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 Nine: Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut by Emily White

I was a women's studies minor in college. I know, right? How much more useless could my university experience be? Major in English lit, minor in gender studies, and find myself several years later suited for not much more than reading, writing book reviews, and loudly proclaiming that if anyone ever marries me, I won't change my last name. Hey, it's a cool last name.

Anyway, that little part of me was attracted to Fast Girls, a decent enough examination of the concept of the slut among teenagers. I admit to feeling somewhat out of my depth, because I went to a private all-girls' high school so I don't think we had a slut. Any girl that was whoring it up certainly wasn't doing it in the hallways, and if someone was doing it on the weekends it obviously didn't make enough of an impression on me that I remember it thirteen years later. White's own memory of her school tramp, a girl they all called "Anna Wanna," inspired her to research the notion of certain girls being singled out and tormented, whether their behavior warranted it or not.

White interviewed dozens of women and incorporated their experiences into what is really a very long senior thesis. The writing isn't particularly great, and the book gets a little tedious and repetitious while depending on references to feminist writings - including those of Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, and Betty Friedan. In trying to find the answer to the question, "Why did that girl get singled out?" White never really came up with a decent answer, and instead just kept telling the same tale of the girl who was known for giving a train job to the lacrosse team or trading oral for cigarettes. The women who she interviewed were more interesting, and ranged from happy and successful in the post-high school world to depressed drug addicts who never really escaped it. White also probed the idea that the slut as outcast is a role found more often in white suburbia than multiracial urban settings, but didn't spend enough time on it to make it worthwhile. In the end it's just acceptance that some girls will always be set apart due to rumor, gossip and innuendo without really offering a way to change it.

Title Twenty Eight: Tribute by Nora Roberts

We've already established that I like mass market romance novels. Don't look at me like that, you snob.

Cilla McGowan, former child actress, has found her calling in rehabbing and flipping old houses. (This book was obviously written before the market tanked last year.) In her biggest project to date, she's moved to Virginia and plans to restore the Little Farm - not just any house, but the house where her maternal grandmother and film star, Janet Hardy, took her own life in 1974. An air of mystery and sadness surrounds the house, but Cilla is determined to make it shine again. Her neighbor, graphic novelist Ford Sawyer (where do these writers get these names?) would like to make Cilla shine, but that's part and parcel. It's a Nora Roberts book.

When Cilla unearths a box of letters to her grandmother from an unnamed lover, she sets out to discover his identity. Of course, threats and violence ensue as someone tries to scare Cilla into leaving town. Meanwhile, Cilla and Ford are getting cozier and cozier, and he creates a new superheroine based on her. I can't even get a decent guy to ask me out on a date, but whatever.

Ultimately, the bad guy is caught, Ford proposes, Cilla says yes, and everyone lives happily ever after. It's a surprisingly good book if you can look past the formula, with interesting details, likable characters, and sharp-ish dialogue. I'd recommend it for a rainy Sunday or afternoon at the beach.

Shut up. Go read Proust or something.

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.

Title Twenty Six: Life Class by Pat Barker

No one does WWI fiction better than Pat Barker. Her Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road) is probably the definitive example of how to create fiction about a war that almost no one ever thinks about. It's true; we remember the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (or War of Northern Aggression, depending on your side of the Mason-Dixon line), WWII, and Vietnam. How often do you think of that little skirmish in the second decade of the twentieth century? America didn't really get involved until the end was near, so it doesn't have the same impact in our history as it does in those of England, Canada, and France, to name a few.

In Life Class, Paul and Elinor meet as art students at the Slade School of Art and have an attraction to one another, but are involved with other people. The first part of the novel is full of blather about art and "the work" and coffee houses and bars and sexual tension, but it's really just filler for the war that is already beginning to cast a shadow on the fringes of student life. As Paul and Elinor turn towards each other, the fighting begins in earnest and Paul, ineligible for service due to problems with his lungs after an illness, volunteers with the Belgian Red Cross. This is where Barker finds her familiar and formidable rhythm, as she describes the conditions of the men, the reports of battle, and the havoc that war wreaks on the mind. Regeneration dealt with the phenomenon of "shell shock" and the beginning stages of its validity as a clinical diagnosis at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland; that novel is based in large part on real events and people (including the famed poet Wilfred Owen, who died only days before the armistice). Although Life Class is completely fictional, there are parts of it that are achingly real and heartwrenching. Barker uses words like the finest strokes of a paintbrush to create the image of a soldier's gangrenous pelvic wound; it's revolting but stunning at the same time. She captures the struggle between the war and home fronts, both turned mad, in Paul and Elinor's letters to each other. Moreover, she uses the concept of art as a medium for what we cannot say to perfection - it's only in Belgium that Paul feels that he can really put himself into his work, although his subject matter is clearly disturbing - it is the only way that Paul can rid himself of the horror of the broken and torn human beings around him. His work, which was never very good at school, is transformed into something more real and honest. It only took the most terrifying circumstances to make it possible.

