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The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan

January 9, 2013 by

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan is about dreams, dreams that can raise you up out of the most dire circumstances, if only you are willing to work hard and do what you must to survive.  Antoinette and Marie, by turns, are ballet girls in the Paris Opera, with Antoinette learning too late that she cannot hold her tongue or bend her stubbornness.  Imagine a time in 1880’s France when Emile Zola publishes L’Assommoir, which becomes a play about a laundress and the dire consequences of poverty and alcoholism, and when Cesare Lombroso postulates that people who are born criminals can be identified by physical characteristics of the skull.  Buchanan has taken the real-life figures of Edgar Degas, Emile Zola, and Degas’ model for the statute Little Dancer of Fourteen Years — Marie van Goethem — and intertwined their stories with criminals Emile Abadie and Pierre Gille.  Tempted by different fates, Marie and Antoinette’s stories are told in alternating chapters, providing greater insight into certain situations and events as well as the complicated relationship between sisters, particularly those struggling to survive with a drunk mother, deceased father, and younger sister weighing heavily upon them.

“But then the next minute, my mind flipped back to thinking how a smear of greasepaint might hide her sallow skin.  Back and forth I went.  How to diminish.  How to boost up.  All I knew for sure was even if old Pluque saw his way to giving her a chance, even if she clawed her way up from the dance school to the corps de ballet, she was too skinny, too vulgar in her looks, too much like me to ever move up from second set of the quadrille, the bottom of the scale.”  (Page 13 ARC)

Even as each sister raises the other up with praise and support when times are tough, there are moments of doubt — that the love is not enough and that the support is somehow hollow.  Antoinette has fallen from her place with the ballet and is scrambling for walk-on parts in the opera before she meets Emile and gets a steady role in L’Assommoir, while Marie is just embarking upon her journey in the ballet with their sister Charlotte close behind.  There is the push and pull of these sisterly relationships as they compete to be the best in ballet and to earn the most, while still supporting one another and doing the little things that keep them spirited.  However, their world is about to fall apart when Antoinette falls in love and becomes tempted by that love to throw all that she knows away on the belief that her love is real and ever-lasting.

Buchanan also demonstrates through Marie the notion that believing something to be true can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Marie says at one point, “Monstrous in face, monstrous in spirit.”  She does not see herself as the beauty others see, and her self-image is a faulty foundation for her to stand on when she enters the ballet as she compares herself not only to her sister, Charlotte, whom is considered a cherub, but also to the beauty and grace of the other ballet dancers.  Meanwhile, Antoinette does not have as many concerns about her beauty, relying on her wiles to capture the attentions of Emile and hold his rapt attention.  She sees him as her escape from poverty, despite his criminal-like behavior and greater commitment to his friends.

In many ways, The Painted Girls is about the bond between sisters and about the self-fulfilling traps that many of us fall into even when the support system is there to support us.  It is about taking things for granted, about being selfish, and about not giving into temptation.  Buchanan’s storytelling is captivating, and her characters, while rooted in history, are dynamic and flawed — like the criminals spotted by their physical characteristics, Antoinette and Marie are typecast by the law, theater members, ballet instructors and the wealthy sponsors who have designs on dancers.  Buchanan’s portrait of sisters in France during this period is gritty and emotional. Readers will immediately feel the dark, dank alleys of Paris and the heel of class distinctions upon their necks, just as the van Goethem sisters do.

The first contender for the 2013 best of list.

Credit: Nigel Dickson

About the Author:

CATHY MARIE BUCHANAN is the author of The Painted Girls, a novel set in belle époque Paris and inspired by the real-life model for Degas’s Little Dancer Aged 14 (forthcoming January 2013). Her debut novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, was a New York Times bestseller, a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection, a Barnes & Noble Best of 2009 book, an American Booksellers Association IndieNext pick and a Canada Reads Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. Her stories have appeared in many of Canada’s most respected literary journals, and she has received awards from both the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council. She holds a BSc (Honours Biochemistry) and an MBA from Western University. Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, she now resides in Toronto.

Please check out the reading guide.

Filed Under: ARC, historical fiction, Penguin, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With: ,

Hokey Pokey by Jerry Spinelli

December 26, 2012 by

Hokey Pokey by Jerry Spinelli (published in January 2013) is a modern day fable in which the maxim “Kids live in their own little worlds” comes to life.  Bicycles become wild mustangs or horses in the plains to be captured by boys who are not just boys but cowboys with rope.  Girls hate boys and boys hate girls — taunting each other with harmless names and petty pranks.  In many ways, they relate to the opposite sex no differently than they relate to their own, though rather than offer advice or imparting skills and knowledge to their gender enemies, they stand apart from them and deride them as inferior.  Spinelli’s tale takes a few chapters to develop into a full blown world, but once it does, look out.  Readers will be wandering around and playing games.

