The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather

2.5 stars

First Sentence: Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.

Thoughts: Thea Kronborg was the daughter of Swedish immigrants living in Colorado. She wasn’t like the other girls. She had a real gift for music. Her mother always made sure Thea had lots of time to practice her piano and got her lessons from the best music teacher in the region, a dissipated German pianist named Wunsch. He had his faults, but he gave Thea a thorough grounding in the basics of music.

Because she was so devoted to her art, Thea didn’t have any friends her own age. All of her friends were older men, which is just as creepy as it sounds. Dr. Howard Archie encouraged Thea’s intellectual pursuits by letting her borrow books from his library. He took her on his house calls as well, which is how she met the Mexican immigrants in Spanish Town. She loved sitting with them at night listening to their music.

Another friend was Ray Kennedy, a railroad man who told her about the world outside Colorado. He was always talking about how he was going to marry Thea as soon as she was old enough, so it was a distinct relief when he was killed in a train wreck. He left all his money to Thea, who used it to move to Chicago to further her musical education.

The first year she studied piano under Andor Harsanyi. He soon realized Thea didn’t have any real calling to the piano, but when he heard her sing he realized it was because her real gift was her voice. He sent her to Madison Bowers to develop her vocal talents. Bowers was a good teacher but a miserable human being. Thea learned a lot from him, but she wore herself down being at his beck and call all the time.

Through Bowers she meets Fred Ottenberg, the son of a brewery mogul. He convinces Thea to spend her summer in the Arizona desert. He meets her there after a few months and they fall in love. Alas, t’was not to be just yet. Instead Fred breaks her heart before financing her further musical education in Dresden.

Ten years later Thea is in New York for the summer singing with the Metropolitan Opera. Dr. Archie, who has given up medicine and now owns several mines, comes to visit her and hear her sing. There he and Ottenberg witness her breakthrough into real artistry/stardom.

Honestly, this is not my favorite of Cather’s works. The best part was when Thea and Fred were in the desert. Cather’s true gift was describing the stark beauty of the American Southwest. Unfortunately this was a character-driven novel, not a landscape novel, and all the characters were likeable at all. Except Harsanyi, he was a good sort. All of the other men, however, were pervy creeps. As for Thea herself, she was a cold fish of a person. The novel tried to pass of her superiority complex as “artistic,” but it wasn’t. She was a spoiled brat who became a right bitch by the end of the book. The story doesn’t tell us how she turned out after her breakthrough performance, but it’s really not a mystery. She became a prima donna of the worst order. There was no other possible future for her.

An Unfinished Season, Ward Just

2.5 stars

First Sentence: The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago.

Thoughts: Have I complained about books ending badly lately? I don’t think I have. Most of my recent reads have ended either well or acceptably and the ones that didn’t I dnf’d as soon as they got on my nerves. This one, though…

An Unfinished Season is the story of about nine months in the life of Wilson Ravan, specifically his nineteenth year. He was a senior in high school at the beginning of the year and a freshman in college by the end of it. “But that’s a year off,” you say. Yes, he had to retake eighth grade because he was sick with a polio-like illness for most of the year.

Wilson’s father is Teddy Ravan. He owned a stationery factory in Chicago. Recently there have been union rumblings around the city which resulted in Teddy’s workers going on strike. Teddy is a staunch 1950s Republican and will not put up with this strike nonsense. Then someone started making threatening phone calls to Mrs. Ravan. Strange cars started following Teddy on his way home from work. So Teddy got his local sheriff (and also friend) to escort him home at night. The sheriff also gave Teddy the gun from the first sentence. Unlike Chekhov’s gun, it is never fired, not even when someone throws a brick through the Ravan’s window one night. Why? Teddy and the sheriff figure out who the mastermind behind the threats was and took care of the problem. The strike ended shortly after.

Then Wilson’s grandfather in New York got sick, so his mother went back east to take care of him. This turned into an ersatz separation between her and Teddy as Mrs. Ravan (whose first name I don’t think was ever mentioned) fell under the influence of her wealthy family. She returned to Chicago after her father died, though, although she had changed. She brought back her family’s Chinese maid who helped her redecorate the house according to the principals of Feng Shui.

Wilson wasn’t too happy about the redecorating, but by then he had graduated high school and was working his summer job as a copyboy at a local small newspaper. He used the job mainly to get stories to entertain debutantes with at the balls he went to every weekend. Networking with the People Worth Knowing, yanno. The parties are where Wilson’s life took a strange turn.

