“I had made a mistake in judgment, and it just kept going, rolling into a larger and larger ball, and I was in the middle of it, tumbling out of control.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JUN 22, 2011)

The Descent of Man could be used as Exhibit A in how to write a taut plot-driven story. The story catches you from the opening line and just never lets you go. If you’re looking for a fast beach read, look no further.

Jim Sandusky is an everyman holding down a steady job when one day, he looks out the window of his house and sees thieves trying to get away with his car. He tells his wife to stay away from the window and call the police, while he goes down to investigate. Instead of leaving the police to take care of the thieves, in a split second, Jim gets into the thieves’ truck and drives it away. What’s worse, he abandons the truck a short distance away and totally bashes it in.

This one split-second decision will come back to haunt Jim and make his life fraught with tension, if not downright misery. As it turns out the duo that was stealing Jim’s car is a set of violent brothers. And yes, they want to exact revenge on the sicko who bashed their car in.

So Jim is constantly living in fear—wary of who might be waiting for him around the corner. Between the weight of this problem and keeping it secret from his wife Marla, he gradually becomes an insomniac, trawling the streets of his city up to the early morning hours. “When you commit a crime, you replay it again and again,” he thinks, “You think about how you might have done things another way.”

And this is precisely what happens to Jim. Unfortunately for him, Jim can’t even confide in a friendly cop, Sergeant Rainey, who assures Jim he can do a lot to relieve him of his troubles. All Jim has to do is to be honest and recount the fateful night’s events faithfully. Jim doesn’t.

What makes The Descent of Man a good read is that Jim’s actions and every decision seem so very plausible. It’s almost as if this could happen to each one of us. As his life spins out of control, it’s hard not to feel some relief in knowing it’s not you in that situation.

The Descent of Man is not without its faults. For one thing, the dialog is a little cheesy at times. “Think of yourself as a slice of bread, and they’re a can of Drano,” Sergeant Rainey tells Jim about the brothers. “After they come in contact with you, all that’s left is a puff of smoke and little crusty bits.” Additionally, the plot falters at the very end and the cop’s actions seemed a little too neat and implausible—especially given how totally believable the plot is until then.

Overall though, The Descent of Man turns out to be a fairly good read. Through his forays into Jim’s and Marla’s delicate relationship, Desinger shows us he is plenty capable of character-driven writing as well. The couple’s struggles with infertility and the effects it has on each of them, are portrayed heartbreakingly well.

Even if the book is not crackling with scintillating dialog, or at least the wisecracking kind that one would expect from such a book these days, it exudes an honest empathy that makes The Descent of Man an extremely fun and fast read. The best thrillers narrate events that are slightly off course yet ever so believable. Jim Sandusky is the epitome of John Doe and as his life spirals out of control, it’s hard to look away. “Adrenaline turns a guy into an ape sometimes,” Sergeant Rainey says. No new revelation there. The more interesting reveal is just how fine a line exists between civilized and feral behavior. It is this revelation that’s the scariest to digest and what makes The Descent of Man a page-turner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Unbridled Books (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kevin Desinger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Long Drive Home by Will Allison

Bibliography:

• The Descent of Man (May 2011)

“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:	from 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 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)

“Playing chamber music involves an intimacy between people that is no weaker than the closeness of love or sex. To play with others is to be bound by and respond to their rhythms and desires without sacrificing your own. Like sex, great music can be made with someone you know well or not at all—and with someone you loathe so long as there is passion in your hatred. Yet, unlike sex, great music can be made even with someone you merely dislike. This explains why Petra, Daniel, and Suzanne play well with Anthony, even when they find his arrangements too facile. There is some other, unnamable sensibility they share.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (SEP 23, 2010)

Classical music, and the games of evasion and deception we play with the ones we love, create the engine that drives this lyrical, well-crafted story by acclaimed author Elise Blackwell. The premise is simple but compelling: Career violist Suzanne hears over the radio about the death of her lover, orchestral conductor Alex Elling, in a plane crash. She can only grieve secretly amid the members of her household, which include emotionally-distant husband Ben, irreverent best friend and fellow musician Petra and her young, deaf daughter. Suzanne soldiers on, rehearsing with her string quartet, playing second mother to Petra’s daughter, until a phone call from her former lover’s widow changes her life a second time. Suzanne and Alex’s secret affair was no secret, in the end, and now his widow extorts a favor from Suzanne: to finish the viola concerto started by her deceased husband. Desperate to keep the affair secret, even now, Suzanne reluctantly agrees.

