Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable

Title: Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa
Author: Benjamin Constable
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I must be fated to start out not liking ebooks as I begin them, liking them as I dig deeper, and then unpredictably either liking them or hating them as I read through to the end! Strange but true. Constable may be a famous last name in English art, but that still didn’t make me want to read any introductions, prefaces, prologues or forewords written by this particular Constable. As I've said before, if it’s worth reading, it’s worth putting into chapter one, which was where I started reading. That's also where I had a problem enjoying it.

Note that the male protagonist in this novel is Benjamin Constable. Why he chose to depict himself - or perhaps more accurately, use his own name for the character - or indeed whether Constable is a real person or merely a pen name for someone, perhaps even a female author, I have no idea at this time. To distinguish between Constable the character and Constable the author, I shall refer to the character as BC, and the author as Constable from this point onwards.

The first thing we get to read is a suicide letter, which normally ought to make a reader perk up and pay attention, but I found myself so distracted by the rather pretentious and overly florid language of the meandering letter that I really started not to care if this person had died! In the end, I felt rather cruelly comforted by her absence from this world, if it meant that she had taken this kind of fluff with her when she left! Fortunately for Constable, the story began to pick up after that, and I found that I’d read some hundred and fifty pages effortlessly, without feeling any awful thoughts towards Constable or towards his female protagonist. The purportedly dead one of his two female protagonists, that is....

The assumption is that she's dead, but I am not convinced. Indeed, given his penchant for not only seeing, but also interacting with a large but non-existent cat, I have to even question whether Tomomi Ishikawa exists at all, much elss whether she did exist and is now dead by her own hand. There is no body, and there is some suggestion that she might still be alive - which even BC himself considers as a possibility eventually! I found myself really starting to like Tomomi Ishikawa even though, as I was to discover, she had some really unlikable traits. Having said this, I have to add, in the end, that I really disliked her! I have a soft spot for Japanese women, so that took some doing! So sue me! Or is it: see Sumo?!

The author of the suicide note had written it on her laptop, printed it out, put it into an envelope, and pushed it under BC's door while he was at work one Friday. Yes, he's quite literally telling this fable about himself - and it’s in the first person! Yes, I know I swore off first-person stories, but I had this one on my e-shelf long before I made that semi-serious declaration. Constable's first person isn’t obnoxious, although he does seem to slip between present and past tenses unpredictably. But maybe this will turn out to be the very first person novel that I've been looking for, as an antidote to the dotes I've been nauseated by of late! We'll see!

BC's ostensibly dead friend is the Tomomi Ishikawa (TI) of the title. The novel is in three parts, one for each of her lives presumably, and the first of these is in Paris, where BC works as an English teacher. Having read the disturbing note, he heads over to her apartment and retrieves her computer, which she evidently intended him to have (since his own is a crappy piece of trash which dies on him soon thereafter). I'm going to blithely assume that his was a nasty old Windows machine and hers is a cool-looking Mac, because I can! There's a complete absence of evidence to the contrary! When he boots it up, he discovers that most of its content has apparently been deleted (and he evidently doesn't know - or doesn’t care - that it’s possible to undelete files if the computer hasn't been wiped with military efficiency). There are several folders apparently left there specifically for his eyes.

At first, these files make no sense (there's a folder titled 'My Dead' which includes his name, for example) along with a handful of others. Some folders contain seemingly random photographs taken all across Paris, others feature entertaining stories (with one or two somewhat boring ones). A couple of the stories relate that TI has killed at least two guys: guys who were evidently suicidal anyway, but this nonetheless makes her at best a Jack Kevorkian-like facilitator and at worst, a murderer. But are the stories true, or are they merely fiction?

BC slowly discovers that TI has left for him a kind of treasure map, whereby if he follows her slightly cryptic clues, which for him are not so cryptic since he knows both TI and Paris so well, he can uncover "treasure" in the form of notebooks or other items (such as, for example, an umbrella) left for him in various hidden locales, secreted in landmarks or hidden in places he and she knew together. These treasures provide further clues which lead him on a journey.

One journey he discovers that he's too chicken to undertake, is to follow a clue which would necessitate him sneaking down into the Paris Metro (subway, underground) tunnels. I thought that this maybe significiant for the novel's finale - and it is! Eventually these clues take him from Paris to Manhattan, where he meets the second female protagonist who accompanies him on his treasure hunt. Her name, curiously, is Beatrice! Curious that is, for me, since I'm currently immersed in writing a parody of Divergent! Yet another weird coincidence in my reading-writing adventures! Maybe I should write a novel à la Constable about those?!

