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review SPOILER ALERT! 2013-11-11 00:27

The Book Thief

Her Fine Eyes

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: An impressive piece of prose and character, marred by some clunky phrasing and a lack of weighty themes.

Honestly, if I were handing out stars, I'd probably give this one five, because of the scope of it, and because the characters truly stick with you. But it does have flaws. Marcus Zusak is so close with the books I've read--so close to greatness, and then there's a slight cave-in and I think, "Is he a bloody genius who loses interest when he's finishing the last 5%, or are his manuscripts hot messes and it already takes a ton of effort to polish them this far?" More likely he's just young and working up to a genuinely stellar career.

Memorable characterization. The characters are strong (if a little bit black and white in their morality), especially Rosa and Hans Hubermann, Rudy, and Liesel. Max is very good, too, despite not having much of a chance to be anything but a heroic tragic figure. I think it's cool that Zusak shows us a town that's not necessarily philosophically pro-Nazi, but scrabbling along in its poverty, joining the Nazi party because it must. And yet he cheats a little in that we never get a sense for how the Jews were integrated in the little town's society before persecution. (Liesel never mentions Jewish friends even from her old home town, as far as I remember. Only Alex Steiner's story mentions Alex's guilty relief that the Jewish tailors are gone, and soon he learns that lack of competition goes hand in hand with the loss of Jews as customers.)

When the story begins, we're dropped in Molching after there's already a ghetto, so we don't have a peek at the pre-holocaust attitudes of our beloved characters (and we don't see the ghetto being emptied, and the town's response to that). We also never see any "gray" characters in the form of likable Hitler Youth or Nazi-party adults. Like Franz and Victor (the boys who tormented Rudy), the bad guys are two-dimensionally horrid, which is sort of...easy? I think Zusak wanted to show that the town is made up mostly of people who are fighting to survive, are not really focusing on others, and are victims of the war, too. (Hans Hubermann's LSE co-workers feel apolitical, for instance, because they're just cleaning up after the devastation; they have no commentary on the cause of the devastation because they don't have the energy.) But for that to be true, for the town to be distractedly oblivious, it would have helped for the town not to have been geographically on the route to and from Dachau. Having starving, emotionally crushed prisoners march down their streets brings up so many issues of what citizens know and are complicit with, and what they don't know and choose to deny. You can't bring it up without dealing with it, and Zusak winds up mostly skirting the issue (other than a couple of definite pro-Nazi townies, like the shopowner who requires a "Heil Hitler" if you want to buy her candy).

The bomb deprives us of an ending. Dumping Liesel off at the Hubermanns after the Jews have already been removed, and ending the story with the obliteration of the town (and almost every character we've come to love) with a bomb before the official end of the war was perhaps Zusak's way of trying to contain the story, but had--like the weird meta-ending of I am the Messenger--the effect of seeming oddly like a cop-out: like Zusak looked at his word count and felt that he'd run 26.2 miles and it was time to finish this marathon. The truncated chronology winds up cutting off two important ends: the town's acceptance of the isolation of the Jews, and the very difficult last two years of the war. And then--plop!--we're reading epilogues about Liesel as an old woman, and about Max who only reappears long enough to hug Liesel in Alex Steiner's shop.

What's the point? I think what nags at me the most is this: what the heck is the point of this book? Who learns anything? If the main character is Death, well, he's too omniscient, too eternal to learn anything. Liesel is a blip in his "life." A blip that matters to him, to be sure, and a person who lives in a time that efficiently encapsulates everything that fascinates and repels him by human beings. But wasn't he demoralized and buoyed by humans when he started the story, and pretty much the same when he ended it? (Small aside about blips: Death says that Liesel "lived to a very old age," and when he collected her soul and showed her the book, "I was finally able to do something I had waited on for a long time." But by my calculations she's 77 when she dies...not terribly old. Life expectancy tables show that if you lived to be 74 in 2003 (Liesel's age in 2003) you could expect to live to be about 87. So by dying at age 77 in 2006, she actually wasn't long-lived for her cohort, statistically. Yes, Death waited 63 years to give her black book back...but what's 63 years to an eternal being?!)

If we think of Liesel as the main character, it's a coming-of-age story, I guess, but what is actually accomplished, thematically for her? Yes, we readers learn the hopelessness and unpredictability and fickleness of life. We're made aware of the (somewhat trite, when it's told--in so many words--again and again) contrapposto of "beauty and brutality," and the fact that humans are "so ugly and so glorious" and their words "so damning and so brilliant." But just in terms of literary closure, or in terms of a story arc, what does Liesel learn?

