Tournament of Books - personal update

I decided late to jump on the Tournament of Books bandwagon and so only read a couple of the contenders.

I started with We Love You, Charlie Freeman, and also read My Name is Lucy Barton.  I'm currently reading Hag-Seed (modern retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, by Margaret Atwood, which was on the long list but didn't make the cut for the short list brackets), and am still planning on reading The Underground Railroad, Homegoing, and possibly The Mothers and Grief is a Thing with Feathers.

So looking at a head-to-head competition between the two I've finished, I definitely preferred Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton over Kaitlyn Greenidge's Charlie Freeman.

Charlie Freeman is a debut novel and it shows--Greenidge has a powerful story with difficult themes and challenging characters, and it seems that she is never quite able to manage all of those elements cohesively.  After I finished the book, I read a couple of reviews that talked about the book being messy, and I agree with that.  There were significant parts that I just didn't get--in particular, the characters of the mother and the younger sister baffled me. I could never make sense of either one.  Likewise, the institution where the family went to live was something I never believed in.  I liked the premise of the story, and I liked the complexity of the characters, but the story-telling was clumsy.

Not so with Lucy Barton.  I loved the structure of the novel--the way Lucy tells the story of her life through her conversations with her mother.  I found the mother borderline believable, primarily because I cannot imagine any mother acting the way she did towards her child, but that could be my own narrow view of the world.  But the writing was great, the dialogue realistic, and the story-telling superb.  It was all flashback with little action, and yet the story was taut with tension.

On to Hag-Seed--in a word, it is great.  I usually don't care for modern retellings, though I have done this myself with some Austen works, but this is spot on, thoughtful, with superb characters and dialogue and it reflects a profound and sensitive reading of The Tempest.  I'm half-way done, so I can't say for sure how I'll feel, but for sheer reading enjoyment, I pick The Hag-Seed.  After reading Atwood's The Blind Assassin and disliking it, I jumped to the conclusion that I didn't like Atwood. Now, I considering reading some of her other works.

It'll be interesting how I rate all the books in this year's Tournament.  I'll keep you posted!  Anyone else reading along these lines?

Three Newish Novels and a Giveaway

Sometimes it feels like I only read classics, but I've just finished three recently published novels, so clearly perception and reality are not exactly aligning.

I'm a big fan of Barbara Kingsolver's writing, fiction and non-fiction, and recently listened to Flight Behavior.  It took a little while to get into the story--at times I felt like I could never relate to someone like Dellarobia, the main character, and the setting, rural Tennessee, seemed more foreign to me than Victorian London, but I stuck with it and ended up loving the book.  

By far my favorite character was Ovid Byron, the scientist who comes to Dellarobia's hometown to study the millions of monarch butterflies who migrate there by mistake.  Kingsolver was the reader of the audio version that I listened to and I particularly loved her rendering of his voice, Jamaican accent and all.  I learned so much from Byron, about how scientists view the natural world, why they study it, and how they feel about the objects of their study.

I was honestly surprised by the apocalyptic ending, which reminded me of an image of Noah and his beached ark on Mount Ararat.  I thought the book would end on a hopeful note but be forewarned, this is not a feel-good novel.  It should make you feel a bit panicky if you take the lessons from Dr. Byron to heart.

I also listened to Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge.  This is my first novel by Strout but I liked it so much that I am going to check out her other books.  I really liked the structure of the novel, in which each chapter is a short story.  Some of the stories are directly about Olive, and others she figures in to varying degrees.  

As virtually every other reviewer has noted, Olive is a tough protagonist to like.  She's brusque, but awfully touchy as only the truly brusque can be.  She is easily offended and offends just about everyone she encounters.  Her heart is large and breaks often; she is perceptive and massively myopic.  A study in contradictions, she is probably one of the most real characters I've ever met in a novel.

I enjoyed the setting, a small town in Maine, and the various inhabitants of the town.  An excellent book--creative, interesting, and very real.

The final book in my trio of newbies is The Widow Waltz, by Sally Koslow.  It was the weakest of the three, but still an enjoyable novel.  Unlike Flight Behavior and Olive Kitteridge, The Widow Waltz takes place mostly in Manhattan and the Hamptons.  It is the story of a middle-aged woman who thinks she is well-off until her husband dies and she discovers he's left her virtually penniless with a mountain of debt.

The plot line actually reminded me quite a bit of The Three Weissman's of Westport, which is a modern riff on Austen's Sense and Sensibility.  The location reinforced the similarity as well.

I had to stretch my willing suspension of disbelief to swallow the ending--what happened to the money and how Georgia, the main character, responded to the revelation.

Flight Behavior and Olive Kitteridge are much more complex books than The Widow Waltz, which was far more formulaic and slick than creative and real, but it was a fun book to read.

Giveaway Time!!!!!

Since The Widow Waltz was sent to me by a publicist as part of the rollout of the book, I would like to offer it up as a giveaway.

If you would like to win a copy of The Widow Waltz, just leave a comment and include your email address.  This giveaway is open worldwide and I'll be accepting entries for one week...until 8 pm MT on Sunday, July 14.