LoveBooksAZ

Salman Rushdie, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

2012-01-14T02:41:00.000-08:00

Harrowing and brilliant, but as I told a friend the other day, it's a bit like riding a bicycle downhill with your hands off the handlebars. You surrender temporal logic and just leave off expecting conventional sentences; right off, the narrator, 31-year-old Saleem Sinai says his book is "an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors." The novel doesn't follow the usual first-person-narrating-his-life line--born in 1947 in India at the same moment the country became independent, lived, and almost-died quite a few times, including a nightmarish episode in the jungle and by a sniper's bullet during the war in the 1970s. Instead, the book has its own inner logic, metaphorical and associative rather than linear. So in the chapter called "Snakes and Ladders," we get Saleem writing about his boyhood, when he liked to play the game "Snakes and Ladders" (Chutes and Ladders), although his father would prefer he plays chess because it's a smarter game; but in the same chapter, there's a rumor that a mad Bengali snake-charming was traveling the country, luring snakes out of captivity; there's a man who raises snakes for research living in a room above them; and a description of how Saleem nearly died on his first birthday and was saved by being given a mixture containing snake venom (so not all snakes are bad, unlike the game); and (though the ladders in the game go up) a servant who stole things is sent down a ladder out of the house. The effect is more like a web than a line. Another thing I loved about the book was Padma. While Saleem is writing the book, she cooks and cleans around him, and she's a wonderful, no-nonsense foil. "But what is so precious," Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air updownup in exasperation, "to need all this writing-shiting?" Throughout, the language is playful, two-edged, something to relish. "I was born ... on the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came." "Saffron minutes and green seconds." Dense, wide-ranging, and not a fast read, one to savor.
Has anybody out there read his non-fiction?

Stef Penney, THE INVISIBLE ONES

2012-01-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

Another good suspenseful novel ... but I have to confess I liked her first (TENDERNESS OF WOLVES) better. I'm not sure why. Like TOW, this novel shifts between points of view--this one between 14-year-old JJ (a Gypsy, a Traveler) and Ray Lovell, a half-Romany private investigator who is asked to solve the disappearance of Rose Janko. It's well told, and the ending reveals a "secret" that is fair, in the sense that the clues are there, when you flip back through. But I think TOW had more power and passion behind it. Still, I'd recommend this one; it's definitely near the top of the stack of suspense/mystery novels I've read. Tana French (another favorite author, of In the Woods) wrote the blurb for the back, and this book reads (to me) very much like hers ... the troubled, drinking Rob Macky with his mess of a love life is fairly close to Ray Lovell.

Jonathan Miles, DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES

2011-12-20T10:22:00.000-08:00

Ok, so my bookshelves are sagging and I had this idea (it being the end of 2011 and a good time to do away with the old) that I'd go through my books and find some I could donate to the local library. (They sell them at their little shop.) The problem is that I picked up this book--one I had read (according to my note on the front cover) with my bookclub in August 2009--and started reading it again. Instead of sorting books, I reread the whole thing.
Not only did I stall out on the sorting project, I think I may keep this slim volume. It's a debut novel by a good writer, about a 53-year-old failed-poet-turned-translator who made hash of his life through his 20s and 30s--married, had a kid, alienated them, spent a lot of time with Mr. Smirnoff. Now he's been invited to his daughter's wedding, and he's trying to get there, except that American Airlines has him stalled at Chicago's O'Hare, and he's going to miss the wedding (like he's missed his daughter's whole life). What starts out as an angry letter to AA turns into a meditation on his life, where things went wrong, and the difference between loving the *idea* of something and loving the thing itself. It's funny and heartbreaking all at once. He also plays with language, which I always like: "They say a watched pot never boils but baby it's tough not to watch when you're neck-deep in the pot.""I take an oversized amount of pride in the fact that I've never worn a wristwatch since my thirteenth birthday when my father gave me a Timex and I smashed it with a nine-iron to see how much licking would stop its ticking (not much, as it turned out)."
It's going back on my shelf. I need to find some books I don't like.

Jay Mathews, WORK HARD, BE NICE

2011-12-16T08:51:00.001-08:00

An engaging, inspiring read about the two teachers who started the KIPP Schools (Knowledge is Power Program) to help low-income, at-risk students graduate from high school. The two teachers Mathews describes, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, began their careers in the Teach For America program; they're doggedly persistent and passionate, but humble, openly admitting that they don't have all the answers and that they made plenty of mistakes along the way. The book isn't polemical but offers plenty of insights about education and what worked for these teachers and these kids.

Nancy E. Turner, THESE IS MY WORDS

2011-11-26T07:56:00.000-08:00

I stayed up until 3 a.m. last night reading this one--one of my new TOP 10 picks for the year. Based on the story of her great-grandmother's life in the Arizona Territories (1881-1901), Turner wrote the book as a diary that Sarah Prine begins in her late teens as she and her family set out for Texas, with horrible consequences. Part historical tale, part love story, it's gritty and real and poignant. Even the marginal characters are round and well-drawn, with their own wishes and histories. It took me about 20 pages to get in and then I did not put it down; it reminded me of Mrs. Mike, another memoir about a girl carving out a life in the wilderness. This book won the Arizona Author Award and was a finalist for the Willa Cather.

Brad Parks, FACES OF THE GONE

2011-11-26T07:52:00.000-08:00

Enjoyable debut mystery novel starring an investigative reporter (by a former reporter for The Washington Post). Plenty of murder and some good twists, though there are marks of the "first novel"--things like a page and half on why the newspaper industry is having financial problems and characters whose psychology shifts a bit from beginning to end. But it's an engaging read, and I'd recommend if you're in the mood for a mystery.

Annemarie Selinko, DESIREE

2011-10-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

The fictionalized autobiography of Eugenie Desiree Clary, daughter of a silk merchant of Marseilles, former fiancee to Napoleon, and wife of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, later King of Sweden. (Yes, she was a real person, with an almost unreal life.) One of my favorite novels as a teen, it was written in 1951 and translated from the German; it's a good old-fashioned, well-researched, thoroughly engaging read. Takes you through French history from the late days of the Revolution through Napoleon's campaigns, and his death, yet remains Desiree's story. First lines: "A woman can usually get what she wants from a man if she has a well-developed figure. So I've decided to stuff four handkerchiefs into the front of my dress tomorrow; then I shall look really grown up."

Kathryn Erskine, MOCKINGBIRD

2011-10-23T12:41:00.000-07:00

A beautifully written middle-grade about a girl with Asperger's who must come to terms with her older brother's death during a high school shooting. Wonderfully layered, written so words and images play. The "Mockingbird" is (of course) from "To Kill A Mockingbird," which movie Caitlin has watched; her brother calls her Scout; at the time of his death he was working on a chest as part of his Eagle Scout badge. It all fits together, sometimes in unexpected ways. National Book Award Winner.

Michael Morpurgo, WAR HORSE

2011-10-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

A well-written middle-grade (a runner up for the Whitbread) that has captured the attention of plenty ... partly because now it's been turned into a Broadway show and a major motion picture. I found myself making comparisons with Lassie Comes Home (the desperate trek back to the one True Master) and Black Beauty (there's even a scene, as with BB and Ginger, when Joey, the War Horse, sees his friend and former harness-mate dead, having been worn to pieces by man's cruelty). In Black Beauty, Anna Sewell constructed an argument against animal cruelty (remember the bearing rein?!); here, Morpurgo has an antiwar message. I don't mean that this book is a re-do or even derivative--only that there are deep mythic structures of homecoming, longing (for love, for peace), and loss that I think tend to find their way into books about anthropomorphized animals because they are so painful; but, as in fantasy novels, we can read about them at one remove from ourselves.

Stephen Kelman, PIGEON ENGLISH

2011-10-20T01:26:00.001-07:00

Shattering first novel about a boy from Ghana who has just moved to the London projects with his mother and two sisters. He's eleven and observant (which is charming for the reader, but deadly for the boy), and despite the senseless murder that opens the book, and the fallout from it, his voice remains frank and hopeful: "Manik's papa's quite hutious. He's always red-eyes. He knows swordfighting. Asweh, I'm glad I'm not Manik's enemy! Manik's papa put my tie on for me and made the knot. He showed me how to take the tie off without untying it. You just make a hole big enough to get your head through then you take the tie off over your head That way you don't have to tie the tie every day. It even works. Now I'll never have to tie my tie my whole life. I beat the tie at his own game!"
Harri has several (human) friends and also finds a friend in a pigeon that flies into his window--a benevolent pigeon whose voice comes in italics and who is an intermediary between the boy and God. (Sounds bizarre, but it works.) The narrative has two levels--Harri's 11-year-old related experience of the violent events around him and the reader's experience, for the boy's narrative reveals more than he knows. Beautifully done.

Books for the young reader: Between Judy Moody and Twilight

2011-10-18T03:44:00.000-07:00

Do you have one of those Avid Upper Middle-Grade Readers?

Signs include: anywhere from 1-6 books lying half-read, spine-up, on furniture around the house at the end of the day (which you know you shouldn't pick up, teaches them all the wrong habits--grin); the phrase "Yeah, Mom, at the end of the chapter" uttered when asked to do chores; a flashlight under her pillow; a sensory dysfunction that manifests itself as an inability to hear when her olfactory organ is in a book.

I'm often asked, what do you let your 11-year-old reader read? People will tell me their daughters (it's usually girls) can read virtually anything (so far as skill level, sentence structure, and vocabulary) but need themes that are emotionally relevant for a middle-grader (roughly age 8-13). She's beyond Judy Moody, but not ready for Twilight. Well, here is my list of titles (supplemented by suggestions from my own AUMGR). Some of these are reviewed elsewhere on my blog.

Do you have any to add? My daughter's burned through these, and I'm still looking!! : )

Relatively new releases (as in things that weren't around when I was an AUMGR)

Diane Stanley, The Silver Bowl
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
M. Ende, The Neverending Story
Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me
Michael Mopurgo, War Horse (will be a movie soon)
Sharon Creech, The Wanderer and Walk Two Moons
Michelle Houts, The Beef Princess of Practical County
Andrew Clements, Things Not Seen and Things Hoped For
Julia Durango, Sea of the Dead (historical adventure)
Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts and sequels (historical, about a boy whose father takes a job on Alcatraz, by turns funny and poignant)
Linda Sue Park, A Single Shard
Ann Rinaldi, Cast Two Shadows; The Fifth of March; The Coffin Quilt; The Hidden Staircase (verges on YA, complicated themes); this writer offers solid historical fiction about girls; well-drawn plots and settings, ie. Civil War, the Hatfield-McCoys, a New Mexico convent; some are better than others)
Patterson, Bridge to Terabithia (must confess I've never liked this one, but my daughter does)
Gail Carson Levine, Enchanted (she has other titles as well, in this vein) and Two Princesses of Bamarre
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Paula Fox, The Slave Dancer
Ann M. Martin, A Corner of the Universe
Laurie Halse Anderson, Fever, Chains and Forged (but maybe steer clear of her novel Speak, about date rape, for this UMG group)
Kirby Larson, Hattie Big Sky
Karen Cushman, The Midwife's Apprentice
Kate DeCamillo, The Tiger Rising
Hale, Princess Academy
Lesley Blume, Tennyson
John Grogan, Marley & Me

Classics (books I read as an AUMGR)

(NOTE: these books often depended less on immediate thrilling action and--hate to say it--tend to be better written than some of the fare out there these days; if your child is reluctant, read some aloud; sometimes it "takes")

Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, Wind in the Door, Swiftly Tilting Planet
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie series (the later ones, esp. Little Town on the Prairie, are better for AUMGRs; early ones are a bit "young")
Carol Ryrie Brink, Caddie Woodlawn (tomboy girl growing up in Wisconsin; good for younger AUMGR)
Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond (historical adventure/romance, but clean)
Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins; Thunder Rolling in the Mountains; The Black Pearl; Streams to the River, River to the Sea
JC George, Julie of the Wolves
Louisa May Alcott, LIttle Women
LM Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables series
Irene Hunt, Up a Road Slowly (for older AUMGRs; this is probably my favorite UMG/YA book ever; Witch of Blackbird Pond is #2) and Across Five Aprils
CS Lewis's Narnia series
Benedict and Nancy Freedman, Mrs. Mike (16-year-old Katherine moves from Boston to Canada, meets a Mounty, marries; true story, great voice)
The Diary of Anne Frank (for older)
Doughty, Crimson Moccasins

Adventure and other series: If your reader gets hooked, you are off the hook for finding a new book, for a bit. I've starred the books that have high "boy" appeal.

