Customer Reviews

Miss Harper Can Do It: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

First time novelist Jane Berentson has created a very likable character in Annie Harper. She's someone with whom we can laugh, shed a tear, and identify. Sometimes her struggles and questions are ours.

At 24 Annie is an elementary school teacher in Tacoma, Washington. She's unmarried but very much attached to David who is being sent to Iraq. He'll be gone for a year, 365 lonely days and nights for Annie. In order to fill her time she decides to write a memoir recounting these days of stress, coping, and making-do. Her original title is "Wartime Alone Time: When Abstinence Fights For Freedom." However, that title will frequently change as she narrates this year of her life in chapters.

Her mother is stalwart, at the ready to feed, hug, and comfort. However, Annie doesn't seem to want or need maternal tending. She agrees when her mother insists that she come by the morning David leaves. Clearly her mother has made plans as Annie finds "There was the special quiche she knows I love. Fresh melons all cut up. Kleenex strategically placed throughout the house in places I'd never seen it while growing up." The Kleenex was unused.

Annie also spends time with an old school friend, Gus. He's a guy who knows her pretty well, knows her well enough to call her in the middle of the night to come and help him scrape painted pumpkins off the windows of the Dairy DeLite.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that happens to Annie between the emails and sporadic phone calls from David. There are, of course, her students who have a gift for asking embarrassing yet straight to the point questions when they're not all speaking at once or creating minor mischief. The youngsters are described neatly and well by author Berentson.

As much as Annie thinks the days will never end they do as she volunteers at a retirement center and gets a pet - believe it or not, a chicken. What Annie had thought would be a tedious, slow year holds many surprises for her as she struggles to identify her feelings about life, war, and love.

Jane Berentson's debut novel will leave readers wanting to hear more from this talented author.

- Gail Cooke

I really thought this would be a fun book to read. I mean, she adopts a chicken! How cool is that? But Annie has an air of desperation that seeps through everything she does. She's just trying too hard to be who she thinks she should be. I've been there myself, so I'm not without sympathy. But she's so self-absorbed that in the end I found her tiresome. Yes, she sets out to write a journal/memoir/best seller so a certain level of self-absorbtion is a requirement; but in order to get other people interested in your ramblings, you actually have to be, well, interesting. And Annie just isn't. She tries very hard to be (e.g. adopting a chicken), but trying to be interesting is probably the worst possible way to actually be interesting. In the end, I couldn't like her, and couldn't love the book.

Okay I really tried to like this book, really I did but I really can't find anything to like about it. The writing reads like one long monotone rambling speech. The footnotes that appear on almost every page and in some cases carry over onto the next page make the book hard to read. I get what the author was trying to do with the format of the book but it just doesn't work. Some of the footnotes take up half the page! So between bouncing back and forth between the text of the book and trying to read the footnotes as well I just gave up on reading both.

I am so sorry.

I wanted to like this book, because the idea of the way it's told, a "raw manuscript," seems really new and fresh to me. And it really does read like a raw manuscript, in my opinion too, too much. I understand that some people will find Annie Harper "quirky" and "funny" or a lovable goofball, but I was absolutely repulsed both by the character and by the way this story has chosen to be told.

The protagonist/narrator, Annie, is like one of those people who, when given a captive audience, launches into a looping, self-referential monologue, complete with backtracking, fictionalizing, calling attention to the fictionalizing, and footnoting (yes, you can have footnotes in spoken monologues, and apparently in raw manuscripts as well!), and because she's so invested in telling the story, she hasn't bothered to notice her audience has glazed-over eyes, or they've flat-out wandered off. She still keeps talking, and talking, and talking. Granted, I picked up the book in this case, so I was asking for it. Annie also can be extremely self-deprecating, as though she's trying to reach through the book to her reader and fish for them to say "No, you're really not that bad! You're good, you're pretty, you're brave!" Needy. That's a good word for Annie. I just did not enjoy spending time with her. If you're the kind of person who screens calls from your acquaintances who are very needy and "quirky," don't even think of picking up this book. You'll be frustrated and angry the whole time you're reading it. You'll be angry at Annie for being such a quirky drip, but you'll mostly be angry at yourself because you picked up the book and started reading her story in the first place. If, on the other hand, you're one of those special and fabulous people who can get along with anyone, and who is genuinely entertained by protracted monologues, you might very well find Annie charming, quirky in a good way, and enjoyable to hang out with while you read her story.

I do want to leave this review on a less-mean note, because as I said in the beginning, this seems like a new and fresh way to tell a story. I like the idea of a "raw" manuscript packaged as a finished book, because it makes the reader feel as though they're on the inside of the story, or at least on the inner ring of the fringes of the narrator's story, as though they're a trusted friend reading a first-draft copy. But this particular "raw" manuscript was a bit too much so, and I found myself marking up between the lines and in the margins as though Annie and I were in a writing workshop together. There are so many cases when the story could be really, really sharp if some of the digressions and contemplations of one's navel were eliminated.

I do like the footnotes in a work of fiction. Nabokov used footnotes/endnotes in "Pale Fire" to brilliant effect. Here's the rub, though: when you're already trying for cutesy, or "quirky," and the manuscript itself is something very close to stream-of-consciousness and the reader might already find herself lost in the "stream," perhaps it is unwise to add in the footnotes too. Just too much. The two together make for one huge mess, unless the reader is incredibly patient.

First time novelist Jane Berentson has created a very likable character in Annie Harper. She's someone with whom we can laugh, shed a tear, and identify. Sometimes her struggles and questions are ours.

