book reviews

Review – Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker

· January 5, 2014 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , , , , , · One Comment

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The demand for commercial sex will never go away. Neither will the internet; they’re stuck with each other. It may no longer even matter anymore whether the sale of sex among consenting adults is wrong or right, immoral or empowering. What’s clear is that no good can come from pretending that the people who participate in prostitution don’t exist. That, after all, is what the killer was counting on.
–Robert Kolker, Lost Girls

Lost Girls starts with a story straight out of a mystery novel, a trendy Scandinavian crime thriller: a panicked prostitute disrupts a sleepy and isolated beach community, usually peaceful behind its private gate, when she sprints from door to door, asking for help, hiding behind bushes and parked boats. A man in a black SUV chases the woman down as she sprints away from his headlights. The stunned community calls the police. Cops show up too late–forty-five minutes later, they arrive to no trace of the girl or the black SUV. In their search for the young woman months later, police start to discover bodies. Four of them, clustered together, at first.

This mysterious sequence of events, seemingly created in the dark mind of a mystery novelist, is pulled from recent history. Robert Kolker‘s Lost Girls documents the unsolved murders of four women (possibly more) on Oak Beach, a barrier island of Long Island. All four women were prostitutes; all four were using Craigslist to solicit johns. It seems the killer in this case realized what apparently many killers do: prostitutes are often not reported as missing, and their deaths are often dismissed as the price of their chosen vocation. Kolker eloquently describes this after one especially frustrating police ruling: “the police seemed to be saying that [the missing woman] had died because her soul had been rent asunder by a life in the streets.”

Lost Girls asks the traditional true crime questions–who is the murderer? Why haven’t they been caught? Why weren’t the bodies noticed? And what about the pathologically lying, limping doctor who lives on Oak Island? But there is an even greater mystery at hand which Lost Girls chooses to explore–how does someone end up on Craigslist, offering their body to strangers for cash? Kolker, in a fascinating, touching, and intimate way, tracks the story of each woman back by finding those who knew her best, from childhood forward. Illustrated by maps charting each woman’s ominous progression towards her final destination point of Oak Beach, NY, Lost Girls documents the four women’s lives. They all encounter hiccups, struggles, and tragedies along the way that lead them to prostitution and Craigslist; their stories all halt mid-frame as each young woman goes missing in the midst of a life they were planning to earn just a bit more from and then get the hell out of.

By making Lost Girls the story of the murdered women, much more than the investigation or the killer-at-large, Kolker manages to shine light on a glaring and uncomfortable point of the sex trade: police seem to dismiss reports of missing prostitutes. Or their friends, working girls themselves, are too fearful to report them missing. When the women are found murdered, and the police are forced to show more interest, they still seem to chalk murder up to a direct result of prostitution, placing the blame with the women and the women’s families. Kolker documents some unbearable victim-blaming by the police, and near the end of the book, it gets to be difficult to read: police describing the women as “greedy”, suggesting they can’t resist going with a serial killer john who offers them a lot of money to hop into a shady situation.

The only thing I did feel was missing, and it seemed to be achingly absent from the second half of the book, was documentation of some of the police work done on the case. I’m not sure if this is because the killer is still out there and the police didn’t want to reveal too much of their investigation, or if there was another reason for this, but Kolker doesn’t document the police investigation itself. It seems that Kolker has one brief interview with the Suffolk County police commissioner and his chief of detectives, both desperately needing a lesson in PR. I kept waiting for more detailed information on the police investigation that never came.

Mysteries without a clear solution are captivating, exhausting, frustrating. As noted in my review of The Hanging Judge a few weeks ago, there can often seem to be a moment when looking over all the evidence, in puzzles both real and created, where it is clear no single explanation can possibly explain past events. Kolker has managed to write clearly about a puzzling mess of facts, rumors, and biases which have built this unsolved case into something daunting and nonsensical. He writes about what happened in the only way we can understand, for now: by telling the stories of the victims, overlooked for so long, unable to speak for themselves. These women were, truly, lost girls. Kolker dared to try to find them. Sadly, he was too late.

