Cascade Public Library

Book: The Grace Year

Author: Kim Liggett

Reviewed by: Amelia Valasek, Library Manager

Who should read this: This is a YA title, but adults who enjoy dystopian fiction, feminist issues, or psychological horror would also enjoy. Although the book is written for a younger audience, it does contain violence and sex (though probably not anything worse that what you’d find in the Hunger Games). If you read YA in order to avoid violence and sex, this may not be the read for you.

Personal impression: The book started out a bit slow, and had some lagging in the middle, but it still managed to keep my attention until the end. Sometimes the “lessons” being conveyed were a bit on-the-nose, there were a few plot holes I couldn’t account for, and there were times I saw the “surprises” coming from a mile away. However, overall I thought the book was a fun and engaging read, and I cut it a bit of slack knowing it was written for a younger audience.

Review: Its not surprising that the opening epigraph of this book contains quotes from both A Handmaids Tale and The Lord of the Flies, as the novel borrows heavily from both of these literary predecessors. This isn’t to say that The Grace Year  is derivative, so much as it takes the themes of these previous works and makes them more accessible for a younger audience. The book opens on Tierney James, a 16 year old girl living in a closed, agrarian and misogynistic society where women have virtually no freedoms. When girls in this community turn 16, they are sent away for their “Grace Year” where they live with other “grace year girls” in an isolated island encampment. The purpose of the Grace Year is to allow the girls to burn through all their dangerous womanly magic and come back cleansed and ready to live a life of servitude as wives or laborers. That is, if they survive.

The opening and closing sections of the book taking place in Tierney’s village, as well as the romantic interlude at the book’s midpoint, were competently written but not terribly engaging. They felt like exposition disguised as plot points, their only real purpose being to reveal information. The book really shines when it leaves behind the standard trappings of YA dystopian fiction and narrows the focus down to the girls at the encampment and their slow descent into madness. I felt like this book missed it’s calling and should have been a straight horror novel instead. These sections of the book had me gripped and I really wish there had been more of them.

I did appreciate the path the author took to conclude the book. Without spoiling the ending, I enjoyed the portrayal of a slow, but sustainable societal change rather than an out-and-out revolution instigated by teenagers (perhaps I’m not giving enough credit to teenagers in doubting their ability to spark revolutions?). The ending felt authentic and moving, even if it lacked the fireworks of some better known series like Hunger Games or the Insurgent series.  Overall, the book was enjoyable, despite its flaws. A great read for a rainy weekend.

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Book: Trust Exercise

Author: Susan Choi

Reviewed by: Amelia Valasek, Library Manager

Who should read this: Anyone who enjoys stories with an unreliable narrator and perspective shift, coming of age, theater (or “theatre”), and stories that focus on how people deal with trauma.

Personal impression: I will admit I was somewhat hesitant to read the book based on the description inside the front flap, but I figured it won the national book award, so it was probably worth at least a try. I was glad I did.

Review: This book is many things, both in the sense of what happens, and in the sense of how the story is told. The first half of the book unfolds as a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story, set in an unnamed sprawling southern (or maybe western?) US city, as well as in the halls and classrooms of a charter (or maybe private?) high school for artistically talented youth. The second half of the book revisits a handful of these same characters in their adulthood and calls into question everything we read in the first half. The book ends with one brief, and final shift in perspective that in some ways clarifies the first two sections, and in other ways deepens our doubt about what we have read.

Discussing too much of what this book is “about” will ruin what makes it satisfying. This isn’t to say that “Trust Exercise” is one of those books that sets out to trick the reader or one where, to discuss the plot would ruin some type of revelatory twist at the end. Such twists often imply that there really is only one set of facts, one ultimate truth that we just failed to grasp because we were distracted by the author’s sleight of hand. There is no sleight of hand here. Instead, this is a book that shows us how truth and trauma can be elusive, slippery, muddy, perhaps not totally understood even in the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves.

Susan Choi exhibits a range of writing styles without ever feeling contrived or dishonest. The first half of the book gives us a story of high school angst and heartache told with a brutal realism and urgency anyone who has ever been a teenager can appreciate. The second section of the book focuses on a different character who is forced to re-visit a trauma from her youth, and plays with identity and narration in an interesting and unexpected way that I enjoyed.

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Book: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Author: Ocean Vuong

Reviewed by: Amelia Valasek, Library Manager

Who should read it: Anyone who appreciates poetry, stories about immigration, LGBT issues, coming of age, and what it means to be an American. Anyone who won’t get bored by a book that is light on “plot” but deep in feeling. Note: this book does contain a few scenes that are sexually explicit in nature.

Personal Impression: There were times I cried and re-read a sentence or paragraph several times just to enjoy the sheer beauty of language. There were other times I got a bit bored and started skimming.

Review: The plot of the book is fairly limited. A family from Vietnam immigrates to the United States after the Vietnam War, where a grandmother, mother, and son navigate through their new life, and where the son falls in love with a local farm boy. What this book lacks in conflict or plot, it more than makes up for with a profound reflection on the human experience.

It’s clear that Ocean Vuong is first and foremost a poet. The book wanders between coherent narrative, in which the protagonist “Little Dog” comes of age and experiences first love, and a less coherent prose-poetry in which the narrator (and one might be forgiven for thinking, perhaps the author himself) explores an often fraught relationship with his family, most especially his mother. Woven between these two main threads are a host of other themes such as the trauma of war, the opioid crisis, and the immigrant experience.

This is a book that works best when it is absorbed. To enjoy this book, I recommend not trying to focus on the story at a rational level, but instead to let it work through you and cling to your subconscious like the cobwebs of a dream.

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Book: The Disappearing Earth

Author: Julia Phillips

Reviewed by: Amelia Valasek, Library Manager

Who should read this: Anyone who enjoys short stories, rugged landscapes, fully realized characters, small human dramas, and a dark mystery puzzled together in intricate parts.

Personal impression: I could NOT put this book down. At first, I felt a little off kilter because I was expecting a standard mystery thriller, but got something much different, and much better.

Review: This book, set on the rugged Kamchatka peninsula of Russia’s eastern shore, hovers in the dreamy space between a novel and a collection of related short stories. Circling the periphery of the book are the stories of three missing people: a pair of young sisters who have been abducted from the center of Kamchatka’s only metropolitan city, and a young Indigenous woman who disappears from a northern village. These missing children haunt the edges of each individual story, where a wide cast of fully realized characters experience their own struggles and triumphs.

For mystery lovers, fear not. The author does not abandon the thread of the missing girls, and those who pay close attention will be rewarded with a tightly woven web that comes to a very satisfying conclusion. Rather than giving us another book in which missing girls serve as a canvas for a clever detective to save the day by following his gut and breaking all the rules, this book instead gives us a mystery that plays out in kitchens and streets and hallways, in the conflict between cultures, and the pull of fully realized humanity.

Julia Phillips, who spent two years living on the Kamchatka peninsula in 2011, infuses the story with small cultural details that transport the reader to this distant and gorgeous landscape. Her writing, both clear and beautiful, lacking in artifice or self-importance, allows the reader to loose themselves within the small unfolding dramas of each new chapter.

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We’d like to try a little something that we think might help our patrons and avid readers: A book review feature! To begin, these reviews will primarily be written by library staff, but we’d love to include reviews from our patrons as well. If you’d be interested in reading and reviewing books available at the library, please contact us at [email protected].