*John Flanagan's "The Ranger's Apprentice" series about a young boy who trains to be a spy in a fantasy world that sounds a lot like England/Scotland (about 10 books in the series)
Brandon Mull, The Fablehaven Series
The Penderwicks (and sequels)
Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society and sequels
*Barry/Pearson, Peter and the Starcatchers series (about Peter Pan before he was Peter Pan; about half a dozen in the series)
*Chris Bradford, The Young Samurai series (may be too scary, dark for some; I'd recommend for the 10+ crowd)
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (OK, the premise is dark ... kids fighting kids to the death in an arena at the direction of evil politicians ... but it is "clean," with no sex, no swearing; it is primarily a book about teenage alliances; and Katniss the heroine rocks. NOT for every reader, but for some older middle-graders.) This is the first in a trilogy; the others are Catching Fire, Mockingjay (and the good guys win); compulsively readable
Kathryn Lasky, Guardians of Ga'hoole series
Anything by Rick Riordan--he has three series out right now, my daughter says
Sarah Prineas, The Magic Thief series
The Royal Diaries series from Scholastic (Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, etc.)
Jessica Day George, Dragon Flight series
Angie Sage, the Septimus Heap series (Magyk is the first)
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass trilogy
Harry Potter (of course)

Gil Adamson, THE OUTLANDER

2011-10-16T15:42:00.000-07:00

The author is a poet (*Primitive*, 1991 and *Ashland*, 2003), and some of the language makes me a bit envious, wishing I'd written it myself. It never sounds as good out of context, but here's some excerpts: "the horses began to walk alert, their ears scissoring with curiosity"; "the ground around them [was] poxed with fallen fruit that lay in layers of years, squelching beneath the horses' hooves"; he had a "look on his face that would etch glass." Much of it made me want to reread the lines for their sound and freshness.
But the plot felt thin to me. A woman kills her husband (he's unambiguously rotten; he abandons her on their honeymoon night to gamble, losing $50 and a watch, and then cheats on her); and his two brothers chase her through the West in 1903. That's the story. In the wilderness, she meets a man who takes care of her and sleeps with him; she meets a man who takes care of her and then meets his wife; she meets a man who takes care of her and moves in with him. (The narrator recognizes the repetition: "Here she was, wandering behind a man again.") Finally she gets caught by the two brothers. Breaks out of jail. Hooks back up with man #1.
There's plenty of tension in the "chase" narrative ... I (for one) know those frightful nightmares of being chased by someone who comes closer and closer and nearly nabs me. But aside from the fact that she's not very good with horses or snares, we don't know much about the widow Mary. Maybe that's why I just didn't care that much about her, whether she lived or died, whether she was caught or not. Another reader might feel differently, maybe especially if they like stories set in the American West at the turn of the century.
But this was Adamson's first novel, and I would give her next one a look.

Alexandra Fuller, COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS

2011-10-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

By turns heart-rending and hilarious, this is Fuller's memoir of her mother, who, it seems at the outset, has not quite managed to forgive her daughter for writing what she calls the "Awful Book" (the title is never named; I imagine she means DON'T LETS GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT, which laid bare Alexandra's peculiar and at times traumatic childhood).
Prose is lovely and quirky and witty as usual. Opening line: "Our Mum--or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself--has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in *them*) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe."
The cover shows Nicola with her first best friend, a chimpanzee, who is dressed in a blue jumper that matches her own. It's all very curious ... otherworldly ... and at times painfully sad. Nicola loses three of her five children, survives a brutal war, and relocates again and again with her husband, the pair of them seeming at various times happily aimless, uneasily restless, and searching for something unnamable. But by the end, it seems that the Awful Book has become something of a joke that the mother and daughter share, and that Nicola's governing characteristic is her resilience.

Geraldine Brooks, CALEB'S CROSSING

2011-10-11T01:27:00.000-07:00

Another wonderful historical novel from Brooks, this one set in the 1660s on the small island of Noepe (Martha's Vineyard) and at Harvard. Narrated by a Calvinist minister's daughter, Bethia Mayfield, it begins with pages that she writes, from the time she is 15, as she looks back on her friendship with a boy she calls Caleb, a Wampanoag who eventually goes to the "Indian College" at Harvard, created for their conversion. As usual with Brooks, many of her sentences sing: "The tasks stretch out from the gray slough before dawn to the guttered taper of night. ... I love the fogs that wreathe us all in milky veils, and the winds that moan and keen in the chimney piece at night." Caleb's father Tequamuck is a seer who predicts the destruction the Europeans will bring; it's embodied in the brilliant, passionate boy who tries to cross from one culture to the other. Knowing how the story would end didn't matter; I found myself dreading it all the way.

Erik Larson, IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: Love, Terror and an American Fami

2011-09-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Like many other people I know, I loved Larson's DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. But I was disappointed in BEASTS; I have to confess I read the first few hundred pages but didn't finish it. I think the topic of an ambassador's family in 1930s Berlin is fascinating and important; but while DEVIL had that wonderful dual-plot structure (vicious murders/building of the World's Fair), this book seems to be structured as a serial accounting of the different Nazis that the ambassador's daughter flirted with, talked with (including Hitler), or slept with. Part of my problem was that I didn't find her engaging as a character--although perhaps my expectations are unfair, the result of 20/20 hindsight, an understanding she couldn't possibly have; she is by turns persistently astonished by what she sees around her and sympathetic to Germany's right to rise up.

Nancy Pickard, THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING

2011-09-14T09:15:00.001-07:00

A good murder mystery/midwest tale. Told in two time periods: when Jody is 3 and her father is killed and her mother disappears; and when Jody is in her twenties and the supposed murderer Billy Crosby is set free by his newly-minted lawyer son. There are very few cliches here--Billy doesn't reform; and the murders mount. But once I found out whodunnit, I felt vaguely disappointed because although there were many clues (as to whodunnit) that pointed to other people, there were few (if any) clues, psychological or circumstantial, (and I breezed back through the book) pointing to the person who had. I always find that a bit of a trick. But Pickard writes wonderfully--some moments just lift off the page.

Jeff Shaara, THE FINAL STORM

2011-08-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

The battle of the Pacific in WWII.
This is how I get my history lessons, having done a bad job with social studies in high school. But I have to say I've been disappointed in his last two books. The first ones Shaara wrote--particularly on the Civil War and WWI--were so tightly woven, and layered, with the story told from a variety of perspectives and every voice different. War is a horror, of course; but these earlier books were more about history and individual experiences and fears. These last have felt rushed and less carefully written, and capture much less of the personal experiences of the soldiers and airmen involved. I found myself missing them.

Hillary Jordan, MUDBOUND

2011-07-31T21:29:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a knockout of a novel. (I'm not the first to say so ... my friend Barbara thrust it at me, insisting it was one of the best things she'd read in a while ... oh, and it won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction.) Set in the Mississippi Delta during WWII, it tells the story of a white man's farm where sharecropping still takes place. Told from five different perspectives ... yes, they all sound different, hooray, the white soldier doesn't sound like the black midwife ... it's a story about money, rage, racism, what war does to people, how war and race intersect, what fathers do to sons, how our private fears and longings can have profound public consequences. The only part that jarred--and this is because the book feels so very fresh and original in other ways--was the part where the black soldier Ronsel liberates Dachau. I've already read accounts, including how Americans gave out chocolate and unintentionally killed people. But that's the one little bit that felt recycled (and I'm not saying it didn't belong) in an otherwise original, suspenseful, brilliant book.

Aimee Bender, THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE

2011-07-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

An unusual novel, about a girl named Rose who, beginning on her 9th birthday, can taste people's emotions in her food. So she can taste when her mother is depressed, angry, cannot choose which of her many talents to pursue, begins to have an affair. Her brilliant brother Joe also has an unusual talent--he turns into furniture and disappears. Near the end of the book, the father of this curious duo--whose own father wore a "strap" around his nose because he could smell things about people--admits to Rose the reason he cannot step into hospitals: because he senses that he might discover his special talent. She longs to drag him to a hospital, but he refuses. The book is thick with physical details (tastes, smells, sounds); the effect is strange, both real and allegorical, and I felt a lingering sadness after reading.

Patricia Reilly Giff, WILD GIRL

2011-07-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Tween novel about a girl named Lidie, a talented horse rider, who dreams of racing horses. Her father and brother left Brazil years before to start a life, planning to send for her. The novel begins the day she leaves Brazil to join them in New York. There, she discovers the difficulties of navigating other people's expectations. She must assimilate to a new environment (her English is not fluent, and her teacher doesn't understand that she is advanced in math) and find a way to reintegrate herself with her father and brother, who still think she likes pink and Minnie Mouse and doesn't know how to sit a horse. Told partly by "Wild Girl," a filly her father has bought and partly in first-person by Lidie.

Carolyn Marsden, MOON RUNNER

2011-07-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

A brief, delicately drawn book about a girl who learns that she likes to run and then must choose between beating her best friend in a race (and possibly losing the friendship) or losing on purpose. Her coach lets her join the relay and she and her friend can race and win together.

Sherri L Smith, FLYGIRL

2011-07-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

An engaging historical YA about a black girl from 1940s Louisiana, Ida Mae Jones, who's light-skinned enough to pass for white and who learned how to fly a crop-duster from her father. After Pearl Harbor, when the Americans join the war, she wants to apply for the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots), ferrying and testing aircraft. But she has to pass not only her qualifying pilot tests in the very Jim Crow town of Sweetwater, Texas but also the "white" test and the "woman" test (in a wholly male Army). Some clumsy bits early on, with scenes that feel a bit inserted to "show" the conflict between her old life and new, vis-a-vis a black boy she knew in school and her best friend Jolene, who is too black to pass. But once Ida Mae reaches Sweetwater, Texas, the story rolls out wonderfully, with Ida Mae courageously trying to found her identity on what she does (fly) rather than her skin color.

