The Longings of Wayward Girls - 2013

The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown
My rating: 3/5

THE Low Down

Sadie is your typical New England stay-at-home mom – a nice house in her quiet hometown, successful and loving husband, young and adorable children. But when Ray moves back to town shortly after she suffers an emotionally crippling late-term miscarriage, “that summer” comes flooding back. From the childhood prank that may or may not have led to the unsolved disappearance of a neighborhood girl to her conflicting feelings for her mother, Ray and the relationship she suspected they once shared, the once long lost memories of her 12th summer reek havoc on her already weakened emotional state. As she struggles to deal with the reemergence of details in her past she may have rather left forgotten, she questions how those memories really have guided her present...and whether she likes where it is going.

“Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?”
Emma Goldman

MY Low Down

For some reason this particular review is drawing out a bit of writer's block in me – it's essentially a conundrum. On one hand, the knee jerk reaction to finishing this story was an easy 4 stars, but due to some life circumstances it has taken me over a week to get my review down. In that time, I was surprised by how quickly a seemingly 4 star read left my psyche – I honestly had to reference the book to remember a couple of characters names. Unfortunate.

Despite various story lines being driven in from many different directions, this story to me was essentially about motherhood – how our mothers affect who we are, and in turn how we mother our own children. As you move through the novel, the perspective alternates between 12 year old Sadie and 36 year old Sadie, highlighting the stark difference between the two but also the aspects of her young life that have followed her into her adult life.

At it's core, the insights did their job and drew you deep into many of the psychological aspects that even the smallest life events can have an impact on, but in many places they got mired down by the story line going in more directions that necessary. How did the disappearance of the first young girl factor into the lives of the girls several years later? Not really. Sure, the jacket tells you that it made the parents more diligent, but in reality the concept never came to fruitioon and the lack of resolution just made it frustrating and annoying. And why exactly was it necessary for Sadie to be suspicious of a past relationship between Ray and her mother? Not at all. He could have simply been girlhood crush of her past who returned to help turn things upside down and it would have had the same impact. None of the details such as Beth's strange behavior, Sadie's mother acting strangely (that seemed to be her norm, after all) ultimately seemed to me like they mattered to the overall theme of the story, but were basically just there to make everyone seem just one notch more screwed up.

Overall the writing was wonderful, particularly the alternation between the time periods that provided a great contrast to Sadie's life, but story itself just didn't do it for me quite as much as I'd originally felt like it would.

*NetGalley ARC*

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Me Before You (2012)

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
Rating: 5/5

THE Low Down

Lou has lived her 26 years quietly within the borders of her small English town, holding the same job for nearly a decade, helping her family get by, keeping her resentments to herself as she puts her family before her. Will has spent his time traveling the world, amassing wealth and a life list that many modern day adventurers would envy until a motorcycle accident derails his high flying lifestyle, leaving him a quadriplegic. Lou's life is also turned upside down when the loss of her job also shakes the stability of her neatly ordered world.
Lou in need of a job and Will in need of a “companion”, their lives are thrown together in a way both despise. Lou does not want to be the companion to someone who hates her; Will doesn't want a companion of any kind, or to continue living a life where he requires one. But there is much more to the story than Lou first realizes, as Will already has plans to escape. But not if Lou has anything to do with.

MY Low Down

This has been touted as a modern day love story, but to say only that does a disservice to this incredibly deep, heart wrenching novel that can both lift you up and knock you down in a matter of seconds. It looks at some of life’s most difficult questions in a way that is so fluid and moving that you often don’t realize the importance of the subject at hand, just that it has been presented in a way that is both readable and thought provoking.

At its heart are the characters who are actually REAL. No, they didn’t hop out of the book and start having a conversation with me, but it felt like they could have. Louisa is the child who has always been second fiddle to the “better at everything” older sibling. She compensated by dressing in bright colors, bringing home money to contribute to the family kitty, remaining stable in the face of her sister’s “look at me! Love ME!” attitude. We’ve all known this person, been this person, and Lou embodies it in a way that is realistic, lovable, annoying and relatable all at once. While her stability has helped her family, it has hindered her personally. She’s never left the shadow of the castle, her town’s one claim to tourist fame, and she doesn’t really care if she ever does. Will on the other hand was happy to leave it in the dust to wander streets of Paris, surf on exotic beaches, leap tall buildings (or off tall mountains, or planes, or whatever else he could get his hands on) in a single bound. Now, Lou has the ablebodiedness to do the exploring but not the heart to do it. Will has the heart but not the physical ability. The combination of these personalities brought out one of the many deeper messages from within the pages: do YOU live your life to its fullest? And if you’re Lou, you also ask who has the right to judge whether you have or not? And if you act as your own judge and jury, from what are you basing your opinion? There are no actual answers to these questions, for anyone, anywhere, yet they are ones that many of us spend a great deal of time in life trying to answer. If we are lucky, we may someday know ourselves well enough to trust that our verdict is correct, or have enough faith in ourselves to follow through, but that is such a personal thing that I honestly don’t feel it can even be described.

