God Help the Child
By Toni Morrison
(Knopf Doubleday, $24.95, 192 pages)
Who is this author?
Toni Morrison, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), as well as a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is a professor of English at Princeton University and one of America’s finest novelists. Her 11 novels include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Paradise, Home, Love and Beloved, whose film version starred Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover and which The New York Times named in 2006 as the best American novel published in the previous 25 years.
What is this book about?
The suffering of little children and how it continually shapes the lives of adults is the core of Toni Morrison’s latest, told, as her novels often are, in a powerful mixture of straightforward storytelling and lyrical fable. A woman who calls herself Bride, born Lula Ann with skin so dark as to look blue-back to parents repulsed by her color, undergoes a metamorphosis into a stunning woman who is just about to launch her own cosmetics empire. But first, she feels she must try to right a wrong she committed as a child: to gain favor with her rejecting mother, little Lula Ann gave false testimony about her teacher, Sofia, accusing her of sexual abuse. Now 15 years later, Bride tries to pay Sofia back, with disastrous results that involve severe injuries and the relinquishing of control over her beauty empire. Worse, Bride’s incomparably satisfying lover, Booker, leaves her, partly because he is haunted by actual pedophile attacks on his murdered little brother that he wishes to avenge. When Bride, who seems to be having a breakdown, tries to find him, she becomes entangled with yet another abused child, Rain.
Why you’ll like it:
The plot of God Help the Child is grim stuff, but Morrison tells Bride and Booker’s story with such literary grace and beauty that the book rises above its dark underpinning. Morrison fluidly mixes elements of racial hate, child abuse, false imprisonment, parental rejection and other emotional and spiritual ills and somehow turns it all into a haunting novel about the possibilities of redemption. Very few writers can set themselves such a task and succeed: the sure-handed Morrison takes on and then overcomes her own challenge.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “In Morrison’s short, emotionally-wrenching novel, her first since 2012′s Home, a mother learns about the damage adults do to children and the choices children make as they grow to suppress, express, or overcome their shame. The story begins with the birth of Lula Ann Bridewell, a midnight black baby whose mother cannot stand to touch her. Grown-up Lula Ann transforms herself into Bride, a stiletto-wearing, Jaguar-driving California executive with dark skin proudly accentuated by stylish white clothing. Amid preparations for the launch of her signature cosmetics line, Bride offers a gift-bag of cash and cosmetics to parolee Sofia Huxley, the kindergarten teacher Bride accused of sexual abuse 15 years before, earning Bride maternal approval and Sofia her prison sentence. Sofia’s angry rejection of Bride’s present, coinciding with the departure of Bride’s lover, inspires such self-doubt that Bride fears regressing back into Lula Ann. A car accident lands her in a culvert, where a little girl keeping dark secrets of her own comes to the rescue. Nobel laureate Morrison explores characteristic themes of people held captive by inner struggles; the delusion of racism; violence and redemption. Her literary craftsmanship endures with sparse language, precise imagery, and even humor. This haunting novel displays a profound understanding of American culture and an unwavering sense of justice and forgiveness.”
“Sly, savage, honest, and elegant . . . . Morrison spikes elements of realism and hyperrealism with magic and mayhem, while sustaining a sexily poetic and intoxicating narrative atmosphere . . . . Once again, Morrison thrillingly brings the storytelling moxie and mojo that make her, arguably, our greatest living novelist,” says ELLE Magazine.
Library Journal’s starred review says: “In her latest book, Nobel laureate Morrison shows us how we hold onto our pain and let it define us, pulling back on her often liquidly lyric style to offer powerful portraits in lean prose. Sweetness, who is from a family whose members can pass for white, gives birth to the midnight-black Lula Ann and raises her at an ashamed and bitter distance, which she rationalizes will toughen her up. As a child, Lula Ann gains some favor from her mother by helping to put away a teacher named Sofia, who is accused of sexually abusing her charges. As an adult who renames herself Bride, Lula Ann becomes a successful, traffic-stoppingly beautiful career woman. But her life starts falling apart when she meets with a just-paroled Sofia. Then Booker, with whom she’s been conducting a passionate affair, leaves without explanation. Serious-minded Booker cannot leave behind a terrible family tragedy, and as Bride pursues him for answers to his abandonment, they are both transformed in more ways than one. VERDICT There are some moves here that may seem obvious, but the pieces all fit together seamlessly in a story about beating back the past, confronting the present, and understanding one’s worth.”
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes: “…slim but powerful…This novel does not aspire to the grand sweep of history in Ms. Morrison’s dazzling 1987 masterpiece, Beloved, but like Home (2012), it attests to her ability to write intensely felt chamber pieces that inhabit a twilight world between fable and realism, and to convey the desperate yearnings of her characters for safety and love and belonging. The scars inflicted on Bride and Booker by their childhoods are metaphors of sorts for the calamities of history and the hold they can exert over a country’s or a people’s dreams…Writing with gathering speed and assurance as the book progresses, Ms. Morrison works her narrative magic, turning the Ballad of Bride and Booker into a tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant.”
In its starred review, Kirkus says: “Brutality, racism and lies are relieved by moments of connection in Morrison’s latest.A little girl is born with skin so black her mother will not touch her. Desperate for approval, to just once have her mother take her hand, she tells a lie that puts an innocent schoolteacher in jail for decades. Later, the ebony-skinned girl will change her name to Bride, wear only white, become a cosmetics entrepreneur, drive a Jaguar. Her lover, a man named Booker, also bears a deep scar on his soul—his older brother was abducted, tortured and murdered by a pedophilic serial killer. This is a skinny, fast-moving novel filled with tragic incidents, most sketched in a few haunting sentences: “The last time Booker saw Adam he was skateboarding down the sidewalk in twilight, his yellow T-shirt fluorescent under the Northern Ash trees.” When Bride’s falsely accused teacher is released from prison, there’s a new round of trouble. Booker leaves, Bride goes after him—and ends up in the woods, recovering from a car accident with hippie survivalists who have adopted a young girl abused by her prostitute mother. Meanwhile, Bride is anxiously watching her own body metamorphose into that of a child—her pubic hair has vanished, her chest has flattened, her earlobes are smooth. As in the darkest fairy tales, there will be fire and death. There will also be lobster salad, Smartwater and Louis Vuitton; the mythic aspects of this novel are balanced by moments like the one in which Bride decides that the song that most represents her relationship with Booker is “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” A chilling oracle and a lively storyteller, Nobel winner Morrison continues the work she began 45 years ago with The Bluest Eye.”
When is it available?
Morrison’s latest is now at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Barbour, Blue Hills, Dwight, Goodwin and Park branches.
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!
Karen Memery
By Elizabeth Bear
(Tor, $25, 352 pages)
Who is this author?
Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky is her real name. A Hartford native who now lives in Brookfield, Mass., she writes as Elizabeth Bear and has more than 30 novels and many short stories to her credit, mostly in the genre of speculative fiction, which is what science fiction is called these days. She says her earlier career pursuits included media industry professional, stablehand, a fluff-page reporter, maintainer of microbiology procedure manuals for a 1,000-bed inner-city hospital, typesetter and layout editor, traffic manager for an import-export business, and “the girl who makes the donuts at The Whole Donut at three A.M.” Whew. Bear won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005 and also has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and she is the author of the Eternal Sky series. Bear spoke at the annual CAPA-U (Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association) workshop day in Hartford this May.
What is this book about?
Bear says this about Karen Memery: “It’s a steampunk adventure set in a fictional city in the Pacific Northwest during the Alaskan Gold Rush. It stars a young woman who goes by the house name of Prairie Dove, which should give you an idea what she does for a living. She’s kind of a badass, and she has badass friends.”
