“He, (Ned), told me he was disgusted with the way Ocean Catch was fishing,” Thomasina says. “He didn’t say why but I figured they must have been exceeding quotas or trawling illegally. You know, breaking some sort of sustainable fisheries things. But I was surprised, because he never cared about this stuff before. ‘Let the environmentalists worry about the environment,’ he used to say.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (MAY 11, 2014)

North of Boston is Elisabeth Elo’s debut novel, and to me it is a real winner. It certainly held my interest and I found that, at times, I was unable to put this books down.

Pirio Kasparov, heir to a very successful perfume business which her Russian immigrant parents founded, is our protagonist. sponsored: Royal Vegas Casino – when you make three initial deposits, you receive up to 1200 Canadian dollars for each coupled with 30 free spins. She is a gritty, smart and complex woman. When Pirio’s mother died, the girl was just 10 years old. Her deceased mother’s will stipulates that when Pirio turns 21 years old, she will inherit her mother’s share of the extremely successful business, Inessa Mark, Inc. and that if she wants full ownership, the company would revert to her upon her eccentric father’s death. Pirio has joined the company where she works as “CEO in training.” Scent permeates much of the novel – the scent of perfume, ambergris, herbs, flowers, etc. And the smells of the sea also play an important part in the author’s descriptive passages.

Pirio’s fisherman friend, Ned Rizzo, has recently acquired a lobster boat, the Molly Jones. He bought it for $1.00. Ned had been a star employee at the Ocean Catch Company in Boston, (where much of this tale is set), and then, out of nowhere, he quits. His parting gift, a sort of severance pay, is the brand new lobster boat, a far cry from the usual gold watch. But why would someone, or some corporation, just give away an expensive boat? And why did Ned, after working 20 years on corporate factory trawlers and long liners, switch to catching lobsters? Is it because his new boat is precisely for that purpose, or is the reason more complex?

Ned finds himself short of crew one foggy day and recruits the totally inexperienced Pirio to stand in for the usual experienced fishermen. Pirio, wanting to help a friend, expresses her doubts about working as a pure novice. Ned teaches her to bait traps before they leave the harbor. He also tells her that he will teach her the ropes as the day progressed,  essentially on-the-job training. When a freighter collides with the Molly Jones, the ship sinks quickly, taking Ned with it. The huge freighter moves off, never bothering to search for possible survivors – an oceanic hit-and-run!

Pirio jumps free of the submerging ship and is thrust into the icy cold waters off the Boston coast. She manages to survive for 4 hours in 42 – 48 degree Fahrenheit water, a heretofore feat rarely heard of. Pirio seems to possess a physiological quirk that makes her almost immune to hypothermia. So Pirio can now be entered into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!  Her miraculous survival causes the Navy Diving Experimental Unit to request that she stop by for testing. They fly her to Florida, their home base, for just that purpose. “We have no idea how that happened, a Navy doctor tells her. “We’ve never seen that in a human before. She becomes sort of a local heroine, called “The Swimmer.”

Pirio is, if nothing else, tenacious. Her instincts tell her that the collision was no accident. Ms. Kasparov simply wants answers: who rammed their boat and why? But the coast guard seems to consider it an unfortunate accident and not a high priority. When she starts asking questions on her own, it’s clear someone is very unhappy with her involvement. After exhausting her inquiries in Boston, she persists in her quest for the mysterious freighter and soon is hot on the trail of a wide-ranging mystery that ultimately takes her far north of Boston, to the whaling grounds of Canada’s Baffin Island.

Pirio meets a mysterious man at Ned’s memorial service who now seems as eager as she to find the truth surrounding the accident…if it was an accident. This man becomes an important figure in the narratve.

To complicate matters further, Pirio spends much of her time consumed with helping her old school friend Thomasina, an alcoholic and gadabout, with her young son, Noah. Noah also happens to be Ned’s son, and Pirio has a strong connection with him as his godmother.

North of Boston, Elisabeth Elo’s novel, is a winner. It is so much more than a mystery. The characters are well fleshed out, the mystery and ominous ambiance are thrilling at times, the storyline is a strong one, the Arctic setting is fascinating, and the supporting cast of characters is interesting.

