Small Town – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 BREWSTER by Mark Slouka /2014/brewster-by-mark-slouka/ Wed, 05 Feb 2014 12:45:16 +0000 /?p=24021 Book Quote:

“The first time I saw him fight was in the front of the school, winter. It was before I knew him. I noticed him walking across the parking lot–the long coat, his hair tossing around in the wind — with some guy I’d never seen before following twenty feet behind and two others fanned back like wings on a jet. It was the way the three of them were walking — tight, fast, closing quickly. That and the fact that instead of speeding up he seemed to be deliberately slowing down…”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 5, 2014)

Brewster reads like a melancholy ballad sung by Leonard Cohen, Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen. It’s like driving down a remote, one-lane dark road surrounding a black reservoir, the starless sky doomy and vast. You are headed toward a forgotten city. Now and then a beacon in the distance blinks like a metronomic eye. Brewster is a static town in upstate New York, where it always feels like winter, “weeks-old crusts of ice covering the sidewalks and the yards, a gray, windy sky, smoke torn sideways from the brick chimneys.”

It was the end of the sixties, and studious, unpopular Jon Mosher, the narrator, connects with rogue, slanty, Ray Cappicciano, and Frank “Jesus” Krapinski. They were 16 and wanted to get out of Brewster, dreamed of a better life. Jon, whose Jewish parents fled Germany to America, and opened a shoe store in Brewster, survived in a gloomy atmosphere, because his parents never recovered from Jon’s brother’s premature and tragic death years ago, for which Jon feels responsible.

Ray’s father is a racist, truculent ex-cop who drinks all day. Ray was the more mysterious, taciturn, and enigmatic of the three friends. His mother left before he could remember her, and his stepmother left when his baby brother, Gene (barely a toddler now) was born. Ray is devoted to Gene. Frank teaches Sunday school and believes in Jesus as the savior. All carried their parents’ burdens, and all vowed to leave Brewster for greener pastures after graduation.

Jon finds a sense of purpose on the track team, and Frank begins to question his faith when his family demonstrates hypocrisy, shunning his sister when she becomes pregnant. Ray hooks up with smart, beautiful Karen Dorsey, and they become a fearsome foursome. Oftentimes, Ray would disappear for days and come back banged up and bruised, from fights he said he competed in in Danbury. As more disappearances occurred, the tale hints at more ominous consequences.

This is a coming of age story, sans sentimentality. It is a tale of loss and the long shadows cast from tragedy and adversity. The tone of the novel is both reflective and melancholy, and the sense of suffocation and imprisonment, and thwarted hopes, swirls like the icy wind of Brewster’s winters. There’s a feeling of paralysis, and yet, woven within Jon’s voice is the promise of a thaw, of a hibernating redemption within an unquiet stillness. This hope buoys the narrative from a relentless pessimism, and also mitigates the pressure cooker of looming menace. I couldn’t be sure how it would evolve, the youthful dreams suspended and the freighted sorrow of their lives more dire as the novel progresses.

“There was no going back, though thinking about it, I’m not sure there was much to go back to anyway. Truth is, there’s nothing more stupid than fighting something there isn’t–a lack of love, a lack of respect. It’s like fighting an empty room…You punch the air, you yell, you weep, but there’s nobody there–just this feeling that there’s something holding you back, that there’s a place outside that room that could answer everything, that could tell you, finally, who you are. And you’re not allowed to go there.”

Slouka’s prose is assured, meditative, and beautiful. I was a fan after I read The Visible World, which shared some themes of displacement, the legacy of war, and urgent love. This novel is a sterling tour de force, which left me both shattered and hopeful. If you like literature with depth, emotion, atmosphere, and authenticity, you will be touched by the pathos and humanity of Brewster.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 60 readers
PUBLISHER: W. W. Norton & Company; Limited edition (August 5, 2013)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Mark Slouka
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> THE MAID’S VERSION by Daniel Woodrell /2013/the-maids-version-by-daniel-woodrell/ Sat, 21 Dec 2013 17:45:34 +0000 /?p=23615 Book Quote:

“She frightened me at every dawn the summer I stayed with her. She’d sit on the edge of her bed, long hair down, down to the floor and shaking as she brushed and brushed, shadows ebbing from the room and early light flowing in through both windows. Her hair was as long as her story and she couldn’t walk when her hair was not woven into dense braids and pinned around and atop her head. Otherwise her hair dragged the floor like the train of a medieval gown and she had to gather it into a sheaf and coil it about her forearm several times to walk the floor without stepping on herself. She’d been born a farm girl, then served as a maid for half a century, so she couldn’t sleep past dawn to win a bet…”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (DEC 21, 2013)

The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell is a small book but reads like a tome, with such literate and beautiful imagery that I was enthralled. The book centers around the mystery of the explosion at Arbor Dance Hall in 1929. The explosion killed 42 people, many unrecognizable in death with their bodies broken up or burned beyond recognition. Alma Dunahew lost her sister Ruby in the explosion and for years has been trying to discover the answer to what happened. Those years have been hard on her with several of them spent at the Work Farm in West Table, Missouri, due to her psychic breakdown caused by rage and grief. Many of the town’s most wealthy citizens want to put the truth of the explosion to the side and no one has ever been apprehended for the crime. They look at Alma’s ramblings about the explosion as words from a crazy person. The magnitude of the explosion was enormous.

“Just as full darkness fell those happy sounds heard in the surviving house suddenly became a nightmare chorus of pleas, cries of terror, screams as the flames neared crackling and bricks returned tumbling from the heavens and stout beams crushed those souls knocked to the ground. Walls shook and shuddered for a mile around and the boom was heard faintly in the next county south and painfully by everyone in the town limits.”

One summer in 1965, Alma’s young grandson Alec comes to visit her. It is to him that she spills the story of the dance hall and her theory about what happened that night. Going back and forth in time, the novel gives the reader vignettes about those who were killed in the dance hall explosion along with the story of Ruby, Alma’s sister. Ruby was a great flirt and what was called in those days a loose woman. She would love them and leave them until she found a real love with the banker, Arthur Glencross. Glencross was married and Alma worked as a maid for the Glencross family. She worked very hard to hide Arthur’s affair from his wife Corrine by carefully washing his clothing to get out smells and stains that would serve as evidence of his affair with Ruby. After Ruby’s death, Alma hated Arthur and this was evident in her actions.

Was Arthur responsible for the explosion? Or, could it have been the preacher Isaiah Willard who spoke of death and damnation to those who danced? He believed that “the easiest portals to the soul through which demons might enter was that opened by dancing feet. Evil music, evil feet, salacious sliding and the disgusting embraces dancing excused provided an avenue of damnation that could readily be seen and blockaded” He was heard to say of the Arbor Dance Hall during that summer, “I’ll blow this place to Kingdom soon and drop those sinners into the boiling patch – see how they dance then.” What about the hobos hanging around town? Those passing through with bad intentions? Someone with a grudge against one of the dancers? Who was it? Alma thinks she knows and tells her story to Alec.

Of the forty-two killed in the explosion, only twenty-eight were whole enough so that graves could be made for them. Most of them were not identified. The rest were parts buried in a pit. Alma’s grief was such that she “touched all twenty-eight and kissed them each, kneeling to kiss the fresh black paint between her spread aching fingers, said the same words to accompany every kiss because there was no way to know which box of wood held Ruby, or if she rested in only one, had not been separated into parts by crushing or flames and interred in two or three, so she treated every box as though her sister was inside in parts or whole and cried to the last.”

Woodrell’s style of writing is unique, sounding like I’d imagine the tenor of speech spoken in the Ozarks. At times it’s a difficult book because of the writing style and the subject matter. It is, however, stunning and has left me with a deep and abiding appreciation for this author’s work. I thank him for sharing his talent and vision with readers.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 117 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Daniell Woodrell
EXTRAS: Interview  and Excerpt
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*The Bayou Trilogy (April 2011)

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]]> ASSUMPTION by Percival Everett /2011/assumption-by-percival-everett/ Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:32:31 +0000 /?p=22091 Book Quote:

“I’ll tell you what this is, it’s two gallons of shit in a one-gallon bucket.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (NOV 17, 2011)

The hardscrabble desert land of New Mexico is the perfect setting for Percival Everett’s new novel, Assumption, mainly because it mirrors the protagonist’s character incredibly well. Ogden Walker is a deputy in the sheriff’s office in the small town of Plata, where he serves after a brief stint in the army. Plata might be where mom Eva Walker lives but Ogden finds her presence not enough of a comfort to overcome his unease with his mixed African American heritage (he is biracial) or his general malaise with what seems to be a dead-end career. He finds it hard to be content hunting for the small fish even if a colleague tells him, “A big fish is fun, I suppose, but so are small ones sometimes. Depends on the water. If I catch a ten-incher in a creek that’s two foot wide, that’s a big fish.”