(Steampunk, for the uninitiated, can be described as “the future as imagined through the eyes of the past,” and this genre can be seen in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” and the early science fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.)
Bear’s novel is set in Seattle-like Rapid City during the late 1800s, a time of fanciful steam-powered machinery and airships in this alternate universe. Her heroine, Karen, for whom the word feisty seems to have been coined, is an orphan who works in a high-end bordello where the poor and the powerful meet. The action picks up when a badly beaten girl seeks safety in the brothel, pursued by a man who has a special glove that can take over a mind and force it to do what it wants. Then a murdered streetwalker turns up in the brothel’s garbage, adding a Jack the Ripper vibe to this piquant tale.
Why you’ll like it:
Sometimes the best and quickest way to find out whether you will like a book is to read a few pages to absorb the author’s style and hear the voice that will tell you the story. Here is the opening of Karen Memery:
“You ain’t gonna like what I have to tell you, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like “memory” only spelt with an e, and I’m one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie on Amity Street. “Hôtel” has a little hat over the o like that. It’s French, so Beatrice tells me.
“Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I pay my sewing machine tax to the city, which is fifty dollar a week, and they don’t care if your sewing machine’s got a foot treadle, if you take my meaning.
“Which ain’t to say we ain’t got a sewing machine. We’ve got two, an old-style one with a black cast-iron body and a shiny chrome wheel, and one of the new steel-geared brass ones that run on water pressure, such that you stand inside of and move with your whole body, and it does the cutting and stitching and steam pressing, too.
“Them two machines sit out in a corner of the parlor as kind of a joke.
“I can use the old-fashioned one—I learned to sew, I mean really sew—pretty good after Mama died—and Miss Francina is teaching me to use the new one to do fancywork, though it kind of scares me. And it fits her, so it’s big as your grandpa’s trousers on me. But the thing is, nobody in Rapid City sells the kind of dresses we parlor girls need, so it’s make our own patterned after fashion dolls from Paris and London and New York or it’s pay a ladies’ tailor two-thirds your wage for something you don’t like as well.
“But as you can imagine, a house full of ladies like this goes through a lot of frocks and a lot of mending. So it pays to know how to sew both ways, so to speak. . . .”
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews says: “Steampunk: Something of a new venture for Bear, whose previous output has ranged from heroic fantasy to science fiction, often with an embedded murder mystery. By the late 19th century, airships ply the trade and passenger routes, optimistic miners head in droves for the Alaskan gold fields, and steam-powered robots invented by licensed Mad Scientists do much of the heavy (and sometimes delicate) work. In Rapid City on the U.S. northwest coast, Madame Damnable operates the Hôtel Mon Cherie, a high-class bordello, paying a hefty “sewing machine tax” for the privilege. Here, orphaned horse-breaker and narrator Karen Memery (Bear doesn’t tell us why the book’s title is spelled differently) works among similarly lively, engaging and resourceful girls. One night, Priya, a malnourished but tough young woman, arrives at the door carrying the badly wounded Merry Lee, who escaped from one of the grim brothels operated by brutal gangster Peter Bantle and has since made a career of rescuing other indentured girls from Bantle’s clutches. Madame Damnable’s steam-powered mechanical surgeon saves Merry’s life—but not before Bantle himself shows up, wearing, Karen notes, a peculiar glove that somehow can compel others to obey his commands. Worse, the following night the girls discover the body of a murdered prostitute nearby. U.S. Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves arrives with his Comanche sidekick, Tomoatooah; they’re tracking a serial killer who seems to have made his way to Rapid City. The story swiftly knots itself into steampunk-ishly surreal complications, with dauntless (and, by this point, love-stricken) Karen in the thick of the action. Supplies all the Bear necessities: strong female characters, existential threats, intriguing developments and a touch of the light fantastic.”
Her language, a celebrated feature in all of her writing, shines here in her descriptions of the setting…. Like George R.R. Martin, Bear presents third-person limited viewpoints from multiple characters, a strategy that allows her to delve deep into their heads without losing her own distinctive poetic narrative voice,” says The DC Spotlight.
Publishers Weekly says: “Bear’s rollicking, suspenseful, and sentimental steampunk novel introduces Karen Memery (“like ‘memory’ only spelt with an e”), a teenage “seamstress”—that is, a prostitute—at Madame Damnable’s Hôtel Mon Cherie in Rapid City. This Pacific Northwest city of an alternate 1878 is home to airships, surgical machines, and other mechanical wonders that can also be put to horrific use. As Karen meets and begins to fall for Priya, another sex worker who escaped from evil pimp Peter Bantle, they learn that Bantle has more dark plans than brothel competition. U.S. Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves and his Comanche partner, Tomoatooah, also tie Bantle to the gruesome murders of some of Rapid City’s most vulnerable women. Bear gives Karen a colorful voice, sharp eyes, and the spunk and skills necessary to scuffle with bad types as well as to win over people whose help she needs. Her story is a timeless one: a woman doing what is needed to get by while dreaming and fighting for great things to come.”
When is it available?
This memorable book is at 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 Secret Wisdom of the Earth
by Christopher Scotton
(Grand Central Publishing, $26, 480 pages)
Who is this author?
According to biographical information on his website and LinkedIn, Christopher Scotton has been many things: a carpenter, bouncer, kite flyer, amusement park ride operator, venture capitalist and CEO of several technology companies. For a time he lived in London to run the European operations of a technology publishing and tradeshow firm and is now president & CEO of ClearEdge3D, Inc., a software company whose technology, it says, can vastly reduce the cost of creating 3D CAD models of industrial plants, buildings, bridges and entire cities. This is all well and good, but what interests us here is his debut novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, which has the good fortune of being favorably compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird just as that classic book is enjoying renewed interest.
What is this book about?
This wistful and dramatic novel, like Mockingbird, involves violence, death, prejudice, injustice and friendship in a small Southern town of the Appalachian variety; a mining town in Kentucky, where big business is raping the beautiful land by removing mountaintops and filling in hollows to get at the coal. It is told through the eyes of Kevin, 14, whose little brother has died accidentally. Kevin and his mom have fled to spend a summer in the hilltown of Medgar with his granddad, a veterinarian active in a local movement to save the mountaintops from the coal company’s ravages. Kevin makes a friend of Buzzy Fink, who schools him in the ways of the woods and witnesses a hate crime involving a gay man who had been quietly accepted by the town until his environmental activism inflamed his opponents. This is a coming of age story that combines contemporary problems with bedrock issues of love, loyalty, grief and redemption.
Why you’ll like it:
Scotton’s book, the story of a boyhood recounted by the man he has become, is tenderly written and has a gripping plot. Here is what Scotton has said about how he wrote it:
“I completed about half of the novel in London—fleshing out those characters, their relationships and the loss each of them suffers—but something was clearly missing from the story. The various plot paths I needed to tie everything together turned out to be nub ends.
“I moved back to the States and immediately went down to eastern Kentucky in hopes of breaking this narrative logjam. It was on this trip that I saw my first Mountaintop Removal operation.
“The horrific gray scar of that mine brought back the sense of sickening loss I’d had at fourteen when the pristine woods I’d grown up in were cut down, hauled away and replaced with tract housing. I knew then, looking out over this massive, denuded landscape in Kentucky, that the eradication of these proud ancient mountains was a fitting allegory for a loss that all of the main characters suffer. Once I connected these themes, the rest of the story began to bubble forth.
