What we're reading: Chenoweth, July
Each week our wonderful staff share the books that they've been enjoying.
Aurelia is reading Maria Petranelli is Prepared for Anything (Except This) by Elisa Chenoweth
I just recently read Maria Petranelli is Prepared for Anything (Except This) and absolutely loved it! This is definitely a Looking for Alibrandi for the next generation, only just slightly more insane.
Maria Petranelli is your average Italian-Australian girl, working at a gelati store, surviving her loving-yet-overprotective Italian family. When she decides to go to Italy for a student-exchange trip, she finally feels a sense of independence away from her family. But Maria's holiday turns completely sideways when she discovers a dead body, is subsequently kidnapped by the murderer, and begins to fall in love for the first time with the American girl, Kennedy, whom she meets in Rome.
Elisa Chenoweth's debut transports you on the wildest journey of self-discovery, love, and the everyday dramas of being a part of an ethnic household.
Baz is reading All Fours by Miranda July
I just finished having a good time with All Fours. It’s tightly written and genuinely funny, particularly in the first half. It was giving me Lorrie Moore vibes, who praised this book and was a big reason I went for it (I hadn’t really seen myself reading July up until the release of this novel). I’d read in some critical reviews and reader reviews that the second half doesn’t maintain the energy of the first, and this turned out to be my experience as well. Overall though it was very readable and punchy.
It’s a perfect book club book. It’s the kind of book you want your friends to read because there’s so much in it to discuss and tussle over. It’s very generous in that way. It’s an ambitious project, spirited and searching, dense with ideas and questions, and much of it is about the kinds of things July’s been contending with as an artist for a long time, and she pulls it off.
July represented an openness and freedom, an improvisational skill of doing whatever in this novel, and I loved it for that. It’s been called weird, even wacky, but the things that happen, the qualities in the narrator and July’s style, felt deeply real and truthful, and the opposite of weird to me.
