“And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—“ You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card— and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 15, 2014)

Americanah is a wonderful epic saga of love, hair, blogs, racism in America, and life in Nigeria. It takes place over a period of about 15 years and is primarily about a Nigerian woman named Ifemelu and her first love, Obinze. The meaning of the word Americanah is a person who returns to Nigeria after spending time abroad.

The main part of the story takes place in a hair salon in Trenton, New Jersey. Ifemelu is on a fellowship at Princeton and the nearest place to get weaves is in Trenton. As she is getting her hair done she goes back in time and the reader gets filled in with her life story.

Ifemelu grew up in poverty in Lagos. She managed to go to university there and won a scholarship to Wellson, a college in Philadelphia. She struggles with money and finds it very difficult to get a job. When she does work, she sends money back home to her parents. Ifemulu’s primary job is as a nanny. She describes the dynamics of her employer’s marriage as “she loves him and he loves himself.” She is introduced to her employer’s cousin Curt and Ifemelu and he have a relationship for quite a while. His being white and rich cause some difficulties for them.

Ifemelu cuts off all contact with Obinze despite the fact that they had planned to be together. She had made a choice to do something that left her shamed and abased and she is unable to tell Obinze about it. So, rather than tell him, she severs their contact. He is distraught and does not know what to do. He continues to write to her for months but there is no answer from Ifemelu.

Meanwhile, Obinze goes to London where he lives underground after his six month visa expires. He is working construction and continues to do this until he is deported back to Nigeria.

Ifemelu remains in the United States for 13 years and has a series of relationships with different men. Of significance besides Curt, who is white, is Blaine who is African American and a professor at Yale. Theirs is a long-term relationship that Ifemelu breaks off in order to return to Lagos.

Ifemelu has started a blog called “Raceteenth: Understanding America for the non-American black.” She writes anonymously about varied topics of racism that she encounters in the United States and the differences between being African American and a non-American black person. Her blog is very successful and brings her status and money as people make financial contributions to keep the blog going. She also does speaking engagements about topics she covers in her blog.

The book has many characters in it, each of whom we come to know and connect with. However, it is primarily about Ifemelu and Obinze, their lives and love. I found the book fascinating and very readable. It does not ever let go of the messages that the author seeks to provide the reader. Racism is a constant theme in the book as is life in America for black Americans and non-American blacks. I found the theme of blogging as a way to share knowledge very intriguing. Actual blogs are a part of the book.

Adiche is a wonderful writer. Her short stories, all of which I’ve read, have knocked me out. I plan on reading her other novels. I can see why this brilliant woman has received a MacArthur Genius Award.   Highly recommended

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 511 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories Purple Hibiscus

Bibliography:

• Purple Hibiscus (2003)
• Half a Yellow Sun (2006)
• The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories (2009)
• Americanah (May 2013) 

“There’s a lot of heartache in these mountains, that’s what my grandma Alice always says.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (MAR 12, 2014)

The setting for Redemption Mountain is located in Red Bone, West Virginia, in the Appalachian region of the Southern United States. Ranked by median income, it is the poorest state in the union except for Mississippi. The major resource in West Virginia’s economy is coal and the state is a top coal-producer in this country, second only to Wyoming.

From the beginning, in 1863, the state of West Virginia mined coal. While it has been blessed with a vast assortment of natural resources, coal is found in 53 of 55 counties, it is a mixed blessing. The downside of this blessing is about the the environment, the land, the people who mine it, and the unfortunate miners’ families who watch their loved ones leave for work never to see them again.

Why the statistics? This novel’s storyline, is based on the poverty of West Virginia miners and state residents as related to coal mining. West Virginia has been treated like a colony by big business. Mining disasters have rocked the state many times over. The controversial practice of Mountain Top Removal or Strip Mining plagues West Virginia, ripping off the tops of mountains to uncover the buried coal seams, leaving behind worthless acres of land. Advocates of mountaintop removal point out that once the areas are reclaimed, the technique provides premium flat land suitable for many uses in an extremely mountainous region. They also maintain that the new growth on reclaimed mountaintop mined areas is better able to support populations of game animals. And, of course, mining coal provides jobs. On the other hand, critics contend that mountaintop removal is a disastrous practice that benefits a small number of corporations at the expense of local communities and the environment.

Natty Oakes, a woman in her late twenties, lives in Redbone, McDowell County, West Virginia. Her grandfather, her mother and her uncle live on their farm at the top of Oak’s Hollow on “Redemption Mountain.” Natty is the mother of two children, 12-year-old Boyd, “The Pie Man,” who was born with Down Syndrome, and his younger sister Cat. Natty is married to Buck Oakes, a former high school football hero who got her pregnant in their senior year, a pregnancy which resulted in marriage and the birth of “The Pie Man.” Buck, perpetually unemployed for lack of jobs, is an angry, abusive man who takes out his failures in life on those around him, especially his wife, who works, (sometimes for no fee), as a home health aide to retired miners. She also runs the children’s library and coaches the local soccer team.

