Book Review: Your Voice in My Head

Emma Forrest's Your Voice in My Head came so highly recommended to me I felt it should have arrived with gilded gold lettering and a velvet cover. Or something appropriately rich and tacky to visually illustrate the raves granted upon its bindings by the person doing the recommending.

Seriously. I'm not sure I have had a book so heavily hyped to me ever, and this is saying something given how much I read.

The problem with hype, especially when it brews at a personal level, is the acute awareness of the possible arguments and unintentional insults arising should you not like the book as much as the person who started the hype. Reading the book becomes a burden of anticipation and, if you are like me, you may put it off and put it off until you just give in or resoundingly shove it away.

I gave in and plowed through it in one sitting. Then I picked it up a few days later and skimmed back through the pages. I knew I'd be quizzed on it so wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Overall, Your Voice in My Head is intended, I think, as a humorous memoir. It certainly isn't a humorless memoir. Forrest is quite adept at laying out the one-liners with a nice cutting edge. One of my faves: "I hate it when Beyoncé wins a Grammy and in her speech thanks God. He didn't have time to help out in Darfur but he made sure you won an MTV Moonman." Can I hear a resounding "amen"?

In way of a synopsis, the story begins in 2000 when Forrest first comes into contact with Dr. R following a suicide attempt. She sees Dr. R over a span of 8 years, the relationship only ending upon his death. Forrest is devastated, as anyone would be, especially since she had no idea he was ill. The narrative takes this event as the trigger point for much of what follows. And what follows are revelations of depression, mental illness, bulimia, romantic highs and lows, and cutting.

Lest you think Forrest's story is just like numerous other memoirs which cover similar ground, consider this quote:

Chicken and egg: which comes first, looking at yourself with burst blood vessels on your eyes and vomit in your hair and having to cut yourself because you're so ugly? Or eating everything in the cupboard to try to hold down how ugly the cutting has made you? It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with an undertow, madness at least gives you an identity.

These are not words of a simple person with simple motives and with a simple story.

What these words relay to me is that this isn't a story of self-pitying, of a self-affected girl seeking external validation for being "fucked up." It is decidedly a narrative devoid of self-pitying, which given the life lived could very easily of turned out being. It is more self-deprecating, self-attributing than anything else. There is introspection and consideration, creation and destruction, all of which are hard fought and rotate deeply within Forrest.

This is more than adequately illustrated in Forrest's relationship with Gypsy Husband (or GH), which is the bulk of the story. This relationship was (and possibly still is) one of the most emotionally crippling aspects of Forrest's young life. It would easy to blame GH for everything that happened but Forrest doesn't take the easy route. Both had faults and both are at fault for how it played out and she lays the facts bare. You may judge harshly, you may over-sympathize but what you cannot do is brush aside her ability to map logic to emotion while, at the same time, not condemning herself to the postures of intellectual superiority or the silliness of emotional haphazardness at any given moment. This is a talent which very few people possess in this particular micro-genre.

It is most likely I would have picked up Forrest's memoir without it being pushed upon me. I had read somewhere comparisons to Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Such endorsements piqued my interest, as both of these books had a strong impact on my life. I discovered these comparisons as being flimsy at best. All are memoirs, all deal with intensely personal ailments and ruminations yet I didn't feel a pull, a settled warmth towards Forrest like I did with Plath and Eggers.

This is because I wanted it to be more of a tribute to Dr. R, or rather just more. His death is the narrative pivot, the defining event for the book. Baring her admiration and respect, Forrest writes,

"[Dr. R.] was cheerful. He was an eternal optimist. There was nothing I could tell him that he'd tell me was as bad as I'd decided it was. 'Oh, and then I murdered a drifter. I stabbed him twenty-two times.' 'Only twenty-two times? That's fewer than twenty-three.' I trusted him completely. And I liked how he saw me. It's that simple." 

