Christina Reviews *Swim the Fly*

         Three friends set a summer goal:  To see their first naked girl in the flesh.  They’ve been setting goals for years, and this one is, by far, the boldest.  They come up with all kinds of crazy schemes in pursuit of their single-minded goal.

          Meanwhile, the protagonist, Matt, falls in love with Kelly --- a new girl on the swim team.  He agrees to swim the butterfly in the upcoming competition in order to impress her.  So between practicing for that and plotting with his friends, you would think he would have no time for anything else.  And yet there’s a subplot involving his older brother and a hilarious subplot involving his grandfather’s infatuation with an older woman next door.

       This book has been compared to a Judd Apatow film for teenagers.  And I would tend to agree with that.  

        Four stars out of five.

Christina Reviews *The Sweet Hereafter* by Russell Banks

          Mitchell:  “That’s my daughter.  Or it may be the police to tell me they’ve found her dead.  She’s a drug addict.”
         Billy: “Why are you telling me this?”
         Mitchell: “Why am I telling you this, Mr. Ansel?  Because we’ve all lost our children.  They’re dead to us.”
                         The Sweet Hereafter (quoted from the 1997 movie)


         The Sweet Hereafter is about a town that has been torn apart by tragedy.  On a winter morning, a school bus crashes through a guardrail.  Several children are killed.

         This is a novel told in four parts.  The first section is from the point of view of the bus driver on the day that her life changed forever.  The second section is told from the pov of a man named Billy.  His twin son and daughter were two of the victims who died in the bus crash.  The third section is told from the point of a view of a lawyer who has come to town to rile up the townspeople with talk of a possible lawsuit.  The fourth section is told from the point of view of Nichole Burnell.  Nichole is one of the survivors of the crash.  She was crippled by the accident and is now in a wheelchair.  Her section is about her involvement in the pending lawsuit and her anger toward her father with whom she has a complicated relationship.

        This is a well-written novel, but I have to say I liked the movie a little more.  Atom Egoyan is a genius.  The Canadian setting is beautiful.  The score is haunting.  And I loved how Egoyan drew a parallel between the story the movie is telling and the story of the pied piper. 

Christina Reviews *Sweet Dream Baby* by Sterling Watson

           Sterling Watson’s Sweet Dream Baby is a compelling coming of age story about one 12 year old boy’s descent into madness.  The story takes place in 1958, back when everyone was into that Devil's music.

         Travis spends a summer at his grandparents’ home in Florida because his mother is in a mental institution and his father is unable to take care of him on his own.  While in Florida, Travis befriends his 16 year old aunt Delia Hollister.  Things spiral downward from there.

        This book is full of murder, secrets, lies and incest.  It’s a haunting Southern Gothic that’s very well-written.  And the author is cool. 

       Four stars

Christina Reviews *Summer Sisters* by Judy Blume

          If you thought Judy Blume only wrote children’s books, then just wait till you read this.  If her children’s books were sex pamphlets for young girls, just imagine what her adult books must be like.

        Victoria and Caitlin are best friends.  They’ve known each other since they were 12.  They’ve spent summers at Caitin’s summer home which Caitlin not-so-affectionately calls “Psycho House.”  They’ve hung around with older boys with names like Von and Bru.  They’ve dry-humped each other because, let’s face it, this is a Judy Blume Book.  And according to Judy Blume, that’s what all best girl friends do in their spare time.  But I have to say that I respect the fact that Judy Blume writes about the kinds of things that the average commercial writer would be scared to write about.

       The novel follows Vic and Caitlin through their teens and into adulthood.  The book is narrated by several characters, though Victoria is the main point of view character.  It’s a decent book about two girls, their loss of innocence and how, for the most part, they have no regrets.

       The book’s ending is a little depressing.

Christina Reviews *Stephen King's The Shining*

          I didn't read this book until after I'd already passed "Sh" and it is very important to me that these reviews be in alphabetical order.  It was pure fate that I had just reached that spot between "Sl" and Su" around the same time that I finished this book.  But even if it hadn't magically worked out that way, I probably still would have referred to this novel as Stephen King's The Shining.  A book written by Stephen King has its own special reason for being.

          I'd had this book on the shelf for years, but it took me until now to read it.  And that's because I had so many other books to read.  And I was intimidated by the book's length.  Who can be bothered with a 683 page book?  That's way too long for me.  I can't be sitting around all day reading a horror story.  I've got to work 40 hours a week like anyone else!  Not all of us can get rich off of our hobbies.

         The Shining is about a family of three who go to stay in a hotel during the off season.  The father, Jack Torrance, is going to be the winter caretaker.  His five-year-old son Danny has psychic abilities and is haunted by the tragedies that occurred in the hotel over the years.  The wife is disturbed because her recovering alcoholic husband seems to always be on the verge of doing something awful.  And as the months go by, and the snow begins to fall, his temper overheats like the neglected boiler in the basement.

