I have a bone to pick with Jane Young/Aviva Grossman. In 1999, you could not just flop down on the bed of your dorm room with your laptop (which would have had to been plugged into a modem) and start a blog. That’s not how it worked back in the olden days. No. You would have had to register a domain name and secure web hosting. You would have had to learn at least four chapters in HTML for Dummies and then, only then, could you have started a blog. Also, that blog wouldn’t have had comments. Though, yes, she might have used Open Diary an early blogging community that did include comments. But Jane/Aviva didn’t strike me as quite that nerdy.

Aviva is the protagonist of Gabrielle Zevin’s compulsively readable if not totally believable novel Young Jane Young. Her story spools out in past and present from her mother, her teenage daughter, the wife of the congressman she slept with in her 20s, and in her own words.

Young Jane Young is an updated re-imagining of Monica Lewinksy’s story. A young women in a powerless position engages in a sexual affair with with a married politician and has her life ruined when the affair is revealed. The man, of course, remains unscathed. The story is not new. Zevin’s thoughts on slut-shaming, feminism, and the forever-ness of the Internet are not new or ground-breaking.

And yet. . . this story is a fun and funny romp through a woman’s life and how she comes to terms with her past. Even with the blog stuff, which is total bullshit, I still liked it. As someone whose blog turned 17 in July I can’t seem to let go of how none of the stuff Aviva talks about re: the blog (which plays a pivotal part in her public shaming) is how things actually worked. At some point, in 1999 or 2000, Aviva makes a crack “They didn’t even know what a blog was until I told them.” NOBODY DID. The ubiquity of blogging was still a good five, six years away.

It’s one of those things where the timeline doesn’t quite add up and is my literary pet peeve. So I bitch about it more than is warranted. It should not get in your way of this book, especially if you’re in the mood for something light and funny.

I liked that Aviva’s story starts with Rachel, her sixty-something mom, going out on a date. Rachel is sharp and really, the funniest character in the book. The opening caught me by surprise, because I knew what the book was about going in, and it delighted me to no end. I wouldn’t have minded one bit if we had stuck with Rachel throughout, she was the most genuine and believable character in the book. Ruby, Aviva’s daughter is a bit too precocious and a good chunk of her story is told through emails she sends to her Indonesian pen pal.

The book ends with Aviva, finally, telling her story in a second-person “Choose Your Own Adventure” style which works really well, all things considered. It not only allows us to see the decisions she could have made and maybe should have made, but also really wonderfully illustrates how stupid we can all be in our 20s.

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One thing to know before you crack into Gail Honeyman’s novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is that it’s very voicey. You are immediately and wholly ensconced in Eleanor’s world and her voice drives and carries the entire book. This is a good thing if you find this social misfit’s quirks and never-ending judgments charming. It’s another thing if you find her fucking annoying.

Eleanor’s thirty and she’s worked at the same place since she graduated university, and has never missed a day. She has zero friends and zero interests aside from doing crosswords and drinking two bottles of vodka every weekend. She’s suffered from horrible child abuse and survived a fire that has left one side of her face scarred and she bounced around through foster care from the age of ten through seventeen.

This is supposed to explain why Eleanor leads a sheltered life away from most people. And I can kind of buy that. However, the internal logic of the novel just doesn’t hold up and because of that the whole thing feels like quirky for quirk’s sake kind of mess and not like a story about an actual, factual person.

Two things happen pretty much simultaneously to break Eleanor out of her world. She falls in love with a shitty pop singer, and she, along with her co-worker Raymond, help an old man who drops of a heartattack in the middle of the street.

Now that she’s begun to engage with the world and decided to pursue this pop singer as her one true love, Eleanor begins to shuck off her social awkwardness and try to get with societal norms. Most of this, of course, is through appearance. She buys trendy clothes, begins wearing makeup, and gets a haircut. This is, I guess, supposed to show growth? I don’t know.

