“Morning brought still more reminders of why she’d hated the cabin: a panging headache, a weird gluey lethargy, small wheeling prisms in her vision. Her mother had attributed these symptoms to Cress’s attitude, admittedly rotten. But Sylvia Hartley was off by a letter, as Cress had discovered camping in the Tetons and skiing in Utah. Anywhere above 6,000 feet, she was a poor adapter.“

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 21, 2014)

Cressida Hartley is suffering from a serious case of ennui. At 28, she is stagnating in ABD status, trying to finish her dissertation in economics, wholly disliking her field of expertise. It’s the eighties, and Reaganomics doesn’t suit her. But she found a way to integrate her affinity with art with her thesis–she’s writing about the value of art in the marketplace. So she moves to her parents vacation A-frame in the Sierras, intending to wrap herself in the mountain air, solitude, and writing.

Soon enough, Cress seeks out disruptions and distractions, and becomes absorbed in the community. I was installed in the story quickly, as I noted that her quirky supporting cast of characters were humanized and sympathetic rather than straw caricatures. Her parents are demanding and difficult. They are building a new cabin and come down periodically, often on the verge of suing the contractor, Ricky Garsh. Cress’s father is peevish and parsimonious to the point of churlish, even to his own children. Cress’s sister, Sharon, now living in London, goes through the primal birth therapy, so popular during this era. This alerts the reader that the sisters had some significant issues. Cress is largely unaware of her deep-seated problems, and acts out by entwining in a difficult relationship. Twice. And with much older men.

“She wasn’t making specific plans, but that hairline crack, she knew, could widen instantly to accommodate her, and day by day, its thin blackness grew less frightening, more logical and familiar, as if she could now walk right up, touch it with her fingertips, and, with a quick last smile over her shoulder at the fading world, slip right in.”

This is not a prosaic domestic drama, not with Huneven at the helm. As in all her novels, she is plugged into collective concerns such as alcohol abuse and complex, obsessive relationships. And always, nature. The landscape, wildlife, and climate buttress the story and provide ample adventure and scenic beauty, as well as some brassy comedy.

This is Huneven’s most fully realized novel, with a stable focus and a memorable denouement. I’m still inhabiting Cress’s life, long after the past page.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Sarah Crichton Books (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michelle Huneven
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Interview with Michelle Huneven
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Blame

Bibliography:

• Round Rock (1997)
• Jamesland (2003)
• Blame (2009)
• Off Course (April 2014)

“I hope they will leave some men behind, to make sure she doesn’t kill us in our sleep.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 10, 2014)

Twenty-eight-year-old Australian author Hannah Kent spent time in Iceland while in high school, chosen because she wanted to see snow for the first time. She fell in love with this island country south of the Arctic Circle, and returned several times to do extensive research on Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland, in 1829. Kent imagined the interior psychological states of various characters, especially the enigmatically alluring Agnes, and has successfully penned a suspenseful fiction tale that transcends the outcome. It reveals a complex love triangle and double murder, and a provocative examination of the religious and social mores of the time. Knowing the fate of Agnes prior to reading the novel won’t change the reader’s absorption of the novel. The strong themes hinge on the backstory and viewpoints that are woven in and reveal characters that go through a change of perception as the circumstances of the crime come to light.

Each chapter begins with official or private correspondence or testimony, which reflects the judicial process and established standards of the time, which was then under Danish rule. The title refers to whether the dead are fit to be buried on consecrated ground. Agnes is sent to northwest Iceland, to stay with the district officer, his wife, and two daughters, pending her execution. The family members are outraged at first, some more than others. The farmers in the area are also hostile to her. Over time, as her story unfolds, I became emotionally engaged with Agnes, and touched by the young cleric, Toti, Agnes’ appointed spiritual advisor.

Kent is a poetic writer, whose descriptions of a grim, harsh, bleak landscape and a socially rigid terrain are told with a striking beauty.

“Now we are riding across Iceland’s north, across this black island washing in its waters, sulking in its ocean. Chasing our shadows across the mountain.”