Molly Gloss, THE HEARTS OF HORSES

2011-07-20T05:29:00.001-07:00

An historical novel about a 19-year-old female "horse whisperer" named Martha Lessen during WWI, who creates a circuit for herself of twelve horses that need to be "broke" among a group of farms in Oregon--but she does it the good way. It's a coming-of-age story, about a young woman finding her somewhat unconventional place in the world, and a romance (with both horses and a man named Henry), but I loved best how some of the minor characters are so well sketched, how Gloss captures voices. She has a wonderful, sometimes wry, turn of phrase, sometimes for the narrator (it's told in 3rd person) and sometimes to give us an immediate feel for her characters. "There was turnip and carrot in the soup, and a chicken may have run through the pot on its way to somewhere else, or more likely this was one of the meatless days that had become patriotic in the last few months." And Louise (whose husband first gives Martha a job): "Well my goodness, I have a sister and a cousin both named Martha, so that's a name will come easy to my lips." An enjoyable read, especially for those who love horses, and clean enough for tweens and up, I think. Gloss's earlier book THE JUMP-OFF CREEK was a finalist for PEN/Faulkner, and I liked this one enough that I'll go find it.

Chris Bohjalian, SECRETS OF EDEN

2011-07-17T10:51:00.001-07:00

A literary murder mystery, set in a Vermont small town, in which George strangles and Alice and then kills himself with a gun (or so it seems). The story is told from the points of view of the Baptist pastor of the town (Stephen Drew), the investigator (Catherine), Stephen's new girlfriend who writes about angels (Heather) and whose parents enacted a similar murder/suicide drama, and Katie, the daughter of Alice and George who tells the truth at last. It's well-written and suspenseful; each of the four voices sounds different. (So often multiple points of view sound too much alike.) My only gripe is that Catherine felt like a "stereotypical" woman investigator, tough-talking, sensitive underneath, and willfully wrong about what really happened. But a good read.

James M Tabor, BLIND DESCENT

2011-07-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

Think "Journey to the Center of the Earth" times two. The split account (although the first, Bill Stone's adventure, gets many more pages than the second) of two men (and their crews, some of whom are women) exploring supercaves. The American Bill Stone explores Cheve Cave in southern Mexico; and the Ukrainian Alexander Klimchouk goes into the freezing supercave Krubera in the Republic of Georgia. Both are trying to find the deepest cave on earth. For those who liked "Into Thin Air" or books of that ilk, this is a good one. The accounts of near drowning (and drowning) in silt-filled water thousands of feet below the surface gave me nightmares.

Debra Dean, THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD

2011-07-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

This enjoyable debut novel gives us two stories in one: the first is a story about a woman named Marina who worked at the Hermitage to wrap and ship paintings out of the Leningrad museum as the Nazis approached the city. From the title (a reference to the many Madonna paintings in the museum), I expected this to be the main storyline. But I came away feeling (in a good way) that it is not; this novel is about memory and how the pieces of past and present fit together, in much the same way the vehicle and tenor (though those categories can be problematic) fit together in a metaphor. The second story is about Marina, now in her eighties and living in the US, experiencing Alzheimer's. Dean has written the narrative in temporally disjointed "fragments"--bouncing from the events of 1941 to present day and back to the short lectures about artists and paintings that Marina would give as a docent. In 1941, another Hermitage worker, Anya, explains to Marina a memory trick: when she had to memorize the entire Law of God, all the Roman emperors and their reigns, etc. she created a memory palace, where the rug, or door, reminded her of x or y, so she could remember it. Marina begins to create her own memory palace, to remember the palace (Hermitage) and which paintings were in which rooms. (This is why I feel the book plays with notions of memory, metaphor, and literal meanings.) In the end, when Marina goes missing (like a painting), her family searches for her, and we readers (privy to her memories the way her children and her husband are not) understand the logic of what she's done.

Judy Blundell, STRINGS ATTACHED

2011-07-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

Another very good, beautifully written YA novel from the writer of WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED, with the same sort of high stakes and rich emotion. 17-year-old Kit Corrigan from Providence goes to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer and actress. Providence and New York are linked through her--because she connects Billy Benedict, the angry boy she loves, with his father Nate, who is a mob lawyer and longs to make amends by giving Kit an apartment in New York when she desperately needs it (though there are "strings attached"), with her father who once was Nate's bootlegging partner, and with her aunt Delia who was once Nate's mistress in that very apartment. Her past is full of lies and bribes, deaths and sudden disappearances that she doesn't know about or understand, and this book slowly unwinds that past until she does.

Rebecca Sklootk, THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

2011-07-09T18:09:00.000-07:00

There's been so much praise for this book that I don't feel I need to add any. It's a triple narrative: the story of a black woman with cervical cancer whose cells were taken without her knowledge by a (white) researcher at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1900s; the story of the field of cellular research, including its uneven development; and the story of a persistent journalist trying to write Lacks's story with erratic, emotional help from her (impoverished, dysfunctional) family. Told with compassion and in a straightforward voice, it's a page-turner. (Who knew the story of some cervical cells could be such a compelling read?) Plenty of complexity and many gray areas.

Scott O'Dell, THE BLACK PEARL

2011-07-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

A great upper-middle-grade novel. Otherworldly, set in Baja California. The protagonist is a boy named Ramon Salazar whose father runs a fleet of boats that hunt for pearls. Ramon goes off on his own to find a huge black pearl that seems to have evil powers--an ability to encourage people's ambition, desire, and greed. Great reading for the tween set.

Jennifer Egan, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

2011-07-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

This novel is brilliant and sharp-edged and so clever I felt like my neurons were firing faster when I was reading it. It's sort of like a double serving of Starbucks latte, particularly chapter 9 by Jules Jones who is brilliant and manic. (Each chapter is focalized through a different character, with a distinct voice, either in third or first person.) Even her most incidental descriptions are cuttingly original. It's never ideal to take an author's words out of context because they never sound as clever but here are a few, of many: Sasha had commandeered two seats at a low table, a setup that made [her uncle] Tom feel like an ape, knees jammed under his chin. * [I wondered] how my ex-wife had managed to populate New York with thousands of women who looked nothing like her but still brought her to mind.
However, I found myself having a hard time caring about these characters--the pathological shoplifter, the schizophrenic who throws a fish onto his old friend's desk, the uncle who takes money from Sasha's mother to find her in Italy but instead spends all his time looking at art, the famous music exec who cheats on his wife with young girls hoping to make it big in the music industry. Maybe this is supposed to be a Fateful Warning to those of us who might live to see the world in the last chapter, where everyone texts instead of talks and global warming has turned New York City hot in January. Maybe it's because I'm coming off of Julia Glass, but I feel like there is very little softness, or compassion, or forgiveness in this book. Maybe that's the point.

Julia Glass, THE WHOLE WORLD OVER

2011-06-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

A beautifully crafted novel about the feelings and events and histories that bind people together. I found it interesting that Glass linked this book back to THREE JUNES through the character of Fenno. It's almost as if she created the link between those two novels to suggest (go meta? we do have a psychotherapist in this novel, named Alan) the ways that connections among people (characters) become apparent over time (through plot). In this novel, a group of about a dozen characters with seemingly disparate stories begin to forge connections--through an act of generosity such as helping to take care of a box of stray puppies, a common interest such as high-end cooking, a similar experience such as being a single adult wanting to adopt a child. Glass's characters are flawed but mostly kind, and though the book ends with 9/11 (the "crash" that brings together nearly everyone who survives) it's an optimistic novel. I loved how layered the novel is--there are references to everything from the lyrics to Broadway musicals to a dozen children's books to cooking recipes with esoteric spices. When I was in grad school they called this "intertextuality"--and I guess I see this novel drawing the links among all these texts as a metaphor for the links among these characters. Not that this is a novel with a message, but it's easy to take away the idea that we have only to look carefully (or be thrown into a particular situation) to see the connections.

Gennifer Choldenko, AL CAPONE DOES MY SHIRTS

2011-06-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

A solid middle-grade novel about a boy who moves to Alcatraz during the 1930s. His sister Natalie has something "wrong" (we might call it Asperger's); his father works two jobs at Alcatraz and is never around; his mother struggles to find a cure for Natalie; his neighbor is a pretty troublemaker who lures him into her schemes. Well-written, realistic but clean read for the tween crowd.

Tony Earley, JIM THE BOY

2011-06-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

Written in 2000, a charming story of a boy growing up in 1930s in a small town in North Carolina, with a heap of uncles and a single mother because his father (Jim the dad) died right before Jim the boy was born. It's told in third-person but focalized through the ten-year-old Jim's perspective. First line: "During the night something like a miracle happened: Jim's age grew an extra digit. He was nine years old when he went to sleep, but ten years old when he woke up. The extra number had weight, like a muscle, and Jim hefted it like a prize." But despite the wide-eyed boy's perspective that this first line suggests, Jim is no saint and this story isn't just sweet--it alludes to some fairly grisly pieces of American history, a mother who is too wrapped up in her husband's death, a horrible grandfather, the clash between mountain-folk and town-folk. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Glen Retief, THE JACK BANK: A MEMOIR OF A SOUTH AFRICAN CHILDHOOD

2011-06-15T04:54:00.000-07:00

This memoir is very engaging--and by turns harrowing, insightful, other-worldly. Retief's father is a computer programmer for the research department at Kruger National Park in South Africa, so among other things young Retief learns that there are 517 varieties of birds in the park and how it feels to come to school and find four lions on the basketball courts. The plot arc that governs the book, it seems to me, is Retief learning (or mislearning) about the links among sexuality, race, and violence and then unlearning them. So if at age 12 he links sexuality (and homosexuality) with violence because of the white prefect John who sexually and physically abuses him at his boarding school (I was physically wincing through this section), he unlearns the link later and begins to connect sexuality with love. Several times he writes about "that great cycle of apartheid violence--the apparatus whereby white boys are bullied when young so that they later they will know how to beat blacks into continued submission." I don't mean to make this sound like a "teaching" memoir--it's compulsively readable--but it provided a window into a world I don't know.

Helen Simonson, MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND

2011-06-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

This novel reminded me of Jane Austen. Not only does it concern "three or four families in a country village" in England, but there is a gently satiric tone that recalls Austen. This novel, set in Edgecombe St. Mary, portrays an older gentleman (with a fairly obnoxious money-driven son, at moments as ridiculous as Mr. Collins) who falls in love with the Pakistani shopkeeper Mrs. Ali and sends shock waves through the town. Mrs. Ali is almost an Elizabeth Bennet, with a sharp-eyed wit. A friend told me the book was "too slow"; but I didn't find it so. It is not a "page-turner," but as in Austen's novels, the plot turns on small events, gestures, or a word spoken out of turn, with the utmost attention paid to delicate shades of feelings.

Garth Stein, THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN

2011-05-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

I loved this book. Unexpectedly.

It's from a dog's point-of-view, which has been done before (and sometimes not very well). This "dog-teller" conceit provides a knowledge "triangle": on one side are the humans who know some things; Enzo provides a second side of the "truth" that only he can provide: Eve's not moody; she smells funny because she's got something wrong inside. Zoe's not willful because she's two; she's refusing to eat her chicken nuggets because they've gone bad. And what Enzo reports, we clever readers can piece together with what we know about the world (side #3) so we know even more than the dog! (Kudos to us.) Also, the governing metaphor of life as car-race has also been done before, although not so well or with so much good, feels real detail. (Tom Cruise in a bad movie ... ?)

But never mind what's been done before, differently, or not so well. This book is tender and true, with very few false notes. No perfect characters and several infuriating ones, whose worst comes out when they have to confront the worst. A very good read ... even for those without dogs. Bring kleenex.