“My trips to Kentucky, talking with folks and listening to their stories, showed me that the apologue of Mountaintop Removal is a complicated one—one that can’t be reduced to simply good vs. evil or rich vs. poor. The geography of this beautiful region makes for an economic hairball and the many decent people who inhabit it are forced to choose from a short list of bad options. I tried to portray this hard-bought paradox and lay it alongside Kevin’s story in a compelling way.”
What others are saying:
“A deeply moving story about human cruelty and compassion…wonderful…This book reminded me a little of Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ “ says The Oklahoman.
Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, says: “Debut author Scotton sets a captivating modern morality tale in Kentucky’s coal country, 1985. With the small-town aura of To Kill a Mockingbird, a man reflects on the summer he learned that tradition, greed, class, race and sexual orientation can make for murder. Multiple stories are at play in the coal town of Medgar: Bubba Boyd, the boorish son of a coal baron, is raping the landscape; local opposition leader and popular hairstylist Paul Pierce’s homosexuality is used to attack his environmental position; and the narrator, Kevin, grieving the death of his younger brother, arrives at age 14 to stay with his widowed grandfather. With a mother trapped by depression and father subconsciously casting blame, Kevin’s left alone in grief’s pit, and it’s Pops, a wise and gentle veterinarian, who understands his pain and guilt. In Medgar, mines are played out, and Boyd’s Monongahela Energy digs coal by “mountaintop removal,” pushing forested peaks into verdant valleys, leaving a poisoned landscape. Scotton’s descriptions of plundered peaks like Clinch Mountain, Indian Head and Sadler, Pops’ boyhood haunts, are gut-wrenching. As Kevin tags along on vet calls with Pops and befriends a local teen, Buzzy Fink—”fresh friends from completely different worlds faced with the hard shapings of truth and deceit”—Scotton explores both the proud, stoic hillbilly culture that accepts Paul’s “bachelor gentlemen” love and the hate-filled greed wielding the Bible as a weapon in service of ignorance and Mammon. And then Buzzy witnesses a brutal killing, a murder whose ramifications may cost Cleo, his brother, a prestigious college football scholarship. With glimpses of a mythical white stag and mad stones symbolic of the land’s capacity to heal, Pop, Buzzy and Kevin “tramp” to an isolated lake and find themselves targeted in a Deliverance-like shooting. Scotton offers literary observation—”a storm was filling the trees with bursting light”—and a thoughtful appreciation of Appalachia’s hard-used people and fragile landscape. A powerful epic of people and place, loss and love, reconciliation and redemption.”
The Amazon Debut Spotlight of the Month review for January 2015 says: “This earnest debut is part coming of age story, part tale of redemption and part Greek myth played out in the holler. After the horrific death of his younger brother in an accident on the lawn, 14 year old Kevin Gillooly and his distraught mother seek healing in the rural Kentucky home of his grandfather. There, Kevin – who is suffering from survivor guilt at the very least – meets up with a local boy, Buzzy Fink; the two embark on the kind of Huck Finnish boyhood adventures – fishing, hunting, hanging out in the tree house – meant to be wholesome and soul-cleansing. But this rural Kentucky town is rife with bigotry and rage, and soon Kevin and Buzzy are drawn into local politics that involve a mountaintop clearing project and the death of a local gay man who had opposed it. There are unabashed good guys, like Kevin (who has a bit of a pyromaniacal tendency, which could have been more thoroughly developed) and his “Pops,” a gruff old man who charms with remarks like “I’ll take another bullet before I eat any more of this hospital slop.” There are some very very bad guys, like the townsperson who murders his neighbor because of his own not unexpected issues. And then there are the guys – like Buzzy and Kevin – who find their characters forged and burnished by one particular hike this particular summer, the summer “when we left the coverings of boy behind,” as Kevin puts it. Readers might recognize something in the tone and style and plot; take one virtuous man, one redneck town and two scrappy, interesting kids. Add in the narration by a boy now all grown up. And you’re just begging for comparisons to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. And yet, Scotton’s very earnestness, the obvious love he has for this particular bit of land, and the perfect ear for its youngsters’ dialogue (“She smiled at me and I almost lost breakfast”) make this novel his own. At once familiar and modern, it is always poetic and compelling.”
In The New York Times Book Review, author Daniel Woodrell writes: “The first half of The Secret Wisdom of the Earth moves with the leisurely pace of summer, but the second half is a page turner featuring masculine challenges, bloodshed and stoic survival. Some of the challenges Kevin and Buzzy encounter strain credulity, but they edge us toward myth, stretching for something larger than verisimilitude. Scotton’s prose is colloquial and evocative; the descriptions are sharp, the voice down-to-earth…[Scotton] should be congratulated on is his willingness to tell a new story in an old neighborhood, to draw characters who are thoroughly human, and to create a story that leads to terror and redemption, love and survival.”
Says Publishers Weekly: “Scotton’s accomplished debut is the story of Kevin Gillooly, a 14-year-old boy who moves to coal country and learns about courage and violence, beauty and danger, from his wise, weathered grandfather and a best friend well versed in backwoods survival. Kevin’s mother brings him to her hometown of Medgar, Ky., after the death of Kevin’s three-year-old brother. Kevin’s grandfather Pops is a large-animal veterinarian and hires Kevin as an assistant. Pops also introduces him to books like Treasure Island and gives him time off to explore the surrounding mountains with his friend and confidant Buzzy Fink, who teaches Kevin how to use slugs to treat spider bites and other survival skills. Kevin sees land destroyed by mining, hears exploding mountaintops, and feels the fly-rock, while Buzzy witnesses the beating of gay hairdresser and anti-mining activist Paul Pierce. Both Kevin and Buzzy are tested during a camping trip with Pops, when an unknown assailant tracks them down and opens fire in the wilderness. Scotton’s cast of classic Appalachian characters also includes housekeeper Audy Rae, Cleo the high school football hero, the violent and inbred Budget family, and an array of old men shooting the breeze at Hivey’s. The coming-of-age story is enriched by depictions of the earth’s healing and redemptive power. Neither the first portrait of mining country nor the most original, Scotton’s novel nonetheless makes for compelling reading when the action grows intense—managing, like the landscape it describes, to be simultaneously frightening and beautiful.”
When is it available?
You can dig this one up at 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 Book of Aron
By Jim Shepard
(Knopf, $23.95, 272 pages)
Who is this author?
Jim Shepard, who grew up in Connecticut and teaches at Williams College, has now published seven novels and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a National Book Award finalist and winner of The Story Prize. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope and other magazines, and often have been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
What is this book about?
Be prepared: this is not your usual light summer reading. The Book of Aron is about a young Jewish boy in Poland during the Holocaust, caught up in an enormity he can barely comprehend even as it dominates his life and gives him slim chances for survival. The Nazis drive his family (and countless others) from the Polish countryside to the Warsaw ghetto, where starvation, rampant disease and vicious persecution merely top the list of horribles. He helps his family by becoming a smuggler and trader with other kids, all being hunted down by evil adults of every persuasion. Eventually, his family is decimated, but Aron finds temporary solace in the Warsaw orphanage run by a real person: Janusz Korczak, a doctor who fought for children’s rights and an opponent of the Nazi war machine. Aron becomes his ward and helper, but the concentration camps await these brave kids and adults. It will take stupendous courage and skill to do what the doctor hopes Aron can: escape and tell the word about the horrors he has seen.
