The Book Blog - Learning Resources at St. Johns River State College

Abby holding a newly-sheared, adorable sheep

This week's guest blogger is Abby Flowers. Abby is a student and long-time member of the St. Augustine Campus Book Club.

Before reading her blog, get to know a little bit about Abby!

Genres I like to read: Romance, Mystery, and Young Adult
Favorite books: Truly Yours, Bad Summer People, and Crazy Rich Asians series
Least favorite books: Where the Crawdads Sing
Authors I enjoy: Hannah Grace and Abby Jimenez
Where, how, and why I like to read: I like to listen to audiobooks in my car, oftentimes missing exits because I’m caught up in a storyline, at the beach or pool via on my kindle. I got my love for reading from my mom, who is a librarian and kept me surrounded by books.

My first thought when I saw Better Together was “wow, this is over 400 pages” and that’s pretty rare for a fiction book I usually read, but I figured it would be great to take this with me on my trip to Ireland, where I traveled as part of a study abroad for my Irish Literature class at SJRState. I had a wonderful time spending a couple of weeks touring around Ireland. Seeing sights from Dublin to West Port, we enjoyed historical sights and a literary pub crawl. It was truly amazing, and I would encourage anyone who has an opportunity to go on one of the study abroad trips to do so. A highlight for me was Galway, because it has so many things to do and in the surrounding area we saw the Doolough Valley, where the Irish people walked through during the great famine. We even got to see a sheep farm where we watched the farmer shear the sheep followed up by being able to hold them. That’s me in the picture! Holding the sheep was an absolutely an amazing experience since most of them were just babies and freshly cut. We learned that sheep don't typically get sheared until they're about one year old. Holding the sheep was also one of my favorite memories! Of course, getting around meant a lot of time on the bus, so it was a good thing I had Better Together by Christine Riccio to keep me company.

When we meet sisters Jamie and Siri, they are living on opposite coasts and struggling in their very different lives. It would be great if they could lean on each other for support, but Siri doesn’t even realize Jamie exists! Jamie is struggling with her anxiety while she harnesses her sarcastic personality to become a comedian. Siri has a quiet discipline that she learned through years of dancing. When life strikes with a string of disasters for both the girls, they decide to head to a retreat in Colorado to help get their lives back on track.

When fate intervenes, Jamie and Siri discover each other (think Parent Trap-style meeting), and they hatch a plan to take a walk in the other’s shoes, confront their parents, and work through their family trauma. With the help of a magical glitter box, they swap bodies and embark on a Freaky Friday-style adventure with hilarious moments of growth you’d expect. These two strong female characters prove that no matter what life throws at you having someone to lean on during rough times makes all the difference.

This book does feel a little long at times, and yes, this book makes you think of some of those old storylines that I mentioned, but Christine Riccio weaves a yarn that tackles some tough topics like family dynamics, trauma, anxiety, and learning to live on your own terms in a way that is heartfelt and vulnerable, but with plenty of humor to balance it out.

Recent Posts

Abby Flowers, Guest Blogger, read Better Together by Christine Riccio on the study abroad to Ireland

