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The Real Boy

Title: The Real Boy
Author: Anne Ursu
Rating: 4 Stars
Genre: Middle Grade Fantasy
Length: 352 pages

Synopsis

Oscar is a magician's hand. He happiest gathering herbs from the ancient Barrow, reading books snuck from Caleb's library during the night, or working in the cellar, surrounded by cats while preparing various magical herbs for Caleb. He doesn't remember life before becoming a hand, and he doesn't quite get his fellow human beings. When an accident forces Oscar to work in the shop, two things happen. One, he realizes he doesn't work and think like everyone else. Two, he makes a friend in the healer's apprentice, Callie.

The "perfect" children from the nearby city begin falling ill, while something dangerous lurks in the forest, attacking things with magic. With the magician and healer disappearing for large amounts of time, Oscar and Callie have to find a way to help the ill children and figure out what exactly is going wrong. 

Review

I really enjoyed The Real Boy. For a one-off, middle grade novel, Ursu's Alethia is richly developed, with magic oozing from its pores (or in this case, the soil). It has a full history and developed society. Oscar and Callie were delightful main characters. And perhaps this is just because I was reading the book while traveling, but I found it hard to predict where the story was going, which I loved.

One of the major themes running through the book is Oscar trying to figure out why he is different from anyone else. He struggles to read people, is anxious in their company, and would rather read about the different properties and uses for herbs. After finding an unusual doll halfway through the book, Oscar starts to worry whether he is even human. Thankfully, he has Callie to help him puzzle it out. In return for teaching her how to use herbal remedies, Callie teaches him how to read and understand people.

During the book, I noticed Oscar had several characteristics that can be found on the autism spectrum, and I wondered if this was intentional on Ursu's part. I looked into it, and it was very much intensional. Ursu's son has Asperger's, and she wanted to write a hero that her son would see is like him.

What I really appreciated about Ursu's story is the nuance she uses with the subject. Yes, autism is a part of it, but Oscar is so well-developed that he is much more than that autism box some might want to put him into. I can't really explain how well Ursu deals with this, so I'd encourage you to read her touching thoughts about her son, Oscar, and writing the book on Read, Write, Reflect. Here's a taste:

I didn’t want Oscar to triumph in the end despite his autism or because of his autism; I wanted him to triumph because of who he is-- an exceptionally brave, loving boy. I wanted him to know that he had the power to survive and triumph no matter what the world throws at him. I want every kid to know that. -Anne Ursu

While I caught the allusions to autism, I'm ashamed that I completely missed the numerous allusions to fairy tales throughout the book--specifically The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Pinocchio. I didn't realize how much Ursu was weaving in older, familiar stories until I read another review that pointed this out. The allusions are everywhere, so now I really want to reread with this in mind!

The book is also really well-written and beautifully illustrated. Also of note is that the main characters are all people of color, but like the autism element, it's quietly part of their characters without being a defining characteristic or an afterthought.

Ursu is also the author of Breadcrumbs, which has been on my to-read list for awhile now, and The Real Boy was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award this year. If you enjoy middle grade fiction or classic fantasy, I'd definitely recommend this book. And if you know a kid who enjoys fantasy, definitely hand this one to them.

The Eyre Affair

Title: The Eyre Affair
Author: Jasper Fforde 
Rating: 2
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 374 pgs. 

Synopsis: It's 1985 in an alternate reality version of England and Thursday Next is a LiteraTec, a detective who investigates literary mysteries. In this world, literature is a *big* deal. There's also time travel and vampire sand seemingly invincible villains. Thursday's uncle has managed to create a machine that uses bookworms (actual worms. who eat books) to transport people into works of literature. For example, right now his wife is lost in a Wordsworth poem. Enter Acheron Hades, whose villainy knows no bounds. He's learned that if you enter the manuscript of a book and make changes, those changes go out to every copy of the book ever created. Hades kidnaps Thursday's uncle and uses his machine to hold Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit hostage. After that plot fails, he decides to go after one of the most beloved books in all of literature, Jane Eyre.

