I Feel Bad About My Neck: Why haven't you read this yet?

Seriously, why not? This is my first Ephron book I've ever picked up and I could kick myself for not enjoying it sooner.

My dad actually recommended this collection of essays to me when I was in college. This is important because my dad doesn't read. As I've mentioned in my modest little bio on the side, he finds it "laborious." So, for that matter, does my boyfriend, my brother, my cousin, my cousin's boyfriend, several close friends, my cat and pretty much every teenager spark-noting Grapes of Wrath. My boyfriend put it plainly in a discussion about his favorite books. "Mmeeehhhh," he said, "books are long." I was unamused at first, but that's just it. Books really are long. In the pentagon of entertainment: movies, TV shows, songs, plays, and books, books take the longest to finish. Movies and plays can be knocked out in a few hours. Whole albums can be listened to in even less time. A novel or memoir requires long-distance focus, which is not common--and for the gosh damn record, is not the fault of Kids Today. I'm tired of Kids Today being pinioned as an army of jackasses who can't focus long enough to get past five whole pages without so much as a doodle in between. People have always purchased more books than they've read, and started more books than they've finished. Human nature dictates a struggle with long-distance. Well, my marathon fearing friends, fear no more.

 I Feel Bad About My Neck is immediately funny, consistently insightful, and evokes a range emotions from amused, curious, bereft and ultimately, satisfied. What's more, you'll finish it in less than a day. Seriously, it took me eight hours total, and I've been tested for A.D.D. twice. Ephron's one of those authors we've all heard of, and have no reason to believe her books won't be worth our time, yet we droll out, "Yeah, sure, I'll get to it." Well, get to it, damnit.

As the almighty New York Times said, "Nora Ephron can write about anything better than anyone can write about anything." There are whole fractions of me that believe this. The woman writes about her neck. Her neck! How can that possibly be interesting? She didn't get it slashed in a knife-fight, there's no snake tattoo coiled around it hissing the cursive name of a lover and for all we know, there aren't even any hickeys. Somehow, though, her neck is amazing--outstanding in its intricacies and nuances (I don't know what a nuance is, but what the hell). She may not write about anything better than anyone can write about anything, but I'm sure that no one has surmised the neck like one, Nora Ephron.

She writes well about other non-assuming things. For instance, the phonebook:

"I miss the telephone book... I miss what it stood for. Self-sufficiency. Democracy. The belief that you could find what you were looking for in a place that everyone in the world had access to."

Ask a crowded room what they think represents democracy, and you'll hear not an utterance about the phonebook. Especially not now, since phonebooks are scary and foreign next to our amazing little phones you can yell someone's name at to make a call.

Anyway.

Ephron, a writer I very much wish was still among us (not that I would meet her, nor know what to do if I met her), left us all a fantastic book you'll finish in what feels like one sitting, compared to the fat novels and bios resting on the coffee table. I zipped right through it and it takes me a whole morning and better part of the afternoon to get through the side of a cereal box.

Chances are, someone has recommended this to you, and you have not read it, like me until now. Instead, we reached for the flashier cover, or the more popular fantasy kick. Having finally read it, I can assure you, we were missing out.

I'll Give You The Sun: The next Fault In Our Stars?

I don't say that lightly. You remember reading John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, right? You probably finished it thinking, oh God, what now? You despaired, wondering how anything else was going to even come close to that good. I was there, friends. I know those feels. Of course, we found other books and enjoyed them like the soul comfort-food they are. Maybe we happened upon one that grabbed us by the collar just as fiercely as TFIOS, and instantly told our friends, neighbors, and bank tellers, "YOU MUST READ THIS." Or, perhaps nothing so wondrous has fallen into your hands; you're still browsing your personal library and the shelves of indies, guessing at which of the myriad covers contains the next story you won't ever want to finish.

Well, get the gosh-damn ready, because this is it.

Jandy Nelson's second novel, I'll Give You the Sun is so consistently good, you'll be plowing through it well past midnight. One might call it a "realistic" novel, which is to say that no one's going to magic school, or leading a resistance against a dictator. Without the flashy back-drop of evil-doing, this one's about love, loss, beauty, creating beauty, the vitality of art, and the courage of owning your own life. We've got two heroes, twins Noah and Jude. They are raised in a nuclear home with two parents: A stoic father and whimsical mother. Together, they provide opposing backdrops against which the kids develop, abandon and rediscover their creative potential among other qualities that blossom in hazardous fashions in that ever-loved coming of age period of life.

