The Docket: A Monster Calls

Some of us may still be working on our last book club pick of The Name of the Wind (and acceptably so—it is over 700 pages after all!), but we decided it’s time to move on and unveil our next pick for the month of March. As the third month of 2014 comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, we’ll be reading and discussing A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Here’s the plot blurb from Goodreads:

The monster showed up after midnight. As they do.

But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming...

This monster is something different, though. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor.

It wants the truth.

And since that was a little on the vague side, here’s the slightly more straightforward blurb from Amazon:

An unflinching, darkly funny, and deeply moving story of a boy, his seriously ill mother, and an unexpected monstrous visitor.

At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting-- he's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It's ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd-- whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself-- Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.

It’s a short read, clocking in at only 224 pages (and S may in fact have already finished reading it!). It looks to have some shiny gold medallions on the cover, though Amazon won’t let us zoom in and see what awards they are. At any rate, A is definitely excited to be reading her first book from this author, and, in a slight spoiler for our Reading Bingo recap for February coming soon to a screen near you, S has apparently MET him! More to come on that in the future, hopefully. Please join us in reading and chatting!

Will you read A Monster Calls with us this month? Have you read any of Patrick Ness’ other books? Let us know! We’d love to hear from you.

The Docket: The Name of the Wind

Hello, dear readers! We are so sorry for the long drought of post-less days and weeks. WE ARE DESOLATE WITHOUT YOU!!! But, holidays. You know how it is. Book club waits for no season, however, and our WordNerds pick for December, and in all likelihood January, and due to the 700+ page count, maybe even February too, is the much-loved first entry in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, The Name of the Wind. (Alyssa has an unfortunate tendency to mix its title up with that of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, despite the completely different subject matter.) People love love LOVE this book (maybe you are one of these people?), and fantasy-enthusiast Alyssa doesn’t know how she has managed to not read it yet. Susan has lately been expanding her forays into the realms of fantasy fiction for grown-ups and has started this one already. Have you read it? Do you love it? Here’s what Amazon has to say about the plot:

The riveting first-person narrative of a young man who grows to be the most notorious magician his world has ever seen. From his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that transports readers into the body and mind of a wizard. It is a high-action novel written with a poet's hand, a powerful coming-of-age story of a magically gifted young man, told through his eyes: to read this book is to be the hero.

Based on what friends have had to say and the smattering of pages we’ve progressed through, this seems to be a book that defies blurbing and has the weight of the praise of highly regarded authors and publications behind it. Think Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Robin Hobb, Locus…all give it glowing reviews. We hope to add ours to theirs in the coming weeks, so please join us as we get into it! Pick up a copy at the library, purchase it from your local bookstore, borrow one from a friend…or if you’re not as late to the Rothfuss party as we are, just join us in chatting about it when we finish. Allons-y!

The Docket: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Hello, bookworms and moths! Our book club's next book has been decided, and we will be venturing into not-YA with Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This one has been sitting on my shelf since its release, so I am glad to have an excuse to finally get into it! I've heard very good things about this one from pretty much all corners, so hopefully we'll continue the pattern after Code Name Verity and the group will enjoy it. Here's the blurb from Goodreads:

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Yay Neil Gaiman!!! And as an added bonus, since Ocean is fairly short and will be for October/November rather than just one month, we decided to throw in his recent book for young readers, Fortunately, the Milk, too. Here's the blurb for that one:

"I bought the milk," said my father. "I walked out of the corner shop, and heard a noise like this: T h u m m t h u m m. I looked up and saw a huge silver disc hovering in the air above Marshall Road."

"Hullo," I said to myself. "That's not something you see every day. And then something odd happened."

Find out just how odd things get in this hilarious story of time travel and breakfast cereal, expertly told by Newbery Medalist and bestselling author Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Skottie Young.

Like with Code Name Verity, after we finish reading the books we'll have a post with our thoughts where we'd love for you to join in and discuss with us. Time for a visit to the library or bookstore to start tracking down some Neil Gaiman!

