“They talked about it afterward, at the end of summer, after the summer folks had left and there was room to breathe again on the island. They talked slowly, hesitantly, in that drawn-out way you hear less and less down east, with long pauses between short utterances, as if, in the end, most things were best left unsaid.

Down at the boatyard where young Floyd was attending to some hitch in the electrics, resuscitating a bilge pump, adjusting a prop shaft that was shaking the engine something awful; down at the town dock where they tied up at the end of a long day, after hosing down their boats, shedding foul-weather jackets, high boots, oilskin overalls, rubber gloves, like lobsters shedding their skins; down at Elliot’s Paralyzo too—the only watering hole on the island—they sipped the froth off their beers and talked of Jim.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 31, 2014)

For any reader who revels in confident, lyrical prose – rich in detail with meticulously chosen words – Alice Greenway’s book will enchant.

The storyline focuses on the elderly and irascible ornithologist Jim Kennoway, who, at the end of his career, retreats to a Maine island after his leg is amputated. There, tortured by past memories and fortified by alcohol and solitude, he eschews the company of others. Yet early on, he receives an unwanted visitor: Cadillac, the daughter of Tosca, who teamed with him as a scout to spy on the Japanese army in the Solomon Islands.

In one sense, the theme is how we evolve and own our memories. In the past, Jim examined how the tongues of different bird species evolved to adapt to different flowers of particular islands. Now he finds himself evolving to circumstances beyond his control: the lack of mobility, the inevitable encroachment of memories and of significant others.

As the book travels back and forth in time – to his youth in the early 1900s, to his stint in Naval Intelligence in the Solomon Islands, to his respected career collecting for the Museum of Natural History, the one constant in his life has always been birding. “Birding, he realizes, offered him both a way to engage with the world and a means to escape it.” Indeed, skinning birds reduces them to their very essence.

So it’s no surprise that even as the book opens, Jim has taken upon himself a quixotic task: to evaluate whether Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was really one of the Solomon Islands. And herein lies another theme: the dastardly pirate Long John Silver, in Treasure Island, remarks how alike he is with the novel’s young hero, Jim Hawkins. Good and evil can exist simultaneously in nature and in life…or can it? Can both co-exist in Jim himself?

The book blurb implies that Tosca’s daughter Cadillac will play an integral role of capturing “his heart and that of everyone she meets.” I believe that sets up false expectations. Cadillac is indeed a catalyst to help Jim arrive at some clarity but for this reader, the center focus of the story is always Jim. It’s an intelligent and beautifully written book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alice Greenway
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld Solomon Time by Will Randall

Bibliography:

• White Ghost Girls (2006)
• The Bird Skinner (January 2014)

“The porch was unpainted and its wood bleached to a silvery white. When the sky filled with clouds, it often turned the same silver color as the wood, so that it only seemed missing a grain to be wood and the wood only missing a breath of wind to stir it and turn it into sky.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (MAY 27, 2011)

I can honestly say that I have not read a book so evocative of place and time since reading anything by Faulkner.

“Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.”

See what I mean?

Tinkers picks up eight days before George Washington Crosby, a New England patriarch, expires. He is lying on a hospital bed in his living room, “right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners.” He is surrounded by the antique clocks he collected and repaired, each tick-tock a motion closer to oblivion. His family, like his consciousness, comes and goes. He built the house in which he now rests. “The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment the floor was going to give.” As he dies, the house and room dissolve, family members disappear. His fragile consciousness returns him to the hardscrabble existence of his upbringing in New England.

George’s father, Howard, was a tinker and traveling salesman. He plied his trade in the backwoods of Maine. He had a hard life. He was epileptic. Upon learning that his cold-hearted wife is going to have him institutionalized, he abandons his family, leaving George and his siblings. “His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and make him into something better.” The event–the abandonment–haunts and plagues George to his last breath. “…personal mysteries,” he thinks, “like where is my father, why can’t I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn’t stop; it simply ends.”

A good reviewer worth his or her salt, would not, should not, pad a review with so much lifting of prose, so many passages directly rendered. But I cannot help myself. The writing in this compact little book is so taut it hums like a drawn bowstring. The reader wonders, how such tension can so artfully be sustained? But sustained it remains, each paragraph more precisely constructed than the previous one.

Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel. The publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, had only been in business a couple of years when they brought it to market. The New York Times did not review the book, it being so far off the radar. (“Every now and then a good book completely passes us by,” Gregory Cowles wrote in the Arts section, a full year after publication.) It won the Pulitzer. Deservedly so. At a time when a thinking person might despair over the crassness and commercialization of, well, of virtually everything that matters, one finds hope and its reward in the tale of such talent realized. Indeed, all is not lost.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 331 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (January 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Harding
EXTRAS:	Excerpt UWIRE interview with Paul Harding
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Pulitzer Prize winners: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• Tinkers (2009)
• Enon (September 2013)

“The idea that we were going back to the land made me laugh. It was the word back. With our son, who was less than a year old my husband and I moved into an unfinished cabin on a sixty-acre woodlot in downeast Maine with no electricity, no plumbing, no phone. It was June 1971.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (NOV 14, 2010)

As the title suggests, this is a book about living close to nature, or rather, being a part of nature while cognizant of that important and salient fact. For, what more can we be reminded of, if not reminded that we are biology first? It is easy to forget that we are made of the salt of the sea and the grist the land, that atoms and molecules somehow cohere and survive and become…us. That is the delicate core of the quiet little book. We are of nature, let us not forget. The writing in this tradition is long and rich and deep. Henry David Thoreau to Audubon to Anne Dillard and E.O. Wilson–all master practitioners of the genre. And now Susan Hand Shetterly. She is in heady company and she belongs there. This book is spellbinding.

As the quote above relates–it’s the opening sentence to the book–Shetterly and her young family moved to rural Mane in 1971. They split wood. They read by kerosene lamp. They grow food. And most importantly, amidst it all, the author pays attention. If nothing else, this exquisite little book is a meditation on paying attention. Thoreau said he went to the woods to learn how to live. Although Shetterly never explicitly tells us what set her upon this course, the motive–how to live–hangs suspended and crystalline quite close to the surface. For her, the answer seems not simple, yet is stark, complex but not complicated: Live close, close to nature, close to that which is wild, close to what makes you alive. “We give wild a chance,” she writes, “and sometimes it comes back, and we are better for it.”

Settled into the Wild is a collection of twenty-six overlapping and related essays. Many are about the animals who, literally, cross her path. Several are about the people, the farmers and the fishermen, who inhabit the land. Several essays overlap, people and animals, the town and the wild. All the pieces are gem-like, written with great care and loving attention. When civilization and the wild overlap, we get perhaps the most powerful images of the book. For instance:

“A neighbor of mine walked onto the deck of his house one early morning just before hunting season with a mug of coffee in his hand, took a sip, and glanced down the cobbles of Patten Bay to the gunmetal water. He looked again. There, up to its belly in the tide, stood a doe. Two coyotes patrolled the beach in front of her. Back and forth they paced over the stones, stopping every now and then to fix her with their eyes. She stood with her head up, frozen in one posture, the water sloshing at her sides. Alert to every move they made, she did not look directly at them. They looked at her straight on.”

Perhaps the most poignant observations in the book are made when the author invites and infuses into her life the wildness found outside her door. There is, for example, a raven named Chac. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “in the high branches of a spruce, there sat a rough nest with four young ravens in it.” She continues: “Three flourished. One did not. Three grew up and flew, but one did not. The parents fed the bird in the nest now and then, but they spent more time with the healthy birds, and then, one day, they did not return.” Shetterly, a licensed expert at wild bird rehabilitation, takes in the raven, heals it–it was bound with fishermen’s monofilament in the nest–raises it, and eventually returns it to the wild. “Letting him go meant that he would never abide a sheltered life. I offered this tamed and crippled wild prince his own ancestral home–bounteous and dangerous.” It is a potential of this type of writing to turn mandolin, to a anthropomorphize wild beasts and then sting the reader for doing so with tales of death or loss or abandon. Shetterly aptly avoids this trap and instead, like a good artful teacher, teaches us of her world without pathos.

Wild birds aside, there are snakes in the bedroom, country roads paved, trees hugged; there are ocean-going farmers studied and crickets caught. Salmons escape their pens and are slaughtered, alewives migrate and rural communities are threatened. Of a neighbor, Shetterly writes, “Jack was one of the first people I knew who lived a sense of place.” This observation stands out and proves to be a watermark for the book. Shetterly too lives a sense of place, to use her phrase. She has arrived there through observation, patience and hard work, and not without a good deal of poetry and art. It is the reader’s privilege to be welcomed into her world. One can learn better how to live studying such a life.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (January 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Susan Hand Shetterly
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Fictional back to the land stories: Drop City by T.C. Boyle Country Called Home by Kim Barnes

Bibliography:

• The New Year’s Owl: Encounters with Animals, People and the Land They Share (1986)
• Settled into the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town (Janaury 2010)

Children’s Books:

• The Dwarf-Wizard of Uxmal (1990)
• The Tinker of Salt Cove (1990)
• Raven’s Light (1991)
• Muwin and the Magic Hare (1993)
• Shelterwood (2001)

“Thoughts popped up while I shut down my computer: Why that particular memory? Why that event and those feelings, and why at that precise moment?