The relationship the develops between Lou and Will is tenuous at first but develops into genuine love for one another, though the way they see their future and what that love means could not be farther apart from one another. Lou can’t see her life without Will, who has opened her heart, her mind, and the doors through which she has begun to broaden her horizons. Will can’t see his life at all, and even worse he can’t see himself burdening Lou’s newfound freedom and passion with his disability. To Lou, losing Will is unimaginable. To Will, losing Lou is the ONLY thing he can do. The manifestations of their love for one another are in such different realms of human thought that it is hard to believe that stem from a common bond, but JoJo Moyes takes you through their relationship in such a way that it ultimately more sense than you ever could have imagined. Don’t get me wrong – it sucks – I cried like a baby – but it made sense. And I loved it for it. There is not happy anything here, yet somehow it is all happy. It forces you to look at a perspective that is not often brought up.
Plus, the writing is just excellent!


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Feature & Follow Friday #3 - Blog Hopping Happiness!

Feature & Follow Friday is hosted by Alison Can Read and Parajunkee's View and is a way for book bloggers to make new friends, gain new followers and find new folks to follow yourself!

So, what's new for this week....?

Q. What were some of your favorite picture books as a kid? If you have kids, what are your favorites to read to them? 

WARNING!! I read just as much as a kid as I do now, so I will make my best futile attempt to keep this from becoming it's own book. And, I may throw in a couple of non-picture books since I tended to like those better...I was a conundrum of a child at times :)

 One of my all-time favorites, both as a kid and to read to my nieces & nephews....

 I had honestly forgotten about both of these until I started thinking about this week's question, though I'm not sure how....Clifford and the Berenstein Bears ROCK! They always had a large selection of the BB books at the library & school book fairs and I would stockpile allowance money to buy them everytime, and then my mom would make me share them with my brothers.......

One of those non-picture books that will always be a childhood favorite, and one that I will even re-read now (honest...I just bought it on Kindle last week!). There was something so romantic about the kids living in the museum and solving the mysteries. This story definitely gets some credit for sparking my love of history!

 Sadly this one was not around when I was a kid, but EVERY baby that is born to a friend or family member of mine these days gets a copy of it. It may not be well known everywhere, but it is certainly a classic to anyone who has raised children around YNP!

 I received my first copy of this from my aunt for on my 6th birthday and we had a lover affair that ended only when the books spine could no longer keep up with me. My dad and I would read some every night, and it was always a negotiation on what we would read (Dad: You get one long one and 2 short ones...Me: Ok. Me after reading the long one: Dad! That was NOT long!). I used to be able to recite "Sick" and "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout" made me laugh every time my dad read it, no matter how many times I heard it!

And how can you NOT love this one? Another that I buy several of a year because every child I know must have one!

So which ones will you never forget? Join the hop and let us know! Add yourself to the list below to join the fun, check here for the rules and to ask questions on the Feature & Follow, and follow me via GFC (preferred) or BlogLovin if you feel like coming back for another visit. Happy hopping!

Daily Delights - For the LOVE of Doggies!

NO. I. do. not. want. a. bath! Seriously though, don't we all wish that our fury friends could talk rather than just squeak, squeal, squawk, whine and yip? I can handle when my best friends' one-year olds do this because at least they will learn to talk eventually, but with critters I am perpetually stuck attempting ESP. But even worse than that? They can't talk to us, but they can still think! Sure, they don't understand human language the way we do so don't think in an internal monologue that we'd understand, but that doesn't mean they don't have their own internal monologue. Is there a doggy equivalent to "is she really wearing that?!", "did she really just say that?!" or worse, the "damn I hate that b*%#" as you're walking away?

My favorite insight into life with the four-legged kind is Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain. Whether you're an animal lover or not, it is extremely difficult to not fall in love with Enzo. But reading this novel comes with a warning: don't start until you're ready to not stop! If you are like me and fall instantly in love, you will be laughing, crying, burning your dinner because you forgot it was even cooking and then looking over to see that it is now 3am and you have finished the book....and may even feel like re-reading in the very next day!

