A study finding one's true self in literary analysis. "This is how it always is, by Laurie Frankel

Hello again, agents,


Thank you for attending today's briefing. I know it's been a while since we've communicated, and I hope that your literary missions are going well and enriching the world's literary conversation. For today's briefing, I thought we would discuss a phenomenal book by Laurie Frankel entitled "this is how it always is." This is interesting. "Fictional" albeit realistic story concerning a family whose youngest son tells his parents and brothers did when he grows up. He wants to be a girl scientist. At first, of course, they just smile and reassure their son Claude that he can be anything he wants when he grows up thinking that wanting to be a girl and wearing dresses is just a phase. But as Claude gets older, they realize it's not just a phase, and he really does want to be a girl when he grows up as he keeps telling his parents. This story takes the reader on a remarkable journey to the lives of a tight knit family. As each of them becomes who they are truly meant to be....



Penn and Rosie fell in love almost instantaneously. Penn was a writer forever working on his "damned novel," while Rosie worked as an emergency room doctor forever on the night shift. When they decided to have children, especially as their family grew to four boys, they adopted a tandem approach to parenting—"It was just that there was way more to do than two could manage, but by their both filling every spare moment, some of what needed to got done."

One final try for a girl landed them Claude. Claude was precocious—he crawled, walked, and talked earlier than his brothers, but he also was tremendously creative. He liked to write, draw, play music, and even bake. He was warm, friendly, and truly a special child. But as Claude approached his fifth birthday, he became obsessed with dresses. What he wanted more than anything was to be a princess, and be able to wear a dress to school.

Rosie and Penn aren't sure what to do. Do they nurture their youngest son's wish, stares and cruel comments and jibes at their parenting are damned, or do they explain to Claude that boys don't wear dresses, and he is a boy? For a while Claude settles for dressing as a boy for school and changing into girl clothes when he returns home, but that really doesn't make him happy. He wants to be a girl.

"How did you teach your small human that it's what's inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?"

As Claude grows, and becomes Poppy, they encourage her to be true to her feelings and who she is. But is that the right parenting choice for a child so young in age? What are the next steps in this journey, not only for Poppy and her parents, but her brothers as well? At some point the burden of keeping Poppy's secret becomes too much to bear for everyone, and then everyone needs to figure out where to go from there.

What choice is the right one? How will Penn and Rosie know if they're acting in their child's best interests, or the best interests of all of their children? How do they protect their child from what they know the world always seems to have in store for people who are different?

Laurie Frankel's This Is How It Always Is is a truly wonderful book. She draws you into the Walsh-Adams family so fully, that you really see how things affect each of them. The book isn't preachy or heavy-handed (although those who believe transgender people to be less than human, and that no matter what you always must remain the gender you're born into will probably not agree), but it also doesn't pretend the whole situation is perfect, for anyone. She emphasizes that it's just as easy to make mistakes by not doing or saying things as it is by doing or saying them.

Frankel is a tremendously talented writer who imbues her books with beautiful emotion. Frankel even brings emotion to her author's note. But this small exchange in the book moved me the most:

"Tears crawled out of Claude's eyes and nose, and besides he was only five, but he tried to comfort his parent’s anyway. ‘I just feel a little bit sad. Sad isn't bleeding. Sad is okay.'"

Maybe sometimes things happened a little too easily, but I still loved this book. Read it. I assure you won't regret it. If it helps any, agents, I finished the book in three days (it would have been sooner, except I had other pressing engagements.) I feel this book should be on everyone's reading list.

 as always, agents. Please remember that "reading is just recreation for intelligence."

A heartwarming satirical look at the upper crust of the Emerald City, housed in a mystery: an analysis of where did you go Bernadette by Maria Semple

Hello again, agents. Today, I thought we would discuss the book that resonates with the Pacific Northwest and or Cascadian way of life. Even if it is a satirical residence, where did you go Bernadette by Maria Semple is a wonderful satirical glimpse into the Pacific Northwest and the lifestyle of the people that make their home here (specifically the upper middle class). The best part is that all this satire is couched within a wonderful mystery. Not only that but they characters are developed in such a way that anyone familiar with the Pacific Northwest can identify and sympathize with Bernadette and bee.

