Monthly Archives: October 2010

Review: You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers

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211. You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers
Publication: Riverhead (October 14, 2010), ARC Paperback, 322pp / ISBN 1594487731
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Rating: Buy it
Read: October 25-26, 2010
Source: Publisher
Summary from Amazon:

Heather Sellers is face-blind– that is, she has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people’s faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, and gait. But she sometimes kissed a stranger, thinking he was her boyfriend, or failed to recognize even her own father and mother. She feared she must be crazy.

Yet it was her mother who nailed windows shut and covered them with blankets, made her daughter walk on her knees to spare the carpeting, had her practice secret words to use in the likely event of abduction. Her father went on weeklong “fishing trips” (aka benders), took in drifters, wore panty hose and bras under his regular clothes. Heather clung to a barely coherent story of a “normal” childhood in order to survive the one she had.

That fairy tale unraveled two decades later when Heather took the man she would marry home to meet her parents and began to discover the truth about her family and about herself. As she came at last to trust her own perceptions, she learned the gift of perspective: that embracing the past as it is allows us to let it go. And she illuminated a deeper truth-that even in the most flawed circumstances, love may be seen and felt.

Review

I absolutely devoured this book. I read it every chance I had, and I even stayed up late one night to read just a bit more before falling asleep (I was barely conscious the next morning, but it was worth it!). It was offered to me as something like Augusten Burrough’s Running With Scissors, and that’s exactly what it reminded me of– except without the humor. Instead, it’s full of hope and love, something that I think wasn’t as evident in Running With Scissors (or if it was, it was buried under the black humor).

What I liked best about You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know is that it’s so relatable. Ms Sellers grew up in a crazy environment, and her face blindness just exacerbated the problem. She didn’t have Mr Burrough’s knowledge that something was wrong with how she was living. She knew her parents were weird (“peculiar,” is how she puts it), but she didn’t know that they had actual mental illnesses until she was in her 40′s. She didn’t even know that she herself had face blindness– she just thought she was crazy!

The author (lifted from her website)

Reading about her journey to work all this out and then come to terms with it (which does take a while) was really fascinating, and I felt great empathy for her. By the end it was clear that by getting a grip on her prosopagnosia she could get a grip on the rest of the parts of her life, too, including her parents and her relationship with her (ex-)husband. Maybe her self-confidence comes on a bit quickly after 200 pages of her vacillating between “is my mother schizophrenic or not,” but I’m glad that it happened, and that she can talk about her life so truthfully and freely now (as compared to when she was younger and apparently twisted things around to make them seem more normal).

It was just a really good book. The only real complaint I have is that the dialogue never sounded really real, like the things people would actually say. It sounded instead like how people talk in newspaper articles or magazine interviews– sort of stilted. But I got used to it eventually, and after a while it stopped bothering me. I don’t think it’s anything that would keep me from recommending this book to y’all! Because I think it’s a fantastic book, and I hope more people read it!

(This book is, by the way, Oprah’s November bookclub pick. If that’s the sort of thing that will keep you away, then…oh, I don’t know. Ignore it? TRUST MEEEEE instead!)

And

Get your own copy @ Amazon (Kindle) or Powell’s and support Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog!

Other reviews: Thoughts of Joy | New York Times

Watch Heather explain face blindness on Good Morning America.

Review: Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye

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198. Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye
Publication: Yearling; Reprint edition (April 28, 2009), Paperback, 304pp / ISBN 0375840761
Genre: MG, Speculative Fiction?
Rating: Borrow it
Read: October 16, 2010
Source: Bought
Summary from Amazon:

When Milton and Marlo Fauster die in a marshmallow-bear explosion, they get sent straight to Heck, an otherworldly reform school. Milton can understand why his kleptomaniac sister is here, but Milton is—or was—a model citizen. Has a mistake been made? Not according to Bea “Elsa” Bubb, the Principal of Darkness. She doesn’t make mistakes. She personally sees to it that Heck—whether it be home ec class with Lizzie Borden, ethics with Richard Nixon, or gym with Blackbeard the pirate—is especially, well, heckish for the Fausters. Will Milton and Marlo find a way to escape? Or are they stuck here for all eternity, or until they turn eighteen, whichever comes first?

Review

Okay, so here’s the thing about this book: it seems like it should be a lot more enjoyable than it really is. Read the plot summary. Doesn’t that sound like a fun book? It does, and it IS a fun book, but it’s not a REALLY fun book. It’s not as magical as it should be for a book set in hell and starring precocious preteens, and that’s disappointing.

I didn’t mind the grossness, like some other reviewers. I’m used to it from Roald Dahl and the Captain Underpants books, and anyway, it was gross in a fun way. I liked the characters and thought they were pretty well-developed for an MG book (I’ve seen worse, basically). I liked the literary and pop culture references– Lizzie Borden is the home ec teacher, for instance, and Richard Nixon is the ethics teacher. It started off slow-moving but soon picked up speed, and the ending was really exciting.

