“She takes pea pods from her vegetable rack and dumps them on the table. For a while there’s just the snap of the pods, and the neat, percussive sound of peas falling into bowls, and through her open door the scratch and bustle of chickens and the whisper of the countryside. A dark lacquer of sadness seems to spread across the room.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 28, 2011)

The quotation shows Margaret Leroy at her best, describing the ordinary routines of everyday life, in a strongly realized setting, and an acute emotional sensitivity. The place is Guernsey, one of the British Channel Islands nestling off the French coast between the arms of Normandy and Brittany. The time is 1940, when the islands came under German occupation, after being more or less abandoned by the British as indefensible. The sadness comes from the fact that man of this little farm has been one of the few inhabitants killed in the bombing that preceded the invasion. One of the very few, actually, for as the title of the book that Leroy acknowledges in her introduction indicates (The Model Occupation by Madeleine Bunting), the German occupation of Guernsey was marked by civility on both sides and little effective resistance. I have never read a wartime story in which the brutal atrocities that have become a stable of WW2 fiction are largely (but not entirely) absent.

But that “not entirely” is significant; where does one draw the line between cooperation and collaboration? When must one raise one’s head and take a stand? It is a moral grey area that fascinated Leroy, who has re-imagined it in a consistently enjoyable romance novel, though sometimes her greys get a little rose-tinted. The misty period cover jacket showing a shapely woman of the 1940s looking into the sunset framed by exotic blooms absolutely screams Romance! Fortunately there is very little in the actual writing that is anything like as misty-eyed. It also made me think of the cover for Sadie Jones’ Small Wars, which had something of the same romance magazine air. An unfortunate comparison, however, for it reminded me that the Jones novel had a great deal more blood and grit than this one, without losing its feminine focus. I could have done with a bit more of that here. But having said that, I have said the worst; Leroy is a compelling writer and gives much to enjoy.

Leroy’s protagonist, Vivienne de la Mare, English by birth, is unhappily married to a Guernsey Islander. Now, while her husband is off with the army, she must look after her two daughters (Blanche and Millie, ten years apart) and her senile mother-in-law Evelyn. There are three main elements to the story. The first is the ordinary business of parenting: reading bedtime stories to the younger child, guiding the older one’s first forays into dating, fielding the criticisms of a demanding mother-in-law; Leroy handles all this with obvious understanding. The second is specific to the place and time, a curious cocktail of glamor and deprivation. This may well be Leroy’s strongest suit, as she captures both the style of the period and the beauty of the island’s leafy lanes and upland heaths, yet does not stint on the difficulty of making do under wartime conditions. Especially strong is her sense of community, and the way in which the inhabitants of nearby farms and homes rely on one another to get by. We have already seen some of this in my opening quotation; let me add to Vivienne’s description of the countryside near her home:

“I love that sense of going deep, of being enclosed. It’s like the way it feels when you follow the Guernsey lanes down here to our home, in this wet wooded valley of St. Pierre du Bois. The valley seems so safe and cloistered, like a womb. Then, if you walk on, you will go up, up, and out suddenly into the sunlight, where there are cornfields, kestrels, the shine of the sea. Like a birth.”

Then there is the third element, the wartime romance. The empty house next door to Vivienne’s is requisitioned by two German officers and their batmen. One of these, Captain Gunther Lehmann, an architect in civilian life, brings small presents to Vivienne; she refuses at first, but despite herself she falls in love. It is a beautiful oasis in the middle of war, answering a need in both of them, for Gunther is a man of peace trapped in a soldier’s uniform, and a passionate man in a loveless marriage. But of course strains do arrive which pull Vivienne’s loyalties and affections in different directions. Despite the model nature of the occupation as it affects people of her own nationality and class, she becomes aware of the more brutal aspects of the war and will ultimately be forced to make choices. Some of what happens at the end seemed a little implausible; this is, after all, a romance. But within its genre it is sensitive, richly textured, and consistently enjoyable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Voice; Original edition (June 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Leroy
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Yes, My Darling Daughter Postcards from Berlin and Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Bibliography:

• Trust (1999)
• Alysson’s Shoes (March 2002)
• Postcards from Berlin (August 2003)
• The River House (June 2005)
• Yes, My Darling Daughter (April 2009) (aka The Drowning Girl in UK)
• The Soldier’s Wife (June 2011) (aka The Collaborator in UK)

Nonfiction:

• Miscarriage (1987)
• Pleasure: the truth about female sexuality (1993)
• Some Girls Do: why women do and don’t make the first move (1997)

“The world, it seemed, though not united in their opinion of our kind, was united in their awareness of our kind, and by extension, their need to remark upon it – the fact of me, a white woman, married to him, a black man.

The only problem, of course, was that it wasn’t true. Any of it.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 2, 2011)

What does it mean to be biracial and free in postmillennial America? The writer James Baldwin is quoted as saying, “Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be.”