I highly recommend North of Boston and look forward to reading the author’s future work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pamela Dorman Books; First Edition edition (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elisabeth Elo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Boston: Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

Bibliography:

• North of Boston (January 2014)

“The walkie-talkie didn’t work. I could hear my mom but not the other person. I hadn’t thought of that. And in a lot of conversations, most of what she said was mm-hmm. I hadn’t thought of that either. With us, she said a lot. I had to be completely still so she wouldn’t hear noise through the device. Most of the time, I just heard her moving in her room, singing Joni Mitchell songs, off-key. “

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (APR 15, 2014)

Miles Adler-Rich is a precocious teen-ager, very much upset by the changes in his family. His parents have recently divorced and his mother has taken up with a new boyfriend named Eli Lee. Eli says he works for the National Science Foundation and professes to love Miles’s mother, Irene, very much. However, there is something about Eli that seems off to Miles.

Miles, along with his best friend Hector, decide to investigate Eli along with the help of a private investigator named Ben Orion. There are things in Eli’s stories that just don’t add up. Is he really divorced from his wife? He said he had pituitary surgery but has no scars. He came to visit with a dog that he borrowed from a friend. Who borrows a dog? He told Irene that he’d loan her a million dollars and that he’d contribute money to their household. Most importantly, he said he’d marry Irene but in the six years that they’ve been seeing one another, no marriage has occurred. Also, Eli is supposed to live in Washington, D.C. and Miles is sure he saw Eli with a woman and child in Pasadena.

Miles and the Mims, as he calls his mother, are quite close but Miles is prone to snooping, prying, and eavesdropping on her. As he says, “I was a snoop, but a peculiar kind. I only discovered what I most didn’t want to know.” Miles looks in his mother’s drawers, on her computers and opens her mail. He also hot wires her telephone. What he finds out has the power to implode the family. What started out as curiosity has taken on a power of its own.

The novel deals with serious issues of good and evil, right and wrong, and the morally ambiguous. The story is narrated by Miles who appears to be a reliable narrator. Over a period of about eight years, from pre-divorce through the time that the Mims spends with Eli, we see Miles grow and develop into a young man. He complains about his younger twin sisters known as the Boops but we also see him care for them tenderly when his mother is not up to snuff.

Miles is looking for certitude in an uncertain world, a world that is not fair and often cruel. He has gone too far in his mission to know the truth and there is no turning back for him. His choices have been made and he is now living with their outcome. Ms. Simpson has written a very intriguing book, one much better than My Hollywood and one not quite up to Any Way But Here. The book held my interest and the characterizations were excellent. Some of the book was repetitive and could have been edited more stringently. There were parts of the book that appeared like snippets and could have been left out, or else the book could have been made longer and these parts developed. Overall, this is a fine book which I recommend.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; First Edition edition (April 15, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mona Simpson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: My Hollywood And another kid detective: Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Bibliography:

• Anywhere But Here (1986)
• The Lost Father (1992)
• A Regular Guy (1996)
• Off Keck Road (2001)
• My Hollywood (2010)
• Casebook (April 2014)

“It is the time of year when Kit must rise in the dark, as if he were a farmer or a fisherman, someone whose livelihood depends on beating the dawn, convincing himself that what looks like night is actually morning. His only true occupation these days, however, is fatherhood; his only reason for getting up at this dismal hour is getting his children to school.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 8, 2014)

Julia Glass’s latest book strikes right to the core of personal identity. How do we solidify our sense of who we are if we don’t know where we came from? In what ways can we take our place in the universe if our knowledge of our past is incomplete?

Kit Noonan has reached a fork in the road. Underemployed with no clear sense of purpose, he is floundering, until his wife urges him to take some time away to work out the secret of his father’s identity. That search leads him back to his stepfather Jasper in Vermont – a self-sufficient outdoorsman who effectively raised him along with two stepbrothers. Eventually, the journey brings him to Lucinda, the elderly wife of a stroke-ravaged state senator and onward to Fenno (from Julia Glass’s first book) and his husband Walter.

Through all this, Kit discovers the enigma of connections and which connections prevail. As one character states,

“..the past is like the night: dark yet sacred. It’s the time of day when most of us sleep, so we think of the day as the time we really live, the only time that matters, because the stuff we do by day somehow makes us who we are. We feel the same way about the present…. But there is no day without night, no wakefulness without sleep, no present without past.”

The biggest strength of this novel – by far – is the beautifully rendered portrayal of characters. Kit, Jasper, Lucinda and her family, Feeno and Walter – even Kit’s twins – are so perfectly portrayed that they could walk off the pages. As a reader, I cared about every one of them and – as the book sequentially goes from one character to another – I felt a sense of loss from temporarily leaving him or her behind.

