'The Walls Around Us' Brings Life to Ghosts of the Past

Perhaps you know Shirley Jackson for her short story ‘The Lottery’ that you read in an American literature class. She published tens of short stories and several novellas, centering on themes of isolation, ‘otherness’, and a perverted sense of justice. Everytime I read one of her stories, I talk about them as creepy, eerie, disturbing, mind-bending, unexpected, yet familiar. They are familiar because she has so influenced our current generation of authors (Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Suzanne Collins, etc) that we surely know her tales just by rubbing shoulders with more contemporary works.

As I read The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma, I kept thinking about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, published a few years before Jackson’s death in 1965. The two stories are so similar that if I described key elements in Jackson’s story, it would reveal important plot points in The Walls Around Us. Both tackle Jackson’s favorite themes that I mentioned earlier, and even some finer details make a dual appearance.

That’s not to say that the stories are identical, however. The Walls Around Us has two narrators: Amber, an inmate in a maximum security juvenile detention center in upstate New York, and Violet, a rich ballet dancer on the cusp of a successful career at Juilliard. They narrate their lives and experiences, but they both have a curious obsession with Ori. Ori, who is a former ballet dancer and Violet’s best friend, is convicted of murder and becomes Amber’s cellmate.

As the story progresses, you realize that Amber’s words, “I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn’t mean they were the good ones,” ring true. Both Amber and Violet are telling Ori’s story, but they are deliberately not telling all of it. As you piece together different angles, versions of events, and correct the timeline that is given, you see that something very dark and disturbing emerges.

The narrative style itself is very beautifully written. Though I usually dislike first-person narration, it made sense to use it in this book because it highlights the differences in the ways each character tells her version of the story. Besides that, the prose and rhythm of the sentences are gorgeous, and I appreciated that the paragraphs were built in a way that wasn’t always linear and straightforward.

I enjoyed reading The Walls Around Us because the story is intriguing, it’s well-edited, and the storytelling itself is of such a high caliber that I would point to this as an example of what to aim for in a YA novel.

On a side note, after reading The Walls Around Us, I was inspired to read all of Shirley Jackson’s stories this year. Anyone with me??


Thank you Algonquin Young Readers for providing an e-ARC for me to review! That didn’t affect my opinion of the book in any way.

‘Belzhar’ Strikes a Good Note

There are no spoilers in this review, I pinkie swear.

Jam Gallahue is in love, in that bubblegum hormone-fueled hurts-so-good way. She’s in love with a smooth, hot British exchange student, and she knows that this is the real deal.

“Our entire relationship consisted of smiling, smirking, and saying funny things to each other. But I wanted our shoulder to touch. It was as if I thought our shoulders could almost communicate.”

You remember that feeling, right?

So she’s in this relationship where they don’t really have much to say to each other, they just have a mutual understanding of their avowed until death-do-us-part love. Oh and btw, they discovered this love 16 days after they met for the first time.

Fast forward a bit: the boyfriend dies after 25 days of dating (this is not a spoiler), and Jam enters such a state of grief that after one year she still hasn’t emerged. If you are thinking that her grieving seems...like she has deeper issues to deal with… you wouldn’t be alone in that. Her parents send her to a special boarding school for teens that need non-medicated psychological support.

At the school, Jam is placed in an exclusive, invite-only “special topics” English class with an intimate handful of other students. They study Sylvia Plath (hence the wordplay between The Bell Jar and Belzhar) the entire semester, and like Plath, must make regular journal entries throughout. These journals come with a special ability to help the students process their grief and pain in a very unique way.

Throughout the book, I was interested in the story, but had to keep taking two-second reading breaks to roll my eyes. I really dislike romances where the characters don’t show me how they have a long-term sustainable relationship based on something other than, “I just knew it,” or “We had a special connection.” I couldn’t get past how Jam was so in love with a guy that she knew for approximately a month, and whom we as the reader know nothing about besides she thinks he’s hot.

I’m glad I kept reading, however (full disclosure: until 3am). The author, Meg Wolitzer, is not a bad writer of romances, and everything made sense in such a clear way in the end. It’s one of those endings that makes you think back and remember all the clues and hints that were dropped along the way. Like, “Duh, dumb Alisa, why didn’t you pay more attention!?”

As the book progresses, Jam begins another relationship with a guy at the boarding school. She struggles with feeling like she is cheating on the dead British bloke, but Wolitzer makes an elegant contrast between the ways the two different guys treat Jam. It’s not in-your-face and preachy, like some authors that are new to the YA club tend to be. The ongoing comparisons are quiet and demure, yet I think that it could help out a reader who is wondering if their current relationship is healthy or not.

