books 60 and 61

i forgot to post this one the other day:

patti kim's a cab called reliable
this book starts off promisingly--it's about a young girl who recently came from korea to america. pretty much the first thing that happens is that her mother leaves, taking her little brother with her, leaving the girl w/ her semi-abusive, drunk father. there's a very cute neighbor character who's her best friend, but he soon moves away. things don't really progress much from here--she starts writing depressing stories, and suddenly is a troubled middle-schooler doing poorly in school, and just as suddenly her terrible father becomes a doting father . . . it makes little sense--i mean, there is NO character development. the book is pretty short, but that's no reason for the chapters to jump around so much. and when a huge reveal is made, it's never explained or even mentioned again. this was just really frustrating to read--it had a lot of potential but really fell short of the mark.

william styron's lie down in darkness
i think it's a bad sign when i've spent the past few days reading this book, yet could not for the life of me remember its title over those days (i actually had to get up and go look just now b/c i'd forgotten it again). i mean, this book is ok, but it was written in 1951 and all the characters are mildly racist, and even styron at times comes off as racist (the "dialect" the black characters speak is appalling, especially since the dialog of all the other southern characters isn't written in any discernable style). there's also some interesting anti-jewish sentiments; the daughter of the main characters marries a new york jew, which lends itself to pages and pages of discussion. the story itself is about a very unhappily married couple--an alcoholic and a delusional weirdo--and their daughter, who early in the book has committed suicide. the story itself is presented as a series of flashbacks loosely interwoven with the action at the funeral. in addition, there's a fairly annoying disjointed section narrated by the daughter just before her suicide--very stream of consciousness and melodramatic. was that a new thing in 1951? now i'm definitely going to hesitate before reading sophie's choice. i really didn't enjoy styron's writing here.