Ridiculous Premise 101

The Good Daughters

by Joyce Maynard

Rating ⭐

This is the story of two women, Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson. They were born at the same time in the same hospital and still live near each other.

Ruth is an artist who feels out of place with her boring, solid, farming family (the Planks, get it?). Dana is most at home with her hands in the soil and loves helping plants grow. Shocking: Dana feels out of place with her free-spirited, artistic family.

Gee, do you see where this is going? This is a hard book to keep reading once you figure out its ridiculous premise. To make matters worse, once the premise manifests itself, it just gets worse. I won't go into details, but trust me, it doesn't matter. You'll figure it out a few chapters in.

This is one of the books that caused me to swear off Kindle Unlimited. **LIGHT DAWNS** If a book is any good, why would they let you read it for "free"?

I Couldn't Do It

The Orphan Collector

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Rating: Did Not Finish

I finished two chapters of this book and stopped. Maybe it's because the last book I read was so brutal (See my review of Tender Is The Flesh), I could not stand to read the horrible things in this book. 

The Orphan Collector takes place in 1918 at the start of the Spanish Flu pandemic. The descriptions of illness and death were bad enough. What got to me was the character of Bernice, who despises immigrants and thinks they are the cause of the flu and her personal economic woes.

Now the entire city was teeming with large ghettos housing every type of foreigner she could think of, and they were stealing jobs from real Americans

I heard enough of that kind of racist thinking during the previous presidential administration, thank you very much. I don't need to spend my free time reading a book with the main character with those beliefs. 

Fava beans and chianti?

Tender is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Trigger Warning: If you have a sensitive stomach or are triggered by disgusting and/or immoral practices, do not read this book.

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Written in Spanish by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica and translated by Sarah Moses, Tender is the Flesh is the story of Marcos Tejos. 

Marcos lives in a near-future dystopian society. A virus sweeps the world and infects every animal. Every single animal is destroyed. Humanity turns to cannibalism as a food source. Humans are mass-produced, slaughtered, and sold as "special meat." Marcos works for a "processing plant," where the humans are slaughtered and prepared for sale. The process is presented in gruesome detail, but to the participants, it's just another process. 

"He’s surprised it’s so quiet. El Gringo tells him they’re isolated in incubators from when they’re little, and later on in cages. He says their vocal cords are removed so they’re easier to control. 'No one wants them to talk because meat doesn’t talk,' he says."

Just outside the plant where Marcos works are a group called Scavengers. These are the poorest of the poor who wait for the scraps of "special meat." Thus it becomes clear that there are three classes of people: the privileged, the meat, and the scavengers. 

We learn that Marcos is unhappy. His wife leaves him after the death of their infant son. He has to slaughter his beloved pet dogs because all animals became illegal. His father is in a nursing home, suffering from dementia. His sister is self-obsessed and brainless. Marcos goes through his life in a sort of fog. As I was reading about him, I began to think that the horrors that Marcos participated in were driving him mad - or at the very least, would cause him to rebel in some way. (Spoiler: Not so much)

A supplier gives Marcos a special gift - a female specimen of the best quality. He tells Marcos he can sell the specimen for a tidy profit, or he could slaughter her for her high-quality meat. Marcos decides to keep her, raising her like a prize calf. They develop a kind of relationship, and he moves her from the barn into his house. Marcos names the female "Jasmine." They regularly have sex and Jasmine becomes pregnant. He hides her away because having sex with "meat" is highly illegal. 

Each situation Marcos finds himself in is more brutal and terrifying than the last, including a human-skin tannery and a human game reserve. He visits an abandoned zoo and finds a litter of abandoned puppies. He bonds with the pups and gives each the name of a member of the Rolling Stones. On his next visit to the zoo, some delinquents have gotten ahold of the pups and Marcos watches them murder each one. 

The unrelenting violence and perversion continue to the end of the book. The ending is shocking and unexpected but completely in keeping with the events leading up to it. 

This is an incredibly disturbing and grotesque book. I rated it four stars because it is so thought-provoking. It brings up the cruelty in our own society, factory farming, societal privileges, and more. 

Manage Holds

How to Manage Library Holds

The only thing I’ve found that I don’t like about Libby is that it’s too efficient.

