Books by Choice - from Margitte's Wingback

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

2017-06-17T11:47:00.002-07:00

At last, yes, at last! It was finito! What a read it was. Honestly, I thought it was never going to end, that the saga beginning in 1945, after the Civil War in Spain, was just too dragging and too detailed for my sensitive soul. Emotionally I shut down around the halfway mark, hanging onto the picturesque, descriptive prose for dear life, sensing a light at the end of the tunnel.

Good lordie, miss molly, good gracious my angel, good heavens dear father! What a journey it was through the antique bookshop in Barcelona on Calle Santa Anna, to the streets of the city where the memories spilled like blood flowing like rain water though the gutters, where souls got ripped, raped and destroyed by the brutality of the war.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

1945. Barcelona Spain. It was a book, Shadows of the Wind by one Julián Carax, which brought the history alive for young Daniel. Not because it was explained in the book, but because through mysterious events after reading the book. It was a rare book, which reverberated quickly through the echoe chambers of the world of book collectors. It immediately draw attention as the last book of the author. Daniel Sempere made a promise never to tell where he he found it and protect it as his most precious possession.

Daniel's father: This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, hidden behind heavy bolted doors and high walls, brought voices alive of authors passed and present, who needed their story discovered and told.

Brave, curious, but innocent, ten-year-old Daniel Sempere did not foresee the consequences when he opened that particular book to read. Nor could the effect it would have on him and his father's life be calculated.

Clara: I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

And so it was for Daniel as well.

People populated Daniel's life from different walks of life. His journey to become a man, would cross paths with villains and angels; carers and destroyers. His life would forever be connected to those who survived the manslaughter of war.

When peace finally came, it smelled of the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots one’s soul and never goes away.

Along the way, a pathos and empathy grew for the people who managed to survive. A tragicomedy, a suspense thriller, a historical fictional tale - a culmination of the voices and ambiance in books such as:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez;
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières;
The Time in Between by María Dueñas;
Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom;
Picasso's War by Russell Martin;
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Return by Victoria Hislop
The Perfume Garden by Kate Lord Brown

Diction, motivation, actions - it all flows along the prose adding context to bravery and courage, unlocking the strange chain of destiny between them. To these people, hope was cruel, it had no conscious, and words were sometimes better of in their prison of memories. Daniel had the power to keep these voice on paper alive, to allow them to be remembered.

And then there is the backdrop of love in all its despicable, deceiving, destructive or honorable definitions. It meanders trough the labyrinth of the The Cemetery of Forgotten Books as well as the lives of the people who survived to tell their stories to Daniel. It was a constant reminder of what makes us all vulnerable and victorious in life. For Daniel, it was a fast, uncompromising road to adulthood in which no secrets remained hidden. For those who wanted to share their tales, words became a sort of melancholic revenge.

Nurieta Monford: I began to dress like a pious widow or one of those women who seem to confuse sunlight with mortal sin. I went to work with my hair drawn back into a bun and no makeup. Despite my tactics, Sanmartí continued to shower me with lascivious remarks accompanied by his oily, putrid smile. It was a smile full of disdain, typical of self-important jerks who hang like stuffed sausages from the top of all corporate ladders.

While the first snow of winter dropped like tears of light on the Plaza de Cataluña, an old man, trying to catch the snow with his gloves, wished Daniel good luck, his eyes the color of gold, like magic coins at the bottom of a fountain. What else could Daniel do but clung to the blessing and run ...

The thing about words is that it takes us prisoner when rolled out by experienced wordsmiths. This is one of those moments, although I must admit that only the beginning chapters, almost to the middle, and the last third of the book finally captured me beyond imagination. I almost gave up, but the magic in the prose propelled me forward. Relentlessly.

I just realized why not anyone can write a book, but why everyone, like yours truly, can get lost in the melody flowing from the magical alphabetic strings, the symbiotic sounds of voices on paper. Sometimes it is this music that kept me reading, surpassing the moral of the story. The quality of thought and execution in this novel confirmed the addiction of words and books.

Humor and hope are strange bedfellows. It may manifest in the intimations of paradise ... a last dance with Eros ...

Happiness in every which way had a purpose, even in galleries of despair, even softened by ecumenical disguise. Sincere laughter came. In 1966 it all made finally sense to Daniel Sempere. Doom and gloom have a counterbalance. A very good one. All it needed was time. And good readers to follow the light to the last full stop of the tale.

The end.

Read this comprehensive and excellent biography of the author at

Classic Spanish Books

The Widow by Fiona Barton

2017-06-17T10:56:00.003-07:00

This book touched me so deeply that I simply cannot talk about it. Anything I say will destroy the feelings I am left with.

I don't even want to fall back on clichés such as magnificent, wonderful, brilliant, unbelievable.

My emotional reaction to this book astounds me. Gut wrenching, heart breaking.

I urgently need to take a walk ...

Later then.

BLURB

'Me, the grieving widow? Don't make me laugh.'

A voice as startling and unreliable as The Girl On The Train, a cast as compelling as Broadchurch.

Jean Taylor is the wife of a man labelled a monster.

Glen Taylor was accused of heinous crimes, implicated in the disappearance of two-year-old Bella Elliot, snatched from her front garden four years ago. But now he’s dead and Jean Taylor is finally ready to tell her story.

For the reporter who has secured the exclusive interview, this is the scoop of a lifetime. For the detective who has lived a half-life since he failed to get justice for the lost little girl, it is a chance to uncover the truth that has eluded him for so long.

It's time. Jean Taylor is going to tell us what she knows.

My career has taken some surprising twists and turns over the years. I have been a journalist - senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at The Mail on Sunday, where I won Reporter of the Year at the National Press Awards, gave up my job to volunteer in Sri Lanka and since 2008, have trained and worked with exiled and threatened journalists all over the world.

But through it all, a story was cooking in my head.

The worm of my first book infected me long ago when, as a national newspaper journalist covering notorious crimes and trials, I found myself wondering what the wives of those accused really knew - or allowed themselves to know.

It took the liberation of my career change to turn that fascination into a tale of a missing child, narrated by the wife of the man suspected of the crime, the detective leading the hunt, the journalist covering the case and the mother of the victim.

Much to my astonishment and delight, The Widow was published in 36 countries and made the Sunday Times and New York Times Best Seller lists.

It gave me the confidence to write a second book ,The Child, in which I return to another story that had intrigued me as a journalist. It begins with the discovery of a newborn's skeleton on a building site. It only makes a paragraph in an evening newspaper but for three women it's impossible to ignore.

The Child will be published in June 2017 and I am embarking on my next novel. My husband and I are still living the good life in south-west France, where I am writing in bed, early in the morning when the only distraction is our cockerel, Titch, crowing.

SOURCE: fionabartonauthor.com

The Nix by Nathan Hill

2017-06-17T10:27:00.002-07:00

THE NOVEL AS SOCIAL COMMENTARY
The introductory epigraph, rather a longish one, contains the Utterances of a Buddha about blind men who had to touch an elephant and then report their findings to the king. Different parts of the elephant is touched by each man, resulting in different opinions of what the elephant is. This 'utterance' establishes the purpose, content and intent of this novel. It also allows different kind of readers to react differently to the elephant.

This complex autobiographical novel puts the spotlight on society as baggage from the previous century, inherited by generations who are dressed up with nowhere to go. It is written as social satire, or a tragicomedy in a way. It shoots straight into the concepts of true or false; the chaotic society as it is established in the postmodern ideology; a freedom demanded which throws any possibility for a structured society out; a democratic establishment so out of control that nothing can be accomplished - too many processes to hinder any final decision on anything.

It is the postapocolypse of social implosion; a prologue to the survival of the fittest in a post-democratic nix(nothing; denial or refusal; put an end to or cancel): pseudonyms - nada, zilch, zero. It leaves the possibility of a renaissance in question.

The country is falling apart around us. This is plain even to the pay-no-attention-at-all crowd, even to the low-information undecided-voter segment. It’s all crumbling right in front of our eyes. People lose their jobs, their pensions disappear overnight, they keep getting those quarterly statements showing their retirement funds are worth ten percent less for the sixth quarter in a row, and their houses are worth half what they paid for them, and their bosses can’t get a loan to make payroll, and Washington is a circus, and they have homes full of interesting technology and they look at their smartphones and wonder ‘How could a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?’

DOCUMENTARY NOVEL: PLOT
Two events triggered the plot. The 1968 protests in Chicago, and the 2011 protests in New York. The former was attended by a mother, prior to her marriage, and the latter by her son, many years after she disappeared.

The story opens in 2011 when the mother is arrested for throwing rocks/stones/pebbles at a presidential candidate. The size of the 'missiles' is irrelevant. It is the perceptions of the press, politicians and public that turns the events into the truth as they see it (the touching of the elephant).

"The story began as a family drama about an estranged mother and son, but over the years it morphed into a sprawling tale about politics, online gaming, academia, Norwegian mythology, social media, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the 1960s counterculture.

“The Nix” centers on a washed-up writer named Samuel Andresen-Anderson, who, after failing to live up to his early promise, has succumbed to a soul-crushing job as an adjunct professor of literature in a Chicago suburb. To escape the suffocating sense of failure, Samuel spends 40 hours a week playing the role of Dodger the Elven Thief in an online game called World of Elfscape, where he goes on dragon- and orc-slaying quests with his guild.

He’s pulled back into his traumatic past when he learns that his mother, Faye, who abandoned the family when he was 11, faces assault charges for throwing rocks at a politician." (Source:New York Times (Aug. 26, 2016))

The Nisse, derived from the Norwegian Mythology, is established in different aspects of the tale.

A nisse,” he said, and she nodded. She loved the weird names her father gave his ghosts: nisse, nix, gangferd, draug.

The 682-page novel reminds me of American Gods by Neil Gaiman in scope, although many other authors are thrown into the mix, such as John Irving, Charles Dickens, Donna Tartt, Michael Chabon, and Tom Wolfe to describe this debut author's work. The Kirkus Reviews noted “hints of Pynchon”.

The New York Times describes the novel as prickly social satire, which takes aim at academia, politics, publishing and social media.

The novel also reminds me of The Politically Correct Ultimate Storybook: Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Gardner.

A big bowl of reality with a dollop of mythology and fairy-fun added to it. Top it off with a hint of stand-up comedy and a very strong storyline. The book was so autobiographical that the author had to promise his mom that she was not the character Faye in the book.

One of the most striking and emotionally-charged metaphors in the book, for me, was when Sam's mom, Faye, told him to choose nine toys and arrange them in his toy wagon to go for a walk. While they were out strolling on the street, they passed trees in which one lonely maniacal leaf near the top of the tree was standing up, dancing in the wind, flopping around like a fish, while the rest hung quietly in the dead air. (Pathetic fallacy at work here?)

Faye pointed out the leaf and the significance of it. "A ghost", she said." "Someone not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell. He's in between."

..."He's restless, she said. "He wants to move on..."

Sam started crying again. He did not want to be that leaf. Faye turned around and took him home, told him to put his toys away. Faye told Sam that he should have brought all nine toys, and not only eight. He should have paid more attention.

Little did she realize that he counted the wagon as the ninth toy...

That was a few months before she disappeared, leaving a marriage in which a spoon tried to love garbage disposal forever...

COMMENTS
It all depends on which part of the elephant you have touched to interpret this monumental tale. It can be sensational, thrilling, gripping, informative, thought-provoking, witty, funny, sad, or whatever you need from this literary masterpiece. A journalistic reality worked into a mythical mystery. An icon of our times. A good one.

So by the way, who remembers the longest paragraph I have ever encountered in a book in my entire life? Pages and pages! Guinness Book of Records material. In the last section of the book.

Quotes from the book:

Pwnage once told Samuel that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps...

...So instead of looking for answers, he’d begun simply writing her story, thinking that if he could see the world the way she saw it, maybe he’d achieve something greater than mere answers: Maybe he’d achieve understanding, empathy, forgiveness. So he wrote about her childhood, about growing up in Iowa, about going to Chicago for college, about the protest in 1968, about that final month she was with the family before she disappeared, and the more he wrote the more expansive the story became. Samuel wrote about his mother and father and grandfather, he wrote about Bishop and Bethany and the headmaster, he wrote about Alice and the judge and Pwnage—he was trying to understand them, trying to see the things he was too self-absorbed to see the first time through. Even Laura Pottsdam, vicious Laura Pottsdam, Samuel tried to locate a little sympathy for her...

...What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones...

...You don’t once consider how Bethany or Bishop might feel about this violation of their privacy. You are so blinded by your desire to impress and dazzle and awe the people who left you that you say yes. Yes, absolutely...

...This is not something you tell your teacher. This is something you carry on the inside, in a cavity filled with every true thing about you so that there is nothing true left on the outside. The morning your mother disappeared, especially, is stuffed way down deep, your mother asking you what you wanted to be when you grew up...

...You’d be amazed at the facts people are willing to set aside to believe that life is, indeed, great...

...then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst...

...Everyone knew this, so they suffered the headmaster’s long and vivid descriptions of medical procedures and bodily effluence because they thought of it as a kind of investment in their child’s education and future...

......it's way easier to ignore all data that doesn't fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we'll agree to disagree. It's liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It's very hip right now.

Nathan Hill’s literary career almost ended before it started.

Like so many optimistic young M.F.A. graduates, Mr. Hill moved to New York City in his 20s with a hard drive full of short stories, hoping to land an agent and a publisher.

Perhaps predictably, things didn’t go according to plan. His early overtures to literary agents brought rejections. Then one day in the summer of 2004, when he was moving out of a house in Queens where he lived with 11 other guys, his car was broken into. He lost all of his possessions, including his computer and his backup drive. All of his work in progress vanished.

He sulked for a while and played lots of World of Warcraft, an online fantasy game. Eventually, though, he started something new. The story began as a family drama about an estranged mother and son, but over the years it morphed into a sprawling tale about politics, online gaming, academia, Norwegian mythology, social media, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the 1960s counterculture.

Now, 12 years later, that novel, “The Nix,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf...
Source: New York Times

The Egg and I (Betty MacDonald Memoirs #1) by Betty MacDonald

2017-06-17T09:42:00.001-07:00

This is one of the most funniest and fascinating memoirs I have ever read. I want to add some quotes later on. This book is a must-read.

THEN .... LATER ON ...
We had a power cut yesterday and since my iPad was low on battery power as well, I did not want to spend it writing reviews. So I waited until today to add some memorable quotes from the book to my thoughts. There was so much in the book to relate to, living in the mountains myself and having to deal with similar adventures(yes, even many decades after this book was published), that I just had the laughs of my life reading this book.

Her outright honesty, just being herself, was really so refreshing!

Sooooo, some quotes: lots o'em!!!

...I was too fat and I wanted desperately not to eat and be willowy and romantic but there seemed nothing else to do. Bob ate almost nothing and looked furtive like a trapped animal. I guess it is quite a wrench for a bachelor to give up his freedom, particularly when, every time he looks at his wife, he realizes that he is facing a future teeming with large grocery bills...

...The moonshine in a gallon jug was a dark amber color and had a hot explosive smell. We had a drink before dinner that night and it went down with lights flashing like marbles in a pinball game...

... And then winter settled down and I realized that defeat, like morale, is a lot of little things...

...WHEN you make a complete change in your mode of living, as I did, you learn that, along with the strange aspects of the new life which seep in and become part of you, will come others to which you never become accustomed. Some of the things I never got used to were:
The hen.
The gasoline lantern.
The outhouse at night where I had a horrible choice of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling on me or bringing a lantern and attracting moths, mosquitoes, night hawks and bats.
No radio.
No telephone.
Bats hanging upside down in the cellar, flying in the open bedroom windows on summer nights, swooping low over the bed, almost touching my face and making my skin undulate in horror. Dropping boards and chicken lice.
The inconsistency of a Mother Nature who made winter so wetly, coldly, soggily miserable that I wanted to get back under my stone, and spring so warm, so lush and fragrant that I wanted to roll on my back and whinny...

...(Cinnamon roles) were so tender and delicate I had to bring myself up with a jerk to keep from eating a dozen. The coffee was so strong it snarled as it lurched out of the pot and I girded up my loins for the first swallow and was amazed to find that when mixed with plenty of thick cream it was palatable. True it bore only the faintest resemblance to coffee as I made it but still it had a flavor that was good when I got my throat muscles loosened up again...

...Mary MacGregor had fiery red, dyed hair, a large dairy ranch and a taste for liquor. Drunker than an owl, she would climb on to her mowing machine, “Tie me on tight, Bill!” she would yell at her hired man. So Bill would tie her on with clothes lines, baling wire and straps, give her the reins and away she’d go, singing at the top of her voice, cutting her oats in semi-circles and happy as a clam. She plowed, disked, harrowed, planted, cultivated and mowed, tied to the seat of the machine and hilariously drunk. A smashing witticism of the farmers was, “You should take a run down the valley and watch Mary sowin’ her wild oats.”...

...Mary sold cream to the cheese factory. One morning she found a skunk drowned in a ten-gallon can of cream. She lifted the skunk out by the tail and with her other hand she carefully squeezed the cream from his fur. “Just between us skunks, cream is cream,” she said as she threw the carcass into the barnyard. She sold the cream and vowed she’d never tell a soul but Bill the hired man told everyone, especially people he saw coming out of the cheese factory with a five-pound round of cheese...

