Coco Chanel once famously said, "Once you've dressed, and before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take at least one thing off". While she was talking about fashion, I think there is some relevance in that quote for writing as well. While good fiction can be mutli-layered and complex, adding more characters, more plot lines, more words just for the sake of them can take a decent story and put it over the top.

I think that Kristin Hannah should have taken that advice when writing The Magic Hour. It is the
story of a psychiatrist named Julia who must flee her practice in disgrace after a scandal involving a patient of hers who perpetrated a violent act at school. When her sister, the sheriff in the small town where they grew up, calls her to consult on a case, she sees both an escape hatch and a chance to earn some redemption. A little girl has shown up in the town-battered, bruised, malnourished, non-verbal, and animalistic. The sheriff wants Julia to assess the girl, and get her to tell them who she is. As Julia begins to work with the girl, she realizes that she has stumbled upon a feral child-a child who has essentially been raised  without any normal human socialization. As Julia becomes closer to the girl, she is determined to protect her from any and all outside influences that might want to exploit her.

This is the first Hannah book I've read, and I will admit that the kind of women's fiction she writes (a la Lifetime movie) is not really my jam. But I was intrigued enough with the premise that I think I would have been OK with the book if only she had followed dear old Coco's advice. There is a LOT going on in this book. There's the scandal that sends Julia away from her lucrative Los Angeles practice; the feral girl; a love story between Julia and one of the doctors in town, who in turn has his own secret that he is protecting; a love story between the sheriff and one of her deputies; a rocky relationship between the two sisters that must be resolved; a group of psychiatrists who want to study the girl like a specimen in a jar; and finally, the girl's father. The girl's father and his back story was the last straw.  See, the girl's father was a man who was accused of killing his wife and child (the girl) when they disappeared years before. Convicted of their murder, he was in jail until DNA tests determined that the girl was really his "murdered" offspring. When he comes to collect her, there is a war of wills between him-rich, arrogant, self-centered-and Julia-caring, nurturing, mama-bear like. It was just one thing too many. The love stories were irrelevant to the main plot, and the added convolution of the father being a convicted killer who maybe isn't a killer but is still a "bad guy" pushed it into the absurd.

Bottom line, I wasn't really feeling this one by the end. But I did finish it, so that's something, I suppose. So, lovers of Lifetime movies, have at it!

Review of The Art of Forgetting, Wherein I Find a Chick Lit Book I Didn't Hate

I tend to shy away from anything that could be considered "chick lit" . As a lesbian in her mid-40s, the stories of young women in search of a man, a career, and the perfect size 2 don't really speak to me much. So when The Art of Forgetting by Camille Pagan appeared as an unsolicited review request in my mailbox, I almost put it right in the donation bin. But something stopped me from sending it back out into the universe to find a more receptive reader. I've always been fascinated by the mysterious workings of the human brain. There is so much that we don't understand yet about how it works, about how much of what makes us "us" is merely structural or chemical in nature. This novel, while not heavy on scientific explanation, does at least present a rather unique take on the friendship story.

The main character and narrator, Marissa, has always played second fiddle to her charismatic best

friend Julia. Ever since junior high, when the popular Julia chose the rather unassuming Marissa as her best friend, the two have been inseparable, but there has never been any question of who is the more dominant in the relationship. Now young adults, Marissa and Julia live in New York. Julia is a talented ballet dancer, and Marissa is an editor at a magazine. Despite her career success, Marissa is still insecure in many ways. She is in a safe, happy, but not super-passionate relationship. She worries about her weight, and her clothes, and she second guesses her instincts at work. One day, Julia is hit by a car crossing the street. While her physical injuries are minor, she sustains brain damage that affects her memory, mood, and personality. Suddenly, it is Marissa who must take the lead in their relationship, causing her to finally deal with her feelings about a long-lost love she gave up in college because Julia told her to.

As you can imagine, said long-lost love shows back up in their lives, Marissa has to decide if she wants to give it a try with him or stay with her loyal but slightly boring boyfriend. She has to figure out who she is without Julia there to define her. She has to decide whether to stay in her current job, or take a chance that could bolster her career. Meanwhile, she is forced to go back home to Michigan, where she also has to deal with her weight obsessed mother and the feelings of inferiority she learned from her. Basically, everything that I usually don't like in a book finds a home in The Art of Forgetting. But for some reason, this time it mostly worked for me. I didn't get annoyed by the constant focus on weight, looks, and size. I wasn't impatient with the "I have to choose between this man and that man, because obviously NO man is not an option" storyline. I felt empathy for Julia, even though she was annoying before the accident left her sort of bitchy. There was enough heart behind the writing that while this book won't make any of my top ten lists, it did keep my attention, and overall I enjoyed it.

The First Thing, and the Last

Katherine Stuart lived every day in fear. Fear that her husband would finally kill her, or turn his abusive attentions to her young son. After a brutal argument and knife fight in their Boston kitchen, Katherine's husband and son both lie dead on the floor.

Hundreds of miles away in Vermont, Lucy Dudley reads the newspaper accounts of Katherine's tragedy, and feels drawn to reach out to her. Lucy, an elderly woman living by herself on a small farm in rural Vermont, feels an immediate kinship with Katherine. She is carrying her own scars, and a secret that she has kept for almost five decades. Despite the two women being complete strangers, Katherine accepts Lucy's invitation to recover on the farm, and a beautiful relationship begins to take shape.

Readers who are interested in issues of domestic violence and their aftermath should find lots to interest them in Alan G. Johnson's novel, The Thing and the Last. Johnson, who was best known to me as the author of The Gender Knot, a non-fiction book about unraveling patriarchy, does an excellent job writing female characters who humanize the travesty and tragedy that is domestic violence in modern American culture. While the first chapter moves at lightning speed, the rest of the action of the book is slow and measured, much like recovery itself. Katherine is so broken by her experiences that she is not sure whether she can ever find a life for herself worth living. Lucy, as constant and stubborn as a boulder, provides both a soft place for Katherine to land, and a strong foundation for rebuilding her shattered life. How can Katherine give up on herself when Lucy never does?

