No fluff or fantasy: Mister Pip

OK, OK, I broke my own rule that I'm only reading fluff and fantasy this year... but Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, was a Mother's Day gift. The narrator, Matilida, uses Great Expectations as a catalyst to escape her war torn world. Through the course of the book, we come to realize that her beloved teacher, Mr. Watts does the same thing, but with him, one can't be sure what is fact or fiction.

I thoroughly enjoyed this work, but I have to read it again. It is so rich! It makes me think of Life of Pi to a certain degree, in the sense that the book illustrates how one can separate one's self during times of terrible trauma. Again, it is a highly engaging book with beautiful prose.

Here is the publisher's description of the book:
After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s island, only one white person stays behind. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens.

For Matilda, Dickens’s hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Watts’s book begins to inflame the children’s imaginations with dreams about Dickens’s London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip?

Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Jones’s breathtaking novel shows what magic a child’s imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I can't forget this gem of a book. What fun! What a suspension of reality! I am having such a good time reading the Eyre Affair. It is refreshing and fun, and challenges me to use my English degree. I'm not even finished yet, but I would recommend it! Here is a overview from Amazon.co.uk:

Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair puts you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney

Fluff and Fantasy

My Summer Sister by Judy Bloom was an enjoyable read, but it left me wanting. It just wasn't satisfying for me. So I turned to another author. My goal this year is to read nothing but fluff and fantasy, so I started to read, Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan -- a book highly recommended by a colleague. Unfortunately, I couldn't handle the separation of Momah, the married woman who falls in love with Frank Lloyd Wright, and her children. Not enough fluff for me.

So I turned to The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler. Again, I enjoyed the book, but I didn't find the characters rich enough for me. I struggled to remember who was who and unlike other books filled with different characters, I could barely visualize anyone. It was an enjoyable read, though. And an added bonus: I got a lead on a number of different science fiction/ fantasy authors. Science fiction is in line with my goal of fluff and fantasy.

But back to JABC, here is a blurb from the publisher:
From the Publisher
In California''s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships. Dedicated Austenites [which I'm not] will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy. "This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears Fowler''s shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don''t have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. . . Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar with her. There's no better introduction."

Keeping up with the Babysitter...

My babysitter was horrified when I admitted that I hadn't read Twighlight by Stephenie Meyers. I was assured that it was an "awesome" book and that I had to read it.

As a result, I read the first then the following two books, New Moon and Eclipse. Ah, what a love story. What teenage angst! The mental anguish: Edward or Jacob?!?

"The story begins with a familiar YA premise (the new kid in school), and lulls us into thinking this will be just another realistic young adult novel. Bella has come to the small town of Forks on the gloomy Olympic Peninsula to be with her father. At school, she wonders about a group of five remarkably beautiful teens, who sit together in the cafeteria but never eat.

As she grows to know, and then love, Edward, she learns their secret. They are all rescued vampires, part of a family headed by saintly Carlisle, who has inspired them to renounce human prey. For Edward's sake they welcome Bella, but when a roving group of tracker vampires fixates on her, the family is drawn into a desperate pursuit to protect the fragile human in their midst. "

The sensitivity of Meyer's writing lifts this novel beyond the limitations of the horror genre to a place among the best of YA fiction. Although the book is recommended for young adults, aged 12 and older, I think this is more of a teenager novel, and I would suggest 14 years and older.

Four Queens

Drat, I missed last week's book discussion.

As requested, here is publisher's blurb about the Four Queens for those of you who missed the meeting:

"Four Queens" is a rich pageant of glamour, intrigue, and feminine power at a time when women were thought to have played limited roles. In thirteenth-century Europe, four sisters from a single family-Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia, and Beatrice of Provence-rose from obscurity to become the queens of, respectively, France, England, Germany, and Sicily. All four were beautiful, cultured, and ambitious, and their stories offer a window into the era of chivalry, crusades, poetry, knights, and monarchs that will appeal to fans of Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser.

Happy New Year

Book Review Refugees met Jan. 15 to discuss an interesting array of titles. Individuals reviewed the following:

1. Four Queens : the Provencal Sisters who ruled Europe, by Nancy Goldstone
2. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer (MS)
3. Run, by Ann Patchett (JK)
4. Life on the Refrigerator Door, by Alice Kuipers
5. Raisin Wine : a boy hood in a different Muskoka (LM)
6. 44 Scotland Street, by Alexander McCall-Smith (KP)
7. Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay (ME)
8. Pontoon : a Lake Wobegon novel, by Garrison Keillor (SK)

We meet again on February 19.

We didn't discuss books in December. Instead JK and IK made us a lovley dinner!

The November titles were:
November 6 , 2007

1. The Almost Moon, by Alice Sebold (MS)
2. October, by Richard B. Wright (JK)
3. Girls of Riyadh, by Rajaa Alsema (LM)
4. Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, by Laurie Viera Rigler (KP)
5. Austenland, by Shannon Hale (KP)