Doubleday – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 RAISING STEAM by Terry Pratchett /2014/raising-steam-by-terry-pratchett/ Sat, 05 Apr 2014 13:11:27 +0000 /?p=26043 Book Quote:

“… the man to whom you refer is a master of every martial art ever conceived. In fact he conceived of most of them himself and is the only known master of the de’ja’ fu*. He can throw a punch into the air and it will follow you home and smack you in the face when you open your own front door. He is known as Lu-Tze, a name that strikes fear in those who don’t know how to pronounce it, let alone spell it.

* A discipline where the hands move in time as well as in space, the exponent twisting space behind his own back whilst doing so.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (APR 5, 2014)

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett is a book in his marvellous Discworld series. As in all the books of this series, Sir Pratchett spins an immensely readable yarn centered on the impact of an idea, an invention or the like into Discworld society. The ideas he’s tackled include the introduction of paper money; the post office; telegraph; deity, religion, and the corruptible priesthood; warfare rooted in ages-old history; terrorism; and in Raising Steam, the introduction of the steam locomotive. His characters are satirical and humorous, often takes on historical and literary icons, from Machiavelli’s Prince to LoTze to Don Giovanni. Discworld is unlike our own on the surface, but seen through Pratchett’s satirical lens, the reader finds hilarious commentary on our own world and its foibles. His impressive social intelligence and wicked sense of humor make for an engaging read.

Raising Steam is about the invention of the steam engine and the attendant implications in Discworld society. The inventor is Dick Simnel, a young man, clearly modelled on a Scots engineer, impenetrable accent and all, who employs a rational and disciplined process to create Discworld’s first steam powered locomotive. Dick goes to the capital to seek funding from Harry King (king of night soil and other smelly endeavors), a wealthy entrepreneur with a history of getting things done, legality be damned. The whole prospect of change engages the interest of Lord Vetiari, a professional assassin and machiavellian lord of the country. Vetinari is a tyrant, but he requires that all the different species (dwarves, trolls, goblins and so forth) of his country be treated alike as sapient creatures. Lord Vetanari engages Moist von Lipwig, his manager of the Post Office, the Mint, and the State Bank to manage the new enterprise. Moist von Lipwig was chosen by Vetanari because his gift for larceny makes him uniquely capable of managing it in others. Lipwig is managed by Vetanari by threat of torture and because he really enjoys living on the larcenous edge under impossible demands. Moist is the central character to this story.

The train becomes a successful enterprise. A cabal of dwarf rebels is trying to bar the entry of dwarves into the larger society. They want to literally derail the train as it makes its first trip to the land that is home to the vampires, one of whom is Vetinari’s lady love. The dwarf cabal sound suspiciously like fundamentalist religious terrorists in our world. Dick is continually improving on his beloved steam engine, Iron Girder. Moist resolves one impossible demand from Vertinari after another with wit, subterfuge and beguiling dishonesty.

There are goblins (a smell that is unbelieveable, but you stop noticing after a while, and they are marvellously good at coding and decoding as well a very handy with all sorts of metalwork) , dwarves (only a dwarf can tell the difference between a male and a female and they both have long beards) , trolls (one of whom is a lawyer, and others are on the police force), werewolves (one of whom is on the police force as a gesture to diversity), vampires, golems and more. All these creatures of fantasy are intensely human, filled with human flaws and foibles with surprising depths of warmth, loyalty and sometimes cruelty and evil.

As with all the Discworld series, the premise entails taking an idea to its logical and absurd conclusions in the setting of a fantasy world that reflects on our own. Raising Steam takes on the Industrial Revolution and does an admirable job of it. Pratchett is a true master. He writes with elan and great skill. His ideas are gut-busting funny and trenchant satire on our world. He is an antidote to prissy and snobbish “art” writing. The work is intelligent, and totally readable. One small quibble; I wish the author had focused on a more limited cast of characters in this novel, rather than bring in so many from the richly imagined Discworld. Regardless of this, I strongly urge you to read him and then go out and read some more.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 191 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (March 18, 2014)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Terry Pratchett
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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The Disc World Series:

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]]> ZONE ONE by Colson Whitehead /2011/zone-one-by-colson-whitehead/ Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:08:52 +0000 /?p=21668 Book Quote:

“…Most skels, they moved. They came to eat you-not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague. Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they’d gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action…”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (OCT 18, 2011)

