California (Book Post and Family Post!)

It's official - we're headed to Disneyland in August! Anyone have any tips for cheap tickets? We are lucky enough to be staying with relatives but wow. Disneyland ain't for the empty-pocketed among us. I don't suppose those $100 a day tickets include free souvenirs, do they? They should give you a set of ears with your name on the second you walk in the gates at those prices. Sheesh.  

We're also going to head to the beach for a day while we're on the West Coast; I'm so excited to show the kids the Pacific Ocean! They have been to the Gulf several times but there's something special about the Pacific...so majestic, and the waves are startling and enormous and blue. I love the mountains but sometimes I wouldn't mind having a little bit of ocean nearby.

Speaking of California, I just read a book set there. Appropriately, it's called California. 

Huh. Now that I look closely at the cover, it's pretty freaky. 

Here's the thing I've noticed about post-apocalyptic literature (and I was on a kick several years ago when I gorged on it, so I've read my fair share of the genre): there's a tendency to get so caught up in the setting - in just trying to imagine a wrecked world and people's place in it - that the plot takes a backseat. And thus it was with California. We have ourselves some believable characters and some really thoroughly imagined settings, from the college that Micah and Cal attended (Plank) and the little shed in which Frida and Cal live to the Communities that have sealed themselves off from the rest of the United States and the Land (which comes later, so I won't explain). The settings and the people make it easy to put yourself in their place. But then? Nada. The plot is about as simple as a plot can be: the search for community, a shocking event, and then more searching. There are some stabs at symbolism, but they're hollow, and lots of stories hinted at but then left untold, which I found charming at first but came to see as little more than filler meant to persuade us that the characters had interior lives and memories. In the end, we wind up not far from where we've come, which disappointed.

This book had great promise, but it doesn't live up to the hype. If you're looking for quality end of the world lit, check out Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, or Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. If you want your apocalypse with some zombies on the side, read Colson Whitehead's Zone One. Those books take the genre to new places. This one does not. 

2.5 stars because she was really good at crafting settings you can almost see.

What are you reading? (I just started Madeleine is Sleeping. It was on a list of "fabulist" literature, which I didn't know even existed as a genre but now that I know, turns out that I've been reading it all along. Have you read The Night Circus? That's fabulist. Fabulist, darling!) Anything you'd recommend? Why does no one comment on my blog? Hullooooo out there...