“They have strapped me to the saddle like a corpse being taken to the burial ground.”

“…waiting for the ground to unfreeze before they can pocket me in the earth like a stone.”

The restrained savagery and cruel irony reflects in those that persecute Agnes and accept the official story of her acts as gospel. The gradual overtures of Toti and certain members of the family were organically developed, allowing for tension and intimacy in equal measure. The slight stumbling block for me was accepting Agnes’ relationship with her lover, Natan, one of the men she is convicted of killing. I understand that very smart women can often make poor choices in men; however, Agnes was depicted as a self-contained woman. I had a difficult time accepting her bottomless apology for Nathan’s consummate cruelty and selfish barbarity.

Despite my tenuous acceptance of Agnes’ love for Natan, I did register the isolated, punishing terrain of 19th century Iceland, especially in the winter months, when loneliness was crushing, and reaching out for companionship a pressing need. The landscape came alive as a character, and Kent folded in an Icelandic Burial Hymn and bits and pieces of the Nordic sagas and myths, such as “I was worst to the one I loved best.” Poet-Rosa, who also loved Natan as passionately as Agnes, writes a bitter poem to her. (Interestingly, I have just read the first 80 pages of the Laxness novel of Icelandic sheep farmers, Independent People, in which a character named poet-Rosa is described.)

This is an impressive debut novel, easily read in a few sittings. The point-of-view shifts back and forth from third to first skillfully. By the end of the novel, I was able to answer the question of whether a condemned life can have meaning, and whether the person who is condemned can change the perceptions of others –for the better. I will be looking out for Kent’s next novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 699 readers
PUBLISHER:	Back Bay Books (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hannah Kent
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve

Bibliography:

• Burial Rites (2013)

“It is the time of year when Kit must rise in the dark, as if he were a farmer or a fisherman, someone whose livelihood depends on beating the dawn, convincing himself that what looks like night is actually morning. His only true occupation these days, however, is fatherhood; his only reason for getting up at this dismal hour is getting his children to school.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 8, 2014)

Julia Glass’s latest book strikes right to the core of personal identity. How do we solidify our sense of who we are if we don’t know where we came from? In what ways can we take our place in the universe if our knowledge of our past is incomplete?

Kit Noonan has reached a fork in the road. Underemployed with no clear sense of purpose, he is floundering, until his wife urges him to take some time away to work out the secret of his father’s identity. That search leads him back to his stepfather Jasper in Vermont – a self-sufficient outdoorsman who effectively raised him along with two stepbrothers. Eventually, the journey brings him to Lucinda, the elderly wife of a stroke-ravaged state senator and onward to Fenno (from Julia Glass’s first book) and his husband Walter.

Through all this, Kit discovers the enigma of connections and which connections prevail. As one character states,

“..the past is like the night: dark yet sacred. It’s the time of day when most of us sleep, so we think of the day as the time we really live, the only time that matters, because the stuff we do by day somehow makes us who we are. We feel the same way about the present…. But there is no day without night, no wakefulness without sleep, no present without past.”

The biggest strength of this novel – by far – is the beautifully rendered portrayal of characters. Kit, Jasper, Lucinda and her family, Feeno and Walter – even Kit’s twins – are so perfectly portrayed that they could walk off the pages. As a reader, I cared about every one of them and – as the book sequentially goes from one character to another – I felt a sense of loss from temporarily leaving him or her behind.

The only weakness was an overabundance of detail (scenes, back story, etc.), which robbed me of using my imagination to “fill in the blanks.” While vaguely discomforting, this story is so darn good and the writing is so darn strong that I was glad to be immersed in its world for the several days I was reading. Kit’s journey and his recognition of what “family” really means — and our imperfect connected world — has poignancy and authenticity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Julia Glass
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: I See You Everywhere The Widower’s Tale

Bibliography:

• Three Junes (2002)
• The Whole World Over (2006)
• I See You Everywhere (2008)
• The Widower’s Tale (2010)
• And the Dark Sacred Night (April 2014)

