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Giveaway Winner: The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga (US ONLY)
The winner of a gently loved audiobook copy of Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga courtesy of the publisher, MacMillan audio and determined by random.org is…….
Comment #4 Corey R!
Corey will be contacted for his shipping information today. Thank you all for entering!
Giveaway: The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga (US ONLY)
I am super-excited to get to offer up my first giveaway of 2012 here at Opinions of a Wolf; this time for an AUDIOBOOK!!
There is one audiobook version of The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor
What You’ll Win: One audiobook copy (CD format) of The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor
How to Enter: Leave a comment on this post with your email address or twitter name so I can contact the winner for his/her mailing address.
Who Can Enter: US ONLY
Contest Ends: March 27th. Two weeks from today!
This giveaway is now over! Thank you all for entering!
Book Review: The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon
Summary:
Martha, a retired, widowed schoolteacher, thought her life was pretty much over until one night when a young intellectually disabled white woman and a deaf black man show up on her doorstop in the rain holding a newborn baby. Soon people from a nearby mental institution show up to take them back away. The young woman, Linny, seems terrified and asks Martha to hide the baby. The man, Homan, escapes. Martha goes on the lam to keep the baby girl out of the institution, and Linny and Homan fight against all odds attempting to reunite their family.
Review:
I received the audiobook version of this as a gift for one of the holiday swaps I participated in in December. It was my first time reading the audiobook version of a modern story, as I’m a cheapskate and usually just get ones for free that are out of copyright. It was thus an entirely different experience to be forced to slow down when reading this piece of historic fiction about a very dark secret in American history–mental institutions. The amount of time that Linny and Homan are forced to spend simply waiting for their lives to get better. Waiting for people to recognize their humanity. It hit me much harder than if I had been able to read this in a couple of hours. (Each disc is about 1 hour long, and there are 10 discs). The wrongness of it all. The amount of time and lives wasted simply because the able-minded and able-bodied didn’t seek to understand or to grant these people the basic human right of self-direction.
The story itself is told from multiple viewpoints–Linny, Homan, Martha, Kate (a caregiver at the institution), and later Julia (the baby daughter when she grows up). Mostly Simon does a great job switching among the different voices, particularly representing Linny. She does not overinflate her internal dialogue to be that of a person with an average IQ, but she still clearly represents Linny’s humanity. I am a bit skeptical of the voice given to Homan though, mostly his tendency to give people bizarre nicknames like “roof giver.” I know that neither
Simon nor I know a deaf person who is unable to communicate with those around him, so really it is all guess-work as to what his internal dialogue would be like. But I can’t help but feel like it’s not quite there. On the other hand, his confusion and frustration at people talking around him, over him, and treating him like he’s stupid just because he’s deaf is very well done.
In retrospect, I’m not quite sure why so much time was devoted to Martha and Julia when Julia was a baby. Her story doesn’t end up being nearly as important as the Homan/Linny romance, so this focus feels a bit like a red herring. I would definitely shorten those chapters.
The use of artwork and items of visual significance to the characters is gorgeous though. Lighthouses are a central feature, and I don’t even like lighthouses myself, but I still found myself moved by how important the visual arts can be to people. This is a book that, surprisingly, winds up being almost a battle cry for the arts. For their value in helping us connect with each other and hold on to our humanity. I think any artist or someone who is a fan of the arts would appreciate this book for that reason.
On the other hand, Simon is clearly a person of some sort of faith, with a belief in god and the tendency for things to all work out right in the end. I’m…not that type of person. So when characters wax eloquent about god or an overall plan or the ability of evil people to repent and turn good, well, it all feels a bit more like fantasy than historic fiction to me. I probably would have been irritated by this less if I had had the ability to skim over those parts though.
In the end, though, I came away from this book appreciating its uniqueness and all the good qualities it had to offer. It demonstrates through a beautiful story why it’s so important not to institutionalize the mentally ill or mentally challenged. It shows the power of love to overcome race and disabilities. It is the story of the power and beauty of resiliency.
