Sisterland
by Curtis Sittenfeld
(Random House, $27, 416 pages)
Who is this author?
When Curtis Sittenfeld, now 38, published her debut novel, “Prep,” in 2005, she was blessed and cursed by a slew of enthusiastic reviews making positive comparisons to “The Catcher in the Rye” – blessed because that is quite a compliment and cursed because it’s nearly impossible to live up to. The book became a best-seller and Sittenfeld (who is female, by the way, though her given name suggests otherwise), went on to write other successful novels: “The Man of My Dreams” and “American Wife,” whose main character suggests former First Lady Laura Bush.
What is this book about?
First of all, a Happy Thanksgiving to all Under the Covers readers. And second, here is a book about family ties, something we all think about on Turkey Day.
The novel follows the lives of identical twins who share a psychic ability to predict the future and read other people’s secrets. Violet makes her living as a medium, but Kate, a wife and mother formerly known as Daisy, tries to hide her unusual and often disturbing talents, just as she has changed her name.
As grown women in their hometown of St. Louis, a small earthquake hits and Violet predicts a serious one will follow. Kate is embarrassed, but secretly thinks her more flamboyant sister might be right about that. Both are forced to examine their difficult relationship and the simultaneously comforting and constricting nature of family ties.
Why you’ll like it:
Few readers can resist a good, solid tale of frayed connections, and “Sisterland” has that in spades. Sister and sister, husband and wife, colleague and colleague: every pairing in this book is fraught with tension. After all, it is not only the earth that has dangerous fault lines: there can be earthquakes in personal relationships too. Reviewers are praising Sittenfeld for her ability to evoke family life and the way we can be both annoyed and enthralled by our siblings, often at the same time.
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews says: “Her psychic sister’s prediction of a major earthquake unsettles a St. Louis woman’s life in the latest from best-selling Sittenfeld. …Although identical twins Violet and Daisy Shramm as girls both had “the senses,” Daisy suppressed her abilities as part of her transformation into ordinary Kate Tucker, wife to Washington University professor Jeremy and mother to toddler Rosie and baby Owen. She’s mortified by being related to a professional psychic and appalled when Vi publicly contradicts seismologist Courtney Wheeling, who says a small quake that rattles St. Louis in September 2009 is not necessarily a prelude to a bigger one. Courtney is Jeremy’s colleague, and her husband, Hank, also a stay-at-home parent, is close with Kate’s. Vi is oblivious to the messy reality of life with small children, and we frequently see her imposing on her overwhelmed sister while condemning Kate (not without justification) as uptight and controlling; it’s a skillful way for Sittenfeld to spotlight the differences that make the twins’ interactions so fraught. The present-day narrative, moving toward the date Vi set for the big quake, intertwines with Kate’s memories of childhood and adolescence to explain why she felt so threatened by her powers–and to reveal a marriage as fraught in its own ways as Kate’s bond with Vi. Jeremy is exasperated by his wife’s anxieties, which sometimes threaten to dominate their lives; she feels inferior to her better educated, more relaxed spouse. The novel has some structural problems; scenes from the twins’ past take up more pages than their intrinsic interest merits and sometimes annoyingly interrupt the compelling main story. These flaws are insignificant compared with the powerful denouement: a shocking yet completely plausible act by Kate and its grim consequences for her marriage. The quiet closing pages remind us that damaged bonds can be repaired. A rich portrait of intricate relationships within and among families by one of commercial fiction’s smartest, most perceptive practitioners.”
Says Library Journal: “Identical twins Kate and Vi (Violet) were born with scattershot psychic abilities. As grown women, living wildly divergent lives in St. Louis, they are inextricably tied to each other in cranky, frustrating, and often combative ways. Narrator Kate has worked hard to mask her “sixth sense” by transforming herself into an ordinary wife to loving, even-keeled husband Jeremy and mother of two adorable kids, but she has enormous insecurities. Kate and Jeremy’s neighbors are Courtney (who is also Jeremy’s colleague) and her stay-at-home husband Hank, who is Kate’s best friend. Vi is an exuberant, self-centered self-promoter who gives psychic readings for a living. When an earthquake rattles St. Louis in September 2009, Vi’s prediction that a much bigger one is on the way gains national traction, setting off a media circus and geographic panic. As well, Kate’s reluctant, growing involvement in Vi’s life leads to a shocking, seismic disruption on her home front. VERDICT Any one of the many themes in this latest novel from Sittenfeld …. would make for a riveting story. The author turns conventions on their collective head and creates a world that is familiar, maddening, alluring, and, ultimately, guardedly hopeful.”
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes: “…Sittenfeld…manages to make [the sisters'] day-to-day relationship palpably real, capturing the alternating waves of loyalty and passive-aggressive competition that animate their every exchange. She shows us the anxieties and insecurities that underlie the choices the sisters have made throughout their lives, and makes us feel the weight of shared history that they carry in their hearts…Ms. Sittenfeld proves equally adept at capturing the rhythms of Kate’s daily life with her husband and their children…The author gives us an Updikean portrait of life in Kate and Jeremy’s comfortable St. Louis suburb that is every bit as well observed as the world of private school evoked in Prep…her portrait of Kate—much like her portrait of the Laura Bush-like heroine of American Wife—is so psychologically vivid that the reader easily overlooks the slick story line…Sisterland is a testament to the author’s growing depth and assurance as a writer.”
“Novelists get called master storytellers all the time, but Sittenfeld really is one, a kind of no-nonsense, BabyBjörn-wearing Scheherazade. . . . What might be most strikingly excellent about Sisterland is the way Sittenfeld depicts domesticity and motherhood,” says The Washington Post
“The power of [Sittenfeld’s] writing and the force of her vision challenge the notion that great fiction must be hard to read. She is a master of dramatic irony, creating fully realized social worlds before laying waste to her heroines’ understanding of them. . . . Her prose [is] a rich delight,” says The Boston Globe.
When is it available?