Questions like those were our lab’s bread and butter.  They stayed with me on my drive to Regina’s house, at least halfway there, until other ideas took hold.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (AUG 12, 2010)

In the isolated Soborg Institute off the coast of Maine, obsessive geneticist Victor Aaron works tirelessly to make a breakthrough in Alzheimer’s research with his capable, motley crew of colleagues. Since his wife, Sara, died several years ago, he has walled himself off emotionally from relationships, frustrating his twenty-five year-old girlfriend, Regina, a research fellow and budding poet. He is fifty-eight and suffering from impotence. She is a potent, burlesque-loving young woman that dances naked for him on their routine weekly rendezvous. They keep a regular regimen of Fridays and a secret email exchange at work.

Victor’s links to his dead wife include a series of index cards that she left behind, detailing the various vectors of their thirty-odd year marriage, and her octogenarian Aunt Betsy, the bellicose island doyenne. He pencils in a regular Friday supper with Aunt Betsy following his Friday afternoon failures with Regina. He compartmentalizes his relationships and quarantines his heart, wallowing in melancholy over his loss. The troubled arc of his marriage left a wake of unsettled issues that Victor is trying to stitch together from their memories. Sara’s index cards tell a story that threatens to unhinge him completely.

The novel contains some elaborate observations on life, particularly memories.

“Some theories said the most accurate memory was one that’s never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push ten others below the surface and construct the memory touch by touch. A sculpture between the neurons that looks like its model, just not completely.”

As a philosophical writer of tart reflections, Baldwin has a pungent flair. However, the story was often fuzzy and unfocused, as it lurched from character to character, from scene to scene. Likewise, this eccentric cast of oddballs was self-consciously overplayed. They were a little too quirky and frenzied, as if the author was trying to fill a weak story with ambient noise. The narrative felt boggy and bleary, and I was routinely impatient to return to the examination of Victor and Sara’s marriage. The book needs some crisp editing; the story tends to become either repetitive and muddy or windy and discursive. Also, a dark and defining event in Victor’s past was too affectedly reminiscent of a scene out of Pump up the Volume.

The narrative thrust declines when Aunt Betsy’s son, Joel, a background character during most of the story, is corralled to front and center during the final stretch of the novel. Once the climax is reached–an over-the-top but ultimately enervating experience–the story continues tonelessly with Joel and his transgressions. He was the least engaging character of all, presented wearily as the stock alcoholic. The story’s indulgence into Joel became tedious to read, and I often lost interest.

Baldwin’s freshman effort does show promising talent, but it suffers from the flaws of many debut novels. The jacket cover describes this book as “dazzling.” Honestly, dazzling it is not. It lacks focus and rhythm and suffers from structural jam and story caulking. But I admire Baldwin’s offbeat wisdom and and I suspect he will refine his craft with time.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (August 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rosecrans Baldwin
EXTRAS:	BookPage interview with Rosecrans Baldwin
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another clueless about relationships: This is Exactly Like You by Drew Perry More novels fascinated with memory: The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey Spilling Clarence by Anne Ursu

Bibliography:

• You Lost Me There (2010)
• Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down (April 2012)

“They had fallen in love at sixteen and over the next ten years had, despite distance and difference, never swerved in their determination to reach this day. The faces in the photograph were alight with joy, and for a long time the bride’s mother would not be able to pass the picture hanging in the front parlor of her summer house without feeling a knot in her stomach and a rush of tears. In time the photograph would recede into the general oblivion of furnishings and knickknacks.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUL 12, 2010)

Without much ado, let me state that I think this book is brilliant. It took my breath away and grabbed me by my heart from the first page till its stunning coda. Without being maudlin or histrionic, Ayelet Waldman’s Red Hook Road examines the impact of loss and grief on two families, each as different as day and night.

In the first chapter of the book, the reader is spectator to a profound tragedy. A young couple, married for about one hour, die in a car accident on the way to their own wedding reception.