The good layers looked motherly, their combs were full and bright red, their eyes large, beaks broad and short, and their bodies were well rounded, broad-hipped and built close to the ground. They were also the diligent scratchers and eaters and their voices seemed a little lower with overtones of lullaby. The non-producers, the childless parasites, were just as typical. Their combs were small and pale, eyes small, beaks sharp and pointed, legs long, hips narrow, and they spent all of their time gossiping, starting fights, and going into screaming hysterics over nothing. The non-producers also seemed subject to many forms of female trouble—enlarged liver, wire worms, and blowouts (prolapse of the oviduct). What a bitter thing for them that, unlike their human counterparts, their only operation was one performed with an axe on the neck...

... I got out iodine, bandages, sleeping tablets and my self-control, because, though Bob was being brave and careless in front of Elwin, alone with me, he would act as if the bear had laid open both his lungs and his large intestine, and would spend many happy hours looking for the first signs of blood poisoning. It occurred to me then, that no mention had been made of our dog’s part in the fray...

I think this book will be one of my all time favorites. I've learnt early in my own expeditions into the wild that a healthy sense of humor was the only thing that will keep me sane and happy. Instead of being mad, frustrated, depressed, I wrote down my experiences for friends and family in long letters that had everyone hollering with laughter. They phoned me with tears of merriment in their voices. It was my way of healing and balancing out life. So in every sense of the word, I identified with Beth and knew what she was trying to accomplish. I felt like her.

The first book written by Betty MacDonald, The Egg and I , rocketed to the top of the national bestseller list in 1945. Translations followed in more than 30 languages, along with a series of popular movies. In the wake of World War II, the hilarious accounts of MacDonald's adventures as a backwoods farmer's wife in Chimacum Valley were a breath of fresh air for readers around the world. On the negative side, her book spawned a perception of Washington as a land of eccentric country bumpkins like Ma and Pa Kettle.

Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard, called Betsy in childhood and later known world-wide as Betty MacDonald, was born in Boulder, Colorado, to Darsie and Elsie/Sydney Bard on March 26, 1908. Her father, a mining engineer, moved the family frequently before settling in Seattle. Betty attended the St. Nicholas School on Capitol Hill, then Lincoln High School. In 1924 she graduated from Roosevelt High School.

On July 9, 1927, Betty Bard married Robert E. Heskett and moved with him to the farm in the tiny community of Center in the Chimacum Valley near Port Townsend that lacked both plumbing and electricity. Betty later regaled family and friends with stories of her struggles during this time, eventually transforming them into the book that would make her famous.

After four years, Betty left Robert Hesket, taking their two daughters, Anne and Joan, with her. She returned to the family home in Seattle and worked at various jobs, keeping her sense of humor and her journal even when tuberculosis forced her to spend a year at Firland Sanatorium in what is now the city of Shoreline.

On April 29, 1942, she married Donald C. MacDonald (1910-1975) and moved with him and her daughters to a beach home on Vashon Island. Built as a summer home, it was cold and damp and in need of improvements. Anne and Joan enrolled in school while Don and Betty commuted to Seattle for work every day. Betty later described her daily scramble from home to the ferry dock in [book:Onions In The Stew|:

"It was always seven o'clock and my ferry left at seven-twenty and I should have left at six-fifty and now I would have to run the last quarter of a mile. I wore loafers and woolen socks over my silk stockings, carried my office shoes along with my lunch, purse, current book and grocery list in a large green felt bag. The county trail connecting our beach with the rest of the world begins at a cluster of mailboxes down by the dock, meanders along the steep southwest face of the island about fifty feet above the shore, and ends at our house ... if it was dark when I left the house (and it usually was) I ... ran the rest of the way to the ferry ... This boisterous early morning activity also started my blood circulating, churning, really, and by the time I got to the office I was not only bileless, I was boiling hot" (p. 57).

Their fortune changed with a call from MacDonald's sister, Mary Bard Jensen (1904-1970). At a cocktail party, Mary ran into a friend who was a publishing company scout and told him that Betty was writing a book (which she was not). Betty whipped up the proposal for The Egg and I to save her sister embarrassment. The scout requested a full manuscript, which was rejected by one publishing house. With the assistance of the New York literary agency Brandt & Brandt, the book was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and then published by J.B. Lippincott. She dedicated the book "To my sister Mary, who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to."

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris

2017-06-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

Cass was on the wrong road during a terrible storm. She saw a woman in a car in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night. She did not stop long enough. She was too scared. It was raining so hard she could not understand why the woman did not ask her for help. Neither of them left their cars. The storm was rolling over them, preventing them to make contact, get out. When she arrived home she could not remember the mundane little things and needed her husband to remind her of appointments, events, invitation, setting the alarm clock. What was wrong with her? Why was it so difficult to pull herself together? And why could she not trust herself?

The answers came unexpectedly and too late.

I knew since the very beginning what was going on, but did not know how the drama would play itself out. Curiosity let me into almost the same predicament as the protagonist. Hers was serious. Cass was riddled with confusion and guilt. So was I, but for very different reasons. While she struggled to escape her situation, I had no intentions whatsoever to leave this psychological thriller and surface before the very end.

What a sad ending it was! I just wanted to cry for them all, while being relieved that it was over. What if she took a different route? What if ...

Water under the bridge, yes. For Cass the solution brought new possibilities and a new future. So it was a good ending. But was it really? After all that she went through Cass deserved a new tomorrow. An innocent, new born day...

This afternoon it was raining outside. Wonderful rain after three years of devastating drought. The four cats and two dogs were on the bed with me, listening to the storm outside. I was under a light blanket, reading as though my life depended on it. It was the perfect book for the perfect day.

I actually smiled when I finished this cozy book. Sadly I cannot tell you why ... :-))
I can tell you this, though, I will absolutely read this author again.

Excellent!

B A Paris grew up in England but has spent most of her adult life in France. She has worked both in finance and as a teacher and has five daughters. Behind Closed Doors is her first novel.

My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

2017-06-17T06:14:00.002-07:00

Just like the alphabet, bitch, I come before U.

Yep, Demeter Farlowe(the goddess of the harvest, but also Mrs. Wilton in her other life), a proper Godzilla II, heads a team of pretty, but nasty nails on parade in the advertising world; a goopy pudding of gals, fluffed up by high heels, the secret Wednesday Bacchus devotion, and Ya Ya-sisterhood to die for.

Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game, can be regarded as the general mantra for the miniskirt brigade coming with the high-prized hype and pretentiousness. Welcome to Cooper Clemmow branding company.

When something goes wrong in your life, just yell 'plot twist' and move on. Katie Brenner, a wanne-be Londoner is forced back to the farm, out in the British sticks, when her low-paid, struggling, position as a research associate in the prestigious advertising company becomes redundant. What feels like the end of her London-ness(which gives her a spring in her step, it's so intangible, so buzzy), is actually the beginning of a new challenge, when she helps her father and stepmother to put glamorous into glamping on their farm, with proper wi-fi, 400-count must-haves on the yurt beds, and a new yoga discovery, called Vedari, for the upper- and middleclasses who's stomach sensitivity grows with their income.

Out with the serum in the curls, the unfamiliar straight, tortured hair, the most important steps at a front door, away from the biscuit people, the naked-man coat stand, the amazing giant plastic flowers, and in with a little bit of amorous huffing and puffing in the cow dung on her way to find a considerate man, number one, but, number two and three, a man of quality who values her. Fun becomes such a last-year's kind of vintage rhetoric in the end, oh so like Alex Astalis, for instance. But wait, that's only in the hunt for the perfect partner. On the farm fun is the buzz word for chia seed, organic ginger, and special seaweed-groupies with a Gwyneth Paltrow-lifestyle craze.

It's the brochure for Ansters Farm that got the moss on the rolling stones to scatter in totally new directions for the Somerset girl.

This is a satire in the rom com literary genre with a touch of Hollywood fluff in the ending. However, it comes with a little more substance, meat to the bones, and I loved that. I'm somewhat subjective and biased too in my rating. My daughter took a sabbatical from her 18-hour days in the advertising world to tour the world. She is the Katie Brenner in our own story.

Cozy and quaint. A cutesy kind of fun read. Really enjoyable and good. A few good laughs came with the experience. Yes, and you will find me in Katie's helicopter dad, but without his crazy schemes. :-))

The Chilbury Ladies' Choir by Jennifer Ryan

2017-06-17T04:44:00.000-07:00

First funeral of the war, and our little village choir simply couldn’t sing in tune. “Holy, holy, holy” limped out as if we were a crump of warbling sparrows. But it wasn’t because of the war, or the young scoundrel Edmund Winthrop torpedoed in his submarine, or even the Vicar’s abysmal conducting. No, it was because this was the final performance of the Chilbury Choir. Our swan song.

...It was the funeral of Edmund Winthrop, the Brigadier’s despicable son who was blown up in a submarine last week. Only twenty he was—one minute a repulsive reptile, the next a feast for the fishes.

...Beside her, that foreign evacuee girl looked petrified, like she’d seen death before and a lot more besides.

And so begins a novel, with Miss Edwina Paltry's letter to her sister (quite a fitting surname given the different meanings: small, meagre, trifling, insignificant, negligible, inadequate, insufficient, scant, scanty, derisory, pitiful, pitiable, pathetic, miserable, sorry, wretched, puny, trivial, niggardly, beggarly, mean, ungenerous, inappreciable, mere).

The fictional tale and characters are based on the real diaries and journals which were written during the first year of WWII in Britain for an organization called Mass Observation. They published a newsletter in which the hearts, minds and souls of the ordinary citizens were shared.

The epistolary character of the novel is the result of the author's commemoration of these writers, and the stories her grandmother shared about the war. Four main narrators share through their diaries and letters the funny, racy, touching or terrifying events in Chilbury during 1940, leaving the reader in the midst of a richly textured novel populated by the citizens of the fictional village of Chilbury.

The main narrators are:
Miss Edwina Paltry - in letters to her sister:

Brace yourself, Clara, for we are about to be rich! I’ve been offered the most unscrupulous deal you’ll ever believe! I knew this ruddy war would turn up some gems—whoever would have thought that midwifery could be so lucrative! But I couldn’t have imagined such a grubby nugget of a deal coming from snooty Brigadier Winthrop, the upper-class tyrant who thinks he owns this prissy little village. I know you’ll say it’s immoral, even by my standards, but I need to get away from being a cooped-up, put-down midwife. I need to get back to the old house where I can live my own life and be free.

Mark these words: her little scheme would have her flustered like a bluebottle in a jam jar in the end.

Kitty Winthrop - in her diary - thirteen years old: she saw people as beams of a rainbow, and her eighteen-year-old sister, Venitia, as simply a vile beast.

I like to see people as colors, a kind of aura or halo surrounding them, shading their outsides with the various flavors of their insides.
Me—purple, as brilliant and dark as the sky on a thundery night
Mama—a very pale pink, like a baby mouse
Daddy—soot black (Edmund was also black, but black like a starless sky)
Mrs. Tilling—light green, like a shoot trying to come up through the snow
Mrs. B.—navy blue (correct and traditional)
Henry is a deep azure blue, to match his eyes.

Silvie - in her diary - the much younger Jewish evacuee from Czechoslovakia with her terrible secret.

Venitia Winthrop - in her letters to the vicar's daughter, Angela Quail.

Mrs. Tilling - in her journal - a nurse and the local billeting agent.

Two male voices appeared in their own letters as well.

Flt. Lt. Henry Brampton-Boyd - the most sought-after bachelor in the village. He had many a nasty nail out on dainty little ladies' fingers and a lot to answer for. Even Elsie the parlour maid got her head around something.

Colonel Mallard - in his letters to his sister Mrs. Maud Green. He arrived as curmudgeon old Mr. Bear, and left as snuggly Mr. Toodles, well .... sort of. Life would drastically change for him in Chilbury, that's for sure.

Miss Primrose Trent from London moved into Chilbury to become the Professor of Music at the Lichtfield University. She revived the choir, now deprived of all the men who went off to war. The Vicar Quail was convinced that all the oxygen and raison d'etre left town with the men. The women would prove him wrong. The choir gave women their voices. The voices they thought they never had. And therein lies the charm of this story of courage, endurance, resilience and hope.

The peripheral characters brought much more color to Kitty's rainbow. They read like the Chilbury telephone directory, but what a wonderful, unbelievable, atmospheric tale they all brought alive.

I'm not going into the plot or storyline. It is for the readers to discover and enjoy through the picturesque prose.

GREAT READ!!! Just absolutely BEAUTIFUL!

RECOMMENDED

Hello, and thank you for being interested in my author page. I'm the author of The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, which came out in February, 2017. It is my very first novel. Before becoming a writer, I was a nonfiction book editor, editing books about politics and economics, travel and health, and biography and memoir. I worked in London before moving to the Washington, DC, area ten years ago with my husband and two children.

I was born in a village in Kent, England, not too far away from the fictional village of Chilbury. The novel is based on the stories of my grandmother who was twenty when the Second World War began, mostly hilarious tales about bumping into people in the blackout, singing in the air raid shelters, and the freedoms women had during the war years--the excitement and romance. She also belonged to a choir, and her choir stories dramatized the camaraderie and support they all took away; the knowledge that they weren't in this alone. The Chilbury Ladies' Choir uses my dear grandmother's stories as its backdrop.

If you have read The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, thank you. I very much hope that you liked it. And if you have yet to read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I loved writing it. Please visit my website: www.jenniferryanbooks.com

Into The Water by Paula Hawkins

2017-06-17T04:11:00.000-07:00

Paula Hawkins, a freelance journalist from London, firmly proved herself as a versatile writer by publishing romantic comedies under her pen name Amy Silver, as well as huge successful thrillers under her own name. Girl On The Train was a phenomenal bestseller, which she followed up with this second thriller Into The Water.

This book reminds me a lot about The Casual Vacancy by J.K.Rowling(a magnificent read in itself). Both books have the community of a small town in common, who address the impact and involvement of all the inhabitants in solving a mysterious death, with various narrators relating the events to authorities and readers.

From the book's epigraph:

"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. Hallucinations ~ Oliver Sacks"

Breckford, a small town in the British Isles must come to terms with the death of a single mother. A multi-character tale is told in which the truth and the memories populating it, become a conundrum of regrets, secrets, lost opportunities and redemption. Everyone feels guilty, nobody is willing to take the blame.

Erin: "It's a fucking weird place, Beckford. It's beautiful, quite breathtaking in parts, but it's strange. It feels like a place apart, disconnected from everything that surrounds it. Of course, it is miles from anywhere - you have to drive hours to get anywhere civilized. That's if you consider Newcastle civilized, which I'm not sure I do.

Beckford is a strange place, full of odd people, with a downright bizarre history. And all through the middle of it there's this river, and that's the weirdest thing of all - it seems like whichever way you turn, in whatever direction you go, somehow you always end up back at the river.

Those who stayed behind after the latest death of Nel Abbott had to deal with the mysterious attraction to the Drowning Pool in the river for women committing suicide. It was the legends surrounding these mysterious deaths that attracted Danielle(Nel) Abbott to the pool for the book she was writing about these women and their demises.

After her own death, she leaves the unfinished manuscript, as well as a fifteen-year-old daughter behind, who has no father listed on her birth certificate.

Nickie: "Some of them went into the river willingly and some didn't, and if you asked Nickie - not that anyone would, because no one ever did - Nel Abbott went in fighting. But no one was going to ask her and no one was going to listen to her, so there really wasn't any point in her saying anything. Especially not to the police..."

From Nel's manuscript:

The Drowning Pool', Danielle Abbott (unpublished):
I decided, while in the process of trying to understand myself and my family and the stories we tell each other, that I would try to make sense of all the Beckford stories, that I would write down all the last moments, as I imagined them, in the lives of the women who went to the Beckford Drowning Pool.

Its name carries weight; and yet, what is it? A bend in the river, that’s all. A meander. You’ll find it if you follow the river in all its twists and turns, swelling and flooding, giving life and taking it, too. The river is by turns cold and clean, stagnant and polluted; it snakes through forest and cuts like steel through the soft Cheviot Hills, and then, just north of Beckford, it slows. It rests, just for a while, at the Drowning Pool."

As atmospheric as you can wish for; picturesque as you can get, and intriguing as you cannot imagine.

Although the numerous narrators created constant confusion, the storyline was never broken, and the suspense kept flowing strongly along the river of words pulling this gripping saga together.

This is an excellent crime thriller. One of those sleep-snatchers.

Another book in the same genre, worth reading is
Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg.

RECOMMENDED!!!

Paula Hawkins is a British author, best known for her best-selling psychological thriller novel The Girl on the Train, which deals with themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse. Wikipedia

Born: 26 August 1972 (age 44), Harare, Zimbabwe

Education: Keble College, Oxford

Movies: The Girl on the Train

Awards: Goodreads Choice Awards Best Mystery & Thriller, Glamour Award for Writer

Everything But The Truth by Gillian McAllister

2017-06-17T03:51:00.001-07:00

REVIEW

In the Highlands of Scotland two people fell in love like two peas in a pod. Only to discover that they're going to have a baby and don't really know anything about each other, apart from knowing that they were meant to grow old together.

