Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

This is a sneaky book—but I mean that as a compliment. It’s got a girly cover and a breezy tone, and it purports to be about yummy mummies whose children attend the same elementary school in an affluent Australian suburb. It looks like a light fun read, and it is, until you realize that it’s also about domestic violence, and how it crops up where you never expect it and how easy it is for the abuse (and the abuser) to hide in plain sight. It’s also a very funny book, except when it makes you cry.

I have already said too much about the plot so I won’t go on. I do want to say that I really was impressed by Moriarty’s ability to hit the right note every single time. She could have gone wrong so many places, veering off into movie-of-the-week territory, or worse, trivializing the issues, but she avoided all these obstacles perfectly. Moriarty is often mentioned in the same breath as Jojo Moyes, another author who excels at giving us a fresh look at the lives of ordinary women, and for tackling difficult subjects with humor.

(Book 2, 2015)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

An Americanah is a Nigerian person who has lived abroad and has adopted American habits. Americanah, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who moves to the U.S. to attend college, and Obinze, Ifemelu’s friend who stays behind in Nigeria.

When Americanah opens, Ifemelu has been in the U.S. for more than ten years. She has made a career as a social critic: She writes a popular blog, gives lectures, and leads university seminars on race relations in America, as seen through the lens of a black African person. But she is restless and wants to return to Nigeria. Obinze, too, is emotionally adrift; after a brief stint living illegally in London, he has become a successful businessman in Lagos, but something is missing from his life.

The book moves back and forth between the past and the present as we watch Ifemelu and Obinze grow up together and fall in love, spend their years apart, then gradually become reunited upon Ifemelu’s return to Nigeria. Contrasts abound in this book: Life in Nigeria vs. life in the U.S. Ifemelu’s success in the U.S. vs. Obinze’s troubles in London. And most interesting of all, the experience of being a black African in the U.S. vs. the experience of being an African American.

Ifemelu provides a unique perspective on this last issue, especially. Her blog is called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Author Adichie sprinkles Ifemelu’s blog posts throughout the novel. It’s a clever device that lets us learn from Ifemelu without feeling like the book is too didactic. Ifemelu’s voice is strong, and her warmth and humor belie her sometimes pointed indictments of white privilege. It was interesting to read this book now. As conversations about race swirl around me I keep wanting to respond “So Ifemelu says…” before remembering that she is just a character in a novel.

Sometimes a book is so good that you stay up all night reading because you can’t put it down. The corollary to this is a book that is so good that you ration it out in tiny bites so that it lasts as long as possible. Americanah falls into the second category; I started reading this in September and made it last three months. Even now I’m sorry that it’s over.

(Book 25, 2014)

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

To describe this book is to make it sound awful and off-putting. As Michiko Kakutani pointed out in the New York Times, it’s kind of a Young Adult/Historical Romance mashup. It’s also a coming-of-age novel with an (at times) unsympathetic teenage protagonist and features some disturbing sexual shenanigans between a boarding school headmaster and that teenager. Nevertheless this book is more than just what these descriptions imply, and it’s a very good read.

Thea Atwell has been sent, at age 15, to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, a year-round boarding school in North Carolina. In the 1930’s at the height of the Depression, the camp is a place where well-heeled southern girls ride horses, practice their social skills, and wait to get married. Thea’s parents have installed her at the school against her will, for some transgression that the author spends the rest of the novel slowly revealing, generating at times almost unbearable tension and anxiety.

Thea’s crime, of course, has to do with sex, and a boy. But it’s a lot more complicated than that: The boy in question is her cousin, and an act of violence has left this boy injured to an extent that isn’t fully revealed until quite late in the book. Thus DiSclafani neatly sidesteps the double standard issue of the boy’s culpability and possible consequences, while saddling Thea with some real guilt in addition to the feelings of shame imposed by her family and society for breaking the conduct codes of the time.

Thea is not always likeable, but she is very authentic. Her intelligence and sexual energy (and that of all the girls at the school) cannot be contained or managed in the way the adults in charge think it can and should be. The whole school simmers with hormones and repression. Readers can get kinda sweaty and uncomfortable reading this book, but will also be caught up in the drama.

Is this a Young Adult novel? I don’t think so. Adult readers will be very interested in DiSclafani’s portrayal of Thea’s parents and their motivations, and to the behaviors of all the adults. Despite the heat and the suspense, this is very much a character-driven story, one that moves beyond obvious emotions and easy answers.

(Book 22, 2014)

The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon

The Liar’s Wife is a collection of four novellas by Mary Gordon. The novellas are thematically linked in that in each one someone revisits an important past relationship. Sometimes it’s by examining a memory, but in other cases the protagonist is faced with the actual person, as in the story “Simone Weil in New York,” where a young woman encounters her old teacher, Simone Weil, in Central Park.

