I recently saw my daughter perform as Mrs. Frank in the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank, so when I saw that this memoir of the likeable and helpful Miep character was available to download, I jumped at it. In the play, it's obvious that the Franks and the others hiding out in the Annex couldn't have survived without Miep and others bringing them food and other supplies, but not until I heard her whole story did I realise just what risks this courageous young woman was taking every day.
I am grateful that Miep Gies started her story at the beginning: describing how she had come to the Netherlands from Vienna after WWI as part of a program to strengthen the health of sickly and starving children; how she quickly grew to love her adopted homeland and yearned for the day when she would be truly Dutch; how she met Otto Frank and then his family, growing to know and love them all; how she became politically aware in the years leading up to the German invasion of the Netherlands; and how this informed her senses of duty and justice.
Anne Frank Remembered choked me up several times, the first time being when Otto Frank confides in Miep that his older daughter had been instructed to report to a work camp and that he was going to take the entire family into hiding. When he asked Miep if she would help them, she immediately replied, "Of course." When he attempted to describe the dangers that she would be exposed to, she cut him off and reiterated, "Of course I will help." How many of us would immediately offer this help, knowing that the penalty for hiding Jews was deportation or death?
In the twenty-five months that the Franks et al were hiding in the secret rooms above her work place, Miep spent every day searching for the supplies necessary to keep them all alive. She visited those in hiding every morning to get their shopping lists and then, with forged ration cards (which her freedom fighting husband was able to obtain) and a quantity of money that would have gotten her arrested had she been searched by the ever present Green Police, she went from store to store, longer and longer trips as food became more scarce, never buying enough from any one store to raise suspicions. She would deliver their supplies and visit over lunch, never letting anyone know just how hard or dangerous conditions were becoming for her, return to her office job and then visit again at the end of the day when the workers had all left and those in hiding could move around a bit more freely. None of this is stated as a complaint in the book; Miep gladly did everything she could to help out her friends. It also choked me up in one scene where Miep, noticing that Anne was beginning to make the leap from child to young woman, brought her a pair of red high heels.
I think that everyone knows that eventually the attic was discovered and those in hiding were sent to concentration camps. There is a monologue at the end of the play where Mister Frank says that the last time he saw his daughter Anne alive, she was naked and starving and her head was shaved and they were separated from one another by a fence. Knowing how their story ended, the arrest scene from Miep's perspective was horrifying and terribly sad. But I had to marvel at the courage she showed when confronted by the arresting Nazi: as he screamed at her, she recognized that he had a Viennese accent. She told him that she was also from Vienna and that he should be ashamed of himself. This was probably the only thing that saved her from arrest like her fellow coworkers. She followed this up by going to the Nazi headquarters the next day to see if he would accept a bribe to release her friends, but they had already been moved on.
As this is Miep's story, it continues on with the conditions endured by the Dutch until the end of WWII, and then on to the reunification with Otto Frank, the details surrounding his decision to publish Anne's diary (which Miep herself had saved from the ransacked Annex), and her decision to publish her own memoir fifty years later. I recently enjoyed a similar memoir,The Secret Holocaust Diaries :The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister, by a Russian woman who was the lone survivor of Nazi atrocities in her own family. It is unfathomable to me that anyone could be a Holocaust denier and I am grateful that these and other memoirs were published before the stories could have been lost forever with the memories of their authors. With this book, Miep Geis went from a minor character in a stage play to a fully real and amazing woman whose courage and senses of duty and justice should be an inspiration to anyone who learns her story.
I find myself slightly annoyed after reading Late Nights on Air. I've never been up to the Territories but have long been slightly fascinated by the North: I would love to go on one of those Polar Bear tours up in Churchill, or see the Northern Lights in Whitehorse, or witness the Caribou migration (as described here) outside of Yellowknife. I also know that I am too intimidated by the wilderness, and the wildlife in it, to ever attempt the epic canoe trip described in this book; in fact I'm too lazy to take out a canoe on the glassy lake my parents live on, too nervous to let my dog off leash in the city in case of coyotes. But going into this book, I was really hoping for a Northern experience, and I don't know if I got it.
