The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, a review

I just finished reading Julian Barnes's novel, The Sense of an Ending, and I loved how it kept me guessing. I love Barnes's writing, and here he really impressed me with his craftsmanship. It's the story of how a man, Tony Webster looks at his youth through the lens of late middle age, confronting his past, and changeable and unreliable memory, in the process. So as Tony examines his memories, and truths that he never knew about are revealed, the story, in Barnes's somewhat restrained style, becomes a bit of a mysterious page-turner. It was a nice combination of thought-provoking, subtle, and entertaining.

As a woman in middle age, I loved that the book made me really think about aging, regret, and remorse. It also made me ponder the idea that we are, at best, unreliable narrators of our own lives. And the book was disturbing in that it made me think about self-delusion, and how easy it is to think you are one kind of person, when maybe you are not. Ah, human frailty, how universal you are.

I did have one strange thing happen while reading it. I read it as an e-book, and because I was powering through it, I never checked how far I was actually getting in the book, and the ending took me by surprise. It felt a little abrupt, but I don't think I would have felt that way had I been reading a paper edition, and anticipating the ending as it got physically closer. And it was a book that I didn't want to end. Barnes left me there, wondering what effect the knowledge Tony gained would have on the rest of his life. The ending was elegant, and satisfying in that it left me sitting there, staring off into space, putting all the little pieces of the story back together in my head, armed as I now was with more knowledge. But it also left me wanting just a little bit more. And isn't that how the best books are?

Room, by Emma Donoghue--a review

Room, by Emma Donoghue, was one of those books I was afraid to pick up because I had heard just a tidbit about it: the book was about a five-year-old boy locked up in a single room, and it was from the boy's point of view. I have a rule about not reading books or seeing movies that feature children in peril. The subject is just too disturbing for me, so that's my rule.

However, I kept hearing about Room--that it was a wonderful book, that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and that it was really original. So I broke my rule and bought it (on the iPad--the first book I've read in that format, by the way).

I'm happy I broke my rule, because I really enjoyed reading Room. The novel tells the story of 5-year-old Jack, who lives in one room with his mother, Ma. The reason they live there is that Ma was kidnapped when she was nineteen, and has been held prisoner in a specially-designed 12-foot-square back-yard shed by her captor, Old Nick.

I was wowed by Donoghue’s ability to effectively communicate the feelings, language and world of a five-year-old who was born and raised in captivity, cut off from society. I was drawn in, not just by the tension I felt about the danger Ma and Jack were in, but also by the intricacies of their world.

Spoiler alert—I’m sorry, I found I just couldn’t talk about this book without revealing some major plot points. If you really don't want to know what happens in the book, read no further. But I don't think knowing what happens spoils the book, so...

The first part of the book is about Jack and Ma’s captivity, and the tension and sense of dread builds really well as Ma realizes, and we realize, that there is no way mother and child will continue to survive in this situation as it is, and they have to attempt a daring escape plan. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a major portion of the story takes place after their dramatic escape, when they have to adjust to “Outside”.

While I was fascinated by the way Ma had created a routine that kept her sane and her son safe and healthy inside Room, I was even more interested in their life after captivity. I was so happy that Donoghue didn’t end the book when Jack and Ma escaped, but rather went on to explore what it meant for Jack to enter a huge, frenetic, bewildering world at the age of five, and how hard it was for Ma to reenter that world after seven years of being held prisoner.

Donoghue is spot on with the voices—obviously of Jack and the immensely sympathetic Ma, but also with Ma’s doctor, nurse, mother, brother, sister-in-law, father, and new stepfather. Each of these minor characters adds layers to the complexity of Jack’s adaptation to the big world outside, and to Ma’s difficulty dealing with her feelings of guilt and sadness.

I was pleasantly surprised by Room. I'm glad I got over my difficulties with the subject matter and went ahead and read it. It was an intense read, but very rewarding. It was one of those books I just couldn't put down--I know I stayed up far past my bedtime to finish it, and that's a rare thing for me these days. I'm looking forward to reading more of Emma Donoghue's work.

The Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee--a review

Chang-rae Lee's new novel The Surrendered tells the tales of the intertwined lives of several characters, all of whom are profoundly affected by their experiences during the Korean War. First of all, there is June, orphaned while fleeing the Communist army. She meets American soldier Hector on the road, and together they end up the orphanage run by Sylvie Tanner and her husband, a minister. Both June and Hector fall in love with Sylvie, who is also emotionally damaged, after watching her missionary parents murdered by the Chinese in Manchuria.

I was fascinated to read that Chang-rae Lee got the idea for this novel more than twenty years ago, after interviewing his father about his experiences during the Korean War. Lee writes that his father had only spoken about the war years in the vaguest way before Lee interviewed him for a college project. The traumatic details of Lee's father's brother's death came out in the interview, and the story became the inspiration for one of the most powerful scenes in The Surrendered.

The anecdote Lee relates reminds me of many stories I have heard from the children of Holocaust survivors, of parents who shelter their children from the horrors of their pasts, and then at some point, maybe when the children are adults, finally tell them their stories--and it is shocking for the children on many levels. Lee explores this theme in the novel, too--he creates a character in June who has hidden some part of herself from her son, and that separation, that hiding, has colored their whole relationship, and made it dysfunctional.

This relationship—or rather, non-relationship—between June and her son leads to their estrangement, and then to June’s dying quest to find him in Europe. Lee is sparing in the details he provides about the characters’ motivations and inner emotional lives, and here it was sometimes maddening and sometimes haunting, as I watched June in her self-delusion, hoping for a reconciliation with a son who cannot acknowledge her, perhaps because he never knew her. There’s a twist at the end that makes the story even more poignant, but I won’t spoil it here.