You may argue, does my complaint "What does it all mean?" have any merit? I agree that it's probably a question that academic literary analysis doesn't care about, in favor of, "What meanings can we draw out of the text?" In the end it may not be necessary for characters to be aware of the meanings and changes that take place for the reader to get something out of it. Certainly adult literary fiction doesn't always concern itself with circularity and plot, but popular fiction does.

Odd prose choices. I'm seeing a pattern with Zusak where he strives so hard for descriptive prose that it sounds clunky or strained and snaps you out of the story. Or perhaps he's trying to emulate Fitzgerald's kooky descriptive terms (the online interpretations of the phrase "non-olfactory money" in The Great Gatsby go through a lot of linguistic calisthenics to show how quirkily beautiful it is, but to me it sounds like a dud). Here are a few of Zusak's:

A breakfast-colored sky.

A disfigured figure...

Pine cones littered the ground like cookies...

There were wooden teardrops and an oaky smile.

And finally, I couldn't believe the last line of The Book Thief. Aaargh! Directly plagiarized from Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It:

I am haunted by humans.

In Maclean's novel the last line is: "I am haunted by waters." It's possibly one of the most moving lines in literature. Did Zusak think no one would notice?! (Maybe he intended it as "homage." But...just...please don't.)

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review SPOILER ALERT! 2013-11-02 22:54

I Am the Messenger

Her Fine Eyes

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: This book has a remarkable male voice, a fascinating emotional journey, and an unfortunate meta-fictional ending.

What was great. I was about to pronounce this book nearly perfect...until I got to the very end. I loved Ed's voice to pieces (what a wonderful young-adult male voice). I loved his personality, and his dog, and his relationship with his dog, The Doorman. (I thought the secondary characters were more hit or miss. More on that in a bit.) The beginning, the bank robbery, had me laughing out loud, as did many single lines throughout. Ed's growth was seamlessly, beautifully slow. I liked the nearly-magical-realism of how the pieces fit together so nicely: how he was able to figure out his messages with just a bit of patience and thought, but also got some perfectly-timed nudging from the hovering, but not-quite-angels Keith and Darryl to keep him on track. I loved the way all the people "helping" him were also essentially helping others by making his journey possible--for example, that the bank robber's sacrifice was to spend six months in jail to help Sophie and Milla and the Rose boys, etc.

Secondary characters. The supporting actors were in general good, and nicely varied. Ed's best friend, Marv, was goofy and miserly and flippant, with a current of angst or soulfulness underneath that paid off when we learned the burden he was carrying for the past couple of years. Glaring exceptions: I thought Nick was not fleshed out at all. Audrey was better, but not adequately "real" for the important role she played. The whole point is that Ed loves her, he's not hoping to just have sex with her, so she should have had a lot of depth, and they should have had something more special between them than what we viewed (she cared about him, and they were always kind to each other, but because she had no character the relationship had no character). I mean, The Doorman had more of a personality and a richer relationship with Ed than than both Nick and Audrey. But in general the way Ed returned to visit and commune with many of his "messages" allowed him to develop relationships with them, which rescued this from feeling like a quest--a ticking off of tasks on his way to capturing the magical crown--and more of an emotional journey.

Australia! The setting was delightfully lower- and lower-middle class, and warm and mosquitoey. The language was wonderful. I did, however, find myself noticing Aussie idioms that are basically cliches, and wondering whether it would have seemed quite as poetic if it had been written with the American equivalents--or whether those phrases would have sounded flat rather than colorful.

A couple of things didn't get enough follow-through. I thought the suit that Milla gave Ed was going to end up being of some use to him in straightening out his life, and it wasn't. There was an odd scene before he delivers his message to Nick where he examines a knife in his dish drainer while he's making up his mind about what to do. The knife feels ominous, but nothing happens with it--it's apparently just a moment for Ed to think about his reflection, and his relationship with Nick. The love scene with Audrey at the end misses an opportunity for Ed to revisit his claim in the beginning of the book that he's bad at sex. I fully expected him to realize that the fact of being with someone you love takes the "grading" aspect entirely out of it. They sink to the ground inside the doorway, kissing, and Ed says something like, "when we were done The Doorman came over to us..." It appears that they've consummated their relationship, but it's almost as if Zusak is suddenly shy about tackling the issue that he brought up of Ed's sexual insecurity.

