Betsy Burke
Like a bad Harlequin romance, only twice as long and with so much dreary exposition about fundraising and the environment that it's less than half as interesting. Help.
Showing posts with label chicklit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chicklit. Show all posts
Friday, June 5, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Remember Me? Snark Revamped
Sophie Kinsella
Scale of 1-10: 4
Pros: Um...no one overspends. No cutesy overdraft letters from earnest, unrealistically patient bank managers. Though there is a bill for a glass leopard. I guess Kinsella just can't help herself.
Cons: Meandering plot and the same staggeringly irritating heroine utterly bereft of common sense who persons every single one of Kinsella's novels and constantly makes bad decisions, plunging herself into ever-increasingly hot water until the hero arrives to save her from herself.
The original review I wrote of this really ripped it apart. My problem with Kinsella's books - and it's a big one - is that all her heroines are simpletons. Shopaholic Becky never learns anything and is the same idiotic spendthrift every single book. She never grows as a character even the tiniest iota...though I've only managed to push through the first 2 books in the series, so I suppose it's possible Bloomwood wakes up and smells the bankruptcy sometime in Book 3 or 4, but I wouldn't hold my breath. And I hated the Wickham-penned novel The Gatecrasher because most of the characters were vapid and bland, and those that weren't were not at all likeable, while the title character was a complete and utter bitch.
For 3/4 of it's meandering, soul-sucking way, Remember Me?, follows standard Kinsella formula, which is to say that nothing happens. There's no character development and no real discernible plot. The whole book just lollygags around while it's main character, Lexi Smart (boy, talk about your misnomers), shops and goes to tea and just generally whines about life as she gets into utterly ridiculous and unrealistic scrapes, until suddenly, in the last 1/4 of the book, a solution to everything falls neatly into her lap and every problem she has is miraculously solved in one fell swoop. In fact, the final 1/4 of the book is true to form as well, but for one small detail: there is actually character development and growth in the final chapter(s) of the book.
Hallelujah.
Sure, most of the book is all, "Oh, I have amnesia. Oh, I'm married. Hurray, I have money; I think I'll go shopping! Oh, I'm a bitch and nobody likes me. Oh, I can't remember anything of the last 3 years, and my old friends all hate me - I know: I'll buy them presents! Oh, I just can't do anything right. Hurray, my friends figured out I really do have amnesia and I'm not a bitch anymore, but no one knows why I turned into one. Oh no, my company is phasing out my department - all my friends will hate me again. What's that you say? I knew this was coming and I put together a supersecret plan to stop it? I have a file? A blue one? Where is it? You don't know? Oh no! What will I do?! Gasp! There! I found it! I shall brandish it over my head and proclaim loudly that as god is my witness, I shall never go--wait. That's too long. I shall just sing gaily, 'Here I am, to save the day!' Oh yes, sweep me off my feet my handsome hero and carry me away! We'll always have Paris!" (Some leeway taken there, but it mostly follows the actual plot.) However, in the final pages, Lexi does actually learn something about herself. And she grows a bit of a spine. More, she actually takes responsibility for herself and her destiny, and GROWS UP. That's right, a Kinsella book which ends with an actual adult heroine. I hardly knew how to react.
I'm not saying it's an awesome book. But it doesn't suck like I thought it did when I wrote my original review (having put it down in disgust) the day before I finished it, and frankly, it needs to be about 100 pages shorter, because if I weren't a literary die-hard who is bound and determined to finish even the crappiest books, and a masochistic reader who will doggedly punish myself by continuing to plough through books I abhor and despise until the very final word, I never would have discovered the pleasantly surprising ending. I'm still absolutely finished with reading any Kinsella book again ever, but by the end of Remember Me? I was over my hatred and happy enough to actually recommend this to lovers of mindless chicklit...with the caveat that it really is 75-100 pages too long* and that it's perfectly okay to skip over mass sections. But that's enough to raise my score of it from a 2 to a 4. And apparently, that's all I can ask from a Kinsella novel.
* For the record, it's worth noting that were the book shorter, this would be a much happier review with a higher score.
Scale of 1-10: 4
Pros: Um...no one overspends. No cutesy overdraft letters from earnest, unrealistically patient bank managers. Though there is a bill for a glass leopard. I guess Kinsella just can't help herself.
Cons: Meandering plot and the same staggeringly irritating heroine utterly bereft of common sense who persons every single one of Kinsella's novels and constantly makes bad decisions, plunging herself into ever-increasingly hot water until the hero arrives to save her from herself.
The original review I wrote of this really ripped it apart. My problem with Kinsella's books - and it's a big one - is that all her heroines are simpletons. Shopaholic Becky never learns anything and is the same idiotic spendthrift every single book. She never grows as a character even the tiniest iota...though I've only managed to push through the first 2 books in the series, so I suppose it's possible Bloomwood wakes up and smells the bankruptcy sometime in Book 3 or 4, but I wouldn't hold my breath. And I hated the Wickham-penned novel The Gatecrasher because most of the characters were vapid and bland, and those that weren't were not at all likeable, while the title character was a complete and utter bitch.