“After she moved to Brooklyn, my mother collected strays — human strays, not animals. every time I went to visit her, there seemed to be another “assistant,” poet, drifter, or just plain charity case living in one of the rooms, and i worried they might take advantage of her, rob her, or even kill her in her sleep.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 30, 2014)

Harriet “Harry” Burden was an obscurely known artist for much of her life, and also a wife, mother, and scholar. She was criticized for her small architectural works that consisted of too much busyness–cluttered with figures and text that didn’t fit into any schema. Her husband, Felix Lord, was an influential, successful art collector, but who couldn’t help his wife for alleged fear of nepotism. After Felix died, Harriet came back with a vengeance, and under three male artist’s pseudonyms (artists that she sought out), she created a combination art (part performance, if you consider the pseudonyms as part of the process) a trilogy which was successful, and even more lauded posthumously. They were shown individually under the names of “The History of Western Art, ” “The Suffocation Rooms,” and “Beneath.” Later, when unmasked (so to speak), they were identified as Maskings. I am reluctant to reduce and categorize Harriet–although labels such as “feminist” may apply.

Harriet wanted to:

“…uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.”

Moreover, it is about unmasking ourselves–which includes the hermaphroditic selves. We are all an amalgam of male and female, or male and female perceptions and the plurality — attributed behaviors. There’s seepage beyond the paradigm.

Again, that may be too reductionist for the complex workings of Harry’s art, and of her psychology and her life. This novel is like an exposé of Harriet’s life, as told via her friends, colleagues, children (including one passage by her son, who suffered from Asperger’s), lover (her significant other after Felix’s death), critics, roommates, and herself. The chapters by Harriet come from her private notebooks/diaries, labeled by letters of the alphabet, and found after her death.

One could call this a presentation novel — a novel that appears more as a collection of writings that make up her life, replete with footnotes. Included are esoteric and big ideas about art, art movements, and philosophy. However, Hustvedt is such a spectacular writer, that it feels very much like a biography, and often an autobiography (sometimes reliable, at other times unreliable — you as reader decide). Hustvedt combines big ideas with story. There are novels, such as written by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and others, who are famous for this style. The novelist Nicholas Mosley writes his story and characters as subservient to the big ideas. This alienates some readers. It is purely subjective to taste, but, personally, I love a cleavage of ideas and story/character. In my opinion, Hustvedt did a superb job of integrating the two. The character of Harriet was pervasive, even in the chapters that didn’t belong to her, because of her inimitable voice that saturated all others who populated the story. Harriet habituated these big ideas, so that it was organically composed.

Harry’s emotional and psychological presence was forceful, formidable. We learn that she saw a psychiatrist twice a week for the last eight years of her life, and her best friend was a psychotherapist. She was a dedicated wife to her husband and children, fraught over the secret life of her husband, and protective over the fragility of her son, Ethan. All vectors pointed back to Harriet–the enigma of her, and the magnitude of her vitality. She was ubiquitous in every page of this book.

I was familiar with some of the scholars/academics/artists/philosophers that Harriet mentioned due to other novels and books I had read. Parisian Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International movement, had a prominent place in Billy Moon. The Situationists advanced the notion of the spectacularized–a mass consumerism where every experience is packaged by the market to be seductive and glamorous, and sooner or later, we experience the copy as an original experience rather than the experience itself — all is commodified. Harriet assimilated this philosophy (and others to demonstrate the conundrum of perception). One of Harriet’s favorite philosophers was the German, Edmund Husserl, who expounded on phenomenology, the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. It all ties into the assemblage of Harriet — like her art, she is made of many miniature selves that together form a whole. Or, perhaps, a panoply of selves.

And, most dear to Harry’s heart — perhaps her heroine — was Margaret Cavendish, a duchess and groundbreaking, prolific writer of science, predated science fiction, and a utopian romance called “A Blazing World,” from which the eponymous title of this novel originates. Cavendish died in obscurity, having published a memoir in which she yearns to one day be recognized. Hundreds of years after her death, her desire is realized. Is this a key to Harriet’s psyche?

