“We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going. There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I’d rather die for guavas. We didn’t eat this morning and my stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe (JAN 5, 2014)

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, is the story of Darling, a young Zimbabwean girl living in a shantytown called Paradise. She is feisty ten-year old, an astute observer of her surroundings and the people in her life. Bulawayo structures her novel more like a series of linked stories, written in episodic chapters, told loosely chronologically than in one integrated whole. In fact, the short story “Hitting Budapest,” that became in some form an important chapter in this “novel,” won the prestigious 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.

In addition to Darling, the stories introduce her gang of close friends. They are vividly and realistically drawn and we can easily imagine them as they roam free in their neighbourhood and also secretly walk into “Budapest,” a near-by district of the well-off… One of their goals is to get a glimpse how the other side lives, but primarily to find food and anything useful to trade. They enjoy climbing over walls, peeking into gardens and houses, and heaving themselves into trees to get their fill of guava, a fruit that can temporarily lull their constant feeling of hunger… but with unpleasant consequences.

Darling’s story is bitter-sweet: her father has left the family for the mines in South Africa and her mother ekes out a living, trading in the border region. Darling is left in the care of her grandmother, Mother of Bones. They all had a better life once, and Darling went to school then, but the family was expelled from their “real” house during an earlier political unrest in the country. In the first half of the book, the backdrop is Zimbabwe in the early years of independence and issues of poverty and inequality, violence and suppression of human rights, disappointment with the lack of democracy, are touched upon without breaking the flow of the young protagonist’s authentic voice. Consistently, Bulawayo stays with voice of her young protagonist whose natural curiosity helps her to make sense of the things she doesn’t quite understand. She expresses her views in often comical ways in a mix of unusual imagery and associations, as astute descriptions of life as she sees and understands it from her limited experience that is mingled with her witty interpretation of stories she hears from adults. Her language can be crude and raw, but also gentle and sensitive. I very much enjoyed the vibrant fresh voice of Bulawayo’s young protagonist.

Darling has an aunt in the USA and she often tells her friends of her and that she will move to America to live with her aunt and to experience everything that goes with wealth and comfort: her American dream. It is not surprising, however, that life, when she has arrived in Michigan, is quite different from what she imagined it to be. Still told in episodic chapters, Darling appears to lose her vibrant and innocent voice; it becomes more mature and even, but also flatter. Also, the stories are no longer as closely connected as they were in the first part. While giving insights into her daily life and that of her close family, we lose the astute and wittily critical observer we have come to like and engage with.

Darling’s life follows more or less the usual paths of young (or older) people arriving on visitors’ visas and staying on under the radar. Darling makes every effort to “fit in” and to adapt to the realities she encounters. She adopts an American accent that her mother and her friends on the phone have difficulty understanding… Darling still thinks of “home,” her mother and her close friends, but… with nostalgia as well as resignation into the impracticality of such a visit. In the chapter, “How They Lived,” written in a voice that is not Darling’s, Bulawayo generalizes the experience of immigration and the efforts immigrants from all over the world put into sounding happier than they are, not telling friends and family back home honestly how their lives have turned out in order not to sound discouraging and ungrateful. A strong story in its own right, but will Darling be able to draw any lessons from it?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 139 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (May 21, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	NoViolet Bulawayo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

Bibliography:

• We Need New Names (May 2013)

“He wondered if religion was partly the love for an imaginary parent and whether any steps to make contact with this parent were justifiable.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (OCT 30, 2011)

Once, many years ago when I was living in Northern Michigan, Jim Harrison walked into the restaurant where I was dining. He didn’t so much walk in, in retrospect, as lumber in. It was the Blue Bird Cafe and I confess that I’d been hanging out there in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him. I was young, trying to turn myself into a writer, and seeking out an idol. Even back then, over thirty years ago, he had lassoed my imagination. Like, many other Harrison readers, it started with Legends of the Fall (1979), then continued with Dalva (1988), and later, The Road Home (1998), a book that changed my life. Much later, I devoured his memoir, Off to the Side (2002), then started filling in the gaps. I studied his poetry, for Harrison thinks of himself first as a poet–and of course there was the column, The Raw and the Cooked in Esquire and Men’s Journal. I used to read the column at the grocery store, between the frozen foods and the bread rack, returning the magazine when I was finished. (Harrison was a foodie before it became sexy, though his style in no way suggests an affinity to the current legions of balsamic vinegar-sniffing poseur journalists.) The man has no gap in his repertoire.