If three people are waiting for a particular book and the library’s borrowing period is three weeks, Libby will give an estimate of nine weeks as the wait for that book. The thing is, most people return their library books early. So that nine weeks could turn out to be two weeks or some other length of time.

When I am deciding which books to place on hold, I try to space them out. I try to select a variety of books with short hold times and other books with longer hold times. The catch is that you never know how long the hold period will really be.

Invariably, just when you’re really involved in a book, you’ll get a notice from Libby that the book you’ve been waiting for is now available. This is what the notice looks like:

Click on "Borrow" and it will take you to the "You are borrowing [title]" screen. If you need a book right now or if you’re one of those people who likes to have two or more books going at one time, then go for it! All you need to do is click the big "Borrow!" button to borrow the newly available book. 

Note that this screen tells you how many days your borrowing period will be. It also shows a facsimile of the library card for the library from which you're borrowing.

If you're not ready to borrow the book right now, click on the < Your Holds button at the top of the screen. This action will NOT borrow the book and will leave it on your Holds shelf, which looks like this:

 

From here, you can Borrow, Manage Hold, or Deliver Later. 

Click Borrow if you want to Borrow right now. Click Manage Hold if you want to go to the screen where you can Cancel the hold. (It's the "never mind, I don't want it" button). 

Click Deliver Later if you want to borrow this book at some time in the future. This will take you to a screen saying "You are scheduling [title] for later delivery."

The cool thing here is the slider. It defaults to the minimum extension, usually seven days. You can move the slider left and right until you find your desired number of days. 

Keep in mind that this is not a guarantee of when you'll receive the book. It depends on how long the other library patrons keep the book. It's kind of like letting someone go ahead of you in line at the supermarket - but you don't know how many items they have.

If you're happy with the number of days you selected, click "Update Hold!"

That action will take you back to your holds shelf, and it will show the new estimated date.

Stop Book Theft

There's a disturbing trend being popularized on TikTok: buy a Kindle book, read it, and then return it to Amazon. This is described as a "life hack" but it's actually stealing from the book's author. Please sign the petition below to ask Amazon to change their return policies to not allow returns of e-books.

 Change.org Petition

The Kentucky Packhorse Library

The Giver of Stars

by Jojo Moyes

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Alice Wright is an Englishwoman in the 1930s. She feels stifled and unhappy with her strict, conventional life. She is swept off her feet by handsome American Bennett van Cleve, who is on a European tour with his father. Alice and Bennett marry and return to his home in Kentucky. After a whirlwind courtship, Alice is shocked to find that her marriage is loveless. Bennett seems to care only about his father, a rich and selfish coal baron. She hates living in the stuffy and stifling van Cleve family home.

Alice gets the chance to join the Kentucky Packhorse Library, a WPA project that brought books and other materials to isolated rural communities. Alice finds fulfillment in this project and develops deep and lasting friendships with the other librarians. She finds that she loves the Kentucky hill country and its tough but loving residents.

The Giver of Stars is about the importance of relationships and searching for your own happiness. The story is based on the real Kentucky Packhorse Library. I found the story to be gripping, and it kept me enthralled to the end. The female characters in the book are excellent and well-written. However, the male characters are caricatures. We never learn much about Bennett, Alice’s estranged husband. I wondered if he was a closeted gay man, which would have been reasonable because he never touched Alice sexually. The reason for his apparent lack of sexuality was never explored or explained. 

All that we see of Geoffrey van Cleve, Bennett’s father, is his scheming, racist, misogynistic ways. We learn nothing about his thoughts and motivation. He might as well have been Snidely Whiplash from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle comics.

I rated The Giver of Stars four stars out of five for the strong female characters and interesting story. I took off one star for the lack of background and motivation of the male characters. 

Harsh conditions in Appalachia

Gap Creek

by Robert Morgan

Rating ⭐⭐⭐

Gap Creek is the story of Julie, who married at 17 and moved to the Appalachian countryside. The book is full of trials and losses. Julie always maintains a good outlook so she soldiers on no matter how difficult the situation. This is a great book to read for real insight into the difficult life that was lived by our predecessors. If you ever think your life is hard, this book will provide some perspective.

Perhaps because of Julie's always-dire situation, I lost interest after a while. It was just so unendingly grim. With my comfortable 21st-century life as a frame 0f reference, I just couldn't relate to the beleaguered Julie.