The Help
By: Kathryn Stockett

Paige’s Rating: (3) of 5
Recommended for: Historical Fiction Readers

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk.

I saw the previews for this movie in the summer, when I was back visiting my family in America. My eyebrows raised as the trailer played in front of me and when it finished, my friend and I leaned in at the same time to say, “Looks good.” When I got back to Turkey, I was disappointed to find out that the movie would not come here until December, so I decided to legally purchase it when it came out on DVD in November. Right? Anyway, the movie was disappointing so when my friend handed me the book last week, I sighed and thought, “Well the book is always better than the movie right? So this must be okay.” And the verdict? The book is okay. It’s not bad like the film but it is not as good as it could have been.

I think the plot is good considering we have been down the 1960’s Mississippi dirt road many times before. Yet, the idea of maids producing a book about their life with the driving force of a white girl behind them is unique and Stockett actually makes it believable in the book. In addition, the author paints a much more dynamic and dangerous view of Jackson than was portrayed in the movie, with extra details and sub-plots. What would have made the overall plot better, however, would have been the development of some of the sub-plots which were introduced and then never developed, like Minny’s pregnancy. Also, some of the sub-plots were unnecessary or in my opinion, a bit ridiculous like the fact that Skeeter’s mother has cancer.

The characters are also done well. Stockett writes from the perspective of the three main characters and does a very good job of making their voices unique from one another. The relationship between the characters is okay, and that is one area that could have also been better. Skeeter and Aibileen grow together as they believe they are doing the right but dangerous thing of organizing the book, but you don’t see them actually have “a moment” where their friendship is apparent, and that is quite a bit of a letdown. In addition, Minny begins to care about the white woman she works for, Celia, but you never see Minny do anything to prove that. Instead the author uses internal dialogue to convey feelings poorly.

Even if you didn’t care much for the movie, you still may find the book a bit more interesting. At the worst, it’s a good rainy-day book to read when nothing else is available to you. It passes the time. But if you liked the movie, than I am sure you are going to love the book and enjoy the extras that didn’t make it to the big screen.

Brida
By: Paulo Coelho

Paige’s Rating: (2) of 5
Recommended for: Spiritual- Fiction Readers

Brida, a young Irish girl, has long been interested in various aspects of magic but is searching for something more. Her search leads her to people of great wisdom. She meets a wise man who dwells in a forest, who teaches her to trust in the goodness of the world, and a woman who teaches her how to dance to the music of the world. As Brida seeks her destiny, she struggles to find a balance between her relationships and her desire to become a witch.

Lately, I feel as if I am in a real bad relationship with the books I am reading. It seems like there is a lot of hype about these books, and my heart quickens when they are described to me. “Oh yes, this one is a best-seller and this other one very smart and deep. Paige, you need to read them.” Wow, that sounds good, and so I can’t wait to meet these books. And while we should never judge a book by the cover, I see that these books have potential; they are attractive and I can dig them. But then, oh, then I read them and get to know them. It is somewhere around page 20 where I find that I am already bored with them but like all my past lovers, I stick it out in case something good does end up coming out of it. *sigh* Oh the hopeful masochist that I am.

I had a few friends, both American and Turkish, recommend this book to me. When I noticed that it was written by the same author of The Alchemist, which also came highly praised, I thought that it would be a good buy. While The Alchemist was good, Brida was barely redeemable.

The character of Brida is a young Irish girl, going to University in the 1980s. Brida begins that journey we all take in order to search for ourselves. Maybe it was due to the translation, but I felt that her character was unchanging from start to finish, even though the words in the book were trying desperately to convince me that she was in a great spiritual transition. In the end, the reader is told that Brida has this new-found knowledge of life and of herself, but when I looked at the actions in the book, I just wasn’t buying it because those actions wouldn’t have personally developed my spirituality.

