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

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JAN 10, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

• How To Be A Good Wife (October 2013)

“She says nothing but stares hard at her husband. She presses a palm to her jaw, though any attempt to stop the vibration is useless. Put it back, George. Put it back. And then you stay. You’ve got no heart for any of this, anyway.

He takes a deep breath, exhales, then tilts his head back and breathes again as though the oxygen he needs were at a height he can’t quite reach. Closed up like this the house can’t take in the sun’s heat, and whiskey won’t help with the chill of an empty house. George refolds the towel, then picks up the bundle.

I’ll pack the tent, he says. Mildew smell and all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (DEC 31, 2013)

The simple plotting of Larry Watson’s Let Him Go – the quest of Margaret and George Blackridge to reclaim their young grandson, who lives with his mother and rotten-to-the-core stepfather – belies the strong emotional impact of this exquisitely powerful book.

The power sneaks up on the reader when it is least expected – in a snatch of dialogue, a perceptive insight, a small detail that turns everything around. Larry Watson is a master of breathing life into his characters through ordinary conversations and actions that hint at extraordinary revelations that bubble right beneath the surface.

The story takes place in Dalton, North Dakota in 1951 in what some people refer to as the “real America” – a place where people don’t waste words, where hard work and straight talk is respected, and where the people and the land are reliant on each other. Their grown son met with tragedy, and Margaret prevails upon her taciturn husband to travel to Gladstone, Montana to find his namesake Jimmy…a boy who has been caught in the web of his stepfather’s violent Weboy family.

Larry Watson walks a delicate tightrope; what he doesn’t reveal is every bit as meaningful as what he describes. Is the long and tender marriage of Margaret and George more complex than it appears? What were they like as parents to their twins – James, who is now dead, and Janie, who is estranged from them? Does raising Jimmy give them the right to another chance?

Along the way, there are brutal surprises and heartbreaks and words so true they cause the reader to gasp at their validity. Take this, for example: “A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.”

At the end of the day, Let Him Go is about what’s worth fighting for and what’s worth sacrificing for along this rocky road of life. Gutsy, authentic, and downright riveting, it’s a book that succeeds at blurring that thin barrier between fiction and the outside world. Quite simply, it’s hard to believe that these characters are anything but 100% real.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Milkweed Editions (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Larry Watson
EXTRAS:	Book Trailer with excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Orchard

Bibliography:

• In a Dark Time (1980)
• Montana 1948 (1993)
• Justice (1996)*
• White Crosses (1997)
• Laura (1999)
• Orchard (2003)
• Sundown, Yellow Moon (2007)
• American Boy (2011)
• Let Him Go (September 2013)

*Justice is a prequel to Montana 1948

“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)

“The call came late on May 2, the first day of what should have been the last ten days of Jason’s fifth tour. First, last, fourth, fifth: everything in military life involved numbers — or letters.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 11, 2014)

In a blog that she wrote for the Huffington Post, Lea Carpenter notes that eleven days was the period of truce negotiated between King Priam and Achilles in the Iliad after the death of Hector — an encounter movingly narrated by David Malouf in his novel Ransom. It is an appropriate reference for many reasons, not least the almost classical values that Carpenter both celebrates and espouses in her storytelling; this gripping debut novel is immediate in content, ample in moral perspective, rich and thoughtful in its human values.

Yet its modernity makes Carpenter’s work quite different from Homer or Malouf. Jason, her male protagonist (yes, the reference to the Argonauts is deliberate), is a Naval SEAL officer on his fifth deployment overseas — pretty clearly somewhere in the Middle East. His mother Sara, a young single mother living at Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, is told that he has been missing for two days. The rest of the book follows her for the remainder of the eleven-day period until he is located. It also follows Jason in flashback over some eleven years, as he swaps the idea of Harvard for Annapolis after 9/11, graduates, and undergoes the extraordinarily demanding SEAL training in Coronado, California.

It is significant that this is a war novel written by a woman. You might expect authenticity in the portrait of a mother waiting at home for news of her only son, but her ability to provide empathy without a trace of sentiment is quite remarkable. Even more remarkable is her portrayal of Jason’s life, with enough military detail to rival Tom Clancy, and yet always focusing on his inner life; to call it spiritual would not be far from the mark.