By that definition, do the young interracial women that inhabit Danzy Senna’s first collection of short stories want to be free? Or do they want to belong to a collective… something, larger than themselves? The answer, as one might suspect, is complicated.

Danzy Senna – author of Caucasia, daughter of the African-Mexican poet Carl Senna and Fanny Howe, a white American of Irish descent – explores this question from her unique vantage point. Each of her characters is struggling for self-identity; each is hopeful and yet yearning for more. The short story collection is populated with ambivalent women, detached husbands, troubled girlfriends, and young babies and toddlers.

In the eponymous title story, Lara, a New Yorker who is anticipating her first byline from an obscure magazine tries hard to love her fate as a childless woman. Still, when she receives a mistaken call from a young girl who believes Lara is her mother, she goes into self-denial: “She had a family – a child – and the knowledge of this made her feel complete, though she knew she was not supposed to buy into such retrograde logic.” Yet still she does, with nebulous “what-ifs.”

Then there’s Livy, a Brooklyn-born artist and new mother who has found happiness with a Santa Fe gallery owner. When Livy hosts an old and spurned friend, she discovers that the connection between them has disintegrated: “She felt the daughter-self, young and vain, dying, and the mother-self, huge and sad, rising up in its wake, linking her to nothing less than history.” And we meet the liberal and African-American couple Cassie Duncan; tensions flare when their pre-schooler is admitted to a very tony private school and a decision must be made.

Lara, Livy, Cassie and others struggle with identity in a world that sometimes considers them interchangeable. (In the story “What’s The Matter With Helga and Dave?,” two women who look nothing alike are mistaken for each other because each is part of a supposedly interracial couple). Their greatest sense of comfort seems to be found in community: a young woman Janice takes in an abandoned puppy after being dumped by her black boyfriend and withdraws into a new world of dog caregivers who meet in the park each morning. Livy feels “love of a religious magnitude” for the world of new mothers, a world to which she has just gained entry. Helga’s friend Rachel gains a feeling of comfort after moving into The Chandler, an apartment building with other interracial couples.

These revealing stories have a seemingly effortless flow to them, despite some flaws. Some of the conclusions do have a retrograde feel: single women are inevitably unhappy; motherhood mostly brings meaning and fulfillment. Danzy Senna sometimes doesn’t trust her readers enough; for instance, the reader can evidently conclude that the mixed-breed dog Beulah is a stand-in for her owner, but Ms. Senna drums the message home. And her story “Triptych” – the same story told three times – is simply too gimmicky. Still, this is an insightful look about appearances and attachment in our increasingly hard-to-define nation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; 1 edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Danzy Senna
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

Bibliography:

• Caucasia (1999)
• Symptomatic (2004)
• You Are Free: Stories (May 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009)

“But you have to trust me when I say that at heart Dan’s a good kid. Honestly. If he were here now, you would see for yourself. He just needs a firm hand at times. Like a lot of boys his age. It’s just a phase. That’s all. Just a phase.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy (MAY 20, 2011)

Julian Poulter, the first-person narrator of Rebecca Frayn’s Deceptions, is a somewhat priggish individual who says things like, “I’ve always believed one must strive to put painful episodes behind one with the minimum of fuss and bother.” He is a master of denial who, in flashback, tells how he and Annie Wray, a teacher, tried to forge a permanent relationship when he moved in with her and her two children by her late husband. Annie is flightier and far more spontaneous than Julian; each provides a quality that the other lacks.

Annie’s daughter, Rachel, is eight; she is a sweet little girl who gives her mother little cause to worry. On the other hand, twelve-year-old Dan has become surly and uncommunicative. He has begun dressing and talking like some of his less wholesome schoolmates in Fishers Comprehensive. Dan’s grades have dropped, and he has made it clear that he resents Julian, whom he views as an interloper. Not long after Julian and Annie announce their intention to marry, Dan leaves and does not return.

This is a heartbreaking tale of a family ripped apart by tragedy. Julian, who adores Annie, tries to be patient with her mood swings. Her outlook fluctuates from optimism to despair; unsurprisingly, she is guilt ridden and finding her child becomes an obsession. To some extent, Rachel and Julian are shunted aside while the drama unfolds. The author captures the agony of waiting by the telephone, spotting kids who look like Dan but are not, and repeating the same information to the police so many times that the situation becomes surreal. This is every parent’s “waking nightmare,” and Frayn explores the ripple effect that this calamity has on the immediate family and the community as a whole.

The title refers to the ways in which we delude ourselves and others: Does Annie really love Julian or is she subconsciously exploiting him? Is Julian psychologically sound or is he so repressed that genuine emotions leave him helpless? Can Annie learn to live with the possibility that Dan may be gone forever? When a shocking development gives Annie hope that her troubles may be behind her, Julian has his doubts.