So let’s talk about that, the actions in the storyline. There was action that occurred that moved the plot forward, but it was in a way that seemed detached from the progress of the character and naturally, to the reader. Let me give you an example from the book, without spoiling the plot too much. There were two love-making scenes that were to be pivotal in Brida’s journey toward spiritual understanding. Now, I have had some good sex in my day, but hardly anything so good that I hit a new level of enlightenment. So I get it, and yet I don’t. Consequently, I have had sex so bad, that it brought a new level of knowledge to me, the knowledge of dead fish whoppie, but I digress. In this way I think Coelho is trying to connect with his reader but failing miserably because the actions in which he chooses to show Brida’s spiritual journey aren’t likely to be the same actions the reader would take, as I stated early. It’s like a lover trying desperately to make you understand that he loves you, but he shows his love for you by making you pay for dinner. You get it and yet you don’t. It’s not bad action, but it’s just not normal actions that would prove the point.

Again, maybe this is due to the translation or maybe the context of these books is so deep that its true meaning is lost to… herm… people like me. Read it if you wish to read about a nice girl who becomes a woman through actions unrelated to the progress, but don’t expect to find your spiritual answer here. After all, real love and real answers comes from within. And that is what Coelho tried to convey ironically, without connecting to the reader.

The Alchemist
By: Paulo Coelho

Paige’s Rating: (3) of 5
Recommended for: Spiritual- Fiction Readers

This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom points Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a journey to find wordly goods turns into a discovery of the treasure found within.

Even being half-way around the world, I have heard the hype surrounding this book but have only been able to find it in Turkish, that is until last week. So being in a book store that has twelve different books in English and six of those by Paulo Coelho, I bought this one and Brida, which I will be writing a review about shortly. But this book seems to fall into the same category as: The Last Lecture and The Secret. People whisper and rave about this book and when you pick it up to read it, you have hope that this book will forever stick with you. And when you finish it, you simply go, “Huh.”

The character was nameless or at least 98% of the time regarded as “the boy,” and naturally this wasn’t coincidence: Coelho wants us to identify with the boy. The character seems young and inquisitive, which is why he was perfect to go on a physical and spiritual journey. He seemed to ask the right questions and find the answers easily.

The plot was that of a journey in search for “treasure.” The boy first found himself in Northern Africa for some time before making his way across the desert towards the pyramids. During the travel the characters whom he met on his journey all help him take the necessary steps forward. The Universe made sure that the boy can always continue forward. He does hit a few obstacles along the way, but it was still interesting to see if he would make it to his destination.

Naturally, everything at this point sounds pretty simple and that’s the truth. The book is very simplistic in its characters and plot. Even the writing takes on a sort of folktale-prose style which is generally short, simple sentences. So is the book incredibly boring because everything is so simple? Well, everything must be simple because it’s the meaning of the book that is so complex.

While reading this book, I felt that the theme of spiritual journey was nice, but the other life lessons were too much. The different characters who helped out the shepherd spoke in short but deep sentences about many Universal truths that couldn’t be processed back to back. Coelho mentioned having fear and faith, he mentioned beginners luck in finding your destiny, he mentioned destiny and following your path in life, he mentioned the signs in the Universe God readily shows us when we follow our path, he mentioned the nature of the human heart and emotions, he mentioned a Soul of the World that we all belong to and so on and so forth. All of these issues are pretty complex, but Coelho sort of breezed through them as if they were regular water-cooler talk. I found myself purposely re-reading some sections because I felt there was a deeper message that was being glazed over.

Overall, the book was good. Was it something that changed my mind and spirituality forever? No and in all honesty, I will probably have forgotten about this book in two years time. But is it good? Yes. If you sit down with a patient mind, I find the issues raised in this book are worth contemplating in your heart.

Our Man in Havana
By: Graham Greene

Paige’s Rating: (4) of 5
Recommended for: Satire- Fiction Readers

Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study it tells of MI6′s man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true.

What a fantastic read! The main character, Mr. Wormold, is a British citizen living in Cuba in the 1960’s. His wife has left him and so he is alone in raising a young daughter who is incredibly spoiled and spends her father’s money without knowing whether he has it or not. As a vacuum cleaner salesman, he really does not.

As a character, Wormold is great because he evokes a sense of pity even though you know his indifference makes him rather pathetic and you can’t help but understand why his clever wife left him. Milly is Wormold’s young daughter who is so innocent, you allow her to be irresponsible with her father’s money and heart. Greene does a fabulous job of creating supporting characters that have glaringly obvious flaws, but the reader loves them regardless.

