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

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 5, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

Nonfiction:

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

“The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit. Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angle Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed. I know it is presumptuous to compare my small life to hers, but I have reason to believe she wouldn’t mind; I will get to that. Right now it’s enough to say that despite everything that happened that summer, I remain tender toward the bees.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (JAN 20, 2014)

Fourteen year-old Lily Melissa Owens has been a motherless child for ten years now. It fills her with anguish to think that she, at age four, had a hand in the accidental shooting death of Deborah Fontanel Owens, her own mother. Lily’s life has been shaped around this incident, and she has never ceased to yearn for her mother, (for a mother’s love), although her memories of the actual woman have been blurred by time. In fact, Lily has very little memory of that dark day’s events, and is totally dependent on her miserable, sadistic father, T. Ray Owens, for any and all accounts of her mom. The only person who shows her any affection is Rosaleen, a black peach-picker T. Ray brought in from the fields to care for his child.

At fourteen, Lily is extremely bright, loves to read and has a talent for writing. One of her teachers has encouraged her to think about a college education, although her father tells her she will be lucky to go to beauty school. On July 4, 1964, Lily’s birthday, she walks Rosaleen to town so the black woman can register to vote. President Lyndon B. Johnson just signed into effect the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Rosaleen feels pride in doing her civic duty, as does Lily in accompanying her. The two are harassed by three white men, one of whom is the biggest racist in town. When Rosaleen tries to defend herself, she and Lily are thrown in jail. In reality, back then in the American South, given what Rosaleen did to defend herself, and to whom she did it, she very well could have been beaten to death on the spot. T. Ray picks up his daughter almost immediately, and painfully punishes the girl. She manages to escape, though, and to break Rosaleen out of the hospital where she is recovering from her afternoon’s encounter with Jim Crowe.

One of the few mementoes Lily has of her mother is a small picture of a black Madonna with the words, Tiburon, S. C. on the back. Lily has saved some money from selling peaches at her father’s roadside stand, and is certain that if she and Rosaleen can reach Tiburon, she will find out about her Momma, and they will somehow be safe. And, sure enough, in Tiburon, S. C. Lily finds a connection between her Madonna picture and a trio of fairy godmother-like women – the calendar sisters May, June, and August Boatwright. These black spinster sisters live in a Pepto-Bismol pink-colored house, on a large tract of land outside of town. They keep bees, sell honey and other bee by-products, and their label, the Black Madonna Honey Company, is the same as the picture keepsake that Lily has from her mother. It is here that Lily learns, among many things, that “without a queen, the hive will die.” She understands that she must replace her own queen, her dead mother, or she will shrivel-up inside.

August Boatwright, Mother Figure, (with capital letters!), earth mother, and Madonna all-in-one, takes Lily and Rosaleen in without question, gives them jobs and a home – at least temporarily, until they can live and grow in an environment which will allow them to thrive. And along the way Lily will learn some basic truths, common for both bees and people.

All kinds of neat tidbits and facts about bees, their lives, habits, care, beekeeping in general, and honey production are woven throughout the book, and the details are fascinating. Each chapter is headed with a quotation about bees. However, as important and interesting as bees are as themes in The Secret Life Of Bees, sometimes the narrative is too sweet and sugary for my taste.

Sue Monk Kidd writes beautifully, lyrically, about a southern white girl’s unusual coming of age. However, the novel reads, frequently, like fantasy fiction. Now, I enjoy a beautiful story, especially when the author is as talented as this one, but I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, and the history I recollect is far different from this book’s version. I clearly remember what the times were like when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and when Schwerner, Cheney & Goodman were murdered in Mississippi, and when Ms. Fanny Lou Hamer challenged white domination of the Mississippi Democratic Party. I was at the Democratic Convention in 1964 in Atlantic City, as a student delegate, when Ms. Hamer and her colleagues entered Convention Hall. Sue Monk Kidd’s bucolic Sylvan, South Carolina, and the little town of Tiburon, are poetic, magical places – in spite of rampant racism. One character is badly beaten, but not killed – she is actually able to walk out of the hospital within 24 hours. Another is unjustly jailed, but set free after a day or so – and not harmed? A strange white girl just moves in with a family of black women, in rural SC, and no one makes a helluva hullabaloo? And I shudder to think of a white teenage girl driving around in a car, in the front seat, with a black teenage male – in 1964 South Carolina. This would not be believable in many northern cities at the time – but it was unthinkable in the south. That poor guy would have never made it to the jailhouse alive!!