Why you’ll like it:
Aron is not an angelic boy, but you will forgive and not soon forget him. Shepard has many talents as a writer, chief among them the uncanny ability to write believably in the voice of a child, as he did in his memorable and terrifying Project X, based on a Columbine-like slaughter at a high school. In this book, Shepard manages to keep readers glued to the kind of story that truly makes them want to put the book down so as not to have their hearts broken by the story it tells. At a time when prejudice has once again reared its ugly head in the U.S., it is important to read what unchecked evil it can unleash. Give Shepard credit for telling such a difficult tale with skill, using dark humor when he can. Events like those in The Book of Aron really happened. Books like this may help in some small way to make sure they do not happen again, at least not on our watch.
What others are saying:
“A masterpiece. . . a remarkable novel destined to join the shelf of essential Holocaust literature. . . . a story of such startling candor about the complexity of heroism that it challenges each of us to greater courage. . . . Shepard has created something transcendent and timeless,” says Ron Charles in The Washington Post.
“The story of what happened to children in the Holocaust is not for the faint-hearted. A fictional, first-person narrative from the point of view of a Jewish child in Warsaw—in fact, a child in Dr. Janusz Korczak’s well-known orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto—is very brave. And a heartbreaking historical novel that ends in Treblinka may not be what many readers are expecting from a novelist and short-story writer whose ironic touch is often comedic. But Jim Shepard has written a Holocaust novel that stands with the most powerful writing on that terrible subject,” says bestselling author John Irving.
Library Journal’s starred review by Patrick Sullivan of Manchester Community College says: “The Warsaw Ghetto during the darkest days of World War II is the setting of this important, heartbreaking but also inspiring new novel . . . Told from the perspective of Aron, a Jewish boy in the ghetto, it is the study of the sadistic and systematic deprivation and dehumanization of a people. Forced with his family from the countryside into the ghetto, where he joins a band of hardy young smugglers, Aron eventually loses his entire clan to typhus, malnutrition, and forced labor and ends up in an orphanage in the ghetto run by Janusz Korczak, an important historical figure from this period. Korczak was a well-known advocate for children’s rights before the war and became famous for the orphanage he ran in the ghetto, and the author brings this heroic figure powerfully to life. Shepard also skillfully depicts the blighted human and moral landscape within the ghetto, where normal understandings of right and wrong have become impossibly compromised under the pressure of extermination. Surrounded by devastation, hopelessness, and cruelty, Korczak becomes an exemplar of all that is good and decent in the human spirit. Few will be able to read the last terrible, inspiring pages without tears in their eyes. VERDICT Indispensable reading.”
Kirkus’s starred review says: “An understated and devastating novel of the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation, as seen through the eyes of a street-wise boy. Shepard has recently earned more renown for his short stories, but here he presents an exhaustively researched, pitch-perfect novel exploring the moral ambiguities of survival through a narrator who’s just 9 years old when the tale begins. He’s a Jewish boy living in the Polish countryside with his family and an odd sense of his place in the world. “It was terrible to have to be the person I was,” he despairs, matter-of-factly describing himself as basically friendless, a poor student, and an enigma to his loving mother: “She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart.” Yet Aron proves to be engaging company as he describes the selfishness that will help him survive as the world becomes increasingly hellish. The horrors are so incremental that Aron—and the reader—might be compared to the lobster dropped into the pot as the temperature keeps rising past the boiling point. Aron’s perspective is necessarily limited, and he often seems to have little understanding of what’s happening around him or why. His family is pushed into the city, and in the ghetto’s chaos, he’s separated from them. Serving as a moral counterweight to the boy’s instinctive pragmatism is Dr. James Korczak, a real-life Polish Jew whose ambition to “become the Karl Marx of children” inspired him to keep a couple hundred alive through his orphanage, which he supports by begging for funds from the better-off ghetto inhabitants. Aron becomes the doctor’s ward and accomplice, though he has also been serving as an occasional informer for the Gestapo through an intermediary in the Jewish police. He tries to use his position to help save the doctor from being sent to a concentration camp, but the doctor is only interested if he can save all the other children as well. “How do we know if we love enough?” asks the doctor. “How do we learn to love more?” Ordinary people reveal dimensions that are extraordinarily cruel or kind.”
Publishers Weekly says: “Shepard is known for his enormous range and for the research that informs his many novels and stories—a reputation that will be reconfirmed with this novel, the acknowledgments section of which runs six pages long. And yet it is a supple, unlabored voice that issues from Aron (Sh’maya to his family), a young Polish Jew who survives as a thief, urchin, and smuggler forcibly relocated to Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto following the German invasion. Typhus, blackmail, and the Nazis’ wanton violence are routine, but perhaps the greatest threat is the Jewish Order Service, in charge of requisitions and expulsions, for whom Aron agrees to become an informer. Meanwhile, his gang—lead by the charismatic and more politically committed youth Boris—fight for control of the Quarter’s meager resources. But Aron’s alliances begin to shift following the rise of disappearances and quarantines, especially after he meets Janusz Korczak, “The Old Doctor,” a famous radio personality turned guardian who runs a shelter for children even as news of the concentration camps begins to trickle down. Aron’s fate will come down to a question of conviction: will Aron commit himself to Boris’s cause, or embrace the doctor’s selfless idealism? Shepard is a master with a light touch—but against the backdrop of the Holocaust, maybe a bit too light. Although this novel paints an unflinching portrait of the ghetto, many characters seem to stand in for ideas, and the limp plot is propped up only by Shepard’s eye for detail.”
When is it available?
This compelling novel is on the new book shelf at 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 Light of the World
By Elizabeth Alexander
(Grand Central Publishing, $26, 224 pages)
Who is this author?
Elizabeth Alexander, who is Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and also teaches African studies there, was honored when she was asked to write and deliver an original poem for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. That poem was “Praise Song for the Day,” and it is among her many accomplishments that also include publishing six poetry collections and being the first winner of the Jackson Prize for Poetry. The Light of the World is the kind of book no author wants to write: it is a memoir about her husband’s unexpected death and its effect on Alexander and her children. The book became a New York Times and Washington Post best seller and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and Amazon Best Books of the Month for April 2015, among other honors.
What is this book about?
Elizabeth Alexander, a much praised poet, and her artist/chef husband, a refuge from Eritrea in East Africa, had teenage sons, a happy marriage and artistic acclaim. And then it all ended, just like that, four days after Ficre Ghebreyesus turned 50, when he died of a heart attack while exercising at home. Stunned with bereavement, Alexander at first could only mourn; writing poetry suddenly came to a halt. Her memoir describes the heartbreaking process of coming to acceptance of great loss, yet is also a joyful celebration of the happy marriage that they had enjoyed for 15 years. Many writers have memorialized a lost spouse; few have done it with a lyrical command of language that transforms prose into poetry.
Why you’ll like it:
Sadly, it is not rare to hear of the death of a beloved spouse. What is rare is the lyrical beauty of this poet’s heartfelt memoir about her loving marriage and what happens when her husband suddenly dies. Not only is the language itself gorgeous, as only a poet can make it, this book is both achingly personal and welcomingly universal. There is much to admire here, as well as lessons, hard-won by Alexander, about learning to cope with the unimaginable while cherishing memories and moving forward with life. Reading this book may make you sad, but it will also uplift you.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “…Alexander…has written a meditative and elegiac account of meeting and losing her husband and great love…We live in a culture so preoccupied with happiness, so instrumental in its attitudes, that we forget grief is not something merely to get over, something over which we “achieve closure,” but a human undertaking, a slow, sticky process of allowing our love to take another, more remote, shape. In The Light of the World, Alexander discovers a warmth that will remind some readers of the deeper truth of grieving: It is a sign of love.
