Nature – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 LONG MAN by Amy Greene /2014/long-man-by-amy-greene/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 12:31:48 +0000 /?p=25107 Book Quote:

“You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 25, 2014)

“You can’t stand against a flood, Annie Clyde.” Oh, yes she can. Or at least die trying. A descendant of the native Cherokees, Annie Clyde Dodson has deep-rooted connections to the land of Yuneetah, Tennessee. Long Man, the river that courses through, is tempestuous and moody but the farmers here have learned to corral its powers to make their living off the land. The Tennessee Valley Authority though, has other plans. A dam has been built upstream and in a matter of a few days, Yuneetah will be under water. Annie Clyde is one of the last holdouts. She just can’t up and leave the land which she wanted her daughter, Gracie, to know and love. And as much as her husband has plans to find factory work up north in Michigan, Annie can’t stomach the thought of a stark existence away from the natural surroundings she loves.

As Long Man opens with a setting in the immediate post-Depression era, the town is just a couple of days away from being flooded by the dam’s waters. To make things worse, a steady, heavy rain has been falling and the water levels everywhere rise slowly. Along with Annie and her daughter, Gracie, there’s Annie’s aunt, Silver Ledford, who makes her meager home on top of a high cliff overlooking the valley. Tensions are running high enough as it is; practically everyone has left town with a relocation package but Annie has just managed to show yet another TVA man, Sam Washburn, the door. She does not want to move. To make matters worse — much worse — Gracie, Annie’s daughter, disappears. Could it be the town’s bad boy, Amos, who has taken her? Or is it the equally menacing flood waters that are to blame?

Using the child’s disappearance as a driver for the story, Amy Greene movingly explores the complicated relationships between the town’s various players and also their deep and abiding respect for the land. The hardscrabble countryside comes gloriously alive in her telling and it is the most arresting aspect of Long Man.

The story itself is slow to unwind and lurches forward precariously, often coming to almost a complete halt as Greene outlines relationships and events through a series of flashbacks. While these back-and-forth movements can feel jerky and disorienting, the pace picks up eventually — it is interesting to note that the tension builds slowly along with the rising floodwaters. It’s almost as if Greene were working consciously to have the book’s tempo increase gradually with the drama of the plotline.

While farming itself can be a challenge (one which Greene points out well), Long Man occasionally lapses into too much starry-eyed worship of the vocation’s faithfuls. The romantic visions that Annie Clyde has seem overwrought at times: “She didn’t understand the power company’s reasoning. She didn’t need electric lights when she could see by the sun and moon. She had the spring and the earth to keep her food from spoiling…if a person didn’t come to depend on material things, it wouldn’t hurt to lose them.”

Where Long Man does succeed, is in showing how even the fiercest of people have weak spots that can be chipped away at and weathered over time. The ties that bind can take various shapes and forms and lend themselves to fluidity. Not many can hold their ground when it comes to a rising and powerful flood — whether that change takes the form of raging waters or technical progress. As Greene writes: “The dam would stand in memory, but not of their individual lives. Only of a moment in history.” Even that, you soon realize, is more than what most of us can hope for.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0 from 12 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Amy Greene
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Another dam story:

Bibliography:

]]> WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler /2014/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-by-karen-joy-fowler/ Sat, 15 Feb 2014 14:20:05 +0000 /?p=22417 Book Quote:

“As part of leaving Bloomington for college and my brand new start, I’d made a careful decision to never ever tell anyone about my sister, Fern. Back in those college days I never spoke of her and seldom thought of her. If anyone asked about my family, I admitted to two parents, still married, and one brother, older, who traveled a lot. Not mentioning Fern was first a decision, and later a habit, hard and painful even now to break. Even now, way off in 2012, I can’t abide someone else bringing her up. I have to ease into it. I have to choose my moment.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (FEB 15, 2013)

The most absorbing books I read have a vital lesson at their core: they teach me what it means to be human. Karen Joy Fowler’s latest book tackles this crucial theme and by doing so, captured my heart and reduced me to tears.

There is no getting around that this is an agenda book. Ms. Fowler’s purpose is to show us—through fiction—that the most complicated animal – the human animal can be disastrous to the rest of the animal kingdom through sheer arrogance.