It doesn’t take psychic abilities to know that “Sisterland” is on the shelves at 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!
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel
by Anthony Marra
(Hogarth, $26, 400 pages)
Who is this author?
For a young and assuredly upcoming writer, Anthony Marra has already won a number of prestigious prizes. Among them are The Atlantic’s Student Writing Contest, the Narrative Prize, a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize. He was included in the 2012 of “Best American Nonrequired Reading” anthology, earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, where “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” is set, and he lives in Oakland, CA.
What is this book about?
Taking place over five harrowing days during the 2004 war in Chechnya, but spanning events over 11 years and looking to the future, it is about a little girl hiding from the Russian forces who have already taken her father; the neighbor and failed village doctor who helps her flee and Sonya, a Russian who is the last surviving doctor at the local and now destroyed hospital who encounters little Havaa and weary Akhmed. Harboring them is dangerous, but in the midst of war and betrayal, basic humanity demands that they help one another.
Why you’ll like it:
Most Americans know next to nothing about Chechnya. Besides being a gripping and moving historical novel, “A Constellation” will open the doors to this little-known place.
Here is what Marra wrote in the Wall Street Journal about why he set his debut novel there:
“Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya’s remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.
He told an Amazon.com interviewer:
“Chechnya is a corner of the world largely mysterious to most Americans, yet it’s a remarkable place populated with remarkable people who have become accustomed to repeatedly rebuilding their lives. To quote Tobias Wolff, “We are made to persist…that’s how we find out who we are.” These characters commit acts of courage, betrayal, and forgiveness as they persist in saving what means most to them—be it their families, their honor, or themselves—from the destruction of war.”
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “Marra’s sobering, complex debut intertwines the stories of a handful of characters at the end of the second war in bleak, apocalyptic Chechnya. Though the novel spans 11 years, the story traces five days in 2004 following the arrest of Dokka, a villager from the small Muslim village of Eldar. His eight-year-old daughter escapes, and is rescued by Dokka’s friend Akhmed, the village doctor, who entrusts her to the care of Sonja, the lone remaining doctor at a nearby hospital. Why Akhmed feels responsible for Haava and chooses Sonja, an ethnic Russian keeping a vigil for her missing sister, as her guardian is one of many secrets; years of Soviet rule and the chaos of war have left these people unaccustomed to honesty. Marra, a Stegner Fellow, writes dense prose full of elegant detail about the physical and emotional destruction of occupation and war. Marra’s deliberate withholding of narrative detail makes the characters opaque, until all is revealed, in a surprisingly hopeful way, but there’s pleasure in reconstructing the meaning in reverse. As Akhmed says to Sonja, “The whole book is working toward the last page.”
Says Booklist in a starred review: “In this extraordinary first novel, Marra homes in on a people and a region that barely register with most Americans and, in heartrending prose, makes us feel their every misfortune. In rural Chechnya, during the second war, a small group of people struggle to survive in the bleakest of circumstances. A gifted surgeon works tirelessly in a crumbling hospital, hardening her heart so that she can perform her gruesome work. An eight-year-old girl who has already seen too much is being hunted by the government ever since the night her father was abducted by Russian soldiers. An incompetent doctor who longed to be an artist paints portraits of 41 neighbors who were killed by government forces and hangs them in the doorways and trees of his ruined village. And a lonely man, once brutally tortured, turns government informant to obtain the insulin needed by his diabetic father, who, in turn, refuses to speak to him. Marra collapses time, sliding between 1996 and 2004 while also detailing events in a future yet to arrive, giving his searing novel an eerie, prophetic aura. All of the characters are closely tied together in ways that Marra takes his time revealing, even as he beautifully renders the way we long to connect and the lengths we will go to endure.”
In The New York Times, Dwight Garner writes: “The strange and invigorating thing about Mr. Marra’s novel…is how much human warmth and comedy he smuggles, like samizdat, into his busy story. At heart he’s a satirist, a lover not a fighter, a prose writer who resembles the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and the Jonathan Safran Foer of Everything Is Illuminated…A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is ambitious and intellectually restless. It’s humane and absurd, and rarely out of touch with the Joseph-Heller-like notion that, as Mr. Marra puts it, “stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.”
Ron Charles says in The Washington Post: “Anthony Marra’s first novel…is a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles…a testament to the vibrancy of contemporary fiction. Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly, a story about desperate lives in a remote land that will quickly seem impossibly close and important…I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years…you simply must read this book.”
When is it available?
You can borrow this book 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 Most of Nora Ephron
By Nora Ephron
(Knopf, $35, 576 pages)
Who is this author?
She was a journalist, a novelist, a memoirist, a screenwriter, a playwright, a director and the kind of writer whose fans adored her. Nora Ephron, the daughter of screenwriters and the sister of successful authors Delia, Amy and Hallie Ephron, had a remarkable talent for connecting with people. She chronicled her ill-fated marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein in “Heartburn,” which also popularized the idea of adding recipes to novels. She wrote lovingly of her later marriage to journalist Nick Pileggi. She was one of the original practitioners of “the New Journalism” but she never forgot the old secrets of good storytelling. Her screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” got her an Oscar nomination, as did the ones for “Silkwood” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” which she directed. She also wrote and directed the hit films “You’ve Got Mail” and “Julie & Julia.” The list goes on.
What is this book about?
Nora Ephron died last year, a sad passing that spurred countless heartfelt appreciations of her life and work by other writers. But her own words say it best, and this nearly 600-page compendium has the best of her brilliant, trenchant and very funny observations on life from the perspective of a clever woman who always seemed like a personal friend to her readers. She wrote about loving, writing, cooking, being a woman, being flat-chested, being full-hearted, aging and dying. Women loved reading her, and so did men. Here, in one volume, you will find pieces you may remember and others you missed. It’s almost –but of course not quite – like having her back.
