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Assassin's Accomplice:
Meh. And I suspect my reaction has as much to do with me as the book itself. My mother read Assassin's Accomplice in a day and a half and liked it just fine. I took six, for no apparent reason, which I probably should have set it aside for later. My focus wandered constantly, facts just didn't penetrate, and I can't fault the writing on that score. Mea culpa. However, I do wish the author had uniformly stuck with the less personal style of referring to her subjects by surname, especially since Booth and Mary Surratt's son were both named John. Another disappointment: I didn't get much of a sense of Mary Surratt's character, though that may well be due to the fact that Mary wasn't the most accessible person even when she was alive. Fuzzy as I was about the intricacies of the conspiracy, I did sense redundant little summaries now and then. On the plus side, Larson is perfectly clear about what's known and what's merely probable. No wild flights of fancy here. And God bless her for the source notes. I heart source notes. It certainly seems that Assassin's Accomplice has striped away decades of sensationalism and misconceptions about the Surratt case, presenting us with the real truth. Now that I've gotten the dirt on the Surratt family, I want to go back and have a skim through Ann Rinaldi's An Acquaintance with Darkness -- I seem to recall Mary, Anna, and John Jr. all play minor roles in that plot, and I'm curious to see how they're portrayed.
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The Porcupine Year
Ok, it's official -- I don't know what my problem is with books this month. Apparently I'm having myself an inexplicable meh-fest. I loved The Birchbark House. Then Game of Silence came along and spat right in the face of my weapons-grade case of Sequel Prejudice. I lusted after ARCs of The Porcupine Year until one arrived at my door. And then? Um...nothing much. I don't even have anything like a tangible complaint (and honestly, who'd complain about Louise Erdrich anyway?) but The Porcupine Year didn't hit me the way the others have. That's all there is to it. Sheesh -- I feel like a traitor to the cause. (Available in September)
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Lincoln and Douglass: An American Friendship
Well here I go again... While I loved some of the artwork in Lincoln and Douglass -- particularly the African-American faces overlaid on New Orleans tree trunks, and later the spread of a slave gazing out from between the strips of an American flag -- I had very mixed feelings about the liknesses of Lincoln, Douglass, and Mary Todd. Similarly, though some of the imagery in the writing also appealed to me, I felt a noticeable lack of storyline. (In my opinion, every picture book needs some sort of narrative arc, even non-fiction.) Instead, this text felt more like a brief meditation on Lincoln & Douglass's relationship, without enough facts to constitute a biography of either man. I also get crotchety when non-fiction text includes invented conversations, so clearly this wasn't the ideal picture book bio for my taste. For the record, I ADORED Giovanni and Collier's previous collaboration, Rosa. (Nice interview here with Bryan Collier on illustrating Rosa, by the way.)
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The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club
Hey, so this is what most people my age are reading instead of novels for 12-year-olds! And no wonder they like it: funny, edgy stuff about trying to get your you-know-what together and look like an actual grown-up. I'm just a little bit stupid and didn't realize until well into the book that this is a collection of columns, not a straightforward memoir. Which explains all the jumping around. (Duh.)
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Fine, it's a re-read, which is totally cheating, but this month was in desperate need of some unadulterated enthusiasm. And guess what? I STILL LOVE THIS BOOK! The audio recording might even be better than the print edition, if you can imagine that.
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Lottery