Charlie Burden, an attractive man in his late 40’s, is a partner in a New York City engineering firm, Dietrich Delahunt & Mackey, that has designed and is supervising the construction of a gigantic state-of-the art, clean coal-burning electricity generating plant in McDowell County, West Virginia. Charlie lives in a posh Westchester community, (think Bill & Hillary Clinton), with his wife Ellen, who spends much of her time involved in the activities of their country club. The couple have a son, a successful stockbroker, and a daughter who is attending university. The marriage is strained, primarily because Charlie and Ellen have developed different values over the years. She wants to move into a larger, 5 bedroom, pricier property even though the children are gone from home. Charlie is tired of his work with the firm. He resigns from the country club, it no longer suits him to spend time there. He longs to return to the field and do some hands-on engineering. “Why does my job get more and more boring and my career feel so unfulfilling as I get wealthier and more successful?” When the opportunity presents itself, Charlie grabs it…although it is not the job in China, supervising a huge construction project, that he wants. He thinks that if he takes on the generating plant project in West Virginia and is successful, he will eventually be assigned to China where Ellen has refused to go, nor does she plan to visit him in West Virginia.

Burden is uncomfortable after spending a night in the sterile company-owned condo in Bluefield, WV, just outside of Red Bone. When he decides to move to the town he has the opportunity to acquaint himself with the Red Bone locals. He meets Natty and her son “Pie Man,” his first friend. Natty is a runner like him and coach of “The Bones,” an under-14 soccer team. His next door neighbor is Pullman (Hank) Hankinson, a retired teacher and the man who plays cribbage with him. Hank also educates Charlie in the ways of Corporate America and how it has effected West Virginia. “The big companies come here, they make a deal in Charleston, and they take the coal, the timber and the gas, and they get rich. And the people get poorer and the land gets tore up, and the water gets fouled, and it’s OK, ’cause there ain’t hardly anybody left in the coal counties, and besides, they’re all just old and poor and uneducated and don’t matter to no one.”

Charlie finds himself happier and, oddly, more at home here than he is back in New York. His decision to leave the Bluefield condo for the tiny apartment in Red Bone impacts many lives, including his own.

This is a novel of the turmoil Big Business can bring as various elements opposed to Burden and his mentor, senior partner Lucien Mackey, try to take over the firm. It is a novel of political corruption and powerful Charleston law firms run by bogus “good ole boys” who know how to make things happen – like obtaining a permit for a mountaintop removal coal mine to fuel the new electrical plant and buying farms of local residents who are in the way of “progress.” And it is a novel of poor but resilient people, good people, whose lives can be shattered in an instant if Big Business has its way.

I am fascinated by the historical aspects of Redemption Mountain. The sad story of the Appalachian miners, their families, the environment, dirty politicians and Big Business is, unfortunately, a black mark on our country’s past and present.

Apart from the seriousness of greed and Corporate America in this poorest of regions in the United States, Redemption Mountain has its moments of humor and humanity. The characters, who make their homes in Red Bone, are extremely likable, just as the characters from Corporate America are detestable. This simplicity in character development is a weakness in the novel. There are the “good guys,” and the “bad guys,” with few shades of gray. The storyline is somewhat predictable…although there are a few big surprises….surprises which make the novel more complex and interesting.

Overall, I enjoyed Redemption Mountain and find it to be a good and interesting read. I learned a lot about coal mining, Strip Mining, and how destructive it can be to the land and the people who dwell there.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (June 25, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gerry FitzGerald
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: LONG MAN by Amy Greene

Bibliography:

• Redemption Mountain (June 2013)

“You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 25, 2014)

“You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.” Oh, yes she can. Or at least die trying. A descendant of the native Cherokees, Annie Clyde Dodson has deep-rooted connections to the land of Yuneetah, Tennessee. Long Man, the river that courses through, is tempestuous and moody but the farmers here have learned to corral its powers to make their living off the land. The Tennessee Valley Authority though, has other plans. A dam has been built upstream and in a matter of a few days, Yuneetah will be under water. Annie Clyde is one of the last holdouts. She just can’t up and leave the land which she wanted her daughter, Gracie, to know and love. And as much as her husband has plans to find factory work up north in Michigan, Annie can’t stomach the thought of a stark existence away from the natural surroundings she loves.