I felt I understood Hector better than I understood June. Hector, like his namesake in Greek mythology, is a talented warrior and, because of the myths his hard-drinking Irish father spins, believes he may be physically invincible. But while bodily strong (and beautiful, which turns out to be a curse), Hector is emotionally damaged, and feels that he is a curse to others if they get involved with him. While June is more of a cipher, because she is so emotionally self-contained and defended, Hector is more openly wounded, and therefore easier to see into.

But overall, while Lee’s characters were very compelling, there were times when I felt I didn’t truly understand them. The writing is clean, steady, and often beautiful. I really enjoyed Lee’s prose style. However, the story is relentlessly tragic, and just about everything bad that you can imagine happening to these characters does happen. So while I recommend Lee’s writing, I feel this book is definitely for the stout of heart.

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann--a review

It is August, 1974, in New York City, and daredevil wirewalker Philippe Petit makes an amazing, and illegal, walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This event is the cornerstone of Colum McCann's novel Let the Great World Spin, the strange and wonderful event that connects the story's characters. But the story is not about Petit at all, it is about the lives of a seemingly disparate group of New Yorkers whose brief contact with his wire-walk sets off a chain of events that changes or touches them all.

An Irish monk, John Corrigan, lives in the Bronx and concentrates his saintly impulses on improving the lives of hookers and nursing home patients. Despite his vow of chastity, he falls in love with a Guatemalan nurse.

Judge Solomon Soderberg sees Petit's wire-walk and wants him prosecuted in his courtroom. In order to hurry to Petit's case, he gives short shrift to the case of two prostitutes, friends of John Corrigan's, mother Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn. Soderberg lets Jazzlyn off but sends Tillie to jail. As Corrigan drives Jazzlyn back to the Bronx, they get in a terrible car accident, their van clipped by a car driven by a wannabe artist, Blaine. Blaine's wife Lara is in the car, too. Lara feels terribly guilty, and later seeks out Corrigan's brother Ciaran to make amends.

Other characters include Judge Soderberg's wife Claire, who mourns their son, killed in Viet Nam. And in Claire's grief group is Gloria, an African-American woman who also mourns her two sons, and who lives in the same building in the Bronx where Corrigan lived.
I won't go further into the plot, except to say that McCann elegantly weaves together the stories of his characters and has the mysterious forces of fate bring them together to experience both grief and redemption.

I was charmed at the outset by McCann's lyrical writing style in the very first few pages of the story--a beautiful description of the setting of Petit's wire-walk. Beautiful writing goes a long way with me, but this book has more. It has an elegant plot, woven together out of the stories of several characters. Some of the characters interested me more than others, but I found most of them engaging, and was always drawn in by putting the puzzle pieces of their relationships together.

I love the novel's atmosphere, and the vibrant images McCann conjures. I also enjoyed exploring the novel's themes of fate and whether or not things happen for a reason, and guilt and redemption. New York City is a character itself, and McCann captures its mysteries, both the pleasure and the pain of the city, very well. Maybe because this novel was written after 9/11, but set before it, there was something eerie about thinking of the Twin Towers as the center of this amazing but benign event that topples the dominos of the characters' lives, and rearranges them so completely.

My book group really enjoyed this novel, too. I'll look out for more of McCann's work.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver--a review

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver, is a rich novel chronicling the life of a novelist: Harrison Shepherd, a man one might characterize as the ultimate outsider. As someone who straddles two worlds, that of his divorced Mexican mother and that of his estranged American father, he doesn’t truly feel at home in either one. Shepherd’s whole history makes him an outsider. Shepherd’s mother abruptly leaves his father and takes her son to live on an island in Mexico with her lover, and her narcissism, benign neglect, and man-chasing start her son on the path to being an internal person who observes life, and writes it down, rather than fully participating. Shepherd is truly an outcast at a Washington D.C. boarding school, where he is ignored by his father, and where he realizes he’s gay.

Later, back in Mexico, he works as a cook in the household of the painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. It’s a wonderful place for a would-be novelist to hone his craft, watching but not quite participating in their colorful lives. Shepherd meets, and then works as secretary to, Lev Trotsky, who comes to use the Kahlo-Riveras’ house as a sanctuary from Stalin’s assassins.

Without going into detail that will give away the story entirely, Shepherd’s experiences in Mexico both contribute to his development as a novelist, and to his development of an anxiety disorder that keeps him away from the public eye, and brings him to a small, neat, orderly existence in North Carolina. There he becomes a famous novelist and a target of the American government’s anti-communist purges in the late 1940s.

I truly enjoyed this as a historical novel, and as a novel of ideas. Kingsolver successfully uses many formats to tell her story—diary entries, memoir, the notes of the main character’s secretary-turned archivist/biographer, book reviews, newspaper articles, letters, and even congressional transcripts.

For me, there are three fascinating relationships in the book—the relationship between Shepherd and his mother, the relationship between Shepherd and the painter Frida Kahlo, and the relationship between Shepherd and his assistant, Violet Brown. Shepherd was a gay man, but he never had a really successful affair of the heart, and his most important relationships were with women. His mother taught him to be wary of human relationships, Frida Kahlo taught him to be an artist, and Violet Brown taught him the meaning of loyalty.

The time Shepherd spends in Mexico in the Kahlo-Rivera household and the Trotsky household is the most compelling and colorfully drawn segment of the novel. Kingsolver’s imagining of Kahlo’s character is captivating. She is difficult, capricious, mysterious, and narcissistic, yet she recognizes a kindred spirit in Shepherd and encourages him to become a writer.

Also fascinating is the section of the novel that has to do with Shepherd’s persecution by the U.S. government as a potential communist sympathizer. Kingsolver deftly explores the American obsession with communists, and its hypocrisies, and paints a portrait of a man who just wants to have a private life, who is driven away from the country that should be his sanctuary.

