Category / books i didn't pick

by booksoverlookedblog

BIDP: Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman

Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

It’s time for another round of Books I Didn’t Pick, and we’ll be taking a step into a world of witchcraft with Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman. Watching the movie Practical Magic has become a Halloween tradition for my sister and me. It’s a really fun movie, and we both like the strong bond between the two main characters, who are also sisters. My own sister gifted me Magic Lessons, the first book chronologically (but not the first written) in the Practical Magic series. 

I think I need to add a disclaimer here: I haven’t read the other books in the series, so my interpretation of things may not be accurate to the series as a whole. But as long as you’re not looking for deep lore analysis, pour yourself a cup of Courage Tea and get comfy.

Magic Lessons is the story of Maria Owens, powerful witch and matriarch of the Owens family. Centuries ago, Maria was scorned by a man, and cast a powerful curse: any man that loved an Owens woman was doomed to die. But who was Maria Owens outside of her curse? Who was the man who spurned Maria? And what happened to Maria after she was nearly hanged as a witch? 

The writing is beautiful. It goes into great depths to describe the details of life in the 1600s, and at times it feels downright cozy. Hoffman has done an incredible amount of research on the time period, and it shows. However, that research at times also gets in the way of the storytelling. The pages are full of history lessons, some relevant to the story, some not. Too much of this history is also given to the reader divorced from the story itself. For example, in the first chapter, the omniscient narrator tells the reader that 90% of women in Maria’s time were illiterate. The book gives us this actual percentage, rather than weaving it into the rest of the narrative. Several chapters start with the history of an area, but don’t add much to the story otherwise. The only “research dump” like this that was really relevant to the story was information about the Salem witch trials, though the characters had left Salem years ago by that point.

While the writing is lovely, the book can be achingly slow. This was because, in part, I had very few characters to cheer for. I liked Maria’s foster mother, Hannah, and Maria’s love interest, Samuel. However, Maria was a hard sell for me. Maria starts  as a perfect, precocious child who becomes a talented and powerful witch. The first three chapters dedicate a lot of time telling the re about how cool and special Maria is. I understood why, as Hoffman needs to establish Maria’s talents and skills, but it got tiresome quickly. I reached my breaking point in chapter three after Maria helps two of her friends deal with abusive husbands. Both of her friends go on to name their first daughters Maria “so that they said that name a hundred times a day with love and devotion.” 

The novel also uses real historical figures as characters, most notably John Hathorne, a magistrate of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and prominent judge in the Salem Witch Trials. In real life, Hathorne would ultimately sentence 19 innocent people to death for the crime of witchcraft. Presenting fictionalized versions of real people can be a delicate thing. Hathorne is given nuance, especially when he and Maria first meet early in the book. I liked that he was shown to be repressed by Puritan society. At that point in time, we typically think of women being repressed, not men. I appreciated seeing how such a strict religious society affected men as well. 

If you were looking for subtlety in the characters, you’ll be disappointed. The omniscient narrator tells you every aspect of their outer and inner lives, without leaving room for interpretation. While Maria and Hathorne have layers, they’re not gradually peeled back as the story progresses. Too often, we learn the characters’ thoughts and feelings through the narration, rather than their words and actions. When this happens, I feel like I’m reading a detailed outline of a story, but not really experiencing it alongside the characters. And, because I could rarely connect with the characters, Magic Lessons committed the greatest sin that any novel can commit.

I was bored. 

Since I didn’t feel invested in the characters, I needed a strong plot to make the book more interesting to read. As I mentioned before, though, the plot is very slow-paced. It was kind of like going fishing: the scenery was pretty, nothing would happen for a long time, and then you’d get a few minutes of frantic action. After the halfway mark, the plot became circular, with the main conflicts repeating themselves twice over. The climax was fantastic, but for the most part, getting there was a slog.

The novel suffers from prequelitis as well. Maria lays her curse because she has to, since it’s an important part of the books in the rest of the series. But the timing of it was terrible, because she fell in love just before the curse was laid. Towards the end of the book, Maria buys a house and sets up a trust so it will always remain in the family. That would be nice, except she buys the house in Salem. The place where she was scorned, nearly killed,  and full of people who want to kill her loved ones. So why does she want to buy a house in Salem? Because the other books in the series take place in Salem.1 Things happen because they have to, not because they make sense for the characters or the plot.

