Lynne's Book Notes

Review: 'Grave Mercy'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:58:00 +0000

GRAVE MERCY
By Robin LaFevers
YA fiction
April 2012
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0-62834-9

Ismae escapes the prototypical fate worse than death – an arranged marriage to a brute – when he sees her scars that mark her as a daughter of Death in medieval Brittany. She is sent via an underground railroad of priests and herbwitches that still worship the old gods to a convent, where she is trained in the arts of the poisoner, the assassin and the courtesan to serve Mortrain, or Death.

After some minor successes, circumstances force the abbess to send her to court to serve the teenage duchess by keeping an eye on the royal bastard brother. Duval is neck-deep in intrigue that surrounds the orphaned duchess and as many attempts to marry her off as Elizabeth I juggled two hundred years later.

The questions of trusting him as an ally and potential lover fit well within the plot, which balances historical fiction with the palace intrigue and battle maneuvers (not shown but discussed), romance with the attraction Ismae and Duval feel for each other, and high fantasy as Ismae comes into her heritage as the daughter of Death.

What follows may be seen as spoilers by some:

Ismae has to save Duval by sleeping with him. As Death's daughter, she draws the poison from him this way. Psychologically, this is a fascinating view of sex. Equally fascinating would be a conversation for older teens for their views of this action. The book is marketed for readers 14 and up, but public school libraries may have to take into account their communities' feelings.

Enough is written about Ismae's two friends to set up their books in the series as well.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Unreliable, naive narrators and The Sense of an Ending

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:48:00 +0000

The narrator of a novel usually, although not always, also is the protagonist. It's the ultimate "it's all about me" kind of storytelling, epitomized by David Copperfield in the novel by Charles Dickens. "Chapter 1: I am born."

Some narrators are trustworthy. Their world is seen only through their eyes, but they can be trusted to tell all they know and not to skew the facts in order to fool you. And then there are the narrators who either have fooled themselves so well you can't trust them or who are so arch they cannot be trusted. These unreliable narrators are at the core of some of the finest storytelling we've known, from Chaucer to Wilkie Collins to Stevens in Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

Just as rewarding for the reader who likes to be involved in discerning who or what to believe is the naive narrator, such as Huck Finn. He accepts slavery as a normal part of his world and recognizes that, in his world, he will go to hell for helping Jim. And decides he can live with having transgressed. His acceptance is not the same as deciding that his world is wrong. Naive narrators are not reliable either, but it's because they don't know the ramifications of everything that's going on. Stevens is this kind of narrator for most of The Remains of the Day. His single moment of near-realization is devastating in the novel, and he backs away from self-knowledge quickly to return to self-delusion.

Sometimes deciding whether the narrator can be trusted takes up a good deal of the reader's attention. This was me when reading Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize last year.

Tony Webster is in his late middle age, divorced yet still on good terms with his ex-wife, the steady Margaret, distant yet polite with his daughter, the preoccupied Susie. His story begins with odds and ends of his time at school and university with his mates and first serious girlfriend, Veronica. Adrian, a newcomer at school, becomes part of his circle. A schoolmate commits suicide after his girlfriend becomes pregnant. At university, Veronica appears to be a tease but Tony says he doesn't mind. He meets her family one weekend and no one appears impressed. His friends meet her and, again, no one appears impressed. After Tony and Veronica break up, he gets a letter from Adrian that he and Veronica are now in a relationship. Tony's life goes on. But Adrian later kills himself.

In the second half of this small, densely packed novel, Tony gets notice that the mother of his former girlfriend has died, leaving him money and an item. The item turns out to be the diary of Adrian, his former friend whose mind and demeanor Tony admired so greatly at school. It is in Veronica's possession

Trying to get that diary, the cat-and-mouse game they play with each other and the inability of either of them to communicate honestly and thoroughly with each other form the main section of the book. These are two people who engaged in tit-for-tat to the nth degree. When they break up, he takes a milk jug she'd given him to Oxfam. Later, he discovers in its place at the shop a small colored lithograph he had given her as a Christmas present. No slight is too small to be reciprocated.

But is Tony unreliable or naive? Is he trying to fool us or did he fool himself because he didn't know better? I decided both are true. It's both honest declaration and a warning when Tony notes early on: "If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage."

The turning point is the actual wording of the letter Tony sent to Adrian and Veronica when they told him they were involved. Originally, Tony tells us his reaction was a "best of luck, Old Bean" postcard. Weeks later, he says he wrote back a short note.

When we read the actual letter later on, it is filled with hatred and spite, and lays a curse on them. Tony reacts with great shock. But after his initial memory of his letter is related, Barnes has Tony think over what he means by calling Veronica damaged and what that term in general means. It's a crucial passage both to the plot (where what happened to Adrian involves Veronica and her family, with Veronica left with the consequences decades later) and to Barnes's purpose regarding memory and how we view what we have done and what we think about ourselves:

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admmit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.

Isn't that last category Tony himself? This is the man who plots devious ways to communicate with his ex-girlfriend because she has something he wants, something he thinks he deserves, in the same way that he carried on a campaign over damage caused by tree roots to his house. His steady, stable (according to him) ex-wife called Veronica "the Fruitcake", but look at who she married and who she wants to have take her on a long weekend holiday with the money he inherits from the Fruitcake's mother.

These characters evoke both revulsion and sorrow. Their story is filled with failings of character, and with the lies they've told themselves and others. The twists of revelation at the conclusion only reinforce the wisdom Tony imparts midway through the book:

...When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Barnes's novel reveals how reliable our own unreliability is in shaping how we think we've lived.

Review; 'When Captain Flint was Still a Good Man'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 01:08:00 +0000

WHEN CAPTAIN FLINT WAS STILL A GOOD MAN
By Nick Dybek
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books
April 2012
ISBN: 978-1594488092

The loss of innocence is a common theme of fiction. It's not unusual for a young man or woman, or even a middle-aged one, to look back on the year that things changed. The year they grew up. For young Cal, it is the winter he discovers what it may have been like for the good captain in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island when he decided to become a pirate. And because of what he learns and what happens, he leaves Loyalty Island in Nick Dybek's novel of innocence lost, believing he can never return home because he will never regain his innocence.

Cal grows up the son of a crab fisherman, the captain of one of the ships owned by John Gaunt. Captain Henry Bollings and the other captains, including one named Brooks (Gaunt, Bolingbrooke, hmmm...) can provide for their families because of Gaunt's good stewardship of the fleet. Everyone and everything on Washington state's Loyalty Island owe their livelihoods to Gaunt. The captains are good, hard-working men whose children adore them and whose wives suffer while they are gone to the Bering Sea (just like those guys on The Deadliest Catch). Cal idolizes his father, who spends one off-season telling him bedtime stories of the good Captain Flint, before things went wrong and set up the action in Treasure Island. To Cal, his father is as honorable and brave and true ad Captain Flint. The next year, his father asks Cal if he knew the stories were just that, stories.

It's a timely question. John Gaunt dies suddenly. His wastrel son, Richard, comes back to town to fidget about what he should do with his unwanted legacy. Ultimately, he makes a public announcement that he plans to sell the fleet. Everyone will be out of a job. The town will die. Then, for the first time in Richard's life, the captains announce he has agreed to go crabbing with them. Not two days into the season, the word comes back that he has fallen overboard.

The rest of that winter, Cal is on his own. His mother, a woman from off island who loves music and doesn't quite fit in, goes back to California, expecting her second child. Cal is dumped at the Norths to share a room with Jamie, another guy his age who he knows but maybe hasn't shared much with before. There hasn't been much to share up to this point. Well, there's a lot to be shared now. To say more would be a major spoiler, but Cal discovers what he has based his world on may not be so, that honorable men may be as capable of doing evil as anyone else. That Captain Flint may be no better than Long John Silver.