Wife of the Gods, by Kwei Quartey--a review, and TLC Book Tour stop

When Darko Dawson was a young boy, his mother travelled from his family's home in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, to visit her sister in the small village of Ketanu where she lived.  While on this visit, Darko's mother vanished without a trace.  This left Darko, his disabled brother, and his often volatile father to fend for themselves.

Darko's father reported his mother missing, and police detective Daniel Armah investigated the case.  Armah persisted in the investigation, but Darko's mother was never found.  But Armah forged a relationship with young Darko, who was inspired by the respect he felt for Armah to become a police detective himself when he grew up.

Now Darko is a detective inspector with the CID in Accra, and he has a wife who is a teacher, and a young son who suffers from a heart defect.  

Darko is called to Ketanu once again, to investigate a murder.  Young medical student and AIDS educator and activist Grace Mensah's strangled body is found in the forest by a young "trokosi", or wife of the gods, essentially a concubine of the local fetish priest.  

In her zeal to educate the local people about AIDS, and in chastising the local fetish priest for following the practice of keeping these trokosi, Grace has made some enemies among the locals.  One of these enemies is the fetish priest, Togbe Adzima.  Grace may also have angered local healer Isaac Kuto.  And young Samuel Boateng had a crush on Grace, and may have killed her out of anger at her rejection.

Local inspector Fiti suspects only ne'er-do-well Samuel, but Darko chooses to investigate more thoroughly.  Darko is aided in his investigation by his special talent of understanding people's true natures by listening to the quality of their voice.  But the case proves to be very challenging, as he is drawn in by the village's secrets, and secrets held by his own family, and he comes face to face with the clash between traditional and modern Ghana.

I am not always a fan of crime fiction, but I find a well-written mystery very satisfying.  And this is just such a satisfying read.  Darko Dawson is a fascinating and complex character, and very relatable.  The writer really lets us get inside his detective's head, and we get to fully explore his strengths and weaknesses.  He is a conflicted man, and a wonderfully flawed hero.  And it is very interesting to watch him struggle not only with his inner conflicts, but with the contradictions between traditional and modern life in Ghana.  

I also love the atmosphere that author Quartey creates in the book.  His portraits of both urban and rural Ghana are very rich and I was very happy to immerse myself in Ghanaian society, customs, and culture.  Though many have compared this book to those in Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series, I would say that the books are not really alike.  Like McCall Smith, Quartey does a wonderful job evoking a time and place, and his descriptions of Ghana sing, as do McCall Smith's of Botswana.  But Quartey's book has a much harder edge than the Ladies Detective Agency books, and his murder mystery is a stronger, more plot-driven story.  

I enjoyed how the murdery mystery is woven with a tale of a family's tangled emotional web, and I found the characters memorable and the story engrossing.  And I loved reading about the culture and practices of Ghana.  I'll be on the lookout for more from Kwei Quartey about his flawed yet appealing detective hero, Darko Dawson.

Visit Kwei Quartey's really great website, and read his blog.

More stops for Wife of the Gods on TLC Book Tours.

Watch the book trailer:

Balancing on the Edge of the World, by Elizabeth Baines--a review

Elizabeth Baines' collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, is a slim volume, but what it lacks in heft it makes up for in emotional power. The stories themselves are often quite short--some might even be considered micro-fiction--but there is nothing small about what they have to say.

Here are some of the stories in a nutshell:

A group of young people, drunk, go out for a pizza, and realize they are not much better off than the beggar they meet outside the pizza shop.

A struggling writer realizes she is being conned by a flashy film producer, and a power struggle ensues between them.

A privileged teenaged boy grows up perhaps more quickly than expected when he is held up at knifepoint.

A child experiments with her "powers" as she watches her father leave their family.

One of the most touching stories, called "Compass and Torch", is about a boy who lives with his mother and stepfather who goes camping with his dad. The boy's vulnerability and the father's inability to relate to the boy are so true, and so heart-breaking.

"Going Back" shows the mix of exhaustion and hysteria that characterizes new motherhood.

"Into the Night" is about a man and a woman who meet at a reception, and have sex--and afterward, the woman debates leaving before he wakes, leaving the experience unadulterated; a perfect thing.

I also particularly enjoyed "The Way to Behave". In the ironic opening sentence, the narrator says, "Sisterhood, it's just a wonderful thing," and then goes on to tell the story of meeting her husband's mistress and taking revenge. I found this by turns biting, funny, mean and satisfying.

I agree with the copy on the back of the book that says that the stories are about power and powerlessness. The power Baines writes about is the power in regular, everyday relationships. She writes about the power struggles that occur during domestic disturbances. The stories are about the power struggles that happen in love relationships, relationships between parents and children, especially when these relationships are broken.

Some of the most powerful of the stories are the ones told from a child's eye view. And all of these stories pushed many of my emotional buttons, especially the stories about children who feel abandoned by parents who are separated or just emotionally distant.

Overall, I really enjoyed this writer's voice. Every story is meticulously crafted, and I loved how the stories are told with such a compact grace. Baines takes life's mundane moments and invests them with meaning, power, and a sort of magic. I also loved how the stories all made me feel something. I am not someone who cries while reading, but I definitely wiped away a few tears while reading some of these stories. There is an emotional honesty to them that is really raw and intense, and I found them very affecting.

I was really impressed with Baines, and how she gets to the heart of the matter. I'm looking forward to reading more by this author.

Click here to read Dovegreyreader's review of this book.

Review: A Mercy, by Toni Morrison

I finished A Mercy a few weeks ago, but haven't been able to corral my thoughts about the book until now. This is the first of Toni Morrison's books that I've read since Beloved, a book I was mesmerized by as a younger woman. And I'm glad I read this, which feels somewhat like a companion piece to Beloved, to reintroduce myself to Morrison's work after some years.