Abby holding a newly-sheared, adorable sheep This week's guest blogger is Abby Flowers. Abby is a student and long-time member of the St. Augustine Campus Book Club.Before reading her blog, get to know a little bit about Abby!Genres I like to read: Romance, Mystery, and Young AdultFavorite books: Truly Yours, Bad Summer People, and Crazy Rich Asians seriesLeast favorite books: Where the Crawdads SingAuthors I enjoy: Hannah Grace and Abby JimenezWhere, how, and why I like to read: I like to listen to audiobooks in my car, oftentimes missing exits because I’m caught up in a storyline, at the beach or pool via on my kindle. I got my love for reading from my mom, who is a librarian and kept me surrounded by books.My first thought when I saw Better Together was “wow, this is over 400 pages” and that’s pretty rare for a fiction book I usually read, but I figured it would be great to take this with me on my trip to Ireland, where I traveled as part of a study abroad for my Irish Literature class at SJRState. I had a wonderful time spending a couple of weeks touring around Ireland. Seeing sights from Dublin to West Port, we enjoyed historical sights and a literary pub crawl. It was truly amazing, and I would encourage anyone who has an opportunity to go on one of the study abroad trips to do so. A highlight for me was Galway, because it has so many things to do and in the surrounding area we saw the Doolough Valley, where the Irish people walked through during the great famine. We even got to see a sheep farm where we watched the farmer shear the sheep followed up by being able to hold them. That’s me in the picture! Holding the sheep was an absolutely an amazing experience since most of them were just babies and freshly cut. We learned that sheep don't typically get sheared until they're about one year old. Holding the sheep was also one of my favorite memories! Of course, getting around meant a lot of time on the bus, so it was a good thing I had Better Together by Christine Riccio to keep me company. When we meet sisters Jamie and Siri, they are living on opposite coasts and struggling in their very different lives. It would be great if they could lean on each other for support, but Siri doesn’t even realize Jamie exists! Jamie is struggling with her anxiety while she harnesses her sarcastic personality to become a comedian. Siri has a quiet discipline that she learned through years of dancing. When life strikes with a string of disasters for both the girls, they decide to head to a retreat in Colorado to help get their lives back on track. When fate intervenes, Jamie and Siri discover each other (think Parent Trap-style meeting), and they hatch a plan to take a walk in the other’s shoes, confront their parents, and work through their family trauma. With the help of a magical glitter box, they swap bodies and embark on a Freaky Friday-style adventure with hilarious moments of growth you’d expect. These two strong female characters prove that no matter what life throws at you having someone to lean on during rough times makes all the difference. This book does feel a little long at times, and yes, this book makes you think of some of those old storylines that I mentioned, but Christine Riccio weaves a yarn that tackles some tough topics like family dynamics, trauma, anxiety, and learning to live on your own terms in a way that is heartfelt and vulnerable, but with plenty of humor to balance it out. ...

Guest Blog- Professor Lisa Mahoney, English Department

The famous horror writer H.P. Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.” While the man himself was not very nice who had deeply ingrained racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic beliefs, he certainly was on to something with fear-mongering and became a pillar in the genre. The multi-billion dollar empire of books, films and video games entertains countless people mostly by exploiting their fears. We’ve all got them. Some are rational--being traumatized by a bee or a spider can bring on anxiety and panic when facing them (apiphobia or arachnophobia). Others seem irrational but nonetheless debilitating, like acrophobia (heights) or agoraphobia (public spaces). Some seem downright silly: turophobia: fear of cheese or hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: fear of long words. But there is one that, while not highly common, has been documented throughout history, reflected in literature, and has even led to the invention of safety coffins: the fear of being buried alive. My recent read of Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman (of The Birdbox fame) takes this concept and synthesizes it with a western and the deep sleep made popular by Sleeping Beauty. Readers follow protagonists Carol Evers in the 1890s west and the outlaw James Moxie. Carol is afflicted by a strange phenomenon that frequently and indiscriminately puts her into deep comas that last for days. Only two people know of Carol’s condition: her husband Dwight and first love turned infamous outlaw Moxie. Unfortunately for Carol, Dwight married her for her family fortune and aims to take advantage of her ailment to keep her money for himself. He plots to bury Carol quickly before she can come out of her coma--in essence burying her alive. Carol’s fated demise reaches Moxie, who rides the deadly trails back to his beloved to save her from her early, unnatural, horrific death. Malerman expertly creates suspense as readers toggle back and forth from Carol’s internal, crippled body but nonetheless aware mind and Moxie’s harrowing journey to save the lost love of his life. The action-packed cat-and-mouse chase of hired guns to stop Moxie and the fierce determination in Carol keep readers turning the pages as we root for not only her survival but also the re-ignition of the deep bond between two long-separated lovers. While my fears don’t go as deep as the worry that I’ll be buried alive, this book does scrape the edges of some of my other angst-ridden, horrific, oxygen-deprived ways to potentially die and left me gasping for air too many times to count. ...

Fear, Fantasy, and Family: Joe Hill, Stephen King, and the True Meaning of Christmas

