Reader’s Journal: The Knife of Never Letting Go

Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go seemed to be everywhere I looked at the end of last year. When I was making my list of Young Adult titles to read this year, this was the first thing on my list because I had read so many wonderful reviews. So did it live up to the hype? Well…

Yes. Yes, I believe it did, and I’ll tell you why, but first I want to discuss something else, and that is this book’s categorization as YA. I worry that not enough people will read this book because it’s classified as YA, when really, if it were possible to have an “All Ages” category, this would definitely be on the list (along with The Hunger Games, The Book Thief, and Hate List, all YA titles I think adults would enjoy—and benefit from—reading). Then again, I wonder if this book were not YA, would it have picked up the loyal (and worthy) fans it has to date, or would it be another great book lost in a sea of mediocre crap (I am looking at you, Jodie Picoult and James Patterson), or dismissed for being a genre novel?

The thing about The Knife of Never Letting Go: it’s quite dark, and also quite violent. The main protagonists are twelve years old, but they are like few twelve-year-olds one is likely to meet in real life. Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown. When the story opens, he has a month to go before he turns thirteen, the age at which he becomes a man. In Prentisstown, the men suffer from a disease called the Noise that makes them able to hear each other’s thoughts. There are no women in Prentisstown; the same disease that brought the Noise has killed them all. Prentisstown is a bleak place, ruled by loneliness and a sort of submerged violence.

Todd Hewitt is wandering through the marshes on the outskirts of town with his dog Manchee when he comes across something odd—a pocket of silence. It’s this pocket of silence that becomes the impetus for a chain of events that will drive Todd away from Prentisstown, fleeing with Manchee in order to save his own life. On his journey, Todd learns the truth about Prentisstown and the New World where he lives, and becomes a man on his own in ways he never expected.

As far as the plot is concerned, that’s about all I am willing to reveal. I will tell you this: you may very likely shed tears. I did, and I am not much of a crier. This is a lonely and difficult book in many ways. I’m not a parent, but I think this would be a terrific book for a family to read together, because it offers a lot for discussion, and for more sensitive kids, it would help give them an outlet to discuss heavier parts of the book without having to run through a plot synopsis to explain why they were upset by it. I don’t know why I am so sensitive to this, and I am not saying that kids shouldn’t read it—but it’s a lot like Lord of the Rings in the sense that different kids will probably be ready for this material at different ages. Remember, YA is not a rating system: it’s a marketing classification only—which brings me full circle. This book might even be a bit much for some adults, but it’s worth the read. Like any great author of dystopian fiction, Ness explores many of society’s constructs—our need to be connected; the overwhelming availability of information; our confessional society; gender roles and the communication gaps between men and women, just to name a few—in an original way. There are no lectures, no heavy-handed narrative sections. The book is full of action, right up to its heart-stopping end, which of course is not really the end, but the “to be continued” before The Ask and the Answer, the second book in the trilogy.

Another thing that struck me about this book is the way Ness uses language. Giving a character an accent or a dialect can sometimes seem like a gimmick, as can funky fonts or strange little stylistic twists such as paragraphs that almost start to read more like lists than narrative, but Ness makes everything work. Todd has a very distinct way of speaking (although honestly, I kept hearing an Irish accent in my head) that adds realistically to who he is. When he hears Noise, it’s represented in the book in different fonts. Animals talk. Given everything the reader learns about the New World and what happened when humans arrived, all of this makes sense for the story, which simply shows its strength.

Excerpt:

Cuz me as the almost man looks up into that town, I can hear the 146 men who remain. I can hear every ruddy last one of them. Their Noise washes down the hill like a flood let loose right at me, like a fire, like a monster the size of the sky come to get you cuz there’s nowhere to run…And them’s just the words, the voices talking and moaning and singing and crying. There’s pictures, too, pictures that come to yer mind in a rush, no matter how much you don’t want ‘em, pictures of memories and fantasies and secrets and plans and lies, lies, lies. Cuz you can lie in the Noise, even when everyone knows what yer thinking, you can bury stuff under other stuff, you can hide it in plain sight, you just don’t think it clearly or convince yerself that the opposite of what yer hiding is true and then who’s going to be able to pick out from the flood what’s real water and what’s not going to get you wet?

