Spring Reading Thing 2011 - What Happened?

My success rate for Spring Reading thing was about fifty percent.  I'll recap my list and explain (make excuses for) why I didn't complete my challenge:

1. Swamplandia by Karen Russell.  I had high hopes for this book because the book flap was enticing.  Although the book had a few great moments, it was a slow-paced read overall.  I suspect Russell was trying to dazzle us with her prose rather than move her story along.  It could have been a great story had the pacing been a little better.  Here's my extended review if you'd like the deets on this one.
2. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown.  I had low expectations for Brown's novel about three sisters, a sick mother, and a Shakespeare-obsessed father because I thought it was going to be fluffy chick-lit (which I will read, but that's not what I was seeking here).  I ended up liking this story.  The characters were well-developed and showed growth.  It wasn't melodramatic (and the subject matter could have easily slipped into melodrama).  I found myself laughing during some scenes and my heart constricting in my chest in others.  Here's my extended review.

Review of Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Why do I dread writing this review?  I was so excited about Swamplandia! – couldn’t wait to read it.  I began reading a few pages but stopped.  I didn’t read it over vacation because I wanted to be alone with it for a stretch (yet I couldn’t be bothered to lift it on the five hour road trip back).  I finished some other books and picked it up in earnest again.  I read.  I got sleepy.  Read some more.  Got sleepy.  What was going on?  I liked the characters.  I liked the concept – it had so much potential and originality.  Why wasn’t I loving this book?

I pushed on because it wasn’t terrible.  It wasn’t even bad.  It just made me very sleepy.  I think part of the problem was Russell’s extensive use of metaphor and many self-conscious turns of phrase.  Gustave Flaubert said, “An author in his book must be like God in the universe; present everywhere and visible nowhere.”  I felt that Russell was too visible in too many places.  Sometimes the description of the setting slowed the pace without adding anything to the general mood or tension in the book.  I got “bogged down”, so to speak. (har, har).  Some of her prose was beautiful but pointless.  Some of it didn’t seem to fit in the characters mouths.  For instance, the main character, Ava, muses:

“I tried to imagine what species of bird could make a sound like that.  A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling.  It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.” 

Beautiful words, but I wouldn’t have put them in Ava’s mouth.  Ava often waxes poetic like this, but it doesn’t sound like a thirteen year old with a substandard education and a sheltered life.  It sounds like Karen Russell trying to dazzle me.  Another thing that slowed the book down was the insertion of historical facts about the Florida swamplands.  These were not seamless – I always felt like they were asides basted in with sloppy whipstitches.  It interrupted the flow of this fantastically original story.