Typically, I avoid authorial intrusion like the plague. But this book was so irresistibly readable, so original, and so psychologically nuanced that I couldn’t help but turn the pages compulsively.

Rosemary Cooke, our narrator, is the daughter of a family of scientists. It takes her 77 pages to reveal a central truism of her life (which, inexplicably, is revealed by the publisher on every book blurb about this novel): she spent the first eighteen years of her life defined by the fact that she was raised as “twins” with a chimpanzee named Fern.

“I tell you Fern is a chimp and already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister,” Ms. Fowler writes. “You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet.” But that just wasn’t so. Rosemary astutely realized that her father was not really studying whether chimps could communicate as humans. Rather, he is asking, “can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees.”

Fern is sent away when Rosemary turns five, for reasons that remain obscure through most of the book. But her absence affects Rosemary the way the sudden disappearance of a sister would. By the time she goes to kindergarten, her mother must work with her to stand up straight, not put her fingers into anyone’s mouth or hair, not jump on tables and desks when she is playing, not bite anyone.

Her whole life is impacted by the “experiment” of being raised with her sister Fern. “What a scam I pulled off!” Rosemary reflects. “What a triumph. Apparently, I’d finally erased all those little cues, those maters of personal space, focal distance, facial expression, vocabulary. Apparently all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.”

I believed in the connection between Rosemary and Fern. This emotionally devastating book – which folds back on itself to reveal more and more of the story through false and real memories – confirms what I have long believed: that the rest of the animal kingdom has much to teach us in being human.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 316 readers
PUBLISHER: Plume (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER: Jill I Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Karen Joy Fowler
EXTRAS: Q & A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

And other chimpanzee books:

Bibliography:

Movies from books:

]]> ALL THE LAND TO HOLD US by Rick Bass /2013/all-the-land-to-hold-us-by-rick-bass/ Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:10:11 +0000 /?p=24015 Book Quote:

“He was not the first seeker of treasure upon the landscape, was instead but one more in the continuum of a story begun long ago by far greater desires than his own.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (DEC 23, 2013)

All The Land To Hold Us is an apt title whose protagonist is the land – and it is a strange and powerful land. The harsh desert environment of West Texas is extremely arid, bitter and bleak. This environment shapes much of the novel’s character and the characters’ characters. The area receives much less rainfall than the rest of Texas and the temperature has been known to hit 120ºF in the summer. “An easterner, after making the stage trip and experiencing the danger of Horsehead and the Trans-Pecos country, wrote to friends back home that he now knew where hell was.” The setting also includes Castle Gap and Juan Cordoba Lake, an inland salt lake.

This is also a tale of those who live on the desert’s edge, where riches — oil, water, precious artifacts & love — can all be found and lost again in an instant. It is a sweeping saga of old Texas oil fields, salt mines, small town morality, and love.

The characters in All the World to Hold Us span three generations. Richard is a young and talented geologist who works for a Midland oil company. He is driven by his need to hunt for oil and fossils beneath the earth’s surface and by his love for his girlfriend Clarissa. Clarissa, a beautiful girl from Odessa, dreams of fleeing the broiling sun of the Permian Basin and moving to Hollywood, where she hopes her great beauty will make her a model or a movie star. She slathers on sun screen many times each day to protect her skin so that the harsh sunlight will not mar her beauty. She hunts for fossils, with Richard, in the burning desert. Richard keeps what he collects, but Clarissa sells her million-year-old fossils to museums. As there is no dialogue here and little character development, I really have no idea who Richard and Clarissa are.

Herbert Mix is an elderly one-legged museum owner. He is greedy for gold and anything one might find while looking for it: bones, animal fossils, arrowheads, knife blades, clay pots, wagon wheels, coins, and human skulls, which he values most of all and refuses to sell.

A Depression-era couple Max and Marie Omo, and their two sons, live in another time on this bone-strewn land. Max and his sons make their living by trapping, harvesting, and selling Juan Cordona Lake’s salt. The entire family, Marie, Max’s lonely wife, and their sons, are transformed by their surroundings. The lake water they drink is brackish. The food, not much better. And for Marie, the loneliness of the place is devastating. Marie, like Clarissa, wants out of the harsh life in their desert salt pan home.