Some readers may have a hard time accepting the rest of the plot. But the rest of the novel can be accepted as a big "what if" cause-and-effect chain of events that could take good people far beyond where they ever thought they would go. It's the wrestling with accepting those you admire are not perfect that matters most in this story. Cal and Richard are alike in that both admire their fathers and neither can see themselves taking over the family business. But where one is a lost soul, the other hasn't given up the search. That difference is what can mean the difference between setting your own course and being overwhelmed by trying to go against the tide.

Dybek's novel is a stronger one because he does a wonderful job of conveying the town's dependence on the successful of the fleet. He puts the reader directly in the middle of the sights, the smells and the sounds of Loyalty Island, of the dreary weather and the long days waiting for the men to return, of the tough men enduring harsh lives because they love the sea as much as they love their families, and of the empty months their sons endure waiting for them to return to tell them more tales of glory.

The historical ties to the names of the characters add an extra layer of dynasty and tradition, but do not overwhelm the story of Cal's coming of age.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Arcadia'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:58:00 +0000

ARCADIA

By Lauren Groff
Literary Fiction
March 2012
Hyperion
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4087-2

The story is vague at first, the how and why opaque as the amoeba grows, as the characters take shape and as the outline of what's going on takes its own time to form.

It begins before the protagonist is even born. Little Bit is the first child born to a group on caravan that eventually becomes a commune. He knows the memory took place before his birth -- a group of women, including his mother, washing clothes in a cold river, people singing old folk songs, a bonfire and a small caravan on the move toward their eventual home.

Before the skeptical reader gives up, know that Bit knows he knows the story because it has been told to him so many times that it feels as real to him as something he actually did experience. So is Bit's own story. He is, after all, "the first Arcadian ever" and his story "is another story so retold that everyone owns it".

This communal passing on of a story is the key to Arcadia, the latest novel by Lauren Groff. So is the sense that, while the novel takes place from the 1960s to the next decade, it is timeless, a tale the Grimm Brothers may have heard to pass along: "The forest is dark and deep and pushes so heavily on Bit that he must run away from the gnarled trunks, from the groans of the wind in the branches." The forest and the outdoors are as much Bit's world as the commune.

Young Bit disappears into the forest during a time his mother, Hannah, suffers from depression. He knows he is not her prince, but he still is on a quest to save her. Bit is living in a fairy tale.

He stays in a fairy tale for his entire life, as Groff fits what could really happen to a child born in a commune in 1968 through the glory days and the downfall, through the love and through the drugs, through the opting out of society and becoming a destination for partiers, into a "once upon a time" framework. Until that fairy tale quest, and even with the occasional fairy tale reference, the early Arcadia often feels like a rewrite of T.C. Boyle's Drop City, written with a child protagonist instead of the adult hippies. Other children's parents fight, the whole commune goes hungry and the ego of the ironically named leader, Handy, is on early display. It's not going to work, as all utopian societies turn out to not work.

But with that quest, Groff's intent emerges and shines through for the rest of the novel. Like the tale of the primordal creature who lived in deep waters in her debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia's strength is from the power of storytelling as an ancient activity. Bit's parents are the kindly center of the tale -- the capable and loving Hannah and Abe. They know how to do things. Their emotions are real. Their dreams are both within reach and beyond the scope of humans with normal foibles and failings.

Handy's children, and those of the other original Arcadia settlers, like Bit, grow up removed from normal society. They don't eat processed food or meat. They don't watch TV. They see childbirth and naked adults, and smoking pot is the norm. Groff delivers all these facts without embellishment and without judgment. This is simply their world.

The fall from grace is a slow-moving one. One character has a literal fall but continues to try to make the dream real. Others fall figuratively but their actions turn the dream into a nightmare and the community falls apart.

Groff, instead of next showing how Bit adjusts to life on the outside, next shows us Bit as an adult, as a father with his path already chosen. While some readers might want to see Bit's journey, this is a writing choice that proves to be a good one. Instead of watching Bit cope with civilization in a coming-of-age story, we know that he already came of age before he left Arcadia.

Even though where he lives has changed (and all the children of Arcadia end up living in big cities, not wanting to be isolated), Bit remains true to himself. He lives with quiet integrity as the days go past. There is one incident where most writers would have Bit commit an act of folly. But instead of having to mutter "Oh dear, Little Bit, don't do it", the reader can instead see that Bit remains true to himself, to the way he was raised. It's sweet and one of the reasons to treasure Groff's writing so much. She knows how to make those little, lovely moments of humanity come alive.

It's only when both personal losses and a society crisis in the near future (a very plausible crisis) merge that Bit comes to his own turning point. But rather than an action to take or not take, Bit's turning point is how he feels. The key to his decision lies in the small moments of life.

Even as a young child, the small noticings are important to him, as when he picks an icicle: "Inside again, he licks it down to nothing, eating winter itself, the captured woodsmoke and sleepy hush and aching cleanness of ice. His parents sleep on. All day, the secret icicle sits inside him, his own thing, a blade of cold; and it makes Bit feel brave to think of it."

Capturing the small moments of noticing is a talent Groff possesses in abundance. Toward the end of the novel, it is in being able to recall these small moments, that the ability to turn a moment into a memory that can be recalled as a story, that the beauty of fairy tales at their homiest shines:

He sits in the rocking chair beside her. The women's noises fill the house at his back. He will make raspberry jam in his head, he decides; he hasn't done any preserving since he was a boy. He closes his eyes. At first he forgets steps, has to backtrack to squeeze the lemons, clean the berries, measure out the sugar, pluck the glass jars from the boiling water. But when he relaxes, things go vibrant. He feels the furry warmth of fresh raspberries in his fingers, and the smell rises up, sweet and tingling, made even brighter by memory.

When things appear at their worst, Bit and the readers of his story are reminded we've survived bad things before. Maybe we will this time as well.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Orphan Master's Son'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:32:00 +0000

THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON
By Adam Johnson
Literary Fiction
January 2012
Random House
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9279-3

At first, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son appears to be a straight-forward story set in a nation surrounded in secrecy and deception, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the son of a man who operates a camp where orphans are dumped until either adopted to work at hard labor or who perform ad hoc hard labor. His mother, a wonderful singer, was taken years ago. Jun Do names all the orphans after war heroes, saving for himself the name of a warrior who proved he could be trusted by killing himself.

During the long famine, the orphans die off, his father runs off and Jun Do ends up in the tunnels, trained to kill in the dark. He next surfaces in the hold of a rusting fishing vessel, monitoring radio transmissions by night and trying to fit in with the crew. He's deemed a hero, sent to Texas, sent to prison and tortured, sent to impersonate a former hero of the nation now in disfavor, and tortured. His life is not his own.

The novel throws some strange twists at the reader and tries more than one way to convey narrative. After Jun Do is sent to prison, a second narrator, a nameless interrogator who tries to get the truth from him, carries part of the story. He cares for his blind parents, who are afraid to say anything that would not be approved by the ruling elite. This interrogator, who tortures people, is as powerless as anyone though, getting swept up in involuntary rice harvesting because he's out on the street and not on a bus. Part of the story is told as the annual Best North Korea story broadcast daily. Part of it backtracks to what happened when Jun Do disappeared and became commander Ga, military hero and husband of beloved actress Sun Moon.

The Orphan Master's Son is ultimately about the ways that, when leaders deceive us, we not only go along with it in order to survive, we find new ways to fool ourselves. The actress Sun Moon sees starving families scavenging through tree branches, trying to find chestnuts to eat even though they are as illegal as poaching the king's deer was in Olde England. She says they are acrobats performing for her.

Jun Do is forced by the captain of the fishing trawler on which he is parked with his listening radio to act like a fisherman when the Americans board, and fails. He fools himself into thinking the crew and captain were like a family. He is left in the apartment of the wife of the Second Mate, who deserts, and she thinks she will be given to some handsome hero of the country as a replacement spouse. Instead, two old, corrupt men are the possibilities.

