The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

A few months ago I went looking for a new book via my library's website.  They listed some top reads by category and I thought a book from their Asian section could be interesting.  I looked at the descriptions of several books and The Surrendered caught my eye the most.  Here is the description that the library gave:


This spellbinding story of an orphaned girl, a young GI, and a missionary whose lives collide at a Korean orphanage weaves a profound meditation on heroism, sacrifice, and love, and possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering self to others.


I'll start with the story: I liked it.  I was really interested to see who the characters were, where they came from, and how they got to where they were.  It was hard to follow at first.  It opens up with the main character, June, on top of a train with her two siblings.  Then there is a flashback, then the story progresses, then another flashback, then we go to another character and they have flashbacks, then their story progresses, then you see how the first two characters are intertwined, etc, etc, etc.  If I put the book down for too long (which happened once or twice, it is several hundred pages long - like over 800) I couldn't immediately remember whose story I was reading so I'd have to go back a few pages to catch up.

I was pretty annoyed with all the moving around at first but once I got into it there was allusion to a certain event and I got to the point were I was seeing what led up to the event and what happened after the event and I got pretty anxious to know what the event actually was.  Turns out this event was the climax and once I got there I was glad that I already knew what happened after the event because if everything had been chronological, the last half of the book would have been a bit boring.

Side note: books like this make me wish that literature came with a warning label or a rating systems like movies.  There is a lot of sex in this book.  Honestly, if I had known how much sex was in the story, I probably wouldn't have chosen to read it.  Sometimes a steamy scene can be interesting and add to the story but there was just so much that it got to the point were I was thinking "Ok, I get it, they're getting it on.  Can we move on already!"  Anyway, just be aware of that if you decide to read The Surrendered.

Overall, I enjoyed the book.  It was a little long, a little difficult to figure out the flashbacks, and had a little too much sex but pretty good.

Peak by Roland Smith

While rifling through a box of books I still need to unpack, I found Peak, a book I think I acquired for free at one of my literature classes at BYU. I honestly don't remember it at all. But for whatever reason it appealed to me (I think it's because of the oncoming winter weather).

The book details the experience of a teenage boy who climbs Everest. The back of the book says:

When fourteen-year-old Peak Marcello's long-lost father presents the opportunity for them to summit Everest together, Peak doesn't even consider saying no--even though he suspects there are a few strings attached. And if he makes it to the top before his birthday, he'll be the youngest person ever to stand above 29,000 feet. It's not a bad turn of events for a guy who's been stuck in New York City with only skyscrapers to (illegally) scale.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this book. The characters are well-rounded and interesting--enough so that when the action slows to a near stand-still I was still enjoying what I was reading. The mountain climbing aspect of the book was also very intriguing. I am not a mountain climber and have no aspirations to become one, but the descriptions of the climbing experience were so detailed that I assumed the author must be a real climber. (After googling and perusing his website, I am still unsure.)

Peak was chosen as an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers (among several awards), and I can see that this book could really appeal to teens who are interested in outdoor activities.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting, feel-good, quick read.

The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

The Orphan Sister is not what I expected. The back of the books says,

Clementine Lord is not an orphan. She just feels like one sometimes. One of triplets, a quirk of nature left her the odd one out. Odette and Olivia are identical; Clementine is a singleton. Biologically speaking, she came from her own egg. Practically speaking, she never quite left it.

Then Clementine’s father – a pediatric neurologist who is an expert on children’s brains, but clueless when it comes to his own daughters – disappears and his choices both past and present, force the family dynamics to change at last. As the three sisters struggle to make sense of it, their mother must emerge from the greenhouse and leave the flowers that have long been the focus of her warmth and nurturing.

For Clementine, the next step means retracing the winding route that led her to this very moment: to understand her father’s betrayal, the tragedy of her first lost love, her family’s divisions, and her best friend Eli’s sudden romantic interest. Most of all, she may finally have found the voice with which to shape the inside story of being the odd sister out.

So after reading the back, I imagined the story starting out with the birth of the triplets and then going into their childhood, showing Clementine’s struggle as the odd sister out. I figured the story would climax with the disappearance of their father, probably somewhere around their teenage years when Clementine discovers what she needs to about herself. I was very wrong.

The story starts out with Clementine in her late twenties and her dad had just disappeared. It continues from this point with Clementine constantly flashing back to her past. Her father returns (before reading the book, I didn’t think that he was going to return, another instance where I was wrong) and must face the family with why he left without telling them where he was going. Only at the very end does the family figure out how to live without Dr. Lord and only some have come to terms with why he disappeared.

I’m not sure that I would recommend this book. There is some bad language, although I can understand why it is used, and Clementine is often bringing up sex, in her past and in the present. The story of triplets where 2 are identical and one is not is an interesting concept. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more without my preconceived ideas. If you’re interested give it a try.

Deerskin by Robin McKinley

I have enjoyed many of Robin McKinley’s children’s novels, so I got on amazon.com to find more of her books to read.