These are profound words expressing profound feelings. Yet, there is little explored in terms of what losing this particular relationship means to her.

Forrest does well to highlight the impact Dr. R had on others in life and in death. She does this by using comments left in the online guestbook setup for his New York Times obituary within the narrative. You get a very solid and clear idea of the type of doctor and person Dr. R was through these comments. But, extracting the impact he had on her life is rather muted and soft. Of course, her selection of specific comments provides a window into the type of doctor and person Forrest wants to project to us. But the narrative doesn't come to any meaningful or personal conclusion, which I now wonder is the point she's striving to make. That there is no meaningful conclusion to be had because the relationship is still, in some fashion, going on in her head. She can deal with and conclude the relationship with GH but does not necessarily strive to conclude the one with Dr. R.

I don't really know, and this is the best compliment I can provide for the book. There doesn't necessarily need to be anything tidied up at the end; I like puzzling out ideas and conclusions on my own. Ultimately, Your Voice in My Head is Forrest's story, her life and how it is played out and written out is for her to decide. And while I cannot achieve the same level of hype which foisted the book upon me, I can offer a suggestion to consider walking up to Forrest's window for a few hours and take a look inside. It may not be a life-altering read for you but her story is worthy of recognition as being life-altering.

Read an edited excerpt.

Book Review: Yes, Chef: A Memoir

My introduction to Chef Marcus Samuelsson came courtesy of Top Chef Masters. I was watching the program in support of Susur Lee, one of Canada's most renowned chefs, and found myself cheering on Samuelsson equally during the final round.

Why? He just seemed likeable. And honest. And not pretentious is the way so many other chefs come across on these shows.

Now, I am not a 'foodie' or whatever moniker is in fashion these days. I like food to be simple, and which can be described in 3 words or less. I'm one of those people who doesn't really like dressing on salads, as I want to taste the true flavors of the components without a mask. I want lettuce to taste like lettuce, and not overly slicked with vinegar or oil or anything else. Knowing this about myself, I was interested to see what I would discover through Samuelsson's Yes, Chef: A Memoir.

Would it be stuffed with self-importance? Would it be condescending towards my simple food choices? And what is the spice mixture on the cover?

My only other experience adventure in the sub-sub-genre of celebrity chef autobiography comes from Anthony Bourdain. I really enjoyed Kitchen Confidential mainly because that world was so new to me. I even enjoyed the television show that was based on it; well, I enjoyed the supporting cast anyway. But unlike Bourdain's tales you will not find booze benders, drug binges, or high profanity in Yes, Chef save for a few youthful follies. Instead, you'll find a heart-warming albeit somewhat tragic tale bouncing from Ethiopia to Sweden to Germany to France to the United States and back to Ethiopia.

Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia where he was hospitalized at age three with tuberculosis along with his older sister and mother. Following his mother's death, a white middle-class couple from Göteborg, Sweden adopted Samuelsson and his older sister. It was his grandmother Helga who inspired Samuelsson’s love of cooking early on, as he spent many hours beside her in the kitchen learning the Swedish dishes that would come to influence his career in later days.

After the heartbreaking news he would not become a professional soccer player ("I sometimes think of myself more as a failed soccer player than as an accomplished chef."), Samuelsson fully embraced a career in the culinary arts. He went to restaurant school, worked in kitchens around Sweden and Europe, and completed stints on cruise ships. All of these experiences fueled his desire to mix food and cultures, to experiment beyond the standard definitions of what is considered "the best food."

I knew I truly liked Samuelsson when he stated: “Who lied? Who started the lie that France had the greatest food in the world?” Yeah, who did? I'd really like to know too.

His rise to chef stardom happened in New York at Aquavit, a famous New York restaurant specializing in Nordic cuisine where he became head chef at age 24. This event shaped many of his experiences that came after, including the opportunity to travel to Ethiopia and connect with his neglected culinary roots. It is here Samuelsson meets his father for the first time, and realizes the full strength of the familial bonds shaping his life and his cooking.

