Book-a-nook
Dec. 4th, 2008 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gogmagogBook rec time! I haven't had much time for fun reading lately (though over break I did read Octavia Butler's Kindred and reread her Wild Seed, both of which are totally awesome and which everyone should read), but the other day I found a book that looked interesting in the library and checked it out. It's called The English American, by Alison Larkin. It's semiautobiographical in that it's about a young adopted British woman who, at 28, meets her Southern American birth parents (like Larkin herself), though it is a novel and certainly I imagine a lot of the things that happen in it are whole cloth.
Basically, Pippa Dunn is a young English woman who's never quite belonged in her very proper and tidy conventional upper-crust British family, being disorganized and creative and extroverted. She's always known she was adopted, but she finally is able to discover her birth parents: a birth mother who is creative, dramatic and welcoming, but also clingy and manipulative, and a neocon birth father whose politics she disagrees with but whose personality she feels kinship with. Pippa ends up moving to New York, near where her Georgia-born birth mother Billie lives, and making new friends there while her relationship with Billie goes up and down like a rollercoaster. Then there's the only other person who seems to understand her issues, a young successful banker named Nick with whom she's had a strong emotional connection, if not a physical one. And ultimately, of course, Pippa manages to come much more thoroughly to terms with both sides of herself - American nature and British nurture - and make it into a much healthier place in life, as well as having a new appreciation of the life she'd always taken for granted before.
It sounds like total stereotypical chick lit with a transatlantic twist, and it certainly leans that way sometimes (especially early on, when the birth-parent plotline and the Nick plotline are both going on simultaneously while seemingly unconnected; in fact, the Nick plotline in general seems purple-prosey soulmate-style most of the time, which is why you know it can't last). But certainly the major thread of the plot - Pippa being torn between her two lives and her attempt to integrate them, or at least come out of the struggle with as little lasting damage as possible - really seems quite genuine and realistic, probably given that it comes out of Larkin's own experience. Similarly, while the doomed Nick romance storyline falls flat, the actual romance storyline - with Jack, an American who works at a mostly-gay cabaret and irons his jeans and so of course Pippa thinks he is gay for 2/3 of the book despite the fact that he's obviously in love with her - is sweet and well-done and I found myself smiling like an idiot at the end of it.
Though I have to say, his being named Jack, and singing showtunes, and being of Scots descent, and wearing a kilt at the end, and seemingly being gay, and looking like "an American movie star," made me imagine him as John Barrowman, which added several whole other levels of lulz by the time the end came around. XD
And of course the transatlanticity of the book was awesome for an Anglophile like myself; Pippa's analysis of British vs. American styles of coping with drama and interpersonal relations seemed especially good, and reinforced my belief that I seem to have more traditionally British styles of both than American, at least in person. (I especially liked Pippa's realization that the British use of denial as a coping mechanism "is wildly underrated," because THAT'S TOTALLY MY COPING MECHANISM A LOT OF THE TIME TOO, TRUFAX.)
Anyway, it's worth reading!
Also this Twilight video from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
braaaiiins is awesome:
Basically, Pippa Dunn is a young English woman who's never quite belonged in her very proper and tidy conventional upper-crust British family, being disorganized and creative and extroverted. She's always known she was adopted, but she finally is able to discover her birth parents: a birth mother who is creative, dramatic and welcoming, but also clingy and manipulative, and a neocon birth father whose politics she disagrees with but whose personality she feels kinship with. Pippa ends up moving to New York, near where her Georgia-born birth mother Billie lives, and making new friends there while her relationship with Billie goes up and down like a rollercoaster. Then there's the only other person who seems to understand her issues, a young successful banker named Nick with whom she's had a strong emotional connection, if not a physical one. And ultimately, of course, Pippa manages to come much more thoroughly to terms with both sides of herself - American nature and British nurture - and make it into a much healthier place in life, as well as having a new appreciation of the life she'd always taken for granted before.
It sounds like total stereotypical chick lit with a transatlantic twist, and it certainly leans that way sometimes (especially early on, when the birth-parent plotline and the Nick plotline are both going on simultaneously while seemingly unconnected; in fact, the Nick plotline in general seems purple-prosey soulmate-style most of the time, which is why you know it can't last). But certainly the major thread of the plot - Pippa being torn between her two lives and her attempt to integrate them, or at least come out of the struggle with as little lasting damage as possible - really seems quite genuine and realistic, probably given that it comes out of Larkin's own experience. Similarly, while the doomed Nick romance storyline falls flat, the actual romance storyline - with Jack, an American who works at a mostly-gay cabaret and irons his jeans and so of course Pippa thinks he is gay for 2/3 of the book despite the fact that he's obviously in love with her - is sweet and well-done and I found myself smiling like an idiot at the end of it.
Though I have to say, his being named Jack, and singing showtunes, and being of Scots descent, and wearing a kilt at the end, and seemingly being gay, and looking like "an American movie star," made me imagine him as John Barrowman, which added several whole other levels of lulz by the time the end came around. XD
And of course the transatlanticity of the book was awesome for an Anglophile like myself; Pippa's analysis of British vs. American styles of coping with drama and interpersonal relations seemed especially good, and reinforced my belief that I seem to have more traditionally British styles of both than American, at least in person. (I especially liked Pippa's realization that the British use of denial as a coping mechanism "is wildly underrated," because THAT'S TOTALLY MY COPING MECHANISM A LOT OF THE TIME TOO, TRUFAX.)
Anyway, it's worth reading!
Also this Twilight video from
braaaiiins is awesome:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-05 07:20 am (UTC)Err... Nick doesn't turn out to be her half-brother or anything, does he?
(I am randomly influenced by lucky (http://www.amazon.com/Lucky-Jackie-Collins/dp/0671023489/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228461444&sr=1-1) by joan collins, which I read at a young and impressionable age, I guess. Not that it sounds anything like the book you're reviewing, except for what I've invented. >.>)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-05 03:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-05 04:38 pm (UTC)Actually, I haven't read more than one of Jackie Collins' novels. She has weird sexual politics. Well, really typical, archaic bothersome sexual politics which aren't so much entertainingly offensive as, you know, boringly offensive. I keep buying them, though, for two dollars at used book stores.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-05 05:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-05 08:13 pm (UTC)... I didn't realize they were related? Or that my mind had randomly supplied one for the other (even though I'd had to look up the book on amazon in the first place to be sure that was the title). XD;;;
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-05 08:28 pm (UTC)I want to, though. God, how I want to.