Author: Amanda Eyre Ward
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
The Same Sky is a title which is somewhat over-used. This one is written by a fellow central Texan named Amanda Ward (although I don't know her) and is about Carla and Alice. You can tell this purely from reading the contents, which consists of a long list of 50 alternating chapters titled "Carla" or "Alice", but the novel is less than 200 pages, so the chapters are extremely short.
As soon as I saw those interleaved names I realized with a sinking feeling that this was going to be a another dual first-person PoV novel and I cringed just from that. First person rarely works for me. It's way too much to believe that someone - or in this case two someones - would have such eidetic recall that they could remember every single detail about a series of events, including verbatim conversations, and especially when one of them is a youngster living on the poverty line with a lot more on her mind than telling stories. This is why it's unrealistic to me, particularly in this case.
On top of that, there's a certain arrogant selfishness about the 1PoV format - whereby it's all about ME!!!. All the time! Nothing but me! It can be well done, but for me, more often than not, it makes my skin crawl. With a print book, in a book store or on a library shelf, you can look inside and see if it's 1PoV and quickly put it back on the shelf, as I normally do. With ebooks, it's a lot harder, especially if they're so-called "galley proofs" (which no books truly are any more in this electronic era) because you don't get that same chance to see inside. All you get is the publisher's own blurb, which by it's very nature is at best, suspect, and which never reveals the PoV. I think books like this should come with a government health advisory like on cigarettes:
WARNING: This format may be damaging to your nerves and sanity.
The novel starts on page nine rather than page one, and I felt I might be in trouble on only the seventh line, where the narrator (Carla) describes a favorite dress which split along the back seam, and her grandmother "stitched it back together with a needle and thread." What else would she stitch it with? A stapler? A sliver of bone and sinew? That struck me as really amusing, and didn't endow me with a lot of confidence, especially not in the context of the info-dump which had been going on from line one.
It turns out that Carla is a girl resident in Tegucigalpa. I don't get what she means when she says that she had imagined "...what it would be like to kiss every boy in our village". Tegucigalpa isn't a village! It's the largest city in Honduras, where poverty and urban decay is rife. Carla's mother somehow managed to make it to Texas as an illegal immigrant, but Carla and her brothers were left behind.
Maybe Carla is talking about some other Tegucigalpa? No, the location is confirmed by the mention of Comayagüela across the river. I can only assume she was talking about her little ghetto, but describing it as a village made no sense to me. It made it sound sweet and idyllic, and it was far from either.
On the very next page I read that Carla "...had two twin brothers"! It made me wonder just how many there are in a set of twins. I'd always thought it was just the two. It bothered me how much Carla was focused on marriage and having children. I don't know if this is a common mind-set in Honduras once your belly is reasonably full. Maybe it is, but it was truly sad, especially when she had so much else with which she was forcibly preoccupied.
The more I read of this story, the less it made sense to me, and it was this which quickly wore me down and turned me off it. So yes, Carla's mom went to Texas to make money, but she never appears to send any back to Carla's grandmother. It seems like all she sends are dresses, shoes, and T-shirts, and primarily for Carla. I have to assume she sent other stuff back, but the descriptive writing is so sparse that there's no sense of that imparted at all. For all I know, she could be sending only stuff for Carla. Either that, or Carla is withholding information, which means she's an unreliable narrator and we can't trust anything she's telling us.
We're expected to believe that Carla and her family live in near-poverty, yet they have a phone, and they eat pretty well. I don't get that Carla's mom sent her high heels, either. Seriously? Where's she going to wear those? The family lives in a really poor part of the city, where crime is rife. What's going to happen when thieves see this little girl dressed in her finery?
The story seemed to be all about conspicuous consumption, and not at all about the quality of life - unless you count the routine recounting of violence and death - with the rhythm of a high-school marching band - as some sort of quality of life. It just became depressing after a while to keep reading this. Every single thing was negative, negative negative.