Narratively, Yes, Chef begins to peter out in the later chapters when the focus switches to more current events such as cooking for the President of the United States, marriage, and his restaurant Rooster in Harlem. They are not as fluid. Perhaps it is because the topics are too current, too "of the now" that they lack the weighted reflection and introspection shown in the previous chapters.

The story of Marcus Samuelsson is of someone who tried, stumbled, tried again, succeeded, and repeated. Samuelsson has made mistakes; he admits it. He doesn't try to make excuses or bend the truth to make himself sound like a better person than he really is. This honesty is what makes the story such an engaging and inspiring read.

What also makes it inspiring is the threaded theme of how crucial mentoring is for youth (and I would say for everyone). A large part of his success can be attributed to the mentoring provided by family, friends, and colleagues along the way. Samuelsson himself takes time to mentor young people in his neighborhood, inviting them over to his apartment to cook with him. Who does this? Really, who does this?

Overall, I admire the reserved nature of the Yes, Chef, which I suspect is also Samuelsson at his core. We are allowed in pretty far but there is still a palpable, respectable distance. This is no 'look at me, how brilliant I am"; it is "here I am and my journey thus far. Take me for what it is and for who I am."

Okay - yes, chef.

Read an excerpt from Yes, Chef: A Memoir

Book Beginnings on Friday

Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Katy from A Few More Pages. Instructions are pretty clear: just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.

 This week's entry - Monica McInerney's Upside Down Inside Out: A Novel






 

Eva Kennedy had just stepped into the cold March air when a watermelon rolled across the footpath in front of her.

How can anyone resist reading about a runaway watermelon?!

Book Beginnings on Friday

Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Katy from A Few More Pages. Instructions are pretty clear: just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.

 This week's entry -Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife: A Novel

In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

This struck me on a personal level. My paternal grandfather passed years before I was born, and in the  photographs I have seen of him he would have also been as bald as a stone had we ever met and gone to see anything, let alone tigers.

Table of Contents: Your Voice In My Head

Author: Emma Forrest
Publisher/Year: Random House, 2011
Synopsis: Emma Forrest, a British journalist, was just twenty-two and living the fast life in New York City when she realized that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. In a cycle of loneliness, damaging relationships, and destructive behavior, she found herself in the chair of a slim, balding, and effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist—a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the dangerous tide after she tried to end her life. She was on the brink of drowning, but she was still working, still exploring, still writing, and she had also fallen deeply in love. One day, when Emma called to make an appointment with her psychiatrist, she found no one there. He had died, shockingly, at the age of fifty-three, leaving behind a young family. Reeling from the premature death of a man who had become her anchor after she turned up on his doorstep, she was adrift. And when her all-consuming romantic relationship also fell apart, Emma was forced to cling to the page for survival and regain her footing on her own terms.

Reviews:

The Guardian
"Who knows whether it would have helped but, as she moves on to new psychiatrists and (presumably) new men, you can't help hoping she'll find what she really needs: someone who'll see straight through her and not fall for her oh-so-plausible lines on everything. And then, chillingly, you worry that the very existence of this book will provide her with the one thing she needs like a hole in the head: an audience."

The Globe and Mail
"Being a “messed-up girl” is an experience of being too much: too smart, too sexy, too crazy, too broken, too demanding. And Forrest's memoir succeeds by including the discursive too-much-ness of all that love and sanity. Her story is crushing and complicated, and entirely common."

The New York Times
"[a]protracted meditation on the blessing of self-­transformation — “You’ve struggled,” the rabbi says, “and now you can change” — is profound. Forrest didn’t write it, but through these words we share her insight: there’s something to be said for occasionally listening to a voice other than your own."

The Sunday Times
"Her style is more honest and witty than harrowing… It's difficult to write a convincing tale of depression that's also an entertaining romp, but Forrest has done it."

