Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year! It's the year of the White Tiger.

Cupcake Brown; The Time Traveler's Wife

I just read Cupcake Brown, a Memoir and The Time Traveler's Wife back to back. Good reads - as in my eyeballs were doing a gazillion RPMs per minute, inhaling the words off the page like I was snorting coke. So I started thinking that Clare is not a nice red-head girl aka Time-traveler's wife but becomes Cupcake - an 11-year-old African-American whose mother dies then her world changes as her birth father "the sperm donor" steps up and claims her and her brother and ships them off to Lancaster, California to a foster home where she gets whupped, raped, runs away to discover prostitution and drugs. Then after being a gangbanger cum prostitute cum narcotics fiend she falls for a librarian who disappears and re-appears out of nowhere time and time again. Then she cleans up her act becomes a lawyer, has a kid that could time-travel as well and becomes The Time Traveler's Mother and watches her husband die and gets jealous that her time-skipping daughter is able to visit her father in the distant past very much alive.

Yeah, good reads.

Seriously though, not demeaning Ms. Brown or being condescending to Ms. Niffenger, I couldn't put their work down. Ms. Brown's memoir is as riveting and awe-inspiring as Ms. Niffenger's is entertaining. I finished both books in three days. I only let go of the books because I had to sleep.

Pacing was, therefore, excellent. Read like a crime novel. Well, not really. I just wanted to know what happened next.