'Unforgettable' by Scott Simon: Portrait of a Classy Lady

I wanted to read this nonfiction book, subtitled A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime, because Scott Simon wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Pretty Birds. Set in Sarajevo in the mid-1990s, it follows 17-year-old Bosniak Muslim high school student Irena Zaric as she goes from basketball all-star to sniper. Although the tale is fictional, Simon met women like Irena when he worked as a war correspondent in the former Yugoslavia.

Pretty Birds was a book that, to borrow a phrase from John Green, filled me with a weird evangelical zeal. I don't know whether or not I ever actually convinced anyone to read it, but oh lord, how I did try.

Pretty Birds made me cry. So did Simon's memoir of Patricia, his glamorous, ultra-thoughtful mother in her last days. Patricia had had a bout with lung cancer, which had cost her half of one lung. She was in remission, but then her husband (Simon's second stepfather) noticed she was losing weight without trying. 

She was hospitalized in her hometown of Chicago and put on a respirator. It turns out the therapy that had eliminated her cancer had also weakened her lung-and-a-half to the point that she could no longer breathe on her own. Her ability to breathe was rapidly running out, and there was nothing left for medical science to do. 

Simon, who lives in California, came to Chicago to stay with his mom. He slept in a camper's sleeping bag on her hospital room floor - although he didn't sleep much, because it's hard to sleep in an intensive care unit. Simon's wife and two daughters followed him to Chicago, and his wife was able to spend time with her mother-in-law, but children weren't allowed in the ICU. The girls had to say goodbye to their Grandmere (Simon's wife is from France) secondhand.

Unforgettable started out as a series of Twitter tweets Simon posted while Patricia was in the hospital - typos and all. He used those spur-of-the-moment written thoughts as a jumping off point to tell his mother's life story and also to capture a sense of what it was like to be with her as she knew her clock was running out.

She was a classy lady up to the very end. A single mom for most of Simon's life, she was from an Irish Catholic background. (Her parents were named Francis and Frances.) She married a Jewish comedian and gave up a nascent acting career when she became pregnant with Scott Simon's only sibling, a little girl who did not survive infancy. They divorced as a result of his alcoholism, and he died when Simon was 16. 

Simon is a good son. Death is hard for everyone, but he made an honest effort to really be present with his mother at the end of her life. I'm glad I read this, because I feel it was a privilege to get to know Patricia, even in a small way. She was an amazing person, and I'm certain Simon's daughters will grow up to be better women for having known her influence.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for this review, which represents my own honest opinion, through the Amazon Vine program.

#YABookReview: Vampire Academy #3 - Shadow Kiss (Spoilers)

Excuse me, but why didn't any of you tell me this book was going to end so...?

SPOILER ALERT! Go away and DO NOT READ if you don't want to know what happens in the third book in Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy novel series. This post will discuss the plotline of Shadow Kiss and will include spoilers. You've been warned.

When I finished Frostbite, I was worried about Lissa and Christian's relationship. He seemed so jealous of Adrian Ivashkov. Yet on the very first page, Rose Hathaway unfortunately finds herself inside Lissa's head while Lissa and Christian are getting very intimate. 

I should probably mention that the sexuality in this series is not explicit. This isn't erotica. It's young adult paranormal fiction, and although there's some sensuality, there's no explicit detail. I wouldn't encourage my 10-year-old niece to read this series yet, but - allowing for individual differences in maturity - I'd think it should be fine for most readers 14 and up. 

So we know right off that Lissa is in love with Christian. Later in the novel, they talk about marriage and having children. I'll be very happy if, at the end of this series, Christian and Lissa get married. She's the last living Dragomir, and that would be so lonely. 

Let's face facts: my Vampire Academy OTP (one true pairing) is Rose and Dimitri. Things end very badly for Rose and Dimitri at the end of this book. 

BUT FIRST! First, there's chapter 23. In chapter 23, Rose and Dimitri do the thing. He's 24, she's his 17-year-old student (one week away from turning 18), and they can't keep their hands off each other. They have the sex.