There are four basic rules in this world of Hokey Pokey:  never leave a puddle unstomped; never go to sleep until the last possible minute; never kiss a girl; and never go near the Forbidden Hut.  With a male protagonist, Jack, Spinelli obviously is gearing the book more toward male readers, but female readers who can remember their childhoods and the games they played, may still find something to hold their attention here.  Jack is flanked by his amigos, Dusty and LaJo, and his enemy, Jubilee, has just stolen his mustang — Scramjet — the most famous bike in all of the land.  Jack is pissed, he’s vengeful, he’s sad, but more than anything, he’s noticed that something has changed since he woke up in the morning.

“The world looked exactly the same as always — the places, the kids — but this time there was a slippery sense, like an uncatchable moth, that he himself was no longer part of the picture, was on the outside looking in, that the world he was seeing was no longer his.  For a scary instant he thought his end of the seesaw was going to keep on rising and catapult him clear out of Hokey Pokey.”  (page 76 ARC)

Spinelli weaves a tale of growing up and leaving childhood behind and that sense of things being the same as they always were, but different somehow.  Highly inventive and at times surreal, Spinelli’s world can be a bit topsy turvy at first, but readers will soon wonder what is wrong with Jack and where he’s going if he is leaving Hokey Pokey when there is no train.  In a world absent of adults, kids run amok, taunt each other and take out their traumatic frustrations on one another in the form of games and the dangerous click, click, click of the exploder, which renders other kids “dead.”  In a land of make-believe and where anything is possible, Jack and his friends are free to think and feel how they wish without consequence.  But even in this world, there are boundaries to how others are treated.

Hokey Pokey by Jerry Spinelli, which is my first experience with this author, is an adventure for young and old.  However, the age range is 10 and up, and readers on the younger end of that range may find the themes and some language challenging, especially as Spinelli often mashes words together or creates his own as part of Hokey Pokey’s world.

About the Author:

Jerry Spinelli is an American author of children’s novels on adolescence and early adulthood. He is best known for the novels Maniac Magee, for which he won the Newbury Medal, and Wringer.  After graduating from Gettysburg College with an English degree, Spinelli worked full time as a magazine editor.  Spinelli was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania and currently resides in Phoenixville, PA.

This is my 88th book for the New Authors Reading Challenge in 2012.

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, children's fiction, fiction, New Authors Challenge, Publishers/Publicists, random house, Read in 2012, reviews Tagged With: ,

The Ghost Runner by Blair Richmond

November 27, 2012 by

The Ghost Runner by Blair Richmond (book 2 in the Lithia Series, published by small publisher Ashland Creek Press) finds Katherine Healy unable to outrun her past and her father.  Ghosts begin appearing in her life, just as she has settled into her new home in Lithia, a home her family abandoned long ago for Houston.  Roman, an immortal carnivore, has been cast aside in favor of Alex, an immortal vegan and environmentalist, by Kat, but even her perfect relationship is showing signs of cracking under the new pressures Kat faces.

In the wooded town, most of the residents are happy knowing everyone in town and supporting causes that keep the forests protected, but developers are still in the shadows waiting to swoop in and change their way of life.  While Kat is hung up on two men, she’s also trying to get her life back to normal, enrolling in college again (at least part time) and holding down her job at the sports show store in town.  After running for her life in the last book, Richmond has Kat tackling more mundane obstacles, like keeping good grades and juggling her responsibilities at the store and school.

“I don’t care that it’s 8:15 on a Monday morning and that most of the other fifteen students are straining to keep their eyes open.  I don’t care that the room is as drab as a prison, with cinderblock walls painted an uninspiring off-white.”  (page 20)

“A ghost runner is someone who is always right behind you, pushing you, always about to pass you.  Or so you think.  Sometimes there is no runner.  Sometimes it’s just a ghost of a runner, the idea of a runner right behind you, that keeps you at your pace.”  (page 68)

The return of Kat’s father throws a monkey wrench into the situation, stirring up trouble not only between her and Alex, but also throughout the town.  Richmond maintains her engaging sparse prose and her first person narration to capture her reader’s attention and engendering a connection between Kat and the reader.  Kat is a 20-year-old woman who is finding that being a grown up is a bit more responsibility than she expected, even if she has been on her own for more than a year working to make ends meet and outrun her past.  What’s nice about the second book is that the theme of running is continued, but not in a cliched way — it is part of Kat, it is who she is, how she clears her head, how she thinks.

The Ghost Runner by Blair Richmond is a solid second book in a trilogy.  The novelist mixes environmental concerns with themes of finding your ground amidst a turbulent sea and the ghosts of the past.  It’s about dealing with your responsibilities as a part of nature and as a part of a wider society, and more than that it’s about changing your own actions and behaviors to make the changes in the wider society and world you seek.