He met a young lady named Aurora at one of the balls. He had noticed her father among the parents along the walls at other balls because Jack (her father) was always silent and never mingled. The reason why was because Jack was a psychologist and amused himself by privately analyzing everyone he passed.

Aurora and Wilson began dating each other over the summer. Wilson found out that the reason why Jack was so odd was because he had been in the Pacific theater during WWII. One evening when he and Aurora explored Jack’s study, Wilson found some pictures and realized that Jack had been in the Philippines and had been on the Bataan Death March.

Then tragedy struck, ending Aurora and Jack’s budding romance. It took Wilson thirty years to find out why Aurora cut him off and when he did it was completely anticlimactic.

Another thing that bothered me about the epilogue where Wilson “got the answers” was the fact that he became a negotiator for the U.N. He didn’t strike me as the type. Corporate lawyer, yes, but not a negotiator.

But the biggest thing that bothered me about the book was Just’s allergy to quotation marks. Once again we get a book full of dead text with nothing setting off the dialogue to make the characters seem alive. People! Serious Literature is not and should not be lifeless words on a page!

Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London, Nigel Jones

2.5 stars

First Sentence: They had been fighting all day, and sheer exhaustion was sapping their strength.

Thoughts: Brother, can you spare me an outline? This book had some interesting history in it, but it was badly organized and in desperate need of more illustrations. Specifically, illustrations showing the plan of the Tower of London through the ages. Or even the current layout of the Tower, I’m not picky. I’ve never been there and I don’t know where all the things are Jones kept mentioning. There were illustrations, true, but they were only of the people who were held in the Tower. Fortunately Wikipedia is a thing that exists and there is a layout of the Tower there.

The first chapter covers the building of the Tower by William the Conqueror. This is rather dull unless you’re into construction and/or architecture. Then we go visit the Tower Menagerie, the main attraction until a proper zoo was built in the nineteenth century and all the animals were moved out. Fun Fact: James I/VI used to go down to the menagerie and make the animals fight each other to the death. That is why he was known as James the Right Bastard. (Not a fact.)

The second half of this chapter talks about the Royal Mint which used to be in the outer walls of the Tower. (See what I mean about needing an outline for this book? Just because they start with the same letter doesn’t mean that these two subjects go together.) I liked this part because Jones talked about how coins were made back in the days of hand-smithing and the dangers that were inherent in that system. He also goes into the economics of England up until the late seventeenth century when Isaac Newton was made Warden of the Royal Mint. Newton took one look at the mess he was given and immediately began using logic to solve the problems. He instituted the Recoining of 1696 where he recalled all the money currently in circulation and issued new coins that were designed to make counterfeiting more difficult. He also personally went after the most famous counterfeiter of his day and took him out of circulation. (Ha!)

From there we fall into the greatest trap of English history: The Recital of the Kings and Queens of the Realm. This part actually does make sense—kind of—because up until Tudor times, the Tower was one of the royal palaces. Along with being the royal prison, especially during the Wars of the Roses when King Henry VI himself was imprisoned there. And murdered, just like the Princes in the Tower and by the same person. Richard III really wasn’t a nice person at all, no matter what his sympathizers say.

And then come the Tudors who gave the Tower its dark reputation. Henry VIII was the first to use it as the favored torture/execution spot for anyone who he didn’t like, and his children kept up the tradition. This is why the Tower is haunted as all get-out. Jones adds an afterword where he tries to scoff at all the stories of ghosts in the Tower, but really, folks, you can’t murder that many people in the same place without having some kind of psychic residue.

After the Tudors, Jones embarks on a Recitation of the Most Famous Prisoners, mainly Sir Walter Ralegh. (I thought it was Raleigh, like the state capital? Or has that been changed across the pond?) After a chapter on famous escapes, the book just kind of peters out.

As an overview of the history of the Tower of London, Tower is okay I guess. I would prefer something less scattershot that had an actual point to it, but we can’t always get what we want in this fallen world. At the very least, a freaking MAP OF THE PLACE would have been most helpful and I blame everyone involved with this book’s creation for not including that.

Saving the World, Julia Alvarez

2.5 stars

First Sentence: In the fall of her fiftieth year, Alma finds herself lost in a dark mood she can’t seem to shake.

Thoughts: This is not a novel. It’s two novellas slammed together under one cover. One is better than the other, but unfortunately if I ripped out the chapters I didn’t like to get the book I want, it would mess up the binding. Such is life.