As Long Man opens with a setting in the immediate post-Depression era, the town is just a couple of days away from being flooded by the dam’s waters. To make things worse, a steady, heavy rain has been falling and the water levels everywhere rise slowly. Along with Annie and her daughter, Gracie, there’s Annie’s aunt, Silver Ledford, who makes her meager home on top of a high cliff overlooking the valley. Tensions are running high enough as it is; practically everyone has left town with a relocation package but Annie has just managed to show yet another TVA man, Sam Washburn, the door. She does not want to move. To make matters worse — much worse — Gracie, Annie’s daughter, disappears. Could it be the town’s bad boy, Amos, who has taken her? Or is it the equally menacing flood waters that are to blame?

Using the child’s disappearance as a driver for the story, Amy Greene movingly explores the complicated relationships between the town’s various players and also their deep and abiding respect for the land. The hardscrabble countryside comes gloriously alive in her telling and it is the most arresting aspect of Long Man.

The story itself is slow to unwind and lurches forward precariously, often coming to almost a complete halt as Greene outlines relationships and events through a series of flashbacks. While these back-and-forth movements can feel jerky and disorienting, the pace picks up eventually — it is interesting to note that the tension builds slowly along with the rising floodwaters. It’s almost as if Greene were working consciously to have the book’s tempo increase gradually with the drama of the plotline.

While farming itself can be a challenge (one which Greene points out well), Long Man occasionally lapses into too much starry-eyed worship of the vocation’s faithfuls. The romantic visions that Annie Clyde has seem overwrought at times: “She didn’t understand the power company’s reasoning. She didn’t need electric lights when she could see by the sun and moon. She had the spring and the earth to keep her food from spoiling…if a person didn’t come to depend on material things, it wouldn’t hurt to lose them.”

Where Long Man does succeed, is in showing how even the fiercest of people have weak spots that can be chipped away at and weathered over time. The ties that bind can take various shapes and forms and lend themselves to fluidity. Not many can hold their ground when it comes to a rising and powerful flood — whether that change takes the form of raging waters or technical progress. As Greene writes: “The dam would stand in memory, but not of their individual lives. Only of a moment in history.” Even that, you soon realize, is more than what most of us can hope for.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amy Greene
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Bloodroot Another dam story: The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

Bibliography:

• Bloodroot (2010)
• Long Man (February 2014)

“What happens to days that disappear? The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held— a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worries and triumphs and regrets— all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room. When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to to do was open those gates.

At least, that was how it started.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 18, 2014)

The idea for writing a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph came apparently from the author’s husband. It is a brilliant one, even more brilliantly executed. First, because she uses it for resonance rather than prediction; you recognize the biblical parallels after they have occurred, but you never know when she is going to depart from the Genesis version, so her novel remains surprising to the end. Second, because the Egyptian setting grounds the book in aspects of Jewish history that are perhaps less well-known, but obviously relevant to the eternal geopolitical situation in the Middle East. And third, because the Torah reference provides the perfect opening to explore many issues in Jewish teaching and philosophy, most notably those concerning divine providence, accident, and free will. The title of her novel, actually, is borrowed from a treatise on these very questions written in Cairo by the twelfth century doctor and philosopher Maimonides. The result, in Horn’s hands, is a richly layered novel that is humane, exciting, informative, and thought-provoking, all at the same time.

Josephine (Josie) Ashkenazi is a software developer and CEO of a company called Genizah, which enables its customers to record, index, cross-reference, and recall even the most trivial aspects of their lives, linking them to everything around them in both historical and geographical dimensions. She is asked to go to Egypt as consultant on a vast new library in Alexandria, and accepts the challenge, leaving behind her Israeli-born husband Itamar, her six-year-old daughter Tali, and her elder sister Judith, who has a subsidiary position with the firm. I must admit that there was something a little science-fictiony about the premise (or magical realist, if you will); although the ideas are all conceivable, it requires some suspension of disbelief to accept the degree to which they had been developed. But two things happen to anchor the book almost immediately. The first is that the action suddenly shifts back to 1896 in Cambridge, England, where two formidable Scottish sisters confront the University Reader in Rabbinics, Solomon Schechter, with a fragment of manuscript they have recently brought back from Cairo. Despite the slightly comic tone of this episode, it is also feels entirely true, and indeed one discovers that Schechter was a real person. And when Josie goes to Egypt, she falls victim to a more contemporary reality: she is kidnapped and held for ransom. The suspension of disbelief quality never goes away completely from Josie’s story, but from now on her role as CEO fades behind those as absent wife, missing mother, and beaten woman.

Genizah, the name of Josie’s firm, is the Hebrew word for the store-room in a synagogue where Torah scrolls and similar documents were placed after they had become unusable, for the name of God could not be erased. The real Schechter unearthed in the Genizah of a Cairo synagogue a chaotic hoard of documents, secular as well as sacred, a discovery which made his name. Among them were letters from Maimonides and a draft of his Guide for the Perplexed. This opens the door to scenes in Cairo of the 12th century, to interweave with those in the 19th and 21st. It also introduces some of the philosophical themes of the book.