A Mercy takes place at the end of the 17th century, when America was a very wild and new place. It is the story of a household, a farm, on the edge of the wilderness in the New World. Jacob Vaark is the farmer, but it is less his story than that of the women who reside with him.

First there is Lina, a young Native American woman Jacob brings into his home to help him with the house and farmwork. Lina was the sole survivor of her village's massacre, and then survived the Protestant proselytizing of the stern white folks who first took her in.

Then Jacob buys a bride from England, and Rebekka shows up. She is happy to exchange the squalor of English city life and her valueless place as daughter of the family for the hard work of a New England farm, and the relative autonomy of being a wife. Rebekka and Lina achieve a mutual respect and good working relationship on the farm, but Rebekka's life is scarred by the loss of several children.

Jacob also takes in a young woman named Sorrow, who was raised on a ship and rescued from it when all others aboard had perished. Sorrow is an enigmatic character who seems to live inside her own head and carry untold secrets. Finally, Jacob reluctantly accepts slave girl Florens in payment for a debt from a slave trader.

When Jacob dies of smallpox, the four women's lives become insecure, as women alone in this harsh new world are never fully safe. And when Rebekka sickens with the disease, Florens takes to the road to find help in the form of a free black man, an artisan who worked for Jacob, and who may be able to cure Rebekka. This man also happens to be Florens's lover, and she goes to him with hope in her heart for a new and different life.

Like Beloved, A Mercy examines the psychological and moral intricacies of slavery. While Beloved takes place in the aftermath of slavery, A Mercy is there at slavery's birth in this country. A Mercy's characters demonstrate the more fluid state of slavery at that time, as the novel depicts slave traders, a reluctant slave owner, a free black man, and people of every color in various states of servitude, including a pair of white male indentured servants who almost (but perhaps not quite) provide the novel with comic relief. The subtlety of their relationships is brilliant; nobody is wholly innocent or wholly guilty, power can shift, and all are slaves to something.

The women in the story not only represent different races and social positions, they also represent the many different points on the spectrum of womanhood at the time: mother, sister, daughter, mistress, servant, slave, lover, wife, friend. And Morrison digs into the subtleties of all these relationships, showing their fluidity, too.

Morrison, whom I consider a magician with words, writes gorgeous, elliptical, poetic prose that evokes a waking dream. I enter the characters' consciousnesses, and end up in my own dream-like state as I read. It is easy to be swept up in Morrison's writing. The plot is non-linear, and the writing is impressionistic, but, maybe through Morrison's magic, or maybe just because the human brain works this way, the non-linear bits and pieces of the story and all of the impressions I've gathered coalesce into a whole that I see with more clarity than I ever expected.

Night Navigation by Ginnah Howard, a review

Ginnah Howard's novel Night Navigation was sent to me by the publisher, and I didn't know what to expect. What I got was a needle-sharp look into the life of a mentally ill drug addict, and his relationship with a loving but frustrated mother, who can't help but give him one more chance, over and over again.

Howard's novel alternates focus between the viewpoint of Del Merrick, a mother in late middle age, who would like to be focusing on her art and living a normal life, and the viewpoint of Del's deeply troubled adult son Mark, who has fallen back into drug addiction, and therefore back into Del's life. Both Del and Mark also have to contend with the ghosts of Mark's father and brother (Del's late husband and her other son), and guilt over their deaths. Through the course of the story, mother and son come together, and come apart, and find out more about themselves and each other in the process.

Howard writes matter-of-factly about the horrendous life of a drug addict; the desperation, the manipulation of everyone around them, the physical pain of addiction, the casual way violence enters the lives of those who cannot manage their own lives and become slaves to drugs. It's compelling to watch, kind of like a train wreck--and it's definitely not for the faint of heart.

Bleak, yes, but I really enjoyed the poetic imagery Howard employs to tell her grim tale. And there is some hope infused here, too. Del is a relatable character, even if you aren't a mother. But if you are, it is oh so painful to imagine yourself in her situation. She has been bound to these men she has loved, and they have either died or are in the process of killing themselves. It is a hard thing to read about, and yet Del's life, in the every day, is quite beautiful. She is an artist, she lives surrounded by rural beauty, and when writing about Del's life, Howard's writing showcases the beauty that exists in the mundane, if we only open our eyes to see it.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery--a review

I think I was as charmed as legions of European readers were when I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, for my book group. It's been a while since I've read anything French (the last thing being Platform by Michel Houellebecq--quite different!) or anything translated, and I found the writer's voice fresh and vibrant--so I'm assuming this is a very good translation.

I had heard very mixed things about this book before I started it. One person told me it was the best book she had read all year, and another told me that she put it down after thirty pages because it was "pretentious". I'm glad I kept reading beyond the first thirty pages, because though I was a little slow getting into it, I ultimately loved this book.

This story is narrated by two people who live in the same ritzy apartment building in Paris, Renee Michel, the dumpy, lumpy, frumpy 54-year-old concierge of the building, and Paloma Josse, the precocious 12-year-old daughter of a diplomat and a socialite who live there. Madame Michel is a very intelligent autodidact, lover of art, books, music and movies, who hides behind a mask of stupidity--what she says is the typical concierge persona--and doesn't want any of the upper class residents of her building guessing that she has a secret intellectual life. Paloma is a very intelligent girl who plans to commit suicide on her 13th birthday unless she finds something in the world, some truth or beauty, that makes life worth living.

Both Renee Michel and Paloma keep diaries, where they record their musings on the nature of beauty, the importance of art, the meaning of life, as well as wonderfully French observations on the foibles of the upper middle class Parisians they live among.

Renee Michel is a great character, a person hiding behind the facade of what people expect her to be. At first I got frustrated by her hiding and posturing. It seemed that she was obsessed with the class difference between herself and those she served as concierge, and I started to wonder if class was a bigger issue in France today than I imagined. But without giving any spoilers, I'll say that later in the story the reasons for Renee's seeming obsession with class became clearer and much more understandable.

