Twenties Girl and Can You Keep a Secret - Sophie Kinsella

When I was at the library getting books for Florida, it occurred to me that some Sophie Kinsella would be perfect for the beach.  It ended up being a good choice.  I read these two during the week we were there in a variety of places: lounging by the ocean, laid out on the couch in the apartment, curled up late in bed one night...


I'm putting them both here in the same post partly because I'm sick of this backlog and just want to catch up, and partly because all the Sophie Kinsella I've read so far is similar in feel if not in plot or substance.  I only just read one of her books for the first time last year after my curiosity was piqued by the sheer amount of women coming into the bookstore looking for her titles.  I read Remember Me and understood why. 


Kinsella writes completely hilarious books with scenes that border on outrageous while still managing to seem like something that could happen to you.  Though her books are definitely chick lit that is not to say that they don't have great twists and likeable characters you end up cheering for.  It seems that a common thread of her writing is the idea of being somewhat lost, with or without realizing it, and searching for one's self/purpose/jumping off point.  This is the kind of authour where you know you could pick up any of her books and enjoy it.  


I liked both of these and they were exactly what I wanted - a good story with a quick continuous flow that makes it a low-key read.  Her humour is just a fantastic bonus; I love Kinsella's real-girl heroines.  For some reason I picture them all as the girl from the Confessions of a Shopaholic movie, though of course they are portrayed differently and read as separate people.  I just can't shake the mental image kept picturing the characters as that one girl.   The Confessions series, which I haven't read, is very popular and those are probably Kinsella's most-read books.  She's a British authour with most of the books set in London and (fun fact) also writes under the name Madeline Wickham. 


Just some quick thoughts on the ones I read - Twenties Girl is a kind of modern ghost story, lots of very cool twenties detail thrown in, brings home that idea of never knowing everything about someone, even a family member, of there being so much to a life - of having to ask the right questions to know a full story. It made me want some vintage dresses so bad. 


Can You Keep a Secret was maybe a little more fast-paced and has some great scenes with semi crazy roommates - a good portrayal of the nuances of many different kinds of relationships and the perils of honesty. 

Juliet, Immortal - Stacey Jay

When I took the previous few books back the library, I was on a mission.  I was leaving for Florida the next day and I needed enough books to last me the drive there and back along with 7 days pure vacation. This sounds like a ridiculous amount of thought or caring to put into such a task but obviously, I am serious about my reading.  I wanted books for the 24-hour drive that would pull me in so deep I wouldn't be able to stop reading and the hours would fly by. It can be so, so satisfying to be able to just read a whole book through uninterrupted and I didn't want to end up with crap books that I would regret taking up room in the small bag I was taking.  


Unfortunately, a lot of the books I had in mind when I went in to the library that day were unavailable. To some extent, I had to wing it.  However, there was one book I had had on hold - it had been released the day before as I hadn't had time yet to come in.  I decided to start there and went up to the teen section to find it, thinking it would be perfect for the drive down.


Teen books have come a long, long way since I first started reading teen books.  I'm jealous of kids these days who now have ever-increasing square footage devoted to them in bookstores.  It used to be one pitiful row of shelves.  Many of the girls I used to work with loved teen books and we'd of course talk about them while we were working.  Juliet, Immortal I came across on my own while reshelving some books and the cover caught me (I'm starting to really see that that's a theme with me).  It's just gorgeous.  The jacket sounded promising, and I made a mental note to read it at some point.  


So, many months later, I'm in a car with my boyfriend and two friends of ours, trucking down the I-75 and I'm reading this book.  It has a really interesting premise that is a little foggy in some ways - essentially Romeo and Juliet existed, their original story closely follows the one we are familiar with except for a crucial detail: at the final moment, Romeo betrayed Juliet.  He murdered her in exchange for an eternal existence, flitting in and out through time.  What he didn't count on was that Juliet would be saved before her last spark of life could go out (by her Nurse) and would be offered a chance at a similar existence.  Think of Romeo working for the powers of evil and Juliet working for the powers of good, and them having to fight against each other for several hundred years.  This concept is part of the book that is very interesting, but could be much stronger. 


That is all setup for the main part of the story, which takes place in our present time with Romeo and Juliet occupying the bodies of teens in the same town and each working with a very different motive.


All in all, it definitely kept my attention, mainly because of the whole idea of Romeo and Juliet being immortal.  The best part, or most effective part, might have been the role of Romeo cast as an evil character. Still for all it's great bits and pieces, I would have loved to see this story fleshed out more, standing on a stronger foundation. It would have made a fantastic and possibly classic adult book, written in the right way.  It seems like there are a lot of teen books that are like this, and I'm not sure if that reflects publishers' greed or a general ambivalence toward the quality of what teens get to read or a little of both. Probably both with a leaning towards the former. 


