Title Sixty Six: Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Ok, I'm totally going to cheat for a couple of posts, okay? From the author's very own Official Lullaby Site:

"Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a forty-ish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scene of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction and once it lodges in Streator's brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover) and who lost a child to the culling song years before, for a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic eco-terrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family. "

This was my first Palahniuk. (No, you cannot revoke my Pajiba card for that. It's in the rules that I've just made up.) I didn't really know what to expect, so I wasn't really surprised when I was completely blown away. I mean, damn, this dude can write. And somehow make you totally uncomfortable while keeping you so intrigued that you can't put the damn thing down. There were passages that made me actually squirm in my seat but I had to know what happened. None of the characters are likeable. In fact, they're all pretty much creepy and I felt like I needed a shower after I finished. But it was good. It wasn't so much a novel as a living thing, breathing words and images. I won't ever read it again, because it's too dark for me, but it is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

Title Sixty Four: Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married

Hello, dahlings. It is I, Marian Keyes. If you haven't suspected before now, I have actually kidnapped your adorable little Nicole and locked her in a closet so that I could take over her blog and promote my books. Here's another one!

On a lark, my heroine, Lucy Sullivan, goes with three coworkers to visit a psychic one evening after work. The fortune teller's prediction for Lucy is that she'll be married within a year. Lucy brushes this off with a "Bah!" That is, until her coworkers' predictions start coming true, and she meets the lovable, unemployed Gus, an Irish musician who charms his way into her pants and her pockets. Perhaps Gus is undependable and fond of the drink, but he's an artiste, moppets. He is a free spirit. Meanwhile, Lucy's best friend Daniel begins dating her roommate Karen, but this doesn't bother Lucy in the least because she simply doesn't find Daniel attractive.

You may be able to guess where the story goes. (I know, but dearies, I wrote it.) Gus turns out to be a worthless cad, Lucy realizes that her father is an alcoholic and that she's been beastly to her mother for years without understanding what the latter goes through, and Daniel is a dream.

Go buy it.

Title Sixty One: The Pact by Jodi Picoult

Emily Gold and Christopher Harte were born, months apart, to parents who lived in adjacent houses and mothers who were best friends. Growing up, they were two halves of a whole, partners in crime, and as close as any two humans could possibly be. As they moved into the maze of their teenage years, it was only natural that Chris and Em take the next step and become a couple. After all, it's like they were made for each other, so what could be more natural or perfect?

That perfection shatters on an autumn evening when both sets of parents are called with horrifying news: they must come to the hospital immediately; there has been a shooting involving Chris and Emily. The Hartes and the Golds race to the emergency room, but it's too late for Em, killed by a gunshot wound to the head. Christopher has a scalp laceration and stitches. In the ensuing hours, tragic details will emerge: Emily and Chris went to the local park, where Chris operated the carousel in the summer, to fulfill a suicide pact. The gun that killed Emily was Dr. James Harte's. Chris fainted after Em's shot and before he could follow through.

It's not that simple. When Chris is charged with Emily's murder, an already tragic situation becomes catastrophic. What really happened that night? Melanie Gold becomes so consumed by bitterness, blame and rage that she turns on everyone, alienating not only her best friend, Gus Harte, but also her own husband Michael. James Harte withdraws into himself and avoids his wife. Chris's younger sister, Kate, is all but forgotten (the Christmas morning scene is downright painful). In the midst of all of this, defense attorney Jordan McAfee is trying to build a case that will let Christopher off the hook while asking his client to just sit down and shut up; meanwhile, Christopher needs to face the truth of his relationship with Emily, and ask himself how much she really loved him. The answer is devastating.

Picoult uses a combination of legal and emotional plotlines to frame her most successful works, and I would argue that The Pact is in her top three, along with My Sister's Keeper and Handle with Care. While moving through the present day, focusing mostly on Chris but keeping a good handle on the supporting characters, Picoult intersperses the details of Chris and Em's years together, from the day Emily was born and Chris shared her hospital bassinet, up until the night that she died and left Chris behind. In the meantime, everyone tries to put together the pieces of what, exactly, happened. Too many variables don't add up - the trajectory of the bullet, Emily's demeanor, her future prospects as a very talented artist - to label her death a suicide; however, if Chris loves Em as much as he, and everyone else, claims, he could never have killed her, because he doesn't want to live without her. Slowly, secrets are rescued from their hidden corners and pockets, and the answers eventually come together in a moving scene that has Christopher taking the stand in his own defense. The outcome and the answers are completely unbelievable, but they fit the novel to perfection. There is no happy ending, and the truth hurts everyone, but it's fitting. Life isn't always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it's a cold marble headstone and regret.

Title Sixty: The Last Cowgirl by Jana Richman

I actually read this book months ago, and then re-read it after that. I'll put it on the stack of books to be reviewed, and then I take it off again and set it aside. I don't know why, but I just feel like I won't be able to do the book justice when I write about it. Then I realized that I need to get my ass in gear on this Challenge, so I resolved to do it. I apologize in advance, because the book deserves more than I'm about to give it. I just...I don't know how. I'm not that good.

Dickie Sinfield (only her father calls her by her given name of Darlene) had a normal suburban girlhood in Utah with manicured lawns and playing on the sidewalk in front of the house until the day her father decided that the family was going to move to a ranch outside of town so that he could follow his own childhood dream of becoming a cowboy. With the exception of Dickie's brother Heber, the family is less than enthused - Dickie misses her neighborhood and friends, her older sister Annie is horrified by the entire thing and spends her time out of the house or locked in her room, and their mother just quietly resents it. Her father's dream is only viable thanks to the efforts of two neighbors and fellow ranchers who would become more family than friends - Bev Christensen and Merv Nelson. A few years later, a local army base and the secrets beneath it would devastate all three ranchers, and Dickie would bolt for Salt Lake City as soon as she hit 18, where she would become a journalist and cut ties with her cowgirl past.