The characters are as captivating as real, breathing people. Each one is composed to feel immediately familiar despite their stranger-ness--the kind of people you lay your eyes on for the first time and know right away they'll be with you for life.

Noah is a wonderful, scattered boy. Nelson's imagination flows from her to him like a bloodline. His lines contain small bombs of wild thinking, describing the world around him as if covering the black and white pages with a mess of color and gashed lines. The text hits your head in the way some paintings hit your ears.

Jude blooms later than her brother, artistically speaking. The trope of the sibling-in-shadow takes on an interesting dynamic here, as Nelson places Jude's story three years into the future from Noah's. It's as if her story literally follows in the wake of her more gifted twin. The temporal jumps between chapters are crafted excellently, leaving us unconfused, yet just clueless enough as the two siblings appear throughout each other's narratives. The stark difference between the Jude in Noah's stories and the Jude in her own stirs curiosity the way a tragic accident sells papers. At thirteen, Jude is a thrill-seeking, surfer babe with hair so long "everyone in Northern California has to worry about getting tangled up in it." Three years later, it's gone, and her surfer friends have been replaced by a ghost--a couple actually. As if she anticipated her readers' incessant need to know what the hell happened to her, she teases us with more and more info as the chapters progress. You won't be disappointed with the delivery.

With this book, we see through the eyes of two deeply gifted and troubled artists. Except, rather than bore us with the ineffective, emo, look-at-me-don't-look-at-me tortured soul, we get Noah, who turns his sister's hair into snakes, a boy's face into pure electricity, and a calm home into the center of a hurricane. Jude's art is un-discovered throughout most of it. Despite significant resistance, she evolves into a voracious sculptor, able to chip at the edges of rocks to reveal the petrified life-form within. Both she and her brother follow treacherous paths in and out of each other's lives in an attempt to bear witness to the merciless, yet gorgeous reality of their lives. A search for truth that delivers pain and understanding in perfect tempo.

That's what Give you Sun is really about: the tedium of truth. The weaving, temporally jumping narratives stretch over 370 pages to explain how reality has far more than two sides, which proves an incredible obstacle for Noah and Jude, since there are only two of them. Truth becomes multi-faceted and its sides multiply so fast you'd have to start numbering them backwards.

I can't help but see the hopefulness in such an overwhelming number. For lack of a better reason, it promises that our curiosity and appetite for exploration of unknown things will always be satiated, since the sides of what's really there will be countless. Nelson's shape-shifting, and dazzling narrative explodes forward with imagination, spinning humor, beauty and mental bedlam in its wake--a cosmic stew concomitant to a life filled with indulgence, whim and the dripping desire to connect with those who send thunder through your chest.

Grasshopper Jungle: What the Hell Did I Just Read?

You'll finish this book with the same look on your face you'd have if your parents told you they're trying to get pregnant with the neighbors. Though it's fiction, Andrew Smith's latest novel edges into a realm of outrageousness you have to pause and digest, before compulsively turning to the next chapter. 

The story follows 16-year-old Austin, a teen boy with a handful of issues that are common enough:

- distant from parents

- bullied by idiots

- easily aroused--like, everything sets him off.

And some not-so-common issues:

- In love with his best friends, Shan (girl) and Robbie (boy).

- Obsessed with recording his own history and that of his ancestors

- Inadvertently unleashes army of man-eating insects that only want to eat and have sex with everything.

I can't help but see the humor in the latter. Smith's 7-foot-tall mantises are really just exaggerations of the teenager, a creature whose penchant for clearing out a food pantry is rivaled only by locusts, and whose sex drive is rivaled only by caged hamsters. Teenage years are a formative mess in which erections and metabolisms are at full-speed, and keeping up with those two championing gems is physical growth. Teenagers are what happen when you throw something reactive into a petri dish of unstable chemicals. In that light, Smith's monsters are the perfect metaphor. They hatch from the bodies of human hosts, start out small, grow feet over-night, and continue an existence of eating, fucking and sometimes, eating and fucking (if you know how to do this easily, let me know immediately). That right there's the over-arching metaphor to life in this book, and it works well. For all it's grotesque delight, however, that's the easy way of describing Grasshopper Jungle.