I had a very Stephen King-heavy childhood. My mother, whose maiden name was King and who has always been a huge fan of horror, loved him and his work. Since her preteen years, she has collected his books and watched nearly every film and television adaptation based on his stories. She also made sure to pass this love of Stephen King on to me at a young age.My first “grown-up movie”—at least, the first grown-up movie that I was deliberately sat down and asked to watch and didn’t just wander in and see by accident—was Misery. I saw Cujo at a young enough age to instill a soul-deep fear of Saint Bernards that has yet to be remedied, no matter how cute and wholesome everyone says the Beethoven movies are. The Shining was one of my favorite holiday movies, which I loved to watch from October straight through until New Year’s—no Nightmare Before Christmas for me, no, sir. I liked watching Jack Nicholson chop his way through a bathroom door and proclaim, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” more than I did seeing Jack Skellington dress up as Santa Claus and sing merry tunes.But I never actually read The Shining until last June. I knew Stephen King didn’t like the Stanley Kubrick film because it strayed from his vision for the story, which had been deeply personal to him. When he wrote The Shining, King was deep in his struggle with addiction, and he was greatly worried about how his dependence on drugs and alcohol affected his wife and young son. As a young father, he was also trying to terms with his relationship with his own father, who hadn’t been the most positive influence in his life when he was a child. As a result, he viewed the creative license Kubrick took with many details of his story personally, and he understandably felt that Kubrick wasn’t treating the story with the respect it deserved.That was what held me back from reading the book for so long; I loved the movie, and was worried that I wouldn’t like it anymore once I had a better understanding of what it was supposed to be. But once I read it, I found that there were many things that weren’t actually all that different. The premise was the same, the characters felt very similar, and almost all of the scenes shown in the film were scenes pulled from the book to some degree.The main difference that I noticed was that Kubrick almost completely removed the supernatural. In the novel, the Overlook Hotel was very much a haunted place where strange, unexplainable things occurred. Things moved on their own, wasps came back to life, ghosts made appearances and manipulated their surroundings. Kubrick scrapped all that. The only thing he kept (which he couldn’t very well get rid of because it was the whole point and was even in the title) was Danny Torrence and Dick Hallorann’s “Shine,” their paranormal connection to the universe which allows them to pass along messages telepathically and, apparently in Danny’s case, manipulate space-time a little bit (I still don’t understand what exactly that was about). However, Kubrick’s decision to keep that might be attributed more to the theory of extrasensory perception (ESP), also called “second sight” or the “sixth sense,” which was, in the mid-20th century, studied as an actual scientific occurrence rather than viewed as something paranormal as it is today.In 2013, nearly forty years after The Shining was published, Stephen King wrote a sequel: Doctor Sleep. This novel introduced readers to Dan Torrence as an adult, now fighting his own battle with the same addiction that plagued his father and nearly destroyed his childhood. King was nearly twenty-five years sober at this point. He had seen both sides of addiction, and he knew how addiction could affect the children of addicts, so he came back to this story, and he showed that part of the journey through Dan, who he wrote leaving his own addiction behind and working to put his life back together.In Doctor Sleep, King also introduced readers to the bad side of the Shining, and the way that ability could be used for evil, through a group of characters called The True Knot, who discovered a way to steal the souls of children who Shine and use them to prolong their own lives. Dan was made aware of The True Knot by a little girl named Abra, whose ability was somewhere between foresight and astral projection, allowing her to see things happening in other places both while they happened and before they happened (One of the first times she uses her Shine is in a scene where she seems to predict 9/11. Crazy stuff!). Dan also learned in passing of a man who Dick Hallorann, his friend from the Overlook, heard of as a child, named Charlie Manx, who apparently practiced the same kind of child-soul-stealing as The True Knot. Dick’s grandfather claimed to know Manx, and would use him as a boogieman-type figure to threaten Dick with to get him to behave—it was only after he and Dan learned about The True Knot that Dick considered that maybe Manx was actually real.And here’s where things get really interesting.The same year that Stephen King published Doctor Sleep, his son Joe (who writes using the surname Hill, a shortened version of his middle name, Hillström) published a book called NOS4A2 about a girl named Vic who has a supernatural connection with a ghost bridge that can help her find lost things. The main villain of NOS4A2 is—hold for suspense—Charlie Manx, who drives a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with a vanity license plate which reads, you guessed it, NOS4A2 (pronounced like Nosferatu, the cheesy knockoff Dracula movie). Manx’s Wraith, it turns out, can not only help him steal the souls of children, but take them to a magical place that exists only in his mind, which he calls Christmasland. This makes for a novel that is both frightening and absurd, jolting the reader from cringing in horror to wondering what the heck they’re reading in a matter of mere sentences.It’s hard to tell who’s referencing whom here, but if I had to guess, based on the fact that Joe Hill is a much slower writer, something he admits freely and which is to be expected based on how prolific his dad is, as well as the fact that NOS4A2 was published about five months before Doctor Sleep, I’d wager that Stephen King was referencing his son’s work when he name-dropped Manx in his own novel. Nevertheless, Hill’s book is also rife with King references, paying homage and tying this book into the broader King universe in a fascinating way and seeming to tell readers that nearly every book his father has written, and some of the ones he’s written, exist within microcosms of the same universe. On a map of all the inscapes (essentially, pockets in the universe created by and often inside the minds of people who Shine, called “Strong Creatives” in Hill’s book) in America, for instance, there are references to IT and King’s Dark Tower series. Manx also mentions that he is aware of the existence of Doctor Sleep’s gang, The True Knot, and implies that they might have even visited Christmasland, but that he and they don’t see eye to eye, and so they mostly just stay out of each other’s way.Further, while the NOS4A2 novel was dedicated to Hill’s mother Tabitha King, and various characters’ relationships with their mothers are highlighted, the father-child relationships in this book are probably the most complex. Vic adores her father, Chris, and looks up to him more than anyone in the world despite his faults, which include choosing his addiction over his family and, at times, being physically and verbally abusive. As she gets older, Vic falls victim to the same cycle of abuse and addiction as her father, but later fights to get better in order to be a good mother to her son, Wayne. Conversely, Charlie’s daughter Millie chooses to go to Christmasland with her father, but she never leaves his shadow, and she struggles with the role she’s forced to occupy as an extension of her father’s legacy. It seems evident, then, that not only was NOS4A2 Joe Hill’s continuation of his father’s Shining/Doctor Sleep universe, it also functioned for him in the same way as the original two novels did for his father: as a way to work through personal and family struggles, as well as generational trauma.Charlie Manx said that the road to Christmasland is paved with dreams. So, too, was the road to NOS4A2. Dreams, and the bond between a father and son.Happy belated Father’s Day to all the different kinds of dads out there, and to my mom, Chris Hauer (née King), who was also my dad for a long time.Oh, and The Shining is still one of my favorite holiday movies. (Sorry, Mr. King.)...

