The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

This book is: beautiful.
Other elements: fate, destiny, following your dreams, love.
Read it: if you enjoy a healthy dose of magical realism.
Overall rating: 9/10

Goodreads’ summary:

“This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom points Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasure found within. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is an eternal testament to the transformation power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts.”

This book is like a mandala. I know right away when I look at it that it’s beautiful and I like how it makes me feel, but I can’t see all of the details and patterns at first. The more time I spend gazing at it and letting it show me its secrets, the more I understand. I may never understand all of it, but I find it really fascinating and soothing.

There’s a lot in this book about listening to the language of the world and following your Personal Legend. I found this part to be subtly inspiring, and it prompted some introspection.

More than anything, I just enjoyed this book. I love how it’s written, I love the gentle story it tells and the rhythm of its syntax. It’s not a page turner. It didn’t keep me up at night. I also am not sure if I fully understood it. But every time I read some of it, it relaxed me and I felt peaceful and happy. I look forward to reading it again someday.

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Fire (A Companion to Graceling) by Kristen Cashore

That’s right, folks. My first 10/10. It turns out that writing a really positive review is much scarier than writing a negative review.

I was just skimming the reviews of this book on Goodreads and I think what some people hate about this book is exactly what I loved so much about it – the spectacular and overt feminism. Not to mention the exceedingly sane discussions of contraception, abortion, casual sex, body image, and love. Those are all things that it’s vital for young women to think and learn about and also things that are exceedingly difficult to discuss. To find those topics so responsibly handled in a YA novel is marvelous. And yes, I am going to spend a lot of this review up on my Lady Issues soapbox.

Fire is a companion book to Graceling, which I’ve already reviewed. They take place in the same world but they can stand alone. I really liked Graceling, but Fire blew it out of the water.

I think that the exploration of body image issues is one of the more vital things that can be potentially explored in literature. One aspect of this that authors and readers must perpetually face is the physical appearances of heroines.  It’s hard to resist the trope of the pretty princess – even Katniss and Hermione have makeover scenes in which they prove that they look good in dresses with their hair done.

In Fire, Kristen Cashore addresses the question of what a heroine can look like by going in completely the opposite direction. Her heroine, Fire, isn’t average or merely exceptional: she is the embodiment of utter physical perfection.

Fire lives in The Dells, a land infested with monsters. Monsters, in this context, are creatures that are extraordinary versions of normal creatures. For example, a monster kitten might be bright blue, much cuter than the average kitten, and have superior mouse catching abilities. A monster tiger would be some fantastic color, be fiercer and more enthralling than the average tiger, and probably enjoy human prey. Monsters are beautiful, alluring, and dangerous. They also have some degree of mind-control power. Weak minded people might find themselves opening the window to let in a monster mosquito, giving up their lunch to a monster mouse, or walking into the den of a monster tiger without realizing what they’re doing. With me so far?

Fire is a human monster. The same rules apply: she looks like a human, except that she’s like a dream of a human, with vivid green eyes and multi-hued red hair. She avoids mirrors because she’s uncomfortable with how enthralling she finds her own reflection. More significant than that, she radiates allure. Men (and women) start fights and go to great lengths to be near her. Some want to impress her, some want to posses her, some want to kill her. She embodies society’s dreams for a young women (attractive beyond all imagining) and it’s terrible. She has almost no true friends, she can’t go outside without a guard, and she is utterly alone: human monsters are considered to be so dangerous that she’s the last one left alive.

The impetus of the plot of the book is the events that unfold as Fire leaves her isolated home to travel to the capitol and see if she can use her monster powers to assist her country in an impending war. There’s a hefty element of self-discovery, as Fire interacts with a much larger number of people than she’s used to and also comes face-to-face with the brutal legacy of her monster father, who used his powers to corrupt the previous king.

Fire must learn how to live her life with the reality of who and what she is, rather than just hiding from the world. She must overcome her physical appearance by accepting it and learning to live with it and the problems it brings, just like any woman must do. Her problems are not solved by the fact that she’s an embodiment of perfect beauty. She’s an extremely complex, strong, empathetic, and fascinating character.

In Fire, sexual freedom is a reality for the female characters (for all of the characters, really, but that’s pretty standard for the men). There is premarital sex, friends-with-benefits, accidental pregnancies, and more. Characters make sexual choices and then face consequences. Not in an if-you-have-sex-you-will-get-pregnant-and-die-way but in an I-had-casual-sex-with-my-friend-and-it-was-great-at-first-but-now-our-friendship-has-changed way. I think this is great. Sex is part of life, and the more opportunities young women have to think intelligently about the sexual choices they’re going to have to make in life, the better.