Side note: for some reason I didn't even think to bring a book light, and was mostly finished when it got too dark to read. I was lucky that my friends had some mini flashlights in the car (partly because we're theatre technicians and it's the kind of thing you just have around, partly because they as a rule tend to be over-prepared). 

Girls in White Dresses - Jennifer Close

Surprise, surprise, it's been a long time since I've been here to write.  I'm many books behind and a whole lot has happened in the few weeks since I last took a minute to write about what I'd read.  It seems like such a simple concept and yet it seems I make it so hard.  However, I have made (yet another) resolution to try very hard to do just this one simple thing, and take those few moments, and just write it out.  It is one of many simple resolutions I have been making lately which, if all goes well, will combine to create some favorable change/forward action in my life.  

Besides all that, I was initially drawn to this book, like many others, when I came across it at the bookstore I used to work at.  It has a beautiful cover, and I think my very first thought about it was just, 'I want that dress.'  The affair with this particular book carried on like many others, in the form of me continuously picking it up and reading the jacket, then adding it to that booklist I made when I eventually got around to making it, and then finally getting from the library probably about a month ago now, in that same batch as Stargirl and the Paper Garden. 

I think I actually read this right after the Paper Garden and before Stargirl, but I can't really be certain because of the time that's now passed.  I do know I read it pretty much in one go and just stayed up way too late, curled up in my living room.  It was easy to do because of the way the story is told. The narrative follows a group of girls through thier twenties.  It is told almost in scenes...each piece of the whole story told in little pieces; the bare minimum needed to get the essence of the fact of what's happened.  It is a surprisingly elegant and fresh take on some fairly common threads.  The effect is very fresh.  I loved it.  I found everything in it - it could be funny, or heartwrenching, or a scene from my own life.  This is a book that feels like a good long talk with your best girlfriends.  Glad I finally read it. 

The Paper Garden - Molly Peacock

This book had been on my list for so long that I had forgotten what it was, or why I put it on there.  A few weeks ago I googled the title (which was the only thing I had written) and then got the book from the library.  As soon as I saw the cover I was reminded of the numerous times I had picked it up and read the jacket during long hours at my previous job; remembered how much I had wanted to read it.

I felt like it took me forever to read; I must have carried this book around for over a week, dragging it from place to place and cracking it open whenever I had a chance. It's not that it's particularly long, but I was reading in short bursts and would stop for a day or so from time to time.  I was also showing it to everyone who came near me because each chapter is preceded by a beautiful colour plate of a bright flower against a back blackground - I would push the flower under people's noses, wait for them to oooh and ahhh, tell them, 'that's made out of paper' and get a kick out of their amazement.

This is really an amazing story.  Mostly biography, part memoir, it follows the life of Mary Delany, a minor aristocrat living in 1700s England.  She had an extraordinary and long life packed with the triumphs and tragedies that make up our years.  In her case, they are all the more interesting because of her class and location in time.  She was essentially sold at the age of 17 to an alcoholic 60-year old, horrific, to be sure, but luckily he died a few years later and she found herself at 23 to finally be able to live in her own skin and have more freedom in terms of choosing how to live her life.  Luckily that life, for the most part, had steady upswings and it seems she found many years of happiness. It was only in her final years, her early 70s, that she began a project that would give her lasting fame in the art world and beyond - she began making collages of paper flowers.

The biographer, Ms Peacock, became entranced by these collages and over time came to ask herself the question, how was Ms Delany able to make them?  Not strictly in the literal sense, of what kind of paper did she use, or paint, or where did she get the glue....but what drove her to the creation of these remarkable flowers, so unlike anything else that exists?  The authour's quest for an answer led her through years of correspondence and research, and enabled her to tell this story of Mary Delany's life.

I love biographies, and have particularly enjoyed reading those of women who managed to break ground in their relatively restrictive time periods.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was entranced by this woman's life, courage, resilience and capacity for love.  Her art is in every way a reflection of her personal story, and it's beauty all the more astounding for it's composition.

My only dislike about this book was the way the authour wove her own story into that of her subject's.  Some of the connections she made between her own life and Ms Delany's felt contrived, and it reads almost like she is speaking up out of turn.  I see why she wanted to illustrate why she became so interested in Mary Delany, but her story could have been summarized into an afterword or chapter at the end of the book in order to let the main story shine clearer.  Her writing is engrossing and poetic (of course, she's a poet) but I definitely felt that it would do more justice to the main story of Delany's life if bits of the authour's semi-memoir weren't interspersed throughout like jutting rocks.

Still, it is testament to the strength and power of the story of Mary Delany's life that I would still love to own this book despite everything I just said above.  I would also love, love love to have some prints of her flowers to put up in my apartment. My favorite were the roses; they match my tattoo.