Novels Now

Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Fiction
2009 Simon & Schuster
Finished on 4/9/09
Rating: 4.5/5 (Terrific!)

Product Description

From the author of the international bestseller Incendiary comes a haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers — one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.

We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this: This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again—the story starts there…

I went into this book completely blind. Although I’d seen it at work (who could miss that brilliantly colored cover art?!), I had no idea what it was about and hadn’t heard any buzz (no pun intended) about the details of the story. Then I came across Marcia’s enticing review and decided I had to give it a read. Picked up a copy and devoured it in just a couple of days. Unputdownable! I fell in love with Little Bee and Sarah’s son, Charlie (the latter of whom provides a touch of much needed humor in this distressing, yet powerful novel), and know they will join my ever-growing list of memorable characters.

Cleave is a marvelous storyteller. The main characters are fully realized and the dialogue is well executed and realistic. I loved the author’s device for explaining cultural differences by having Little Bee explain how she would describe a particular situation to “the girls from back home.”

I wait for a gap in the traffic and then I ran across to the center of the road. I climbed over the metal barrier. This time a great many car horns were blown at me. I ran across, and up the green grass bank at the other side of the road. I sat down. I was out of breath. I watched the traffic racing past below me, three lines in one direction and three lines in the other. If I was telling this story to the girls from back home they would be saying, Okay, it was the morning, so the people were traveling to work in the fields. But why do the people who are driving from right to left not exchange their fields with the people who are driving from left to right? That way everyone could work in the fields near to their homes. And then I would just shrug because there are no answers that would not lead to more foolish questions, like What is an office and what crops can you grow in it?

Cleave paints a vivid portrait of the harsh realities in an immigration detention center:

Me, I was a woman under white fluorescent strip lights, in an underground room in an immigration detention center forty miles east of London. There were no seasons there. It was cold, cold, cold, and I did not have anyone to smile at. Those cold years are frozen inside me. The African girl they locked up in the immigration detention center, poor child, she never really escaped. In my soul she is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent lights, curled up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked up underneath her chin. And this woman they released from the immigration detention center, this creature that I am, she is a new breed of human. There is nothing natural about me. I was born—no, I was reborn—in captivity. I learned my language from your newspapers, my clothes are your castoffs, and it is your pound that makes my pockets ache with its absence. Imagine a young woman cut from a smiling Save the Children magazine advertisement, who dresses herself in threadbare pink clothes from the recycling bin in your local supermarket car park and speaks English like the leader column of The Times, if you please. I would cross the street to avoid me. Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.

On an asylum seeker’s newly found freedom:

Outside, the fresh air smelled of wet grass. It blew in my face. The smell made me panic. For two years I had smelled only bleach, and my nail varnish, and the other detainees’ cigarettes. Nothing natural. Nothing like this. I felt that if I took one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and reject me. There was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy boots with my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a creature who had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past had crumbled to dust.

On desperation and loneliness:

Three weeks and five thousand miles on a tea ship—maybe if you scratched me you would still find that my skin smells of it. When they put me in the immigration detention center, they gave me a brown blanket and a white plastic cup of tea. And when I tasted it, all I wanted to do was to get back into the boat and go home again, to my country. Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. And it vanishes—the taste of it vanishes from your tongue when your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you—like children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.

Little Bee on the sad irony of rock music’s popularity:

“Everyone in my village liked U2,” I said. “Everyone in my country, maybe. Wouldn’t that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music. Do you know what? The first week I was in the detention center, U2 were number one here too. That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”

As I sit here composing this review, I find myself thinking back to The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent novel about a missionary family’s experience in an African village in the 1960s. Both Little Bee and The Poisonwood Bible deal with tragic violence and political unrest experienced in Nigeria and the Belgian Congo, respectively, and yet Cleve’s compelling story of loss and survival never feels preachy or pedantic. Little Bee is an excellent choice for a book club discussion, perhaps even combined with Kingsolver’s novel for comparison.

In the news: Kidman vying for film rights

Final word? Can I say I loved this before Oprah smacks her logo on the cover and claims it for her book club?!

Amazing Journey

Skeeter Phelan just graduated college and is trying to go about her day to day living like a good white Southern woman should. She is a active member in the Junior league, she plays Bridge with her friends, and even goes out on a date that her best friend Hilly set her up with. Her over bearing mother wants nothing more for her daughter than to marry, live in a nice house, and have a black maid. So what’ s wrong with her? Why isn’t this enough?

Skeeter has her own aspirations and dreams big for a southern white woman. She wants to actually make use of her college degree and become a writer. She sends her resume to Harper and Row in New York City. Amazingly she actually hears back from the editor. Not with a job but with some sound advice. Skeeter quietly follows it.

On her path to becoming a writer, Skeeter starts to question the norms of the southern society she lives in. This is when she forges an unlikely friendship with two black maids. The book is narrated in turn by Skeeter and the two maids, Aibileen and Minny.

This is an amazing book about race relations in the south during the Civil Rights era. Reading this book was like Kathryn Stockett put me in a rocket and transported me back in time to the 1960’s south! I lost hours of sleep and had a hard time prying the book out of my hands.

