The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

The Buddha in the Attic was published by one of the six--excuse me-- one of the five (as of yesterday) publishing conglomerates doing business in the United States, and that company is Random House.  (Penguin merged with Random House, by the way.)  I mention this because, as many of you know,  I review self-published books, and I didn't want anyone to mistake this for an indie book.  As an indie/self-published book this wouldn't have gotten much attention because it is closer to poetry than prose, doesn't have much character development, doesn't have individual characters whom we get to know well at all, and it doesn't have scenes with dialogue.  Oh yes, and it would be accurate to say that this book asks many questions and is repetitive.  But this isn't a self-published book and was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction.

So I asked myself a few questions when I finished reading it:

Did I want to keep reading?  Yes

Did I care about the characters?  Not in the sense that I was concerned about a particular outcome or about what happened to any individual character.

Why did I keep reading?  I enjoyed the flow of the words, the rhythm of the sentences.  I didn't keep reading because I wondered what happens next or wondered what's going to happen to that character.

Did it feel like a story?  It felt like a story the way history feels like a story.  It didn't feel like fiction. I wasn't getting caught up in a fictional world with specific characters and their very specific problems.  This was history (which is a story) told in poetry.

Was this a novel?  Ah, that's a good question.  To say something is a novel creates certain expectations, and this book definitely deviates from those expectations of what a novel is.  I didn't get emotionally involved in the characters' lives like I like to do in novels.  I didn't know any of the characters except in a collective sense, and there was a detached feeling, a distance that prevented me from getting close.

If you enjoy poetry and are interested in the time in history when Japanese women went to the United States as mail order, or picture, brides-- then you might want to give this book a try!

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I did not read The Kite Runner.  Just want to put that out there.  I read A Thousand Splendid Suns because I'm organizing a fundraiser for the Afghan Women's Writing Project (awwproject.org), and Splendid Suns was suggested to me but not by anyone affiliated with the Afghan Women's Writing Project.  The atrocious treatment of women and the horror of war, seemingly a constant in Afghanistan, makes me very glad that this book has been read by so many people-- for awareness purposes.  Of course, as far as the storytelling goes, I did want to finish the book, and, in fact, I read it quickly.  But I was taken out of the story several times which, if you've read some of my Fiction Writing 101 posts, is not the best thing to happen while reading a story.

I was taken out of the story because I was able to guess what happens next.  I wasn't trying to guess, but it was so obvious  and predictable that I just knew-- psychically I suppose-- that this was how things would turn out.  Here are a couple examples, and if you haven't read Splendid Suns and want to without knowing any of the plot points, you can stop reading.

I knew Laila would get pregnant, and that it would be Tariq's baby, of course.  All that throwing up after she was injured by the attack that destroyed her family's house was just too much, and besides, I knew she was pregnant before all that throwing up.

Laila and Mariam were at odds with each other, to put it nicely, in the beginning, but they become great allies.  Yes, out of necessity but also predictable.

One other thing that bothered me that wasn't about the plot being predictable, exactly:  Mariam's self-sacrfice.  Ok, of course this was supposed to bother me, but there were other ways to resolve that sub-plot without killing her off.

Nonetheless, I wanted to keep reading A Thousand Splendid Suns to find out what happens.

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

The House Next Door is a wonderfully scary book for October.  Originally published in 1978 by Simon & Schuster, Anne Rivers Siddons does a terrific job making a house-- which people attempt to make a home in a middle class neighborhood-- terrifying and horrifying. And that's quite an accomplishment because I'm not a fan of horror. Although when I was a teenager I read The Shining and was so scared while reading it that I couldn't read it while alone in a room. And The House Next Door succeeded in making me a little scared of my own house, but that's a different story.  This is fun especially for this Halloween time of year.  Enjoy!