Why you’ll like it:
You can tell from what I have written above that I was a serious fan of Nora Ephron and why I think you will like this book. Here, from its introduction by her longtime editor and friend, Robert Gottleib, are more reasons to read it.
“The reaction to her death was an outpouring of disbelief and grief. Before the publication of her two final collections—I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing—she was, of course, admired and enjoyed for both her writing and her movies, but the readership of these last books seemed to me to be on another level. It was personal. Her readers not only felt that they knew her but that she knew them. Obviously, not all the people—more than a million of them!—who bought Neck were women who identified with her or sensed her identification with them, but certainly many of them were. She had become a model, an ideal, or at the very least, an example—she was telling them things about herself that were also about them, and giving them permission to think these things and feel these things. And she was also telling them what to look out for, what lay ahead. Her honesty and directness, and her unerring prescience, had made her a figure—someone whose influence and authority transcended her individual achievements, extraordinary as they were.”
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “This posthumous collection celebrates Ephron’s talent for turning her experiences into material, no matter the medium. Organized by occupation (“The Journalist,” “The Advocate,” “The Foodie,” “The Blogger,” and others), the volume contains numerous classics: her novel Heartburn; the screenplay to When Harry Met Sally; and wry essays on aging that made her collections, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing, bestsellers. Ephron’s last work, Lucky Guy, a play about the career of New York tabloid journalist Mike McAlary, is published here for the first time. The book’s most delicious offering is Ephron’s magazine journalism from the 1970s, with razor-sharp profiles of figures such as Helen Gurley Brown, Dorothy Schiff, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and keenly intelligent reportage on subjects that include the 1971 National Women’s Political Caucus and the 1973 Pillsbury Bake-off competition. From Ephron’s days as a reporter at Newsweek in the 1960s to blogging for the Huffington Post in the 2000s, the book documents the changing culture of the New York media world. “Everything is copy,” Ephron’s mother always said. This collection fulfills that motto with aplomb, and will likely serve as a perfect holiday gift for Ephron fans.”
“Representing 40-plus years of work, this volume illustrates not only Ephron’s dynamic writing career as a journalist-turned-novelist-turned-filmmaker but also her incredible wit. Whether Ephron is writing about politics or purses, sexism or soufflé, her appeal is her intelligent, incisive sense of humor. This is also part of what makes her such an icon . . . for America. Women may idolize her—she is the major inspiration for funny girl Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO hit Girls—but through her writing and films, she has changed the actual timbre of American humor . . . Gottlieb manages to pack this almost 600-page anthology with Ephron’s most timeless pieces. Since we will never have enough of Nora Ephron, the most will have to do,” says Library Journal in a starred review.
“This hugely entertaining collection includes classics like Ephron’s novel Heartburn and her screenplay for When Harry Met Sally . . ., as well as columns, blog posts, and her final play, Lucky Guy . . . Many people already know how Ephron felt about her neck (bad) and what she’d miss when she died (bacon). But while these gems are included here, they’re offset by the ruthless young Ephron, who skewered journalistic ethics at The New York Times and made Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown cry during interviews. Tracing her evolution from these hard-nosed early pieces to the later, vulnerable essays on aging makes this book even more moving . . . What made Ephron great was that she took the very things seriously that others dismissed as frivolous, Cosmopolitan, Teflon, breast size, and, most of all, herself,” says Entertainment Weekly
Kirkus Reviews says in a starred review: “A thick collection of writings by the iconic Ephron a year after her much-mourned death. …The remainder of the anthology consists of much briefer entries across an impressively diverse set of topics. The final two entries are two lists, “What I Won’t Miss” (dry skin, my closet, Fox, the collapse of the dollar) and “What I Will Miss,” which unsurprisingly mentions her children, her third (and final) husband and walking in the park. The very last item on the list is “Pie.” Reading nearly 600 pages of Ephron in one volume is a joy, not only due to the range of her interests, her capacious mind, her mixture of humor and satire and self-deprecation, but also her skill as a stylist. Few writers of Ephron’s range and output have written so few clunky sentences or so many memorable ones. … Ephron might be best remembered, however, for her searing insights into the craft of journalism and the complications of feminism. A delightful collection from a unique, significant American writer.
Says Booklist: “….No matter how versed in Ephron’s cherished work a reader may be, she or he will be dazzled and touched anew by this life-spanning, life-embracing collection that so richly showcases her clarity, brio, and candor. Mining her own intriguing life in Beverly Hills and New York, Ephron wrote about what it means to be female, from her hilarious “A Few Words about Breasts” in 1972 to her touched-a-nerve laments about marriage, motherhood, age, and persistent sexism. A canny interpreter of the zeitgeist, Ephron threshed topics social, cultural, and political, and shared her passion for food. Nearly 80 stellar essays are accompanied by Ephron’s novel, Heartburn; her play, Lucky Guy, and her acclaimed, oft-quoted screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. A tonic and essential celebration of a scintillating and mighty writer. …Ephron’s bereft readership will embrace this robust, strongly promoted tribute to her incandescent talent and intensely creative life.
When is it available?
Nora’s gone, but her words live on in this book, now at 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!
Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater
by Michael Sokolove
(Penguin , $27.95, 352 pages)
Who is this author?
Michael Sokolove, who lives in Maryland, writes for The New York Times Magazine, and has published three previous books, including “The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw” and “Warrior Girls:Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports.” He’s been a frequent guest on TV and radio shows, including “Good Morning America,”, “ESPN’s Outside the Lines” and NPR’s “Fresh Air,” “The Tavis Smiley Show” and “Only a Game.” While his journalistic topics range far and wide, he is known for his exploration of the sociology and culture of sports.
What is this book about?
