Category: Recent Reads

Out of college and forced into the “real world,” Jennifer Close’s novel Girls in White Dresses follows the lives of a group of girl friends as they strive to find their place in the world. The novel focuses on Isabella, Mary, and Lauren –their struggles with finding a job, paying rent, love, starting a career, etc. all while they watch other friends in their circle “succeed” at these things. They watch as their friends get married, have baby showers, and pop out children while they are still trying to figure things out. Through humorous anecdotes involving the various female characters, this book appeals to the new adult crowd (especially those fresh out of college) who are watching in disbelief as their friends are getting their “grown up” lives together while their own life seems to be in shambles. Through this novel, Close reaches out to her readers and tells them to keep hanging in there even if things don’t fall into place right away. The pieces will fall as they may and the picture will still be beautiful, even if it isn’t a complete fairy tale.

As someone who is the same age as these characters towards the start of the novel, I found it very easy to relate to this book. It is easy to question if you are on the “right track” or if you are doing things “wrong” when all of your friends are getting engaged/married/having children/picking out dishwashers/moving to the moon/etc. This book was nice in that it used a group of female characters to show that everyone’s lives pan out differently –that it is all a series of choices and has to do with your priorities in life.

At first I was unsure of the book’s style. Let me explain. From the back cover (and my description above), you read that there are going to three main female characters yet, in the first section, you only meet Isabella. I was confused as to how the other characters fit in when I got to the end of that section and they still hadn’t been mentioned. Once I got through the next section though, I began looking at this book less like a novel and more like a short story collection. It is made up of different sections that focus on a given character at a time (sometimes even told with a fourth or fifth girl as the sort of “main” character of that section) that works together as a coherent whole and allows Close to jump large spans of time…aging her characters several years by the books end. In a way though, that is nice because you get a realistic timeline for the characters lives and you, the reader, gets to focus on the truly interesting aspects from these various friends’ lives. This style also made it easy to find a breaking point (after any section) although the book overall, for me at least, was a quick read.

All in all, this book was a nice little slice of life for this group of friends that I think new adults would find particularly relatable.

Something Like Fate is the story of Lani and Jason discovering that they are “soulmates” while Jason happens to be dating Lani’s best friend, Erin. Jason and Lani try to fight their feelings for each other for the sake of Erin, but you cannot fight fate.

Overall, the book is well written and the storyline is easy and engaging to follow. However, there were a few things about this book that were strange for me as a reader. Some of these were aspects of the story line and other aspects had more to do with the way the book was described and marketed to readers. I’ve broken them up by category below.

Fate

This is, undoubtedly, an overwhelming aspect of this book. If you don’t believe in fate or horoscopes, don’t pick this book up. You will be frustrated. That being said, if you do believe in those things (to whatever extent may apply to you), this book references these things a lot. Lani reads her horoscope every Monday and her and her friend Erin designed their own curriculum, so to speak, for learning various ways to predict how their lives will play out by having a different topic of study for every month during school (tarot cards, dream interpretation, palm reading…you get the idea). This is a main factor of what leads both Erin and Lani to believe that Jason is their soulmate. (Is this a Jason conspiracy?)

The Erin-Jason-Lani love triangle

I want to start this off by saying that the description on the back of the book is not an accurate depiction of the story line. The marketing (including description and cover) make it sound like Lani is stealing Erin’s boyfriend when, in fact, (not such a spoiler alert) nothing happens between Lani and Jason until Jason and Erin are already broken up. In that sense, she isn’t “stealing her best friend’s boyfriend” as it sounds on the back of the book and is depicted on the cover. However, there is chemistry between them from their initial interaction (even if the reader has to be told that the chemistry is there instead of shown) which only increases as they begin to hang out more (per Erin’s encouragement). Lani and Jason have a bunch of random little things in common (including a strange desire to give colors and shapes to bottled water and abbreviating words while speaking) that are meant to build on this idea of the two of them being soulmates that fate has finally brought together. Given that Lani and Jason are likely the only two people to attribute colors and shapes to bottled water (I’m still hung up on the strangeness of that part of the book), maybe they really are meant for each other.

Character development

After finishing the book, it only took me a few minutes to pinpoint what it was that really threw me about it. There was just something off. The characters in this novel are supposed to be around 17 years old, and yet they act much younger. As a young adult author myself, I found this to be really frustrating. Erin was constantly trying to figure out what Jason was saying about her (pushing Lani to get intel on her behalf even while they were dating). Lani and Jason spent lunch time creating codes to write secret messages in (you know, when they weren’t talking about colors and shapes of water). Lani is afraid of driving and drowning (which is why she begins to take swimming lessons with little kids where she continues to fear drowning even though she could stand in the water). Erin is self-centered, mean, and shallow which are not really endearing characteristics in a best friend. Erin also pulls a really childish move towards the end of the book which I will not divulge here for fear of a real spoiler, but it is not characteristic of a seventeen year old. The way others react after that also seems rather unbelievable. However, we can all rest easy over the fact that Lani, Erin, and Jason all enjoy giving back to the community and are members of various groups and clubs whose goals ranged from helping middle school students to saving the planet…just like all seventeen year olds. So yeah, there’s that.

One boy helps her remember. The other lets her forget.

Lennie Walker is struggling with the recent death of her only sister, Bailey, when a new boy at school (Joe) is thrown into her life. He helps her forget, at least for a little while, the gloom in her life…just in time for Bailey’s boyfriend Toby helps her remember. Caught in a love triangle she could never have foreseen while dealing with a death that was even more unpredictable, Lennie strives to sort out this new life…this life without Bailey. In The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson takes her readers into Lennie’s world where we experience her sorrow along with her joy as she learns just what it means to move forward.

Admittedly, my interest in this book was peaked by the fact it sounded similar to my own first novel, Facing the Tide, in general plot, but it turned out our books differed more than I had anticipated. That being said, this book was an enjoyable journey alongside Lennie as she falls out of her sister’s shadow and into a life she never saw coming. You really do find yourself feeling Lennie’s pain from the loss of her sister and the guilt she faces from the love triangle. More than that, you feel her falling in love for the first time. The poetry and various writings Lennie litters throughout the town really help get the reader into her head and feel like they are a part of the ride no one saw coming.

Tampa

By: Alissa Nutting

“In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.

Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.

Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.” (as pulled from http://www.amazon.com/Tampa-Alissa-Nutting-ebook/dp/B00AXY3GQS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391196413&sr=8-1&keywords=Tampa)

My reading experience:

I was actually waiting for this book to come out for a while now. One of my fiction writing professors in college had told us about it when we finished reading Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (which I loved [and can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Unclean-Women-Girls-Alissa-Nutting-ebook/dp/B00CSCNOYC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391196687&sr=8-1&keywords=unclean+jobs+for+women+and+girls]) and I knew I was going to have to read it. I am a huge fan of Alissa Nutting’s unique perspective and writing style. Tampa, in particular, does a good job of getting into the head of Celeste and making you really understand someone you wouldn’t necessarily want to be in the head of.

One night while I was reading, my boyfriend decided to read over my shoulder. And yes, it happened to be a sex scene between the teacher and her student. It was a little awkward having to explain why this was the book I had chosen to read, but I make no apologies. I like books that are different, that shed a new perspective and really put me in the head of another person –and this is one of those books. And fear not, it won’t turn you into a pedophile. So read it. It is time well spent.