Horn is a Jewish writer (and winner of two National Jewish Book Awards), not just because she writes about Jewish characters and subjects, but because she shares the Jewish fascination with philosophical debate. There is a chapter, for instance, in which Maimonides outlines five theories of divine providence, ranging from total predestination to utter chance, and another in which he classifies three different kinds of evil. Other readers might consider these dry diversions, but they fascinated me both as ideas and for how they linked to the moral implications of the story of Josie and her family at home. They formed a serious core to the novel that amply balanced its more fantastic aspects. And indeed balance is all; the more I look, the more I see parallels and linkages that bind this complex novel together. Perhaps some of its characters could be developed a little further, but as a theme-based novel it could hardly be bettered.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (September 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dara Horn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on the biblical Joseph
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Bibliography:

• In the Image (2002)
• The World to Come (2006)
• All Other Nights (2009)
• A Guide for the Perplexed (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Rescuer (DATE)

“As part of leaving Bloomington for college and my brand new start, I’d made a careful decision to never ever tell anyone about my sister, Fern. Back in those college days I never spoke of her and seldom thought of her. If anyone asked about my family, I admitted to two parents, still married, and one brother, older, who traveled a lot. Not mentioning Fern was first a decision, and later a habit, hard and painful even now to break. Even now, way off in 2012, I can’t abide someone else bringing her up. I have to ease into it. I have to choose my moment.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (FEB 15, 2013)

The most absorbing books I read have a vital lesson at their core: they teach me what it means to be human. Karen Joy Fowler’s latest book tackles this crucial theme and by doing so, captured my heart and reduced me to tears.

There is no getting around that this is an agenda book. Ms. Fowler’s purpose is to show us—through fiction—that the most complicated animal – the human animal can be disastrous to the rest of the animal kingdom through sheer arrogance.

Typically, I avoid authorial intrusion like the plague. But this book was so irresistibly readable, so original, and so psychologically nuanced that I couldn’t help but turn the pages compulsively.

Rosemary Cooke, our narrator, is the daughter of a family of scientists. It takes her 77 pages to reveal a central truism of her life (which, inexplicably, is revealed by the publisher on every book blurb about this novel): she spent the first eighteen years of her life defined by the fact that she was raised as “twins” with a chimpanzee named Fern.

“I tell you Fern is a chimp and already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister,” Ms. Fowler writes. “You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet.” But that just wasn’t so. Rosemary astutely realized that her father was not really studying whether chimps could communicate as humans. Rather, he is asking, “can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees.”

Fern is sent away when Rosemary turns five, for reasons that remain obscure through most of the book. But her absence affects Rosemary the way the sudden disappearance of a sister would. By the time she goes to kindergarten, her mother must work with her to stand up straight, not put her fingers into anyone’s mouth or hair, not jump on tables and desks when she is playing, not bite anyone.

Her whole life is impacted by the “experiment” of being raised with her sister Fern. “What a scam I pulled off!” Rosemary reflects. “What a triumph. Apparently, I’d finally erased all those little cues, those maters of personal space, focal distance, facial expression, vocabulary. Apparently all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.”

I believed in the connection between Rosemary and Fern. This emotionally devastating book – which folds back on itself to reveal more and more of the story through false and real memories – confirms what I have long believed: that the rest of the animal kingdom has much to teach us in being human.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 316 readers
PUBLISHER:	Plume (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Karen Joy Fowler
EXTRAS:	Q & A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Jane Austin Book Club Sister Noon And other chimpanzee books: Captivity by Debbie Lee Wesselman Lucy by Laurence Gonzales The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale

Bibliography:

• Artificial Things: Stories (1986)
• Sarah Canary (1991)
• The Sweetheart Season (1996)
• Black Glass: Short Fiction (1998)
• Sister Noon (2001)
• The Jane Austen Book Club (2004)
• Wit’s End (2008)
• What I Didn’t See: Stories (2010)
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (May 2013)

Movies from books:

• The Jane Austen Book Club

“Iris Dunleavy?” asked Mary. “Is she the plantation wife? She dresses so well for a lunatic. She had the most colorful flounces on her skirt the other night.”

Book Review:

Review by Judi Clark  (FEB 9, 2014)

This is Kathy Hepinstall’s fourth novel… and I’ve read all four, so obviously I like this author. She writes a different book each time and thus one never knows what will be found upon picking up her latest, although one can be sure it will be both literary and lyrical, no matter the tone and subject.

Blue Asylum takes place during the Civil War years on Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida.

