The Edge of Everything by Jeff Giles

The Edge of Everything by Jeff Giles

There was such a stark contrast between the YA books that I have been reading and this book that I had to pause for a moment to allow my brain a little time to catch up.  It was quickly apparent that this was not a book to be taken lightly.  Don’t get me wrong, I love some good light YA reading, but a really fantastically well written YA book is a treasure unto itself.  The Edge of Everything is full of the kind of rich imagery and vivid characters that leave me in awe.  It is the sort of book where the words are multilayered, and so it makes the world multilayered.

It is unusual for a fantasy novel to be set in our world along with cell phones and instagram and still have the ability to foster a belief in the possibility of the supernatural, but The Edge of Everything manages just that.  Zoe is a fairly regular high school girl, assuming regular high school girls are totally into instagram, spending time with their best friend, taking care of her little brother … and caving with their father.  At least she used to be into caving with her father, until the day he died in a caving accident and their days of exploring together came to an abrupt end.  X is a boy with no name, a reaper of souls, a resident of “The Lowlands” a hell-like existence.  He is the only person to ever be born and raised there, and, therefore, one of the only truly alive and innocent beings to call it home. During a relatively routine soul reaping X saves Zoe from a dangerous situation, and she, in turn, tries to save his soul.

There is a lot to like in this book.  I can forgive characters a lot if I, at least, understand why they make the mistakes they insist upon making.  Zoe loved her father, she loves her brother and she wants to do what is right for him.  X is naive about the way the real world works, but also much more naive about his place in The Lowlands.  He alone grows and changes in The Lowlands and I think that might inform some of his more interesting choices.  I don’t yell at them nearly so loudly in my head if I can see where their decisions are coming from, flawed as they might be.  I already mentioned that I was fairly blown away by the writing style of this novel.  It was just such a notable change from a lot of the YA I had been reading it made me really think about the words I was reading and why they were so effective.  Also, I really like the sense of humour between many of the characters in this book.  I feel like the implication so far has been that this book is ultra serious and that is just not the case.  Zoe and her brother have a rapport that is easy to see as they joke around.  They keep things light, even as X brings them a taste of something unknown, by bringing their sense of fun to their interactions with him as well.

The Edge of Everything is a solid first novel in a new series and I am eager to find out what happens to X and Zoe, as well as all of the characters I have come to love after THAT gut-wrenching ending.

Denton Little’s Still Not Dead by Lance Rubin

Denton Little’s Still Not Dead by Lance Rubin

Denton Little lives in a world where everyone knows their date of death, no one can outrun or bribe their way out of the date, regardless of their age, wealth or status.  At least that was the case until the crazy mad-cap events of Denton Little’s Death Date…and Denton lived through his date of ultimate doom.

In this follow-up, Denton attempts to navigate how to live after living, when that is a secret so big the government might be willing to kill you.  But is it murder if everyone thinks you are dead?  If you should have been dead already?  Is life worth living if you can’t go back to your old life?  And to complicate matters, Denton’s best friend’s death date is rapidly approaching and Denton is desperate that he should live through his death date as well.

For a book about death and dying, this series is fairly lighthearted fun.  The humour is wry and sarcastic while still managing to have a lot of heart.  I love Denton’s best friend Paolo, and I think that the books are best when he and Denton are together.  Their friendship shines and is what helps give the books the chemistry they need to tackle the tough world of knowing the day of your demise from the day you are born.

I read the first book and listened to this second installment on audio and would recommend it in either format.  This is a fairly action-packed series and sometimes the audio makes you slow down just enough to fully appreciate the series of events.  On the other hand sometimes things happen so quickly that the ability to re-read or skip back is helpful to the understanding of those fast action sequences.

I don’t know if there are any more Denton books slated in this series.  But if there is I will read every single one of them.

T.V. Transliteration: Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

I was supposed to listen to this while I was on the train, but I made the mistake of starting it while I was packing for my trip and I didn’t stop listening to it until it was done…long before it was time to leave.  I quickly became obsessed with all of the people that populate the book Big Little Lies.  I may not have always liked each character and I may not have always agreed with the choices that a character made, but I came to know them very well and, at least, understand why they made those decisions.  Not only were the characters interesting and well defined, but the mystery aspect was enough of a puzzle, and the narration by Caroline Lee was a delightful performance of the text.

The novel opens on Trivia Night with an event that is being investigated by the police. We do not know what has occurred but there are police interviews interspersed throughout which both give an account of what may have contributed to the incident in question and serve to underline the sort of gossip-filled community in which these characters reside.

The novel Big Little Lies is a deftly woven story of a group of parents whose children all go to the same elementary school and are in the same class.  School politics and classroom drama spill over into the lives of the parents, who, at the end of the day, are devoted to their children.  The subtleties of the story is its strength.  It is also why the adaptation to the screen feels so clunky and unrefined.  When it loses a lot of the little lies, they just don’t feel as big.  Which, I think, the script writers were feeling as they tried to adapt this for the small screen.  They were feeling the loss of complexity and therefore the loss of tension and intrigue.  And so they made changes.  So many weird and unnecessary changes.  These changes were both to plot and to character traits and left me desperate to read the book again to cleanse all these truly terrible changes from my mind.

I feel like the story has not only been compromised, but it has been assaulted by all of these changes.  Not enough drama?  Add GUNS!  Can’t convey the complex and subtle emotions?  Add an AFFAIR!  Want to convey that the abusive relationship is complicated?  Add SEX!!  Seriously…why?  The original material was a virtuoso with such a grounded and organic tension, it didn’t need the salacious and inane additions that the adaptation came to rely upon.

In my mind, any adaptation, whether it be for the big or the small screen, is successful if it leaves you wanting more.  That is to say, if it causes you to want to go back to the source material to experience more of the world you have come to love, hate, or puzzle over.  However, if I had seen the adaptation before having read the book I know that I never would have picked up the novel at all.  And that would have been a huge mistake because Big Little Lies is truly a captivating tale about every day people living an every day life.

Big Little Lies is best enjoyed in its original novel form as read by narrator Caroline Lee.