I was trying to find some old quote I thought I knew that says that all Canadian literature is really about geography-- a quote that I have found curious because, as a Canadian who has always lived in cities, the geography of my life isn't terribly different from people who live in cities anywhere in the world. What I found, repeatedly, were references to Margaret Atwood's Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, wherein she argues that all Canadian literature is about is the notion of survival and its central character the victim. As this book is set in the timeframe that Atwood wrote her book, I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the characters in Late Nights on Air come off as victims (every female character is obsessed with her relationship with her own father, some are the uncomplaining victims of physical violence from their partners, the Natives are victims of Colonialism, the landscape is the victim of the white settlers, men are the victims of drink or their own passions, etc.) As it is probably also not a coincidence that this is really a book about survival, I take this as an homage to Atwood and her themes, but I have to believe that in the 40+ years since her critical study was published, Canadian literature has moved on from this narrow perspective. Something about this book, therefore, felt diminishing to me.
I was also annoyed at the politics of this book-- from the boosterism of the CBC (whose funding today are tax dollars I resent paying) to the notion that all of the Natives who opposed the Mackenzie Pipeline project were doing so out of a selfless regard for the purity of the ancestral grounds it would defile. The last is particularly timely as right now we debate the similar project, the Keystone Pipeline. I have often thought that if the main argument against the pipeline is environmental, then surely pumping fossil fuels south, through two countries that already have strong environmental regulations, must be safer for the Earth than extracting oil in countries without such strict rules and then shipping it across the ocean in tankers. In this book, however, a small scene that describes the skittishness of migrating Caribou goes a long way towards influencing my ideas about the harm of running a pipeline through their calving grounds. Finding the people in this book sketchy and not all likeable, I would have liked more scenes with the animals, more scenes with the wilderness, more of a Northern experience.
I was also annoyed, at times, by the writing style. Many passages were fragmentary, which can be poetic or disjointed. Where they were poetic, I revelled in them. Where they were disjointed, I was confused and a little bored. I actually can't believe it took me two weeks to finish this book, but I was rarely looking forward to picking it up.
My last complaint: the excessive foreshadowing. I don't know if I have ever read a book that promised so often that something horrible was going to happen. The device did not keep me intrigued, and by the time the tragedy occurred, I was just happy to be getting near the end of the book.
I'm not surprised that Late Nights on Air won the Giller Prize; it is unabashedly a Canadian novel, if something of a throwback to early Atwood, but in the end, you know what I wanted? More Canada. At the risk of negating everything I said about not thinking Canadian literature can/should be reduced to its geography, the following geographical passage is where I think Elizabeth Hay gets it right in this book:
Somewhere between three and four in the morning, as they were paddling back, they saw a world that Ralph might have photographed had he seen it, and that Gwen would later try to paint. But it wasn't possible to duplicate the colours except by closing her eyes. Then the islands in the distance became the right shade of jet black, and the sky and the water were an identical, intense, unblemished peach.
I would love to see that scene, even vicariously, and am left wanting more.
I'm walking my dog Libby and listening to an audiobook of Nic Sheff's Tweak. The sidewalk is so slushy and the air is so chill and the narrator's voice is just talking slowly, slowly, slowly. Nic got himself pretty messed up on crystal meth, and heroin, and crack and whatever. I look at the sun stuck on the horizon and I can imagine I'm in Nic's brown aired LA. Suddenly I can't tell if the sun is bleeding into dusk or crashing into dawn, but either way it's shattering the light into little fragments that mix with the snow and puddles and stuff.