That by way of introduction and confession: there will be no objectivity to this review.

I wish I’d mustered the courage to introduce myself and tell him how much I appreciate his work, but that’s not my style and I image it’s not his either. How do you approach someone who has peered so throughly into your being? A man the critics cite as the progeny of Faulkner and Hemingway? A real died-in-the-wool man of letters? A quiet and respectful distance is the way to go, at least that’s what we do in the Midwest from which we both harken. Anyway, he was seated at the bar. Bothering a man at a bar is bad form.

It has been said that Harrison is that rare writer who can successfully blend the life of the mind with the life of action. It is a formula, though I am hesitate to use that word, that most often appeals to the male reader. That said, the voice he created for Dalva, a woman, in the book of the same name, astounded critics for being so spot-on a female voice–and this from a manly man.

The Great Leader falls soundly into the Harrison oeuvre. It is the story of a hard-drinking, female-ogling fiercely-independent male, Simon Sunderson. (Harrison’s men ogle without the uncomfortable squeamishness of, say, those created by Roth or the hormonal blindness of Updike.)  Sunderson, a recently retired detective, lives deep in Harrison territory, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “It was good to live in a place largely ignored by the rest of the world,” reflects Sunderson. Though now officially off the job, Sunderson can’t seem to call it quits and the novel finds him in pursuit of a religious cult leader with an affinity for young girls. Like so many of Harrison’s characters, Sunderson is not so much a reflection of biography as an amalgam ideas. Attempting to explain his current pursuit: “My hobby has always been history,” Sunderson says. “I became interested in the relationship between religion, money and sex.”

Sunderson, not without his personal challenges, is trying hard to be a better man. He misses his wife Diane who left him three years earlier, though they remain in close contact. (“With Diane he always felt a little vulgar and brutish…”) He is a father figure to a neighbor, a sixteen-year-old hottie who seems hell-bent on seducing him. (“The frankness of young women these days always caught him off guard and made him feel like a middle-aged antique, or like a diminutive football player without a face guard on his helmet.”) He drinks too much and is trying to cut back. He spends a lot of time by himself in the woods, thinking, walking around and resolving to make retirement work. His progress is slow on all fronts. He is wracked with ideas, but execution is haphazard.

There is a character in the novel, a friend of Sunderson, who ruefully observes “that a central fact of our time was the triumph of process over content.” That notion is at the core of the Harrison attraction. His prose, like his characters, is direct and intelligent, without many grace notes and devoid of filigree. There is, in other words, a zen-like transparency to the Harrison process. That process, the act of conveying content, is trumped every time by content. Pulling that off consistently, as Harrison continues to do, is a talent that is reserved for the best of the best. This novel is an example of how rare such a voice has become.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jim Harrison
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy

Bibliography:

• Wolf: A False Memoir (1971)
• A Good Day to Die (1973)
• Farmer (1976)
• Legends of the Fall: Three Novellas (1979)
• Warlock (1981)
• Sundog: The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang (1984)
• Dalva (1988)
• The Woman Lit By Fireflies: Three Novellas (1990)
• Julip: Three Novellas (1994)
• The Road Home (1988)
• The Beast God Forgot to Invent: Three Novellas (2000)
• True North (2004)
• The Summer He Didn’t Die: Three Novellas (2005)
• Returning To Earth (2007)
• The English Major (2008)
• The Farmer’s Daughter (2009)
• The Great Leader (2011)
• Brown Dog: Novellas (December 2013)

Children’s books:

• The Boy Who Ran to the Woods (Illustrated by Tom Pohrt) (2000)

Nonfiction:

• Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction (1991)
• The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001)
• Off to the Side: A Memoir (2002)

“In a movie there might have been more warning. I might have heard a tiny mechanical click, the sound of him releasing the safety. But in reality that single impatient breath was the only warning I got. Then the muzzle brushed my side and he pulled the trigger.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (AUG 7, 2011)

David Loogan lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his girlfriend, Detective Elizabeth Waishkey and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah. Loogan edits a mystery magazine, and he has made the mental leap from writing and critiquing stories about crime to tracking down villains in real life. In Harry Dolan’s latest novel, Very Bad Men, David tells us a story that will explain “the motives people have for killing one another.” As we will see, the reasons for taking someone’s life can vary from a matter of convenience to a thirst for revenge. Loogan, who is a witty first person narrator, gets embroiled in his latest adventure when someone drops an unsolicited manuscript at his office, in which the anonymous writer confesses to committing murder and even provides the name of his next victim.