Again, not explicit, but rather poetically described from Rose's point of view. In Frostbite, we could presume that Christian was probably a virgin and that Lissa, the sexually experienced one, took the lead and guided him.We know Rose, despite her reputation as being sexually adventurous, has never gone so far as to have intercourse, and we can assume gorgeous Dimitri Belikov is not a 24-year-old virgin. (Not there's anything wrong with being a virgin. Not that there's anything wrong with not being a virgin. Everybody has to make the sexuality decisions that work best for themselves.) As usual, Dimitri gets to be the teacher and Rose the student. 

Yes, this seems a little wrong. She's really close to being an 18-year-old adult woman, though - that one last week isn't going to magically make a difference. She's already been in combat with mortal enemies and watched a friend die. For that matter, she's already come back from the dead herself! For all practical purposes - if not for all legal purposes, depending upon the age of consent in Montana - Rose is a grown woman. 

(I looked it up. Weirdly, Montana has different ages of consent for women and men. Women can legally consent to sex with a man over 18 at the age of 16, but the age of consent for men is 18, and a woman has to be 18 to legally consent to sex with a woman over 18. Montana, your sex laws are heterosexist - you should fix that.)

Yet, it still doesn't seem quite as wrong as the relationship between 17-year-old Muslim Bosnian basketball player Irena Zaric and 40-ish Coach Dino in one of my all-time favorite books, Pretty Birds. ("You could run laps, or...") Coach Dino is married and sleeping with the women's soccer coach. At least Dimitri is only seven years older than Rose (not that age matters much once you turn 18), single, and unattached. 

If you want my detailed exploration into the intricacies of underage intimacy, you can read "Reviving the Runaways: Who Should Rule When Law, Psychology, and Teenage Hormones Collide?" 

Rose and Dimitri have legal, consensual sex and then admit they love each other. Their feelings are mutual - they are in love.  

And then the bad thing happens. The very bad thing. 

Remember at the end of the Vampire Academy movie how all the Strigoi (bad, undead vampires, not the living Moroi like Lissa and Christian) were lurking in a cave, and Strigoi Ms. Karp ominously said, "Soon?"

Well, that didn't happen in the first book at all, but in this third book, the Strigoi do get onto the grounds of St. Vladimir's Academy. (Ms. Karp isn't with them, though.) They kill people, and they kidnap people to snack on later. The Guardians decide to go on a risky rescue mission.

This is a bad idea. The Strigoi get Dimitri. They turn him into a Strigoi. Dimitri is now not only dead, but he's become an evil vampire. The last line of the book is, "I set off, off to kill the man I loved." 

I feel a little bit like Richelle Mead has taken a silver stake to my heart. I remind you, I'm only halfway through the series. I have three books to go, and half of my OTP is dead already. This reminds me unpleasantly of a certain TV series that has ripped out my beating heart and shown it to me. NO ONE warned me that anything sad was going to happen to Rose and Dimitri's relationship. I feel...sad, in the way only devastating fiction can create. 

Damn you, Vampire Academy movie, for making me read these sad-ass books. 

I checked this book out from my local library. I wasn't solicited or obligated to review it in any way. This review represents my own honest opinion.

Next up: Panic, a contemporary YA - no fantasy or dystopian elements - by Lauren Oliver, which I got for free from the Amazon Vine program. 

This is an affiliate link:

Shift by Madison Dunn. $8.99 from Smashwords.com
I'm not sure why it happens, but when I focus just right, I can slow time. Things around me become lighter somehow, and I almost feel the tiny particles of energy spinning inside of them. The thing is, having the ability to transform the world around you isn't all it's cracked up to be -- especially when you are running from the Valencia without any deodorant.

Successful Completion of James Jones' Wartime Trilogy

It is finished. I have finished reading Whistle, and thus concluded the entire wartime trilogy by James Jones.

