CBR16 Book 57: "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov

Page count: 448 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Nowhere Books Bingo: Banned books (Wasn't published until 27 years after Bulgakov's death, and only then in a censored version. )

CBR16 Bingo: Cult (cult classic, and there's the whole Devil and his entourage as a central plot point - that's pretty cultish, right?)

I can't remember exactly how long The Master and Margarita has been on my TBR list, but it's certainly more than twenty years. A quick glance on Goodreads shows me that 15 of my friends have rated it four or five stars, with several naming it one of their favourite books. So why has it taken it so long for me to read it? Some of my reticence comes from having tried to read translated Russian novels in the past, and in on one memorable occasion, nearly losing my will to read anything at all (Anna Karenina, I am absolutely looking at you). So the idea of tackling another Russian classic wasn't always that appealing. Knowing that so many people whose opinions I respect and trust rate it so highly, also makes me nervous - what if I don't like it and they'll be disappointed in me?

I made an attempt to read my mother's Norwegian translation of the novel for the first couple of chapters, but because the copy she had was translated in the 1970s, the language was heavy and archaic enough that I struggled. So instead I read the 50th Anniversary edition, translated into English by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. Once the language flowed more smoothly, reading became a lot less like unpleasant homework. As readers of my reviews know, I mostly read genre fiction like romance, fantasy and science fiction, where the plots are light-hearted and the books are very easily digestible. That is not the case with this book, written in the 1930s and up until the author's death in 1940, and finally published in 1996. It's an allegorical political satire, written in a very different time and culture, and getting into it felt like a bit of a slog.

I feel like I'm letting down all of my bookish friends and acquaintances when I confess that the first part of the novel mostly either bored and/or confused me. So much of it is absurdist and strange, and there is a long series of, to me, mostly interchangeable men with long Russian names either dying or ending up in an asylum, as a result of their encounters with Woland (the Devil). Nor was I particularly interested in the sections that involved Herod and Yeshua.

The novel finally got interesting to me in the second part, where the reader finally gets to meet the eponymous Margarita, and discovers the lengths she will go to to be reunited with her beloved, the Master. This section seemed more like a dark fairytale for the most part, and while it also had some odd twists and turns, I was mostly enjoying what I read. I can also faithfully say that at no point could I predict where the story was going to go next, and certainly not the way it was going to end. 

If the entirety of this book had only been the main story of part two (which involved Margarita and her beloved), I think I would have liked the novel a lot more. 20th-century history was never an area that particularly interested me, and while I know some of the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, I am in no way well-versed enough in the background of this novel to get the many layers of satire that the author has created. I found all the digs at literary intellectuals and various officials tedious. 

I don't regret finally reading the book, even though the first part was very hard going. However, I think I can also conclude that great Russian literature is not for me. I have tried several authors now, and if this, which so many of my bookish friends rate five stars, only for about half the novel, entertained me, it may be time to accept that I'm just not cut out for the Russian greats. I can see why it has been a controversial novel since its publication, not just for the political critique, but for prominently featuring the devil and witchcraft as part of the plot. 

Judging a book by its cover: There are 1229 (!) different editions of this listed on Goodreads, so obviously there are also a huge amount of different covers available. Most of them seem to have a black cat somewhere on the cover (Behemoth is a very striking character, who can blame them?). My e-book edition seems to have the black cat in upper corner and the face of a young woman (obviously Margarita) in the lower one. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR12 Book 74: "Solutions and Other Problems" by Allie Brosh

Page count: 528 pages

Rating: 5 stars

Back in 2013, Allie Brosh published Hyperbole and a Half named after the blog she kept (and has finally updated with a new post!). I pre-ordered the last book and bought it as a Christmas present for pretty much every single person my husband and I knew that year (now our own copy seems to have mysteriously gone missing - which distresses me). Allie's blog (we are clearly on first-name basis, and would be great friends if we ever met) and her book meant a lot to me, frequently made me laugh until I gasped and allowed me to lose many hours on the internet, just reading her older entries. So many of her posts and drawings are now memes.

