Pearl's Picks Fiction Staff Picks
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A Place of Greater Safety
Author: Hilary Mantel
Probably many of us were assigned Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities in high school; quite likely a good number of those who were assigned it never read much beyond the oft quoted first sentence (“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”) until later in life, if at all. It’s undoubtedly still the best known novel about the French Revolution ever written and, like all of Dickens, well worth reading. But wait! With A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel offers us a brilliantly written contemporary novel covering the same events. This masterful retelling of the events of 1789 to 1799 is impeccably researched and compulsively readable. Mantel brings the major movers and shakers of the French Revolution – among them Danton, Robespierre, and Desmoulins – as well as their families, lovers, friends, and enemies to vivid life (including, in most cases, a vivid death). She shows how the idealistic rebellion against the monarchy descended into terror, lawlessness, and the ultimate corruption of those who came to power determined to make France more democratic. Fans of historical fiction won’t want to miss this.
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A Safe Place for Dying
Author: Jack Fredrickson
If you want to get in at the beginning of what promises to be a superior mystery series, check out Jack Fredrickson’s first novel, A Safe Place for Dying. The main character, Dek Elstrom, is a down-on-his-luck and recently divorced private investigator. He’s hired to find the facts of a case involving an explosion that destroyed a multi-million dollar mansion in Crystal Waters, a gated, heavily secured community on the outskirts of Chicago. (Coincidentally, it’s the place where he lived with his very wealthy wife during their brief marriage.) When Dek starts digging, he uncovers clues that indicate that the roots of this crime lie more than 30 years in the past. In addition to Dek, who’s satisfyingly complicated and comes with a solid back story, I look forward to getting to know more about Fredrickson’s secondary characters as the series progresses.
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A Thread of Grace
Author: Mary Doria Russell
It’s been almost a decade since Mary Doria Russell’s first novel The Sparrow was published, and seven years since its sequel Children of God appeared. Her patient fans will discover that her newest book – so long in coming – was well worth the wait.
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Adèle & Simon
Author: Barbara McClintock
When Adèle picks up her younger brother Simon from school, he starts out on the walk home with his hat and gloves and scarf and sweater and coat and knapsack and books and crayons and a drawing of a cat that he did that morning – but as their walk home progresses, with slight detours to two museums and a pastry shop, a stop to watch a parade and a puppet show, acrobats and a sword swallower, gradually many of Simon’s possessions disappear. How they’re returned to Simon will delight young readers of Barbara McClintock’s Adèle & Simon. An added pleasure, especially for adult readers, is that there’s a map from a 1907 edition of Baedeker’s Paris and Environs on the endpapers showing the children’s route home; as well as a guide to the illustrations at the close of the book. The detailed pen-and-ink illustrations are filled in with soft watercolors, and if you look closely you’ll find McClintock has introduced some familiar characters from another beloved picture book set in France in the early 20th century in one of the pictures.
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American Born Chinese
Author: Gene Luen Yang
Three different storylines are interwoven in Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese. They include the story of the over-reaching Chinese folk hero, the Monkey King; the story of Jin Wang, the American born Chinese of the title, a typical middle-school student except that he’s one of the few non-Caucasians in his class; and the story of Danny, a white kid who’s terribly embarrassed by his Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee (presented here as a racial stereotype, in both appearance, speech, and behavior, that’s both painful to read and view). Yang uses his sensitivity to the difficulties of adolescence (he’s a high school teacher in San Francisco) and his consummate skill as an illustrator – the drawings are sharp and distinctive – to bring these different strands together in a satisfying way. His book conveys an important message – be satisfied with who you are – in a sufficiently subtle and authentic way that teen readers won’t be put off or feel they’re being preached to. Yang’s book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature from the American Librarian Association.
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Anahita’s Woven Riddle
Author: Meghan Nuttall Sayres
One of the great gifts of literature is that it can entertain us, while at the same time expanding our world. A case in point is Meghan Nuttall Sayres’s young adult novel, Anahita’s Woven Riddle. It’s the story of high spirited Anahita, a teenager who lives with her family, a tribe of nomadic weavers, in 19th century Iran. Needless to say, her father’s plan to marry her off to the khan, or leader of the tribe – a much older man whose two earlier wives died under mysterious circumstances – doesn’t thrill her in the least. Disdaining tradition (as teenagers are wont to do, even in 19th century Iran) she wants to choose her own husband, and devises a plan to do so. She will weave a riddle into her wedding carpet, and the man who comes closest to solving the riddle will win her hand. Despite the faraway setting, contemporary readers will identify with Anahita’s relationships with her parents and her friends, as well as her strong desire to have a say in her own future. Sayres skillfully interlaces a lot of Persian history and culture, including information about the daily lives of nomads, Sufi poetry, and carpets and carpet weaving into Anahita’s story.
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As She Climbed Across the Table
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table is the story of a most unusual love triangle – one that involves a man, a woman, and a black hole. Particle physicist Alice Coombs has discovered a hole in the universe, which she and her colleagues have named Lack. Philip Engstrand, a social scientist whose academic interest is studying the behavior of other professors, is deeply in love with Alice, who returns his love until she falls for Lack… This is a moving, intelligent, and often deeply humorous tale of the lengths Philip goes to in order to win back Alice from the most formidable of opponents—a being with no bad qualities, indeed, no qualities at all. Fans of Lethem’s later novels will find that this early work offers many of the same pleasures as The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn.