Sokolove’s latest, however, is not about sports and the jocks who play them. This one is being called “Friday Night Lights meets Glee,” and it is about the incredible team spirit and life-changing potential of a great high school drama program, an aspect of education often – and sadly mistakenly – derided as a “frill.” Sokolove, who grew up in Levittown and was in the legendary theater company directed by teacher Lou Volpe at Harry S Truman High School, chronicles how the program has helped the struggling town and sent countless students on to careers in show business as Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, broadcasters and community-theater founders and more. The program is so respected that Broadway produces have been known to attend performances to see how well the kids put on a show or to try out more experimental shows before they are released for high school productions. Volpe has retired, but the show goes on in this well-reported and affectionate book.
Why you’ll like it:
The recent successes of such TV shows (and their spinoffs) as “High School Musical,” “Glee” and even “Smash” show how popular a good story about onstage and backstage doings can be. “Drama High” gives readers the real thing: an uplifting and behind-the-scenes story of how a great high school teacher can inspire kids to a lifetime of success, providing the have the talent and the determination to make the most of it. Deeply reported and deeply felt, this book is receiving standing ovations from readers and critics alike.
What others are saying:
Booklist says: “Journalist Sokolove pays tribute to drama teacher Lou Volpe, who in the last 40 years has revolutionized the theater program at Harry S. Truman High School. Located in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar town that has been on a slow economic downswing since the 1960s, Truman has become known for its drama program, thanks to Volpe, whose productions draw not only critical acclaim but also the attention of famous theater producers. A dedicated teacher who inspires loyalty in students past and present, Volpe often stages productions that are controversial but that he firmly believes his kids will relate to. During the season Sokolove spends at Truman, Volpe and his kids put on the play Good Boys and True and the musical Spring Awakenings—both of which address teen sexuality, angst, and reckless behavior. Volpe pushes his student actors hard, but for most of them, being in one of his productions is transformative. Many alums go on to pursue careers in theater or the arts. A powerful look at the way a dynamic and dedicated teacher can change lives.”
From Barnes & Noble: “The drama program at Harry S Truman High School in Levittown, Pennsylvania is not your average HS theatre project. For one thing, it’s a national standout: Broadway producers travel to this unemployment plagued industrial town to see productions staged by its veteran drama director Lou Volpe. For another, its actors are not bound-for-glory rich kids; in the middle of rehearsal, you might expect to see one of the lead actors rush off stage and change into his or her Chick Fil-A uniform. Michael Sokolove’s Drama High captures the brilliance, grit, and determination of an exemplary teacher and his awe-inspiring students.”
Says The New York Times Book Review: “…as much a personal memoir as it is equal parts admiring profile…tribute to the power of arts education and jeremiad on the evaporation of middle-class opportunity…[Sokolove] is conspicuously present, expressing astonishment at the work he witnesses, reflecting on his own upward trajectory and occasionally ranting, honorably, against the widening income gap and the “small-bore metrics” that have ruinously subsumed public education in recent years…Whether the fulfillment of a school’s mission must rely on a few heroic teachers, rather than be addressed institutionally and systemically, is not Sokolove’s subject. He shines a heartening light on how one of those passionate heroes devoted himself, as Volpe himself puts it, to educating, rather than training, young people.”
Library Journal says: “….The theater program at Truman has been so successful that when Music Theatre International, which licenses Broadway productions, looks for a school to pilot a high school version of a play, it often turns to the stage where the first high school versions of Rent and Spring Awakening were also performed. Sokolove … grew up in Levittown and is a former student of Volpe’s, and that experience informs his narrative. He chronicles the on- and off-stage lives of Volpe (who just retired after 44 years at Truman) and his students and writes movingly of the challenges they faced. VERDICT You don’t have to be a “Gleek” to enjoy this compelling account of the power of theater.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “… The man behind the program, Lou Volpe, was the main reason for its amazing success. Sokolove follows his former teacher and two groups of students Volpe worked with at Truman High between 2010 and 2012. Demanding, complex and sensitive, Volpe, who was also Sokolove’s high school English teacher, taught by instinct rather than formula. The main lesson he passed on to his students was that dramatic art was not just a way of expressing feelings, but also of “fully embracing, and understanding, life.” Volpe never shied away from controversial subject matter, nor did he balk at having his students perform plays that had only been done by professional theater companies. In the two years the book covers, this gifted teacher brought two sexually explosive plays, Good Boys and True and Spring Awakening, to the Truman stage. Volpe showed his students, who ranged from drama “regulars” to athletes to talented unknowns, how to harness the discomfort that often characterized their lives and channel it into their art. The results were astonishing by most measures but ordinary by the Truman drama program’s standards. Good Boys earned the class a berth at a prestigious high school theater festival, and Volpe’s version of Spring Awakening received the nod from its Broadway producers to be performed at other high schools. A memorable, uplifting story about a man who helped students create meaning, hope and magic for themselves and their beleaguered community.”
When is it available?
The curtain’s up on this one 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!
My Notorious Life
By Kate Manning
(Scribner, $26.99, 448 pages)
Who is this author?
Kate Manning, who lives in New York City, won praise for her earlier novel, “Whitegirl.” She has a background in TV documentary television production and has won two Emmy Awards. She also has been a contributor to The New York Times, Glamour, and More magazine and has taught writing at Bard High School Early College.
What is this book about?
If you think contraception and abortion and women’s rights are just contemporary hot button issues, then get acquainted with Axie Muldoon, a fictional mid-19th century character based on the real-life female physician who was called “the Wickedest Woman in New York.” We meet Axie as a starving fatherless street kid who is taken away from her family, and apprenticed to a doctor. She later marries and with her husband sells “Lunar Tablets for Female Complaint” and becomes a successful midwife (and abortion provider) and a wealthy woman. As her fame and outspokenness grows, she runs afoul of the self-important and self-anointed moralist Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. But there’s no suppressing the indomitable Axie, who knows how to fight for herself and for the women she helps.