At each place where I had to stop reading this, I found myself looking-forward to resuming it, which is always a good feeling for a reader. This story is a bit like a Dan Brown novel, but with a real story in place of the trade-marked high-speed Brownian motion. And this is enough spoilers for a new novel, so the rest of this review will be much mroe vague observations, not detailed descriptions, and the first of these is that Constable really has a charming way with his characters (the suicide note notwithstanding!). Their interactions (even with TI who can be obnoxious to him at times in his reminscences), and especially with Beatrice, are whimsical and endearing. There is a sly sense of humor running through their conversations which I very much appreciate.

His initial encounter and budding relationship with Beatrice at the New York Public Library and afterwards is completely captivating. I was impressed by the maturity and playfulness of the friendship, with both BC and Beatrice contributing equally to the bond which they created between them, and this is exactly how it should be in my mind. What a pleasure it is to read something of this quality after having dealt with some truly dreadful relationships in YA novels of late! It’s like comparing a blue ribbon mousse with several day-old, rubbery, chewy Jello which is of a flavor you didn’t even like to begin with.

The relationship doesn't come as a gilt-edged security however, because Beatrice is uncomfortable with all the coincidences which seem to be popping up, and rather leery of his treasure hunt. However this doesn’t appear to prevent their relationship from continuing to blossom. BC - who evidently hails from the Midlands (of England), just as I do - also begins to feel uncomfortable, but not with Beatrice. His discomfort comes from the fact that he's still receiving emails from TI forwarded to him by a third party (or from TI herself, perhaps). Whoever it is has evidently followed him from France to the US, and is tailoring the emails to his activities. He's being watched!

In the end, I was a bit disappointed in how this story came to a conclusion, even though it was entirely in character with what had happened before. Pretty much all of my theories were wrong - save one! I felt a bit cheated by the ending; however, given the quality of writing, and the characterization of the main protagonists, Ben, Tomomi, and Beatrice, I highly recommend this: it's excellently well-written and quite enchanting.

The After Girls by Leah Konen

Title: The After Girls
Author: Leah Konen
Publisher: Adams Media Corporation
Rating: worthy!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available now.

I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the author of her story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel is very well written, although there are a few technical glitches I've noticed, FYI the author and editor:

"There were a lot of places like around here" (p5) I suspect it should be "There were a lot of places like that around here".

There's a missed carriage-return between two speeches from different characters (p98).

"Just let me know I you need me" should be "Just let me know if you need me, presumably (p106).

"...looking at Ella friend in the mirror…" (p158) perhaps ought to be "...looking at her friend in the mirror...", maybe?

"The two of them tread quietly..." (p176) ought to be "The two of them trod quietly..." (wrong tense)?

"She'd thought that his flirtation was Ella was cute…" (p234) should be (I think) "She'd thought that his flirtation with Ella was cute…"

" "He's just such a dick", he said... " (p258) should be, I suspect, " "He's just such a dick", she said... "

"She looked read the words of her song…" (p259), maybe should read "She read the words of her song…"? (remove 'looked')

Other than that, it’s really well written. I liked the way I was pulled into the story, and seduced into caring about the characters, about who they are, what they're going through, how they came to be this way. There's no fakery here. Except for some small issues discussed later, you can believe these people are real, and accept that they feel as they do and behave as they will. It's hard to believe that I'm excited about reading what is, at heart, a depressing story! Nicely done!

The story begins when three friends, in the summer they have before they all go off to college, lose one of their number to suicide. Astrid apparently poisoned herself in the tiny one-room derelict cabin in the woods where the three of them used to meet. Ella found her, and she and Sydney are dealing with this horrific loss in strikingly different ways. The novel alternates between Ella's PoV and Sydney's PoV, but it's all told in third person. Ella is almost paralyzed by Astrid's death, not dealing with it at all well, seeing a cold, black hole everywhere in her life where Astrid should be, whereas Sydney is badly hurt by it, but trying to keep her life from sliding away because of it.