The character and plot development were stellar, that of a seasoned writer. Imagine my surprise when I learned that this is Stockett’s first novel! I rarely read a book more than once because there are so many that I want to read however, this book is worth a return visit! I see quite a promising writing career ahead for Kathryn Stockett and cannot recommend this book highly enough!

5/5

First settlement in New South Wales

Born in 1767 England, Daniel Rooke was a boy of great intelligence. He was exceptional with numbers and has a keen sense of curiosity about where numbers could lead him. Even though he had this intelligence or in part because of it he had trouble forming friendships with his peers.

Daniel was accepted to At Portsmouth Naval College on scholarship and became quite interested in astronomy. He becomes a Lieutenant in the Navy and goes on a mission to take convicts to New South Wales. On the ship he took on the role of navigator and once in Australia, that of Astronomer. Part of the mission was to get to know the natives and try to befriend them so that the convicts and others could live in safety.

As Astronomer, Rooke was given permission to build an observatory away from the camp to live and work in. After a time some of the natives started visiting him there and he built up a friendship with a young girl named Tagaran. She teaches him the native language and he keeps meticulous records about their conversations and the language. However, soon the relationship between the natives and soldiers deteriorates and Rooke has to choose between his friendship with the natives and duty.

I loved Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (see my review) and was highly anticipating her next book. While I quite enjoyed it, I didn’t love it like The Secret River. It took a long time for me to warm up to the character of Daniel Rooke . Once her started his relationship with the natives, I did warm up to him and loved reading about his special friendship with Tagaran. The problem is that it took well over 100 pages to lead up to this and it didn’t last very long. I would have like to explore the relationship further. Also, in the last chapter when find out the Rooke had been married but nothing about the relationship. We are never introduced to his wife.

That said, I did enjoy The Lieutenant and would recommend it, especially to those interested in the first settlement in New South Wales.

3.5/5

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
325 pages

“They didn’t recognize me,” I repeat. 
He stops, in turn, my hand still on his arm. 
“It is because they have never seen you,” he says. (p. 303)

Renée is a concierge in a posh Paris apartment building. She is a recluse, quietly tending to the needs of her wealthy tenants. They consider her inferior, and she plays up to the stereotype. But behind closed doors, Renée is an intellectual who reads Tolstoy, watches Japanese films, and has in-depth knowledge of art. And unbeknownst to Renée, a kindred spirit resides in her building: Paloma, a 12-year-old girl of extremely high intelligence.      

For most of this novel, Renée and Paloma lead separate lives. Then one day, a new tenant moves in and unwittingly brings them together. And this marks a turning point in the novel. Beginning as an interesting and very well-written character study, The Elegance of the Hedgehog becomes an incredibly emotional work. In very simple and subtle ways Renée, Paloma, and the new tenant Kazuro each exert profound influence on their new friends, taking each other to unprecedented levels emotionally and spiritually. The last two chapters are some of the most moving literature I’ve ever read. 

This is a beautiful book. I loved it. 

The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
276 pages

See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone happy. … And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 — the day the British left — the cages had been left open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. (p. 53-54)

Balram Halwai lives in “the jungle” that is 21st century India. The book is organized as a lengthy letter from Balram to China’s Premier, shortly before the Premier’s visit to Bangalore. In the letter, written over several days, Balram describes how he left his rural village to work as a driver for the son of the village’s wealthiest man. He landed this position completely by luck, and used it to rise up in Indian servant society, and eventually become an entrepreneur.

But this is no rags-to-riches story. It is instead a sometimes humorous, sometimes scathing account of contemporary Indian society. Adiga vividly describes the stark contrasts between “haves” and “have nots,” and is resigned to this remaining as status quo for years to come:

An Indian revolution? No, sir. It won’t happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else — from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. (p. 261)

The White Tiger explores many of the same themes as A Fine Balance, but I found the latter better-written and far more moving. This was an OK read, but disappointing compared to other Booker Prize winners. 

A Mercy
Toni Morrison
167 pages

One afternoon a few months ago, I was sentenced to that purgatory that is a 2-hour drive on the New Jersey Turnpike. But then my spirits were lifted heavenwards by a National Public Radio interview with Toni Morrison. Ms. Morrison discussed her new book, A Mercy, and rewarded her audience with a reading. Sheer bliss. I knew I had to read this book! 