Since we suspect Julian’s perspective may be somewhat distorted, we have no choice but to draw our own conclusions. Frayn makes good use of dialogue, pregnant pauses, and subtle clues to seize and hold our attention. We suspect that what seems obvious may not even be true, and that one person’s reality can be another’s fantasy. Deceptions is distressing, touching, and painful; it shows how dangerous it is to love someone too much; when we open our hearts, we become vulnerable. Sometimes, self-deception is the only tool that allows us to face another day without going mad.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Washington Square Press; Original edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Frayn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver The Disapparation of James by Anne Ursu

Bibliography:

• One Life (2007)
• Deceptions (May 2011)
• Loved Up

“How did your mother happen to go missing?”

That is the most awkward—and frequent—question people have asked since Mom went missing. It’s always asked with a mixture of curiosity and judgment.

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtuman  (APR 15, 2011)

Those who have traveled in Southeast Asia – and Korea in particular — will know right away that the number 4 (pinyin sì) is considered unlucky because it sounds like “death” (pinyin s?). Why, then, did Korean author Kyung-sook Shin carefully craft a novel from four different viewpoints?

The answer is that the members of this family are unlucky, or at the very least, careless.  Through years as a family, none of them ever really knew Mom or understood the sources of her strength.  And now she has disappeared in a crowded Seoul subway station, where she and her husband of 50 years were about to board a train. Her disappearance devastates those who are left behind.

The story is told from four alternating points of view:  Chi-hon, the oldest daughter and a successful novelist, Hyung-chol, the oldest son who is wracked with guilt for not living up to his potential, her husband who inevitably disappointed Mom through his selfishness and adultery, and last of all, Mom.   Little by little, a fuller image of Mom emerges, although we, the readers, never really get to know all the facets of Mom either.

Chi-hon reflects, “Either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers…You realized you’d become a stranger as you watched Mom try to conceal her messy everyday life.”  As Chi-hon strives to sort out who her Mom really was, she realizes that, “…because of one thing or another you would push calling her to the end of your list.”  Mom had become superfluous in her busy life, a solid presence who was always a little bit of an enigma.

Hyung-chol was the favored son who was both idolized and pressured.  In the end though, he could not live up to Mom’s aspirations and dreams for him.  “Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.”

The two adult children – and their father – realize, too late, that Mom was an integral part of their existence.  Father thinks, “When she planted seedlings of eggplant, purple eggplants hung everywhere throughout the summer and into the fall.  Anything she touched grew in bounty.”  Still, he selfishly ignores her intense headaches and the heartbreaks that Mom is forced to undergo alone.

When we get to Mom’s story,  we learn some of the background – her arranged marriage, for instance, and a few of the secrets she keeps.  But it’s left to Chi-hon to recognize the truth in a letter from her younger sister, “Do you remember asking me a little while ago to tell you something I knew about Mom?  All I knew was that Mom’s missing.  It’s the same now.  I especially don’t know where her strength came from. Think about it.  Mom did things that one person couldn’t do by herself.  I think that’s why she became emptier and emptier.”

Please Look After Mom is a novel that’s distinctly Korean –ancestral-rite tables, the Full Moon Harvest, plum juice and steamed skate – but is also very universal.  Every view is explored – Chi-hon and Father’s stories are in second person, Hyung-chol’s is in third person and Mom’s is in first person.  And, while the second person tense can become a little cumbersome, the writing is still direct, moving, and graceful.

It’s worth noting that Kyung-sook Shin is already a prominent novelist in Korea; the book sold nearly one and a half million copies in South Korea.  Translated expertly by Chi-Young Kim,  the book is certain to make readers appreciate the hardworking, uncomplaining women who go by the simple endearment “Mom.” (Translated by Chi-young Kim.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kyung-sook Shin
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “missing” people stories: The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Please Look After Mom (2009; April 2011 in US)

“When she lay in bed at night, looking back on the past year, she realized the loss of all that money and the prospect of her children growing up poor had terrified her more than the ghastly scenarios described on the news. And Douglas seemed more afraid of screwing up their finances again and of her walking out on him than he was of terrorists.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman  (NOV 24, 2010)

Let me say it straight out: this book is astoundingly GOOD. Page-turning, jaw-dropping, laugh-out-loud, cry-into-your-sleeves, gasp-with-recognition GOOD. It takes on nothing less than the theme of what is wrong with America today and it does it very well.

The action takes place over one Thanksgiving day with lots of flashbacks. There hasn’t been a family like the Olsons since Zoe Heller’s The Believers – with a dollop of the movie Pieces of April blended in. This family DEFINES dysfunction.