Then, suddenly, Allie just seemed to vanish entirely from the internet. She stopped updating her blog. Her rumoured second book failed to appear and no one really knew what had happened to her. Because of her honest portrayal of depression and anxiety, there was every possibility that something serious was to blame for her complete disappearance from the web. Until earlier this year, when suddenly this book, Solutions and Other Problems had a cover and a confirmed publishing date and I think I genuinely screamed with joy - because it meant that no matter what else had happened, Allie was alive and had completed another book and was ready to share her thoughts with the world again.

You'd best believe I pre-ordered this the very second I saw the news. I feared that with the usual Covid-delays, my book wouldn't make it here in time for the release day, but I was wrong. Even if this book had been a series of blank pages with the occasional gibberish scrawled on them, I would have happily paid for the book, because I'm so relieved and happy that Allie is OK (in a manner of speaking) and ready to engage with the internet again. She posted one chapter of the new book on her blog. If this doesn't make you laugh like a loon until your stomach hurts, then maybe her way of telling stories isn't for you. 

For anyone wondering what happened to Allie, and why she's been gone for so long - it all gets explained in the book. Not everything she writes is laugh-out-loud funny. Like Jenny Lawson, Allie Brosh balances the hilarious and the tragic really well. She was honest about her struggles with depression and mental illness in the last book. When I reviewed her first book back in 2013, I had only the memory of my years of depression back at Uni and during my first years in Edinburgh. Now I'm fighting my way through another fairly major depressive episode and trying to navigate therapy and I feel like some sort of toxic rage monster has taken over my body and is slowly poisoning me and making me unable to control my thoughts and emotions. So this book probably meant even more to me now than Allie's first book did back in 2013. 

From what I can gather from my Facebook updates feed, I am not the only one who pre-ordered and has happily consumed this book. For those like-minded people who love Allie and her wonderful way with words (and illustration), she is also updating her Facebook page with pictures, sketches, little videos, and many other things to show her fans more of what she's been up to in the seven years since she last appeared "in public". 2020 has been a very difficult year, this book and Allie Brosh's reappearance feels like a true blessing.

Judging a book by its cover: Oh Allie and your strange little MS Paint style self-portraits, I've missed you so much! Before I read the book, I thought this image was of childhood Allie, but it turns out I was wrong. I don't really want to say anymore so as not to spoil anything. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 56: "I Hope You Get This Message" by Farah Naz Rishi

Page count: 432 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Official book description:

Seven days. Seven days. The Earth might end in seven days.

When news stations start reporting that Earth has been contacted by a planet named Alma, the world is abuzz with rumors that the alien entity is giving mankind only few days to live before they hit the kill switch on civilization.

For high school truant Jesse Hewitt, though, nothing has ever felt permanent. Not the guys he hooks up with. Not the jobs his underpaid mom works so hard to hold down. Life has dealt him one bad blow after another — so what does it matter if it all ends now? Cate Collins, on the other hand, is desperate to use this time to find the father she’s never met, the man she grew up hearing wild stories about, most of which she didn’t believe. And then there’s Adeem Khan. While coding and computer programming have always come easily to him, forgiveness doesn’t. He can’t seem to forgive his sister for leaving, even though it’s his last chance.

With only seven days to face their truths and right their wrongs, Jesse, Cate, and Adeem’s paths collide even as their worlds are pulled apart.

This was yet another of the book club suggestion for our June CBR book club, with the theme The Future is Queer. I had nothing to go on except the book description but thought it sounded interesting and the short chapters and multiple POVs made it a relatively quick read. 

So the premise of this book is that it turns out Earth and all the people and creatures living on it is basically some big science experiment for a bunch of aliens, who now deem the project a failure (mostly because humans have bollocksed things up pretty badly at this point) and want to basically press the big red destruct button which will end all human life on the planet. However, the proper procedure has to be followed, and there are those who are for full-scale destruction of the humans and those that feel it would be unethical and wrong. So they send a message that Earth has seven days to get its affairs in order, so to speak, before the final verdict will be delivered.