About the Author:

Blair Richmond is the pen name of a writer from the Pacific Northwest. Out of Breath and The Ghost Runner are books one and two of the Lithia Trilogy. Visit Blair’s blog for the latest on The Lithia Trilogy.

Also Reviewed:

Out of Breath

Filed Under: ARC, fiction, Read in 2012, reviews Tagged With: , ,

Thirty Days With My Father: Finding Peace From Wartime PTSD by Christal Presley, Ph.D.

November 14, 2012 by

Thirty Days With My Father:  Finding Peace From Wartime PTSD by Christal Presley, Ph.D., is the result of a 30-day project Presley undertook to get to know her father and his Vietnam War experiences after not relating for more than a decade, and she got much more than she expected.  Alternating between conversations wither her father and memories written down in her journal — the idea of her therapist — Presley relives parts of her own past just as her father does when speaking of Vietnam and what happened there.

Delmer Presley was drafted into the Vietnam War and never once thought about running off and dodging the draft, and he was a member of Americal Division, First Battalion, Sixth Infantry, referred to as the Gunfighters.  He entered the war following the Tet Offensive and came back a changed man.  While Presley’s book talks about his experiences as they were related to her during phone conversations and other encounters with her father, the memoir focuses mainly on Christal Presley’s intergenerational PTSD symptoms and childhood as it relates to those war memories.

Living in constant fear due to unpredictable behavior and other outside forces can cause heightened awareness fueled by adrenaline.  In the case of warriors and soldiers, this constant state of awareness can be hard to shake even when the unpredictability of the situation is removed and soldiers are sent home.  Consequently, the families that these soldiers return to find that their loved ones are altered, and in some cases, these situations can become very volatile and lead to unintended consequences, such as families subject to verbal abuse and more.

“‘I just didn’t consider those people human.  I never saw a Vietnamese before in my life, and I hated them.  We didn’t even call them Vietnamese back then.  Called them Charlies, dinks, and gooks.  That’s all I knew.  They taught us that.  I was trained not to see them as human.  The government can say whatever they want, but they trained us that way.  It hurt me more to see a dog or cat dead than them Vietnamese.  The government likes young boys who ain’t got no sense.  Easier to train, easier to brainwash that way.'”  (page 59 ARC)

The relationship between father and daughter always has been fragile.  The tentative nature with which Christal makes her calls to her father and feels him out before she asks each question is how readers would imagine any conversation to go given the years of silence between them, but particularly given traumatic nature of her upbringing.  Thirty Days With My Father:  Finding Peace From Wartime PTSD by Christal Presley, Ph.D., is about finding yourself amidst the chaos of family life, particularly a family life full of baggage, and about forgiveness for yourself and your family.  One of the most surprising and astonishing memoirs I’ve read in a long while.  It will have you re-evaluating your own conceptions about your childhood and how to repair relationships that have been damaged.

About the Author:

Christal Presley received her bachelor’s degree in English and her master’s degree in English Education from Virginia Tech.  She received her Ph.D in Education from Capella University. She is a former intern at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, and spent seven years teaching middle and high school English in Chatham and Danville, Virginia.

Her first book, Thirty Days with My Father:  Finding Peace from Wartime PTSD, will be published by Health Communications, Inc. in November 2012.

Christal grew up in Honaker, Virginia, and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the founder of United Children of Veterans, a website that provides resources about PTSD in children of war veterans. In her spare time, you can find Christal playing with her dogs, tending to her chickens, and gardening.

***IF you would like to win a copy, leave a comment on this post about your interest by Nov. 21, 2012, at 11:59 PM EST***

This is my 80th book for the New Authors Reading Challenge in 2012.

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, giveaway, memoir, New Authors Challenge, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, tlc book tours Tagged With: , ,

A Walk in the Park by Jill Mansell

November 8, 2012 by

A Walk in the Park by Jill Mansell is another engaging story about love and coming together as a family.  Lara Carson is forced to leave home at the age of 16 and returns to Bath 18 years later for her father’s funeral.  Things have changed drastically, but Evie is still the warm friend she remembers.  Lara believes she’s prepared to deal with the past, but when Flynn Erskine arrives unexpectedly her feelings nearly overcome her.  Not only does she owe the two most important people from her past an explanation, but she also has secrets she has to reveal — secrets that Flynn and Evie may not be ready for.

Mansell’s characters are always quirky, and there is no absence of that here, from Lara’s strong Aunt Nettie in Keswick to Don the jewelry shop owner in Bath.  While many of these characters are looking for love, denying that they are looking for love, or hoping to fall out of love with a cad, Mansell quietly addresses the fear that still haunts gays who have not come out of the closet, single-parenting obstacles, and how secrets can topple families.