Code Name Heartbreak (Which is not a paperback romance novel, we promise.)

You may remember last month when we mentioned that our book club's September pick was going to be Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity, and that we would probably work on some sort of analyze-and-chat post after we finished the book so we could all collectively join in the book club fun. Well friends, that time has come. The book has been read, the feels have been felt, and we are ready to DISCUSS!

Three covers. Take your pick!

WE ARE COWARDS.

Or at least we were. And by we, we definitely mean just Susan, who REJECTED reading this book for our book club on the grounds that it would be TOO SAD (based on pretty much every review that said it was brilliant but heartbreaking). My God, we tried to avoid the waterfall of emotions we knew this book would bring, but we just couldn’t. Our book club picks of late were Not Living Up to Our Expectations, to say the very least. So it seemed petty to continue to avoid a book that made at least 15 Best Books lists in the last year just because we were gormless.

And now our earlier compunctions just seem SO EMBARRASSING. This book is wonderful in basically every way possible, and you have no excuse not to read it. (Okay, maybe one excuse, but it’s pretty lame. We assume it could be possible that everyone else in your town has realized this is a book that should be read and loved, and because of that all the copies in your library may be unavailable. But that’s a weak excuse; pony up the money to buy a copy for yourself. You’ll want to reread it. And then do research and then reread it again.)

We’re just floored. We are utterly and completely floored. WE LOVED SO MUCH OF THIS. Writing voice, narrative structure, characters, emotions, plot. Everything, actually.

Here’s the gist for those of you who are meeting Code Name Verity for the first time: Our narrator is Verity, a British Special Operations Executive who is confessing the details of her mission in Occupied France and her knowledge of airfields and planes to avoid an excruciating death at the hands of her Gestapo captors. It’s all a little disorienting because Verity writes about her feelings towards her collaboration deal, then starts telling the story from the point of view of her best friend, Maddie, whose papers got switched with hers when they flew into France weeks earlier. There are all sorts of twists and turns because Verity is very clever and Maddie is very skilled, but you know all along that it’s leading to the plane crash that left Verity in France, and the consequences of her capture by the Gestapo. We WILL NOT SAY MORE than that until after the jump.

In the spirit of the memorable lists that Maddie and Verity make of their top ten fears, we’ll make a list of the top ten things we want to tell you, and we’ll jump when the information is CLASSIFIED for people who have already read the book.

1. Verity and Maddie as characters. Both are extremely talented and courageous.
2. It’s a downer plot but not a downer book. Verity’s narration is funny at times, and almost always upbeat in spite of her being held in a secret Gestapo prison.
3. Verity’s brother Jamie. He makes eggs for children and we basically fall in love.
4. The structure of the novel is so inherently unreliable, but her friendship with Maddie is so lovely that you want the narration to have all been reliable, so you end up questioning EVERYTHING while hoping against hope that things are the way you want them to be.
5. The Nazis are as well developed as the Allies we meet. It is clear that they are performing evil deeds, but it also comes across that their main flaw is their cowardice rather than an innate evil. Unlike in other novels, the Nazi characters have more motive (and internal conflict) than sadism.
6. Maybe this is part of no. 5, but we can’t fully hate SS-Hauptsturmführer Amadeus von Linden.
7. Did we mention how much we love Maddie and Verity’s best friendship?
8. The Peter Pan allusions start on page 5 and carry through to the end, but the exact parallels of characters change.
9. Everything carries through to the end, and it’s the symmetry and resolution that create the biggest emotional moments.
10. We have book-overs. Or book hangovers. Whatever the word is to describe that we are having trouble reading other books because we can’t let go of this one.

Now we will jump, to leave in unspoiled condition those who haven't read the book yet and wish to remain spoiler-free. If you find yourself in this category, we leave you with the exhortation of GO READ THIS BOOK, and bid you a fond goodnight. For those who have read the book or really don't care about being spoiled (you know who you are...), click onward!