The Girl Who Chased the Moon

Southern mystical realism with barbeque and cake - what's not to like? This is a really sweet novel about Emily, a teenager who comes to live with the grandfather she didn't know she had - who's a giant - in the small town her mother left in shame 20 years earlier. There she finds a room where the wallpaper changes to reflect her mood, and plenty of secrets - plenty.

Emily also meets some really nice people who have issues with their own pasts, including Julia and Sawyer. She also is drawn to Win Coffey, with whom she shares a past of which she is unaware, but who also is hiding a secret of his own.

The characters in this novel are all pretty likeable, even those who have made mistakes and kept secrets. I like that there is a lot of gray area - people are made up of good and bad elements, as regular people are. I also like that there is some obvious struggles to resolve issues and mysteries - nothing is handed to the reader all neatly tied up with string. There is a definite arc to the story, a getting to the end, which I enjoyed.

I also enjoy that the author ends the novel with a germ of a new novel - that's always fun.

The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel

The Year of Disappearances

This is book two in Susan Hubbard's "ethical vampire" series, and it was okay. I like the third book better. It's really my own fault, I read the third one (The Season of Risks), then the first one (The Society of S), then this one, all within a few months, and I think I just overdosed on ethical vampires.

This novel did answer some questions for me that were raised by reading the third book first, like how Ari came to go to college so young, and what the heck was going on with those crazy Nebulists. But the plot line just wasn't as engaging for me as The Season of Risks was. But I do like how Hubbard shows the characters developing, particularly Ari, and I look forward to reading more of her novels in the future.

I do this to myself too much - I read a novel by an author that I like, and then I go and get everything else s/he has written, and it's like eating too much chocolate - nice, but just too much. I need to pace myself.

The Year of Disappearances: An Ethical Vampire Novel (Ethical Vampire Novels)

Bitter in the Mouth

WOW! I love this novel! It's like a combination of Like Water for Chocolate, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood. I swear.

Linda Hammerick can taste words. Her name, for instance, tastes like mint. The word "mom" tastes like chocolate milk. Linda doesn't share her secret sense with very many people (obviously) and she spends a lot of time finding ways to lessen the "incomings." Tobacco, alcohol, and sex seem to do the trick, but that's not what this story is about.

Linda is a typical small-town southern girl growing up in North Carolina in the 1970's-80's. That she is different from everyone else is obvious, but she gets along fine, has a best friend and a boy who likes her. Yes, there are some very bad experiences, but Linda grows up to attend Yale and become a lawyer, and to have a pretty good life. The only thing that makes her different, we think, is her ability to taste words.

But we learn at the very end of Part One of the novel that we're wrong: there is something else that makes Linda very different from everyone she grew up with, and the second part of the novel deals with her journey to find out where she really comes from. But it's more that: it's also about discovering what constitutes a family.

There are some great southern characters in the novel - I adore Baby Harper - and many typical southern scenarios (the town gets all their gossip from the beauty shop). But the language and structure take this from mass market novel to literature: I just loved it.

Bitter in the Mouth: A Novel

The Reader

I have to admit, I had no idea what this book was about before I started reading it. I read it because it was on a list of great novels, and because the movie was on a list of great movies. I am SO glad I read it. It's a truly moving novel.

While on the surface this is the story of a young man who reads to, and falls in love with, a mysterious older woman, it is so much more than that. It is a story of forgiveness, and redemption, and deception, and a number of other moral issues. And I am not sure that the characters - or those of us who read the book - ever come to any real kind of resolution.

In a larger way, it is about how an entire country, an entire population, is able to - chooses to - move forward following a nationwide atrocity. It is in a way specifically about how the German people dealt, or didn't deal, with the shame of the Holocaust - and even how some of them didn't feel any shame. For such a simply and beautifully written short novel, it packs a lot of punch.

I've put the movie on my Netflix, at the top. I'm not sure how much I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I really want to see it. Does that make sense?

The Reader