Dickie's story begins with the death of her brother Heber, an accident hushed up by the military base where he works - the same military base that played a role in the destruction of cattle herds decades earlier. Dickie is forced to confront the past in order to come to terms with Heber's death, and the story switches gracefully from the present day to Dickie's recollections of her youth, all told from her point of view. The novel ebbs and flows, unfolding at just the right pace. The plot folds in ranching, government research, environmentalism, Mormonism, family drama, friendship, betrayal, and acceptance in a fascinating way. It's not exactly a tale of redemption; it's more a tale of peace, and coming to terms with your life.

It's just so real. I think that's always been one of the best compliments I can give a book, because I want a story that I can believe in and characters I can know. I'm telling you, there is so much I'm missing here: Dickie's tumultuous relationship with Stumpy, Merv's grandson; her strained relationship with her father; the faithful details of cattle raising and ranch life; the pain of loss; Dickie's spiteful best friend Holly; the residents of Ganoa county and their uneasy acceptance of the military presence that provides jobs yet always casts a shadow of potential disaster. I just don't know how to incorporate all of my thoughts. This book is layered and thought-provoking and insightful and emotional. It's the book that any aspiring writer wants to create. It's lovely. I probably haven't made a very convincing argument here, because I'm babbling, but The Last Cowgirl is a gem. I hope that Richman keeps writing, because she has a fan here.

Title Fifty Eight: Being Committed by Anna Maxted

Yes, again with the British chick lit. You shut your mouth when you're talking to me.

Hannah Lovekin prides herself on her lack of emotion; she believes that it makes her a good detective, and serves her well enough in her private life. The first sign of trouble comes when her boyfriend, Jason, proposes to her on a hotel bathroom floor, and she turns him down. This leads him to turn around and propose to his neighbor Lucy, which then makes Hannah decide she wants him back, even though he's kind of a puss. "Encouraged" by her father Roger to reconcile with Jason, Hannah goes through a sort of test course proposed by Jason in order to facilitate a reunion - she needs to be more feminine (the novel is written in the first person, and the description of a Brazilian had me putting down the book so that I could wipe away tears of laughter), she needs to learn to cook, she has to attend therapy in order to be more emotionally open, and she needs to find some closure with her ex-husband, Jack. The last proves the most difficult, since Jack left Hannah five months after they got married, at age twenty, because he believed that she cheated on him. Hannah has to spin a complicated web when she realizes that she's still in love with Jack, but needs to break off her engagement to Jason - he asked again after the Brazilian and the spray tan and the haircut and the dinner she made - in a delicate manner and return him to Lucy.

Things start to fall apart. Lies begin to spread, and with them truths come out. Memories of her own mother's affair, twenty-five years earlier, start pushing their way into Hannah's brain. She begins to see the people around her for who they really are: her parents, her brother Oliver and his wife Gabrielle, Jack, and her best friend Martine. Hannah starts feeling and it freaks her right the fuck out, but there's nothing she can do about it, and she finally begins to grow up.

Being Committed, like Maxted's other books, is a fast, fun read with a great central theme and a well-developed cast of characters. As the story branches out, it never becomes unwieldy; it just seems to evolve naturally. Maxted mixes humor with levity and creates an overall enjoyable experience. I dig it, and I'll read it again. And again.

Title Fifty Six: The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper

It is so, so rare to find a memoir that can blend fact, experience, personal and political history, and a conversational tone and deliver something so pitch-perfect that you can't put it down. I managed to read Cooper's lovely account of her privileged girlhood in Liberia, followed by her escape to America as a refugee and successful career as a journalist, in about three and a half hours (roughly the time it took for me to fly to Portland and back). It was that engaging and gripping; touching without being manipulative, and informative without being pedantic.

Cooper begins with a short history of the country of Liberia itself - the only American attempt at colonization - and traces her own roots back to the founders of the country through both her mother and father. The author neatly encapsulates the background and peppers it with enough details and anecdotes to keep it from becoming dusty or dry. Fast forwarding nearly a hundred and fifty years, Cooper describes her childhood as a daughter of a wealthy and influential family; her father built a luxurious estate in a secluded suburb of the city of Monrovia, a home that the family called "Sugar Beach." Cooper's parents, who already had children of their own, brought a poor native girl named Eunice to live with the family in order to keep Helene and her sister Marlene company. Eunice was treated well and loved by the girls as a sister, but the Liberian caste system prevented her from truly belonging to the family. Cooper evokes vivid memories of parties, private school, clothes from America, vacations, fancy cars, and handsome boys as she describes a charmed girlhood. Then overnight, a coup destroyed the delicate balance of Liberian life and families such as the Coopers were marked for death. Helene watched her uncle, a government official, executed on television. In a matter of weeks Helene, Marlene, and their mother refugeed from Liberia and fled to America as the world they left behind crumbled and burned, giving way to a new world where women were raped and slaughtered and children were orphaned and forced into militias. Eunice had to be left behind, and Helene didn't see her again for decades.

After the coup and the escape, the Coopers built a new life in America, but Helene was never comfortable, and they moved around quite a bit. John Cooper eventually went back to Liberia and died there; Calista and Marlene Cooper also returned but came back to the U.S. after several years. Only Helene never cared to go back. Helene dedicated herself to her studies and became a reporter at UNC, then moved on to a journalism career that took her to the Wall Street Journal and later all over the world, but she locked away her feelings on Liberia and focused on her new life as an American, preferring to forget her past, until she found herself in Iraq in the beginning of the war and narrowly avoided dying in an attack. Helene Cooper picked herself up, dusting herself off, and decided that if she were going to die in a war, it should be Liberia. Her decision brought her face to face with the horrors she never wanted to see again, but it also brought her back to Eunice, and gave her a second chance that should probably never have happened.

