Book Review: One-Hit Wonder by Lisa Jewell

Bee Bearhorn had a number-one hit single in 1985 – and was never heard of again. Fifteen years later she is found dead in her flat and nobody seems to care … But Ana Wills always day-dreamed about the exotic half-sister she hasn’t seen in years. And when she comes to London to clear Bee’s flat, she uncovers a life more exotic than she imagined: a secret country cottage, mysterious weekends away, and even a missing cat. With Bee’s closest friends – mad Lol and strong, silent Flint – Ana sets out to discover exactly what did happen to Bee Bearhorn, the one-hit wonder … Read my review underneath

This Lisa Jewell novel was definitely darker than the previous novels I’ve read of hers. It took me a hundred or so pages to get into it but once I did I really wanted to know exactly what happened to Bee and what everyone knew of her. It is marketed as chick-lit but it isn’t really, or if it is it is much less fluffier. How many chick-lit novels deal with aids and suicide?

It was good yet sad to read how much Ana found out about her sister after she had died. Not only that but there’s Bee’s mysterious cottage which introduces us to Zander, a disabled boy, who is probably one of the best child characters I’ve read; there’s also Amy, Bee’s next door neighbour as well as Flint & Lol. The whole story twists and turns right up until we find out exactly why Bee killed herself.

I think there’s a morality issue: because Bee wasn’t paying attention she killed 4 people and left a boy disabled and orphaned and while Bee did help make it up to Zander and was deeply regretful and that is ultimately what killed her, she never faced legal action. However that’s a minor issue and doesn’t detract from such a great book.

The ending was incredibly sad with the wake and the revelation of what drove Bee to kill herself. It was incredibly sad when everyone was making the speeches at the second funeral (if that’s what I can call it).

The best part about the book was Ana coming out of her shell and accepting herself for who she is, height and ganglyness and all. I loved Ana and Flint together, too. There’s a potential sequel in there somewhere and maybe after Lisa finishes her Ralph’s Party sequel she can do one for Ana, Flint, Lol and the gang.

It was a very enjoyable book and I’m looking forward to Lisa’s next book: The Truth About Melody Browne.

Rating: 3/5

Send in your reviews: chicklitreviews@gmail.com

Tales of Twin Cities: Beirut and Haifa

Tales of Twin Cities: Beirut and Haifa (April 1, 2009)

 

Note: I am reading the interesting Arabic/Lebanese book “This Life, my Sweetheart” (Ya Dunia, ya Gharamy) by Ussama El Aref.  One of its chapters inspired the theme of this article.

 

By the year 1933, the city of Haifa was the main magnet for the Levantines and Iraqis.  A railroad linked it to Egypt, Damascus and to the Hijjaz (Mecca) in the Arabic Peninsula.  A pipeline was exporting half of Iraq’s production toward Europe.  A modern port was the main export location of Syria’s wheat and grain to Europe. A new oil refinery was installed. Haifa was the most prosperous and promising destination for the Lebanese. 

Many streets were named after Lebanese towns and cities.  Anywhere you walked the stores had common Lebanese family names.  The Maronite Selim Khoury from Bkaseen (by Jezzine) was considered the richest in Palestine; he instituted a modern silk factory and many laborers from Lebanon flocked there.  The families of Bustros, Sursok, and Tuweiny owned half the fertile plains in Galilee about (180 square kilometers). Suleiman Nassif had exclusivity on thermal pools. The CAT Company, a building contractor, erected series of houses outside Acre’s walls.

Lebanese educators and intellectuals taught there.  The famous lawyer, Wadi3 Bustani was the special counselor to the British Governor Colonel Stanton.  Dailies were created.  Haiffa was like Qatar and Dubai today for the Lebanese emigrants; they were welcomed and needed to absorb the fast pace economic explosion.

 

Then, in 1948, the infamous Zionist State was created by a majority of a single vote in the UN.  The infamous administrations of the USA, France, and Britain wanted to get rid of the Jews in their midst.  The monster Stalin stupidly believed that Israel would be the first communist State in the Middle East.

The tide turned; the Palestinians flocked to Lebanon; the prosperous and educated Palestinian refugees headed to Beirut.  What the English and USA governments could not do in Lebanon was done by the Palestinians:  the English language spread and prospered. The American University in Beirut got a new lease on life; most of the Arabs in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq studied in Beirut. The port of Beirut was modernized and expanded and replaced Haifa; oil pipelines and refineries were installed in Lebanon, most of the land transit passed through the port of Beirut.

South Lebanon was transformed into a vast garden of orange and apple orchards thanks to the expertise of the cultivators of Jaffa.  The financial institutions in Beirut flourished.  The insurance businesses got foothold; even today, most of the insurance executives are of Palestinian origins. Folk dancing, songs, theaters were initiated by Palestinian artists.