An emotionally disturbed individual has targeted particular men whom he believes must die; if he has to dispatch others who are not on the list, so be it. When Elizabeth and David become familiar with the case, they discover that it is far more complex than it at first appears. Very Bad Men involves a seventeen-year-old bank robbery, corrupt public officials, an aspiring senatorial candidate, and an ambitious young newspaper reporter who stirs things up.

Harry Dolan has created a large cast of characters, each of whom plays a role in what will turn out to be a Greek tragedy, Michigan style. The author is good with details: how to kill someone who is locked up in prison; what it is like to live with excruciating migraine headaches; a fine description of the landscape and inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and the tricks that tenacious journalists use to get their stories. Although the plot is ridiculously convoluted and not particularly believable, Very Bad Men is entertaining enough to hold our interest. As bodies pile up and events occur that shed new light on what is happening, David and Elizabeth decide to dig deeper into the past. They suspect that the slaughter will not stop until secrets that have been hidden for many years are finally revealed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (July 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Harry Dolan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We All Fall Down by Michael Harvey Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton

Bibliography:

• Bad Things Happen (2009)
• Very Bad Men (July 2011)

“The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 18, 2011)

Odysseus was a legendary and cunning hero on a journey to find home, and lived by his guile. Annie Oakley was a sharpshooter with an epic aim, living by her wits. Siddhartha traveled on a spiritual quest to find himself, and defined the river by its timelessness—always changing, always the same. Now, in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s adventure story, we are introduced to sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, gutsy, feisty survivor who manifests a flawed blend of all three heroes, who lives once and inexorably upon a river.

Raised on the Stark River by throwback hicks (some who are rich) in rural Murrayville, Michigan, Margo can shoot and skin a buck, fish like Papa Hemingway, and fire a bullet clean through a rabbit’s eye. She’s a free spirit, a river sprite, a dog lover, an oarswoman and a woodcutter. Her heroine is Annie Oakley, a renowned figure that she hopes to embody.

A series of incidents in Margo’s young life cause her to run away. Her beloved grandfather dies, and her mother—who never adapted to the river life—abandons the family. At fifteen, Margo is raped by her Uncle Cal, but is more perplexed than traumatized when it happens.

“Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus.”

It takes a year for Margo to comprehend that she was violated; circumstances eventually culminate in a baroque twist on a Mexican standoff–with one dead body, one tip-shot pecker, and one pissed off family. She quits school, grabs her Marlin .22, boards her rowboat, and heads up river with her mother’s address found under her father’s bed. She is determined to reunite with her mother and forge a new life.

Margo likes to hear the water rustle against the rocks; sleep under a canopy of stars; watch the pink dawn of the sky; listen to whip-poor-wills call from the trees; and count blue herons as they wade in the river. But her journey is tangled by an undertow of complications, a ripple effect of the sand and silt and muddiness she brought with her from Murrayville and continues to accumulate. Margo has a ripe sexuality, a flood of pheromones and hormones coursing through the channels of her body like a tidal wave. As she paddles upstream, she bounces from one man to the next, (lying about her age), leaving a wake of misadventures at each stop, with minimal contemplation between disasters. With each imbroglio, she unwittingly tugs at the past, pulling it into the present and future, like floating debris that follows along.

The reader is enticed to root for Margo, but I was turned off by her attraction to losers and drunks and skeptical of extremes in her nature. The commando girl power was redundant—she was a superwoman of courage and resolve, and when it was favorable, she would vulnerably depend on the kindness of strangers, who appeared at convenient times. She also inflicts some irreparable damage to a menacing one-eye-blind man from the recent past—his brute strength was reminiscent of the Cyclops in the Odyssey–and then wipes her hands of it with too much nonchalance.

