The Big Over Easy
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde
This was the book club pick for March in my regular original book club. (I’m now in three and it’s beginning to get a bit complicated to keep track. One is a subset of my original book club, called Electric Bookaloo, much to my amusement. The other is my YA book group. Just in case any of you are trying to write a biography about me based on my book log.)
Anyway. I’ve read and heartily enjoyed Jasper Fforde’s other books, the Thursday Next series, and this one was possibly even more entertaining. I wouldn’t classify them as the most intellectual books ever written, but they are highly readable, clever, and funny, and that’s a combination I am partial to in my reading.
This one is a story of Jack Spratt in the Nursery Crime Division, who investigates crimes that have some basis in Nursery Rhymes. In some ways it’s more accessible than Thursday Next, who works in literary crimes (I think), so those ones require a little more general knowledge about books. Nursery rhymes are much less complex, and so the little in-jokes and references that are woven through this were much less likely to escape me than the ones in Thursday Next. (I like to think I’m well read, but an online discussion about the series made me realize how much I’d missed.)
Great book, quick read, entertaining characters. Good one all around.
My Sister's Keeper
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
I waited for about six months for this book, so the anticipation was perhaps working against it when I finally got my hands on it. (Fortunately for those of you who read everything I recommend, it has since been chosen for the senior division of YRCA and will therefore be much easier to get ahold of. This is exactly what happened with me and the Time Traveler’s Wife last year – I wait ages, and then as soon as I get it we get dozens of paperbacks for YRCA. Oh well.) My obsession with this one was a little weird – somebody checked it out from me, I glanced at it, decided it looked interesting, and put it on hold. But since it was on my hold list for so long, I got kind of obsessive about seeing where I was in the list, how long I’d be waiting, et cetera. (I did the same thing with The Girls, but it wasn’t nearly so bad since it took about six weeks for that to come in.)
Uh, right. The book. Anyway, the concept of it was great – really interesting idea, and definitely timely. The basic gist of the idea is it’s the story of a girl whose parents conceive her (through IVF, so as to be able to selectively choose her DNA) to be a donor to her older sister, who has cancer. Initially, it is just the cord blood they want, but as both girls get older, they continue to use the younger sister as a convenient living donor for everything that the girl needs.
There were elements of it that were immensely predictable, but the story was good and quite engaging. I zipped through it one night when I was home alone (and just sat and read – unusual for me since I’m prone to excessive multi-tasking), and I would have given it an unequivocal recommendation if it weren’t for the ending. Now, I’m not against endings with a twist. Some of my favourite books have had major twists at the end, and if it works, I’m a big fan. (We Need to Talk About Kevin is the prime example of that – the ending just blew the socks off me.) But this is an ending that tries to be mind-blowing and just ended up being totally contrived. A twist has to be shocking but not over-the-top. This was over the top.
It really was too bad, because the story of this girl’s struggle to assert her own identity in a family where it is usually forgotten, but the ending soured me on the book overall. As I said, it’s been chosen for YRCA this year in the senior category, and I think it’ll go over really well with the older teenage crowd that it’s aimed at. (It’s an adult book, but the 15 and up crowd will go for it, I think. These illness/disability/death books are always a hit with the girls who like to weep over books. I know this because I was one of them as a teenager.)
Anyway, it’s a good book, and I’d recommend it because the concept of it was interesting and thought-provoking (it would make a great book club book, I think), but be warned that the end might not live up to the rest of the book. (I kind of felt that way about Prep too, actually, so maybe I’ve just become too picky about how books end.)
Prep
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
I took this out of the library several months ago after hearing a number of recommendations for it, but never got around to reading it. Fortunately, I was lent a copy while in Vancouver, and I started reading it at the airport on my way home. I read it the whole flight (we didn’t have the fancy tvs on the back of our seats this time, alas!), and was finished about 15 hours after getting home. In other words, it was a quick read.
It was a good book with an agonizingly believable protagonist. It was hard not to start skimming at some points when the awkward high school moments got to be too much. The author made the decision to write it from the perspective of the post-high school character, and it was a relief in a lot of ways because there were moments where I really wasn’t sure she was going to live through high school.
Although the main character was extremely three-dimensional and believable, many of the secondary characters were left a little flat. Part of that, I’m sure, was intentional to show just how immersed in herself Lee, the main character, is, but it makes the story somewhat less enjoyable. Martha, Lee’s roommate and best friend, is central to most of the story, but while we are repeatedly told that they are best friends, we never really get much of a sense of why. Cross, the object of Lee’s affections for all four years, never gets much beyond the stereotype of the popular guy. It’s a shame, because the tastes we get of their personalities are intriguing, but we never seem to get the whole story. Without the secondary characters, the story lacks something, leaving what could be a great book merely a good book. It’s good, no question, but it comes close to great a few times and it’s always a shame when books miss the mark like that.
