To be honest, when I started Other People’s Money by Justin Cartwright, I wasn’t sure that I was going to love it. The book came to me through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program, and when I got the notice I was getting it, I couldn’t remember requesting it. It was a little slow going at first, but the story really draws you in. These aren’t always very likable people, but you find yourself interested in them and wondering how things will turn out for them. Eventually, I found I did not want to put it down.

Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal has been the head of Tubal & Co., a small privately-owned bank in England, for decades. A stroke has left him weakened, unable to write, unable to speak clearly. His son, Julian, has taken over the bank. His wife, Fleur, is absent — she can’t bear to see him this way. He is cared for by his longtime secretary, Estelle, who is secretly in love with him:

“But when Harry’s first wife, Eleanor, killed herself she had foolishly hoped that he might turn to her, Estelle. It was like something from Jane Austen: the plain governess who hopes her good qualities will win through with the master in the end. But he was arranging for Fleur, the twenty-five-year-old actress, to be cast in a play he was financing.”

The bank is in trouble. Julian was suckered in, like so many financiers, and now the bank is sunk deep in worthless mortgages and complex financial instruments that he barely understands. His father always said he wanted to run a bank, not a casino, but his son gambled and lost. Now Julian will need some fancy footwork — and shady dealing — to keep the bank solvent.

The complication in all of this is playwright Artair MacLeod, Fleur’s ex-husband. When they divorced, he was given a grant — a quarterly stipend and a stern admonition to stay away from Fleur. That has worked well for MacLeod, until the money dries up. He’s a character, one of my favorites, cobbling together a living out in the sticks from grants and speaking arrangements and children’s theater productions of Thomas the Tank Engine. When the checks stop coming, MacLeod takes action.

I loved the writing in this book — it pulled me in and kept me reading. I loved his descriptions of people and places:

“He couldn’t wait to come back to Cornwall, where you could take a lungful of air which had travelled undisturbed from Nova Scotia, rather than one which had passed through the lungs of twenty wheezing cockneys on its way to yours.”

The descriptions of the villa at Antibes, with its turtle doves and umbrella pines, its hushed servants and the view of the Mediterranean — vivid and enticing. (Well, maybe not the servants, but definitely the turtle doves.) It’s a peek inside a family that is shackled in many ways by its ridiculous wealth, by all the unwritten rules of their status and its obligations. They operate on a different plane than the people around them; it both insulates and isolates them.

You see the trainwreck coming, but there is no getting out of the way. I was particularly impressed with the wrap-up; I hate a book with a bad ending. Here, the storylines are wrapped up nicely, but not too tightly. Even in the train’s path, people manage to salvage bits of their lives; some of them are even happy. All in all, a lovely, satisfying read.

My copy of Other People’s Money was provided by the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program free of charge.

Judy McFarland’s life is a mess. Her marriage is crumbling, her school is going bankrupt, her best friend just died. She’s started to think about escape — her youngest son will be graduating soon and then she could leave, get a divorce, do whatever she wanted. Unfortunately, she doesn’t wait until after graduation. In Rebecca Coleman’s The Kingdom of Childhood, she makes some terrible choices that devastate the people around her.

You really want to feel sorry for Judy. The school she has loved and supported for more than 20 years is financially unstable. Her husband, Russ, is withdrawn, caught up in his own career struggles and out of touch with the family. Her daughter, Maggie, away at college, is rebelling against the very principles her parents found so important. Her son, Scott, is silent and sullen (a typical teenager).  Her best friend, Bobbie, died of cancer and every day, Judy has to walk by the classroom where she used to teach. It’s a miserable situation for anyone.

The problem is, Judy makes one horrible decision after another. She is drawn to a friend of her son’s , Zach, a good kid with a dirty mind and a quick wit. She’s assigned to work with him on a school bazaar and one day, he kisses her.

If she had any sense she would have walked away right then. She would have made sure she didn’t spend time alone with him, she would have gotten some counseling, anything. Instead, she decides she can handle it. She can work with him. But she can’t. And the inevitable happens.

