There are a number of things that work well in Steven Soderbergh’s smart, scary thriller.  Everything from the tight plotting and fast pacing to the largely talented cast makes this movie a standout and nearly perfect in its execution.  This is a thriller that shouldn’t be missed.  It is that good.

Directed by Soderbergh, who worked with his usual crew (including writer Scott Z. Burns), the movie is full of a visceral urgency that makes watching the film an intense experience.  This dystopian view of our present world is marked with paranoia, self-interest, obliviousness, and a complete denial of science–all things that the world struggles with.  The film wastes no time in setting up its premise, and while it is highly controlled in its precision, it’s also frightening and emotionally engrossing.

While the film could easily derail into a disaster flick (see: 1995′s Outbreak), the movie stays closer to an international thriller.  The result is, as I’ve already said, really great.  Part of what propels this greatness is the talented cast.  While Laurence Fishbourne is serviceable as a CDC bigwig, it is Kate Winslet as a CDC worker who really nails the role. She tightens her voice and her face and is almost pathological in her sense of duty.  Matt Damon is also great as the bewildered husband of patient zero Gwenyth Paltrow.

Definitely worth your two hours, Contagion is out on DVD now.  Don’t miss it.

Mara Dyer can’t remember anything about the accident that killed her friends and left her alone in an abandoned building.  Her family moves from Rhode Island to Miami in hopes of leaving the past behind, but it’s hard when Mara keeps seeing her dead friends.  Then she meets the gorgeous Noah Shaw, and things get even more complicated.

Hodkin’s much-hyped debut novel seems to be fairly divisive amongst readers.  Reviewers seem to either love or hate Mara’s (questionable) story.  I’m sorry to say that I fall somewhere in the middle.  A muddled direction, too many subplots, and in need of some desperate editing, Hodkin’s psychological-supernatural-crime story will resonate with fans of Hush, Hush and Hourglass but will leave other readers out in the cold.

There are elements that work in Hodkin’s book.  She manages to set up the story so that as Mara remembers details about the past, readers are jarred into Mara’s darkness.  The snippets of memories are creepy, slightly sinister, and absolutely engaging.  However, as Mara becomes more embroiled in her romance with the rather bland Noah Shaw (seriously?  British and rich do not characterization make), the story loses steam and moves away from psychological thriller to limp supernatural romance.

Strong prose dominates the novel.  Much of Mara’s story is engaging, and Hodkin has definitely created some strange, attractive characters for readers to latch onto.  However, Hodkin is also guilty of providing too much detail, which adds to the book’s excessive length (it could easily have been 100 pages shorter).  The book’s twist near the end sets it up for a potentially entertaining sequel, but it might leave readers scratching their heads in confusion, too.

Overall a very ambitious debut with enormous potential, this book will work best for those who like their supernatural reads a little creepy with a healthy dose of romance.  Once the series figures out what it wants to be, it could end up being great.

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin.  Simon & Schuster: 2011.  Library copy.

“Miss Amelia Hayes, welcome to The Land of Dreams. I am the staff trainer. I will call you grasshopper and you will call me sensei and I will give you the good oil. Right?”

15-year-old Amelia Hayes is in love with Chris Harvey from the moment she meets him when he trains her in at Woolworth’s.  Chris is funny, charming, and smart, and he offers a respite from all the immature boys at Amelia’s school.  The only problem is, Chris is 21.  The age difference notwithstanding, the two talk about everything from feminism to literature to movies, but Amelia worries that he’ll never look at her the way she looks at him.  Will Chris ever see her as anything but the kid at the check-out lane?

Here’s the thing about Laura Buzo’s debut novel: it’s really, really good.  Buzo takes a simple enough concept–a young girl falling for an older man–and turns it into something complex, beautiful, and utterly real.  Amelia is searching for identity and Chris is searching for meaning.  Despite their age difference, the two have a lot of common ground, and credit has to be given to Buzo for managing to create such undeniable chemistry between the characters by allowing them to actually interact.  There is no insta-love here; it is slow-building and palpable.

Make no mistake: the characters in Buzo’s novel are remarkably well-rendered.  There’s great attention to detail here, ranging from general characterization to mannerisms to speech patterns.  Because Amelia and Chris trade off sections of the book (it’s not alternating chapters so much as giant chunks) whose time frames overlap, Buzo keeps the momentum going through vivid characters and genuinely funny dialogue.  She also manages to craft distinct voices for both characters.

The story as a whole is incredibly well-written and heart-breaking in its realness.  The story engages both the characters and the reader.  Funny and charming, this is perfect contemporary YA.  The novel’s bittersweet ending will leave readers satisfied and a little ache-y.  Highly, highly recommended.

Unfortunately, Good Oil hasn’t been released in the U.S.  If you can find a way to get one, you should do it.  The trouble is worth it.

Good Oil by Laura Buzo.  Allen & Unwin: 2010. Borrowed copy.

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.  Its purpose is to spotlight eagerly-anticipated upcoming releases.