So let me stop here and say, that while I enjoyed reading this book, with its rich narrative and characters, it does read like a fairy tale. The hideous racism and violence of life in the US, north and south, is not depicted realistically in comparison to the beautiful, pastoral setting and peace of life with the Boatwright women. I do hope readers realize that much poetic licence has been taken here in terms of what this difficult period was like in US history.

It’s interesting to note, I think, that Lily’s ideal home, almost heaven, is depicted as being among black women. There used to be many white children, in the south, (and in the north), during the 1960’s and before, who received a primary source of love and care from black women, hired to work for their families. I am sure this warm, loving fantasy is not uncommon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,862 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking; 1st edition (October 10, 2002)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sue Monk Kidd
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels to remind us of the way it was in the 1960s: The Help by Kathryn Stockett Train, Paper Boy and Paris Trout by Pete Dexter Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas Leaving by Richard Dry

Bibliography:

• The Secret Life of Bees (2002)
• The Mermaid Chair (2005)
• The Invention of Wings (February 2014)

Nonfiction:

• God’s Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved (1987)
• When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (1991)
• The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996)
• Firstlight: The Early Inspirational Writings (2007)
• Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story (2009)

Movies from books:

• The Secret Life of Bees (2008)

“She frightened me at every dawn the summer I stayed with her. She’d sit on the edge of her bed, long hair down, down to the floor and shaking as she brushed and brushed, shadows ebbing from the room and early light flowing in through both windows. Her hair was as long as her story and she couldn’t walk when her hair was not woven into dense braids and pinned around and atop her head. Otherwise her hair dragged the floor like the train of a medieval gown and she had to gather it into a sheaf and coil it about her forearm several times to walk the floor without stepping on herself. She’d been born a farm girl, then served as a maid for half a century, so she couldn’t sleep past dawn to win a bet…”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (DEC 21, 2013)

The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell is a small book but reads like a tome, with such literate and beautiful imagery that I was enthralled. The book centers around the mystery of the explosion at Arbor Dance Hall in 1929. The explosion killed 42 people, many unrecognizable in death with their bodies broken up or burned beyond recognition. Alma Dunahew lost her sister Ruby in the explosion and for years has been trying to discover the answer to what happened. Those years have been hard on her with several of them spent at the Work Farm in West Table, Missouri, due to her psychic breakdown caused by rage and grief. Many of the town’s most wealthy citizens want to put the truth of the explosion to the side and no one has ever been apprehended for the crime. They look at Alma’s ramblings about the explosion as words from a crazy person. The magnitude of the explosion was enormous.

“Just as full darkness fell those happy sounds heard in the surviving house suddenly became a nightmare chorus of pleas, cries of terror, screams as the flames neared crackling and bricks returned tumbling from the heavens and stout beams crushed those souls knocked to the ground. Walls shook and shuddered for a mile around and the boom was heard faintly in the next county south and painfully by everyone in the town limits.”

One summer in 1965, Alma’s young grandson Alec comes to visit her. It is to him that she spills the story of the dance hall and her theory about what happened that night. Going back and forth in time, the novel gives the reader vignettes about those who were killed in the dance hall explosion along with the story of Ruby, Alma’s sister. Ruby was a great flirt and what was called in those days a loose woman. She would love them and leave them until she found a real love with the banker, Arthur Glencross. Glencross was married and Alma worked as a maid for the Glencross family. She worked very hard to hide Arthur’s affair from his wife Corrine by carefully washing his clothing to get out smells and stains that would serve as evidence of his affair with Ruby. After Ruby’s death, Alma hated Arthur and this was evident in her actions.

Was Arthur responsible for the explosion? Or, could it have been the preacher Isaiah Willard who spoke of death and damnation to those who danced? He believed that “the easiest portals to the soul through which demons might enter was that opened by dancing feet. Evil music, evil feet, salacious sliding and the disgusting embraces dancing excused provided an avenue of damnation that could readily be seen and blockaded” He was heard to say of the Arbor Dance Hall during that summer, “I’ll blow this place to Kingdom soon and drop those sinners into the boiling patch – see how they dance then.” What about the hobos hanging around town? Those passing through with bad intentions? Someone with a grudge against one of the dancers? Who was it? Alma thinks she knows and tells her story to Alec.