The fishermen of North Korea have portraits of their wives tattoed on their chests. Jun Do's chest is tattoed aboard ship with the portrait of Sun Moon after his poor job of impersonating a real seaman. The real Sun Moon is given to Commenader Ga as a wife. Jun Do ends up impersonating Ga. Sun Moon is told to treat him as her husband. "Dear Leader" knows it's an impersonation but calls him Ga and refers to Jun Do as another person.

All this deceit from above, from the daily news that the Americans are attacking, that South Korea is suffering from natural disasters and North Korea is shipping food and medicine to the rescue, that the entire world envies North Korea. The characters in this novel don't let themselves question these "truths". It's as if they know that that way lies madness. The few times their understanding breaks through are brief and poignant. Sun Moon, for example, without saying so, realizes her mother has not retired to a seaside town to enjoy life. But her eyes show "a darker knowing". And then she snaps back into her role of obedient citizen. When confronted later with more unwanted information on the subject, she tells the informant: "You're a thief," she said. "You are a thief who came into my life and stole everythng that mattered to me."

Commander Ga has a sorrowful reminder of his past as Jun Do while in prison when a character from earlier in the novel returns unexpectedly. While comforted, he is called a poor little orphan. He returns to his usual refrain: I am not an orphan. Yes he is. But he will never say so. As another character tells him, he can speak a lie while telling the truth.

And he tells himself "of how difficult it was to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that llowed you to function and move forward. To really do it, you needed someone's help."

Johnson presents all this deceit within the context of humans trying to survive. There is no national hubris, no sense of superiority from a Western writer.
The characters became people who, while not often allowing themselves to think through the ramifications of their plight, were still capable of caring for others. They became people whose lives mattered. And how they were going to avoid outcomes that were not devastating was going to take a magician's talent. For the second half of the book, a reader could well wonder if Johnson was going to pull it off. The ending is rather cinematic, as many novel endings are these days, but he keeps to the spirit of what he has been trying to accomplish. The ending works if the readers believes that despite what the North Korean characters say and do, they know the truth of their situation.

At the same time, North Korean and American cultural differences were a natural part of the story. The trip to Texas, as part of a delegation visiting a Texas senator at home, is a strong story in its own right. It has repercussions and implications throughout the rest of the novel, but the various layers of communicating frankly and in code play out brilliantly. The North Koreans, whether living under a brutal dictator or not, are thoroughly disgusted by some of the things they see. An outdoor barbecue is being forced to eat outside with filthy dogs. Cutting brush, an activity George Bush delighted in doing for the cameras, is seen as degrading slave labor. And what is wrong with these Americans that they have to put cheese on all their food?

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Watergate'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:20:00 +0000

WATERGATE
By Thomas Mallon
Historical literary fiction
February 2012
Pantheon
ISBN: 978-0-307-90708-0

How one perceives Thomas Mallon's latest work of historical fiction could well depend not so much on the merits of the work itself, but what one brings to it. Much of this novel may not make sense if one didn't live through 1972-73, when a third-rate burglary either took down a presidency or revealed a cancer on the honor of the nation.

For those of us who were amazed at the events and people of those times as they unfolded, Watergate (and Vietnam) remain definitive. For anyone to take on the whole scope of Watergate -- the burglars, the politicians, CRP (or CREEP, or Committe to Re-Elect the President), Woodward and Bernstein, Mrs. Nixon and the girls, and, at the dark center of it all, Richard Milhous Nixon, the drinking and cussing Quaker who carpet bombed Vietnam during peace talks -- how could all that fit into one novel? And be readable?

Mallon has found a way to make it work by focusing on several characters. But they are not all the usual ones. There is as much from the viewpoint of Alice Roosevelt Longworth as there is from both Nixons. Unexpectedly, the central character to the whole story, the one who can put all the pieces together, is Fred LaRue. Mallon says LaRue's life is the one most tampered with. The results are the stuff of which conjecture is used to make sense of events.

The same can be said for Rose Mary Woods and the infamous erasure of 18 1/2 minutes of Oval Office tapes. Mallon comes up with a way that it could have happened that fits perfectly with one way to look at Woods's character and also plays into the way so many people were ready to believe the worst of Nixon and his inner circle. This storyline also makes Woods a woman of her time, so there is trope of women's liberation and how some women who didn't believe in it limited themselves. Pat Nixon is treated with dignity and has an even sadder storyline than the tragedy of being married to Nixon.

The acts of both LaRue and Woods, and reactions to their acts, are used by Mallon to create not a tragedy, but a farce. This is how a presidency self-destructs? Are you kidding? Well, no. And that's why using Alice Roosevelt as a character also makes great sense. This woman of one liners who says late in the novel that someone should have seen that the great promise she had was wasted demonstrates both sides of the coin for both Nixon and his presidency. There is tawdry pettiness and there is the dark desire to not be overshadowed hanging over the characters of this novel and the real Watergate scandal as clearly as any storm cloud that blocks the sun.

Both Woods and LaRue are moved late in the book to read about themselves in books written by others in the scandal's aftermath. Both are crushed by what they read. Both see injustice done to them.

If the novel was adapted into a movie, it would have to pay homage to the TV program Mad Men. That's because the novel is practically an homage to the end of that era, and not just because of all the hard liquor and distaste expressed by so many characters about how the times are changing. The female characters are remarkable portraits of intelligent, ambitious and loving people trapped by their societal roles. Those who try to break the mold are either punished or, at the least, don't win.

This is where the farce Mallon has constructed shows its sturdy underpinnings in tragedy. What if Pat Nixon had had a chance to be happy? What if Rose Mary Woods had not been put down by an ad executive? What if Alice Roosevelt Longworth had forged a life with the man she really loved? How fulfilling would their lives have been? How might history have been different? And how might the men in their lives have messed it all up any way? That's only one way to look at not only Mallon's novel, but also the real people portrayed in it.

And that, regardless of where one stands on Watergate and its aftermath, makes this a novel worth reading, its characters worth caring about and its events worth pondering.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review; 'Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:07:00 +0000

PAULINE KAEL: A Life in the Dark
By Brian Kellow
Biography
October 2011
Viking
ISBN: 978-0670023127

Pauline Kael reveled in the notion that movies had a subtext and were more than entertainments. The years she wrote reviews in The New Yorker began during a golden age of moviemaking. She continued on through the era of blockbusters and the beginning of the dominance of CGI over other methods of storytelling.

And although she reveled in strong film storytelling that included nuance, she did not celebrate shades of grey in her own life. Biographer Brian Kellow shows, rather than merely tells, how her world view of pro and con shaped the major relationships in her life. Those included her daughter, her grandson, her boss William Shawn and her acolytes, the Paulettes. For the last group, if you didn't take her advice, you were cast out. For her daughter, it meant years of being the practical one who took care of mundane arrangements. For her grandson, who has since died, it mean pure love. And for Mr. Shawn, it meant constant poking and no support, although she certainly sought his recommendations whenever it could help her.

There isn't much actual drama to Kael's life, and Kellow acknowledges this. He gives a great deal of space in his biography to quoting Kael's reviews. And this is fitting. Because the movies were her life. The scope and sweep of an era when movies came of age, when the blockbuster mentality took over and when movie critics had an influential voice in championing films, are the story of Kael's life.

The reviews themselves hold up well. The reviews provide a window into the passionate viewing experience of someone who took each film on its own merits even while upholding overall high standards that art be accomplished. Agreeing or disagreeing with a Kael review remains rewarding, for it engages the reader in reasoned decisions, based on reactions from the heart and the head, on whether the film delivered a rewarding viewing experience.

