Bitching About Books

The Fitzgerald’s daughter, Kate, has acute leukemia. In an effort to save her, they have a second child, Anna, in the hopes that Anna’s umbilical cord blood will cure Kate. It works for a while, but Kate relapses, and over the years, Anna is asked again and again to donate bone marrow or what have you to Kate. The parents love Anna, she is not merely a donor for her sister, but when she is 13, Kate goes into kidney failure, and they ask Anna to donate one of hers. Instead, Anna goes to a lawyer, and she sues them for emancipation, so she won’t be compelled to donate anymore.

Of course, if she doesn’t donate a kidney, Kate is going to die. She might die even with the surgery, which is bigger than any prior procedure the girls have endured. This book was so thoughtful, and handled issues of bodily autonomy and the morality of having a child to farm them for parts so well. Then there’s their other child, Anna and Kate’s brother, who feels invisible, and acts out all of the time. I was really enjoying this story, and was considering giving it to my friend as a gift, and then the ending. THE ENDING. It turns out that Anna is willing to donate to Kate, she wants to save her sister. It’s Kate who has had enough of living her life this way, who asked Anna to sue for emancipation in the first place. Well, Anna wins her lawsuit, she is free, but for some reason I can’t remember, Kate decides that she will accept this gift one last time, and as Anna is in the car on the way to the hospital to donate her kidney, SHE IS IN AN ACCIDENT AND IS NOW BRAIN DEAD. WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK, HOW LIFETIME MOVIE CAN YOU GET??? I was SO ANGRY. SO ANGRY. I felt cheap and manipulated. In the end, they harvest the organ, Kate is finally cured, and lives a bittersweet life, knowing a part of her sister lives inside her. Whatever. I give this book the side eye when I see it at the bookstore.

This is the story of four friends in New York City, and how they become fabulously successful and wealthy. Jude is a lawyer, William is an actor, Malcom is an architect, and JB is a painter. As they grow up and become successful and wealthy, their relationship changes. Fights are had, they have a falling out, blah blah blah.

What this book is really about is Jude, who is violently raped when he is about 30, and refuses to go to the police because he believes that he deserved it. We then learn about Jude’s childhood, which is like a Dickens novel gone very, very wrong. He was an orphan, raised by priests, and is raped again and again as a child. He goes to someone for help, they rape him. One of the fathers kidnaps him and pimps him out. He tries to escape and the guy runs him over with a car, causing a debilitating limp and constant pain for the rest of his life. He cuts, he burns himself, he goes to therapy, he finally finds love, but then his lover is killed. He has his legs amputated. Eventually, he cannot take this bullshit one more minute and kills himself. I MEAN COME ON. This book was torture porn and every time I see it mentioned I am angry. I only finished it because I wanted some kind of happy ending, some justice for Jude. There was none. NONE. And yet…the writing is beautiful.

This book is nowhere near as horrible as the others. I just reviewed it the other day, and there’s a synopsis there. Then I went back and listened to it again. When I first listened to it, I was confused by the back and forth and the different possible outcomes for Rose. So I wrote up a quick review and posted it. But then I thought perhaps this was a me problem, so I gave it another try. I liked it a lot more this time. I think the author did a wonderful job of writing about the pressure placed on women to become mothers in our society, about consent and bullying within relationships, about a person’s duty to themself vs their marriage or whatever. I really liked it.

EXCEPT. In every single life, Rose becomes a mother. The one thing she didn’t want. In some lives the child is her daughter, in some it is her stepdaughter, but always, always there is a child. A child that she loves and adores. Does she regret having her? No, but in at least one life, she is still angry about the loss of the person she wanted to be, child free. The thing that made me angry about this book was that there was not a single instance when Rose got to live her life entirely on her terms. Sure, one could argue that she went into the relationship with her second husband, Thomas, knowing that he was a parent, and she could have simply walked away. Which is true. But she never does. In every instance, she becomes a mother and is fulfilled by that parent / child relationship. I’m spicy about this. I feel like the author was trying to write about women who do not want children, and the pressure that society puts on them, and then in the end she undermines that by having Rose become a mother every.single.time. If she had had one life, just one, where she didn’t have a kid, I think it would have been an excellent read. Maybe she could have changed her husband’s mind (he didn’t want kids when they got married, he changed his mind.) Maybe she could have divorced him and moved on, either with another partner or alone. There are a lot of ways to be happy and fulfilled in this life, and I felt like this ending failed to explore that at all.

Sara Crewe is a wealthy little girl in the late 1800s London. She was raised for her first several years in India, but her mother has died, and her doting father sends her to London to boarding school. There she lives with privileged status, befriending some of the children, while others are envious of her beautiful room, her expensive clothing, her sweet demeanor, her everything. Four years go by, and on her 11th birthday, after an extravagant party, word comes that her father has died, and has lost his fortune. Sara is penniless. The headmistress of the school wants to put her out on the street, but she doesn’t dare because it might ruin her reputation. So she sends Sara to the attic, to the room next to the scullery maid, Becky. Sara and Becky become great friends, and Sara has to work hard every day, and is generally cold, wet, hungry, and miserable. Still, she tells herself that if she were a princess, she would behave a certain way. She would not lose her temper, she would not complain, she would always be kind, she would try to cheer Becky up with stories that warm their hearts in the cold damp evenings in their dingy attic.

A few years go by this way, and a wealthy man (she sees him from the window when he’s moving in, and calls him ‘The Indian Gentleman’, because his furniture reminds her of her time in India) moves in next to the school. He takes an interest in Sara, and his servant, Ram Dass, comes up with charming ways to make her life better, bringing meals and blankets to her room, that kind of thing. When they discover that he was her father’s business partner, who has felt horrible guilt for these last years over the fortune that was not lost after all, that by all rights belongs to Sara, he becomes her guardian and she is again fabulously wealthy.

I don’t actually have a problem with this book, other than that when Sara is freed from her life of servitude, she takes Becky with her as a maid instead of as a sister or something, but it was written when it was written, so whatever. My problem is with the movie adaptations. Both the 1939 version with Shirley Temple, and the 1995 version rob the story of its true heart. In the book, Sara is such a kind, loving person that when she discovers that the Indian Gentleman was her father’s partner, that he was in some way responsible for her father’s death, because he died of a broken heart after he thought the Indian Gentleman had betrayed him, she forgives him. In the movies, she runs around London looking for her father, who is very much alive and is in a hospital suffering from amnesia. STUPID I tell you, stupid. And for me, it ruins the story.