My, oh my, oh my. Morrison packed so much richness into this short novel. The richness is centered around a tiny bit of storyline, in which Florens, a slave girl, is sent on an errand to get help for her seriously ill mistress. But there’s so much more in the stories of each character, told in their own voices: Jacob and Rebekka, the sadly childless European landowners; Florens, who was sold away from her mother to repay a debt; Lina and Sorrow, women who came to the farm via slave ship; Willard and Scully, the white indentured servants; and the blacksmith, a nameless free African who captured Florens’ heart. I found myself enveloped in Morrison’s prose, savoring every word, as with this description of an Atlantic crossing: Women of and for men, in those few moments they were neither. And when finally the lamp died, swaddling them in black, for a long time, oblivious to the footsteps above them, or the lowing behind them, they did not stir. For them, unable to see the sky, time became simply the running sea, unmarked, eternal, and of no matter. (p. 85) 

This is a wonderful, moving, haunting book. Highly recommended. (  )

The Cellist of Sarajevo
Stephen Galloway
235 pages

She knows that twenty-two people died here and a multitude were injured, will not walk or see or touch again. Because they tried to buy bread. A small decision. Nothing to think about. You’re hungry, and come to this place where maybe they will have some bread to buy. … And then some men on the hills send a bomb through the air to kill you. For them, it was probably just one more bomb in a day of many. Not notable all. (p. 82) 

The siege of Sarajevo took place between April 1992 and February 1996, killing approximately 10,000 people. The city was repeatedly shelled, and snipers took up posts in the surrounding hills, firing on unsuspecting victims. Following the May, 1992 bombing of a bakery, a local cellist played Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor (listen here), every day for twenty-two days, in memory of the dead. Each day he would quietly take his place in the street, putting his own life at tremendous risk. The title character of this novel is based on that cellist. Other characters include Arrow, a young woman caught up in the fighting, and sent to protect the cellist from snipers; Dragan, struggling to survive after sending his wife and son to safety in Italy; and Kenan, a young husband and father who routinely traverses the dangerous city streets to get water for his family and an elderly neighbor. None of these characters know each other, but their stories are loosely intertwined around the cellist. 

The real power of this book was in its portrayal of war-torn Sarajevo, and the impact of the struggle for survival on its people. Kenan put himself in grave danger to fetch water, and during his journey across town, he imagined a better time for his family where they will once again be able to visit restaurants and go on long walks eating ice cream. Dragan’s story centered on one particular day where he attempted to cross a street on his way to the bakery. He was paralyzed with fear of the snipers who had set their sights on the street that afternoon. And then there was Arrow, who became involved in the conflict after losing her own family. She also lost both her youth and her happiness. Each character’s life was changed irrevocably: food shortages took a toll on their bodies, and frequent contact with death shattered their spirits. 

Every time I read a book like The Cellist of Sarajevo, I wonder what it is about humankind that makes us do such things to one another. (  )

He was hunting just then, hot on the trail of something obscure, tracking a rare butterfly-like quotation as it fluttered through thickets of dense tropical paragraphs. The chase seemed to require the utmost concentration; still, he couldn’t help but think later on that if he’d only glanced up from the work, he might’ve seen something: a look in her eyes, a foreshadowing of doom, perhaps a train ticket in her hand or the words I’m Leaving You Forever stitched on the front of her coat. - from Last Night In Montreal, page 3 -

Lilia awakes one night when she is seven years old and finds her father waiting for her outside in the snow. She walks out of her home and into his arms. What follows is a life of constant travel - moving from place to place with the sensation of being hunted, changing identities, and an inability to create lasting relationships.When Lilia meets Eli, a young man studying dead and dying languages in New York City, she knows she will eventually leave him. But when she does just that, the act puts in motion a series of events which will not only change Lilia’s life, but the lives of those around her.

Fifteen years later in another country Lilia pressed her forehead against a windowpane in Eli’s apartment, looking out at an uncharted landscape of Brooklyn rooftops in the rain, and came to a somewhat unsettling conclusion: she’d been disappearing for so long that she didn’t know how to stay. - from Last Night In Montreal, page 9 -

Last Night In Montreal is a novel which intersects the lives of four flawed characters: Lilia, scarred by events she cannot remember but from which she constantly flees; Eli, stuck in one place and unable to move forward until he becomes obsessed with Lilia; Christopher, the private investigator who gives up everything to find a missing child and uncover the mystery of her disappearance; and Michaela, Christopher’s daughter who is abandoned by her parents and haunted by a girl she only knows through her father’s notes. The mystery surrounding Lilia’s abduction serves as the focal point from which the other characters’ stories revolve. As they are all drawn into Lilia’s life, they are forced to come to terms with their own weaknesses, desires, and fears. Thematically, the story is one about loss, repressed memory, family secrets and identity.

Lilia is a complex character whose life is not her own. She has no recollection of her years before the abduction and seems unable to stop traveling - a compulsion which allows her to see the world and yet not be a part of it.

She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these current: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth. - from Last Night In Montreal, page 119 -

Last Night in Montreal is Emily St. John Mandel’s first novel, and it is a stunning debut. Told from multiple viewpoints and moving back and forth between the present and past, the book is compulsively readable. Mandel’s writing is flawless - poetic, compelling, and achingly beautiful. Perhaps the strongest aspect of Mandel’s prose is her ability to fully develop her characters - people who are adrift and searching and often in pain, but who attract the reader’s empathy and admiration despite their weaknesses.

Last Night In Montreal is one of those books which once started cannot be laid aside. Disturbing and dark at times, it is a novel which will haunt the reader long after it is completed.

Highly recommended.