She becomes friends with Raymond and he really makes her go outside her comfort zone — taking her to parties, concerts, and such. However, Eleanor is still suffering. She has weekly phone calls with her abusive mother who is locked away somewhere. Her mother sounds exactly like a Disney-evil-stepmother and some of this is hard to buy. . .

And you’ll eventually learn why in an eye-rollingly obvious and stupid twist.

The problem with ‘Eleanor Oliphant’ is that the novel’s internal logic doesn’t hold up well and like a house of cards once you start questioning one part of Eleanor you question them all. So what could have been an edifying story about a lonely, quirky woman who comes to friendship late in life turns into a mental illness disguised as quirk none of this is really funny and it reeks of bullshit kind of mess.

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I can always tell if a mystery is really good because the moment I finish it I will text my friend, Adam, and tell him how much he needs to read it so I can talk about it with someone. That’s exactly happened after I stayed up until like 2 a.m. one night finishing Karin Slaughter’s The Good Daughter.

For the most part, I gobble up mysteries like their Chicken McNuggets. They’re delicious going in, but they don’t stick with you for very long and when you’re done you feel a little . . . off. This does not stop me from gobbling up mysteries or McNuggets, occasionally at the very same time.

(Aside: I recently listened to What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton and she too has coped with the Fascist, Racist Gameshow Host who is “leading” our country by losing herself in mysteries. See? She’s just like us!)

So mysteries, yeah. I don’t write about a lot of the ones I read because my feelings about them are generally “Eh. It was alright. Better than a “Friends” rerun, not as good as watching “The Good Place” for the 7th time.” This means I usually only end up writing about the really good ones, or the really shitty ones.

The Good Daughter, as I mentioned is a good one. It passed the Text Adam test, which hasn’t happened in awhile.

The other problem with writing about mysteries is you don’t want to give too much away and ruin it for people. I like to go into them as blind as possible because a lot of times you can guess the whodunnit by like chapter 3. In really good mysteries you might be able to guess whodunnit but that doesn’t even ruin it because the whole story is that engrossing.

That’s The Good Daughter. I guessed who did it pretty early, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of twists and turns I didn’t see coming. This one’s about estranged sisters who witnessed their mother’s horrifying murder, their shitty defense attorney dad, a small Georgia town that won’t let anything go, and a school shooting.

There’s about four mysteries packed into this one book and some of the reveals made me gasp. So good! Read it.

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According to Goodreads, I read 65 books this year. According to me I finished 60 books and quite five for various reasons most of them having to do with boredom. After about 88 seconds of thought here are the books that would win awards this year if I were in charge of creating and awarding awards.

Awards!

Most Surprising Book I Loved: Everyone Who Knows Me Category

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

I can’t even describe the skeleton plot of this one without wanting to roll my eyes and make barf faces — college-senior bisexual spoken word poet struggling with love, life, money, etc. Come on! And yet. And yet. And yet. It was one of the smartest, most-thoughtful and thought-provoking novels I read this year. I loved and loathed all the characters in equal measure and it ends so wonderfully that I kinda want to read it all over again.

Most Surprising Book I Loved: Me Category

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Frankly, I’m still kind of surprised I picked up this one to begin with. I really, really did not like Ng’s first novel Everything I Never Told You. In my ever so humble opinion it was over-written, over-rated dreck. Fires, however, is the goods. Artsy-fartsies fall into well-off, staid family and cause all kinds of delicious emotional mayhem. There’s a little bit of mystery, a lot of talk of art, and genuine characters who all feel real. Plus, unlike her first novel, people do things. It’s great!

Most Damning Reason Men Should Not Write Female POV

Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perotta

This is a hot, steaming pile of garbage written by a man who thinks he knows women, but writes female characters that feel like paperdolls enacting the way a man thinks women would act. It tried really hard to be ripped from the headlines and very on topic, but comes across as pointless trying too hard tripe. Really, you’d get more insight on human behavior and what it’s like to live in the now by taking 18 Buzzfeed Quizzes (and that’d be way more entertaining).

