Mercy Among the Children

David Adams Richards

2000

Ok so it won the Giller Prize and was selected for Canada Reads, no one is going to argue that this isn’t an exceptionally well-crafted novel. It is. It is so well crafted it’s annoying, in that good type of annoying where you want to playfully shake your finger at David Adams Richards and say “oh you.”

So what’s its deal. Well, if you like Canadian literature highlighting the impoverished Maritimes (78% of all Canadian lit) you are going to love this story. Set in New Brunswick this story follows the Henderson family through unbearable and incredible amounts of strife and hardship. Literally (pun) everyone in town has it out for this family. The worst part is that the reader can see that things are going to get worse for this them even though the family can’t see it coming. And when it gets worse it get’s way worse than you thought it would be! This book over 400 pages long, and these pages are full of information and details. That’s a lot of pain and suffering to take in.

The story weaves throughout the families of this poor New Brunswick town, as they plot against each other and work to screw over the Hendersons who are undeserving of their hardships. What’s nice about the story is that it really highlights how unfair life is; you can work as hard as you want and try to be a good person, but others will still dislike you. In that sense the story is very realistic. But as you get to the end all the coincidences start driving you mad! The good characters are so good, the bad ones are so bad, of course Cynthia’s daughter will get Percy’s heart after she kills him in a snowstorm! If it wasn’t so amazingly artful and well crafted it would be a soap opera.

And then the intertextuality! Lyle Henderson is telling the story, but he starts with his grandfather. He includes details of Cynthia and Mathew’s lives that he wasn’t there to witness, he couldn’t possibly know! But the damn device is used so well because it makes Lyle an unreliable narrator (the best kind!) and so his character descriptions have to be taken with a grain of salt. Percy never cries (bullshit), his mother is a saint (she sounds kind of dumb), everyone is out to get them. It makes Lyle seem paranoid. What’s weird is that every character is so wonderfully well rounded and full of details. It makes the world so full, yet I’m not sure if I believe Lyle! Damn you Richards!!!

But at the end of the day, although it is exceptionally well written and so well thought out I just can’t handle reading a novel full of constant pain. It isn’t my style, I don’t like it. My friend Becky likes these hardcore stories about life, I just can’t handle it. Which is why I give this Giller Prize winning marvelously written novel two and a half lightning bolts. It’s just too much pain!

Reviewed by Meg!

The Fault in Our Stars

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By John Green

2012

I am a fan of infinite fiction, no series is long enough. I want to know what happened to the characters everyday of their lives until the day they die forever and ever amen. I am also a fan of teen lit, mainly due to being a recent university grad who is turning twenty three and finds her own stark adult life too similar to adult lit themes that do not offer the escapism that the pleasant themes of finding yourself and possible teen vampires provide. Adult life is like J.K. Rowling's six page epilogue. It sucks.

Girl meets boy, falls in love, it does not end well. Just your typical love story, add  in a dash of cancer and some international travel and you have  John Green’s “The Fault in our Stars”. John Green is an exceptional writer, who does not write series, yet just like Coupland and Apatow he creates a universe for his characters. This is not your world of perfection and heros, it does not always have a happy ending and the good guy does not always get the girl but the writing is beautiful.  With quotes such as “my thoughts are stars I cant fathom into constellations” or “that’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt” and “some infinities are bigger than others”. 

While it is a good book and is beautifully written I realized during the writing of this review that nothing really happens plot wise, which is why I give it three and a half lightning bolts.

Reviewed by Lorenda!

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling
2011

As a complete disclaimer, I feel like I have to admit that this book took me almost two weeks to read, which is completely ridiculous seeing as even Mindy Kaling says that it’s going to be an easy read. The truth of it is that I started reading the book, realized that I was going to love it, then stopped reading it. Instead of sitting down and reading it, I ended up carrying it around with me for almost two weeks, reading snippets at a time. I read it when I was feeling down, or when I was just too tired to read “Game of Thrones” (Game of Thrones review is pending).

Going into this book I already knew that I liked Mindy Kaling. But once I got started in this book I realized that I love Mindy Kaling, I have a total lady crush on her, and I think we could be really good friends. Not best friends, she already has enough of those, but maybe just close friends, the kind of close friends where one completely idolizes the other.

“Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) is the story of Mindy Kaling’s life up to now, with anecdotes and advice just tossed in there. There’s a good ratio of Mindy’s life to funny anecdotes so it doesn’t completely feel like a memoire or a joke book.

