“What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China’s sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.“

Book Review:

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

This bighearted, voluptuous, riveting book – one of my favorites of the decade – is filled with contradictions. It tells an apocalyptic and ancient tale but its topic is fresh and timely. It is told without any pretensions yet it’s lyrical and bracing. It focuses on the microcosm of a family under pressure yet its theme is universal and its messages integrate age-old mythologies.

As the book opens, China – the pure white pit bull – is turning on herself, trying to eat her paws. The winds of Hurricane Katrina are gathering force. And the narrator, a young precocious and sensitive teenager named Esch, is realizing that she is pregnant. These forces and situations add up to classic tragedy, but Jesmyn Ward has other things in mind. Esch and her brothers – Skeetah, whose life and passions revolve around his prized dog and her puppies; Randall, whose dream is to get a basketball camp scholarship; and, Junior, the youngest – are a unit who support each other.

As Katrina closes in — as the internal storms play out — we view a world that is steeped with violence and tenderness. Nothing is as expected. Let me interject that I share my home with two dogs and every cell of my body abhors pit bull fighting. Yet when the inevitable scene arrived, it shattered every single one of my expectations. Skeetah massages and speaks to China like a lover; his rival coaches Kilo, the other dog, calling him “son.” Some of it is written in love language: “China flings her head back into the air as if eating oxygen, gaining strength, and burns back down to Kilo and takes his neck in her teeth. She bears down, curling to him, a loving flame, and licks.” This is a book that dares you to confront yourself at an elemental level.

As an added level, Jesmyn Ward weaves in the Medea and Jason story and other Greek myths. Esch is young in years, but old in wisdom: she already knows that “There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in the ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it.” While she is tethered to earth – her father’s hands are “like gravel,” her brother’s blood “smells like wet hot earth,” her mind is unleashed and floats to the sky.

The tenderness – yes, tenderness! – between Skeetah and China, the bond between China and Esch (“China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a waiting silence…”), and the desperation and love of this family elevates it far beyond most other contemporary books I have read. A day after reading it, I am still in its thrall.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 285 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (April 24, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official blog for Jesmyn Ward Wikipedia page on Jesmyn Ward
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other National Book Award Winners: Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Bibliography:

• Where the Line Bleeds (2008)
• Salvage the Bones (2011) 

Nonfiction:

• Men We Reap: Memoir (September 2013)

“It’s taken me years to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of another’s lives until not death, but distance, does us part – time and space and the heart’s weariness are the blander executions of the human connection.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 24, 2011)

Let’s Take The Long Way Home is, at its core, a love story. It’s a story of how a close connection with a friend can ground us and provide us with a life worth living. And it’s a story that any woman who has ever had a friend who is like a sister – I count myself among those fortunate women – will understand in a heartbeat.

Gail Caldwell, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, met Caroline Knapp, also a writer, over their mutual love of their dogs. Ms. Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.”

Both women – about a decade apart in age – are passionate about writing and their dogs and have successfully dealt with alcohol addiction that knocked them to their knees. “We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time,” Ms. Caldwell shares.

Quickly, Gail and Caroline and their two dogs become a “pack of four.” They are both self-described moody introverts who prefer the company of dogs. Yet, “…we gave each other wide berth – it was far easier, we learned over the years, to be kind to the other than to ourselves.” As they grow closer, Gail and Caroline learn that nurturance and strength “were each the lesser without the other.”

It is almost inconceivable that this close friendship would ever end, but Caroline is a smoker and at 42, she learns she has stage 4 lung cancer. Her death comes quickly, in a matter of weeks. Gail Caldwell reflects, “Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage form what you thought you couldn’t stand to lose.” And later: “Caroline’s death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.” Eventually, she comes to realize “…we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

This memoir is poignant, authentic, unflinching, and genuine – never manipulative or sudsy. In addition to the profound look at an extraordinary friendship, it also focuses on “inter-species” love – between two fiercely private and self-reliant woman and their incredible dogs. The rich and moving portrayal of Gail Caldwell’s Samoyed, Clementine, will be entirely familiar to those of us who have shared our lives with four-legged “fur babies;” love in any guise is still love.

