az- Broken as Things Are: Martha Witt
Henry Holt and Co. (August 12, 2004) 4 stars 14 customer reviews not bad (I tht of this as a book not discovered, that maybe hardly anyone else had read - this I think is my favorite of the books grouped here)
-Told in the dry, savant-like voice of 14-year-old Morgan-Lee, this tale of a Southern girl's coming-of-age gives a droll twist to the tropes of dysfunction. Morgan-Lee and her handsome, "unwell" 15-year-old brother, Ginx, are as emotionally close as twins. They have a secret language—a nonsensical patois that Ginx created—and share a running story about a brother and sister who are given permission to love each other forever and ever. Their mother is an overdelicate flower who's taken to her bed rather than face her son's problems; their father is kind but incapable of taking control; and their younger sister, Dana, has all but abandoned the family, moving into her aunt and uncle's house next door. Everything is proceeding as well as can be expected—one accepts, for example, that it's okay for Ginx to give his sister the occasional concussion—until Morgan-Lee falls in love with her childhood friend, Billy. Arch, slyly humorous and occasionally overblown ("I felt my jaw throb and swell, drinking the purple and black straight out of that warm evening"), this is an unusual, uncompromising debut.
-"I was the fire over which Ginx's soul became less blank, more legible." Morgan Lee's brother, Ginx, speaks in poetry no one else can understand; only Morgan Lee can decipher his curious rush of words, chosen for their sound and emotional impact rather than their meaning.
-A dysfunctional family in denial, the thin line between social acceptance and the taint of poverty and a lack of personal boundaries between brother and sister, mother and son; everything factors into this disturbing and poignant coming-of-age tale, all the more painful for its immutability.With a mother too distracted to care for Morgan-Lee, Ginx and their sister, Dana, the children create their own landscape. Against a southern gothic background, Morgan-Lee, her brother and sister play out their fates, all of them branded by a lack of emotional support and affection. It is not until the children socialize with a very strange young woman, Sweety-Boy, and her half-brother, Jacob, new to their part of North Carolina, that their careful surface develops fissures. Sweety-Boy's world-weary cynicism acts as a catalyst for Morgan-Lee: prematurely worldly, Sweety-Boy is conscious of her own currency in a stingy world, while, in contrast, Morgan-Lee is still wrapped in innocence, grappling with unfamiliar emotions, knowing the price will be the loss of her brother and the solace they offer each other. When the siblings attend an intimate birthday party thrown by Sweety-Boy, the status quo is altered by the drunken exposure of naked needs blooming in the humid summer air. Ginx, Morgan-Lee and Dana are thrown into unexpected betrayals. The most keenly observant of the three, Morgan-Lee recognizes the storm on the horizon: "the prison of solitude that so often kept people together, no matter how unhappily, was constructed out of pure, empty yearning."


az- A Complicated Kindness: Miriam Toews
Counterpoint (October 5, 2004) 3 1/2 stars 36 customer reviews so *this* is the standout most popular
-In bleak rural Manitoba, 16-year-old Nomi longs for her older sister, Tash ("she was so earmarked for damnation it wasn't even funny"), and mother, Trudie, each of whom has recently fled fundamentalist Christianity and their town. Her gentle, uncommunicative father, Ray, isn't much of a sounding board as Nomi plunges into bittersweet memory and grapples with teenage life in a "kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions." Still, she and Ray are linked in a tender, if fragile, partnership as each slips into despair.
-"People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event. The only reason we're not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. My guidance counsellor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her. Oh, that's rich, she said. That's rich." Nomi's uncle, "The Mouth", always knows what to say, and it never fails to be irrelevant and discouraging. But she values those whose love and concern go beyond the limitations of their prescribed answers, who can only love her and feel confused, without lashing out because they feel threatened by her ragged search to unite her family and find healing. Nomi's dad, Toews' best character, embodies this combination of deep love and confusion. He holds rigidly to the prescribed order of the community while gently falling apart with grief. Ray wears a suit every day, even gardening, wins an award for perfect church attendance and listens to the radio hymn programme every night. But he spends nights secretly rearranging rubbish at the dump and slowly selling off the household furniture while letting his daughter see, with a sad and affectionate humour, that he doesn't know the answers. Even though I desperately wanted to tell her at the end of the book, "fly away!" I was moved by her dad's loyal attempt to encourage and empower her in the only way he knows how.


