“… the man to whom you refer is a master of every martial art ever conceived. In fact he conceived of most of them himself and is the only known master of the de’ja’ fu*. He can throw a punch into the air and it will follow you home and smack you in the face when you open your own front door. He is known as Lu-Tze, a name that strikes fear in those who don’t know how to pronounce it, let alone spell it.

* A discipline where the hands move in time as well as in space, the exponent twisting space behind his own back whilst doing so.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (APR 5, 2014)

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett is a book in his marvellous Discworld series. As in all the books of this series, Sir Pratchett spins an immensely readable yarn centered on the impact of an idea, an invention or the like into Discworld society. The ideas he’s tackled include the introduction of paper money; the post office; telegraph; deity, religion, and the corruptible priesthood; warfare rooted in ages-old history; terrorism; and in Raising Steam, the introduction of the steam locomotive. His characters are satirical and humorous, often takes on historical and literary icons, from Machiavelli’s Prince to LoTze to Don Giovanni. Discworld is unlike our own on the surface, but seen through Pratchett’s satirical lens, the reader finds hilarious commentary on our own world and its foibles. His impressive social intelligence and wicked sense of humor make for an engaging read.

Raising Steam is about the invention of the steam engine and the attendant implications in Discworld society. The inventor is Dick Simnel, a young man, clearly modelled on a Scots engineer, impenetrable accent and all, who employs a rational and disciplined process to create Discworld’s first steam powered locomotive. Dick goes to the capital to seek funding from Harry King (king of night soil and other smelly endeavors), a wealthy entrepreneur with a history of getting things done, legality be damned. The whole prospect of change engages the interest of Lord Vetiari, a professional assassin and machiavellian lord of the country. Vetinari is a tyrant, but he requires that all the different species (dwarves, trolls, goblins and so forth) of his country be treated alike as sapient creatures. Lord Vetanari engages Moist von Lipwig, his manager of the Post Office, the Mint, and the State Bank to manage the new enterprise. Moist von Lipwig was chosen by Vetanari because his gift for larceny makes him uniquely capable of managing it in others. Lipwig is managed by Vetanari by threat of torture and because he really enjoys living on the larcenous edge under impossible demands. Moist is the central character to this story.

The train becomes a successful enterprise. A cabal of dwarf rebels is trying to bar the entry of dwarves into the larger society. They want to literally derail the train as it makes its first trip to the land that is home to the vampires, one of whom is Vetinari’s lady love. The dwarf cabal sound suspiciously like fundamentalist religious terrorists in our world. Dick is continually improving on his beloved steam engine, Iron Girder. Moist resolves one impossible demand from Vertinari after another with wit, subterfuge and beguiling dishonesty.

There are goblins (a smell that is unbelieveable, but you stop noticing after a while, and they are marvellously good at coding and decoding as well a very handy with all sorts of metalwork) , dwarves (only a dwarf can tell the difference between a male and a female and they both have long beards) , trolls (one of whom is a lawyer, and others are on the police force), werewolves (one of whom is on the police force as a gesture to diversity), vampires, golems and more. All these creatures of fantasy are intensely human, filled with human flaws and foibles with surprising depths of warmth, loyalty and sometimes cruelty and evil.

As with all the Discworld series, the premise entails taking an idea to its logical and absurd conclusions in the setting of a fantasy world that reflects on our own. Raising Steam takes on the Industrial Revolution and does an admirable job of it. Pratchett is a true master. He writes with elan and great skill. His ideas are gut-busting funny and trenchant satire on our world. He is an antidote to prissy and snobbish “art” writing. The work is intelligent, and totally readable. One small quibble; I wish the author had focused on a more limited cast of characters in this novel, rather than bring in so many from the richly imagined Discworld. Regardless of this, I strongly urge you to read him and then go out and read some more.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 191 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (March 18, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Terry Pratchett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Unseen Academicals Making Money Going Postal Thud Monstrous Regiment Night Watch The Bromeliad Trilogy: Trucker, Diggers, Wings

Bibliography:

The Disc World Series:

• The Color of Magic (1983)
• The Light Fantastic (1986)
• Equal Rites (1987)
• Mort (1987)
• Sourcery (1988)
• Wyrd Sisters (1988)
• Pyramids (1989)
• Guards! Guards! (1989)
• Eric (1990)
• Moving Pictures (1990)
• Reaper Man (1991)
• Witches Abroad (1991)
• Small Gods (1992)
• Lords and Ladies (1992)
• Men at Arms (1993)
• Interesting Times (1994)
• Soul Music (1995)
• Maskerade (1995)
• Feet of Clay (1996)
• Hogfather (1996)
• Jingo (1997)
• The Last Continent (1998)
• Carpe Jugulum (1998)
• The Fifth Elephant (1999)
• The Truth (2000)
• Thief of Time (2001)
• The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable (illustrated) (2001)
• Night Watch (2002)
• Monstrous Regiment (2003)
• Going Postal (2004)
• Thud! (2005)
• Making Money (2007)
• Unseen Academicals (2009)
• Snuff (2011)
• Dodger (2012)
• Raising Steam (March 2014)

Other Books:

• The Carpet People (1971; 2013)
• The Dark Side of the Sun (1976)
• Strata (1981) (Special Order)
• The Unadulterated Cat: A Campaign for Real Cats (1995)

For Young Adults:

The Tiffany Aching Series- For Young Adults:

• The Wee Free Men (2003)
• A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
• Wintersmith (2006)
• I Shall Wear Midnight (2010)

More Young Adults;

• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001)
• The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers, Diggers, Wings (2004)
• Nation (2008)

For Children:

Johnny Maxwell books:

• Only You Can Save Mankind (1990)
• Johnny and the Dead (1994)
• Johnny and the Bomb (1996)

Collaborations:

• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (with Neil Gaiman) (1990)
• The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs) (1993)
• Death’s Domain: A Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs) (1995)
• The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs) (1997)
• A Tourist Guide to Lancre (with Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby) (1998)
• Gurp’s Discworld: Adventures on the Back of the Turtle (1998)
• Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook (with Stephen Briggs, Paul Kidby, Tina Hannan) (1999)
• The Science of Discworld (with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen) (1999)
• The Science of Discworld II – The Globe (with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen) (May 2002)
• Discworld Roleplaying Game (with Paul Kidby) (2002)
• Where’s My Cow? (illustrated by Melyvn Grant) (2007)
• The Long Earth (wth Steven Baxter) (2012)
• The Long War (wth Steven Baxter) (2013)

There are ten of them in the limo’s plush passenger bay, the eight remaining soldiers of Bravo squad, their PA escort Major Mac, and the movie producer Albert Ratner, who at the moment is hunkered down in BlackBerry position. Counting poor dead Shroom and the grievously wounded Lake there are two Silver Stars and eight Bronze among them, all ten of which defy coherent explanation. “What were you thinking during the battle?” the pretty TV reporter in Tulsa asked, and Billy tried. God knows he tried, he never stops trying, but it keeps slipping and sliding, corkscrewing away, the thing of it, the it, the ineffable whatever.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Mainly it was just this sort of road rage feeling. Everything was blowing up and they were shooting our guys and I just went for it, I really wasn’t thinking at all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (FEB 27, 2014)

It is, perhaps, a fortuitous accident that I turned the last pages of Ben Fountain’s absolutely brilliant novel during Memorial Day…a day when rhetoric about courage, support, sacrifice, and patriotism overflows.

Billy Lynn – the eponymous hero of this book – is a genuine American hero. He and his fellow Bravo Squad members decimated an insurgency – caught on film by an embedded Fox News crew — and became overnight sensations in a nation starved for good news about Iraq. They are brought home for a media-intensive “Victory Tour” – in cities that happen to lie in an electoral swing state — to reinvigorate support for the war. We meet them at the end of that tour, on a rainy Thanksgiving, hosted by America’s Team, The Dallas Cowboys.

They are, in more ways than one, anonymous to an American public; their reinvented names are meant to erase their identity (Major Mac, Mango, Lodes, Billy, etc.) In the fabled Texas Stadium, their faces are interspersed on a JumboTron screen with ads for Chevy cars and Cowboy-brand toaster ovens and high-capacity ice-makers.

Surrounded by so-called patriots, Billy and his friends are bombarded with words stripped of meaning: “rerrRist, currj, freedom, nina leven, Bush, values, support.” Billy reflects: “They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.”

The people that surround him are insatiably expecting Billy to impart wisdom in sound bites. Amid a world of plenty, multi-millionaires who have never put themselves in harm’s way let loose a stream of platitudes but Billy “truly envies these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point…” At another point, he reflects, “Never do Americans sound so much like a bunch of drunks as when they are celebrating at the end of their national anthem.”