Why you’ll like it:
Axie, and the woman she is based on, are great characters and Manning draws her with wit and verve that echoes the real-life qualities. Besides being a fascinating historical novel that pulls back the curtain on women’s health and issues some 150 years ago, it’s also a lively tale in its own right. You won’t soon forget Axie’s voice – here is a sample from Chapter 2:
“We stood in the doorway of the bakery. If you stayed there long enough, you could get maybe a roll that was old, maybe the heels they would give you of the loaves. We were not particular. We would eat crumbs they swept out for the birds. We was worse than birds, we was desperate as rats. That day the smell was like a torture, of the bread baking, them cakes and the pies and them chocolate éclairs like all of your dreams coming up your nose and turning to water in your mouth. We Muldoons had not eaten since yesterday. It was February or maybe March, but no matter the date, we were frozen, no mittens, no hats, us girls without no woolies under our skirts, just britches full of moth bites. We had baby Joe warm in our arms, heavy as beer in a half keg. Dutch had my muffler I gave her, she was so cold. We wrapped it around my head and her head both, and there we stood looking like that two-headed calf I saw once in Madison Square. Two heads, four legs, one body. Two heads is better than one, but we children should’ve been smarter that day and seen what was coming.”
What others are saying:
Amazon.com’s review in The Big Fall Books Preview 2013 says: A historical novel of Dickensian sprawl, My Notorious Life is loosely based on the experiences of an infamous midwife in late 19th century New York. While she’s eventually dubbed Madame X by a rabid press. our heroine’s strength is that for all her success at self transformation, she remains forever the orphaned guttersnipe Axie Muldoon–a pioneer for women’s rights before anyone much knew that such rights could exist. But this novel is never pedantic or preachy, just compelling, assured and irresistible.
Says Booklist: “These fictionalized pages from the diary of the infamous Madame X, a self-proclaimed “expert in the subterranean sanguinary aspects of feminine existence,” tell a compelling and tragic (in its way) success story. Manning convincingly presents willful nineteenth-century child Axie Muldoon, based on an actual person, who was born of piss-poor Irish immigrants but was as prideful as the queen herself. And it’s a good thing too, or else Axie—later to become Mrs. Anne Jones then Madame DeBeausacq then Madame X—might have died of starvation or hypothermia on the streets of an indifferent New York City. Or worse, she might have died in childbirth like her mother. But witnessing her mother’s unnecessary death inflamed a coal in Axie’s heart that burned for every woman she encountered who faced uniquely feminine perils. Manning’s fascinating dramatization of the hazards of her protagonist’s pillar-to-post childhood and slave-labor apprenticeship, followed by her creation of Madame X’s above-and-around-the-law career vividly and movingly portray an unsympathetic world for women.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “A rollicking romp through 19th-century American contraception inspired by the true story of a Manhattan midwife. In 1860, Axie, née Annie, is “rescued” from a New York slum along with her siblings and sent West on an orphan train. In the Illinois prairie, Axie’s younger sister Dutchie and brother Joe find homes, but the irascible 12-year old is sent back to New York along with Charlie, another street-wise urchin. Axie reunites with her mother, but her joy is short-lived: After “Mam” delivers an infant who dies shortly after birth, Mam herself expires of childbed fever at the home of Mrs. Evans, a midwife and, some say, abortionist. Truly orphaned this time, Axie is apprenticed to Mrs. Evans and by the age of 16, is an accomplished midwife’s assistant who has picked up many helpful hints about all aspects of pregnancy, including avoiding it and ending it. After her mentor’s death, Axie, who is now married to Charlie, a would-be journalist, concocts and peddles a female medication that, often enough, has a side effect of inducing miscarriage. Aided by Charlie’s marketing smarts, Axie is soon running a thriving and lucrative business, dispensing pills, sex education, birth control advice and, when necessary to help her clients avert certain death or ruin, the occasional first trimester abortion. Her clients range from tenement dwellers to Manhattan’s upper crust, and while amassing tremendous wealth, Axie, operating as Madame DeBeausacq, sees her main mission as freeing women from the consequences of men’s unbridled lust and profligacy. However, when Manhattan’s penny tabloids, egged on by two disgruntled doctors, foment a scandal accusing “Madame X” of child murder and infant trafficking, Axie is consigned to Manhattan’s notorious Tombs jail. The ensuing events highlight controversies regarding “reproductive health” that are still raging today. Axie’s profane Irish brogue is vividly recreated with virtually no anachronistic slips, and though a certain degree of polemical crusading is unavoidable given Axie’s proclivities, her voice never fails to entertain.
Publishers Weekly says: “Loosely based on the life of Ann Trow Lohman (aka Madame Restell), the infamous abortionist who became known as “the Wickedest Woman in New York,” Manning’s second rags-to-riches novel (after Whitegirl) nimbly resurrects the bold woman behind the scandalous headlines. Manning’s Axie Muldoon endured a scrappy childhood as the fierce and foul-mouthed eldest daughter of Irish immigrants living amidst the filth of lower Manhattan. She began her midwifery apprenticeship at 14, and learned when to administer “Lunar Tablets for the relief of Female Obstruction,” before becoming the renowned Madame X with a thriving business (her newspaper ad reads “Renowned Female Physician”) of her own. Manning paints a vivid portrait of this daring yet deeply compassionate woman who is willing to flout convention and defy the law in the name of women’s reproductive rights. While Muldoon’s public battle against the “lying weevils and scandalmongers of the New York press” as well as old codger Comstock—the Chairman of the Society for the Suppression of Vice—take center stage throughout the latter half, it’s the details of Madame X’s private life, told in her thick Irish brogue—about the search for her long-lost siblings, her fiery relationship with her devoted husband, and her growth as a mother—that lend a human face to a this sensational figure.
When is it available?
You can find it now at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Barbour branch.
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Dirty Love
By Andre Dubus III
(Norton, $25.95, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
Massachusetts author Andre Dubus III could say writing is in his blood, as his late (and often estranged) father was the noted short story writer Andre Dubus and his cousin James Lee Burke writes best-selling mystery novels. But Dubus III took a long path to becoming a much-honored writer: studying sociology and political science and working as a carpenter, actor, bartender, boxer, private investigator and bounty hunter before plunging into writing full-time. We’re glad he did, as he is the author of such bestselling and critically praised novels as “The Garden of Last Days” and “House of Sand and Fog,” which became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, Oprah’s Book Club pick, finalist for the National Book Award and an Oscar-nominated movie starring Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley. He followed those successes with “Townie,” a frank and fascinating memoir of growing up poor and angry, son of a struggling divorced mother and a famous but disengaged father. It won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
What is this book about?
