Brittany Can Be Fickle

Oh, yes. I am not going to follow the order I had preordained for myself just a few days ago. I am going to dive into The Night Circus, but put aside the wonderful Liane Moriarty's other novel, What Alice Forgot, at least for now anyway. After Night Circus, I'll have to make my next choices wisely because I just received four new books over the break that I have to pick through and devour as well. I'd also like to get The Hunger Games sooner rather than later, so the fifth "Game of Thrones" book might just have to wait longer than I had anticipated. But we'll see. 

I don't want my break to end ... I really truly do not. I read more than I have in months, I was able to relax a bit, and I was so happy back in Minnesota with my family and my nephew in particular. Having not seen my nephew in 10 months, I was simply dying to see him, and he has grown so much that it's hard to believe he's the same baby I first saw in July of 2012 over a too-short respite from Teach For America's Summer Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Teaching has taught me how important it is that we teach our children to love books. To love reading is to open up doors for our children that will provide them with a better ability to succeed and excel in school, have a wide imagination, and to know that as with books ... anything is possible. Unfortunately, I don't feel right now that teaching is the career I was meant to stick with. I want to incite a love of literature in children, but perhaps I need to do that in my own way. Teaching is too troubled a profession for me to be able to stick with it for the rest of my life, but I feel the need to congratulate and admire those who do stick with the teaching profession. Our children need you. My family needs me more back in Minnesota, and my own growing family (Scott and Ike) need me to be a sane and loving woman, instead of the frustrated mess I become when I look at the state of our education system. I will never stop fighting for more educational equality for our kids, but there are other capacities in which I can do that and play a more fitting role for myself. Then again, who knows? By the end of May, perhaps these past few months won't seem so daunting and I'll have a renewed energy to stay in the classroom, but ultimately I have to be the best me to be the best teacher for them. If I can't be that, I'll choose another career. I won't be less than the best for my kids. Some of my interests have expanded to looking into counseling careers - still working in a school setting, but in a different capacity - turning to social work like Scott, or perhaps getting back into children's theater, but this time as a director instead of an actor. We'll see what the future holds ... and like my last book taught me, we can't always know the secrets our lives hold (even though it'd be really helpful in my case). 

Keep reading, keep breathing, keep calm and carry on. Love you all. And I'll keep you updated on my ever-expanding book pile. 

The Husband's Secret

When I first picked up this novel it immediately struck me as another one of those "old lady fiction" books that I have come to despise. As it continued I became distracted by watching episodes of Revenge on Netflix and Law and Order: SVU on TV. When I finally urged myself to re-engage with the book I finally started to think "wow this is good." Now I must say that this book is not just "good," but this book is excellent. 

"There are so many secrets about our lives we'll never know." But sometimes some secrets are revealed that change our paths forever. The book starts with story lines attached to three different main women. We have Cecilia Fitzgerald whose husband has a secret that is hidden in a sealed letter from long ago. The Berlin Wall (a topic that her middle daughter is obsessed with) causes her to hunt around in the attic for a piece of it that she gathered long ago to give to her child as a keepsake. She bumps some old shoe boxes and discovers this letter - to her, to be opened after her husband's death. The only problem here is that her husband isn't yet dead. His secret causes connections to other families dealing with their own secrets. There's Tess, whose brain can't catch up to her new reality - that her best friend and cousin, Felicity, wants to have an affair with Tess's husband, Will. And Will is reluctantly bringing this secret love affair to Tess's un-wanting attention. Finally there is Rachel, whose daughter was murdered years ago. 

The Berlin Wall caused all of the events in the book to unravel. It all seems to go awry with the finding and subsequent opening of that letter. Esther, Cecilia's formerly Titanic-obsessed, but now Berlin-obsessed daughter, constantly points out to her mother the craziness of the whole situation. "Imagine, Mum, if we kids were visiting Grandma in West Berlin for the weekend when the wall went up, and you and Dad were stuck in East Berlin. You'd have to say to us, 'Stay at Grandma's place, kids! Don't come back! For your freedom!" She admonishes to her mother that "it's history," and her mother is left imaging herself in Berlin, separated from her children by a wall. Cecilia is the Queen of her daughter's catholic school, however, and a social-scene master. Her own personal wall has not yet come down, but with the reading of her husband's secret she will find that her wall slowly starts to crumble, and with her own freedom there will be pain and suffering and unimaginable hatred. 

