Tag Archives: 1 book review

Biblioholic Review: Super Sad True Love Story

25 Oct

Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY, is all summed up in its title. This novel really is sad, a love story and a sardonic but frighteningly truthful guess at the near future.

Lenny Abramov is a middle age man, afraid of dying, who falls in love with a beautiful young woman, 15 years his junior, a theme that transverses time and cultures.  Their unlikely romance begins on the brink of America’s crumpling society.  Shteyngart imagines a future where intelligence has finally lost out to the shallower virtues of beauty and wealth and a society that bases all social interactions on your credit score and your sexual attractiveness (Shteyngart is a little more explicit about this virtue).

Shteyngart has taken those of us attached to our smart phone a couple steps further in our dependence on technology, all of the characters have “aparrat” (imagine a iPhone the size of the iPod shuffle) that constantly streams data about themselves and everyone around them, ranking individual against each other. Shopping is not only the nation’s pastime but an imperative to maintain the necessary credit score and Juicy Couture takes on new dimensions in Shteyngart’s Manhattan. The population considered LNWI, low net worth individuals, have been rendered homeless and with the luck of fortune-teller, Shteyngart foretells a more violent version of the Occupiers in Manhattan parks.

Perhaps the most terrible in this near future world is the disappearance of books.  Reading is so passé that Lenny, a reader and collector of books, brings shame on his girlfriend when he tried to read to her.  To have the smell of the books on your hands is a akin to blood on your hands.

The characters are shallow and SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY’s universe is grim however, you cannot debate the effectiveness of Shteyngart’s skill in creating exactly what he must have intended.  Shteyngart, a Russian-American, mixes the fatalism of his motherland’s writers and an American’s capacity to meld technology and society into an insightful novel that sometimes hits too close to home.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart was received for free for review by Boston Book Bums

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Biblioholic Review: A Vintage Affair

6 Oct

How often we overlook history, both world and personal history, refusing to learn our lessons.  At the same time, how often we do we live in the past, refusing to let go of an old argument or a desire to relive our supposed glory days.  Isabel Wolff produces a novel about vintage clothes, a woman at a crossroads and a little lesson about history in A Vintage Affair.

Phoebe Swift’s life has drastically changed in recent months, her best friend has died, she has ended her engagement, quit her job and opened a vintage clothing store.  Phoebe is mired in regret about her relationships but her new store is a great step forward and an avenue to meet new friends that help her move on with her life.

Wolff fills the pages with descriptions of beautiful, elegant suits from the 40’s and fun flirty dresses from the 50’s that transform the wearer’s life, give them hope or confidence or just bring a smile to their face. But none of the gorgeous articles of clothing have the same impact as the little blue child’s coat that Phoebe comes across when purchasing an elderly French woman, Therese Bell’s clothing collection.  This coat has a secret that the owner has carried around for 60 years like an albatross around her neck and near the end of her life, Therese needs to share the secret.  Phoebe is carrying around her own secret that weighs heavy on her conscience and these women create a transformative friendship over their shared secrets.

Phoebe’s job as the proprietress of Village Vintage is to give “these clothes as new lease on life” but actually, it seems the clothes give Phoebe and her customers a new lease on life.

The details of the vintage couture in A Vintage Affair are enough for a fashion lover to turn each page but it is Wolff’s characters and the relationship between Phoebe and Therese is the real substance.  This book is touted as a romantic chick lit but the romance is the weakest and really the least important part of the story.  Although there are flowers, and expensive dinners, the romance is clearly a rebound.  The man of interest in Phoebe’s life is actually the least interesting of all the characters and really plays a minor role in Phoebe learning to let go of the past.

The true heart and soul of the story is the way the characters learn from their own personal histories to accept themselves from Phoebe to Therese to the unhappy young woman who buys the turquoise cupcake dress.

We would have read A Vintage Affair just for the clothing descriptions, like watching Mad Men for the wiggle dresses, but the likability of the characters and the friendships formed are an even better reason to read A Vintage Affair.