We don’t always think of teenage boys as being the “victim” when they are having an affair with a teacher. Sure, we know — technically — that it’s rape, that it’s a crime, but there’s still a little part of the brain that thinks the kid really got lucky. Coleman does a very good job of showing Zach’s differing reactions. Part of his mind thinks he’s gotten lucky – very lucky indeed. But he also feels pressured — Judy can be downright demanding — and although he’s pretty sure she’s joking when she says “Better watch out. You’re going to need a college recommendation one of these days,” he really can’t be sure. He’s under tremendous pressure — what if someone finds out? What will his friends say — he’s sleeping with his best friend’s mother! Will he get expelled? Will Judy get fired? It’s more than a teenager should have to deal with.

The story also wraps us up in Judy’s childhood, a strange series of flashbacks to the time her family spent in Germany. Her father worked at a military base while her mother went slowly insane. In some ways, her childhood mirrors Zach’s, in that they both learned things about their parents that they were far too young to deal with.

The book is set in a Waldorf School. This was a new concept for me and I could see why people would be drawn to it, especially for young children. Certainly an affair like Zach and Judy’s could have taken place in any suburban high school, but there is something about the freedom and wholesomeness of the Waldorf environment that makes it seem by turns more inevitable and more perverse.

This isn’t a book with a lot of plot twists — you know what’s coming. You can feel the rumble, see the headlights of the oncoming truck, but you can’t get out of the way. Still, the book kept me intrigued through the ending, which was what I expected, even as I hoped they would be able to change it.

For more information on Rebecca Coleman, check out her website. My copy of The Kingdom of Childhood was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Tags: Rebecca Coleman, The Kingdom of Childhood, Waldorf School

Sometimes, a book makes lovely reading, even when the subject matter is very sad. Partitions by Amit Majmudar is one of those books. I was not at all surprised to read that the author is an award-winning poet; there is a certain poetry to the language in this story that gives it away. (He is also a diagnostic nuclear radiologist, but I haven’t quite worked that into the mental picture I get when I’m reading.)

In 1947, the border between Pakistan and India was closed. It was not a peaceful closing. Muslims and Hindus caught on the wrong side of the border found themselves in great danger; by some estimates, up to a million people died. Partitions deals with the stories of several people trying to get to the right side of the new border.

Our narrator, Roshan, is dead. He has been dead for five years now, but he is keeping watch over his wife, Sonia, and his twin boys, Shankar and Keshav. In the train station, trying to get on the last train headed to Delhi, the boys become separated from their mother — an absolutely terrifying event for all of them. Roshan will follow the boys on their journey. He will leave the story of Sonia’s fate to the very end.

We also follow Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor. The doctor frightened me — he seemed somehow simple, stunted either by age or defect, with tremendous difficulty speaking to adults around him. His tremendous tenderness dealing with children leads him to try and help those he meets on the road to Pakistan. There is also Simran, a young Sikh girl who found that at the last minute, she could allow her father to “save” her, and fled her home and family. Both will encounter kindness and cruelty as they search for safe passage on what Majmudar describes as a river of humanity.

The stories are heartbreaking. In the face of so much hostility, it is hard to imagine any sort of happy ending. The narrator is particularly interesting — he is not quite omniscient, but he sees these events, travels back and forth in time and place, to bring us their stories. He wants desperately to protect his sons, but in the end, all he can do is watch.

Still, I did not find this a sad book to read. The writing is beautiful, although I had some trouble with vocabulary. I gave up trying to look up all the Indian words that were unfamiliar to me; most are clear enough in context, but I feel like I’m missing something, translating them on my own. I loved the narrator’s voice, his fierceness in defense of his sons and as well as his hesitance. He makes you want to invest in these characters, even if you can’t see a way for there to be any good ending.

For more on Amit Majmudar’s poetry, check out The Poetry Foundation or his Facebook page.  My copy of Partitions was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

This is going to be a tough review to write.

I can tell you how The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma begins. I could possibly even tell you what the Map of Time is. But most everything else I would want to tell you, I can’t tell you. It would spoil something. And this is the sort of book where you really don’t want the plot twists spoiled.

