Live Blog – Reading THE KID by Sapphire

So. We all know that I have some serious procrastination issues. I had three book reviews to do this week (MY FAULT) and because my life is insane (also… my fault) and I think that procrastination is a skill, not a problem, I’m still reading The Kid by Sapphire for the TLC Book Tour. I’ve decided that my procrastination shall be your reward… or this will be really stupid and I’ll never do it again.

Basically, I’m going to live update this post with my thoughts and feelings on The Kid, sans spoilers. I’m sure I will have lots of opinions.

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10:49 AM – Let’s begin! I’m already about 120 pages into the book and so far, wow. This is so difficult to read. You never really know what’s real and what’s happening, at least you’re never sure. Abdul or J.J., Precious’s son, is on his own after Precious dies of AIDS. He has been staying at a home for boys, but got kicked out because he abused a little boy. Abused children often become the abusers, I know that, but reading this was so incredibly infuriating and I can’t even describe it. This book is very graphic, be warned.

11:21 AM – One of the things I do like about The Kid is the way Sapphire is consistently and constantly reminding us that Abdul is an unreliable narrator. Is all of this really happening, or is he imagining it? It’s hard to tell what is real and what isn’t, what people actually say. It’s an interesting technique, but one that makes a slightly frustrating read. Now I’m going to take a break for lunch.

1:43 PM – I’m back from lunch! (It was far away.) Let the reading continue!

1:49 PM – I’m currently on pg 143. My favorite parts of this novel, so far, are when Abdul goes to dance class. When he is living at the school for young boys, they have free time on Saturdays. He chooses to take an African dance class. The narration really suits itself to describing dance, since it is so reliant on sounds, much like poetry. This is something I remember loving in Push.

3:35 PM – You really can’t read this book straight through. I’m on page 203 now, because I took a break to do something else. It’s hard to see the word through Abdul’s eyes for very long. The perspective shift that happens here, when Abdul’s great-grandmother is telling her story, is difficult to read.

4:20 PM – Pg. 250 – UGH. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

5:00 PM – Pg. 295 – We just heard another characters horrible story. This is so painful to read. It just keeps getting worse and worse. I hope there’s something redeeming about this novel, something hopeful, because if not, I’m not sure what the point is.

5:49 PM – Finished the book. Wow. That was one of the most intense, disturbing and, quite honestly, awful reading experiences of my life. Sapphire is a brilliant writer, but I question the merits of this story. There is no hope, nothing beautiful about this story, except perhaps dance. And not even Abdul’s love of dance can save him. I’m going to  take a few minutes to gather up my thoughts and put together a short review for the end of this post.

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Final thoughts: Any novel by Sapphire is art, but there’s a certain fact that the entire plot of The Kid revolves around. I was having a conversation with Doret and she pointed out, and I have to agree, that she just doesn’t believe that Precious didn’t come up with any plans for Abdul for after he died. It just doesn’t make any sense, after everything Precious did to change her life. It was exhausting experiencing Abdul’s mind for over 350 pages and I think one of Push‘s strengths was its length. It was very short, but it packed an overwhelming emotional punch. The Kid was more like running a marathon, but I’m just not sure it worked. So many horrible things happened and Abdul was such a horrible narrator, it was hard to like this book. Does that mean I think it’s a bad book? No, it’s amazingly well-written. But I did not enjoy reading it and I can’t  say I could ever recommend it.

Nerds Heart YA!

I’m a day late! I know. I have lots of excuses. Like “I’m moving!” Actually the real excuse is that I thought that this post was supposed to go up on the 27th, but fortunately I checked my calendar and realized that I was way behind schedule. So yesterday I had a reading marathon (please don’t judge my procrastination) and I am happy to say that I have come to a decision. Maybe.

Let’s start with the basics. Pull and Jumpstart the World actually have a lot in common. Last year, I read two books for this competition that were so drastically different. I still think I chose the right book, but that doesn’t mean that the other wasn’t great. That’s true this year too, but there’s a lot more to compare here. Both of these books are told in the first person by young people who are suddenly forced to change their living situations. Both books feature a serious accident as a catalyst in the novel. Both take place in large cities, Jumpstart the World in New York and Pull in Chicago. Both characters have a talent that they use to help them heal. Both main characters have strong, realistic voices that totally pulled me into their stories.

I really liked both of these novels, but I didn’t necessarily love either of them. For very different reasons. With Pull, I loved David’s voice and I thought it was realistic, but I didn’t always like what he had to say. In Jumpstart the World, the characters were very real, and Elle has a consistent, believable voice, but I almost groaned when Elle’s next door neighbors begin talking about activism. It’s just so obvious, we all knew that this is where Jumpstart the World was going, but I really didn’t like that Hyde felt the need to spell it out so clearly. As if we wouldn’t have gotten it on our own. Nothing gets me riled up like when an author doesn’t believe her audience is smart enough to get it on their own.