Obviously this wasn’t a great book for me. So it might surprise you to read that I’ve actually recommended it to a few other people. Well, to people who loved Where the Crawdads Sing. Much like Crawdads, the beautiful writing is what makes Magic Lessons shine. 

I’ve seen mostly positive reviews for Magic Lessons, which often cite the prose, the mother-daughter relationship, and Hoffman’s depiction of women as some of the strongest points in the book. I honestly don’t think that Magic Lessons is a bad book, so much as it is a bad book for me. It’s “no thoughts, just vibes,” and that’s not really the kind of story I go for. If that’s something you enjoy, and you like historical fiction (especially with a touch of magic), check this one out. I recommend reading on a rainy Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea.

Because I enjoy doing this, I have my chapter-by-chapter review below. I tried to not get too spoilery in the main review, but everything in the chapter breakdown is a big spoiler party.

  • Chapter 1: I like Hannah and the last scene was very good, but so much of this chapter feels like a research dump.
  • Chapter 2: I don’t really like omniscient narrators, but it’s not driving me crazy, even if it means there’s not a lot of dialogue.
  • Chapter 3: The book has started getting better, since it’s no longer all about how special Maria is.
  • Chapter 4: I’m really curious how the book will handle Hathorne going forward. I think it’s interesting that the author depicts Hathorne as repressed by Puritan society, not just repressed women.
  • Chapter 5: Faith continues the Owens tradition of “precocious child wise beyond her years.”
  • Chapter 6: Shit finally got real. Also, why are all but two men in the book utter scum? Martha’s husband could have been kind and died, and it wouldn’t quell her desire for a daughter of her own.
  • Chapter 7: This is a problem with prequels: Maria lays the curse because she has to, because it’s dealt with in the later books. But she lays the curse after she realizes she’s in love with Sam, so now the whole chapter is about how she can’t be with him, and it’s frustrating as all hell.
  • Chapter 8: The first two pages of this chapter are just history lessons that have nothing to do with Faith. Faith is a lot like her mom, which goes back to her being the “perfect child” trope. Also, Hathorne – real guy who sent real innocent people to their real deaths – has been given much more sympathy than the fictional Martha.
  • Chapter 9: Another frustrating chapter of Sam wanting to be with Maria, and her telling him no, then they sleep together anyway.
  • Chapter 10: Maria’s story is just more of the same; Faith’s the one I’m invested in now.
  • Chapter 11: …is Hoffman implying that Katherine Parr was not only a witch, but an evil one? Curious to see where the story will go now, as the biggest plot line so far has been wrapped up and there’s still 100 pages left.
  • Chapter 12: So much of this book has been about Maria looking for Faith, but we barely see them together once they’re reunited. Talk about a lot of buildup with little emotional payoff.
  • Chapter 13: I don’t like Faith, but I am 100% here for her seeking revenge on Hathorne. However, this circular plot is getting even more circular. We’ve had the will they-won’t they with Sam and Maria three times now, and now Faith and her mother are separated again.
  • Chapter 14: This is fine. At least the plot’s moving forward, and of course Maria is just the best writer ever. The Fall Out of Love Tea is a bit manipulative, though, if you ask me.
  • Chapter 15: Of course it’s Faith that ensures Hathorne will be remembered as a bad man, not just society in general thinking that killing innocent people is bad.
  • Chapter 16: Maria’s house is perfect, just like Maria. The epilogue still doesn’t tell us why Maria chose to settle in Salem, but it tells us every herb in her pantry and the outfit she wore when she sat for a portrait. Why. 
  1. The Salem thing bugged me so much I had to stop reading for a couple days. No, it’s never explained why Maria settled in Salem.  ↩︎
by booksoverlookedblog

BIDP: Partials by Dan Wells

Today’s edition of “Books I Didn’t Pick” is brought to you by Partials, courtesy of a holiday book exchange.

Some books are timeless: stories that ring true from generation to generation, no matter how circumstances change. Other books are timely: it’s no surprise that Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague was a New York Times best seller for weeks in 2020, even if it was set in the 1500s.

Then there’s books that I’ll call “personally timely.” These are the ones that might not have meant as much to you if you’d read them at another point in your life, but they’re meaningful now.

Partials by Dan Wells is one of those for me.