This eloquent book ends up being a celebration of life in all its complexities – including love, friendship, devotion, and grief. As Gail Caldwell writes, “The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 87 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Interview with Gail Caldwell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mentor by Tom Grimes

Bibliography:

By Gail Caldwell:

• A Strong West Wind : A Memoir (2006)
• Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship (August 2010)

By her friend Caroline Knapp:

• Drinking : A Love Story (1996)
• Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (1998)
• Appetites: Why Women Want (2003)
• The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays (2003)

“ZIRA: What will he find out there, doctor?
DR. ZAIUS: His destiny.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (JUN 26, 2011)

Consider the big questions. For instance, what does language afford us? Is self-consciousness and all it implies (self-reflection, guilt, joy…) embedded in language, daresay a function of language? Why do we create art? Nature or nurture, what shapes us? How is love possible? Where does rage come from? Cruelty? What are we to make of the animals, those we imprison, those we consume, the beasts we love as companions? What, indeed, does it mean to be a human being and can it, whatever it might mean, be fully realized? Now, take these questions and a bunch more just like them, and wrap them up in a narrative so unique and compelling, so rich as to bring transparency to the questions. Then shape the story around a unique voice that ranges from the mindlessly inarticulate to the Mensian complex. If you can imagine experiencing all that, you have a sense of what this book affords the adventurous reader.

This is the story of Bruno Littlemore, chimpanzee extraordinaire. Rather, more properly, as the first-person narrator tells us, this book “contains the memoirs of Bruno Littlemore, as dictated to Gwendolyn Gupta between September 9, 2007 and August 8, 2008, at the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, Eastman, GA 31024.” And what a memoir it is.

Bruno, we are informed, grew up in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago. He was the scion of Fanny, who was raised in the zoo, and Rotpeter, a chimp who had been rescued from the Congo jungle after watching “his mother and father murdered and subsequently devoured.” As a small chimp, Bruno was delivered to a the University of Chicago’s behavioral primatologist, Dr. Lydia Littlemore. He recalls the meeting early in the book. “I will begin with my first significant memory, which is the first time I met Lydia. I was still a child at the time. I was about six years old. She and I immediately developed a rapport. She picked me up and held me, kissed my head, played with my rubbery little hands, and I wrapped my arms around her neck, gripped her fingers, put strands of her hair in my mouth, and she laughed. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her, and the only way I knew to express it was by sucking on her hair.”

He quickly grasps the complexity of evolved consciousness. “I am Bruno,” he declares. “I am an animal with a human tongue, a human brain, and human desires, the most human among them to be more than what I am.” And yes, as he states, he falls in love with his keeper. Does that imply what we think it does? Well, jumping ahead, yes, they have sex, assuming your mind raced there. Bruno takes evolutionary steps, learns language, creates art, walks erect and of course has sex. This is a coming-of-age memoir, ergo sex is discovered. Inter-species relations might put some readers off, understandably. However, in the context of understanding the measure of humanness it cannot be avoided. Hale manages this territory with aplomb. But, not to get derailed, there is love here too. Lydia removes Bruno from the captors and takes him home to further her research. He has demonstrated a capacity for intelligence beyond the norm and she is convinced he is the subject from which careers are launched. That is, before she is as smitten by him as he is by her. “Of course I was in love for all the vainest and greediest reasons,” writes Bruno, several years later. “I climbed down from that tree to spend the rest of my life running from the yawning darkness of animal terror toward the light of fire stolen from the gods, and like you, I remain in a state of constant pursuit, never quite escaping the darkness nor ever reaching the light.” This is no ordinary chimp obviously.

Bruno finds creative relief in art. He paints. He exhibits. He becomes known. But as enlightened as Bruno is, he cannot repress his more beastly urges. His outbreaks eventually cost Lydia her job. Their relationship breaks into the news and they are scandalized. They escape to the compound of a wealthy animal-rights couple in Colorado. Eventually they return to Chicago where Lydia falls ill. Bruno, left to his own devices, plunges solo into the world of humanity. He travels to New York, is befriended by Leon, a Falstafian character of brilliant, yet dubious talents. Together they produce Shakespeare’s Tempest. But circumstances intrude and Bruno must escape, returning to Chicago. Picaresque as his journeys might be, the weight of his adventures at times seems unwieldy, as if they might all fall in upon themselves, so dense and allusion-filled they seem.

Returned to Chicago, Bruno’s last act of unbridled rage occurs when he discovers that his primate sibling, Céleste, is being subjected to animal experimentation. He commits murder and lands in jail. Ironically, it is his voice, his command of language and story telling which, like Scheherazade, saves him. He is an animal, after all, and should be “put down.” But he saves himself–and his story. Nine years after committing the crime, 24 years old and hairless, his face surgically altered (he wanted a human nose), he dictates his memoir.

This book is compelling every way you consider it. It is rich in philosophy, ideas, notions, questions and preponderances. Yet, as practiced in the best of the literary tradition (yes, this book, from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, stands tall), the ideas are carried along on a narrative stream which twisting and turning is wildly entertaining. The writing is gin-clear and elegant. (You’ll want to have a dictionary handy.) This is a first novel. What a debut for Mr. Hale, a truly wonderful and heretofore unknown author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve; First Edition edition (February 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Benjamin Hale
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Descent of Manby Kevin DesingerLove in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

Bibliography:

• The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (February 2011)

“All of these names…could be linked by two factors: death and proximity to Blade Ridge. The manner of death, though, those tales of trestle falls and stampeding horses and electrocutions, turned any legitimate concern about the road’s safety into a bizarre raving about…what? Some sort of cursed ground? A karmic disaster zone?”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUN 10, 2011)

Michael Koryta scores again with The Ridge, a thriller set in an isolated and rugged area of Eastern Kentucky. Inexplicable events are happening near a hilltop known as Blade Ridge. Sawyer County Deputy Sheriff Kevin Kimble and his colleagues get involved after an eccentric old drunk named Wyatt French is found dead in his lighthouse, an apparent suicide. No one understands why French spent time and money building a wooden lighthouse “in the middle of nowhere.” French had his reasons, but what he knew was so bizarre that no sane person would ever believe him.

Sheriff Kevin Kimble, who patrols Whitman and its environs, has a history of his own. While trying to protect a woman named Jacqueline Mathis from her abusive husband, Kimble was shot in the back. He still has lingering pain and stiffness, but knows he was lucky to survive. Meanwhile, a widow named Audrey Clark is carrying on the work of her late husband, David, a wildlife preservationist. She, along with a small paid staff and volunteers, has relocated sixty-seven exotic big cats (tigers, cougars, lions, and leopards who had suffered mistreatment at the hands of their owners) to a rescue center near Blade Ridge Road. Among the animals is Ira, a beautiful and unique black cougar who is crafty, powerful, and deadly when angered. Observing the goings-on is sixty-year old Roy Darmus, a veteran reporter whose newspaper has folded. Roy is extremely curious about strange episodes of violence that have marred the tranquility of his town. When he starts digging into Whitman’s history, he makes some astounding discoveries.

Koryta has created a richly delineated cast of characters who face extraordinary challenges and grave danger. The gripping plot is chilling and eerily suspenseful. Michael Koryta is a consummate craftsman whose expressive dialogue, evocative descriptive writing, and atmospheric story draw us into his menacing world. Some readers may hesitate to turn the pages, fearing that terrible things are about happen. Still, they will be riveted by this intense story and will continue reading until they finally learn the ghastly secret of The Ridge.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (June 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Koryta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt (see widget)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Cypress House Also check out: Captivity by Deborah Lee Wesselmann

Bibliography:

• Envy the Night (2008)
• So Cold the River (2010)
• The Cypress House (2011)
• The Ridge (2011)
• The Prophet (August 2012)

Lincoln Perry series:

• Tonight I Said Goodbye (2004)
• Sorrow’s Anthem (2006)
• A Welcome Grave (2007)
• The Silent Hour (2009)

“How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I’ll be civil when the killing’s done and not a minute before.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 23, 2011)

Never one to shy away from sacred cow territory or the ruthless ways in which humans stampede it, T.C. Boyle’s latest wise epic puts ecologists on a restless collision course with agitated animal rights activists. In his vintage style of tackling issues with snarling drama and incendiary humor, Boyle plots a political novel without sending the reader a preachy message, although he comes right up under it.

Boyle turns eco controversy on its head, turning back to the theme that man’s desire to keep a clean footprint on the earth is a messy and dirty job, often with dire consequences. This is Boyle; bully pulpits are bent with irony, and righteousness is fraught with disobedience. Endangerment of the species brings on reckless endangerment of lives. Who has the right to dominate, to possess this planet? Humans, creatures, natural inhabitants, invasive species–several are examined, many left wanting–especially humans.

Restoration ecologist/ biologist and PhD Alma Boyd Takesue spearheads a program with the National Parks Service to exterminate invasive species on the Channel Islands of California. She argues that the infestation of rats and feral pigs are killing off the endemic Channel Island Foxes and disrupting the natural ecosystem.

Her dreadlocked redheaded nemesis, businessman Dave LaJoy, knows all about disruption. He protests every one of Alma’s presentations to declare war on her efforts, and is opposed to the idea that extirpation leads to preservation. No public presentation by Alma is without LaJoy’s outcry.

LaJoy is the contentious head of FPA (For the Protection of Animals), a small organization viewed by ecologists as fanatical. His folksinger girlfriend, Anise Reed, is at his side on this issue, contrary to–or a result of–her childhood on a sheep farm on one of the Northern Channel Islands, Santa Cruz, which ended with a bloodlust tragedy.

Alma has the law of the federal government, if not always nature, on her side, as well as her Park Service employee boyfriend, Tim Sickafoose. LaJoy is the underdog, dependent on citizen donations and ruled by his unbridled rage. He is primed to fight with subversive acts designed to undermine Alma’s program. No ecologists will keep LaJoy from his battle to save the animals. Boyle, in his typical rogue tenor, demonstrates that both sides of the fence are imbued with truth and riddled with internal contradictions.

Boyle shifts time periods to illustrate the recent history of the islands and dramatize the inextricable links between past and present, from the introduction of non-native species, to the family connections of Alma and Anise. Alma’s grandmother survived a shipwreck near Anacapa while she was pregnant with Alma’s mother. Boyle’s portrayal of this disaster was stunning, a pinpoint event of woman overcoming the storm of nature’s catastrophes with some tragic and triumphant results.

Years later, on Santa Cruz Island, Anise’s mother suffered a chilling invasion of corporate corruption and a hideous attack on the sheep farm where she lived and toiled. She had worked hard to keep the hungry ravens from the ewes, their carrion cries now reverberating through the years.

The historical segments were superbly vivid and requisite to the central story, but interspersed throughout were florid narrative ambushes and excursions that slowed the central movement to a crawl. The cadence was generally barky and rough, as choppy as the Channel Island waters, as emphatic and forceful as a winter storm. I never felt that Boyd hit a rhythmic stride; it was loud and strident, with a manic refrain. But there were jewel-cut, Boyle-cut passages within that often lifted off and flew from the turgid overflow.

Although he dodged from sermonizing, it periodically read like an almanac or lecture. His voice tapped in the background, then ceded to the ripe moments of story. It was page-turning terror until the advent of excess fluctuations, like waves crashing against the wily outcroppings of jagged rock. The symmetry was lost at sea, and the climax was drowned in the fury.

However, despite these complaints, I was mentally fastened and stimulated, although the emotional resonance faded by the last hundred pages. It’s a visionary story, but it lacks visual constancy except for some eye-popping flourishes.

Also, some of the characters drift off or stagnate, or are trammeled by the themes. It was their “purpose” that overrode their other characteristics. There was something missing emotionally, and I lost interest in them as individuals. But, alas, their absolute certainties are left for the reader to ponder. I am tempted to just say: Boyle was being Boyle, only more so. He is one-of-a-kind, an island of Boyle, and who am I to cross it?

The inclusion of pigs, whether capitalist or feral; the onslaught of rats, both animal and human; a nest of snakes, poisonous or colloquial; and the carrion birds circling the sky are just a few of the metaphorical joists that furnish the narrative and add dimension to the interlocking sequences. As a conservation story, the prose isn’t too thrifty, but in the end, you will be glad you read it. I hesitate to say it is significant, but there you go. Boyle is a rare species. It is topical and arch, Boyle and boiling, trenchant and tough.

End note—there’s an intrepid video trailer of this book, directed by Jamieson Fry. It rocks!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 58 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (February 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	T.C. Boyle
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide andExcerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Drop City The Inner Circle Tooth and Claw: Other Stories Talk Talk The Women

Bibliography:

• Descent of Man (1979)
• Water Music (1982)
• Budding Prospects (1984)
• Greasy Lake and Other Stories (1985)
• World’s End (1987)
• If the River Was Whiskey: Stories (1989)
• East Is East (1990)
• The Road to Wellville (1993)
• Without A Hero and Other Stories (1994)
• The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
• Riven Rock (1998)
• T.C. Boyle Stories (1998)
• A Friend of the Earth (2000)
• After the Plague (2001)
• Drop City (2003)
• The Inner Circle (2004)
• Tooth and Claw and Other Stories (2005)
• Talk Talk (2006)
• The Women (2009)
• Wild Child and Other Stories (2010)
• When the Killing’s Done (2011)
• San Miguel (September 2012)

Young Adult:

• The Human Fly and Other Stories (2005)

“Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (DEC 3, 2009)
SPECIAL: MF Author Interview

