Boom Baby! Book Club is back!
After my last book club ended in summer of 2018, I was itching to do another one and Carmen said she was ALWAYS in for another too. It took me awhile to find another group of ladies just as avid about reading as I am, but it just so happened that one day I was out for dinner and there we were talking about Jane Austen novels and adaptations for a straight hour. I knew then - these ladies were going to be my next book club group! And as I said, Carmen was in again in a heartbeat. (Love her!) I found the fifth member in my new co-worker - I recently switched positions at my job - and I discovered that she was also an avid reader and into the same things I was. It was fate, I swear.
We started in September and our first book was Smoke by Dan Vyleta (2016). The story follows two boys, Thomas and Charlie, members of an elite boarding school for England's gentry. The school teaches them the history and lessons around how smoke is sin. It also tries to teach them to suppress their sins and not display their smoke at all. During their winter holiday, the boys stumble into a revolutionary plot that not only has grave consequences for those they know, but for England as a whole.
We each rated the book out of 10 at the start of the meeting; with the overall rating being a 6/10. Pretty decent from the five of us, considering the Goodreads rating is 3.4 stars out of 5. People online seem to really like this book, however that did not seem to be the case for our book club.
We discussed how we thought many of the characters were very flat, with the exception of Julius and some of the adults. In cases where we were hoping for more, we were left hanging, and when we didn't want more is where the most explanation was unnecessarily given. The three main characters - Thomas, Charlie and Livia - all lacked in-depth character development. All of their choices were selfish or lacked process and conviction for what the outcome ended up being. The ending hinted at a poly-amorous relationship, a decision that seemed hasty on the part of the author when we all agreed that, based on Thomas and Charlie's relationship, they should have ended up together.
Few of us read the acknowledgements at the end, so Janean summed it up for us: "Well of course this book is political, but how its political is up to you." This is frustrating because if the author was intending to write a political book, then he should have just had an opinion on the politics and not left 'up to the readers' to determine a point for the story. This lead into a discussion about all the hanging plot lines within the story itself. As the reader you are set up for more explanation on certain topics or a resolution to key plot points several times but you are given neither! There is no satisfaction and you are left wanting.
We had a great discussion on this passage from the book:
"Children are born in sin. Most babies turn black with Smoke and Soot within minutes of being born, and every birthing bed and every infant crib is surrounded by the dark plume of shame. The gentlefolk and all commoners who can afford it employ nurses and attendants to look after the child until Good begins to ripen in it, at age three or four. Sometimes they make a point of barring the child from all family intercourse until it is six or seven: from love, and so they will not grow to despise it. Smoke is tolerated to the eleventh year: the Holy Book itself suggests the threshold before which grace is only achieved by saints. If you die before eleven, you die in sin and go to hell." (pg. 8)
The discussion revolved around how this passage lines up with specific points in the Catholic religion regarding baptism, communion, confirmation and a child's age. We also touched on the theory of whether or not evil is born or made. This evolved into a discussion about the character of Mr. Price and how his situation relates to Freud's Oedipus Complex which I would LOVE to elaborate on further, but it is a major SPOILER; so alas, I cannot. The psychology majors in the club really made me see that part of the book in a different way. It was enlightening.
One other thing we focused on was the two key 'creepy' images of the Zombie-like Julius and the little girl strapped into the self-torture smoke-suppression harness. Both were quite disturbing and stuck out to all the members of the group. I noted that much of what is said about Julius and his character in the book do not come from himself, but rather come from other characters' views and perceptions. Julius has one chapter near the end of the book that is literally five pages of his rambling thoughts and urges after he has descended into complete madness. I really liked that chapter because it was one of the most in-depth and exploratory chapters of a character in the whole book.
At the end of the meeting - after discussing the novel for over an hour - we decided to see of our ratings of the book changed at all from our initial one. Elissa went from a 5 or 6 out of a 10 to a 3. Hers was the biggest change. The overall rating went from a 6/10 to about a 4.5 or 5 of 10. We thought this was interesting and decided to develop a rating system from 1 to 10. A 1 being that we would leave it on the floor at the university with a sign that says "FREE" and a 10 being that it would have a permanent place on the bookshelf. As Book Club manager, I said I would develop a poll to solidify our ratings system and then we can rate each book just prior to the meeting each month. This part sounds like so much fun to me.
In the end, I doubt I would recommend this book to anyone I know. A couple of the girls said that they know people who would actually really love this book, so that was interesting. Like I said though, this book is quite popular on the interwebs. Funny enough too, as I was doing a little research for writing this post, I found out Smoke has a sequel titled Soot. I posted in the group chat and we all had a little laugh and freak out about how it was even a thing. Safe to say we're NOT going to read it for Book Club.
UP NEXT: For October's Choice we decided to have a little spooky fun (because it is the month of Halloween and all) and choose a horror novel. Elissa is our resident horror aficionado and chose The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971). There is a mix of members who have read the book or seen the movie or done neither. I am personally excited to not only do a book club post on this book, but also an adaptation one as well, because I have neither read the book nor seen the movie!
Vyleta, Dan. Smoke. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2016. Print
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