Of the forty-two killed in the explosion, only twenty-eight were whole enough so that graves could be made for them. Most of them were not identified. The rest were parts buried in a pit. Alma’s grief was such that she “touched all twenty-eight and kissed them each, kneeling to kiss the fresh black paint between her spread aching fingers, said the same words to accompany every kiss because there was no way to know which box of wood held Ruby, or if she rested in only one, had not been separated into parts by crushing or flames and interred in two or three, so she treated every box as though her sister was inside in parts or whole and cried to the last.”

Woodrell’s style of writing is unique, sounding like I’d imagine the tenor of speech spoken in the Ozarks. At times it’s a difficult book because of the writing style and the subject matter. It is, however, stunning and has left me with a deep and abiding appreciation for this author’s work. I thank him for sharing his talent and vision with readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 117 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Daniell Woodrell
EXTRAS:	Interview  and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Outlaw Album The Bayou Trilogy

Bibliography:

• Under the Bright Lights (1986) *
• Woe to Live On (1987; 2012)
• Muscle for the Wing (1988) *
• The Ones You Do (1992) *
• Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir (1996; 2012)
• Tomato Red (1998; 2012)
• The Death of Sweet Mister (2001; 2012)
• Winter’s Bone (2006)
• The Outlaw Album: Stories (2011)
• The Maid’s Version (September 2013)

*The Bayou Trilogy (April 2011)

Movies from Books:

• Ride with the Devil (1999) (adapted from Woe to Live On)
• Winter’s Bone (2010)

“I can always tell if a broad is lying to me. I spent a lot of years honing this bullshit detector.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 9, 2011)

In the 1960s, Mickey Spillane began to write The Consummata–a follow-up to The Delta Factor, the novel which introduced super-crook Morgan the Raider. After a series of disappointments with the Delta Factor film, Spillane stopped work on the unfinished The Consummata manuscript. Twenty years ago, he gave the manuscript to long-term friend, collaborator, and creative heir, Max Allan Collins. Since the death of Spillane in 2006, Collins has devoted himself to finishing the many Spillane projects left behind. So far fans have seen a number of publications, including Dead Street, The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang, and Kiss Her Goodbye. Now comes The Consummata–the long awaited sequel to The Delta Factor. The appearance of the sequel is reason enough to celebrate, but the novel’s publication also heralds the autumn return of Hard Case Crime following a short hiatus.

The Consummata finds Morgan the Raider on the run in Miami’s Little Havana and being chased by “federal suits” teamed with “local fuzz” who think he has 40 million dollars in stolen funds. With no place to hide, the chase seems to be coming to its inevitable conclusion, but suddenly Morgan finds himself snatched and hidden from the feds by some of Little Havana’s Cuban community. As Morgan hangs out with the Cubans waiting for the heat to cool down, he learns that the exiles managed to scrape together a fund of $75,000 to assist their relatives back in Cuba. Double agent Jaimie Halaquez wormed his way into the Little Havana exile community, and once he gained their trust, he lifted the dough. Morgan, grateful for the Cubans’ help, agrees to track down Halaquez and get the money back.

Easier said than done….

Halaquez, as it turns out, is “an S&M freak,” and this leads Morgan on the hunt for La Consummata, a legendary dominatrix who is rumored to be “setting up shop in Miami:”

“Sometimes she works alone, by appointment through intermediaries. Other times she has set up a location with other young women trained in the arts of sado-masochism. And, again, clients are by referral only. She has turned up in every major city in America and not a few in Europe. Her clients, they say, are among the most rich and powerful men in business and government. If she exists.”

“You don’t even know if she exists?”

“She is a rumor. A wisp of smoke. A legend. A dream. Lovely, a vision in black leather, they say….”

Of course, it’s inevitable that La Consummata and Morgan meet and tangle.