While I have never had the experiences Katherine or Lucy have lived through, I couldn't help but think as I read that EVERYONE needs a Lucy in their life. A person who doesn't judge, but accepts you with all of your flaws. A person who is a constant comforting presence, just by the very fact of her existence in your life. Bit by bit, Lucy helps Katherine manage her grief, providing the compass for getting through the darkness, and finding at least a glimpse of the light. This book is a beautiful testament to the power of friendship and platonic love between women, and the power of forgiveness and redemption.

Revival, Stephen King

Stephen King's latest novel continues his long tradition of using events from his own life to inform the lives of his extremely well-crafted and believable characters.  Revival is the story of fanaticism and addiction and magic (or science?  Magical science?  Scientific magic?).  The main character is Jamie, who first meets Rev. Jacobs when he is a young boy living in a small town with his parents and siblings.  Rev. Jacobs and his young wife take over the struggling church in town, and turn it into a thriving congregation, complete with an active youth ministry.  All of the young people in town love Rev. Jacobs and his beautiful, talented wife, and they are taken in by his adorable little boy.  When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, Rev. Jacobs preaches a sermon that gets him driven out of town.

Years later, Jamie is a strung-out rock guitarist who is one high away from being incarcerated or dead. When he stumbles upon the Rev. Jacobs at a carnival, he can barely believe what he's seeing. The former minister has taken his lifelong fascination with electricity and devised some truly amazing optical illusions.  But that's not all Charles Jacobs has discovered.  The man formerly known as Rev. Jacobs thinks he can help Jamie with his little addiction problem, but the help will come at a price that Jamie isn't sure he's willing to pay.

King himself famously dealt with an addiction to pain killers after a near-fatal car accident left him in near constant pain for years as he recovered.  Jamie's drug addiction certainly mirrors his experience to a certain extent, but it is Rev. Jacob's addiction that is the truly frightening part of this story.  While this story is not horror in the traditional sense, there is that element of the supernatural that infuses almost all of King's works in some way.  This time the "magic" is presented in the guise of science that we don't yet understand, and highlights the dangers of playing around with natural forces without really understanding the possible consequences.

The story also explores the nature of faith, both in the opening section when Jamie is a child, and later in the book when the Rev. Jacobs becomes a faith healer.  The power that Jacobs had was terrifying, but couched in the language and ritual of religion people were more than willing to be taken in.  People who are desperately searching for an end to their fear, pain, and despair become easy marks for a con man.  But was it a con?  If people really were healed, did it matter where the power came from? When Jamie discovered that the people who were healed didn't always stay that way, he became determined to stop Jacobs.  Determined, that is, until it was his own high school sweetheart who needed help.  As usual, King shines a light on human nature in all of its flawed beauty.

The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier

I'm a  pretty big fan of historical fiction.  To be honest, I wish that history classes were taught using historical fiction as the hook.  Read Ken Follett, then research the time period to confirm or deny his portrayal. (Of course, I think that literature can teach us just about anything).

For instance, if you were interested in art, say the process of making tapestries, in the 17th century, you could read Tracy Chevalier's The Lady and the Unicorn.  Much as she did in The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Chevalier used a famous piece of art from the past and created an elaborate backstory using characters based on the real artists, artisans, nobles, petty bureaucrats, and common folk who contributed (either in reality or in the fictional world she creates) to the creation of that work of art. In The Lady and the Unicorn, we are introduced to an arrogant Parisian artist named Nicholas des Innocentes (who is anything but).  This womanizer is commissioned by a newly noble patron to design a set of tapestries to be hung in his formal dining room.  Nicholas agrees, though not before seducing the young daughter of his patron.  When he insists on traveling to Brussels to oversee the work of turning his smallish paintings into large tapestries, we meet the weaver, Georges, and his family.  Jumping back and forth between Paris and Brussels, we learn a lot about French society, the social expectations of men and women based on their gender and station, and about making tapestries in the pre-industrial age.

The best parts of the book for me was the descriptions of the tapestry making process.  The process was incredibly painstaking, and could takes months or years to complete depending on the size of the tapestry and the complexity of the pattern.  The plot itself has enough drama to make it an enjoyable read even if you don't care about the art-making parts, with lots of twists and turns.  There is lust, love, betrayal-all of the components of a satisfying read.  The story is old through alternating perspectives, which has become a very common narrative style, and Chevalier does a good job making the story feel cohesive despite the frequent change in narrator.  As historical fiction goes, I suspect this book is longer on the fiction than the history, but either way it is an an enjoyable way to spend a few hours!

The Honey Thief

This fall I installed a Little Free Library in my front yard.  For anyone who might not be familiar with Little Free Library, it is an organization that promotes and supports small "take one, give one" libraries in yard, parks, and other public places.  To be honest, my reasons for wanting on were not entirely altruistic.  I need somewhere for the "ink and paper" books I've read to go, and I can only give so many at a time to my public library.  But, of course, the universe has other plans for me than neat, orderly, not-stuffed-to-the-gills bookshelves.  It's that whole "give one" part of "take one, give one" that gets me.  Because while its true that the books I read go to good home (rather than my overstuffed bookcases), they are replaced with other books!  Clearly, my house is meant to be a permanent fire hazard.

There are, of course, upsides to this arrangement, like getting to know my neighbors as readers, and
watching the neighbor kids come running to see if there is anything new in the library for them.  But the biggest, without doubt, is that books appear before me that I would never have found on my own. Such was the case with The Honey Thief, by Elizabeth Graver.  It tells the story of eleven year old Eva, a city girl exiled to rural upstate New York after a brief crime spree as a shoplifter.  In desperation, her mother Miriam gives up her job, finds a subletter for their tiny Manhattan apartment, and hightails it out to the country.  Eva spends her days riding her bike down isolated roads, blacktop and dirt, while the babysitter her mother hired sleeps on the porch in the heat of the day.  One day while riding, Eva comes upon a table full of honey, glowing in the sunlight.  Her inner conflict (should she steal it or not) causes her to come back again and again to the small farm, where she gets to know the reclusive bee keeper, and where she learns about the importance of balance and harmony, in the life of the bees, and in the life of her family.

