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The Time Between by Karen White

September 4, 2013 by

Source: Borrowed from Diary of an Eccentric
Hardcover, 352 pages
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The Time Between by Karen White is undulating between the past and present of Eleanor Murray and Helena Szarka’s lives as they find they have more in common than how they feel the piano music they play.  Eleanor and her sister Eve’s relationship was severed by a childhood prank that festered and paralyzed them both, while Helena is an aging woman who has been close to death more than once.  As Helena delves into the deep secrets Eleanor is keeping, Eleanor does the same behind closed doors.  White balances the WWII past with the present beautifully, crafting a novel that juxtaposes the past and the present in a way that uncovers how second chances can be easily missed or taken by the horns.

“She taught us that building baskets was like building a life, finding materials from different places–bits and pieces with their own purpose–and creating a vessel that could pour out or keep in.  I thought about this now, driving to Edisto, wondering what sort of basket my life would be and what it would be named.”  (page 67 ARC)

Caring for the aging Helena for her boss, Finn, Eleanor begins to reconnect with the past she has forgotten and the dreams she once had, but at the same time she’s struggling to reconcile the spark of dreams rekindled with the harrowing guilt of her past.  Like Helena, the guilt has weighed Eleanor down so heavily to the point at which she cannot move without the approval of her conscience.  She has set aside her life in favor of other’s needs and they have let her because of their own guilt and shame, as Helena has done for more than 50 years.  White brings Charleston and Edisto to life, immersing the reader into the marshes, the salt spray, and the wildness of town life.

She brings about the juxtaposition of Charleston’s upper crust life and the busy go-go-go of business with the quieter, lulling music of nature and sea life on Edisto.  Eleanor is not awakened by the busy life of Charleston in Finn’s firm, but by the sedate musicality of the rivers and ocean and the not-so-gentled prodding of Helena.  White has created multi-faceted characters who have real fears and guilt, and these women will burrow into readers hearts, twist them up and wring out so many emotions.

The Time Between by Karen White is stunning in its historical scope and its emotional scale.  As Eleanor and Eve learn about forgiveness and rekindling their connection, Helena learns to loosen her grip on her terrifying past and let go.  Both must forgive and be forgiven, and as they learn to move beyond their pasts, it becomes easier for them to see doors that open to new opportunities.  White is one of the best writers today, and each of her stories transports readers beyond themselves and into the lives of her characters, ensuring they become indelible.

About the Author:

Known for award-winning novels such as Learning to Breathe, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 2009 Book of the Year Award finalist The House on Tradd Street, the highly praised The Memory of Water, the four-week SIBA bestseller The Lost Hours, Pieces of the Heart, and her IndieBound national bestseller The Color of Light, Karen has shared her appreciation of the coastal Low country with readers in four of her last six novels.

Italian and French by ancestry, a southerner and a storyteller by birth, Karen has made her home in many different places.  Visit the author at her website, and become a fan on Facebook.

Also check out my reviews of The House on Tradd Street, The Girl on Legare Street, The Beach Trees, After the Rain, Sea Change, and On Folly Beach.

Filed Under: borrowed copy, fiction, Penguin, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With: ,

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje

September 3, 2013 by

Source: Public Library
Paperback, 207 pages
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Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje is a travel and family memoir (highly recommended by Beth Kephart), and he says that it is a composite of two return trips to Sri Lanka, formally known as Ceylon, in the 1970s, as well as endless stories and questions-and-answers from family members and those that knew his father Mervyn best.  Michael is among the youngest of the family, having left Ceylon when he was 11 after his mother and father divorced.  Much of this memoir borders between fiction and truth, but like all memories and perceptions, the story of someone’s life can be as fluid as the relationships that begin and end with and around them.  The crux of this memoir, in which Ondaatje embarks on his own journey of remembering about his family and the country he came from, is about the fluidity of memory and the inability to truly know even our closest family members.

“What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.  I was sleeping at a friend’s house.  I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape.  The noises woke me.  I sat up on the uncomfortable sofa and I was in a jungle, hot, sweating.”  (page 21)

Ondaajte’s magical realism shines through in the narrative, particularly as he takes trips to the former family home and into the jungle.  There are humorous anecdotes about his grandmother, Lalla, who clearly had a love for life and freedom.  There is one incident in which she doesn’t realize her breast is being fondled by a stranger on the bus, but the reasoning is something very unexpected.  His father and grandmother did not get along well, and whether that is because Mervyn is a victim of dipsomania, also known as alcoholism, or Lalla’s inhibition after her husband’s death that enables her to do as she pleases without one thought to the consequences.  