Says Publishers Weekly: Poet and Yale African Studies professor was devastated by the death of her artist husband, who died of cardiac arrest at age 50 while exercising in the basement of their home. This memoir is an elegiac narrative of the man she loved. Artist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus’s death was as inexplicable as the spark of love between him and Alexander after they met at a New Haven café in 1996. Ghebreyesus was a thin, fit person who nonetheless smoked; and he was not without his mysteries. For example, in the days before his death, he was obsessed with buying lottery tickets. Ghebreyesus was a gentle, peace-loving East African who had come through the Eritrean-Ethiopian civil war and was a refugee in America; he became a fashionable painter and an inventive chef at Caffe Adulis, which he ran in New Haven with his brothers. Alexander, who grew up in Washington, D.C., describes her husband’s endearing traits such as sleep-talking or singing in his native Tigrinya, and the special rituals he made when their sons reached age 13. Fashioning her mellifluous narrative around the beauty she found in Ghebreyesus, Alexander is grateful, patient, and willing to pursue a fit of magical thinking that he might just return.
Library Journal’s stared review says: “Alexander’s marriage to her husband, Ficre, was a great love, one filled with his painting, her poetry, their cooking, and an extended family all over the world. When Ficre dies suddenly, the life she has built with him and their two sons in New Haven, CT, seems to disintegrate. This gorgeous, shimmering account from a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry is an homage to the 15-year partnership the author and her husband shared. Though Alexander’s story is deeply personal, readers who have experienced love and loss will relate to it easily. VERDICT While it’s impossible to avoid comparisons to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this work is set apart by the fluid translation of Alexander’s poetic ability into sentences so beautiful they beg to be reread.
Kirkus Reviews says: “A distinguished poet meditates on the early death of her beloved artist husband. A Brooklyn psychic once told Alexander that she would meet a mate sooner than she realized. What the psychic did not say was that Eritrean-born Ficre Ghebreyesus would bring her a love and fulfillment that transcended anything she had ever known. Though hailing from different worlds—Alexander from Harlem and Ficre from East Africa—the two blended their lives to create a kind of trans-Atlantic “karmic balance.” Alexander firmly grounded the husband who had seen war and poverty in his nation, and Ficre gave his American wife an abundance of family while connecting her to a history of black warriors who had never known slavery. Together, they built and inhabited an extraordinarily colorful, multicultural space made of books, art, food and friends. But then, 15 years into their marriage and just four days after his 50th birthday, an outwardly robust Ficre died of a heart attack. Now a widow with two teenage sons, Alexander began the lengthy, often wrenching process of mourning the man who had been the “light of [her] world.” With tenderness and fierce poetic precision, Alexander recalls the hours, days, months and years after her husband’s death. Grief-stricken to the point she could not produce the poetry she loved, the author marked the passage of time by observing whether she or her children still cried over his passing. At the same time, she celebrates how the love she and Ficre shared helped heal “every old wound with magic disappearing powers” so that the descendant of slaves and the survivor of a tragic war could go on with their lives. In letting go of—but never forgetting—her husband, Alexander realizes a simple truth: that death only deepens the richness of a life journey that must push on into the future. A delicate, existentially elegiac memoir.”
“This is a gorgeous love story, written by one of America’s greatest contemporary poets. Graceful in its simplicity, sweeping in scope, this book is proof that behind the boarded up windows of America’s roiled marriages and ruined affairs, true love still exists, and where it does exist, it graces the world-and us-with light and hope. Elizabeth Alexander is a prose writer of deep talent and affecting skill. With ease, she peels back layer after layer to show the soft secrets of affection, the kindness, and the wide open generosity of a full hearted man and talented artist, who had more love to give in his relatively short lifetime than most of us will ever know,” says James McBride, National Book Award-winning author of The Good Lord Bird and #1 New York Times bestseller The Color of Water
When is it available?
This elegiac memoir is now at 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 Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician’s First Year
by Matt McCarthy
(Crown/Archtype, $27, 336 pages)
Who is this author?
Matt McCarthy, once a pitcher on Yale’s baseball team, got his first best-seller with Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit, about his brief experience with the Provo Angels, the minor league team of the 2002 Anaheim Angels. He abandoned (probably wisely) baseball for medicine and is now an assistant professor of medicine at Cornell and a staff physician at Weill Cornell Medical Center. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Slate, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Deadspin, where he writes the Medspin column.
What is this book about?
The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly puts us right into one of the most stressful career situations imaginable: a medical internship. Despite his lofty ambitions to become a caring and cool-headed doctor, McCarthy nearly lost his first cardiac care patient during his first night on call. This often scary, often hilariously funny memoir captures the tensions and opportunities that on-the-job training offers those with the smarts and stamina to make it through, and is a valuable insider’s look at what goes into the making of a competent doctor. Among other worthy insights: savvy doctors learn as much from their patients as they do from their teachers.
Why you’ll like it:
You’ve no doubt heard that it is best to stay out of hospitals during the summer, when the new crop of interns dons stethoscopes and start making decisions based on schooling but not hands-on experience. Matt McCarthy takes us into that world and, with honesty and a great deal of humor, shows why that advice can be true. Books that offer an insider’s perspective are often delightful; this one may also help readers understand how medicine does and does not work these days: invaluable knowledge.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “McCarthy follows his controversial tell-all about his brief baseball career, Odd Man Out, with an account of his grueling first-year internship at one of New York’s premier hospitals. Here, the New York-Presbyterian Hospital attending doctor is hardest on himself: he expresses guilt over a missed diagnosis with his first patient, coldly brought to his attention by the patient’s angry primary doctor, and learns a sobering lesson about the doctor-patient relationship from a patient awaiting a heart transplant. Along the way, he is guided by others, such as the second-year resident who gives him the tough love and experience required to make it through a rotation in the Cardiac Care Unit, the “real doctor” at the hospital’s clinic who helps him make independent—though not always perfect—decisions, and the physician who teaches him that through medicine “it is possible to reach the unreachable.” McCarthy’s story is one of transformation. “I felt different now because I was different,” he writes. “I was looking out for my patients, not myself.” McCarthy’s growth will seem familiar to everyone traveling a path of self-discovery.”
“Matt McCarthy’s new book, The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly, is an honest, beautiful, and terrifying look at what goes into creating a doctor. Filled with very human characters, both doctors and patients alike, Matt’s well-paced writing makes it easy to imagine yourself in the shoes of a brand new intern, nervous and afraid, yet still tasked with literal life and death decisions. I would recommend this book to anyone who knows or has been treated by a doctor (so basically everyone,” says Chris Kluwe, former Minnesota Vikings football player and author of Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies.
“Well-written and brutally honest, Dr. McCarthy’s engrossing memoir of his internship year is told with uncommon frankness and perception. The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly is one of the most powerful books about a doctor-in-training I have ever read. The author vividly describes the crushing emotional and physical demands a young doctor must face, and he does so with consummate skill and compassion. A marvelous book,” says Michael Collins, author of Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs.
Library Journal says: “Author of the best-selling Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit, Harvard Medical School grad McCarthy delivers a sometimes raucous, sometimes moving story of his year as an intern at a New York hospital. Between nearly losing a patient the first day and befriending a man awaiting a new heart, McCarthy learned what it’s like to deal with real patients instead of just textbooks, formulas, and cadavers.”
When is it available?
No need for a waiting room here: this book is available at 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!
When Reason Breaks
by Cindy L. Rodriguez
(Bloomsbury USA, $17.99, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
Cindy L. Rodriguez, of Plainville, is a former Hartford Courant reporter and Boston Globe investigative researcher who left journalism to become a public school teacher. Rodriquez is now a reading specialist at a Connecticut middle school and also teaches college-level composition. When Reason Breaks, a YA novel, is her debut book. She is a member of the Class of 2K15, the Fearless Fifteeners, the We Need Diverse Books Team and Latin@s in Kid Lit. You can reach her on Twitter: @RodriguezCindyL .