“WHENEVER THE SALTCUTTER, Max Omo, encountered bounty in that land of deprivation—be it salt or the heat, almost igneous in nature, that wrung all but the last of the water from his body and sent it in sheets down his chest and back—he fell even harder in love with the salt, without even realizing that was what it was, falling into the clefts between the bounty of one thing and the deprivation of another, falling through an incandescent pluming kaleidoscope of colors that belied completely the physical constraints of his salt-colored life and his methodical movements above.”

Oddly, in passing, a runaway circus elephant, makes his appearance, as does his Indian trainer. Bizarre – but this incident brings some humor and a bit of sadness to the novel.

Rick Bass paints a vivid portrait of a fierce place and the inimitable characters who populate it….who survive it. They possess the capacity to adapt to and also despoil it the land. The author’s prose is lyrical and lush, at times poetic. Mr. Bass brings much of his geologist background to the novel; he is the son of a geologist, and he studied petroleum geology at Utah State University.

Bass has won many literary awards.  He won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for his novel Where the Sea Used to Be. He was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006 for his short story collection The Lives of Rocks.  And he was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West. He was also awarded the General Electric Younger Writers Award, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction.

I previously read  The Ninemile Wolves and The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness by this same author and I really enjoyed them and respect Mr. Bass as the talented, award-winning writer he is. However, I do not think he is up to par in his latest offering. When I reached page 84 in Book One, (the novel is made up of 3 Books), I found that I was plodding along – simply bored with the characters and storyline. This first third of Bass’ novel is a dense and difficult read. It is all narrative, no dialogue. The point of view is that of an omniscient observer.

When I reached the infamous page 84, an image came to mind. I was in an art gallery, or an art museum, and viewing the work of a famous, much lauded artist. “Objectively,” I recognized the paintings for their worth. I believed that the critics’ and other viewers’ praise was on the money.   “Subjectively,” the work left me cold. It didn’t touch me personally. I thought of an artist, perhaps someone like Jackson Pollack, and know many art lovers who think his paintings are the work of genius…and they might be. While recognizing the greatness of Mr. Pollack’s work, I am untouched by his paintings. So it is with  All The Land To Hold Us. I  appreciate the excellence of the author’s prose and the novelty of the story he tells…but I am not moved by any of this. I have now finished reading the novel and understand, objectively, why so many people would praise it well. However, I am left feeling that the novel has added little to my life, except for the knowledge I acquired reading about the “Land.” I did complete the novel as it improved in Books 2 and 3.

While this one is not a favorite of mine, I do recognize that many people might feel otherwise. And, as I just wrote, the authors writing is outstanding – subjectively and objectively….just a bit dense and slow paced at times.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 12 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Rick Bass
EXTRAS: Daily Beast interview with Rick Bass
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

And another big Texas novel:

Bibliography:

Non-fiction:

]]> THE ORCHARDIST by Amanda Coplin /2013/the-orchardist-by-amanda-coplin/ Sun, 22 Dec 2013 13:57:35 +0000 /?p=24118 Book Quote:

“From the folds of her skirt she brought out a dull green change purse.  How much?

He told her. She pinched out the correct change and handed it to him.

As he filled the sack with fruit, the woman turned and gazed behind her.  Said: Look what the cat drug in.  Those two looking over here like that, you aren’t careful, they’ll come rob you.  Hooligan-looking. She sniffed.

After a moment he looked where she nodded.  Down the street, under the awning of the hardware store, two girls— raggedy, smudge-faced— stood conspiratorially, half turned toward each other.  When they saw Talmadge and the woman observing them, they turned their backs to them.  He handed the burlap sack to the woman, the bottom heavy and misshapen with fruit.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (DEC 22, 2013)

In this understated and emotionally raw novel of a family born as much from choice as from blood, debut novelist Amanda Coplin explores themes of love, loyalty, courage, compassion, revenge, and honor, as well as the lifelong, traumatic impact of both childhood abuse and loss.

The novel opens with orchardist William Talmadge, a tall, broad-shouldered and solitary man who is composed of the most steadfast moral fiber and potent vulnerability of almost any protagonist that I can recall in recent (new/contemporary) literature. After his father died in the silver mines of the Oregon Territory when Talmadge was nine, he came to this fertile valley at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains (Washington State) in 1857 with his mother and sister. Within the next eight years, he suffered from smallpox, his mother died of illness, and his sister later disappeared in the forest, never to return. This is Talmadge’s story, and the saga of his chosen family, borne from the blood of loss and abuse.

