“My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (OCT 8, 2011)

In Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers, Chip Linton is a forty-year-old commercial airline pilot who is traumatized when, through no fault of his own, one of his regional planes goes down in Lake Champlain. In the aftermath of the accident, Chip, Emily, and their ten-year-old twin daughters, Hallie and Garnet, move from Pennsylvania to an isolated three-story Victorian near Bethel, New Hampshire, in the scenic White Mountains. Emily resumes her career as a lawyer, the kids enroll in the local school, and Chip becomes a do-it-yourselfer, replacing wallpaper, painting, and doing carpentry around the rickety old house.

Unfortunately, Chip is an emotional wreck who sees a psychiatrist to treat his depression, guilt, and anxiety. He has upsetting flashbacks and vivid nightmares and knows that his career in aviation is most likely over. Although Chip adores Emily and his daughters, they are not enough for him. He cannot help but mourn the loss of his livelihood.

The Lintons soon have concrete reasons to regret their move to Northern New England. There is something creepy going on in this town. The place is filled with greenhouses. Various herbalists and botanists grow exotic plants, talk like aging hippies, and constantly bring over homemade food that they foist on the Linton family. In addition, it is possible that the Linton house, which was once the scene of an untimely and unnatural death, may be haunted. If Chip was teetering on the brink of madness before he moved to New Hampshire, living here may very well push him over the edge. The Night Strangers is a tale of psychological horror in which Chip and Emily gradually suspect that when they relocated, they may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Chip starts having visions and hearing voices; his family is also under threat from others who are up to no good. How will the Lintons cope with the various forces threatening to tear them apart?

Chris Bohjalian has always been an outstanding descriptive writer who uses setting brilliantly. He has a gift for creating sympathetic characters with whom the reader can readily identify. This time, alas, he may have bitten off more than he can chew. Chris’s mental deterioration alone would have been a strong enough centerpiece to this book. Even adding a haunted house into the mix might work. However, Bohjalian overreaches when he veers too far into Stephen King and Ira Levin territory. He concocts an outlandish (yet oddly predictable) plot that throws the book seriously out of balance. What should have been a compelling narrative about the demons that inhabit our minds becomes, quite literally, a story about evil incarnate. Still, Bohjalian creates readable dialogue, brings Chip, Emily, and their girls to life, and engages our interest in the fate of his protagonists. In spite of ourselves, we hold our breaths, wondering whether this horribly tormented husband, wife, and two children will ever reacquire the peace of mind that they once took for granted.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 252 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chris Bohjalian
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Secrets of Eden Before You Know Kindness The Double Bind

Bibliography:

Bibliography:

• Hangman (1991)
• Past the Bleachers (1992)
• Water Witches (1995)
• Midwives (1997)
• The Laws of Similars (1999)
• Trans-Sister Radio (2000)
• The Buffalo Soldier (2002)
• Before You Know Kindness (2004)
• The Double Bind ( 2007)
• Skeletons at the Feast ( 2008)
• Secrets of Eden (2010)
• The Night Strangers (2011)
• The Sandcastle Girls (2012)
• The Light in the Ruins (July 2013)

Other:

• Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town (2003)

Movies from books:

• Past the Bleachers (1995)

“Later, thinking back on the way my father recounted the story, it occurred to me that much of the language he used to describe the storm might have been applied to the act of a couple making love. He made the sound of the wind for me, then, and I pressed myself against his chest so he could wrap his big arms around me. I shivered, just to think how it must have been that night.

For some reason, my father liked to tell this story, though I – not my sisters, not our mother—was his only audience. Well, that made sense perhaps. I was his hurricane girl, he said. If there hadn’t been that storm, he liked to say, I wouldn’t be here now.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 24, 2010)

Joyce Maynard’s books are usually about love, loss, life, and resolution. This book is no exception. It is a lovely book that I’d like to have read while resting against a tree in a forest or while lounging in a canoe in a crystal still lake. It’s that kind of book.

The Good Daughters is about two girls, Dana Dickerson and Ruth Plank. They are called “birthday sisters” because they were born in the same hospital on the same day, almost nine months to the day after the great hurricane of 1949. Because of this connection, their families stay in touch as the girls are growing up. Usually they visit one another once or twice a year. The Planks own a large farm in New Hampshire that has been in their family for generations. The Dickersons are never in one place for very long.

Ruth grows up on the farm with four older sisters. The four other sisters all look alike, just like their mother. They are short, sturdy, strong girls who are close with one another and their mother. Ruth is tall and lean, built unlike her sisters or mother. Her father calls her “beanpole.” Ruth doesn’t think that her mother loves her like she loves her other daughters. Their relationship is stiff and difficult at the best of times. Ruth feels very close to her father and loves to ride the tractor with him or spend any other alone time she can get with him. Ruth is drawn to art and wants to be an artist when she grows up. She has an active imagination and loves to create stories in her head.