A story like this should be trite. It should make you roll your eyes and sigh derisively. The beauty of The House at Sugar Beach is that, instead, it makes your heart ache and your eyes tear in the best of ways. (I fully admit to crying a little while reading the description of Helene's father's death, although I was surreptiously trying to knuckle the tears away lest the air hostess ask me if I was all right and embarrass me on a plane full of strangers.) It made me wonder why I didn't know more about Liberia or the atrocities committed there, and it made me respect someone who took the pieces of a shattered life and rebuilt them while she was still just a child, and then had the courage to risk that fragile existence by going back as an adult. Cooper keeps it real in the best sense of the word, being matter-of-fact without being cold, being honest without being callous, and being true without being exploitative. The mixture of emotion and fact is beautifully balanced, and makes for a bittersweet story with the happiest ending it could have had.

Title Fifty One: Behaving Like Adults by Anna Maxted

Oh, British chick lit, how I love thee. Like candyfloss for my brain, you are. Maxted takes what could be a light, fluffy, and completely mindless story and gives it a heavy, serious layer underneath, and it works beautifully.

Holly Appleton believes in love. Even though she's just split up with her fiance, Nick, a grown man who makes a living by dressing as Mr. Elephant at children's parties and Febrezes his feet when he's too lazy to shower - which is most of the time - she is an eternal optimist and runs a hip little dating firm called Girl Meets Boy in London. In order to help Holly get over Nick (and give Nick some incentive to move out of their house), Holly's coworkers, sister Claudia and actor Nigel, convince her to go on a date with a prospective client. Little does Holly know that opening the door to Stuart Marshall, a successful lawyer with a ridiculous sense of self-worth and entitlement, will be more disastrous than she could have imagined; one night, after seeing Holly home from a party, Stuart rapes her on the kitchen floor. Nick walks in during the middle and promptly moves out. Holly spirals into a dark denial and depression and nearly runs her business and life into the ground while keeping her secret locked away.

Maxted has a gifted touch with the material. All of the characters, save Stuart, are likeable and real. She keeps the devastatingly serious subject of the rape in perspective at all times while letting the story unfold from Holly's perspective. It is never treated lightly, and the steps that Holly must take with the police and finally therapy are described frankly without being heavy-handed. The reader almost gets a sense of being in Holly's skin as she moves through her existence in the weeks and months following "that night," going through the denial, shame, fear, hope, and cautious return of optimism with her. The mood is tense in just the right places, with an unexpected turn for the better here and there as Holly realizes that she is surrounded by love and support.

There are times when she retreats, but she always moves forward again, buoyed by her friends and family. The plot is made more substantial and realistic by the supporting characters and their experiences with life: Nick, who discovers a family secret; Claudia, who is keeping a piece of herself separate; Holly's parents, who turn out to be more than she ever expected; Rachel, Holly's best friend who grew up in a posh English family but is delightfully filthy; and Nigel, who is so theatrical that it's nearly impossible to believe he's straight. The point is, life goes on, and Maxted makes that the central theme of the novel. Even when your world is ripped to shreds and you find yourself in a strange place where up is down and the sky is green, you have to keep going, because that's what life is about. It's about the good and the bad, and keeping each in perspective, and making the most of what you have. It's lovely.

Title Forty Nine: My Lobotomy by Howard Dully

What a sad, sad story. I've reconciled myself to the fact that memoirs are, by and large, sad. Most of them are a means for an author to purge himself of pain or atone for past sins, and that's all right. It's what keeps us reading, the thrill of living vicariously through someone else's abuse, addiction, illness, and sorrow while we're tucked up comfy and safe in our beds. For some reason, this book touched me more than the last few memoirs that I've read. I don't know if it's because Dully's anguish is rooted in childhood or because he is obviously just a simple man, a bus driver telling his story in order to stand as a voice for thousands like him without any affectation or sense of importance. The point is, it's a sad sad story but one very much worth reading.

Howard Dully's mother died when he was very young, and his father remarried a woman who was her opposite: where Dully's mother had lavished him with love and affection, his stepmother Lou treated him like a black sheep, punishing his severely for both real and imagined transgressions while his stepbrother and brother were exempt. Dully was also often physically punished, with great force, by his father. Howard was a mischevious boy, often in trouble in school and at home, but not malicious; were he a child today, he would probably be overmedicated on Ritalin for ADD when it seems that he was just a bright child (he used to disassemble and reassemble electronics when he was a toddler) with a vivid imagination and a dearth of intellectual challenges at school. His stepmother, however, couldn't stand Howard and tried various ways of removing him from her household; eventually she came upon the idea of having him lobotomized by the field's pioneer, Walter Freeman, who decided that Howard had been a schizophrenic from the age of four. Howard had no idea what was going to happen to him and the decision was made by his parents in a matter of days. After, Lou's campaign to get Howard out of her house was successful as he was bounced to foster families, relatives, and mental institutions. He was never allowed to return to the family home.

As Howard grew to adulthood, he moved from halfway houses and dead end jobs to homelessness, going from woman to woman, drinking heavily, marrying, divorcing, and fathering a child, but with no purpose. He was arrested time and again. It was only after years of such aimless existence that he realized he couldn't blame the lobotomy and decided to get his act together. He married a good woman, got clean, and got a steady job as a bus driver. Soon after he decided to research what had happened to him, Howard was contacted by two NPR producers who were putting together a segment on Freeman and the devastating effects that his cavalier lobotomies had had on his patients. After hearing Howard's story, the producers revamped the focus of the piece, choosing him as its center, and convinced him to interview patients, their families, medical professionals, and others, including his own father, who ultimately refuses to accept any responsibility or blame for what happened to his son. Eventually Howard became the voice for Freeman's patients as the narrator of the NPR piece "My Lobotomy," which was so well and widely received that the emails coming in after its initial airing crashed NPR's server. That program, in turn, led to the writing of this book.

Howard Dully uses an honest voice as he recounts and rediscovers his past. He is modest and candid, and the story is all the more powerful for it. At the end, you are glad that the adult Howard has picked up the pieces and rearranged them into a better life, but sad that the child ever had to endure such pain and absence of love. I'd like to give Howard Dully a hug.

Title Forty Five: The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

So imagine that I'm browsing in a bookstore, or maybe the book section at Target. I notice you checking out The Uses of Enchantment. I watch for a minute while you read the back, sense your hesitation, and then see you say to yourself, "Eh, seems interesting. I'll take it."

