“Rocco, I’m in Vegas.”
“Bullshit.”
“I told you guys that the other night.”
“Maybe Jerry remembers, hang on.” Rocco passed the phone to one of the Jerrys, who dropped it.
“Shit!” I heard two people say together.
“Hello?” Jerry Number Two said. “Who’s this?”
“Jerry, it’s me, Duff. I’m in—“
“You comin’ in?”
“Jerry! Listen to me. Just shut up for a second and listen!”
“Hello?” Jerry said.
“Jerry, get the guys to come out to Vegas. I have a…er…a house all to myself—you guys can stay for free.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (DEC 26, 2013)

Although Duffy Dombroski was getting heat from his supervisor to go to a required training program so that he could perform better at his social worker job, Duffy jumped at the chance to go to Las Vegas as a sparring partner for Boris Rusakov, the Russian heavyweight champion. Duffy even somehow finds a way to bring his dog Al on the plane and he convinces all his friends but his trainer Smitty to go with him. Duffy doesn’t care that his doctor is worried about his head injuries; Duffy just wants the chance to go to Vegas. Once he’s in Vegas though, things don’t go the way he hoped and he ends up in some unanticipated situations. Tom Schreck provides an entertaining book with lots of adventures, including some difficult and often touching moments with humor and entertaining moments, primarily provided by his basset hound Al and Duffy’s bar friends.

When Duffy arrives, he finds that he’s not staying at one of the Vegas strip hotels, but rather a legal brothel outside the Vegas city limits. He does have a nice room cleaned every day by the young maid with beauty in looks and voice, a convenient bar and working women that he only visits to have interesting conversations (really). Unfortunately, Boris Rusakov is not interested in following the customary professional sparring practices and is only interested in hitting Duffy hard and often, especially when Duffy gets in a few good hits on the champion.

This is not really a serial killer book, but Schreck includes one that almost seems added after he wrote the main part of the book. Mexicans, primarily ones in Las Vegas illegally, are being killed without any clues to who or why. The reader gets the killer’s perspective, especially how much he hates the poor Mexicans, without knowing who it is until the end. Although it adds some suspense to the story, in a way it is a distraction to the what is really a story of Duffy’s adventures in Las Vegas – the Russian boxer, the Latino boxers he befriends, the relationships with the brothel prostitutes and of course his usual friends who are there primarily for humor and to help him out when he gets in trouble.

I picked up a copy of this book as part of my book bag at Bouchercon this year in Albany. Tom Schreck lives in the Albany area and this series typically takes place there, so it made sense that they would give out a lot of these books. Unfortunately,  I didn’t get a chance to meet Schreck or attend the panel he was on.

I’ve never read any of the other books in this series of which this is the fourth; I certainly did not have any trouble following along with the story. I’m sure I would have picked up a little bit more on Duffy’s friends and how and why they acted the way they did and maybe had a better understanding of Duffy’s interests, but I didn’t feel slighted. I will, however, read some of the prior books in the series as I really enjoyed Duffy Dombrowski, Schreck’s style and all the various new and recurring characters in this book. Of course, this book and presumably all the books in the series are based a lot on boxing and that may be a turnoff for some readers. However, with Tom Schreck being a world championship boxing official, he’s very qualified and is certainly writing about something he knows well. He also provides the accurate detail without boring even those who have no interest in boxing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 108 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas & Mercer (May 15, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Check Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official website for Tom Schreck
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More boxing: Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson More as Vegas fun: Dice Angel by Brian Rouff

Bibliography:

Duffy Dombrowski – Ghetto Social Worker:

• On the Ropes (2007)
• TKO (2008)
• Out Cold (2009)
• The Vegas Knockout (2012)

Also:

• Planter’s Punch (2009) (written with J.A. Konrath)

TJ Dunn:

• Getting Dunn (2012)

Anthology:

• Duffy to the Rescue (2011)

“He was not the first seeker of treasure upon the landscape, was instead but one more in the continuum of a story begun long ago by far greater desires than his own.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (DEC 23, 2013)

All The Land To Hold Us is an apt title whose protagonist is the land – and it is a strange and powerful land. The harsh desert environment of West Texas is extremely arid, bitter and bleak. This environment shapes much of the novel’s character and the characters’ characters. The area receives much less rainfall than the rest of Texas and the temperature has been known to hit 120ºF in the summer. “An easterner, after making the stage trip and experiencing the danger of Horsehead and the Trans-Pecos country, wrote to friends back home that he now knew where hell was.” The setting also includes Castle Gap and Juan Cordoba Lake, an inland salt lake.