On the bald spot and through the strands of his scant pale hair could be seen glistening beads of sweat. “That’s not her name, by the way,” he said. Quirke did not understand. “I mean, it is her name, only she called herself something else. Laura – Laura Swan. It was sort of her professional name. She ran a beauty parlor, the Sliver Swan. That’s where she got the name – Laura Swan.” - from The Silver Swan, page 10 -

The Silver Swan is the second novel in the Quirke series written by John Banfield under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. Dysfunctional Dublin pathologist Quirke’s return appearance happens two years after solving the Christine Falls case. Finally sober, he is mourning the loss of his unrequited love Sarah and trying to make amends with his daughter when he receives a phone call from an old school friend whose wife’s body has been fished out of the dark waters near Dublin. The man requests that Quirke ignore the law and refrain from performing an autopsy to cover up the apparent suicide. But Deidre Hunt’s death is not as straight forward as it first appears, and Quirke once again finds himself embroiled in the dark side of human behavior. He is unable to let the mystery alone.

It was a postmortem he had performed on the body of another young woman that had led to the unraveling of the Judge’s web of secrets; did he want to become involved in another version of that? Should he not just let the death of Deirdre Hunt alone, and leave her husband in merciful ignorance? What did it matter that a woman had drowned herself? - her troubles were over now; why should her husband’s be added to? Yet even as he asked himself these questions Quirke was aware of the old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden – to know. - from The Silver Swan, page 25 -

Banfield’s writing is dark and rich and The Silver Swan, like its prequel Christine Falls, reads more like literary fiction than straight genre mystery. Characters are well-developed and plot is secondary to the motivations of the characters. The story unravels through alternating point of view which gives the mystery greater depth and interest. Once again, I found myself not entirely liking Quirke who always seems to be struggling with ethical decisions, while unable to deal with his personal demons. But, despite this, Banfield’s strong prose engaged me in Quirke’s story. I found The Silver Swan less predictable and with more intriguing twists than its predecessor – just when I thought I had solved the mystery, the story took an unexpected turn which kept me guessing.

He flicked the stub of his cigarette over the embankment wall. A gull, deceived, dived after it. Nothing is what it seems. - from The Silver Swan, page 55 -

Both Christine Falls and its sequel The Silver Swan will appeal to those readers who enjoy a good mystery, but also appreciate literary fiction. Speaking for myself, I know I would not hesitate to pick up another thriller-mystery by this author.

Highly recommended.

Read Caribousmom’s review of Christine Falls.

To find someone suddenly gone, to see them one day and not know that this will be the last day you see them, to not have the moment register until hours, days later, or years, is never easy. How we catch ourselves as life moves forward, thinking about that last moment and about what we might have done differently, if only we’d known. [pg 110]

She entrusted me with her version of this story late in her life. In fact, it’s a long story when all the pieces are added together, and it begins many years before my father jumped from the pedestrian bridge, when my grandmother was young and set out to follow the Tuskee River north. She confided in me because she wanted me to understand, as she put it, how one thing led to another. But I had to promise never to repeat what she told me to anyone. She would be furious to hear that I’m about to break my promise. I’d like to hope, though that by the end she would forgive me. - from Follow Me, page 7 -

Sally Werner is only sixteen years old in 1946 when an unexpected sexual encounter with her cousin Daniel results in the birth of a baby boy. On impulse, Sally abandons her baby on her parents’ kitchen table and flees, heading north along the fictional Tuskee River in Pennsylvania to seek a bigger life and leave her shame behind. Sally Werner recreates herself many times - changing her last name along the way (from Werner to Angel to Mole to Bliss), and starting her life over again each time fate delivers a bad hand.

More than sixty years later, the story of Sally’s life is retold by her granddaughter and namesake who has the benefit of pitting her grandmother’s story against another version…that of her biological father who one day sends her a package of tapes which reveal his side of the story.

There’s her side of the story, there’s mine, we’re lichen, our stories, the way they relate, they remind me of lichen. Lichen, you know, is made up of fungus and algae, it’s really two plants in one, the fungus is a parasite, it draws the carbohydrates from the algae, but the algae don’t seem to mind. I like to cite lichen as a prime example of symbiosis. Doesn’t every story involve symbiosis in a way, a relationship of dependence between two parts? Your mother’s story, what she knows, it’s a partial version, but so is your grandmother’s. - from Follow Me, page 313 -

Follow Me is a magical tale of one woman’s life and how her decisions impact others long after she is gone. Thematically, it is a novel about the selective process of memory and how history is defined by who is telling the story. Like the river which parallels Sally Werner’s life, Follow Me is filled with secrets and murky half-truths and things are never entirely how they first appear.

Joanna Scott is a gifted story teller. Her prose flows smoothly and the interconnected lives of her characters are revealed from several viewpoints. Embedded in the story of Sally is a larger story - that of the struggle of single women faced with unplanned pregnancies and the shame that often accompanies them. Sally is not a wholly likable character, and yet I found myself admiring her resilience and determination. Her mistakes, her desire for forgiveness, her effort to make things right again - all resonated with me.

My only complaint with the novel was its length. At times I felt impatient for the story to unravel faster. I wanted the secrets revealed sooner. Follow Me is a leisurely story. It meanders. But despite my impatience, I turned the final page with admiration for Scott’s writing, as well as a deeper understanding of her characters.

