“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping sates, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (JUN 20, 2010)

What is the Pulitzer Prize winning The Road by Cormac McCarthy really about? The plot is easily summarised as a man and his young boy moving south on foot through a post-apocalyptic North America towards southern shores, in hope of better chances of survival. The core reasons for the novel’s existence may be a little harder to grasp.

The scenery they move through is burned and dead – there is no alteration in the state of the entirely annihilated landscape, and nothing at all living apart from a scattering of humans – the solitary exception is one bark of a dog. Whatever the catastrophe was, it seems to have wiped out something like chlorophyll or plant life at some fundamental level. The sea is entirely barren when they reach it. There is no moss, no grass, the trees are all dead and continually falling over, and of course no crops grow. Without the base of the food chain to work on, there are no animals – hence the only living things remaining are the alpha predators that are humans, now also predominantly turned into cannibals. Scavenging sustains the two main protagonists but the obvious implication is that almost everything has already been scavenged, it is only a matter of time before all nourishment finally runs out. There is no indication whatsoever that there will be any change in circumstances.

Opinions that have been mooted (along with many others) as to the core thrust of the novel are:

• It is a story of the love between a father and his child
• A story of every parent’s worst nightmare, of not being able to live long enough to secure your child’s future
• A story of biblical redemption
• A warning to the present generation to cherish the luxuries we have

I have to confess, I do not see any redemption in this story. There is no hope anywhere, and though at the end the child is “saved” temporarily, the implication does not change for the “long-term goals,” as the child himself puts it. The father and the child certainly love each other, but what the nature of that love is might be slightly different to what one would expect. There are a few passages that point what this might be.  For example, when the child gets ill with a fever and the man is sure the child is about to die, he is frantic with the fear of isolation for both of them. He tries not to leave his son’s side so that he will not die alone, and repeats to himself the oath he made that if the child dies he will not let him “go alone”– in other words, the father will commit suicide. Interestingly, he terms this the “last day of the earth,”  not the last day of his own existence on earth. As everything else has been wiped out, his perishing would demark the end of the world.

At another point, they encounter a key moral dilemma. After a solitary traveller steals all their provisions, they track the thief down and the man makes the thief take off all his clothes at gunpoint, leaving him naked and stranded in the road, justifying it as being exactly what the thief had attempted to do to them: the biblical eye for an eye. The child weeps uncontrollably in pity for the stranded man and they eventually return the clothes, leaving them piled up on the road as there is no sign of the traveller. The father tries to explain to the son why he has acted so uncharitably, and that he too is afraid. He says:

“You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? He said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes, I am, he said. I am the one.”

Why is the boy the one that has to worry about everything? He relies on his father for food, shelter, ideas, directions: everything. The implication is twofold. The boy is the true repository of “the flame” of charity and compassion that they both think they are carrying. Also, the boy is well aware of the insubstantiality of the status quo – that of his father being present and guiding him through the desolate world. He watches his father for the worsening signs of sickness, and knows it is only a matter of time before the father is no more. Once that happens, the father will have no further worries. Both protagonists are often shown envying the dead. Death is by no means an ultimate state not to yearn for; it is the dying that is the problem.

And here I think we get to the very heart of what this book is about. It is a book about dying. What are the ethics of dying? I think the insistently dead grey scenery of the world and all the post-apocalyptic implications are mainly a metaphor for the situation of truly having nothing to live for. There really is no hope whatsoever, there is no redemption in this life. The biblical resonances so often noted are not aimed at an immediate, earthly application but the workings of the soul. The two characters both seem to be believers in some form of afterlife, but for different reasons. For the boy, the afterlife seems to have to exist logically as there is no before-life. He tallies the differences between the typically upbeat stories his father tells him about how life was before the catastrophe with the reality that he himself knows. If the stories are not “true” now they must have some truth somewhere, but he makes it plain that he has no point of reference for his sort of “happy” truth. But where does the boy’s “fire” come from? The answer to this, it is implied that the father thinks, can only be divine. Perhaps that is where the belief of the father comes from, not from the world past or present, but from the boy.

Why do the two of them stay alive? Certainly, for the man, his reason is the child. He labours entirely to save the child, and were the child to die, his link with life would be entirely severed. But what of the child? This is where the biblical tones come in. Christ-like the child is innocent but knows he has to take on the sins of the world and keep living for as long as is allotted. There is no love of life, no thought that life as it is has anything to offer but pain but that one must keep going because one is “carrying the flame.” Just to cement this, there is the background figure of the boy’s mother who has some long time ago committed suicide already – as the only sensible thing to do.

So there are the three options: get out of the running quick because it’s the sane thing to do (the mother), stay in as long as possible because you’re morally bound to (the child), or find yourself a reason, a person, to stay alive for (the father). Bind yourself to something like a raft otherwise the logic of the “secular” (a word McCarthy uses frequently in the most surprising applications) world will inevitably push you into the direction of self-destruction. All of a sudden, we find that the narrative is not in some horrifying future, but right here in our own godless world: these are already our choices.

This once again brings one full circle back to the implication that the dead scenery is indeed a world, but it is the world of the soul. Where has God gone, and where has creation and the gift of life gone? As per previous works by McCarthy, the punctuation in the book has been severely pruned, though relatively few critics bother to refer to the fact. The fragmentation of the sentences. The press-ganging of verbs made to work as adjectives or adverbs – the narrative is one painful trail of action after action. Most apostrophes have been slaughtered, there are no speech marks. The result is a flow of words that seeks to eliminate differentiation between personalities, scenery, time and space. The landscape and the travellers, the state of the world, are all blending into each other, like the corpses of the people who burned to death and were combined into the tarmac of the road as it melted.

