Sarah's Key

Synopsis
In 1942, the Vichy government forces ten-year-old Sarah and her parents from their apartment in Paris. Before they leave, Sarah manages to hide her little brother in a cabinet. In present-day Paris, Julia Jarmond, a journalist with a personal tie to the apartment, uncovers Sarah's story.

My thoughts
I'd heard a lot of wonderful things about this novel, so I grabbed it when I saw it at my library's used book sale. Sarah's story is undeniably moving, but it's not enough to save this predictable novel.

First, the good. When we first meet her, Sarah is a happy girl and it is heartbreaking to see her innocence taken away so brutally. I'd defy anyone to read her part of the narrative without crying. Tatiana de Rosnay does a good job exposing the brutality of the Nazi-compliant Vichy regime. She also doesn't flinch from depicting the indifference of many non-Jewish French citizens. (In college, I read a book called The Vichy Syndrome, which described how postwar France strove to whitewash its past and envisioned itself a nation where everyone was involved in the Resistance and the Vichy government was run by an unpopular minority.)

And now for the not-so-good. The present-day narrative is atrocious. Julia is an indecisive emotional wreck who's married to a stereotypically sleek, skeezy, hypersexual French guy. Together they have a teenage daughter who acts as Julia's conscience, not a teenager. After years of trying to have a second child, forty-something Julia finds herself pregnant, which triggers her husband's midlife crisis. There's a lot of drama that feels incredibly trite, especially when you contrast it with the other half of this double narrative—a child in the Holocaust, for heaven's sake.

Unfortunately, as the novel goes on Julia's narrative takes over and Sarah's is lost. De Rosnay tries to build suspense by having Julia uncover Sarah's story layer by layer. This is unsuccessful largely because key plot points are so heavily foreshadowed that the reader can see them coming from a distance of fifty pages. Sometimes a double narrative works, but in this case it's jarring to switch gears between the two.

Bottom line
Read The Invisible Bridge instead.

Fine print
Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

Wonder

Synopsis
Auggie has a rare craniofacial abnormality. ("I won't describe what I look like," he writes. "Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.") He's attending public school for the first time in fifth grade and he seems to bring out the very best and the very worst in some of his classmates.

My thoughts
When I checked this book out from the library, one of my friends spotted it in my pile and told me she'd loved it. The librarian who checked me out told me that the library had eight copies of the book and they were all always checked out (I'd snagged the last one off the shelf). Apparently that's pretty remarkable for a YA novel that was published more than a year ago (and that isn't Harry Potter). And now having read it, I'd say Wonder lives up to the hype.

Auggie is a rare gem of a character with an indomitable spirit and a can-do attitude. He's been homeschooled because he's had so many medical issues, and he's initially reluctant to attend school. People have gaped at him his entire life, but that doesn't mean he's used to it or somehow immune to it. His classmates react much as he expects them to—kids say insensitive things (whether they mean to or not) and some of them won't sit by him. But Auggie does manage to make a few friends who overlook his unconventional looks and genuinely like him for his sense of humor and intelligence.

R.J. Palacio does a good job writing from the tween state of mind. It's a really ugly stew of exerting and succumbing to peer pressure, attempting to forge your own identity, and learning to figure out right from wrong when there's not a clear choice. In their own ways, Auggie's friends Summer and Jack go out of their way to befriend Auggie when the prevailing attitude is to shun him, which takes an uncommon mixture of strength and self-confidence. There's a herd mentality in middle school that makes it extremely difficult to be your own person, and it's no surprise that two out of the three kids who act as Auggie's welcoming committee at the beginning of the school year drop him as soon as they can.

One of them is Julian, the child villain of Wonder. Palacio shifts the blame to Julian's parents for raising him to be the inconsiderate little monster he is. He simply follows their example. The scary thing is that I know people who are an awful lot like them. Like Julian's parents, they're French and they named one of their kids Julian. But they're also selfish, self-absorbed people who feel that if a situation inconveniences them or makes them uncomfortable, then others must make everything "right" for them.

The only problem with the book is that everything gets tied up a little too neatly. As much as I reveled in Auggie's triumph over his bullies and his peers' whole-hearted acceptance of him at the end of the book, his story probably wouldn't have ended that happily or that decisively in real life. It was a little disappointing for a book that had had such an authentic voice from the beginning, but it's a YA novel—best to savor the warm, fuzzy feeling it leaves you with.

Bottom line
Wonder has a wonderful feel-good message and I can see why so many schools are making it required reading. I'll keep an eye out for Palacio's next book, too.

Fine print
Wonder, by R.J. Palacio
Genre: YA fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Fast Food Nation

Synopsis
Fast food has revolutionized the way Americans eat and work—and not in a good way.