Nineteen-year-old Billy – still a virgin, with major lust going on for a Cowboys cheerleader who believes that cheerleading is a “spiritual calling” – has the necessary replies to inane questions down pat. He is as real as he can be, as American as he can be.

And in this way, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk –marketed as a satire and blurbed as a new Catch-22 – is anything but. There is nothing surreal about it; in fact, it is an entirely apt portrayal of the times we live in. I thought this book was absolutely brilliant – well-crafted, filled with insight and wisdom, and heart-wrenching. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it the quintessential American novel, asking that all-important question: who are we and what do we want to become?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 506 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco; First Edition edition (May 1, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ben Fountain
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:

Bibliography:

• Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007)
• Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012)

“All he knew with sure was that his thoughts now converged around the idea of flying home to Nigeria to spirit away Ngene and sell the deity to Mr. Gruels. At first, the thought had scandalized him. He had tried to rebuke himself; he upbraided himself in all the stern silent languages he knew. In spite of his effort, he had found the temptation impossible to shake off. His waking hours were now often preoccupied with speculating what price the deity might command? He peered into what he always took to be his soul. He reminded himself how unlike him it was to peel away at all considerations until all that remained was the vulgar question of dollars and cents. Still his resolve was unyielding.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 15, 2014)

Foreign Gods Inc. by Ndibe is one of those rare books that has you laughing and crying at different intervals. It is well-written, excellently characterized and the story line is near perfect. I enjoyed this reading experience immensely.

Ike (pronounced E-Kay) is a Nigerian in America, a graduate of the elite Amherst College who has been driving cab in New York City for thirteen years because he can not get a job despite graduating cum laude and majoring in economics. He is told at job interview after job interview that his accent is too thick and he is not a good candidate for a public relations or financial position. He is at his wits end. His bills are overdue, his ex has taken him for everything he has, and he is now up to his ears in gambling debts.

As the book opens, Ike has the idea of going to a gallery called Foreign Gods Inc. and trying to sell them a statue, one that resides in his home village of Utonki. The statue is of the God of War, Ngene, a powerful god of war that served his people for centuries. At this time, Ike’s uncle is its protector. Ike believes that Negene is very powerful and will get him hundreds of thousands of dollars and take him out of debt. His mother has been begging him for money as has his sister. He has not sent them any support money for years.

Ike talks to Mark Gruel, the owner of Foreign Gods Inc. who tells Ike that he must bring the statue to him before he can tell how much it is worth. Ike decides to go back to his hometown in Nigeria and steal the statue and bring it back to New York. It is in Nigeria that a comedy of errors occurs and the reader is given the amazing history of the old and new Nigeria, the collision of the christian beliefs with the traditional religion. Ike is caught in the middle and ultimately we are left to wonder “Did he have the guts to snatch the statue of Ngene and sell it?”

The story unwinds slowly and resolutely, leading the reader from New York to Nigeria and back to New York again. We follow Ike with all of his conflicting beliefs and moral ambiguity. He is a complex and intelligent man trying to make a life for himself and for his family, while at the same time that life may end up destroying the very family he is trying to save.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soho Press (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Okey Ndibe
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin

Bibliography:

• Foreign Gods, Inc. (January 2014)

“Rocco, I’m in Vegas.”
“Bullshit.”
“I told you guys that the other night.”
“Maybe Jerry remembers, hang on.” Rocco passed the phone to one of the Jerrys, who dropped it.
“Shit!” I heard two people say together.
“Hello?” Jerry Number Two said. “Who’s this?”
“Jerry, it’s me, Duff. I’m in—“
“You comin’ in?”
“Jerry! Listen to me. Just shut up for a second and listen!”
“Hello?” Jerry said.
“Jerry, get the guys to come out to Vegas. I have a…er…a house all to myself—you guys can stay for free.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (DEC 26, 2013)

Although Duffy Dombroski was getting heat from his supervisor to go to a required training program so that he could perform better at his social worker job, Duffy jumped at the chance to go to Las Vegas as a sparring partner for Boris Rusakov, the Russian heavyweight champion. Duffy even somehow finds a way to bring his dog Al on the plane and he convinces all his friends but his trainer Smitty to go with him. Duffy doesn’t care that his doctor is worried about his head injuries; Duffy just wants the chance to go to Vegas. Once he’s in Vegas though, things don’t go the way he hoped and he ends up in some unanticipated situations. Tom Schreck provides an entertaining book with lots of adventures, including some difficult and often touching moments with humor and entertaining moments, primarily provided by his basset hound Al and Duffy’s bar friends.