Gavin, the father, is a Vietnam vet whose career went wildly off track because of the anti-war sentiment when he returned. His wife Eleanor is a Wellesley graduate who traded in ambitions for an apron and a cookbook. Douglas, their older son, cashed in on the real estate boom – making him more successful than his old man ever was – and is now suffering the effects of the crash. His wife Denise – a one-time poor girl who has become enamored of the money – is less than enchanted with him. Ginny, the academic daughter, is emotionally closed-off and has recently adopted a 7-year-old Indian daughter, Priya,

Add to that two 17-year-olds from the housing projects – Kijo and Spider – who have a personal grudge against Douglas and break-in and enter his home while they’re temporarily away – and you have the makings of a potentially tragic situation.

The author, Jennifer Venderbes, has a clear understanding of the human condition. Her dialogue is crisp, compelling, and pithy. There are little gems throughout this book. For instance: “Men didn’t have heroes, they STUDIED heroes, as though greatness and masculinity could be transmitted through reading, as though knowing the lyrics to every Mick Jagger song…got them one step closer to playing Madison Square Garden. A woman, at most, would dress like the woman she admired…”

There is much about the emasculation of the American warrior (Ginny is writing a paper on it), and how Vietnam was directly responsible for this phenomenon; this emasculation will show up time and time again. There is much about eminent domain and how it plays out in the real world, particularly with race relationships. There is much about how we – as Americans – have lost our sense of values and have substituted it with worship of money and status.

But the book is never preachy or never pedantic. It’s filled with smart conversation, convincing characters, compassion and insights. Portions will make you laugh with acknowledgement, other portions will break your heart. In a way, this is a portrait of the “every family.” You won’t soon forget the Olsons or the world that Jennifer Venderbes has so expertly created.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 35 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jennifer Vanderbes
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another family dinner book: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Bibliography:

• Easter Island (2003)
• Strangers at the Feast (August 2010)

“As she talks, she distractedly quickens her pace, pulled along by the living memory — Ofer on the beach, a bold puppy bristling with the future, she behind him, hiding at times, although there was no need because he never turned to look back. She wondered how far he would go, and he answered her with his steps: forever. She saw [...] how the day would come when he would leave her, just get up and go, as they always do, and she guessed a little of what she would feel on that day, a little of what now, without any warning, digs its predatory teeth into her.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 21, 2010)

This is Ora, a fiftyish Israeli woman, thinking about her younger son, Ofer, who has not merely left home, but done so in a way that fills her with fear. On the day of his discharge from military service, when he is already on leave at home, he volunteers to join the forces fighting some unspecified action in Southern Lebanon, signing up for a further month. Terrified that at any moment a notification team will turn up at her house to inform her of Ofer’s death, Ora flees to the Galilee mountains, beyond the reach of any news. As her husband Ilan has left her several months before, taking with him their eldest son, Ora is all alone. On impulse, she calls on Avram, a former lover who has fallen on hard times, seeking his company, his listening ear, and perhaps his restoration to mental and physical health, along with her own. The whole novel is essentially her “Month of Magical Thinking,” in which the past combines with the present, folding her personal history and that of her country into an almost mystical union.

It would be magnificent if the book were not so confoundedly long; even so, there is a lot in it I can praise. I was impressed, for instance, by the phantasmagorical prologue, in which Ora, Avram, and Ilan, sick with high fever in the wake of some epidemic, meet each other in night-time visits to each other’s wards in a darkened Jerusalem hospital that has been almost evacuated in anticipation of casualties from the 1967 Six Day War. The bonds forged between the three of them will last a lifetime. I was impressed at first, too, by the immediacy and tension of the story when it jumps ahead to 2000. As Ora has lost her license, she is forced to ask their Palestinian driver Sami take her and Ofer to the army rendezvous point, a strangely insensitive mission to ask an Arab to undertake. But Grossman himself is not insensitive, balancing this extraordinary event against a long background of apparent friendship between Ora’s family and Sami, who in turn exacts his own price, leading to a fascinating glimpse of Palestinian culture in the Israeli underbelly, a scene that directly reflects the nightmare mood of the novel’s prelude. After so much polemical writing set in the Middle East, this political frankness was heartening; Grossman is clearly a writer whom one can trust.

But this too is only prelude. It is not until page 116 that the main part of the novel begins, when Ora and Avram arrive in the Galilee. Now we begin to look back as much as forward. Avram’s connections with Ilan, Ora and her children will be explained gradually over the course of the next 460 pages, if the reader can be persuaded to ignore the many other reviews that will certainly give the key facts away. In a narrative that seemingly occupies three or four different time-frames at once, we will learn of Avram’s traumatic experiences during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the testing of the close bonds between him and Ilan, and the strains in Ora’s marriage, caused in part by his presence offstage. We will also learn — at length — of Ofer’s childhood; it seems that Ora’s prime motive in this hike is to talk about her son (even at one point digging a pit and screaming into the belly of the earth), in the shadow of her fear for his death. Even as we follow Ora and Avram in their hike through wild and beautiful country, their trail is dotted with memorials to Israeli soldiers killed in defence of their land, exactly the kind of memento mori that Ora is hoping to avoid.