More than anything, Ondaatje’s memoir is about learning about his family’s outrageous past in a time of excess (1920s), but also realizing that there are mysteries about the interconnectedness of their lives that may never be resolved.  He must come to terms with what he knows about his family through his own memories and that of others and what will always remain a mystery — how can he reconcile the two.  But this is not just all prose, he also illuminates some of the family stories with poetry.  Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje is sparkling in the jungle, a bead of sweat that slithers down your arm and seeps beneath the skin and causes a startling chill.

About the Author:

Michael Ondaatje is one of the world’s foremost writers – his artistry and aesthetic have influenced an entire generation of writers and readers. Although he is best known as a novelist, Ondaatje’s work also encompasses poetry, memoir, and film, and reveals a passion for defying conventional form. His transcendent novel The English Patient, explores the stories of people history fails to reveal by intersecting four diverse lives at the end of World War II. This bestselling novel was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.

Filed Under: borrowed copy, nonfiction, Publishers/Publicists, random house, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With:

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, narrated by Simon Vance

August 27, 2013 by

Source: Public Library
Audiobook, 9 CDs
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Our August book club selection, His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire book 1) by Naomi Novik, narrated by Simon Vance, meshes the Napoleonic wars with dragons.  The novel opens with the capture of a French frigate run by a crew unwilling to give up its prize, a near hatching dragon egg, to the British HMS Reliant and Capt. Will Laurence.  While the prize is a great find, the hatchling will be very dangerous should it emerge while they are at sea where there are no mates, trainers, or food available. The situation forces the captain to have the men without families draw straws to determine who would become responsible for the dragon and its egg while aboard.

Handlers of dragons are considered second-class citizens, causing severe disappointment among families and generating a great separateness between handlers and their families.  Generally, children as young as seven are taken away from home for training.  While the young John Carver, who is afraid of heights, is selected to be the dragon’s handler, the dragon has other ideas.  When the dragon speaks, the men are astonished as they expected there to be a trick to getting them to speak.  Once named, Temeraire becomes the focus of the Reliant and its crew, and its relationship to Laurence takes an unexpected turn.

Vance’s voices are easily discernible as different characters and he excels at expressing the character’s fears and awe as he speaks their dialogue, but Novik tends to rely a great deal on adverbs to demonstrate fear or anxiousness and in some cases at the beginning the narration seems to contradict itself — either the dragon egg is an unusual find or a well-known item captured in the surgeon’s books about different dragons or there is a three hour trip to London from Madeira or a three hour trip from London to Scotland, but it is unlikely that both would take that long by transport or dragon.  There is a great deal of explanation through the characters about what they know and don’t know about the dragons, which can get tiresome as the descriptions become longer than necessary.

However, the growing relationship between Temeraire and Laurence is endearing.  And the conflicts between handlers about the care for the dragons and Laurence’s expectations about the training build up the tension as Napoleon continues to mount his forces.  While the first half of the book seems to be setting up the world for the dragons and can drag on a bit, the second half picks up speed with the battles and fighting.  The audio, as narrated by Vance, enables readers to become more closely engaged in the relationship between Temeraire and his handler, as they learn how to fly formations in training for battle and as they get to know one another.  There are a number of endearing scenes in which the handler and the dragon curl up together, with the handler reading to the dragon about mathematics, naval history, and more.

His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire book 1) by Naomi Novik satisfactorily meshes history with dragons, but the strength of the novel is in the relationships built between the dragons and their handlers.  These relationships are caring and strengthen with the passage of time, so much so that handlers often plan their futures around them.

 

This is my 53rd book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

 

About the Author:

An avid reader of fantasy literature since age six, when she first made her way through The Lord of the Rings, Naomi Novik is also a history buff with a particular interest in the Napoleonic era and a fondness for the work of Patrick O’Brian and Jane Austen. She studied English literature at Brown University, and did graduate work in computer science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadow of Undrentide. Over the course of a brief winter sojourn spent working on the game in Edmonton, Canada (accompanied by a truly alarming coat that now lives brooding in the depths of her closet), she realized she preferred writing to programming, and on returning to New York, decided to try her hand at novels.  Naomi lives in New York City with her husband and six computers.

What the book club thought:

It seemed as though most of the members enjoyed the book, and one member said that the historical facts about the Napoleonic wars were accurate for the most part.  Some expressed an inability or slight difficulty in determining the size of the dragons or transports used to move the dragons.  One member, who led the group, pointed out that the illustrator in the back of the book got some of the details wrong in the section that explains the differences between the dragons and their features.  One member said that she was not really excited to read the book because she doesn’t usually read fantasy books, but the author made it seem plausible that dragons would fit into our world.  She also indicated that she wanted one of her own dragons to curl up with and read to, and she would like to read the other eight books in the series.  Another member said that if Napoleon really did have dragons the world might have been more in trouble than it was at the time.  One male member had not finished the book, but said that he would continue reading.  Overall, is seems like the club enjoyed this foray into fantasy novels.