The travellers are in constant fear of being “lost,” and indeed even when they know where they are it does not do them much good. What is the right thing to do when you are in the middle of a spiritual wasteland with not the faintest reason to continue to draw breath in this harsh world for one second longer? I believe that the implication here is: there is no sense, and there is no God and no creation apart from what dwells inside us, and that the capacity to care for another creature is the only thing that separates us – in this case, literally – from death. Placed back in the relentlessly materialist, capitalist, selfish scenery that is the reality of today’s world (perhaps more so in America than many other places), these are strong conclusions to arrive at. It is not so much a cautionary tale but a handbook on the choices of paths between the dead shores or the beach, the road and the woods.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2,853 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage Books; 1ST edition (March 28, 2007)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Cormac McCarthy Wikipedia page on Cormac McCarthy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: No Country for Old Men Blood Meridian

Bibliography:

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Dark (1968)
• Child of God (1973)
• Suttree (1979)
• Blood Meridian (1985)
• No Country for Old Men (2005)
• The Road (2006)
• The Sunset Limited (2007)

Border Trilogy Novels:

• All the Pretty Horses (1992)
• The Crossing (1994)
• Cities of the Plain (1998)
• The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain

Movies from Books:

• All the Pretty Horses (2000)
• No Country for Old Men (2008)
• The Road (2010)

“I had been friendly when I was eight; by twelve, fidgety and preoccupied. I kept up my schoolwork and threw a ball when I could. My mouth—always so active, alert—could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I hate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I’d use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively.

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (JUN 2, 2010)

Ever since the publication of her story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender has established herself as a writer of minimalist magic realism, a description that seems contradictory given the lush prose of the founding father of magic realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the emotional adjective-laden writing of popular American author Alice Hoffman. But Aimee Bender has claimed her niche as a writer who tells stories the way we pass on fairy tales to our children: spare plots that contain wondrous images and, ultimately, wisdom. Her plots center on one or two magic elements in an otherwise ordinary world. In her latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender focuses on narrator Rose, a girl who learns, to her horror, that she can taste the emotions of those who cooked or grew her food, whether that person is her desperate mother or the farmer who grew the organic lettuce in her salad. As Rose matures along with her “gift,” she learns about the peculiar history of her family and gains insight into her odd brother Joseph, who suffers, too, but in a wholly different manner.

Rose’s family is about as dysfunctional as a functional family can get. Her mother casts off a boring administrative job to follow a series of “hands-on experiments”—baking, growing strawberries, becoming a carpenter—designed to find the happiness she desperately craves, finding it at last in a secret affair that Rose discovers through the taste of dinner. Her father, a lawyer, hates hospitals so much that he refuses to be present at Rose’s and Joseph’s births or at any other family emergency that requires one. Joseph is the family’s reclusive genius and favorite child until it becomes apparent that his intelligence isn’t honed enough to escape from the oppression of the family; instead, he finds another way, with his own gift, an avenue that only Rose and his friend George can understand. Rose’s grandmother won’t visit them (and they don’t visit her), so she sends boxes of cast-off belongings that, on the surface, are junk, but which serve as a connection to her grandchildren. At the center of all this, Rose lives in quiet, underappreciated and largely unseen, a position which both hurts her and allows her to mature as Joseph cannot. What is most amazing is that Rose is able to detect emotions in a family that purports to have none.

The strength of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is not in its unusual premise or even its dissection of a crumbling family but rather in the way Rose’s emotions and insight build within the magic to illuminate the casual way we go about our lives without realizing how we might impact others. When Rose freaks out after tasting the unbearable sadness in her mother’s pie, her mother rushes Rose to the hospital instead of addressing and admitting the real problem: how her emotions are being passed on to her children. It’s no accident that the only characters who believe in Rose’s talents are well-adjusted individuals who want to be better at what they do.

Bender’s prose verges on the lyrical at times, with images that resonate without being flowery, but, for the most part, she writes in a straightforward manner, with a narrative voice that suggests a simplicity of purpose when the underlying currents are anything but. Rose is both storyteller and participant, and her voice reflects this dual role. While such a technique doesn’t create the intimacy expected of most first-person narratives, it does allow the extraordinary to fit into a more mundane reality. Rose is trustworthy, honest in her appraisals, the only one who could successfully guide the reader through the stages of her survival and the love she maintains, despite all, for her family.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 396 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Aimee Bender
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Willful Creatures

Bibliography:

• The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories (1998)
• An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000)
• Willful Creatures: Stories (August 2005)
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (June 2010)
• The Color Master: Stories (August 2013)

As Contributor:

• Land-Grant College Review (2003)
• Lit Riffs
• The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (June 2005)

I’d gone off to Detroit so that someday I might be able to come back to Starvation and walk up to Elvis and tell him, “ Why don’t you go to hell, so what if I lost a stupid hockey game years ago? Look at me now, a big-city reporter, a Pulitzer Prize winner.” But there I was, just another local loser who worked at the little paper across the street with the shaker shingles over the door and the sign in the window that read, “Peerless Pilot Personals Will Put You on the Path to Pleasure and Profit.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAY 16, 2010)

• Chicago Wall Street Journal bureau chief Gruley has hit on a winning combination for his debut novel – visceral amateur hockey and in-your-face small-town newspapering.

  Narrator Gus Carpenter, hockey goalie and editor of the Pilot, isn’t too happy about either role. He had escaped insular Starvation Lake, Michigan, and landed a job at the Detroit News intending never to look back. But the big story that was supposed to win him a Pulitzer earned him a one-way ticket back home in disgrace instead.

  Now Gus, best known as the guy who lost his hometown team its one hard-fought chance to win the youth state hockey championship, is back tending goal with the same bunch of older, if not wiser, guys and back working for the same little rag that put him through college.