This week I’m eagerly awaiting:

The Raft by S.A. Bodeen

Expected Release Date: August 21, 2012

Robie, 15, lives with her family on the Midway atoll, a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific. Her parents are scientists; it’s an isolated life. Robie enjoys visiting her aunt in Hawaii – she gets back and forth on a cargo plane that brings supplies to Midway.

During a visit, her aunt is called to the mainland for a work emergency, leaving Robie to get home on her own. On her flight back to Midway the cargo plane hits nasty weather, and goes down. It’s just Robie, the pilot, and Max, a co-pilot she’s never met till this flight, on board. Robie is pulled aboard a raft by Max, who is injured and slipping in and out of consciousness. They have a bag of candy and very little water between them. When they finally reach an island that seems abandoned, Robie hopes they’ll be found quickly. But she’s not sure she was even on the flight manifest. Her parents must be looking for her…aren’t they?

(summary via Goodreads)

Something about this book reminds me a little of Kirsten Tracy’s Sharks & Boys.  I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of being stranded at sea or on a deserted island.  This book looks to be a terrifying combination of both those situations.  If this is done well, it’ll be suspenseful–an absolute page-turner.  I’m always game for a novel focusing on survival–and here’s to hoping this one doesn’t disappoint.

What are you waiting on this week?

Walter and Patty Berglund were classic gentrifiers of St. Paul: present, communicative parents, advocates for healthy food and a better environment, model citizens.  The two were the envy of their neighbors–a perfect example of a happy marriage.   In the new millennium, though, things have started to go awry.  When their teenage son moves in with the neighbors, Walter quits his job to work for Big Coal, and Patty seems to go a little batty, people start to wonder about what has happened to their neighbors.

Franzen is one of those divisive writers people either love or love to hate.  His follow up to The Corrections is an ambitious, epically sprawling novel that tries to encapsulate the feelings of the new millennium through a nuclear family, but it falls short of its ultimate goal.  Despite an intriguing premise and an intricately-woven narrative (told in alternating perspectives from some of the book’s characters), Franzen’s novel ultimately feels a little unsatisfying.

Part of the problem is the novel’s own self-involvement.  Although Franzen’s main point–that the word “freedom” has become a sort of a catch-all for the pursuit of individual liberties–as well as becoming synonymous with “power,” the novel ends up so obsessed with the word “freedom” that every time the word (or a version of it) appears, it seems to scream “LOOK! THEME!  THEME! THEME!”  The fact that Franzen beats the reader over the head with his point is not particularly endearing.

Neither, then, are his characters.  While they are certainly compelling characters (with, perhaps, the exception of the Berglund’s son Joey, who is slimy and weaselly and completely disgusting), none are particularly likable.  The characters are richly drawn and deeply flawed, but their flaws make them whiny, selfish, and annoying.  It doesn’t seem as though any one of them learns a thing about themselves, and in a novel this long, that’s…a difficult pill to swallow.

All of this isn’t to say that this reader didn’t enjoy the novel.  Parts of it are particularly enjoyable–Franzen’s tour through parts of the Twin Cities are fun for Minnesotans especially.  Rich writing and well-developed characters make for an interesting (if not always completely engaging) read.  However, Franzen’s tone–which goes from sardonic and archly ironic to flat-out tragic–makes the book’s ending hard to take.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2010.  Purchased copy.

It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.  The purpose of the meme is to discuss books we are reading this week, as well as books we completed the previous week.

Books I Completed Last Week:
Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi: Really underwhelmed by this one.  Review to come.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows: Cute, clever, and leaves you with a warm feeling.  Review to come.

Books I’m Reading This Week:
Shut Out by Kody Keplinger: I want to like this one, but something about it is bothering me.  I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Bittersweet by Sarah Ockler: One of my favorite YA authors.  Excited about this one.

What are you reading this week?

From NetGalley:
Goddess Interrupted by Aimee Carter: I read the first in this series, and while I didn’t love it, I also couldn’t put it down.  Here’s to hoping that’s what happens with this one.

What’s in your mailbox this week?

Thirty-seven-year-old Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) lives in Minneapolis and ghostwrites a series of young adult novels about a prep school.  Although on the surface she lives a fairly successful life: she lives in an upscale (if slightly sterile) high-rise apartment, has a cute dog for a companion, and drives a mini-cooper, it’s clear, from the start, that she’s stuck in some sort of a rut.  When her high school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson) sends her a picture of his new baby, she gets it into her mind that it’s a cry for help and decides to go back to her hometown of Mercury, Minnesota to steal him away from his wife Beth (Elizabeth Reaser).

Directed by Jason Reitman with an absolutely searing script by Diablo Cody (viewers wary of Cody’s Juno-esque verbal shenanigans need not worry: she’s much more toned down here), Young Adult challenges most expectations viewers have about movies like this: the protagonist is not likable in the least, humans do not grow/change/evolve, and there is no epiphany.  Young Adult is brilliant, darkly funny, and deeply unsettling.

