Dan Chaon’s new book revolves around identity theft but there’s so much more going on. There are three separate stories that finally interconnect in a surprising ending.
Miles Cheshire has been searching for his troubled twin brother Hayden for 10 years. Lucy Lattimore, a recent high school graduate from a small town in Ohio, runs off with her history teacher. She is hoping for a sparkling new life. They end up at a deserted motel in Nebraska. Ryan Schuyler learns some shocking news, leaves college, and disappears from society.
It’s dark and unsettling. You can never quite grasp what is true and what is not. I would love to hear your comments about the book. Let me know what you think.
“You know, Ida Mae Jones, you were born to be a WASP. You’ll do just fine without me.”
Flygirl begins on December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy. World War two has just started. For Ida Mae Jones, it means her brother will join the US Army and fight with the other coloreds, a dangerous position. With skin light enough to pass for white, Ida Mae becomes Jonesy, a flygirl in the Women Airforce Service Pilots. Thanks to her father’s instruction in flying his Jenny, a small crop duster, Jonesy adapts to larger plans and more dangerous flights with relative ease and excitement. But pretending to be white during Jim Crow is easier said than done for a housemaid.
Everything about this book will draw you in: the authenticity of the time, the danger, the racial tension and injustice, the language and dialogue.
The Stoic Philosopher/Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (whom most of you are more familiar with from the beginning of the movie Gladiator) commented that the source of anger is dashed expectations. Take myself for example, I look outside and it is snowing. Then I get in the car to drive somewhere and get angry that no one seems to remember how to drive in the mysterious white stuff that seems to be falling from the sky. I am angry because people should remember given the fact that they live in the snowbelt but they don’t and this happens every first snow. If I could just remember that this would happen then I should not be angry according to the Emperor.
This brings us to the end of chapter 1. Bella in the preceding chapter has sought to remind us that she is an outcast, that no one will like her, and how especially different she is than the rest of the typical high school crowd. She has convinced the audience that she is going to be an outcast, feared and reviled from the rest of the population for merely existing. We understand that she isn’t the bubbly cheerleader type with blond hair, a nice tan, and an outgoing personality.
The difficult thing about this is that while we accept it clearly the character, herself does not. She has so far gone out of her way to avoid one person, become arrogant and self-important with the group she is sitting with at lunch, and look down her nose at the “typical teenager.” I have said it earlier, she wants attention for not being accepted, for people to talk about her as being the mysterious loner that shoves people away. For proof of this we look no further than her first actual meeting with Edward Cullen.
Edward so far has merely cast a glance in her direction at lunch. Now, they have to sit next to each other in Biology class.* We know from the hype around the book that they will get together later but how is this first reaction: “He stared at me again, meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face–it was hostile furious.“
Once she sits down at the lab table next to him: “He was leaning away from me, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair and averting his face like he smelled something bad…I peaked up at him one more time and regretted it. He was glaring down at me again, his black eyes full of revulsion.“
Class ends (a subject that Bella has already covered she notes) and Edward gets out of his chair racing to the door. This apparently not the usual behavior for a high school students in the planet that Bella lives on causes her to reflect, “I sat frozen in my seat staring blankly after him. He was so mean. It wasn’t fair.”
This guy, instead of paying attention to her pays attention to class and this isn’t fair? I don’t know but Edward’s reaction doesn’t seem odd to me. I feel that never being a teenage girl I should cut her some slack, it’s obvious from these few pages that she has already developed a crush on Edward, who somehow never read her mind and returned even an atom of that to her. However, Bella isn’t the usual teenage girl, she has reminded us of that fact many times already in the book. So I won’t cut her the slack she seems to be begging for, I will cut her some because it’s not that Edward ignored her he seemed to be angry with her existence. That always puzzles me too, I have met some people that right off the bat hate me. I never get it, and my insistence on finding out why usually makes it worse. We haven’t really gotten the inquisitive nature of Bella yet, all we have is a sense of superiority and her desire to be treated as an outsider.
Yet it gets more puzzling when the school day is over and she returns her forms to the office only to find Edward attempting to switch out of the Biology class they share, “It was impossible that this stranger could take such a sudden, intense dislike to me.”
