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So Many Ways to Begin: A Novel Review

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So Many Ways to Begin: A Novel ReviewThe author invites readers to observe closely as a life unfolds, each recollection triggered with reference to a found object. The story moves backward and forward in time, from World War II until the present, to tell a story at once curious and remarkably prosaic. The pace is slow but the writing is beautifully evocative in its simplicity. One feels present to the objects described and the events marking their significance to the narrative. I hesitate to say too much about either the characters or events since it is the unfolding of events and deepening appreciation of the characters that is the stuff of this book. I would say that there is nothing dramatic here, and yet I found myself deeply touched by the humanness of all the characters. Happily ever after has no place in this book, and yet I was certainly not depressed by the "reality" of these characters' lives. If I'm perfectly honest, I saw my own strength, fragility, heroism, cowardess, courage and fear in these men and women. There are no heroes here, only ordinary folks making the best of what life brings them. Through it all I was mesmerized.So Many Ways to Begin: A Novel Overview

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Through Eyes Like Mine Review

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Through Eyes Like Mine ReviewThe quiet power of Noriko Nakada's childhood memoir, Through Eyes Like Mine, is rooted in the author's spare, graceful prose. Nakada's is the rare memoir that captures the reader through careful observations and a minimal, yet absorbing present-tense child voice.
The story opens with an image of moonlit frost on junipers on the night of Noriko's birth. Her Japanese-American father and her German-Irish mother live in Bend, Oregon, where Nori grows up with her older brother and sister, all of whom look different than everyone in the small town. When Nori is five, the Nakada's differences are highlighted by the arrival of Mitch, a six-year-old boy they adopt from Korea, who comes kicking and screaming into a family of strangers.
There is much that goes unspoken in Nori's home, and much that she is left to make meaning of on her own. Silences settle like snow in young Nori's world, masking the darker contours below. In Through Eyes Like Mine, Nakada creates a kaleidoscope of arresting images that transport readers of any age back to the mysteries of childhood and the enduring struggle to find one's place.Through Eyes Like Mine OverviewThrough Eyes Like mine is the story of a childhood told through the present-tense voice of Nori Nakada. Born to a Japanese American father and German-Irish mother in rural Oregon, Nori's family becomes increasingly diverse when they adopt a six-year-old boy from Korea. She struggles to find comfort within a family, a community and a world that is both simple and complex.By examining her family's silences, she begins to understand life, death and her own identity.The joys and challenges of growing up invite the reader to recall the world through eyes like mine.

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The Speed of Light (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Review

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The Speed of Light (Ballantine Reader's Circle) ReviewElizabeth Rosner has written an extraordinary debut novel in "The Speed of Light," an elegant, understated work which tackles such serious themes as the Holocaust's impact on the children of survivors, political massacre in Latin America and the significance of personal connection as a means of liberating the human possibiliites of hope, memory and love. "Speed" is that kind of lovely, slow-paced psychological novel where three decent people, scarred deeply by the anguish of either directly or derivately witnessing horrific suffering, learn that shared memory, tenderness and the need to risk everything for love assist them in overcoming the pain of a murderous past. This brilliant work ultimately is about possibilities: of living in a world drenched with blood, of overcoming enormous personal fears, of embracing one another's past to insure the chance of mutual survival.
Each of the three central characters has a unique voice (so much so that this latticed work includes three different type settings) and presents his or her own complicated confrontation with silence and memory. Each character gropes for meaning; each confronts the terror of the past, the anguish of living a solitary life and the desperate fear of abandonment, great sadness and existential isolation. Each character learns the nobility of bearing witness.
Julian Perel has absorbed the silence and imagined Holocaust memory of his father, Jacob. Living upstairs from his musically-gifted sister, Julian is an obsessive recluse, immersed in a life of suffocating detail, terrified of human touch, suspicious of language and voice. He theorizes that his father "gave up his language because it belonged to the killers; he could not live with the sounds of their voices inside his own." Like his now deceased father, Julian speaks in "the vocabulary of science and never reveal[s] his heart." Tormented by a past which he does not fully comprehend but which dominates his personality, Julian's self-imposed isolation is at once a private punishment and a social rebuke. It is only through his halting relationship with Sola, a hired housekeeper, that he begins the process of personal integration.
Hired by Paula Perel to oversee her downstairs apartment while pereforming in Europe's opera houses, Sola expands her domestic obligations as she initiates a friendship, a relationship, with the reluctant Julian. Sola, ravaged by memories of her village's annihilation at the hands of a brutal Latin American despotism, has her own torment, unshared and terribly burdensome. Slowly, quietly, Sola and Julian begin to learn a central lesson: sharing memories and making others become derivative witnesses to social evil is a good thing. By permitting this "buried language" to surface, Sola initiates a process by which both Julian and she perceive the possibilities of life.
The most tragic figure in "Speed" is Paula Perel, whose operatic voice soars through her apartment and vibrates with immediate beauty. Seemingly oblivious to post-Holocaust trauma, Paula sets out to Europe to test the quality of her voice. There she discovers the hidden story of her family's past with shattering consequences. Where Julian has had a lifetime to absorb memory and silence, Paula has but days. She learns that inflicted silence "bruises the heart," that her father's heart must have been "completely black and blue from a lifetime of sorless grief banging around in his chest." How Paula confronts both her own personal crisis and the implications of the Holocaust on her professional life is one of the many instructive moments of the novel.
"The Speed of Light" is nothing less than brilliant. Invoking the Hasidic teaching that "there are three ways to mourn: through tears, through silence, and by turning sorrow into song," Elizabeth Rosner has crafted a moving novel about love and meaning and connection in the midst of remembered pain and sorrow. Through her sensitive portrayal of three fully-imagined protagonists, Rosner teaches us that people can emerge from the wilderness of despair to the refreshing oasis of possibility, voice and connection.The Speed of Light (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Overview

