Review: Beyond Clueless

By Linas Alsenas
Available now from Harry N. Abrams (ABRAMS)
Review copy

I keep passing BEYOND CLUELESS in my Kindle and thinking, "What book is that?  It's marked that I read it."  Then I open it up and remember.  "Oh yeah!  That one."  BEYOND CLUELESS was a cute little read (with a subplot about sexual assault), but the details just keep falling out of my head.

Marty and Jimmy always thought they'd be best friends for life, but two recent events have strained their friendship.  Marty's parents sent her to an all-girls school and Jimmy came out and started making new friends in the local gay community.  Marty finds a way to bridge the old and the new by joining her school's performance of Into the Woods.  Boys are needed for the musical, so some of Jimmy's friends can be in it and the rest can be crew.  And Marty definitely thinks things are looking up when she's cast as Little Red Riding Hood against the very attractive Felix Peroni as the Wolf.  (Clearly, she doesn't take that as a symbolic bad sign.)

I liked that both Marty and Jimmy made new friends once they were separated.  Jimmy takes to it a little bit better, but Marty does find other girls she can hang with, especially Xiang.  I also enjoyed Linas Alsenas explorations of her failures to be socially adept, such as when she ostracizes someone herself even though she didn't mean to be cruel.  Her difficulties navigating what other people are feeling felt realistic.  So did her trouble understanding and articulating her own feelings, especially when she got something she thought she wanted only to discover she wasn't feeling it at all.

I think BEYOND CLUELESS will appeal to young theater fans, especially since it doesn't ignore the importance of the crew.  Jimmy's relatively easy coming out probably holds more appeal than more dated portrayals.  Marty's difficulties with her relationship with Felix are handled well.  Generally, I can't point to anything in BEYOND CLUELESS I didn't like.  Remembering that I read it is the only problem.

Movie Monday: The Intern

The Intern is written and directed by Nancy Meyers.  I've enjoyed many of her films, especially The Holiday and Something's Gotta Give, so that was one plus in the movie's favor.  Add in that it stars Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway and I was ready to give it a chance even though the trailer seemed somewhat ho-hum.

I'm glad I did, because I really enjoyed The Intern.  I cried, because I am a big ol' softy at the movies, but I spent even more time laughing.  It's a rather gentle comedy that relies more on character than event.  (Although there is one hilarious scene that verges into slapstick involving an email that was sent to the wrong person.  It's predictable but beautifully done.)  The cast is game for it.  De Niro inhabits Ben Whittaker wonderfully, taking on a much quieter persona than usual.  Hathaway is an obvious choice for an ambitious, driven woman and she nails it.  Not to mention they play off of each other quite well as the friendship between their characters builds.

Jules is an entrepreneur whose internet business has been growing at an incredible speed.  It means late nights and early mornings, little of it spent with her cute hipster husband and adorable little girl.  It also means that the venture capitalists behind her site want her to hire an experienced CEO to make the site more corporate.

One touch I loved was that I believed in About the Fit as a successful site.  It's an internet clothing store focused on delivering detailed information about how the clothes fit based on people trying them on.  I know worries about the fit is often what keeps me from clicking "buy" on a website.  (I can't believe any site that doesn't at least let the users say if an item runs big or small.)

Ben joins AtF as a senior intern.  It's an outreach program by the company, and he takes it up because he's bored.  Retired and widowed, he's done what he wants to in life and is left to find something new to fill up his days.  He's a fish out of water at first, of course, but he and Jules find they both have qualities to offer each other.

Part of what I enjoyed about The Intern is the female point of view that Meyers brings to the table.  For instance, Jules is yet another female protagonist torn between balancing career and family and the movie doesn't automatically take the side that she should focus on being a mother.  Meyers does have her shortcomings.  The Intern takes place in an exceedingly, and rather unlikely, white Brooklyn.  The strengths of the movie did outweigh that bum note, for me.

Review: I Crawl Through It

By A.S. King
Available now from Little, Brown (Hachette)
Review copy
Read my A.S. King tag

From her first novel, THE DUST OF 100 DOGS, A.S. King has been interested in realistic issues but tackled them with fantastic flourishes.  With each of her novels, her popularity and critical acclaim have risen.  I love that she's taken the opportunity not to do the same thing repeatedly, but to push her work further and further into the edges.  I CRAWL THROUGH IT leaps into full surrealism.

The majority of the book is told through the point of view of Stanzi.  (Her name isn't Stanzi.)  She is split into two and finds refuge in her love of biology, always wearing a lab coat and compulsively dissecting frogs.  Some is told by China, who swallowed herself.  Some is told by Lansdowne Cruise, whose hair grows when she lies.  (She has very long hair.)  Some is told by Patricia, who is trapped in a place with no departures.  Their friend Gustav tells none of it, but he is central to the story - as is the helicopter he is building, which Stanzi can only see on Tuesdays.

