Sooooo amazing! Beautifully written, compelling, timely (notably, what happens to Lena) and so rich. Hope to return and write a proper review but justSooooo amazing! Beautifully written, compelling, timely (notably, what happens to Lena) and so rich. Hope to return and write a proper review but just want to recommend this far and wide in the meantime!...more
When Katie Greene's mother dies and leaves her only child an orphan, she is sent to live with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, instead of with her grandpaWhen Katie Greene's mother dies and leaves her only child an orphan, she is sent to live with her aunt in Shizuoka, Japan, instead of with her grandparents in Canada, her preferred choice. Her aunt is an English teacher living alone, and encourages Katie to embrace the language and culture and have some fun. Katie learns the language to attend school but sees it as a waiting period, while her grandparents wait to see if her grandfather's cancer is in remission and the paperwork goes through for her to live with them instead.
At school, it feels like Katie is committing one faux pas after another. When she goes back to the school building to change her indoor slippers for her shoes, she finds herself eavesdropping on the dramatic breakup between Myu and her boyfriend, the school Kendo champion, Tomohiro Yuu. Katie isn't sure what is worse: seeing the callous way Tomohiro is treating Myu, who thinks he cheated on her and got another girl pregnant, or catching the hidden feeling on Tomo's face beneath his smirking facade. In that glimpse she can see that the boy is pretending he doesn't care about Myu, but she has no idea why. When Myu brandishes the sketchbook at Tomo as proof and then flings it to the floor, the pages scatter and one lands by Katie's feet behind the sliding door. She picks it up and sees a drawing of a girl sitting on a park bench, the rounded bump of a pregnant belly visible under her top. What shocks Katie to her core is when the girl in the drawing turns her head and glares at Katie.
It is only the beginning - the start of Katie's fascination and suspicions about Tomo, which lead to an odd friendship between them where animosity was before, and then something deeper and sweeter. But it is also the beginning of a new path in Katie's life, as she learns about the kami, a word that means both "paper" and "god" in Japanese, and what that means to Tomo and his ability to bring ink drawings to life - a gift that goes haywire when Katie is around.
What is Katie to the kami? Why is the ink drawn to her, like she's a magnetic force? Can she help Tomo control this power and help protect him from the yakuza, who see his ability to draw money and weapons that actually fire a boon to their cause. But the biggest question of all: can she leave Japan behind and continue on with her other life, now that she knows about kami and has fallen for Tomo? Even if staying together means danger and worse? The months ahead are full of unexpected excitement and danger and one very beautiful, tormented, talented boy for Katie Greene.
I was very keen to read this when I heard it was a fantasy novel set in modern-day Japan, because after I finished uni I lived and worked in Japan for about three years (until early 2005), and I love reading stories set there (especially by Japanese authors). Often when I'm reading YA books from America, they have some Spanish in them, which I know nothing of and can barely pronounce. And when I read adult novels, I often come across French words and sentences or expressions, which I can sometimes figure out, sometimes not, and my pronunciation is atrocious. I always feel left out, like I'm missing nuances and cultural references and so on, and not getting the full impact of the story because of it. So as I was reading Ink, I was absolute in love with my ability to pronounce all the Japanese words (I'm terrible at learning languages and have forgotten much that I did learn while there, but the one thing I was really good at was pronunciation! Japanese is actually quite easy to pronounce once you learn the very simple rules), and I was able to recognise and understand a lot of the words and expressions. After always feeling left out as I mentioned above, I had a kind of heady rush of exhilaration - that sensation of being included, of being "in" on the joke, so to speak. The cultural references were all familiar to me, I "got" all the details and their importance, socially-speaking, and yet there were still some things new to me that meant I could learn from it. It's clear that Amanda Sun has spent considerable time in Japan and has a far greater ability with the language than I ever did!
There were other aspects of the novel that I really liked. I liked Katie, most of the time - she sometimes slipped into whiny-YA-heroine mode for no apparent reason, it didn't even seem to really gel with her character - and she came across as a bit, well, a bit aggressive or bull-headed at times. And she existed in a sort of vacuum: we learn nothing about who she was prior to coming to Japan, what kind of person she was, what her interests are, so there's no contrast or real understanding of her character. Yet I really liked watching her adapt and even embrace living in Japan. She went way out of her comfort zone and was richly rewarded.