A judge finds the main character, Iris Dunleavy, insane essentially for hating and embarrassing her husband, “Wives were not supposed to hate their husbands. It was not in the proper order of things.” Her rich husband pays extra for her to be cured at the institution with the best reputation, the SANIBEL ASYLUM FOR LUNATICS which is managed by British born psychiatrist Dr. Cowell, who stubbornly believes that Iris is insane because a judge declared it. But Iris insists that she is not insane, that she was merely escaping from a hateful husband and cruel man. As she reveals her horrific story bit by bit, we can see that while she may not be clinically insane, she may have been crazy mad considering the decisions/actions she undertook (and continues to undertake).

She befriends the doctor’s 14-year-old son Wendell and another patient, Ambrose, who is suffering from something that happened during the civil war. She longs to escape and eventually does but with devastating effects.

I liked many things about this book, but I didn’t “love it,” at least not as much as I did The Absence of Nectar and Prince of Lost Places. But I did enjoy it immensely even though it is a little heavy handed on the message, not unlike her debut (and Oprah book club choice)  The House of Gentle Men.  Then again, given headlines such as Todd Akin’s comment on legitimate rape, it may be that heavy handed feminist historical literature is still necessary.

Hepinstall captures the historical detail of well and it is very visual as she sets a mood and imagery that plays out well both as metaphor and setting:

“Dawn broke soft and clean on the island of shell and marl and current. It was a day like any other, one more day in a season when marking the days was difficult, since the balminess was resolute and the birds were attuned to the tides, the tides to the moon, and the moon to the lunatics, under their crazy spell, waxing and waning in the accordance with the fluctuations of their madness and the depth of passions. A group of terns had gathered at the edge of a calm sea, and a single raccoon, caught after a daylight, skittered out of the dune vegetation and into the forest, leaving behind a loggerhead nest full of ruined eggs, shells broken and half-formed turtles spilling out in the sand.”

Hepinstall considers this a love story… and it is, but not the happy kind. This novel is an excellent choice for book clubs.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 139 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Judi Clark
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kathy Hepinstall really humorous blog
EXTRAS:	Website for Blue Asylum Reading Guide Interview with Kathy Hepinstall
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Prince of Lost Places  The Absence of Nectar The House of Gentle Men

Bibliography:

• The House of Gentle Men (2000)
• The Absence of Nectar (2001)
• Prince of Lost Places (2003)
• Blue Asylum (2012)

“So,” Vail said, “William Shakespeare, white bread legend of national and international stature, wasn’t a white church-going Catholic but a black Jewish woman.” Okay, I can see that not sitting well with some. “But that was over four hundred years ago, and my job is to assess the threat as it stands now.”

“Fine. Fast-forward to the present. There’s considerable unrest among a rising minority base in this country. British society is under pressure from an Arab Islamic population that’s growing rapidly. And there’s a substantial population of disadvantaged minorities that are aligned against the white establishment, an establishment that supports the Shakespeare fiction through high-browed elitist organizations like the government backed British Shakespeare Academy.

“Given everything the government’s dealing with, keeping the peace, if proof emerged that Shakespeare was actually a minority woman, it’d almost be too much for the country to bear.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (FEB 6, 2014)

Karen Vail finds herself in a different role and a different country in No Way Out, the fifth book in the series by Alan Jacobson. Karen, an FBI profiler, is sent to England to assist Scotland Yard in a theft of a key document that she finds out may show that Amelia Bassano Lanier, a woman who also happens to have been Jewish and black, actually was the author of all of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare. Karen, though soon realizes that something is just not correct with Gavin Paxton, the curator of the gallery that owns the Shakespeare document. She suspects that he may have been involved in the bombing attempt to destroy the document. She also doesn’t fully understand why Hector DeSantos is there (as Hector Cruz) and pushes him to tell the truth. He is slow to bring her into his covert operations which only annoys and fuels Karen more. He eventually tells her that she may be right about Paxton as they suspect he is Hussein Rudenko, a terrorist who sells deadly weapons to the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and other terrorist organizations. She is soon pulled into a very much different adventure that finds her traveling all over England and at times being on the wrong side of Scotland Yard that she is there to help. Overall, Jacobson has written an interesting well researched adventure.

There is humor in this generally fast paced book, especially with Karen and her misunderstanding of the “improper” English of the British.

As they reached the second landing, Reid said, “Oh—what was that about the guv’nor being a bad Frisbee player?”
Vail shrugged, “He said he’s been known to throw a wobbly.”
Reid snorted. “It means to throw a tantrum, have a fit.”
Vail stepped outside, into the rain. “Why can’t you Brits just speak English?”

