Review: Bluebird

Bluebird by Bob Staake

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Oh, the mean kids! There's that undercurrent through the whole read, and then... Well.



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Review: Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months

Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months by Maurice Sendak

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I can't say how many times I went back to this book over the years. I know I looked at it a lot even when I was a teen, and then when I was in grad school I read it countless times with Bela and the kids out at Dimondale. Sendak and Gorey are close cousins in terms of psychologically compelling illustrations, ones that stand on their own and tell a thoroughly different story than the words alone could do--not only a complementary match, but also with some stark counterpoint to the words.



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Review: Bear Despair

Bear Despair by Gaetan Dorémus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



So I've been wondering what it would be like to 'read aloud' this book just with prosody. To do non-linguistic noises that offer an impression. (I could probably do that with some images in Snowman, too...)

Oh, man! This one was close to a 5. I'll have to wait and see if I keep coming back to it, or if I buy a copy [yes, ten months later I still think it was the best picture book of the year]. The bear gets so mad! I laughed out loud three or four different times, and then again while I had it open to write this.

I'm going to get the rest of the Stories Without Words series from Enchanted Lion Books, even though they're not all by Gaetan Dorémus.



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Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was more of an event than a great book, with all the anticipation of the release built up over the years. Then I entered a pile of contests for an advance copy and didn't win one. So it was quite a build-up. It might have rated a three but was compelling enough in large swathes that I was really into it. Other patches were less so. Between pages 250-450 when he lived in Las Vegas was gripping to me. And this was during the time when it was all character building instead of plot development. Like her other books, Tartt sets up the first half of the book to be super full of character work, and then rolls the camera to unfold the plot in the last half. Well, maybe it's not even halves in this book, but still the same pattern. In both other books, I preferred the character buildup to the plot rollout.

This was 771 pages. So as I often wonder about other people's high ratings I'll confess for mine: It gets a four because I spent two weeks reading it. I'm not sorry, but it's not a five because I won't be buying a copy or rereading it soon.

I thought I was so clever early in the book when I caught myself saying, "Hey, this is just Dickens". Then about two thirds of the way through Tartt actually had Theo and Hobie notice this out loud in the narration. Oh, well. I enjoyed discovering it anyway. Sometimes when she laid down a string of names next to each other in a sentence or paragraph I felt transported into Pickwick or Bleak House. The attorney's name was "Bracegirdle"! Anyway, the ripoff wasn't so distracting that it made me want to quit, like when I noticed JK Rowling was aping Roald Dahl and put the book down. What I'm still not sure about is what Tartt was up to. What was her masterplan for "here's what I'll do with the Dickens structure..."? Or was she just using it because she likes it?

I waited a week to write the review because I wanted to see if I missed Theo or Boris as much as I missed Harriet at the end of Little Friend. Nope, I don't. Upshot: This wasn't as good an experience as [b:The Little Friend|775346|The Little Friend|Donna Tartt|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327936589s/775346.jpg|1808852].

I was disappointed by the self-indulgent monologuing at the end ("You sly dog! You got me monologuing!"). The ending could have and should have wrapped up quickly. I found myself reading the final 35-40 pages more out of duty than the draw of Tartt's narrative wiles. But by thickness alone, at that point in the book 35-40 pages seemed like nothing. I didn't care to hear Theo hold forth about all the things he learned (show me don't tell me!). Also, I was hoping for her to darken Hobie's character up a bit. She laid down the threads for this development when she roped his past to some bad guys, and set him up with a lot of stillness that should belie deep-running waters. But then it all just ended. Maybe she needed another 3-8 years...



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