And as I read on, I started to enjoy Renee's character more. She is an extraordinary mind inside an ordinary person--she's a character we can all relate to, because don't we all feel just a little bit misunderstood, and wouldn't we all like to say we are more than what meets the eye? And she has a lovely Cinderella moment, when she is finally seen, finally understood, by the two kindred spirits who live in the apartment building where she lives, Paloma and the elegant and mysterious new tenant, Kakuro Ozu. I completely bought the character of Paloma, too. At first I was worried that I wouldn't believe her--I was thinking how hard it must be as a writer to make the voice of an unbelievably smart pre-teen sound believable. But Barbery pulls it off, and as I read I stopped thinking about whether it was working, and got completely engrossed in the book.

And as the book became more about the relationships between these three characters, I liked it even more. The message of the book reminded me of E.M. Forster's quote in Howard's End: "Only connect! ...and human love will be seen at its height." Because it's ultimately all about human relationships, isn't it? By the end, The Elegance of the Hedgehog was both a book of ideas and a book I could relate to on an emotional level. I understand that the author is a professor of philosophy. This shows in the elegance with which she discusses ideas. But she is also a writer who gives us a lovely story peopled with interesting characters, and manages to tug at our heartstrings, too.

Here are a few passages I enjoyed:

From page 53. Renee Michel, on reading without guidance:

"I have read so many books...And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading--and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure."

From page 123. Okay, another reason I really like this book is that Renee Michel loves Tolstoy, especially Anna Karenina, and so do I. Renee describes a passage in Anna Karenina when Levin is scything grain, and goes into that kind of pleasurable trance that repetitive actions can put us into, and then she compares it to writing in her journal:

"What other reason might I have for writing this--ridiculous journal of an aging concierge--if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me."

From page 145. Paloma, after meeting Kakuro Ozu for the first time:

"So here is my profound thought for the day: this is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond. That may seem trivial but I think it is profound all the same. We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy."

I can't wait to discuss all this with my book group next week!

Welcome to the Departure Lounge, by Meg Federico--a review

I often didn't know whether to laugh or cry while reading Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother, by Meg Federico, so I ended up doing some of both. This is a wonderfully honest memoir of Federico's "adventures in mothering mother" (as the subtitle puts it) during her mother's final decline. It is by turns tragic and funny, and it should probably be on the required reading list for anyone dealing with the care of an aging parent.

Federico's 81-year-old mother Addie, a patrician New Jersey matron, lives a topsy-turvy life with her volatile new husband Walter. Walter has Alzheimer's, and Addie is frail and nearly blind, and despite various spills and alcohol-fueled thrills, Addie and Walter refuse to stay put in a nursing home. So Federico and Walter's daughter Cathy set up a precarious home-care situation for Addie and Walter, helped out by a hodge-podge of hired health-care workers, and overseen part-time by Federico, her brother, and Cathy. And it is this crazy situation at home that comes to be known as the Departure Lounge.

So much of what goes on in the Departure Lounge is absolutely appalling, but Federico is able to see the humor in every situation, and writes with poignancy and warmth about the good, the bad, and the ugly of elder care. She also writes with insight about how becoming her mother's caregiver transformed their very complicated parent-child relationship.

This relationship was fascinating to me because of its complications. Addie was a rich, mid-20th century wife and mother who raised children the way upper-middle class WASPs raised them then--with lots of criticism, judgement, and rules, without listening to them, and even tying them to the bed at night if they got up and inconvenienced you with night wanderings. The stories of how Federico's mother treated her were horrifying to me from today's perspective, but it was also interesting to see how Federico came to terms with her mother's rotten parenting style, and how she came to, if not forgive her, at least feel she more fully understood her mother and where she came from.

That the author could write about some of this heartbreaking stuff with such grace and wit was why I would recommend the book. It's a bittersweet memoir, one with important lessons for us all.

Crossed Wires, by Rosy Thornton--a review

I was excited to receive a copy of Rosy Thornton's latest novel, Crossed Wires, before its debut in the United States in April. Last year I read her earlier book, Hearts and Minds, which I really enjoyed, so I was very much looking forward to this one.

In Crossed Wires, single mother Mina works the phones at an insurance company in Sheffield. It is while answering the phone at work that Mina first comes into contact with Cambridge lecturer Peter, who calls in to report an accident he's had in his Land Rover, hitting a tree while trying to avoid killing a cat. Peter is also a single father, a widower raising twin girls on his own. Peter and Mina are separated by geography, and they come from different walks of life, but they find a connection, and develop a relationship over the phone, bonding over the problems they both have raising children on their own.

It's hard to put this novel into a category. It seems that Ms. Thornton's publishers want her work to be firmly in the romance category, considering the covers that end up on her books. But Ms. Thornton writes romances in the same way that Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, or Edith Wharton wrote romance--it is as much social commentary and pyschological portraiture as it is the story of boy meets girl.

In this book, Ms. Thornton has created endearing characters with real problems, people you can really root for. I love that the sympathy Peter and Mina have with each other develops in spite of their differences, and that it helps each of them through tough times when they are misunderstood by those around them. Thornton's main characters are often put upon, or taken advantage of by family and friends, and you really just want them to find a little well-deserved happiness. That is the driving force of the narrative, what keeps me turning the pages. But I find I am really reading the book not to find out what happens, but to get to know the characters better.

The characters here are beautifully drawn. Peter and Mina are both outsiders, in a way; Peter as a widower raising two daughters, and Mina as a single mother who also has to referee the relationship between her prickly mother and her wayward sister. And as outsiders, they are happier when they find each other. The minor characters are really well done, too. I love Peter's friends, the gay neighbor couple, who babysit and offer comfort when needed, and I think Mina's mother is wonderfully brassy and difficult.