Meanwhile, Lara is blindly making decisions that are best for her daughter, Gigi, but she refuses to look around her to see how her decisions affect herself and others.  She’s also busy trying to make love matches for her aunt and friends, at the same time she’s struggling to ignore her own passionate feelings for Flynn — her former teenage boyfriend.  Life and love is anything but a walk in the park for Lara and her friends, especially when the death of Lara’s mother raises questions about her mother’s faithfulness and about where she got the money to buy the family home.

Readers will note there are a variety of subplots, and while they are successfully concluded, there are some that felt a little rushed, which may be partially due to the multitude of characters Mansell creates.  Mansell novels are full of romance and flirty fun, but this one has some serious notes and a more mature set of story lines.  With a mother-in-law from hell and the outrageous behavior of rap star EnjaySeven, A Walk in the Park by Jill Mansell is a literary soap opera that leaps off the pages and makes readers thank their lucky stars their lives are less complicated.

About the Author:

Jill Mansell lives with her partner and children in Bristol, and writes full time. Actually that’s not true; she watches TV, eats fruit gums, admires the rugby players training in the sports field behind her house, and spends hours on the internet marvelling at how many other writers have blogs. Only when she’s completely run out of displacement activities does she write.

Filed Under: ARC, chicklit, fiction, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, sourcebooks Tagged With: ,

The Lost Art of Mixing by Erica Bauermeister

November 5, 2012 by

The Lost Art of Mixing by Erica Bauermeister (January 2013) picks up where her earlier novel, The School of Essential Ingredients (Check out my review tomorrow), left off — revisiting with Lillian, Chloe, Isabelle, and Tom.  Bauermeister also brings in some new characters as well as she leads readers on a journey of human interaction and family.  In many ways, recipes still play a role here as they did in the first book, though the imagery and word choices here are less about ingredients and cooking than they are about nature and the people themselves.  Isabelle plays a more integral role here than she did in the last book as a mother to grown children concerned about their new role as caregivers and to her wayward roommate, Chloe.  She’s also a motherly figure to Lillian when she finds herself in uncharted waters.

“For all the glamour of restaurants, the underlying secret of the successful ones was their ability to magically repurpose ingredients, a culinary sleight of hand that kept them financially afloat and would have made any depression-era housewife proud.”  (page 3 ARC)

Bauermeister expands on her early work and how food and emotions are closely tied to one another, looking deeper into her recipe to the ingredients and how they blend together or are mixed.  When a recipe is created, are the essential ingredients lost in one another or do they merely bring out the best elements of one another to create something luminous?  Isabelle’s memory loss highlights the mixing element further in terms of how memories are mixed in our minds with scents and seemingly innocuous objects, but the recall of those memories in those moments when scents and objects are present is all at once disconcerting, phenomenal, and joyous.

Bauermeister has created another set of deep characters with nuanced personalities and places them in unusual situations that are all at once odd and plausible, and readers will be swept up in the relationships within these pages and how the characters mingle and mesh with one another in different ways.  Whether a chance meeting when returning a lost coat or a rushed moment in the accountant’s office, lives are touched and changed.  The Lost Art of Mixing by Erica Bauermeister examines the relationships we have, the ways in which we perceive them and ourselves, and how an outside perspective can improve our interactions with those we think we know the best and are closet to, creating even deeper connections than we thought possible.

About the Author:

ERICA BAUERMEISTER is the author of The School of Essential Ingredients and Joy for Beginners. She lives in Seattle with her family. Check out her Facebook page.

Also look for a giveaway and interview in January when the book is released.

Filed Under: ARC, fiction, Penguin, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, tlc book tours Tagged With: ,

Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark

September 21, 2012 by

Maribel Campbell Lowe’s Beautiful Lies (by Clare Clark) ensure that she is mysterious to the reader and London society from the beginning, but as the prose unfolds, readers get glimpses into her past as she attempts to navigate her life in the confines of a London society on the verge of change, in which seances and photography are gaining admirers. Married to radical politician Edward Campbell Lowe, Maribel is thrust into a society full of expectation and one that is changing, but her fateful meeting with Alfred Webster, a reporter, could be her family’s undoing.

But the novel also is more about the society around the Lowe’s and the idea of wearing a mask to your family, society, and to some extent to yourself — hiding the truth from even your own consciousness.  Clark blurs the lines between truth and fiction here in the photographs taken and discussed and as Maribel reflects on her past — lamenting tough decisions she made — and assessing her current situation — finding her way in a relationship with a very busy and outspoken politician.

“”It’s a pity you could not be there when Bill took forty of his Indians to the Congregational Chapel at West Kensington,’ Henry said.  ‘That would have made a splendid photograph.  Apparently, they sang “Nearer My God to Thee” in Lakota.’