I read some “action thriller” books, but over the years, I’ve been reading less and less primarily since they tend to be a bit too unbelievable and are not as much character based as I prefer. To me, the best thrillers keep me interested from start to finish and are so well paced that I can ignore how fast things occur and how ridiculous some of the circumstances and the character decisions are. No Way Out has a lot of these situations with Karen and Hector doing things that no person, no matter how well trained is likely to do. Jacobson obviously has experience and research on his side to present what appear to be accurate historical and present day accounts of England (only a few guns but a lot of video cameras everywhere!). This is somewhat of a balancing act however in presenting interesting and believable background that could, in the wrong hands, slow down the pace too much. For the most part, Jacobson keeps the story moving although it is a bit uneven at times. This story may not work for everyone but overall I can recommend this book, especially to those that really enjoy action thrillers.

As a first-time reader of this series,  I was missing some back story about Karen Vail, especially since she was really not using her profiler skills that much. I wondered whether any of the US characters were in other books and if I should know about past relationships. Nonetheless, a new reader can follow along and enjoy the story. I certainly enjoyed the book enough to order (at a discount) the first two books in the series so I’ll eventually know if I was missing any key back story about Karen and the other characters.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 56 readers
PUBLISHER:	Premier Digital Publishing (September 17, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alan Jacobson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	In the company of conspiratorial thrillers: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Bibliography:

• False Accusations (1999)
• The Hunted (2001)
• Hard Target (2012)

Karen Vail Series:

• The 7th Victim (2008)
• The Crush (2009)
• Velocity (2010)
• Inmate 1577 (2011)
• No Way Out (September 2013)

“When people asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, Paul Krovik did not say he was going to be a fireman or soldier or pilot, as some boys will before they know the kind of drudgery and danger such jobs entail. He did not want to be an actor or rock star or astronaut, nor did he harbor secret desires to dance, design clothes, or write poetry — the kinds of dreams most in his world would have regarded as evidence that his parents had failed to raise a true man, whatever that might mean.

He always wanted to build houses.

And now they are trying to take away the only house that belonged to him. He is not about to give up the one thing he ever wanted.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (JAN 23, 2014)

A perfect title for a stunning book. Its literal meaning is explained in the 1919 prologue, when a tree on which two men have been lynched falls deep into a sinkhole with the bodies still on it. The rest of the novel takes place in the present, or perhaps the not too distant future, when the land has been developed as an upscale subdivision for a rapidly growing city in the Midwest. But we are not quite there yet. In a second, slightly longer prologue, a woman goes to visit a convict on death row. It is a creepy, brilliant scene, although we know little of either of them, except that his name is Paul Krovik, and she regards him as a destroyer.

The next 380 pages tell of Paul’s crime, among much else. He starts out as a property developer, building neo-Victorian houses with more love than skill, and when the recession hits and he is sued by purchasers demanding repairs, he goes bankrupt and his own house is foreclosed. It is bought cheap at auction by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles (pronounced “no-eye”), a couple who move from Boston with their seven-year-old son Copley. Large sections are told through their eyes, but they have two watchful neighbors who ad the protagonists of their own sections. One is Mrs. Washington, an African-American woman whose century-old farmhouse gets condemned to make way for the new development. And the other is Paul Krovik himself, who cannot bear to lose touch with his former property. So the title gets another meaning: the erasure of farmland and the rural way of life to make way for subdivisions springing up like faceless Stepfords. And it is all focused on the house, like a horror movie in the making. Nathaniel and Julia gut it of all its detail, paint it white, and install security, but still feel they have moved into an alien environment. Copley, brilliant, unhappy, and borderline autistic, believes the house has been invaded by strangers, but his parents merely take him to the doctor for medication.

One of the remarkable things that Flanery does is to recalibrate our sympathies. Yes, we will discover why Kravik is arrested, but he is not the worst villain of the piece. The company that Nathaniel works for, a Haliburton-like global conglomerate called EKK, specializing in total security, has virtually rebuilt the city as a company town, requiring compliance to its right-wing rules. I mentioned Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives; there are also after-echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in the inhuman authoritarianism that only seems futuristic if you ignore the changes that have already taken place over the past dozen years. That is the third meaning of the title: the moral fall of this land, America, from a country of humanity and individualism towards a managed state of paranoid conformity.