The adventures lack variety or surprise–Margo’s marvel trick shots often gild the lily, and whatever a grown man can do, she can do better. Her noble relationship with Smoke, an elderly, smelly, chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound hermit with emphysema, is supposed to be the pinnacle of the story, but it reeked of authorial manipulation. Margos’ beneficence is obviously meant to offset her other transgressions, which only calls attention to the incredulity of this relationship. When she climbs in bed (platonically) and sleeps with Smoke as an act of virtuous love, it came off as orchestrated. Smoke ultimately became a plot/story device, rewarding Margo with the right things at the right time.

Despite the obvious flaws, Campbell’s story is a page-turner. Her prose is warm, rollicking, and natural. She conveys a spiritual power to the river and surrounding environs, massaging the narrative with the raw power of nature. Margo is earthy, plucky, and engaging, a passionate heroine with a physical, sensual nature and double-barrel gaze. The loose ends in this story imply that a series is in the works, or a follow-up novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bonnie Jo Campbell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: American Salvage

Bibliography:

• Women and Other Animals (1999)
• Q Road (2002)
• American Salvage (April 2009)
• Once Upon a River (July 2011)

“He hanged himself. From a tree. There was some alcohol in his system, I guess, but… I mean, he went out on his own and he drove down by the lake and he hanged himself.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“No note. There usually isn’t.”
“I know, but…”
But nothing I thought. The man was right. Despite everything you see in movies, no matter how somebody kills himself, they almost never leave a note.

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (JUL 3, 2011)

After a wait of 5 years and 2 non-series books, including last year’s Edgar award winning The Lock Artist, Steve Hamilton has brought back Alex McKnight in Misery Bay, the eighth book in this excellent series. While relaxing at the Glasgow Inn in Paradise, Michigan with the owner Jackie Connery and his friend Vinnie “Red Sky” LeBlanc, Alex’s evening is interrupted by a man he didn’t expect to ever see there, Chief Roy Maven, who surprisingly asks for Alex’s help. Chief Maven, the head of the nearby Sault Ste. Marie police force, wants Alex to help his old state trooper partner, Charles “Raz” Razniewski, determine why his son Charlie would hang himself in a remote part of Misery Bay, Lake Superior on the Upper Peninsula part of Michigan.

Alex reluctantly agrees to help by visiting Michigan Tech, the college where Charlie was a senior majoring in forestry, a recent change from the major his father wanted him to study, criminal justice. Alex meets Charlie’s roommates and other friends and really doesn’t find much to help understand the suicide. Although Charlie and his father had some words about the switch in major, Alex doesn’t really find anything significant. However, when Alex returns to Chief Maven’s house to let Raz know about his conversations, he finds Raz on the floor with his throat cut open and dead in his own blood

This leads to the visit to northern Michigan of two FBI agents, the annoying and distrusting Agent Fleury and the somewhat friendlier Agent Janet Long. Neither wants Alex or Chief Maven’s help and encourage them to stay out of their way. Of course, that’s the wrong thing to say to Alex or Chief Maven, who despite their differences, are both passionate in their dedication to find Raz’ killer. Working together and separately, they are more successful than the FBI in finding the clues that may uncover the murderer of Raz and possibly other related murders and possibly a link to the Chief’s past. Hamilton does a very good job in bringing Alex and the Chief together, providing a little more depth into the struggles that both men face with their past and how it influences their current and future relationships with their family and friends.

Overall, this is an excellent book and I can only hope the start of more in this series. Although I’d certainly recommend starting at the beginning of this series, Steve Hamilton does do a good job in providing enough back story about each of the main characters so that this book could be read without having read the prior books. However, really this background serves more as a reminder to the faithful readers and Hamilton does hold back on the much of the details of the major impact on Alex’s life that occurred in A Stolen Season.

I really enjoyed how Hamilton presented the main story of this book and the back story of learning more about Chief Maven and the changing relationship between him and Alex. However, the scenes at the Glasgow Inn and those between Alex and Vinnie were minimal in this book and that was a little disappointing after all this time waiting for the new book in the series. I certainly felt as if Alex (and Steve Hamilton) were just not ready to deal completely with the hardships from the prior book, although you could feel the pain that Alex still has. Although five years has occurred between books, that is not the case between the two books as the events in A Stolen Season appear much more recent.

