The Cranes Dance made me feel sick, but in the best of ways. The kind of nauseous that makes you stay up until 2am to write a review because if you don't get to talk about this book, you might actually go crazy. The kind of sick that makes you wonder how on earth you're going to find a book that can possibly beat this. I have to be at my desk by 7:20am tomorrow and I'm still going to sit here and ramble about The Cranes Dance for a while until I can calm down a bit and actually sleep.
Plot summary: So begins the tale of Kate Crane, a soloist in a celebrated New York City ballet company who is struggling to keep her place in a very demanding world. At every turn she is haunted by her close relationship with her younger sister, Gwen, a fellow company dancer whose career quickly surpassed Kate’s, but who has recently suffered a breakdown and returned home. Alone for the first time in her life, Kate is anxious and full of guilt about the role she may have played in her sister’s collapse. As we follow her on an insider tour of rehearsals, performances, and partners onstage and off, she confronts the tangle of love, jealousy, pride, and obsession that are beginning to fracture her own sanity. Funny, dark, intimate, and unflinchingly honest, The Cranes Dance is a book that pulls back the curtains to reveal the private lives of dancers and explores the complicated bond between sisters.
This is a novel about ballet, about siblings and about that dark voice inside your head. From the beginning we know that Kate and Gwen Crane are ballet dancers with a strong sisterly bond who dance with a prestigious ballet company. Unfortunately Gwen has had to temporarily absent herself from the ballet as Kate has informed their parents of her sister's bouts of (unspecified) severe mental illness. What this entails and how this came about is very slowly unravelled throughout the book, which becomes progressively darker with every page.
What made this book for me is Kate Crane. She is possibly the most relatable, the most believable and the most real character I have ever read. It was honestly like she was inside my head. She has flaws, but not those exaggerated traits that fictional characters are often given to pad them out a bit. She was so, so real. She was likeable, for the most part, but those parts where she wasn't so perfect just made her relatable. Every other character was a little flat, but perhaps almost purposefully? The point of this book is that we're inside Kate's head and she's so preoccupied with her sister's illness and her own mental state that she doesn't take the opportunity to examine other people.
What impressed me the most was that the reader somehow knows that Kate feels disregarded and abandoned. Everybody is so preoccupied about Gwen that nobody asks how she's feeling, nobody wonder if it was hard for her to do what was best for Gwen, nobody cares whether it's difficult for her too. The thing is, although she never once shares this, somehow it seeps through. The Cranes Dance is a masterpiece of characterisation and I've really never read anything like it.
I think you have to have at least a minor interest in the ballet to get on with this book, or at least not be totally opposed to it as a concept. The novels takes place almost entirely between Kate/Gwen's flat and the theatre, and most of the scenes involve some sort of dance. It is accessible though - you won't need any of the terminology or routines to understand what's happening. This is evident from the way Kate explains Swan Lake in the first few pages - she always 'talks' as though she's explaining the plot to a beginner.
My one criticism would be the ending, which I think was just a little too neat and didn't really answer any of my questions. I can't decide how it should have ended, but I know that I felt just a little unsatisfied. I know this isn't a particularly well-written post, but I just had to write about The Cranes Dance before I went to bed. It isn't a perfect book, but it's one that will stick with me for a long time.
Somehow I wasn't even aware of the existence of I Capture the Castle until Laura's review earlier this year... although now I reread that, she didn't know about it until she was 20 either. Huh. Anyway, apparently it's one of those staple classics that every woman should read (aside from the fact that neither Laura nor I 'stapled' it until we were 25)... but I'll be honest. I don't get it.
Plot summary: Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and impoverished family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. She records her life with her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fadingly glamorous stepmother, Topaz, her little brother, Thomas, and her eccentric novelist father who suffers from a financially crippling writer's block. However, all their lives are turned upside down when the American heirs to the castle arrive and Cassandra finds herself falling in love for the first time.
I know, I'm sorry. I really wanted to like this one, especially as I know it's so universally loved and I occasionally do like books, you know. It just read to me like an older, longer and more tedious version of Little Women.
This book had its good points. It absolutely did. My review notebook doesn't quite enlighten me as to what they were and I'm a month behind with reviews, so I can't remember myself... but I'm sure it did. Probably. My lasting memory of I Capture the Castle is of beautiful prose but not a whole lot of actual content.
