“Because this was the part she couldn’t tell anyone, except her mother. And then, not all of it, not right away. She still thinks it came from knowing too much, more than she understood or could accept. She needed her world to be safe, and if bad things happened, she had to work them out first in her head, then only later, inside, deep, deeper than she could ever have imagined.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 27, 2011)

Nellie Peck is thirteen years old going on forty. She is wise, intelligent and impulsive. Despite her precociousness, however, she is still a child. She lives with her parents and two siblings, Ruth and Henry; Ruth is a half-sister from a relationship that her mother had in high school. The Pecks are struggling financially. Nellie’s mother works as a hair dresser and Nellie’s father owns a hardware store that is slowly going under. Her father’s passion is his writing – he is writing a tome about the history of their town, Springvale. His goal is to get it self-published so that it can be read by a wide audience.

To enhance their income, the Pecks rent out an apartment attached to their home. Nellie loves to listen in to conversations in the apartment through the bathroom wall. Their latest tenant is Dolly Bedalia, an exotic dancer, aka a stripper. Nellie likes her and feels that Dolly actually listens to her. Her brother Henry has built a treehouse and from the treehouse Nellie and Henry can see into their neighbor’s living room and also view the comings and goings from Dolly’s apartment.

Ruth is obsessed with finding her real father who moved to Australia during high school. She has written multiple letters to him. When a return letter finally comes, Nellie absconds with it and hides it from Ruth which sets off a chain of events that leads to Nellie feeling like an outcast from her family.

Nellie is in that in-between age, not yet in adolescence but on the cusp of it. A wild child, Bucky Saltonstall, likes Nellie and tries to involve her in his illegal and wild schemes. One of them is stealing bicycles and then selling them. Bucky is also a bully and can turn on anyone at the drop of a hat. He is living with his grandparents because his parents can’t handle him.

Charlie is Nellie’s grandfather. He is the proprietor of the local junkyard. He is cold and mean, not at all what one thinks of as grandfatherly. Recently, he hired a helper named Max Devaney. Max has a history that includes being in jail and he is a registered sex offender for having sex with an underaged girl when he was a young man. He has a dog named Boone. Nellie really likes him and his dog. She dreams of going fishing with Charlie and Max but they only invite her along one time. Nellie considers Max to be a hero. There was an instance when Henry was attacked by a neighbor’s dog and Max came to the rescue, killing the offending dog violently. Henry ended up with a considerable number of stitches in his arm.

Jessica Cooper is Nellie’s annoying friend. She pursues Nellie like white on snow. Nellie does not like her because Jessica has very weird thoughts about killing people, hating her mother, and is generally mean and unfeeling. She calls Nellie all the time and Nellie doesn’t know how to get her off her back.

So far, the above events are just the daily workings of a small town and a small town girl. However, Dolly gets murdered and the only one there, the only witness to who might be the murderer, is Nellie. She was in the basement with Max while Max was fixing the hot water tank and they needed to get into Dolly’s apartment. The door of the apartment was unlocked and when they get in, Dolly is dead. Nellie saw another man coming out of Dolly’s apartment but has said nothing about it so Max is tried for the murder. Nellie is in a real fix – she feels like she can’t tell anyone about who she saw but she doesn’t want Max to go to jail for a murder she doesn’t believe he committed. Nellie also remembers hearing some thumps and bumps coming from the apartment earlier that same afternoon.

Most of the novel focuses on Nellie’s dilemmas about the murder, her family and growing up. She is the primary witness at the trial and she often thinks about Mark Twain’s quote that moral courage is more important than physical courage. Will Nellie have the moral courage to speak up? If so, what will be the consequences to those involved?

Light From A Distant Star is not one of Mary McGarry Morris’s stronger novels. I’m a real fan of hers and have read everything she’s written. I especially love Vanished and Fiona Range.  This novel includes some of the same types of characters for which she is known – the unlikable outcasts that just can’t seem to make it in the regular ways of life. However, in her previous books, the characters were so well-executed and brought to life that the reader feels empathy for them. I felt little or no empathy for the characters in this book. They were fleshed out, but not to the point where I cared all that much. The writing is excellent, just what I’d expect from Morris, but ultimately, it does not come up to her best work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mary McGarry Morris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of The Last Secret Songs in Ordinary Time

Bibliography:

• Vanished
• A Dangerous Woman (1993)
• Songs in Ordinary Time (1997)
• Fiona Range (2000)
• A Hole in the Universe (2004)
• The Lost Mother (2005)
• The Last Secret (2009)
• Light from a Distant Star (September 2011)

Movies made from books:

• Dangerous Woman (1993)
• Songs in Ordinary Time (200)

“I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.

Or not me. It was hard to tell.“

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 21, 2011)

Anne Enright, author of the 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, has written a new novel called The Forgotten Waltz. It is told from the point of view of Gina Moynihan who has a lust-filled affair with a married man, Sean Vallely. They first meet at a garden party hosted by Anne’s sister Fiona, and progresses from there. At first there are innocent (and not so innocent) looks, and then on a business trip in Switzerland, the affair begins in earnest.

When Gina first sees Sean at Fiona’s garden party, she is happily married to Conor. There are no outward signs that there is trouble in the marriage and, as I read this book, I did not see the marriage and any shortcomings as a reason for the affair. Gina saw Sean, felt lust, and let her impulses prevail. Sean is married and has a child named Evie who, at the time that Gina first meets Sean, is four years old.

The novel is not told in any particular linear order. It is related to the reader in fragments of memory that Gina recalls. “So don’t ask me when this happened or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I was concerned, they were happening all along.”

Always playing a key role is Evie, Sean’s daughter. When she is five she begins to have childhood seizures that continue for many years. Annette, Sean’s wife, is vigilant about Evie’s medical care and appears not to notice that Sean is otherwise preoccupied with Gina. Evie, however, has the sense that something is happening in her home that is not quite normal. At one point, she even sees Sean and Gina kissing on the stairs of her home.

The novel takes place at the start of Ireland’s economic boom in the nineties and progresses to the depressions that hits later on. As the novel starts, people are making more money than they know what to do with, buying second homes with ocean views and dropping hints about all the money that they have. By the time the novel ends, people are lucky just to have jobs. Their houses have been on the market for a very long time and no one is buying. The market has seen a real depression.

Gina tells the whole story in the first person and we go along with her as she does her best to remember what happened between her and Sean. She strongly believes that Evie is responsible for her and Sean’s love. Evie’s watchful eyes, times of poor health, and perspicacious study of her father and his lover mark an ever-present omen for Gina.

As the affair progresses, Gina finds out that she is not the first person Sean has been unfaithful with. There was a young woman in his office, many years ago, that Sean had courted and loved. Gina is careful not to ask Sean too many questions about this as she wants to see their relationship as special and romantic, which it is, but as life goes, it is not that unique. “Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen foot of a hotel room. Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate.”

During the course of the affair, Gina deals with the death of her beloved mother, Joan, her estrangement from her sister, Fiona, and the breakdown of her marriage to Conor. She tries to see these events in relationship to the affair but they all have a full life separate from her love for Sean.

It takes Sean a long time to leave his wife, time that Gina waits for him in agony and pain. She had hoped they’d be together by Christmas but as April comes around, Sean is just beginning to move into Gina’s home. “It was delicate business, being the Not Wife.”

The affair takes on a triangular pattern – Sean, Gina and Evie. “I said it to Sean once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as if I had blasphemed.” “As far as he is concerned, there is no cause; he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.”

The book is filled with musical metaphors and reads poetically. Enright is a master of the inner mind and our deepest thoughts. She not only tells a story but she captures lives, sparing no moment, no movement and no detail. Nothing is too small for her to notice and reflect on. In fact, it is the small things that make up the big deeds that change our lives from one second to the next.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (October 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Anne Enright
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Gathering

Bibliography:

• The Portable Virgin : Stories (1991)
• The Wig My Father Wore (1995)
• What Are You Like? (2000)
• The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002)
• The Gathering (2007) 
• Yesterday’s Weather : Stories (2008)
• The Forgotten Waltz (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004)

“Dad, do you think dogs go to heaven?”

“You mean what will happen to Grandma when she dies?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn Oct 16, 2011)

George Baxter Henry is no paragon of virtue. In fact, he is a paradigm of vice, with a penchant for lustful young women. His marriage is on the rocks and his fractured family is falling apart. Connor Bowman’s novella after The Last Estate takes us back to the South of France—this time Nice, but with an American protagonist. In this sinfully laugh-out-loud story about a wounded family trying to stitch itself back together, Bowman manages to make the reader care about these cross and querulous individuals who are headed on a grease skid to oblivion.

George is a fifty-one-year-old trial-phobic attorney in Boston. His vitriolic ninety-one-year-old mother-in-law, Muriel, hired a snoop, who captured George in a Kodak moment in flagrante delicto, and now Muriel is trying to convince George’s wife, Pearl, to divorce him. Seventeen-year-old rock musician, Billy, needs dad’s consent to a big record deal offer from Carnivore records, but George won’t do it until Billy’s urine is clean for a month; he snorts cocaine like kids eat Cheerios. Fourteen-year-old daughter, Iska, is researching apples for a book she wants to write, and is on the brink of new discoveries.

George sequesters the family away to a rented chateau in bucolic Nice, hoping to save his marriage, his son, and his finances from ruin. Pearl is open to reconciliation, but Muriel, his nemesis, is determined to interfere. A former screen star of the twenties and thirties, Muriel Hale née Meek is an italicized battle-axe who George derides as “about as meek as a Panzer division.” She never lets anyone forget her averred fame and one-time Oscar nom, flashing celebrity names like rhinestones on an Elvis cape.

George executes his own private rehab for Billy — he locks him in his room, while trying to repair the fault lines in his marriage, which has had a five-year sexual drought. Every step of repair between Pearl and George is a lure for sabotage by Muriel:

“If you’d listened to me all those years ago, you’d have married somebody suitable instead of scraping the barrel for an engagement ring and a time-share in George’s pecker.”

George starts playing boules with some locals he encounters during daily solitary walks, and also meets an Elvis-obsessed French pastry chef with a hot oven, big cupcakes, and porn-star moves. Salvation is laced with cream pie.

George’s perspective on life volleys between mockery and scorn, with a generous dose of self-effacement to lend a measure of vulnerability to his cynicism.

“Children are the single greatest drain on the world’s finances after global warming and oil slick clean-up costs… As far as they’re [children] concerned, it’s win, win, win. They didn’t ask to be born, so you pay for that. You want the best for them, so you pay for that, and best of all, they hate you and you want them to love you, so you pay for that, too. Stick a dunce hat on me and call me Chase Manhattan!”

The avaricious tension between Muriel and George keeps the zingers fresh and lively:

“To get a clear picture of my precious mother-in-law in your head, think Godzilla meets Margaret Thatcher and they have a child.”

As the narrative glides like a combat missile, the reader is installed in George’s personal battle of a lifetime — a self-propelled mission to redeem himself and his family. There’s a bit of a dues ex machina, but it comes with a wink and a wallop that will have you cheering for his redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (August 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Conor Bowman
EXTRAS:	Publisher page on The Redemption of George Baxter
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Estate

Bibliography:

• Life and Death and in Between: Stories (2004)
• Wasting By Degress (1998)
• The Last Estate (2008; August 2010 in US)
• The Redemption of George Baxter Henry (2008; August 2011 in US)

“Later, when it no longer mattered, they learned that the horror that had come from the sky had a name: derecho.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (OCT 2, 2011)

In Northwest Angle, William Kent Krueger’s 11th book in the award winning Cork O’Connor series, Cork and his family vacation in September on a houseboat in Canada, near the Northwest Angle area of Minnesota. Cork had hoped that his family, including his three children, Jenny, Annie and Steve and his sister-in-law Rose and her husband Mel, could finally get some time to relax and enjoy each other. They had all suffered the loss of Cork’s wife two year’s prior and they had not yet found any time to spend together especially since his kids had become older and living on their own.

Unfortunately for Cork and his family, the vacation becomes anything but enjoyable when soon after arrival, Cork and his older daughter Jenny become trapped in a major quick forming and very dangerous derecho storm that shipwrecks them on one of the many islands in the area.

During the storm, Jenny at first becomes separated from her father when he is tossed off their small boat before she is able to steer the boat to a nearby island. She seeks shelter at a small cabin in what appears to be the only building on the small island. She uncovers a baby that has been placed in safety from the storm and shortly thereafter finds the apparent mother of the baby dead. Although at first she thinks the woman was killed by the storm, she soon realizes that the woman was actually murdered and, given how hungry the baby is, she realizes the baby was more likely hidden from the murderer than from the storm. Fortunately, soon thereafter, she finds her father but they both become concerned when they see a man with a gun that they fear may be the killer of the baby’s mother.

Cork and Jenny manage to avoid the man with the gun and eventually reunite with the rest of their family and go to Northwest Angle to report the murder of the woman in the cabin. There they meet with people eager to help especially against who they believe is the murderer Noah Smalldog, the brother of the murdered girl, Lily Smalldog. However, the longer Cork and the others stay in the area, the more confused they become about who is really helping and what is really going on.

As usual for a William Kent Krueger book, I really enjoyed this book that starts and ends as a thriller and is more of a traditional mystery in the middle. He does a great job in presenting believable and likeable main characters while providing an interesting and realistic story. To me, the mix of the thriller and mystery was interesting but led to some dragging in the middle of the book, especially after such a quick reading beginning during the storm and finding of the baby. Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable and well recommended book that adds to an already great series.

Although it would be helpful to have read prior books in the series to understand all of the back story and relationships among the various characters it is not necessary. Krueger does a good job in the beginning in providing the key back story without boring his faithful readers (some of which are like me and appreciate the reminders anyway).

I was not very familiar with William Kent Krueger until I went to Bouchercon in 2008 where I found he had a significant presence and following. He was also a very interesting and entertaining speaker so I picked up a copy of his Anthony-nominated Thunder Bay while there and later picked up a couple of his prior books so as to start at the beginning of the series. I finally started reading the series in January, 2010 starting with Iron Lake, the first book in the series, which became one of my favorites in 2010. I’ve now read the first six and last two and I’m looking forward to going to back to read the three I’ve missed.

As soon as I started reading these books, they reminded me of the Alex McKnight series by Steve Hamilton. Both books take place in the United States just below the Canadian border, with Hamilton’s books based in Michigan and Krueger’s books in Minnesota. Both have a strong American Indian influence to their stories with significant Indian characters and reservations key to the story. Both of the main characters were policeman in major cities prior to moving to their current more remote locations, with Cork having spent a short time in Chicago and Alex in Detroit. Of course, several key differences exist, the most significant of which is the key part of family that is important to Cork as he is married with children in most of the books while Alex has no immediate family. Nonetheless, if you’ve enjoyed only one of these writes, I know you’ll like the other.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 92 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atria Books; First Edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	William Kent Krueger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton

Bibliography:

Cork O’Connor Series:

• Iron Lake (1998)  / 
• Boundary Waters (1999)
• Purgatory Ridge (2001)
• The Devil’s Bed (DATE)
• Blood Hollow (2004) 
• Mercy Falls (2005)  
• Copper River (2006)
• Thunder Bay (2007)
• Red Knife (2008)
• Heaven’s Keep (2009)
• Vermilion Drift (2010)
• Northwest Angle (2011)
• Trickster’s Point (2012)
• Ordinary Grace (March 2013)
• Tamarack County (August 2013)

“It was time it happened, the determination that this should never be allowed to repeat itself, the hatred and the bitterness of not being able to decide whether to thrust a knife in her or start to weep so that she could console me like a second Linda, for I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 28, 2011)

Navigating that shaky bridge between childhood and adulthood is never easy, particularly in 1961 – a time when “men became boys and housewives women,” a year when Yuri Gargarin is poised to conquer space and when the world is on the cusp of change.

Into this moment of time, Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen shines a laser light on young Finn and his mother Gerd, who live in the projects of Oslo. Fate has not been kind to them: Gerd’s husband, a crane operator, divorced her and then died in an accident, leaving the family in a financially precarious position. To make ends meet, she works in a shoe store and runs an ad for a lodger for extra money.

To complicate the situation, Finn’s father’s second wife – a now-widowed drug addict – views the ad and unloads on the family Finn’s half-sister, Linda – a young girl who appears to have mysterious problems that are only gradually revealed. Figuratively, this “poor mite got off the Grorud bus one dark November day with an atomic bomb in a small light blue suitcase and turned our lives upside down.”

Linda becomes the mirror in which Gerd, Finn, and others (including the lodger Kristian) eventually define themselves. Gerd, who identifies strongly with Linda, is transported back to an abusive childhood and views herself in the little girl. Finn — who is the first-person narrator — battles jealousy, bewilderment, and eventually, stirrings of love as he defends Linda from the Norwegian educational system and the school bullies. He reminisces: “Linda was not of this world, one day I would come to understand this – she was a Martian come down to earth to speak in tongues to heathens, to speak French to Norwegians and Russian to Americans. She was destiny, beauty and a catastrophe. A bit of everything. Mother’s mirror and Mother’s childhood. All over again.”

Not unlike his regional compatriot, Per Petterson, Roy Jacobsen is (as one publication stated about the latter), “a master at writing the spaces between people.” He succinctly and beautifully captures the incomprehension of a young boy who is trying to make sense of the adult world and his place within it. The increasing bond between the boy and his accidental sister is explored painstakingly and is exquisitely poignant. The portrayal of Linda’s evolution to her new family is genuinely heartrendering.

A pedestrian and at times downright awkward translation does not serve the stream of consciousness sections well. In the best translations (such as the talented Ann Born’s translation of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses), the reader loses sight that the book is a translation. It takes a little while to get into the cadence and the rhythm.

But the authenticity of Roy Jacobsen’s vision wins out with its universal themes: how others become gifts in our lives, unveiling us, and the lengths we go to preserve relationships with those we love. Or, in the words of the author, “Something happens to you when someone spots you – you see yourself from the outside, your own peculiar strangeness, that which is only you and moves in only you, but which nonetheless you have not known…” This quiet book is a hopeful testimony to transformative change.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Roy Jacobsen
EXTRAS:	Blog with all sorts of Roy Jacobsen info
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

Partial Bibliography (translated):

• The New Water (1987; 1997 in English)
• The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles (2005; 2009 in English)
• Child Wonder (2009; September 2011 in English)

“The real meaning of retirement had come to him the first day. When it didn’t matter what time he got up, he could stay in bed all day. He didn’t, of course. Those first days, all his interest seemed petty, not worth doing. It seemed to him that he had read all the books he wanted to read, heard all the music he wanted to hear. He thought of closing his eyes and turning his face to the wall.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (SEP 25, 2011)

The brilliant and prolific Ruth Rendell continues to entertain us with her latest Inspector Wexford novel, The Vault. Although he is retired and has no official standing, Wexford, the former Chief Inspector of Kingsmarkham, is delighted when Detective Superintendent Thomas Ede asks for his advice concerning a puzzling case. The scene of the crime(s) is a two-hundred year old house in London, Orcadia Cottage. The current residents are Martin and Anne Rokeby, who bought the property for one and a half million pounds. One day, Martin decides to lift a manhole cover in the “paved yard at the back of the house,” curious to know what, if anything, is down there. Little does he realize that this deed would end up “wrecking his life for a long time to come.” It seems that some unknown person or persons had hidden four dead bodies, two male and two female, in this hole in the ground, along with forty thousand pounds worth of jewelry.

Ruth Rendell has always dug beneath the surface of her characters’ lives, and this time she reveals how retirement has, in some ways, diminished Wexford. Although he loves reading, long walks, listening to music, and spending time with his family, he misses being a detective. How could he be content when “it didn’t matter what time he got up?” Fortunately, Wexford’s affluent daughter offers her parents the use of a home in London, which they happily accept. Now that Wexford and Dora have places both in London and Kingsmarkham, they have more ways to keep themselves active and entertained.

The case of the four corpses proves to be just what the doctor ordered to make Wexford feel useful and involved. He examines the evidence, helps interview witnesses, studies the autopsy reports, and uses his superb instincts, experience, and impressive intellect to help solve what turns out to be a series of complex misdeeds and misadventures. Adding to the drama, another crime is committed that hits close to home, since the victim is Wexford’s daughter.

The author’s prose style is as crisp, fluid, and succinct as anyone writing today, and she creates a rich and realistic picture of life in urban and rural London. Her descriptive writing is precise and evocative. In addition, Rendell presents us with a fascinating and varied array of characters who are compassionate, altruistic, adulterous, desperate, vicious, and predatory. The mystery is challenging, even for someone as uniquely talented as Wexford. The Vault succeeds as a character study, family drama, police procedural, and whodunit. Ruth Rendell delivers the goods, as she has done so often during her long and legendary career.

Bibliography:

Inspector Wexford Mysteries:

• From Doon with Death (1964)
• A New Lease of Death (1967) (retitled: Sins of the Fathers)
• Wolf to the Slaughter (1967)
• The Best Man to Die (1969)
• A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970)
• No More Dying Then (1971)
• Murder Being Once Done (1972)
• Some Lie and Some Die (1973)
• Shake Hands Forever (1975)
• A Sleeping Life (1978)
• Put on the Cunning (1981) (a.k.a Death Notes)
• Speaker of Mandarin (1983)
• An Unkindness of Ravens (1985)
• The Veiled One (1988)
• Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (1992)
• Simisola (1995)
• Road Rage (1997)
• Harm Done (November 1999)
• The Babes in the Wood (2003)
• End in Tears (July 2006)
• Not in the Flesh (2008)
• The Monster in the Box (2009)
• The Vault (September 2011)

Standalone Mysteries & Psychological Thrillers:

• To Fear a Painted Devil (1965)
• Vanity Dies Hard (1965)
• The Secret House of Death (1968)
• One Across, Two Down (1971)
• The Face of Trespass (1974)
• A Demon in My View (1976)
• A Judgement in Stone (1977)
• Make Death Love Me (1979)
• The Lake of Darkness (1980)
• Master of the Moor (1982)
• The Killing Doll (1984)
• The Tree of Hands (1984)
• Live Flesh (1986)
• Heartstones (1987)
• Talking to Strange Men (1987)
• The Bridesmaid (1989)
• Going Wrong (1990)
• The Crocodile Bird (1993)
• The Keys to the Street (1996)
• A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999)
• Adam and Eve and Pinch (2002)
• The Rottweiler (2004)
• Thirteen Steps Down (2005)
• The Water’s Lovely (2007)
• Portobello (2010)
• Tigerlily’s Orchids (2011)
• The St. Zita Society (August 2012)

Collections:

• The Fallen Curtain and Other Stories (1976)
• Means of Evil (1979)
• The Fever Tree (1982)
• The Copper Peacock (1991)
• Blood Lines: Long and Short Stories (1996)
• Piranha to Scurfy: And Other Stories (2001)

Movies from books:

• Dead Lucky (The Lake of Darkness)
• An Affair of the Mind (1988)
• A Demon in My View (1992)
• Master of the Moor
• A Judgement in Stone
• La Ceremonie (1996) (A Judgement in Stone)
• Live Flesh (1998)

“We’re never gonna escape this,” Paps said. “Never.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 22, 2011)

We The Animals in this wonderful debut novel refers to three brothers, close in age, growing up in upstate New York. They are the Three Musketeers bound strongly together not just because of geographical isolation but because of cultural separateness too. The brothers are born to a white mother and a Puerto Rican father—they are half-breeds confused about their identity and constrained by desperate and mind-numbing poverty.

This wild and ferocious debut is narrated by the youngest of the three, now grown, looking back on his childhood. It’s a coming-of-age story told in lyrical sentences that are exquisitely crafted. And while there are many moments of beauty in here, there are also ones of searing violence.

The boys can do nothing but stand back and watch as the intensely abusive relationship between the parents plays out everyday and it’s almost worse because the evidence creeps up after the fact. One day, Mom’s eyes are swollen shut and cheeks turned purple “He told us the dentist had been punching on her after she went under; he said that’s how they loosen up the teeth before they rip them out,” the narrator, barely aged seven, recalls. The severe abuse is compounded and made even more heartbreaking by the boys’ innocence and gullibility—they buy this lie and many others, whole.

The daily struggle for survival is heart wrenching yet without melodrama. “We stayed at the table for another forty-five minutes, running our fingers around our empty bowls, pressing our thumb tips into the cracker plate and licking the crumbs off,” Torres writes about one of the many evenings when one can of soup and a few crackers would have to make do for all of them. The boys don’t quite understand why their parents are seemingly happy one moment and why their mother slips into deep bouts of depression the next.

One of the many beautiful chapters in the book is one called “Night Watch” (each short chapter in this slim volume has a name). In it, the boys accompany Dad to work when he finds work at a night job. They have to sleep on the floor in sleeping bags in front of the vending machines, out of plain sight. They are here (and not home) because Mom is at her job working the night shift at a local brewery. The next morning, when a white man comes to relieve Dad of his duties, he spots the three musketeers and can guess at the situation. From the argument that follows, the boys already know that Dad has probably lost this job too. The family’s otherness, especially as perceived by the boys, is just beautifully rendered here.

As the boys enter adolescence, the narrator immediately knows he is separate and apart from his brothers. “They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent,” Torres writes. It wouldn’t be a reveal to say that the difference lies in the narrator’s sexuality, which can be glimpsed early on, if one pays close attention.

In a recent interview, the author Justin Torres has said: “I think that everybody struggles with family in some way and I hope that they can come away realizing that you can go back to those experiences and find something beautiful in everything and that you can make art out of your experiences.” With We The Animals, Torres has crafted just that—a beautiful and memorable work of art. This slender novel packs a powerful punch.

Justin Torres proves you don’t have to pen a giant volume to write precociously about huge themes such as family, race, adolescence and sexuality. Of course Torres writes so beautifully that you almost wish that he did.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 49 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	An interview with Justin Torres
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Bibliography:

• We the Animals (August 2011)

“Four – almost five – years of erratic visits – perhaps twelve visits in all. No, Avis corrects herself; she has not lost track after all. There have been eight visits to date, no more no less. She has seen her daughter exactly eight times since she turned thirteen.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 15, 2011)

Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber is a richly layered and beautifully written novel. It is akin to an archeological dig – each layer uncovering unexpected treasures. The book begins five years before Hurricane Katrina hit and ends during its aftermath.

The gist of the novel is about a family living in Coral Gables, Florida. The chapters are told from the viewpoints of different family members. Felice, the protagonist of the novel, is a thirteen year-old runaway who, at first, runs away repeatedly and is brought back by the police or social services. At some point before she turns fourteen, she leaves her home for good, leaving a distraught, broken family behind.

Felice manages to survive in Miami by doing odd modeling jobs, living in “the Green House” with other run-aways, and hanging out at clubs and partying. She is incomprehensibly beautiful, often compared to the young Elizabeth Taylor. She has run away to atone for a crime she believes she has committed which becomes clear as the story progresses.

Avis, Felice’s mother, is a baker – but not any baker. She has trained with French chefs at one of the best culinary arts programs in the United States. “She knew how to blow sugar into glassine nests and birds and fountains, how to construct seven-tiered wedding cakes draped with sugar curtains copied from the tapestries at Versailles…She studied Audubon and Redoute.”  When she had a show of her work at Cornell, where she interned, her own mother commented that the exhibit was “amusant.” In Florida, she has a baking business that she runs from home. “She could charge almost any price and customers seemed to consider it a privilege to pay it.” All of this came with a price for her, too. For years she was so busy baking that she had little time to see her son, daughter, or husband.

Felice’s father, Brian, is an attorney for a land acquisition firm. His firm buys land, develops it, and then flips it. He misses Avis and is drawn strongly to a co-worker.  He is losing his moral compass at this job. At one point, he is about to buy into one of the company’s land deals so that he can raise some capital for his son, Stanley’s, business.

Stanley dropped out of college to start a grocery based on local organic farming and green foods. His venture has become a phenomenal success but he sees his parents rarely, feeling like he lives in the shadow of his missing sister. Felice left when he was eighteen. He started college but felt like the real world was where he wanted to be. For years, he could not get into a car without looking for Felice.

Avis has seen Felice infrequently during the five years she has been gone. Most of these visits are when Felice needs money. She and Avis meet at a café and chat. Avis is careful not to touch Felice which would chase her away. As the book opens, Avis is waiting for Felice at a restaurant for hours and Felice never shows up.

This book deals with many themes. Obviously, food plays a big part. Avis is focused on the beauty of her creations, Stanley runs a specialized food market, and many of Felice’s friends suffer from anorexia or bulimia. While Avis is enamored of her beautiful pastries, “she didn’t really approve of food.”  She is smitten by the beauty of a pastry that looks like a replica of a cathedral but regular food makes her ill.

The book also deals with adolescents and the way they interact. Girls are known for their meanness through words and banishment and this book looks closely at the way that girls are cruel to one another.

Those of us who have kept up with real estate news know that Florida has been very hard hit by a depression due to its boom and bust housing market. Both Fort Meyer and Port St. Lucie in Florida are two of the hardest hit cities in the country due to flipping and the bust in real estate. Brian’s work puts him right in the middle of this.

The book is riveting and the writing is as lush as the Florida foliage. Abu-Jaber is an artist of the highest caliber and this is definitely one of the top ten books I have read this year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Diana Abu-Jaber
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Crescent Origin

Bibliography:

• Arabian Jazz (1993)
• Crescent (2003) 
• Origin (2007)
• Birds of Paradise (September 2011)

Nonfiction:

• The Language of Baklava (2005)

“Her eyes came open. Fully open. But she could no longer see the Abyssinian mountain that the Sabbath sun had turned like fire…
She could no longer see anything. She was blind.
For a long and disconcerting moment, she did not know who she was or where she was.  Only five to eight seconds later did she begin to realize that she had been dreaming.”

Book Review:

Review by Friedericke  (SEP 10, 2011)

Makeda is the title character of Randall Robinson’s astounding, thought provoking, and highly engaging novel. A blind retired “laundress,” Makeda’s life is anchored in her tiny, often sun-filled, parlour in Richmond, Virginia. Her modest circumstances, after a life of hardship, stand in stark contrast to her appearance and demeanor: at home, at church and in the market, she is usually clad in richly embroidered beautiful African gowns and she radiates wisdom and emotional strength, instilling respect wherever she goes. Some unknown visitors leave gifts for her, or speak to her as if she were somebody else…

Often, when she lifts her unseeing eyes toward the sun, her posture and diction change: she appears to have moved from one instant to the next – like a time traveller – into a far away place. She dreams “in pictures – color pictures, pictures of people, pictures of odd places – though she had never in her life seen a human soul…” she tells Gray, her youngest grandson, later. Recalling her dreams in great detail, she will only allow Gray, her “spirit child,” to share her secrets. “I remember at that point she said to me: Things are almost never what you, with your two eyes, can see them being. Sometimes they are less, but most of the time they are more. Worlds and worlds more, son.”

Makeda’s dreams, the “special ones,” take her to different places in Africa, regions that all have a special spiritual connection to African-American history. The dream stories are so vividly told, and, with each recurrence, grow in such intricate detail, that they pull the reader into those past lives just as much as Gray, letting us forget that it may be “just a dream.” Or is it? Is there more to it? Makeda knows where she has been and who she is in her dreams; did these places really exist at some time in the past? Is there surviving evidence of them today? Why those places and not others? What are the connections of those people to her own life and time? Many questions occupy her mind. Her curiosity grows to the point that she, after warning her grandson not to share his knowledge with anybody, instructs him to investigate any factual bases of what she tells him. Especially the amazing story of the Dogon people in Mali, West Africa, fascinates both: Dogon cosmology claims to have known about Sirius and his three stars hundreds or, maybe, thousands of years before science could prove their claim. Gray, by then a college student, will have to find a way to make this journey for his grandmother, and as it turns out, also for himself.

Robinson, recognized for his extensive non-fiction writing on topics that range from African-American socio-politics to international human rights, ventures with Makeda beyond any confines of a more traditional novel. The very moving account of Gray’s coming-of-age journey, the depiction of his close ties to his grandmother, set against the backdrop of the family’s difficult circumstances in nineteen fifties and sixties, represent by themselves a richly rewarding story. Yet, Makeda’s dream travels are more than a key for Gray’s own journey in search for identity and, eventual, love. They are like virtual spiritual doors that Robinson opens that lead us into his multi-layered vision of a broad-based African-American identity that, while recognizing its contemporary challenges, is intimately connecting it back to its African roots and its African historical and spiritual heritage.

To expand on his theme, the author introduces fictional and existing expert voices that speak to the young people in Gray’s college environment. For many students and readers, these are provocative and challenging propositions. For Gray, through the many talks with his grandmother, they are, more than anything, confirmation of his learning and evolving vision of his own role in life.

Robinson is an exquisite writer and stylist who brings the different narrative strands and themes harmoniously together and into one fascinating and enriching reading experience. I want to add on a personal level, that I found Robinson’s choices for Makeda’s “dream places and times” highly relevant for the themes of the novel. For me, they have been meaningful also as they reminded me of my own journeys of discovery into Africa and, especially of my very own very similar experience in Mali’s Dogon region.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	OpenLens; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Randall Robinson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker

Bibliography:

• Makeda (August 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (1998)
• The Debt: What America Owes the Blacks (2000)
• The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other (DATE)
• Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land (2004)
• An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (2007)

“It is the feeling that your life has just left the room.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 6, 2011)

Nabokov stated in the first page of his 1961 memoir, Speak Memory, “…our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” In Diana Spiotta’s new novel, Stone Arabia, eccentric narcissist, obsessive archivist and iconoclastic musician Nik Kranis mines that fleeting fissure of light and warns his sister, Denise, “Self-curate or disappear.”

This nostalgic and affecting story of siblings (and family) is a philosophical meditation on memory and the driven desire for autobiography–to document and render a consequential life, and to assemble disparate experiences into coherent narratives. “And even then,” says Denise, “the backward glance is distorted by the lens of the present…It is not just that emotions distort memory. It is that memory distorts memory.”

At the vortex of this novel is fifty-year-old Nik Kranis, aka his alter ego, Nik Worth, a pre-punk, no-hit wonder, LA musician, whose band The Fakes almost made it twenty years ago. “Nik had the sensibility down. And Nik had the look down. He was born to look pasty and skinny and angular.” But a combination of self-sabotage and solipsism undermined commercial success, and he alternately constructed a legendary career in music via his manufactured narrative, “The Chronicles.” Stretching back from 1973-2004, “The Chronicles” is a thirty-volume reinvention of a life, a daily scrapbook and fictionalized biography of Nik Worth, platinum rock star. It is a career arc so detailed and spectacular that it would rival Dylan’s.

Included in “The Chronicles is every band Nik was ever in, every record he ever made, and his solo career, recorded via his twenty-volume “Ontology of Worth.” We also get liner notes, reviews (sometimes highly critical and damning, all created from Nik’s imagination), obits of former band members, and detailed artwork for every cover. Nik is what we would call a legend in his own mind. We depend on Denise’s shifting narrative modes to trace the authentic Nik, a hermetic, aging, chain-smoking, alcoholic mooch who is blasé about his present decay and his future prospects. “He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future.” But even Denise is hooked on Nik’s worth as a musician.

The story is narrated largely through Denise’s point-of-view, which shifts back and forth from first to third person, and is conveyed like the 80’s eclectic music scene, mash-up style, that fans of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad will appreciate. She’s the slightly younger sister and caretaker of the family, and Nik’s biggest fan. However, Denise is concerned with exact recall, and is writing “The “Counterchronicles” as counterpoint to Nik’s mythical biography, to earnestly document an accurate record of recent events. Besides Nik, her life orbits around her daughter, Ada, a documentary filmmaker who wants Nik as her next subject; a tepid relationship with boyfriend, Jay, who she sees every two weeks for sex and old movies; and a mother who is suffering from early dementia. Denise is frightened of her own memory loss, convinced that it is imminent and inevitable.

Trebly and anxious, Denise panics vicariously through sordid and tragic news events. External though they are, they penetrate her personal boundaries, leak inside and cause ongoing existential crises. SARS, Abu Ghraib, and a celebrity murder-suicide are but a few of the terrors that invade Denise’s psyche. Moreover, Denise and Nik are enmeshed to a degree that “My sister doesn’t count as my audience because she feels like an extension of me. She’s, well, an alternative version of me.”

Spiotta’s creamy prose is abundant with quotable lines and arch aphorisms. There isn’t much of a plot, but the story is powerful and vibrant, laced with mordant, electric riffs and visceral, melancholy chords.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; First Edition edition (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dana Spiotta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Bibliography:

• Lightning Field (2001)
• Eat the Document (2006)
• Stone Arabia (July 2011)