Still more reviewlettes!

Sometimes my words, they escape me.

Vacant Possession - Hilary Mantel

I snagged this from the library because I love this book so much:

and now check this out:

That woman is like clip-art for book covers.  ANYway, I also have liked what Mantel does twice, which always bodes well.

Vacant Possession is a dizzyingly weird book.  A madwoman returns from the nuthouse after ten years incarceration and sets out to avenge herself on everyone she thinks has wronged her.  Except she seems to venge by...just being around?  I mean, you can't make someone's horrid old mother come out of her coma to be sent home with them and inconvenience the hell out their lives, and you can't make someone's teenage daughter turn up pregnant by the husband of their former lover.  Right?  But that's what happens and non-sequiturs jump out at you from behind every bush and after a while you're not sure if everyone has been driven mad or if they were all mad to begin with, but everyone is most certainly mad.  I might even be mad by this point.

Sevenish caterpillars, I think?

The Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff

I picked this up and almost put it down immdiately because I was in the mood for actual monsters, and the only actual monster here is pulled dead from the lake maybe two pages in.  The rest of the monsters are, you know, metaphorical.  Monsters of the soul, and whatnot.  But if I can't have monsters I can at least have SCANDAL, and that in spades. 

Willie Upton returns home to Templeton, knocked up by her married archaeology professor, to find that her own father was not, in fact, some hippie in San Fran but one of Templeton's own.  But whom?  And then she spends the rest of the book reading through old letters and quizzing aged librarians about bastard children the town scions may or may not have had and every time I put it down I wanted to be reading it again.  Because it is fantastically salacious but also elegantly spun-out and everyone in it is so flawed and dear.

Eight caterpillars.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - F Scott Fitzgerald

I think I might have liked the route the movie (which I haven't seen) took with this more than the book.  The book is amusing and almost indecently short (59 pages), but it's quite pat and no one has any real depth of emotion.  I'm pretty sure it's poking fun at something, but I get an F in farce and irony and satire and such.  But also, it has PICTURES!  Quaintness.

Six caterpillars.

Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka - Charlie Russell

Our landlords lent this to me when we were staying in Terrace because Terrace is bear-country and if I saw a bear I'd be tempted to hug it and they were all like, Do not hug a bear, read this book.  This tale of a couple who lived in harmony with batches of bears and then raised orphan bear cubs (!!!) did absolutely nothing to persuade me not to hug that bear.  CHECK IT!

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Dude, that bear just wants to come over and hang at my house, and I want to LET IT!  But ok, the book.  The Russells set out to un-demonize The Bear and come up with a list of mutually polite behaviors so that Man and Bear could live in harmony without bears getting shot all the time.  But to see if their behaviors worked they had to go into the wilds of Russia to roll with some bears.

And it isn't terribly finessed as a piece of writing and life in the wild is just the same damn thing over and over so the story gets a little repetitive in parts (bad weather keeps Charlie from flying out for supplies, the storm breaks the chimney, ze Russian beaurocracy is so Russian) but then they get some orphaned baby bear cubs and AAAAAIEEEEEEE!  I feel like I did with Edgar Sawtelle where I think I liked it but I can't see past the ORPHANED BABY BEAR CUBS to make sure.

Seven caterpillars (also, bear cubs).

Push - Sapphire

This is equal parts hopeful and wrist-slitty.  Because a tale of incredible odds surmounted! But egads, the odds.  Precious is raped by her daddy and now (at 16) pregnant with her second child (the first is 3 [you do the wretched math] and has Downs Syndrome) AND is kicked out of school for being pregnant AND may or may not have the HIV.  The only think that kept me from spiralling into a fist-shaking and garment-rending frenzy was the indomitable Precious herself.  And the fact that the book is written in ebonics when it isn't functioning as Precious' (who is creeping out of illiteracy) diary, so you have to concentrate hard for to read.  Concentration is a balm for Aggressively Tragic Stories

Short!  Moving!

Eight caterpillars.

The Singer's Gun - Emily St John Mandel

At first this seems like just another book where a man leaves his wife while on their honeymoon for apparently no reason, but then one thing turns out to have led to another thing and we're back in time watching events unfold and by the time we've come full-circle to the honeymoon again, it's a completely different book.  I enjoyed the hell out of myself reading this.

Eight and a half caterpillars.