I suggested it; I'll start it.
First of all, I liked Heidi. She's smart without knowing it, and sensitive and logical, but almost friendless. It's an appealing innocence and purity mixed with an unusual self-confidence. Heidi is admirable.
I also enjoyed the writing. Words were chosen carefully. There was foreshadowing and imagery. Everything I read had a purpose; there was no filler. I especially liked how Heidi would hear soof wherever she went.
Probably the least noticeable but most pleasant thing about the book is that none of the characters annoyed me. This happens more than it should. It seems like the popular thing to do lately in both books and TV is to create quirky characters. Most of the time, the quirky is fun and interesting, but sometimes it's taken too far. Too much quirky becomes cliche.
It was simple, entertaining, and meaningful. I really enjoyed it. I think it's the best book we've read so far.
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- The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
- Absolutely, Positively Not - David LaRochelle
- Zap - Paul Fleischman
- Stay with Me - Garret Freymann-Weyr
- Blow Out the Moon - Libby Koponen
- The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
- American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
- Kalpana's Dream - Judith Clarke
- The Body of Christpher Creed - Carol Plum-Ucci
- The Canning Season - Polly Horvath
- Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - Rachel Cohn & David Levithan
- Wrecked - E. R. Frank
- Burning City - Ariel & Joaquin Dorfman
- Stuck in Neutral - Terry Trueman
- Criss Cross - Lynne Rae Perkins
- Sandpiper - Ellen Wittlinger
- Looking for Alaska - John Green
- Full Service - Will Weaver
- Black Hole - Charles Burns
- Autobiography of My Dead Brother - Walter Dean Myers
- Geography Club - Brent Hartinger
- So B. It - Sarah Weeks
- A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray
- Bound - Donna Jo Napoli
- Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem - Marilyn Nelson
- The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place - E. L. Konigsburg
- Chasing Vermeer - Blue Balliett
- The Gravedigger's Cottage - Chris Lynch
- House of Stairs - William Sleator
- HOOT - Carl Hiaasen
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7 comments:
I read this back in January. Here are my notes --
Enjoyed very much and cried at the end. Good thoughts on knowing and wanting to know, thinking you have the right. Reminded me of Stephen King's From a Buick 8 in that respect, except their curiousity lead to death. [That's a great story, by the way! I listened to it in the car on the way to and from Denver.]
The whole luck part seemed convenient, but I accepted it as part of the story.
The kite on the cover puzzles me.
On p. 46, Heidi is asking all sorts of questions. "I spent hours picturing that word [soof] with all the answers to my unanswered questions tied to it, one after the other like the knotted rag tail of a kite. I'd imagine myself standing there on the ground holding on to the ball of string while that word sailed and skidded and danced across the cloudless blue sky above me."
That kite--soof and all her questions--drove the whole story, her journey to Liberty and for the truth. A nice image, I think. It's curious that Heidi was so focused on that word, Mama's word that no one else knew, and I'm glad it turned out to be so significant in the end.
I loved this book. I agree with Erica in that no one annoyed me. I found the characters real, believable, and heartbreaking. I wanted to be in Heidi's mind, hear her story. I wanted to know Mama. I wanted Bernie to leave the house but I was so glad she never did (wouldn't have been believable, would have been too tidy).
I got the impression she was writing this story after the fact (p. 241 she says that the gravestone list and the cabinet list are "the only lists that remain from that time in my life"), but did anyone get an idea of how much time had passed? A year or two or more like when Heidi was an adult?
Thank you, Eunice!
I am blind.
You showed me the light.
Finally read it, in an hour and a half sitting in the sun. I also enjoyed it, mostly because I thought there was a happy balance between the unusual circumstances of Heidi's life (an agoraphobic neighbor, mother with a "bum brain") and the simplicity of the writing, which almost never called attention to itself. I loved that Heidi was intelligent and curious without being a super-brainiac wordfreak totally obsessed with the texture of language, like so many J/YA narrators. (That really gets tired for me -- you're a writer, I know you're smaht and like words. You don't need to force your character to be in love with the dictionary in order to prove your own worth! Argh. Anyway.)
I didn't really like the luck thing, because I thought it injected a note of fantasy into a story that didn't really need it. But ok, if it had to be there I guess I liked the fact that it got "passed on" to Ruby so she could have a baby. Speaking of Ruby, I really enjoyed the supporting cast -- Zander, Mr. Thurman Hill, Georgia Sweet -- clearly people with stories of their own to tell, and I liked that Weeks didn't feel the need to give those threads too much closure.
My one major complaint is that the name "So B. It" feels like it's an authorial invasion to make a point, or for the sake of poeticism -- I needed a reason why Sophie would have chosen that name for herself, and I was expecting to hear that Mr. Hill, or someone around, had used that phrase in her hearing to speak about her pregnancy, her "bum brain," or something.
I'm still thinking about the central thread of the book, about truth and what you can and can't know, how much it matters, etc. Those questions didn't really resonate for me, and I think it's because the novel is so short; but I'm not sure about that.
I took the whole "So be it" nickname to be that Sophia couldn't pronounce her own name, and if you say her name fast and blurred (sofeea) it kind of sounds like "so be it" (sobeea). I would assume that she had heard that phrase at some point in her 17 years (maybe her mother always said it), and that's what her name became to her. I didn't get the impression, ultimately, that someone had said it like Bernadette originally thought (there's no hope left, in thinking about Sophia's disabilities). I just think Sophia had heard it, her name has similar vowels and sounds, and she adopted it as her own. And I guess it didn't really bother me that we didn't find out who had used the phrase before, since it's common enough in my mind.
Did anyone else get that?
And good thought, Meera, about the questions not totally resonating in your mind. I think I agree. I'm going to need to think about that one.
The question of knowing resonated quite a bit with me, and I think it made sense in Heidi's life beyond the actually compelling mystery. Like Erica, I found Heidi so appealing because she has a weird mixture of elegant confidence and also lives in a state of shuttered innocence. I can't imagine my life being so... contained, I guess. Anything outside of the container, anything she couldn't grasp or couldn't be explained, would be maddening.
I loved that Heidi's excitement for her trip melts into frantic anxiety once she realizes how tenuous her connections to Bernadette are (see? the phone IS evil!). I would have been annoyed had she happily buoyed herself along from one fake-mother to another.
And holy shit, did I CRY... It wasn't just a tear leaking out, a tightening of the chest, I was SOBBING! Maybe I'm premenstrual, but I began to lose it when she found all her clothes folded up. Seriously. This book gave me a rare, "wow, I'm such an adult reading this book," moment. I thought of how much I wanted to help Heidi and what I would do for her if she came into my life. "Oh GOD, how will she get around in Reno? What if she gets sick? What if Bernadette gets sick? Oh god! That kid needs a cell phone!"
(Yes, despite my fears, I'm converted.)
Oh! I also wanted to mention how much I felt So B. It was like a Konigsberg book - the tightness of the language, the intelligence of the character, the need for knowledge that interferes with adults' insulated society. Weeks' style errs on the side of minimalism, compared, which I don't think is really an error at all.
And Sus, I'm buyin' what you're sellin'. I mean about So B. It/Sophia. I wasn't bothered by it (and actually found it a little too easy to unravel).
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