Christina Haag, COME TO THE EDGE

2011-05-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

A well-crafted memoir by the actress Haag who had an on-again, off-again romance with John F. Kennedy, Jr. This is not a prurient memoir, for those who are looking for the ugly "skinny" on the Kennedy family. This is Haag's story, and she begins with her affluent childhood and her schooling with the nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on the Upper East Side; then her days at Brown and Juilliard for training in acting; her years spent taking parts in plays and bits in movies until she hit her stride; and her years of being, quite tenderly and deeply, in love. Most interesting to me, so far as insight into John Jr.'s psyche (which I must admit has never really captured my interest), was the episode when CH and JJr are vacationing in Jamaica. She has a broken leg; the two of them are in a kayak, without the rubber apron, without a bailer, quite ill-prepared. John pushes to try to make it to shore, to the beautiful beach, and despite her fear and resistance, they go. They nearly die trying to get in; then they nearly die trying to get back out. Afterwards, Christina is still shaken, angry and upset. "We could have died!" she tells him. "What a way to go," is his response.

C.S. Forester, MR. MIDSHIPMAN HORNBLOWER

2011-05-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a tale about 1790s British nautical history and found it here. Swashbuckling popular yarn, complete with a gangly hero who proves his worth unexpectedly. Dated 1948.

Isabel Wilkerson, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS

2011-05-24T17:33:00.000-07:00

This book tells the story of the great migration of six million Blacks from the South to the North over the course of about three generations. She slips back and forth between the biographical tales of three particular people (Ida Mae, who moved from Mississippi to Chiciago; George, Florida to Harlem; Robert, Louisiana to Los Angeles) and a general, well-researched historical discussion (that at times repeats). But the historical discussion is broad and astonishing. It addresses social, geographical, economic, and political aspects of race relations from 1920s-1970s; it also debunks several "myths" about blacks moving North that have unfortunately been taken, and perpetuated, for truths. Half-way through this book, I found myself amazed that race relations in this country are not worse than they are.

Thrity Umrigar, THE SPACE BETWEEN US

2011-04-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

Brilliant and poignant. Set in contemporary India, two women's lives cross and re-cross in ways they don't find out until later. Ties of gender overruled, in the end, by class lines. Beautifully done.

Elizabeth Brundage, THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

2011-04-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

What's interesting is EB puts the ending first ... the doctor is almost murdered and thrown into a basement. The rest of the book is finding out how he ended up there. My only gripes (and they're minor) are: (1) there is no nuance to the representation of the pro-lifers ... they pretty much all come off as complete whack-jobs (I'm pro-choice); (2) at the end, after she's made some astoundingly bad choices, the doctor's wife pretty much gets off scot-free. However, it's harrowing, dark, and a compelling page-turner ... I'd buy another by her ... but right now I am feeling in need of a very lite joke book.

Tea Obreht, THE TIGER'S WIFE

2011-04-12T13:37:00.001-07:00

Nothing to do with Tiger Moms! A beautiful, lyrical book, equal parts raw experience and magic. Natalia, a doctor, bravely crosses a new border in a war-torn countryside to bring desperately-needed vaccines to an orphanage; but to find her grandfather who recently died, she must listen to stories of a deathless man who gambles with her grandfather for a copy of The Jungle Book, and a tiger that was tamed by a deaf-mute and then chewed its own legs off. I found myself unevenly engaged--some parts were more compelling than others--but it's a very good debut novel by a writer who is only 25 (and looks about 16, by her picture).

Sarah Waters, FINGERSMITH

2011-03-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

Good writing and a wicked, twisted plot, set in Victorian England (my favorite). Two girls, set against each other by a vicious swindler only ever called "Gentleman" and a woman whose maternal instincts are ... shall we say, awry. Great historical details and plenty of evil and murk. My one gripe is the repetition: part 1 is told by Sue; part 2 is mostly the same events, told by Maud; part 3 is back to Sue. And I'm not sure that part 2 couldn't have been cut down to represent just Maud's childhood, until the Sue and Maud plots cross ... especially since I found the two girls' voices very similar. But a great, thrilling read.

Chris Cleeve, INCENDIARY

2011-03-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

Almost as harrowing as LITTLE BEE. He wrote this one first; I've never seen the movie; I'm not sure I could watch it. This novel probably has one of the most compelling first-person voices I've read--I almost wrote heard--it's that much of a "voice"--in a while. She loses her son and her husband in a bombing; and this narrative is an open letter to Osama bin Laden. Opening lines: "Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop. Well I wouldn't know about that I mean rock 'n' roll didn't stop when Elvis died on the khazi it just got worse. Next thing you know there was Sonny & Cher and Dexys Midnight Runners. I'll come to them later. My point is it's easier to start these things than to finish them. I suppose you thought of that did you?" One of the many elements that makes this novel almost poetic is the way the content and theme go hand-in-hand. If you've read LB, you can guess this book (INCENDIARY) is not going to have much in the way of closure. And that's part of the wretchedly sad point. There is no finish. And in this book, he suggests this from the shape and content of these first sentences to the structure of the whole narrative arc. Painful, but good.

Joyce Carol Oates, A WIDOW'S STORY

2011-03-17T10:25:00.001-07:00

JCO's memoir of the four months following her husband's sudden death from pneumonia. Heartfelt, sensitive, at times sharp, and beautifully written. It took me a full week to read; it's too intense to be read quickly. Comparisons with Joan Didion's YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING are inevitable, although I found the books quite different in tone. The small bits JCO writes about the doctors and hospitals I found alarming and infuriating ... her husband died of an infection acquired at the hospital; the nurse Jasmine is horridly insensitive and inappropriate; her own doctor (Dr. M--, with the exception of Jasmine, JCO names no names) stupidly misdiagnoses her shingles the first time around. But mostly I was left with a feeling of astonishment--that everything she wrote about--the visits to and from friends, the Fed-Ex and UPS sympathy deliveries, the emails and letters, her life with the cats, her lectures, planting the garden, the "death tasks"--happened in four months. Also very interesting was how she finally read the partial manuscript that her husband left behind, in which he represents her (as the character "Vanessa") and she speaks of the artist's need to be able to write and let go.

Conor Grennan, LITTLE PRINCES

2011-03-02T08:34:00.000-08:00

This reminded me of Jamie Zeppa's memoir of her two years in Bhutan. In this, the young American Grennan signs up for 3 months of volunteer work with children in Nepal (he claims it's a great line to use in bars) and gets sucked into loving these orphans, many of whom were trafficked away from their families. At the time when the Maoist rebels and the King's forces are at war, he tries to reunite the children with their parents, begin an orphanage, and start Next Generation Nepal. An engaging read.

David Mitchell, THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET

2011-02-28T10:05:00.000-08:00

This one was given to me by one of my most trustworthy reader friends (i.e., I don't think he's ever passed me a dud), but he warned me that this is not a page-turner. And he's right. It's a book to relish rather than race through--in fact, I found myself turning back at times to reread pages. At points, I found it a bit "writerly," with its metaphors. But most of it is genius. The plot? A young Dutch man (de Zoet) is a clerk for the Dutch East Indes Co., in 1799 on Dejima, a small island in Nagasaki Harbor. He's betrothed to Anna (back in Holland), but falls in love with Orito Aibagawa, a midwife with a startling burn on her face. Then Orito is spirited off to a strange shrine where the women are "engifted" by monks, only to have their newborns vanish. I won't tell any more (that's enough of a spoiler). Although the main "action" takes place over only a year, the novel has the feel of an epic. And (perhaps not surprising, giving the time period) it felt to me to have many of the same themes as late-18th and 19th-century novels. Trollope comes to mind first, with his themes of corruption and honor, how everyone has a price, whether it's money (easy to refuse, though most characters in this novel don't) or a beloved friend's life (much harder). Also Dickens, with his consciousness about language and representation (especially during the scenes where Jacob has to translate words like "repercussions" and explain the criminal connotations of the phrase "in broad daylight"); and the depictions of how vilely cruel one person can be to another.

Perhaps the thing I loved most was the cast of characters beyond Jacob; they all had such distinct voices. Excerpts never quite do a novel justice, but here is Fiacre Muntervary, explaining how he became a thief and prisoner: "We pawned Da's tools, but soon enough me, ma, five sisters, an' one little brother, Padraig, were living in a crumbling barn, where Padraig caught a chill, an' that's one less mouth to feed. Back in the city I tried the docks, the breweries, I tried feckin' everything, but no luck. So back I went to the pawnbroker ... and he says '[Your father's tools're] sold, handsome, but it's winter an' folks need coats. I pay shiny shillings for good coats. You understand me?'" And here's Van Cleef, on how he ended up in bed with his aunt Gloria: "Oh, lawful wedlock, awful bedlock yes, yes, ... Batavia-born I was, but sent to Amsterdam to learn the gentlemanly arts: how to spout bastard Latin, how to dance like a peacock, and how to cheat at cards. ... My 'aunt Gloria' was four years my junior and one-third the age of her proud groom [my cruel uncle] ... Gloria, you must remember, had rarely gone beyond the Singel Canal. Java was as far off as the moon. Farther, in fact, for the moon is, at least, visible from Amsterdam."

Stacy Schiff, CLEOPATRA

2011-02-23T20:57:00.000-08:00

This was another bookclub pick, and it seemed a sure thing. (As a side note, does anyone out there remember the movie The Sure Thing? I first saw it in college and caught part of it on TV the other night. Wow, Cusack was young back then. Oh yeah, so was I. Hm.)
Anyway, CLEOPATRA is everywhere. It's been on the bestseller list for weeks. It has received glowing reviews. Schiff is an acknowledged talent. So I was perplexed when everyone in my bookclub except for two hardy souls bailed on the book. Most gave it the required fifty-page try before pronouncing it "a slog," "unengaging," and "disappointing." Then, while traveling recently, I saw a friend who belongs to two bookclubs in the midwest. She said that with only one exception, everyone in both clubs had disliked it and failed to finish it.
So I sat down to study the book, curious to find out why it didn't seem to engage this disparate group of readers (most of whom are pretty omnivorous).
I think part of the problem is that--as with a trailer that doesn't quite match the movie--we have a certain set of expectations when we open a book called CLEOPATRA, as opposed to a book called, say, TAXATION IN THE 1960S. The book cover is marvelous, exotic, coy--the model's shoulders are draped in vibrant red that shades to rich purple; her hair is tidily pinned, but tendrils escape; her face, turned away, is barely visible but beautiful all the same. We've all read the myths and stories about Cleopatra. They're sensational, larger than life, intriguing. And perhaps unconsciously, we approach this book expecting to be intrigued, engaged, passionately interested from the first page.
But this book lacks two of the ingredients that tend to draw readers in: dialog and scenes. For example, at one point early on, Schiff describes Cleopatra's education: "Aeschylus and Sophocles, Hesiod, Pindar, and Sappho, would all have been familiar to Cleopatra and the clique of well-born girls at her side. As much for her as for Caesar, there was little regard for what was not Greek. She probably learned even her Egyptian history from three Greek texts. Some schooling in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astrology and astronomy ... She read aloud or was read to by teachers or servants." I'm not saying this sort of synopsis is a flaw. But I think most readers would be more engaged by a scene showing Cleopatra with her tutor.
So then I wondered if Schiff was reluctant to perform this smudging of the line between biography and historical fiction. I love historical fiction. I willingly--no gladly!--suspend my disbelief. I'm thinking of the works of, say, Jeff Shaara, in which he imagines the arguments between Eisenhower and Patton, for example. I don't believe for a minute that Shaara is accurately representing the words that were said between the two men (or that he expects us to think he is). But I'm thoroughly sucked in. And consider UNBROKEN. For all the accomplished research, the book is a page-turner because we are provided harrowing scenes, with dialog (accurate or not--and let's not even get into the problems of translating the Japanese to English). In striving to win readers to their version of the "truth," these writers (Shaara and Hillenbrand) could be said to sacrifice "accuracy." And if Schiff wants to stay closer to biography than historical fiction, so be it. But then a friend told me that she was listening to NPR and Schiff described the work as historical fiction. (I confess I haven't looked up that NPR string.)
Schiff's scholarship is ambitious and thorough. I'd say that a successful read of this book may simply require managing expectations. That said, I'd be interested in another book about Cleopatra. If anyone out there knows of a good one, please comment.

