Whirl Away

From the book cover:
The stories in this dazzling new collection look at what happens when people's personal coping skills go awry. These are people who discover their anchor-chain has broken: characters safe in the world of self-deception or even self-delusion, forced to face the fact that their main line of defense has become their greatest weakness.

From the caretaker of a prairie amusement park to the lone occupant of a collapsing Newfoundland town, from the a traveling sports-drink marketer with a pressing need to get off the road to an elevator inspector who finds himself losing his marriage, these are people whose lives are spinning wildly out of control as they try to navigate their way through their rapidly changing worlds.

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My Review:
The twelve short stories in this collection have more in common than the theme of coping skills gone awry. They all feature a slice of Canadian life. Most of the stories are set in Atlantic Canada - a region that seems to inspire a lot of Canadian literature.

The thing I admire most about this collection is Russell Wangersky's writing style and his ability to set the scene quickly while giving the reader enough information to become emotionally involved in each of the short stories. Most of the stories are 20 pages or less, yet almost every single story came to a gut-wrenching climax that led me to ask 'How would I cope in a similar situation?'

At the end of the day, I think being able to throw ourselves into someone's else story is why most of us read. Thus, I'm adding Russell Wangersky's Whirl Away on my 5ers list.

5

Unfinished Portrait

From the book cover:
Bereft of the three people she has held most dear, Cecilia must decide if she has the strength to come to terms with the past.

My Review:
I think what I like most about Agatha Christie's works as Mary Westmacott is the character development. In her murder mysteries, everything moves so fast there isn't much opportunity to really get to know and understand the characters. Unfinished Portrait has a lot of similarities with Giant's Bread.
Unfinished Portrait is Celia's life story. However, the narrator who is an injured painter trying a new medium (writing stories), points out in the prologue that it's such a common story that it could be any one's story.

The story opens with Celia at a seaside resort getting ready to commit suicide.

Celia had a happy childhood. She lived on a beautiful country estate and was loved and adored by her mother, father and grandmother and teased by her older brother. Her father has a heart attack and dies when she's eleven years old, and from then on she and her mother live very modestly. At this point, her brother, who is several years older than her, has already left home to join the army.

Celia grows up and marries Dermot despite her mother's fears that he can't be trusted and her grandmother's general warnings about the fickleness of men. Celia and Dermot are happy for 11 years. During that time, Celia gives birth to their daughter, Judy and Dermot gets a good job that affords them a life of luxury. When Celia's mother dies, things quickly spiral out of control, and she finds herself without all the people who matter the most to her.

As I was reading this novel, I kept thinking about how Celia is a version of Nell, and Dermot a version of Vernon from Giant's Bread. It's like they couldn't be together in that story, so the author tries them out under different circumstance in this novel. Unfortunately, the results are just as disastrous.

Unfinished Portrait really made me think about the different types of people that make the world go around.

4/5

The Complexity of a Soldier

From the book cover:
No one knows the heart and mind of a soldier. Every day they must face scenarios and life choices that most of us will never even imagine. When Rory Nichols joins the army, this hard lesson hits hard and fast. After 911, he is deployed to Iraq. He and his wife, Emily, face sacrifice and strife which they fear their young marriage may not survive. Pushed to his limits, Rory begins to ask questions. Then one day, he receives a fateful phone call relaying the most wicked of betrayals. He rushes home to face an enemy he had not predicted. In this penultimate moment he will right a wrong and stand for what he believes in at all costs; making a statement to his country, to his family, and to all victims of this seething crime. It is a story of life, love, and rising above the acts of war and abuse.


My Review:
Behind all of the cheese, this is a mediocre coming-of-age novel. The main character, Rory, is desperately trying to discover his true self by escaping from his small hometown, while his best friend is trying to break away from family expectations and give the system the finger.

The romantic and familial relationships are  cliched and typical of the type of stuff found in self-published novels.

Emily is a sweet, pure, beautiful blond that embodies the American girl next door myth. Her love for Rory is loyal and unwavering, even in the toughest of times. Rory respects his parents, even though they don't see eye-to-eye on many things, including Rory's decision to seek out a career as a police officer, thus moving away from the family's ranch. Rory and his brother Rodney love wrestling but truly love and respect each other. Minutes after receiving a black eye from his brother as he's about to leave for a date, an eighteen-year-old Rory is thinking about how much he really loves his brother. It just doesn't ring true. And there are many other examples where the characters' emotions lack depth.

Although Rory is the story's main narrator, Emily, Rory's best friend J.T., his girlfriend Abby, and Rory's daughter, Callie, all take turns narrating at various plot crossroads. A writer of a higher calibre would have used these different characters to add emotional depth but in this case, it's basically a regurgitation of Rory's thoughts. The only slight exceptions are J.T. and Abby.

The 'wicked betrayal' eluded to on the book cover does not  occur until the last quarter of the book and it comes across as being one last ditch effort to add a little more drama and to tug at the heart strings. The final pages are so unreal, this book might as well be classified as fantasy.

2.5/5

The Song of Achilles

From the book cover:
The legend begins...
Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia to be raised in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. "The best of all the Greeks" - strong, beautiful, and the child of a goddess - Achilles is everything the shamed Patroclus is not. Yet despite their differences, the boys become steadfast companions. Their bond deepens as they grow into young men and become skilled in the arts of war and medicine - much to the displeasure and the fury of Achilles' mother, Thetis, a cruel sea goddess with a hatred for mortals.
When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece , bound by blood and oath, must lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

My  Review:
Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles is the winner of the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. Achilles is Ms. Miller first novel. It is based on Homer's  Illiad poem.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. It definitely a good book. It one of the stories that sparked my interest and sent me on to the world wide web to further investigate and get the back story on some of the people/gods mentioned.

I'm a bit surprised that Song of Achilles  won the Orange Prize. It seems like cheating, taking the plot of someone else's poem and developing it into a novel. Yes, Ms. Miller did bring the characters to life. Yes, her writing style did make this novel a pleasure to read, but still it doesn't seem fair to the other authors who actually developed their own plots.

Achilles is a historical fiction, one could argue that all historical fictions steal their plots from a story already written. What do you think? Am I overreacting?

I'm going to hold off on rating this book until I've read Homer's poem.