Book Review: "Sweet and Low: Stories" by Nick White

The characters in Nick White's soon-to-be-published story collection Sweet and Low are all trying to figure out their next steps. These are all different kinds of people—widows, ex-lovers (or on the verge of becoming ex-lovers), teenagers, men become rapidly disillusioned with the path their lives are taking—yet each struggles with questions, decisions that could impact their lives.

I first became familiar with White's writing when I read his debut novel, How to Survive a Summer (see my original review), last year. That story, about a young man who can't seem to shake the experience of attending a gay conversion camp when he was younger, had a searing, haunting quality at times, and demonstrated White's talent for creating powerful emotion in quiet moments.

White's stories don't share the same subject, but they reinforce his talent, and I found many of them tremendously compelling, poignant, and beautifully told. The first half of the collection is composed of miscellaneous stories; linked stories comprise the second half, following Forney Culpepper from boyhood to disillusioned adulthood. Some of the stories are longer than others, and some honestly felt like they could be expanded into full-length novels.

Among my favorite stories in the collection were: "The Lovers," which follows a widow trying to figure out life without her husband, and his lover, who has become obsessed with getting back a family heirloom he gave the man before his death; "These Heavenly Bodies," about a troubled adolescent who is bewitched by a beautiful pair of conjoined twins; "The Exaggerations," which tells of a young boy living with his aunt and uncle, and only starting to understand the mysterious paths adults travel; "Gatlinburg," about a couple trying to give their relationship one more try on a vacation to the Smoky Mountains; "Break," the story of three college friends who get more than they bargained for on a weekend trip; and "Lady Tigers," in which a high school senior haunted by family scandal can't keep his mind off the school's basketball coach—with disastrous consequences.

I'm not always a fan of linked stories, but I thought they worked well here. White's characters are tremendously appealing, and at times I found myself disappointed that a story ended because I wanted to know more of what happened to the characters. I always view that as a mark of a talented writer. One warning: two of the stories have brief moments of animal cruelty—the stories don't glorify it, and both incidents are over quite quickly, but I know some people like to be prepared.

Even when a story didn't quite click for me, I was still drawn to White's writing ability, his ability to draw me in. He's definitely going to be an author whose career I'll continue to follow, and I hope this collection earns him some notice. Once again, I am reminded of why I love reading short stories.

NetGalley and PENGUIN GROUP Dutton provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

Book Review: "The Shadow Girl" by Misty Mount

Have you ever felt invisible? Even though you may be speaking or doing something to get attention, have you ever felt like people just aren't hearing or noticing you?

Thirteen-year-old Zylia feels that way constantly. But it's more than being one of six kids, competing for the attention of her parents, and it's more than just adolescent insecurity or impatience. There have been times where her mother literally doesn't see her, doesn't serve her breakfast alongside her siblings. There even was a time when the kid sitting in front of her in class didn't pass her a quiz because he didn't see she was there, and the teacher didn't even notice.

Is she actually disappearing, crazy as it sounds?

There's one person who notes Zylia's presence, though—her grandmother, although she is in the throes of dementia. Zylia keeps hearing that she somehow resembles her great-aunt Angelica, who disappeared many years before, when she was Zylia's age. Anytime she goes near her grandmother, the woman becomes gets agitated, accusing Zylia of knowing where Angelica is. Her grandmother believes Zylia is keeping Angelica from her.

In her quest to understand what is happening to her, Zylia discovers that her fears are justified—she keeps inadvertently traveling into a shadowy "in-between" dimension. Can she stop this from happening permanently, before it's too late? Can she solve the mystery of what happened to Angelica, and perhaps give her grandmother some comfort? And perhaps most importantly, can she just start living a "normal" life, and focus on friends, and perhaps the boy she has a crush on?

I'm being a little vague in my description of the plot in an effort not to give too much away. This is a book that should be enjoyed as the plot unfolds for you.