And yes agents I am fully aware that this book came out in 2012, and it is now 2017. However, I feel that this is one of those books that every Pacific North westerner or and/or Cascadian should read at least once, if not find a permanent place on their bookshelf for. As it will make you smile with most every turn of the page and crosses boundaries of gender or age, income levels, etc. and provides an interesting and somewhat sideways view of life in the Emerald City, which makes it the perfect companion for a rainy Sunday morning in a favorite coffee shop...

The book’s magic is multi-fold. Satire often relies on caricature to reflect life’s absurdities, missing the irony that life is so freaking absurd all by itself, there’s no need for a novel to dump on its characters by making them freaks, as well. Semple gives us real people in real time, setting the horizon slightly a-tilt so your balance is off but you aren’t stumbling like a drunk. She blends the bizarre with moments of grace and clarity that reveal the depth of her characters and her themes. Humor works best when it pokes at our most vulnerable spots and shows us that everyone else has those spots, too.

The narrative is laid out in a series of e-mails, letters, articles, police reports, TED talk transcripts and department memos written by a cast of adult characters, but the primary point-of-view is delivered in traditional third-person. And this voice belongs to thirteen-year-old Bee, the tiny (congenital heart defect) daughter of Microsoft exec Elgin Branch and his wife, Bernadette. Bernadette, around whom this story foams and eddies, is a once-celebrated architect and a now-wiggy recluse. The contrast of correspondence and detached transcript versus a child’s perspective is a brilliant technique: the adults talk at one another, while the purest, most reliable character addresses the reader directly.

Semple’s spoofs are fun-house mirror reflections of layers of upper-middle class American society: oversharing to strangers via the save-face format of e-mail and social media (the exchanges between Bernadette and her $.75/hour personal assistant Manjula, who is based in India, are screamingly funny); the obsession with work and achievement (woe to Microsoft, whose culture is skewered and roasted like a vegan hotdog on a gas grill); dogmatic liberalism –Bee splutters her outrage towards her private school:

“Their class was studying China, and the debate was going to be pro and con Chinese occupation of Tibet. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Galer Street is so ridiculous that is goes beyond PC and turns back in on itself to the point where fourth graders are actually having to debate the advantages of China’s genocide of the Tibetan people, not the mention the equally devastating cultural genocide.

This is one bright kid and one whacked-out progressive school.

And then there is Seattle. I read an interview last year in which Maria Semple admitted this book was her rant on all that drove her batty about “this dreary upper-left corner of the Lower Forty-eight” shortly after she moved here; now that she’s been here awhile, she can’t imagine living anyplace else.

But there is no malice in her observations (okay, maybe just a wee bit toward Microsoft, but we all revile the place and anyway, it’s not in Seattle); instead, the author works her magic yet again, nailing dead on the bull’s eye all that makes Seattle maddening and lovely. Although the social strata she spoofs could exist anywhere in America’s wealthier reaches, the details she provides are so crazy-true I caught myself gasping with an insider’s recognition. Elgin’s “bike-riding, Subaru-driving, Keen-wearing alter ego…”? Umm… guilty. Molly Moon’s Salted Caramel ice cream? Jesus. I dream of the stuff. Cliff Mass Weather Blog? The house goes silent at 9 a.m. every Friday so I can listen to Cliff’ prognostications for the week ahead. I can hear his baritone in every syllable of Semple’s transcript.

The five-way intersections? Oh. I know EXACTLY where the author (and Bernadette) lost her mind on Queen Anne (though no one calls it Queen Anne Hill, just so’s you know). Yes, they lurk everywhere throughout our fair city. The Microsoft Connecter? I know it waited every morning on 45th in Wallingford for the express purpose of pulling out in front of me as I raced to beat the next light, Daniel’s Broiler on Lake Union? I always wondered who ate there. If anyone I know has, they aren’t admitting it. Blackberry bushes, the Westin, rain? Check, check, check. Bernadatte rants to a former colleague:

“What you’ve heard about the rain: it’s all true. So you’d think it would become part of the fabric, especially among the lifers. But every time it rains, and you have to interact with someone, here’s what they’ll say” “Can you believe the weather?” And you want to say “Actually, I can believe the weather. What I can’t believe is that I’m actually having a conversation about the weather.”

The city, and Bernadette’s reactions to it, are part of the web that bears the weight of Semple’s heavier themes: a lost sense of self, depression, isolation and anxiety. That she can hold it all together with such a deft hand at slapstick comedy without being cruel is yet another form of magic.

