#8-11: Shadow Family, Waiting for Rain, All I Asking for is My Body, Say You're One of Them
What we have today is a selection of not very good reviews. Why? Because I'm moving into an apartment that's half the size of my current place. That means that some stuff has got to go. So I'd thought I'd do these reviews before I got rid of the books.
Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe
Miyabe is the author of one my favorite mystery novels, All She was Worth, so when I saw this book, I snatched it up. Unfortunately, Shadow Family isn't nearly as interesting or as strong a story. Part of that may be due to it's length. At less than 200 pages, there isn't enough time to build up a lot of suspense, nor is there room to follow the trail from one clue to another.
The plot is as follows: two people have been murdered, a young girl and a middle aged man. In the course of the investigation, the police come across a chat room where four people, including one of the victims, have made an online family of sorts, with a mother and father and two children. (Note: these are not spoilers. You can learn as much from the dust jacket and first few pages.)
To really get into why I was so disappointed with the book, I'll have to get into some spoilers. The following are minor spoilers: The cover and blurbs really built up the "dangerous internet" aspect, so I was expecting something exciting and properly depraved. Imagine my disappointment when four people recreating a normal nuclear family was as far as it went. I've done more exciting things on the internet than that, and I'm boring. The deep dark secret was so bland that I had to scoff.
My other problem with the book involves the ending, so the following should be considered major spoilers: At the end it's revealed that for the cops there was never any mystery. They knew who did it the whole time, and the whole so called investigation was a trap for the culprit. This could have been done brilliantly-I love twist endings, but it fell flat. Maybe because I had never felt much a sense of urgency to begin with.
Miyabe has several other books translated into English, and I'll definitely pick them up eventually. However, I'll be hoping that they're closer to All She was Worth than Shadow Family.
Waiting for the Rain by Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay
Waiting for Rain takes place in Kolkata during the seventies it focuses on two very different young adults, Manju and Somsundar, examining how the two of them are affected by the Naxalite movement.
The book has a really intriguing premise, but something about it didn't work for me. In my review for The Feast of Roses I said that the highest praise that I could give a book is that it made eager to learn and read more. Waiting for Rain failed that test. It's not bragging to say that I have a great amount of intellectual curiosity, so one would think that this book would have me running for Wikipedia and the library to study the Naxalite's. But I didn't. Waiting for Rain simply didn't excite my interest.
This probably is mainly the fault of the main characters, who are thoroughly unsympathetic. Manju at least knows that she's unsympathetic, which makes her somewhat interesting at the very least. Somsundar, on the other hand, I found to be nothing but obnoxious, unlikeable and stupidly violent.
All in all, not recommended.
All I Asking for is My Body by Milton Murayama
All I Asking for is My Body is the story of a family of Japanese workers on a Hawaiin plantation. It's a fascinating book, illuminating a history usually ignored. The books central themes are the culture clash between the first generation immigrants and their children as well as the lives of the workers and how they were used against each other and kept apart by the white men in charge.
Despite how interesting the book is, the ending caused everything to fall apart for me. Perhaps that's due to the length of the book. Barely more than 100 pages, the ending comes pretty quickly and strongly affects the rest. I found the ending far to convenient. Spoilers: In the last few pages the protagonist suddenly discovers that he's an incredible gambler. He then makes just enough to pay of his family's debt, the existence of which has fueled the whole book. I felt that Murayama was trying to hard for a happy ending.
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
I was expecting to like this one. I wanted to like this one. Everybody else seems to like this one. So I actually feel guilty that I didn't like it too much. I'm entirely sure what the problem was. Partly it was the pacing. Perhaps for other people it worked as mounting dread, but I felt like events kept repeating themselves without any movement. (And not in good, thematic way.) This will have to be the shortest review because all I can say is that I didn't like and I don't know why.
Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe
Miyabe is the author of one my favorite mystery novels, All She was Worth, so when I saw this book, I snatched it up. Unfortunately, Shadow Family isn't nearly as interesting or as strong a story. Part of that may be due to it's length. At less than 200 pages, there isn't enough time to build up a lot of suspense, nor is there room to follow the trail from one clue to another.
The plot is as follows: two people have been murdered, a young girl and a middle aged man. In the course of the investigation, the police come across a chat room where four people, including one of the victims, have made an online family of sorts, with a mother and father and two children. (Note: these are not spoilers. You can learn as much from the dust jacket and first few pages.)
To really get into why I was so disappointed with the book, I'll have to get into some spoilers. The following are minor spoilers: The cover and blurbs really built up the "dangerous internet" aspect, so I was expecting something exciting and properly depraved. Imagine my disappointment when four people recreating a normal nuclear family was as far as it went. I've done more exciting things on the internet than that, and I'm boring. The deep dark secret was so bland that I had to scoff.
My other problem with the book involves the ending, so the following should be considered major spoilers: At the end it's revealed that for the cops there was never any mystery. They knew who did it the whole time, and the whole so called investigation was a trap for the culprit. This could have been done brilliantly-I love twist endings, but it fell flat. Maybe because I had never felt much a sense of urgency to begin with.
Miyabe has several other books translated into English, and I'll definitely pick them up eventually. However, I'll be hoping that they're closer to All She was Worth than Shadow Family.
Waiting for the Rain by Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay
Waiting for Rain takes place in Kolkata during the seventies it focuses on two very different young adults, Manju and Somsundar, examining how the two of them are affected by the Naxalite movement.
The book has a really intriguing premise, but something about it didn't work for me. In my review for The Feast of Roses I said that the highest praise that I could give a book is that it made eager to learn and read more. Waiting for Rain failed that test. It's not bragging to say that I have a great amount of intellectual curiosity, so one would think that this book would have me running for Wikipedia and the library to study the Naxalite's. But I didn't. Waiting for Rain simply didn't excite my interest.
This probably is mainly the fault of the main characters, who are thoroughly unsympathetic. Manju at least knows that she's unsympathetic, which makes her somewhat interesting at the very least. Somsundar, on the other hand, I found to be nothing but obnoxious, unlikeable and stupidly violent.
All in all, not recommended.
All I Asking for is My Body by Milton Murayama
All I Asking for is My Body is the story of a family of Japanese workers on a Hawaiin plantation. It's a fascinating book, illuminating a history usually ignored. The books central themes are the culture clash between the first generation immigrants and their children as well as the lives of the workers and how they were used against each other and kept apart by the white men in charge.
Despite how interesting the book is, the ending caused everything to fall apart for me. Perhaps that's due to the length of the book. Barely more than 100 pages, the ending comes pretty quickly and strongly affects the rest. I found the ending far to convenient. Spoilers: In the last few pages the protagonist suddenly discovers that he's an incredible gambler. He then makes just enough to pay of his family's debt, the existence of which has fueled the whole book. I felt that Murayama was trying to hard for a happy ending.
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
I was expecting to like this one. I wanted to like this one. Everybody else seems to like this one. So I actually feel guilty that I didn't like it too much. I'm entirely sure what the problem was. Partly it was the pacing. Perhaps for other people it worked as mounting dread, but I felt like events kept repeating themselves without any movement. (And not in good, thematic way.) This will have to be the shortest review because all I can say is that I didn't like and I don't know why.