And it starts young. The scenes in the company school where Copley goes made me livid, especially as the parent of a once-troubled child myself. Indeed, the more the boy was in the limelight, the more disturbing the story became. For there are other themes in play beyond corporate security. The legacy of abusive parents, for example. The tyranny of psychologists and psychiatrists. The intolerance of anything a little bit out of the ordinary: an old black woman who won’t sell her land, a sensitive boy who prefers reading to sports, a same-sex couple who set up house together. Although this is in no sense a personal confession — indeed it has the makings of a good Hollywood movie written all over it — it is hard not to look past its mounting terror and political commentary, and wonder about what experiences the writer must have had to write with such conviction about outsiders. And that makes a special book very special indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 32 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (August 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Absolution

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)

“The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit. Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angle Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed. I know it is presumptuous to compare my small life to hers, but I have reason to believe she wouldn’t mind; I will get to that. Right now it’s enough to say that despite everything that happened that summer, I remain tender toward the bees.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (JAN 20, 2014)

Fourteen year-old Lily Melissa Owens has been a motherless child for ten years now. It fills her with anguish to think that she, at age four, had a hand in the accidental shooting death of Deborah Fontanel Owens, her own mother. Lily’s life has been shaped around this incident, and she has never ceased to yearn for her mother, (for a mother’s love), although her memories of the actual woman have been blurred by time. In fact, Lily has very little memory of that dark day’s events, and is totally dependent on her miserable, sadistic father, T. Ray Owens, for any and all accounts of her mom. The only person who shows her any affection is Rosaleen, a black peach-picker T. Ray brought in from the fields to care for his child.

At fourteen, Lily is extremely bright, loves to read and has a talent for writing. One of her teachers has encouraged her to think about a college education, although her father tells her she will be lucky to go to beauty school. On July 4, 1964, Lily’s birthday, she walks Rosaleen to town so the black woman can register to vote. President Lyndon B. Johnson just signed into effect the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Rosaleen feels pride in doing her civic duty, as does Lily in accompanying her. The two are harassed by three white men, one of whom is the biggest racist in town. When Rosaleen tries to defend herself, she and Lily are thrown in jail. In reality, back then in the American South, given what Rosaleen did to defend herself, and to whom she did it, she very well could have been beaten to death on the spot. T. Ray picks up his daughter almost immediately, and painfully punishes the girl. She manages to escape, though, and to break Rosaleen out of the hospital where she is recovering from her afternoon’s encounter with Jim Crowe.

One of the few mementoes Lily has of her mother is a small picture of a black Madonna with the words, Tiburon, S. C. on the back. Lily has saved some money from selling peaches at her father’s roadside stand, and is certain that if she and Rosaleen can reach Tiburon, she will find out about her Momma, and they will somehow be safe. And, sure enough, in Tiburon, S. C. Lily finds a connection between her Madonna picture and a trio of fairy godmother-like women – the calendar sisters May, June, and August Boatwright. These black spinster sisters live in a Pepto-Bismol pink-colored house, on a large tract of land outside of town. They keep bees, sell honey and other bee by-products, and their label, the Black Madonna Honey Company, is the same as the picture keepsake that Lily has from her mother. It is here that Lily learns, among many things, that “without a queen, the hive will die.” She understands that she must replace her own queen, her dead mother, or she will shrivel-up inside.

August Boatwright, Mother Figure, (with capital letters!), earth mother, and Madonna all-in-one, takes Lily and Rosaleen in without question, gives them jobs and a home – at least temporarily, until they can live and grow in an environment which will allow them to thrive. And along the way Lily will learn some basic truths, common for both bees and people.

All kinds of neat tidbits and facts about bees, their lives, habits, care, beekeeping in general, and honey production are woven throughout the book, and the details are fascinating. Each chapter is headed with a quotation about bees. However, as important and interesting as bees are as themes in The Secret Life Of Bees, sometimes the narrative is too sweet and sugary for my taste.

Sue Monk Kidd writes beautifully, lyrically, about a southern white girl’s unusual coming of age. However, the novel reads, frequently, like fantasy fiction. Now, I enjoy a beautiful story, especially when the author is as talented as this one, but I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, and the history I recollect is far different from this book’s version. I clearly remember what the times were like when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and when Schwerner, Cheney & Goodman were murdered in Mississippi, and when Ms. Fanny Lou Hamer challenged white domination of the Mississippi Democratic Party. I was at the Democratic Convention in 1964 in Atlantic City, as a student delegate, when Ms. Hamer and her colleagues entered Convention Hall. Sue Monk Kidd’s bucolic Sylvan, South Carolina, and the little town of Tiburon, are poetic, magical places – in spite of rampant racism. One character is badly beaten, but not killed – she is actually able to walk out of the hospital within 24 hours. Another is unjustly jailed, but set free after a day or so – and not harmed? A strange white girl just moves in with a family of black women, in rural SC, and no one makes a helluva hullabaloo? And I shudder to think of a white teenage girl driving around in a car, in the front seat, with a black teenage male – in 1964 South Carolina. This would not be believable in many northern cities at the time – but it was unthinkable in the south. That poor guy would have never made it to the jailhouse alive!!

