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.