I found this book, with its endearing and colorful characters, and its attention to detail, very emotionally satisfying. I also found the author's earlier book, Hearts and Minds, to be similar--comforting, satisfying, warm and accessible, yet with a sharp sense of humor and a keen eye for the details of her characters' worlds. I was happy when Crossed Wires turned out to be satisfying, too--maybe even more so, as I thought the story was better realized. And I'll be happy to enter Rosy Thornton's world again when she writes another book.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson--a review

About a million years ago, I read Kate Atkinson’s novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and I was really taken with her prose style. It was the story of an ordinary English family, dealing dysfunctionally with what seemed to me to be an extraordinary amount of tragedy. I loved the characters, and I loved the dark sense of humor Atkinson displayed.

After that I was eager to read Case Histories, which I didn’t know was a mystery before I read it. It surprised me, because I didn’t think of Atkinson as a mystery writer, but it was a pleasant surprise. I don’t usually read mysteries, so I’m not sure how it stacks up against other mysteries, but I enjoyed it. It was character-driven, thoughtful, dark and really well-written. And I knew I would continue to follow private investigator Jackson Brodie, which I did through the next novel, One Good Turn. I guess you could say that Atkinson writes literary mysteries, and I’m finding it’s a genre I like.

When Will There Be Good News? is the third novel featuring Jackson Brodie, an ex-cop who now works as a P.I., and it again brings Brodie in contact with his former love interest, police detective Louise Monroe. Thirty years ago Joanna Mason was the only survivor of a brutal knife attack that killed her mother and siblings. Now Joanna is a doctor, married and a new mother. And she has hired 16-year-old Regina “Reggie” Chase as a nanny—which is a good thing, as when Joanna goes missing, Reggie is the only one who believes she’s been kidnapped. After Reggie saves Jackson Brodie from death in a terrible train crash, she enlists him to help her find the missing Joanna. Both Reggie and Jackson spar with detective Louise Monroe, and work parallel to her, as they unravel the mystery of Joanna’s disappearance.

Some people have criticized the novel for its complicated plot, and the coincidences that hold this plot together, but I didn’t mind these things at all. In fact, I feel that Atkinson is very skillful in her plotting, and has woven the disparate strands together so well that I didn’t mind any leaps I had to make to believe them. Atkinson also resists giving neat motives for her criminal characters, or real reasons for crimes. I love this, because I don’t think real crime is ever that neat. And instead of neat motives, Atkinson provides real insight into all her characters, and gives them wonderful flaws and foibles, so that you believe what they do.

But what really keeps me coming back for Atkinson’s crime novels is her dark sense of humor and her sheer talent. She is a really good writer. I love the novel’s cleverness, and I appreciate its darkness.

Dear American Airlines, by Jonathan Miles--a review

Benjamin “Bennie” Ford, 53, the narrator of Jonathan Miles’ novel Dear American Airlines, is a middle-aged, alcoholic, erstwhile poet who now translates novels from the Polish. He is on his way from New York to Los Angeles to keep a promise to his estranged daughter, to walk her down the aisle at her commitment ceremony. But he gets stranded at O’Hare airport when a layover turns into a flight cancellation, and mere waiting turns into purgatory. Poor thing, we think—we can all relate to that kind of horrible situation, especially at the hands of a bureaucracy or a corporate giant. But Bennie has more riding on this trip than most people do—he’s counting on it for a share of redemption.

At the outset I was worried that Bennie’s tale would not hold my attention, because it was based on the gimmick of a screed to the airline, demanding a refund, and I didn’t think the angry letter gimmick was going to be sustainable, no matter how impressive the writing. But I soon found that the story stands on its own merits. Not only does the author engage us in the tale of the downward spiral of Bennie’s life till now, we also get pulled into the complementary story of the Polish novel Bennie is translating, about the post-WWII wanderings of a Polish soldier who lands in Trieste. And we get drawn into the sad but funny anecdotes about Bennie’s crazy, southern mother Miss Willa, and her misbegotten marriage to Bennie’s father, a Polish concentration camp survivor and refugee.

Bennie’s a “poor thing” in general, we realize, as he spins his tale. He speaks with appealing self-deprecation, dark humor, and brutal honesty about the many regrets he has about his fairly miserable life, and though you may not respect some of the choices he’s made, you can’t help but like the poor fellow. And by the end of the story, I was invested in discovering whether or not he would find any redemption. Without giving away the ending, I’ll say that Bennie’s journey turns out to be more than just his reflection on the wreck of his life, it shows us that, whether or not we are late for the wedding, we can still make time to make things right.

I enjoyed this book for two main reasons—the sharp, witty writing, and the engaging human story. I’ll be interested to see what Jonathan Miles does next.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie--a review.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a semi-autobiographical young adult novel by prolific poet/novelist/short story writer Sherman Alexie. The novel's plucky protagonist is Arnold Spirit, a geeky 14-year-old Spokane Indian who lives on the reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. Arnold tells us that he was born with water on the brain, and barely survived his infancy, only to have seizures as a kid, and have to endure endless teasing from his peers. But Arnold is very smart, funny, and draws cartoons as a way to make sense of his life, and after a teacher begs him to go to school off the reservation, Arnold starts to attend the white school in Reardon. An outcast at home, and an outcast at his new school, Arnold joins the basketball team, where he eventually finds a measure of acceptance. But he also faces tragedy after tragedy in his family life, where alcoholism takes an ugly toll on the reservation Indians. That Arnold retains his sense of humor, and learns lessons from his extreme difficulties in life, is nearly miraculous.

I think Arnold Spirit is a wonderful character for young adult readers to identify with. He makes difficult choices, he struggles with guilt for leaving his community to try to make himself a better life, he's a fighter, and he tells it like it is. Alexie tells it like it is, too, never sugar-coating the effects of crushing poverty on the Indians on the reservation, yet leaving hope and the possibility of the triumph of the human spirit on the table.