860 pages of From Here to Eternity + 416 pages of The Thin Red Line + 576 pages of Whistle = 1852 pages. That's quite an investment in the main characters, so hopefully it makes some sense why I get so wrapped up in them.

The ending is rather unpleasant. Charlotte's Web unpleasant. Pretty Birds unpleasant. As in, a character I care deeply about meets a particularly cruel death. All four of the characters meet particularly cruel fates; one could say that they've all succumbed to incapacitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the end, we don't know what happens to Bobby Prell's pregnant wife, Della Mae. Prell isn't interested; he and Della Mae have considered having an abortion. It isn't the bittersweet resolution that Suzanne Collins gives us to (SPOILER) Finnick and Annie's story in Mockingjay. The marriage isn't a happy one - he's cheating almost immediately, but remember, James Jones characters do tend to be shameless sexual opportunists. It's very possible that Della Mae will simply forget Bobby Prell and move on to the next guy. She seems very innocent, but there's actually something predatory about her.

It's not that Jones couldn't write a female character he respected - Lorene/Alma is drawn quite sympathetically in FHTE, and Whistle's Arlette seems to have her shit together quite nicely. Carol, once she's been with Winch for a while, matures into a person Winch respects. Other women, including Della Mae and Winch's wife, get less sympathy. It's intentions and personality that make the difference; women aren't judged for their sexuality. In fact, Jones laments that Christian cultures repress sexuality.

In one particularly interesting passage, Winch muses that female multiple orgasms must be largely a thing of the male imagination. As long passages in From Here to Eternity are devoted to the question of whether homosexuality is natural or not, long passages of Whistle are devoted to cunnilingus. Landers is grateful when a woman gives him instructions. Strange at first refuses, then discusses it with Landers, then gets a little obsessed and kind of offended when a woman isn't interested.

My theory is that Jones was familiar with the Shere Hite report, which was generating a lot of buzz around the time of the writing of this novel. According to The American Women's Almanac:

"The Hite Report, in 1976, upset a lot of applecarts. Hite's report on female sexuality was disturbing because, perhaps for the first time, she allowed women - 3,000 had answered questions for her book - to talk about how they defined sex. Although many feminists were attacking Sigmund Freud's idea that only vaginal orgasms represented mature female sexuality, Hite's report popularized the idea that many women preferred clitoral stimulation. She was roundly attacked, her methods called unscientific, her sample not representative. A Washington Post reviewer said the book was 'about as intellectually provocative as the plumbing in my basement.'"

Jones found it intellectually provocative, apparently, enough to have his female characters assert that they liked receiving oral sex. Clearly, Jones admired the more assertive women in his novel, and was rather dismissive of the ones who were too shy or prudish to get what they wanted. In retrospect, all this feminist assertiveness may seem a bit anachronistic for the 1940s, but then again, strong women have existed in every age, and I'm sure there were plenty of ballsy Rosie the Riveter types.

Whether Shere Hite is right or wrong that female multiple orgasms from intercourse without direct clitoral stimulation are rare, I don't know. They're certainly possible; I know that from experience. I usually stop counting around five. For me, the only trick is to be on top. Maybe that's what Winch is doing wrong - I don't think there are any sex scenes in Whistle with the female partner on top. In fact, Prell blames Della Mae's pregnancy on the fact that, while he get enough strength back in his legs to get on top of her, it wasn't as easy to get off her when he wanted to pull out. (That's not a very effective birth control method anyway, but we don't expect Prell to be too educated about these kinds of things anyway, since he's a coal miner's son from West Virginia. Yes, Jones moved his birthplace from Kentucky to West Virginia in the third novel. Winch and Carol use a diaphragm - then again, maybe birth control would've been covered in their army hygiene lectures?)

By the way, Prell did learn to walk again by the end of the novel. He used the wheelchair largely for show, to get the attendees at his war bonds talks to feel additional sympathy for him. It worked remarkably well for picking up women whose husbands were off fighting in Europe.

