sixty, but by temperament still a good deal south of death.”
“He knew that every person was a fiery furnace of passions and attachments, unknown to every other.”

bisous und обьятий,
RaeAnna

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Title: Mr. Dickens and His Carol
Author: Samantha Silva
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9781250154040

Books, Fiction

Home for Erring and Outcast Girls by Julie Kibler

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Yes
Length 400
Quick Review A librarian stumbles across a puzzling part of history in the Berachah Home, where erring girls went for a fresh start.

Reading Home for Erring and Outcast Girls by Julie Kibler in downtown Houston. | Dress | Belt | Earrings | Watch | Sunglasses

Home for Erring and Outcast Girls by Julie Kibler is a much better novel than I expected to encounter. There are so many ways Kibler could have gone wrong, but she didn’t. Diving into complex women’s issues and how society dealt with the women in question paralleled by a century of “change.” Based on a real house in rural Texas serving real women, Kibler builds a world full of sorrow and empathy.

In 2017, Cate is a librarian working in a Texas University Library’s archives and becomes fascinated looking through documentation of the Berachah home after stumbling upon a cemetery in 2017. She has a penchant for running and running away; she lives a solitary life aside from making a connection with one of her student workers. Dealing with a mysterious past, flashbacks to 1998 as a highschooler slowly reveal insight into her troubled past. In 1904, Lizzie Bates, Docie, and Mattie Corder are escaping the evils of a patriarchal society by finding refuge in the Berachah Home for Erring and Outcast Girls. They find solace surrounded by religion and other fallen women and their children as they are taught skills to fend for themselves.

Kibler touches on everything from drugs to rape to incest to abuse and more in this raw historical fiction about loss and friendship. Home for Erring and Outcast Girls drives home the fact that women take a backseat to men, always. Their plans. Their dreams. Their reputations. Their futures. This has been a truth for the majority of societies for as long as history can document. As much as things are changing, much remains the same. Including Cate, as a contemporary woman, shows the parallel between the two eras and how little has changed for women. How little choice there is.

The Berachah Home really did exist outside of Arlington, Texas and was founded by James and Maggie Upchurch. They had a revolutionary idea to keep the children with their mothers. At the time, mother’s were separated from their children without a choice, more often than not, when the children were born out of wedlock. There are real excerpt from The Purity Journal, which went out to graduates of the home and donors.

Abuse is a central point in Home for Erring and Outcast Girls. Kibler makes a beautiful statement I and many other survivors of abuse, loss, abandonment, addiction, rape, assault, and more have felt: “Or how I maybe didn’t fight hard enough, or say no the right way, or at the right times.” Guilt and shame are a raw undercurrent in this book about being helpless and reclaiming an identity in the after. Everyone survives their own hell, but so many of the emotions and recovery processes are the similar.

Religion is a character in its own right in this novel. It plays a role of savior but also demon. Kibler is not afraid to show the church in the light of benefactor and evil doer depending on the point of view of the character. Religion is not one size fits all, and everyone has different experiences. Even in the most positive of lights, the church do not do right by women. Women are often depicted as temptresses “because churches, in general, are still bastions of judgement masquerading as refugees of grace and acceptance.”

I was utterly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but Julie Kibler captured my interest and respect with her cutting and insightful novel Home for Erring and Outcast Girls.

Memorable Quotes
“A room filled with people can be lonelier than solitude.”
“Her ma had done what she must to survive, and that was how it was for women.”
“It was always the man who took what he wanted, and the woman who lost everything.”
“Devastation was a pain you thought would never go away, and sometimes it didn’t.”

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Title: Home for Erring and Outcast Girls
Author: Julie Kibler
Publisher: Crown
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780451499332

Books, Fiction

The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis

October 1, 2019September 30, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Meh
Length 289
Quick Review The Barbizon is now condos but used to house hundreds of girls looking to make it in NYC. What happens when the lives of a long-time resident and new resident collide?

Reading The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis at Glassell. | Dress | Watch | Earrings

The Barbizon really did exist as a women’s only residence in New York City. In 2005, the building was converted into condominiums. Fiona Davis creates a world where the two identities of the Barbizon meet in her novel The Dollhouse. A mystery with a touch of love and a lot of independent women searching for belonging.