It's a very character-driven novel, which is I usually quite like. Unfortunately the characters are alternately flat and lifeless, or so annoying I want to shake them. Combining the two is quite a feat. It's told using a first person narrative as we're theoretically reading Cassandra's diary... so how is it possible that I feel I don't know her at all? I may as well have been reading the minutes of my dentist appointment it's so abnormally clinical.
My problem, character-wise, is that we're told to like somebody and then suddenly told not to like them, but by other characters. We're never shown their true personalities so we can make up our own minds, thus it feels a little bit convoluted at times. Cassandra changes her mind about people so often that the other personalities never get chance to stabilise.
However, the prose is beautiful and there are some lovely passages. There's one where Cassandra talks about how she imagines scenarios in her head but then grows to rely on them to get her through the day, which is something I think a lot of teenagers do. I don't find her to be at all relatable on the whole, but this particular quote kind of resonated with me:
Rose came in while Simon was kissing me and was absolutely livid - or was that a later imagining? There have been so many that they have gradually merged into each other. I don't think I could bring myself to describe any of them in detail because, though they are wonderful at the time, they give me a flat, sick, ashamed feeling to look back on. And they are like a drug, one needs them oftener and oftener and has to make them more and more exciting - until at last one's imagination won't work at all.
Most of it, however, was simultaneously boring and melodramatic. I found the first half to be much more interesting than the second half, because it does start to drag towards the end. I felt that the entire point of the novel was lost as it tried to follow too many different paths at the same time. The actual ending made me want to push Cassandra off an extra large cliff as I really can't stand self-imposed martyrdom.
I kind of feel like I should apologise for not liking this book and I'm not really sure why. I know it's loved by an awful lot of people but it's just not for me. The flat and irritating characters plus a rambling plot just didn't add up to something I could 'click' with. I think I'll stick to Little Women.
After I finished reading Atonement, I sent out wary feelers to my Reading Friends to see if I was the only one who felt this way. Apparently I am.
Warining for very strong language below... taken straight from the book, I might add.
Plot summary:
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934,
thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her
clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country
house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like
Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge.
By the
end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever.
Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even
imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger
girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a
crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
As it turns out, I had absolutely zero idea what this book was actually about before I started reading it. I was expecting a reasonably generic, 'coming of age,' family saga, but I watched the film trailer when I was a quarter of the way through the book and appaaaaaaaaarently not. There's lots of drama. And also children that can't act, but that's (almost) beside the point.
I found Atonement to be surprisingly accessible when I had expected it to be dry and a little dull. The prose was fine, if a little purple, but unfortunately it just can't compensate for the sheer awfulness that is the rest of the book.
The main problem with this book lies with Briony, the protagonist. I would normally despise her and have a little rant about how awful she is, but I actually have no feelings about her. Do you know why? Because she is completely unbelievable as a character. Firstly, no eleven year old speaks like that. Even adults don't philosophise as pretentiously as she does.
She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had
sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy
spider at the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command.
Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and
straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the
dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took
effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at
the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part
of her that was really in charge.
Oh my God, shut up. Does it sound like an eleven year old came up with that? Anyway, secondly, her actions make no sense. I understand she was young and naive and all that, but the reasonings given for her are silly and unrealistic. I've never read such a narcissistic, self-important character - I understand the need for flawed characters, but this is too far and therefore I can't take it/her seriously. The pretentious, grandiose ramblings of a learned philosopher professor just don't fit with her OTT naivety.
Her mother was forty-six, dispiritingly old. One day she would die. There would be a funeral in the village at which Briony's dignified reticence would hint at the vastness of her sorrow. As her friends came up to murmur their condolences they would feel awed by the scale of her tragedy. She saw herself standing alone in a great arena, within a towering colosseum, watched not only by all the people she knew, but all those she would ever know, the whole cast of her life, assembled to love her in her loss.
ARRRGH. But even now, I'm not annoyed with Briony - I'm annoyed with the writing. Sometimes it's just bewildering. At one point, it says, 'He caught a whiff of underarm perspiration, which put him in mind of freshly cut grass.' Hmm? Sweat reminds you of grass. Well, alrighty then.
