” ‘Hannah Elizabeth Payne, having been found guilty of the crime of murder in the second degree, I hereby sentence you to undergo melachoming by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to spend thirty days in the Chrome ward of the Crawford State Prison and to remain a Red for a period of sixteen years.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (OCT 6, 2011)

Hannah Payne is twenty-six years old and Red, with a capital R, her badge of shame. Her skin has been “melachromed” by the State for her crime of abortion, and for not naming the abortionist and not identifying the father, the celebrated pastor and TV (“vid”) evangelist, Aidan Dale, who is now the nation’s “Secretary of Faith.” Her sentence is thirty days confinement, and then sixteen years in the community as a Red, where she will be constantly ostracized and persecuted.

Other criminals of the same or different color (depending on the crime) are wandering through the prison of life, beyond the walls of crowded cells (this is the State’s answer for overcrowding), and many don’t survive — the Blue child molesters have especially low survival rates. Hannah is deeply in love with the married Aiden, and refuses to upbraid him or the doctor who was kind and tender to her. She is also a product of her religious upbringing, and when she wakes up Red, she concedes that she deserves this punishment.

Many dystopian novels are noir and bleak -— you can just hear Mahler’s symphonies in your imagination -— the lost world of childhood, the yearning of fulfillment, life’s despair and discord. Therefore, Jordan’s more insistent, high-strung tone in reimagining a liberal interpretation of The Scarlett Letter, Hawthorne’s gothic melodrama, was unexpected. Her exuberance is like a lit match that never goes out. It has a pumping action, much like Dennis Lehane’s in his Kenzie and Gennaro series.

It also conforms to the margins of conventional genre more than the open-endedness of literature; Hannah is portrayed as a solid, misunderstood hero, and the demarcation of villain/hero-martyr is obvious and continuous with the secondary characters as well, except for a surprising and complex French radical named Simone, the most intriguing character in this tale. Much of the time, Hannah is on the lam with her newfound Red friend, Kayla, and heartily braves and overcomes dangerous hurdles at a page-turning glee.

In this near-future world, Roe v Wade has been overturned, and most of the fifty states have outlawed abortion. The government métier is fundamental New Testament, and is ruthless and unforgiving in its Kingdom-minded law. From reading this book, it appears that abortion is the primary preoccupation of the militant State, and that Aidan Dale is the only celebrity on the vid. Much of the novel takes place in the North Dallas area, where Jordan partly grew up. She knows the ingrained and forceful pieties of the area (the actual geographical area of Roe v Wade), and seems to draw on them. She started this book even before Mudbound, and it is left to wonder if she was shaking loose some demons from the Texas Red Oaks.

This is a commercial novel, unlike Mudbound, with a knowing arc and slender, reductive characters. She has a gift for thrumming action, even if it tends toward didacticism and a tidy outcome. This isn’t a novel that provokes thinking, as Jordan does much of the thinking for the reader, but it does provide action and visceral thrills and some poetic lyricism amidst the many indictments against religious zealots.

There is an exquisitely transcendent scene about two-thirds through, where a quietness and stillness pervades for a few pages, and Hannah reaches a key turning point in her life, and expresses it in a way that I hope others won’t fail to appreciate. It may seem lurid at face value, or even gratuitous, but it is anything but —- rather, it is sublime in its implication. This was the high point of refinement in this not typically nuanced novel.

Twists and turns are relentless and exciting, although it is obvious, in this world of morally challenged monkeys running the State, who will prevail. Ambiguity is not a paramount trait in this heavy-handed story with potboiler themes. It is comfort food—like popcorn with a little too much butter, and addictive. The author will keep you fastened till the end, because Jordan’s thrall with her characters and exultance with her story is contagious and highly spirited.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 351 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hillary Jordan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mudbound by Hilary Jordan

Bibliography:

• Mudbound (2008)
• When She Woke (2011)

“You’ll understand one day, her mother had said at the bus station. When you find a man of your own, you’ll know why you’ll run toward him.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 28, 2011)

What do you see in the dark? Well, that partly depends on your perspective. In Munoz’s stylistic mise-en-scène novel, the second-person point of view frames the watchful eye and disguises the wary teller. Reading this story is like peering through Hitchcock’s lens—the camera as observer’s tool and observer as camera–with light and shadow and space concentrated and dispersed frame by frame, sentence by sentence.