Now you see a slightly manic blonde hauling ass towards you making frantic waving motions. When did they start letting homeless women with well-maintained highlights hang out in Barnes and Noble? you think. At that moment I arrive in front of you, my ponytail slightly disheveled, panting a bit from my trek across the store. (I should really cut down on the cigs.) "Put it back!" I cry. You wonder why I'm so vehement. What could be so wrong with a book whose blurb promises a tale of Mary Veal, who disappeared from her posh New England prep school one day after field hockey practice and reappears a few weeks later with no visible injury or trauma save a case of amnesia. Was it true, or did she fake the whole thing? What repercussions will the event have on Mary's family, therapists, and Mary herself? Why wouldn't you want to check this out?

I'll tell you why. It's a hot fucking mess. Julavits is aiming for literary and instead turns out a disjointed, confusing, and subpar book that tries to blend three different "narratives" - "What Might Have Happened," a convoluted account of Mary's experience with a kidnapper/fellow fugitive/pervy old dude who supposedly suffers from amnesia himself; "Notes" from her first therapist, who goes on to write a book detailing what he considers Mary's entire fabrication and which ends up destroying his career when he's accused of improper patient conduct with Mary by a feminazi colleague; and "West Salem," the events that follow the funeral of Mary's mother fourteen years to the day from Mary's disappearance (Mary's mother, incidentally, refused to see her before she died, and spent most of her life obsessed with an ancestor accused of being a witch). Is that confusing enough you? Congratulations, now you know how I felt when I read the book. Beyond the fact that Julavits has three concepts that never come together, there is no real resolution. You never find out why Mary took off with the guy (if that's what actually happened). You never understand why Mary let the feminazi take over and trash her therapist. You certainly never get any sort of revelations or conclusions from grownup Mary. It's never even made clear who the dude in the car was. It ends abruptly; it doesn't even whimper to an end. The whole thing is like watching a fly buzz between a window and a screen until it drops dead, but somehow less entertaining.

Put the book down. Walk away. I promise not to stalk you through the store.

Title Forty Four: Love The One You're With by Emily Giffin

When it comes to Emily Giffin, I have very definite opinions. I adored Something Borrowed, enjoyed Something Blue, and loathed Baby Proof. My expectations towards Love The One You're With were mediocre, and they were just about met.

Ellen had a great life; she married Andy, the brother of her college roommate/best friend, she started a great photography career in New York, she was welcomed into the wealthy Atlanta family of her husband, and she was happy, happy, happy until the day she saw her ex Leo on a street corner. Instead of ignoring it, or brushing it off casually, she had to make a huge deal about it, sneaking meetings and calls and texts, hiding it from everyone except her older sister Suzanne, who still lived in their hometown of Pittsburgh. Ellen needed *closure* from Leo, the one who broke her heart and got away, the one who knew her inside and out and just ditched her one New Year's Day. Meanwhile, Andy asked Ellen if she would like to move to Atlanta so he could join his father's law firm and be closer to his family, including sister Margot, who is pregnant with her first child. Ellen voiced no doubts and away the two went, with Ellen realizing how stifled she felt in their new mansion, or social circle, or life. I have no sympathy for Ellen; she should have spoken up. Instead she sabotaged her marriage, reignited her relationship with Leo, and burned bridges with her best friend and husband in the process, only to realize that she made a colossal mistake on an ill-fated trip back to New York to work on an assignment with Leo, a writer. Luckily for Ellen, Andy realized how much he loved her, and how stifled she felt, and he took her back, although I frankly don't think she deserved it for being such a selfish cow. Andy wasn't innocent but Ellen, a grown woman, should have tried to deal with the situation constructively. Instead she nearly imploded everything and manages to keep hold in the nick of time. A compromise is reached and everyone gets a happily ever after.

Sweet Christ, what shit. With the exception of Something Borrowed, Giffin has a unique talent for creating completely unlikable characters and constructing situations that are so bland they make plain yogurt look delectable. In my opinion she's a one trick pony and I hope someone stops publishing her dreck.

Title Forty Two: The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

I'm pretty sure I read this back when it came out and caused a stir, but I wasn't certain (probably not a good sign) so I thought, "Eh, why not?" Wow. Seriously? This book wasn't funny. It was just sad. I only had sympathy for one character, and he got royally screwed in the end.

Nanny is a grad student in child development at NYU who lives in a shoebox apartment and works as a nanny to afford said education and living quarters. She gets picked up in Central Park one day by Mrs. X, who wants her to watch darling Grayer a few days a week. Predictably, it turns into Nanny-as-indentured-servant as Mrs. X flits from salon appointment to charity function and Mr. X fucks a girl from the Chicago office. Nanny falls for Hot Rich Guy Who Goes To Harvard And Lives In The Xes' Building. Grayer, whom Nanny calls Grover, is largely ignored by everyone but her. She is the only shining light in his existence. (Wait, I just heard Handel's Messiah.) Of course, she gets too close to Grayer and Mrs. X fires her while Grayer wails in the background. The end.

It wasn't cute. It was about a bunch of self-centered New York assholes who essentially give birth to expensive accessories, whom they hand off to students and immigrants. Maybe someone should have advised McLaughlin and Kraus to stick with childcare.

Title Forty: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson

Laurel Hawthorne makes beautiful quilts, but she always puts in hidden pockets and secret compartments where she places something ugly - a bird's skull; a broken tooth. It's her way of acknowledging that everything beautiful has something dark inside, but she won't let it show. Laurel lives her life much the same way, tucking away her sordid family relatives in DeLop, Alabama and the ghost of her pervert uncle Marty, keeping those things separate from the picture-perfect life that she lives with her husband and daughter in a gated community in Victorianna, Florida. Everything is orderly and tidy until the hot summer night that another ghost comes to visit Laurel, the first she's seen in the thirteen years since she moved to Victorianna - her daughter Shelby's best friend Molly, who has drowned in the Hawthornes' pool. In order to find the truth about Molly's death, Laurel has to open the secret compartments and expose the ugliness to the light of day.