Tess, with the news of her family's infidelity, moves from Melbourne, Australia to Sydney and takes her son along with her. The wall that separates her and her son from her husband is a geographic one, in which only time will close the gap. 

And Rachel, a woman whose lost daughter has forever caused her to pin her eyes upon one suspected man as the murderer has no idea that the truth behind her daughter's death is one that she never would have considered, again until it's too late. As the secrets come spilling out, the book becomes wildly entertaining and morosely realistic. That being said, out of all the books I've read lately this would probably be the happiest. I would not say that The Husband's Secret is a lighthearted read, but is infinitely lighter than some of the other heavy mysteries I've been unpacking. 

At first when the letter that starts the plot rolling was opened I was upset. Beforehand I had had an "aha!" moment where I thought I knew exactly what information that letter would contain. Considering everyone's lives in this book are connected, I figured it out quickly and was not wrong. I was disappointed that I what I thought was the big reveal, the climax of the story, was actually a letdown. It was all revealed too easily, and the truth wasn't grisly enough for my darker hungers. I still appreciated, however, that it happened in the middle of the book so we had somewhere to go. 

As we hear snippets of the Berlin Wall we are also privy to hear some hints and facets of the past that help us figure out the present. All at once this book can be just sad. Horrible, heavy, distraught, sad. Then other times the book makes me feel so happy, and guilty at being happy, that I find myself physically feeling the sensation of what it is to smile. 

In the midst of her life unraveling, the once perfect and poised Cecilia Fitzgerald sits down with her daughter to watch footage of the Berlin Wall coming down, and she cries. When asked why she's crying, she replies "Because they're so happy." And here we see more of the vulnerability of this once proud and perfect woman. "Because they endured this unacceptable thing. Because that woman probably thought, like so many people had, that the Wall would eventually come down, but not in their lifetimes, and that she would never see this day, and yet she had, and now she was dancing." Sometimes it's a good thing that walls come down, and other times it's terrifying and shatters the surreal sense of protection we all once thought we had. 

What this book teaches us is that we all must pay the price for our sins, but sometimes that payment is exacted later on in life when we're not expecting it. It ruins us. In moments like these we use our "crisp, crunchy words" all lovely and fresh: shit, fuck, damn. "This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either." 

This book isn't just about our secrets and our walls, our due payments and our sick sense of justice. This is about those abstract ideas of life, love, and relationships. Those "fun flings where nobody got hurt;" those social anxieties that alienate us from people who only want to love us; that healing of relationships that were worn thin from years of neglect, or that were just always tattered and torn to begin with, and that warm feeling that rushes through your veins when all is well. The love of a grandmother toward her grandchild, and the relationship between women - a mother and a daughter, or a girl and her cousin. Tess at one point wonders if her husband fell in love with another women because of her basic personality. Her social anxiety - "Wasn't there something close off, even small-minded and mean, about the way she cut herself off from people, ducking down behind the convenient wall of her shyness, her social anxiety?" I'm like Tess in that I have a horrible social anxiety, and sickeningly I feel relief when friends finally stop calling ... although the good friends never do stop. But Tess's wall of anxiety, and Rachel's wall of emptiness, and Cecilia's wall of perfection ... in the end they all must come tumbling down and the women must embrace the 'freedom' that brings whether they want to or not. 

"Did you know that some people wish the Berlin Wall had never come down? ... That's weird, isn't it? Why would you want to be stuck behind a wall?" 

"Marriage was a form of insanity; love hovering permanently on the edge of aggravation." The words in Moriarty's novel are so rich that I can taste them on my tongue as I read. Her characters are so identifiable ... by this I mean that I can commiserate with them so easily. I can feel for them, with them, and hide behind my own wall as I watch what happens when theirs crumble. When Rachel's wall comes down she must suffer the consequences, as they all must do. 

Again this novel is not just good; it is excellent. My reactions were constantly visceral - my coarse emotions come clawing to the surface with Moriarty's well-connected characters and the damaging effects of karma. I felt so connected to Tess and the fears she faced and the constant crippling shyness she felt in the simplest of situations. I admired and admonished Cecilia and her plight, and felt horribly for Rachel, but God did I just want the woman to move on. But put quite eloquently, "You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else's tragedy - drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall - but nothing truly hurts until happens to you."

