Review: Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

Linda Hammerick grew up in small-town Boiling Springs, North Carolina, always knowing she was a little different from everyone else. To her, words have tastes. The sound of mother brings the flavor of chocolate milk to her mouth, even if her mother is anything but comforting and sweet. The name of the neighbor boy evokes a palate of orange sherbet, and hearing her own name the earthy tang of fresh mint. Bitter in the Mouth is the story of Linda’s life with these never-ending incoming tastes.

At its core, Bitter in the Mouth is a beautiful novel, the words are soft and flow sweetly around Linda who is a character we can appreciate and enjoy. We’re given tidbits of her childhood, from meeting her best friend via letters, to the instant bond she shares with her great-uncle, to the abhorrence she feels for her absent mother and abrasive grandmother. I enjoyed the relationships Truong developed amongst Linda and the others. I only wish the whole book had been as cohesive as its main artery.

There are major parts of Linda’s story that we’re not told about in the beginning; this is a common tool of writing, but when those pieces of information are revealed later in the novel, it’s less of an unveiling and more of a brick to the head. Basically, it left me wondering why the choice to hide so much crucial detail until the very end. A similar conundrum were strange threads that magically appeared throughout the novel, but had no connection to anything other than North Carolina. The Wright brothers and their first flights, the legend of Virginia Dare, and a story about George Horton, a poet and slave. I literally have no idea why these characters or stories were involved. If there’s a reason for them, other than abstraction, it’s complete lost on me.

The other complaint I have about Bitter in the Mouth is a technical one. I know the author is trying to explain the tastes that Linda experiences when she says or hears a particular word, but the way these tastes are connected to the words is distracting. For every sentence spoken aloud, a specific taste is attached to each provoking word in italics. For example: momchocolatemilk, Lindamint, Wadeorangesherbertboy. This makes for a distracting and often halting flow of reading when full sentences are constructed this way. Either the sentence’s meaning is lost, or if you choose to gloss over the italics, the taste is lost. I have no better solution to this problem, but it’s sad that the connection between word and taste fell flat for me.

In general I really enjoyed the majority of Truong’s writing, I think she created a wonderfully realistic, yet unique character and world around Linda. There’s so much more to her story than just the synesthesia she experiences with words. There are certain things about Bitter in the Mouth that I did not love so much, but I lived through them and would still recommend this novel to those who might be intrigued by the premise.

4 stars

(I received a free copy through the Amazon Vine program)

In My Mailbox Monday: Bitter in the Mouth, State of Wonder

In My Mailbox is hosted by The Story Siren, and Mailbox Monday is hosted at Passages to the Past. This past week I received two books from the Amazon Vine program…

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong (August 2010, Random House)

For as long as she can remember, Linda has experienced a secret sense—she can “taste” words, which have the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. She falls for names and what they evoke: Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to her great regret). But with crushes comes awareness. As with all bodies, Linda’s is a mystery to her, in this and in other ways. Even as Linda makes her way north to Yale and New York City, she still does not know the truth about her past.

 State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (June 2011, Harper)

Years ago, Marina Singh traded the hard decisions and intensity of medical practice for the quieter world of research at a pharmaceutical company, a choice that has haunted her life. Enveloping herself in safety, limiting emotional risk, she shares a quiet intimacy with her widowed older boss, Mr. Fox, and a warm friendship with her colleague Anders Eckman. But Marina’s security is shaken when she learns that Anders, sent to the Amazon to check on a field team, is dead–and Mr. Fox wants her to go into the jungle to discover what happened.

Review: The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman

Carol Goodman always has an unparalleled way of transforming a location in a book into a beautifully haunted atmosphere. Her descriptions jump from the page, and every time she sets her novel in a new location I know it’s going to be lush, gothic, decrepit, and wonderful.

Her location in The Ghost Orchid is no different. Set at the upstate New York sprawling aged and crumbling Bosco Estate, Goodman unites an intriguing cast of characters amid the ivy-covered statues and dry fountains. Novelist Ellis Brooks has hoped her acceptance into Bosco’s notorious writing program would allow her the freedom to pursue her novel in peace. But the past pursues her instead, and she soon finds that the residents of Bosco were not brought together by chance.

At times a romantic mystery, at times a suspenseful thriller, Goodman deftly weaves between an ages old missing child case, and the present day sleuthing Ellis is forced to undertake into the people and places around her. Always intriguing, I never want to finish a Goodman novel. Though the writing in this, her fourth novel, occasions into the trite and predictable, I was still engrossed by the scene set before me.

I had one issue with the end of the novel and a short side-tracked path that Goodman decided to briefly explore, but it was not the focus of the novel so I can set it aside as author-folly. Overall, I still love her novels and find them to be uniquely mysterious and haunting. I haven’t read many other authors that can successfully pull off a mystery while still making it literary. In this day of mass-market quick-publications, I delight in the fact that there are authors like Goodman who take suspense to another level.

4 stars

In My Mailbox Monday: The Girl Who Chased the Moon

In My Mailbox is hosted by The Story Siren, and Mailbox Monday is hosted at Library of Clean Reads. My hubbers bought me this for Valentines Day! I’ve been dying to read Sarah Addison Allen’s third novel ever since I finished her first two long ago. So excited!

