Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Three: The Summer Prince

Alaya Dawn Johnson's first book, The Summer Prince, is set in a fictitious far-future post-nuclear fallout enclosed city in what in our time is Brazil.  This book takes some of the best elements of post-apocalyptic and dystopian teen fiction and includes them suggestively, without being too overbearing or heavy-handed.   (Not to say that some dystopian elements are not obvious and brutal, in the post-Hunger Games tradition: a main plot point is that, every five years, the city elects a king who will be sacrificed at the end of a one-year term.)  Numerous minor and fascinating details about some of this future society's rules are slipped in throughout the text, helping create a very textured and realistic world, or at least the city of Palmares Três feels very realistic--the rest of the world is tantalizingly vague, which makes sense since the protagonist, June, has never left her glass-pyramid enclosed home city.  And as for June, she reads like many teenage characters do: passionate, creative, intelligent, and very angry with her mother (largely due to the death of her father) and lashing out at her new step-mother, too.  Her anguished relationship with her mother feels just a bit overblown and tired--haven't we seen this before in teen literature?--but the saving grace is that June's relationship with her mother is (slightly) dynamic, and June at least sometimes engages in self-reflexive thinking about her anger at and relationship with her mother, leading to some growth.  Another aspect of this book that I appreciated was its natural inclusion of a diverse array of characters, which can be hard to find in popular literature.

One of my library science/children's literature classmates recommended this book to me, and I'm so glad I took the recommendation and read it.  I could hardly bear to put it down because it kept me guessing until the end, and I would heartily recommend it.  Readers who enjoyed Lois Lowry's The Giver (and sequels), Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, M.T. Andersen's Feed, or similar books will probably especially enjoy The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson, or if you are looking for a way into the teen dystopian/post-apocalyptic adventure novel, this would be an excellent starting point.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Two Across

I couldn't resist making a little play on words in the title of this post, which is about a book called Two Across, a debut novel by Jeff Bartsch.  My grandmother sent me this book a few months ago, and I've finally had time to read it.  I love the premise of the book, which follows two over-educated teenagers, Vera and Stanley, from their tie at the National Spelling Bee when they are both 15 through their very tumultuous relationship, in which an odd importance is given to coded messages they send each other in crossword puzzles they construct and have published in major newspapers.  Stanley and Vera are both intriguing characters, though I often found Stanley in particular to be rather frustrating.  This book kept my interest, though by the last third or quarter of the book, it was starting to feel irritatingly repetitive.  (Boy loses girl and regains girl via crossword puzzles... and makes the same stupid mistake and loses her again... and finds her again via crossword puzzles... and makes a similar stupid mistake and loses her again... repeat several times...)  However, I found the ending to be generally satisfactory, which I value in a novel.  One element I disliked was the emotionally distant tone, especially in this novel that focuses on the turbulent relationship between two people in their late teenage years and in their twenties.  I prefer novels where I am made to feel the characters' emotions, rather than being told briefly and periodically about their emotions as though they are mere details rather than the glue of daily life.  This sort of emotional distance in the writing seems to me to be characteristic of a certain type of contemporary fiction for adults (I'm thinking, for example, of The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai, and of The Magicians by Lev Grossman, all previously reviewed on this blog).  Despite the emotional distance and repetitive plot toward the end, the story had many original elements, and I found this book to be fairly engaging.  If you enjoy contemporary U.S. fiction for adults, or stories with lots of quirk, or stories set in the 1960s and 1970s, I'd recommend this book.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-One: My Life in France

In this autobiography by well-known chef Julia Child, she recounts how she came to learn and love cooking from her first stay in France in the late 1940s and 1950s and how she turned what started as a personal interest in cooking into a successful career as a cookbook writer and television chef.  Child also includes numerous details of her daily life (along with her husband and helper Paul) in France, Germany, Norway, and the U.S. through the early 1990s.  There are also hearty helpings of her political leanings and the tensions these caused with her father, as well as her views on American and French culture, though the focus of the book always remains on cooking and food.  By her account in My Life in France (co-written with a grand-nephew), her life was generally a happy one, despite the stresses and strains that come along with celebrity, and she certainly led an interesting life as well.  Even as someone who is relatively uninterested in food and cooking, I found this a fascinating and cheerful account of an interesting life well lived, and I would certainly recommend it to readers interested in the cultures of France and the U.S. in the late twentieth century or in biographies of chefs, or of women, or in books about generally happy people.  