The timeline is very jumpy, discussing her feelings throughout the trial before anything even remotely relevant has happened. This can work in some novels, but here it didn't particularly help that I didn't care what her feelings were.
I'm not usually a fan of soldiers-in-the-trenches descriptions so I might be a little biased, but I don't understand the purpose of Part Two. It contributed nothing to the plot as it didn't make a blind bit of difference whether anybody went off to war or not. Book Three would have been exactly the same regardless so it just seemed like a dreary piece of filler fiction.
I also don't like the ending, but I doubt that will come as a massive surprise to you at this point. There's no conclusion and no answers - what did she decide to do? Is the issue resolved? What happened? I was also disappointed In Briony during the epilogue - I had somewhat higher hopes for her, but they were eventually dashed against the Rocks of Unbelievability.
I aware and have always been aware that Atonement was written and published 2001, and yet I can't get it out of my head that this is a classic book from the 1940s or thereabouts. Naturally then, it shocks me when it frequently uses words like 'cunt,' but I think it's meant to shock readers which automatically irritates me. It's cheap.
So this is obviously a fairly neutal review. Bet you're amazed at how impartial and unbiased I am. I do have to admit that Atonement has stayed with me during the month between reading it and writing this review, but not in a good way. If Briony had been slightly less... well, we won't go into that again, but if she had been written better and Part Two had a purpose, it could have been an interesting the novel. The premise had promise (ooh. That's my new favourite phrase) but it's just so over-the-top that I couldn't take it seriously.
I signed up to NetGalley pretty much just so that I could request this book. The idea of an almost limitless supply of instant books to review always seemed like a horrendous idea in reference to the amount of books I already own and haven't read, but I finally succumbed. Hey, I'm glad I did - What's Left Of Me is even better than I'd been told and who knows, it may even make it's way onto my Best Books of 2012 list in a few weeks ;)
Plot summary - Imagine that you have two minds, sharing one body. You and your other self are closer than twins, better than friends. You have known each other forever.Then imagine that people like you are hated and feared. That the government want to hunt you down and tear out your second soul, separating you from the person you love most in the world.
Now meet Eva and Addie.
They don’t have to imagine.
I understand that the blurb is meant to be all mysterious and intriguing, but I don't think it does justice to the book at all. It's much more complicated and darker, somehow, than that. Basically everybody is born with two souls, two completely separate identities, in one body, which then start to 'settle' around the age of eight when one soul takes over permanently and then the other falls by the wayside. If this fails to happen for whatever reason, that person is deemed unstable and mentally ill, thus becoming a danger to society.
There. Less pithy, but more accurate.
Anyway, I really, really liked What's Left Of Me. It has an original plot and it's actually written very well - I've fallen in love with the plot of too many YA novels only to have them fall flat on the writing and ruin the whole thing. By the second page of this book however, it was obvious that a lot of effort had gone into making the prose as accessible and flowing as possible.
For me, it was the excitement and atmosphere that really made this book. Kat Zhang is clearly gifted at writing tense action scenes that leave you desperate to know what was happening - at times I skimmed through a couple of pages and then went back and read them properly just so I could know that little bit quicker. It's a very fast-paced plot, in both a positive and negative way - I never got bored, but it perhaps would have been deeper to explore the characters a little more.
Speaking of, it's important to keep in mind that the author had to create two personalities for every character and it actually comes across very well. Both Eva and Addie have different identities, as do most of the other hybrids and it's easy to remember who's who. I have to admit though; Addie really, really got on my nerves. I accept the need for a difference between her personalitiy and Eva's, but it didn't seem like she was meant to be that irritating. She was selfish, whiny, stubborn and generally refused to think about anybody but herself. I think there was meant to be A Character Development somehow, but I just didn't see it.
It surprised me that Eva, the recessive soul, was the 'voice' of the book. It worked out to be a clever idea, but it threw me a little. I didn't understand how a body-less voice could narrate an entire novel, but watching her try and cover her despair while Addie lives their life is heart-breaking.