A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff was purchased for review by the Boston Book Bums

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Books to Box Office: The Town

24 Sep

Chuck Hogan is unofficially part of the two-fisted Boston writing tag-team with Dennis Lehane. And with The Town receiving celluloid treatment, courtesy of Cambridge’s own Ben Affleck, we decided the book and movie were naturals for our newest feature Books to Box Office.

The Book: Hogan is at his peak in The Town. The book revolves around a band of life long, tough guy Charlestown residents (home to the Battle of Bunker Hill and its commemorative monument,) who live in the sun as Townies, but work in the shadows as methodical and brutal thieves and bank robbers.

Hogan’s strength lay in the time spent inhabiting his characters skin. You are up close in personal with men and women, you can see their stubble, scars and badly dyed roots. His dialogue has a thug-chic rhythm, and to this working class Boston bred reader, rings entirely true. Hogan adeptly captures testosterone bloated, sometimes insecure, male bravado perfectly. And when Hogan’s harpies shriek, they sing true to the ear of a cop responding to a “frequent flyer” domestic A&B call.

Hogan has his short comings but they are quickly plowed asunder with genuine dialogue and a great pace setting.

Hogan shows what he could really do by utilizing the Bunker Hill monument as a sun dial, and ticking off times as locations of the main character’s Charlestown life. His penchant for average minutia  is washed away by a single, smart line.

The Town is also a crime procedural, with nomenclature, cops-n-robbers slang and other details that lend respectability and credibility to the thieves and their pursuers.

The Town is a far superior book than Devil’s in Exile and seems to be perfectly suited to film treatment.

The Film: To call The Town a visual love letter to Boston is an understatement. Actor/director Affleck creates a well worn, familiar Boston, Charlestown and Cambridge. From shots inside the O’Neill ice rink, to a Dunkin Donuts and the Phipps Street Cemetery, Affleck portrays Boston like someone who’s lived here. No weird jumble of streets to create a chase, his North End does connect quickly to Charlestown Bridge via Commercial Ave, not to some strange opposite side of the city loop.

Affleck’s film topography of Boston is true and immediately comforts we life-long Bostonians. However, like the book, The Town is not about a city, but the thieves and thugs that inhabit its corners.

His interpretation of Hogan’s source material is more a fine tuning rather than a wholesale rewrite. Some of the dialogue effectively used Hogan’s own words, but snipped to create more potent interchanges. Affleck wears the track jacket of Townie Doug MacRay with rough intensity. He’s man of few words, but always thinking and while physically imposing, more gentle than his fellow crime cohort, Jem, played by Jeremy Renner.

Renner’s Jem has a lived in tough guy feel to his performance. A little Cagney and a whole lot of trouble. Jem’s snap shot violence is disturbing, but it comes with a devil’s grin and ability to disarm with common man charm.

Each supporting character, from John Hamm to Blake Lively and Rebecca Hall, allow Affleck and Renner to bounce about Charlestown and Cambridge, like pinballs, all leading to a battering climax.

The action pieces in Affleck’s The Town, like Hogan’s book, felt like channeling of director Michael Mann’s crime epics like Heat and Thief. To see Fenway, the inside, the bowels, used for a full volume shoot-out was something this native Bostonian never expected to see.

Like Hogan’s book, Affleck’s The Town is a story of people that working class Bostonians know. They may not run in the same circles, may not know tough guys or ex-cons, but the men and women in the movie and book are true, they are Boston’s fractured mirror image.

The Town book and movie were paid for by Boston Book Bums for review.

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Biblioholic Review: Faithful Place

23 Aug

Irish author, Tana French treats us to an insider’s view of a close-knit, discontented neighborhood in a poor section of Dublin and an even closer look at a dysfunctional family at its worst and best in her third novel, Faithful Place.  Faithful Place is ostensibly a murder mystery but this story unfolds well beyond the detective work.

Frank Mackey is an undercover detective with Dublin’s finest, fresh off a divorce and devoted to his nine-year old daughter.  His life seems fairly typical for a middle-class cop but some twenty years ago, he escaped his abusive family, leaving home and never looking back.