Filed Under: audiobooks, borrowed copy, challenges, fiction, New Authors Challenge, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With: , ,

The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins

August 15, 2013 by

Source: Borrowed from Anna at Diary of an Eccentric
Paperback, 373 pages
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The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins is a dual narrative novel with heroines in present day Queens, N.Y., and County of Mayo, Ireland, during the potato famine when a blight hit all of the crops and the fever was rampant.  Normally, readers either connect with the present day or the historical narrative in books like this, but the eventual entanglement of these narratives reinforces the strength, weaknesses, fears, and courage mothers must face when they are responsible for children.  Majella is a new mother who had certain expectations about motherhood, which are blown to bits in her first emotional months after Emma is born, while Ginny is an Irish potato farmer whose husband ventures to America in the hope that he will send money home to keep his family from being evicted after the blight destroys their crops.

“They didn’t notice that pungent bitterness in the dark, beyond their walls, and turf fires, beyond the milky breath of their sleeping children.  They slept, while that mortal fog stole into their bright, green country, and grew like a merciless stain across the darkened land.  It killed every verdant thing it touched.” (page 2)

Majella considers herself a strong, independent woman with a mother that is less than connected to her own emotions, let along those of her daughter, but when she gives birth to her first child, fears rise up in Majella awful fast.  She’s scrambling for something to hold onto other than her fears and her daughter because holding her too tightly could cause even more harm.  Leo, her husband is supportive but must work and even then, his nerves are fraying with all of his wife’s tears and outbursts.  Her brash and unfiltered commentary on motherhood and her fears is fresh and tangible, and will speak to the hearts of every new mother who has floundered and wondered about how to be a mother.

“I passed out.  The contractions were ferocious because the doctor had turned off my epidural so I could feel them.  As if I was in danger of not feeling the eight-pound child who was attempting to exit my body.  He was a male doctor, and he thought the pain would help me push, which is like the philosophy that waterboarding helps people confess to hiding weapons of mass destruction.” (page 7)

Ginny is another strong woman and she’s forced by their poor circumstances as tenant farmers to take her family’s fate in her own hands after her husband’s letters do not come for months.  As she comes to the estate of Mrs. Alice Springs, she begs for the lives of herself, her children, and her unborn son, seeking employment and safety as the world around them crumbles to Irish dust.  Even though life as a chambermaid is not hellish at the estate, what is is the separation from her children with the knowledge that the crops have gone bad and that they could be starving.  She musters the courage and crafts a plan to save them and herself, at least for a while.

Cummins’ passionate prose brings these women’s struggles to life, making them relate-able in ways that readers will never foresee.  Motherhood is both joyous and full of struggle, and it is life-altering in so many ways, much more so in modern society where women work outside the home and have innumerable choices.  What the author is able to build is an underlying tension between the narratives that pulls the reader forward, hooking them to the very last page when their connections are revealed in full.  What Majella learns about herself and her family will propel her beyond the hormonal mess she has become, and what Ginny has learned as a chambermaid working outside the home, forces her to assume the mantle of decisionmaker at a time when few women did.  The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins is stunning and a powerful read that will open up readers eyes to the emotional and psychological mess that new mothers face, often alone if their husbands and own families are unavailable emotionally.

About the Author:

Jeanine Cummins is the author of the bestselling memoir A Rip in Heaven, which People magazine called: “…a straightforward, expertly paced narrative that reads like a novel.” She lives in New York City.

 

 

This is my 3rd book for the Ireland Reading Challenge 2013.

 

 

 

This is my 52nd book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: borrowed copy, challenges, fiction, historical fiction, Ireland Challenge, New Authors Challenge, Penguin, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With: ,

The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham

July 30, 2013 by

Source: Public Library, though Beth Kephart’s review had me seek it out.
Hardcover, 208 pages
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The News from Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story by Joan Wickersham explores what it means to love in its many forms, and how that emotion can be caught up with and distorted by other emotions and desires.  From the woman whose husband is a serial cheater even as she lays partially paralyzed and dependent upon him to the woman who is drawn again and again to a co-worker who is just out of reach, Wickersham demonstrates the power love has over our bodies and the helplessness we feel as we try to fight off that power.  Each story is titled “The News from Spain,” harkening to the segues used in conversation to divert attention or change the subject from something more personal and deeply wounding, as if calling attention away will make relationships and connections easier to bear or ignore.

“What they had together was pleasant.

