Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende

Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

This is the story of a woman and a man who loved one another so deeply that they saved themselves from a banal existence. I have carried it in my memory, guarding it carefully so it would not be eroded by time, and it is only now, in the silent nights of this place, that I can finally tell it. I do it for them, and for others who have confided their lives to me saying: Here, write it, or it will be erased by the wind. -author's note

Over the weekend I finished Of Love and Shadows, a novel that (according to the Bookcrossing journal for the copy I have) has been on my bookshelves since April 2006.

Of Love and Shadows is one of Allende's early novels (initial publication in 1984). The copy I have has the cover depicted in this post (1988 Bantam mass market paperback). When I was viciously weeding the book collection post-move, I almost put this book in the Bookcrossing wild-release pile despite the fact that I like Allende's novels. Why? Because of the cover. Not because of the cover art, which is undeniably dated, but because of the blurbs selected for the back-cover text. The review blurbs, while positive, felt backhanded as they all seemed to say "it's good... for a political novel." Overtly political and/or religious novels can be a real turn-off for me, especially when they are preachy, so I would have been perfectly justified in weeding Of Love and Shadows. I didn't, though, and Of Love and Shadows does have a decided political stance, depicting as it does a fictionalized Chile under Pinochet.  But, the novel is about a romance as much as it is about the fate of the desaparecidos and those left to mourn them (see Allende's epigraphic author's note above) and I think that Of Love and Shadows balances the two stories much better than other novels I've read that have attempted to do the same.

Skylark Farm

Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan
translated by Geoffrey Brock

Winner of the 2004 Premio Campiello (a prestigious Italian literary prize), this debut novel by a former professor of modern and contemporary literature at the University of Padua tells the story of one family during the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey.

Based on the author’s own family history, Skylark Farm is written with immense sensitivity. The author treats the subject as well as her readers with care, ever mindful of their tolerance for violence. One of the things that makes the novel stand out is that despite the horrific subject matter, Skylark Farm also manages to be part adventure story as it chronicles the escapades of the family’s would-be rescuers.

disclosure: I received an advanced copy of this book to review for Library Journal when the book came out a few years ago. As far as I know the review never appeared in periodical.

15 december

I love to have hardcover copies of books that I really like and am planning to keep longterm. Many people have enjoyed these books so a boxed set might be just the thing.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (see post) over the summer. I haven't continued with the series because The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is our book club selection for January, but I plan to start The Girl Who Played with Fire right after our book club meeting next month.

The Storyteller

October's book of the month for the student services blog...

The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat” (prize committee). Vargas Llosa is a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction; 25 of his books exist in English translation. His The Storyteller has been one of my favorite novels since I first read it in the late 1990s.

The Storyteller begins with a Peruvian writer touring Florence. He stumbles upon an exhibit entitled “Natives of the Amazon Forest” at a small gallery. In that exhibit he sees a photo of a tribal storyteller and is overcome by a sense of recognition.

It then begins to tell the story of the writer’s school friend Saúl Zuratas (known as Mascarita, mask face, on account of birthmark covering most of the right side of his face). Brilliant, but alienated, Zuratas is an outsider because of the birthmark, his Jewishness, and his inability to live the life his family wants for him. He decides to leave urban Lima to study the Machiguenga tribe deep in the Amazon. He goes native, eventually becoming a central figure in the tribe. As hablador (storyteller), Zuratas is responsible for preserving and sharing the history and mythology of the tribe.

Zuratas’ storytelling is interspersed throughout the narrative. While the Machiguenga stories are interesting in their own right, what is most fascinating is how elements Zuratas’ own history, experiences, and belief system begin to creep into their stories.

The Storyteller is about storytelling and identity, memory and truth. It questions the attempts of anthropologists and ethnologists to preserve native societies and the benefits and disadvantages of hybridism. The novel is multilayered and builds to a thought-provoking conclusion.

A Novel Bookstore

I have a confession to make. I rarely love any of the books I'm assigned to review for Library Journal. I expect that's partly due to the nature of the books they send me. It seems like my niche is literary fiction in translation with an emphasis on Scandinavian and German-language authors. I don't get light, fluffy, fun reads, I get hard-core literary stuff that is sometimes hard to get through. That's not to say that the books aren't accomplished, just that reading them often feels more like work than pleasure.

Earlier this week a novel I reviewed for Library Journal and really enjoyed was published.