The main thing I learned from her book is how smart she is. She tends to play fun bubbly characters, and even on her own show where she’s a doctor she still seems fairly ditzy. But in real life she went to Dartmouth, and her writing is clever and smart. Fuel for a lady crush. I have a soft spot in my heart for people who don’t have famous parents and who have just worked really hard to get where they are and are still in touch with themselves.

However my favourite tid-bit the book offered was her stance on comedy and women. She explains joining a discussion on this topic is like asking "Should dogs and cats be able to care for out children? They're in the house anyway." She is wonderful

Writing books seems to be the new Pixar voice acting for a lot of celebrities. It’s something else to keep a career a float, or it’s an obvious cash grab. And I am not talking about Tina Fey’s book here, I’ll get to her’s later. But Mindy’s book seems somehow necessary. She is such an awesome writer but she doesn’t seem to get the credit she deserves for it. No one thinks of the Office and goes directly to Mindy Kaling, they usually go to Steve Carell or B.J. Novak. And the characters she plays do not do her brain power justice. Her book gives people a deeper sense of who she is, and how hard she’s worked, and how amazingly endearing she is. 

I’ll give her four out of five lightning bolts!  

Reviewed by Meg!

Girlfriend In A Coma

Douglas Coupland
1998

Have you ever watched a Judd Apatow movie? Or a Quintin Tarantino film? They create these alternate universes for their characters. If you have not seen any of Judd Apatows films please watch: The 40 Year Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Knocked Up, I love you Man and This is 40. These movies in particular from the Apatow Vault can chart the love and marriage of Paul Rudd and Leslie Man, both exceedingly funny comedians.

I am a fan of alternate universes in pop culture films and books and because of that I love Douglas Couplands work. If you lived in the Douglas Coupland universe you would experience and apocalypse or the threat of an apocalypse at every turn. But do not confuse this apocalypse for the zombie-ridden adrenaline filled apocalypses of our dreams. Douglas Couplands apocalypses involve the dry dry heat of an atomic bomb and the bright bright light as your life and lies are burnt into your corneas. “And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.” (Generation X). Douglas Coupland loves the prospect of an apocalypse, not the threat, the prospect.

In the Douglas Coupland Universe, if you were to loose your job and your character was in the "parent" roll, you would loose it at the age in which you should have been retiring however due to our current consumer driven materialistic world you wouldn’t be able to retire and would be forced to return to the job market, on the hunt, for a job you no longer want and are no longer relevant to. If this happens you will be instructed by your wife that she will:

a) Not be making you lunch

And you will:

b) Not be coming grocery shopping

I find these to be excellent rules and will incorporate them into raising my future imaginary children.

These rules will also apply to any and all children that may or may not have to move in after loosing their jobs as well.

Have you thought about your own mortality today? How the world will continue on with out you. Do you believe in God but look at the world around you and wonder if maybe he just doesn’t really like us? Have you spent time thinking about the burning dry heat of an atomic bomb? How you might be grocery shopping, have it be a sunny clear day. So sunny that you a feel it all the way in the crevices of your brain, bleaching the inside of your skull bright and holy white. How you will see a flash and a whoosh and a dry dry heat. No?

Well you need to pick up a Douglas Coupland book immediately. It doesn’t even matter which book. Any of them, all of them will satisfy this need.

I first read Douglas Couplands book "Girlfriend in a Coma" at the tender age of 16, and I fell in love. I fell in love with a book years before I would know what falling in love with a human being would feel like and I think Douglas would approve of that.

Girlfriend in a Coma involves a girl, who is dating a boy and falls into a Coma. The end.

Just Kidding.

The book, written with a youth perspective that includes an omnipresent narrator, chronicles a teenage girl who in the process of starving herself for an upcoming vacation accidentally sees a prediction of the end of the world. In an attempt to avoid the end of the world she slips into a coma. Right after loosing her virginity. You guessed it; she’s also knocked up.

Her boyfriend and baby daddy never really grows up; this can be extended to her group of friends as well. Girl wakes up from coma, world ends. They survive. Sacrifice themselves and the world returns to continue as always.

While the plot itself seems strange it was the language and dialogue that I fell in love with, with quotes like "At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?" or “One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild–into its ancestral sea–its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end.” And also “I didn’t realize then that so much of being an adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience”; how could, I a youth coming of age, not resist this book that had answers to questions I had never even considered and questions I am still trying to find the answers to.  

Reviewed by: Lorenda!