It's a convoluted story, and on top of the surrealism, all of the narrators are unreliable.  Some truths are easy to find.  We all know what Irenic Brown did to China.  The details can be harder to determine, and much is left to the reader's interpretation.  King has a lot to say.  She sometimes hammers her point in, but she's often subtle.  (I do love the touch that despite there being prominent male characters, there are no male narrators.  This is a book where women's voices have primacy.)

Much is made in the blurb of I CRAWL THROUGH IT, as well as the design of the book itself, about the testing angle.  Yes, there is satire of the modern school curriculum culture.  In many ways I wouldn't pick that out as the central issue of the novel.  I think it has far more to say about how girls' voices are devalued, but maybe that's just me.

I CRAWL THROUGH IT is King's least accessible novel.  I think it accomplishes what King said out to do with it, and that her fans will have a lot of fun tangling through it.  It is definitely not my favorite King novel.  Like GLORY O'BRIEN'S HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, sometimes the polemics take over the story.  However, it is a rich read and a bold artistic statement.

Review: Followed by Frost

By Charlie N. Holmberg
Available now from 47North (Amazon Publishing)
Review copy

Charlie N. Holmberg's Paper Magician trilogy had an inventive magic.  It was enough to get me to give her new book a glance, which sounded right up my alley.  Beautiful and spoiled Smitha was cursed to be as cold as her heart by a man she rejected.  Now she lives in a permanent blizzard; her only companion is Death.  He wants her to come with him, but Smitha clings to life, even lonely.

I thought FOLLOWED BY FROST was a beautiful book.  I like that Holmberg and the novel acknowledge that Mordan was wrong to pursue Smitha when she made her disinterest clear.  At the same time, Smitha went above and beyond to be cruel in her rejection, both standing him up and then going on a nasty tirade.  No one deserves to be cursed as she was, but she does come to realize that she could've handled the situation better.

The descriptions of how thorough the curse is are wonderful.  Smitha's clothes freeze on her body, and tears can stick her eyes shut.  She has to gulp down boiling food lest it freeze in her mouth.  As Death points out to her, few people would survive.  I thought Death's tête-à-tête's with Smitha were wonderfully tense, but I enjoyed when the world expanded to include more people.  FOLLOWED BY FROST really does use Smitha's curse quite fully.  As the book continues it starts to shift into a romance, which is unsurprising in a book revolving around a curse about a cold heart.

Smitha does get the most development of anyone in the book, as she should.  But I thought the hero was a good fit for her.  Smitha is stubborn and impulsive, but also kind and passionate about books and languages.  She's an interesting person who needs someone equally intriguing in her life to truly be happy.

FOLLOWED BY FROST is a terrific romance with a fairytale feel.  It has YA appeal, and does start when Smitha is seventeen, but most of the book is set in her early to mid-twenties.  If this sounds like your kind of thing, then give FOLLOWED BY FROST a chance to burrow under your skin and into your heart.

Movie Monday: The Perfect Guy

The Perfect Guy is an uninspired thriller that coasts on its overqualified cast.  Sanaa Latham was the best part of Alien vs. Predator, and she's one of the best parts of The Perfect Guy.  She plays Leah, a driven woman who has a great career, great house, and great boyfriend (Morris Chesnut).  But Dave isn't ready to get married or have kids and Leah is tired of waiting.  I liked how Latham played her heartbreak as she made the hard decision.

Three months later, and Leah has found another man: Carter.  Michael Ealy has an amazing smile and loads of charisma, so it is little wonder that Leah would fall so hard, so fast.  Especially when she takes him to meet her parents and he's ridiculously charming.  However, when she witnesses a sudden violent episode she's not willing to stick around and see if it is a one-off or if he'd ever direct that anger at her.

Spoiler alert: he would.

What follows has very little tension.  Ealy is inspired casting, because his pale blue eyes can look quite creepy indeed and he plays the change in energy for his character perfectly.  Most of the other cast members are wasted.  Leah's parents only appear the once, and her two best friends are little more than props for Leah to tell her thoughts too.  There is a cop who gets a bit more to do.  The Perfect Guy did do a good job of showing how difficult it is to build a stalking and/or harassment case.

I did enjoy seeing The Perfect Guy in the theater because the audience I saw it with was very responsive.  It's hard to describe the sound everyone made when Carter stuck Leah's toothbrush in his mouth, but it was the exact sound that scene deserved.  (That was definitely one of the movie's most memorable and original scenes.)

The Perfect Guy is a route thriller.  If you like that sort of thing, it does have an appealing cast.  But I'd say this is one to catch when it comes on late one night or to rent from the library.  It's not a movie I'd pay full price for.