In this story, Genevieve, the student, is a grown woman with a husband and a baby. As they become reacquainted, she finds Mlle. Weil’s anxieties and eccentricities disturbing, and as evidence of her instability, instead of awe-inspiring signs of her brilliance. Yet ultimately she is not surprised by her own change in perception. I identified with Genevieve’s experience of reexamining her impressions and drawing different conclusions. It’s a universal experience, no?

Two of the novellas feature real-life characters as well as fictional ones: Simone Weil and Thomas Mann, who appears in “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana.” That story highlights Mann's speaking tour of the U.S. in the late 1930’s, where he tried to call attention to the horrors of Nazi Germany to a mostly uninterested U.S. public.

Incorporating a real person into a fictional world introduces a whole subtext that may or may not be accessible to the reader. Note the parallel titles of the two novellas. Would either of these stories have worked the same way if Gordon replaced Weil or Mann with fictional versions of their characters? I wonder. In truth, I preferred the two novellas that had only fictional characters, especially the title story, "The Liar’s Wife," about a woman who receives a midnight visit from her first husband, a man she hasn’t seen in many many years.

Mary Gordon is a Serious Writer. I’ve read most of her earlier novels but have found her more recent stuff harder to get into, as she has turned to nonfiction to explore her relationships with her family and with Catholicism. I was happy to have something new from her that was more like the older stuff I remember reading. But that reflects more on me as a reader than on Gordon as a writer.

(Book 21, 2014)

Alena by Rachel Pastan

This book is a contemporary retelling of the classic Daphne DuMaurier book Rebecca. I read it because I love Rebecca, and because the author was coming to the Wisconsin Book Festival and I wanted to attend her reading. I also read it because I’m interested in modern retellings of classic novels. Pastan isn't the first to tackle Rebecca; a few years ago I read a book called Daphne, by Justine Picardie, which was a mashup of Rebecca and elements from duMaurier’s life.

The plots of Alena and Rebecca overlap considerably. Rebecca was written in the 1930’s and made into a popular movie starring Lawrence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. In that novel, a nameless young narrator tells of her marriage to a much older man, Max de Winter, and her life at his home, Manderley, where she lives in the shadow of his first wife, Rebecca, who died under mysterious circumstances. Life at Manderley is fraught with anxiety. The servants, especially the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, adored Rebecca and view the narrator’s arrival with suspicion and hostility. Her attempts to run Manderley are undermined, she is filled with self-doubt, and duMaurier cleverly ratchets ups the tension with each chapter. In a dramatic conclusion, the details of Rebecca’s death emerge and the reader discovers that all is not as it seemed.

In Alena, author Rachel Pastan moves the setting from Cornwall to Cape Cod, thereby retaining the windswept isolation of the original novel. She moves the action to the present day, and gives the unnamed narrator a career – she is now a museum curator, hired by Bernard Augustin, an art collector, to run his contemporary art museum after the mysterious death of the previous curator, Alena. Like Max deWinter, Bernard is alternatingly attentive and remote. The narrator is inexperienced and in over her head. Agnes, the museum’s administrator, stands in for Mrs. Danvers.

I loved the choices Pastan made when she transformed the book to a contemporary setting. It was essential to give the narrator a career, and making her a curator gives Pastan (who works in a museum) a chance to populate the background with contemporary artists both real and imagined. Bernard Augustin is gay; this enables him to have an emotionally intimate relationship with the narrator while removing the marriage element from the story. I didn’t find Agnes to be as menacing as Mrs. Danvers. In Alena she is more of a caricature, in her black dresses and red nail polish – a kind of Cruella De Vil of the art world. My perception of all the characters was of course colored by what I know about Rebecca, and Pastan relies on this to a certain extent, especially when it comes to conjuring up the late Alena.

But do you have to have read Rebecca to read this novel? Absolutely not. It stands alone perfectly. It works as a mystery, as a coming-of-age novel, and as a commentary on the world of contemporary art. Pastan writes elegant prose that honors duMaurier’s work but which also envelops the reader in atmosphere and art.

(Book 20, 2014)

The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit

Historical fiction comes in two basic flavors: the kind that teaches you about history as you read it (e.g., The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, 1008 pages about building a 12th century cathedral), and the kind that is more opaque, where the history, while important, is not so spelled out. I like both kinds, but I often get more of a kick out of the second type, especially when the historical details intrigue me enough to go off and read more on my own, later.

The Wives of Los Alamos is definitely in the second category. In spare prose, author TaraShea Nesbit tells the story of the community of scientists and their families who lived and worked in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the 1940’s, where the scientists developed the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Most of the scientists were civilian men, formerly university professors, many of them with families and children. The U.S. government moved them to New Mexico where they worked for years under top secret conditions. Their families were kept in the dark about the nature of their work, and everyone’s contact with family members and friends from outside the community was strictly monitored. In some cases, where a scientist was well known within the field, names were changed as well. The restricted nature of their lives meant that the women, especially, formed close bonds with one another as they attempted to create a semblance of normal life in the isolated desert community.