When Duffy arrives, he finds that he’s not staying at one of the Vegas strip hotels, but rather a legal brothel outside the Vegas city limits. He does have a nice room cleaned every day by the young maid with beauty in looks and voice, a convenient bar and working women that he only visits to have interesting conversations (really). Unfortunately, Boris Rusakov is not interested in following the customary professional sparring practices and is only interested in hitting Duffy hard and often, especially when Duffy gets in a few good hits on the champion.

This is not really a serial killer book, but Schreck includes one that almost seems added after he wrote the main part of the book. Mexicans, primarily ones in Las Vegas illegally, are being killed without any clues to who or why. The reader gets the killer’s perspective, especially how much he hates the poor Mexicans, without knowing who it is until the end. Although it adds some suspense to the story, in a way it is a distraction to the what is really a story of Duffy’s adventures in Las Vegas – the Russian boxer, the Latino boxers he befriends, the relationships with the brothel prostitutes and of course his usual friends who are there primarily for humor and to help him out when he gets in trouble.

I picked up a copy of this book as part of my book bag at Bouchercon this year in Albany. Tom Schreck lives in the Albany area and this series typically takes place there, so it made sense that they would give out a lot of these books. Unfortunately,  I didn’t get a chance to meet Schreck or attend the panel he was on.

I’ve never read any of the other books in this series of which this is the fourth; I certainly did not have any trouble following along with the story. I’m sure I would have picked up a little bit more on Duffy’s friends and how and why they acted the way they did and maybe had a better understanding of Duffy’s interests, but I didn’t feel slighted. I will, however, read some of the prior books in the series as I really enjoyed Duffy Dombrowski, Schreck’s style and all the various new and recurring characters in this book. Of course, this book and presumably all the books in the series are based a lot on boxing and that may be a turnoff for some readers. However, with Tom Schreck being a world championship boxing official, he’s very qualified and is certainly writing about something he knows well. He also provides the accurate detail without boring even those who have no interest in boxing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 108 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas & Mercer (May 15, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Check Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official website for Tom Schreck
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More boxing: Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson More as Vegas fun: Dice Angel by Brian Rouff

Bibliography:

Duffy Dombrowski – Ghetto Social Worker:

• On the Ropes (2007)
• TKO (2008)
• Out Cold (2009)
• The Vegas Knockout (2012)

Also:

• Planter’s Punch (2009) (written with J.A. Konrath)

TJ Dunn:

• Getting Dunn (2012)

Anthology:

• Duffy to the Rescue (2011)

“The last time Ramiro Areyzaga was in Mexico was so long ago it was more like a fairy tale. . . A place of lush green shade, both a forest of trees and a jungle of huge waxy palm leaves, and a zocalo of marionettes and dancers, musicians and painters, with toys and balloons for the little ones and shawls for his grandparents. And of course the church, like none he’d ever seen, all the cool stone space, and God – which he never got over, so much so it stayed inside him, quietly, the rest of his life, like it was the word Mexico itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (NOV 9, 2011)

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, Before the End, After the Beginning, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

The collection opens with a disorienting story, “please, thank you,” about a Mexican-American man struggling to regain control of his body after a stroke. Uncomfortably dependent on the hospital staff, forced to face his physical vulnerabilities with tasks as mundane as taking a shower or balancing a checkbook, his psychological vulnerabilities also come to the fore. All he sees around him are minorities persecuted by a white majority trying to keep them down. Everyone from his adult children to the hospital staff shake their head, bemused by his racial conspiracy theories, but as his body heals, so do the lifelong wounds of prejudice, at least enough that he can advise Erlinda, a Mexican janitor, to rise above the ignorance around her so that the wounds she endures on account of her race won’t fester and leave deep and putrid scars.

While sometimes, an illness forces us to recede into ourselves, often times, it’s through our relationship with others that we struggle with undesirable aspects of our identity. “The Last Time I saw Junior,” a hot-headed Mexican must face his former self when an old buddy comes around and manipulates him (once again) into helping him. In “Cheap,” a Mexican musician is forced to face both his fiscal and emotional frugality when the pursuit of an unfairly low bid by a local contractor causes him to face the exploitation of other Mexicans, who he tries to help.