I really enjoyed The Shadow Girl, and it surprised me tremendously. When I first started reading the book, I thought it was going to be a tale of adolescent woe, but it turned out to be something completely different, and beautifully imaginative. Misty Mount captured the buzz of a huge household, the sibling dynamics, the dialogue of school and home so perfectly, and yet as the plot shifted, her storytelling shifted with it. Her use of imagery is immensely lyrical, almost poetic.

This is a book about self-discovery, finding bravery when you think you have none, and trusting that those who care about you will stand by you. There are elements of fantasy which will require you to suspend your disbelief, but they so perfectly fit within the confines of the story Mount has created. Oh, yeah, and the names of the characters are awesome.

If you've ever struggled with being shy, feeling insecure, you'll identify with Zylia, and you may even cast a few wayward glances toward your reflection in the mirror, just to be sure.

The author provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

Book Review: "Far from the Tree" by Robin Benway

This book...

Robin Benway's Far from the Tree recently won the National Book Award. It's a beautiful, thought-provoking tearjerker of a book, a meditation about family and its different forms, as well as the fears we don't share with those we love, and how what we don't say is often more of a roadblock than the things we do.

At times this book had me like:

While at other times it had me like:

Grace is an only child, although she's always known that she was adopted. But shortly after she gives birth to her own daughter while she's still in high school, and gives the baby up for adoption, she decides that it's time to start looking for her biological mother. She more than surprised to find out from her parents that Grace had two biological siblings—an older brother, Joaquin, and a younger sister, Maya, whom she never knew existed.

Maya is tremendously outspoken about everything, perhaps because she's the lone brunette in a house full of redheads. Her adopted parents' marriage is floundering, her mother has a drinking problem, and she's always felt the outsider in her family, since her younger sister was born shortly after her parents adopted her. She's not sure what she hopes to find in her biological siblings, but she hopes it brings her security.

While Grace and Maya were adopted as babies, Joaquin has spent his life in and out of foster families. Even the times he let his guard and his heart down, he ultimately was disappointed and hurt, so he's determined not to let that happen again, even when the situation looks promising. More than anything, he's afraid that he believes he can hurt the people who care about him, so he's afraid to let anyone get too close, even Grace and Maya.

Each of the siblings has their emotional wounds and their secrets, which poses challenges for their relationship but also demonstrates just how much they have in common. Beyond their mutual love of eating their French fries with mayonnaise, and their similar physical characteristics, the three share the fear of telling the people they care about the truth, about letting them see all of their problems, which has resulted in friction with others in their lives. But little by little, they let their walls down with one another and try to help each other face those fears—which is far easier said than done.

"Maya wondered if it would ever be like this with Grace and Joaquin, the ability to just sit quietly side by side, content in the knowledge that no matter what happened with your parents, or your girlfriend, that your siblings will still be there, like a bookend that keeps you upright when you feel like toppling over."

There is a lot of emotional upheaval in this book, as the siblings deal with their own issues as well as search for their biological mother. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but I'll admit I found their inability to verbalize the things they were afraid of/angry about tremendously frustrating. I know this was a realistic depiction of how people, particularly teenagers, often handle their problems, but to have it be the case with three people at the same time was a bit bothersome.

Beyond wanting to shake the characters so they'd finally say what needed to be said, I really enjoyed this book and was tremendously moved by it. It was a very real reminder about the fears and anxieties adopted children and children in the foster care system face, and it also demonstrated how feeling like you belong for the first time can truly make a difference.

This is a really well-written book. Benway had an ear for dialogue that was on-target for teenagers without making them sound so much wiser and more sarcastic than their years. I'm always a big fan of books which make me feel while they make me think, which is why I definitely recommend Far from the Tree.

Book Review: "Green" by Sam Graham-Felsen

"I am the white boy at the Martin Luther King Middle. Well, one of two. Kev, my oldest friend and the biggest dick I know, is the other. But if you had to pick just one, it'd be me. There are a few other white kids in the system (unless you count Boston Latin as a public school, which you shouldn't), and I pretty much know all of them."

Dave Greenfeld (aka "Green") is starting the sixth grade in Boston in 1992. His "hippie parents" have no interest in the latest fashion trends or really any of the status symbols that would ease his transition into middle school—they'd rather buy his clothes at thrift shops, and don't see the need to spend money on fancy sneakers, even if no one else would be caught dead in year-old Filas. He wishes his parents would just send him to private school, like they do his troubled younger brother, Benno.

Middle school starts pretty much the same way elementary school ended for Dave—the girls pretty much ignore him, and he gets bullied by kids of all races. Even Kev, his oldest friend, would rather avoid him and hang out with the cooler kids. Avoiding bullies and being friendless seems to be Dave's destiny, unless he aces the placement test that will guarantee him a spot at Boston Latin, the best public high school in the city. If you get into Latin, you're going to college, guaranteed.

One day, Dave is surprised when one of his fellow classmates, Marlon Wellings, stands up for him. Marlon lives with his grandmother in the public housing projects down the street from Dave's house. But Marlon is far from the stereotypical "projects kid": he is driven by his ambition to get into Latin, he steers clear of those who want to draw him into their gangs or their trouble, and he's obsessed with the Boston Celtics, especially his favorite player, Larry Bird.

Mar and Dave become fast friends, and they spend their time hanging out at Dave's house, watching vintage Celtics games (Mar has them all on videotape), playing "nasketball," a game Dave made up involving a trampoline, and listening to Mar's obsession with doing well on the Latin placement test. Dave envies Mar's devotion to his church (Dave was raised a "secular Jew," although his family doesn't observe any religion, which is a frustration to his paternal grandfather, whose entire family was killed in the Holocaust), his fascination with going to Harvard some day, and the way he doesn't seem to let anything bother him, yet Dave knows he has issues of his own.

But when Mar is not around, Dave is still being bullied, and confronting the violence that breeds in the urban community in which he lives, as well as among his own classmates. He becomes more and more desperate for his parents to put him in private school because he doesn't think he'll be able to do well enough on the Latin placement test to escape his school, but his parents would rather just report Dave's problems to the principal, making him even more a target. He's afraid to stand up for himself, let alone his friends, like Mar.

As Mar begins experiencing problems of his own, problems he doesn't want to discuss with Dave, Dave realizes that there are differences between the two of them that they keep running into. He never really thought he was actually luckier than his friend, and doesn't quite understand the struggles that Mar faces, snap judgments from people that don't even know him. But little by little, those differences strain their relationship, causing both of them to act in ways they never imagined they would.

Green is an insightful, thought-provoking coming-of-age novel which deals with some significant issues without being overly heavy-handed. Sam Graham-Felsen, in his debut novel, provides interesting, and at times poignant, commentary about racial and cultural differences, and how they can strain a friendship. He has also created a fascinating, flawed narrator in Dave, who at times seems much older than his age, and at times reminds you that you're listening to life filtered through the eyes of a sixth-grader.

I enjoyed this book but thought the pacing was a little slow, and the same things seemed to happen a few times before the plot advanced. There were a few plot threads that never really got resolved, particularly why Benno refused to speak for more than a year, and there were veiled references to tragedies within Dave's father's family that never were addressed. Why allude to things that you're not willing to wrap them up?

One warning: there's a good amount of attention given to Dave's burgeoning hormones and his increasing obsession with masturbation, so this could make you uncomfortable.

Much like the main character himself, Green is imperfect but tremendously engaging. Sam Graham-Felsen has created a refreshing new narrator with a fascinating and moving perspective on growing up in the midst of racial and cultural tensions. It's a surprisingly timely book, even though it takes place in 1992.

NetGalley and Random House provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

Book Review: "The Burning Girl" by Claire Messud

The friendships we form when we are younger often have a profound effect on our lives, even into adulthood. And although I can't speak from experience, it's often been said that female friendships, particularly those forged during adolescence and the teenage years, can be tremendously intense, providing special memories and, in some cases, inflicting emotional pain.

Cassie and Julia have been friends for as long as they can remember—since nursery school. They've always been an inseparable part of each other's lives, and have shared their secrets, fears, desires, and dreams. The summer before seventh grade they spend volunteering at the local animal shelter, hiking in the woods outside their small Massachusetts town, and secretly visiting the abandoned asylum in the woods, imagining the lives of those imprisoned there.

But little by little, things change between Cassie and Julia that summer, and into the school year that followed, when the two are assigned to different academic levels, and Cassie makes new friends who encourage her to act in a more rebellious manner, and develop relationships with boys. Julia feels the loss of Cassie palpably and can't seem to figure out what went wrong, wishing that things could return to how they were before.

"It's a different story depending on where you start: who's good, who's bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren't anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward."

Even though they barely speak, Julia keeps tabs on Cassie through a mutual friend. She learns that Cassie's relationship with her mother has become tenuous since her mother found a boyfriend, a man who makes Cassie tremendously uncomfortable in her own home and who convinces her mother to become even more restrictive of Cassie's freedoms. And as her home life continues to deteriorate, Cassie leans on the one thing she has always depended on, the memories of her dead father, and even that doesn't provide the security it once did.

The Burning Girl is more than the exploration of how intensely an adolescent friendship can affect us throughout our lives, but it also is a reflection on how well we can truly know a person we have grown up and shared so much with. At the same time, this book shows the sometimes painful realization between daydreams and realities, and reminds us that sometimes we need to be saved even if we don't want to be.

While I like the way Claire Messud writes (and I'm a big fan of a number of her earlier books, including When the World Was Steady, The Last Life, and The Emperor's Children), this book really didn't wow me. I feel that this story has been told many times before.

I'm never particularly enamored of when crucial events in a book are relayed third-hand, that the protagonist told one person, who told the narrator, who then shared what they had learned. It often made me wonder whether the story was actually reliable, or whether there were threads I should doubt. I also tend to get frustrated when a book's plot is advanced more by conjecture and assumption than actually witnessing events taking place.

There are powerful moments of longing, emotion, and betrayal in The Burning Girl, but they weren't quite enough to generate a lot of passion. I also was thankful that Messud avoided taking the plot in one direction I feared she might.

Perhaps the fact that I never quite had a friendship like this (and I'm not a female) might have dulled the book's power for me, so if this sounds intriguing, I'd encourage you to pick this book up.

Book Review: "Perennials" by Mandy Berman

I attended a sleep-away summer camp in the Catskills Mountains for 10 years, from the summer I was 10 until the summer I was 19. It's crazy to think that I started there nearly 40(!) years ago, and made some incredible friendships which have sustained through all this time, thanks in some part to social media.

Over the years I realized that only those people who had similar experiences truly "got" what camp meant—how spending every day for eight weeks with people created more intense relationships than with those people you saw 10 months a year back home; how you'd spend so much time during the fall and winter wishing you could be back in camp, thinking of all of the things you couldn't wait to do when summer rolled around again, and how it felt like you could just pick right back up where you left off the year before. Many of those years were some of the best times of my life, and it's crazy how vivid the memories of those days still are given there are days I can't remember where I put my wallet.

Needless to say, when I saw that Mandy Berman's debut novel, Perennials, touched on the camp experience, I jumped on it.

Rachel Rivkin and Fiona Larkin met as campers at Camp Marigold, the same camp where Fiona's parents met as children and fell in love. Even though Rachel and Fiona don't see each other much during the winter months, their friendship is as solid as ever, and they've already planned to stay in the same tent and be as inseparable as always. Yet the summer they turn 13 is a pivotal one, as they teeter on the brink between adolescence and self-proclaimed maturity, innocence and bravado, and their differences threaten to harm their friendship.

Rachel, the daughter of a single mother, knows she is fortunate to go to camp every summer, since they lack the financial resources Fiona's family has. Yet Rachel has something Fiona lacks—self-confidence in her looks and a willingness to test the limits of her budding sexuality, while Fiona has no interest in doing the same and resents Rachel both for moving forward without her and keeping secrets when she does. Even so, they know that their friendship is more important than anything else.

Six years later, Rachel and Fiona return to Camp Marigold as counselors. While they've maintained their friendship even though they attend separate colleges, they're looking forward to one last summer together before they need to become "adults" and pursue internships, jobs, etc. Yet it's not long after that they fall into the same behavior patterns—Rachel is rebellious, flirtatious, confident, and willing to take risks, while Fiona, caught in a cycle of low self-esteem, begins feeling the distance between her and Rachel growing.

During that last summer, things change for both of them, things that rock their lives and Camp Marigold. The book follows not only Rachel and Fiona, but Fiona's younger sister, Helen, now a camper, as well as some of the other counselors and camp staff. This is a book about the power and the burden of friendship, how sometimes our differences make us stronger friends while at other times they just ultimately tear us apart. It's also a book about how fast we want to become adults until we find ourselves in adult situations, and then we wish we could have our innocence back again.

I thought this was an interesting book, and there were definitely instances which I could so vividly picture in my head, as they reminded me of my own experience at camp. Berman is a very talented writer and she knows how to make you care about her characters, even when they may annoy you more than a little bit. (But chances are you know people just like them.)

I liked the first section of the book, which followed Rachel and Fiona as campers, but once the story moved six years later, I feel as if Berman got a little too ambitious and lost the focus and heart of her story. The book suddenly shifted to characters we had never met before, characters who seemed reasonably peripheral to the actual plot, and yet there was a great deal of time dedicated to them. They were interesting but it distracted from the real story (or at least what I wanted the real story to be). I also felt as if Rachel went a little too far, even though I could understand her motivations, and that made her a little less interesting.

I'll admit I was hoping this would provoke a little more nostalgia and generate a little less drama, but perhaps that was my fault. Still, this is a solid story about adolescent friendships and how they sometimes struggle as they move into adulthood, and I'd imagine that given the main characters are both female, it may resonate a bit more for women than it did me.

NetGalley and Random House provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

Book Review: "Another Brooklyn" by Jacqueline Woodson

Wow, this book was absolutely exquisite and powerfully emotional.

"Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone."

Another Brooklyn is a memory poem of sorts, a lamentation on lost youth and the intensity of adolescent friendships which burn with an intense heat for a period of time, only to leave behind the ashes of longing, anger, and regret.

Seeing an old friend on the subway brings August face-to-face with her memories. She remembers growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s after her father brought her and her younger brother from their home in Tennessee. She remembers longing for their troubled mother to join them, remembers how sheltered her father kept them for a while, not allowing them to leave their small apartment. But most of all she remembers watching Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi as they walked down the street, jumped rope, and appeared inseparable, possessing a bond August so desperately desired.

"I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone? And now the four of us were standing together for the first time. It must have felt like a beginning, an anchoring."

August recalls how the four girls came from disparate ethnic and economic backgrounds yet dealt with the same things—fear of the junkies and the perverts and the creeps who stared at them, wanting them as they matured; wanting to be desired by their boyfriends yet fearful of giving them what they really wanted; and wanting desperately for their dreams to come true, whether they were of stardom, of money, or of a family unit made whole once more. She recounts the way her father struggled, only to find peace as a Muslim, a peace he tried to impart to his children.

The book reflects the changing demographics of the Brooklyn August remembers, one which saw the white people fleeing for Manhattan and the suburbs as increasing numbers of people from all over the world, people with less and less money, moved in. The book also reflects the veterans returning from Vietnam with drug addiction, the murders of young African-American girls all over Brooklyn, the sighs of relief after the Son of Sam held New York in his grip.

Jacqueline Woodson's prose is absolutely luminous in this book. I would read and re-read sentences and paragraphs, and find myself in awe of the language and imagery she used. She let me loose both in the story and in my own memories, as I remembered those friendships, that longing to fit in and be part of a group, to feel both powerful and helpless simultaneously.

This is a short book that has a lot of weight and depth to it. I haven't ever read anything Woodson has written, but she truly dazzled me. I know I'm a little late to the party on this one, but I'm glad I showed up, because this is a book I would regret having missed.

Book Review: "The Fall of Lisa Bellow" by Susan Perabo

When a tragedy strikes a friend, or even someone we're merely acquainted with, we wonder how that person or family is handling what happened. "I can't imagine what they're going through," we might think, or, sometimes more commonly, "There before the grace of God go I." Susan Perabo's new novel, The Fall of Lisa Bellow, looks at a tragedy through the eyes of a young girl who witnessed it, as well as her family, and illustrates reactions we might not be proud of, but which seem completely understandable in the wake of what occurred.

Meredith Oliver is an eighth grader with marginal self-esteem. She and her two best friends spend their time loathing the "mean girls" of their class—the pretty, popular girls who are the center of everyone's attention, criticize and belittle their classmates, and make many students hope they can avoid the girls' notice. One of the queens of the group, Lisa Bellow, was Meredith's friend in fourth grade, but obviously a lot has changed since then, and although Meredith and Lisa have lockers next to each other, Meredith lives in somewhat-constant fear that Lisa will embarrass her publicly,, relegating her to the bottom of the social strata of middle school.

One day after school Meredith goes to get a soda at a nearby deli before walking home, and Lisa is there, criticizing the sandwich maker. Without warning, a masked man with a gun enters the shop, orders both girls to get on the floor, and demands access to the store's safe. Meredith is calm at first, and helps Lisa deal with what is happening, but it's not too long before she herself begins to panic. The man demands Lisa stand up and he takes her from the store, leaving Meredith behind on the floor.

The Fall of Lisa Bellow looks at how Meredith handles the mixed blessing of being safe and being the one left behind. She vacillates between catatonia and rebellion, throwing her already worried parents further into a tailspin. She even imagines speaking with Lisa, and imagines what is happening to her, even picturing what it might be like if the two of them were abducted together.

Behind the fragility of Meredith's condition, the book also looks at how Claire, Meredith's mother, is handling this close call her daughter experienced. What happens when you realize you can't protect your children from everything out in the world? How can you keep living life as usual when you know there's a chance something might affect your children, something you can't control no matter how hard you try? How do you help your children if they won't tell you what they need, what they're feeling, what they're afraid of? And how do you handle everything else around you—your marriage, your job, your other relationships—when all that matters is what happened?

This is a tremendously thought-provoking book, and as she did in her incredible story collection, Why They Run the Way They Do (which made my list of the best books I read in 2015), Perabo pulls you into the story almost immediately. There is tension, there is emotion, there is even a little bit of disgust (perhaps even a bit more than you think), but there are also glimmers of hope.

Where I struggled with this book is that while I understood what might make the characters act the way they did, and certainly sympathized with them, I really didn't like Claire or Meredith's characters very much. Claire's behavior at different times in the book was almost horrifying, and while I realize Meredith was dealing with significant post-traumatic stress, her actions and reactions made her difficult to root for. But as I thought about how this book and these characters made me feel, I realized my reactions might be more true-to-life for observers of a family dealing with such a crisis, and I realized again what a genius storyteller Perabo is.

I didn't love this as much as her story collection, but this is still a very well-written book. If you're unfamiliar with Perabo's work, you owe it to yourself to pick up one of her books. You'll marvel at her words, but also the choices she makes in telling her characters' stories.

NetGalley and Simon & Schuster provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!