az- The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done: Sandra Newman
HarperCollins (May 27, 2003) 4 1/2 stars 8 customer reviews so this is not the standout most popular of these, as I thought of it
-Transforming that most pedestrian of documents-the business report-Newman has fashioned a first novel that is anything but by-the-numbers. Chrysalis Moffat, a South American orphan, has grown into a psychologically unstable young woman living alone in the California mansion of her adopted parents, both dead. Her brother, Eddie, "five foot seven inches of sheer depravity," returns from a slacker trip around the world towing a fake Buddhist guru named Ralph, and together they open the Tibetan School of Miracles in the run-down mansion, selling enlightenment to spiritually destitute Californians. Was their father in the CIA? What, exactly, was he doing in South America when he adopted Chrysalis? The novel is full of false turns, fake names and jaw-dropping coincidences, all slotted neatly together in Newman's blunt, wry prose. This is a virtuoso performance, if it sometimes reads like wallowing in cancer, suicide, incest, mental illness.
-The author uses numbered and lettered lists and odd formatting that I expected to find annoying after a while, but the effect does not feel contrived or `writerly'. It's poetic, clever, funny, and tragic. The characters are, to put it simplistically, all deeply messed up by a lack of love and by their experiences of loss and abandonment. They are, therefore, all doomed. In the meantime, they live twisted and fascinating lives.
-Style is the chief hook here, as Chrysalis's dry tone and seemingly straightforward narration (often organized into the numbered paragraphs of a formal report) provide comic counterpoint to numerous over-the-top, out-of-sequence subplots involving--among other things--biological weapons, alien abduction, divine visitations, professional gamblers, guerilla war, unrequited love, and suicide. deft and edgy first novel.


az- Built in a Day: Steven Rinehart
Doubleday (July 22, 2003) 3 1/2 review 5 customer reviews
-Andrew, the antihero of this blackly humorous novel, is still in college in his 30s, has a job as a youth counselor that involves nothing more than hanging out with teens all day..
-Andrew Bergman, self-described "underachiever and alcoholic," relates the story of his thirty-second year, during which he is married, then widowed, then loses everything except one friend. The setting, a small midwestern college city, shapes the story: a good thing, since the plot packs in enough dire happenings and bizarre behavior to fuel several novels, leaving more than one dangling subplot. The characters, representing the oddball Andrew's self-centered lifestyle, are a weird melange: bar maids and bar owners; randy, smart, mouthy teens; a sprinkling of social workers; a couple of tough older ladies; several academics (including his outrageous, Shakespeare-loving mother); and assorted townsfolk. As the character list indicates, Rinehart can write with humor. He has a talent for apt, witty phrases and, at least at the beginning of the book, integrates amusing scenes with the bathos. The slacker tone, vulgar language, and some graphic sex suggest that this book will appeal most strongly to readers of modern, edgy fiction.
-finds himself charged with the care of his dead wife's son and foster-daughter .. the story he finds himself in builds to bang-up climax, with a sweet little resolution that gives the reader some hope that Andrew is climbing out his hole, and might even be better for it when he gets there.
-As I neared the end I thought, "Sure, it's a great read, but what about the ending? Can he make me believe in the ending?" And yes. The ending is great. Surprising and inevitable, as a good ending should be.


az- An Everyday Savior: Kathryn Larrabee
Thunder's Mouth Press (June 10, 2002) 4 1/2 stars 7 customer reviews
-a moving debut novel.
- has humor, tension, and a real move along story.
-Understated integrity and quiet dignity are the hallmarks of Kathryn Larrabee's debut novel, An everyday Savior. Harley Cookson has been married barely six months to his Russian bride, Sonia, when he must bring his ailing mother to live with them. A chance encounter with an old girlfriend, Lynette, gives him another reason to worry - it seems Lynette's husband has been beating her. Larrabee's sure hand with her material and her feel for the rituals of home life make this a richly textured and rewarding novel.
-A charmingly simple story with complex layers. The male point of view is refreshing and captivating. I loved the descriptions of the rural settings and the relationship between Harley and Sonia. Sonia prompted her husband to do the right thing even when that action might be against her interests. I especially found the ending provocative; who are the saviors in our lives?
this is odd one in the group? about an adult, not arrested in developement. not esp about loss, abandonment?

__________________
all these authors American? yes I think (Toews is Canadian).
all first novels? yes.. except Toews: Complicated Kindness is her third novel.
and all more or less coming-of-age stories? about adolescents (Broken, Complicated Kindness) or young adults (Only Good Thing, Built in a Day, Everyday Savior no this is story of a man in -and re?- middle-age~)
Only Good Thing & Built in a Day are "edgy" - the other three are not, right? Nomi's voice is irreverent and Morgan-Lee's is dry; neither style is edgy. and Everyday Savior least of all.
I don't know if a novel can be edgy and be great. ~to me that is. edgy is Chuck Palahniuk. I liked esp his Lullaby, but feel something to be cheap about it ~


catalogue of novels liked, seattle-chicago at 2/01/2007 09:28:00 PM