STACKED

books

Things I Know About Love by Kate Le Vann

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The cover on the left has total appeal to me as a reader: it suggest a chick lit story set in a city. Maybe there’s a little sight seeing and as the title suggests, maybe there’s a little bit of love involved. It’s reminiscent of Joanne Philbin’s The Daughters and Emma McLaughlin’s The Nanny Diaries.

But I have to be honest: I was deceived. Yes, there’s love and romance, but the book is anything but the light fluffy read I was expecting.

Livia Stowe has been a sick teenager for a long time. But finally, she’s feeling a lot better, and with her brother living abroad in Priceton, New Jersey for the semester, her mother decides she’s healthy and mature enough to travel from England to spend a few weeks with him. While she’s gone, she’ll be blogging, too. Livia’s never had luck in love, and she’s hoping that maybe she’ll snag a cutie while visiting Jeff.

Wouldn’t you know, she meets a sweetheart named Adam almost immediately? He is actually British also, which is super convenient. He is a stand up guy, and he helps Livia fulfill a life wish in visiting New York City — twice. Jeff’s okay with their relationship, since Adam is one of his closest friends.

Sounds good, right? The girl gets love and hangs out in the big city. But then the ending is a changearoo. Sure, I saw it coming from miles away in this 160 page story, but I didn’t want it to happen. It would be too convenient. Unfortunately, it does, and it left me really disappointed as a reader. I never felt enough compassion or interest in the characters, and the ending made me feel like the author didn’t either.

Since I don’t want to spoil the story, I’ll change the tone of this review and say that this is a book that will appeal to Lurelene McDaniel fans, I think. There’s a good sense of drama and a nice flash of romance that develops. Unfortunately, I think a lot of readers will feel the way I did with this: the book changes its story completely about 3/4 of the way through, and most reviews on Goodreads commented that their initial interest in the story was thrown out with the complete change in story near the end.

On the plus side, this is a quick read and may be an appealing choice for reluctant readers. Adam is a sweet character, and Livia’s British quirks are just enough to keep readers engaged in her experiences. Since this book is making its US debut this month, I think readers might like the outsider perspective of American life (it’s a book that originally published in the UK in 2006). I think that this is a book that could have benefited from another 100 pages to fully flesh the characters for the ending OR a book that could have stood out as a true chick lit/fluffy read if the ending were altered.

Riffs on the Tale – A Rant

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Yesterday, Kelly posted about the phenomenon of the mash-up: the original text of classic tales infused with monsters. Sounds fun and it’s a clever marketing ploy, what with the current flood of vampire and zombie stuff out there. I thought the first one, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was a cute idea.
I’m going to be honest and say that I haven’t read any of the mash-ups. But I hate them. Hate hate hate them. Hate them more than nuts in chocolate (WHY do people ruin perfectly good chocolate in this way?). Hate them more than I hate having to deal with cranky library patrons. Hate hate hate.
Whew.
Why do I hate them? Let’s explore what nearly all of the mash-ups have in common: they are almost all classic novels written by female authors and/or featuring female protagonists. I think the best way to explain my feelings is to make a list of the mash-ups I know about, which I have done below (note that these are strictly mash-ups, not original stories, so it excludes Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, as well as the one about Queen Victoria):
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – female author (fa), female protagonist (fp)
  • Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters – fa, fp
  • Little Vampire Women – fa, fp
  • Little Women and Werewolves – fa, fp
  • Jane Slayre – fa, fp
  • Mansfield Park and Mummies – fa, fp
  • Emma and the Werewolves – fa, fp
  • Android Karenina – fp
  • Alice in Zombieland – fp
  • The Undead World of Oz – fp
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim
As you can see, even the books written by a male author still feature female protagonists, with the sole exception of Twain. (This is the point where I invite you to add to my list, with the hope that there are more mash-ups that feature male protagonists out there.)  I’m predicting right here and now that the next mash-up will be Wuthering Heights.  Soon, though, these hacks are going to run out of public domain titles to butcher (a good thing, but also shows the appalling lack of female classic literature out there).
It’s no secret that most of the books Western society considers part of the classic canon are written by men and feature men, so the argument that this is merely coincidental is clearly untrue. What does the mash-up trend have to say about our society’s views of literature written by women and featuring women? I’ll venture a few ideas:
Our society thinks female-driven literature isn’t good enough to stand on its own, that it doesn’t appeal to enough people to make it worthwhile reading by itself, that it needs something extra to make it worth our time. Our society thinks female protagonists in classic literature aren’t sufficiently “bad-ass” or interesting enough, that they need either more violence or more humor or both. Our society views female written and female-driven literature as inherently frivolous (the characters, the events, the themes) and thus these books are perfect for the monster mash-up, which is meant to be frivolous and fun and nothing more. I could go on.
Please, give me your thoughts in the comments. I know I’m not alone, since I’ve read similar rants elsewhere. I really don’t think I’m blowing this out of proportion.

Riffs on the tale

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Classic mashups have been hot for a little over a year now. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the first to come out, back in early 2009, but now you can get your classics in about any flavor you want them.

I haven’t read any, so I can’t make a statement for how I feel about them. I’ve been asked a few times, but really, all I can say is that I think that now, they might be over done. Little Vampire Women, put out very recently by HarperTeen, is the first of many that the publisher wants to aim at teens, who have latched on to popular adult titles like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer.

What’s your take on the trend? Does it do a good thing by exposing people to classics in a new way or is it destroying timeless work?

I guess the real question is this: what’s the one you would most like to read? I’d love to read a mashup of Moby Dick. Oh, or maybe Leaves of Grass (what would be possible?). It’s one of my all-time favorite books, and I’d love to see how it could be mashed. But what goes well with a white whale?

Two steps forward…

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and one step backward. Check out this forthcoming title about an overweight girl. Sorry, chickie, it’s a donut for you!


Starstruck by Cyn Balog is about a girl whose nickname is Dough and she becomes a total fatty when she moves away from her old home. Longer description available at Lauren’s Crammed Bookshelf.

I get that the family runs a donut shop, so it sort of fits that. But, you know, it’s the theme of fat girls with food on the cover…