“Willows Village,” explores the other side of help – dependency. When Guillermo moves from El Paso to Santa Ana in search of a job that will support his young family, he has little choice but to stay with his aunt, his mother’s sister, Maggy, who, according to his mother, was “an all-spoiled this and did-all-bad-that” who got away with murder on account of her looks. Maggy lives in a tract housing development, called Willows Village, with a kitchen “loaded up like a mall gourmet store” and a bedroom as “beautiful as any hotel.”  Her husband is gone for weeks at a time on business and so Maggy manages her loneliness by keeping an unfortunate friend, Lorena. In exchange for room and board, Lorena does the errands Maggy doesn’t want to do and accepts Maggy’s capricious generosity with a smile and appropriate gratitude. While Guillermo pounds the pavement in search of a job, his dependency on Maggy and his mother, on Gabe, the man who employs him for a time, frustrates him, and with the wine always flowing at the house, it’s inevitable that tensions and resentments will come to a head, exposing the line between need and reliance.

Gilb explores the fraught dynamics of attractive women financially dependent on men through the eyes of the males who actually love them. In “Blessing,” a young man sets out to visit his high-school sweetheart, now married to a much-older man. Sexually unsatisfied, she visits him during the night, which prompts him to flee her house in the morning, putting him in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “Uncle Rock,” a young boy deals with having a mother who is beautiful enough to attract restaurant owners and engineers, but not white enough to be marriageable. With a precocious understanding of the sexual marketplace, he deflects a professional baseball player’s advances in favor of a man with modest means who worships the ground his mother walks on.

Perhaps our most poignant search for identity is in the face of death. In “Hacia Teotitlan,” a dying man journeys home to a Mexico that he remembers as a fairy tale with glorious churches. He rents a room that is too small for his body, and vows to discontinue his medication, resigning himself to dying with the same resignation of a stray dog. While he may not have found what he was looking for, he walks away with new ways of expressing his innermost desire – to be well.

Each of these stories is a wonderful meditation on identity and the pain we endure in the struggle to create ourselves. In 2009, Dagoberto Gilb suffered a stroke; these stories are the product of his recovery. Although judging from the simple power of this book, I’d say it definitely marks a return to form.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dagoberto Gilb
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short  review of: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña And if you like this one, try: The Madonna’s of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

Bibliography:

• Winners on the Pass Line (1985)
• The Magic of Blood (1993) 
• The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1995)
• Woodcuts of Women: Stories (2001)
• The Flowers (2008)
• Before the End, After the Beginning (November 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Gritos: Essays (2003)

Other:

• Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature (2006)

“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)

“I was suddenly crazy about collecting the hands of old mannequins, and vintage etiquette books, like the 1963 edition of  Blueprints for Building Better Girls! Ray and I’d take turns reading it aloud to each other. It was hilarious how clueless these women, teetering in hells, on the cusp of the sexual revolution, were.””

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 11, 2011)

Poor Holden Caulfield. In Catcher in the Rye, he muses, “Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.” How right he was! In Elissa Schappell’s new short story collection, the old blueprints for Appropriate Female Behavior — the name of a vintage etiquette manual, 1963 edition — have all been tossed away. And now the girls and women are forced to muddle through with the new rules: Be yourself but also be what your boyfriend, parents, and girlfriends want you to be as well.

These women are survivors, some only barely, armed with caustic humor to withstand the toughest stuff that life can throw their way. In “A Dog Story,” a couple that has long tried to have a baby discover, in a routine examination, that the technician cannot locate the heartbeat. “My husband asked her to keep looking,” the wife says, “as if the baby were playing Marco Polo and had swum behind a kidney.”

In another story called “Elephant,” two women who mouth all the right clichés about how “motherhood matters,” finally get real with each other. “She was crying the way mothers learn to do. Her body betrayed nothing. There was no wiping her eyes, or heaving shoulders, no sound at all.”

And then there’s “Joy of Cooking” – with all its anti-feminist connotations. An anorexic daughter, who believes she’s in love for the first time, calls her mother in a panic, cajoling her to walk her through the steps to roasting a chicken for her boyfriend. The story veers from what, at first, seems like a traditional coming-of-age rite of passage – the passing down of menus from any mother to any daughter — to a dark tale of manipulation, guilt, lack of gratitude, and hidden angers.