I don't feel particularly good about the ending that James Jones planned for his characters while he himself was dying. I understand why it has to end this way, but it is a very bitter pill to swallow. Which, I suppose, is a comment on war itself. Jones firmly believes that combat has no happy ending, anywhere, for anybody.

Kick-Ass Heroines

Juliet Capulet: for centuries, the heroine of Shakespeare’s tragedy has been defined in terms of her relationship to Romeo Montague. She is the pursued, the beloved, the object. He is active, the pursuer, the lover. The most decisive thing Juliet does in the play is commit suicide. She doesn’t even get first billing in the title.

Along came Stacey Jay, whose paranormal young adult novel Juliet Immortal cast Juliet Capulet in an entirely new light. Suddenly, Juliet had a personality, a consciousness, thoughts and opinions and the ability to tell her story in her own words. According to this Juliet, Shakespeare got it wrong - way wrong. Although she loved Romeo when she secretly married him, but by the end of their honeymoon night, Juliet had good reason to hate Romeo Montague forever. They were not dead by their own hands, but rather given an immortality in which Juliet was a sort of cosmic bodyguard, sent through time to save pairs of lovers whom Romeo would try to rip apart.

Jay allowed Juliet a full range of emotions above and beyond fawning over a hot guy. Her Juliet has pent-up rage, even murderous impulses, tempered with a basic goodness and sense of duty. She has little reason to believe in true love, yet it’s the very thing she’s sworn to protect. She’s complicated. She has better days and worse days. Her emotions are realistic.

This is not to say that female authors can write a kick-ass teenage heroine better than male authors can. Consider the examples of two fictional teenage girls forced to become warriors when war broke out in their once-peaceful homes. One is Scarlett O’Hara, heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s 1930s masterpiece Gone With the Wind.

Before the Civil War broke out, Scarlett’s biggest concerns were boys and parties. She’s a smart young woman, but thinks it’s “cute” to play down her intelligence. For a while, she saw the war as the dreadful thing that forced her to be a nurse and wear widow’s clothes when she only wanted to wear bright colors and dance. Once the Yankees burned Atlanta, something inside her snapped. Scarlett’s fierce determination to “never go hungry again” hardened her. Some might say she went from a thoughtless young woman to a heartless one. Love her or hate her, by the middle of the book, Scarlett will do anything to survive.

Scarlett’s more modern counterpart is 17-year-old Irena Zaric in Scott Simon’s novel Pretty Birds. She loves to play basketball, hang out with her friend Amela, sneak around with boys, listen to Madonna and watch Johnny Depp movies when the Bosnian Civil War hits her home of Sarajevo. Like Scarlett, she’s forced to starve. Her family lives in the ruined remains of her grandmother’s apartment building, where they crawl on the ground like crabs to avoid becoming targets for snipers.

Like Scarlett, Irena makes a hard decision to survive: she becomes a sniper herself, learning how to use a rifle. She shoots at the teenage boys, classmates only days before, who have become soldiers. She kills young women not unlike herself, only they happen to be Serbs and she is a Muslim. Still, she never becomes heartless. The one thing Irena will never do is betray a friend.

Written seven decades apart, one by a Southern belle who wrote to avoid boredom while recovering from a broken leg and the other by a Chicago journalist who witnessed the war firsthand, these very different novels tell the same story. To write a kick-ass heroine, you must capture all sides of her, the good and the bad. If everybody loves her all the time, why is she interesting? The reader needs to know what makes her angry, what can push her over the edge, what she hates as well as what she loves...and who loves her. To write a kick-ass heroine, you first have to discover the human being.

Images: Juliet by John William Waterhouse is in the public domain.
Retouched photo from Gone With the Wind is in the public domain within the U.S.

That Yugoslavia! Thing 2 - Toni Kukoc Edition

Former Michael Jordan teammate Toni Kukoc was born September 18, 1968, in Split, Yugoslavia, (now Croatia) in the Dalmatian region.