That said, the story ends rather weakly, with an injured but recovering Paul and a drifting Elinor stumbling towards the end of the love affair that they consummated over a few days while the latter came to visit in the early days of the war. Neither of the main characters could be called likeable, and I didn't really care what happened to them. I think that the real strength of the book rests in the war, but unfortunately the book is meant to encompass more than that and it falls rather flat.

Title Twenty Five: Intern: A Doctor's Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar

Why do I read so many memoirs? Is it because I'm so bored with my own life? Do I just have a voyeuristic tendency to dig into the lives of others? I don't know, but since I bought another one today, I'm just going to admit my powerlessness over the memoir and give it up to a higher power.

In the case of Intern, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar's account of his internship and residency in a New York hospital, I was drawn because I have a mild obsession with medicine. I was supposed to be a doctor when I grew up. Throughout my entire childhood I was fascinated by the human body and the way it works. Every year, while making my Christmas list from the Sears Wish Book (do y'all remember the Wish Book?) I asked for the anatomical model with the removable organs; I never got it. Maybe I should tell my mother that's the reason I never followed through. The model would have made all the difference! Anyway, when I got to high school and it was time to pick a college and a major, I set my sights on the Physican Assistant program at a local university and applied to a couple of premed programs for backup. I got into the highly competitive PA program (one of only 40 accepted, whoot!) and promptly failed out after one year, not because I wasn't any good at it, but because I was 17 years old and no one in their right minds sends a 17 year old off to live in a dorm and expects her to actually, I don't know, go to class instead of spending her nights doing beer bongs and hanging out with fraternity boys. I spent the next couple of years at community college, acing my way through biology, anatomy and physiology, microbiology and medical terminology courses, but then I got lazy and bored and said, "Fuck it, I want to get an English degree instead." Don't think that I don't kick my own ass for that at least three times a week.

Anyway. Jauhar, the youngest son of Indian immigrants (his family came to the United States when he was a small child) took a circuitous route to medicine - he originally earned his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley. His older brother Rajiv followed the family dream into a career in cardiology, and after a few years screwing around with quantum dots, whatever they are - physics were not a requirement for my PA program so I took anatomy and physiology in high school instead, and dissected a cat - Jauhar decides that he needs to do something meaningful with his life. A great part of his decision to go to medical school is tinged with jealousy of his brother and the respect and praise that Rajiv receives from their parents, who see Sandeep's little foray into academia as foolish and immature. After fast-tracking through Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Jauhar packs up and heads out to New York Hospital to begin the three years of boot camp known as medical residency.

Jauhar does a very good job of describing his feelings of inadequacy, fear, and self-doubt as he is plunged into a reality for which no amount of reading and studying can prepare a person. Surrounded by the sick and dying, he sometimes wonders if doctors do more harm than good. He exposes the God complexes of the attendings, the futility of treating patients who seem to fight the men and women charged with treating them at every turn, and the overwhelming exhaustion of trying to be in several places at once without really knowing what he's doing in any of them. It's an interesting take on a place that is a mystery to many; unless either you or a family member has spent any length of time in a hospital (I myself went through it last summer when my grandmother was hospitalized for several weeks following an intracranial hemhorrage, or brain bleed) most of us have vague notions regarding how hospitals and doctors function, based mainly on shows like "ER," "House" or "Grey's Anatomy." Jauhar fleshes out the experience from the other side, showing what it's like to be the person responsible for those bodies in the beds, hooked up to wires and tubes and machines.

At times the narrative is bogged down by too much backstory; my real interest was in the patients and the medicine. In the course of his first year, his internship, Jauhar meets a fellow medical student who would become his wife less than a year later and does a mostly seamless job of integrating that subplot. He also hammers again and again at his sense of inadequacy next to his older brother, a cardiologist in the same hospital, and at times it gets tiring. We get it, your brother is a golden boy and you're in his shadow. He also explores the ethics involved in treatment, and in trying to find the line between helping a patient and causing more damage. It's an important point, but I just don't know if Jauhar has a hard time expressing his feelings on the subject or if, writing this book ten years later, his memories and feelings have blurred and merged in the ensuing decade, because those passages can be somewhat unwieldy and confusing. Granted, that could also be my interpretation of something that is really more of a moral issue and colored by my personal opinions and experiences.