The only weakness was an overabundance of detail (scenes, back story, etc.), which robbed me of using my imagination to “fill in the blanks.” While vaguely discomforting, this story is so darn good and the writing is so darn strong that I was glad to be immersed in its world for the several days I was reading. Kit’s journey and his recognition of what “family” really means — and our imperfect connected world — has poignancy and authenticity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Julia Glass
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: I See You Everywhere The Widower’s Tale

Bibliography:

• Three Junes (2002)
• The Whole World Over (2006)
• I See You Everywhere (2008)
• The Widower’s Tale (2010)
• And the Dark Sacred Night (April 2014)

“She knows that she is the obvious — the inevitable — literary agent for this project. And there’s also one very obvious acquiring editor for the manuscript, a close friend who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, no matter how ludicrous, no matter what level of lunatic the author. He used to have impressive success with this type of book, even by some of his less rational authors; there’s apparently a good-size book-buying audience out there that inhabits a space beyond the margins of sane discourse. He’ll be motivated to publish another. Especially this one, about these people.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (APR 6, 2014)

Isabel Reed, a literary agent for ATM, spends all night reading, The Accident by Anonymous, the new manuscript from her assistant Alexis who was very enthusiastic about it. The book has startling information about Charlie Wolfe, a major media figure with major political connections that is hoping to run for office himself. The information in the manuscript, if true, would certainly end Wolfe’s career as it describes a crime he apparently covered up while a student at Cornell University.

Isabel’s agency and the book business in general have not been doing well, and she knows immediately that this new book is one that will make a lot of money for everyone. She also knows she needs to be careful with whom she works with or it could get out from under her control. She therefore goes to one of her best friends, Jeff Fielder, an editor for McNally & Sons, Inc. Soon after meeting with Jeff, Isabel visits her assistant Alexis to make sure she has not given away the manuscript but she finds her dead in her apartment. This leads Isabel to fear that the wrong people may be working to assure The Accident is never published.

The author of The Accident is very intent on assuring the book is published and has gone to many lengths to stay hidden and to assure that the book is given to the right people. Slowly throughout this novel, more and more information is given about the author, his life and what he has done to assure the story about Charlie Wolfe is revealed. Some of what is revealed is not that surprising while others are major twists that only add to making this an even more enjoyable read.

Hayden Gray, a CIA operative apparently working on his own time, is working with Charlie Wolfe to assure that The Accident is never published. He seems willing to take whatever means are necessary to find out who and where the author of the book is and to eliminate all copies of the manuscript. These conflicting objectives and challenges lead Isabel Reed, Jeff Fielder and many others on one long adventurous day in this very entertaining book.

Pavone includes a lot of characters in the book, along with lots of twists and really you need notes to keep track. I normally do this when reading a book I’m reviewing, but if you are not one to do it, you will need to do it for this one or you probably will get lost. Pavone also likes to change the point of view through many of these characters as well. He rewards the reader with a great story if you can keep up, but otherwise you may be frustrated. Pavone also uses his many years in the book business to provide a realistic and interesting portrayal of the people and difficulties they face.

I was fortunate to meet Chris Pavone in Bouchercon in Albany last year, but at the time I did not know anything about him, although I certainly enjoyed my time talking to him. I was impressed though that he, along with a few other authors, were volunteering in the Concierge area where I was also volunteering. I was happy to see later that he won the Anthony for The Expats, his first novel and that I was able to obtain a copy of The Accident in my Bouchercon book bag. (As as a Boucheron volunteer, I obtained a few extra books and I made sure this was one of them.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 98 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown; First Edition edition (March 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chris Pavone
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another murder story: Death of a Writer by Michael Collins

Bibliography:

• The Expats (2012)  / 
• The Accident (March 2014)

“…tipped the contents of  of the pouch into his plan. He caught hold of the gold chain. The gold-filgreed pendant dangled. It bore the image, in vitreous enamel, of a peacock, a perfect gemstone staring from the tip of each painted feather.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (MAR 31, 2014)

Ayelet Waldman’s new book begins in Red Hook, Maine, the setting of her novel Red Hook Road, but the two could hardly be more different. For whereas she had previously confined herself to two families in the same setting over a period of a very few years, she travels in this one to Salzburg, Budapest, and Israel, at various periods over a hundred-year span. By the same token, though, it is a stretch to call Love and Treasure a novel; it is essentially a trilogy of novellas, each with different characters, but linked by a single object and common themes. The object is an enameled Jugendstil pendant in the shape of a peacock. Although only of modest value, it plays an important role in the lives of the people who people who possess it, and provides a focus for the novelist’s enquiry into the lives of Hungarian Jews both before and after the Holocaust.