It's so goddamn beautiful that I'm just kind of stopped, staring at the sun. When my dog turns and looks at me with her big and knowing eyes, I realise that I'm crying for the first time since I don't know when. Just crying, crying, crying. I wipe snot on my sleeve and look straight back into Libby's eyes and say, "I think Nic's going to be okay this time."
She looks at me with such understanding, I think she agrees with me.
Smiling through the tears, I say, "Word."
With apologies to Nic Sheff, if the above sounds both a little sophomoric and overwritten, that's how his memoir comes off to me. On the other hand, he was basically still a kid when he wrote it, and if he was experimenting and falling in love with the sound of his written voice, then more power to this damaged soul who was learning to love himself for the first time in his life.
After reading Beautiful Boy A Father's Journey through His Son's Meth Addiction, an account of Nic's drug addiction from the point of view of his father, David Sheff, I was fascinated to hear many of the same stories from Nic's point of view. While David was frantic with worry when his son disappeared, obviously relapsed into drug use, here Nic fills in the blanks and tells us the gritty truth about what drugs he was using, what he had to do to acquire those drugs, and who he was consorting with at the time.
My main interest in these two stories is as a parent of teenagers, and as I said in my review of Beautiful Boy, the superaddictive drugs like Nic was using are of particular concern-- even now I'm left without any real clues about how to positively prevent one of my girls from ending up just like he did. It seems like such a crapshoot-- unless you're on a deserted island, kids will likely experiment with soft drugs, some of them will try harder drugs, and some of them will become hopelessly addicted, living on and off the street, in and out of rehab, struggling with sobriety for the rest of their lives. So I'm looking for clues and can't help but compare these two books.
In Beautiful Boy, David Sheff says that Nic appeared to adjust well enough to his parents' divorce at a young age and spent his childhood as bright and engaged, going on to become a Varsity athlete, an Honour Student and an award-winning writer, even published in Newsweek while still in high school. Although Nic had been caught with pot at 12, his Dad understood about drug experimentation, having used just about everything himself at one point or another, and Nic was able to assure his Dad it was a one time thing. David was eventually stunned to discover that his bright and shiny golden boy was a meth addict who barely finished high school. The whole story seems like it could happen in any family at any time and there's little to be done to prevent it.
In Tweak, Nic Sheff says that his parents' divorce was devastating and he spent his youth shuttling back and forth between two homes, neither of which he felt he belonged to. When he was with his Mom, her second husband would be demanding and abusive, often leading to frightening shouting matches with Nic's mother. When he was with his Dad, he would be brought along to Hollywood parties where his father would drink and do drugs with famous people, all of which seemed impressive and glamorous to Nic. When his Dad remarried and had a son and daughter, Nic felt removed, replaced. While no one was paying attention, Nic smoked pot throughout every day, starting at the age of 12, eventually progressing to more drugs, harder drugs. So could this particular story happen in any family at any time?
As a journalist, David Sheff's book came across as honest and open. It seemed like he has laid out all of the facts, taking blame for himself for the parts he could have done better as a father.
As a damaged yet aspiring writer, the parts that sound over-written in Nic's book seemed to take away from the plain facts truthfulness of his story-- yet I couldn't help noting that there's a lot more blame that could be apportioned to his Dad than David had been willing to claim.
So I am left to examine the clues, to see if anything from these memoirs can educate me, can keep my own kids from this pain. To the extent that I have been so educated, I am grateful to both of these writers for sharing their harrowing experiences and I wish them both futures full of peace and happiness.
I don't tend to not finish the books I start, yet I've been staring at Ape House on my nightstand for over a year. I couldn't remember why I had put it down, but looking for my next book, I picked it up again. Rereading the page where I had left off, I could vaguely remember what had happened, but decided to start from the beginning again anyway. I didn't find it horrible, if a little Harlequin Romance-y, and couldn't really remember why I had abandoned it. When I realised that I had stopped right after what was actually a pretty exciting part, the bombing of the Language Lab, I had to wonder why I had abandoned it in the first place.
Sure, I didn't really like the characters. Or anything they were doing. Or, for the most part, the writing. But I really liked the Bonobos. Browsing some reviews, I've seen other people comment that they couldn't imagine why Sara Gruen bothered to do serious research on the apes for what was such a lightweight novel, but I'd say that's the part I totally understand: Gruen was obviously affected by her interactions with Bonobos who had been taught to communicate in human language, and when the book is describing these types of interactions, or reporting on how they interact with each other when humans aren't present, the writing is joyful and playful and intriguing. My biggest complaint would be: who cares about the humans and their mundane (if in this case a bit sketchy and two-dimensional) lives? I wanted more of the Bonobos.
As for the Ape House that the title refers to: I would totally watch a television show about a troop of Bonobos. Not the "monkeys running the zoo" type show that the pornographer (!!) produces, where they eat an unhealthy diet, are recklessly exposed to mold and other germs, and there are close-ups of sex acts (complete with claxons and whistles), but since even the pornographer (!!) producer references Meerkat Manor, I can imagine that a similar show based on the uncontrived lives (ideally lives in the wild) of such human-like animals could be fascinating. I've never seen an episode of Jersey Shore, but I imagine here is where one would insert a joke about Snooki or The Situation.
And as for the ending: By the time the book ends, Gruen isn't even talking about the Bonobos anymore. It's just happily ever after and everything tied up in a bow; everyone has their dream job, dream family, dream lives. Incidentally, I was SUPER annoyed by every part of the Pinegar subplot. From the first mention of the name, I knew that Pinegar was a gun that would need to go off (a la Chekov) but I didn't expect it to be a toy gun with a little BANG! flag coming out the end. I think Chekov would have advised leaving the gun at home this time.
To the extent that there were more Bonobo scenes to come, I am not sorry that I read this book to the end. But had it continued to gather dust indefinitely on my nightstand…meh.
I wanted to read this book because 1) I tend to agree with the sensibilities of the Man Booker Prize judges, and 2) I have an abiding interest in the Finkler Question and suppose I was looking for the Finkler Answer.
There's a scene early in this book where school chums are discussing one's visit to a fortune teller. The gypsy had told Treslove that a mysterious woman named Juno would enter his life at some point. Treslove asks Finkler if he knows a Juno.
"J'you know Juno?" Finkler replied, making inexplicable J noises between his teeth.
Treslove didn't get it.
"J'know Juno? Is that what you're asking me?"
Treslove still didn't get it. So Finkler wrote it down. D'Jew know Jewno?
Treslove shrugged. "Is that supposed to be funny?"
"It is to me." Finkler said. "But please yourself."
"Is it funny for a Jew to write the word Jew? Is that what's funny?"
"Forget it," Finkler said. "You wouldn't understand."
And as much as I wanted to love this book, perhaps, like Treslove the token goy, I just didn't understand it. As timely as today was this editorial in the paper I read.
Judaism, Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism-- it's there around us every day. Here in Canada there are Israel Apartheid Weeks at the major universities, Queers Against Israel Apartheid march in Toronto's Gay Pride Parade, CUPE muses about organizing boycotts against all goods made in occupied territories-- and it's an issue that I feel I never get to fully formed ideas about. After the Holocaust (not just the atrocities that happened in Europe but also countries like Canada refusing boatloads of Jewish refugees at the time), I can't imagine the thought processes of anyone who would deny the Jewish people a right to their own homeland, as safe harbour if nothing else. I also would agree that the Palestinian people deserve and requiretheir own homeland, that they should have the same rights to peace and hope and confidence in the future that we enjoy here. In The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson puts all imaginable viewpoints regarding the Middle East Situation in the mouths of his characters, but I ended the book without a greater understanding; I had only heard the arguments rehashed without any conclusions drawn.
There are certainly funny bits in this book. This is probably my favourite:
(He passed) Nash's church where he had once fallen in love with a woman he had watched lighting a candle and crossing herself. In grief, he presumed. In chiaroscuro. Crepuscular, like the light. Or like himself. Inconsolable. So he'd consoled her.
"It'll be all right," he told her. "I'll protect you."
She had fine cheekbones and almost transparent skin. You could see the light through her.
After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, "Why do you keep telling me it will be all right? There isn't anything wrong."
He shook his head. "I saw you lighting a candle. Come here."
"I like candles. They're pretty."
He ran his hands through her hair. "You like their flicker. You like their transience. I understand."
"There's something you should know about me," she said. "I'm a bit of an arsonist. Not serious. I wasn't going to burn down the church. But I am turned on by flame."
He laughed and kissed her face. "Hush," he said. "Hush, my love."
In the morning he woke to twin realisations. The first was that she had left him. The second was that his sheets were on fire.
And this muscular bit of scene-setting:
In Treslove's eyes Hephzibah didn't so much cook as lash out at her ingredients, goading and infuriating them into taste. No matter what she was preparing she always had at least five pans on the go, each of them big enough to boil a cat in. Steam rose from four of them. Burning oil from a fifth. Every window was open. An extractor fan sucked noisily at whatever it could find. Treslove had suggested closing the windows when the fan was on…But Hephzibah ignored him, banging her cupboard doors open and closed, using every spoon and every casserole she owned, breathing in the flames and the smoke. The sweat poured down her brow and stained her clothes. Every couple of minutes she would pause to wipe her eyes. Then on she'd go, like Vulcan stoking the fires of Etna. And at the end of it, there was an omelette and chives for Treslove's supper.
There are many examples of persuasive and well-formed arguments for and against the actions that Israel takes, and although I am open to being educated on the issue, I was left, like Treslove, feeling like an outsider who couldn't possibly understand an issue I wasn't born into. It's like when someone says, "My mother is nuts!", and you reply, "You're right. Your mother is nuts!", and they sock you in the jaw for talking smack about their mother. It's like Jaobson is saying that the Finkler Question can only be understood and answered by the Finklers themselves, and if this is the point of this book, then that feels like a bit of a copout.
From a purely narrative point of view, The Finkler Question is a slightly frustrating story, with mostly unlikeable characters, but the writing is strong and compelling and carried me through to the end. A Man Booker winner? Mazel tov.
Recently, there was a gruesome article in the newspaper about a woman's torso that had been found in a Dumpster. It turns out that her likely murderer was a co-worker of someone I know and I was given the inside story: the victim was a crackhead who was involved in a relationship with the accused. When his money ran out, she ran out on him, and likely out of jealousy, maybe even by accident, he killed her and then dismembered her body. In telling the story, "crackhead" was used freely to describe the victim, and there is just the slightest implication that she ended up the way that crackheads do; that it was perhaps inevitable; foregone. Once her remains were identified, her family released a picture to the newspaper of the victim as a fresh-faced 15 year old, apparently the last picture they have of her before she became an addict and unrecognizable to them. Fifteen. And murdered at twenty-four. I don't know this family, but I can imagine they did everything they could to get between their daughter and her addiction, but crack, like meth or heroin or whatever I've never even heard of, is one of those drugs that can hook some users nearly instantly (or so I've been told). As the mother of teenage daughters, this young woman's death scared me and I totally empathized with her family; there but for the grace of God…
I also recently started watching Breaking Bad, and although I have been silently cheering on this terminally ill high school teacher who is just cooking up some meth to set his family up financially before he dies, perhaps I should be recognizing him for the villain that he really is.
