Astonishing X-Men/ Amulet (book 2)

Whether you love Joss Whedon (Firefly/Serenity) or hate him (Dollhouse), you have to agree he writes a good story. He doesn't forget humor in even the darkest tales and he moves things right along. So it is with his version of X-Men. I've only read Volume 1, Gifted, because I checked it out of the library on a whim and by the time (later that day) that I realized how fun it was, someone else had taken out the other three volumes. In this town, we seem to all read the same things at the same time.

Anyway, I don't really dare say much about the X-Men universe. All I know I've gotten from the movies and from being a member of a houseful of superhero geeks who are currently really into (age-appropriate) versions of wolverine and the X-Men. Still, I really liked this volume. Cyclops seems to be trying to pull the team back together in Professor Xavier's absence. They've got Kitty Pryde back, Emma Frost (currently playing a good ? guy), Dr. McCoy (the Beast) and Logan (Wolverine) who only grudgingly joins in. Also a cool little alien dragon who tends to save the day. There's an evil and gross alien, there's a rumored cure for mutants, there are rumors of Jean Grey still kicking around somewhere and other characters coming back from the dead. There's some fighting and a bit of blood. Some funny parts. You know, the usual. Some of the humor comes from the errors in programming of the Danger Room. Dr. McCoy tries for Hawaii, but fails to specify size so they're all sitting around on rocks, dipping their feet into the simulated Pacific Ocean. Another time, Logan and Scott are about to get chewed out for swaggering and fighting (over Jean, still) and Emma Frost accidently, though appropriately, drags them into a giant pink dollhouse to do the yelling.

The art work is really good and leaves enough to the imagination that I wasn't grossed out or too confused. The stand alone pages are nice and fit in well enough without giving too much away. The only thing I didn't like was sometimes the flow of the story was confusing. Words appeared in one scene that really belonged to the next. I guess that's like the voice-over on a tv show, sometimes, but I didn't like it. I have enough trouble following graphic novels. I like the version of these characters and the clean art work, so I'll finish the series as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I picked up my son's book, Amulet, Book 2 of The Stonekeeper's Curse by Kazu Kibuishi which he and I have been waiting and waiting for since reading the sort of freaky Book 1. He didn't like the beginning of book 1 because the father of the family dies in a horrible car accident (car slides off cliff) and it made me think I was a bad parent for letting him read this, but the rest of the book and this one too is a great quest book. Young siblings Emily and Navin slip into another dimension or world and they become supposed saviours of the way life used to be. In book 2, they must fight the evil Elves who've taken over an already cursed town under which the inhabitants are turning into animals. There's a funny scene in which we see the close up of a furry rabbitty-mouse doctor's face, saying: Hmmm, I'm afraid you're right. Next scene we see his patient and the doctor continues: You're turning into a slug. And the patient is a boy with eye stalks growing out of a perfectly normal face. But this isn't a scary/bad thing since the whole town is mostly made up of creatures at this point.

The walking house is one of the coolest things from the first book and it's back here, though slightly less cool because it's not new and it gets kind of wrecked. It's straight out of a Miyazaki movie. The coolest thing here is the fox bounty hunter who leads Emily further along on her quest to be the next stonekeeper. He's like the baron in The Cat Returns movie (Studio Ghibli) with a touch of the Disney Robin Hood fox. Though my favorite character is still Miskit, the animated stuffed pink rabbit, complete with a patch on his ear. Love him. In this volume, Emily must learn to control the stone before it controls her, she's trying to save her mother who was poisoned by an octopus in the last book, and the elves grow (literally) more evil. It still ends on a cliffhanger which is annoying since it'll be another year before the next book comes out, but I highly recommend this series for any budding (9 and up) fantasy readers (and their parents).

Secrets to Happiness

Ahhh, this is just the novel if you've been in a fairly heavy rotation of depressing books. Sara Dunn's book is what Good Grief by Lolly Winston wanted to be. The characters are great, the story is light enough to be fun without being condescending and you get inside the heads of all kinds of people. The story is ostensibly about Holly Frick, the author of a long-remaindered book with the embarrassing title Hello, Mr. Heartache. She's also the author, or at least contributor, to a few remaindered relationships, including a somewhat recent divorce. So, yeah, this is a relationship book, but don't even begin guessing who ends up with whom in the end because it's not as straight-forward as a Jane Austen.

Along with Holly, we meet her best friend by default, Amanda, Amanda's slipper-footed, sleepy husband, an arrogant, hamburger-eating Buddhist named Jack, an ex-, ex-boyfriend with mother issues (but not the kind that freak you out as a reader, necessarily), an overweight gym employee, a lost single woman named Betsy who is everything you'd expect from the name, but with more depth than you thought (also she went to my husband's alma mater. It's always nice when the little schools get a shout out). There are a few other fringe characters, including an over-medicated gay TV writer, a vet, and a dog with a brain tumor. I'm probably missing a few , but it's not confusing to keep them straight. It's all fun as they navigate their NYC world, fall in and out of relationships, and find out what other people really think of them. I love the ambiguous ending because even when I read light stuff, I don't necessarily want the happy ending spelled out for me. This book is more like life where everything is ongoing even if it doesn't have all the heavy lifting of our own boring little existences.

I recommended this to friend Denise who was recently lamenting that every book seems to be about people being miserable. Since she is the one who introduced me to Sarah Dunn through The Big Love (which I don't remember much, but in my defense it was years ago), I was happy to pass this on to her. Any misery is short-lived in Sarah Dunn's books.

The Zookeeper's Wife

A review I read of Diane Ackerman's account of Polish Christians hiding Jews during WWII was very provocative, making much of the fact that Jan and Antonina Zabinski hid their "guests" in empty animal cages, but reality doesn't offer quite so literal and tidy a metaphor.

That's not to make any less of the really horrifying existence of Polish Jews and others deemed unacceptable by the Nazis. Jan and Antonina are what you would call animal people. Yes, they're in charge of the Warsaw Zoo, but they are so into their animals and their jobs that it's a little hard to see where their home ends and the grounds of the zoo begin. Their house is full of "pets" and assorted sick zoo animals. They live and breathe for their animals. Oh, and their son, Zys (which, by the way, means lynx). And when the Nazis attack Warsaw, they watch in horror as their zoo (unfortunately rather strategically placed for both the defenders and the attackers) is decimated. What animals aren't killed outright, are carted off by the victors to enhance their own zoos (the Nazis are strangely into conservation and nature). The left over few--the inappropriately exotic, the dull, the overly cumbersome--are used for an organized hunt.

Jan and Antonina and the other zoo employees listen in horror as the animals are killed for sport just outside their door, but this is still only the beginning of their story. Ackerman rather casually drops in that they are members of the underground and soon their semi-defunct zoo turned Nazi pig farm (there's some irony for you), turned Nazi fur farm, soon becomes a center of an underground railroad system of safe houses. Their proximity and somewhat easy access to the infamous Warsaw ghetto allows them to, in the end, save over 500 people from certain death.

The book is full of the sorts of subterfuge many Poles became adept at during the occupation. Ackerman makes much of the Zabinskis knowledge of animal camouflage to explain how well they played their roles in the underground. But in Warsaw, life was all about camouflage. Everyone was hiding something, even if it was just a way of keeping themselves alive. There was even a beauty salon secretly teaching Jewish women how to "pass", that is, how to camouflage their Jewish looks and ways. The subtleties of this are completely lost on a modern American, living in a liberal town, but the descriptions drive home the hazards of living in Poland at that time.

The risks that Antonina and Jan and many others faced defies belief, but this is a story with a more or less happy ending (if you can ignore that Poland got swallowed behind the iron curtain for so long). You root for the Poles, even those in the Ghetto, while fully knowing the annihilation that awaits Warsaw. As a reader, you keep your head down and hope that at least your main characters come out okay. You still hope for young Rys' pets to help save him from the horror of war even while, one after another, they meet unhappy ends. (Their ends are not always due to the war either since the drunk hamster is just as sad as the piglet shot by soldiers.) You still want all the guests to live, you want the teacher in the Ghetto to escape from the train taking him "East". Not all of the small stories are happy so you have to look at the big picture.

Interestingly, Antonina explains their own survival away as "luck" on her part but feels her husband was "brave." I suppose that every Pole must have felt some version of that as well. One of the most horrifying moments for me was when Antonina is forced to watch as her young son is led away by soldiers. It is hard to know how one would react in similar circumstances and this scene is towards the end of the war when, presumably, they're fairly worn down, but I was shocked by the lack of emotion the author allowed for. Ackerman is culling from the woman's diaries, but still. I felt this lacked a certain amount of drama, but I guess that's non-fiction for you. The other thought that I returned to often was that the elder Zabinskis carred cyanide pills with them at all times. This made sense from their position as underground workers with knowledge that would endanger hundreds of others, but all I kept thinking was: Who would take care of their son Zys if they killed themselves? I guess that's the selfish question of an outsider.

The Zookeeper's Wife was a perfect follow-up to my book group's read last month of The Madonnas of Leningrad. The fiction of that book was glaring when compared to the reality in this book. This is not a depressing book because, I suppose, Ackerman focused on nature, and the return of life each year. I don't want to say this was a "gentle" war story, but it was easier to find hope in the pages than in many other books about Warsaw at that time.

Admission

I am really glad I don't have a kid heading toward college any time soon. Reading Jean Hanff Korelitz's fictionalized account of working for Princeton University Admissions brought all sorts of anxiety-inducing images of what it's like for kids to get into (admittedly highly selective) colleges these days. Admission was actually a lot of fun at first. Each chapter begins with a presumably fake, but believably varied excerpt from an application such as: "My favorite saying is 'no guts, no glory' I can't recall who said it first, but whenever I'm in trouble or facing a big challenge, I think about this saying." Or "I have engaged in a myriad of activities at my school, none more meaningful to me than accompanying the A Cappella choir." Really, they're all special in their own way and usually tie into the chapter.

Portia Nathan is a 38 year old veteran of two admissions jobs (Dartmouth and Princeton). She's not burnt-out but she is at a crossroads in her life. The fact that she's been living the past 16 years with a professor at Princeton (sans marriage) comes out to the reader only after she sleeps with a former classmate from Dartmouth whom she meets for the first time on a recruiting trip. He works for a weird little alternative school in rural NH and you just know the kids she meets there are going to cycle back into the story in ways that the kids she meets at Deerfield Academy on the same day are not. So, yeah, all is not necessarily happy and settled with Portia, in spite of early appearances.

I loved the sense of getting inside information. Portia insists (often and relentlessly to desperate parents) that there's no rule book or secret formula for kids to get accepted at Princeton, but this book almost shows that there is. Still, admissions officers come off as almost glamorous and thoughtful and fair. It certainly seems an exciting, if exhausting, job even if most of the time a lot of people hate you and find you supremely underqualified to hold the balance of their children's lives in your hands.

A lot of the book is very interesting and the characters are all good: Portia's reactionary, uber-liberal (but secretly wealthy) mother living in Vermont via Northampton, MA (bastions of liberalism, of course); Portia's live-in lover English professor, their barely-social good friend who is a philosopher, the nutty professor who finally loses it spectacularly...the list goes on because Korelitz has a good ear for dialogue and voices. The kids she meets (and there are tons of them) are generally believable and recognizeable without making them caricatures.

Things do fall apart in the book. I can almost mark the section that caused my first sinking feeling that there was going to be a really contrived coming together of all sorts of loose ends. Not all of my connect-the-dots predictions came true, but the fact that one of them did (and it's a biggie) kind of ruined the book for me. Still, by all means, read this for the entertainment and the writing (which is pretty good). Also, if you know New England at all, it's a lot of fun. I grew up practically in the embrace of Dartmouth so I loved walking the streets with Portia, recognizing all the landmarks, though I've got a few picky things to say about that, too. If she's going to be hyper-specific about landmarks and streets, then she can't turn around and make places up completely. The Ice Cream Machine did NOT in any believable way become a Hemp Emporium (which Hanover, NH probably couldn't support anyway) but a very tasty Indian restaurant. But I'm just being picky, of course, and an author can make up all she wants.

I love her description of NH as it is seen nestled strangely between ultra-liberal Vermont and Massachusetts. To be sure, NH has changed dramatically since my childhood, so much so that I was confused for a moment when she called it the "reddest of red states" but she's spot on: Vermont was Massachusett's natural sibling, its cousin up north. One drove up to Vermont to visit friends, and friends of friends, and to attend music festivals and solar energy festivals and peace festivals. But nobody you knew lived in New Hampshire, land of Live Free or Die. Over there they were too busy incubating right-wing politicians and shooting their guns to take much of a look at solar energy or--God forbid--peace. Love it! Just don't read that to my uber-liberal New Hampshire mother, or her peace group.