Line By Line: Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”

“Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.”

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.”

“I felt my voice had fallen through and through me, and I couldn't summon it back to tell him or myself anything at all.”

“When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality."

Table of Contents: The Swimming Pool

Author: Holly LeCraw 
Publisher/Year: Random House, 2010
Synopsis: Marcella di Pavarese Atkinson has always longed for love, warmth, understanding.  Seven years ago, she believed she had found it, although illicitly, with Cecil McClatchey–a married father of two, and a longtime summer acquaintance from Cape Cod.  But on the night their romance abruptly ended, Cecil’s wife was found dead, and Cecil died soon after, an uncharged suspect.  Now Marcella lives alone, divorced, estranged from her teenaged daughter, and hobbled by her grief and guilt.

Meanwhile, Cecil’s grown son, Jed, returns to the Cape for the summer for the first time in years, with his sister and her young children.  One morning, in an upstairs closet, he finds a bathing suit he recognizes as Marcella’s–a relic, unbeknownst to him, of his father’s affair.  A hunch, his years-long hunger for answers, and the memory of a teenaged crush send Jed looking for her.  But when Marcella and Jed, to their deep surprise, fall into a passionate affair of their own, they must hide it from their families and also begin, reluctantly, to look more closely at the past. What they find is shocking, heartbreaking, and, perhaps, the beginning of healing; but as they confront their shared pain, a crisis is brewing in the present that will force them, and us, to think about the very nature of love.

What Others Have To Say
The New York Times
"I understand that this is a bodice-ripper couched as a literary novel, something you can, without blushing, leave on the white rattan coffee table at your vacation rental. But does it have to take itself so seriously?"

Kirkus Reviews
"Whether open or suppressed, passion rules events, but this is not a murder mystery; instead LeCraw reveals the complex moral and psychological mystery within all relationships."

Entertainment Weekly
"...Holly LeCraw wades slowly into her narrative instead of diving straight in, so the story takes a while to pick up. But once it does, the suburban afflictions that are drowning these characters make it difficult to put down"

Book Trailer: The Story of Forgetting

Book Trailer: The Ravine

Table of Contents: Olive Kitteridge

Author: Elizabeth Strout
Publisher/Year: Random House, 2008
Synopsis: Olive Kitteridge is "a novel of stories," that all revolve around Olive Kitteridge, a retired seventh-grade math teacher in Crosby, Maine. She's married to Henry, a kind pharmacist and they have one son. Olive, though, is a larger-than-life force to be reckoned with. She's large, stubborn, opinionated, and more than willing to speak her mind. The thirteen stories concern her relationship with her husband, her son, her neighbors, and her ex-students. Olive is more complex and feeling than she seems, and she struggles with the changes in her life.

What Others Have To Say
The New York Times
"...there are moments in which slipping into a character's viewpoint seems to involve the revelation of an emotion more powerful and interesting than simple fellow feeling - a complex, sometimes dark, sometimes life-sustaining dependency on others."

The Washington Post
"There are glimmers of warmth, of human connection, in even the darkest of these stories."

San Francisco Chronicle
"Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she's not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her."

Book Review: Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

Publisher/Year: Random House, 2009
Book Club: The Next Best Book Club 2010

Review
Andrew Davidson’s debut novel The Gargoyle has all the aspirations of bestseller dynamite, yet is clouded by the reality of reader contraction. Authorship pretensions bleed through on every page, through the clunky narration that at best limps along to a highly unsatisfactory and weary end. Davidson is, if nothing else, imaginative in his narrative formulations; however, the execution of these formulations runs the gamut from highly emotive to cringe-inducing.

The novel begins with high and seductive intentions, plunging its unnamed hero into a fiery self-apocalyptic adventure. A pornographer and cocaine addict, the hero runs off the road one night after witnessing a shower of arrows heading for him. He survives but suffers from horrific burns to the majority of the body, thanks to the explosive combination of the car catching fire and him having an open bottle of liquor in his lap.

