So I lied.

This post was not even hinted at in the last one, and that's because my mother has taken up the habit of shoving books in my hands and being like, "Here! Read this! You'll really like it!" Most of these books involve young Amish people dealing with love and life in the order, but once in a while she actually choses a good one.

The latest novel she demanded I read was The Friday Night Knitting Club. I’m always kind of skeptical about novels that revolve around handicrafts, and here’s why: their target audience is almost always middle-aged Southern Baptist moms who are looking for something to read before bed.

That’s fine, especially if you happen to be a middle-aged Southern Baptist mom, but that’s not me and, as such, I never enjoy that kind of book. But Kate Jacobs seems to have taken the traditional form of the handicraft novel and tweaked it just enough to make it interesting.

The book is clichéd, yes. There are reunited fathers and daughters, pregnancies, and trips to find relatives abroad. But it’s not a Christian romance novel, and people actually cheat on their husbands, make sweaters that don’t fit and afghans that are really ugly, explore the tricky subject of race (albeit briefly and a little unconvincingly), and discuss the importance of gynecological appointments for sexually active senior citizens.

Because of those slightly different aspects, I got the feeling that Jacobs was trying very hard not to fall into the feel-good novel trap. This is most likely why she peppered her writing with very mild swear words that she probably felt gave her writing a hip edge. I don’t believe Kate Jacobs ever actually uses the word “damn” in real life, and I think she relies on it to bring validity and realism to her dialog, when it actually does just the opposite.

Still, she gets points for being pretty gutsy later in the novel. At the risk of revealing a spoiler, let’s just say that when something very terrible happens to a very loveable character, Jacobs lets it run its full, purely realistic course without trying to make much sense of it or imbue it with a moral lesson. Shit happens, Jacobs seems to say, and sometimes there’s not a reason. Though there are a few soppy scenes surrounding the incident (and throughout the novel), it was genuinely gut-wrenching without being preachy or too emotionally manipulative. Way to be -- definitely a book worth borrowing.

Coming Soon to a Blog Near You

My internet access will be touch and go until sometime next week, but here's a brief look at what's coming once I get settled:

-- A special romance novels post, highlighting three "best of the worst" (or is it worst of the worst?) novels from various series. Most of them involve inheritances that are about to be lost, the need for green cards, sexual abuse, and pregnancy.

-- A review of The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella. Not a bad book, all in all, but not really for serious literary people. You'll see what I mean.

-- A half-review and a pondering of The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Liang. It's a half-review because I didn't finish the book. You'll see why.

-- Other reviews, including The Coffee Trader by David Liss, Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris, a book about interpreting body language, and whatever else my parents gave me for graduation.

I'm also debating tweaking the subject matter of this blog to make it exclusively about bad books, or books I expect to be bad, which seems more in keeping with the title but would narrow the field a bit. On the other hand, bad books are always easier to write about and more fun to read, so maybe I'd actually post more. Hmm.

Sharp Teeth

"We are wolves," Cutter chants
in his mind.
"We don't find the weak. We
don't prey on the slow.
We simply eat absolutely
fucking everything."

I first heard about this book in Mother Jones, where they interviewed the author, Toby Barlow. After hearing what it was about (werewolves in L.A.) and desperate for a good book during my last week here, I ran out to the library and tracked down a copy. So excited that I found it, I settled back in my nest chair, opened to the first page....and let out a cry of dismay.

Poetry. The whole thing is an epic free verse poem. Now, I hate poetry with a passion. I think that most post-modern poetry is pretentious, narcissistic and cliched. But this book sounded so good, and it was shelved with the novels (rather than poetry or, God forbid, sci-fi) so I decided to give it a go.

And it was amazing. Eight pages in I already couldn't put it down. This book grabbed me and held me and wouldn't let me go until I finished all 308 pages of lyrical wonderfulness.

The language is excellent -- this free verse isn't Walt Whitman-style, with huge long sentences that don't give your brain a chance to keep up. Barlow writes in snippets, almost, little snapshots of information that really are perfect for grabbing and keeping one's attention. Even I, with my tendency to unconsciously speed-read, didn't skim for at least the first 250 pages (a miraculous feat, really). To give you an idea of the length of the lines, I actually had to count to make sure it wasn't blank verse.

The poetry also gives Barlow a chance to be more flowery than he would be able to in a novel of this sort. If he had written in prose, it might have been a good book, an okay book -- but it would have simultaneously have been overwrought and underemotional. There would have been too many unnecessary words and we would have been following around a pack of dead-inside dog/humans who have little to no beauty in their world.

But the poetry allows Barlow to dwell on how wonderful it is to be with someone and feel safe, the joy of living the life of a surfer in Santa Cruz, and how beautiful the moon is. And all without being too sappy, because it's tempered by the depictions of how utterly violent these characters are. The second one of Barlow's characters pulls out a chain saw, all soppiness is pretty much gone.

The characters are amazing, too, and coupled with a twisted plot that comes together almost seamlessly (though it suffers a little, I think, because of the form of the novel itself), this makes for one seriously impressive debut novel. Rumor has it that the film rights have been bought and screenwriters are working on it now -- though Barlow told Mother Jones that he doesn't think it will work, I think it's at least worth a shot.