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Birds without Wings
Author: Louis De Bernieres
Louis de Bernières, author of Corelli’s Mandolin, sets his newest novel, Birds without Wings, in a small coastal town in Anatolia, a region of Turkey, during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire just before, during, and after World War I. Told from the points of view of dozens of characters, including both men and women, rich and the poor, nobles and peasants, Christians and Muslims, Greeks and Armenians, all of whom have lived together for generations in peace, unnoticed and far from the seats of influence, until they're swept up in the maelstrom of war and become simply pawns of history, subject to the decisions of their misguided, incompetent, and dangerously power-hungry rulers. Alongside the story of the residents of this one small town, de Bernières tells the story of the rise of Kemal Ataturk, whose goal was to make Turkey a modern, secular country. These parallel tales play off one another brilliantly and together make for a particularly rich and satisfying novel.
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Blow the House Down
Author: Robert Baer
In Blow the House Down, Robert Baer, who worked for the CIA’s Directorate of Information, and whose memoir See No Evil was the basis for the movie Syriana, offers a convoluted, fast-moving narrative of deceit, deception, and bureaucratic ineptitude. Brought in from the field by his bosses to languish at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in early 2000, Max Waller uses his time to investigate the death of his mentor a decade and a half before, a search that takes him from one of the world’s hot spots to another, culminating in a discovery that ties directly into the horrific events of September 11, 2001. If you like your thrillers laced with a large dose of reality, don’t miss this first novel.
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Book! book! book!
Author: Deborah Bruss
In Deborah Bruss’s Book! Book! Book! the whimsical illustrations by Tiphanie Beeke provide a perfect complement to this story of a group of bored animals who go to the library to check out some books to read and find it difficult to make the (human) librarian understand their wishes, until it’s the hen’s turn to ask. There’s a chuckly surprise at the end, too.)
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Dealing with Dragons
Author: Patricia C. Wrede
Long before J. K. Rowling arrived on the scene, Patricia C. Wrede was writing terrific fantasies for fourth through eighth graders. (Her books for teens and adults are well worth reading as well.) One of my very favorites is Dealing with Dragons, the first in the high-spirited Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Witty and well-written, the series features a dynamic pair of heroines – the indomitable and rebellious Princess Cimorene and the dragon Kazul. We first meet Cimorene as she is deciding that she would much rather even keep house for dragons (the worst fate she can imagine) than live a humdrum life as a princess in her parent’s castle. She needn’t worry – there’s plenty of danger and adventure coming her way: together, Cimorene and Kazul must figure out how to foil a dastardly plan concocted by a group of evil wizards.
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Dirt Music
Author: Tim Winton
Tim Winton is one of those writers whose books just keep getting better and better. Two of the Australian novelist’s best books are Cloudstreet and The Riders. (The latter is a wonderfully infuriating choice for book clubs.) And his newest novel, Dirt Music, just might be his best book yet, in which the two main characters are haunted by their pasts. Fleeing her family and her job as a nurse, Georgie Jutland moves in with wealthy widower Jim Buckridge in his home on White Point, on the coast of Western Australia, recognizing the emptiness in her life but unable to rouse herself enough to do anything to change it. Then by chance (but somehow in Winton’s novels you get the feeling that it’s fate) she meets musician Luther Fox, whose lost his love of music when his family was killed, and who now ekes out a living as a poacher, threatened and despised by the townspeople. The feelings that spring up between Georgie and Lu are visceral, passionate, and ultimately dangerous, and their affair only comes to an end after an act of terrible violence. Luther disappears, and Georgie tries to track him down, following him along the coast and into the desert of Western and Northern Australia. This is one of those novels that will thrill readers looking for good writing, living, breathing, complicated characters, and a palpable sense of place, not to mention an engrossing story of loss and the possibility of forgiveness (for oneself and others) and grace.
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Gloriana’s Torch
Author: Patricia Finney
Gloriana’s Torch is the third of Patricia Finney’s three novels set in late 16th century England, but you don’t need to read the first two, Unicorn’s Blood and Firedrake’s Eye, to thoroughly enjoy this one. Finney vividly animates a complicated historical period, in which religious issues roil England (and, indeed, all parts of the known world), slavery extends its tentacles ever further into the European continent, and Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, is beset by threats to her rule both from within and outside England. The most immediate danger is that Philip II of Spain is intent on invading England and restoring a Catholic monarch to the throne. Two of the Queen’s loyal subjects, David Becket and Simon Ames (both of whom figure prominently in the earlier novels) are caught up in the events of the day. Becket, still recovering physically and emotionally from his horrendous experiences as a prisoner in the Tower of London, discovers that large quantities of gunpowder destined for use against the invaders have disappeared. Has a traitor diverted them to the Spanish cause? Meanwhile, Ames is captured by the Inquisition in Lisbon while on a secret mission for the Queen, and is forced to serve as a galley slave on a boat in the Spanish Armada. Becket, Ames’ wife, Rebecca, and her African slave, Merula (one of the best characters in the book) set out on the difficult task of rescuing him. Historical fiction doesn’t come any better than this series; I recommend it highly for all fans of the genre.
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Guess How Much I Love You
Author: Sam McBratney
Awwww. Sweet but definitely not sappy is the best way to describe Guess How Much I Love You. According to the publisher, Sam McBratney’s picture book has already sold more than 13 million copies worldwide. It’s easy to see why this lovely tale of the game a father and son play before bedtime resonates with families everywhere. Anita Jeram’s engagingly tender watercolor illustrations lovingly depict Little Nutbrown Hare and his father, Big Nutbrown Hare, as they take turns telling each other how much they love each other. This is a perfect choice to read just before you tuck that little one into bed and turn out the light.