The Consummata is unabashedly pulp, so this is fast-paced action with not a lot of down-time. The story is set in the 60s, so expect the women to be sexy babes and the men (Morgan specifically) to be macho. This is a sequel novel, and for those who didn’t read The Delta Factor, The Consummata plays catch-up for approximately one chapter. Naturally, since the action hits the notorious bordellos of Miami and includes some of its working women, the book includes sex which is told from a male fantasy perspective. Overall, however, the emphasis is on action, reaction, and the recovery of stolen money.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hard Case Crime (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mickey Spillaine and Max Allan Collins
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins Something’s Down There by Mickey Spillaine And by both authors together: Dead Street

Bibliography:

Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins:

• Dead Street (2007)
• The Goliath Bone (2008)
• The Big Bang ( 2010)
• Kiss Her Goodbye (May 2011)
• The Consummata (October 2011)

“It was time it happened, the determination that this should never be allowed to repeat itself, the hatred and the bitterness of not being able to decide whether to thrust a knife in her or start to weep so that she could console me like a second Linda, for I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 28, 2011)

Navigating that shaky bridge between childhood and adulthood is never easy, particularly in 1961 – a time when “men became boys and housewives women,” a year when Yuri Gargarin is poised to conquer space and when the world is on the cusp of change.

Into this moment of time, Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen shines a laser light on young Finn and his mother Gerd, who live in the projects of Oslo. Fate has not been kind to them: Gerd’s husband, a crane operator, divorced her and then died in an accident, leaving the family in a financially precarious position. To make ends meet, she works in a shoe store and runs an ad for a lodger for extra money.

To complicate the situation, Finn’s father’s second wife – a now-widowed drug addict – views the ad and unloads on the family Finn’s half-sister, Linda – a young girl who appears to have mysterious problems that are only gradually revealed. Figuratively, this “poor mite got off the Grorud bus one dark November day with an atomic bomb in a small light blue suitcase and turned our lives upside down.”

Linda becomes the mirror in which Gerd, Finn, and others (including the lodger Kristian) eventually define themselves. Gerd, who identifies strongly with Linda, is transported back to an abusive childhood and views herself in the little girl. Finn — who is the first-person narrator — battles jealousy, bewilderment, and eventually, stirrings of love as he defends Linda from the Norwegian educational system and the school bullies. He reminisces: “Linda was not of this world, one day I would come to understand this – she was a Martian come down to earth to speak in tongues to heathens, to speak French to Norwegians and Russian to Americans. She was destiny, beauty and a catastrophe. A bit of everything. Mother’s mirror and Mother’s childhood. All over again.”

Not unlike his regional compatriot, Per Petterson, Roy Jacobsen is (as one publication stated about the latter), “a master at writing the spaces between people.” He succinctly and beautifully captures the incomprehension of a young boy who is trying to make sense of the adult world and his place within it. The increasing bond between the boy and his accidental sister is explored painstakingly and is exquisitely poignant. The portrayal of Linda’s evolution to her new family is genuinely heartrendering.

A pedestrian and at times downright awkward translation does not serve the stream of consciousness sections well. In the best translations (such as the talented Ann Born’s translation of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses), the reader loses sight that the book is a translation. It takes a little while to get into the cadence and the rhythm.

But the authenticity of Roy Jacobsen’s vision wins out with its universal themes: how others become gifts in our lives, unveiling us, and the lengths we go to preserve relationships with those we love. Or, in the words of the author, “Something happens to you when someone spots you – you see yourself from the outside, your own peculiar strangeness, that which is only you and moves in only you, but which nonetheless you have not known…” This quiet book is a hopeful testimony to transformative change.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Roy Jacobsen
EXTRAS:	Blog with all sorts of Roy Jacobsen info
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

Partial Bibliography (translated):

• The New Water (1987; 1997 in English)
• The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles (2005; 2009 in English)
• Child Wonder (2009; September 2011 in English)

“Her eyes came open. Fully open. But she could no longer see the Abyssinian mountain that the Sabbath sun had turned like fire…
She could no longer see anything. She was blind.
For a long and disconcerting moment, she did not know who she was or where she was.  Only five to eight seconds later did she begin to realize that she had been dreaming.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (SEP 10, 2011)

Makeda is the title character of Randall Robinson’s astounding, thought provoking, and highly engaging novel. A blind retired “laundress,” Makeda’s life is anchored in her tiny, often sun-filled, parlour in Richmond, Virginia. Her modest circumstances, after a life of hardship, stand in stark contrast to her appearance and demeanor: at home, at church and in the market, she is usually clad in richly embroidered beautiful African gowns and she radiates wisdom and emotional strength, instilling respect wherever she goes. Some unknown visitors leave gifts for her, or speak to her as if she were somebody else…

Often, when she lifts her unseeing eyes toward the sun, her posture and diction change: she appears to have moved from one instant to the next – like a time traveller – into a far away place. She dreams “in pictures – color pictures, pictures of people, pictures of odd places – though she had never in her life seen a human soul…” she tells Gray, her youngest grandson, later. Recalling her dreams in great detail, she will only allow Gray, her “spirit child,” to share her secrets. “I remember at that point she said to me: Things are almost never what you, with your two eyes, can see them being. Sometimes they are less, but most of the time they are more. Worlds and worlds more, son.”

