“It’s quarter to midnight. I’m standing in the rain outside my next-door neighbor’s house, gripping his rusted railings with cold, wet hands, staring down through them at the misshapen and perilously narrow stone steps leading to his converted basement, from which noise is blaring. It’s my least favorite song in the world: Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (FEB 13, 2014)

In Sophie Hannah’s The Orphan Choir, forty-one year old Louise Beeston may be on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Her creepy next-door neighbor, Justin Clay, plays loud music late at night, usually every other weekend. Although Louise has repeatedly implored him to stop, Clay is indifferent to her pleas. (Louise’s husband, Stuart, is oblivious to the cacophony. Even if a freight train were to pass through their bedroom, Stuart would remain asleep.) Unfortunately, Louise has little hope that Clay, a pot-smoking party animal who enjoys living it up with his loud-mouthed friends, will change his ways.

Adding to her distress is Stuart’s plan to sandblast the exterior of their sooty Cambridge home. The workman her husband hired plans to cover and seal their windows, leaving them without natural light for at least three weeks. In addition, the sandblasting will kick up a great deal of dust. All this would be bearable if Louise’s only child, seven-year-old son, Joseph, were living with them. Instead, he is a junior probationer boarding at Saviour College School, an elite educational institution that trains promising youngsters to sing religious choral music. Although Louise and Stuart see their son regularly, Joseph spends most of his time away from home. Louise hates this arrangement; she misses Joseph terribly. Stuart, on the other hand, argues that their child is happy and thriving, and should remain where he is.

As Louise narrates her tale of woe, we gradually start to wonder if she is completely sane. She admits that she is sleep-deprived, irritable, and resentful. Louise and her husband quarrel frequently and she soon becomes too distraught to go to work. Moreover, she is having troubling visions: She sees and hears a choir of children similar to her son’s, except that this group includes girls. Is Louise hallucinating? Or does this “visitation” have a deeper meaning?

The Orphan Choir is relatively brief, yet extremely vivid and powerful. The author is clever but not self-consciously so, and she uses foreshadowing skillfully to hint that everything is not as it seems. Hannah’s hard-hitting dialogue, adept use of setting, and wonderful feel for language add to the novel’s potency. We sympathize with the exhausted, frustrated, and high-strung heroine, and hope that she will somehow find the peace of mind she craves. Leave it to the talented and creative Sophie Hannah to spring some big surprises at the conclusion of this engrossing and eerie psychological thriller; the riveting finale will knock your socks off.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sophie Hannah
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dead Lie Down

Bibliography:

• Gripless (1999)
• Cordial and Corrosive: an unfairy tale (2000)
• The Superpower of Love (2002)
• The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets : Stories (2008)
• The Orphan Choir (January 2014)

Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries:

• Little Face (2006)
• The Wrong Mother (2008 UK; 2009 US) ( Published as The Point of Rescue) in the UK
• The Dead Lie Down (2009 UK; 2010 US) (Published as The Other Half Livesin the UK)
• The Truth Teller’s Lie (2010 UK; 2010 US) (Published as Hurting Distance in the UK)
• The Cradle in the Grave (2011) (Published as A Room Swept White in the UK)
• The Other Woman’s House (2012)  (Published as Lasting Damage in the UK)
• Kind of Cruel (2013)
• The Carrier (2014 in UK)

Note: Sophie Hannah is also an accomplished poet, see her website for more information on her poetry books.

“Iris Dunleavy?” asked Mary. “Is she the plantation wife? She dresses so well for a lunatic. She had the most colorful flounces on her skirt the other night.”

Book Review:

Review by Judi Clark  (FEB 9, 2014)

This is Kathy Hepinstall’s fourth novel… and I’ve read all four, so obviously I like this author. She writes a different book each time and thus one never knows what will be found upon picking up her latest, although one can be sure it will be both literary and lyrical, no matter the tone and subject.

Blue Asylum takes place during the Civil War years on Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida.

A judge finds the main character, Iris Dunleavy, insane essentially for hating and embarrassing her husband, “Wives were not supposed to hate their husbands. It was not in the proper order of things.” Her rich husband pays extra for her to be cured at the institution with the best reputation, the SANIBEL ASYLUM FOR LUNATICS which is managed by British born psychiatrist Dr. Cowell, who stubbornly believes that Iris is insane because a judge declared it. But Iris insists that she is not insane, that she was merely escaping from a hateful husband and cruel man. As she reveals her horrific story bit by bit, we can see that while she may not be clinically insane, she may have been crazy mad considering the decisions/actions she undertook (and continues to undertake).