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Happiness Sold Separately
Author: Lolly Winston
Take a successful lawyer (Elinor) and a successful podiatrist (Ted), who, after two years of infertility treatments that don’t work try to accept the reality that they will never have a child. Elinor is so preoccupied with her sorrow that she stops paying attention to Ted, who falls into an affair (and in love) with his trainer at the gym, Gina. Gina’s ten-year-old son, Toby, becomes emotionally attached to Ted and desperately wants Gina to marry him. Toss in an attractive tree surgeon, a male house-cleaner, an alcoholic musician, and a concert promoter. Mix well. Can this marriage be saved? Can you predict the ending? In Lolly Winston’s tender and compassionate Happiness Sold Separately, it’s not as obvious as you might think (or wish).
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Icebergs
Author: Rebecca Johns
Although the central metaphor of Rebecca Johns’ first novel Icebergs may not be original (people are like icebergs, less than a quarter is visible; the rest remains hidden), it’s still a solidly satisfying, quietly powerful, and deeply pleasurable read.
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Ilium
Author: Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons, one of the best novelists in the field of speculative fiction, deserves all the accolades that have been heaped upon him. Simmons' novels are engaging and thought-provoking, playing with the events of the past and speculating, in interesting ways, about possible futures. In Ilium, a complicated cliffhanger of a novel set hundreds of years in the future, a group of highly evolved beings - humans, but at the same time more than human - use Mars as their staging area to recreate Homer's Iliad, with themselves cast as the gods and goddesses of the epic poem. (They've even imported their own Homers, a group of humans from the past, who report on the events both on and off the battlefield.) Meanwhile, a team of robots from Jupiter (one a lover of Proust, the other more a fan of Shakespeare: their dialogue is priceless) is sent to Mars to investigate the resultant worrying increase in quantum fluctuations felt throughout space. At the same time, members of a small group of humans living on a now minimally populated Earth begin to question their own way of life. These three groups converge on Mars, and the novel concludes with an ending that's worthy of those Saturday afternoon serials staring Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, where you don’t see how the good guys can get out of this alive….
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In this Rain
Author: S. J. Rozan
In her last two books, S. J. Rozan has abandoned her mystery series characters Bill Smith and Lydia Chin to write stand-alone suspense novels. Her newest stand-alone, In This Rain, takes place in and around the construction industry in New York City. (In addition to being an award-winning mystery writer, Rozan is an architect, so she knows whereof she writes.) It’s a fast moving, hard-hitting, nicely complex thriller, filled with a whole host of interesting and realistic characters. Three years before the book opens, Joe Cole, former inspector for the city’s Buildings Department, went to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now, out on parole, he can only watch from the sidelines as deaths from accidents at construction sites begin to pile up. But are they accidents? Is someone sabotaging these multi-million dollar projects? Who? And why? Cole’s former partner, Ann Montgomery, is determined to find the truth, and asks for Cole’s help. They soon discover that the path to that truth just may involve some of the highest profile politicians in the city, and if they choose to proceed, they do so only at their peril.
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Interface
Author: Neal Stephenson (Stephen Bury)
Along with many superior science fiction novels (like Cryptonomicon), Neal Stephenson co-authored a few splendid suspense novels with J. Frederick George. Originally published in the 1990s under the name of Stephen Bury, they’ve been reissued with the real names of the two authors. You don’t have be a conspiracy theorist to enjoy Interface – just liking fast-paced, more-or-less plausible political thrillers is enough – but it certainly helps in the requisite suspension of disbelief. A powerful group of financiers (i.e., sophisticated bad guys) from around the world decide they need to elect a U.S. president who will answer only to them. When genuinely likeable Illinois governor (and potential presidential candidate) William A. Cozzano has a stroke and is hospitalized, they seize their opportunity and have a microchip implanted in his brain that places him under their control. Will these miscreants get away with it? Will Cozzano be elected president? It’s basically up to three people - Cozzano’s daughter Mary Catherine, his best friend, Mel, and Eleanor Richmond, a spunky, plain speaking, down on her luck former bank teller - to foil their Manchurian Candidate-like plot. Or not.
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Little Big Man
Author: Thomas Berger
If you’re looking for a great novel and a Great American Novel, don’t miss Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man. (Although it was first published in 1964, I somehow missed out on reading it the first time around.) It’s one of those books that – once begun – is impossible to put down. Not only is it a cracking good story, it’s about all those big issues like identity (both national and self), the myth of the American West, civilization and its discontents, and race. 111-year-old Jack Crabb narrates the story of his event-filled life, which essentially began with the slaughter of his pioneering family on their way west after the Civil War. Soon after, Jack is adopted into a tribe of Cheyenne Indians and given the name Little Big Man by his new father, the chief. Over the following decades, Jack goes back and forth between the white and Indian cultures, trying to figure out who he is and where he belongs. As he poignantly observes at one point in his story, “God knows I thought enough about it and kept telling myself I was basically an Indian, just as when among Indians I kept seeing how I was really white to the core.” Jack describes his experiences as an Indian scout, a buffalo hunter, a scam artist, and a soldier (both for the Indians and the U.S. army), and gives us the definitive story of the Battle of the Little Big Horn (which he alone – of all the whites there – survived). Along the way we get some delightfully unexpected insights into Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp (there’s a terrific little scene in the book when Jack misunderstands Earp’s last name), George Armstrong Custer, and others. Even if you’ve seen the film (directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman), don’t miss the book.