The bride is Becca Copaken and the groom is John Tetherly. Becca comes from a Jewish intellectual family that has summered in Maine all of her life. Her grandfather, Mr. Kimmelbrod, is a holocaust survivor, and had been a concert violinist until recently when he became symptomatic for Parkinson’s Disease. Iris, Becca’s mother, is a holier-than-thou professor of the holocaust who thinks she knows what’s best for everyone. Beccas’s father is an attorney who never made partner and makes his living as an adjunct professor at a second-rate law school. Becca’s sister, Ruthie, goes to Harvard where she is studying English literature and has her eyes set on academe. She is emotionally needy and dependent. Becca had stepped away from her family’s traditions. She gave up her chance to be a concert violinist by giving up the violin completely and dropping out of conservatory.

John is a master boat designer who builds wooden yachts. He comes from a family of sturdy Maine folk who are not college educated and have lived by the generosity of the sea. His mother, Jane, is taciturn and autonomous, not wanting to feel grateful to anyone. She thinks of the Copakens as snooty and part-timers in Maine. Her ex-husband is a ne’er-do-well and Jane has survived by starting a house cleaning business. In fact, she cleans the Copaken’s home. John has a ne’er-do-well sister who is on welfare. He also has a brother, Matt, who is a student at Amherst. Matt is the first person in the Tetherly family to attend college.

The novel is divided into four parts: the first, second, third and fourth year after the tragedy. We watch as the families are forced to interact with one another despite wanting to keep their distance. We watch them in the classic stages of grief as defined by the physician and researcher, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining/Blame, Depression, and finally Acceptance. The stages are not always linear but they tend to be present in this order as each person works out their personal losses. As the years pass, the families move from denial and anger towards acceptance.

The novel is lyrical and moving at every stage. In fact, there is a lot about music in this book which serves as a wonderful backdrop and metaphor to what is happening to the families. Mr. Kimmelbrod is 92 years old but still teaches a few students in the local conservatory. By chance, the families find out that Jane’s niece, an adopted Cambodian child, has perfect pitch and is a musical prodigy. Mr. Kimmelbrod takes her under his wing and gives her violin lessons. We watch her flourish and we can almost hear the music jump off the pages.

I was especially taken by Mr. Kimmelbrod’s stoicism and very rare display of external emotion despite a sea of feeling residing inside him. Here is a man who has suffered some of life’s most profound losses at Terezin Concentration Camp, yet has been able to find meaning in life and a way to love others. He is not unlike his granddaughter Ruthie who flounders with the spoken word yet has a world of expression just beyond her capacity to verbalize. The two families are actually much more alike than they think. Jane is stoic and unlikely to show feelings yet they resound deeply in her spirit. Both families have a love of wood, one for beautiful boats and the other for violins.

This is as much a book about Maine as it is about grieving families. The reader can feel the pulse of the sea, the solid stoicism of the rocks, and the danger of the granite outcroppings in a place that can be fickle: at times loving and welcoming and at other times dangerous and moody. The weather and elements can cause death in an instant. This is the atmosphere that the book portrays and the reader feels throughout.

Ms. Waldman’s writing is riveting and beautiful. She uses her words like a musician plays an instrument: for beauty, impact, power, melody and mood. It is rare to find such fine writing on such a difficult subject. The only other book I’ve read that portrays grief as beautifully as this is How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall. If this review encourages at least one person to pick up this amazing book, I’ll have achieved my purpose.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 98 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (July 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ayelet Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Love and Treasure Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Bibliography:

• Daughter’s Keeper (2003)
• Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006)
• Red Hook Road (2010)
• Love and Treasure (April 2014)

Mommmy-Track Mysteries:

• Nursery Crimes (2000)
• The Big Nap (2001)
• A Playdate with Death (2002)
• Death Gets a Time-Out (2003)
• Murder Plays House (2004)
• The Cradle Robbers (2005)
• Bye-Bye Black Sheep (2006)

Also:

• Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (2005)
• Bad Mother: A Chronical of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009)

“Big Jim briefly visualized Anderea’s brain: fifteen percent favorite online shopping sites, eighty percent dope receptors, two percent memory, and three percent actual thought process. Still, it was what he had to work with. And, he reminded himself, the stupidity of one’s colleagues makes life simpler.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JUL 8, 2010)

What happens when you take an ordinary small town in rural Maine and put a lid on it? An invisible, tougher than Superman, nearly impermeable dome of a lid that extends into the sky nearly 50,000 feet?

At more than 1,000 pages, quite a lot. King’s latest is not so much a horror tale as a horrifying thriller – the dome is a mystifying fact; it’s the people under it that get really scary. In King’s vision, cutting a town off from the world – from accountability – leaves the bullies in charge. Perhaps a different town would have had a different result, but I suspect (on no evidence) that King thinks bullies are attracted to small-town authority.