It can be a challenge for authors to write adult novels with child narrators, but Graver manages it pretty well.  There are also chapters told from the point of view of the bee keeper, and of her mother, but it is Eva's chapters where the real emotional pay off is for the reader.  I found myself rooting for Eva, even when she made choices that were not necessarily in anyone's best interest.  Graver also manages the fact that Eva is a girl child and the bee keeper an adult man in a way that is neither creepy nor inappropriate (though there is one scene that verges on ewwww).  All in all, I'd say The Honey Thief is a pretty good way to spend an afternoon.

Help for the Haunted, John Searles

I love spooky stories.  Some of my very favorite authors write the best ones (I'm looking at you, King and Gaiman).  I am also a skeptic.  I read supposedly "real" accounts of ghosts and spirits and the like and I am completely unmoved.  But a fictional ghost story gets me every time.

I also love mysteries, so I was pretty excited when my mother recommended Help for the Haunted by John Searle.  A murder mystery of sorts, with all of the supernatural, paranormal creepiness I could want.  The narrator of the story, Sylvie, is the daughter of a pair of "spirit hunters".  They make their living giving talks at paranormal conventions, and helping people with hauntings.  After getting a strange phone call one snowy night, Sylvie and her parents leave the warmth of home for a cold dark of an empty church at midnight.  Before the night is over, both of her parents are dead, and Sylvie and her sister are left orphaned.

One year later, Sylvie is trying to deal with her grief over her parents' deaths, and to process her feelings about her own role in the events of that winter's evening.  She feels as though there is something important she is not remembering about what happened in that church, and she desperately wants to remember before the man accused of killing her mother and father go on trial.  Her sister, who is now her guardian, is no help, all anger and indifference and sarcasm.  And, the spooky events that used to plague her family during her parents' work have started happening again-dolls that appear where they shouldn't, lights that appear to turn on and off by themselves.  It's all too much, and Sylvie feels as though she will go crazy if she can't discover the truth.

I really enjoyed the mood of the whole book, up until the very end.  There is just enough creepy goodness to make you a little uncomfortable (in a good way, if you like that sort of thing) while you are reading (probably with the lights on).  But this is also a story about mothers and daughters, about faith vs. skepticism, and about trying to do right by people, even when you're not sure what "right" is. That said, I was disappointed in the ending.  Without giving anything away, I can confidently say that most readers of this book will be completely blindsided by the answer to the riddle of what happened that night in the church, not because Searle expertly crafts such a tight narrative that the clues are only obvious in hindsight, but because the clues are not really there to begin with.  While this isn't technically the right term for what I mean, the resolution to the story had a deus ex machina kind of feeling.  Something comes right out of left field that no one could have seen coming, which annoyed me on a certain level because it made the end feel disjointed, like the ending to another story. Or maybe I was just not paying enough attention (but I don't think so).  At any rate, I'd still recommend this book to anyone who likes a good scary story, or a good family story, or a good mystery story. It's a (mostly) satisfying read.

Stereotype Busting in Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

As someone who is engaged in social justice work and peacemaking through youth ministry, I am probably hyper-aware of how various groups are people are represented in media.  Overall, I find that news outlets, especially the less serious ones, tend to play on the stereotypes people have about the "other" (blacks, Hispanics, gays, the poor) when reporting their stories, or even in choosing which stories to cover.  Television comedies get easy laughs from portraying members of various groups in stereotypical ways, and social media memes like "The People of Wal-Mart" appeal to the lowest form of shaming disguised as "humor" to make their posts go viral.  Even as someone who strives to be anti-racist and anti-oppressive in my own language, I sometimes find myself using words and phrases that upon reflection are in fact just the opposite.

Therefore it was refreshing to read Barbara Kingsolver's novel Flight Behavior, set in Appalachia, and see her deftly highlight the very real issues of poverty and lack of education that have historically affected the area without blaming the people of Appalachia for them.  One of the most persistent stereotypes about people from areas of the US south and east of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers is that of "red neck" or "hillbilly".  Given the amount of rural poverty, lack of access to education and job training, and the Bible Belt culture of the southeast, it is easy to look at those living in poverty and assume that they must "want" to live that way, or that they are just too backward thinking to raise themselves out of circumstances that most of the rest of the country thinks are "trashy".  Those who are being the most generous consider them victims of ignorance and superstition, as though the social ills that result in the poverty and poor quality of education there are the result of some natural process, rather than of systems created and perpetuated by other humans.   Kingsolver, in Flight Behavior's main character Dellarobia,  has created a fully developed human person who will make the reader question their own assumptions about the people of the Appalachia region.

Dellarobia is a young mother of two small children, living with her husband in a small house on her in-laws' sheep farm.  She feels desperately trapped by the narrow edges of her life.  A stay-at-home mom, who once had dreams of going to college and leaving her small mountain town, Dellarobia is on her way to an assignation with another man when she stumbles upon the most amazing sight-the forest is covered in millions of monarch butterflies.  Despite the natural wonder of the scene, her father-in-law is determined to log the mountain to pay of his debts and keep his farm.  When scientists arrive in town to discover why the monarchs have strayed from their usual migration pattern, they and some of the more religious townspeople, who see the butterflies' arrival as a sign from God, become unlikely allies in trying to save them.

Through Dellarobia's eyes, we see the quiet strength of a people who are living so close to the edge of survival, and the power of religion to give people hope that the next life will be better.  In her mother-in-law, we see a woman who has grown hard and brittle, rigid in her insistence on conforming to tradition, that comes from a life filled with the constant struggle to put food on the table.  The reactions of the scientists to the lack of education and superstitious beliefs of some of the townspeople holds a mirror up to anyone who has helped perpetuate the negative hillbilly stereotype, though it is the media for whom Kingsolver reserves her scorn.  Dellarobia's naive experiences with the news reporter who comes to talk to her about the butterflies highlight starkly the exploitation of marginalized and vulnerable people in the search for readers and ratings.