She befriends the doctor’s 14-year-old son Wendell and another patient, Ambrose, who is suffering from something that happened during the civil war. She longs to escape and eventually does but with devastating effects.

I liked many things about this book, but I didn’t “love it,” at least not as much as I did The Absence of Nectar and Prince of Lost Places. But I did enjoy it immensely even though it is a little heavy handed on the message, not unlike her debut (and Oprah book club choice)  The House of Gentle Men.  Then again, given headlines such as Todd Akin’s comment on legitimate rape, it may be that heavy handed feminist historical literature is still necessary.

Hepinstall captures the historical detail of well and it is very visual as she sets a mood and imagery that plays out well both as metaphor and setting:

“Dawn broke soft and clean on the island of shell and marl and current. It was a day like any other, one more day in a season when marking the days was difficult, since the balminess was resolute and the birds were attuned to the tides, the tides to the moon, and the moon to the lunatics, under their crazy spell, waxing and waning in the accordance with the fluctuations of their madness and the depth of passions. A group of terns had gathered at the edge of a calm sea, and a single raccoon, caught after a daylight, skittered out of the dune vegetation and into the forest, leaving behind a loggerhead nest full of ruined eggs, shells broken and half-formed turtles spilling out in the sand.”

Hepinstall considers this a love story… and it is, but not the happy kind. This novel is an excellent choice for book clubs.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 139 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Judi Clark
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kathy Hepinstall really humorous blog
EXTRAS:	Website for Blue Asylum Reading Guide Interview with Kathy Hepinstall
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Prince of Lost Places  The Absence of Nectar The House of Gentle Men

Bibliography:

• The House of Gentle Men (2000)
• The Absence of Nectar (2001)
• Prince of Lost Places (2003)
• Blue Asylum (2012)

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

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (DEC 28, 2013)

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

• Mother, Mother (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

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

“We’re nearly ready, we’re always almost ready and it takes only a little time for the vessels to flush and fill with memory, and then we can open our eyes, lift our heads, sit up in our beds, and turn to meet your gaze. We’ll tell you what we remember.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JUL 15, 2011)

Nestled in the pristine Finnish woods is a sanatorium for women. It’s the 1920s and medicine and its accompanying attitudes towards women’s health is moving from Victorian ideas to more modern methods of treatment, but those shifts have not yet reached the women’s hospital at Suvanto. This vast multistoried building is still part spa for the wealthy wives of the male employees for the local timber company, and part hospital for the poor. This is a building with sharp physical and mental divisions between staff and patients and also between the patients themselves. The poor patients–those who are considered “really” ill are kept on the bottom floors, while the convalescing wives of the timber employees, called the “up-patients” lodge on the 5th floor.

American nurse, Sunny Taylor, arrives at Suvanto hoping to leave the memories of her mother’s protracted illness behind. Upon arrival, she’s assigned to administer to the up-patients on the top floor. Most of these women are not seriously ill–although they may suffer from a number of hysterical illnesses, age-related problems or perhaps just ennui–the result of the delicate, protected and largely synthetic lives they lead. Into this stifling atmosphere of hospital pajamas, organized games and medications, arrives Julia Dey, a former tango teacher dumped on the hospital by her husband.
There are hints that Julia may suffer from some sort of venereal disease, but she also suffers–as many middle-aged women do at Suvanto–from a “woman’s ailment.” In Julia’s case, she suffers from a prolapsed uterus. Sunny begins to find that she identifies with the patients rather than the rest of the nursing staff, and she’s particularly sympathetic to Julia.

Unlike Julia, who had no say in the fact she was sent to Suvanto, some of the women have chosen to stay at Suvanto and welcome the time as a break from their husbands. Indeed, some of the wealthy wives are regulars who return each year. These wives lead protected, hothouse lives, so Julia is a totally different being. For one thing she’s worked for a living and she’s led an exotic life. She’s also not an easy patient, and Julia’s refusal to cooperate causes the latent cruelty of the nurses to surface. Pearl Weber, one of the more popular women, is considered by her frustrated husband to be suffering from neurosis and actively making herself ill. The perfumed, powdered and cosseted Pearl becomes Julia’s unlikely friend.

