love triangle

Kiss The Sky

admin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:06:00 +0000

_“I don’t believe in the devil anymore. But if I did, he would look a lot like Ari Malcolm Klein.” _

This is how Farai Chideya draws her readers into her mesmerizing, charismatic novel Kiss The Sky. Sophie Maria Clare Lee, a Black girl from blue collar Baltimore, remakes herself by applying and being accepted to attend Harvard. By the time the novel opens, Sophie has graduated, married Ari Klein, toured America as part of an indie rock band, and is divorced.

Ten years later Sophie has made a career as a music television host in New York City, but she is tired of the work and decides to become the newest female pop star. The talent and drive are present to aid in her success. The catch—there is always a catch—is she begins to play music with Ari Klein again. A complicated triangle is completed when Leo Masters, her manager, is drawn into her new self-made stardom.

Is Sophie’s fame worth her faith, family and friendships?

Farai Chideya spent many years covering music and pop culture. Her knowledge is evident in the smooth way this intricate story unfolds. My love of music was fed by this novel, and one of my favorite parts of the book is the Play Lists included in the back. Whether you are a lover of pop music or not, this imaginatively rich novel is a must read. I loved adding it to my bookshelf.

Written by: Ann Hite, September 17th 2009

Mating Ritual of the North American WASP

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:32:00 +0000

By Lauren Lipton

5 spot

spoiler alert At its core, Mating Rituals of the North American WASP is wholly typical. Girl goes to Vegas. Girl gets drunk. Girl wakes up to find she married some stranger. Girl flees back to New York. Boy calls her up to tell her that, yes, they’re legally married. In time, Boy and Girl fall in love and decide to stay married. Mix in a secondary cliché plot: if they stay married, they get money.

Peggy is a New Yorker who runs a shop with her best friend. They’ve been successful for ten years, but their rent is about to be hiked up (that much is realistic). Luke Sedgwick is the last surviving member of the venerable Sedgwick clan, a family that has not left Connecticut since its founder built a big house which is now falling apart. Luke would love to sell the house and leave his oppressive birthright behind him, but his great-aunt Abigail is in her eighties and she refuses to leave. Her health is deteriorating at the same pace as the house, and Luke is badly in need of a way to pay for both.

Peggy and Luke meet in Vegas where inhibitions go to die. Aunt Abigail, clearly having her priorities straight, says she will allow Luke to sell the house if he and Peggy remain married for one year. Needing her share of the house’s selling price, Peggy starts leading a double life. During the week she lives and works in the city and on weekends she rents a car, drives to Connecticut, and pretends to be the happily married wife of a genuine, full-blooded WASP.

I kept reading this book out of a sense of obligation, and because there was nothing terribly egregious about it. But in hindsight, I’m actually rather pissed. You see, there’s Peggy and Luke… and then there’s Peggy and Brock.

Brock is Peggy’s long-time boyfriend/pet frat boy-cum-thrillseeker. They’ve been dating for six years, and she desperately wants him to pop the question. He’s constantly finding reasons not to. They have a big fight right before Peggy goes to Vegas, and later, just as she’s having feelings for Luke, Brock shows up with a ring. Peggy tells herself she can wait out the six months left of secret marriage with no one the wiser.

Brock is a selfish, childish dolt. He has no redeeming qualities besides being handsome. He’s comfortable in a no-strings relationship with a woman who is too anxious to assert herself, and he likes it that way. Peggy’s waffling is annoying, and her self-delusion more than a little infuriating. Worse, she doesn’t have that big, cathartic "I Am An Idiot And I Really Love Luke" moment at the end. In a faceoff between the three of them, she chooses Brock. Sure, it comes right in the very end, but Silent Luke’s not exactly fantastic either.

The book itself is WASP-ish. There’s no sex, no intimacy, and no delicious description. I never really rooted for Luke because I never felt the supposed connection with Peggy. I didn’t have much sympathy for either of them because there wasn’t much to like about them.

I will give kudos for a heroine who wasn’t stereotypical. Peggy has a streak of neurosis that I liked, but it wasn’t made into a defining issue, and it could have been. I would have much preferred a story about a woman who learns to let go of her own anxiety through her exposure to some classically repressed people.

Written by: Richenda Gould, July 30th 2009

Laura Rider's Masterpiece

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:25:00 +0000

By Jane Hamilton

Grand Central Publishing

Jane Hamilton's latest novel has a delightful premise. Laura and Charlie Rider own a Midwestern landscape business, for which Laura writes a newsletter. Charlie is a fantastic lover, a man whose equal doses of femininity and masculinity make his understanding of women profound. Laura suffers from “sexual fatigue,” and after twelve years of marriage, she has decided to stop sleeping with Charlie.

Jenna Faroli, the host of Milwaukee Public Radio's Jenna Faroli Show, has recently moved to Laura and Charlie's town of Hartley. Laura has always greatly admired Jenna. In fact, she has told Charlie that Jenna has “the biggest cranium on the planet.” When Laura meets Jenna at the Hartley Garden Club, she is awe struck, and decides Jenna would be a good person for Charlie to befriend. Laura has always dreamed of writing a novel, and she imagines that if she could bring Charlie and Jenna together, she would have real-life inspiration for the characters in her novel, and at the same time, she would be relieved of the sexual guilt she carries for not sleeping with her very sexual husband.

Hamilton's premise is intriguing, her characters quirky, and the setting is charming. But Laura Rider's Masterpiece seems to barely skim the surface of the complications that might arise from such an unusual triangle. Hamilton uses an omniscient narrator who follows all three main characters. This device might have been more successful had Hamilton not written such a brief novel. Coming in at merely 214 pages, the book doesn't quite give us the chance to know any of the characters well as we move quickly back and forth between them.

There are far too many oddities to be contained within these few pages. Charlie believes he saw a UFO when he was a teenager, and he and Jenna first meet when they see bobbing lights in the night sky. Charlie tells her about the Silver People he saw as a teenager. Jenna, who doesn't believe in UFOs, is taken with Charlie's story nonetheless. The Silver People are referenced frequently when Charlie and Jenna begin an email correspondence, yet ultimately, they serve as nothing more than a red herring in Masterpiece's plot. In addition, Laura's book idea disappears almost completely from the novel, along with the Silver People, while Charlie and Jenna pursue their off-beat romance.

Hamilton's prose is at times simply stunning. Early in the novel, when she is trying to think of ways to bring Charlie and Jenna together, Laura remembers that Charlie has Jenna's e-mail address: “Laura, thinking of that, closed her eyes and saw all at once a small opening, as if in the distance. A prick of light. It was the warm, well-lit tunnel of cyberspace, and she could hear it, too, hear the scurrying, the hum of the channel that would connect Jenna and Charlie.” Masterpiece is peppered with such illuminating passages. The various threads of the plot are all, in themselves, rich ideas, but the story and the characters are deserving of fuller treatment. Ultimately, Laura Rider's Masterpiece leaves the reader wanting more.

Written by: Natasha Bauman, July 29th 2009