In the prologue, Jack Wiseman, an old man dying of cancer, entrusts the pendant to his recently-divorced granddaughter Natalie. Immediately, we plunge into the first and by far the best of the novellas, set in Salzburg, Austria, in 1945. Jack, as a young lieutenant in the US Army, is entrusted with the administration of the box-car loads of valuable goods brought out of Hungary on the “Gold Train” — items that he realizes have all been “donated” by Hungarian Jews prior to their exile or extermination. I have no doubt that this is based on truth — not only the train itself, but the horrifying revelation of what happened to its contents, and indeed the exposure of continuing anti-Semitism on both sides even after the War was over. Set in a jurisdiction almost overrun by the sheer numbers of refugees, survivors, and other displaced persons, the story was disturbing, informative and gripping. Even more so as Jack falls passionately in love with one of the survivors, a fiery redhead named Ilona Jakab. It is a surprisingly muscular piece of writing building to a powerful finale. Had I stopped the reading then, I would have given the book five stars.

The other two sections are not quite of this standard. The second novella returns us to the present day when Natalie is in Budapest, keeping her promise to track down the original owner of her grandfather’s pendant. It is less interesting because the laborious process of searching archives is inherently less compelling, but also because it is more difficult to buy into the romance story in this episode. Natalie pairs up with an Israeli art dealer named Amitai Shasho, virile, polished, and wealthy — everything a hero should be — except that he is essentially a Holocaust profiteer, and thus a difficult man for me to trust. He will change towards the end of the novella, but I never really got over my initial disapproval.

The third section is rather more successful, taking us back to Budapest, but now in 1913. It works because Waldman has so perfectly captured the narrative voice of a Freudian psychoanalyst, Imré Zobel, describing his work with a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl named Nina S. It is a perfect parody of Freud’s own literary style, with the added deliciousness of a narrator who, if not actually unreliable, is certainly self-deceiving. But it takes us away from any of the characters whom we have met earlier, and although it fills in some interesting back-story, it is essentially a stand-alone piece.

I mentioned Waldman’s themes. Chief among them is anti-Semitism, seen in an historical context and in some unexpected places; Waldman both makes a strong case for Zionism, and reveals disturbing patterns of discrimination within the Zionist ideal. Almost equally strong is her concern for women’s rights and the historical suffragist movement. And as always, she writes very freely about sex. I was reminded of two other novels in particular. One is The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, which also looks at the twentieth century in Eastern Europe through the history of a single artifact. The other was The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, in its multi-sectional structure and use of psychoanalysis, though Waldman’s book is neither so adventurous in its writing nor so strongly focused on the Holocaust. But you might call it a peri-Holocaust novel, and this I did find interesting. If only it had maintained a stronger focus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ayelet Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Red Hook Road Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Bibliography:

• Daughter’s Keeper (2003)
• Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006)
• Red Hook Road (2010)
• Love and Treasure (April 2014)

Mommmy-Track Mysteries:

• Nursery Crimes (2000)
• The Big Nap (2001)
• A Playdate with Death (2002)
• Death Gets a Time-Out (2003)
• Murder Plays House (2004)
• The Cradle Robbers (2005)
• Bye-Bye Black Sheep (2006)

Also:

• Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (2005)
• Bad Mother: A Chronical of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009)

“The Interestings,” said Ash. “That works.”

So it was decided. “From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived,” said Ethan, “because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are.” In a ludicrously ceremonial moment they lifted paper cups and joints. “

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 24, 2014)

The greatest gift that any writer can give her readers is providing them with a fictional world they can immerse – and ultimately lose – themselves in.

That’s precisely what Meg Wolitzer achieves in The Interestings, surely the most fully-realized and satisfying book of her career.

This panoramic saga focuses on a group of Baby Boomers from the time they meet at a camp for the creatively gifted as teenagers through middle age. The bond that draws these divergent characters together is powerful and special; they dub themselves “The Interestings.” And the bond, for the most part, is stretched, sustained, and redefined as they age.