  His old boss was glad to get him but for Gus the joy is gone. The fun of small-town newspapering is the privilege – no, the obligation – to stick your nose in anywhere the public right-to-know is served, be it the financing of the new marina or the bullet holes in the rusted old snowmobile the cops just pulled out of the wrong lake.

  But Gus, burned by his own ambition into crossing an ethical line back in Detroit, hounded now with the threat of jail if he doesn’t give up his source, has lost the fire to root out secrets into the light of day, to expose liars and cheats and betrayers of the public trust, to anger the powers that be and rock the status quo.

  So it falls to the young and hungry reporter Joanie to get the scoop on the possibly bullet-riddled snowmobile. Ten years earlier, after Gus had gone off to college, his childhood hockey coach, Jack Blackburn, the man who had brought Starvation Lake’s team within snatching distance of the state championship, had died in a snowmobile accident on Starvation Lake. He and his snowmobile had disappeared beneath the ice and neither was ever recovered. But now the snow machine has turned up in Walleye Lake.

  And this is only the first of the anomalies and discrepancies that begin to surface in the original version of the accident, a version put together by multiple sources.

  Joanie runs with a story that hints at murder and Gus spikes it. But his journalistic instincts – a measured combination of curiosity and professional duty – grind into motion. Gus pushes on, asking questions and digging in places long too long left undisturbed. Even his own mother is ready to see the back of him.

  The story unfolds and unravels and rats run out from all the exposed places, just as you’d expect. But this is a novel with crime rather than a crime novel, and it’s the characters that hold your interest. Gus is a reflective man, coming to terms with the many ways deceit has directed the course of his life, from a blinkered boyhood to the self-serving manipulations of wily sources, from the evasions of friends and lovers to his own sometimes-devastating rationalizations.

  All of the characters are richly depicted with private or hidden motivations that emerge in the course of the story and hint at depths Gus may never plumb.

  Much of the story’s action and gore happens on the hockey rink. Old and new feuds play out, unspoken messages are delivered, secrets are revealed. I’ve never been a hockey fan but Gruley had me riveted.

  Gruley knows his small-town newspaper, where everybody does everything and everybody knows everybody, where claustrophobia and professionalism go hand in glove and doing your job means offending your friends, your enemies and your advertisers.

  With the character depth of Dennis Lehane and the atmospherics of Steve Hamilton, Gruley’s Edgar-nominated novel stands out from the crowd. Readers will look forward to Gus Carpenter’s next appearance in Gruley’s second novel, The Hanging Tree, coming in August.

  AMAZON READER RATING:	from 100 readers
  PUBLISHER:	Touchstone; Original edition (March 3, 2009)
  REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
  AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
  AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bryan Gruley
  EXTRAS:	Excerpt
  MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More newspaper stories, not necessarily mysteries:Occupational Hazzards by Jonathan Segura The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman The Room and The Chair by Lorraine Adams

  Bibliography:

  Starvation Lake series:

  • Starvation Lake (March 2009)
  • The Hanging Tree (August 2010)

  Non-fiction:

  • Paper Losses: A Modern Epic of Greed and Betrayal at America’s Two Largest Newspaper Companies (August 1993)

  ---

“In the back of the van were a crowbar, a tangle of battery cables, one basket containing newly laid eggs from his own hens, and another with his garden’s first spring peas. Two tennis rackets, a pair of rugby boots, sneakers, and a large bag with various kinds of sports attire and a spare line from a fishing rod added to the jumble. Tucked neatly to one side were a first-aid kit, a small tool chest, a blanket, and a picnic hamper with plates and glasses, salt and pepper, a head of garlic and a Laguiole pocketknife with a horn handle and a corkscrew. Tucked under the front seat was a bottle of not-quite-legal eau-de-vie from a friendly farmer. He would use this to make his private stock of vin de noix when the green walnuts were ready on the feast of St. Catherine. Benoit Courreges, chief of police for the small commune of St. Denis and its 2,900 souls, and universally known as Bruno, was always very well prepared.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (APR 29, 2010)

A paean to the Dordogne, an exploration of fractious French history, and the debut of the most self-possessed, accomplished, even-tempered, life-savoring Holmesian character ever, Walker’s first Bruno novel proves once and for all that heavyweight journalists can write mystery novels.

Former Russia and U.S. bureau chief for The Guardian, current Editor Emeritus of UPI, author of such books as The Cold War, and The President They Deserve, this British journalist, historian, scholar, and global policy advisor has created a hero dedicated to the quiet, regular, sensual life of rural France.

Bruno, an orphan abandoned by his mother, joined the military at an early age and spent 12 years with the Combat Engineers, which seems roughly equivalent to Special Forces. Receiving a Croix de Guerre for his service in the Balkans, Bruno retired to St. Denis and became the town’s police chief and only policeman.

Although new to the town, he has become part of its fabric, savoring the rhythm of life – his own and that of the townspeople, from the two old WWII partisans that don’t speak, and the town’s token communist, to its bakers and cheese makers and vintners, its quarrels, rivalries and long-simmering feuds, even its newcomers – the English tourists who have lately been pushing up the housing prices.

He plays tennis with the Baron (atheist and retired industrialist), coaches kids at rugby, hunts birds, cooks, works on his house, organizes parades, safeguards the local market from the health inspectors of the European Union, and with the help of his friend the politically well-connected mayor, generally keeps the peace.

This idyllic life is threatened when someone stabs a reclusive Algerian grandfather – a hero of the French Resistance and winner of the Croix de Guerre – carving a swastika into his chest. Some druggy kids, local members of the Front National, the extreme right, are arrested, but despite motive and opportunity, Bruno is not convinced.