For 3/4 of it's meandering, soul-sucking way, Remember Me?, follows standard Kinsella formula, which is to say that nothing happens. There's no character development and no real discernible plot. The whole book just lollygags around while it's main character, Lexi Smart (boy, talk about your misnomers), shops and goes to tea and just generally whines about life as she gets into utterly ridiculous and unrealistic scrapes, until suddenly, in the last 1/4 of the book, a solution to everything falls neatly into her lap and every problem she has is miraculously solved in one fell swoop. In fact, the final 1/4 of the book is true to form as well, but for one small detail: there is actually character development and growth in the final chapter(s) of the book.
Hallelujah.
Sure, most of the book is all, "Oh, I have amnesia. Oh, I'm married. Hurray, I have money; I think I'll go shopping! Oh, I'm a bitch and nobody likes me. Oh, I can't remember anything of the last 3 years, and my old friends all hate me - I know: I'll buy them presents! Oh, I just can't do anything right. Hurray, my friends figured out I really do have amnesia and I'm not a bitch anymore, but no one knows why I turned into one. Oh no, my company is phasing out my department - all my friends will hate me again. What's that you say? I knew this was coming and I put together a supersecret plan to stop it? I have a file? A blue one? Where is it? You don't know? Oh no! What will I do?! Gasp! There! I found it! I shall brandish it over my head and proclaim loudly that as god is my witness, I shall never go--wait. That's too long. I shall just sing gaily, 'Here I am, to save the day!' Oh yes, sweep me off my feet my handsome hero and carry me away! We'll always have Paris!" (Some leeway taken there, but it mostly follows the actual plot.) However, in the final pages, Lexi does actually learn something about herself. And she grows a bit of a spine. More, she actually takes responsibility for herself and her destiny, and GROWS UP. That's right, a Kinsella book which ends with an actual adult heroine. I hardly knew how to react.
I'm not saying it's an awesome book. But it doesn't suck like I thought it did when I wrote my original review (having put it down in disgust) the day before I finished it, and frankly, it needs to be about 100 pages shorter, because if I weren't a literary die-hard who is bound and determined to finish even the crappiest books, and a masochistic reader who will doggedly punish myself by continuing to plough through books I abhor and despise until the very final word, I never would have discovered the pleasantly surprising ending. I'm still absolutely finished with reading any Kinsella book again ever, but by the end of Remember Me? I was over my hatred and happy enough to actually recommend this to lovers of mindless chicklit...with the caveat that it really is 75-100 pages too long* and that it's perfectly okay to skip over mass sections. But that's enough to raise my score of it from a 2 to a 4. And apparently, that's all I can ask from a Kinsella novel.
* For the record, it's worth noting that were the book shorter, this would be a much happier review with a higher score.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Currently Reading: Remember Me?
Sophie Kinsella
I don't know why I do this to myself. I don't tend to like much of what Kinsella writes, but I had an advance copy of the first 3 chapters of this last spring and was interested enough to want to buy it, so I'm taking a break from teen fic for a book or 2 and reading this.
I don't know why I do this to myself. I don't tend to like much of what Kinsella writes, but I had an advance copy of the first 3 chapters of this last spring and was interested enough to want to buy it, so I'm taking a break from teen fic for a book or 2 and reading this.
Monday, October 6, 2008
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
Scale of 1-10: 8
Pros: Strong, well-developed characters; makes beautiful use of language without getting too purple or verbose
Cons: A tad long, sometimes hard to follow
Synopsis: Time-traveling Henry DeTamble meets his wife-to-be, Clare Abshire, when he is 28 and she is 20. She meets him when she is 6 and he is 36. She lives life linearly, he lives it as a jumbled mishmash of random hops and jumps throughout his also somewhat linear life. At its heart, this is a book about true love, but it's also about destiny.
My take:
I really enjoyed Niffenegger's story, though I did find it a tad long. The prose is beautiful, and only every once in a while fails to fit the telling - once or twice, I thought it was a bit too mature for the narrator's age at the time. Generally, though, it fits well and is descriptive without bogging down the reader in too much detail. The tale is told in chunks, from both Henry and Clare's points of view, now in the present, now in the past, always preceeded by date and the ages of both Henry and Clare during each vignette. That helps, but while the leaps back in time mostly follow chronological order, they don't always, so every once in a while, it get confusing. Likewise, every now and again, Niffenegger retells one of the jumps to the past in the present, and that can also be confusing. Mostly, it isn't, as she has been very careful to cover with enough detail for the reader to follow and remember, but every once in a while, I had to page back to remind myself what happened the first time, from the other character's point of view (generally, one character tells the story the first time, and then when it happens "again" in the present, the other character will tell his/her side of things).
