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Book Review: Towelhead

BuzzSugar — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:30:50 -0700

I first heard of Towelhead when I caught a trailer for the Alan Ball-directed film adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel. The trailer looked like a sweet (perhaps a little bittersweet) coming-of-age story with moments of dark humor. The book is all of these things, but I was not at all prepared for exactly how disturbing it would be, or how utterly sad.

Towelhead is written in the frank and simplistic words of 13-year-old Jasira, the daughter of a white mother and a Lebanese father. In the summer of 1991, Jasira moves from her mother’s house in Syracuse, NY, to Houston, TX, to live with her strict father, Rifat. In a largely white community, Jasira becomes increasingly aware of the fact that she’s different and that different is bad. But when she starts to date a fellow student who is black, Rifat angrily forbids her from seeing him, reacting out of deep-seated prejudices he insists he doesn't possess. For more about Towelhead, read more.

Turns out, most things anger Jasira’s father, and when he's angry, he hits Jasira and berates her. Meanwhile, Jasira's next-door neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, offers her the attention and what she perceives to be positive affection that she so desperately craves. Unfortunately, Mr. Vuoso wants to be way more than just a friendly neighbor and at the root of his interest in Jasira there’s a sinister, ugly desire. Jasira’s one ray of hope comes from another neighbor, a young pregnant woman named Melina who wants to help and protect Jasira.

At times it’s a frustrating read because Jasira has very few people she can trust not to hurt her and this grows wearying. Even her mother has jealousy issues and blames Jasira for any number of things she couldn't possibly have done. Jasira’s father constantly finds fault with her, mostly having to do with her developing body. The worst parts involve Mr. Vuoso, whose depraved exploitation of Jasira’s naivete and her burgeoning curiosity about sex is absolutely heartbreaking and difficult to read. Thus, she receives mixed messages about her body and her sexuality: shame and disgust from her father, leering objectification from the adult man next door, and a slightly more innocent desire for exploration from a boy her age.

In truth, there are parts of this book that made me feel like vomiting, and I had to put it down at times. And yet somehow, Erian's writing made me obsessed with Jasira’s story and I had to keep reading. As bleak and horrible as it can get, Jasira's narration is so simplistic and childlike, I kept reading just so I could see if she would ever find some kind of relief, love, or peace. There are also points of great humor as Jasira tries to navigate this new, very adult world all by herself. It’s a gripping tale, and I really like Erian’s no-nonsense writing style, though it’s also emotionally trying.

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Book Review: Certain Girls

BuzzSugar — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:30:00 -0700

When I was first introduced to the smart, hilariously sassy Cannie Shapiro in Jennifer Weiner's Good in Bed, I felt like I'd made a friend. She's clever, outspoken, fun and talented, though she also, like many of us, struggles with her weight and her feelings of self-worth. Thus, I was delighted to find out that we get a continuation of Cannie's story in Certain Girls - and this time there's another voice talking: Cannie's now-13-year-old daughter, Joy.

Joy, whose premature birth left her with hearing problems, has always known that her mother wrote a salacious, bestselling novel many years ago but never had much interest in reading it - until now. And what she reads horrifies her. She starts to question her mother's honesty, and goes in search of the truth about her family's history. Meanwhile, Cannie's husband Peter wants to find a surrogate so he and Cannie can have their own baby together. Not loving the idea, Cannie explores their options while also trying to plan a bat mitzvah for her surly teenage girl.

In a rare occurrence of the sequel surpassing the original, I enjoyed Certain Girls more than I liked Good in Bed. To find out why, read more.

While I like the character of Cannie and the collection of hilarious characters that surround her in Good in Bed, that book is a whole lotta Cannie. It's also fanciful in ways that I couldn't quite swallow at times. But Certain Girls benefits from Joy's voice and her teenage perspective. At times it struck a chord so familiar I had to put down the book, recognizing as I did the painful experiences of puberty. It's also surprisingly fun to get a new, inside look at Cannie through her daughter's eyes. Certain Girls is also darker, in many ways, and though there's still a good amount of fantasy-world fun, there's also a hefty dose of real-world drama. Perhaps because of this, I became powerfully attached to this mother-daughter duo and had to do that thing where I lingered over the final few pages to try and make it last.

