Cherise the niece by J.K. Benton: subversive kids’ lit for adults, and more

You sort of expect Charles Addams-esque humor from the creator of the Its Happy Bunny series. And, in Cherise the niece by J.K. Benton (Plume Original, $!0), you get it.

Cherise is a Wednesday Addams clone of an orphan who spends the book dispatching her many aunts:

Auntie Rose loved her garden

Though Cherise despised it.

But together, one Wednesday

They both fertilized it.

The accompany line drawing is of little Cherise wielding a shovel with which to dig an environmentally-appropiate final resting place for the latest of her aunts to meet a gruesome end.

Yes, it’s probably not worth $10, but it’s a fun if minor giggle on a Friday afternoon in which it seems the best-seller list is dominated by true-life tales from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints: Escape by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall with Lisa Pulitzer and When Men Became Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear and the Women Who Fought Back by Stephen Singular, which has a publication date of June 3.

Grim stuff all, although I have to give credit to Elissa Wall’s book, which I’m now reading: If Wall had any hand in the actual writing of this book, she has a future beyond the tell-all. Still, if I were picking up a nonfiction religious tragedy right now, I’d rather read Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.

Your favorite book passage? Readers share

Last week, I asked readers to share their favorite bits of their favorite books. (Last summer I asked readers to share their favorite books, so this seemed a natural follow-up: But you can still send lists of your favorite books. After all, this is a blog. We have all the space on earth.)

So, to begin:

From Pride and Prejudice, chapter 31, the snoot supreme Lady Catherine Debough on playing the piano: “If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

That’s a favorite bit from Jackie Van Willigen, who says: “I call it the perfect excuse which works for many occasions and activities.”

From Donna Moore Campbell of Lexington: “As someone who adopted a wonderful boy from Golden Retriever Resue), I found Dean Koontz’s suspense novel The Darkest Evening of the Year especially poignant.”

The passage Campbell cites is from page 314:

“After a hesitation, almost as gawky as a boy, Brian came to her and sat beside her.

“Following an awkward silence, he said, ‘Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while aways aware it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and for the mistakes we make because of those illusions.”

“Dear God, she heard nothing awkward in that. In that was the perfect truth of her eight years in rescue, as she could never have put it into words.

“For a time they didn’t need to speak, and they lavished on the dog, on this living Nickie, the affection they felt for each other.”

Got favorite books or passages? Send ‘em on.  The e-mail is ctruman@herald-leader.com.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Berg: The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted …

Elizabeth Berg’s new book of short stories: The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, is being released Tuesday.

Of course, it had me at the title story, about a woman who ditches a Weight Watchers meeting and flies straight into the arms of a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Then she eats a bacon cheeseburger. Dinner starts with olives stuffed with blue cheese. In between there are heartfelt discussions of cake and Cheetos (“I love Cheetos so much it kind of makes my butt hurt”) and a finale that involves steak, a truly loaded baked potato and two desserts. Then the narrator takes a mallet and dismantles her scale.

That right, folks: food fantasy. “Die Hard” with a calorie count.

Now, I sit before you, a woman who had the chef salad for lunch when I really wanted the fried fish with onion rings, and I appreciate that short story like nothing else I’ve read this year.

Because in the end, you look pretty much like what you’re supposed to look like, not like what TheSkinnyWebsite.com hypothesizes an adult woman should look like, which is a set of chicken legs who leads with her water bottle. I exercise every day, sometimes for more than two hours, and my wish for heaven is that there be no chicken breasts there, and also no treadmills, and definitely no energy bars. And when I’m about to die, please let me know, because of course I want to make things right with my family, but I also want to switch back to the full-fat ice cream. And I want to eat cheesecake, and I want somebody to take a picture.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the niceties of weight loss: I’ve gained, and lost, a lot of weight. But there’s a certain inevitability to the weight loss process: After a while your body just hits a plateau and doesn’t budge, and you have to decide: Do I keep up this punishing regime, or do I go back to the chub clothes and again look like that multi-chinned behemoth on my driver’s license picture? After a certain point, after I lost the first 80 pounds, I simply began waging a battle again my age and heredity, and I do it daily, with the kind of grim determination I bring to nothing else in life. Wake up, lace up the shoes and strap on the MP3: Mary J. Blige and I have a few hills to conquer.

But every day my first thought on waking is this: Maybe I won’t exercise today.  Maybe I’ll pull into White Castle and eat onionburgers — those greasy little slivers of beef and cheese and translucent onion bits — until I can hold no more, then wheel on down to the Dairy Queen. And I have to admit, I think about that even on mile 6 of the daily trek, and yes, mile 8, too: Fried chicken and coleslaw. Peach cobbler. And my ultimate food fantasy: Donut with a donut chaser.

And really, who can go wrong with that? I want Berg’s next book of short stories to be titled:

 The Day I Sat On My Couch Watching 24 Hours of ‘Law & Order’ and Drinking Box Chardonnay 

The Day I Didn’t Vacuum or Even Swiffer

The Day I Didn’t Change the Cat Litter

The Day I Didn’t Mow the Grass, Wreaking Havoc with My Mulching Regimen and Neighborhood Aesthetic Standards

You want to go into hard-core Chuck Palahniuk territory, try:

The Day I Didn’t Make It to My Parent-Teacher Conference

The Day I Didn’t Serve PTA Punch

The Day I Blew Off Vacation Bible School

I think there’s a brave new genre here: It’s not chick lit. It’s irresponsibility lit. It’s fun to read, and yet? A greasy, sweetish aftertaste of guilt.

 

 

 

 

Beloved book, wretched movie adaptation: “Memory Keeper’s Daughter”

In today’s newspaper I scalded the Lifetime movie version of Kim Edwards’ novel “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” which is set largely in Lexington.

The book is great stuff.

The movie is something you can easily pass over in favor of whatever’s on VH-1 at the moment: From “Rock of Love” to “My Fair Brady,” it’s surely more tightly scripted than the Lifetime-ization of Edwards’ book, which manages to waste the considerable talents of Gretchen Mol and Emily Watson.

And if you’re looking for some Lexington in this movie largely set in Lexington, don’t bother. It appears to have been filmed in a California driveway.

But the question is, what other books have simply ruined your day when you saw how they have been shredded into celluloid?

The cinematic record is mixed for some authors — John Irving has been particularly oddly served, from “The World According to Garp” and “The Cider House Rules” on the up side to the “A Prayer for Owen Meany” sort-of adaptation on the let-us-never-speak-of-it-again side. All you can say is: Read the book. Forget the movie.

But even though Lifetime laid out some bucks to publicize its adaptation of “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” including a ginormous ad in the New York Times book review, this won’t be the movie that breaks Lifetime’s reputation as the purveyor of all that is cinematically tacky, choppy, poorly scripted and wasting of actor talent. It’s true that some Lifetime movies are watchable, that some fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category: This isn’t one of them.