The plot is also creative and comedic. Because Wodmold’s daughter uses his money with no regard, he is in a tight financial position when he is cornered in the men’s room by a man named Hawthorne. Hawthorne is a British spy and convinces Wormold to keep important tabs on the going-ons of Havana and send reports to Britain. Of course, Wormold is not only compensated for his work, but he is compensated for a team of additional spies who will help him. Wormold is not interested in playing spy, but being interested in the money, he creates a team of spies that work for him and conjures up dangerous missions that they take on. All is fine until, of course, Britain sends in some extra help and the spies that Wormold has created begin to show up dead in reality. From there, reality and fiction spiral out of control as Wormold tries to hang onto the illusion of his spy life while figuring out how his fantasy has turned into non-fiction.

The writing is wonderful, and Greene is not only great at creating unique characters and story lines, but he also infuses a lot of wit into the character’s dialogues. The result is a charming book with a subtle dark lesson: don’t take the easy way out!

I suggest this book to anyone who is looking for something that is entertaining and light.

Ye, whose aspirings court the Muse of lays
“Severest of those orders which belong
Distinct and separate to Delphic song”
Why shun the sonnet’s undulating maze?
Or why its name, boast of Petrarcan days,
Assume, its rules disown’d?–whom from the throng
The Muse selects, their ear the charm obeys
Of its full harmony:–they fear to wrong
The sonnet by adorning with a name
Of that distinguisht import, lays, though sweet,
Yet not in magic texture taught to meet
Of that so varied and peculiar frame.
O think, to vindicate its genuine praise
Those it becomes whose lyre a favoring impulse sways.
Capel Lofft

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that there are very few people who still enjoy the sonnet. I count myself among the few, the proud, the sonneteers. The form, which rose to popularity in medieval Italy and moved to Edmund Spenser’s Britain where it would meet perhaps its most successful vector, one William Shakespeare, began to fall out of vogue as the novel rose to prominence and poetry began to break the confines of form. When poets stopped caring about form, sonnets became a thing of the past. Never mind sestinas.

As a writer, Borges occupied himself with the notion of unreality and how it appeared in the lives of everyday people. This often manifested itself as some of the most memorable magic realism of his generation and produced works like Ficciones (1944) and El oro de los tigres (1972), books that have been widely translated throughout the world, some of them by Borges himself.

American readers have been enamored of Borges’ short fiction for decades, but lesser known is his poetry, much less his sonnets.

I found the Borges book on a whim; I was on a visit to the Windy City and looking for what to do in Chicago when I found a bookstore. I moseyed in and saw The Sonnets on a discounted shelf. When it comes to literature in Spanish, I usually opt for the original copies; it helps me maintain my speaking acumen and there is some merit in owning a work in the original language. However, it’s also difficult to parse things like poetry, especially when I’m out of practice. This book is a dual-language edition, offering the poems in their original Spanish and translations by a team of some of the best Borges translators on the facing page. This sold me, so I walked out of the store, flicked open the book and read this:

On a certain street there is a certain door
Shut with its bell and its exact address
And with a flavor of lost Paradise,
which in the early evening I can never
open to enter. The day’s work at its end,
a voice I waited for would wait for me
there in the dissolution of every day
and in the stillness of the beloved night.
Those things are no more. This is my fate:
The blurry hours, impure memories,
Habitual abuse of literature
And at the edge my yet to be tasted death.
That stone is all I want. All I request
Are the two abstract dates and nothingness.

From that moment on, I was captivated. Borges writes his poems with a delicacy and gravity. Each one is like an episode in a sad cartoon that you are tricked into believing is happy until you realize its real sentiment.

The poetry grabs you, stops you in your tracks and immediately asks you to question the world around you. Sonnets about dreams, death, sorrow and family would be downers if they weren’t so musical – this is where the original language comes in handy.

If you haven’t availed yourself of the Poetry of Borges, this is a great introduction.

Ever since the first monk cobbled together a series of wax tablets into a portable collection of reading material, books have played an invaluable role in the development of mankind. Movable type, scrolls and leaflets, and the eventual development and dissemination of bound editions to the masses all mark the ways in which the printed word has moved humanity forward.

Despite this, people seem to think that recent innovations in e-reading technology will somehow kill off a cultural artifact that’s been around for thousands of years. I’d hate to break it to the starry-eyed technologists and futurists, but five years of increased digital sales is nothing compared to two thousand years of book production.

True, the publishing industry as we know it is changing. The traditional model of book-buying has been updated for a more mobile, technologically equipped society. Ardent readers get much more value out of being able to access a library via their iPad, Kindle, smartphone or any of the other myriad devices capable of acquiring and presenting books to consumers. What few advocates for the “future” of reading fail to acknowledge is that people are still buying books: used books, paperbacks, and hardcovers. The ascendance of technology isn’t so much cannibalizing hard copy print as much as it is supplementing it.

Kindle owners are quick to laud the device’s ability to pull a high-profile book, say Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, or Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned, out of the ether and into their device for immediate reading, and for less than the cost of the actual copy. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great application of tech to readers who can’t be bothered to wait until they get to some bookseller to shell out dough and read a novel. This isn’t an indication of the decline of physical books; it’s simply the type of world we are accustomed to.

Last month I attended a book reading and while I was there guess what I did? I bought a book! You know what I did after that? I got it signed! I know it’s crazy for some people to imagine, but there is still a real and valuable place for books.

The upside is that by all accounts, people seem to be reading more. Between the unilaterally low prices of eBooks compared to hardbacks, the proliferating of web coupons driving the price down further and the manifold distribution channels that exist with Amazon, Google, Barnes & Noble, and every retailer ever, technology has made it easier than ever for people to read, and you definitely can’t knock that.

The main benefits of eBooks are in their portability and price. But to say that eBooks are driving hardcover books to extinction is not only shortsighted in both directions, it also implies that the only value/pleasure in books comes from reading. People still collect books. First editions are still valuable to those collectors. A few people with foresight realize that in ten years a physical copy of a book is going to be worth more than a 13,421kb file on an archaic Nook. eBooks are super convenient, but ultimately immaterial.

Coincidentally, it may be that sense of immateriality that drives continued physical book sales. Let’s look at another popular media: music. The rise of the MP3 considerably lowered the price of music and paved the way for online megastores like iTunes and devices like iPods to hold court over music. But 10 years after Napster dismantled the music industry as we know it, we’re still buying CDs. Hell, we’re still buying vinyl albums because they are the exact opposite of MP3s: the ethereal, intangible, yet convenient digital format. Vinyl albums are giant, bold and can be held in your hands. Much like a hardcover book. And for my part, I can guarantee they’re not going anywhere.

Reading Lolita in Tehran
By: Azar Nafisi

Paige’s Rating: (1) of 5
Recommended for: History- Non-Fiction Readers

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran and fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. 

I really love literature as well as culture, so when I saw this book just hanging out on the shelf of a friend, I slipped it into my bag only to later say, “By the way, I grabbed a book to read.” I was excited for this one, but it ended up being a big let-down.

Nafisi, who was a college literature professor, begins the book by attempting to give the reader an image of the young student women who came to her house to secretly study literature, and attempts to show the reader how these women held quite different in religious, political and even social views. However, I found that Nafisi’s imagery got lost in other tangents and so the students instead seemed indistinguishable to me.

But the reason I really wanted to read the book was because I wanted a glimpse into Iran during and after the revolution. Yet even these events are very disjointed as Nafisi jumped from the present regime to flashback into the past and even sometimes flashes forward into a different time in her flashbacks. In what could have been a wonderful opportunity to highlight the Iranian Revolution and the effects it had on university life, instead became a jumbled time line of protest events, problematic students, bombings and reading in her living room.

At least the author gives us a plot that is interesting to read about, even if we are a bit lost and uninterested, right? No, not so much. I found myself asking what the plot was exactly. While Nafisi does share some stories of her students, the book essentially has two plots: one in which she clearly boasts about her knowledge of Western Literature, and one in which she laments about the difficulties arising from living in Iran with such a modern mind. Both these underlying, and yet perhaps they are the main, plots fail the reader. Nafisi talks about the books studied in her classes and expects the reader to have a working academic knowledge of them as well. Some of her analysis of the literature seems to be too deep and complex for the purpose it is serving in the novel, which is… well I think it was supposed to be to show a connection between Western Literature and Iranian life. And so with the Western Literature being taught to the readers, some refuge for the reader might be taken in the comparison to Iranian life. But the author again doesn’t describe this well and when she does, Nafisi is continual writing of herself and the hardships she faces with teaching narrow-minded students and the problems of being an independent woman in a male-dominated society. Her tone is one that is so whiney and egocentric, that I really wanted to give up on reading the book.