To begin, Partials is set eleven years after the devastating Partials War. The Partials are genetically engineered super-soldiers that turned on their human creators, and then vanished. Before disappearing entirely, the Partials left humanity with a parting gift: the RM virus. The virus all but annihilated the human race, and robbed humanity of its future. Every human baby born since the introduction of the virus has died, succumbing to RM within days, if not hours.

The Defense Grid, one of the last pockets of humanity, requires all women age 18 or older to become pregnant as often as possible, in the hope that one of the babies will be born with an immunity to RM.

Kira Walker is a medical intern whose father was killed by the RM Virus. When her best friend becomes pregnant, Kira will risk her life to find a cure for RM. With every other avenue of research failing to find a cure, she will attempt to do what no one else has done. To save the life of her best friend’s child, she must capture and study one of the brutal and deadly Partials.

That’s a lot to unpack, I know. I’m sure that everyone will have a different reaction to reading a story about a pandemic now than they would have pre-2020. Before COVID, I was even working on a post-apocalyptic short story which had been brought about by a plague. I liked the possibilities that pandemic fiction offered: a reset of the world that you live in, while keeping much of the world’s infrastructure intact. It also felt like a safe, remote end of the world scenario. Nuclear war and devastating natural disasters are threats that felt much more real at the time. But after three years of a pandemic that has killed millions of people, plague-related fiction isn’t nearly as fun as it used to be. COVID-19 wasn’t the end of the world by any means, but living through it has changed the way I engage with media that use a pandemic as a plot or setting element. As for my post-apocalyptic story? I haven’t touched it since 2020, and it’s unlikely that I ever will again.

Other than the fictitious pandemic, there’s something else that triggered a strong reaction in me, which wouldn’t have been as strong if I’d read Partials as a teenager. But for a thritysomething woman who’s been married for just shy of three years now, pregnancy is kind of a huge deal.

I have baggage around pregnancy/childbirth/motherhood. It’s not severe enough that I wouldn’t be able to read a book like Partials, but instead of feeling like a dystopia, the novel felt like a horror story to me. And that’s okay. Sometimes I seek out something that I know will scare me, if only out of some eerie fascination with it. The 1996 Mount Everest disaster, for instance. Horrifying, and yet I’ve read every Wikipedia page related to it, Into Thin Air by John Krakauer (and the made for TV movie), along with watching the movie Everest, and two separate documentaries on the subject. That’s what reading about pregnancy (forced or otherwise), childbirth, and infant mortality is like for me. It’s a nightmare, but when there’s a fourth wall between it and me, it’s easier for me to engage with it. It’s a safe way to interact with something you’re afraid of.

But that’s not what you’re here for, so let’s get back into the book itself.

The writing is fine. There’s nothing stellar about the prose, but it’s not bad, either. It gets the job done, which works for the breakneck pace of the plot. However, the moments with the biggest emotional impacts sometimes feel lackluster because of it.

The plot is pretty dense, and I think the novel suffers from excess. There’s so many characters and factions to keep track of, along with their relationships with one another. Several of Kira’s friends play a role in the story. Alongside Kira, there’s her boyfriend, Marcus; foster-sisters Madison, Ariel, Xochi, and Isolde; Jayden, Madison’s brother; and Madison’s husband, Haru. There are also a plethora of other characters that the audience needs to remember and keep track of: the senators that run the island, various military and medical superiors, and members of the rebel group, the Voice. These people play no small role in the story, but it’s nigh impossible to keep track of all of them.

Then there’s also the factions in the story. Kira and her multitude of friends live in the Defense Grid, on Long Island, possibly the last human city remaining on Earth. The Grid is occasionally attacked by The Voice, a group of rebels seeking to end forced pregnancy. Both the Grid and the Voice hate and fear the superhuman Partials, who have created their own society away from the Grid and the Voice. As the story goes on, we discover that the Partials have also all subdivided into factions of their own.

It’s a lot. Sometimes I felt like I needed a notebook to keep track of what was going on. With so many characters, they can’t possible get all the time they need to be fully developed. This made many of Kira’s friends an indistinct blur, and the villains largely forgettable. They’re evil, but they’re not interesting.

There’s also plenty that I do like about this book, too. It’s exciting with plot reveals that keep you guessing. While it could be overly complicated at times, the story never stagnates. I also liked the reasons why teenagers had to be the protagonists in this book.