Naturally, not everyone believes in the aliens, but the vast majority of people do and naturally start panicking. We follow three teenagers in the week that leads up to the final decision. Jesse lives in Roswell, New Mexico and decides to help his struggling single mother get enough money to pay their bills by setting up a fancy-looking device and claiming he can send messages to the aliens. The people flocking to Roswell seem more than willing to pay, even the ones who suspect it's most likely a hoax. Cate is forced to watch her schizophrenic mother turn herself over to the authorities to be committed and decides to go looking for her missing father. Along the way, she starts travelling with Adeem, a young man looking for his sister, who left without leaving any forwarding address after coming out to the family as gay.

A lot happens over the course of the seven days with each of the three characters. While Jesse's story is more separate, Cate and Adeem go on quite the road trip together, getting into increasingly worse trouble until they manage to reach their mutual destination, Roswell, and eventually also interact with Jesse. Obviously, for a story where each of the protagonists (as well as everyone around them) are forced to contemplate their own mortality and the very short time they may have left, there is also a lot of introspection and internal development for each of them. 

Of the two new books I read for June's book club, this was probably the one I liked the best (I would rate The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - yet another of the selections, which I read back in 2018, highest of all). So far, this appears to be the author's only novel, but I shall keep my eye out for anything new she releases. 

Judging a book by its cover: I like to be able to use my imagination when picturing the characters in the books I read. So having all three protagonists portrayed on the cover art, especially because I don't really think they match what I have in my mind's eye, is a bit distracting. I did like them all sort of randomly posed on a big radio antenna (radio plays a big part in the story), with a cityscape in the background, though. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR11 Book 34: "All the Bright Places" by Jennifer Niven

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

#CBR11 Bingo: Youths!

From Goodreads:
Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him.

Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death.

When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom. And when they pair up on a project to discover the “natural wonders” of their state, both Finch and Violet make more important discoveries: It’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself—a weird, funny, live-out-loud guy who’s not such a freak after all. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink.

This book was basically described as The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor & Park, but it suffers in comparisons to both of those novels, which several years after being published are still among the best of YA novels out there. Neither of the teens in this book battle a terrifying and terminal disease (#Fuck cancer!), nor do either of them have as fraught and depressing a home life as Eleanor in Eleanor & Park. Finch has genuine and very difficult struggles with depression, however, and Violet is trying to process a very deep and genuine grief, missing her vibrant and inspiring older sister, while also battling survivor's guilt (her sister was driving Violet home when they had a car accident. Violet survived, her sister got killed).

Violet isn't really suicidal, Finch occasionally very much is. He keeps researching different ways to kill himself, because when his anxiety and depression really take over, he loses months to the illness and he is finding it harder and harder to find reasons to continue living. No one in school knows the truth about Violet and Finch's meeting at the ledge of the school bell tower. The official story is that Violet persuaded Finch not to jump, no one knows that she was in fact there first, and it was Finch who talked her down (when he arrived to possibly do the same thing she was contemplating). When they are paired up for a school project (Violet has usually been able to get out of any course work in the past year, because of her "special circumstances") and Finch refuses to let Violet get away with half-assing it, they eventually build an unlikely friendship that begins to blossom into something more.

Violet stops counting the days until she graduates and can get away to college. Finch finds he has things to look forward to, and the friendship/romance with Violet keeps the darkness at bay for at least a while. I guess the reason this book has been compared with The Fault in Our Stars is that depression is a ticking time bomb for Finch, the way cancer was for Hazel and Augustus. A lot of people can manage anxiety and depression with the aid of family members, good therapists and medication. Sadly, Finch doesn't really seem to engage much with therapy, has a mother who is entirely unable to handle her son's serious malady and seems deeply sceptical and reluctant to medication. All of that spells danger on the horizon. Without wanting to spoil anything, don't go expecting a happily ever after for the young teens of this book.

This is another of those books that had been on my TBR list for years and years, and it could have fitted on several of the squares of the Book Bingo card. It's not a bad book, but while I felt like the reader got a pretty good insight into what Finch is going through, Violet remained rather bland and anonymous throughout. I get that she was pretty much utterly consumed with grief to begin with, but even as the book develops, it was difficult to see what her interests were or what she really cared about. She stayed too anonymous for me throughout, and therefore I couldn't really seem to care about her or what happened to her.