Joyce Maynard, THE GOOD DAUGHTERS

2011-02-23T20:40:00.001-08:00

This was a bookclub pick. I cannot say I enjoyed it very much. (Spoiler alert.) The plot hangs on an unlikely device: two girls are switched at the hospital just after birth. And it just so happens that the two girls, who were born on the same day, have a father in common! This man (he cheated on his wife one night in the middle of a storm) says nothing to fix the mistake. In fact, when his wife mentions her concerns, he stonewalls her.
The book is told from the two girls' perspectives, in alternating chapters. (We're seeing a lot of this in novels of the last few years; when done well, as in Little Bee or The Postmistress, it makes for an interesting read.) The problem is that in this book, the girls' voices are virtually indistingishable from each other. However, their appearances are not--so much so that the reader catches on to the fact that the daughters have been switched someplace before the middle of the book. How is it that most of the characters fail to notice that one girl is short and sort of dumpy and dark and likes plants (like all the girls in the farmer's family) and one girl is tall and blonde and beautiful and loves to draw (like the artistic mother in the other family)? The "good daughters" metaphor is forced to work hard ... toward the end, we're told that strawberry plants create daughters who are exact replicas of their parents.
I think this book will appeal to those who like Jodi Picoult's work (especially My Sister's Keeper). But it had too much melodrama for me.

Peter Allison, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T RUN: TRUE TALES OF A BOTSWANA SAFARI GUIDE

2011-02-03T15:44:00.001-08:00

A fun read. Short, lively stories (5-10 pp.) about a young man's adventures over the course of several years. Getting lost on a river with two friends, a first aid kit and some ramen noodles. Nearly being drowned. Being chased by a lion. Overrun with mice. Infatuated with birds. Tipped badly. Tipped well. You get the idea.

David Benioff, CITY OF THIEVES

2011-01-26T00:27:00.000-08:00

I reread this last night. It stands up to a second reading. Don't be thrown by the fact that the protagonist of the story--a young Russian, age fifteen, in 1940s Leningrad--has the last name Beniov and that the story begins with a frame narrative (purportedly) about David Benioff interviewing his grandfather. It's pure fiction. But Benioff wrote the screenplay for KITE RUNNER years ago, and this book reads like a movie--fast-paced and intensely visual. It's the story of two men--the young Beniov and Kolya, a brash, lewd, sly Cossack--who are granted a reprieve for their respective crimes (looting a dead German paratrooper and desertion) and sent by a high-ranking Russian officer to find a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. In Leningrad people are eating rats and there are no eggs, so the men leave, crossing German enemy lines. No more or I'll spoil it. Nearly everyone I've given the book to liked it, including all the members of my book club, my husband, and my former English teacher. (That's rare.)

Jamie Zeppa, BEYOND THE SKY AND THE EARTH

2011-01-26T00:09:00.000-08:00

My sister went to Bhutan a few years ago and read this book on the plane on the way over--because it was one of the few books she could find written about Bhutan, a small country squeezed between India and Tibet. (It is closed to most tourists, but it is typical for my sister that she knew someone who knew someone in the royal family and was allowed in.) It's a treasure of a memoir, of the "woman immersed and transformed by another culture" ilk, and I found it more satisfying than EAT PRAY LOVE. Zeppa, a young Canadian woman, abandons her thoughts of entering a Ph.D. program to teach English in Bhutan for two years. She spends her first five months in a tiny rural village with sporadic running water, and her remaining time at a university, where she falls in love with one of her students and converts to Buddhism. It's by turns hilarious and poignant and thoughtful.
The best part of my sister's story about this book is that one night she and her friend found themselves in a bar in Bhutan. My sister had a long conversation with one man--extremely good looking, articulate--and finally asked if he's married. He replied, "I was ... I married my English professor .... but my wife and I are divorced, and she moved back to Canada." My sister stared. "Were you married to Jamie Zeppa?" "Yes." (This, too, is the sort of thing that happens to my sister.)

Laura Hillenbrand, UNBROKEN

2011-01-22T03:29:00.001-08:00

Holy cow, this one is heartbreaking. Hillenbrand brings the same sort of energy, the same strong plot arc as she drew for SEABISCUIT, to the life of Louie Zamperini, one-time Olympic runner, bombardier on a B-24 in WWII, and survivor of Japanese POW camps. When his plane goes down in the Pacific, he and two other men float for 47 days on a poorly equipped liferaft, with sharks circling. Then he's taken to one horrifyingly inhumane Japanese camp after another, persecuted by a sadist called "the Bird." At times, I had to skip paragraphs and go back to them after I read ahead to find out how he survived. By page 200, I was jumping ahead to the end of the book. Ultimately, it's a story of courage and forgiveness, of letting go the desire for revenge that, left to itself, can bind us to our pasts. But be prepared to stay up half the night reading it. Or wake up in the middle of the night needing to finish it. Yes, it's 4:30 a.m. in Arizona.

Elizabeth Strout, AMY AND ISABELLE

2011-01-20T10:35:00.001-08:00

Brilliant and terrifying. In a claustrophobically small mill town (I found myself thinking of Richard Russo), 16-year-old Amy's math teacher begins to molest her, and her mother Isabelle has no idea. Estranged from other people in town (and from her daughter) by what she imagines to be her own dark secrets, Isabelle only finds out because her boss comes upon Amy and Mr. Robertson in his car. Ultimately, the novel is somewhat redemptive--Isabelle finds her place by sharing the truth; but Amy is already almost gone. I'd compare the emotional intensity and the skill of the writing to that of LITTLE BEE.
By the way, has anyone out there read Chris Cleave's newest?

Alexander McCall Smith, LA'S ORCHESTRA SAVES THE WORLD

2011-01-18T09:30:00.002-08:00

Very enjoyable, as with all Smith's work ... I've realized the reason I like him is he's a bit akin to Jane Austen ... and this book has some of her impulse ... with her "three or four families in a country village" in England. This (Smith's) novel is a small window, with a few characters, to provide a view of what life in the country was like during WWII, when foxes were making their way into henhouses against all efforts to stymie them with slats of wood, and when a Polish airman refuge might really be a German, but he played the flute beautifully. The one peculiarity with this book, and it's not a gripe, really, is that the first 253 pages carefully and delicately represents a short period of time--five or six years, during which La leaves London, moves to the country, plants her vegetables, begins her orchestra, and the war ends. Then in the remaining 40 pages, La goes from 34 years old in 1945 to 50 years old in 1961, with the only consistency being the two times she sees Feliks (the Polish refugee with whom she'd fallen in love). But the book charms.

Paul Auster, SUNSET PARK

2011-01-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

Very good. A group of four troubled people, squatting in a Brooklyn house. As is usual with Auster, the characters are round, flawed, psychologically coherent. Miles, one of the four, and the figure at the center of the novel, has run away from his life for seven years, after he shoved his brother into the street, in the middle of a fight, and a car came around the corner, just at the wrong moment. Interesting that Jennifer Donnelly uses the same trope--accidental responsibility for a younger sibling's death--to pitch her heroine into the same trajectory of loss and recovery. Except with Auster's novel, the ending is bizarrely without closure. Just as Miles seems to get it together, he loses it again. And maybe that's the point.

Erik Weihenmayer, TOUCH THE TOP OF THE WORLD

2011-01-10T06:26:00.000-08:00

OK, I am a wuss. I wince when I bump myself, say, on the corner of the desk. From now on, I will think, at least I am not shivering in 200 mile-an-hour winds, crouched behind a rock wall, eating freeze-dried spaghetti and suffering from oxygen deprivation. A friend (with whom I hiked the Grand Canyon) passed me this book, partly because the author used to teach at my daughter's school; it turns out he went to my husband's high school, too. The author is blind, and he has climbed some of the world's toughest mountains, including Everest. It's a great story, a good read; he tells his story with plenty of humor, and also some pointed and wry insights about how the world treats, and what the world believes about, blind people.

Cassandra Clare, CLOCKWORK ANGEL

2011-01-02T21:35:00.001-08:00

YA, and angels instead of vampires, set in late Victorian London (OK, I'm a sucker for all those historical details). Page-turner for those who liked Twilight series.

David Liss, THE DEVIL'S COMPANY

2011-01-02T21:32:00.000-08:00

Usually I love anything David Liss writes ... and I've recommended his books, particularly THE WHISKEY REBELS, to many friends. But this one ... was it just the holidays? Is that why I couldn't quite slip into his world, because I was too busy in my own? Not sure. But I didn't enjoy this one nearly as much as some of his others. It felt to me ... almost as if he weren't very interested in the fate of Mr. Weaver anymore. Plenty of twists and turns to the plot, though, and as usual, his historical setting feels very rich.

Tatiana de Rosnay, SARAH'S KEY

2011-01-02T21:20:00.000-08:00

Like HOTEL, this book takes as its topic another powerful moment in history--the night when French police conspired with Nazi Germany to round up hundreds of Jews and put the on busses into the Velodrom d'Hiver, an enclosure in Paris, where there was no sanitation, next to no food or water, and many died ... and from thence, to Auschwitz. Told in a double-narrative (we're seeing so many these days) between Sarah (1940s) and Mlle. Jarmond (2000s). The personal story at the core of the narrative concerns young Sarah, who, instead of bringing her little brother along when she and her mother and father were dragged out of their apartment, locked the boy into a secret cabinet, promising to return. He died there. Years later (again, the parallels with HOTEL!) an American-French journalist, Jarmond, discovers that her husband is renovating that apartment, bequeathed to him by his father. She is determined to find out what happened to Sarah's family and discovers that Sarah went to America and passed herself off as non-Jewish and French. This is a remarkable story. But I found myself bothered by the romance/baby plotline ... her husband is having an affair with an old flame, a midlife crisis, and Jarmond becomes pregnant; her life-and-death decision about whether to keep the baby (her husband doesn't want, and will divorce her over) is, I think, somehow supposed to parallel and add depth to her decision about whether to pursue the story of Sarah, which her father-in-law is dreading (because he was there at the apartment the day Sarah came back, opened the compartment with her key, and found her brother dead). There are some wonderful sections, especially in the Sarah parts; but the ending (SPOILER ALERT) in which Jarmond ends up marrying Sarah's son feels too tidy to me.

