The Cue Card

“The Girl With No Name” is a nonfiction book I saw on display at a local bookstore that I ended up buying and reading. The subtitle caught my eye: “The True Story of a Girl Who Lived With Monkeys” – Come on, I couldn’t walk away from that! I hadn’t heard about it before, but I was curious whether the book, which came out this past spring, was some kind of modern-day Tarzan story, albeit a true one.

It tells the account of a little girl, almost five, who’s abducted from her family’s home in Colombia in the 1950’s and abandoned in the jungle. She learns to survive by copying and living with a troop of monkeys, gradually becoming feral and losing her humanness over the five years she spends with them.

Eventually she’s discovered by two hunters who take her to the Colombian city of Cucuta and sell her to a brothel, where she’s beaten constantly and being groomed for prostitution. She manages to escape but winds up living on the streets for a few years till a crime family enslaves her to work in their house. Finally she gets away from them thanks to a neighbor she befriends who puts her on a path to start her life all over again at age 14.

It’s quite an incredible, harrowing childhood account and reads quite well thanks to the author’s daughter who apparently put her mother’s memories together over several years to make this book, along with the help from British ghostwriter Lynne Barrett-Lee.

I did have trouble believing the author survived alone in the jungle living with monkeys at the age of four. Seemingly there’s no way to verify it. But I read on and got caught up in her many escapes and misfortunate story nonetheless. By the end, the years she recounts in the jungle seem the least of her worries as a kid — as she went to hell and back many times over living among various humans. (No wonder she appreciates the monkeys so much!)

I’m not sure if it totally matters to me if the monkey part is totally true or not; even if the story is peripherally true it seems quite something. The book reads sincere and from what I’ve heard from interviews from the author (Marina Chapman) and her daughter (Vanessa) – the scary things that happened to her in childhood seem quite believable – it’s a glimpse of poverty and hell in South America. Marina Chapman appears real to me and one who’s overcome a lot. She and her daughter don’t seem in it for fame or money, they are donating the profits to charity. The daughter says she wrote the book to find out more about their long-lost relatives, her grandparents.

I credit Marina Chapman for her strength and perseverance to make a life for herself and her daughter for making this pretty unforgettable story of redemption known.

Wow this is a dynamite novel. So well done, so heartfelt, the characters so believable I thought they were real. It was sad to leave them behind at the end. So far I think “Me Before You” is my favorite read of 2013; does that make me a lightweight? I hope not. After all, British author Jojo Moyes is definitely more than a romance writer by now if ever she was categorized as only that.

This was my first Moyes read so I’m definitely behind the curve as I know she’s popular for quite a few other novels. I had heard such great things about her and this book that I had to snap it up. It was a pick for my book club, too, and I was glad it didn’t disappoint.

Most know by now, “Me Before You” is about a 35-year-old former male business executive in England who suffers an accident and becomes confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. Twenty-seven year-old Louisa Clark becomes his caretaker though she has no experience working with disabled people. She’s not wealthy like he is, and they are at odds at the beginning, he is very embittered and she’s quite new to the situation. But after months they finally start to warm to each other and begin to broaden each other’s horizons. About then Louisa secretly finds out Will’s set a six-month deadline to go through with an assisted suicide. So she begins to plan adventures to take him on that hopefully will change his mind. Both meanwhile find themselves falling for the other. Will he go through with the suicide or won’t he? That is the question.

The issues behind the book seem quite topical and well researched by Moyes. You really feel a perspective of what disabled people go through and what they face on a daily basis. Despite the grim subject matter, the novel is quite uplifting and didn’t seem overly sentimental; the character of Louisa is upbeat and endearing, funny at times, and the families of Will and Louisa play interesting supporting roles. Moreover, the love story of these two from different worlds sweeps one away. I felt for both of them, and thought the ending worked okay though others might disagree.

If you read this one, let me know what you think. And if you didnt, check it out!

I’m usually game for science/suspense novels especially having to do with Arctic exploration, paleontology/anthropology or those of another era, including people or creatures stuck in the ice (or even sap for those “Jurassic Park” readers). Yeah let me at those books!

Stephen Kiernan’s debut “The Curiosity,” published last month, came right at a good time for such a summer read. It’s not giving anything away to say it’s about a man swept overboard into the Arctic Ocean in 1906, who’s found frozen deep in the ice by a group of modern-day scientists and is brought back to life to today’s world.

The ramifications of this are huge and the novel interestingly delves into all sorts of issues: how the frozen man views today’s technological advances in contrast to the world he left behind; what his reanimation means for the field of cryonics; and the moral, ethical and religious questions it raises about humanity and bringing back a dead person to life.

The story unfolds through four rotating narrators; there’s the frozen man himself (Jeremiah) who comes back to life and slowly regains his memory of his former life as a judge, husband and father; and Dr. Kate Philo, who’s scientific team made the discovery and comes to know and love her subject albeit a bit too personally; and her boss the egotistical Erastus Carthage who’s after power, glory and money from the discovery; and lastly, Daniel Dixon the slimy journalist who ends up playing a heavy hand in the novel’s crash-down ending.

All in all, I enjoyed the novel, and thought it a good summer yarn, one that raises some interesting dilemmas, and in places was a good page-turner. The author has a good ear for writing dialog and conjuring the transformative story. Just a few problems popped up for me: the middle of the novel seemed to lose steam and lag a bit and I thought it could’ve been edited shorter than its 432 pages. It seems to get a bit redundant in the middle, and two of the narrators (Carthage and Dixon) I looked forward to much less than the two main narrators, Jeremiah and Dr. Philo. Perhaps in this respect their characters were a bit too black-and-white, between being bad guys than good guys.