And while it was the way Kingsolver's character reflected an inherent dignity and essential humanity that most spoke to me, at its core this is a book about the controversial issue of climate change. Calling the residents of this fictional mountain town climate change deniers is too strong, because climate change as a social problem is barely on their radar.  Those who have considered it only have the opinions of the local conservative radio host to go on, because the science teacher/basketball coach at the local high school spend most of the class sessions in pick-up games with the boys, and the students at the local community college are only interested in learning the bare minimum to get a job with a regular income.  Dellarobia becomes a bridge from that world to the scientists, and through her Kingsolver examines the way that faith, knowledge, and tradition intersect, and the difficulty of changing hearts and minds when what has always been done is what is always expected.

Is the Universe Trying to Tell Me Something?

The last book I reviewed for this blog was about a medieval hangman who solved the mystery of a murder supposedly perpetrated by a woman who was then falsely accused of withcraft, The Hangman's Daughter.  I read the last page, looked at my Kindle library, and chose a Robert R. McCammon book that I hadn't yet read.  The first McCammon book I read, called Boy's Life, reminded me a lot of one of my very favorite author's, Stephen King.  I assumed I would get something similar with Speaks the Nightbird.  So imagine my consternation when I found myself reading a mystery, about a murder, that was blamed on a woman, who was falsely accused of, you guessed it, witchcraft.  What exactly is the universe trying to tell me?  Should I refrain from making poppets and potions?  Healing the sick? 

Speaks the Nightbird stars Matthew Corbett, clerk for Magistrate Isaac Woodward, who is on his way to the far flung town of Fount Royal, in the Carolina territory to hold the trial of an accused witch, Rachel Howarth.  The year is 1699, and the Salem witch trials are still a fresh memory in the minds of many.  Fount Royal is the dream of a weathly shipbuilder who will do anything to see his town survive.  People have been fleeing ever since the murder of the minister and Daniel Howarth, husband of the accused.  The town founder had one goal-burn the witch, for the sake of the town!  But things are not as cut and dried as one might think.  Matthew finds himself drawn to Rachel, but more importantly to his sense of honor and justice, he thinks she has been framed, meaning the real killer is getting away with murder, literally.

Well, regardless of the message I was being sent, Speaks the Nightbird and The Hangman's Daughter are not exactly the same.  The Hangman's Daughter takes place in 17th century Germany, and Speaks the Mightbird takes place in 17th century America.  Matthew Corbett, the main character of Speaks the Nightbird, is a well educated man who was rescued from the almshouse as a young man.  The titular hangman of the other novel is an older gentleman who is a societal outcast because of his profession.  But the stories end up being remarkably similar, and both shine a light into the kind of superstition and hysteria that caused innocent men and women to be burned alive as punishment for the supposed witchcraft they hypothetically practiced. 

To be honest, if you had given me both Boy's Life and Speaks the Nightbird, minus the author's name, I would never have guessed that these books were written by the same person.  McCammon's earlier books are mostly supernatural thrillers or horror, but he took about a decade off from publishing, and Speaks the Nightbird was the first book he published in this new genre.  This book is the first in a series, of which there are at least two more.  I'm looking forward to both carching up on McCammon's earlier works, and continuing the journey with Matthew Corbett and 17th century America.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I have a t-shirt that says "Authors are my rock stars".  It features a jaunty picture of Edgar Allen Poe wearing John Lennon-style sunglasses.  And aside from the clever mash-up of depressive, alcoholic 19th century author and free-loving  20th century musician, the message on the shirt is true for me, and I bet is true for many of you.  Sure, it would be cool to meet some of my favorite rock stars (John Bon Jovi comes to mind!), but if you really want to get me excited, tell me I am going to meet one of my favorite authors.

So imagine my delight, excitement, and butterfly-in-the-stomach inducing invitation to the wedding of a friend of mine at the home of none other than Neil Gaiman!  I won't bother to go into the ways in which my friend and Mr. Gaiman are connected...suffice it to say that he and his wife Amanda Palmer had graciously offered their lovely home in Cambridge, MA for the ceremony and reception.  (They have since moved, thereby negating any lingering stalkerish impulses knowing their address may have had.) Obviously I was thrilled for my friend and her fiance, and would have flown cross-country to see them wed regardless of the setting.  But Neil Gaiman!?!  He's near the top of my "prominent people dinner party" list-you know, that list of people that you would invite to a dinner party just to listen to the amazing wonderfulness that falls from their lips in between bites of exquisitely prepared gourmet food.

When I learned I would be meeting him, I quickly realized that it would be in my best interest to read his latest two books prior to the wedding.  Because clearly we would become fast friends and spend the entire evening talking about his amazing work.  (Spoiler alert:  this did not, in fact, come to pass.  I met him, congratulated him on his recent book awards, and then spent the rest of the evening too nervous and awkward to actually try to have a conversation with the man.  And you'll have to take my word for it that any of this actually happened-I was also too nervous and awkward to ask for a photo.)  Mr. Gaiman had two books come out recently.  One, a children's book called Fortunately, the Milk, is still in my to-be-read stack. But the other, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I picked up immediately after getting the wedding invitation.

First, let me say that given the pretty short length and the age of the main character of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I assumed it was another children's book.  Good thing I actually read it before I handed it out to any of the children at my school.  It may be short, and be mostly about children, but it is very definitely not for the under 12 crowd.  The story is told in flashback.  The narrator is a man returning to his childhood home for a funeral.  While there, he revisits places he knew as a child.  He find himself drawn to the farm at the end of the road, and to the pond that stands behind the neat farmhouse.  All those years ago, he met a girl named Lettie Hempstock and her remarkable family there, and as he gazes at the pond (which Lettie called an ocean), memories of the most terrifying time of his life come flooding back.  When a man committed suicide in his family's car, it created a soft spot in our world that allowed something horrible to come through, something that almost destroyed his family, and could have destroyed the world as we know it.  It is up to Lettie and her family to put things right again.