In the picturesque little village, Oban, an old mansions and its inhabitants had a secret to protect, and in the city of Newcastle the young woman had her reasons for leaving her dream world of being a dedicated doctor. Relationships within Rachel's own family handicapped her efforts to move on and just be happy, trust people, fall in love with love and commitments in itself and feel comfortable with the life she chose to share with Jack, the freelance journalist.

The harder Jack tried to escape his history, the more obsessively Rachel delve into his past. She just could not stop herself, yet could not scrape enough courage together to tell him her own secret.

This atmospheric psychological thriller centers around forgiveness. In order to forgive others, one has to forgive oneself first and before that can actually happen, many mistakes are made and bad memories created. Lives can get ruined and futures can become meaningless, null and void, in the process.

Richly textured and complex in character, the secrets in the book are slowly revealed. This beautifully written book leaves the reader with thought-provoking questions for which there are no easy answers. I did not like Rachel for most of the book, but in the end it was easy to understand her, and most IMPORTANTLY ... forgive her for rubbing me the wrong way.

The ending was just perfect. I closed the book with an 'awwwwwww' that left me feeling optimistic and excited about life.

Thus, a wonderful entertaining, suspenseful, compelling read; tense and intriguing, without ripping my guts out.

An absolute YES! YES! YES!

BLURB

It all started with the email.

It came through to her boyfriend's iPad in the middle of the night. Rachel didn't even mean to look. She loves Jack, and she's pregnant with their child. She trusts him. But now she's seen it, she can't undo that moment, or the chain of events it has set in motion.

Why has Jack been lying about his past? Just what exactly is he hiding? And doesn't Rachel have a right to know the truth at any cost?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gillian McAllister graduated with an English degree in 2006 and is now a lawyer with a large law firm.

Her blog has been featured in various publications including Company magazine. You can find it at www.gillianmcallister.com

She lives in Birmingham with her boyfriend and cat.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

2017-06-17T03:33:00.000-07:00

REVIEW
I'm not reviewing the book, neither writing a blurb for it. I'm expressing my experience of this deeply humane saga.

I've read all Frederik Backman's book and was looking forward to this latest offering. As usual it was packed with emotions, strong characters and passion.

This time around it was a small town with a passion for ice hockey and a community who desperately needed to win the season in the interest of the future.

Beartown did not have tourism, high-tech or mine industries; it only had darkness, cold and unemployment. It was a town where wild animals barely endure but where the people were tough enough to overcome the challenges. The high school's ice hockey team was their only claim to possible fame and future fortunes. Nobody lived in that town, everybody just survived it. The rules by which the community was built determined that all inhabitants must play by the rules, work hard, take the knocks, don't complain, keep your mouth shut. And so it was for generations.

It was the end of the season with the semi-finals looming. Emotions ran high, winning was everything, the social dynamics sped out of control and the ice hockey club's motto, "Culture, Values, Community", shuddered against the walls of the club offices and ice rink.

The players understood their trainers. If you apply enough pressure to coal, it becomes diamonds. The club had an unpleasant culture of silence, the sort of thing you find among soldiers and criminals.

... Silence always goes hand in hand with shame.

But then: the unthinkable happened and the silence was broken, defied, challenged, by an event that rocked the town. A whole community had to test and re-evaluate their own mores and values as well as the noble intentions they had for their children. Nobody could escape the test of loyalty...

Some quotes from the book:

Water expands when it freezes; you need to know that if you build a house in Beartown. In the summer the rain seeps into the cracks in the bricks, then when the temperature slips below zero the moisture freezes to ice, and the bricks break. She will remember that that’s how it felt to grow up as the little sister of a dead big brother. A childhood that was one long, desperate attempt not to be liquid, not to seek out the cracks in your parents.

Water: If you let it make its way too far in, it can freeze into ice and break your heart.

There are few words that are harder to explain than “loyalty.” It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.

“Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.” Her mom loves a man who loves a place that loves a game. This is a hockey town, and there are plenty of things you can say about those, but at least they’re predictable. You know what to expect if you live here. Day after day after day.

Beartown by Backman differs hugely from his previous books in that it moved away from the Swedish idiom and adapted a North American 'feel'. The Swedish authenticity is absent. I can only assume that the prose was adapted, stream-lined, for a much bigger American audience, with a touch of popular drama, action and excitement brought in to cater for this particular audience. The editors changed.

However, Beartown is an excellent story written by a skillful author. The town is still Swedish. The setting still the dark wonderland of the Swedish winter. A really thought-provoking, heart-stopping tale.

A Man Called Ove was, and still is, by far my favorite Backman book. In fact, it is still one of my all-time favorite reads. It was written for a different audience with different characters to serve the tale and presented an honesty which made it a superb and highly popular read.

The 'earthliness' and charm in A Man Called Ove, and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry and Britt-Marie Was Here have gone. The dry and subtle humor left with it. In its place a political correctness moved in with a politeness that will be more acceptable and soothing to a different audience. The previous books were character driven. This book is action-driven. The Beartown characters were interesting, strong, passionate about life, family, community and self interests. They were honest, dishonest and multi-faceted. Some were heartwarming and other heartbreaking. It ripped my heart out.

Be that as it may, I loved Beartown too. Not in love with it. Just loved it. However, it still gets another well-deserved five-star rating. Thankfully Frederik Backman was still present.

A fantastic read. RECOMMENDED for sure!

~O~

BLURB
New York Times bestseller • The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove returns with a dazzling, profound novel about a small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true.

“You’ll love this engrossing novel.” —People

“Backman is a masterful writer, his characters familiar yet distinct, flawed yet heroic....There are scenes that bring tears, scenes of gut-wrenching despair, and moments of sly humor....A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit.” —Kirkus Reviews

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, as well as a novella, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer. His books are published in more than thirty-five countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Beartown is his latest novel.

Oh, Pioneers! by Villa Cather

2017-06-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

REVIEW:

Once again, a second time, I was at the mercy of Willa Cather's writing, and closed this book with a feeling of accomplishment: as a reader as well as a human being.

In my world, more than a century after this novel was written, we still battle nature on a daily basis and we are aware that nature will return the moment we leave this little piece of earth behind forever. With seed, roots and rain, the stories of ages of human history will be covered in an instant, wiped away as though we never walked these paths a few million times through the slow passing of time.

Willa Cather gloriously painted the lives of pioneers in the unforgiving virginal wilderness at the turn of the 20th century, somewhere between 1883 and 1890, by describing the toughness and resilience of a group of immigrants in surviving the harshness of life on the prairies of Nebraska. The Bergsons children and their neighbors established a strong community through stubborn pride and dreams. It was their dreams, after all, that kept hope alive and celebrated the good times when it finally arrived. However, tragic love, diverse opinions, and hard manual labor drove those who preferred to stay behind, when the less experienced farmers were forced to leave.

Alexandra Bergson instinctively took the road less traveled, the one on which love took a second place, and meticulous learning challenged old ideas, and the less brave combatants against nature preferred to leave. She compassionately took care of neighbors, family and friends, by making choices that left herself devoid of love and allowed loneliness to become her a life companion. The ones who benefited the most appreciated her the least, but her promise, as well as understanding of her father's insight into the land and its possibilities, made her stick to her dreams and decisions.

The most important theme in the novel starts out in the beginning of the book, in the little town Hanover, Nebraska, in the bitterly cold winter, when Alexandra's little brother Emil's little kitten got chased up a telephone pole by stray dogs. He is waiting for her at the store while she is at the doctor's office. Carl Linstrum, a neighbor, arrives to rescue the little kitten on Alexandra's request for help. In the store where they try to warm up again, they meet the exotic Bohemian little girl Marie Tovesky who, with her sunny disposition, brown curly hair like a brunette doll's, her coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow -brown eyes, with their golden glints like the Colorado mineral called tiger-eye, attracts men like flies even as a toddler.

The plot centers around the strong bonds of friendships, which pushes love aside for most of the book, yet cannot manage to deny this strong attraction between humans in the best and worst of ways. Two love stories, with two different endings, snake through the tale. Two relationships are tested by different rules. Perseverance nestles itself in different situations leaving the people involved exhausted or dead.

This book is so rich in emotional ironies, that I sat back afterwards and wondered why it was banned numerous times by the American Library Society. The kaleidoscope of human activities, driven by strong emotional intensity portrayed people in all their splendor. What part of this masterful text of human nature in all its intricate ways insulted some readers enough to have it banned?

“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.”

Since love does not form the center of the plot, although many readers probably wanted it to do so, it does play out in the hearts of lonely, often desperate people. It becomes a secondary, underlying force in the book.

The major focus, in my humble opinion, is the relationship between the different role players and their land.

Alexandra: "The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while."

Love becomes the third member of the marriage between humans and nature, resulting in an overcrowding of the relationship. Tears of joy and sorrow follows, as can be expected.

This was a magnificent read. The prose lends itself to numerous memorial quotes. Willa Cather knew how to sell this part of the Divide to her readers with her poetic descriptions of the land and the people who conquered it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

BOOK BLURBO Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.

At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. Wikipedia

Born: 7 December 1873, Gore, Virginia, United States

Died: 24 April 1947, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

Education: University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction

Movies: My Antonia, A Lost Lady, O Pioneers!, Masterpiece Theatre: The Song of the Lark

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards

2015-02-26T23:03:00.000-08:00

BOOK BLURB
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.

G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller's art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.

Cover art of this edition by R.B. Kitaj, from painting titled "Blake's God", 2006.

________________________________________________

BOOK REVIEW

This is a one-in-a-billion best-ever reads.

Sitting here trying to capture my thoughts and feelings is a daunting exercise. All I want to do right now is bawl my eyes out, really! And let me make a confession right now: I am deeply, utterly and hopelessly in love with Ebenezer Le Page!

Ebenezer Le Page is a fictional, 80-year-old gentleman who decided to write down his memories of his life on Guernsay Island.

P. 112: "Tonight the sea is pounding away on the rocks of La Petite Grève and the spray is dashing against my windows and the wind is whistling round the chimney and the fire burning blue in the grate. I am in the warm, and as old Jim would say, as snug as a bug in a rug. I could be out visiting this person or that, if I wanted to. They all make a fuss of me when I arrive, and shoo the cat off the armchair for me to sit in; but they are not really interested in anything I have to say. It is not that I want to say much; but I like to sit in a corner and listen to people talking, and put in my spoke now and then. Nowadays people don't talk among themselves around the fire like they used to. As soon as I've sat down and been made comfortable, it's 'Sh! it's Maugret!' or 'It's Eamon Andrews!' and I have to sit in the half-dark and look at the horrible T.V.; and you can't put your spoke in against the T.V.

That is how it is I come to be writing this book. I got to say what I think to somebody: if only to myself. I don't expect anybody will ever read what I have written; but at the back of my mind I always have the hope perhaps some day somebody will."

What seems to be a memoir is in fact a novel wherein several characters have their turns to be spotlighted and a consistent story line is subtly woven through his memories. It is indeed a fictional novel in memoir-form. Amazing, really. The author is not well-known either. It probably could have been a memoir in novel-form, for all one knows! What a good idea, after all ! The period between 1890 to 1970 is covered in the story. It is certainly the period when a world as it was known was totally revolutionized on many levels. Ebenezer Le Page took the time to share his own experiences of the old and new in his memoir.

Ebenezer Le Page was born on Guernsey Island. He grew up and old there. He never left it. Only once did he venture off to Jersey island for a football game between the two islands. But that was it. Vividly and detailed he wrote down his memories of the people and events. His subtle wit snaked though Chapel and Church services, conflict between family members, English and French influences, romantic canoodeling of friends and foes. He mourned the death of his friends in the two big wars of Europe. He dutifully, and lovingly, although not obviously, dotted down his words filling up three thick volumes. Oh how well he remembered the intrigue of everyday life on the island between France and England; how independent they demanded to be from both countries; how mixed up their cultures and histories. He remembered it all. He did not only share the human stories, he shared the local patois they used as a language as well.

He questioned everything and never stopped doing so, not even when he neared the final pages of his story.

P. 55: He went to St Sampson's Chapel regular, but sometimes I thought he didn't believe a word of it. He said Horace said it was all made up. That was the first I heard of Horace having any idea in head except girls and his belly and swank. Horace didn't believe Jesus was conceived of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. He said there are plenty of virgins on Guernsey who conceive, but it is not by the Holy Ghost."

Another church service: "P. 59: It was well back in a field by a query before you come to Richmond Corner: there are houses there now. I had seen it by day. It was only a tin hut and there was a board outside which said SEAMAN'S BETHEL . BRIGHT GOSPEL SERVICES. ALL WELCOME. They had already started when we got in and was standing up singing 'Eternal Father, strong and save'. The place was packed and we had to stand at the back. I had never seen such a congregation. It was all men. They was of every race and colour and nation, and young and old, and bald and curly and straight; and had come every one of the ships in St Sampson's Harbour. .. The only light was a paraffin lamp hanging from the rafters; and, on a low platform at the other end, my great-aunt was conducting the service.

She was a finely built woman, but looked as if she hadn't washed for years, and was wearing a skin-tight black robe that was green with age. She had a crumpled old black hat on her head with what had once been an ostrich feather on it, but was now only a spike sticking up. She was leading the singing in a voice that shook the corrugated iron roof and rose above the voices of the seamen, who was singing like the roaring of the sea. My great-uncle in a reefer-jacket, and looking like an old sea-captain with his white beard flying, was putting his whole heart and soul into the wheezy old harmonium and bringing out the rage of the storm and the whistling of the wind in the shrouds, until I thought every minute the old harmonium was going to fall to pieces on the floor."

He shared his secret loves and affections for various people in his life. But most of all, he wrote down his love story, although it took him a lifetime to finally admit the word to himself as well as to the greatest love of his life.

"P.63: " I can see her yet as she was that Sunday evening with her small square chin and straight nose and her hair done up for show. She had lovely hair. It wasn't red and it wasn't gold, but in between; and she didn't have a flaw in her skin. It was smooth and rather pale, but it could flush really like a rose; and she had the mouth of an angel when she was pleased, and the mouth of the she-devil when she was vexed. She was taller than the others and they wasn't so much walking along as dancing, and their little feet was coming out like mice from under their skirts...

They knew they was being watched by us fellows on the galey wall. Ada Domaille nodded and my Cousin Muriel smiled; but the Roussel girls was shy and made out they didn't see us. Liza, as she would, looked us over one by one from head to foot, as if we was fish on a slab in the fish-market she didn't want to buy. I thought, you wait, my bitch! I'll show you yet I'm not a fish! 'Who'se that one in the middle?' I said. The fellow didn't know. 'She's a hot bit of stuff,' I said."

He is gracious. He is honest. He is in pain. He is cranky. He is sometimes happy. Happiness was not his primary forté in life. He simply did not believe it was possible to be happy. Women were trouble, except for his mother, his sister and another one he so dearly wanted to forget. There was little reason for him to grab onto optimism when two world wars, including the German Occupation dictated the outcome of the islanders' lives. And soon afterwards it was the promiscuous, decadent vulgarity of the Sixties and Seventies, according to him. He adjusted slowly or not at all. Women in trousers were not welcome in his house. Tourism was destroying his beloved island. Young people could not remember the hell and damnation of the wars and did not care to know. Nobody wanted to look back.

As an old man, he had an urgent need to draw up a will. But he never got married and had no immediate heirs. He started to look for possible candidates, visiting old- and new acquaintances, and discovered a secret that changed his life. It changed mine completely. I never saw it coming!

This book will forever fascinate me. The skilled way in which a mystery was built into the slow-moving narrative will never be forgotten. What initially looked like memories written down haphazardly was in fact a master storyteller at work. It is only in the last pages that the magic exposed itself and the magnitude thereof became evident. I was actually speechless when the plot finally concluded.

Of course I will reread it. Do yourself a favor and read this book. Make time for it. Don't try to rush it. Be patient. You will be thoroughly rewarded. I was blown away! But of course, I read it emotionally and allowed myself the time to fall in love word for word for word. I wish it never ended.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

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BOOK INFORMATION
Genres: Fiction, Guernsey Island, love story, diary, novel, WWI, WWII,
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Number of pages: 427
Edition language: English
ASIN: B006XWYE10
ISBN: 1590172337 (ISBN13: 9781590172339)

Kortetjies en 'n lange deur P G Du Plessis

2015-02-26T22:26:00.000-08:00

BOEK INLIGTING
Aantal bladsye: 284
Formate: Kindle, Sagteband
ISBN: 139780624048107
ASIN: B00BW76FTK
Tekstaal: Afrikaans
Boekverkopers: Amazon | Loot |
Graffitiboeke | Kalahari |

___________________________________________

RESENSIE

Hierdie boek kan nie sonder aanhalings geresenseer word nie. P.G. Du Plessis lees 'n mens met hoofletters in gedagte.