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is an incredibly creepy, disturbing novel, and throughout the story there’s a sense of malevolence and gathering menace. The hospital’s stagnant atmosphere shifts with the arrival of a male doctor who’s experimenting with some new surgical techniques, and the building is detailed in such a way that it becomes a vivid part of this story. The hospital exudes a sterility in which death, depression and hopelessness linger. Its intricate architecture includes soundproofing, passages and locked rooms–all things that echo the ideas of secrecy, separation and impenetrability. Yet oddly, most of the up-patients look forward to their rest at Suvanto. What does that say about their everyday lives?

Author Chapman cleverly allows the narrative to shift from third-person to first person plural, and this technique underscores the idea that while the hospital operates on a bland day-to-day-level, there’s an underlying culture between the female patients that’s largely impenetrable by the staff:

“We cared only for ourselves. We had large windows, and we watched the sky thicken with snow. We pulled open the metal door to the roof and positioned ourselves along the curving promenade, scraping our lounge chairs over the concrete, turning to absorb the winter sunlight through fur-lined hats and soft, generous coats. From the promenade you can see the cornerstone; we discovered this by carefully leaning out over the railing, into the air, looking down to where the building meets the ground. Pictures were taken, and we’d like to see them now, because we were beautiful then. We’d like to be beautiful again, and in memory we will be, and then we’ll tell you all about that winter, including the early deaths, some say preventable, some say one, some say three, that happened at Suvanto. We’re nearly ready, we’re always almost ready and it takes only a little time for the vessels to flush and fill with memory, and then we can open our eyes, lift our heads, sit up in our beds, and turn to meet your gaze. We’ll tell you what we remember.”

There’s a quote at the beginning of the book from The Bacchae, and it’s a quote that fits both the novel’s action and the relationships between the up-patients–women who are largely kept like expensive pets by their husbands, and when these women begin to suffer mentally from the shallowness of their caged lives, they’re shipped off to Suvanto for repair. The women may appear to be docile dolls with expensive habits, but there’s a rage and violence lurking beneath the text that Chapman captures perfectly. The hospital is a strictly hierarchal institution, and yet the up-patients operate, eventually, outside of that hierarchy as they challenge and then destroy it. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is primarily a women’s novel for its exploration of women’s health (real and imagined) and that includes a number of female-specific issues and its strong feminist subtext.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (May 24, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maile Chapman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

Bibliography:

• Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto (March 2010)

“She knows that she does not believe – not really – the stories she tells of Frederick. She knows she does not believe – not really – the opinions of Frederick’s psychiatrists, her relatives, her own family. She knows that she still does not believe that it is as simple as others tell her it ought to be, as she tells herself it ought to be: that she was sane, while Frederick was mad; that she performed the heroic necessary work of saving her family, while, in his mental hospital, Frederick ‘indulged in the escapist writing behavior’ (his psychiatrist’s words) that is now in Katharine’s hands. Sane mad, heroic, dissolute, earnest, deluded: she knows she does not believe – not really – in those simple divisions into which she has spent the last twenty years organizing her past.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUL 1, 2011)

Stefan Merrill Block has written a novel so irrepressibly beautiful and poetic that it left me stunned. The Storm at the Door is based on the life of his grandparents, Frederick and Katharine. Partly imagined and partly based on fact, this is the story of a troubled family dealing with mental illness, secrets, and denial. It is also about the horror and the power of a psychiatric hospital, along with the myriad patients who have enacted their trust in this institution.

Frederick and Katharine met on the cusp of World War II and were married six months later. Theirs was a love affair based mostly on correspondence and the desperation of wartime. For some unknown reason, Frederick does not finish out his service and is placed in a naval hospital. When he is released he looks like a victim of starvation. The reasons for these events are never truly clear to Katharine.

Frederick is charismatic and the life of the party. He is also rowdy and loves his bourbon. He begins to be unfaithful to Katharine early on in their marriage. He disappears for days at a time and comes home promising to change and be a better man and husband. He has lots of plans and aspirations, none of which seem to come to fruition. He cannot hold down a job for long although he has an MBA from Harvard. When he drinks, which he seems to do to self-medicate, he is inappropriate but he is usually able to steer clear of getting into all-out trouble. Katharine’s goal in life is to please others and she constantly and consistently forgives Frederick his transgressions.