I thought Niffenegger handled the subject of time travel really well, avoiding inconsistencies nicely and offering a reasonable explanation for the lack of effect Henry has on the future when he's traveling through the past. Which is where the destiny part of the telling comes into play. Perhaps part of the success in Niffenegger's explanation is a lack of detail; she does not bog herself down in lengthy explanations of how or why things happen and whether or not they can be changed. We get Henry's explanation of the facts as he sees them, and as they are as pragmatic as they are sketchy, I find myself willing to accept Niffenegger's version of time travel without real question.
My only real nits with the book were having to page back sometimes to remind myself what had happened before, and some of the scenes really only needed one telling, as Henry was the only character in them, from different times in his life. In addition, there is one very dramatic part of the book where Henry materializes in his own apartment while he, Clare, and some friends are all having dinner, but Niffenegger never explained why it happened or what was going on with the time-traveling Henry. I found that really aggravating, as the scene was really dramatic. I mean if you're going to drop a convulsing time-traveler into the middle of a dinner party, destroying a china cabinet (or something that sounded like a china cabinet) in the process, you might want to drop me a clue somewhere down the line telling me why the character was convulsing and what happened to him when he made it back to his own time, all sliced up from the broken glass and crockery he landed in. As well, since at no other point in the book does Henry displace solid objects when he "lands" in another time, I don't understand why he did then, either. Perhaps he only tripped and fell and knocked over the cabinet, but since Niffenegger never tells that part of the story from the time-traveling Henry's point of view, we'll never know. It really irked me that she never bothered to explain that scene. She also failed to adequately explain why when Henry travels to the future, he seems to avoid contact with Clare. That doesn't really make any sense to me, given the characters' love, and one or two sentences from Henry in the future would have sufficed to explain it. I find that a bit lazy on Niffenegger's part. Aside from those small things, however, I definitely enjoyed the book and am very glad I read it.
Scale of 1-10: 8
Pros: Strong, well-developed characters; makes beautiful use of language without getting too purple or verbose
Cons: A tad long, sometimes hard to follow
Synopsis: Time-traveling Henry DeTamble meets his wife-to-be, Clare Abshire, when he is 28 and she is 20. She meets him when she is 6 and he is 36. She lives life linearly, he lives it as a jumbled mishmash of random hops and jumps throughout his also somewhat linear life. At its heart, this is a book about true love, but it's also about destiny.
My take:
I really enjoyed Niffenegger's story, though I did find it a tad long. The prose is beautiful, and only every once in a while fails to fit the telling - once or twice, I thought it was a bit too mature for the narrator's age at the time. Generally, though, it fits well and is descriptive without bogging down the reader in too much detail. The tale is told in chunks, from both Henry and Clare's points of view, now in the present, now in the past, always preceeded by date and the ages of both Henry and Clare during each vignette. That helps, but while the leaps back in time mostly follow chronological order, they don't always, so every once in a while, it get confusing. Likewise, every now and again, Niffenegger retells one of the jumps to the past in the present, and that can also be confusing. Mostly, it isn't, as she has been very careful to cover with enough detail for the reader to follow and remember, but every once in a while, I had to page back to remind myself what happened the first time, from the other character's point of view (generally, one character tells the story the first time, and then when it happens "again" in the present, the other character will tell his/her side of things).
I thought Niffenegger handled the subject of time travel really well, avoiding inconsistencies nicely and offering a reasonable explanation for the lack of effect Henry has on the future when he's traveling through the past. Which is where the destiny part of the telling comes into play. Perhaps part of the success in Niffenegger's explanation is a lack of detail; she does not bog herself down in lengthy explanations of how or why things happen and whether or not they can be changed. We get Henry's explanation of the facts as he sees them, and as they are as pragmatic as they are sketchy, I find myself willing to accept Niffenegger's version of time travel without real question.
My only real nits with the book were having to page back sometimes to remind myself what had happened before, and some of the scenes really only needed one telling, as Henry was the only character in them, from different times in his life. In addition, there is one very dramatic part of the book where Henry materializes in his own apartment while he, Clare, and some friends are all having dinner, but Niffenegger never explained why it happened or what was going on with the time-traveling Henry. I found that really aggravating, as the scene was really dramatic. I mean if you're going to drop a convulsing time-traveler into the middle of a dinner party, destroying a china cabinet (or something that sounded like a china cabinet) in the process, you might want to drop me a clue somewhere down the line telling me why the character was convulsing and what happened to him when he made it back to his own time, all sliced up from the broken glass and crockery he landed in. As well, since at no other point in the book does Henry displace solid objects when he "lands" in another time, I don't understand why he did then, either. Perhaps he only tripped and fell and knocked over the cabinet, but since Niffenegger never tells that part of the story from the time-traveling Henry's point of view, we'll never know. It really irked me that she never bothered to explain that scene. She also failed to adequately explain why when Henry travels to the future, he seems to avoid contact with Clare. That doesn't really make any sense to me, given the characters' love, and one or two sentences from Henry in the future would have sufficed to explain it. I find that a bit lazy on Niffenegger's part. Aside from those small things, however, I definitely enjoyed the book and am very glad I read it.
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