I got this one as a preview from NetGalley, and the cover doesn’t show up on my Nook, so I had to steal the cover art from the NetGalley website. This is a pretty literal cover. When you read the book, you get it. 

I’m sure the title of the book also has nothing to do with the song Dare You To Move by Switchfoot because there is a playlist in the end and that song isn’t on it. Nonetheless, I couldn’t get that song out of my head the whole time I was reading. Or now. And it is appropriate to tone and story. And this is not something that is relevant to the book review, is it?

I’m going to go really easy on spoilers here. Like I said, I got this one from NetGalley, and as of the writing of this it is still on pre-order on B&N, so I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. The plot, in short: Beth Risk gets lifted out of her terrible life circumstances by a rich uncle, moves in with him, and through some uncle-interfering ends up with BMOC baseball player Ryan Stone as her friend/guide to her new town and school. Angsty teen romance ensues. But, of course, Beth’s terrible life didn’t just disappear into fairy-land, and Ryan’s got issues of his own. I’m short-selling the plot big time here. Clearly, I hate doing plot reviews. Let’s get to what works about the book and what doesn’t. 

The romance here is classic, and it works. Beth is a girl from the wrong side of the tracks that most people have given up hope on, Ryan is the superstar ballplayer whose life and future look “perfect,” there’s a meet-cute, there are obstacles to overcome, and YAY HEA! Exactly what a romance novel is supposed to be. Let me put this little disclaimer here - I do mean “romance.” It is aimed at teens, the main characters are teens, and the story is about them falling in love, not rushing to the bedroom. There is no explicit sex, despite the angst-in-pics cover that looks like so many of the New Adult titles coming out that are full of explicit sex. And I must say, props to McGarry for that. Beth and Ryan approach sex in an incredibly mature, responsible, and believable way.

There are a lot of other things about the high school experience in this story that are also represented in a believable way - insecurity, bullying, pressure, confusion and excitement about the future, and the comfort of having good friends. There’s also a “big theme” here about the difference between taking care of yourself and being selfish; Beth’s circumstances are certainly grittier and more dangerous than Ryan’s, but both of them are facing the same question about when it is better to put your own needs ahead of someone else’s. These other concerns are all handled well as part of the central romance story.

This brings me to my only major criticism of the book - the supporting cast is flat, particularly Ryan’s family. It isn’t as noticeable in Beth’s case, because her family problems are more extreme than Ryan’s. I guess this is a little spoiler, although it is clear pretty early on - Beth’s mom is an alcoholic/drug addict with an abusive live-in boyfriend. Because that’s the situation, Beth’s mom doesn’t have to be a particularly well drawn character for the conflict to make sense. The conflict in Ryan’s family is much more personality based. Ryan’s dad is a jerk but it’s never clear why he’s such a jerk. Ryan rebels against the expectations of his family, but the motivations for his family’s expectations are poorly (and all too quickly) explained. That became a distraction when Ryan decides to take a stand about what he is going to do with his future - all of his options were good (unlike Beth’s), and his parents weren’t developed enough for their objections to make sense.

The tropes that always bother me in romances bothered me here too. For instance, I hate that there is always one thing that the hero absolutely will not tolerate, and sometimes there’s an explanation and sometimes there isn’t. Ryan’s one thing that he absolutely will not tolerate is mistreating girls, with “mistreating” defined as anything from talking smack about his ex-girlfriend to physical violence. Before it seems like I’m heartless, let me just say I’m not in favor of characters who think it is cool to hit girls. (Or real people who think it’s cool to hit girls.) But the way the trope works, this one thing that will absolutely not be tolerated doesn’t seem to come organically from the character’s personality, and so it aggravates me. It would have been much more believable for Ryan to do the right thing just because he’s the kind of kid who does the right thing, and even surprises himself at how far he’s willing to go to do the right thing (because he is a teenager, after all), than for him to be so blindly insistent. I also hate the trope wherein the hero has the one thing that he absolutely must always do, and for Ryan he must always win, which is often phrased as “I do not lose.” Again, nothing wrong with ambition and hard work. But give me a break. Losing your girlfriend is not “losing.” It’s not a competition. 