After playing for the Bulls, he also played for Philly and then Milwaukee. He currently resides in Highland Park, Illinois, with his wife Renata, their teenage son Marin and daughter Stela. Today's blog post is dedicated to Toni Kukoc in literature.

From one of my favorite books EVER, Pretty Birds by Scott Simon: "It wasn't until Irena had opened up the shirt that she saw JORDAN across the back, CHICAGO on the front. The gift, along with the gunshots and emptiness outside, alarmed her. Irena was cunning. She knew that Coach Dino enjoyed having sex with her, but she assumed that one day he would approach her with his sad hound's face and announce that he was returning to his wife (or, at least, to their bedroom from the couch on which he professed to sleep) or moving in with Julija Mitric, the hazel-eyed women's soccer coach. Irena enjoyed her moments with Coach Dino, but she spent more time dreaming about Toni Kukoc, the great Croatian player, or Johnny Depp than about the coach."

From Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure by Alexander Wolff: "During his first season in the NBA, while the war raged back home, you could see the labor in everything Toni Kukoc did...after joining the Chicago Bulls in 1993, he seemed to repudiate the style that had turned him into the finest young player in Europe...Crack through the shell into which Kukoc retracted and you could find an essential homebody, a player who back in the mid-1980s was always the most reluctant to take part in those late-night high jinks [as part of the Yugoslavian national youth team]. His first coach in Chicago, Phil Jackson, would tease Kukoc about how he played better when a Bulls game was being broadcast back to Croatia and his mother might be watching."

From Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson: "Toni wasn't a selfish player. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to dish the ball to someone else. But he didn't want to conform to the triangle offense. I knew right from the start that I would have to ride him hard in practice to protect him from being torn apart by his teammates. I'm sure my method didn't seem like an act of kindness to Toni. He couldn't understand why I allowed Scottie [Pippen] the freedom to make creative moves outside the system, but would start yelling at him when he tried similar gambits."

From Scottie Pippen by Fred McMane: "...at times, Pippen made life difficult for Kukoc. He sometimes yelled at him on court for failing to execute a play properly. As Kukoc became more comfortable with the NBA style of play, however, he became a valuable member of the team and Pippen softened in his criticism of the Croatian star.

'I think Toni is a very talented player,' Pippen said. 'He has a lot to learn about this game...When I push Toni, I try to make him better, like Michael did me. People look at it wrong and assume I dislike him. The problems I supposedly had weren't personal. I objected to the way they were pursuing him and offering him so much money...I honestly enjoy talking to Toni and trying to teach him how to be a better player...I see a lot of my game in Toni.'"

From Bad As I Wanna Be by Dennis Rodman and Tim Keown: "I think Toni Kukoc is the guy who was most affected by the trade [when Rodman came to Chicago]. He went from being the best player on the whole continent of Europe to being the fourth best player on this own team. I'm not saying he was overwhelmed when I showed up, but he has to understand that with this kind of team they've put together here, it doesn't matter who gets the glory. This team will free him up to do whatever he has to do; he just needs to understand that and get his mind right about the game. We'll cover up for Kukoc's mistakes. He's a great shooter, and he can shoot 15 times a game and score 16 or 17 points a game, easy. Kukoc can take over the Vinnie Johnson, instant-offense role on this team."

My contribution! From "Pairs of Really Big Ones" by Erin O'Riordan: "But I soon found that, with Reggie and Rik, I'd established a pattern. My chocolate fantasies needed a scoop of vanilla. For that, there was Toni Kukoc, the Bulls' six-foot-eleven power forward. Not quite as pretty as Dennis, a bit skinny and slope-shouldered, he had other nice features. In contrast to Dennis's many colorful markings, Toni had a single tattoo, a shark. He pulled off a goatee that would have looked ridiculous on any American white boy. And he was even more exotic than Rik [Smits, who is Dutch], coming from Croatia. He spoke to the press rarely, but when he did, his deeply accented English (think Gary Oldman in Dracula) never failed to melt my butter. Most of my Dennis and Toni fantasies began with Dennis and me putting eyeliner on Toni, and ended with sexy words I didn't understand hollered out in Serbo-Croat."