The value of this biography may not be in recounting the life of its subject, but rather in giving voice once again to its subject as she writes about what she loved most. The reviews quoted are both a history of that time in movie-making and a vibrant demonstration of honest reaction to a work of art that connects that work to its value in the viewer's life. Kellow shows how criticism can be enriching and, in doing that, pays honor to his subject.

Review: 'The Baker's Daughter'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:07:00 +0000

THE BAKER'S DAUGHTER
By Sarah M. McCoy
Literary Fiction
January 2012
Crown
ISBN: 978-0307460189

Families and dual storylines are getting to be rather common in popular and literary fiction these days. Both are important factors of an uncommonly good novel -- Sarah M. McCoy's The Baker's Daughter.

The novel is more than one story and, indeed, it's even possible to make the case that more than one character is the baker's daughter. There is the obvious one -- Elsie is the daughter of a baker in a small German town where everyone struggles to survive as the Nazis gain power and as the war drags on. There also is Elsie's daughter, Jane, who works alongside her mother in a small town German bakery in Texas. And then there is a daughter of Elsie's heart, Reba, who comes to the bakery for what she thinks will be a quick interview about holiday traditions. Instead, Jane and Elsie befriend a woman who has closed off her heart, even with love from family and a good man staring her in the face.

Young Elsie is the salt of the earth that leavens good bread. She is quiet yet not passive. She misses her sister, who is in a Nazi compound set up for Aryan breeding mares (the Lebensborn Program really existed). Her life is like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale told from the viewpoint of proud family members boasting of their daughter's fate, not realizing until far too late what horrors and ruthless cruelty are there. In a grotesque pastiche of a whirlwind, fairy tale romance, a Nazi officer bestows his ring on Elsie, and this protects Elsie and her family. Josef is acting out of guilt from Kristallnacht. Elsie realizes she has to use the gift of his protection even as she feels guilt for not loving him.

Elsie does something far braver when fate presents the opportunity to do so. It's an impulsive move, but she shows true strength in perservering with the consequences of her act.

In the present time, Reba also is separated from her sister, but it's a voluntary move. Their father was haunted by what he did in Vietnam, and Reba discovers exactly how haunting what he did was. The parallel with the German officer's guilt is but one of many parallels in the novel. None of the acts or characters are exact matches, but they do offer varying perspectives on such big ideas as honor, duty and fealty. Reba leaves her home because she wants to leave behind the hurt, although her sister continues to reach out to her.

Another man has guilt over what he once believed in. Reba's fiancee is a border agent. As an American citizen who is Hispanic, Riki believes he is doing the right thing by finding and helping deport people back across the U.S.-Mexican border. Until a young boy grabs his heart.

The Baker's Daughter is written with a light touch about drastic events that really happened or could have happened. People's lives are altered forever in seconds. People try to do the right thing. They feel guilt. They feel sorrow. Their paths, decades apart, show similar trajectories about the big ideas without making direct comparisons. The border patrol agents, for instance, is not likened to S.S. officers. But the reader knows that the actions dictated by both jobs can lead to similar misery for the people they hunt, that families can be torn apart and that tragedy can occur.

It is this ability to show how history repeats itself in the way people are treated, the way they are condemned not because of who they are but because of what they represent to those with the power, and the ability to let readers draw their own conclusions about individual characters and how their choices can work in with or challenge the power structure, that demonstrate lasting power of McCoy's novel.

There is much sweetness and coming together in the novel. There are touching moments and characters doing the right thing by others. There are the sins of the past to be mourned. But underneath that are the movements of society in how people in power treat those without any.

So enjoy the food descriptions -- which are rendered with loving care by someone who obviously knows her way around a kitchen, and be moved by the journey of the various bakers' daughters. But also let the bigger questions move you.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Under the Mesquite'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:23:00 +0000

UNDER THE MESQUITE

By Guadalupe Garcia McCall

YA Novel in verse

September 2011

Lee & Low Books

ISBN: 978-1600604293

Lupita is the oldest child in a growing family of Mexican-Americans who love each other very much. Even so, she feels her bond with her beloved mother is the closest of all. To prove this, she searches through her mother's purse to find a small, wizened brown thing. It is her umbilical cord. Her Mami saved it.

So begins Guadalupe Garcia McCall's debut book, a novel in free verse that describes Lupita's coming of age. The verses include the longing for Mexico even as their family puts down roots (and plants roses bushes amid which a stubborn mesquite thrives) in Texas, Lupita's discovery of drama class and poetry, and her mother's cancer.

In one of the most dramatic parts of the story, Lupita is put in charge of her younger siblings while her father goes out of town to stay with her hospitalized mother. The children don't obey her, neighbors and relatives resent giving them food for such a prolonged period -- apparently an entire summer -- and Lupita marvels at how easily her mother took care of them.

However, in this section, as in the others, any emotional impact is supplied by the reader. McCall's understated verse is bare bones writing that calls upon her readers to enrich Lupita's small moments and larger journey.

Under the Mesquite won this year's Pura Belpré honors as work that "portrays, affirms and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth", as stated on its American Library Association home page. While it's not the best written piece of literature, with poetry on the level of what its young readers will be able to write themselves, it is an important work in putting on the pages of a book experiences that speak directly to young Latino/Latina readers. McCall, herself a teacher, has written a book that will be shared in many classrooms and libraries.

Review: 'The Lost Saints of Tennessee'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:30:00 +0000

THE LOST SAINTS OF TENNESSEE
By Amy Franklin-Willis
Fiction
February 2012
Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 978-0-8021-20005-2

Ezekiel is about as unhappy a man as can be. He hasn't adjusted well to his divorce, his hovering mother has lung cancer, the once promising young man has a dead-end job after dropping out of college and his dog is really old. Bad as all that is, Zeke's real problem is that his twin brother died 10 years ago. And no matter what his mother wants him to believe and no matter how much his sisters and ex-wife want him to talk, Zeke is having none of it.

Having reached his nadir, Zeke loads his dog and a Twain novel into his old pickup and heads toward Pigeon Forge to do in himself and Tucker the dog. He ends up at the refuge that is the home of his cousins in Virginia, the people who took him in years ago when he was a young college freshman and full of promise. They love him more than he does.

Amy Franklin-Willis has written a debut novel that celebrates poetry in prose, the beauty in hardscrabble, ordinary lives and the second, third and fourth chances we give those we love if we give in to that love. Interestingly enough, though, the characters who get second chances and those who are forgiven may not be the ones usually suspected. This makes for a bumpy ride. At times, the story reads like women's fiction and even veers toward romance when Zeke ends up in Virginia and his cousins' comely neighbor immediately catches his eye. But Zeke is no romantic hero. More than anything, having a history with another character is what dictates how Zeke and the other characters react to each other. How have they felt about each other underlies what they do now.

The author also inserts an interesting bridge in the novel when Zeke's mother takes over the narrative. She is alternately a monster, a misunderstood woman, a hard-working mother and, always, a human being fully capable of making tragic mistakes and fully aware of it. To gain a better understanding of her, Zeke will have to think like a parent when it comes to his own two daughters, to walk in his mother's shoes, before the reader learns what happened to his long-lost twin brother.

Although this is not a perfect novel, it does take great care to chronicle a plausible journey by a family and by a man who finds he is a grown-up. Zeke has to take his own place within the family and find he has come into his own whether he was ready for it or not. The writing itself is lovely. but there is not quite enough reason to see why Zeke arrives at where he does. Nor is there a sense that he has truly moved on from his brother's death, which has affected him even more than divorce from a woman he loves and separation from daughters who mean the world to him.