I took my black chopsticks and lifted the leftover croquettes from my bentou into my mouth. The taste of peanut-butter sandwiches had drifted away with my old life. I wondered who I was then, when I couldn't speak or read or eat, totally immobilized by the change in my world. Vines were entangling the hole in my heart, buds sprouting on the outskirts. There was still a void, a pocket of emptiness. But around it, my heart was blooming.
I enjoyed the Japanese characters too, though they weren't as well fleshed out, especially Katie's friends at school, Yuki and Tanaka. They were sadly one-dimensional, Katie's "token" friends. Tomohiro was a much more vivid character, which is just as well because in many ways, he carries the story. The other key male characters were Tomo's friend and yakuza wannabe, Ishikawa; and Jun, a boy Katie meets on the subway who turns up at other times just when she needs the help. There's was always something a bit suspicious about Jun, and the revelations at the end worked well with the impression of his character I'd already built in my mind.
While the pacing was good and there wasn't an overload of exposition - explaining Japanese elements, for instance - to bog it down (explanations were given when needed, and were slipped in quite naturally I thought), there were weaknesses to the story. The fantasy side of the premise and plot, which had initially appealed to me, failed to really excite me in the end. It just didn't really go anywhere. Once Katie learns about the kami and what Tomo can actually do, she doesn't really learn anything new about it, and so the fantasy element stagnated a bit. There is some exciting and dangerous scenes, but they somehow lacked the desired impact. And while I enjoyed the character of Tomo and there were moments when he felt real and vibrant to me, overall the connection between him and Katie lacked the kind of chemistry you'd want to feel when you get two characters in their situation. There's tension, but also a great deal of distance. Perhaps the tricky part is maintaining his Japanese-ness while satisfying a non-Japanese audience. Romance Japanese-style isn't like romance, Western-style.
This is going to be a bit of a hard sell to a white Western audience, I think, and that will be a shame, because there's a lot of potential here, a lot of exciting new ideas, and some great writing. Some of Tomohiro's drawings are shown in the book and there's some flip-page animation which you can't get the full benefit of when reading this on an e-reader as I did: I'm going to have to pick this up in a bookshop and check out the illustrations in person. Bottom line? Absolutely give this a go. It's genuine and different and has moments of excellence, and it just might be different enough to win you over. Or maybe not - it could be that I'm more in love with the Japanese setting than anything else, and that has distracted me from its larger flaws. It didn't wholly satisfy me in the end, but I am curious about where the story is going from here.
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via Netgalley....more
Rose Zarelli begins grade ten with a pool party that sets the tone for the year to come. The swim team - or "swim thugs" as everyone calls them - are Rose Zarelli begins grade ten with a pool party that sets the tone for the year to come. The swim team - or "swim thugs" as everyone calls them - are initiating a new member, a trendily-dressed boy called Conrad, by throwing cups of beer at his face until he falls into the swimming pool while the boys yell homophobic insults at him, and blasting water from a hose into his mouth until he chokes. When Conrad is pushed into the pool he lets himself sink and isn't coming back up; only Rose seems to even notice, but when she leans over the edge to check on him she's pushed in too.
That's when Jamie Forta arrives, just in time to help Rose out of the pool. She hasn't seen him since the end of the last school year and has no idea what he's been doing over the summer or where they stand or what he is to her. Is he even her friend still? He still seems awfully close to Regina, the girl who made Rose's life hell last year, and it turns out that Conrad is Regina's younger brother - Conrad who is, he tells Rose and her best friend Tracy, actually gay, and one very angry boy who's taking out his feelings of anger and impotence on everyone around him (he also hates Rose because Jamie likes her).
Anger is in the air it seems. Only Tracy is handling adolescence well, and turning some petty bullying into something positive: her own fashion website where she profiles the looks of her peers. Suddenly Tracy is someone everyone wants to be friends with, while Rose can only think: how come she's never taken a photo of me? At home things haven't improved much: Rose is still attending counselling with her mother, who wants Rose to take down the memorial website she created in honour of her father, who died in a roadside bomb in Iraq where he was working as an engineer. Her brother, Peter, is clearly doing more drugs at uni than studying, and it's no surprise to Rose when he's kicked out and arrives home to face the wrath of their mother.