Deerskin is NOT a children’s novel. The story starts off just like any good fairytale talking about how the king married the most beautiful woman in 7 kingdoms and how they were so happy together until the queen dies and the king is filled with an uncontrollable grief. Before her death, the queen makes her love promise to only marry again if he can find a woman that is more beautiful than she ever was and the queen also has a portrait made to remind the king of her beauty.

Honestly, the first part of the novel made me think that this was going to be like a Snow White type of story. In a way, it is, but it’s not a wicked stepmother that drives the daughter away. The king brutally rapes his own daughter (I guess because she grew up to be as beautiful as her mother), and the rest of the book is how the princess (Deerskin as she later calls herself) recovers from such a brutal and utterly wrong experience.

I was somewhat disturbed with what happened in this story. I still like Robin McKinley as an author, but I think I’ll be a little more careful with her future books.

The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen

I was playing around on amazon.com when this book was recommended because of other purchases that I had made.

I enjoyed reading The False Prince. I did find it a little predictable, but that is probably because a 30 year old adult is not the intended audience. This book is probably for a 5^th grader or higher.

It is the story of an orphan boy who is chosen, against his will, to be trained to impersonate a prince. The actual prince was lost at sea and presumed dead, but when the entire royal family is murdered, one man tries to gain control of the throne by bringing back the “lost” prince.

I really liked this book. It was a refreshing read. It is also the first book in a series and I look forward to reading the others.

Howards End by E. M. Forester

This is one I picked up at the library.  The back of the book says:


What makes this masterpiece a pure delight for contemporary readers is its vibrant portrait of life in Edwardian England, and the wonderful characters who inhabit the charming old country house in Hertfordshire called Howards End. This cozy house becomes the object of an inheritance dispute between the upright conservative Wilcox family and the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, sensitive and intuitive women loved by men willing to leap wide social barriers to fulfill their ardor.  Through romantic entanglements, disappearing wills, and sudden tragedy, the conflict over the house emerges as a symbolic struggle for England's future.  Rich with the tradition, spirit, and wit distinctively English, Howards End is a remarkable novel of rare insight and understanding. As in his celebrated A Passage to India, E. M. Forster brings to vivid life a country and an era through the destinies of his unforgettable characters.


Sounds interesting.  After reading the back of the book I expected there to be a lot of drama surrounding Howards End throughout the whole book.  The truth: there isn't much of an inheritance dispute, there aren't very many social barriers for the Schlegel sisters and they weren't really loved by very many men, the "will" that "disappeared" had no legal bearing so it wasn't really a will at all and because of that truth there isn't really any conflict over the house to create any symbolism anyway.

The back of the book makes Howards End seem a lot more dramatic that it really was.  In fact, most of the drama is created by Margaret and Helen anyway and even then it is mostly in their heads - as drama in the lives of rich, female, bored characters from Edwardian England usually is.  Don't get me wrong, there is some drama, even some juicy drama, but overall it is a pretty tame story.

One thing that really bothered me was the wordiness.  There were a few places were E. M. Forster seemed to use the same sentence three or so times in a row but just rewrote them - like he needed is book to be a certain number of words for a homework assignment.

It also felt like the author was trying too hard to create a female character that wasn't typical.  He seemed to try to make Margaret a progressive thinker but really, to me, she came off as being confusing.  She'd go on and on about her ideals but they really didn't make any sense making her feel less like a progressive thinker and more like a dumb woman who was trying to pretend to be a progressive thinker.

I know I haven't said a lot of good things about Howards End so far but I did think it was worth a read.  After getting past the wordiness and Margaret being confusing, the story line was solid and interesting with a few unexpected twists and few more expected twists.  If you like reading stories from this era of England then you'd probably enjoy it.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

I read The Lovely Bones. It took me well over a month to finish it - not because it was long but because every time I picked it up, I never felt like I had to keep reading.

That sounds like a negative but in this case it really wasn't a bad thing. It was nice to be able to read a book for just a few hours once a week and never feel like when I picked it up again I might be lost or I might have forgotten what had happened since the last time I read.

The back of the book reads:

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her - her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy.

With the above description I figured it would be some kind of murder mystery type book but we find out who killed Susie on the second page. That's when I thought that maybe it isn't a mystery to the reader but it will be a murder mystery to the characters in the book who are still living. It wasn't that either. The whole book is written from Susie's point of view - which was a little different (in a good way) considering she was dead the whole time - and was basically just Susie watching the lives of her family and friends from heaven.

You'd think that a big climax of the book would be the fate of her murdering, but it was really anti-climatic, just a little blurb toward the end - it was written in a way that made it hardly seem important. Any maybe, given everything else that happens, it wasn't important - I still thought it was strange that so little emphasis was put on it when a good chunk of the beginning and middle of the book focuses on the murderer.

The back of the book also indicates that the story might contain some humor, but to be honest, I don't recall thinking anything in the story was funny at all. It is actually a quite disturbing story at times and it was on the sixth or seventh page when I went "Oh, that's why the movie was rated R."

Overall I'd say The Lovely Bones was good. Not great, but good.