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Family History: A Novel Review

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Family History: A Novel ReviewHow could a family and a marriage fall apart after so many happy years? Rachel Jensen finds out in Dani Shapiro's novel FAMILY HISTORY, the story of her family and how they deal with a child that shows signs of mental illness. The book opens with Rachel sitting in her house alone, watching home movies taken by her husband Ned. She stares at the movie screen and sees herself and her family, yet she does not recognize them. The happy smiles and laughter that she is watching is from a lifetime ago. She still has not adjusted to her new life without her husband or her daughter Kate. The smiles and laughter are only memories. The only remnant of her family is her young son Joshua, who lives with her in this house. He is far too young to really understand how bad things are for his parents and he does not know that he has a sister named Kate. For most of Joshua's life, Kate has not lived with the family.
Rachel goes downstairs to check her phone messages and listens to one that asks her to go to Stone Mountain in regards to Kate. Whatever the news is, Rachel is dreading to hear it. There could be no good news if they are calling her about Kate.
How did things get to this point? The bulk of the story is told in flashbacks. As the story line slowly progresses and the appointment at Stone Mountain approaches, the reader learns about Ned and Rachel's courtship and their romantic dreams of being artists before their children were even a glimmer in their eyes. The two of them lived in New York and, while trying to make their artistic dreams come true, Rachel learns she is pregnant. With the help of Ned's parents, who also happen to be very wealthy, they buy a fixer-upper near his parents' home in Massachusetts. It's away from the big city and closer to her in-laws, who could help them out as the two of them try to make a new life for their new family. Rachel sees this move as a big change --- along with her pregnancy --- and it becomes one of the pivotal points in their lives.
We learn about Kate, who had shown much promise of a bright future. We learn about the event that ultimately sends Kate away from her family, because she is too unstable to be cared for at home by her parents. Neither Ned nor Rachel saw the signs that led to this event. They did not see the signs that would have told them that Kate would start to go through a transformation, from happy-go-lucky preteen to sullen and moody teenager. Close friends said it was just a phase all girls go through and Rachel believed it for a while. Then things started to get worse.
They did not predict the unexplainable tantrums and mood swings Kate would begin to experience: her foul language at home, shoplifting incidences and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Again, this all could have been a phase that Kate was going through. No one would have believed that things would get so bad that Kate would have the power to break apart and destroy their family and nearly ruin a marriage and a love that should have lasted throughout the years. Ned and Rachel are united in their love and care for Kate, but when Kate reveals the ultimate accusation at her father, their lives are torn apart.
FAMILY HISTORY sounds like a complex psychological drama built around a family that is falling apart. Part of the story is just that, but there are other layers to this book. The relationship with mother and daughters is a secondary plot as we compare Rachel's relationship with her own dysfunctional mother to that of her own relationship with Kate. The study of a marriage is another subplot --- how two people who thought they knew each other so well become total strangers overnight. All these factors helped make this a very fast read for me, but overall I enjoyed the way Dani Shapiro writes. She made these characters seem familiar to me; I felt close to all of them, as if I was the friend or family that surrounded them. I finished this book in a record 24 hours. That's how much I enjoyed this book. This reviewer highly recommends FAMILY HISTORY and looks forward to reading Dani Shapiro's other novels.
--- Reviewed by Marie Hashima LoftonFamily History: A Novel Overview