While this was a good book, it was neither great nor particularly memorable. As I said, I don't think it benefits from being compared to two of the most well-written and emotionally wrenching young adult books in the last decade, because it doesn't hold a candle to either of them. Nevertheless, it's good to see depression and grief dealt with as topics in YA literature - these things need to be destigmatised and seeing them in literature and film makes them less scary concepts.

Judging a Book by its Cover: While this cover might seem a bit generic YA (there was a lot of books with similar covers for a while), the blue background colour and the various post-it notes are actually really on point and relevant to the story

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR9 Book 54: "Everything Everything" by Nicola Yoon

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Madeleine has never left her house or been outside. She's got a rare auto-immune disorder and lives in a house hermetically sealed, with special filters making sure nothing gets in that could hurt her. The only people she sees regularly are her mother, whose a doctor, and her nurse, Carla. On very special occasions, when he's been decontaminated thoroughly, she's allowed to meet one of her favourite tutors, but Madeline's life is lived mostly vicariously through books and the internet, dreaming of the outside world.

Everything changes when Oliver, or "Olly" and his family move in next door. Olly is tall and handsome and wears all black. He and his younger sister try to give Madeline and her mother a bundt cake as a welcoming gift, but aren't allowed inside. Olly's inventive and does his best to get Madeline's attention. Soon they are exchanging messages, and he takes to calling her Maddy, because everyone should have a nickname.

The teens communicate through their windows and on messages, frequently late at night, as Maddy is pretty sure her mother isn't going to be enthusiastic about her new friendship. She confides in Carla, however, and eventually, the nurse agrees to let Olly in to visit.

Maddy has lived seventeen years in isolation. She knows that leaving the house could be disastrous, but she also wants to feel like she has actually lived. She concocts a wild plan and persuades Olly to go along with it, telling him she's been taking a new kind of drug that will protect her from all her allergies of the outside world. So Maddy and Olly go off together to Hawaii, where Maddy will walk on a beach, bathe in the ocean and really experience life. She's willing to risk her life to really live, if only for a few days.

The movie adaptation for this is in cinemas now, and I haven't made up my mind about going to see it or not. As a YA romance, I thought it was pretty sweet. Yes, Olly is probably the ideal first boyfriend and a bit too good to be true. He has some family troubles that give him just the right level of angsty and he's sweet, sensitive, funny and incredibly understanding. Any girl would fall for him, not just Maddy, who's lived an extremely sheltered life, reading books and dreaming of what other teenagers have.

A lot of romance is all about wish-fulfilment and I don't see why teenage girls shouldn't get some of that too. Yes, a lot of teenage boys are dumb, self-centred, immature and rude, but there are exceptions and it doesn't hurt to have books that tell young women what they should be aiming for in their first loves. Do I think Maddy and Olly will get married and live happily ever after? Probably not, they are just seventeen - but Olly certainly wouldn't be the sort of boyfriend you look back on with regret.

Maddy is a sweetheart. She refuses to let her illness or forced isolation get her down. She does her best with the hand life has dealt her, and only really starts to chafe when Olly and his family move in next door and she gets an idea of all the things she's really missing. While her actions are rash and incautious, I can't blame her for wanting to run away and have an adventure, even knowing it might have serious consequences for her health. As it turns out, it does, but not exactly in the ways you may have first suspected.

I probably should have foreseen the surprise twist during the last third of the book, but I actually didn't. I suspect a lot of other readers will see it coming, though, especially now that there are movie reviews out that may spoil things as well. I do wish this development had been dealt with in a better way, and it didn't really have a proper resolution. The love story between Maddy and Olly took centre stage and the final act reveal sort of got a bit lost in getting the separated lovers back together again.

By all accounts, the movie adaptation is supposed to be pretty good. I think I'd rather go see Wonder Woman again, but suspect that many of the young women I taught for the last three years (and possibly some of the boys) would enjoy it a lot.

