“They are too accomplished. They have accumulated too much. They expect too much. They demand too much. They even love their kids too much. This love is crippling in its own way.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (AUG 2, 2011)

Somewhere on the journey from the comfortable upstate college town of Ithaca to the glistening moneyed world of downtown Manhattan, the Burgamots have lost their way.

Dad Richard has become consumed by his prestigious executive role at a major New York university. Mom Liz is fielding social calls and taking her young adopted daughter to sleepovers in a lush and decadent midtown hotel where “the central part of the suite looked exactly like the one Tony Soprano had once rented in a dream sequence…double sink, toilet, shower, and bidet in the size of a studio apartment.” And their teenage son, Jake? He’s navigating adolescence without a roadmap. Like all too many teens, he feels like he “didn’t belong here, in the city, in this apartment, at this school, or in this family…”

This is a family crusin’ for a bruisin’. And it all comes to a head when one morning, Jake received an explicit emailed video from a sexually precocious eighth-grade admirer named Daisy. Stunned and clueless, Jake is overcome by a cocktail of emotions: “He’d gotten hard. He’d gotten proud. He’d been appalled, scared; he’d wanted to show off.” And just like that, without forethought, he clicks and forwards to a close friend…who clicks and forwards to HIS close friends…and so on. Soon the video has gone viral all over the world and Jake – and his entire family – is in murky legal waters.

Author and social observer Helen Schulman maps out this family’s spiraling journey to the top – and their ignoble withdrawal from favor. With cinematic pacing – reminding me somewhat of Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal— she moves her focus in and out, in a blistering look at a family on the crossroads

Had this book remained tightly focused on the ensuing scandal, it would have been a page turning “read.” But Ms. Schulman is more ambitious. She takes on broader themes: how one two-second bad decision can change a teen’s whole future, when today’s technology in involved. How one’s sense of identity and security are all fragile conceits that can disappear in a heartbeat. And perhaps most important, how wealth without grounding can turn individuals into careless people who use questionable tactics to get optimum results. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it becomes all too easy. The Bergamots, too, are on the verge of those who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”

With an abundance of psychological acuity, Helen Schulman tracks a family who is having difficulty managing “this beautiful life” – a life that shows cracks and fissures along its underbelly. Everyone is affected, even their young daughter Coco, who, with her overblown kindergarten graduation ceremony and over-the-top schedule, is primed (it is hinted) for a similar destiny to Daisy’s. The ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, but the fragility of the shattered sense of self – for Jake, for the young girl, for Liz and Richard – lingers. No one is insulated by privilege…not when the demands of life have become so complex. And no one, the author suggests – rich or not so rich – is immune to the sudden scandal in a digital age.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 126 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Schulman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Testimony by Anita Shreve Aftermath by Brian Shawyer What Was She Thinking? by Zoe Heller

Bibliography:

• Not a Free Show: Stories (1988)
• Out of Time (1991)
• The Revisionist (1998)
• P.S. (2001)
• A Day at the Beach (2007)
• This Beautiful Life (August 2011)

“…But what I really mean is Poor us. All three of us have had terrible things happen – murder, cancer, abandonment – and for the first time I’m tempted to tell Robbie about Rachel. It’s not sympathy I want but the credibility that comes with having faced and lived through something tragic. I can say that I understand, and I do, but to Robbie and Alice – who know nothing of my past – my words would sound hollow……I say nothing.”

Book Review:

Review by Maggie Hill (JUL 30, 2010)

It is important to set the parameters, or the standards, of a Young Adult novel right up front when reviewing one in a public forum. The Young Adult novel is a genre that allows authors to explore edgy content within the typical bathos of teen self-consciousness. If a novel is to be successful in this market, it must ambitiously try to underscore topics such as murder, sickness, abuse, heroin addiction, suicide, sexuality – pretty much any topic with an “edge” – and have a central character that is either surrounded by the subject, or is going to potentially be lost to the subject. Take Romeo & Juliet, minus out the words of William Shakespeare, put it in first person narrative form – let’s let Romeo be the narrator – and you will be soundly situated in a Young Adult novel.

In general, these novels tend to be action-oriented, filled with personal drama, and focused almost exclusively on a difficulty that one character experiences. Because the genre’s goal is to dramatize a topic and render an ultimate (usually, moral) denouement, chapters are generally short and can read like scenes from a television show or play. Good examples of this genre make liberal use of dialogue, realistic setting, and character archetypes (i.e. the mean girl, the bad boy, the messed-up-by-sadness protagonist).

All of this is by way of introducing Beautiful Malice, a YA novel by first-time author Rebecca James. The novel centers around, and is told by, a high school student who has been a witness to, and victim of, her sister’s murder. On the heels of this tragedy, she relocates to another town and takes a new name. There, she keeps to herself and keeps her secrets and self-blame safe. Until she meets the larger-than-life, beautiful, magnetic Alice, who befriends her. Alice makes Katherine, the narrator, her best friend. Although Katherine is striving to just be unnoticed and live a quiet last year of high school, Alice’s friendship spins her into a web of psychological torture as only a teenage girl can experience it.

The topic of this novel is murder; specifically, the repercussions of a terribly normal mistake suddenly crashing into someone else’s malicious intent. Thrown into the mix is promiscuity, teen pregnancy, mistrust of adults, and a world in which teenagers must find their own way. It’s a page turner.

