Read This, Not That

I’m in the middle of two books I might finish by the end of the year, but I have two book reviews I want to share in case you are looking for something to read over the holidays: Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please. As you probably have guessed, one review is positive while the other is not. 

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I used to be a voracious fan of Jodi Picoult, reading her new books as soon as they came out. I remember enjoying My Sister’s Keeper, but don’t think I have read anything of hers since, until the synopsis of Leaving Time: A Novel caught my attention.

(click the image to view on Amazon)

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

The story unfolds with chapters that alternate between the present and the past, with several characters speaking in the present, and Alice speaking in the past. There are a number of remarkable coincidences that help Jenna get closer to discovering the truth about her mother’s disappearance, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief in the interests of solving a good mystery. On the other hand, when the story took an unexpected sharp turn toward the supernatural, I was disappointed. Maybe that says more about me than this book, but I was bothered by it because I didn’t think it was necessary. On the other hand, maybe Jodi Picoult thought it was important to stretch my thinking and expand my believing.  Anyway, I cared enough about Jenna and Alice to keep reading, and was satisfied with the ending, so I am recommending this book to my friends, especially if you have enjoyed other Jodi Picoult books. 

I was looking forward to Yes Please as a fun read, but it turned out to be more of a slog that I probably only finished because it was all I had loaded on my Kindle on my flight to Raleigh.

(click the image to view on Amazon)

I think Tina Fey set a high bar with Bossypants (you can read about how much her book impacted me here), and maybe it’s not fair to compare, but I couldn’t help it. I enjoyed the chapters of Yes Please where Amy shared personal stories and her thoughts on life, but in so much of the book she does little more than list people she met, people she worked with, and shows she did, with an emphasis on her early days in Chicago and then on Saturday Night Live.

It would be different if she told stories about all those people, but usually the name-dropping doesn’t go anywhere. Sometimes I felt like I was reading her back-of-the-envelope list of everyone she had to be sure she thanked once she “made it big,” while at other times I felt like I was listening to her rattle off her resume (or whatever the equivalent is for actors). There were a few laugh-out-loud stories, and a few take-it-to-heart insights, so if you are a fan of Amy Poehler or Saturday Night Live, there’s  probably enough here for you to enjoy.

But if you haven’t read Bossypants, please read that first. And if you want a book that’s more fun, try Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)–you can read my review here.

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Do you plan to read any books over the holidays? 

What was your favorite book of 2014?