After Alice: A Novel
By Gregory Maguire
(Morrow, $26.99, 288 pages)
Who is this author?
Gregory Maguire is one wicked storyteller.
The author of the mega-super-bestselling Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which expanded the Wizard of Oz tale and inspired several sequels and a mega-super-hit Broadway musical, Maguire has a brilliant knack for using well known fairy tales as the basis for clever and provocative novels for adults. These include Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, based on Cinderella, and Mirror Mirror, which sets the Snow White story quite believably in Renaissance Italy. Maguire, who lives near Boston with his husband, artist Andy Newman, and their three adopted children, also writes realistic fiction for upper grade school and middle school readers.
What is this book about?
Published as the literary world celebrates the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s immortal Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Maguire’s imaginative novel asks and answers the question of how 19th century England might have responded to Alice’s disappearance down the rabbit-hole. He takes the character of Ada, Alice’s best friend (who gets a brief mention in Carroll’s book), and sends her down that hole to find Alice and bring her home from her subterranean (and/or subconscious) adventures. At the same time, Alice’s older sister Lydia is searching for a young boy who is visiting and seems to have passed through their manse’s looking-glass to parts unknown, and she visits Wonderland, too. There they meet such timeless creations as the Mad Hatter, plus a few whipped up by Maguire, and the “real” world of the story contains cameos by such notables as the British royals and Charles Darwin. Adding to the enjoyment is the charmingly nonsensical language of Carroll’s creatures, as deftly echoed by Maguire.
Why you’ll like it:
After Alice is both an entertaining spinoff from the beloved children’s classic for adults and a thoughtful look at issues such as identity and the development of the imagination. Maguire’s book is witty and wise, and his take on Wonderland is a wonder in its own right. Readers who loved the original will be chortling, “O frabjous day!”
What others are saying:
The starred Kirkus Review says: “Alice doesn’t live here anymore—and Maguire has great fun upending the furniture to find out where’s she gone. Continuing his tradition of rewriting fairy tales with an arch eye and offbeat point of view, Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice has dropped down the rabbit hole—”again,” sighs an exasperated governess, one of the story’s many bêtes noires—and now her best friend and confidante, Ada Boyce, is falling in after her, looking to bring our young Persephone, or perhaps Eurydice, back into the light. Well, of course, Ada finds all sorts of curiouser and curiouser things down below, from hookah-smoking caterpillars to mad hatters and pince-nez-sporting sheep, with Carroll’s original cast of characters plus a few of Maguire’s own imagining. Up on Earth, Maguire populates the scene with all kinds of folks from real life, among them Walter Pater, Charles Darwin, and various members of the British royal family, who fuss about doing serious and real-world things—including, in a nice, smart closing turn, a meditation on the evolutionary qualities of, yes, the imagination. Not that Alice and Ada aren’t (weren’t, that is) real, but Maguire leaves it to them, mostly, to enjoy the wackiness of the underworld and for the grown-ups to do the pondering. Still, some of the slyest moments come when the two worlds collide: “I have always heard that Queen Victoria was moderate in her tastes,” says Ada, confused at a subterranean knight’s alarm that the queen is likely to have their heads. And there’s no end to sinister possibilities along with the usual charming Alice storyline—after all, Lewis Carroll didn’t inscribe the entrance to Wonderland’s tiny door with the words out of Dante, “All ye who enter here, abandon hope.” A brilliant and nicely off-kilter reading of the children’s classic, retrofitted for grown-ups—and a lot of fun.”
The New York Times Book Review says: “…a narrative that purrs with all the warm confidence of a Cheshire cat…Maguire confronts his weighty themes with a light touch and exquisite, lovely language…Maguire’s playful vocabulary may be Carroll-esque, but his keen wit is closer to Monty Python…Gregory Maguire has made a cottage industry out of reframing famous children’s stories to explore neglected side characters and misrepresented villains. He has tracked through all of the precincts of Oz and a lot of the landscape of Grimm’s fairy tales, and one would not be surprised if his heart was no longer in such expeditions. Furthermore, Alice’s Wonderland has been so often revisited…that it would seem everything worth discovering there must have been strip-mined long ago. Even that phrase, “down the rabbit hole,” is so overused that it now has all the life of a taxidermied white hare. But Maguire’s enthusiasm is intact, his erudition a joy, and his sense of fun infectious. What could have been a tired exercise in the familiar instead recharges a beloved bit of nonsense. By book’s end, most readers will be hoping for a sequel…”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Maguire turns his attention to Lewis Carroll’s Victorian fantasies, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in this thoughtful and disconcertingly memorable novel. Ada Boyce, Alice’s best friend, also falls down a rabbit hole into a phantasmagorical realm where she too is tossed and bossed about by strange creatures who delight in clever, frustrating wordplay. She longs to shed the metal brace that both imprisons and protects her crooked back, but she also wants to reunite with Alice and go home. Meanwhile, Alice’s older sister, Lydia, disturbed by the death of their mother and her own impending womanhood, searches distractedly for a visiting little boy, Siam, who has climbed into the world on the other side of the mirror in the family drawing room. Maguire frequently pulls back from the action to offer a larger perspective as characters struggle to discover who and what they are—and, most importantly, why they are. This is a feast for the mind, and readers will ruminate on it long after turning the last page.”
Says Library Journal: “What happened above after Alice fell down the rabbit hole into Wonderland? That is the question Maguire answers in his latest novel. In alternating chapters we follow Alice’s sister Lydia, who was watching Alice but lost her, and Ada Boyce, Alice’s neighbor and friend, who also falls into Wonderland. Lydia is beset—by Miss Armstrong, Ada’s governess; by her father’s entertaining Charles Darwin that day; with being a newly motherless 15-year-old girl. Ada, free of adult scrutiny and her scoliosis brace for the first time, experiences the oddness of Wonderland as she follows in Alice’s wake. In one vexing day, Ada, Lydia, and Miss Armstrong must adapt to deal with their circumstances and find new facets of themselves. VERDICT Maguire fans should be pleased with his take, at turns clever and philosophical, on the Lewis Carroll classic. Other readers may find the slow build up of action and wrenching jumps between the two disconnected settings, one in stilting 19th-century language and the other in the nonsense of Wonderland, a bit too high a barrier to keep them reading.”
When is it available?
Don’t go down the rabbit-hole. Just visit the Downtown Hartford Public Library to borrow this book.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
The Wonder Garden
by Lauren Acampora
(Grove/Atlantic, Inc., $24, 354 pages)
Who is this author?
Lauren Acampora’s name may not be familiar to you now, but the praise she has won for her debut story collection, The Wonder Garden, should make her very well known. Acampora grew up in Connecticut , has a degree from Brown University and now lives in Westchester County, N.Y. with her artist husband and their daughter. Her work has been published in various literary reviews, and The Wonder Garden was named an Indie Next Pick, Amazon Debut Spotlight book and Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
What is this book about?
Acampora’s stories take us behind the prim and proper facades of a Connecticut suburban town to reveal the messy lives of those who live in the otherwise neat colonials and ranches. Old Cranbury is not exactly Stepford, but its wives and husbands suffer from disconnects between their outer lives and inner turmoil. In one story, an obsessed husband wangles permission to watch his wife’s brain surgery. In another, a husband heeds his “spirit animal” and abandons his career, much to the shock of his wife. An artist takes on a commission that turns risky; a home inspector grows resentful of the lucky young couple who have found their dream house. Many of the stories are linked and most involve old historic homes that function almost as characters themselves. Reviewers’ comparisons of Acampora’s work to that of Evan Connell, Edith Wharton and John Cheever herald the emergence of a fine new talent.
