![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI walked with M.
This month’s book group, which may or may not be tonight, is about _Where the Forest Meets the Stars_, by Glendy Vanderah, a surname which I really struggle to remember correctly.
This short, engaging and emotionally compelling tale of an ornithology grad student doing field work on Indigo bunting nest viability on human created edges vs. naturally created edges has a whole lot going on in it. First, there’s the backstory of her deceased parents and her own struggles with BRCA related breast cancer detected at an early stage only because of her mother. Second, there’s the enigmatic neighbor selling eggs by the side of the road. But most importantly, there’s the skinny, abused girl who shows up and claims she’s from another galaxy.
The backstory of the enigmatic neighbor — look, just leave now.
SPOILERS
Gabe’s a late-in-life son of a dead lit prof father and a poet mother. Mom’s still around, suffering from Parkinson’s. The excessive number of over-educated folk living in the woods here is because Gabe’s parents and a couple friends of theirs bought vacation homes here. Their natural habitat is UI Urbana Champaign. The ornithology grad student is here because the other couple’s vacation home is rented out summers to grad students doing field work. Gabe’s back story includes a hilarious wrinkle, in which is putative father was impotent and his much older sister an unexpected accident. Gabe is totally impossible, because his dad is actually the other guy. Other guy’s wife descended into alcoholism, dying in the course of the book allowing Gabe’s bio parents to marry. This really feels like it could be a backstory in a JAK novel or Jennifer Crusie book. And yet here we are.
Obviously, with this degree of earthy realism, the skinny, abused girl is not actually from the Pinwheel Galaxy, but rather from a town partway along the road to Urbana: Effingham. Almost feels like commentary. Her parents are also dead — this book is chock full of dead parents — and the murderers of Ursa’s mother eventually join the deceased as well, at Gabe’s hand.
There’s a good chunk of JAK style commentary about the tradeoffs between the pacifism of Jo and her deceased mother, vs the libertarian, gun-owning style of Gabe and his family.
Anyway, the story winds up integrating with regular reality in the hospital, as everyone is trying to pry out of Ursa what she did or did not see happen to her mom and herself, and then attempt to foster Ursa to anyone other than Jo, which goes about as well as you might expect.
There’s just plain too much plot in this book, a problem that is remarkably common with a certain kind of author who goes on to write more aerodynamic tales to great commercial success. I hope — if Vanderah wants commercial success — that pattern happens here as well. In the mean time, there is so much to talk about here, and I am really looking forward to that conversation in book group. I particularly want to know who perceives this as realistic vs not, and why, and who perceives this as emotionally believable or not, and why. I could go a bunch of different directions.
If this sounds at all interesting to you, please read it and share your thoughts.
This month’s book group, which may or may not be tonight, is about _Where the Forest Meets the Stars_, by Glendy Vanderah, a surname which I really struggle to remember correctly.
This short, engaging and emotionally compelling tale of an ornithology grad student doing field work on Indigo bunting nest viability on human created edges vs. naturally created edges has a whole lot going on in it. First, there’s the backstory of her deceased parents and her own struggles with BRCA related breast cancer detected at an early stage only because of her mother. Second, there’s the enigmatic neighbor selling eggs by the side of the road. But most importantly, there’s the skinny, abused girl who shows up and claims she’s from another galaxy.
The backstory of the enigmatic neighbor — look, just leave now.
SPOILERS
Gabe’s a late-in-life son of a dead lit prof father and a poet mother. Mom’s still around, suffering from Parkinson’s. The excessive number of over-educated folk living in the woods here is because Gabe’s parents and a couple friends of theirs bought vacation homes here. Their natural habitat is UI Urbana Champaign. The ornithology grad student is here because the other couple’s vacation home is rented out summers to grad students doing field work. Gabe’s back story includes a hilarious wrinkle, in which is putative father was impotent and his much older sister an unexpected accident. Gabe is totally impossible, because his dad is actually the other guy. Other guy’s wife descended into alcoholism, dying in the course of the book allowing Gabe’s bio parents to marry. This really feels like it could be a backstory in a JAK novel or Jennifer Crusie book. And yet here we are.
Obviously, with this degree of earthy realism, the skinny, abused girl is not actually from the Pinwheel Galaxy, but rather from a town partway along the road to Urbana: Effingham. Almost feels like commentary. Her parents are also dead — this book is chock full of dead parents — and the murderers of Ursa’s mother eventually join the deceased as well, at Gabe’s hand.
There’s a good chunk of JAK style commentary about the tradeoffs between the pacifism of Jo and her deceased mother, vs the libertarian, gun-owning style of Gabe and his family.
Anyway, the story winds up integrating with regular reality in the hospital, as everyone is trying to pry out of Ursa what she did or did not see happen to her mom and herself, and then attempt to foster Ursa to anyone other than Jo, which goes about as well as you might expect.
There’s just plain too much plot in this book, a problem that is remarkably common with a certain kind of author who goes on to write more aerodynamic tales to great commercial success. I hope — if Vanderah wants commercial success — that pattern happens here as well. In the mean time, there is so much to talk about here, and I am really looking forward to that conversation in book group. I particularly want to know who perceives this as realistic vs not, and why, and who perceives this as emotionally believable or not, and why. I could go a bunch of different directions.
If this sounds at all interesting to you, please read it and share your thoughts.