A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé

Heiress Francesca and bookseller Ivan don't expect to make a profit when they open a bookstore in Paris that sells nothing but the best fiction. The store's unexpected success produces a powerful backlash: outcry from pundits, negative ad campaigns, targeted competition, and threats that escalate to physical violence. When members of the store's secret inventory selection committee are attacked, barely escaping with their lives, it becomes imperative for the owners to find out who is behind the intimidation.

With A Novel Bookstore, French novelist Cossé gives readers a truly literary thriller. Eminently readable, A Novel Bookstore is a love letter to the novel (literature junkies will find within its pages a seemingly endless supply of book suggestions) and a profound exploration of human nature.

On a side note, I love what translator Alison Andersen [by the way, she was the translator of The Elegance of the Hedgehog (see post)] did with the novel's title. In French the title is "Au bon roman" ([place] of good novels), while the English title drops the good modifier, it plays very successfully on the double meaning of the word novel.

See full review at Library Journal.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog or book clubbing in March part 2

March was the first discussion month for the online book club my friend Lizzie started. The selection: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog was an interesting experience for me. After hearing all the buzz I was really looking forward to reading the book, in fact it was one of the ones I suggested for inclusion in the reading list, but tracking down a copy was a case in frustration (as per usual, at least for me, the "on the shelf" copy wasn't on the shelf in Lockwood. After checking twice, I put a trace on the book and it yielded nothing). Eventually I gave in and ordered a copy, which I didn't receive until after the discussion period had already started. I planned to read it right away straight through (as I'm wont to do) so I could participate in the discussion, but once I started it soon became apparent that The Elegance of the Hedgehog is not a book that can be read quickly.

When Paloma (the 12-year-old protagonist) on page 37, in only the third line of her narration, announces that she's going to be committing suicide in a few months I was shocked and horrified and I really wasn't sure whether I'd like the novel. Nevertheless I continued to read, persevering through all the dense philosophical passages, and ending up loving the novel.

Europa Editions has a really fantastic discussion guide available on its website. Our discussion leader brought it to our attention and pointed us to questions 1, 2, and 9 as starting points for our discussions.

The philosophical interludes, for me, were the most difficult portions of the book. I had to fight my desire to skim when they came up. Because of my educational background I have a better grounding in philosophy than many, but I was still overwhelmed by the amount and detail included the novel. I had to laugh, though, at the passing reference to Melanie Klein because I only know about her because one of the characters in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street books is obsessed with her.
The fact that Barbery is a philosophy professor explains the inclusion of the interludes (as does Renée's solitary and intellectually inquisitive character), but I do think they are off-putting to many readers. The philosophical musings decrease as the plot progresses, making the novel easier to read and Renée easier to relate to.

One of the most interesting things about the novel is how very easy it is to relate to the protagonists and how utterly unsympathetic they can be. Both Paloma and Renée are experiencing things we all experience--being misunderstood, un(der)appreciated, feeling alone even when surrounded by others--but they way that they act distances them from the reader. In particular, one can't help being turned off by the self-righteous way that both of them describe the others who inhabit their world. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is essentially about the humanization of Paloma and Renée so as each of them changes she becomes more sympathetic.

My favorite part of the novel, I think, is when Paloma puts Dr. T., the psychoanalyst, in his place:

'Listen carefully, Mr. Permafrost Psychologist, you and I are going to strike a little bargain. You’re going to leave me alone and in exchange I won't wreck your little trade in human suffering by spreading nasty rumors about you among the Parisian political and business elite. And believe me--at least if you say you can tell just how intelligent I am—-I am fully capable of doing this.' (209)

I have to admit that I think part of the reason I like this bit so much is because of how I feel about Dr. Fairbairn from the 44 Scotland Street books. I think Fairbairn is even more deserving of Paloma's vitriol than Dr. T.

I'm always interested in the meaning of books' titles, especially when it isn't apparent. In this case the title's genesis is Paloma's description of Renée:

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terribly elegant. (143)

One of the reasons I was drawn to The Elegance of the Hedgehog was its intriguing title, but I appreciate the title even more now that I know that it's meaningful.

Broken Glass Park

A review that appears in the latest issue of Library Journal...

Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky

This debut novel, which was nominated for the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, reveals a strong voice that's simultaneously biting and accessible.
Its narrator, precocious 17-year-old Sacha, lives in a housing project in Berlin populated by Russian immigrants. She's at the top of the class in her exclusive private school and has two goals in life: to kill her stepfather and to write a book about her mother tentatively titled "The Story of an Idiotic, Redheaded Woman Who Would Still Be Alive if Only She Had Listened to Her Smart, Oldest Daughter." This modern coming-of-age story follows Sacha as she interacts with the characters that populate her world and ventures further afield.