Ever since that fateful night twenty years earlier, Mackey has been living a scarred life, believing that the love of this life dumped him. The plan was to run off to London with his secret girlfriend, Rosie.  This was Rosie’s idea and Frank was more than happy to go along but when he goes to meet Rosie at the end of the street in an abandoned house to make their escape, he finds a note but no Rosie.  He doesn’t turn back and although he never makes it to London, he also never goes back home.  Until now.

French’s characters adopt their native Irish brogue throughout the novel and her writing reflects all the grammatical mispronunciations.  At first, the accent-reflected writing seemed a barrier to becoming fully invested in the story but after a couple of chapters, the accents were as much characters as Mackey himself.

The book title, Faithful Place, lets the reader know that this is more than a story about the people but about a neighborhood that shaped these characters.  The mystery here is not that well cloaked, the reader can make a fairly accurate guess early on despite a few attempts at twists and turns.

What the reader cannot predict is the complexity of the protagonist, Mackey.  He is a good guy, right?  He’s a detective, he loves his daughter unconditionally, doesn’t drink too much, he never hits a woman.  These are the parameters that he has measured his life and declared himself nothing like his family.  Blood runs thicker and deeper than he may expect and although he is all those things, he is also a master of deception, a talent that runs in the family as much as his good looks.

French may attract the murder mystery fans but the readers who will most enjoy this novel are those who appreciate the complex family dynamics.

Faithful Place by Tana French was purchased the Boston Book Bums for review

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B3 Week in Review

31 Jul

Monday: We reviewed The Doctor and the Diva, a fascinating and engrossing look at early 20th century Boston and the tribulations of an infertile couple and the doctor who sought to remedy their heartbreak.

Tuesday: Launched two new regular features the Bookish Intelligence Report, literary news around the world, and the Jill/Jack Book Previews, some anticipated new releases from the perspective of the girls and guys of B3.

Wednesday: When it comes to superheroes, we realized they are not all created alike and for that we are thankful. We came to this conclusion after reading the remarkably inventive superhero anthology Masked.

Thursday: We rustled up a Backlist Review of Eat Pray Love and ran some book news tid-bits in our Bookish Intelligence Report.

Friday: When Nikola Tesla arrived in America he was conversely considered a genius or alien from another world. In Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else, the magic and oddity of Tesla is nearly perfectly captured in the eyes of a young New York chambermaid.

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Biblioholic Review: Masked

28 Jul

Can a book about superheroes appeal to someone who doesn’t read comic books?  Certainly superhero movies reach a much larger audience then their comic book equivalents. Lou Anders, who specializes in collections of sorcery, alternative history and science fiction, has turned his attention to Masked, an assemblage of original super heroes’ stories written by some well established comic book writers and graphic novelists.

{WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD!}


The first story of the collection opens with a misunderstood, cannibalistic super hero, admittedly maybe not the best way to start.  However, the joy of an anthology is there more than one story and more than one opportunity to find your favorites.  There are reluctant heroes, supervillians and revenge seekers to choose from in Masked.

A couple of stories into the anthology and the reader will find Secret Identity by Paul Cornell, it is about more than a costumed superhero saving the day, it is a metaphor for the closeted world of gays.  Can a superhero be him/herself without donning a mask?  How does it feel to hide a part of yourself from the world?  Secret Identity explores these questions with surprising depth and is a gem in this collection.

Later, Chris Robertson treats us to a classic pulp tale in Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, where a vigilant protector of city not unlike LA in the 1930’s grieves for his lost mentor and recognizes an opportunity to pass the torch to the next generation. Explore the world of a teenage black belt or a manipulated bully.

Other than crazy costumes and sometimes crazier powers, these stories have another common thread; each superhero must balance their responsibilities to the human race with their responsibilities to themselves. Comic book legend Stan Lee once wrote in Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. And this has been increasingly explored by graphic novelists and super hero geared filmmakers of the last decade.

The struggle is not only the good guy vs. the bad guy, but the inner turmoil that special powers bring, Masked clearly shows these powers as burdens and how they may avenge evils, but can easily destroy the souls of the good that wield them. 