The politicians swoop in and take over, determined to bring this sensational hate crime to a swift and triumphant conclusion. But Bruno keeps turning up evidence that delays their gratification.

Meanwhile there is budding romance with an attractive inspector assigned to St. Denis for the investigation, and flirtation with the English ladies who run a small resort near the murdered man’s home. There are truffles to be shaved, meals to be cooked and enjoyed with good wine, ruffled feathers to be smoothed, scenery to be admired, facts to be gleaned and interpreted.

There is an edgy feel to the book, a tension caused by the ugly feelings towards immigrants, especially Muslims, seen as disrupting tradition. In return the Muslims dig in their heels and don chadors. And longstanding tensions arise from the tangled roots of WWII occupation and collaboration. Not everyone was really a member of the Resistance. Hard feelings run deep.

But the strongest undercurrent is a sense of French joie de vivre, an attention to small rituals, an appreciation of conversation, attractive women, good clothes, good food, and all the trappings of civilized life.

Bruno is a master of calm thinking, diplomacy and planning – a marvel really. But his careful and commanding organization seems part of the fabric of his being, well nurtured after his chaotic youth. Readers will appreciate – even believe – his apparent perfection.

Walker’s love of the place shines through. Readers will look forward to visiting it again with him and the incomparable Bruno, this coming July when The Dark Vineyard is released.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; 1 edition (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Martin Walker
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More in this series: The Dark Vineyard More new favorite mystery series: Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall

Bibliography:

French Countryside Mysteries:

• Bruno, Chief of Police (2008; March 2009 in US)
• The Dark Vineyard (2009; July 2010 in US)
• Black Diamond (2010; August 2011 in US)

Other Fiction:

• The Caves of Perigord (March 2002; July 2009)

Nonfiction:

• Waking Giant: Gorbachev and Perestroika (1986)
• The Cold War: A History (1993)
• The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton: His Rise, Falls, and Comebacks (1996)
• Makers of the American Century (2000)
• America Reborn: A Twentieth-Century Narrative in Twenty-six Lives (2000)

“Olive Kitteridge was crying. If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person. But there she sat, large and big-wristed, her mouth quivering, tears coming from her eyes.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JAN 19, 2010)

Big-wristed Olive Kitteridge is the imposing, even frightful, over-sized woman at the center of this novel. She lives in a small town on the coast of Maine, where traditionally people keep to themselves, living out lives of granite-like individuality. She trucks no silliness, has little patience for people she does not care for, which is virtually everyone, and has no problem speaking her mind, in fact seems genetically predisposed to it. She is a retired high school math teacher, who, her adult son tells her, was the “scariest teacher in the school.” She is one of those individuals you meet and wonder, how does a person get this way?

And yet, we are not repulsed by her. In fact, we root for her, seeing ever so slightly–and skillfully, I have to add–that she can be more human than first meets the eye. Can she take this humanity and nurture it? The reader hopes so. That would be a redemption we might expect. Yet, there are traits and ways of being that are so deep and developed that they can never be upended. Still, it is the beauty of how this story is drawn that the reader even wonders at such a thing as redemption. We root for Olive, but doubt her, dislike her, yet find something approaching kinship with her.

Olive lives with her loving and patient husband, Henry. Together they have a son, Christopher. The story spans an undisclosed period of years whereby Olive looses Henry, Christopher disappoints and moves away, and Olive is left alone in the village, surrounded by odd characters and old students, neighbors and enemies and a very small handful of friends. She daily passes the lovely house she and Henry built for Christopher, the place where he was to spend his life close to mother and father. But that did not happen and every day her anger grows. Her world was her son and he married a disagreeable wife who took him away and his house-home was sold. She has been abandoned by everyone. Or did she push?

There is a unique structure to this book, a structure, which I confess escaped me until the very end. This is a novel of thirteen short stories, which together form a highly informed narration and refreshing perspective on the protagonist, Olive. She is not at the center of each story chapter, but she is present, sometimes looming, sometimes passing through. If there is a failure with this technique it is slight and hinges on those few stories where she is just a pedestrian, crossing the stream of narration, a reflection in a mirror, so to speak. But even in these situations, we learn something more of her, of her community and her plight and thereby the story breaths afresh, albeit in an unconventional fashion. I like the technique very much. Although the narration follows a traditional sequential timeline, the reader gets the sense that you could take the stories in any order and the novel would work just as well. That is no small matter.

It is not hard to portray Olive as an unseemly curmudgeon. There are the neighbors she has offended, the shop keeper snubbed and professional peers put-off. But nothing is so painful as Olive’s break from her son, a break of her own making. After Henry’s stroke, Olive visits Christopher and his new, second, wife, who seems lovely. But Olive says she is stupid. And she thinks her grandson, a toddler, an idiot. As I said, it is easy to dislike this woman. Finally, she takes offense at being assumed on duty, watching her grandson in a park, and announces she is leaving. When she remains steadfast in her decision, despite the pleadings of her son and daughter-in-law, they fold and give up arguing with her. Christopher who grew up subject to her mood swings, wants no more of her and her antics. He welcomes her to go. Olive cannot believe they are going to let her leave. “You’re kicking me out, just like that?” Olive said. Her heart pumping ferociously.” For the first time Christopher reacts to his mother with calm and intelligence:

“See, there’s an example,” Chris answered, calmly. Loading the dishwasher calmly. “You say you want to leave, then accuse me of kicking you out. In the past, it would make me feel terrible, but I’m not going to feel terrible now. Because this is not my doing. You just don’t seem to notice that our actions brings reactions.”