Munoz applied the famous director’s noir techniques to create a story about murder, madness, and longing amid the desire and antipathy of a working-class California town. Lives intersect, scenes juxtapose, and shades of gray color the landscape of the novel. Scenes of tenderness dovetail with acts of menace, plaintive music integrates with the rattling of chains, dark interiors annex the stark white heat of day.

In the hushed and dusty working-class town of Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950’s, the locals jealously watch the fresh and guarded romance of Dan and Teresa. Dan is the rugged bartender/guitarist and sexy son of Arlene, a bitter waitress at the downtown café and the abandoned wife of a motel owner out on the changing Highway 99. Teresa, a shoe saleswoman and aspiring singer, is the willowy Mexican-American daughter of a mother who left her to chase dreams of love in Texas. The narrow-minded prejudices of the town encroach upon the open bud of romance, and the ill-fated romance takes an ineluctable bloody turn. We know from the start that that someone dies, but it is the why and how and where that sustains the tension of the story.

At the height of Dan and Teresa’s love story, the glitter and fantasy of Hollywood comes to Bakersfield as the crew arrives to shoot select scenes of the iconic movie we know today as PSYCHO. The unnamed Actress and Director reveal themselves implicitly through details of the unnamed film-in-progress. It was evident when they scouted exterior shots for the motel, and during the illustrious shower scene. The interior monologues of the Actress and the frame by frame shoot of that most renowned scene in movie history is worth the price of admission alone. It felt as if Munoz had been standing next to Hitchcock. The author’s interpretation of historical data are transposed with polished clarity into film as words, and the searing silences that Hitchcock is so famous for lands on the page in the spaces between passages.

There are superbly captured details and Hitchcockian motifs that add subtlety to the story and incite the reader’s suspense, such as stairwells, keys, mothers, blondes, confined spaces, as well as loss of identity and optical symbols. The plate glass window of the café serves up a film frame metaphor (and the lens of a camera). Moral ambiguity, mirrors, bars and grills, and kisses, and of course—the MacGuffin, are all woven in with care and control.

My primary criticism is that the narrative is dry and cerebral. I was academically stimulated by the author’s style and complexity of techniques, but occasionally it felt studied and detached. The muted coolness kept me at a distance; I wasn’t emotionally engaged, but I was intellectually absorbed. The frequent jump-cuts were its strength, but also its drawback.

So what do you see in the dark? The eyes, said Hitchcock, the eyes said it all.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Manuel Muñoz
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Psycho: Point Omega by Don Delillo

Bibliography:

• Zigzagger: Stories (2003)
• The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue: Stories (2007)
• What You See in the Dark (2010)

“We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 16, 2011)

Visit the website for the National Park Service and you will find that the Elwha River Restoration project is a key one for the Olympic National Park in Washington state. “Elwha River Restoration will restore the river to its natural free-flowing state, allowing all five species of Pacific salmon and other anadromous fish to once again reach habitat and spawning grounds,” the project literature explains.

It is with this kernel of truth that writer Jonathan Evison spins a grand tale in his new novel, West of Here. The novel essentially looks at environmental decisions made during the late 1800s, when the American frontier moved rapidly west, and land grabs were in full swing—and the consequences of those same decisions more than a hundred years on.

Arguably the central protagonist in the novel—one populated by dozens of characters—is Ethan Thornburgh who envisions a dam across the mighty Elwha to harness its energy. “We’ll transform this place, for a hundred miles in every direction. Our dam will be a force of nature.” Thornburgh predicts.

In a twisted way, Thornburgh’s prediction comes true—the dam certainly “transforms” Port Bonita, the fictional town on the river’s banks, but not in the way that Thornburgh intended.