Humans have varied and convoluted relationships with the animals on this planet. We eat some, wear others, and a few enjoy or endure the precarious position of becoming household pets. Sometimes the relationships people have with their animals make the headlines. Take for example, Dutch artist Katinka Simonse–who strangled and then skinned her own cat before turning it into a handbag. While this act unleashed a storm of controversy and a range of reactions, it also raises many questions. What, for example, is the difference between Katinka’s feline purse and a purse made of cow hide? Is the difference between the death of the pet cat and the death of a cow a moral question or a question of species? Do “owners” have the moral and legal right to kill their pets? Should Simonse be prosecuted for animal cruelty? This case illustrates the complexity of animal rights issues precisely because we humans pick and chose which animals we will love and cherish and which ones we will objectify. There’s a moral dissonance afoot in our relationships with animals, and it’s a dissonance that allows us to coo about how much we love animals while we continue to exploit them through factory farms and animal experimentation.

And these complex moral issues are at the fore in the short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet–a short story collection which “treads newly imaginative territory with charismatic tales focused on our fascination with famous people, animals and human-animal relations.” Each of these ten stories examines some aspect of human interaction with animals with some of the stories focusing on real people and fictionalized animal related incidents in their lives. In “Sexing the Pheasant,” for example, we enter the mind of Madonna–a singer notorious for her radical self-inventions. In the story, Madonna newly married to Guy Ritchie and still in the warm glow of her British phase, dons a hunting outfit and totes a rifle around. In “Girl and Giraffe,” George Adamson tells a haunting tale of one afternoon spent in the African bush.

One of the stories, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov” incorporates a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction incident involving Edison and the 1903 electrocution of an elephant. This true story, set to fiction for the purposes of the collection, records the death sentence duly delivered to Topsy:

“Topsy, the elephant in question, was a disgruntled circus and work animal who had suffered the pains of forced labor, captivity, neglect and abuse. She had responded by killing three men, the last of whom fed her a burning cigarette.

Simple shooting would not have been theatrical enough for her owners, Thompson & Dundy of Coney Island’s Luna Park, had decided to make an example of the rogue.”

And this “example” results in the hideous electrocution of Topsy, her “fiery death” duly recorded on film.

In the title story “Love in Infant Monkeys” based on fact, animal researcher and psychologist, Harry Harlow, moves between his laboratory and a faculty party. Harlow, seen by some as a key figure in the rise of the Animal Liberation Movement is depicted as a troubled man, a “functioning alcoholic” whose familial relationships leave a lot to be desired. His lack of connection with his estranged children is reflected in his experiments–extreme isolation experiments using baby monkeys. Harlow’s sadistic callousness is evident here as he records–without emotion–the decline of monkeys in the “pits of despair.” (Harlow named the apparatus himself. For example, he also named the forced mating device, the “rape racks.”)

Of this excellent collection, “Sir Henry” remains my favorite. It’s the story of a New York based professional dog walker, a conscientious and sensitive man who selects wealthy, reliable clients in order to insulate himself from exposure to the harsher aspects of dog ownership:

“When a dog was taken from him—a move, a change of fortune or, in one painful case, a spontaneous gifting—he felt it deeply. His concern for a lost dog, as he thought of them would keep him up for many nights after one of these incidents. When a young Weimaraner was lost to him with not even a chance to say goodbye, he remained angry for weeks. The owner, a teenage heiress often featured in the local tabloids, had given his charge away on a spurt of the moment to a Senegalese dancer she met at a restaurant. He had no doubt that drug use was involved. The dog, a timid, damaged animal of great gentleness and forbearance, was on a plane to Africa by the time he found out about it the next day.”

The dog walker prefers dogs to humans as dogs are clearly our “moral superiors.” To the dog walker, most people are unworthy of owning a dog and they are not as much dog owners as “dog neglecters.” While the dog walker imagines that he has rules for accepting clients that will shield him from the more painful aspects of his job, he is ambushed by an unforeseen incident involving a poodle owned by an elderly violinist.

These excellent stories run the gamut of the relationships between humans and animals–we read of beloved pets, not-so-beloved pets, research animals that exist to fulfill sadistic paradigms, zoo animals, wild animals, animals as accessories, and animals as entertainment. While animals exist to fill whatever needs and whims humans may have, we also see the hypocrisy of humans in their relationships with animals as well as a total lack of accountability in how we treat them. And that lack of accountability ranges from the ownership of our pets to the shadowy world of animal experimentation in which sadism seems indistinguishable from “data collection.” Yet in spite of the subject matter, Millet, in telling these stories manages to remain an observer and a recorder rather than a moralist. This sometimes uncomfortable position is left for the reader.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soft Skull Press (September 22, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lydia Millet
EXTRAS:	ExcerptOur interview with Lydia Millet
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of  How the Dead Dream

Bibliography:

• Ominvores (1996)
• George Bush: Dark Prince of Love (2000)
• My Happy Life (2002) 
• Everyone’s Pretty (2005)
• Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005)
• Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories (2009)

Trilogy:

• How the Dead Dream (2008)
• Ghost Lights (2011)
• Magnificence (November 2012)

For younger readers:

• The Fires Beneath the Sea (July 2011)

Other:

• State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (terrific essay on Arizona)

“Humanity. The greatest plague the planet has ever known…too many people…If a man must choose between wealth and conservation, wealth will always win. We will always overexploit, we will never be cured.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (OCT 3, 2009)

Setting his novels in contemporary South Africa, Deon Meyer raises the bar for thrillers by infusing each of his novels with the national political tensions—historical, racial, and economic—and the urban and rural disparities which make the country so complex and so difficult to govern. His “heroes” have traditionally been far from “heroic” in the traditional sense, always people at odds with society, especially in the case of Lemmer, main character (and hired bodyguard) in Blood Safari, a man who has allowed his passions to dominate him to the extent that he served time for his assault on four men and gained pleasure in killing the ringleader—“I felt at one with the world, whole and complete, good and right. It’s a terrible thing. It intoxicates. It’s addictive. And so terribly sweet.”

Lemmer, working for Body Armor, the premier bodyguard service in the country, has been hired to watch over Emma le Roux, a wealthy young woman who, after seeing a news story on TV, believes that her brother Jacobus le Roux, thought dead for twenty years, is, in fact alive after being a suspect in a mass murder in Kruger National Park—the death of a sangoma (a traditional healer) and three elephant poachers. Emma herself has recently been targeted by unknown assassins and has barely escaped from her house after a violent attempt on her life. She has no idea whether her suspicions about her brother are correct, nor does she have any idea what motive might inspire evil-doers to attack her so viciously.

Her brother Jacobus, four years older, was always interested in conservation, especially the conservation of the animal life in South Africa, and he worked at the Kruger Park, where he disappeared twenty years ago. A man calling himself Jacobus de Villiers has worked at the Moholololo Rehabilitation Center, which nurses ill and wounded vultures, and at a private reserve, run by a multimillionaire, which tries to keep large areas of the veld free of development for a natural animal habitat.

As Lemmer and his client, Emma le Roux, try to find out if the Jacobus de Villiers whom she saw on TV is, in fact, her brother, they are exposed the life-or-death infighting among the various conservation groups, their relationships with conservation police and local law enforcement, and the relationships and conflicts of these groups with developers and local tribes who want a piece of the tourist game-park action. Violence is a way of life for these people, and Lemmer is often in the cross-hairs of his and Emma’s unknown enemies.

Meyer is careful to include all the players in the game here, allowing him to present all the facets of the big picture regarding the wildlife bounty of the country and the lures of development, the commitment to a lawful country under unified rule and the every-man-for-himself attitudes which have undermined every aspect of the country over the years. No one knows whom to trust, if anyone, and no one knows what secret arrangements any of the players may have made with sleazy operators or money-mad groups which exist outside the mainstream. As the characters develop more fully, and as the author reveals more and more information about their backgrounds, the reader’s stake in the outcome becomes more and more powerful. The action comes fast and furious, and the suspense builds.

Meyer creates vibrant scenes, describing the environment, the local settings, the animals, and the racial interactions of South Africa’s citizens in vivid detail. The people who oppose Lemmer’s investigation are understandable in their reluctance to go along with him, and their points of view are broad and not tritely black or white. Irony abounds, and the political and social repercussions of the action become understandable even if they do not always draw the reader’s sympathy. This is a terrific and unusual thriller, the fifth of Meyer’s novels, all of which are written in Afrikaans and translated, and each of which has been better than the last.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 37 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (August 25, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Blood Safari
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Deon Meyer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: Dead at Daybreak Heart of a Hunter

Bibliography:

• Dead Before Dying (1999;May 2006 in US)
• Dead at Daybreak (2000; August 2005 in US)
• Heart of the Hunter (2003; July 2004 in US)
• Devil’s Peak (March 2008 in US)
• Blood Safari (August 2009 in US)
• Thirteen Hours (September 2010 in US)