One doesn’t have to be a scholar or artist to relate to this book. In fact, it is written in a highly accessible style, with a smoldering, emotional, and psychological expressiveness. In my opinion, this is a subtle meta-fiction — one that draws attention to itself as a work of art, while keys to the truth of Harriet Burden are revealed. As individuals, we all have our perception of quality and merit; therefore, readers will come away with our respective portraits of Harriet, and the thrumming purpose of her story. For fans of Siri Hustvedt, this is highly recommended. It equals the power of What I Loved, while being different in approach. Hustvedt has a nimble way of disclosing the incongruous features of her characters that make them both distinctive and sympathetic. By the end of this book, I could imagine a three-dimensional Harriet Burden walking out of the pages.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (March 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Siri Hustvedt
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Sorrows of an American

Bibliography:

• The Blindfold (1992)
• The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
• What I Loved (2003)
• The Sorrows of an American (2008)
• The Summer Without Men (2011)
• The Blazing World (March 2014)

Essays:

• A Plea for Eros (2005)
• Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 21, 2014)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.” For four friends, that line was crossed during their late teenage years, when one of them was poisoned, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, lingering in a physical limbo state until she finally dies years later.  The young man, Boyang, remains in China; the two young women, Ruyu and Moran, move to the United States. Each ends up living in what the author describes as a “life-long quarantine against love and life.”

Kinder than Solitude is not primarily a mystery of a poisoned woman nor is it an “immigrant experience” book, although it is being hailed as both. Rather, it’s a deep and insightful exploration about the human condition – how one’s past can affect one’s future, how innocence can be easily lost, and how challenging it is to get in touch with – let alone salvage – one’s better self.

“To have an identity – to be known – required one to possess an ego, yet so much more, too: a collection of people, a traceable track lining one place to another – all these had to be added to that ego or one to have any kind of identity,” Yiyun Li writes.

In the case of Moran, who married and divorced an older man she still cares for, what she called her life “…was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.” Riyu, the most enigmatic and detached of the characters, is an empty vessel, unable to connect or to experience much pleasure or pain, who strives to receive an “exemption from participating in life.” And Boyang, a successful entrepreneur with a cynical sense of the world, has discovered that “love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.”

This is a deeply philosophical book, one that delves into its characters, with an ambling narrative that shifts from the shared Chinese past to the present –China, San Francisco, the Midwest. It is not for everyone – certainly not for readers who are anticipating an action-packed, page-turning suspense novel. But for those who seek insights into the human condition and love strong character-based novels, Kinder Than Solitude offers rich rewards.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Yiyun Li
EXTRAS:	Q&A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pen/O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 edited by Laura Furman

Bibliography:

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (2005)
• The Vagrants (2009)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories (2010)
• Kinder Than Solitude (February 2014)

I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don’t even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to smack Augustus Waters and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn’t suck at being lungs. I was standing with my Chuck Taylors on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine. I yanked my hand free but turned back to him.

“They [cigarettes] don’t kill you unless you light them,” he said as Mom arrived at the curb. “And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see:  You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”

“It’s a metaphor,” I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.

“It’s a metaphor,” he said.

“You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances…” I said.

“Oh, yes.” He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. “I’m a big believer in metaphor, Hazel Grace.”

Book Review:

Review by Judi Clark  MAR 9, 2014)

When I was in high school, Love Story by Erich Segal was THE book (and movie) that we were reading and quoting (“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”). It was a weepy love story, between Oliver Barrett (Wasp, rich Harvard guy) and Jennifer Cavilleri (smart, poor Radcliffe music student of Italian descent — and a smart mouth). From the first line of the book we know that Jennifer dies young in this epic star-crossed love story. It’s a cheesy, sentimental story, but still told in a way that makes it a compulsive read. (And didn’t we all love Ali McGraw in the movie!)

The Fault in Our Stars is a “love story” for our current teen/young adult generation. Like any love story, it is kind of “cheesy” … and not easy to put down. But this one is smart. I liked it a whole lot better than Love Story because it is cynical/realistic and its setting is far more accessible than the Ivy league town of Cambridge, Massachusetts with its star cross relation between rich kid and poor kid.