This is also a tale of those who live on the desert’s edge, where riches — oil, water, precious artifacts & love — can all be found and lost again in an instant. It is a sweeping saga of old Texas oil fields, salt mines, small town morality, and love.

The characters in All the World to Hold Us span three generations. Richard is a young and talented geologist who works for a Midland oil company. He is driven by his need to hunt for oil and fossils beneath the earth’s surface and by his love for his girlfriend Clarissa. Clarissa, a beautiful girl from Odessa, dreams of fleeing the broiling sun of the Permian Basin and moving to Hollywood, where she hopes her great beauty will make her a model or a movie star. She slathers on sun screen many times each day to protect her skin so that the harsh sunlight will not mar her beauty. She hunts for fossils, with Richard, in the burning desert. Richard keeps what he collects, but Clarissa sells her million-year-old fossils to museums. As there is no dialogue here and little character development, I really have no idea who Richard and Clarissa are.

Herbert Mix is an elderly one-legged museum owner. He is greedy for gold and anything one might find while looking for it: bones, animal fossils, arrowheads, knife blades, clay pots, wagon wheels, coins, and human skulls, which he values most of all and refuses to sell.

A Depression-era couple Max and Marie Omo, and their two sons, live in another time on this bone-strewn land. Max and his sons make their living by trapping, harvesting, and selling Juan Cordona Lake’s salt. The entire family, Marie, Max’s lonely wife, and their sons, are transformed by their surroundings. The lake water they drink is brackish. The food, not much better. And for Marie, the loneliness of the place is devastating. Marie, like Clarissa, wants out of the harsh life in their desert salt pan home.

“WHENEVER THE SALTCUTTER, Max Omo, encountered bounty in that land of deprivation—be it salt or the heat, almost igneous in nature, that wrung all but the last of the water from his body and sent it in sheets down his chest and back—he fell even harder in love with the salt, without even realizing that was what it was, falling into the clefts between the bounty of one thing and the deprivation of another, falling through an incandescent pluming kaleidoscope of colors that belied completely the physical constraints of his salt-colored life and his methodical movements above.”

Oddly, in passing, a runaway circus elephant, makes his appearance, as does his Indian trainer. Bizarre – but this incident brings some humor and a bit of sadness to the novel.

Rick Bass paints a vivid portrait of a fierce place and the inimitable characters who populate it….who survive it. They possess the capacity to adapt to and also despoil it the land. The author’s prose is lyrical and lush, at times poetic. Mr. Bass brings much of his geologist background to the novel; he is the son of a geologist, and he studied petroleum geology at Utah State University.

Bass has won many literary awards.  He won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for his novel Where the Sea Used to Be. He was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006 for his short story collection The Lives of Rocks.  And he was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West. He was also awarded the General Electric Younger Writers Award, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction.

I previously read  The Ninemile Wolves and The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness by this same author and I really enjoyed them and respect Mr. Bass as the talented, award-winning writer he is. However, I do not think he is up to par in his latest offering. When I reached page 84 in Book One, (the novel is made up of 3 Books), I found that I was plodding along – simply bored with the characters and storyline. This first third of Bass’ novel is a dense and difficult read. It is all narrative, no dialogue. The point of view is that of an omniscient observer.

When I reached the infamous page 84, an image came to mind. I was in an art gallery, or an art museum, and viewing the work of a famous, much lauded artist. “Objectively,” I recognized the paintings for their worth. I believed that the critics’ and other viewers’ praise was on the money.   “Subjectively,” the work left me cold. It didn’t touch me personally. I thought of an artist, perhaps someone like Jackson Pollack, and know many art lovers who think his paintings are the work of genius…and they might be. While recognizing the greatness of Mr. Pollack’s work, I am untouched by his paintings. So it is with  All The Land To Hold Us. I  appreciate the excellence of the author’s prose and the novelty of the story he tells…but I am not moved by any of this. I have now finished reading the novel and understand, objectively, why so many people would praise it well. However, I am left feeling that the novel has added little to my life, except for the knowledge I acquired reading about the “Land.” I did complete the novel as it improved in Books 2 and 3.