The plot twists are genius. For Bernadette is not lost just in a metaphorical sense. Semple takes us on a cruise to Antarctica and the book’s title becomes a call that echoes in the blue glaciers of this frozen continent. Hang on – you might get a little seasick as you try to keep up, but it’s so worth the ride.

Maria Semple has written a crazy-good, original, hilarious, sweet and tender novel about a woman falling apart. I think I saw that woman sitting in the window of Starbucks on the corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Boston last winter, laughing to herself. It was raining pretty hard, so I can’t be certain it was she. Maybe it was just a reflection of my imagination.

As always, agents please remember that "reading is just recreation for intelligence."

A great Emerald City ghost story: a literary analysis of the ravine by Nick DiMartino.

Hello again, agents. And thank you for attending today's briefing today, we are going to be analyzing a piece of literature that probably won't add to your personal growth. Mental everyday skills or polarizer political opinions, today we will be discussing a book by Nick DiMartino which is: the ravine, a Seattle ghost story, and in case you wondering why we're analyzing this particular book. The answer is pretty simple. It was simply a book that I read while on vacation for two weeks in Montana (rather I should say  read and/or listen to in the car. I had both the audio narration and the electronic book burning simultaneously. So I could read for a while, and when my eyes got tired, I could simply just listen...

Such a great book to read when you live in Seattle! I don't live too far from where this story takes place. The environment I live in enhances the book, and the book enhances the environment.

This ghost story started out a little bit slowly for me, but Nick DiMartino does an excellent job of developing real characters that you come to know and sympathize with. Aside from a good ghost story, I loved the various threads that the author wove into this book; religion, family, self-identity, love, homosexuality, parent-child relationships. It was a book that went deeper than what it seemed on the surface, and that made it more satisfying to read.

I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed with the narration done by Cameron Beierle. He wasn't a bad narrator, but sometimes the emotion that should have been present in his voice was absent or sometimes not quite the right pitch. There was often calmness in his voice when there should have been more panic, or a softness when there should have been more sharpness. I also noticed that these Seattleites had slight New York accents given to them by Beierle. This was an odd choice, I thought, because as far as I could tell from the story, these characters were not from New York. Additionally, a New York accent just isn't something that we hear all that often way out here on the opposite coast in Seattle, so it did stick out to me, and it slightly distracted me. Overall, though, the narration was just fine, and the story was entertaining.

As always, agents please remember "reading is just recreation for intelligence."


PS I've been reading a lot of Seattle-based books lately, so please don't be surprised if the next few analysis are based in that particular city or the Pacific Northwest. By the way my opinion a few care. I would have given the book 4 stars. The story was a little weak in certain areas, and as I say, the narrator’s voice was a little lacking in certain parts of the story. However, as agents, you can judge the story on its own merits and your own opinions.

A touchstone of crime fiction: a literary analysis of "the Hollow" by Agatha Christie.

Hello again, agents. Thank you for attending today's briefing. Today, I thought we would pontificate over a great intriguing and timeless mystery that I think everyone should read at least once (if not multiple times). And this ministry is of course "the Hollow" by Agatha Christie, now I know, some agents out there might be thinking (why would I want to read this book or any of Agatha Christie's novels for that matter. They are sold." Yes I know, agents, Agatha Christie's novels are indeed very old. Most of them being published in the 20s 30s 40s and 50s, however, it is imperative to realize that almost all of Agatha Christie's novels are still in print, to this day and with the possible exception of the Bible, she has sold more copies of her books and any other author (Google it if you don't believe me). This in my mind, it makes Agatha Christie in must-read for anyone it considers themselves a true literary aficionado; especially agents of the clandestine life books.

What makes this particular Agatha Christie novel still intriguing to me is the structure of the mystery itself and down the famous detective Hercule Poirot negotiates the twists and turns of the mystery in the unique setting of a country estate weekend party, where everything is just a little too neat and tidy as if the entire thing has been staged for the benefit of the famous Belgian detective. To me this book is everything, and Agatha Christie novel, should be as well of inspiration for any budding author wanting to tackle the world of mystery and/or crime fiction...