I loved this novel, and I must thank the author, Liane Moriarty, for finally giving me the book I wanted. She gave me everything I wanted in a book. A hint of a climax, then a rise to an even greater climax, and then just enough of the falling action to make the ending completely worth it all. And she revealed the secrets I didn't know I was dying to know. In the epilogue she tells us that "None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have and maybe should have taken. It's probably just as well. Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. Just ask Pandora." Remember, no one ever told Pandora not to open the "box." Some books have failed me in giving me the secrets I so often crave like a maniacal addict, but this book did. Thank you, thank you, and thank you for a truly delectable read. 

P.S. If you read my blog for whatever reason, but tend to ignore my recommendations for reading for whatever reason ... please listen to me on this one and pick up The Husband's Secret. I only wish I would have read it in one sitting. Likewise if you know of any books similar to this one - send them my way. I always love to add to my reading piles. 

Orange is the New Black

Orange is my favorite color, so I suppose I wouldn't mind if orange became the new black - a moment discussed in Piper Kerman's memoir, Orange is the New Black. Perhaps though I wouldn't enjoy that fashion shift it was a joke written to me by my best friend whilst I was in prison. Piper Kerman found it endearing that her friend send her a newspaper clipping of a fashion trend saying "New York is going orange!" but I think that I would feel super conscious of my new prisoner's uniform.  

I found myself going into the memoir expecting it to be a close resemblance of the Netflix hit TV show. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong. Although all of the same elements are there, many of the things that we see happen to Piper in the TV show are exaggerations of the truth, or they're things that happened to other people and the writers of the show took all those things and made them happen to Piper. In her memoir she states often that she learned to survive prison because of the women in there whom she spent time with, but she also laments "prison is terrible!" and I think that in the show they took her reality out of it and made it a farce. I say this disappointingly because I love the TV show, but I think I must now separate the TV show from the book before I get irritated with how helpless and unfortunate the TV show Piper is. In the show, Piper struggles with her family and fiance on the outside, whereas in the book her friends and family are nothing if not absolutely supportive of her. Sure, they might not understand some things she has to deal with, but they don't make it all about them like they do in the show. In my opinion, Netflix's version of this woman's real life experiences is more entertaining than the book, but the book's got way more heart. 

Obviously this memoir is more genuine and certainly more authentic than what I saw on Netflix - but let's be reminded I never would have picked up this book if it were not for the show. I was indeed touched by Piper Kerman's accounts of her time in prison and the relationships she formed there with women - but unlike the show she never indulged in any lesbian affairs and every relationship was purely platonic, although filled with love and care. Also her ex-girlfriend is NOT in the prison with her, but she does happen to meet Nora later at another prison when they're both sent to testify against another drug smuggler who Piper does not even know. It's pretty tense considering Nora is the one who ratted Piper out to the feds for a crime she just barely participated in ten years ago. Nora is "Alex" is in the TV show. Many names and characters were also changed or events were switched around compared to the memoir. 

If I take the Netflix hit off my radar, here's what I think purely about the book. Piper's prison experience did not hold all of the violence, sex, intrigue, time spent in solitary, etc. that I thought it would or that I was expecting. It was truly an account of how a group of women tried to survive the day-to-day nonsense of an institution that didn't care about them and that they didn't want to be in. It talked about the small and large injustices that these women faced and how they were able to cope with it all. In Piper Kerman's case it seemed particularly unfair that she was being punished for something that she did so long ago; something that she doesn't even remember doing, and something that was done by a person she doesn't even recognize anymore as herself. Once sentenced, Piper had to wait 6 years before she actually did her 13 month prison sentence, and then was on probation afterward for 2 years. This means she was basically under federal control for 9 years. 9 years of her life gone for a stupid mistake she made in her early twenties. 

Piper "Chapman" from the show and the real Piper Kerman

One aspect of her memoir that I respected, but that also made the book less engaging than the show (I know I said I'd drop the show, but listen!), was that Piper included many statistics for us to drive home the point that America has invested too much money in a system that doesn't work, doesn't rehabilitate its prisoners, and only serves to try and dehumanize them as much as possible before throwing them back out into the world, where more than likely they'll have to do something that leads them back to prison. There's also a lot of commentary on how lucky she is, being an upper-middle class citizen with a family to go back to, a job waiting for her, and lots of support. Many of our poor citizens in prisons go through a system of rotating doors. Once in prison they get used to a life of structure and rules and are provided for (however poorly that may be), but once released they have no idea how to get housing, get jobs, and survive. 