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery on Amazon.com/Indiebound.org

Robert Kolker’s Author Page/selected articles written by Kolker for New York Magazine

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Review – Coming Clean by Kimberly Rae Miller

· December 22, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , · 2 Comments

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Considering its grim subject matter, Coming Clean is a surprisingly upbeat memoir. Kimberly Rae Miller takes us back, as much as she may be able, to a home raised by hoarding parents. Growing up, the kitchen was often too messy to eat in, and the family (Miller, her mom, and her dad) would gather on the parents’ bed, the only clear space in the house, to eat a family dinner. At times the water and plumbing would break down and fights with neighbors were constant. As a girl Kimberly picked another house near her own, and had her friends’ parents drop her off their after playdates so no one saw the disrepair of her yard. As an adult, she has dreams where she is back in the squalor of her childhood home, where “wet mashed newspapers, between [her] toes, not so different from the way sand feels as you inch closer to the ocean.” When the living conditions became too much for the family, abandoning homes entirely seemed an easier choice than cleaning the mess they’d created.

Despite the neglect Miller suffered as a child, and the responsibility she takes on for her parents’ hoarding issues as an adult (repeatedly attempting to help them clear out stuff so they don’t literally die in their own filth), her parents are both portrayed as sympathetic, loving, and likable people. I think this is part of the memoir’s charm–above all, this is a story of a family’s struggle with mental illness. As Miller grows into a more self-aware adult, her role within her family is able to change. She broaches the subject of hoarding with her seemingly oblivious parents (her father continually implies that she is just very clean, rather than him having any sort of issue), passes along a book on hoarding, and eventually takes it upon herself to write this book. These choices make ripples, and these ripples can make waves: near the end of the book, another young woman sneaks up to Miller at a party, and asks if she is writing about hoarding. Miller is sort of panicked, still not sure if she is “the kind of person who regularly told people that my father is a hoarder.” The young woman quickly says that her mother is a hoarder too, and the two women compare stories “like grizzled war veterans.”

There are always bunches of memoirs of notable or unremarkable life experience, and one thing I appreciated about Coming Clean was Miller’s restraint when it came to self-analysis. Right at the start, she admits she may not be fully over her traumatic childhood, and I don’t think this book was written as an attempt to find herself or better herself. I’ve had to stop a few memoirs because I felt so bogged down by the author’s moody, indulgent pontification on their upbringing.

I also liked that Miller acknowledged, at the end of the book, that this was (to a great extent) her parents’ story. Many memoirs cover the area of childhood and upbringing, and many do it well, but these stories can skip dangerously close to biography–who are these mothers and fathers that children have assumed to know so well? Do mom and dad wish to chime in? Maybe Miller was able to acknowledge and have the support of her parents in writing Coming Clean because of their still strong relationship, despite all the stuff accumulated between them. Miller notes that upon finishing Coming Clean, her father said: “Wow, that’s quite a story. I’m sorry that it was yours.”

A quick note here: Coming Clean is available to borrow from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, if you have a Kindle and are an Amazon Prime member. One of the perks of Prime/Kindle I often forget about, but there are some gems available to borrow amidst all the rest!

Coming Clean on Amazon.com/Indiebound.org

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Review – The Hanging Judge by Michael Ponsor

· December 14, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , , , · 5 Comments

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In almost every trial he’d ever done, as a lawyer or as a judge, there came a moment in the testimony when the effort to re-create the past entered the Twilight Zone, when all the possible realities were implausible.

-The Hanging Judge, Michael Ponsor

Michael Ponsor, the author of The Hanging Judge, writes from a unique perspective in his debut novel. Ponsor is himself a sitting federal judge in Massachusetts, and he presided over the first death penalty case in Massachusetts in over fifty years. The emotional and messy plot of The Hanging Judge assumedly echoes his experience, although he insists the case is in the novel is, of course, fiction.

