Melanie’s Reviews

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The point of our book reviews is to steer you toward good new work, but it’s Christmas and I haven’t read much. Instead, I’m recommending my favorite book of all time, The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood.

In a word, it’s brilliant. In fact, my review won’t do it justice. But if you like complex, clever reads, this one’s a gem.

The plot is revealed in non-linear fashion through back story, fast-forwards, occasional newspaper clippings, and personal letters. There’s even a story within a story, a lurid tale doled out during clandestine lover’s trysts.

The story revolves around the relationship between Iris and her sister Laura. Their lives are so entwined that they love the same man and are irreparably hurt by the same man.  One of the delights of the book, for me anyway, was the sly revenge wrought by one sister on behalf of the other. Payback at its most masterful!

I hesitate to reveal too much, because much of the satisfaction is derived from the delicately layered way that secrets are revealed.

It’s so good, I re-read it occasionally. I’m never disappointed. Enjoy!

The Accidental Demon Slayer by Angie Fox

The whole paranormal romance category was threatening to pass me by, much like most new technology, but fortunately AJ passed me a copy of this book and said, “read this, it’s funny.” I did, and it was.

Lizzie Brown’s orderly world is turned upside down when her Harley riding Grandma shows up and informs her that she will become a powerful demon slayer on her birthday.  When a demon crawls out of Lizzie’s toilet moments after she turns thirty, she makes a snap decision to trust the grandmother she’s just met.

Thus begins a frantic, cross-country odyssey to unite with the rest of the coven and learn the fine art of demon slaying. Lizzie’s adventures and misadventures, with what surely must be one of the most colorful covens around, provide a lot of laughs and some tense moments too.

Aided by her flamboyant dog, Pirate, who she now has the ability to communicate with, and a really hot griffin (who knew?), Lizzie must find a way to travel to hell and defeat the demon Vald. Her grandmother’s life depends on it.
This book was a lot of fun and an easy introduction to the paranormal world. On a personal note, I happened to attend a workshop at The Big Read in St. Louis hosted by Ms. Fox and others, and she is every bit as sparkly in real life as her writing suggests.

She Flew the Coop by Michael Lee West

I just finished a book that transported me so expertly to the fictional town of Limoges, Louisiana that I could taste the home-grown tomatoes and see the heat-waves shimmering up from the streets. It’s rare for a book to capture the essence of small-town South, but She Flew the Coop by Michael Lee West did it to perfection.

The book starts in the point-of-view of 16-year-old Olive Nepper, who is on her way home to poison herself after learning she is pregnant with the Baptist preacher’s child. Through Olive, we meet others: her parents, their neighbors and relatives, even the maid who cleans the Nepper home. The book follows and reveals each of these different characters, weaving their stories with Olive’s, until the reader is left with an intricate understanding of the town and its secrets.

I enjoyed the way many of the stories ended on a positive note without resorting to a false sense of happily ever after. I also appreciated that the author never tried to explain the unexplainable – why a woman stays with a man who beats her senseless, or why some people are simply mean-spirited for no reason. Some mysteries in life have no pat answers, and the author is wise to respect that.

I am a huge fan of Southern fiction, and I found a lot to love about She Flew the Coop. I would definitely recommend this book to friends.

Good Grief by Lolly Winston

I laughed my ass off at Lolly Winston’s debut novel, Good Grief, about a wife who loses her husband to cancer after three years of marriage. There, I said it. And believe me, I know how it sounds. But if laughing out loud was wrong, I don’t want to be right!

In lesser hands, main character Sophie Stanton would have been a caricature, but Winston deftly blends the humor with the humanity. Much of the comic relief is provided by the juxtaposition of Sophie’s world-changing loss with the mundane, every-day tasks of her life: holding down a job, maintaining a home, shopping for groceries.  The chapter about Sophie’s job as PR rep for a scrotal patch alone is worth the price of the book.

With help, Sophie begins the halting journey back to normal, discovering along the way a new idea of what constitutes family and a different benchmark for career success.

All in all, one of the funniest, most delightful books I’ve read in a while. I thoroughly admired a main character whose stages of grief included denial, anger, depression, and Oreos. 

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

In Jonathan Tropper’s new novel, “This Is Where I Leave You,” Judd Foxman has just lost his father to cancer and his wife to his own radio shock-jock boss. To top it off, his father’s dying request is for the family to sit shiva, a Jewish custom of mourning that forces the immediate family together for seven days. All these events conspire to set up quite a raucous tale of mourning.

To say that Judd’s family is dysfunctional would be an insult to dysfunction. Let’s just say that unless you’re Mackenzie Phillips, the Foxman family has more skeletons rolling around in their closet than you. Predictably during the week, old grievances are addressed (sort of), new starts are attempted (all without any guarantee of success or real change, much as in real life), and revelations are made.

But none of this gets to the heart of how heartbreaking , yet acerbically funny this novel really is. As Trotter writes, “There is no occasion calling for sincerity that the Foxman family won’t quickly diminish or pervert through our own genetically engineered brand of irony and evasion.” And here I thought my family was the only one who did that!

Even while you’re laughing at the “cake with the lit candles up the ass” scene, or the “we just smoked a doobie during Jewish services and set off the fire alarms” scene, those laughs are tempered by the emotions swirling just underneath: fear, insecurity, loneliness, anger. For me, it was quite a satisfying combination and a heck of a read.