Yet, it is the beauty of how her story is written that we still find in her qualities which give us pause. In one chapter (short story) Olive visits a woman whose young neighbor, Nina, is also visiting. Olive enters the kitchen, takes a doughnut, and with characteristic bluntness, upon seeing Nina, says, “Who are you?” It is soon apparent that Nina is anorexic.

Olive finished the doughnut, wiped the sugar from her fingers, and said, “You’re starving.”
‘The girl didn’t move, only said, “Uh–duh.”
‘“I’m starving, too.” Olive said. The girl looked over at her. “I am,” Olive said. “Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?”
‘“You’re not starving,” Nina said with disgust.
‘“Sure I am we all are.”
‘“Wow,” Nine said, quietly. “Heavy.”

A few sentences later, Olive’s neighbor, Harmon, looks over at her. She is crying. “If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person.”

This is an intelligent, insightful book. The technique of constructing the novel over a series of short stories is well devised. It is an example of telling a good story well while carving out new technical territory. Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer prize for fiction. It was well deserved.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 517 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 30, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Strout
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other Pulitzer Prize Winners: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The Known World by Edward P. Jones Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Bibliography:

• Amy and Isabelle (1998)
• Abide with Me (2006)
• Olive Kitteridge (2008)
• The Burgess Boys (March 2013)

“You’re telling me I have to wait till he does something, till he gets to me, kills me, before you can do anything.”

“You could put it that way, I guess,” the sheriff said.

“How would you put it?”

“That way.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Lynn Harnett (JAN 15, 2010)

We actually get to meet the iconic Sheriff Ripley Wingate in Freeman’s acclaimed, dialogue-driven third novel. Ripley only appears briefly – at the beginning and the end – but he sets the story going and his existence is something of a reassurance to the good ol’ woodchucks that gather and blather at Whizzer’s defunct sawmill.

A scared, defiant young woman, Lillian, comes to Wingate for protection against the thuggish Blackway. She has offended Blackway and in return he has stalked her, trashed her car and killed her cat. She believes, with reason, he is going to kill her. But Wingate tells her there’s nothing he – the law – can do.

But just because the law can’t help doesn’t mean nobody can. Wingate sends her to Whizzer who assembles an unprepossessing duo – a hulking, taciturn, non-too-bright boy and a decrepit old man – to go with her and find Blackway. Nobody seems to be too sure what happens when they find him, but off they go.

The action switches between the trio’s journey and the old geezers sitting commentary at the sawmill – a backwoods Greek chorus hopeful, even confident, that an act of uncertain chivalry will improve all their lives.

Defying categorization, Freeman’s lean, razor sharp novels rely on the volition of characters for page-turning suspense. Strategy and craftiness arise out of a complexity of people who know not only each other but also their father’s mother’s sisters pretty well. But the most predictable people can still surprise you all the time.

Place also defines the characters as much as the characters define the place. The Fort, a former garage, “was not the kind of bar where you stopped for a drink on your way home from work. It was the kind of bar where you stopped for many drinks on your way to work, until soon enough they fired you and you could spend the whole day at the Fort…. The Fort was a plain, businesslike place, a factory for the manufacture and upkeep of drunks.”

But the place where our heroes are going is worse. The Lost Towns is a lawless wilderness of timberland and bare sawdust dunes where more than a few hikers, loggers and campers have disappeared over the years, and where taking a man’s truck keys is a step over a no-going-back line.

Funny, dark, complex and lean, with a nod to the back-and-forth jawing of George V. Higgins, there’s not a wasted word, all the way to the nail-biting, dread-inducing conclusion.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (February 17, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	Go With Me
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	An interview with Castle Freeman, Jr. on Go With Me
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of All That I Have More sheriffing: The Blight Way by Patrick F. McManus

Bibliography:

• The Bride Ambrose: Stories (1987)
• Judgement Hill (1997)
• My Life and Adventures (2002)
• Go With Me (January 2008)
• All That I Have (March 2009)

“”…he mulled over his long list of poor judgments and the human losses his inadequacy had caused.””

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JAN 10, 2010)

Sugawara Akitada, an eleventh-century Japanese senior secretary in the Ministry of Justice, is determined to prove the innocence of two men: one, his current retainer who has been arrested for the murder of a blind woman, and two, a convict who died in exile. As he bails out Togo, his accused employee, and searches for deceased convict Haseo’s family, Akitada also contends with a contemptuous superior, Minister Sogo, and the persistent rumors of a small pox epidemic in the city.

All of these worries eat at his relationship with his only wife Tamako (unlike other men his age he hasn’t taken multiple wives — yet). Listening to her own women’s network, Tamako believes the epidemic is real and wants to protect their young son from exposure to it. But her husband, who functions in official circles in the capital and who gets out among the people more than she, insists that, since there has been no warning announcement by the government, those who leave the city out of fear of contagion are just foolishly causing panic. The rift between husband and wife grows as he rashly judges her actions and acts himself without consulting her. Feeling the distance, Akitada yearns for someone who can give him the warmth he once shared with Tamako and this leads him into a tempting situation with a beautiful woman who is already a wife of a powerful — and dangerous — lord. Akitada is a man from another culture and another time, but his tendency to discount his wife’s opinions and behavior, his focus on job and personal crusades while allowing vital domestic issues to fester, remind us that the centuries have not changed us human beings that much. For Akitada, his “poor judgments” will exact a heavy price on him, Tamako, and others. He truly desires to do the right thing but repeatedly speaks or acts precipitously. This Achilles’ heel of Akitada’s renders him a character whom the reader may long to guide out of his misconceptions. Alas, one can only stand by and watch the consequences.