Vir my mening oor die boek gaan ek my ook nie in 'n BMW verbeel, Times en Newsweek lees, soos Silvia op Sondamiddag nie. Daar is ook geen sisrok-fase nie, en geen gemik na folk-kitaar, of stukkies papier wat akademiese status en gepaardgaande verhewendheid beloof nie. En hierdie Griet gaan ook nie 'n oulike weduwee wees nie.

Begroot maar ruim vir 'n uit-die-boks-uit benadering. Want erens in die Afrikaner psige skuil daar nog die Griete sonder geite: ongesofistikeerd, vrydenkend, ongeïntimideerd deur titel of tone van belangrikheid. Die briekdraaiers van die ossewa met die V8 enjin, bult op en afdraende af. Somtyds waag hulle om resensies te skryf. Vir boeke soos hierdie. Uit die hart uit.

Kortetjie en 'n Lange is die gedagtemalery van 'n man wat deurleef en deurloop is. 'n Tikkie sout gemeng met 'n versigtige gedagte van suiker, soos wat van 'n tipiese joernalis verwag kan word wat die wereld en sy mense oorleef het. Voeg 'n spatsel fyn elitisme by om die vertrekpunt te bevestig, en die boek kry lyf.

Die pleister op die stories is, tipies, P. G. Du Plessis, geriffel met anekdote en 'n diep, ironiese deurdrenkende sielslagie van eerlike grinnike en guitighede. Maar dit penetreer dieper as wat die oog kan sien. Soos in al sy boeke is sardoniese insig die muse.

" As jy jou mure "face" soos Booi 'n muur "face", dan moet jy groterige klippe partykeer, voorlopig en hoog, half wankelrig staanmaak.

Die een val toe op Gert. So 'n twee meter, met ongeveer vyftien kilo's liefde vir die aarde. Hy Newton Gert op die knie." Uit Oor Sy Knyp En Sy Knietjies

Anderkant Grand-Pa, in die modus van PG, vereer 'n ryk lewe, vol goeie onthoudings:

" ...dit word alweer Oktober. Want ons sit op die stoep en ons kyk hoe September die bome aan't verwe is vir Oktober. Ek het 'n ding oor Oktober, veral die eerste. Ek is vatbaar vir die ding, want dan word al die ou bome jonk, die piet-my-vrou roep jou dat die verlang na vergane Oktobers in jou keel kom bondel tot jy wurg van Oktobersmart."

As daar een beginsel in skrywery is wat hom leen tot meesterskap is dit die 'show don't tell'-kuns.

Uit Een Been" :"Die outjie wat die trekkers hier by ons probeer regmaak, en enige meganiese ding meer bekonkel as besalf, sê nou die oggend 'n waar ding:

Al wat jy van 'n man kan verstaan, sê hy, is, is sy ratte, maar sy electronics is so onmoontlik te verstane soos 'n Boeing.

'n Boeing moet vir dié man baie onverstaanbaar wees, want enige ratkas met meer as drie versnellings vorentoe, is bo sy verstand, en aan die eletronics van my bakkie laat ek hom nie vat nie ná Faan se ongeluk nie. Dié se ligte-stelsel het die mannetjie so verkeerd gekoppel dat die arme Faan een nag nie sy intensie aan die skaaplorrie agter hom kon verduidelik nie. Hy is toe met die skaaplorrie agter op die bakkie die sloot in.

Ná die ongeluk het Faan daardie swaar bul van hom by die verse weggevat, want hy sê dit was vir hom vreeslik om so oor sy skouer te sien wat die skaaplorrie doen."

Dan weer haal vriend Bieëlie hom in (Dag-Man Van Die Duiwel) by die motorhek, as die maan skyn op die droë mielies, die taaibos kolle staan in die veld, die vlieswolkies soos die uitgewaaide sluiers van te vroeg gestorwe bruide is, die gras langs die pad buig sonder dat daar wind is, elke donkie langs die pad iets anders word.

"Dis in die nag dat die vrees, die skaduweewêreld, die ou goeters wat nog in ons roer, by ons aangesit kom. Vreeslike, onnoembare dinge uit die wêreld waaroor die daglig lag, en waaraan die donkernag glo."

Daar's 'n mediterende stilte rondom die groot sjamaans, voordat die woorde uitvloei wat wysheid, genesing, of waarheid bevestig.

Wie onthou die woorde van die liedjie, The Sound Of Silence":
“The words of the prophets
Are written on subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”

Om die vure van Afrika, waar inwoners nog, om verskeie redes, vergader vir danksegging, word die wysbegeerte van 'n Afrika-lewe nog besing deur die profete in woorde wat uit die omliggende Afrikanag se stilte gebore word. En dis waar die Afrikaner se storievertellers die ryke tradisie voortsit, en waar woordsmede hulle stories spin vir die nageslagte om aan te herkou. In die neonligte daar ver, is daar nie meer plek vir woorde en stories, of selfs die mediterende stiltes nie. Dis dan wanneer boeke soos hierdie die stilte kom leegdra en die harte vol maak met die broodnodige nostalgie daaragter.

P.G. Du Plessis is 'n storieman. 'n Woordsmid wat die kuns van storievertel en menswees verstaan. Die diepe respek waarmee die karakters aan die leser voorgestel word, wurm moeiteloos deur al die kortverhale deur. Afrikaans het 'n ryke versameling Scheherazades waarvan P.G. Du Plessis een van die heel grootstes is. Lag-met-'n-traan, ironie, duiwel-op-die-skouer, asprisgeit tot 'n kuns vervolmaak - dis P.G. Du Plessis. En hierdie is sy stories in 'n landskap waar stilte om ons al hoe groter mag word as ons dit wil laat gebeur.

"Daarheen, tobbende oor die versyferbaarheid van die mens, was ek op pad toe daar voor, teen die horison, 'n dotjie op die perspektieflyn van die pad verskyn. Met die naderkom word die punt 'n uitroepteken en maak hom uiteindelik van die donkie-moontlikheid los deur 'n duidelike menslike vorm aan te neem.

Die pad se streep loop wragtig soos tyd se streep deur die ruimte, dag ek toe ek besluit om stil te hou en te vra wat hy te voet hier in die onmeetlikheid soek.

'n Hele dag se son het hom gebrand, sien ek toe ons groet. Sy een oogbank is oopgeslaan en sy geswelde lip het 'n sonbrand-blaas by.

Die skaaplorries kom later verby en sal hom oplaai, sê hy, en toe ek enige moontlike hulp aanbied, begin hy sonder verdere woorde aanstryk. Hy loop in die teenoorgestelde rigting waarin ek ry en ek moet in trurat ry om hom die halfwarm Coke in die hand te stop.

Hy vat dit, sê dankie, en stryk aan. Ek weet ek durf nie verder probeer indring nie. Ry dus.

Agter my verander hy van mens tot uitroepteken, tot dotjie, tot niks. Die stofstreep skuif oor hom."
Uit: Bloed Aan Vossie

Mag dit nooit met P.G.Du Plessis gebeur nie. Dit sal ook nie.

Hierdie boek is soos 'n poel stilte wat gewag het vir P.G. Du Plessis om weer te gebeur.

___________________________________________

OUTEUR

Foto bron

Pieter Georg du Plessis is op 14 Julie 1934 op Boshof in die Vrystaat gebore. Sy pa was vir veertig jaar onderwyser in Engels in die Vrystaat. Pieter, soos hy verkies om genoem te word, gaan skool op Cornelia en Heidelberg in Gauteng waar hy aan die Hoër Volkskool matrikuleer.

Hy behaal die grade:
BA -1955 -(Universiteit van Pretoria),
Onderwysdiploma- 1957 - (Pretoriase Onderwyskollege),
BA Honneurs - 1960- (Universiteit van die Witwatersrand)
Phd -1966 - (Universiteit van die Witwatersrand)

In sy beroepslewe maak hy 'n draai in die onderwys (Hoërskool Fakkel in Johannesburg), lektor by die Johannesburgse Onderwyskollege, senior lektor in Afrikaans en Nederlands by die Universiteit van die Witwatersrand, Direkteur by die Instituut vir Taal, Lettere en Kuns by die RGN, eindredakteur by die tydskrif Standpunte, assistentredakteur by die dagblad Die Transvaler, redakteur van Hoofstad koerant.

Literêre kritiek
1968 Die verwysing in die literatuur, Nasionale Boekhandel

VERHOOGSTUKKE
1969 Die nag van Legio, Tafelberg
1971 Siener in die suburbs, Tafelberg
1973 Plaston: DNS-kind, Tafelberg
1977 ’n Seder val in Waterkloof, Tafelberg
1985 Vereeniging, Vereeniging, Tafelberg
1999 Inkleurboek
2005 Nagkantoor
2006 Bedevaart
2004 Send for Dolly (Engelse vertaling van 'n Seder Val In Waterkloof)
2008 Sophia Mentz beredder haar boedel
2014 Pandjieswinkelstories

Prosa: Kortverhale
1980 Koöperasie-stories op Donderdag, Perskor
1983 Hier sit die manne…, Perskor
1985 Nog koöperasie-stories, Perskor
1991 Koöperasie-stories: die omnibus, Perskor
1997 Tussen die riewe, Benedic
1998 Tweehonderd stories, Perskor
2006 120+ sommerstories, LAPA
2009 Kortetjies en 'n lange, Tafelberg

Prosa: Sketse
1987 Het olifante elmboë?, Tafelberg
1993 Neklis, Tafelberg

Prosa: novels/romans
1994 Syferfonteine, Tafelberg
1998 The Married Man’s Guide to Adultery: A Study of Adulterations, Tafelberg
2008 Fees van die ongenooides, Tafelberg

VERTALINGS
Die nag van legio (1969) English (My name is Legion)

Dramas en verhoogstukke:
Die Nag van Legio;  Siener in die suburbs (Hertzogprys, W.A. Hofmeyr-prys);
Seder val in Waterkloof (1979), vertaal in 2004 as Send for Dolly;Vereeniging, Vereeniging; Bedevaart; Inkleurboek; Nagkantoor;
Plaston: DNS-kind; ;

Verwerkings vir verhoog:
Mikro se Mattewis en Meraai; Gonnakolkers;
Die Wa-as; Die Houtswaan en Die Porseleinkat.

Televisiereekse en draaiboeke:
Koöperasiestories; TJ7; Rand 'n Droom; Die Maplotters; Andries Plak;
Feast Of The Uninvited; Dryfsand (ATKV-Televisieprys, ATKV-Televisieprys vir Beste Draaiboek vir ’n Afrikaanse Dramareeks, Sepie of Enkeldrama, Beste Regisseur (Koos Roets), sowel as Beste Afrikaanse Dramareeks, Sepie of Enkeldrama.);

Films: Nag van die Negentiende; Liewe Hemel, Genis - die moevie;

Verhoogoptredes:  Spies en Plessis met Permissie (saam met Jan Spies);Klets, Klawers en Kitaar ( Saam met Ollie Viljoen en Valiant Swart).

Intussen vestig Pieter en sy vrou Marie hulle op ’n plaas, Sémoér, by Rysmierbult net duskant Ventersdorp. Hier boer Marie en kan Pieter sy liefde vir houtwerk uitleef.
Bron: Wikipedia

TOEKENNINGSWA Hofmeyr Prize (1970) – Die nag van Legio
CNA Prize (1971) – Siener in die suburbs
Hertzog Prize for Drama (1972) – Die nag van Legio and Siener in die suburbs
WA Hofmeyr Prize (1973) – Siener in die suburbs
FAK Prize for Light Fiction (1988) – Het olifante elmboë?
Insig Afrikaanse Onbeperk Pioniersprys (2002)
ATKV Television Prize for Best Script (2007) – For the TV series Dryfsand
ATKV Prize: Fees van die ongenooides (2009)
Helgaard Steyn Prize: Fees van die ongenooides (2012)

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The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, Rod Bradbury (Translator)

2014-09-26T01:28:00.001-07:00

MY REVIEW

This is the most hilarious, off-the-charts, tragicomedy-idea I have read in a long time. Probably the most outrageous bucket list in motion ever constructed as a plot. I felt a little bit psycho for sniggering where I should not. And laughing out loud made me question my own levels of emotional intelligence! But really, the book is written so bizarrely funny, I just could not help myself. Did I stop reading when I thought to rather see a shrink than continue? Of course not! The action-packed murder, suspense, thriller had me tied to the characters, of which Sonya the elephant was my favorite, like a desperate closet-masochist! It is not really a murder | Suspense | thriller, but it contains many of the elements there of.

You not only have to think outside the box here, you will have to stand outside it as well and make sure to drag a ton of salt with you. You won't make it otherwise! Everything in the book could have happened, but not with the satirical twist it was done with. Crazy, obscene, and cynically brilliant. It is more or less a hundred years of world history summarized in one aged old man's life story. Just imagine if it all could have been true! Indeed, an unusual rendition of the question 'what if'!

The book reminds me so much about the Broadway black comedy play, which became a successful motion picture "The Little Horror Shop". In the one scene a masochist is waiting in the dentist's office for his turn, when the sadistic dentist comes out with a huge bore machine yelling "who wants to have a slow...painful...bridge!" The little masochist excitedly jumped up and down on his chair, pleading "Me!....Do Me!....oh please do me!" - or something like that. And the audience fell down laughing, including yours truly, scared into anaphylactic shock!

Yes, as someone commented elsewhere, it can be Forest Gump on steroids, and in my humble opinion, it would have taken a few truck loads of the stuff for Forest to become Alan Emmanuel Karlsson.

It is the same idea as "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" Yes, very much the same, come to think of it! Only this time the bus accommodates the one-hundred-year-old Alan Emmanuel Karlsson, who decided to elope from the old-age home in his Swedish town, and his cronies, whom he met on his new adventure: Julius Johnsson(67), eternal student Benny Ljungberg, the red-haired Gunilla Björkund, newly-religious food-wholesaler Bosse(Benny's brother), gangster-boss Per-Gunmar Gerdin, Sonya the elephant and the Alsation dog, Buster. In hot pursuit was Chief Inspector Göran Aronsson, the police dog Kicki, and prosecutor Ranelid.

This is social commentary at its most bizarre, which makes it even more hilarious. Hilarious in the sense of plot and the execution there of. The two parallel stories, told in alternating chapters, both revert the ordinary into the extraordinary in consistent high drama. Most of this book can be offered as stand-up comedy and it will raise the roof of the venue with hysterical laughter. But, you must have a healthy sense of humor to appreciate it.

In the end, I walked away with a smile and will forever do so when I see this book on my shelves. It made me laugh at the world. For today it is okay. Tomorrow is another day.

But right now the world is a much better place because this story made me laugh for everything that is wrong with our human existence. Just for once.

Kudos to Bobby McFerrin's song: Don't worry, be happy!

____________________________________________

BOOK BLURB
It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, we learn something of Allan’s earlier life in which – remarkably – he helped to make the atom bomb, became friends with American presidents, Russian tyrants, and Chinese leaders, and was a participant behind the scenes in many key events of the twentieth century. Already a huge bestseller across Europe, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a fun and feel-good book for all ages.

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Find Virgil by Frank Freudberg

2014-09-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

REVIEW
Mark Muntor was undoubtedly an unwilling Christ. He refused to pay for the sins the world has heaped up on themselves. Starting at home, he had to endure his enormously fat wife, who smoked two packets of unfiltered Camels a day, taught their two daughters to do the same, and left him after the divorce to live without real human contact for ten whole years.

There was his chain-smoking drunkard dad, who called him a loser for not saving his mother's life after she overdosed and committed suicide. His dad blamed him for not being more than the sum total of the person he became. Muntor was also a laid-off journalist, who wasn't appreciated by his industry either. He was convinced of that.

His friends did not fare better either. They were like the rest of America:

"dump, useless people who perhaps read an average of five books a year, mostly bullshit recycled pop-spych disguised as self-help, and romance stories. Muntor read more than 200 books per year and could have qualified for several PhDs by now. The fat, lazy and ignorant lived on, like cows chewing the cud of the Madison Avenue and government propaganda that had replaced intellect in American life. People were too stupid and weak to understand the lesson he presented to them. They polluted their bodies and minds with physiological and intellectual poisons—drink, drugs, cigarettes, ludicrous TV shows, books aimed at the masses. He had hardened himself, become even more of a model of human potential. His body was a temple, and he was the high priest. The more people failed to respond to the lesson he delivered merely by walking out the house each day, the more he became devoted to his mission. In the end, he knew that the cows would never learn."

And now he is the one dying of lung cancer. He was the perfect example of what a gift it was to be born in a healthy body with a powerful mind. He was simply not meant to die, at the age of fifty six. He treated his human armor against the elements with respect all his life. He would show them all what he was made of. He would take a few sinners with him. Deservedly or undeservedly, they would make him the hero of his own American Masada.

Building his Masada required more than the victims going down with him. He needed the tobacco companies, the FBI, the media hype and every other which way to storm the walls of his fortress of righteous control and fail miserably in doing so. He needed them all to fuel his legend, his hero status, his place in history. Incognito was simply not his middle name. Period.