There is Jules, the key character, an aspiring comic actress-turned-therapist who attended the camp on scholarship . Her best friend is Ash – she and her twin Goodman have lived a charmed and fortunate life – and eventually marries their mutual friend Ethan. Ethan, the creator of an animated series called Figland, becomes successful beyond their wildest dreams. And then there is Jonah, the son of a Judy Collins type songwriter, who must navigate the boundaries of attachment at the start of the AIDS era.

At the core of this novel, there is an exploration of what it means to be special. As one character ultimately says about the camp that brought them together, “It made you feel special. What do I know – maybe it actually made you special. And specialness – everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do – kill themselves?”

The spotlight is squarely on two couples – Jules and her ultrasound technician husband Dennis and their friends Ash and Ethan – as the lure of money and fame threaten to place them in different stratospheres. The themes center on longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success…and how the definition of what it means to be “interesting” changes as life goes on. Jules says to Dennis,..meeting in childhood can seem like it’s the best thing – everyone’s equal, and you form bonds based only on how much you like each other. But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore…”

The Interestings is cemented in a transformative time, touching on many of the milestones of a unique generation: the rise of feminism, the confusion and terror of being gay at the cusp of the AIDS era, and perhaps most of all, being alive during that tipping point when “portfolios” shifted meaning from art portfolios to financial portfolios. It’s authentic, it’s genuine, and it’s so good I didn’t want it to end.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1003 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; Reprint edition (March 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Meg Wolitzer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Uncoupling

Bibliography:

• Sleepwalking (1982)
• Hidden Pictures (1986)
• This Is Your Life (1988)
• Friends for Life (1994)
• Surrender, Dorothy (1998)
• The Wife (2003)
• The Position (2005)
• The Ten-Year Nap (2008)
• The Uncoupling (2011)
• The Interestings (April 2013)

Movies from books:

• This is My Life (1992)
• Surrender, Dorothy (2006)

“Later, two cops would ask, more than once, how it was she didn’t see her. She could have offered up any number of theories: the dirt and mud on the woman’s back, the distance of twenty or thirty yards between the fence and Caren’s perch behind the driver’s seat, even her own layman’s assessment that the brain can’t possibly process what it has no precedent for. But none of the words came.

I don’t know, she said.

She watched one of the cops write this down.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 22, 2014)

The past and the present are inextricably bound, and history is examined, re-examined, and refined within the context of a changing world of ideas, new evidence, and reform. Attica Locke demonstrated this in her first crime book, Black Water Rising, (nominated for an Orange Prize in 2009). Once again, she braids controversial social and historical issues with an intense and multi-stranded mystery.

Locke artfully informs Cutting Season with the dark corners of our nation’s past and the ongoing prejudices and failures to live up to the enlightened ideals of equality and justice. Her fiction tells the truth through an imaginative storyline, and she enfolds these issues and more in this lush historical novel of murder, racism, and family. The title of the book refers to the season of sugarcane cutting.

Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a pre-civil war sugar cane plantation, Belle Vie, sits on eighteen acres of land, owned by the affluent Clancy family. The Clancys are descendants of William Tynan, who was hired by the federal government after the civil war to oversee the plantation. Tynan did such an outstanding job, he was eventually deeded the land.

Converted to a tourist attraction/historic preserve, with restored slave quarters and dramatic re-enactments of plantation life, Bell Vie is also a favorite setting for weddings and other festivities. Caren Gray, a single mother, manages everything at Bell Vie– the grounds, events, and personnel. Caren also has ties to the early descendants of the plantation, a complex history that unfolds gradually and evocatively. She is the great-great-great granddaughter of a slave named Jason who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and was never found.

Abutting the land to the west sits 500 acres of actively farmed sugar cane, also owned by the Clancy family and run by the Groveland Corporation. Since Groveland started managing the land, the families that worked there for generations were pushed out and replaced by migrant workers.

The book starts off with a bang, just like Locke’s earlier book did. On the border between Bell Vie and the sugarcane land, an employee stumbles on a murdered women, a migrant worker. When the local sheriff prematurely accuses a Bell Vie employee with a criminal past, Caren resolves to solve the crime herself. She subsequently learns that there have been sinister shenanigans involving Groveland, including support of the budding political interests of Raymond Clancy.

The atmospherics and setting of this novel, as well as the increasing tension and artful story, keep the reader attentive. Locke is not just skillful, but fragrant in describing the landscape of this largely provincial community. Her prose is sensuous and plump, and the visuals are ripe and resonant.