Why you’ll like it:
Lauren Acampora knows the territory: suburban Connecticut, where the homes have histories and their inhabitants have complicated lives. Local readers will feel right at home in the milieu she describes, and many may wonder what may really be going on in the clapboard-and-shutter houses in their own neighborhood. Her stories combine the familiar and the mysterious in powerful ways, giving readers a disquieting and intriguing peek behind the curtains.
What others are saying:
Amazon.com Review says: Lauren Acampora’s debut novel is a series of linked stories set in the affluent suburbs. The characters in one story might turn up in one farther along in the book, but each story stands on its own—taken as a complete novel, The Wonder Garden has an alchemical effect that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Working with precise language and metaphor, she peels back the suburban veneer, highlighting our wants and our weirdness, taking characters that might seem stock if you saw them in the local Whole Foods and drawing out their individual eccentricities. It is inevitable that some will generalize Acampora’s novel as dark or even weird, and some of the individual stories are; she is working in the same milieu as Cheever, examining how relationships are tested by the particular pace and expectations of suburbia, and exploring the unique individual’s relationship to a place that, on the surface, demands homogeneity. Her characters are far from normal, even if they exist in a world that seems that way. But maybe that is normal. This is a wonderful debut by a striking talent.”
In these linked stories, all set in the pristine Connecticut suburb of Old Cranbury, Acampora wields prose with the precision of a scalpel, insightfully dissecting people’s desperate emotions and most cherished hopes. A home inspector undergoing a bitter divorce tries to dissuade a couple from buying their dream home, unable to bear the sight of their optimism about the future. A disturbed businessman becomes obsessed with the idea of viewing his wife’s brain surgery while inside the operating room. A young, pregnant wife cannot believe the advertising executive that she married now wants to chuck his career and heed the call of his spirit animal. Acampora not only meticulously conveys the allure of an outwardly paradisiacal suburban community, with its perfectly restored Victorian homes and well-tended lawns; she also clearly captures the inner turmoil of its residents, homing in on their darkest impulses and beliefs. Some of the stories’ starring characters make cameos in others, adding considerable complexity to the whole. Like Evan S. Connell in his iconic novels, Mrs. Bridge (1958) and Mr. Bridge (1969), Acampora brilliantly captures the heartaches and delusions of American suburbanites, “says Booklist.
Publishers Weekly says in its starred review: “Acampora’s debut creates a portrait of a fictional upscale Connecticut suburb, Old Cranbury, through a series of linked stories that are intelligent, unnerving, and very often strange. In “The Umbrella Bird,” a woman eases into her new life as a housewife in a stuffy neighborhood only for her husband to trade his lucrative job for a career as a spiritual healer. In “The Virginals,” a woman obsessed with the town’s early American history resorts to criminal measures to preserve it. The book’s best entry, “Afterglow,” centers on a wealthy businessman who pays off a doctor in order to gain a troublingly intimate glimpse of his wife’s anatomy. In each story, Acampora examines the tensions, longings, and mild lunacies underlying the “beady-eyed mommy culture” and sociopolitical “forgetfulness” marking Old Cranbury. At the same time, Acampora’s picture of the town—rendered in crisp prose and drawing on extensive architectural detail—is as irresistible as it is disturbing. . . “
“Acampora’s stories show that an Anna Karenina principle still applies: All happy families are the same; the unhappy ones are miserable in their own special way. Or to boil it down to modern terms: mo’ money, mo’ problems … Add well-drawn characters, interesting plots, cultural zingers and dead-on critiques of consumerism and Acampora delivers a page-turner,” says the Dallas Morning News.
The New York Times says: “I thought of Wharton when reading Lauren Acampora’s stylish debut collection of linked stories, “The Wonder Garden,” and not just because her characters — WASPy, upper-middle-class residents of a town called Old Cranbury — are contemporary descendants of Wharton’s own. Like Wharton, Acampora seems to understand fiction as a kind of elegant design. As characters reappear in one story after another, Acampora reveals herself as a careful architect, gradually building a group portrait of a place that is financially comfortable but otherwise ill at ease. It is a place of evasions and ambivalence, “this softest pocket of the continent, this deepest pouch of forgetfulness.”
Many of the stories revolve around houses — their renovation, preservation, decoration and sale. The opening story, “Ground Fault,” follows a grouchy home inspector as he meets a couple just out from New York City, looking to buy their first house. It’s a static story, not really indicative of Acampora’s flair, and I personally wouldn’t have put it first; but as I read further I came to understand that its theme — the importance of a stranger’s judgment of a new home — lays a foundation for the collection as a whole. The house as the locus of suburban identity and anxiety is more than just a motif in “The Wonder Garden”; it’s a structuring principle and focus of the characters’ lives. . . ‘
Says the Boston Globe: “Lauren Acampora’s debut collection, “The Wonder Garden,” is a weird, inspired, original collection of 13 interwoven short stories. It is reminiscent of John Cheever in its anatomizing of suburban ennui and of Ann Beattie in its bemused dissection of a colorful cast of eccentrics. But Acampora’s is entirely her own book, as it is self-consciously of its own world: Set in the fictional town of Old Cranbury, “a desirable suburb in a sterling school district, not too far from the city,” with a “historic pedigree” dating back to the Puritans. . . . Acampora is a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs, keenly “aware of the hidden, parallel world beneath the mundane,” adept at uncovering unexpected parallels and interesting connections between ostensibly very different people. Although the situations she puts her characters in are extreme, verging on implausible, she repeatedly strikes universal chords.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “The odd interior lives of suburban Connecticut residents are unceremoniously unearthed in the interwoven stories of Acampora’s debut. On the surface, Old Cranbury is just another New England town: picturesque, soaked in history, full of unspoken class divides, and populated with people who have abandoned New York City for, presumably, greener pastures. But beneath its exterior are wishes, dreams, and choices as grotesque as anything out of Winesburg, Ohio, and Acampora paints the town’s web of relationships with lucid, unsettling prose. In “Afterglow,” a wealthy businessman becomes obsessed with touching a human brain in the wake of his wife’s tumor diagnosis. A pregnant newlywed watches helplessly as her husband becomes convinced he’s being poisoned by technology and abandons his livelihood to take up New-Age medicine in “The Umbrella Bird.” An aging gay couple struggles with the yawning gulf between them in “Elevations.” In “Moon Roof,” a real estate agent stops her car at an intersection on her way home and cannot bring herself to continue as the minutes and hours inch by. In “Swarm,” a retired teacher is given the chance to realize his artistic dreams when a couple commissions him for an ambitious installation project: giant insects obscuring every wall of their home. “If it is possible,” he wonders, marveling at his good fortune, “that a boy who sucked licorice on the sidewalks of Flatbush could be a millionaire now…then the world is a spooky and fabulous place indeed.” Acampora’s world is exactly this: spooky and fabulous. There are expected beats—affairs, teenage mischief, ennui, unhappy marriages—but woven through them are bizarre set pieces, unnerving hungers, and such weirdly specific desires it’s as if the author rifled through a local therapist’s filing cabinet.
A clear-eyed lens into the strange, human wants of upper-class suburbia.”
When is it available?
The Wonder Garden is on the shelves of the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
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Golden Age: A novel (Last Hundred Years Trilogy)
by Jane Smiley
(Knopf, $26.95, 464 pages)
Who is this author?
Jane Smiley, who lives in California, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel A Thousand Acres, a modern retelling of King Lear set in Iowa farm country. She went on to write many other novels:, such as Moo (a biting satire of life at an agricultural college), Horse Heaven, Good Faith and Private Life, as well as five nonfiction books and a series for young adults. Her honors include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.
What is this book about?