In the same Huffington Post blog, Carpenter says that one inspiration for her novel was an old photograph of her father, who was some sort of special forces agent in Vietnam. Another was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, just as she was beginning to write. It is an impressive attempt to imagine what her father must have gone through then and what those young men in the Middle East were going through now. Something of the lost father figure comes through in the novel in the person of Jason’s father, David — an older man probably connected with the CIA, who loved Sara and continued to support her from a distance until his death in the 1990s. Jason’s attempt to live up to his idealized image of his father is a large part of his motivation; we eventually come to realize that he has greatly exceeded it. Carpenter cannot really fill David out, though, and she is wise not to try. Her main focus is on these two younger people, mother and son, and her empathy with both is extraordinary.

As a pacifist, with little patience for the jingoistic flag-waving of the past decade, I am amazed by how much I liked this book. Yet Carpenter’s achievement is to make politics vanish in the light of simple humanity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 48 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 18, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lea Carpenter
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Soldier’s Wife by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• Eleven Days (June 2013)

“He will rub at his eyes, rub away the unsatisfactory aspect of the world. Then he will blink at me. He blinks until I am back in focus… He sits up straighter, moves himself into the edge of the table. He is back to wishing there was more of me, more of me to see.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 28, 2011)

Who is Ines, the illegal African migrant who embarks on a hazardous sea crossing to Italy and Germany in search of her stolen son? At first, she is a total enigma; we keep wishing there was, indeed, more of her to see. Slowly and painstakingly, her inner identity is revealed in this haunting new book by Lloyd Jones, author of the acclaimed Mister Pip.

When we first meet her, Ines is working as a maid in a tony Tunisian resort, where women routinely supplement their wages with “hotel sex.” In the first few pages, we learn that she is seduced and impregnated by a callous black German guest, Jermayne, who tricks her into signing adoption papers for him and his wife. What Jermayne does not anticipate is that Ines will put herself in the hands of people-traffickers who launch her on a journey to the Sicilian coast, where she is arrives “bitten as a sodden sea cucumber.” From there, she makes her way to Berlin.

This story is revealed in bits and dabs, through successive narrations of an unscrupulous truck driver, a group of mostly benevolent alpine hunters, a British film researcher, a selfless French poet, and finally, a blind German man whose father may have been complicit in the war horrors. It is only after the first 120 pages that we meet the three key narrators: Ralf (the blind man), Defoe (his other lodger) and finally, Ines herself.

It’s an intriguing way to reveal Ines, a woman who is driven by motherly love and who will do anything and everything to spend time with her stolen son, Daniel, including betraying the trust of those who give her shelter and devotion. Like an old-fashioned detective story – in modern and sparse prose – we discover the contradictions between the narratives, what is real and what isn’t, and who Ines really is, deep down inside.

There is a beautiful symmetry about this book. In the first few pages, Lloyd Jones reveals the stuff that Ines is made of. She buys a parrot, that she quickly tires of, and tries to sell it. When that proves impossible she places the parrot on a skiff as it “rolled its eye up to her, to look as though it possibly understood her decision and had decided it would choose dignity over fear.” Much later on, Ines’s constant harping to see her son is described as parrot-like; she, too, chooses dignity as the best way to go.

The sparseness of the prose – the distance from Ines – places the reader at a bit of a distance. At times the narrative sags under the weight with a sense of inertia. Yet every time it slows down to a snail’s pace, something – some action, some decision, some revelation – creates more forward momentum. As a reader, I felt as if I were on a slow-moving train that suddenly picked up speed and oh, look at the view!

Lloyd Jones reveals a sense of daring and experimentation that shows he has come quite a way since Mister Pip – a book I enjoyed greatly. This subtle book is, in turn, riveting, disquieting, and haunting as we follow Ines’s odyssey to become reunited with her son. It reminded me a little bit of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee in its tautness and ability to summon up emotion. Lloyd Jones is definitely a writer to watch… and it does makes me curious about the many books still unpublished in the U.S. Maybe it is time that they share some of his short story collections.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lloyd Jones
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Nalo Hopkinson

Bibliography:

• Gilmore’s Diary (1985)
• Splinter (1988)
• Swimming to Australia, and Other Stories (1991)
• Biofrafi: An Albanian Quest (1993)
• This House Has Three Walls (1997)
• Choo Woo (1998)
• Book of Fame (2000)
• Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002)
• Paint Your Wife (2004)
• Mr. Pip (2006; 2007 in US)
• The Man in the Shed: Stories (2009)
• Hand Me Down World (2010; September 2011 in US)

“She takes pea pods from her vegetable rack and dumps them on the table. For a while there’s just the snap of the pods, and the neat, percussive sound of peas falling into bowls, and through her open door the scratch and bustle of chickens and the whisper of the countryside. A dark lacquer of sadness seems to spread across the room.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 28, 2011)