The suicide was the first thing that clued me into the fact that perhaps I had misjudged the intended audience for the book.  The fact that the evil thing that comes through the hole in the world seduced his father in the guise of an attractive nanny made it official.  But despite some very adult events, the book does read childlike.  Gaiman was able to capture what happened in a way that we understand it as a child might understand it, and it reminded me of my own childhood fears-fears about monsters and losing my parents. Those seem to be fairly universal childhood fears, and Gaiman uses them expertly to create a sense of menace, even though much of the book is not, in fact, violent.  And like the boy in the story, we are left wondering about the nature of Lettie and her family as much as we are about this monster and where it came from.  There is basically no back story for those characters in the book, at least not directly stated.  You can infer a few things from the abilities of the characters and the way they describe "crossing the ocean", but there is no grand explanation.  In the end it didn't matter.  The story has an emotional impact and a creepiness factor that are independent of the mythology of the supernatural characters involved.

I enjoyed The Ocean at the End of the Lane differently than I enjoyed some of his other books.  It's doesn't have the intricate plotlines of American Gods or Anansi's Boys, and I guess it comes the closest to Coraline in terms of its overall mood.  But it is truly a story like I have never read before, which I think speaks volumes about Gaiman's talent as a storyteller.  Maybe our paths will cross again someday, and I will overcome my awkwardness enough to have that conversation about his art.  But until then, I'll make do with his always entertaining and thought-provoking books.

The Hangman's Daughter

A witch trial, torture, murdered children, the devil, and buried treasure...doesn't exactly sound like a pleasant way to spend the afternoon, does it?  But when these elements come together in Oliver Potzch's novel The
Hangman's Daughter, that's exactly what you get.  The main character is Jakob Kuisl, the executioner for a small town in Germany in the 1600s.  As executioner, it is also his job to torture suspects to gain confessions that could be used by the powers that be to justify the executions they ordered.  In this story, the accused is a midwife who is charged with witchcraft.  A young boy has been murdered, and he appears to have a symbol of witchcraft tattooed on his shoulder.  The woman is captured by a mob, and taken to the hangman to be questioned.  He does not believe in her guilt, however, and does whatever he can to put off the torture and eventual burning at the stake that inevitably follows such an accusation.  He works with the son of the town doctor, Simon, and grudgingly with his oldest daughter, Magdalena, to find the real killer and save the woman from a gruesome fate.

The main character's profession is only one thing that makes this book different from other historical mysteries I've read.  It is set in Germany during the middle ages, and there is sufficient detail about the daily life of the average person of that time that I can only assume the context is well-researched.  It highlights much of the backward thinking of the day, from the existence of witchcraft itself, to the severe class distinctions, to the political structure of small towns of the era, to the completely unscientific practice of "medicine" during that period in history.  This in itself makes for interesting reading.

But there is more than just a well-researched setting.  The mystery itself is sufficiently developed that I was kept guessing until pretty much the end of the story.  Potzch finds a good balance between exposition and action, and while the description of the torture inflicted on this poor woman is detailed enough to make you squirm, it is not gratuitous, and definitely does not glamorize it at all.  In fact, one of the things that I loved about the character of Jakob Kuisl is how conflicted he is about his profession.  It was never something he wanted to do, but the rigidly enforced class structure meant that he had very few options-his father and his father's father were executioners, therefore he must be as well.  But being a principled man, he wants to ensure that his torture does not lead to the death of anyone who is not well and truly guilty.  He is also in intellectual, which is what draws the physician's son, Simon, into his orbit.  It is socially unacceptable to be friends with the hangman, but Jakob has books that a scholar like Simon can only dream of, and together their combination of intellect and experience make them a very effective, if very unorthodox,  detective team.  This book is the first in a series, and I look forward to spending more time in 17th century Germany uncovering the truth about murder and mayhem.

A Bitter Truth, by Charles Todd

Charles Todd, the mother-son writing team of Caroline Todd and Charles Todd, first introduced nurse and accidental detective Bess Crawford in A Duty to the Dead.  Ms. Crawford's world is World War I England. The daughter of a British colonel who grew up in India, Bess felt compelled to do her duty to her country by becoming a nursing sister in France.  During her leaves, she often comes home to England, where she shares a flat in London with some other nursing sisters.  When not in London, she visits her parents in the English countryside.  Given the diverse places she find herself (battlefield, gritty London street, or bucolic English field), she has plenty of opportunity to get drawn into drama and mystery.

In this particular story, Bess is home on leave during the winter of 1917.  Struggling from the train station to her flat in London through a frigid rain, she discovers a bruised young woman shivering on her doorstep. Being incapable of ignoring the suffering of any poor soul, she invites the woman into her flat to warm up and dry off.  She learns that the woman is the wife of a wealthy landowner from Sussex, who has run away from her husband after he struck her during an argument.  She wants to return home, but it afraid of what her husband will do.  She asks Bess to accompany her to Vixen Hill, the family's country estate.  Bess, who desperately wants to see her own family, cannot refuse the terrified woman's request.

Vixen Hill proves to be a brooding manor house, surrounded by harsh, windswept countryside.  Bess is grudgingly welcomed by the family, who are mourning the loss of the oldest son in the war.  When a guest at the memorial service is found murdered, Bess and everyone in the house become suspects, and family secrets begin to come out.  Bess' quest to identify the murderer and help the family takes her from England to the devastated villages of France.

I enjoy the Bess Crawford novels for a variety of reasons, from the setting to the strong-willed main character to the rather intricate plots.  Of course, I like all things British, and the fact that the setting of this series closely resembles Downton Abbey doesn't hurt.  I have to say that for the most part I didn't really like any of the characters in this book, other than Bess and the other recurring characters in the series.  But that strangely didn't make it any less enjoyable to read.  Despite their rather selfish behavior, and downright snobbery, I couldn't help but be drawn in emotionally, and found myself empathizing with the grief and sadness that was just below the surface of their family life.  I did feel as though the middle section dragged a bit, but the ending was dramatic enough to make up for it.  If you are a fan of period mysteries a la Agatha Christie, then I think that you would enjoy Bess Crawford's investigatory capers!

