In one of my many cookbooks, I have a recipe for freezer-cookies. Basically, the recipe is this: find a bunch of sweet things you like to eat, mix them into little balls stuck together with peanut butter, put balls in freezer. Done. I make them sometimes when I have a variety of baking supplies (chocolate chips, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, etc.) and just want something quick. Do they do the trick? Yes. Are they really that satisfying? Well …

And therein is my issue with Tears in the Grass by Lynda A. Archer. It does the trick of being a quick-to-make-out story; it has everything in it, and I do mean everything (residential schools, rape, forced adoptions, sexism, racism, discrimination, the thoughts of a taxidermied bison, First Nations rights, LGBTQ issues, murder); but, ultimately the peanut butter to stick the balls together (to return to my already weak metaphor) just isn’t there. In three hundred pages, so much is thrown at us, one thing after another, that by the final page, it’s a bit like getting to the end of a marathon. The book wears me out. Plus, much like my last review, there’s a bit of wish fulfillment it seems going on here. Everything ties up in a nice tidy bow. Uplifting sure. Realistic, well … (a missing Cree senior in Saskatchewan is on the news in Ontario? I don’t buy it.)

Plus I’m more interested in the side stories: What was it like for Louise to go to law school in the 1930s as a Cree woman? Are Alice and Wanda going to continue seeing each other? Why didn’t Elinor search for her baby earlier? Does John have any personality at all? Why is the whole novel set in the sixties when it could just as easily be set now?

Overall, an okay book. Would likely be improved with less internal thoughts of a stuffed bison and more plot and character development.

Tears in the Grass by Lynda A. Archer went on sale March 19, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A Mary Sue story of the statutory rape variety for the cinephile, white, CIS-hetero boys out there.

We have Joe. He’s seventeen. He has limitless access to alcohol, and drugs. He has no parental oversight and does whatever he wants. He has a quip and a comeback for every situation. Women drop their panties at the sight of him. FBI agents need his help. He’ll do anything to protect his sister. He knows everything there is to know about movies.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Perhaps this is poorly done satire? I’m going to assume that this is just poorly done satire, otherwise I think I’d feel like I lost fifty IQ points for reading it. I’m also going to assume that my free preview copy hasn’t been fully copy edited yet because I don’t understand why someone like Joe who professes to love cinema so much keeps making mistakes regarding film, such as calling Brad Pittle’s character in Fight Club Tyler Dern. That’s right. Brad Pittle. Tyler Dern. Or watching the French prison movie En Prophet rather than a movie that actually exists, say Un prophète. I’m not even a movie buff and I seem to know more that Joe about movies. (And it isn’t as if all characters/movies/actors are slightly misspelled to avoid legal implications or something. Most are spelled correctly.)

The writing, sadly, is actually decent. The pacing is great. Just the story, of Joe continually and effortlessly saving the day while banging girls in their twenties (plus one teenager), is so moronic and facile that the whole thing smacks of stupidity and wish-fulfillment. Ebner should maybe try his hand at something a little more meaty and put this whole nonsense of a story behind him.

Movie Game by Michael Ebenr went on sale May 5, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I didn’t know Charlotte Salomon before reading Charlotte. I wasn’t enthused about reading this book (So why did you request it from Netgalley then? one asks. Because I request everything from Netgalley because free books. That doesn’t seem like a very good reason. Well, no. It isn’t.) But sometimes a book comes along at exactly the moment you need to read it.

Little by little, she does everything more slowly: eating, walking, reading. Something inside her is slowing down.

Her body, I imagine, being infiltrated by melancholy.

The kind of melancholy that devastates, that never goes away. Happiness becomes an island in the past, unreachable.

I know that feeling!

Grandmother and granddaughter understand each other. Their hearts beat in the same way.

That’s how I feel about my grandmother, who I miss like a limb more and more each day.

Paint so she will not go crazy.

Replace paint for write fiction and that’s also me.

So I needed this. I needed Charlotte by David Foenkinos.

In style, tone, topic, time period, basically every descriptor of the novel, Charlotte reads like HHhH by Laurent Binet: clipped sentences that function as paragraphs, Holocaust, Europe, World War II, the act of resistance, the narrator as a character in the novel itself, the narrator’s search in the here-and-now woven into the historical story of Charlotte Salomon. But don’t mistake this for Charlotte being derivative. It’s its own story. As Foenkinos says:

I felt the need to move to the next line in order to breathe.

So, I realized that I had to write it like this.

Maybe now, with distance, with writing about atrocities removed from one’s own existence by the passage of time, that’s all a writer can do: a line or two and then a breath. Else we become overwhelmed. Even so, missteps occur. I knocked a full star off (to four stars out of five) for Foenkinos’ disingenuous comparison of his being spoken to rudely by a woman who didn’t want him to come onto her private property to the anti-Semitism Charlotte Salomon endured in Nazi-occupied France. Those two things do not merit comparison. I did not like that part. Actually, you can’t really like anything in a book about the Holocaust, can you? Like is for ice cream and action movies. I’d say that part made me angry, but the whole book made me angry because one is angry when reading about the Holocaust. One has to be. Disgusted, same descriptive problem. So I guess I’m back to a misstep. Try to ignore that page and read on.

Thus, in summary and in repetition, I needed to read this.

Charlotte by David Foenkinos went on sale May 3, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.