My thoughts
Is it bad that more than anything else I just wanted to eat the fries on the cover?

There was a lot of buzz around this book when it was first published 14 years ago, and I think I simply came too late to the party to be outraged by this book. The indictments of the fast food industry seem stale now. Big business discourages unions?! Well ... duh. Fast food chains use unskilled teenage workers?! Have you ever been to a McDonald's? They market their evil, anti-nutrition agenda directly to innocent, unsuspecting children?! Yeah, Happy Meals were certainly a part of my all-American childhood and I turned out okay.

Fourteen years is a long time and the world is a different place now—perhaps in part because of this book. There's a trend toward healthy fast food and away from putting Burger Kings in schools. Small, independent farms are certainly still an endangered species, but it's become trendy to eat locally raised food that comes directly from the source. If this book contributed to the recent focus on healthy eating and increased physical activity, especially for children, then I'm glad people have taken Eric Schlosser's message to heart. And Schlosser does raise some very important points about workplace safety and food safety that have not been addressed. Government oversight of the way our food is raised, prepared, and sold is hopelessly underfunded and ineffective. But I can't raise my own food and I have to eat something. So I will simply continue to do what I've always done—keeping my kitchen clean, washing my hands frequently, washing fruits and veggies carefully, and limiting the utensils that come into contact with raw meat. This book didn't scare me away from fast food, either. I don't eat it very often—just a few times a year—and that won't change.

Something about the way the book was written rubbed me the wrong way. The tone was very sensational—look at the downtrodden fast food worker! the victim of horrific food poisoning! the immigrant working in perilous conditions in a meat packing plant!—yet I was unable to connect to any of them emotionally. And that meant I wasn't able to get all worked up over the issues that were raised in the book. This was a heavily researched product, but I felt at times that Schlosser picked and chose his data and stats to make his conclusions seem more damning.

Bottom line
Underwhelming.

Fine print
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
Genre: current events
Photo from Goodreads
I owned this book.

The Big Short

Synopsis
A few savvy investors realized that they could potentially make a lot of money by shorting subprime mortgages.

My thoughts
I don't have a background in finance, but Michael Lewis makes a very complicated topic easy and entertaining for laymen to follow. I read this as a follow-up to Lewis's Boomerang, and both have whetted my interest in other books on the financial meltdown. I'm a bit late on this—after all, the market crashed in fall 2008. But the fact that it was so long ago gives me some added perspective. I know what happens next, even if my memories of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing chaos are a little hazy. The real treat of this book is getting into the meat of what happened before all hell broke loose.

Lewis has become one of my favorite non-fiction writers, and it's because of the way he can take boring, complicated topics and make them relatable and funny. He does this by writing about the eccentric men who independently clued into the impending crisis. He gives you someone to root for—if not an everyman, then an underdog. It's not a blow-by-blow account from the financial institutions' point of view, but it's interesting to read about the people who accurately predicted the crisis, especially since some of them were denounced as crazy or were not taken seriously before it happened.

Looking back, it's easy to wonder who thought the doomed financial model was a good idea, but Lewis reminds us that it was so large and complex that it was hard to see the whole big picture. It's also scary that—apparently—no one broke any laws. Since 2008, there has been some legislative action (in the form of Dodd-Frank), but there hasn't been much else—or much demand for it. So there are some new safeguards in place, but they are limited and they still leave Wall Street to police itself and show restraint.

One note not about the book itself: I read this on my brand new Kindle and liked it quite a bit. I was annoyed that I was constantly turning pages, but I did like how light it felt in my hands (and in my purse). I used the Kindle Owners' Lending Library to borrow the book and I'd definitely do that again.

Bottom line
A compulsively readable account of the spectacular failure of the financial system.

Fine print
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Genre: non-fiction, current events, finance
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.

Boomerang

Synopsis
The versatile author of Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short travels to Germany, Greece, Iceland, and Ireland to explore the origins of the recent financial crisis - and then he brings it back home to the United States.

My thoughts
This is a whole new genre of travel writing. Each chapter is dedicated to a different country and its dysfunctional economic system (they started as individual articles for Vanity Fair). Michael Lewis first travels to Iceland, where clueless Icelandic fishermen-turned-bankers ran their national economy into the ground. In a chapter titled "And They Invented Math!" he turns his attention to Greece and recounts how a projected budget deficit of 7 billion euros had to be revised upward to 30 billion because "until that moment, no one had bothered to count it all up." (There is also the bizarre story of a group of monks who managed to get the Greek government to give them land, which they turned into a real estate empire whose worth can be measured in the low billions.) Lewis's next stop is Ireland, whose Celtic Tiger had been transformed into a Celtic Garfield and whose citizens seem oddly complacent about their country's financial collapse. And then there's Germany, which finds itself suddenly responsible for the rest of the Eurozone's financial mistakes.