         It doesn't help that they also have to worry about the possessed hedge animals and the secret of Room 237.  The fact that Danny sees the word "murder" backwards in a mirror in one of his visions and can only make out that it spells "Redrum" was a stroke of pure genius in my opinion.  There is something genuinely creepy about this story.  I blew through the first four hundred pages during a four day weekend.  But as the pages went on, the story seemed to drag on.  At some point, I just wanted it to end already.  I'm trying to think of what could have been cut out.  Probably 90% of the Halloran chapters.  Halloran is a hotel employee who has the ability to "shine" just like Danny does.  He tells Danny to call to him in his mind if there's ever any trouble.  But I didn't need to read so many pages of his misadventures as he tries to make his way to the hotel so that he can save the day.  All I needed was just enough so that his appearance didn't come across as Deus Ex Machina.  But is it possible for Deus Ex Machina to exist in a book that's all about reading people's minds?

        I didn't much like the wife (Wendy).  Maybe it was due to a lingering distaste for Shelley Duvall's performance in the Kubrick version.   In the movie, Wendy was this sad sack woman who probably never passed a jumper in a department store without having to take it home.

         Stephen King is a great writer.  There's no doubt about that.  I really enjoyed this book.  It was a great horror story that also delved into the hidden horrors that can lurk deep within the human psyche.  But like I said before, it didn't have to be so long.

Christina Reviews *Sleepers* by Lorenzo Carcaterra

         Sleepers is about four friends who get put in a juvenile detention center called Wilkinson’s Home For Boys after a hot dog cart incident gone wrong nearly kills a man. While at Juvie, they are tortured by prison guards and even raped. Needless to say, they emerge from Wilkinson’s as damaged young men.

         Many years later, they have the chance to take revenge on the prison guards, and they leap at the opportunity. They come up with a scheme so cunning and ridiculous that it could only happen in a movie. Or a fake memoir.

         It’s a simple story. And yet it takes Lorenzo Carcaterra 400 pages to tell it. This is because he spends 150 pages building up to the story.  It took me about four years to read the first one hundred pages.  Once I reached the hot dog cart incident, I was able to get through the remainder of the book within a week or so.  It might have taken me a few weeks to finish the book by that point.  What I'm trying to say is that the very long preamble is a nightmare to wade through.

        The boys are fresh-faced rascals who are up to no good 99% of the time, and when they’re not up to no good, they’re plotting future exploits. Once the reader reaches page 150, Carcaterra gets to the point of the book, and the story starts to move forward. The prison scenes are particularly grueling, but rest assured, none of it really happened. A lot of investigation went into Lorenzo Carcaterra’s claims and I have serious doubts that any of the story could be true.

       It does seem a bit strange that an author will write a book that he claims to be true, but he’ll change all the names and he’ll place the events in false settings so that nobody can ever verify the accuracy of his claims. If he’s going to do all of that, why not just call the book fiction?

        I’ll tell you why. The book is so poorly written that nobody would read it if they knew that it was all make-believe. And that’s the only truth you’ll find in this book.

Christina Reviews *Sing You Home* by Jodi Picoult

           **1/2

          In the beginning of the book, Zoe Baxter wants to have a baby with her husband but can’t.  After several failed pregnancies, her husband can’t take it anymore, and so he divorces her.  They still have some frozen embryos left in a fertility clinic, but he has given up.

        Not long after the divorce, the husband, Max, has a near-fatal accident and comes to know God.  The ex-wife, Zoe, falls in love with a woman and comes to know gay marriage. 

        Zoe and her spouse Vanessa want to have a child together.  More specifically, they want to use one of Zoe’s and Max’s frozen embryos because Zoe would really like to have her child be biologically related to her.   She can’t grow the baby inside her own womb any more because she had to have a hysterectomy, so the embryo would be placed inside of Vanessa.  The only problem is that they need Max’s permission to do this.  And when Max finds out, not only is he dead-set against his child being raised by lesbians, he’s determined to take the embryo away from Zoe and give it to his infertile brother and sister-in-law because another belief of his is that the embryo has a right to life.

         Picoult puts twists in at the end just for the sake of putting in twists.  There was at least one twist that didn’t amount to anything and so I don’t know why Picoult even put it in there.

         This is a book that has a sweet ending, but we arrive at the sweet ending by being forced to accept the fact that sometimes the characters who inhabit Picoult’s fictional world have no reason to behave consistently.  And most of the characters, particularly the religious extremists, are boring and trite.

         This was an OK book but nothing special.