First thing I loved about this novel: the Narrator. This is not just any omniscient narrator — this one has a charming voice and a lovely way to tell a story.

“Assuming you stay until the end of this tale, some of you will no doubt think that I chose the wrong thread with which to begin spinning my yarn, and that for accuracy’s sake I should have respected chronological order and begun with Miss Haggerty’s story. It is possible, but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them.”

Andrew Harrington is a troubled young man and he is about to do something profoundly stupid. Fate is going to intervene and push him in an entirely different direction and it is an amazing, complicated and surprising journey. Set in Victorian England, H.G. Wells has just published The Time Machine and a little store-front business called Murray’s Time Travel has opened in London. Andrew and his cousin, Charles, hope to use their services to avert a tragedy.

The story spirals and explodes from there. We go forward in time, back in time, and sometimes we move in a relatively straight line. We’ve got The Time Machine and Dracula. We’ve automatons, amateur assassins, star-crossed lovers, greed and betrayal. There is violence and mayhem and true love — even a little sex. It is full of famous characters — H.G. Wells, Joseph Merrick, Jack the Ripper and Bram Stoker — and they all play a part.

“Yes, I know that when I began this tale I promised there would be a fabulous time machine, and there will be, there will even be intrepid explorers and fierce native tribes — a must in any adventure story.”

I wish I could tell you more about it! Unfortunately, anything I might tell you is bound to spoil some surprise that’s waiting for you in the winding paths of these pages. It’s a story that held my attention for 600+ pages and that is no small feat. I loved the way the story unfolded and I found myself wondering as we meandered along just how Palma would bring the tendrils of this story all together in the end, and I was not disappointed. It’s a terrific read and one I highly recommend.

For more information on Felix J. Palma, check out his website. My copy of The Map of Time was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

What would you do if you caught someone reading your diary? If you caught your spouse snooping in your inner-most thoughts, how angry would you be? In Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, Irene America is a woman in an abusive marriage, who discovers that her husband has been reading her diary. Instead of lashing out, she takes advantage — she starts a secret journal and uses her diary to manipulate her violent husband, Gil.

Gil is an artist and Irene is his muse. His iconic paintings of his wife have brought him tremendous success, but they have also pigeonholed him as a Native American artist:

“Don’t paint Indians. The subject wins. You’ll never be an artist. You’ll be an American Indian artist…Still, Gil had no choice. He painted Indians when he painted his wife because he couldn’t help it — the ferocity between them, the need. Her blood ancestors came out in Gil’s paint as he worked.”

There is certainly ferocity between them. There is evidence of great passion, but it is passion that has turned sour and gone wrong. Irene has fallen out of love with Gil and I am never really certain whether Gil adores Irene or despises her. He goes out of his way to antagonize her, buying her expensive gifts she doesn’t want and throwing parties that she will hate. He ridicules her in person and on canvas — he paints her nude, in demeaning positions — but she continues to model for him. They are locked in a sort of mortal combat; they hurt each other terribly but they just can’t break away.

“Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.”

I love the way that story is both subtle and jarring. There are hints of violence and unhappiness, then there is a sudden slap. Gil dotes on his children, praising their unique qualities, then he slams his son’s forehead into the table. The family orbits around Gil, pandering to his mercurial moods — especially the children — knowing when to pull away, when to hide. Even the dogs are sensitive to it, milling around and putting themselves physically between Gil and the children.  The children seem too wise, too knowing, and then Erdrich sneaks up on you with something shocking.

The story shifts around – the red diary that Gil sneaks downstairs to read. The blue notebook, safely under lock and key. Gil’s fevered attempts to win back Irene’s love. The children, hiding in their rooms. Irene’s dreams of escape. She uses the diary she knows he reads to test and manipulate her husband, with occasionally startling results.

There are several interesting themes in the book – I kept thinking that this is one I would love to introduce to a reading group. There is the way that Gil and Irene’s Native American heritage influences their thinking and their relationship. The complex relationship between artist and model, the way that Gil has painted Irene in both beautiful and terrible ways, and the way Irene holds his career and his inspiration in the palm of her hand. There is the question of a mother’s duty to protect her children:

“Florian gave Irene a false smile. Don’t cry. He changed his voice to an insinuating whine. You’ll be okay. We’ll just put a little ice on that bruise.”