When you remember Toni, you must remember this song, ubiquitous in the summer of 1998 when the Bulls were winning their 6th championship of the 1990s. I'd like to think that if I ever danced with Toni, this would happen. You've seen the size of the dude's feet.



Image: the "cover" of a RPF (real person fiction) I wrote in 2005, featuring Toni, Madonna and Dennis Rodman

That Yugoslavia! Thing

You may think this has something to do with the recent arrest of Ratko Mladic, but Chaz Wood started it. In his book review post yesterday, Chaz mentioned a scene in one of his own novels (Maranatha), a scene of disturbing violence set in a Serbian church. This made me realize that in 2 years of blogging at Pagan Spirits, I had never specifically addressed The Yugoslavian Thing. I'm shocked by this.

Do I have a fascination with the former Yugoslavian republics in southern Europe? Absolutely. Observe only this dream I recorded in my journal in February 2010:

"I dreamed my husband and I went to see a movie called Yugoslavia! It was sort of like Borat in reverse, with a couple of clueless Americans dropped in the middle of the former Yugoslavian cultures. It starred Will Ferrell as a man who, as a child, wrote on his to-do-before-I-die list that he wanted to visit Yugoslavia. As an adult, he went to start doing the things on his list, and he was severely disappointed to find out there wasn't a place called Yugoslavia anymore. He decided to visit Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, etc., with his best friend, played by Hugh Jackman. (That's a Hunk du Jour link. You're welcome.)

Dream heroine Brandy Norwood in a 2011 Creative Commons photo by Bob Bekian

"Hugh was a Croatian-American. He was trying to get a woman (played by Brandy Norwood) to go out with him, but she wouldn't unless he knew something about his Croatian heritage. They were the romantic subplot, and in the end, she went out with him. Meanwhile, the Will Ferrell character somehow ended up playing basketball for Serbia in the Eurobasket, with comedic results. There was a cameo by former Chicago Bulls player Toni Kukoc, who made a stirring speech about playing in the Olympics for Croatia and how all he wanted was to buy his mother a car."

One of my favorite books EVER is Pretty Birds by Scott Simon, in which both Toni and his Serbian/Laker rival Vlade Divac are mentioned. (If you dug the men's NBA in the 1990s, you may vaguely recall the Lakers traded Divac to Charlotte for the rights to draft Shaquille O'Neal. Divac and his best pal, half-Serbian/half-Croatian baller Drazen Petrovic, were separated by the war; Petrovic died before its end. Their sad bromance is the subject of the ESPN film Once Brothers.) Simon's teen heroine, Irena Zaric (a Muslim girl from Sarajevo) has a crush on Toni. Me too! Irena's story is incredibly violent, disturbing, sad...and funny. That book is surprisingly funny.

I'm neither Serbian nor Croatian, so why am I so fixated? Because I went to high school with a guy from Sarajevo. In the '90s. While the war was actively going on. He had a Serbian dad and a half-Muslim, half-Croatian mom. They were stuck in Bosnia while he lived with foster parents. I'll never forget the experience of sitting through Schindler's List with him...an experience I translated into fiction in I Made Out With a Teenage Communist!

In fact, many of my stories have at least one former Yugoslavian character. In "Fall of the Estrela," it's Milos, the honey-eyed stranger from the Adriatic isle of Vis. The Smell of Gas has Nenad, the Serbian dishwasher, a very minor character. The Pagan Spirits erotic romance series, however, stars a half-Slovenian guy, Orlando Parisi, in the alpha male role. It may be true that tall, hazel-eyed, dark-haired Orlando looks a tiny bit like Toni Kukoc. Maybe.

So that's the Yugoslavia thing. Will Ferrell, you're welcome to steal that dream and make the movie.

(You can't tell from this picture, but Toni has the HUGEST feet on earth.)