At 24 Annie is an elementary school teacher in Tacoma, Washington. She's unmarried but very much attached to David who is being sent to Iraq. He'll be gone for a year, 365 lonely days and nights for Annie. In order to fill her time she decides to write a memoir recounting these days of stress, coping, and making-do. Her original title is "Wartime Alone Time: When Abstinence Fights For Freedom." However, that title will frequently change as she narrates this year of her life in chapters.

Her mother is stalwart, at the ready to feed, hug, and comfort. However, Annie doesn't seem to want or need maternal tending. She agrees when her mother insists that she come by the morning David leaves. Clearly her mother has made plans as Annie finds "There was the special quiche she knows I love. Fresh melons all cut up. Kleenex strategically placed throughout the house in places I'd never seen it while growing up." The Kleenex was unused.

Annie also spends time with an old school friend, Gus. He's a guy who knows her pretty well, knows her well enough to call her in the middle of the night to come and help him scrape painted pumpkins off the windows of the Dairy DeLite.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that happens to Annie between the emails and sporadic phone calls from David. There are, of course, her students who have a gift for asking embarrassing yet straight to the point questions when they're not all speaking at once or creating minor mischief. The youngsters are described neatly and well by author Berentson.

As much as Annie thinks the days will never end they do as she volunteers at a retirement center and gets a pet - believe it or not, a chicken. What Annie had thought would be a tedious, slow year holds many surprises for her as she struggles to identify her feelings about life, war, and love.

Jane Berentson's debut novel will leave readers wanting to hear more from this talented author.

- Gail Cooke

In the hands of a more matured writer, this book could have been good. Perhaps if Ms. Berentson had set the manuscript aside and tried it again when she was a little older she may have been able to craft a less hyperactive, frenetic story. Thoughts come out of nowhere and references are made (and then footnoted and then appendixed) to minor plot points and characters as if the writer is manic and has to get it ALL out right now. You can just feel the ghosts of countless !!!!!!!! that the editors probably took out of most sentences. The concept of the story intrigued me but the execution fell flat. I finished the book in order to give it a review, but it was hard going as it went along. I lost interest in her story, her friends, her spazziness, her life, her everything before the middle of the book. I felt worn out after a few pages with the prattle that makes up Annie's inner dialogue, wondering if perhaps she has an undiagnosed bipolar problem or ADHD.

To make matters worse, Miss Harper is not a sympathetic character in many ways -- a grown woman who teaches elementary school, she comes across as a potty-mouth, airhead party girl who drank her way through her state school and took whatever career looked like the least amount of work and where she could draw with crayons all day. It makes me wonder what her boyfriend, David, whose character is level headed, sober, and intelligent, saw in her in the first place.

I would pass this one by.

I have tried and tried, but I just can't get into this book, and have finally given up (which I HATE to do).

While I tried to keep in mind that the "twist" on this book is that it's a memoir in the making (i.e., first draft and notes), the "stream of consciousness" style really got on my nerves. Instead of a story made of carefully chosen themes and words, this book felt like one big long ramble, and an immature one at that. It felt like the author was trying way too hard to be spontaneous and clever. I thought the swear words seemed forced, and the endless footnotes were extremely tedious.

Bottom line - I'm tossing this one.

Was I crazy about this book? No! Did I think I would be? Yes! But overall, I found it to be an average, light read with some room for improvement by a first time author. Written cleverly as if it were Annie Harper's own manuscript, the book may be hard to follow in places because of the unusual format which even included footnotes. Miss Harper is a third grade teacher who has to withstand the loneliness of her boyfriend, David, being sent to Iraq. She spends her time in different volunteer situation, often with her good friend Gus, which in the end, leads to a rather predictable relationship....she starts to question her feelings for David as the war drags on but also how she feels toward Gus who had been just a friend but now there are some romantic tendencies involved. Miss Harper was at her best when she was doing her job teaching those third grade students. I am sure the author has taught before as she was right on with the description of Annie's school time and those students were one of the nicest parts of the story. For a light summer read, I think this was fine but warning to those who don't like a different format, this is not the book for you. However, if you are open to reading this as the main character's own manuscript, then you will find it a fun read.

`Miss Harper Can Do It' tells the tale of an elementary teacher whose boyfriend has been deployed to Iraq. She writes of her reflections on self and surroundings during that year.
My problem in reading these reflections is that I felt so disconnected with any empathy to her, much as she seems to feel to the military life that her boyfriend is leading, not just because she is against the war and has a huge reaction against the news of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but she feels one incident chisels its' way between her and him - it destroys. She writes of the stupid flag waving departure. It's difficult to summon up empathy for one who seems to lack that emotion for a person with whom she is supposedly in love with.
I cannot say that I see growth in her through the year, even with changing situations between her and different acquaintances. She speaks of her brain turning to mush because her guy is gone, but at least there is no evidence of that either. I just felt no emotion for what was a book that seemed to have such a good premise to begin with.

This book is a good easy read, very light. The lovers separated by war storyline is timely if a bit simplified in this book. The real action is in the 24-year-old learning to be alone and enjoy/create the non-romance parts of her life.

How Annie creates her own life while boyfriend David is deployed to Iraq is the true star of this story. Her anxiety over filling the time while he's gone is something many women experience--after break-ups, in-between relationships, etc. Living without a man leaves a big void that most of us immediatlely seek to fill with another man/love interest. Annie fills her time with a job teaching third grade, a new friend--93-year-old retirement home resident (Loretta) a new pet chicken (Helen) and her long-time friend, Gus. She does spend quite a bit of time agonizing over her now long-distance relationship with David, but that seems to lessen quite a bit as her new life takes shape.

Like other reviewers, I most enjoyed the scenes with Annie's students. The third-graders are some of the best characters in the book and the scenes there are the most fun. Max, Annie's (and my) favorite student is so wonderful that you just can't get enough of him!

This is a good summer read--enjoyable and fun.