Zone One by Colson Whitehead plays on the archetype of apocalyptic zombie literature. The unnamed protagonist is known as Mark Spitz, because he is afraid to swim. He is a sweeper, someone assigned by the pseudo-government in Buffalo to destroy any zombie AKA skel or catatonic victim AKA straggler of the plague that has destroyed civilization. The zombies are virtually mindless with a lust for human flesh that can only be quenched by destroying their heads. A zombie’s bite is what spreads the infection. Stragglers just stay immobilized where they stopped. They do nothing, even in response to attack. Both are routinely exterminated by a lethal strike to the head via bullet, baseball bat, axe or what have you. The authorities in Buffalo are sponsored by the remnants of corporations and are in touch with similar enclaves around the world

Everyone suffers from PASD, or Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. Every survivor has killed, starved, and betrayed others in order to survive and has horrific flashbacks. Nobody is immune to PASD. The horrors of Last Night (when the plague started) and its sequelae have taken all joy out of life. This is dystopia maxima.

Pheenies, non military survivors, do the grunt work. Mark Spitz is a pheenie, but as a sweeper, he is more or less privileged, better off than many and somewhat valued. He has always wanted to live in Manhattan. Now he has been assigned as part of a team to mop up zone one, the first part of Manhattan to be cleared of skels and stragglers and made safe for a rebirth of civilization. Mark is “everyman.” He never stands out; neither brilliant nor dunce, leader nor blind follower. He ekes out survival and remembers horror upon horror like everyone else except the skels, the stragglers and the dead.

We have a brilliant exposition of survivor guilt; of the dehumanization that derives from inhuman behavior. The prose is poetic and compelling. It has the awful beauty full of grue that is required to represent a world gone mad. No one is a survivor in this world; they are all dead, brain dead or going to die. The dead and the dying are all ugly. Paranoia is the norm. What is delusional are hope and belief in a future. Is this a judgment like Sodom and Gomorra, a revolt by Gaia, or just an unlucky roll of the dice over and over and over again unto bleak horror and total despair? We never learn why skels do not eat stragglers or why they do not fall on each other in an orgy of eat and be eaten. How can any creature, no matter how torpid survive with absolutely no food? Who cares in a story about zombies; and one so well-written!

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 342 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (October 18, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Colson Whitehead
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> AT HOME, A SHORT HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE by Bill Bryson /2011/at-home-a-short-history-of-private-life-by-bill-bryson/ Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:01:31 +0000 /?p=21534 Book Quote:

“On one occasion in the 1890s, Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom. With a lusty cry of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ he leapt into the bed – only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (OCT 14, 2011)

What would the world do without Bill Bryson? One simply wants to sit at his knee with a huge grin and listen interminably. I’m an irredeemable skinflint and get all my reading material from the library, but At Home is one book I would seriously like to buy for myself. Considering I have almost no books apart from reference books, my Complete Shakespeare and a Bible I once found in a discard pile somewhere, that’s saying quite a lot.

The volume is in essence a long and amiable discourse on the marvel that was the Victorian era. It’s loosely based around (and supposedly inspired by) the Victorian rectory Bryson lives in. The chapters have titles like: “The Hall,” “The Kitchen,” and so on. The theory is that “houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” However, apart from in the early chapters (notably “The Hall”) there’s little talk about anything prior to the Victorians. It’s the speed of change and the immeasurable vigor with which so many Victorians pursued their eccentricities and interests that really fascinates Bryson, and he re-tells it at the top of his engaging best.

The downside of the book may perhaps be that it has little structure. It is a little like swimming through thick soup, but oh such good soup! It’s the perfect book for sitting companionably of an evening. The urge to exclaim “Listen to this one!” and regale anybody within earshot with the latest snippet of fascinating information Mr. Bryson has dredged out of history for you, probably occurs about once every fifteen minutes. Which, incidentally, is the perfect interval for this sort of activity: any less and it’s startling, any more and it gets annoying.

The best thing about it is that it’s simply so shockingly knowledgeable. The bibliography alone goes on for 25 pages of dense text, with a further note at the bottom: “for Notes and Sources, please go to www.billbryson.co.uk/athome .”