His time on earth was short, his dreams big, his body unwilling, his spirit indestructible. Suicide, being nature's own severest form of self-criticism, would not be the ironic outcome of his own Masada. No, he had Danté's Virgil from the greatest poem ever written, on his side. Written seven hundred years ago, and divided into three parts, the Inferno, Purgatrio and Paradiso, it would become the ultimate building blocks of his own revenge. He would start off by mailing 700 letters to the carefully chosen unsuspecting inhabitants of his American Masada...

COMMENTS: I was initially livid at the protagonist's arrogance as well as the 'what if' element behind the story and the devastating consequences this book could have if it landed in the wrong hands, because, we all know it is possible, how many times have this kind of lunacy served to cause immeasurable sorrow in America. Who can ever forget the Uni-bomber, the school shootings, and so many more?

I still do not subscribe to the message in the book and it undoubtedly has an influence on the subjective appraisal of its content. I strongly reject the idea of forcing people to die if they do not want to accept mores and values being forced upon them. So yes, does it make me a groupie to the average American psyche? For sure. Now get over yourself and get lost, with my compliments, Muntor! Or a simple 'Now bite me' will do nicely. Everyone in the world has problems, and my opposition to this kind of mind-mmmm-fornication, is your problem, Muntro. You've so chosen the wrong opponent, Muntro! If I was one of those people, hot on your trail, even your mama's pictures of you on her bedroom wall would have burst out in tears, and that's guaranteed, Muntro!

And so said the body language of all the American characters in the story as well. And this is why the book should be read!

The further I steamed through my chagrin and distaste of the whole set-up, the more I realized what a brilliant book this was and I simply hated myself for admiring the master at work behind it all.

Every single element in the book played a pivotal role in the construction of the strong outcome. Yes, melodramatic and grotesque in form and structure, as all good, American, psychological thriller movies require, since it has movie potential, it worked splendidly!

The sub themes in the book, well developed, reminded me so much of John Lennon's words "Life is happening to us while we're busy making other plans." All the characters had their own stories to tell, and a distinguished role to play in the riveting saga.

There isn't much surprises in the character choices nor in the theme. Was the message, new, or successful? The information used in the book to attack the tobacco industry was as stale as the smoke in a closed-up restroom. More people smoke than ever before in the history of the world. A fact that has been, perhaps conveniently, left unsaid. More young people have made it their drug of choice. Ironic, right?

However, the thrilling suspense kept me in deep trouble and hopelessly determined to finish the book in one sitting, come Hell or high water. The development of the story line, the characters, the mind games, compassion, as well as the pragmatism made this an excellent read. Nobody in the book is perfect, which is endearing and acceptable. It makes the story so much more possible. They are all people we can relate to.

Was the book worth the angst? Yes, even the reader is controlled! It felt like being held captive in a serial killer's mind with no way out. The only escape was to storm ahead to the ending. The last period finally set me free. I fell asleep exhausted but immensely relieved. You have simply no idea!

So, without further ado, five stars it is!

An Inside Job Media publication through Netgalley. Thank you for the opportunity.___________________________________________________

BOOK BLURBGet inside the mind of a serial killer as you never have before.Is Martin Muntor a villain or a victim?Can you imagine rooting for a madman to succeed in a terroristic plot to kill hundreds of people? Second-hand smoke gave Muntor lung cancer, and he's mad. Very mad ... and he's going to do something about it.
It's 1995, and the tobacco industry thinks it's invincible. But is it?
Muntor devises an ingenious strategy to put cigarette companies out of business, and he doesn't care how many people he has to take with him in order to do it. Hapless private investigator Tommy Rhoads has to
find Muntor, and fast. But that's not going to be so easy. Muntor's smart and has nothing to lose, and the FBI doesn't want Rhoads's help.
Rhoads has a lot at stake -- personally and professionally -- and is desperate to stop the killer.
Who's right, and who's wrong? Read Find Virgil now, and go along for the wild ride.
You'll never forget it.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank Freudberg is a novelist, journalist and ghostwriter. He enjoys writing about underdogs and their battles with forces seemingly bigger than them -- and he particularly likes watching them prevail. Freudberg lives near Philadelphia and he's contributed to Reuters, Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Der Spiegel, and others. His work has been mentioned in many notable publications including Time, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

Frank Freudberg on Find Virgil:

Source: Amazon

"Martin Muntor" Ratted Out to the FBI : One day in 1999, my home phone rang. "Frank? You there?" the caller said. "Who's this?" I asked. Click. Sixty seconds later, my doorbell rang. It was a Special Agent of the FBI and a detective with the Upper Merion Township police department. They flashed badges and asked to come in. "What's up?" I said. The agent answered: "We want the cyanide."
After about 45 minutes of questioning at my dining room table, and my hasty explanation of the difference between a novel and a non-fiction book, the agent admitted he was embarrassed. The detective apologized for bothering me. "We had no choice, we had to come," the agent said. "You and your book were reported directly to Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States. We were told the book encourages people to poison cigarettes." No, I told him, it's the tobacco companies that put poison in cigarettes.
After leaving some colorful FBI-logo stickers for my toddler - and taking two hardback copies of Gasp (they requested I autograph them) - the FBI agent and detective left. "If you get any more of those threatening letters," the agent said, "let me know." We all shook hands.

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BOOK INFORMATION
Genres: Drama, Suspense, Thriller, Literary Fiction, Adam Langer
Format: Paperback Kindle, Audio
Print Length: 358 pages
ISBN: 0984594582
ASIN: B00G5JD8TK
Publisher: Inside Job Media
Publication Date: October 15, 2013
Language: English

Purchase Links: Amazon USA | Amazon UK

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The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer

2014-09-09T01:29:00.002-07:00

REVIEW
'“Every criminal would be an artist if he had the talent, and every artist would become a criminal if he had the guts.”

This quote is the center of this thriller. A struggling author, with financial as well as marriage problems, encounters a man who asks him to write a book just for him, with secrecy being the key which will unlock the ultimate payment of the author's life. It will simply wash away all the hang-ups, problems, issues and everything else money could possibly solve. How can he say 'no'.

Enters the bad and the bizarre: '“Isn’t that why all writers write? To inspire their readers?”

"Come now," Dex told Conner. "There is nothing mysterious here. Everything is exactly as it appears. Maybe even too much so. I have told you I am a fan of your work. I have said that your work inspires me. I have asked you to write a book for me. I have explained why."

J.D. Salinger inspired more than dreamy-eyed romantics on a thriller-high with his tales, written in seclusion for more than forty years in Cornish, New Hampshire. He was also the bubbles in the champagne of the infamous John Hinckley(attempted onslaught on Ronald Reagan's life), Mark David Chapman(John Lennon's assassin) and later Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

The fictional suspense becomes a cruel reality when the author is challenged to turn his back on his own brilliant tale, or persist and declare himself the noble innocent.

Comments: The book addresses the debate around criminals taking their cue from their favorite author's books. However, it was not the reason why I read the book at all. I wanted to read a crime thriller, be entertained, and relish the after effects of a adrenaline booster.

When an author can climb into my head and read my thoughts, knows what I want, from the get go, the book will be ravished, giving up everything near and dear to make it a one-sitting experience. This book was one of those.

For the less-informed, such as yours truly, this book provides the behind-the-scenes thrill of the current publishing industry - the plummeting book sales, the blogging phenomenon, the influence of online reviews being often less forgiving than the printed versions, the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes. And then of course, it confronts the reader about our reactions after reading it.

Two ingenious tales are snaked through the narrative, involving two authors with both their families being trapped in an existential panic. They are basically honest people pushed to their limits forced to make choices they wouldn't have made under ordinary circumstances

Books can safe or destroy lives. Sometimes in fiction you had to mute reality in order to make it seem more believable.

The most important issue addressed in the book is:where does fiction stop and reality begins. Where does the responsibility of the author ends when fiction is used by criminals as a do-it-yourself manual for real crimes.

I am not the brightest peanut in the packet when it comes to delving deep and thoroughly into the hidden meanings behind an author's motives in writing their stories. Sometimes I do want to bestow such pain on myself, but most of the time, I use reading as a stimulant to relax!

The Salinger Contract did just that, but also left me pondering the content of the tale for weeks afterwards. The suspense thriller did what it was suppose to do - be an excellent addition to the genre. The plot, story line and drama were a relentless and riveting journey through emotions and thoughts.

However, the author also used the drama to address social responsibility by both authors and readers. And that's where the brain-drain started for me. It made me think about it days on end. Did the writer inspired the reader? What do you think? Did I want to act upon the suggestions in the book to commit a crime? No.

Suggestion is the most powerful tool in the world. It is used in every single action of the human existence. It preys on the subconscious. One of the most successful ads ever made was for Disprins. The initial ad had only a glass of water on the table, and one Disprin being dropped into it to relief headaches and flu symptoms. The same glass of water was again used in the follow-up ad. But this time two Disprins were dropped in. The sales immediately doubled!

So, for what it's worth, here is my take on crime-inspired-by-books: No author can plant a disorder in a person's psyche. The disorder was already hiding in the subconscious. A book can just be a final (and probably not the first) trigger of lunatic behavior. As can be seen in the many different opinions and experiences of books by different readers, different reactions are inspired. It becomes a totally different ball game when a novel is used to hide a manual for crime. Salinger never intended to do that, nor does this book.

Five flashing stars for this brilliant suspense thriller! There is not a single dull moment anywhere in this book. I could not stop reading it until it was all finished. I am definitely an Adam Langer fan after reading this book.

It is a must-read for EVERYONE: wanna-be authors, reviewers and readers alike. The story in itself is a fast flowing suspense drama incorporating the highly interesting background of the publishing industry.

If the book was intended as a commentary on social responsibility by an author, it passed with flying colors. But it was so much more than that. It is one of the best crime thrillers I have ever read.

It is a crime in itself NOT TO READ IT!

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BOOK BLURB

An enthralling literary mystery that connects some of the world’s most famous authors—from Norman Mailer and Truman Capote to B. Traven and J. D. Salinger—to a sinister collector in Chicago.

Adam Langer, the narrator of this deft and wide-ranging novel by the author of the same name, tells the intertwining tales of two writers navigating a plot neither one of them could have ever imagined. There may be no other escape than to write their way out of it.

Adam is a writer and stay-at-home dad in Bloomington, Indiana, drawn into an uneasy friendship with the charismatic and bestselling thriller author Conner Joyce. Conner is having trouble writing his next book, and when a menacing stranger approaches him with an odd—and lucrative—proposal, events quickly begin to spiral out of control.

A novel of literary crimes and misdemeanors, The Salinger Contract will delight anyone who loves a fast-paced story told with humor, wit, and intrigue.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Langer is a journalist, author, playwright and filmmaker.

His work has been featured most recently on NPR's Selected Shorts, in The Best Men's Stage Monologues 2000, and The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2000, as well as in the Chicago Reader's Fiction Issue, and in the literary magazine Salt Hill. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and numerous other cities throughout the United States. His 2000 play, Coaster, received rave reviews from numerous publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune.

He is the writer and director of the film The Blank Page, distributed by Troma. In addition to his novels,Crossing California, Ellington Boulevard, The Washington Story and The Thieves of Manhattan, Langer is the author of three nonfiction reference works: CitySmart Guide to Chicago, Film Festival Guide, and The Madness of Art. He also wrote a memoir about his father, My Father's Bonus March.

As a journalist, he worked as a features writer and theater critic for the Chicago Reader and has had his work published in numerous newspapers and periodicals, including Mother Jones, the Chicago Tribune, Men's Journal and Rolling Stone.

Langer holds a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.A. from the University of Illinois. He was a playwright-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a winner of a National Arts Journalism fellowship at Columbia University (2000-2001). He has lectured on writing and journalism at Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia College, and Pace University. He has been a frequent radio and television guest in Chicago and New York and has been featured on such stations as WGN-TV, CNN Headline News, Fox News, E! Entertainment Network, and National Public Radio, among others.

He lives in New York City.

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Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart

2014-08-31T06:00:00.002-07:00

REVIEW
While reading the book I started writing the review as the memories of a young immigrant unfolded on the pages. I thought it was excellent, experienced, eloquent writing, gracing the valuable hours I spent reading it.

Many hours it turned out to be, for I constantly fell asleep, due to the fact that I was either tired of working physically hard and very long hours for weeks now, or did not have time for a good sitting with the book, or the subject matter turned stale. I was not sure where the book was taking me.

One of my thoughts, while hanging in there was: How many books do we have to read about the lost generations of the drug-induced eras of the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties into ad infinitum, and it's getting worse. What was once cult books for the enlightened and the ambitious social climbers, rebellion against an old order, petered out to become endless repeats of the same dark, morose hell of dopey thinking. Like old bread ...

Another thought was: I feel like Balaam's Ass, writing this review. I could treat this memoir as the scribbles of a nerdy, narcissistic Jewish friend, a needy, demanding one, or delve deeper into the Jewish comedy phenomenon and totally lose my way among the plethora of labels billowing all over the globe.

A third sleep-induced thought was : I was wondering why a youngish person, thirty-eight-years-old, would want to write a memoir, when his parents are still alive, and most of his adult life still pirouette on the horizon. It is, after all, a huge embarrassment to the family within their cultural context.

Then I thought about the title of the book and realized I probably would have done the same if my parents called me"Little Failure" and I had enough shutzpah as well as eloquence, to revenge myself on them. My reaction to something like that , in my own humble scribbles, would have been "It takes one to know one!" Not that I think it was the intention in this tale. Mmm, perhaps it was!

Beyond the often hilarious, witty tale, lies the image of, and I am borrowing the words of Ralph Ingesoll, ' an elephant being dressed in a hooped skirt and ruffled pants to make her look like a crinoline girl'.

In one instance, as a young boy, he wrote a story, "Lenin and His Magical Goose" in which Lenin gets off his granite pedestal, gets onto the goose , flies over to Finland and bombard the 'hapless Fins' with the thick Soviet cheese.

Like all satire and comedy, the author's masterful mockery of something unbearable is well hidden if the reader is naive enough not to understand this kind of satire. For those of us who admire and enjoy it, we understand the shudder, masked behind the slapstick, quick-witted jokes, with which the sad tale of the American- Jewish history is told.

The intellectual quick-wit and laughter conceal the tragicomedy it really becomes. The underlying wealth of the tradition of Jewish comedy supports this tale. How can we forget people such as Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, George Burns, Bette Midler, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld , Billy Crystal, Adam Sandler and probably the world's most beloved comedian, Robin Williams?

Comedians are extraordinary entertainers, provide an endless parade of gags, an unstoppable flow of jokes, and a unique slant on life and society. They provide audiences with a diversion, they retell history to lighten up the struggles of participating in the human condition; offer laughter in times of distress.

The game of wit in this book is played superbly. The reader laughs at language, at unexpected turns of logic, at improbable situations. Laughter becomes a weapon to confront life's unfairness.

There is a slight dollop of screwball zaniness flowing through the text as well, with Gary's loving, mismatched parents, as well as his own love experiences. His parents are constantly competing for his attention, constantly threaten each other with divorce, yet stay glued to the family unit for survival.

He struggles to maintain his loyalty of all things Russian, the lessons his parents taught him, while trying to adapt to a new life in America, where the cultural blend is staggering. He also has to prove himself - a sickly asthmatic child with no friends- to his family and the outside world.

This memoir tells the story of Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart (the disobedient son and beloved grandson, to his parents and grandmother Ploya); Gary Shteyngart ( to his teachers at the Solomon Schecter School of Queens); Yitzhak Ben Shimon, 'or some shit like that' ( to the Hebrew teachers); Gary Gnu The Third (to his fellow pupils with their Macy's regalia at Stuyvesant); and Shteyn-dawg to his university friends at Oberlin College, Ohio). The various personalities are also the various stages in his development with the behavioral patterns associated with it.

Yet another memo to myself: The tone of the prose reminds me of 'Lucky Us' by Amy Bloom. I am unsure why. Perhaps it is the detailed descriptions, the struggle for survival, I don't know. Perhaps it is the fact that I just enjoyed reading both books.

The humorous side of Little Failure' also places itself in the company of Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo tales. An element of Captain Corelli's Mandoline by Louis de Bernières is also present. First the blatent, in-your-face wit, and then the honest underscore of sadness and challenges waiting for the author and his family.

However, the book is not about the Holocaust, neither the Soviet Communist regime's atrocities against its own people. This part of the author's history serves only as reference to the rest of their adaptation to American life. His parents were part of the 'Grain Jews' whose permission to immigrate was negotiated by Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.

Gary eventually becomes a successful writer, despite the marriage détente of two mismatched people whom he calls his parents and the negative attention he constantly had to endure from them.

It is evident that love comes in different forms, like a few regular slaps against the head, the silent treatments that drives him insane, and the constant reminders of his failures. But not grandmother Polya. Grandma Polya's love manifest itself in the daily three-hour gorging process after school.

"Behind every great Russian child, there is a Russian grandmother who act as chef de cuisine, bodyguard, personal shopper, and PR agent. You can see her in action in the quiet, leafy neighborhood of Rego Park, Queens, running after her thick-limbed grandson, with a dish of buckwheat, fruit, or farmer's cheese..."

I haven't read the author's other books. However, I can clearly understand why his previous books won various awards. Apart from becoming an insightful, compassionate author, he also became another loud voice of all 'late-comers' to the American dream; all the immigrants from all over the globe.

In his quest to be accepted, to be loved, and to conquer his various aspirations, he ultimately becomes more American than the Americans themselves, just because he was trying too hard! He starts right at the beginning of being American, arriving as an immigrant in a country for immigrants, and excel through all the stages of settlement fairly quickly, where as it took most of the established Americans several generations to do the same. As he progresses and develops into the person he aims to be, his need, to associate with the known world of his culture and parents, becomes weaker.

Memo: As a writer it can be his strongest or weakest point, depending on how far he is willing to venture off into new territory in his personal life and writing.

Memo to self again: His evolution is typical of immigrants to a country. The first generation still honors the old country in culture and language, identifies with it strongly. The second generation will have lesser knowledge and desire to identify with the old teachings, will only use the original language at home, and the third generation can no longer speak the original language, nor have the need to be associated with the original culture. The future will tell.

So in this sense, there is nothing new to this immigrant tale. What makes it different is the author's honest, direct approach to his own strengths and weaknesses and the sense of humor, the irony, the satire, he harnesses for his self-mockery. He is no angel at all. In fact, sometimes he is totally unlikable!

He summarizes his writing himself very well.

P. 277: "I'm desperately trying to have a history, a past. I am flooding myself with memory, melancholy and true. Every memory I repressed at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, where I pretended to be a good East German, is coming back to me. I write about eating pelmenidumplings with my mother by the mermaid statue in Yalta. I write about the mechanical chicken I used to play with in the Crimea. About the girl with the one eye in our first apartment in America, the one who played Honeycomb license plates with me. I proudly use words I just picked up, words like "Aubusson", writing next to it, in parentheses, "French rug." I stick the Aubusson into a kind of literary action story called "Sundown at the International", complete with 'jet-black Sikorsky helicopters."

Fifteen years later, that story will be expanded into the novel Absurdistan.

Sometimes my writing sucks, but sometimes it strives for the truth and it works. My parents are fighting across the pages. I am learning English. I am learning to be second-class. I am learning Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Faced with an American pizza parlor, my "mother instructs me to order a pizza with meat on it so that I'll have a complete meal." My imagination is allowed to roam in all directions, even ones that fail (especially ones that fail). I hand in a truly strange character sketch of Nikita Khrushchev celebrating a lonely seventieth birthday on a collective farm. I write about my grandmother's fictional meeting with Pope John Paul II."

Refreshing, yes. Self-centered, for sure. It's a memoir.

" I knew I wanted to write a novel, and I knew what it would be about. When you're twenty-one there really is only one subject. It appears in the mirror each morning, toothbrush in hand."

In the end this book is not about revenge at all. It is an honest quest for understanding, for acceptance, and as a memoir, which ensures a stronger message, it is brilliantly done. In a memoir the truth can no longer be "an elephant being dressed in a hooped skirt and ruffled pants to make her look like a crinoline girl"

His friend John, who will help him develop his first novel, at one point told Gary what he could not see about himself in his writings:

"There is practically nothing writerly about your process. Your acute and omnipresent anxiety causes you to function much more as an accountant or a producer, with his eyes on the bottom line and no understanding of how artists function, rather than as as a young writer, trying to develop a first novel, a new career. In short, you are as mean and ungenerous to yourself as your parents are; they taught you well."

My final conclusion: This memoir is much more than just a colorful painting in which satire and irony was used as brushes. It's not only an intellectual, brilliant play with words. It's more than the sum total of a narcissistic brooding, or a self-pity partying memoir.

In fact, I was sitting straight up, wide awake, when the ending unfolded. Yes, it was 3.30 in the morning. I gave up many hours of sleep to finish this book!

How masterfully plotted! The Chesme Church on Moscow Square, introduces the author's memories to the reader, but surprisingly becomes the axes around which the memoir will return full circle and with good reason. There is even a touch of suspense created, which distinguish this memoir from any others I have read before. The young boy, then young man's struggle, apart from being an immigrant, could have been the story of all of us, if we can dish up the same guts to be THIS honest. In the end, it all came together and it was good. Very good indeed!

IN FACT, I RECOMMEND IT TO EVERYONE!

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BOOK BLURP
After three acclaimed novels—The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story—Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own.

Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor decided to become a writer, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page he produced. He wrote Lenin and His Magical Goose, his first novel.

In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange tankers of grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.

Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler” on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly.

As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being.

Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger.

Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world.
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BOOK INFORMATION

Genres: Autobiography, Memoir, Russia, American immigrants, Family, New York, Solomon Schecter School of Queens, Oberlin, Ohio, Stuyvesant School, Grain Jews

Formats: Hard cover , Paperback, Kindle,
Number of Pages: 351
Publisher: Penguin(USA) Hamish Hamilton (UK)
Publication date: February 27th, 2014
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0241146658
ISBN-13: 978-0241146651
ASIN: B00H7O86W6
Purchase links: Amazon USA | Amazon UK | Loot.co.za

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo credit

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as a best book of the year by Time, The Washington Post Book World, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. He has been selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, and Travel + Leisure and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City. (Info Source)

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October by Zoe Wicomb

2014-05-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

MY REVIEW

Scotland / South Africa.

I am not sure if this book is more biography than fiction or the other way around. There are many similarities between the protagonist's and the author's lives. As I am not sure what is fact and what is fiction, I will review it as a fictitious tale.

Mercy, or Mercia, is an English senior lecturer at a Scottish university. She left South Africa in the early Seventies to settle overseas after deciding to make a new life for herself away from the political-discriminatory establishment, as well as her personal family situation. After many years her father dies and her brother, a totally and too-far-gone alcoholic, writes her a letter and pleads with her to return home.

Her life partner, a Scottish poet, has just decided to leave her after many years of sharing a life outside marriage with no children born from the relationship. She never wanted children and regards herself as a feminist.

To clear up her own emotional turmoil, as well as life, she decides to take a break and return to the dusty, semi-arid village in the Namaqualand region for a holiday, where she grew up with her brother, taken care of by their father after their mother died many years earlier. What she encounters there, the poverty, the desperation, the neglect, as well as the intelligent ignored little boy(her brother's son), shocks and depresses her. Her brother pleads with her to take the child.

The tiresome, slow moving narrative provides an in-depth look into the life of the brother and sister; their bitter relationship with their abusive father; the situation in which the little boy was born; her 'snobbish' attitude towards her sister-in-law; her broken love affair with her ex-life partner and her confusion with her true identity.

After coming back and being suddenly thrust back into her past with all the emotions around the political as well as social memories of their world brought to life once again,she expects to feel the same as when she left, but too many changes occurred and the new experiences of her old world turns everything she held dearly as the truth upside down. What began as a social visit turned into a challenge in which she must navigate a new life for herself from it all. The little boy becomes a catalyst for the memories she kept locked away deep inside her. His innocence and trust in her unraffels the feelings of apathy and emotional arrest she so dearly cultivated to protect herself against a cruel South African political system and a new reality in Scotland which redefined her.

When she is finally ready for an emotional as well as geographical turning point, sure of her new direction, a family secret destroys everything she ever held sacred. She had to become a middle-aged woman before she finally could face her true reality. There is a heritage she cannot escape, responsibilities she never wanted, consequences to the choices she made.

The scenery in the book is excellently described. The protagonist's feelings are laid bare and dissected. For both international, as well as South African readers, the story will be both enchanting but equally heartbreaking. The Afrikaans words which is not explained in the narrative can easily be translated online. There are not too many of them. The words also do not interrupt the overall story and how everyone's life is interconnected with each other and nature. A fascinating experience!

There is such a wealth of emotions exposed in the book, so much human nature to discover as the reader becomes intimately involved with the characters as they develop and provide more colour and texture to the story. The reader is left with an insight into a multilayered true South African experience. Or rather, a glimpse into the world of a Colored family in a remote part of the country. It is not everyone's story. But it is an important as well as endearing one to share. I felt infinitely enriched by this book.

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BOOK BLURB

“Mercia Murray is a woman of fifty-two years who has been left.” Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-five years, Mercia returns to her homeland of South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and secrets. Poised between her life in Scotland and her life in South Africa, she recollects the past with a keen sense of irony as she searches for some idea of home. In Scotland, her life feels unfamiliar; her apartment sits empty. In South Africa, her only brother is a shell of his former self, pushing her away. And yet in both places she is needed, if only she could understand what for. Plumbing the emotional limbo of a woman who is isolated and torn from her roots, October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of an intelligent immigrant, adrift among her memories and facing an uncertain middle age.

With this pitch-perfect story, the “writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman) Zoë Wicomb—who received one of the first Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes for lifetime achievement—stands to claim her rightful place as one of the preeminent contemporary voices in international fiction.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zoë Wicomb was born in Namaqualand and attended the University of the Western Cape. After graduating, she left South Africa for England in 1970, where she continued her studies at Reading University. She lived in Nottingham and Glasgow and returned to South Africa in 1990, where she taught for three years in the department of English at the University of the Western Cape She gained attention in South Africa and internationally with her first work, a collection of short stories , You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), which takes place during the apartheid era. Her second novel, David's Story (2002), takes place in 1991 toward the close of the apartheid era and uses the ambiguous classification of coloureds to explore racial identity. Playing in the Light, her third novel, released in 2006, covers similar terrain conceptually, though this time set in contemporary South Africa and centering around a white woman who learns that her parents were actually coloured. She published her second collection of short stories, The One That Got Away. The stories, set mainly in Cape Town and Glasgow, explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendships, family ties or relations with servants.

She was a winner of the 2013 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction.

Zoe Wicomb resides in Glasgow where she teaches creative writing and post-colonial literature at the University of Strathclyde.

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BOOK INFORMATION
Genres : Scotland, South Africa, Namaqualand, Family, Drama, Literature

Formats: Hard cover , Audible
Number of Pages: 256

Publisher: New Press, The

Publication date: March 4, 2014

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1595589627

ISBN-13: 978-1595589620

Purchase links: Amazon USA | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble

Freeman by Leonard Pitts Jr.

2014-01-03T06:17:00.000-08:00

It is the end of the American civil war and slavery had just been abolished. People were jubilantly dancing in the streets of America. An era came to an end.

Although it was one of the purposes of the war to establish freedom for everyone, nobody really seemed to grasp the real meaning of the concept. Those who finally gained their freedom were the least prepared for it. For most of them slavery was bad, but peace brought much worse consequences than ever envisioned. You could say the battle was won but the war was not over and some of the more optimistic celebrators did not know what was waiting on the other side. For those who never knew freedom, who were born in slavery, the thought of freedom was a highly unsettling and frightening idea. After all, people were still white, and other black. And the whites still regarded the black people as something similar to dogs or horses. Not human. No, not human at all.

"In physical deportment, intellectual capacity, and moral integrity, white men were set apart from all the other races of the world. That includes your red man, your yellow man, and most certainly, your black man.”

Bostonian Prudence Cafferty Kent's father warned her. “When this war is finished, when the Union is restored, this government will do nothing for the colored man. It will free him and then it will leave him to fend for himself in a hostile and resentful land. It will require people like us, people of means, to fill in the gaps.”

In memory of her late father, she decided to move down south and establish a school for the newly freed slave children in a building belonging to her father. She wanted to make a difference. She felt it was her calling. Her husband gave his life to make a difference as well. She had to carry on their visions and wishes. But Prudence was an inexperienced, and a simply stubborn, mulish, headstrong person who envisioned herself as the savior of many. A person who thought that her wishes would become everyone else's commands. What she found in the little town Buford, Mississippi, would not only drastically clear up her misconceptions about life, and destroy innocent people's lives, but will also make her realize how damaging her actions were for the inhabitants of Buford she tried to help.

We have lost our homes and other property. We have lost our dignity and pride. We have lost our way of life and we have lost our country. By the holy God, how much more can you Northern people expect us to lose? Would you have us surrender our sacred place in the very order of creation? We will not meekly accept that. We cannot, if we wish to still consider ourselves white men. You will not prop the Negro up as our social or political equal. We will resist that with every means at our disposal, Mrs. Kent. We will resist for a hundred years, and more.”

The intolerance, resentment, bitterness and rebellion in the different groups are pushed to the limits with her arrival and the choices she made.

Sam Freeman fled the south and landed up in Phillidelphia working as an assistant in a library when the good news arrived about the end of the war. He wanted to return to Buford to search for his wife Tilda, whom he left behind fifteen years earlier. It was a dangerous decision to make. He made an oath when he fled the bondage of Mrs. Louisa Prentiss down south, that he will return for his wife when he managed to establish a new life up north. He knew the time had come for him to go back to his roots in Mississippi. He walked a thousand miles and more, to honor the promise he made to himself.

Tilda had her own story to tell. It was a life of hardship and hell that did not end with the signing of the peace treaty, since her 'owner' refused to give up his 'property'. She had no desire or aspirations to leave her master. The unknown and the uncertainty of a free life convinced her to stay, be loyal and endure. The known was intolerable, but still better than the unknown.

Comments: Fastidious. Intense. Convincing. Excellent. What a stroke of luck it was to choose this book as my first read for 2014! I often read Leonard J. Pitt Jr's syndicated columns and had this book now for a few months stacked to be read. I love his writing style, so it was with excitement and joy that I opened this book last night and got going.

All I want to say is that it was an emotionally-charged, suspenseful read. The plot, the rawness of the events, the scenery and historical details in the book kept me reading from beginning to end without taking a break. I am not sure how well this book is received in the American psyche, but I do wish more people from all over the world can read it for the powerful message it contains about human dignity and respect and what people do to each other when one group, so often violently, is denying it to another.

There is such a wealth of pathos, character, and deeply moving moments in the book. There is the good the bad and the ugly. But mostly, there is an honesty of thought and intent rolled out in the rainbow of eloquent prose.

I recommend this book to EVERYONE!

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AMAZON BLURB

Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam--a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army--decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all "belonged."

At the same time, Sam's wife, Tilda, is being forced to walk at gunpoint with her owner and two of his other slaves from the charred remains of his Mississippi farm into Arkansas, in search of an undefined place that would still respect his entitlements as slaveowner and Confederate officer.

The book's third main character, Prudence, is a fearless, headstrong white woman of means who leaves her Boston home for Buford, Mississippi, to start a school for the former bondsmen, and thus honor her father’s dying wish.

At bottom, Freeman is a love story--sweeping, generous, brutal, compassionate, patient--about the feelings people were determined to honor, despite the enormous constraints of the times. It is this aspect of the book that should ensure it a strong, vocal, core audience of African-American women, who will help propel its likely critical acclaim to a wider audience. At the same time, this book addresses several themes that are still hotly debated today, some 145 years after the official end of the Civil War. Like Cold Mountain, Freeman illuminates the times and places it describes from a fresh perspective, with stunning results. It has the potential to become a classic addition to the literature dealing with this period. Few other novels so powerfully capture the pathos and possibility of the era particularly as it reflects the ordeal of the black slaves grappling with the promise--and the terror--of their new status as free men and women.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leonard Pitts, Jr. was born and raised in Southern California and now lives in suburban Washington, DC, with his wife and children. He is a columnist for the Miami Herald and won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, in addition to many other awards. He is also the author of the novel Freeman (Agate Bolden, 2012), Before I Forget (Agate Bolden, 2009); the collection Forward From this Moment: Selected Columns, 1994-2009, Daily Triumphs, Tragedies, and Curiosities (Agate Bolden, 2009); and Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood (Agate Bolden, 2006).

In a career spanning 35 years, Leonard Pitts, Jr. has been a columnist, a college professor, a radio producer and a lecturer. But if you ask him to define himself, he will invariably choose one word. WRITER.

He is a writer, period.

In 2004, Pitts was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1992. In 1997, Pitts took first place for commentary in division four (newspapers with a circulation of over 300,000) in the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' Ninth Annual Writing Awards competition. His recent columns on the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman have garnered much attention from his peers and readers alike. Click here to read the archive of columns by Leonard Pitts Jr. (source: Goodreads)

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BOOK INFORMATION
Genres: african-american, american-history, historical-fiction, reviewed, romance
Formats: Kindle Edition | Nook, | Paperback | Audio, CD | Audiobook | MP3 Audio
Page Numbers: 415 pages
Publisher: Agate Bolden | Amazon Digital Services, Inc
Publishing date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 1932841644
ASIN: B008164K6A
Edition language: English
Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - by Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows

2013-12-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

REVIEW
The more I read about the Second World War, the more I am so thankful that it was over and can only hope and pray it will never be repeated anywhere ever again on that scale! I never liked watching war movies, neither reading the graphic detail, still don't, since the cruelty, suffering, hardships and horror are way too much to handle for me personally. So many millions of books were written about it that the actual message gets lost in the apathy resulting from too much information over a too long period of time. But then I come across a an epistolary novel such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and I am once again mesmerized by the immensity of the human spirit, the need to survive, and the determination to succeed under appalling circumstances after the devastating war.

The letters between Juliet Ashton and the members of the society got me hooked to the book since the first "Dear Sidney" flowed from the pages. First off, it was like being invited into someone's personal space, mind, life, by being able to read their personal letters.