Masked highlights some very creative minds, and whether you like every story or not, you will be amazed by the collective imagination of these writers.

Also, the Boston Book Bums continues its special Masked giveaway. Pop on over to last week’s post for the 411 on how to win!

Masked- edited by Lou Anders- was received as a free review copy by the Boston Book Bums

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Biblioholic Review: The Doctor & the Diva

26 Jul

It does not take much to imagine Boston in 1903, not much has changed on Beacon Hill in the last 100+ years.  The Brownstones are still beautiful and stately, the residents are still upper class and there is still quite a bit of Yankee gentility.  Minus the cars parked along the street, that is where Adrienne McDonnell begins her debut novel, The Doctor & the Diva.

The Doctor & the Diva centers on an aspiring opera mezzo-soprano, Erika Myrick, her handsome, doting, successful husband Peter and an ambitious doctor, Ravell.  This story may be set a century ago but it is a very modern story.

Erika and Peter struggle to get pregnant, as many power couples do in today’s society.  In their desperation, they see many doctors, hoping one will have the answer and it seems Dr. Ravell does.  Ravell’s success intertwines the three lives, even as they head across the globe in different directions. How does Erika balance her dream of being an opera diva and a mother?  What is the price for the ‘perfect world’ that Peter seeks?  How can Ravell keep his professionalism when he gives all of himself to his patient?   McDonnell’s story spans almost a decade and travels from Boston to Trinidad and Italy.

Erika’s aspirations and beauty propel all these characters forward in pursuit of their own heart’s desires, often selfishly.  Erika, Peter and Ravell all make decisions based on their own immediate desires with little regard for the consequences.  This is McDonnell’s greatest feat.  She writes a story where the reader cheers for the protagonist, even if the protagonist is in the wrong.

In the beginning, we rooted for Dr. Ravell, hoping for his success. Then later, we kept our fingers crossed that Erika would get what she hoped for.  Later still, we  sympathized with Peter, believing he may have gotten the wrong end of the deal.  And in the end, we finally realized that they all play a part in this story, the good and the bad.  No one is innocent, no one is perfect.

McDonnell’s first novel seems obvious in its plot but there are a few unexpected twist and turns.  We started guessing the main plot point early on in the novel but admittedly got it wrong.  The characters are rich, each one getting their due.  Since Erika desires to be in the Opera, it is easy to imagine the story as its own opera and all three characters would be meaty roles that any singer would want.

As a side note, McDonnell will be at BPL on July 27th.  This is apropos  since she did a stint there as a children librarian, which explains the rich detail on the Boston streets in The Doctor & the Diva.

The Doctor & the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell was received for free from the publisher.

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B3 Week in Review

24 Jul

We’re totally diggin this summer so far here in Boston. And while the core B3 crew are around, we know that readers might be spread to the winds for vacations. So, we’ll keep these rewinds coming to catch up.

Monday: We were disappointed by George Mann’s Ghosts of Manhattan. We felt like the earlier hype did not meet our expectations. More mindless pulp than sharp pulp.

Tuesday: Our review team tackled our first e-book, Bitter Seeds on the Kindle App for the BlackBerry. In the first installment we talked about the download and buying experience.

Wednesday: We reviewed Pulitzer Prize winner Tinkers from Paul Harding. Harding chooses to explore a finite plot- a man on the brink of death- in a finite space and 191 pages did the trick well.

Thursday: The Book on Phone experiment continued with the actual reading and navigating experience of Bitter Seeds on the Kindle BlackBerry App.

Friday: Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis was reviewed by the B3 team. An occult-alternate history of World War II filled with strange inter-dimensional demons and super-powered Nazi foot-soldiers. Surprisingly deep with characters and far from one dimensional, an excellent addition to the fantasy world of 2010.

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Biblioholic Review: Tinkers

21 Jul

Inspired by last week’s post regarding the length of books, B3 decided to take a closer look at 2010 Pulitzer prize winner Tinkers by Paul Harding.

This book has been read by more than one person on the team and had fueled some inter-B3 debate about the length of prize-winning fiction. One member felt the brevity of the book inhibited the ability to really know the characters, therefore choosing the ‘longer is often better’ side of the argument.

