“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them and believed them to be trustworthy. I’d hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me’s. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us, and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton. I felt the reflection at my shoulder like a touch. I was on the most familiar terms with her, same as any other junior dope too lonely to be selective about the company she keeps.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 10, 2014)

“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.” So begins the dazzingly imaginative and enigmatically-named new novel from Helen Oyeyemi.

But what happens when mirrors are not trustworthy? When Boy is really a girl? When a beautiful pale-skinned youngster actually shares the bloodline of the blackest of black individuals? When beauty is not truth and when truth is not beauty? When a mother or a grandmother is not a safe haven but something else entirely?

Helen Oyeyemi explores questions like these in her own imitable way, mixing a dose of fantasy with a dollop of reality. Her writing gifts, carefully honed in her startlingly good prior novel, Mr. Fox, are on display again here as she merges the real with the fantastical to create a canvas all her own.

The book’s curious title is a compilation of the names of three unique women: Boy, who escapes from her abusive rat-catcher father to settle in a New England town called Flax Hill; her strikingly attractive and widely treasured stepdaughter Snow; and the daughter she conceives with Snow’s father Arturo, named Bird. As the publicist’s blurb on this book reveals, Bird is “colored” since Arturo and his family have long passed for white.

The observant reader can pick up the threads of the Snow White fairy tale: the “evil” stepmother (who is perhaps more protective than evil), the removal of Snow White from the scene and particularly the “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s The Fairest of Them All” query.

Who, indeed, is the fairest? Helen Oyeyemi writes, “”It’s not whiteness that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things—fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too…” Or, to put another way, nothing – not race, gender, or beauty – is valuable onto itself; it is we who place the value on these attributes.

Ms. Oyeyemi sometimes overplays her hand. The narrative (told by Boy in the first and third sections and by her daughter Bird in the second section) loses a bit of steam when Bird takes over. The metaphors on race become too concrete as the author tackles the unfortunate devaluing of persons based on shade of pigment; the writing is far more effective when the reader draws his/her necessary conclusions on the tyranny of the mirror rather than being lead there.

Still, Boy, Snow, Bird is so freshly-conceived – with writing that often leverages our mythic beliefs in fairy tales and soars into our subconscious – that it still manages to beguile. Ms. Oyeyemi is comfortable shattering many of our perceptions about race, gender, appearance, and family and does a masterful job of forcing us to confront our own mirror and ask, “Is the person reflected in the mirror a true representation about who I really am?”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (March 6, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Helen Oyemi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Icarus Girl

Bibliography:

• The Icarus Girl (2005)
• The Opposite House (2007)
• White is for Witching (2009)
• Mr. Fox (2011)
• Boy, Snow, Bird (March 2014)

“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)

“I then realized that the cathedral is a monument to our grief. It is a shrine for all our dead, constructed of the wreckage of the lives that have fallen down around us.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perksie  (FEB 14, 2014)

Swan Gondola literally starts off with a bang! Two elderly sisters, Emmaline and Hester, known by most in their small county, as the “Old Sisters Egan,” are sitting in their Nebraska farm kitchen drinking coffee. The day has been a peaceful one. Suddenly the house begins to shiver and shake and they are enveloped in noise, a loud BANG!! Books fall from their shelves, china dishes and cups fall to the floor, breaking, chimney bricks drop into the hearth, their caged canaries stop singing and the two sisters are left stunned, shocked. Hester, the tough one, lifts her rifle and opens the door, not knowing what to expect. She and petite, romantic Emmaline, are immediately enveloped in silk. Silk is everywhere. They have witnessed so much in their lives on the farm that nothing really surprises them anymore. The silk comes from a ruined hot air balloon which has apparently crashed into their roof. “Escaped the circus?” Hester wonders. The two immediately search for the pilot, who could be hurt or, even worse, dead. They do find the man alive, flat on his back on the ground, his left leg in a terrible bend. Emmaline’s and Hester’s discovery of the balloon’s pilot will change their lives forever as he relates his strange, mesmerizing and sorry tale.

Obviously in pain, the man snaps his fingers weakly and a card slips from his sleeve which reads, “B. ‘Ferret’ Skerritt, Omaha, Nebraska.” And on the back “This slight of hand you just witnessed is only a hint of my wizardry.” From his inside pocket a postcard falls. Written by Ferret, it gives the reader an example of his unrequited love for his beloved, Mrs. Cecily Wakefield of Omaha. Their’s is a star-crossed love…dramatic, romantic and heartbreaking.

Thus we meet our protagonist whose name is really Bartholomew Skerritt. He is an orphan, (now 25 years-old), left at the door of a Catholic orphanage when he was an infant. Sister Patience told him, “All orphans are born of whores.” There was a note that his mother had tucked into his little suit. “She had addressed the baby as Mr. Bartholomew Skerritt and written: ‘Your last name is your daddy’s last name, (I’m damned sure of it, don’t let anybody tell you different), and your first name was the longest first name I’ve ever seen written down. I can’t give you nothing much but I can give you a name with lots of letters in it. Sincerely, the mother you never knew.'” Reflecting back on his childhood, Ferret says: “Childhood is too awful a thing to make happen to somebody.”