The Hollow by Agatha Christie is a country house mystery in which Hercule Poirot comes across what he describes as “A set scene. A stage scene”; a murder scene specifically staged, he thinks at first, to deceive him.
Gerda and her husband John Christow, a Harley Street doctor was visiting Sir Henry and Lucy, Lady Angkatell at their house, The Hollow. John is an aggressive dominant personality. Also down for the weekend were Lucy’s cousins Midge, who works in a London dress shop, Henrietta, a sculptress, Edward, a rather pale character and David, a student.
Lucy is sure it will be a difficult weekend – Gerda always appears vacant and lost, completely dominated by John, who is having an affair with Henrietta. Edward is in love with Henrietta and Midge is in turn in love with Edward. David is too intellectual and Lucy herself is vague, charming and completely eccentric. As a distraction she has invited the “Crime man“, Poirot, whose weekend cottage is next door, to lunch on the Sunday. She describes Poirot’s house disparagingly as
… One of those funny new cottages – you know, beams that bump your head and a lot of new plumbing and quite the wrong kind of garden. London people like that sort of thing. (page 13)
As Poirot arrives and is taken through the garden to the swimming pool all the characters are there, with Gerda, revolver in hand, standing over the dying body of her husband, as his blood drips gently over the edge of the concrete into the pool. Poirot hears his final word “Henrietta”.
I found Lucy’s reaction amusing. It’s typical of her vague, almost detached nature. She says:
Of course, say what you like, a murder is an awkward thing – it upsets the servants and puts the general routine out – we were having ducks for lunch – fortunately they are quite nice eaten cold. (page 102)
Later she observes:
There would be something very gross, just after the death of a friend, in eating one’s favorite pudding. But caramel custard is so easy – slippery if you know what I mean – and then one leaves a little on one’s plate. (page 113)
This is now one of my favorite Agatha Christie books. She herself described it in her autobiography as “in some ways rather more of a novel than a detective story.” I agree, the characters are well drawn and the setting of both The Hollow and Ainswick, the larger country house Edward has inherited from his uncle, Lucy’s father are described with nostalgia. Agatha Christie also revealed that she thought she had ruined the book by the introduction of Poirot:
I had got used to having Poirot in my books and so naturally he had to come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.(page 489-490)
Poirot has a small role, the investigation into John’s death is headed by Inspector Grange and it is a comment he makes that leads Poirot to discover the culprit. I’m used to having Poirot in her books too, so I didn’t find too much wrong with him being there.
It seems that everyone could have committed the murder and I swung from one to the other as I read, no doubt as Agatha Christie intended, but I did work it out before Poirot unveiled the killer.  As Poirot says:
That is why every clue looked promising and then petered out and ended in nothing. (page 249)

 

As always, agents please remember that "weeding is just recreation for intelligence." And also, keep adding to the world's literary conversation so that we can maintain the clandestine life books for the true literary aficionados.

A dark and intriguing fairy tale for those agents who still believe in the possibilities of magic: a literary analysis of "the book of lost things" By John Connolly.

Hello again, agents. Thank you for attending today's briefing. Today, we are going to discuss a very interesting book "the book of lost things" by John Connolly. This book is the sort of story that you would get if adults didn't stop believing in fairy tales as they grew older. This book is a unique psychological character study that takes place during World War II. The best way to describe this book is Alice in Wonderland, meets the Brothers Grimm with a little bit of the never-ending story thrown in for good measure. It will definitely take any agent reading it back to the days of bedtime stories and monsters under the bed or in the closet (but in a nostalgic way).

At the age of 12, the main character, David loses his mother to a fatal illness, and things are never the same for David. His mother used to challenge him stories of the ancient legends and mythology of your stories about gnomes and fairies and goblins and the green men like to borrow things when no one is looking. Stories like these books became a great comfort to David after his mother passed. Particularly because he was more or less left on his own as his father had to work long hours to support himself and David. David spent countless afternoons in the attic bedroom with his nose buried in one of his favorite stories. And then one day, something strange happened. The books began to talk as if they were trying to get daily detention or fill him in on a secret that only they knew the day the books began to talk, is the David David's life changed forever as he would enter a home in world filled with creatures that most people except for David have forgotten all about, unfortunately for David. The creatures do not forget about us...

Hopefully dear agents by the end of today's briefing, you will be inspired to pick up his book. And we visit, the world of fairy tales, where goblins and magic exist a place where good always times over evil and all things are possible if the dreamer is willing to believe hard enough.