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming was surprising; it was far better than I expected and I found myself engrossed in solving the mystery of Molly's death. Laurel brings her sister, Thalia, to Victorianna to help; Thalia is the polar opposite of Laurel, an actress who is married to a gay man, a woman who lives life messily and loudly and brashly. Thalia cannot understand how Laurel can exist in her tidy little world, but Thalia has the courage to root out the truth that Laurel lacks. The novel is peopled with interesting, realistic characters, such as Laurel's husband David, a placid computer programmer who loathes Thalia; simple Bet Clemmens, a teen cousin from DeLop who has come to visit the Hawthornes (Laurel's own little charity project); Stan Webelow, a neighborhood man whom Laurel suspects in Molly's death; and Laurel's parents, especially her mother, who came from the poverty and squalor of DeLop but has managed to insulate herself beneath a veneer of Southern respectability and charm. Jackson also shows the secret side of the upper-middle class suburbs, with its alcoholics, cheats, and liars, contrasting it with the outright crime, drug addiction, illiteracy and hopelessness of DeLop.

Jackson keeps the pace moving as she weaves the threads that Laurel will pick apart as the days following Molly's death pass. She also cleverly uncovers Laurel's past and deftly guides the reader through a sort of journey both forward and back, a plot device that can often feel contrived or heavy-handed when used by other authors but not here. Laurel is the center and she needs to look both behind her and ahead if she is going to find her way out of the pocket within which she has hidden herself. In trying to protect her family, Laurel has frozen them, and Molly's death is the catalyst for Laurel's realization that it's no way to live. She has tried so hard to not be Thalia that she's more a sketch than a painting. There is only one awkward scene, which Jackson resolves nicely enough, even though it was a bit out of place with the rest of the book. All in all, a definite recommendation if you're looking for something with some substance and flair.

Title Thirty Nine: Driving with Dead People by Monica Holloway

Hey, y'all. Did you miss me? I've been real busy.

Anyway, I need to tell you something. I think I have memoir ennui. I mean, we should have realized that this was going to happen, right? I feed on other people's stories like a leech. Eventually I'd meet one that I'd close and say, "Huh. I should feel more than I do, but I don't."

That book is Driving with Dead People. Please don't misunderstand me; I felt for Monica. She got a raw deal. Her parents were both shitty. Her father splurged his goodwill on being a good guy in public, at his hardware store and Elks barbecues, while he made his kids' lives a living hell, treating them with cruelty and violence and going out of his way to humiliate them. Her mother was a selfish bitch who pretty much abandoned her kids when she figured out she didn't want to play house anymore and decided to go back to school, where she got her own apartment and hooked up with a married guy that she would later take on as a second husband. In the meantime, Monica, her sisters Becky and Jo Ann, and her brother Jamie were kind of left to fend for themselves, and they all turned out about as fucked up as you could imagine they would. Not much is told of Becky's story, and Holloway hints strongly at a sort of estrangement that grew from childhood between the girls, so I got the impression that she's left out mostly because Becky doesn't want to be a part of Monica's life and "lawsuit" can be a sweet word when family is on the outs. (Of course, that's just my take on it. Maybe Monica wanted to give Becky some modicum of privacy.)

Monica does a decent job of essentially raising herself, and forges a strong friendship with Julie Kilner, whose father owns the local funeral home (and by whose family and family business Monica is fascinated; hence the title). The girls create a bond and Monica is amazed by a family where knocking over your glass at the dinner table won't get you knocked off your chair. Monica's father has an obsession with gruesome accidents and death, filming them with the family movie camera, and Monica often wishes she were dead. She's not exactly suicidal; she just sees death as a sort of peaceful place to be, and this feeds her interest in the Kilner mortuary. In their teens, Monica and Julie pick up extra money by fetching bodies from the airport in the hearse, but the book is about so much more than that. It's about how a kid who has the deck stacked against her turns out all right, and how, just when she thinks she's figured out her life - Holloway put herself through college and became an actress, even though she's spent a lot of her time scrabbling from day to day and engaging in disastrous love affairs - one thing comes along and knocks her sideways. You're going to get spoiled, so don't read further if you want to wait and see for yourself.

One Christmas, Jo Ann tells Monica that she's not going home for the annual family celebration. Apparently, now that the kids are all grown up and no longer in need of mothering, Mom likes to pretend happy family at the holidays. Monica stops off to see Jo Ann on her way home, and Jo Ann reveals that she remembers being molested by her father throughout her childhood. It's both shocking and yet not; I had a simultaneous feeling of "Seriously? Something else happened to these kids, on top of the rest?" and "Well, in a family that messed up, I guess it makes sense." The rest of the book deals with Monica trying to come to terms and remember if she, too, was a victim of sexual abuse. Their mother patently refuses to believe that such a thing happened, but Monica recalls her mother's insistence that the girls sleep in nightgowns without underwear to "air themselves out" and slathering their privates with Vaseline at night. Also, all three girls slept in the same room for years, so Monica must have borne witness, mustn't she? Could she really not have known this was going on? Was her mother complicit in the most vile of crimes? Becky refuses to discuss it; Monica and her mother stop speaking; Jamie is too far gone down a road of self-loathing and alcohol abuse to be present; Jo Ann becomes suicidal and is hospitalized. Monica cuts off the oddly congenial relationship she's fostered with her father while trying to figure out her own truth. Then, one day, like an ice pick to the chest, her father inadvertently confesses his guilt: Monica phones him after Jo Ann's suicide attempt and tells him that he must help her support her sister while she recovers, and that Jo Ann left her a suicide note that she has yet to open. Her father tells her not to open it, and when she presses him about it (there is no such note) he screams into the phone, "I never touched that girl!" With that, the entire house of cards falls to the ground. Monica remembers the sensation of orgasm from her childhood, when she would lie still and pretend to sleep while a finger probed her. Her already horrible memories are forever smeared by a layer of filth that can never come clean.

