“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)

“Irish nor English, Jerseyman nor bushborn nor savage, not Roman or Episcopalian or apostate, Judah was the wilderness on two legs, mute and unknowable, a blankness that could drown a man.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (APR 8, 2011)

Michael Crummey opens his new novel with Judah, sitting in a “makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days.” Only Mary Tryphena Devine comes near him these days, urging him to take a little food – or, if he doesn’t want to eat – to just die. Judah’s story is the primary, yet not the only otherworldly theme that glides through this multigenerational family saga, touching everybody in its wake. The novel is set in one of Newfoundland’s wild and rough eastern coastal regions, and, more specifically, in two remote fishing villages, Paradise Deep and The Gut.

Crummey, himself a Newfoundlander, has written this highly imaginative, superbly crafted folkloric tale that blends with great ease strands of supernatural magic of old fairy tales and beliefs into a chronicle of the early colonists’ precarious existence. Spanning over one hundred years, starting with the early eighteen hundreds, the author spins a tall tale of life in the early settler communities, that delves deep into personal relationships, social strife between the Irish and West-country English, the political and the religious powers, competing for influence and control.

In the first few pages, Crummey hints at important future developments, but then he quickly moves back in time to events when Mary Tryphena was a child and a whale had beached itself on the shore of Paradise Deep. The villagers, starving and desperate for food after another meager fishing season and an icy-cold winter of scarcity, cannot believe their luck. However, when they carefully cut through the animal’s flesh, a human-like body emerges from its belly. Devine’s Widow (Mary Tryphena’s grandmother and one of the most powerful personalities in The Gut) while preparing the body for burial, turns him over, and the strange, completely white figure starts coughing up water, blood and small fishes…! He cuts an unusual figure among the locals and he stinks of sea and rotten fish, a smell that is so overpowering that nobody wants to be near him…

The locals, God-fearing yet illiterate, and with the priest not due for a visit for some time, cannot agree which of the biblical names belongs to the “story with the whale” and as a compromise decide on “Judah.” While suspicious of him from the outset – not just physically is he an oddity, being completely white from head to toe, he also appears unable (unwilling?) to speak – the villagers, who have a tendency towards superstition, start blaming the intruder for all the mishaps that are befalling them. Until, that is, when Judah joins one of the fishing boats and leading them to the most amazing catch. Is this a one-off occurrence or will the fate of the poor fishermen from The Gut finally change for the better?

Judah’s survival is intricately linked to the Devine family, the most important clan in The Gut. Paradise Deep is controlled by the Seller clan, wealthy merchants who own more than their share and exert their power over the communities by any means, legal or not. The clans’ disputes and quarrels go back to a personal fight between Devine’s Widow and King-me Sellers, the matriarch and patriarch of the respective clan, but over the generations it expands into a constant rivalry between the Irish and West-Country English, between poor illiterate fisher folks living in The Gut and the merchants/land owners from Paradise Deep. Crummey weaves such an intricate six generation portrait of the two clans and the people around them that it is difficult to go into details without revealing too much of the events or the many individuals that stand out as full-fleshed characters. For his realistic and factual backdrop, the author touches the political developments on Newfoundland, such as rise of the first fishermen’s union at the turn of the nineteenth century, and far away places where some of the younger generation escape to or fight in the first World War. Nonetheless, he never loses his focus on the local people of the two villages and, especially the women who carry a tremendous burden to ensure the survival of the next generation.

To help the reader through the myriad of names and characters that come to life in the story, a genealogical chart is displayed upfront with the names of the numerous offspring through the six generations. I can only recommend, however, not to look at this chart, if at all possible, prior to at least reaching part 2 of the novel. While such a chart is useful to remind us who is related to whom, and in what generation we find ourselves, it does hint at some surprising cross connections that are better discovered in due course as it will take away some of the pleasure in discovering and reading this rich tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press; Reprint edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Michael Crummey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “whale” of a tale:  Fluke by Christopher Moore Another “folklore” novel: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Bibliography:

• Flesh and Blood: Short Stories (1998; 2003)
• River Thieves (2001)
• The Wreckage (2005 in Canada only)
• Galore (March 2011) Commonweatlth Prize

Poetry:

• Arguments with Gravity (1996)
• Hard Light (1998)
• Emergency Road Assistance (2001)
• Salvage (2002)
• Went With (2007)

“A formidable wind seemed to have flown in through the half-inch of open window, but had then immediately found its way under the duvet…”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 5, 2011)

Once upon a time…no. On a dark and stormy night…wait–there was no storm. Long ago and far away…but, it was only a few years ago, and not far if you live in suburban New Jersey. So, one dark and December night in the safe and tidy suburb of Stellar Plains, New Jersey, an arctic chill seeped under doors, a frigid blast blew through windows, and a glacial nipping swirled between the sheets of spouses and lovers. And, just as suddenly, the woman turned from their men, and stopped having sex.