One auspicious evening in 1962, Frederick drinks at least five bourbons and leaves the party they are at, borrowing a friend’s raincoat. He is naked underneath. He walks up to the nearest road and flashes either his rump or his genitals to oncoming traffic. Most of the cars just peer and go on. However, two old ladies call the police and Frederick is handcuffed and taken to jail. He has the option of prison or entering a psychiatric hospital. Katharine, with the help of her friends and relatives, decides to commit him to Mayflower Hospital , a fictional hospital based on the actual McClean Hospital in Massachusetts. McClean has been a temporary shelter for the poet Robert Lowell, singer James Taylor, and mathematician John Nash. It is supposedly the best psychiatric hospital in the country. What Katharine and Frederick don’t realize, however, is that Frederick’s hospitalization is not strictly voluntary. He is to remain at Mayflower until the chief psychiatrist sees fit to release him.

When Frederick first enters the hospital, it is very laid back and the patients have privileges and room to move – physically and psychically. There are cows in the pasture and the setting is idyllic, designed by the great architect Frederick Law Olmsted on 65 beautiful acres. Frederick has been diagnosed with manic depression and the diagnosis appears to be quite accurate.

The stories of different patients are shared with the reader. There is Robert Lowell. the poet, who suffers from manic depression. There is Professor Shultz, the Harvard linguist who hears sounds in the words he reads, whose life of loss and tragedy most likely contributed to his first psychotic break as well as his subsequent ones. There is Marvin, the most famous patient at Mayflower, a man of 15 distinct personalities ranging from a French poet to Carmen Miranda. There is James Marshall, a war veteran with only one limb (and not all his limbs were lost in the war) who can fold the U.S. flag with his one remaining arm, raise it on the flag pole daily and take it down lovingly every night to refold.

Unfortunately, the administration of the hospital changes and a psychiatrist with little empathy and a desire for complete control takes the helm. During group therapy, he delights in bringing up painful aspects of each patient’s illness and they cringe in the mandated group therapy with him. He betrays each and every one of them in some great way.

The novel is told in alternating viewpoints; one chapter from Katharine’s and the other from Frederick’s. The structure works well. We understand what Frederick is going through in the desperate situation of his hospitalization, which goes on for months. He struggles with multiple solitary confinements and ECT (electric shock) treatments. We also see how hard it is for Katharine to sustain her family as a single parent and to maintain the strength she knows that she needs to have in order to find herself. She is gaining insight on codependency and sees that her desire to please helps everyone but herself.

All of the characters are given great depth. The patients, and the extent of their illnesses, is poetically described. Block gets mental illness, both the beauty and despair that go along with it. His poetic imagery and narrative never falter and the beauty of the book is sustained until the end. This is by far one of the best books I have read in the last ten years. It is a phenomenal feat of love and writing.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stefan Merrill Block
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds Lowboy by John Wray

Bibliography:

• The Story of Forgetting (2009)
• The Storm at the Door (June 2011)

“Frozen with fear and anxiety, he felt lost, displaced, and without any idea of what to do next. It was inconceivable. The perfect, organized, meticulously planned Charlie Giles might be the most out-of-control beast imaginable.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy  (JUN 25, 2011)

Daniel Palmer’s Delirious is a nightmarish tale in which Charlie Giles, “an electronics superstar,” suddenly loses his job, his reputation, and quite possibly, his mind. Charlie is no stranger to mental illness. His father was schizophrenic and his older brother, Joe, also suffers from the disease. Their mother has devoted her life to helping Joe become more stable, but Charlie has carefully distanced himself from his family and his past. He is a workaholic who made a small fortune from the sale of his start-up company, and is still putting in long hours to earn more money and accolades. One day, everything comes crashing down and he has no idea why. It seems as if he is committing a series of crimes, but he has no memory of having done anything wrong.

This plot, although familiar, works surprising well because Palmer fleshes out his characters and inserts realistic details into the story. The stage is set when we observe Charlie, who cares for his dog more than anyone else, pushing his employees mercilessly. He is a control freak who avoids feeling such “messy emotions” as compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. He prides himself on inspiring fear in his team; he believes that if his workers are anxious, they will produce at a higher level. Soon, the shoe will be on the other foot. Not only will Charlie learn what it is like to be stressed out, but he will also become all too familiar with panic and hysteria. Adding to Charlie’s burdens are serious health issues affecting his mother and brother. For the first time, Charlie sees Joe as a good and valuable person in his own right who deserves love and respect.