While this one is not a favorite of mine, I do recognize that many people might feel otherwise. And, as I just wrote, the authors writing is outstanding – subjectively and objectively….just a bit dense and slow paced at times.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Rick Bass
EXTRAS:	Daily Beast interview with Rick Bass
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nashville Chrome And another big Texas novel: The Son by Philipp Meyer

Bibliography:

• The Watch: Stories (1989)
• Platte River (1994)
• In the Loyal Mountains: Stories (1997)
• The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (1997)
• Fiber (1998)
• Where the Sea Used to Be (1998)
• The Hermit’s Story (2003)
• The Diezmo (2005)
• The Blue Horse: Novella (2005)
• Nashville Chrome (2010)
• The Lives of Rocks: Stories (2008)
• All the Land to Hold Us (October 2013)

Non-fiction:

• The Deer Pasture (1985)
• Wild to the Heart (1988)
• Oil Notes (1989)
• Winter: Notes from Montana (1991)
• The Ninemile Wolves (1992)
• The Lost Grizzlies: The Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado (1995)
• The Book of Yaak (1996)
• The New Wolves: The Return of Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest (1998)
• Brown Dog of the Yaak : Essays on Art and Activism (1999)
• Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000)
• The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wild Places (2002)
• Why I Came West (2008)
• Caribou Rising: Defending the Porcupine Herd, Gwich-‘in Culture, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (2004)
• The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana (2009)
• The Black Rhinos of Namibia: Searching for Survivors of the African Desert (2012)

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Highway Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

Bibliography:

• In Search of Snow (1994)
• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction (2002)
• The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
• Mr Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2009)
• Into the Beautiful North (2009)
• Queen of America (December 2011)

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

• Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993)
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996)
• Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998)

More Nonfiction:

• Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999)
• The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004)

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

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (NOV 17, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Percival Everett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Terror of Living by Urban Waite Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• Suder (1983)
• Walk Me to the Distance (1985)
• Cutting Lisa (1986)
• The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories (1987)
• For Her Dark Skin (1990)
• Zulus (1990)
• The One That Got Away (1992)
• God’s Country (1994)
• Big Picture: Stories (1996)
• Watershed (1996)
• Frenzy (1997)
• Glyph (1999)
• Erasure (2001)
• Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001)
• American Desert (2004)
• Damned If I Do: Stories (2004)
• Wounded (2005)
• The Water Cure (2007)
• I am Not Sidney Poitier (2009)
• Assumption (October 2011)

“Do the things you’ve done in your past add up to the person you are now? Or are you reinvented by the choices you make for the future? I used to think I knew the answer to those questions. Now I’m not so sure.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 9, 2011)

Hard Case Crime is back after a short hiatus, and for avid fans, the line-up is impressive: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins (delayed release from a year ago), Getting Off by Lawrence Block, The Consummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, and Choke Hold by Christa Faust.

Choke Hold is novelist and former peep show girl Faust’s second title for Hard Case Crime, and it’s a sequel to Money Shot. Faust is Hard Case Crime’s first female novelist, and if you think that means a tender, sensitive look at crime, then think again. Faust’s protagonist is tough former porn star, Angel Dare, a woman who feels more comfortable giving a blowjob than extending a sympathy hug. In Money Shot, Angel, owner of an adult modeling agency came out of retirement for one last gig. Big mistake. The job is a set-up by some particularly nasty gangsters who are hunting for a briefcase full of cash. Angel, who’s raped, beaten and stuffed in the trunk of a car, finds herself on the wrong side of a prostitution ring.

Choke Hold (and the title’s meaning becomes clear as the story plays out) finds Angel living under an assumed name as a waitress in Arizona. She was part of the Witness Protection program for 19 months and attending mandatory therapy with a shrink named Lindsay:

“She was always making these unequivocal statements about ‘women in my situation’ that had nothing to do with how I actually felt. She also insisted that I was in denial about my ‘abuse’ in the adult film industry. I could never talk to her about the things that were really on my mind. About the fact I didn’t feel like a poor violated victim at all. I felt like some kind of war veteran. Like I’d been forced to turn off something important inside me to become the killer I needed to be and I didn’t have any idea how to turn it back on again. To become an ordinary citizen again, if such a thing were possible. So instead I spent most of our time during the sessions with her by telling the raunchiest, kinkiest stories about my ‘abuse.’ I think she secretly got off on it. Poor Lindsay just needed a decent orgasm.”

Angel’s boring life under the Witness Protection program comes to an abrupt end when she realizes that her cover’s been blown. With her emergency ever-packed, go-bag, “two shitty fake IDs” and a few grand in cash, Angel ran. She’s in Arizona, waitressing, and providing after-hours entertainment for her boss trying to work off the expenses of a forged passport when her past catches up to her in an explosively violent way. Thick Vic, crankster and washed-up porn star, unexpectedly walks into Angel’s diner and death’s along for the ride. From this moment until the novel’s conclusion, it’s non-stop action with Angel on the run from pissed off Mexican gangsters involved in illegal boxing matches and cocaine smuggling. And she’s also on the run from her old nemesis, brutal Croatian gangster, Vukasin.

