Sheesh, I just can’t get it together to write proper reviews this month. So here are two unproper ones.
One Perfect Day, Rebecca Mead
I love the title of this book, but it wasn’t as SHOCKING as I had hoped. I was anticipating lots of SHOCKING anecdotes about the SHOCKING American tendency towards excess in weddings. And there was a bit of that, sure, but the book is properly called One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, and it is indeed mainly focused on the selling and marketing of weddings. Mead talks about many aspects of the marketing – popular wedding locations like Vegas, selling of dresses, wedding planners, and bridal magazines. The wedding industry is very industrious, but not very SHOCKING. I want to read more about weddings, with hopefully more SHOCKING stuff, and more about the wedding participants versus the wedding industry people. Thanks to Schatzi for the recommendation!
Power of Three, Diana Wynne Jones
And now for something completely different: one of the very few books by Diana Wynne Jones that I truly loved the first time I read it. Power of Three is about three races of people that live on a Moor – regular people, who live in mounds under the Moor; Dorig, who live in the water; and Giants, who are – you know – us. The titular Three are the three races, or else the three Powers (Sun for the regular people, Earth for the Giants, and Moon for the Dorig), or else the three siblings – Ceri and Ayna and Gair. There are many groups of three in the book, lots of sets of three powers coming together.
Diana Wynne Jones always writes a disconnect between how characters perceive themselves, and how others see them, and their emotional journeys always lead to self-awareness. Hooray for self-awareness, perhaps the personal quality most valued by me in myself and other people. The “regular people”, Ayna and Gair and Ceri, understand the world in one way at the start of the book – they are people, and the Dorig and Giants are enemies to be feared – and they gradually find that they’re all, essentially, the same. It’s nice.