61 million American families deal with the "justice system" every year. 1 in 100 American adults are sent to prison. Piper struggles to understand the bizarre and often nonsensical nature of the BOP, for example commenting on standing in line all the time. To this she remarks that "For many women, I realized, this was nothing new. If you had the misfortune of having the government intimately involved in your life, whether via public housing or Medicaid or food stamps, then you'd probably already spent an insane amount of your life in line." This thought comes to her as she's waiting to receive laundry soap packets, one of the only free things handed to you in prison. To this she asks the question of why not soap? Why not something that would help you actually clean your body? "Why not toothpaste? Somewhere within the monstrous bureaucracy of the Bureau of Prisons [BOP], this all made sense to someone." 

Prisoners struggle to reconcile their lives in prison with their future lives on the outside. They often struggle with authority, or the middle-class white women struggle with being locked up with people they think they're better than. Piper laments that she knows she's not better than anyone else she's locked up with, but often because she's white and from the middle-class she is treated better by the authority figures; she tries desperately to avoid these favors and they often make her angry. Going back to the real world is often hard for prisoners, because again they do not have what she has. For this she has to keep herself updated with the real world constantly from newspapers or TV so she doesn't get lost inside her own head. 

Piper also tells us about the inequality between the prison guards and the prisoners. How this formal relationship which is enforced by the institution is one in which the guard's word means everything and the prisoner's means nothing, and that is terrifying. "One can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face." The extreme inequality often leads to abuse of many different kinds, "from small humiliations to hideous crimes," and many times sexual abuse. After experiencing this kind of power dynamic for sometimes many years we expect our prisoners to re-enter society and become meaningful members ... that is something I don't understand. How can they? 

About 80% of women in prisons have children. We're putting these mothers, and mostly these nonviolent offenders, in jail for sometimes very long periods of time. Who are we helping by doing this? "... in the federal system alone (a fraction of the U.S. prison population), there were over 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more." Add to this statistic that many of the women in the prison that Piper went to were poor and poorly educated and come from neighborhoods where the "mainstream economy was barely present and the narcotics trade provided the most opportunity for employment." These women went to jail for anything from dealing, allowing their apartments to be used, passing messages, etc. and for all of this they still received pretty low wages. In the memoir we also found out that if a person is in prison without their GED, they're only allowed to get paid $0.14 an hour. That means you would make roughly around $5 for a 40 hour work week in prison. 

Piper's experience in prison leads her to recognize the harm she did to those around her. Her family and friends suffered because of her when she was convicted, and she was complicit in aiding the addicts get addicted with what she participated in, and she has seen those negative effects firsthand in prison. The women around her have humbled her and helped her take responsibility for her actions. One of her last points on our prison system made me so incredibly angry because the truth of it is so obvious. We are not helping our society. We have prison pipeline that shoots out from poor neighborhoods and poor schools straight to the prison system. Race and class have made it so that prison is a reality in many of our youth's futures, and our country is doing nothing to stop it. We invest more in the prison system than in our schools and the education of our children. We do not invest in opportunities for kids from crappy neighborhoods to have a shot at making out of themselves. And when they do go to prison, we don't rehabilitate them or "correct" them, we purely punish, humiliate, and abuse them. And for the 80% of women who are mothers, we leave their children without a parent. Please do not get me wrong, just as Piper points out in her book many times she realized that deserved to get punished for what she did, and that what she participated in was a drug trade that hurts people in very real ways. But here is what she points out that I think is worth listening to:

"A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge, and retribution, all and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in." 

Piper in an interview in the back of the book comments that prison is awful. Her attitude going into it was what saved her. "I didn't focus on feeling bad for myself. And when you start talking to people who are doing so much more time than you, and it seems like the only reason is the color of their skin and that they're from a poor neighborhood or family, it's pretty damn hard to feel bad for yourself." Additionally, Piper reinforces what her book is about, and I would agree with her assessment, " ... the focus on the positive that the book offers is really about finding the value in humanity and warmth in a setting where we're constantly told there's none to be found - people are irredeemable, terrible people. And that's not the case." 