Palmer keeps the adrenaline rush going for close to four hundred pages. He masterfully describes Charlie’s horrible mental decline. Should he trust his senses or accept the evidence that condemns him? The author’s familiarity with computer software and music come in handy, since Palmer finds ingenious ways of integrating this knowledge seamlessly into the narrative. The roller coaster ride finally stops when we reach the shocking revelations and final confrontation. Although the ending is implausible in a mind-boggling way, strangely enough, it does not completely detract from the book’s entertainment value. Delirious is an exciting, mind-bending, and suspenseful thriller that explores the dangers inherent in our digital world; the crucial role that family plays in our psychological development; and the ways in which connecting with others helps us realize our full potential as human beings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Kensington; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Palmer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk by David Ambrose

Bibliography:

• Delirious (February 2011)

“Like most private schools it was part fantasy, part reality, and therefore all reality. (…) We were boys who wore suits, monkeys with manners. We didn’t have parents but were treated like babies. We were left on our own but had hundreds of rules to abide by.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (DEC 13, 2010)

I’d seen Fall described as a “literary whodunit,” and was looking forward to some good sleuthing. It’s not quite like that. Mystery is involved, but plot and intrigue are entirely secondary to the study of adolescent development.

The two main narrative voices are Noel and Julius, both students at St Edbury’s – a Canadian high school for the children of the wealthy. Julius’s narration is an unpunctuated stream of consciousness, immediate and sensory. He’s good-looking, not overly bright and (as the story progresses) increasingly shown to be good-natured.

By contrast Noel’s prose is highly structured – more so than would be possible for the age group. This is excused by the account being written retrospectively from an adult standpoint. Within the novel, it’s only Noel that is examined in detail and whose changes are viewed. Most of the other characters are almost static emotionally. There’s also a nominal contribution from William, Julius’s father’s driver.

The “Fall” of the title is the name of one of the few girls in the predominantly male school, and is short for “Fallon.” Fall is dating Julius: they’re the ideal couple, both popular and attractive. Noel is obsessed with Fall as well, though he never declares it to her, but instead continues to state in the narrative that his turn with her will come later. The plot (such as it is) revolves around the disappearance of Fallon from the campus grounds, with both Julius and Noel being questioned about it.

What the novel is concerned with is the development of Noel from a weedy sixteen year old who won’t retaliate if pushed down in a corridor, to a seemingly self-confident, possibly self-knowing sociopath, prone to explosive violence at rare moments. When he visits his family in Sydney near the outset of the book, he describes himself:

“One day I came out of the pool and saw myself reflected in our sliding door. I was a pale and skinny sixteen-year-old who had forgotten to put sunblock on one of his shoulders. My lazy eye was swollen shut, my face was ugly and drained, my shoulder was livid, and I was still unformed.”

It’s the “unformed” that McAdam is concerned with. The environment the teenagers are put into is portrayed as artificial, unhealthy. Despite being highly supervised, there are effectively no adults in the children’s lives. It’s noticeable that Julius’s mother is dead (she committed suicide), Fallon’s father is absent (her parents are divorced) and Noel’s family is supposedly intact but they’re as far away as they can be, in Australia.

The implication is that growing up in this unnatural environment, the children inevitably miss out on vital components of life. Like plants deprived of isolated nutrients, they’re prone to becoming emotionally stunted – lop-sided, etiolated.  In Sydney, as Noel prepares to leave his parents’ house for school at the end of the holidays, his mother says to him:

“I don’t like seeing how much you’re changing. … I’m missing all your changes.”

When adults don’t keep a watch on the changes children go through, undesirable developments multiply unnoticed. There are key incidents that serve as markers along the road to Noel’s increasingly antisocial tendencies. The first is an incident in 9th grade, mainly described by Chuck, a close associate of Julius and Noel’s. The incident involves Noel (still in his “unformed” state) being bullied by a larger boy, and after a fair period of non-retaliation suddenly turning and biting his tormentor’s arm. Chuck says it wasn’t even the fact that he physically bit a piece out of a fellow student’s arm, but that afterwards Noel was absolutely unaffected by it. “…like it was all normal for him. Like he just forgot about it.” It’s not the incident itself that the stolid Chuck finds disturbing, but the separation from a workaday mentality.

Nuances and hints are brushed in lightly but deliberately. In the corridor of a quiet Friday afternoon when not many other people are about, Noel passes Mr Staples:

“who taught Algebra and Functions, nodded at me and said, ‘Mr Reece.’ His lips were tight and there was a look in his eyes that had developed a few years earlier whenever he saw me. Distrust or caution or just that squint of a half-formed opinion. I never liked him.”