Nesbit reinforces the women’s closeness by writing this novel in third person plural, which I thought would bother me, but which didn’t. The wives speak as a group, about their children, the landscape, and the difficulties of being cut off from extended family. They reveal both the petty (whose government- issue house has a coveted bathtub) and the frightening aspects of their lives (what, exactly, are their husbands working on? Something very dangerous.).

Real historical figures inhabit this novel (Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr) but their influence is minimal. It’s not the kind of historical novel where you play “guess who this character is?” It’s more diffuse than that, because of the third person narrative voice and also because it’s mostly about the wives, whose names we don’t know anyway. After I finished reading it I read the Wikipedia articles about the Manhattan Project. On her website, Nesbit recommends another book, The Girls of Atomic City, by Denise Kiernan, which is nonfiction, about the women who worked in the secret Oak Ridge, Tennessee uranium separating plant. Now I want to read that, too.

(Book 19, 2014)

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

The Silkworm is J. K. Rowling’s second mystery novel written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, and featuring the curmudgeonly detective Cormoran Strike and his clever assistant Robin Ellacott. Strike is hired to find Owen Quine, a missing novelist, and find him he does. Quine is dead--murdered, it turns out, by a grisly method described in Quine's latest (and not yet released) book. The initial list of suspects includes anyone who may have read the manuscript, and this list contains more folks than you might imagine: family members, his agent, his publisher and the office staff, fellow authors, lawyers, etc., many of whom had good reasons to hate Quine, whose capacity to offend was outmatched only by his ego.

Who knew there was so much vitriol in the staid world of publishing? Rowling apparently knows. As her characters offer observations on the state of modern literature, book marketing, and fame, it’s hard not to interpret them through this lens. The world that Rowling/Galbraith describes is a hotbed of jealousy, spitefulness, incompetence, greed, and decades-old grudges, all of which seethe under a thin veneer of respectability.

While it’s interesting that Rowling brings all this publishing world angst to the novel’s backstory, the real question I’m thinking about is, what makes this book better than the hundreds of other mysteries out there? Or more precisely, why did I like this book (and the first one in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling) better than many other mysteries I’ve read? Here are my reasons, in no particular order:

1. Rowling hews to some classic mystery character tropes (an outsider detective and a clever assistant who have some unresolved sexual tension between them) but her skill and experience as a writer elevate them beyond the cliche. Hence Strike and Robin are well-developed, sympathetic characters--Strike is not very good looking or overly macho, and he makes mistakes. Robin is smart and self-motivated, but still learning. She and Strike treat each other like colleagues, despite whatever might be simmering underneath.

2. The crime, while gruesome, is not titillating or exploitative. I’m really tired of mysteries that include sexual violence, and The Silkworm is blessedly free of that.

3. The book is just not as dark as a lot of current mysteries. Strike, despite his difficulties, remains essentially a hopeful man, and if he has a self-destructive streak, he’s working hard to get it under control. While the publishing industry takes some shots, Rowling avoids the tendency of a lot of modern mystery writers to engage in broad (and usually negative) social commentary. The death of Owen Quine is not viewed as a symptom of some larger social ill and we are not called upon to draw any such conclusions. (That said, this is certainly not a "cozy mystery" where all unpleasantness happens off screen and recipes are interspersed throughout. Not that there's anything wrong with those.)

Almost everyone I know is reading Robert Galbraith’s books. The library waiting list for The Silkworm has over 400 people on it, and a few hundred more are still waiting for The Cuckoo’s Calling. For some reason this fact brings me a lot of pleasure.

(Book 18, 2014)

One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

I’ve come to regard books by Jojo Moyes as little treasures, to be indulged in when I need a special treat. When I get a new one I hang on to it for a while before reading it, enjoying the anticipation. (The same is true for J. K. Rowling’s mysteries that she writes under the pen name Robert Galbraith; I'm reading The Silkworm now.) My only problem is that neither writer is cranking out books fast enough to satisfy me. Maybe I could stick them both into a parallel universe where there are more hours in a day, enabling them to produce more books, faster. I’ll have to get right on that.

In One Plus One, Jess is a single mother who is just barely getting by, working as a cleaner and barmaid in a resort community in southern England. She lives in a crappy apartment in public housing, her kids are being bullied at school, and her ex-husband hasn’t sent her a penny in years. In the face of these problems, Jess remains unrelentingly cheerful, buoying everyone along through creative budgeting, hard work, and unflagging optimism.

On the other side of town, where the rich folks have their beach houses, we find software entrepreneur Ed Nicholls, who is hiding out from, well, from everyone. Under investigation for insider trading, Ed is dodging phone calls from his ex-wife, his ex-business partner, his lawyer, and his sister, and sinking further and further into self pity.

