Ah revenge suicide. I'll kill myself and then everyone will be sorry. That's pretty much my biggest beef with Thirteen Reasons Why. It's every middle/high schoolers revenge suicide fantasy. But it's playing out in a way that works for the person who kills themselves. Hannah lives on posthumously through cassette tapes and haunts those she blames for her death. It's wickedly unfair to several people on the tapes, notably the other narrator Clay Jensen. Who's biggest crime was that he didn't "save" Hannah. And as annoying as Clay's sometimes overly descriptive narrative is, he's the only person who really makes counterpoints to the revenge suicide - if you're bothering to listen to him. Eg. - telling Hannah she didn't have a funeral, which I believe would be a big upset for someone looking to have people hand wringing and heart rending at their funeral after their suicide plays out. He also is the only one who consistently fights back against Hannah's assertion that people had a chance to save her and didn't take it. I don't want to victim blame here, because Hannah was an unlikeable character, but it wasn't due to any kind of woe is me mentality. A lot of crappy things happen to her in high school. Things that would be handled in a multitude of different ways by different people. So I'm not down on Hannah for ultimately deciding killing herself was the only option. But blaming other people and going out in a raging audio-taped glory was just a bit much. Since one of the people she blamed was a friend who believed a rumor and thus ended the friendship is then horribly raped while Hannah bears silent witness in a closet, yet somehow Hannah can't get over herself enough to think about other people. So the entire time Hannah is so mad that people aren't seeing the "real" Hannah, but she completely fails to offer the same thing to anyone else in the book. Except Clay. The nice guy narrator of the story. His sterling reputation is deserved. Yet Hannah still makes him listen to about (I'm unclear just how long these audiotapes of Hannah's are supposed to be) 8 hours of blaming others just to tell him that actually she doesn't blame him at all. But he's part of her "story". Overall the premise of the book is so problematic and poorly executed that I had to give it two stars. It's a book intended for the same demographic which currently can't stop eating Tide Pods. It doesn't come with enough nuance or depth to actually get to the heart of the matter or to give young adults the tools they need to digest it.So what did I like about it? (see that's Hannah voice there). Well, the split narrative works pretty well (discounting the sections where Clay's repetitive interjections are awkward). And the timeline works to unravel the story.
2/5 Stars.
If you're a literary or linguistics nerd like I am, then you'll probably appreciate The Mother Tongue as much as I did. I found if fascinating and hilarious at the same time. English as a language, written and spoken, comes from a variety of sources, some legitimate and others, less so. But it's all come together to make the complex rules and pronunciations we love and love to hate today.
It seems that scholars have been predicting a split in British and American English for decades and as yet, the two cultures miraculously can still understand one another. Seems like some predictions just never come true.
The book was published in 1990 and it could use some updating. Why not a whole chapter on how texting has further influenced our Anglophone penchant for shortening words and phrases. Otherwise I loved learning where some of our more familiar idioms and phrases came from.
4/5 Stars.
Every time I read a Laura Markham book I vacillate between thinking I'm a terrible parent, and then that maybe I'm doing okay. As my children are getting older and conflict seems to be inevitable, Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings was a good resource to find some ways to foster their relationship.Markham begins the book with some of the foundational precepts that made me appreciate Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids (you can read that review here), and served as good reminders of those things I have casually forgotten in the two years since I read the earlier book. I'm thankful to have the reminder and have been trying to put the ideas into practice, even as our post-Christmas euphoria has devolved into the same petty squabbles of finding and equipping ourselves with shoes and coats which make up the most stressful 20 minutes of my morning.
4/5 Stars.
This excellent short book was more poetry than prose. There's no main character in The Buddha in the Attic, which tells the collective stories of young women brought from Japan in the 1930s to wed men they had never met. Promised lives of ease and comfort in America, most of these women were gravely disappointed, but scratched out a life in the fields of California's agriculture industry until they saved enough (or didn't) to buy a piece of land of their own. Or they married shop keepers in the J-towns of the cities in which they arrived and lived their lives serving other Japanese immigrants within a small tight-knit community. Or they served as housemaids to oblivious, or caring, or cruel white people. And they had children that died, farmed, prospered, and left them (or didn't). And then they were awarded for their hard work by being rounded up and transported to camps on suspicion of enemy activity. And there their story ends and is taken up by the white people who didn't notice the Japanese until they were gone, carrying forth a half-hearted effort to get answers from the government as to the disappearance of their neighbors.This little book was so well written and lovely and sad. I really enjoyed it.
4/5 Stars.
Yikes. What more can you ask for in a book like this.... serial murders in the beautiful Tuscan countryside, conspiracy theories, blood feuds, clan mentality? It's all in here. In The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston chronicles at first the murders beginning in 1981, later connected to 1968 and 1974 killings, which are investigated and covered by journalist Mario Spezi. Spezi watches as the investigation makes several missteps including the basic fundamentals of crime scene security. Suspects are arrested and then freed after the killings fail to stop. The brutality of the murders create panic in the countryside as young lovers are targeted in flagrante delicto. And the police seem unable to stop the carnage. A Sardinian clan affiliated with the 1968 murder comes under suspicion, but the investigators are unable to make anything stick against the experienced criminals. However, as it's clear the family was involved in the 1968 killing and the same gun is used for all the subsequent murders, the family and the Monster must be connected, but how? Unable to make any of the convictions stick, aside from the 1968 conviction of the victims cuckolded husband, the investigators give up on the "Sardinian Trail" and disband letting a new crop of investigators pick up the pieces. Instead of a thoughtful review of the evidence, the new inspector Guittare, along with a Perugian judge Menini, embarks on a twisting conspiracy theory involving satanic cults and fancifal explanations for simple facts. The ridiculousness of their pursuits is highlighted in insisting a Perugian drowning in 1985 is related - the proof, the fact that the body buried was not that of the drowned man - but when he's exhumed and found to be the same man the investigators claim there was a double body switch. If this seems far fetched and hard to understand then you get the drift of how absurd their investigation became.Eventually even Preston and Spezi come under scrutiny for their vehement disagreements with the investigators theories. Spezi is jailed and Menini insists he was involved in the 1985 Perugian drowning. If Menini's name sounds familiar, it's because he used the same satanic cockamamie theories to arrest and convict Amanda Knox in the killing of her roomate back in 2008. The complete autonomy with which Menini operates leads to many miscarriages of justice and wrecks many lives. The book is fascinating and blessedly well written. A very good read for true crime fans and law nerds alike.
4/5 Stars.