But this year Rose is determined to take control of her life in whatever way she can, and that means trying out for the school musical - or maybe even a friend's band, as lead singer. It certainly gives her a chance to channel her inner angst, all her anger at everything she can't control in her life: her dad's death, her problems with her mother and brother, the elusive Jamie Forta, and all the crap that comes with being a teenager. Rose is still angry, but she's looking for an outlet, and she's also learning how to stand up for herself when it comes to Jamie, who's still dicking around with her feelings, going hot and cold on her, and making her choose between doing the right thing by him or the right thing by her worst enemy. Grade ten is going to be one messy year.
All the things I said in my review of the first book, Confessions of an Angry Girl, is just as true for this sequel. Rozett has created, with Rose, a truly distinct, relatable, identifiable heroine who is wading through adolescence in a realistic urban American high school setting and trying to deal with everything that involves. I may not have had the same high school experiences as Rose, but I had similar ones, and there's something universal about being a white middle class teenager in a western country that makes it easy to relate and identify with Rose and her experiences.
Rose is on a noticeable character-development arc, and she's not the same girl she was in grade 9. She's already grown up since then and finding some of her inner strength. She loses her starry-eyed perspective of Jamie, for one, and that was deeply satisfying. I like Jamie, as a character and a love interest for Rose, but he too is a teenager and he's been through some crap of his own. He's far from the perfect, gentlemanly boys the heroines of so many YA books fall in love with. He's a flawed character, as is Rose, and has a lot of growing up to do himself. He does shitty things, and this time Rose calls him on it. She learns how to tease him, how to express herself better, and she faces head-on her own limits: how far would she go with Jamie?
The mess of Rose's personal life is set against a backdrop of bullying and homophobia that is depressingly relevant today. This certainly isn't the first YA book or series to tackle these issues, but the way Rozett presents them and handles them is refreshing: they're not the point of the story, rather they're ever-present alongside the school lockers and the cat-fights and the homework assignments. It's the way Rose views the world around her and her seemingly callous dithering over whether to intervene or tell the truth about something she's witnessed. This, too, makes her a very realistic teenager. Telling the truth about what happened to Conrad at the party before school started, for instance, isn't a black-and-white matter. After what happened the year before, when Rose called 911 after a girl needed medical attention at a party where there was a lot of underage drinking going on, she's learned the consequences of "ratting" on her peers the hard way, and she's also learned that sometimes its important for the person being bullied or abused etc., to make that stand themselves, that you can't do it for them.
What I'm trying to say is that, Rozett doesn't moralise or try to slip in messages for "right" behaviour or even pretend that these things don't happen, because they very much do. I love that Rozett doesn't shy away from the worst of teenage behaviour, and I appreciate that she isn't trying to under-handedly moralise, which is something I've come across in other YA novels. In fact, she doesn't even need to. Simply creating Rose, a character I'm sure many teens will be able to identify with, and showing her own conflicts and her struggles in deciding what is the right thing to do - which isn't always as obvious as adults like to think it is - is enough. Show, don't tell. Nothing could be more true of teenagers, surely; nothing can get their back up more than being told how to behave etc. But they still look for guidance, reassurance, support, in their own way. And this is the kind of series to offer that.
What was funny - in an ironic way - for me was how much anger I felt while reading this. I felt furious at Rose's mum for the way she's handling her relationship with her daughter, and the joint therapy sessions they have with her mother's therapist, and how completely ineffective she is at expressing her own true feelings - you can't fault Rose for not being honest with her about her own feelings in turn. I felt anger at the injustice of the stupid "slut list", and all the forms of bullying that go on. I felt anger at Jamie for being a dick, and for being quite lovely when he wants to be, and for what happens at the end of the book. But I also felt unbearably sad - sad for Regina and Conrad, sad for Jamie, sad for Rose who's mourning her father yet feels that she's not allowed to grieve anymore, that, what, she should have moved on? It made me angry all over again.
In part, that's intense emotional connection is what makes this book really work. That and the gritty realism. These characters - not just Rose and Jamie but the supporting characters as well - are true-to-life, flawed human beings. They make mistakes. They struggle to express themselves. They can make bad situations worse. They lash out at each other. But such is Rozett's skill at depicting these people and giving them room to breathe and grow and be, you also see all their good points, their vulnerabilities, their strengths, their pain and their sense of honour. I liked this even more than the first book: the story only gets stronger and the adolescent stakes higher, as Rose continues to grow up and figure out who she is and what she wants out of life. This is YA fiction at its best.