But. But! It was just so-so. The writing wasn’t overly great, and there were plotholes that the narrative acknowledged but did nothing to fix. Why?! If you know there’s problems with your world’s setup…fix it! Don’t just lampshade it and then not follow through with a patch. And, overall, I think if I was a kid and I was reading this I’d think it was boring.

As an adult, I recognize almost all of the references and why hell is set up the way it is (except for the plotholes…) and etc. I get it. As a kid, I wouldn’t recognize them, simply because back then I hadn’t read any Dante yet and I wasn’t Catholic (still not Catholic, for that matter), and I wouldn’t have understood most of it except for the poop jokes. Not that I’m saying kids shouldn’t read it, or that they wouldn’t enjoy it or that they wouldn’t get the references. Kids are smart, and they like poop jokes, and they’d probably like this book. And I’m not saying that just because you don’t understand everything in a book you can’t enjoy it. But the references are a BIG PART of the story, and when you don’t know who Richard Nixon is, would the scene with him freaking out about ethics be half as funny? I don’t think so.

I guess kids could always ask their parents about Nixon, or use Google or something, but…eh. It’s an uneven reading experience, and I don’t think it’s got a clever enough story or good enough writing to interest adults (that don’t already read YA books, I mean). And while it might interest kids, plot-wise, a lot of the details would be lost when they’re reading it, which makes for a subpar reading experience (I know this from experience). So basically, I don’t think I’ll read the sequel.

However, if you’re the sort of person who likes poop jokes along with your literary references, and you don’t mind simplistic writing and witticisms that really aren’t, you might like Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go. Even if you’re just interested in the story because it sounds fun, you might like Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go. But I’d recommend borrowing it over buying it.

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Get your own copy @ Amazon or Powell’s and support Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog!

Other reviews: Welcome to my Tweendom | Back to Books | Beyond Books

Be sure to go to the official website, because the background song is adorable-creepy!

In My Mailbox (1)

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Man, I haven’t done one of these since my first year of blogging! Only then it was Mailbox Monday. Yeah. Anyway, I’ve been taking pictures of new books I get, so I thought I might as well post them here, too!

In My Mailbox is a weekly meme hosted by The Story Siren (who was inspired by Alea of Pop Culture Junkie‘s This Week in Books). Basically you just post about new books that came into your house over the past week, whether in the mail or by getting them at the library or by buying them in a store. Capiche?

Mine’s in pictures! Pictures with cuddly toys in them!


Books pictured:
The Tapestry Shop by Joyce Elson Moore (offer from publisher).
The Pharaoh’s Secret by Marissa Moss (bought from Amazon).

What did you get in the mail last week?

Birdwatching: Witches!

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So I originally had a big ol’ rant about why most modern books-with-witches suck because they’re almost always trying to appropriate the Silver RavenWolf sort of Wicca which is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS and actually kind of insulting but then I remembered that every religion has been appropriated badly and that I shouldn’t get pissed off because someone thinks that calling someone a “Wiccan” instead of a “witch” is better because it’s less scary/super-duper cool and if they don’t bother doing any research or even trying to get the details right because it’d make for a more boring story anyway, naked frolicking aside, and then I deleted everything and wrote this sentence instead. So…just know that I take my witches (probably overly) seriously, and that I like the ones that are more based on the Ye Olde version of witches than the Modern Interpretation (aka Wiccan Free-For-All).

Note: If you want to know more about real-world witches and Wiccans (and other neo-pagan religions), you may be interested in reading Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler. It’s fun to read AND informative!

Some books with ANASTASIA-APPROVED! witches in them:

  • The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (1973). One of my favorite YA books EVER, and not just because of Amanda-the-maybe-witch.
  • Andromeda Klein by Frank Portman (2009). Although maybe Andromeda would be considered more of an occultist than a witch.
  • The Letter, The Witch and the Ring by John Bellairs (1976). Also any of his Lewis Barnavelt books, which have really great characters, creepy storylines, and excellent writing.
  • The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983). The movie is really good, too: Angelica Huston is the witch queen!
  • Anything Diana Wynne Jones does. Obviously.
  • Her Wiccan, Wiccan Ways by Traci Hall (2008), aka the one that does Wicca-as-fiction right.
  • Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Witch series (1980-2005?). Seriously spooky– I think it actually gave me nightmares when I was younger.
  • The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. Duh.
  • Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series has some fun witches in it, including Equal Rites (1987).
  • Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990). Agnes Nutter!
  • Stardust by Neil Gaiman (1999) has some scary witch sisters in it.
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum (1900). Heh.

Do you like books with witches in them? Or do you just get irritated and insulted (if you’re a witch yourself, I guess)?

Thanks to Once Upon a Bookshelf for list-y inspiration!