Makeda’s dreams, the “special ones,” take her to different places in Africa, regions that all have a special spiritual connection to African-American history. The dream stories are so vividly told, and, with each recurrence, grow in such intricate detail, that they pull the reader into those past lives just as much as Gray, letting us forget that it may be “just a dream.” Or is it? Is there more to it? Makeda knows where she has been and who she is in her dreams; did these places really exist at some time in the past? Is there surviving evidence of them today? Why those places and not others? What are the connections of those people to her own life and time? Many questions occupy her mind. Her curiosity grows to the point that she, after warning her grandson not to share his knowledge with anybody, instructs him to investigate any factual bases of what she tells him. Especially the amazing story of the Dogon people in Mali, West Africa, fascinates both: Dogon cosmology claims to have known about Sirius and his three stars hundreds or, maybe, thousands of years before science could prove their claim. Gray, by then a college student, will have to find a way to make this journey for his grandmother, and as it turns out, also for himself.

Robinson, recognized for his extensive non-fiction writing on topics that range from African-American socio-politics to international human rights, ventures with Makeda beyond any confines of a more traditional novel. The very moving account of Gray’s coming-of-age journey, the depiction of his close ties to his grandmother, set against the backdrop of the family’s difficult circumstances in nineteen fifties and sixties, represent by themselves a richly rewarding story. Yet, Makeda’s dream travels are more than a key for Gray’s own journey in search for identity and, eventual, love. They are like virtual spiritual doors that Robinson opens that lead us into his multi-layered vision of a broad-based African-American identity that, while recognizing its contemporary challenges, is intimately connecting it back to its African roots and its African historical and spiritual heritage.

To expand on his theme, the author introduces fictional and existing expert voices that speak to the young people in Gray’s college environment. For many students and readers, these are provocative and challenging propositions. For Gray, through the many talks with his grandmother, they are, more than anything, confirmation of his learning and evolving vision of his own role in life.

Robinson is an exquisite writer and stylist who brings the different narrative strands and themes harmoniously together and into one fascinating and enriching reading experience. I want to add on a personal level, that I found Robinson’s choices for Makeda’s “dream places and times” highly relevant for the themes of the novel. For me, they have been meaningful also as they reminded me of my own journeys of discovery into Africa and, especially of my very own very similar experience in Mali’s Dogon region.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	OpenLens; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Randall Robinson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker

Bibliography:

• Makeda (August 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (1998)
• The Debt: What America Owes the Blacks (2000)
• The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other (DATE)
• Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land (2004)
• An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (2007)

“When Rose, voice quivering, told Washington Harold what she’d seen, he said it didn’t do to focus on what might have happened, better to rejoice at a fortunate result. Most deaths, he opined, were accidental, even the vicious ones.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  AUG 31, 2011)

The late Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, is better known in Britain than over here. The winner of the Whitbread Award, and five times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000, joining AS Byatt and preceding Margaret Drabble. She published sixteen novels over the course of her life, and was working on her seventeenth, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress at the time of her death. Cast in a clear trajectory heading for an unmistakable conclusion, it does not feel unfinished, though the enigmatic compression which I gather is typical of all her books may perhaps be a little more enigmatic than usual.

This is a road trip novel, reflecting a journey across America that Bainbridge herself made in 1968, but this is a nightmare America where nothing comes quite into focus. A young Englishwoman named Rose, a dental receptionist, arrives from London with a few items in a suitcase and an absurdly small amount of money. Her ticket has been paid for by a man she knows as Washington Harold (though he actually lives in Baltimore), who obviously expects a gratifying holiday liaison. But Rose is not as he expected, either in appearance or behavior. She has come to America to reconnect with someone referred to only as Dr. Wheeler, who had somehow been very important to Rose during her adolescence. Harold, it appears, also wants to find Wheeler, though for very different motives which he keeps hidden at first. But Wheeler himself is elusive, both in character and location. At times he seems some kind of preacher or guru; at times a political operative; sometimes even a revolutionary. He never stays in one place for very long. Rose and Harold’s search takes them in a camper from Washington to upstate New York, then across the country to Malibu and finally Los Angeles.