But still that word continued to bother her, whenever she thought of it.  The fact that it appeared to be lauding, but the thing that it praised was a limitation.”  (Page 40)

There are characters here who are emotionally detached for a number of reasons, but even they find themselves in the midst of relationships, waffling through the navigation of their emotions.  Each character is seemingly stuck in a pattern of love, and these patterns continue infinitely through time as some of them long separated from these emotional or physical affairs continue to mull them over and remember them either fondly or quizzically.  Wickersham explores what it means to love and be loved, but also what it means to hurt the ones we love, to struggle in the quest for giving and receiving forgiveness, and also what it means to move beyond the hurt and pain to find peace and fondness without the bitterness and regret.

In one story, the narrator talks of unrequited love and the emotions running throughout her body becoming an unruly mob when she tries to rein them in after confessing to the man.  And this frenetic movement within her is reminiscent of those first flushes of love — requited or not — and the passions they inflame, but as she professes to continue to love her husband, readers may begin to wonder if it is love she feels at all for this other man or a want for those feelings of passion to reignite her life.  The News from Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story by Joan Wickersham is at times an emotional roller coaster and at others a dark comedy on the passions of love, but her characters struggles are brought to life in a way that will leave a lasting impression on readers.

About the Author:

Joan Wickersham was born in New York City and grew up there and in Connecticut. Her new book of fiction, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story, will be published by Knopf in October 2012. Her memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt 2008) was a National Book Award Finalist. She is also the author of a novel, The Paper Anniversary.

Please visit her Website and her Facebook page.

This is my 49th book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: borrowed copy, challenges, fiction, New Authors Challenge, Publishers/Publicists, random house, Read in 2013, reviews, short stories

What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Mullan

July 24, 2013 by

Source: Public Library
Hardcover, 320 pages
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What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan is a detailed look at 12 stylistic techniques and concerns in Jane Austen’s numerous works, including the unfinished The Watsons and Sanditon.  The twelve puzzles Mullan explores range from the importance of age in her books, what characters call one another, and what games characters play to why her plots rely on blunders, what her characters read, and how experimental a novelist she was.  There are moments in the book where Mullan’s examinations become bogged down and overly verbose, but he clearly enjoys picking apart the most innocuous moments in Austen’s novels to support his theories.  Most of the theories he offers and backs up with source material from Austen’s books and letters to family members also are discussed by other scholars, whom he cites.  For aspiring writers, Mullan’s book can be used as a guide for creating those unique moments and nuances in a novel, emulating Austen but adapting it for modern sensibilities.  Although it is not a how-to guide for writers, it does offer some insight into elements of the craft.

“Admission to a bedroom is a rare privilege, for the reader as well as for a character.” (page 29)

“Names are used by Austen, as well as by her characters, as though they are precious material, so we sometimes hear only once, glancingly, what someone’s name is.  Thus the label on the trunk seen by Harriet Smith, directed to Mr. Elton at his hotel in Bath, which names him as Philip (II. v).” (page 46)

“But Austen wants us to think not so much about how characters look, but how they look to each other.  Her sparing use of specification when it comes to looks is striking when looks can be so important.”  (Page 57)

“Meteorology clues us in to the passing of the year.  But it is more than this.  Austen likes to make her plots turn on the weather.  Having arranged her characters and defined their situations, having planned her love stories and hatched the misunderstandings that might impede them, she lets the weather shape events.  It is her way of admitting chance into her narratives.” (page 101)

“The rather few critics who have written on speech in Austen’s fiction have discovered how each of her speakers seems to have their own idiolect — a way of speaking that is individually distinctive.”  (page 132)

Austen is an often underestimated author, especially in light of the writers who dismissed her early on.  Mullan pinpoints the genius of Austen beyond the morays of the time period in which she wrote and the social commentary.  Readers who have read all of Austen’s major works but once are likely to want to read them anew after reading Mullan’s examination.  Even those have read certain Austen books multiple times could find new theories in this book.  It is interesting to see what it means when characters blush, why weather is important, and what seaside resorts mean in Austen’s work.  Mullan also asks whether there is sex in her books.

What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan is less about the puzzles of Austen than about her techniques as a writer and creator of fiction.  It was an interesting look at how she stacked up to her contemporaries and offered something more.

About the Author:

John Mullan is a Professor of English at University College London. He specialises in 18th century fiction. He is currently working on the 18th-century section of the new Oxford English Literary History. He also writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for The Guardian and reviews books for the London Review of Books and New Statesman. He occasionally appears as an 18th-century and contemporary literature expert for BBC Two’s Newsnight Review and BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. Mullan was a judge for The Best of the Booker in 2008 and for the Man Booker Prize in 2009. He was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge and a Lecturer at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before coming to UCL in 1994.