The first novella is about Alma Huebner, a Dominican writer living in New England. She has a bad case of writer’s block. She shot to fame with her first semiautobiographical novel which quickly became part of the Modern Canon. Her publisher wants her to write the next installment in the family saga. No matter how hard Alma tries, the saga just isn’t coming. But she has found something she does write about.

Back in 1803 a Spanish doctor, Francisco Balmis, set out on an expedition to bring the smallpox vaccine to the western hemisphere. This being 1803, the only way to transport the vaccine reliably was in a person. What he did was to vaccinate a boy, wait for the vesicle to rise, and “harvest” the fluid from the vesicle to vaccinate the next boy. The boys he chose were all orphans who were all guaranteed to have never had smallpox by their guardian. That guardian is what really interests Alma. Her name was Isabel Sendales y Gomez. Who was she, really, Alma wonders. Why was she on the expedition? What was it like for her? That’s what she ends up writing about and it’s a captivating story about a woman who becomes a reluctant explorer and finds her destiny in places she never expected.

Unfortunately that story is caged in by Alma’s tale which starts out ridiculous and only gets worse. First she gets a call from a woman claiming she gave Richard, Alma’s husband, AIDS. Turns out the woman was a few pallets short of a full load and was calling people all over town with the same (false) story. Then a strange man shows up in Alma’s yard. But then she finds out that he’s her neighbor’s formerly-estranged son who came home when he heard his mother had terminal cancer. And guess what? The crazy lady is his wife! This all culminates in a Thanksgiving Day scene that is too silly for words.

Before she can deal with the fallout from the Silly Thanksgiving Scene, Alma has to rush down to the Dominican Republic to help her husband. Richard works for a do-gooding corporation called Help International that goes around the world doing good. The current project was to set up a some kind of “green” something in a remote DR village, but that’s not all they’re up to. The green project was affiliated with a clinic where a pharmaceutical company was testing a new AIDS vaccine. Richard blithely assumes the locals are fine with what’s going on, but he’s brought back to reality when a group of young men storm the facility and hold everyone there hostage. That’s why Alma went back to her home country.

When she gets there she boards the first train to Crazytown. She jumps over the barricade and barges into the facility pretending to be a journalist sent to get the real story of the standoff. Does it go badly? Yes! Is it a ham-handed condemnation of American business invading Caribbean nations? Of course! Do we learn anything by the end? Are you kidding? Do we feel a deep pang of regret every time one of the Isabel chapters end and we find ourselves back in Alma’s fever-dream of a life? Most definitely! Is this up to Alvarez’s usual standard of excellence? Absolutely not!

Count Zero, William Gibson

2.5 stars

First Sentence: They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.

Thoughts: The Sprawl series hits its sophomore slump in Count Zero. Instead on focusing on one group of characters, this time we have three different plots that are supposed to fit together at the end but don’t.

The first plot is about Turner. He’s a mercenary for Hosaka Corporation who gets blown up in the first paragraph. The various bits of him are rescued and put back together in the Chiba City labs. Once he’s back together he goes to Mexico to recuperate. There he meets a nice lady and has a relationship with her. Then a Hosaka corporate ship appears on the horizon. Turns out the nice lady was actually a corporate psych and she’s just released Turner back to active duty. And what is that duty? Go to Arizona to pick up a scientist who’s defecting from Maas Biolabs. This particular scientist, Mitchell, has developed a biochip that will allow people to access the Matrix without a cyberdeck. Off Turner goes to the Arizona desert to meet his motley crew.

The second story is about Marly, a disgraced Parisian art dealer. She was in all the newsfeeds recently when she got caught selling a counterfeit collage box. Now she has a chance at a new job hunting down a mysterious artist who creates anonymous collage boxes. Her new employer is notorious billionaire Herr Josef Virek. Virek only meets Marly in a reality he’s constructed within the Matrix for the excellent reason that his physical form is a pile of goo in a vat in the vast metropolis of Undisclosed Location. Marly takes the job and quickly realizes that Virek’s motives for finding the artist are increasingly sinister.