Noooo. The ending. ARGH with the meta-fictional ending. It just ruined the literary magic for me when the author showed up, physically, at the end of the book, announcing that this whole thing is a construction, a fabrication. And he shows up with his writing files in tow, no less! I know Zusak is trying to make a deep point about messages and messengers, but after creating someone as individual as Ed, it just ended up pointing a big, blinking, neon arrow at Ed in the last pages (and retroactively, for the entire book) saying, "FICTIONAL CHARACTER." I was fully transported, and then I was slammed to the ground. I thought the hierarchy of people helping other people to help people was wonderfully mystical--it could have even been left without an explanation. Or alternatively, the book was spiritual in so many ways (Father Thomas, Ed's prayers to himself, Ed's thoughts about souls [Milla's and Jimmy's], the celebration of religious holidays), I thought Zusak could easily have made us wonder, without stating it directly, whether the reason no one knew the answer to who arranged it all was that ultimately it was arranged by God. But instead, Zusak made himself a god!

So close. So close to perfect.

contemporary I am the Messenger marcus zusak meta Printz honor YA young-adult

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review SPOILER ALERT! 2013-10-15 19:34

Please Ignore Vera Dietz

Her Fine Eyes

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book. Spoilers ahead.***

I thought PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ was lovely. King has a distinctive voice. Her prose is excellent--I can see why she's already a literary powerhouse. I really enjoyed the frank realism of the magical parts. I loved Vera's wounded voice; in fact I loved all the characters. It was awesome to have a fully-fleshed-out parent on the scene for once. The setting was beautifully realized. Many of Vera's frailties were so convincing, like the way she embarked on the relationship with James but you could see small insights into how young she was--that she wasn't ready for him, even though on the outside (and to people like Marie) she looked ready.

I always have questions and minor quibbles, though...so here goes...

Vera's personal conflict--not wanting the kids at school to discover that her mom was a stripper (for only two months), and not wanting herself to become a slut or to have a baby out of wedlock--was just slightly weak for the strength of the rest of the plot, particularly given how brilliant and perceptive King made Vera. Yes, when her classmates finally found out her secret her life was hell for a couple of weeks, but was that really a strong enough motivator, to be the sole and driving force in her adolescence? It's a small flaw, though, because I think King tried hard to show that 1. it was a small town and perhaps oppressively narrow-minded, and 2. Vera's parents were stunted (let's not even mention Charlie's parents), so that Vera was left too much on her own to develop both a philosophy about her life and personal strength (something that's hard to do with no guidance). King also did a great job of showing how Charlie's life would be nearly impossible for a child to survive intact, and how he slowly lost control.

Was it believable that Vera would hold back information that could clear Charlie's name for so long? I wasn't entirely convinced. Was it believable that her upbringing (of ignoring problems--e.g. not intervening in the Kahns' abusive household, and not addressing her mom's abandonment) was her sole guide in her moral dilemma? For me, the answer is mostly yes. I just had little waffling feelings, because even though Vera said she hated Charlie for those five weeks (or was it five months?), I thought King deftly represented Vera's love as being truer than her hate. And again, I thought King made Vera a little too smart to wait nine months to exonerate a friend.

I loved the patchwork construction of the reader's knowledge about the past. But then I wasn't sure why, after such a long build-up to the mystery, we didn't get all the answers. I'm torn over whether more complete answers were necessary for the investment we put in, or an acceptable plot choice. Most of the remaining mystery is Charlie's, and he's dead, and Vera points out more than once that there's nothing anyone can do about that fact. I'm sure that's why King did it--they're Charlie's secrets--but I still felt that we traveled with King in good faith that we'd learn the answers, and then we didn't.

Lingering questions:

--Was Charlie being sexually abused by John? I wasn't sure whether he truly had diarrhea (which might have come from anal intercourse), or whether he used that excuse with his mother for why his underwear was disappearing so regularly and she dragged him to the doctor as a result. He did in fact say that the doctor put him on (an unnamed) medication, which I thought implied the diarrhea was a real symptom he was having.