Choke Hold moves the action from Arizona to the illegal boxing matches held in Mexico, to a Las Vegas porn convention with live-streaming action. Throughout the chase, Angel picks up two protectors, Thick Vic’s cocky son, Cody and Hank “The Hammer”–a legendary boxer who’s sunk to teaching in a tacky local gym, fighting illegal matches, and practicing a little loan enforcement on the side. It’s through Angel’s relationship with Hank that this pulp novel shows its depth beyond the action. Angel never sees herself as a victim, but here’s she’s used and abused more than once in an industry in which no one rides for free. Hank’s industry takes a similar approach. He’s boxed his way into physical damage and suffers permanent migraines and short term memory loss. There’s a sad connection between Angel and Hank–a connection of two people who use their bodies to get by.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hard Case Crime (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christa Faust
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Money Shot And: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins The Consummata by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Bibliography:

• Control Freak (1998; 2002)
• Hoodtown (2004)

• Money Shot (2008)
• Choke Hold (2011)

With Poppy Z. Brite:

• Triads (2004)

“I was becoming a fabulous liar. It was like I’d been born to the outlaw life. If I lost my library job, I could go pro.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 9, 2011)

Debut novelist and elementary schoolteacher Rebecca Makkai combines a wily, madcap road trip with socially poignant conundrums and multiple themes in this coming-of-age story about a twenty-six-year-old children’s librarian, Lucy Hull, and a ten-year-old precocious book lover, Ian Drake, in Hanibal, Missouri. (Guess who is coming-of-age? Answer: not so evident.)

Lucy isn’t entirely sure that she’s a reliable narrator—part of our reading pleasure is to figure that out. She tells us in the enigmatic prologue “I’m not the hero of this story.” Is she the villain? And, if she is not the hero, who is? The answers turn out to be thoughtfully complex and yet exquisitely simple for those of us–and only for those of us–whose love of reading is almost religious (upside down pun there).

Lucy has been sneaking laudable books to Ian, whose evangelical, anorexic mother, Janet, will only allow him to read books “with the breath of God in them.” No books with content matter related to magic, witchcraft, wizardry, the occult, weaponry, adult content matter, evolution, or Halloween. No authors/books that question authority and explore complicated issues, or that have morally ambiguous themes. Oh, or contain a “sensitive” male character.

Janet has enrolled her son in the Glad Heart Ministries youth group with Pastor Bob, in order to de-gayify her son for his proto-gay behaviors. Pastor Bob is a “former” homosexual married to a “cured” once-upon-a-time lesbian, who believes that “sexuality is a choice, not an identity.” His goal is to “speak to our children before the secular media has reached them with its political agenda.” It makes your hair stand up and splits your ends.

One morning, when Lucy opens the library, she discovers that Ian has been camped out there all night. This sets the stage for the fugitive scene–adult and child on the lam, playing spontaneous road trip games and mimicking passages of children’s books. (OK, the reader needs to suspend a little judgment here on how Ian maneuvers this, but this is fiction, so waive a little realism for a little magic, capisce?).

Lucy, as it turns out, has some, ahem… issues. A Chicago-raised Mount Holyoke graduate with a Russian émigré father and Jewish-American mother, she has a predilection for flight and self-flagellation. Her dad was a revolutionary, and his shady business dealings and questionable money sources have been a cause of discomfort all of Lucy’s life. It seems she also has a knack for prevaricating. And indolence. Her adult decisions have, up to this time, been aimed at not taking action in her life, other than putting distance between her and her parents. She’s “a would-be revolutionary stuck at a desk.”

As Lucy and Ian cross state line after state line, she has moments of doubt and dread about her hapless journey with a juvenile. Although she tries to remind herself that Ian maneuvered this odyssey, she acknowledges her complicity. Lucy wants to save Ian from the clutches of religiosity. She impugns Janet Drake for wanting to censor a highly intelligent boy’s mettle. But is she trying to censor the censor? She has doubts. But the voice of her insurrectionist father vexes her.

There are flaws, admittedly. Yet, they are easy to ignore when trumped by the nimble narrative and crack characterizations. Librarians beware—Lucy doesn’t have her Masters of Library Science. And, as mentioned above, the inadvertent “kidnapping” scene raises a few eyebrows of believability.

But this beguiling story captivates, nonetheless. Ian and Lucy have a tart, biting relationship rather than a sentimental, precious one. Moreover, Makkai deftly weaves in children’s literary lore, including The Wizard of Oz, Madeline, Charlotte’s Web, and many others, bolstering the narrative. Moreover, Lucy’s subversive ire for social liberty and freedom of expression are ripe and riveting. Makkai pushes the envelope, and the reader may wonder if the story will wax pedantic, but the author doesn’t disappoint with easy answers; she doesn’t manipulate Lucy’s rant into her personal crusade.

