Review: Feed

Feed by Mira Grant

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



It's really refreshing to read a story that has important relationships that aren't teenage romantic ones. I loved the characters and the worldbuilding. Grant's gradual revelation of more and more about the world -- in parallel with the characters' learning more, but simultaneously filling us in on the background facts they already knew -- is masterful.

Feed reads like a book that was meant to be reviewed on John Scalzi's "Big Idea" feature (and I think that might actually be how I heard about it to begin with). The whole story could be the result of taking two ideas (viral zombieism and blogging journalism), smashing them together, and seeing what kind of fire they started. It's a pretty cool fire, no matter how it started.

I was actually quite satisfied with the ending to this book. There's a sequel, and I'm eager to read it, but Feed stands on its own as a complete book; it's not just the first third of a really long novel.



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Review: Divergent

Divergent by Veronica Roth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Hard to decide if Divergent was a 3-star or a 4-star book. I've read a lot of books that I'd describe as being a lot better, and yet I finished Divergent in a day. There are a lot of inspiring ideas in there, and I'd highly recommend it to any reader of young adult books, as long as they have a fairly strong stomach (there's a lot of violence).

The main thing that seemed silly to me was the existence of the factions -- which is to say, the premise on which the whole book is built. I still don't find it easy at all to believe that this system would grow up in post-apocalyptic Chicago (or post-apocalyptic anywhere). But the world of the story works exactly the way it would work if our world somehow developed into the world of the factions; people's reactions to it, individually and in groups, feel completely real.

The Dauntless, in particular, are good for psyching yourself up to do things; it seems very worthwhile to work hard to be like them. In fact, for each of the faction virtues, Roth paints a very clear picture of how it can be hard work to live up to the virtue, while at the same time it's the obvious driving force in your own life. Because sixteen-year-olds choose their factions, they know that the virtue they're trying to cultivate is their inner focus, not only the focus of their community, but that doesn't mean it comes easy.

As I keep ending up saying, this is a book that uses some well-worn post-apocalyptic tropes (the familiar-yet-unfamiliar city, the societally mandated coming-of-age ceremony, the completely vague but oppressive danger, the conspiracy discovered by kids) to do some very good things. To me, it seems that the main point is to challenge our assumption that something is not for us just because it's hard.

I thought the setting and the characters were a great deal stronger than the plot; the main thing the plot did for me was to keep us moving, meeting and exploring new parts of the book's world.



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Review: squash soup and tuna steaks

Seared Tuna Steaks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Acorn Squash Soup
My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars


Sunday night (observed) dinner: Tuna steaks, rice pilaf, and squash soup. The soup was actually the Inspiration Piece for this meal; Husband had a squash-and-tomato puree soup while traveling in New Mexico, loved it, and wanted to try to recreate the experience. For accoutrements, he broiled some tuna steaks and made up a packaged rice pilaf. We drank oolong tea with dinner.
I did not love the tuna steaks. There was nothing wrong with them; I often prefer white fish to pink fish. They might have added just a little too much sweetness to the meal, in spite of the counterbalancing savory pilaf.

The soup was lovely. A bit too sweet, not unlike our last Soup Adventure. The texture was extremely nice. I liked the taste, but (maybe because of the sweetness) don't think I could have eaten much more than I was served. But I finished that enthusiastically!

Review: A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Picked this one up with a whole mess of other books recommended by the Book Smugglers (who were, in turn, recommended by Lauren). I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the right emotional place at the right moment, or if I'm a heartless monster, but the end of the book didn't have me in tears as it does some people. But it's a fabulously well done book, start to finish. Ness's craftsmanship is excellent; the stories and stories-within-stories are woven together so perfectly, and everything *works*.



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Review: How I Live Now

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I read this book in a single day, so obviously it's a page-turner. It's really in my long-standing favorite genre, post-apocalyptic fiction, but it starts out pretending (sort of) to be ordinary realistic fiction.

The apocalypse in question felt a little iffy to me -- it was plenty terrible, but it seemed a little too flat, somehow. It reminded me of the post-apocalypse worlds I used to try to invent for my stories when I was a young teenager. Meg Rosoff is a much, much better writer than I was, obviously; *everything* about my writing was flat and a bit derivative, and her characters and their relationships are real and deep and fresh. They feel real from the very beginning because she's combined some unusual elements in each of the main characters; it gives them a sort of "you couldn't make this up" feel, without being gimmicky.

In the way the story is told, the book is entirely too realistic for my taste. It feels a little like the rough draft of a memoir; there are some threads that get dropped and never picked back up, and many that Daisy, the narrator, picks back up but can't properly explain, either because she doesn't know enough or because she doesn't have the time. To me, this makes the ending feel rushed and a bit unsatisfying. But I think this so often that I've been told it's a problem with me, not the books I read, and I suspect that's the case here; I'm certainly more satisfied than usual with the ending.



