MostlyFiction Book Reviews » 2012 PB Release We Love to Read! Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:15:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami /2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/ /2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:37:21 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=22307 Book Quote:

“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (DEC 31, 2011)

Haruki Murakami doesn’t lend himself to easy categorization. Though his prose is spare, almost styleless, it’s more supple than muscular, and though his stories are often occupied with mundane domesticities, they’re also often founded in the surreal. It’s no surprise, then, that Murakami’s long-awaited latest, 1Q84, isn’t easy to shelf –it’s at home among either fantasy, thriller or hard-boiled noir – but one thing’s for sure: this book is grotesquely Murakami. That is, quiet domesticity punctuates adventures tenuously connected to reality, and yet for all its faults – and some have argued there are many – this is a book that haunts you long after you’re done, a book that, like a jealous lover, won’t let you move on.

For all its parallel worlds and magical creatures, for all its anonymous sex and ruthless violence, this is a book about love. The lovers in question, Tengo and Aomame, haven’t seen or spoken to each other in almost 20 years. In fact, they may have never spoken at all. Their shared history is limited to a 5th grade incident during which a ten-year-old Aomame reached for Tengo’s hand – and stilled his soul. But for Tengo, a popular athlete and academic star, to befriend Aomame, a religious freak who stands up and shouts a version of the Lord’s Prayer before she eats lunch, would’ve been social suicide. Aomame transfers schools before Tengo acknowledges to himself what she means to him.

Twenty years pass – it’s 1984 – and Tengo, considered a math prodigy, has frittered away his promise: he teaches math at a Tokyo cram school while moonlighting as a novelist. Though he has weekly sex with a married girlfriend, he still wonders about Aomame.

Disowned by her family for breaking with their church, the Society of Witnesses, Aomame is a lone-wolf. She works as a fitness instructor at a swanky Tokyo gym and although she trolls for wild one-night stands, her heart, after all these years, still belongs to Tengo. As it turns out, she moonlights too –as an assassin. Under the auspices of a wealthy and mysterious dowager, Aomame, with a method of her own invention, kills wife-beaters and rapists.

The Tengo-Aomame attachment – their love itself – is absurd, and this absurdity calls into existence a strange alternative world – 1Q84, the world with a question mark – with a second, “moss-green” moon. Ostensibly, Aomame enters this alternate world, like Alice down the rabbit hole, when she escapes a gridlocked Metropolitan expressway by climbing down an emergency stairwell. But it’s Tengo, in ghost-writing the best-seller, Air Chryaslis, or perhaps in writing a novel of his own, that opens that portal. What has brought Tengo into 1Q84 isn’t entirely clear – although his skill as a storyteller is a factor – but, unbeknownst to the other, both are trapped in 1Q84, a world that becomes increasingly perilous.

When Komatsu, Tengo’s editor, suggests Tengo rewrite a manuscript submission, a fantastical, but compelling story, told in substandard prose, Tengo is hesitant. The author, a strange and beautiful 17-year old girl, who goes by the name of Fuka-Eri, insists that her story, a tale about Little People who emerge from the mouth of a goat and weave wombs out of strands of reality, is true. The Little People use these wombs, or air chrysalises, to gestate doubles, or dohtas. The dohtas act like antennas of sorts, receivers for the perceivers of “the voice.” Fuka-Eri has no literary ambitions and gives Tengo permission to rewrite her work.

But when Air Chrysalis is a runaway hit, a powerful and mysterious cult, Sakigake, is angered. Although most people read the book as fantasy, Sakigake maintains that Fuka-Eri, the estranged daughter of their mysterious Leader, has revealed sacred truths not meant for outsiders. It seems they’ll stop at nothing to halt publication, but when their Leader is found dead, Sakigake must devote itself to finding his murderer.

As it turns out, the Leader is suspected of raping pre-pubescent girls, Fuka-Eri, his daughter, among them. The dowager charges Aomame with dispatching the Leader to “the other side,” but when he demonstrates his supernatural powers, Aomame becomes conflicted and confused. A telepath, the Leader knows Aomame’s intention, but the cost of his great gift is excruciating pain. The Leader welcomes death, and when Aomame hesitates, he bargains with her: his death for Tengo’s life. Unfortunately, killing the Leader will likely mean Aomame’s death too. But, in sacrificing her life for Tengo’s, their connection inexplicably tightens, and the danger Aomame flees inadvertently flings them together.

1Q84 is possible because of faith. It is the belief in love, in something beyond reason, something magical, that creates the metaphysical space for impossibilities to actualize themselves. Born from air chrysalises, dohtas are affectless shadows, without desires or dreams of their own. But we only need look around us, at the “hunched over people carried by force of habit into the new day” to see that it’s all too easy to lose your dreams and desires to the monotony of everyday life, individual passions and secret hopes lost to the roles we play – father, mother, teacher, banker – unaware that if you stop and look up, you might just see two moons. Of course, the real problem, as Tengo and Aomame figure out, is not the revelation of the magical, but how to steal a bit of that wonder up the rabbit hole, to the mundane world of day jobs and traffic jams.