How to end this review? A thousand little cliches are rolling through my brain. I would put this book on the shelf in my classroom. (But I probably wouldn’t direct any boys to it.) I would recommend it to people I know like romance novels, especially the angsty version, even if they aren’t teenagers. There was a preview of another book in the series at the end of this one, and when I went to enter the book on my Goodreads account it was listed as #2 - I’ll most likely seek out book #1 (I’m guessing it is Noah and Echo) next time I’m in the mood for a romance novel, and I’ll keep my eye out for book #3. That’s about as good an endorsement as I can give.

And also, this song… 

Also, I vote that we start calling it Yumblr. 

So, what I’ve learned from all this coverage of Yahoo buying Tumblr - apparently I’m on the old end of the tumblr-user spectrum. To this I say: WHATEVER I’M NOT THAT OLD!

(okay, I’m know I’m getting there, but still WHATEVER)

The Breakfast Club, followed by Sixteen Candles, both with Story Notes on AMC. And I thought I was going to bed early tonight.

Look how pretty my new Nook HD is! The cover of this book is boring. But I got a new Nook! Happy Mother’s Day to me! (My old one worked just fine, but I have been itching for an upgrade. And I am brand loyal - this is my third Nook. I use them all in one capacity or another.)

Anywhoooo - Eleanor & Park. This one was another random suggestion for the summer reading list. This one is still kind of new, so I’ll go lightly on the spoilers…not that there is a whole lot to spoil, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I didn’t get around to reading this one before it was time to get the summer reading list out, so it didn’t make the list this year. It won’t make the list next year either. 

Eleanor & Park is about this girl Eleanor and this boy Park. (Did you guess that from the title?) It is set in Omaha, but that isn’t really a factor in the book - it could be set anywhere rural. The time is early 80s-ish - again, not really a factor, except that The Smiths and The Cure and new instead of being nostalgic. (The attitude toward them is the same.) Eleanor is the new girl at school and she’s a bit of a misfit. (Apply all relevant tropes here, including a messed-up family life and getting bullied at school.) Park is a boy who reluctantly allows her to share his seat on the bus. Teenage romance, aided by comic books and music, ensues. The narrative voice switches between Eleanor and Park so that you don’t miss any of the FEELS in all their sweet angsty-ness.

For about the first 100 pages, I was all in. Eleanor and Park are VERY slow to move past the random-person-on-the-bus stage, but I thought that the representation was true to having and crush and to wanting to reach out to someone who is socially verboten. The nervousness over little things, like a particular glance or holding someone’s hand, was sweet rather than cloying. 

And then, I got bored. I was checking the page count often. I was wondering, “when is something going to happen?” This book suffers from what I now think of as “Twilight-syndrome,” wherein conversations are mistaken for plot points for the majority of the book, and then in the last quarter of the book (approximately) something huge happens out of the blue, as if the author suddenly realized that a bunch of conversations don’t add up to a plot. The insecurity that was realistic and kind of sweet in the beginning got really boring and really annoying at the point when, even though they are together, Eleanor and Park are questioning every little action and reaction. (Not to get all spoiler-y, but why would making out with your boyfriend make you think he was going to break up with you?) The “chapters” (which are really just switches in narration) started to get shorter to make sure that nobody misses a single mood swing. Then - BAM! - major family crisis that threatens the whole relationship. And this crisis only tangentially makes sense. I could have come up with several more likely (or better built-to, I guess I should say) crises.

Compared to the rest of the book, the end is radio silence. So many things are left unexplained. (Again, not to get all spoiler-y, but what happened to the rest of the family after the family crisis?) And I don’t mean “ambiguous,” which is what the author was clearly trying to go for on the very last page, I mean unexplained. If this book were about 100 pages shorter in the middle, and the part after the crisis was about 50 pages more explained, this book would have been a whole lot better. Maybe I should stop referring to this as “Twilight-syndrome” and start campaigning for authors tor remember that plot shouldn’t look like this:

but should look like this:

although I wouldn’t even count a bunch of conversations as “rising action” if they aren’t leading to the climax of the book, which is the case here. “Twilight-syndrome” it is. 

I do still kind of like the book, plot issues notwithstanding. It won’t make my summer reading list because of the plot issues, and also because I don’t see a whole lot of cross-gender appeal. (This is a “girl book,” if you haven’t figured that out yet.) I don’t love it enough to buy another copy to put on my bookshelf, but I will leave it on the Nook so that the kids who borrow my first edition Nook in class can read it if they want. (I really do still use all three of my Nooks.)