At its heart (yeah I said it) the book is about adolescence and the trifling honesty found even in young people who hardly know the world around them. Austin, our leading teen, connects his arousals, his memories, and his streaming consciousness. With a voracity that matches the mantis-soldiers' appetite, he records everything in a journal, weaving the present with heartbreaking stories of his ancestors--men and women who tried hard to live happily and were met with both joy and devastation. His compulsion to record life--to put paintings on his cave wall, as he puts it--makes history itself more appealing, and maybe even a little sexier than I remember it being in high school. 

Austin is a complex boy whose intelligence is crafted with honesty and precision. He unabashedly reveals romantic feelings for two close friends of different genders, and as if under oath, informs us of whenever something makes him think about sex, which is damn near everything. Don't be deterred by that--what he has to say about what he sees is far from the gutter. Sex is not a consistently attractive event in this explosively weird narrative, giving the idea of sex a dynamic shape. This is especially so when Austin and Robbie are trapped in a mysterious room filled with jars of odd objects--the sort you find in a sci-fi horror show--and a pack of bullies breaks in, forcing our two heroes/best friends/potential lovers beneath the shelter of a desk.

As the two boys hide, the bully pack, lead by alpha ass-hat, Grant, observe a dismembered penis in a jar of liquid. Sex swiftly goes from teenage dream (hey, Katie Perry) to Frankensteinian freak-show. The shift is used as an opportunity for Austin to lament about the life of this boy, who not too long ago, kicked the crap out of him and Robbie for being "queer." In one line, Austin sums up every bully known to man: 

"I desperately wished they'd stop talking about the penis in the jar, but Grant and his friends were like lonely parakeets in front of a mirror."

A lesser writer would not be able to capture the sad and repulsive nature of mean people so easy. If Smith can do anything, it's pack a lot of substance into a small amount of words. He doesn't leave much room for boredom, or for cheap tricks. Smart, funny, delightfully grotesque, and with an ending that will make you go What in holy hell just happened? I recommend it right away.

A YA Book Without Apocalypse: Yes, It's Possible, And Yes, It's Good

Goodreads

If this book were a graph chart, and the y axis measured levels of excitement, the x measuring page number, the line traveling along the x axis would flutter near the bottom until around the 200th page. Then it shoots up. Morals come crashing down on young Philip's teenage brain and the sense of clarity he gains is as satisfying to him as it will be to you, the reader.

As for the beginning, I was hoping to laugh more. Klauss is a writer for College Humor, and several endorsements on the cover sell the book's comedy. Personally, I felt that for all the promises other authors made about it being funny, it fell short. It shouldn't take over 150 pages to start chuckling when humor is what you're essentially promised.

However, the comments are not all off base; Klauss does an excellent job with charging the hero, Phillip, with asking questions that we all need to ask ourselves, our kin, and our mentors if we want to survive. Philip's story is not about the world physically ending; it's about what an end means to us, and thinking, loving, hating and guessing human beings. Bits of clarity sparkle in the beginning and middle, and by the end, like I said, understanding comes crashing down like a bucket of sun. I don't like to even give a shadow of a spoiler, but it's worth mentioning the device of how the story develops, because after 300 pages, you'll be glad you didn't put it down.

This book is a good read for teens, adults, atheists and christians, and well, everybody you wouldn't normally find in a room together. There isn't any strong alliance with one particular audience. Regardless of their various faiths and temperaments, the characters are people first, and believers second. Don't get impatient if the characters don't reveal the juiciest parts of their personalities. Like meeting people in real life, Klauss asks us to be patient in getting to know them. 

The cover design, which Klauss himself admits is attractive, looks like the story reads. Much of it is raw and vibrant--but like one color, it sometimes begs for something a little more. Then, as if he anticipated that desire from wherever he was typing out Philip's coming of age, it explodes with well-tailored chaos.

The Book Thief: Far Better Than Nazi Germany

There are some stories that read like an old soul reminiscing with a moat of eager listeners, and there are others that read like a hushed and urgent whisper, coming from a friend who is practically spilling over with secrets. The Book Thief is both.

Death narrates and he (yes, he), has stories to tell and an appreciation for spoilers. He's not giving us cliffhangers to keep us fiending for the next page. For Death, who is trapped to the tedious burden of gathering souls, the big events (characters' deaths, for one) aren't enough. He spoils several of them halfway through, and with hardly an apology. Rather than keep us tilting on the edge of our seats, he wants us to appreciate the nuances and details of the characters' lives in full appreciation before they're gone. "I don't have much interest in mystery," he says, "Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me."Markus Zusak creates a narrator that wants us to savor the meal, rather than scoff it down.