Here Noel is narrating, but he doesn’t refer to the biting incident specifically, but simply as “a few years earlier.” In the lop-sided world of the semi-abandoned school, even the teacher’s opinion is possibly “half-formed.”

There’s also an ambiguous encounter with a girl at the gym in Sydney, where Noel first starts working out. Meg is a no-nonsense girl and is pointedly stronger than Noel at the time, but after an encounter at a midnight beach suddenly stops turning up at the gym. Noel writes her a letter of apology for “frightening” her, but as far as Noel’s own account relates, there has been nothing to justify this apology. One is left to wonder what happened after Noel’s pen stopped writing.

This is the case throughout Noel’s account. How self-aware is he? Although it’s deliberately left unanswered, the fact that he’s writing after (what is obviously) extensive discussion and analysis, as well as brief pointers, suggest that Noel is quite aware of his own nature. When he’s sitting in a café with Fallon, he narrates:

“I’ve often tried to see the world through her eyes. I know that café looked different to her than it did to me.”

This brings us to the issue of lack of empathy. Critics of the book have pointed out that characters are not rounded, they’re cut-outs. Particularly Fall, the prime object of desire. We’re not at all clear  what she looks like, or anything about her other than she’s a reasonably attractive, decent girl with a slightly troubled family background. The point about Fall is, however, not why she is desirable, but that she is. In the two-dimensional mind of an underdeveloped human with an insufficient intake of adult stability, the fact that she is desirable is much more important than what she actually is. As readers, we need know no more. In a world reduced to symbols and arbitrary black-and-white areas, protagonists are unable to function when they collide with real life or emotion – the “grey” areas, within themselves and in the external world.

The premature separation from parents caused by boarding school is juxtaposed with the infantilisation of physically mature boys. The school imposes rules, often ineffectual and seemingly arbitrary. Julius says:

“Chuck’s bed is here and Ant’s bed is there and I’m wondering why I’m eighteen years old and sleeping in a bunk bed.”

These two aspects of the evils inflicted by the school seem to combine to create a small vortex strong enough to suck susceptible minds into an emotional limbo. McAdam himself went to a similar boarding school, and there is without doubt a great deal of catharsis and self-healing within the volume. This does not make it less worthwhile a read.

Once again, on hearing the novel was a “literary whodunit” with the title of Fall, I expected perhaps a detective’s journey into the abyss of a killer’s mind, which drags the detective into a biblical “Fall” in the process. In the first analysis, one might be disappointed going in with these expectations. However, in retrospect, this is precisely what it is – except that the detective is the reader, and McAdam tries his best to share the “fall” in a manner that will be participated in, also by the reader. Here, though, the state before the fall is not some prelapsarian innocence. It’s more mere ignorance, unformedness. The protagonists lurch from being unformed to being malformed, no pause inbetween. It’s perhaps more chilling for this, as for all their two-dimensionality, they are in their own way entirely believable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; 1 Reprint edition (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page for Colin McAdam
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Some Great Thing

Bibliography:

• Some Great Thing (2004)
• Fall (2009)
• A Beautiful Truth (September 2013)

“The hardest part is trying to find a way of accepting that there is nothing you can do about any of it. Nothing you can do to change it, or to put the clock back, or put things right if they were wrong.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (SEP 3, 2010)

Susan Hill’s The Shadows in the Street is her fifth Simon Serrallier mystery. Hill continues to engage us with fresh characters and intriguing story lines. Simon does not even appear in the early chapters, since he is vacationing on a remote Scottish island, “where people did not hurry and there was little noise other than the sounds of nature.” Back in Lafferton, Simon’s twin sister, Dr. Cat Deerborn, is worried about her oldest child, Sam, who is upset but stubbornly uncommunicative, “an oyster, closed up tight.”

The most compelling aspect of this novel is its frank depiction of young women who walk the streets trying to earn quick money.  Some of them “were probably no more than twenty, thin, hollow-eyed, their legs without tights under the short strips of skirt.” One of them, Abi Righton, has a small son and daughter whom she adores. She never touches drugs and, against all odds, dreams of going to college and getting a proper job. When a killer begins stalking and strangling prostitutes, Detective Chief Superintendent Serrallier and his team work tirelessly to find a clever and elusive murderer.