To me, Steve Hamilton is one of the best authors at developing characters especially in the use of dialog in developing his characters, especially with the occasional humor. He also does a really great job in making the reader see and feel the Upper Peninsula part of Michigan where most people have not visited. I If I ever went to Paradise, Michigan, I would expect it to be cold (and snowy even in April) and that Jackie would be behind the bar at the Glasgow Inn. I’d ask him for one of his special supply of Canadian Moulson (which he probably wouldn’t give me). If Alex wasn’t there, I’d try to find the five cabins his father made. Also, although many readers I’m sure have grown up near American Indians, many of us have not, and reading about them in this series is also educational as I trust Hamilton has presented these people and their relationships correctly. The primary first person presentation from the mind and voice of Alex McKnight also helps better understand him and his relationships with his friends and enemies. Overall,  Steve Hamilton is one of the best people writing today and I wish he he’d decide to quick his day job at IBM to write full time.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Steve Hamiltion
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  Night Work And another set in Northern Michigan: Dead of Winter by P.J. Parrish

Bibliography:

Alex McNight series:

• A Cold Day in Paradise (1998) / 
• Winter fo the Wolf Moon (2000)
• The Hunting Wind (2001)
• North of Nowhere (2002)
• Blood is the Sky (2003)
• Ice Run (2005)
• A Stolen Season (2006)
• Misery Bay (June 2011)

Stand-alone:

• Night Work (September 2007)
• The Lock Artist (January 2010) 

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

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (MAY 16, 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Bibliography:

  Starvation Lake series:

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

  Non-fiction:

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

  ---

“Jerry didn’t want to think about credit cards now, seeing how he and his wife were about to go on a weekend vacation. Instead he looked out over the scrubby field scattered with locusts and maples, and dotted with the storage sheds, rusted hulks of defunct cranes, and piles of deteriorating I-beams and concrete blocks. Way up beyond the white pines, out of sight, was the open, hilly land full of bristly mosses, ground birds, deer, and wild turkeys, even.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (DEC 4, 2009)

The story of the slow collapse of Michigan’s economy is well known by now. Built around the automotive industry and a core base of manufacturing, the economy started a slow decline as those manufacturing jobs moved out of state. The state now has an astounding unemployment rate of 14.8%.

The characters in American Salvage, a memorable set of short stories nominated for the National Book Award this year, are all victims of the state’s slow decline. The author Bonnie Jo Campbell narrates stories in which some of the characters have taken to meth or alcohol while still others cling on to jobs that don’t pay much.

In “Fuel for the Millennium,” an older Hal Little has stocked up on at least half a dozen fifty-five-gallon blue-plastic drums of gas, in preparation for what he is convinced will be the end of the world, Y2K. He buys into conspiracy theories as way of clinging on to what little he has: “Hal hoped further that accepting both Jesus and the millennium problem would help Americans recognize the way that banks and Jews and the government were plotting together to deny the impending Y2K disaster,” Campbell writes. In the story, Hal meets a younger couple on one of his service repair rounds—customers who don’t buy into his theories. Campbell beautifully brings out the dichotomy of the two mindsets with the story.

In yet another wonderful story, “Yard Man,” Campbell paints the story of a jobless man who spends his time trying to construct something useful out of industrial scrap. His wife, who is from a richer and higher social status, is quickly tiring of putting her dreams on hold, waiting for things to turn around for them.

My favorite story in American Salvage is “The Inventor, 1972,” in which a hunter with a checkered past hits a teenaged girl and works hard for her survival. What the reader slowly finds out in absolutely brilliant writing is that the two are connected to each other by means of an earlier tragic accident.

American Salvage was nominated for the National Book Award this year. Other nominations, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; and Let the Great World Spin, include books by first-generation Americans of Pakistani and Irish descent respectively. Two of the five books nominated in the fiction category, American Salvage and Lark & Termite, are painted in the America of destitute poverty—its characters are trying their best to eke out an existence despite overwhelming odds.

It is hard not to view this selection of nominations as a snapshot of America now—a country trying to redefine its place on the world stage in the midst of powerful cultural forces. Together, these books show that even if the promise of the American dream remains elusive for many, the nation’s citizens remain gritty and determined as ever.