What we want, what we need, what we get. In this collection of linked novellas – not quite a novel, but close – Dubus explores what we do for love or infatuation or gratification, and what it costs us. Set north of Boston, where Dubus and his family live, the stories show the “dirty” side of love: raw hungers, ego trips, the urge to control, the willingness to betray. They involve a long-married husband who finds out his wife has been unfaithful, an overweight girl who gains a lover but loses something in the process, a bartender and wannabe poet who betrays his wife at a very difficult time and a girl who is victimized by a slutty online image that goes viral as she struggles to regain respect.
Why you’ll like it:
Dubus has a deep understanding of human nature, which illuminates the lives of his characters: ordinary, flawed people trying and often failing to find some satisfaction in their constricted lives. He writes with clear eyes and a compassionate heart, laying out the predicaments his characters get themselves into with care and welcoming readers into their stories. There’s nothing far-fetched here, and that is the magic of this kind of writing. We feel for these people even when we don’t like them, and we can learn the lessons that they would prefer to ignore.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “The master of naturalistic New England fiction returns with a book of four loosely connected short works that showcases his Dreisarian abilities at their most trenchant. In the superb “Listen Carefully as Our Options Have Changed,” Mark Welch is a middle-aged project manager who suspects that his wife is having an affair. How he finds out and what he does about it form the core of this novella, which is affecting for all the ways the author shows how difficult it is to accept that sometimes we know the least about those we think we know best. Credit Dubus for taking a hackneyed premise and making it seem new through the specificity of his observations. One shorter work deals with Marla, an overweight bank teller, and the surprising things she discovers about herself after she falls in love for the first time; another follows Robert Doucette, a bartender-cum-poet who cheats on his pregnant wife in a way that has repercussions for their unborn daughter. In The Scarlet Letter-ish title novella, teenage Devon Brandt, after an Internet indiscretion went viral, goes off to live with her great-uncle Francis, a recent widower and Korean War veteran, and develops an online relationship with Hollis, a 27-year-old Army vet. But will she ever be able to escape her past? Once again, Dubus creates deeply flawed characters and challenges the reader to identify with their common humanity.”
Booklist’s starred review says: “Award–winning novelist Dubus debuted as a short story writer nearly 25 years ago. He now reclaims the form in an incisive collection of subtly linked tales set in a changing coastal town. With fresh energy and conviction, Dubus explores the demands and disappointments of desire and marriage, generating a critical mass of sensory detail and refined suspense. A desperately orderly man hires a detective to follow his longtime, suddenly unfaithful wife. Two overweight loners attempt to find the intimacy other couples seem to take for granted. A bartender posing as a poet and living on charm and evasiveness suddenly faces the realities of fatherhood. In the unforgettable novella “Dirty Love,” Devon is hounded out of high school when a dirty cell-phone video, recorded without her permission, is posted online. She seeks sanctuary with her great-uncle Francis, a retired teacher haunted by his experiences in the Korean War. Dubus’ emotional discernment, sexual candor, penetrating evocation of place, sensitivity to family conflicts, and keen attunement to the perils of our embrace of “iEverything”—from online sexual roulette to cyberbullying and violent video games—are electrifying, compassionate, and profound. These are masterful and ravishing tales of loneliness, confusion, betrayal, the hunger for oblivion, and the quest for forgiveness.”
Ron Charles writes in the Washington Post: “It’s that just-out-of-reach desire that creates such poignancy in each of these stories, including one about a philandering bartender named Robert, who likes to pretend he’s a poet. He’s not, but Dubus is. He’s got a transparent, easy style that’s never self-consciously lyrical but constantly delivers phrases of insight and gentle wit that lay open these characters without scalding them with irony, as we’ve come to expect from so many clever novelists.”
Says Library Journal: The latest from the best-selling author of The Garden of Last Days and House of Sand and Fog is a collection of loosely linked novellas that explore, with devastating detail, the failings and never-ending needs of people who search for fulfillment in work, food, sex, and love. Dubus’s characters are flawed individuals who discover how life is easy to screw up. Marla, an overweight young woman, at last finds love but loses herself. Robert, a bartender and aspiring poet, betrays his pregnant wife. Mark, a controlling manager, catches his wife of 25 years in an affair. And Devon, a teenage girl in the astounding and timely title novella, flees the fallout of an intimate image of herself posted online. She escapes to her uncle’s house, seeking his respect, and befriends a soldier on the Internet who offers her redemption. VERDICT Filled with heartbreak, slices of happiness, and unrelenting hope, this expertly crafted collection depicts human weakness and our amazing capacity for forgiveness. Dubus fans will embrace this latest work, as will lovers of the short story and fiction. Highly recommended.
Kirkus Reviews says: Dubus anatomizes personal–especially sexual–relationships brilliantly in these loosely concatenated novellas. At the center of the characters’ world are the small, economically depressed towns in Massachusetts where waiters, waitresses, bartenders and bankers live and move and have their being. To Dubus’ credit, he doesn’t feel he has to solve their personal problems and the intricate twists of their relationships. Instead, he chronicles what’s going on with sympathy but without any sense that he needs to rescue them. In the first narrative, we meet hapless Mark Welch, who’s recently found out his wife, Laura, is having an affair with a banker. Although occasionally picking up and hefting a piece of lead pipe, Mark ultimately finds himself powerless to change the circumstances of his life. In the second story we follow Marla, a physically unprepossessing bank teller (yes, she works at the same bank as Laura’s lover) who feels her life slipping away from her. She begins a desultory affair with a 37-year-old engineer whose passions tend toward video games and keeping his house pathologically clean. The next story introduces us to Robert Doucette, bartender and poet manqué, who marries Althea, a sweet but reticent upholsterer. In the final months of Althea’s pregnancy, Robert has hot sex with Jackie, a waitress at the restaurant, and Althea finds this out and simultaneously goes into labor. The final narrative focuses on Devon, an 18-year-old waitress at the tavern where Robert works. To get away from an abusive father, she lives with a considerate great uncle (who harbors his own secrets), but she has to deal with the unintended consequences of an untoward sexual act that was disseminated through social media. First-rate fiction by a dazzling talent.