While recovering in the burn unit, the hero learns that he has lost his good looks and his penis, and with that pretty much any will to live on. But, and it takes him awhile to accept this, he has also gained something in return - a mysterious female companion named Marianne Engel who claims to be his lover from the 14th century. Marianne is a sculptor well-known for her gargoyles that are high in demand by the wealthy. She is also a patient at the hospital, though a resident of the psychiatric unit and not the burn unit. Her assigned unit offers an explanation of sorts to the hero for the cryptic and history-steeped narrative formulations she hurls at the hero as fact.

The two become close, eventually resulting in co-habitation following the hero’s release from the hospital. Their slow-creeping closeness is not the resulting fantasy of a delusional mind paired with a psychically crippled one, as would be easy to conceive based on how the overarching story is initially positioned. Davidson leads the reader down the path in another direction, one that wishes to present a picture of calm sanity and battered redemption rooted in the ever-elusive tangible forces of love.

Through the months marking the hero’s recovery, Marianne reconstructs their love affair in installments that take on almost mythical proportions. She tells the hero of their first meeting, her a nun at a monastery at Engelthal and he a mercenary brought there for treatment after being hit by a flaming arrow. She nursed him back to health, renounced her vows, and fled with him to continue their apparently undying love affair. Her devotion to his recovery in the present mimics that expressed upon their initial engagement. Now, as then, it is Marianne who inspires the hero to live, to move beyond his blistering physical reality and to move towards the continuity of re-birth. To Marianne, “gargoyles ache to be born” and no such greater gargoyle has such a compulsive ache than the unnamed hero.

The release of their story is excruciatingly slow, a pace even noted by the hero, as Marianne weaves tales of inextinguishable love from around the world into their own. Viking Iceland, 14th century Italy, medieval Japan, and Victorian England all take resident in drawn out tragic tales that hinge on the four elements of air, water, fire, and earth to wring every ounce of romanticism for the hero’s edification. There is even a tour through Dante’s hell, a hallucinated travel positioned as a coda to previous narratives for the hero as he endures morphine withdrawal. All of these tales convey a common message – love outlasts death, as one or both of the intendeds will and must sacrifice in its name.

This particular episode could be considered the most vivid of the novel, not only because of the evocation of its literary predecessor but also because it is where the deepest disappointments of the novel become fully realized. Davidson is just not a strong enough author to follow through on fluidly projecting his imaginings onto the page. He constantly muddles his sensitivities to his own characters by imparting quick quips and descriptions of the inane (“a plump eggplant’s fecund belly pregnant with stuffing”) that serve to implode the intensity of the moment in favor of a more comforting middle ground. The commitment Davidson requires to own the audacity of his imagination and the characters engrossed within it is just not present on a consistent basis.

And without the consistency, it is taxing to move past the immobility of the present-day story and submerge into the collage of stories-within-stories that is The Gargoyle. While readers can allow themselves to be seduced by the possibility of ever-lasting love that spans centuries, it is markedly more difficult to believe that any of the characters marking the various tales were experiencing love. Little intimacy is portrayed, as Davidson does not excavate any of the emotional depth expected for such a grand topic. There is more sentimental sheen than true affection threaded throughout the novel, and unfortunately that is just not enough.

Davidson’s determination to make The Gargoyle a comprehensive whole is applaudable and a little enviable. He did not back away from the scope of his story, demonstrating an ambitious will for his entrance into the literary world. And he does deserve admiration for his skill at tackling physical descriptions ("I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat"). Actually, he is perhaps a little too skilled as the first few pages can be more than a little assaulting on the senses.

Guaranteed, The Gargoyle will inspire decidedly different takes on how successful Davidson was on packaging his ambitions within its pages. It will be difficult though for the most ardent supporter to not agree that The Gargoyle suffers from wanting to be more substantial than it regrettably turns out to be.

