It's been a while.
Let's just put it down to me enjoying the Now, shall we?
Part of that enjoyable 'Now' has been starting a book club. A friend asked me if I knew of any book clubs that we could join. I only knew of two that some friends were in. But one was a Lesbian club and as we are both straight, I didn't want to crash their party - there must be few enough gay book clubs in Melbourne without two straighties muscling in on things. And the other club - two of my friends regularly attend it but they had so far never seemed to think that a fellow booklover who works for a publisher and teaches about how to make books might be interested in coming along.
So, I took matters into my own hands and she and I started our very own book club. We've got around 14 members, most of whom never come along. Around 6 or 7 people are virtual 'attendees'. One is an absentee member who lives in another state - she's a recent addition, so we'll see how we manage that!
Anyway, since I'm reading these books and making notes at the same time, I might as well commit my notes to digital.
Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant. (this book was suggested by my co-book club manager. Excellent - I'm now a club manager. She'd given us one or two dogs of books IMHO over the last year, so I suspect a few of us readers were wary of this latest offering, what with the peculiar title and all (we're just so provincial - sigh. Turns out though, that she was also riddled with doubts about our acceptance of it too.)
It was hard to get info on Jessica, even on the internet. She's Canadian, as is the main character in this book, Audrey. She actually looks a helluva lot like my old psycho housemate who took to wandering about the house, muttering loudly and when I would ask what she had said, thinking 'hey, there's only two of us in house, she must be talking to me...' would snarl at me, 'I'm not talking to YOU!' Maybe the nutbar ended up moving to Canadia and became an author under a pseudonym? Well, good for her!
This book is her debut novel, but she has won a few writing awards previously to this being released.
So first off, I was a bit annoyed with this book. Five pages in and Audrey the main character deliberately misspells a word and then corrects herself. I am NOT a fan of deliberate corrections in print. I know and I know the author knows that I know that I'm reading something that has been through the wringer many times. You can't pretend you've accidentally made an error and correct it. It doesn't work in written format! So that pissed me off.
THEN she did it again on the next page in an email to someone - that just compounded it a quadrillion times!
My next note reads: 'This author is really trying hard to piss me off. Page 8 Audrey says she dislikes people who read. So far, this book has used a deliberately non-standard Literary style - minimum punctuation and not distinguishing with speech quotes when people are talking. I assume this author wants people to read her book. Then the main character hates people who read. The author needs to get on top of this shit soon.
Now I'm in the tortoise's head? It's even letting me know the meaning of the word 'internalised'. So she hates people who read and she uses many French phrases.'
Yeah, I can look up the French phrases and if I'd bought this on my kindle, I'd have found it even easier to get translations. But as it is, I obtained a print copy ( and don't even get me started on how hard it was for just 6 Australian chicks to get hold of a copy of this book each! Nearly each of us still bear the scars) So anyway, as you can see, Come, Thou Tortoise and I did not start off our relationship amicably.
Audrey is a Leapling. She was born on Feb 29 - so she's only had about 6 birthdays and often acts a lot like it. Am I making this book appealing yet? Well, you know what? I cried in a public eatery when I finished this. It is a breath of fresh and welcome air in the world of intense and text-filled diatribes that we keep getting from all those lauded Extremely Louds and Heartbreaking Geniuses we keep getting on our bestsellers lists. Bleurg to them compared with this.
Audrey is indeed impulsive and literal. And I warmed to her. She has a life of adventures that only she could create and her thoughts are constant and bewilderingly wonderful. She deals with people in a way that disarms you as a reader. I constantly had this train of thought running through my head: 'What? Who says that to someone? This Audrey is nutso! Aargh, can't believe she did that, she's so cool!'
When she steals the gun of the Sky Marshall in the plane and locks herself in the bathroom in order to save her fellow-passengers, I felt a glimmer of camaraderie in this character, who I had been grumpy with for some time. Although, the one problem I have with her is that she does discover she has a low IQ - her father, when she found out, told her to ignore it and it wasn't important. This is something that I think Jessica Grant feels quite strongly about herself. I didn't know that Jessica felt this while I was reading and it did very very occasionally feel a little laboured when Audrey became a little too 6-year-old ish for her own good. But that was rarely and overall she is a fantastically complex and well-rounded character. (by the way, about a third of this book takes place in the now in Audrey-time while she is in Canada dealing with her father's death and when she goes on a detective hunt to the UK, another third in Audrey's past childhood in Canada and the last third in Winnie the tortoise time - a mix of the now in Portland being looked after by a friend of Audrey's and of her own tortoise past.)
When Winnie the tortoise begins to swear, I think I lost my heart to this book. I love Winnie - I want a tortoise. I don't know if we can get them here in Australia and I suspect my rather ill-tempered feline would rip it to shreds, given half a chance (why that cat is so grumpy, I'll never know! I suspect that old housemate of some scurrilous acts in connection with the poor little thing's initial development, but again, I'll never know!). So I just have to content myself with Winnnie. Winnie is a winsome character. She has her own personal past that no one can ever begin to guess at, she's about 80 years old or more and has many opinions on the humans around her.
There are some just all-round wonderful people in this book. One thing I do like about this book is the way Jessica can create characters who you may not necessarily like at first - such as Chuck, the partner of the girl looking after Winnie while Audrey is back in Canada for her father's funeral. I didn't like Chuck, all he did was recite endless Shakespeare - Winnie didn't appreciate this either. He used her as a book weight too. But Chuck became quite fond of Winnie and when he is forced to hand over Winnie to Clint, Audrey's ex, who comes to collect Winnie simply because, it appears, he has decided to rejoin the world after skipping out for ages, Chuck's protectiveness of Winnie makes him an instant favourite.
We find out about Cliff and how Audrey drove around the US with Winnie (who loves to sit on the dashboard) looking for him in her determined way. Cliff is a pill but again, at the end, he redeems himself.
Oh and the nefarious Lionel de Tigrel, her father's arch-enemy! I thoroughly enjoyed Audrey's enmity towards this unknown person who kept stealing her father's scientific limelight to the point where he is the major evil instigator in her planet-traversing search for her lost mouse, Wedge. For ages, I thought Wedge was a hamster - I'm not sure why...
Uncle Thoby is marvellous - he lives with Audrey's dad and was Audrey's other parent. I felt TERRIBLE for him. He is a fascinating character because not much is revealed about him. We know that he cares so much about Audrey that he refuses to drive her anywhere in a car in case his English-ness takes over for a second and he swerves to the wrong side of the road and endangers her. We also know that Audrey loves him with all her soul.
This is a long book and well worth the time. There is much in it that I'm not going to reveal because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.
One thing I didn't get was that there was absolutely no mention of Audrey's mother. I don't know if this was deliberate so as to give more weight to what may have been a side-message of this story. But it was strange that Audrey being such a thoughtful and introspective person, would never wonder about or miss her mother.
I'm going to sign off here although I could write another couple of hundred words about the joy of this book.
Read it. And I can tell you after reading this that I would not say no to another book by Ms Grant.
9/10.
