All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


All the Bright Places

Five very bright shining stars and I hope it gets many more five star ratings from its intended readership, teens. I hope every teenager reads this, and gets some hope and/or understanding from it. It has been more years than you might guess since I was in high school, but evidently it has not changed.  So easy for all the adults around you to believe everything is fine or ignore the clues when in reality, death and madness are waiting to embrace and engulf you…
And then you find somebody or some book or something inside to help you hang on.

This is first of all a love story, how Finch and Violet fall in love. It’s also a story about dealing with high school and cliques and tragedy, difficulty, mental illness, survivor’s guilt. It’s about resilience, and sinking or swimming.  It’s hard to survive to adulthood, and the book acknowledges that, no talking down. All told in present tense, alternating chapters with Finch’s point of view, then Violet’s.

All in such luminous, tender prose. It’s a beautiful, beautiful book and I read the last three chapters and beyond while sobbing. Good tears and sad tears and grateful tears.  I can’t go any deeper without spoilers…




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The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium by Michael Marder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Philosopher's Plant is a lovely series of explorations of philosophy in the light of postmodern ecology, a turning of the mental eye from the world of the abstract back to the world of the physical--an attempt at organic food for thought, if you will. Roughly following the timeline of Western philosophy from Plato to Luce Irigaray, we can follow a path or wander, plow ahead or meander through this intellectual herbarium, touching, tasting, sniffing, and engaging the physical senses in addition to the mental ones. We can practice philosophy, forming a world view based upon observation, experience, and contemplation of the world around us, herein exemplified in vegetable life.

An excellent book for beginning philosophers and anyone interested in philosophy, botany, shamanic theory, or similar disciplines. A companion reading with David Abrams' Spell of the Sensuous would be very provocative. Very much a book for intellectuals; not recommended for those who do not enjoy doing their own thinking. Fun and umami for those who do.

I received a temporary EARC from the publisher for review.


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A Life of One's Own

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved it. It’s hard to imagine a fresh take on Bloomsbury until reading this truly wonderful novel. With lush and lyrical prose Priya Parmar draws a portrait of love—many portraits, in fact. Presented as a journal/scrapbook—journal entries are interspersed with letters and telegrams from others to others—the story is told from Vanessa’s point of view, and covers the period whence the Bloomsbury circle formed until Leonard Woolf’s return to Britain from India. As is common with young, smart, artistic people, the focus is mainly on romantic love of the difficult kind: unrequited love, desperate love, stupid love, forbidden love, mad love, dangerous love—and damaging love. Of course this is what makes a story about rich, privileged people who take themselves (too) seriously a universal story, and by focusing on Vanessa, Parmar brings in familial love and the love of friends as well. At its core, the novel is the story of a woman’s (not a young girl’s) coming of age, a glimpse into what it is to love a person doomed to madness, and an exploration of what it takes to remain a stable personality amidst the whirl and wonder of the creative lifepath.  There are layers and depth here, and beautiful sentences to be savored.
(I received an E-galley of the novel for review from Ballantine and Netgalley)


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Learning made fun! For us wonks, anyway.

Favorite 2014 Women's Fiction, approved for gifting and book clubs