Book Review: Made You Up by Francesca Zappia

Goodreads

First: Look at that cover.  Look. At. It. It is beautiful and I want a print of it for my walls.  There has got to be an etsy shop for this kind of thing.  *franticly googles

Alex Ridgemont is going to school for the first time as a seventeen-year-old high school senior.  She has been struggling with schizophrenia for the last ten years but finally her therapist and her mother decide that she is ready for high school.  And not just any high school but possible the trippiest, weirdest high school ever.  From the entire student body being irrationally terrified of one boy to the Principal’s creepy obsession with a scoreboard, nothing at her new school is quite right. 

The unreliable narrator factor of this book is something that actually slipped my mind until almost halfway through.  She is schizophrenic so of course what she is seeing is suspect.  Even after I remembered this I was never quite able to figure out what was real and who was not. The imagery in the book, like the cover, is stunning. 

Mental illness isn’t hard to find in books. And while I cannot vouch at all for the accuracy of the portrayal in this book I can say that it certainly made me experience the terror, frustration, pain, and sometimes even the beauty of not knowing if what you are seeing is real or only in your head.  The first person narration perfectly conveys that here. I loved Alex.  There was a sharpness and a toughness about her that kept her from become the “manic pixie dream girl”.  I found her funny and charming in a way that doesn’t often happen.

“I was diagnosed a thirteen. Paranoid got tacked on about a year later, after I verbally attacked a librarian for trying to hand me propaganda pamphlets for an underground communist force operating out of the basement of the public library. (She'd always been a very suspect type of librarian--I refuse to believe donning rubber gloves to handle books is a normal and accepted practice, and I don't care what anyone says.)”

On the other hand her parents were awful.  First, why was her father in South Africa without them?  Second, was her mother actually trying to make Alex worse?  I know that parenting a teenager isn’t the easiest thing in the world and parenting a teenager with a mental illness that much more difficult.  But come on!  Gage your audience.  Your paranoid schizophrenic daughter is probably not the most appropriate target for your passive aggressive siege.  Poor decision making throughout the book.

“There is no force in high school more powerful than one person's blunt disagreement.”

Then there is the German love interest! Ah, Miles! This is important because there really aren’t enough of them.  Also, my love interest is German so I am, you now, a little biased.  I like how he was never the uber hot bad boy.  He was sort of this extreme social outcast which made his character much unstable feeling.  You were never quite sure where he was going to fall.   To be honest there were a couple of times when I was a little afraid that he was going to shoot us the school.  There was just that much repressed rage and social miscues going on with Miles. He was not an easy character to like but he definitely worked.

This book kept me thinking, entertained me, and was well worth the time to read. I will be looking out for Francesca Zappia’s next book.

Book Review: Shuffle, Repeat by Jen Klein

Goodreads

“I’m not bleak. I’m realistic. I mean it, too. I don’t hate my life and I’m not unhappy. It is just that I understand the way that the world works. I don’t need to pretend.”

Like many a YA novel this is the story of a senior year. June Rafferty just wants it over and to be able to move on with “real” life.  She has been paired with Oliver in a carpool in an evil conspiracy set up by their mothers.  She is pretty sure that it is just to make her miserable.

June know that she is smart… no one is on her level of smartness. She is smarter than everyone else so of course it is okay for her to be mean and judgmental. I really didn’t like her. Condescension is not something that I forgive a character for easily. Or really ever. It made it hard to get the “cute”. 

And there was cuteness:

“We haven’t spent much time together since Kindergarten, when we got married under the monkey bars in a ceremony officiated by Shaun Banerjee. Our relationship was consummated with a sticky kiss and then annulled a couple of hours later when we got into an argument during art class.   It culminated in our sitting in the principal’s office, dripping blue paint, waiting for our mom’s to bring us clean clothes.”