Jess cleans Ed’s house, and she waits on him at the bar. She finds him arrogant and rude; he barely registers her existence. But through a series of events too complicated to get into here, Ed ends up driving Jess and her kids to Scotland so that Jess’s daughter Tanzie can compete in a math competition. It’s Jess’s last desperate attempt to get Tanzie, a math whiz, out of the local school and into a safer place where her skills can be nurtured. It’s this road trip (complete with a huge flatulent dog) that takes up the lion’s share of the book, and where of course, Jess and Ed fall in love.

Nothing in this book is as simple as it sounds here though. Moyes can sketch out a character in a few telling lines, and provide unexpected richness and depth to simple situations. She’s really a great writer and this book works on a lot of different levels: as a love story, a modern family drama, and an investigation of entrenched class differences in modern Britain.

The trickiest thing she does is to make Ed sympathetic. He transitions from a clueless self-absorbed whiner into a man who takes responsibility for his poor decisions and moves forward with insight and compassion. My favorite part of the book is where Ed dismisses £50 as “nothing” and Tanzie schools him on all the things that her family can buy with that amount of nothing (the school lunches, bus fare, and other expenses that Jess sweats every day). A lazier novelist would have been content to make Ed the knight in shining armor who rescues Jess from poverty. In this book the person who really gets rescued is Ed.

(Book 16, 2014)

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is a big sprawling book that reads like classic literature. In fact, maybe someday it will be classic literature. Elizabeth Gilbert has written an old-fashioned historical novel that has more in common with works by Rebecca Stott (Ghostwalk) and Andrea Barrett (The Voyage of the Narwhal) than it does with Gilbert’s most famous work to date, her memoir Eat, Pray, Love.

The title refers to German mystic Jakob Bohme’s belief that every object in the natural world contains some hidden meaning, put there by God to help people make sense of the universe. And indeed, this book’s protagonist Alma Whittaker, is searching for meaning. But she’s not waiting to hear it from God; she’s going to try to figure it out for herself. Alma has very little time for God and a lot of time for scientific analysis, specifically botany. And human nature. And world exploration. All of which she engages in over the course of her long life.

Alma is the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia botanist and plant collector Henry Whittaker, who makes his fortune developing a method for manufacturing quinine, and whose story takes up the first quarter of the book. Henry and his Dutch wife have unorthodox ideas about women’s education (the book is set in the late 18th and early-mid 19th centuries) and they train Alma to manage their vast pharmaceutical empire, botanical collections, and gardens.

Considered physically unattractive (tall, big-boned, with unmanageable hair), Alma eschews traditional women’s pursuits and spends her time at her parents’ sides learning both business and science. She devotes years to studying various plants before happily settling on mosses (bryology) and becomes the world’s leading expert in this field. (Note: historians tell us that botany was actually rife with women scientists in the 19th century as it required little more than a notebook, pencil, magnifying glass, and long walks in the woods, all of which were more available to women than, say, a laboratory filled with chemicals or a surgery for dissecting things.)

Tragic events, including a failed love affair and her father’s death, upend Alma and force her to step outside her tiny moss world and embark on her quest for meaning in the universe. This section of the book (especially the long middle section about her voyage to Tahiti) reminded me of those books by Victorian women travel writers like Isabella Bird, who stoically endured shockingly harsh conditions aboard 19th century sailing vessels and lived rough among the natives. Alma’s journey echoes her father’s earlier explorations, but while he was singled-mindedly focused on plants, Alma remains open to discoveries about all aspects of the world and about herself. And it’s while she’s in Tahiti that she hits upon her own theory of the signature of all things, the pursuit of which takes up the final part of the book.

What a great novel! Carefully researched, ranging among a huge variety of historical and scientific topics, and intensely personal, this book is unique and delightful.

(Book 15, 2014)

Wake by Anna Hope

Wake tells several stories at once, some very personal, and some public. Set in England in the years immediately following World War I, it follows several characters whose worlds intersect, and uses a real-life event as an anchoring device to bring the stories together.

Running throughout Wake is an account of the 1920 state funeral of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey in London. Author Anna Hope follows the anonymous soldier’s body from its exhumation from an unmarked grave in France, to its burial alongside kings on November 11, 1920. Hope’s report is well researched and well told. As we know, the British excel at pageantry and they pulled out all the stops for this event, providing the poor unknown soldier with a battleship escort on the journey from France, and a Field Marshall’s funeral, complete with a 19 gun salute.

Intertwined with this narrative are several fictional stories of women who could be the wives, mothers, or sisters of the unknown warrior, and the men who escaped that fate, but whose lives were nevertheless ruined by their experiences in the war. Their tales are dark and brutal and the women, especially, rail against the futility of their losses. The funeral of the unknown warrior was in part designed to help British citizens start to heal; this book shows how impossible that process was for many people, and how little the men in charge understood that. This book is extremely sad, but it's beautifully written and very moving. Don't be put off by the topic--Hope's characters are compelling and I love how she mixed the fiction with the nonfiction.