Were these elements in better balance, the book might be superb. But Ora’s magical thinking dominates all; it is almost though she is exorcising a premature grief. Imagine a mother going through every picture in every family album, and telling you exactly what her child was doing when it was taken, the clever things he said, the phases he went through, the small worries he caused. The obsessive detail is excruciating. When Grossman describes the actual hike, he can be superb; there are marvelous incidents such as a meeting with a peripatetic messiah of mirth, or a terrifying encounter with a pack of wild dogs, but these are too few and far between. My interest picked up towards the end, which describes the desperate fighting in Sinai just before the change of fortunes in the Yom Kippur War. And on an almost metaphorical level, Grossman offers an insight into Israeli psychology that strikes me as being deeply authentic. But when everything has to be filtered through the mind of a warm but obsessive and often hallucinating woman, it can be hard going to get there — though the very ending is grace itself. (Translated by Jessica Cohen.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 71 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 21, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on David Grossman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Israeli woman tells her story:My Michael by Amos Oz

Bibliography:

• Duel (1982; 1998 in English)
• The Smile of the Lamb (1983; 1990 in English)
• See Under: Love (1986; 1989 in English)
• The Book of Initmate Grammar (1991; 1994 in English)
• The ZigZag Kid (1994; 1997 in English)
• Be My Knife (1998; 2001 in English)
• Someone to Run With (2000; 2003 in English)
• Her Body Knows: Two Novellas (2003; 2005 in English)
• To the End of the Land (September 2010)

Nonfiction:

• The Yellow Wind (1987; 1988 in English)
• Sleeping on a Wire: Conversation with Palestinians in Israel (1992; 1993 in English)
• Death as Way of Life: From Oslo to the Geneva Agreement (2003)
• Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson (2005; 2006 in English)
• Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics (2008 in English)

“Lots of TV is made-up pictures – like Dora’s, just a drawing – but the people, the ones with faces that look like you and me, they’re real.”

“Actual humans?”

She nods. “And the places are real too, like farms and forests and airplanes and cities…”

“Nah.” Why is she tricking me? “Where would they fit?”

“Out there,” says Ma. “Outside. ” She jerks her head back.

“Outside Bed Wall?” I stare at it.

“Outside Room.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 18, 2010)

Emma Donoghue is not afraid of making bold choices. Her first is the narrative voice she adapts in this novel: that of five-year-old Jack, a young boy who was born and has lived his entire life in an 11-foot by 11-foot room. One might think the voice would eventually become cloying or overly precious or manipulative or downright tiring. But it never does.

Jack is an innocent, an imaginative child, whose mother was spirited away by an abductor (called Old Nick) when she was returning home from her college library. She has lived in Room ever since – for seven long years – and gave birth to Jack, the son of her abductor, within Room (a sound-proofed, lead-lined backyard shed).  And she has tried her best to fashion a life for him there, creating innovative games — from the Scream (done once a day), to Labyrinth and Fort and Bouncy Bunny. Together, Ma and Jack have created characters out of all aspects of Room – Rug, Plant, Wardrobe, Stove – watch the world on their small T.V. set, and devote every ounce of energy to each other.

The horror of this confinement is racheted up through Jack’s simplistic view of the Room, which to him, constitutes the world. He hides in Wardrobe at night and times Old Nick’s visits by counting the number of creaks in the bed. He senses when Ma is “Gone”–depressed and withdrawn — and yet can’t quite reason out why. But Ma is more attuned to the threats: she knows that as Jack ages, he is in increasing danger and that his budding curiosity will eventually cause him fatal harm.

Eventually choices are made and freedom comes, but at a cost. And when it does, Ms. Donoghue develops some bold and powerful themes: is the Room we know safer than the World Outside? Is it better to have multiple choices or just a restrictive few? Are we all confined in a Room of our making – even when we choose freedom or have it thrust upon us – or will we eventually find the strength to break out?

As Jack yearns for the security and predictability of Room, Ma tells him, “I keep messing up. I know you need me to be your ma but I’m having to remember how to be me as well at the same time…” The scariest thing for Ma is the fear that Room has obliterated who she really is. And for Jack? The scariest thing is a world without being the core of Ma’s universe.

This riveting book – a book I easily place in my Top Five of the year – goes far beyond the victim-and-survivor tale. It’s an amazing and sensitive look about a mother’s love, a study of a “stranger in a strange land,” a tale that displays the power of survival, and an indictment of a society that has lost the ability to empathize with those who are hurting (Ms. Donoghue’s wickedly humorous look at the media and its over-the-top rhetoric is reason enough to buy Room.) Most of all, it’s a careful examination of how we can take the most heinous circumstances and painstakingly extract something of beauty and value.