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Love Walked In
Author: Marisa de los Santos
Cornelia Brown, the utterly charming and sympathetic heroine of Marisa de los Santos’s first novel, Love Walked In, is a movie fanatic (she’s practically memorized The Philadelphia Story) and a hopeless romantic. When Martin Grace (who could pass for Cary Grant even in the light of day) walks into the Philadelphia café where she works, Cornelia is sure that she’s found her dream man (or at least her dream man not counting Cary Grant), only to discover early on that it’s his estranged 11-year-old daughter, Clare, who has really captured her heart. Readers will love Clare as much as Cornelia does. And we can all look forward to the upcoming film starring Sarah Jessica Parker.
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Magic for Beginners
Author: Kelly Link
On the one hand, reading Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link’s exquisitely loopy collection of stories, demands a certain suspension of disbelief, not unlike when you read Garcia-Marquez, Salman Rushdie, or the other magical realists. (As Shakespeare had Ham
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Manhattan Nocturne
Author: Colin Harrison
Colin Harrison’s third noirish thriller, Manhattan Nocturne, is a doozy. Tabloid columnist Porter Wren – married to a surgeon and father of two children he loves dearly - meets a beautiful woman at a party, who immediately asks him to investigate the deat
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Minaret
Author: Leila Aboulela
When Najwa and her family are exiled to London, after a coup overthrows the government of Sudan and her father is hanged by the rebels, she turns to her Islamic faith - long abandoned in her ultra secular upbringing - for comfort. One of the things I found so compelling in Minaret, the first of Leila Aboulela’s works of fiction to appear in the United States, is that Najwa’s turn towards Islam seems completely believable. In addition to its restrained, pitch perfect writing, Aboulela’s novel offers Western readers a different picture of Islam (and the role of women in the Muslim religion) than the one we have tended to get both from our popular press and from other recent novels dealing with the subject (such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane). I thought about Najwa and her experiences long after I finished the book and returned it to the library, always a sign of a book worth reading.
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Morningside Heights
Author: Cheryl Mendelson
All the time I was reading Messud’s novel, I was remembering how much I enjoyed Cheryl Mendelson’s Morningside Heights, so naturally I had to go back and reread this delicious first novel, which was just as good the second time around. Set in the present day in the upper West Side of Manhattan, the richly detailed list of characters focuses mainly but not exclusively on Charles and Anne Braithwaite, a married couple who discover that their devotion to the good life for themselves and their three children demands more money than they currently have. The plot revolves around a suspicious death, a missing will, a priest unhappy with his vocation, an unscrupulous lawyer, and everyone’s various friends and relations. As in the novels of Anthony Trollope, to which this novel pays loving homage, the good are ultimately rewarded and the bad are suitably punished. Written in a confiding, intimate tone, Mendelson inexorably draws you in and keeps you reading. Follow this up with its sequel (the second of a proposed trilogy), Love, Work, Children.
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My Latest Grievance
Author: Elinor Lipman
I eagerly await every new book that Elinor Lipman writes. She’s one of the authors I included as “Too Good to Miss” in Book Lust. My two favorites have always been The Way Men Act and The Inn at Lake Devine, but now I have to add her most recent, My Latest Grievance, to that short list. What distinguishes Lipman’s entertaining novels is that they’re so good-hearted; although they usually turn on difficult issues – racism (The Way Men Act), anti-Semitism (The Inn at Lake Devine), adultery and dementia (My Latest Grievance) her touch is so sure that the issues never overwhelm the plot. Plus, Lipman just adores her characters, so readers come to love them too. Her newest novel is funny and warm, with a great cast of quirky characters, who all interact at a third-rate women’s college in Brookline, Massachusetts. The novel is narrated by Frederica Hatch (I loved her narrative voice), whose life turns topsy-turvy when her father’s first wife (a former Rockette of whom she was previously unaware) is hired as a housemother at the college where her parents teach.
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Napoleon’s Pyramids
Author: William Dietrich
On the lookout for a book with a swashbuckling hero, an exotic setting, and pretty much nonstop action? You need look no further than William Dietrich’s Napoleon’s Pyramids. In 1798, dashing American Ethan Gage, a protégé of Benjamin Franklin’s, wins an unusually inscribed medallion in a Paris poker game, and almost immediately finds his life in danger. Falsely accused of killing a prostitute, he’s given the choice of going to prison or joining a group of learned men, or savants, whom Napoleon plans to take along with his army on his quest to conquer Egypt. Choosing the latter, he sets off on the adventure of a lifetime, marked by encounters with dangerous enemies and a beautiful Macedonian slave, and soon realizes that his medallion might offer the answer to the ancient mystery of who built the pyramids and for what purpose. Well-crafted historical fiction like Dietrich’s is always a pleasure to read, because in addition to a good story you have the opportunity to learn so relatively painlessly. Dietrich includes much information on military and political history, the Freemasons, Egyptology, and mathematics, as well as introducing readers to a host of real characters (Napoleon being only the most famous), along with the ones he’s invented; yet the solid research Dietrich obviously did in preparation for writing this book rests lightly on it, and the pages turn quickly from beginning to end.