There are good people in Chester’s Mills, plenty of them, but after a mishap with the Dome gets rid of the sheriff, the good people are no longer in charge. To Big Jim Rennie, selectman, self-appointed town bigwig, and businessman (used car salesman of course), the Dome is a godsend. Literally. Big Jim is a serious Christian. That is, he prays and he doesn’t swear or drink. And he makes sure that other peoples’ sacrifices are “for the good of the town.” The Dome is his chance to be a really big fish.

Then there’s Rennie’s son, Junior, whose nasty streak has been exacerbated by a brain tumor. There is temporary pain relief for his debilitating migraines though. Violence. Beating young women to death, specifically. Sitting with their decaying bodies afterwards is especially soothing.

Junior is the first person Big Jim deputizes, quickly followed by a squad of Junior’s closest friends, boys for whom power means the freedom to throw their weight around.

Opposing Big Jim are a handful of stalwart citizens and a drifter. The drifter – Dale Barbara, or Barbie, as he prefers to be known – is hitchhiking out of town on that fine October day when the Dome invisibly materializes just a few tantalizing steps ahead of him (doing in a small plane overhead and a woodchuck whose last thoughts are remarkably like those of a raccoon). Barbie’s stint as a short order cook at the town café had come to an abrupt end when Junior and his friends jumped him in the parking lot (for, at first, unknown reasons) and he was run out of town by Big Jim.

But Barbie isn’t going anywhere now, much to Big Jim’s chagrin. And it gets worse, as far as Big Jim is concerned. Barbie, it turns out, is not just any drifter. He’s ex-military, with a lot of smarts, training and special skills. He’s a lot like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher in fact (Reacher gets a mention or two in the course of things). And the powers-that-be in the outside world – the military and the President – want to promote Barbie to colonel and put him in charge of “the situation.”

Barbie is the voice of reason and dissent, accompanied by the town’s gutsy hardworking newspaper owner, Julia Shumway, an old-style Republican. They soon begin to attract a few more folks resistant to the Big Jim version of order. Rusty Everett, the nurse practitioner who soon becomes the closest thing the town has to a doctor – or a coroner. His wife, Linda, a cop, and the sheriff’s widow, Brenda Perkins, as well as a trio of adolescent geeks as smart as they are brave, and a couple of lefty Massachusetts profs who rise to the occasion.

Big Jim gets apoplectic just thinking about any of these people, though Barbie brings out his real evil genius. Meanwhile children are having seizures and peculiar visions having to do with Halloween, which is just a week away. And life under the Dome gets a bit more uneasy every day in ways both predictable and strange.

King explores the effects of isolation from civilization in both physical and psychological ways, using these elements to flesh out the action. Lights and freezers wink out as generators run out of fuel. The air grows gradually hotter, more fetid. Pollutants begin to accumulate on the outside of the Dome, making the sky smeary and strange. Health care is minimal.

And everyone needs to choose a side.

King’s latest is longer than it needs to be, but compulsively readable, like all his books. The development of the Dome environment – the physical and mental mechanics of isolation from the world – is more compelling than the thuggish mind of Big Jim, but Big Jim provides the action, from arming the town’s delinquents to orchestrating a riot to, well, murder, and he’s just getting started.

Over a week of worsening air, frayed nerves, terror and tyranny, the building tension and accelerating action arise not only from the megalomania of Big Jim Rennie but also from the choices of ordinary people, elements of fate and whimsy, and irony. The long, breath-snatching conclusion is pure King.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,299 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pocket; Reprint edition (July 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephen King
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia page on Under the Dome Publisher graphic excerpt for Under the Dome
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: 11/22/63: A Novel From a Buick 8 Everything’s Eventual

Bibliography:

• Carrie (1974)
• Salem’s Lot (1975)
• The Shining (1977)
• The Stand (1978)
• NightShift: stories (1978)
• The Dead Zone (1979) *1
• Firestarter (1980)
• Cujo (1981) *1
• Different Seasons: stories (1982)
• Christine (1983)
• Pet Sematary (1983) *2
• Cycle of the Werewolf (1985)
• Skeleton Crew: stories (1985)
• It (1986) *2
• The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)
• Misery (1987)
• The Tommyknockers (1987)
• The Dark Half (1989) *1
• The Stand (the uncut edition) (1990)
• Four Past Midnight: stories (1990)
• Needful Things (1991) *1
• Delores Claiborne (1992) *3,P
• Gerald’s Game (1993) *3,P
• Nightmares and Dreamscapes: stories (1993)
• Insomnia (1994) *2
• Rose Madder (1995)
• Desperation (1996)
• The Green Mile: serial novel (1996)
• Bag of Bones (1998) *1,2
• Apt Pupil : a Novella in Different Seasons (1998)
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)
• Hearts in Atlantis (1999)
• Storm of the Century: screenplay (1999) *3
• Dreamcatcher (2001) *2
• Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (2002)
• From a Buick 8 (2002)
• The Colorado Kid (2005)
• Cell (2006)
• Lisey’s Story (2006)
• Duma Key (2008)
• Just After Sunset: Stories (2008)
• Under the Dome (2009)
• Blockade Billy (2010)
• Full Dark, No Stars: Stories (2010)
• 11/22/63: A Novel (2011)
• Joyland (June 2013)
• Doctor Sleep (September 2013)
• Mr. Mercedes (June 2014)

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

The Dark Tower Series

• The Gunslinger (1982)
• The Drawing of Three (1987)
• The Waste Lands (1992)
• Wizards and Glass (1996)
• Wolves of the Calla (2003)
• Song of Susannah (2004)
• The Dark Tower (2005)
• The Wind Through the Keyhole (April 2012)

Originally written as Richard Bachman

• Rage (1977)
• The Long Walk (1979)
• Roadwork (1981)
• The Running Man (1982)
• Thinner (1984)
• The Regulators (1996)
• Blaze (2007)

Co-written with Peter Straub

• The Talisman (1984)
• Black House (2001)

Non-Fiction:

• Danse Macabre (1981)
• On Writing: A Memoir (2000)

And the Movies created from his books:

• Carrie (1976)
• Salem’s Lot (1979)
• The Shining (1980)
• Creepshow (1982)
• The Dead Zone (1983)
• Christine (1983)
• Cujo (1983)
• Firestarter (1984)
• Children of the Corn (1984)
• Stand by Me (1986)
• Pet Sematary (1989)
• Misery (1990)
• It (1990)
• Needful Things (1992)
• The Lawnmower Man (1992)
• The Tommyknockers (1993)
• The Dark Half (1993)
• The Stand (1994)
• The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
• Delores Clairborne (1995)
• The Langoliers (1995)
• Thinner (1996)
• Storm of the Century (1999)
• The Green Mile (1999)
• Hearts in Atlantis (2001)
• Riding the Bullet (2004)
• Nightmares and Dreamscapes (2006)
• Desperation (2006)
• The Mist (2007)
• 1408 (2007)
• Dolan’s Cadillac (2010)
• Haven: The Complete First Season (2010) (based on The Colorado Kid)

“Olive Kitteridge was crying. If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person. But there she sat, large and big-wristed, her mouth quivering, tears coming from her eyes.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JAN 19, 2010)

Big-wristed Olive Kitteridge is the imposing, even frightful, over-sized woman at the center of this novel. She lives in a small town on the coast of Maine, where traditionally people keep to themselves, living out lives of granite-like individuality. She trucks no silliness, has little patience for people she does not care for, which is virtually everyone, and has no problem speaking her mind, in fact seems genetically predisposed to it. She is a retired high school math teacher, who, her adult son tells her, was the “scariest teacher in the school.” She is one of those individuals you meet and wonder, how does a person get this way?

And yet, we are not repulsed by her. In fact, we root for her, seeing ever so slightly–and skillfully, I have to add–that she can be more human than first meets the eye. Can she take this humanity and nurture it? The reader hopes so. That would be a redemption we might expect. Yet, there are traits and ways of being that are so deep and developed that they can never be upended. Still, it is the beauty of how this story is drawn that the reader even wonders at such a thing as redemption. We root for Olive, but doubt her, dislike her, yet find something approaching kinship with her.

Olive lives with her loving and patient husband, Henry. Together they have a son, Christopher. The story spans an undisclosed period of years whereby Olive looses Henry, Christopher disappoints and moves away, and Olive is left alone in the village, surrounded by odd characters and old students, neighbors and enemies and a very small handful of friends. She daily passes the lovely house she and Henry built for Christopher, the place where he was to spend his life close to mother and father. But that did not happen and every day her anger grows. Her world was her son and he married a disagreeable wife who took him away and his house-home was sold. She has been abandoned by everyone. Or did she push?