Canada Reads: Nikolas Dickner, Nikolski

Translator: Lazer Lederhendler
Publisher/Year: Random House, 2005 (translation 2008)

“Archaelogy is the discipline of the future. Every time an old IBM finds its way to the dump, it becomes an artifact. Artifacts are the main products of our civilization. When all the computer experts are unemployed, we’ll still have millions of years of work ahead of us. That is the fundamental paradox of archaeology. Our discipline will reach its peak at the end of the world.”

These are the wise words of one Thomas Saint-Laurent, a secondary but key character in Nicolas Dickner’s crafty first novel Nikolski. It is an appropriate statement, as its undertones apply to all three of the main protagonists looping through Dickner’s literary excavation site. Dickner himself takes on the role of archaeologist throughout the novel, evaluating with ease and discipline the lives, experiences and intentions of his multi-faceted characters. These evaluations occur in a similar fashion as to how we the readers may guide guests through a photo album or slide show, pausing on a singular photo, working through the memories from the bits of information contained within its boundaries and then moving on to the next without any further regard.

Nikolski initiates with the narration of an unnamed young man who represents one point on the interlocked triangle of Dickner’s archaelogical zone of personal destiny. Through this young man, the reader learns that Nikolski is a tiny village on Unmak Island in the Aleutians “[i]nhabited by thirty-six people, five thousand sheep and an indeterminate number of dogs,” and the final resting place of one Jonas Doucet.

For the unnamed narrator, Nikolski is the name with which he christens a treasured plastic compass, the only item he has of his father Jonas. This compass is a constant companion for the narrator following the death of his mother, strung around his neck like a grown-up version of a baby pacifier. It is the only link the narrator has to life as he knew it, and to the life that he thinks could have been. The constant companionship of the compass with the unnamed narrator also keeps the reader tied to the soon-to-be colliding biographical and geographical worlds of the narrator’s yet unknown family branches, as evidenced in the compass’ refusal to point anywhere but Jonas’ final resting spot.

As the story progresses, it is revealed that Jonas is also the father of Noah, an archaeology student from Saskatchewan. Noah is half-Chipewyan, raised solely by his mother Sarah in the back of an ever-moving caravan nicknamed “Grampa”. Sarah and Noah roamed across Canada, barely staying in any of the towns they encountered on their nomadic adventures. He decides to move to Montreal to study archaelogy, specifically nomadic peoples, leaving his mother to continue passing through the Canadian landscape solo. A large component of his story is the continuous act of writing letters to Sarah, picking post offices based on ever-slipping knowledge of her travel patterns to which to send his life updates.

The third protaganist is Joyce, recently transplanted from the East Coast where she was raised by her widowed father. Joyce grew up listening to the grand stories of her family’s long lineage of pirates and buccaneers from her grandfather, including the seafaring life of her uncle Jonas. Then one day Joyce learns that her mother is not dead, and has been seemingly peddling the family legacies south of the border. This knowledge propels Joyce to bolt from her small town existence and head for Montreal. Joyce dreams of being a pirate like her legendary ancestor, Heremegilde Doucet, and she makes this a reality by becoming a computer hacker and identity thief.

Once all three individuals converge on the same stomping ground, Nikolski starts to pick up a little steam by having their lives intersect, albeit independently, through the second-hand bookstore where the unnamed narrator works. Joyce finds a job at a local fish market, working with immigrant Maelo who happens to be sharing a flat with Noah. Neither Joyce nor Noah ever meet though, despite their one degree of separation; they remain ignorant of their biological connections, their shared genetic predisposition to nomadism.

And the idea of nomadism is the arching untidiness that Dickner uses to define his central thesis. Nikolski is pinned together by coincidences and chances that fan together into an absorbing rumination on destiny. All three protagonists are soloists, seeking connection with the world around them but in controlled measures they believe to be of their own making.