This book is not as entertaining as the Netflix series. The Piper in that series is a lost girl with extremely bad luck, a lesbian lover, and she's a magnet for crazy trouble. The memoir however is a gem. It's a piece of literature that attempts to let us commiserate with her about the injustice of our world, and recognize that she had it good overall. She was genuinely relieved to get out after her relatively short sentence but many of the women who helped her survive her time on the inside were not that lucky. Likewise her friends at the prison were not going to be well equipped when they were sent back out into the world, and her worry for them never stopped. This book is indeed about humanity and surviving in the face of something so surreal that many of us can't begin to fathom it. What if our country was invested in making people atone for their sins in a way that was productive both to the convict and their victims? What if we invested more in our youth - no matter what neighborhood they came from? What if we made it so that our prisons did not contain a large portion of our adult population? And what if we made it so that nonviolent offenders and mothers could indeed be helped so that they could go back to their children and be productive in a society that shuns them? What if we take away the stigma of being a felon and instead try to lessen the amount of time we throw on top of people who get involved in a dangerous enterprise that seems to be the only venue open to them? I think this book made me want to do better. 

Piper was only 1 out of 700,000 people who return home from prison each year. And as she states "What happens in our prisons is completely within the community's control ... what we expect and what we get from our prisons are very different things." Prisons teach prisoners how to survive as a prisoner not as a citizen. People unlike Piper who leave prison have to prepare for homeless shelters, family court, and uncertain prospects for work. These people usually have little to no help. The United States has the biggest prison population in the world. "We incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners, though we are only 5% of the world's population." Most of our prisoners are low-level offenders who committed nonviolent crimes. As a society I think we can do better for these people. "Lack of empathy is at the heart of every crime," and I think it's time that we teach each other to recognize the harm we do to others. I see it all the time on the playground at my school. Kids will break some one's neck and not realize the repercussions of their actions. This attitude is fostered throughout their early lives. 

In conclusion, in 1980, there were approximately 500,000 people locked up in the United States, but today we incarcerate 2.3 million. Many of these, again, are low-level offenders for nonviolent crimes. The "war on drugs" has not stopped addiction or drug abuse in our country. Our system is a racially biased one that over-punishes and fails to rehabilitate. Over-incarceration in America destabilizes families and limits opportunities for change. You should read this book because it's frustrating, heartbreaking, heartwarming, and genuine. It recounts a woman's genuine experience and shows us her journey of realizing the gravity of her crime and opening up her eyes to see what our justice system really accomplishes - which is not much, and it does not make us any safer. It's a good social commentary on our system as well as a commentary on her life. I will keep watching the show, but for me it takes events from her experiences and turns them into entertainment. This book is about a dialogue and a really terrible time that yielded memorable moments in Piper Kerman's life. 

World Prison Populations from 2008

Connections

In Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, the main character was living in Chicago. In Harrison's The Silent Wife, the couple lived in Chicago. On any list it is suggested that Moriarty's The Husband's Secret should be read after The Silent Wife; that enjoying one recommends the other. This being said I will not rush into The Husband's Secret, even though I own it. I believe that I'm going to jump into Orange is the New Black, a story that based on what I know from the Netflix original series is about a women struggling in prison and dealing with her love for the man in her life outside prison walls, and succumbing to old feelings for her female lover stuck inside with her. I'm excited to see how the show (which I adored and watched in a binge-session over the course of a week) compares to her memoir. 

After Orange ... is finished then I'll decide between The Husband's Secret or the fifth book in the "Game of Thrones" series, A Dance with Dragons. The fifth book in the series I own in hardcover - and I'm hoping the sixth novel will be coming out next year (2014). There is supposedly going to be seven novels in total (which seems fitting for the seven kingdoms in the novel), but I can't wait. 

Keep reading folks! 

This my nephew posing ... it looks like he could rule the Iron Throne, yeah? 

The Silent Wife

Is The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison indeed better than Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl? This is the question I posed to myself as I read based on the quote by Sophie Hannah, author of The Other Woman's House. Hannah put out there that this novel was a "must read," and other critics called it "deliciously wicked" and "a chilling portrait of a relationship gone terribly awry." 

Here is my answer: The Silent Wife shines and indeed goes above what Gone Girl was able to deliver. I have always lamented the endings of Flynn's novels - they always feel short to me, cut off, almost as if the author got tired of writing and said "here you go! The ending! Now I'm done." The Silent Wife has a coming down after what I consider to be the ending. We have closure and a release after the climax hits, as opposed to a hurried and rushed finality. 