Fast forward to 2006, and Port Bonitans are struggling. Fishing, once a thriving business in town, is no longer a viable industry—the dam has seen to that. The town’s commercial fish processing plants serially shut down and only one lonely one is left to go on. Nevertheless Port Bonitans remain hopeful as they celebrate their heritage and look forward to the dam becoming a thing of the past soon. A poster around town perhaps says it best:

“Dam Days, September 2-3
Come celebrate over 100 years of Port Bonita history!
Featuring Live Music, Logging Competition, Chainsaw Carving Contest, and World-Famous Salmon Bake
Proudly presented in part by your neighbors at Wal-Mart.

It is at this “Dam Days” event that Jared Thornburgh, the manager of the fish processing plant, is expected to give the keynote speech. Jared, a descendant of the ambitious Ethan Thornburgh, has none of his predecessor’s fire. Instead his life is in mid-life stasis, consumed wholly by everyday trivialities. Forever bogged down by the weight of history, Jared worries he never quite measures up to the family name. “He forever lived in the shadow of this obsolete dam, his fortune linked inextricably to its hulking existence, its legacy of ecological menace,” Evison writes.

The novel moves back and forth between two times—the relatively recent present set in 2006 and the past set in 1890. A whole assorted set of characters populates each time period. Evison tries hard—sometimes too hard—to create characters in 2006 that are analogous to ones in the past. So it is that there’s an ex-convict Timmon Tillman who traces the same treacherous path along the Olympic National Park, that James Mather, an adventurous pioneer once did.

Native Americans, especially members of the Klallam tribe, also populate these pages as they too try to adapt to a changing landscape.

Evison traverses a lot of ground in this hefty novel and given its length it is remarkably well edited. The problem with West of Here is that it ultimately can’t move beyond its cast of characters to look at the wider picture and explore complexities. Evison loses the forest for the trees. As the book winds down, the “happily ever after” ending seems pat especially given the interesting complexities each of the characters started out with. It’s almost as if Evison finally ran out of steam and decided to wrap it all up with a neat bow. Notwithstanding this, West of Here truly transports the reader and lovers of a meaty story will really take to the novel.

In his “Dam Days” address, Jared Thornburgh echoes the words of his predecessor when he describes Port Bonita as “not an address, after all, not even a place, but a spirit, an essence, a pulse—a future still unfolding.”   For all the pep talk, Jared Thornburgh might be papering over the truth. After all, one might wonder, what kind of future does it portend when the only two times that someone from Port Bonita actually managed a modicum of success, was when each broke free?

As the residents of Port Bonita learn, some essential truths remain unchanged over centuries. “Can we really be whoever we want to be, now that we’ve collected all that we are?” asks one of the characters in the novel. The answer to that essential question is “Maybe.” Which, as it turns out, is still the same answer in 2006 as it was in 1890. Nevertheless, that answer carries with it some measure of hope—and that just might be enough for the hearty Port Bonitans.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 92 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (February 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jonathan Evison
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels set in the Pacific Northwest: The Wilding by Benjamin Percy The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

Bibliography:

• All About Lulu (2008)
• West Of Here (2011)
• The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (August 2012)

“On that last day Mor took us up to the roof, she had calculated the difference between what we couldn’t have and her ability to watch us want. The difference between her pain and ours, she decided, measured nine stories high.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 11, 2011)

It amazes me that The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is Heidi W. Durrow’s debut novel. It is poetic, poignant, beautiful and elegiac with the panache of a seasoned writer. Once I started it, I could not stop thinking about it. It haunted my days until I finished it. Durrow has a talent that is rare and brilliant, like the northern lights.

The novel is about Rachel, the lone survivor of a fall from an apartment building. How did she fall? What made her family go off the roof-top? Told in different voices, the story unfolds slowly and the reader is let in on family destinies, secrets, shame, and the legacy of alcohol.

The story starts off in Chicago. It is told from the viewpoints of Rachel, a bi-racial girl who is in fifth grade when the story opens and is in high school at its end. There is Nella, Rachel’s mother, who is Danish, and whose surviving diary tells her story. Roger, Rachel’s father, is a black man in the military who meets Nella in Europe and who leaves Rachel with his mother after the fall. Laronne is Nella’s supervisor at work who comes across Nella’s diaries after her death. And then there is Brick, a young man of the Chicago tenements whose stolen copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of North America is his most prized possession.