Overall, I found Intern to be an enjoyable and informative read. Most people look at doctors and think, "Well, they must know what they're doing; we let them poke needles in our arms and shine lights in our eyes and stick us in radioactive machines and cut open our chests." The truth is that a white coat doesn't make you God; it just means you have a really good aptitude for memorization. Some doctors take that knowledge and try to do good, while others use it to lord over other people and look for glory. Jauhar does a standout job of giving civilians a peek behind the curtain and showing his readers that there is no great and powerful Oz; it's just a man who knows more than you do about something.

Title Twenty Four: Angels by Marian Keyes

I've already noted my love for Keyes on this here blog, but somehow I managed to miss Angels, which is strange, because Lord knows I love me some of those crazy Walsh sisters. Angels is Maggie's story, and it takes place after Rachel's Holiday and before Anybody Out There? for those of you playing along at home.

Maggie is married to Garv, her first boyfriend, and they have a pretty decent life - he's an actuary, she works in entertainment law, and they have a house in Dublin. Maggie's the good Walsh girl who's never let her parents down, which makes it quite a shock when her marriage ends and her job is terminated in the span of 24 hours. After fleeing to Casa Walsh and spending several days in its bedlam trying to figure out what to do next, Maggie decides to get on a plane and head to Los Angeles to visit her best friend Emily, who is trying to make it as a screenwriter. Over the course of a month, Maggie is submerged in the sterotypical L.A. culture - everyone drives everywhere, all of the people are beautiful, the drinks are complicated, the waitstaff are out-of-work actors/models/writers, and each day is spent waiting for an agent to call. In the meantime, Maggie tries to be supportive of Emily, who is desperately trying to sell her latest screenplay (if it doesn't happen, she'll have to move back to Dublin in disgrace because her money is gone) and spends her days at the beach and her nights drinking at hotspots, trying to understand how she ended up several time zones away from her old life. There are a couple of romantic interests (male and female - Maggie tries hard to shed her good girl image), funny haircuts, and amusing shopping expeditions as well, but under the surface Keyes does what she does best: she exposes the story, layer by layer, so that the reader figures out how Maggie got to this point at the same time that Maggie does.

It's not fair to give away the answers because it would take away from the reading experience. I will say that Keyes shifts so smoothly from the present-time action of the book and Maggie's flashbacks that it gives the novel a very organic and realistic feel while avoiding being jarring or confusing. The further you read, the more pieces click into place, and that's why I love reading Keyes' books so much, whether they're about the Walsh sisters or not. Her stories are both light and serious, making you think but at the same time keeping a steady flow of action, priceless characters (including, of course, the awe-inspiring Mammy Walsh), and enjoyable dialogue coming. Now if she would just write Helen's story...

Title Twenty Three: The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the books of my youth, and I root around in the bookcases for Anne Shirley or Trixie Belden. A week or so back I found myself perusing the shelves, looking for a little comfort read, and my eyes kept going back to my nifty Little House boxed set. I said, "Why not?" and pulled out Little House in the Big Woods, intending to while away a couple of hours with the Ingalls family during their time in a log cabin in Wisconsin. Next thing I knew, I was up to The Long Winter on the prairies of North Dakota, and I just couldn't stop myself. It took me three days to read through the eight book series, which begins with Laura "Half-Pint" Ingalls as a little girl and ends in her fourth year of marriage to Almanzo Wilder.

The Little House books are sweet, quick, and reminiscent of a time and place when church socials, county fairs, and buggy rides were the excitement of the day. Settlers battled the elements, Indians, and the government as they strove to carve out their place in the history of the American Dream. While I was breezing through the series, I thought of my experience with Revolutionary Road a couple of weeks before, and how I proclaimed that the American Dream was a ghost during the 1950s, long since dead of ennui. It was interesting to be reminded that at one point in time that idea of manifest destiny was very much alive and well in our country. I'm not someone who would like to return to that time; I enjoy indoor plumbing and voting rights and my car and supermarkets and the interwebs far too much to want to live on a farm and go to town in a wagon on Sundays while deferring to my husband and keeping an eye out for blizzards, pests, and Indian raiding parties - there is a certain note of racism throughout the books that I didn't recognize as a child, most notably with regards to Ma Ingalls' view that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." However, I've always believed that every little girl should have a set of Ingalls Wilder's books and I treasure the many hours that I spent with them in my younger years.