Also, COVER LOVE! ;)
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via Netgalley. ...more
Ellie O'Neill is seventeen and living with her mum in the small coastal town of Henley, Maine. It's the summer holidays and she's working two jobs to Ellie O'Neill is seventeen and living with her mum in the small coastal town of Henley, Maine. It's the summer holidays and she's working two jobs to save money for a poetry class at Harvard that she's been accepted into in August. When a Hollywood movie crew arrive to film scenes for a new romantic movie, Ellie doesn't have much time to take notice of it all, unlike her best friend Quinn whom she works with at the ice cream parlour, who's weak at the knees at seeing gorgeous young celebrity actor Graham Larkin, one of the stars of the film.
What Ellie doesn't realise is that she already knows Graham Larkin, the seventeen-year-old movie star made famous from his lead role in a trilogy of movies about a magician. She's been emailing him since March, when he accidentally sent her an email asking her to walk his pet pig, Wilbur. She replied to tell him he'd got the wrong person, and a flirty, friendly ongoing conversation began. While neither told the other their name, they shared many other details about their lives, details that were both vague and deeply personal all at once.
From these emails, Graham pieced together where exactly Ellie lived, and that she worked at an ice cream parlour. When the original location for the film fell through, Graham managed to convince the director to try Henley, Maine instead. Graham wants to meet Ellie. She doesn't know who he is or what his life is really like, and because of that he's been able to talk to her as if he were a regular teenager, not a celebrity.
When Ellie meets Graham in the flesh, she's torn. A part of her misses the emails they shared, the mystery of it all. Part of her wants to know him better, spend more time with him. And a part of her - the reasonable, clear-headed part - knows just how important it is for her to stay away from cameras, which makes dating Graham Larkin - who is always stalked by paparazzi - an impossibility. It's not just for her, but for her mother as well, who moved them up here when Ellie was five in order to escape the press and the stress of being watched, but also to protect Ellie's father. And it's this kind of secret that comes between Ellie and Graham now, a secret that seems impossible to overcome.
I greatly enjoyed Smith's previous novel, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, which was fast- and smoothly-paced, tightly written, poignant and thoughtful. I was excited to get her new book, and after reading a very heavy Israeli novel, a book with a title like this seemed just the thing for me. And while I still greatly respect and admire Smith's writing, the maturity of her characters and their ability to grow, and her avoidance of the usual clichés, I did find that this novel was missing something, for me. Some spark of magic, or chemistry, or oomph. I'm not sure what exactly, only that I was left feeling a bit disappointed.
There is much to enjoy here, nevertheless. The emails at the start are fun to read, and both Ellie and Graham are likeable and sympathetic characters who are learning independence and how to balance their conflicting wants. Graham, after the surprise of landing his first major acting role when he'd just been goofing around in the school play, finds himself really enjoying the job of acting, and wants to do it for as long as he's interested in it, even though his parents, both ordinary, unadventurous middle class teachers, want him to go to university instead. He lives with his pet pig, Wilbur, alone in a big house in Los Angeles, and finds himself isolated by his celebrity status. His parents seem uncomfortable in his world, and treat him like visiting royalty - a stranger, in other words - when he goes home to see them, so he's started avoiding them. Graham is young, and new to it all, and has a fan base of screaming teenage girls, so he's got a long road ahead of him in terms of balancing a career in the film industry with having any sense of normalcy in his personal life.
Ellie is a strong heroine, intelligent and thoughtful but her moments of great maturity are balanced by her moments of adolescent drama - which aren't often but they do happen. Though I must add that I found her a bit, well, cold. She was just so very confident and "together". I found it hard to feel much interest, or sympathy, for her family secret, and felt a bit resentful on her behalf about it all. It also seemed a bit, well, tacky, and rather irrelevant. I would have quite happily cut that part out completely. But Ellie knows how to hold her own, even if she is rather serious about everything. (I liked Ellie, but I think I liked Graham more; aside from anything else, he just seemed a bit more human than she did.)
I don't know how realistic the premise of their original meeting is, or whether we should be romanticising it. Too many girls get trapped or taken advantage of or worse, through anonymous online communication of various kinds. Granted, Ellie is clearly too smart to fall for an online stalker or creepy pervert masquerading as someone younger, but still, she never really had any doubts about continuing to communicate with some unknown person half a country away. And true, they never discussed meeting in person, never went from slightly flirty to anything more overt, never wanted to exchange photos. But still, it's one area where I feel a great deal of caution around, because the mystery of it all makes it very tantalising to the teenage mind.
This is a lot longer than Smith's previous novel, and I found it a bit slow. It works in the sense that you get the chance to get to know the characters and understand them, but there just wasn't a whole lot else going on. I'm also unconvinced as to Ellie and Graham's chemistry. I just didn't really feel it. Perhaps because Ellie was so sensible and oh so mature, and perhaps because, like Ellie, it was a bit anticlimactic to meet someone in the flesh whom you've created as a certain person in your head while texting back and forth, all this time. As I mentioned, it's the mystery - the romance of the mystery - that appeals, but once the mystery is solved, well, then it's more of a struggle to remain interested. (The mystery isn't much of one to the reader, but you still pick up on their feelings about it.)
They always felt like real people, Ellie and Graham (though not, perhaps, as flawed as real people), and their friendship and budding romance was realistic - not rushed, not instant, but cautious and tender and a bit anxious too, lit with possibilities, not certainties - and the romance was not really the point of the story: growing up and figuring things out, was. As such, it was a successful novel, a solid chapter in adolescent life, but while I did like it, I did find it lacking in oomph. And that, for me, with this book, was a critical ingredient in making me care. Instead, I found the novel - which I read a couple of weeks or so before writing this review - to be sadly forgettable, especially in the details. I couldn't even remember the characters' names. Smith is a strong writer and I like her style and the characters she creates, but I just wasn't all that interested in this particular story....more
After many years, Amaranth has run from the polygamous commune she married into. It is the only world she's known, since her earlier life was one of nAfter many years, Amaranth has run from the polygamous commune she married into. It is the only world she's known, since her earlier life was one of no family and poverty, which ended the day she married wandering preacher Zachariah. The polygamy came later, as did Zachariah's increasingly rabid pronunciations of the coming of the end of the world - aided by Amaranth's own oldest daughter, Sorrow, who has become her father's assistant, acting as a Seer to his Prophet.
Now, after a showdown with local police who were more worried than anything else that ended in their temple burning, Amaranth took the opportunity to flee. Taking one of their many cars, the boot loaded with provisions she's been hiding away, she drives for four days across the country, with her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow, sitting in the backseat. After Sorrow's first attempt to escape when they stopped for fuel, Amaranth tied her daughters together at the wrist with a strap. But driving without sleep takes its toll, and in the middle of nowhere, Amaranth crashes into a stump, flipping the car onto its roof.
There is help at hand, of a sort: they are by an old shop and petrol pump that belong to a farmer called Bradley. His wife has left him and he has only an adopted teenaged son nicknamed Dust to help him on the farm. In this corner of Oklahoma - the dusty panhandle to Oklahoma's frying pan - there's little money to be made off the farm which is being squeezed by the companies selling the seed, and aside from letting the strange trio sleep on his porch, Bradley has little interest in helping them.
Amaranth was initially certain that Zacharia was following them, hunting them, livid with rage and determined to drag them back. But as the days go by and he never appears, she turns her attention to Bradley and the run-down house. Meanwhile, her daughters - aged fifteen and twelve - are caught in a strange new world where the rules they have always lived by are being discarded and everything they once understood about the world is being threatened by a new reality. Amity, younger and more flexible of mind, tries to incorporate the new world into her previous understanding, but Sorrow remains fixed in her belief of her father's claims, and will not be shaken. She is determined to get home to him and in her skewed reality, it matters not who is harmed along the way.
Amity & Sorrow is a fairly short novel and simple in its structure and its story; yet for all that it focuses its energy on some big key themes and explores them deftly without falling too heavily into the tides of melodrama - yet it becomes somewhat side-tracked by these issues at the detriment of its characters. The story could certainly have gone many ways, and one of the reasons why I've given as detailed a summary as I have, is because I felt a bit lost going into this - I wasn't even sure of the time period, at first, or where it was going. Sometimes this is ideal, preferred even, but other times it helps to know something of the story first.
