When I Was a Soldier: a memoir, Valerie Zenatti

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First, a confession: I don’t know anything about history starting immediately following World War II. Especially international history. It seems all my history classes never managed to get past WWII, thus never learning about Vietnam, the Korean War, etc. It also means I never officially learned anything about the establishment of Israel and the who what why and where of why everyone in the Middle East hates us and why people are willing to blow themselves up over the whole thing.

This used to not matter to me. But now I care a great deal about why people blow themselves up and how that affects our lives – because it does, and it directly relates to why terrorists hate us so much.

So when I read a little review of this book I went out of my way to find it. This is the non-fiction account of Valerie Zenatti’s two years of mandatory service in the Israeli army, written from her teen perspective, making is very readable and clear and understandable. And enjoyable!

In Israel, everyone, both girls and boys, are required to serve in the military starting at age 18. Girls serve two years, boys serve three. Valerie not only shares the nitty gritty details of what this is like--to know your whole life you are going to serve in the potentially deadly military when you are still very young, and the details of her military service—but also what it is like to live in the country of Isreal, and how many people have such mixed feelings about the whole thing. Valerie is able to convey the many sides of the confusing issues for Israel and Palestine, without being confusing. I know it’s not a history book (which is why I liked it so much), so that the views are not unbiased, and that it is very partial and really only a starting point of understanding that conflict. But I definitely learned a lot.

It’s a fairly short book, and also in it Valerie is also typical teenager with friends and loves and complicated and simple relationships, just wanting to have some fun, just trying to figure out her place in the world. She is smart and witty, and has written a good book that spoke to me – not over my head, but not speaking down to me, either.

Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult

This is the latest from Jodi Picoult, and it is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from this author. A little bit of a mystery, a bit of romance, a court room crime drama situation that manages not to derail the book, and so on. I really like her stuff, but I’ll have to be honest, this one comes apart at the seams a bit. They are all good page-turning beach reads, but some of Picoult’s books are definitely better than others.

Our main girl Delia is a semi-single mom (maybe in her late 20s?) whose relationship with her baby-daddy, Eric, has been rocky because of his alcoholism. She has a very close relationship with her own father, who solely raised her because her mom died when she was very young, or so she’s been told. Turns out, her mom is not dead, her dad kidnapped her from Arizona when she was really young, changed their names, moved them to New Hampshire, and has been living the suburban life of a fugitive ever since. He did this, he insists, because her mother was a terrible mother, being an extreme alcoholic.

So Delia’s father is arrested, she is having a real true identity crisis, Eric is a lawyer so he’s trying to represent Delia’s dad, Delia meets her mom, this other best friend of theirs is actually in love with Delia and gets all up in the mess, Delia has an experience with this Native American spiritualist, and on and on. I could list about fifty more plot elements without giving anything away, and therein lies my point: there is just too much thrown in here for a cohesive novel to emerge. It’s an ok book, but most of her other books are way better, especially My Sister’s Keeper.

I read the Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum. This is a thriller about a man named Jason Bourne who is found washed up on a beach with no memory. He has no idea who he is and his only clue is a microfilm implanted in his hip. Little does he know, this microfilm will lead him to a bank in Zurich, where he will start on a race for his life against unknown forces, the whole time trying to piece together his fragmented past. He is told by one source that he is one of the most feared assassins in the world, only topped by the mysterious assassin Carlos. Bourne is actually a trap for Carlos, a tool being used by the US government. He meets a woman named Marie St. Jacques, who tries to convince him he's not an assassin, and she eventually succeeds, but that's for the sequel.

I recommend this book to people who are not looking for a quick read. Sometimes the details used make it a slow read, but it's exciting and worth the time investment. You also have to like action and thrills if you read this book. Just in case you can't put it down, make sure you have some time on your hands.

Your personal favorites

Yet again, I must start a post in bibliotalk with "I don't know if this is allowed".

I think that one can learn a lot about one's taste in books by reading reviews, but even more by reading a list of a blogger's personal favorite books. I'm sure that we have all filled out the 'books' section in our blogger.com profiles, so why not simply copy and paste our selections into comments on this entry? Reading through these lists may give us all some background information on the reviewer's taste in literature. This might be helpful while considering reviews on bibliotalk, don't you agree? I'll start:

Cut, Wasted: The Memoir of an Anorexic and Bulimic, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, Stargirl, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books, Violet and Claire, The Belljar, The Feed, Burgerwuss, Thirsty, Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teens, Born Confused, Hard Love, The Gospel Acording to Larry, Jinx, Buddhism Without Beliefs, Born Confused, the Gossip Girl books, the Harry Potter books, A Chamber of Horrors, Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet, This Lullaby, Elvis by the Presleys, Taming of the Shrew, Modern Feminisms