“…beneath its loamy topsoil…two centuries of breathtaking wealth and spectacle—a stark beauty both irrepressible and utterly incapable of even the smallest nod of contrition—lay a land both black and bitter, soft to the touch, and pressing in its power. She should have known that one day it would spit out what it no longer had use for, the secrets it would no longer keep.”

Like Locke’s first book, the plot is multi-faceted, with subplots often taking center stage and progressively weaving into the main intrigue. The theme centers on the uneasy link between the past and present, and how they must be reconciled. Caren’s desire to protect her child and expose corruption across echoes of time struck a deep chord in me.

The pacing is initially taut, although the characterizations gravitate toward standard. I was a bit disappointed in the relationship between Caren and her ex, Eric, because Black Water Rising’s main character, Jay Porter was so arresting—tilted, ambiguous, and most of all, unpredictable. The action between Caren and Eric is stilted, and feels convenient to the arc of the story. However, Caren’s voice is sensitive, intimate, and tenderly portrayed, despite being easily anticipated.

As the novel progressed toward the climax, Locke veered to formula. Perhaps she tried too hard to please readers of conventional genre. Cutting Season lumbered as it neared the final moments, becoming too ungainly and stitched together. The past and present fall into place too readily, yet I appreciate what Locke was trying to do in the juxtaposition of time and circumstance. Her intent was poetic; she strove for equanimity, but it got too exorbitant and contrived.

Despite these complaints, Locke’s talents are evident on every page. Locke’s sensual approach to language and narrative filters her flaws, mitigating them. The joy of reading comes from being absorbed in Bell Vie and the sumptuous layering of story. There’s a fine line between writing platitudes and conveying an awareness of racial issues and conflicts. Locke is generally nuanced, but she occasionally turned toward heavy-handedness, especially toward the finale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 172 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (September 17, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Attica Locke
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Black Water Rising

Bibliography:

• Black Water Rising (2009)
• The Cutting Season (2012)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 21, 2014)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.” For four friends, that line was crossed during their late teenage years, when one of them was poisoned, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, lingering in a physical limbo state until she finally dies years later.  The young man, Boyang, remains in China; the two young women, Ruyu and Moran, move to the United States. Each ends up living in what the author describes as a “life-long quarantine against love and life.”

Kinder than Solitude is not primarily a mystery of a poisoned woman nor is it an “immigrant experience” book, although it is being hailed as both. Rather, it’s a deep and insightful exploration about the human condition – how one’s past can affect one’s future, how innocence can be easily lost, and how challenging it is to get in touch with – let alone salvage – one’s better self.

“To have an identity – to be known – required one to possess an ego, yet so much more, too: a collection of people, a traceable track lining one place to another – all these had to be added to that ego or one to have any kind of identity,” Yiyun Li writes.

In the case of Moran, who married and divorced an older man she still cares for, what she called her life “…was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.” Riyu, the most enigmatic and detached of the characters, is an empty vessel, unable to connect or to experience much pleasure or pain, who strives to receive an “exemption from participating in life.” And Boyang, a successful entrepreneur with a cynical sense of the world, has discovered that “love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.”

This is a deeply philosophical book, one that delves into its characters, with an ambling narrative that shifts from the shared Chinese past to the present –China, San Francisco, the Midwest. It is not for everyone – certainly not for readers who are anticipating an action-packed, page-turning suspense novel. But for those who seek insights into the human condition and love strong character-based novels, Kinder Than Solitude offers rich rewards.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Yiyun Li
EXTRAS:	Q&A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pen/O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 edited by Laura Furman

Bibliography:

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (2005)
• The Vagrants (2009)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories (2010)
• Kinder Than Solitude (February 2014)

“Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 20, 2014)

The protagonist of Orfeo, Peter Els, listens at age thirteen to a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and is transported. This novel continues the author’s literary exploration of cutting edge science and its impact on its practitioners. Peter Els becomes a composer of serious music, very much of the current moment in the arts. He is a musical idealist, with a belief in the power of music to truly move the listener. As he matures, his work becomes ever more difficult and timely. As a young man he was a prodigy in music with talent in science as well. The creative juices of both flow in his veins. In college he starts out in chemistry, but becomes enmeshed in music through the musical connection with his first love, Clara. In graduate school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, his work becomes ever more difficult and “modern,” in part through his collaborations with Maddy, who becomes his lover and later his wife for a while, and with Richard Bonner, an experimental theater director who he meets while in graduate school. Richard pushes him to become ever more radical.