Overall, I recommend this work of historic fiction to fans of historic and contemporary fiction, advocates of the mentally ill or mentally challenged, and those just simply looking for a unique love story.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Gift
Counts For:
Secret Santa 2011 #2
My second secret santa present arrived!! This one is part of the Book Blogger Holiday Swap. The lovely lady who sent it to me said in her card that she’d just started following me on twitter when she was assigned to me, but girl! I couldn’t make out your twitter handle! So please do let me know who you are! :-) She individually wrapped everything in gorgeous paper that I, yet again, do not have a picture of because I ripped the package open as soon as I got it, haha. It contained:
A Northern Light
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
The Story of Beautiful Girl
A beautiful card! Currently hanging on my fridge.
Thanks for making my swap a wonderful experience, and please do out yourself thoughtful twitter follower!
Friday Fun! (Thoughts on Community and Environment)
Hello my lovely readers! Boston got hit with yet another blizzard, although the real record-breaker was that 49 of the 50 states had snow on the same day (including Hawaii). The one without? Florida. I spent my Wednesday morning shoveling about a foot and a half of snow off of my building’s steps and sidewalk. Another member of the building did the afternoon shoveling. It was actually really lovely getting a workout in outside in the snow while listening to an audiobook on my iPod. :-) Of course, the afternoon was spent alternating between reading and craft projects.
My friends Nina and E and I have been spending a lot of time lately discussing big questions. Maybe it’s because we all went to Brandeis where you were more likely to find huge groups of people discussing existential questions than playing Beirut. Maybe it’s just the kind of people we are. Anyway. Nina is currently on a kibbutz in Israel, and she emailed me asking me what I think makes a community. I know a lot of people believe it’s your family or your religion or nationality or who lives in proximity to you, but that’s not how I make my community. I think the ideal community is a group of people who happen to meet in whatever way and who love and support each other unconditionally. You should be able to trust your community to support you and be there for you no matter how you fuck up or what choices you make. I’m incredibly grateful to have found that with my current groups of friends. It’s not an easy thing to find, but I think it’s what works. I’m a big proponent of creating your own family and often talk with various friends about how awesome it would be to one day all live together on a big plot of land. A gal can dream, can’t she?
Meanwhile, E and I have been discussing the environment a lot. I’ve always considered myself a bit of an environmentalist, but I’m continually moving even further in that direction. To put it bluntly, the earth doesn’t belong to humans. The earth is its own thing, and if we don’t straighten up, we’re gonna kill ourselves off. You think the earth cares if we die? Nope. The earth will keep on doing its thing and other creatures will take over. Kind of like how we took over from the dinosaurs. Still though. The earth isn’t our. It belongs to all creatures, and it honestly disgusts me the way humans have been ruining it, not only for future generations, but for current creatures of other species. So what is a gal to do? How can I function within modern society and make the least impact? As I become increasingly aware, I strive every day to make less impact to the best of my abilities. I keep my heat turned down incredibly low not just for my electric bill, but to make less of an impact on earth. I’m a vegetarian and am striving to slowly cut down and maybe eventually eliminate dairy from my diet. I’ve already decided that I’d rather adopt than have children of my own. Yet every week when I bring out my recycling, I’m shocked that one person has created so much waste. It’s mind-boggling.
I guess being out of grad school has given me more time to contemplate these core values. Community. Environmentalism. Maybe I’m still a bit more idealistic than I thought I was. I thought I’d entirely reverted to pessimism and giving up on idealism, but that may not be the case after all.
Book Review: The Collected Public Domain Works of H. P. Lovecraft
Summary:
Lovecraft was an American author of horror living during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He has a bit of a cult following, largely due to a creature featured in some of his stories known as Cthulu. (I’d link, but your experience will be much more amusing if you google “cthulu”). Some common themes in his horror include eerie things coming from ocean depths, scientific reanimation of corpses, human-like apes, the dreamworld, and ancient myths being fact. This collection includes 24 short stories–The Alchemist, The Beast in the Cave, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, The Cats of Ulthar, Celephais, The Crawling Chaos, Dagon, The Doom that Came to Sarnath, Ex Oblivione, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, Herbert West: Reanimator, Memory, The Music of Erich Zann, The Nameless City, Nyarlathotep, The Picture in the House, Polaris, A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Jackson, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Street, The Terrible Old Man, The Tomb, The Tree, and The White Ship.
Review:
I decided I needed to actually read some Lovecraft after getting swept up in the Cthulu subculture last December through Cthulumas hosted on Tor.com. So I searched Librivox via the Audible app and found this collection. Unfortunately, there was no Cthulu in it. Also unfortunately, I wasn’t too impressed by most of the stories.
