I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don’t even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to smack Augustus Waters and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn’t suck at being lungs. I was standing with my Chuck Taylors on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine. I yanked my hand free but turned back to him.

“They [cigarettes] don’t kill you unless you light them,” he said as Mom arrived at the curb. “And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see:  You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”

“It’s a metaphor,” I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.

“It’s a metaphor,” he said.

“You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances…” I said.

“Oh, yes.” He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. “I’m a big believer in metaphor, Hazel Grace.”

Book Review:

Review by Judi Clark  MAR 9, 2014)

When I was in high school, Love Story by Erich Segal was THE book (and movie) that we were reading and quoting (“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”). It was a weepy love story, between Oliver Barrett (Wasp, rich Harvard guy) and Jennifer Cavilleri (smart, poor Radcliffe music student of Italian descent — and a smart mouth). From the first line of the book we know that Jennifer dies young in this epic star-crossed love story. It’s a cheesy, sentimental story, but still told in a way that makes it a compulsive read. (And didn’t we all love Ali McGraw in the movie!)

The Fault in Our Stars is a “love story” for our current teen/young adult generation. Like any love story, it is kind of “cheesy” … and not easy to put down. But this one is smart. I liked it a whole lot better than Love Story because it is cynical/realistic and its setting is far more accessible than the Ivy league town of Cambridge, Massachusetts with its star cross relation between rich kid and poor kid.

In The Fault in Our Stars, the currency isn’t money but health. Our star-crossed lovers meet at a church support group for kids dealing with cancer, “This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.” Hazel lives with terminal cancer and inseparable from her oxygen bottle; her life has been extended (but not cured) by a miracle drug. Augustus, who had the highly curable osteosarcoma has been cancer free for fourteen months, but had one leg amputated for the cure. He is not a regular participate of the group; this time he has come with his best friend Isaac, who has one fake eye and one real eye:

“He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you.From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.”

Hazel narrates the story with her unique perspective — she may be cynical, but she is not depressing — she’s just a realist. “Augustus asked if I wanted to go with him to Support Group, but I was really tired from my busy day of Having Cancer, so I passed.”

Hazel also likes to quote from her favorite book, “An Imperial Affliction” written by an American living in Holland. “AIA” turns the conventional “cancer kid genre” on its ear and Hazel (and once introduced to the book, so does Augustus) loves re-reading this book that ends mid-sentence. The plot of this book moves forwards on the hope that the author might one day answer what happens to the other lives in the book after the main character dies.

Considering the subject matter, this novel is snappy (not sappy) — not at all morbid, although it is sometimes sad. I loved experiencing the world through Hazel’s eyes and getting to know these kids and seeing them live life preciously knowing that it can’t go on forever.

I think today’s generation are being served a far better love story than mine. The repeatable quote from this book? It is:  “Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10,691 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Books (January 10, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Judi Clark
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Green
EXTRAS:	Spoiler Q & A (for after reading the book)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: An Abundance of Katherines

Bibliography:

• Looking for Alaska (2005)
• An Abundance of Katherines (2006)
• Paper Towns (2008)
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2011) (with David Levithan)
• The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

“The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle and, in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer’s face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes and, eventually, even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 5, 2014)

Falling to Earth is the kind of novel that makes me want to grab the very next person I see and urgently say, ”You MUST read this.” I read this rabidly with increasing awe and respect that Kate Southwood had the chops to create a debut novel with this degree of psychological insight, restrained power, and heartbreaking beauty.

The story centers on a tragedy of unimaginable proportions – a tornado hits the small Illinois town of March in 1925, causing devastation and grievous loss in the homes of every single resident of the town.

Except one.

That one is Paul Graves, a man of dignity and integrity, who lives with his wife Mae, his three young children and his mother, Lavinia. Incredibly, nothing in Paul’s life is touched – not his family, not his home, and not his thriving lumber business…which, in fact, is even more in demand as townsfolk order coffins for the burials of their loved ones.