As an aside, isn't it strange how sometimes you completely ignore the description the book provides you with and subplant your own? I know what Hally is meant to look like, I get it, I do. But for some reason my imagination kept coming up with a girl called Sophie from Law School, who couldn't look more different from the 'official' Hally if she tried, bless her. After a while I stopped fighting it and went with it, but I just have no idea where I got that from. </irrelevance>
There is a romantic sub-plot, but it's just that - a subplot. It never feels like it's taking over the point of the novel or bashing you in the face with that damned important need for teenage love. Ugh. Anyway, it's very subtle and dealt with very nicely and hey, I even liked the guy in question. How rare.
What's Left Of Me is the first book in the Hybrid Chronicles series, but honestly it's pretty good on it's own. Most things are neatly rounded off without some irritating cliffhanger device to force you to buy the second one. I will definitely buy it anyway, but I don't feel like I'm being shanghaied into it.
As this review has already ended up much longer than I intended, I'll round off as succinctly as I can. What's Left Of Me is a great book - fast-paced, well-written and frankly, a pleasure to read. I'll pretty much be buying whatever Kat Zhang writes from now on.
Don't you love it when not only is an author nice enough to send you a copy of their book, but also takes the time to write a nice note in the front of it too? Terri Giuliano Long seems like a lovely lady and I whole-heartedly wish her success with this book and her next, Nowhere to Run.
The Tylers have a
perfect life--beautiful home, established careers, two sweet and
talented daughters. Their eldest, Leah, an exceptional soccer player, is
on track for a prestigious scholarship. Their youngest, Justine, more
responsible than seems possible for her 12 years, just wants her
sister's approval. With Leah nearing the end of high school and Justine a
seemingly together kid, the parents are set to enjoy a peaceful
life...until Leah meets Todd, a former roadie for a rock band.
As
Leah's parents fight to save their daughter from a world of drugs, sex,
and wild parties, their divided approach drives their daughter out of
their home and a wedge into their marriage. Meanwhile, twelve-year-old
Justine observes her sister's rebellion from the shadows of their
fragmented family-leaving her to question whether anyone loves her and
if God even knows she exists.
In Leah's Wake reads like an early Jodi Picoult novel - there's a similar unfolding emotional saga, alternating perspectives between different family members and the strange, nagging feeling that you're not really sure who you're meant to be rooting for. It has a very 'what would you do?' type theme, as Will and Zoe attempt to reign in their rebellious teenager, although I suspect my zero-tolerance, Nazi-esque ideals of parenthood may be slightly over-dramatic.
From the title, I figured that it would be a story revolving around the death of a daughter and the aftermath, taking 'wake' to mean 'funeral.' But apparently not - instead it refers to the trail of destruction and heartache that Leah leaves behind her as she continues to do, well, exactly as she pleases.
That was the sticking point for me - I liked the plot, the writing and the dialogue, but I just could not stand Leah herself. I didn't really have difficult teenage years myself (it's true, I was always a model child), so I always want to give recalcitrant adolescents a good kicking. I didn't really have a problem with her rebellion - that is, after all, the point of the book - it was the way she did it that irritated me. She just whined and bitched, and refused to believed that not everybody was out to get her. She's not a bad girl, and that's kind of the underlying concept of the book, but she makes horrendously bad decisions. I know that she's meant to make bad decisions, but I just couldn't get past the overwhelming urge to beat her over the head.
But, like I said, there are five different perspectives, so it's hard to stay annoyed with one character for too long. I particularly liked Justine, Leah's sister, who feels pushed out of the frame because of the drama surrounding her older sibling. She's a confused little thing, constantly torn between her parents and her sister. For me, she was the most 'real-' as her grades slowly decline and she fails to take an interest in anything at all, I really wanted to reach across the pages and help her.
It's a slow-moving story, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Instead, the time is devoted to building up three-dimensional characters and creating believable dialogue. I'd have liked to have a few more questions answered in the epilogue, I think, but all-in-all it's a good ending and I finished the book satisfied.
As a long story short, I really enjoyed In Leah's Wake. The build-up of emotion and poetic dialogue creates a wonderful look at the unintentional sadness caused by angry teenagers, although I think perhaps Leah herself could have been less of a caricature of an adolescent.
So, just to continue with my apparent 'parents-who-make-terrible-medical-decisions-for-their-children' phase, today we have My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. See also my review of The Adoration of Jenna Fox here, while I try terribly hard to nip my growing obsession in the bud.