The early summer of 1968 was a troubled time. The Vietnam War was at its height. Rose arrives in a Baltimore still seething from the race riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King; she will arrive in Los Angeles the day that Robert Kennedy is killed. In between, Rose and Harold will be exposed to several moments of random violence themselves, and news will come through of the attempted shooting of Andy Warhol in New York: “Rose, tone truculent, asked him why Yanks kept shooting each other; was it because they were all allowed to own guns? It was obvious she’d never heard of Warhol.” Indeed, she is neither well educated nor worldly wise. But we do find out a little more about her traumatic past and discover that, despite her flirtations with religion, she is not quite as innocent as she might appear. As Harold drops in on former friends, we find out a little more about his life also, with hints about why he is so determined to track down the mysterious Dr. Wheeler.

The novel comes to a poignant focus at the end, but few of the mysteries are completely cleared up; I suspect they were never meant to be. Despite much detail about driving, diners, campsites, and roadside restrooms (and extended play on the different American and British expectations for personal hygiene), there is a slight layer of unreality to the whole story; this is America as viewed through a B-movie lens. But in some respects America IS a B movie, and 1968 was a nightmare from which the country has never fully woken. I wish I could be sure that this is Bainbridge’s point.

When I look back and see that none of her American characters (Wheeler, Harold, and all his friends) can be placed unambiguously as to socio-economic status, I wish I could be sure that this was deliberate obfuscation rather than ignorance. I admit to having been thrown for a loop early on, when very little of Rose’s journey seemed to fit. How could she work four hours in the dentist’s office before taking the bus to Heathrow for her transatlantic flight? At what airport would she walk through the rain straight from the plane to the arrivals lounge? I live in Baltimore, and know that no sensible route from there to Washington would take three hours and approach the capital from the West. Were these errors, or deliberate choices to knock the reader off balance? Eventually, I gave in to them and spent the rest of the book in the waking dream that Bainbridge presumably intended. But the fact that this is a posthumous novel — perhaps unfinished, perhaps inadequately edited — raises unfortunate doubts in addition to those so magnificently planted by the author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page Beryl Bainbridge
EXTRAS:	Man Booker Bridesmaid
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More stories of America from foreign travelers: Parrot and Oliver in America by Peter Carey Fanny by Edmund White

Bibliography:

• A Weekend with Claud (1967; 1979)
• Another Part of the Wood (1968; 1979)
• Harriet Said… (1972)
• The Dressmaker (1973)
• The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)
• Sweet William (1975)
• A Quiet Life (1976)
• Injury Time (1977) 
• Young Adolf (1978)
• Winter Garden (1980)
• Watson’s Apology (1984)
• An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)
• The Birthday Boys (1991)
• Every Man for Himself (1996) 
• Master Georgie (1998)
• According to Queeney (2001)
• The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (August 2011)

“In his mid-forties, he feels he’s come to a pretty good place in his life, and he couldn’t have got there if he hadn’t been able to survive some of his earlier selves, forgiving, maybe, but also forgetting, even erasing. From his present vantage point, it isn’t exactly magnanimity he feels toward the passionate but confused graduate student he’d been twenty years ago. From that time onward he’s been acutely aware of the importance of chance in the affairs of human beings, and he hopes it’s given him a better understanding of people who are down on their own luck. But what he feels toward the person he’d been then is mostly relief that he’s been able to move beyond him.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 1, 2011)

It’s 1968 and Alan Ripley is a graduate student. He is definitely a man of his era, tuning in, turning on and, to some extent, dropping out. He is attending a party and the posters on the wall are of Dylan, Che and Stokely. “Like the saints in old churches, Alan thinks, the measure of our dreams and aspirations, our doubts about ourselves.” At this party, Alan meets Lily, a true revolutionary who wants to provide guns to oppressed black people.

The problem is how to get the guns. Alan is attracted more to Lily and her drugs than to her politics but he goes along with her as Lily machinates a caper designed to provide weapons to the oppressed. The idea is that some students, along with two ex-cons, will rob a gun store and give all the guns to the oppressed black population. Alan agrees to participate as a watchman. He will be in the car and be a spotter for anything suspicious going on. On the day of the heist, however, Alan feels sick and he ends up in the hospital getting his appendix out. A man named Rory takes Alan’s place. The caper fails as an off-duty policeman sees the suspicious goings on and gunfire erupts. One man is killed and the policeman is injured. Rory gets caught by the police and spends fifteen years in jail. The heist is known as the Lyletown Five, after the five participants.