It is Cody and Reitman’s sly subversion of viewer’s expectations that make this film work as well as it does: viewers expect the hotshot from the city to be humbled by the small-town folk, and when that doesn’t happen, well–that’s when things get interesting.  This willingness to subvert what is expected, as well as their ability to infuse the film with an unparalleled generational identity make this movie so inherently watchable.  Everything from the music used (The Replacements, obviously, as well as The Breeders and Teenage Fanclub–whose song “The Concept” serves as a sort of ambiguous anthem for both Mavis and the film as a whole) to the fashion to the reminiscing the characters do–invokes a sort of nostalgia specific to Generation X.  All of this nostalgia, of course, plays into Mavis’s inability to let go of her own adolescence–and the past.

Of course, the characters (and the actors who inhabit them) help to propel Young Adult into much more memorable territory.  Theron is absolutely terrifying as the cruel and obliviously selfish Mavis.  She manages to be both beautiful and ugly, and while the film could make her an absolute villain, it doesn’t.  Buddy is perfectly nice: a little bland and more than a little uncool.  Surprisingly, it is Patton Oswalt as Matt, a former classmate who was left permanently injured after being beaten by some of Mavis’s high school classmates, who most consistently steals scenes.  It is his acerbic wit and wry observations about Mavis’s character that infuse humor into the film, elevating it from something simply darkly uncomfortable to something with real power and resonance.

Highly, highly recommended.  This is the kind of brilliant dark comedy that is deserving of accolades.  Worth the theater ticket, to be sure.

For Isabella, Mary, and Lauren, life is full of bridal showers, wedding showers, and weddings.  It seems as though every girl they know is getting married.  They play their roles as bridesmaids and friends well, but they also struggle with their own lives and what they want.  All three girls struggle with careers, boys who are less than worthy, and the very real fear of never getting exactly what they want–if only they could figure out what it is that they want.

Jennifer Close’s low-key coming-of-age novel about three girls who face their twenties with apprehension, wit, and a lot of alcohol is fairly entertaining fare.  Told from the alternating perspectives of all three girls in loosely connected chapters, Close’s novel is lightly sardonic and often poignant.  It is chick lit for readers who like smart novels.

By far the strongest aspect of Close’s novel are her undeniably believable characters.  The girls in Close’s novel feel like people I know (and maybe even am, sometimes).  Although the characters feel a little indistinguishable at times, there’s no denying that they are authentic.  Close fills her novel with humor, heartache, and a bit of optimism (careful optimism, though).  The events that transpire are illustrative of life in your 20s.

Despite the lightly sardonic tone that Close keeps in her prose, there’s no denying the hint of melancholy that runs throughout the novel.  All of the characters are searching, and though each girl seems to find at least a semblance of happiness at the end, the reader can’t help but feel the uncertainty that the future holds.

Recommended.  I enjoyed this one even though it made me sad in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close.  Knopf: 2011.  Library copy.

Until recently, romantic commitments were all about the tangible: rings, pins, letter jackets.  All of these things let people know when a couple was together and when they broke up.  But with the advent of social media, the rules are changing.  What does it mean to be “Facebook Official,” and what happens when one person in a relationship cancels that status?  What are the rules when it comes to breaking up in a 2.0 world?

Gershon is an associate professor at Indiana University, and a few years back, she was teaching a linguistic anthropology class.  In order to get her students thinking about language and its impact, she asked them what makes for a bad breakup.  Instead of hearing stories about cheaters and love lost, her students started arguing about etiquette, especially in light of social media technology.  Was it okay to break up with someone via email?  On Facebook?  Via text?  As her students argued over logistics, Gershon started formulating a research question.  The result is The Breakup 2.0, an accessible rehashing of the interviews Gershon did with 72 undergraduate students (18 male, 52 female).

It’s a limited but very intriguing study.  Because social media usage is limited amongst older generations, Gershon’s focus on the upcoming generation is particularly fascinating.  Social media users who have essentially grown up with the technology have their own set of rules that govern its usage, and these explanations of the norms and mores are some of the book’s most fascinating tidbits.  The increasing reliance on technology to conduct personal relationships is alarming but also fast becoming what is normal and expected.  Examining it is important in order to better understand society.

One of the most interesting parts of the book focuses on the usage of Facebook, both in beginning and terminating relationships.  Gershon makes a particularly astute observation when she points out Facebook (by far the most public of all 2.0 technologies) is implicitly conservative in its operations: by creating options for relationship statuses, Facebook present monogamy as the ideal and encourages users to link to one another’s profiles.  It is an interesting observation that many casual Facebook users have probably missed.

Although the book starts to feel overly long in its final third, Gershon’s observations about 2.0 technologies and breakups are still relevant and important.  Recommended to those interested especially in how social media 2.0 technology is changing our relationships.

The Breakup 2.0 by Ilana Gershon. Cornell University Press: 2010.  Electronic galley accepted for review via NetGalley.