It is unfortunate that Bronsky's depiction of the immigrant community veers into stereotype because, as an émigré herself, she is uniquely situated to critique her fellow travelers. Additionally, while translator Mohr's prose is pitch-perfect, the way his notes are inserted in the text distracts from the flow of the narrative.

Broken Glass Park is the kind of book one expects to see on high school reading lists. It faces difficult issues head-on and its edginess will appeal to teens.

Handke's Don Juan

I reviewed this book in November, but waited until it's on sale to share it with you.

Don Juan: His Own Version by Peter Handke

Austrian Handke's latest to be translated into English is narrated not by Don Juan as its title would suggest, but by a lonely French innkeeper into whose garden the protagonist tumbles one day. The innkeeper becomes Don Juan's confidant and during his stay Don Juan recounts his previous week's adventures. Over the course of that "womanweek" Don Juan travels as far as Damascus and Norway encountering a new woman each day. At first Don Juan is like a mythological character. The narrator describes him as a veritable St. Francis, nourished by sorrow (he was orphaned by the loss of his only child), with the ability to magic rare and wonderful foodstuffs. The narrator's impression of Don Juan, however, changes after the week of storytelling has concluded. Whatever was awe-inspiring seems to dissipate and Don Juan becomes just a regular man with irritating quirks.

Don't come to Don Juan expecting tales of excitement and seduction or detailed accounts of the lothario's encounters or you'll be disappointed. The novel is literary and philosophical rather than sensational.

Read the official review at Library Journal...

System of Vienna

A book I reviewed for Library Journal this fall is in stores today.

The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square by Gert Jonke

In Austria, Jonke's award-winning work has a reputation for being extremely difficult; outside, he is still virtually unknown.

The System of Vienna is both a collection of short stories (originally and disparately published in 1970 and 1980) and an inventive autobiographical novel. The first-person narrator details his travels on the streetcars of Vienna and through life, starting with his blue-skinned birth and ending with a stony love scene, and belatedly explaining the book's subtitle. Translator Vincent Kling's attentiveness to Jonke's use of language—long, intentionally confused sentences, repetition, and fantastically superlative compound words like darkgreenblackcreepingplantalgaemurky (a descriptor for canal water)—helps retain the book's balance as well as its complexity.

This slim volume is not an easy read, and, while Kling's afterword does make it a bit more accessible, readers who aren't into experimental fiction may want to skip it.

See review in Library Journal...

Georg Letham

A review in Library Journal last month.

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss

Originally published in 1931, this is an account of a crime and its aftermath, interspersed with flashbacks that may illuminate the cause of the crime and the root of the perpetrator's moral defectiveness. The title character is the novel's unreliable narrator. Letham, who describes himself as "a physician, a man of scientific training of certain philosophical aspirations," is ever a medical researcher and taxonomist, categorizing his fellow men impassively as either frogs or rats. After murdering his wife, Letham is sent to the yellow fever-ridden penal colony C, where he is able to continue his epidemiological work and questionable experiments. The author, Jewish physician Weiss, is often compared to friend and contemporary Franz Kafka, but Weiss's work is more realistic, clearly influenced by his own life and work in the medical field.

Read the full review at Library Journal...

The White Castle

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

I wanted to like The White Castle more than I actually did, which is why I think it took me so long to finish the book despite its relatively short length.

There's a bit of metanarrative: the story does not stand on its own. The novel begins with some text about a contemporary researcher coming across this obscure 17th century manuscript, which he is now bringing to light.

The novel is primarily concerned with two characters: Him (the unnamed narrator), an Italian Christian captured at sea by a group of Ottoman Turks, and Hoja, the Turk who becomes his master. The two look eerily alike and are similar in many ways despite their mutual hatred* of each other. Pamuk uses these facts to explore identity and sense of self.

The White Castle is a very slow read without a lot of narrative thrust. I quite liked this line from somewhere near the end of the book: "I have now come to the end of my book. Perhaps discerning readers, deciding my story was actually finished long ago, have already tossed it aside." Very tongue-in-cheek, but quite apropos.

* theirs is truly a love-hate relationship

book club voting lists (4 of 4)

This post explains what the lists are all about...

World Literature

1. Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason (Iceland)
2. Blindness by Jose Saramago (Portugal)
3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic)
4. Farming of Bones by Edwige Dandicat (Haiti)
5. The Garden of Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani (Italy)
6. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie(Nigeria)
7. The History of Danish Dreams by Peter Hoeg (Denmark)
8. The Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa (Pakistan)
9. Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
10. The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
11. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)
12. Waiting by Han Jin (China)
13. Wild Meat and the Belly Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Hawaii)

Young Adult

1. The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga
2. Bad Kitty by Michele Jaffe
3. The Black Tattoo by Sam Enthoven
4. Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
5. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
6. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty
7. Going Bovine by Libba Bray
8. I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak
9. Sovay by Celia Rees
10. Strictest School in the World, The: Being the Tale of a Clever Girl, a Rubber Boy and a Collection of Flying Machines, Mostly Broken by Howard Whitehouse
11. Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

Special Month: Your Choice by Author X
(voters will pick their top two)

• Jane Austen
• Ernest Hemingway
• Henry James
• Toni Morrison
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Jodi Picoult

Special Month: Margaret Atwood
She's be speaking at the University at Buffalo on March 3, 2010, so we'll read her in February in preparation
(voters will pick their top two)

• Edible Woman (1969)
• The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
• The Robber Bride (1993)
• Surfacing (1972)
• The Year of the Flood (2009)

I'll post our reading list for 2010-2011 as soon as the results are in...

God's Mercy

God's Mercy by Kerstin Ekman

In March 1916, Hillevi Klarin, a young midwife from Uppsala, takes a post in the forbidding wilderness of northern Sweden. Hopeful and naive, Hillevi is unprepared for the life she finds there: the ignorance, poverty, and superstition, the unforgiving elements, and the wide expanses of white. After struggling through disappointment and bewilderment, she settles down and finds a place in the community. One unspeakable thing, however, keeps her from feeling completely at home. This is primarily Hillevi's story. But it's narrated by her foster daughter, the enigmatic Risten, who is part Sámi and known as the girl who was stolen by an eagle.

As Risten interweaves Hillevi's story with her own and that of teenage runaway Elis, a broader narrative emerges, concerned with both the far-reaching consequences of a single event and the us-them dichotomy in all its forms. The result is an atmospheric first novel, set in the same area as Eckman's successful thriller Blackwater.

God's Mercy isthe first in the Wolfskin trilogy.

Read the full review at Library Journal...

Some literary fiction in translation

A couple reviews in Library Journal this month...

Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner

Published to critical and commercial success in Europe ten years ago, this debut from prominent Canadian Germanist Eichner is now offered as the third title in the "Biblioasis International Translation" series. Narrated by Peter Engelmann, a middle-aged veterinarian working in Haifa, this work is at once the story of a family and a memorial to Viennese Jews. The narrative, the stream-of-consciousness recollections of a man caught between the need to remember and the desire to forget, opens in both 1980 and 1880 and chronicles the Kahn family's move from rural Hungary to Vienna, the narrator's 1938 flight to Belgium and eventual settlement in Israel, and all the family drama in between. The result is a moving book full of humor and humanity.


The Possession by Annie Ernaux

Ernaux's latest book to be translated into English is the story of an all-consuming jealousy, a self-portrait whose spare 64 pages sketch the life cycle of a possession. A woman has left a man "as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up [her] freedom." (9) The relationship may have been forgettable, but the narrator finds the idea of the man being with another woman unbearable, and her life is soon eclipsed by an obsession with that nameless, faceless woman. Occupation, the title of the original French edition, more clearly elucidates this state with its double entendre: the narrator is both engaged and possessed. While actively cultivating the obsession, the narrator is also very much concerned with chronicling it; this work is as much about the act of writing the novella as it is about the six months it recounts.

The Conqueror

Another Scandinavian lit review for Library Journal this month...

The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad

In The Conqueror, the second novel in the Jonas Wegeland trilogy (after The Seducer), celebrated Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad offers a dark narrative exploring both the "Norwegian national character" and the human condition.
A scholar has been contracted to write the definitive biography of Wegeland, one of Norway's most famous personages, now infamous after murdering his wife. After two years of research, the scholar is mired in contradictory details and suffering from acute writer's block. That is until a mysterious stranger arrives at his doorstep. What follows is a set of eccentric but intimate stories, ostensibly recalled by the stranger, that woven together -- "the sequence is crucial; only by following it can you hope to understand anything at all [...] just one story out of place and it all falls apart" (64) -- may yield a coherent picture of Wegeland.

Read the full review at Library Journal.

book clubbing in December

For this round of book club selections, we decided to include some riskier, more literary titles. Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude was scheduled for December, mostly because it is short and wouldn't be too daunting a read in the midst of all the holiday craziness. I was looking forward to rereading it, but had no idea how it'd go over with the other members of the book club.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim

Too Loud a Solitude is a short, but powerful book. It is the story of Hanta, a man who has spent his entire working life compacting wastepaper. Though he saves books when he can (his apartment is packed with three tons of books), he's weighed down by the loss of knowledge and the innocent lives of the mice he's accidentally compacted, but also by the hopelessness of his (and their collective) life.

