lit_stacks's Reviews (579)

PC Peter Grant heads to the suburbs! But leaving the insanity of London provides for no less excitement and magic. There are unicorns, there are bee-people, there are fairies, there are changelings. However, the first half of this book does suffer from a lack of regular characters as Peter heads to the suburbs alone leaving behind Nightingale, all of the River characters, and, of course, Leslie who is God knows where. Peter doesn’t even bring Toby along for some fresh air! He does meet a new character to snark at, Dominic, whom I enjoyed very much, and Beverly Brook does join Grant for the latter half, which improves the book mightily. This was a weaker book in the series because of the lack of recognizable characters, and I think it suffers especially because Leslie only makes a few cameos, although some of her practical advice is provided through Peter’s ongoing “What would Leslie do” mental narrative. I truly liked Leslie (and still do, despite her Benedict Arnoldian ways) and I hope her storyline gets resolved quickly so that she can rejoin Peter and the rest of the team.

My disclaimer to this review is that I listened to this book rather than read it, which I do not recommend if only for the fact that you miss out on the timelines at the beginning of every chapter. This is important because the book jumps from tribe to tribe rather than focusing on a chronological telling. So I would have appreciated being able to consult the timelines when I had a question about the order of events.

Everyone should read this book in order to dispel the myths and lies that were taught to you in the American public school system. I exited school knowing that the Native Americans had been wronged in many ways and that most of them were peaceful people. However, I still left school under the impression that certain populations of Native Americans were in fact “savage,” an impression that was enforced by tales of scalpings and games of Oregon Trail, on which you could always be attacked and killed by Indians. So imagine my surprise when Dee Brown describes the bounties that white settlers collected when they turned in Native American scalps. Perhaps the public school system would have thought it slightly controversial to describe the coin purses made out of Native American genitalia that white settlers were so proud of (yes really), but if they were talking about the Indians scalping white settlers to imply that there were still unruly populations of natives, why weren’t we taught that whites were scalping the Native Americans right back?

One of the drawbacks of this book was that I found myself thinking of the Native Americans as naïve at some points. After Brown’s description of the roughly millionth broken treaty, I started to resent the Indians for continuing to sign them. While this was partially my fault for reading this book so slowly that it was days between chapters, I also lay some blame at Brown’s feet for keeping the sections on massacres and the sections on treaties so dichotomized. When reading about the treaty, I was in no way thinking about how the natives must have felt at that point due to the ever-present threat of violence.

I find Atwood's books to be very unsatisfying, but this one is getting five stars because it is so damn powerful. The world seems fantastical and impossible when looked at as a whole, but when one looks at individual aspects of this dystopia, it all seems entirely too probable, so probable that it was frightening at times. This book deals with so many of the issues facing women today from anti-abortion to the availability of birth control to victim blaming to slut shaming. But at the heart of the book is the argument of whether our freedoms should be sacrificed for our safety.

Now for the criticism. Atwood is very good at weaving these worlds that I want to immerse myself in, that I want to know more about. And she dangles that knowledge in front of the reader for the whole book, a carrot in front of a cart-horse. But the twist is you never get the carrot, which is so unsatisfying. Atwood focuses neither on the character getting a good ending nor on the world being well fleshed-out and explained, so you're left with disappointment. Oryx and Crake was much the same for me, but I related with so many of the tropes in this book that I couldn't give it any less than five stars.

I have to concur with some of the other reviewers in that this was not the most well-written book. Letts falls into a common trap of trying to make her book longer by including details that are just not pertinent. I found myself thinking "Why do I care?" entirely too often. But the thing is that I would have appreciated some more fleshing out of other parts of the story that she glosses over, especially in the epilogue. Despite these shortcomings, I still give this book four stars because the story is just so amazing that any writing pitfalls are secondary.

The selection of attorneys seems random at best (although the author's law school alma mater Rutgers is disappointingly overrepresented). Not only that, but some of the attorneys seemed more interested in delving into their personal lives than sharing their professional lives (I'm looking at you, attorney who spent a good portion of his 24 hours at marriage counseling). In addition, its audience seems to be people who already have some law school under their belt and so will understand the legal terms included. Oddly, Kim does not feel the need to explain these legal terms but felt it necessary to define seemingly universal things such as Craigslist and Sesame Street. Although the book suffers from these problems, I have no doubt that it gave a realistic picture of the life of each lawyer, though I wish more lawyers had been profiled.

I feel that the best way to describe this book is to recount my thought process during one scene:

Is this a sexual scene with a pregnant person? No it can't be Amanda, you're only thinking that because every interaction that Stern has had with a female non-family member has been sexual in nature. That's probably why Turow made her pregnant, as a non-sexual interest for Stern. Okay now they're both naked in the hot tub. This is weird. Oh God it is sexual in nature, this is disgusting! Okay Amanda, Stern just went through a tough ordeal, he's just being weird right now. *Several hours of listening later* Dear God, she was into it too. This book is horrifying!

Why anyone thinks this is a good book is an absolute mystery to me. It is the story of a man who has tried so hard to protect the women of his life (misogynistic attitude included) when in fact they were protecting him because he is such a LOSER! He finds himself in a world of strangers after his wife dies even though he has friends and children because he never took any time getting to know any of them. This book is at best eyeroll inducing because of the terrible awkwardness of the main character and at worst a soap opera that drips with unnecessary drama.

And imagine my surprise when reading "1L," Turow's non-fiction tale of his time at law school, I find that he has given someone the pseudonym of Sandy Stern! So sorry to whomever is the real-life Sandy Stern, Scott Turow thinks you're a loser with weird sexual predilections.

While a good book, this was no "Omnivore's Dilemma." "In Defense of Food" lacked the thoughtfulness, direction, and even-handedness of "Dilemma." One of the best things about the earlier book was that it presented a measured approach to food. Pollan went out and did his own investigations, talked to farmers, and actually ate the food that he was discussing. None of that is present in "Food" and it results in a book that feels rushed and impersonal. "Food" additionally falls into the trap of many books of this nature in that it both cites and berates studies, but gives no reasoning as to why each study falls into the good or bad category. This leaves the reader to simply believe Pollan because of who he is, which does not make for good science nor informative reading. While I have seemingly torn this book apart, it is still interesting and, if separated from its far superior big brother "Omnivore's Dilemma," it gets a four star review.