The Hanging Judge follows gangly, awkward federal judge David S. Norcross as he struggles through a debated and publicized death penalty case in Massachusetts. Ponsor writes from each character’s perspective as they are affected by the case: from the mother of the gang ruffian who drove the getaway car, to the overweight cop with wife woes. We learn about the case from the perspective of the wife of the former gang-banger arrested for the crime, and also from the Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the crime who just wishes everyone in Massachusetts would stop mistaking her for Puerto Rican (she’s Cuban).

This jump in perspectives has a wonderfully humanizing effect on all the characters involved in the trial, and especially on the protagonist Judge Norcross himself. I can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t Ponsor’s intention in writing The Hanging Judge–to give us all a sort of pause and remind us that there actual men and women do these difficult jobs in criminal law, while others get caught up in this net of a legal system we turn to for entertainment.

The book drags when Ponsor strays from the story of Judge Norcross’s case and excerpts the story of two men wrongly tried and hanged in Massachusetts in 1806: Dominic Daley and James Halligan. Although I can understand the relevance of this Massachusetts death penalty debacle, and the point of interweaving the narrative history throughout the larger story, each piece of history was like a speed bump placed in the middle of the book.

At several times in The Hanging Judge, there is a sort of delirium expressed about trying to seek the truth regarding criminal events. As layers of conflicting motives and untruths are revealed in the case, in and out of the courtroom, it seems the truth is less important than the motivation behind the words spoken. I’ve actually picked up a few true crime books recently, and it will be interesting to see how this feeling translates into the documentation of actual court cases.

There is a memorable scene where Judge Norcross is invited to a dinner with a liberal professor, who heckles him about America’s legal system throughout the evening.  I’m sure this is something judges have to deal with in the real world, people being as difficult as they are. In a burst of frustration after ignoring the professor’s bait for the evening, Judge Norcross grabs the salt and the pepper shakers off the table and asks the professor if he could determine what happened if “‘Ms. Pepper says she saw Mr. Salt stab her boyfriend. There was a lot of confusion, but she’s positive it was him. Mr. Salt says he was home at the time…”  He has the sugar bowl and the creamer chime in as alibis for the salt. The professor admits he’d have no idea what happened.

After laying out the difficulties of the legal system in such stark terms (with condiments, no less!), one would hope the author and (let’s not forget) sitting Judge Ponsor would have some grand summary about America’s justice system to ease all of our fears. The Hanging Judge isn’t that sort of book, however. The message here is that justice is messy, fallible, and, above all, human.

Final thought:  What is a “hanging judge”?  From Wikipedia:

“Hanging judge” is an unofficial term for a judge who has gained notoriety for handing down punishment by sentencing convicted criminals to death by hanging. More broadly, the term is applied to judges who have gained a reputation for imposing unusually harsh sentences, even in jurisdictions where the death penalty has been abolished. The term “hanging judge” is generally applied to officers of the court with mandates, as opposed to extralegal lynch law.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the book for free, there is a Goodreads giveaway for 3 copies ending on January 7th.

The Hanging Judge on Amazon.com

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Review – Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

· December 9, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , , · One Comment

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What happened to that little kid from The Shining, once he grew up? What would have happened to his dry drunk of a father, if he had found Alcoholics Anonymous? These are two of the questions Stephen King wanted to answer in Doctor Sleep, he explains at the end of the novel. King has built up quite the tale out of the Overlook Hotel’s ashes: I listened to the audiobook version of Doctor Sleep, narrated by Will Patton, and it was just awarded best audiobook of the year at Audible.com a few days ago.

Doctor Sleep brings us that little strong, sweet, and smart kid Danny Torrance all cragged and grown up; Danny is such a painful portrayal of innocence lost he’ll make you wistful for your own early childhood, before all the mistakes started piling up. The Overlook still haunts poor Danny’s dreams, and he’s now a drunk who despises himself for turning out like dear old dad.

King takes us through Danny’s alcoholic bottom with the descriptive language he has such a knack for, making the first bits of the book difficult, but necessary, to get through. King loves to linger a bit on the rough stuff in life; rather than having an off-putting effect, this is part of what makes him a horror powerhouse. The man who spent paragraphs describing wind-up teeth in “Chattery Teeth” and didn’t shy away from documenting the split of a woodchuck into two in Under the Dome turns his attention to Danny’s low points with alcohol, and we are spared no detail of where Danny’s drinking takes him. Danny’s recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous is a part of the story, something that is becoming more common in novels and television shows.