This is my 47th book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: Bloomsbury, borrowed copy, challenges, New Authors Challenge, nonfiction, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With:

A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson

July 9, 2013 by

Source: Public Library
Hardcover, 440 pages
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A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson is a mystery set in Lisbon, Portugal, in the 1990s, but also a novel that has routes in World War II when Germans were looking for an escape route when the war looked to be ending, and not in their favor.  The novel opens with the death of a young teen, Catarina Oliveira, who has a promiscuous past and a less-than-ideal family life.  Inspector Zé Coelho is on the case, which drags him into conspiratorial intrigues and the dark, convoluted past of his home nation.  Shifting back to 1941, Wilson unveils Klaus Felsen, a German businessman who is “recruited” by the German SS for a particular purpose that takes him into Spain, Portugal, and later Africa, as some Nazis, including his recruiter Lehrer, begin to see the campaign against Russia as folly.  Wilson’s novel is about political regimes and how even their single-minded focus can be derailed by the most personal of matters.

Felsen is an opportunist who attempts to make the most of his new position in the SS, doing the best he can to game the Wolfram markets and garner more of the mineral and other materials away from Britain and the allies from neutral countries, like Portugal.  His meeting with a British agent Edward Burton turns ugly, marring his character and leading him down an ever darkening path that sets him adrift.  Coelho, meanwhile, is slowly investigating the murder of young girl, finding that the ghosts in Salazar‘s closet are not so hidden.  The links between the Oliveira girl and the Nazis’ past in Portugal are convoluted and sinister even as publicly the nation remained neutral.

“‘So you’ve seen some of Lisbon,’ he said.  ‘Now when you see Salazar’s capital after dark perhaps you understand my point about the harlot.  Lisbon’s a whore, a peasant Arab whore, who wears a tiara at night.'”  (page 92)

Wilson successfully paints an atmosphere of paranoia among the Germans as the war winds down, and demonstrates through a series of minor characters the tensions between fascism and communism in Portugal following the war.  These political tensions weigh heavily throughout the mystery novel creating a multilayered, interlocking puzzle to be unraveled by Coelho.  Ripe with sex scenes and the underbelly of prostitution in Lisbon, the darker elements of Felsen and later Miguel Rodrigues’s desires come into the light, along with incest, adultery, perversity, and murder.

Unfortunately, these multiple story lines seem forced together toward the end with newer, less important plot lines that could have remained unresolved by Wilson.  Ultimately, the most well drawn character in the book is Felsen, though for the latter third he disappears until the very end when there seems to be no other way to tie up the mystery.  Coelho is a carbon cut out of any police detective and doesn’t seem particularly Portuguese with any respect, which could be due to the time he spent in England with his wife and child.  His time in England, however, may have made him less old-world Portuguese in some sense, but at his core, readers may expect him to still have those old world values, which could leave readers feeling that Wilson’s detective is not authentic enough.  A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson works as a mystery novel but not as well as one would expect given the high number of coincidences, but the historical parts of this book are deeply engaging and unique.  Overall, a satisfying read that will keep readers turning the pages.

About the Author:

Robert Wilson is the author of nine previous novels, including A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece and West Africa.

This is my 42nd book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: borrowed copy, challenges, fiction, historical fiction, New Authors Challenge, Penguin, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With: ,

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

June 25, 2013 by

Source: Public Library
Paperback, 244 pages
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, first published in 1968, was our June book club selection, and is the basis on which the classic movie Blade Runner is based.  (Previous to reading the novel, I’ve seen the movie, and recent memories of the watching the movie kept me alert for similarities in the book)  Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter, who works for little money in San Fransisco’s Police Department, and what money he does make is from bounties on the heads of escaped androids that escape Mars often by killing humans.  Society has evolved to the point at which androids are so human-like that they cannot be sniffed out except through a couple of tests administered by bounty hunters, which will puzzle the reader as to why the android would sit for such a test knowing that to fail means immediate retirement — a.k.a death.

Animals are no different, with many of the animals made extinct by the war and fallout, and residents of this desolate Earth are desperate to own an animal, even if it is an electric sheep.  As David Sedaris says in his essay “Loggerheads” in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, “As with the sea turtle, part of the thrill was the feeling of being accepted … allowed you to think that you and this creature had a special relationship …”  These humans are looking for connections in any way that they can get them, either through animal ownership — such as ownership of electric animals — or through the empathy machine that connects them with other members of society through Mercerism.

“Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet.  Because, ultimately, the emphatic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.”  (page 51)

In Roger Zelazny’s introduction, he says, “His management of a story takes you from here to there in a God-knows-how, seemingly haphazard fashion, which, upon reflection, follows a logical line of development — but only on reflection.”  He’s correct in that the story shifts from Deckard’s story to that of J.R. Isidore, a so-called special or chickenhead who has been declared genetically unfit to emigrate to the Mars colony.  Isidore lives alone in a dilapidated apartment building filled with kipple, the detritus and radioactive dust, etc.  His condition requires readers to have a lot of patience for his ramblings, which in some cases seem like LSD trips or a schizophrenic break, but in some ways, Dick is attempting to demonstrate another aspect of loneliness and disconnect than what he’s showcased in the human-android relationship.  In addition, Dick seems to want readers to think long and hard about their faith in religion as the subject of Mercerism pervades the story as a way for humanity to connect on a deeper level through technological means.

“Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else’s degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.”  (page 231)

Deckard is a man conflicted about his job, but only after he meets an android he finds attractive, and as with most men living on the edge and crossing over moral lines, he struggles to regain his footing and return to his real life and think little about what he’s done.  While he’s cocky about his abilities to take down androids, that bravado soon gives way to concern, doubt, and even fear.  Dick’s surreal narrative will leave readers guessing about the direction of the chase for the androids and whether Deckard will have the strength to complete his task or whether in completing that task he’ll have a complete breakdown or experience no repercussions what so ever.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick is an exploration not of the future, but of ourselves and our never-ending search for connection with others — whether that is with an android, a spouse, a co-worker, a lover, or an animal.  In his convoluted and disconcerting narrative, the author seeks to upend the beliefs of his readers and challenge their moral boundaries.  Unfortunately, there are big gaps in the narrative and the background about the war that caused the destruction of Earth, the origins of Mercerism, and what exactly is going on Mars — are androids in control of Mars, turning humans into androids, or something else.  These are just some of the issues that are not explored fully in this cerebral exercise.

What the Book Club Thought:

Most of the book club liked the book a great deal, with two members liking it more than they expected to when they began reading it.  Dick is one of the member’s favorite authors.  In the discussion, we touched upon the jabs at capitalism throughout the text in that animals are bought and sold at high prices and the addiction of characters to the mood organ (on which they can preset their mood for the day) and the empathy machine, which allows humans to commune with one another and Mercer.  These machines seemed to leave humans dependent and in a fog, but there is also the surreal portions of the story that left many of us guessing as to whether a spider found by Isidore was real or imaginary and Rick’s sudden transformation into Mercer without the empathy machine after completing his job.

The ownership of androids (which are advertised as an incentive to move to Mars) was compared to that of owning slaves, as well as why bounty hunters were necessary to retire the androids — are they dangerous or just different?  I theorized that perhaps the incentive of owning an android was a ploy to get humans to Mars so they could be replaced with androids.  None of the other members seemed to agree.  One member also questioned from the beginning whether Rick was human or an android, though most of the members assumed he was human.  Other topics touched upon were that the androids were child-like and not as evolved as humans and hence why they sometimes acted with malice, and that perhaps given more time to live, they could develop empathy, thus making them harder to distinguish from humans.

Our July book club selection is His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik.

About the Author:

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

This is my 40th book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

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Three-Ring Rascals: The Show Must Go On! (Book 1) by Kate Klise, illustrated by M. Sarah Klise

June 20, 2013 by

Source:  Anna of Diary of an Eccentric gave me this ARC as the book was aimed at readers younger than The Girl, but only slightly older than my girl. (probably the longest explanation EVER!)
Paperback, 141 pages
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Three-Ring Rascals: The Show Must Go On! (Book 1) by Kate Klise, illustrated by M. Sarah Klise, is a cute book about circus life, complete with talking animals, feats that defy gravity and the laws of physics, and a scoundrel, which is due for publication in September 2013.  Sir Sidney’s Circus is a story about redemption and about being true to your friends, but it’s also about the surprising things that can happen when you’re not looking.

Sir Sidney is getting older and he’s looking for a manager when he settles on a self-proclaimed lion tamer named Barnabas Brambles, but while Sidney is away, Brambles has plans of his own — to make money for himself.  The path he takes to make more money backfires even as he strives to accomplish even more devious strategies.  Meanwhile, the animals sure miss their owner and suffer at the hands of Brambles, though they don’t exact any revenge.

Leaving the acrobats in charge of driving the train, Brambles finds that his plans are thrown out into the wind as the train gets stuck in places that will boggle his mind.  Klise is an imaginative storyteller, and readers will like the little definition explanations she includes for some of the larger words used, as well as the explanation behind the made-up words used by the mice, Bert and Gert.  The illustrations are fun and simple, and they include dialogue bubbles as the animals talk amongst themselves while Brambles makes his plans.  The text is mixed in beside and inside the illustrations, which will keep readers exploring the pages, rather than rushing over the pictures.

