The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

I read this book at the perfect time in my life.  I am currently about six weeks away from graduating from a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin (only a little south from Westish, actually) and so a lot of this book really resonated with me.  Like the characters in the book, I am both fighting with the want to move on from college to work on living my dream but I am also not prepared to leave this place that has been so comfortable and that makes up the majority of my social life as well as having a built in support group.  Reading this book, though, I felt like it could appeal to all groups of people. This book really shows that big changes can come at any time in one's life, whether or not they are expecting them.  While college may end, education never does.  Just because someone has an education doesn't mean that they will ever stop learning, whether that be academic, social, or just about themselves.

I really enjoyed this book.  The storylines wove in and out of each other very well and I never found myself to be disappointed to have to move away from one storyline to read another one (which I don't find in most books that follow this structure).  That said, I sometimes felt like the baseball talk got in the way of the story.  I know this might sound silly.  A book about baseball talks about baseball?  Ridiculous!  But in all reality, I sometimes had a hard time following the emotion or even plot of what was happening in certain chapters because of the amount of description of baseball.  The book was so beautifully written and flowed so well that I was a little disappointed by how much my brain slowed down and started to tune out when the baseball games were playing.  Books like this also have the possibility of wrapping up far to easily in a beautiful little bow but Harbach did a good job of giving us just enough closure but also not having everything end the way in which we would expect it.

I am giving this book 4 Sequinbeasts.

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

I am going to up-front and let you all know that I read this book for a class about post-colonial coming-of-age novels so my opinions of it have a lot to do with what we have discussed in that class.

Nervous Conditions was an incredibly stereotypical book, in my opinion.  Nothing that happened surprised me and none of the opinions stated were at all surprising to me.  Nervous Conditions tells the story of an African girl living in Zimbabwe and her first acceptance and then slow rejection of white colonial culture.  I found the first two-thirds of the book to be quite slow and filled with the stereotypical moments of a post-colonial coming-of-age novel, but the ending actually picked up and introduced some new ideas that were interesting and some moments of choice making that I appreciated.

All that said, the writing throughout the book is quite nice.  Dangarembga does a great job of writing about a world that I knew very little about in a way that is incredibly easy to understand.  She really immersed me in the two conflicting worlds.  Parts of this book felt like an anthropological essay, giving me sight into the lives of these people and seeing their views on things that we take for granted.

I am giving this book 3 Sequinbeasts.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years.  I kept picking it up and then deciding to read something else.  Last year, I read Telegraph Avenue, which is also by Michael Chabon, and really did't care for it, which also took away some of my motivation to read Kavalier & Clay.  But I've been looking at the lists of past Pulitzer winners and a lot of "Best of" lists and this book kept popping up.  So, while I was home for Spring Break, I decided to bite the bullet and finally read it.  And I am so glad that I did.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay tells an amazing story of family, friendship, and creativity.  Oh boy, that made it sound super cheesy and this book is not at all cheesy.  A complaint that I have heard about this book is that it is overwritten, which is definitely something that I felt when I was reading Telegraph Avenue, but that overwriting made sense here, at least to me.  The book tells the story of comic book writers, spending a lot of time discussing a visual art form that we, the readers, cannot see.  The writing style helped me to see the clarity of a picture that I would see if I were reading a comic book, even in the parts of the book that had nothing to do with comics.  In that way, I felt like the whole book was mirroring the art form it was discussing, even though it was all prose and no pictures.  I felt very connected to all of the characters in this book, which is actually quite rare for me, and was honestly disappointed when I would learn that certain chapters were just the origin stories for their comic book characters, because I wanted to know more about them.  I would tell myself that I was going to stop reading at the end of the chapter and catch myself in the middle of the next one because I didn't want to stop reading.  The book flowed beautifully.  Even though it covered a pretty large expanse of time, even the jumps were smooth, not leaving behind huge gaps, and the gaps that were left were always filled in in some creative way or another.  This book gave me a look into a world that I knew nothing about and now I want to read and learn more about this early comic book world.  I will also add that I loved Chabon's use of historical characters (most notably Orson Wells and Salvador Dalí) to connect his fictional characters to a world that I know about and understand.

I give this book 4 out of 5 sequinbeasts.

A Memory of Violets by Hazel Gaynor

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.

I got an Advance Reader's Copy of this book, even though I didn't actually finish reading it until I had been out for over a month.  But what can you do?  I was intrigued by the concept of the book.  I love period pieces and I was drawn in by the idea of the book being about "London's Flower Sellers," something that I don't know anything about.  This book, though, seemed lost, like it couldn't figure out what it wanted to be.  At first it flipped between Tilly's story (told from a third person narrator) and a first-person account of Florrie's life.  Suddenly we had sections of the stories told through Florrie's diaries, newspaper articles, letters, and even sections told from the perspective of ghosts (which I am still a little confused about, to be honest).  It felt like Gaynor wanted to try a lot of different styles of writing and decided this book was the place to experiment with all of them.

That said, I enjoyed the story for the most part.  None of the twists were as surprising as they were supposed to be and everything wrapped itself up far too easily.  For the amount of complicated ideas and plots that I though had or were being set up, the end came together in a neat little bow in the course of only a couple of pages.  While there were hints of the supernatural throughout the entire book, the ending seemed filled with it, acting as a plot device to pull everything together.  I put the book down and didn't feel fulfilled.  I was left wondering why, exactly, I had decided to spend my time with these characters.  This book may have been 400 pages long, but they were a fast 400 pages.  I feel like there was more story here and I would have liked to hear it rather than having the perfect ending thrust upon me all of the sudden.

All of that said, I give it 2 out of 5 Sequinbeasts.