I cannot praise Room enough. It’s a triumph of story-telling filled with crackling dialogue, thought-provoking themes, and a page-turning quality that won’t let you stop until you reach the last page.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 881 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (September 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Emma Donoghue
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another unique narrative: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Bibliography:

• Stirfry (1994)
• Hood (1995)
• Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) 
• Slammerkin (2000)
• The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories (2002)
• Life Mask (2004)
• Touchy Subjects: Stories (2006)
• Landing (2007)
• The Sealed Letter (2008) Lambda
• Room (September 2010) Commonwealth Prize

Nonfiction:

• Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993)
• We Are Michael Field (1998)
• Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (May 2010)

“This Wednesday has been building to since seven this morning, Jacqueline thinks, since Sylvie was first born.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (SEP 6, 2010)

From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and just recently, Jennifer Vanderbes’ Strangers at the Feast, unhappy families have been a staple of literature all over the globe. What, or who, put the “y” in unhappy, in dysfunction? Canadian author Lee Kvern mines this question with a brutally honest sensitivity in her intimate family portrait of Lloyd and Jacqueline Burrows and their three children–”four, if you count Sylvie.”

In short, enigmatic, alternating chapters, over three decisive Wednesdays in three successive decades, the story of the Burrows family is teased out with measured restraint from its blistering beginnings to its nuanced conclusion. Three days of narratives gradually unite–Jacqueline in 1961, Lloyd in 1973, and Lesa, their oldest daughter, in 1987–and the years between them melt away and form a cohesive, lucent whole.

In the punishing prairie landscape of Red Deer, in Calgary, Jacqueline Burrows lives with her philandering husband, Lloyd, and their three small children, in a small and indistinct row house next to other RCMP wives, aka “the abandoned wives.” Lloyd is on the night shift of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and is rarely home. In 1961, Jacqueline is pregnant and exhausted, her maternal eyes on Lesa, Nate, and Sylvie, as they frolic bantam through the street. A devoted and sensible mother, she nevertheless relies on five-year-old Lesa as her bulwark to keep Sylvie close.

Sylvie was born asphyxiated, the cord wrapped around her neck. She was left with severe mental challenges and suffers from grand mal seizures. Jacqueline loves her fiercely but is overcome with guilt.

On this hot July Wednesday, Jacqueline sees Sylvie (from the kitchen window) start to climb in a strange man’s car. She intervenes and saves her with a scream, blames Lesa for failing to protect her, and subsequently chides herself. To make matters worse, the RCMP can’t find her husband when she calls for help.

“She thinks about her husband…in the arms, the bed of some other woman. Another other. And…while she no longer wants her husband–whether by God or by the sheer luminosity of their children, she needs him. The two are twisted up like electrical wires, complicated and live.”

Flash forward to February, 1973, and Corporal Lloyd’s narrative. His shift has ended, but he is embroiled in rescuing Jimmy Widman, the town drunk, who has been beaten senselessly and left frozen in the snow. Jimmy has had countless drunk-and-disorderly troubles, and no authority wants to help him anymore. But the taciturn corporal overextends himself and risks his job to help him.

Ironically, Lloyd recoils from home life and is often absent during family crises. Early in the marriage, he was Dudley-Do-Right to Jacqueline’s Nell, but the moniker has faded along with his vows; the matter of Sylvie has eroded his love.

“He sits in his cruiser, motor idling, glances down Main Street–his street, his town…farmers, ranchers, one doctor, one vet…one drive-in theater…one wife, three–no, four children, if he counts Sylvie, but he seldom does. The cruel, imperfect line across her small lips, her dark eyes glimmering like Lloyd’s, like the blonde’s in the bar last night…”

The connection of Jimmy’s destiny to the Burrows’ fate is disclosed through the drama of his story. Lloyd hauls a bundled-up Widman through hoops in a cat-and mouse chase to save Widman’s life and perhaps his own soul.

Lesa’s Wednesday of 1987 begins with a plane ride home to visit her mother in Red Deer. She’s a wreck, an adolescent at thirty-one. She flirts shamelessly but silently with a stranger at the airport, hoping to–she doesn’t know what. Her live-in boyfriend is home in Vancouver, but she’s terrified of emotional intimacy. She has dyed her firebrand red hair to the inky black of Sylvie’s, her agenda unknown.

Moreover, she is parading around in a super-hero costume with spiked pleather boots and a tawdry wig. (Her excuse–it is almost Halloween) Her brother, Nate, doesn’t recognize her at the baggage claim. When they get to Red Deer, her courage takes a flying leap. She deposits Nate at Jacqueline’s door and goes on an adventure in her Storm costume and cape that is poised to either sabotage or awaken her life.