For readers who enjoy literary fiction, family sagas, and character-driven novels -  Follow Me will appeal.

Recommended.

Hillary Jordan
336 pages

It’s hard to say that I loved a book that deals with such tough subject matter as prejudice, hatred, and violence but when the author is so skilled in evoking emotion, you gotta love it.

When Laura McAllen’s husband Henry drops the bombshell on her that they are leaving her city home and all of her family behind and moving to the Mississippi Delta in a week, I was angry at his lack of consideration for her feelings and sympathetic to Laura and her difficulty in adapting. I’m not sure I could go from having a shower in my home to bathing once a week and then having it be such a chore that it is turned into something that must be done rather than an enjoyment.

The profiles of the racism and prejudice are difficult but they are moving. It’s a sad journey back into our past where these events took place but, as with other painful historical facts, it is necessary to revisit them to keep the memories alive so that the learning continues.

I was really drawn in by Mudbound, much more than I expected to be. I would recommend this to lovers of historical and/or southern fiction. There are also WWII elements to this story but they are played out to a lesser extent. (4.5/5)

Some people are too stupid to be afraid on a runaway horse. Some people seize up. Some people turn cold and clear inside, like Clay, and only start to shake afterward. Annie sails into trouble like she wants it to last forever, like she can skim off from fear only what’s precious. She almost never comes off. - from The Mechanics of Falling, page 90 -

Catherine Brady’s latest collection of stories explore the various ways individuals respond to the unexpected events in their lives - will they seize up? Turn cold inside? Face things head on? Will they get back up after a fall, or give in to it? By exploring the ordinary lives of her characters, Brady reveals the extraordinary turns of fate and the gradual insight which swells inside us all when life does not go as expected.

In Scissors, Paper, Rock Natalie, an aging photojournalist, resists conforming to the changes in her profession and her behavior is accommodated at work. This irritates a co-worker, Liz, until a seemingly minor incident illuminates a deeper issue and forces Liz to examine her own values and sensitivities in the light of another person’s crisis.

Natalie’s visits reminded her of the happy time when her children were small, and they taught her over and over how to let each day happen as it would, centered on the wobbly axis of their needs and not her own intentions. The sick days that disrupted her plans were also enticing pools of time in which she might spend an entire afternoon reading in bed with a feverishly hot child pressed against her or playing endless rounds of scissors, paper, rock, in which no strategy could defeat the illogic of the hierarchy that set paper over rock, an open hand over a fist. - from Scissors, Paper, Rock, page 78 -

One of my favorite stories of the collection - Much Have I Traveled - involves Nina, married twelve years to her college professor, who examines the base on which her marriage turns during a weekend visit with friends. Nina and Carter’s marriage reveals itself gradually not only to Nina, but to the reader as well. When Brady describes a pond clotted with algae, it becomes a metaphor for the evolution of Nina and Carter’s relationship which has begun to shift under the shadow of Carter’s newly diagnosed multiple sclerosis.

When the pond became clotted with algae scum a few years ago, the channel from the creek slowly filling in, Nina had accepted this next small loss, the pond growing murky the way her memories of summers here as a child had silted up over time. They couldn’t really afford to keep up the property that had come to her, and they could not pay to dredge the pond. But Carter started digging a new channel from the creek and enlisted their guests in daily labor, flinging stinking muck on the grass, scoring the earth with shovels, tearing rocks from the creek bed and carting them in wheelbarrows to line the raw trench. - from Much Have I Traveled, page 162 -

In all of Brady’s stunning and beautifully wrought stories, there is a shift or change either inside the protagonist or within the primary relationship - boyfriend/girlfriend, daughter/father, husband/wife. The internal struggles of the characters are often paralleled with external events or catalysts. In Seven Remedies, a middle-aged woman finds herself juggling work, major house repairs, and rebellious children - but it is her struggle to communicate with her Mexican housekeeper which grants her the most insight into her relationships and what her life is all about.

She cannot get used to the construction noise, the sound of blows raining down as men rebuild her house. The gods have poor aim too. There are only these bungled missives that may or may not encode ruin. Or maybe it’s that Laurel misjudges the peripheral cues she’s given. The kind of peripheral cues - right turn after the yellow house, second left after the light, there’s the bus stop - she is forced to rely on when she tries to talk with Mayda, nothing ever precisely located. There’s just stumbling on. - from Seven Remedies, page 189 -

Brady creates memorable and complex characters whose inner lives are rich with doubt, fear, faith, and conflict. The characters encounter such things as  infidelity, violence, medical decline, issues of aging and single parenthood. A simple story becomes an intriguing look at deeper issues through Brady’s careful and wise prose. I often found myself re-reading certain passages, teasing through them just to listen to the perfect rhythm and finely tuned nuance.

Short story collections like The Mechanics of Falling are rare - the ideal blend of excellent writing and good story telling, giving the reader a wealth of detail about the characters while leaving room for interpretation of what will happen next. A good short story makes the reader think while pulling them deeper into the lives of the characters. Catherine Brady has written eleven outstanding stories which compliment each other perfectly.