As the townspeople are forced to bear up under nearly unbearable grief, their envy of Paul’s “unfair” providence reaches a fever pitch and they begin to turn on him – and against him – in droves. Paul, meanwhile, labors under extreme survivor’s guilt as Mae increasingly falls into a dark depression.

Kate Southwood writes,

“A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame.. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it…Even after you’ve yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.”

A parable of sorts, this magnificent novel strives to answer questions that have haunted humankind since early times: how do we comprehend the forces of nature and our own fates? How do we manage the extreme hostility and envy that result from nature’s unfairness? How do we break the cycles of revenge, vengeance, retribution and reprisal? These questions transcend this book and can easily be asked of modern tragedies – Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example.

The themes are universal: love and loss, family, jealousy and suspicion, guilt and survival. I will not spoil the ending but I will say this – it is masterly and seamlessly brought together all the themes of the book and literally let me gasping.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Southwood
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another tornado-based story: Sing Them Home By Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• Falling to Earth (March 2013)

“I then realized that the cathedral is a monument to our grief. It is a shrine for all our dead, constructed of the wreckage of the lives that have fallen down around us.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perksie  (FEB 14, 2014)

Swan Gondola literally starts off with a bang! Two elderly sisters, Emmaline and Hester, known by most in their small county, as the “Old Sisters Egan,” are sitting in their Nebraska farm kitchen drinking coffee. The day has been a peaceful one. Suddenly the house begins to shiver and shake and they are enveloped in noise, a loud BANG!! Books fall from their shelves, china dishes and cups fall to the floor, breaking, chimney bricks drop into the hearth, their caged canaries stop singing and the two sisters are left stunned, shocked. Hester, the tough one, lifts her rifle and opens the door, not knowing what to expect. She and petite, romantic Emmaline, are immediately enveloped in silk. Silk is everywhere. They have witnessed so much in their lives on the farm that nothing really surprises them anymore. The silk comes from a ruined hot air balloon which has apparently crashed into their roof. “Escaped the circus?” Hester wonders. The two immediately search for the pilot, who could be hurt or, even worse, dead. They do find the man alive, flat on his back on the ground, his left leg in a terrible bend. Emmaline’s and Hester’s discovery of the balloon’s pilot will change their lives forever as he relates his strange, mesmerizing and sorry tale.

Obviously in pain, the man snaps his fingers weakly and a card slips from his sleeve which reads, “B. ‘Ferret’ Skerritt, Omaha, Nebraska.” And on the back “This slight of hand you just witnessed is only a hint of my wizardry.” From his inside pocket a postcard falls. Written by Ferret, it gives the reader an example of his unrequited love for his beloved, Mrs. Cecily Wakefield of Omaha. Their’s is a star-crossed love…dramatic, romantic and heartbreaking.

Thus we meet our protagonist whose name is really Bartholomew Skerritt. He is an orphan, (now 25 years-old), left at the door of a Catholic orphanage when he was an infant. Sister Patience told him, “All orphans are born of whores.” There was a note that his mother had tucked into his little suit. “She had addressed the baby as Mr. Bartholomew Skerritt and written: ‘Your last name is your daddy’s last name, (I’m damned sure of it, don’t let anybody tell you different), and your first name was the longest first name I’ve ever seen written down. I can’t give you nothing much but I can give you a name with lots of letters in it. Sincerely, the mother you never knew.'” Reflecting back on his childhood, Ferret says: “Childhood is too awful a thing to make happen to somebody.”

When he was a boy he met librarian, Mr. Crowe. Crowe’s real vocation is that of a ventriloquist. He took a shine to Bartholomew and taught him about the world of books, and more importantly to the boy’s future, how to excel as a ventriloquist.

Ferret has become a petty thief and con-man who currently works as a ventriloquist and a magician at a vaudeville theater, (before the Fair). He usually follows the carny circuit with his unique dummy, Oscar. It is at the Empress Opera House where he meets and immediately falls in love with the mysterious Cecily, an actress with an unknown history. “I heard her name before I saw her, backstage.”

