“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:	from 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: Late Nights on Air Garbo Laughs

Bibliography:

• Crossing the Snow Line: Stories (1989)
• Small Change: Stories (1997)
• A Student of Weather (2000; 2001 in the US)
• Garbo Laughs (2003)
• Late Nights on Air (2007; 2008 in the US)
• Alone in the Classroom (2011 in Canada)

Non-Fiction:

• The Only Snow in Havana (1992)
• Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (1993)

“I was suddenly crazy about collecting the hands of old mannequins, and vintage etiquette books, like the 1963 edition of  Blueprints for Building Better Girls! Ray and I’d take turns reading it aloud to each other. It was hilarious how clueless these women, teetering in hells, on the cusp of the sexual revolution, were.””

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 11, 2011)

Poor Holden Caulfield. In Catcher in the Rye, he muses, “Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.” How right he was! In Elissa Schappell’s new short story collection, the old blueprints for Appropriate Female Behavior — the name of a vintage etiquette manual, 1963 edition — have all been tossed away. And now the girls and women are forced to muddle through with the new rules: Be yourself but also be what your boyfriend, parents, and girlfriends want you to be as well.

These women are survivors, some only barely, armed with caustic humor to withstand the toughest stuff that life can throw their way. In “A Dog Story,” a couple that has long tried to have a baby discover, in a routine examination, that the technician cannot locate the heartbeat. “My husband asked her to keep looking,” the wife says, “as if the baby were playing Marco Polo and had swum behind a kidney.”

In another story called “Elephant,” two women who mouth all the right clichés about how “motherhood matters,” finally get real with each other. “She was crying the way mothers learn to do. Her body betrayed nothing. There was no wiping her eyes, or heaving shoulders, no sound at all.”

And then there’s “Joy of Cooking” – with all its anti-feminist connotations. An anorexic daughter, who believes she’s in love for the first time, calls her mother in a panic, cajoling her to walk her through the steps to roasting a chicken for her boyfriend. The story veers from what, at first, seems like a traditional coming-of-age rite of passage – the passing down of menus from any mother to any daughter — to a dark tale of manipulation, guilt, lack of gratitude, and hidden angers.

Each of the stories tackles a certain female archetype: the slut, the victim, the exhausted new mother, the party girl, and the seemingly infertile woman. At first, the reader settles in, secure and comfortable that she knows where the story is heading – after all, it’s been told many times before – but wait! There’s something a little “off” about each portrayal. Take Heather school slut, for example, who is involved with a newly trimmed down, former “fat boy.” Just as she begins to develop feelings, there is a subtle betrayal and she bites back, aiming to do the utmost emotional damage – and succeeding.

We meet Heather again, in the last story, my personal favorite, “I’m only Going To Tell You This Once.” Now a mother, she must confront the reality of her coveted son becoming involved with a young woman Candy, who reminds Heather all too well of herself. In fact, a number of characters are woven into other stories: Charlotte, a girl who left girlhood after being raped, is off stage but very central to another story, where her friend Bender – a self-destructive party girl – is left to deal with the effects of what happened to Charlotte. And we find that Paige, the young mother in “Elephant,” is the sister to the anorexic girl in “Joy of Cooking.”

This is a fine collection of eight stories for mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and for those who love them. As Heather says in the final story, “…there is no such thing as just a girl.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elissa Schappell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle

Bibliography:

• Use Me (2000)
• Blueprints for Building Better Girls (September 2011)

“Milly knew what other people thought: that they were just the weird old sisters who rescued birds, just like the crossing guard was the man with no teeth and the house on Oak Street was haunted and the river bottom was home to people who were missing their limbs and their eyes. That was the way with small towns, and there was something comforting about that.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 13, 2011)

Milly and Twiss are known throughout Spring Green, Wisconsin as “the bird sisters” – two elderly spinsters who minister to broken birds and make them whole again. And, in many ways, the birds are a metaphor for who they are. Early on, Milly reflects, “The smartest birds built their nests high up in the trees. Some birds, namely the wood pigeon, the clumsiest architect of all, began building their nests but never finished them.”

The sisters would fall into that latter grouping. At one point in their lives, they were eager to take wing until the summer of 1947 changed everything. Since the story is told as a flashback, we, the readers, are charged with the task of finding out how – and why.

It was, indeed, a pivotal summer. Their long-time trusted priest, Father Rice, pronounces that God doesn’t exist and leaves an astounded congregation for Mexico. Their father, a golf-pro, who loves the lifestyle more than he loves their mother, is in a car accident while coming home from buying ice-cream sundaes; his game, both literally and metaphorically) is forever altered. Milly develops her first real crush with a boy named Asa.

But perhaps most important of all, their older cousin Bett arrives for an extended stay from her small town. Rasmussen writes, “While other girls planned their future weddings down to the kinds of cakes they thought they might like to serve, Bett had Twiss running around without her underwear on, hanging from trees in the moonlight invoking spirits who took joy in menacing young girls. She had Milly giving up her secrets only so she could make fun of them.”

