First challenge completed!

I've finished my first challenge: the Eponymous Challenge, hosted by Between the Covers. My books were:
1. The Girl Who Kept Swimming, by Joshilyn Jackson
2. The Senator's Wife, by Sue Miller
3. Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones (my unannounced alternate)
4. Mary Modern, by Camille DeAngelis

Sadly, I didn't love any of these books, but I definitely enjoyed playing in the challenge. So a good experience overall. And yay for completion!

Modern love

Camille DeAngelis is an ambitious woman to tackle cloning in a realistic fiction setting. I found Mary Modern fascinating and strange (though, as far as cloning fiction goes, I preferred Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go). The characters in DeAngelis' book were a little too unsympathetic for me -- I didn't really feel sorry for any of them except Mary, and I thought Gray was way too much of a doormat. The political aspect seemed not quite developed enough; there were random snippets from a book that strongly criticized various aspects of the 2000s, and while I don't disagree, it seemed odd to have that disconnected soapbox in there. The story itself, however, and the writing, were entirely compelling and readable; the book is well-paced and the plot suspenseful in the right places. I'm glad the author is putting these ethical and political issues out there for readers to ponder and analyze, but I wish she had given them more context in the fiction.

Island turmoil

I didn't really like this book, but it's hard for me to say exactly why. Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones, is certainly well written, with interesting characters, but the story just dragged for me. It seemed perhaps like there was too much happening -- Jones wanted to get in the political context of the island, but without ever thoroughly explaining it; he wanted to capture the mother-daughter struggles, but those never seemed fully real; and he wanted the quirky Mr. Watts to have his background and reality, but that got a bit lost in everything else. Intermixed with all this is the children learning Great Expectations from Mr. Watts, which were the most engaging parts of the book. I wanted more of that and less of so much else.

I'm including this for the Eponymous Challenge -- though he starts as a character in the book-within-the-book, Pip does actually become a character in a variety of ways.

What's love got to do with it?

In The Senator's Wife, Sue Miller intertwines the story of recently married and newly pregnant Meri with that of her next-door neighbor (and the title character) Delia. The novel moves between the two women, with a heavier focus on Delia, whose complicated relationship with her womanizing husband fascinates both Meri and the reader. In fact, despite disbelief from so many of the characters, Delia's love and forgiveness of Tom was much more believable and understandable than Meri and Nathan's relationship. They seemed quite mismatched, and I found myself disliking Meri in many places, especially in contrast to Delia -- the younger woman was just a little too selfish and too whiny, though I understand that worked beautifully against Delia's elegant generosity and contained emotions. The book was compelling and well-paced, but not anything to rave about.

The girl who kept reading

Both of Joshilyn Jackson's books that I've read have had the same effect on me: I thoroughly enjoy them while I'm reading them, but they don't stick with me at all once I'm done. (As proof, I always have trouble remembering the first of her books I read, even when I have the titles in front of me. It was Gods in Alabama.) The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is a fast-paced, engrossing novel, and I think it does have more depth than some plot-oriented books. There's a mystery element to it that really digs at the idea of who we all are on the inside, and the unraveling of that mystery was unexpected and thought-provoking. While I didn't particularly like the characters, I found them generally believable and entirely human -- flawed, interesting, occasionally really strange. My only real complaints are Thalia's name (too obvious -- the parents just happened to choose that name for the daughter who happened to be drawn to the theater?) and the bit of jacket copy that refers to a "literal" family skeleton. Let's look up words before tossing them around, shall we?