HelloKatieO’s #CBR4 Review #34: Emily and Einstein by Linda Francis Lee

Emily and Einstein is a story of a woman who only discovers her marriage had disintegrated after her husband’s death in a tragic car accident, and how she recovers from the death of her husband and mourns the marriage she thought she had.  But the single most important fact about this book is left out on the book jacket (at least on my copy): Emily’s husband Sandy, after dying, is reincarnated in the dog Einstein who Emily subsequently adopts.

The book is told from the alternating perspectives of Einstein/Sandy, and Emily. At first, I was put off by Sandy’s reincarnation in the dog because introspective books flirting with the spiritual realm really are’t my thing. But his perspective was important: Emily knew so little about the actual state of her marriage, that you needed Sandy/Einstein’s input to figure out what had gone wrong, and why.

Sandy was insufferable! Even as a dog. The book jacket makes it sound like Sandy, through Einstein the dog, helps Emily recover to repent for his awful actions and because he loves her. But that’s not why. Sandy pushes Emily to live the life he wanted to live – run a marathon where he could not, stay thin so he still finds her attractive, etc. Everything Sandy pushes Emily to do is in his own self interest , with the ultimate purpose of trying to get her to spend more time with his dog form. I would feel better about Sandy/Einstein’s role in Emily’s recovery if he was something other than self motivated.

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Amurph11′s #CBR4 Review #12, Lost and Found by Jacqueline Sheehan

Full disclosure: I recently took a class from Jacqueline Sheehan, and checked out this book from the library after that class. Despite liking the class and it’s teacher, I can pretty definitively say that it won’ t affect my review, because after reading it, it’s pretty clear to me that I am nowhere near the same zip code as this book’s audience.

Listen, quirk can be done well. Some of my favourite books are high on quirk. But here’s a rule I’ve found helpful in determining the casual user from the habitual abuser: if one of the characters in your book has synesthesia, you’ve overdosed on the quirk. Synesthesia, for those of you don’t know, is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one neural pathway leads to the second, involuntary stimulation of another, seemingly unrelated pathways. The most commonly talked about manifestation has to do with colours – synesthetes tend to apply colour to non-tangible concepts. The letter A as red, for instance, or, in the case of Ms. Sheehan’s character Tess, experiencing pain as a streak of  hot orange. You can sort of see why it might be popular among practitioners of a certain flowery style of writing, but in my experience, it never reads as anything but gimmicky in fiction.

Tess the synesthete, however, is just one example. There’s also the main character of Rocky, who gives up her career as a psychologist after her husband dies of a massive heart attack and (only after tossing his ashes in a deep-fryer at his favourite local fish-fry), moves to Maine and takes a job as an Animal Control Warden – how does she qualify, you ask? Well, her husband was a vet, and people in small-town Maine apparently don’t care about work experience. And then there’s the plot in general: you see, while trying to start a new life as Animal Control Warden of Peake’s Island, Maine, Rocky stumbles across a black lab with an arrow sticking out of him, and decides to a) take up archery and b) track down the perpetrator who shot her new foster dog. Oh, and there’s an anorexic neighbor girl in the mix, who heals by sharing the aforementioned dog’s kibble.

All that, right there? A solid argument for a quirk intervention, maybe a stint in quirk rehab. In addition to all of this, the transitions between quirky-Sheehan and serious-psychologist-Sheehan are jarring, and the narrative is not always entirely clear. Despite these things, it is definitely an engaging book with a lot of heart, and I can see how it might be attractive to a certain kind of reader – dog-lovers who, unlike me, don’t mind excessive amounts of quirk (or the occasional dog-voiced narration). I am just not that reader.

Recommended for: See above. People who love dogs and don’t mind psychobabble. Let’s be honest – your mother’s book club would probably really enjoy this book.

Read when: Either after a bout of particularly heavy reading material when you just need to zone out, or when you run out of books while visiting Peake’s Island, Maine.

Listen with: anything from anyone who has ever performed at Lillith Fair.