These two influences led me to listen to the memoir Beautiful Boy A Father's Journey through His Son's Meth Addiction by David Sheff. The author paints his son's childhood as happy and fulfilling, perhaps glossing over the traumatic effects of the breakup of his marriage to the boy's mother. Although Sheff had once caught his son with a small amount of pot, he thought of it as normal experimentation, and Nic went on to become a Varsity athlete in high school, an honour student, an award-winning journalist, and by all accounts a bright and engaged kid. By the end of his senior year, however, Nic had become chronically tardy and absent and, as is discovered later, had been abusing drugs and alcohol. This led, ultimately, to a meth addiction, dropping out of college, rehab, relapse, more rehab, another relapse…The story is horrifying in the sense that if it could happen in this family, maybe it could happen in any family… In mine? Is it possible to prevent your children from trying meth (or crack or heroin or…)? Is it possible to predict if your children would be among those unfortunate experimenters who go on to become addicts?
As a journalist, Sheff dealt with the helplessness of his situation by educating himself on meth addiction through research and interviewing leading experts. The information he intersperses into the memoir was fascinating to me, and ultimately, discouraging: meth is a widely available and particularly addictive drug that traditional rehab has very little efficacy in dealing with. Not only that, but Sheff cites research that proves that drug dealers are lacing less serious drugs (ecstasy and pot) with meth. Is that true? Is it happening here?
I know that here in Canada there is growing support for the legalization of marijuana, and to the extent that it would ensure that my kids don't get criminal records for one day trying a so-called "soft drug", I can get behind it. If it gets pot out of the hands of criminals who might taint it with meth, then the safe supply argument gets me even further behind it. But then Sheff explains that pot is indeed a gateway drug: not everyone who smokes pot will end up trying meth but, he says, everyone who becomes a meth addict started out smoking pot. What can a parent do with that information?
This memoir is well written and interesting and had me rooting for the whole family to come out safely on the other side of addiction. As Sheff learns in Al-Anon, the families of addicts need to remember the three C's: the families didn't cause the addiction; they can't control the addiction; they can't cure the addiction. I understand and believe those words but what I was hoping to learn was: can families prevent an addiction? Probably not.
I understand that Nic Sheff, the addict at the center of this father's memoir, has written his own account of life as a meth addict and I'll be listening to that next, looking for another piece of the puzzle.
When I was a teenager, there was this older man who used to do a lot of walking around the town I lived in. He had an aging Elvis kind of a look with a greying ducktail, tinted aviator glasses, denim coat and jeans, and click-clacking cowboy boots. Always the cowboy boots. We probably all have these people we don't know who just pop up everywhere we go and I saw this maneverywhere. Yet, I assumed he had no idea who I was, giggling with nervous hilarity with my girlfriends if we ever happened to pass him in a car, us young and cruising along, he old and plodding. Click-clacking along the sidewalk. This man was there at the edge of my awareness, like a piece of the scenery, until I started reading The Stand. And then he became the Walkin Dude:
Randall Flagg, the dark man, walked rapidly, rundown bootheels clocking against the paved surface of the road, and if car lights showed on the horizon he faded back and back, down over the soft shoulder to the high grass where the night bugs made their homes... and the car would pass him, the driver perhaps feeling a slight chill as if he had driven through an air pocket, his sleeping wife and children stirring uneasily, as if all had been touched with a bad dream at the same instant.
He walked south, south on US 51, the worn heels of his sharp-toed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket.
He moved on, not pausing, not slowing, but alive to the night. His eyes seemed almost frantic with the night's possibilities. There was a Boy Scout knapsack on his back, old and battered. There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think - and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make waterglasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody.
He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.
He strode on at a steady, ground-eating pace. Two days ago he had been in Laramie, Wyoming, part of an ecotage group that had blown a power station. Today he was on US 51, between Grasmere and Riddle, on his way to Mountain City. Tomorrow he would be somewhere else. And he was happier than he had ever been, because -
He stopped.
Because something was coming. He could feel it, almost taste it on the night air. He could taste it, a sooty hot taste that came from everywhere, as if God was planning a cookout and all of civilization was going to be the barbecue. Already the charcoal was hot, white and flaky outside, as red as demons' eyes inside. A huge thing, a great thing.