‘I am not interested in the Indians as curiosities.  If I am to photograph them it should be as they really are.  The truth, not the myth-making.'” (page 173 ARC)

Maribel is an actress of the first order, as are many of the characters in the novel, as they navigate the complexity of their politics and society at a time when the economy is faltering.  They attempt to hang onto anything that appears true and solid, whether it is Buffalo Bill’s traveling show or spirit photography.  Clark offers very detailed accounts of Victorian society from the clothes to the streets and the economic conditions, but she also provides readers with a stimulating atmosphere that also blurs the lines of reality with those of art.  In many ways, her chain-smoking protagonist’s view of the world permeates the novel so well that the story takes on a mysterious lilt, keeping readers in a state of distanced observation that makes it hard to connect with Maribel on an emotional level.

“Beside the tea chest he hesitated, fumbling in his pockets.  There was the rattle of a matchbox and then the scrape and flare of a match.  Shadows leaped from behind the lines of laundry as he lifted the candle to his face.  Beneath the snarl of his eyebrows his sharp eyes flickered like a snake’s.”  (page 1 ARC)

While the details are appreciated about the House of Commons, the rest of Parliament, the economy, the socialist movement, and other goings on of this era, Clark bogs down the narrative at certain points with these details, which keeps the reader at a distance from her character.  While Maribel smokes obsessively and the prose focuses on it obsessively, the character comes off as careless and even boring at times as she waffles between taking action to improve her happiness and wallowing in the past.  With that said, Clark has written an interesting narrative based upon a real-life politician’s wife who led a double life for many years.

Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark is an unique look at Victorian society plagued by hidden scandals and events that are exaggerated so that they become scandalous by newspapers and reporters.  Disappointingly, the novel drops one of the story lines that was originally set up as one of the things that had the potential to bring down the Lowe family.  Rather the scandals involving politicians and upper class activities uncovered by Webster become the crux of the novel, but the solution to the Lowe’s problem of Webster’s vendetta is unique.  Overall, Clark has recreated the world of the late 1800s and touched upon the hidden lives of many members of society and the masks that humanity wears in public and even at home.

About the Author:

Clare Clark is the author of four novels, including The Great Stink, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize and was named a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and Savage Lands, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2010. Her work has been translated into five languages. She lives in London.

 

 

This is my 68th book for the New Authors Reading Challenge 2012.

 

To enter to win 1 copy of Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark, please leave a comment below by Sept. 28 at 11:59 PM EST.  You must be a U.S. resident and 18 years or older.

 

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, giveaway, historical fiction, New Authors Challenge, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, tlc book tours Tagged With: , ,

The Names of Things by John Colman Wood

September 20, 2012 by

The Names of Things by John Colman Wood is the journey of an anthropologist through the grieving processes he documented among the Northeast African Dasse nomadic camps following the passing of his wife sometime later.  Beautifully written in alternating time frames from the anthropologist’s past field work that helped him create two books on the nomadic lives of these people and their grieving rituals and the present when he returns to the African Chalbi Desert to cope with his wife’s passing.  Wood also includes excerpts on the tribe’s grieving rituals throughout the book, which help to anchor the story in Africa, and help the reader learn how the tribe has named the unnameable — a task the anthropologist must learn.

The prose of this novel is hypnotic and carries the reader into the desert with these people as the anthropologist gains their favor and begins to feel at one with the community.  Wood not only raises questions of an academic nature about the role of an anthropologist, but also whether his presence has polluted the natural dynamic of the community by introducing foreign ideas and culture into their community.  But the presence of the anthropologist among this community also raises questions of how well he can integrate into the community and understand their rituals, feelings, and perspectives, especially since he always remains mostly an outsider to their customs and their grief.

In many ways, the protagonist observes and hangs on the outside not only of the lives of the African tribe, but also of his own life.  His artist wife, who accompanies him to the desert, is left to her own devices as he gallivants through the desert with the tribe and conducts his research.  While she paints and sketches and carves out a routine for herself in which she sits with the sick in the city hospital and does menial tasks, her husband is not with her and he seems to not even think of her much until he returns to her side.  What’s even more curious about these characters is that they seem well paired in that they both need to be alone to complete their work, though their philosophies about the privacy of notes/sketches are very different.

“What I think is interesting, she went on, is that for the list to be interesting you have to bring something else to it.  You have to want what’s on it, and that isn’t a matter of accuracy.  It’s not about the place but about you.”  (page 221-2)

John Colman Wood knows the best way to write about the research anthropologists conduct, while at the same time maintaining the reader’s engagement in the story of his protagonist and his wife.  Even though the research separates them, and the anthropologist seems indifferent to his wife’s suffering, it is clear that he understands her artistic nature and her need to be alone to observe.  However, these characters (who do remain nameless throughout the book) are separate but together on their journeys of observation, with only one of them truly connecting with something outside themselves.  Although The Names of Things is about how to define and deal with the grief that inevitably comes when we love, belong, and need one another, it also is about how we interact with those around us and how much a part of the community we become or not.  A well-written and paced debut novel that will surprise readers with its journey into the customs that bind us together and how they are shaped by the people that create them.