Most Memorable Lines (tie)

“I looked like a promise fulfilled.” From Lesley Nneka Arimah’s fan-fucking-tastic you should read it right right right now story collection What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky

“His rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.” From Sherman Alexie’s devastating memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.

Most Loved Book I Kept Forgetting About

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

I loved this one about a father with 12 bullet wounds and his teenage daughter. It felt like an old-timey western (said the person who has never read an old-timey western). It was smart and sweet and kept me engaged throughout. And yet. . . I kept forgetting how much I loved this one or that I even read it, but every time I’d stumble across the book cover of the title in my online adventures I’d stop, sigh, and say “God, I loved that book.”

Most Like a Memoir I’d Write If I Ever Wrote a Memoir

Hunger by Roxane Gay

This was probably the hardest book I read all year. Gay’s body is a lot like mine. Her’s is black and mine is a little taller, but for the most part we’re physically quite the similar. Though I come upon my fatness by nature & nurture and not as a self-defense against gang rape. And yet a lot of our experiences are eerily similar. I have so much I need to say about this book, but can’t quite find the intellectual way to it. Reading this book hurt. Just typing about it brings tears to my eyes. It made me feel less alone and at the same time makes me wonder what my life would have been like had I been fat and wealthy instead of fat and poor.

Most Disappointing: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Most Mind-Blowing: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Most Tear-Inducing: They Both Die at the End Adam Silvera
Most Reassuring: What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

The post Supergenius Superlatives: Books 2017 appeared first on I Will Dare.

I’m not sure why so many people who read Mona Awad’s collection of linked short stories, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, found it so funny. What was hilarious? The way the main character Lizzie/Liz/Elizabeth hated every woman she came into contact with? How all the thin women were petty, vapid, and stupid? How she constantly described women as whorish? Was it when she calls some girls ‘laughably obese’? Or was it the way, when she was fat, that she always had loads of sweets and homemade fudge around, and would moan about not having eaten in hours?

Because as far as I could tell, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was just every stereotype you’ve ever read or seen about fat women thrown into one book and I guess it’s satire? Only it’s the way people really see fat women.

Lizzie our main narrator, is a fat teen who is miserable, she grows up to be a thin woman who is also miserable. She hates the men who love her when she’s fat and she’s not a big fan of the men who love her when she’s thin. Really, Lizzie doesn’t like anyone, which is probably why she’s so miserable all the time and it might, shockingly, have little to do with her size.

The problem isn’t that Lizzie is fat, the problem is that Lizzie is a one-dimensional character. There’s no nuance here. We can’t even tell what Lizzie really wants because what it seems she wants — a smaller body, a husband — she gets and is still miserable. And there’s no self-reflection here, no self-awareness. Lizzie is oblivious to how harshly judges every woman around her based on their appearance. And maybe this she is supposed to represent the way society views women? Maybe? I don’t know.

For me satire has to go over the edge near the absurd, and the way Lizzie thinks and acts is just the way like really is.

As I was reading this one, I googled the author. I wanted to see if Mona Awad was fat, and from her picture she doesn’t look fat. That doesn’t mean she isn’t fat or hasn’t been at some point in her life. She doesn’t write like someone who has been fat. At one point she has Lizzie looking at all her clothes, this is when she is still fat, and Lizzie says something like, “I looked at all my plus-sizes clothes spread out on the bed.”

Fat girls don’t refer to their clothes as plus-sized clothes. We just call them clothes.

At another the author has a group of men discussing sex with fat women. One of them men talks about having sex with a woman who was a size 12. I don’t know any men who could look at any woman and guess what size she was. I don’t think this is a thing men know.

The book is just awful and, frankly, offensive. I haven’t been this offended by a book since I read A.S. King’s Everybody Sees the Ants, which is also rife with harmful, negative fat shaming.

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