A spell had been cast, unbeknownst to the enchanted. Married woman turned in disgust from their husbands, and teen girls recoiled from their pimply boyfriends. The town was in chaos, but nobody was talking.

At the start of the new school year, the new bohemian and canny drama teacher, Fran Heller, had come to teach at Eleanor Roosevelt High School (Elro), where much of the action takes place. She was staging a production of Lysistrata, the ancient Greek play written by Aristophanes. And, in case you aren’t familiar with it, it is about an entire city of woman that resolves to stop having sex with their men in order to end the Peloponnesian War. That includes their favorite position—The Lioness on The Cheese Grater. Yeah, think about it! This extraordinary mission inflames the battle between the sexes in Athens, just as the suburban spell provokes a war between the mates in Stellar Plains.

Dory and Robby Lang, the central couple of the book, are spirited English teachers at Elro with a high approval rating with students. Until this spell, the Langs had a youthful vigor and robust sex life. Their sophomore daughter Willa, who Dory has deemed “conventional” (average), had found first love with Eli, the drama teacher’s son. But things are now frigid in the soundless fury of their house. Only their old lazy dog lingers to lick himself clean.

The Nordic, big-boned gym teacher, Ruth, had a largely healthy sex life with her sculptor husband—as active as one can expect with twin toddlers and an infant—all boys. She was not immune from the “enchantment,” either. Then there is Bev, a stout and menopausal woman with her hedge fund husband, Ed, who had said some cruel things to her not long ago. The spell has her in its grip, and she is fighting back frisky.

Does Leanne Bannerjee, the hot school psychologist, go on an icy sex strike when the wind chill factor blows her way? She has three boyfriends and a love life that rivals her students.

Wolitzer’s prose is gusty and cinematic, immaculate from start to finish, with well-considered, write-‘em-down one-liners and irrepressible, lucid characters. The voice and style are similar to Tom Perotta, but with a more whimsical moral thrust. The spell’s chaos must reach some conclusion, and this is where the reader enjoys sliding into the ice.

This is a domestic comedy/drama with some acid moments, some poignant insights, and a sprinkling of the psychology of love, coupling, and married life. To enjoy this book, it helps to be flexible about a few unrealistic elements present in a contemporary, earth-bound setting.

This is warm Wolitzer on ice, with a few Mazurkas and a double lutz finale. She did employ a risky contrivance, but it was an active choice, not a slack trick of the pen. Along the way, she demonstrates fine regard to our tech-savvy, digitally addicted society. A delicious sorbet book, this is sly chick-lit that pricks—and puts a spell on you.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Meg Wolitzer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Little Children by Tom Perrota

Bibliography:

• Sleepwalking (1982)
• Hidden Pictures (1986)
• This Is Your Life (1988)
• Friends for Life (1994)
• Surrender, Dorothy (1998)
• The Wife (2003)
• The Position (2005)
• The Ten-Year Nap (2008)
• The Uncoupling (April 2011)

Movies from books:

• This is My Life (1992)
• Surrender, Dorothy (2006)

“The living are like spinning tops, powered by a need for atonement, or revenge, or by avoidance, guilt, shame, fear, anger, regret, insecurity, jealousy, whatever, it doesn’t matter because it all derives from the same pop-psyche alphabet soup and oh Lord here comes another best-selling book on the self-help shelf when really if they could just smash all the time-keeping devices excepting sundials, do a crossword puzzle, study the backs of their hands, notice their breath going in and out, drink their food and chew their water, RELAX, it would be a great step forward in the evolution of  the species and the dead would be so grateful.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 27, 2011)

This is a saga, a sweeping family story that lodges in your marrow, the kind of story that makes you smile, laugh, weep, snort, chortle, sing, spread your arms wide and lay your heart wide open.

With flavors tender, ribald, ironical, farcical, tragic, magical, and wondrous, Sing Them Home narrates an epic story of a family emotionally disrupted by the disappearance of their mother (and wife), Hope, in a Nebraska tornado of 1978. Hope was swept up, along with her Singer sewing machine and a Steinway piano, but she never came down. Due to the absence of her remains, all that stands in the graveyard is her cenotaph.