What is this book about?
Two high school girls with serious emotional problems find comfort in the words of poet Emily Dickinson and help from a caring teacher. Elizabeth Davis, a Goth girl whose mother is overwhelmed with problems, develops anger management issues. Emily Delgado, a sweet girl tentatively exploring romance, has a father obsessed with political success and unblemished family images, and she struggles with serious depression. This novel captures the emotional whirlwinds of adolescence well and cleverly brings Dickinson’s words and ideas into the plot.
Why you’ll like it:
I first met Cindy Rodriguez in 1993 when she was hired by The Courant to be the first reporter for a new City Desk feature, the Hartford Neighborhoods page, which I edited. She was newly graduated from UConn and immediately proved to be a sensitive and savvy reporter who knew how to tell a good story. Those skills are also evident in her first novel, which handles teenage angst with delicacy, offers believable characters and also may serve as an introduction to Dickinson’s immortal poetry for teen readers. The story opens with a near-suicide but does not reveal which girl attempted it until the end, telling the tale through flashbacks that add a bit of mystery to this dramatic and compelling story.
What others are saying:
“This realistic novel invites readers into the lives of two high schoolers, Elizabeth Davis and Emily Delgado, as they struggle with unrelated painful events, reacting in ways as different as their personalities. Artistic Elizabeth changes her appearance to look Goth, skips class, fights with her mother and sometimes experiences uncontrollable rage. Emily tends toward a preppy, academic style, but bouts of anxiety impact her studies and relationships. The two young women are brought together in their English class, where teacher Mrs. Davis engages students with authentic care and a curricular focus on Emily Dickinson. Deep analysis of the poet’s life and writings results in personal insights for the protagonists. The use of foreshadowing at the beginning of the book alerts to future trauma without spoiling the plot, and a reference to the board game Clue provides a subtle tool for making meaning of the quick shifts in narrative perspective and form. Latino culture, and bicultural and gay family relationships are woven easily into the story; popular culture references and some romance will also resonate with adolescents. Overall, this text provides important insights into the various stressors that can lead to depression and suicide, as well as the type of support required to move toward potential healing,” says School Library Journal.
Publishers Weekly says: “First-time author Rodriguez cleverly represents Emily Dickinson’s dark side and her reclusive tendencies through the two distinct personalities of her teenage heroines, who are studying the poet in English class. Elizabeth Davis, who enjoys visiting a nearby cemetery, is fascinated with death, but her expression of it through drawings and journal entries have gotten her into trouble at school. Classmate Emily Delgado is not nearly as bold, keeping her despair a secret, but the pressure of being the perfect daughter of a rising politician is becoming too heavy a burden to bear. After the girls team for a project on Dickinson, Elizabeth’s ideas are misinterpreted, causing her to become enraged, while Emily, absorbed in conflicts with old friends and the boy she likes, spirals into depression. The question remains whether, in the heat of their individual crises, the newly formed friendship between Elizabeth and Emily can survive. If the numerous allusions to Dickinson’s life (pointed out in an author’s note) are somewhat forced at times, the inner torment of the two main characters and the book’s psychologically intense climax remain gripping.”
Says VOYA: “A high school student leaves a note under her teacher’s door and walks into the woods to swallow a handful of pills. As she lies on the ground and her teacher rushes to find her, the story flashes back eight months. Two high school sophomores, Emily and Elizabeth, tell their very different stories in alternating chapters. They connect in English class where they are studying Emily Dickinson’s life and work. It is clear that both students are troubled; however, it is unclear until the end which of the two students is the one in the opening scene. This narrative gambit allows the author to give one of the main characters a resolved ending while still illustrating effectively and accurately the struggle that suicidal teens face. As one would expect with a novel of this type, contact information for suicide hotlines is provided. In addition, the connection between Emily Dickinson’s life and When Reason Breaks is also discussed in an author’s note. One of the more notable characteristics of this title is the prevalence of Latino characters, doing culturally Latino things, like speaking snippets of Spanish at home, in a story in which the heritage of the characters is not critical to the plot. Representation of diverse characters in books that are not overtly multicultural in nature is an additional positive in an already strong story. . .”
Kirkus Reviews says: “Two young women struggle with family and school pressure, finding support in a kind, principled teacher in this contemporary novel featuring alternating narrators.The story opens as one of them—readers do not know which one—attempts suicide in the opening chapter. Though readers may at first have trouble distinguishing between their voices due to the similarity of their names and to that purposeful obfuscation, Emily Delgado and Emily Davis (who goes by her middle name, Elizabeth) could scarcely be more different. Quiet, careful Emily is the daughter of a local politician whose image-conscious authority grates on his family. Elizabeth is opinionated and tough, though she, her younger sister and her mother are still reeling from the anguish caused by her father’s departure from the family after his extramarital affair. One of their teachers, Ms. Diaz, becomes a confidante for each of them, and she pairs them up for a project on Emily Dickinson, whose poems are discussed throughout and whose life circumstances serve as inspiration for the characters. The portrayal of the different ways people experience depression is spot-on—including the terrifying and believable way some of its less visible symptoms can be missed by the loved ones of those who are suffering. A sharply drawn, emotionally resonant tale of two girls—one gripped by uncontrollable rage, the other by unrelenting numbness—that will speak to many teens.”
When is it available?
The Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain, Albany, Ropkins and Barbour branches have copies 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!
The Family Hightower: A Novel
by Brian Francis Slattery
(Seven Stories Press, $27.95, 336 pages)
Who is this author?
Brian Francis Slattery, an editor and co-founder of the New Haven Review, has published four novels, as well as short fiction for Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, the Revelator and other journals. His novels include Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America, which was named by Amazon’s editors the best science-fiction book of 2008, and Lost Everything, which won the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award. And he’s a musician, too.
What is this book about?
What are the odds? Two members of the same family, one living in Morocco and the other in Cleveland, unwittingly name their sons Peter Henry Hightower, after the boys’ grandfather, an Ukrainian-American crime boss who has amassed a fortune in ill-gotten gains. One boy grows up to be a journalist who lives abroad; the other follows in the family footsteps by becoming a criminal. Their lives are not exactly parallel, but eventually they become dangerously entwined: killers seeking to wipe out the criminal mistakenly go after his cousin, the reporter. Throw in the grisly Eastern European black market for human organs and you get a dark thriller that combines a compelling crime novel with a family saga.
Why you’ll like it:
Slattery writes with a knowing air that is at once gruff and wry, confiding his often gruesome and shocking tale to his readers as though he were sharing some dark family secrets. Which, actually, is exactly what he is doing. Moving from Cleveland to Ukraine and back, with side trips to Morocco, Zimbabwe and Romania, this is a fast-paced thriller with tough characters engaged in bloody endeavors.
What others are saying:
Author Stewart O’Nan says: “There will be blood, Brian Slattery promises early on, and, man, does he deliver. Expertly paced and beautifully detailed, The Family Hightower is a Ukrainian-American Godfather–a time-traveling, globetrotting crime saga spanning the last century, spiriting the reader from Morocco to Zimbabwe to Romania and always back home to strangely exotic Cleveland. Completely satisfying and completely brilliant.”