As dad retreats to his barn and shuts the door to the marriage and Bett becomes an unlikely rival, we know that things cannot end well, although the chain of events is only gradually revealed. We learn, for example, that these sisters realized during that summer that they no longer possessed the power to change the future; they take an ordinary wounded starling back to their farmhouse, hoping it would recover from its injuries and take flight for them.

But why? That’s part of the journey of discovery awaiting the reader. In heartbreaking detail, Ms. Rasmussen describes the loss of innocence and the tough decisions and sacrifices that will have far-reaching effects. As with many important moments in life, trades have to be made and none of it is easy.

And through it all, the setting becomes a “character” in its own right. Ms. Rasmussen expertly recreates the life of a small farming town where townspeople gather and from time to time, dreams are shattered. Using descriptions of a town fair, home-baked pies sitting on checkered tables, and a goat named Hoo-Hoo, Spring Green becomes a little touch of Eden before the fall.

Achingly authentic, filled with the loss of girlish dreams and the embracing of what is left, Rebecca Rasmussen weaves a portrait of two sisters who realize that for humans as well as birds, “You couldn’t fiddle with even the tiniest bones without repercussions in the larger ones.” The Bird Sisters is particularly recommended for female audiences who enjoy talented debut authors such as Beth Hoffman, Randy Susan Meyers, Eleanor Brown, and Ellen Meeropol.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 40 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (April 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Rasmussen
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown The Sister by Poppy Adams

Bibliography:

• The Bird Sisters (April 2011)

“You thought you couldn’t stand not to know a thing until you knew it, wasn’t that right? Who had said that, the Chief? Some poet from the Library Boat, maybe.

Knowledge at last, Kiwi’s mind recited dutifully. The fish’s living eye glass.

Sometimes you would prefer a mystery to remain red-gilled and buried inside you, Kiwi decided, alive and alive inside you.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (FEB 02, 2011)

In her hotly-anticipated debut novel, Swamplandia!, Karen Russell returns to the mosquito-droves and muggy-haze of the Florida Everglades and the gator-themed amusement park featured in her short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” that opened her widely-praised 2006 collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. It was that collection, with its exuberant mix of satire and fabulism, that secured Russell’s reputation as one of the most exciting up-and-comers around and earned her a coveted spot on The New Yorker’s much buzzed about “20 under 40” list last fall. With her energetic prose, quirky settings, and fantastical plots, Russell is a writer’s whose style forces you to sit up and take notice, sometimes at the cost of emotional involvement with her work. However, Swamplandia!, with all its flashing-neon prose is an insightful (and surprisingly funny) exploration of the loss of innocence that inevitably follows the death of a parent.

In the year following her mother’s death, 13-year-old Ava Bigtree quickly learns how “one tragedy can beget another and another.” Since birth, their family-owned, 100-acre island attraction, Swamplandia!, has been Ava’s home. Its 98 alligators (all named after their original gator, Seth, because as Chief Bigtree likes to say “Tradition is as important as promotional materials are expensive.”), Reptile Walk, Live Chicken Thursday feeding shows, and lone mammal, a balding, rhythmless bear named Judy Garland, have all helped Swamplandia! hold its position as the “Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” in southwestern Florida. That, and Ava’s mother’s gator-swim routine. However, when Hilola Bigtree dies of ovarian cancer, Chief Bigtree, lost in his own fog of grief, fails to amend the promotional materials and tourists continue to file off the Mainland-Swamplandia! ferry eager to watch the “Swamp Centaur” swim through a gator pit “planked with great grey and black bodies.” Initially, the disappointed mainlanders are understanding –- after all, a family has lost its mother – but, their hijacked sympathy soon swings to money-back-demanding indignation, until a new corporate theme park, the World of Darkness, opens just off the highway, and the tourists stop coming altogether.

With the tourists gone and their father increasingly preoccupied, Ava and her dreamy older sister, Osceola, (white-haired and violet-eyed, Ossie resembles “the doomed sibling you see in those Wild West daguerreotypes, the one who makes you think Oh God take the picture quick; this one isn’t long for this world”) are left alone with empty days to fill. The girls take to hanging out on the abandoned library boat with their studious brother, Kiwi. Kiwi is the kind of guy who gives himself report cards and studies for his SATs long before he’s even stepped foot inside a high school, and so he scoffs when he learns that Ava and Osceola plan to contact their mother with Ossie’s newly acquired occult powers and their homemade Ouija board.