Is it? The very manner in which Edward has treated her has been the attitude she has been telling us that she is used to, now somehow when that expectation has been met this upsets her. Bella isn’t a snob, she’s what I term the “lonely loner.” Using the idea of the mysterious loner, in order to attract friends so that they don’t have to be the loner anymore.** According to her in the beginning of chapter 1 this sudden, intense dislike is not only possible but has been expected!
Of course this all operates under my expectation that a girl, especially a teenage girl is going to be rational and consistent. However all that is thrown out the window because she’s been hit with the thunderbolt, according to the Godfather. All of the other people in the school can treat her however they want and none of that will matter because Edward is going to be occupying all of her thoughts. Her true expectations of finding friends has been met, despite her lies to the reader. Now something else has entered the equation that she never anticipated and that is why the Emperor can smugly stroke his beard, he’s still right and Bella’s reaction is just as he predicted.
*We’re going to get to one of the biggest questions of the book later, but as a teaser the question is: “Why is he in high school to begin with?”
**And according to 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant this makes Isabella Swan an immoral person for breaking the first Categorical Imperative.
Happy New Year!!! I am so excited about the new year. It’s like a fresh start and a time to try new things. So, in the spirit of the new year, I am going to try something new: Mondays with Megan, right here on the Teen Blog. My idea is to have something interesting from the weekend to share and recommend and/or talk about something to look forward to in the week to come.
Over the weekend I finished Candor by Pam Bachorz. It’s about a town in Florida where all the teens are being brainwashed to be perfect. Everyone loves bran and homework and no one lies to their parents. No one knows it is happening either, except Oscar Banks and if he isn’t careful he could become like every other teen in Candor. I would recommend this book to fans of Feed by M.T Anderson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson and the Uglies Series by Scott Westerfeld.
Looking forward this week there a few books being released that I am excited to read:
By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead by Julie Anne Peters Captivate by Carrie Jones is the sequel to Need and Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves
You can put a hold on any of these now!
I also hope to finish Fallen by Lauren Kate and Duplikate by Cherry Cheva. Happy Reading!
I very much enjoyed this novel. Christian suspense! And it didn’t disappoint. Bree is a canine search and rescue professional and this novel focuses on her professional life ( which is so interesting) as well as weaving in the story of her life ( A husband and son lost on a plane crash a year before). I was very impressed with Ms. Coble’s character development. From the first page, I was drawn in, not just to Bree, but the Michigan UP city of Rock Harbor that she calls home and the people that make make up her circle of family and friends.
The plane carrying her husband and son has never been found, and she continues to search for them. Lost children, lost hunters, a mysterious death and a “witch in the woods” combined to keep me turning pages. And don’t we all adore a happy ending?!
There was also no doubt that many of the characters in this novel were Christians. They lovingly display spiritual characteristics without preaching or being overly religious in nature. Scripture was incorporated in the story and the poem, Hound of Heaven. These characters make me want to be a better person and the represent what real Christianity is about – ” loving people” .
Final word : Read this one. It doesn’t disappoint. In addition, this is only book one in a series of novels about Bree and her serach dog Samson ( The Rock Harbor Mystery series) . I can’t wait for the store to open tomorrow, so that I can get the next one!
Karen Kingsbury said ” Colleen Coble is a master story-teller..” and she is right!
Steve Martin has written screenplays (L.A. Story, Roxanne) and short stories. Under consideration in this review are two novellas.
A novella is the tween of fiction–neither a short story nor a novel, but having some qualities of each. It’s more complex than a short story and goes on longer to its conclusion. It’s shorter than a novel, as we’ve come to expect novels to be. Few writers can really pull off the novella, certainly in English. It is difficult to think of someone who really got it right. The Bertie and Jeeves novels by Wodehouse probably qualify; Joyce’s “The Dead,” the last entry in Dubliners, arguably is a novella-length short story. And so we are used to novel-length novels–anything shorter seems underdone. Maybe a novella is just a novel that the writer couldn’t quite flesh out.