A starred Kirkus Review says: “A tale dripping with blood and money in a family that’s far more fun to read about than it would be to live with. “So listen,” the narrator begins, and you feel like he’s confiding in you about a bunch of crooks he knows. But no, he’s “selling them out to you” as though he’s more snitch than storyteller. “There is blood everywhere,” he assures “dear reader” near the beginning, and in due time, it’s a promise amply kept. What else to expect from people who make some of their riches from involuntary organ donors? The bulk of the story takes place in Cleveland, with side trips to Ukraine. Cleveland is “a city built to make money and a city that money built, built and took apart, again and again.” There are two cousins named Peter Hightower. One is a journalist, and one, Petey, is a criminal who evolves from Petro Garko to Pete the Uke to Peter Henry Hightower, falsely claiming to have gone to Yale. “How much money does my family have?” asks the other Peter Hightower. The answer is that they stopped counting long ago. Their grandfather was a thug with deep Ukrainian roots. The criminal tradition continues in Cleveland, with the women just as vicious as the men—but will that be enough against a rival named The Wolf? Slattery goes into rich digressions such as the fatal Sugar Ray Robinson-Jim Doyle fight, and he does them so well the reader doesn’t care that they’re only tangential to the storyline. And one could fill a page with all the novel’s quotable lines; “I love you means I will bleed you dry” tops the list. This is a splendid story filled with betrayal and disaster. Readers prone to schadenfreude will find it doubly delicious.”
Says Library Journal: “Philip K. Dick Award winner Slattery does something a little different, turning in a book that’s at once literary thriller and family drama. Peter Henry Hightower has grown up abroad, always on the run with his father, but he doesn’t know why until he rebels and gets in touch with his family in America. He soon discovers that the family wealth has been built on the criminal activities of the grandfather after whom he’s been named and that a cousin also called Peter Henry Hightower is a spectacular criminal-in-training. VERDICT A swift but thoughtful read about what family means.”
Publishers Weekly says: “Slattery’s fourth novel has a dynamic premise that unfortunately descends into a frustrating jumble. Two cousins are given the same name: Peter Henry Hightower, named after their grandfather, a Ukranian-American crime boss. They grow up differently (one becomes a journalist, the other a criminal), but their fates are entwined by a mistaken phone call setting killers on the trail of one, thinking it is the other. The bulk of the book is set in 1995, although sections go back as far as 1896, and move past 1995 to an unnamed contemporary date. The canvas of the book ranges from Cleveland to Kiev to Granada to Africa and many places in between. Delving deeply into the horrors of the Eastern European black market organ trade, Slattery should be commended for not watering his story down or giving us false heroes, and his research and sensory detail are excellent. Unfortunately, the choice of present tense and the unnamed narrator talking at the reader throughout keep a buffer zone between the reader and the experience of the book. A rather wry, somewhat condescending tone prevent what could have been a strong emotional impact and thought-provoking aftermath.”
When is it available?
It’s on the shelves of the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Barbour 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!
Everlasting Lane
By Andrew Lovett
(Melville House, $25.95, 368 pages)
Who is this author?
Andrew Lovett is a British author and teacher and a married father of three who lives in York, turns 50 this year and has based Everlasting Lane, his debut novel, partly on his own childhood. Here are some thoughts about his work that he posted in 2013 on his website, Andrewlovett.co.uk:
“If, like me, you’re a human being, a flawed bag of flesh, blood and bones, struggling to make sense of your world and the people with whom you share it; struggling, perhaps, to even make sense of yourself, then you already know something of what Everlasting Lane is about.
“The book is the result of twenty years work and initially inspired by a family tragedy; events of twenty years ago, the consequences of which continue to play out and affect lives to this day.
“Everlasting Lane is a real street in St Albans, Hertfordshire which I used to drive past when visiting one of the local secondary schools – I was a Year 6 teacher at the time.
“I always thought it sounded like the title of a children’s book which is how I originally wrote it. I assume the name is ironic as the street itself is alarmingly short.”
What is this book about?
Peter is a little boy – 10 years old – when his father dies and his mother chooses to leave the city and install them in a house in the country, where she insists Peter once lived, though he cannot recall that. There is a lot about the world that Peter does not understand, just like most kids his age. But most kids don’t suddenly have their mothers tell them to now call her Aunt Kat, or live in houses with a secret locked room where mother spends time alone. He’s an outsider at his new school, but does acquire two friends who also are loners: too-fat Tommie and too-precocious Anna-Marie. They make the acquaintance of the hermit-like Mr. Merridew and Scarecrow Man. And Peter grows increasingly troubled by whatever it is that his mother is hiding in that mysterious locked room. This is a nostalgic look at childhood interlaced with a sad, dark family history. And it makes you think that it’s possible that memory itself is a kind of everlasting lane.
Why you’ll like it:
Lovett is a largely unknown writer, but his talents are obvious to the reader. He tells this coming-of-age story with tenderness and humor, capturing the bewilderment and challenges of childhood. Here is what he told rifflebooks.com about the book:
“I’ve dreamt and day-dreamed of being a writer ever since the age of fourteen after reading Catcher in the Rye, but my early attempts were pretty embarrassing and now sit gathering dust in the attic. Experience gave me something real to write about, the desire to commit to the task and the drive to get it done. Except in exceptional circumstances, I’m not sure how people who have their first novel published in their twenties can have anything of substance to say. I know I didn’t.
“The plot/s of Everlasting Lane came from a whole range of experiences; my childhood, my relationship with my mother, my career as a teacher etc. The characters also come from all over. The character of Anna-Marie first appeared in a short story I wrote whilst teaching. She later forced her way into Everlasting Lane by sheer strength of personality.
“I’m too cynical and middle-aged to cite Holden Caulfield as a hero nowadays. I have always empathized with Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I really relate to the permanently startled expression he wears as the universe continually throws curve-balls at him. A real hero, though, would be Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. He represents a moral courage which I would love to imagine I would show in similar circumstances.
Good news for those who like this book: it is the first of a planned trilogy.
Lovett says: “Part 2 is called As if We Were Still and is set in a college in the mid-1980s. Part 3 is set in a primary school in the mid-1990s but I haven’t yet settled on a title. As to what they’re about, you’ll have to wait and see.”
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “British author Lovett’s engrossing debut, partly based on events from his own childhood, follows 10-year-old Peter Lambert, who is uprooted by his mother to go live in a “dusty and undisturbed” cottage in the Amberley countryside in the mid-1970s after his WWII veteran father’s untimely death. Even more confounding than his new environment are his mother’s decision to change her name to Kat; her reference to the fact that he’d lived in the town before; and the plucky, dominating behavior of Anna-Marie, the girl next door. Peter befriends Anna-Marie along with Tommie Winslow, a schoolmate who eventually competes with Peter for the girl’s attentions. The unexpected trio bring Everlasting Lane to vibrant life along with a host of peripheral characters, including harsh grade school teacher Mr. Gale and a few local eccentrics such as reclusive Mr. Merridew, a hermit living in a wooded cabin, and Dr. Todd, a secretive physician who becomes Kat’s special friend. While Peter narrates the story with the naive, goofy curiosity of a young boy, there are also thin swaths of the bitterness and angst more befitting his aggrieved mother. She’s hiding a secret behind one of their cottage’s locked doors, and it becomes one of Peter’s burdensome obsessions. Familial melodrama and confusion are resolved and explained as Lovett’s creative tale broadens into an exploratory, discovery-filled journey for three zany outcasts—“a fluttering rabble of butterflies,” each taking in the world one revelation at a time.”