The third plot is about Count Zero himself. His real name is Bobby Newmark and he’s a teenager in over his head. He wants to be a cyber cowboy and now, thanks to his contact Two-a-Day, he has his first job cracking corporate ice. Unfortunately it goes bad and Bobby dies. Fortunately his death was noted by something within the Matrix and it revives him. Now Bobby’s on the run because he knows the company he tried to hack knows what he did and where he lives. His fears are confirmed when the apartment complex he lived in blows up shortly after he leaves. He goes into the slums of New Jersey to find Two-a-Day and ask him what the hell. When he finds him, Two-a-Day is very nervous and not because of the two crimelords in his apartment with him. They want to talk to Bobby about the voice that revived him. Why? Because the voice was one of the loas that have appeared in the Matrix.

These plots meander around separately until Angela Mitchell shows up. She’s the daughter of the defecting scientist in Arizona. Turns out her father never planned to get out himself, he just wanted to get Angie away from Maas Biolabs. He had implanted his biochips in her brain, which gives her strange powers as far as the Matrix goes. For instance, she can connect with the loas that the bosses that caught Bobby are interested in. Eventually Turner, Angie, and Bobby end up in New York to find out more about the gods in the machine while Marly goes to the Spire from Neuromancer where she supposedly ties up a few loose ends from the rogue AI plot. According to legend, this is where the three plots all snap together but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how.

Everyman & Other Miracle & Morality Plays

2.5 stars

First Sentence: I, God, that all the world have wrought
Heaven and Earth, and all of nought,
I see my people, in deed and thought,
Are foully set in sin.

Thoughts: Miracle and morality plays were performed at religious festivals in England before Shakespeare. This is what he was watching when he was a little boy and [INSERT FAVORITE PLAY HERE] was just a twinkle in his eye. They were also Catholic. Dangerously Catholic. Which is most likely why the secular theater world exploded during Elizabeth I’s reign. They had to have Protestant plays to align with the new state religion. And that’s why state religions are stupid.

The plays in this collection are:

Noah’s Flood: It’s exactly what it says on the box: a theatrical version of the great flood of Genesis. Noah (or Noe depending on how strict a speller you are) builds the ark, gathers all the animals, and loads them on the ship with his family. Except for his wife. The major conflict in this play is Mrs. Noah refusing to leave her friends until her husband drags her on the ark seconds before rain starts to fall. She’s the typical shrew wife from other medieval plays, stories, and modern-day sitcoms. It’s an old trope that was never funny.

The Second Shepherd’s Play: This play tells the story of what the shepherds were up to before they were called over to Christ’s manger. Most of the story centers around Mak the Sheep-Stealer living up to his name. He steals a lamb and brings it home. When the shepherds show up, Mak’s wife Gill wraps up the lamb and hides it in the cradle. It’s an early use of foreshadowing from the days before subtlety was invented.

Everyman: The classic play the Everyman’s Library series was named after. All of the characters are allegories: Death, Good Works, Kindred, Beauty, Discretion, and, of course, Everyman. Death comes to Everyman and tells him that he’s going to get him one day. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Death won’t tell. Everyman panics and starts gathering everything he has to see how he can avoid going to Hell. Fellowship, Cousin, and Kindred won’t help. Goods laughs in his face. Good Works is too weak to help. Then Knowledge steps in to guide Everyman on the way to salvation. Along the way Good Works gets its strength back and helps Everyman to Heaven. It’s Catholic theology in a nutshell.

Hickscorner: This is the only play in the collection I had never read or even heard of before. It’s about another collection of allegories discussing Catholic theology. On the good side we have Pity, Contemplation and Perseverance. Opposing them is Imagination, Free Will, and Hickscorner. What the heck is a hickscorner, you ask? “A libertine scoffer at religions and the religious.” This is apparently the only time it was ever used. It’s also pretty bawdy which is probably why it usually isn’t included in the School Editions of English medieval plays. It’s also less subtle than Everyman, which is a feat that must be seen to be believed.

Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies, Laura Thompson

2.5 stars

First Sentence: In fiction, in general, the heiress does not have a very good time of it.

Thoughts: Nor do they in real life as this book sets out to prove. It’s a survey of super-rich heiresses (mainly British with some Americans thrown in) from Mary Davies in the 17^th century to Barbara Hutton in the 20^th. Along the way it also chronicles the rise of women’s rights and how that didn’t stop heiresses from making stupid decisions.

Back in the late 1600s/early 1700s when the book begins, the major threat to an heiress was kidnapping. It was almost a rite of passage from rakes both young and old who were looking for an easy way to get a fortune. They would snatch the heiress, take her to a conveniently distant place with a conveniently dishonest parson and marry her. Then, since the marriage laws at the time treated women as property, the rake would have control of the heiress’ fortune. This got to be such a problem that Parliament was forced to pass laws expressing its extreme displeasure with this state of affairs. Oh, and also letting women have a little bit of autonomy after marriage.