This isn't a spoiler because the fact I'm about to present you with is revealed to the reader on page four of the book. Meet Todd Gilbert and Jodi Brett. They are not married in the traditional sense, meaning they never actually walked down the aisle and said their "I Do's," but the two of them have been together in what they consider a common-law marriage for twenty years. Jodi Brett is often called Mrs. Gilbert, and she cooks, cares for, and keeps life easy for her husband. By easy I mean to say that she knows full well that he is a cheater, and she allows this with the idea that all men cheat on their wives somehow. By staying silent she keeps his love. She is a counseling psychologist and Todd is an entrepreneur who flips/builds buildings. 

On page four it is revealed to us that the relationship between these two is disintegrating. "Her notions about who she is and how she ought to conduct herself are far less stable than she supposes, given that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer out of her." Jodi Brett will kill her husband. At this point we do not know how she will accomplish this but we read the book knowing and expecting it to happen. 

The Silent Wife is similar to Gone Girl in that there are "him" and "her" chapters. We get the story from both sides of the conflict. We hear their own personal discontents with their marriage, and in both novels neither couple has children (at first). Both books make us at points hate each character individually, although in this book I always hated Todd Gilbert more than I did his wife. Jodi is a therapist (as I mentioned) who only takes what she can handle. She doesn't do cases with clients who have eating disorders or more serious issues - she keeps the "crazies" at bay, preferring to not worry about a potential suicide or such. The story itself is told in third person - their dialogue is the only genuine insight we get from them, otherwise there's a narrator who tells us about what "she" and "he" are going through. 

A main theme in this book is the roles of men and women, and should women become domesticated and allow their husbands to roam as long as they come back at night? "And yet, none of this matters. It simply doesn't matter that time and time again he gives the game away, because he knows and she knows that he's a cheater, and he knows that she knows, but the point is that the pretense, the all-important pretense must be maintained, the illusion that everything is fine and nothing is the matter." Jodi Brett, and in a way Todd as well, are in constant denial. As long as the facts are maintained and their routines are kept up, the two of them for a long time believe that things can keep going on the way that they are. This is until Todd gets a rush of excitement as he finds out that his twenty-something girlfriend on the side is pregnant and thus demanding him to move out and leave Jodi with nothing - and remember she's not entitled to anything, because in all actuality the two are not married. Dilemmas ensue. 

Before the bottom falls out from underneath her, Jodi believes in her clinical sense that you must accept someone for who they are, their faults, their idiosyncrasies and not try to change them. "Other people are not here to fill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive." We realize early on that Jodi has suppressed a lot of things from her childhood, and now she suppresses the negatives, the untidy parts, of her relationship in the hopes that if she can ignore the glaring grease spots on the otherwise tidy glistening counter of her relationship she can survive. In my opinion, it is this suppression that leads her to losing her mind over the inevitable grief that follows in the repetitive blows dealt to her by the man she loved for so long, and in the stupidity she feels as she recognizes that she should have sucked up her pride and married him long ago. In trying to protect herself by not getting married, she doomed herself to landing in a sticky situation with no security. 

Todd calls Jodi a "cold dish of porridge in bed," but claims that he can accept her faults as she keeps his life nice and neat and provides him with comforts such as an always homemade dinner and a clean house, and no angry yelling or pointed questions about his weekend "fishing" trips and late night "dinners" with "colleagues." Todd truly believes that a "fling" on the side is nothing worth fretting about. Early in their relationship he made a comment to Jodi that didn't seem to raise her alarms. He stated that "Monogamy wasn't designed for men. Or men weren't designed for monogamy ... all men cheat sooner or later, one way or another. My father [an alcoholic] cheated with the bottle." Another theme in this novel is your childhood informing your adult self. Todd believes cheating is okay, because all men do it. When he was a kid he knew that his father loved his booze more than his family, but everyone dealt with it. 