Twenty-five years later, the three grown-up children are still trying to cope with their grief. None ever married. Larkin, an art history professor (whose work is symbolic with her loss and grief) hides behind food and refuses to “leave the ground.” Gaelan is a weatherman (ah! the irony) who has only superficial, sexual relationships with women, and the youngest, Bonnie, is a virgin and garbologist. She roams after storms to look for “archival” remains of things that flew away in the tornado with their mother. And she talks to the dead at the cemetery.

There is also a beloved but inscrutable stepmother, Viney, (although she never legally married their dad); a large supporting cast of unforgettable characters; ancestral Welsh traditions; and the Nebraska weather and topography, a salient ingredient in pulling the story together.

The prose is beautiful and evocative as the story moves along non-linearly, but with grace. Past events are revealed gradually and build momentum as it catches up to the present. You will experience an intimate relationship with these radiant, unconventional characters and their extraordinary story.

There are some themes similar to The Lovely Bones–loss, unresolved grief, isolation, the meaning of memories and the idea of home. However, Kallos’ novel is richer, more sprawling and textured. John Irving comes to mind, with veins of Philip Roth, Margot Livesy, and Ann Tyler. She is an original, though–she leaves her own memorable imprint.

This is no garden-variety redemption story. It exhilarates with an elixir of spiritual, metaphysical and deeply human voices, of things said, unsaid, unuttered, and forever sung.

For a taste of the author’s wit, poise, sensibility, and charm, read her bio on her website.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1ST edition (January 6, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephanie Kallos
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving Another book that involves a child found in a tree: The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis

Bibliography:

• Broken for You (2004)
• Sing Them Home (2009)

“We’re all entitled to our superstitions.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAR 10, 2011)

This spectacular debut novel by the talented Téa Obreht, is narrated mostly through the voice of young Natalia Stefanovi. Shortly after the novel opens, we learn that Natalia has followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and studied medicine. Just recently done with medical school, she has taken on a volunteer assignment to inoculate children in an orphanage in a small seaside village called Brejevina. The book is set in a war-ravaged country in the Balkans, quite possibly Obreht’s native Croatia. Brejevina, Natalia explains, “is forty kilometers east of the new border.”

En route to her volunteer assignment, Natalia finds out about her grandfather’s death in Zdrevkov, a distant town away from home. Nobody in the family can tell why Grandpa would travel so far away from home and die in a strange place. The rest of the family members were not even privy to the one piece of information that Natalia did know: her grandfather was dying from cancer.

Just like the book’s author, Téa Obreht, Natalia too is convinced that place has a lot to do with the shaping of a man’s character. So it is that she sets off to travel to the places visited by her grandfather for some clues about the man she thought she knew, but didn’t quite. “The village of Galina, where my grandfather grew up, does not appear on a map,” she says. “My grandfather never took me there, rarely mentioned it, never expressed longing or curiosity, or a desire to return. My mother could tell me nothing about it; my grandma had never been there. When I finally sought it out, after the inoculations at Brejevina, long after my grandfather’s burial, I went by myself, without telling anyone where I was going.”

The novel’s narrative flows back and forth between two and sometimes even three threads. One part details Obreht’s current journey to the orphanage in Brejevina, her experiences with local superstitions there and eventually her journey to the small town where her grandfather died. Another narrative moves to the past—first to the immediate past shared between Natalia and her grandfather, and then way back further, when the grandfather was a little boy in the tiny village of Galina.

It is in this past that the narrative of the “tiger’s wife” unfolds—the story is a hypnotic mix of old-fashioned folklore compounded by local superstitions and gossip. The tiger that stalks the novel might just be one that Natalia remembers visiting as a child with her grandpa or one which haunted the hills of Galina years ago.

Rudyard Kipling’s famous Jungle Book is an essential element of Obreht’s novel and one can see where the anthropomorphic qualities of Kipling’s classic tales have made their way into Obreht’s prose as well. She does an outstanding job of mixing doses of these qualities with good old folklore and classic storytelling. There’s a very “Once upon a Time” quality to her writing that’s instantly arresting. As the novel progresses, Obreht describes many a colorful character in the town—the apothecary, the town butcher and other assorted characters. Each of these has his or her own special place in the overall story.

Obreht’s favorite novelist, she has said, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One can recognize his influence especially in one story that stands out in the novel—that of Gavran Gaile, the “deathless man.” For various reasons, Natalia comes to believe that her grandfather, just before he died, was on a quest to meet this “deathless man” and she tries to understand why.