There is a unique structure to this book, a structure, which I confess escaped me until the very end. This is a novel of thirteen short stories, which together form a highly informed narration and refreshing perspective on the protagonist, Olive. She is not at the center of each story chapter, but she is present, sometimes looming, sometimes passing through. If there is a failure with this technique it is slight and hinges on those few stories where she is just a pedestrian, crossing the stream of narration, a reflection in a mirror, so to speak. But even in these situations, we learn something more of her, of her community and her plight and thereby the story breaths afresh, albeit in an unconventional fashion. I like the technique very much. Although the narration follows a traditional sequential timeline, the reader gets the sense that you could take the stories in any order and the novel would work just as well. That is no small matter.

It is not hard to portray Olive as an unseemly curmudgeon. There are the neighbors she has offended, the shop keeper snubbed and professional peers put-off. But nothing is so painful as Olive’s break from her son, a break of her own making. After Henry’s stroke, Olive visits Christopher and his new, second, wife, who seems lovely. But Olive says she is stupid. And she thinks her grandson, a toddler, an idiot. As I said, it is easy to dislike this woman. Finally, she takes offense at being assumed on duty, watching her grandson in a park, and announces she is leaving. When she remains steadfast in her decision, despite the pleadings of her son and daughter-in-law, they fold and give up arguing with her. Christopher who grew up subject to her mood swings, wants no more of her and her antics. He welcomes her to go. Olive cannot believe they are going to let her leave. “You’re kicking me out, just like that?” Olive said. Her heart pumping ferociously.” For the first time Christopher reacts to his mother with calm and intelligence:

“See, there’s an example,” Chris answered, calmly. Loading the dishwasher calmly. “You say you want to leave, then accuse me of kicking you out. In the past, it would make me feel terrible, but I’m not going to feel terrible now. Because this is not my doing. You just don’t seem to notice that our actions brings reactions.”

Yet, it is the beauty of how her story is written that we still find in her qualities which give us pause. In one chapter (short story) Olive visits a woman whose young neighbor, Nina, is also visiting. Olive enters the kitchen, takes a doughnut, and with characteristic bluntness, upon seeing Nina, says, “Who are you?” It is soon apparent that Nina is anorexic.

Olive finished the doughnut, wiped the sugar from her fingers, and said, “You’re starving.”
‘The girl didn’t move, only said, “Uh–duh.”
‘“I’m starving, too.” Olive said. The girl looked over at her. “I am,” Olive said. “Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?”
‘“You’re not starving,” Nina said with disgust.
‘“Sure I am we all are.”
‘“Wow,” Nine said, quietly. “Heavy.”

A few sentences later, Olive’s neighbor, Harmon, looks over at her. She is crying. “If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person.”

This is an intelligent, insightful book. The technique of constructing the novel over a series of short stories is well devised. It is an example of telling a good story well while carving out new technical territory. Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer prize for fiction. It was well deserved.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 517 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 30, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Strout
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other Pulitzer Prize Winners: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The Known World by Edward P. Jones Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Bibliography:

• Amy and Isabelle (1998)
• Abide with Me (2006)
• Olive Kitteridge (2008)
• The Burgess Boys (March 2013)

“Tears [are] making tracks on his cheeks.  The cheeks I want to take between my hands and smother with kisses filled with love.  The kisses that will push away the hurt.  The cheeks I cannot touch, or he will have to do another round of compulsions.  The cheeks I love with all my heart, with every inch of me, because they are my darling son’s, and it is killing me to see him in such pain.””

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (SEP 22, 2009)

Are your kids healthy and happy? If so, you are way ahead of the game. Just ask Beth Alison Maloney, whose son, Sammy, came down with a mysterious malady at the age of twelve. He started yelling at the treetops and the squirrels, refused to go into bed at night, could not enter or exit through the front door of his home, and did not allow anyone to touch him. Beth, who is a single parent with three brilliant and personable boys, had just moved to a new house in Kennebunkport, Maine. (The scenery is gorgeous, and Maloney eloquently describes the wondrous beauty of Maine throughout the seasons.) When Sammy changes so drastically, Beth assumes that the boy is distressed about the move or angry about his parents’ divorce. Perhaps, she thought, he is acting out as an expression of his displeasure.

Unfortunately, as time goes by, Sammy’s behavior becomes more extreme and compulsive (head banging, twitching, hopping, verbal tics, difficulty getting in and out of a van, among others). Beth’s life comes to a standstill and her other children, James and Josh, are adversely affected by Sammy’s constant need for attention. Since Sammy cannot attend school regularly, Beth is on duty 24/7, aghast at her child’s ever worsening condition and desperate to come up with a strategy to help him. Soon, Sammy is unable to sleep, eat normally, or even take a shower. Psychological counseling and a high dose of an anti-depressant do not help. When Beth tells Sammy to stop acting so bizarrely, he replies hysterically, “I can’t! It’s like a mental itch!” Beth finds it hard to accept that her son had become unhinged out of the blue and that he could stay this way for the rest of his life. Her pleasures (including socializing, kayaking on the beautiful waters of Maine, and even enjoying a restful night in bed) take a back seat to finding the answers that she needs.

