HelloKatieO’s #CBR4 Review #44: The Book Borrower by Alice Mattison

This summer, I sublet an apartment in NYC from two professors. They had a wall to wall library filled with books on political science and education, with just one shelf of fiction. I had intended to tear through the shelf, but the only book I actually ended up reading from their small fiction selection was Alice Mattison’s The Book Borrower.

This book details the friendship between two women, from beginning to end. The book is told primarily in fragments of memory of the two women, Deborah and Toby. You see them meet, become fast friends, grow their families, attempt to grow their personal and professional lives, and slowly outgrow each other.  There’s intense jealousy in the friendship, as both women are teachers trying to make their way in a struggling market. There’s also jealousy over their marriages, their past times, and the new friends they make along the way.

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rdoak03’s #CBR4 review 32: These Girls by Sarah Pekkanen

These Girls chronicals the drama of Cate, Abby and Renee, who all face their own battles as single women in New York City. All the drama was a little unbelievable, but the girls are likeable. I was expecting more focus on the women’s friendship, and there is some of that, but they are just really getting to bond and know each other towards the end of the book. Read my full review here.

HelloKatieO’s #CBR4 Review #37: The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

Sarah Addison Allen’s The Peach Keeper is a standard tale of secrets, gossip and female friendship set in the South.  Set in a small town in rural North Carolina, Willa Jackson breaks free of her family’s legacy through a series of high school pranks and later, by running a successful independent business. Paxton Osgood is set up as the classic Southern daughter; dutiful, highly involved in the town’s women society and planning the social event of the season.  As Paxton runs into a series of obstacles planning the gala and Willa falls for Paxton’s brother, both women discover they have more in common than they realized.

The book  is fairly heavy handed in its discussion of female friendship.  Paxton and Willa’s grandmothers bonded over a tragic series of events many years ago, and as those long-buried secrets come to light, Paxton and Willa forge their own bond.  A major theme in the book is rediscovering your roots, and your values, by learning to look past shallow distractions like status.

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Malin’s #CBR4 Review #56: Finding Cassie Crazy by Jaclyn Moriarty

Cassie, Em and Lydia are best friends and go to Ashbury High. Because their English teacher is all about forging friendships across school boundaries and The Joy of the Envelope, he makes his class write letters to pupils at the nearby Brookfield high school. While and Lydia appear quite lucky with their pen pals, and strike up tentative friendships and even flirt through their letters. Em tries to help the boy she’s writing impress a girl he likes, and as their letters progress, she even offers to take him on practise dates. Lydia and her pen pal give each other secret missions and challenge each other to perform dangerous and even borderline illegal feats of daring.

Cassie, whose father died the year before, and who is still grieving, is less lucky with her pen pal. What starts out as abusive messages and threats that she refuses to respond to with anything but sunny cheer, take a turn for the dark and sinister when the boy she’s writing to seemingly warms to her, and suggests they meet. When Em and Lydia finally find out what Cassie has been hiding from them, they are furious, and soon the two schools are in all out war against each other.

Just as Feeling Sorry for Celia, Finding Cassie Crazy is an epistolary novel, made up chiefly from the letters between the Ashbury girls and the boys of Brookfield. However, the story also unfolds in diary entries, e-mail, notice board announcements at the two schools, reports and Lydia’s creative interpretations of the “lessons” given in the So You Want to be a Writer journal her father gave her for her birthday. 

Jaclyn Moriarty is brilliant at depicting teenagers, and the seemingly mundane realities of their lives. The previous book centred on only girls, whilst in this book, the Seb and Charlie (the two boys who write to Em and Lydia) are just as important, and as fully realized as the female characters. This book’s got a larger cast of characters, but you feel deeply for all of them, and the growing unease Moriarty develops through Cassie’s diary entries and correspondence makes it even more satisfying when her loyal friends finally discover the truth and utilise everything at their disposal to find out the true identity of the creep who hurt her, and in getting revenge.

While I didn’t adore this book as much as Feeling Sorry for Celia, possibly because this book didn’t quite so much remind me of my own teenage years and writing to a best friend, it was still a book that I had trouble putting down. I’m very glad I have the final two Ashbury/Brookfield novels lined up on my reading list.

Crossposted on my blog and Goodreads.

Malin’s #CBR4 Review #55: Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty

Elizabeth Clarry is a pupil at the posh Ashbury Academy, where her new English teacher has decided that the pupils need to be introduced to the fine art of letter writing. Each of the pupils are to write letters to a pupil at the neighbouring Brookfield school, in order to improve relations between the schools (Ashbury students think that the majority of Brookfielders are delinquents and drug-dealers, while Brookfield students think the Ashbury kids are spoiled, vacuous and snooty).

Elizabeth lives with her mother, who is absent a lot, but communicates with her through the medium of hilariously written all-caps notes that she leaves around the house. Elizabeth also seems to receive a large amount of snarky letters from her own subconscious, addressed from the Cold Hard Truth Association, or the Association of Teenagers (who feel that she is a dismal failure, both in her lack of rebelliousness and never having had a boyfriend and it would be easier for everyone if she just climbed into a fridge and died). Elizabeth’s parents are divorced, and her father used to live in Canada, but has now moved back to Australia temporarily, and keeps wanting to see her and spend time with her. When Elizabeth isn’t worrying about her distinct lack of coolness, her non-existent love life or her missing friend Celia, she tries to keep both parents happy, and she also enjoys long distance running.

Elizabeth’s best friend Celia is clearly a rather unusual person, and in her letters to Christina, Elizabeth talks about the many different antics Celia has got up to in the past. This time, she’s gone missing, though. Celia’s mother seems to think everyone around her is overreacting, and that it’s perfectly natural for a teenage girl to want to spread her wings and find herself. After a while, Elizabeth starts receiving post cards from Celia, who’s run away with a circus.

Christina comes from a big family, and confides in Elizabeth about her wish for some privacy on occasion, which is difficult when you share a room with your younger sister, and her boyfriend troubles. While Elizabeth has little experience in the romance department, she advises Christina as best she can, and the two strike up a close friendship through their correspondence, encouraging each other, comforting and helping each other, without ever meeting face to face.

As the book progresses, it becomes clear that all is not well with Celia on her circus adventure. Elizabeth, with the the help of a boy she’s been running with, goes to rescue Celia, but their friendship isn’t the same anymore, for a number of reasons, and Elizabeth really struggles to come to terms with this. When she and Christina finally meet, it’s under fairly dramatic circumstances, where several story line threads have come to a head.

This is a really difficult review to write, because when trying to describe the plot of the book, not that much seems to happen, but it’s an absolutely delightful novel, made more interesting because of the epistolary device. All the characters are incredibly well fleshed out, even the supporting characters like Elizabeth’s parents, or Christina’s boyfriend Derek, and the two main characters are both wonderful girls, who you’d be lucky to have as friends in real life. There are also several unexpected twists in the narrative (which while a bit dramatic, nonetheless seem plausible), the first being the reveal that Celia’s run off to join a circus.

I absolutely loved this book, probably not helped by the fact that I got to know my best friend Lydia through old timey correspondence (back in the days when we didn’t really have regular access to Internet and e-mails), and the entire book made me miss the joy of writing letters. I’m just not very good at writing about books I feel really strongly about (I never seem to get across exactly what’s so great about them), but take my word for it, this book is a complete delight, and I will try to get as many people as possible to read it.

Crossposted on my blog and Goodreads.