Despite being caught by the police, Rory never gave them Alan’s name though he did give the police other information including the names of the other participants. Alan has always been thankful that he hasn’t been implicated in this debacle though he is not sure why Rory spared him. He never visits Rory in jail as they really didn’t know each other very well.

Fast forward to 1988, “After Lyletown.” Right after the caper, Alan spent some time in solitude in Vermont and later decided to study law. Alan becomes a successful attorney near Boston. He is a partner in a law firm that represents a housing project and Alan gets to work with both renters and tenants. He has a wife and son and is happy. He plays tennis, has a weekend home in Connecticut and is living the good life. Out of the blue he gets a phone call from Rory. Alan is scared, not knowing what Rory wants. Is it blackmail, money, just catching up, or what? He agrees to meet Rory for lunch.

Rory tells him a bit about his time in jail and informs Alan that the other Lyletown Five, have never been seen or heard from again. There are rumors that one of them died in a car crash and that Lily owns and runs a bakery in Washington. Rory does ask for some money but it’s for a “business venture” and he assures Alan he will pay him back with interest.

The novel examines who we are now and who we were in the past. Which one of our selves is the real one or are all our selves real, past and present? The parts of the book that deal with Alan and Rory are psychologically astute and excellent reading. The book flounders some in the middle when it takes a turn and focuses on Alan’s legal work which is not really all that relevant to the book.

The language is crisp and the dialogue right on. I found myself back in the sixties remembering C.O.R.E., SDS, the Weathermen and other political movements. Images of Timothy Leary popped into my head and I remember the immense allure of “flower power,” trying to make real change in the government and protesting the war in Vietnam. K.C. Frederick gets all of this along with the picture of baby boomers – their paths to the present and their lives in the past.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (July 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	K.C. Frederick
EXTRAS:	Award winning author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Backward-Facing Man by Don Silver The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell

Bibliography:

• Country of Memory (1998)
• The Fourteenth Day (2000)
• Accomplices (2003)
• Inland (2006)
• After Lyletown (July 2011)

“He wanted to work when other people worked, go out to dinner at restaurants that proclaimed their names in fancy gold script above the entrance and used starched white tablecloths and heavy silverware; he wanted to go to the theater and he wanted to ride in cabs as a passenger.   Most of all he wanted to go to bed when it was actually dark outside, and make love to a beautiful woman, more than one even, who wouldn’t put up with a man that arrived at seven in the morning and slept until one.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 14, 2011)

Family sagas have long been a staple among American best-sellers; the examples are wide and vast. The very predictability of the family saga genre promises an absorbing yet familiar reading experience: the once-poor yet highly attractive and charismatic main character who overcomes all kinds of adversities, goes through heartbreak and scandal, and then emerges older, wiser, and in most cases, wealthier than before (or at the very least, with enough knowledge to become wealthier).

Sharon Pomerantz mines this territory once more with Rich Boy, a novel infused with a heavy dose of melodrama combined with the realism of growing up American and Jewish in the pivotal years of the 60s through the 80s.

Robert Vishniak is a character on the rise. We meet him when he is a pre-teen, pickpocketing his rich relative’s wallet so that his father will not have to experience the shame of losing at a card game. The stage is set: we know he is resourceful and will do whatever it takes to succeed.

In the years ahead, Robert will show his resourcefulness in many ways: with his well-heeled college roommate who harbors a “shameful” (in some eyes) secret, with his unprecedented rise in his chosen law firm, with his choice of stunning women (all of whom are inevitably drop-dead gorgeous, sexually aggressive, and somewhat manipulative). He will also experience adversity with his first true love – Gwendolyn, an extremely fragile, socially conscious, vulnerable, and yes, gorgeous and doomed young woman.

Sharon Pomerantz is at her best when she delves into an exploration of Jewish-American life in the 1960s-1980s: the one-time outsiders assimilating and taking their deserved place within the social hierarchy. The clash between the impoverished and frugal world that Robert shares with his birth family and the opportunities that are opening themselves for him is crisply done. Here is Robert, reflecting on the privileged life he shares with his moneyed wife and their young daughter:

“Why now, when his daughter never needed to step inside a subway, and every major possession they owned came with insurance and an alarm, why now did he feel so nervous, as if he had woken up in the wrong life – a life lived from car windows and behind locked doors?”