Two young pregnant teenagers, Della and Jane, enter Talmadge’s life in his middle-aged years. They steal fruit from him at market, where he sells the apricots, apples, and plums from his sweeping acreage of crops. A bit of a touch and go, cat and mouse game ensues, as they follow him home, hide, and emerge when they are hungry, only to scamper and scatter away again, staying close to the edges of his property. Talmadge gradually gains, if not Della and Jane’s trust (they have a harrowing history of ritual abuse), then a tentative acceptance, and they become inhabitants of the orchard, living alongside Talmadge. He becomes their loyal benefactor.

If I give any more of the plot progression, it will proceed into spoiler territory. The story bears its fruit gradually, almost meditatively, during the first two sections (135 or so pages). There are eight sections in all, but some are long and pensive, and some short, at times just a few pages. The middle sections compress the years into thumbnail sketches without losing its stirring effect on the reader. The story is told in a quiet and nearly oblique manner, yet without being detached. The overall effect is powerful, and it rumbles fiercely, and menacingly, at intervals, without open sentimentality. The characters evolve delicately, with contemplative subtlety.

“Through glances she had caught various features—his nose, the set of his shoulders, the striking color of his eyes. But he had one of those complicated faces that one had to consider at length to understand how emotion lay on it, to understand it at all. It was like a landscape: that wide and complicated, many-layered expanse.”

The land is essential to the story—the planting of seeds, the cultivation, and the harvest. The orchard is Talmadge’s lifeblood, and a ripe motif for the burgeoning love he has for the family that has germinated from the edges of his vast plantation. Nature and nurture merge, and the repository of grief yokes to the deep basin of humanity and from there, the kernels of love grow and reproduce.

At times, as I reflect on the ending, I am troubled by the author’s choices, but so goes the cycle of life in its order and perplexity.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 675 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Amanda Coplin
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another orchard book …

Bibliography:

]]> FLIGHT BEHAVIOR by Barbara Kingsolver /2013/flight-behavior-by-barbara-kingsolver/ Sat, 14 Dec 2013 18:59:02 +0000 /?p=23635 Book Quote:

“On shearing day the weather turned cool and fine. On the strength of that and nothing more, just a few degrees of temperature, the gray clouds scurried away to parts unknown like a fleet of barn cats. The chore of turning ninety ewes and their uncountable half-grown lambs through the shearing stall became a day’s good work instead of the misery expected by all. As far as Dellarobia could remember, no autumn shearing had been so pleasant.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 14, 2013)

Barbara Kingsolver is one of those rare writers with whom you know what you are getting before you open the first page.

You know, for example, that the prose is going to be literary, dense, and luscious (take this descriptive line: Summer’s heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved.”) You know that the content will focus on some kind of social justice, biodiversity, or environmental issue. You know, too, that at some point, Ms. Kingsolver will cross the line into authorial intrusion based on her passion for the subject she is writing on.

But you keep coming back for more. At least, I do. There is something mesmerizing about a Barbara Kingsolver novel, and something refreshing about a writer who combines a solid scientific background with stunning prose.

This book is entitled Flight Behavior, and for good reason. It opens with a young Appalachian woman – Dellarobia Turnbow – ready to take flight from her shotgun marriage and closed-in life with two young children. On her way up the mountain to engage in an affair, she views an astounding natural phenomenon that changes everything for her.

The core of the novel focuses on that phenomenon, centering on the migratory patterns of the bright orange Monarch butterfly, usually viewed only in Mexico. The topic is climate change and Ms. Kingsolver slashes through the obtuse definitions with language anyone can understand. Dellarobia is paired thematically with a Harvard-educated scientist Ovid Byron, whose lifework is studying the butterflies. He says, “If you woke up one morning, Dellarobia, and one of your eyes had moved to the side of your head, how would you feel about that?” That, in effect, is the same as the butterflies migrating to Appalachia.

There is much to love about this novel. Dellarobia is authentically portrayed: a woman who is confined in a life she has outgrown, complete with two very genuinely created toddlers and a best friend who is not similarly constrained. The duality of science and religion is also tackled. While Barbara Kingsolver makes no secret of how she feels about those who piously say, “Weather is the Lord’s business” while polluting our environment, she also concedes to the majesty and mystery of nature, culling in parallels from Job and Noah.

