[Thank you computer-powers-that-be, for informing me that previous sentence may be a fragment. I choose to be fragmentary, I'm sorry if that warrants a dotted green line.]
This is not going to turn into a commentary on how we're judged by everyone, and evidently everything, now.
Instead I'll tell you that I've judged Wedge + Fig to be a fantastic place to grab lunch or dinner in Old City. Though if they tell you that a piece of cake is enormous, listen. Still order it and eat the entire thing, but don't be flabbergasted when it comes out of their little kitchen looking like it couldn't possibly have been housed in such a small space.
Something that competes [slightly] with enormous slices of strawberry-filled coconut cake: Winning books for free!!! Publishers have been unwittingly giving me free books for review and y'all are lucky enough to be exposed to my unbridled opinions.
This publisher was nice enough to send me the prequel (reviewed below) and a t-shirt along with the novel I had originally requested. Unfortunately for them, I'm not quite so cheap...
The American Girl by Monika FagerholmMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
It isn't very often you encounter a book with dedications and acknowledgments from a translator. Perhaps on some classical works when Ovid or Virgil didn't opt to thank their publicists, you get a fill-the-space dedication from a contemporary scholar. But really, the emphasis on translator should have been the first sign. The translator thanking the author for answering her questions should have been the second.
Not to say that The American Girl was a bad book. There was certainly no lack of story and a dynamic style in the telling.
In a linear storytelling, it would have taken the space of a short story. With the jump arounds, backtracks, revisiting, and flat-out repetition, the book clocked in at nearly 500 pages. I'm not shy of large-scale novels. I'm not afraid of creative literary structure. I am wary of manuscripts that could have benefited from some cuts. Tailored a bit this could have been a very intriguing story. I'd even venture to say that a screen adaptation would be wickedly popular. Cutting this down to screenplay size would certainly allow the reader/viewer to stick with the story and cut down on the overwhelming number of circles it travels in.
Ultimately, I'll chalk it up to lost in translation - a solid story hidden in some confusing text
Disclosure: The above book was provided to me by Other Press through the Goodreads First Reads program. The opinions are all my own.
