Everyday I Write the Book

Authors and Book Clubs

One of the things I've loved most about writing this blog has been the interaction I've had with authors. I still can't believe I have emailed with, and even met, some of my favorite and most admired writers - I wonder if they realize that they are celebrities in my mind. I credit Web 2.0, which has connected us all in ways we would have had difficulty anticipating even a few years ago. This social networking phenomenon is a powerful one.

Along those lines, check out this Philadelphia Inquirer article (forwarded to me from Josh Henkin, author of Matrimony) about how authors are more frequently interacting with book clubs - in person or on the phone - and how they are finding and connecting with these groups.

Children's Books: "Ralphina the Roly-Poly" and "The Tutu Ballet"

I recently received two kids' books for review, Ralphina The Roly-Poly, by Claudia Chandler, and The Tutu Ballet, by Sally Lee. Here's what I thought:

Ralphina the Roly-Poly is a bright, colorful book about Ralphina, a small roly-poly, which is a fourteen-legged insect that lives in damp, dark places. Ralphina lives near a house, and has her eye on the little boy who lives there, with hopes that he might become her friend. She tells her mother that the only way she can think of to catch his eye is to wait until he goes to pick some newly blossomed tulips for his mother, one of which she will curl up inside so that he will find her. Sure enough, that is what happens - the little boy finds her and they become friends. This book is short on plot, even for one aimed at little kids. That's the whole story! My four year-old daughters liked this book but were surprised when it ended, because I think they were expecting more to happen. The pictures are beautiful, though, and definitely captured their attention. The best part of the book is the "Did You Know?" section at the end about rainbows and roly-polys. The author, Claudia Chandler, is an author and illustrator as well as an avid gardener. Her love of gardening clearly shows through in this book. Julie at Booking Mama also reviewed Raphina the Roly-Poly (and loved it) - check out what she had to say.

The Tutu Ballet is the second book I have read and reviewed by Sally Lee. The first was The Rabbit and The Snowman, reviewed here. Like The Rabbit and The Snowman, The Tutu Ballet is illustrated with beautiful watercolor drawings. It is the story of a ballet class with four students - a bear, a mouse, a hare and a fox. The ballet teacher faces a quandary: each of her students is very good at one particular ballet move (a kick, a twirl, a jump or a plie), but not good at all at the others. With a ballet recital upcoming, she decides to choreograph a ballet where each student only has to perform the move that he or she excels at. And that's the story. Again, I thought this one was a little light on plot (especially compared to the very charming The Rabbit and the Snowman), and I wasn't sure I liked the message - that if you don't like doing what everyone is supposed to do, you can just do your own thing. This is supposed to be a group performance, and the book is teaching kids that they can just opt out of what they don't like or aren't good at. Of course, my ballet-obsessed four year-olds didn't quite grasp the overall theme of the book, but they did enjoy looking at the pictures of the dancing animals.

That's my kids' book report for early January 2009. Any new favorites on your kids' bookshelves?

Book Giveaway: "The Captain's Daughter" by Margaret Cezair-Thompson

I have a book to give away: The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson. Here's what Amazon has to say about it:

Cezair-Thompson conjures the tragic glamour of golden age Hollywood against the backdrop of lusty, turbulent Jamaica in her dual generational coming-of-age saga. Ida Joseph is 13 years old when Errol Flynn is nearly shipwrecked off the coast of her hometown of Port Antonio in 1946. Flynn instantly loves Jamaica and, eager to find a refuge from stateside scandal, purchases an island across from the port. Navy Island becomes the setting for his glittering parties, movie projects and affair with Ida in her senior year of high school. Flynn refuses to take responsibility for the resulting child, May, and after trying to make a go of it in Jamaica, Ida leaves May and heads to New York City, where she marries a wealthy baron friend of Flynn's who purchases the island after Flynn dies. May grows to adulthood on Navy Island, develops something more than a crush on a married family friend 40 years her senior and indulges in drugs and free love. Jamaica's tumultuous progression toward self-governance—with the violent chaos it unleashes on Navy Island—reveals certain hidden truths about the baron. For all the high drama, the reader never feels fully privy to Ida or May, but Cezair-Thompson otherwise succeeds magnificently in evoking a world distant in both time and place.

I haven't read The Captain's Daughter. I'd like to pass it along to someone who would enjoy it. If you're interested, leave a comment here with your name (and be sure I have your email address). I will draw a name at random on Sunday, January 11. Good luck!

Book vs. Movie: "Revolutionary Road"

I saw "Revolutionary Road" - movie version - tonight. Here's my take on book vs. movie.

First, I wonder if I was crippled by having JUST read the book. I felt as if I were watching a play, one whose script I knew by heart. This made the movie seem more like a performance than a believable world that pulled me in. The movie is pretty faithful to the book. There are some plot points in the book that don't make it into the movie, and a few details are changed in the movie. Some of these changes make sense - of course the book had to be streamlined to turn it into a two-hour movie. Some of the changes make less sense, but I don't want to get into them here for fear of spoiling the movie for those who haven't seen it.

Like the book, the movie is not uplifting. And like the book, some of the fights between April and Frank Wheeler are not convincing or well-explored. Why is she so angry at him at the end? Does she honestly believe that she doesn't love him? Have all of her prior kindnesses toward him been purely calculated to get her where she wants to go? The movie is even more spare than the book, and offers less explanation for why April is who she is.