Peter teaches music at a small university for some years, but retires fairly young and returns to chemistry, taking up biohacking as a hobby, encoding music into the DNA of the serrata marcescens bacterium. Peter chooses it because of its ubiquity in scientific research and ready availability despite the fact that it can cause illness. On the surface, this might seem like an implausible fantasy to write art onto DNA, but Joe Davis, an artist, in Cambridge, MA, hijacked the expertise of molecular biologists at Harvard and MIT more than 30 years ago to modify the DNA of e-coli to encode a bitmapped image as well as the decoding scheme onto areas of that organism’s “junk” DNA. Through a Kafkaesque series of happenstance Peter becomes pursued by the authorities who are concerned that Peter might be a bio-terrorist.

Orfeo is literary science fiction of the highest order. It is not about the future, but rather takes the cutting edge of contemporary science and makes it part and parcel of the novel. Among other things it is also a learned and passionate discourse on western music as it has developed over time to the present with an emphasis on more recent work. Powers’ description of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is remarkable. My composer father wanted to name me Jupiter because the Jupiter Symphony was, in his opinion, the greatest symphony of all time. I’ve listened to it many times and find it quite wonderful, but I do not have the musical vocabulary to really appreciate its depth. Powers’ description of Peter Els listening to it for the first time showed me why my father felt so strongly. The poignant and elegiac description of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is wonderful poetic history. It is a piece that I’ve enjoyed many times and one whose history was familiar to me as well. Powers’ sympathetic appreciation of music is admirable.

I’m familiar with much of the contemporary music he describes and as far as I can see, the details, historical and artistic, are correct. The composers, old and new are as described. Powers gets his science right as well. The writing is brilliant, not dumbed down in any way, and evocative as all get out. I recommend this novel and author without reservation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (January 20, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Generosity: An Enhancement The Echo Maker

Bibliography:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
• Prisoner’s Dilemma
• The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
• Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• Gain (1998)
• Plowing the Dark (2000)
• The Time of Our Singing (2003)
• The Echo Maker (2006)
• Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
• Orfeo (January 2014)

“If a woman chooses the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (MAR 18, 2014)

Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel of domestic angst, You Should Have Known, is the story of Grace Reinhart Sachs. She is a therapist who, for fifteen years, has specialized in helping couples mend or sever their relationships as painlessly as possible. In addition, Grace’s publicist has arranged interviews and television appearances to stimulate interest in Grace’s forthcoming work of non-fiction. It cautions women to be on the lookout for warning signs that should give them pause before they invest time, energy, and emotional resources in a serious relationship. Her message is that when women fall in love, they are sometimes dazzled by what they perceive as instant chemistry. Consequently, they may not pay close attention to their partners’ flaws; only when it is too late do they realize that should have been more circumspect.

Grace considers herself fortunate to be wed to the handsome and charming Jonathan, a dedicated pediatric oncologist. The couple has a twelve-year-old son, Henry, who attends an exclusive private school and studies the violin with a top-notch teacher. One day, Grace learns some shocking secrets that prove how vulnerable even a trained professional may be to the blindness that she describes in her soon-to-be-released book. She realizes that her stable and blessed life is actually built on a foundation of lies.

The protagonist is a likeable character who, although a bit too clueless (hence, the irony), is an unselfish, kind, and loving mother. Her resilient and realistic attitude helps her and her son rebound from a series of horrendous setbacks. In addition, the author accurately portrays the entitled, affluent, and self-congratulatory parents who enjoy the good life in Manhattan with their cherished progeny. Korelitz insightfully explores how one handles unpleasant truths that have been carefully hidden from them for years. Do they break down and look to their friends and loved ones to bail them out? Do they run away? Or do they use whatever resources they have to get on with their lives? These are the dilemmas that face a thoroughly chastened Grace, who finally acknowledges how little she really knew about the man she married. You Should Have Known is timely, although it is marred by excessive length, several contrived plot elements, and a too-neat conclusion. Nevertheless, most readers will find Grace appealing enough to follow her struggles with interest and empathy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing (March 18, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jean Hanff Korelitz
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Admission

Bibliography:

• A Jury of Her Peers (1996)
• The Sabbathaday River (1999)
• The White Rose (2005)
• Admission (2009)
• You Should Have Known (March 2014)

Movies from books:

• Admission (2013)