So let me stop here and say, that while I enjoyed reading this book, with its rich narrative and characters, it does read like a fairy tale. The hideous racism and violence of life in the US, north and south, is not depicted realistically in comparison to the beautiful, pastoral setting and peace of life with the Boatwright women. I do hope readers realize that much poetic licence has been taken here in terms of what this difficult period was like in US history.

It’s interesting to note, I think, that Lily’s ideal home, almost heaven, is depicted as being among black women. There used to be many white children, in the south, (and in the north), during the 1960’s and before, who received a primary source of love and care from black women, hired to work for their families. I am sure this warm, loving fantasy is not uncommon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,862 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking; 1st edition (October 10, 2002)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sue Monk Kidd
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels to remind us of the way it was in the 1960s: The Help by Kathryn Stockett Train, Paper Boy and Paris Trout by Pete Dexter Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas Leaving by Richard Dry

Bibliography:

• The Secret Life of Bees (2002)
• The Mermaid Chair (2005)
• The Invention of Wings (February 2014)

Nonfiction:

• God’s Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved (1987)
• When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (1991)
• The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996)
• Firstlight: The Early Inspirational Writings (2007)
• Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story (2009)

Movies from books:

• The Secret Life of Bees (2008)

“I don’t know how you can confuse drawings by Gustav Klimt with drawings by Egon Schiele. Schiele’s line jerks and cuts like a knife being dragged through flesh–his own, I suspect–whereas Klimt has fluid, caressing stroke. Schiele made a lot of interesting sketches of young girls, but wasn’t careful and eventually got himself a couple of weeks in jail. All I know is, if you let them hang around your studio and do whatever they’re forbidden to do at home, like reading a book or eating french fries or whatever, after a while they’ll relax and sprawl this way and that and now you’ve got yourself a spicy little twelve-year-old model, plus a chance at prison time.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JAN 19, 2014)

Renato the Painter by Eugene Mirabelli is a fictional memoir about a contemporary painter living in the Boston area. The novel starts when Renato is just days old, a foundling, and continues to the present time, when he is in his 70’s. Renato is a man with a fierce pride in his art, unrepentant sexual appetites and strong personal loyalties. He is very dissatisfied with his status in the art world, feeling that the art world has left him behind. He hasn’t had a gallery show in some time and is getting depressed about his prospects. His family life is complicated. He lives in his studio on one side of the Charles River and his wife, Alba, lives in a condo on the other side. Their relationship is passionate, but sometimes combative. Both Renato and Alba appear comfortable living separate lives. Renato has children by Alba, his wife, and by Zoe, a sometimes lover. He sees both women who know and like each other. Renato has numerous friends, mostly other artists who he meets for drinks or coffee and to bemoan the state of the current art world. His best friend died some time ago and he misses him. He’s worried about his prostate and getting old and being forgotten.

Renato is living the life of the macho painter of the 1950’s. His life is filled with exuberant sex and no less exuberant memories. He has as much time as he wants in his studio. His wife, Alba, lives on the other side of the river, available for occasional sex, for good food, thoughtful advice and being a good mother. He regularly sees Zoe, one of his former lovers, with whom he has a child. Alba, Zoe and all their children know each other and are comfortable with the complicated family. Renato, for all his complaints about lack of recognition, appears to have no real financial worries. He gets to paint, to worry to his heart’s content, and to enjoy the love, lust and affection of others. His social life with other male artists is his chance to enjoy complaining about the sorry state of current art affairs.

Renato is in his 70’s, and the time is supposed to be now, but he graduated at 17 from High School in 1948, so he would be 82 or 83 today. His voice reminds me of artists I have met who would be in their 80’s today. The voice of his youth fits with the 1930’s. The novel captures that period well, and pretty accurately captures the voice of artists I knew in 2000, when they were then in their 70’s. His voice recalls the romantic machismo of the Beats, the abstract expressionists and their artistic progeny. There is an authentic ring to how he speaks about art and life, but it is somewhat anachronistic.

I found the book very enjoyable, although the last part rambles a bit. Renato is someone I would have liked to meet. I hear his voice loud and clear, but I can’t quite see the paintings. I understand Renato’s fears of ageing and dying unknown; his glorification of sexuality; and his artistic idealism. Peaceful coexistence within the complicated family is a bit implausible, but consistent with the myth of the bohemian artist.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	McPherson (May 14, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eugene Mirabelli
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on painters / artists: The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte Orchard by Larry Watson

Bibliography:

• The Burning Air (1959)
• The Way In (1968)
• No Resting Place (1972)
• The World at Noon (1994)
• The Language Nobody Speaks (1999)
• The Passion of Terri Heart (2004)
• The Goddess in Love with a Horse (2008)
• Renato The Painter (2012)