Rose, a journalist, lives in the Barbizon with her boyfriend in 2016. Her boyfriend decides to go back to his ex-wife, Rose is left with a lot of time on her hands and a curiosity about the women who have been in her building for decades. Darby, an elderly tenant, never leaves her apartment without a veil, and the mystery piques Roses interest. Models, night clubs, drug raids, friendship, and more. Rose is on a journalist’s hunt with a personal investment.

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Davis crafts the plot of The Dollhouse well. The chapters alternate between following Rose in 2016 and Darby in 1952. There is restraint in the story telling and tries to add some good twists, but I found the plot fairly predictable.

Overall The Dollhouse maintains a nice pace throughout the story and avoids clichés until the last five pages when she throws a good book in the toilet. I actually did not mind this one at all, but the last bit just ruined it for me. Davis does a good job maintaining a consistent and interesting pace, but the ending comes quickly and suddenly. It’s as if her editor asked her to wrap everything up with a nice bow and throw the love story completely out of proportion with the rest of the story. It was saccharine and a little vomit inducing how spoonfed it was. What was an interesting story about finding oneself and relationships between women ended up being a deflated mess of an ooey-gooey love story.

If I could erase the last five pages, I would like The Dollhouse much better. I’m trying not to let the ending overpower the other nice 200 or so pages, but I can’t.

Memorable Quotes
“His eyes, which were the color of seawater, had a laserlike intensity that made politics the obvious career choice. That or terrorist interrogator.”
“Not scared of change, like Darby was, but scared of staying put, staying unchanged.”

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Title: The Dollhouse
Author: Fiona Davis
Publisher: Dutton
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781101984994

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Books, Fiction

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

August 13, 2019August 12, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth a Read Yes
Length 336
Quick Review Golden Oaks is a gilded cage for the very wealthy to know their babies are getting the best of everything including surrogates.

Reading The Farm by Joanne Ramos in Jacksonville, North Carolina. | Dress | Shoes | Sunglasses

Cover of The Farm by Joanne Ramos. | Dress |

The Farm is Joanne Ramos’ debut novel. Ramos balances the outlandish and the painfully possible reality the near future could hold for privileged and not-so-privileged parts of society.

Golden Oaks is a place where young, healthy, pretty, desperate-for-money women go to be Hosts for lavishly wealthy Clients in want of a baby or three. Located a few hours outside of New York City, it couldn’t be a safer or more beautiful place for a baby to grow under the watchful eye of trained health professionals looking after every aspect of the baby and the Host. Women of all colors, backgrounds, and ethnicities are hosts at Golden Oaks, which is not-so-lovingly referred to as The Farm by many of the Hosts.

The story follows four women from vastly different backgrounds. Mae is an American of Asian descent who manages Golden Oaks. Jane is a Filipino immigrant trying to support her daughter. Ate is Jane’s older, Filipino, immigrant cousin who nannies for upper class New York families. Reagan is a young, wealthy, white woman trying to make enough money to support her art career without her father’s money and control. The Farm dives into socioeconomic diversity and driving forces behind poverty, emigration, and choices women make based solely on need.

Ramos fills The Farm with interesting plots and characters. There is a 1984 Big Brother kind of feel to the novel that is simultaneously overtly creepy yet almost comforting. Though, the plot has a happier rather than completely realistic ending, there are very realistic aspects and problems to Golden Oaks that ground the plot in human emotion and complexity. Ramos doesn’t simplify difficult concepts nor does she try to explain them. She tells a story about motivation, poverty, and womanhood allowing the reader to take away what they will.

The quote “Sometimes a person has no choice but hard choices…” is incredibly insightful and the entire point of The Farm. Though simple in concept, it can be hard for people who have never experienced that kind of desperation to understand what women will do when their backs are against a wall looking into the mouth of a hippo.

The Farm is heartbreaking and infuriating. Joanne Ramos’ has quite a literary career ahead of her if this is what she brings to the table with her debut novel.

Memorable Quotes
“But babies are stronger than people think, and smarter.”
“the monumental efforts taken to make Clients feel food about outsourcing their pregnancies.”
“As if being a good girl and being strong willed were in conflict.”

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Title: The Farm
Author: Joanne Ramos
Publisher: Random House
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781984853752