Highly recommended.

See more reviews of this book through TLC Book Tours.

Catherine Brady has published two other collections: Curled In The Bed Of Love (co-winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2003 Binghamton John Gardner Fiction Book Award.) AND The End of the Class War (a finalist for the 2000 Western States Book Award in Fiction).

And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon. As I stood there, thrown by Herald Square’s flows of pedestrians and the crazed traffic diagonals and the gray, seemingly bottomless gutter pools, I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark. - from Netherland, page 68 -

The protagonist of Joseph O’Neill’s latest novel is Hans, a wealthy banker living in the Chelsea Hotel in post-911 New York City. Rachel, Hans’ conflicted wife, abandons him to return to London with their child and leaves Hans to navigate his way through a city of immigrants, idealists, and whacky characters. It is not long before Hans discovers the little known, yet thriving culture of immigrant men who gather each week to bat and bowl their way through cricket games. One of these men is Chuck Ramkissoon - an immigrant from Trinidad who runs an illegal gambling operation, cheats on his wife with a scrapbooker, and dreams of creating The New York Cricket Club - a venture which he envisions making millions while introducing Americans to a ‘whole new chapter in U.S. history.‘

“I’m saying that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket. What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. Everybody who plays the game benefits from it. SoI say, why not Americans?” - from Netherland, page 211 -

Netherland explores the aftermath of 911 through the eyes of America’s immigrants who have come to America in pursuit of their dreams but find a country conflicted in the face of impending war with Iraq.

We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic , like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow. - from Netherland, page 24 -

O’Neill uses Hans and Rachel’s marriage as a metaphor to explore fear, isolation, disaapointment and reconciliation as they separate and then come back together. Family and country are two intertwined themes as Hans tries to understand his own identity within the larger concept of community.

Although O’Neill’s writing is fluid and evokes a New York which most American’s will relate to, I found myself indifferent to Hans and his troubles. I liked the colorful and outgoing Chuck, but his ultimate fate left me thinking “so what?” I am not exactly sure why the character development left me cold in this novel - O’Neill certainly gives the reader plenty of background and insight into the two main characters - but, ultimately, I found them forgettable. There are also long passages about the game of cricket - a sport which I know next to nothing about - and these I found mostly boring.

At the end of the book, Hans is talking to a minor character who had considered funding Chuck’s idea for a cricket club in New York:

“The New York Cricket Club,” Faruk says, raising his eyebrows, “was a splendid idea - a gymkhana in New York. We had a chance there. But would the big project have worked? No. There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.” - from Netherland, page 251 -

And this is pretty much how I felt about O’Neill’s novel. A good idea, but it did not work for me. Although this book has gotten some great reviews (including being recognized as a NYT Most Notable book in 2008), I wonder if many Americans will struggle as I did with a story which in large part centers around a sport which is not well-known in our country. Some readers might like this one.

Near mid-century when Edward was born, the full moon was years from being the brightest. That would happen - in terms of luminosity and size - in the last month of the century. As a child growing up, however, Edward found much splendor and mystery in the moon. It kept changing and following him around, a rock with its own rhythms, much like girls, and he knew he was years away from understanding girls. - from The Brightest Moon of the Century -

Christopher Meeks has transitioned from short stories to his first novel - and the result is a book which draws the reader in with humor, empathy, and a gentle understanding of what it means to live our lives with a sense of wonder.

The Brightest Moon of the Century is organized into nine distinctive chapters which allows the reader to experience the life of Edward Meopian from the age of 14 through his 45th year. Edward is a bit of a nerd and socially naive, a character who consistently made me feel for his struggles and celebrate his triumphs. As a young boy, he loses his mother to a tragic accident and it is perhaps this one event which shapes the man he ultimately becomes. Forced to attend a private boy’s school by his father (who is seeking his own happiness while struggling in his role as single parent), Edward must confront bullies and figure out his place in the world. Edward’s teenage challenges and search for love in the first two chapters reveal Meeks’ finally honed sense of humor and understanding of what it means to be young.

Guys would never talk about, say, what brand of acne medicine they were using, or what great pants another guy was wearing, or wow, good color for a golf shirt. Didn’t girls want to know how far someone got on a date? Or did they talk about how their boyfriends got boners and they happily let them suffer? The more suffering, the better a girl you were? If so, Annie was a fantastic girl. - from The Brightest Moon of the Century -

Edward moves from his childhood home in Minnesota to college in Colorado, later makes his way to Los Angeles (where he tries to follow  his dream of becoming a movie director), and finally ends up in rural Alabama managing a mini-mart in a trailer park (my favorite part of the book). It is through these years of his life that Edward struggles with self-discovery, faith, and fate.

“Failure seems to follow me around,” said Edward.

“You’re no failure, son,” said the officer, and Edward turned to face him. “This is God,” said the man. “Or the disorder of life, if you like. This is what we all have to live with.” - from The Brightest Moon of the Century -

In the final chapters, the reader watches Edward grow into middle-age and discover that often the joys of life are balanced with pain. Edward is revealed as a man who empathizes deeply with others and never loses his hope and optimism despite tragedy.

And this is what I love about Meeks’ writing ability - he gives us characters who are very human and who face many obstacles in life, and then he infuses their stories with hope.  As in his previous short story collections (reviewed here and here), I found myself caring deeply about the characters in The Brightest Moon of the Century.  Meeks writes with a wry humor as he shows Edward tripping and stumbling through the world with a refreshing openness to what life has to offer.

He was simply going to be open to the moment, like a sunflower or the Hari Krishna guy at the airport. - from The Brightest Moon of the Century -

Christopher Meeks’ work is joyful, funny and sensitive. The Brightest Moon of the Century is a satisfying read and one which made me hope that Meeks will continue to write novels.

Visit the Author’s Website where you can find many reviews of all of Christopher Meeks’ work.

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

Pages: 337
First Published: Feb. 3, 2009
Genre: literary fiction, historical fiction
Rating: 4/5

First sentence:

The day started before sunrise, on March 21, 1979, when Teacher Gu woke up and found his wife sobbing quietly into her blanket.

Comments: This book is a story of ordinary Chinese citizens in 1979, China. A year in which people are still getting used to the Communist regime after the break-up of the Cultural Revolution. Those who were staunch Red Guards during the rule Mao have been take care of and anyone still harbouring those or any feelings other than communism are antirevolutionists. The book opens upon the day that the Gu’s daughter, Shan, now 28 after spending 10 years in prison for her actions during the rule of Mao is to be executed for her writings found in her diary in her cell.

The story is mostly one of the characters who knew Gu Shan, those affected by either her life or her death, and those who live upon her street. It is a story of the horrors of political indoctrination, crimes against the people, ordinary people trying to live their lives, and of love. Love, both gone sour from years of hardship and burning romance between two very unlikely people.

What a beautiful book! Very well written, continuously moving from one character’s experiences to an other’s. A slow-paced plot, the book encompasses only one year, but
a moving look into the minds of various Chinese mindsets from traditional superstition to staunch communist to fierce activists. I loved every one of the eclectic characters but especially Nini and Bashi, two young people who slowly become more and more the main focus as the book progresses.

I love reading about China and this brief period of the seventies is one that, historically, I haven’t read of before. I found it fascinating as well as tragic and heart-wrenching. While slow-paced as mentioned above, it is not a slow read and I found myself turning pages as fast as I could. By no means a happy story but a dark and heart-rending one with glimpses of hope.

This is the author’s first novel, having previously published an award winning collection of short stories, and I most certainly will be keeping an eye out for her next one. Highly recommended especially to those who enjoy character driven novels.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Pages: 541
First Published: Feb. 3, 2009
Genre: fiction
Rating: 5/5

First sentence:

After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother’s womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954.

Comments: This epic family saga spans through the 1950s to present time and travels from Ethiopia to America and back again. A brilliant tale that starts off with an Indian nun working as a nurse in Ethiopia surprisingly going into labour with complications. Her twin sons are delivered alive but she dies on the table and the white doctor who is assumed to be the father refuses to look at the boys and leaves the Mission Hospital never to return again. This, then, is the story of the twins, Marion and Shiva, told through the eyes of Marion, the first born. The story of how they were as one person together until the day that betrayal over a woman tore them apart. An intense story that centres around medicine as the doctors and nurses try to help the poor of Ethiopia but also spans the history of this country from an autonomous monarchy through two coups, and a Marxist regime.

An absolutely brilliant book that I could not put down. Once I started I kept on reading like there was no tomorrow. The characters that populate this book are immensely genuine and eclectic from the twins, to their adoptive doctor parents, to the servants, the Matron and finally the collection of Indian doctors working together in America. A loving family and community from a mixture of cultures (white, Indian and Ethiopian) that combine Catholicism with Hinduism, live together through shocking event after shocking event.

A real page turner. An epic story that is a joy to read. An unfamiliar setting and a focus on medicine both captivated me and a truly heart-wrenching story of love and betrayal that continues to surprise you at every turn. Truly wonderful, this is a book that will stay with me. Highly recommended!

The years of Scarlet’s migration, through the decade of the 1990s up to this cool and puzzling spring of 2002, were relatively quiet ones for Addie. Had her mother somehow been holding her breath, reining herself in, waiting to see how far south, and now how near to this overdeveloped coastline, Scarlet would fly? Had she been watching for those final fledgling years to pass before her next and last great scheme? - from In Hovering Flight, page 8 -

In the first chapter of In Hovering Flight poet Scarlet Kavanagh arrives at the New Jersey shore home of her mother’s closest friend Cora to sit with her mother Addie as she dies. Scarlet’s father, a professor of ornithology at a small college in southern Pennsylvania, and Lou - another of her mother’s friends - are also present. Although the novel begins with Addie’s death, it is the lives of these characters, not the death of Addie, which the reader becomes enthralled with in this delicately unfolding novel about love and loss.