Murakami shirks conventional expectations, refusing to answer the questions he poses and tie his loose ends into pretty little bows. He breaks from craft wisdom – stick to the essentials – with gratuitous descriptions and his characters repeatedly mull over the same plot points. He even challenges Chekov’s famous maxim by introducing a gun that never goes off. But I can’t help but feel that’s the point; life isn’t pared down to essentials, and insofar as our lives have meaning, they’re necessarily narratives, stories just as mundane – and hopefully just as magical, if not as fantastical – as this one.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 514 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf; First Edition edition (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Haruki Murakami
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Non-Fiction:

Related:

Movies from books:

]]> /2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/feed/ 1 THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffrey Eugenides /2011/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides/ /2011/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:32:53 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=22088 Book Quote:

“In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novels of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely…Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 16, 2011)

“Reader, I married him.”

What sensitive reader hasn’t thrilled to the last lines of the novel Jane Eyre, when the mousy and unprepossessing girl triumphantly returns to windswept Thornfield as a mature woman, marrying her one-time employer and great love, Mr. Rochester?

That era of these great wrenching love stories is now dead and gone. Or is it? Can these time-honored stories be rewritten for our current age, adapting to the accepted forces of sexual freedom and feminism? That’s the main focus of Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel and the theme shows up early on. He writes about his key character: “Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.”

You’d expect the author of the ground-breaking Virgin Suicides – a beautifully-rendered mythology about the suicides of five secluded sisters as seen through the eyes of neighborhood boys – and Middlesex, the exhilarating Pulitzer Prize winning multi-generational saga focusing on a hermaphrodite – to bring a fresh energy to the topic. And indeed, Mr. Eugenides does.

The” marriage plot” is a term used to categorize a storyline centered on the courtship rituals between a man and a woman and the potential obstacles they face on the way to the nuptial bed. It often involves a triangle – typically, the woman and man who are fated to be together and a strong rival for the woman’s attention.

So it is here. Madeline Hanna – the center of this new marriage plot — is a privileged Brown University student, a young English major whose books range from the complete Modern Library set of Henry James to “a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters.” Her brain is tantalized by her readings of deconstructions like Roland Barthes in her Semiotics 211; her heart, though, is firmly tethered to the literature of a century or two past. The other two sides of the love triangle are composed of Leonard Bankhead, a charismatic, sexually charged, intellectual, and intense college Darwinist, and Mitchell Grammaticus, the spiritually inclined seeker who has been delving into various religious mythologies including Christian mysticism.

But – Eugenides being Eugenides – someone who does not shy from complex characters – he adds a twist. Leonard is not only tall, dark and brooding (he wears a leather jacket, chews tobacco and is uncontrollably moody. Think: David Wallace Foster), he is also bipolar. What follows is one of the most breathtaking descriptions of this mental condition that this reader has ever read:

“As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up in his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest. There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito. All these planes requested permission to land simultaneously. Leonard radioed the aircraft, telling some to keep circling while ordering others to divert to another location entirely. The stream of traffic was never-ending…”

How do you carry on a relationship with someone who is hostage to his emotions and at the mercy of Lithium, which leaves him dulled and somnambulant, plump and often impotent…yet often magnetic? Indeed, there are times the reader will question exactly what the attraction is and why Madeleine succumbs to it. But wait – in the wings is the man who still carries the torch and who is currently overseas working out the big questions: the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

There are those who will consider the plot to be vaguely misogynistic. After all, Madeleine is the “prize” between two very determined men; she is hardly “I am woman, hear me roar.” Rather, “it turned out that Madeleine had a madwoman in the attic: it was her six-foot-three boyfriend.” Mr. Eugenides is not trying to make politically-correct statements; rather, he is working within the confines of the traditional marriage plot, with wisps and tendrils of everything from Jane Eyre to Anna Karenina. And he does so smartly. He deconstructs not only the deconstruction of the marriage plot, but answers the question about why we still rejoice in this timeworn style. And he does it with page-turning fervor to show how reading about love affects the ways we fall in love.

With devastating wit and a nod to intellectual and academic influences, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a fresh new way to approach the predictable marriage plot, revealing its relevance in today’s world. It is an achievement.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 392 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 11, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Jeffrey Eugenides
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Movies from books:

]]> /2011/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides/feed/ 0 BEFORE THE END, AFTER THE BEGINNING by Dagoberto Gilb /2011/before-the-end-after-the-beginning-by-dagoberto-gilb/ /2011/before-the-end-after-the-beginning-by-dagoberto-gilb/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:33:49 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21957 Book Quote:

“The last time Ramiro Areyzaga was in Mexico was so long ago it was more like a fairy tale. . . A place of lush green shade, both a forest of trees and a jungle of huge waxy palm leaves, and a zocalo of marionettes and dancers, musicians and painters, with toys and balloons for the little ones and shawls for his grandparents. And of course the church, like none he’d ever seen, all the cool stone space, and God – which he never got over, so much so it stayed inside him, quietly, the rest of his life, like it was the word Mexico itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (NOV 9, 2011)

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, Before the End, After the Beginning, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

The collection opens with a disorienting story, “please, thank you,” about a Mexican-American man struggling to regain control of his body after a stroke. Uncomfortably dependent on the hospital staff, forced to face his physical vulnerabilities with tasks as mundane as taking a shower or balancing a checkbook, his psychological vulnerabilities also come to the fore. All he sees around him are minorities persecuted by a white majority trying to keep them down. Everyone from his adult children to the hospital staff shake their head, bemused by his racial conspiracy theories, but as his body heals, so do the lifelong wounds of prejudice, at least enough that he can advise Erlinda, a Mexican janitor, to rise above the ignorance around her so that the wounds she endures on account of her race won’t fester and leave deep and putrid scars.