By knowing which characters will not survive by the last page, we focus harder on them. Their actions, smirks and words sit a little more beautifully in our minds, now that we are agonizingly aware of their mortality. Doesn't chocolate taste better when you know there isn't any more in the box? By spoiling a few major events, Death implores us to enjoy what we can before it's too late. And still, even with this cushion of knowing the future, you will not cry any less when Death reaches in and grabs their souls. He doesn't rob us of the opportunity to be shocked and overwhelmed. The experience simply, and effectively, moves us with something more profound than an assassination or otherwise eventful plot-twist.

Which leads me to why this isn't a typical story about Nazi Germany, or World War II. Yes, the Nazis and the war play major roles in how these characters cross each other's paths, but they're the stage and the set, not the players. The players weave the real story, which is one of innocence lost, and making irrevocable choices. When you lose innocence, that means you've become aware; you've realized that you have the power to make a decision. Eve, for instance, lost her innocence when she was faced with the decision to either eat the apple from the tree of knowledge or remain in paradise. Liesel, the book thief, is faced with similar decisions, and more often than not, she takes the contraband despite the risk of punishment. Her loss of innocence didn't come from sex, like the phrase unfortunately implies. Innocence is nothing more than ignorance. Is it coincidence that Eve was tempted at the Tree of Knowledge? Liesel has no interest in innocence, so she takes the apples (sometimes literally, and sometimes in bulk) when they present themselves. That's what this book is about: losing innocence so that survival becomes more than waking up; it turns into a challenge to come back from sleep with a sharper mind, a fiercer ability to love, and a taste for trouble. this is why Death describes her as a "perpetual survivor," an "expert at being left behind,"which is why he tells her story. Of the heaps of souls he's encountered and carried, she is among a handful that are worth not only remembering, but also sharing. It's as if Markus Zusak himself is telling us to grab the apples, if only for Death, an immortal whose soul-bearing burden is lifted by the delight of our own mischief.

Salvage The Bones: Failed Poet Twists the Grotesquerie Of Life Into A Thing Of Beauty

Goodreads

In her own words, Jesmyn Ward is a "failed poet." At face value, this statement sounds like another lofty, author-y quip that makes many of us roll our eyes. After reading Salvage though, you understand. Ward is an extremely talented wordsmith. She's the kind of writer that was supposed to be a poet, but somehow tripped and fell into prose. This is mostly a good thing.

Early on, we're treated to lines like this: "Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly," (5). It's brief, beautiful, and for a moment, we drift away from a novel into what could be the start, climax, or ending to a really good poem. We know, however, that we are not in a poem; we are reading fiction. At times, the elaborate images can ware on you as you trudge through a narrative that practically bruises the pages with motherless survival and ever impending storms. There's no questioning the skill in her "poetry," but within the prose, it seems out of place at times, like an extra spoon at a table setting. Don't be dissuaded though: the dramatic imagery certainly makes a home for itself in the subjects of the story--the current and imminent hurricanes overhead of a desperate family.

The impending "storms" are both literal and figurative, the former being none other than Ms. Katrina. The figurative spin around young pregnancy, dog-fighting, and a motherless girl in a family of men. You don't get any story about Katrina without lines that turn your stomach, and force your eyes open to the grotesqueries of life. Namely, childbirth. Perhaps the most vivid passage is when our young hero, Esch, describes the birth of her younger brother and subsequent death of her mother:

"I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try and stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born" (4).

Consider this line a gift. Now, you can say that being a mom is the hardest job with conviction, rather than an obligation to tinkle kindly in polite society.

From the beginning, Ward treats us to a savage image of survival, and a heart rendering image of relief (page 5),  setting the tone for a bloody, messy, and--miraculously--hopeful narrative of a young girl trying to stay alive.