Dana’s parents are on the fringe of society and move around frequently. Her mother is a narcissistic artist and her father is absent more than present. He is full of get-rich-quick schemes that come to naught. Dana’s mother is almost six feet tall and blond. Dana has a brother, Ray, that is quirky and ephemeral. Neither parent pays much attention to the children. Ruth and Ray have a special relationship. Dana’s mother showers her with Barbie dolls and Barbie outfits which are about the last thing in the world that she wants. When Ruth comes to visit she likes to play with them. Dana is short and stocky, not built at all like her tall, lanky mother. Dana loves the smell of the earth and the Plank farm. She doesn’t like to dress up. Her idea of dress-up is clean jeans and a clean shirt. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress.

The book harbors a big secret that is obvious to the reader very early on. This secret, however, is not obvious to Dana or Ruth. As they grow up and become the women they were meant to be, pieces of the story fall into place more and more.

The story is told in the alternate voices of Ruth and Dana. Each chapter is told by one of the girls and is about their lives from their births in 1950 until they are in their 50’s. The reader is privy to their childhoods, first loves and relationships. We live with them through the Vietnam War, Woodstock, their love of the land, and their relationships with their families. It is a tender book that has its share of sadness and torment. Joyce Maynard knows how to write page-turners that are literate and strongly emotive. This is a wonderful follow-up to Labor Day.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	William Morrow (August 24, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Joyce Maynard Wikipedia page on Joyce Maynard
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from authors like this one: A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein Every Last One by Anna Quindlen Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Bibliography:

• Baby Love (1981)
• To Die For (1992)
• Where Love Goes (1995)
• The Usual Rules (2003)
• The Cloud Chamber (2005)
• Labor Day (2009)
• The Good Daughters (2010)

Nonfiction:

• Looking Back (1973)
• Domestic Affairs: Enduring the Pleasures of Motherhood and Family Life (1987)
• At Home in the World (1998)
• Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City (2006)

“In any work of fiction, weren’t those things that had really happened to the writer–or, perhaps to someone the writer had intimately known–more authentic more verifiable true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story–as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend fiction in fiction writing–because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 26, 2009)

I had dinner recently with a friend who asked me what I was reading. “The new John Irving book,” I told her. She became instantly animated. “I love John Irving,” she declared. “I’ve read everything he’s written, and watched the movies too.” I was almost finished with the newest Irving book, Last Night in Twisted River, and was exhausted at what I found to be its inherent ups and downs. I needed her enthusiasm. “Tell me why you like him so much,” I asked. “Well,” she began, “his characters are always so interesting. And the stories, they’re usually tragic but still somehow funny. I love how he can do that.” I understood both these comments–and agreed. “He’s just different than all other writers.” I understood that too–I think.

Last Night at Twisted River is a story about Great North Woods lumbermen, three men specifically. There is Daniel Baciagalupo, who is twelve when the novel opens; his father, Dominic, known at the lumber camp, where he cooks meals of high repute, as “Cookie.” And there is Ketchum, best-friend of Cookie, woodsman extraordinaire, a man among men. The book opens in Coos County, New Hampshire in 1954 and ends in 2005, Pointe Au Baril Station, Ontario. The arc of narration, the event that ties down this fifty-one year span is the frigid clumsy death of Angel Pope, a too-young lumberman, who slips into the Twisted River during a log drive and never surfaces. “The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long.”–is the wonderful opening sentence to this long tale of bitter winters, even more bitter women, murder and violence. And of course, this being a John Irving novel, bears.

You might have noticed above that I used a semicolon. You don’t see semicolons much any more. I mentioned this because semicolons are discussed in the novel, as are other fine points of writerly interest. (“The semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place.”) Though Last Night in Twisted River is the story of lumber drives, revenge and manly pursuits, it is also a novel about writing, about books and learning to read and write. It is a novel within a novel, as the young Danny matures and discovers his calling as a writer, including proper use of the semi-colon. Grown up and successful after nine novels–some books sharing remarkable similarity to Irving novels–Danny turns to his childhood in the woods for material. I found this part of the book the most interesting. It was like sitting with Irving and listening to him talk about his craft, about foreshadowing, and tension, about narration and timing. This section also shines a light from within on the balance of the book, as we learn from Danny that the protagonist of his novel will share a resemblance to his family friend Ketchem and that only late in the book will his Ketchem be brought to full life. “It is good to make the reader wait,” says Danny. And it is in our book, late, when Ketchem is given full exercise, that the narration sings. For instance,

“Even with a stick shift, Ketchum managed to drive right-handed. He stuck his left elbow out the driver’s-side window, with the fingers of his left hand making only coincidental contact with the steering wheel; Ketchum clenched the wheel tightly in his right hand. When he needed to shift gears, his right hand sought the navel-high knob on the the long, bent stick shift–in the area of Carmella’s knees. Ketchum’s left hand tentatively took hold of the steering wheel, but for no longer than the second or two that his right was on the gearshift.”