Each of the stories tackles a certain female archetype: the slut, the victim, the exhausted new mother, the party girl, and the seemingly infertile woman. At first, the reader settles in, secure and comfortable that she knows where the story is heading – after all, it’s been told many times before – but wait! There’s something a little “off” about each portrayal. Take Heather school slut, for example, who is involved with a newly trimmed down, former “fat boy.” Just as she begins to develop feelings, there is a subtle betrayal and she bites back, aiming to do the utmost emotional damage – and succeeding.

We meet Heather again, in the last story, my personal favorite, “I’m only Going To Tell You This Once.” Now a mother, she must confront the reality of her coveted son becoming involved with a young woman Candy, who reminds Heather all too well of herself. In fact, a number of characters are woven into other stories: Charlotte, a girl who left girlhood after being raped, is off stage but very central to another story, where her friend Bender – a self-destructive party girl – is left to deal with the effects of what happened to Charlotte. And we find that Paige, the young mother in “Elephant,” is the sister to the anorexic girl in “Joy of Cooking.”

This is a fine collection of eight stories for mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and for those who love them. As Heather says in the final story, “…there is no such thing as just a girl.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elissa Schappell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle

Bibliography:

• Use Me (2000)
• Blueprints for Building Better Girls (September 2011)

“Only a madman unaware of what he was doing would admit to being directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds and thousands of people and then behave as if nothing had happened.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (OCT 4, 2011)

Saramago’s last, indeed posthumous, book is a real treat. Brief, inventive, funny, it furthers the author’s well-known distaste for religious dogma by traversing many of the familiar stories of the Old Testament by means of a fanciful parable told from a rational point of view. Much like The Elephant’s Journey, it shows Saramago’s stylistic fingerprints in relaxed form. There are still the run-on sentences, but they are the product of irrepressible exuberance rather than philosophic density. There is a lot more dialogue than usual, but, liberated by the author’s minimal punctuation, it propels the page forward rather than breaking it up. And his avoidance of capitals (except to start sentences and dialogue) has the familiar effect of demystifying his various beings — most especially god — making them earn respect rather than being granted it automatically. He treats the lord as an omnipotent but rather amateur bungler, forever tinkering with his unsatisfactory creation, as here with Noah’s ark:

“God was not there for the launch. He was busy examining the planet’s hydraulic system, checking the state of the valves, tightening the odd loose screw that was dripping where it shouldn’t, testing the various local distribution networks, keeping an eye on the manometers, as well as dealing with tens of myriads of other tasks, large and small, each of them more important than the last, and which only he, as creator, engineer and administrator of the universal mechanisms, was in a position to carry out and to which only he could give the sacred ok.”

Saramago’s most audacious stroke is to choose the outcast murderer Cain as his protagonist. He has him argue successfully that at least half the blame for Abel’s murder should be shouldered by god (let’s stick with lowercase) for his unreasonable provocation. Condemned to wander the earth as a kind of compromise, Cain finds the rest of the Middle East quite adequately populated already; it appears that the Garden of Eden was not the beginning of anything, simply god’s private experiment. Other than an extended amorous interlude with the capricious Queen Lilith, Cain will jump around in the Bible story, turning up at most of the key events of Genesis, and several from other books of the Old Testament also. Sometimes he gets there only in the nick of time, as when the official angel arrives too late to prevent the sacrifice of Isaac, and Cain himself has to intervene.

The middle sections of the book are rather episodic, and I was not entirely convinced by Saramago’s choice of just these episodes in just that order. But it gradually becomes clear that Cain’s role is to be a witness, and — murderer though he is — a moral conscience that Saramago’s god himself lacks. The chosen stories focus on god’s capriciousness, apparent unconcern for human life, and willingness to accept any amount of collateral damage in pursuit of his goals. Cain cannot understand how the killing of one’s son can be a worthwhile test of anything; would god be willing to sacrifice his own son? (Well, yes.) How can god think that giving Job another set of sons and daughters can replace the ones he has arbitrarily destroyed, as though family, like wealth, were a fungible commodity? Cain is haunted by the cries of the innocent children slaughtered along with their Sodomite parents. He leaves Joshua’s army in horror at the massacre of combatants and non-combatants alike, and the capture of virgins for other purposes. Finally, having been brought onto the ark by Noah, he takes matters into his own hands directly, standing up to god once more face-to-face.