I kind of hate this cover and its stupid optical illusion. At least it doesn’t have a bar of soap on it. 

This one was a random suggestion for a summer reading book. I almost dismissed it out of hand because, having seen the movie a few times, I was pretty convinced that there was no way this book would be appropriate. Too much violence, too much cursing…I mean, you saw the movie, right? I was wrong. Considering my expectations, this book was pretty tame. I might say something different if I’d never seen the movie. 

Another “everything is relative” observation - I’m pretty sure if I had read this book in 1996, or even in 2006, the offhand descriptions of bomb-making would not have bothered me. But now, so soon after the Boston marathon bombings, and in the midst of incredible gun violence, I’m having a hard time getting past the depiction of domestic terrorists to the themes of the book. In fact, in 1996, I probably wouldn’t have even used the phrase “domestic terrorists.” I probably would have just said “sociopath” for Tyler Durden, and moved on to the psychology of belonging, nihilism, and repression the books tackles. I still would have had a problem with the violence=masculinity trope, but that would have been on a theoretical level; in today’s cultural climate, it seems like a much more urgent (and dangerous) subject. I’m also having a little misanthropic nostalgia - can you imagine railing against recycling these days? These are certainly the abstractions of a cushy 90’s mindset. And if the 90’s were a time to question the real worth of material possessions, what would Tyler Durden do to the 1%? Would he have joined Occupy Wall Street, or used that to create pointless mayhem? Lasting themes, indeed.

It was hard to resist comparing the book to the movie while I was reading. (It is equally hard to write about the book without talking about its differences from the movie.) And in this case, that was a good thing - had I not known all along that Tyler Durden was the narrator, I would have MAD at how sloppy the big reveal is in the book. Especially since the narrator stays so stupid about it for so long. It was also much clearer in the book how difficult it is to construct a story with a split-personality narrator (if that’s what you want to call it - the narrator also refers to Tyler as a “projection”). Though I remember never being entirely clear about how and why Tyler started showing up, I was distracted by this:

Ahh, eye candy. The book offers a fuller explanation of the narrator becoming aware of Tyler - a better “meeting scene,” if you will - but still does not adequately explain how Tyler could have done the things he did before the narrator became aware of him, or even once the narrator is aware of him. A lot of this stuff Tyler did had to be done during the day, so the “I become Tyler when I sleep” explanation doesn’t really work. The Paper Street Soap Company was a fully operational business. The narrator was in DC when his apartment blew up. The army of “space monkeys” gets built after the narrator is aware of Tyler, so they couldn’t have been doing it. And the way Tyler is “killed”? Am I really supposed to believe that Tyler is gone?

What’s good about the book, that is not nearly as strong in the movie, is the loss of control the narrator experiences over what he/Tyler created. Enigmatic leaders are agents of change, but once a movement has a life of its own, even the most enigmatic are hard-pressed to change its course. The organizational paradox is also very well done here. For anything to succeed, even anarchy, there must be organization. That Tyler sets about assigning menial tasks to the “space monkeys,” and ensures that no man knows any more than absolutely necessary to do his one menial job, shows that the methods of oppression are the same no matter who employs them. The men are no more “free” under Tyler’s direction than they are under a corporate boss. They have not even truly been freed of the expectation of betterment - Fight Club becomes a farm club for Project Mayhem, and each successful Project Mayhem mission creates the desire for bigger and more missions. Which is an interesting contrast between the movie and the book as well. The movie attempts to resolve Project Mayhem by giving Tyler a specific aim - destroying the banking system and erasing all credit records, so that everyone starts from scratch. That’s a much more satisfying resolution than in the book, which only has Tyler and Project Mayhem looking to dismantle the current society and build something out of its ashes. But the book’s resolution is more suited to its nihilistic theme. When there is nothing to lose, there are no specific goals. 