One day, when an old lady in town is shot dead in her own home, Walker is not sure quite where to begin. His investigations eventually lead him to discover that she might have been part of some hate groups — it’s a hard paradox to serve the very people who might wish you harm. Before this murder is completely resolved, there’s more trouble. The body count rises again, this time through a seemingly unrelated murder on the other end of town.

This incident has Walker chasing down prostitutes in seedy sections of Denver. This mystery snowballs into a third one where a fellow law enforcement agent is shot and again, nobody knows what happened and how. As Everett goes about putting all the pieces together, the writing increasingly reaches a feverish pitch and one wonders if anybody is keeping count as the body count ratchets up easily and steadily. “Warren moved on to the next structure, knowing nothing more than that he was confused,” writes Everett of Ogden’s coworker, Warren Fragua, “More so with each piece of this puzzle, if in fact these were pieces, if in fact this was a puzzle.” That same disorienting sensation works itself on to the pages of this fast-paced novel.

Assumption is full of razor-sharp dialog and Everett does a wonderful job of capturing the gritty landscape but the disparate story threads and sudden detours in the action occasionally make the book trying.

With the twists and turns in the story, the moral of the novel might well be to assume nothing. But it sure feels like Everett goes to great lengths just to make that point. After a while the story is not so much genre-bending as genre-defying. Readers who like their suspense stories resolved well will find Everett’s latest novel frustrating. Even the surprise ending might not help redeem matters in such a case.

On the other hand, readers who love the chase as much as the outcome, will find Assumption entertaining and a fun ride. When one of the characters in the novel points out that the whole mess is “hinky as hell,” they will only be too happy. After all, when it comes to murder mysteries, “hinky” is good.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Graywolf Press (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Percival Everett
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> LIGHT FROM A DISTANT STAR by Mary McGarry Morris /2011/light-from-a-distant-star-by-mary-mcgarry-morris/ Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:34:26 +0000 /?p=21896 Book Quote:

“Because this was the part she couldn’t tell anyone, except her mother. And then, not all of it, not right away. She still thinks it came from knowing too much, more than she understood or could accept. She needed her world to be safe, and if bad things happened, she had to work them out first in her head, then only later, inside, deep, deeper than she could ever have imagined.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 27, 2011)

Nellie Peck is thirteen years old going on forty. She is wise, intelligent and impulsive. Despite her precociousness, however, she is still a child. She lives with her parents and two siblings, Ruth and Henry; Ruth is a half-sister from a relationship that her mother had in high school. The Pecks are struggling financially. Nellie’s mother works as a hair dresser and Nellie’s father owns a hardware store that is slowly going under. Her father’s passion is his writing – he is writing a tome about the history of their town, Springvale. His goal is to get it self-published so that it can be read by a wide audience.

To enhance their income, the Pecks rent out an apartment attached to their home. Nellie loves to listen in to conversations in the apartment through the bathroom wall. Their latest tenant is Dolly Bedalia, an exotic dancer, aka a stripper. Nellie likes her and feels that Dolly actually listens to her. Her brother Henry has built a treehouse and from the treehouse Nellie and Henry can see into their neighbor’s living room and also view the comings and goings from Dolly’s apartment.

Ruth is obsessed with finding her real father who moved to Australia during high school. She has written multiple letters to him. When a return letter finally comes, Nellie absconds with it and hides it from Ruth which sets off a chain of events that leads to Nellie feeling like an outcast from her family.

Nellie is in that in-between age, not yet in adolescence but on the cusp of it. A wild child, Bucky Saltonstall, likes Nellie and tries to involve her in his illegal and wild schemes. One of them is stealing bicycles and then selling them. Bucky is also a bully and can turn on anyone at the drop of a hat. He is living with his grandparents because his parents can’t handle him.