I will say this for the movie - visually, I got a better sense of why April and Frank's world was so inflexible and suffocating than I did reading the novel. I know I wrote in my review that I didn't think Revolutionary Road the novel was necessarily successful as a statement about the 50s. The movie, however, changed my mind a bit. April's unhappiness - her restlessness - made a lot more sense after seeing the movie and understanding how she lived.

All in all, I didn't love either the movie or the book. But I definitely found reading the book to be more satisfying and ultimately more enjoyable than watching the movie. So... Advantage: Book.

"Revolutionary Road," by Richard Yates

I wanted to read Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, before I saw the movie, which came out last week. It had been on my TBR list for a long time, and the holiday release of the highly anticipated movie, starring a reunited Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, was good incentive for me to pick it up.

Revolutionary Road is about a young couple - April and Frank Wheeler - living in the New York suburbs in the 50s. Frank works for a business machine company, the same one his father worked for many years ago. April is a frustrated housewife with two small kids who finds living in the suburbs imprisoning and unfulfilling. Frank and April married young, and had kids earlier than they expected.  The book is about their unhappy marriage, and their increasing inability to communicate and satisfy each other. Frank and April seem incapable of connecting with each other unless they are belittling the suburban society that surrounds them, filled with office drones, pastel cookie-cutter homes, and women without ambition.

Yates is a precise, compelling writer, and despite the book's age (55 years) the narration felt fresh and current. I have to say, however, that I didn't love it. I know it is supposed to be a period piece, a statement about the 50s in America and the perils of conformity and materialism.  However, I found the book to be less universal than that. I read it as a sad story about two people whose marriage takes a few very tragic turns. April, especially, is a deeply troubled woman with issues that extend beyond Frank to her horrible parents and childhood. To me, this book was about the disintegration of a relationship. Perhaps the book was revolutionary at the time it was published, and its commentary about the lives of young, middle-class suburban Americans was jarring and new. Now, however, there have been so many expressions of rebellion against the 50s that this book seemed less powerful to me.

I am curious to see the movie, to see how faithful the script remains to the novel, and how Leo and Kate interpret these unhappy spouses. I am glad I read Revolutionary Road, and certainly found it hard to put down. But I didn't love it.

"Waiting for Daisy" by Peggy Orenstein

Happy New Year! I am back from my trip to Colorado. After a frigid first few days, the weather warmed up and we had some beautiful ski weather. And the backdrop of the snow-covered Rockies was gorgeous. Sometimes it is just refreshing to be in a totally different part of the country - different terrain, different pace of life.

I read two books while I was gone - Waiting For Daisy and Revolutionary Road (to be reviewed tomorrow) and visited another of the Great Bookstores I've Never Been To - the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. It's a great store with an excellent fiction selection, and its layout makes you feel like you are wandering through someone's (albeit huge) personal library. Old wooden shelves, big overstuffed chairs - a lovely place to spend an hour browsing. I picked up a signed copy of Without A Backward Glance, a book I've had my eye on for a while. It is now resting atop the teetering TBR pile.

On to the review...

I really should have liked Peggy Orenstein's Waiting for Daisy. It's about a woman in her late thirties who decides that she does want to have children after all (she had her husband had been on the fence for a long time). The book chronicles her experience with infertility, including multiple rounds of fertility drugs and IVF, miscarriages, attempts at surrogacy and adoption, and the eventual birth of her daughter Daisy by natural conception.

As someone who experienced infertility and went through many of the same procedures that Orenstein did, I found much of the book to be pretty familiar. The waiting, the disappointments, the anxiety, the loss of control - this was common ground for me. What disappointed me about this book was that it felt more like an infertility diary than a memoir. There has been so much written about infertility-related topics in the last 10 years, and Waiting for Daisy didn't really add much to what's out there. Also, the author was ambivalent about having children throughout the whole book, which made her honest but also ultimately less sympathetic in my mind. It was hard to feel a lot of emotion when each disappointment seemed to have been tinged with relief in her mind.

There was a section in the middle where Orenstein traveled to Japan and experienced a miscarriage while researching the effect of the Hiroshima bombing on young women. That interlude was interesting, but again, it felt more like a travel diary at times than a memoir. Orenstein was so unhappy most of the time that I learned more about her moods than about the country and the trip's impact on her journey toward motherhood.

I don't mean to be harsh on Orenstein. Infertility is an intensely personal experience, and it impacts people differently. She is, of course, entitled to her own experiences and emotions, and she certainly needn't justify how she felt about becoming a mother and how all of the losses and frustration impacted her. I just wonder why she wrote the book - was she simply unburdening a few years' worth of intense emotions? was she hoping to help others in the same boat? If her book was ultimately a celebration of motherhood and her newborn daughter (hence the title), why did she spend so little time talking about her?

I would recommend this book to someone going through IVF or making tough decisions about surrogacy and adoption, just to remind themselves that they are not alone, that others have forged those difficult grounds. Otherwise, I am not sure what readers would get out of this book.

I'd love to hear from anyone else who has read Waiting for Daisy - do you agree?