Men lie, and they lie to theirselves worst of all.

Nymeth has a wonderful review of The Knife of Never Letting Go on her blog (which includes some spoilers that you can skip if you wish), as well as links to many other wonderful bloggers who’ve reviewed it as well.

BTT: Winter Reading

The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do?

Atlanta winters tend to be mild, but we still get our share of cold, grey days like today. I am too whimsical of a reader to be affected much by something like the weather in my actual habits, but I admit that mentally I tend to gravitate toward works with heavier subject matter or darker atmospheres. Last February I read Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, and for me it was the perfect book for curling up and escaping the winter doldrums. I loved the magic, the dark story, the idea of London, the cold country houses with roaring fires. Everything fit. This winter I am again reading books set in England, both fiction and non-fiction: The Children’s Book, A Great and Terrible Beauty, and Victorian London: The Tale of a City 1840-1870. I am hoping to get to The Moonstone before the trees bloom and the days get long as well, because something about a Victorian mystery just seems to lend itself to a dark, rainy day.

How about you: do you like a dark, Gothic tale or a suspenseful mystery on a cold day, or do you gravitate toward books with a light atmosphere that take you somewhere warm and sunny? Happy Thursday!

Note: I welcome all BTT participants and your comments, if you have something interesting to offer in response to this post. Please do not leave a generic comment simply so you can post your own link. All participant links can be found at the Booking Through Thursday site. Thanks!

Reader’s Journal: The Dart League King

The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris, follows team members of a small town dart league on the night of the league championship. I first heard about this book in December of 2008 on the Emerging Writers Network blog. Just the short blurb in an end of year post made me add it to my TBR list and my Amazon wish list.

Over the last year or so, I had sort of forgotten about it. In fact, I’ve been busy reading things outside the sort of literary fiction I am very used to reading–this book, from its description, sounded much like my usual fare, an internal and quirky story about small-town eccentrics experiencing one relevant moment in their lives. Although I still like those sorts of stories, lately I have found them a bit claustrophobic, and even formulaic. I am more than happy to say that The Dart League King is neither, that it’s very much its own book, and even a bit genre bending in the best ways.

The story is told in third person, alternating points of view between five different characters: Russell Harmon, the self-proclaimed dart league king and founder of the dart league in Garnet Lake, Idaho; Tristan Mackey, Russell’s teammate; Vince Thompson, Russell’s dealer and sometimes friend; Kelly Ashton, Russell’s ex-girlfriend; and Brice Habersham, Russell’s dart-league nemesis and the man Russell must beat to keep his title. Each of these people has a secret; some secrets are worse, in a larger-than-life sense, than others. Morris does a terrific job of giving each of these characters a voice, and making them surprising in a way that makes the story both refreshing and troubling.

As I said, I expected a small, quirky story about a small-team dart league, but there are bigger things at stake. I didn’t expect suspense, but several of these people’s lives literally hang in the balance through the course of the story, and not everyone will have a happy ending. In a lot of ways, this is a story about luck, both good and bad, and about how the smallest decisions or errors in judgment can change the course of fate forever. That’s what good literature is all about in the end, I believe, and Morris does a fine job of showing the reader the significance of each of these people, and how nothing is too small in the big picture to make us wonder out loud about the role of fate in our lives, about how we become who we are, about the thread by which we all may (or may not) be hanging.

I wish I could tell you more, but there are so many plot elements, large and small, that I wouldn’t want to give away, because really: everything means something in this book. I don’t think Morris wasted a word. I highly recommend it.

Passages to whet your appetite:

Tonight was Thursday, and Thursday meant dart league, and Russell Harmon was the Dart League King. For that reason, and for others, Thursday night was Russell’s favorite time of the week. His least favorite time of the week was Friday morning, when he would have to step down from his role as founder/commissioner/team captain/individual champion two years running of the Garnet Lake Dart League and resume his job on a logging crew, a type of work for which he was unenthusiastic and ill-suited.

