"Jellicoe Road" by Melina Marchetta

Somehow, I missed reading this Printz winner from a few years back. I think it was so popular when it came out that I wasn't able to get a copy to read initially, then I just forgot. Well-written, yes. Layered and unique, yes. Did I like it? No. I think maybe this was just one of those "bad timing" things. Life is busy, I'm a little stressed, and reading this book in small chunks did not work. It is a complex tale -- two stories interweaving, with little context in the beginning for either. One of the tales is deliberately out of order, the other makes sense after a while but the Australian foreignness is yet another hurdle to overcome. I'm not dissing the Aussies. We adore Markus Zusak. And Margo Lanagan, despite the occasional bleak darkness, is pretty engaging. This novel, however, felt distant. Taking place (I gather) at the edge of the outback, there is a constant use of vocabulary and phrasing I had to read twice to fully understand. Add the inter-woven plots that seem to start in the middle and I was literally at chapter 14 before I began to see the arc of the book. Which was frustrating. What should have been a story of love/loss and mystery turned into a tale that was not a page-turner for me. I found the lead character, Taylor, to be nearly as irritating as Bella from "Twilight" and the so-called mystery fairly guessable once I could place the characters and events. The efforts by the author to hide facts were so successful I missed one of the "big reveals" even when it happened. She seemed more concerned with the essence of things than the things themselves. It's possible it is "just Australian." From the first pages, I could sense the cultural elements of Dreamtime and Walkabout having a lot of influence. Not being from that culture, however, I was never sure what was real or what was dreamed (the Australians, of course, would say that Dreamtime is real, just another reality). Could someone who has read the book tell me who the little boy hanging from the tree is? Four hundred pages later and I still don't know. Despite all the different threads, the story also felt contrived. At one point, a disaster-like event seems to occur for no other reason than to move characters to a key clue in the story. I guess, as a reader, I resent having events thrown in at random just to advance the tale the author wants to tell. I've always felt the best authors let the story go where it goes, instead of warping everything around the point they want to make. There is a strong group of readers who adore this book, so I can't say it's bad. It's just not for me.

"Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen

It's been a strange year. Books I didn't think I would like, I loved, and books I thought I would love, I sort-of liked. Guess which one this was? "Water for Elephants" is a New York Times Bestseller, so hugely popular it was turned into a Hollywood film (coming to a location near you!) It has a lot going for it. The tale is unique and fresh, told extremely well and the world explored is one completely foreign to most of us. I especially enjoyed the back and forth between "then" and "now." Ms. Gruen has an arch, sarcastic sense of humor that made me giggle in several inappropriate places. She seems to have a knack at writing characters she should know nothing about. I kept checking her biography in the back of the book to figure out how a young woman like her could write such a decidedly male-perspective tale, not to mention get into the head of an aging member of a senior citizen's home. In many ways, I thought this was a great novel. And yet. Set in depression-era 1930s, the detail of the story was completely on-point. So much so, that it felt a little like a 1920s era melodrama. The lead character, Jacob, his nurse, Rosemary and his sullen roommate, Walter, all seemed fairly fleshed out. So does the elephant, Rosie. But the object of his affection, Marlena, seemed to be a cardboard cutout. The same applied to her vicious husband, who was only one step away from twirling a mustache. For me, there were too many moments where I felt she was crying "I can't pay the rent" and he shouted back "You must pay the rent!" For this reason, one of the central plot points, the epic love story, just fell flat. It's like my complaint with bad productions of "Othello." You have to buy into the love story for everything else to work. The trappings of the book were fascinating, but the weakness of this element made the whole thing less engaging for me. The story is also brutal (but probably accurate) in the treatment of animals (including those of the human variety). Let's face it, I'm a wuss. Go into detail about some furry thing getting beat, and I just can't take it. The overall tone is incredibly dark, and, near the end, tremendously sad. The actual ending is kind of sweet, but in a "Schindler's List" way -- coming out of the dark to an okay moment. It's a good book, and easy to see why it has received the accolades it has. But not really my cup of tea.

"Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss

This should not have been a book I liked. Very long, at 722 pages, with painful detail and slow pacing, one might say it is Dickensonian in its scope. I don't like Dickens (the horror! A librarian dislikes Dickens!) but I did like this book. A lot. Recommended to me by a colleague, this felt like a very comfortable return to the kind of fantasy novels I read in my youth. With minimal "magic" there are many sections that could be mistaken for a story set in the middle ages. The tale begins in a tavern; with the familiar hallmarks of working folk, wooden tables, dark corners and a bartender who knows more than you might think. From there, the story meanders along, giving the reader stories within stories to weave a rich tale of heroes. The essence of heroism is one of the central themes here -- what makes a hero heroic, how mythology muddies the nature of a story and how legend changes truth. Some are comparing this book to Tolkien, and while I can see the surface parallels, in many ways this is an anti-Tolkienesque novel. Tolkien is about the journey (a metaphor for his own spiritual journey). Rothfuss is about the individual. The character of Kvothe spends the book describing his journey, but the things that happen along the way are less important than the person being forged out of these events. Rothfuss (or Kvothe) is also clearly not a fan of organized religion, making out the religious leaders to be clueless or corrupt and the faith of these simple folk as silly and pointless. A better comparison would be to the work of Ursula K. LeGuin, who is quoted on both the frontispiece and back of the book. LeGuin was a favorite author of mine for many years, and this writer seems to echo her dark sense of the world and the ongoing battle of our inner demons that was present in her Farthest Shore trilogy. Although nearly nothing happens for the first 50 pages or so (the so-called "First Day" for which the book is subtitled doesn't begin until page 59) I was intrigued and definitely felt the pull of turning the next page, charging on to the next chapter, to see what would happen. It's a credit to Rothfuss, whose writing is so rich, engaging, layered and beautiful that you just feel that you are sitting there in the tavern listening to a tale well-told. The story is downright palpable. Maybe it's the Irish in me, but I truly felt "drawn" to this book. The challenge, however, is that my life doesn't accommodate long books very well these days, and this is the first of a trilogy. Don't know what I will do about that, but I'm dying to read the next book in this Kingkiller Chronicle, entitled "The Wise Man's Fear."