“I found the cigarette packet in my handbag this morning underneath my purse. It was disorientating, as if it wasn’t my bag after all. There were some cigarettes missing. I wonder if I smoked them. I imagine myself, standing outside the shop in the village, lighting one. It seems ridiculous. I’m vaguely alarmed that I do not know for sure. I know what Hector would say: that I have too much time on my hands, that I need to keep myself busy. That I need to take my medication. Empty nest syndrome, he tells his friends at the pub, his mother. He’s always said I have a vivid imagination. ”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JAN 10, 2014)

Marta Bjornstad is the chillingly robotic narrator of Emma Chapman’s psychological thriller, How to Be a Good Wife, a disturbing portrait of a woman whose mind may be playing tricks on her. After twenty-five years of marriage, Marta’s existence is tightly regimented: She shops, cooks, cleans the house, does laundry, and tends to her husband, Hector’s, needs. The title is derived from a book of the same name filled with platitudes about how a perfect spouse should behave. Marta’s controlling and overbearing mother-in-law, Matilda, presented the book to her sons’ young bride as a wedding gift, expecting Marta to dutifully memorize every page. One example of the book’s contents: “Your husband belongs to the outside world. The house is your domain, and your responsibility.”

It soon becomes apparent that Marta is not well. She is hallucinating, obsessing about the past, and remembering things that may or may not have occurred. She desperately misses her son, Kylan, who is now a grown man with a job and a girlfriend. As much as Marta would like to cling to Kylan, he is making his own way in the world. Marta was just twenty-one when she married Hector, who is much older than she is, and when she looks at her wedding picture, she observes, “I look happy, but I can’t remember if I was.”

Chapman is a superb storyteller whose evocative descriptive writing and finely-tuned metaphors are powerful indicators of the heroine’s disordered psyche. For example, Marta’s “apron strings catch on the kitchen door” and she spots a smudge on a panel of glass. She rubs the stain until it disappears, since her guidebook warns her: “The smudges cling on: they do not want to be removed.” The catching of the apron strings and Marta’s obsessive attitude towards cleanliness are significant. She is fettered to a dismissive and condescending man who has little understanding of how miserable she is. She cannot cut the strings that tie her to him, and she is unable to cleanse her soul of the pollution that is poisoning her spirit.

The author leaves a great deal to our imagination about what is real and what is the product of Marta’s fantasies. However, whether or not her “delusions” have any basis in reality, it is clear that Marta is clinically depressed, if not psychotic, caught in a vise, and desperate to escape at any cost. This is a heartrending story about a wife’s need to be understood; to express herself; to be loved and cherished; to have friends; and to feel productive. Hector and Marta talk at one another, not to one another. This is a tragic portrait of a sterile, unfulfilling, and dysfunctional relationship that lacks the empathy, communication, and passion that can make a marriage vibrant and rewarding.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 83 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Press (October 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Emma Chapman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: How to be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward

Bibliography:

• How To Be A Good Wife (October 2013)

“Of all the crazy that had transpired the night before, Will had felt most unsafe when he saw the way his sister eyed his mother across the dining room table. How Violet-like she’d been, glowering with her hangdog neck and hooded eyes. Anyone else might have mistaken her for someone meek and self-punishing. But Will knew the truth: Violet thought she was proof of nature over nurture. She didn’t need their mom’s loving care to survive.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (DEC 28, 2013)

Koren Zailckas’ Mother, Mother is a tale of psychological horror–a savage portrayal of a narcissist, Josephine Hurst, who lies compulsively, shamelessly manipulates her family, and tries to destroy anyone who crosses her. This disturbing story is told in alternating chapters by twelve-year-old William Hurst and his sixteen-year-old sister, Violet. William is mommy’s prissy little boy whom Josephine home schools (he has been diagnosed with autism and epilepsy) and infantilizes; Will is completely dependent on his mother and will do anything to stay in her good graces. Violet, on the other hand, is a rebel. She chops off her hair, takes mind-altering substances, and refuses to be intimidated by Josephine’s sick behavior. Josephine’s husband, Douglas, is, for the most part, an ineffectual bystander who gives his wife free reign. Missing from the picture is twenty-year-old Rose, whom Josephine was grooming to be a famous actress. Rose left home abruptly and never returned.

Zailckas makes our skin crawl as she reveals how dysfunctional the Hursts really are. She etches each character with a pen dipped in acid. Instead of communicating honestly, everyone plays his or her assigned role. The children are expected to act like obedient automatons, and Douglas is little more than a shadowy presence in the household. Agents from Child Protective Services visit the Hursts after William’s hand is damaged, allegedly by a knife-wielding Violet (who denies responsibility). Tensions run even higher when Violet is sent to a locked mental ward) and starts receiving mysterious messages from Rose.

Violet is the key to unlocking the secrets that she hopes will set her free. With courage, shrewdness, and the help of good friends, Violet intends to unearth damning facts that will alter everyone’s perception of what has really been going on behind the Hursts’ closed doors. At least, Violet still has a chance to escape, since she has enough self-esteem to fight for her life. The author’s understated but vivid descriptive writing, dark humor, and biting dialogue add to the novel’s impact. Ultimately, we grieve for the offspring of selfish and mentally ill parents who are incapable of offering their sons and daughters the nurturing and affection that they so desperately need. As one of Violet’s fellow patients in the psychiatric unit states, “Having a baby doesn’t make you a mother any more than buying a piano makes you Beethoven.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 73 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (September 17, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Koren Zailckas
EXTRAS:	Interview with Koren Zailckas
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another bad mother: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver Another Dysfunctional Family: The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Bibliography:

• Mother, Mother (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Smashed: A Story of a Drunken Childhood (2005)
• Fury: True Tales of a Good Girl Gone Ballistic (2010)

Annie held him tightly and said, “They fucked us up, Buster.”
“They didn’t mean to,” he replied.
“But they did,” she said.

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 5, 2011)

Perhaps it’s entirely appropriate that their last name is Fang. For Caleb and Camille are truly parasites—sucking the blood out of their children, while using them primarily in the service of their art. “Kids kill art,” the elder Fangs’ mentor once told them. Determined to prove him wrong, Caleb and Camille incorporate Annie and Buster, their two children, into their art—even referring to them as Child A and Child B, mere props in the various performance art sketches they carry out.

The resultant harm Caleb and Camille inflict on their children is venomous and destructive and the amazing thing about this debut novel is that the full extent of it all creeps up on the reader insidiously.

Performance art typically is art of an unconventional kind—not like the traditional staged plays, which follow a script. Instead performance artists create an atmosphere ripe for drama to happen; the unwitting audience is as much a part of the art as the artists themselves. In one such art piece, the elder Fangs print out fake coupons for a free chicken sandwich at a local mall. They then try to pass these coupons to mall customers and have the restaurant’s reaction recorded on camera. That the restaurant owners (nor the customers) don’t respond the way Caleb and Camille had hoped they would, is beside the point. The point is the Fangs have crafted a free-flowing drama to be recorded and savored forever.

Here is the big problem: Caleb and Camille are superb artists. They are so good at these spontaneous productions and worse, so prolific at it, that it is hard for Annie and Buster to tell the difference between real life and art. After all, adults, especially those who stage the art, can easily tell what’s going on. But what about kids? Annie and Buster can never tell when what they’re experiencing is simply life or yet another art project. Years later, when Buster is grown, his date tells him: “It’s like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don’t know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is a buildup to something awful.” Predictably, he walks out on her.

Even worse, the kids’ feelings and emotions always come in second to the art. It doesn’t matter if Annie and Buster don’t want to participate in any of the Fangs’ elaborate pieces—they simply must. Wilson does a superb job of working the parent-child relationship in these pages. At various times, one wonders if the elder Fangs are just completely oblivious of the harm they are wreaking on their children or if they simply don’t care.

The Family Fang has chapters that alternate between the present where Buster and Annie are grown and their childhood past which is glimpsed through a series of performance art pieces.

In the present, Annie is a moderately successful actress who even won an Oscar nomination for one of her early roles. At the very beginning of the book though she comes undone when a producer asks her to go topless. Her childhood forever spent in pleasing her parents, Annie doesn’t quite know how to say “No” when presented with a situation she doesn’t want to agree to. Her parents having dismissed her newfound vocation as lowly and not even art, Annie is plagued with self-doubt. “Her worst fears,” Wilson writes, “what she’d convinced herself was not at all true, that being a Fang, the conduit for her parents’ vision, was perhaps the only worthwhile thing she had ever accomplished.”

Buster’s life is not much better—if anything, it’s worse. At least Annie has a bit of money. Buster takes to writing fiction initially. While his debut novel is moderately successful, his subsequent work gets bad reviews so he just gives up and instead takes on freelance writing gigs that barely keep him afloat.

Through an interesting set of circumstances Annie and Buster eventually again end up home at their parents’ house and Caleb and Camille are thrilled at the prospect of creating one last huge performance art piece together. Ultimately it remains to be seen whether kids indeed do kill art of if the reverse holds true -— if it is art that kills kids.

The Family Fang is Wilson’s debut novel and it is spectacular. The writing is so breezy and witty (it’s easy to mistake this novel for a comedy) that the dark undercurrents that work their way so subtly in this dazzling novel, stand out ever more sharply because of it.

In one of many brilliantly realized scenes in the book, Caleb and Camille convince Buster, much against his will, to participate in a beauty contest for girls. He is to wear a dress, impress the judges and win the crown. When understandably the little boy suggests Annie as a substitute, his parents tell him: “Annie winning a beauty pageant is not a commentary on gender and objectification and masculine influences on beauty. Annie winning a beauty pageant is a foregone conclusion, the status quo.” Fine. He does it: Buster wears the dress and wins the crown, which he then refuses to give up. Camille is outraged. “This is what we rebel against, this idea of worth based on nothing more than appearance. This is the superficial kind of symbol that we actively work against,” she reminds him. “It. Is. My. Crown.” Buster reminds her. It is a moment—one of many -— that will absolutely take your breath away. For an adult a beauty crown might represent the worst kind of “superficial symbol” but for a child who has just won it, it is simply a coveted prize—nothing more, nothing less. As Buster reminds us in this telling moment, not every moment in life need be a grand theatrical gesture or high art. Because if you look only for those, you can easily miss the mundane, everyday moments that bring us as much joy as well… art.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 150 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kevin Wilson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another family business: Swamplandia by Karen Russell

Bibliography:

• Tunneling to the Center of the Earth : Stories (2009)
• The Family Fang (August 2011)

“When she lay in bed at night, looking back on the past year, she realized the loss of all that money and the prospect of her children growing up poor had terrified her more than the ghastly scenarios described on the news. And Douglas seemed more afraid of screwing up their finances again and of her walking out on him than he was of terrorists.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman  (NOV 24, 2010)

Let me say it straight out: this book is astoundingly GOOD. Page-turning, jaw-dropping, laugh-out-loud, cry-into-your-sleeves, gasp-with-recognition GOOD. It takes on nothing less than the theme of what is wrong with America today and it does it very well.

The action takes place over one Thanksgiving day with lots of flashbacks. There hasn’t been a family like the Olsons since Zoe Heller’s The Believers – with a dollop of the movie Pieces of April blended in. This family DEFINES dysfunction.

Gavin, the father, is a Vietnam vet whose career went wildly off track because of the anti-war sentiment when he returned. His wife Eleanor is a Wellesley graduate who traded in ambitions for an apron and a cookbook. Douglas, their older son, cashed in on the real estate boom – making him more successful than his old man ever was – and is now suffering the effects of the crash. His wife Denise – a one-time poor girl who has become enamored of the money – is less than enchanted with him. Ginny, the academic daughter, is emotionally closed-off and has recently adopted a 7-year-old Indian daughter, Priya,

Add to that two 17-year-olds from the housing projects – Kijo and Spider – who have a personal grudge against Douglas and break-in and enter his home while they’re temporarily away – and you have the makings of a potentially tragic situation.

The author, Jennifer Venderbes, has a clear understanding of the human condition. Her dialogue is crisp, compelling, and pithy. There are little gems throughout this book. For instance: “Men didn’t have heroes, they STUDIED heroes, as though greatness and masculinity could be transmitted through reading, as though knowing the lyrics to every Mick Jagger song…got them one step closer to playing Madison Square Garden. A woman, at most, would dress like the woman she admired…”

There is much about the emasculation of the American warrior (Ginny is writing a paper on it), and how Vietnam was directly responsible for this phenomenon; this emasculation will show up time and time again. There is much about eminent domain and how it plays out in the real world, particularly with race relationships. There is much about how we – as Americans – have lost our sense of values and have substituted it with worship of money and status.

But the book is never preachy or never pedantic. It’s filled with smart conversation, convincing characters, compassion and insights. Portions will make you laugh with acknowledgement, other portions will break your heart. In a way, this is a portrait of the “every family.” You won’t soon forget the Olsons or the world that Jennifer Venderbes has so expertly created.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jennifer Vanderbes
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another family dinner book: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Bibliography:

• Easter Island (2003)
• Strangers at the Feast (2010)
• The Secret of Raven Point (January 2014)

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

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

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (NOV 02, 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

• The Handbook of Lightning Strike Survivors (April 2010)

“The difference between a fact and a secret was the slithery phrase: ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (SEP 1, 2010)

Early on in Monique Truong’s powerful new novel, Bitter in the Mouth, the narrator, Linda Hammerick, realizes her family is keeping secrets from her. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two. Those were the last words that my grandmother ever said to me,” Linda recalls. It will take many more years before Linda can discover what those secrets are but before then she must navigate a strained childhood in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina.

As Truong reveals slowly over the course of the novel, Linda is different from the residents of Boiling Springs in many ways but there’s one specific condition that we find out about right away: Linda suffers from synesthesia. This is a neurological condition where different senses can overlap. Linda suffers from a specific one where spoken words coming at her yield various taste sensations in her mouth. For example, she forever associates her teen crush with the taste of orange sherbet. Needless to say, this is a crushing disability made worse by the fact that nobody in town—including her own parents—can really comprehend what’s wrong. “Many of the words that I heard or had to say aloud brought with them a taste—unique, consistent, and most often unrelated to the meaning of the word that had sent the taste rolling into my mouth,” Linda recalls, “On my report cards, my teachers conveyed this undetected fact to my parents as ‘your daughter’s unwillingness to pay attention in class.’”

As Linda works her way through school, she manages her “incomings” with other strong tastes—namely cigarettes and alcohol. By the time she graduates from Boiling Springs High School, she is close to smoking a pack a day.

Despite the synesthesia, Linda’s giftedness surfaces anyway and she is easily the brightest kid in school—the Brain. At school she has a best friend, Kelly, who is herself struggling with a poor self-image and later, an unplanned pregnancy.

Linda’s relationship with her family is strained. Her mother, DeAnne, is especially distant and it isn’t very clear until the end why she is so. When Linda tragically is raped by a local landscaper, she is horrified that the incident doesn’t really register with her mother. It is this seemingly chilling indifference that forever turns Linda off her home and family. The only family member she is very close to is her granduncle, Harper Evans Burch, known to the family as Baby Harper. In fact, it is Baby Harper who offers Linda the shoulder she needs when she goes through life’s many ups and downs.

Unmoored by slowly decaying family ties, Linda jumps at the first chance she gets to leave home. Like her father, Thomas Hammerick, she goes to Yale and studies law. “I hadn’t thought about my refusal to return to Boiling Springs as a habit, but it was. Like biting my fingernails or smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, the act of not returning home had an ameliorative effect on my psyche,” Linda says. “It had begun with the idea, new and fizzy in my eighteen-year-old brain, that family was a choice and not fate. If that was true, then I chose not to have a family.” Soon Linda is settled in New York City working at a law practice, on her way to becoming junior partner, until tragedy strikes again.

She eventually returns to Boiling Springs and learns of the secrets from DeAnne. As much as this sounds like the stuff of melodrama, it is not. Monique Truong, whose debut was the sensational The Book of Salt, does a wonderful follow-up job with Bitter in the Mouth. Her writing is simply superb and she explores the weightiest of themes with ease.

The only problem with her new novel is that while the story might be completely different, the ground she covers here is not. The themes she explores in The Book of Salt are here again. This is not to imply that it diminishes Bitter in the Mouth as a novel in any way—but instead to say that one wishes the immensely talented Truong had taken some more risks and colored a little outside the lines. Evaluated by itself, Bitter in the Mouth is fantastic. But taken together with The Book of Salt, you don’t see much growth in the author’s range. Despite this minor quibble, it’s plenty evident that Monique Truong is extremely talented and her latest novel is an absolute delight.