I don't mind this in a story when it's leavened by other things, but here it was all negative, all the time, and it was just depressing and off-putting. One of the kids (one of those two twins, remember?) for example, and without preamble or warning, is unceremoniously dumped into the trunk of a car and taken somewhere - exactly for what purpose isn't explained. Who arranged this isn't explained.
Dad is nowhere on the scene, Mom is living in Texas. The only person there with authority is grandma. Did she arrange it? Did mom approve? Did mom even know what her mom was doing with her own child? Did she care? Why it was this even 'necessary' given that the family seemed to have enough to eat (and had fine clothes and a phone) isn't explained. None of this made any sense whatsoever to me.
On the Alice side of the story, Alice and Jake are living in Austin, Texas. Alice is a double mastectomy survivor as a result of a lump found in one of her breasts. She went the same radical route as did Angelina Jolie recently. It was after this that she met Jake and they hooked-up. She can't have children, presumably because of chemo (and no one thought to 'harvest her eggs', evidently - or if they did, we're kept in the dark about it). As it happens, this is fine with Jake, yet Alice is obsessing over it now, and unsuccessfully trying to adopt a kid.
We're told of many failures and of one instance where they actually had the child brought to their home and then suddenly whisked away again as the mom had second thoughts? I didn't get that. What kind of operation was this? If it was official, it could never happen that way. Once a woman has officially given up her child, she doesn't get to just take it back like that. If it's not an official process, then Alice got what she deserved for gaming the system.
Some of the writing was a bit off for me, too. For example, there's a conversation on page thirty-five which in some parts made zero sense. Alice is given some information and asked a favor of by Principal Markson - principal of exactly what isn't quite clear - some Austin school, evidently. Again the descriptive prose is lacking.
What relationship Alice has with Markham isn't clear either, but she meets with her one day and is told that the school's psychologist is being laid off and they'd like Alice to volunteer time to help with troubled children. Alice has a master's in Eng. Lit. and is not a mom, and works at a restaurant evidently, (as opposed say, to a day-care facility or a pediatric hospital), so she's hardly the most qualified person in the world to counsel children. Here's how a small part of the conversation goes:
"One of the positions we'll be losing is the full-time school psychologist. Juliet Swann - do you know her?"
I shook my head.
"She might be a vegetarian, now that I think of it,' said Principal Markson. "Or a vegan? Not sure. There's usually a big yogurt labeled with her name in the staff refrigerator...."
"Well that would explain it," I said.
That was a monstrous Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot moment for me. That piece of writing is evidently fast-tracked to advance placement in non-sequitur! I actually got a bad case of whiplash from snapping my head around. What the heck does that exchange even mean? I don't know! I don't think I want to! She's vegetarian because she eats yogurt? She's a school psychologist because she's a vegetarian? She's a vegetable and that's why they're laying her off? I don't know!
If this was a comedy, then that kind of a conversation would have been funny, but to discover it stuck there like a squashed fly on an otherwise pristine window was just completely weird. And I'm tired of vegetarian bashing when they're doing one thing which can help starving children: rejecting the "meat animals" to which we feed tons of corn that could, if it were not selfishly squandered on our "stock", be fed to those starving children. Admittedly, it's asking a lot to expect beef-fed Texans to get that!
Another weird instance is when Carla, traveling north to find her mom, recalls things from the Internet. How was this possible? She was poor, so we're expected to believe. Yes, she had food, but Internet? Was this at school? If so, how come she was allowed to read such bad stuff at school? Again it makes no sense.
The biggest problem for me however, is the fact that both Carla, the ten year old, and Alice, the mature woman, speak with exactly the same voice. To me, there was no discernible difference between them. They were different ages, different circumstances, different nationalities, and yet they had the same voice!
That was pretty much it, for me. I couldn't face reading any more of this and so I dropped it. Life is too short to read novel like this when there's the siren-call of other, potentially engrossing novels whispering seductively in my ears. I cannot recommend this.
