Review:
West Oversea takes the tone of a saga, only with an accessibility that had me turning pages like a madwoman to find out what new wonder Lars Walker would create for me. I want to read everything else he’s ever written!

Lucky for you, the publisher (Nordskog Publishing) has given me 2 copies to give away to lucky readers of this blog! I’m so excited by this book that I’m opening up this contest to anyone, anywhere in the world. Just leave a comment before midnight EST on July 10, 2009. I’ll pick 2 winners at random.

Subtitled “A Norse Saga of Mystery, Adventure, and Faith,” West Oversea comes from the point of view of Father Aillil, an Irish priest who has heard that his sister Maeve is living as a thrall (slave) in Greenland. When brave, wise, and good Viking chieftan Erling Skjalgsson loses everything to his unscrupulous older brother, Father Aillil convinces him to set sail for Greenland to trade with Leif Eriksson. Before he leaves, Father Aillil is given a talisman called The Eye of Odin, a gray eye that gives Father Aillil the second sight. Despite his initial misgivings, the lure of power overtakes him and soon he is losing his faith and putting Erling, Erling’s wife and son, and all Erling’s men in jeopardy.

I love all things Norse and Scandinavian, having spent 5 memorable weeks in Iceland back in 2000. I also love a good adventure, and West Oversea delivers. Father Aillil is a marvelous narrator, full of flaws and sins. He’s no pious scold–he’s a man with a past who struggles with temptation. Erling is a first-rate hero. He’s courageous, noble, and admirable, yet he’s not afraid to kill to defend his honor. These were bloodthirsty times, and the body count is high, but Walker never lets the violence become sensationalized. He creates a context by which we can both understand and recoil from the bloodletting.

I was hooked on West Oversea from this exchange early in the book, where Erling debates whether to concede his holdings to his brother.

“It seems to me there are two kinds of right. Most times they sit in the same seat, so a man can bow to both at once. But sometimes they move to contrary ends of the hall, and then a man must choose.

“One kind of right is simple. You do what the law says. You keep your vows though it beggars you.

“The other kind is knottier. It means asking what action will bring the best fruit. Might my keeping my word bring suffering? Might it put folk in danger? Might it break some greater good I’m trying to work? Looking at it that way, a man might persuade himself it was right to break the law.”

“And what do you think?”

Erling wrapped his arms around himself and sat on the sod with a sudden movement, his cloak tented around him. He sat mute for a moment, staring at the red sun-ball in the south as the mist burned away. I waited for his word.

At last he said, “I think the second way gives a man an excuse to betray himself. I think any kind of crime and dishonor might be justified that second way.

“I will do my duty. I will lay down my power.”

He added, very softly, “I think it may kill me.”

What truth! What beauty! What excellence! I have so many people I want to loan this book too, but they better give it back, because this is one for my permanent collection.

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Review:
I wasn’t sure that I would like This Wicked World, being that I typically prefer British crime novels written by women to American crime novels of any kind. It did not take long for me to get totally sucked into the book, however, mainly because Richard Lange tells one helluva story.

Formerly a bodyguard to the rich and famous, Jimmy Boone is working as a bartender and a building superintendent while on parole after beating a client half to death. He’s trying to keep his nose clean, but when he helps the bouncer at his bar try to get answers for the grandfather of a dead young Mexican man, Boone winds up bringing home a badly injured pit bull whose teeth have all been forcibly extracted. He decides to do a little digging on his own and soon he’s in one wicked world of trouble.

You can’t help but feel sympathy for a guy who rescues a dog that’s been so mistreated. Boone really wants to tread the straight and narrow, in sharp contrast with most of the rest of the characters. It’s a sad story, and a dark story, but it’s not a story that glamorizes the criminal life at all. I really appreciated that Lange was up to something deeper than just guns and goons. I wish Superfast Husband had more time for books because I know he’d really like this one.

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Review:
I really did not care for A Morning Like This. I felt like David expected cheap grace just because the child from his affair had cancer, and didn’t think he needed to do any real work of repentance. He was just awful to Abby, not allowing her the space to grieve the loss of the marriage she thought she had. He didn’t seem to have any sense of the depth of his sin, nor sorrow over wronging God. Where is the fear and trembling?

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Review:
Ms. Taken Identity could’ve been a big huge miss. It’s a great concept that the author could’ve coasted on. Happily, Ms. Taken Identity has humor, heart, and a whole lot of smarts.

Mitch is a PhD candidate with a 750-page magnum opus that nobody wants to buy. On a lark, he decides to write chick lit because in his mind, any idiot can do it. He adopts a false persona and infiltrates a dance class, where he meets the winsome Marie and falls in love. Of course, since he’s living a lie it’s all bound to blow up in his face. I usually hate stories where this happens, but Dan Begley makes it work because he goes for real emotions instead of relying on the circumstances of the plot. You can see where the story is going from page one, but it’s still really enjoyable. As Mitch learns, there’s nothing wrong with formula if the characters are people you can believe in. Fun stuff!