As this haunting novel begins, Brick, a budding ornithologist, is watching for birds to fall in the alleyway of his building. He is hoping for an egret but usually what he sees are falling trash bags and detritus from the upper floors. This time, he sees what he thinks is a huge bird falling and he runs downstairs to see what kind of bird it is.

“He was certain the silhouette of the great egret had passed his courtyard window…When he finally reached the courtyard, he saw that his bird was not a bird at all. His bird was a boy and a girl and a mother and a child. The mother, the girl, the child. They looked like they were sleeping, eyes closed, listless. The baby was still in her mother’s arms, a gray porridge pouring from the underside of her head. The girl was heaped on top of the boy’s body, a bloody helpless pillow.”

This sight becomes imprinted on Brick and effects the course of his entire life.

Rachel is the only survivor of the fall and, after her hospitalization, is sent to live with her grandmother in Portland, Oregon.   With her blue eyes and “good” hair, she becomes very much aware of race. There are the white girls and there are the black girls. She fits in nowhere though she tries to make a new self after the fall. Her mother, “Mor,” had done her best to shield Rachel and her siblings from race, to see themselves as unique beings, not as a color. This was much easier to do in Europe than in the United States. As Rachel navigates the racial terrain of her new world, she is stymied over and over by the subtleties and outright cruelties of race.

Rachel watches her grandmother drink her “contributions” and sees how the amount of her drinking increases daily. Rachel is very aware of the impact of alcohol on her family’s lives. Nella was in recovery when she died and her diary begins each day with the number of days she has been sober. Roger, Nella’s father, is an alcoholic, and it becomes clear that Rachel’s grandmother has a huge problem with her “contributions.” Though Roger does not visit Rachel once she is out of the hospital, his story is told through Brick who met him in the hospital. There, Roger shared family secrets with Brick and made him promise to one day tell these to Rachel.

The story unfolds in layers, slowly and magnificently. The reader has questions answered page by page until the story of the fall, the family secrets and history, are all given to us in haunting and precious bits. This is more than a story of a bi-racial girl and her ability to adapt to a new world and the horror of her legacy. It is a story of resiliency and hope and awareness and insight. Rachel is one of the strongest and clear characters that I have come across in literature. This is a book to be treasured and re-read. It is that good.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 228 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (January 11, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Heidi W. Durrow
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “fall off the roof” novel: Stella Descending by Linn Ullman Another “mixed race” book: Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Bibliography:

• The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (January 2011)

“The idea that we were going back to the land made me laugh. It was the word back. With our son, who was less than a year old my husband and I moved into an unfinished cabin on a sixty-acre woodlot in downeast Maine with no electricity, no plumbing, no phone. It was June 1971.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (NOV 14, 2010)

As the title suggests, this is a book about living close to nature, or rather, being a part of nature while cognizant of that important and salient fact. For, what more can we be reminded of, if not reminded that we are biology first? It is easy to forget that we are made of the salt of the sea and the grist the land, that atoms and molecules somehow cohere and survive and become…us. That is the delicate core of the quiet little book. We are of nature, let us not forget. The writing in this tradition is long and rich and deep. Henry David Thoreau to Audubon to Anne Dillard and E.O. Wilson–all master practitioners of the genre. And now Susan Hand Shetterly. She is in heady company and she belongs there. This book is spellbinding.

As the quote above relates–it’s the opening sentence to the book–Shetterly and her young family moved to rural Mane in 1971. They split wood. They read by kerosene lamp. They grow food. And most importantly, amidst it all, the author pays attention. If nothing else, this exquisite little book is a meditation on paying attention. Thoreau said he went to the woods to learn how to live. Although Shetterly never explicitly tells us what set her upon this course, the motive–how to live–hangs suspended and crystalline quite close to the surface. For her, the answer seems not simple, yet is stark, complex but not complicated: Live close, close to nature, close to that which is wild, close to what makes you alive. “We give wild a chance,” she writes, “and sometimes it comes back, and we are better for it.”

Settled into the Wild is a collection of twenty-six overlapping and related essays. Many are about the animals who, literally, cross her path. Several are about the people, the farmers and the fishermen, who inhabit the land. Several essays overlap, people and animals, the town and the wild. All the pieces are gem-like, written with great care and loving attention. When civilization and the wild overlap, we get perhaps the most powerful images of the book. For instance:

“A neighbor of mine walked onto the deck of his house one early morning just before hunting season with a mug of coffee in his hand, took a sip, and glanced down the cobbles of Patten Bay to the gunmetal water. He looked again. There, up to its belly in the tide, stood a doe. Two coyotes patrolled the beach in front of her. Back and forth they paced over the stones, stopping every now and then to fix her with their eyes. She stood with her head up, frozen in one posture, the water sloshing at her sides. Alert to every move they made, she did not look directly at them. They looked at her straight on.”

Perhaps the most poignant observations in the book are made when the author invites and infuses into her life the wildness found outside her door. There is, for example, a raven named Chac. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “in the high branches of a spruce, there sat a rough nest with four young ravens in it.” She continues: “Three flourished. One did not. Three grew up and flew, but one did not. The parents fed the bird in the nest now and then, but they spent more time with the healthy birds, and then, one day, they did not return.” Shetterly, a licensed expert at wild bird rehabilitation, takes in the raven, heals it–it was bound with fishermen’s monofilament in the nest–raises it, and eventually returns it to the wild. “Letting him go meant that he would never abide a sheltered life. I offered this tamed and crippled wild prince his own ancestral home–bounteous and dangerous.” It is a potential of this type of writing to turn mandolin, to a anthropomorphize wild beasts and then sting the reader for doing so with tales of death or loss or abandon. Shetterly aptly avoids this trap and instead, like a good artful teacher, teaches us of her world without pathos.

Wild birds aside, there are snakes in the bedroom, country roads paved, trees hugged; there are ocean-going farmers studied and crickets caught. Salmons escape their pens and are slaughtered, alewives migrate and rural communities are threatened. Of a neighbor, Shetterly writes, “Jack was one of the first people I knew who lived a sense of place.” This observation stands out and proves to be a watermark for the book. Shetterly too lives a sense of place, to use her phrase. She has arrived there through observation, patience and hard work, and not without a good deal of poetry and art. It is the reader’s privilege to be welcomed into her world. One can learn better how to live studying such a life.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (January 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Susan Hand Shetterly
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Fictional back to the land stories: Drop City by T.C. Boyle Country Called Home by Kim Barnes

Bibliography:

• The New Year’s Owl: Encounters with Animals, People and the Land They Share (1986)
• Settled into the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town (Janaury 2010)

Children’s Books:

• The Dwarf-Wizard of Uxmal (1990)
• The Tinker of Salt Cove (1990)
• Raven’s Light (1991)
• Muwin and the Magic Hare (1993)
• Shelterwood (2001)

“Indeed, I was quite the romantic. A man would have to be heartless not to be, and a fool not to outgrow it. Of course, every Jew wishes to summon the Messiah, to draw him down, through the force of his own goodness, from the throne upon which he sits chained in the Heavens. But one might profitably ask: Who has chained him there, if not the Lord Himself, the devil being a theological convenience we Jews…forbid ourselves?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (SEP 8, 2010)

Science, religion, and language intersect in this edgy, Judeo-mystic satire about love, brotherhood, and neuroses in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1895, oculist Jakob Sammelsohn meets Sigmund Freud on the same night that he eyes and falls in love with Freud’s primary patient, Emma Eckstein. As Jakob is guided into Freud’s world of psychoanalysis, he reluctantly becomes a guide himself. He plunges into the mythological realm of a dybbuk, the dislocated spirit of his dead wife, Ita, who possesses and inhabits Emma. Or so Ita-as-Emma claims. As the relationship intensifies between Jakob, Freud, and Emma, Ita’s haunting voice lures Jakob into a psychosexual seduction.

But here in Vienna, the cultural center of the world, supernatural notions and Jewish folklore is rejected in favor of more intrepid theories of science and psychology. Freud believes Emma is in the throes of hysteria, while his friend, Dr. Fliess, advances the theory of “nasal reflex neurosis” as the source of all unhappiness. In the meantime, Jakob just wants to lose his virginity. His tyrannical father, who spoke to him only in Hebrew scripture, forced him to marry Ita, the village “idiot,” after the first forced marriage to Hindele ended in chaste disaster. Just after the wedding, Ita fled and drowned herself. But she is back and commanding Jakob with menace and affection.

Jakob later meets Dr. Ludvik Zamenhof, a half-blind, retired oculist and language enthusiast. Zamenhof’s aim is to join all of humanity in a utopian, universal language called Esperanto. When Jakob meets the radiant Esperanto patron, Loe Bernfeld, he is smitten. Subsequently, Jakob is thrust into an idealistic world of love and linguistics–the neutral tongue to unite the world and a passionate one to join him with Loe. But the ether world has a different design on this incurable romantic.

Jakob’s Hebraic-Homeric journey is full of colorful and magical characters, such as bickering, burly angels; a bedeviling dybbuk; a wicked demon child; and zealous polyglots, to name just a few. A clash of the titans of intellect and faith crosscut through the leviathans of lexicon and argot. The story follows Jakob from the countryside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the cultural hub of Vienna, from the terrifying streets and ghetto of Warsaw, and to celestial, rarefied dimensions.

Skibell’s tale is wholly imaginative and inventive, with ripe and rollicking prose and outrageous, unforgettable characters. In addition, it is peppered with an array of languages and dialog, most notably Hebrew and the enigmatic Esperanto, which endow symbolic and metaphoric texture to the narrative. At times, he is overwrought and long-winded, dawdling down his shadowy side streets and rambling for too long in his self-indulgent thoughts. But his ardent, spunky voice keeps the reader engaged and hooked in this fantastical and sometimes unearthly odyssey.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Joseph Skibell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another imagined Freud meeting: Lions at the Lamb House by Edwin M. Yoder Another imaginative historical novel: The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Bibliography:

• A Blessing On The Moon (1997)
• The English Disease (2003)
• A Curable Romantic (2010)

“This is something about himself that Alec still doesn’t know: how much he was wanted, how difficult it was to have him. And during some moments of adolescent rebellion, and again during the wars over his dropping out of Hampshire, when he would scream that he wished he’d never been born, Elaine would grab his flailing arms, hold him still, and say, You can never say that. That’s the one thing you are never allowed to say.

He was born at Round Hill Medical Center on July 4, 1985, nine fifteen at night. As we held Alec for the first time, the town fireworks began to whiz and boom, celebrating 209 years of democracy in America and also, Elaine and I were certain, our son’s long-awaited arrival.”

Book Review:

Review by Sudheer Apte (FEB 5, 2010)

Just like her earlier debut novel Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, Lauren Grodstein’s new book, too, is written from the point of view of a morose male protagonist. The hero in A Friend of the Family is Peter Dizinoff, a doctor living in a very comfortable New Jersey suburb.

In the beginning of the novel we find Dizinoff unhappy and separated from his family, but we are not told why. Flipping between flashbacks, we learn that his son Alec, on whom all of his fatherly expectations are laden, has disappointed his father by dropping out of a promising school. Not only is Dizinoff worried about his son’s life and career, but he is also worried that his wife Elaine seems much more blasé about how their son will manage, content to just love him and trust that he will find his own way.

Why can’t Alec be more like their best friends’ children, two of whom went to MIT? There are plenty of bad examples on hand to beware of: the same best friends’ eldest daughter got pregnant a few years ago as a teenager, was suspected of having murdered her baby after birth, and left home for years to escape the scandal. In fact this girl, Laura, now thirty years old, is back home now, and the much younger Alec is taking an alarming interest in her.

The central dilemma of the novel is a father’s love for his son and how far he is willing to go to protect him from approaching horrors. This kind of story is tricky to write: make Peter Dizinoff too sympathetic a character, and you veer into tragic melodrama as bad things happen to an innocent person; yet if you make him too flawed, the reader is apt to stop caring what happens to him.

Grodstein does a good job balancing these tensions, although your reaction to the novel will depend on how much Dizinoff’s character repels you. The man has no empathy for others. He is quick to judge people and to interfere in his son’s life, all the while offering elaborate justifications to himself for his own actions. Always a bit off, he gradually becomes more and more socially conservative, starting to take an interest in his Jewish heritage. He desperately wants his son to talk to him but is unable to relate to him. What prevents Dizinoff from becoming a Bollywood movie dad is Grodstein’s use of the first person, so that we see his life through his eyes. He is also a somewhat unreliable narrator; gradually his perspective becomes more and more skewed, while the past and present become more and more intertwined.

What I liked about the novel was its fast pace, especially toward the end when the mystery is revealed. Grodstein’s minute observations of everyday life, and her insight into a middle-aged father’s mind, also make this novel enjoyable. With well-researched medical terminology and some excellent lines, this should make for a good feature film—I can already see Robin Williams in a white coat.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 287 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (November 10, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Sudheer Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lauren Grodstein
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on Fatherhood: Captain Saturday by Robert Inman Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Bibliography:

• The Best of Animals: Stories (2002)
• Reproduction is the Flaw of Love (2004)
• A Friend of the Family (2009)
• The Explanation for Everything (September 2013)

“‘We’re not gonna make it,’ I said.

‘We will,’ he said.

That was Henry for you: absolutely certain that whatever he wanted to happen would happen. The body would get buried before the storm hit. The weather would dry out in time to resow the cotton. Next year would be a better year. His little brother would never betray him.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Bonnie Brody (AUG 09, 2009)

“Mudbound” is the very unaffectionate name that Laura and her children give to her husband, Henry’s, Mississippi cotton farm. Mudbound is without running water, electricity and, as the name implies, muddy and dirty. For a good part of the year it is inaccessible to any town because the huge quantity of rain washes out the only bridge that links Mudbound to civilization.

The novel takes place in Mississippi shortly after the ending of World War II. It is a Mississippi that would shudder in its shoes if it knew that Martin Luther King and a Civil Rights Movement were only 15 years down the road. It is a Mississippi of segregation, racism and hatred, even for black WW II heroes returning from their time overseas.

The chapters are told from the voices of different characters. There is Laura, at first fearful that she will be a spinster, but then finding love of a sort with Henry who marries her and takes her far from her family so that he can fulfill his dream of being a farmer. Henry’s voice is that of a man trying to do the right thing under difficult economic and social conditions. Florence is a midwife and Laura’s housekeeper, a black woman wise in the ways of the world and understanding that there is a wall too tall between blacks and whites for her to traverse. Hap is Florence’s husband. He is working as hard as he can to try and make it as a tenant farmer on Henry’s farm. It is an uphill battle all the way with two steps backward for every step forward.

Then there are Jamie and Ronsell. Both are war heroes but one is black and the other is white. Jamie is Henry’s brother, many years his junior. Prior to the war, Jamie was light-hearted and easy-going. However, he brings demons back with him from his war experiences. Ronsell, too, is a war hero, having served in a black brigade under General Patton. He is Florence and Hap’s son. He, too, carries demons from the war. Both likely have cases of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Ronsell and Jamie become friends and this stirs up a pot best left alone.

In the background without his own voice in the story is Pappy, a mean-spirited, nasty and racist man – – Henry’s father. He is even cruel to his own granddaughter. There is not likely a person on earth that Pappy has a nice word for except occasionally Jamie.

This story beautifully and tragically unfolds through the different voices. Mudbound is a book that will not soon be forgotten. It is horrible in its tragedy and beautiful in its telling.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 471 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (March 17, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hillary Jordan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: When She Woke Similar reads to MUDBOUND: In the Dark of the Moon by Suzanne Hudson Paris Trout by Pete Dexter Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton

Bibliography:

• Mudbound (2008)
• When She Woke (2011)