I’ve read a lot of Second World War fiction, but not as much about the First World War. A lot of World War II fiction focuses on the victims of the war—on those oppressed by the Nazis or on the civilians who were collateral damage. But it seems to me like World War I fiction often focuses more on the soldiers themselves. Wake joins books like My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, by Louisa Young, the Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker, and even the Ian Rutledge mysteries by Charles Todd in identifying the soldiers themselves as primary victims. Wake especially continues this approach.

(Book 14, 2014)

Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison

I read this book because I'm interested in fanfiction as a literary trend. I was hoping for a coherent discussion of why fanfiction is so derided while at the same time it is increasing in popularity. I wanted to read about the gender issues surrounding fanfiction – the fact that it is mostly written by and read by women. And I wanted to read about the porous boundaries between fanfiction and mainstream fiction like Longbourn, which is a new original novel that uses characters and settings from Pride and Prejudice (but which no reviewer described as fanfiction, despite its obvious connections).

But I didn’t get any of that in this book. Instead, I got a scholarly history of fanfiction and a snapshot of the current state of the art, especially the role of fanfiction within the larger world of fandom. An English professor at the University of Utah, author Anne Jamison has read and written fanfiction for years, as have most of the book’s other contributors (of which there are several). Her enthusiasm for her topic, however, in some ways prevents her from delivering me the answers I wanted; Jamison and the other authors are too close to the subject to give it an objective analysis and they consider the appeal (and the legitimacy) of fanfiction to be self-evident. Jamison does not address the gender issues, and swiftly dismisses the idea that writing fanfiction is “playing in someone else’s sandbox.” She says that writing is writing. I tend to agree.

But nevertheless, I enjoyed this book, albeit slowly. I’d love to recommend it to other fanfiction readers but unfortunately I can barely find anyone I know who will admit to reading it. Part of me wants to write a spirited defense of fanfiction here, and address those issues that Jamison didn’t. Another part of me thinks it’s not worth my time. Either you are open-minded about it or you aren’t. I have read fanfiction written by anonymous amateurs that moved me to tears, and award winning literary novels that bored me to tears. Remember, there are no reading police. If you think reading new stories about Harry and Ron sounds like it could be fun, well so do hundreds of thousands of other people. Why not join them?

(Book 12, 2014)

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

It’s hard to write about this book without revealing spoilers. If you are considering reading it, I recommend you stop reading this post and go get the book right away, before you accidentally discover the secret. Diving into it without knowing the central conceit will be a good adventure and I envy you the pleasure. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Okay, off you go… bye!

Everyone else—In We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, Rosemary and Fern are adopted sisters, raised together from infancy through age 5, when they are suddenly irrevocably separated. Rosemary spends the rest of her childhood mourning Fern’s loss and her young adult years tracking Fern down. She struggles to adapt to life without Fern and rails against her parents whose involvement in Fern’s disappearance baffles, then haunts Rosemary.

Here’s the thing: Rosemary is a girl but Fern is a chimpanzee, a fact that Fowler doesn’t reveal until about a third of the way through the book. Both Rosemary and Fern are test subjects in an experiment run by Rosemary’s father, a behavioral scientist. For their first five years, Rosemary and Fern are happily cared for by their parents and a slew of graduate students, their every move documented, their development celebrated and recorded at every turn. However, for reasons that unfold in the story, the experiment goes awry and Fern must be sent away, leaving the research project in shambles, and the entire family far more damaged than anyone thought possible. Rosemary’s mother retreats into serious depression, her father into alcohol, her brother becomes a fugitive animal rights activist, and Rosemary herself must navigate through life never sure whether her instincts are human or chimpanzee.

The novel’s complex structure of present-day narration combined with flashbacks adds suspense and makes the big reveal very satisfying, even if you already know it in advance, which I did. It was hard to avoid--this book got a lot of press when it came out last year and recently won the 2014 Pen/Faulkner award.

While it has a political subtext, the book is, at heart, a very personal story about relationships, loss, love, and what it means to be human. Fowler was inspired by several well-known cases of chimps raised in human families but has added her own spin. Politically, she walks a fine line, managing to avoid vilifying Rosemary’s father while still coming down firmly on the side of the animal rights folks. She has clearly done her research. It’s tricky subject matter and Fowler never puts a foot wrong. I was really delighted by this book, even when it was sad and heartbreaking.

(Book 9, 2014)

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

Attentive readers will know that Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling. Rowling’s identity was outed by someone from her law firm, but not before she had gotten this book published, sold a decent number of copies, and had offers from television production companies for the rights. Rowling had planned to keep writing as Galbraith for as long as she could, but her anonymity only lasted for three months after the book’s release in the UK. She says she was “more disappointed than angry” about the revelation.

I only heard of the book in conjunction with the news that Galbraith was Rowling, though I like to think I would have found it anyway. It’s really an excellent detective story, featuring a hardboiled PI, his intrepid assistant, and a dead supermodel.