“She wishes she were a kid again. That brief period of time when no matter what, all is forgiven; everything slips away like silk to skin, smoke to air, a magician’s trick performed by her mother…She knows the trick of the dysfunctional family all too well in that it leaves you lacking, looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

This isn’t a sentimental story about caring for Sylvie, a child with special needs. It is about a family’s catalyst to a long, uncertain truth. Sylvie, at age four, was that catalyst, on a particular thorny day when Murphy’s Law and Wednesdays became destiny. In elegiac and spare prose, Kvern brings the reader from the oblique to the sublime, from the edges of the family to the heart of the matter…of Sylvie.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Brindle & Glass; 1st edition (September 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lee Kvern
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Bibliography:

• Afterall (2001)
• The Matter of Sylvie (September 2010)

“Don’t we all assume we’ll do it differently, not repeat the past? We believe with all out hearts that we can rise above the things [our parents] couldn’t. Sometimes, our beliefs blind us.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 19, 2010)

At first I thought this book was not for me as a male reviewer, for its focus is so much upon its central female character and her roles as daughter, wife, and mother. But I soon found Dori Ostermiller gripping me with her writing, and her uncanny ability to plot the emotional seismograph of a woman on the brink of an affair. “I want to ask if she ever felt she was falling through her life, pulled down through dream and memory by a force larger than gravity. I want to know if she felt the splintering pain of it — a terrible, fruitful pain like birth, a pain you can’t stop because you have to know what’s on the other side.”

The speaker is Sylvia Sandon, a 38-year-old artist living in the Berkshires, cautiously probing her mother about her own experience with adultery. Up to this point in the book, we have seen Sylvia in alternating chapters: as a rising teenager in California in the seventies caught on the edges of her mother’s affair, and as a mother herself three decades later, getting drawn into this affair of her own. While Ostermiller’s identification with the younger Sylvia is strong, her insight into the adult woman is extraordinary, as she struggles in vain against her attraction to the divorced father of one of her art students. One may not approve of Sylvia’s choices, but my goodness one feels for her.

Lurking in the background, however, is also the specter of child abuse. Not merely the physical violence that Sylvia’s father visited on her in his drunken rages, but the more subtle co-dependent relationship she was drawn into with both parents, which can be equally harmful in the long run. Sylvia’s mother recruited her daughters as allies, enablers, and secret-keepers in her long-running affair, playing into the unhealthy rivalry the girl was already feeling towards her father. Now Sylvia looks like repeating the mistake with her own children. Although the novel threatens to settle into a pattern in its middle section, Ostermiller keeps some surprises in store, showing that it may be possible to learn something from old errors. While avoiding facile conclusions, I found the outcome far more moving than I ever imagined I would.

It is not quite a perfect novel, though. It is hard to believe that Sylvia’s mother could keep her affair hidden from her husband for so long, when she even takes the children on holiday with her lover. More serious to me as a male reader is the comparative lack of dimension in Ostermiller’s male characters, unless she simply sees the world of men as inherently flawed. Sylvia has a tyrannical grandfather, a father given to outbursts of violence, and a well-meaning but excessively absent husband. To her credit, Ostermiller shows some of their good sides also, as when Sylvia, on the edge of her affair, is tormented by happy memories of her own courtship. But the male portraits are partial, and always seen through her eyes. Even Tai, the man she falls in love with, does not emerge as a character in his own right, so much as somebody who can touch Sylvia’s own private yearnings: “His lips fanned out inside the oval of his beard, broad and lonely, and it reminded me of the Northern California coast for some reason — a kind of beauty shot through with loss.”

And yet this is the imagery of an artist, which Sylvia is. When struggling to get a handle on her feelings, her confused emotions do become a kind of poetry. And I realize that Ostermiller is being entirely consistent in viewing her men exclusively through Sylvia’s eyes. Her mother’s lover is no more fleshed out than a young girl would see of him. Her own lover exists mainly in a dream world, because she never sees him in his everyday one. Her husband remains a shadow until she begins to think seriously about what she might be giving up by leaving him. I can admire the intensity of Ostermiller’s identification with Sylvia from a certain distance, but I bet there are many readers out there who will say: “In different circumstances, this might well be ME.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mira; Original edition (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dori Ostermiller
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other books to explore: Husband and Wife by Leah Sterwart She is Me by Cathleen Schine

Bibliography:

• Outside the Ordinary World (July 2010)

“She skipped right over the sledding in her made-up scenario and thought instead about the tired kids trudging home afterwards, their boots crunching over white diamonds of snow. Her imagination focused on the mother who greeted them at the door, helping them take off their wet things, hanging damp mittens and hats by the radiator, warming their icy fingers between her own hands and asking if they wanted marshmallows in their hot chocolate. The mother part was the only thing she really envied, the only thing she wanted for herself.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (AUG 10, 2010)

Motherhood gets explored in A Scattered Life, by Karen McQuestion. Skyla lost her own mother when she was a girl, and with that loss began a itinerant life with a father who had to move around to find work. Married for a few years, she has settled down to the suburban life she dreamed of as a child, and is the mother of a four-year-old daughter named Nora. Her orderly and more-than-a-decade-older husband, Thomas, and she were always in agreement that they would only have one child.