In YA fiction, especially dystopian YA, teenagers often get put in dangerous situations that they have no business dealing with, especially if there are adults better able to handle the situation. Partials at least does a good job of addressing this. When sixteen-year-old Kira is placed in charge of research that goes well beyond her training and knowledge, she and her friends question why the senators are allowing her to do this. Their reasons are revealed later and actually make sense.

Even more than that, Kira makes a point about why it had to be teenagers and young people to make a change, and why her generation will the ones who cure R.M. Kira and her generation are called “plague babies,” born before R.M., but too young to remember remember what the world was like before the virus. The adults do remember the old world, as well as the horrific events of the Partials uprising and the spread of R.M. Most of them have given up hope that R.M. can be cured, and refuse to take the drastic measures required to guarantee the future of the human species. Billions of humans are dead, and they’re unwilling to risk any more lives on trying to a cure. They insist on doing the same thing over again, mandating pregnancy, hoping one day a child will be born with an immunity to R.M. This has not produced a single healthy baby, yet the Senate refuses to change tactics and try something new. When the adults have given up on the future of the human race, Kira realizes that only “plague babies” like her have enough will and passion to act and try to fix things.

I remember what it was like to be a kid. I remember feeling unheard, or that no one took me seriously because I was young. Thankfully, I had parents, teachers, and adults in my life who understood that children and teenagers have something worth saying. In the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, students rose up and demanded change. I observed many adults criticizing the student activists. One of the common refrains of their detractors were that they were kids, with no real-world experience and no business in telling adults what to do.

It made me think of one of my favorite high school teachers, who gave quizzes on current events and made us watch political debates as homework assignments. In 2006, he took a group of students, including me, to a Save Darfur rally in Washington, D.C. It was incredible to be there with so many like-minded people supporting a cause I cared deeply about. My teacher understood that just because we were young didn’t mean that we couldn’t be passionate about saving human lives, or civil rights, or a million other things outside of typical high school worries.

I didn’t realize how remarkable that was. At this point I’ve spent most of my career working with children and families, and I have a better understanding of how young people need to be heard. And how rare that can be.

In Partials, this is all Kira’s choice. She doesn’t have a special fate or destiny. There’s no prophecy about her. She just knows what she has to do, and she’s willing to risk everything for what she believes in.

I don’t think I’ll be reading the any of the sequels, but I liked Partials as I was reading it, even when it hit a bit too close to home.

by booksoverlookedblog

BIDP: Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owns was released in 2018 to great acclaim. Consequently, I’ve heard praise for the novel for a few years now, but never read it. I added it to my ever-growing “To Be Read” list at the recommendation of just…so many people, but there were always different books that intrigued me. Crawdads was one of many books that I’d get around to reading “someday.”

And then: book club. Yes, the same small book club that forced me to read An Ember in the Ashes got back together. And, as you might have guessed, the first book we picked was Where the Crawdads Sing.

I am the type of person who dismisses popular things out of hand. When a lot of people praise something to high heaven, I tend to roll my eyes and stay away. Especially when it sounds like something that Facebook moms with “Live, Laugh, Love” wall art would be enamored by. However, I am trying to be less judgmental and open to new things, so I picked up Crawdads without complaint.

There was one through line I heard through all the praise the book received: that it was beautifully written. However, no one casually talking about the book ever seems to mention the characters or the plot. This worried me a bit. If you’ve read any of my other reviews, you’ll know that what really draws me into a story, more than anything, is the characters. Would this be a beautiful book, but devoid of emotion and characters I would actually care about? There was only one way to find out.

I have to agree with the same thing that everyone says: the prose is beautiful. It’s lush with description and metaphor, and is easily the novel’s strongest point. I wasn’t surprised when a movie based on the book was announced, but I had my doubts about how well it would work. Removing the narration is like removing the heart of the original work. Though I haven’t seen the movie myself, I think the many mixed and critical reviews show the importance of the actual writing in the book. The story suffers without it.

Looking beyond the beautiful prose, the plot can feel thin at times. For example, the book starts with the (probable) murder of Chase Andrews, a character that the protagonist, Kya, has been involved with. The investigation and Kya’s subsequent arrest feels more like a framing device for the story. Near the end of the novel, Kya is arrested and goes to trial after being arrested for Chase’s murder. Until that point, the murder mystery doesn’t feel fully integrating into Kya’s story.