Judging a book by its cover: While I thought the cover was a bit generic YA at first, I liked it better when I saw it had a connection to illustrations inside the book, all done by Nicola Yoon's husband, apparently. It's still not the most exciting of covers, but since it's part of a bigger whole, I'll allow it.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 88: "The Rest of Us Just Live Here" by Patrick Ness

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Growing up in a small town somewhere in America (schools, family-themed restaurant, lots of cars, a bunch of huge churches, a Wallmart, a couple of multiplexes, so many trees), Mikey and his sister Mel (don't call her Melinda) are just trying to get through their final year of high school, hoping that something so momentous happens that the indie kids have to blow up the school gym again. Who are the indie kids, you ask?

The indie kids are the ones that all the YA paranormals are usually about. They have names like Finn (there are several in this book), Dylan, Kerouac, Satchel or something else unusual (Joffrey, Aquamarine and Earth are also mentioned) and they are bound to attract whatever new threat is coming, be it sparkly vampires, aliens, faeries, contracting cancer so they can all die beautifully together. Currently, something or someones called the Immortals are looking for human vessels and looking for a portal through to our world. Their first victim is one of the Finns, but Mikey, Mel, Mikey's gay linebacker best friend Jared and Mikey and Mel's best friend Henna (her father is Finnish) don't really care about that. They see Finn running into the woods, but don't give it much thought, as they are unlikely to be directly affected.

Mikey and Mel have more than enough to worry about in their own lives. Mikey has a pretty serious case of OCD, while Mel is in the same year as the others (despite being a year older) because she was hospitalised with anorexia for a long while. Mikey is hopelessly in love with Henna, despite the fact that he knows that for most of the time he's known her, she's been with someone else. Even now that she's single, he's afraid to confess his true feelings for her. After graduation, her parents (who are missionaries) are taking her to some war-torn corner of Africa to do aid work, so he's running out of time if he wants to have a chance with her before she leaves. The Mitchell siblings' father is an alcoholic, while their mother is a State Senator, busy running for re-election and desperate that no one sees any flaws in their family dynamic. Only their ten-year-old sister Meredith seems to be entirely normal and not overly bothered by anything, except whether she'll a) get tickets for and b) permission to go see her favourite band play live.

Mikey struggles with his anxiety and his OCD getting increasingly worse. Henna needs to decide whether she's going to stand up to her parents and refuse to go to Africa. Jared, who could easily have been an indie kid with the heritage he has (there is a reason all cats are absolutely mad for him) has weighty decisions of his own to make, and doesn't really feel that he can talk to his other friends about them. Mel still needs to be reminded to eat regularly and chafes under the concern from her mother. All the while they each have their own private little crises, the Immortals are causing havoc in the little town, causing accidents, disappearances and more indie kid deaths.

This is my first Patrick Ness book (I've heard so many good things about so many of his novels) and I decided to read it as it was one of the runners up in the YA Cannonball Book Club poll. Since I'd already read (well, listened to in audio) the winning book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, earlier this year, I wanted to see what other options we might have ended up with.

I'll give Patrick Ness this, his characters pretty much tick off every single square on a diversity bingo card. There is no danger of bland white-washing here. Eating disorders, mental illness, homosexuality, racial diversity (Henna is half African American, as well as being half Finnish). There's bad parents, so so parents and some really very great ones. These kids felt fairly real, which I guess is the point, as the whole book is a bit of a satire on all the melodramatic YA fantasy and sci-fi novels so popular right now. I'm such a sucker for those kinds of books though, and I think my favourite bits of the whole novel were the little snippets at the beginning of each chapter relating what was happening to the indie kids - I'm not ashamed to say I'd happily read a whole novel about Satchel and her struggles to save the town.

I liked this book, but I didn't love it. As I have at least four other Ness books waiting on my bookshelves, this will absolutely not be the only book of his I'll ever read. I think the conceit of the book is more clever than the execution, but your mileage may vary.