In The Fault in Our Stars, the currency isn’t money but health. Our star-crossed lovers meet at a church support group for kids dealing with cancer, “This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.” Hazel lives with terminal cancer and inseparable from her oxygen bottle; her life has been extended (but not cured) by a miracle drug. Augustus, who had the highly curable osteosarcoma has been cancer free for fourteen months, but had one leg amputated for the cure. He is not a regular participate of the group; this time he has come with his best friend Isaac, who has one fake eye and one real eye:

“He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you.From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.”

Hazel narrates the story with her unique perspective — she may be cynical, but she is not depressing — she’s just a realist. “Augustus asked if I wanted to go with him to Support Group, but I was really tired from my busy day of Having Cancer, so I passed.”

Hazel also likes to quote from her favorite book, “An Imperial Affliction” written by an American living in Holland. “AIA” turns the conventional “cancer kid genre” on its ear and Hazel (and once introduced to the book, so does Augustus) loves re-reading this book that ends mid-sentence. The plot of this book moves forwards on the hope that the author might one day answer what happens to the other lives in the book after the main character dies.

Considering the subject matter, this novel is snappy (not sappy) — not at all morbid, although it is sometimes sad. I loved experiencing the world through Hazel’s eyes and getting to know these kids and seeing them live life preciously knowing that it can’t go on forever.

I think today’s generation are being served a far better love story than mine. The repeatable quote from this book? It is:  “Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10,691 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Books (January 10, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Judi Clark
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Green
EXTRAS:	Spoiler Q & A (for after reading the book)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: An Abundance of Katherines

Bibliography:

• Looking for Alaska (2005)
• An Abundance of Katherines (2006)
• Paper Towns (2008)
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2011) (with David Levithan)
• The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

“You knew my mother?”
“Not really. I only met her that once.”
“When was that, Birdie?”
Birdie Grackle sucked his dentures for a moment and then said, “The night I done killed her.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (MAR 7, 2014)

Justin Chase has adjusted to his life as a barkeep (and the Zen lifestyle) after several years of living without his mother and the man he believed murdered her, his father. However, a strange man, going by the odd name of Birdie Grackle, enters the bar where Justin works and tells him that Justin’s father did not murder his mother. He alleges that Birdie himself murdered her at the request of a woman who hired him to do it. Birdie says he doesn’t know who paid him but that for $10,000 he will track her down. Justin does not agree to pay Birdie and does not immediately believe what Birdie is telling him. With his brother Frank’s urging, Justin visits his father in prison for the first time since his father was sent there 6 years ago.

After meeting with his father, Justin decides to do some investigating of his own. He hires his friend Jody to follow Birdie to see what he can learn. Jody doesn’t really find anything useful, just that Birdie likes to drink and doesn’t have much money. Justin looks into the various people in his parents’ life that may have wanted his mother dead. Justin knew that his father was having an affair with Annie Overmeyer, someone who may have wanted his father all for herself. Annie at first appears to be a likely candidate but Justin is not sure after meeting her and actually starts to feel some attraction for the woman. Annie appears to have moved on from his father, although generally with one night stands, but maybe her attraction with Justin is different. His father also tries to convince Justin that he and his mother had an open marriage which seems to be confirmed when he reads old letters that his brother gives him that implies that his mother had had an affair as well. This leads Justin down other paths to people in his parents’ life to try to find out if his father is in fact innocent.

Although Justin studied to be a lawyer, he was just fine being a good barkeep. However, he has to rethink his life along with his thoughts about his father. Many of the other people in Justin’s life are stressed with the possibility that his father is not the killer and that his father may return (which is not necessarily what everyone wants). Lashner’s characters are so realistic that you can really understand how and why they react to the changing circumstances as Justin unravels what appears to be the truth about his mother’s murderer. Of course, Lashner throws in a few twists to not make everything quite be as they are first presented which makes for an even more enjoyable book.

The Barkeep is told mostly through the third person perspective of Justin Chase, although Lashner also occasionally presents the book from the perspective of other characters such as Annie Overmeyer. This gives the reader a little more perspective and also allows the reader to know a bit more about the characters and the truth before it is learned by Justin.

I really enjoyed this book as Lashner presents realistic, different and often flawed characters that are placed in difficult situations. Some of the other characters that Lashner includes are a couple of attorneys (Lashner is an attorney himself, after all), including the attorney who wonders if she was right in putting Justin’s father in prison. Another interesting character is Derek, a man with limited mental capabilities but with the ability to open any locked door and who uses violence to solve his problems.

William Lashner has had success with his Victor Carl stories, but lately he’s been writing stand-alone books such as The Barkeep. I’ve read most of the Victor Carl books (and am looking forward to the next Victor Carl novel, Bagmen, due out later in 2014) and I really enjoy them; this was the first non-series book of Lashner’s that I’ve read. The Barkeep certainly has some of the same writing style and well-written somewhat flawed characters that I enjoyed in the Victor Carl books, but it does not quite have the same amount of humor (which likely would have been out of place). The local Philadelphia area color is also a bit less obvious. However, no one will be disappointed in this fast-paced and enjoyable book by William Lashner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,497 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas & Mercer (February 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	William Lashner
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Killer’s Kiss Falls the Shadow Fatal Flaw

Victor Carl Series:

• Hostile Witness (1995)
• Bitter Truth (1997) (Originally titled Veritas)
• Fatal Flaw (2003)
• Past Due (2004)
• Falls the Shadows (2005)
• Marked Man (2006)
• A Killer’s Kiss (2007)
• Bagmen (August 2014)

Stand-alone:

• Blood and Bone (2009)
• The Accounting (2013)
• The Barkeep (February 2014)

Writing as Tyler Knox:

• Kockroach (2006)

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

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 5, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 60 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Limited edition (August 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Mark Slouka
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Kept by James Scott

Bibliography:

• Lost Lake: Stories (1995)
• God’s Fool (2002)
• The Visible World (2007)
• Brewster (August 2013)

Nonfiction:

• War Of The Worlds: Cyberspace And The High-tech Assault On Reality (1995)
• Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations (2011)

“We whoosh down between dark ­rock-­faces, through hairpin turns, down and around past dry scrub,  silver-­pale trees and back up, then over a ridge where the car nearly leaves ground and Niklas and I whoop as our entrails become weightless.

The hot Mediterranean air buffets our faces, for all four windows are open. Frederik takes a curve so fast that I grab my headrest. The sea beneath us keeps switching left and right.

Normally Frederik’s never brave behind the wheel, so I try not to be afraid. And the heat makes the rocks steeper, darker, the lemon groves prickling even more tartly in my nose, the sea shining blue like I’ve never seen it before.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (FEB 4, 2014)

In Christian Jungersen’s You Disappear, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, forty-two year old Mia Halling’s life will never be the same following a family vacation in Majorca. Mia notices that her husband, Frederik, who is at the wheel of their rental car, is speeding through hairpin turns like a madman. She implores him to slow down, to no avail. Although they crash, they manage to survive. What should have been a relaxing and enjoyable holiday nearly ends in tragedy.

Frederik’s behavior in Spain is just the tip of an iceberg that threatens to irrevocably damage the Hallings’ ability to communicate. It seems that Halling has a brain tumor that manifests itself in bizarre changes in his speech, actions, and emotional responses. A complete recovery is far from certain. Thus begins a lengthy ordeal that Jungersen describes in excruciating detail. Mia and Frederik live together, but they might as well be on different planets. Their son, seventeen-year-old, Niklas, is frightened and confused. In addition, when revelations emerge about Frederik’s unsavory activities while he was the headmaster of a private school in Copenhagen, it becomes horrifyingly obvious that the Hallings’ troubles have just begun.

You Disappear is far more than a conventional tale of domestic angst. Jungersen is an accomplished and daring writer who challenges us to ponder weighty topics such as free will and the mind-body connection. In addition, he poses a question that has no clear-cut answer: What does a spouse owe to a husband or wife who can no longer function normally? Mia is frustrated, angry, guilt-ridden, and lonely, knowing that the person she married is unable to provide her with the love, caring, and companionship that she desperately needs. To help her deal with her battered psyche, she joins a support group and reads extensively about brain injuries. Excerpts from her findings are inserted in key points of the book, giving us a window into her thoughts.

Jungersen creates fully developed characters, writes evocatively and perceptively about sensitive topics, and offers provocative theories about what makes each of us who we are. Mia, the narrator, reveals her most intimate and embarrassing thoughts and deeds, as well as her dreams, memories, and fantasies. She had a difficult childhood and her marriage to Frederik was imperfect, even prior to his diagnosis. Readers will empathize with this woman who is torn between her duty to her impaired husband and her desire to have a partner who understands and cares for her. This is a grim novel with little humor and few lighthearted moments. However, it is filled with enlightening information about how brain injuries affect both the victims and their loved ones. Mia describes her existence as an “endless grey corridor of disheartening days, days that look like they’ll last the rest of your life.” “You Disappear” is recommended for its poignant, compassionate, and uncompromising look at how people cope (or fail to cope) when they are in danger of losing everything that they cherish.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christian Jungersen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Exception and some other marriages: The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris  Caribou Island by David Vann

Bibliography:

• Undergrowth (1999)
• The Exception (2004; 2007 in US)
• You Disappear (2012; January 2014 in US)

“They talked about it afterward, at the end of summer, after the summer folks had left and there was room to breathe again on the island. They talked slowly, hesitantly, in that drawn-out way you hear less and less down east, with long pauses between short utterances, as if, in the end, most things were best left unsaid.

Down at the boatyard where young Floyd was attending to some hitch in the electrics, resuscitating a bilge pump, adjusting a prop shaft that was shaking the engine something awful; down at the town dock where they tied up at the end of a long day, after hosing down their boats, shedding foul-weather jackets, high boots, oilskin overalls, rubber gloves, like lobsters shedding their skins; down at Elliot’s Paralyzo too—the only watering hole on the island—they sipped the froth off their beers and talked of Jim.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 31, 2014)

For any reader who revels in confident, lyrical prose – rich in detail with meticulously chosen words – Alice Greenway’s book will enchant.

The storyline focuses on the elderly and irascible ornithologist Jim Kennoway, who, at the end of his career, retreats to a Maine island after his leg is amputated. There, tortured by past memories and fortified by alcohol and solitude, he eschews the company of others. Yet early on, he receives an unwanted visitor: Cadillac, the daughter of Tosca, who teamed with him as a scout to spy on the Japanese army in the Solomon Islands.

In one sense, the theme is how we evolve and own our memories. In the past, Jim examined how the tongues of different bird species evolved to adapt to different flowers of particular islands. Now he finds himself evolving to circumstances beyond his control: the lack of mobility, the inevitable encroachment of memories and of significant others.

As the book travels back and forth in time – to his youth in the early 1900s, to his stint in Naval Intelligence in the Solomon Islands, to his respected career collecting for the Museum of Natural History, the one constant in his life has always been birding. “Birding, he realizes, offered him both a way to engage with the world and a means to escape it.” Indeed, skinning birds reduces them to their very essence.

So it’s no surprise that even as the book opens, Jim has taken upon himself a quixotic task: to evaluate whether Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was really one of the Solomon Islands. And herein lies another theme: the dastardly pirate Long John Silver, in Treasure Island, remarks how alike he is with the novel’s young hero, Jim Hawkins. Good and evil can exist simultaneously in nature and in life…or can it? Can both co-exist in Jim himself?

The book blurb implies that Tosca’s daughter Cadillac will play an integral role of capturing “his heart and that of everyone she meets.” I believe that sets up false expectations. Cadillac is indeed a catalyst to help Jim arrive at some clarity but for this reader, the center focus of the story is always Jim. It’s an intelligent and beautifully written book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alice Greenway
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld Solomon Time by Will Randall

Bibliography:

• White Ghost Girls (2006)
• The Bird Skinner (January 2014)