Both of them feel awful in that they think they should have seen this coming: that they should have detected signs; have been able to tell that things were wrong, and have been able to intercept this event and prevent it, and as it turns out, yes, they should have! Ella feels worse at least in part because she found the body. Sydney wasn't with her that day, and she feels bad about that. Ella is having bad dreams about Astrid. Both of them have family and boyfriends, but none of that seems to help; their boyfriends in particular are essentially blind to what they're going through, but the two young women don’t seem to be able to lean on each other, either.

Sydney is in a three-piece folk band, which gives her something to focus on. Ella, unfortunately, has to go back to work at the coffee shop owned by Astrid's mom, Grace, where she worked regularly with Astrid. Astrid's mom has pretty much shut down. She lost her husband some years before, and now Astrid, and it's looking like Grace has pretty much left, too. Her sister comes to stay for a while, and brings Astrid's cousin, Jake, who starts to become friends with Ella, but what gets really weird is when Ella leaves a message on Astrid's F-book page. She wanted to ask why this happened, but chickened out and instead posted "I miss you". The last thing she expected was for Astrid to reply in kind.

Ella is invited by Jake to come over and eat with Astrid's family. This highlights an interesting theme in this novel which is that it’s really about the young people. The adults are nothing but vaguely sketched background figures which is fine, normally, for a YA novel, but in this particular story, where someone has died and made a huge impact, I find Ella's mom's lack of engagement with Ella to be disturbing, especially in light of the fact that there is no hint of any counseling going on, or even being discussed. They're all out of school so a school counselor isn't obviously in the picture, but there's neither sign of such a person taking the initiative and contacting these young women, nor of any other kind of support system here at all, and Ella's mom seems really out of her life. Just saying! There;s also a notable lack of focus on Astrid;s mom, but I have no explanation for this, given what's going on with her.

Anyway, Ella inevitably ends up in Astrid's room and Grace finds her there and rather gracelessly loses it, essentially throwing Ella out of the house. Like a child, Ella runs off into the woods and goes into the cabin, where she finds photos of the three of them on the floor where Sydney left them, and it freaks her out. She hurries over to Sydney's place and tells her what's going on, so the next day they visit the cabin and all the photos are back up on the walls! This freaks out Ella even more, but not Sydney who thinks it’s a sick joke - the photos, the F-book comments, the phone calls - perpetrated by someone playing a trick on Ella, so Ella loses it with Sydney! Now that they're rather on the slide, Jake takes up the slack, inviting Ella to a concert, which she really enjoys. It's almost as if he planned it that way...!

So I have to wonder not only what cousin Jake is up to but also what mom Grace is up to. The pills Astrid used to kill herself were from Grace's large collection of anti-depressants. We've had it revealed that Grace was really, really strict with her - forbidding her to cut her hair, for example, and other eccentricities. Is it possible that Grace really isn’t the sweet second mom which Ella has always accepted her as? Is it possible she killed Astrid for some perceived infraction of her rules? I have to admit that this has crossed my mind! Is Astrid really communicating from the grave or is Sydney right about it all being a sick joke? What if Astrid was less of a victim than a victimizer? Or is Ella so far over the edge that she's doing all of this to herself? She has stolen Astrid's journal, after all.... These are a few of the wild thoughts which ran through my mind during my reading of this novel!

I have a bit of an issue with how the adults relate to the girls in this novel, particularly to Ella. She's talked to by her mom and by Grace and by Caroline (Grace's sister, Jake's mom) like she's a lot younger than 17! OTOH, Ella behaves as if she's a lot younger than 17! I don’t know if that's intentional, or if it's just inappropriately written, but I certainly wouldn’t like being called "sweetie" were I seventeen, male or female. Maybe that's just me!

Somehow Ella talks Sydney and Jake into having a séance at the cabin, and this novel takes a decidedly darker turn after that. There are surprising revelations about Astrid, missing pages from her journal, Sydney's change of heart about Ella's perspective. But what about Ella's shameful memory, after all her denials to herself that she had known anything was wrong, of a truly important interaction with Astrid that should have told her something? Sydney undergoes this same revelation - she should also have noticed something about Astrid given an interaction they had. Both Ella and Sydney had been blind, or distracted, or both, and when the final revelation comes, it’s almost as painful as anything else they've experienced.

I am going to recommend this one because of the quality of the writing and the characterizations; it's so well done that I was willing to forgive some loose ends and red herrings! Go ahead - give it a try and see what you think!