Review: It had so much promise! Who wouldn't want to read a book with literary detectives, time travel, and the ability to travel into books?! But oh my god, it was bad. Let's start with the setting: Thursday Next's world is weird and not in a god way. It's England, but alternate history, but set in the modern day, but not really, with vampires and genetic splicing, but everything else is normal, but the Crimean war has been going on for 100 years...you get where I'm going with this, it's just too much. It reminded me of Terry Pratchett, but on a really off day.

The characters left much to be desired as well. Thursday was one of the few fully fleshed out characters, yet her whole focus was on things that happened 10 years ago. Get over it, girl. She has the potential of being a really strong female character, but she ends up being just a stereotype. The other characters were just as bad. Acheron Hades (because of course you'd name your villain after 2 gods of hell) doesn't have any motivation other than being a pain in the side of the police. He doesn't seem evil, just bored. Everyone else, including the man Thursday left behind and yet can't stop think about, were instantly forgettable.

I was all for giving this book 1.5 stars until the point that Thursday went into Jane Eyre. Then the book really picked up and the plot got interesting, it's just a shame that it waited until the last 50 pages to do so. This book was a waste of my time. Skip it.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Author: Katherine Boo
Genre: Narrative Non-fiction
Length: 262 pages
Rating: 4.5 Stars

Synopsis:

Katherine Boo chronicles the lives of an undercity (or slum) in Mumbai, India and the complexities and effects of inequality in her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.

While the lives and dreams of many Annawadi residents weave in and out of Boo’s narrative, Behind the Beautiful Forevers focuses on three individuals who are all striving to make it New India: Manju, aiming to become the slum’s first female college graduate; her mother, Asha, with the less principled goal of becoming the slumlord; and Abdul, who through focus, hard work, and a keen business sense tries to generate enough money from his family’s garbage business to buy a plot of land.

Review:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is both a very easy and a very challenging book to read. Everything in the book is real (Boo lived in this community for three years), but the book reads like fiction. You get pulled in and engaged in these individual's stories. This is why Behind the Beautiful Forevers is also hard to read. It hurts. It's distressing. It pushes you to face the consequences of global inequalities and poverty.

Abdul’s story was the most challenging to read—when a family feud spins out of control, Abdul is (wrongly) accused of murder alongside his father and sister, and their journey through the legal system has serious ramifications for Abdul’s successful garbage business. Asha’s story is perhaps the least sympathetic, but Boo manages not to demonize this character. Asha’s hard work and scheming allow her daughter, Manju, to attend college, which Asha hopes will help raise the entire family out of poverty.

The stories Boo captures give us a humanizing portrait of life in an undercity. “Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?” Abdul asks at one point. Behind the Beautiful Forevers gives all the people depicted a life. They may not be glamorous or particularly good lives, but gives Abdul, Manju, Asha, and everyone else an identity separate from their poverty.

I appreciated that Behind the Beautiful Forevers doesn’t offer any easy solutions. If anything, it highlights the complexities of anti-poverty work. Charitable efforts to promote education, microfinance, and health conditions are almost completed stymied by corruption. Government officials, elections, police, and local slumlord all support themselves through bribery.

In short, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an excellent, engaging piece of narrative non-fiction that thoroughly deserves the National Book Award it earned. 4.5 Stars.

Editorial note: This review was drafted as a sample post in January 2013 when this blog was still an idea. I recently found the review and decided to edit, reformat, and publish it.

The Lace Reader

Rating: 3 stars

Genre: Magical Realism

Length: 390 pgs.

Synopsis: The last time Towner read lace, a form of psychic reading, her twin sister drowned and Towner ended up in a mental institution. Now after 20 years(?) Towner's great-aunt/adopted mother has gone missing and Towner is called back to Salem. After finding out what happened to her aunt, sort of, Towner and a local police detective end up investigating another missing woman and a local cult leader, who just happens to be Towner's uncle. The plot of this story isn't linear and is very hard to explain.