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No Good Deeds
Author: Laura Lippman
When Tess Monaghan’s do-goodnik boyfriend Crow invites a homeless African-American sixteen year old to spend the night at their Baltimore house, all three become involved in the case of a murdered federal prosecutor. Former reporter, now private investigator, Tess realizes that Lloyd Jupiter knows something about the death of Greg Youssef, but what information does he have? And why are a disgraced and demoted FBI agent, a Drug Enforcement Agency employee, and a gung-ho government attorney all so interested in questioning Lloyd and implicating Tess in the murder that they’ll go to any lengths to do so? Laura Lippman’s No Good Deeds is a mystery, of course, so all questions do get answered in the end, but not before readers have a grand time trying to put the pieces together before Tess does. Fans of the multi-award-winning Lippman will welcome Tess’s ninth outing; others will be delighted to make the acquaintance of a detective who’s smart, tough, ironic, and attractive. You don’t absolutely need to start at the beginning of the series with Baltimore Blues, but I predict you’ll want to go back to find out more about Tess’s life and times. Reading Lippman, there’s always a strong temptation to pick up and move to – or, at the very least, go visit - her (and Tess’s) beloved Baltimore, which, when you come right down to it, is really the main character in all these books.
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Our Kind
Author: Kate Walbert
I was reminded by Trueblood’s novel how much I had enjoyed Kate Walbert’s hauntingly beautiful Our Kind: A Novel in Stories. Written in seductively oblique prose, Walbert’s second novel limns the lives of a group of upper-class women who married in the early 1950s, raised children, divorced in the latish 1970s, and are now, in the 1990s, soldiering their way through the repercussions of illness, regrets, old sorrows, and the indignities of growing old. Among the group are the artistic one, the recovering alcoholic, the one whose daughter killed herself, and more. Narrated by these women collectively (“Years ago we were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond”), their current lives include an intervention with the local realtor, trying to save the geese at the Country Club, calling old lovers on the phone, and my favorite, a priceless chapter called “Sick Chicks,” which describes a book discussion group that meets in a local hospice (this week they’re talking about Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway).
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Pandora’s Star
Author: Peter Hamilton
I can't praise Peter Hamilton's science fiction opus Pandora's Star too much. Once you begin it, you won't be able to put it down. Hamilton's 24th century world is one of thousands of planets connected by wormholes, thus allowing for high speed transport throughout the galaxy (think a subway through space). His characters - from the bad guys to the aliens to the heroes - are totally three dimensional. As the complicated plot unfolds - is there some alien being out there that is eager to destroy anything that is not himself? - the tension mounts. Who knows what? Who's to be believed? This first of a two-part techno-Space Opera (concluded in Judas Unleashed) should be high on any science fiction fan’s reading list.
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Piece of My Heart
Author: Peter Robinson
I’d encourage fans of the popular mystery novels of Elizabeth George and Colin Dexter to try those of the less well known Peter Robinson. Robinson’s tautly written, well imagined novels of suspense all feature Chief Detective Inspector Alan Banks, and are set in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Like several others in the series, in Piece of My Heart the crime Banks is brought in to solve has its roots deep in the past. This time, a rock music journalist is found murdered and, try as they might, the police can’t seem to come up with a motive for the killing. In this novel, though, we get two crimes for the price of one: Robinson alternates chapters between accounts of the current investigation and that of a past crime – the stabbing death of a young woman at a rock festival in 1969. The story of how these two crimes – separate by more than three decades - are linked, and who’s responsible for each, provides several hours of enjoyable reading.
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Racketty Packetty House
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
There are some children who love playing with doll houses and whose most fervent wish is that the dolls in them could come alive. For those children, Racketty Packetty House by Frances Hodgson Burnett is the perfect book to share. First published in 1906, it’s recently been reissued with charmingly spirited illustrations by Wendy Anderson Halperin. When Tidy Castle arrives in Cynthia’s bedroom, she moves her old and shabby dollhouse (which she calls Racketty Packetty House) and its inhabitants (the wonderfully named Meg, Peg, Ridiklis, Kilmanskeg, Peter Piper, and Gustibus) behind a door and out of sight. It takes a visit from a real princess (this is the Victorian period, after all, when there were many princesses around) and some help from Crosspatch, the queen of Fairyland (who tells the story), to give the old dolls and their home a new lease on life.
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So Sleepy
Author: Uri Shulevitz
One children’s book author and illustrator whose works are always worth checking into (and checking out) is Uri Shulevitz. Right from your first glance at the cover of his newest, So Sleepy Story – with its dozing house and peacefully slumbering moon set against a background of various shades of blue – you know you’re in for a treat. It’s the tale of a house full of sleeping people and objects who are all awakened by music drifting in through the windows. Even the very youngest child will enjoy pointing out familiar objects behaving in unfamiliar ways. (I was just beguiled by the dancing dishes.) This is a perfect bedtime read for three to five year olds.
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The Abortionist's Daughter
Author: Elisabeth Hyde
The Abortionist’s Daughter is the story of the death of a wife and mother who just happens to run an abortion clinic in a smallish Colorado town. Dr. Diana Duprey has made plenty of enemies in her day, including the head of the local anti-abortion coalition, and she’s not getting along all that well with her husband or her teenage daughter, either. When she’s found dead in the family’s pool, though, it’s going to take both sound reasoning and a bit of luck to figure out who was angry enough at her to actually kill her. Contrary to what one might expect, this is not a book about abortion rights; rather, it’s an examination of mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, and love gone awry.
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The Brambles
Author: Eliza Minot
The difference between good writers and the rest of us is that good writers can take ordinary situations – motherhood, the death of a parent, marriage, the sticky relationship between siblings – and present them in fresh, luminous, insightful, and often humorous ways. That’s just what Eliza Minot does in her very enjoyable second novel, The Brambles. Fans of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections should definitely enjoy this too, but in some ways Minot’s novel is the anti-Franzen, refreshingly presented without the irony and edginess of post-modern fiction. The splendid writing and vivid characterizations made this one of the few novels I’ve read recently that I wished were longer. I just wanted to spend more time with Margaret, Max, and Edie Bramble, as well as Margaret’s three children, who nearly steal the show. (You can tell that Minot knows preschoolers forward and backwards, and loves them dearly.)