Ultimately, Ms. Kingsolver leaves us with the most important question of all: “what was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reef…What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park?” The interconnectedness of all nature’s creatures – and our true place in our own lives and in the lives of the universe – is a message that lives on in this reader’s mind long after the last page is closed.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1,546 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (June 4, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Barbara Kingsolver
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of:

Bibliography:

Poetry:

Non-fiction:

]]> THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert /2013/the-signature-of-all-things-by-elizabeth-gilbert-2/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 13:00:36 +0000 /?p=23527 Book Quote:

“Alma Whittaker, born with the century, slid into our world on the fifth of January, 1800.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (Dec 5, 2013)

From the opening pages, it is evident that Gilbert can write with lyricism, confidence, and substance. I was afraid that her mass popularity would lead to a dumbed down book with pandering social/political agendas or telegraphed notions. I am thrilled to conclude that this was not the case. Gilbert is a superb writer who allows her main characters to spring forth as organically as the natural world that they live in. This is a book of well-considered people of the times, who are emblematic of daring and discerning ideas, as well as an absorbing story that will keep the pages flying. The 18th and 19th century comes to life, and botany keeps the composite parts anchored to the earth. It is a both beautiful and intermittently appalling story of humanity and nature.

The book begins with British ex-pat Henry Whittaker, a boy of humble origins, who, by the time he is an adult in the 19th century, turns himself into a captain of industry in the botanical and pharmaceutical industry, particularly quinine. As a boy, he pilfered from the Royal Botanical Kew Gardens and sold to others, and showed his mettle as an entrepreneur. The director, Sir Joseph Banks, eventually apprehended him. Whittaker’s penance was to be sent on faraway travels, in order to prove himself worthy and edify himself in the realm of plants.

When Whittaker returned, he made it his life’s work to eclipse Banks and become a wealthy self-made industrialist of the natural world. He got himself an educated Dutch wife, left Europe for good, and settled in Western Pennsylvania, where he built an elaborate estate that truly did rival the Kew Gardens, called White Acre. All alike envied his ostentatious mansion on the hill, and were impressed by his breathtaking, unparalleled gardens. He sired one daughter, Alma, and adopted another, Prudence. Whittaker became one of the richest men in North America, or anywhere. But, more important than riches, to him, was the power to command others, and the talent and skill to master your work. Education was the tool to that end. Therefore, his children received a scholarly education at home.

Henry’s prominence on the pages segues into his daughter’s, Alma. The beautiful Prudence becomes an outspoken abolitionist, while Alma grows into a scholarly, tall, large-boned, homely, and privately carnal woman who becomes the flourishing main character. I would list her as one of my favorite protagonists of contemporary times, as unforgettable as Teresita Urrea of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, although of polar sensibilities. Alma is so fleshed out that I can smell her, and every moment in her life is organically rendered. As she becomes her father’s daughter as a scientist, (but with a gentler disposition), the reader is taken ever further into her inner and outer journeys. She is not just a botanist and taxonomist, but in many ways, a philosopher, a noble thinker, with a sexual and sensual hunger.

Gilbert doesn’t portray Alma as flawless or unbelievable. Rather, Alma is a construct of her environment and her gifted mind. She is also metaphorically imprisoned by the life of a proper woman in the 19th century. However…

Alma’s portrait is the fruit of this elegantly written, lyrically cadenced, engrossing tale. Gilbert braids in the enigma of life from botany to the human body, and folds in science, mysticism, spirituality, psycho-sexuality, all in a vibrantly flowing historical novel. Some of the characters make a brief or lucid appearance, and then fade, but Alma grows more luminous with each passing chapter. A few sections focus on scientific philosophies and the question of creationism and evolution (the way a discussion would happen in the 1800’s), but it fits radiantly into this story. But, mostly, it is Alma who pollinates this ripe and exhilarating tale. I still see her bending over a leaf, or examining moss with a microscope, or hunched over her scholarly tomes and writing her books on the mysteries of plant life. Being at her father’s beck and call, but carving out a solitary but teeming life.