Ten White Geese

Right about this time of year, after the holidays and months before spring break, when the weather is dreary and the days still short, I start to long to run away to a little cabin in the woods.  Ideally, it would be me, a stack of books, and no cell phone or internet.  I desire the solitude, the lack of responsibility for anyone but myself, and permission to hunker down and wait for warmer weather.  Of course, since I like my job and my house and my wife (and would like to keep all of them), I have never actually run away to the forest, but I do think of it from time to time.

So when I began reading Ten White Geese, I was at first envious of the main character-a woman whose

name we don't learn until the very end of the book.  She is a professor of literature, specifically a scholar of Emily Dickinson.  Something has happened, though at first we don't know what, that has caused her to leave her husband and her job, and to rent a small house deep in the forest in Wales.  When she moves into the house, there are ten geese living on the property.  One by one, they start to disappear.  In addition, there is a badger that only she can see, a surly neighbor who acts as though he has dominion over her house and her person, a nearby town full of small people with small concerns, and eventually a boy and his dog.  The woman, who calls herself Emilie, slowly comes apart before the eyes of the reader, despite the best efforts of the boy and his dog to care for her.

Not being all that familiar with Emily Dickinson myself, I can't really speak to how much the plot of the book may or may not have paralleled her life, but the other women in my book club assure me that there were definitely some elements that spoke to her work.  Both the main character and Dickinson withdrew from society, both undoubtedly were suffering from depression, and both longed for human connection, but only on their own terms.  Dickinson had her poetry, and Emilie had a garden-a garden that she was trying to plant, despite the wrongess of the season, so that at least something would be left behind when she was gone.  In the end, the futility of her endeavors only added to her belief that while she may revere Dickinson and her work, she can't possibly live up to her example.

This novel is odd and spare and fairly bleak.  It's set in November and December in the Welsh countryside, a time between-between fall and full winter-and Emilie herself seems to be in some in-between place in her life.  Slowly over the course of the novel her layers are peeled away, until what is left is merely the shell of a woman who is trying desperately to have some control over a life that has gotten away from her.  By then end of the novel, I was certainly not envious of her running away to the woods anymore.  Instead, I felt the loneliness and despair that drove her away from everyone and everything she knew, and I was relieved for her when it all finally came to the end-an end that was as tragic as it was inevitable.

MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I credit Margaret Atwood with making me understand exactly what feminism is.  When I read The Handmaid's Tale in college, I was finally able to see clearly how high the stakes for women are in a society that oppresses and controls them.  But Atwood is more than just a feminist author.  Many of her works also address environmental justice, and indeed how issues of environmental Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, and culminating in her latest book, MaddAddam.

justice are linked to forms of oppression such as classism and sexism.  None of her work displays this as strongly as the MaddAddam trilogy, beginning in

MaddAddam picks up the stories of both the MaddAddamites and God's Gardeners-one, the scientific and technological geniuses behind both the new humans known as Crakers, and the plgue that wiped out most of the population; the other, the eco-cult started by Adam One to teach people how to live without the technology that was invading their lives and ruining the planet.   In the wake of the plague, the two groups have come together in an attempt to create a sustainable existence on the remnants of the world they knew.  Their survival is threatened by a couple of ultra-violent psychopaths whose humanity has been drilled out of them through painballing, a "sport" where criminals were given the option to fight to the death rather than be locked up in prison.  Surviving the painball arena meant becoming a cold blooded killer, and survival at any cost became the only goal.  The survivors must be constantly on the lookout for these men, not just for their own sake, but for the safety and survival of the Crakers, the not-quite-human creations of Crake, who were genetically designed to have no need of or desire for violence, and would be wiped out by contact with the painballers.

I see the painballers as a symbol for all of the violent and soulless influences of modern society that Atwood writes about with such disdain and horror.  Atwood has set up an interesting duality within the book, between the non-violent Crakers, and the ultra-violent Painballers.  The other survivors find themselves existing somewhere between these two extremes.  In killing the painballers, the survivors are in essence killing off the last vestiges of the old, violent world they lived in.  This frees them to define how they will choose to live going forward.  Will they revert back to old ways of gaining and keeping power over others, or will they create a more egalitarian way of living.  And where do the Crakers fit in?  With most of humanity gone, are they now free to live an populate the world with their kind?

To be honest, while the Crakers are certainly endearing, there is much about their existence that would be unsatisfying.  Controlled by strong biological urges for mating, lacking in art or intellectualism, their lives read more like the lives of animals than humans.  I believe that Atwood uses the Crakers to show that while there is much about human behavior that is concerning and possibly dangerous, taking away those same qualities would be to take away what it is that makes us human.

I found it interesting that so much of the book dealt with Zeb, and how he came to be a part of God's Gardeners.  Zeb is introduced in The Year of the Flood, and never really seemed to fit in with the peaceful, gentle God's Gardeners.  But Zeb's story clears up some of the unanswered questions from both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, namely the connection between Adam One and Crake.  MaddAddam brings a satisfying completeness to the story, but it does not leave the reader without some questions.  Three of the women were pregnant with Craker babies.  How would those children, provided they survive, change the dynamic of the group?  And is that the future of humankind?  By the end of the book, the Crakers are beginning to evolve intellectually and socially, and I couldn't help but wonder what their future society might be like.  Will they be able to keep their innocence and peacefulness, or would the old human traits of greed and the desire for power creep back into what is left of humanity. As usual, Atwood has delivered a provocative story highlighting some scary possibilities for the future of our world.  

The Silent Wife

The description for The Silent Wife makes it sound a lot like your average women's fiction.  Boy meets girl, boy cheats on girl, girl pines and pines for boy, girl eventually finds a way to move on.  What makes The Silent Wife different is that the moving on is more hitman and less gallon-of-ice-
cream-on-the-couch.