Coincidentally, I have recently encountered two other books that involve Julia Child, but neither made it onto this blog originally, as one is a picture book and the other I listened to as an audiobook.  But I heartily enjoyed both of them, and as they're on the same subject, I'd like to mention them here.  The first is Minette's Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and her Cat by Susanna Reich, a really charming picture book mainly about Julia Child's cat, Minette (whom Child discusses in My Life in France).  If you want an adorable picture book about a happy cat, Minette's Feast is a great choice.  The second is Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste by Luke Barr, which gives some context to Child's career and offers a wider perspective on some of the events mentioned in My Life in France.  A nonfiction book, it provides a history of the evolution of food culture in the U.S. of the late twentieth century.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty: Career of Evil

Career of Evil follows The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm in the mystery series J.K. Rowling writes under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  I enjoyed this (grizzly) read at least as much as the first two, though it probably is not for the faint of heart (it starts with a severed leg and the brutal crimes continue).  The mystery certainly kept me guessing, and it is interesting to see how the personal lives of detective Cormoran Strike (our hero) and his assistant Robin Ellacott (also our hero) continue to evolve throughout the series.  The end left me eager for the next installment, and I can only hope it will follow the pattern of a book each year and be published in 2016.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Nine: Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

This memoir by Jenny Lawson is actually her second book, and I definitely plan on reading her earlier memoir (Let's Pretend This Never Happened) at some point in the near future.  When I saw the taxidermied raccoon dancing in golden glitter on the front cover of Furiously Happy, I simply couldn't resist.  (Also one of my trusty co-workers had started reading the book and was regaling us with hilarious anecdotes from it.)  Lawson provides a humorous account of her daily life and her serious, sometimes debilitating struggles with various mental illnesses, including depression and anxiety.  This is a fascinating read for anyone interested in a first-hand account of one person's experience of living with mental illness or for people who enjoy contemporary memoirs.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Eight: Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

After seeing a Google Doodle featuring Hedy Lamarr, I was inspired to learn about this pioneering woman who helped invent spread-spectrum radio transmission, a technology key to the later development of the internet and mobile phones.  I looked up biographies of her, and found this one by Richard Rhodes, a well-respected non-fiction author, which also happened to be available at my local library!  Because this was such a busy semester for me, it took me some time to read it, but I did find it really interesting.  Hedy Lamarr led a fascinating life: not only was she a hobbyist inventor, but she was also a famous early Hollywood actress and a person of Jewish descent who fled a pro-Nazi arms-manufacturing husband in her native Austria.  This book also includes information on the life and times of George Antheil (her co-inventor of spread-spectrum radio transmission), an avant-garde American composer who made a living by writing news articles and scoring Hollywood films.  This book chronicles how these two became unlikely inventing partners and how their invention, after years of neglect and obscurity, came to be the unsung technology that makes so much of our modern life possible.  If you want a bit of interesting inventing information or heady Hollywood history, Hedy's Folly is the book for you!

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Seven: Lonely: A Memoir

Lonely: A Memoir is basically what it sounds like: a memoir of chronic loneliness, with a healthy helping of the author's research into international studies on loneliness.  Author Emily White, a Canadian ex-lawyer, intersperses accounts of her own periods of loneliness throughout her life with the interviews she conducted with self-identified lonely people from around the world whom she met online when she started a (now-defunct) blog about loneliness and her research into more clinical studies of loneliness--its causes and its effects, mental, physical, and social.  Along the way, she addresses stereotypes about loneliness and lonely people as well as her own efforts--successful and otherwise--to combat loneliness.  As someone who has experienced loneliness at times, I found this to be an engaging and fascinating book, and I think it would be valuable for everyone to read, even if they have only experienced situational (rather than chronic) loneliness.  As White notes, chronic loneliness is a social issue that affects everyone, whether they experience chronic loneliness or know people who do, yet few people discuss loneliness and there is so much shame associated with loneliness.  Her book is an excellent introduction to the subject of loneliness and I highly recommend it.