I liked Alexie's movie Smoke Signals, and found it to be a fascinating portrait of Native American culture. I feel the same way about this book, and it makes me want to read his writing for adults.

Sherman Alexie's website is also pretty cool--check it out here.

Review--Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe, by Jennie Shortridge

Mira Serafino is living what seems to be a perfect life, fulfilled in her career as a teacher, happy as a wife to her college sweetheart, and busy with her family and friends in her small, coastal Oregon hometown. She adores her only daughter, Thea, though she does not find it easy to parent her now that Thea has chosen to forego college and pursue the life of a musician. Then Mira’s life is turned upside down when she finds out her husband Parker is seeing another woman. Unable to face the scrutiny of her family and the busybodies of her small town, Mira bolts from her life, driving north until she hits Seattle. There she finds the Coffee Shop at the Center of the Universe, owned by Gus, who is more interested in surfing and skiing than owning a coffee shop, and staffed by a motley crew of inefficient young people. Mira steps in to help run the place, and in the meantime, she picks up the pieces of her life, and begins to find a new version of herself.

I found Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe to be warm and witty, and also wise. The author’s style is down-to-earth and readable, and the characters are wonderfully fallible and real. Main character Mira comes from a large Italian family that, it turns out, holds many secrets. When her life starts falling apart around her, she basically leaves it behind, and this gives her the perspective she needs to change her bad habits and rethink what she wants and needs out of life. I was intrigued by Mira’s transformation from a perfectionist to someone who, in her daughter Thea’s words, “didn’t seem so worried about everything. She was just kinda going with the flow of whatever was happening, not making anybody do anything, not overplanning and stressing out, not making Thea feel guilty about anything.” Mira has learned to just be, in the moment.

Being near Mira’s age (and veteran of 14 years of marriage, and parenting a child who is approaching the teen years) I couldn’t help reading this without a bit of fantasizing—what would it be like to start life over now? There’s sexual freedom and freedom from constrictive responsibilities and freedom to redefine oneself, balanced against the pain of the loss of love and the severing of lifelong relationships. Shortridge doesn’t sugar-coat Mira’s experience—though she tells the story with plenty of humor--and she explores the good and the bad in Mira’s situation equally.

The relationships in the book were rich and interesting. I particularly enjoyed the exploration of the relationship between Mira and her controlling, strict grandmother, juxtaposed with the relationship between Mira and her rebellious daughter. And I thought even the smaller relationships—Mira’s relationship with her best friend Lannie, and with her estranged brother Fonso--were insightfully written. The only character I wanted to get to know better was Mira’s husband Parker—we get into the heads of some of the other characters besides Mira, including Thea and Mira’s grandmother Nonna--but the portrayal of Parker left me wanting a little more.

I’m not always seduced by a happy ending, but here it was totally appropriate that Mira’s life is in some way healed by her experiences. I enjoyed reading about Mira’s adventures, and I also loved that they both made me think and made me laugh. I look forward to reading Jennie Shortridge’s next book.

Tomorrow come back and see my Q & A with author Jennie Shortridge, who makes a stop here on her TLC Book Tour.

Review: When the White House Was Ours, by Porter Shreve

The year is 1976, and as the U.S. celebrates its bicentennial, Daniel Truitt moves from the midwest to Washington, D.C., center of the excitement about the celebration, and about the upcoming election.  Daniel's father Pete, a teacher, has been fired from yet another job, and he's got a crazy idea to start an alternative school. Pete's mother Valerie is not so keen on the idea, but she agrees to give it a try. So Pete calls in a favor from an old friend, who rents them a ramshackle mansion in an iffy D.C. neighborhood. Daniel's hippie uncle, his wife, and her lover come to live with them and serve as teachers, and "Our House", a school where the learning is student-directed, is born. Daniel's parents struggle to attract students to the school, but they end up with a ragtag group of kids who don't fit in anywhere else, and the experiment gets under way. But almost as soon as it has begun, outside forces work against the school, and even Daniel's family is in danger of falling apart.

When the White House Was Ours is loosely based on the author's own life, and it definitely feels that way. There's an appealing authenticity to the book, which you feel when reading about the atmospheric setting, and about the complicated family relationships depicted in the story. I could relate to the time period when the novel was set, as I was eleven years old in 1976, when the country was in the clutches of bicentennial fever. I could also relate to the tensions that main character Daniel felt between the conservative elements in society, represented by his father's Republican old friend who rents them their school house, and the more liberal elements of society, represented not only by Jimmy Carter, but also by Daniel's free-thinking parents and his uncle with his hippie friends.

The author definitely brought me back in time to 1976 and my old corduroys and culottes!  His descriptions of things I remember often made me smile.  I also enjoyed the characters very much.  I thought the writer handled Daniel's coming-of-age deftly.  He did a good job portraying the difficulties young people have when they realize the adults around them are just as confused and imperfect as they are.  There were a few missteps, as when Daniel doesn't go to his parents with some information that will definitely make a difference in their lives--it's not necessarily not believable that Daniel keeps the information to himself, as it's clear that Daniel's trust with his father has been broken, but it was still a little frustrating for me. But overall, the author writes convincingly about a boy's coming of age in a confusing time and coming to terms with an unconventional family.

Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris

The other night I sat in bed and read David Sedaris's newest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, in one big gulp. Like his earlier books, this is a series of essays about Sedaris's life--in fact, though he admits that his work is only "realish" and "97 percent true", his body of work feels like it adds up to one long memoir. This book was also hilarious, as all of Sedaris's books are. I kept laughing aloud, which made my husband look up from his book and say, "What?", which meant I had to read the paragraph to him. But it was okay, because the jokes were often better the second time around, and spoken aloud.