June and Oliver start debating the Great Question of High School: Are these the best times (or at least significant and important times) of our lives or are they a placeholder while we wait for the “real” world to allow us to join it at the grown up table.  It actually is an interesting question.  I know that I was with June on this one when I was in High School.  I didn’t hate it.  I wasn’t bullied.  But I was so busy being self-conscious and shy that I really didn’t experience many of the “typical” high school moments.  I think that there is something to be said for being fully invested in the moment that you happen to be in rather than waiting for life to happen.

June dislikes Oliver.  Or at least June dislikes who she things Oliver is.  Predictably, they start to get closer as they get to know one another on their daily commute.  June has a boyfriend and, of course, Oliver has a girlfriend.  This leaves them in the gray area of being “just friends” while pining for one another.  Yeah, maybe I didn’t miss much in high school… Cue months of misunderstandings, longing looks, and secondary characters constantly asking what is up with them. And since there are very short flash forwards to Prom it isn’t as if the outcome is really much of a surprise.

I found the music motif pretty tired in YA so in order for it not to be cliché and boring an author really has to have unique take on it or at least make the music feel vibrant.  Sadly, this was a fail.  I can think of half a dozen books off the top of my head that did it better. 

What I did like was the exploration of the idea that everyone, no matter how cliché or predictable they may seem, has hidden depths and is much more complicated than they might seem on the surface. I also thought that the writing was quite good.  Although, I did not love Shuffle, Repeat I will most likely try a different book by this author.  Jillian Cade: (Fake) ParanormalInvestigator is going on my TBR pile.

Let's Eat

Chinese food has been a revelation.  In the United States Chinese immigrants have traditionally come from southeastern China mostly Guangdong Province (and Hong Kong).  It is one of the “Eight Culinary Traditions” of China and is delicious.  The flavor profile is pretty familiar  (spring onions, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sesame oil, and based on rice as a staple) because most of what we in America know as “Chinese” food is actually Americanized Cantonese food. 

Northern China’s staple is actually wheat.  Now, traditionally Chinese people do not have oven, which means that bread as we think of it isn’t part of a traditional Chinese diet. Noodles, steamed or deep fried breads, flat breads, and dumplings are served and sold all over in Beijing.  I am starting my third year of life in China and I am still constantly amazed at the variety of noodles available.   Eating noodles with chopsticks with any sort of dignity takes skill.  I do not in fact have this skill.  I have decided to just abandon my hope of not have a face covered in sauce and noodles and just to dive in. 

The thing about eating out in China is that it leads to a lot of surprising places.  There is beauty in these unexpected moments.  This week we found ourselves wandering down unfamiliar hutong lanes to find… chicken wings.  I grew up in Buffalo so “chicken wings” to me is a pretty specific image.  Carsten had researched the restaurant so I had no idea, other than chicken wings, what we were going to be in for. 

Let me set the scene as we wander through the back alleys of Beijing.  First, it is hotter than all get out.  35/95 degrees with the humidity hovering at “for God’s sake rain already”. Second, we are literally wandering because none of us really knew where we were going and were basically navigating by the stars at this point.  Or at least we would have been if it had been dark enough for stars.  In reality we just kept passing the same group of old people playing mahjong and getting more and more embarrassed at each pass.

But finally we find it.  A smaller alley off of a small Hutong street in what turns out to be a familiar(ish) area for us (we stayed in this street of the Hutong when we visited China in 2012).  It is crowed and noisy and as bare bones as you might imagine a back alley restaurant in China to be.  An older shirtless man with a bunch of tattoos of Mao Zedong hands us a menu.  In Chinese of course. Usually that would present a problem but we had brought a good friend, ChengCheng, with us.   She is Chinese and so was able to order for the three of us.  Actually, since we ordered three things I am almost 100% sure that we ordered the entire menu.  Pretty sure we just leveled up.

We started with a tofu and egg salad.  “Sure, eggs and tofu are fine!”, Carsten and I assured ChengCheng.  And that is how we ended up eating our first century eggs.  Century eggs, if you are unfamiliar with them are eggs (most commonly duck, but I have NO idea what we were eating) that are preserved in salt, lime, ash, and some other stuff until the whites look like jellied motor oil and the yolks, a sort of grey-green mess.  It looks TERRIFYING.   It is in fact not all that bad.  Sort of salty vinegary creamy jelly.  It is better than I am making it sound.  BTW: if you have ever wondered about people who eat tofu China has some things to teach you. Tofu here is magic.