Despite this, there are a number of curious little niches which harbour the oddest throw-away statements. Like the one that claims the dining room really came about because of the advent of upholstery, with the Victorians not really wanting people smearing greasy chicken over their expensive sofas. What on earth were all those Medieval dining halls doing, then, one wonders briefly? Or the later Elizabethan private dining rooms? Oh Billy, one thinks – but it’s such a lovely idea that a specialised room should be invented because people couldn’t quite envisage a table napkin that one quite forgives it.

These little anomalies only seem to add to the charm: they’re like “Easter eggs” in a computer game. The vast majority of the time, one is overwhelmed with gratitude at the sheer volume of reading and dredging that has been done to winkle these pearls of Victoriana from dusty obscurity. They range from the obscure (why forks usually have three tines: actually it’s never quite explained but apparently people have experimented with other numbers and it’s never quite right) to the monumentally important (such as the discovery of the sources of cholera and scurvy). Electricity holds sway over a whole chapter in “The Fuse Box,” and seems to hold a particular fascination for Bryson, as the “characters” who feature here pop up throughout the book. Perhaps it is not surprising, as without electricity so much of further development would simply not have been possible.

I would recommend this unreservedly to anybody, but actively prescribe it if you are feeling glum. Perhaps that’s why I’d like it on my shelf permanently. It’s cheering for three reasons. The unquenchable amiable spirit it’s written in, along with the sheer love of language and words that beams through the pages are two of these reasons – but any Bryson fan will already be familiar with these. The third is that the book will immerse you entirely in the day-to-day reality of Being Victorian. Which includes carrying 40 bucket loads of hot water upstairs nightly for a bath, having to take clothes apart and re-stitch them together for the laundry, refrigerating food (if one were so lucky) with ice brought over from lakes in the States, and countless other inconveniences and checks to daily living that we would simply never consider possible. The writing is so engrossing one’s arms almost ache with the weight of the water-buckets… only to look up and find that: joy! One can just turn the hot water on instead. If you think you’re bogged down with a tedious job or an unrewarding existence or poor working conditions, just read this. You’ll be skipping in no time.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 491 readers
PUBLISHER: Anchor; Reprint edition (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Bill Bryson
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> DISASTER WAS MY GOD by Bruce Duffy /2011/disaster-was-my-god-by-bruce-duffy/ Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:02:16 +0000 /?p=21532 Book Quote:

“Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 13, 2011)

I was in my late thirties when the poet Arthur Rimbaud first crossed my horizon. It was Jim Harrison, the American writer, who brought him to my attention. In his memoir Off to the Side, Harrison writes, “I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s ‘Everything we are taught is false’ became my modus operandi.” Harrison continues, “…Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against.” I admire Harrison a great deal. If he liked Rimbaud, if Rimbaud was the man, then I needed to know more. I discovered that the poet had influenced a good bit of the music of the ‘60s and 1970s, that Morrison and Dylan and a host of others had cited his authority. Of this time, Patty Smith writes in her recent memoir, Just Kids: “’When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” His work, she concludes, “became the bible of my life.”

Further, I discovered that the term infant terrible was essentially coined to describe him and that, not only the writing, but the life lived was breathtaking.

I bought Rimbaud and dug in. But try as I might, he was lost on me. There was no fire there. The revolution was dead. I’d come too late to the poet. To Harrison’s point, to Patty’s point, Rimbaud was a young person’s game. To the mature reader, discovering him for the first time, his genius, well, it is obvious, particularly in the context of history; but he does not speak intimately to the older reader, does not influence to the degree of life changing, at least not to this reader. That the right book must find the reader at the right time, was never more true.

Louis Menand has written that a feature of modernity is that “the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence.” Like all ground-breaking endeavors, a visionary must come along and shatter tradition, setting a new standard and creating something that did not exist previously. In the modern tradition, the past is defined against the new, not incorporated into it. In the arts, in particular, the visionary becomes the genius-hero, an immortal. (“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself,” said Beethoven. “There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”) Though he did not touch me in a visceral way, Rimbaud nonetheless did not fail to impress. That the poet visionary-genius Rimbaud was a child prodigy, almost unheard of in literature, makes for good copy. (“He was,” writes Mr. Duffy, “that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities–a prodigy of letters.”) That after producing his art and while still a young man, he renounced his genius and broke with society, fleeing to the African desert, some say running guns, seems a more likely creation of Hollywood than history. But it is history, and a rich history at that. That is the vein Mr. Duffy so deftly mines.

“I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood.
Disaster was my god.”