The rich Palestinian Christians were offered the Lebanese citizenship. The poor Palestinian Christian refugees were installed in camps in Christian districts such as the camps of Jisr Pasha, Dbaiyeh, and Mar Elias.  The Palestinian Moslems were distributed in camps all over Lebanon.  These inexpensive Palestinian workmen were the main backbone for the emerging small and medium industries and in agriculture; until the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) disturbed the entire structure when it installed its headquarters in Beirut in 1969.  During the civil war that started in 1975, all the Christian Palestinian camps were overturned by the Lebanese Christian militias and the surviving refugees expelled from the Christian regions or cantons.

The PLO was forced to vacate Lebanon in 1982 and the Palestinian workforce was replaced by Syrians and the Palestinian refugees were confined to their camps; they experienced renewed constraints on work permits and selective jobs and restraining labor licenses.

 

Since time immemorial, the southern Lebanese seaport of Tyr was the administrative center for the entire region extending to beyond Haifa, Mount Carmel, and including Galilee. Under normal circumstances, the coastal zone from Tyr to Haifa could have been the largest Megapolis on the Mediterranean Sea. The newly created apartheid Zionist State disrupted all kinds of major development in the region.

 

Note: After the Second World War, Germany welcomed the Kurdish workforce, arriving by train with fanfare and official bands, because it needed badly to reconstruct the country.  Germany thinks that it finished reconstruction and has no idea how to repatriate the Kurds of Turkey.  Germany is offering to finance private enterprises in the Kurdish region for any Kurdish family willing to return.  The catch is: would anyone not feeling secure and safe in his homeland return?  Would Germany re-welcome any Kurds if political conditions deteriorate?

Great Review of Ups & Downs on Rebecca's Reads

Melissa Koltes of Rebecca’s Reads posted a review this week of David’s and my bo0k, Ups & Downs.  Here’s an extract from what she had to day.

“I do not typically laugh out loud as I am reading. But this book made me LOL more times than I can count. … The authors do a fantastic job of giving a visual account of the uniqueness of the towns-people, the villages, the countries and the cultures. The beauty of the landscape, the difficulty of the journey and the individual experiences that each narrate is awe inspiring, incredibly amusing, and greatly entertaining.”

Read the entire Rebecca’s Reads review of Ups & Downs here.

<i>The Fourth Hand</i> by John Irving

Bizarre is the first word that pops into my head when I think of this book.  The Fourth Hand is a wonderful book and I enjoyed it immensely, but the plot was just plain weird.  Here it is in a nutshell:  

A reporter looses his hand in an accident of sorts on live television.   A woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin writes to an eminent hand surgeon saying that her husband has agreed to leave his left hand to the reporter.  Her still alive husband.  When the husband does die, the hand is rushed to Boston for the transplant, but there’s a catch.  The new widow wants visitation rights with the hand! 

Visitation rights!  That’s not all, it gets even weirder if you can believe it, but you get the idea.

I liked this book very much.

Rating:  4 out of 5 stars

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Thank you to everyone who sent birthday wishes.

Corsets and Crowns

That might sound saucy and a tad inappropriate, but that is what I think of when I think ‘historical fiction.’ My introduction to historical fiction was through adult books by Margaret George of Phillipa Gregory, but there is a plethora of awesome young adult historical fiction.

Anderson, Laurie Halse

Fever 1793

There is a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. There is death everywhere and Mattie Cook’s life is changed forever. She no longer lives comfortably and her mother is dead. To survive this modern plague, she must escape and struggle to stay alive.

Anderson, M.T.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party

Octavian lives with his mother, an African princess and a group of deep thinking philosophers in revolutionary Boston. He has the finest classical education that money can buy and can have anything he wants. Except he cannot venture outside of his house, it is forbidden. One day he breaks this rule, and his eyes are opened to a hideous plan at work.

Boyne, John

Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Bruno has a wonderful life. His family is a loving one and he has plenty of friends. But when his father gets a promotion, he must leave everything that he loves and move to the middle of nowhere. Life is much different, he has no friends and isn’t allowed to go exploring. From his window he can see a village where people wear ugly blue pajamas…but who are they?

Bray, Libba

A Great and Terrible Beauty

Gemma Doyle doesn’t have any family. What is worse, is that she is forced to move from her home in India to a boarding school in England. But when she starts having visions and is followed by a strange Indian boy, she has no idea what is in store for her.

Cullen, Lynn

I, Rembrandt’s Daughter

This novel follows the Rembrandt’s daughter, Cornelia. Life is never normal living under the same roof. Many would think that Cornelia has a privileged life, but she is forced to live within a strict social class system.

Donnelly, Jennifer

A Northern Light

Mattie Gokey is at a crossroads in her life. She’s escaped the overwhelming responsibilities of helping to run her father’s brokedown farm in exchange for a paid summer job as a serving girl at a fancy hotel. She doesn’t know if she should use the money to pay for Barnard College or use it for her dowry to the potential marriage of a handsome, but dull man. She also becomes wrapped up in the disappearance and murder of a young girl.