Jamie Ford, HOTEL AT THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET

2011-01-02T21:03:00.000-08:00

God knows this is a powerful topic: the camps into which Japanese Americans in Seattle (and other areas) were thrown in the early 1940s. Plotwise, this is a love story about a Chinese twelve-year-old boy (Henry) who meets and falls in love with a Japanese girl (Keiko), partly because they are the only two scholarship kids, working in the kitchen, at their school in 1942. Years later, in 1986, he sees the Panama Hotel being excavated ... and realizes that this is where many Japanese stowed their personal valuables and treasures that they could not bring with them into the camps. The most painful and touching moments for me were between Henry and his miserable, angry father, who lives half his mental life back in China, fighting with Chiang Kai-Shek against the Japanese. When Henry becomes friends with Keiko, and visits her in the camp, his father disowns him; even on his deathbed, his father doesn't forgive him, and instead confesses to keeping Keiko's letters from ever reaching Henry--"I did it for you". But I found Henry's dialogues with his son Marty awkward ... at times Henry sounds like he can barely speak English -- "My son is graduating soma como lode" (p. 38). But at others, Henry speaks with absolute fluency--because his parents refused to let him speak any Chinese from the time he was 12. Sometimes, the 12-year-olds seem precocious ... Keiko says, "Henry, this isn't about us. I mean it is, but they don't define you by the button you wear. They define you by what you do, by what your actions say about you ... They see you as a person." And I'm not sure the phrase "street cred" was around in 1986. Maybe? But it's a touching story, and while it's focalized through Henry, the third-person narrator lends an eerie distance that keeps me a bit uneasy through the whole book ... reminded me that I cannot know this experience, not really; there are some people who knew it firsthand. I can only ever be at a distance.

Jennifer Donnelly, REVOLUTION

2010-12-08T01:04:00.000-08:00

Very, very good. As in NORTHERN LIGHT, there is a "twinned" structure. The protagonist teenage-girl-with-a-problem has documents from another young woman in a similar situation. Here, Andi is a musical genius who was not watching out for her brother on the morning he was killed by a madman in Brooklyn. In the case of an old violin in France, she finds a diary of a girl Alexandrine who sent up fireworks in Paris during the French Revolution, trying to comfort the Dauphin, imprisoned in his cell, until he is killed (arguably, also by a madman). The coincidence of Andi going to Paris and being handed a violin case with a compartment that only opens to the key that her brother found in a scrap heap back in Brooklyn ... well, ... but so what. Donnelly writes so well, I feel like I'd be a nitpicking kill-joy if I were going to stick at that. One review I read felt that the second plot (Alexandrine's journal) was made to serve the first, but I felt Donnelly kept them in balance. There's always a risk when writers lean too heavily on letters or journals, but I was drawn along and compelled by Andi's conflicts/plots--her mind-numbing guilt about her brother, her mother's mental illness, her estrangement from her father, her romance with the hot French musician Virgil (!)--and because Donnelly doesn't insert the journal sections in big chunks, I usually felt I was in Andi's head while I was reading them. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Nancy Werlin, IMPOSSIBLE

2010-12-08T00:49:00.000-08:00

This is a curious book. It mixes a somewhat typical YA theme--teen pregnancy--with a "magic" theme of the Elfin Knight who, in "Scarborough Fair," demands three impossible tasks. The villain/Elfin Knight has been enchanting all the women on Lucy's family tree for centuries, and he takes the shape of the handsome Padraig Seeley--who is so charismatic that women (including Lucy's foster mother) can barely think in his presence. Lucy's mother went mad because of him, and after Lucy is raped by a boy who is possessed by Padraig's spirit, she decides she is going to keep the baby. The difference is that Lucy has foster parents and a handsome boy named Zach who are willing to help her perform the three impossible tasks to break the curse--their true love matters. I can see this appealing to some YA readers, the same way Twilight does. But the "magic" element didn't really work for me. Werlin writes very well, however, enough to make me curious about finding her National Book Award Finalist, The Rules of Survival, and her Edgar-winner, The Killer's Cousin.

Barbara Demick, NOTHING TO ENVY: ORDINARY LIVES IN NORTH KOREA

2010-11-16T12:45:00.001-08:00

This book weaves together the stories of half a dozen North Koreans who eventually defected to South Korea, where Demick interviewed them. An early chapter features a photograph of both Koreas at night; Seoul is a big blob of light; the rest of South Korea has scattered lights throughout; North Korea is dark. And Demick shows, again and again, just how dark it is--both opaque to visitors (who are barely allowed, and kept to carefully manicured bits of the major city, Pyongyang) and having a very dark future. The stories of starvation are what stay with me--the parents feeding their children on ground-up bark and weeds; people eating dogs; people digging through nightsoil to find undigested pieces of rice, after aid from the former USSR vanishes.

One of the most curious stories was the thwarted love story between Mi-Ran and Jun-sang, who kept their forbidden relationship secret for nine years ... and then idealized it for half a dozen after Mi-Ran left. But Demick doesn't make the mistake of suggesting that as soon as these defectors moved to South Korea, everything came up roses. She explores quite frankly the difficulty of assimilation and how learned personality traits in North Korea did not translate so well south of the border.
There's black humor throughout. My favorite bits are some of the math questions in the North Korean textbooks (p. 120):
Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?
A girl is acting as a messenger to our patriotic troops during the war against the Japanese occupation. She carries messages in a basket containing five apples, but is stopped by a Japanese soldier at a checkpoint. He steals two of her apples. How may are left?
Three soldiers from the Korean People's Army killed thirty American soldiers. How many American soldiers were killed by each of them if they all killed an equal number of soldiers?
And a favorite song:
"Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
with guns that I make with my own hands.
I will shot them. Bang, bang, bang."
My one gripe is that it feels to me as though at times Demick plays fast and loose with her translations--the sentences feel too close to contemporary American slang. I found myself wondering, Really? Did that sixty-year-old grandmother really say that? But the book is interesting, especially as I knew very little about North Korea.

Sapphire, PRECIOUS

2010-11-16T12:34:00.000-08:00

The heartrending story of Precious Jones, age 16, who begins her story: "I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver [sic]."
At first glance, I wasn't sure if she was left, back when she was twelve--left by whom?--and then I realized she means "left back a grade." But this book is about every kind of being left--left back, left behind, left for hopeless, having AIDS left in her, left for dead. It could have gone melodramatic and cliched--this story is one we've heard before--but the nuances are all fresh. Even the way that Precious confronts the other Others. She declares that she hates gays--she's repeating what she's heard Farrakhan say--until she discovers her teacher "Ms Rain a butch." Again and again, Precious bravely allows her felt experience to overturn what she thinks she knows. But this book was a hard read and created some images in my head that I wish I didn't have.

Justin Cronin, THE PASSAGE

2010-11-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

A good, horrifying read. This novel is post-apocalyptic in the style of the HUNGER GAMES trilogy (although more adult than YA), except that this time the weapon is a virus that turns people into vampires. Warning: this is not a TWILIGHT redo (thank God) ... nothing sweet or sexy about these blood-suckers. Cronin uses a third-person narrative with shifting focalization among four or five complex major characters, which works. My only gripe is the ending. It's almost as if Cronin decided he was tired of writing and stopped. Not a lot of closure ... and while that can be done productively, this just felt like the novel just petered out. But for about 700 pages, this novel tears along with plenty of suspense and good prose.

Hiatus destination: HOGWARTS

2010-11-16T09:42:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'd read the first two Harry Potter books years ago. But now that I have a daughter who is reading them, I jumped back in. Read all seven in about 18 days. Was walking about in a mild trance muttering spells. Wingardium Leviosa. Am I pronouncing it right? Wrong? Why doesn't that spell work on my children's wet towels? It worked for Hermione and her feather. Wondering what I really think of Snape. And why doesn't the ministry believe Harry in the face of all that proof--how can they be so stupid? And what's up with Rupert Grint--he was quite cute as a youngster but later?
But I am back, now.

Tom Franklin, CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER

2010-10-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

Very good, deftly written literary mystery about two boys, one white and one black, in rural Mississippi. Similar to Tana French's IN THE WOODS, although not quite as suspenseful because it's not focalized through only one character, which means we readers know more than either Simon or Larry (the two protagonists). But like French's first, there is an old murder (which was never solved) matched with a new murder. Good read.

Elizabeth Gilbert, COMMITTED: A SKEPTIC MAKES PEACE WITH MARRIAGE

2010-10-20T09:11:00.001-07:00

I actually liked this book as much as EAT, PRAY, LOVE. Very typical Gilbert writing, anecdotal, clever, playful, but it also historicizes marriage, situates it as a cultural construct within different frameworks ... it has, as she points out, changed greatly since, say, the tenth century. The initiating event is her fiance Felipe being stopped at customs and sent to jail because it has become clear that he's coming to the states, staying the allowed 90 days, leaving, and coming right back. It's not illegal ... but the officials don't like it. Gilbert talks frankly about pre-nups, being broke and being broken-hearted, the mistaken ideas she had about love when she was in her twenties, feminism, and psychological baggage. Intermixed are stories of people she met while she traveled around, asking people from all different cultures about marriage, what it means, what it provides, the sacrifices it demands (particularly of women who become mothers). Good read.

Julia Durango, SEA OF THE DEAD

2010-10-12T14:35:00.000-07:00

Small powerhouse of a YA historical novel. It's fierce, compelling, and well-written. The protagonist Kehl is a prince of the (fictional) Teshic Empire. One night he is kidnapped and taken to a ship owned by a tribe called the Fallen. Although he at first is arrogant and despises the leader of the Fallen, he begins to learn that everything he has been taught as a Teshic prince--everything that the Empire said was true--is suspect, including the story of his own mother's death. This is the classic case of an adolescent who must remake his world view. Good read.

Laura Joh Rowland, BEDLAM: THE FURTHER SECRET ADVENTURES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE

2010-10-12T14:27:00.001-07:00

I'm sorry to say I would not recommend. The premise is fun: the novelist Charlotte Bronte's secret life as an adventuress/secret agent, saving the royal family of England, dashing around the countryside in hot air balloons. While Rowland is very good at period detail--she includes a great deal of interesting information on Victorian England, from Whitechapel to broughams--the plot and narration is clumsy, and the psychology fails for me. For example, on a visit to Bedlam with her publisher, to gain information for her next novel, Charlotte just happens to see a man being brutally tortured with electric probes by a vicious looking Russian--and that man being tortured is John Slade, with whom she has been desperately in love with for three years, though she has had no word and has been terribly worried about him. !!! Goodness, shouldn't she do something? And she does. She and her publisher immediately go off to view the Great Exhibition (of 1851) at the Crystal Palace. Her comment: "I was so impressed by the Crystal Palace that I almost forgot about Slade." My heart is hammering with worry about the poor man, and she's going to the Exhibition? And then, because the most interesting part of the story belongs to John Slade (who dashes between England and Russia, playing double agent, with three different names) she is forced to resort to this sort of maneuver: "Here I must describe other events that occurred outside my view. The details, based on facts I later learned, are as accurate as I can make them. Reader, you will see ... I was in grave danger." For those of us who know and love JANE EYRE, the phrase "Reader, I married him" is etched in our brains, and the apostrophe was used to wonderful effect. Rowland uses it when she wants to remind us that this is Charlotte Bronte's voice. It didn't quite work for me.