When he was a boy he met librarian, Mr. Crowe. Crowe’s real vocation is that of a ventriloquist. He took a shine to Bartholomew and taught him about the world of books, and more importantly to the boy’s future, how to excel as a ventriloquist.

Ferret has become a petty thief and con-man who currently works as a ventriloquist and a magician at a vaudeville theater, (before the Fair). He usually follows the carny circuit with his unique dummy, Oscar. It is at the Empress Opera House where he meets and immediately falls in love with the mysterious Cecily, an actress with an unknown history. “I heard her name before I saw her, backstage.”

The narrative takes place in the Sisters Egan’s farmhouse while he is recovering. The ever practical Hester, who acts as the community’s amateur veterinarian, has patched him up and put his leg in a cast. It is at the farmhouse where he relates his tale. The author effectively uses letters from Ferret to Cecily, and from Cecily to him, to further the storyline, which weaves back and forth in time from Autumn 1898 to the winter of 1899.

This story-within-a-story begins in the spring of 1898, at the opening of the Omaha World’s Fair. Omaha, Nebraska, is still a noisy, dirty frontier city whose nickname was the “Gateway to the West.” The author writes, “The Omaha World’s Fair, as depicted in  The Swan Gondola,  is a fictional approximation of the “Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” The author’s version of the Omaha World’s Fair was held from June 1 to November 1 of 1898. Its goal was to showcase the development of the entire West, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. Over 2.6 million people came to Omaha to view the 4,062 exhibits during the four months of the Fair. President William McKinley was among the dignitaries who attended. McKinley, in a cameo role here, is immersed in the Spanish-American War, yet still makes time to attend.

Already known as the “New White City,” this fair tries to one-up the fair at Chicago, originally called the “White CIty.” Chicago’s fair took place in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The Omaha Fair is much different from Chicago’s, as there is very little “white” about it. Behind the scenes at the Fair, another story takes place, a sleazier story: that of the “rousties,” those workers who put the fair together and take it down; ZigZag the clown, Rosie the anarchist and friend to Ferriet as well as August, another close friend of our protagonist. August is an eccentric Native American homosexual who has a crush on Ferrit. Also among the fair’s “players” are the ragtime player, the nervous lion tamer, the waltzing dwarves, can-can dancers, hootchy kootchy showgirls, etc. They are all looking to make a buck from the “gillies,” (civilians), legally or illegally. This “carny-like” background really enriches The Swan Gondola.  The author has said in an interview, “As for the genre of carnival fiction – perhaps its appeal rests in the hodgepodge of it all. Our concept of an American carnival brings to mind childhood delights, but also an element of the seedy, the deceptive, and the decidedly adult. A carnival is a bit of a fever dream – it’s all cotton candy and sex, on a dirt lot.”

“The Swan Gondola” is situated on a lagoon on the midway. It is at the gondola that Ferret and Cecily meet and conduct their romance, at least initially. Ferret is obsessed with Cecily from the first moment he sees her. His obsession drives the narrative.

The Swan Gondola is a novel that grabbed me from page one until the very end. The characters are well fleshed-out and complex and the writing is tight – no unnecessary filler. Readers will be ensnared by the offbeat personalities and carried along by the unexpected plot developments. Timothy Schaffert clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book. It seems that the author is a huge fan of L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” as demonstrated in this tale. A riveting piece of historical fiction from page one to the very end. I highly recommend this novel. It is original and entertaining and gives one a good look at the goings-on at a fair, a carny show or a circus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (February 6, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perksie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS:	Swan Gondola Nostalgia
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Coffins of Little Hope

Bibliography:

• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
• Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
• The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
• The Swan Gondola (February 2014)

“When people asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, Paul Krovik did not say he was going to be a fireman or soldier or pilot, as some boys will before they know the kind of drudgery and danger such jobs entail. He did not want to be an actor or rock star or astronaut, nor did he harbor secret desires to dance, design clothes, or write poetry — the kinds of dreams most in his world would have regarded as evidence that his parents had failed to raise a true man, whatever that might mean.

He always wanted to build houses.

And now they are trying to take away the only house that belonged to him. He is not about to give up the one thing he ever wanted.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (JAN 23, 2014)

A perfect title for a stunning book. Its literal meaning is explained in the 1919 prologue, when a tree on which two men have been lynched falls deep into a sinkhole with the bodies still on it. The rest of the novel takes place in the present, or perhaps the not too distant future, when the land has been developed as an upscale subdivision for a rapidly growing city in the Midwest. But we are not quite there yet. In a second, slightly longer prologue, a woman goes to visit a convict on death row. It is a creepy, brilliant scene, although we know little of either of them, except that his name is Paul Krovik, and she regards him as a destroyer.