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Review:
The Castaways put me off at first because it reminded me of The Big Chill, a movie I’ve never liked. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why, except I know it has something to do with Glenn Close’s smug smile throughout. Perhaps it was because although they were ostensibly reuniting because of a death, they were so solipsistic in their mourning. I found some of that in The Castaways, with motherly Andrea taking the Glenn Close role as the most annoying among them.

Greg and Tess have always been the golden couple in their group of eight, but when they go out for an anniversary sail from their home in Nantucket to nearby Martha’s Vineyard, their boat ends up capsized and both Greg and Tess are killed. The rest of the group shatters in grief, particularly Addison, who had been having a love affair with Tess, though he cannot share his particular grief with anyone. Andrea, Tess’s older sister, anoints herself the most devastated and takes immediate custody of Greg and Tess’s two children. This hurts Delilah deeply, because she knows that the kids would rather live with her–and would be better off as well. Meanwhile, their spouses follow their own journeys of grief while struggling to repair their rapidly shattering marriages.

Elin Hilderbrand is expert at limning the details of relationships, making choices for her characters that are subtle and unexpected. The Castaways’s complex twin geographies of mourning and sexual attraction held my interest even though the only character I really connected with was Delilah. While it’s not one I am jumping up and down for, I would recommend it to someone looking for a meaty book about relationships, one with more substance than the usual beach read and with a story rich in emotions and character.

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Review:
I’m totally the wrong demographic for “boomer lit,” and I never really connected with the characters in You Make Me Feel Like Dancing. I felt like the Christian aspect didn’t go very deep, with much of the God-talk feeling like Oprah-theology, not orthodox Christianity. It just was not for me.

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Review:
The Sinful Life of Lucy Burns was a quick, breezy read. Elizabeth Leikness has imagination to spare when it comes to her plotting, and I never quite guessed what was coming next. She has a wonderfully satirical wit, but her book isn’t superficial at all.

Lucy’s job is to wrangle the truly wicked and send them to hell, and has been paid handsomely for it. In addition to her sister’s life being saved, Lucy has a perfect body and all the worldly goods she wants. However, she’s estranged from her family and prevented from falling in love. She wants a normal life desperately, but afraid she’ll end up transferred to the (very hot) Main Office.

The theological underpinnings of the book aren’t exactly orthodox–they’re more Gnostic than anything else–but that didn’t detract from the pleasures of the book. Sure, this Faustian tale won’t cut the Reformed or Catholic muster, but the voice that Leiknes creates for Lucy is a lot of fun to experience.

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Review:
Breezy and snazzy, The Down and Dirty Dish on Revenge does a lot with what seems on the surface to be a thin premise. Eva Nagorski looks at revenge in literature, through history, and across different cultures, with almost a sociologist’s eye. She peppers the book with real-life anecdotes of revenge both creative and mean-spirited. And she closes the book with a chapter on the virtues of forgiveness as the best revenge of all.

A lot of the stories that Nagorski presents don’t seem to me to be revenge per se–more like justice, if you ask me! I love it when a cheater gets his or her comeuppance, particularly in the form of a creative divorce settlement, as in the woman who won all her husband’s baseball collectibles then sold them on Ebay. I’m less a fan of the people who make sex tapes public–though I suppose the people who make sex tapes to begin with should know the risk involved.

Christian theology teaches forgiveness because even righteous anger can quickly turn sinful, and because only God can enact true justice. However, I do think it is possible to teach someone a hard lesson, if your aim is to bring them to repentance. Revenge may feel good at the time, but it will never be as satisfying as true forgiveness.

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Review:
The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome is a good companion piece to James Howard Kunstler’s A Geography of Nowhere. Author John F. Wasik offers a cogent overview of the current housing crisis along with an analysis of the unsustainability of the current fads in American housing. He explains trends in environmentally conscious architecture and building, and offers his ideas about what it will take to put the American dream back to rights.

I was most interested by his discussion of “spurbs,” housing clusters that are not connected to a metropolitan area, offer no public transportation, are not walkable, and are interspersed with strip malls and shopping centers. I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore and now I live in Queens, NY, so I’m not intimately familiar with these areas. They sound like nowhere I’d want to live. I love what I read about the New Urbanism, one of whose central tenets is “get people outside.” I love that I can walk everywhere–sure, it’s a 30 minute walk to the park but that’s great exercise, and it’s so fun to bump into people I know along the way.

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Review:
Though not quite as poetically haunting as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, The Unit is a gripping account of a utilitarian world where humans constitute the ultimate resource.

Basically, any man or woman who has not had children by a certain age gets locked up in paradise, where they are the subjects of various experiments, and donate their organs one by one until they have to give one that they can no longer live without. Dorrit largely accepts her fate, though she experiences an understandable anger and grief at times. She falls in love with a man in the unit, experiencing romance for the first time in her life. It’s heartbreaking to know that her story is bound to end in tragedy.

Holmqvist’s elegant plot doesn’t try to do too much, sticking largely with emotions and ideas. Still, there was enough of an engine here to keep me turning the pages. I definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys dystopian fiction.

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