So a fun book with a serious message. From any other writer, it would be a wonder; from Saramago, though, little more than a jeu d’esprit. Compared to his rewriting of the New Testament in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a complex book which proves by no means hostile to religion even while denouncing the official manifestations of it, this seems little more than a whimsical after-dinner entertainment. But I would have happily gone to dinner with Saramago any time, and listened to his stories for as long as he cared to tell them. (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on José Saramago
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Elephant’s Journey The Double The Cave

Bibliography:

• Baltasar and Blimunda (1982, translated 1987)
• The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1991)
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1993)
• Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: A Novel (1994)
• The Stone Raft (1994)
• The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1996)
• Blindness (1997)
• The Tale of the Unknown Island (1999)
• All the Names (2000)
• The Cave (2002)
• The Double (2004)
• Seeing (2006)
• Death with Interuptions (2008)
• The Elephant’s Journey (2010)
• Cain (2009; 2011)
• Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (2012)
• Raised from the Ground (2012)

Other:

• A Journey to Portugal (2001)

“Normally you can’t get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away; but put your conscience in the cage of this paradox, where it can slither and bark but it can’t hurt you, and you can study it for as long as you wish. Most people don’t truly know how they feel about the Holocaust because they’re worried that if they think about it too hard, they’ll find out they don’t feel sad enough about the 6 million dead, but I’m an expert in my own soul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  SEP 13, 2011)

First-time author Ned Beauman really lays it out there in the first chapter of this extraordinary novel, which begins with an imaginary surprise birthday party thrown by Hitler for Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It is an exhilarating, outrageous opening to a book that will in fact take a quite different course. But it is important as a way of establishing the moral parameters (and this IS a moral book) and freeing up an imaginative space in which Beauman can explore some ideas that are normally unapproachable.

Actually, Beauman reminds me of nobody so much as Evelyn Waugh. He writes about the same period (England in the 1930s), he inhabits some of the same milieux (a house party in some noble pile), he shares or even tops Waugh in his outrageous use of absurd humor, and he writes about serious subjects at heart. His debut novel explores the world of British Fascism in the years before WWII. Despite the opening, the German Nazis never make an appearance other than as tutelary deities. In its place is a gaggle of mostly well-connected amateurs, a sort of lunatic fringe of the upper class, pursuing theories of eugenics and a universal world language. Yes, they had their real-life counterparts; Lord Claramore’s family is in the book, the Erskines, somewhat resembles the Mitfords; Evelyn Erskine, the daughter who shows her independence by becoming an atonal composer, is virtually identical to Elizabeth Lutyens; and Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists, makes a cameo appearance, but his 1936 march of supremacy through the largely-Jewish London East End is shown as the farcical debacle it really was.

This period background is viewed from a modern frame. Kevin Broom, the narrator and a collector of Nazi memorabilia, gets caught up in a rivalry which leaves two other collectors dead and Kevin himself in danger of his life. The goal of the rivalry is not at first clear, but it turns upon a letter from Hitler to British scientist Philip Erskine thanking him for an unusual gift, and some as-yet-unspecified connection between Erskine and a diminutive London Jewish boxer named “Sinner” Roach.

Do not look to the story for any great plausibility, though. It propels the plot with exhilarating efficiency, but it is more in tune with the popular adventure stories of the earlier part of the century than with modern expectations of verisimilitude; Kevin’s role model, for instance, is Batman. Waugh used such devices also, but Beauman is very much of his own time in translating Waugh’s absurdity into shock or even disgust. Kevin, for instance, has trimethylaminuria, a genetic disease that makes his bodily secretions smell of rotting fish; there is also strong undercurrent of homosexual violence, which may turn some readers off the book.