One thing that jarred me, very much, was that in the epilogue Holloway describes a conversation she has years later with Julie Kilner, who still lives in her hometown. Julie recounts that the last time she saw Monica's father and asked about the girls, he responded that as far as he knows, they're not dead yet. For some inexplicable reason, this compels Monica to send her estranged father flowers with a note that says that she misses him every day and loves him. That was my what the fuck moment, when I officially stopped caring about this book. How do you write such an exposing tale of your life and end it by saying that you sent a monster an arrangement from 1-800-Flowers? What does that even mean? How can I be expected to feel anything but ambivalence for a woman who clearly doesn't even know how she feels about the situation?

Maybe I'm being unfair. I don't know. I was just disgusted by that. I respect Holloway for sharing her story with the world, but it left me feeling hollow and vaguely repulsed in its entirety. I need a few rounds of fiction to cleanse my palate.

Title Thirty Eight: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

If Sarina read this blog, she'd be looking for something handy to chuck at her monitor right now. I don't care. It's well known that Gone with the Wind is one of my favorite books (and films) and reading it makes me happy. There's a reason that it's both a classic and a masterpiece, friends. Whether or not you want to believe it is on you. My faith cannot be shaken.

You probably know the basic story - Scarlett O'Hara, Southern belle, is living an antebellum lifestyle at Tara as the eldest daughter of a Georgian plantation holder when the Civil War (or War Between the States/War of Northern Aggression, whatever) breaks out during the fateful barbecue at Twelve Oaks plantation, where she meets Rhett Butler for the first time. Scarlett wants Ashley Wilkes, but she can't have him, since he's going to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton. Petty Scarlett decides to marry Melanie's brother Charles for spite, but it kind of backfires when Charles dies of illness in the war's early weeks. War, destruction, starvation and Reconstruction ensue; Scarlett travels from Tara to Atlanta and back, then marries her sister's fiance out from under her when she needs money for taxes to save the family home from falling into the hands of Carpetbaggers. When husband number two, Frank Kennedy, is killed during a Klan raid, Rhett finally swoops in and snatches up Scarlett, telling her that he can't go all his life waiting to catch her between husbands. As Mrs. Rhett Butler, Scarlett finally has enough money to keep her nightmare of being hungry and lost at bay, but there's no happy ending; when Scarlett and Rhett's daughter, Bonny, is killed in a fall from a horse and Melanie Wilkes dies in childbirth, Rhett leaves Scarlett, who has realized too late that all the time she imagined herself in love with Ashley, her heart really belonged to Rhett. Rhett doesn't have enough left in him to care, and utters his famous last words on his way out the door: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Sobbing to herself on the stairs of their Atlanta mansion, Scarlett resolves to go back to Tara, start again, and find a way to get her husband back. Fin.

Look, it's a long book, and the movie cut out about a third of the story, and STILL needed an intermission.

What you might not realize is that GwtW isn't a potboiler or a love letter to slavery. It's a powerful, detailed, and rich portrayal of a time in American history that is often reduced to bare bones and dry facts in high school modules. Mitchell uses authentic dialogue and sweeping narrative to create two tales: the first, of a way of life and a class of people, both of which ended the second the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter. Mitchell does a masterful job of describing the war, martial law, poverty, loss, despair, and the Southerners' efforts to find a place in an alien world where the old rules and laws no longer apply. On another level is Scarlett's story; she never really belonged in the world of gentle, quiet women who oversaw homes and raised children. She is too much like her wild Irish father, too intelligent, too strong, and these traits are what keep her going, working her fingers to the bone in order to thrive while those around her are content to sit around, recounting tales of the old days and Confederate victories while letting life happen to them. Scarlett cannot rely on anyone but herself, and it makes her hard and bitter, but it also makes her real. She's not just a protagonist, but a heroine, clawing, scheming and plotting her way towards a life without fear but not realizing that the fear lives in her, and by the time she does, it's too late. She's too far from where she always intended to be but she recognizes that she just has to go on and find another way. Mitchell knew what she was doing when she created Katie Scarlett O'Hara. You should take some time to meet her.

Title Thirty Seven: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman

Emelia falls for her married boss and breaks up his marriage. Next thing she knows, her two-day-old daughter dies of SIDS and she is stuck with an insufferably precocious 5-year-old stepson, William, who insists on puncturing the cocoon of grief she has built around herself. Everything she does makes her feel like a failure - as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a stepmother; she is a failed lawyer and a homewrecker; she cannot breathe. Her husband's ex-wife, a respected and revered obstetrician to the elite of New York City, does everything she can to make Emilia's life a living hell while her husband, Jack, gives off an air of mere tolerance; eventually even his patience breaks and her life lies around in jagged pieces and she has no glue with which to reconstruct it.

I would probably wax rhapsodic about this novel except for one thing: it's really a love letter to Central Park. The book is rife with obscure factoids about the structure and history of the park; Emilia spends all of her time there; her memories center on it; entire chapters revolve around it. I GET IT. New Yorkers love Central Park. It is the greatest park in the history of parks. (At one point Emilia, the first person narrator, even says this in no uncertain terms.) Your life is empty if you don't live near Central Park. You are a philistine if you've never been to Central Park.

The Park is probably much more than just a reference point; I'm sure there's some great metaphor I'm missing, but it's wasted on me because I have a headache from the anvilliciousness of it all.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is a decently crafted book with a thoughtful exploration of the themes of loss, love, grief, and family. Sometimes I wanted to hug Emilia; sometimes I wanted to spank William; sometimes I wanted to shake Jack. Unfortunately, my investment in the characters was sporadic and half-hearted because the cover may as well have had an "I (Heart) NY" logo on the front. I would have been more emotionally involved in the story if it were less about geography. Or maybe I just missed the point entirely.