One family; 100 years. One year; one chapter. Jane Smiley’s Iowa farm family trilogy, which opened with Some Luck and continued with Early Warning, is now completed by Golden Age: more than 1,300 pages all together, and for readers who are engrossed by this story, that is not enough. The trilogy opened on a cold and windswept Iowa farm in 1920 and ends in an imagined 2019, populated by a sprawling family, the Langdons, who expand their footprint across the country and beyond, with some achieving fame, others fortunes and still others experiencing some bad luck, occasionally mixed with good. Their story is of course also the story of the past 100 years in America, and Smiley effectively mixes the two. The first book began with farmer Walter Langdon worrying about his land and the final book is also permeated with worries about the health of farmland and the health of the land in its larger meaning as the country itself. Characters introduced earlier play out their lives in ways both expected and surprising. You can read this book as a standalone, but I recommend you begin at the beginning with Some Luck and follow this saga of American life through all three volumes.
Why you’ll like it:
Happy Thanksgiving! Here is a book that celebrates family life in all its comforting and frustrating realities, peopled by characters that struggle but mostly survive. If you immerse yourself in its three volumes, you will feel you have come to know a group of real people, and without doubt some of them will touch you in unexpected ways. Smiley can be compared to such classic authors as Dickens and contemporary stars as Louise Erdrich for her ability to create memorable, unpredictable and believable characters. As winter comes on, those looking for a long but satisfying read will find it in Smiley’s bountiful trilogy.
What others are saying:
The Chicago Tribune says: “To most novelists, the prospect of writing a trilogy that spans an entire century might have seemed outrageously ambitious, if not downright foolhardy. But Jane Smiley is not most novelists. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author didn’t simply rise to the multiple challenges of the multigenerational family saga. In the trilogy—which concludes with Golden Age—Smiley tells not only the story of an American family, but also the story of America itself. Set on a farm in Iowa and, as various members of the Langdon clan spread out, throughout the country and the world, The Last Hundred Years finds the family buffeted by change, including war, economic ups and downs, shifts in the culture and practice of farming, politics and a variety of other factors. At the same time, the way the characters interact with history is indivisible from the way they interact with each other, which is inextricably bound up with family dynamics and the mystery of human personality.”
“Ambitious, absorbing, rich in detail . . . In this final installment of her Last Hundred Years trilogy, Smiley wraps up the story of an Iowa farm family, with branches stretching to California and Chicago and New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Golden Age opens in 1987 [and] ends in a fraught 2019. Smiley allows plenty of room to incisively explore both sides of the increasingly bitter American political divide. She builds an unsparing portrait of a country seared by change and tempered by humanity, a place that tests and tries the Langdons, but never quite breaks them . . . Golden Age flows with the nuances and rhythms of everyday life, with time passing steadily, through births and deaths, triumph and tragedy. Smiley’s prose is precise but spare; she doesn’t need histrionics to wring your heart or make it sing. She only needs a few simple sentences . . . The book’s structure allows her to hone in on the historical events through the eyes of people about whom we care, and she builds unexpected joys and alliances into their remarkable and ordinary lives . . . Smiley lays out the dangers, daring us to ignore them at our own peril. But Golden Age is not downbeat; it puts our existence into perspective . . . In the wild, unpredictable, precious ride of life, we can still find moments to savor,” says The Miami Herald.
“With Golden Age, Smiley wraps up her sweeping, cumulatively absorbing American epic—as expansive and ambitious in its way as Balzac’s Human Comedy and John Updike’s Rabbit quartet . . . References to historical benchmarks anchor the novel in time. But what captivates are the unfolding lives of characters who share DNA and a fraying connection to their agrarian roots . . . Smiley’s plot is a marvel of intricacy that’s full of surprises. Her view of old age and, especially, old love, are unexpectedly sweet. [The] trilogy demonstrates repeatedly that most lives are a combination of improvisation and serendipity, good luck and bad. With issues such as corruption, climate disruption and racism blighting the country’s horizon, her characters wonder if the golden age is behind them. But Claire, the last surviving child of Walter and Rosanna Langdon, reflects on the bright spots of her 80 years, [making] her realize that ‘all golden ages, perhaps, were discovered within’ . . . A satisfying finale to a monumental portrait of an American family and an American century,” says the Los Angeles Times.
Booklist’s starred review says: “With Golden Age, Smiley grandly concludes her Last Hundred Years trilogy, a multigenerational saga about an Iowa farm family. In each novel, Smiley has subtly yet pointedly linked forces political, technological, financial, and social to personal lives, tracing in the most organic, unobtrusive, yet clarifying manner the enormous changes that have taken place over the last century . . . Smiley revels in the blissfulness of being, celebrating the glory of horses, the good company of dogs, the sweet astonishment of quickening life and newborn babies, the sheltering intimacy of a loving marriage, the pleasure of solitude . . . She sustains an enthralling narrative velocity and buoyancy, punctuated with ricocheting dialogue, as she creates a spectacular amplitude of characters, emotions, and events. Sensuousness, dread, recognition, shock, sorrow, mischievous humor, revelation, empathy—all are generated by fluid, precisely calibrated prose, abiding connection to the terrain she maps, fascination with her characters, and command of the nuances of the predicaments. Each novel is a whole and vital world in its own right, and together the three stand as a veritable cosmos as Smiley makes brilliant use of the literary trilogy—the ideal form for encompassing the breadth and depth of our brash, glorious, flawed, precious country . . . Smiley’s cantering, far-reaching, yet intimate trilogy is both timely in the issues it so astutely raises (especially as Iowa is once again in the presidential election spotlight), and timeless in the rapture of its storytelling and the humanness of its insights into family, self, and our connection to the land. Readers will be reading, and rereading, Smiley’s Last Hundred Years far into the next.”
When is it available?
Golden Age should be available at the Downtown Hartford Public Library by Dec. 4. Early Warning and Some Luck are at the Downtown Library, and Some Luck is also at the Mark Twain branch,.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads
by Paul Theroux
(Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $29.95, 464 pages)
Who is this author?
Paul Theroux divides his time between homes in Hawaii and Cape Cod, and he has traveled the world for business and pleasure. Now 74, he has published more than 30 works of fiction, including The Mosquito Coast, which was adapted as a major motion picture, but he is best known for his travel writing, which includes such books as The Great Railway Bazaar, about traveling by train from Britain to Japan and back, The Old Patagonian Express, The Kingdom By The Sea, The Happy Isles Of Oceania, Riding the Iron Rooster, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He speaks Italian, French, German, Spanish, Urdu, Chichewa, Swahili, and Mandarin Chinese. Deep South keeps him closer to home, but in many ways he finds it is just as alien and mysterious as his most exotic destinations.
What is this book about?
After 50 years of world travel, captured in many acclaimed books, Theroux decided that it was time to do some exploring of a place – and a culture – that is uniquely American. His visits covered four seasons and many paradoxes: wonderful music and cuisines and friendly welcomes that may or may not be sincere, but deplorable schools, housing situations and unemployment, not to mention the lingering impact of slavery and ongoing racial discrimination. He visits the rural South — Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, and South Carolina – stopping at churches, gun shows and diners, meeting preachers and good ol’ boys and families mired in poverty and finding a kind of Third World embedded in our First World country. It’s an epic journey to a culture quite different from the New England where Theroux grew up, and in this book he captures its language, customs, preferences and prejudices with the skill of a practiced traveler and a gifted writer.
Why you’ll like it:
Theroux writes with verve and irony, and his sharp eye and ear for dialects create vivid portraits of people and places. As America seems to grow more politically and culturally polarized by the day, this book is a valuable guide for readers in the North to a part of the country that seems simultaneously cut off from the rest of the U.S. yet indubitably American.
Here is what Theroux says about a woman who volunteers to guide him to a hard–to-find country church: “As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, and she gave me a wonderful smile, and just before she drove on she said, “Be blessed.”
“That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand.”