Three-Ring Rascals: The Show Must Go On! (Book 1) by Kate Klise, illustrated by M. Sarah Klise, is a book that will entertain younger readers, though age 10 may be a little old for the book depending on the readers’ abilities.  The book indicates it is for kids ages 7-10, but it read more like a book for ages 5-8, but younger readers may need help reading.  As a book read at bedtime for younger ages, parents could break it up in installments over several evenings.  The book is fun and only the first in the series, with certainly more antics to come, especially from Bert and Gert who are a riot.

**The Three-Ring Rascals Website offers some great insights into how the author and illustrator are like Bert and Gert, the two mice, and there are resources for teachers and fun games for kids.

About the Author and Illustrator:

Kate Klise and M. Sarah Klise have collaborated on numerous middle-grade and picture book projects. Their most recent series, 43 Old Cemetery Road, has been nominated for reading awards in nearly twenty states to date and is a Junior Library Guild selection. The pair’s novels and picture books can be found on their Website.  And to find out more about the Three-Ring Rascals, visit the Website.

This is my 39th book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: Algonquin, ARC, borrowed copy, challenges, New Authors Challenge, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With: , ,

Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

June 5, 2013 by

Source: borrowed from Anna
Paperback, 269 pages
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Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister is the perfect summer read, and while summer may be a few weeks away yet, this book hit the spot.  A group of friends came together unexpectedly from different walks of life and varied backgrounds and families, with some divorced, others perpetually single, and even a few happily married and content with family life.  These women — Daria, Marion, Sara, Hadley, Caroline, Ava — came together at first to help out Sara, a mother with twins and not enough hands, through a baby holding circle.  Once the twins grew old enough and Sara adapted to her new role as a mother of three, the women turned to another challenge, helping Kate through chemo and her battle with cancer.  As her daughter challenges Kate to take on the rapids of the Grand Canyon, she challenges all of these supportive women to face their own fears and challenges, and luckily each of them agrees.  From baking bread to getting a tattoo, these challenges are as varied as the women who must accomplish them.

“Two months later, Henry came into town just in time for Thanksgiving, bringing with him the smells of travel, cigarette smoke from a crowded train in Poland, yeast from a bakery in Alsace-Lorraine.  The toys he brought the children were not made of plastic; the music he hummed was nothing she recognized.  He was her twin, and looking at him she had never felt more as if he was her second half, the one she had sent out into the world while she stayed home.  She felt as if she could not stand close enough to him, listen to his stories long enough, as if doing so would make her a complete person again.” (page 107 ARC)

Like Bauermeister’s previous and current books that focus on people and food, so does Joy for Beginners, and in many ways all of her books center on the theme of learning to enjoy life and make the most of it.  Rediscovering what it means to be alive is at the heart of this novel, and it was a wonderful ride to see these women conquer their fears and face the challenges before them.  Like her previous books, readers will taste and smell the foods the women eat and find; they’ll smell the perfumes and scents around them; and they’ll experience the joy, surprise, and invigoration each of these women find.

Each of these women’s stories reads like a separate short story, but what makes this novel work are the connections these women share with one another and between themselves.  Kate and Sara may have brought these women together to nurture them and be their rocks of support, but its the connections that they continue to build together that propels these stories onward and deepens the ties that bind them together.  Readers are likely to want to see more from these women as their stories seem to be just beginning.  Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister is uplifting, fun, and reflective, but it also demonstrates the perseverance of the human soul despite the challenges of life that can seem overwhelming.

About the Author:

ERICA BAUERMEISTER is the author of The School of Essential Ingredients (my review) and The Lost Art of Mixing (my review).  She lives in Seattle with her family.  Check out her Facebook page.

Filed Under: borrowed copy, fiction, Penguin, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2013 Tagged With: ,

The Last Van Gogh by Alyson Richman

May 21, 2013 by

Book Source:  Library
Paperback: 308 pages
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The Last Van Gogh by Alyson Richman, which was our May book club selection (unfortunately, I missed this meeting due to obligations at the 2013 Gaithersburg Book Festival), is based on true events in near the end of Vincent Van Gogh’s life in Auvers, France, in the 1890s.  Told from the point of view of Marguerite Gachet, a story unfolds not so much about Van Gogh but about the cloistered life of a young woman trapped inside her own family home by not only an overbearing and controlling father, but also family secrets.  More than that, it is a tribute to an artist and the tension between that art and the desire to have a normal life, as well as the struggle between family obligation and one’s own desires.

“For a home that had so many colors and vibrant paintings on its walls, there were still so many shades of gray between us.”  (page 182)

Richman does really well in using painting techniques and colors to describe the scenes in Auvers, and it is almost as if the reader has stepped inside one of Van Gogh’s paintings and is walking around among the village’s people.  Another surprising element is that the chapter headings, which often appear in some translated works, are less in-your-face about each chapter’s contents.  The headings also add to the atmosphere of the novel, reinforcing the painting and French aspects of the novel.