Bottom line: Certain Girls isn't literary perfection, but it is a funny, absorbing and emotional read.

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Book Review: One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding

BuzzSugar — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 06:00:00 -0700

As you know, we've been paying a lot of attention to weddings this season on the Sugar Network. This week, we're wrapping up our coverage by talking about what happens when the honeymoon's over and the newlyweds begin their lives together.

Of course, one of the things the happy couple might be doing upon their return home is paying the wedding bills. With the plethora of vendors involved in assembling a modern wedding, the costs can add up fast. But how did American weddings become such a major investment, with an average cost comparable to a year's education at one of the nation's top universities?

That's the question New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead sets out to answer in One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. Mead traces the anatomy of a standard wedding, from the first attempt to capture an engaged woman's attention through bridal magazines to the department stores' attempts to secure a customer for life by providing a gift registry, and analyzes how the flowers, gowns, and honeymoons add up to a $161-billion industry. By putting weddings in their historical context, Mead also suggests that what we think of as a "traditional" wedding with all the trimmings might not be so traditional at all, with marketers inventing new customs to serve our fantasies of happily ever after. To read more about Mead's revelations - and learn about the book's one major shortcoming - read more

Some of Mead's revelations are sobering. In one chapter, she visits a videographers' convention where those in attendance are ordered to double their prices to prey on the families who will want "only the best" for their daughters. In another, she visits a bridal parlor where she discovers a supposedly high-quality gown with a "100 percent polyester" price tag and traces the creation of others to a sweatshop floor in China. She reports on the glee with which wedding vendors react to the ever-rising cost of the average American wedding, figuring that if people are told they should expect to spend upwards of $27,000 on a wedding, they'll assume they have no choice but to do it. It's fairly terrifying - though maybe not entirely unexpected - to see all of the ways in which head honchos in the wedding industry refer to brides as consumers and customers, people who only exist to fill their coffers - hopefully long after the wedding day has passed.

But in Mead's takedown of the wedding industry, she fails to include one major segment of the wedding population: the brides - and grooms - themselves. The engaged couple Mead portrays is totally at the mercy of the wedding industry, hemming and hawing over the perfect shade of napkins and ultimately pulling out the credit card again and again in search of some fantasy of a perfect wedding (and, therefore, a perfect marriage). But save for some anonymous interviews at the very end of the book, Mead never asks real-life brides and grooms why they feed the machine. And she never talks to any couples who have chosen to have their weddings outside the corporate wedding culture; to hear Mead tell it, she and her husband - who got married in a courthouse ceremony, as Mead makes clear at the end of the book - might be the only such couple in existence.

Ultimately, Mead does a fine job of exposing the corporate side of wedding culture. But when it comes to achieving a true understanding of why couples often choose to marry in an elaborate, expensive way, the book falls short.

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Book Review: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

BuzzSugar — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 12:00:17 -0700

I'm excited about a lot of the movies premiering at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, and Suburban Girl is near the top of my list. It's based on two of the short stories from Melissa Bank's collection The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which was one of my favorite books when it came out in 1999. It had been a while since I'd read the book, so with the movie looming, I decided to drag my old paperback off the shelf and see if the book still holds up.

And it does. Bank's books (she also wrote The Wonder Spot) are great examples of what I like to call "upscale chick lit" - well-written stories with central female characters who are intelligent, witty and unafraid to speak their minds. In Girls' Guide, the focus is Jane Rosenal, whom we first meet as a 14-year-old realizing, as she watches her brother's relationship with his girlfriend slowly disintegrate, that the quest for true love really sucks.

Jane never stops looking for love, but as she grows older she also starts trying to piece together the other components of a fulfilling life. Those interests intersect fiercely in the two stories on which Suburban Girl is based, so read more

"My Old Man" and "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine" show Jane at her conflicted and endearing best. She's in her 20s, trying to succeed in publishing, when she meets Archie Knox, a powerful executive at a rival firm. She's drawn to him, but in a matter-of-fact way; there's no hearts-and-flowers romance, just a series of dinner meetings and sudden advances. Not even half his age, she longs to impress him, to be the sharp, brilliant woman he's been looking for. "I stored up stories to tell him," Jane says at one point. "I practiced them in my head." She wants to hold her own with him, but at every turn, he gives her a new challenge - his alcoholism, his playboy past, his unexpected difficulties in bed.

In the second of the stories, "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine," the Archie story dovetails with that of the other important man in Jane's life: her father. After a brief breakup, Jane is back with Archie, much to her family's disappointment, and she's also in the process of choosing to ruin her career rather than please her boss, a sort of Miranda Priestly-lite. Then she finds out her father is dying of leukemia, which snaps everything into perspective - but not in the way you'd imagine. I've reread that story several times now, and there are a few lines that always give me chills.

I'm glad the movie zeroed in on those two stories; they have a coherent arc, and they show off the strongest parts of Jane (called Brett in the movie) as a character. But the other stories in Girls' Guide are also worth a read, including the hilarious final chapter in which Jane decides to abandon her natural sarcasm and try out the dating techniques in a book called How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right. She imagines the authors perched on her shoulder, telling her when to talk and what to say ("Keep him guessing!" "Let him pay!"). In the end, of course, she figures out it's all ridiculous, and she leaves us with a pure, simple revelation that sums up Jane's whole story: "I realize that I can say whatever I want now. And I do."

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Book Review: Little Children by Tom Perrotta

BuzzSugar — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:35:05 -0800

Little Children didn't win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay; that honor went to The Departed, which was merely adapted from another film script. But translating Tom Perrotta's novel to the screen is almost as much of a no-brainer: This book was just made to be made into a movie.

Now a critically acclaimed film starring Kate Winslet (who earned an Oscar nod for the role), Little Children pays homage to the adult suburban dystopias imagined by authors like John Cheever and The Ice Storm author Rick Moody. But here, the story is told entirely with an eye toward children, from toddler play dates threatened by a child molester to grown-ups behaving like children.

Fittingly, the storytelling style leans more toward parable than novel, which is precisely why it's better suited to film, so

Essentially the story of two adults indulging in a youthful summer romance, Little Children centers on Sarah (played by Winslet in the film), a recovering radical poseur turned suburban mom who can't stomach the vapidness of her playground peers. That is, until she meets Todd, a hunky dad the moms call "the Prom King," and the two start a convenient love affair.

Meanwhile, a convicted child molester moves to town, and Todd and his football-team buddies rally to protect the local kids and end up looking rather foolish in the process. At a meeting of concerned parents, Todd is described as "plagued by the self-consciousness of the imposter, an adult playing dress-up."

And therein lies the book's central conflict, as both Todd and Sarah feel thrust into adult responsibility before their time. Both they and the other characters feel extraordinarily one-dimensional, and - parable-style aside - I found myself getting angry at their whininess. Meanwhile, the simple, conversational prose reads so much like a script treatment I found myself wondering why I didn't just put down the book and go see the movie, where capable actors might add some depth to the characters.

Now, I just need to see Little Children; if you've seen the movie (or, better yet, also read the book), tell me what you think.

Book Review: A Long Way Down

BuzzSugar — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:02:05 -0800

Nick Hornby's gift for witty, cinematic prose lends itself to big-screen transformations, and A Long Way Down is no exception. Recently, Warner Brothers announced it would turn the 2005 novel into a movie produced by Johnny Depp. If you haven't had a chance to read this slightly sinister but hilarious novel, now's the perfect time, since the launching point for the whole sordid plot begins on New Year's Eve, when four strangers find themselves scheming to plunge to their deaths from the same London skyscraper.

Though the premise is morbid, A Long Way Down is less about death and more about learning to appreciate the absurdities of life. Craftily, Hornby manages to pull this off without the least bit of sentimentality or condescension, so

After the foursome decides to nix the whole suicide idea, the characters take turns narrating the group's story, and we learn what was so terrible in the first place. The constantly shifting perspectives, which follow the players as they reunite in cafes and on misguided holidays, are what make this book so captivating. There's a former TV show host named Martin, who loses his job and custody of his kids after a sex scandal, but his tone and take on the story is completely different from that of Maureen, whose only diversion is caring for her vegetable son.

The book's major weakness is that it could have been about one-third as long. But with its excesses of laugh-out-loud funny and crushingly human moments A Long Way Down is such a fast-paced read that you'll still be sorry when it's over.

Book Review: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

BuzzSugar — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 07:26:00 -0800

There have been plenty of books narrated by wise teenage girls, but it's possible there's never been a protagonist quite so literary as Blue Van Meer. The voice of Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Blue was raised on books and black-and-white movies in random small towns across America while her professor father jumped from college to college. She's socially awkward and generally too smart for her own good, but her research skills serve her well when she's thrust into the center of a mystery that only she can unravel.

Early in the story, Blue's father decides they'll spend Blue's entire senior year in one town: Stockton, North Carolina, where Blue is expected to become valedictorian of her class at the prestigious St. Gallway School and secure admission to Harvard. Before classes begin, Blue randomly meets Hannah Schneider, a St. Gallway teacher who facilitates Blue's adoption into the Bluebloods, a clique of misfit teens who idolize Hannah and grudgingly accept Blue. The story gets dark from there, so read more

It's not a spoiler to say that Hannah dies: It's on the book's first page, and the manner of her death is spelled out on the jacket's front flap. But how the story unfolds is intriguing, putting Blue's tenuous friendships in jeopardy and leading to a clever twist ending that I never saw coming.

The trouble with Special Topics is that it can be too clever for its own good, all stylistic charms (pen-and-ink sketches, chapter headings named after Great Books, even a final exam) without a lot of substance to fill its 500 pages. It feels more like a game than a novel, especially in the first half, when the plot is at its weakest. I found myself wondering which of the literary references I was supposed to get and which I could discard, which of the tedious scenes with the Bluebloods I'd want to remember for later and which I could just skim. And I waffled between wishing the sharp, smart Blue were my friend and wanting to tell her to stop being such a precocious little brat.

But ultimately, I'm glad I invested the time to finish Special Topics; the mystery surrounding Hannah's death becomes much more engrossing. And Pessl's writing is lively and fun - her description of a bland boy who develops a crush on Blue as "creamed spinach and stale hot dog" still has me laughing. Special Topics can be frustrating and exhausting, but it's worth plowing through to see what happens to Blue in the end.

Book Review: The Time Traveler's Wife

BuzzSugar — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 08:08:33 -0800

Though having completed "only one" novel, Audrey Niffenegger has achieved with The Time Traveler's Wife what many veteran authors have not even achieved through a collection of works: a solid, thorough, well-researched, and gorgeously told love story. She weaves the lives of Henry and Claire, a couple destined to be together throughout their entire lives, as Henry, due to a genetic quirk, defeats the confines of time and space, shuttling back and forth between his past and present. The concept is not easy to sum up quickly, but once the reader understands what Henry does, it is impossible to doubt that this is a reality. Niffenegger tells the tale from both Henry's and Claire's perspectives, and her writing is rich and vivid, poetic and visceral. The lovers' experience is ethereal and other-worldly, yet the characters themselves are achingly human and emotional creatures with whom you find yourself feeling a kinship. If you are looking for fluff, this isn't your book. But if want a love story that is both identifiable and larger-than-life, you will be changed after reading this work.

CD Review: Sufjan Stevens "Songs for Christmas"

BuzzSugar — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 09:11:08 -0800

Sufjan Stevens began writing and recording these Christmas tunes in 2001, in effort to combat the fear and sadness permeating the holiday atmosphere after September 11. He made CDs of the music to send to friends and family, complete with stickers and funny cartoons in the package. Since people liked the gifts so much, he continued to send out new CDs every year. This year, Stevens has decided to compile 5 years' worth of holiday music for the general public.

The end result is Songs for Christmas, five CDs (42 songs) which feature old standard carols and church songs, as well as original pieces. Along with the CDs (titled "Hark!" "Joy," "Peace," "Ding! Dong!" and "Noel"), the box set includes liner notes, stickers, cartoons, original essays, and a poster-sized creepy 1970s-ish Christmas family photo. Packaging like this makes me sad that we are addicted to iTunes, and the music is just as charming, so

Using guitars, piano, tambourine, sleigh bells, organ, recorders, and banjo, and soliciting the help of friends and family, the album in its entirety gives a warm, community feeling. Standards like "I Saw Three Ships" with its upbeat banjo sound, conjure up images of old-fashioned Christmases. The softness and delicacy of Stevens' voice in "Little Drummer Boy" makes you want to sit in reverent stillness, while the two acoustic guitars in "Amazing Grace" give it a folksy sound, more heartwarming and less funereal than that song usually seems.

The original songs, however, are the surprising delights of the album. It must be an enormous challenge to create new, enjoyable holiday music that will be relevant to modern listeners, but also familiar enough to appeal to those who may be reluctant to introduce new pieces into their repertoire of favorites. Many of the original tunes are fun, quirky, and charmingly innocent. “It’s Christmas! Let’s Be Glad!” for example, sounds like something Zach Braff would use in the soundtrack of a holiday movie. One of my favorites is “Come on! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!” with its happy bouncy tune and lyrics full of exclamation marks: “Kmart is closed! So is the bakery!/Everyone’s home watching TV!/ Santa Claus is coming!/ Hear the banjo strumming!”

Lately it seems that every over-produced pop star has recorded passionless renditions of the same old holiday tunes, and Stevens' album is like a response to this problem, an earnest attempt to bring back sweetness, hopefulness, reverence, and meaning to holiday music. With this expansive mix, Stevens has definitely earned a place (er, several places) in my holiday music lineup.

Book Review: Holidays on Ice

BuzzSugar — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 23:04:47 -0800

Because he is one of my favorite authors, it surprises me how many people still don't know about the awesome hilarity that is David Sedaris. If you’ve never read anything by him, Holidays on Ice is a great introduction, and if you’re already a fan, now is a great time to revisit some of his older (and seasonal) work.

In this collection of essays, Sedaris alternates between his own dark and funny non-fiction and purely fictional holiday-themed humor. If you’ve ever resented that “perfect” family and their annual letters probably filled with half-truths, “Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family!” is a highly satisfying read, presenting the downward spiral of the fictional Dunbar family in the form of their increasingly deteriorating annual Christmas letters. In “Santaland Diaries,” Sedaris describes his experiences working as a Christmas elf in a department store, highlighting in a funny/sad way how some parents view their kids as tiresome accessories.

To hear about my personal favorite essay,

My personal favorite, “Dinah the Christmas Wh*re,” is the story of how the Sedaris family found togetherness and Christmas joy when a prostitute named Dinah became their guest of honor. The essay is typical of the sort of dark innocence in Sedaris's writing, as though to say, “Just reporting the facts, folks! Isn't it crazy?!” Sedaris’ offbeat humor may not appeal to everyone, and in truth this isn’t his best work ever. (That would be a toss-up between Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day.). But as a quick-read during the holidays, this thin volume is the perfect treat.

Check out this review and lots of other great book reviews in The Book Club group!