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “…Theroux’s eye for landscape remains as sharp as ever…But in the end it’s Theroux’s remarkable gift for getting strangers to reveal themselves that makes going along for this ride worthwhile.
In its starred review, Publishers Weekly says: Travel writer Theroux finds the traveling easier and his insights more penetrating in this engrossing passage through the South. Celebrating the wonders of American driving—no more rattle-trap trains or jam-packed buses—the New England native recounts several road trips from South Carolina through Arkansas, circling back to revisit places and people in a way he couldn’t on his treks across foreign continents. His relaxed schedule lets him forget the journey and, instead, immerse himself in destinations that seem both familiar and strange (“Jesus is lord—we buy and sell guns,” reads a billboard). Avoiding tourist traps, Theroux seeks out gun shows, church services, seedy motels, and downscale diners such as Doe’s Eat Place, in Greenville, Miss.; he insistently probes the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and the appalling poverty of back-road towns abandoned by industry. All this emerges through vivid, novelistic reportage as he gently prods people for their stories, reveling in their musical dialects, mapping the intersections of personal experience and tragic history that give the South “a great overwhelming sadness that couldn’t fathom.” Free of the sense of alienation that marked his recent travelogues, this luminous sojourn is Theroux’s best outing in years.
Says Library Journal: “Theroux’s title takes us on a trip to a part of the South few seek out. He avoids big cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans and heads to the Deep South: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, and South Carolina. The author visits, several times in some cases, a number of the poorest cities and communities in the nation. The result is a socially conscious travelog, with a good deal of Southern history thrown in, including literature, race relations, and economics. Theroux writes of the people he meets with sympathy and verve, and though many seem to fit Southern stereotypes, they still come across as genuine on the page. It’s the people of the Deep South—from the frat boys and Southern preachers to African American farmers and local officials—working to save their small towns who bring this book to life. VERDICT: A literary travelog that will interest readers of Southern history and literature and anyone with an interest in American urban history and the plight of the poor.”
Kirkus Reviews gives it a star and says: “An acclaimed travel writer and novelist’s engrossing account of his journey through the Deep South. During his long, fruitful career, Theroux has traveled to many exotic locations all over the world. Yet 50 years after he began as a travel writer, he was suddenly seized with a longing to travel through the hominess of the American South. Driving along rural highways and deliberately bypassing “buoyant cities and obvious pleasures,” he sought out the sights and people that he believed would help him understand a remarkable but profoundly troubled region. The green landscapes of the Deep South still included tobacco and cotton fields, both of which stood as reminders of the “persistence of history.” Even the many gun shows that Theroux visited seemed to recall the Old South’s preoccupation with defending not only its soil, but also its values against incursions from the North. For African-Americans, churches still served as spaces of “focus and respite from a hostile…majority [white] culture.” Memories of slavery and segregation even persisted in the geography, with whites living in the hills and mountains and blacks primarily inhabiting the agricultural flatlands. What stirred Theroux the most, however, was how so many of the places he observed resembled “what [was] often thought of as the Third World.” Despite encounters with lingering racism and deeply entrenched social and economic problems, the author found a warm welcome almost everywhere he went. Everyone—from barbers and welfare families to preachers and politicians—showered him with kindness, generosity, and, more often than not, stories. Broken by history but rich in culture and spirit, the South that Theroux came to know was “a dream, with all a dream’s distortions and satisfactions.” As thoughtful as it is evocative, the book offers insight into a significant region and its people and customs. An epically compelling travel memoir.”
When is it available?
You only need to travel to the Hartford Public Library to borrow this book.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Adult Onset
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
(Tin House, $25.95, 400 pages)
Who is this author?
Just like her protagonist, Mary Rose MacKinnon, Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald is a best-selling novelist with a wife and two children. She also is a playwright, an actor and a broadcaster. Her previous books include Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Belle Moral: A Natural History, Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies.
What is this book about?
Mary Rose is caught in a bind. Trying hard to take care of her two young kids while her partner, a theater director, is out of town for a very long week, and also dealing with her aging and increasingly difficult parents, she is suffering a massive case of writer’s block and cannot seem to finish the third book in her YA trilogy. Worse, she is full of general anxiety and suffering a return of a painful arm condition that marred her childhood, physical pain that brings up sad memories of being the surviving child of a mother prone to miscarriages and stillbirths. And though her parents have come to accept her lesbian life and partner, some tensions remain. Motherhood can be wonderful, but Mary Rose, at 48, is learning that its realities are far from idyllic and that family ties can be tangled and constraining as well as sustaining.
Why you’ll like it:
Anyone who has spent time as a solo parent or has had a difficult childhood will understand and sympathize with what Mary Rose is going through in this tautly written novel. And even if that has not been the reader’s personal experience, MacDonald writes with the kind of power that makes Mary Rose believable and calls forth empathy. This book delineates the pleasures and pitfalls of mothering in a compelling and provocative way.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “MacDonald’s riveting drama features 48-year-old Mary Rose MacKinnon as she dutifully cares for her two young children in Toronto, outwardly making all the right choices with organic foods and extreme toddler proofing. Inwardly, however, she frets over potential disaster scenarios while struggling to retain a sense of self. Although Mary Rose writes young adult fiction and has a loyal fan base, she can’t make headway on the third novel in her trilogy. “She never imagined she would be a ‘morning person’ or drive a station wagon or be capable of following printed instructions for an array of domestic contraptions that come with some assembly required; until now, the only thing she had ever been able to assemble was a story.” During a week when her partner, Hilary, is out of town, Mary Rose reflects on her tumultuous childhood, which forced her to shoulder survivor’s guilt after the loss of would-be siblings, while coping with her lifelong painful bone condition. Glimmers of escalating anger—a family trait—begin to creep through her constructed veneer in Hilary’s absence. MacDonald’s strong narrative is a compelling examination of the loneliness and the often-absurd helplessness of being a parent of young children.”
Says Library Journal: “As winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and a finalist for many more, Canadian author MacDonald comes with sterling credentials reflected in the engrossing flow of this book. YA fiction author Mary Rose MacKinnon has put her career on hold to tend to the two young children she has with her partner, Hil, who’s spreading her wings as a theater director. The frazzled insanity of parenthood is well rendered here, but Mary Rose is also dealing with physical and psychic pain from her past. Her military father and unbalanced mother, Dolly, of Lebanese descent, lost two babies, including one who would have been named Mary Rose, and as a youngster Mary Rose suffered pain in her arm that led to multiple bone surgeries. The pain is returning, as is a sense that there’s more to her difficulties than her parents admit. In addition, their resistance when she came out has melted but still troubles Mary Rose, who’s worrying Hil by drifting closer to the edge. VERDICT Though the book seems somewhat drawn out, the fine, clearly detailed writing makes for an accomplished read blending the familiar parental/spousal angst with the specifics of Mary Rose’s struggle.”
Kirkus Review says: “Assaulted by mysterious pains and bracketed by painful childhood memories, Mary Rose MacKinnon engages in power struggles with her willful toddler and endures the stresses of stay-at-home parenting while her partner, Hilary, is out of town. An acclaimed young-adult novelist, Mary Rose is suffering from severe writer’s block, unable to complete the third volume in her popular series. Despite the surface comforts of life in her liberal, upper-middle-class Toronto enclave, she feels an inexplicable sense of alienation from her environment; she distances herself from the other mothers at her child’s preschool and avoids communication with her own parents, despite their belated acceptance of her homosexuality and loving acceptance of Hilary and their grandchildren. When Mary Rose’s charming Lebanese mother, Dolly, was younger, she had numerous miscarriages, stillbirths and babies who died shortly after birth, and she seems to be fixating on this tragic period many decades later. The effect of this sad legacy on family dynamics has never been fully explored, and Mary Rose has many vague, unspoken questions about her own childhood, the answers to which might help explain her emotional paralysis and phantom arm pains, as well as the mysterious bone cysts she suffered as a young girl. MacDonald integrates three narratives into this novel—Mary Rose’s mundane day-to-day existence, Dolly’s experience of severe depression as a young mother lamenting her lost babies, and Mary Rose’s novels, which parallel elements of her own family story distorted through the lens of teen fantasy fiction. While clever, the novel within the novel seems a bit forced. There is a recurring theme of impostors and doppelgängers and a shrewd twinning motif, but the reader is always conscious of the writer’s craft. Of the three, Dolly’s story is the most naturalistically and sensitively portrayed. Despite the too-neat Freudian implications of Mary Rose’s story, this is an affecting, multilayered account of domestic ennui and the painful effects of long-held secrets on three generations.”