Review: I have a problem with unreliable narrators. I'm an incredibly gullible person who tends to take things at face value when I read, especially when the story is told in first person. How could you lie to me when I'm inside your head?! Well...

I liked Towner from the beginning. Towner is in recovery from surgery when she first gets the news about her auntand having just undergone surgery myself, I was very concerned about the amount of traveling and exercise she was undertaking so soon during her recovery. I absolutely loved the secondary characters. Towner's hermit mother living on Yellow Dog Island infested by packs of wild golden retrievers (Take a minute and picture that. Remote Island. Adorableness running rampant. Ok, back to the story). Having been fascinated with the Salem witch trials since middle school earlier, I'm surprised I didn't read this book when it first came out.

Until the last 50 pages or so, I would have given this book four stars and then the twist happened. I'm not going to say what it is, just that I did not see it coming. And now I kind of want to re-read the entire book to see if there were any clues and I'm just ambivalent, or if it was just an oddly written book. In any case, the twist changes the entire feeling of the book and it made me doubt everything I had just read. That being said, if you like family drama, the Northeast, and sort-of-witchy witchiness I would actually highly recommend this book even though I only gave it 3 stars.

The Secret of Magic

Rating: 3.75 stars 

Genre: Mystery

Length: 402 pgs

Synopsis: While on a bus traveling through Alabama on his way home from WWII, decorated officer Joe Howard Wilson is ordered, along with the other blacks on the bus, to give up their seats for German POWs. Upset that having fought for the United States in the war hasn't changed attitudes in the American South coupled with disdain for the Nazis he was asked to move for, Wilson refused. The bus continued on its way, but arrived at its destination minus one black soldier. Wilson's body turns up two weeks later.

A few months or a year later (the timeline isn't perfectly clear) a letter shows up at Thurgood Marshall's office with the NAACP. One of the young lawyers, Regina Robichard, is surprised when she recognizes the sender of the letter as the author of one of her favorite books from childhood, The Secret of Magic. The letter urges someone from their office to come down to help with an investigation of Joe Howard's death and Regina convinces Marshall that she should be the one to do it. Thus Regina, a young black woman lawyer from New York City, travels to the Jim Crow South to find a murderer.

Review: There's no magic! Often I'll request books months before their release after seeing them on GoodReads or in BookPage or somewhere and then by the time they come in for me, I've completely forgotten what they were about. That happened in this case. I got this book from the library and it's called The Secret of Magic and there are fairy lights in the trees on the cover, so I assume something fantasy-ish, but instead I got murder. Which is fine - I like murder, but it's a bit like thinking you're going to eat ice cream and then it turns out to be frozen yogurt. Both are good, but my brain wasn't quite ready. So here's your warning: there is no magic in this book.

Other than the whole "no-magic" thing, I actually really enjoyed this book. I loved the character of Regina! She was such an interesting character. Her father had been lynched when she was very young and her mother had turned into kind of a crusader for civil rights, but Regina had never been outside of New York City. When she made her way to a small town in Mississippi, she was completely overwhelmed with the differences between the way the races were treated and how they interacted with each other. She had heard second hand about segregation, but what she didn't expect was how there were black and white people everywhere. In New York City, people of different races stayed in their own neighborhoods and she had never really talked to a white person before. I think my favorite character, however, was Mary Pickett Calhoun. Regina was surprised to get the letter from this famous white author, especially when she reaches Mississippi and find that the lead suspect is the son of a former flame. The murdered man and his father had worked for and Mary Pickett's family for generations, in fact, since before slavery was abolished, so she felt she had to do something to avenge the death, but was also just starting to come to terms with the town's inherent bigotry. All in all, the murder mystery serves as a backdrop to a character study of small town Southern life in the late 1940s and its themes definitely stuck with me after finishing it.

1 Year of Blogging

Owl You Need is a Good Read has been up for a year! 

It has been a fun first year of blogging. Thanks for reading along with us. 

Photo by yanyanyanyanyan / CC BY-NC 2.0 

Two Owls Review Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is held up as one of the greatest American classics. The story of the rising and falling fortunes of the fiery, independent, selfish Scarlett O'Hara and the rascally Rhett Butler is set against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Georgia. Two of our parliament recently read the book for a book club, and gathered here for a discussion.

Sonya: After loving the film version of this historical novel, I never thought that the book could be as good. Having finished Gone with the Wind, I can honestly say that it has become one of my all-time favorite books. Margaret Mitchell’s narrative is so easy to read and yet so beautiful.

Madeleine: I have never seen the film version! I’m actually glad I hadn’t seen the movie before reading the book. Besides knowing a few things (it’s about the Civil War and it’s aftermath, the main couple is Scarlett/Rhett, and there are a lot of fancy dresses), it was all completely new to me.

I also loved the book, but I don’t know if it would make it into my all-time favorites. I need some more time to think about it. There were some bits that I really struggled with in this book (more on this later). What really made the book for me was the characters.

Sonya: I think that is what she does best! We get to see Scarlett journey from naïve, selfish Southern belle to a destitute woman who is willing to do anything to keep food in her stomach and Tara under her feet, and then finally in the end to a person that finally understands herself and what is really important to her.

Madeleine: Margaret Mitchell took a really big risk making her main character a dislikable character. I loved and hated Scarlett. I was cheering for her throughout the whole book, except for the stage of life that you skipped: her selfish, malicious, ignorant behavior after earning back her fortune. She annoyed me enough that I stopped cheering for her for awhile.

I like Scarlett best when she’s at Tara. She needs Tara to keep her grounded.

My other favorite character is Melanie. She’s an easy character to love, but I love the unexpected strength she shows throughout the novel and her unflinching loyalty to Scarlett, who doesn’t deserve it. She’s wonderful.

Sonya: I also liked Melanie, and thought that Ashley did not deserve her. Rhett is the other character that I find so enthralling and mysterious. (BTW, Clark Gable could not have portrayed him better in the movie.)

Madeleine: Obviously. :)

Sonya: Even after finishing the novel, I still don’t really have a sense of who he really is. Even though he is a scoundrel, I can’t help but cheer for him and hope that Scarlett can realize how wonderful he is.

Madeleine: I was actually more impressed by Rhett’s character development through the novel. He changes and becomes a better person a lot more than Scarlett does. I’m not totally convinced that Scarlett has changed by the end. But I absolutely loved them together. Whenever Rhett walked onto the page, I always got very excited. The dialogue! The wit!

Sonya: Every scene with Scarlett and Rhett was just bursting with well-wrought dialogue, and consequently I could practically feel the sparks between these two coming off the pages. I so hoped that this story would be happy in the end (even though I know from the movie that it’s not), and I always think that somehow Scarlett does get him back. I sure hope that she does.

Madeleine: When I first finished the book, I felt the same. Having had some time to digest the book a bit, I like the open ending. I don’t know if Rhett will ever let Scarlett back into his life. He was burned pretty badly. I hope Scarlett stays at Tara. Tara makes Scarlett a better person; I don’t know if Rhett does.

Sonya: The other aspect of Gone with the Wind is its insight into Southern life before the Civil War, during the war, and the war’s aftermath. Naturally, as a child I learned how the South consisted of inhumane bad guys keeping slaves in bondage, and then the North swept in and saved the slaves from their awful plight.

I absolutely do not condone slavery, but I will say that it was interesting to see this time in American history from the point of view of a Southerner. Even if Mitchell is biased, this fictional account gives us another perspective to ponder, and I found it fascinating. Mitchell really shows that war is war, and there are going to be bad and good people on both sides of the conflict.

Madeleine: Ah, here we are, the parts I really struggled with in the book, and that I have to separate from the book when making my judgements. I agree that the Southern point-of-view is very interesting, and I know that contextually Margaret Mitchell is just reflecting the period she’s writing from, but I really struggled with the racism in the book. In fact, I might’ve given up on it if I weren’t reading for a group.

The book romanticizes slavery, and does so very subtly. If you aren’t paying attention, it is easy to buy into this romanticization. In our book club, we had someone argue that it wasn’t that bad because the slaves were treated well by their masters who saw them as part of the family. This point-of-view takes something horrible and completely unjust, owning people and forcing them to work for you, and turns it into something kind and paternalistic.

Again, I understand that we have to take context into consideration, but I really struggled with how to respond to it. Book Riot ran an interesting series of posts on this exact issue last year. I’ll leave you with those: “I Couldn’t Finish GONE WITH THE WIND Because it Was So Racist” and the response “Let’s Talk About Racism in the Classics.”

Stepping off my soap box, I still enjoyed Gone with the Wind and give it 5 stars. Aside from it’s size, the book is very accessible and wonderfully written. Margaret Mitchell made me love a rather unpleasant character and wrote interesting enough stories that I didn’t complain about the 1000 page love triangle. Read it.

Sonya: Overall, Gone with the Wind fabulous read that I will recommend to pretty much everybody. It’s a commitment to read as it's so long but it is definitely worth it. I was hooked from the beginning and never wanted it to end. A solid 5 stars.

Bored of Opium

I so regret checking out The Lord of Opium at the same time as The House of the Scorpion, the first book in this series. I never really got into the sequel and just slogged through the 400+ pages simply to finish it so I could move on to something else (like Gone with the Wind). The problem is that NOTHING HAPPENS. There is no story arc; no climax; no build. Farmer simply has Matt bringing his friends to visit, fighting with his girlfriend, “cheating” on his girlfriend, and just romping around Opium, the land where he lives. In this second book, Matt is now the Patron in charge of Opium and all the drug lord duties that go with it. Farmer still brings in moral conflict with the cloning and power struggles, but it’s just not enough to save this book.

My other major issue with this book is the love triangle between Maria, Matt, and Mirasol. Maria has been Matt’s love interest since early into The House of the Scorpion, and it was no surprise that they now call each other novio and novia. Mirasol, Matt’s other love interest is a Waitress eejit. In Opium, eejits are slaves with chips in their brain that program them to do certain tasks without any pain or sentience. One major plot line of The Lord of Opium is Matt’s quest to free the eejits from their bondage. He finds that Mirasol momentarily comes out of her reverie when he plays a certain song where she begins to dance. Once the song stops playing she faints….and then he kisses her. This happens numerous times. How creepy is it that he’s taking advantage of someone who is both brainwashed, unconscious, and in his employ?! Eventually Mirasol is out of the picture (no spoilers), and at the end of the novel, Matt rekindles his relationship with Maria, and then they decide to get married because he’s this rich powerful Patron that can do whatever he wants. This is how the book ends!! These kids are 17 and ridiculously immature. What is Nancy Farmer thinking?!

In The House of the Scorpion, I sympathized with Matt and his plight. He was abused as a child and had to find his identity in the world as a clone. His coming of age story really developed him as a character, and made him more likable. For the majority of The Lord of Opium Matt is rather selfish and mean to those around him. I understand that he’s a moody teenager, but I did not sympathize with his situation. That is some of the reason that the first novel was better. There isn’t good character development with any of the characters in this second book, and I think that was the major reason why it was so boring.

Perhaps if I you loved The House of the Scorpion, this would be more enjoyable for you. I, however, was not a fan of either of these books, especially The Lord of Opium. Take my advice and just read The House of the Scorpion and leave it at that.