About fifty years ago, Robert van Gulik authored a series about crime-fighting magistrate Judge Dee who lived in seventh-century China. One of these volumes was called The Chinese Maze Murders: A Judge Dee Mystery (Gulik, Robert Hans, Judge Dee Mystery.). I. J. Parker’s The Convict’s Sword follows, to a degree, in van Gulik’s footsteps. Although Judge Dee is a wiser man than Akitada, he also seems, by design, more god-like and less human. And Judge Dee is more secure professionally and domestically. It is interesting to compare van Gulik and Parker’s depiction of women. Herself a woman, Parker, in tune with the twenty-first century, compellingly shapes the chasm of communication between the sexes as her female characters inhabit the traditional roles but also emerge with distinct personalities and strong wills.

Containing martial arts and mayhem, drama, intrigue, and romance; The Convict’s Sword is many things including an intricate and absorbing mystery reaching in several directions (although, like many mysteries, the ultimate closeness of its human associations is a trifle too coincidental). This is an as-accurate-as- possible picture of life in Japan among a cross-section of the classes and a poignant look at a harried middle rank civil servant whose sense of duty blinds him. Blindness, this superior novel imparts, isn’t only a physical impairment. Highly recommended.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin (Non-Classics) (July 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	I.J. Parker
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dragon Scroll Hell Screen

Bibliography:

• Rashomen Gate (July 2003)
• Hell Screen (September 2003)
• The Dragon Scroll (June 2005)
• Black Arrow (November 2006)
• Island of Exiles (September 2007)
• The Convict’s Sword (July 2009)
• The Masuda Affair (November 2010)
• The Fires of the Gods (April 2011)

“Sometimes,” he told clients “what frightens us the most is that which is nameless.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JAN 7, 2010)

Special–>  Interview with Aifric Campbell

Therapists make fascinating fictional characters–just consider the raw material. They listen to the secrets of others all day long, but where do those secrets go? It’s assumed that therapists are rational, ethical, well-balanced individuals. But what if they’re not? These questions surface whenever I come across a fictional therapist. Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You features a therapist with a very messy private life, while in Irvin Yalom’s novel, Lying on the Couch, the fictional therapists are both seduced and conned by patients.

This brings me to The Semantics of Murder, the first novel from Irish author Aifric Campbell, recently published by Serpent’s Tail Press. This engrossing tale is inspired by the 1971 unsolved murder of UCLA Professor Richard Montague. Montague was born in California and attended UC Berkeley where he earned degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics. As is often the case with truly brilliant people, Montague’s work crossed subject boundaries, and he pioneered a logical approach to semantics known as Montague Grammar. Montague was also a talented organist and a real estate investor. But Montague had a dark side, and it’s this dark side which led to his murder.

The Semantics of Murder begins with London-based therapist Jay Hamilton as he begins a session with another of his troubled clients. Jay is well-respected and has a practice full of affluent clients who can afford his services, and yet there’s something not quite right about him. He has no sustained relationships, no private life to speak of, and his professional manner is carefully prepared, studied and manufactured. In reality, Jay is an emotional vampire who unethically feeds his secret literary career with the private confidences of his clients:

“The air was thick with frantic secrets. Closing his eyes, Jay caught a fleeting glimpse of a red silk scarf flapping through a car window, heard the sound of swift, light footsteps receding in the night—it was the hurried press of Cora’s story unfolding just out of earshot, but when he listened, it fell silent. For five weeks now he had watched her scuttle round the fringes of her past while he sat in the armchair, a textbook arrangement of attentiveness in the fifty-minute hour. His body language had been successfully deflated years ago, during long sessions in front of the full-length mirror in his studio room, head swiveling between an oblique view of the bay—all he could afford in San Francisco in those early days—and a honey strip of afternoon light sliding across the back wall. He’d studied his reflection, monitoring the gradual erosion of his identity into a pared–down expression of alert neutrality that would reassure his clients that he could listen without judgement, without pity, shock or horror; that he could take the story of a life and help them to rewrite it, give it a sequence and consequence it didn’t have, make it a better story.”

In the dark, almost-forgotten recesses of Jay’s life are the memories of his elder brother, Robert, a mathematics professor at UCLA who was murdered decades earlier. Jay, now 51 years old, finds these memories somewhat unsettling, but he’s managed to minimize his past by moving to Britain and establishing his successful practice there. Jay is disturbed when contacted by writer Dana Flynn, a woman who intends to write a biography of Robert Hamilton, and he finds old, unwelcome memories resurfacing:

“Jay had found himself continually ambushed by reminiscence which presented as a sort of arrhythmia that disrupted the familiar beat of his days.”

Jay doesn’t quite approve of Dana’s last book, the biography of an eminent scientist and a secret homosexual, for while the book cannot be faulted, its author questioned the official verdict of death-by-suicide in a “rather dubiously presented closing chapter.” Jay is cautious at the prospect of the resurrection of old, painful memories, and concerned about the intrusion of a biographer, but at the same time, he isn’t averse to the idea that Robert should receive some recognition of his life’s work. So simultaneously curious and uneasy, Jay, as the “keeper” of Robert’s memory agrees to meet Dana.

The novel goes back and forth from Jay’s present to his past, and in these glittering, bitter-sweet memories, Jay emerges as the younger brother who lived in the shadow of his brilliant, favoured brother’s success. Robert never approved of Jay’s career choice, and thought he could do better. Robert, a dynamic, vibrant person comes alive in these pages through intense, painfully sharp moments which vacillate between an astonishing academic career and a dark “private underworld.” The duality of Robert’s nature, one half productive and the other seemingly unconnected half of secret, brutal sexual encounters haunt Jay–a man whose life is about control, order and presentation:

“It was as if a lid was creaking open on his vaporous past and old unwelcome phantoms were slipping out to invade the present. His resuscitated brother was gliding towards him, gathering up the years.”