The quotation shows Margaret Leroy at her best, describing the ordinary routines of everyday life, in a strongly realized setting, and an acute emotional sensitivity. The place is Guernsey, one of the British Channel Islands nestling off the French coast between the arms of Normandy and Brittany. The time is 1940, when the islands came under German occupation, after being more or less abandoned by the British as indefensible. The sadness comes from the fact that man of this little farm has been one of the few inhabitants killed in the bombing that preceded the invasion. One of the very few, actually, for as the title of the book that Leroy acknowledges in her introduction indicates (The Model Occupation by Madeleine Bunting), the German occupation of Guernsey was marked by civility on both sides and little effective resistance. I have never read a wartime story in which the brutal atrocities that have become a staple of WW2 fiction are largely (but not entirely) absent.

But that “not entirely” is significant; where does one draw the line between cooperation and collaboration? When must one raise one’s head and take a stand? It is a moral grey area that fascinated Leroy, who has re-imagined it in a consistently enjoyable romance novel, though sometimes her greys get a little rose-tinted. The misty period cover jacket showing a shapely woman of the 1940s looking into the sunset framed by exotic blooms absolutely screams Romance! Fortunately there is very little in the actual writing that is anything like as misty-eyed. It also made me think of the cover for Sadie Jones’ Small Wars, which had something of the same romance magazine air. An unfortunate comparison, however, for it reminded me that the Jones novel had a great deal more blood and grit than this one, without losing its feminine focus. I could have done with a bit more of that here. But having said that, I have said the worst; Leroy is a compelling writer and gives much to enjoy.

Leroy’s protagonist, Vivienne de la Mare, English by birth, is unhappily married to a Guernsey Islander. Now, while her husband is off with the army, she must look after her two daughters (Blanche and Millie, ten years apart) and her senile mother-in-law Evelyn. There are three main elements to the story. The first is the ordinary business of parenting: reading bedtime stories to the younger child, guiding the older one’s first forays into dating, fielding the criticisms of a demanding mother-in-law; Leroy handles all this with obvious understanding. The second is specific to the place and time, a curious cocktail of glamor and deprivation. This may well be Leroy’s strongest suit, as she captures both the style of the period and the beauty of the island’s leafy lanes and upland heaths, yet does not stint on the difficulty of making do under wartime conditions. Especially strong is her sense of community, and the way in which the inhabitants of nearby farms and homes rely on one another to get by. We have already seen some of this in my opening quotation; let me add to Vivienne’s description of the countryside near her home:

“I love that sense of going deep, of being enclosed. It’s like the way it feels when you follow the Guernsey lanes down here to our home, in this wet wooded valley of St. Pierre du Bois. The valley seems so safe and cloistered, like a womb. Then, if you walk on, you will go up, up, and out suddenly into the sunlight, where there are cornfields, kestrels, the shine of the sea. Like a birth.”

Then there is the third element, the wartime romance. The empty house next door to Vivienne’s is requisitioned by two German officers and their batmen. One of these, Captain Gunther Lehmann, an architect in civilian life, brings small presents to Vivienne; she refuses at first, but despite herself she falls in love. It is a beautiful oasis in the middle of war, answering a need in both of them, for Gunther is a man of peace trapped in a soldier’s uniform, and a passionate man in a loveless marriage. But of course strains do arrive which pull Vivienne’s loyalties and affections in different directions. Despite the model nature of the occupation as it affects people of her own nationality and class, she becomes aware of the more brutal aspects of the war and will ultimately be forced to make choices. Some of what happens at the end seemed a little implausible; this is, after all, a romance. But within its genre it is sensitive, richly textured, and consistently enjoyable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Voice; Original edition (June 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Leroy
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Yes, My Darling Daughter Postcards from Berlin and Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Bibliography:

• Trust (1999)
• Alysson’s Shoes (2002)
• Postcards from Berlin (2003)
• The River House (2005)
• Yes, My Darling Daughter (2009) (aka The Drowning Girl in UK)
• The Soldier’s Wife (2011) (aka The Collaborator in UK)

Nonfiction:

• Miscarriage (1987)
• Pleasure: the truth about female sexuality (1993)
• Some Girls Do: why women do and don’t make the first move (1997)

“The world, it seemed, though not united in their opinion of our kind, was united in their awareness of our kind, and by extension, their need to remark upon it – the fact of me, a white woman, married to him, a black man.

The only problem, of course, was that it wasn’t true. Any of it.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 2, 2011)

What does it mean to be biracial and free in postmillennial America? The writer James Baldwin is quoted as saying, “Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be.”

By that definition, do the young interracial women that inhabit Danzy Senna’s first collection of short stories want to be free? Or do they want to belong to a collective… something, larger than themselves? The answer, as one might suspect, is complicated.

Danzy Senna – author of Caucasia, daughter of the African-Mexican poet Carl Senna and Fanny Howe, a white American of Irish descent – explores this question from her unique vantage point. Each of her characters is struggling for self-identity; each is hopeful and yet yearning for more. The short story collection is populated with ambivalent women, detached husbands, troubled girlfriends, and young babies and toddlers.

In the eponymous title story, Lara, a New Yorker who is anticipating her first byline from an obscure magazine tries hard to love her fate as a childless woman. Still, when she receives a mistaken call from a young girl who believes Lara is her mother, she goes into self-denial: “She had a family – a child – and the knowledge of this made her feel complete, though she knew she was not supposed to buy into such retrograde logic.” Yet still she does, with nebulous “what-ifs.”

Then there’s Livy, a Brooklyn-born artist and new mother who has found happiness with a Santa Fe gallery owner. When Livy hosts an old and spurned friend, she discovers that the connection between them has disintegrated: “She felt the daughter-self, young and vain, dying, and the mother-self, huge and sad, rising up in its wake, linking her to nothing less than history.” And we meet the liberal and African-American couple Cassie Duncan; tensions flare when their pre-schooler is admitted to a very tony private school and a decision must be made.

Lara, Livy, Cassie and others struggle with identity in a world that sometimes considers them interchangeable. (In the story “What’s The Matter With Helga and Dave?,” two women who look nothing alike are mistaken for each other because each is part of a supposedly interracial couple). Their greatest sense of comfort seems to be found in community: a young woman Janice takes in an abandoned puppy after being dumped by her black boyfriend and withdraws into a new world of dog caregivers who meet in the park each morning. Livy feels “love of a religious magnitude” for the world of new mothers, a world to which she has just gained entry. Helga’s friend Rachel gains a feeling of comfort after moving into The Chandler, an apartment building with other interracial couples.

These revealing stories have a seemingly effortless flow to them, despite some flaws. Some of the conclusions do have a retrograde feel: single women are inevitably unhappy; motherhood mostly brings meaning and fulfillment. Danzy Senna sometimes doesn’t trust her readers enough; for instance, the reader can evidently conclude that the mixed-breed dog Beulah is a stand-in for her owner, but Ms. Senna drums the message home. And her story “Triptych” – the same story told three times – is simply too gimmicky. Still, this is an insightful look about appearances and attachment in our increasingly hard-to-define nation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; 1 edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Danzy Senna
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

Bibliography:

• Caucasia (1999)
• Symptomatic (2004)
• You Are Free: Stories (May 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009)

“But you have to trust me when I say that at heart Dan’s a good kid. Honestly. If he were here now, you would see for yourself. He just needs a firm hand at times. Like a lot of boys his age. It’s just a phase. That’s all. Just a phase.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy (MAY 20, 2011)

Julian Poulter, the first-person narrator of Rebecca Frayn’s Deceptions, is a somewhat priggish individual who says things like, “I’ve always believed one must strive to put painful episodes behind one with the minimum of fuss and bother.” He is a master of denial who, in flashback, tells how he and Annie Wray, a teacher, tried to forge a permanent relationship when he moved in with her and her two children by her late husband. Annie is flightier and far more spontaneous than Julian; each provides a quality that the other lacks.

Annie’s daughter, Rachel, is eight; she is a sweet little girl who gives her mother little cause to worry. On the other hand, twelve-year-old Dan has become surly and uncommunicative. He has begun dressing and talking like some of his less wholesome schoolmates in Fishers Comprehensive. Dan’s grades have dropped, and he has made it clear that he resents Julian, whom he views as an interloper. Not long after Julian and Annie announce their intention to marry, Dan leaves and does not return.

This is a heartbreaking tale of a family ripped apart by tragedy. Julian, who adores Annie, tries to be patient with her mood swings. Her outlook fluctuates from optimism to despair; unsurprisingly, she is guilt ridden and finding her child becomes an obsession. To some extent, Rachel and Julian are shunted aside while the drama unfolds. The author captures the agony of waiting by the telephone, spotting kids who look like Dan but are not, and repeating the same information to the police so many times that the situation becomes surreal. This is every parent’s “waking nightmare,” and Frayn explores the ripple effect that this calamity has on the immediate family and the community as a whole.