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The Emperor’s Children
Author: Claire Messud
Nearly a decade after they graduated from Brown, three friends try to navigate the rocky waters of love and work in the months before and after September 11, 2001 in Claire Messud’s marvelous The Emperor’s Children. Marina is stuck midway in her attempt to finish writing a long overdue book on children’s fashion; Danielle is scrambling to find new ideas for the television shows she produces; Julius, a freelance critic, keeps both his personal life and his demeaning temporary office work a secret from the two women. Although all three believe that they’re destined for greatness, the only one even slightly within their circle who’s achieved that elusive goal is Marina’s father, Murray Thwaite, writer and public gadfly. Then two new men enter the scene: Ludo, a dashing Aussie who’s come to New York to edit a new magazine (it sounds as though it’s a hybrid of New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Rolling Stone), who sets about wooing Marina and at the same time plotting to discredit her father, and Marina’s college dropout cousin Bootie, who arrives from upstate New York to worship at the altar of his uncle Murray; their actions set in motion events that will affect a wide swath of people. Messud’s vivid storytelling, juggling of multiple viewpoints and plotlines, and solid characterizations (even the most minor characters seem like real people) make this an absolute pleasure to read.
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The Eyre Affair
Author: Jasper Fforde
Jasper Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair is inventive, intelligent, and exuberant - there's a good laugh on nearly every page. It's sure to please readers willing to try something a little bit different. Fforde bends the conventions of science fiction and mystery novels in this tale set in 1985 England – but it’s a very different England from the one we know. Great Britain is run by a large, somewhat sinister corporation, time travel is an everyday affair, the Crimean War has been going on for over 130 years, Wales is a satellite of the Soviet Union, extinct animals can be had as pets, and there's a whole department of the police force devoted to uncovering literary frauds and felonies (as well as to policing the strident Baconians, who travel door-to-door trying to convertpeople to the belief that it was not Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet, Macbeth, et al.). When someone kidnaps Jane Eyre out of the pages of Brontë's novel, it's up to our heroine, Thursday Next, to discover whodunit (as well as to return Jane to the pages of the book). It helps to be familiar with some of the classics of English literature (like Dickens and Bronte), but it's not an absolute necessity when it comes to enjoying this novel.
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The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Author: Jose Saramago
The hero of Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon is a proofreader for a Lisbon publishing house. While Raimundo Silva is proofing a history of the 1174 siege of Lisbon by Moorish troops, he breaks the cardinal (if implicit) rule of proofreading by deciding to “improve” the text. He inserts the word ‘not’ in a sentence, thus totally changing its meaning. Naturally his transgression is discovered, but his supervisor, rather than firing him, asks him to write a “what if” history, based on his changed sentence. Saramago is right up there with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie in his brilliant use of language, inventiveness, and wit. The density of Saramago’s prose may present a challenge to some readers, but it’s well worth the effort. Not only is the novel magically written, but it raises some wonderfully provocative questions about history and language, chief among them: Can recorded history, really, ever be anything other than a variety of fiction? (Of course, reading the novel in Giovanni Pontiero’s excellent translation introduces as subtext a parallel question: To what extent are you reading the thoughts of the author and to what extent the interpretation of the translator?)
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The Inhabited World
Author: David Long
I’d have thought that a novel narrated by a dead man – a suicide, at that - would, perforce, be desperately sad. It’s true that David Long’s The Inhabited World isn’t an entirely happy book, but it has so many moments of transcendent joy that add up to a mesmerizing read. A decade after his death, Evan Malloy, still hanging around the house in which he died, attempts to understand the trajectory of his life: his journey from childhood to marriage, from marriage to divorce, and the depression that accompanied him every step of the way. While this sorrow of the soul sometimes waxed and sometimes waned, it never entirely disappeared, until it finally became too much for him to live with. He says, “Mine was a surmountable despair. I just didn’t. Surmount it.” As Evan tries to understand his life, he fears for the newest tenant in his old house, a young woman involved in a losing relationship, whose own despair is becoming more and more palpable. Gorgeously written and intensely moving, this is Long’s best work yet.
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The Intuitionist
Author: Colson Whitehead
Some books begin with such an imaginative premise that you worry they won’t be able to live up to their beginnings. Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist fully delivers on the promise of its premise. Part science fiction, part noir mystery, Whitehead's novel creates its own world and its own genre. Set in an unnamed city filled with skyscrapers (made possible by the invention of the elevator – the history and technology of which therefore play a central role in its culture and this novel), Lila Mae Watson is the first black female elevator inspector. Not only is she set apart by her race and gender, but Lila Mae is among those inspectors known as "Intuitionists," who belong to the minority philosophical school which advocates judging an elevator's safety by instinct, as opposed to the "Empiricists," who depend upon scientifically derived checklists of elevator safety factors. As the novel opens, the Elevator Guild's elections are coming up, and both Intuitionists and Empiricists are searching for the lost writings of James Fulton, the father of Intuitionism, and his plans for the perfect elevator which will render all current vertical transport systems obsolete, and resolve the conflict between the two philosophical systems once and for all. As Lila Mae becomes involved with this search and all its ramifications, the novel explores race and gender issues relevant to 21st century American society. Whitehead’s stylish prose will bring to mind the novels of both Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.