Their unsuccessful séances crush Ava, but when Ossie starts using the Ouija board on her own to meet other ghosts –strange men! – Ava tattles to their father: her sister is dating men, dead ones. Burdened by the park’s mounting debt and his own mismanaged grief, Chief Bigtree isn’t up to dealing with his lonely and disturbed 16-year old daughter.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Angry at his father’s inability to face their increasingly precarious financial situation, Kiwi runs away to the mainland to save his family from destitution and is initiated into the realities of minimum-wage labor as a peon at the World of Darkness. And so, when the Chief disappears to the mainland on mysterious business, Ava and Osceola are left to fend for themselves in the swamp. However, as Osceola’s romance with the ghost of a ill-fated, Depression-era dredgeman, Louis Thanksgiving, intensifies, Ava is left increasingly alone. When Ossie runs off to the Underworld to elope with Louis Thanksgiving, a mysterious stranger, the Bird Man, offers to be Ava’s guide in her quest to retrieve her sister

Forget Dante’s rings or Homer’s River Styx; this is mangrove swamp as the Underworld! With its fecundity and “blue lozenge” water ways, Ava frets that the swamp doesn’t look much like the underworld she’s read about in books, but with its “leafy catacombs,” ravenous mosquitoes, and “rotten-egg smell [that] rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangrove’s stilted roots,” but I can’t think of a milieu more likely to harbor ghosts.

Part of successfully navigating the swamps of adolescence involves knowing which beliefs to cling to tenaciously, and which to modify, if not altogether discard. Although the inevitable loss of innocence that follows is heart-breaking, as the Bigtree children learn that life on the mainland is just as imperfect as life on the swamp, that loving a ghost, if possible, comes with a steep cost, that mothers, once dead, stay gone, Russell never lets us lose our sense of humor. Moreover, as Ava oscillates between her girlish beliefs and her adult awakening, Russell maintains expert control over the narrative. So much so, in fact, that the reader, like Ava, is unsure of exactly what to believe. That is, until disaster strikes, and the reader is left sharing Ava’s sentiment: we should have seen it coming all along.

Ava and Osceola’s story is about loneliness, loss and sisterly love, but Kiwi’s sudden emersion in the ways of the contemporary teen helps to lighten some of that darkness. Fascinated by the alien customs around him, Kiwi takes to writing down his observations while his colleagues take to calling him Margaret Mead. His education into mainland life is perceptive, and often hilarious.

Swamplandia! is a quirky, but well-crafted read, and Russell’s prose is dynamite. While the ending might be too pat for some, I was so impressed by Russell’s knack for description and laughed far too many times (really!) to hold it against the book. Karen Russell has been likened to writers as wide ranging as Amy Hempel, George Saunders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kelly Link and Judy Blume, and while her energetic prose might be too exhausting for some, if her writing is anything, it’s this: original.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 462 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	MacArthur Foundation page on Karen Russell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Southern Florida story: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Bibliography:

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006)
• Swamplandia! (2011)
• Vampires in the Lemon Grove ( 2013)
• Sleep Donation: A Novella (March 2014)

“Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story and tell the story of yourself. Stop defining yourself in terms of them. You don’t just have to exist in the empty spaces they leave.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JAN 20, 2011)

The thorny relationship between sisters has offered a mother lode of material for writers dating back to the start of time. Shakespeare tackled it in King Lear; in modern times, authors that vary from Louisa May Alcott to Julia Glass and Jane Smiley have put their personal spin on this theme.

Now debut author Eleanor Brown takes her turn. Meet Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia, three sisters named for Shakespearean heroines by their eccentric and professorial father. These are women who look very much alike, maintain a common family bond, but if truth be told, don’t like each other very much.

Ms. Brown defines the roles that sisters are inevitably forced to play within the structure of the family. She writes, “Who would Bean be if she dropped her beautiful mask? Who would Cordy be if she stepped up to the plate in her own life? And who would Rose be if she weren’t the responsible one anymore?”

These are the questions the three sisters are forced to explore when twists of life bring the two younger prodigal sisters back to their collegial hometown, just at the point when their mother has received a breast cancer diagnosis. Each is at a cross point: Rose must decide whether to burst free from her self-imposed safety net, spread her wings, and follow her fiancée to his once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity in London. Bean is running from significant debt that she needed “to play her part effectively: the shoes, clothes, the makeup, the drinks at bars and clubs where a bottle of water alone ran nearly ten dollars.” And Cordy? The baby of the family has discovered that she herself is pregnant with her own baby.

Eleanor Brown chooses to use the third-person plural to demonstrate the “we-ness” of these sisters, who are threads of the same cloth, tied in together for life. Third-person plural is not an easy tense to pull off, and there is an awkwardness in it from time to time, although I certainly applaud her intentions. Similarly, the Shakespeare aphorisms that the father regularly spouts – “communicating his deepest feelings in the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years” — sometimes come across as inorganic.

Of course, the exploration of sisterhood is complicated, as these characters show. Ms. Brown writes, “We weren’t going to talk about it, we weren’t going to share any feelings or discuss any arrangements, not going to bond in any type of movie montage moment where emotional music swelled as we hugged and wept for our mother’s loss and our own fear. Instead, we were going to wrap ourselves in cloaks woven from self-pity and victimhood, refusing to admit that we might be able to help each other if we’d only open up.”