This book. The characters are basically faceless Iranian women who have stories to share but none of those stories are as important as the incessant crying of the author’s inability to save her faceless students mentally and physically from an oppressive regime. Instead, the author focuses on drawing out our pity for her situation and yet our awe in her ability to know so much about a single piece of literature. All of this is written in time that jumps forward and backward. Reading Lolita in Tehran is probably about as painful as actually reading Lolita in Tehran. My advice is skip it, really.

In a month of big tech news, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made the biggest tech news on September 28^th. Speculation about Amazon’s “iPad killer” tablet had been floating around for months, but what Bezos revealed was even bigger: a family of new Kindles with almost shockingly low prices. Leading the pack is the brand new Kindle Fire, and it’s like an e-reader on steroids: not only can Amazon customers read e-books in color, but they can buy and rent movies and TV shows, browse the web with a lightning-fast custom made browser, play games, communicate with friends via IM and e-mail, and much more.

Still, the “iPad killer” moniker doesn’t mean much when you look at each tablet’s specs, because the iPad 2 wins in almost every category. And when it comes to its uses in education, the iPad2 is the fastest, most comprehensive machine for the job. But the Kindle Fire and the iPad2 have two completely different roles: while the iPad2 is a tool, the Kindle Fire is a content delivery device. And that difference could at least cripple the iPad2 in the educational sector.

Form follows function

The iPad2’s success as an educational device has remained uncontested in part because of Apple’s history of catering to the educational market—from its inception, Apple has made an effort to offer quality hardware to teachers and students. iPad2’s are also popular in the classroom because they lend themselves to collaboration: with front- and rear-facing cameras, teachers and students enrolled in online education can communicate without a computer.

But for many consumers, including students, the cameras and other features are rarely used. A clear, bright screen, a wide-ranging selection of applications, and a size custom-made for portability are important factors for an educational device. The Kindle Fire’s screen is smaller, but its size makes it perfect for purses and small totes. If an electronic device is easier to hold and handle, it’s easier to use.

The price is right

The Fire is certainly impressive, but it’s simply not in the same category as the iPad2. And that’s why its price will give it an edge: even with a discount, schools are paying almost twice as much for iPad2’s as they will for Amazon Kindle Fires. For less than $200 per device, teachers and students will have access to thousands of free books, hundreds of thousands of reasonably-priced books and learning materials, and a whole collection of movies and videos that can be used for educational purposes.

Amazon’s Prime program is free for a month with new Fire purchases—an agreement Amazon is sure to modify for devices used in schools. But Amazon’s focus on content—not hardware—allows them to deliver a device that makes choosing and using content quick, easy and affordable. Until Apple makes content a top priority, they’ll be behind Amazon.

Teaching and learning in the cloud

Cloud computing has gotten mixed reviews, but as it improves and becomes more reliable, more people are using it for storage and easy access to data. Amazon’s Cloud Drive allows consumers to buy media and store it in the cloud—making a large hard drive superfluous. And since the Fire has a relatively small 8GB drive, users are encouraged to use the Amazon Cloud Drive for storage of large pieces of data. For teachers and students, storing assignments and projects in the cloud can make it easier to access them no matter where they are—a real benefit for students enrolled in online education. Apple’s iCloud purports to store data and push it to every Apple device—but it’s not up and running just yet. Amazon’s cloud drive isn’t as ambitious as Apple’s, but for regular consumers, teachers and students who use their tablets for basic schoolwork, it’s good enough.

Amazon’s new Kindle Fire is sure to be a blockbuster with consumers and schools. It won’t kill the iPad2, but that’s not the point; the Fire will serve as a basic, easy-to-use alternative to the iPad2. And until the Fire, an alternative like that didn’t exist. The Kindle Fire fills the void of an affordable tablet—and for millions of consumers, that’s the perfect alternative to an iPad2.

Super Sad True Love Story
By: Gary Shteyngart

Paige’s Rating: (4) of 5
Recommended for: Fiction- Futuristic Dystopian Demise Style

Super Sad True Love Story belies almost every word of its title, but it still plunges us into a satirical realm that we can recognize if we open our eyes widely. Restless, middle-aged, maladjusted Lenny Abramov and young Eunice Park, his somewhat reluctant old-fashioned love interest alternate as narrators, each of them projecting a slightly twisted view of an even more twisted reality.