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The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
Author: Susanna Clarke
Fans (I am one) of all 780-plus pages of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, Susanna Clarke’s story of two warring English magicians during the early 19th century, will want to quickly find a copy of The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories and settle down to spend a diverting several hours revisiting not only the same world, but many of the same characters who appeared in her international best-selling novel. For those to whom Clarke’s writing is a new discovery, it’s important to know, going in, that in Clarke’s world view, magic and what we may call reality are only thinly separated. The world of Faerie can be perceived out of the corner of our eyes, as it were – it’s that close. Here, in her first collection, are tales of cunning (and beautiful) witches, merciless owls, the power of embroidery to change the course of history (as Lord Horatio Nelson discovers), and a little known event in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots. The writing is captivating, the characters charming (if dangerous), and the notion that perhaps there’s more to reality than what our senses tell us, is, as Clarke might say with a smile, simply enchanting.
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The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
Author: Eva Rice
Sometimes what we need from a book is simply the means to escape to a world more vivid and Technicolor than ours, where the characters are cleverer, and more dashing, and where events seem much more interesting than those of our own, ordinary, lives. A perfect book for such a mood is Eva Rice’s The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets. Set in post World War II, London, there’s enough Champagne, references to then American heartthrob Johnnie Ray, and fancy parties to enliven anyone’s fantasy life. But the real pleasure comes from spending time with the narrator – when Penelope Ferris meets the more worldly and somewhat shocking Charlotte, and is introduced to her Aunt Clare and cousin Henry, Penny’s world is turned upside down – but only in the most lighthearted, delightful, and engaging way. This is the sort of book in which the plot details themselves matter less than discovering how the characters are going to cope with them.
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The Man of My Dreams
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Once I started Curtis Sittenfeld’s The Man of My Dreams, I was so charmed by the narrative voice that I could barely put the novel down. We first meet Hannah Gavener when she’s 14, at the point in time when her mother has just decided to stand up to her controlling and unpredictable father. (Throughout the novel Hannah shares with the reader her observations about the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional family. She says, for example, “Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you...you have never believed you live under the shelter of some essential benevolence." I think anyone who’s ever lived with a father anything like Hannah’s will see the truth in that statement.) We follow Hannah through four years of college and beyond, watching as she struggles to figure who, exactly, she is, and what it is she wants. It’s clear to her that she’s not like Allison, her beautiful and intelligent older sister, or her boy-crazy, wildly attractive cousin, Fig. Why is she so dissatisfied with Mike, a young man who adores her? Why does she hold herself so aloof from her classmates and would-be dates, and why does she - it sometimes seems deliberately – choose to remain basically the same lonely, self-doubting kid she was at age fourteen? That the book ends with no satisfyingly complete resolution shows, I think, the author’s respect for her readers.
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The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
Author: Kate diCamillo
I’ve included Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane in my new book Book Crush (due out in the spring of 2007) in a category called “Dolls and Dollhouses,” knowing full well that the main character, Edward Tulane, would argue that he is not a doll at all. And he’d be right. But I couldn’t think of where else to put this moving novel about the power of love to transform even a most proper (not to say full-of-self-pride) three-foot tall rabbit. Edward lived a serene (not to say boring) and most self-important life under the care of a little girl named Abilene, until the unforeseen and unthinkable happens, and he’s unwillingly set on a challenging series of adventures, none of which he’s prepared for, and, especially at the beginning, none of which he welcomes. DiCamillo (who won the Newbery Award for The Tale of Despereaux : Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread) has crafted a purely wonderful reading experience for 6 to 12 year olds.
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The Night Journal
Author: Elizabeth Crook
All her life thirty-something Meg Mabry, the heroine of The Night Journal, Elizabeth Crook’s third novel, has resisted the spell of her great grandmother Hannah Bass, whose diaries, written in the 1890s, have become required reading for anyone interested in the history of the American Southwest. Out of rebellion against both her flighty mother and her domineering maternal grandmother Bassie, Meg became a scientist and an avowed anti-romantic. But when Bassie decides to revisit her childhood home in New Mexico, Meg reluctantly agrees to accompany her. There, where Hannah Bass fell in love, married, gave birth to Bassie, and died of consumption at 31, Meg somewhat unwillingly unearths the family secrets that Hannah chose to leave out of her diaries. The setting for this tale of three generations of complicated and dynamic women is so well evoked and inviting that I thought about planning my next vacation in New Mexico. Readers who enjoyed Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose will likely enjoy Crook’s novel as well.
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The Reconstructionist
Author: Josephine Hart
How much do we ever understand the events of our own pasts? In The Reconstructionist, Josephine Hart shows us how in some sense we spend our adult lives rewriting (consciously or not) our childhood experiences. After the shocking murder of their mother, when Jack was thirteen and Kate three years younger, brother and sister are sent from the family’s home in Ireland to live with relatives in England - torn away from the home and the father they loved, who stands accused of the crime. Jack grows up to be a psychiatrist, helping other people to examine their pasts and reconstruct their lives, but cannot do the same for himself. He colludes, as well, in his sister’s amnesia regarding the traumatic events of their childhood. When their father dies, and their former home in Ireland is put up for sale, Jack decides it’s finally time to return and face the ghosts of his past - to reconstruct the truth from the unstable shards of memory. Hart’s elegant writing and her deep understanding of human nature make this a very special novel, indeed.