The Tiger’s Wife is also a quietly damning indictment about war and Obreht catalogs its ill effects through the ways it affects the grandfather. “In my grandfather’s life, the rituals that followed the war were rituals of renegotiation. All his life, he had been part of the whole—not just part of it, but made up of it. He had been born here, educated there. His name spoke of one place, his accent of another,” Natalia says speaking of the emotional displacement that the war brought about, and which never ever healed.

Above all, Obreht’s greatest strength is her spectacular evocation of place. In an interview with The Atlantic, Obreht has said that she is “very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.”

“What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling…I like to explore the interactions of people with place and how place influences characters’ decisions, and their conflicts with one another, and also with the place itself.” It is this inspiration that really fuels The Tiger’s Wife. It’s one of the most evocative novels I have read in a long time. Every tiny village in the Balkan country comes alive within its pages.

At 25, Obreht is the youngest on the New Yorker’s famous “20 Under 40” list. The Tiger’s Wife is an extremely auspicious start from a writer to watch. Even if the somewhat disparate threads in the book fall slightly short of tying into a seamless whole, this debut novel is easily one of the year’s best.

Obreht tackles large and complex issues here: war, loss, the sense of place and how it forms who we are. Obreht also shows how strongly superstition ties into that very sense of place. “When confounded by the extremes of life—whether good or bad—people would turn first to superstition to find meaning, to stitch together unconnected events in order to understand what was happening,” she writes. While this is universally true, it is especially relevant in the war-torn isolated landscapes that Obreht writes of so evocatively in the book.

Even Grandpa, Natalia finds, couldn’t resist the pull of place and story. Trying to make sense of his fractured country, of his own body that was wasting away, it stands to reason that Grandpa would give in to superstition and try and have his fortune read by the deathless man. After all, as one of the characters in The Tiger’s Wife says, we are all entitled to our superstitions. Even a man of science needs an occasional crutch.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 172 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (March 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Téa Obreht
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	One Hundred Years of Solitudeby Gabriel Garcia Marquez Another recent novel set in the Balkans: Solo by Rana Dasgupta

Bibliography:

• The Tiger’s Wife (March 2011)

“You thought you couldn’t stand not to know a thing until you knew it, wasn’t that right? Who had said that, the Chief? Some poet from the Library Boat, maybe.

Knowledge at last, Kiwi’s mind recited dutifully. The fish’s living eye glass.

Sometimes you would prefer a mystery to remain red-gilled and buried inside you, Kiwi decided, alive and alive inside you.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (FEB 02, 2011)

In her hotly-anticipated debut novel, Swamplandia!, Karen Russell returns to the mosquito-droves and muggy-haze of the Florida Everglades and the gator-themed amusement park featured in her short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” that opened her widely-praised 2006 collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. It was that collection, with its exuberant mix of satire and fabulism, that secured Russell’s reputation as one of the most exciting up-and-comers around and earned her a coveted spot on The New Yorker’s much buzzed about “20 under 40” list last fall. With her energetic prose, quirky settings, and fantastical plots, Russell is a writer’s whose style forces you to sit up and take notice, sometimes at the cost of emotional involvement with her work. However, Swamplandia!, with all its flashing-neon prose is an insightful (and surprisingly funny) exploration of the loss of innocence that inevitably follows the death of a parent.

In the year following her mother’s death, 13-year-old Ava Bigtree quickly learns how “one tragedy can beget another and another.” Since birth, their family-owned, 100-acre island attraction, Swamplandia!, has been Ava’s home. Its 98 alligators (all named after their original gator, Seth, because as Chief Bigtree likes to say “Tradition is as important as promotional materials are expensive.”), Reptile Walk, Live Chicken Thursday feeding shows, and lone mammal, a balding, rhythmless bear named Judy Garland, have all helped Swamplandia! hold its position as the “Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” in southwestern Florida. That, and Ava’s mother’s gator-swim routine. However, when Hilola Bigtree dies of ovarian cancer, Chief Bigtree, lost in his own fog of grief, fails to amend the promotional materials and tourists continue to file off the Mainland-Swamplandia! ferry eager to watch the “Swamp Centaur” swim through a gator pit “planked with great grey and black bodies.” Initially, the disappointed mainlanders are understanding –- after all, a family has lost its mother – but, their hijacked sympathy soon swings to money-back-demanding indignation, until a new corporate theme park, the World of Darkness, opens just off the highway, and the tourists stop coming altogether.