Hill’s well-delineated characters include fifty-three year old Leslie Blade, a solitary and eccentric librarian who lives with his homebound mother; Jonty Lewis, a vicious bully and drug addict who enjoys abusing women; Ruth Webber, the bossy and obnoxious wife of the new Dean of St. Michael’s cathedral; Judith, Simon and Cat’s sympathetic and gentle stepmother; and Ben Vanek, an ambitious Detective Sergeant who worships Simon. When no quick solution to the murders is forthcoming, the media and Simon’s boss impatiently demand results. Soon, Serrallier’s pleasant holiday fades to a distant memory as he directs his team to study CCTV tapes, distribute leaflets, and interview potential witnesses.

The Shadows in the Street is a grim tale about the ways in which people deal with bereavement, abject loneliness, and chronic mental illness. The author depicts the terrible plight of desperate single mothers who sell the only commodity that they have—themselves– in order to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. This is an engrossing police procedural in which a frustrated Simon faces the possibility that he may fail to solve an important case, Cat struggles to emerge from her year of misery, and a shadowy individual with a hidden agenda wreaks havoc on a lovely cathedral town. For maximum enjoyment, this series should be read in order, starting with The Various Haunts of Men.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Overlook Hardcover (September 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Susan Hill
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Risk of Darkness The Vows of Silence

Partial Bibliography:

• The Enclosure (1961)
• Do Me a Favor (1963)
• Gentlemen and Ladies (1968)
• A Change for the Better (1969)
• I’m the King of the Castle (1970)
• The Albatross : stories (1970)
• Strange Meeting (1971)
• The Bird of the Night (1972)
• A Bit of Singing and Dancing : stories (1973)
• In the Springtime of the Year (1973)
• The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story (1983)
• Air and Angels (1991)
• The Mist in the Mirror (1992)
• Mrs. de Winter (1993)
• The Service of Clouds (1997)
• Listening to the Orchestra (1997)
• The Boy who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (2003)
• Farthing House: An Other Stories (2006)
• The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story (2007; September 2008 in US)
• The Beacon (October 2008; May 2009 in US)
• The Small Hand (2010)

Simon Serrailler Mystery Series:

• The Various Haunts of Men (2004; 2006 in US)
• The Pure in Heart (2005; 2007 in US)
• The Risk of Darkness (2006; March 2009 in US)
• The Vows of Silence (2008; October 2009 in US)
• The Shadows in the Street (2010; September 2010 in US)

Nonfiction:

• Howard’s End is on the Landing : A Year of Reading from Home (November 2010)

“A therapist who rushes to help forgets to listen, and therefore cannot understand and therefore cannot see. The eager therapist, the one who’s determined to offer salvation, involves himself and seeks his own salvation. The good psychologist keeps his distance and does not involve himself in the results of his work. The right distance allows a deep and clear gaze. The good psychologist reserves the business of closeness for family members and beloved pets and leaves the business of salvation to religious bureaucrats and street corner eccentrics.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 3, 2010)

Noam Shpancer has written a heady and unique novel that takes its primary form as therapy sessions between a psychologist and a stripper. The psychologist has a limited clinical schedule in his anxiety clinic and teaches a university class to augment his income. He also plays weekly basketball with a group of guys that he barely knows. He’s been involved in a love affair with another psychologist, Nina, and they have a child together. This relationship is ebbing.

The Good Psychologist is the protagonist of this novel and also the referent of the university class on clinical psychology – what makes a good psychologist. The Good Psychologist is never given a name. The author is very knowledgeable about many psycho-therapeutic modalities, especially cognitive behavioral therapy. As a clinical social worker and marriage and family therapist, I found this book fascinating. It reads somewhere between a textbook and a novel of clinical methodology.

The chapters switch between sessions with the psychologist’s 4 p.m. client, a stripper named Tiffany, his university teachings, his time or phone calls with Nina, his basketball games and an odd chapter or two where he is alone or getting his piano fixed. The gravitas is in the session time. It is in the classroom where the psychologist’s knowledge, charisma and sensitivity come to light. The author describes the university classroom as though it were real. It brought me back to my clinical work in graduate school and I was impressed with the class’s accuracy and thoroughness.

As the novel opens, the psychologist and Nina are ending a passionate affair, one in which she wants to become pregnant by him. She loves her husband but he is ill and unable to provide her with a child. She will never leave him. She and the psychologist have an agreement that he will never try to see his child. Nina and the psychologist have an easy relationship, speaking frequently and e-mailing one another for personal and professional reasons. As the novel progresses, their interchanges become more professional and less personal and finally start ebbing altogether. Nina is the person to whom the psychologist is closest and he is losing her.

