Book Review as Wine Review: Citrus County, John Brandon

First impressions: I hadn't read John Brandon's earlier novel, Arkansas, though we have it in the house. But yesterday Citrus County came in the mail, and the tactile cover drew me in (oh, McSweeney's production values!)

Middle: So there's going to be a lot written on this book about how it's a great book about junior high, teenagers, etc. And it is. But just saying that leaves out, I feel, one of the things that I most appreciated about it: while the book was often set inside a junior high, and three of the main characters were strongly associated with the junior high (Shelby & Toby are students, and Mr. Hibma one of their teachers), the book wasn't about junior high. It wasn't about sex or hard moral choices or teenage romance in the way that a saturday after-school special is about those things. Rather, it was about those things in the way that life is about those things. It took the idea of "junior highschool students are able to make hard moral choices" not as its moral, but as its beginning, as its starting axiom, the way that other novels about adults assume it from the get-go.

I can't tell you much about the plot without spoliers, except that it revolves around a character who's not actually present for most of the book (not really a plot- or writing-trick; just a quirk of the particular social type of narrative the book is structured around), and that Shelby and Toby might be in love.

The writing is quite plain in most places, but plain in a way that's beautiful in its sparseness, like the way a cinderblock building can be beautiful in its sparseness. It's narrated in turn by different characters--Shelby, Toby, and Mr. Hibma, for the most part.

Finish: It is also a study of the ways that depression manifests itself. It is not a happy book, though it has what would be conventionally considered to be an incredibly happy ending, plotwise. You could take the same plot and characters in this book and come out easily with a sensational beach-read-type of book, and countless authors have, but Brandon veers away from taking the easy choices, plot and characterwise--as if those easy choices hadn't actually existed in the first place. That, I think, is what I like most about Citrus County: it seems like the idea that easy choices don't exist in the first place is both embedded into the book's style and constitutes the book's theme.

Pairs well with: this book basically made up for my reading My Sister's Keeper earlier this summer, which looked like it was going to be about hard choices and then the author's deus ex machina showed up to make the ending conventionally happy. It would be an interesting experiment to try and read these books back-to-back to compare how authors manipulate readers when the characters are in difficult situations.

Book Review as Wine Review: Hugh Pine, Janwillem Lincoln van de Wetering

First impressions: This is a children's book featuring a lot of roadkill, a sub-header reading "Hugh doesn't want to be a man. He just wants to look like one," and an anthropomorphic porcuipine who is mistaken for human by everyone except the post-office manager. I found all of these things strange even when I first read it in third-grade or so, and continue to find them strange every time I reread this book, but you can already tell that this cannot be an unbiased review.

Middle: It was only last night, after rereading this book for maybe the 10th time, that I realized that the book is actually about how hard it is to find satisfactory solutions to the problem of freedom vs. security for both the individual and a collective group of people, and about how hard it is for those boundaries to be navigated among and between cultural and linguistic divides, and especially about the problems that happen when said cultures understand each other just enough so that the solutions that at first look good to later turn out to be very wrong indeed. It is also a book about how animals don't make the same decisions people do, despite having the human world imposing its decisions on them. It is also about a loner trying to deal with things that scare him once he recognizes that the right thing to do is both a.) right and b.) not easy c.) there would be consequences to a decision to choose not to act, as well. It's also a book about how it's necessary for each person to make their own decision about how to draw that boundary, and how sometimes the boundaries that work for most people won't work for all.

Finish: This book is hilarious. "Hugh Pine stayed very still. Maybe they would go away. But the noise only got worse. They were shouting and banging on the tree. Hugh Pine snorted. He began to climb down....'We are the committee,' the three porcupines said. 'Very nice,' Hugh Pine said. 'How very good of you to be the committee, and how very good of you to come and see me. Why don't you go away?'"

I understand that the author also wrote an introduction to Buddhism for children.

Pairs well with: pecan pie, coffee with cream, Lies my Teacher Told me by James W. Loewen.