This book was given to me by a friend who was a little hesitant to have me read it. “I know you hated ‘The Road’ and so I don’t know how much you will like this book.” Being that it was one of those dystopian themed books, I understood and shared in his skepticism. However, unlike ‘The Road’ which was merely a plot less pointless waste of time, this book had a lot of redeeming aspects that made me actually give it 4 of 5 stars.

The setting of this book is somewhere in the (hopefully not) near future, where America has been completely destroyed by its greedy corporations and China is bailing us out but ready to foreclose. In this America, everything is dominated by the Media and Retail, as these are the highly sought after jobs for people. The Media people spend time video blogging everything, checking their Global Teens account and my favorite, assessing their fuckability, personality and credit scores. The Retail people are sure to wear the latest fashion of see-though pants and nipple-less bras. Even though the future is designed around not so far-fetched ideas, I still give Shteyngart props for drawing in today’s social networking hype and exploiting it realistically.

The characters were, well, a different story. Lenny is a 40 year old man who is single and quite lonely. He is desperate to give love and be in love about as much as he is desperate to obtain high fuckability scores in the local bars. He is a fish out of water: a man who is financially responsible but socially childish. There could be a lot of redeeming qualities about him, but I just read about a very weak and pathetic man. And maybe that was Shteyngart’s goal. The female protagonist, Eunice, is 24 years old and is actually unconcerned about her fuckability. Rather, she seems to try to live her life according to the strict traditions of her family. She seems, ironically, more emotionally mature than Lenny but a financial train wreck. Thus, they both need each other for balance. Their personalities are interesting; however, I find them a bit difficult to relate to as they don’t seem like anyone I remotely know.

The plot is good. It starts out describing the relationship between Lenny and Eunice, but through this you see the state of America, crumbling. In this way, the book is hard to read because you know the climax is going to contain doom and gloom for America. Yet, you aren’t sure if Lenny and Eunice’s relationship will meet the same end. So you keep turning the pages.

I also liked how the book was written by the point-of-view of the two characters through their Global Teens account. This, I thought was a good way to present the book.

Overall, I would suggest “Super Sad True Love Story” if you are indeed, ready for just that.

Water for Elephants
By: Sara Gruen

Paige’s Rating: (3) of 5 Stars
Recommended for: Fiction/Romance Readers

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski’s ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.

I was at the local bookstore, looking through the very sparse English section. While on my way out, disappointed, I noticed this book on display. I didn’t think twice about reaching out and grabbing it. The title was English, the back cover was in English, and when I snapped the book open, I saw English. Hot damn! I bought the book immediately as it was one that was on my “to read” list. Talk about disappointment and again, this may be my own fault because I tend to get too excited about some books.

The plot had great potential, as it is set in the 1930s era of the Depression and Prohibition. In the beginning chapters as we are introduced to a young man, Jacob. Through a twist of fate, Jacob ends up being a part of a circus and recounts his memories of this lifestyle as an elderly man of now 90 or 93 (he can’t remember). But as the story continues, the author tries to introduce a romance, which I think fails miserably. The romance seems to be based on nothing as the characters that fall in love have no real connection at any time in the book. I felt that the romance was therefore forced and completely unbelievable.

The characters were also interesting in the beginning, but they never fully developed and remained flat throughout the book. The main character, Jacob, seems shy, awkward and yet incredible kind. You expect him to sort of rise up and act like a man but he never really does. Oh sure, he starts fights and stands up for the woman he supposedly loves, but at the end of the book he just seems like this holier-than-thou angel. His soul is so innocent and pure that as a reader, I find it hard to connect with him. The woman he falls in love with, is as well, flat. She seems to be demure and yet overly emotional. Throughout most of the book, she is either crying or crying on the inside. The only character that is believable is August, the schizophrenic. Apparently the author can nail a character like that, but can’t quite draw up believable lovers.

The book was a quick and easy read, so it is one that I would suggest for the upcoming summer holidays if you want something light to read. In fact, it’s much like the circuses of today: slightly entertaining but mostly disenchanting.