Yet Dickner writes their world and experiences such to portray that none of the characters escapes the machinations of fate. The events through which their connections appear and dispel are inexplicable, "[a]nd that is exactly the trouble with inexplicable events, you inevitably end up interpreting them in terms of predestination, or magic realism, or government plots."

The concept of predestination seems hokey but transforms under Dickner’s guidance into a charming exercise of narrative randomness. Each character’s story represents different points on the Nikolski compass with the needle swaying endlessly between desire for the open road and longing for a singular place to call home.

The untidiness mentioned earlier inspires numerous loose ends that never get resolved by the conclusion of the novel. Readers may be discouraged at the lack of challenge or action devices thrown in the path of these characters. Nikolski is not a novel to pursue out of a need for an ending or conclusionary codas. Its cleverness lies in the ways Dickner dances around such potential inevitabilities with evocative imagery and a cast of eccentric and believable characters. He picks up and picks at the artifacts created through each character’s experiences and renders an elegant and creative view of their world. Nikolski is a high achievement in storytelling, by craftily threading an allusive story that propels the reader to do just the same.

Table of Contents: Before I Wake

Author: Robert J. Wiersema
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2007
Synopsis: Injured by a hit-and-run driver while crossing the street, Sherry Barrett lies in a hospital where her doctors say she will never wake up. Her distraught parents, Karen and Simon, make the painful decision to take her off life support. But when they do, Sherry spontaneously begins breathing on her own, the first of many miraculous events to occur.

Henry Denton, the driver who struck Sherry, is haunted by the accident and attempts to take his own life, only to be saved by an unexplained force. Sherry's nurse discovers that the little girl has the power to heal. When word of her gift leaks, the sick begin lining up to be saved and a mysterious stranger sets his sights on vanquishing the believers and the Barretts.

What Others Have To Say:

Quill & Quire
"While there’s no doubt that Wiersema’s compassion and sympathy for his characters are genuine, and that he tells a cracking good tale, occasionally it’s just possible that he may be pulling our leg."

Canadian Literature
An elaborate, unbelievable plot drives the novel and peoples it with stereotypical, unbelievable characters."

Quarterly Conversation
"Wiersema creates an intriguing novel that’s part literary, part supernatural thriller."

Extras:
Interview with CBC.ca

Book Review: Joël Glenn Brenner, The Emperor's of Chocolate

Author: Joël Glenn Brenner
Publisher: Random House, 1999

Review:
It took ten years, 250 interviews and countless phone calls, letters and emails for Joël Glenn Brenner to complete her investigation into the world of chocolate making. This investigation started out as a routine assignment for The Washington Post on how Mars succeeded Hershey as the preeminent chocolate company in the late 1980’s. However, the assignment soon turned into a more concentrated investigation when Brenner discovered how little was known about these two candy empires.

The result of her efforts, The Emperor’s of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars, is an impressive exposè of the two corporations that have defined and refined, standardized and strategized the public’s appetite for all things chocolate. Brenner’s book is an eye-opening and mouth-watering exploration of the all-too-real Willy Wonka world of chocolate making. In fact, one cannot help but feel a little like Charlie in the chocolate factory—bewildered, amazed, excited, frightened—when reading about the exploits of both companies.

Brenner approaches her subject manner on numerous fronts, including historical, biographical, economical and cultural reference points throughout her discussions. Her varied investigative positions provide for a vivid rendering of how the mutual interdependency that characterized the relationship between Hershey and Mars throughout the early decades of both corporations had turned bitter and hostile by the late 1980’s.

What plainly emerges from Brenner’s presentation is that the delectable, addictive sweets contained within various hued paper and foil wrappers are anything but representative of the chocolate world. This world is as cunning and ruthless as any other major industry; we just tend to naively think of it otherwise because of the resulting product. But the reality is that the world of chocolate is big, big business. Forget the Cola Wars. Brenner sharply demonstrates that Pepsi and Coca-Cola have nothing on the madness and meanness that permeates the chocolate world in general, and Hershey and Mars in particular.