Oddly enough I may have been happy with a story of Danny Torrance without the horror, but rather than only documenting Danny’s struggle to find recovery, King introduces a new and unlikely set of villains: a nefarious band of energy banshees called the True Knot, disguised as old folks touring America in RV’s and campers. They feed off of the shining that those like Danny possess. They sense something delicious in a bright young girl named Abra, who shines something strong and needs a mentor like Danny desperately.

The characters here were delightfully vivid for me. The evil figures, roving in a band of trailers, were reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic armies in Robert McCammon‘s Swan Song, and I’d be interested to know if King was influenced by that classic in any way while writing this book. King has in Doctor Sleep, as he does in many of his books, an appreciation for the full spectrum of human capability.  It would have been so simple for King to write Abra as a one-dimensional sweetheart, but she has her own dark side–as we all do, King seems to be noting.

Where the story lost me a bit was in the action. Without giving too much away, many of the battle scenes felt a bit silly to me because they were taking place, well, in people’s minds. When used in books and in films, incredible mental powers (let’s face it, all magical powers) can often feel a bit hokey as they can at anytime become a cheap trick. I think King relied on this type of thing too much towards the end of the book. Things become much more cerebral than they did in The Shining, and I was disappointed there wasn’t a more epic The Stand style battle between good and evil.

The final question here is Abra, Danny’s delightful and powerful-beyond-belief mentee, whose temper matches her strength. Will we meet Abra again, in her own book? It would be wonderful to see the capabilities of an older Abra, adolescent and out-of-control. It seems like too good of a story not to tell.

Doctor Sleep on Amazon.com/Indiebound.org/Audible.com

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Review – The Burn Palace by Stephen Dobyns

· December 4, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , · No Comments

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The Burn Palace: A Novel by Stephen Dobyns is an enchanting kind of book, a pick-it-up-at-the-bookstore-because-the-dandelion-yellow-cover-calls-your-name kind of book, a read-the-glowing-blurb-from-Stephen-King-on-the-back-and-you’ve-gotta-get-it-now kind of book, a happy-to-curl-up-with-its-little-towns’-happenings-at-night kind of book, a baby-turns-snake-while-vicious-coyotes-prowl-oh-my! kind of book.

In The Burn Palace, small town life get weird. The quaint community of Brewster begins experiencing bizarre (and possibly supernatural?) occurrences: coyotes turn cruel, and a baby disappears from a bassinet leaving a snake in its place. Characteristics of small town life once considered quaint and sleepy become glaringly inefficient in a crisis, and Dobyns ensures we are privy to each town resident’s struggle to adapt to the odd on-goings and the hysteria surrounding the events.

Dobyns writes in a fantastical tone, boldly dropping into the second point-of-view (that’s right, you heard me) to include the reader as a sort of peeping tom, an unseen witness or incredibly private private investigator, and we are taken flying through the town and into residents’ homes at intimate times, checking out their thoughts as they tuck themselves into beds, asking us to try and put together the puzzle pieces while we also feel the tension bubbling up within the community like a pot ready to overflow.

The one thing (okay, maybe two things) glaringly absent here were a map and a character list. With such a focus on the layout of the town of Brewster, and such a wide array of characters included, I kept flipping back to the beginning of the book seeking an illustrated map of the town that just wasn’t there. Would it have been a bit too cheeky? I think Dobyns already took us there, and it would have felt just right. So many characters were introduced so quickly and briefly, that I had a hard time keeping them straight. I think a map and a list of characters, their relations, and professions at the beginning of the novel would have been a greatly utilized tool to help readers further envision and understand the town we were being invited into.