His 4 p.m. appointments with the stripper are often troubling to him as he traverses the difficult issue of boundaries. He consults with Nina about this and tries to be ethical and correct in his treatment. However, he often trips himself up or is tripped up by extenuating circumstances. Tiffany, the stripper, is a difficult client with a lot of baggage, some of which she transfers onto the psychologist.

We get to know some of the students in his class and learn to appreciate the knowledge he imparts. He utilizes Socratic teaching methods, eclectic psychoanalytic methodology and cognitive behavioral modalities. Additionally, he utilizes narratives, metaphors, and stories from the old masters. His students seem to respond to him and it is clear to the reader that he is making some bold inroads to his students’ thinking.

The psychologist is lonely and alone. He lives in a sparsely furnished apartment with cherished gifts from his clients and one mondo-sized piano. He has no friends or acquaintances. He is a world of one whose life is acted out in his clinic and in his classroom. Without Nina in his life, he has no one left who is dear to him. He yearns, from time to time, to see his daughter Billie, but remembers the promise he made to Nina. This creates strong tensions for him.

I loved this book. I don’t think it is a perfect choice for every reader but I think that any reader that is interested in psychotherapy, clinical sessions, and the heart of what makes a good psychologist, will be transfixed by this remarkable book, a debut novel written with the wisdom of a master writer.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co.; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Noam Shpancer’s PT blog
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “shrink” who writes great novels: Irvin D. Yalom

Bibliography:

• The Good Psychologist (August 2010)

“John turned his face to the sun, the light split into beams by the branches. One of them, the size of an infant’s vague kiss, played warmly on the corner of his eye and forehead…Overhead, the weep of birds. The touch of the world. Glad of it. Yearning across it, for home. All the world was road until he was home.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman (JUN 28, 2010)

Somewhere toward the end of this inventive and imaginative novel, peasant nature poet John Clare muses about “the maze of a life with no way out, paths taken, places been.”

In reality — and much of this book IS based on reality — each of the characters within these pages will enter into a maze — figuratively, through the twists and turns of diseased minds, and literally, through the winding paths of the nearby forest. Some will escape unscathed and others will never emerge. But all will be altered.

At the start of the novel, John Clare has been incarcerated in a progressive (for the times) institution called the High Beach Private Asylum. It doesn’t take long for the reader to come to the understanding that this seemingly sane poet is not unjustly imprisoned, but is in fact, stark raving mad. Shortly thereafter, John Clare is joined by Septimus Tennyson, the mad brother of the famous Alfred Lord Tennyson, who also takes up residence; he may belong outside its walls but just by a smidgin because of his gloomy constitution.

The owner of the asylum — Matthew Allen — displays fairness to the inhabitants, yet he has demons of his own. He has escaped a dodgy past as a debtor and has lost the respect of his parsimonious older brother. One of his older daughters, Hannah, is just coming of age and has developed an unrequited crush on Tennyson. Other characters, such as the brutal right-hand man Stockdale and the delusional and fervent Margaret-turned-Mary, drift in and out of the narrative.

The Quickening Maze slips slightly when it delves into a subplot about a doomed mass-produce decorative woodcarvings invention, in my opinion. It helps to know that in reality, this happened, and Tennyson lost most of his inherited fortune as a result. After reading The Quickening Maze, it is nearly impossible to not go running to check out what parts of this book are based on truths. Yet it does not slip enough for me to deprive the reader of a satisfying experience.

Without spoilers and with a nod to the poet Robert Frost (who is NOT mentioned in this book), John Clare will try on various personage from the past, including Lord Byron and Shakespeare himself; his mind will travel “to where it bent in the undergrowth.” Hannah will need to lose her path to find the one that has “perhaps the better claim.” Matthew Allen will slip on his path and go back down one that he has already precariously traveled before, forgetting “how way leads on to way.” And the famous Tennyson? He, too, will forge forward on the path that bcomes his destiny and he will be remembered “aged and ages hence.” As Hannah states, “To love the life that was possible: that also was a freedom, perhaps the only freedom.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Adam Foulds
EXTRAS:	Reading GuideBooker Prize interview with Adam FouldsGuardian review of The Quickening Maze
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another look at poetry: The Anthologist by Nicholas Baker The Booker Prizer winner: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Bibliography:

• The Truth About These Strange Times (2007) Betty Trask Prize
• The Broken World (2008)
• The Quickening Maze (2009)
• In the Wolf’s Mouth (June 2014)