Review: Glimmerglass

Glimmerglass by Jenna Black

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Disclaimer: I won this book in the Goodreads giveaway.

Glimmerglass is a novel about Dana, a 16-year-old girl who runs away from her alcoholic mother to Avalon, where Faerie and human worlds meet, to live with her Fae father. What she doesn't realize when she makes this decision is that she will be pulled in all sorts of directions, and her life put in danger several times, just by alerting her father to her existence.

This is definitely a novel for young adults. The language and situations are geared toward teens. In that respect, it was an effective book. My problem is that it is too made for teens. I love YA literature, especially YA fantasy, because a lot of it is able to cross borders into adult enjoyment. Diana Wynne Jones is a master of this, as well as Tamora Pierce. Jenna Black just doesn't quite cut it.

The author does a good job with the teen "dialect," for lack of a better word. "Like," "duh," and other words associated with teens were pretty prevalent in the text, which put me off a bit. I think the book's story could have gotten across just as easily without it, and in fact, I would rather have read it in the third person than first person. Dana I found to be a confused, indecisive, and needy girl, which is understandable considering her past, but did not make for a heroine I particularly admired. Maybe that wasn't the point of the book. But if I can't feel a connection with the heroine, I can't enjoy the read.

There comes a point in a novel where some detail needs to become clear. Whether it be the bad guy finally coming into the open, or the heroine learning who she needs to trust and what she needs to do, there needs to be a decisive moment in the book that serves as the climax. There was no climax in this book; rather, there was constant conflicting information. Who do we, as readers, trust? Is Ethan a good guy or a bad guy? Is Dana just a pain in the ass who feels betrayed at the drop of a hat? Is EVERY Fae guy going to be drooled over? And who the heck is looking out for her? The scene at the end where Aunt Grace takes decisive action is an "almost" for this need, but doesn't quite fulfill.

When the end of the novel came, I was frustrated because there was no closure. Dana is put essentially into a prison of her father's making, and her mother is a ruined wreck of a woman, albeit sober (but bitter). Finn is still stoic and not completely friendly, Ethan is nowhere to be seen, and Kimber has become a sniveling self-conscious baby instead of the strong woman she shows off at the beginning. I understand there is a sequel, so there can't be complete closure, but every book needs to have some sort of conclusion. This was like putting a "To Be Continued..." message at the end of a TV show. The best authors can conclude a book and then start the sequel as a continuation.

Overall, there were a lot of things I would change, but then it wouldn't be Jenna Black's book, it would be mine. I guess you can't always get what you want in a read, but while it was a somewhat interesting read, I didn't end up liking it enough to pick up the next book.



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Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In a previous post I mentioned how I'm kind of getting into ebooks for some of my reading. Well, I managed to get my hands on a copy of the ebook of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and boy was that a doozy!

As I've mentioned previously, Goodreads has become an invaluable resource for me in my book addiction. I literally spend hours on that site when I visit, perusing my friends' recent reading, checking up on new giveaways, editing my library... So of course it makes sense that I would go to Goodreads for reviews of books I've just finished. Note: I (almost) never read reviews before I read the books themselves. I find it spoils my desire to read the book and I end up not enjoying it. I much prefer to read them after, when I've had a chance to digest the book's contents, and can coherently articulate my thoughts.

I realize I'm starting with the end here. Let's back it up a little bit.

Non-fiction is not my thing. I get really bored really quickly with books that just aren't written well, and I've had a lot of trouble with non-fiction because I find a lot of the books I've chosen to read over the years just weren't written well. They were written by someone who wanted to get something off her chest, or by a historian who has no idea how dry his prose really is. But last year (I believe anyway) I read an article on CNN about this book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot about a woman whose cancer cells were taken from her during a biopsy, and have been growing and multiplying since, while she died of her horrible disease, a very painful death and one from which her family never recovered. They're called the HeLa cells (pronounced HEE-lah), and they are responsible for the polio vaccine, many cancer treatments, advancements in HIV/AIDS research, and may other scientific advancements since their harvesting in the 1950s.

The problem put forth in the book: Henrietta Lacks' cells may be immortal, but she certainly wasn't. And while people were getting richer and richer off her miracle cells, her family was barely surviving in the squalor in which they lived. Most were uneducated past elementary school, her children were all partly deaf because she had married her first cousin, cousins were having sex with each other, her daughter was being molested by another cousin, and the ignorance in which this family lived threatened to wipe them out. When scientists came knocking for their cells after Henrietta died, the family had no idea what had actually happened to her. When they were finally told the advancements her cells had made possible, they believed that she was still alive, that her cells had created a new her. That when her cells flew into space, Henrietta had flown into space. That they had cloned Henrietta in London and that they would someday visit and see her there.

It was funny and sad at the same time. Henrietta had done so much for humanity without her knowledge, and yet her family couldn't even pull itself up by the bootstraps.