The next 380 pages tell of Paul’s crime, among much else. He starts out as a property developer, building neo-Victorian houses with more love than skill, and when the recession hits and he is sued by purchasers demanding repairs, he goes bankrupt and his own house is foreclosed. It is bought cheap at auction by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles (pronounced “no-eye”), a couple who move from Boston with their seven-year-old son Copley. Large sections are told through their eyes, but they have two watchful neighbors who ad the protagonists of their own sections. One is Mrs. Washington, an African-American woman whose century-old farmhouse gets condemned to make way for the new development. And the other is Paul Krovik himself, who cannot bear to lose touch with his former property. So the title gets another meaning: the erasure of farmland and the rural way of life to make way for subdivisions springing up like faceless Stepfords. And it is all focused on the house, like a horror movie in the making. Nathaniel and Julia gut it of all its detail, paint it white, and install security, but still feel they have moved into an alien environment. Copley, brilliant, unhappy, and borderline autistic, believes the house has been invaded by strangers, but his parents merely take him to the doctor for medication.

One of the remarkable things that Flanery does is to recalibrate our sympathies. Yes, we will discover why Kravik is arrested, but he is not the worst villain of the piece. The company that Nathaniel works for, a Haliburton-like global conglomerate called EKK, specializing in total security, has virtually rebuilt the city as a company town, requiring compliance to its right-wing rules. I mentioned Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives; there are also after-echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in the inhuman authoritarianism that only seems futuristic if you ignore the changes that have already taken place over the past dozen years. That is the third meaning of the title: the moral fall of this land, America, from a country of humanity and individualism towards a managed state of paranoid conformity.

And it starts young. The scenes in the company school where Copley goes made me livid, especially as the parent of a once-troubled child myself. Indeed, the more the boy was in the limelight, the more disturbing the story became. For there are other themes in play beyond corporate security. The legacy of abusive parents, for example. The tyranny of psychologists and psychiatrists. The intolerance of anything a little bit out of the ordinary: an old black woman who won’t sell her land, a sensitive boy who prefers reading to sports, a same-sex couple who set up house together. Although this is in no sense a personal confession — indeed it has the makings of a good Hollywood movie written all over it — it is hard not to look past its mounting terror and political commentary, and wonder about what experiences the writer must have had to write with such conviction about outsiders. And that makes a special book very special indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 32 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (August 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Absolution

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)

“There is something I never told you, Laura, a thing about me that makes us more alike than you might imagine. While I have many regrets — in particular about the kind of mother I was to you, and the kind of mother I never managed to be — I have no greater regret than this: that I failed to tell you the darkest truth about me when you were present to hear it, that I failed to show you, when you needed it, how alike we were. This my true confession. To confess is all that I can do for you.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (NOV 30, 2013)

Patrick Flanery’s debut novel is a very interesting example of an overarching story that incorporates another “novel” or “memoir,” a journal and more embedded inside it.  Set in post-apartheid South Africa Absolution is a thought provoking book, and engaging; not necessarily, or least of all, in the sense one would initially expect. Much of the novel could be set in any other country that lived through two opposing government systems. While there are hints of the political realities of South Africa, such as the brief visit to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the central theme of the novel addresses deep moral questions of the human condition that are not time or place specific.

In the most broad sense Absolution is a deep reflection on guilt and seeking foregiveness, on what is truth and why we may not even admit aspects of the truth and our behaviour to ourselves, let alone to others. How many shades of truth are there?

Two central characters – Clare, a grand old dame of literature and Sam, her much younger biographer – enter over the course of the novel into a kind of intellectual and emotional “pas de deux,” whereby each reacts to or dances around the other’s questions and answers. Both reveal slowly and tentatively snippets of themselves and their lives… leaving us as readers to sift through the many shades of truths. As we follow each piece within the emerging puzzle we may at times think we are ahead of the two protagonists, but are we really?

While the “pas de deux,” the discussions between author and biographer, are central to the novel, the backstories of the two protagonists, told in separate sections and in different tones, are as essential. There is Clare’s “letter” to her daughter Laura, which reflects on and responds to her daughter’s notebooks, written while she was on the run from authorities during the “old regime” some twenty years earlier. Clare is also writing a “novel,” Absolution, that reads more like a personal memoir and in another series of chapters we learn more about Sam’s life that was deeply shaken early on in his youth.

Flanery is very effective in pursuing these different narrative streams, interleafing them in a way that, taken together, make for an engaging and comprehensive whole. Your attention is required to keep the different versions of the truth apart. Personally, I couldn’t help comparing Clare with the real-life grand old dame of South African writing, Nadine Gordimer. Be assured, though, there are no parallels between the two, other than maybe the home invasion that both experienced and that weighs heavily on Clare’s mind. I was taken by surprise that, despite the important political undercurrent in the novel, so little was in fact expressed in terms of the complex South African realities then and now. Race or colour was hardly ever mentioned, if at all. On the other hand, I found some sections too detailed and a tightening of those would have increased my reading engagement. Yet, for a debut novel, this book is a great achievement and we can hopefully look forward to more by the author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fallen Land More on guilt & forgiveness: Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)