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A Spot of Bother (Vintage) Review

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A Spot of Bother (Vintage) ReviewMark Haddon had quite a challenge coming off of the quirky, wonderful "Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-time." How could you possibly follow that up? Haddon takes the noble approach by trying a different tact this time around; while "Incident" was seen solely from the point of view of one person (who just happened to be autistic), "Bother" takes on an entire family whose lives get shaken up in the weeks before the daughter's wedding. It's a very different approach that thankfully keeps Haddon's quirky sense of humor. Haddon also challenges himself by presenting us with some deeply shallow, selfish characters that for the first hundred pages are pretty severely unlikable. I was thoroughly convinced that there was no way I could ever care what happens to such wretched people, but Haddon proved me wrong. First, let's meet them: there's the matriarch, Jean, who has been having an affair with a former colleague of her husband; Jamie, the gay son, who has just been dumped by the boyfriend he stubbornly refused to invite to the wedding to meet his family; daughter Katie, whose nuptials may be cancelled because she can't decide if she loves her fiance or not; and George, the patriarch who suffers a complete mental breakdown after retirement and the appearance of a lesion on his hip (the titular spot of bother). Jean, Jamie, and Katie start out completely insufferable, but after the first hundred pages they have been forced to re-examine their lives and become determined to be better people. They discover their softer, more human sides and set about righting the wrongs they have committed. In no time at all I was hopelessly caught up rooting for them to get their lives back on track. George has the opposite problem: he has always been relatively stable, if emotionally distant. Caught up in a passed-mid-life crisis, he completely unravels. It is utterly fascinating -- and scarily realistic --to witness his descent into madness, and it gives the family drama a powerful edge that makes it all the more resonant. In the end I thoroughly enjoyed "A Spot of Bother" and its characters. And I really can't wait to see what Haddon comes up with next.A Spot of Bother (Vintage) Overview

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Toast Review

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Toast ReviewFood writer Nigel Slater is a man after my own heart, as he, like me, relates episodes of his childhood, through the food he ate at the time. I am not familiar with many of the foods he references since they are Brit-specific, for example, oddities such as grilled grapefruit, space dust, angel delight, cheese-and-onion crisps, arctic roll, and heinz tinned puddings. At the same time, I feel his descriptions are so illustrative that it is easy to sense what these concoctions taste like. He also captures the ambivalent feelings consumers had in the 1950's and 60's about accepting modern convenience foods, especially with his mother's culinary pride and his own fastidious palette on the line. Even more personally, Slater shows how he used food as an emotional substitute for a mother who died early and a distant father, who vented his frustration through abuse and ultimately remarried the family cleaning lady as if to destroy the family nucleus intentionally. However, the author does not dwell on the emotional impact of these events but rather uses his edible memories as the catharsis to which we could all relate.
The author can be a cipher as he is hesitant to incur the risk of sharing too much of his personal history. The wider significance of the people in his life is never explained, and as a reader, I don't miss this dimension since Slater is so engaging in his narrative, the focus of which is almost entirely on himself - through breakfasts, lunches and dinners. He is full of hilarious anecdotes such as his overachieving stepmother who sounds like she would put Martha Stewart to shame or taking nightly walks with the dog and a candy bar to observe couples making out in the back of cars. Slater eventually finds a substitute family working after school in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant, and he describes the mundane tasks as if they are pioneering adventures, whether it amounts to preparing prawns for a cocktail or defrosting ready-made meals. The timeline of his story is thankfully limited. It begins with burnt toast and ends as the author, just out of school, finds employment in a restaurant in London. Slater converts the recollections in between into precise sensory memories that attain emotional resonance. This is not sentimental writing by any means, as he evokes time, people and place with a palpable realism in his energetic prose. Like Ruth Reichl and Anthony Boudrain, Slater makes his own idiosyncratic exercise in culinary history a winning childhood memoir.Toast Overview