In many ways, The Burn Palace feels like a light tale when compared with some of the gritty and gruesome mysteries that are popular today. I have a lot of love for darker mysteries, but some can get so graphic that I wonder where authors have left to go. When we’ve all visited our darkest nightmares, where will we go for our thrills? The Burn Palace reminds me that the shock value doesn’t always need to be there for a great mystery. All you need is a great story, one that people would enjoy gathering around a campfire to hear, maybe. One that perhaps starts in a small town, maybe a town named Brewster, on a dark and windy night…

The Burn Palace on Amazon.com/Indiebound.org

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Review – Homeland: Phantom Pain by Glenn Gers

· November 17, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , , , , · One Comment

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“You are truly the worst terrorist I have ever met. With nonsense like that and your friends in the CIA. I thought you would be another spider, hiding under the rug, sneaking out to bite. I have met them, these soldiers of god. That’s not you. You’re not even a good patsy. You think too much for yourself. And you care so much about individuals! It’s all personal for you isn’t it? You’re a fucking civilian!”

Although perhaps just a small blip on the grand radar screen of the literary world, Homeland: Phantom Pain is an Audible.com release worth mentioning. Showtime and Audible came together to create this free 3o-minute audiobook, narrated by Sergeant Nicholas Brody himself, Damian Lewis. A noir glimpse into Brody’s journey between Seasons 1 and 2, Phantom Pain is a chance to see what we miss when we can only spend an hour a week with these characters.

Lewis is a fantastic narrator, which isn’t always a given when actors turn to story narration. We can’t forget Molly Ringwald’s bracing performance of The Middlesteins, in which it seemed she was gasping her way through each line almost desperate for the book to end. Lewis’s narration is understated but comes across as softer than he portrays his character on the show, and there is something irresistibly charming about him writing a letter to Carrie:  “I tried to imagine what you were doing at that very moment. All mussed up in your bed or all put together in your suit, with your ID tag clipped to the pocket.”  Lewis manages to convey emotion without distracting from the words he’s reading, which can be quite a challenge.  Narrators must walk a fine line between blasé and hokey, Lewis does it well.

The story here is poignant for both the main characters on the show, and emphasizes a bit of the love story that has been lost in this second season without getting sappy. I was skeptical of listening to this at all, even thought I downloaded it quite a while ago, as I thought a TV tie-in work of fiction would be pretty low quality. I think anyone who likes to read and watches the show will be pleasantly surprised, however. This isn’t an adventure style promo-piece, it is a great addition to the show that gives us a realistic glimpse into Brody’s struggle to come to terms with being the most wanted man in the world, traveling in foreign lands, with memorable and untrustworthy characters.

This would make sense with Homeland, as with many of the TV shows as of late. As Difficult Men, a book I recently reviewed noted, TV has gone through a sort of cultural renaissance. Where it was once considered fairly low brow (and certainly, much of it still is), TV shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and certainly Homeland can claim to be works of art on par with many movies or books. It would then make sense that this type of television translates more successfully into literature.

The buzz is that more of these stories are on the way… We can only hope! If you don’t have an Audible.com account and you like to read, I can’t suggest it enough. The company lets you return any audiobooks you don’t like, no questions ask. They also giveaway a lot of stuff (like this story). I double (at least) the amount of books I read by listening to audiobooks in the car, while I’m doing chores around the house, and while I’m taking walks or doing other exercise. I have a Bluetooth headset so I don’t have to worry about being connected to my phone. People often ask me how I read so much–and I do, certainly, I read a bunch. But I also listen!

Homeland:  Phantom Pain on Audible.com

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Review – This is Rage by Ken Goldstein

· November 13, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , · One Comment

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“Tell me your worst fear,” posited Dadashian, the melodrama unavoidable.

“Nuclear winter, followed by impure drinking water, global starvation, and mass untreated surgical needs, plus permanent damage to the earth’s ability to heal,” said Choy.

“As it pertains to business,” rephrased Dadashian.

