Emma Donoghue's "Room"

Oh, where to even begin... I think I have told everybody who might be remotely interested to read this book. It's been on my list since it started racking up nominations and awards last year, and even with the hype, it still blew me away.

The premise of Room is simple: Jack and his Ma live in a 14x14 room, which is the entirety of Jack's universe. Jack and Ma live a highly routinized life: three meals each at 8ish, 12, and 5; one TV show a day (Jack loves Dora); exercise by running around Track; Shouting time, when they each take turns shouting at Skylight; building Snake (who lives under Bed) out of cracked eggshells; and each night Jack goes to sleep in Wardrobe and hopes that Old Nick won't come and visit Ma. Jack's voice is idiosyncratic and compelling; Donoghue claims the reader up until the very last page, which you both race towards and dread.

What makes this novel so fantastic is the subtle way Donoghue narrates the horrors of their life while maintaining Jack's perspective. One of  the more horrific scenes describes Jack counting the creaks of the bed from his hiding spot in the wardrobe while waiting for Old Nick to leave his Ma alone. On his fifth birthday, Ma decides he is old enough for the truth and so explains that there is a world outside of Room that is real, and that many things seen on TV are actually real. And soon, much too soon for young Jack, Ma begins planning their escape. Despite being told from an adoring son's point of view, Room presents Ma as a character with flaws of her own. She deals with serious depression and a guilt complex throughout the narrative, all of which is sketched on the sidelines of Jack discovering the truth about the world and his life.

Room is one of those books that is almost impossible to review fully without divulging all of the significant plot points; I personally think this is because the narrative, the ways Donoghue crafts her story, outshine the story, even such a tragic and compelling story as this. Read, read, read it.

Elizabeth Kostova's "The Swan Thieves"

When I saw that Elizabeth Kostova had a new book out, I was very excited. I had been swept up in the hype surrounding her debut novel, The Historian, which was a surprising retelling of the Dracula legend. Surprising, mostly, because it was not a book I would have anticipated liking nearly as much as I did - Kostova sweeps you up before you realize what's happening. I don't envy her having to follow up such a debut. I definitely think the international success of The Historian weighed on Kostova and her editors. The first time I picked up The Swan Thieves, I was repulsed by the overly large print. I think they wanted to plump up the book so it resembled the hefty weight and length of The Historian. I was not fooled - it felt like reading a Large Print book. So I decided to wait until the paperback came out - only to learn I'd waited for those months just so the editors/publishers could make the same stupid decision with the font size. Maybe others aren't bothered by this as I am, but it certainly downgraded my experience. (That, combined with a leaking water bottle and subsequent water damage led me to believe I should have opted for the ebook on this one).

The Swan Thieves opens with the renowned painter Robert Olivier taking out a knife and attacking an Impressionist painting in the National Gallery of Art. He is then referred to Andrew Marlow for psychiatric evaluation. He says, "I did it for her" before lapsing into a yearlong silence. Frustrated, Marlow breaks his own rules and probes into Olivier's private lives and personal relationships for answers. The book follows Marlow's investigations, with large sections devoted to the tales of Olivier's wife Kate and his young student/mistress Mary. A parallel storyline follows the letter exchanges between Beatrice de Clerval and her husband's uncle, who is both artistic mentor and romantic love interest to her.

One review I read compared the book to Dan Brown, by which I think it means to compare the elements of art-based mystery. Given my antipathy towards all things Dan Brown, I found this to be a disparaging comment that I don't think Kostova merits. The Swan Thieves is at its best in the lyric descriptions so utterly lacking in The Da Vinci Code (which the HuffPost review did mention as well). At the same time, it gets bogged down in plot. Kostova devotes large chunks of the novel to both Kate and Mary's perspectives, both of which I found to be drawn out and wordy. Kate's narrative, especially, seems to hint at some deep, dark secret about Robert which she seeks to keep, a dark secret never fully realized. (He certainly was not Dracula, to put it mildly, even though Kostova's use of delayed suspense echoed her earlier novel.) I found it incredibly difficult to motivate myself to get through the book, and though the last hundred or so pages were interesting, the art history mystery was not nearly enticing enough to merit the delays along the way, and the happy ending felt overly contrived (especially because the less-than-happy endings of other characters goes pretty much unmentioned).

I have recommended The Historian to several people over the years, but I will refrain (and perhaps even issue a warning against) The Swan Thieves. I enjoyed the parallel historical aspect and the novel had a lot of potential for a good smart-person's mystery, but it unfortunately did not live up to it.