Skippy Dies

Ooooh Skippy. You and your dying. I wanted to like this book a lot; I really did. I saw it on various bookstores' featured tables and I picked it up countless times. It's heavy, and the pages are thin and silky. It's a really beautiful book, and all the comparisons in the jacket to Harry Potter (an irrelevant comparison) and other boys-at-boarding-school type books made me very eager to read it, so I shelled out full price for the hardback.

The story begins with a big shocker: our main character, Skippy, dies. Rewind a few months and we get his and many other characters' stories (there is proportionately more time given to the other characters than to Skippy himself, really): Carl and Barry, the creepy, skeezy, mysogenist and violent teenaged drug dealers; Ruprecht, Skippy's friend and scientific genius (much time is dedicated to String and M theory ramblings on behalf of Ruprecht); Howard, one of Skippy's teachers, and his struggles with both his love life and with some troubling events that occurred in his own days at this boarding school not so long ago. The book takes place at this boarding school near Dublin-- points for taking place in Ireland (wee!) but don't expect anything magical-mystical-Enya here; that's really not what you're in for. This is a character study of Dublin's upper middle class; it's pretty drab and depressing except for the fact that it's also hilarious, primarily on account of Mario, one of the boarders at the school who was an outlet for Murray's pervy (and very funny) wit. Mario provided many moments of laughing out loud on a bus for me.

Pluses: the book is funny; can't deny it. Howard's storyline is interesting, and so is Skippy's and Carl's.

Drawbacks:
   1. it's waaaaaay tooooo unnecessarily looooong. Do we really need another diatribe on M theory and philosophy? I'm interested, but it doesn't move the book forward or really even add to it, in my opinion. And this is speaking as someone who is interested! Alas.

   2. Some of hte minor story lines (in particular, the sideshow of Ruprecht and friends' science project) also lacked any force in the story-- why were these here? It felt like a silly TV show with out much depth.


So, overall: 5/10

Read it if you:

1. are interested in boys in adolescence. This is definitely an insightful, funny look.

2. want to laugh and don't mind plodding through a lot of other stuff to get to these great, awesomely-immature laugh lines.

The book isn't dense, exactly, it's just long. I'm glad I read it, but I didn't love it.

Happy Birthday, first book review! And wholly unrelated: How to feel like an asshole

Yay yay yay! It's finally here! Time for my first book review to be born!



So we got Purge, by Sofi Oksanen. Here's one of those books where I saw the cover and went, "ooooooh, prettyyyyy," and plus, my heritage is Swedish and Oksanen's is Finnish so woot woot, we're neighbors, hey. Had to read it. Also, it was translated by someone who went to the same Scandinavian department as me (shout out to UW) so double had to read it. And after the rather slow first ten-ish pages, I'm definitely glad I did.

The Haps, Paps: Zara has shown up, rumpled, messy, and freaking out, outside of Aliide's house in Estonia. She (Zara) is claiming to be on the run from her husband, the Incredibly Evil Bastard (IEB for short, mayhaps?) Pasha, which Aliide hesitantly believes, though she is suspicious of Zara's story. The novel tells each woman's story in alternating chapters: Zara's struggle with being forced into the sex trade industry by the IEB Pasha, and Aliide's duplicitous actions during World War II. Oksanen does a good job of making you feel one way and then slowly spinning you in a circle so that you feel quite the opposite by the end of the novel (you'll see what I mean). The writing is beautiful, though I did at times feel held at a distance. I think this is in part due to the fact that it was translated into English, and in part due to the mentioning of things that I am perhaps just not privy to:


"Would you rather have the Russians here? Would you rather have the floor of your home covered with sunflower seeds so it sounds like you're treading on beetles?" (203).

Errr...are Russians known for that?