While sometimes, an illness forces us to recede into ourselves, often times, it’s through our relationship with others that we struggle with undesirable aspects of our identity. “The Last Time I saw Junior,” a hot-headed Mexican must face his former self when an old buddy comes around and manipulates him (once again) into helping him. In “Cheap,” a Mexican musician is forced to face both his fiscal and emotional frugality when the pursuit of an unfairly low bid by a local contractor causes him to face the exploitation of other Mexicans, who he tries to help.

“Willows Village,” explores the other side of help – dependency. When Guillermo moves from El Paso to Santa Ana in search of a job that will support his young family, he has little choice but to stay with his aunt, his mother’s sister, Maggy, who, according to his mother, was “an all-spoiled this and did-all-bad-that” who got away with murder on account of her looks. Maggy lives in a tract housing development, called Willows Village, with a kitchen “loaded up like a mall gourmet store” and a bedroom as “beautiful as any hotel.”  Her husband is gone for weeks at a time on business and so Maggy manages her loneliness by keeping an unfortunate friend, Lorena. In exchange for room and board, Lorena does the errands Maggy doesn’t want to do and accepts Maggy’s capricious generosity with a smile and appropriate gratitude. While Guillermo pounds the pavement in search of a job, his dependency on Maggy and his mother, on Gabe, the man who employs him for a time, frustrates him, and with the wine always flowing at the house, it’s inevitable that tensions and resentments will come to a head, exposing the line between need and reliance.

Gilb explores the fraught dynamics of attractive women financially dependent on men through the eyes of the males who actually love them. In “Blessing,” a young man sets out to visit his high-school sweetheart, now married to a much-older man. Sexually unsatisfied, she visits him during the night, which prompts him to flee her house in the morning, putting him in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “Uncle Rock,” a young boy deals with having a mother who is beautiful enough to attract restaurant owners and engineers, but not white enough to be marriageable. With a precocious understanding of the sexual marketplace, he deflects a professional baseball player’s advances in favor of a man with modest means who worships the ground his mother walks on.

Perhaps our most poignant search for identity is in the face of death. In “Hacia Teotitlan,” a dying man journeys home to a Mexico that he remembers as a fairy tale with glorious churches. He rents a room that is too small for his body, and vows to discontinue his medication, resigning himself to dying with the same resignation of a stray dog. While he may not have found what he was looking for, he walks away with new ways of expressing his innermost desire – to be well.

Each of these stories is a wonderful meditation on identity and the pain we endure in the struggle to create ourselves. In 2009, Dagoberto Gilb suffered a stroke; these stories are the product of his recovery. Although judging from the simple power of this book, I’d say it definitely marks a return to form.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Grove Press (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Dagoberto Gilb
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our short  review of:

And if you like this one, try:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Other:

]]> /2011/before-the-end-after-the-beginning-by-dagoberto-gilb/feed/ 0 11/22/63: A NOVEL by Stephen King /2011/112263-a-novel-by-stephen-king/ /2011/112263-a-novel-by-stephen-king/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:34:45 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21953 Book Quote:

“It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery glass we call life…A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 8, 2011)

Dedicated Stephen King fans are in for an epic treat—an odyssey, a Fool’s journey, an adventure with romance. A genre-bending historical novel with moral implications, this story combines echoes of Homer, H.G. Wells, Don Quixote, Quantum Leap (the old TV show), Jack Finney’s Time and Again, and even a spoonful of meta-King himself, the czar of popular fiction.

For King fans, the voice is familiar—the hapless, reluctant, lonely, courageous, romantic, destiny-bound hero/scarred social warrior. The story is King-esque– towering, prophetic, and flamboyant. For non-King readers, this may not chime. It may seem melodramatic, exaggerated, histrionic. But he isn’t attempting to write a deep and complex revisionist history. This is mainstream entertainment; King is King of what King does—the unruly escapist story with a huge and sentimental heart. The “Constant Reader” will approve.

This is not horror, in case you are strictly old school fans. However, there is a touch of the supernatural via time-travel. And there is blood and gore sprayed here and there. If you liked Under the Dome,  you will likely enjoy this one. If you are new to King, and are reading this for more insight into the fateful day of 11/22/63, or a “what would the world be like if…?,” this is not King’s principle design. It hovers, yes, and is material only to the primary theme.

Somewhere in the space-time continuum between preservation and progress is the “obdurate past” and the malleable future. Do we have the moral right to alter history, if we could? This is Jake Epping’s noble journey–to answer that question—and, even more so, to ask it. The thrust of the story centers on Jake and the other fictional characters King created; however, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and other historical characters are an essential backdrop and stimulus to the events that unfold. King’s best nuances illuminate how the past and the present have a harmony that echoes, sings, dances, and shadows.

“It’s all of a piece…It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning.”

