By: PAIGE FOSTER
Staff Writer
Christmas break – the longest break of the year apart from summer – is an eagerly awaited time for students looking to temporarily escape the routine chaos of tests, college applications, sports, and extracurricular obligations. Students transition from the heavy stress of finals week to a lengthy break with hours to fill with work or leisure. Personally, I filled many of those hours with reading. Below are brief reviews of the books I read.
Midnight Library by Matt Haig ★★★☆☆
Haig’s novel centers around a woman who has recently committed suicide and is perusing the library which lies between life and death. The library is filled with an infinite number of books that represent various lives the woman could have had if she had made a different decision at a particular moment than she had in her “root life”. She essentially gets to reverse the regrets in her life one at a time to sample the lifestyle that an alternate decision would’ve created, and decide whether she would like to live in one of these or continue her journey towards true and final death.
Though Matt Haig’s whimsy shines through in this work just as well as in his popular children’s novels, the plot was simplistic and repetitive. The spaces Haig could’ve used for the protagonist’s growth were too often squandered and left the reader with a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction. However, I still give this book three out of five stars because the rich descriptions and variation in setting made it pleasant to read, and the premise was sufficiently creative to pique the interest of even the most lukewarm readers.
The Bible (NIV, 1978) ★★★★★
Last January, I started a reading plan to finish the entire Christian Bible in a single year. I finished the last chapter on New Year’s Eve – a feat that felt even more remarkable than surviving a global pandemic and online AP Chemistry. The Bible is actually a small library composed of 66 books and is speculated to have been authored by 35 – 40 different authors. It is divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament, which document history, poetry, laws, and teachings before and after Jesus’ birth, respectively.
It feels mildly blasphemous to give the Bible any kind of rating at all. It is lengthy, ancient, and difficult to understand, but there is beauty and profound significance in it. It is, after all, the story of a benevolent God offering undeserved reconciliation to twisted and sad people He has adopted to sonship. God’s grace runs like a thread through every story, even the most bloody accounts of the battle and the most sterile accounts of ancient Jewish law. The Bible is by far the most complex book I’ve ever read and has had the most impact on my life. For any followers of Christ, I would highly advise working through the Word of God. Since it can be difficult to interpret, I utilized the BibleProject website often for their podcasts, videos, and articles.
Girls in the Garden by Lisa Jewell ★★★★☆
This book is, as one of my former English teachers would’ve called it, brain candy. The novel follows the story of two sisters, ages 12 and 13, who move into a rather unique neighborhood after their schizophrenic father burnt down their family home. The houses in the neighborhood are arranged in a rough rectangle, broken by a few gates, and back up against a multi-acre park complete with a rose garden and a playground. The neighborhood children often congregate in the park while their parents socialize with one another, and the entire atmosphere is comfortably familial. That is until one of the girls is found drugged, bloody, and unconscious in a copse of trees.
I enjoyed this book greatly because the plot was fast-paced, intriguing, and alarmingly plausible. The writing also captured the awkward vacillation between maturity and infantilism that is characteristic of youth. I would recommend this book, but I would not give it five stars because it had two major flaws. The first was that the children in the book were improperly aged. The subjects of their speech and the complexity of their motivations are highly uncommon in ten to thirteen-year-old children and might’ve been better suited to kids who were between fifteen and eighteen. The second flaw isn’t truly a flaw, but I felt that the ending had no real resolution and did not provide a rich or meaningful conclusion to the plot up to that point.
Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis ★★★✰☆
For my friend group’s Secret Santa gift exchange, we each made a wishlist of small items we would like as a gift. I requested that my Secret Santa get me their favorite book, and this is the book I received. Lives of the Monster Dogs is a spin-off of Frankenstein and takes place in a world where a man created a colony of hyper-intelligent dogs and fitted them with prosthetic arms. The man kept the dogs in isolation until his death. His followers subjugated the dogs to slavery within the colony, until the dogs organized a rebellion and escaped the settlement. They lived in New York as celebrities, partially feared and universally adored. The only issue is that the dogs did not salvage any scientific papers from the dead colony they came from that might allow scientists to replicate their condition. They also cannot reproduce, making them a dying race.
The premise of this novel is odd, to say the least, and yet the stylistic choices within the writing – such as having the narrator be a journalist who was friends with the dogs – made it feel distinctly non-fiction. The entire work has an air of sorrow and speaks to complex themes regarding human interference in nature. The book wasn’t scintillating or fast-paced the way many of today’s best-sellers often are, but the poignance of the novel redeems its worth and gives it the feel of a modern classic, earning it a respectable three and a half stars.
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo ★★★★☆
Leigh Bardugo is perhaps best known for her fantasy series Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows. I am a huge fan of the former and seized the opportunity to read her new book Ninth House. The protagonist in Bardugo’s latest novel, Alex, is a perfect antihero – she has a past with drug dealing, prostitution, sexual abuse, and chronic mental instability. At the age of 20, Alex is a high school dropout and sole survivor of a horrific (and unsolved) multiple homicides. While recovering from the bloody event in the hospital, she is visited by the Dean of Yale, who offers her a full ride to the school under mysterious conditions. Alex takes the chance to restart her life but soon finds it to be more difficult than she anticipated to dance around the rules of her peculiar benefactors.
If there is anything Leigh Bardugo knows how to do, it is how to create fantasy worlds within alarmingly mundane ones. Her masterful blending of natural and supernatural elements allows her to inspire genuine interest and anticipation in her reader. Additionally, each of her characters has a distinct form and quality in the mind of the reader. They are round and magnificently real. Clearly, I adore Bardugo’s writing style and creativity. However, I refrained from giving this book five stars partially because the plot was so intricate it became hard to follow at times, and partially because I expect a sequel, which will affect my rating either by adding significance to the first book or by falling short of its excellence.