Sedaris's books often make me laugh out loud, but I'll admit the laughter is sometimes uncomfortable. This is because Sedaris is not just self-deprecating, he is unrelentingly honest. He says the stuff the rest of us are afraid to say, or at least to say out loud. And he has a finely-tuned sense of the absurdity of human nature. His observations often reveal his acceptance of the dark side of humanity, too. Yep, dark and absurd, that's what we people are, and Sedaris doesn't shy away from showing it.

Sedaris is the ultimate outsider. He writes about his painful and painfully funny childhood, his adolescence, his parents, his addiction to drugs, his homosexuality, his marginal jobs, his life as an expat, and it feels as though all of this has created an outsider in Sedaris, or it all comes from Sedaris feeling like an outsider originally. It's chicken and egg, I suppose, but that outsider's viewpoint is what makes Sedaris so funny and so sad. It's a wonderful perspective for a diarist to have, and while Sedaris's writing is self-aware and sometimes a little depressing, it's never bitter.

This book is also about mid-life, as Sedaris is approaching 50. He is obsessed with death and dying, and his mid-life crisis also includes his attempt to quit smoking. The end of the book is devoted to the three months Sedaris and his partner Hugh Hamrick spent in Japan while Sedaris was trying to quit smoking. Again, his outsider's perspective spears the absurdities of Japanese culture, but he also spears himself, as a westerner trying to learn the language and failing miserably, and trying but never succeeding in understanding Japan.

The outsider in me loved this book and will always like Sedaris's work. It's not a comforting read for anyone approaching middle age, but it will make you laugh.

Review: The Mercy Rule, by Perri Klass

I was sent a copy of Perri Klass's novel The Mercy Rule by the publisher. I hadn't read her work before, but I had heard good things about her. I also was intrigued by the fact that Klass is a practicing physician as well as a novelist. I thought that would bring an interesting perspective to her work, and I was right.

The Mercy Rule is about a pediatrician, Lucy Weiss, who lives with her professor husband in a suburb of Boston, where she is busy working and raising two kids who attend private school and play weekend sports, and trying to find a balance between all these things. But, surprisingly, Lucy is also a child of the foster care system. Her mother died when she was small, and her father gave her over to be raised in the foster care system. Now, as a doctor, Lucy serves children like her, who are in the foster care system, or who are at risk for being put into that system.

The novel's narrative is split between Lucy's home life and her professional life. Part of the time Lucy is dealing with addicted or otherwise neglectful mothers and trying to assess the needs of their children, and part of the time she is struggling to raise her own two children. But the parts are tied together by the central theme of raising children, and how difficult it is under the best of circumstances.

As a mother of three, I really related to this novel. Lucy's demographic is in some ways similar to mine, and I laughed and cried over many of the poignant parenting moments in the book. It feels very authentic, almost like a memoir (though I know I'm making an inference here, as Klass is a physician, and clearly a parent, as well as a writer, and the main character is also a physician and parent who writes, at least as a hobby), and its genuine quality was part of what made it involving.

I recognized so many of the parenting challenges that Klass details in the book. Lucy has two difficult children, a girl going from tween to adolescent, and a 7-year-old boy who is eccentric, to put it kindly. Klass wisely resists "diagnosing" or labeling the kids, but they definitely have some issues. And, like Lucy, we all face bewildering issues as parents, even if they aren't exactly the same as the ones Lucy faces, and we all wish we could smooth the way for our children and help them navigate every awkward social situation, even though we know we shouldn't.

While I enjoyed the parts about Lucy's family life, I was also completely drawn into the parts about Lucy's professional life. The interaction between Lucy and the families of her patients was fascinating, and I would have liked to see even more of this. My problem with the book was that it lacked a clear story. Yes, many things happen, but there is no arc to the story--it's made up of a series of episodes, but it doesn't quite have a cohesive plot. However, since I found the episodes compelling, the lack of plot wasn't a major problem for me--it's more just an observation about the style, and a warning for those who don't like books that aren't story-driven.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how involving I found this warts-and-all look at parenting, and how much I related to its main character, a modern woman trying to balance work and family, and sometimes just barely hanging on to both.

Review: Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

I remember reading and liking Strout's first novel, Amy and Isabelle, around the time that it came out. But Strout's new book, Olive Kitteridge: Fiction, made a much bigger impact on me. Olive Kitteridge is not a novel, but a book of thirteen short stories, linked by the character of Olive Kitteridge, a cranky middle school math teacher in a small town in Maine. Some of the stories are from Olive's point of view, others are about other characters in the town who have some relationship, large or small, with Olive, and the stories span a time period from Olive's youth to her old age.

I really admire Strout's writing--it's economical, yet gorgeous, and she has real insight into the human condition. She uses small details to create scenes of great emotional power. Her characters are complicated, and though they live small-town lives, they deal with all the big issues--suicide, addiction, loss, bad marriages, miscommunication--really, the gamut of human issues.

Strout paints us a nuanced picture of Olive, and of the community she lives in, by telling us stories that center not just on Olive, but on the people around Olive; her husband, son, and neighbors. We see Olive's misanthropic, difficult, angry side, and we also see how, as a strong woman and teacher, she has strengthened those around her. Olive is a great character because we both love and hate her; we identify with her and yet abhor many of her actions. And what's brilliant about this book is that the small, seemingly disparate portions add up to a vibrant whole--for example, a particular story may only have a tiny bit about Olive in it, but that tiny incident will inform some action of Olive's later in the book.

The book is definitely dark. It deals with a foiled suicide attempt, anorexia, adultery, prostitution, illness and death. Small town Maine, as depicted here, seems to be a world that knows the dark side, though it is not without hope. But the sadness feels emotionally honest, and I know many such stories really exist in small towns, as elsewhere. And even though the book was sad, it was compelling, and I really enjoyed every page, and highly recommend it. I'll definitely put Strout's earlier novel, Abide With Me, on my TBR list.