Celia Rees, WITCH CHILD

2010-09-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Excellent read. Recalls Witch of Blackbird Pond, some of Ann Rinaldi's historical YA novels. Fourteen-year-old Mary Newbury travels from England to Salem with a woman who befriends Mary after her grandmother dies. She believes she's a witch, though she comes off as merely an intuitive, intelligent girl who has a knack for finding herbs and learns healing from Martha. Mary writes in a journal, which she then stitches inside a quilt; the frame narrative is that a woman named Allison Ellman of Boston, MA finds the journal and compiles the papers. (Not sure why the frame is necessary.) I'll look for the sequel.

Kathleen Duey, SKIN HUNGER

2010-09-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

This National Book Award finalist is the first in the "Resurrection of Magic" series. Moving back and forth between two POVs and two time periods--linked by the character Franklin, who is young in one and old in the other--the novel describes a fierce and frightening "academy" where apprentices are starved until they figure out how to work true magic, which has been debauched and degraded by charlatans. Some of the language is quite beautiful: "It was silver-gray this morning, the flat color of a parlor mirror before the lamps are lit." But most of the fine metaphors are in the early chapters; the plot takes over the second half of the book and the writing becomes more ordinary. But it's a page-turner, and while not quite as dark or suspenseful as HUNGER GAMES, it's a good read.

Tracy Chevalier, BURNING BRIGHT

2010-09-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

I found this book on the Bargain table, which surprised me because I remember loving GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING. But while TC is still the master of historical detail ... and she's got the 18th century down ... Astley's, Vauxhall, pubs, carpenter's tools, how to make buttons, the kinds of wood used in chairs ... this book felt somewhat plotless and lacking in suspense. The entire plot consists of a family moving from Dorsetshire to London and then back again; the time period is 1792-93 (surely an exciting time in England); and the next door neighbor is William Blake (hence the title ... from his poem "Tyger, Tyger"). But paradoxically, although not particularly well-plotted, the book felt formulaic: lots of historical detail + famous, eccentric artistic personality + everyday characters. For me, it wasn't enough. Add to that the contrivances ... young Jem believes that two sides of the road aren't opposites because they're both sides of the same road ... he espouses this belief to young Maggie, just as Mr. Blake is wandering by and is struck by how the young man's philosophy matches own! This might work if the three of them gathered together at the Blakes' house, but this scene happens on a bridge, in London, after Jem has left a circus where there are thousands of people milling around. Similarly, at Astley's Amphitheater, with hundreds of people jammed around him, Jem looks up from the pit by the stage to find "Maggie's face up in the gallery, poking out between two soldiers." Really? Amidst all those people, he can find her face?? Hate to be so critical ... but after GIRL, I was hoping for better ...

Andrew Clements, THINGS NOT SEEN

2010-09-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

Very good YA book, about a boy named Bobby who wakes up one morning invisible, but meets a blind girl to whom it doesn't matter. Larger themes include the feelings that young adults have when their parents and others overlook them, or ignore their wishes, echoed by the Threat of the State that single-mindedly interferes with parents who are trying to do the right thing in a crazy situation. Well-written with a solidly truthful boy's voice.

Mary Stewart, THIS MOON-SPINNERS, THIS ROUGH MAGIC, NINE COACHES WAITING

2010-09-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

THIS is my oldest guilty pleasure, and I've reread the three of these in the past few days.
These books were written in the 1950s. They are DATED. The heroines all fall in love with their counterparts, sometimes after some fuss, but in a matter of pages. Why do I love these books? Not sure ... I think when I was about 14, I read all of them, and the way you read books when you're 14 ... they stay with you. So it's familiar ground. "The Moon Spinners" was made into a Disney movie with Hayley Mills about twenty years before I saw her in DIAL M FOR MURDER in London, which is about twenty *more* years ago now. I think the movie was in black and white. (!)
So why do I read these when I'm in the mood for mental M & Ms? They're literary. They use the old device of a quotation from classic literature at the top of chapters. The descriptions and language verge on poetic. They're murder mysteries--what we'd now call "cozies"--with the suspense drawn out on a long, long cord, in Greece. Or France. Or Italy. I dragged my husband to Greece back in 1992 because I was dying to see Mary Stewart's Greece ... in the way that plenty of people go to Prince Edward Island to see Anne of Green Gables's PEI. And she shows an unflinching willingness to lay bare weaknesses (compassionately) in well-drawn characters. I won't recommend them ... they're so unfashionable, though they were all months on the best-seller list in their day.
But here, I'll give you some of the opening to NINE COACHES WAITING (the title is taken from Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy). The heroine has just arrived in Paris:
"Some of the baggage was out on the tarmac. I could see my own shabby case wedged between a brand-new Revrobe and something huge and extravagant in cream-colored hide. Mine had been a good case once, good solid leather stamped deeply with Daddy's initials, now half hidden under the new label smeared by London's rain. Miss L. Martin, Paris. Symbolic, I thought, with an amusement that twisted a bit awry somewhere inside me. Miss L. Martin, Paris, trudging along between a stout man in impeccable city clothes and a beautiful American girl with a blond mink coat slung carelessly over a suit that announced discreetly that she had been to Paris before, and recently. I myself must have just that drab, seen-better-days shabbiness that Daddy's old case had, perched up there among the sleek cabin-class luggage. But I was here, home after ten years."

Laurie Halse Anderson, CHAINS

2010-09-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

Deeper and richer than LHA's SPEAK and FEVER. For those who enjoyed Jennifer Donnelly's NORTHERN LIGHT, this is an historical YA with a similar feel, and a female protagonist who must negotiate space in the world for herself. Set during the beginning days of the American Revolution, with a slave girl protagonist, the novel raises the question of freedom--freedom for the colonies from British rule and freedom for slaves. The binaries split and reform in this book: black/white, slave/free, Loyalist/Patriot, prisoner/free. 13-year-old Isabel and her younger, epileptic sister Ruth are supposed to be freed when their mistress dies; but her cruel nephew arrives, claims them, and takes them to Newport to be sold. The two girls end up in the household of the Locktons, Loyalists masquerading when need be as Patriots. Madam Lockhart is this book's version of Simon Legree, vicious and prone to hurling cutlery. But portraits of other characters--the boy Curzon, a slave who believes in the Patriot cause; Mr. Lockhart's mother--are complex and well-drawn. Isabel frees Curzon from prison in the final chapter and the book ends with the promise that their adventures will be taken up in her next book: Forge.

Joel Richard Paul, UNLIKELY ALLIES: HOW A MERCHANT, A PLAYWRIGHT, AND A SPY SAVED THE AMERICAN REVOLUITON

2010-09-05T12:17:00.001-07:00

This historical narrative debunks the version of history that puts Benjamin Franklin at the center of obtaining French support for the American Revolution. At times the story becomes tedious and detail-oriented, and Paul could paint with a quicker brush. But at other times it reads like something out of a crazy historical farce--a cross-dressing, double-crossing woman spy; a playwright who couldn't keep his head down, his trap shut, and his identity secret when he saw his play being produced badly; and Silas Deane, a Connecticut merchant who marries two widows, ends up with about a dozen children who aren't his own, and cannot get anyone to answer his frantic letters from France. Truly, as I read this book and saw ALL the things that went wrong in trying to obtain French support ... the corruption, the bribes, the affairs, the lost letters ... I'm amazed that it happened at all.

Beth Kephart, UNDERCOVER

2010-09-05T12:11:00.001-07:00

A beautifully written YA about a girl who plays Cyrano to her friend Theo's Christian, in his courting of Lila, the nasty girl's Roxane. Teenage Elisa has no friends at school (somewhat peculiar, as she's personable), a beautiful sister and mother, and a father who travels most of the time. She takes refuge in nature, in language (we have the usual passionate English teacher Dr. Charmin), and ice skating on the pond.

First line: Once I saw a vixen and a dog fox dancing.

Other beautiful lines: In the woods that night the old snow had turned to slush and the muck of animal tracks, and there were sapphire shadows between the trees.

My one gripe with the book ... I must confess I get tired of reading about girls who want to be writers, or are "discovered" by their English teachers. But that aside, this book is a lovely narrative about a girl who first hides behind words and then discovers that they are only one medium--music and ice skating become the others--through which she accesses her own experience.

Suzanne Collins, CATCHING FIRE & MOCKINGJAY

2010-09-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

Numbers two and three in the trilogy that began with THE HUNGER GAMES. In CATCHING FIRE, Katniss has returned to Victory Village in District 12 to enjoy her triumph. But soon President Snow demands that she return to the arena, she and Peeta, on the 75th anniversary of the games, along with any other tributes who are still alive to face poisonous fogs and forcefields. Still torn between Gale and Peeta, Katniss becomes the symbol for a revolution, the mockingjay--a bird that can mimic any sound, including a human voice in pain. Peeta is captured by the Capitol, for torturing, and to bring Katniss into line. In MOCKINGJAY, Katniss must try to get him out safely. District 12 has been burned, although Gale managed to get Katniss's mother and sister Prim out in time, to District 13, where the revolution is growing. She is at times a pawn of the revolution, but in the end, she must help Peeta distinguish between Real and Not real (what the Capitol has tricked him into thinking). And she breaks the cycle of revolution, preventing one violent and authoritarian party from merely replacing another. It concludes with an ending that is surprisingly tender, and haunting, and carries a message that reminds me of that old Matthew Broderick movie, WAR GAMES. The only way to win is to stop the cycle. And she concludes ...

"on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could b taken away. That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do. It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years. But there are much worse games to play."

I'd say HUNGER GAMES is my favorite of the three; as often happens in trilogies, the middle book doesn't seem to carry as much weight as the other two. But for all that, it's a good story arc, and while the plot drives the books, the symbolism and layers raise it well above a mere suspense/thriller.

I stand by my earlier comparison with Stieg Larsson's trilogy.

Stef Penney, THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES

2010-08-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

Read this debut novel last year and recently re-read; it stands up to a second read. This is one of my favorite historical murder mysteries. Set in 1867 in the Northern Territory, a trapper named Laurent Jammett is murdered. 17-year-old Francis Ross disappears and becomes a suspect; his mother goes on a trek through the cruel snowy landscape to find him and discover the truth. Told in chapters that shift in point-of-view among Mrs. Ross, Francis, Andrew Knox, Elizabeth Bird, the story of the Jammett murder is only the first layer; behind it are other murders and kidnappings that put people where they are when the book begins. First line: "The last time I saw Laurent Jammett, he was in Scott's store with a dead wolf over his shoulder." A-.

Suzanne Collins, THE HUNGER GAMES

2010-08-30T07:54:00.001-07:00

Intense YA/crossover-to-adult book about Katniss Everdeen, a girl in a post-apocalyptic nation called Panem. When her sister is chosen to be the "girl" half of one of twelve boy-girl teams to fight the Hunger Games on national TV, 16-year-old Katniss volunteers to take her place. Together with Peeta, and chaperoned and guided by two adults, they must compete to survive. Chilling, suspenseful, dark, well-written ... I would say this is not a book for the 9-12 set, no matter how good a reader. This book strikes me as the YA version of Stieg Larsson's trilogy--Katniss, resourceful, angry, and tough is not far off Lisbeth Salander. Excellent read.

Thomas Mullen, THE LAST TOWN ON EARTH

2010-08-29T11:31:00.001-07:00

Very good debut novel, historical fiction. In 1918, at the end of WWI, a small lumber town in Washington state decides to quarantine itself from the Spanish Influenza, but a soldier comes, breaks the quarantine and is killed; then another solider apears. This is about how panic infects the town and why a quarantine fails. It's a dark book, about selfishness and cruelty and inhumanity under duress. Reminds me of Geraldine Brooks' YEAR OF WONDERS (plague, quarantine, 1666 England) in some ways.