Kirkus’ starred review says: Debut novelist Lovett offers a dreamy portrait of an English childhood, with some sharp edges beneath the blur. Following the death of his father, 9-year-old Peter and his mother move from London to a mysterious house in the country. Peter states at the onset of the novel, “I can’t promise that this is the way it was, not exactly, only that this was perhaps how it sometimes seemed to be.” He tells and retells stories, all in luminous and evocative language, as he begins to realize that the secrets of the past are layered and complex. Among the many changes that occur quite quickly in Peter’s life is his mother’s strange request that he refer to her as Kat and keep the details of their home life to himself. That secret, and the secrets that begin to rise up all around him, become more difficult to protect when he meets Anna-Marie, a bossy neighborhood girl, and Tommie, an outcast schoolmate. Taking to the countryside, they begin to investigate a series of intertwined mysteries stemming from the discovery of a hidden room within Peter’s new house, a museumlike nursery filled with artifacts for a lost baby girl that the children long to understand. The narrative is driven by images, connecting and unfolding like the mysteries beneath the surface: mirrors, clocks, butterflies and a storybook rambling through the physical Everlasting Lane, lush and green and seemingly unending. Deeper still is the reminder that the narrative itself is connected to the realm of imagination, as Peter muses on the idea that like stories, real life can be amended for happy endings and a second chance to make the right decision. Beautifully written, and as charming as it is dark, the novel unwraps the endless secrets that elude a child.”
Library Journal says: “Peter is at that phase where he doesn’t quite understand adults and the consequences of one’s actions. He fills his ten-year-old world with imagination, exploration, and playtime with his two new friends, Anna-Marie and Tommie; this helps him escape from his mother’s sadness and the uneasy feeling that he did something to make her blue. Though the same age as Peter, Anna-Marie has a grown-up understanding of the world, which can get her into trouble. As Peter and friends travel down life’s lane, they meet odd neighbors and encounter disapproving adults; Peter learns that adults can be weighed down by secrets, and he starts to realize how his actions affect others. VERDICT The experience told through a child’s eye, with Peter always two steps behind Anna-Marie, is authentically rendered, and Lovett creates a realistically naïve narrator in Peter. Although the viewpoint is simplified, Lovett’s writing is sophisticated and evocative. Anna-Marie’s dialog is cheeky and entertaining, yet she also has a vulnerable side and is endearing as an outcast and as Peter’s fearless friend. The strong points in this sometimes meandering tale of a British childhood are the absorbing literary writing, the vibrancy of Anna-Marie, and the dynamic among the three friends.”
When is it available?
Everlasting Lane is on the shelves of the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its 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!
The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing: A Novel
By Mira Jacob
(Random House, $26, 512 pages)
Who is this author?
Mira Jacob is not a familiar name to most readers, but she has earned widespread praise for her debut novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. Her novel was on the shortlist for India’s Tata First Literature Award was and made the best books of 2014 lists put out by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle and The Millions.
Jacob, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son and teaches fiction at New York University, was a co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, an organization that sponsored on-stage presentations of literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She also has taught writing in New Mexico and Barcelona, has contributed to such magazines as Vogue and Redbook, and last year was named the Emerging Novelist Honoree at Hudson Valley Writer’s Center.
What is this book about?
A daughter hears from her mother, a woman who often embellishes her stories, that her father, Thomas, a famous brain surgeon, has taken to holding conversations with dead relatives at their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Amina, a wedding photographer living in Seattle, takes Kamala’s concerns seriously and returns home to find that indeed, something strange is going on and it is apparently related to a trip home to India that the Eapen family, including rebellious Akhil, Amina’s brother, took 20 years earlier. Akhil’s life took a sad turn, and Amina discovers that she must uncover unpleasant truths about their history to understand what is troubling her father and to help her family.
Why you’ll like it:
Family sagas, especially those that carefully reveal hidden truths and closely guarded secrets, have universal appeal. Jacob’s novel, cleverly plotted and deftly and often wittily written, spins one such story and augments its power by being set it in the world of Indian immigrants to America, a fast-growing and increasingly influential group in business and politics. This particular family is Christian, which may surprise some readers. But you don’t have to know much about life in India or among its expatriates here to appreciate this nuanced story of a family whose future depends on squarely facing its past.
What others are saying:
“Jacob’s novel is light and optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty. Jacob has created characters with evident care and treats them with gentleness even as they fight viciously with each other. Her prose is sharp and true and deeply funny. . . . This is the literary fiction I will be recommending to everyone this summer, especially those who love multigenerational, multicultural family sagas,” says the Associated Press.
Entertainment Weekly says: “This debut novel so fully envelops the reader in the soul of an Indian-American immigrant family that it’s heart-wrenching to part with them. . . . Thanks to Jacob’s captivating voice, which is by turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion, her characters shimmer with life. [Grade:] A-.”
Publishers Weekly says: Toggling back and forth between the early 1980s and late 1990s, Jacob’s emotionally bountiful debut immerses us in the lives of Amina Eapen and her extended Indian-American family, who have lived in Albuquerque, N.Mex., since the late 1960s. In 1998, Amina, then age 30, works as a wedding photographer, having given up a promising photojournalism career after a single picture—a photo of a Native American activist jumping off a bridge—made her notorious. She moved to Seattle to distance herself from her overbearing parents, Kamala and Thomas, but returns home after learning that Thomas, a surgeon, has begun acting strangely. She plans to make it a short trip but decides to stay after her father is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This extended visit forces Amina to confront anew the death of her older brother Akhil, who committed suicide as a teenager, and to rekindle her romance with Jamie Anderson, whose sister was Akhil’s girlfriend. The author has a wonderful flair for recreating the messy sprawl of family life, with all its joy, sadness, frustration, and anger. Although overlong, the novel, through its lovingly created and keenly observed characters, makes something new of the Indian immigrant experience in America.
Says Library Journal: “In this strong debut novel, grief has haunted the Eapen family since their move from India to the United States in the late 1960s. Now, in the late 1990s, Amina Eapen is called back from Seattle to her parents’ home in New Mexico to deal with her brain surgeon father’s presumably delusional dialog with dead relatives, and the family’s grief powers to the forefront. As the poignant yet witty and irreverent story unfolds, Amina seeks to disentangle fact from fiction, especially regarding the suicide of her precocious brother, Akhil. Ultimately, the Eapens must relive their past in order to face a troubling future. VERDICT Jacob’s writing is refreshing, and she excels at creating a powerful bond between the reader and her characters, all wonderfully drawn and with idiosyncratic natures—the mother, Kamala, for instance, is a born-again Christian—that make them enchanting. Recommended for those who like engaging fiction that succeeds in addressing serious issues with some humor.
A starred review from Kirkus says: “Jacob’s darkly comic debut—about a photographer’s visit to her parents’ New Mexico home during a family crisis—is grounded in the specifics of the middle-class Indian immigrant experience while uncovering the universality of family dysfunction and endurance. Amina Eapen was born in New Mexico, but her older brother, Akhil, was born in India before the family moved to America. Amina and Akhil chafed against their parents’ evident unhappiness—their mother, Kamala, clung to impossible dreams of returning to India; their father, Thomas, disappeared into his medical practice—while also enjoying the extended Christian Indian community to which the Eapens have always belonged . . . . By the time Thomas is diagnosed with a physical disease, Amina is feeling a bit haunted by the past herself—she can’t escape from memories of growing up with the gifted but troubled Akhil, whose death as a high school senior was a blow from which no one in the family has recovered. Amina also finds a lover she avoids introducing to her parents for good reason: He’s the brother of Akhil’s high school sweetheart, and he isn’t Indian. Amina’s romance, as well as mouthwatering descriptions of Kamala’s cooking, leavens but does not diminish the Eapens’ family tragedy. Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable; Lahiri may be more overtly profound, Jacob more willing to go for comedy, but both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.”
When is it available?
The Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain Branch have copies of this book.
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