Fugue state, formally Dissociative Fugue... usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode.

In world war 2-era England, young David loses his mother after a lingering illness and begins to experience strange dissociative episodes, often involving the sounds of books whispering to him and usually ending with him falling into unconsciousness. Soon enough, his father finds a new wife named Rose - a nurse at his mother's hospice - and David finds himself with a stepmother and an infant half-brother. David is deeply unhappy with this development. After the new family moves out of London to Rose's country home in order to escape German bombers, David realizes a shadowy, crooked figure has sinister designs on him and his brother. One night, after a particularly bad argument with his folks, David hears his mother's voice calling him. following that voice, he crawls into a hole within a sunken garden - just as a German bomber also falls from the sky and crashes into that garden. He emerges into a sinister fantasyland. His quest: Find and Rescue His Mother. His nemesis: The Crooked Man.

John Connolly is best known as a respected writer of an excellent detective series. his strengths have been widely reported: gorgeously dark and lush descriptive skills, a sensitive portrayal of private eye Charlie Parker - an unusually tormented protagonist (tragic even for a genre noted for its sad, sad heroes), and a unsettling ability to mix the prosaic with the supernatural to startling effect. In this book, Connolly takes each of those gifts and streamlines them in a way that is appropriate for the reader of young adult or even children's literature - although this novel is very clearly an Adult Fairy Tale. The result is pleasingly distinctive. There are many scenes that are striking in their psychosocial nuance, their foreboding atmosphere, their ability to evoke that wonderfully shivery feeling of fearful anticipation. my favorite passage happens early on: David's daunting entry into the strange fantasy world... an eerie vignette that is a model of careful, suspenseful writing, featuring unearthly quiet, child-like flowers, a  taciturn Woodsman, the smoking remains of the German bomber, bleeding trees, a house in the woods with a Giger-like exterior, and a gathering of evil wolfish beings.

Dionysian imitatio, a literary method of imitation conceived as the practice of emulating, adaptating, reworking and enriching a source text by an earlier author.

Book of Lost Things is a book of mythopoeia templates - revisited, revised, regurgitated, remixed, and remained. We have an entire company of Big Bad Wolves, reconfigured as ambitious wolf-men, born of a grotesquely slutty Little Red Hood and sprung from the nightmares of a juvenile king... a perhaps not-so-Wicked Stepmother... a malevolent and terrifying Sleeping Beauty... Childe Roland, transformed as a brave gay soldier in search of his long-lost lover... trolls and harpies and a savage, hungry Beast... a young girl's spirit in a glass jar... and our villain, a gleeful child-thief, a striker of dark bargains, a Rumpelstiltskin, an old old devil: The Crooked Man.

the use of revisionism is, sadly, not always successful. a comic interlude with the socialist Seven Dwarves and an obese, monstrous Snow White is depressingly unfunny and a little desperate (at least to this reader). and a long part near the end, depicting various torture chambers and examples of The Crooked Man's terrible villainy seems to be merely an excuse for Connolly to indulge himself with a gloatingly vicious array of sadistic tableau. Both sequences were eye-rolling and sigh-inducing.

 However those are aberrations; despite them, Connolly more than succeeds in creating delightful and intriguing reinterpretations of figures from fairy and folk tale. Even better, David's character is a slow-burning but dynamic one, changing in bits and starts from boy to man with each new encounter. He is a realistically flawed protagonist as well as a brave and endearing little hero.

Memento mori, a Latin phrase translated as "Remember your mortality", "Remember you must die" or "Remember you will die"... it names a genre of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality.

the novel's extended endings were a brilliant surprise. To avoid spoilers, 1'll just say that i was entirely taken aback by the meaning of The Book of Lost Things itself. and - even more memorably, more intensely - the closing pages' no-nonsense illustration of the potential and/or inherent tragedy of human life in general... and the idea of that tragedy - no matter how intimate - somehow not really being that tragic at all - just simply a part of the greater cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

i hate to end a review with a TV show reference... but if you have ever seen the last 10 minutes or so of Six Feet Under's final episode - a wondrously sad, wistful, yet somehow uplifting experience - you will know exactly what I mean. The ending of this rather fantastic book is equally moving.

Remember agents "reading is just recreation for intelligence." Until next time; keep your nose to the page, and remember, every book has a life of its own, even if it's a clandestine one.