With the revelation of his girlfriend's pregnancy, Todd starts to realize that his perfect double life is going awry. He compares his two women to one another. If only she was more like her, etc. He is selfish and idiotic, but in a way, so is Jodi. To get him back all this years, Jodi commits little misdemeanors against him. She is silently vindictive and does things to him that hurt him but he never traces it back to her - such as throwing his cell phone into the lake when he's drunk, drugging his milkshakes, or stealing his keys. It soon becomes evident that Jodi is a crazy methodical bitch, and she doesn't even realize how calculating and dangerous she is. She excels at discreet retaliation that punishes Todd just enough to make her feel satiated. The two of them are deranged. They are in denial and try to give themselves personal affirmations of their own sanity. 

Jodi's weapon in the novel is indeed her silence. Her silence is dense and purposeful; it is a barricade against anything that could hurt her. 

This is truly the first suspenseful suspense novel that I have ever read. It raises your blood pressure and then brings it back down as you can finally breathe once you realize that the end has not come too soon. You will find yourself wanting the death of Todd Gilbert to be painful and incredibly slow as realization creeps across his face in his final moments, and that wish may or may not be denied you. You won't be sure until the end. This brought out the ugly in me, but I'd read it again and relish the feeling of losing my own clarity as the novel continues. In the end I felt satisfied and only wish I had more. My only commentary is that it would be nice to someday read a book like this where the woman becomes the cheating bastard and the man suffers from financial and emotional deprivation. I have yet to come upon a novel that serves me up that treat in such a way as this - long-suffering pain and repressed urges that erupt in a blunt and bitter end - where the woman is the one we despise more-so than the man. 

As the book states, "we sometimes have to live with unpleasant realities," and how we deal with those realities can make for some really good reading on a rainy day. Give this book a shot because you will enjoy its upscale commentary on relationships - the unfairness of it all and the sick pleasure one might achieve from revenge and redemption. Once you leave the comfort of your home - the comfort of your loved one - anything is possible ... 

Picking Your Books

I don't know if anyone else ever has this problem ... but I'm somewhat overly concerned with the order in which I read my books. I like them to have some sort of connection to them that makes sense and makes me feel good as a flit around from one book to the next - from one beautiful cover to another.

Hence here is my fall break dilemma. In what order to I read the books leftover on my shelves? Here is what I'm thinking thus far:

Finish The Silent Wife ... move on to:

Orange is the New Black

Pick up the fifth book in the "Game of Thrones" series, called A Dance of Dragons. Work really hard to finish that in a couple of days and move onto:

The Husband's Secret and then What Alice Forgot ... both by the same author, Liane Moriarty

The Night Circus 

Then start The Hunger Games trilogy. At this point I will probably be back in school, and then after The Hunger Games are through I will be moving on to finishing the last two books in The Southern Vampire Mysteries series and then reading Admission, which has now been turned into a movie starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd. At this point I will need to buy some more new books - but trust me I've already got a list compiled of my next purchases.

If you have any suggestions of books to add to this ongoing list - send them my way!

Keep reading ... oh! And enjoy your fall break ... or if you're not on break, enjoy your fall with some nice beer or fancy wine - some of the best accompaniments to a reading marathon.

<3 Britt

Done in a Day - "The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you"

Last night before I slipped off to blissful sleep I finished Gillian Flynn's debut novel, Sharp Objects. First, let me start with the negative criticism. I love her stories, but I do believe that I had this objection of her other two novels as well. They end too quickly, too abruptly. Sharp Objects has such an epic build but it's filled with a somewhat obvious ending that comes too fast. This is a mystery/psychological thriller novel, and I had my opinions early on concerning who I thought the killer was. Turns out both of my assumptions ended up being correct in their own ways. 

It's not a new story in my opinion but it adds a new twist when we meet our main character, Camille. Camille has a history of cutting herself. Words - she cuts words all over her body, and it's this deeper edge to her ... that vivid outside representation of her internal scars that makes her an intriguing character. You are rooting for her to return to her home down, a place that has damaged her psyche and her physique, to write about two serial murders of two young girls. Girls that we find out are damaged and wild just like she was. 

