HarperPerennial is promoting short stories this summer and one of their approaches is to offer a free story on their site every few weeks. Right now they have “Bolero” by Francis Itani up. You can check their Summer Is Short page for new stories as the summer goes on.

Tim Bete is giving away the ebook of Cap’n Billy “The Butcher” MacDougall’s Guide to Pirate Parenting. I found this one through ReadStreet. Bete explains his reasons for giving his ebook away better and more “piraty” than I could:

Avast ye scurvy dog, me publisher’s ship sank leaving me marooned with no way to sell me book. Rather than see me book scuttled, I’ve decided to give away the e-book version of GUIDE TO PIRATE PARENTING for free!

Reading Tim Bete’s website is worth a visit in and of itself even if you don’t have kids that need pirate parenting (though it might be worth having some just to apply pirate parenting theory ).

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller is about Pippa Lee, a woman in her fifties married to a man in his 80s. The couple moves to a retirement village and Pippa starts to come unglued: sleepwalking, sleepdriving, sleepsmoking, etc. The book moves to an exploration of her past and then back to the present. The marketing copy says that Miller is an acclaimed author, but I don’t see it in this book.

I found it difficult to care about any of the characters. Pippa herself didn’t seem real or have much depth even though she was given an interesting past. I didn’t feel Pippa’s struggle, and I didn’t believe the sleepwalking/breakdown plot device, which is never explained properly and rests on weak ground as far as suspension of disbelief goes.

What put me off the book most was the style of writing. When Miller writes in the third person, she tells what the characters are like, what they are feeling, and how they are perceived by others. I felt like I was watching a director giving instruction to actors about how they should act and feel.

Miller also overreaches when she tries to use similes. Instead of flowing with the writing, the similes took me right out of the story while I tried to wrap my mind around the imagery (this is not a good thing). I would have found the book much more readable if the similes were deleted, which would also have saved Miller from winning this year’s Purple Prose Award. Here are some examples of her similes:

“…the impulse had rung out faintly within her for years, like the occasional beep of a cell phone lost deep in an apartment.”

“The two swollen halves of her upper lip drooped suggestively, like a set of red velvet curtains tied at the corners of her mouth.”

“…wondering if she could possibly be pregnant in spite of the vestigial coil still lodged in her uterus like astronaut litter abandoned on the moon.”

It’s a shame, because once I got to the part of the book about Pippa’s past, I could see glimpses of the acclaimed writer Miller is supposed to be. That section is written in first person and the use of similes drops tremendously—I’m not sure which change improves the story more.

Dating Makes You Want to Die (But You Have To Do It Anyway) is a fun read. It is sarcastic and yet there is truth in the sarcasm. There are fun little quizzes, silly scenarios, and she says/he says banter. I like that the chapters progress through the various stages of a relationship (and send you back to the previous chapter if you didn’t graduate).

Although I’m not dating, my partner and I had a laugh as I read some of the book aloud and we reminisced about our first date (The Kinda Date). You know the Kinda Date, the one where you’re not sure that you’re actually on a date because the other person is hedging their bets and not declaring it a date? Yeah, those are fun.

I did find that the brash humour got a bit much in large doses, but that won’t bother everyone. Here’s a passage about breaking up so you can get a feel for the type of humour:

The good thing about being cathartically vengeful is that it gets tiresome. After week three of screaming into his voice mail, you’ll get tired. You just need to exorcise the hurt of being dumped. Once that clears through the pure force of your abject bitchiness, you can go back to being antagonistic to your Chinese deliveryman for not including your egg roll order again. (p. 165, ARC)

This book is very American in its humour and popular culture references, which is worth noting if you are buying it outside of the US. I don’t have cable so I don’t get a lot of American TV and some references escaped me completely, while others were well-known enough that I could supply the Canadian equivalents myself (I mention this because I got this book through a Canadian publisher–if I had received it from an American publisher I would make allowances for that).

This is not your typical self-help book which is both its strength and its weakness. After reading a lot of self-help books on many different topics, this humorous and irreverent approach is certainly refreshing. I did find that there was a certain superficiality to the information, which is almost a requirement with the humour approach.

If you are just starting to explore why you aren’t having success in dating, then this book is a gentle and easy introduction to the issues. If you already know you have issues with dating, then this book addresses the issue on too superficial a level to be helpful. However, if you know someone who complains about their lack of success at dating, but they don’t seem to know where to begin to fix the issue then this may be the right book. It is definitely a good book to give someone who is in denial about their dating prowess (you can pass it off as a gag gift if they get offended).

I read this for a writing class that I’m taking, so it’s not my usual fare (but I’ve learned lately that reading outside the usual fare is a good thing–I never thought I would like sushi either until I tried it). This particular memoir just doesn’t spark anything in me though.

Lucy Grealy writes about her childhood battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, which resulted in half of her jawbone being removed, and her teens and adulthood spent reconstructing her face and constructing her self. I read this a couple years ago, and then read Truth and Beauty (Ann Patchett) which has become the companion book to Autobiography of a Face. Now when I reread Grealy’s memoir, I can’t unknow what Patchett reveals about Grealy in her memoir so it’s hard to see it as a single work. (I’ll be rereading Truth and Beauty in the next few weeks and post a review when I do).

One of the passages from Grealy’s book that caught my eye:

pg. 7

This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.

I like the writing (see quote), but I just don’t find much that is universal in Grealy’s story and I find myself tiring of her life long before she did. Grealy disconnects herself so much from her emotions as a child that this distance is transmitted to the reader and I end up not caring as much as I should after spending 200 pages reader her life.

Something I did pick up on in the second reading that I didn’t see in the first, is Grealy’s dysfunctional view of how children should act:

pg. 29

…I found myself deeply embarrassed for the boy. How could anyone sink so low as to hide beneath a bed? This went against every belief I held dear. One had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry. I was nothing if not harsh. Had I not found myself in this role of sick child, I would have made an equally good fascist or religious martyr

The way that Grealy deals with her childhood seems harsh, but it is the classic thinking of a child raised in a dysfunctional environment (her mother experienced depression requiring hospitalisation although this is mentioned only in passing).

Grealy focuses so much on herself that you are left with very little sense of the people around her—her parents, her siblings, her teachers, her doctors. The depth with which Grealy excises other people from her memoir becomes apparent in Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty which relates a different view of Grealy’s college years.

It’s not one of my favourite books, but the combination of Autobiography of a Face and Truth and Beauty gives insight into how truth is a matter of perspective and how you can tell the truth and yet lie by omission. If you read one of these books, you really should read the other as they are a set despite the fact that they are by two different authors (who were friends and even roommates for a while).