“[Adult Onset is] the most accurate description of solo parenting I’ve ever read . . . [MacDonald’s] writing is dizzying and brilliant, and often disorienting, which beautifully supports the novel’s themes, perfectly capturing how it feels to be unmoored and seemingly alone,” says the Associated Press.
“If you’re of [an anxious] disposition, reading Ann-Marie MacDonald’s latest novel, Adult Onset, is both a blessing and a curse. It’s certainly an accurate depiction, and best described as exposure therapy—an exercise in committing yourself to multiple hours of low-grade anxiety, like walking into a crowded, sweltering room if you’re claustrophobic, wandering a fluorescent-lit hospital if you’re a hypochondriac, or travelling a long distance via air if you have a fear of flying. There’s an inexplicable sense of doom to overcome if you’re going to get through it, a looming spectre of disaster, even if all seems well on the surface as you turn each page. Adult Onset is MacDonald’s long-awaited third novel, following her highly successful blockbuster 1996 debut, Fall on Your Knees, and her 2003 Giller Prize shortlisted The Way The Crow Flies. . . . At its core, Adult Onset is about what happens when we are unable to face the physical and emotional pain of our past head on, and how the chronic illness of trauma will haunt even the most insignificant moments of our days. . . . It is a high achievement for a writer to portray the persistent worry of avoidance in a way than rings true, and MacDonald has beyond succeeded. It is in this sense that Adult Onset is both a book that is difficult to endure, and one worthy of our praise and attention. . . . Many of us will see ourselves in the profound discomfort MacDonald has conjured, and though the narrative lends itself to frustration as a result, the book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity,” says the National Post.
When is it available?
You can borrow this novel from the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
By Stephen King
(Scribner, $30, 512 pages)
Who is this author?
He’s ba-a-a-a-ck! Stephen King, our premier master of literary horror fiction (and plenty more) has a new collection this year, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. King has published more than 50 international bestsellers, including novels, story collections, memoir, mysteries, a guide to writing well and more, not to mention the movies and TV series based on his books. This year, his recent novel, Mr. Mercedes, won the prestigious Edgar Award for mysteries. His awards are too numerous to detail here, but one stands out: the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an honor that packed a double punch: it confirmed his talent and influence and also annoyed the stuffier members of the literary world. Now 68 and living in Maine with his wife, novelist Tabitha King, he is still productive and still winning awards and plaudits.
What is this book about?
Here are 20 stories and poems, about half of which are new or never before published. His themes are familiar: mortality, morality, life after death, guilt after bad acts, scary supernatural abilities that foretell future sorrows or perhaps actually cause them. In “Obits,” the very act of preparing a death notice for a celebrity for a gossipy website before he or she dies opens the door to the Grim Reaper, as do names written in the sand in “The Dune.” “Afterlife” is a “Groundhog Day” kind of tale, about a guy who keeps getting do-overs but can’t do them right. These stories may make readers uneasy, but they also will make them think.
Why you’ll like it:
King published his first story collection 35 years ago. He knew how to craft a story then and his talent is ever more powerful now. One of the best things about this new book is that each story is adorned with the author’s explanation of why and how it came to be written, which gives the reader some insider’s insights into Kings creative process and prodigious imagination. Here is his chatty but just a touch chilling introduction:
“I’ve made some things for you, Constant Reader; you see them laid out before you in the moonlight. But before you look at the little handcrafted treasures I have for sale, let’s talk about them for a bit, shall we? It won’t take long. Here, sit down beside me. And do come a little closer. I don’t bite.
Except . . . we’ve known each other for a very long time, and I suspect you know that’s not entirely true.
Is it?”
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly gives this book a starred review: “Renowned author King’s impressive latest collection wraps 20 stories and poems in fascinating commentary. Each work’s preface explains what inspired it and gives readers insight into King’s writing methods, with occasional tidbits of his daily life. The stories themselves are meditations on mortality, destiny, and regret, all of which showcase King’s talent for exploring the human condition. Realistic and supernatural elements sit side by side. The tragic “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” contrasts the charmed lives of two world-famous poets enjoying a roadside picnic with the grim existence of two single mothers who are taking one last road trip. “Under the Weather” tells of a man’s fierce love for his wife and the terrifying power of denial. “Summer Thunder,” a story about a man and his dog at the end of the world, is a heart-wrenching study of inevitability and the enduring power of love. Other standouts include “Ur,” about a Kindle that links to other worlds, and “Bad Little Kid,” about a terrifying murderous child (complete with propeller hat). This introspective collection, like many of King’s most powerful works, draws on the deepest emotions: love, grief, fear, and hope.”
The Tampa Bay Times says: “[King]has always had a wicked (in more ways than one) sense of humor, too, and it’s often on display along with the scary stuff in his new short story collection, The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams…One of the bonuses of Bazaar is that each story is preceded by a note from the author about its genesis… If you’re looking for King’s paranormal horror side, though, Bazaar has plenty to satisfy you…And if you want King in full funny tall-tale mode, head for Drunken Fireworks. It’s the hilarious story of how its narrator, a Maine native named Alden who lives with his mother in a modest cabin on the ‘town side’ of Abenaki Lake, gets into an ever-escalating Fourth of July arms race with a rich guy on the other shore who’s rumored to be ‘connected,’ if you know what I mean. One lesson: Never buy a firework called Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.”
Says The Miami Herald : “The best stories in The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams are the ones that read like they meant something to King… A Death, which bears the easy, plaintive prose of Kent Haruf, follows a sheriff preparing to go through with the hanging of a man who may have been falsely convicted of murder. Obits channels the snark and cynicism of contemporary culture as its hero, a writer of celebrity death notices for a Gawker-like website, discovers he can kill people by writing their obituaries while they’re still alive. Summer Thunder, the touching post-apocalyptic story that concludes the book, ends on a note of lovely melancholy. Death may be inevitable, King says. But to fret about it or dwell on it is a waste of time when life, even at its most difficult, can bear so many rewards.”
Library Journal’s starred review says: “This collection begins with an introduction by King on why he writes short stories. To the reader’s delight, he also provides a backstory for each tale, enticing the reader with a memory or scenario that prompted that particular selection’s birth. Some of the pieces have been previously published. Some have been polished and revised—”Ur” was originally written as a “Kindle Single” for Amazon. Veering from the short story format, King published “Tommy” as a poem in Playboy in 2010. For baseball fans, watch out for the unexpected ending in “Blockade Billy.” With “The Little Green God of Agony,” King hints at how his life experience shapes his works. VERDICT The stories collected here are riveting and sometimes haunting, as is the author’s style. Surprise endings abound. King is in a class all by himself. Be prepared to read voraciously.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “A gathering of short stories by an ascended master of the form. Best known for mega-bestselling horror yarns, King has been writing short stories for a very long time, moving among genres and honing his craft. This gathering of 20 stories, about half previously published and half new, speaks to King’s considerable abilities as a writer of genre fiction who manages to expand and improve the genre as he works; certainly no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels). Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, with allowances for modern references (“Somewhere far off, a helicopter beats at the sky over the Gulf. The DEA looking for drug runners, the Judge supposes”). Pulpy though some stories are, the published pieces have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker. Many inhabit the same literary universe as Raymond Carver, whom King even name-checks in an extraordinarily clever tale of the multiple realities hidden in a simple Kindle device: “What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Like Carver, King often populates his stories with blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone: “Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.” Best of all, lifting the curtain, King prefaces the stories with notes about how they came about (“This one had to be told, because I knew exactly what kind of language I wanted to use”). Those notes alone make this a must for aspiring writers. Readers seeking a tale well told will take pleasure in King’s sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy pages.”