Camille lives in Chicago writing for a second-rate paper, and she considers herself to be a second-rate journalist. This story could be a big break for both her own career and the future of her paper. When her boss advises her to give it a shot and head down to Missouri, a place that is painted as being more Deep South than Midwest,  Camille's old-time anxiety and panic rise up to terrify her, but she manages to wrench her hands free of the chair she is sitting in and head down to Wind Gap, Missouri to write about horrific events happening there and face the demons of her past life as well. And when I say demons ... I mean her family. She refers to herself as white trash from old money ... but we soon find out that appearance is everything in her family household, and she obviously doesn't fit that bill. She also lacks the self-confidence, submissive mindset, "southern" poise, and placid personality that pleases her mother, the matriarch of Wind Gap - Adora. In addition to the powerful and unloving Adora, Camille must face a sister she doesn't know, Amma (who acts like a china doll at home and a 13-year-old-street-whore outside of it), and then there's the outsider cop brought in to solve the murders from Kansas City who she may just have a crush on, the old friends she no longer fits in with, and finally the families and residents of Wind Gap who just really don't want to talk to her at all.

 

Camille is obviously put off by her southern Missouri upbringing and as previously mentioned is incredibly reluctant to return to her home town, especially to investigate the murders of two little girls. So while we may be rooting for her to survive this trip, we find out quite fast that this is not going to be a welcome homecoming for her, and she will constantly struggle to find her footing. Being back in Wind Gap leads our psychologically damaged heroine to become awash in alcohol, twitch at the sight of sharp objects, and torment her mother. Tormenting her mother is not hard considering that years ago Camille's little sister, Marian, had died from a terrible sickness, and it becomes evident that Marian was the favorite child, and at one point Adora even remarks that it should have been Camille and not her darling little sister. Every time that Adora sees Camille working on the murder cases she freaks out - further widening the gap between her and her daughter. 

As the case goes on with no visible leads in sight, and the cops aren't leaking any information to Camille, she starts to drink even more and judge herself more harshly as an incompetent second-rate journalist. She is hindered by her mother's reproaches and the wariness of her small town neighbors. As time drags on, the tension between Camille and Adora grows stronger. Amma has a tantrum one day, and Camille remarks upon how it's strange for a 13-year old to throw such a fit, at which time Adora tells her daughter, "Yes, well, you weren't exactly placid yourself at that age." Camille stands up as she tries to dissect that comment - did her mother mean her 'cutting, her crying jags over her lost sister, her overactive sex life ...' 

Her stepfather asks her to sit down and then questions Camille about the good feedback she is receiving as a journalist in Chicago, to which she replies "Well, I've been doing some more high-profile stories. I've covered three murders just since the beginning of the year." Camille's mother, ever the reproachful one, replies "And that's a good thing, Camille? ... I will never understand where your penchant for ugliness comes froLm. Seems like you have enough of that in your life without deliberately seeking it out." And then her mother laughs - a shrill sounding laugh. 

"Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach. She worries over people she's never met who have a spell of bad chance. She cries over news from across the globe. It's all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings." 

This book exposes the cruelty of human beings, the emptiness of women, the feeling of being barren even if you do produce children, the judgment one passes down on victims, and the feeling of being targeted for something you didn't commit. Sharp Objects is indeed a great debut novel, and no one can deny that Gillian Flynn's other books are just as twisted and delightful. Okay, I don't know if I'd call this novel delightful, but it's extremely engaging. Again, I only wish that the ending was packed with just as much punch as the rest of the story. It lacked the tension and attention needed for such a moment of discovery. 

Read Sharp Objects, and if you haven't already give her other two novels a shot, Dark Places and Gone Girl. She's a great author, truly, and her books can foster some great discussions. Sharp Objects is a novel that forced me to examine my own demons, my own times where I sought out a love that was damaged and just not there, and it pushed me to at times question my own coping mechanisms for when things get ridiculously hard.

I'm moving on to The Silent Wife, described by author Sophie Hannah as "better than Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. A must read for anyone who is occasionally ruthless, reckless, or ... loves clever books with depth and heart." That sounds like a great invitation to me. Check by in a day or two for my opinion on A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife. Let's examine if she can pull off mystery better than Mrs. Flynn. 

On to something new ...

I just finished reading the fourth book in the "Game of Thrones" series, A Song of Ice and Fire. I loved it. The series keeps getting better, even though it took a while for me to get used to some of the new point of view characters.


Now I'm onto another book by an author who I haven't read in a while. I will be diving into Sharp Objects, the debut novel of Gillian Flynn, bestselling author of Gone Girl and Dark Places - both novels that I've read. I'm exciting to get into this psychological thriller which was described by Stephen King as being an "admirably nasty piece of work, elevated by sharp writing and sharper insights." Here we go folks!

Keep on reading,

Britt