Attachments

Attachments is Rainbow Rowell's first book and only adult book until Landline is published this summer. She's probably better known for her two YA novels for Eleanor & Park (reviewed by Nox last year) and Fangirl. I've actually read and enjoyed all three, but this is the first one I'm reviewing here.

The year is 1999. Y2K is approaching. Email is just catching on, and it has some employers running scared. Enter Lincoln--late 20s, serial student and degree earner, D&D player, and living with his mother until he can save up for his own place. Lincoln is hired as the Internet security officer for the local newspaper, which means he is responsible for reading employees' emails to make sure no one is using it inappropriately.

Jennifer and Beth are both co-workers and best friends at the newspaper. Despite the fact that they know someone is reading their emails, they are definitely not following company policy. At first, Lincoln is highly entertained by their witty conversations, but eventually he finds himself interested in their lives.

When Lincoln falls for Beth, it gets very tricky, very quickly. He's never met Beth. He doesn't even know what she looks like. Despite this, he knows very personal details about her life, because he's been reading her emails.

Attachments is unique for several reasons. First, it's a romance told from the point-of-view of the guy. Second, guy and girl don't even meet until very late in the book.

I really enjoyed Attachments. Lincoln is a great character. Yes, he's a little nerdy and geeky, but he's much more adorable than my description above makes him sound. He's conscientious, smart, sweet, and funny. He reminds me of Clay from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. I definitely had a bit of a crush on him.

While the main part of the book is told from Lincoln's point-of-view, the chapters are interspersed with emails between Jennifer and Beth. These emails were wonderful! I wanted to be friends with Jennifer and Beth. Rainbow really captured the camaraderie and spirit of female friendship. She has posted a deleted scene from her book with Star Trek themed emails and another section that made the cut where Beth waxes poetic about the month of October (which also happens to perfectly capture my feelings about the most glorious month of the year).

I only had two minor complaints about the book. There was ongoing tension between Lincoln's sister and mother that was weird. I never quite figured out what was going on. Also, the book wrapped up really quickly, at a pace that didn't quite match the book. It was a bit jarring.

I got to briefly meet Rainbow Rowell when she came to speak about her books and censorship last year, after a school in Minnesota challenged Eleanor & Park. (I have LOTS of passionate, library school student thoughts about that situation, so let's not go into that). You guys, she's such a genuinely wonderful person. My younger sister once woke me up in the middle of the night with ecstatic texts when Rainbow Rowell responded to her tweets. And now I've read her backlist. Do yourself a favor and follow her on Twitter/Tumblr, or even better, read one of her books.

4.5 Stars.

The Cuckoo's Calling

J.K Rowling’s first crime novel, written under pseudonym Robert Galbraith, has its ups and downs, but overall it’s a great read. As Rowling is so adept with details and figuring out how to weave those details into a cohesive conclusion, she is primed to be a master of the crime novel. What seems to bog her down though is the tedium of these details. Often, I just wanted the book to move faster! Towards the end I couldn’t put it down, but the first few hundred pages were a bit slow. Even so, her characters are wonderful. At first I wasn’t sure about Cormoran Strike, private detective, as the main character but he definitely grew on me. However, Robin, Cormoran’s temporary assistant, I have to say is my favorite character. The scenes between her and Cormoran are alternately hilarious and embarrassing. I also like that she’s a strong female protagonist without being uber-feminist. I’m getting rather sick of the unconsciously gorgeous, independent female leads who all end up seeming the same. Robin falls somewhere in the middle, and I think she’s awesome. I just hope she dumps that loser of hers, Matthew.

I don’t really read crime or mystery novels, so I can’t say that I have much to compare The Cuckoo’s Calling to, but it was well-written and I never suspected who the killer actually was. I had my suspicions on one person but was completely wrong. If Rowling writes a second Cormoran Strike novel, which I believe she is, I would definitely read it.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I actually listened to the audiobook of The Ocean at the End of the Lane read by the author, Neil Gaiman. I had read the blurb on the back cover but was still not expecting the story that I actually got.  I’m also still unsure as to how I feel about the book or if I even liked it. The story unfolds with the narrator looking back on a childhood adventure as an adult. In this adventure, he and his neighbor down the lane, Lettie Hempstock, try to send a spirit back who is stirring up trouble, especially for the narrator. This spirit is in the form of Ursula Monkton, the new family babysitter. I can identify with a child’s dislike of a babysitter and seeing her as a sort of monster, so that bit of fantasy definitely appealed to me. I enjoyed the scenes with the Hempstock family as I particularly liked Lettie’s mother and grandmother as characters. The end was quite sad, but it was an ending that suited the story well. Gaiman’s books and fantasies are always so different, but yet very imaginative. This is definitely a story that no one else has written.

On a side note, this book was in the adult fiction section but I would consider it more of a YA book minus the dodgy sexual encounter between Ursula Monkton and the narrator’s father. I think that is part of the reason why I liked it more than American Gods. I just tend to like Gaiman’s younger narrators better.

To hell with literature - read Inferno!

Seek and find...

Symbologist Robert Langdon is back in Dan Brown’s newest thriller. Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital with no memory of the past few days, including what the heck he’s doing away from Boston. He doesn’t have time to ponder his predicament however, as he’s attacked by a spiky-haired assassin and barely escapes with his life with the help of a beautiful young doctor with an IQ of 208 who also happens to know martial arts. Unrealistic – yes. Fun – definitely. While hiding out at pretty doctor (Sienna)’s apartment, Robert finds something sewn into the back of his precious Harris Tweed jacket. Turns out, it’s a laser pointer carved out of bone and that projects an image of Botticelli’s Map of Hell with a few distinct and suspicious changes. Soon, Robert and Sienna find themselves racing against time to stop the plot of an evil geneticist who worshiped Dante and thinks that the Black Plague was the greatest thing to ever happen to civilization. Following clues that take them from Florence to Venice and on to Istanbul, Robert and Sienna try to piece together macabre clues adapted from Dante’s Inferno. 

You don’t read a Dan Brown book looking for great writing. You read it to go on an adventure, a fantastically nerdy adventure where you get a bit of a humanities lecture about every museum and every piece of artwork mentioned in the book. Add that to the fact that Inferno was my favorite of the required reads in my high school AP English class and there shouldn’t have been any doubt that I would read this book. In fact, I’m surprised it took me this long to get around to it. All in all, Inferno made for an entertaining mind-break.