Rescued from an impertinent and ill-mannered literary agent (redundant, oui?) by MSWord, Marguerite owns her life story

Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is a slim novella at 69 pages that packs a satisfying punch. After my sister, Sara (who I mistakenly thought was the person on the right in the photo below at Liz’s Book Bar in NYC) encouraged, cajoled, and demanded that I read TEUW, I bought the audiobook on sale for around $4.00 and sat on my back patio and listened to Marguerite writing her memoir. After about five minutes, I wondered: what the heck is this about? Who is this girl who speaks French and is hounded by her fancy NYC literary agent, Bethany, who offers notes, “I know you’ve been traumatized; when you’ve been through something like that* sometimes it’s easier to bottle it up inside, especially if you’re working alone.” *That trauma, dear reader, is something you will discover further along, and it’s as surprising a plot as I’ve read in recent years. Liz’s Book Bar. The person on the right is NOT my sister, Sara…or so she claims…About ten pages in, I understood that DeWitt was no ordinary author. I moved from my seat to cleaning the screens on my porch and kept stopping to rewind what I’d thought I’d heard. There’re several non-English phrases that challenged my college French and googled before moving on. Thus, exigeante means demanding; C’est curieux means It’s curious; and at the heart of this gem is Mauvais goût meaning bad taste.Marguerite was raised with good taste, and tacky, rude, or otherwise gaudy behavior, clothing, or manners is unacceptable. And soon this reader found herself immersed in that world where Mauvais goût was unacceptable as well! Marguerite agrees to meet her tacky NYC agent, Bethany at a classy restaurant and is appalled by her clothes, shoes, and philistine beliefs. Typically, I’d side with the character who is the recipient of such ridicule, but DeWitt’s wit is beyond perfection:She [Bethany] came rushing in [late] at 1:15. She wore white patent-leather shoes; these distracted me from the muddle of garments thrown together seemingly at random. (It seemed unkind to condemn these; New York offers hideous garments in an abundance rivaled only by Scotland. The shoes were inexplicable.) She sat down; I was unable, with some difficulty, to take my mind off the mystery of the shoes.Later when Marguerite, who is 17, orders wine with no ID necessary, Bethany is hung up on this fact. Marguerite, who serves as narrator for DeWitt’s already-classic novella, remarks, “This [Marguerite ordering and drinking wine] was precisely the sort of idiocy one would expect from someone who wore white patent-leather shoes.” Classic Marguerite!The English Understand Wool is one book in a group published by Storybook New Directions in New York City. With seven other titles (all under one hundred pages) in this collection, I’ve already got them on TBR list in Goodreads.Saint Johns River State has the novella in its collection. I listened to the novella, and now I’m reading it in preparation for hosting my in-person book club on June 27. À bientôt, mes ami! (See you later, my friends!)Natalie Portman reading DeWitt's gem....

Abby Flowers, Guest Blogger, read Better Together by Christine Riccio on the study abroad to Ireland

Leave a comment