But Pull’s narrative structure left a lot to be desired and it ended much too conveniently. Though I did really like the decision that David made. It’s not what I expected, but it was probably a lot more realistic and honest. As far as the characters in Pull, we are so completely in David’s mind, it’s hard to see the characters as anything but one dimensional. Yolanda, David’s love interest, is a little bit more complex than that, but everyone else really just seemed flat, especially when compared to the ways we saw the characters through Elle’s eyes.

The characters are much more complex in Jumpstart the World and I felt like I could connect more with Elle over David. But Jumpstart the World is just so convenient. There are mothers out there who would dump their children for a boyfriend, but what mother would then rent a entirely separate apartment for that daughter? In New York City, no less. Really? I just had a hard time believing any of it. But I did believe Elle’s emotions and I did believe everything that happened after.

When it comes down to it, I liked and disliked Jumpstart the World and Pull in pretty much equal measures, but I have to go with the novel that I connected to more. I think that the way Jumpstart the World explained and represented a cisgendered girl encountering a transgendered man for the first time was really impressive and this book’s greatest strength. And that really is the point, isn’t it? I am perfectly able to look beyond some of the faults here to admire completely the gentle way Jumpstart the World starts the conversation about how difficult it is to be transgender, even in a place like New York City.

Jumpstart the World moves on!

Nerds Heart YA is a bracket-style competition that was started by Renay. This is my second year participating and it’s one of my favorite blogging events every year! Pull by BA Binns was originally reviewed by The Rejectionist and I have to say, I definitely agree with their assessment about David. Jumpstart the World was first reviewed by TATAL, and while I didn’t love Jumpstart the World as much as they did, I am still pleased to have it move on in the competition!

Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy

Oh, Simon Van Booy.  Everyone truly seems to love him and his fiction. I remember when Love Begins in Winter was being reviewed left and right a year or so ago and thinking it would be something I’d love. So when I was offered the chance to review it, I jumped at it. Now that I’ve finished reading it, I would call this a hit or miss collection of five stories, with two that I loved, two that were okay and one that I didn’t understand at all.

When Simon Van Booy is on, he’s excellent. He is a good writer and he has some lines that really make your heart stop with just how beautiful they are. That was true of all of his stories, they all had beautiful lines in them, but sometimes the rest of the story just didn’t live up to those moments.

It’s difficult to explain sometimes why something isn’t quite right with a story. Part of it is that I just didn’t feel that the narrative was always genuine, but I have a much harder time pinpointing what exactly makes a narrative less genuine. In the case of the stories “Love Begins in Winter” and “Tiger, Tiger” it seemed like the structure was more important than the actual story.

But what about what I do love? I love the way Van Booy moves effortlessly back and forth between time. Even in the stories I didn’t like as much, the way the narrative subtly explained the histories of the characters through shifts in the time was so well done. I love lines like “Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land” (49) and “All siblings have a secret life from their parents. Parents love their children, but children need each other to negotiate the strange forest they find themselves in” (28). And I love the story “The Coming and Going of Strangers,” it’s the most beautiful story in this collection.

In the end, I think Love Begins in Winter is like most story collections. Most readers, in my experience, don’t love every story. But if the stories you do love make you want to read more, then the collection has done its job. I think Simon Van Booy is an author I will revisit in the future.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me this book to review. You can find out more about the tour, including past and future tour stops, here.

A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano

This is a different kind of book love story. A couple weeks ago, we were promoting A Good Hard Look for FridayReads and I got to spend a lot of time with Ann Napolitano’s website. I love her website. It’s beautiful, it’s helpful, it has unique and original content, not just links to the places you can buy her novels. It also has an excerpt of A Good Hard Look. Trying to come up with some clever tweets, I tweeted about one line in the first few pages, “The peacocks were not out to make friends.” I knew in that instant that I had to read this book.

A Good Hard Look completely lived up to every single expectation I had. In fact, it might have exceeded them. I am always wary of historical fiction novels that feature real-life people. In the case of A Good Hard Look, that person is Flannery O’Connor. I’ve never read anything by O’Connor, except for a story here and there, but I’ve been intrigued by her for a while now. A Good Hard Look just made me more interested in O’Connor and her fiction. But back to this story.

On the eve of Cookie Himmel and Melvin Whitestone’s wedding, Cookie’s cousin Flannery’s peacocks just won’t shut up. Restless because of the noise, Cookie gets up and and trips over a stool, giving herself a black eye. The next morning, she walks down the aisle, picture perfect, except for her eye. That bruise foreshadows everything that will take place in Millidgeville, the small town where Flannery O’Connor grew up and where she returns when she is diagnosed with lupus, like her father. Later in the book, Flannery and Melvin form an unlikely friendship, while Cookie refuses to have anything to do with the cousin she despises. Meanwhile, Lorna designs the curtains for the wealthy Whitestones, while employing Flannery’s next door neighbor, the teenage Joe.