Tampa: The Most Wicked Thing On Your Shelf

Goodreads

This is going to chill you a bit before you even get halfway through. You probably won't look down your own street the same way for a little while. Celeste Price is a 8th grade teacher and pedophile. Her appetite for 14-year-old boys is insatiable and her ability to hide her secret is borderline sociopathic. Not unlike hearing a broadcast of a school teacher who slept with a student in your neighborhood, Tampa will hang on your shoulder when you peer down your street, lined with otherwise unassuming households. You'll be sure to remind yourself that not only can you be unsure of what's taking place within those homes, you can also not be sure what kinds of thoughts and desires are spinning behind the eyes of your neighbors. Suddenly everyone has an invisible finger dipped in some kind of wickedness, and the really jarring part is that mixed in with the fear of potential secrets, you've got a budding curiosity.

I don't mean to make you paranoid. I want to make it clear that fear is no decent cage to lock yourself in--because really, it isn't a cage; it's a box. The only path outside of it is a hole just big enough to suck oxygen through, yet too small to peer out of. And you don't want that, do you? You would rather read about a murderer than protect your innocence from a frightening character. You read things like Tampa, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. You're probably trying like hell to catch up on Breaking Bad. This is because you know that wicked people make for good stories. When a good brain, like Oscar Wilde's, Fay Weldon's and Vince Gilligan's are put to the task of making that story into something we can sink our teeth and claws into, we get exactly what we want out of these villains, or rather, these anti-heroes. The reward is an exposure of wickedness that is so unabashed and honest that you can't help but revel in the quality of the work. The evilness in the character is not chaotic or randomly dangerous; it's deliberate, unwavering, and chillingly human. It's what Alissa Nutting has tapped into with this book.

Nutting writes like a psychologist who's been around forever. Celeste Price's observations of the people around her are so fluid and bright that you constantly find yourself at war with your distaste for her criminal activity. Since I mentioned cages earlier, I'll use an excerpt where Celeste contemplates the captivity of souls within the bodies of middle aged women while she's trying to spy on a student from her car:

Their silhouettes eclipsed my binocular view and I looked up to watch them saunter off, elbows out, rowing through the air like impotent wings. Were there souls left inside these women? It seemed doubtful. The soul had always struck me as being a tricky thing to keep with the body: an easily bored aristocrat with the means to leave whenever it wished. What temptations, what vistas were their lives of folding socks and online diet-plan message boards offering? The goosey (sic) flesh of their limbs was not in rhythm. What facile cages for a spirit hell-bent on sneaking out, the bodies of these women.

How wrong, or misguided is she? Is this the unusually bright, albeit superficial mind of a teenager, trapped in the body of an educated 27 year-old? Either way, what goes on in Celeste's head is not fit for polite society... obviously. We have to admit, however, that these thoughts are not reserved for women parked outside teenagers' houses with a pair of binoculars. For as long as women have been women, the societal gaze upon their bodies has been relentless, and often brutal. Nutting allows us to explore these observations as if Celeste is a vehicle for what we openly agree is wrong, but privately consider anyway.

And within this passage, this matter-of-fact consideration of the "soul" and of these women, is desperation, which might explain deviancy, if only in part. In order to keep her soul intact and within her body, she must avoid the monotonous life she sees many women living out in her neighborhood. She is afraid that others might observe her body and being as Nature's failed attempt to make something beautiful enough to be worth the lustful attention of those she desires. There is weakness in her cold assessment of these women, and weakness is a very natural thing. In the eyes of those women, Celeste is a gorgeous specimen either at subject to their envy, or indifference. Those who did get to know her, truly--those wise to her secret desires--would likely cut their descriptive powers down to one simple word, "monster." Where is the enlightenment, or dare I say it, fun in that?

Looking through eyes of the villain is a rare opportunity we get as readers, or even as movie goers and video game players for that matter. We are always with the good guy, the hero. We're with Harry Potter, and Superman on the side of righteousness and virtue; the side of nobility in the face of death and cruelty. This is all good--in life we want to bring harm to no one and be kind to all, ideally. However, as consumers of entertainment, we limit ourselves to a very cushioned experience as readers. We fool ourselves into thinking there are immoral books that, if read, will contaminate our minds and our desires. We are afraid of being won over by Celeste Price, and then possibly becoming her.

This is an unfounded fear. No book is going to singlehandedly make you into a sex offender. If you somehow become a sex offender after reading this, I guarantee no sensible judge is going to let you go and throw her behind bars. You'll be changed after this book, like with any good book, but you won't be unrecognizable from your old self. I give Nutting a lot of credit for her writing, but she's not a witch; she's an author. A really good one who just doesn't have the face of someone who wants you to sleep with the members of One Direction (see book jacket for image).

4 out of 5 stars.