Sunday, August 24, 2014

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (5 stars)

In one of the best starts to a book that I can remember, this classic Pulitzer Prize winner begins with a quote:
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once
--Charles Lamb
Writing this review feels a little too much like a high school English assignment so I'm going to keep it (somewhat) brief.  It's an incredible book, and every bit deserves its Pulitzer and place on many Top 100 lists.

Once you've suspended your disbelief that your 8-yr old tom-boy narrator, Scout, is a natural wordsmith with an uncanny talent for deconstructing the messy, complex adult world into powerful and moving observations you'll love it.

Scout's father Atticus is a beacon of progressive thought and moral standing in deeply racist 1930s Alabama.  This from Miss Maudie:
"What I meant was, if Atticus Finch drank until he was drunk he wouldn't be as hard as some men are at their best. Thre are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."
And I completely agree with his philosophy on answering kids' questions, here he reproaches his brother after he evades Scout's question about the meaning of "whore-lady":
"Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em."
This quote also shows his intense desire to be the best he can, when faced with a moral crisis right at the end of the book:
Sometimes I think I'm a total failure as a parent, but I'm all they've got.  Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I've tried to live so I can look squarely back at him...if I connived at something like this, frankly, I couldn't meet his eye, and the day I can't do that I know I've lost him.  I don't want to lose him and Scout, because they're all I've got.
Some spoilers coming.  If you didn't read it in high school, you should go read it now.

There are some incredibly powerful scenes in the book, particularly Atticus camping outside the jail to protect his client.  Scout defuses an angry mob with a big dose of childish naivete that humanises and personalises Atticus, changing him from the man defending the subject of the mob's hatred, to a father and neighbour.

After the dramatic events of the trial, the denouement seems a little weird.  Basically you know there's something bad still coming, and we just have to sort of wait around for it to show up.  Once it does show up it's shocking, and Scout's simple "Hey, Boo", after the dramatic events is incredibly raw and emotional.
Boo was our neighbor.  He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives.
 5 stars.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

The Bloodletter's Daughter by Linda Lafferty (2.5 stars)

This was my backup book, purchased for $1 through some promotion and left on my kindle in case I found myself without a book or internet. That happened recently and it served its purpose, but was fairly unremarkable.

I appreciated the historical fiction aspect and the research that went into it: the descriptions of the Cesky Krumlov bathhouse, bloodletting and application of leeches were all fairly interesting.  Kepler was thrown into the story in a clumsy fashion, I guess his sidebar was supposed to be background on the conflict between religion and science, but it felt very disconnected.

The writing is amateurish, but not in a terribly distracting way.  Marketa and Don Julius are the only characters we get to know in any sort of detail.  Marketa's pure white virginity and passion for medicine and academic study seemed fairly implausible for a poor bathmaid in the 1600s, but I was willing to put that aside.  Don Julius is actually pretty good.  Where the story really falls apart is shortly before the climax.

Spoilers ahead.

Marketa's friend and protector drugs and date-rapes her true-love sweetheart, which is completely forgiven by all parties, because Annabella wants a child and the guy was being too precious about his virginity.  Right then.
I shall have the child I long for, and you - you no longer have your priestly virtue to confuse your heart and deny love.  I have set you free.
Marketa blindly accepts that Annabella's plan is the right course, even though she has no idea what it is.  Everyone else also appears to be on board, including Jakub and Marketa's dying aunt.  When the completely implausible plan comes to fruition I could see why it needed to be kept secret from Marketa and the reader - it's so incredibly complicated and unlikely that it would never work.

It's not like there were no other options. Putting aside the bizarre notion that Don Julius would call on the barber he has imprisoned and whose daughter he is promising to kill to cut his hair and shave him with a straight razor, having Pichler kill him at that point would have been far more plausible.

In the early part of the novel I thought Don Julius was going to turn out to be some sort of autistic savant and solve the puzzles of the Coded Book of Wonder, leading us on an Indiana-Jones meets Dan Brown quest for treasure.  I'm glad this book didn't turn out that way, but I still wasn't very impressed.

2.5 stars