News & Blog

Over on the Book of Face, I’ve got three conversations going that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

The first pertains to which of Stephen King’s books I’ve read and, perhaps more importantly, the shocking amount of his work I haven’t read.

The second discusses Robert McCammon, Bentley Little, and John Saul.

And the third is a discussion of one of my favorite authors, Clive Barker, and which of his books I missed but shouldn’t have.

Feel free to leave comments here if you can’t or don’t want to on Facebook.

Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This sequel to FUN HOME follows Bechdel into adulthood and explores her fraught relationship with her emotionally distant mother, a mother who had been raised to believe boys were more important than girls. While I loved FUN HOME unequivocally, this one didn’t affect me quite as strongly. Bechdel spends more time on her own psychotherapeutic history and the story of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott than on her family life, which for me was what made FUN HOME so interesting. Regardless, ARE YOU MY MOTHER is actually quite good and succeeded in keeping my attention, perhaps thanks to my own interest in psychology. The art is as good and evocative as it was in FUN HOME, as is Bechdel’s storytelling. I suspect what disappointment I have with the memoir, which is actually quite minimal, stems solely from the fact that it doesn’t tell the story I wanted it to. Because FUN HOME was so focused on Bechdel’s memories of her father while growing up, I wanted the same thing here but with a focus on memories of her mother. That’s not what this is. ARE YOU MY MOTHER is a different kind of book altogether. Not a worse one, not a lesser one, just a different one — although, admittedly, one that didn’t grip me as strongly.

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had been wanting to read FUN HOME since a friend of mine who owned a comic book store recommended it to me back in 2006 or ’07. It promptly slipped my mind, but after seeing the amazing Broadway musical recently, my desire to read the graphic novel was renewed. I’m glad I did because I absolutely loved it! The writing is witty and engaging, with Bechdel’s personality coming through in every word. The art is evocative without overpowering the words or the emotions behind them. The story is deeply affecting. Most of us have awful childhoods in one form or another, but Bechdel’s childhood relationship with her difficult, moody, closeted father, culminating ultimately in his suicide, ought to come off as excruciatingly painful. Instead, it comes off as deceptively mundane, just as I imagine most of our awful childhoods would when viewed from the distance adulthood grants us, and I found that to be the perfect tone for this book.

Additionally, for me, part of the joy of reading FUN HOME was seeing in retrospect how they adapted certain scenes — and even just certain concepts — for the stage. They’re different entities in many ways, the memoir and the musical, but they share a big, glorious, beating heart. It’s easy to see why FUN HOME was a bestseller and award winner, not to mention why it’s so widely beloved and even taught in schools. It’s a great story, beautifully told, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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In the Woods by Tana French
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let me just say up front that despite only receiving three stars from me, this isn’t a bad novel. The prose is great — I’d go so far as to say it’s exquisite at times — the setting was interesting and evocative, and the mystery twisty and compelling. Everything points toward a wonderful reading experience for mystery lovers, except that, in my opinion, Tana French includes a single fatal flaw that sabotages the novel: Detective Rob Ryan, the narrator. He is, to put it simply, a chore. He’s a sad sack, he constantly makes bad decisions both as a detective and as a person, he’s rude to his friends, he’s absurdly judgmental, he has a myriad of problems with women (including an inexplicable anger toward anyone who shows any interest in him, as well as an equally inexplicable hatred of women who have salad for lunch, I mean what?), and perhaps most egregious of all, French decides that because he’s the narrator Rob needs to voice his opinion on every little thing, from the aforementioned salad lunches to his cuckoo roommate to how much he enjoys his sleepovers at Cassie’s. It became tiresome to me.

The more I read of this novel, the more frustrated I became because Rob kept getting in the way of the story. I understand that French wanted to craft a character who has significant emotional and psychological scars from his childhood trauma, but where she could have used this to make the reader feel sympathy for Rob, even root for him, she instead presents us with behavior that disgusts us and pushes us away, making it more and more trying to experience the story through his POV. (And frankly, many of his reactions in the latter half of the novel felt like a stretch even for someone who’s carrying around that much baggage.)

For all the good things this novel has to offer, and there are many, I find it hard to recommend it to anyone, simply because of the narrator. It’s a bold and ambitious decision to make your first-person protagonist so unlikeable, but in a dense and complexly written mystery where you’re deep in his head for over 400 pages it backfires. Or at least it did for me. It’s also quite bold what she does with the mystery from Rob’s childhood, a choice that has frustrated some reviewers and readers but one that I think serves the author’s overall theme of the knowable vs. the unknowable. I also love that French gives the woods in which his friends disappeared an almost supernatural presence.

But there were many times when I wanted to stop reading the novel altogether because I was so fed up with Rob. I’m glad I didn’t, although I suspect not everyone will make that same decision when the same thing happens to them.

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