Blackwell, who directs the University of South Carolina MFA program, excels in bringing small moments and insights to life through vivid detail that keeps the prose fresh and surprising. Pick a page, randomly, and odds are you’ll find some engrossing anecdote or pearl of wisdom about music, life, or class distinction, such as in the following:

“The houses she passes proclaim upper-middle-class respectability. Though Suzanne knows that unhappiness can invade any home, seeping through its cracks as easily as the scent of honeysuckle or skunk, and that all people are deeply strange when you really know them, it’s hard to imagine anything but perfectly browning apple pies, badminton games in the backyard, dinners eaten in the comfortable knowledge of growing stock portfolios.”

Initially the story’s pacing is languorous, chronicling Suzanne’s grief, her attempts to move forward, interspersed with flashbacks to her past, her time with Alex. An intriguing side story is the deafness Petra’s daughter suffers from, and Petra’s exploration of cochlear implants as a possible auditory enhancement, paving the way for some interesting introspection on the concept of hearing in general, and what it would be like to be forever closed off to sound, to music.

The story provides a wealth of information on classical music and its composers, the inner workings of a string quartet, the challenges of being a career musician. Other reviewers have argued that Blackwell used a heavy hand in the number of digressions about classical composers and concerts attended with Alex, but as a classical music enthusiast, I have to say I enjoyed that aspect of the story. Like Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, this is a music story for musicians.

The only false note came up in a flashback scene where Alex has used his conductor’s influence to have rising star violinist Joshua Felder (think Joshua Bell) perform, blindfolded, in a San Francisco hotel room, while Alex makes love to Suzanne in a bed four feet away. It seems to me a professional violist in a hotel room with one of the world’s top violinists would be far more interested in observing his performance and technique up close (and four feet is pretty darned close) versus the tawdry overtures—no pun intended—of a philandering conductor whose species, in general, is despised by orchestral musicians (add in the dictatorial nature, the seven-figure salary, and now you know why).

Could this really have happened? Sure, anything goes in a world where talent, ambition, desire and influence collide. But that Suzanne should remember the experience (and remember she does, referencing it three times in the story) as something romantic and exciting felt disingenuous, out of character for both her and the story. Further, a reference to Alex’s guest-conducting stint that night with the San Francisco “Philharmonic” (it’s the San Francisco Symphony) left me wondering uneasily if this were an attempt at fictionalizing, or an error that should have been caught.

That is my only rant. The rest is great stuff, fiction that strikes the perfect balance between literary and commercial. I enjoyed learning about Suzanne’s past, her career trajectory, her prospects and fears for the future, unsure of whether or not it would include husband Ben, whom apparently has plenty of hidden issues of his own. The other females in the story are masterfully drawn, in the form of Petra, a lively, opinionated, irreverent sort, raising a deaf daughter, sometimes taking rash action that serves to complicate everyone’s life. Olivia, Alex’s widow, is a wondrously vile creature, elegant, decisive and vindictive, and the reader, like Suzanne, can’t help but feel a mix of both admiration and dislike any time the woman sweeps into the room.

The novel is presented in the form of a concerto, with three movements. In the third part, the Appassionato, the story takes on a breathless, page-turning pace. As Suzanne puzzles through Alex’s concerto which Olivia plans to have premiered with a major orchestra, Suzanne is allowed a glimpse into who her lover was, deep inside, in a place incapable of lying. In his work, she searches for some last message from him. Her deepening confusion at the ambivalence is wonderfully depicted, turning the story into a psychological mystery of sorts, while, concurrently, dynamics in Suzanne’s personal life provide her with the same jolts of “who is this person I thought I knew so well?”

The story’s climax is well-paced and satisfying, casting new light on all that came before it, deepening each character, enriching the story as a whole. A coda neatly clears up loose bits and leaves us with one final image of music and the redemptive power it offers to those who serve it. An engrossing read on an evocative subject, An Unfinished Score should please fans of Blackwell’s previous writing and win her some new fans (myself included).