The narrative takes place in the Sisters Egan’s farmhouse while he is recovering. The ever practical Hester, who acts as the community’s amateur veterinarian, has patched him up and put his leg in a cast. It is at the farmhouse where he relates his tale. The author effectively uses letters from Ferret to Cecily, and from Cecily to him, to further the storyline, which weaves back and forth in time from Autumn 1898 to the winter of 1899.

This story-within-a-story begins in the spring of 1898, at the opening of the Omaha World’s Fair. Omaha, Nebraska, is still a noisy, dirty frontier city whose nickname was the “Gateway to the West.” The author writes, “The Omaha World’s Fair, as depicted in  The Swan Gondola,  is a fictional approximation of the “Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” The author’s version of the Omaha World’s Fair was held from June 1 to November 1 of 1898. Its goal was to showcase the development of the entire West, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. Over 2.6 million people came to Omaha to view the 4,062 exhibits during the four months of the Fair. President William McKinley was among the dignitaries who attended. McKinley, in a cameo role here, is immersed in the Spanish-American War, yet still makes time to attend.

Already known as the “New White City,” this fair tries to one-up the fair at Chicago, originally called the “White CIty.” Chicago’s fair took place in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The Omaha Fair is much different from Chicago’s, as there is very little “white” about it. Behind the scenes at the Fair, another story takes place, a sleazier story: that of the “rousties,” those workers who put the fair together and take it down; ZigZag the clown, Rosie the anarchist and friend to Ferriet as well as August, another close friend of our protagonist. August is an eccentric Native American homosexual who has a crush on Ferrit. Also among the fair’s “players” are the ragtime player, the nervous lion tamer, the waltzing dwarves, can-can dancers, hootchy kootchy showgirls, etc. They are all looking to make a buck from the “gillies,” (civilians), legally or illegally. This “carny-like” background really enriches The Swan Gondola.  The author has said in an interview, “As for the genre of carnival fiction – perhaps its appeal rests in the hodgepodge of it all. Our concept of an American carnival brings to mind childhood delights, but also an element of the seedy, the deceptive, and the decidedly adult. A carnival is a bit of a fever dream – it’s all cotton candy and sex, on a dirt lot.”

“The Swan Gondola” is situated on a lagoon on the midway. It is at the gondola that Ferret and Cecily meet and conduct their romance, at least initially. Ferret is obsessed with Cecily from the first moment he sees her. His obsession drives the narrative.

The Swan Gondola is a novel that grabbed me from page one until the very end. The characters are well fleshed-out and complex and the writing is tight – no unnecessary filler. Readers will be ensnared by the offbeat personalities and carried along by the unexpected plot developments. Timothy Schaffert clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book. It seems that the author is a huge fan of L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” as demonstrated in this tale. A riveting piece of historical fiction from page one to the very end. I highly recommend this novel. It is original and entertaining and gives one a good look at the goings-on at a fair, a carny show or a circus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (February 6, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perksie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS:	Swan Gondola Nostalgia
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Coffins of Little Hope

Bibliography:

• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
• Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
• The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
• The Swan Gondola (February 2014)

“You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  FEB 10, 2014)

Julian Barnes’ memoir of grief for the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh in 2008 after a thirty-year relationship, must be one of the most moving tributes ever paid to a loved one, but also the most oblique. So let’s start with something simple, a photograph. Look up the title in the Daily Mail of London, partly for the marvelously-titled review “Lifted by Love, Grounded by Grief” by Craig Brown, but mostly for the photograph that accompanies it. Julian is seated. Pat stands behind him, her arms around his shoulders, her chin resting on the crown of his head. Her love is obvious, she whom Barnes refers to as “The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” But equally striking is the unusual vertical composition. Pat, who on the ground was a small woman beside the gangling Barnes, here appears above him, like a guardian angel reaching down.

