Blended - Sharon Draper

This book ended up on my daughter's shelf. She's still a bit too young to get into this (there are no pictures) but in a couple years, she'll likely be able to read this on her own. The prose is fairly simplistic and the themes are complicated but accessible.

There are two major tween drama themes running through Blended. 1) Isabella's parents get divorced. It's traumatic for her. She doesn't feel truly at home in either house, and 2) Isabella's dad is black and her mom is white and being mixed race she gets a lot of comments from strangers that are hurtful. I felt the author dealt with these subjects well. She gets into a bit of nuance as Isabella learns to stand up for herself and her split identities.

The book does, however, spend a ridiculous amount of time on mundane details that don't add a lot to the story. Each chapter has a detailed explanation of what Isabella is having for breakfast. There are plot lines that seem to go nowhere. At one point, Isabella and her black friend are shopping at the mall and visit an upscale formal wear store where they are followed and then told to leave by the private security guard. This episode was well described and later when Isabella returned to the mall with her soon to be stepmother to pick out wedding attire, I thought this might come up again to close the loop but it did not.

And I'd be remiss not to mention that during the final 20 pages of the book there is a very traumatic episode that occurs that is really not explored at all except to be summarily disposed of in an effort to move the book to closure. It's hard not to compare this book with The Hate U Give, which is just a really masterful story told through the lens of Starr Carter. But of course, that book is intended for a more mature audience and this one is geared toward the middle school crowd.

For all its shortcomings, this is probably a very accessible book for a tween reader.

3/5 Stars.

Love and Ruin - Paula McLain

When I read The Paris Wife, I was living in Evanston, IL and had been obsessed with Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises for some time. It was the first book I examined critically. My junior year term paper was all Lady Brett all the time. My husband and I both listened to Farewell to Arms while training for the 2010 Toronto Marathon. I have read or re-read basically everything else Hemmingway. So I was ready for The Paris Wife and I really liked McLain's voice in telling Hadley Hemmingway's story. I may have actually named by own Chicago-born daughter after Hadley. 

So I was nervous that maybe lightening wouldn't strike the Hemmingway brides twice in Love and Ruin. But thankfully, I was wrong. I really enjoyed McLain's portrayal of Marty Gellhorn. She reminded me a lot of Beryl Markham in McLain's Circling the Sun (you can read my review of CTS here). Marty, like Beryl, chafed at conventional expectations of womanhood. They both excelled in male-dominated fields. They both wanted adventure and career and to felt seen. These are all very modern aspects of my own life as a woman, but fortunately I live in a decade where having all these things and being a mother are not entirely out of the question (but also not a given). 

Marty, though madly in love with Ernest, does not want to be tied down by motherhood in a way that would limit her opportunities. It's not as if Ernest Hemmingway was going to be home with a toddler while Marty was a war correspondent. Above all else, Marty seemed to be committed to being her own true self, and there is so much to admire about that.

Ernest and Marty

The strong Marty chapters are interspersed with, what I thought were, unnecessary chapters from Ernest's third person voice. I thought this detracted from the overall story. Perhaps McLain felt Ernest was not coming along so well in the book. I was hardly ready to feel sympathy for him after his bizarre behavior with Hadley and Pauline Pfeiffer in The Paris Wife. 

I also have a bit of a weird feeling about the book because I've read a lot about Marty Gellhorn and I know that she was adamant that she not be treated as just Ernest Hemmingway's third wife. I think her phrase was about being a "footnote" in someone else's life. She was an amazing war correspondent, a novelist, and an interesting person in her own right. And, probably to Marty Gellhorn's consternation, this book ends, abruptly I'd say, right after her relationship with Ernest ends. It's a disservice to the bulk of work she performed and wrote after her divorce from Hemmingway, and the name she made for herself independently through the later decades. I would have loved to stay on the journey with her through her years in Korea and Vietnam. So I found the timeline of the book to be a bit of a betrayal to the heroine.