Sara and Brian are devasted when they can't find a donor for Kate, their little girl with leukemia. So, in desperation, they have a 'designer' baby - Anna, who is the perject genetic match for Kate. They plan to only use the blood from her umbilical cord, a procedure that will neither hurt or inconvenience her. But as Kate's condition worsens, they need Anna to donate more and more.
When Anna is thirteen, her parents assume that she will willingly donate a kidney to Kate. If she doesn't, Kate will die. But Anna is fed up of feeling invisible next to Kate and sick of never being asked for consent. She goes to court to sue her parents for the right to her own body.
I first read this in 2007, and it hurt me so much that I swore blind I would never, ever read it again. I both loved and despised it for the way it hurt and moved it me, but I just couldn't bring myself to get rid of it. I'm not sure why I went back to it yesterday, but I'm glad I did. It's a wonderful, wonderful book.
The plot itself is very original - I've never read anything like it before. Family sagas, or whatever you want to call them, aren't my usual kind of book, but Jodi Picoult's books usually revolve around some kind of contraversial issue (designer babies and sacrificing one child to save another, in this case) and involve legal aspects and a court case, and the two combined more than sustain my interest.
I pull Anna to her feet, one shoelace still untied. Dragging her out of the gymnasium, we reach the car before we say a word.
Anna scowls. 'Why did I have to leave the party?'
Because your sister is more important than cake and ice cream; because I cannot do this for her; because I said so.
I'm so angry that I have to try twice before I can unlock the van. 'Stop acting like a five-year-old,' I accuse, and then I remember that's exactly what she is.
As I said, I have read this book before, so the ending wasn't such a shock. The first time though, I cried like a child. Not one slow tear rolling slowly down my face either - full on sobbing and dribbling (attractive, right?) . I never saw it coming and I don't know anybody that did.
What makes it so clever is the way Anna never comes off as selfish, not once. Even though you know and she knows that her lawsuit would indirectly result in her sister's death, Ms Picoult makes sure you know that its not motivated by selfishness or a desperate bid for attention - its a genuine wish to have her opinions listened to. What she is doing to Kate breaks her heart, but she can't go on being used as a walking organ suppository.
On the other hand, you have her parents. Brian is unsure how he feels - he desperately wants Kate to recover, which means she needs a kidney; but he loves Anna equally and wants her opinion to be respected. Sara is adamant that Anna is just having a tantrum and constantly shouts at her to get a grip. At times she made me so angry, I'd have slapper her if she wasn't so, well, fictional.
I duck my head. 'I don't want to do it anymore.'
That ignites my mother. 'Well, you know Anna, neither do I. In fact, neither does Kate. But it's not something we have a choice about.'
The thing is, I do have a choice. Which is exactly why I have to be the one to do this.
My mother stands over me. 'You went to a lawyer and made him think this is all about you - and it's not. It's about us. All of us-'
My father's hands curl around her shoulders and squeeze. As he crouches down in front of me, I smell smoke. He's come from someone else's fire right into this one, and for this and nothing else, I'm embarrased. 'Anna, honey, we know you think you were doing something you needed to do-'
'I don't think that,' my mother interrupts.
My father closes his eyes. 'Sara. Dammit, shut up.' Then he looks at me again. 'Can we talk, just us three, without a lawyer having to do it for us?'
What he says makes my eyes fill up. But I knew this was coming. So I lift my chin and let the tears ago at the same time. 'Daddy, I can't.'
Despite this though, you never doubt that either of Anna's parents genuinely love her. That's the beauty of Jodi Picoult's wonderful writing - you can really understand the conflicting emotions behind every character and see their confusion. They each seem so real, they're never cardboard cut-outs with only one emotion.
It was made into a film a year or two ago, so I'll probably use this one for my Book to Movie Challenge. My only concern is that it stars Cameron Diaz as Sara, and she doesn't look nearly old or haggard enough. But we'll see. That's my plan for this evening, I think.
The Cranes Dance made me feel sick, but in the best of ways. The kind of nauseous that makes you stay up until 2am to write a review because if you don't get to talk about this book, you might actually go crazy. The kind of sick that makes you wonder how on earth you're going to find a book that can possibly beat this. I have to be at my desk by 7:20am tomorrow and I'm still going to sit here and ramble about The Cranes Dance for a while until I can calm down a bit and actually sleep. 