Which is relevant, because Barnes’ book is about verticality, about love and loss, and incidentally about photography. The first of its three sections, “The Sin of Height,” is essentially an essay. It begins with three ascents by balloon: the English adventurer Colonel Fred Burnaby in 1882, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1876, and a French entrepreneur named Félix Tournachon in 1863. Tournachon was to become one of the most famous early photographers under the name Nadar; it was he who took the iconic photographs of Bernhardt, and it was in his studio in 1874 that the first Impressionist exhibition was held. Barnes’ second section, “On the Level,” is typical of many of his short stories (and also longer works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and Arthur & George), starting off from fact and developing it in the imagination. In this case, his subject is the passionate affair between Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt in the mid-1870’s, the remarkable openness of the actress with the soldier (on the level, indeed), and its inevitable end. All the way through these sixty-plus pages, you can see the author conjuring examples of daring and discovery, love and loss, and creating a language of metaphor with which to describe it.

My assumption was that in the third and longest part, “The Loss of Depth,” he would apply these things directly to his wife, giving us a portrait of her more intimate and revealing even than those Nadar took of “the divine Sarah.” But no, he does almost exactly the opposite; in photographic language again, what he gives us is the negative, leaving it for us to develop. Almost immediately, he plunges into a description of grief, the constant reminders of things no longer shared, the intolerable intrusion of friends with euphemistic circumlocutions or bracing suggestions, or worse still avoidance of the subject altogether. Pat (whom he never names except in the dedication) is present only in the spaces she has left in his heart; one of the things that turns him away from thoughts of suicide is the knowledge that he retains the mould of her memory; without him, that too would be lost. He comes back, to a degree, through art: through the discovery of opera, through reading, and above all through writing. As you read on, you see him using links to the earlier sections, a phrase here, an idea there, and you think: “Ah, now he is going to pull it all together, and himself too.” But it is never as easy as that. Barnes has great skill, but also the daring to leave doors open and loose ends untied; I am sure that “closure” is one of those words he hates. And that is fine, because this strange asymmetrical hybrid is Barnes’ tribute to a love that will never end, and probably the best book he has ever written.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 24, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Julian Barnes
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pulse The Lemon Table And: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Bibliography:

• Metroland (1980)
• Before She Met Me (1982)
• Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
• Staring at the Sun (1986)
• A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• The Porcupine (1992)
• Cross Channel: Stories (1996)
• England, England (1998)
• Love, etc (2000) (prequel to Talking it Over)
• The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003)
• The Lemon Table: Stories (2004)
• Arthur & George (2005)
• Nothing to be Frightened of (2008)
• Pulse: Stories (2011)
• The Sense of an Ending (2011; 2012 in US) 

Essays:

• Letters from London (1995)
• Something to Declare (2002)
• Levels of Life (2011; September 2013 in US)

“I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (FEB 3, 2014)

The above opening line pulled me immediately into Mia Couto’s novel, The Tuner of Silences; it raised questions for me from the beginning and these didn’t let me go until the end. Mwanito, the narrator, reflecting back on the early years of his life, recounts his experiences while living in the company of three men and his slightly older brother in a remote campsite in a semi-desert. Couto, an award-winning Mozambican author, has written a novel that is part coming of age story, part family drama and part a kind of love story.

Mwanito’s mature voice recaptures covincingly the innocence of his childhood, his gradual awakening to a life that may be different from the one prescribed by his father, whose trauma and loss keep haunting him. In the tradition of African story telling, Couto’s narration moves with ease from realistic depiction of people and scenarios to fantasy, symbolism, mythology and the rich imagination of dreams. Set against the early years of post-Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique, Couto touches on questions of race and identity, of long held beliefs and traditions, and the uncertainties in the newly independent country.