He had been born when times changed, and the times were going to change again. It was in the wind, in the wind of this soft Idaho evening.
It was almost time to be reborn. He knew. Why else could he suddenly do magic?
He closed his eyes, his hot face turning up slightly to the dark sky, which was prepared to receive the dawn. He concentrated. Smiled. The dusty, rundown heels of his boots began to rise off the road. An inch. Two. Three inches. The smile broadened into a grin. Now he was a foot up. And two feet off the ground, he hung steady over the road with a little dust blowing beneath him.
Then he felt the first inches of dawn stain the sky, and he lowered himself down again. The time was not yet.
But the time was soon.
He began to walk again, grinning, now looking for a place to lay up for the day. The time was soon, and that was enough to know for now.
Something about The Stand terrified me as a teenager, and totalling identifying with the Walkin Dude as evil incarnate, I would be doubly creeped out if I heard my own cowboy boot wearing walker making his way down my street late at night as I was devouring my Stephen King. And the thing about Stephen King and The Stand is that, as an author, he's allowed to set up a perfectly plausible science-based dystopian situation and then add in some magic. We buy that, expect that, and slurp it up.
And then there's Justin Cronin. I really enjoyed The Passage, particularly because it sets up a perfectly plausible science-based dystopian situation; it's a vampire book that uses science to explain all of the mythical information that we all know already about the evil bloodsuckers (garlic, crosses, sunlight, stakes…) and it drew me in completely. I even accepted the telepathic abilities of the original twelve as reasonably scientific, and I believed and accepted the world he created.
I see many reviewers of that book drawing comparisons to The Stand, some even saying that it seems derivative, but I didn't really think that was fair: vampires are a definite point of distinction. So imagine my disappointment when one of the first new characters we meet in The Twelve is Danny the mentally challenged school bus driver-- I expected him at any point to pull on his Oshkosh (B'gosh!) and crow out, "M-O-O-N spells bus!" Why add a character like this after you've already been accused of being derivative?
No matter, my biggest complaint about this book is the overwhelming use of coincidence; that fate is moving everyone to exactly where they need to be at exactly the right time. It became a bit of an eyeroller. I understand that the middle book of a trilogy must be the hardest to write, it's often the hardest to read, but there was something a bit lazy about the feel of this book, like a place filler. I also thought that there were some gorgeous bits of writing in The Passage, but in this book, Cronin kept taking me out of the story with some clunky look-at-me-I'm-really-writing-here phrases.
With excruciating miraculousness, she took Sara by the hand.Flesh meeting flesh. The unbearable corporeal smallness of it, its discreet power, its infusion of memory. All of Sara's senses molded around the exquisite sensation of her child's tiny hand in her own. It was the first time their bodies had touched since one was inside the other, though now it was the opposite: Sara was the one inside.
Excruciating miraculousness. Despite the fact that my spell-check is telling me that "miraculousness" is not even a real word, I think that phrase (and the spoiler that followed) sums up what I found wrong with this book. I accept that Stephen King will throw in magic and the impossible (and evil clowns), but I wanted Cronin to stick to the rules of the world he had created in The Passage, and with the fate and the coincidences and the excruciating miraculousness of this book, I didn't feel as engaged with the characters this time; I didn't feel any real danger to the main characters and they're battling vampires.
And yet, this is still a good book. I kept reading and am definitely looking forward to how the author will wrap it all up in the third book. One more thing-- I wish the Dramatis Personae was at the beginning of the book; I never flip to the end of a story I'm reading and I could have used the reminder of who some of these characters were as I went along.
And I do hope that the real life Elvisy Walkin Dude that click-clacked down my sidewalk when I was a teenager never heard me and my girlfriends and our nervous laughter-- it was never at him, but more the idea of him; he was simply a character who popped up with regular coincidence, perhaps even with excruciating miraculousness, in my very nonmagical, ordinary world.