Lewis highlights every absurdity with a gleeful how-could-they-not-see-this-coming tone. But the brilliance is evident in the last chapter, when Lewis turns the same voice on the United States. Lewis travels to California, where he goes on a memorable bike ride with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and talks to a fire chief about the tough decisions he's made regarding pensions. The bike ride is fun to read about, but Lewis makes sure the impact of the financial crisis hits home when he takes the conversation to a municipal level.

Lewis paints a truly horrifying picture of an unethical, under-regulated financial system driven by the bottomless greed of American bankers. Bankers were rewarded with large salaries and even larger bonuses, leaving them absolutely no incentive to think beyond short-term gains. This ruined the financial markets - and everywhere else in the world, it was seen as a completely unconscionable way to conduct business. At one point, Lewis interviews a lifelong German public servant and asks him whether he ever thought of going into private practice and making a fortune. "But I could never do this," is the shocked reply. "It would be illoyal!" This neatly sums up the difference between America and the rest of the world, and it explains how so-called financial experts were mislead into making disastrous decisions - they were playing by a different set of rules that the Americans disregarded.

The Big Short, Lewis's in-depth study of the causes of the U.S. crash, has catapulted to the top of my reading list.

Bottom line
A quick, hilarious, and terrifying read.

Fine print
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis
Genre: nonfiction, finance, travel
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.

Where Are the Children?

Synopsis
Seven years ago, Nancy's two children disappeared. They were found murdered and Nancy was convicted in their deaths. Freed on a technicality, she has relocated to Cape Cod, where she has rebuilt her life. Now her two children from her second marriage have gone missing.

My thoughts
When I was in middle school, one of my friends recommended Mary Higgins Clark's mysteries. For a couple years, I devoured everything of hers that I could get my hands on. Her heroines were smart, successful, resourceful, and chic - and they always got the guy in the end. My enthusiasm waned sometime in high school, and when I picked up one of her books after college I didn't even bother finishing it because it was so formulaic and predictable.

Where Are the Children? was Clark's first bestseller and I remembered liking it, so I picked it up at the library. It's one of those books that you can fly through in a few hours. It was enjoyable to read and it reminded me what I like best about Clark's writing. She pays a lot of attention to detail and the inner monologues of her characters.

The story is chilling. Two children go missing and that's bad enough, but you have the added twist of a mother who's been convicted of murdering her children from her first marriage. As a reader there's never any doubt that Nancy is innocent of both crimes, but it's understandable that the investigation immediately focuses on her.

You have to suspend disbelief for a lot of mysteries, but this one in particular stretches credulity. There are an awful lot of big coincidences that allow all the threads of the novel to come together at exactly the right moment. There are also some enormously cheesy lines ("Now, listen, bum, and listen good.") But the ending is very satisfying.

Bottom line
Read some of Clark's other books before this one. Try Weep No More, My Lady; Remember Me; or Loves Music, Loves to Dance.

Fine print
Where Are the Children?, by Mary Higgins Clark
Genre: mystery
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Embassytown

Synopsis
Oh God. So there's this remote outpost at the edge of the universe. Humans have colonized it and get along with the indigenous Hosts. Until a new Ambassador shows up and ruins everything. Okay, so that's the basic premise. It sounds like your run-of-the-mill science fiction story, but it's more complex. The book makes you think hard about language, religion, colonialism, and human nature.

My thoughts
I wasn't smart enough for this book. So that kind of put a damper on my enjoyment of it, but it was exciting and I did like it.

The most intriguing aspect of the book was its ruminations on language. The Hosts are pure creatures who cannot lie, and Language is everything to them (hence the capital L). Unless there's a word for something, the Hosts cannot conceptualize it. To get around this, they need similes to express the concept that one thing can be like another. The catch is that there are highly structured rules concerning similes. Similes must be based on something that has actually occurred, so the Hosts stage events so that a new simile (and therefore new ideas) can enter their language. Humans are a corrupting influence on the Hosts. The Hosts invite them to festivals where the humans tell lies and the Hosts try to emulate them.

The tragic twist is that the humans bring an illness that decimates the Hosts, and there are only two ways to stop it. The Hosts must murder all of the humans (obviously untenable for our human heroine) or they must learn to lie, ruining their relationship with Language. It's powerful.

Bottom line
Probably not worth it unless you're a hardcore science fiction aficionado. I'll try some of China Mieville's other novels, though.

Fine print
Embassytown, by China Mieville
Genre: science fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.