So much detective fiction coming out of the UK and northern Europe right now is really really dark, featuring isolated self-destructive detectives and horrifically violent crime. Galbraith draws on that tradition but avoids the extremes. In fact, I think he (she?) hits exactly the right tone. Cormoran Strike, the PI, is an Iraq war veteran, down on his luck, something of a drinker, but he maintains his sense of humor and a desire to turn things around; he hasn’t given in to his worst impulses (yet). And the crime Strike investigates, while sad, isn’t strange or sick, like some of the serial killer stuff that’s out there. Finally, Galbraith gives us Robin, a young woman who has always taken the safe, predictable path, but whose outwardly pragmatic demeanor hides a restless longing for something, anything, more exciting than a job in human resources and another evening with her stolid fiancé. When the temp agency sends her to Strike (by mistake, actually) she can finally let her true colors shine.

With these elements in place, Galbraith sets us up for a series of books (we hope) that will draw on Strike’s gruff, methodical methods and Robin’s flashes of insight to create a team that will keep delivering the goods. The second in this series (The Silkworm) is coming June 19, 2014 and Rowling says she’s looking forward to writing more books as Galbraith.

(Book 8, 2014)

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

World building is one of the trickiest aspects of writing fantasy and science fiction. Books are often front-loaded with detail—sometimes this detail is essential for understanding later plot developments but sometimes it’s just there because the writer was so enamored of her own creativity that she wasn’t a good judge of which elements were ornamental rather than strictly necessary. It’s no wonder that some readers find navigating a fantasy world off-putting or not worth the trouble.

Bee Ridgway, in The River of No Return, walks a fine line between these two extremes but in the end succeeds nicely. The book (a literary time travel feminist romance mashup) throws a lot of detail at you right out of the gate and I found myself, in the first 50 pages or so, thinking “Do I have to remember all this?” (Kind of the reader’s version of “Is this going to be on the test?”) The answer is yes, but it’s worth it: Ridgway’s details are all crucial to understanding what happens to Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, when, just as he is about to die in the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, he jumps forward in time to 2003 where, with the help of a mysterious organization called the Guild, he lives for the next ten years as Nick Davenant, a hipster organic farmer in Vermont. It turns out Nick has a special ability that enables him to swim around in the river of time (while the rest of us idiots are just carried along in the current). This skill qualifies him for admission to the Guild, a super-secret club for time travelers.

Threaded throughout Nick’s story is that of another time traveler from Regency England: Julia Percy, ward of the recently deceased fifth Earl of Darchester. Julia’s powers exceed those of all but the most practiced Guild members. Not only can she swim around in the river, she can stop it from flowing all together. But in the beginning of the story Julia is untrained; she uses her nascent skills mostly to fend off the unwelcome attentions of her new guardian, the Earl’s foul and abusive nephew. Julia and Nick meet when Nick is drafted by the Guild for an undercover operation wherein he must return to his old life as the Marquess to discover who is threatening the Guild’s sovereignty. Romance ensues but with a twist: Nick is now a 21st century guy who finds the societal strictures on women to be degrading and counterproductive. When protofeminist Nick meets superpowerful Julia, sparks fly. I loved it.

Ridgway includes all sorts of wink-and-nod references to traditional Regency romance tropes while turning the whole genre on its head. If that isn’t enough, she also offers sly interstitial commentary on the time travel conceit. If you’ve read/watched anything else in the genre you’ll pick this up. She even takes on that well-worn cliché about using time travel to change the future (all discussions of which now include killing Hitler), in this delightful conversation between Nick and some Guild leaders, when they warn him that he won’t be able to alter anything important when he returns to his own time. Alice says: 

“You will only be able to change the smallest things, things that get subsumed back into the big push of the river without making a difference.”

“No killing Hitler,” Nick said.

“No killing Hitler. No giving Queen Liliuokalani back her Hawaii, no saving Malcolm X, or Joan of Arc, or the princes in the tower. But smaller things—things that are just normal, everyday stuff of life? Those things are perfectly possible.” …

Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. “Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.”

Ridgway has recently released a prequel to The River of No Return, available as an e-book from Penguin and Amazon. It's called The Time Tutor and is only 90 pages and costs $2.99. I'm definitely going to read this. I'm not surprised to find this—it was clear from the ending of The River of No Return that Ridgway was setting us up for a lot more to come. Which of course takes us back to the world-building discussion. After all, if you go to all the trouble to construct a world where the rules about time are all different, it seems wasteful not to keep using it, no?

(Book 6, 2013)

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin

Is this genre-bending book a ghost story? (There are lots of ghosts.) Is it an investigation of a real historical mystery? (What happened aboard the brigantine Mary Celeste in 1872, and why was it found floating derelict near Gibraltar, its crew and captain missing, but with no signs of a struggle and all the cargo intact?) Further mixing fact with fiction, it’s also the story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s sensational account of the Mary Celeste that he wrote anonymously for a British literary journal, and a straight historical novel about a female journalist who investigates the Spiritualist movement in upstate New York (hence the ghosts). And I’m omitting a few other threads that wind their way through this intricately plotted, beautifully written novel.

Sometimes books like this, that lack a defined main character, can be difficult to connect with, and a reader can find herself trying to pin that role on someone specific. John Vernon, writing about this book in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, assigns that role to Phoebe Grant, the journalist, whom he says is “at the novel’s heart.” I disagree. Grant may be the intellectual center, but the woman at the heart of the book is Sarah Briggs, the wife of the Mary Celeste’s captain, whose story opens and closes the book. She may get less ink than Phoebe Grant but her bittersweet tale (and her links to many of the other characters) help bind everything together into a coherent whole.

Confused yet? Don’t be. Martin is in complete control of all this material. She never loses her forward momentum, and never derails us with too much emphasis on one thing or another. It’s really brilliant and we all know how geekishly enthusiastic I get over complicated books that don’t disintegrate under their own weight. I don’t really understand why Valerie Martin isn’t more famous. Her book Property won the 2003 Orange Prize and her subsequent books have been positively reviewed, but I don’t see her name come up in the discussions where I’d expect to see it. Perhaps it’s because Martin never writes the same book twice--maybe it’s her versatility that makes her difficult to track.

(Book 5, 2013)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Who can keep up with Neil Gaiman? He writes fiction (for adults and children), screenplays (for film and television), comics, and graphic novels. He seems to always be popping up here and there, speaking, teaching, blogging…the man is busy. I am not into everything he does, but I like some of what he does very much, so I try to look out for his new adult fiction, which has been scarce in the last few years. (I also love his episodes of Doctor Who.)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Gaiman’s return to adult magical realism. In this novel, a man looks back on events that occurred when he was 7 years old, when he comes, for a time, under the protection of the mysterious family who live down a dirt road not far from his house. When a sudden death unleashes an old elemental evil, the boy is caught up in the battle to subdue it, a battle waged by his friend Lettie Hempstock and her mother and grandmother, who look harmless, but whom we soon find out are practitioners of powerful ancient magic.

Like all good magical realists, Gaiman expertly mixes the mundane with the fantastic. Thus our 7-year-old is worried about his birthday party and loves his kitten, but he unquestionably accepts that Lettie’s grandmother can change past events with her needle and thread, and that Lettie keeps a jar of shadows dissolved in vinegar. For a time the malevolent force takes on the shape of something that terrifies all children: an evil nanny. Gaiman says that this book is partly about the ways in which children are wiser than adults--the boy can sense the nanny’s true nature right away, but his father cannot. Her powerful sexual hold on the father is rendered in a few quick, disturbing scenes that are brilliantly written. Adult readers can tell exactly what is going on, but the boy only knows that something is horribly amiss and he cannot understand why his father can't see it.

Gaiman has written about Lettie Hempstock’s family before, most recently in The Graveyard Book. I would love to see a whole novel about the Hempstock women, especially one that focused on the grandmother, who says she remembers the Big Bang. This is clever, original stuff and I wish that Gaiman would spread himself a bit less thinly so he could give me more of what I want.

(Book 4, 2013)

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

I am always on the lookout for books by (and about) funny women but they aren’t so easy to find. You’d be amazed at the junk that pops up in a search on Google or Amazon; aside from recent offerings by the heavy hitters like Helen Fielding, Tina Fey, and Ellen DeGeneres (all of which I’ve read), there’s not a lot to choose from. Pretty quickly your search starts turning up titles about how to laugh at your breast cancer. No thanks. But eventually I poked around enough to discover Caitlin Moran. She’s not nearly as widely known in the U.S. as she is in her native Britain, where she’s an award-winning columnist for The Times, but How to be a Woman was reviewed widely in the U.S. and sold well.

This book is scary funny and scary raw. Moran, it seems, will say anything, and in this book she tackles all sorts of issues: body image, pornography, feminism, fashion, childbirth, and especially poverty. She is fearless and relentless as she makes her points, in a way that is both shockingly direct and extremely funny. This book is not light humor. It’s social commentary delivered via shovel, in a voice that is loud, original, irreverent, and hilarious.

Moran grew up the oldest of 8 children in a three-bedroom council house (subsidized public housing) in a down-at-the-heels northern English city in the 1980’s. Despite this bleak beginning, she was winning writing awards by the time she was 13 and by 18 had landed a job as a reporter at a music magazine. Her childhood poverty informs all her commentary, especially when she takes on mainstream academic feminists and really anyone whose privilege gets her goat. Moran has also cultivated a larger-than-life public image in Britain and recently led a 24-hour boycott of Twitter in response to the anonymous threats of violence against outspoken women that are pervasive on that social network.

In case you like the idea of Moran’s work but aren’t very interested in how to be a woman, last year she released another collection called Moranthology which applies the same approach to more gender neutral political and pop culture topics. I just bought that one for my Kindle – sample chapters include I Do a Lot for Charity but I Would Never Mention It, and Downton Abbey Review 2: “SEX WILL BE HAD! SEX WILL BE HAD!" 