She showed him blenders and microwave ovens and silverware, dinette sets and sofas, bed frames and draperies. Most of what she suggested, he purchased. She was not friendly, but neither was she impolite. The same age as Brice Habersham, he would later learn, she was not pretty, but neither was she unattractive–straight brown hair very neatly cut, a thin, rather nervous body, a plain face with regular features, tiny hands and feet. She didn’t look like the love of anyone’s life. Maybe, in some way, it was the setting. Brice Habersham watched her move through the simulated environment of a home. She was dour and solemn and timid and somehow sad, and that also helped. She struck him as someone who would not judge his careful ways too harshly.

Which left Russell Harmon with one dart in his hand. And that hand was raising already, because he couldn’t stop to think, and that hand was now releasing the dart, and Russell felt all the breath go out of him as if it were his breath and not his hand that set the silver ball onto that wheel, sent the dart into the air, where it twirled ever so briefly, like the bright burst of a single lifetime measured against the stars, the flights spinning gently in little flames of candlelight, blond twists of a small girl’s hair, and before Russell Harmon had time even for the lowering of his hand he saw…

And there across the bridge, backing away from the light, moving out of the yellow glow into the safety of darkness, was Vince Thompson, both arms held out in front of him, pointing a large handgun toward Russell on the bridge. How strange it was that the world outside his own quick breathing, his thrumming heart, in the night breeze beyond his windshield, out there suspended above the water, lit like a Hopper painting and swirling to the musician’s tune he still heard somewhere in his head, there should be this other story going on, and that the characters should be people he knew.

Seymour at Rest

J.D. Salinger has died. Franny and Zooey is not so much a favorite book as a part of who I am. R.I.P., Mr. Salinger.

BTT: Twisted

1. Do YOU like books with complicated plots and unexpected endings? 2. What book with a surprise ending is your favorite? Or your least favorite?

In general, I enjoy complicated plots all by themselves, surprise endings or no, as long as they feel organic to the story. I also enjoy surprise endings, but again only when they feel organic to the story. The trick is that the characters in the book must be as shocked by what’s happening as the reader is–when that happens in the hands of a skillful writer, it’s magic. At the moment, I can’t think of a least favorite book with both features, but I’ve read three books I loved in the last few years that fit the bill: Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters; Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane; and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. I’ve also started Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking Trilogy, and that seems to be a part of this group as well. And now that I think about it, another book I just read, The Dart League King,  had a rather surprise ending, more of a quiet shock than a gut-punch, but it left me a little stunned, nonetheless.

Update: I did think of a book I enjoyed that had a twist at the end that upset me: Bel Canto. I suppose I should have seen it coming, given the circumstances, but I didn’t like the ending. Not at all.

This is yet another topic where I hope to find some great recommendations. Happy Thursday!

Note: I welcome all BTT participants and your comments, if you have something interesting to offer in response to this post. Please do not leave a generic comment simply so you can post your own link. All participant links can be found at the Booking Through Thursday site. Thanks!

Goodies

I think we can all agree on this now: I will never be a photographer. No matter, I got some goodies over the weekend that I wanted to share with you. I am still reading The Knife of Never Letting Go, and although I do like it very much, right now it feels like the book of never letting go, especially with this little pile taunting me every day.

My next read is perched right there on top: A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I won from the lovely Nymeth. Thanks so much Nymeth! I cannot wait to read it.

The next three are more ARCs from HarperCollins (I know, I know–stop accepting books!). Shadow Tag, Louise Erdich’s latest novel, tells the story of a marriage in dissolution. The wife, a scholar, discovers that her husband, a painter, has been reading her journal, believing she is having an affair. When she discovers his secret, she starts recording her thoughts in a new journal, which she keeps stashed in a safe deposit box at the bank, and turns the one her husband has been reading into a sort of farce. I read the first few pages, but I’m suspending judgment. The next book is a memoir/collection of essays by feminist scholar Terry Castle titled The Professor and Other Writings, in which she investigates her relationship with a female professor and how it shaped who she became as a person and a scholar. Under that one…The Devil’s Star, Jo Nesbo’s latest Harry Hole novel. I have not read Nesbo yet, but I keep seeing his name everywhere, so I am looking forward to this one (and hoping I can jump right in, as it’s a series and I haven’t read the other books yet).