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An Uncertain Refuge Review

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An Uncertain Refuge ReviewI downloaded An Uncertain Refuge, by Carolyn J. Rose for an afternoon read on the couch, chips and ice-tea at hand. I managed to move from couch to dinner table, then back to couch, then to bed and by 11:30pm I finished this very satisfying Indy author's book in record time because I simply had to read it all without stopping.
This is suspense at its finest. Kate Dalton runs a women's shelter in Arkansas, but when an abusive ex-con husband takes a knife to his wife, Kate steps out of her comfort zone and in the altercation, he dies. Pushed by her superiors to capitalize on the incident with a sleazy movie company, Kate, without anything to keep her in this town, leaves her job for the open road, intent on starting over. Then she gets a request from the victim: Take my son with you. Kate has no husband, no children and she intends to keep it that way. But, the woman is adamant, take him, or she'll put him in foster care. In spite of her better judgment, Kate's heart softens and she agrees to take the shattered woman's nine-year old son for two weeks while the woman recuperates--at least that's her take on it, until the road trip gets to Oregon and the boy has a medical emergency and Kate must get the mother's permission for an apendectemy. The mother's phone message says to refer all questions to her lawyer. She's gone, leaving behind a sick and agitated child, and Kate, who is trying not to panic. The lawyer fixes the problem with the hospital about Kate's guardianship, but not the final question of where Way-Ray's mom has gone or why she ran.
Seeing an opportunity to get a cheap place for the boy to recover and some additional money, Kate takes a temporary job in a local motel as manager, and in doing so, acquires a ready-made circle of friends in Rhea, the wise cracking, chain smoking and big hearted motel manager and Evie who runs a wildlife refuge on the coast, and eventually, a man of steadfast character who loves her and in whom she learns to return that love.
The question of why the boy's mother is soon resolved when Kate hires a PI to look for her. The dead ex-con husband has a half-brother and he's hell-bound to finish the job on the mother and take the boy back to the father's drunken, abusive family.
This book reads like women's fiction, thick with beautifully written atmosphere, a deeply introspective protagonist with incredibly well developed secondary characters. The ending is perfect, and remarkable in that there was not the over-the-top violence. I'm going back for more Carolyn J Rose books, they're terrific at any price.
RP Dahlke,
A DEAD RED HEART
A DEAD RED CADILLAC
Kindle @$2.99
An Uncertain Refuge OverviewA child orphaned by violence. A woman sworn to protect and raise him. A killer come to claim him. A few deadly minutes in An Uncertain Refuge.Kate Dalton lives by the rules of honesty and fair play until she steps between a battered woman and the man intent on killing her. Amanda Blake barely survives; her ex-husband dies by Kate's hand. The repercussions force Kate from her job at a domestic violence shelter. Fleeing unwanted publicity and yearning to break with her past, she heads to the Oregon coast, burdened by a coerced promise to Amanda-to care for the nine-year-old son of the man she killed and shield him from the truth. For several weeks Kate holds a tattered web of lies together. Then Way-Ray's vengeful uncle murders Amanda, an ambush journalist tells the story, and the boy bolts in horror. Aided by a dangerous man she only half-trusts, Kate searches for the boy she's come to love. But a sadistic killer intent on claiming his kin is watching every move.

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Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel Review

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Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel ReviewThis is one of the best books I have ever read. I've been carrying it around with me, showing to all my friends and recommending that they read it, too. It's magical, magnificent, a very great, important piece of writing. Although the story revolves around Ruby and her family, the lives of her maternal great-grandmother, grandmother and mother are woven into the story so that in effect, the there two books here: Ruby and pre-Ruby. Several reviewers have described this novel as "one of the funniest books to come out of Britain in years (The NY Times Book Review) and as "comic" (Boston Sunday Globe) and while Behind the Scenes is enormously charming, inventive and endearing, don't buy this expecting it to be a funny or humorous book. At times it is unbearably sad, sadness tinged with dark scamperings of horror. I was telling my husband about this book and he kept saying, "this sounds awful, terrible things keep happening to these people," ! and while that is true, the author tells this story with a beautiful lightness that keeps Ruby safe despite her sadness.
One thing I found very interesting about this book was the way the women's lives went from the unending drudgery of cooking, cleaning, mending, pregnancy and taking care of numerous children by Alice, the great-grandmother who lived in rural 19th century England, to the comparatively empty days of Bunty, Ruby's mother, days that are filled up with a dedication to housekeeping that only mimics what was once a necessity of life. Alice lived in a world where the failure to bake bread and to keep up with darning and mending meant that children went hungry and cold in winter. Bunty lives in a world attached to a strict household schedule (washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, cleaning on Wednesday, etc) and where store-bought cakes and cookies are looked upon as evidence of a slatternly nature.
Another interesting this about this book is the way Ruby's! voice changes from when she is little to when she grows up! . Little Ruby is consumed with magical thinking, she believes in a world of ghosts where things happen for no reason and a deck of cards designed to teach the alphabet become a wondrous bridge to life away from home. As she grows, her voice takes on depth and the effects of secondary school and while the frivolity and delightful silliness that characterize little Ruby's world continue to exist, they are moderated by her maturity. This is a truly wonderful book.Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel Overview

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