The Semantics of Murder is difficult to define within the context of genre; the novel occupies the space where reality meets fiction, past blends into present, and genius merges into the dark recesses of sexual gratification. Part mystery, The Semantics of Murder explores the difficulties of biography, the fragility of the therapist-client relationship, and the unfathomable depths of motivation. Campbell shows a sharp understanding of the complex duality of human nature and this duality is explored and accepted unflinchingly within the pages of this excellent novel.

Aifric Campbell’s next novel The Lost Adjustor is due out in February 2010, and I’ll be first in line to read it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Serpent’s Tail (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AMAZON PAGE:	The Semantics of Murder
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aifric Campbell
EXTRAS:	Our interview with Aifric Campbell
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books with shrinks: The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom Dry Ice by Stephen White

Bibliography:

• The Semantics of Murder (2009)
• The Loss Adjuster (2010)
• On the Floor (June 2013)

“The postwar economy created a demand for women workers, and the postindustrial economy created jobs that they were particularly suited to fill. The soaring expectations of the postwar boom, followed by the decline in men’s paychecks in the 1970s, made wives’ participation in the workforce almost a requisite for middle-class life. The birth control pill gave young women confidence that they could pursue a career without interruption by pregnancy. The civil rights movement made women conscious of the ways they had been treated like second-class citizens and made them determined that their own status was one of the things they were going to change. It was, all in all, a benevolent version of the perfect storm.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JAN 03, 2010)

Title IX bans discrimination in schools based on gender—thus ensuring equal opportunities for girls and boys in academics and athletics. When ex-congresswoman Pat Schroeder, one of the driving forces behind Title IX once visited a high school, a coach asked his team of boys to show her what they collectively thought of the legislation—they turned their backs to Schroeder and mooned her.

This shocking incident is but one of many Gail Collins uses to superb effect in her illuminating book, When Everything Changed. Collins, who works as a columnist for the New York Times (and who edited the Times’ editorial page for many years), frames many everyday incidents against larger rumblings for change.

It is but fitting that the book starts out in 1960—after all the 60s was the decade that brought about significant social upheaval in the country. Illuminating events and incidents from the 60s also serves to underline the relative newness of the many rights we know and enjoy.

The escalation of the women’s movement was brought about by a “benevolent storm” as Collins puts it, in the introductory quote above. After the war, the economy was in such overdrive that women had to be recruited to keep the astounding growth rate going. When women joined the workforce then, they thought it was a good deal: “Most tended to compare their opportunities and achievements to those of other women, not men. And for those who did venture into the public world, the mere fact of being allowed to take part was so exciting that the details scarcely mattered,” Collins explains.

Of course many women in the 60s were not in the workforce and the idea that they had to derive immense satisfaction from being housewives in perfect suburban homes was all but shattered when one of the early feminists, the famous Betty Friedan, conducted surveys among women for her groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique. One respondent tried to explain the dull nothingness her life had become: “There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?”

This gnawing ache morphed into something larger as women tried to carve a niche in the world at large—Collins chronicles their steady march beautifully in When Everything Changed. In here, she describes the work of more famous feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem but also less well known ones like Ella Baker and Pauli Murray. She describes the struggles of women across all cultural, racial and political divides—the resentment felt even within the women’s movement itself, is also highlighted.

In a strange way, it is also reassuring to see that hysteria has always been a part of the American political process and that fairness eventually does seem to come out ahead. For example, when the Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed, the opponents drew dramatic pictures: “Maybe the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts would have to be merged. Would child support become unconstitutional? What about unisex bathrooms? Since the language was so general, opponents felt free to argue that it could mean anything,” Collins writes.

Today, while many more women can do many more things, true rights and burden sharing have been more difficult to come by. In that sense, Collins also shows us what the women’s rights movement has not yet brought about. It’s captured well in this statement by First Lady Michelle Obama: “We have to be realistic and honest with young women and families about what they will confront, because to say, ‘You can do it all and should do it all,’ and not to get the support, to me is frustrating.” In other words, a larger societal network that makes daycare affordable, that makes flex jobs part of the equation, has yet to be implemented. As many women are finding out, giving 100% at work and at home without support of any kind is all but impossible.

What serves When Everything Changed very well is the fact that it’s extremely well edited and readable and above all it’s so very accessible. It is evident that Collins has done a lot of research (there is a good bibliography at the end) and conducted many interviews for the book but this is not an intimidating academic treatise—instead it has her funny and droll touches all over the pages. She writes crisply and draws out drama even in the shortest of sub-chapters. In that sense too, When Everything Changed excels—it makes the material more fun and readily consumable. Equally commendable is the way in which Collins treats the stories of women from all across the political spectrum (she gives Phyllis Schlafly as much coverage as Gloria Steinem; Sarah Palin as much as Hillary Clinton)—in that sense this is pure reporting undiluted by opinion.

Another reason to pay attention? As Collins herself points out, the fight is far from over. As daily news headlines about the Stupak amendment in a potential health bill, or a whole slew of other issues indicate, it could be dangerous to rest assured that women’s rights have been won in all areas that matter. In fact the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that helps women from being discriminated against by means of pay, was passed only this year—the first one by the Obama administration.

When Everything Changed is a must-read for both women and men. Collins’ book expertly shows us why the study of history is so crucial. “There was … the disappointment of realizing that the younger women took it all for granted. The things I fought for are now considered quaint…” the novelist Erica Jong told Time. “They say, ‘We don’t need feminism anymore.’ They don’t understand graduating magna cum laude from Harvard and then being told to go to the typing pool.” Whether or not such fears are justified, When Everything Changed should be essentially reading for all young women. The famous scientist Isaac Newton once said: “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That same statement is very applicable to the women’s movement.