--Most important: why did Charlie tell Vera to go to the pet store? Did he think she could stop Jenny? And was it just cowardliness that made him show up at John's instead of joining Vera at 7 PM? Were we supposed to think--and this may be a stretch, because there's very little to support it--that Jenny paid John off (possibly with sexual favors) to overdose Charlie with pills? (I seem to recall Charlie taking something like ten of them...so it could also have been a kind of reckless, suicidal act.) After all, Charlie did say that Jenny was going to kill him.

In the end I felt that King wasn't willing to go as full bore with the darkness as the story needed. She wasn't willing to leave Vera with the uncertainty that life really has. Perhaps King felt protective about either our feelings as readers, or Vera's feelings as the main character. Four things nag at me as being "too-safe" choices: 1. that Vera was given an opportunity to open her heart to Charlie before he died and tell him how he hurt her ("You flew paper airplanes with them at the Pagoda; you allowed them to carve their initials in the oak, etc."); 2. that Charlie was able to tell her he loved her via the napkin letter; 3. that Charlie was able to give her--in a neat, bulging yellow envelope--everything that she'd need to implicate John and Jenny. I had thought all along that one of the reasons Vera was so conflicted about Charlie's death was perhaps that she hadn't been able to voice her feelings to him before he died. But in fact she had. And belatedly, he gets to voice his feelings to her, which is incredibly reassuring, and one of the pieces she needs to be able to get the courage to clear his name, but is maybe too pat in the form of a letter. And how much more difficult would it have been for her to tell the police without having physical evidence? How much more of a sacrifice? And finally, with respect to King's deliberate "trimming" of darkness: 4. I wanted Vera to have an uncomfortable sex experience with James. I mean he was 23. King did a good job of making him a bit stunted, but it's still hard to believe they'd have so many heavy kissing sessions in a car and never take it further.

This is all Monday-morning quarterbacking. I'm not even sure I'm right, or that I would change a thing if I were the author. I just had nagging feelings about some of these plot choices as the story was wrapping up. But I think as a writer King is fascinated by themes and ideas, not necessarily in perfecting plots. It's still a very strong book.

A.S. King contemporary magical realism Please Ignore Vera Dietz Printz honor YA young adult

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review SPOILER ALERT! 2013-10-07 16:08

Code Name Verity

Her Fine Eyes

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

***Really, seriously, Code Name Verity will be irrevocably spoiled for you.***

***Also, this discussion won't even make any sense if you haven't read it.***

***Okay? Okay, here we go...***

Code Name Verity is a beautiful book, and well deserving of its Printz honor, but no one will be surprised to hear that I think it has flaws. Let's just agree, shall we, that it was an insanely difficult book to write, that Elizabeth Wein should get loads of praise for producing such an ambitious, lovely tribute to friendship, and that my comments are Monday-morning quarterbacking, pure and simple?

One of the largest problems is the epistolary format of the book. The conceits that Julie is writing her confession on scraps of paper for von Linden, and Maddie is writing an accident report from the loft of a barn while she's behind enemy lines were not believable. Rather, I felt that Wein was attempting to construct a tour de force via narrative calisthenics. Julie's narrative was not possible: von Linden would not have allowed her to essentially write a novel about her youth with Maddie. She didn't include enough "confession" in each chapter for me to believe he'd allow it to continue for so long. A friend suggested that maybe it should have been a transcript of oral interrogations, and I think that would have been more appropriate, but obviously would have limited the novel-style digressions (which only serves to point out how much they don't fit). Also, about twice in Julie's story I squirmed because the fact of Julie's writing about her captors to her captors didn't work. (I wish I had marked them; they had a common trait that made them not work). And what about Maddie's impromptu accident report? She tells us several times that if her notes got into enemy hands before she was rescued, they would have implicated Julie's grandmother. Is this a risk Maddie would have taken? No, it's not likely with both her training and her understanding of just how grave a situation everyone is in, and so it draws too much attention to the conceit.

There seemed to be one genuine mistake in the book: we never learned how Maddie's and Julie's IDs were switched before the drop into France. Maddie sort of waves her hands about how it's similar to the incident at the airfield, but it's not, because given where we saw them at every step before the drop, the switch appeared to me to be physically impossible. This is a potentially serious narrative flaw, because we're told that Julie would in all likelihood not have been picked up by the Gestapo if her papers had been in order.