I think the main issue is that a lot of the horror just didn’t age well. Lovecraft’s stories depend largely on the unknown, only a lot of what was unknown in his time is known now. For instance one of his stories focuses around the mystery of the North Star, which isn’t so mysterious anymore. They also depend on unexplored territories on the continents, whereas now it’s space that is unexplored. I can’t get into the character’s mindset of fear when he reads simply as naive and uneducated.
His stories that center around the hypothetical reanimation of the dead are some of the best ones. They read like a mix of zombie and Frankenstein, and it works because we still don’t know what happens after death. Herbert West: Reanimator was one of the only stories to give me the actual chills.
I would be amiss not to mention the racism evident in his stories. Any that feature Africa talk of a pervasive fear of what lies in the depths of the continent and repeatedly mention apes mixing with men. Even if he was unaware that he was harboring racism, these read at the very least as being anti-miscegenation. It’s hard to listen to stories whose horror centers around fear of what people look like as opposed to what they may be capable of doing.
Similarly, he read as being anti-science. Any scientists in his short stories are portrayed as sticking their noses where they don’t belong. Apparently, we can never fathom the universe, so we better not. It’ll hurt us if we try. I found myself rolling my eyes at the sleep stories. They were all so ridiculous when I know doctors and researchers studying sleep. It’s really not this dangerous other-world he presents it to be.
Where Lovecraft is at his strongest is when he veers from his typical themes. My loyal readers probably won’t be surprised at all that one of the most pleasurable reads to me was The Cats of Ulthar, which basically presents animals as sentient and capable as humans.
I can only hope that the Cthulu stories fall more in the category of Herbert West: Reanimator and The Cats of Ulthar. The rest wrought a decided “meh” reaction from me. I’d recommend them only if you have no issue reading horror centering around unknowns that are now known.
2 out of 5 stars
Source: Librivox recording via Audible app for the iTouch and iPhone
Book Review: The Thing from the Lake By Eleanor M. Ingram
Summary:
In the 1920s Roger Locke is a composer living in New York City. He buys a house by a lake in Connecticut as a country retreat and appoints his cousin, Phyllida, and her husband, Ethan Veer, as caretakers of the property. His first night on the property, he meets a woman–whether spirit or alive, he can’t tell–and is promptly intrigued by her. His visits quickly turn sinister, though, as a dark force based in the lake comes at night to threaten Roger away from the woman. What is the thing in the lake? Who is this woman? Can Roger defeat the dark force thereby returning himself and his cousins to their idyllic lifestyle?
Review:
I had a feeling I was going to like The Thing from the Lake when I discovered that every chapter started with a relevant quote pulled from the classics of the western canon, and I was right. Ingram weaves a complex tale, filled with surprising twists and turns. Just when you think you know what the overarching point is, or where the story is going to go next, you find out that you were wrong.
Ingram artfully goes back and forth between the daytime where the story is more period piece and the nighttime, which is all horror. It is a very New England tale, featuring small farmers, big city dreams, references to the Puritans, and quirky, drawling neighbors. While Phyllida and Ethan are believable and infinitely likeable, Roger’s immediate infatuation with the woman is a bit suspect. It seems shallow how infatuated with her hair and her scent he is, but I think he later proves himself. Sometimes people just know when they meet, so I’m willing to give Roger the benefit of the doubt.
Ingram leaves it up to the reader whether to believe the scientific or the supernatural explanation for the goings on at the lake. It reminded me of my class on the Salem Witch Trials a bit, and I’d be willing to bet that Ingram was at least partially inspired by them. It’s not easy to make both answers to a mystery equally plausible, but she pulls it off wonderfully.
The only thing holding me back from completely raving about the book is that there are parts that smack of historic misogyny. I’m not blaming Ingram. For her time period, many of her thoughts were quite progressive, and I’m sure Roger is an accurate representation of many men of that time period. However, when he speaks about how his “plain cousin” Phyllida is so much more comely when she’s doing “womanly” household chores, it makes me cringe, and not in the good horror way. Thankfully, these instances are not that frequent, so they’re easy enough to glide over.
The Thing from the Lake is a surprisingly thought-provoking book. I highly recommend it to everyone, but particularly to those who enjoy New England literature or light horror.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: Librivox recording by Roger Melin via the Audiobooks app for the iTouch
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 