Adele
Charming memoir. About all growing up in the 70s. As a kid of the 80s it was cool to reminisce about a time before video games , computers, and cell phones. When you got home after school and your parents kick you out of the house to play with the neighborhood kids until dinner. Turning her hearing aid into a superpower. Growing up issues - friendship, bullying. How even well meaning friends treat her differently. Life before the ADA - no tv subtitles. Sleepovers. How awful it feels to be “othered” - referred to in front of her face as “my deaf friend”. “Oh you poor thing”. She's so sweet and too nonconfrontational. She uses her hearing aids as an excuse to get out of stuff (a sleepover makeover). Learning sign language. She finally meets a real friend who doesn't treat her differently.
The simplicity of Brianna's plea & the art style make this book even more affecting. Good for teens especially but also adults. Only thing I'm sad about is that she felt the need to point out that she's a “model minority”. As she rightly points out, having family problems, or engaging in drug use, sex work, or any illegal activity don't tell the whole story about a person and don't make that person less worthy of human rights.
It's a 3-star book, but Haddish elevates the audiobook to 4 stars. I have trouble paying attention to audiobook sometimes, but I was riveted and listened to this one straight through. Haddish is a great storyteller, with excellent rhythm and timing (thanks Quincy Jones!) I wish she'd talked more about her professional life. The memoir is episodic and heavily focused on her personal life. I'd like to learn more about how the tenacity and faith she highlights in these stories about her personal life helped her in her career. You get the impression that her personal life was falling apart while her career was on a slow but steady course upwards, and I would love to know more. Can't wait for her next memoir.
This book is beautiful. It's just a pleasure to look at. It's also not at all didactic. Who doesn't love mermaids and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade? It's a concept that doesn't need to be “sold”, it's just a beautiful backdrop to the story of a boy and his grandma and the love and respect they have for one another.
Boring. Not at all suspenseful. The characters aren't unique or deep enough to compensate for he barebones plot. Obvious after 15% that the dead body is Ambrose and that the girls buried, but didn't murder, him. But the reader is strung along until 50% before that's stated clearly. About a third of the way through, it's clear that either Kate or Luc killed Ambrose, and the other main characters look stupid not to consider the possibility. The characters aren't well drawn enough for the reader to care about the killer's motives.
This book should be a movie. I could see it being a tense thriller/character study in the vein of “What ever happened to Baby Jane?” It's a series of slowly unfolding reveals that cause the reader to continually reevaluate how the reader regards each sister's character, and the overall narrative. It's also a little absurdist and funny, which is a great compliment to the tension. The book is so well paced too. There's not a single wasted scene. The prose is breezy and witty, so it's also a fun read. I think I finished it in 2 days.
Like the rest of the Trilogy, this book isn't particularly well written. There are many awkward or ambiguous phrases. Characters are cardboard. The “main” characters of the trilogy are peripheral to the story, except at the beginning and the end. But wow, what a ride. Great story. The whole trilogy is great, but this final entry is the best. Expands the Crazy Rich universe in time and scope.
Historical part at the end was my favorite part. The “Crazy Rich” world is abandoned, writing style changes, characters and motivations are better developed. It was not well integrated with the rest of the book. Very jarring, like reading a totally different book.
Hope they make more movies because a movie of this book could be epic.
Usually the “errors” I've found in Gregory's books have been matters of interpretation or opinion. Not so with this one.
First, Lady Catherine Gordon (Katherine Huntley, former wife of Perkin Warbeck), was never a lady in waiting to Margaret Tudor and she never returned to Scotland. (We know she never returned to Scotland because she needed permission to leave England, which she once obtained to live in Wales with a later husband.) I suspect this error was deliberately perpetrated for the purpose of dramatic irony.
Second, and most egregiously and inexplicably to me because it's such a basic factual error, Coldstream Abbey is and was in Scotland, not England. When Margaret fled from Scotland, she was turned away in England and had to return to Scotland to find safe harbor in Coldstream.
It's truly bizarre. I read Gregory's novels because I like fanfic. Whether it's Star Trek fanfic or history fanfic, I appreciate when an author attempts to forge fragmentary and nonsensical “canon” into a coherent and logical story with consistent characters. But it aggravates me to no end when authors ignore established facts as Gregory has done here.
It's the usual sob-eliciting mother/daughter Chinese-American cross cultural story that Amy Tan could probably write in her sleep. This is not to say I didn't enjoy it, because of course I did, Tan is very good in her niche. However, I don't know if I didn't notice it before in other books of hers (it's been a while), but woah, I was not feeling the whole Chinese=Bad; White=Good thing.
** spoilers from here on out.
At first, it was wholly within the book, and it was valuable and important subtext. I loved Tan's unflinching look at how Violet – a half Caucasian, half Chinese girl in the last imperial days in Shanghai – has such a racial complex about herself that with everything, from her looks to her personality. For the most part, she ascribes the “good” to her American side, and the “bad” to her Chinese side. As someone who stands at the intersection of different cultural and racial groups, I very much identify with longing to be fully part of the “better” culture. I wish I didn't, but I'm not sure it's possible to grow up as a racial or cultural minority and remain wholly unscathed by these sorts of insecurities. (Semi-related anecdote: as a child, my mom caught me tying socks to my afro puffs and telling her to look at “my long blonde hair”!)
Tan lost me, however, because the novel's internal value system seemed to seep into Tan's portrayal of the characters. White characters, for the most part, turn out to be redeemable, while the Chinese characters – even those who at first seemed pretty decent – turn out to be scum.
The white characters do harm, but are ultimately forgiven. Why were the Minturns (Lulu and her parents) absolved of their cruelties towards their children and each other? Why was Edward THAT perfect? I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop on him; even after he died, I thought, well, Violet's surely going to learn something about him that calls everything into question: but no, his posthumously discovered letters make him out to be even more saintly than he was. A character like Danner, for example, could have easily been an evil exploiter like Perpetual. In fact, I think that would have made more sense in terms of how/why Lulu was forced into becoming the owner of a courtesan house.
As for the Chinese characters, I was disappointed in how Perpetual turns about to be so evil it verges on cartoon-level super-villainy. Abusers rarely flip switches so thoroughly: I thought his characterization was the laziest part of the book: initially, he is 100% wonderful (albeit a bit boring), and he becomes 100% evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And why is Lu Sheng unable to be anything but mediocre and an object of scorn? There's no effort by Tan to establish that his obsequiousness to his family is just as valid a reaction as Lulu's wild rebellion against hers.
The only exceptions are Edward's wife, and (sorta) Loyalty. The final verdict on Loyalty seemed to be that he was kind of a douche, but hey, he's as close as anyone could get to being a ‘good Chinese'.
I also found myself missing the perspectives of the Chinese courtesans who were critical to the narrative, Golden Dove and Magic Gourd. It was never really clear why they latched onto Violet and Lulu so loyally. What in their past motivated them to reach outside their own cultures and attach themselves so devotedly to these women? There's one chapter from Magic Gourd's perspective that I really liked: as much as it was ostensibly about preparing Violet for life as a courtesan, I also got a decent sense of what her early years as a courtesan must have been like. But what about her life before? What about Golden Dove's life? A few sentences here and there aren't enough for such important characters.