Thomas’ mother, Audrey, has three grown sons on whom, arguably, she doted so much that two were in no hurry at all to leave even after adulthood. Thomas was one of those. He taught school and saved his money and lived at home for years. But then he met Skyla waitressing in one of Wisconsin’s few Mexican restaurants and finally felt inspired to leave his mother’s comfortable but somewhat stifling nest. Audrey doesn’t begrudge her son a life, she thinks, but she does feel left out sometimes. She never was granted one of her heart’s desires — to have a daughter too — and she would like to see granddaughter Nora a lot more than she does.

Skyla’s new neighbors are the Bears: Ted, Roxanne, and five pre-adolescent boys. Skyla feels drawn to this loud, boisterous family right away. Thomas, however, disapproves of the hit-and-miss parenting skills they see all too pointedly on the Bear family’s moving-in day and advises her to stay away from them. Think Skyla listens? As the women quickly become friends, Roxanne confides that her childbearing ambitions extend to Cheaper by the Dozen territory. She says she told Ted about her dreams when they first started going out and he said, ” ‘Whatever you want, baby.’ ” Yet, now Ted thinks Roxanne should deal with the passel she’s got and he is thinking of getting a vasectomy to keep their herd from accidentally increasing. Like Audrey, whom Roxanne also encounters — much further along in the story — Mama Bear longs for a daughter. She and Skyla take their children on picnics and enjoy time together.

But life for these mothers doesn’t stand still, of course. Audrey (whose husband likes to plant himself in front of the TV) tries to fill her days with something besides being a busybody. Skyla decides that while little Nora is attending four-year-old kindergarten, she will work in the rundown bookstore owned by a rather eccentric widow. The store owner was told by a fortune teller who does readings in the store that someone would come to help her, and Skyla fits the bill — especially since Skyla herself shows signs of possessing a few extrasensory abilities. Roxanne, meanwhile, is busy trying to get pregnant again with or without Ted’s explicit agreement. She also finds herself in hot water when a social worker makes a surprise inspection and finds the house and the children topsy-turvy. Could her rather careless mothering methods be an endangerment to her kids? Will there be consequences? And what made the social worker knock on the Bears’ door in the first place?

For much of A Scattered Life, the reader can savor getting to know Audrey, Skyla, and Roxanne. I chose this novel because I was in the mood for something light and heartwarming about families, and I hoped to find that in these pages. I did. But I would have had to stop reading at a certain point to be able to say there no tragedy takes place. There does. When I realized what was going to happen (don’t worry, I won’t tell you here), my stomach clenched a little from dread. Oh, no, I thought. Of course, my wishing it wouldn’t happen didn’t change the print to come. Did I stop reading? No. I still had plenty of curiosity about how the story tied up in the end. And after I finished, I thought it was a good conclusion that showed a very valuable life lesson. Still, I felt disappointed about the sad turn the book took. I wish it had been different.

But then again, isn’t it that the way in real life? Sad things happen. We can wish until donkeys go parasailing — wait! a donkey did go parasailing, so I need another example — er, until jellyfish make honey that we could stop them, but we can’t. There is nothing “unreal” about this book. Skyla’s mother died when she was young. Nothing could change that. Some children, Skyla realizes, are destined to grow up without their own, loving mothers. But there are people who also mothers who don’t have daughters (or, for that matter, who don’t have sons). Perhaps they can fill in. Mothers are forever mothers; they and their children are still joined somehow someway no matter what happens. And, wonder of wonders, mothers can also be mothers to others who aren’t their own flesh and blood. At some point Skyla decides, “Most people have everything they need to be happy.” But it isn’t until someone wisely advises her to open her heart that she makes use of the “everything” she has.

McQuestion’s novel is gentle, funny, and, yes, inevitably bound to raise a tear. Sometimes it seems to be rambling a bit, but that is part of its charm. The men are background, not foreground, and it would have been nice to have become better acquainted with them, but one can’t have everything in 255 pages. If you are seeking a laid-back look into three devoted mother’s lives, this is for you.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 143 readers
PUBLISHER:	AmazonEncore; Unabridged edition (August 10, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Karen McQuestion
EXTRAS:	A Blog article about this book and self-publishing Wall Street Journal article on same subject
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Motherhood fiction: Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk My Wife’s Affair by Nancy Woodruff Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman

Bibliography:

These books are available in print, originally published for Kindle only.

• A Scattered Life (August 2010)
• Easily Amused (September 2010)
• Celia and the Faires (November 2010)

Self-published on Kindle only:

• Lies I Told My Children and Other Stories (July 2009)
• Favorite (November 2009)
• Life on Hold (December 2009)