And now to the unfortunate scene on the bridge, which is what makes everyone cry, but made me shake my head. It's just not possible for a person who has been shooting a gun for only several weeks to be a marksman like that. And even if Maddie were the most gifted shot ever--which is still an inaccurate premise, because all things like marksmanship are a matter of practice and not talent-- her shots were taken 1. in the dark, 2. from below, 3. through the scrub on the bank of a bridge, 4. using a handgun, not a rifle.

So the chain thing? Impossible. (But also pointless for the plot. Those two prisoners quickly get ferried off by the resistance.) And then the shot to Julie's head? Double impossible. I sympathize that Wein wanted an exciting climax, and wanted to tie it together with the aunt's story, to make a point that it was deep love that allowed Maddie to do this thing that was abhorrent to her. And perhaps she wanted Maddie's first successful effort (the miraculous chains shot) to be her reassurance that euthanizing Julie was worth attempting because she actually had a chance of pulling it off. But the more realistic way, the only plausible way to write this scene, would have been to have Maddie do a messy, imperfect job of the killing, but still have it somehow result in Julie's death. I haven't thought alternatives through carefully, but maybe Maddie could have mortally wounded Julie with the first shot, or failed to hit her and caused the Nazis to finish Julie more perfunctorily than they were planning, in a panic, or we could have seen one or more resistance fighters follow-up on Maddie's botched shot, seeing that Julie was down, and add their shots to her body. Just something that's not impossible, please. Here's the scene:

"KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!"

Turned her face away from me to make it easier.

And I shot her.

I saw her body flinch--the blows* knocked her head aside as though she'd been thumped in the face. Then she was gone.

*Here we see"blows," plural. Earlier in the book Maddie makes a point more than once of telling us she learned to double-tap, and she deliberately shoots the chain twice as well. But again, Julie's body would have crumpled instantaneously on the first shot, making the second shot in the same spot impossible.

The "clean shot" soothes the reader that this is a mercy killing. But of course killing Julie at all at that moment is already genuinely merciful. I worried that Wein wanted readers to be able to comfort themselves not just about the fact that Julie didn't suffer, but also about Maddie's emotional recovery for the rest of her life. Wein wanted the reader to think, "Maddie will be able to forgive herself, because Julie didn't suffer." Taking care of her readers in that way doesn't really trust us, though.

Perhaps this whole unfortunate bridge scene is the insidious influence of movies on novels: we think there has to be a cinematic climax, and we forget that it should feel real, too. In fact, I found myself questioning the whole bridge denouement--would the resistance have just waited for the Nazis to bring their reinforcements? I may be wrong, but my instinct is not. I think they would have abandoned the mission to protect themselves and their Damask cell, as soon as it became clear the enemy had sent for help. (I'm wondering whether I should blame the extravagance of the bridge scene on Wein's daughter, who is given credit in the acknowledgments: "My daughter Sara suggested some of the more harrowing plot twists.")

I don't agree with any of the reviewers on Goodreads who say there was too much piloting and plane details and other "specialized knowledge." These sections were perfectly understandable, even for a non-pilot, and the actual number of words devoted to technical details was tiny if you were to snip them out and count them. It's ridiculous to think that any other period details (ration coupons, blackout shades, whatever) are "too much" for a historical novel. Other than the ballpoint pen, which I thought smacked of fondness for her research, Wein's period details were perfect.

Three other tiny things:

1. It's possible for a novel to fit too perfectly together, so that it feels constructed: Jamie showing up so often at the right time, the Thibauts, Julie's grandmother.

2. I would not have chosen to have von Linden kill himself. I know Wein wanted us to understand that he did experience intense internal conflict, that he was in some sense still just a headmaster who had been carried away by events into cruelty, that he couldn't in the end live with himself. But we didn't need his story to wrap up "on camera." His conflict about Julie was already so masterfully done (really remarkable, the way you could subtly see that he admired Julie) that it seemed heavy-handed to "tell" us he was conflicted in the end. An astute reader will know that von Linden's end was (historically) not going to be good: his headquarters got destroyed, he had failed the Gestapo, and the Germans were losing the war. He was already a goner.

3. I didn't buy the very tiny scene where Maddie encounters von Linden at the end, and can't control herself not to openly grit her teeth at him (no matter how much she hated him, her fear would have overridden her anger). And then Anna Engel jabs her in the ankle, which is another movie trope--one usually reserved for slapstick--because how can anyone do that without the person they're talking to noticing?

Code Name Verity elizabeth wein historical fiction Printz honor YA young-adult