In Tinkers, George Washington Crosby is on his deathbed and in the remaining days of his life, he fades in and out of conscience, mixing memories and hallucinations. He recalls his estranged father, sometimes even recalling his father’s own past.

While in agreement that the character development was limited, is time more of a protagonist in this brief work then the father and son. The opening sentence clearly states that Crosby is 8 days from death. From here, the story unravels, with the ticking of the clock in the background.

Harding won the much coveted Pulitzer for this work, so there is little debate that is a literary pearl. The sentences are a lesson in descriptive writing.

However, the story is blurred in the minds of the father and son and leaves the reader feeling ambivalent to the outcome, which you, of course, know in the first page of the book.

Do the immediate hours before death make the journey into the past mute? The reader knows that it too late to learn lessons or make amends in this eleventh hour but maybe the memories are enough in themselves.

If Harding’s goal was a succinct, moment in time story, he has succeeded and a longer format would not have served this story any better. Alas, we must concede on the point that if this was a broader story, we would have needed to read at least another 100 pages. Harding chooses to explore a finite plot in a finite space and 191 pages did the trick.

Tinkers by Paul Harding was purchased by the Boston Book Bums

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Biblioholic Review: Ghosts of Manhattan

19 Jul

George Mann is carving out a pulpy niche for himself with books like Ghosts of Manhattan, old fashioned adventure tales of action and suspense. But what happens when you create a story that is all action, little real suspense and a century’s worth of influences?

Ghosts owes heaps to The Shadow, Dick Tracy, Batman, Doc Savage,  Johnston McCulley’s The Bat, even the flawed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but doesn’t capture their spirit or vivacity.

Straight forward as straight forward can be with a war-tormented vigilante- The Ghost, a good NYC cop battling him and the true scourge of the city an uber-villain named The Roman, Ghosts of Manhattan snaps along with few surprises. Each major scene an action set piece or character development thinly doubling as connective tissue to the next gun blazing scenario.

Again, we’re very much OK with that. Yet sometimes, even in an adventure story, you need to slow it down.

Mann brings you close to some interesting characters, yet cracks the whip to fire some guns, fly some planes or engage in fist-a-cuffs. Characters, even the ones with potential, immediately become one dimensional.

Too many writers and readers assume that pulp means shallow character development, a mere check list of personal demons and gadgets. And they would be wrong.

The Ghost in Mann’s work is not particularly original or likable. War scarred him, but what does he (or we) learn about the demons and how they motivate him? Obtuse, moody references and flashbacks don’t really do it. We know he has a violence begets violence credo, but he is an unaccountable executioner whose rules of engagement are as thin as one of the flechette he fires.

Ghosts of Manhattan also never fully explains the alternate universe that Mann hints at. The jacket blurb actually does a better job of back filling the universe than the narrative. Centenarian Queen Victoria has died, but we don’t know much about her successor and the idea of a Cold War with the British seems slapped into the story line. It contributes nothing to the plot.

Ghosts rests somewhere between steampunk and dieselpunk, with some unusual mixing of technologies. Exotic, but slightly impractical, coal powered cars live alongside rocket assisted take off planes, holographic communicators and quasi-electrical targeting goggles.

Yet The Ghost has to get out and stoke a car’s steam boiler, after simply jumping into a RATO bi-plane and soars into the sky to do battle a few scenes before. Wildly differing levels of technology in the same universe lead some to question what arrested some tech, while others leaped forward. And when you start ‘thinking’ in the middle of a story, you might have lost the reader.

Time and again we thought Mann needed to slow it down and write more about the characters and the plot, instead of falling back on any number of superhero cliches to sustain the reader.

We were disappointed because we had higher expectations for Ghosts of Manhattan. We imbued the book, pre-purchase, with cultural heft and insightful characterization that didn’t materialize. Our fault.

As we wrap up our review it dawned on us that Ghosts of Manhattan read more like the mechanics of screenplay, than novel, waiting for animation or CGI to invigorate the story.

Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann was purchased by the Boston Book Bums for review.

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