Back to American Salvage, in the story “The Trespasser,” for example, the smell of meth hangs in the air as a ghost. A teenaged protagonist recognizes the smell: “she has walked through the ghost of this crime and felt its chill—in the hallways of her school, in the aisles of the convenience store, and in the gazes of men and women at the Lake Michigan beach where she and her friends swim,” Campbell writes. Despite this intense hopeless desperation, the characters in American Salvage show amazing courage and a determination to make the best of their circumstances. That they really don’t have much of a choice but to do so, is almost beside the point.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (December 14, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bonnie Jo Campbell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of:  Once Upon a River More books set in Michigan: Real Life and Liars by Kristina Riggle Second Hand by Michael Zadoorian

Bibliography:

• Women and Other Animals (1999)
• Q Road (2002)
• American Salvage (April 2009)
• Once Upon a River (July 2011)

“I choose my favorite summer dress, an olive green thing with shiny metal beads sewn all around the neckline. It hangs like a sack and feels so good, it’s like being naked.

I should ask to be buried in this. Katya would be horrified, because it’s not at all appropriate. Ivan wouldn’t want any part of that decision, nor would Max. Death and fashion together—not a male specialty. Irina would argue with Katya just out of habit.

No, it would be selfish for me to dictate what happens after I’m dead, when it couldn’t possibly matter to me.  I’m being greedy enough by daring to set the agenda of my own demise.

If I have to go down,  fine.  But I’m going down with both tits swinging.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (OCT 19, 2009)

In Real Life & Liars, protagonist Mira Zielinski represents a new demographic for our times: hippie turned senior, at age sixty-five still free-spirited and defiant, who has decided to refuse treatment for her recently diagnosed breast cancer. She’s also decided to withhold the diagnosis from her three grown children, as they converge on the family home in Charlevoix, Michigan for a grand 35th anniversary party. As it turns out, however, the Zielinski children are bringing home a few secrets of their own.

Author Kristina Riggle’s intelligent, entertaining debut novel is tightly chronicled, covering four points of view over the course of the party weekend. Eldest daughter Katya is stressed over her unruly teenagers, her husband and his suspicious behavior, her own too-tight hold on maintaining the perfect life. Middle child Ivan, dreamy high school music teacher and struggling songwriter, can’t seem to find the right woman, even when she is right there under his nose. Irina, young and irresponsible, recently saddled with a surprise pregnancy and much older husband, is already questioning the wisdom of this latest impulsive decision of hers.

Amid the weekend festivities is a growing storm—meteorological and otherwise—that promises to bring these disparate issues to a head, bring family members face to face with their problems and each other, clearing the way, however violently, for resolution and redemption.

In the wrong hands, the subject of a life-threatening cancer diagnosis could have become a maudlin, sentimental read, but Riggle has crafted a story that renders the issue entirely palatable, while still treating it with the dignity and thoughtfulness it merits. Mira’s observations, her down-to-earth introspection, are both hilarious and bittersweet. Her ponderings over how one actually leaves life and loved ones behind are the sort of thought-provoking questions that make this novel rise above the mainstream in today’s commercial fiction.

Additionally, Riggle successfully delineates the four diverse point of views, telling the story in brief sound byte chapters composed of snappy dialogue and vivid prose. Mira’s voice is the most distinct, told in first-person versus the others’ third-person narration, a set-up that suits the story well. Katya’s story and point of view are the second most distinct, although her strident personality throughout the story—think PMS on steroids—grows a little exhausting on the reader. Yet her predicament rings true, free of cliché, and flashbacks to her teenage years, showing a more vulnerable girl desperate to fit in, with a mother determined to cultivate the opposite, offer a welcome soft touch to Katya’s character. Irina’s story, as well, profits from backstory that paints the portrait of a youngest child, born after her mother was “done” with parenting, who now analyzes her own unplanned pregnancy and her past with new eyes.

Chosen as a Target “Breakout” pick in August, graced with irresistible cover art, Real Life & Liars will hold strong appeal for women’s fiction readers, or anyone who likes their fiction intelligent but breezy, relevant and unforgettable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Avon A; 1 edition (June 16, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kristina Riggle
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other recent debut novels: Tell Me Something True by Leila Cobo Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment New World Monkeys by Nancy Mauro

Bibliography:

• Real Life & Liars (2009)
• The Life You’ve Imagined (2010)
• Things We Didn’t Say (2011)
• Keepsake (June 2012)