Mary K Foster

~*A LOVE(S) STORY*~

Revisado: 03-21-25

I’m an Austen woman, a Brontë sisters die-hard, and a life-long Louisa May Alcott disciple—- and I speak with the added conviction of 3 degrees in literature to say: Emily Henry is their 21st-century heir.
To describe Henry’s Book Lovers (or Funny Story, et al.) as ‘rom-coms’ is about as accurate as describing Austen’s Emma or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as ‘feel-good heart warmers.’ This is not to say these beautiful books do not share shades of romance, comedy, softness, or warmth— but it is to say, they are so, so much more as complex topographies of emotion, identity, and feeling— Henry’s books in particular here, and Book Lovers, especially.

With Book Lovers, Henry’s gorgeously lyric prose, unflinching wit, and immersive skill for dynamic character development gifts us a rich, unyielding manuscript about *ALL* the forms and weathers of love, grief, and passion that weave together to make us who we are and to teach us how to better love others by first better loving all the love stories of ourselves.

With Book Lovers, we’re gifted love for siblings, love for parents and children, love for home and belonging, love for purpose and pride for one’s passion, love for place, love for community, love for stories and what they mean to us— and *then*, there’s love for the beloved, a complex relationship (in the fashion of Thomas Hardy’s FFTMC) that is made fathomless by first knowing the rougher parts of the other and growing together towards understanding, admiration, then passion— allll of which is as accessible as cloudless sunlight. And I am floored. Well done, Henry— and merry reading, lit lovers. Go forth.
PS: Charlie Lastra is a ‘book boyfriend’ for the ages, and I haven’t been this gone since George Emerson in Forester’s A Room With A View. Good luck, besties.

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**UNPARALLELED**

Revisado: 03-26-23

I have never read another book like Figuring, and there’s a very real part of me that doesn’t want to. Figuring is immortal in its cosmic beauty, and my experience of being immersed within Popova’s critical storytelling was nothing less than sacred, starting with the opening paragraph, which was itself an unparalleled encounter for me. I had only waded three sentences deep into Popova’s rich, translucent prose when I realized that I was reading one of my favorite books of all time for the first time and that I hadn’t even finished the first page. As a brief synopsis, Figuring is a sweeping tour de force lyric essay odyssey that charts intersections between historical events, biographies of influential humans, literature, scientific discover, nature, time, art history, and deep space and weaves a constellation tale that gifts readers a lens for reimagining our lives as small infinities of synaptic connections between one another and the world around us. The journey is long, but mesmerizing, and as sung by Natasha McElhone’s beautiful reading voice, I cannot recommend Figuring highly enough to lovers of entrancing storytelling who approach with their minds open and their hearts in their hands. Go forth.

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~*WONDROUS FUN*~

Revisado: 12-30-22

Despite being a longtime lover of all the Bond films, I had never read the novels—this was a first for me, and I was FLOORED! Not only was I thrilled for how delightful the book was but I was also quickly beside myself to realize this is only a start to the JB saga! Further, I’m usually incredibly particular about reading the basis books of familiar movies, so I decided on OHMSS because it’s not a film I know well and also because I adore the work of David Tennant. And this is what I found: if you’re looking to dive into the JB saga, this is your starting point. You need to go in with unfamiliarity, you need to get thrown into medias res headfirst, you need a brilliant narrator guide to get you through the journey, and you have all of these elements in OHMSS. And that is only a beginning, as well. Spy/action novels are not in my wheelhouse because I often find the storyline to be stale and the writing weak— but not with Fleming! (Eat your heart out, Hemingway). Fleming’s Bond novels read the way a Bond film plays: we get an exquisitely suave balance of efficient, slick plot and vivid characters through the pane of trim, beautiful writing. And then (unlike the movies!): we get to experience firsthand the veritable damaged stained glass window that is James Bond’s psychomachia. For example, we never, ever think of the fact that The Core Reason that Bond is Bond is because he is an orphan with no one to call home, so he wields wild survival tactics and braves unthinkable missions with the equal measures of a man with nothing to live for and a man with Odyssean levels of grief and starvation for home—and again, we never ever think of Bond in those terms! The closest we get is the masterful, brilliant work of Daniel Craig as Bond from 2006-2021, but Fleming’s novel goes all in. I highly recommend this novel to Bond lovers and fighters alike and hope it will bring you the wondrous fun and adventure that I found here! Enjoy!