When is it available?
It’s not a dream: copies are waiting at the Albany, Barbour, Blue Hills, Goodwin, Mark Twain and Park branches of the Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series)
By Sister Souljah
(Atria/Emily Bestler Books, $27.99, 544 pages)
Who is this author?
Sister Souljah, whose real name is Lisa Williamson, was born in 1964 in the Bronx. She graduated from Rutgers University with a dual major in American History and African Studies and achieved fame and notoriety as a political activist and teacher for disadvantaged urban youth, as a rapper and author, and during the 1992 presidential campaign, as someone Bill Clinton repudiated for her inflammatory statements about race relations – a risky move for a Democrat that became known as a “Sister Souljah moment.” Her debut book, in 1995, was the autobiography No Disrespect, and she went on to write bestselling novels beginning in 1999, including The Coldest Winter Ever, Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (an instant bestseller), Midnight and the Meaning of Love and A Deeper Love Inside: the Porsche Santiaga Story. A Moment of Silence is the third in her Midnight series. She also has contributed to Essence and The New Yorker.
What is this book about?
He is a young, compelling Muslim man, but Midnight has challenges, among them being the husband of two wives who live with him, his mother Umma and sister Naja in New York. That seems difficult enough, but Midnight also must contend with living among people who do not follow his faith or understand it and adults who resent his intelligence and ability to make money. Although his trademark cool personality and Ninja training serve him well, he succumbs to an outburst of rage while defending his sister that upends his life and throws him into dangerous contact with the drug trade, bad cops and worse gangs and a crooked money laundering ring that offers him desperately needed shelter. The story asks if Midnight can keep his faith, defend his manhood and overcome envy, hate and the pull of the streets to survive, thrive and receive justice.
Why you’ll like it:
As an author, Sister Souljah has a raw and powerful voice, radical and outspoken beliefs and a very passionate fan base. A spokesman for the Hartford Public Library says that her books are among the most frequently checked out in their entire collection. She will visit the downtown library, 500 Main St., Hartford, on Saturday, Nov. 14 at 1 p.m. to give a free talk about her life and books. For more information, go to www.hplct.org.
What others are saying:
www.blackpageturners.com says: “In her next heart-pounding novel of passion, danger, temptation, and adventure, New York Times bestselling author Sister Souljah returns to the story of Midnight, a young man searching for love and fulfillment across the globe. Having returned from a worldwide journey to reclaim his wife, Akemi, Midnight returns to Queens, where he hopes to create a new, less tumultuous life with his love. But things fall apart when violence targets his younger sister Naja. Forsaking his usual control, the ninja warrior kills his sister’s attacker in cold blood, forcing him on the run and into the only shelter he can find: a seedy money laundering ring whose members are in league with the police. Though Midnight is promised temporary refuge, he’s soon recognized for the murder of Naja’s attacker, and lands in jail. Separated from his love, his city, and his family, Midnight must cling to his Muslim beliefs to stay strong. But soon enough, he meets Ricky Santiaga, the man who will become his leader and father figure…and perhaps, his only hope. From Japan to New York City, Midnight is back in action on the mean city streets and ready to fight for love. Here is a powerful new novel that packs more passion, plot, and emotional punch . . . Sister Souljah’s most masterful story yet.”
Library Journal says: Sister continues her in-depth character examination of Midnight, the mysterious enforcer for drug kingpin Ricky Santiaga and the unrequited love of Ricky’s wild daughter, Winter. In this lengthy tale set in 1986 and before Midnight crosses paths with Winter, there are sudden shifts in time and place designed to reveal Midnight’s emotional core. Midnight prefers to remain silent in all situations but is an honorable and devout Muslim. Although only 17, he has married two women and is a loving husband to both of them. Readers may be taken back by Midnight’s precocious maturity especially when he’s speaking about his life philosophy. “How each man responds to evil options and suggestions is the only way for you to determine if he is a good man. He may be good. But no man is innocent.” VERDICT Undoubtedly Midnight is one of the more intriguing characters found in urban fiction. Yet too often the author sacrifices her plot by digressions into extensive messages/editorials about Muslim beliefs, how women should always be respected, and the ignorance of police. The slow-developing story finally accelerates when Midnight meets Ricky Santiaga and then is sent to Rikers prison. Sister Souljah’s many fans will want this.”
When is it available?
A Moment of Silence is expected to be on the shelves of the Downtown Hartford Public Library and all its branches by Nov. 12 or shortly thereafter.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Mycroft Holmes
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with Anna Waterhouse
(Titan, $25.99, 336 pages)
Who is this author?
I’m betting that ALL of you, sports fans or not, know who Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is. The basketball all-star who played for the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers is the all-time leading NBA scorer and a literal giant – he’s 7’ 2” – of the game. But did you know that he has written several well-regarded books? They include the children’s book, What Color is My World, the military history Brothers in Arms and the black history book On the Shoulders of Giants. Abdul-Jabbar also is a a U.S. cultural ambassador and, more to the point here, a major fan of the Sherlock Holmes books.
Anna Waterhouse is a screenwriter and script consultant. They teamed up to produce a TV documentary version of On the Shoulders of Giants that won NAACP and Telly awards.
What is this book about?
In Abdul-Jabbar’s tale, savvy Sherlock has an even smarter older brother, Mycroft. A Victorian-era graduate of prestigious Cambridge University, he begins a successful career in the British government, assisting its Secretary of State for War. Mycroft also has connections with Trinidad, where his best friend Cyrus Douglas, an African by heritage, was born and where his beloved wife-to-be, Georgiana Sutton, grew up. Then comes word of strange and menacing doings on the island: people disappear and mysterious footprints appear. They may be the traces of evil spirits called douen, who lead children to even more evil spirits called lougarou who kill them and drink their blood. Georgiana heads to Trinidad and Mycroft and Cyrus follow her into the dangerous web of disappearances and death. This frightening adventure sets Mycroft on the path to founding the Diogenes Club and becoming a secret player in the British government.
Why you’ll like it:
There’s great fun in reading fiction that takes a familiar character and expands his or her world, and it’s also enjoyable to read a story written by someone who has made a legendary career in one field and then branches out successfully into a totally new and unrelated endeavor. In Mycroft Holmes, you get both, and both are done very well. Lame puns about towering intellect and slam dunks aside, this book would be worthy of your time even if its authors were heretofore unknown.
What others are saying:
“Basketball legend Abdul-Jabbar makes his triumphant adult fiction debut with an action yarn that fills in the backstory of Sherlock Holmes’s older and smarter brother, Mycroft. In 1870, the 23-year-old Mycroft, who has a reputation as a daredevil, is serving as a secretary at the War Office when word reaches London of a series of unusual deaths in Trinidad. Someone, or some thing, has been killing children and draining their blood. The locals believe the culprits are supernatural beings known as lougarou, who drain children of their blood, and douen, who leave highly unusual footprints near their victims. The tragic news stuns Mycroft’s fiancée, Georgiana Sutton, who immediately sails home to Trinidad. Disobeying her request to stay behind, Mycroft follows Georgiana to Trinidad, where he must exercise his intellect and his innate diplomatic skills to solve the crimes and remain alive. Sherlockians who relish the screen adventures of Cumberbatch and Downey will be particularly entertained,” says Publishers Weekly’s starred review.