English schoolteacher Jake Epping is introduced to a portal to the past by his friend, Al Templeton, who owns a greasy spoon diner in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Al discovered it years ago, and has made many “trips” back and forth, but he is too sick now to return. The portal brings you to September 9, 1958, 11:58 am. No matter how many days, months, or years you stay, you always return two minutes later on the day you left, 2011 (but you will biologically age).

Jake’s mission is to stay five years, keep tabs on Oswald and uncover the truth of the Kennedy assassination controversy—and, if Oswald acted alone, to stop him. King provides details that make the time-travel plausible—suspending disbelief in that sense is playfully easy. Compounding Jake’s goal is his desire to change other pieces of the past—to change other tragedies, which confronts the prophecy that “the past is obdurate,” those words that he returns to.

Jake assumes the identity of George Amberson, and makes a couple of trial runs before committing to his five-year stay. He eventually lands in the fictional town of Jodie, Texas, a town north of Dallas, where he can earn a living as a teacher, and tail Oswald during his off-hours. It is in Jodie where the moral questions and most of the adventure lodge in the reader’s heart. Jake/George becomes emotionally invested in the people, the town, and one attractive librarian, Sadie Dunhill. Inevitably, his mission and his new life rub together, generating poignant conflicts and urgent demands that threaten to undermine his quest.

King’s strengths include his sense of place and time. He renders 1958 so specifically that you will be transported. Ten-cent root beers with foam; fin-tailed Chevrolets; cigarette smoke wafting inside and out; Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis from the jukebox; dancing cheek-to-cheek; mink stoles and Moxie soda; rotary dial phones and party lines, and so much more to texturize the “Land of Ago.” There’s even a meta-fictional surprise in Derry, where characters from a former novel appear, connecting George with the past’s push on the present. King makes it credible for memories to branch arterially from past to present, for different time periods to cast hazy shadows and intersections on each other. Parallels flourish, coincidences shade.

The novel is both story and character-driven, but there’s no question of the white hats vs. the black hats here. King removes the guesswork, which can be a drawback to discovery. Dialogue is earnestly overstated, motives occasionally simplified, and plot devices conveniently executed, or with a bait-and-switch technique. He isn’t one for much subtlety, justifying (too many) coincidences by cleverly making coincidence part of the theme. But it works, and beneath it all is an enchanting story. The reader cares as passionately as Jake. Sadie, however, is the unforgettable character in this book. Jake/George may be the hero, but Sadie is the spirited touchstone. Comely, fetchingly clumsy, and wounded, she dances off the pages.

Despite the voluminous research done by King into the Oswald controversy, his conclusions are woven into the book rather cursorily, but emphatically. Does this matter? It might, especially to readers who feel that authorial intrusion into the narrative was intemperate. The reader doesn’t have to necessarily agree with a character’s actions, but if a historical context is displayed as fact, but the facts don’t add up for the reader, then it falls apart.

No popular author closes a story like Stephen King. Consummately sublime and serendipitous, he builds deft bridges and ladders that are not only cosmic and mystical, but also fitting and relevant. He captures in a few chapters what an evocative song can capture in a few minutes. Whatever his flaws, his rewards are plentiful. Classy, cosmic, mystical, and kaleidoscopic–it was radiant and clear, through a glass, darkly.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 2250readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner; Original edition (November 8, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Stephen King
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

*1Takes place in Castle Rock, Maine
*2Takes place in Derry, Maine
*3 Takes place in Little Tall Island, Maine
*P These two books have one “pinhole” vision into each other

The Dark Tower Series

Originally written as Richard Bachman

Co-written with Peter Straub

Non-Fiction:

And the Movies created from his books:

]]> /2011/112263-a-novel-by-stephen-king/feed/ 0 THE AFFAIR by Lee Child /2011/the-affair-by-lee-child/ /2011/the-affair-by-lee-child/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 01:35:45 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21771 Book Quote:

“I understand you’re doubly arrogant. First you thought I wouldn’t figure out your genius scheme, and then when I did, you thought you could deal with me all by yourself. No help, no backup, no arrest teams. Just you and me, here and now. I have to ask, how dumb are you?”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (OCT 22, 2011)

What’s a writer to do when his action hero ages? One option is to go back in time.

In The Affair, Lee Child flashes back to 1997, when Major Jack Reacher (his thirty-six year old protagonist and first-person narrator) was an army MP. Leon Garber, Reacher’s commanding officer, sends Jack to Carter Crossing, Mississippi, to monitor a potentially explosive situation. The body of Janice May Chapman, twenty-seven, has been found with her throat cut. Since the army has a base in the area, there is reason to suspect that a rogue soldier may have committed this and other grisly crimes. Although Reacher is a highly skilled and meticulous investigator, Garber makes it clear that under no circumstances should he conduct his own inquiries. A fellow MP named Duncan Munroe will be on hand to ask the tough questions. Of course, it is laughable to expect Reacher to sit on the sidelines while Munroe does the heavy lifting. 

We have long admired Reacher for his intelligence, toughness, passion for justice, and ability to scrutinize the evidence for subtle clues that the average cop would miss. In addition, he is independent and rarely accepts anyone’s word at face value. As ever, Jack is low-maintenance, carrying no excess emotional or physical baggage. Since he has a clock in his head, what use would he have for a watch? As the weeks pass, Reacher realizes that the Chapman case has significant political and legal ramifications; he will have to watch his back carefully if he is to emerge unscathed.