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Smashing the Glass Specimen Container*~

Revisado: 06-07-22

Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar is *not* the lurid account of “insanity” that it has been labeled and fetishized as for almost 70 years— it is a gorgeous testament to life in solidarity for individuals struggling to reclaim themselves from pained mental health, and I reread it every June; but this time around, I want to finally leave a review to highlight how the beauty of this novel goes beyond wellness. It is an immersive treatise against the increasingly constricting, claustrophobic, long-term death sentence of every domestic expectation and demand forced over the female body (regardless of era, the 1950s or the 2020s). Often leagued with the “mad woman” archetypes of Ophelia and Bertha Rochester, Esther Greenwood does not spiral and spin out due to some inexplicable, unhinged psychosis; none of these women do. On the contrary, it is just the opposite: it takes direct rational, reasoned defiance for a woman to lash out and push back against anything and everything that tries to rip her autonomy and self-possession. As such (with an invocation of Taylor Swift), Esther is not a “mad woman”, but a *mad* woman— so furiously alive and inarticulably livid at everything she can see hanging over, circling, and closing in around her, she would rather try to take her own life and then dig her heels in against misogyny than live inside the ruled and measured existence set out for her— and THAT is what really makes this book such an unbeatable, hilarious, rawly rendered essential read, not just for individuals seeking solidarity in pained mental health, but for everyone who’s ever felt (big air quotes here) “crazy” for not wanting the life expected of them and wanted to crash their way through— not a glass ceiling— but the neat glass of a specimen container: a bell jar. To this end, Esther suffers from pained mental health, but she does not *only* suffer from illness— none of us do, which is also the genius of the book in underscoring this agony as only compounded by a full, volatile web of persona and cultural triggers and trauma. Also, if you made it this far in the review and are still thinking “um, but this was, like, semi-autobiographical? And like, wasn’t Sylvia Plath was super confessional”? then please join me in applying this same vision of this treatise against societal expectation to the life of Sylvia Plath, a ferocious 5’9”woman-king creator who definitely wanted to live and live abundantly and sought the best mental health support she could stand for the time she lived within, but she did not want a life on anyone else’s terms playing by anyone else’s rules; and everything she ever wrote was not a “confession” of these complicated feelings; it was one vividly accounted, powerful grieved outcry of protest mosaiced with the dark, icy fire of female rage, after another. Now, go forth, and live the truth of your own ‘I am, I am.’

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::I Needed This Book::

Revisado: 10-05-21

John Green’s stunning volume of beautiful, quirky essays gives us an elegy for life as we knew it and an ode for life on Earth as only we can know it, and in that, it is also a nativity for a future on Earth that loves the Earth without question or condition. And to this end: I needed this book. I really did. I played and replayed multiple chapters while driving to work and crying in my car. Every single chapter was like crying in my car at a stoplight and turning my head to see the person next to me also crying in their car at the stoplight. They don’t look up, they don’t see me crying at the same time, the light changes, and I never see them again. Not like that. And after, it’s not that I stop crying, but the crying is different because some part of where my crying is coming from felt relief, for just a moment, over not feeling alone or being terrified all alone. Where there is relief, there is rest. Where there is rest, there is healing that feels like heading in the right direction. I give John Green’s ‘Anthropocene Reviewed,’ for all its quirky elegance, awe-striking vulnerability, brilliant hilarity, wicked cleverness, and beautiful, exquisite tenderness: 5 stars.

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~*Cheeky & Solid*~

Revisado: 06-08-21

Here is a sturdy little edition to the genre of “Wonderland/Looking Glass” tales that holds its own as quasi-combo of ‘Coraline’ x ‘Labyrinth’—but with puppets! Also, shout out to Katherine Kellgren for all-out committing to the story with individualized voices & excellent delivery!