About the Author (Photo credit: Carol Young Wood):

John Colman Wood teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His field research with Gabra nomads of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His fiction has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, and he has twice won the Ethnographic Fiction Prize of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

This is my 67th book for the New Authors Reading Challenge 2012.

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, fiction, New Authors Challenge, Read in 2012, reviews Tagged With: , ,

The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar

August 23, 2012 by

The World We Found by Thrity Umrigar focuses on four women — Laleh, Kavita, Armaiti, and Nishta — who were in college during the 1970s in India and were part of a socialist movement with their male friends Iqbal and Adish.  The students were caught in the midst of a nation’s struggle to improve its government and build a new identity as corruption had plagued the elections process and religious violence against Muslims and Hindus occurred relatively frequently.  In the late 1970s, The Emergency was declared in India, which gave the government extraordinary powers to restrict civil liberties, and led to a number of arrests and violence, among other things.

Laleh, Nishta, Armaiti, and Kavita were idealists looking to create a new world, and with their combined enthusiasm and wide-eyed innocence about a world that they could create for their futures and that of India, they dove headlong into the movement they thought best poised to help them achieve their goals.  However, the realities of social movements intervened, demonstrating the brutality on both sides and those realities forced them to choose the path that would lead them into adulthood.  Looking back on their college years, some of the group is filled with regret at what was not achieved and the friends lost, while others are glad to have had their delusions shattered and the truth revealed.  Umrigar’s characterizations demonstrate the ways in which poignant events in history can leave a lasting impression on idealists, forcing their perceptions to skew so much that they adopt the most radical of views or forcing them to realize that bodily and emotional harm are not endurable.  Although there is one member of the group who followed her ideals and made the tough choices, there are consequences of those hard decisions as well — the loss of friendships, family, and independence.

“Could time really alter things so much? If so, the devil that every religion taught people to fear and loathe was simply the passage of time.”  (page 113 ARC)

Following thirty years of silence, the women are called upon once again to come together, but this time for a friend in America who needs them.  One of them is dying and wishes to seem them all together again, but she cannot travel and they must come to her in America.  Reuniting is never easy, especially when each of them holds guilt about not keeping in touch, secrets from the past, and prejudices born of their not-so-shared history.  The world that each of them found may not be the world that they dreamed they would create together, but it is a world in which they all live now and must learn to either accept or make moves to change for themselves and one another.

“Color.  She was obsessed with color.  There was the read of the Shiraz that Richard had opened the night before.  The burnt orange of the handcrafted cherry table in the hallway.  The glitter of a computer chip, the history of human intelligence shrunk into a capsule.  The muted gold of this leather couch she was napping on.  It made you greedy, intoxicated, made you want to open your mouth and bite into the richness of the world.  It made you want to never leave it, never miss out on a day of this party, this wild carnival ride.”  (page 234 ARC)

Thrity Umrigar not only shares a bit of India’s history with her readers, but she shares some of the religious tensions that pervade Indian society and how it can color the perceptions of people who were once considered friends.  The World We Found is stunning, emotional, and heated in the issues it tackles from religious fanaticism to moral ambiguity and the tenuous bonds between friends and family.  The ties between Laleh, Kavita, Armaiti, and Nishta are unbreakable no matter what tore them apart after college, but the ties between Iqbal and Adish are no less strong, though they seem more complicated by the roles expected of men in their respective religions and Indian society.  Book clubs would have a great deal to discuss after reading this novel and are likely to come away from the discussion with a new perspective on religion and friendship.

About the Author:

Thrity Umrigar is the author of three other novels—The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time—and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for 17 years, she is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University and a 2006 finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. An associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, Umrigar lives in Cleveland.  Please visit her Website.

Also check out my review of The Weight of Heaven.  Enter to win a copy at GoodReads before Sept. 10.

Filed Under: ARC, fiction, Harper Collins, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, tlc book tours Tagged With: ,

Small Damages by Beth Kephart

August 2, 2012 by

There are books that pump your adrenaline for you and there are books, like Small Damages by Beth Kephart, that seep deep into your being, settle there, making their mark on your emotions, your perceptions about other cultures, and your own world view.  Kephart has a skill unlike other young adult authors in that she never sees her younger readers as incapable of understanding or of deep emotion.  She trusts them to follow her characters in their unusual circumstances and settings and garner a deeper understanding of what it means to mature from a child into an adult and the responsibilities that weigh on them even now when they are so young in this modern world.

Kenzie Spitzer is an 18-year-old pregnant girl who struggles with the loss of her father and the silence of her mother every day, and she keeps secrets from her friends, her family, and herself.  Kevin Sullivan, the boyfriend, is on his way to Yale in the fall, and she had planned to attend Newhouse film school after a summer on the New Jersey shore in a rented house with her boyfriend and friends.  To say the least, her life is turned upside down by the pregnancy news, but what’s worse is the decision to have the child and give it up for adoption is taken out of her hands when her mother makes arrangements for her to go to Los Nietos (the granchildren) ranch in Spain where she will be cared for by her mother’s friends Miguel and Estela until the baby is born.