I can feel the breeze in my hair reading this. Unfortunately, writing like this, precise and sharp, is sadly missing in most of the book. Sentences are too often repetitive–”the war…would drag on and on.” and “he sat, listening and listening.” And they are clunky, as in, “Yet, as Danny would one day consider, maybe this was a writer’s peculiar burden–namely, that the anxiety he felt as a father was conflated with the analysis he brought to bear on the characters in his fiction.” Prose is the stream of narration and without it, to use a metaphor from the book, there will be a log jam. Once the log jam is broken up, the flow returns. So it is in this book.

Irving’s books, some say, have grown darker and more disturbing through the years. I have not read all of his work, I confess, so I cannot attest to this first hand. But of the books I have read, I can tell you that this book is perhaps the darkest and offers the least relief. Irving has explored the caprices of fate before, it is a constant Irving theme. And it is here too, in the fashion of an accidental murder early on in the book. As a consequence of the murder, Cookie and his son Danny set out from camp and cannot return–ever. They must live on the run. Sadly, this theme is a log jam. We are to believe that men late in life, in their seventies and eighties, are still set on revenge; that an accident cannot be explained; that violence is a given. Regardless, we follow Cookie and Danny to Boston’s North End (where Danny goes to prep school, as Irving went to Exeter), then Iowa City (where, like Irving, Danny studies at the writer’s workshops), then back east to Vermont and finally settling in Toronto (Irving home cities).

Fate, “the fragile, unpredictable nature of things” and “a world of accidents”–these are the worlds explored in this novel. Accidents abound: Young Danny’s mother falls through the ice and drowns in the river–the same spot where Angel, the young lumberman, will years later drown. A woman is mistook for a bear and killed with a skillet. A dog attacks a runner and sets into motion a world of events that lead, one to the other, to a surprise encounter and ultimately a double murder. It is dark stuff here, indeed. And unlike previous Irving works, there is little humor. There is a comment made of a woman in the novel, “Nothing but happiness would explain why she was so boring.” From that we can infer that unhappiness is interesting. Granted, there is a lot of unhappiness in this book. Unfortunately, it could be more interesting. There is slight traction to the unhappy themes explored here. And where there is happiness that is not extinguished, specifically at the book’s end, it is,yes, boring.

It was this unevenness, the unhappiness fronting for the interesting, that troubled me. It was overwrought and hard earned–too hard earned, so as to not be reliably honest to the book. I got a sense that Irving was exhausting old notebooks and filling chapters with previously unused material. I want to be fair, this is a big book and just to sustain a narration for 553 pages is a supreme accomplishment. To do it without blemish is an act of genius. I believe in Irving’s genius, but it is not apparent here. This is an accomplishment, but not a work of high order. It is, at times, a very well told tale, but it is not lasting.

With the well-drawn similarities between Danny and John Irving I find it sadly interesting that Danny is advised and later repeats this observation: “…writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die…”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (October 27, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AMAZON PAGE:	Last Night in Twisted River
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Irving
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of A Prayer for Owen Meany Another book that involves an accidental murder: The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney A more on fiction that discusses the art of writing: Generosity by Richard Powers The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Setting Free the Bears (1968)
• The Water Method Man (1972)
• The 158 Pound Marriage (1974)
• The World According to Garp (1978)
• The Hotel New Hampshire (1981)
• The Cider House Rules (1985)
• A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
• A Son of the Circus (1994)
• Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996)
• A Widow for One Year (1998)
• The Fourth Hand (July 2001)
• Until I Find You (July 2005)
• Last Night in Twisted River (October 2009)
• In One Person (May 2012)

Non-Fiction

• The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir (1997)
• My Movie Business: A Memoir (1999)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (July 2002)
• Study Guide for A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY (July 2002)

Movies from books:

• The World According to Garp (1982)
• Hotel New Hampshire (1984)
• Simon Birch (1998)
• Cider House Rules (1999)
• The Door in the Floor (based on a Widow for One Year (2004)