Bossypants (Tina Fey)

Hardcover

I like Tina Fey.  She's extremely funny, a decent actress, and stars on (what used to be) one of my favorite sitcoms.  She's also pretty normal-looking and seems to be well-adjusted and approachable.

Unfortunately, she's not much of an author.  Most of her chapters seem more like a stream-of-consciousness ramble than a finished product.  She simply has zero knack for writing in such a way that the reader gets the intended inflection.  All of the sentences -- moments of truth, memories of childhood, jokes at her own expense -- seem to butt up against each other with hardly a breath between.  Maybe if I had heard the audio version, I could've had it exactly as she meant it...but on the page it felt a little bit as though she was keeping herself too guarded -- absolutely every moment of "real" was undone by a joke.

I still like her, but only on the screen.

C+

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Bryan Lee O'Malley)

Paperback

This is, officially, my first graphic novel (Malice doesn't really count) and I can't wait to get my hands on Vol. 2.

I don't really have a good reason for having avoided comics/graphic novels -- my only explanation for keeping away is that when I've previously flipped through them, I 1) worried that I wouldn't know how to read it (right to left?  top to bottom?  across pages or page by page?) as the rules seem less than consistent and 2) I wouldn't know whether to go pictures first or words first.  Since I sometimes like to have captions up on the television -- especially for heavily-accented shows -- I know how frustrating it can be when the captioning is slightly "ahead" of the on-screen action.  When that happens, it's like having constant spoilers and I was under the assumption that graphic novels couldn't help but have the same problem.

But I'm quite won over.  This was such fun to read and, though the art is rather samey-samey (to the point where I was getting a few of the characters confused), it was also approachable.

B+

Crow Lake (Mary Lawson)

Hardcover

Tragedy strikes the four Morrison children in the first pages of this book when their parents are killed in a car accident.  How the two teenage boys and their quite-small sisters cope and survive is both heartbreaking and heart warming.

The older of the two sisters -- now 20 years older and an associate professor -- is our narrator.  She tells the tale in flashback and always from her perspective, which is the most unusual thing about this book.  She was a child watching very adult things unfold...and although I wouldn't call her "unreliable," I would say she's both limited and prejudiced.

The way the book wraps up, with us finally seeing the story from another perspective, was almost a letdown because I'd conjured something so much more horrible in my mind.  That said, it was also a relief.  I came to truly care about the people of Crow Lake and to see them content  was a gift.

I can't believe this is a first novel -- it's magnificent.

A

The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)

Audiobook

Detective Alan Grant is bored to death in the hospital recuperating from a broken leg. He's uninterested in the novels well-wishers have brought for him to read, but he perks up when an actress friend drops off a packet full of photos as a stab at distracting him. He gets particularly interested in a portrait that he immediately classifies as belonging "on the bench" (side of justice) rather than "in the dock" -- and is surprised to find that it's of Richard III, widely known as a notorious murderer of his nephews in order to secure the throne. Grant becomes obsessed with reading about Richard III and, with the help of a newly-met American researcher, begins to untangle the mystery of what really happened to the boys and whether Richard III could've committed such a crime when his face looks like that of an innocent.

Every single scene takes place in Grant's hospital room. Every single scene is nothing but talk -- mostly conversation between Grant and his researcher. And yet it's pretty dang interesting. I think that I would have enjoyed it even more if I'd have taken in the words myself off of a page; instead I listened to the Derek Jacobi-narrated audiobook, which contains one of the most hilariously-bad American accents in the history of bad accents. It's like a cross between a 1920s gangster and a Scottish brogue...and it's strapped onto a character that is supposed to be a "woolly lamb."

This is the sixth book to feature Grant, but the only one I've read. Although I'm sure I would've had more appreciation for his investigative method and a fuller understanding of some of the characters seen only briefly, I didn't feel as though being new to the series hurt this particular entry at all.

B