Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke

I feel very conflicted about this book. There were things about it that I loved, but just as many (if not more) things that I hated. Daughters of the Revolution was the second book I read for my book club this year (the first was A Cook's Tour), and every person in the book club hated it. In fact, everyone (except for me) actually stopped reading it at one point or another because they were just so over it, and so unwilling to waste their time finishing it. And I do understand why.

The first, and most obvious, problem with this book is that it has the worst synopsis in the history of the world. The description on the dust jacket makes it sound as though the story revolves around a character (Carole Faust, a young black woman who is admitted to an adamantly all-boys school through a clerical error) who is mentioned in about 20 of the 173 pages. It is like the publisher sent a sample chapter of this novel to the description author, and they formulated the whole description around that one 10 page chapter. If I were Carolynn Cooke, I would be furious, because the description is really a horrible representation of the novel (it doesn't even mention the two main characters!). This discrepancy was maybe the biggest problem, especially with the women in my book club, because the synopsis makes it sound like the book is really about what it means to be the first girl let into an all male school, along with gender/race politics in the late 60's and 70's. This is what the women in my book club wanted, and it is not what they got.

Daughters of the Revolution reads more like a collection of short stories circling around a set of central set of characters than a novel. The vignettes jump around in time, beginning in 1963 with the death Heck Hellman (who is husband and father to our two main characters, Mei-Mei and EV, respectively), and ending in 2005 with the death of Goddard (God) Byrd, the former headmaster of the Goode school, which Heck attended (if you can't tell, the names are symbolic in the least subtle way). Cooke's only published work outside of journals before DotR was a collection of short stories, so it makes sense that the novel takes this form.

What I did enjoy about this novel was Cooke's writing. The imagery was beautiful, and Cooke is clearly a gifted writer technically. During the portions of the novel that I enjoyed, her prose was able to transport me to a place and feeling outside of myself. Much of the novel seemed almost in a slightly surreal, dream-like state, as the chapters are narrated by different characters and the reader is forced to view the world through their somewhat distorted lenses. There were flashes of excellence, but those are not what stick in my mind.

What I did not enjoy was that the narrative did not sit together well enough, or accomplish what it seemed to want to. Now, I often like narratives split up temporally or with different narrators, so it's not that that bothered me. What ultimately bothered me was that I didn't feel like Cooke accomplished a novel that made these different times and different narrators come together as a whole. There were beautiful moments, and I could definitely see what she was hinting at and trying to get to, but I don't think that this novel ever really pulled it together. Also, there was a lot of sex and sexuality in this novel - group sex, sex with tweens, moms sleeping with their daughters' boyfriends, and more. Sexuality doesn't bother me in art as long as I can see what purpose it serves, but I just couldn't see a way in which all the sex really added to the novel. Mostly, it was just the outlet of the totally screwed up, main characters, who I never really liked. It's fine that they're screwed up, I just didn't feel like the novel actually explored the roots and effects of this dysfunction in a satisfying way. It all just seemed a little shallow to me, and I really thought there was a potential for depth, which is maybe the most upsetting thing.

So, obviously, I have a lot of feelings about this book, but I'll shut up about it now. Ultimately, I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you want to wallow in the disjointed dysfunctional sexuality of unlikeable characters for 173 pages. Which you might. I'll leave you with a quote, which is fairly representative of some of the things I didn't like about the novel: "If Pilgrim had looked up, he would have seen that EV's face expressed no particular joy or tenderness at the sight of him; she wanted more. At least I hoped she did. (I'd tried to raise a greedy, lusty girl—which EV so defiantly was, especially as a child.)"

Whoops. And I'm back.

Okay, that was a bit of a bump in my road to becoming a good blogger. For some reason I have just been the most lethargic person on the planet for the last couple weeks (meaning I pass out around 9:30 - 10 on my couch every night and don't end up even doing my laundry or washing my dishes, let alone actually blogging). This was all exacerbated by the 9 day weekend I had in late January (snow shuts down my workplace and my motivation to exercise or really do anything that isn't drinking mimosas and watching How I Met Your Mother). Also, my mom visited during the last weekend in January, so I was busy then and am now busier consistently since she brought my PUPPY (read: small but fully grown dog) to live with me! Which is just great and fantastic, but adds another thing to the list of stuff I'm more likely to pay attention to than my blog.

But ultimately, these are all just excuses. And now I'm back, attempting to get back onto track. Just because I wasn't posting doesn't mean I wasn't doing things, though! Currently on my blog to do list I have one book (soon to be two), two crafts, and eleven recipes, so these should all be (hopefully) coming out in the next couple days.

Today, though, I'll update on the exercise. Things have been a little shaky as I've fluctuated from going to the gym 4+ times per week to walking around as my only exercise all week (hello, snow week). I didn't keep great track of what I've done over the past few weeks, but I'm going to estimate that I did about 14 hours of exercise, ranging from trudging uphill in the snow to jogging at the Y while watching Toddlers and Tiaras (I know, it's awful).

So, here's to a fresh start on my new beginning, and get ready for a bunch of posts in the next couple days!