Judging a book by its cover: I really love this cover, done in mostly blues with just a few characters in full colour (obviously our protagonists). The very skinny Mel, Jared with a cat at his feet, the neurotic Mikey and finally Henna, while all the others are the indie kids that these YA books are normally about. Interspersed between them are what I'm assuming are the Immortals, the creatures threatening the town, always in the background of our main characters' lives.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 92: "Where'd You Go, Bernadette?" by Maria Semple

Page count: 306 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Because I read this book a month ago, and the plot is somewhat convoluted, I am resorting to the plot summary from Goodreads to help me explain what the book is about:

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fiercely opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace, to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she's a best friend, and simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence - creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

I know I'm ridiculously late to the party when it comes to this book. So far this year, it's already been reviewed by Badkittyuno and MelBivDevoe, and last year, for Cannonball V, it was reviewed by a staggering 15 people (search the archives to find the reviews). So a lot of my fellow Cannonballers already know how great this book is. I'm not even going to pretend that I've read all your reviews, sorry guys, but way to go for discovering this book before me.

Maria Semple was one of the staff writers on Arrested Development, so it should be no surprise that she can do funny, satirical and absurd. Even having noticed that a lot of people out there were excited about this book, I really had no idea what to expect. The book was quite different from what I thought going in. Comprised of e-mail correspondence, journal entries, letters, in-voices, receipts, reports, articles and other written forms of documentation, the book tells the story of Bernadette Fox, who won a MacArthur grant for her revolutionary architectural design and ended up becoming an agoraphobic recluse in Seattle. Her husband, Elgin Branch, is a lauded genius over at Microsoft, but is so busy with his own career that he hasn't really noticed just how off the rails his wife has gone. Bernadette hates the expectation and opinions of all the other mothers at the private school Bee attends, and refers to them dismissively as gnats. Through a series of escalating events, she ends up in a full-blown feud with one of them, her next door neighbour, Audrey, resulting in a devastating mudslide and total chaos at a recruitment drive for Bee's school.

Having agreed to take her beloved Bee to Antarctica, Bernadette is reluctant to renege on her promise, even though the trip clearly terrifies the heck out of her. And as the family are about to depart on their trip, Bernadette disappears, without a trace. It's Bee's attempts to trace her, as well as discover more about who her mother really is and used to be, that makes up the majority of the book.

This is such a funny book, and an amazingly quick and engrossing read. I read it all in one day, amazed at the twists and turns the story took. No matter what you think you've figured out, Semple manages to keep you surprised. While a very clever and entertaining satire, the book deals deftly with serious issues like mental illness, daring to be different and defying the expectations of society. I may have been late to join in with the praises sung for this book, but am glad I finally caught up.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Book 61. "Fangirl" by Rainbow Rowell

Page count: 416 pages
Rating: 5 stars

Cather and Wren are twins (their mother hadn't planned on twins but always wanted to name a girl Catherine - so just split the name). Their whole life has been spent together, sharing a room, sharing interests, especially their love of Simon Snow (think basically Harry Potter, if Draco was his room mate, and also a vampire). Cath and Wren write fan fic read by tens of thousands of fans, while everyone awaits the release of the eight and final Simon Snow book. Cath doesn't really think much will change when they go off to college, but then  Wren declares that she wants to live in a different dorm from Cath, and spends most of her time having the crazy party girl freshman experience, leaving Cath anxious and adrift in a new and confusing place.

Cath isn't even sure she wants to be at college. She's worried about their father, who manages fine most of the time, when his girls remind him to eat, and do the dishes, and the laundry. His mental health really isn't as stable as it ought to be, and Cath doesn't think he should be by himself. For the first couple of weeks, she barely even leaves her dorm room, just holes up and eats energy bars, goes to lectures and continues her fan fiction grand opus. The only people she sees are Reagan (who seems very popular, but kind of aggressive and angry all the time), and Reagan's boyfriend Levi, who works at Starbucks and studies farming and is happy and cheerful all the time, winning even the bitterest of souls over with his charming attitude. Reagan decides to "adopt" Cath, and forces her to come to meals (where they quietly mock and make up stories about everyone else there).