This novel is a successful YA novel for all the reasons mentioned above. For an adult, there are limits to what we will accept as drama. However, for the audience that this novel seeks, it deserves to be noticed and read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bantam (July 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Maggie Hill
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca James
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More YA: Lucy by Laurence Gonzales Twilight by Stephanie Meyers Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Bibliography:

• Beautiful Malice (July 2010)

“There were so many things I wanted to see and do in my lifetime, but how many of them were within my reach?”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JUL 16, 2010)

In the baking hot Texas summer of 1899, Harry, the oldest of eleven-year-old Calpurnia Tate’s six brothers gives her a notebook in which she begins to write down her observations of nature. She also longs to get her hands on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but the local librarian says it’s barely fit for adults, let alone a child. Calpurnia’s mother is busy riding herd over her seven active offspring and running the house, while her father oversees their cotton acreage and the mill. Neither parent nor all the brothers seem to have a scientific bone in their bodies. In the Tate family, Darwin’s note that “the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather’ seems on the money: Calpurnia’s granddaddy is a rather remote man who retired from commerce years ago to take up the pursuits of a naturalist. One day he comes across his granddaughter making her notes, and they begin exploring their mutual interest together. The old man mentors her, even opening one of his locked cabinets to haul out his copy of the book she so wants to read.

But Callie Vee, as most call her, is a girl born in times when women were expected to get married, have families, and run homes. Few and far between were those who had already bucked the conventions of the time. Calpurnia has the quiet, steady influence of her grandfather to encourage her love of science and nature, but her mother, especially, thinks it is time for her to really start applying herself to learning domestic skills. So her opportunities to roam the land and be in her granddaddy’s makeshift lab are sometimes curtailed by the order to learn knitting, needlepoint, and cooking. Captain Tate (her grandfather) tells her how one day, rather late in his life, he discovered the pull toward learning more of the world. Callie Vee has felt the same pull, much earlier in her life. But both of them know that no matter when such a desire for knowledge is discovered, it should be heeded. The old man, late as it was, did so. But Calpurnia is not sure she will be able to. As the new century approaches, she wonders whether her ambitions are within her reach.

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate is a lovely invitation into a rural America just on the cusp of instituting sweeping changes such as the telephone and automobiles. Jacqueline Kelly creates the details of Calpurnia’s life so engagingly; and Calpurnia herself is, refreshingly, not a spoiled, insolent child (too often depicted in books). She is conscientious, sensitive, and caring, yet possessed of a definite will of her own. Her oldest and her youngest brothers arguably make the greatest impressions among boys, and her mother is more of an influence than her often absent or in-the-background father. And, of course, there is her granddaddy who can’t seem to keep the boys straight, but whose heart Calpurnia wins over.

This is a novel that doesn’t offer completely outrageous adventures or an unbearably suspenseful denouement, although it certainly contains both amusing and heart-tugging episodes. It reminds me of Caddie Woodlawn and similar novels of that genre. It is simply a wonderful story of a girl’s ripening awareness of her inquisitive nature and the possible limits into which she’s been born. Highly recommended to both young and old.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co. (BYR); 1 edition (May 12, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jaqueline Kelly
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larson

Bibliography:

• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (March 2009)

“It might well be riskier to reveal much of anything to one’s parents, burdened as they were by the course of their own imperfect lives and likely to react to secrets or confessions with the usual defenses: scornful dismissal or a panicky, fawning appeal to a ridiculous army of experts.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JUL 15, 2010)

Scan the young adults or teen sections of pretty much any bookstore and you will find an overwhelming percentage of fiction devoted to the vampire segment or to fairy tale romances. In that sense, Jean Christophe-Valtat’s slim novel 03, is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Told through the voice of a high school narrator in the French town of Montperilleux, it captures the emotional rootlessness of the teen years brilliantly. The story revolves around the narrator’s interest in a fellow teenager, a girl who is mentally handicapped and who therefore travels to a special school on the outskirts of town. Even if the narrator is gifted and his mental faculties way ahead of the girl’s, he finds many similarities between himself and the girl. “I was like her, an overprotected schoolchild in a town where nothing at all could plausibly have distracted me from my records and books for any length of time,” he says.

At one point in the story, he admits he is too unsure as to how to even approach the object of his desire. “As far as feelings were concerned, I too was slightly deficient,” the narrator points out.

In pointing out these similarities, the French author drives home the point that even the brightest of teenagers can be quite lost and adrift.

It is evident that the narrator has figured out the rules of the adult world however, and learned how to play their game. “My intelligence is carefully crafted to satisfy all the demands of my teachers, right down to the essential touch of originality that would set me apart,” he says. These are the hints of giftedness in the narrator’s voice. Of course this could also be classified as an adult author’s cynical take on the matter but it’s easy to overlook that angle in the wonderful 03.

It is also touching to see that while the narrator has almost figured out how to work the grownups around him and to play their game, he is still unsure and bumbling when it comes to interactions with his peers. After all he has none of the attention-getting trappings so coveted by teens—nice clothes or, even better, a fancy car.

03 doesn’t really have much of a story but as the book progresses you can see the narrator make peace with the fact that his friend will remain forever trapped in her mind and body while he will move on. This realization is beautifully done.

American readers might wince at the generous use of the word “retarded” in the prose. The prose itself is rendered as one long paragraph over 90-odd pages. This form too might make the material less accessible to some.

Nevertheless those who persevere will be richly rewarded. 03 is a beautiful reflection on the bewildering complexities of the teen years. Teenagers (and adults who have all been there) will find the narrator’s voice to be a mirror of their own. It’s especially heartening to see Christophe-Valtat prove that you don’t need vampires or werewolves to speak to your audience. As his wonderful novel shows, a teen’s everyday insecurities are scary enough.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (June 22, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jean-Christophe Valtat
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another different teen years story: The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson

Bibliography:

• Exes (1997)
• Album: Stories (2002)
• 03: A Novel (June 2010)
• Aurorarama (August 2010)