But as I said, this is a story of themes rather than action, a story of human nature rather than a story of a life's journey. It takes on some key themes that are something of a preoccupation in America: fervent, zealous religion and a belief in televangalists and the end of the world; and the sorry state of agriculture - which ties into the end-of-the-world frenzy, the idea that everything's going to shit. Bradley, the farmer, lends his voice to this theme, giving voice to the paradox of large scale farming and the problems that arise when the seed companies - and the stock market and government policy - dictate what he can and can't grow.
"I got acres of rape out there and I don't know what I'm doin'. We was always wheat here but the price drops and someone says they want rapeseed oil, so you buy it and you plant it and then they call in a loan. You plant soybean, then sorghum, and you keep settin' your share, diggin' deep, diggin' broad, puttin' in things you never grew before 'cause they say someone'll buy 'em. And everythin' you grow you sell and put back into seeds, 'cause they won't let you save seeds anymore. And then you have to spray and you have to buy their spray. And then out of the blue, folks want organic, but your seeds and spray ain't green and if you don't spray you'll only harvest cheatgrass and shattercane. And then they tell you to plant corn for ethanol when that's what all the rape was for. [...] When all of this was dust once. And before that it was buffalo grass and they made it worse, men like my pa, settin' their shares too deep. Wantin' too much. Turning everythin' over 'til nothing would grow. [...] Hell, anything growin' here is a miracle."
The landscape of this part of Oklahoma is a tangible, vivid one, as is the sense of isolation and poverty. It's in the small details but also captured effortlessly in Bradley himself, who typifies the situation in the way he speaks, the life he's lived, his attempts to keep going and not give in, though he knows full well that farming's a joke when the soil's bereft of nutrients and there's barely any rain. He's trying to make a living off a new kind of desert, and that makes a certain kind of man.
Tied into this is, of course, the much larger theme around religion in America. Zacharia's polygamist cult consisted of fifty wives by the time Amaranth leaves, and while many of them are brought back by her husband at the end of his summer preaching travels, others arrive of their own accord, having met him and learned about the commune as a place they can escape their old lives to, a place of basics and a simple life far removed from terrorist attacks, drugs and all the other problems that come with living our hectic contemporary lifestyle. This will resonate easily with Riley's readers, giving Zacharia's cult believability - and from there it's not such a huge step to understand how people can buy into his fervent spiels about God and the coming apocalypse, especially as these women have all seen (or are all thinking about) the worst side of humanity.
Where the cult becomes scary is when the madness takes over, when the things Zachariah says lose all semblance of reason, and, most especially, with Sorrow. She's at that age where teens are caught up in their hormones, carving out a place for themselves and trying to figure out their identities. Sorrow believes everything her father says and more, she has created a God that no one outside her would recognise, and she makes the rules up as she goes without even realising it, all to satisfy whatever aim or desire she has. She's like the ultimate spoilt child. I got the impression that even if she'd been raised in a "normal" household, she would have still had the potential to go her own way, to look for something that would have given her the illusion of being special and superior. What her father did to her - and I'm not just talking about the brainwashing - was absolutely horrible, but you can't feel sympathy for her because, in her twisted mindset, she's made it into something else that puts her above others.
In any contest with Sorrow she is bound to lose. Amity shrugs. "How will He bring us a car?" "A truck." "What truck?" Amity has a bad feeling about this sign. "A red truck. A faded truck." "The man's truck? You can't just take his truck." "God put it here for us." "God gave the truck to the farmer. He won't just give it to us." Sorrow reels Amity in by the end of the wrist strap. "God says the boy will take it for us, just as he took the food. God will make him."
What Sorrow really needs is firm parenting, right from the beginning, but that never really happened and this is the result. Needless to say, Sorrow's mother Amaranth is useless as a mother. She has no role models to emulate, and no education to help her think her way through things. She knows she's ineffective but that knowledge alone can't fix things. This is another theme that is touched upon in the book, that sometimes weak parenting without barriers is just as bad if not worse than no parenting at all.
"I hit her!" she calls to him. "I hit her." She gestures with the stick. "I've taught her. I've done it." A dark row of spikes stands between them. "That what you people do?" "She is willful. She has to learn." He nods. "My pa used to beat the crap out of me. Didn't teach me nothin', 'cept he was a bully. Big man, hittin' a kid." She squeezes the stick. "I don't know how else to reach her."
In contrast to Sorrow - who is really quite scary, in her brainwashing - Amity is young enough to have more of an open mind, and also her place in the cult wasn't anything like Sorrow's. She was a watcher, observing much but mostly keeping quiet; she also believes she can heal with her hands. Her naivete and ignorance is that of a child, so that what becomes frightening in Sorrow, a wilful, headstrong, selfish teenager, is mostly amusing or merely sad in Amity. She looks out for her sister, looks over her even, but has a task she is ill-equipped to know what to do with. Her ignorance puts her in a dangerous position and her mistakes are the direct result of her lack of parenting and the cult's over-zealous theology.
Amaranth isn't a hateful figure, for all of her mistakes and stupidity. I felt sorry for her much of the time, but also angry with her for how her daughters have turned out. What was most telling were her thoughts regarding her place in the polygamous cult. She is Zacharia's first wife, his only legally-recognised wife, but she has no special hold on him and doesn't seem to regard their lifestyle as a religious one. And at the end of the day, it's the women who are her family, the women whom she lives all her days with who mean so much more to her than her own husband. It's a poignant moment:
She had only ever wanted a family, to love and belong to, and she thought of the time when she had first arrived, when she saw he women there, women she didn't know and hadn't expected, and thought she was better than them because he'd married her. She thought with a start that she should have married them, not her husband. It was these women who stayed when her husband did not. It was these women who cared for her and loved her in her failing. Her husband didn't even know that she had had Eve and already she'd lost her. Her thumb picked at the oversized ring she wore, hers alone.
And of course, the novel spends a fair bit of energy on the state of religion in America, and the appeal of televangelists. Through Bradley's bed-ridden curmudgeon father, we get the voice of the tricks of the trade, breaking down the so-called spirituality of these preachers into a give-and-take commodity: giving the people what they want to hear in exchange for money. When Amaranth takes Sorrow and Amity to the nearby town, Sorrow is drawn to a local preacher of this type, who has styled his own young son into a prophet, and they have a show-down:
"Our work glorifies God," Sorrow bites back. "What works do you do - what gifts have you?" "He has the gift of tongues!" a woman in a wheelchair calls. "Then speak, Prophet," says Sorrow. "You got nothing to prove, son," the man says, but the little boy screws his face up, throwing his head back and opening his mouth in a susurration of consonants, a string of long and sensuous vowels. A woman in a caftan falls to her knees, hands up to fondle heaven. Sorrow flings her own head back then and roars her gift through clenched teeth. Where the boys words are silken, hers come as stabs. Where his slip along a slick path, hers are a switchback of barbs and hooks, grunts and clicks. "Listen to that!" the man calls. "Will the grapes of our Lord be gathered from thorns?" The woman in the caftan struggles to get back up, grabbing hold of the wheelchair arms. "That's the devil's talk!" "It is not!" Sorrow protests. "You're making it up," the boy says. "Yours is a bunch of noise." Sorrow pokes the boy in the chest. "You're making yours up." "You are!" The boy's face goes red. "You're only a girl!" "And you're too little to make Jesus!"
It is these scenes (scenes I've quoted here) that hit hardest, that carry the most weight and make the most impact. They aren't subtle, but they are effective. I like subtlety when tackling these kinds of issues, but I must admit to being entertained by them nonetheless - especially when, as in the quote above, I hear a little bit of Monty Python coming through.
There is much to like and admire in Amity & Sorrow, though it's not a novel that I'd say you would "enjoy", it's ultimately too sad and tragic for that. The issues it deals with are just too heavy of heart. And I know for sure that I would have been able to immerse myself better in this story had I read a physical copy rather than an e-book - that's just the kind of reader I am. But even had I read it in hard copy, I still would have been left feeling rather disappointed. The novel lacks oomph, it lacks subtlety, and it lacks the kind of characters - even one - that you can really connect with. I felt that Amaranth was meant to be that character, but you never quite get below the surface with her. The book is not just short, it's a bit too short. It wanted to take on so many big issues, that it lost its heart. For what is at the heart of this story, really? It's no one character, no one issue or theme. It's a broad, overall picture that skims over its characters depths to paint their surface and not much else. As interested as I am in the topics it touches upon, and as interested as I was in the characters it introduced to me, it never quite achieved heart. And that was a real let-down for me.
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via Netgalley. ...more
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