Jodi and her common law husband Todd live a charmed life.  Todd, a successful developer, and Jodi, a part-time therapist, live in a luxury condominium right on Lake Michigan in the Chicago Gold Coast.  While from the outside their marriage looks charmed, within the relationship there is nothing but coldness and a lack of true connection.  Todd is a serial philanderer, and in order to keep their lives from completely falling apart, Jodi chooses to live in the state of denial.  But soon, Jodi realizes that Todd is not content to play the part of loving husband.  He is looking for a way to leave her, and as he slips away, so too does her sanity, until finally she makes her way inexorably towards a decision she can never take back.

The story is told from alternating perspectives, first Jodi's, the Todd's.  The voices change chapter to chapter, so unlike Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (to which this book has often been compared), you are reading about all of the events in real time in the story.  This book is defintely no Gone Girl.  It does not rise to the leve of dark and twisty that Flynn's book portrayed.  Honestly, the female character in that book was just evil.  Jodi is not evil, nor is she a sociopath, but she is someone who has been deeply scarred in the past, so deeply that she doesn't even remember what happened to her that created this ability to compartmentalize to such an extreme.  Once her inner boundaries start to fall, however, she begins to realize just how big a lie she has really been living.   The Silent Wife starts out slowly, and the writing style and plot stay rather understated.  But despite the sometimes clinical feeling of the writing, especially the parts narrated by Jodi, the ending has a satisfying emotional jolt that made the effort to read it worth it.

Cross-Blog Pollination: Graceling, by Kristin Cashore

Regular readers of this blog will know that I also write a blog devoted entirely to children's and young adult literature.  As a literacy coach, it is part of my job to keep up with the best in literature for young people, so that I can guide students and teachers in the right direction when it comes to what to read.

Occasionally one of the young adult books I read seems like it would also be enjoyable for adults, and when that happens, we get cross-blog pollination!  I think that adult readers who deny the enjoyability and relative value of books written for children and youth are denying themselves some very pleasant reading experiences-experiences that just might help them understand the world of children and youth, and the way that children and youth see the world.

This particular cross-pollination comes in the form of a fantasy novel called Graceling, written by Kristin Cashore.  Graceling tells the story of Katsa, a young woman born with a remarkable gift.  She has a Grace-a special ability that is innate, and that sets her apart from other people.  And Katsa's Grace requires her to keep people even more at a distance than usual, for her Grace is killing.  Her uncle, the King of Middluns, uses her to bully and threaten people who oppose him, and to get his way with the other kingdoms.  Katsa hates being his slave, but she considers herself to dangerous and flawed to do anything else.  That is, until she meets Prince Po of Leinid, another Graceling who is gifted with fighting ability.  His grandfather has been kidnapped, and Katsa is part of a team that rescued him from his captors. But even after he is safe, the question remains-why would someone kidnap an old man, even if he is related to the King of Leinid.  Katsa and Po will travel across the seven kingdoms to discover what nefarious plot is afoot, and along the way Katsa learns new things about herself, her Grace, and her ability to choose her own path.

Despite the fact that the "seven kingdoms" of Katsa's world immediately make me think of A Song of Ice and Fire, Cashore has created a fantasy world that is all her own.  The story moves at a good pace, and the emotions of the characters and the events as they unfold feel authentic within the mythology of the fictional seven kingdoms.  And there are some big questions addressed by the story-the nature of violence and freedom, the use of torture, naked power wielded cruelly, exclusion, the responsibility to use our "power" ethically, and the right to self-determination.  But what makes this a book I couldn't put down was Katsa's strength, determination, and unwillingness to be used as anyone's pawn.  Katsa is a hero, not in spite of being female, or because of being female...she is entirely her own person, operating almost completely outside of any gender roles.  There is a love story hidden within the action, but it is not what drives  the story; rather, the love story enhances the emotional impact of the true task of the characters-to save a princess, and in doing so their entire society, from an evil king bent on world domination.  This is a book that I will give to my daughter, and to the young teens I work with as a youth advisor, because Katsa is an example of a heroine that we can look up to, even when we may not agree with her every decision.  Because despite the violence of Katsa's Grace, what we see in her is the struggle all of us engage in every day to act in as moral a way as possible, even when people and events seem to conspire against us.

Red Hook Road

For most people, their wedding day is one of the most joyful days of their lives.  For me, even though my first marriage ended in divorce, I still have fond memories of the wedding that brought us together as a family for the short time we lasted.  But for Becca and John, the young couple who get married at the beginning of Red Hook Road, their happy day becomes a nightmare when they are killed in a car crash on the way to their reception.

For a marriage that only lasted an hour, Becca and John's union had a lot of power over the other people in their lives, which becomes evident as the story follows Iris (Becca's mom), Daniel (her dad), Jane (John's mother), Matt (his brother) and Ruthie (Becca's sister) in the years following their deaths.  Set during four summers in the small coastal Maine Town of Red Hook, the book details the way that each person struggles to deal with their loss.  Iris is an East Coast intellectual a professor of English literature who lives in New York most of the year, but who strongly identifies with her family's connection to the old beach house where they have summered for three generations.  She is like a force of nature, strong and willful, and her sometimes overwhelming personality causes her children, her husband, and the other people she loves to be at once awed and intimidated by her.  Daniel, who has always found it easy to let Iris plot the course of their lives, suddenly finds himself frustrated and resentful at her attempts to control everything that happens in the aftermath of the tragedy.  Jane, John's mother, is a local woman who was never comfortable with her son's relationship with a privileged daughter "from away", and resists any attempt my Iris to continue their families' connection after the young people are killed.  Ruthie and Matt each try to live up to their older siblings' examples in their own ways, but find following in the footsteps of those who have passed on before their time more difficult than they anticipated.

The book examines issues of death and loss, dealing with grief, and privilege.  John was a shipbuilder, and the old boat that John was restoring at the time of his death, which Matt takes over afterward, becomes a symbol of the group's collective experience-mainly, that of being stuck, unable to move on with the task of living their own lives, so mired are they in trying to honor and remember the dead.  Each character must go off the the trail a bit to eventually find their footing-Iris, through a young musical prodigy; Daniel through revisiting his young adult self; Ruthie by re-examining her assumptions about what her own path should be; and Matt through coming to grips with his feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  The relationship between Iris and Jane highlights the differences between two very different kinds of mother, but in the end their strong love for their children brings them together, if not into an easy friendship, at least into mutual respect.  Red Hook Road is not the best family drama I've read, but it does have an easy readability about it that makes is accessible to even the casual reader.