The Burn Journals, Brent Runyon

Wow. This is a totally amazing book. I kept having to remind myself that Runyon didn’t write this weeks after all this happened but years, because the way he puts everything down, the language he uses and the tense and everything just make it all feel so real and immediate. Of course it is real, but sometimes when you are reading non-fiction and there is dialogue, or there are parts where the author is telling what they were thinking at the time, it is so unbelievable. And you know the author just forgot what it felt like, or what somebody said, and just had to make it up to fill in the blanks. Not this book. Maybe Runyon did have to do that, but you never get that feeling at all. Everything he is thinking, the thoughts he has about why he set himself on fire and what he was like before and after, it’s just so authentic, not cheesy or moralistic or anything. It just really amazes me that he was able to get back into his fifteen-year-old brain and think in that same way again. Really well done. I wish this guy would write more YA, because he definitely has a great style for it, but he hasn’t written anything else at all.

A Mango-Shaped Space, Wendy Mass

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I just really love this book. Normally I am extraordinarily critical, and pick apart this and that. This is not to say this is a life-altering, amazingly perfect book. But there is a sweet and gentle story, wrapped up in some real stuff that’s not overly dramatized.

Mia has synesthia – a condition where she sees colors in association with words, numbers, sounds, etc. In third grade she is called a freak and she understands no one else can see colors, so she hides it from her family and friends until her problems at school become overwhelming and she happens to meet a kid who appears to have the same deal she does. In other story lines, her grandpa has just died and she sort of transfers her grief into love of a new cat, the Mango of the title.

I don’t really want to give more away, just say that her condition is real, not many people at all have it but it is really interesting. Wendy Mass does a good job creating a story around it, with real and lovable characters.

Swollen, Melissa Lion

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Although this book is told from Samantha’s, the main character’s, point of view, she is so good at not really thinking about the things in her life that are affecting her, that it takes a long time for us to get the full picture. Samantha has slept around some, and doesn’t feel great about it, though she hasn’t slept around as much as people credit her with, and she definitely didn’t sleep with the super popular boy who dies right at the beginning of the book, though he leads people to believe she did. She struggles with her self-image and therefore the image others have of her: she’s an athlete, she’s a slut, she’s a girl who wants to love somebody and have somebody love her. At the core her relationship (and lack thereof) with each of her parents has a lot to do with what is happening with her. This book isn’t heavy on the plot, and in that way and many others maintains a lot of honesty. She meets a boy, thinks he could be the one, and then discovers . . .

Annie On My Mind

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I finally read this book after years of having it recommended to me – gblt ya is one of my favorite genres, and this book is a classic. Having now read it, I understand why so many people were trying to push it one me, and why it has earned its place as a classic. This is, at its core, a sweet story about first love. That it happens to be about two girls discovering something essential about themselves and the way they love enhances it. But Nancy Garden manages to keep the story about emotion, about that amazing feeling of pure, sweet, and somewhat innocent love. Sure, there is drama-–no good love story is without its trials. But more than most ya romance, this one maintains a good balance and doesn’t tend toward the melodramatic. Garden is respectful of her characters feelings, and portrays them (both the characters and the feelings) as having enormous depth and complexity.

America, E.R. Frank

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I should've written this post weeks ago when I actually finished this book, because I've forgotten a lot of what I wanted to say. So I briefly considered not writing a post at all, but the book was so good (that I do remember), that I at least wanted to recommend it.

The story follows a kid, named America, that basically gets lost in the foster care system over and over again. Some horrible things happen to him, and he is shuffled around to different group housing situations. If this were all it would be a pretty average book, but it is really raw and genuine emotionally. The author is very skilled at relating America's emotional state, and how sometimes the least little things can set a person off, and how counseling takes forever and three days to actually work, and what happens to a person's soul when they can't trust anybody at all, because no one sticks around long enough. It's just a really authentic, not at all corny, book.

Can't Get There From Here, Todd Strasser

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This is a pretty good book, I guess especially if you are interested in teen homelessness. The author does a really good job of being honest about what it is like to be homeless, without vilifying or glorifying the topic. I appreciate the dirty grimy details of life on the streets, but it was clear that however bad it was, for those kids it was better than what they had been dealing with at home. And it definitely wasn't all about drugs, although that was part of it for a lot of the characters in this book. It was interesting comparing this fictional book to Living at the Edge of the World: How I Survived in the Tunnels of Grand Central Station, by Jamie Pastor Bolnick, which is a non-fiction book written by a formerly homeless teen. And based on what Bolnick said, the descriptions and realities in this book are fairly right on, even to the point of teens living in "tribes" and the extent of totally slimy creepy people who are looking to take advantage of these kids.