Books and Sensibility

We're an Open Book

★★★★

Audiobook Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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  • Release Date: September 9th 2014
  • Audiobook Hours: 10 hours and 41 minutes
  • Genre: Literary….Science Fiction ?
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  • Publisher: Random House Audio

I feel like three years ago you couldn’t trip anywhere in the book-sphere without falling into this book. Station Eleven is the fascinating and deeply haunting story of what happens after a flu epidemic kills 99% of the Earth’s population and infrastructure collapses.

Everything I knew about this book happens in the first 20 pages; An actor in a production of King Lear dies on stage in front of child actor Kirsten Raymonde. Jump cut to 20 years later where Kirsten is part of a traveling symphony, a theater troupe that performs Shakespeare in the small towns dotting the the desolate and often dangerous North American landscape.

I am seriously in awe of the narrative structure of this book. The novel moves back and forth through time, telling stories of people who were in the theater that night with Kirsten. Mandel effortlessly weaves her characters fates through and around each other. There is also kind of a twist, I’m not sure how soon you’re supposed to see it, but it took me by surprise.

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Audiobook Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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  • Release Date: October 6th 2015
  • Length: 6 hours and 23 minutes
  • Genre: Contemporary / Paranormal YA
  • Publisher: HarperTeen

17-year-old Mikey Mitchell just wants to enjoy his last few months of high school with his best friends and hopefully getting his OCD under control.  But he’s also kind of stuck in the middle of your favorite paranormal YA novel, except you know. . . he’s a background character.  Strange blue lights and mysterious deaths  means the indie kids–those high school kids with the capital D destinies and weird names–are up to something. Mikey just hopes the indie kids don’t  blown up up the high school….again.

Patrick Ness is a mix bag of an author, you just never know what you’re going to get. The concept of having a Mikey’s contemporary narrative  adjacent to the indie kid’s paranormal adventure made for an entertaining listen.  The indie kid’s plot is a parody of e those paranormal YA books of the early 2010’s and Ness creates a loving satire of the genre.

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Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley

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Release Date: April 28th 2015

Pages: 309

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: HarperCollins

When Aza Ray Boyle dies in the middle of an unusual storm; one life ends and another begins. Because her true destiny lies with the captain of a ship that sails the sky, but not everyone on Earth is ready to let Aza go.

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More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

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Release Date: 6/2/16

Audiobook Length :  8 Hours 25 minutes

Genre: Contemporary 

Publisher: Soho Press

The expectation to be happy can be overwhelming, but Aaron Soto is going to try. He is going to happily spend the summer hanging with  his friends, nerding out over comics and finally telling his girlfriend he loves her. He won’t think about the things that threaten his happiness like his father’s suicide or Tomas, a neighborhood boy whose friendship could spark something more. Looming in the background of this happy summer is the divisive Leteo Institute, a facility that claims that can make memories go away.

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The Serpent King by Jeff Zetner

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  • Release Date: March 8, 2016
  • Pages: 384
  • Genre: Contemporary
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  • Publisher: Crown (Random House)

Apparently my new jam is contemporary told from the POV of a trio of friends because in a lot of ways this book is like Fans of The Impossible Life by Kate Scelsa which I read last year around this time and enjoyed.

Our unlikely friend group in The Serpent King consists of; Travis who lives in a fantasy world to escape his abusive home life; Dill, the son of the Pentecostal signs preacher who handles snakes and is currently in prison for possession of child porn and then there is Lydia. Lydia should be the popular girl, her parents are upper middle class, she runs a successful fashion blog and is internet friends with the daughters of New York elite.  But all of that makes her a misfit in Forrestville, a small Tennessee town named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

The dynamics of the characters and sense of place are just perfect. There was an interesting tension between Lydia and the boys because she is from a richer, more liberal family while they  are from poorer and more religious conservative upbringings. I happened to hear Gwen Glazer on The Librarian Is In podcast describe this book as evocative and that is just the perfect way to describe it. I actually read the first 50% of this in May and then forgot about it until August, but I was thrown right back into the story and characters, three months later.

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Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

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I don’t usually read buzzy commercially successful  authors–but when I do I read them at least 2-5 years after the buzz has died down and nobody cares. I’m looking at you Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Fifty Shades of Grey and Girl on The Train. I’ll get to you. . . eventually.

Instead of picking up  Gone Girl (Which I have NOT read. No spoilers) I picked up Sharp Objects cause it was on a nifty library display.

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