Draper, Sharon

Copper Sun

Amari has been taken away from everything and everyone she loves. Her family has been killed by white slavers and she has been forced to travel thousands of miles from home on a cramped slave ship. She is then sold to the highest bidder to work as a kitchen slave. She along with an indentured servant, Polly plan to escape their cruel masters and the plantation.

Myers, Walter Dean

Fallen Angel

Perry, a Harlem teenager who volunteers for the service when his dream of attending college falls through. Sent to the front lines, Perry and his platoon come face-to-face with the Vietcong and the real horror of warfare. But violence and death aren’t the only hardships. As Perry struggles to find virtue in himself and his comrades, he questions why black troops are given the most dangerous assignments, and why the U.S. is there at all.

Zusak, Mark

The Book Thief

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich. She scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

Sometimes I feel like historical fiction is one of those underrated genres, but then I started to search for popular historical fiction novels and remembered that the Libba Bray, the author of The Gemma Doyle Trilogy will be visiting CLP- Squirrel Hill on April 16th!

A Wild Ride Through the Night

Having read several books by Moers (Rumo and his Wonderous Adventures, The 13.5 lives of Captain Bluebear, The City of Dreaming Books), I was thrilled to stumble upon another one.  This one, however, was fundamentally different from the others.

Moers took several works by Gustav Dore (an artist I had never heard of prior to reading this book), and used them to create the plot for his book.   I have never heard of an author doing this (that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done), and I think it is an amazing idea.  

As excited as I was about the premise of the book, I have to admit that it didn’t live up to my expectations.   Maybe it’s because I was utterly spoiled by the genius in Rumo (seriously, it is AMAZING), or maybe it’s because I just wasn’t in the right mood, but I found this book difficult to stay involved in.  

I would still recommend it, however, because the illustrations are amazing, and I am still excited about the way that it was written. 

 

Peace

Amy's Marginalia: The god of Small Things

About ten years ago, Arundhati Roy hit the literary scene with full force.  Her first novel, The god of Small Things, received an unheard of half a million pound advance.  It turns out, her publishers knew what they were doing, as the book won the prestigious Booker Prize and hung around on the New York Times Best Seller list for quite awhile.  Although it’s never gone out of popularity, it’s going through a bit of a re-surge, and Costco is selling it as one of its Buyer’s Picks right now.  Now you know where I got my copy.

I kept the title of the book purposefully miscapitalized. I didn’t want to capitalize the “g” in “god” because I didn’t want there to be any sort of hint that we were talking about the one and only God.  In fact, I was a little disappointed that the book didn’t have much to do with religion at all.  The title refers to a specific character, who gets renamed “The god of Small Things.”  And even when the name gets explained, the “god” part didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

At its core, The god of Small Things is an impossible love story.  Roy is challenging the caste system in India by creating a gifted, loveable untouchable who slowly becomes the center of the story.  The two main characters are twin children, Rahel and Esta, who are 7 years old for most of the story, but they are also 31 for part of it.  The twins live with their mother in India, with their uncle, aunt, and grandmother.  They are Syrian Christians, except the aunt, who is Roman Catholic. But their town and culture is diverse, linking Hindu traditions with a Communist government.

This book has troubled me a great deal, on multiple levels.  Some of it has been a good kind of bother.  I’m obsessed with how Roy can craft such unique descriptions.  She creates new words to depict things, and she also strings unusual combinations together, ones that I’d never consider.  I read one interview in which she claimed that her training as an architect compelled her to re-arrange words to create new structures.  The children in the book would often playfully reconstruct words: “‘Later’ became ‘Lay. Ter.’ ‘An owl’ became ‘A Nowl.’ ‘Sour metal smell’ became ’sourmetal smell’” (Salon).

I’m also annoyed with the author, that she created a brilliant plot arrangement, without revising her drafts.  In fact, that really upsets me.  Doesn’t she know that all good authors revise their work? It’s the law, or something like that.  To simply write out a brilliant, non linear plot structure as you go, it defies all the ways writers are taught to write.

But some of the discomfort seemed unnecessary, over the top, and grotesque.  The book depicts the sexual abuse of a child, incest, graphic murder, and a highly erotic, albeit consensual, sex scene between adults.  This book isn’t light weight in any respect, and I wish I had a little more warning about the subjects artfully, yet openly, portrayed in the book.

That said, I don’t know if knowing this information in advance, I’d have avoided the book completely. There are many redemptive qualities, which is why it doubtless earned so much acclaim.  But some books, like this one, create difficult dilemmas.  They offer great rewards in total, but there are also some serious drawbacks to reading them as well.  I can’t in good conscience offer my ringing endorsement of it because I think its content was far too disturbing in some scenes.  But I also hope that my review helps you to make a more informed decision, when you notice that enticing copy sitting out on Costco’s book isle.