After the sudden death of his wife, Mwanito’s distraught father takes his sons and flees the city for an abandoned game reserve far away. For him life as he knew it has ended and, he explains to his sons, “Over There,” beyond their camp, the world has seized to exist; it is a total wasteland. He declares the camp an “independent” land, names it “Jezoosalem”. Yes, the religious connotation is intended. Following the “renaming ceremony” of place and people, he, now Silvestre, rules “his land” dictatorially, his strict discipline not to be questions. The children live in fear of their father. No books are allowed or anything to do with writing; Mwanito is forbidden to learn: he is to be the Tuner of Silences. “I was born to keep quiet. My only vocation is silence…” he recalls his early experiences. Only he can calm the father’s anxieties. The family is accompanied by a raggedly looking ex-soldier who acts as a servant, security guard, hunter for essential meat supplies and, sometimes, friend to Ntunzi, Mwanito’s brother. Lastly, there is “Uncle Aproximado”, who lives at the edge of the game reserve, far away from the camp. He turns up from time to time to bring other essential supplies from “Over There.” His arrival is welcomed by the boys, who also wonder whether he steals, whether the father has escaped a crime, whether there is really a “wasteland” beyond the perimeter they are allowed to explore…

Mwanito, too young to remember his mother or anything from “Over There,” is a docile and dedicated follower of his father’s instructions. However, influenced by his older brother’s stories about their mother, Mwanito feels her presence in his vivid dreams, yet cannot define her features. Ntunzi, old enough to have been to school, pressures his younger brother to go against the father’s rule and learn to read, one letter at a time. “I already knew how to travel across written letters, as if each one were an endless highway. But I still needed to learn how to dream and to remember. I wanted that boat that took Ntunzi into the arms of our dead mother…”

Eventually, after years in isolation, Marta, the woman from the novel’s opening sentence appears, inadvertantly disturbing the life of each of the camp’s inhabitants and challenging the father’s enforced order. Marta’s presence is not quite as coincidental as it may seem at first, although some readers might find her involvement with the family and their secrets a bit too convenient. Still, she represents an important new conduit to the world outside, essential for the boys in coming to terms with their understanding of identity and other needs.

Mia Couto’s writing is engaging, his sense of place evident and with it the description of the abandoned game reserve in the semi-desert environment evocative. I found the story’s narrator Mwanito totally believable and in his childhood observations, his dreams, desires and wonderments very endearing. While his father may need him as the Tuner of Silences, the boy is a very astute observer of his surroundings. In his musings his language is gentle, poetic and rich in imagery. Silvestre, the father, by contrast, comes across as a tragic figure. In his inability to communicate, he isolates himself increasingly from his children. Unable to recover from his personal trauma, his clinging to a happier past with pseudo-religious rituals alienates his children and, rather than protecting them from the “wasteland Over There,” pushes them towards planning their escape if there is a chance. Given the place and the time frame the novel is set, I sense that Couto while personalizing his story very effectively, his novel also explores the deeper societal traumas and challenges that people in Mozambique have faced in their recent history. For me, this has been a thought provoking read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Biblioasis (February 26, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Mia Couto
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A River Called Time

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Voices Made Night : Stories (1986; translated 1990 )
• Every Man is a Race (selected works from author translated 1994)
• Under the Frangipani (1996; 2001 in US)
• The Last Flight of The Flamingo (2000; translated 2005)
• Sleepwalking Land (1992: translated 2006)
• A River Called Time (2002; 2009 in US)
• The Tuner of Silences (2009; February 2013 in US)

I know that I can no longer reach her.

I know that, should I try to reach her–should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her the song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in–she will fade from my touch.

Vanish.

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (NOV 10, 2011)

Blue Nights is ostensibly about the loss of a child. In reality, however, it is about the passing of time. Indeed, it is the passing of time that captures all loss, loss of children, of loved ones, and ultimately, of self. It is the classic Heritclitian flow and Ms. Didion has here given herself to it fully, embracing every ripple, bend and eddy. With superhuman strength she resists fighting the current. She does not emote. She does not wax sentimental. Rather she turns her hard-edged and beautiful prose squarely upon her subject matter–as she always has done–and sets to work. Yet even she wonders if the manner in which she practices her art is up for the task. Halfway through the book she wrestles with the question: “What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point–the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated–what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own?” How can one write about the loss of a child with prose chiseled from tempered steel?