And, hey, guess what? This book is a “love story.” Marla Singer is FAR more important in the book than she was in the movie, and this was possibly the most aggravating “revelation” of the book for me. I mentioned the violence=masculinity trope earlier. For the majority of the book, Tyler, Fight Club, Project Mayhem, are all wrapped in the rhetoric of the oppressed and nihilistic. Early on the narrator talks about his absent father, and references being a generation of men raised by women (note the negative connotation). But, whatever, right? The narrator hates everything. Fast forward to the end, when the narrator had figured out that he and Tyler are one in the same, and begins to wonder why Tyler made an appearance. His conclusion? Because he wants Marla. The narrator wants Marla, and in order to allow himself to pursue her, his psyche breaks off into another personality that proceeds to spread violence and commit all manner of criminal activities (including murder) so that he has a way to allow this woman into his life. Let me repeat that, in the short version: to get a girl, the narrator develops a psychopathic second personality that kills people and builds an army of obedient anarchists. Not because psychos attract girls, but because that’s the only way his brain will allow him to pursue a woman. So maybe he was kind of disgusted with the materialism of his life, and he did kind of hate his job and his boss, but mostly he wanted to get the girl. And that’s a repulsive thing. What this leads to is the utterly ridiculous penultimate face-off between the narrator and Tyler, where Marla tells the narrator she likes him (and that she knows the difference between him and Tyler) to stop him from shooting himself. Really, WTF? We’re going to go ahead and blame all the violence on the girl?

All in all, I did like the book. I didn’t put it on the summer reading list, mostly because the movie is so well known that I have no doubt not a single kid would pick up the book. They would watch the movie instead. And if I were a Durden-esque teacher, I would let them walk right into that trap and design an assessment full of trick questions. Alas, my heart is not quite that cold and black yet. Maybe if some chick I really wanted walked into my support group… 

I had no knowledge of Dr. Ben Carson’s existence a few weeks ago, and now suddenly this guy is everywhere. I picked up his book (which as you can see is having a 20th anniversary) on my Nook because it was the Daily Deal. I was still looking for non-fiction titles. In this one, a poor kid from Detroit becomes a brain surgeon. That sounds like a pretty good start for a memoir, and it’s likely to have some science crossover value. Then, I hear Carson’s name on the news because he said some sketchy stuff about gay people, and was lightly critical of President Obama at the White House prayer breakfast. Right-wing media LOVES him. They want him to be the next president. Okay…well then…I’m not really looking for a political memoir. Nevermind.

Twenty years ago, Carson was not a political animal. He asserts, in the latter part of the book, that he is aware he could make significant money on the speaker’s circuit, but it isn’t worth it to him. I’m not sure if that has truly changed for him in the last two decades or if our current media (as it is wont to do) overreacted after his prayer breakfast speech. In any case, this book involves little politics. It involves a lot of spirituality and American ideals that contemporary Republicans like to associate with themselves, so I can see why they are carrying Carson’s banner right now.

The book overall is uneven. I don’t consider myself a merchant of negativity, but there is nothing that irks me more than a writer who refuses to represent difficult situations as difficult. That can be done without sacrificing positive or uplifting themes. Carson’s book starts with the departure of his father from their family, which he is angry about. And that is about as much as you get about the difficulties of growing up without a father. Carson’s mother has to take multiple low-paying jobs to make ends meet, which keeps her away from the boys frequently, and the family remains quite poor. They eventually have to move in with relatives because they can no longer afford their house (which was not a great house to begin with.) In addition, Carson’s mother has to seek in-patient psychiatric treatment and is away from the family for weeks to months at a time, during which the boys live with neighbors or relatives. Carson isn’t too specific about his mother’s condition; according to him, she explained the trips as “visits” to relatives when he was a child, and I suppose as an adult, or at whatever age he realized what was really going on when his mother left them, he wasn’t curious enough to find out his mother’s exact condition. Actually, I find that hard to believe (he starts off studying psychology before becoming a neurosurgeon, after all), so I’m more inclined to think he left it out on purpose. All of this sucks. Except in Carson’s story, where his mother had gifted him and his brother with such a sense of “safety” that they were not troubled by their mother’s extended absences. The family’s poverty - the depth of which Carson only hints at - is a life lesson about working hard in school, not being materialistic (particularly about clothing), and bettering yourself through your own sweat and tears. (Carson briefly mentions the family getting food stamps and being on public assistance only to point out that his mother was determined to work even harder.) If it were possible to hear an eye rolling, that would be the sound blasting through your computer speakers right now. I’m glad Carson wants to show that a positive life can come from an unfortunate upbringing, and I believe that is true, but the heroic poor cliche is tiresome and inauthentic. 