And on the bottom of the pile there, a couple of library books: Victorian London, by Liza Picard, a book about…well, Victorian London, which I picked up just to learn some more interesting facts about life in London during that time and refresh my memory a bit, as I plan to tackle both Wilkie Collins and Dickens in the next few months. And finally, Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, which I am reading as part of my YA discovery. I hate to admit it, but I actually laughed out loud when I got this book home from the library and skimmed the first few pages (I am not the only one who reads the first few pages of every book she receives, am I?): the font is HUGE. (Update: Dummy did not realize she picked up a large print version of the book. Duh.) I had a moment of nostalgia then for when I used to teach writing, and students would turn in triple-spaced papers with eighteen point font (yes, despite the guidelines). It looked like Dr. Seuss had edited their papers. I am not judging the story, but I imagine it will be a quick read. That will be a good thing if I enjoy it enough to read the other books in the trilogy.

Happy Monday! I am off to watch Chuck, our Monday night guilty pleasure.

Paris Review Interviews: Raymond Carver

I finally received my Paris Review Interviews box set, and I thought it would be fun to share some excerpts with you every Saturday. This week, since I said in my Booking Through Thursday post this week that I think people should read Raymond Carver, I thought I would start there:

Interviewer: Are your characters trying to do what matters?

Carver: I think they are trying. But trying and succeeding are two different matters. In some lives, people always succeed; and I think it’s grand when that happens. In other lives, people don’t succeed at what they try to do, at the things they most want to do, the large and small things that support the life. These lives are, of course, valid to write about, the lives of the people who don’t succeed. Mot of my own experience, direct or indirect, has to do with the latter situation. I think most of my characters would like their actions to count for something. But at the same time they’ve reached the point–as so many people do–that they know it isn’t so. It doesn’t add up any longer. The things you once thought were important or even worth dying for aren’t worth a nickel now. It’s their lives they’ve become uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down. They’d like to set things right, but they can’t. And usually they do know it, I think, and after that they just do the best they can. (1983)

BTT: You Want Me to Read Who?

Who’s your favorite author that other people are NOT reading? The one you want to evangelize for, the one you would run popularity campaigns for? The author that, so far as you’re concerned, everyone should be reading–but that nobody seems to have heard of. You know, not JK Rowling, not Jane Austen, not Hemingway–everybody’s heard of them. The author that you think should be that famous and can’t understand why they’re not…

In general, I would like to see people read more short story collections. As far as authors go, my first pick is Raymond Carver. I was hoping especially that with the new Carver biography and the endorsement of a popular author like Stephen King, he would get more attention. Writers revere him, but he deserves a broader audience because he’s more than just a “writer’s writer.” He’s also an interesting study in the (sometimes harmful) influence an editor can have on an author’s work. I would suggest picking up the new Collected Stories.

Another author I have long admired and rarely see discussed on blogs is Antonya Nelson, who writes both short fiction and novels. Her collection Female Trouble is well-written, entertaining, insightful and accessible. As her novels go, I’d recommend Nobody’s Girl.

Tim O’Brien is another wonderful author who doesn’t seem to get his due. The Things They Carried should make every “Best Book of the Twentieth Century” list there is. It is one of the most telling books about war, and it reveals more than any documentary could hope to about the personal side of military conflict.

And finally, I’ve plugged it before and it can’t hurt to plug it again: Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever, which is both sad and wonderful.

I am off to find new authors for my TBR based on everyone’s suggestions. Happy Thursday!

Note: I welcome all BTT participants and your comments, if you have something interesting to offer in response to this post. Please do not leave a generic comment simply so you can post your own link. All participant links can be found at the Booking Through Thursday site. Thanks!