Charlie is Nellie’s grandfather. He is the proprietor of the local junkyard. He is cold and mean, not at all what one thinks of as grandfatherly. Recently, he hired a helper named Max Devaney. Max has a history that includes being in jail and he is a registered sex offender for having sex with an underaged girl when he was a young man. He has a dog named Boone. Nellie really likes him and his dog. She dreams of going fishing with Charlie and Max but they only invite her along one time. Nellie considers Max to be a hero. There was an instance when Henry was attacked by a neighbor’s dog and Max came to the rescue, killing the offending dog violently. Henry ended up with a considerable number of stitches in his arm.

Jessica Cooper is Nellie’s annoying friend. She pursues Nellie like white on snow. Nellie does not like her because Jessica has very weird thoughts about killing people, hating her mother, and is generally mean and unfeeling. She calls Nellie all the time and Nellie doesn’t know how to get her off her back.

So far, the above events are just the daily workings of a small town and a small town girl. However, Dolly gets murdered and the only one there, the only witness to who might be the murderer, is Nellie. She was in the basement with Max while Max was fixing the hot water tank and they needed to get into Dolly’s apartment. The door of the apartment was unlocked and when they get in, Dolly is dead. Nellie saw another man coming out of Dolly’s apartment but has said nothing about it so Max is tried for the murder. Nellie is in a real fix – she feels like she can’t tell anyone about who she saw but she doesn’t want Max to go to jail for a murder she doesn’t believe he committed. Nellie also remembers hearing some thumps and bumps coming from the apartment earlier that same afternoon.

Most of the novel focuses on Nellie’s dilemmas about the murder, her family and growing up. She is the primary witness at the trial and she often thinks about Mark Twain’s quote that moral courage is more important than physical courage. Will Nellie have the moral courage to speak up? If so, what will be the consequences to those involved?

Light From A Distant Star is not one of Mary McGarry Morris’s stronger novels. I’m a real fan of hers and have read everything she’s written. I especially love Vanished and Fiona Range.  This novel includes some of the same types of characters for which she is known – the unlikable outcasts that just can’t seem to make it in the regular ways of life. However, in her previous books, the characters were so well-executed and brought to life that the reader feels empathy for them. I felt little or no empathy for the characters in this book. They were fleshed out, but not to the point where I cared all that much. The writing is excellent, just what I’d expect from Morris, but ultimately, it does not come up to her best work.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 22 readers
PUBLISHER: Crown (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mary McGarry Morris
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> THE NIGHT STRANGERS by Chris Bohjalian /2011/the-night-strangers-by-chris-bohjalian/ Sat, 08 Oct 2011 13:39:18 +0000 /?p=21444 Book Quote:

“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: stars-3-0from 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
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]]> A TRICK OF THE LIGHT by Louise Penny /2011/a-trick-of-the-light-by-louise-penny/ Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:26:54 +0000 /?p=20617 Book Quote:

“The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  SEP 02, 2011)

Three Pines is a village near Montréal that is so small it does not appear on any map. For its size, this town has had an inordinate number of murders; solving them is the job of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec and his team of detectives. This time, the victim is a woman, Lillian Dyson, whose art criticism years ago was so caustic that she was responsible for putting an end to budding careers. Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light is all about artists—their insecurities, craving for recognition, pettiness, resentment, and jealousy.

Two artists, Clara Morrow and her husband, Peter, live in Three Pines, and Peter has been moderately successful. However, it is Clara who is having a private solo exhibition, a vernissage, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal. For years she toiled in relative obscurity, receiving nothing but “silence from a baffled and even bemused art world.” Now that Clara has come into her own, Peter has mixed feelings about his wife’s long overdue fame.

This novel deals with relationships and emotions. Gamache is still barely on speaking terms with Olivier Brulé, who bears a grudge against him. Moreover, Gamache still has nightmares about a bloody raid he conducted that went terribly wrong, nearly taking his life and that of his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvior. Jean Guy is a wreck, who relies on pain pills to get through the day and is planning to end his miserable marriage (“all the petty sordid squabbles, the tiny slights, the scarring and scabbing”).

Louise Penny understands what makes people tick. She knows that they often show one face to their family, friends, and neighbors, while they bury their true feelings under a façade of amiability. A Trick of the Light exposes the soul-destroying anger, the disappointments, and the bitter rancor that can eat a person up from within. She specifically examines the mind-set of alcoholics, who are capable of doing extensive damage before they are ready to admit that they desperately need help.

As a murder mystery, this is a fairly routine effort. There is little suspense (the list of people who had motive, means, and opportunity to kill Lillian is not particularly large) and most readers will not be shocked when Gamache unmasks the culprit. Penny is a stand-out for other reasons: her eloquent use of language, analysis of people’s psychological foibles, and her beautiful and sometimes humorous description of life in a place so tiny that everyone is intimately acquainted with everyone else. Ruth, an old drunk who insults people with wild abandon, Olivier and his beloved partner, Gabri, and Armand’s lovely wife, Reine-Marie, are all on hand, along with an assortment of art dealers, gallery owners, associates of the homicide victim, and the detectives who are under Gamache’s command. Penny explores what makes art memorable and also what it is like to struggle creatively. This alone makes A Trick of the Light both fascinating and, at times, poetic.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 287 readers
PUBLISHER: Minotaur Books (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Louise Penny
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> NEXT TO LOVE by Ellen Feldman /2011/next-to-love-by-ellen-feldman/ Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:54:14 +0000 /?p=19606 Book Quote:

“They love one another with an atavistic ferocity, though, it occurs to Babe sitting in the sunporch, these days perhaps they do not like one another. But she is asking too much of them. Friendship, like marriage, is not all of a piece.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 28, 2011)

“War…next to love, has captured the world’s imagination,” said the British lexicographer Eric Partridge in 1914. And indeed it has. in English classes, we rapidly become acquainted with The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom The Bell Tolls, From Here to Eternity, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five…the list goes on and on.

But here’s what we don’t read about: the personal battles that are fought on the home front. We don’t get an upfront-and-personal look at the women behind the men and what war means to them…and to the children they create together.

Next To Love starts out very strong. We meet three childhood friends in Massachusetts – Babe, Millie, and Grace – whose men are on the cusp of going off to World War II. Ms. Feldman deftly juggles their stories and breathes life into their characters. Grace is the beauty who is married to the heir of one of the town’s most illustrious citizens and has a young daughter; Millie is married to Pete, the pharmacist’s son; and Babe is the feisty wrong-side-of-the-tracks gal who is in a committed relationship with an upstanding man who wants to become a teacher.

The period details are handled beautifully. Ellen Feldman summons up an age where instant communication (cell phones, Internet, etc.) did not exist and when lovers wrote their heart out in letters. It’s an age where women were divided into “nice girls” and “tramps” and men kept a stiff upper lip and talked about “honor” and “duty.” And it’s an age when the telegram is feared and one town can suddenly lose several of its beloved American boys overnight.

It’s also a time when there’s a clear divide between men and women. “The husbands speak the language of drills, marches, and officers who don’t know which end is up; the wives speak the dialect of carping landladies, dirty bathrooms and no hot water to wash their hair, and endless spirit-killing games of bridge. Since there is no common tongue between them, they communicate in sex,” writes Ms. Feldman. In this aspect, the book calls to mind another excellent one: Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When The Men Are Gone.

Profound change comes after the war. The novel takes on a lot in a scant 300 pages and the characters I had come to love in the first half begin to feel a little bit like stand-ins as the forces of history flow past. Yet Ms. Feldman’s riveting style keeps the reader in a “what’s next?” mode.

We are at their side as they try to understand the men who have been forever changed by the horrors of war; one of them has what would be called post-traumatic stress disorder today. We see the toll it takes on their young children who can only fantasize about the fathers they have never met. And we are on the sidelines of what is now familiar milestones: the way that black veterans are shuffled aside after the war, unable to participate in the new prosperity; the treatment of women as frivolous things, not worthy of jobs or deep thoughts; the bigotry against Jews, ironically, after a war where six million of them were callously murdered.

Ultimately, the book is focused on female friendship – at turns, courageous, poignant, and fragile. The friendships are not idealized, but rather portrayed to be sustaining, enduring, and nurturing. At its core, it is about survival through life, love, children, war, grief, and resurgence, delivered with just the right amount of drama and intensity.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 88 readers
PUBLISHER: Spiegel & Grau (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Ellen Feldman
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
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]]> COLD WIND by C.J. Box /2011/cold-wind-by-c-j-box/ Mon, 09 May 2011 02:55:28 +0000 /?p=17037 Book Quote:

“When someone hurts a member of your family, no matter what the reason, he’s hurt you by proxy. You go after him and get revenge. People need to know there are consequences for their actions, especially when it comes to our loved ones. That’s the only way to keep some kind of order in the world….”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (MAY 08, 2011)

C. J. Box’s Cold Wind is set in a part of Wyoming that is beautifully scenic and, in some ways, untamed. When an enemy threatens one of Box’s characters, the prospective victim does not automatically dial 911. He is more likely to take matters into his own hands. The hero, Joe Pickett, is a game warden and devoted family man who values harmony over conflict. Much to Joe’s displeasure, he is caught up in a web of deceit and violence when his wife’s latest stepfather, “multi-millionaire developer and media mogul, Earl Alden,” is shot dead and found hanging from one of his own windmill turbines. Joe’s mother-in-law, Missy Alden is charged with the crime, and although he has no jurisdiction, Joe undertakes his own unofficial investigation out of obligation to his wife and daughters.

“Joe, I don’t want her found innocent because Marcus Hand ran rings around Lisa in court. I want her found innocent because she didn’t do it. Don’t you understand?  I don’t want this hanging over our girls.  I don’t want it hanging over my head.”

In a parallel plot, Nate Romanowski, a former member of a “rogue branch” of Special Forces, is lying low, since he has bitter enemies who would like his head on a platter. One of them has picked up his trail and is bent on vengeance.

This is an earthy, dryly humorous, and action-packed novel that captures the spirit of the mountainous west. Jumping into the 11th book in the series, the characters sometimes seem like thinly drawn stereotypes.   Missy Alden has been married five times and is a selfish, manipulative, and overbearing harridan; Nate’s lover, Alisha, and Joe’s wife, Marybeth, are sweet and altruistic; two shiftless low-lives, Johnny and Drennen, are overly fond of liquor, meth, and loose women; and Sheriff Kyle McLanahan is less interested in fair play than in getting reelected. Although Joe occasionally bends the rules to achieve his goals, at least he feels guilty about it.

Yet the backstory of the main characters is revealed enough for us to follow their lives and I’m sure for those you have stuck with this series from the beginning, they will welcome learning more about Joe Pickett and his current situation with his mother-in-law. They will also be hoping that Joe and Nate, who have had a falling out from something that happened in the previous novel, can get over it and help each other out with each other’s troubles.

An intriguing theme (hence the title), is the huge amount of money to be made in renewable energy by private entrepreneurs — and how that money is funded by the government.  As the author says in an interview, the face of the west is changing with hundreds of gleaming 250-foot wind turbines is part of the landscape.  He says, “There are those who look at miles of wind towers and see the energy source of the future. Others look at the same sight and see an abomination. Me, I wondered if it was possible to hang a body off one of the blades and what that body would look like after rotating at a hundred miles per hour.” Which is where Joe Pickett finds Earl Alden in the opening chapter of this book. Before his death, Earl Alden invested a small fortune in turbines (“each tower was a hundred feet higher than the Statue of Liberty”) to generate wind power. When Joe and Marybeth look into Alden’s business dealings, they make some surprising discoveries. Like Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, in which the debate on global warming is given an ugly marketing twist; Box’s characters also find a negative side to the wind energy business, and although it may or may not be a motive for murder, it is an interesting look at the whole business.

Cold Wind will appeal to readers who like clearly delineated good guys and bad guys. In Box territory, folks do not pussyfoot around. They settle their differences the old-fashioned way–using knives, guns, or whatever weapon is needed to get the job done. In a politically correct world, there is something bracing about individuals who take a direct approach. If you prefer works of fiction filled with ambiguity, sentiment, and indecisiveness, Box may not be your cup of tea. On the other hand, those who enjoy morality tales with tough-talking hombres will likely find Cold Wind as refreshing as an ice-cold beer on a hot summer’s day.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 78 readers
PUBLISHER: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (March 22, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: C.J. Box
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:

Others set in the “wild west:”

Bibliography:

Joe Pickett Series:

Stand-alone:

]]> THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE by Timothy Schaffert /2011/the-coffins-of-little-hope-by-timothy-schaffert/ Sun, 01 May 2011 15:00:42 +0000 /?p=17685 Book Quote:

“And this very book began not as a book but as an obit of a kind for a little girl who up and went missing one simple summer day. On this girl we pinned all hopes of our dying town’s salvation. The longer we went without seeing her even once, the more and more dependent upon her we grew. She became our leading industry, her sudden nothingness a valuable export, and we considered changing the name of our town to hers; we would live in the town of ‘Lenore’. Is it any wonder we refused to give up hope despite all the signs that she’d never existed, that she’d never been anybody – never, not even before she supposedly vanished?”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 1, 2011)

The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert is a small gem. Its multi-plotted story takes place in a small Nebraska town with characters who make this novel special. The town is peopled by a lot of old folks. Essie, the protagonist, is 83 and the novel is told in first person from her point of view. “We were all of us quite old, we death merchants – the town’s undertaker (seventy-eight), his organist (sixty-seven)…the florist (her freezer overgrown with lilies, eighty-one). The cemetery’s caretaker, who procured for the goth high schoolers who partied among the tombstones, was the enfant terrible among us (at an immature fifty-six.”

Essie writes obituaries for the town’s local paper which is owned by her grandson, Doc. She feels very close to the people she writes about and wants to know as much about them as possible, both the good and the bad. Essie had a son who died in an automobile accident many years ago, leaving two children – Essie’s grandson Doc and her granddaughter Ivy. Essie also has a teenaged great granddaughter named Tess with whom she is very close. Doc has raised Tess for most of her life as Ivy ran off to Paris with one of her professors when Tess was seven. As the novel opens, Ivy has just returned to town and her relationship with Tess is tenuous.

There are two very eventful things going on in town. The first is the alleged disappearance of a child named Lenore. No one has ever seen or met Lenore. Lenore’s mother, Daisy, says that her boyfriend Elvis abducted her. Supposedly, Lenore was born at home and home schooled. That’s the reason that no one has ever seen her and no records of her birth exist. The town is split into those who believe Lenore existed and was abducted and those who think that Lenore is merely a figment of Daisy’s imagination. Is Daisy delusional or has there really been a crime committed? Much of the book focuses on these questions.

The other big event in town is top secret. There is a young adult book series based on two characters named Miranda and Desiree. Think Harry Potter in terms of popularity. The publishers want a very out of the way place to print it and they choose this small Nebraska town. The paper that the book is printed on is very special. It contains grass seeds and herbs so that its “greenness” won’t harm the environment. The author, William Muscatine, has a correspondence with Essie that is top secret. They are pen pals and friends of a sort.

As word of the abduction gets out and travels around the country, people gather in town to park and camp all around Daisy’s ranch which is called “The Crippled Eighty.” These folks are known as Lenorians. It becomes somewhat cultish and these folks form a tight and closed circle around Daisy. They are hangers-on and try to keep other people away from Daisy.

Meanwhile, Ivy and Tess are trying to rebuild their relationship, which is a very difficult task. Tess had lived with Doc for the past six years and decides to move in with Ivy which hurts Doc’s feelings. Essie tries not to get too involved in their decisions. Tess often comes to Essie for advice and support. Essie and Tess have one of those special relationships that is comprised of love and mutual respect.

Essie attempts to solve the mystery of Lenore and also protect the secrecy of the book printing. She manages to get herself into different sorts of trouble and ends up with a real crisis on her hands. The characters in this gentle and compassionate book truly speak to the reader. In other hands this book would seem too light but Shaffert does an expert job of making the reader care and want to keep reading in order to find out what happens next. He does a good job of poking fun at the publishing industry, painting vivid portraits of dysfunctional families, and showing the sensibilities of a small town. This is quite an enjoyable book, one that leaves a sweet and mellow feeling with me. This is the first book I’ve read by Schaffert but I plan to check out his others.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 14 readers
PUBLISHER: Unbridled Books; 1 edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt

An interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another good read set in Nebraska:

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

]]> THE BAYOU TRILOGY by Daniel Woodrell /2011/the-bayou-trilogy-by-daniel-woodrell/ Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:05:35 +0000 /?p=17621 Book Quote:

“I don’t want friends, you silly shit. Friends—hah! Friends are the ones shoot you twice in the back of the head. Friends snitch you out for the long stretches. Up the joint, you see a guy doin’ life you can figure he had one too many friends.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (APR 27, 2011)

Winter’s Bone was one of the best crime films I saw in 2010. I discovered that it was based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, and I was surprised that I’d never heard that name before. But I’m apparently not the only one, and the success of Winter’s Bone is guaranteed to bring this author new readers. Woodrell is best known as a writer of Ozark Noir, but the Bayou Trilogy is, as the title suggests, set in a different geographical region. The trilogy is composed of three novels from Woodrell’s early writing career: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and The Ones You Do. The protagonist of the trilogy is Cajun cop Rene Shade. Shade hails from the fictional Louisiana city of San Bruno: “a city of many neighborhoods, Frogtown and Pan Fry being the largest and most fabled, and great numbing stretches of anonymous, bland, and nearly affluent subdivisions.” These neighborhoods are sharply divided along ethnic lines with the French hanging out in Frogtown and the blacks sticking to Pan Fry. There’s also Hawthorne Hills–the wealthy impenetrable suburb of the powerful elite.

Former boxer now detective Rene Shade has French-Irish roots. His older brother Tip runs the Frogtown Catfish bar while younger brother, District Attorney Francois is trying hard to disguise his working class roots. Rene’s mother, Ma Blanqui rules a run-down pool hall, and Rene lives in a room above the family business. To add even more flavour to the local geography, a swamp, the Marias du Croche–full of water moccasins with plenty of attitude, lies on the outskirts of town. Rene’s father, John X, returns to Frogtown for the third novel in the series.

In the fast-paced, explosive action-packed tale Under The Bright Lights, a local city councilman is murdered and Rene Shade is pressured by his “superiors” to conclude that the crime was a simple burglary gone wrong, but it’s not long before all hell breaks loose with a range war between Frogtown and Pan Fry. A hired hit man with dreams of becoming a professional musician is just the tool of other ambitious, greedy men in a matter of contracts and corrupt local politics gone wrong.

Muscle for the Wing begins with a “protected” poker game being blown wide open (literally) by a violent gang known as the Wing. These ex-cons, led by a muscle-bound brute, Emil Jadick have moved into town with the intention of taking what they want and to hell with the consequences. Here’s the Wing’s first hit:

“Despite the low hum of air-conditioning, the victims sweated gushingly and shook with concern, for, not only were they being shorn of their gambling money, but history was staggering and order decaying before their eyes. The swinging side of St. Bruno night world had been run as smoothly and nearly as openly as a pizza franchise for most of a decade and now these tourists from the wrong side of the road somewhere else were demonstrating the folly of such complacence. Auguste Beaurain, the wizened little genius of regional adoration, had run the upriver dagos, the downriver riffraff, the homegrown Carpenter brothers, and the out-of-state Dixie Mafia from this town and all its profitable games in such an efficient manner that no one had truly believed he would ever again be tested this side of the pearly gates.

But here and now these strangers, too ignorant of local folklore to know how much danger they were in, were taking the test and deciding on their own grades.”

St. Bruno operates with its own customs and laws, and the reason the city doesn’t blow apart from crime and corruption is it’s controlled from the top down. So the rich white folks in Hawthorne Hills call the shots and occasionally throw a bone to a chosen few in Frogtown or Pan Fry. Everybody plays by the rules–more-or-less–although we see the sort of catastrophe that develops when someone gets greedy (Under the Bright Lights). In Muscle for the Wing, outsiders think the local muscle is soft, lazy and fat enough to be taken without much of a fight. It’s Shade’s job to stop The Wing from taking over.

The Ones You Do sees the return of Rene Shade’s father, former pool shark John X. Dumped by his young second wife who’s split with all the cash, John X returns to his roots with a pissed-off killer Lunch Pumphrey in hot pursuit.

The Bayou Trilogy is extremely violent, fast paced and the closest thing I’ve read to a pulp flick pasted onto 470 pages. There are no middle-of-road characters here. The busty, trampy babes slide into cut-offs three sizes too small, tote weapons, flip hash and are meaner than pole cats. As for the men–there’s a range of stupid, and others who are cunning, vicious or just plain evil. Woodrell can wrap up character in a nutshell. Here’s Mayor Crawford after hours in Under the Bright Lights:

He was in slacks and a polo shirt with a cherry half-robe loosely belted. Fit and silver-haired, he looked like the aging stud of a prime-time soap.

Woodrell’s Bayou world is not a place for outsiders–the author makes that clear. Only those born and bred in view of the swamp can understand the arcane rules and Cajun St Bruno philosophy of righteous violence and vengeance.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 29 readers
PUBLISHER: Mulholland Books (April 28, 2011)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Also by Daniel Woodrell:

Bibliography:

*The Bayou Trilogy (2011)

Movies from Books:

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