Disaster was my God is a fictionalized biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life. The literature resulting from that early life is here too, not as exegesis, but rather as a compliment, an illuminating accent. In a note to the reader, Mr. Duffy explains his intent: “In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts–and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems–the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors.” The poet’s life lends itself well to this technique. It is a vivid rainbow. Mr. Duffy’s technique succeeds wonderfully.

The outline of his life is nothing short of remarkable. Rimbaud created his ground-breaking art in a five year period, while in his late teens. (Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare.”) At age sixteen or seventeen, at perhaps the height of his powers, he left his village of Charleville, his middle-class upbringing, his sister and mother, and traveled to Paris, at the invitation of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. “Come, dear great soul,” wrote Verlaine. “We await you; we desire you.” The older Verlaine, married and a father, fell under the boy’s spell and the two began a torrid and public affair that scandalized Paris. (It is unclear whether Rimbaud was homosexual, or simply a provocateur–likely the latter.) Eventually the two separated, driving Verlaine to wit’s end, shooting Rimbaud. The young poet is slightly wounded and Verlaine consequently spent two years in prison.

Leaving Paris, Rimbaud began a life of adventure, traveling widely, giving up–even renouncing–his writing. He undertook the life of a businessman and explorer, ending up in sub-Saharan Africa. He was 24 when he settled in Harar, Ethiopia, working as a merchant. In 1891 he developed a problem in his leg which would ultimately force him out of the desert. He was carried across the desert on a gurney, his savings strapped to his chest in a special vest, shotgun at his side, surrounded by hired mercenaries. The leg was amputated in Marseille but the cancer soon spread and he died, in the company of his sister Isabelle, in Marseille at age 37.

“I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men.”

Mr. Duffy has rich material here and he makes the most of it. He builds his narrative on the premise that Rimbaud and his mother Vitalie had a love-hate relationship, a dynamic that spurred in Rimbaud both his creative life and his peripatetic life. Indeed, the letters of Rimbaud to his mother include many suggestions that a great tension did exist. For instance, Rimbaud writes to his mother in December 1882 from Aden, Yemen: “I just sent you a list of books to send me here. Please don’t tell me to go to hell! I am about to reembark into the African continent for several years; and without these books, I will be without a heap of essential information. I will be like a blind man…” Subsequent letters find him pleading with his mother for supplies and support. Mr. Duffy’s premise is largely successful–”It was you, Mother,” he has Rimbaud’s sister say, “you who made him a foreigner in his own home.” The mother opens the book and ends it; she is the impetus, even the muse, of genius–though it is lost on her completely, in Mr. Duffy’s iteration.

Early on, Mr. Duffy asks, “…how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms–stubbornly resist, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets…..in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life–unwrite it? How? To what conceivable end?” It is a question that cannot be answered. The subject is gone, the analyst’s couch can never reveal the answer. This is where the novelist’s art comes in. Drawing on the life, the history, the writing and a good deal of imagination, Mr. Duffy fills in the gaps. He does it with much enthusiasm and verve. One gets the impression that he truly loves his subject, that he wants in a bad way to reveal a profound secret of this genius. But of course the secrets have all gone to the grave. Hence the art.

Late in the novel, Mr. Duffy puts these words into the mouth of Verlaine: “When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naive as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world–quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for while I suppose I did, too.” They say that a society has no culture until the poets show up. Rimbaud showed up and set culture on it’s ear, creating a new culture out of whole cloth. He did, indeed, change the world. He set a generation upon a new path–and does still. That is the job of the immortals.

“I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer; you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet…”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on  Bruce Duffy
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morganstern /2011/the-night-circus-by-erin-morganstern/ Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:06:47 +0000 /?p=20913 Book Quote:

“The circus arrives without warning.

No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers.  It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 13, 2011)

Illusion and reality intersect and overlap to reveal a luminous, mesmerizing character– Le Cirque des Rêves (The Circus of Dreams). As the sun is the center of the solar system, the Circus of Dreams is the central character of this enchanting tale. Like a magnetic field, Le Cirque des Rêves pulls in other characters like orbiting satellites around a bright star. This isn’t your childhood circus–rather, this is more in tune with Lewis Carroll or M.C. Escher–a surreal and hypnotic place of the imagination and spirit.

Le Cirque des Rêves is a dazzling venue of magical intensity and Tarot images, a story of dreams and desires. It is an invention that reflects the Jungian collective unconscious and personifies the archetypes of polarity–night/day, good/evil, life/death, safety/danger, among other symbols and experiences that have repeated themselves since ancient times. The manipulations of these images and forces speak to the core of the story.

At the end of the nineteenth century in London, two self-regarding necromancers arrange a duel, part of an ongoing contest reaching back through their long history. Prospero the Magician and “the man in the grey suit” agree to provide a worthy opponent each for this contest of illusion, a competition that is only partly visible to the reader’s eye. Prospero trains his daughter, Celia; the grey-suited man selects a fitting boy, Marco, from an orphanage. Sealed with a ring in a familiar ritual, the turf war proceeds.

When Marco and Celia become adults, the duel commences within the venue of the atmospheric, aromatic circus, which is open only at night, in colors black and white (and shades of silver). The duel and its setting is showcased in its artistry of conception, the beauty of its containment, and the mystery of its migration. Le Cirque des Rêves travels silently, invisibly, from country to country, unannounced. There’s a tent of stars, a room of sculpted ice, a pool of tears. The fireplace burns eternally with a white-hot blaze. The landscape of the duel’s setting is a phantasmagorical tour de force.

The cast is inseparable from Le Cirque des Rêves. Among others, they include the tattooed contortionist, Tsukiko, the twins, Poppet and Widget, (born on the dawn of the circus’ opening night), and the Tarot reader, Isobel. Marco is a chameleon-like magician and Celia is the Isis of alchemy. They mirror the archetypes of Jung’s collective unconscious–the shadow; the animus/anima; the hero; the mother; sacrifice/rebirth; the Self, and the wise old man.

The tarot readings, like the story’s progression, are dynamic components of character transformation, digging down to the layers of repressed memories and sublime intuition. ??Within this process of transformation, the individual characters of this story must journey through uncharted terrain like portals in the soul, proceeding toward a cosmic relationship with humanity. How to separate reality from illusion and arrive at the totality of the Self? What obstacles and pathologies must be overcome to achieve a kindred consciousness? Likewise, the duelists become lovers, complicating the stakes of the game–if you win, you lose.

A magnificent, spectral clock is commissioned from a renowned German clockmaker, a clock that is mystical and harlequin, dreamlike and figurative. It stands like an emissary at the gates of the circus, a timepiece of magical stratification, an emblem of temporal shifts. No patrons can enter until dusk, and all must be gone by dawn.

In Erin Morganstern’s enchanting first novel, illusion and reality are two sides of the same coin. Inspiration and imagination become tangible territory, a dream circus of the wakened mind, a magical mystery tour of the unconscious. This is a Fool’s (Hero’s) journey, an adventure for the immortal child and enduring lovers, to a star-filled tunnel and a silver sky. Step from bare grass to painted ground, eye the towering tents of black and white stripes. Enter.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 1085 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Erin Morganstern
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> THE FALSE FRIEND by Myla Goldberg /2010/the-false-friend-by-myla-goldberg/ Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:46:00 +0000 /?p=12761 Book Quote:

“A friendship like hers and Djuna’s could only ever be a child’s possession. Only a child could withstand its stranglehold.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 7, 2010)

Celia Durst and Djuna Pearson are best friends in middle school and have been queens of their clique since elementary school. They have a very tight, mercurial and labile relationship but they usually get over their fights very quickly. One day, as they are acting out by walking in a wooded area where they aren’t supposed to go, Djuna and Celia have a fight. Celia walks away from Djuna and moments later Djuna is abducted by a man in a brown car. Three of the other girls from their clique are there and witness this event. Djuna is never seen or heard from again despite extensive police investigation. Celia can never remember the details of the event until she becomes an adult and then her memory of what actually happened is very different from what allegedly transpired.

The False Friend by Myla Goldberg opens twenty years after Djuna’s disappearance. Celia is an auditor for the city of Chicago and has been living with Huck, a history teacher, since right after college. Her relationship with Huck is in stasis and Celia is worried that he will leave her. Huck wants children and Celia is not up for parenting. Celia suddenly has a recovered memory about Djuna’s disappearance. She remembers walking with Djuna, the two of them having a fight, and then Djuna falling into a hole (like an abandoned well) while Celia just walks away and leaves her there, never telling anyone. Celia decides to fly back east to upstate New York where she grew up to do some reality-testing. She wants to tell her parents about her memories and talk to the other girls who were there that day.

This book is as much about the relationships of ten and eleven-year-old girls as it is about Djuna’s disappearance. Ms. Goldberg’s knowledge of the way that girls can be cruel to one another is right on the mark. There is one girl named Leanne who is always trying to be part of Djuna and Celia’s group but they make it almost impossible for her. Instead of telling her no or ignoring her, they shame and humiliate her. “Standing Leanne against the flagpole had lent their scrutiny an official air. Starting from her head, they worked their way down, inspecting the way she pushed her hair behind her ears, the slope of her neck as it emerged from her shirt, or some other random aspect of Leanne’s body completely beyond her control. Occasionally they would give Leanne homework, and she would show up the next day wearing something with flowers on it, or having curled her bangs. A passed inspection meant she was free to join them at lunch and recess: failure meant she had to earn their company.” This ritual was repeated daily and Leanne was graded harshly, especially by Djuna. This went on for several grades. Sadly, Leanne was such an easy mark and never spoke up for her own defense nor gave up trying to please the unpleasable.

Right after Celia recovers her memory, she returns to her hometown and tries to research the events of the traumatic day that Djuna disappeared. She attempts to contact the other girls, now women, to see what they remember. One of them has been so traumatized by Djuna’s disappearance that it is reflected in her life’s work. Celia finds out how immeasurably painful their treatment of Leanne was to her. Many of the realizations she acquires are more about the way they were as girls than about the disappearance itself. I think that this is one of the main points that Ms. Goldberg is making in the book – Celia is hoping to find something out that can no longer be separated from who she was as a girl.

Complicating matters is the way that Celia’s parents interact with each other and with Celia. They are both quite repressed and restrained individuals. Emotions are hard for them to show. Celia begins to see herself in her parents and compares this to Huck’s love and emotional expressiveness versus her personal restraint.

As Celia discusses her new revelations with Huck, her parents and her childhood friends, they all have different reactions to her. What is more interesting than their reactions, however, is what she finds out about them now in comparison to who they were when they were children. The book touches on nature and nurture along with the difficulties of child-rearing, especially parents allowing for autonomy and individuation.

This book is a literary mystery on several levels. It is a search for the truth of that one day when Djuna disappears, the search for who these five girls were twenty years ago, and how these girls became the women they are today. While Ms. Goldberg is excellent at portraying the behaviors and emotions of pre-adolescent girls, segments of the book can be confusing and create challenges. At times I became unclear about what Celia is looking for and what she actually finds. Perhaps this is part of the mystery. When we go back into the past, we can only go so far and we can’t take our childhood selves with us as adult excavators.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 35 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Myla Goldberg
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another look at growing up:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman

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]]> THE ANGEL’S GAME by Carlos Ruiz Zafon /2009/angels-game-by-carlos-ruiz-zafon/ Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:21:01 +0000 /?p=2322 Book Quote:

“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that will surely outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Jana L. Perskie (JUN 15, 2009)

It must be extremely difficult for an author to write a brilliant, literary bestseller and then have to deal with the expectations of a worldwide audience waiting for him/her to do as well, or even better, with the next novel. I congratulate Carlos Ruiz Zafon on his latest offering, The Angel’s Game, a superb work of fiction where magical realism meets gothic horror and romance. Ruiz Zafon pays homage to the art of writing, and to such authors as Charles Dickens, who wrote Great Expectations, a book which plays an important role here, as well as to Charlotte Brontë, with her Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, the couple who gave “Gothic” its name. The reader enters a world which on the surface seems normal, however, there are many elements at play which are magical, illogical and often disturbing.

Before reading The Angel’s Game, I couldn’t help but think about The Shadow Of The Wind, which I read as soon as it came out in 2004 – a wonderful book. Now, five years later, as I began to read this new novel, I couldn’t take my mind off its storyline to even consider or to compare it with its older sibling. Yes, afterwards I recognized that I had already met some of the characters who appear here, including the wonderful “Cemetery of Forgotten Books,” a labyrinthine library where each book awaits someone to choose it and give it another chance to live by making it part of the new owner’s life. The book cemetery is a “sanctuary and a mystery,” and formidable enough to be a character in its own right. “Every volume has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived with it and dreamed with it.” This cemetery first appeared in The Shadow Of The Wind, but that is all the two works have in common. The Angel’s Game‘s, storyline is totally new and original.

In Barcelona, late 1920s, protagonist David Martin is a writer and author of “penny dreadfuls,” (lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks), for the Voice of Industry newspaper, a periodical which has seen far better days. Martin uses a pseudonym, as he considers himself to be a serious writer and does not want to be identified with the work which earns him his daily keep. Pedro Vidal, the publication’s star writer, is Martin’s mentor. The young man believes that he owes him much for his encouragement and for affording him the opportunity to make a decent living. As Martin’s Grand Guignol-like series takes off, new customers flock to buy the latest installments, and David’s once empty pockets begin to fill. But his colleagues resent his success.

David Martin’s favorite place in the whole city is the Sempere & Sons’ bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It is here that he took refuge from his troubled childhood. Sr. Sempere, his dear friend for much of his life, gave him the best gift he had ever received – a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Sempere also introduced him to the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

Martin is released from his job at the paper – too much ill will from his colleagues, bad moral, etc., etc. On the recommendation of Vidal, he receives an extremely lucrative offer from a new publishing house to continue writing his stories, a series called “City of the Damned.” Martin signs the contract which offers him more money than he ever thought he would make. It stipulates that he will write, anonymously, segments of the story to appear monthly in hardback editions. Unfortunately, as he is later to learn, the publishers are a bunch of “second-rate fraudsters.” This deal does make him a huge “success” with the public, but he has never written a page with which he was satisfied, and in a few years he will be thirty years-old. His fans don’t even know his real name. And, Christina, the woman he loves is looking for someone worthier to receive her affections.

It is at this time that he receives his first correspondence from Andreas Corelli, a mysterious editor of a French publishing house. The genial Corelli makes Martin an offer which he cannot refuse, but refuse he does…sort of. He is asked to devote an entire year of his life, exclusively, to “working on the greatest story you have ever created: a religion.” The writer is appalled. Apart from the fact that he knows or cares little about organized religion, he is not “tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing themselves to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handing over their souls.” In return for his work, should he accept, he will receive all that he has ever wanted. Corelli’s initial geniality now takes on a more sinister aspect. David doesn’t refuse outright, but allows that he will give the matter some thought.

He holes up in his gothic-style mansion, topped by a tower that “rises from a facade carved with reliefs and gargoyles.” The house had been closed for years, abandoned, before he bought it, and has a murky and macabre past… as any good goth house would. Here David maniacally writes two great novels – one for Vidal to claim as his own, and one for himself. Vidal’s book is celebrated while David’s is panned. He suffers from terrible, blinding headaches and forgets to eat and sleep.

In dire straits, emotionally and physically, he finally accepts Corelli’s Faustian offer. Then he pays a visit to the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books.” He selects one, “Lux Aeterna,” by “D. M.” Who is this author with the same initials as David’s? The volume appears to be about a new religion. It seems that David Martin is not the first writer to receive the same request from Corelli. What happened to the other’s manuscript, which was obviously not what the editor wanted, or else why hire Martin? As David begins to write, to fulfill his nefarious promise, he discovers that his life seems to parallel that of his predecessor who wrote “Lux Aeterna.” This is a real mystery and quite a deadly one, with several very real corpses. All evidence points to Martin as the guilty party – the prime murder suspect. Soon David’s life begins to resemble those of the characters he creates for his penny dreadful series.

The Angel’s Game kept me riveted to the page. Ruiz Zafon’s gift for remarkable storytelling shines. As one reads his elegant, frequently poetic prose, the theme of the beauty of the written word becomes manifested in the author’s narrative. He paints the city of Barcelona with a dark brush. And his characters are wonderfully original.

The novel’s one weakness is the conclusion. I was disappointed in the facile manner in which all the threads were tied together, but not disappointed enough to rate this fascinating tale anything less than 5 stars.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 396 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (June 16, 2009)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of

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]]> SAG HARBOR by Colson Whitehead /2009/sag-harbor-by-colson-whitehead/ Sat, 23 May 2009 21:00:21 +0000 /?p=1955 Book Quote:

“We were a Cosby family, good on paper, that was the lingo.  Father a doctor, mother a lawyer.  Three kids, prep-schooled, with clean fingernails and nice manners.  No imperial brownstone, but our Prewar Classic 7 wasn’t too shabby, squeezing us tight in old elegant bones.  Did we squirm?  Oh so quietly.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (MAY 23, 2009)

Colson Whitehead’s newest “novel” is not strictly a novel at all.  A book that he himself refers to as his “Autobiographical Fourth Novel,” it features a family that resembles his own—middle-class, upwardly mobile, and well-educated—a New York City-based family that spends summers at their vacation home in Sag Harbor, on Long island, “in the heart of the Hamptons.”   Sag Harbor in 1985, the time frame of the action, has a large African-American summer community which owns compact homes on the beach, and a white summer community which lives uphill, with larger homes and panoramic views.  For Benji, the fifteen-year-old main character, “There was summer, and then there was the rest of the year…It didn’t matter what went on during the rest of the year.  Sag Harbor was outside the rules.”  

At home in New York City, Benji is part of a prep school culture that has so few black students that when he walks to school wearing the required blazer and tie, he is often taken to be the child of a U. N. ambassador.   In Sag Harbor, however, Benji and his brother Reggie, ten months younger, are on their own, five days a week.  The children of busy professional people who come to Sag Harbor only on weekends, Benji and Reggie take care of themselves, buy and prepare their own food, and obey the unwritten rules of the community while they are alone at the family cottage during the week.  They set their own limits and test them, always making sure, however, that the cottage is clean and orderly when their parents arrive on weekends.  They volunteer no information about their week’s activities.

As Whitehead recreates Benji’s coming of age during that one summer, he explores all the issues of adolescence, creating a genial memoir filled with humor and the universal angst of puberty, within the Sag Harbor microcosm of a generation ago. This summer in Sag Harbor is different for Benji, since Randy, one of the older boys who still summers at “Sag,” now has a car, which will hold five people.  With a group of regular friends who number six, the competition is fierce to be seen in the car and not be the one poor soul stuck pedaling a bike.  Girls are now an issue, and sexual boasting a way of life, though imagination plays a huge part in the stories of their experience.

Benji’s teenage concerns are universal, and his changing relationships are typical.  Reggie, who has been so close to him that the brothers have been regarded as Siamese twins, is now going in new directions, and they spend less time together.  Both have summer jobs—Reggie at a hamburger joint, and Benji at Jonni Waffle, an ice cream chain with waffle cones made on the premises, the site of much of the action here.  Benji wants to be called “Ben,” and he, like his friends, spends much of his time figuring out what’s “in” and “out” regarding rock music and clothes.  For the first time he gets a haircut by someone other than his father, who, we learn, always did a terrible job, though Benji did not notice it until later when he saw his early school pictures.  Though the boys ARE boys and get into the usual amount of mischief, it is minor, usually not even caught by the adults around them.  He, like his friends, is, at heart, good, intelligent, and thoughtful—for a young teenager just discovering girls and beer.

As he is maturing, he is also taking a closer look at the relationships of his parents and their friends, knowing that some of his father’s friends have been discovered to have Other Families, that over the years his father, a drinker, has been verbally abusive to his mother and brother, and that now his parents are “deep into…ancient grudges and unforgivable failures.”  His older sister Elena, who went off to college and then never came home again to live, has told him to “get out when you can.”  He’s not sure why.

Filled with homey details and vivid descriptions of people and places, Sag Harbor memorializes a time and place, a place that is changing even when Benji is there.  He bemoans the gentrification of the area, where the local “Winking Whale” has been replaced by the Jonni Waffle chain, and notes that new people are buying up the houses owned by people who have been there for a whole generation, and that the “haunted houses” left empty and untended by people who have not come to Sag Harbor for years, are being sold and upgraded.

Sag Harbor is an ideal place to set a fresh coming-of-age novel consisting of a series of summer adventures.  The many charms of Whitehead’s “Fourth Autobiographical Novel” come from the warm good humor of the narrator, his intelligent commentary on his private and public life as a fifteen-year-old, and his sense of perspective, even as he is living through adolescence.   We have probably all felt as Benji does at the end of summer when he says, “I was definitely more together than I was at the start of the summer.  It didn’t seem like that much time had passed, but I had to be a bit smarter.  Just a little.  Look at the way I was last Labor day.  An idiot!”  Readers who have had the good fortune to grow up with their own “summer place” as a refuge from school pressures will find this “novel” especially appealing for the memories it conjures, along with the friends (some of them probably long lost) who will always inhabit them.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 88 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday; First Edition (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Colson Whitehead
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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Bibliography:

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