Addie Strumer Kavanagh is a college student when she meets Tom Kavanagh - her professor in Biology of the Birds. Addie’s love of drawing birds parallels Tom’s fascination with bird song, and when they marry they live in a small cabin in the Pennsylvania woods full of birds and close to bubbling creeks. When their daughter is born, she is named for the Scarlet Tanager which Addie has grown to love. Addie’s friends, Cora and Lou, move in and out of Tom and Addie’s lives - having children of their own and pursuing their own dreams, and yet sustaining a connection with each other. As in all great stories, the characters face challenges and grow and change through the years - Addie becomes obsessed with environmentalism and activism, Cora struggles to raise a child with autism, Tom must live with a mistake, Lou’s choice of men is never right, and beautiful Scarlet moves from girlhood to womanhood with all the struggles one might expect of a creative and sensitive child.

In Hovering Flight is a beautifully wrought and soothing story about what it means to love another, about the flaws in relationships and how they are sustained despite these flaws.

At that moment he knew that whatever happened in the following year, or the years after that, he had made one perfectly right decision: to be with her. And like Tom’s other certainties - the importance of work that one loves, the redemptive powers of music and poetry, the unquestionable clarity of evolutionary theory - he remained unflagging in this as well, in his love for Addie Kavanagh, “the Sturmer girl,” despite countless trials, for the rest of her life. - from In Hovering Flight, page 71 -

The novel is also about the ambivalent relationship between mother and daughter. Addie and Scarlet’s relationship is one of subtle conflict, doubt, awe, and ultimately deep love.

Two nights ago she’d held her mother’s hand and looked into her eyes, which were remarkably clear, despite her obvious pain; she had declined the medication the hospice workers offered for as long as she could, saying she wanted to stay as clear-headed as possible. As she gazed into those remarkable, impenetrable eyes, Scarlet said, “You’ve taught me so much.” It seemed that the words came, unaccountably, from her chest, which ached with a very real pain. Because Addie had taught her a great deal, and at that moment she could see it, and she longed for her mother to teach her more. - from In Hovering Flight, page 175 -

Throughout the novel, Hinnefeld wraps the themes of friendship, nature, the fragility of eco-systems, and art. These themes inspire the characters and bind them to each other. Hinnefeld’s writing is poetic, sensitive and evocative. I was touched by the very real struggles of her characters - their failed dreams, their conflicted love for each other, their doubts and triumphs.  This debut novel is simply a joy to read - one which resonates with the songs of birds and the grace of the human spirit.

Highly recommended.

My father stepped back and examined me. Whereas Serena Jane possessed the limbs and features of a vain little pixie, my physiognomy brought to mind the heaviest and roundest of objects - a cannonball, perhaps. Something impervious to smashes and collisions. Since I began walking at the unprecedented age of seven months, I had fallen down the stairs twice, plunged unharmed into the flower beds from the front porch, and survived being pushed into oncoming traffic by Serena Jane in our rusted red wagon. - from The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, page 32 -

Truly Plaice’s birth brings out the betting folks of Aberdeen County who wonder how large a baby must be to stretch a mother to such huge proportions. But Truly’s birth is also marked by the death of her mother and the beginning of her father’s descent into alcoholism. Her size seems all the more incredulous when she stands next to her beautiful and petite sister Serena Jane. When the girls’ father dies, Serena Jane is taken in by a wealthy couple and Truly is dropped off at the deteriorating farm of a local family. From this point on, Truly can not help but view herself as less worthy than her sister whose beauty seems to enchant the people of Aberdeen County and attracts Bob Bob Morgan’s attentions. All is not what it seems on the surface, however. As Truly grows more enormous and matures from a young girl into a woman, she must rethink the idea of beauty and come to terms with the pain and anger of her size. Redemption for Truly lies in a series of moral decisions and her ability to forgive those who have wounded her the most.

Tiffany Baker’s debut novel is set in the fictional, rural town of Aberdeen - a place where time seems to stand still.

Its sidewalks had weedy cracks that gaped bigger every winter. The bells at the firehouse sometimes locked when the weather was damp, and the newspaper had quit printing its Saturday edition. There was a recreational softball team, a ladies’ gardening committee, and a brick library, but the team ever won, the collective age of the gardening committee was four hundred and seven, and the print in half the books in the library was so faded and smeared, it was no longer legible. - from The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, page 49 -

The characters who people Aberdeen are quirky, flawed and carry secrets passed from one generation to the next. The novel’s protagonist (Truly) is not wholly likable and yet the reader feels compelled to hear her story and understand her. Baker asks the most basic of questions in her novel: What defines who we become? How important is appearance when we determine a person’s beauty? Can forgiveness redeem us?

Baker captures the essence of small town life - the gossip, the secrets, the relationships and expectations which define each person’s role within the constraints of a community.

The novel is not without its weaknesses - at times situations seem contrived or unbelievable (such as the complete lack of investigation into the disappearance of Serena Jane, and the extent of the cruelty toward a very young Truly). Despite these faults, Baker’s writing is infused with a dark humor and deep insight into what motivates her characters. And it is these qualities which keeps the reader turning the pages.

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County is not a light read - it is disturbing at times - and some readers may be dismayed at the moral decisions of the protagonist. But for those readers who enjoy character driven books which take them to a new level of understanding, this one is worth the read.