Brenner’s main thesis is that “the histories of these two industry rivals are closely intertwined. . . . Mars would not have succeeded without Hershey and vice versa.” This intertwining is most evident in Brenner’s reinforcement of the fact that early on Mars’ relied on Hershey to provide the chocolate for their products. However, one of the most interesting ways Brenner goes about proving her thesis is in relaying how M&M’s got their name. The M’s stand for the two senior executives at both companies, Forrest Mars Sr and William F.R. Murrie, president of Hershey. The partnership between these two men, while necessary at first for Forrest Mars to increase the production and stature of this product, quickly soured as Mars’ ambitions clashed greatly with those of Murrie and Hershey. Brenner threads this story throughout the book, using it to link how the individual behaviors and perspectives of the principle players of both companies – Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars Sr – became actualized in their respective corporate philosophies and outcomes. In brief: “where Milton Hershey saw utopia, Forrest Mars saw conquest”.

To her credit, Brenner does not rush to give Mars the chocolate maker crown. Rather, she concludes that it is understandable as to why Mars succeeded Hershey in the late 1980’s. Forrest Mars’ hunger for conquering new markets led to an expansion of Mars Inc into the international market, and consequently the creation of a global brand name. Such hunger is evident in Brenner’s detailing of Mars’ shrewd capitalization on the Gulf War to snag military contracts from Hershey, and the ‘Snickerization’ of Russia.

Conversely, Hershey was imprisoned by its own philanthropic history, resulting in a closing of ranks rather than full-on expansion until the mid-1960’s. The principles of family and “staying the course” that built the company were by then stifling its ability to grow as aggressively as Mars. Hershey was (and still is) accountable to a trust that made competing with Mars very difficult. It was almost inevitable then that Mars would eventually take top spot over Hershey. But Brenner accurately states that the bitterness between the two companies will never be stayed as long as Hershey and Mars are players in the chocolate world; it will only continue to grow and lend itself to even more conflicts.

What ultimately makes Brenner’s book so fascinating is that she was the first reporter ever allowed within the hallowed walls of Mars Inc. She eagerly takes her readers inside along with her, shedding light onto all facets of their operations. Hershey and Mars reacted to her book by slamming shut their corporate doors. Mars even went so far as to fire the public relations consultants who assisted Brenner’s investigation. But their reactions just make Brenner’s book all that much more important, all that much more richer as we know that we may never get a glimpse inside this secret world ever again.

Perhaps the greatest compliment one can give this book though is that Brenner never gets stuck in the minute details of the story. The histories of Mars and Hershey are not easily uncovered or assembled, and she puts her journalist skills to good use. She easily transitions between time periods, people and places, being sure to pick up the threads in later discussions to ensure the continuity of her arguments. Her attention to the various ‘stories within stories’ such as Hershey’s experiments and subsequent discovery of the sour Hershey chocolate provides for a rich and multi-layered book that never gets bogged down in its own complexity. It oscillates neatly between a harsh exposè and an unabashed tribute to the candy addict in all of us.

Table of Contents: The Opposite of Love

Author: Julie Buxbaum
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2008
Synopsis: Emily Haxby is eager to break through the emotional and professional ties that bind. She is all about self-destructing and blowing apart all her relationships with friends and family. Emily soon finds out that the opposite of love is not hate but loneliness and emptiness.


What Others Have to Say:
Washington Post
"One of the pleasures of Buxbaum's novel is her manipulation of the conventions of "Sex and the City" and its literary ilk."

Buzz Sugar
"The best part: it's funny. Not fall-down-guffawing funny, but wry and self-aware and silly and sarcastic."

Trashionista
"My eyes were stinging with emotion right towards the end, then bizarrely, I also found myself skipping little bits."

Extras:
Interview with the Author