Sunday Salon: Chalice and Feeding the Hungry Heart

Maybe now I can read when I sleep, hmmmm?

This week I read Chalice by Robin McKinley and Feeding the Hungry Heart: The Experience of Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth.

Chalice, a young adult novel by noted fantasy author Robin McKinley, is my first experience with this author and sounded promising. Marisol is a young woodskeeper and beekeeper who lives alone on the parcel of land that was allocated to her family many generations ago, making honey and tending her goats. Her life changes when she is chosen to be "Chalice", an important part of the hierarchy of her county and intrinsically tied to the earthlines of the land. Her county is in trouble - the last Master and his Chalice died in a fire and the new Master is coming back from being an elemental priest and has almost forgotten what it is to be human. If the storyline sounds confusing, that's because it is. It's actually a wonderful idea and I really resonate with the storyline. However, McKinley fails her beautiful story in its telling. For some reason she starts the novel not at the beginning of the story where young Marisol discovers she is Chalice, but instead tells that portion of the story through a series of confusing flashbacks. The language in this book is cumbersome and confusing. The sentences are tangled and there is so much exposition that I almost gave up 80 pages in. I wanted to shout "Show don't tell!!!!" constantly as I felt the first third of the novel was all back story. When you have that much back story you should restructure the book. I recently found the same thing with my novel and I had to admit that I needed to tell the story from the beginning and not try and tell it through flashbacks. Annoying? Yes. But ultimately I hope my book is stronger for it.

I wouldn't recommend this book, despite the lovely storyline and those incredible bees! I read some reviews on Amazon and a lot of people seem to indicate that McKinley's early books are far superior to her later efforts, but for now I think I'll let my experience of this author rest with Chalice.

Feeding the Hungry Heart: The Experience of Emotional Eating is a book I've wanted to read for some time. I'm an emotional eater and I was interested to read what Roth, a noted "expert" on overeating and emotional eating had to say. This book is 25 years old, and focused on a lot of case stories (mostly women married to uncaring men!). I found a lot to resonate with, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading the "left overs" of another better book, and I probably was as I've since discovered this was about the third book Roth had written on the topic. I plan on hunting down her first book as I have a feeling it will have more of the information I'm looking for about emotional eating and less of the stories from women who have the problem.

That's it for this week. I've read a few books in the past weeks - Unwind by Neal Shusterman (amazing) and Tithe by Holly Black (a re-read for me as I wanted to re-acquaint myself with Kaye and Robien's world before beginning it's sequel Ironside).

Happy reading!