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Pulled pork and honey shrub

Pulled Pork (which slow-cooker cookbook?)
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Honey Shrub (from Homemade Soda by Andrew Schloss)
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars


We had friends over for dinner and games on Monday night, and Husband made pulled pork in the slow-cooker. No unique details (although Husband says he might not bother with the from-scratch barbecue sauce to cook it the next time), but it was very tasty pulled pork. All four of us enjoyed it with cornbread and vegetables.
With my dinner, I had Honey Shrub from the homemade-sodas book I got Husband for Christmas. It's a simple recipe -- just honey, vinegar, and seltzer. I made that batch with local buckwheat honey; like the honey itself, the shrub was a little too intense. Much more success with the batch I took to work yesterday: half stringy-bark honey from our trip to Kangaroo Island, and half grocery store honey from a plastic bear. Both batches had apple cider vinegar instead of the prescribed sherry vinegar; we didn't have sherry vinegar around, and shrubs are usually fruity drinks, so the substitution seemed appropriate. I might try making a batch with plain water instead of seltzer next; shrubs are older than carbonated water, but I'm not sure if they were originally carbonated by fermentation, or just drunk flat. Mine was flat by the end of the day yesterday, and still tasted good (and felt good on a slightly sore throat).

Review: Chicken and waffles!

Creole Chicken (November 2011 Taste of Home)
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Waffles and Scrambled Eggs
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars





Yum! This Creole Chicken came out seeming more Italian than Creole -- partly due to teaspoon/tablespoon confusion on the oregano and basil, not noticed until a moment too late, but you can see how the mise-en-place to the left would result in an Italiany dish. I'm at least as happy with what we got as I would have been with more thoroughgoing Creole, though.



Husband is irrationally prejudiced against the Chicken Parmesan of my youth. But we both liked this Chicken Creole, and it's got all the same things I love going on -- tender chicken, juicy vegetables, a cozy blend of spices with just a little kick, perfect over rice. So there's a (previously) tragic gaping family menu hole, all fixed. Furthermore, Husband served it up with his first attempt at recreating Lemon, Lime & Bitters, a delicious soda that's common in Australia, where we honeymooned, but very hard to find here in the US. Very nice indeed.



It's become traditional for us to spend the night with some good friends on New Year's Eve, playing board games in the old year and the new. This year, my dad happened to ask over the phone if we were making waffles in the morning. Now, when I was growing up, my dad made waffles nearly every Sunday morning. But the waffles of my people are Bisquick-based, with a homemade sugar-and-maple-flavoring syrup.



Both the menfolk like to flaunt their cooking chops. They did have a momentary seizure in which they hoped to be able to substitute leftover eggnog for the eggs in the waffles, but once that cleared, they valiantly procured actual eggs and cooked up a lovely breakfast: scrambled eggs, waffles from scratch, maple syrup from trees, and strawberry syrup from our pick-your-own experiment earlier this year.* Not the waffles of my people, but a very satisfactory substitute.

*Upon which expedition the womenfolk picked a few pounds of strawberries; I stayed up late to make jam and was, in the process, demoted to "must ask an adult before using the stove." But the jam is good.

Review: The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I first read The Joy Luck Club in probably 1998, as required reading for a high school English class. When I joined Goodreads, I apparently marked it as a 3-star book. I'm not sure now whether I actually didn't like it when I was younger, or if I just didn't remember how much I liked it.

This time around, I loved it. I re-read my high school copy, and was repeatedly surprised by the little parallels of phrasing that I'd underlined and cross-referenced in the different stories. In order to have caught them, I must have been just devouring the book -- I've been reading it much more slowly and choppily this time, and that sort of detail would have slipped right past me.

So The Joy Luck Club is very nice as literature -- parallels between the parallel story threads, linking the mothers to their daughters and their families to each other before you really find out much about how they really interact. It's also thoroughly absorbing to read.

(When you have to put it down and pick it up a lot, as I did this time, it can get difficult to remember who was talking. Eight point-of-view characters is a lot to keep track of, even when their stories are pretty clearly distinct, and especially because one of the many things the stories are about is how we can misunderstand each other.)

I picked up The Joy Luck Club off my shelf this time because I recently read Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which of course makes mention of it. Since I had brought them to the lunch table in that order, several of my friends commented on how I was reading all these books with terrible mothers in them. But they're not! And really, the Joy Luck Club mothers (and their mothers) are no way, nohow supposed to be the kind of unsympathetic meanies that we're all supposed to think the Tiger Mother is. People are more complicated than that, which is one of the points of both books.





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