The book uses an omniscient narrator, which I generally don’t like. Omniscient narrators make me feel like I’m looking at a character through a window, and not like I can connect with them or get in their heads. It felt like there was a lot of telling and not enough showing when it came to characters’ emotions.

She’d given love a chance; now she wanted simply to fill the empty spaces. Ease the loneliness while walling off her heart.

Over time, I grew to like it. Even though the narrator knows everything, it doesn’t give the whole story away. While the book opens with the mystery of Chase Andrews’s suspected murder, the reader doesn’t get an actual, final answer to the who-dun-it (if anyone dun it at all) until the final pages.

Considering the premise of the book – an abandoned girl living alone in a marsh for years – I expected this to be a survival narrative. A coming-of-age story in the style Island of the Blue Dolphins or Hatchet, perhaps. Especially after the book points out that it’s easy to find your dinner in a marsh, provided you didn’t mind digging up shellfish or fishing.

Kya observes and studies the marsh and great detail, and she relies on it for her survival, though not in the way I expected. For much of the novel she sells mussels, and uses the money she earns to buy groceries and supplies. She receives secondhand clothes from two characters, Jumpin’ and Mabel, who become parental figures to her. It is a survival story in that it’s about a girl living alone and in poverty, and raising herself to adulthood. While she does ultimately live off the land, it’s not in the direct way that I’d anticipated.

Towards the middle of the book, I realized, with growing horror, that this was a romance novel. Romance isn’t one of my favorite genres, but I usually like it as a B-plot. But this was no B-plot. The bulk of the book focuses on Kya’s romantic relationships with two boys from town, Tate and Chase.

I was a disappointed. I wanted Hatchet, but what I got was a banal love triangle. Kya falls in love with Tate, but he leaves her to go to college, and doesn’t come back into her life for years. Lonely and heartbroken, Kya lets herself fall for Chase.

A lot of the plot was predictable from here on out. Anyone who’s ever watched a romantic comedy could figure out what would happen next.

We know who Chase is from the start of the book. He’s a star quarterback in high school, which in fiction about a weird girl is usually synonymous with “asshole.” He comes from a prominent family in town who look down on people like Kya as “marsh trash.” He’s known to cheat on his partners, and even Kya understands that becoming romantically involved with him could be disastrous.

On the other hand, Tate is a nice, smart boy who loves and respects the marsh. He teaches Kya to read and helps open her to the wider world. Which of these two do you think she’s going to end up with? It’s not hard to figure out.

I really wasn’t that into the romance aspect of the novel until I saw it in a different light. Instead of a generic love story, Kya’s relationships with Tate and Chase could be read as an extended metaphor for humans’ relationships with the marsh. Chase sees the marsh as a thing to be used, either for hunting, fishing, or draining the water for land development. It’s much the same way as he treats Kya. She’s a curiosity, an exotic adventure, someone to bed for the bragging rights of having slept with the feral marsh girl. He uses Kya and discards her when she no longer suits his needs.

Like most people, Chase knew the marsh as a thing to be used, to boat and fish, or drain for farming, so Kya’s knowledge of its critters, currents, and cattails intrigued him. But he scoffed at her soft touch, cruising at slow speeds, drifting silently past deer, whispering at birds’ nests.

Tate loves the marsh for what it is. Where some people only see it as a swampy wasteland, Tate understands its intrinsic beauty. He dedicates his life to studying and protecting the marsh. Similarly, he doesn’t reject Kya out of hand as “marsh trash” as the other townspeople do. He appreciates Kya for who she is, and doesn’t try to tame or change her. He gives her the tools she needs to expand her world, and by doing so, helps protect her and the marsh.

Overall, I liked Where the Crawdads Sing well enough. I’m glad I kept an open mind about it, but it’s not a book I’d re-read. The plot as a bit thin and I didn’t always like the narrative style. Even so, the prose is excellent and the book can be read on a couple different levels. If you’re looking for a well-written, even relaxing book, this is for you. The audiobook also has a wonderful reader, Cassandra Campbell.

But I think I’ll stick with Hatchet and Grandma Gatewood’s Walk for now, thanks.