Reader’s Journal: Hate List

I picked up Hate List sometime Saturday afternoon, not long after I had finished Shutter Island. I finished it before lunch on Sunday, not because it was an easy read, but because I found it difficult to put down. Hate List tells the story of Valerie Leftman, a high school student whose boyfriend, Nick, goes on a shooting rampage at school one fine spring morning at the end of their junior year. For her part, Valerie tries to stop Nick and winds up being shot in the leg by him just before he turns the gun on himself.

She might have been considered a hero, but during the course of the investigation just following the shooting, the police uncover a red spiral notebook that contains a list of everything and everybody Nick and Valerie hate, including the names of the victims shot that May morning at school. The list is released to the press, and speculation circulates about Valerie’s part in the shooting. The book deals mainly with the aftermath, as Valerie recovers from her physical and psychic wounds and faces the challenge of returning to the school for her senior year.

While I was reading this book, I remembered that when I was young (younger than Valerie, even), the big thing was slam books. Slam books were notebooks that were passed around from person to person (let’s be honest: mostly from girl to girl). Each page had a person’s name at the top, and on that page you were supposed to write what you thought of that person. Of course it was all supposed to be anonymous, and of course it wasn’t anonymous at all. What’s significant to me about those books is how it showed us all–perhaps for the first time–the power words had over us, what they made us believe about ourselves, or made others believe about us.

So much of what happens in Hate List happens because of words; not just the words that make up the hate list itself, but the words that spawned the hate list in the first place. Valerie and her friends endure constant bullying and name-calling at school, and for Valerie and Nick, the hate list is a way to deal with their feelings of frustration and rejection. It also helps them to deal with less-than-stellar family lives at home, and with all the anger and unhappiness in the world.

Brown offers us Valerie’s first-person account both of the day of the shooting and of her long recovery. She handles Valerie’s feelings with such care, shows us every bit of her confusion, her anger, and her regret. She shows us how much Valerie misses Nick, how little she trusts herself to form new bonds with people, how unaware she can be of how the tragedy has affected people other than Nick’s direct victims. Valerie can be selfish and petulant one minute, generous and hopeful the next. She is a flawed human being, but one who keeps on going, much like the other people in the book.

Brown also takes aim at the media. Each chapter opens with a short news article about the shooting or one of its victims. Over the summer, while she’s recovering, Valerie sees even more news shows and articles about how the tragedy has brought people together, but when she returns to school, she finds things completely different than the media has portrayed them: people are fighting and placing blame; kids still have nightmares; metal detectors and special doors are being installed in the school, instilling mistrust and fear. Valerie’s therapist has told her to see the way things really are–to stop and look and let the world as it really is show itself to her. When Valerie sees the truth about her classmates, how they are basically denied the right to grieve and suffer in the name of harmony and peace and love, it makes her even more angry and confused. This made me wonder about the kids at Columbine and Virginia Tech and all the other schools where something like this has happened. We all see the news stories (backed by the swell of some emotional pop song) about memorials and healing and moving on and heroes. At some point, it all seems to be yarn-spinning so that we can tell ourselves it’s all okay and get on with life. And maybe that’s fine, but I think Brown is right to show us, there’s so much more underneath the glossy news stories, the carefully arranged musical montages accompanying pictures of victims. And not all of the victims are innocent. And not all the perpetrators are simply evil psychopathic killers.

There is no black and white in this book. In the end, Valerie is better, but she’s not all the way okay. Her family is broken, but healing, and she realizes fully that the people who were brought together by the tragedy (and some of them really are, if only for a moment, if only out of a temporal necessity) will likely go on with their lives and never see or speak to each other again. At one point in the book, Valerie tells us that as angry as she was, she liked school. She enjoyed her friends, loved her boyfriend, and most of the time, things were okay. But things were not okay for Nick, and that’s the one question left hanging: the why. Why did Nick decide to do what he did? It’s the question that will never be answered, beyond the fact that he was in real pain and couldn’t find any other way past it.