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~*RADIANT & MAGICAL*~

Revisado: 05-23-21

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted was a magnificent game-changer for my love of beautifully-wrought and richly imagined high fantasy. When I am lost, I return and return to bury my whole mind and heart in the vivid wilderness of Uprooted’s gorgeous prose, ingenious mythologies, and lavish topos, and when I need a hero, need a tale grounded in women discovering, embracing, and taking up to wield the power within them, I reach out for Uprooted with such regularity that it has become one of my all-time favorites. To be clear, I am usually unbearably critical of both contemporary high fantasy novels and most (not YA-proper, but) younger adult fiction because I am often frustrated by works which sacrifice well-wrought prose in order to tell a new flavor of a predictable ice cream-base of narrative or which build up ornate mythologies with gaping plot holes— this said, UPROOTED IS EXCEPTIONAL in every possible way. Go forth, and find yourself in this bright, brave world. (Note for the audiobook: this narrator does require a steep adjustment at the outset, but! in the long run, they are absolute perfection for their ability to seamlessly shift between character voices and beautifully read the many Slavic language passages in this book.)

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>>BUCKLE. UP.<<

Revisado: 05-23-21

George Saunders did not come here to play. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is not here to enchant you with crisp prose (but the writing is unbeatably lean, clean, & deliciously wry), nor is it here to win you over with tart chuckles from firecracker sui generis characters (but each character is so rich with bizarre idiosyncrasies and strange hungers that you just keep leaning forward in your seat like, “How dreadful! Then what happened?”)— no, Saunders is here to serve up barely-there tales and to leverage the dry, hysterical, unhinged-cringe testimonies of the denizens of these collapsing twilight worlds and sundry dystopian theme parks; and in doing so, Saunders is here to participate in a tradition of his own design that shoves fabulist realism and grimed humor into the close quarters of short form fiction in such a way that (not unlike the mastery of Ursula K. Le Guin) we are viscerally dislocated from our own world grooves in a way that awaken and rattle us through the disarming power of comedy and (truly) sheer weirdness: and in the process, we cling to the only structures we understand and, in doing so, know them for the first time. (Be advised also that trigger warnings apply, as well as hefty allowances for cultural dialogues written in the 1990s that are clearly trying to rehearse and progress discussions of sensitive topics, including racial violence, PTSD, and disability.) If cringe and grime are not your jam, this George Saunders collection may not be your best fit— but! definitely your best bet if you’re a fan of the short fictions of Hemingway, Pynchon, and Vonnegut and cannot get enough richly imagined sardonic narrators writing from world after flawed world that makes so little sense, it’s glittering logic, welcome home, and hold onto something.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas

A Destination of a Book, Not a Journey*~

Revisado: 04-09-21

—but to be clear, this is not a sign of bad, but of different. What I mean here is that Journey is a slim, muscular, clever book of unending arrivals, rather than a smooth narrative arc. You will get discombobulated. You will lose your way. You will get claustrophobic. And you just might want to stuff sock in the main character’s mouth— BUT! The charismatic power of Verne’s scientific imagination is worth the trek. If you have arrived at Journey of the Center of the Earth in pursuit of a terrestrial Nautilus or a German Captain Nemo, turn back. You will find neither. If, however, you are looking for yet another sweeping, signature Verne narration of the scientific natural works, you are in the right place.
I also want to give a shout-out to the genius of Tim Curry. I’ve only ever heard him through Dickens, and his performance here is delightful and dynamic!

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~*A MASTERCLASS IN LORE*~

Revisado: 12-19-20

Hands-down, the most vivid and immersive narration of family lore that I’ve ever encountered. Wallace’s novel is a stunning homage to the recursive, labyrinthine mythology of home and homeland through which we learn the world as children and to which we look as adults as we grow our own. If (like myself) you’ve come to this novel encouraged by the 2003 Burton film, you’re in the right place— with half of the whole story. In Burton, we experience Edward Bloom’s fantastical life side-by-side with him. The catch (truly) of Wallace’s novel is we experience Edward Bloom’s fantastical life, but only at the same narrative arm’s-length as his son, William, and then only through the veil of William’s own retelling of the tales. In this way, Wallace’s novel gifts to us not only a masterful narrative in the handling of grief and shaken identity that comes with the loss of a parent, but also a devastatingly beautiful, warm, and hilarious vision for honoring our own parts in the stories we inherit— as players, as audience, and, ultimately, as keepers.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas