“I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 6, 2014)

Alena is a novel about the art world and the people who inhabit it. It is said to be an homage to du Maurier’s Rebecca. However, not having read Rebecca in no way took anything away from my love of this novel. This novel stands on its own and I loved it.

The novel gets its name from the first curator of The Nauk, a private museum on the Cape in Massachusetts. For fifteen years, Alena held this position and gained a reputation of being bigger than life. She was headstrong, other-worldly, manipulative, dark, flirtatious, and intently involved in conceptual art, especially art that related to the human body. As time progressed her tastes became darker, leaning more and more towards the bloody, death-glorifying, and often gross renderings of the physical. As the novel opens, Alena has disappeared. She has been gone for two years and is presumed dead though her body has never been found. The prevailing belief is that she drowned by taking a swim in the ocean when the currents were too strong for her.

Bernard Augustin, Chair of the Board of the Nauk, goes to the Venice Biennale as he does every year. He is a well-known collector and figure in the art world. In Venice he hobnobs with the top tier art dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It is in Venice that he meets a young female curator from the midwest who is there with her controlling boss on her first visit abroad. (Interestingly, the name of this young curator is never provided in the book.) She meets Bernard by chance and is in awe of him and a bit in love as well despite the fact that he is gay. They hit it off intellectually and emotionally and on an impulse, Bernard offers her the position of curator at The Nauk. She accepts, not actually knowing what she is getting in to.

Once at the museum, the young curator is met with a staff that is still loyal to Alena and resentful of someone taking her place. Alena had promised the next show to a conceptual artist, a Gulf War veteran and multiple amputee who displays scenes of war with body parts and lots of blood. She, however, wants to decide on her own what the next show will be and she offers it to a ceramic artist who makes porcelain butterflies. The Nauk hasn’t had a show in two years and Bernard tells her that the show must be up in two months, by Labor Day. There is a lot of angst between the employees and the curator, and between the curator and the ceramist.

The ambiance of the novel is gothic and eerie. There are a lot of strange characters and happenings that serve to upset and off put the curator each time she attempts to accomplish something. Bernard is not there most of the time to ease the way in for her as he travels to his homes in New York, Colorado and Europe or else he’s attending art-related business far away.

The information about art is comprehensive. The author, Rachel Pastan, knows her conceptual art very well and her knowledge of art history is impressive. This book hooked me right away and I could not put it down. I resented anything that got in the way of my reading it; it was that good. So I present to you this review from a reader who has not read Rebecca but loves this novel as it stands on its own with no history or homage to any other piece of literature but solely to art.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Pastan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another to try: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Bibliography:

• This Side of Married (2004)
• Lady of the Snakes (2008)
• Alena (January 2014)

“Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAY 03, 2011)

What becomes of those who independently and courageously navigate the intellectual and cultural shoals that divide cultures? Is it truly possible to make those crossings without relinquishing one’s very identity?

Geraldine Brooks poignantly explores these questions in her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing. The story is based on sketchy knowledge of the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk – the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College — and a member of the Wampanoag tribe in what is now Martha’s Vineyard.

This is truly a work of imagination since the sources on Caleb’s brief, tragic, and remarkable life are scant. The voice belongs to the fictional Bethia Mayfield, a minister’s quick-minded daughter who gently (and sometimes, not so gently) defies the rigid expectations of a Calvinistic society that demand silence and obedience from its womenfolk.

As outsiders, both Bethia and Caleb – who meet on the cusp of adolescence – quickly bond and form a lifelong friendship. On the sly, Bethia absorbs the language and the cultures of the Wopanaak tribe while out in the field; at home, she secretly absorbs lessons that are meant for her brother Makepeace.

Eventually, both serendipitously find themselves at Cambridge. Caleb’s Harvard education – conducted in the classical languages of Latin, Greek and Hebrew – is funded by rich English patrons as an experiment as to whether “salvages” can be indoctrinated into Christian culture alongside the dismissive colonial elite. Bethia goes along with Caleb and Makepeace as indentured help, striving to remain in close proximity to scholars and avoid her fate as yet another small settlement farm wife.

There are plenty of twists and turns, trauma and heartbreak, celebrations and sadness along the way; after all, Geraldine Brooks already has a reputation as an absorbing story teller who is able to imaginatively use history to fictional ends. And it would be unfair to even allude to some of these page-turning plot developments.

The themes, though, are fair game. This novel particularly shines when it touches upon matters of faith, which rely heavily upon John Cotton, Jr.’s account of his conversations with native islanders in the 1660s missionary journals (according to the author in her epilogue). The pantheistic view of the medicine men is placed in a high-stakes battle against strict and judgmental Calvinism time and again. Bethia muses, “It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here. I have come to think it is a fault in us, to credit what we give in such a case, and never to consider what must be given up in order to receive it.”

Ms. Brooks drums that point home – sometimes a bit too firmly, not relying enough on the reader to form his or her own conclusions. Still, there is intense observation in the “civilizing” of Caleb’s crossing to the world inhabited uneasily by Bethia. She reflects, “In that shimmering, golden light I saw the wild boy I had met here four summers past, no longer wild, nor boy. The hair was cut short and plain, the fringed deer hide leggings replaced with sensible black serge. The wampum ornaments were gone, the bare mahogany arms sheathed now in billowing linen. Yet neither was the youth who stood before me some replica of a young Englishman…” The story of Caleb and Bethia is part of an age-old battle of repressive and misguided individuals who callously use religion to assert dominancy, superiority, and control over others.

As a result, destiny and preordination wrestle as the boundaries of both cultures are movingly explored in a voice that may be described as “period language.” From the natural beauty of an early Martha’s Vineyard to the drafty dormitories of Harvard College, this fictional work includes a wallop of historical fact. Those who have thrilled to other Geraldine Brooks’ absorbingly told novels – March, Year of Wonders, People of the Book—will find yet one more reason to rejoice.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 99 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Geraldine Brooks
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:People of the Book An historical novel set on the adjacent Massachusette island of Nantucket: Ahab’s Wife, the Stargazer by Sena Jeter Naslund

Bibliography:

• Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
• March (March 2005)
• People of the Book (January 2008)
• Caleb’s Crossing (May 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Foreign Correspondence (1994)
• Nine Parts of Desire The Hidden World of Islamic Women (December 1994)

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

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 19, 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mira; Original edition (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dori Ostermiller
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other books to explore: Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart She is Me by Cathleen Schine

Bibliography:

• Outside the Ordinary World (July 2010)

“He always sings in the car. He has a low voice scraped out by cigarettes and all the yelling he does. His big pointy Adam’s apple bobs up and down, turning the tanned skin white wherever it moves. He reaches for the puppy in my lap. ‘You’s a good little rascal. Yes you is,’ he says in his dog voice, a happy, hopeful voice he doesn’t use much on people.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JUL 30, 2010)

Years ago, I sent out a birthday invitation with the theme, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” Funny – or so I thought.

But for Daley Amory, the main character of Lily King’s poignant and at times heartbreaking Father of the Rain, those words are anything but funny. We meet her as an 11-year-old, torn between the liberal and do-good world of her mother and the conservative, erratic, liquor-soaked world of her charismatic and arrogant father. A WASP of the first-degree – rich, Harvard-educated, disconnected – his signature phrase, while lying on his chaise chair, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, is, “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”

Daley soon learns the rules of engagement with her father: “In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness. To take something seriously is to be a fool. It has to be all irony, disdain and mockery. Passion is allowed only for athletics. Achievements off the court or playing field open the achiever up to ridicule. Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.”

This could fall into the world of stereotype or cliché – the toxic, alcoholic father and the daughter who tries to please him. But it doesn’t. Lily King takes great pains to paint Gardiner Amory – the father – as damaged but not evil. It is inevitable that the grown Daley try to reconnect with him and be the savior, attempting to liberate him from his alcohol dependency…as if that would make everything all right.

Her beau will say to her: “Oh Daley…you want the daddy you never got. You want him to make your whole childhood okay…You’ve got it nicely cloaked in a gesture of great sacrifice.”

The heartbreak, of course, is that none of us can ever “fix” another human being or get our childhood back. As Daley becomes more and more immersed in his world, falling into her charismatic and narcissistic father’s gravitational orbit, the stakes get higher and higher. There is not a false note in this authentic book, which takes the reader right into the vortex of a broken family relationship gone asunder. It is a compelling psychological study of how much we give up – including our own survival – to try to save and repair those relationships that are most dear to us. In a non-manipulative way, this book will pull at your heartstrings and stay with you.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 53 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (July 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lily King
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Father/Daughter stories: Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey The Ruins of California by Martha Sherrill

Bibliography:

• The English Teacher (2006)
• The Pleasing Hour (2010)
• Father of the Rain (2010)
• Euphoria (June 2014)