While we’re speaking of eye-rolling, let’s get to Carson’s depictions of himself. He’s trying hard not to brag. Which is nice. But he is (and I mean this literally) the best at every single thing he tries, ever. He fails at nothing. And I don’t just mean he’s successful at everything he tries, I mean he is a record-breaker, trail-blazer, best anybody has ever seen golden boy at everything. His only failure is in elementary school, where he does poorly in math, until he gets tired of being called stupid and made fun of by the other kids so he cracks the books and zooms right to the top of the class. (Bullying is good for you kids!)

And then there are the two scenes that nearly made me give up on the book. Spirituality is another big part of Carson’s memoir; he talks at length about the support he and his family received as members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the role his faith plays in his life. His discussion of his faith is sincere and uplifting. However, at one point, while Carson is at Yale, he is running low on money and asks God for help. He looks down on the ground and there’s a $10. Shortly after, Carson has procrastinated studying for a big exam. He gives up cramming for the night and goes to sleep, praying for God’s assistance on the exam. He has a dream where he’s sitting alone in a classroom and a nebulous figure walks into the room and starts writing problems on the board. When Carson arrives at his test the next day, he discovers that all the problems on the test were written on the board by the nebulous figure in the dream, and so Carson is able to do well. God gave him the answers to the test. WHATEVER SANTA-GOD.

I am glad I didn’t stop reading there, even though I wanted to. Once Carson begins discussing his medical career the memoir loses much of the cliche that plagues the beginning half. The brain surgery stuff is pretty fascinating. Carson discusses several of his most significant cases, including the one that made him “famous,” separating a pair of Siamese twins joined at the head. These stories are the ones he really wanted to write. Carson’s brilliance and bravery show much more effectively as he discusses experimental procedures, careful surgical planning, precise operations, and his interactions with other surgeons working on challenging cases. While he is still the best ever golden boy of brain surgery, when he discusses his medical successes (and his few failures) there is an element of gravity to his approach that keeps the eye-rolling at bay. Carson is a pediatric neurosurgeon, and the attendant emotional weight of treating kids with life-threatening brain conditions is in each re-telling of his past cases. Perhaps that is why Carson’s golden boy status is not so grating in the second half of the book - the narrative becomes as much about his patients and their parents as it is about him. It becomes about the way brains work, or malfunction, and the way doctors try make them right again. It becomes about parents who want the best for their kids, and are faced with something they may not even have known existed, let alone imagined would  hurt their children. So then, instead of rolling my eyes, I was cheering for Carson, hoping he could make every one of those kids healthy again. 

Carson talks very little about his own family. He talks about courting his wife, Candy, while they were in college. (Basically, just enough to tell you God saved them from dying in a car accident.) But she is an MBA and an accomplished musician. He has three kids, one of whom he delivered himself in the couple’s home. Toward the end of the book, he discusses balancing his work life and home life, and determines that he will adhere to a 12-hour work day so that his kids will know who he is. So this is where he started to lose me. Working from 7:30-7:30 is not being a partner in a household - that’s maybe 2 hours a day with your kids when they are school-aged, and you are probably missing dinner every night. Carson doesn’t mention any of his wife’s accomplishments in any detail during the memoir, which I thought was a function of the focus of the narrative, but I think point in the book I start thinking it’s because he is not invested in his wife’s accomplishments. He says that before they married, he told Candy that being married to him meant not seeing her husband very often because he was going to be busy being the most awesome doctor ever (I’m paraphrasing there, obviously), and she says she can handle that. But that’s kind of a jerky thing to say. Carson is unapologetic about it in the sense that it doesn’t seem to register with him that that might be a jerky way to set up your marriage. And this book was written 20 years ago, so that probably wasn’t as controversial a statement as it is now. But it made me think of a recent interview I saw with Sheryl Sandberg where she talked about being in a two career marriage, and she said something to the effect that the difference between her and her husband was that she felt guilty about the time away from the family and he didn’t. That’s kind of how Carson talks about his marriage and family - he isn’t antagonistic or defensive about putting his career first, because there’s never been any expectation that he should do something other than that.

Ultimately, I’m too ambivalent about the book to include it on the summer reading list. I considered it for a long while, because the science in the book is strong, the tone and message are positive and uplifting, and the treatment of faith-life is solid. It isn’t so challenging that a freshman couldn’t handle it. It’s interesting enough, and short enough, that a kid would finish it. So I felt like it was a good back-up choice - if I didn’t find anything else, I could overlook the books faults. But I found something else. I may still buy another copy of this to put on the class bookshelf.