Book Reviews: Books We Read in Fall 2017

Book club members,

Please use the comments to give a short review/recommendation for one of the books we read together in fall.  Here's a partial list of our fall books (what am I missing? Let me know in the comments):

- Unwind by Neal Shusterman
- The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
- Season of the Witch by David Talbot
- The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey
- Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
- Paper Towns by John Green
- The Screaming Staircase (Lockwood & Co. Book 1) by Jonathan Stroud
- Every Day by David Levithan

Here's a sample:

I really loved The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey. It is the story of an orphaned teenager who works as an assistant to a "mad" scientist who studies monsters in the late 1800's.  The style of writing builds suspense and horror while also creating characters that you really know and understand, and either care for or are horrified by... or both!  Some characters are revealed to be just as monstrous as the terrifying human-eating beasts they are hunting. At it's heart, it uses a horror backdrop to tell a moving story about relationships between fathers and sons.

Movies Into Books: Are You Excited?

Here are two movies coming out soon that are based on books we have read as a book club!

READY PLAYER ONE (coming March 30th, 2018)

EVERY DAY (coming February 23rd, 2018)

Which movie are you most excited to see?

Movie Review: Wonder

We read the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio in the first year of the book club.  I've been looking forward to the movie ever since I heard it was in production, and this year we finally got to see it.

In short: I loved it!

Of course, the book was better, but the book is always better.  The movie made some changes from the book, but I think that all of the changes worked well for the transition to a different medium.

In particular, they really toned down Auggie's face.  As it's described in the book, the differences are a lot more pronounced.  It makes sense to me, though.  In the book, you read that description, get an idea, but then you continue reading the book and can concentrate on the story without being continually distracted by Auggie's face being re-described every time he says something.  Throughout the movie, however, I can see it being a distraction since it is a visual medium. Also, in a book narration can convey a character's feelings without the character having to say anything, but in a movie any unspoken emoting can only be communicated visually, and heavy prosthetics might make that too challenging for the actor.

I was also really glad that they took little "detours" in the film to shift the point of view to other characters as was done in the book.  I particularly appreciated Via's "chapter" (played wonderfully by Izabela Vidovic), but all of the characters' points-of-view served to fill out the story of not only what Auggie's life is like, but the fact that everyone else in his life is their own person with their own issues.  I liked the presentation of life being the interaction of fully-formed individuals that we and Auggie came to care for.

Overall I found that the same beats that hit me emotionally in the book translated well to the film, and I cried more than once!  This was my favorite Mandy Patinkin performance since The Princess Bride.  The scene at the end of the book in which his character gave a speech was one of the places I cried at first reading, and even though I knew it was coming, I cried again when the movie got to that point.

Daveed Diggs continues his successful quest to become a superstar of all media. His role was small and understated in the film, but when he was on screen he was great.  If I had edited the movie, he would have been in so many more scenes!

One nitpick: I wish Owen Wilson had more age-appropriate hair...

On the Nook: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Here's an overview of the story from Barnes & Noble:

In America after the Second Civil War, the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life armies came to an agreement: The Bill of Life states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, a parent may choose to retroactively get rid of a child through a process called "unwinding." Unwinding ensures that the child's life doesn’t “technically” end by transplanting all the organs in the child's body to various recipients. Now a common and accepted practice in society, troublesome or unwanted teens are able to easily be unwound.

With breath-taking suspense, this book follows three teens who all become runaway Unwinds: Connor, a rebel whose parents have ordered his unwinding; Risa, a ward of the state who is to be unwound due to cost-cutting; and Lev, his parents' tenth child whose unwinding has been planned since birth as a religious tithing. As their paths intersect and lives hang in the balance, Shusterman examines serious moral issues in a way that will keep readers turning the pages to see if Connor, Risa, and Lev avoid meeting their untimely ends.

Neal Shusterman visited our school several years ago and talked about how he came up with the idea to write Unwind.  He quoted a political poll where they were asking people what issues were important enough to them that they'd switch their vote to a different candidate - even if it was a candidate from another political party - if their candidate's views differed from their own.  People were willing to compromise on just about every issue except for abortion.  He figured that if we were every to have another civil war in this country, it would probably be over this issue.

I've read this book several times and always enjoyed it.  I've always found the central premise of the story, however, to be unbelievable: it's too much of a stretch to think that this "compromise" where children from 13-18 could be unwound (not technically killed, but still, you know, killed) would be acceptable to either side.

On my last reading, however, I started to think about how many people - including many people known personally to me who are reasonable, kind people - are vehemently opposed to abortion but just as strongly supportive of the death penalty.  The best defense I have heard (though I don't find it ultimately persuasive) goes something like this: the death penalty is a just and proportional penalty for very serious crimes.  Taking someone's life is so great an offense that no penalty could justly be imposed short of losing one's own life.  Conversely, an unborn fetus cannot possibly make any choices so horrible as to ever justify demanding its life.  Proponents would argue that their support of the death penalty actually reflects how highly they value life - particularly the life of the person killed or destroyed by the perpetrator - that they would consider such punishment to be merited.

Like I said, I don't find that argument persuasive myself, but I can see a lot of people in our country agreeing with it.

So, the idea of people believing that someone between 13 and 18 having been around long enough for their choices and behavior to justify a parent's decision to have them unwound might not be as crazy as I initially thought.  I mean, we consider someone who is 18 to be an adult, and we often hear of people younger than that being "tried as an adult" with the argument that they are old enough to know that what they did was wrong and that they should be held accountable.

Once we've accepted the general premise, the rest is just haggling over details.  So, yeah, this story is actually scarier than I initially thought it was, and for that reason, perhaps more important to read than I initially thought, as well.

And it's really well written!