Rebecca Skloot had to do a lot of digging and had to be persistent in order to get the family to talk to her. She mentions this a few times in the book, and that was something the reviewers on Goodreads brought up when they wrote negatively about it. One reviewer said,

Furthermore, I don't feel the admiration for the author of this book like I think many others do. She wanted to make herself out to be different than all the rest of the people who wrote about the woman behind the HeLa cell line but I only saw the similarities. Yes, she has established a scholarship fund for the descendants of Henrietta Lacks but I got tired of hearing again and again how she financed her research herself. I think the exploitation is there, just prettied up a bit with a lot of self-congratulatory descriptions of how HARD she had to try to talk to the family and how MANY times she called asking for interviews. At times I felt like she badgered them worse than the unethical people who had come before.

I didn't get that at all from the book (considering she only mentioned twice how she was paying for the research herself), but it shocked me to see so many other people saying exactly the same thing. I read it differently (and said so). It made me sad that people could so seriously misconstrue an author's intent when it seems so clear that the only motive behind this book is to expose the moral, ethical and legal obligations the doctors may or may not have had toward her family. Some people also accused Skloot of bias in her reporting, since she became so close with the family. I didn't see that either, especially in the afterword when she presents the questions in a very scientific and ethical way. She gives both sides, tells the law, explains the science, and then gives the story of the family. She is interjected into the story only because without her presence the book wouldn't make sense. She is a necessary character, and maybe her personal bias showed, but her journalistic bias was not compromised.

I invite you to read the book and decide for yourself. I really loved Skloot's story of the Lacks family and ate it up like a giant piece of chocolate cake. It was a fantastic book and I would love to know what you all think of it, whether you agree or disagree with me, and what you think of the ethics involved in cell and tissue donation.

Giveaways, or Free Books Are Awesome!

Since I started using Goodreads, I've been having a lot of fun figuring out the website, my stats, taking quizzes, rating books, writing reviews for books I've loved and hated, and entering giveaways (which is my favorite part!). It's great! All I have to do is pick a book I'm interested in reading and enter the giveaway, and if I win they let me know! I've entered several hundred giveaways (lol) and won two so far, and today I got the first one in the mail. Exciting!

So the next hard copy book I start will be Glimmerglass by Jenna Black. It actually looks pretty good for being a modern fantasy set in today's world (which I've never really been interested in). The synopsis on the website is a little dramatic but still sounds interesting:

It’s all she’s ever wanted to be, but it couldn’t be further from her grasp…

Dana Hathaway doesn’t know it yet, but she’s in big trouble. When her alcoholic mom shows up at her voice recital drunk, again, Dana decides she’s had enough and runs away to find her mysterious father in Avalon: the only place on Earth where the regular, everyday world and the captivating, magical world of Faerie intersect. But from the moment Dana sets foot in Avalon, everything goes wrong, for it turns out she isn't just an ordinary teenage girl—she's a Faeriewalker, a rare individual who can travel between both worlds, and the only person who can bring magic into the human world and technology into Faerie.

Soon, Dana finds herself tangled up in a cutthroat game of Fae politics. Someone's trying to kill her, and everyone seems to want something from her, from her newfound friends and family to Ethan, the hot Fae guy Dana figures she’ll never have a chance with… until she does. Caught between two worlds, Dana isn’t sure where she’ll ever fit in and who can be trusted, not to mention if her world will ever be normal again…

I'll be honest, the thing that drew me to the book was the cover. It was a cool-looking image and was really happy when I saw I'd won it!

The other book I'm waiting on is Struck by Living by Julie Hersh, about mental health and taking the right steps to treat it. Since I struggle with anxiety and depression, which only relatively recently it was still too difficult for people to talk about let alone admit they dealt with it, I am all too familiar with the need to treat mental illness and do everything you can to better your life. I'm really looking forward to reading this one and seeing what she has to say about the problems I deal with every day.

If you haven't joined Goodreads yet, I really recommend it. And start entering giveaways! You may just find books and authors you never knew you would enjoy.

Being a Bride, or When Books Just Don't Cut It

Obviously this is a book blog, but sometimes, books just don't cut it for me.

There are a lot of things that go into being a bride. I've done a majority of the planning for this wedding, including contacting all the vendors, making all the appointments, arranging around everyone's schedules, and deciding what we do and do not want. It's been crazy and wonderful and a complete trip, more complicated and involved than I ever imagined.

But where I used to be able to turn to books to take me away from this kind of mind occupation and put me in a different mindset, it's been a little difficult to concentrate lately. Sometimes books just don't work.

What do you do when you feel like you're out of control, and the one thing that used to keep you occupied doesn't hold your attention anymore? I'm sure once the wedding is over I'll be back to "normal," or as normal as I've ever been, which isn't very. But until then, what would you suggest to help relieve the stress? (And no gym - I quit that because it was boring.)