(Book 3, 2014)

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Jojo Moyes was in Madison a few months ago for the opening of the new Central Library. At that event she read from her latest book The Girl You Left Behind. I read that book in advance of her visit – here is my post about it. But most people who came to hear Moyes read that day were fans of her previous book, Me Before You, which was a big seller. Maybe you’ve already read it, but I hadn’t until now. I bought a copy of it at the library event and got around to reading it in late December.

Some reviewers try to pigeonhole Moyes as a romance writer. It’s true that both these books have elements of romance but neither really fits into that category, as they both lack the traditional happy ending that is mandatory for the romance genre. Instead Moyes cleverly combines elements of romance novels with more contemporary motifs to make a kind of hybrid novel that delivers both an emotionally satisfying read, and a story that incorporates some of the moral ambiguity that you see in literary fiction.

In Me Before You, Moyes delves into what it’s like to live with a serious disability – quadriplegia – and what it’s like to care about someone with this disability. Will Traynor is a former master of the universe who has been laid low by a traffic accident. He’s lost his high-powered job, his supermodel girlfriend, and his autonomy and is now confined to a motorized wheelchair under the care of a full time nurse and his parents. Lou, short on education but long on compassion, has been hired as his personal assistant. Lou has empathy to spare and it doesn’t take long for her to figure out what’s really going on. Will has made a perverse bargain with his mother – he’ll refrain from suicide attempts for six months, at the end of which she will take him to Switzerland to an assisted suicide center. Lou will keep him company during those six months, in essence holding him to his bargain.

As a reader I instinctively shared Lou’s revulsion at this deal and rooted for her efforts to convince Will to live. Their six months together is an exercise in opposites attract, class warfare, and last-ditch panic on Lou’s part. Will is, by turns lovable and monstrous to Lou, and Lou gives everything to Will. It’s deeply romantic, albeit futile, and a good cry is part of the deal.

Moyes is nothing if not prolific. Apparently she's got yet another book coming out in February called One Plus One. The other day she tweeted a link to a free download of the first chapter. I haven't tried downloading this yet, and I'm not sure how long the link will work, but here it is, if you want it.

(Book 36, 2013)

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Alice Munro’s stories conjure up feelings that I don’t normally experience from reading fiction. I abandon my concern with plot or character arcs (though these are certainly present) and instead allow myself to be transported by the beauty of each story as a whole. Every story is perfect and contains universes; to read them is to feel humble and uplifted at the same time. I finish each one and feel more like I have been staring at a beautiful painting or listening to music, than reading a book.

That said, I can’t read them very often, or read a lot of them in a row. To do so leads to feelings of overindulgence, like eating too much exquisite chocolate. You start to lose your ability to appreciate the subtleties and you are just blinded by the light. Am I overdoing my praise here? I don’t think so. All art forms have pinnacles and astute observers can recognize when an artist has reached one. It doesn’t mean that other artists can’t get there too, or haven’t gone there already. I’m just saying that Munro is there and I’m glad the Nobel committee has affirmed it. It’s gratifying to see this modest woman receive the honor she is due.

Should you read these stories? Absolutely. This volume, published in 2001, is as good a place as any to start. They are accessible, poignant stories about ordinary people in ordinary situations. A lot of them are about middle-aged people coming to terms with their lives’ decisions. One especially powerful one is about two people stuck on a golf course in a thunderstorm. Only it’s not really about that at all. As you read it you will feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up, just like the characters do in the story, but for different reasons.

(Book 35, 2013)

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding

Bridget Jones’s Diary was clever and original when it came out in 1996, and I loved it. I also liked the 2001 movie version starring Renee Zellweger and Colin Firth. Somewhat less interesting was the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. That book broke no new ground and as far as I could tell only served to wrap up the romance.

But now it’s 2013 and we have Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Bridget is 51! Mark Darcy has departed this earth in a blaze of glory, leaving Bridget a widow with two school-aged children and all her neuroses intact. It’s the same Bridget, only not; she’s sadder, and her love for her children gives her an emotional weight that was missing in the earlier book(s). She still records the same things in her diary (lbs. gained and lost, her alcohol consumption, who her friends are sleeping with) but she also writes about her pain at losing Mark, her attempts at being a worthy mother, and with great humor, her struggles to get back in the dating game. Funniest of all are Bridget’s encounters with 21st century technology, especially Twitter, as she attempts to tweet her way into a new life.

Helen Fielding is a funny writer, but what I like best about these books is that they aren’t just funny in a narrative or plot-driven sense. Fielding has created a main character (or alter ego) who has a great sense of humor. Bridget’s observations in her diary are funny; Bridget’s tweets are funny; and it’s her humor on line that first attracts the titular “boy” to her in the first place. I can’t think of a lot of fictional heroines who possess this characteristic and it feels as fresh in this book as it did back in 1996. So good to have Bridget back – I missed her!

(Book 34, 2013)