There are other reasons Cath has trouble adjusting to college: her writing professor, who Cath admires greatly, is completely dismissive of and refuses to support fan fiction. She won't let Cath hand in anything even vaguely inspired by Simon Snow, and keeps pushing Cath to write things well outside her comfort zone. Wren keeps pulling away from Cath, and seems to spend most of her time getting dangerously drunk with her roommate. She also wants to reconnect with the girls' mother, who abandoned them the week after 9/11 to "find herself". Still scarred by the betrayal and remembering how much it affected their father, Cath wants nothing to do with her, or even to hear her mentioned. Finally, there's her father's health. Cath is right to be worried about her dad, who while he tries to sound chipper, really doesn't deal as well without his daughters as he'd like to think.

It's no secret that I love Rainbow Rowell. Attachments was one of my top 3 books of 2011, and if I hadn't been made so intensely uncomfortable by Eleanor's home life in Eleanor and Park, I probably would have given that five stars too. I literally screamed with joy when I saw that I'd been granted an ARC by St. Martin's Press through NetGalley. To say that my expectations were high was not an understatement. After completing it, I can say that Attachments is probably still my favourite, but this is a worthy second place.

I've been a fangirl of many things over the years, but I've never really understood the appeal of fan fiction, be it the reading or writing thereof. Obviously I'm aware that it exists, and that thousands of people around the world spend their time, like Cath in this book, on forums, and message boards and fan fiction sites. I'd rather just re-read the books I loved, or watch the TV shows, rather than reading someone else's interpretation of the characters and stories that I loved. Yet Rowell writes Cath so well, that while I was urging her to break out of her comfort zone and live and meet boys and use her considerable writing talent to create her own character and worlds, rather than stay safe in the world of the fantasy characters she loved, I could also understand why it was important and necessary for her.

I can also add the Simon Snow books to the list of fictional books that I desperately want to get my hands on. The first instance of being almost more caught up in the fiction within the fiction was probably when I read Misery by Stephen King as a teenager. I would have been completely hooked on those books. I was upset that they didn't exist. I love the fact that I can read Richard Castle's actual Nikki Heat books. The various excerpts from Simon Snow books in Fangirl (usually at the end of each chapter) made me desperate to read more. I suspect I would enjoy them more than certainly the later Harry Potter books.

This is becoming a really long review, and while I've written a bit about Cath, I've not really covered much about the other wonderful characters in this book. Wren, who so understandably wants to try to define herself away from her identical twin sister. Their father, with his manic ideas and so much affection for his daughters. Reagan, Cath's roommate, and of course, Levi, who I fell madly in love with, and have added to the list of my many fictional boyfriends and future husbands. If you've even vaguely enjoyed a Rainbow Rowell book in the past, do yourself a favour and read this one. If you haven't, this is a great book to start with, although I suspect you might need to have some affinity to fandom of some kind to really sympathise fully with Cath. While I was given this ARC, I will totally pay full price for the book when it's actually released in September, and begin my impatient wait for Rowell's next book.

#CBR5 Book 55. "Ultraviolet" by R.J. Anderson

Page count: 416 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Alison is sixteen, and currently residing in a mental institution. Ever since she was little, she's know she's not quite like everyone else. To her, words have distinct tastes and colours. Certain sounds can make her see things. She feels physically sick if she herself tries to lie, and can taste it in the back of her mouth if people are lying or not. Loud noises give her fits. She's suspected of the murder of the most popular and perfect girl in her school, Tori Beaugrand, and only Alison knows why the authorities haven't been able to find a body. Tori Beaugrand disintegrated in front of Alison's eyes, after they had a terrible fight. How insane is that?

Alison doesn't want to stay sectioned, and tries to appeal to be released. Yet her mother is afraid to keep her at home with her younger brother, and the doctors at the institution want her to take her anti-psychotic drugs so she can get better. The police want to know where Tori Beaugrand is, and why Alison came home, distraught, with bloody hands. As the weeks pass, Alison no longer knows what the truth is. Only the enigmatic young scientist Sebastian Faraday seems to believe that Alison is innocent. He performs a number of cognitive tests on her, and explains that what she and her mother always believed was madness, and have kept hidden from everyone, is actually just synesthesia, and that she has a particularly complex form of it. His further testing seems to suggest that she also has the ability to see lights on the ultraviolet spectrum. With each new meeting, Sebastian puts Alison's mind more at ease, and when she confesses what happened to Tori, he actually seems to believe her.