When is it available?
“Dirty Love” is on the shelves at the Albany and Dwight 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!
The Goldfinch
By Donna Tartt
(Little, Brown & Co., $30, 784 pages)
Who is this author?
Donna Tartt is a novelist, essayist and critic who was born in the Deep South, in Greenwood, Miss., but was educated in New England, at Bennington College in Vermont. Her earlier novels, “The Secret History” (1992) and “The Little Friend” (2002) were critical and popular hits and have been translated into 30 languages, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Oxford American. Tartt’s fans have been waiting impatiently for over a decade for her next novel, and now it is here.
Why so long a wait? Tartt told the BBC: “I can’t write quickly. If I could write a book a year and maintain the same quality I’d be happy. I’d love to write a book a year but I don’t think I’d have any fans.”
What is this book about?
Tartt is adept at mixing privileged lives with danger and death, and she does it again in “The Goldfinch.” Its central character is Theo Decker, whose life is cruelly upended when he is 13: his mother is killed at work at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when a bomb goes off. Theo’s father drops out of his life, a friend’s wealthy family takes him in and he eventually becomes part of the underworld of art and fine antiques, throughout keeping possession of, and being emotionally captivated by, a slightly sinister and very valuable Dutch painting called, you guessed it, “The Goldfinch.” It gives his life meaning and also puts him in danger. Tartt has created a compelling character in Theo and in his buddy, Boris, who is one hysterically funny guy, and in the very eccentric Hobie, and she moves the story from Manhattan to Las Vegas and back to New York City.
Why you’ll like it:
Beautiful writing, memorable characters, engaging story: what’s not to like? Tartt seamlessly combines a mystery with a coming-of-age story with a tale of a dysfunctional family with the heartbreak of losing one’s mother early in life with piquant characters with fascinating information on the black market in high-end art and antiques. That should keep any reader satisfied.
What others are saying:
Says Sara Nelson in an Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013, review: It’s hard to articulate just how much–and why–The Goldfinch held such power for me as a reader. Always a sucker for a good boy-and-his-mom story, I probably was taken in at first by the cruelly beautiful passages in which 13-year-old Theo Decker tells of the accident that killed his beloved mother and set his fate. But even when the scene shifts–first Theo goes to live with his schoolmate’s picture-perfect (except it isn’t) family on Park Avenue, then to Las Vegas with his father and his trashy wife, then back to a New York antiques shop–I remained mesmerized. Along with Boris, Theo’s Ukrainian high school sidekick, and Hobie, one of the most wonderfully eccentric characters in modern literature, Theo–strange, grieving, effete, alcoholic and often not close to honorable Theo–had taken root in my heart. Still, The Goldfinch is more than a 700-plus page turner about a tragic loss: it’s also a globe-spanning mystery about a painting that has gone missing, an examination of friendship, and a rumination on the nature of art and appearances. Most of all, it is a sometimes operatic, often unnerving and always moving chronicle of a certain kind of life. “Things would have turned out better if she had lived,” Theo said of his mother, fourteen years after she died. An understatement if ever there was one, but one that makes the selfish reader cry out: Oh, but then we wouldn’t have had this brilliant book! –
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani says: …dazzling…a novel that pulls together all [Ms. Tartt's] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the immersive, stay-up-all-night pleasures of reading…It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns…Ms. Tartt is adept at harnessing all the conventions of the Dickensian novel—including startling coincidences and sudden swerves of fortune—to lend Theo’s story a stark, folk-tale dimension as well as a visceral appreciation of the randomness of life and fate’s sometimes cruel sense of humor…But it’s not just narrative suspense that drives this book; it’s Theo and Boris, the stars of this enthralling novel, who will assume seats in the great pantheon of classic buddy acts (alongside Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, and Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon), taking up permanent residence in the reader’s mind.
In The New York Times Book Review,Stephen King says: “The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of The Goldfinch, they never do…Surprisingly few novelists write well of grief, but Tartt—whose language is dense, allusive and so vivid it’s intoxicating—does it as well as it can be done…The Goldfinch is a triumph with a brave theme running through it: art may addict, but art also saves us from “the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.” Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction. “
Publishers Weekly says: “Donna Tartt’s latest novel clocks in at an unwieldy 784 pages. The story begins with an explosion at the Metropolitan Museum that kills narrator Theo Decker’s beloved mother and results in his unlikely possession of a Dutch masterwork called The Goldfinch. Shootouts, gangsters, pillowcases, storage lockers, and the black market for art all play parts in the ensuing life of the painting in Theo’s care. With the same flair for suspense that made The Secret History (1992) such a masterpiece, The Goldfinch features the pulp of a typical bildungsroman—Theo’s dissolution into teenage delinquency and climb back out, his passionate friendship with the very funny Boris, his obsession with Pippa (a girl he first encounters minutes before the explosion)—but the painting is the novel’s secret heart. Theo’s fate hinges on the painting, and both take on depth as it steers Theo’s life. …there’s a bewitching urgency to the narration that’s impossible to resist. Theo is magnetic, perhaps because of his well-meaning criminality. The Goldfinch is a pleasure to read; with more economy to the brushstrokes, it might have been great. “
When is it available?
Look for “The Goldfinch” 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!
We Are Water
By Wally Lamb
(Harper, $29.99, 576 pages)
Who is this author?