“I had gone out to do my errands, as I always did in the early afternoon.  It was a warm, radiant day in May.  The sky was cornflower blue, the sun the color of crushed marigolds.  I have to confess that I walked a little slower that day when I passed by the station.  I knew approximately which train he would be arriving on.  So I walked with smaller steps than usual, carrying my basket of eggs and my loaves of bread.”  (page 1)

From the moment readers meet Marguerite, they can see her rebellious nature, even though her daily tasks showcase her obedience to her father at every turn.  When the secrets begin to unravel, she finds herself less torn between duty and desire and more willing to follow her own mind and heart, even if it means getting caught.  Her father is the most irritating and self-absorbed character as he seeks to ingratiate himself into the artistic community by claiming his tinctures are actual cures.  And the son, Paul, is just as bad as he attempts to please his father at every turn and garner his favor.  The only way he can gain that favor is through Marguerite’s downfall, which she brings about on her own during her fateful meeting with Van Gogh.

The Last Van Gogh by Alyson Richman is a rich story in character, setting, and nuance.  Van Gogh’s perceptive nature as an artist shines through in his painting of Dr. Gachet as an aging man with sallow features, but it also shines through in his paintings of Marguerite at the piano and in the garden.  A love story in painting that comes alive with each brush stroke, only to be mired by the rain streaked canvases touched by tinctures that are misused and the controlling desires of a man torn between propriety and his obsession with art.

About the Author:

Alyson Richman is the author of “The Mask Carver’s Son,” “The Rhythm of Memory (formerly published as Swedish Tango),” The Last Van Gogh,” and the national best-seller, “The Lost Wife.” She loves to travel, cook, ride her yellow bicycle, and do ballet. She currently lives in New York with her husband and two children.

This is my 33rd book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: borrowed copy, challenges, historical fiction, New Authors Challenge, Penguin, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2013, reviews Tagged With: ,

The Klipfish Code by Mary Casanova

May 14, 2013 by

The Klipfish Code by Mary Casanova is a young adult novel set during World War II when Norway was occupied by the Nazis for five years.  Rather than acquiesce to all of the Nazis demands and become indoctrinated, many of them showed their solidarity in small ways, including wearing paperclips on their clothes and not speaking to those in the community who turned into Nazi informers.

Marit is a young girl of ten when the first bombs fall on Norway, which has become a pawn in the war as the Germans seek to control the ports and the British seek to do the same.  Her parents are eager to join the Resistance and help the British as best they can — her father’s knowledge of bridges and roads and her mother’s ability to speak English — but it forces them to break up the family and send their children to Godøy Island to live with their grandfather Bestefar and their aunt Ingeborg.  While Marit and her brother Lars have spent summers there, Marit does not get along well with her grandfather who she finds favors her brother.

“She couldn’t believe he was actually speaking to her.  She didn’t know if he wanted an answer or not, but she gathered her courage.  ‘But Bestefar, if no one fights back, the Germans will be here forever!'” (page 41)

Casanova’s story is based in fact, which can be found in the notes at the back of the book, and her characters are believable as young children caught in a war they do not understand.  Marit struggles with her morals as she’s forced by her peers to not speak to her friend Olaf in school because his parents turned in a Norwegian to the Nazis.  While Marit is brave at the beginning of the occupation, she falters as any young child would in the face of oppression and danger, and she must come to terms with her own convictions and if they are worth the price she and her family might pay.

Unlike other suspenseful young adult novels in which children are the main protagonists and the most important actors in the plot, Casanova has stuck to the real world dynamics of the world in which children do not know everything and are not the main actors.  Marit demonstrates fear as she strives to deliver the klipfish code and when she encounters the Germans up close.  The Klipfish Code by Mary Casanova is a realistic account of Norway’s struggles during the Nazi occupation without being too graphic about the violence that came with that regime.

About the Author:

Mary Casanova is an award-winning children’s author of novels and picture books. Many of her books stem from her life on the Minnesota-Canadian border; yet some of her stories have taken her as far away as France, Norway, and Belize for research. Whatever the setting for her books, Casanova writes stories that matter–and stories that kids can’t put down.

Her book awards include: American Library Association “Notable,” Aesop Accolades by the American Folklore Society, Parents’ Choice “Gold” Award, Booklist Editor Choice, and two Minnesota Book Awards. Her books frequently land on state children’s choice book master lists across the country. “The greatest reward for me,” Casanova states, “is when a young reader tells me she or he loves one of my books. For me, it’s all about communicating writer-to-reader through a character and story.”

This is my 31st book for the 2013 New Authors Challenge.

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