Title Thirty Five: If I Am Missing Or Dead by Janine Latus

Look, I'm going to come right out and say it: this book was stupid. I feel very bad for the author and the fact that she suffered from such low self-esteem and that a shitty childhood with her pervy father led her into a marriage with a disgusting, abusive, nasty pig who thinks of nothing but fucking her after she has surgery to make her tits bigger because he wants them to be. It's a vile stream of recollections from someone who unfortunately spent most of her life trying to live up to or hide behind the images of herself that the men in her life have created. I'm sorry that Latus suffered this way for so many years, and only found the guts to claw her way out of the vicious cycle a couple of months before her beloved younger sister, who lived her life in much the same way, was murdered by her boyfriend. I just don't see the point to this book, I really don't. There isn't enough redemption to balance out the filth oozing off the page. I wanted to take a shower with a Brillo pad after I finished it. Again, I'm not mocking the plight of victims of domestic and sexual abuse; I just don't want to read page after page about it without there being something more substantial at the end than "after living with it for years and years and years and knowing something was wrong I finally got out." Latus is a writer for a living; this book should be better. I bought it because I thought it would have more to do with her sister Amy, and it didn't, so maybe that's why I'm so annoyed, but it's just a disappointment.

Title Thirty Two: Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

I don't want to review this book.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad book. It's beautifully written, poignant, thought-provoking, and sensitive. I think it's fantastic and the characters are true and flawed and shining. This might be one of the best books that Picoult has written; I look back at some of her earlier work and this one just shows a level of intensity and maturity that speaks to her talent. I don't want to review it because the ending broke my heart, and I don't want to think about it.

Instead I'll give you a quick recap, and I'll let you decide if you want to read it. Sean and Charlotte O'Keefe have two daughters; Amelia is Charlotte's daughter from a previous relationship and Willow is their miracle baby, who was born with a condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, or OI. Also known as "brittle bone" disease, OI is caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation and its biggest result is the incredible delicacy of the bones; fractures can be caused by a bump into a table, a child hugged too tightly, a stumble over the edge of a rug, or simply a sudden movement. During a family trip to Disney World, Willow slips in an ice cream parlor and falls, fracturing her leg. Charlotte and Sean realize that the doctor's note they carry at all times, detailing Willow's disease, is home in their van in New Hampshire. They are arrested at the hospital on suspicion of child abuse and the girls are taken from them. It lasts only overnight, until Charlotte is able to contact Willow's doctor, but it ignites a fire in her. Upon returning home, Charlotte and Sean visit a lawyer, who tells them that they don't have a case against the police department in Florida but that they do have a case against the obstetrician who may have failed to diagnose Willow's condition early enough in Charlotte's pregnancy for her to terminate - a case called a "wrongful birth" lawsuit. This presents two major problems: one, Charlotte will have to testify that Willow should never have been born; two, the obstetrician in question is Charlotte's best friend, Piper.

What follows is a fracturing of the characters' lives - Charlotte and Sean are literally on opposite sides of the lawsuit, Charlotte and Piper's friendship is irrevocably shattered, Amelia turns inward on herself, and Willow tries to make sense of it all in her six-year-old mind. Picoult shows an amazing depth of understanding as she recounts the story in a way that keeps the reader engaged and shares information about an unknown disease, using it as a metaphor for the larger picture. I usually find subplots slightly tedious, but Picoult picks up pace with Charlotte's lawyer, Marin, who is herself adopted and searching for her birth mother, adding another dimension to the debate over termination in pregnancy.

It's an excellent book, and if you don't mind emotional reads then I certainly would suggest it. I just don't want to think about it anymore myself. Not for a little while, yet.

Title Thirty One: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Some books are like old friends. Even though you know them well, return visits are always enjoyable and you remember just why you loved them in the first place. I've read The Lovely Bones several times, but each time I do I drift back into the story of Susie Salmon and the characters are familiar and comforting, even as I experience the sadness and heartache with them over again.

One day, walking home from school, 14-year-old Susie runs into a creepy neighbor who convinces her to investigate a room that he built under the cornfield that is the shortcut between the school and the Salmon home. Susie's natural curiosity is what leads her into the underground space, but once down there she realizes that something is very, very wrong. Harvey refuses to let her leave, then pins her down, rapes her, dismembers her, and erases any evidence of the crime. The only lead that police have is the hat that Susie had on her, made by her mother, until a neighborhood dog turns up with an elbow in his mouth and the Salmon family realizes that Susie is never coming home.

Told from Susie's point of view, looking down on her family from her heaven, the story is one of loss and pain but it's also a tale of how a family tries to move on from a tragedy that creates cracks in the foundation. Susie explores the efforts of her father, mother, sister, and brother as they attempt to navigate a world without her in it. Sebold treats what is a horrific and devastating situation with suprising grace and imagination, and the characters are what make the novel so worthwhile. I came to love the Salmon family, even as they make mistakes and flounder. I watch as her father battles the deaf ears on which fall his conviction that Harvey is the murderer; as her sister Lindsey tries to move beyond being the "dead girl's sister;" as baby brother Buckley attempts to make sense of what it means that Susie is gone; as Mrs. Salmon does the only thing she can to survive by methodically distancing herself from her family; and as Susie's maternal grandmother, Grandma Lynn, becomes the unlikely glue that holds this fractured collection of broken people together.

Sebold takes a tale of horror and turns it into one of redemption, a rare gift indeed, but at the same time she never takes away from the devastation of the emotional chasm that is left by the unnecessary death of a young girl just beginning to discover who she is. The story is real enough to be uncomfortable but at the same time powerfully endearing, and it has kept me coming back again and again, as I suspect it will for years to come.

Title Thirty: Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult

I'm such a sucker for Jodi Picoult novels. I'm in the middle of reading another one right now. I can't help it; I'm powerless. I know when I pick up one of her books that I'm going to ride an intellectual and emotional rollercoaster that redefines whatever concepts I have about fairness and justice. It's pretty rad.