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Unbridled Books; 1 edition (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elise Blackwell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:GrubUnnatural History of Cypress Parish Hunger

Bibliography:

• Hunger (May 2003)
• The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish (March 2007)
• Grub (September 2007)
• An Unfinished Score (April 2010)

“It isn’t black-and-white, what we do, or what anyone else does in this world…Most things you have to do in life are at least a little bit questionable.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAY 5, 2010)

Emily St. John Mandel, the author of the taut and well-written novel, The Singer’s Gun, is a regular on one of my favorite book blogs, The Millions. Understanding the reason for why authors write the way they do is often difficult—especially because one doesn’t have ready access to their insights. This is why St. John Mandel’s wonderful essay about writing, The Trojan Horse Problem: Thoughts on Structure, which was published by The Millions, is particularly valuable.

After reading the essay, you are convinced that her novel is going to do away with excess. This is going to be one lean, mean, plot-driven machine. And this is precisely what The Singer’s Gun is.

The central character is Anton Waker, a vanilla white-collar executive working at an engineering firm in Manhattan. After many days at the company doing seemingly thorough work, Anton suddenly finds himself unmoored. His secretary is missing; slowly none of the company workers report to him and eventually he finds himself shunted away to a basement office next to file storage. Anton himself is now in endless cold storage. Anton has no idea what happened to cause this sudden shift in his fortunes—except maybe he does.

A few weeks ago the engineering company had won a lucrative government assignment—one that required thorough background checks. It turns out Anton’s past has been less than stellar. In writing that seamlessly moves back and forth in time, St. John Mandel shows how in his early youth, Anton is roped into a shady business by his cousin, Aria. The orphaned Aria is adopted by Anton’s parents early on and she convinces Anton to join her in a scheme selling fake Social Security Cards and U.S. passports to illegal immigrants.

Anton’s parents, for their part, run a business selling refurbished stolen goods so the lines of morality for the young Anton are very blurred early on. It is his act of rebellion that he decides to break free of the dubious businesses his family works in—he sets off to become an executive, someone who walks on the straight-and-narrow. Of course noble intentions are not readily achieved. Anton’s shady past returns to haunt him and there are no easy solutions to the quandary he finds himself in.

Worse, Anton’s personal life is in shambles. His wedding to Sophie Waker took many starts and stops to finally happen but Anton soon realizes she is not the one for him. Part of the reason may be his affair with his secretary, Elena James, an illegal immigrant herself, whom Anton once helped with papers. Halfway through his honeymoon with Sophie, during their stay on the island of Ischia in Italy, Anton tells his new wife he wants to stay behind on the island—why doesn’t she just go ahead back to the United States without him. If all this sounds unreal, Anton has legitimate reasons to stay behind—it would be too much of a reveal to state the reasons here.

The element of suspense in the story revolves around the reasons for Anton’s stay on the island and the true dealings that cousin Aria is up to. An agent from the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service Division, Alexandra Broden, is hot on Anton’s trail to learn more.

The author does a wonderful job with the pacing and the dialog in the novel. The island of Ischia is just marvelously rendered—you can absolutely feel you’re there. St. John Mandel also beautifully shows the contradictions Anton has to grapple with. He desperately wants to walk away from a life of crime and shady dealings yet he finds it very hard to do. As his parents remind him, everyone’s life is full of moral ambiguities. All told, The Singer’s Gun is a crisp, taut novel and will work really well as a beach read this summer.

Back to St. John Mandel’s essay in The Millions, she writes: “It seems to me that a good novel, one that holds a reader’s attention for three hundred pages, requires a kind of sustained enchantment.” The Singer’s Gun definitely meets this criterion. There is a very surreal, atmospheric, “sustained enchantment” quality to the novel that makes it all work effectively.

In a particularly snide review of the book, The Publisher’s Weekly complained that “the sex isn’t sexy and the violence isn’t especially violent.” But that is precisely the point. The Singer’s Gun doesn’t conform to stereotypical expectations of what a book in the suspense genre should read like. And in this case, that is definitely a good thing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Unbridled Books; 1 edition (May 4, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Emily St. John Mandel and on FaceBook
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Poornima’s review of Lola Quartet
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	We discovered this publisher when we attended BEA a couple years ago.  Here are some other Unbridled Books that we’ve enjoyed in the past: Unnatural History of Cypress Parish by Elise Blackwell Hick by Andrea Portes The Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson A Season of Fire and Ice by Lloyd Zimpel

Bibliography:

• Last Night in Montreal (2009)
• The Singer’s Gun (2010)
• Lola Quartet (May 2012)