Cashore touches on briefly on the nature of sexual violence, and I think she deals with it exceptionally well. Fire is assaulted a number of times in the book – groped, grabbed, etc. As a human monster, Fire has some degree of insight into the minds around her. She can hear and see the horrible things that some of these attackers are thinking about doing to her, often far worse than what they actually manage to do. It’s in this context that Cashore manages to slip in a detail: Fire observes that the men who want to rape her are the ones with hate in their hearts, the ones prone to violence, the ones likely to cause harm and pain in the world in other ways. For a YA book to characterize rape as an act of power, violence, and hate rather than an act of lust is both impressive and significant.

I read this book twice before buying it and Graceling, and I plan on reading them both again (I’m a rereader, if you couldn’t tell). Actually, I read Fire and Daughter of Smoke and Bone in the same week and I was on such a YA fantasy high.  Fire is a wonderful book and I hope Kristen Cashore keeps writing.

The Reluctant Matchmaker by Shobhan Bantwal.

This book is: boring with sprinkles of offensiveness.
Other elements: fat-shaming, sexism, romance between people of different heights, arranged marriages.
Read it: if the idea of an Indian-American main character is enough to make you forgive a lot of flaws. If you’re not prone to bouts of feminist rage. If you think women without husbands are pathetic.
Overall rating: 3

I committed a cardinal error of readership when I selected this book. I judged it by its cover. I assumed, because of the pretty picture and the lack of cartoon women carrying shopping bags, that this was not chick lit. I was wrong.

“One thing I was sure of: I had to find a husband.” – Page 220

Chick lit (does anyone else hate that term?) is not my favorite. I have a deep and abiding love for Bridget Jones’ Diary, but nothing else in the genre has ever captured my interest.

By page 3 of this book, I was asking people if I needed to finish a book in order to give it a bad review.  Opinions varied. Boyfriend: “You don’t have to finish it. Your time is too valuable!” Friend: “To be fair, you should finish it, but it’s your blog…who says you have to be fair?”

I finished it, but it wasn’t easy. The characters are flat and un-engaging. The love story is dumb: girl loves boy, but girl is short and boy only dates women over 6 feet tall!

The writing is not stellar. It’s not actively off-putting, but this is not one of those books that redeems a mediocre story by telling it in a fabulous way.

I’ll tell you what is actively off-putting: the amount of fat-shaming in this book. This book’s heroine weighs “not an ounce over eighty-five pounds in [her] heaviest wool suit”. She regularly skips meals. At one point, the book goes off on a tangent about how tiny she is and how it must be because she skipped meals so often in her formative years. This information is presented in a way that makes it clear that this heroine’s tinyness is supposed to be part of her appeal. There is never any concern discussed for her health, only repeated references to her fragile tinyness and her loveliness. Her love interest refers to her repeatedly as a “doll” and calls her “baby.”

Throughout the entirety of the novel, the heroine refers to the other women around her by how they compare to her in attractiveness. No one is slenderer than her, but some women are still slender. Others are not:

“If only Pinky ate a few less candy bars, she’d be attractive. …Besides, as a forty-year-old mother of two young boys, Pinky didn’t really need to look chic. She’d bagged her man sixteen years ago, and he apparently loved her, spare tires and all.” – Page 3

I can’t even address the number of things that are wrong with that so I’ll just nail down the easiest.

The heroine also cries continuously, and opens the novel by falling on her back, exposing her panties, spraining her ankle, and needing to be carried around “like an eight-pound baby” by the man who becomes her love interest.

The book is rife with generalizations about men and women:

“I couldn’t stand men who constantly fussed with their hair and clothes–a feminine trait.” – Page 229

“He tossed me an indulgent, paternal sort of smile. ‘If you’re like my female cousins, you probably read those romance books. That’s not real life.'” – Page 130

Other generalizations were common as well:

“Indian men could be a little scary that way–one harmless little date and they started thinking in terms of holy matrimony and a lifelong commitment to sharing a bed and a bathtub.” – Page 97

“In mom’s book of wisdom, anything done by an Indian was good, and if it was done by a male, it was near perfect. She belonged to the male-worshiping Indian sisterhood.” – Page 43

The stereotyping of the Indian and Indian-American culture in this book is something that I feel unqualified to evaluate, although it definitely made me uncomfortable. There is a fine line between good-natured ribbing of one’s own people and internalized racism, and I think that a reader needs to be from or very familiar with the culture in question to tell which side of the line things fall on. The author is Indian American and I believe she may be writing primarily for an Indian American audience.

The author’s note at the end of this book said that it was supposed to be a Bollywood movie in novel form. I can sort of see it – the nutty plot, the dance scene, the improbable ending. It’s a cute gimmick, but it’s not enough carry this mediocre story.