Lee Child has great fun placing Jack in challenging situations that force him to use his brain power and formidable fighting skills to defeat his opponents. All work and no play, however, makes Jack a frustrated soldier. Therefore, he is delighted to learn that the town’s sheriff, Elizabeth Deveraux, a former Marine, is gorgeous and available. The two gradually get to know one another a little better. Unfortunately, complications ensue that may put a damper on their promising relationship.

Child colorfully depicts life in a rural southern enclave, with its cholesterol-laden food (cheeseburgers, fries, and pies are consumed in alarming amounts), irritating busybodies, and obnoxious louts. The author’s terse, no-nonsense prose style keeps the story moving briskly. As usual, Reacher does not rely solely on his formidable fighting skills. He taps into his network of army buddies to unearth vital information and uses old-fashioned legwork and sharp analysis to unravel a mystery that he was never meant to solve. Child keeps us turning pages with scenes of violent confrontations, a torrid romance, a juicy murder probe, and an intriguing back story that helps explains why Reacher left the army so suddenly and became a solitary wanderer.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 492 readers
PUBLISHER: Delacorte Press; First Edition (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Lee Child (and Jack Reacher!)
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Movies:

]]> /2011/the-affair-by-lee-child/feed/ 0 THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ by Anne Enright /2011/the-forgotten-waltz-by-anne-enright/ /2011/the-forgotten-waltz-by-anne-enright/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:19:46 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21666 Book Quote:

“I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.

Or not me. It was hard to tell.“

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 21, 2011)

Anne Enright, author of the 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, has written a new novel called The Forgotten Waltz. It is told from the point of view of Gina Moynihan who has a lust-filled affair with a married man, Sean Vallely. They first meet at a garden party hosted by Anne’s sister Fiona, and progresses from there. At first there are innocent (and not so innocent) looks, and then on a business trip in Switzerland, the affair begins in earnest.

When Gina first sees Sean at Fiona’s garden party, she is happily married to Conor. There are no outward signs that there is trouble in the marriage and, as I read this book, I did not see the marriage and any shortcomings as a reason for the affair. Gina saw Sean, felt lust, and let her impulses prevail. Sean is married and has a child named Evie who, at the time that Gina first meets Sean, is four years old.

The novel is not told in any particular linear order. It is related to the reader in fragments of memory that Gina recalls. “So don’t ask me when this happened or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I was concerned, they were happening all along.”

Always playing a key role is Evie, Sean’s daughter. When she is five she begins to have childhood seizures that continue for many years. Annette, Sean’s wife, is vigilant about Evie’s medical care and appears not to notice that Sean is otherwise preoccupied with Gina. Evie, however, has the sense that something is happening in her home that is not quite normal. At one point, she even sees Sean and Gina kissing on the stairs of her home.

The novel takes place at the start of Ireland’s economic boom in the nineties and progresses to the depressions that hits later on. As the novel starts, people are making more money than they know what to do with, buying second homes with ocean views and dropping hints about all the money that they have. By the time the novel ends, people are lucky just to have jobs. Their houses have been on the market for a very long time and no one is buying. The market has seen a real depression.

Gina tells the whole story in the first person and we go along with her as she does her best to remember what happened between her and Sean. She strongly believes that Evie is responsible for her and Sean’s love. Evie’s watchful eyes, times of poor health, and perspicacious study of her father and his lover mark an ever-present omen for Gina.

As the affair progresses, Gina finds out that she is not the first person Sean has been unfaithful with. There was a young woman in his office, many years ago, that Sean had courted and loved. Gina is careful not to ask Sean too many questions about this as she wants to see their relationship as special and romantic, which it is, but as life goes, it is not that unique. “Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen foot of a hotel room. Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate.”

During the course of the affair, Gina deals with the death of her beloved mother, Joan, her estrangement from her sister, Fiona, and the breakdown of her marriage to Conor. She tries to see these events in relationship to the affair but they all have a full life separate from her love for Sean.

It takes Sean a long time to leave his wife, time that Gina waits for him in agony and pain. She had hoped they’d be together by Christmas but as April comes around, Sean is just beginning to move into Gina’s home. “It was delicate business, being the Not Wife.”

The affair takes on a triangular pattern – Sean, Gina and Evie. “I said it to Sean once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as if I had blasphemed.” “As far as he is concerned, there is no cause; he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.”

The book is filled with musical metaphors and reads poetically. Enright is a master of the inner mind and our deepest thoughts. She not only tells a story but she captures lives, sparing no moment, no movement and no detail. Nothing is too small for her to notice and reflect on. In fact, it is the small things that make up the big deeds that change our lives from one second to the next.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 27 readers
PUBLISHER: W. W. Norton & Company (October 3, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Anne Enright
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2011/the-forgotten-waltz-by-anne-enright/feed/ 0 WHEN SHE WOKE by Hilary Jordan /2011/when-she-woke-by-hilary-jordan/ /2011/when-she-woke-by-hilary-jordan/#comments Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:16:53 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21410 Book Quote:

” ‘Hannah Elizabeth Payne, having been found guilty of the crime of murder in the second degree, I hereby sentence you to undergo melachoming by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to spend thirty days in the Chrome ward of the Crawford State Prison and to remain a Red for a period of sixteen years.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (OCT 6, 2011)

Hannah Payne is twenty-six years old and Red, with a capital R, her badge of shame. Her skin has been “melachromed” by the State for her crime of abortion, and for not naming the abortionist and not identifying the father, the celebrated pastor and TV (“vid”) evangelist, Aidan Dale, who is now the nation’s “Secretary of Faith.” Her sentence is thirty days confinement, and then sixteen years in the community as a Red, where she will be constantly ostracized and persecuted.

Other criminals of the same or different color (depending on the crime) are wandering through the prison of life, beyond the walls of crowded cells (this is the State’s answer for overcrowding), and many don’t survive — the Blue child molesters have especially low survival rates. Hannah is deeply in love with the married Aiden, and refuses to upbraid him or the doctor who was kind and tender to her. She is also a product of her religious upbringing, and when she wakes up Red, she concedes that she deserves this punishment.

Many dystopian novels are noir and bleak -— you can just hear Mahler’s symphonies in your imagination -— the lost world of childhood, the yearning of fulfillment, life’s despair and discord. Therefore, Jordan’s more insistent, high-strung tone in reimagining a liberal interpretation of The Scarlett Letter, Hawthorne’s gothic melodrama, was unexpected. Her exuberance is like a lit match that never goes out. It has a pumping action, much like Dennis Lehane’s in his Kenzie and Gennaro series.

It also conforms to the margins of conventional genre more than the open-endedness of literature; Hannah is portrayed as a solid, misunderstood hero, and the demarcation of villain/hero-martyr is obvious and continuous with the secondary characters as well, except for a surprising and complex French radical named Simone, the most intriguing character in this tale. Much of the time, Hannah is on the lam with her newfound Red friend, Kayla, and heartily braves and overcomes dangerous hurdles at a page-turning glee.

In this near-future world, Roe v Wade has been overturned, and most of the fifty states have outlawed abortion. The government métier is fundamental New Testament, and is ruthless and unforgiving in its Kingdom-minded law. From reading this book, it appears that abortion is the primary preoccupation of the militant State, and that Aidan Dale is the only celebrity on the vid. Much of the novel takes place in the North Dallas area, where Jordan partly grew up. She knows the ingrained and forceful pieties of the area (the actual geographical area of Roe v Wade), and seems to draw on them. She started this book even before Mudbound, and it is left to wonder if she was shaking loose some demons from the Texas Red Oaks.

This is a commercial novel, unlike Mudbound, with a knowing arc and slender, reductive characters. She has a gift for thrumming action, even if it tends toward didacticism and a tidy outcome. This isn’t a novel that provokes thinking, as Jordan does much of the thinking for the reader, but it does provide action and visceral thrills and some poetic lyricism amidst the many indictments against religious zealots.

There is an exquisitely transcendent scene about two-thirds through, where a quietness and stillness pervades for a few pages, and Hannah reaches a key turning point in her life, and expresses it in a way that I hope others won’t fail to appreciate. It may seem lurid at face value, or even gratuitous, but it is anything but —- rather, it is sublime in its implication. This was the high point of refinement in this not typically nuanced novel.

Twists and turns are relentless and exciting, although it is obvious, in this world of morally challenged monkeys running the State, who will prevail. Ambiguity is not a paramount trait in this heavy-handed story with potboiler themes. It is comfort food—like popcorn with a little too much butter, and addictive. The author will keep you fastened till the end, because Jordan’s thrall with her characters and exultance with her story is contagious and highly spirited.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 191 readers
PUBLISHER: Algonquin Books (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Hillary Jordan
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> /2011/when-she-woke-by-hilary-jordan/feed/ 0 NORTHWEST ANGLE by William Kent Krueger /2011/northwest-angle-by-william-kent-krueger/ /2011/northwest-angle-by-william-kent-krueger/#comments Sun, 02 Oct 2011 13:55:17 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21278 Book Quote:

“Later, when it no longer mattered, they learned that the horror that had come from the sky had a name: derecho.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (OCT 2, 2011)

In Northwest Angle, William Kent Krueger’s 11th book in the award winning Cork O’Connor series, Cork and his family vacation in September on a houseboat in Canada, near the Northwest Angle area of Minnesota. Cork had hoped that his family, including his three children, Jenny, Annie and Steve and his sister-in-law Rose and her husband Mel, could finally get some time to relax and enjoy each other. They had all suffered the loss of Cork’s wife two year’s prior and they had not yet found any time to spend together especially since his kids had become older and living on their own.

Unfortunately for Cork and his family, the vacation becomes anything but enjoyable when soon after arrival, Cork and his older daughter Jenny become trapped in a major quick forming and very dangerous derecho storm that shipwrecks them on one of the many islands in the area.

During the storm, Jenny at first becomes separated from her father when he is tossed off their small boat before she is able to steer the boat to a nearby island. She seeks shelter at a small cabin in what appears to be the only building on the small island. She uncovers a baby that has been placed in safety from the storm and shortly thereafter finds the apparent mother of the baby dead. Although at first she thinks the woman was killed by the storm, she soon realizes that the woman was actually murdered and, given how hungry the baby is, she realizes the baby was more likely hidden from the murderer than from the storm. Fortunately, soon thereafter, she finds her father but they both become concerned when they see a man with a gun that they fear may be the killer of the baby’s mother.

Cork and Jenny manage to avoid the man with the gun and eventually reunite with the rest of their family and go to Northwest Angle to report the murder of the woman in the cabin. There they meet with people eager to help especially against who they believe is the murderer Noah Smalldog, the brother of the murdered girl, Lily Smalldog. However, the longer Cork and the others stay in the area, the more confused they become about who is really helping and what is really going on.

As usual for a William Kent Krueger book, I really enjoyed this book that starts and ends as a thriller and is more of a traditional mystery in the middle. He does a great job in presenting believable and likeable main characters while providing an interesting and realistic story. To me, the mix of the thriller and mystery was interesting but led to some dragging in the middle of the book, especially after such a quick reading beginning during the storm and finding of the baby. Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable and well recommended book that adds to an already great series.

Although it would be helpful to have read prior books in the series to understand all of the back story and relationships among the various characters it is not necessary. Krueger does a good job in the beginning in providing the key back story without boring his faithful readers (some of which are like me and appreciate the reminders anyway).

I was not very familiar with William Kent Krueger until I went to Bouchercon in 2008 where I found he had a significant presence and following. He was also a very interesting and entertaining speaker so I picked up a copy of his Anthony-nominated Thunder Bay while there and later picked up a couple of his prior books so as to start at the beginning of the series. I finally started reading the series in January, 2010 starting with Iron Lake, the first book in the series, which became one of my favorites in 2010. I’ve now read the first six and last two and I’m looking forward to going to back to read the three I’ve missed.

As soon as I started reading these books, they reminded me of the Alex McKnight series by Steve Hamilton. Both books take place in the United States just below the Canadian border, with Hamilton’s books based in Michigan and Krueger’s books in Minnesota. Both have a strong American Indian influence to their stories with significant Indian characters and reservations key to the story. Both of the main characters were policeman in major cities prior to moving to their current more remote locations, with Cork having spent a short time in Chicago and Alex in Detroit. Of course, several key differences exist, the most significant of which is the key part of family that is important to Cork as he is married with children in most of the books while Alex has no immediate family. Nonetheless, if you’ve enjoyed only one of these writes, I know you’ll like the other.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 92 readers
PUBLISHER: Atria Books; First Edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER: Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: William Kent Krueger
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Cork O’Connor Series:

]]> /2011/northwest-angle-by-william-kent-krueger/feed/ 0 REAMDE by Neal Stephenson /2011/reamde-by-neal-stephenson/ /2011/reamde-by-neal-stephenson/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:55:08 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21095 Book Quote:

“…what mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than paper Mache, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition. It would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 30, 2011)

Neal Stephenson’s ReaMde, a play on words for the ReadMe file that accompanies many computer programs, is above all a wild adventure/detective story set in the present day. As one would expect from this author, current technology features prominently. The cast of characters is international, offering windows into such diverse types as Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, American entrepreneurs, Idaho survivalists and second amendment fanatics among many others. A video game, T’Rain, is central to the tale. Most of the characters are addicted to the game; much of the detection is done by playing the game or by mining the data kept by the game. ReaMde as a story is something like a prolonged session of T’Rain. T’Rain is a play on words for terrain.

Reamde is a computer virus that hijacks data by encrypting it so it is unreadable. Victims get a computer message including a file named ReaMde, that they mistakenly read as ReadMe. ReadMe files are text files with important how-to information and are commonly bundled with downloaded computer programs. The victim opens the file, but instead of getting a text message with useful information, they activate the virus. The victim is told that they must pay a ransom in virtual currency within the T’Rain game in order to receive the encryption key that will free their data. The virtual currency is worth a fairly inconsequential sum in real money, something like $75. The action starts as a consequence to Reamde hijacking credit card data that has been sold to Russian gangsters. The gangsters kidnap the seller and his girlfriend, who just happens to be the niece of the founder of T’Rain, the computer game in which the ransom must be paid.

T’Rain is a game played on the Internet with thousands, maybe millions of players at any given time. The game play consists of the interaction of this massive cast of characters in an incredibly detailed world. ReaMde is played out in much the same way with a very large cast of fascinating characters. They include:

Richard Forthrat, billionaire founder of Corporation 9592, the parent company of the computer game, T’Rain, a game distinguished by the incredible richness of its simulation of an entire world, its underlying physics and 4.5 billion year geophysical history;
Zula, his niece, an Eritrean refugee with a specialty doing computer simulations of the geophysics of volcanoes, a skill she is employed to use to enhance the virtual richness of T’Rain; Ivanov, the Russian gangster who purchased the credit card data from Zula’s boyfriend and kidnaps the two to start off the adventure; CIA and M16 operatives, gun nuts, fundamentalists of all stripes from Christian survivalists to Islamic jihadists.

The story flows remarkably smoothly for all its complexity, and is immensely readable. All the ends tie together and the action never flags, just like an addictive video game. This is a great entertainment for anyone in tune with modern computer technology, gaming or just plain interested in a good adventure story. One wonders how an entire world’s physics could be simulated in such a game. The story itself is like the computer game that is itself a part of the story, raising the idea of recursive games within games. How could a game with such virtual complexity be supported? This is the only part of the tale that is science fiction in that even the much simpler complexity of atmospheric or ocean physics is beyond the reach of current technology.

ReaMde is like a video game, and recalls the serialized adventure stories from the pulp era with its intensely interconnected series of adventures and adventurers. The characters are all fascinating. They each embody an adventurer or geek type possessing exceptional luck, physical and/or technical prowess. Each spin of the adventure dial is within the realm of possibility, but there is no sense that this is realism. What we have is great escapist literature with a gaming twist. In short, just about perfect for the geek-gamer audience.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 508 readers
PUBLISHER: William Morrow (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Neal Stephenson
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Our reviews of:

Bibliography:

The Baroque Cycle

Non-Fiction

Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George):

]]> /2011/reamde-by-neal-stephenson/feed/ 0 LOST MEMORY OF SKIN by Russell Banks /2011/lost-memory-of-skin-by-russell-banks/ /2011/lost-memory-of-skin-by-russell-banks/#comments Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:05:44 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21235 Book Quote:

“The Kid reminds the Professor of Huckleberry Finn somehow. Here he is now, long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go…and there’s no farther place he can run to. The Professor wants to know what happened to the ignorant, abused, honest American boy between the end of the book and now…[H]ow did he come years later to having ‘no money, no job, no legal squat’? In twenty-first-century America.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 27, 2011)

The main character of Banks’ new novel, a twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender in South Florida known only as “the Kid,” may initially repel readers. The Kid is recently out of jail and on ten-year probation in fictional Calusa County, and is required to wear a GPS after soliciting sex from an underage girl. Ironically, he is still a virgin.

The Kid cannot leave the county, but he also cannot reside within 2,500 feet from any place children would congregate. That leaves three options—the swamplands, the airport area, or the Causeway. He chooses the Causeway and meets other sex offenders, a seriously motley crew, who consciously isolate from each other as a group. He befriends one old man, the Rabbit, but sticks to his tent, his bicycle, and his alligator-size pet iguana, Iggy. Later, he procures a Bible.

These disenfranchised convicts are enough to make readers squirm. Moreover, in the back of the reader’s mind is the question of whether authorial intrusion will be employed in an attempt to manipulate the reader into sympathizing with these outcasts. It takes a master storyteller, one who can circumnavigate the ick factor, or, rather, subsume it into a morally complex and irresistible reading experience, to lure the wary, veteran reader.

Banks’ artful narrative eases us in slowly and deftly breaks down resistance, piercing the wall of repugnance. It infiltrates bias, reinforced by social bias, and allows you to eclipse antipathy and enter the sphere of the damned. A willing reader ultimately discovers a captivating story, and reaches a crest of understanding for one young man without needing to accept him.

An illegal police raid on the Causeway, provoked by hatred and politics, disrupts the Kid’s relatively peaceful life early on, and now he has nowhere to turn. Subsequently, a hurricane wipes out the makeshift homes of the inhabitants. The kid becomes a migrant, shuffling within the legal radius of permitted locales. At about this time, he meets the Professor, who the Kid calls “Haystack,” an obese sociologist at the local university who is the size and intellect of a mountain, an enigmatic man with a past of shady government work and espionage. He is conducting a study of homelessness and particularly the homeless, convicted sex offender population.

The Professor offers the Kid financial and practical assistance in exchange for a series of taped interviews. He aims to help the Kid gain control and understanding over his life, to empower him to move beyond his pedophilia. They form a partnership of sorts, but the Kid remains leery of the Professor and his agenda. The Professor’s opaque past, his admitted secrets and lies, marks him as an unreliable narrator. Or does it? Later, perilous developments radically alter their relationship, a fitting move on the author’s part that provides sharp contrasts and deeper characterization.

Sex offenders are the criminal group most collectivized into one category of “monsters.” Banks takes a monster and probes below the surface of reflexive response. There is no attempt to defend the Kid’s crime or apologize for it. We see a lot of the events through his eyes, and decide whether he is reliable or not. He acquires an undernourished, skulking yellow dog and a crusty old grey parrot with clipped wings and a salty tongue. His relationship with these animals is rendered without a lick of sentimentality, but it bestows the most resonant and powerful feelings in the reader compared to anywhere else in the book. The care and feeding of dependents bring out the Kid’s protective instincts and help keep him focused.

The book is divided into five parts. Along the way, Banks dips into rhetorical digressions on sex, pornography, geography, and human nature, slowing down the momentum and disengaging the tension. These intervals are formal and stiff, although they are eventually braided into the story at large. However, despite these static flourishes, the story progresses with confidence and strength.

Most characters, whether stand-up citizens or sex offenders, have a moniker, which deliberately mechanizes them, but between the author and reader, humanization occurs between the pages. There’s Shyster, the pedophilic, disbarred lawyer and ex-Senator; Otis, the Rabbit, an elderly, disabled member of the tribe; and a Hemingway-esque character, the Writer, who incidentally resembles Banks himself; and others who personify their names.

Overall, the languid pace of the novel requires steadfast patience, but commitment to it has a fine payoff. Readers are rewarded with a thrilling denouement and a pensive but provocative ending. It inspires contemplation and dynamic discussion, and makes you think utterly outside the box.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 109 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Russell Banks
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Movies from books:

]]> /2011/lost-memory-of-skin-by-russell-banks/feed/ 0