Ariana Franklin, MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH

2010-08-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

Good medieval mystery set in 1171, England, with a woman medical examiner. Suspenseful, set in Cambridge, good period detail. I'd give it a B+.

Chris Bohjalian, SKELETONS AT THE FEAST

2010-08-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

Engrossing historical novel of WWII from an East German perspective, which is refreshing, because most WWII literature is either Holocaust literature or describes the war from the Western perspective. This book is told through four different perspectives, done well, with the changes in voice indicated by cues instead of labels. But it's heavy-handed in some of its criticism of the Nazis (via the voice of a Scottish POW), and puts up a bad straw-woman in the clueless East German mother who asks, wide-eyed, "They're Jews? Really? Those girls?" and "Why do people hate us?" It's based on a diary, so there is a good primary source. Engrossing and at times heart-rending.

John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black), CHRISTINE FALLS

2010-08-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

Good crime fiction! It's 1950s Dublin, and a girl's corpse in the morgue leads Quirke (a pathologist) to discover a baby-donating/trading scandal in the Catholic Church. Aside from his propensity to use names that fit almost too neatly (Quirke is quirky and the bad brother in law is Malachy -- called Mal through most of the book and sporting a "smooth seal's head of oiled black hair, scrupulously combed and parted"--EW!), the writing is clean, the plot fast-paced, the secondary characters well-drawn. This is the first of a series, and I'm going to find the next.

Mary Downing Hahn, HEAR THE WIND BLOW: A Novel of the Civil War

2010-08-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Middle-grade historical fiction, with some edge due to a near-rape (off-stage), murder, light cursing, all the ugliness attached to the end of the Civil War. Oddly, although there are plenty of events--a wounded soldier comes to their house in Virginia; he's found and killed and the Magruder family is burned out as punishment; the mother dies; the two kids ride off on a horse in search of their brother--I found the plot arc lacking. Likable enough characters, a brother and sister (securing both sides of middle-grade readership), but despite all the tragedy, and having many of the right "elements," I was not emotionally drawn to this story.

Stieg Larsson, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, ETC.

2010-08-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

What can one say about this trilogy? My husband made the mistake of buying me the third installment (THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST) for our "get away" 20th anniversary weekend. The first night, I ignored him and hung out with Lisbeth for 8 straight hours, from about 7 pm till 3 am so I could finish the book. My husband and I still had 3 days, but he will never make that mistake again. And unless Stieg's girlfriend releases the 4th book from her computer, to the Larsson kids who no doubt are scratching for it, I may never again read so obsessively.
I found it interesting that when I googled Stieg Larsson, his name came up (of course) followed by "Stieg Larsson death." The books are certainly full of death, and violence, and gross unfairness ... plenty of twists and turns through corruption and unlawful acts ... followed by justice and redemption. I think the international psyche has responded to these books so strongly in part because this is a story of how the little guy (or--intriguingly--in this case, the little girl: Lisbeth Salander is only about five feet tall) gets tromped upon and survives, gets cut to pieces and survives, gets locked away by the Big Bad State, and manages to triumph ... and she does it largely by hacking computers instead of hacking bodies (although she does that, too, on occasion, to those who really deserve it.)
Great reads, all three.

Carolyn Mackler, THE EARTH, MY BUTT, AND OTHER BIG ROUND THINGS

2010-08-16T17:58:00.000-07:00

Good realistic YA. Virginia Shreves (named for V Woolf), has an older brother whom everyone holds up as a paragon of virtue ... until he date rapes someone at Columbia University. The mother in this book is perhaps too sharply drawn as the psychiatrist mother who has no idea what's going on with her own kids; but Virginia's struggles to put dieting aside as a substitute for living and her fears about dating and losing friends who move away are drawn with a deft hand. Good for the 13+ crowd.

John Flanagan, RANGER'S APPRENTICE SERIES

2010-08-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

A great middle-grade/YA series; I've read the first seven (THE RUINS OF GORLAN, THE BURNING BRIDGE, THE ICEBOUND LAND, THE BATTLE FOR SKANDIA, THE SORCERER OF THE NORTH, THE SIEGE OF MACINDAW, ERAK'S RANSOM). There's a male protagonist but my 10-year-old daughter and I are reading them together and she loves them. The boy Will (an orphan, of course, with two friends, a la Potter: a girl and a boy) is chosen to be a Ranger's apprentice--the rangers being the spies for a quasi-fantastical kingdom that sounds a lot like England. (For example, one of the tribes in the outlying areas is the "Scottis," whose leader is Mac-something or other.) Like the Harry Potter series, the first book is more middle-grade; later ones have darker themes and a bit more swearing and love-interest. But well-written, good vocabulary, fast pacing. For those who liked Harry Potter and Riordan's Percy Jackson series, this is a good fit.

Laurie R. King, THE GOD OF THE HIVE

2010-08-03T21:26:00.001-07:00

Great read. A suspenseful detective/murder mystery set in sloppy, sordid, early 20th-century London. It's partly about Sherlock Holmes (for fans of Conan Doyle)--but this tale is told from the perspective of his gutsy, brilliant wife Mary Russell whose plot runs independently of his. Plenty of twists, well-drawn characters, engaging, lively writing. This is the first of King's novels that I've read--she's written quite a few, ten of which are these Mary Russell mysteries--but I will hunt down others.
First lines:
A child is a burden, after a mile.
After two miles in the cold sea air, stumbling through the night up the side of a hill and down again ... having already put on eight miles that night--half of it carrying a man on a stretcher--even a small, drowsy three-and-a-half-year-old becomes a strain.

Tana French, FAITHFUL PLACE

2010-07-29T13:07:00.001-07:00

French's 3rd book is probably as fabulous as the first two (though I loved INTO THE WOODS the best). The protagonist Detective returns home to Faithful Place (on the ugly side of Ireland, wherever it is) to find out that the girl whom he loved as a young man, and who vanished one night, was actually murdered, her body hidden in the basement of vacant house nearby. What unravels is typical Tana French ... a dysfunctional family, multiple motives, and the recognition that often the only difference between the good man and the bad man is that the good person doesn't do the things that they both imagining doing.

Beryl Markham, WEST WITH THE NIGHT

2010-07-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

An old favorite that I read years ago, when I was (!) 24. The autobiography of a woman who grew up in colonial Kenya; as a child, she ran with kids in the bush and was nearly killed by a wild boar; at age 16 she was training world-class race horses; ten years later she was flying medical equipment and running safaris all over Africa. Born in 1902, she was the first woman to fly west across the Atlantic, against the headwinds, before crash-landing in Nova Scotia. She was Denys Finch-Hatton's mistress (you'll remember him as Robert Redford in OUT OF AFRICA) and was actually supposed to be on the plane that he died on. There's some debate about whether she actually wrote the book--Errol Trzebinski swears that one of her several husbands ghost-wrote it for her. But no matter. It's a fabulous read.

Zoe Sharp, SECOND SHOT

2010-07-29T12:54:00.000-07:00

I went to see Zoe Sharp speak at Poison Pen in Scottsdale. She's very engaging, self-deprecating, with that dry "British" sense of humor. Book was fun, a slowish start, faster ending. I'd probably read another by her if it came my way.
My only gripe is the way that Charlie Fox (the protagonist/heroine/ex-military/bodyguard with a PAST) so quickly loves her little charge, Ella, age five or so, who actually seems sort of dull and spoiled, coy and giggly. But I must confess ... I don't always like other people's children in real life either. (Grin)

Karen Hesse, PHOENIX RISING

2010-06-30T13:06:00.001-07:00

YA about a girl Nyle whose community experiences nuclear disaster at The Plant not far away. Usual gritty Hesse, with a strong girl protagonist and an evacuee boy/friend who takes up residence in the "back room" (where everyone in Nyle's family dies); he too dies at end, from radiation poisoning. Good Gran, evil Ripley, and a girlfriend named Muncie. Not bad, but feels somewhat standard YA.

Irene Latham, LEAVING GEE'S BEND

2010-06-14T10:31:00.001-07:00

Good tween/YA book. Her first novel, and well-written. Great first lines: "Mama pulled a chicken egg from behind the azalea bushy in our front yard and narrowed her eyes. 'Ludelphia Bennet! You go back in there and get your eye patch!'"
An eye patch? Hm!
Turns out Lu wears the eye patch because of a wood chip that flew from her father's hatchet; there's no doctor in Gee's Bend, AL, so when Mama takes sick, Lu has to cross the river and go to Camden to find a doctor. Hence, leaving Gee's Bend. But on the way to the doctor she meets the Angry Crazy White Boss Lady Mrs. Cobb who has never been able to have children (when Mama had too many that came early and died, and nearly killed her in the process). Lu's central activity is stitching quilts, and she hangs onto the needle and bits of cloth she collects as talismans against evil. Didn't quite do it for me as an "organizing" force to her psyche, but that may be because I don't quilt. But at least she didn't turn out to be yet another girl-who-longs-to-be-a-writer.

Ann Rinaldi, A BREAK WITH CHARITY: A STORY ABOUT THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

2010-06-08T15:26:00.001-07:00

YA Historical fiction.
Not Rinaldi's best but all her trademarks present: trouble, a bad historical moment, well-drawn and flawed characters with good intentions. Good for the 13-15 girl crowd.

Jenna Blum, THOSE WHO SAVE US

2010-06-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

This is a first novel, and it's pretty well written. Like a lot of novels I'm seeing lately, it's told bouncing between points of view, which I happen to like. In this case it's past/present. But this is a Novel With A Purpose. Not saying it's not a valid purpose. The premise is that Trudy, whose mother was the German mistress of a Nazi officer and an assistant in a bakery in Weimar, is a college professor interested in hearing and videotaping stories from average Germans during the war. Naturally she encounters some horrid Germans who still hate Jews; some decent Germans who helped hide Jews; and one man who is Jewish and reads a blistering prepared document for Trudy's camera.
The tough part, narratively speaking, is that the last interview is with a man who just Happens to be from Weimer and just Happened to see Trudy's mother delivering bread one day and just Happened to have met a man named Max in the Buchenwald camp, and just Happened to know that Max was in love with Trudy's mother and had a child with her out of wedlock. OH MY GOODNESS! Trudy thinks. You mean, I'm not the daughter of a horrible Nazi officer? I'm the daughter of a Jewish doctor? And the book ends. The good thing is that Anna, Trudy's mother, refuses to acknowledge the truth of what this man says. That feels psychologically real to me, and saves the book from being a melodrama. Worth a read. I give it a B.

Alan Bradley, THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN'S BAG

2010-06-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

A fun book--from the author who wrote "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie." But although the 11-year-old protagonist has a fairly original, feisty voice, and has a nice array of bizarre interests (including poisons), the point of view (and narrative power) is somewhat limited by her age and some typical tween brattiness. But a fun read, worth two hours of time.

Elly Griffiths, THE CROSSING PLACES

2010-06-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

A fun new series featuring a detective heroine who is more than just a few eccentric traits cobbled together to make a personality. The book is plot-driven, good on setting and dialog, and contains some creepy characters. I wish there were more twists and that the criminal had more motivation than just madness for his acts of cruelty ... which I always feel is a bit of a cheap way out for a writer. But this was a good, quick read. I would read the next.