It is, however, a journey well worth chronicling and one that bodes well for the promise of a long career on the part of its author.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'No Mark Upon Her'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:12:00 +0000

NO MARK UPON HER
By Deborah Crombie
Crime fiction (British police procedural)
February 2012
William Morrow
ISBN: 978-0-06-199061-8

A seasoned world-class athlete decides to return to her sport. She will need time away from her demanding career, but she may just have the leverage she needs for that. However, Becca Meredith's Olympic potential as a rower will not be measured, nor will she need a sabbatical from her Metropolitan Police job. Instead, she is found dead on the Thames, separated from her scull.

Her murder rips open deceit upon deceit and more than one kind of betrayal when Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid is assigned to investigate. It's a case Kincaid takes on reluctantly in the 14th book in Deborah Crombie's traditional British police procedural series. He not only has just married his partner, Gemma James, who also is a Scotland Yard detective, but their blended family has grown and at least one of them needs to be at home to help a scarred, scared three-year-old they adore. Gemma is just coming off her leave and Duncan is ready to be a househusband -- if this case and office politics at The Yard allow him to keep his word.

Keeping his word is something that matters a great deal to Kincaid. In this case, that could have lasting repercussions against not only himself, but his wife. Both during the unfolding of the investigation and in the first consequence that directly affects James, this is where the suspense of the novel lies.

Crombie has done a brilliantly effective job creating two main characters in Kincaid and James. These characters are exceptionally decent without being the least bit sanctimonious or starchy. In a case such as this one, when there is banal evil amongst those in society who should be the most trustworthy, their willingness to just get on with it, getting angry without pulling stunts and staying true to who they are shows how it is possible to create realistic crime fiction that displays both the best and worst in human nature without being maudlin or sensationalistic. Other characters, including the deputies of Kincaid and James, and others who are deeply touched by Meredith's murder, are drawn as complex people who seek redemption and healing. There is the feeling that their stories do not end with the last page here. And for those who have not yet read any in the series, this is a good place to begin. Chances are these readers not only will look forward to new installments, but will seek out the earlier titles.

Like all practioners of this art, Crombie's series delves into the psychological whys of deliberate death. Crombie uses this kind of storytelling, which she does very well, to combine the personal and the professional in the way the case unfolds to affect Kinkaid and James. When so many of those in power are corrupt, it was perhaps inevitable that this series involving such decent lead characters would find themselves up against corrupt power.

It's going to be fascinating to see how this plays out. Just as the denoument of this case has its twists and turns, and is not numbingly obvious, chances are the author will do the same in the continuing story of her characters.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews

In Progress: 'A Life in the Dark'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:02:00 +0000

Nearly midway through Brian Kellow's remarkable biography of The New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael, A Life in the Dark, and completely enthralled by the movies, art and why having honest opinions about both matter.

I'm at the part now where Kellow is summarizing Kael's 1971 The New Yorker essay, "Notes on Heart and Mind". Kael is essentially saying people can mistake the packaging, or the way the story is told, rather than the point of the story itself in their appreciations. Although she pits Pop against The Arts, and there is a significant conversation that needs to take place often about the importance of both, there is another aspect to her thinking that matters as well.

When evaluating how a work has affected me as a reader, and of its value as a work of storytelling, there are two things to consider. What is the point of the story and how was the story told? Each plays a significant role in how well the other works. A story that works on every level -- characterization, a plot that arises naturally from the characters and their situation, whether there are any layers to the story that dwell on the complexity of the human condition -- all the story elements can jell together to make a story that resonates with the mind and the heart. This is true of any genre, whether literary or horror, whether classic Victorian tearjerker or modern hard-boiled tale, whether experimental short story or traditional Regency romance. And, yes, how well the story works while operating within the conventions of its genre is another consideration, but one that is within the broad area of how the story is told.

After all, it is possible to write about the same scenario within many genres. A revenge tale will look different as a mystery, a horror story, a romance or a contemporary literary novel. And each should be considered on its own merits, not whether a mystery, a horror story, a romance or a contemporary literary novel is a more worthy work of fiction based solely on its genre.

The other great aspect of any work of fiction that determines how well it works -- how well it gets its point across and how competely a reader can respond to it -- is the point itself. Sometimes, the point is so ridiculous the whole work collapses.

This is one reason it took me months to write the review of Reginald Hill's The Woodcutter, which I posted earlier today. I just didn't see what the point of this elaborate, albeit well-written, novel was. Over time, what I have seen as the point doesn't raise my assessment. In fact, the assessment was lowered.

Sometimes the point of the story is a terrific one and most of the story elements sing, they work together so well. But one little aspect becomes larger and larger, until its weight collapses the ability of my disbelief to remain suspended. This is what happened with another extremely well-written crime novel, The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen. This is a very strong story about the strength and power of love, with engaging characters who I would gladly read about in other novels. But the thriller-like ending with more and more improbable acts of violence made me shake my head even while wishing the end could be possible.

Does anyone else look at what they read through similar lenses? I can see where breaking this down could help me view any fiction I would write, in addition to the way I look at what others have written.

Review: 'The Woodcutter'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:33:00 +0000

THE WOODCUTTER
By Reginald Hill
Fiction
August 2011
Harper
ISBN: 978-0062060747

Occasionally a book comes along that engages the reader but does not lend itself easily to any category. The Woodcutter, written by crime fiction master Reginald Hill, is such a novel.

It begins with Wolf Hadda, a successful man of the city, master of finance and friend to those in both government and business, a man who built an empire on his own. His life unravels as he is accused of financial misdealings and being a child pornographer. He is arrested, escapes and is grievously wounded when recaptured. His wife deserts him and his only child dies while he is in prison.
Years later, this shell of a man unleashes a plot of revenge after a young prison psychologist attempts to break through what is left of his encrusted ego.

Although the ups and downs of Wolf's life, told through letters, flashbacks and present-day narrative, are fascinating, it is not apparent for much of the novel whether he is guilty or innocent. If he is innocent, who would go to such elaborate lengths to set him up, and why? But if he is guilty, is he about to become an even more dangerous character if he ever is free?

Hill, whose beloved series of police procedurals featuring the irrascible Dalziel and straight arrow Pascoe has grown ever more complex and rewarding over the years, goes all out in exploring what may be the dilemma of an innocent man in reclaiming his life or the extremely clever plotting of a master criminal intent on rebuilding his empire.

Although a reader may form a conclusion early on as to which of these situations is the true one, it is fascinating to see how other readers could come to the opposite conclusion.

The novel is ultimately about the lengths a person will go to when showing the world he has what it takes is more important than even twisted love, and definitely more important than worldly success or honor. With an ending that is all too neatly gift-wrapped and tied with a gaudy bow, a reader may be excused for wondering what all the technical prowess was about. A new relationship at the end does not honor one of the people in it because it dishonors that character's profession. And that relationship could even be seen as an authorial dismissal of that profession. If, however, the journey is what matters, then that reader will be amply rewarded by this display of Hill's considerable agility.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Train of Small Mercies'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:52:00 +0000

1968 just about broke America's heart with assassinations, riots and war protests. After Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, apparently on the brink of winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency, tens of thousands mourned the loss of promise and felt sorrow for his pregnant widow and other family members.

The funeral train that carried RFK's body from New York to Washington, D.C., for interment at Arlington National Cemetary became one of those great national events when people come together. It is possible that 2 million people waited along the tracks of the route to pay their respects. For photographs of that journey, there is a poignant archive of Paul Fusco's work.

David Rowell uses the train's voyage as the focal point of his first novel, The Train of Small Mercies, and through the stories of many characters presents a narrative of quiet hope that arrives when least expected. It is not always evident along the journey that any of the characters will see hope, and not everyone has a happy ending. The climax of many characters' stories is melodramatic, especially for two cases when things go drastically wrong at the end.