As Collins’ book wonderfully shows, enormous progress has been made. We too stand on the shoulders of giants—women who challenged the status quo and paved the way for generations to come. It is because of the positive changes that have been implemented in the not-so-recent past that we can now hardly believe, for instance, that the appallingly discriminatory situations women find themselves in, in the television drama “Mad Men” were once the stuff of real life. What’s worse, they were the rule not the exception—until of course, (almost) everything changed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 64 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (October 14, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Gail Collins The New York Times on Gail Collins
EXTRAS:	Hachette Open Book Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Fiction that embodies this book’s premise: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Bibliography:

• The Millennium Book (1990) (with Dan Collins)
• Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics (1998)
• America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines (2003)
• When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (October 2009)

“The world was at war, but the world also seemed like a Charlie Chaplin movie, full of scowlin society matrons, mountainous mustachioed toughs, pretty girls who hadn’t enough to eat, and pies left at dangerous angles at the edges of tables.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JAN 2, 2010)

In the first chapter of Gold’s ebullient, complex, over-the-top Charlie Chaplin novel, Chaplin dies in a rowboat accident off the stormy, rocky northern California coast in 1916. At the same moment he also causes a riot in a small town in East Texas and is spotted engaging in various acts of mayhem around the country.

This bout of mass hysteria or “Chaplin-itis,” serves to introduce the primary members of the supporting cast, whose lives will intersect crucially and randomly at least partly because of the events of that day.

Leland Wheeler, the mother-dominated lighthouse keeper who failed to save the seagoing Chaplin hallucination, breaks from the family tradition and runs ashore to Hollywood to become a famous actor.

Hugo Black, the effete son of an ill-paid college professor, has proved clownishly inept at a string of railroad jobs, his mind ever lured away to the more refined world in his imagination. When his train is burned by the mob in the East Texas riot, he loses his last railroad job.

And Rebecca Golod (who is more a recurring imp than a real main character) discovers she has inherited the family calling when she breaks her conman grandfather’s precious spyglass and adroitly manages to blame Hugo Black without saying a word.

The center of the story, of course, is the most famous man in the country, maybe the world, Charlie Chaplin. Two years before, at age 24, he had made his first film. Now, almost 60 films later, he is the highest paid man in America.

But Charlie suffers. Before a party he crams his pockets with conversational gambits designed to dazzle and discomfit his hosts. He loathes Mary Pickford. Her fame nearly eclipses his own and her wholesome, sweetheart image grates on his nerves.

He is an inveterate, obsessional skirt chaser who can’t recall a pretty face. In a scene of high hilarity and charmed misunderstanding, Pickford’s writer captivates Chaplin with clever repartee. She thinks he knows she is Pickford’s writer – his greatest nemesis – while he thinks he’s conducting an artful seduction of a kindred soul.

Charlie is also a driven genius, obsessed by ideas and images. Gold shows him at work on several films, culminating in his 1919 tortured, ambitious, over-budget flop, Sunnyside.

As the world plunges deeper into World War I, Hollywood, a fledgling industry, stands on the brink of soaring flight. The film industry in Europe has been co-opted by propaganda where it hasn’t simply been stifled. But the unhappy population demands the respite of moving pictures more than ever and Hollywood is rushing to comply.

War fever is growing in the US too. Chaplin (a Brit) is condemned for making movies instead of enlisting, but there are rumors that the State Department has asked him to stay out of the fray since he can best serve the war effort through his celebrity and talent. In fact, to ensure his cooperation, they have agreed to prevent his dreaded, beloved mother from visiting by refusing her entry into the country.

Meanwhile, Leland has seen his acting dreams evaporate as a misunderstanding involving his weakness for women (and catalyzed by young Rebecca Golod) forces him to enlist and be sent to France. Here another incident sparked by his weakness for women nearly gets him killed and leads to a fateful rescue.

Hugo Black is as unhappy in the army as he was on the railroad. But as war ends for the rest of the world, Hugo finds himself in the frozen misery of a Russian winter; a place bereft of all comforts and mired in a forgotten bloody fight.

Gold (Carter Beats the Devil) has poured the whole WWI era out on the page – American cowboy shows in Europe, crumbling political structures and the scary new ideas behind Bolshevism, patriotic Liberty Bond rallies and a burgeoning propaganda machine, a runaway train in Russia, grinding misery in France. But above all, there’s the movie business – the stars, the studio system, the glitter, the insatiable demand of the audience, the magic, and the work. Underneath the glamour and flush of triumph is the lingering insecurity; the fear that it’s all just a fad and people will tire of looking at moving pictures by tomorrow or next year.

This is a sparkling, sprawling story with frequent jarring jumps. From Beverly Hills fretting to an eerie tableau of frozen, stripped soldiers, their dead limbs emerging from rock-hard mud, to the angst and intensity of a Chaplin vision to a scene of callous cruelty in the trenches of France, to the backrooms and boardrooms of American business and government. Sometimes we experience the book like a panoramic film that then zooms in on the individual. We find ourselves inside lots of heads, empathizing with a plethora of personalities, ambitions and fears.

Each element engages the reader; the writing is dazzling, visual and intense; the history is thorough and authentic, the ideas are ambitious. While it often feels like trying to hold on to too much at once during a bumpy, spectacular ride, in the end it feels like you’ve been someplace.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	Sunnyside
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Glen David Gold Glen David Gold blog
EXTRAS:	Guardian interview with Glen David Gold
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read an excerpt from Carter Beats the Devil

Bibliography:

• Carter Beats the Devil (2001)
• Sunnyside (May 2009)