The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

I know a lot of people who read Young Adult (YA) fiction. Most are mothers of middle and high school girls who started reading it because they wanted to share the reading experience with their daughters, or their daughters recommended specific titles to them, or they were just curious about what was out there. But I know this isn’t the full story; YA is too popular among adults to be only the province of a certain group of women. I have tried to read a few popular YA books without much success (including The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins and Un Lun Dun, by China Mieville). In most cases I just found it too difficult to identify with an adolescent narrator. Yet I have no trouble with J. K. Rowling’s books, so obviously it’s not always a problem for me.

I’m thinking about this recently because I just finished The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, which features an adolescent narrator, but which deals with sophisticated issues of identity, race, substance abuse, and depression. Now I am wondering what makes a book a YA novel? Is it the age of the narrator? The subject matter? Or just the marketing plan? I don’t know the answer.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the story of Rachel, daughter of a Danish mother and an African American father. Raised in Europe, where her father was a career U.S. serviceman, Rachel must go live with her African American grandmother in Portland, Oregon after the death of her mother and siblings. It is there that she learns about being biracial as she navigates middle school, then high school, with her black hair and blue eyes. She must also deal with the loss of her mother--the circumstances of her death and the deaths of Rachel’s siblings add some mystery and drama to the story.

This is a quick read. Rachel is not a terribly complex girl. The more interesting characters are her grandmother and aunt, and the version of Rachel’s mother that we see filtered through the lens of Rachel’s memories. I got a little mixed up at the end of the book – were there some loose ends? Or did I just not read carefully enough? No matter -- I still enjoyed it a lot. I don’t believe this book is marketed as YA, but it would be an excellent choice for a high school reader, and even a mature middle schooler, and a good book for a mother and daughter to read together.

(Book 14, 2011)

My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe

Ben Ryder Howe is the sweetest man on earth. Or at least he comes across that way in his memoir My Korean Deli: Risking it all for a Convenience Store, the story of his family’s attempt to purchase and operate a deli/convenience store in Brooklyn. He must be sweet – he goes along with this plan to please his mother-in-law! What a nice boy.

Ben, son of New England gentry, is married to Gab, daughter of Korean immigrants. Gab is a corporate lawyer in Manhattan; Ben is an editor at the exalted literary magazine The Paris Review. Gab’s mother, Kay, has worked for years in other people’s convenience stores, but longs for one of her own. Despite having what seems like enviable careers, Ben and Gab agree to purchase and work in said deli for as long as it takes Kay to get up and running, while still (most of the time) working at their original jobs to keep income flowing in. To save even more money, Ben and Gab move into Kay’s basement in Staten Island. Does this sound like a recipe for peace and family harmony? No, but it’s abundant fodder for a book like this.

Ben is terrible as a deli owner. He makes dozens of mistakes at the cash register, and doesn’t have a clue how to handle the suppliers or the staff. To say that the store’s success is erratic is an understatement; pretty much whatever can go wrong, does. The store gets robbed, is fined for code violations by the city of New York, and becomes a nighttime hangout for neighborhood drunks and drug addicts. Kay nearly drops dead from the stress of overwork. Nevertheless Ben maintains a sense of equanimity and soldiers on. I won’t give away the ending, but be assured that management skills and profits eventually come their way.

Ben also writes affectionately of working at The Paris Review under its founder and editor George Plimpton. Observant readers will remember that Plimpton was famous for taking jobs for which he was supremely unqualified (Detroit Lions backup quarterback) and then writing books about the experience. Is this book a kind of sideways homage to Plimpton? You decide. Ben Ryder Howe is much too modest to make any such claims.

(Book 13, 2011)

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett, Do Over

Here is a more nuanced discussion than the one I posted yesterday.

In recent years, many mystery novels have become platforms for social analysis. There is something about the form that lends itself to the task, whether it's the requirement that all mysteries contain some form of good vs. evil, or the close character studies afforded by the tradition. While some mystery writers have always done this on a micro level (think Patricia Highsmith’s ongoing fascination with the role of the outsider in her work), only recently have we seen such a spate of books that use the mystery novel framework to reflect on a society as a whole. I’ve talked about this before here and here. But Bangkok 8 is like a supercharged example of the phenomenon.

In yesterday’s post I complained that this book was too long. Part of that length involves Burdett’s continual examination of the differences between Asian and Western culture. He illustrates some of these differences with his two protagonists, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a Thai detective, and Kimberley Jones, an American FBI agent, who are assigned to work together to discover the killer of a U.S. Marine in Bangkok. But Burdett goes much further than just showing us their different approaches (Jones’s reliance on hard facts; Sonchai’s reliance on his intuition). In Sonchai, Burdett has given us a character who thinks really hard about these differences. As a man of mixed race (he has a Thai mother and an unknown U.S. Vietnam-era serviceman father), Sonchai is uniquely situated to provide ongoing analysis and commentary. And Burdett doesn’t hesitate to pull the puppeteer’s strings; towards the end of the book he even has Sonchai reading a book about how the West doesn’t understand Thailand. He even treats us to quotes from that book, in case we haven’t gotten his point.

Another theme of the book is the sex trade in Thailand (which Sonchai, as the son of a former prostitute, has a unique perspective on) and more specifically, the booming Thai industry in gender reassignment surgery, which is much cheaper and less regulated than what is available in Western nations. Burdett again provides an east vs. west analysis of people’s attitudes toward sex and gender that (of course) ends up relating back to the original murder.

This book is a lot of work – it’s not a mindless escapist sort of mystery, but one you can sink your teeth into, if you like this kind of thing. I do, sometimes, and felt (despite my complaints about its length) that it was a really good read.

(Book 12, 2011)

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett

A conversation among Me, Myself, and I.

Me: Ugh, I thought this book would never end.

Myself: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Me: I mean it that way. It was just endless. I kept on reading and reading, but I never seemed to finish.

Myself: But it was really interesting! And it had so much cool information about Bangkok! And the detective, Sonchai, was so likable, wise, and funny. Didn’t you love him?

Me: Well yes, he was great, and so was Jones, the American FBI agent. She was smart and intrepid, yes. But what about the snakes? Yuck. And that sleazy guy Warren? Eeeeeeeeeewwwww. What he did was awful!

Myself, Yes but Sonchai and Jones were on him! They figured him out!

Me: I know, but still….and what about all the stuff about the sex trade? Wasn’t it a little bit Too Much Information?

Myself: Well maybe, but didn’t you love the ex-prostitute Nong, who was busy taking finance and management courses over the web in anticipation of opening her own sex club? And she was Sonchai’s mother! What a smart cookie!

Me: I guess. But it sure didn’t make me want to visit Bangkok. I’d be afraid I’d get caught in one of their traffic jams.

Myself: So what I hear you saying is that you loved this book’s characters, but maybe didn’t enjoy the action or the setting so much.

Me: That’s kind of an over-simplification. I liked a lot of that, especially the Bangkok setting. There was just a bit too much; Burdett could have left some of it out, saved it for his next book. Then he would have gotten to the finish more quickly and efficiently. And I could have started to read all these other books that are piling up next to my bed.

I: Shhhhhhh. Would you girls stop talking? I’m trying to read.

(Book 12, 2011)