Which would be a pity, because the best parts are very good indeed. I am thinking especially of a dinner conversation in New York involving Sinner, two Rabbis, and an American architect, showing how easily some humanitarian endeavors such as mid-century town planning may be perverted into crypto-fascism. Or a brilliant discursion on the quest for a universal language that would unite mankind, discussing real attempts such as Esperanto and Volapük together with the fictional Pangaean, invented by an Erskine ancestor. Or Philip Erskine’s own work with beetles, breeding them for extraordinary aggression and strength, an obvious parallel to the human Eugenics programs of the Nazis for the enhancement the Master Race — though the principle had earlier advocates in both Britain and America. This is a valuable and serious subject for a novelist (it is also examined in Simon Mawer’s excellent Mendel’s Dwarf), and though Beauman chooses an absurd and at times offensive vehicle in which to present it, his obvious intelligence and meticulous linking of his story to real events makes this a far better book than a mere summary might suggest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 39 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ned Beauman blog  and website
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon Second Glance by Jody Picoult

Bibliography:

• Boxer, Beetle (2010; September 2011 in US)
• The Teleportation Accident (February 2013)

“There isn’t much call for deep thinking in my current job in Cloisters, New Jersey. We don’t do a lot of chatting about philosophical issues or natural phenomena in the casino. I tried to talk about National Geographic one night, and Jason gave me a look like I was insulting him, so I moved on to a safer subject: which of the girls have implants.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (SEP 9, 2011)

Eoin Colfer? He writes those kid’s books, Artemis Fowl, doesn’t he? What’s someone who writes really popular children’s books doing writing a crime novel? Well according to the dedication, Irish author Eoin Colfer says the book is “For Ken Bruen who made me do it.” So we have Bruen to thank for this first book in what promises to be an entertaining series.

The protagonist and narrator of Plugged is 40-something Irishman Daniel McEvoy, an ex-British army soldier with two horrendous tours in Lebanon under his belt. Plugged finds McEvoy, unable to adjust to civilian life, in Cloisters, New Jersey working nights as a bouncer in a seedy, low-rent strip club called Slotz:

“A formica bar, low lighting that’s more cheap than fashionable. A roulette wheel that bucks with every spin, two worn baize card tables and half a dozen slots. Slotz.”

Hardly a stellar career move, but then McEvoy isn’t so much into appearances–except when it comes to his bald head. When the book begins McEvoy is getting hair plugs from an unlicensed doctor named Zeb who operates a fly-by-night office, and it’s this relationship combined with the murder of a Slotz hostess that takes McEvoy out of his role of neighbourhood bouncer to amateur investigator. McEvoy soon finds himself partnered-up with a prickly female detective, and on the unfriendly end of the local crime boss.

The book’s narrative has an almost chatty, humorous, and casual approach which belies the violence that frequently and suddenly explodes on the page. McEvoy confides in his reader and enhances the narrative with flashes of Lebanese hell and memories of therapy sessions with his permanently hungover, trendy therapist Simon Moriarty–a man who in his absence has assumed the role of mentor and advisor. McEvoy is a likeable character whose seemingly-loser role in life covers independence and a well-honed philosophy:

“The great Stephen King once wrote don’t sweat the small stuff, which I mulled over for long enough to realize that I don’t entirely agree with it. I get what he means: we all have enough major sorrow in our lives without freaking out over the day-to-day hangnails and such, but sometimes sweating the small stuff helps you make it through the big stuff. Take me, for example; I have had enough earth-shattering events happen to me, beside me and underneath me to have most people dribbling in a psych ward, but what I do is try not to think about it. Let it fester inside, that’s my philosophy. It’s gotta be healthy, right? Focus on the everyday non-lethal bullshit to take your mind off the landmark psychological blows that are standing in line to grind you down.”

If you like that quote, then chances are you’re the sort of reader who will enjoy Plugged. It’s a light, fresh crime novel with an engaging protagonist whose lively sense of humour and unflinching eye deliver an entertaining read. Some of the humour gravitates around McEvoy’s Irishness and still more erupts from the well-drawn characters who range from McEvoy’s nutty neighbour–Mrs Delano: a woman who’s “beautiful-ish in a psycho kind of way” to the bitchy retired stripper, Brandi who’s “been angry at the world for about a year, since she had to hang up her stripper’s g-string and downgrade to a hostess job” at age 30.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Overlook Hardcover (September 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eoin Colfer
EXTRAS:	Audio Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Max by Ken Bruen and Jason Star

Partial Bibliography:

• The Wish List (2000)
• The Supernaturalist (2004)
• Half Moon Investigations (2006)
• Airman (2008)
• And Another Thing…(Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) (2009)

Artemis Fowl series:

• Artemis Fowl (2001)
• Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident (2002)
• Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code (2003)
• Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception (2005)
• Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (2006)
• Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox (2008)
• Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex (2010)
• Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian (2012)

Not a kid’s book:

• Plugged (September 2011)