Among those encountered during the journey are a not-quite-young married couple celebrating their first pool party with another couple in a working class version of John Cheever's world, a boy who takes an unexpected fishing holiday with his father, and a mother who wants to see the funeral train despite her husband's political stance. The couple with their above-ground pool embody Rowell's most successful story that reflects the passing of the Kennedy promise. The boy who goes fishing and the mother, who takes her young daughter on a long car ride to pass the time before the train goes by, show different perspectives in how the dynamics between a husband and wife can affect their children in drastic ways. Their stories are interesting, but it's not certain why they would be tied to the train. They might have been even stronger had they been the dual focus of a book not tied to a great national loss. Here, they do not resonate but rather only rise to the level of provoking a "oh, my" moment before getting lost in the maelstrom of the many other narratives in Rowell's book.

Among the other stories are those of a young Irish girl who was set for an interview as nanny to the Kennedy babies, and the son of a proud railroad porter whose first ride on the job is on the train itself. Their stories are nearly lost in the criss-cross rush.

And that's the problem with this book. The stories are not all fully developed. Some look on early to eventually take on more significance than they do. The more significant stories are not allowed room to breathe and blossom. In real life, these characters would not have necessarily have that privilege of being given the space they deserve. But because an author took the time to give them names, they deserve that space. Even on their own, most of the stories would work. But if they are to be parts of something greater, such as the passing of an era in American politics and society, they do need to contribute to that something greater. Only one of these stories does that. The others are reduced to the level of faces not clearly seen when a train goes by, no matter how slowly it's going down the tracks.

Liebster Blog Awards: The Winners

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:41:00 +0000

Cannot believe I let more than a month go by before fulfilling my obligation in the Liebster Blog Awards. The main point is to pass on the award to five other recipients to spread the word about other book blogs you enjoy.

Here are my winners:

Stu Allen of Winston's Dad, a blog that celebrates fiction translated into English. Stu is not only widely read in world fiction, and brings many deserving authors to my attention, he also has excellent taste in music and film, and as a fellow dog lover always has my highest esteem.

One book blogger who blows me away with his discernment and enthusiasm for excellent writing is the wordish celebrator behind Rob Around Books, whose site always makes me want to turn into a whirling dervish of a reading machine.
Author, smart reader and all-around wonderful fellow David Abrams has a blog I rely on. If you haven't seen The Quivering Pen, please do.

We have similar taste but aren't always reading the same thing, so I enjoy Col Reads for both new and classic choices. Plus, she's also a Europa Challenge blogger. Speaking of ...

I was one of the first to sign on the the Europa Challenge, as it is one of my favorite imprints. How many reviews have I contributed? You're right. But I haven't given up trying to get there and I still want everyone else to discover the incredible range of books through this blog created by two colleagues I hold in the highest admiration: Marie of Boston Bibliophile and Miss Liberty herself.

Winners, I hope you have the chance to pass on the peer appreciation as well.

Thank you again to Emma Hunneyball of In Potentia, another book blogger who I hope you're reading for her lovely insight.

Review: 'Serious Eats'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:23:00 +0000

SERIOUS EATS: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO MAKING AND EATING DELICIOUS FOOD
Ed Levine
Coookbook/Food Guide
November 2011
Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 978-0307720870

Part cookbook, part traveling guide, Serious Eats is all food love. Created by the people behind the popular website, this self-style comprehensive guide does a quick decent job of rounding up where to go to find the best good grub and how to go about making it yourself.

The introduction by Ed Levine is a quirky celebration of all things food, but not "foodie", in appreciating great meals, good ingredients and no stuffiness.

Featuring real-world descriptions and gorgeous photography by Robyn Lee, the guide has a defense of oatmeal in the breakfast chapter, pages upon pages of pizza oven investigations, and a burger section that includes discussion of regional variation and bun choice -- as well as acknowledging that American cheese is important to a good burger.

Although more an addition to a well-stocked home culinary library than one of the essential cookbooks, Serious Eats does provide opportunities for fun browsing sessions.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Discovering more: Clarice Lispector

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:34:00 +0000

My introduction to Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was the unfortunate volume, I'm a Box, by Natalia Carrero. In it, an earnest, inquisitive young woman discovers Lispector's writing and tries to become her biggest fan girl in this debut work of fiction. The text itself shies away from calling this a novel and that's an honest assessment. There is no narrative structure, no plot, no conflict outside young Nadila's wishes to be a writer as good as her role model.

In the closing pages, another reason for seeking kinship with the writer is revealed but, as with everything else in this work, nothing comes from it.

Just writing that someone is important to you and quoting from that person doesn't carry much weight. The narrator says she has learned more about herself from the experience of doing this writing, but what that was remains abstract. Lispector wrote abstract pieces herself, in addition to journalistic pieces, but the allure of her work isn't made clear in I'm a Box.

Communicating how she has grown in self-knowledge, and what that might mean to her future, or communicating why Lispector should be read today would have made for a successful work. What is communicated is the earnestness and sincerity of the writer's quest, but the results of that quest remain out of reach.
Fortunately, I discovered this morning that there may be more to Lispector's work. Volume 199 of The Paris Review includes two very short stories by Lispector, One Hundred Years of Forgiveness, and A Story of Great Love.

One Hundred Years is a quick remembrance of something the narrator did as a child -- steal single roses from gardens and, later, berries. How the idea to suddenly steal a beautiful rose, to possess such beauty for herself, and how both roses and berries are beautiful and nourishing for a fleeting time, give this very short work a gravitas that goes well beyond what a young girl does on impulse.

A Story of Great Love works similar magic in the tale of another young girl who loves the hens in her yard. Told in third person, this short story also reveals a greater truth through the prosaic circumstances of what inevitably happens to chickens. When it comes to both domestic fowl and their keepers, Lispector writes, "A hen is alone in the world."

Just as Lispector's two short stories go from the simple and everyday to greater truths, my reading experience here has shown me once again a greater truth: Sometimes an introduction is not the best way to judge what a writer, or any other person, has to offer to make my world richer.

Review: 'Wonderstruck'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:21:00 +0000

WONDERSTRUCKBy Brian Selznick
Children's Fiction
September 2011
Scholastic Press
ISBN: 978-0-545-02789-2

Ben is a boy now living with his aunt, uncle and two cousins since his single mother died in an accident. His aunt and uncle talk about selling his mother's house next door on a Minnesota lakeshore. Lonely, he sneaks over to his old home one night when he sees a light. It's his cousin Janet, dressing in his mother's clothes and playing her old music. He talks his cousin into letting him stay in the house alone for a bit. Ben discovers a note in one of his mother's books that leads him to believe he might be able to talk to the father he's never met. Deaf in one ear, he dials the phone just as lightning strikes the house. He's now totally deaf. Ben is hospitalized, but sneaks out to take a bus to New York to see if he can find his father.

While this story in prose takes place in the 1970s, Selznick intersperses it with detailed drawings, in the same style as his Invention of Hugo Cabret, of a young girl in the 1920s. She, too, is deaf and sneaks away from her house to watch a silent movie. The girl, Rose, runs away to take the ferry from Hoboken to New York City, where she tracks down the star of the silent movie to a stage, rehearsing a play. It's her mother, and she is ashamed of her deaf daughter.

The stories go back and forth until they converge in the unlikeliest of coincidences.

Selznick uses much exposition, including having characters write great portions of tell, not show, in bringing the characters together. Objects large and small, from a small carved turtle to the American Museum of Natural History and a diorama of wolves, figure in both characters' stories. The rest of the characters do important acts that help the two main characters without having their own stories explained or resolved. Janet, for example, is never seen again. A boy who helps Ben spend several nights at the museum has an unresolved story.