In its starred review, Booklist says: “Abdul-Jabbar, a Holmesian since his college days, joins forces with Waterhouse to offer a rousing mystery starring Sherlock’s older (and smarter) brother, Mycroft, a rising star in the British government. The action begins in 1870 London but quickly moves to Trinidad, where Mycroft’s closest friend, Cyrus Douglas, a native of the island, must travel to investigate what some believe is an infestation of douen—tiny supernatural characters who lead children into the clutches of werewolf-like lougarou. Mycroft joins his friend for the trip, and what the two find on arrival—after a near-fatal ocean crossing—isn’t supernatural but far more harrowing… The authors hit all the right notes here, combining fascinating historical detail with rousing adventure, including some cleverly choreographed fight scenes and a pair of protagonists whose rich biracial friendship, while presented realistically, given the era (Douglas must sometimes pose as a butler), is the highlight of the book. Yes, Douglas is a sort-of Watson, but a much brighter, more physical, more bantering version, an equal not a foil. Mystery fans will be eager to hear more from this terrific duo, who may well develop into a gaslit version of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Hawk.”
“Clear space on your new fiction shelf for this slam-dunk of a debut novel. Cowritten by NBA all-star and author Abdul-Jabbar and screenwriter and producer Waterhouse, the team behind the NAACP and Telly Award–winning documentary On the Shoulders of Giants, this latest collaboration brings a fresh voice and broadened scope to the Holmes canon. Historical fiction and mystery fans will be the first to demand this title, but its mass appeal is undeniable,” says Library Journal in its starred review.
Says Esquire: “The erudite Jabbar has managed to weave elements of his far flung interests into a fascinating mystery narrative. The briskly written book has a delicate woven plot that brings together such diverse elements as Trinidadian culture and folklore, the tobacco importation business in London, and the usual Holmesian array of brightly obtuse knowledge and libertine philosophy that Sherlock fans enjoy— not to mention a plot that involves an elaborate scheme to bring slavery back to the Caribbean. By far the star of the novel is Holmes’ able accomplice Douglas—as compared to Watson, Douglas is portrayed as an equal instead of a foil. The careful dance of the friendship between the two men of different races, complicated by the laws and conventions of the era, is fascinating.”
“That’s right: nonpareil basketball player Abdul-Jabbar, who’s already written memoirs, nonfiction titles, and children’s books, partners with screenwriter Waterhouse to introduce a prequel to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ smarter brother.
Says Kirkus Reviews: “Back in 1870, when Sherlock is still an indifferent student at the Royal College of St. Peter, his older brother, a little wet behind the ears at 23, serves as secretary to Edward Cardwell, the Secretary of State for War, and looks forward to his marriage to Georgiana Sutton, a perfect English rose born in Port of Spain. His plans are knocked sideways by the hushed news from his Trinidadian friend and associate Cyrus Douglas that a lougarou, as the islanders call werewolves, has been draining the blood of young children and causing mass disappearances of their elders. Booking passage aboard the Sultana for Trinidad, the two men swiftly find themselves immersed in an unholy scheme by a ring of freelance entrepreneurs to revive a horror recently and traumatically abolished in the Americas. Even more disturbingly, every new development in the adventure, which eventually leads the visitors to the Sacred Order of the Harmonious Fists, seems to point unerringly to well-placed government functionaries and protectors and implicate someone close to Mycroft himself as a conspirator.
The central conceit is audacious; Mycroft’s sense of moral outrage is nicely reflective of the era; the historical detail is solid; and the period decorum is well-maintained throughout. Only the characters and their cumbersome individual interactions are muffled by all the grade-A trappings.”
When is it available?
Finding this book is no mystery: it’s at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Ropkins branch.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
The Green Road
By Anne Enright
(Norton, $26.95, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
An Irish author, based in Dublin, Anne Enright has published five novels, three story collections and one nonfiction book. In 2015, she was named the first Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and her last novel, The Forgotten Waltz, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
What is this book about?
Meet the Madigans, a family from the west of Ireland that has scattered to destinations as disparate as New York and Mali in West Africa, and now must come together for a last Christmas gathering in their old home on Green Road in County Clare, which their mother, the mercurial and theatrical Rosaleen, is determined to sell and then to divide up the proceeds among them. The grown children fear their childhood (or at least their memories of it) are on the block as well. Dan is finding himself in New York, Emmet is battling poverty and starvation in Mali, Hanna is an alcolholic actress with an unplanned child on the way and Constance, on whom Rosaleen relies, is facing a serious health problem. Will they find a way to come together, or this their last Christmas as a family?
Why you’ll like it:
Enright, like so many gifted Irish authors, knows how to spin a tale and create compelling characters. And she deftly employs a lilting Irish tone when those characters talk, adding to the authenticity of this tale. Above all, this is a family drama about a dramatic family, people who love and annoy each other in the way that only a family can. If you believe, with Tolstoy, that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” you will appreciate the uniqueness of Enright’s accomplishment here.
What others are saying:
In The New York Times Book Review, author David Leavitt writes: “. . . an impressive novel that bounces its readers through some fairly rocky terrain, not the least of it the green road of the title, as [Enright] charts the fortunes and misfortunes (mostly the latter) of the Madigan family over a period of roughly a quarter of a century…Enright writes with authority and confidence not just about her native Ireland…but about the AIDS-stricken New York in which Dan is making his way and the poverty-stricken Mali where Emmet, the novel’s unsparing voice of conscience, is going about the practical business of saving lives…The Green Road is, in the best sense of the word, a strange novel. Or perhaps I should say it’s a novel that gets stranger and stranger as it goes along.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “The eponymous road of Enright’s flawless novel is in County Clare in Ireland, running from the impoverished farm of handsome Pat Madigan in Boolavaun, to a house called Ardeevin, where he wooed Rosaleen Considine, daughter of the town’s leading family. Pat and Rosaleen marry and have four children. A volatile drama queen, Rosaleen is the fulcrum about which her children warily move. Even as they mature and flee from her embrace, she exists in their heads, where they continue to blame her for their bad fortunes. In 1980, Rosaleen takes to her bed when Dan, the eldest and her favorite, announces his intention to become a priest. She is even more aggrieved when he abandons the priesthood for the art community in New York in the 1990s and eventually allows his true sexual nature to emerge in a series of ardent gay trysts. Enright (winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering) writes of this time and place with crystalline clarity. The tone is much different in the chapters set in Ardeevin, where the lilt of Irish vernacular permeates the dialogue. Meanwhile Emmet, the second son, is engaged in relief work in Mali, trying to retain his sanity as the death toll from famine mounts and his girlfriend lavishes her love on a mangy dog. Hanna, his sister, is an aspiring actress and a drunk who confronts reality at 37, bitterly ambivalent about being the mother of an unplanned baby. The fourth sibling, Constance, who has married well and lives with her happy family in Limerick, is her mother’s dogsbody and the unappreciated provider. This novel is a vibrant family portrait, both pitiless and compassionate, witty and stark, of simple people living quiet lives of anguish, sometimes redeemed by moments of grace.”
Says Library Journal: “. . . . Rosaleen’s adult children, for the first time in years, are gathering for Christmas in west Clare, Ireland. Rosaleen can’t be made happy, and her children are far from trying anymore, if they ever did. Their own lives, which vary so much they seem to inhabit different eras as well as different countries, need tending. Dan is fearfully navigating early 1990s New York’s AIDS-devastated gay scene and has found a love he can’t even admit to himself is real; Hanna’s acting career, which never really took off, is floundering; Constance’s health scare underlines the isolation she feels in her marriage; and Emmet, the most distant of them all in every way, is exhausted by Ireland’s excesses when he leaves his aid work in Mali. The family’s stuttering reunion is capped by a surprise move by Rosaleen that breaks the tension and forces the children to see their mother and her choices in a new light. VERDICT Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering) lays bare the hopes, desperations, and all too brief moments of understanding in family and modern life. Her unsparing look at the difficulties of being in the world will appeal to lovers of literary fiction.