Imagine Sister Carrie in Los Angeles c. 2000, at about 20 percent of the length of Dreiser, and you have Shopgirl. Mirabella works at the glove counter at Neiman Marcus, where she is discovered/preyed upon one day by the millionaire businessman (his business is never specified) Mr. Ray Porter. She wants someone to take her away from it all; he, twice her age, wants a delightful little thing to pass the time with. The plot recalls the film Pretty Woman, but with Richard Gere as he is now, and Julia Roberts as she was then–and without the Disney/Touchstone certainty of an eventual happy ending.
The novella dwells too much on intimate details, but it would have been even shorter without them, and thus a short story. Mirabella gets the most extensive character treatment; Ray Porter is a blank. Her parents have a few brief scenes and are stock figures–her father is a scarred Vietnam veteran, for goodness’ sake. This was one of the only real fits of laziness in Martin’s effort. Unlike Sister Carrie, it ends happily enough, as life comes back in a circle for Mirabella and she finds (rediscovers) the right man.
The Pleasure of My Company, on the other hand, is clearly a comic effort. It is told by Daniel Cambridge, who is either a genius or borderline mentally disabled. He sits in his apartment in Santa Monica all day, watching the world outside his window. He is obsessive-compulsive; he won’t step over a curb and so is limited in where he can walk by fortuitous driveways, which allow him to cross the street. Daniel finds himself getting involved with the social worker, Clarissa, who comes to see him, even though he had longingly desired the local realtor, Elizabeth, and the pharmacy clerk at Rite Aid. He does well in an essay contest in which he writes about being “the most average American”; on a lark, he writes two essays, and places in the contest under both his own name and the alias. Daniel’s grandmother in Texas supports him with regular checks. When she dies, Daniel and Clarissa go on a road trip to the homestead. His middle name is Pecan.
The narration recalls Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a memoir as told by someone with flat emotional responses. Only at the end do you find out that she was a clone. Daniel Cambridge’s true status never really is clarified. He mentions at the beginning that his application for Mensa was rejected and that his test clearly was scored wrong. You’re supposed to laugh at his presumption, since he is obviously so clueless, but at the end, he is told by Mensa that they had made a mistake after all. Martin cleverly lets Daniel’s actual performance remain a mystery.
The book is written without chapters, though there are odd little squiggles at various points to break up the text. It is impossible to tell whether any hierarchy is involved. There is extra space between the paragraphs, plainly in an effort to pad the book out to a respectable length.
Both these books are set in the shallow soil of Los Angeles, where no one is native and everyone is in need of a real connection. Both protagonists are from other, realer places: Vermont in Shopgirl; Texas in Company. Martin is probably being unfair to L.A., though others have had that reaction. He does not work hard enough, though, at showing the realness of life in the other states. They exist only to have a real place to go home to on a visit. Los Angeles is where the exciting living is done.
Here’s my review of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, a 2008 book by Dan Buettner. I give the book four stars on Amazon.com’s five-star system (“I like it”).
♦ ♦ ♦
The lifestyle principles advocated in The Blue Zones would indeed help the average person in the developed world live a longer and healthier life. The book is a much-needed antidote to rampant longevity quackery. Dan Buettner’s idea behind the book was “discovering the world’s best practices in health and longevity and putting them to work in our lives.” He succeeds.
Mr. Buettner assembled a multidisciplinary team of advisors and researchers to help him with a very difficult subject. Do people living to 100, scattered over several continents, share any characteristics? Do those commonalities lead to health and longevity?
They studied four longevity hot spots (Blue Zones):
Okinawa islands (Japan)
Barbagia region of Sardinia (an island off the Italian mainland)
Loma Linda, California (a large cluster of Seventh Day Adventists)
and the Nicoya Peninsula (Costa Rica).
Research focused on people who lived to be 100.
Until recently, two of the Blue Zones—the Nicoyan Peninsula and Sardinia—were quite isolated, with relatively little influence from the outside world.
Mr. Buettner et al identify nine key traits that are associated with longevity and health in these cultures. Of course, association is not causation, which Mr. Buettner readily admits. He draws more conclusions from the data than would many (most?) longevity scientists. Scientists can wait for more data, but the rest of us have to decide and act based on what we know today. Here are the “Power Nine”:
regular low-intensity physical activity
hari hachi bu (eat until only 80% full—from Okinawa)
eat more plants and less meat than typical Western cultures
judicious alcohol, favoring dark red wine
have a clear purpose for being alive (a reason to get up in the morning, that makes a difference)
keep stress under control
participate in a spiritual community
make family a priority
be part of a tribe (social support system) that “shares Blue Zone values”
Of these, I would say the available research best supports numbers 1, 4, 7, 8, and the social support system.
I doubt that hari hachi bu (eat until you’re only 80% full) will work for us in the U.S. It’s never been tested rigorously. The idea is to avoid obesity.
The author believes that average lifespan could be increased by a decade via compliance with the Power Nine. And these would be good, relatively healthy years. Not an extra 10 years living in a nursing home.
Appropriately and early on, Mr. Buettner addresses the issue of genetics by mentioning a single study of Danish twins that convinces him longevity is only 25% deterimined by genetic heritage. Environment and lifestyle choices determine the other 75%. I believe he underestimates the effect of genetics.
Over half the population of the Nicoya Peninsula Blue Zone are of Chorotega Indian descent, not from Spanish Conquistadores. Would a Danish twin study have much tosay about Chorotega Indians’ longevity? We don’t know, but I’m skeptical. Also, the Sardinians and Okinawans would seem to have centuries of a degree of inbreeding, too, according to Buettner’s own documentation.
Do the Adventists tend to marry and breed with each other (like Mormons), thereby concentrating longevity genes? You won’t find the question addressed in the book.
Because I think genetics plays a larger role in longevity than 25%, I’d estimate that the healthy lifestyle choices in this book might prolong life by six or seven years instead of 10. But I’m splitting hairs. I don’t have any better evidence than Mr. Buettner, just a hunch plus years of experience treating diseased and dying patients.
These four Blue Zones do share a mostly plant-based diet of natural foods with minimal processing. Two of the populations—the Okinawans and Costa Ricans—didn’t seem to have any choice. Heavy meat consumption just wasn’t an option available to them. Rather than promoting a low-meat plant-based diet, it might be more accurate to conclude that “you don’t have to eat a lot of meat, chicken, or fish to live a long healthy life.”
In other words, it may not matter how much meat you eat as long as you eat the healthy optimal level of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. It’s a critical difference not addressed in this book except among the Adventists.
Even if you could live an extra two years as a vegan, I’m sure many people would choose to eat meat anyway. By the way, this book conflates vegan, lacto-vegetarian, lacto-ovo vegetarian, near-vegetarian, and vegetarian into one: vegetarian. It’s a common problem when considering the health aspects of vegetarianism. They are not necessarily the same.
By the same token, plenty of my patients have told me they don’t like any kind of exercise and they won’t do it, even if it would give them an extra two years of life. What many don’t realize is that from a functional standpoint, regular exercise makes their bodies perform as if they were ten years younger. There’s a huge difference between the age of 80 and 70 in terms of functional abilities.
Why read the book now that you have the Power Nine? To convince you to change your unhealthy ways, and indispensible instruction on how to do so.
Steve Parker, M.D.
Disclosure: The publisher’s representative did not pay me for this review, nor ask for a favorable review. They offered me a review copy and three give-aways, and I accepted. I figure the cost of the books to the publisher was $16 USD total. I gave away the books through my Advanced Mediterranean Diet Blog. Cost of shipping the books to the winners came out of my pocket.
Flygirl begins on December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy. World War two has just started. For Ida Mae Jones, it means her brother will join the US Army and fight with the other coloreds, a dangerous position. With skin light enough to pass for white, Ida Mae becomes Jonesy, a flygirl in the Women Airforce Service Pilots. Thanks to her father’s instruction in flying his Jenny, a small crop duster, Jonesy adapts to larger plans and more dangerous flights with relative ease and excitement. But pretending to be white during Jim Crow is easier said than done for a housemaid.
Here’s my review of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, a 2008 book by Dan Buettner. I give the book four stars on Amazon.com’s five-star system (“I like it”).