–This is Rage, by Ken Goldstein

This is Rage: A Novel of Silicon Valley and Other Madness lives up to its subtitle, delivering all the madness of the Valley and then some. This novel is funny, smart, long (a 530 page thriller), and perhaps the polar opposite of that other recent release making a Silicon statement, The Circle. This is Rage’s plot sounds unbelievable but somehow works: at a party where investors, bankers, and engineers mingle (“Conversation as a conduit for data extraction…”) a pair of well-meaning, success-seeking entrepreneurs kidnap leaders of a powerful company, hoping either for ransom money or some start-up capital (are these two things that different, after all?). A washed-up radio host picks up the story, and the sort of mass hysteria that only today’s social media makes possible ensues.

The story here goes where The Circle didn’t: straight to the money. The book starts with a prospectus, and many of the chapters begin with a stock ticker. Although This is Rage takes place in Silicon Valley, Goldstein doesn’t want us to forget that “the Street” makes the Valley tick.  As much as any character in the novel is concerned with the safety of those who have been kidnapped, their company’s precious stock price is always sitting heavily on everyone’s shoulders, acting as the ultimate guidance and true leader.

Author and tech insider Ken Goldstein certainly knows his subject material: previously a VP for Disney Online, he currently advises start-ups and businesses through his company Corporate Intelligence Radio. Whereas David Eggers publicly stated he visited no tech campuses while writing his dark-tech speculative fiction work The Circle, Goldstein has been in the tech biz for years. To be honest, I was sort of worried when I read that a former CEO wrote This is Rage. It just doesn’t seem like the business world and the creative world of writing fiction mesh too often.  And I do think the story can get drift too far into investment jargon here and there. As a layperson, I had no idea what a few sentences explaining stock prices meant and I’m not sure it was important for me to understand their meaning.

This is a big book, but a fun one. The characters here range from the traditional tech guys (scruffy and ready to save the world by giving their employees free lunches), to a calculating self-made congresswoman, to a bitter radio announcer lost in today’s evolving media world, to an aging and insecure FBI agent. Part thriller and part satire, what really makes this novel a good read are the observations Goldstein has tossed in that are so right on.  He’ll throw in a snippet like, “Fools who wanted something responding to fools who claimed it was not theirs to have, rinse and repeat,” or “Attempted definitive action of any kind could always be touted as leadership,” and it reminds you that Goldstein may be writing a clever book, but he may also be sort of wise.  While especially in the last few pages this sort of statement-making could creep toward ranting, I didn’t see it that way.  I felt that This is Rage managed to beautifully balance sincere frustration with a raucous laughter at the madness of it all.

This is Rage: A Novel of Silicon Valley and Other Madness on Amazon.com

Ken Goldstein’s This is Rage page (with an excerpt from the book)

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The Shining!

· November 9, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , , , · 2 Comments

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I just finished Stephen King’s The Shining, in anticipation of reading the recently released Doctor Sleep.  Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining, features a grown-up but still traumatized Danny Torrance.  The Shining is one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read, and it is amazing how King manages to heighten the fear around harmless things like topiary art to an intense level.

I love to read King’s comments on his work, as he always has great perspective. Here are some great thoughts written by the author in an introduction to a new edition of The Shining, written in 2001:

A killer motivated to his crimes by supernatural forces was, it seemed to me, almost comforting once you got below the surface thrills provided by any halfway competent ghost story.  A killer that might be doing it because of childhood trauma as well as these ghostly forces…ah, that seemed genuinely disturbing.
…
The decision I made to try and make Jack’s father a real person, one who was loved as well as hated by his flawed son, took me a long way down the road to my current beliefs concerning what is so blithely dismissed as “the horror novel.”  I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives…
…
That truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too.  They live inside us, and sometimes they win.

The Shining by Stephen King on Amazon

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King on Amazon /Doctor Sleep on Indiebound

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Review – The Never List by Koethi Zan

· October 31, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , · One Comment

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In honor of Halloween I’m reading some seriously scary books right now (revisiting The Shining, listening to Snow White Must Die). The Never List by Koethi Zan had been on my to-read list for a bit, and I decided this was the appropriate season to check it out. The Never List chronicles the aftermath of heroine Sarah’s traumatic kidnapping, in which she and her best friend were chained in a basement and tortured with two other girls.