The Borrower appeals, inevitably, to the ardent reader whose love of books starts with the mind but voyages to the soul. It is a journey of self-discovery and sanctuary, finding home wherever you are, and the courage to face your future.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult; First Edition edition (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Makkai
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé

Bibliography:

• The Borrower (June 2011)

“Above the dry hills the air turned white — that shimmering electric pallor that pretended to promise rain in the desert, and the hard wind swirling up grit from the ground, while Ned climbed trees to nail up speakers behind D—‘s speaking stone, and Crunchy and Creamy stirred up batches of gangster acid, cut with speed, with Tab or Mountain Dew in plastic garbage cans, so that it rained snakes instead of water, and I — I tore my robe to bare one breast and caught such a snake, its diamond back writhing over my hand, meaning to bind it around my brow as a living coronet, wedge head erect and spitting venom while I danced outside the borders of any mortal consciousness, whirling my thyrsus in one hand and a wildcat’s spotted cub in another.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 06, 2011)

I have chosen this rather longer quotation to show how Madison Smartt Bell can turn on a dime between a realistic description of a California druggie cult in the late sixties to an evocation of the revels of Dionysian maenads from the earliest age of Greek mythology. The link here is an acid trip, but Bell does not need chemicals to effect his alchemy. In 2001, when the book opens, the narrator Mae is a middle-aged croupier in a Las Vegas area casino. Bell’s description is realistic and immediate: “Only the whirl of lights and the electronic burbling of machines, rattle of dice in the craps table cups, and almost inaudible whisper of cards, the friction-free hum of roulette wheels turning.” But two sentences later, he has already made the shift: “It was a sort of fifth-rate hell, and I a minor demon posted to it. A succubus too indifferent to suck.” Writing of the harsh life of the trailer park behind a chain-link fence in the desert, with the tracks of ATVs crossing the serpentine marks of sidewinders in the sand — Cormac McCarthy country — Bell can match the master, image for image. But he is also liable to launch into a passage of Classical Greek (and, what’s more, leave it untranslated)! There are scenes of drugs, sex, mutilation, and murder in this book that would normally turn my stomach, but Bell’s ability to juggle the violence of the American underbelly with the Bacchic celebration of unbridled passion, and to keep both balls scintillating in the air at the same time, made for such an exhilarating experience that I was fascinated throughout. It was even worth the nightmares when I went to bed.

Perhaps it worked for me because I have had a classical education, and have worked with myth all my professional life. I think the intensity of the writing will still come through to those who do not catch the references, but it might still be worth checking the Wikipedia article on Orpheus before starting. Not just his trip to the underworld to reclaim Eurydice, but also the less familiar legends about his death, torn apart by maenads in the throes of a Dionysian orgy. Two important figures in the novel are referred to by their initials only — rather coyly, since the allusion is pretty obvious: O— (Orpheus) is a rock star, living in a beach house in Malibu; D— (Dionysus) is the charismatic leader of a drug cult known as The People. Although this may sound impossibly fantastic, so was a lot else that was going on in the late sixties, not least the murderous Manson Family. Madison Smartt Bell’s miracle is his ability to be simultaneously mythic and utterly realistic.

The novel, broken into 74 very short chapters, begins in 2001. Mae’s reaction to the World Trade Center attack is different from that of most Americans. She compiles the news footage into a two-hour tape that she watches again and again, reveling in it: “The planes bit chunks from the sides of the towers and the gorgeous sheets of orange flame roared up and the mortals flung away from the glittering windows like soap flakes swirling in a snow globe and the tower shuddered, buckled, blossomed and came showering down.” It is clear she has a fascination with violence, and in alternating chapters we discover why. Traumatized by incestuous abuse (worse in that she seems to have embraced rather than resisted it), she leaves home as a teenager and travels to California, “balling for bread” as she puts it. There, she is picked up by D— and recruited into The People, living in their commune outside San Francisco, taking part in activities which become more and more anarchic. When the police raid the compound, Mae manages to escape with her lover Laurel, but the two later separate to go into hiding under false identities. Now, over 30 years later, the memories come flooding back, triggered by a news shot of Laurel fleeing from Ground Zero: “So I saw Laurel for the first time again, Laurel kneeling on the sidewalk, her head thrown back, her hands stretched out with the fingers crooked, as weapons or in praise. Blood was running from the corners of her mouth, like in the old days, though not for the same reason.”