Wonderstruck is a high-concept project that doesn't quite mesh as a story, but rather wants attention paid to objects the author practically treats as sacred. Selznick's art is stunning but does not carry the story forward on its own. Even in the drawings, the characters write to each other to give the reader information and propel the story forward. Because of the young age of the characters, it is doubtful the book will find a large audience in secondary schools. Because of the size of the book, and the two stories in prose and pictures not meeting until several hundred pages have gone by, it may deter younger readers. It is probably most likely to find a home in elementary for advanced intermediate students, but is suitable for readers in grades 4 and up.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reposted with permission

Review: 'Essential Pepin'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:34:00 +0000

ESSENTIAL PEPIN: More Than 700 All-Time Favorites from My Life in FoodBy Jacques Pepin
Cookbook
October 2011
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0547232799

Even with decades of being on television, writing cookbooks and serving thousands at his restaurants, Jacques Pepin may not have the same name recognition or star power as more recently arrived celebrity chefs. That should change, however, with the release of his Essential Pepin and an accompanying PBS series.

Essential Pepin is no quickly turned-out scrapbook filled with color photographs to capitalize on a TV program, even though there is a companion series. As the subtitle says, it's "More Than 700 All-Time Favorites from My Life in Food". This is a comprehensive reference work for home cooks from neophyte to foodie. Everything is written down simply and completely.

There was not a single recipe that I didn't think I couldn't tackle. For example, his Cranberry Bread is a rustic bread designed to go with meats for a hearty winter meal. As shown in the first photo, milk and butter are combined over low heat, then set aside.

Dry ingredients, as seen in the second photo, are combined.

After the wet and dry ingredients are mixed, cranberries and walnuts and folded in (I left the cranberries whole as a personal preference, although the recipe calls for chopping them). Pepin suggested using a springfoam pan, which worked well (see the third photo) to bake the bread in a hot oven for approximately an hour.

As seen in the fourth and fifth photos, the results were terrific for a bread to accompany a meal -- not too sweet and substantial without being too heavy.

Each chapter thoroughly covers a wide range of food within that group. Soups, for example, include Pea Pod Soup, Raw Tomato Soup and Chicken and Spinach Veloute. In Pasta, there's a Red Pepper Pasta with Walnuts to try. Poultry includes a Lentil and Chicken Fricassee, Roast Boned Squab with Peas in Tomato "Saucers" and a Duck Cassoulet, while the Meat chapter has two Carpaccio recipes. There's a separate chapter for Charcuterie and Offal. The Vegetable chapter includes such gorgeous sounding fare as Asparagus in Mustard Sauce, Chestnut Puree and Artichoke Hymn to Spring (with snow peas and asparagus spears). Separate chapters are devoted to Puddings, Sweet Souffles and Crepes; Cakes, Cookies and Candies; Tarts, Pies and Pastries; and Frozen Desserts. The book includes a Basics chapter on stocks, glazes, sauces, relishes and drinks. And there is a DVD of Pepin demonstrating techniques thrown in.

And while each chapter could be its own cookbook, the Seafood chapter is stunning, with recipes ranging from Cold Striped Bass in Flavored Broth and Molasses-Cured Salmon to Red Snapper in Potato Jackets, Clam-Stuffed Sole with Cucumbers and Grilled Swordfish with Spicy Yogurt Sauce.

In between the recipes are line drawings and antecdotes from Pepin. Combine these with his short, sweet introduction and there is a portrait of a lovely man who enjoys food, family and people.

Pepin mentions more than once that he is now an old man. But looking through this enormous memory collection of what he has loved preparing, what comes across is not a feeling of being tired, but rather an invigorated examination of the bounty that can be served to friends and family.

This cookbook will take pride of place in my kitchen bookcase, when it's not open on the counter for meal after meal. I look forward to dripping ingredients on it for years to come.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Also Known As Rowan Pohi'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:01:00 +0000

ALSO KNOWN AS ROWAN POHI
By Ralph Fletcher
November 2011
Clarion Books
ISBN: 978-0547572086

In one memorable M*A*S*H episode, Hawkeye and the crew invented Captain John Tuttle, a remarkable man who had to “die” when a real officer wanted to honor him. Ralph Fletcher uses the same premise to explore how a teenage boy comes to terms with himself and his name in Also Known as Rowan Pohi.

Bobby Steele doesn't have the best life around – his mom left after his father did a horrific thing to her. Bobby's sophomore year is about to start, he has a younger brother starting kindergarten to watch out for, his father goes to AA meetings and work and that's about it. Bobby also has the burden of having the same name as his father, the name splashed across the local news.

One afternoon at IHOP, the snooty kids at a nearby booth leave an application for the esteemed private school they'll be attending. Whitestone has a new multi-million dollar planetarium; Bobby's high school can't afford to have the parking lot refinished. As a lark, the boys fill out the application. Rowan's last name is the name of the restaurant backwards. He's a go-getter from the extremely poor town of Pinon, New Mexico.

Rowan, of course, is accepted to Whitestone. The guys know they'll never be able to come up with transcripts and a Social Security number, so their invention dies after a sudden illness. They bury the acceptance letter and go on with their real lives. Circumstances compel Bobby to dig up the papers and go to new student orientation at Whitestone.

For a short novel (199 pages), there's a lot going on. The ways Fletcher invents for Bobby to stay at the school are creative and fun to read. His encounters with the students there, which are a cross-section of realistic types, are fairly realistic. A subplot with Bobby's old friends is not developed.

Bobby's younger brother, Cody, has an obsession with pretending he is a cliché of a Native American, replete with feather, that isn't explored fully. It's also uncomfortable when this young child, obsessed with fake Indian artifacts, shoplifts, and the aftermath of that episode is used for Bobby's story but not for Cody's story. There is another short attempt to connect with a fictional Native American when Bobby compares one of his friends to Chief Broom in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which will fly right over the heads of young readers who have no connection to the book or film. (Iconoclast alert: Fletcher, who has published several “how-to” writing books for students, also slams To Kill a Mockingbird.) Fletcher does connect Bobby's father to Bobby's story in true Hollywood fashion but in this case, it's fairly successful.

On a superficial level, there is much in this book to enjoy. It does have the bare bones of what could have been an even deeper story.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

The Liebster Blog Award

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 01:46:00 +0000

Many thanks to the wonderful Emma Hunneyball of In Potentia for nominating Ye Olde Humble Blog for the Liebster Blog Award! It's a lovely way to let fellow book lovers and bloggers know about other great blogs. As Emma wrote in her lovely note (found in the comments section of the review of The Mirador):

Hi Lynne

I was recently awarded the "Liebster Blog Award" and when prompted to share it with five other blogs I immediately thought of yours.

I'm a big fan of your book reviews, which are honest, varied and interesting.

congratulations!

Emma

I'm chuffed to be recognized by a fellow reader whose opinion I esteem as a discerning reader. In these days when niche markets and pigeonholes are the norm, it's a thrill to be recognized by a fellow blogger for refusing to stay in a pigeonhole or be stuck within the confines of a singular niche.

And when it comes to noting how lovely such recognition is, I cannot say better than Emma did at her blog, In Potentia:

Peer-to-peer awards are so important in this world: They let us support each other, reach out to each other and remind us that when we feel like our posts are disappearing into a vacuum of apathy, that someone out there is reading!

Check back in the next few days to see how I've chosen to pass this lovely award to in honoring more peers in this invigorating community.

Review: 'The Mirador'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:45:00 +0000

THE MIRADOR: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky by her Daughter
By Elisabeth Gille
Fictionalized biography
September 2011
NYRB Classics
ISBN: 978-1590174449

Elisabeth Gille was five years old when her mother was taken to the death camps and didn't return. Her father suffered the same fate. She and her older sister survived when a German officer saw the older girl's blonde hair and told their governess they were not taking any children that night. The governess understood. She and the children disappeared.

Decades later, when she was older than her mother ever became, and although she remembered nothing about her, Elisabeth tried to see the world through her mother's eyes. That attempt is The Mirador. Her mother was the once acclaimed, then forgotten, then reclaimed, writer Irene Nemirovsky. In pre-WWII France, Nemirovsky was greatly admired for her novels such as David Golder, the story of a Jewish banker who loses, then regains, a fortune. Reactions to this novel and Nemirovsky's being published in right-wing journals before her death made her a controversial figure as well as a celebrated writer.