One final thought about the book has not much to do with the book itself but with the timing of its release. Anybody who has been paying any kind of attention in the literary world is well aware of the release of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom on September 1. It’s just unfortunate that Bitter in the Mouth will be released exactly at this time. The immensely able Truong deserves loads more attention than she has received so far and the timing of this book’s release will, unfortunately, not help.

Bitter in the Mouth is an impressive feat especially given that her brilliant debut made it such a difficult act to follow. With her latest novel, Truong conclusively proves she’s no one-hit wonder.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 59 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (August 31, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Monique Truong
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Book of Salt Also consider: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Bibliography:

• The Book of Salt (2003)
• Bitter in the Mouth (2010)

Co-editor:

• Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (1998)

“My mother – well – she just wasn’t around much. I look at her now and I know why. She married the wrong man, handed over her children to Gran and grabbed life by the throat. But she was only strangling herself. I’m watching her recovery now. She is, you know, a very clever woman. Underneath the facelifts, there’s a decent brain.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUN 9, 2010)

Ruth Hamilton’s A Parallel Life is a darkly comedic novel about an extraordinarily dysfunctional family. It is an English comedy of errors that is sometimes over the top, reminiscent of Monty Python or a Peter Sellers movie.

Hermione is the matriarch of the Compton-Milnes family. Despite having Multiple Sclerosis and being wheelchair bound, her mind is sharp as a tack and she possesses great wisdom. She insists on Tuesday morning breakfasts for the purpose of the whole family getting together. The rest of the family is not big on these breakfasts but they attend at her request. Other than these breakfasts they usually meet one another on the run.

Hermione’s son is Gustav. He married Lisa when he was young and they produced two children, Harriet and Ben. Since the children were born, they have nothing to say to each other nor do they interact. Each has their own life, completely separate from the other. Gustav was trained as a doctor but is much better known as an eccentric scientist who studies the potential dangers of microbes to the world. Gustav collects train sets and rents a room from Sheila Barton who takes care of him as if she were his mother.

Lisa is addicted to Botox and bridge. She’s had so much Botox that her face moves very little and one can no longer read her emotions. Lisa has had a series of affairs with men that she’s picked very poorly. There is one loser after another. Of late, she picked a man who was involved in a crime a few years ago. Through a very round-about turn of events, Lisa becomes friends with this man’s wife, Annie. He is convinced that Lisa and Annie have evidence that connects him to the crime and he is stalking them, trying any way he can to find the gun that he thinks they have hidden somewhere that connects him to the crime.

Harriet and Ben are the children of Lisa and Gustav. Ben has a very serious case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and rarely leaves his apartment in his grandmother’s house. He is compulsively clean and the only person he allows near him is his sister Harriet. He is, however, partial to some kinky sex on the internet which has created emotional and medical issues for him. Harriet has put off going to Oxford University because she feels it is her obligation to care for her brother. She has asked her grandmother to build her a cottage on their grounds and is in the process of moving in. Harriet works in a jewelry store and is renowned for the way she can “mend a watch and make platinum shine like an item stolen from clear night skies.” Recently, she is trying to get Ben to deal with his OCD because she has fallen in love, wants to attend school, and basically desires a life of her own.

Neither Harriet nor Ben were brought up by their parents, each of whom was too narcissistically involved in their own lives. Hermione, their grandmother, and their funny housekeeper, filled with malapropisms, raised them.

During the novel, the family will face major troubles and they will have to act as a whole “for the very first time if they are to survive with any degree of sanity.” What makes this book interesting is all the unexpected things that happen to the characters along with the eccentric personalities of the characters themselves.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Severn House Publishers; 1 edition (May 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ruth Hamilton
EXTRAS:	Hmm… nothing
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another extraordinary dysfunctional family: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Bibliography:

• A Whisper to the Living (1989)
• With Love from Ma Maguire (1990)
• Nest of Sorrows (1991)
• Billy London’s Girls (1992)
• Spinning Jenny (1993)
• The September Starlings (1994)
• A Crooked Mile (1995)
• Paradise Lane (1996)
• The Bells of Scotland R0ad (1997)
• The Dream Sellers (1997)
• The Corner House (1998)
• Miss Honoria West (1999)
• Mulligan’s Yard (2000)
• Matthew and Son (2002)
• Saturday’s Child (2002)
• Chandler’s Green (2003)
• The Bell House (2005)
• Dorothy’s War (2005)
• Judge’s Daughter (2007)
• The Reading Room (2009)
• A Parallel Life (May 2010)
• Mersey View (July 2010 in UK)
• Sugar and Spice (December 2010)

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

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (JUN 2, 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

As Contributor:

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

“I have to smile, even as I chafe, as always, at our family’s patented inability to express emotion during watershed events. There is no occasion calling for sincerity that the Foxman family won’t quickly diminish or pervert through our own genetically engineered brand of irony and evasion. We banter, quip, and insult our way through birthdays, holidays, weddings, illnesses.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (SEP 23, 2009)

This is a grand book – hilarious, poignant, thoughtful, emotional, and real. It is one of the best books I have read this year and a book I intend to give to many of my friends and family members. It is THAT good.

The book is told in the voice of Judd Foxman. It starts off with Judd finding out that his wife of ten years is cheating on him with his boss, a radio jock. Shortly after realizing he’s a cuckold, he gets a call from his sister telling him that their father died and that his father wanted them to sit Shiva. (This is a Jewish ritual that the immediate family participates in for seven days after the death of a loved one). Judd immediately leaves for his mother’s house to meet up with his two brothers, his sister, and his mother.

The Foxman clan is riotously over the top. When someone says something reasonable, “we all stare at her as if she just started jabbering in ancient tongues. We have always been a family of fighters and spectators. Intervening with reason and consideration demonstrated a dangerous cultural ignorance”.   Listening to the Foxmans reminded me a bit of watching “All in the Family,” only better.

There is mom, a famous writer who wrote a book on how to bring up children. She is also famous for her double-D cleavage and the amount she likes to show. Phillip is the youngest of the clan. One can never be sure if what he is saying is true. His favorite activity is sex, lots of it. He arrives late to the funeral in a Porsche, bringing with him an older woman, his ex-therapist, to whom he is engaged. There is Wendy, the sole female sibling. She is married to a financier who spends little time with her. He spends most of his time on the phone discussing business, even at the funeral and during sitting Shiva. She has three children and it all seems just too much for her. Paul is the oldest of the boys. He runs the family’s sporting goods business. He also carries around a lot of anger, mostly directed at Judd. He was once headed for the major baseball leagues and had a baseball scholarship to UMass. This was all ruined when he got attacked by a Rottweiller while he was coming to Judd’s defense. His pitching arm was maimed severely and his baseball career ruined. He and his wife, Alice, have been trying to get pregnant. Alice is on an emotional roller coaster from her fertility treatments.

And then there is Judd. He is an emotional wreck. He still loves his wife but can’t get over the fact that she’s been cheating on him for a year. He’s out of a job now, not wanting to work for the man who’s shtupping his wife. He’s been living in a basement, eating pizza and take-out Tex-Mex. Basically, his life is a royal mess. The thought of spending seven days with his family is a nightmare because they never get along, and that is putting it mildly. Sitting Shiva creates more problems for him. “Suddenly, I can’t stop seeing the footprints of time on everyone in the room. The liver spots, the multiple chins, the sagging necks, the jowls, the flaps of skin over eyes, the spotted scalps, the frown lines etched into permanence, the stooped shoulders, the sagging man breasts, the bowed legs. When does it all happen? In increments, so you can’t watch out for it, you can’t fix it. One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.”  Judd doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he sees all the old folks come and go from his family home.

During the course of sitting Shiva, the Foxman clan fights, loves and learns a lot about one another – – sometimes more than they wanted to know. I loved reading this book from the first page till the last. It’s everything a book should be, and more.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 206 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Adult (August 6, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE:	This Is Where I Leave You
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jonathan Tropper
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of How to Talk to a Widower More humorous dysfunction: The Family Man by Elinor Lipman Mailman by J. Robert Lennon Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom

Bibliography:

• Plan B (2000)
• The Book of Joe (2004) (a.k.a. Bush Falls in UK)
• Everything Changes (2005)
• How To Talk to a Widower (July 2007)
• This is Where I Leave You (August 2009)