The title of the book refers that all life contains a divine code or print, and was put forth by a 16th century German cobbler and early botanist, Jacob Boehme, one rejected by the Whittakers, for the most part, as medieval nonsense. He had mystical visions about plants, and believed there was a divine code in “every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code.”
You can see it in a curling leaf, a nesting bird, and when the stamens of one plant stick it to its receptacle. Every unique living creature, according to Boehme, contains the eponymous title. Alma meets an orchid painter who embodies this belief, and who pulls her into the world of mysticism. As an explorer and thinker, she is compelled to understand this notion.

Alma’s professional and personal life leads her to contemplate the “struggle for existence.” As the reader follows Alma on her odyssey of the natural world and beyond, the wonder of life becomes ever transcendent–that “those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.”

This exquisite novel feels like a gift to humanity. It has heart, soul, and earthiness. And Alma.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 407 readers
PUBLISHER: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (October 1, 2013)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Elizabeth Gilbert
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> A STUDENT OF WEATHER by Elizabeth Hay /2011/a-student-of-weather-by-elizabeth-hay/ Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:18:29 +0000 /?p=19604 Book Quote:

“He nudged his chair close and studied the warm little hand. He smelled of sweat, peppermint, tobacco, old coffee. Despite his accent he wasn’t hard to understand – he talked so slowly and so carefully. She would have a long life, he said. She would have one child… You have special talents, he told her. People don’t realize.” 

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  DEC 15, 2011)

… stated the “tiny old man,” one of the many transient visitors to the Hardy farm in the small village of Willow Bend while reading eight-year-old Norma Joyce’s palm.

Canadian author, Elizabeth Hay, centers her superb, enchanting and deeply moving novel around Norma Joyce and sister Lucinda, her senior by nine years. Set against the beautifully evoked natural environments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, and spanning over more than thirty years, the author explores in sometimes subtle, sometimes defter, ways the sisters’ dissimilar characters. One is an “ugly duckling,” the other a beauty; one is rebellious and lazy, the other kind, efficient and unassuming… In a way, their characters mirror what are also suggested to be traditional features of inhabitants living with and in these two contrasting landscapes: on the one hand the farmers in Saskatchewan, patient and often fatalistic in their exposure to the vagaries of the weather and the hopes and destructions that those can bring, on the other the Ontarians, assumed to have a much easier life and, to top it off: they grow apples… A rare delicacy for the farmers out west. Hay wonderfully integrates the theme of the apple – the symbol of seduction as well as health!

Hay’s novel is as much an engaging portrait of the quirky Norma Joyce as it is a delicately woven family drama, beginning in the harsh “dustbowl” years of the 1930s. Still, Hay gives us much more than that: her exquisite writing shines when she paints in richly modulated prose, rather than with the brush, a deeply felt love poem to nature: its constantly varying beauty in response to a weather that seem to toy with it as in a never-ending dance.

While Lucinda runs the household on the farm with efficiency and dedication under the admiring eye of their widowed father, Norma Joyce succeeds in daily disappearing acts to avoid taking her place as a dutiful daughter. Into their routine lives enters, one day, and seemingly from nowhere, Maurice Dove, attractive, knowledgeable and entertaining, a student of weather patterns, Prairie grasses and much more… Ontario meets Saskatchewan with unforeseeable consequences…

Norma Joyce has always been a child of nature through and through: “She had her own memory of grasses. Five years old and lying on her back in the long grass behind the barn, the June sun beating down from a cloudless sky until warmth of another kind pulsed through her in waves […] she remembers every name of every plant.” Now, at eight, she has found in Maurice the ideal teacher and she turns into the “perfect student.” Her small hand reaches out to claim him… He, while enchanted with Lucinda, had been “taken aback by [Norma Joyce’s] ugliness, a word he modified to homeliness the next morning […] then at breakfast he thought her merely strange, and now, interesting.”

Hay is too fine and imaginative a writer to let the story develop predictably. There will be many twists and turns with the family moving to Ottawa and Norma Joyce even further away to New York. At every turn, Hay builds an environment in which human beings interact with the natural surroundings they are placed into. Her description of the Ottawa neighbourhood is intimate and real; New York has its own attractions and disappointments. As Norma Joyce grows up, she feels forced into a difficult journey, that, she later realizes has been an essential phase for her to gain confidence in herself and to discover “her special talents” as the old man had predicted: “Her life would stop, then it would start again…”.

As a reader, I was totally engaged with Hay’s exploration of Norma Joyce’s maturing that teaches her, among many other lessons, to let go while allowing herself to also accept new experiences into her life. Her life-long connection to the prairies sustains her at a deep level, her community in Ottawa helps her to find new avenues to her inner soul. At a different level, Hay plays with references to Thomas Hardy, to established naturalists to underline the importance of landscape and our traditional connection to it. She evokes images that remind us of fairy tales, such as the drop of bright red blood on the white pillow or Norma’s ability to pre-sense events happening many miles away. For me they form part of a richly created background to what is a very authentic and meaningful account of one young woman’s road to herself, an extraordinary achievement for a first novel. A Student of Weather collected several awards and, deservedly, was a finalist for the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize in 2000.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 31 readers
PUBLISHER: Counterpoint (January 2, 2002)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Elizabeth Hay
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Non-Fiction:

]]> THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Vanessa Diffenbaugh /2011/the-language-of-flowers-by-vanessa-diffenbaugh/ Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:36:52 +0000 /?p=20430 Book Quote:

“I acknowledged his presence only by reaching out to grasp what he had brought me, keeping my eyes on the ground. When I was safely around a corner, out of view, I looked into my hand.

Oval, gray-green leaves grew from a tangle of lime-colored twigs, translucent balls clinging to the branches like drops of rain. The clipping fit exactly into the ball of my hand, and the soft leaves stung where they touched.

Mistletoe.

‘I surmount all obstacles’.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  AUG 23, 2011)

Before she is emancipated at eighteen years old, Victoria Jones has lived in 32 different foster homes creating havoc wherever she’s lived. Abandoned at birth by a mother she never knew and knows nothing about, the only steady contact she’s had in her life is Meredith, her social worker. Meredith’s role is primarily to take Victoria from one foster home and place her in another.

The novel goes back and forth in time, exploring Victoria’s childhood years and comparing them with her current life. The reader learns of the one real and significant relationship that Victoria had as a child – her relationship with Elizabeth who wanted to adopt her when she was ten. It is through Elizabeth that Victoria learns the Elizabethan language of flowers, each flower signifying an emotion or feeling. Victoria’s time with Elizabeth started out very rocky and during the sixteen months she spent there, she grew to love Elizabeth. A tragedy prevents the adoption from taking place.

Once emancipated from her final group home at eighteen years old, Victoria has no place to live. She makes herself a shelter in Delores Park in San Francisco. There she plants a garden with flowers that she tends with love. She observes a florist, Renata, who own a store called Blooms and approaches her with a request for work. At first, Victoria works one day a week helping Renata at the wholesale flower market on Sundays. Her work time increases and she is able to rent a very small apartment on the money she earns.

At the flower market, Victoria meets a man who she is attracted to. This is a miracle for her as she hates to be touched – physically or psychically. This man, Grant, corresponds with her by the language of flowers, sending her notes that have particular meaning in the floral tongue. Victoria responds to this but is terrified of intimacy or attachment of any type.

Her knowledge of flowers and their meanings is so complete that Renata’s customers go to Victoria and ask her to make special bouquets for goals in their lives – pure love (dianthus), purity of heart (water lily), warmth of feeling (peppermint), and courage (protea). These are just a few of the dreams, hopes, and aspirations that Victoria’s clients ask her to share with them in her flower arrangements. Renata, as Victoria’s mentor, watches happily as Victoria begins to come into herself.

I found myself smelling the flowers as I read the book. It was like an experience in synesthesia. Sometimes I smelled roses, then peppermint, then cherry blossoms. I was mesmerized by the book and the flower metaphors that prevailed. I loved the way The Language of Flowers showed how Victoria was able to escape her locked in world of fear, to reach out in a way that only someone else well-versed in her floral knowledge could respond to. When Grant and Victoria start a correspondence with flowers, the reader can’t help but root for them to overcome all the many obstacles in their paths.

This is a book filled with pain and anguish, ameliorated to some extent by the beauty of floral language that the protagonist is well-versed in. Without this language, she would be alone, cut off from everyone and without a way to communicate. It’s her own personal way of signing as she is deaf to the true meaning of the spoken word. Her life of group home after group home has dulled her senses, scared her out of trying intimacy and prevented her from normal attachment.

Victoria is a lonely soul whose growth and connections are beautifully portrayed in this book. This is a debut novel by the author, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, who attributes her inspiration for writing it in part from her experience as a foster mother. Diffenbaugh has a natural affinity for words and I hope that this is the beginning of a long and fruitful writing career.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 57 readers
PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books; First Edition (August 23, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Vanessa Diffenbaugh
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> BACK OF BEYOND by C. J. Box /2011/back-of-beyond-by-c-j-box/ Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:53:39 +0000 /?p=20134 Book Quote:

“Even though he was exhausted and stabs of pain pulsed through his ear, Cody refused to take the medication they’d given him because he knew, he just knew, that if he let his defenses down even a little he’d start drinking. He knew himself.  He’d find a justification to start off on another bender.  His ear hurt; he was suspended; precious hours for finding the killer had been wasted and he’d never get them back; his dog had died (granted, it was twenty years before, but it was still dead; he missed his son; his 401(k) wasn’t worth crap anymore…”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (AUG 20, 2011)

Back of Beyond by C. J. Box is just what a mystery thriller should be – a wild ride through twists and turns with rogue characters that have depth of spirit and lots of baggage. This book is a hardcore page-turner with characters the reader gets to know well. It’s well-plotted and everything comes together just when it’s supposed to; no red herrings and no deus ex machina. Box knows exactly how to plot his book so that each page brings the reader closer to crisis and then conclusion. There is the dark side that is required in order for good to prevail and there are lots of cold, dark pathways that wind their way to a fine conclusion.

Cody Hoyt is a rogue cop with a history of alcoholism and wild behavior. If he doesn’t like a suspect he will shoot him in the knee to get a confession. He’s been kicked out of the Denver police force and finds himself back in Helena, Montana where his people hail from. As he self-describes his family, they’re “white trash.” The only good thing to his credit is his son Justin, who has turned out to be a good kid raised primarily by his ex-wife, Jenny.

As the book opens, Cody has been on the wagon for 59 days and is participating in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). His AA sponsor, Hank, is a man Cody trusts and who has guided him to his tentative sobriety. Cody finds out that Hank’s cabin has been destroyed by fire and that Hank has been killed. It appears, at first, to be a suicide but after careful investigation, Cody realizes it’s a homicide. He knows Hank and he knows that Hank would never take his life. He also realizes that Hank’s AA coins are missing and Hank never kept these coins far from his person. Whoever killed Hank stole the coins and made the scene look like a suicide.

The only person who believes Cody is his partner, Larry. The clues that Cody finds lead him to an outfitter called Wilderness Adventures run by one Jed McCarthy. Jed is a narcissistic self-promoter who is about to start his longest trip of the season into Yellowstone Park. He calls this trip “Back of Beyond” because it goes so deep into the National Park. Unfortunately, Cody finds out that his son, Justin, along with Jenny’s fiancé, are on this trip. He tries to get to Yellowstone in time to prevent the trip from starting but doesn’t make it.

Meanwhile, Cody gets suspended from the Helena police force and must make the trip alone as a civilian. He realizes that he’s being followed and stalked and that his very life is in danger. As he gets closer to the park, there is an attempt on his life. Cody becomes paranoid and doesn’t know who to trust. Could his partner Larry be his nemesis?

The book has a lot of good information on alcoholism and recovery, both the disease, the confidentiality and the rehabilitation process. It shows Cody’s constant efforts to remain sober along with his slips. It also shows him picking himself up again to get on the wagon. I was impressed by how much Box knows about AA and the program.

The reader can’t help but notice the author’s love and respect for the wilderness. His descriptions of Yellowstone and its geologic formations are breathtaking. We get to see Wyoming and Montana from the eyes of a writer who loves the spaces of the great outdoors. Back of Beyond is hard to put down. It’s one of those thrillers where each page adds new information and each of the characters are interesting. The book comprises the best of both worlds – it is character and action driven. It may be a bit formulaic but it’s a great formula, one that keeps the reader on his toes and coming back for more.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 182 readers
PUBLISHER: Minotaur Books; First Edition (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: C.J. Box
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Joe Pickett Series:

Stand-alone:

]]> TINKERS by Paul Harding /2011/tinkers-by-paul-harding/ Fri, 27 May 2011 13:07:33 +0000 /?p=18019 Book Quote:

“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: stars-3-5from 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:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More Pulitzer Prize winners:

Bibliography:

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