Then the doctors reveal to Alison that Sebastian is not who he claims to be. He's not a grad student, but a journalist, and his motives for coming to see Alison in the hospital were unlikely to be charitable. Yet Alison discovers that the reason he lied to her is stranger than she could have imagined, and the reason he believes in her innocence, is because he knows what actually happened to Tori.

I found Ultraviolet through a very glowing review on The Book Smugglers, and put it on my TBR list, and then promptly forgot about it, because I discover intriguing sounding books all the time. Besides, the cover looked so very generic, and there were so many other shiny things to distract me. I decided to give this a try, because the sequel (where Tori Beaugrand is the even more awesome than Alison protagonist) starts with a Q, and that's not the easiest thing to find for my A to Z challenge. I was pretty instantly engrossed, and because I'd consciously tried not to find out too much about the book, I was very surprised by the twists and turns it took.

While I grew fond of Alison over the course of the book, she's prickly and sullen and not the easiest of characters to like at first. It's pretty obvious early on (if you've ever heard of or read about synesthesia) that what she considers part of her insanity is something that could have been diagnosed if her mother had been less rigid and paranoid about doctors (it is revealed over the course of the book where that fear comes from, though). The fact that she believes she saw a person dissolve into thin air in front of her eyes, that's more of a mystery. While she may not be insane, you start to realise, as the book progresses, why she's never exactly been a popular kid in school, and while it's obvious that she's not insane or a murderer, she could probably be a bit more gracious about accepting help from people. Luckily, while she's slow to adapt, she does change, and becomes a lot more easy to root for by the end of the book.

I really liked the world building in this book, and that something that I thought was just another YA novel with mystery elements turned out to be something completely different. The supporting characters are incredibly well developed, and none of them seem to be your stock "troubled teen asylum inmate" tropes that a lesser writer might have resorted to. There is a tiny romantic subplot with the always mysterious (but so much more strange than I first expected) Sebastian, and the last third of the book especially, was surprising and very well done. I'm trying as hard as I can not to give anything away, because these books are better if you don't know too much going in. Give this book a try, it's miles above a lot of YA fare out there.

CBR4 Book 96: "Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir)" by Jenny Lawson, the Bloggess

Page count: 289 pages
Rating: 5 stars
Date begun: October 18th, 2012
Date finished: October 19th, 2012

I'm ashamed to say that I'd not really heard of the Bloggess, Jenny Lawson, before I read this book. I'd also seen it reviewed in this year's Cannonball a bunch of times (I just counted - 11 people have already reviewed it), but never really paid any attention (or read the reviews - I'm sorry, guys), mainly because I saw the mouse on the cover and assumed it was a children's book or something. I did, however, read the review featured on Pajiba, and that's what finally made me realize that I had to get a copy for myself. I have since gone back and read all the other reviews - so many good writers on this blog this year!

I don't think I have laughed as loudly or as much, or annoyed my husband with insisting on reading bits out loud to him when he was busy doing something, with any book this year, or for as long as I can remember. Jenny Lawson's writing is hysterically funny, and several times I had to put the book down because I was wheezing for breath.

Jenny Lawson writes honestly and tragi-comically about her childhood in rural Texas, about her slightly scary taxidermist dad, about the poverty she grew up with, about her anxiety attacks, meeting her husband and their subsequent marriage, her difficulty conceiving, her many different and difficult health issues, and I'm now an avid follower of her blog, still reading my way backward through the bits I've missed.

While the book made me laugh, it also made me so glad that this woman is out there, sharing her life and her experiences in this way. It also made me deeply sympathetic for her husband, and I now feel so much better about my husband's "funny little ways", because even at his worst, it's nothing like some of the stuff I read about in this book. Unlike several of the comic celebrity biographies I've read, this affected me more, because Lawson is a regular person, who just happens to have a gift at writing about her life.

I'm sorry I didn't discover the book sooner, so I could join in the general chorus of acclaim for this book. I will from now on do my very best to obnoxiously pimp it to all my friends, to ensure that Lawson gets another book deal and will keep writing.