The Never List is a quick read and it is hard not to fall for Sarah’s frank and wry narrative voice. You will find yourself cheering for her as she overcomes fears, deals with her past, and becomes a stronger person. I listened to this on audiobook and it was the best kind of story to listen to, as it kept me looking for chores around the house I could do while I kept listening.

Clearly, this is a book only for the bravest of readers. I was a bit hesitant about the subject matter, as I enjoy a great twisted tale of suspense but dislike the sort of gruesome and gory torture porn that horror films like Hostel have made popular.  The Never List is tastefully done for such dark subject matter, in the way that I think the best tales of suspense often are. Although we get flashbacks of what Sarah and the other girls suffered through, the focus of the book is not on human suffering.

Zan has done a great job of creating a gang of likable female sleuths who have overcome an awful trauma together. When the three kidnapping victims who escaped the basement are told their captor will be eligible for parole, they reunite to investigate loose ends of their case, assisted by a benevolent male FBI agent always a phone call away but slow to arrive in crucial moments. The Never List is the girl-power thriller that The Shining Girls wanted to be;  these women are honest, flawed, strong, taking control of their past and their future.

I heard about this book because of its odd timing – right around the time of its release (July 2013) we all watched in horror as women were rescued from Ariel Castro’s home in Cleveland. The similarities between the real life news story and the events in the work of fiction are bizarrely similar–three women kept chained in a house by a sadistic man. There is an interview on mybookishways.com about Zan’s almost surreal reaction to watching the news in Cleveland unfold. As she says, “I’d written a book based on my worst nightmare, and there it was on the screen—real.” It was such an eerie coincidence.

I look forward to Zan’s next work, as I believe this was her first novel and it was an impressive start. Having completed the The Never List, my house is swept, my laundry is done, and I’m all ready for Halloween.

The Never List on Amazon

The Never List on IndieBound

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Review – The Circle by Dave Eggers

· October 27, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , · 3 Comments

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Josiah rolled his eyes. ”No, I mean, I know this is a tangent, but my problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity. You look at your paper guide, and that’s where it ends. It ends with you. Like you’re the only one who matters. But think if you’d been documenting. If you’d been using a tool that would help confirm the identity of whatever birds you saw, then anyone can benefit — naturalists, students, historians, the Coast Guard. Everyone can know, then, what birds were on the bay on that day. It’s just maddening, thinking of how much knowledge is lost every day through this kind of shortsightedness. And I don’t want to call it selfish but — ” –The Circle, Dave Eggers

Dare I say this beautiful work of publishing, The Circle by Dave Eggers, is the most debated book of the year?  Certainly it is the most debated since Reza Aslan’s Zealot.

First, there was the excerpt published as the New York Time Magazine‘s first ever fiction cover story.  Then, there was the plagiarism claim.  The claim was part humorous (Kate Losse, author of The Boy Kings, hadn’t actually read The Circle but just the excerpt from the NYTmag), and part ominous (both stories, one fiction and one memoir, feature a young woman exploited publicly by a menacing tech company).  After that, there was Eggers’ somewhat flippant and confusing reply to the plagiarism claim.  He said that he “didn’t want The Circle to seem to be based on any extant companies or upon the experiences of any employees of any extant companies.”  In a book that had a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, with aspects clearly grabbed from Facebook and Google, this seemed to be an odd statement to make.  After Eggers’ proclamation of obliviousness, there was the backlash from the technocrats, who claimed Eggers knew nothing about computers.  Oh, the madness surrounding The Circle!

I was so excited to get The Circle I purchased it for its $27.95 cover price at an indie bookstore rather than getting it through Amazon at a $10 discount.  Yay me, saving small bookstores one irresistible and pricey hardcover at a time!  I had listened to the excerpt from the book (“We Like You So Much and Want To Get To Know You Better”) for free on Audible.com, and I was blown away.  Those who enjoyed the excerpt and choose to check out the book should prepare themselves.  Where “We Like You So Much..” was concise and edited, The Circle itself is a sprawling tome spelling out its message again and again.