How does one make sense of it, bestow order where there is but chaos, the losses, the aging and the attendant frailty?. How does the writer rise to this? She exhibits no pretension, no artifice. There is that line, repeated throughout her previous memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking: “She’s a pretty cool customer.” Never did anyone seem so cool than the writer does here. She is a reporter, a cool and trained observer, even when she is her own subject matter. Yet she is laid bare. “When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room…” she writes, noting her infirmities, “is this what I am actually saying? Does it frighten me?”

Yet, she is present, bold and unflinching. She is serious. We can ask for nothing more, and at times wish she would hold back–a trait, I would wager, of which she is not capable. In characteristic Didion fashion she brings her steely eye and razor-precise prose to her subjects: the loss of her daughter Quintana Roo, and, unflinchingly, her advancing inescapable personal extinction. Her narrative is peppered with bits of her childhood, her fading friendships, the loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the adoption (March 1966) of Quintana. All this reflected against the backdrop of growing old. It is all loss.

“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast,” she writes.

Early in the book, reflecting on the loss of her daughter, she wonders, “Had she no idea how much we needed her?” When I first read this–it is a sentence repeated throughout, like a mantra–when I first read this my mind filled in the blanks quickly rushing ahead. My mind read, Had she no idea how much we loved her? I stumbled over the word need and had to reread the sentence. Was love too strong an emotion to bring to the page, I wondered? Or was she saying something else? A few pages later, while remembering the adoption of the infant Quintana, she asks, “…what if I fail to love this baby?” (Her italics.) Only here will love appear as a doubt-filled question.

Late in the book she finds herself in the hospital. She had awakened in the night on the floor of her bedroom, lying in a pool of blood. “It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness.” The event, however, is not the point. The point is the question of who to contact in case of emergency. “Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?” (Her italics.) She goes through the lists of people, possible candidates. But there are problems. They live elsewhere, or are out of the country, or aren’t someone with whom she wants to share such intimacy. Or are gone. Ultimately she concludes, “Only one person needs to know.” And then the bookend to Had she no idea how much we needed her? “She is of course the one person who needs to know.” And she is gone.

It is the intertwined nature of family and friendship, of life itself, on display here. The denouement comes in the fashion in which it all unravels, how fast the end arrives and the struggle of the observer, the chronicler–indeed, the mother–to survive. As she confesses at the book’s end: “The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Joan Didion
EXTRAS:	Powerful Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Year of Magical Thinking

Bibliography:

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) 
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006) (first seven previous books in one)
• Blue Nights (November 2011)

Fiction

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It As It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

“I am imprinting this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment I’ll want to keep.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (SEP 12, 2011)

This is a beautiful book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.

The plot follows the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.

The technique of the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly peculiar, and entirely seductive.

It’s even more astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal, bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.

Two of the central characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven, moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion, religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as the “traditional” poet.

These extreme stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous, depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the novel.

Along with the much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process, which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the meticulous precision with which it’s put together.

The character reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is slightly dizzying.

If you read action thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry, just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lan Samantha Change
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on poetry: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Hunger: A Novella (1998)
• Inheritance (2004)
• All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (September 2010)

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

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (SEP 10, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

• Makeda (August 2011)

Nonfiction:

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

“His hand is growing cold; still she holds it. Sitting at his bedside she does not cry. From time to time, she lays her cheek against his, taking slight comfort in the rough bristle of unshaved hair, and she speaks to him a little.

I love you, she tells him.

I always will.