Few Connecticut authors are better known or better loved than bestselling novelist Wally Lamb, who was once an unknown high school teacher and later a UConn professor. Lamb was honored by Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, which catapulted his 1992 debut novel, “She’s Come Undone,” about a severely overweight young woman’s emotional struggles, to the best-seller stratosphere: a No. 1 spot on the New York Times list. His second novel, 1998’s “I Know This Much Is True,” about troubled twin brothers in Connecticut, also hit that mark. Two more successes were the novel “The Hour I First Believed,” which combined the Columbine murders and some complex Connecticut characters and history, and the delightfully humorous Christmas in parochial school novella, “Wishin’ and Hopin.” Lamb‘s books have garnered multiple awards, and he has also earned praise for editing two compilations of essays, “Couldn’t Keep It to Myself” and “I’ll Fly Away” by women prisoners in his writing workshops at York Correctional Institution in Niantic,. Those books made headlines when the state went after one prize-winning contributor, tried to shut down the writing workshop and later moved to ban the books – efforts that ultimately were abandoned.
What is this book about?
All of Lamb’s novels involve emotional conflicts, often mixed with issues of race, class, artistic endeavor and family dynamics that are braided into the main story. “We Are Water” continues in that rich vein.
In it, an “outsider” artist and long-married mother of three, Anna Oh, falls in love with the Manhattan art dealer who has launched her career. And that new love is a woman. When their wedding is planned to take place in Three Rivers, the fictional Connecticut town based on Norwich, New London and Willimantic where Lamb sets his stories, problems ensue that uncover difficult family secrets, and this family has plenty. The novel also involves a character based on a real outsider artist, Ellis Ruley, who was black, lived in Norwich and died mysteriously, bringing issues of race, prejudice and violence into the story.
Why you’ll like it:
Lamb has the uncommon ability to write believably and powerfully from the perspective of his female characters, which is a huge plus for an author with a large following of women readers. He is at home with the nuances of emotional turmoil and the difficulties that even loving couples encounter in their relationships. He can write about such things seriously and movingly, but also can inject humor into situations and dialogue. And he is fascinated with Connecticut history, both past and present, such as the Norwich flood that figures in this book. He also is skillful at writing from multiple points of view, as he does here. It’s always a pleasure to read work by someone with such talents, and while most of his novels are long, they are stories that won’t easily let you go.
What others are saying:
Library Journal says in a starred review: “We are water: “fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” That’s evident in this emotionally involving new novel from the author of She’s Come Undone. At its heart is the Oh family: Orion, half Chinese and half Italian, a psychologist who never knew his father and has taken early retirement from his university rather than face trumped-up charges of sexual harassment; his wife, Annie, a shy, successful creator of angry installation art who survived foster care and carries a dark secret; and their three children: willful aspiring actress Marissa and the twins, goodhearted Ariane and born-again rebel Andrew. As the novel opens, Annie has thrown everyone into turmoil by leaving Orion for her chic, sophisticated art dealer, Viveca, and even as the new couple plan a wedding in the Ohs’ hometown, Three Rivers, CT, past and present hurts unfold in chapters told deftly from alternate viewpoints. Annie’s self-doubts are particularly affecting, as is the satisfyingly predictable unfolding of her secret; Orion gracefully comes to terms with his limitations and his future. Meanwhile, Viveca’s interest in a painting found on the Oh property links to the story of a black artist that intriguingly frames the novel. VERDICT Clear and sweetly flowing; highly recommended.
Says Kirkus Reviews: “A searching novel of contemporary manners–and long-buried secrets–by seasoned storyteller Lamb. …Lamb’s latest opens almost as a police procedural, its point of view that of one Gualtiero Agnello (hint: agnello means “lamb” in Italian), rife with racial and sexual overtones. Fast-forward five decades, and it’s a different world, the POV now taken by an artist named Annie Oh, sharp-eyed and smart, who is attending to details of her upcoming nuptials to her partner and agent, Viveca, who has chosen a wedding dress with a name, Gaia. Notes Annie, reflecting on the Greek myth underlying the name, “[c]haos, incest, monsters, warring siblings: it’s a strange name for a wedding dress.” That thought foreshadows much of Lamb’s theme, which inhabits the still-waters-run-deep school of narrative: Annie has attained some renown, is apparently adjusted to divorce from her husband, a clinical psychologist named Orion (Greek myth again, though he’s Chinese) Oh, and is apparently bound for a later life of happiness. Ah, but then reality intrudes in various forms, from Viveca’s request for a pre-nup to the long-suppressed past, in which natural disaster meets familial dysfunction. The story is elaborate and unpredictable, and the use of multiple narrators is wise, considering that there are a few Rashomon moments in this leisurely unfolding narrative. The characters are at once sympathetic and flawed and mostly, by the end, self-aware …We all know that life is tangled and messy. Still, in reminding readers of this fact, Lamb turns in a satisfyingly grown-up story, elegantly written.”
“Wally Lamb’s latest, We Are Water, works the same magic as his 1992 Oprah-anointed breakthrough, She’s Come Undone, capturing a snapshot of modern life (class struggle, racial violence) through the lens of a family faced with jarring news from its matriarchal figure,” says Out.com.
“A tragic event can ripple through a family for generations. After 27 years of marriage and three children, artist Anna Oh has left her husband, Orion, because she’s fallen in love with her agent, Viveca. That would be plenty of drama for any family, but as Wally Lamb masterfully unfolds the tale, in We Are Water, it becomes clear that a fatal accident half a century earlier is what set the Ohs’ chain of events in motion. Lamb takes his time, peeling back the layers of family secrets and lies. He uses multiple narrative voices with varying degrees of success (reading the point of view of a pedophile is more than a little uncomfortable). Yet despite its occasional unevenness, this family saga is hard to put down. B+.” says Entertainment Weekly.
When is it available?
“We Are Water” can be borrowed from the Barbour, Park and Ropkins 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!
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