Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold

I really had high hopes for this book, which is the first volume of a series called The Sharing Knife. My hopes were high not so much because I had heard anything about this book, but because I wanted it to be good. I wanted to get involved in another fantasy series. Alas, wanting isn’t enough. This was just average, and certainly not compelling enough to make me go on and read the rest of the series.

Lois McMaster Bujold is the author of the very popular science fiction/fantasy series about Miles Vorkosigan (of which I think there are currently 18 books, but there may be more). I tried to read these but they were too hard science fiction for me, what with their spaceships and wormholes and such. I also tried to read another fantasy novel by Bujold, The Curse of Chalion, but I can’t remember why I didn’t like it. Beguilement was my most recent attempt at her work.

The world of The Sharing Knife was interesting (something like rural 19th century Europe or North America but with bad monsters called Malices who must be hunted and killed by roving bands of men and women called Lakewalkers). I was especially intrigued by the creatures called Mud Men, who are kind of like the golems of Eastern European lore, built by the Malices out of animals and mud, to do their evil bidding. But for some reason McMaster let these plot points fizzle out and spent way too much time on a romance between Dag, an older, disallusioned Lakewalker man and Fawn, a young (non-Lakewalker) woman. The age difference between these two was kind of off-putting, and Fawn was just silly even though she was brave. The action picked up again somewhat toward the end, but it was clear that a lot of this series was going to be about Dag and Fawn’s evolving relationship and not so much about the Malices and the Mud Men. That discovery disappointed me. If I want a relationship novel I can find plenty to choose from, but really cool constructs like the Mud Men are few and far between.

(Book 33, 2009)

Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach

This book came out in 2006 and I remember reading some of the press about it with interest. Autism was in the news a lot because I think 2006 was the height of the autism/vaccination link controversy; not that autism has stopped being in the news. At the time I thought I might find it too much of an issue du jour book and I skipped it, but I recently found it on the library shelf and remembered my earlier interest.

This is a novel, though it is based on the author’s experiences with her own son’s autism diagnosis. It’s another “everything was perfect then suddenly everything went wrong” book like I’ve been reading recently. Melanie (an American) and Stephen (an aristocratic Englishman) have a perfect life, except that 3-year-old Daniel isn’t talking, and he walks on his toes, and eventually starts banging his head against the floor. Melanie insists that something is wrong but Stephen thinks she is overreacting. Tragically, Melanie is right and Stephen can’t cope; he leaves the family after she refuses to institutionalize Daniel.

Leimbach writes intelligently about the autism diagnosis and subsequent adjustments: fearing that something is wrong with your child, having those fears confirmed, and the ensuing chaos as you try to adjust to the new reality. The book is set in London and as an American I found some of the cultural differences interesting. Everyone seems very interested in putting Daniel into a special school, to his mother’s dismay. A lot of the book is about Melanie’s battle to keep Daniel as much in the mainstream as possible, an approach to autism that is common in the U.S. but perhaps not so in Britain? Melanie eventually finds a therapist who connects with Daniel, but he’s not sanctioned by the National Health Service. The most poignant bits of the book are Melanie’s oblique references to the things she must sell in order to pay for Daniel’s sessions: “The vacuum fetched ninety pounds and I really don’t miss the carpet at all.”

Leimbach doesn’t sugar coat the hardest parts of life with Daniel but doesn’t dwell on them either. And Melanie is no saint, but she is a loving mother who rejoices in her child’s eventual progress. In the hands of a less skilled writer this could have been an exploitative, opportunistic book, but it’s not. It’s just a very personal story about one family’s experience. I liked it a lot.

(Book 32, 2009)

The Dressmaker by Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck

This book was so forgettable that I forgot to blog about it. It’s one of the books I bought at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon back in the beginning of August. The plot sounded like something I would like: a simple tailor in rural France is transformed into a leading couturier when he creates a fabulous wedding dress for a socialite. I like to read about French fashion, French food, and French family life so I thought this would be good. Instead it proved to be a very dull, plodding story of a boring guy with a boring life, who momentarily gets famous and hates it. It did offer a few good scenes of French village life, but there was almost no food at all! And it had a really weird out-of-left-field plot twist at the end that totally ticked me off.

I found it very odd that this book included a reading group guide. I was absolutely shocked that anyone thought it needed one. I looked at some of the questions and they were as trite as the book. Here is one (and I swear I am not making this up):

Nearly every time a character appears on the scene in the novel, their clothing is described. How does the author use clothing to suggest something about a character? What are some of the most memorable, most vividly described outfits in the book?

Whoa, deep. You can find much better writing about French life, French style, and French food on the Web. Here are a few places to begin:

Paris atelier
The Sartorialist
Chocolate and Zucchini
Pollyvousfrancais

(Book 31, 2009)