Je t’aime, she says.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 8, 2011)

Lily Tuck`s novel, I Married You for Happiness, is the story of a woman mourning the sudden death of her husband. It was shortly before dinner when Philip came home from his college teaching position. When Nina calls him for dinner he is dead. She lies by his cold body all night remembering their lives together. The prose is spare and lovely, recalling their joys, passions and pains of their forty-two years together.

Recently, I’ve read three memoirs about grieving a spouse after sudden death: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name. Lily Tuck’s book covers similar territory as these memoirs but in fictional form.

Nina is an artist and Philip is a mathematician specializing in probability theory. They have one daughter, thirty-five year old Louise. This book takes place over the course of one night following Philip’s death. As the story unfolds, Louise does not yet know her father has died. Nina just wants to spend this one night next to Philip. “In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service – whatever needs to be done. Tonight – tonight, she wants nothing. She wants to be alone. Alone with Philip.”

Nina tries to remember their lives together, the big things and the little things. She is especially focused on thoughts about a woman that Philip had known before meeting her. Iris and Philip were in a car crash and Iris died. Had Iris lived, Nina wonders, would Philip have married her instead of Nina? She puts together different theories of probability in her mind for different scenarios and tries to think like her husband would in these situations. “What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer.”

Simple things cause her great anxiety. What were the exact last words she said to Philip? What did they do yesterday, last weekend? She is not sure and this bothers her. She wants to know and hold the past close to her, remembering all that she can.

She and Philip were so different. Nina paints mostly landscapes and portraits, usually with water colors. Philip gives lectures on probability. She remembers lots of mathematical problems and information that Philip has shared with her even though many are beyond her capacity to understand. “Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to undo – like addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together.” Nina thinks about the physics of alternate universes and wonders if Philip can be alive and dead. Is he really dead?

Nina also gives a lot of thought to the existence of an afterlife and what the great philosophers had to say about it, especially Pascal. Pascal believed it was a better probability to believe in God than not because if God existed and one behaved righteously, they could have eternal life. Still, Nina is not convinced. Ironically, Philip the mathematician had more of a belief in afterlife than does Nina. Philip believes in a libertarian God, “a God who allows room for free will.”

Nina struggles to remember where they’ve lived, what countries they’ve visited, how many houses they resided in, how many animals they’ve owned. These little things help her feel closer to Philip as she spends the night next to him holding his hand and stroking his face. This is her night to be with him, her last night to shower herself in their love.

Philip’s favorite color was red. He once brought her a red embroidered coat from Hong Kong. She rarely ever wore it. However, tonight she puts it on over an old coat she is wearing and parades around the room in it, wondering if Philip would have found this silly.

During their marriage, Nina had an affair and once was raped. She kept both of these occurences secret from Philip. She worries about Philip’s faithfulness to her. “Sometimes when Philip comes back from being away, she sniffs through his laundry, searching for the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – patchouli, jasmine, tuberoses. What is her name? The name of a city. Sofia.”

The prose is spare and the book is written in short vignettes, each about some aspect of their life together or their belief system. As the night progresses, Nina drinks wine, dozes occasionally, but mostly stays up and remembers and imagines their time together. Theirs was a great love and one that has withstood the test of time. Lily Tuck understands what it is like to be with one person for forty-two years. She understands great love and passion.

Interestingly, Ms. Tuck has borrowed information from some of the greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and philosophers for this book: Pascal, Einstein, Wilczek, Erdos, Hofstadter, Hawking, and Feynman to name a few. Though the parts about physics and math were sometimes difficult for me to get my head around, they served nicely to illustrate the yin and yang of this marriage. This is a short and lovely book, an homage to a great love, now lost in real time, but forever present in Nina’s heart and mind.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 43 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lily Tuck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Also by Lily Tuck: The News from Paraguay

Bibliography:

• Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991)
• The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996)
• Siam Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (1999)
• Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived (2002)
• The News From Paraguay (2004) 
• I Married You for Happiness (September 2011)
• The House at Belle Fontaine: Stories (April 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2008)

“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)