Despite my review’s focus on the romances in the story, the Belzhar’s overall message isn’t about dating. All of the characters are trying to stay living in the past, and are missing out on the present as a consequence. The story is built to illustrate the problems of being too self-abrading with mistakes (hellooo, perfectionist self!), and left me with a powerful punch of one of my favorite self-affirmations: You cannot go back. You can only go forward.

5 Reasons 'A Tale for the Time Being' is Worth Your Time

A Hello Kitty box washes up on the shores of a small island in British Columbia, where it is deemed trash by Ruth, and picked up to be thrown away later. Ruth’s husband Oliver satisfies his curiosity by opening the box, finding a diary and old letters. When Ruth begins reading the diary, the perspective changes to that of the diary’s writer, a Japanese teenager named Nao. Nao plans to write about her Buddhist nun great-grandmother Jiko, but reveals more about her personal life and struggles in the process.

Nao and Ruth are imperfect yet intriguing mirrors of each other. Both were placed involuntarily into a culture that they didn’t ask for and don’t want to accept. They remain convinced that their former lives would have freed them from all of their current problems. For Nao, this means her life in Silicon Valley where her dad was a programmer, before he lost his job and had to move the family back to Tokyo. For Ruth, this means her life in New York City, where she was filled with inspiration to write and had many like-minded friends. Both process the suffocating isolation that is their new lives by biting their tongues until withholding their thoughts is no longer possible.

I’m still reeling from trying to process all that occurred in A Tale for the Time Being. I listened to this as an audiobook, beautifully narrated by the author, Ruth Ozeki. After the book ended, she explained that the physical book has footnotes, appendices, and illustrations that greatly enrich the story, and understandably, those simply can’t be conveyed in an audio format. Even without those, the story is bursting with influences from esoteric sources. To condense my thoughts on the novel, without giving away spoilers or re-writing the book, I think it would be easiest to explain why I loved it by concentrating on five points:

5. It’s meditative yet brilliantly paced.
To me, when I read a book, good timing is more important than plot. This book delicately balances descriptions of Buddhist funeral rites and of Pacific Ocean current patterns while still moving the plot forward. I enjoyed pondering the subjects that needed a little more brain power as much as I enjoyed the parts where characters raced against time.

4. It digests recent historical events into our cultural metanarrative.
9/11, the Fukushima Daiichi tsunami and nuclear disaster, and the lingering effects of WWII are things that we as a culture are continuing to process. It seems that every year Hollywood retells war stories completely fascinated with violence. How can we not be fascinated by it? We live beside it. And there’s no doubt that this attempt at storing our violent histories is similar to storing the nuclear wastewater in underground tanks—it cannot be contained and is bound to seep out into our culture. A Tale for the Time Being subliminally relates the prevalence of violence through the horrific bullying of its characters. But grandma Jiko uses the Buddhist perception of eternity to teach an alternate way to accept violence. I’m thankful for Ozeki’s work in this area by opening up other narrations of history and hopefully permeating our collective conscience.

3. It addresses ups and downs of being bicultural.
Nao lived most of her life in Southern California, and Ruth clearly identifies as being from NYC. Ruth, who is Japanese-American, and Nao, who is, practically speaking, American-Japanese, both wince with questions like: You are Japanese, why can’t you do this? Or the pregnant expectations of: You live here now, why don’t you act like us? The truth is, it’s not that simple. But one of the benefits of being bicultural is that, while they may not perfectly fit into either culture, they are able to form a relational bridge between both.

2. Ecology, theoretical quantum physics and Zen Buddhism are seamlessly blended.
Don’t be intimidated! Thankfully, Ruth also doesn’t have much of a grasp on these subjects, and other characters come alongside to teach her. It can come off as preachy or patronizing, but it’s worth the sacrifice to be able to connect the dots and follow the path the author is taking you down. In Jiko’s view, science and Buddhism don’t conflict at all. In fact, they have been supporting each other all along. This part isn’t overly-explained, and I loved the enlightened feeling I got when I was able to reach the conclusions on my own.

1. The writing is eloquent and breathtaking.
At times I was giggling, other times I was reverent, but at all times I appreciated the deliberate care and consideration that Ozeki put into crafting this story.

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Does anyone else have trouble remembering what it is about?

If you ask me: Hey, what is that book about that you said you really liked? I will probably give a vague response that will leave you thinking that the summary I just gave could have been about any number of books. I have had multiple embarrassing conversations at the reference desk of a bookstore that all went something like this...