It’s that “opening up” process that is mined within these pages. By the end of the book, there will be growth in each and every character, some predictable, some a surprise. There are many “weird sisters” out there who will recognize their own roles and their own family dynamics.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 98 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (January 20, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eleanor Brown
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of these “Sister” novels: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

Bibliography:

• The Weird Sisters (January 2011)

“None of the patients ever ventured to reply to Helene’s question by asking how she was herself. Her uniform protected her. The white apron was a stronger signal than any of the traffic lights going up at more and more road junctions in the city these days, shining brightly to show who could go and who must stop. If you wore white you could keep your mouth shut; if you wore white you weren’t asked how you were. Courtesy was all on the outside for Helene and hardly tamed her despair, but it controlled it; pity for the suffering of others was her inner prop and stay.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 22, 2010)

In the original German version, so I’ve been told, the title of this book is Die Mittagsfrau, or “The Noonday Witch.” According to legend, the witch appears in the heat of day to spirit away children from their distracted parents. Those who are able to engage the witch in a short conversation find that her witch-like powers evaporate.

In Julia Franck’s brilliant English version (translated by the very talented Anthea Bell), Helene gradually retreats into silence and passivity, losing her ability to communicate effectively. We meet her in the book’s prologue as the mother of an eight-year-old boy, leading her son towards a packed train in the direction of Berlin. Before the train arrives she tells him a white lie, abandoning him at a bench, never to return. In the succeeding 400 pages, the reader gains a glimpse as to what drove Helene to this most unnatural act.

Helene is born into a family that defines the word “dysfunction.” Her charismatic, morphine-addicted older sister Martha engages her in an incestuous relationship. Her mentally unbalanced “foreign” (i.e., Jewish mother) is unable to connect with her two daughters, totally distancing from them when their father goes off to fight the Great War and becomes grievously injured. When the two sisters gain the chance to flee to Berlin, they grab it and train as nurses, exposing them to the pain of their patients and also giving them ready access to drugs.

Martha fits right into the debauchery and frantic partying of a decaying Berlin with her enlightened free-thinking friend and physician-lover, Leontine, but Helene is far more circumspect and sensitive. Her one enduring love is a philosophy student named Carl who also feels deeply and tells her, “The God principle is built on pain. Only if pain were obliterated from the world could we speak of the death of God.” When he is gone from the scene, she is unable to protect herself from victimization, occurring time and time again, with sexual predators and the cruel man she eventually marries.

As readers, we watch helplessly as Helene becomes increasingly detached, her heart becoming cold and numb. So it is no surprise when she concludes of her son, “…she had nothing more for him, her words were all used up long ago, she had neither bread nor an hour’s time for him, there was nothing of her left for the child.”

As the book progresses, the reader is forced to adapt an omnipotent stance; we know the consequence of some of the characters’ decisions and the genocide that will soon follow, but we are powerless to guide the characters through. Julia Franck instructs through omission as much as she does the details. When Helene calls Berlin to speak to Martha and gets no answer, we as readers are reasonably sure what has occurred. But it is never confirmed. As a result, as Helene goes numb, we begin to understand. And we begin to gain some compassion for an act that virtually all mothers would consider unforgiveable.

There is a menacing quality that pervades the book, becoming more and more pronounced as Hitler rises in power. There is no black-and-white morality or easy outcomes; there are simply all kinds of loss – loss of one’s sanity, loss of innocence, loss of love, loss of the natural order of things, loss of hope. The more the characters lose, the more they must abandon. In many ways, we know they are already as good as gone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Julia Franck
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Germans: The Good German by Joseph Kanon The Reader by Bernard Schlink

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Blindness of the Heart (2007;  2010 in US)

“This Wednesday has been building to since seven this morning, Jacqueline thinks, since Sylvie was first born.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (SEP 6, 2010)

From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and just recently, Jennifer Vanderbes’ Strangers at the Feast, unhappy families have been a staple of literature all over the globe. What, or who, put the “y” in unhappy, in dysfunction? Canadian author Lee Kvern mines this question with a brutally honest sensitivity in her intimate family portrait of Lloyd and Jacqueline Burrows and their three children–“four, if you count Sylvie.”

In short, enigmatic, alternating chapters, over three decisive Wednesdays in three successive decades, the story of the Burrows family is teased out with measured restraint from its blistering beginnings to its nuanced conclusion. Three days of narratives gradually unite–Jacqueline in 1961, Lloyd in 1973, and Lesa, their oldest daughter, in 1987–and the years between them melt away and form a cohesive, lucent whole.

In the punishing prairie landscape of Red Deer, in Calgary, Jacqueline Burrows lives with her philandering husband, Lloyd, and their three small children, in a small and indistinct row house next to other RCMP wives, aka “the abandoned wives.” Lloyd is on the night shift of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and is rarely home. In 1961, Jacqueline is pregnant and exhausted, her maternal eyes on Lesa, Nate, and Sylvie, as they frolic bantam through the street. A devoted and sensible mother, she nevertheless relies on five-year-old Lesa as her bulwark to keep Sylvie close.

Sylvie was born asphyxiated, the cord wrapped around her neck. She was left with severe mental challenges and suffers from grand mal seizures. Jacqueline loves her fiercely but is overcome with guilt.

On this hot July Wednesday, Jacqueline sees Sylvie (from the kitchen window) start to climb in a strange man’s car. She intervenes and saves her with a scream, blames Lesa for failing to protect her, and subsequently chides herself. To make matters worse, the RCMP can’t find her husband when she calls for help.

“She thinks about her husband…in the arms, the bed of some other woman. Another other. And…while she no longer wants her husband–whether by God or by the sheer luminosity of their children, she needs him. The two are twisted up like electrical wires, complicated and live.”

Flash forward to February, 1973, and Corporal Lloyd’s narrative. His shift has ended, but he is embroiled in rescuing Jimmy Widman, the town drunk, who has been beaten senselessly and left frozen in the snow. Jimmy has had countless drunk-and-disorderly troubles, and no authority wants to help him anymore. But the taciturn corporal overextends himself and risks his job to help him.

Ironically, Lloyd recoils from home life and is often absent during family crises. Early in the marriage, he was Dudley-Do-Right to Jacqueline’s Nell, but the moniker has faded along with his vows; the matter of Sylvie has eroded his love.

“He sits in his cruiser, motor idling, glances down Main Street–his street, his town…farmers, ranchers, one doctor, one vet…one drive-in theater…one wife, three–no, four children, if he counts Sylvie, but he seldom does. The cruel, imperfect line across her small lips, her dark eyes glimmering like Lloyd’s, like the blonde’s in the bar last night…”

The connection of Jimmy’s destiny to the Burrows’ fate is disclosed through the drama of his story. Lloyd hauls a bundled-up Widman through hoops in a cat-and mouse chase to save Widman’s life and perhaps his own soul.

Lesa’s Wednesday of 1987 begins with a plane ride home to visit her mother in Red Deer. She’s a wreck, an adolescent at thirty-one. She flirts shamelessly but silently with a stranger at the airport, hoping to–she doesn’t know what. Her live-in boyfriend is home in Vancouver, but she’s terrified of emotional intimacy. She has dyed her firebrand red hair to the inky black of Sylvie’s, her agenda unknown.

Moreover, she is parading around in a super-hero costume with spiked pleather boots and a tawdry wig. (Her excuse–it is almost Halloween) Her brother, Nate, doesn’t recognize her at the baggage claim. When they get to Red Deer, her courage takes a flying leap. She deposits Nate at Jacqueline’s door and goes on an adventure in her Storm costume and cape that is poised to either sabotage or awaken her life.

“She wishes she were a kid again. That brief period of time when no matter what, all is forgiven; everything slips away like silk to skin, smoke to air, a magician’s trick performed by her mother…She knows the trick of the dysfunctional family all too well in that it leaves you lacking, looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

This isn’t a sentimental story about caring for Sylvie, a child with special needs. It is about a family’s catalyst to a long, uncertain truth. Sylvie, at age four, was that catalyst, on a particular thorny day when Murphy’s Law and Wednesdays became destiny. In elegiac and spare prose, Kvern brings the reader from the oblique to the sublime, from the edges of the family to the heart of the matter…of Sylvie.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Brindle & Glass; 1st edition (September 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lee Kvern
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Bibliography:

• Afterall (2001)
• The Matter of Sylvie (September 2010)

“He asked me to keep everything,” Sandra said.

George wasn’t listening. “Do you see this? A paper clip!” The silver wire clipped several scraps of paper to a recipe for petites meringues a l’ananas. George pulled it off, and showed Sandra the rusty impression left behind. “This is criminal.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (AUG 21, 2010)

One of Goodman’s favorite authors is Jane Austen and it shows in her subtle, wryly witty social comedies. This latest takes place on both coasts between 1999 and 2002 and centers on two California sisters: responsible, ambitious, principled Emily and flighty, vegan, philosophical Jess. The title character, though deceased, plays a beguiling role in the plot.

The major part of the action takes place in and around Berkeley. Emily, 28, has founded an up-and-coming dot-com company. Jess, at 23, is floundering in grad school, majoring in philosophy, working in an antiquarian bookstore, taking Incompletes in her courses. She’s also very caught up in Save the Trees, though she has a phobia of heights and can’t participate in any of the redwood occupying.

Their mother died when Emily was 10 and Jess 5, and left letters for each of them to open on their birthdays, up to age 25. Emily treasures her letters but Jess, who barely remembers her, had read them all on her twelfth birthday and found them wanting. Still, passages from the letters sprinkle the narrative. Their long-departed mother had high hopes for them and much advice. Emily worries that Jess has not found the “profession” her mother hoped she would; Jess counters with barbs about Emily’s high-energy boyfriend, Jonathan, another ambitious dot-com founder who lives in Boston and seldom sees Emily.

“’Find someone musical,’ Jess quoted, for she was not above citing Gillian’s letters in a pinch, and she knew Jonathan could not carry a tune. ‘Find someone giving. Find someone who will sacrifice for you.’ “

Emily and Jonathan both have imminent IPOs. All the young techies are giddy with prospects of immense wealth. On a trip to see Jonathan, Emily, worried that her love isn’t enough, impulsively decides to share a company secret. “She would prove herself to herself. Satisfy his curiosity and confide in him, share her work, her life, her most secret joy.”

Jonathan, when Emily demands a similar confidence, lies. And thereafter, he struggles mightily not to seize her new secret for his own company. Will his better instincts win out? The reader suspects not. The reader also knows the bubble is about to burst – even the dot-commers have some inkling – and our omniscience contributes to the suspense. Will they get rich? Will it all come to nothing? Goodman is good enough to make us care.

Meanwhile Jess can barely be bothered to scrape up the money required to get in on Emily’s IPO. She shows up late for work at the bookstore and scares customers away with her strong opinions. But George, the proprietor, a 41-year-old retired Microsoft multimillionaire, can’t keep his eyes off her, despite her infuriating habits and greasy boyfriend from Save the Trees. His wit is dry. “ ‘Three months,’ George said as he was locking up. ‘I didn’t realize Save the Trees had been around that long.’ “

George has never married, though he insists he wants to. His girlfriends say he refuses to commit; George says he hasn’t found the right person. The bookstore is more a hobby than a business, though he can be cutthroat where sales and acquisitions are concerned. George is also a bit of a curmudgeon. He has eschewed the technology that made him rich and is known to fulminate about the end of Western Civilization. He hits his hectoring stride while on a jog with a friend, who picks up the pace, “hoping to outrun George’s rant.”

“ ‘What was it Jess said today?…’ George panted, trying to keep up. ‘Ruskin is a dogmatic, self-indulgent, sexually repressed misogynist with an edifice complex.’

Nick smiled. ‘Sounds just like you.’ “

The manic excitement of the dot-com frenzy contrasts with George’s deliberate preservation of the past. Chips and get-rich-quick schemes versus venerable books and timeless architecture. Jess finds both worlds materialistic and does her best to stay destitute while longing for the peace of mind lack of debt can confer.

The cookbook collector comes into the narrative haltingly, a book at a time. When the collector’s niece finally admits George to the collection, Jess finds herself entranced as well, as much by the notes and drawings interleaved with the recipes as the gorgeous, worn books themselves. Once George gets over his horror at the desecration, he too finds himself curious about the collector, a man with whose obsession he can identify.

There are a lot of secondary characters –including a couple of Hasidic rabbis – and Goodman involves us in each of the subplots they inspire (although the bookshop always beckons). Even the characters we don’t much like – or at least disapprove of – come to life on the page. One of the Austen-like things she does is to allow her characters to gently thwart our hopes through willfulness, misunderstanding, timidity, occasionally even by accident or fate. But they grow and learn. Jess, researching the cookbooks, looks at her mother’s letters with new eyes. “What was it about them? What was it she had overlooked before? Their secrecy. The obliqueness of the language drew her in, where before it had confused and bored her.”

The writing is unflaggingly delightful, and Goodman doesn’t let wit stand in the way of weighty issues. Among the ponderables are values, ethics and the meaning of life – or at least the meaning of how we choose to live. A wonderful novel, with all its plots resolved, some in ways that won’t please everyone. Readers of Goodman’s other novels will love this one and fans of Cathleen Schine, Helen Simonson, Marian Keyes, or Penelope Lively should enjoy it as well.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 125 readers
PUBLISHER:	The Dial Press; 1 edition (July 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Allegra Goodman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Authors you may also like: Cathleen Schine Penelope Lively

Bibliography:

• Total Immersion: Stories (1989)
• The Family Markowitz (1996)
• Kaaterskill Falls (1998)
• Paradise Park (2001)
• Intuition (2006)
• The Other Side of the Island (2008)
• The Cookbook Collector (July 2010)

“Yumi’s mother grew lazier by the day. The physical toll of childbirth had undeniably affected her vitality. But it was one thing to hand Little Eight over to Yumi, and yet another to turn the whole household over to her. What does a woman live for anyway? Isn’t it to run a household? If she shuns even the authority to do that, what besides a rotten egg with a watery yolk is she? But there were no complaints from Yumi, who was content with the way things were. When a girl learns to care for a baby and take charge of a household, she can wake up that first morning after her wedding day fully prepared to be a competent wife and a good daughter-in-law, someone who need not be in constant fear of what her mother-in-law thinks.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 9, 2010)

Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu is a tragicomic novel, a tongue-in-cheek parody, about three sisters in the Wang family living in Wang Family Village in rural China: “Many rural villages are populated mainly by families with the same surname.”   The novel opens in 1971 and ends in 1982. It is structured like three novellas though it is described by the publisher as a novel. The book’s strength, and also its weakness, is that it is primarily comprised of character studies without a lot of plot. This can make it less accessible to some readers. Throughout the novel, the author utilizes Chinese proverbs, aphorisms and adages to make points. It comes out sounding something like a Greek chorus, adding a comic element to what is often heart-rending or calamitous. It is also very culture-specific which makes it harder to access for many readers.

The background is Maoist China following the Cultural Revolution. The position of women is lowly. They have no say in their lives except through subtle avenues where they can make small choices that may have a large impact on their lives and those in their community. This is often achieved by how a salutation is given, who is addressed and who is ignored, and what gossip is spread among them.

The book opens in 1971 with the story of Yumi, the oldest sister in the Wang family. The family is comprised of seven daughters and one son. Yumi’s mother has given up the care of her son to Yumi who takes her brother around the village with pride as though she were his mother. In essence, she is the head of her family. Her father is a philanderer and a drunk who has the job of commune-secretary. He falls from grace when an affair he is having with the wife of an active duty soldier comes to light. This impacts Yumi’s marriage plans. She had been engaged to an aviator from a neighboring town but he pulls out of the engagement because of Yumi’s father’s disgrace. Yumi is a strong woman who has plans – she wants to be associated with power. She manages to become the second wife to a powerful man in another village. Though her heart is broken and she is filled with embarrassment and shame, she proceeds with her life, giving the appearance of “one of those intrepid women in propaganda posters, a woman who could charm any man and still look death in the face without flinching.”

The second part of the book is about the third daughter,Yuxio. Yuxio is a flirt and is described as cunning and two-faced, like a fox or a snake. She and Yumi have never gotten along and she has never respected Yumi’s authority. After her father’s downfall, she goes to attend a movie and during the course of the film she is abducted and raped. Yumi does her best to help her maintain face in the village but is soon gone off with her husband to a new town. On top of the shame associated with the rape, Yuxio gets into a fight with one of her younger sisters that is observed by many in the village. The outcome of this fight is that Yuxio becomes a village outcast.

Yuxio leaves her village and travels to Yumi’s home where she seductively entrenches herself into the good graces of Yumi’s stepdaughter and husband. The next thing Yumi knows, Yuxio is living with her family. There is already a wedge between Yumi and her stepdaughter and this is widened by Yuxio. Though Yuxio actually despises the girl, she fawns and acts obsequiously towards her. She is so underhandedly awful and provocative in her behaviors that she is described as “a dog that can’t stop eating shit.” She tries to install herself into the good graces of various town folk but over and over she sabotages herself by her indiscreet and false pretenses. It doesn’t take long for others to catch on to her back stabbing personality. Yumi becomes pregnant and Yuxio loses her power at home. By the end of this section Yuxio is in much worse shape than when she started. She has ended up fooling nobody, not even herself.

The third chapter in the novel is about Yuyang, seventh sister, and takes place in 1982. Yuyang has won a scholarship to a teaching college and gets involved in the intrigue of the school, working on underground intelligence. This consists primarily of keeping an eye on her fellow students and teachers to see who is fraternizing with whom and reporting these events to her superior. She has read a lot of Agatha Christie and feels up to the job.

The novel ends without pulling together the lives of the three sisters. There is no follow-up to the other two stories and no real connecting of them. That is why I consider this book to be comprised of novellas rather than considering it a novel. I think this book might appeal to readers who are familiar with Chinese literature and culture. It is not likely to have widespread appeal because of stylistic issues. I found it informative and interesting, at times laugh-out-loud funny but I am sure that there is a lot here that went past me. (Translated by Howard Goldbatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bi Feiyu
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from Chinese writers: The Dictionary of Maqiao Han Shaogong

Bibliography:

• The Moon Opera (2007; 2009 in US)
• Three Sisters (2008; August 2010 in US)

“Do you know what I sometimes still think? Lidy’s just gone for a day, and she’s relying on me to live her life for her, all organized and proper, and that’s exactly what I’m damn well doing.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (APR 12, 2010)

It seemed such a harmless, even playful thing: in the Netherlands, two sisters, two years apart and nearly identical in appearance, would trade places one weekend. Armanda, would stay home. looking after a toddler niece and attending a party that evening with her brother-in-law. Lidy, would travel south by auto and ferry to Zierikzee to give a birthday gift to Armanda’s goddaughter. Perhaps no one would even notice the difference?

What sounds like a comedy of misidentification isn’t really, because both sisters quickly ‘fess up to being themselves rather than impersonating each other. What matters in Margriet de Moor’s new novel is that a sisterly prank proposed by Armanda results in each young woman stepping into the other’s life. And for twenty-three-year-old Lidy, the older of the two sisters, this fateful role swap is actually a permanent good-bye to her life. “If anyone had said to her that with Nadja held tight and safe in her arms she should take a good look all around because her farewell was a final one, she would have known deep in her heart this was possible at any moment in life, but she wouldn’t have believed it.”

The date is January 31, 1953, and that night a catastrophic flood engulfed the province of Zeeland (where Zierikzee is located), killing many hundreds outright and leaving many unaccounted for. Later, the official national toll of that North Sea flood would be nearly two thousand people in all. The Storm: A Novel follows Lidy as her ferry encounters such rough seas that it will in fact be the last transport for several days from Numansdorp to Zijpe. As she arrives at the Hotel Kirke in Schouwen-Duivelan, natural warning signs are all around, but the last great flooding of dikes had occurred in 1906 and somehow people just didn’t think it could happen again…to them. But it did, and so interspersed in this novel de Moor relates the grueling last hours of Lidy and others who, like her, at first found some kind of shelter but were ultimately swept out into the storm. Perhaps unluckier than those drowned right away, they didn’t die immediately, but finally succumbed to exposure, exhaustion, and the water. In Lidy’s case the novel turns almost poetic: “Some living force was coming at her, constantly shape-shifting, in curves, and wings, and foam, and spray; it was the question that silenced all life’s other questions. Almighty God, merciful God…” Lidy’s exact end wasn’t known, but the storm consumed her.

Armanda, who by her godchild’s invitation should have been the one imperiled by the raging sea, lives many decades beyond her sister, and The Storm proceeds to drop in on her and her loved ones as time presses on. She, the survivor, sometimes holds internal conversations with Lidy, and during one of those she states,”I am Armanda, the sister of a  woman who was very young when she drove away one morning from a happy home and sadly never came back. Since that time she lives inside me…Good, so, when I was twenty-eight and then thirty, I enlarged my sister’s family, which had consisted until then of a husband, a wife, and a little daughter, with an additional daughter and son….I maintain that the only person who ever really knew me was Sjoerd, and you, Lidy, have the absolute right to feel offended that he drew the line at our menage-a-trois. I’m sorry, but I obviously didn’t manage your husband very well.”

So Armanda marries Sjoerd too and tries to carry on in Lidy’s place. Here, then, we have one physical body left and, in a sense, two occupants. This prevailing theme recurs in variation in Armanda’s story about her father’s death late in the novel. Actually his two deaths. First he “dies” peacefully of pancreatic cancer with his family surrounding him, but then he appears to recover. However, he isn’t the same anymore. He seems to be a different person, with changed habits and attitudes. Perhaps he is what is called a “walk-in.” Then he dies “again,” alone this time. The body is a container, Armanda thinks; it can exchange occupants or contain more than one tenant. That, at least, is how she would like to console herself over the loss of Lidy.

The Storm is a tribute and memorial to those who lost their lives in the 1953 flood, vividly imagining how they were overcome, either quickly or after determined struggle. The novel is also a study of the effects of grief on a family that never was 100% certain what happened to Lidy. And it is a pondering on metaphysics; one of the chapters is entitled “Dreams and Ghosts,” which encapsulates how both Lidy and Armanda sometimes grasp at the world and their tentative existence: “And like someone who in a chance moment recognizes that the heavens are the eternal, everlasting, primeval landscape of our minds, she said, ‘Yes, we say it’s beautiful, but just think of everything that lies behind it all, you know?’ ”

The translation into English by Carol Brown Janeway includes some beautiful and almost transcendent passages. On the other hand, it can be less-than-easy reading. Several times during the novel, I wished I were able to read Dutch so I could determine whether only the translation feels somewhat awkward or whether de Moor transmitted the same inapproachable quality. This is, after all, a book about a storm, and so perhaps the feeling of floating around the prose rather than being anchored in it is entirely intentional. I can admire that desire to shape the writing to the subject, but the style nevertheless tends to be distracting and lessens the ability to fully engage with the characters and their histories.

So, The Storm feels somewhat alien (not necessarily a disadvantage for a work by a foreign author?). But once involved in it, the novel is more than the stories of two sisters; it is a rumination on what constitutes “being,” how far one can take alikeness, whether the veil of death is permeable, and whether psychological health includes a sense of “the other inside.” At one point the narrative says “everyone always said they were exactly alike.” Armanda stoutly replies, “Absolutely not.” She adds, “We distinguished between the two of us the way only sisters can. We knew it.” She continues, “So now my past has been exchanged for hers, while her future has passed to me, there’s this veil of bottomless sadness, though naturally I try to ignore it.” A futile endeavor, to ignore that which absorbs the self.

Finally, a side note of sorts: recently another novel called Losing Charlotte, by Heather Clay, was published. It too deals with two sisters and the toll on one when the other dies unexpectedly and traumatically. Although these two books are very different from on another in many respects, if readers find The Storm compelling, they might be interested in Clay’s book too. Both volumes are published by Knopf.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AMAZON PAGE:	The Storm
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official website (in Dutch) Margriet de Moor
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Kreutzer Sonata

Bibliography:

• Seen From Behind (1988)
• Double Portrait ( (1989)
• First Gray, Then White, Then Blue (1991; 2001 in US)
• The Virtuoso (1993; 2000 in US)
• Duke of Egypt (1996; 2002 in US)
• The Sea Road (1999)
• The Kreutzer Sonata (1999; January 2005 in US)
• Drowned (2005)
• The Juggler (2006)
• The Storm (March 2010)