Irene is not painted as a saint here. She takes her share of swings, even if they aren’t physical. She lies to her husband in that little red book, hoping to get a reaction, hoping to make him leave. Her flaws make her an interesting character.

The ending was a shock. Occasionally, you think you see where a book is going. You’ve got an idea how the story will end and then…it doesn’t. It takes a path you never expected. In hindsight, it made perfect sense, but I was still jolted in my chair as we hurtled toward the end.

Shadow Tag is a compelling read with flawed but sympathetic characters, an interesting premise and an excellent, gradual reveal. My copy of Shadow Tag was the unabridged audio version, read by Coleen Marlo, checked out from the Kent Free Library. Louise Erdrich is the author of 13 novels; she has also published volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories and a memoir. She lives in Minnesota and is the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.

Regular readers know that I spend a lot of time in St. Paul — I’m going to have to go by the store and check it out!

Tags: Lousie Erdrich, Shadow Tag

The Sweet Relief of Missing Children begins with the story of Leonora.  She is pretty and tidy and protected. She has her vaccinations, she knows not to talk to strangers, she eats her vegetables and she never takes the shortcut through the alley.  She is precious to her parents and she understands these precautions because she understands that she cannot be both precious and free.  In the end, none of it matters.

Sarah Braunstein’s novel begins and ends with Leonora, but woven throughout the book are the stories of other people, other missing children, who are tangentially connected to Leonora. Their lives are sad and desperate and although it seems like something could be salvaged from them, nothing ever is.

This is not a novel for people who like straightforward story-telling. (I seem to say that a lot lately — lots of twisty story lines these days.)  Bits and pieces of stories are woven together, forward and backwards in time, and it was sometimes hard to keep everything straight. These are all people whose lives brush up against each other — some of them are related, some of them are simply acquainted — but each brush makes a mark.

There was poor Paul, a lonely boy whose mother leaves him home alone on his birthday. Thomas who can’t stop himself from watching Goldie, Paul’s mother, usually through her windows late at night.  There’s Sam, a nice young man who wants desperately to be a bad boy, and Judith, who really was a bad girl. Joe and Constance and their interrupted honeymoon, and their new stepson, Sam. Sam helped rescue Judith, but left Helen behind…and then there’s Helen’s strange and striking encounter with Constance.

Their lives intersect in unexpected and intriguing ways, but it can be difficult keeping them all straight. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal — I would work my way through a chapter, a wedding, an argument, and then suddenly realize that this must be the same person as in an earlier chapter, only a different part of the timeline. I enjoy that, I enjoy the confusion and sense of discovery you get, but that doesn’t appeal to all readers.

I enjoyed the book, but in the end, it didn’t really move me. I haven’t felt the urge to tell people about it, to recommend it to other readers, as I have with other books I’ve finished more recently. Good, but not great, I suppose. It would make a great book club selection — there is so much that would make for good debate, and so many potential discussions about the timeline and the choices the characters make, but it isn’t something I’m likely to re-read on my own.

My copy of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein was provided by the publisher through LibraryThing‘s Early Reviewer program.

Interested in this one?  Check back tomorrow to win a copy!

The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai by Ruiyan Xu is all about isolation and communication.

Li Jing is a Chinese businessman with a beautiful wife and son, a successful investment company, family and friends.  But in one tragic instant, he finds himself cut off from everything.  A gas leak, an explosion, and a flying sheet of glass change his world forever.  He is having dinner with his father at the Swan Hotel when an explosion rips through the building.  In the midst of the aftershocks, he is hit by a falling pane of glass.  The resulting brain damage causes him to forget how to speak Chinese.  He can still understand the language, but the tones, the sounds, the words are all gone.  By an odd twist, he can speak English, a language he had nearly forgotten; he lived with his father in Virginia until he was about 10 years old.  When they moved back to China, he struggled to learn Chinese, but kids are resilient and their brains are still developing.  Now the damage is done.

Li Jing’s isolation was almost physically painful to read.  He loves his wife, but he can’t speak to her.  He wants to comfort his son, who has been terribly frightened by the injuries to his father and grandfather, but he can’t make himself understood.  His business depends on his ability to network, to court clients, to pick up and sift through bits of information and rumor, in order to make investment decisions.  He is horrified by the sound of his halting, mispronounced Chinese and retreats into himself, refusing to speak to the doctors or his family.

The struggle is even more painful for his wife, Meiling.  The burden of maintaining the illusion of an ordinary life falls to her.  She deals with the friends and colleagues who want to visit, but must be prevented from learning the extent of her husband’s injuries.  She cares for her father-in-law, her frightened son, with little time for herself.  She worries about her husband’s business and her own job, and through it all she must keep a calm, serene front.

Eventually, the hospital brings in Rosalyn Neal, an American doctor who specializes in aphasia and language disorders.  She speaks no Chinese, but the hope is that she can improve his English skills, evaluate his progress, and guide the other doctors in ways to improve his halting Chinese.  Rosalyn is in the midst of a divorce; she is lonely and unhappy, and escaping to Shanghai seems like a solution to all her problems.  Instead, she finds herself in a country where she doesn’t understand the rules or customs, where she requires a translator for even the simplest transactions, leaving her even more alone than before.

I read The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai while on a business trip in the Netherlands, and it resonated very strongly with me.  Even though most of my Dutch colleagues speak excellent English, it is still isolating — they will occasionally lapse into Dutch during difficult parts of a discussion or talk amongst themselves during breaks, unintentionally excluding me from the conversation.  It becomes embarrassing to ask for English menus and to not be able to pronounce the names of streets correctly.  You long for one meal that is not an ordeal of deciphering menus and looking for something familiar.  So Rosalyn and Ji Ling’s struggles seemed very real to me.

The book is haunting; sad and lovely.  The descriptions of Shanghai are vibrant and alive.  Meiling’s fear and pain are so clear — her desperate struggle to hold her family together, to save face, to appear calm and unruffled on the surface when she is terrified and angry on the inside.  And poor Rosalyn!  I understood her suffering, as well as her relief when she falls in with a group of ex-pats who can show her the ropes.  She walks a fine line between her old life and her new, between her professional responsibilities and her girlish glee at being unfettered in a strange new city.  I wanted to comfort each character, to hold their hands and reassure them.  I found myself completely caught up in their stories, the sign of a truly effective novel.

I received my copy of The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai through the Early Reviewer program at LibraryThing.com.  It is scheduled for release in October, 2010.

In Raven Stole the Moon, Jenna Rosen walks away from a life that is fractured. Two years ago, her young son drowned in a tragic accident at a resort in Alaska. Her husband seems to have moved on, but Jenna cannot let go of her grief. On the anniversary of their son’s death, they attend a party that turns out to be Jenna’s breaking point. She walks away from the party, gets in her husband’s car and drives…straight through to Bellingham, Washington. She gets on the ferry and heads to her home town of Wrangell, Alaska — and straight into a mystery.

Jenna and her husband, Robert, had a romantic courtship and a happy marriage, but all that changed when Robert got involved in an investment group that was building a resort in Alaska. While visiting the resort, their son, Bobby, dies and nothing is ever going to be the same. There are issues of blame, issues of money, and very different ways of dealing with grief. Robert shoves everything deep down inside and buries himself in his work, while his wife finds a therapist with a handy prescription pad. They don’t realize how far apart they’ve grown, until they find themselves truly far apart.

Jenna receives a strange gift on the ferry and meets an old Tlingit woman who tells her a story about the kushtaka, a shape-shifting spirit who usually appears as an otter. According to legend, they save endangered swimmers from drowning; you can see why the story appealed to her. She will have to come to terms with her son’s loss in a very dramatic way, and at the same time, decide if she and Robert can save their marriage.