The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen (Random House, Originally released March 2010)

Emily Benedict has come to Mullaby, North Carolina, hoping to solve at least some of the riddles surrounding her mother’s life. But the moment Emily enters the house where her mother grew up and meets the grandfather she never knew, she realizes that mysteries aren’t solved in Mullaby, they’re a way of life: Here are rooms where the wallpaper changes to suit your mood. Unexplained lights skip across the yard at midnight. And a neighbor, Julia Winterson, bakes hope in the form of cakes, not only wishing to satisfy the town’s sweet tooth but also dreaming of rekindling the love she fears might be lost forever. Can a hummingbird cake really bring back a lost love? Is there really a ghost dancing in Emily’s backyard? The answers are never what you expect. But in this town of lovable misfits, the unexpected fits right in.

In My Mailbox Monday: The Emerald Atlas, Safe Haven

In My Mailbox is hosted by The Story Siren, and Mailbox Monday is hosted by Knitting and Sundries. Here are my arrivals from the past week:

The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens (Random House, April 2011)

Kate, Michael, and Emma have been in one orphanage after another for the last ten years, passed along like lost baggage.

Yet these unwanted children are more remarkable than they could possibly imagine. Ripped from their parents as babies, they are being protected from a horrible evil of devastating power, an evil they know nothing about.

Until now.

Before long, Kate, Michael, and Emma are on a journey to dangerous and secret corners of the world…a journey of allies and enemies, of magic and mayhem.  And—if an ancient prophesy is correct—what they do can change history, and it is up to them to set things right.

Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central Publishing, September 2010)

When a mysterious young woman named Katie appears in the small North Carolina town of Southport, her sudden arrival raises questions about her past. Beautiful yet self-effacing, Katie seems determined to avoid forming personal ties until a series of events draws her into two reluctant relationships: one with Alex, a widowed store owner with a kind heart and two young children; and another with her plainspoken single neighbor, Jo. Despite her reservations, Katie slowly begins to let down her guard, putting down roots in the close-knit community and becoming increasingly attached to Alex and his family.

But even as Katie begins to fall in love, she struggles with the dark secret that still haunts and terrifies her . . . a past that set her on a fearful, shattering journey across the country, to the sheltered oasis of Southport. With Jo’s empathic and stubborn support, Katie eventually realizes that she must choose between a life of transient safety and one of riskier rewards . . . and that in the darkest hour, love is the only true safe haven.

Review: The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

The characters were no mere paper dolls, nor were they thinly veiled extensions of Charles Dickens’s own persona. No, the characters were utterly themselves. In a Dickens story, readers were not asked to aspire to a higher class or to hate other classes than their own, but to find the humanity and the humane in all. That is what had made him the world’s most famous author.
The Last Dickens - Matthew Pearl

Set in alternating time periods of 1870 post-Charles Dickens’s death, and 1867 during his American reading tour, The Last Dickens is Matthew Pearl’s idea of what could have happened to the last six installments of the last novel ever written by Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Taking real facts and blending them with research, The Last Dickens is a fun mystery that makes you more of a Dickens fan than a Matthew Pearl fan, but it’s still decent enough.

The book opens in Bengal, India in June 1870 and introduces us to two mounted policemen, Mason and Turner, who sadly don’t have much to do with the rest of the book. Yes they come back, but the parts set in India serve only to illustrate the booming opium trade (central to The Mystery of Edwin Drood) and introduce one of Charles Dickens’s sons, Francis. Neither Francis, nor Mason and Turner have a huge role in the remaining novel, so I am not certain why this was the first chapter of the first installment, nor really why they were there to begin with.

Then we meet the team of Fields and Osgood, Dickens’s American publishers who are struggling to stay in business and keep their Dickens to themselves. Sent on a mission for the two publishers, Daniel Sand, their clerk, dies while trying to receive the latest Dickens installments (numbers five and six) from England. Sand is run over after being chased by a scary man from India, and Osgood must travel to England with Sand’s sister, Rebecca, to unravel the enigma behind the end of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. They go searching for clues to see if Dickens perhaps had an idea of how Drood was to end so they can publish the true ending before poachers swoop in. Sand’s death is used as a way of making the book intriguing, of uniting Osgood and Rebecca, and giving them a reason to travel to England together. There’s also a lawyer who dies, some “Bookaneers” who hangout at the docks trying to steal novels from each other for publishers, and a crazy lady who stalks Dickens during his tour thrown in for the mix.

Basically, there was a LOT going on in this novel, which normally I enjoy because I like to piece all the puzzle parts together on my own, but this was a little overwhelming. Lots of strings that were neatly tied at the end, but left me aggravated wondering why they were there to begin with. I think Pearl tried too hard with Dickens to make a good, natural mystery into something more sensational. The India and opium trade plotlines served only to fill space, and the lady stalking Dickens served only as a means to an end for the question of whether Dickens had already written the second half of Drood.

In general, I was underwhelmed by this book. I loved Pearl’s The Dante Club and would place this book below that, but above his second book, The Poe Shadow. It all seemed a tad scattered to me, but I do want to go read The Mystery of Edwin Drood now.

3 stars