“We scatter the herd, break the bulls out of the shade until they are near, running beside us — fast in a straight line, awkward on the turns, annoyed.” (Page 14 ARC)

Like the scattering of the bulls when she arrives, Kenzie’s life has been derailed and those of her friends and of Kevin are moving parallel to her and from her point of view cased in blissful ignorance as her life is the only one changed.  She even ruminates on how even though a child conceived is the doing of man and woman, it is the woman’s life that is changes irrevocably.  Kenzie’s thoughts are very similar to teenage girls, vacillating between the past and what the future could have been — analyzing each moment over and over.  Unlike other novels on this topic, Kephart’s kind hand guides the narration without judgment allowing the character to reveal her own maternal love for the child and her confusion without the harsh lens of blame and resentment.

“I stay where I am, halfway in, halfway out, the moon and the stars bright behind me.”  (Page 172 ARC)

Forced into a decision that is not her own — but is in a roundabout way a compromise with her mother — Kenzie is left adrift in a foreign land with people she doesn’t know or understand, wondering through silences and asking endless questions that are unanswered more often than not.  She meets Esteban with whom a connection is born as they share a tragic parental past, even though for a long while all Kenzie wants is to be someone else, somewhere else.  Like the birds in Seville and at Los Nietos, they are there guiding Kenzie, showing her the color as Kevin had done when her father died.  She is alive, and they remind her.  There is one passage in the novel in which Esteban talks of how one particular bird always comes, but that he brings the others with him — reminiscent of The Conference of the Birds (my review) and the faith they need to find what they seek.

“‘Only to the earth do I tell my troubles,’ Arcadio sings softly, ‘for nowhere in the world do I find anyone to trust.’

‘If my heart had windowpanes of glass,’ Bruno sings the next line, ‘you’d look inside and see it crying drops of blood.’

‘These Gypsies, they are the famous,’ Miguel says.  ‘They are starting very young; they played for Lorca.  They had duende. Have duende. Sí?'”  (Page 165-6 ARC)

Small Damages by Beth Kephart is about the courage we must find within ourselves to face the past, our tragedies and losses, and our fears about the future.  Kenzie is a young woman on the verge of her new life when it is turned upside down, and while the decision to go to Spain is not her own, she finds the courage to make her own decisions for herself, her baby, and her future.  Through the chords and melodies of gypsy music, Kenzie must peel the tough, bumpy rubber skin of the orange in her journey through Spain to reveal the prized juice and supple pulp beneath the skin.  While damages may seem large and insurmountable when they are first scored through our hearts and skin, they heal and become the small scars that make us who we are and how we learn to be better than we were.

About the Author:

Beth Kephart is the author of 14 books, including the National Book Award finalist A Slant of Sun; the Book Sense pick Ghosts in the Garden; the autobiography of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, Flow; the acclaimed business fable Zenobia; and the critically acclaimed novels for young adults, Undercover and House of Dance. A third YA novel, Nothing but Ghosts, is due out in June 2009. And a fourth young adult novel, The Heart Is Not a Size, will be released in March 2010. “The Longest Distance,” a short story, appears in the May 2009 HarperTeen anthology, No Such Thing as the Real World.

Kephart is a winner of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fiction grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Leeway grant, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize, among other honors. Kephart’s essays are frequently anthologized, she has judged numerous competitions, and she has taught workshops at many institutions, to all ages. Kephart teaches the advanced nonfiction workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. You can visit her blog and my interview with her.

My other Beth Kephart reviews:

Have you seen this book trailer?

Filed Under: ARC, Penguin, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, young adult fiction Tagged With: , ,

Flight From Berlin by David John

July 30, 2012 by

With the London Olympic Games already under way, Flight From Berlin by David John is a novel that can demonstrate the political turmoil beneath even the most beloved sporting event across the globe.  It is set during the 1936 Olympic games in Germany just as Adolf Hitler is gaining more power, and British journalist Richard Denham is fully aware of the brutality the Nazis hope to hide behind the spectacle of the games.  Mrs. Eleanor Emerson is an Olympic hopeful whose father, a senator, is very much against the United States’ participation in the games and who eventually gets kicked off the team when her rebellious behavior aboard ship gets her into all kinds of trouble with her father’s nemesis.  Fate conspires to bring these two together as Emerson is offered a job as a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s media empire given her connections with the team.