June Nealon had a good life; she was raising her seven-year-old daughter Elizabeth with her husband Kurt and counting down the final weeks until the birth of her younger daughter Claire when her world was blown apart by the murders of her husband and child, leaving her clinging to Claire, all that she has left. The killer, handyman Shay Bourne, became the first person in over forty years to be sentenced to the death penalty in New Hampshire. Eleven years later, as Shay's time to die approaches, so does Claire's - the girl needs a heart transplant to survive. When Bourne decides that he has to donate his heart to Claire to right some cosmic wrong, it creates an outcry that is dwarfed only by Bourne's sudden transfiguration into a Christ figure; he turns the water in the cell block toilets to wine, brings a dead robin back to life, and cures a fellow inmate of AIDS. Added to the cast of characters are a priest who served on the jury that found Bourne guilty and sentenced him to death, now questioning his own faith in the face of what is happening around Shay, and an agnostic lawyer for the ACLU who takes on Shay Bourne's case and champions his right to die in a manner that will allow for organ donation (hanging, as opposed to lethal injection) while intending to use it as a hammer to shatter the idea of the death penalty.

When you read a Picoult novel, you have to suspend some disbelief. There's always a little mystical/mysterious woo-woo happening; some books, like The Pact and My Sister's Keeper, are much more rooted in fact, while others, like Salem Falls, Mercy, and Keeping Faith ask you to imagine a world where magic and miracles happen. Change of Heart walks a line somewhere between the two camps; on the one hand, really, an uneducated carpenter (anvil!) is suddenly healing the sick and quoting Gnostic gospels? On the other, a sick kid needs a heart and there's enough medical and legal jargon to keep the story grounded in reality for a good part of the novel.

Ultimately, it's a story about people. Picoult is very good at creating complex characters and setting a stage for them to interact. Shay Bourne is going to die at the end; that is never in question. He killed a little girl and her father for reasons that come out later, but he never denies that he murdered them and believes that he needs to die to even the scales, and that saving Claire is his ultimate purpose. As in other books, Picoult uses her people to probe the edges of a thorny issue and gives an ending that is just satisfactory enough, but still leaves some regret. That's the kind of story that I like. I don't need neat corners and tidy bows; I want to think, and this book delivers.

Title Twenty Seven: Still Alice by Lisa Genova

My aunt, who passed away a few years ago from cancer, once looked at me during one of her chemo treatments and said, "Alzheimer's is the cruelest disease. There's no way to fight it." I was a little stunned that someone as sick as she was could be thinking of someone else, but that was just her. I should have paid attention at the time.

Alice Howland is a well-respected professor of psychology at Harvard University who begins to notice that she's forgetting things. She chalks this up to her busy schedule as a teacher and world-wide lecturer, the stress of her career and empty-nest syndrome, and what she assumes to be the approach of menopause- she is fifty, after all, and these things happen. Then one day, taking her daily run, she becomes lost a few blocks from home. She knows that the buildings are familiar and that she's supposed to know where she is, but her mind is blank. She is dazed and terrified, and when she comes back to herself a few minutes later, she tries to brush it off but can't.

After a visit to her primary and then another with a neurologist at Mass General, Alice is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Genova, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard herself, does a masterful job of portraying the devastation, despair, and loss that Alice begins to experience from the moment of diagnosis. While focusing on Alice and charting her steady, heartbreaking decline month by month, Genova also explores how this changes the dynamics of every relationship in Alice's life - with her husband John, a fellow professor; with her three grown children; with her colleagues; most importantly, with herself. Alice knows that there is going to come a time when everything that she has worked and fought toward is going to be washed away, like a sandcastle on a beach, and as a professor who wrote groundbreaking papers and conducted milestone research in the area of psychology and linguistics, the idea of losing the ability to communicate is shattering.

One of the best things about this book is that Genova chose to write it in the third person but it comes across as a first person voice. It's almost an eerie sense of Alice's story, told by Alice as an onlooker. The eloquence of the first half of the novel begins to fade into a more simplistic fashion as the disease marches on. One plot point that jabbed at my heart, again and again, was this: Alice, who has come to rely entirely on her BlackBerry for tying her to who she is, sets an alarm to ask her five questions every day. If the day should come when she cannot answer the questions, she instructs herself to go to her computer and open a certain file and follow the instructions. It just made my heart ache that she knew she was going to reach a certain point and wanted to leave an escape hatch. As the story progressed, and she could answer the questions with less and less certainty, I found myself crying. I tried to tell myself that it was only a story, but by the end I couldn't pretend anymore. It's not just a story. It's the story of every person with this horrible illness and no cure in sight. It's my grandmother's story.

My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's over ten years ago. Since then, I watched her slip away, bit by bit, until she wasn't my Nanny anymore. Now she lives in a nursing home, and I never go to visit her. I'm a terrible person, and there's most likely a spot reserved for me in hell, but I just can't do it. My Nan was fierce; you didn't cross her and you didn't question her no-nonsense Pennsylvania German ways. She raised eight kids as a working mother, tag-teaming with my grandfather (he was on days while she did nights) and had the unwavering respect and love of her clan. She beat my ass on more than one occasion, and I deserved it. She helped my mother raise me and my sister when my father took off when we were babies, and when she and my grandfather moved to Idaho in the eighties for their health I missed them like crazy; I was thrilled when they moved back in 1996 and we didn't have to wait months between visits anymore. This is the woman who taught me how to scrub a floor on my hands and knees, make a bed (with hospital corners), and cook a roast. Her recipe for hobo bread is legendary. She used to pass steaming baked potatoes out with her bare hands and wash dishes in scalding water without gloves. She called me "Lady Jane" when I was in trouble, and "honey" when I wasn't. We spent a Christmas together in Aruba. She would tell me not to sit on her davenport in my dirty dungarees. She wore starched blouses and slacks in the winter, and pressed t-shirts and khaki shorts in the summer, with her hair always combed, lipstick fresh, and jewelry well-placed. She passed her middle name to me. She's been gone for a long, long time. In her place is a stranger who doesn't know me, or anyone for that matter. She can't speak. She wears a diaper. She's fed by an aide. The staff at the nursing home is wonderful, and they take extremely good care of her, but she's really just an elderly infant in a wheelchair, and I'm a useless excuse for a granddaughter. My Aunt Judy was right; it is the cruelest disease.