This is, I think, a must-read. I was going to say a must-read for teens or parents of teens, but really, I think everyone could take something valuable away from this book. The sad truth is, much of life is like high school. Bullying exists in the workplace. Road rage is a menace. We continue to see people as we want to see them and not as they really are, to fit them into our own narratives in a way that has nothing to do with reality. When we see people who are hurting, who hold themselves away from other people, people who let doors slam in our faces or never smile and say hello, we should at the very least consider, before we respond angrily ourselves, what kind of day they might be having, what fears they face, what disappointments they’ve experienced that day or week or month. We might not be able to help them get better, but we can certainly do our part to keep from making things worse, and hope someone will do the same for us when we need it.

Reader’s Journal: Shutter Island

The problem with reading a book like Shutter Island and trying to discuss it on a blog is that while you want everyone to stop what they’re doing and run out and get a copy of this book right now, you also realize that it’s almost impossible to say anything convincing without giving away important pieces of the plot. In an indirect way I’ve been a Dennis Lehane fan, if only because I’ve enjoyed the movies based on two of his other books, Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River. When I saw the trailer for Shutter Island at the theater over the holidays, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy of the book first.

When the story opens, Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal, and his partner Chuck Aule, are on a ferry to Shutter Island, where a former Civil War fort and its surrounding buildings have been turned into a sort of compound/hospital for the criminally insane called Ashecliffe. The men have been called to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient there named Rachel Solando, who has gone without a trace. As Teddy and Chuck follow the course of the investigation, we learn the truth about why they are really at Ashecliffe, and what the true motives are of the people who brought them there.

And that’s about all I can tell you. Seriously. I would not dare deprive you of this terrific story by giving anything away. Lehane has paced events in this book impeccably. When I read suspenseful books or watch suspenseful movies, I try as hard as I can to suspend that part of my brain that starts looking for the answers right away. Lehane has created such believable characters, told their stories so well, and created such a terrific atmosphere for the story, it’s easy to be distracted from what’s really happening.

I definitely plan to see the movie, but I admit I wonder what my reaction will be now that I know the ending. I am going to go ahead and say that I think you should read the book first, even if you are planning to see the film, mainly because Lehane is such a skillful writer. I look forward to reading the rest of his books, and to seeing his episodes of The Wire, to which Bob and I are officially addicted after watching the first two seasons. We have a tendency to talk about the characters and the story lines as though they are real people and events. Sad, no?

Read Teresa’s review of the audio book here.

Some passages to entice you (but also keep you in the dark):

Since that trip as a boy, Teddy had never enjoyed being out on the water, took no pleasure from such lack of land, of visions of land, things you could reach out and touch without your hands dissolving into them. You told yourself it was okay–because that was what you had to do to cross a body of water–but it wasn’t. Even in the wat, it wasn’t the storming of the beaches he feared so much as those last few yards from the boats to the shore, legs slogging through the depths, strange creatures slivering over your boots.

They’d looped around the back of the compound, met more manacled gardeners and orderlies, many hoeing a dark loam against the rear wall. One of the gardeners, a middle-aged woman with wispy wheat hair gone almost bald on top, stared at Teddy as he passed, and then raised a single finger to her lips. Teddy noticed a dark red scar, thick as licorice, that ran across her throat. She smiled, finger still held to her lips, and then shook her head very slowly at him.

“But, boss? I need to know what to expect. I’m serious. We got to get our shit straight or we’ll end up in some new Kefauver Hearing or something. Everyone’s looking these days, you know? Looking in at all of us. Watching. World gets smaller every minute.” Chuck pushed back at the stand of bushy hair over his forehead. “I think you know about this place. I think you know shit you haven’t told me. I think you came here to do damage.”

The warden made an appearance, driving into the compund with three guards in a jeep, the water churning out from the tires. The warden noticed Chuck and Teddy standing idly in the yard, and it seemed to annoy him. He was taking them for orderlies, Teddy realized, just as Cawley had, and it pissed him off that they didn’t have rakes or water pumps in their hands. He drove past, though, his head snapping forward, on to more important things. Teddy realized he had yet to hear the man’s voice, and he wondered whether it was as black as his hair or as pale as his skin.

And the trailer!