These plots weave together beautifully to a tragic climax that affects everyone in Millidgeville. I think the best novels are the ones that, when a tragedy occurs, you just can’t believe it yourself. You want to go back to that time in the novel when everyone was happy, or when everything is “good”, as the first part of the novel is titled. What happened hit me hard and, honestly, was so unexpected. Ann Napolitano has written a book that truly just made me feel. I felt Flannery’s loneliness and the joy she felt when she was with Melvin. I felt Melvin’s helplessness in front of his own life. He’s a wealthy man, but he never seems to do much with it or do much at all, until he meets Flannery. I understood Cookie’s resentment of her famous cousin. And when it all fell apart, I fell apart too. These characters were just so real.

In a recent article, Ann Napolitano says that she thinks Flannery O’Connor would have hated this book. I have to agree with her, but only because I think the Flannery that Napolitano created is so vivid and real. And while she is the “backbone” of this novel, as Napolitano describes her, she’s not necessarily what this book is about. This book is about the complexity of love and all of its manifestations and it is done beautifully.

So go read this!: now | tomorrow | next week | next month | next year | when you’ve read everything else

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book to review. You can read more about the tour, including links to other tour stops, here. 

A note on life, books and blogging

Ah, summer. Every summer I find myself writing a post about how, shockingly, summer is never what I expect it to be. I always expect to have a ton of time to blog, but like every summer, this one finds me blogging a little bit less. I blog when I have the chance and I’m okay with that. There have been a lot of people lately that have been changing their blog, making it a more personal blog, and I love that. I love to hear what people are doing in their lives and I love to hear how everyone is. Because if I don’t know who you are as a person, how can I know who you are as a blogger? On our blogs we are who we want to be. I think most of us try to be as close to our real-life selves as possible, but we are still our best selves. Or rather, the best self we are capable of  projecting. I want my book reviews to be about the books, but I also want them to be about me. I want you to know how and why I relate to a book so you can know if you will, too. But I, too, get tired of just expressing that person through book reviews.

Regular Rumination has never been anything but what I have made it. I know what I want Regular Rumination to be and I hope you don’t mind that it has never been as well-organized as some other blogs, as focused or even as open. I admire bloggers who are able to turn their blog into a brand, but the truth is that Regular Rumination has always just been about me and my thoughts. Though in my professional life I have decided to pursue publishing, thanks largely to this blog and the connections I have made because of it, I want to let you know that Regular Rumination will continue to be what it already is: me, telling you about books. I don’t review the most recent books, I don’t get tons of review copies, I often leave my “Currently Reading” book photo unchanged for months, and I read what I want, when I want. I read YA, I read literary fiction, I read comics, I read nonfiction; I have a niche, and it is called words.

Sometimes the pressure is there to make Regular Rumination bigger than it is. Sometimes jealousy is there, I admit that openly. But the overwhelming majority of the time, I’m just as in love with my little corner of the internet as I was when I wrote my first post. Blogging has changed a lot since Regular Rumination began, mostly because social media is always shifting and changing and reinventing itself. I started this blog when the internet was still a place where you kept your name a secret, but the reality is that Lu, while a nickname that I use mostly on the internet, is as much a part of me and my identity as Leslie is. I have been some variation of Lu on the web since 2001 and while I sometimes contemplate going by Leslie, especially since I want to jump into the publishing industry, it’s never suited this blog or my internet identity. I’ll always be Lu here and that separation is necessary. I want books to present in every part of my life, but I still want this, my hobby and my passion, to be different from my job.

All of this began as a simple note, a note to explain one thing that has changed at Regular Rumination the last few months. I’m sure you’ve noticed more review copies and NetGalley titles. I wanted to express that this is not because I am not buying books, I’m buying and reading just as many books as before, but I’m in the process of moving, twice. So I will not have access to a library for at least another month or two and most of my books are in storage. For that reason, I have been reading review copies and NetGalleys to make up for the library books that I no longer have access to.

Life sometimes gets in the way of blogging, but blogging sometimes changes your life. My career has changed, for the better, and I have met such amazing people through Regular Rumination. I hope I’ll get to meet some of you in real life some day. For now, I’m happy with what this blog is and what it has become. I’m happy that I can write nearly 1,000 words about blogging and books and reviewing and feel that it has a place on my blog. I’m happy that I can ramble and I don’t have to apologize, this is my space and you have helped me make it what it is. I’m happy that I see Regular Rumination being my home on the internet for a long time. Thank you for being such a huge part of my little corner of the internet. Thank you for talking about books with me.