The paranoia of the Nixon and Vietnam years, the real estate and commodities boom and bust, the drug culture and over-the-top parties of the affluent, the wheeling-dealing of law firms – all this is handled with aplomb. Less successfully done is the focus on his Robert’s many relationships. The women are mostly caricatures: the self-destructive and forever-remembered first love, the cold and moneyed wife, the young-and-genuine actress on the cusp of discovery…as readers, we’ve met these women before.

Still, this is a particularly American story – a Jewish-American story – of the class divides between rich and poor, rich and obscenely rich. It’s a story of  “a family built for the 1970s.” Those who like straightforward, old-fashioned, rags-to-riches sagas will likely enjoy Rich Boy a great deal.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve (July 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sharon Pomerantz
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• Rich Boy (August 2010)

“The subject of freedom begs the question of who is ‘free’ and at what cost—and includes the whole history of oppression and the whole history of the oppressor.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JUN 27, 2011)

Carolyn Cooke is a master of the short story form—she won the O. Henry Award for her collection, The Bostons. Cooke’s debut novel, Daughters of the Revolution, is also set in New England in the late 60’s, in a town called Cape Wilde.

The epicenter of much of the action, even if it might not seem so at first, is the Goode School—a prep school for boys. Principal Goddard Byrd, known simply as “God,” is absolutely against allowing co-education in his school. “Over my dead body” is his constant refrain when asked about it.

Despite all resistance the winds of change do sweep over the Goode School as well and a girl is admitted through a clerical mistake. As it turns out, the girl Carole, is not just at a disadvantage because of her gender—she is also black. Through Carole, Cooke introduces issues of segregation and gender equality and it is to her ample credit, that none of these weighty issues ever feels forced or contrived.

A whole host of powerful women populate the novel. Much of Carole’s story is told through the eyes of a girl several years her junior, EV. As the book progresses, EV grows too and in the late ‘60s, when Carole joins the Goode School, EV and her mother Mei-Mei, are living with “God.” The young and impressionable EV watches Carole’s situation unfold from a distance and she sees the effect it has not just on Carole but also on God.

Incidentally, EV is the daughter of Heck Hellman, a “Goode” boy once held as an example of a model student by God. Early in the novel, Hellman drowns when on a swim with another old friend from the school, Archer Rebozos. As the narrative moves along, Cooke clearly outlines the relationships between the varied cast of characters.

Daughters of the Revolution is a wonderful read—succinct and precise, not a word out of place. For instance, one of the characters is described as “fully formed, the clay still damp.” Cooke treats material that is potentially ripe for melodrama with grace. It is often said that it is hard to make the transition from a short-story writer to that of a novelist. While Cooke has succeeded in moving to a narrative that is more broad in its scope, the only shortcoming in her novel is that it often leaves just a little too much unsaid. The relationship between EV and Carole for example, leaves much room for expansion. It would have been nice to see Cooke draw the line from Carole’s brave foray into unknown waters and its effects on the young EV, much more directly.

Moby Dick makes brief cameo appearances here and one wonders how much Cooke herself is influenced by the themes of fate, courage and racism prevalent in that American classic. Carole once compares herself to the whale and tells God that just as the whale is a projection of man’s fears, she too is a manifestation of God’s.

As for God, “he survived the Great Depression, the crisis of modernism, civil rights, integration, McCarthy, the Bay of Pigs, the 1960s, black power, the sexual revolution, Vietnam and the Cold War,” Cooke writes of him. Cooke’s choice of the word “survived” is careful and deliberate. God did indeed only survive the historic events that shaped the country’s history. While social mores all around them were being rewritten, people like God could do nothing more than bury their heads in the sand and hope it all blew away. That God cuts a sympathy-inducing figure nevertheless, speaks volumes about Cooke’s abilities.

The women though have the last word. At one point in the novel, Mrs. Graves, God’s secretary, reminds him that he is not the only spectator to world events. “The story of the century—well, others have been there too,” she says. In her own subtle way, she puts him in his place. And it’s hard not to cheer when she does.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carolyn Cooke
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: When Everything Changed by Gail Collins

Bibliography:

• The Bostons: Stories (2001
• Daughters of the Revolution (June 2011)