Embroideries
Marjane Satrapi
2006
144 pages
Published by Pantheon

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FTC disclosure: I bought this in New York City at the Strand. Beth Fish and Dawn are my witnesses.

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As I was googling this to find an image of the cover, I came across a great write up on Bookslut. So great, in fact, that I’m just going to refer you there:

Review of Embroideries by Carrie Jones at Bookslut

That review says everything I wish I would have thought of to say.

This little book is fabulous. It’s very different from Persepolis, the only other Satrapi that I’ve read. But it’s just as fascinating in a very different way, as it offers a glimpse into the intimate lives of Iranian women, providing varied opinions about bodies and self-image and relationships and sex. It’s very forthright and, at times, surprising.

The Woman Who Fell From the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen
Jennifer Steil
2010
321 pages
Published by Broadway

she was a woman
who fell from the sky in robes
of dew
and became
a city

In 2006, Jennifer Steil accepted an offer of a short-term job to teach journalistic skills to the employees of the Yemen Observer, an English-language newspaper in Sana’a, Yemen. Despite the poor English and almost non-existent journalism skills of her students, Steil was sad to leave at the end of the three weeks. When the owner offered her another job, to act as editor-in-chief and continue mentoring the staff, she jumped at the chance to return to a city and people she had fallen in love with.

Friends and co-workers were less enthused. As her then boss exclaimed, “Holy fucking shit, are you kidding me? Are you out of your fucking mind? You’re crazy! You’ll die over there! I can’t believe you are seriously doing this! Why?”

This book tells of Steil’s experiences in Sana’a and her travels in Yemen during those initial three weeks, and then during her year as editor at the Yemen Observer. Sana’a is known as the oldest city on earth, and Steil shares her delight in the gingerbread houses of the Old City. She talks about the frustration of working with qat-addicted men who take four hour lunches and the joys of watching her women journalists become talented reporters. (Qat is a stimulant that the majority of Yemenis rely on. It’s a plant…you stuff the leaves in your cheek and chew. Qat chewing is also a very social activity.) She discusses her experiences with the medical system, and her embarrassment over packages seized by customs (a friend sent her a vibrator). Steil truly immersed herself in Yemeni culture, eating at local restaurants with her fellow employees (but only the men, as women do not eat out), joining in qat chews, and attending women-only weddings (the men and women celebrate separately). Yet she also reveled in the expat experience (after she got the newspaper under control and found some free time), going on weekend vacations with friends, drinking alcohol at expat parties, and hooking up with a few men.

I really enjoyed seeing Yemen through the author’s eyes. While she was certainly frustrated at times by the sense of male entitlement and the restrictions many women faced, Steil fully participated in Yemeni work and life. She is able to share a wide variety of experiences, thereby giving me a glimpse into a culture that I previously knew nothing about. It’s also interesting and entertaining to read about her efforts to instill a work ethic and journalistic ethics into a group that had no previous training in journalism.

Despite my vow to not buy any books, I bought this one last weekend. Because it has a truly gorgeous cover…so really, who can blame me?

The Tricking of Freya
Christina Sunley
2009
342 pages
Published by Picador

Iceland is land alive, the earth split open, forming and re-forming before your eyes. Vast vistas of swirling black and neon green moss-drenched lavascapes. Volcanoes in all directions and at every stage of existence: smoldering, dormant, extinct. Glaciers on the move, their hoary tongues licking the edges of meadows. Water falling everywhere, trickling spilling clamoring rumbling down rocky crevices and canyons. And spitting up boiling hot from holes in the ground. Meandering through this riot of lava and ice and emerald slopes as if it were the most ordinary scenery in the world: wild horses, stout-bellied and thick-maned, peering out from behind fringed bangs. And the ubiquitous sheep, with their spiraling horns and shaggy dreadlocked coats. –p. 122

I’ve always been fascinated by Iceland. And if you look at the pictures on the author’s blog you’ll know why. It’s gorgeous, it’s relatively isolated, and it’s small (there are only about 300,000 Icelanders). And Icelanders revere poets and writers. Sunley includes an Icelandic saying: Blindur er boklaus madur. Blind is the bookless man. Obviously, it’s my kind of place. Well, except for the cold.

So a few weeks ago on Twitter Beth Fish mentioned The Tricking of Freya. And I was intrigued. And then Sarah of Terra Communications emailed me and asked if I would like a copy to review. Would I ever! When it arrived I was just finishing Purge and The Tricking of Freya offered the perfect contrast to that book.

This novel is loaded with atmosphere and culture. If you love reading about other cultures and traveling via books as much as I do, then this is the book for you. Seriously, I feel steeped in Icelandic lore.

Freya is the granddaughter of Skald Nyja Islands. The Poet of New Iceland. After a devastating volcanic eruption in the 1800s, her grandfather’s family left Iceland and settled in Manitoba, Canada. Freya, however, is American. Her mother’s family has been begging for years for her mother to bring Freya for a summer visit. And finally, when she is seven, Freya is introduced to her people and a whole different world.

Freya’s Aunt Birdie is unlike anyone else Freya has ever met. She’s outspoken, she loves words, she’s exotic. Yet she’s also moody and mean. Over the next seven years, Freya visits her grandmother, Amma Sigga, and her Aunt Birdie for a month each summer. And then the visits stop. It’ll be seventeen years before she returns, only to discover a family secret that she is driven to investigate.

The Tricking of Freya is written in the form of a letter. Freya is talking to her cousin, telling her the family histories and mysteries. It’s a very intimate way to relate the story, as Freya discloses her frustrations and feelings about her family and herself.

And while I figured out how Freya was tricked long before she did, Freya discloses late in the book that she kind of suspected that might’ve happened. Still, the history and culture that is interwoven throughout Freya’s tale makes for a fascinating read, and I especially loved the way the prose often reflects the moods (you’ll have to trust me on this, or, better yet, experience it yourself, but it totally works). There’s a hint of it in the excerpt above.

If you’re at all interested in Iceland, or you like a lot of culture mixed in with your plot, or you want a moody family saga, check this one out!

Manhood for Amateurs
Michael Chabon (pronounced Shay-bon, which is not how I was pronouncing it!)
2009
306 pages
Harper Perennial

And yes, as a matter of fact, I did receive this for review at BEA.

This is the first Michael Chabon I’ve ever read. I started Kavalier and Clay a few years ago, but it’s still sitting unfinished on my shelf (for no reason other than I got sidetracked). In contrast, I read most of this book in one evening, and then finished it up the next morning. This is a collection of essays on such varied topics as:

• Raising daughters and the horrific thought of being left alone to teach them about tampons and bras
• David Foster Wallace and suicide
• Circumcision
• Murses:  A hilarious treatise on men’s purses. “A wallet is a man’s totem, his distillation. It pockets his soul as surely as he pockets it. The necessary corollary to this inviolate principle is that no man, ever, ought to carry a purse. Purses are for women; a purse is basically a vagina with a strap.” p. 151
• Discussing pot with your children
• An ode to his wife
• Losing his virginity
• The power of radio: “There may be no span of years longer than that which separates your parents’ youth from your own. I heard Prince’s “Lets Go Crazy” the other day, and I could easily imagine, could feel, just how remote the world of that song and Purple Rain (about as distant form my eight-year-old as Bill Haley was from me) must sound and look to a kid today.” p. 169
• Being a kid: “As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it. What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible.” p. 65

One of the reasons I enjoyed this so much, even though Chabon and I have little in common, is that we’re of the same generation. I could totally relate to his references to a carefree childhood, and I got most of the pop culture references (except for Wacky Packages. I think I was isolated in the boonies of Oregon when those were in their heyday).

Also, Chabon is a gifted writer (I think). I love his use of language, as well as the things he comes up with. Many of the essays were both profound AND entertaining. And despite the title, I think this is a book equally relevant to men and women.

I’ve passed this on to a friend’s husband, and last I heard he was totally engrossed in it.

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
2009
658 pages
Published by Vintage Books

“Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?” -p. 95

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin boys born to a nun that no one knew was pregnant. After their mother, Sister Mary Praise dies in childbirth and their father, Dr. Thomas Stone, disappears, they are adopted and raised by two Indian doctors, Hema and Ghosh. Marion and Shiva are raised within the grounds of Missing Hospital, in Addis Ababa. Although they are of Indian and English descent, Ethiopia is an integral part of their lives.

“Call me unwanted, call my birth a disaster, call me the bastard child of a disgraced nun and a disappeared father, call me a cold-blooded killer who lies to the brother of the man I killed, but that loamy soil that nurtured Matron’s roses was in my flesh. I said Ethyo-pya like a native. Let those born in other lands speak of Eee-thee-op-eee-ya, as if it were a compound name like Sharm el Sheikh, or Dar es Salaam or Rio de Janeiro. The Entoto Mountains disappearing in darkness framed my horizons; if I left, those mountains would sink back into the ground, descend into nothingness; the mountains needed me to gaze at their tree-filled slopes, just as I needed them to be certain I was alive. The canopy of stars at night; that, too, was my birthright. A celestial gardener sowed meskel seeds so that when the rainy season ended, the daisies bloomed in welcome. Even the Drowning Soil, the foul-smelling quicksand behind Missing, which had swallowed a horse, a dog, a man, and God knows what else – I claimed that as well.
Light and dark.
The General and the Emperor.
Good and evil.
All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would become of me?” -p. 349

Verghese does a wonderful job of evoking Ethiopia throughout the novel. The revolution, the people, the food…all play a key role in Marion’s (our narrator) life.

To some extent, this novel is reminiscent of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, another novel set in Ethiopia during the turbulent time following the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. Although I think that novel was published more recently, so perhaps I should flip that statement. Both books have strong characters whose lives are affected by the events of the revolution, and both do a tremendous job of portraying Ethiopia. However, I think Cutting for Stone is a more sweeping novel, broader in scope and with deeper characters. Marion recounts his life story, and the stories of his parents, as well as some of Hema and Ghosh’s stories, as well. At 658 pages you might think that this is a chunkster, but it never feels that way. There are a ton of side stories and what initially appear to be meandering reflections, but Verghese ties everything together. And not in a tidy, pat way. It’s just that if he includes a detail, you can be assured it’s for a damn good reason. This book kept me engaged through all of its 658 pages…it was a heck of a ride, and I’m bummed that it had to end.

And if anyone is wondering, including those snoops at the FTC, I bought this book at Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara…a bookstore I dream of returning to.

The Story of a Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer
2008
195 pages

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I bought this book at last year’s LA Times Festival of Books…sometimes it takes me awhile to get around to reading things. But at least I remembered where this one came from! I’d hate to disappoint the FTC, you know.

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“We think we know the ones we love.”

This phrase appears a few times in this book, and it is perhaps the best way to describe the story.

Pearlie Cook is San Francisco housewife in the early 1950’s. As she retraces the story of her relationship with her husband Holland, some surprises crop up. And the surprises are beautifully done. Some you can figure out, and others you can’t, and even better, they’re really not the focus of the story (I’m still not going to tell you what they are, though). Just as the title states, this is the story of a marriage, and the secrets within it. And not the secrets I just mentioned, but rather what you choose to share, and what still remains private, even when you are married. Because just like the opening line states, you may think you know the one you love, but there are still things that can surprise you, and things that need to be said. In this story, both Holland and Pearlie have secrets, but they also operate under assumptions.

This is a hard book to discuss, though, because I don’t want to give anything away. I’ll just tell you that it is a gorgeous story, both for the writing and the characters. I wasn’t expecting to be so captivated by it, particularly by lines like this:

“We kept each other’s stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instance – which is the only definition of happiness I know.” p. 137

The Queen of Palmyra
Minrose Gwin
April 2010
416 pages

It’s funny how different things stand out to different readers. I interrupted a conversation on Twitter between Bookfool and The Book Lady as they were discussing this book. Bookfool couldn’t finish it, due to the excessive number of cockroaches that appeared in the beginning of the book. And Rebecca was finding it difficult to wade through the similes. Me, I loved it…I barely remember the roaches and I didn’t even notice the similes (actually, I probably wouldn’t recognize a simile if it bit me on the butt).

However, my problem is that the day after I finished this book (which I loved so much I read in one day) I started seeing reviews pop up. Seems the book is on tour with TLC. Which is awesome, seeing as how I want the book to have lots of love, and I happen to really like TLC. Thing is, I’m not part of this tour (yes, FTC, that means I bought the book…well, sort of, I had a gift card from my birthday that I used, so really my boss bought the book for me) and the thought of all the reviews that would soon be forthcoming infected me with BBB (book blogger’s block). Okay, not really, but doesn’t that sound better than “I don’t know what the hell to write?”

So what did stand about this book for me? I honestly can’t pinpoint any one thing, but I can tell you that it grabbed me at the beginning and wouldn’t let me go. I found myself crossing my fingers (and toes) for our young narrator, Florence, as she deals with her neglectful, dysfunctional mother and her abusive, racist father. Sure, there are times when you want to scream at Florence to sit up at take notice (or sit up and scream “no!”), but then you remember that it’s the 1960s and she’s a young girl. This is one of those southern coming-of-age novels that works (well, for me, at least). While the setting may be familiar (racial tension, a hot summer, violence…), Florence is different enough that the story is still unique. I’ve seen it compared to To Kill a Mockingbird and The Help, but I found it to have a completely different feel. This is Florence’s story, and it’s painfully obvious at times that she just has no clue.

And Ti loved this one so much she’s the reason I bought the book. You should go check out her review.

The Girl Who Chased the Moon
Sarah Addison Allen
March 2010
288 pages

I love Allen’s books, even if they are all somewhat similar. Sometimes that works for an author, and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, I have yet to get tired of Allen’s magical books. They’re just the ticket for when you need a light but captivating read. The Girl Who Chased the Moon was perfect for that afternoon when I just couldn’t decide what I wanted to read and everything else sounded either too meh or too heavy.

I’ve been writing reviews and posts all day (I’m trying to get most everything done in advance for the rest of the month in preparation for vacation), so I’m going to leave you with the synopsis from Publishers Weekly:

Allen’s latest (after The Sugar Queen) takes the familiar setup of a young protagonist returning to the small town where her elusive mother was raised, and subverts it by sprinkling just enough magic into the narrative to keep things lively but short of saccharine. Seventeen-year-old Emily Benedict, intent on learning more about her mother, Dulcie, moves in with her grandfather, but is disappointed to find that her grandfather doesn’t want to talk much about Dulcie. She soon discovers, though, that many still hold a grudge against Dulcie for the way she treated an old sweetheart before dumping him and disappearing. Luckily, Dulcie’s high school adversary, Julia Winterson, back in town to pay down her deceased father’s debt, takes a shine to Emily. She’s working another quest as well: baking cakes every day with the hope that they’ll somehow attract the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago. There are love interests, big family secrets, and magical happenings (color-changing wallpaper, mysterious lights) aplenty as Allen charts the spiraling inter-generational stories, bringing everything together in an unexpected way.

Psst, FTC…you probably thought I forgot ya, but I didn’t. I bought this book.