The Circle follows malcontent but kindhearted Mae, excited to leave her mundane job at the local electric company for a customer service position at The Circle, a sort of Google-Facebook-Apple-and-then-some tech giant.  Mae, who feels so honored to get this supercool job, becomes exhausted as she struggles to keep up with the increasing demands of the perfection-seeking corporation.  Mae is encouraged by her superiors to use the company’s social media heavily, and she becomes depressed and disconnected from real life.  The Circle is making a lot of statements surrounding technology, privacy, and the companies who control these two aspects of our lives;  Eggers seems focused on just getting the message across, loudly and clearly, instead of in a way that might make the book more believable.

There was a lot I liked here.  The manipulating use of positive language rang especially true to me, as I worked at a .com company where we had a list of positive words we could say on the phone and to each other.  The almost constant addition of screens to Mae’s workstation is comical; she is excited about having two monitors, then she gets a third, then a fourth… And most importantly, as Mae finds more affection online, in her rankings and likes and shares, she feels lonelier in the real world.  There is a great moment in The Circle when Mae has left her phone at her desk while running an errand on the company’s gigantic campus.  When she comes back to her desk, her phone is overloaded with texts from her friend Annie:

“She read the first:  Hey Mae, realizing I shouldn’t have gone off on Dan and Alistair that way.  Wasn’t very nice.  Not Circly at all.  Pretend like I didn’t say it.

The second:  You get my last msg?

The Third:  Starting to freak out a little.  Why aren’t you answering me?

Fourth:  Just texted you, called you.  Are you dead?  Shit.  Forgot your phone.  You suck.

Fifth:  If you were offended by what I said about Dan don’t go all silent-treatment.  I said sorry.  Write back.

Sixth:  Are you getting these messages?  It’s v. important.  Call me!

Seventh:  If you’re telling Dan what I said you’re a bitch.  Since when do we tattle on each other?

Eighth:  Realizing you might just be in a meeting.  True?

Ninth:  It’s been 25 mins.  What is UP?”

I think we all rely on this instant gratification style of comfort from text messages and social media. The compulsive way immediate communication has affected us all is illustrated well here.  There are always those times I have to tell a girl friend, “Dude just stop texting that guy!  Put down the phone!”  But we all now have this need to reach out for reassurance of our self worth, and fall into a panic if a reply doesn’t appear on our time table.

That being said, there was a lot about The Circle that was hard to take.  I wasn’t sure if Eggers was purposefully making Mae incredibly naive, or if he is maybe just not able to create a believable female character.  Mae’s obliviousness throughout the novel is completely unbelievable, and almost laughable by the end.  I’m not sure how to explain this without giving it away, but one of the main plot points relies on Mae not noticing something simply impossible not to notice; this makes the entire book a frustrating read.  I’m not sure if Eggers believes people capable of missing obvious connections or if Mae’s character is supposed to be some sort of caricature of idiocy.  What feels like clever speculation in the beginning (The Circle introducing affordable small cameras, so you can observe your social networks activities) becomes more dramatic and extreme, until actions towards the end of the book are totally unbelievable.  Even if the technology Eggers presents is plausible, Mae’s reaction to it is so distracting that any message is completely lost.  She is like the buxom blonde in the horror movie, oblivious to the monsters we can all so clearly see creeping up on her.  The warning of a society without privacy owned by a Google-like company has no bearing on the real world, because people simply don’t act like Mae acted.  As commenters on Goodreads noted, Mae acts with the flighty lack of self-knowledge or awareness equal to a character in a YA Romance novel.  And that makes The Circle hard to take seriously.

I’m a huge Eggers fan.  I thought A Hologram for the King was the best book of 2012, and How We Are Hungry showed early on that he has some seriously amazing ability to write great fiction.  I love McSweeney’s and I’ve heard Eggers speak on the good works he does tutoring kids in San Francisco and building the Voice of Witness series, so I have no doubt this guy is a saint.  Eggers still has my heart, but The Circle was a spectacular crash and burn for me.

The Circle on Amazon
The Circle on Indiebound

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