In The Mirador, Gille writes from her mother's point of view about being raised in a secular home of a rich banker where the tenents of their family's heritage were never celebrated. She imagines her mother coming of age during the Russian Revolution, moving back and forth from the gilded cities of Russia as that world crumbled and Paris. Irene is portrayed as preternatural, a wise beyond her years woman child who nontheless has no clue about how dire her family's situation is. Instead, she is wrapped up in resentment of her mother, who spends her evenings with varied men friends while her father travels the world on business, and her books. It is a lovely world, and the fact we know it will soon disappear adds to its poignant elegance.

After the revolution and her family's safe return to France, there is a gap in the story. Now it's 1942 and Irene has married and given birth to two daughters. Their neighbors in the village where they moved are starting to shun them. A daughter needs emergency surgery; one neighbor finally succumbs to human kindness to take the child to another village to find one doctor who finally agrees to perform the surgery, then immediately sends the girl back. The family will lose their Parisian apartment; relatives make one last trip to retrieve some valuables they can sell to live on.

First her husband's employer refuses to help them, then Irene discovers that her belief that they are safe because she is a famous French writer is false. The literary establishment that once embraced her as a talented young woman who came to them from Russia is as unable to stand up to the Nazis as the rest of mainstream French society.

At the end of each chapter is a short look at Irene from the viewpoint of her daughter years later, adding to the feeling of impending doom.

If viewed only as a work of fiction, The Mirador has a flimsy quality to it; its strengths are more in the way of capturing certain scenes such as wintry sleigh rides and helpless aristocrats trapped in a hotel rather than a tightly woven narrative. As a way to try to come to terms with a complicated woman's life and complicated outlook, however, The Mirador is an emotionally open work that makes the reader feel compassion toward its author and her aims. It also sparks new interest in examining all of Nemirovsky's works in a new light, especially her most famous, incomplete work, Suite Francaise.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Last Dragon'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:28:00 +0000

THE LAST DRAGON
By Jane Yolen
Illustrated by Rebecca Guay
September 2011
Dark Horse Comics
ISBN: 978-1595827982

Dragons once ruled the islands on the edge of the land where men lived. But men settled on the islands and eventually conquered the flying serpents. For the last 200 years, men believed there were no more dragons. But they were wrong.

The first person to disappear is the healer, who had a timely conversation with his daughter Tansy about dragonsbane just before he makes a decent dinner for the dragon. Tansy is his youngest daughter and the one who will become a healer as well.

In true fairy tale fashion, she has two older sisters, who fill Mary and Martha roles as worker and dreamer. They and other villagers react to the dragon's menace in ways that show, in true fairy tale fashion, how fear makes people foolish.

Three boys are sent to scour inland for a hero to vanquish the dragon. They find someone, all right, but Lancot isn't quite what he seems (just as his name isn't quite Lancelot, he isn't quite heroic when we meet him). But because this is a fairy tale and it is written by Jane Yolen, Lancot and Tansy find a way to slay the dragon.

Jane Yolen's words and Rebecca Guay's art combine superbly for a richly detailed story. Dark Horse shows once again why it is a serious publisher in a field that encompasses a wide range of storytelling themes and styles with publications such as this. And Jane Yolen shows once again why she is one of the grand storytellers of our time.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Scorch City'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:58:00 +0000

SCORCH CITY
By Toby Ball
Fiction
September 2011
St Martins
ISBN: 978-0312580834

Fifteen years after the events in The Vaults, Toby Ball's brilliant noirish debut, his Scorch City follow-up takes an even darker turn. War veterans have returned, broken in spirit and body, while a more menacing threat worries some. A Red menace, that is.

Hovering over Scorch City's strands of a burgeoning civil rights movement, religious leaders and police corruption is the paranoia of people scared by the idea of communism and, even worse, the idea that someone might be a Commie in secret.

And a secret is how the story begins. A blonde woman's body is found washed up on the river near the Uhuru Community, an African-American enclave of shanties set apart from the bustling city. Its leaders of a Communist faction within the community contact influential columnist Frank Frings to contact in turn incorruptible policeman Piet Westermann to do the unthinkable. Westermann -- the true blue Lieut -- agrees to move the body so attention is turned away from the community even as the investigation into the young woman's death proceeds.

In short chapters, the action moves slowly but surely forward to a fiery conclusion. Why does the religious leader of Godtown, whose residents spend every evening at church, refuse to talk to police and call in the big guns to stymie the investigation? Why are two more women's bodies dumped in the river? The answers reveal that sometimes there is paranoia, and sometimes people really are out to get you. But perhaps not the ones you think.

What adds another layer to Ball's writing is how easy it is to transplant his story of McCarthyism tactics to today's world of media noise machines. The demonization of groups of people who aren't like you is a handy tool for tyrants. Ball shows how easily people of good will can be drawn into bigotry, and how easily bigots can wield power.

Even characters who aren't bigots play into the way tyrants control people, as when one character early on advocates organization within the community. Providing for people and leaving "them to their own devices as long as they are free" isn't enough, the character says. It certainly isn't enough in Scorch City, although Frings, who was introduced in The Vaults, hasn't had all his optimism crushed yet. Frings asks Westermann at one point which is more important to the police, protecting one of their own or justice? "Because institutions, Piet, you start making them more important than people, that's how things get balled up." Apply that to "too big to fail".

Ball combines such real world, contemporary connections with a writing style steeped in noir. The novel unfolds in the imagination like a black-and-white Warner Brothers classic. The noir fate for certain characters is inevitable and fascinating. The seamless weaving of point of view, character, story and style found in Ball's writing is fiction writing at its best.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Breadcrumbs'

noreply@blogger.com (Lynne Perednia) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:59:00 +0000

BREADCRUMBS
By Anne Ursu
Middle grade/YA fiction
September 2011
Walden Pond Press
ISBN: 978-0062015051

Hazel is a precocious fifth grader who believes in magic and the power of stories, and who relishes time with her best friend, Jack, more than anything. During recess after a particularly intense snowstorm, Jack gets hurt. Then he changes, Then he disappears in Anne Ursu's brilliant and enchanting Breadcrumbs.

What happened is that an imp made a magical mirror, flew it toward the sun to take a look at the entire Earth, and got too close (shades of Icarus!) The mirror shattered and shards fell across the world. One piece fell into Jack's eye. He is whisked away by a Snow Queen who offers him Turkish Delight. (When Jack says, “Huh?” the queen replies that it was “Just a little joke”.)

Hazel, who was adopted by her parents from India when she was an infant, hasn't made friends at the public school her long-time friend Jack has always attended and that she now must go to since her parents divorced. At first, she's the only one to notice the change in Jack and things get worse at school. After she throws a pencil case at a taunting boy, she gets to go to the counselor and a plan of action to help her only cements her despair.

She discovers she must set out on a quest to save her friend. And so she does. Her adventures are indeed the stuff of legend. Ursu references The Snow Queen, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, Coraline, Alice in Wonderland, The Red Shoes, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Nightingale, The Little Matchgirl, The Secret Garden and tales of faerie enchantments. And Hazel's last name is Anderson, as in Hans Christian.

Because quest stories are about more than the surface search, Hazel must wrestle with some hard truths about the nature of friendship and that boys and girls inevitably change and grow apart. As with the entire story, Ursu is not heavy-handed in handling this. Her pacing is such that readers will have the opportunity to put the book down and ponder how they feel about these hard truths.

Breadcrumbs is a future classic for middle grade and middle school students, and adults. High school students may not want to read about a fifth grader but for those who try it, they also would be enchanted with this story.

©2011 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission