meghan rose allen

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.

Sometimes I just want to read books about Canada. Even if that Canada is shrunk down, essentially, to only Toronto, there’s something comforting about the Canadian-ness of Can-Lit. You can see the importance of literature that speaks outside the white, male, American/British experience when one finds a book that gives comfort to one’s own experience. So Middle-Aged Boys & Girls — even when the stories are supposed to be cringe-inducing, I can still feel like yay Canada (Toronto)! Yay women! Yay yay!

I can’t say that every story works. The collection’s opener Shadow Selve is too rambly, and feels almost out-of-place with the other, more focused stories. The female characters tend to melt together, a bit bitter, a bit trusting, a bit beat down by life. Yoga keeps reappearing. Passionless marriages. The description of husband and wife as brother and sister appears in consecutive stories. Plus there are unnecessary framing devices, like an in-your-head-conversation to an ex-boyfriend in Prey or what feels like the endless beginning to Doughnut Eaters musing on the neighbours before getting to the actual story which takes place years earlier in Germany.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy Middle-Aged Boys & Girls. I did. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I just couldn’t love it. The plots and the writing were at such high a level that when there was a misstep, it was all the more apparent because it felt so out of place. Plus I’m jealous. I’d love to have a collection of short stories published.

Contemporary Canadiana. If that’s what you enjoy, you’ll probably like Bracuk’s book. But you might not love it.

Middle-Aged Boys & Girls by Diane Bracuk went on sale March 1, 2016.

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

A bunch of Japanese comic strips about Atsumi, a high school girl who looks like a child, and her younger brother Atsushi, a child who looks like a high school student. They have parents, eventually, about half-way through when I was starting to wonder why Atsumi and Atsushi were living on their own. Their friends and neighbours make an appearance. Atsushi’s teacher, Moriyama-sensei, is around too. The jokes just recycle through — mainly that Atsushi, looking like an adult but really a young boy, keeps getting arrested for “kidnapping” his classmates. I guess it’s funny that the Japanese police force are on the lookout for child predators? Or that a lot of older girls/women want to date Atsushi because he looks like an attractive young man? I guess, maybe, sort of funny? Reading Recorder and Randsell is sort of like reading all the Peanuts‘ strips where Lucy is holding the football ball for Charlie Brown: you know what’s going to happen, but you keep reading anyway.

But, over-arching everything else in this manga, we need to discuss more on Moriyama-sensei (ignoring the fact that she seems sexually attracted to her student Atsushi, which is just rather unsettling.) Even adjusting for manga/anime style, Moriyama-sensei’s bosom is distracting. My back aches just looking at her boobs sticking out like a good foot from her body. Like having two watermelons Krazy-glue’d to your chest. I’m guessing that this artistic choice of character rendering probably should be taken as a hint that I am not the projected audience of this manga.

Recorder and Randsell by Meme Higashiya went on sale September 1, 2015.

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

Tesfa’s thoughts:

I liked it. I liked that there was more than one story so it felt like it kept going. My favourite story was the last one where Pinkie Pie goes to a fair and eats all these cupcake things and gets sick but then learns how to not eat so many. I also liked the story about teaching the pegasuseseseseses [sic] to fly. One of the stories though I already had the comic book so I didn’t read that one.

I liked it. I want to read more comics like this on the iPad.

Tesfa (Age 7).

My Little Pony: Friends Forever Volume 3 went on sale March 17, 2015.

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

The other day I went to Netgalley because I go there and click on books I want to read thinking that I will never be approved for them, and then I get approved, which is why I have an enormous backlog of books to review from Netgalley. Pretty much, Netgalley is my book addiction enabler.

And there, right on the front page, is a picture of Denise Mina, and, due to my aforementioned book addiction, I know what Denise Mina looks like so I’m like Oh my goodness, Netgalley must have a new Denise Mina book for me to read and I click on Ms Mina’s face and the little flag on the request-book-sub-website that tells you what countries they are approving readers for is a Union Jack and I’m like Whatever. That used to be Canada’s flag and I lived in the UK for two years thirty years ago and I don’t care, just give me the new Denise Mina book!. And then they do and I’m so happy and then I actually read what Netgalley is offering and it isn’t the new Denise Mina book: It’s only a chapter from the new Denise Mina book.

Whaw-whaw sad trombone sound.

Still, partial Denise Mina is better than no Denise Mina. Although I’ll likely read all of The Long Drop when it comes out, irrespective of what I think of the first chapter, because the first chapter of mystery novels are always disjointed and disorienting because they want to pique your interest and make you want to read the next chapter, then the next, then the next, etc. There’s a bit too much detailing of physical traits for my taste in the first chapter (what he wore, what colour the walls were, etc.), but it’s a mystery novel. Excessive description may come in handy later for solving the mystery. Still, I wish that an editor would have stripped a lot of it away.

So the first chapter was all right. Could have been awful; I’d read the final book anyway, although waiting until 2017 to do so seems like a big tease.

In any case, maybe Denise Mina will be my friend and then send me all of The Long Drop before the release date for me to read.

Yay Denise Mina!

The Long Drop goes on sale sometime in 2017. It probably says on the Netgalley page a more specific date, but I was too blinded by Denise Mina possibilities to read the page properly.

I received the first chapter free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.