Subterranean, James Rollins

While is enjoy great literature, I am not averse to a romping action story.  And when I listen to audiobooks, which I only do when I drive or exercise, I need something that will keep me from being bored without taking attention away from what I am doing-especially when operating a 2000 pound piece of machinery at high speeds.  It is in this spirit that I downloaded my first James Rollins novel a couple of years ago.  Rollins is best known for his Sigma Force novels, where the dashing Commander Gray Pierce and his crack team of geniuses with black belts race around the globe averting catastrophes and solving historical mysteries.  They are basically The Da Vinci Code on steroids.  I've listened to a couple, and while I can't exactly speak to the accuracy of Rollins' historical or scientific research, the stories are plausible enough not to trigger my "yeah, right" meter.

I decided for my latest audiobook to download one of Rollins' stand-alone novels, called Subterranean.  The plot is like a mash-up of Jurrasic Park and Journey to the Center of the Earth, in that it had both human arrogance and greed,  and big, scary monsters from the past.  A team is sent below the surface of Antarctica to explore the remains of what appears to be a human settlement in caverns that have been recently discovered.  Also discovered-a solid diamond statue that has aroused the interest of scholars and businessmen alike.  The team includes an anthropologist, a geologist, an expert caver, a biologist, and a few Marines along for security.  What the team doesn't know is that the previous team that had been sent in to explore the series of tunnels and caverns had disappeared without a trace.  As they delve more deeply into the earth under the "uninhabited" continent, they discover fierce marsupial predators, unknown species of sharks, predatory snails as big as a basketball, a luminescent fungus that emits a powerful knock-out drug, and a tribe of intelligent marsupial "people" living in a village and growing a wheat-like plant...

Which is exactly where he lost me.  For about half the book, the plot, while incredible, did at least seem to have some basis in solid science...the semi-reptilian, marsupial predators did tweak my suspension of disbelief, but I went with it because humans running away from something trying to eat them is basically the basis of every monster-movie, ever.  But an entire race of beings, not human, developing human qualities and human-like behaviors and societal structures, despite having no contact with humans-sorry, nope, not gonna happen.  Had this novel been billed as fantasy, or had the setting been another planet, I could have gone there.  But not in a supposedly scientific thriller.  I did what I almost never do-I abandoned the story, choosing instead the download Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, which at least has the decency to call itself a fantasy novel.

So, if you're not bothered by scientific inconsistency and completely implausible storylines, then give this book a try.  But for myself, I'll stick with Rollins' historical mysteries, which for all I know may only sound well-researched, but which allow me to listen without rolling my eyes.

Eye Contact, Cammie McGovern

America seems to have an obsession with autism at the moment.  Every time you turn around there is another  special news segment, heart-warming story, video of someone with savant abilities, or slightly goofy sit-com character that either explicitly or implicitly is identified as having autism.  And really, while the effects of autism can be devastating for those living with it and their caregivers, it is a pretty fascinating condition.  Autism brings up all of the things that we don't understand about the brain, and the ways in which a brain affected by autism works can be as intriguing as it is impenetrable.

In Eye Contact, Cammie McGovern uses autism as the framework for a murder mystery.  A young girl is killed when she wandered from the school playground.  The only witness to the crime is another student, a boy with autism named Adam.  He doesn't speak for says after the murder, but his mother Cara is sure that he knows what happened.  She begins to work with him on expressing what he saw, and in the process discovers that the murder may have connections to her own life that she never expected.

The story goes back and forth between the present-day mystery and Cara's past.  We discover her tumultuous relationship with her best friend, and the relationship that led to Adam's conception.  The mystery did keep me guessing, but what really kept me engaged was the relationship between Cara and Adam, and the very authentic descriptions of living with autism.  McGovern has a son with autism herself, and her intimate knowledge of caring for a child with special needs made the story feel very real.  I was not 100% satisfied with the resolution of the mystery itself, but not so dissatisfied that I was disappointed in the book.  Overall this was a good popcorn book for my Christmas vacation!

Dead Wrong,by J.A. Jance, AKA Desert Popcorn

Imagine you are the sheriff of a large county in southern Arizona that is routinely understaffed and over-extended.  Now imagine that you are also almost nine months pregnant.  That is exactly Joanna Brady's life at he beginning of Dead Wrong.  When she and her team of detectives gets a call to a murder scene in the desert, she is surprised to find a man brutally beaten to death, missing is fingers.  The victim is an ex-con, who was paroled recently after serving over 20 years for allegedly killing his wife in a drunken black-out. Convicted, despite the fact that her body was never found.  In addition, one of her animal control officers is beaten and left for dead while investigating a couple of local thugs for running a dog fighting ring.  With her manpower shortage, Joanna has no choice but to keep working-but this turns out to be a relief, when her overbearing mother-in-law shows up unexpectedly to wait out the birth of her grandchild.  Joanna and her deputies will soon be facing the consequences of a decades old secret, one that puts Joanna and her unborn son at risk.  But being a sheriff is part of her now, and finding a way to balance her career and her family is a challenge.

It took me a little while to get into this book, but once I did it was hard to put it down.  The Joanna Brady series is one I have dipped in and out of over the years.  I haven't read all of them, but when I do pick one up I am never disappointed with the story.  Her character combines the traits of all great female crime fighters-inner strength plus common sense plus compassion and a deep sense of justice.  Not to mention she's kind of bad-ass when it comes to taking down the bad guys.  The plot is fairly intricate but pretty believable  which enough wiggle room in how it could play out to keep a person guessing until the end.  I figured out the broad strokes of the secret fairly early, but I still wasn't sure about the details prior to the big reveal.  As popcorn books go, I'd say Jance's books are pretty much a safe bet.