These closing words of the opening chapter, which itself is only a page and a half long, deliver a mule kick into a roller-coaster of a ride. It is horrible yet thrilling, sickening yet exhilarating, with a tense pace that never lets up. Other than McCarthy, it makes me think of Robert Stone, who writes an appreciation on the cover, of the violence of Roberto Bolaño, and most recently of Carlos Fuentes, whose Destiny and Desire makes a similar play between myth and reality. But The Color of Night is leaner and meaner than any of these, and more brilliant in its darkness. Undoubtedly one of my best books of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Madison Smartt Bell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Devil’s Dream

Bibliography:

• The Washington Square Ensemble (1983)
• Waiting for the End of the World (1985)
• Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime) (1986)
• The Year of Silence (1987)
• Soldier’s Joy (1989)
• Barking Man and Other Stories (1990)
• Doctor Sleep (1991)
• Save Me, Joe Louis (1993)
• Ten Indians (1996)
• Anything Goes (2002)
• Devil’s Dream (2009)
• The Color of Night (April 2011)

Haitian series:

• All Soul’s Rising (1995) 
• Master of the Crossroads (2000)
• The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004)

Nonfiction:

• Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure (1997)
• Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft and Form (2000)
• Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution (2005)
• Toussaint L’Ouverture (2006)
• Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore (2007)

“My name is Katherine, same as my mother’s name, same as my mother’s mother’s name. I’ve never been a Kathy, never been a Kath, not a Katie or a Kate, not a Kat, a Kitty, a Kitten, not a Kit. Katherine I have always been, as Katherine I am today.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (DEC 09, 2010)

Dozens of books have promised the sentiment “for lovers of Cormac McCarthy” and left me sorely disappointed. But, in this claim, Froderberg is truly McCarthy’s literary offspring, echoing his hot, haunting brand of southwest essence, desert landscape, and gothic narrative elixir, if not yet fully capturing his linguistic sublimity and lethal, graveyard humor. In this ambitious debut novel, the author explores desperate and broken souls living through a drought in southern Arizona—a land of sand and scrub, cactus stands, spiny shrubs, bitterbrush, dusty maiden, diamondbacks, rodeos, distant foothills, punishing climate, and an endless starlit sky. If you don’t like McCarthy’s prose style, you surely won’t relish Froderberg’s highly stylized prose and narrative, either. If, like me, you adore McCarthy’s (particularly his southwest) lore, such as The Border Trilogy, then you can potentially connect with and savor this quasi-mythical tale.

Seventeen-year-old bride Katherine lives with her (significantly older) husband, Son, and his kind-hearted and affluent parents, Rose and “Rose’s Daddy,” on their ranch on Old Border Road, in a stately adobe house above an aquifer. Rose’s Daddy calls Katherine “Girl” (affectionately), and Son calls her Darlin.’ She accepts her new identity and learns how to live and work on the ranch, including horse riding, barrel racing, and driving the water truck. Besides prospering from the ranch, Rose’s Daddy channels water to the coast, just like his father did, earning a heavy bounty and a lot of frowns from the local people. He tells Girl the history of the nomads who wandered to this land, leading up to his own father’s industrious wealth.

“They sought a fabled people within a fabled landscape. They sought a promised life…They walked across sandbanks of hot ash, the ground on which they walked trembling like paper sheeting, as if it were a fiery lake bubbling and steaming right beneath them.”

The narrative, told in Katherine’s voice, reads a lot like gothic fable. Although set in contemporary times, there is a timeless quality about it, and the author’s temporal sense is frequently ephemeral. Like McCarthy, she plays with tenses, and sustains a biblical subtext and timbre.

“The words as they were chalked, the sand and the dust, the grime and the duff and the tar and the oil and the mud, and whatever else of the earth we collect along the way, will all be washed away in the moon after, once we are back to here where we are, to begin another beginning.”

Katherine tells the story of the drought, of Son’s cruel infidelities, stemming from Rose’s Daddy’s infidelities, of Rose’s fragility, and the ghosts of stories that still haunt the adobe house. The desire of Katherine to stand by Son is increasingly frustrating as the story progresses, but taken as poetic fable, I was able to tolerate it. The characters are often not what they seem, and some shocking revelations are even more unnerving to the reader as the protagonist continues to honor her spousal obligations. Most characters do not develop over time; rather, who they are amplifies, the aperture widens, and the person you see is more resonant and less inscrutable, but unchanged. Unlike McCarthy, the author portrays a woman with some finesse.

There is a New Age priest, known as Padre, who beguiles his congregation with a noble mien and zen-like homilies, and whose relationship with Katherine leads her to a further maturity of mind, while she retains her fastness of character, deepening it. A rancher and businesswoman named Pearl Hart, her husband, Ham, and her daughter, also named Pearl, round out the story and enlarge the myth and mystery of the town.

You don’t read this novel for the individual characters but for their fate, and for Katherine’s. You read it for the themes of disillusionment and strength; the narrative grip of lush, elliptical language; the earthly elements that imperil and fortify these marginal people; and for the landscape that resounds like a character. You tacitly observe what is in a name, and what is not.

At times, the author’s talent overreaches, and the overwrought language and florid descriptions threaten to choke the narrative flow. I occasionally experienced reader fatigue. Froderberg hasn’t yet harnessed the nuanced linguistics and tension of McCarthy and his ability to create a chemical reaction in the reader, although she clearly is aspiring to. The tale acquired some dark humor toward the end, which the story was begging for at intervals. The problem with her style so closely resembling the master is that she hasn’t fully developed her own unique one. When she fails to attain McCarthy’s bracing, muscular tongue and allegorical depth, the reader notices her self-conscious drive to try.

As a novelist, this is Susan Froderberg’s first rodeo, and I am inclined to give the rope some slack. She is a debut author that will surely evolve over time. This is an earnest, inspired start, and facets of the story were well realized. I was exceptionally moved when I came to the last line of the story, a sentence that touched me with its purity, subtlety, and pith. Those final words fall strikingly smooth on the page, seizing the moment with indelible ink, without a hitch, without a sound.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (December 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	BookPage interview with Susan Froderberg
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Southwesterns: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• Old Border Road (December 2010)

“Ben is wearing the knife when he rides out of Lochiel, crossing into Mexico as easily as one might cross a street in Tucson or Phoenix. There is no barbed wire to impede him, no signpost except for a tall stone boundary marker to tell him that he is leaving the Arizona Territory. He’s made this trip before but feels a small buzz nonetheless—it’s an adventure for a thirteen-year-old to ride alone into another country on a fine horse like Maggie, small, lithe, and fast, a possession he prizes more than the knife hanging from his belt in a plain leather sheath.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (OCT 21, 2010)

I dashed out to buy Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Philip Caputo’s, latest novel after reading an enthusiastic review in my local newspaper. I was unfamiliar with this author, but I was intrigued by the promise of a burly border tale. I was not disappointed. This is a generational saga and epic of the southwest, bristling with illegal border crossers and warring drug cartels, studded with outlaws and vaqueros. A dense book, it starts rather slowly, gradually lassoing the reader into a complex, emotional story brittle with sepulchral secrets and spilling with scoured grief.

Gil Castle, a Wall Street broker broken by the death of his wife in the tragic events of 9/11, lives day to day in suicidal agony. At the advice of his grown daughters, he has submitted to therapy. However, the platitudes of “healing” and “closure” bring him even further to the brink of despair. He prefers to read the intellectual, reflective stoics, such as Seneca, or the Greek tragedian, Aeschylus; they speak to him with a deep and thoughtful gravitas. He rebuffs what he considers the psychobabble of grief counseling, of America’s proposition that we weren’t meant to suffer for long periods of time, “as if grief were something like digestion.” As a last grasp for hope, he decides to leave New York and move to a small cabin in Patagonia, a berg in the desert of the Arizona-Mexico border, where his cousin still owns and operates a cattle ranch that has been in the family for a century. His maternal grandfather, Ben Erskine, pioneered this business, the San Ignacio Cattle Company. What Gil and the reader gradually discover is that this sprawling ranch is riddled with “ghosts and bones.”

Two main narrative threads emerge, each with its distinct flavor, tone, and color. The author creates a scintillating outlaw tale of the early twentieth century that is both chilly and taut, ripe and ropy. The actions of Gil’s desperado descendants alternate with the modern-day fable of family and the open graves of grief. The story seamlessly goes back and forth from Gil’s twenty-first century tale to Ben Erskine’s of a hundred years ago. Peppered throughout are letters and interviews with Gil’s relatives from mid-century. Caputo heightens the broad western tale with an astute character study, giving us some salty figures a la Cormac McCarthy meets Larry McMurtry, but branding his own mark and riding in his own saddle.

Crossers keeps its narrative focus, even as the subplots spread and the landscape widens. The vengeance and violence of the drug runners and border crossers keep the pace tight and the action grisly, as well as reticulate the ancestral histories and hatreds between and within families and neighbors. Moreover, the subplots serve as allegory and as metaphor to the wide divides of the human heart, and to the sorrows and histories that threaten to bury us in modern and distant tragedies.

Some of the characters are a little contrived or thin, although there are some, like Ben and Blaine, who are vibrant, blunt, and truculent, knotted like a fist. Gil’s unbridled Midas touch is a bit too convenient at times, but it is a minor affliction. Additionally, the author laid on the idea of evil terrorists a bit thick in the beginning of the novel–but, thankfully, to a larger purpose, which became evident as the story leavened. I am reluctant to discuss my controversial perceptions of 9/11 in any detail, except that I initially considered abandoning the story. Yet my instincts told me to persevere, that this wasn’t a polemical novel. Fortunately, the author’s dynamism eclipsed the indictments and he keenly underscored the dreadful, wretched terrorists that roam our souls–the penetrating terrorists that inhabit the psyche and scream from our hearts–the terrorism of the unconsoled.

I have read complaints (of earlier works) by a few readers that Caputo’s storytelling is too expository and more suited to journalism. Occasionally, Crossers is indulgent and immoderate, and I can see vestiges of the tendency. But he reined himself in and penned a captivating, sweeping story. Even with the minor flaws, this is a powerful, piquant tapestry of a tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 19, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Philip Caputo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Acts of Faith

Bibliography:

• Horn of Africa (1980)
• Delcorso’s Gallery (1983)
• Indian Country (1987)
• Equation for Evil (1996)
• Exiles (1998)
• The Voyage (1999)
• Acts of Faith (May 2005)
• Crossers (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• A Rumor of War (1977)
• Means of Escape: A Ware Correspondent’s Memoir o fLife and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Vietnam (1991)
• In the Shadows of the Morning: Essays on Wild Lands, Wild Waters, and a Few Untamed People (2002)
• 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings (2005)
• 10,000 Days of Thunder: A History of The Vietnam War (September 2005)

Related:

• Interview with Philip Caputo (1989)

“I had become known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn’t half bad to be in a place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman (SEP 18, 2010)

Jeannette Walls is a natural-born storyteller. In her memoir The Glass Castle, she described in fascinating detail what it meant to be the daughter of Rose Mary and Rex, perhaps two of the most dysfunctional individuals on the planet, brainy underachievers who raised their bevy of children in a most unconventional way.

By the end of that book, Jeannette was on her way to graduating from Barnard College and becoming a celebrated journalist in New York City. I exited the book wanting to know more and in ways, Half Broke Horses goes back to the well, helping readers understand the forces that shaped her mother Rose Mary.

Half Broke Horses precedes The Glass Castle by channeling the voice of Jeannette’s gritty West Texan grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. A rebellious and headstrong little girl, she is in charge of breaking in her father’s horses at age six and by age 12, she is running the ranch and helping to geld the horses. By the time she is a mid-teen, she takes off to the Arizona frontier atop one of the horses – Patches – to teach children not much younger than she is. All the while, she adheres to her mantra, “You had to be willing to work hard and persevere in the face of misfortune. A lot of people, even those born with brains and beauty, didn’t have what it took to knuckle down and get the thing done.”

Knuckle down she does. Within the course of this true-life novel, Lily Casey Smith takes on many roles: she is a totally unorthodox teacher who gets fired from position after position; she marries and dumps a crumb-bum polygamist, she learns to fly an airplane, sells bootleg liquor from her back door, runs a 100,000-acre ranch with her second husband — the indomitable lapsed Mormon Cowboy Jim Smith, survives tornadoes, floods, and the Great Depression, and gives birth to two incorrigible children, Jeannette’s mother Rose Mary and Little Jim.

And herein lies the main problem with Half Broke Horses. The book has a campfire feel; it’s almost as if the reader is sitting at the author’s feet as she narrates one amazing adventure after another, upping the ante each time. But nowhere does the reader get the sense of the inner life of Lily Casey Smith, a rebel-before-her-time, a tough American original in the old frontier. After the birth of Rosemary and Jim, the prose becomes less imaginative, without the sparkle of The Glass Castle. Lily Casey Smith becomes bigger than life, a woman to be admired but not really known, whose life may or may not be filled with half-truths. The emotional distance the author takes from the narrative tends to distance us from ever really knowing Lily Casey Smith and Jim Smith.

It’s a hard task that Jeannette Walls took on herself – writing about her legendary grandmother. And I’m sure this was a task she took on with love and imagination. It was a New York Times Top 10 Best Book in 2009 and certainly has – and will continue – to have appeal for many readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 730 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; Reprint edition (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jeannette Walls
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another novel based on real people: Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

• Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip (2000)
• The Glass Castle (2005)

Fiction:

• Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel (2009)
• The Silver Star (June 2013)