Hrabal's rhythmic, repetitive prose offers vivid descriptions of the world in which our protagonist lives. A world where the heavens are not humane, where academics clean the sewers and loved ones can disappear without a trace.

But, in as much as Too Loud a Solitude is the story of a love affair with the written word, it is filled with eloquent descriptions of reading, the first of which appears on the novella's very first page: "Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel" (1-2).

The dark worldview and lack of plot were the turn-offs for some book club members. That being said, I do think that Too Loud a Solitude generated a very good discussion. We discussed how the book is typical of central/eastern European literature of this period, what we as Western readers may have lost in context, how we related to the protagonist, what appealed to and repulsed us about the narrative, and how the protagonist quietly rebelled through his work.

Three Musketeers

Three Musketeers by Marcelo Birmajer
translated from the Spanish by Sharon Wood

Despite his fear of becoming his newspaper's token Jewish affairs correspondent, apathetic reporter Javier Mossen is strong-armed into interviewing expatriate Elias Traúm, who is visiting from Israel for the first time in 20 years. When Traúm is kidnapped from the Buenos Aires airport before Mossen's eyes, the unwanted assignment takes on a whole new meaning. Mossen becomes invested in both ensuring Traúm's safety and the story Traúm has to tell. Darkly comic and unapologetic, the novel subtly explores the political reality of Argentina's past and what it means to be a good Jew. Narrated by the sex-obsessed Mossen, this is the tale of Traúm's short visit to Argentina and the legacy of his role as one of the tres mosqueteiros, a group of precocious young radicals, two of whom joined the Montoneros during the Dirty War. It is also the story of Mossen's struggle to reclaim control of his life.

I was particularly taken by this passage:
"Nobody knows who he is, and as such the best thing is to proceed cautiously through life and not get our hopes up too much. Maybe paradise is simply the place where we will be handed a leaflet telling us clearly who we are, what we wanted and why we couldn't have it" (4).

Read the full review in Library Journal or at Barnes & Noble (click on "editorial reviews").

Beowulf

Beowulf, translated and read by Seamus Heaney

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and lives to old age before dying in a vivid fight against a dragon.
The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) the library at work doesn't have many audio books. Since I've had a good deal of coding to do lately, I've been working through my personal stash of audio books (and those loaned from friends) as well as the library's selection of fiction on CD. On the Road is currently checked-out, but I've listened to Eragon (kind of a strange choice for an academic library) and now Beowulf.

Actually, I was quite excited when I realized that the library owned an audio version of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. I'd been wanting to read it ever since it first came out and I knew that listening to Heaney read it himself would be a much more authentic way to experience the poem.

While Beowulf probably isn't the best choice for listening while doing mindless work (I prefer something lighter), it is nonetheless a good "read". Heaney reads wonderfully and his translation makes the work accessible to the modern reader.

literary movements and whatnot

At their request I recently wrote a little article on literary movements for Readers' Advisor News.

Here's the intro:
While readers' advisors often use genre designations and appeal features to help guide readers, it is easy to overlook other reading interests that may not be as obvious. Literary movements are a perfect example. While literary movements can be both nebulous and intimidating to readers, given a well-placed recommendation, books that fit into those categories may appeal to readers who don't normally think in these terms.

Care to read the rest?

On a Day like This

Here's a peek at a review that appeared in Library Journal this month.

On a Day Like This by Peter Stamm

Swiss author Peter Stamm's latest novel describes a few months in the life of Andreas, a secondary school teacher and confirmed bachelor. This glimpse at one man's midlife crisis is a mediation on what it means to be lonely. Sitting in a doctor's office awaiting the results of a biopsy, Andreas has an epiphany. Dissatisfied with the banality of his life, he decides to quit his job, sell his apartment, end his romantic affairs, and leave Paris for good. He heads to his childhood home in Switzerland and an ill-fated reunion with his first love. Andreas's completely unrealistic self-perception (illustrated with subtle irony by his language-teaching materials) makes up for his being far from sympathetic as a protagonist. Stamm's narrative is both insightful and dreamy, his fluid prose rendered adeptly by award-winning translator Michael Hofmann. And while the novel's ending is unexpected (and, some might argue, inappropriate), it is not unwelcome.

See the full review at Library Journal (temporarily) or Barnes and Noble under "editorial reviews" (it should be there shortly).