It was a step in the right direction, but it really didn’t help much. Witness the case of Mary Bowes. After her stodgy first marriage, she fell for the extremely dodgy Andrew Stoney. When he tried to take control of her fortune, he found out that she had honest advisors and had tied it up so he couldn’t get at it. So he straight up tortured her until she signed it over to him. Then she escaped and filed for divorce. It was quite the sensational trial which ended in no divorce, but did send Stoney to jail for kidnapping, the least of his crimes.

Then we get to the American heiresses that trooped over to Europe in the late 19^th century to marry titles. This was covered better and more extensively by The Husband Hunters. However, this book does give us the end of Consuelo Vanderbilt’s story. You might (not) remember her as the Vanderbilt heiress whose mother locked her up in their Rhode Island beach manor until she agreed to marry the Duke of Marlborough. She got back at him by cheating on him constantly and, after his death, mended fences with her mother. Then in the 1950s she published a memoir that glossed over the whole affair.

Meanwhile in France there was a group of lesbian heiresses that ditched their husbands to live a rich bohemian life sponsoring many up-and-coming artists that later became famous. This also marks the decline of the book’s narrative. The story starts jumping around among so many different women it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and where we are and what’s going on.

And that’s the main flaw of this book. It switches back and forth among so many different people in the same chapter that it’s almost impossible to follow. Even the chapters named after a single heiress cover many. Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, is mentioned at least once a chapter until she gets her own chapter at the end. By that point I really didn’t care about Barbara Hutton anymore because Thompson had already gone over her story sixteen times earlier.

Another thing that got on my nerves was the constant reference to what the Mitford sisters thought. Thompson’s previous book was about the Mitfords and I guess she didn’t get it out of her system before starting this one because the latter half of the book was at least 35% quotations from one of their diaries. Another 15% was quotations from Evelyn Waugh’s diaries.

If the focus of the book had been the rise of women’s rights as seen through heiresses this might have been a 4 or 5-star book. As it is, I’m going to have to get it a prescription for Ritalin or something because it really needs some kind of medication to keep on track.

Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, Gary Krist

2.5 stars

First Sentence: “The crime,” as detectives would later tell the newspapers, was “one of the most gruesome in the annals of the New Orleans police.”

Thoughts: You wouldn’t think a book about sex, jazz, and murder would drag so much but you’d be wrong. Maybe if the book was actually about those things it would have been as thrilling as we all expected, but they were only sidelines to the real story: the politics of New Orleans from the 1890s to the 1920s. But Empire of Sin: A Story of Legislative Bickering and the Battle for Modern New Orleans doesn’t exactly make the book fly off the shelves. Once again we have been duped by a clever marketing department.

That’s not to say the book was completely dull. The sex, jazz, and murder bits were very interesting and kept me reading long after I would have ordinarily have tossed the book across the room. If it had been better organized it still might have been tossed, but I was confused about what the heck was going on most of the time.

Let me explain: the book begins with police arriving at the scene of a murder committed by the Axman of New Orleans. Then it jumps back in time twenty years to a man getting into a fight with his girlfriend’s brother. Then we go into the anti-Italian prejudice that was running rampant at the time (1890s). This was one of the interesting parts and if it had been explored in more detail it would have been worthwhile, but instead we jump right into the rise of Jim Crow laws.

It is a worthless nonfiction book that does not teach you something. This is not a worthless book because I learned that the Plessy from the famous Plessy vs Ferguson Supreme Court case was from New Orleans and the whole thing started from segregated street cars in that fair city. Somehow or other the Jim Crow laws that were validated by that case led to the creation of Storyville, the legalized prostitution district.

Most of the book is about Storyville and the people who ran it and how it was created and destroyed. It’s really not that interesting. What was interesting is that it was the birthplace of New Orleans jazz, which was the best part of the book. We follow the rise and fall of Buddy Bolden, one of the forefathers of jazz, the beginning of Jelly Roll Morton‘s career, and the humble beginnings of Satchmo himself.

Then out of nowhere the Axman (re)appears and starts hacking people to death. People are terrified, the police are on constant alert, accusations fly freely, and then it all just kind of stops. Krist makes a weak attempt to tie together all the different threads he’s been dropping throughout the book but it’s too little too late.