Looking for Alaska - John Green (2006)

Looking for Alaska by John Green
RATING: 3.5/5
THE Low Down

Miles "Pudge" Halter's only friends are the books that his father constantly reminds him to stop highlighting and the only guests at his going away party are a couple of kids he occasionally sits with at lunch who probably only came because their parents made them. But his books tell him that there is more than this, and he thinks his ticket to finding it is hiding in the woods outside Birmingham, Alabama at Culver Creek Preparatory School. He doubts his decision from the moment he arrives to find a lack of air conditioning, a room that looks nothing like what his JFK biography told him boarding school looked like, and once again being the outsider. Until he meets Alaska Young. Alaska is a whirlwind - holding guilt about her mother's death, bucking the system while still wanting to be a part of it. The whirlwind turns Pudge's life on end, launching him toward his "Great Perhaps", makes him question everything, answer what he can, and try to hold onto his heart. And then the storm is over. Torn between whether knowledge truly is the best thing or just a path towards more pain, Pudge and friends delve deeper into who, and what, Alaska really was and in turn are forced to face these very questions about themselves.

 

MY Low Down

I both loved and not-so-much loved Looking for Alaska, and for such a wide range of reasons. First off though, it is a well written and *mostly* creative novel. It draws you in the from the beginning and keeps a quick pace that holds onto you. I liked the characters. I liked the message. I liked the story. I didn't love any of it.

The premise of Miles and Alaska is great, but just a little too typical. I love Alaska's passion, maddening mood swings and inspiring energy, but I have also loved it in every other character like her in every other story I've read or watched that had such a character (my knee jerk comparison was Drew Barrymore in Mad Love). They are endearing and intriguing, but they need something to separate them from all the others before them.

The underlying themes Alaska pulls you into though are well constructed and presented, and in a way that many of all ages can relate to. We have all been the outsider, loved and lost, rebelled against the system. Green writes his way through the days of angst-ridden teenagers in a believable way that makes you think that YES, that could have been me, and what would I have done? How would I have reacted.

Unfortunately though, I also got hung up on the number of things that just struck me as so unrealistic. As I've said before, I'm completely ok with creative license where appropriate. This is not the kind of story where I want that exercised. This story is serious, down to earth in dealing with real issues and sky ward in energy. I did not need it go skyward in liberties though. For example...has anyone else ever heard of a school with only a few "expelable offenses" that are so black and white that the students can basically prank, riot and raise the most ridiculous kind of ruckus, but are safe because they didn't "officially" commit an expelable offense? And smoking in their dorm room? Really? These details may seem nit picky, but if you want me to buy into the serious themes of the story and that these could be real kids dealing with real life issues, their setting needs to be realistic.

Overall though this is an almost great book, one which I can certainly see a lot of value in. I can easily see it being a 4 or 5 star read for others who see things from a different angle than I do as it is well written, engaging and gutsy in taking on tough subjects.

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Daily Delights - Yellowstone Wildfires

Image from National Weather Service - August 2013

What a difference a day can make! Fire is a natural part of a forest ecosystem and something many people contend with year after year. When they happen in Yellowstone each year though, there is always the perpetual question of "what do we do?". To let it burn means to allow the forest to follow it's natural course, but also drastically alters the landscape and risks the safety of visitors and historic structures. To suppress it protects these things, but to the detriment of the forests natural life cycle. And weighing even heavier than these questions, is the question of who gets to decide?

Alston Chase's Playing God in Yellowstone goes into this and other controversial subjects, essentially telling the National Park Service that it is destroying the world's 1st National Park. Whether you agree with him or not, it is still a compelling read that will get you thinking about what should or should not be done with our land, as well as who you think should get to decide.

Daily Delights - Paradise Valley, MT

Photo by John Salvato - Emigrant forest fire August 2013

Comprised of the 50 mile stretch between Livingston and Gardiner en route to Yellowstone National Park, the Paradise Valley of Montana is exactly as it's name implies. In this beautiful place, you will find the meandering Yellowstone River, historic lodges, soaring peaks and working ranches, which all lend to the amazing combination of scenery and old west atmosphere. If you look hard enough, you will also find the quaint little "ghost" town of Old Chico, nestled into the hills behind the historic Chico Hot Springs Resort.

To get a little taste of the Paradise Valley of old, check out local author Edie Mellgren's new novel, The Vindication of Lucas Goddard. I just got it today and haven't had a chance to get into it yet, but I'm hearing good things. Look for my review sometime in the next couple of weeks!