The Wreckers: Stand Still, Look Pretty

My husband and I alwasy thought Michelle Branch was talented with great potential, which she occasionally (often) realized, but had more room for growth.

I believe she has found it teamed up with Jessica Harp to form The Wreckers.

Their album Stand Still, Look Pretty has made its way into my daily CD rotation, despite the fact that the title song makes me think of Paris Hilton. It’s moving and meaningful anyway.

The tunes alternate from ballads to upbeat, and are all enjoyable—a rare compliment from me on a single artist album.

If you like Dixie Chicks, you’ll like this duo.

copyright 2007 Julie Pippert

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

I recently finished reading Nick Hornby’s latest novel, A Long Way Down. It’s a dark comedy about four suicidal strangers who meet on the top of a building, where each had gone to jump. Their impulse to save each other forces them to realize their own self-preservation instinct. After walking down, the four bond into an unlikely band of friends.

‘If Camus had written a grown up version of The Breakfast Club, the result might have had more than a little in commmon with [A Long Way Down] … a brave and absorbing book. It’s a thrill to watch a writer as talented as Hornby take on the grimmest of subjects without flinching, and somehow make it funny and surprising at the same time’

Tom Perotta, Publishers Weekly

JJ, described as a “tall, cool, American, looks like a rock-star (was, in fact, a rock-star before his band split) – who’s weighed down with a heap of problems and pizza,” was the character who most struck me. At an adult developmental leap point in life, he’s trying to decide whether he can choose to leap forward, or if he ought to just leap off.

Early on he’s explaining his story, how he ended up on the roof, and references it all back to when his band, Big Yellow, split up:

When Big Yellow played live, it was like some kind of Pentecostal service; instead of applause and whistles and hoots, there’d be tears and teeth-grinding and speaking in tongues. We saved souls.
…

But we used to have these messages boards up on our Web site, and I’d read them every now and again, and I could tell that people felt the same way we did; and I looked at other people’s boards, too, and they didn’t have the same kind of fans. I mean, everyone has fans who love what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be fans, right? But I could tell from reading the other boards that our guys walked out of our shows feeling something special. We could feel it and they could feel it. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them, I guess. Anyway.

As usual, Hornby has created four very flawed characters who nevertheless engage you, and to whom you relate (even if in varying degrees).

The story requires no suspension of disbelief, flows easily and entertainingly, and is well worth your time.

copyright 2007 Julie Pippert

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro, I’ve noticed, always incorporates elements of letting go, self-sacrifice, and sense of self in his books. He usually explores the line of where one person ends and another begins by creating dysfunction and imbalance in both the situation and in the characters, who usually are in a position of serving others to the point of near or total self-loss—although, that might be a misunderstanding, perhaps instead it is our issue of trying to understand how a person can be whole when his or her identity is formed through serving another/others.

He continues that theme in his book, Never Let Me Go (Random House, 2004).

Reviewers describe this book with terms like, “devastating,” “quiet desperation,” “deceptively simple,” “existential crisis,” and “emotionally shattering.”

The book doesn’t hide anything from you. It opens with the main character, Kathy H., telling the story of her life. She states the facts in the first sentence: she is 31, grew up in a school called Hailsham raised by a slew of guardians, and has been a carer—one of the best—of donors for more than eleven years. Upfront Ishiguro has revealed that this is a book of horror, for all that it is about a compelling story of a love and friendship triangle between Kathy and her two friends Ruth and Tommy. But you are so drawn in to the people and their relationships that it takes time to process that these people were created to serve as organ donors for the rest of the population.

After I read this book, I begged for someone to talk to me about it because it was burning a hole in my mind and soul. Thankfully, Mary-LUE was willing and able. We both found that this story grew and grew, more and more, the horror dawned on us increasingly after we had read the last page and closed the book. It takes a few days for it to all sink in. For me, it was the next day as I was driving on the highway. I glanced to the person in the car next to me, and suddenly I was overwhelmed by humanity, and I choked up thinking about it, and about the book.

It is devastating. But also gorgeous, moving, enthralling, and enlightening.

It’s horror, a parable, science fiction, a mystery, as well as a tale of characters growing and evolving—probably, believe it or not, the most compelling part of the book. It’s a story that is thick and rich, so dense you might normally read a couple of chapters and set it down to process, but you can’t because the story—the mystery and suspense—makes it a “read it all in one sitting page turner.”

I haven’t provided any spoilers.

You know where this book and its characters are headed from the opening line of the first page.

But you can’t accept it. You can’t let them go.

Or, at least I can’t.

If you like well-constructed fiction, go…read.