Kirkus’s starred review says: “When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered. Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now . . . gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane. A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When is it available?
The Green Road beckons readers at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
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The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
by David Orr
(Penguin, $25.95, 192 pages)
Who is this author?
David Orr, whose debut book of literary criticism, “Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry,” made the Chicago Tribune’s list of the 20 best books of 2011, is the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review and teaches at Cornell University. He won a Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate and The Yale Review. A Princeton graduate from South Carolina who holds a law degree from Yale, Orr now lives in Ithaca, N.Y.
What is this book about?
“The Road Not Taken,” the Robert Frost poem that nearly everyone has committed to memory, celebrated its 100th anniversary this August, and while it may be the most popular poem Frost wrote and is certainly well-loved, literary critic David Orr says we just don’t get it.
In this “biography” of a classic piece of literature, Orr makes the case that superficial interpretations of “The Road” miss the point of what its author was trying to do, and he suspects that the poet was actually spoofing the indecision and romanticism of a close friend. He makes his case by citing the poem’s influence on culture; its subtle artistic structure, which is far more complex than its short length and simple vocabulary suggest; and its historical background and appearances in inspirational books, titles for TV show episodes and even TV commercials for cars in New Zealand. Orr plumbs its true meaning – or meanings. Is it sincere or sardonic? Is the poem a hymn to individualism and nonconformity, albeit at an unquantified price, or a sly dig at the human desire to find deep significance in random decisions? Orr’s book has four main sections that explore Frost the man and poet; the poem itself; the American predilection for choice; and the self that does the choosing. Without being pedantic or academic (no small feat for a college professor), Orr explicates it all for you.
Why you’ll like it:
You probably know this poem by heart, but haven’t pondered its meaning since that long-ago English class in which you studied it. With Orr’s help, you can plunge into it once again and refresh your appreciation of this American classic. His wide-ranging analysis is provocative, insightful and just plain fun. He may be going down a road less traveled in his interpretation of what Frost intended to convey, but you will enjoy making that literary journey with his astute guidance.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “”New York Times poetry critic Orr, in his engaging follow-up to Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to American Poetry, narrows his scope to focus on one of America’s most beloved and most misunderstood poems. Even with poetry‘s diminished hold on the popular consciousness, many Americans can still recite the final lines of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” from memory (though most would probably misidentify it as “The Road Less Traveled”). Orr looks at how one poem could become so well-known among a generally poetry-allergic populace that it’s been used to launch a self-help revolution, provide titles for episodes of TV shows, and, further afield, sell cars in New Zealand. The book is divided into four sections, beginning with “The Poet,” a biographical sketch of Robert Frost the man and “Robert Frost” the myth. “The Poem” offers a close reading that disputes both popular readings of the poem as “a paean to triumphant self-assertion” and more critically accepted interpretations of it as a “joke (or trick).” “The Choice” probes American conceptions of choice from the days of the Founding Fathers to contemporary neuroscience. Finally, “The Chooser” synthesizes previously presented ideas into a nuanced discussion of modern selfhood. Orr blends theory, biography, psychology, science, and a healthy dose of pop culture into a frothy mix so fun, readers may forget they’re learning something.”
Says The New York Times Book Review: “David Orr has written the best popular explanation to date of the most popular poem in American history…he’s persuasive enough to give us good reason to hope that his interpretation will lodge a toehold in conventional wisdom. This holds for the poet as well as the poem. If Frost’s most famous poem is representative, and if Orr is right about it, we should see Frost not as the earnest Yankee sage beloved by junior high school teachers or the dark jokester expounded by college professors, but as an artist able to evoke and clarify the conflicts that follow from the ways we think we understand ourselves…In Orr’s lucid reading, the poem brings to life and dances on the grave of the plucky, nonconformist, self-determined and self-realized person at the heart of the American myth of individualism.”
The Boston Globe says: “The most satisfying part of Orr’s fresh appraisal of “The Road Not Taken” is the reappraisal it can inspire in longtime Frost readers whose readings have frozen solid. The crossroads between the poet and the man is where Frost leaves his poems for us to discover, turning what seems like a fork in the road into a site of limitless potential, ‘in which all decisions are equally likely.’ “
Says Library Journal: “Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, provides a literary and cultural examination of human desires and the United States through this book-length study of Robert Frost’s famous 1915 poem “The Road Not Taken.” Orr finds that Frost’s poem, which is an exploration of choice symbolized by reaching a crossroads, is more complicated than it appears and the overall meaning of it may be quite different from what most admirers and readers of the poem believe. Although the poem is revered worldwide and is arguably a universal creation, Orr sees it as decidedly American, owing to its central theme of free choice and self-determination. In his examination, the author first writes on Frost’s life and then discusses the origins of the verse. The final chapters provide a critique of the poem, often through a cultural lens. VERDICT This entertaining book, published on the centennial of Frost’s poem, will appeal to poetry and American literature lovers, as well as to readers interested in the interweaving of art and culture.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “Unraveling the mystery of a famous poem. New York Times Book Review poetry columnist Orr brings his finely honed skills as a literary critic to a meticulous investigation of Robert Frost’s beloved poem, “The Road Not Taken,” which Orr believes has been consistently misread. The poem, he argues, is not “a salute to can-do individualism” or an exhortation to choose an uncommon path in life. Orr presents a fresh, perceptive reading of the verse; places it in the context of Frost’s life, other works, and public persona; and considers the meaning of choice in American culture. Anyone writing about Frost confronts an early biographer’s portrayal of him as a monster: unfeeling, arrogant, and cruel. “Frost is always being rescued, always being reclaimed,” Orr notes. “He’s like a disputed frontier, constantly contested, and this book is yet another stone thrown in that conflict.” Orr sees Frost as neither monster nor angel, nor the modest, “witty, rural sage” that became his public image. “The Road” was inspired by Frost’s dear friend Edward Thomas, who tried Frost’s patience with his “romantic sensibility,” indecisiveness, and “self-dramatizing regret.” Frost meant the poem as a joke, but Thomas—and future generations of readers—failed to understand the humor. Instead, many readers took the poem as underscoring Americans’ “belief in human perfectibility, a concept that assumes the humans in question can make choices that will lead to improvement.” As the poem seems to imply, taking one road rather than another can make “all the difference.” Orr, though, concludes that the poem is a “critique” of the choosing self. “What matters most, the poem suggests, is the dilemma of the crossroads,” a troubling, unsettling intersection; a space, Orr suggests, “for performance and metaphor.” An illuminating voyage into the heart of Frost’s poem and the American spirit.”
Says the Observer: “. . . Orr, who lives in Ithaca with his wife and daughter, is a poet and a professor of literary criticism at Cornell University. (He is also a lawyer, but doesn’t practice full-time anymore.) He decided to write about one poem so he could do a kind of extended close reading. He divided his latest book into four parts. The first two look at the poem and the poet while the second two are a bit more abstract, containing, for example, meditations on free will and examinations of the nature of the self, forms of which are slyly embedded in Frost’s poem.
“Perhaps the greatest testament to the poem’s enduring strength is the fact that, for Mr. Orr, “The Road Not Taken” had not lost its mystery by the time he finished writing his book. “The more you look at it,” Mr. Orr observed, “the stranger it seems.”
When is it available?
Take the road to the Downtown Hartford Public Library to borrow a copy of this book.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
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