Life might have continued in this vein indefinitely if someone had not tipped Beth off to the possibility that her son’s obsessive compulsive disorder and Tourette-like symptoms may stem from an undiagnosed strep infection. Beth embarks on a frustrating odyssey, visiting one doctor after another until she at last learns what is really wrong with Sammy. This is a heartbreaking and, ultimately, inspiring and hopeful book about a mother whose love for her child impels her to become his champion at school, in doctors’ offices, and wherever he needs an advocate. She accomplishes a great deal by networking, surfing the Internet, and finally, locating a developmental pediatrician in New Jersey and a child psychiatrist in Boston who proved to be godsends.

Maloney’s tenacity, selfless devotion, and intelligence shine through; readers will cheer for this courageous and loving mother. Beth made a vow and she has kept it. If Sammy were to get well, she promised, she would publicize his case so that other children who are suffering needlessly might also receive the help they need. Saving Sammy is a poignant story of a family in crisis, and it highlights how mysterious the world of medicine still is. Even with all of our technological advances, sometimes it all comes down to a great diagnostician who realizes that the most improbable answer can be the right one. Beth says, “There are some people who can do more for you in an hour than others can do in a lifetime.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 32 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown; 1 edition (September 22, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AMAZON PAGE:	Saving Sammy: Curing the Boy Who Caught OCD
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Beth Alison Maloney
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books like this one: Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Bibliography:

• Saving Sammy: Curing the Boy Who Caught OCD (September 2009)

“At the bottom of the basement stairs, Bennie grabbed a saber saw and a crowbar from Littlefield’s pegboard, and a pair of canvas gloves and a flashlight from the tool apron. Littlefield would have suggested poison—and he wouldn’t have allowed Bennie to use the saber saw—but Littlefield had gone out to the bar, which meant he was probably now sleeping in his Chevette. When Bennie returned to the living room, he knelt beside the baseboard, listened a final time, then cut a rough rectangle through the plaster. With the crowbar he pried back the lath. He aimed the flashlight into the hole. Eight or ten raccoon eyes looked up at him, little quivering noses pointed toward the light, black fur around the eyes, a stripe of white across the ears and snout. Tiny bandits with miniature claws. ”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Sudheer Apte (JUL 13, 2009)

Small-town Maine in the winter has a unique character, made famous by other authors like horror maestro Stephen King. In Water Dogs, Lewis Robinson’s first novel, Robinson gives us the chilly, overcast days of January and February. He also gives us a cast of young men and women in their twenties, and the drama of their relationships and intrigue. Mixed into the snow drifts is the mystery of a man who goes missing. The novel is difficult to put down.

The protagonist, Benjamin “Bennie” Littlefield, has slipped into a meager existence, with a part-time job at an animal clinic serving to just barely maintain his parents’ old, crumbling house. The house, which is referred to as “the Manse,” is shared by his older brother, who calls himself just Littlefield and makes a depressingly uncommunicative companion.

When the brothers are not whiling away their hours on cheap beer at a local bar, the highlight of their life is a paintball game they play with three other young men in a wooded quarry behind a paintball club. One fateful evening, they decide to continue their game past the legal time, in the middle of a nasty blizzard, and, of course, there is trouble. Bennie falls and breaks several bones, and another player goes missing. What follows is a deepening mystery about what exactly happened to the missing man and what role, if any, Littlefield played in it.

Bennie’s relationship with a young woman in the town, and the brothers’ relationships with their late father, their mother, and their sister, are all revealed in the wan winter light. The peculiar community that we see is as rugged as the unforgiving Maine landscape. They may be “hockey-playing, urchin-harvesting hard asses,” but their struggles to keep their bonds of love and family loyalty alive despite their disappointments and old wounds, makes them instantly understandable and universal.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (January 13, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Sudheer Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	Water Dogs
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lewis Robinson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Similar “small town” fiction: The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris The Resurrectionists by Michael Collins (another good “cold, snow” novel.) Empire Falls by Richard Russo (also set in Maine) The Echo Makers by Richard Powers

Bibliography:

• Officer Friendly and Other Stories (2003)
• Water Dogs (January 2009)