I also had a few credibility issues here and there with the narrative (beyond the premise), but I guess I could possibly believe the love story theme towards the end between scientist and subject.

After all, remember Timothy Hutton in “Iceman” in 1984? It was similar in concept. Hutton plays an anthropologist whose team finds a body of a prehistoric man in ice who comes to life. And Hutton finds himself defending the man against those who want to dissect his life in the name of science. There’s a love there for another persecuted human being, am I right? And always in these tales, the scientist will go down fighting. Meanwhile the modern-day world, which ruins everything, is viewed as awful.

Interestingly author Stephen Kiernan says the idea for “The Curiosity” came from the James Taylor song “Frozen Man,” which he heard in 1992. I guess I’m not too familiar with that song, but I have to give Kiernan credit for letting his novel thaw over these many years. “The Curiosity” got me interested in the ice again, earlier eras and the primordial goo that makes up life and ties all that lives together. Way to go, an enticing debut!

PS. I like the book cover of the Canadian edition (pictured above) much better than the U.S. edition (at left), which seems with the clothes spread out almost clown-like and perhaps confusing. The Canadian edition is more fetching and dignified of the frozen man. What do you think? And are you curious to read “The Curiosity”?

Quite an alluring book jacket cover eh? I had not read author Robert Olmstead before but I was intrigued that “The Coldest Night” was a love story set in the 1950s at the backdrop of the Korean War. What could be more tragic than intense young love and war? And on the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean conflict, I was curious to know more and pay tribute to the Vets who fought to keep the peninsula free. “The Coldest Night” looked like a good read, so I was game.

The story is broken into three parts. The first part introduces a boy named Henry Childs, 17, who has been raised by his single mother in the hills of West Virginia on not a lot of money. He starts working at a ranch caring for horses in his spare time when he falls for a judge’s daughter named Mercy who takes riding lessons there. They end up falling passionately in love and decide to run away to New Orleans in a state of young bliss, that is until Mercy’s father and brother track her down and force them to part ways, letting Henry know he’s not on par with their kind of people.

Devastated to lose Mercy, Henry joins the Marines (in the second part of the novel) and is sent to Korea in time to fight in the brutal battle of the Chosin Reservoir. Here he experiences war atrocities and suffering that are unimaginable. His dreams of Mercy and their times together seem to pull him through in the darkest of these times.

In the final part, Henry slowly makes his way back home, though he’s changed and literally scarred by the war. He can’t seem to forget the horrendous things he’s seen and experienced in Korea, and is also shattered by his mother’s passing while there. Will he reconnect with Mercy, you wonder, or will both be too changed to be together now? What has happened to her in the meanwhile? These are questions mostly resolved in the novel’s final pages.

It may seem a straightforward love/war story with a familiar premise yet the writing in “The Coldest Night” is quite beautiful, notably the descriptions and the coming of age of the boy Henry, who’s quite sensitive to the world and his first love. I especially thought the author, Robert Olmstead, wrote the war scenes amazingly well, and the falling in love parts aren’t too shabby either. His descriptions of the Korean battles really blew me away, and were more effective to me than another war novel I read recently called “The Yellow Birds,” which I know is about a different war but on the whole didn’t grasp me like this one did. Olmstead has a beautiful command of words, which makes “The Coldest Night” a stark but moving book that’ll simmer through you long after the pages float by.

What about you, have you read this novel? What did you think? And what are the best war stories you’ve ever come across?

I heard so many good things about Maria Semple’s 2012 novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” from the blogosphere that I snatched it up for summer reading especially because I heard it was “divinely funny” and “masterfully satirical.”

Many know by now it involves a quirky, smart family living in Seattle. The mother (Bernadette), formerly a recipient of a MacArthur genius grant for architecture, has turned agoraphobic and bipolar; the father, a star at Microsoft, is crazy-busy developing a program with robots; and their whip-smart 15-year-old daughter Bee, who’s suffered various heart operations as a child, has gotten in early acceptance to an elite prep school back East. For this, her parents grant her any wish she wants, which turns out to be a family trip to Antarctica during Christmas break. But the stresses this puts on them starts to unravel their world and ultimately leads to Bernadette’s disappearance.

Written in the form of correspondences: emails, letters, documents, the novel comes off quite fresh and innovative. The first half I found pretty amusing especially the mother’s emails to a “virtual assistant” in India who does many of her chores because Bernadette doesn’t want to go out of her house or see people, whom she seems to dislike. Bernadette’s definitely a bit nutty and cynical (especially to other school kids’ parents whom she refers to as gnats), but she’s still a bit humorous in her ways and not unsympathetic. Her love for her daughter comes shining through.

With its pieced together correspondences, I wasn’t exactly sure where the story was heading, but Bernadette’s unstable actions begin to take the family to the brink in the book’s second half. It gets a bit more serious, for sure, as her husband attempts an intervention for her, only to find Bernadette’s flown the coop. It’s around then the novel picks up and you’re not sure if the family will break apart or if she’ll be found and they’ll get back together. But along the way you get a good perspective of each of the characters and what they’re going through. I especially liked the brainy teenage Bee.

Perhaps my favorite part of the novel, which I found engaging especially toward the end, is the whole Antarctica trip and the voyage the father and Bee take there trying to find Bernadette. It seems the perfect backdrop for the family’s woes and a lot of interesting detail is given to their travels to the continent, which on average is the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth. For this particular family, Antarctica seems just the right place to begin the healing, or should I say, the thawing. …

What about you, did you like Semple’s novel? Or did you think it went overboard?