Love for the Moon Over Manifest

Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


One of those sweet and intriguing stories that makes you feel torn between whether you like reading the flashbacks better or the present. And you gotta love twists at the end.

I loved the mystery surrounding the fortune teller/story teller and how in the end, most of the narrative turns out to be her story. Was that too much of a spoiler? I hope not.

Being the English major/writer nerd that I am, I have to put a plug in for the narrative itself. There are multiple layers of story. Each character has a story that weaves throughout all of the others. It's intricate, it's...Dickens-esque, even. You get the spunky girl on the cover telling her story, you get the fortune teller, you get the news writer, you get the soldier writing home, and... you also get the ultra mysterious Jinx character, who I believe never actually tells his story from the 1st person, but who you can't help but identify with in some degree.

(*Slight spoiler alert here.*)

why you should love Oliver Twist

First of all, how can you not automatically like someone with the last name Twist? What if my name was Sam Spin? Or Sammy Shout? Dickens is totally the pioneer of making up cool last names.

Other things to love about Dicken's Oliver Twist:

1. The boy is adorably, heart-breakingly innocent.
2. He wants so badly to please people.
3. Did I mention the cool last name?
4. The book spawned a musical which I am seeing in November.
5. The book has also inspired several movies and spin-off's, including 1 magically moving film that is absolutely beautiful, musical, romantic, happifying, and a must-see: "August Rush." Just trust me. It really is magical. And that's what this blog is about, after all - stories that are magical.
6. The novel is a Dicken's classic, for heaven's sake.
7. Second only to the last name Twist is the name given to the spunky, independent pock-picket, The Artful Dodger, also called simply The Artful. You have to say it out loud with an English accent to get the full effect. Just try it. 
8. The book gets me thinking about the human element in my own writing. How some characters really are "all bad," but some are not.

Anyway, Moon Over Manifest is next, I promise. I hit a speed bump in my audiobook listening when I stopped driving to Provo, but I'm still an avid reader. Never changing that.

Review of Poison Study by Maria Snyder

The library did not have an audiobook of Poison Study, so I had to go back to reading hardcopy. I was a little worried about having time to read, but it turns out it wasn't a problem.

I blazed through this book.

It was easy reading, but that's not to say it wasn't also intelligent.

An intriguing idea - the comparison of love to slow poison. Or is being in love only like slow poison until you confess it, share it, and find out it is returned; then is love the antidote?

Yelena, the main character, is likeable for a number of reasons. She's a bit gritty with some dark history and bleak sentiments - making her similar to what a real person might be like who undergoes what she does. I liked that about her.

She is believable as a jaded character but not in a whiny or cheesy or one-dimensional way. In fact, Yelena is actually quite... decisive. And...

Dynamic. That's the word.

I'm still deciding about the love story.

On the one hand, I loved that it started out subtle. You don't realize that you've already met the love interest until, well... you start looking for him. And then you start reading into small reactions a little bit more.

But then once the love story started to gain steam, I felt like a few things happened a little too fast.

*SPOILER ALERT BELOW*

Have you started reading "Life of Pi"?

I have. And so far Life of Pi by Yann Martel is rather slow-going. But that's okay, because I've talked to others who have read it and they say that it picks up.

So hang in there with me.

You may want to keep this interesting tidbit in mind:
Apparently, the story is not as true as it would lead you to believe. Even the "author's note" at the beginning is all part of the overlaying narrative. However, this should not be a deterrent from appreciating the adventure.

(I could go into an abysmal exploration of how the different layers of narrative affect the story experience - I wrote an interesting paper about narrative voice in college. Interestingly enough, that paper was about Ian McEwan's Atonement. I will forbear torturing you with geeky analysis, for now.)

I am still very near the beginning, but I have already found a few passages that I just love.

As a writer, I like to pick apart how other authors build their story and their characters. For instance, chapter 3's primary focus seems to characterize the man called Mamaji by the narrator. Yet, we also get a few quirky little nuggets that teach us about Pi's family and himself.

For instance, I am inclined to think Pi's father is a comical character. Pi says, "It was the talk that Father loved. The more vigorously he resisted actually swimming, the more he fancied it" (chapter 3, page 10). Does this sound like someone you know?

And in chapter 4, when Pi describes his father's zoo.... what a wonderful description! He not only gave me an original perspective on zoo animals, he made me appreciate the sensory experience.

And I am not just referring to what is probably a pungent smell.

Pi pummels us over the head with detail after detail. We get colors, sounds, and exotic animals listed with almost a feverish excitement. You can almost picture Pi waving his arms as he is describing the zoo to you and becoming more and more excited - trying to convey all the wonderful and intriguing details.

The abundance of imagery in words represents the abundance of sensory experience in person. Doesn't it make you feel like you are there, looking around you in wonder as fast as you can, trying to take in as much of the zoo as you can? It's almost overwhelming. It reminds me of how a child might feel upon entering Disneyland for the first time.

I told you I haven't gotten very far. How is it going for you?

The ending twist of City Of Bones - no spoilers

I stayed up late reading in bed this weekend and I finished City Of Bones. I couldn't help it!

Question for you, when you get to the end: What did you think about the twist?

It was definitely startling. I didn't see it coming; I am not ashamed to admit. It definitely "thickened" the plot up nicely and gave you a reason to pick up Book 2.

However, the twist was a little disturbing. Much of the book was spent in building up a certain "tension"...until the end, when it's sort of yanked out from under you.

As a writer, I have to appreciate that Clare has constructed a very clever plot with a cliffhanger that you cannot disregard. As a reader, I'm not so sure that I have accepted the ending twist yet, and I'm mostly reading on in the hopes that the twist will unravel again. If you've read it, you know what I mean.

So you might say that Clare is now in danger of losing my interest... unless she can somehow validate the tension of the first book. Really soon. I've already started book 2, and... I'm waiting.

Final thoughts on Uglies

Just in case anyone else out there has recently finished the Uglies series and wants a few more thoughts about it, here ya go!

I thought a lot about the interaction between the main characters in the books. Specifically, between Tally and her best friend, Shay. It seemed a little... ironic... to me that their friendship lasted only a short period of time before the conflict of their world pulled them apart.

To recap, they became best friends during just a few short months before their scheduled "pretty surgeries," in the first book, Uglies. Near the end of Uglies, they had a falling out that lasted all through the second book, Pretties, and even resonated into the third book, Specials.

Of course you could argue that when Tally and Shay both became Specials in the third book that they were technically aligned on the same "team" once again. They acted civil towards each other, right? Yet to me it seemed like the tension between them never fully dissipated.