Author Garth Stein takes the fractured family story and stirs things up. He adds a healthy dose of mysticism; Alaska is full of legends and stories from a variety of native peoples. When I visited there several years ago, every store, every restaurant, every person I met had a story to tell. Many of the people I met believed in the traditional legends and stories — and not just the elderly or people living on the fringes. It is a community that seems both modern and ancient and I can easily imagine the way these myths might act on a distraught woman. While the legends come to life for Jenna in a very real way, the novel is not all ghost story — Robert and Jenna live in the modern world and they have modern problems to deal with.

It’s a very interesting story — I was fascinated by the mythology and I was caught up in the family’s story. They were both suffering, it had been a terrible loss and it had driven a wedge between them. I was curious to see how, or even if, Jenna and Robert could find their way back to each other.

This isn’t exactly a new novel from Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain. This is actually a re-release of his first novel, written 13 years ago. It has to be a really interesting experience to look at something you wrote so long ago. According to the afterword, the only real change he made was cutting out a lot of foul language. Stein’s mother was born in Wrangell, Alaska, and he is registered with the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. He has based portions of the book on the stories he heard from his aunts and uncles.

My copy of Raven Stole the Moon was an Advanced Reader Copy provided free of charge.

Tags: Garth Stein

I have occasionally described books as “a wild ride,” and it’s often a very apt description. Books are like trips we take — some are pleasant Sunday drives, some are fast and bumpy. John Dies at the End
is like a ride on a twisting, speeding, swooping roller coaster. On acid. With no seat belt.

John and Dave are slackers. They work in a video store. They play video games. They are occasionally kind of silly:

“Dave? This is John. Your pimp says bring the heroin shipment tonight, or he’ll be forced to stick you. Meet him where we buried the Korean whore. The one without the goatee.”

That was code. It meant “Come to my place as soon as you can, it’s important.” Code, you know, in case the phone was bugged.

But this book has nothing to do with heroin shipments. The drug involved in this story is called soy sauce. And in this story, you don’t take soy sauce. Soy sauce takes you. It will, in fact, batter its way out of the vial, fly around the room and burrow right through the skin of your face to get to you.

John and Dave attend a doomed party where one of the partygoers introduces his pals to the sauce. At first, the side effects are amazing: knowledge and clarity and heightened senses. David knows that the cop he’s talking to has 2 daughters who attend Catholic school. He can hear a man talking on a cell phone — down on the street, outside the building he’s in. They see things and know things and the world is an infinitely more interesting place. Of course, David also walks up to a fast food joint, and instead of the smiling, happy clown we’re all familiar with, he sees a terrified, eviscerated clown, being forced to eat his own intestines. Dropping by his buddy’s house, he sees his friend already has a visitor:

There was a noise above me.
I looked up.
My heart skipped a beat.

It was hanging off his ceiling on seven little pink hands. The ridiculous thing’s red wig was cockeyed on its head. It looked down at me, then let go and landed a few feet away with a soft thump.

The thing is, I’m not sure that I can adequately describe the plot without giving away things that will be a lot more fun as surprises. It comes down to this: the soy sauce gives them access, lets them see. There are forces at work and nefarious plots. Time is a lot more flexible than they ever imagined. And these guys — they are very accepting. They aren’t thrown by the weird stuff they see around them, and we are talking about some seriously weird stuff:

The only other thing that was different about Molly was the blood staining her muzzle and the fact that she was floating three feet off the floor. Molly’s legs were stiff below her as she moved, buzzing slowly across the room as if on a track hung by invisible threads, When Molly came near the door she turned her head my way and in a clear but guttural voice said, “I serve none but Korrok.”

I loved this book. It was an amazingly fun read, even when it made no sense at all. There’s a lot of really funny stuff, some truly bizarre stuff, a host of interesting characters…and underneath, there’s some depth to it. I liked David, even though there is a certain sadness (totally understandable sadness) about him. John is the kind of guy who would bug the crap out of me, but would still be kinda fun to hang around with. And when the truly weird, scary stuff begins to happen, they are willing to dive right in, no matter how bad they know it’s going to be, because what else can they do?