This is before we got the second batch

Then there were the main event.  The wings.  10 skewers at a time were brought back to us as if the waiter was holding a bouquet.  Each skewer had two wings on it and the minimum order is for 40 wings.  We had asked for it “half spicy” which meant that they came with one side encrusted with chilli.  I was a bit apprehensive at first but it wasn’t nearly as hot as I feared and I started to really enjoy the heat.  I have a tendency to be a wimp about spice and these wings certainly helped give me a new appreciation for spice.  Since my tongue was numb the who next day I suspect that there was a liberal use of Sichuan flower pepper in the mix.  Oil, chicken bits, and seasoning were everywhere and since I also managed to soak myself with an Arctic Soda in the first minute and a half at the restaurant it was a good thing that the tables had rolls of toilet paper on the table to clean up with.  Grilled poached chicken wings=difficulty rating high. 

My favorite part of the meal was actually the bread.  It was a flatbread dough sort of twisted on itself, shoved on a skewer and grilled.  It was FRICKIN” amazing and I ate all of mine, all of ChengCheng, and most of Carsten’s.  I regret nothing!

ChengCheng, who is an eater extraordinaire, also decided that we needed to order the meatball soup.  “My father makes this.  It tastes like home.”  The proprietor brought it to the tables boiling in cast iron pots with huge metal tongs.  It was like a graceful dance back and forth and considering that there was only about a foot between each table I am amazed that no one ended up with third degree soup burns.

Going out to dinner in China  is always a slightly different experience then Chinese takeout at home.

Book Review: Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi

Finally, I have been meaning to read Persepolis for years.  It has been so long in fact that I can’t even remember how I first learned about them.  I read both of the books together one after another in one afternoon so I am going to review them as one. 

 I am not crazy into graphic novels.  I don’t hate them but they aren’t something that I naturally gravitate towards.  It has cropped up on so many lists and been recommended to me so many times but for one reason or another I just never got around to it.

First of all, now I want to learn more about the Iran-Iraq War.  I am too young to remember anything about it and because it had “nothing” to do with America I never studied it in school or university (EVEN THOUGH I HAVE A DEGREE I HISTORY! But hey, I know all the things about WWII and the French Revolution.)  The way that the war, the revolution, and the change in Marji’s family’s life were portrayed was incredibly effective.  She looks back on her life and her childhood with this incredible awareness and braveness and yet manages to not be cynical.  There is whimsy and humor to be found even when you or someone that you love is in danger. 

Source 

I suspect that one of Marjane Satrapi’s goal’s in writing Percepolis was to give Iran a face.  It is so eas to be afraid of people that you don’t know.  To put down people that you have never met.  When you think of a country and have a face and a person to put with it then in a way you become invested in that country.  I don’t think that I think about Iran in the same way that I did before I read this book.

I loved how she addressed things as she saw the as a child.  There were things that were too big for her.  Things that she misunderstood until later in life.  For example at one point she is desperately disappointed that she was not able to brag that her father had been arrested and tortued.  She ended up lying about it all without really comprehending what that would really mean.  It is perfectly summed up in a thought bubble of her peers as she is bragging, “Too much.”  This is what it is like to grow up and that universal truth made the parts of her story that were specifically her own or specifically Iranian universal as well.

Source: Also, this may be my favorite part

I like that Marji never has an American perspective.  She is unapologetic about her opinions, her love for Iran, and her vision for the future.  She grew up in a very pro-communist household and I am not sure that this would have been as obviously or casually referenced if she had been living or had lived in the United States. 

The translation was flawless.  I mention this because awkward translations make me crazy and have caused me to DNF more books than I care to admit.  Her maturing voice was preserved and the humor and jokes are still funny in English.    

All in all, this is well worth your time to read.