I love that you can still see the witch in the picture and that she’s smiling. Can you see her?

Anyway, meet the new face of Reader Witch!

Just for the record: I won’t get any money if you order anything from him too.

You always know when you are reading a good book. It doesn’t feel like a book. You see no traces of backstage manipulations, no tricks, no author. The story is alive on its own.

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles feels so real I had to double-check it’s not a memoir. Even when I already knew the characters were fictional (although they were partially based on real people) I was still googling for them. I wanted to see what they looked like even though I knew they never existed. That’s the closest I could find.

According to the interview with the author, these two singers, Carmen Miranda and Chavela Vargas, were the inspiration for some of the characters’ traits and stories.

In some sources The Air You Breathe is called a saga. It does indeed cover a lifelong story but it doesn’t feel unbearably huge. Reading it is like listening to a person who is speaking about her love for a person and for music.

The music is so palpable it gives the book a new dimension. I now know samba without having ever listened to it before.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76R6O1va9iM?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

At first, I was thinking the book would make a great movie. There are so many amazing visuals, really good songs. But the more the story developed the more I understood a movie might turn this story into another postproduction amputee. There are too many depths and precious moments for a movie to handle. I just hope that if the story is ever picked up for an adaptation it will be preserved as it is.

Such books are not born overnight. I don’t even mean all the research that went into The Air Your Breathe to show the readers Brazil in the 30s and Hollywood in the 40s. I mean the maturity of the book. It feels like classic even though it was published just three days ago. Such quality requires not only skill and talent but time to brew. I contacted Frances de Pontes Peebles, the author, for more information and found out that my perception was right. Frances said it took her 9 years to write the book.

I feel lucky to have found this book and to be living at times when I could get it with one click. I also feel a bit envious of those who haven’t read it yet. They have yet to meet the characters, whom I already miss, and to enjoy a really good book.

When I was a kid a special type of books was very popular. The genre could be called romance with erotical scenes as the main reason for the books to be written. Housewives frantically exchanged those cheap paperbacks hiding them from kids and reading them by packs. The books contained no plot, no decent dialogues, no character development apart from characters being beautiful and having sex whenever the plot allowed.

Have modern thrillers taken the place of those books? Is there a target audience for whom certain types of books are produced? These audience oriented books contain a number of obligatory elements that are to be squeezed in regardless of the plot.

The Girl Before is a classic example of such a product. The story is so dumb its mere existence is possible only due to the real estate market being bad. The characters agree to follow the rules of a bizarre landlord because they can’t find anywhere else to live. Is the market in London really so bad or it’s just an invented factor?

Looks like the target audience of the book is supposed to be interested in:

• What the characters are wearing. All of them, always, everywhere, in details; color, material, shape, size, texture. Nothing of it is related to the plot.
• Men who serve as furniture for the book; “slick body under the shower water”.
• detailed sex scenes.
• OB visits, pregnancy tests, pregnancy symptoms discussed at length with no purpose for the plot.
• Parenting problems not related to the plot.

While many books are infected with a certain set of words that authors think make the dialogues sound more natural, in case of The Girl Before the infestation is severe. At one point the word “somehow”, the most popular parasite, is used 4 times by different characters within one scene. The same happens with “that’s all” which is plopped at the end of a phrase regardless of the situation. Somehow it’s just another bad book that’s all. By the end of the book there’s a risk of developing a strong allergic reaction to the words due to overexposure.

The behaviour of the characters often doesn’t match the situation. “I can never say if you are joking” says a character to the one who never jokes. Another character keeps gulping down tons of sadistically cooked food. It can serve as a demonstration of personal traits when done for the first time but it keeps being repeated along the whole book, probably to make the book more salient; hey, the plot was dumb as were the characters, but they had sex and ate live fish so now the book is stuck in my memory.

Surprising as it may sound, there are still two good things to be thankful for. The first one is that narcissistic people and sociopaths are described quite well. I believe many people can benefit from learning what those disorders are and how they manifest themselves.

The second nice thing happens in the audiobook. A complete silence is used to illustrate a situation. The silence creates such a powerful effect that I listened to it several times. I’ve never rewound any record before to listen to its silence. That silence is a brilliant idea. I hope more audiobooks will pick up this tool.

With this book I’m putting on hold my reviews of thrillers. I need some literary detox. There will be one more thriller-related rant but otherwise better books will be discussed. Stay tuned!

I’m not a professional critic, but I’m a natural one. If you scratch the surface of any professional critic, there must be a natural one. For, what kind of job is that? What is its purpose? The job grew from a desire to ruin with words a creation constructed by others. Then it becomes a question of ambition, your either earn from it or you blog about it.

I give in to my nature, which my idol would have never approved of. “Eunuchs of literature”. Perfect choice of words, as always.

There’s more: “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.” But another metaphor brings it more home to me. It’s about big mindless fishes that come to the boat and devour a fisherman’s treasured and hard-earned catch.

I’m the fish, although a very self-aware one. I pick my books very carefully, and I stay away from anything predisposed to devouring.