Secondly, the story is based on old fashioned paper letters which do not hail the same excitement or even are in fashion anymore in our modern world and the reader is immediately drawn into the nostalgia of a romantic art that disappeared almost completely.

The charm, as well as magic of the book being written in a constant flow of letters keeps the reader mesmerized. The characters introduce themselves through their own thoughts they shared with the writer in their letters to her. Juliet needed a fresh idea for her new book and accidentally receives a letter from the Guernsey island from a man who can hardly express himself verbally(she would later find out), yet writes detailed letters.

The Literary Society on the Guernsey island saved people's sanity in many ways during the German occupation when Elizabeth, the island's own earth angel(in modern terms she would be described as a people's pleaser) lied the society into existence. The society, which was afterwards forced to become functional, was like a key opening up the people's slumbering personalities when unlikely people were forced to read books, never realizing what an effect it would have on each person's life.

Another thought which struck me while reading how the islanders were forced by hunger and dire circumstances to burn their own wooden furniture, beloved books, even the banisters in their homes to survive the Occupation, was how the effect on the world is slowly repeating itself with the deforestation of the planet and what an effect it will ultimately have on people's lives. If there is one message I would like to take from the book it will be to plant more trees. I have not planted enough! It will also be in honor of those people who suffered severely in the wars of the world. Where there is war, nature is paying a dire price. Where there is peace the trees start growing again and the flowers come back. Earth heals itself like the human spirit gets healed by time.

The wit in the book is refreshing, the drama exhilarating and the narrative finishes off every issue. Compared to other war novels, it is a kind of 'light' read, but not too cheesy to be just another romantic novel for the light-brained. It has some meat to the story.

The fictional characters are ordinary human beings, even the male hero is an ordinary quiet man. It's based on real-life characters in real-life circumstances - people we all recognize as our families, friends and neighbors - no frills no fuzz, no fantasy or unrealistic heroes.

The book includes love, romance and everything needed to keep female readers(especially) interested, but surprisingly does not need to fall into the sex trap to make it acceptable to prospective buyers. The story itself is strong enough to guarantee the best seller status and deserves it. I give it four stars for excellent research, the delightful wit, as well as the dignity and respect it shows towards the more intelligent readers. If it was only a romantic novel, I would have dropped it after page three, but I finished it and loved every moment. It was worth it.

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AMAZON BOOK BLURB
It's 1946 and Juliet Ashton can't think what to write next. Out of the blue, she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey - by chance, he's acquired a book that once belonged to her - and, spurred on by their mutual love of reading, they begin a correspondence. When Dawsey reveals that he is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, her curiosity is piqued and it's not long before she begins to hear from other members. As letters fly back and forth with stories of life in Guernsey under German Occupation, Juliet soon realizes that the society is every bit as extraordinary as its name.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Anne Shaffer
Mary Ann Shaffer worked as an editor, a librarian, and in bookshops. Her life-long dream was to someday write her own book and publish it. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was her first novel. Unfortunately, she became very ill with cancer and so she asked her niece, Annie Barrows, the author of the children’s series Ivy and Bean, as well as The Magic Half, to help her finish the book. Mary Ann Shaffer died in February 2008, a few months before her first novel was published.

Annie Barrows is the enormously talented author of many acclaimed books including he Ivy + Bean series, The Magic Half, and the Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society. She has also written non-fiction books under the pen name Ann Fiery. Annie’s latest book in the Ivy + Bean series is No News Is Good News. She worked for years as an editor until she decided to write children’s books like the ones she loved growing up. Her dedicated fans are eternally grateful she decided to pursue her dream. (Information source)

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Genres: Historical fiction, Second World World, Island Guernsey, Drama, Community, Romance, Suspense
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Mass Market Paperback, Kindle, Nook, Audio, CD, Audiobook,
Number of Pages: 257
Publishing date: May 10, 2009
Edition Language: English
ISBN: 0747596689
ASIN: B002R88G4U
Purchase links: Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes& Noble

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Little Indiscretions - a delectable mystery by Carmen Posadas

2013-12-21T07:03:00.001-08:00

REVIEW:
Madrid. Costa del Sol. Spain.

“His moustache was thicker than ever, so stiff a fly could have strolled out to the end, like a prisoner walking the plank on a pirate ship. Except that flies can’t survive in a cold room and thirty below zero, and neither could the owner of the blond frozen moustache: Nestor Chaffino, chef and pastry cook, renowned for his masterful way with a chocolate fondant."

The famous clairvoyant Madame Longstaffe, with her Yoruba accent, predicted Nestor Chaffino of the Mulberry & Mistletoe - restaurant's death with her words: "He who believes he is mortally ill shall die not by his illness but by ice, and he who believes that words can kill should not keep them so close to his heart."

He had a little moleskin black book containing more than secret recipes. A few little indiscretions by ordinary people who hit behind their social high class, were dutifully recorded as well. Perhaps a book. Who knows? But he thought that Madame Longstaffe did not know about the little notebook at all.

Yet, the old woman insisted: "Do as you please, enjoy yourself, my friend, fall in love, write a scandalous novel, learn how to play the bassoon, whatever you like. Don't worry about your future, because Madame Longstaffe has seen it clearly: Nestor has nothing to fear until four T's conspire against him....For your luck to turn, four T's would have to join forces, and that could never come to pass, could it? Although coincidences do occur. The gods are fond of practical jokes."

Nestor, with his little black moleskin notebook of secret indiscretions did not believe in coincidences. He didn't think it was hard to cheat destiny, after all not after his own secret discoveries. Adela Teldi would have to stay where she was found, still locked up in that armoire, she, with her little indiscretions with its unforeseen consequences, her own homemade Greek tragedy, her own soap opera scandal. No it was not that hard to cheat destiny. If the gods can play tricks, so can he. "And then, predictably employing a gastronomical simile, he vowed that the little indiscretion would never be divulged, because coincidences, he thought, are like soufflés: they come to nothing unless someone takes the trouble to beat, stir, or otherwise agitate the egg whites."

The plot is so amazingly constructed. Every element in the story belongs there. A wide variety of social issues addressed with infinite finesse, often satirically, and all the characters are well defined.

Now that's the formal part of the review. What I find difficult to explain is how this book was not about thrifty detectives or whodunit-tricks pulled from a magician's imaginary black hat. It is a murder mystery, by any means, but oh so very different.

"With a real death and a couple of basic ideas, it is not hard to spin a story of passion, secrets, and malice, because lies can be perfectly convincing if they contain an element of truth."

Even this observation does not really explain why this murder mystery was totally different, and when someone is murdered, a confession will come. It is the form in which it is presented that will blow your socks of.

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AMAZON BOOK BLURB
A runaway international bestseller and winner of Spain’s top literary prize, Little Indiscretions is part ingeniously entertaining whodunit and part sparkling social satire.

Business is slow for Nestor Chaffino, pastry chef to the rich and famous, until he’s invited to cater a party in a villa on the Costa del Sol. When Nestor is found frozen to death in a walk-in freezer with a notebook in his hand, the party guests gathered that evening are the natural suspects. But who could have it in for a harmless cook?

The answer, it turns out, is just about everyone who happens to be staying in the house. Nestor, while quietly stirring his sauces and whisking his egg whites, had decided to publish a compendium of gastronomic secrets that revealed, along with the culinary tricks of his trade, more than a few damning details of the hosts’ and houseguests’ private lives. To what lengths would they go to ensure that Nestor maintained a more permanent sense of discretion?

Not since Nick and Nora Charles’s last cocktail party has such a merry band of mischief makers convened in one place. Little Indiscretions marks the discovery of a phenomenal writer with tremendous flair. It’s a gourmet treat readers will pounce on.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo source

She was born in Montevideo in 1953 as the daughter of a Uruguayan diplomat. She has lived in Madrid since 1965. Besides Madrid, she has also lived in many capital cities including Moscow, Buenos Aires, and London where her father was ambassador.

She went to Oxford University but left before graduating when she married Rafael de Cueto. They had two children, Sofia (1975) and Jimena (1978). She later divorced de Cueto and married Mariano Rubio. In 1985, she was granted Spanish nationality. In 1988, she became a host on Spanish public television RTVE.

She began her literary career in 1980 writing books for children. In 1984, she won the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Spanish prize of literature). In 1996 she published her first novel, Cinco Moscas Azules (Five Blue Flies) which was one of the most original and successful books of the year. Her second novel, Pequeñas infamias (Little Indiscretions), won the coveted Planeta Prize in 1998. Since then, she has sold more than a million copies in more than fifty countries and she has been translated in 23 languages. More recent successful books are "Childs Play" and "The Red Ribbon"
(Information source)

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GENRES: Spain, Costa Del Sol, Madrid, Murder, Mystery, Suspense, Drama

Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Audio Cassette

Number of Pages: 320

Publishing date: July 12, 2005

Publishers: Random House Trade Paperbacks

ISBN-10: 0812966317

ISBN-13: 978-0812966312

Original language: Spanish (title 'Pequeñas infamias')
Edition language: English

Literary awards: Planeta Prize in 1998

Purchase links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble

Partners and Rivals: The Uneasy Future of China's Relationship with the U.S.- by Wendy Dobson

2013-12-07T02:38:00.000-08:00

Genres: China - American relationships, nonfiction,
Formats: Kindle, Nook, Hard cover,
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Publishing Date: October 25, 2013
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B00G6ZZYEU
Purchase links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble

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AMAZON BOOK BLURB:

Until the global financial crisis, China was thought to be decades away from overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy. But while the US skirted economic stagnation, China was able to successfully navigate the crisis, and its growth continues to accelerate. Has the time arrived to re-evaluate our assumptions about the current world order? Will China openly contest the United States’ status, unchallenged since the Second World War, as a world leader? Will conflict be inevitable, or would its costs be unthinkable in a globalized world economy?

Partners and Rivals, the latest book from acclaimed economist Wendy Dobson, examines the central role that China and the United States will play on the global stage in the next half-century. Dobson provides a balanced and accessibly written understanding of China’s domestic challenges, as well as an analysis of both the United States and China’s goals on the world stage. Demonstrating why neither power will be able to dominate the other, the book emphasizes that they will need to cooperate and work together in the coming decades because of their deep economic interdependence.

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REVIEW:
As anyone who has visited China would tell you, it is not an open society, which welcomes foreigners under the current Communist regime. Social conditioning and prejudice towards foreigners are present in all societies, but in a competitive, closed society such as China, the chances to get away with anti-western sentiments is much nearer to 100 %, as well as safer to maintain the status quo in that part of the world. Even the internet is severely guarded and strictly monitored.

With that said, it is difficult as ordinary citizens, to make sense of the deep economic inter-dependencies of the two international gigantic economies and what the end result will be.

"Partners and Rivals- The Uneasy Future of China’s Relationship with the United States" explains the situation and opens up the uncertain world that is hard to comprehend for most people like us. The reader learns what exactly it is that the fastest growing economy, China, needs from the rest of the world.

My comments:

First off, the book has a 25-pages introduction to summarize the book. Secondly, it has a 10-page bibliography with a comprehensive index at the end of all the terms used in it. The acknowledgements: almost 3 pages long. "This book builds on my 2009 study of China and India, "Gravity Shift: How Asia’s New Economic Powerhouses Will Shape the Twenty-First Century."

The author also visited China several times and is familiar with the core of the challenges facing both countries.

I review this book as a non-citizen of both countries and how the book contribute any new information that will inspire fellow non-citizens to read it. I am sure there will be enough inhabitants of America who will share their opinions on the book as well.

My comments, which is summarized, center around the American-Chinese relationship and how it impacts on the rest of the world, since I am a nonresident reader of both countries and try to find the importance of this message to us. Although it is not an easy read, you need to concentrate, it does bring together the opinions of various influential players in the field as can be seen in the bibliography.

The internal problems which the Chinese government has to face are applicable to all societies in the world, except that the restrictions posed on the citizens are far more severe than anywhere else. For instance, the one-child policy resulted in a dramatic decrease of child births, but it also resulted in the demographics becoming seriously unbalanced. A minority of young people have to support a majority of older people, with the forecast of negative economic growth as another result of the decision.

(For interest's sake: An interesting comparison with the former "Apartheid" socialist system in South Africa: a minority of white tax payers had to support a vast majority of non-white citizens. While white people had to pay high tax rates - at one time it was around 64%, they also had to pay for everything else such as schools, medical services, university, etc, while the non-white subsidized citizens got everything for free. For instance: an open-heart operation in 1985 would cost a white tax paper R50 000, while the same operation cost a non-white citizen R2.00. It was an effort to compensate for the lack of job opportunities to non-white citizens, but the burden became too heavy for the young white people, especially, to bear. Europe is getting into a similar situation with the immigration problem currently getting out of hand. A smaller tax pool has to sustain an increasing number of non tax-paying immigrant society who receive social benefits from the governments.)

Back to China: It is the only country in the world who tried to stop an uncontrolled explosion in human childbirths even though it was done in an unacceptable way. With the negative effect it had on the economy, talks are doing the rounds that it will be reversed. With the scarce natural resources, the appalling pollution problem with its associated health problems, the future does not look well for the planet.

The USA are the biggest owners of private property, but China is the biggest owners of cash. China also owns the biggest share of the USA's foreign debts. 40% of the USA expenditure is financed by foreign loans. Both countries need a healthy growth rate to sustain their economies. It is important for China to ensure a healthy economy in America so that their imports and loan repayments can be sustained.

From the book: "China’s leaders need a stable international environment if the country is to continue to rise. To that end the relationship with the United States is key, not just as an economic partner but, significantly, as a strategic partner in Asia, where recent re-balancing of US interests has heightened China’s sense of vulnerability, evoking fears of Cold War–like containment and prompting President Xi’s push for a “new type of great power relations.”

China's domestic problems are the same as any other nation's, including the USA's. The loss of jobs and incomes promise revolt and instability, not to even mention the ever increasing crime rate and burden it has on the state funds. It is therefor crucial for both governments to address this threat that can lead to civil unrest.

The book provides an interesting, comprehensive and informative view on this bilateral relationship. It is an important book for ordinary American citizens to read who do not want to spend hours and days on the internet, reading the same information. I prefer to read books like these, instead of lose articles.

China's influence in the world is rising while the USA 's is dwindling. Yet China also has to take care of internal problems which could cause instability if not addressed. It can have a severe effect on the rest of the world. South American, South East Asia, as well as African countries are dependent on their export of commodities to China (they have become enslaved to it) and have little power when it comes to protecting their natural resources or economies. China, as the biggest role player in Africa, needs these commodities to ensure stability in growth for not only China, but also the rest of the world. It is a complex situation.

With the fastest and biggest population growth on the planet, and another few billion people globally already eager to join the middle class, China(1.351 billion) and India(1.237 billion) will become the focus of job creation challenges and opportunities. There is simply no sector of industry which cannot be duplicated by the Asian countries. Manufacturing- as well as service jobs are already there. It leaves the rest of the world with huge challenges to survive economically, including Europe. The social burden on governments are becoming bigger and bigger demanding more tax increases, more loans from China to sustain their own populations' spending. China subsidizes the financially dependent countries to ensure a steady growth rate, but also inadvertently allow them a greater influence on national as well as international policies.

“Global economies, particularly emerging markets, are driven more and more by the new world, which is exemplified by Chinese strength and contribution to global growth,” Murat Ulgen, HSBC’s chief economist for central and eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa said."Source

The book discusses the situation between the USA and China, and focus on an American audience in addressing the situation. The influences and effects on the rest of the world is also touched upon.

However, the rest of the world play a pivotal role in feeding these two monstrous economies' appetite for raw materials and minerals. For instance, Africa's development, sponsored by the big economies, are done mostly in infrastructure which benefit the outside economies, such as roads, harbors and mines, with nothing, or hardly any, restoration incentives demanded for recuperating the enormous damage to the environment afterwards when those interests in Africa fade. Lack of local manufacturing opportunities also results in a severe overutilization of natural capital to survive by the continents' own people.

"Development" in Africa means to find the quickest and cheapest way of transport out of the continent for the raw materials. Compensation to governments gather moss safely in Swiss bank accounts while the inhabitants are starving. High taxes, as well as strict import agreements in other countries for locally manufactured goods are killing off the continents' own industries. The same for the rest of the world who are the providers of minerals and commodities.

A non-sustainable perk for countries such as China, is the pool of uneducated, poor people who can be utilized to produce the cheapest products in the world. But as the middle-class is expanding in China, higher wages will bring China into the fold of economically low growth rate economies such as the First World group. China is also currently exporting their unemployment problem to places such as Africa. Millions of Chinese workers are brought to the continent to do the jobs on the infrastructure development sponsored by the Chinese government. Separate towns are even developed to house them and their income goes back to China, with little, if any of it, spend in the host countries. This situation is leaving the host countries poorer and deprived of all those job opportunities.

South America: "Experts also see risks for the environmental protection. The route of the Nicaragua Canal will pass through protected areas. Environmental activists already announced protests. Environmental organizations blame Beijing and its appetite for oil for the failure of the well-known Yasuni-Initiative, which fought against the exploitation of protected rain forest.