The title refers to the ways in which we delude ourselves and others: Does Annie really love Julian or is she subconsciously exploiting him? Is Julian psychologically sound or is he so repressed that genuine emotions leave him helpless? Can Annie learn to live with the possibility that Dan may be gone forever? When a shocking development gives Annie hope that her troubles may be behind her, Julian has his doubts.

Since we suspect Julian’s perspective may be somewhat distorted, we have no choice but to draw our own conclusions. Frayn makes good use of dialogue, pregnant pauses, and subtle clues to seize and hold our attention. We suspect that what seems obvious may not even be true, and that one person’s reality can be another’s fantasy. Deceptions is distressing, touching, and painful; it shows how dangerous it is to love someone too much; when we open our hearts, we become vulnerable. Sometimes, self-deception is the only tool that allows us to face another day without going mad.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Washington Square Press; Original edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Frayn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver The Disapparation of James by Anne Ursu

Bibliography:

• One Life (2007)
• Deceptions (May 2011)
• Loved Up

“How did your mother happen to go missing?”

That is the most awkward—and frequent—question people have asked since Mom went missing. It’s always asked with a mixture of curiosity and judgment.

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtuman  (APR 15, 2011)

Those who have traveled in Southeast Asia – and Korea in particular — will know right away that the number 4 (pinyin sì) is considered unlucky because it sounds like “death” (pinyin s?). Why, then, did Korean author Kyung-sook Shin carefully craft a novel from four different viewpoints?

The answer is that the members of this family are unlucky, or at the very least, careless.  Through years as a family, none of them ever really knew Mom or understood the sources of her strength.  And now she has disappeared in a crowded Seoul subway station, where she and her husband of 50 years were about to board a train. Her disappearance devastates those who are left behind.

The story is told from four alternating points of view:  Chi-hon, the oldest daughter and a successful novelist, Hyung-chol, the oldest son who is wracked with guilt for not living up to his potential, her husband who inevitably disappointed Mom through his selfishness and adultery, and last of all, Mom.   Little by little, a fuller image of Mom emerges, although we, the readers, never really get to know all the facets of Mom either.

Chi-hon reflects, “Either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers…You realized you’d become a stranger as you watched Mom try to conceal her messy everyday life.”  As Chi-hon strives to sort out who her Mom really was, she realizes that, “…because of one thing or another you would push calling her to the end of your list.”  Mom had become superfluous in her busy life, a solid presence who was always a little bit of an enigma.

Hyung-chol was the favored son who was both idolized and pressured.  In the end though, he could not live up to Mom’s aspirations and dreams for him.  “Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.”

The two adult children – and their father – realize, too late, that Mom was an integral part of their existence.  Father thinks, “When she planted seedlings of eggplant, purple eggplants hung everywhere throughout the summer and into the fall.  Anything she touched grew in bounty.”  Still, he selfishly ignores her intense headaches and the heartbreaks that Mom is forced to undergo alone.

When we get to Mom’s story,  we learn some of the background – her arranged marriage, for instance, and a few of the secrets she keeps.  But it’s left to Chi-hon to recognize the truth in a letter from her younger sister, “Do you remember asking me a little while ago to tell you something I knew about Mom?  All I knew was that Mom’s missing.  It’s the same now.  I especially don’t know where her strength came from. Think about it.  Mom did things that one person couldn’t do by herself.  I think that’s why she became emptier and emptier.”

Please Look After Mom is a novel that’s distinctly Korean –ancestral-rite tables, the Full Moon Harvest, plum juice and steamed skate – but is also very universal.  Every view is explored – Chi-hon and Father’s stories are in second person, Hyung-chol’s is in third person and Mom’s is in first person.  And, while the second person tense can become a little cumbersome, the writing is still direct, moving, and graceful.

It’s worth noting that Kyung-sook Shin is already a prominent novelist in Korea; the book sold nearly one and a half million copies in South Korea.  Translated expertly by Chi-Young Kim,  the book is certain to make readers appreciate the hardworking, uncomplaining women who go by the simple endearment “Mom.” (Translated by Chi-young Kim.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 251 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kyung-sook Shin
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “missing” people stories: The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Please Look After Mom (2009; 2011 in US) *MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE WINNER*
• I’ll Be Right There (June 2014)

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

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman  (NOV 24, 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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