The Afterword is interesting. David Wong is the editor of Cracked.com. John Dies @ the End started off as an online story about two buddies and their adventure with a monster made of meat, back in 2001. The buzz slowly grew, attracted readers, got the attention of a publisher; there was even a movie deal. He says:

Word of mouth. That’s all it was. No one “discovered” me, I didn’t get some big break out of the blue. It was a slow advance of strangers from around the world, passing around the link and loaning out those sad homemade copies.

Personally, I think that’s fabulous. I love the idea that such a cool story got such a cool start — and the idea that crazy folks all over the world, joined by the internet, can force the book industry to publish something we would really like to read. In the fine tradition of those strangers, I am putting my copy in the mail this week, sending it to my friend Julie in New Orleans. After that, who knows where it may go? I know a lot of people who are really going to enjoy this crazy ride.

I purchased my copy of John Dies at the End
based on the recommendation of a good friend with excellent taste in books.

Tags: David Wong, John Dies at the End, Korrok

I have always loved Joyce Carol Oates’ writing.  I love her combination of long, flowing sentences and short, choppy fragments.  Little Bird of Heaven is lovely to read, even when the story is heartbreaking.

Krista Diehl’s family was fine before “the trouble” came.  Her father, Eddy, ran a construction company.  A handsome man, he was well-known around town as a bit of a flirt and a bit of a drinker.  Her mother, Lucille, a stay at home mom, her teenaged brother, Ben.  A happy family until trouble came along in the form of Zoe Kruller.  Zoe was small-town beautiful — she had an exotic name, she was everyone’s favorite at the ice cream shop, she sang with a little rock band on Saturday summer nights at the town bandstand.  When she is found murdered — strangled in her bed — the prime suspects are her estranged husband, Delray, and her lover, Eddy Diehl.

The story is told by 2 narrators — Krista and Aaron, Zoe’s son.  Aaron discovered Zoe’s body the morning after her murder and he may have lied to provide his father with an alibi.  Krista’s family has been torn apart by the revelation that Eddy has been carrying on a long-term affair with Zoe.  Gossip swirls around them as it does in any small town:  Zoe is living apart from her husband and son, she has “male visitors” who are being investigated by the police, there are stories about drugs and prostitution.  Ben and Krista have to deal with the whispers of their classmates.  It is particularly hard on Ben, who goes to school with Aaron.  As a small-town girl myself, I felt great sympathy for those two kids, living in that particular fishbowl.  Oates’ depictions of the raw side of rural life has always seemed very genuine to me.

Banished from the family home, Eddy is reduced to sneaking visits with his daughter after school, driving around town, stopping for dinner at the County Line Bar.  Ben wants nothing to do with his father.  Lucille’s relatives have closed ranks around her; she has her pills and her mysterious phone calls.  She conspires with her son and watches her daughter like a hawk.  Krista still wants to love her father.  She doesn’t believe he could be a murderer and she resents her mother for keeping him out of her life:

I thought Yes I know he has wounded you.  He has betrayed you.  Yes I know you are hurting but I don’t care, I am my father’s daughter and not yours.

Aaron, on the other hand, is on his own.  He and his father live in the same house, but they are no longer really father and son.  He works in his father’s garage and is just waiting to turn 16 so he can quit school.  There are drugs and alcohol and women — Aaron is part Seneca Indian and looks older than he actually is — and there is Krista.  The daughter of the man Aaron believes killed his mother.  An under-age high school girl who has fallen in love with him.

Already in ninth grade at the age of fifteen Aaron Kruller was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 150 pounds looming over his younger — mostly Caucasian — classmates with the gleaming menace of a switchblade among bread knives.

The murder and its aftermath create a bond between Aaron and Krista.  Eventually, years later, they are brought together again with a chance to gain some closure, an opportunity that brings Krista to an important crossroad.

Joyce Carol Oates, born in 1938, has written more than 40 novels, including several books written under her pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.  Her work has been honored a number of times: she won the National Book Award (them), the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellent in Short Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award (Zombie), and the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, among many others.  She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University and, since 1978, has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

My copy of Little Bird of Heaven was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Tags: Joyce Carol Oates, Little Bird of Heaven