Summer House

Summer House
By Nancy Thayer (351 pages)
Contemporary Literature
Published by Ballantine Books
Bookish rating: 3.5

Following three generations of women--Charlotte (30), Helen (50s), and Nona (90)--at their summer house on Nantucket, this summery beach read gets the job done: it's an escapist coastal novel with enough heart to not suck or make you stupider for reading it.

Charlotte runs an organic gardening business on her Nona's land, and Helen has the predictable wifely plot of a woman scorned plus midlife crisis. Nona is all wise and knowing because she's old.

The plots are fine and the characters okay, but the family dynamics are probably the most interesting. The character of Charlotte was the most disappointing to me, despite Thayer's excellent choice of name. Thayer has no wit and little voice when writing, so everyone sounds like a post-menopausal mom. I mean, really. Show me a 30-year-old who uses the terms "rascal" to describe a jerk, or "jive" to describe dancing. And such hostessy phrases like "Oh, how wonderful." Charlotte had nil depth--not a thing was special about her as far as her personality went, and she simply did not come across as young.

Overall, the writing is a pretty bland, but I enjoyed getting sense of water, sand, evening cocktails, and humid summer air. I'm ready for my beach vacation! Can you tell?! 

Beauty Queens

Beauty Queens
By Libba Bray 
Young Adult (390 pages)
Published by Scholastic Press
Bookish rating: 4.25

Beauty Queens is a campy, over-the-top tale of a plane crash of beauty queens on an island---think Lord of the Flies meets The Hills---and I loved it.

We meet each of the surviving beauty queens, initially through a Miss Teen Dream Fun Facts Page! (Exclamation point in the original, thankyouverymuch.) The girls are hilariously vain and shallow and ridiculous, but because this is Bray and Bray is ever the champion of girlhood, each girl has her own conflicts and--hooray!--substance.

As the girls spend more time on the island, they become more like themselves as less who the judges (read: society) expects. As Mary Lou observes, "'Maybe they need a place where no ones' watching so they can be who they really are' . . . . There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade, They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping. They were becoming." (p. 177)

Of course, Bray makes the ride to these girls finding their inner, not perfectly preened selves fantastically wacky and outrageous. As I've written in other reviewers of Bray's work, she obviously loves girlhood and boldly challenges the expectations we have for girls and, by extension, women. She covers everything from the virgin-whore dichotomy, to transgender identity, to lesbianism, to race, to mother-daughter relationships, to, of course, beauty. It's brilliant.

I knocked off a smidge of a point for the final climax scenes on the island. It had so many moving parts, I struggled to follow it. Overall, though, I loved this book and thought Bray's irreverent, on-the-girls-side, snarkily campy tone made the craziness of this novel WORK. Recommended!

Room

Room
By Emma Donoghue (321 pages)
Published by Back Bay Books
Bookish rating: 5

Am I getting too lenient in my book ratings? Or am I finally reading . .  . better books?

Yeah, I gave it a 5.

Room is narrated by 5-year-old Jack, who was born and lives in a small, 11'x11' room with his mother, where they are held captive.

And really, reading this right after all the Amanda Beery stuff? It's weird.

Jack's narration never breaks character, at least to my reading of Room. He always seems five years old, and his voice is believably naïve while also incredibly perceptive--which it has to be, if he's gonna tell this story.

Ma, his mother, makes Jack's life as full as it can possibly be, shielding him entirely from Old Nick, the sleazeball who kidnapped Ma in the first place, keeps them prisoners, and rapes her.

I thought Donoghue's contrast of the horror--the long, continual horror--of Jack and Ma's situation with the love a mom has for her child and happy life she was able to create for him out of bare nothingness was remarkable.

This book stuck with me for quite awhile after reading it, which is saying something. My attention span and memory aren't fantastic these days. Totally recommended.