"The Chinese expansion will damage the region if we don't talk about how to protect our nature and our traditional culture," said Thiago Gehre from the Institute for International Relations at the University of Brasilia. "But if the Chinese presence is accompanied by contracts that protect our interests, it will be positive for us."(Source)

The Partners & Rivals summarize the challenges around the ever-increasing world population but focuses mainly on two competing giants. However, this challenge does not only effect the USA (313.9 million people). The rest of the world is scrambling for the morsels falling from the table set for the two biggest players. "A powerful China is coming, and we have two choices. Either we're at the table, or we're on the menu," says Fitz-Gerald, who adds that China isn't the enemy. "Good news from China is good news for the U.S.; bad news from the Chinese economy is bad news here."(Source) That also counts for any other nation in the world today. Nobody is disconnected from this power play between the two competing Big Brothers.

My personal opinion in concluding the review: uncontrolled human birth numbers are the biggest obstacle and threat to the current world. We all know that. Decreasing the number of births impacts severely on natural, economical, personal, government as well as social services. Increased numbers will destroy the planet. It is a catch-22 situation and a serious one. We cannot blame governments for this problem that we as citizens create.

Understanding the challenges is better than living in ignorant fear.

So, dear friends, this book is for you! For all of us. Let us read it.

Interesting related articles to tickle your interest:
China economy
Economic influences of China
China as the USA's biggest creditor
China's Global Influence
China v the US: how the superpowers compare
World population numbers

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Wendy Dobson, one of Canada's leading international economists, provides two unique vantage points based on her own experiences in the two countries and in the international system. One is top-down, informed by her role as Canada's Associate Deputy Minister of Finance responsible for international financial diplomacy in the G-7 in the late 1980s and more recently as a professor at the University of Toronto. The other perspective is bottom-up, drawing on her life and work in India in the 1960s, in a job that took her into politicians' offices and sent her into the villages, and her many visits to China starting in 1978, the year that its transformation began to emerge.
Since 1993 she has led research and teaching at the Rotman Institute for International Business at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. She has published twenty books and many articles on Asia and the international economy. Between 1995 and 2002 she was the managing editor of the Hong Kong Bank of Canada's Papers on Asia, published by University of Toronto Press. One of her books, Multinationals and East Asian Integration, won the Ohira Prize in 1998 for the best English-language book on Asia, and several of her other publications have been translated into Chinese.

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Fortunate by Andrew JH Sharp

2013-11-14T00:33:00.000-08:00

Genres: British novel, African adventure, Mystery, Historical fiction, Drama, Suspense, Zimbabwe

Original title: Fortunate
Number of pages: 368
Formats: Paperback, Kindle, Nook

ISBN: 1783060018 (ISBN13: 9781783060016)

Publishers: Troubador Publishing Ltd

Publishing date: July, 1st, 2013

Edition language: English

Purchase links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble

Amazon Book Blurb:

From the winner of the 2010 Waverton Good Read Award comes another good read. Beth Jenkins – locum doctor, semi-bereaved wife – runs away from home at the age of twenty-eight and a half and becomes heroine of a revolution.

Locked into a lonely future by a cruel twist of fate, Beth reaches breaking point, leaves her husband, and flees to faraway Zimbabwe. But there she finds herself at the centre of a deadly struggle for the ownership of a farm. From a guest of honour at the President’s table to a disastrous decision that betrays a good man, her fresh start threatens to end in catastrophe. Does the land, and its painted rocks, hold clues to atonement and re-found love?

Fortunate is an intelligent, moving novel with a gripping plot about how to defy fate and about the relationship we have with the land we live on.

REVIEW

A true story embedded in fiction. From this angle the reader can expect that drama will be limited and characters cotton-wrapped. In a sense it is true.

Yet, Beth Jenkins, a locum doctor, young and somewhat lost in a one-year old marriage to the love of her life - who lost his mind, has enough on her plate, and enough inexperience to make a royal mess of things. Especially when she gets entangled with her patients such as Mr. de Villier. He needs a favor, and Beth has enough challenges, with her demanding mother-in-law, a new mysterious friend, Fortunate, and circumstances pressuring her, to evacuate her poshy life in England for the more intimidating African bush.

Zimbabwe has just been liberated. What promised to be heaven soon proved to be hell-on-steroids for the inhabitants and a little bit better for tourists with pockets full of spending money. For illegal tourists it gets even more tougher and thrilling! The adventures are more intense, the ambiance volatile. That is where Beth's break from her own reality leads her to. She would make enough mistakes to last her a lifetime, but would gain enough new insight into a world her husband, as an archaeologist, discovered and loved. Her voyage will ultimately lead her home - a place she was unable to find before. Home. It is not what she thought it was.

It is a great story. A relaxing, informative, adventure. A soft-landing for anyone interested in reading more about the African lifestyle behind the glitz and glamour of an African Safari, but with the same intensity and feeling of being-there. Really being there. Nothing in the book is outrageously extravagant or overly exaggerated. On the contrary! ...

This is a really enjoyable book. It is multidimensional - covering the life of a young woman finding her path in life, meeting warm-hearted, sincere Africans, introducing tragicomedian politicians acting out their mafia-style looting of a continent's resources, and addressing loves lost and found. These elements serve a smorgasbord of different interests, which makes it an informative, great read.

It is the second book of Andrew J. H. Sharp that I read. I am looking forward to the third, for sure.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Sharp's first novel, The Ghosts of Eden, won the 2010 Waverton Good Read Award and was shortlisted for the 2011 International Rubery Book Award.

Andrew was brought up in East Africa and has worked in Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe - where his second novel, Fortunate, is set. He is based in the East Midlands in the UK where he combines his medical work with writing.

Nutmeg by Maria Goodin

2013-11-01T01:18:00.000-07:00

Genre: Mystery, Suspense, Fantasy, Satire, Drama, Relationships, Mother-Daughter relationships, Community, England, British author

Formats: Paperback, Kindle, Nook
Publishers: Legend Press
Published date: March 13, 2012
ASIN: B007JVNOCE
Pages:304
Edition language: English
Original Title: Nutmeg
US Title: From the Kitchen of Half Truths
Australian Title: The Storyteller's DaughterPurchase links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble

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US edition - kindle: From the Kitchen of Half Truths ; Nook edition

Amazon Book Blurb:

Meg is growing up in a world of food filled fantasy; where her first tooth was so sharp her mother used her as a can opener, and eating too many apples once left her spitting pips. Then, age five, she is humiliated in front of the other children at school and turns her back on the world of fiction, deciding to let logic rule her everyday thoughts and deeds.

Years later, Meg's mother falls ill, and as she struggles to deal with the situation in an orderly fashion, her mother remains cocooned in her obsession with cookery, refusing to face up to her illness.

Slowly, Meg uncovers the truth about her childhood and is now faced with a humbling decision: to live in a cold harsh reality, or envelop herself in a wonderful world of make-believe.

Maybe life isn't defined as fact or fiction perhaps it can include truth, lies, and everything in between.

REVIEW:

I loved the beginning of the book:

" I came out a little underdone. Five more minutes and I would have been as big as the other children, my mother said. She blamed my pale complexion on her cravings for white bread (too much flour) and asked the doctor if I would have risen better had she done more exercise (too little air). The doctor wasn’t sure about this, but he was very concerned about the size of my feet. He suggested that next time my mother was pregnant she should try standing on her head or spinning in circles (spinning in circles on her head would be ideal) as this would aid the mixing process and result in a better proportioned baby."

Meg's mom had an obsession with food which lead to the most outrageously funny fantasies about her daughter's first five years on this planet. At first I laughed, because the stories were so unbelievably creative and funny. I would not have minded to have a mother with an imagination like that all.

But truth be told, I was seldom so touched by a book that I sat with a mouth full of teeth, not knowing what to say in reviewing a book. If I blurted out 'magnificent', I still would have to explain why, in which case it will become necessary to quote this entire book in the review!

A 21-year old girl, Meg May, arrives home after earning a degree in science. She is coming home to take care of her dying mother. It is soon clear that mom's outrageous fibs and fiction hid a mystery about Meg's childhood that she was unable or unwilling to reveal to Meg.

"Throughout her pregnancy my mother suffered all manner of complications. She was overcome by hot flushes several times a day which the midwife blamed on a faulty thermostat, and experienced such bad gas that a man from the local gas board had to come and give her a ten-point safety check. Her fingers swelled up like sausages so that every time she walked down the street the local dogs would chase her, snapping at her hands. She consumed a copious amount of eggs, not because she craved them, but because she was convinced the glaze would give me a nice golden glow. Instead, when the midwife slapped me on the back I clucked like a chicken."

As a young girl, the world of fairies and talking animals only brought rejection from Meg's school friends, which left her lonely and growing up fending for herself in the harsh world of school and mean neighborhood kids. Now, as a grown-up scientist, she wants her mother to finally face reality and tell the truth and stop dodging her own story. Meg is convinced that people who believed in fiction and fantasy were gradually rotting their brains. Their fictional world was destroying them day by day, like a maggot eating away at their brains. Life has taught her that science is the only way to address the world and it's challenges. Science is her way of addressing life. It is the social home where she finally is accepted and respected.

The gardener, Ewan, appears out of nowhere, starts talking to the trees, asks the frogs nicely to leave the garden and explains to snails why they are not welcome. Valerie, Meg's mom, finds a soulmate, which drives Meg to more antagonistic behaviour. But Meg has a few lessons to learn, of which the first one is that Ewan might sometimes have his head in the clouds, but his feet are firmly on the ground.

When Meg finally discovers the truth behind her mom's fantasy world, she is devastated. As she meanders back into her mom's past, she slowly begins the walk on the road of healing and understanding. Forgiveness comes slowly and quietly.

It is the second mother-and-daughter book I read this year that had me in tears. First of longing and sadness, and then of joy. The biggest compliment a daughter can give her mother is to finally be able to say to her: " I am everything you ever taught me, even when you thought I wasn’t listening."

My mom never had to tell me fairy tales like this. She did not have to rewrite my history for me like Meg's mom. This book shocked and shook me to my deepest core. This book is so multifaceted it is very hard to write a complete review on it without turning it into a dissertation! Apart from the delightful fibs and fantasy in the book, it also addresses a magnitude of emotions, perceptions, approaches and -isms that can enhance or destroy lives, depending on how we apply it to our own life stories.

I recommend it to all mothers and daughters alike; to fathers and brothers who always wanted to know what the real magic in fairy tales is all about.

I wanted to rate it five stars for excellent writing, originality and plot, but if it was possible, I would have added another five stars for the unbelievable emotional journey it invites the reader on. Nobody will walk away unscathed from this experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Maria Goodin was born in the South-East of England. Her first novel, 'Nutmeg', was published in the UK in 2012, and was based on an award-winning short story of the same title. The novel was published later that year in Australia under the title of 'The Storyteller's Daughter', and is soon due to be released in the US under the title 'From the Kitchen of Half Truth'. Book deals have also been secured in Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden. Following a varied career which included administration, teaching and massage therapy, Maria trained to be a counsellor, and her novel was inspired by her interest in psychological defences. She lives and writes in Hertfordshire.

The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander (Jin-Shei #2)

2013-10-24T11:06:00.000-07:00

Kindle edition

Paperback

Genre: Chinese Historical fantasy, Drama, Family, Relationships,
Pages: 480 pages
Formats: Paperback(2nd Hand perhaps as well) Kindle, Nook
Published: July 1st 2009
Publisher: Harper Collins (first published January 1st 2006)
Original title: The Embers of Heaven
ISBN: 0007204078 (ISBN13: 9780007204076)
Edition language: English

Series: Jin-Shei #2
Purchase links: Amazon; Barnes & Noble

Amazon Book Blurb:

The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-shei

Four hundred years after The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people’s revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and death to anyone embracing the old ways.

An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches for the magical bond of jin-shei, the women’s oath, in her ancestral home of Syai, unaware that her quest will bring her to the very person who may destroy her and her family. And yet, she must face him, or all hope for Syai will be lost…

“Beautifully written, with rich characterisation and captivating originality, it quickly draws you in and is a real page-turner.” -- Glasgow Evening Times

“The Last Samurai has nothing on this complex adventure.” Belfast Telegraph

"A beautiful and magical tale of one girl's quest to restore the secret language of jin-shei and its customs to Syai four hundred years on from its peak. Amais finds her crusade swept up in a people's revolution which threatens her bid to restore the once powerful sisterhood. Richly layered with a strong sense of place and wonderfully written characters. Perfect if you enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha." -- Lovereading.co.UK

REVIEW:

This review is an addition to the GR book blurb.

Amais, a little girl, was torn between two families. On the one hand there was her maternal grandmother who tutored her in the ancient women's language, jin-ashu - the language of gentle things, of her royal ancestors, insisting on it being done. On the other hand there was Amais's dad, a commoner and fisherman, who taught her the secrets of the sea, introducing her to the dolphins in a cove - his secret place of rendezvous with these gentle creatures of the sea. But then he died.

Her mother decided to take her two daughters and go back to the land of her ancestors, Syai, amid a bitter battle between herself and her mother-in-law, Elena. Apart from this power struggle, both grandmothers staked their claims on the two granddaughters of which Amais was the oldest. Nika, the youngest, born the day her dad drowned in his fishing boat, was regarded as the incarnation of her dad, the son of Elena, and deepened the rift between the two grandmothers from different social classes. Nika had two names due to the grandmothers insisting on naming the child. For Elena she was Nika, and for Dan, Aylun. For Vian it became intolerable to be caught up in the middle with her two daughters.

For nine-year-old Amais the sea voyage between Elaas, her place of birth, and Syai, the place of her ancestors, will be the place where her past and future will be lost and born.

However, Amais would find a deeper mission by way of her dreams in which her ancestors would guide her to reach her real destiny. She inherited the ancient journals of an maternal ancestor which she promised to protect forever. It contained the secrets of a women-bond written in a language only the women could understand.

The second main character is Iloh - the peasant boy, who would achieve every dream he ever dreamed and much more. His past and his future were not the same thing and he did not care what was behind or what the consequences of today would be on tomorrow. Iloh's story is loosely (although historically quite accurate) based on the life of Mao Tse-tung, who was born on 26th December 1893, in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China. This region was dotted with beautiful, ancient Buddhist temples. It was surrounded by forests where more than 300 species of trees grew in abundance, and was protected by the isolating hills. Although it is not mentioned in the book, these surroundings are accurately borrowed for this tale. It will become one of the main backgrounds in the book.

This is a historical fantasy, which is confusing in itself, since too much accurate historical facts form the background to the story. Taken as a historical fantasy it is a good book and very well written in beautiful prose. I was drawn into the story from round about page 90 and continued mesmerized for most of it. But since I read the books of Amy Tan, Wild Swans-Three Daughters of China, and Mao - The Unknown Story, I was able to recognize the historical facts offered in the fictional tale. I also read books before of Lisa See and Amy Tan, with which I compared this book and found The Embers of Heaven to be a successful assimilation of the two approaches. Amy Tan and Jung Chang dish out the hard
cold facts on the one side, and Lisa See presents a much softer romantic coloring of the history and culture on the other. However, in certain respects this story was just too fantastical for my taste. I still cannot figure out why it was suggested as a historical fantasy. Historical fiction could have worked very well. However, it is always a risk to write about a country as a foreigner and bend the historical facts a bit to fit a plot. So it makes sense then to offer it as a fantasy.

The elements in the book blended well. The descriptions were breathtaking. The plot was convincing.

I really would love to rate it five stars, since so much research went into the book and it was very well written.

What I did not like: I would have loved to read more detail about the food that was eaten; the specific medicines used. For instance, during Amais's stay in the temple, she mentioned the vegetable stew. I was wondering: what exactly was in the stew, how was it prepared. In various places in the book I wanted more detail of the mundane things. To a certain extent this lack of small details rendered the story light-weight, although it is in reality a detailed, multifaceted book. The story was dragged out with too much information added through the dreams and thoughts that was included, and became a marathon reading to finish in the end. The drama got lost as a result in the middle part of the book, but not in the entire story. However, I needed a huge second breath to finish. It took a little bit of self-convincing to do so, which is a pity. It is a strong, powerful story and a book I will read again in ten years time. Yes, it is one of those stories that will stay with me for a very long time! It was a really relaxing, interesting, good read.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

"I have a wonderful occupation; I dream for a living." Alma Alexander
----- ------ ----- ----- -----

Alma Alexander, the 'Duchess of Fantasy,' was born on the banks of an ancient river in a country which no longer exists. When she was ten, her family left Europe and moved to Africa. Since then she has lived in several countries on four continents and now lives in America with a husband she met on the Internet

She has written three million words in more than 20 books and one of her novels, "The Secrets of Jin-shei," has been published around the world in 14 languages. The heroine of her popular Young Adult Worldweavers series is as American as Harry Potter is British. The first book in another young adult series about a shape-shifting Were family will be published shortly.

When asked what she would be if she weren't a writer, she quotes Ursula LeGuin's answer to that question: "Dead."

Alma is a punaholic and a chronic worrier, one of those people who proves that real pessimists are truly born and not made. She is owned by a cat. She was born on the fifth day of July (the day after America), six years before man walked on the moon, which makes her a cancer according to the Western horoscope and a water rabbit according to the Chinese one.
(Information source: Amazon)