I recommend not reading this and instead listening to Hep Cat’s Ball on WWOZ. It’s on Sunday nights at 7:00 Central time or you can listen on the two-week archives. It’s got more early jazz than you can shake a stick at. And why are you shaking a stick at the radio anyway? Weird person.

World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven

2.5 stars

First Sentence: There was a moment so short that it had never been successfully measured, yet always far too long.

Thoughts: First off, let me present the soundtrack to this book to get you in the mood:

Science fiction is more often about the time it was written in than the future it claims to depict. That goes double for World of Ptavvs which depicted what the future would look like if society had never progressed past the 1960s. You’ll notice this within the first few pages because everyone—everyone—smokes like a chimney. Also California never passed strict emissions-control laws so there’s still constant smog over Los Angeles. (There is still smog, but it’s not like it was back in the 1960s.) Also also the main character’s wife exists only as a sex object to the extent that a freakin’ dolphin hits on her.

But that’s not what this book is about. What it is about is an alien creature discovered at the bottom of the ocean. A scientist posits that this alien may have some telepathic abilities, so he gets Larry Greenberg, one of the best human telepaths, to mind-meld with the alien to see why it’s been at the bottom of the ocean. This will forevermore be known as Mistake Number One.

This isn’t a friendly alien who just happened to make a wrong turn at Neptune. No, this is a classic golden-age sci-fi alien who wants to enslave all humans and take over the solar system. We actually meet this alien in the beginning of the story when his spaceship goes kerflooey. His name is Kzanol and he’s a Thrin, a species that has enslaved most of the known galaxy with its telepathic powers. Kzanol, realizing that he’s in trouble, get himself into a stasis suit and then stuffs his most valuable possessions in his spare suit. He programs the ship to land on a nearby food planet and hits the stasis button.

Two billion years later, Kzanol is dredged up from the ocean floor. Those stasis suits really last.

So back to Larry Greenberg. When he links with Kzanol, he loses control of his own mind. Kzanol, now controlling Larry’s body, breaks out of the stasis cube and begins wreaking havoc. He steals a flying car and heads off to the St. Louis spaceport. It was on this trip that he realized how long he’d been out. Enraged, Kzanol takes over the minds of a spaceship crew and steals a ship. His destination? Neptune, where his spare suit had crashed. One of the prized possessions he stuffed in the suit was a helmet that enhanced his telepathic abilities so he could enslave an entire planet.

Obviously the humans aren’t going to stand for that kind of nonsense! A team from Earth and another team from the asteroid belt head off after Kzanol/Greenberg to thwart his/their perfidious plans. It’s all very exciting but I got confused halfway through the chase when another Thrin showed up and then it wasn’t clear if Larry or Kzanol was in charge and honestly I was just glad it ended when it did. But can anyone tell me what role the dolphins played in the denouement?

The Sun and Her Flowers, Rupi Kaur

2.5 stars

First Sentence: bees came for honey

Thoughts:

Just because
you can
break
a sentence into

fragments
does not mean
you wrote

a poem.

There are rules.
Learn them.
Follow them.
Then break them.

Sonnets are more impressive
than this.

However, if you read each of the five sections of this book as an avant-garde short story rather than a collection of “poems,” it almost works. The best of the five were the “Falling” section about rape and recovery, and “Blooming” about accepting oneself as one is. “Wilting” is a decent Hallmark Channel-style breakup story, although I personally thought the narrator was way too into the guy. And in “Rising” she gets a new boyfriend and promptly gets way too into him.

But then I have no romance in my soul. Rooted it out years ago and salted the earth it grew in.

And while we’re on the topic of roots, the central chapter, “Rooting,” is just awful. It’s supposed to be about the power of immigrant women and transmitting that power to their children. However it’s a flimsy bit of tissue paper covered with meaningless platitudes that you can tell the author has heard but doesn’t really understand. There’s way too much “I never asked my mother about this but….” Why don’t you ask her? And if you have, why don’t you listen? And if you don’t answer why don’t you open your eyes and observe? For a chapter about her mother, it felt like it was too much about the author/narrator.

I want to be nice, though. Kaur has potential. The way she illustrated the “poems” was just wonderful and maybe if she really works at her craft and gains some more life experience* she’ll reach that potential.

*This book was written and published when she was barely in her twenties. I thought I knew it all when I was that age, too. Life quickly taught me otherwise, as it does to all of us.