With the tourists gone and their father increasingly preoccupied, Ava and her dreamy older sister, Osceola, (white-haired and violet-eyed, Ossie resembles “the doomed sibling you see in those Wild West daguerreotypes, the one who makes you think Oh God take the picture quick; this one isn’t long for this world”) are left alone with empty days to fill. The girls take to hanging out on the abandoned library boat with their studious brother, Kiwi. Kiwi is the kind of guy who gives himself report cards and studies for his SATs long before he’s even stepped foot inside a high school, and so he scoffs when he learns that Ava and Osceola plan to contact their mother with Ossie’s newly acquired occult powers and their homemade Ouija board.

Their unsuccessful séances crush Ava, but when Ossie starts using the Ouija board on her own to meet other ghosts –strange men! – Ava tattles to their father: her sister is dating men, dead ones. Burdened by the park’s mounting debt and his own mismanaged grief, Chief Bigtree isn’t up to dealing with his lonely and disturbed 16-year old daughter.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Angry at his father’s inability to face their increasingly precarious financial situation, Kiwi runs away to the mainland to save his family from destitution and is initiated into the realities of minimum-wage labor as a peon at the World of Darkness. And so, when the Chief disappears to the mainland on mysterious business, Ava and Osceola are left to fend for themselves in the swamp. However, as Osceola’s romance with the ghost of a ill-fated, Depression-era dredgeman, Louis Thanksgiving, intensifies, Ava is left increasingly alone. When Ossie runs off to the Underworld to elope with Louis Thanksgiving, a mysterious stranger, the Bird Man, offers to be Ava’s guide in her quest to retrieve her sister

Forget Dante’s rings or Homer’s River Styx; this is mangrove swamp as the Underworld! With its fecundity and “blue lozenge” water ways, Ava frets that the swamp doesn’t look much like the underworld she’s read about in books, but with its “leafy catacombs,” ravenous mosquitoes, and “rotten-egg smell [that] rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangrove’s stilted roots,” but I can’t think of a milieu more likely to harbor ghosts.

Part of successfully navigating the swamps of adolescence involves knowing which beliefs to cling to tenaciously, and which to modify, if not altogether discard. Although the inevitable loss of innocence that follows is heart-breaking, as the Bigtree children learn that life on the mainland is just as imperfect as life on the swamp, that loving a ghost, if possible, comes with a steep cost, that mothers, once dead, stay gone, Russell never lets us lose our sense of humor. Moreover, as Ava oscillates between her girlish beliefs and her adult awakening, Russell maintains expert control over the narrative. So much so, in fact, that the reader, like Ava, is unsure of exactly what to believe. That is, until disaster strikes, and the reader is left sharing Ava’s sentiment: we should have seen it coming all along.

Ava and Osceola’s story is about loneliness, loss and sisterly love, but Kiwi’s sudden emersion in the ways of the contemporary teen helps to lighten some of that darkness. Fascinated by the alien customs around him, Kiwi takes to writing down his observations while his colleagues take to calling him Margaret Mead. His education into mainland life is perceptive, and often hilarious.

Swamplandia! is a quirky, but well-crafted read, and Russell’s prose is dynamite. While the ending might be too pat for some, I was so impressed by Russell’s knack for description and laughed far too many times (really!) to hold it against the book. Karen Russell has been likened to writers as wide ranging as Amy Hempel, George Saunders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kelly Link and Judy Blume, and while her energetic prose might be too exhausting for some, if her writing is anything, it’s this: original.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 326 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Karen Russell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Southern Florida story: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Bibliography:

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006)
• Swamplandia! (2011)
• Vampires in the Lemon Grove (February 2013)

“This is the kind of story the Jade Emperor himself enjoys hearing from me, one where the focus, indeed the whole point of the tale, is the grand heroic choice, the cinematic action. He is always telling me to hurry up, to cut out the needless detail, to do some editing and present him with the stripped-down version. But life is not like that. The fight to ensure the survival of love is more likely to find its toughest battles amid small snarls about changing nappies or midnight feedings or plain old boredom; it is more likely to focus on little betrayals or hurtful slips of the tongue, to feature the day-to-day heroism of pretending not to be aware of a thousand little annoying habits. In short, love is hard work, and the fairytale ending of our story is only the beginning of the hard work of keeping love alive.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 7, 2010)

If this book doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.

Under Fishbone Clouds is written by debut author Sam Meekings, who grew up near the south coast of England and currently resides in China. It is absolutely remarkable that the author is under 30; the book is full of gravitas and maturity that is normally the result of decades of living and writing. Interwoven seamlessly within this mesmerizing narrative is Chinese folklore and myths – absorbingly told – in addition to insights into Chinese distant and recent past history.

This novel is narrated by the Kitchen God, a common household deity who is challenged by the more powerful Jade Emperor to fathom the inner workings of the human heart. He chooses to follow a couple who, like him and his own mythical wife, were caught in the whirlwind of history: Jinyi and his wife Yuying. The tale begins in 1942 when the two fall in love, in spite of their different backgrounds and their arranged marriage, and continues to their doddering old age as the new millennium takes hold.

At the onset, Yuying follows her husband across war-torn China to her husband’s rustic and impoverished home. Bad times ensue, and when they eventually make their way back to the city, the Cultural Revolution has begun; everything now belongs to the state and all social strata are forced to undergo hard labor in the factories and the fields.

Although the Mao Cultural Revolution years have been well documented, Under Fishbone Clouds takes you up close and personal to these dehumanizing times; it is a rare reader who will not wince at the no-holds-barred look at a country whose rigid ideology trumps personal relationships and freedoms. Business owners, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, intellectuals – all are labeled “bourgeois” and re-educated in the harshest possible ways. In a particularly harrowing scene, a man has a heart attack and is ordered to “crawl” to comfort and stop being a slacker. The depths to which Jinyi and Yuying are forced to descend to – separately, without each other’s comfort – is heartbreaking.

Yuying reflects, “Life isn’t meant for perfect things. I knew it when we were told to put making steel above common sense; I knew it when we were told to starve patriotically because the noble peasants had been huddling around homemade furnaces instead of growing food in the fields; I knew it when the whole country began to rise up to cut down the past. I felt in the pit of my stomach all the time; I just never knew what it was until now.”

Yet despite the intensity of the Cultural Revolution years, Under Fishbone Clouds is not a book about tragedy; at its heart (and a big heart it is), it’s a family saga about the universal and enduring power of love. There is sheer magic and lyricism in the love that Jinyi and Yuying share as they navigate answers that are often impenetrable.

And, Meekings suggests, by love we are transfigured. Jinyi realizes toward the end of his life: “Love also changes shape. It is no longer slim, lithe, nervous and sweaty palmed. It was no longer sleepless, heavy, a stone weighing deep within the chest. It was now warm, slow, soft, a tarry old blanket huddled under in the dark. It was the last embers of a promise made decades before, still glowing red though the flames had petered down.”

Using Jinyi as a catalyst, the Kitchen God comes to the realization that people don’t just carry on with their lives because they must; the secret of life is love, atonement, and retribution. He puzzles out the human heart as he follows this couple through all kinds of trials: deep anguish, death of children, famine and forced labor, class warfare, drastic social and culture changes, isolation and homelessness, the loss of dignity and health.

Under Fishbone Clouds is one of those rare books that I would confidently recommend to anybody: those with an interest in the history of the East, those who are enthralled with mythology and folklore, those who hold out for the best of prose, and those who are simply seeking an old-fashioned story where love prevails. I predict an amazing future for this very talented author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (December 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Living Scotsman interview with Sam Meekings
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels based on Mao Cultural Revolution: A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Becoming Madam Mao by Anchee Min And a current novel that it can be compared to: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Under Fishbone Clouds (2009; December 2010 in US)

“She thought about the summer’s end, another boring school year about to begin, about the dried blood caked on her knee – and her world exploded. It cracked open and Becca fell inside a whiteness that erased everything: the driveway, the tree, the long summer’s day, the blood, and the ice cream. For a time, the world was blank. She was still.

She woke up, her fingertips tingling, her head full of static, raindrops only now wetting her legs. She knew she’d been struck by lightning. There was never a question.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (NOV 02, 2010)

Michele Young-Stone’s debut novel, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors has, at its premise, the impact of lightning strikes on people and their loved ones. It is primarily about a young woman named Becca who comes from a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic mother and a philandering father. It is also about Buckley who loves his mother very much but is filled with guilt and remorse about his life.

The novel starts out with both Buckley and Becca as children. Their stories are told in alternate chapters. Becca is growing up in North Carolina with a mother who is passed out much of the time from booze and pills. Her father is cheating on her mother with the babysitter and just about anyone else he can lay his hands on. When Becca is about five years old, she gets struck by lightning in her driveway.  She lives to tell her parents who don’t believe her. But strange things begin to happen to her. Photographs of her have auras around her head, watches that she wears go backwards instead of forwards and she sees things that no one else is privy to, such as dead people. She also has premonitions. When Becca is a teenager, she is struck again by lightning, once again surviving. She also feels responsible for the death of her grandmother’s dog due to a lightning strike. She feels cursed and hunted by lightning. The only way she can get her demons out is through art, and she paints with a passion.

Buckley grows up in a desolate part of Arkansas that has not seen rain in six years. He is an outcast who is made fun of by other children. He has an obese mother that he loves very much but who embarrasses him. He also has a grandmother named Winter who is mean-hearted, not the type of grandmother a child would wish for. Buckley wishes for acceptance and a new life. His mother, Abigail, dreams of a life near the ocean. Abigail marries a local fundamentalist minister and Buckley’s life goes from bad to worse. The minister is critical, harsh, and nothing Buckley does can please him. On top of this, Abigail does not love her husband. Abigail packs up and she and Buckley head for Galveston, Texas where they make new lives for themselves by the ocean. By this time, Abigail has lost over 100 pounds because she’s been so unhappy in her marriage. In Galveston, they both are happy. Buckley is popular, he’s remade himself, and has a surrogate grandmother and father he loves. Abigail falls in love with a man who is supportive of Buckley. Unfortunately, Abigail is hit by lightning and dies.

After Abigail’s death, Buckley feels like he can no longer stay in Galveston. He feels guilt and shame for not saving his mother and he wants to suffer. For this reason, he heads back to Arkansas to live with the Minister and his Grandmother Winter. Life again is miserable for him but it is what he wants. Without his mother, he does not feel entitled to happiness.

The novel goes through the childhoods and young adult years of both Becca and Buckley. Becca heads to New York to go to art school and ends up having an affair with her art teacher. When he tries to dump her, she threatens to call his wife and spill the beans about the affair unless he lands her an art show. Becca is not one to mess with. She lands a solo show in a decent gallery and her work is mainly of fish who have been forced out of the sea after lightning strikes. By trying to paint lightning, she hopes to shed her own demons. Her show is successful. Meanwhile, after leaving college, Buckley heads for New York where he works in a restaurant washing dishes for eight years. His path crosses with Becca’s and they feel an immediate connection.

All his adult years, Buckley has been writing a book called The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors. He types his book on an old standard manual typewriter, not even electric. Pages of his book are interspersed between each chapter. The book gives advice on where most lightning strikes occur, ways to avoid lightning strikes, survivors’ guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the like. It is a helpful book for anyone who has ever been hit by lightning or knows someone who has been hit.

Because this is a debut novel, it has many of the characteristics that first novels often have – plot driven, stylistic inconsistencies, and not enough depth characterization. However, it holds the reader’s interest because of the topic and events that unfold. Young-Stone’s books is part magical realism and part narrative driven. I expect good work from her in the future and look forward to her next publication.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michele Young-Stone
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More unique premises:The Vanishing of Katharine Linden by Helen Grant The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

Bibliography:

• The Handbook of Lightning Strike Survivors (April 2010)

“She told him stories, too, sprawling ones…about a baby girl who disappeared from a home that did not want her, that had not given her a name, and who survived mysteriously until she was discovered, wild, birdlike, alone in the crown of a tree, and soared from there, or fell, depending on whom you asked and when you asked him. She told him about another woman, who, legend had it, met her future husband while she was his patient, in a wheelchair and a dull hospital gown, seducing him with her sheer intensity of spirit…”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 9, 2010)

The Invisible Mountain is a gem of a novel, grounded in actual history, with a dollop of magical realism, a splash of Dickensian coincidence, with some forbidden romance and political intrigue added to the mix.

The novel opens at the turn of the 20th century in a remote Uruguayan village, when a baby is spirited away and then reappears, a year later, unharmed in the branches of a tree. The young one is named Pajarita – translated to little bird – and the narrative, divided into three sections, sequentially focuses on her, her daughter Eva, and her granddaughter Salome.

All three are strong, impassioned women, who are capable of making bold choices in order to remain authentic and true to themselves. As the century opens up with more options for women, the choices become increasingly bolder. One of the beauties of The Invisible Mountain is that the prose accurately mirrors the country of Uruguay – from a time when gentle magic lit it from within to the near-present, when the country struggled under the harsh light of despotic politics.

Each woman is named fortuitously and fulfills the destiny of her name. Each in turn, embraces passion, poetry, and politics and becomes a vessel into which De Robertis pours decades of Uruguayan and Argentinian culture and family dynamics. The magical lyricism (think: Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez) is replaced with the intense and painful down-to-earth images of a country that has veered from its destiny and imprisoned those with the courage to speak out.

De Robertis writes: “This Uruguay: less innocent, smaller somehow, dwarfed by the looming world, more wounded, bleeding people out through its wounds, mourning the lost blood of the exiled and the dead and also those who simply shrugged and flew away, but also stronger for its wounds, mature, tenacious, wiser about what it can withstand, with a heart that beats and people who pulse through its pathways.” She could be speaking of her characters who also mature with their hearts joyfully beating despite their wounds.

In many ways, this is a love song to Uruguay: “El Rio de la Plata’s curving motion a woman weeping against a balcony rail, the red aroma of beef roasting at las brasas at the corner bar…Montevideo’s sleepy beauties and its daily return into her skin.” In equally powerful ways, it’s a celebration of women, particularly mother-daughter relationships and how they evolve and endure.

If there is a flaw in this novel, it is in the depiction of the male characters. The author was, at one time, a rape crisis counselor; perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the vast majority of men are depicted as abusive, inebriated, unfaithful, and downright violent. There is one notable exception, but that character’s story is told inorganically; from both an economic and psychological perspective, the character’s decision – and the results stemming from that decision – would be highly unlikely in the real world.

But as I closed the pages, I was left with the feeling that this multi-generational saga is assuredly destined to stand among the finest debut works, with a tone that is often elegiac and a theme that is truly of the ages.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 40 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; 1 Reprint edition (August 10, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carolina de Robertis
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Classic Latin American Magical Realism: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

Bibliography:

• The Invisible Mountain (August 2009)

“I had been friendly when I was eight; by twelve, fidgety and preoccupied. I kept up my schoolwork and threw a ball when I could. My mouth—always so active, alert—could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I hate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I’d use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively.

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (JUN 2, 2010)

Ever since the publication of her story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender has established herself as a writer of minimalist magic realism, a description that seems contradictory given the lush prose of the founding father of magic realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the emotional adjective-laden writing of popular American author Alice Hoffman. But Aimee Bender has claimed her niche as a writer who tells stories the way we pass on fairy tales to our children: spare plots that contain wondrous images and, ultimately, wisdom. Her plots center on one or two magic elements in an otherwise ordinary world. In her latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender focuses on narrator Rose, a girl who learns, to her horror, that she can taste the emotions of those who cooked or grew her food, whether that person is her desperate mother or the farmer who grew the organic lettuce in her salad. As Rose matures along with her “gift,” she learns about the peculiar history of her family and gains insight into her odd brother Joseph, who suffers, too, but in a wholly different manner.

Rose’s family is about as dysfunctional as a functional family can get. Her mother casts off a boring administrative job to follow a series of “hands-on experiments”—baking, growing strawberries, becoming a carpenter—designed to find the happiness she desperately craves, finding it at last in a secret affair that Rose discovers through the taste of dinner. Her father, a lawyer, hates hospitals so much that he refuses to be present at Rose’s and Joseph’s births or at any other family emergency that requires one. Joseph is the family’s reclusive genius and favorite child until it becomes apparent that his intelligence isn’t honed enough to escape from the oppression of the family; instead, he finds another way, with his own gift, an avenue that only Rose and his friend George can understand. Rose’s grandmother won’t visit them (and they don’t visit her), so she sends boxes of cast-off belongings that, on the surface, are junk, but which serve as a connection to her grandchildren. At the center of all this, Rose lives in quiet, underappreciated and largely unseen, a position which both hurts her and allows her to mature as Joseph cannot. What is most amazing is that Rose is able to detect emotions in a family that purports to have none.

The strength of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is not in its unusual premise or even its dissection of a crumbling family but rather in the way Rose’s emotions and insight build within the magic to illuminate the casual way we go about our lives without realizing how we might impact others. When Rose freaks out after tasting the unbearable sadness in her mother’s pie, her mother rushes Rose to the hospital instead of addressing and admitting the real problem: how her emotions are being passed on to her children. It’s no accident that the only characters who believe in Rose’s talents are well-adjusted individuals who want to be better at what they do.

Bender’s prose verges on the lyrical at times, with images that resonate without being flowery, but, for the most part, she writes in a straightforward manner, with a narrative voice that suggests a simplicity of purpose when the underlying currents are anything but. Rose is both storyteller and participant, and her voice reflects this dual role. While such a technique doesn’t create the intimacy expected of most first-person narratives, it does allow the extraordinary to fit into a more mundane reality. Rose is trustworthy, honest in her appraisals, the only one who could successfully guide the reader through the stages of her survival and the love she maintains, despite all, for her family.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 396 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Aimee Bender
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Willful Creatures

Bibliography:

• The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories (1998)
• An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000)
• Willful Creatures: Stories (August 2005)
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (June 2010)
• The Color Master: Stories (August 2013)

As Contributor:

• Land-Grant College Review (2003)
• Lit Riffs
• The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (June 2005)