Embroiled unwittingly in a cloak-and-dagger search for a secret that could stop the rise of Hitler, Emerson and Denham run through the Berlin streets, attend society parties, and hide in back alleys as they seek to interview the only Jewish athlete on the German Olympic team.  The rebellious streak of Emerson draws Denham to her, but she’s intrigued by his passion to uncover the truth even without considering the consequences.  John’s prose is quick paced and appropriate for the old world espionage feel of the novel, and the relationship between Denham and Emerson is one of convenience and mutual respect.

“How strange, how small the things that change history, turn it from its darkened course, send it eddying off down new, sunlit streams.”  (Page 2 ARC)

However, the fast-paced nature of the story often takes over too much in that the relationship between Denham and Emerson is not fully realized and when declarations of love occur, it seems to be too soon.  While John does use the cliched oops moment of overhearing a conversation in the garden, the story is intriguing enough to keep the reader’s attention.  Meanwhile, the chapters on the Hindenburg are very well done and demonstrate the awe people at that time would have felt at seeing such ingenuity.

“It was like a film set built from an Erector set.  A gargantuan spider’s web of bracing wires and girders radiated out from the central axis, and looking along the corridor’s length was like seeing infinity reflected between two mirrors.  The air was much colder.

Together they walked along the corridor between towering gas cells, which hummed quietly with the vibration of the engines.”  (Page 66 ARC)

Flight From Berlin by David John provides the right mix of thrill and historical elements to anchor readers into the time between WWI and WWII when Germany was hosting the Olympic games and Hitler was hovering the line between diplomatic peace and alienating the entire world.  Denham, a former WWI soldier, is forced to recall his training and the tragic things he saw during the war, but it also enables him to remain sympathetic to the Jews and others he meets while working in Berlin on his journalistic stories.  Emerson is a socialite who is used to getting her way either through charm or her father’s connections, but she has to learn to be more observant of the world around her and that she has her own strength to get her through.  Another gem in the novel is the notes in the back about what characters were real and which were fictionalized.

About the Author:

DAVID JOHN was born in Wales. He trained as a lawyer but made his career in publishing, editing popular books on history and science. In 2009 he moved to Germany to write Flight from Berlin. He lives in Seoul, South Korea, where he is researching his second novel.

This is my 56th book for the New Authors Reading Challenge 2012.

Filed Under: ARC, challenges, Harper Collins, historical fiction, New Authors Challenge, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, tlc book tours Tagged With: ,

Enchantment: New and Selected Stories by Thaisa Frank

July 20, 2012 by

Enchantment by Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses (my review),  is a collection of short stories that offers a variety of perspectives on the real and imagined, and some stories have a more other-worldly feel to them than others.  Each story wears a mask of beauty and fantasy in which characters themselves take journeys or dream of traveling to cover up the heartbreak and dissatisfaction with their lives.

Frank’s prose is beautiful and mysterious, and her characters are genuine and real, even the vampire from “The Loneliness of the Midwestern Vampire.”  Each story has an undercurrent of longing as each character searches for a connection to something or someone, and in some cases, there is a longing to repair even broken connections as a means of regaining some of that lost sense of wonder that most of us feel when a connection is first made.

From “The White Coat” (page 147 ARC)

“She remembered almost nothing of her life back home–the cramped little alcove where she did translations, their sprawling city apartment–everything vanished in this air of limitless depth.”

Starting out the collection are some more fanciful stories, like “Thread,” “Enchantment,” and The Girl with Feet That Could See,” but further into the collection the stories are less fanciful and less playful and more realistic, like “Henna” and “Postcards.”  However, the real gem of the collection is the collection of stories within the collection — a series of stories — that make up “The Mapmaker.”  These stories or vignettes told from a single point of view focus on one family and its most intimate secrets, like who made the map that hangs in the father’s study and was it really the narrator’s grandfather.  There is even a story that touches on the manipulative nature of children when adults have a secret they don’t want others to know and of course, there is the overarching story of families and communication and how broken it all becomes.  In this section of the collection, it is clear that Frank is a novelist and in many ways, these stories could become their own full fledged novel.

Enchantment by Thaisa Frank straddles the world between the real and the imagined as her characters try to capture some of that awe that we often feel as children about life and to connect with others in the deepest way possible.  Frank is a talented writer with a firm grasp of characterization and storytelling, and while not all of the stories feel complete, they all will transport readers to another world, another time, and another place in the hope that they will once again become captivated with their own lives.

About the Author:

Thaisa Frank grew up in the Midwest and the Bronx, the granddaughter of a Presbyterian theologian and a Rumanian Chassid, who consulted each other about Aramaic texts. Her father was a professor of medieval English and her mother a director of small theater groups.  She earned an honors degree in philosophy of science and logic from Oberlin College, studied graduate linguistics and philosophy at Columbia and worked as a psychotherapist before becoming a fulltime writer. She has traveled extensively in France and England, and currently lives in Oakland, California.

Filed Under: ARC, fiction, Read in 2012, reviews, short stories Tagged With: , ,