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The Shakespeare Stealer
Author: Gary L. Blackwood
It might be hard to believe that knowing shorthand can change your life, even in the very early 17th century, but as Widge, the 14-year-old orphaned hero of Gary Blackwood’s The Shakespeare Stealer, finds out, it just might. Widge learns a unique and cryptic form of writing from an unscrupulous clergyman, who himself uses it to quickly copy down the sermons of other ministers and pass them off as his own. When the minister apprentices him to a mysterious traveler, Widge learns that his new task is to go to London’s Globe Theater and surreptitiously copy down every word of William Shakespeare’s new play, Hamlet. But events don’t go as planned, and Widge, even as he’s growing close to the members of Shakespeare’s acting troupe, realizes that he’s going to have to deliver on his new master’s orders, or else. The first of a trilogy (which should be read in order), this is a perfect book to offer budding actors and historical fiction fans between the ages of 9 and 12.
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The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
Author: Diana Wynne Jones
All fans of fantasy age 10 and up will enjoy reading Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. With tongue firmly in cheek, Wynne Jones offers a clever and humorous encyclopedia of alphabetical entries relevant to the wide world of fantasy fiction. These range from Adept (“one who has taken what amounts to the Post-graduate Course in Magic”) to Zombies (“These are just the UNDEAD, except nastier, more pitiable, and generally easier to kill.”), with entries along the way such as Mountain Pass, Blocked (“The Rule is that any time you need to get from one side of the MOUNTAINS to the other, the pass across is blocked.”) and Serious Soldier (“a rather boring Tour COMPANION…even better at his job than the FEMALE MERCENARY and speaks even less”) and many many more. (Words in all capital letters in entries indicate that there’s a separate entry in the book for them.) Each entry also includes symbols for easy identification of the various components readers of fantasy novels will find useful, such as Royalty, Religion, Battle and/or Fighting, and Transportation. I found myself chuckling throughout.
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The True Account
Author: Howard Frank Mosher
Howard Frank Mosher’s The True Account: An Account of the Lewis & Clark & Kinneson Expeditions tells the story of a Vermont ex-soldier named True Teague Kinneson and his nephew Ticonderoga, who race Lewis and Clark to the Pacific. Ticonderoga narrates their adventures, which include a run-in with Daniel Boone (who believes that True has jilted his red-headed, six foot, two inch daughter, Flame Danielle); an historic baseball game with the Nez Perce Indians; frequent death-defying escapes from dangerous situations; and their periodic meetings-up with the more famous pair of explorers (who often need to be rescued by means of True’s ingenuity). Ti’s descriptions of his uncle and their adventures across the Louisiana Purchase to the west are related with a straight face, but will leave the reader with anything but one – True, philosopher, inventor, classicist, and Ti’s much loved teacher, dresses in chain mail, sports an Elizabethan codpiece, and wears a cap festooned with bells to cover the copper plate that protects the top of his head from further injury (he fell while he was celebrating with Ethan Allan after the victory at Fort Ticonderoga during the Revolutionary War), clashes constantly with the devil (whom he calls the Gentleman from Vermont), and carries his hemp habit across the continent, generously sharing his stash with all and sundry. Don’t miss this gem.
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The Year of Secret Assignments
Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Fans (and their moms) of the mega-popular Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series by Ann Brashares have a treat in store in the novels of Jaclyn Moriarty. My particular favorite is her second book, The Year of Secret Assignments. When they become penpals with three guys from a rival high school, Cassie, Lydia, and Emily discover romance, a mystery, a slew of Secret Assignments, and just how much fun “The Joy of the Envelope” (as their English teacher describes the letter writing assignment) can be. Composed entirely of letters, emails, diary entries, and memos, this novel showcases Moriarty’s light but sure touch; it’s sure to please teen readers. Don’t miss Moriarty’s earlier novel, Feeling Sorry for Celia, another of my favorites.
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Traction Man is Here
Author: Mini Grey
In Mini Grey’s delicious picture book, Traction Man Is Here!, a superhero action figure who bravely guards the breakfast toast, searches in the soapy dishwater for the lost wreck of the sieve, rescues some dolls in distress, is finally almost outdone by an all-in-one green romper suit and matching bonnet that a kind grandmother knits him for Christmas. Will Traction Man prevail against the odds of unfortunate clothing choices and more? Read this with the three to eight year old children in your life so that you can all share in the fun.
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Un Lun Dun
Author: China Miéville
As I read Un Lun Dun, China Miéville’s satisfying first fantasy novel for teens, I could imagine that his literary influences might include Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and even J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Miéville conjures up a wonderful alternative world – both like and unlike London - where words are alive, houses are constructed from all sorts of material that’s mildly obsolete in London (hence, “moil” houses), books talk, giraffes are far from gentle animals, wraiths abound, propheseers more or less correctly predict the future, and a dark cloud dreams of polluting the world into extinction. But wait – the prophecies proclaim that Shwazzy will arrive in the nick of time and save UnLondon from certain smoggy doom. Turns out that Shwazzy is really 12-year-old Zanna, who magically arrives from London with her best friend, Deeba (who adopts a cardboard milk carton in UnLondon and names it Curdle), and heroically undertakes to fulfill what’s been foretold. But nothing happens quite as it’s supposed to, and there are many scary encounters and death-defying adventures (as well as puns and other wordplays) before good prevails, at least for the time being.
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Uniform Justice
Author: Donna Leon
Reading any one of Donna Leon’s uniformly excellent mysteries – all set in contemporary Venice (Italy, not California) and all starring Commissario Guido Brunetti - will get you hooked. But one of my favorites is Uniform Justice, in which Brunetti is called in to a military school to investigate the apparent suicide of a young cadet. He discovers that young Ernesto Moro, rather than killing himself, was in fact brutally murdered. Was it payback for his doctor-turned-politician father’s whistleblowing about the details of a military procurement scandal? Who knows more than they’re telling? Who’s covering for whom, and why? In this series of mysteries, Leon gives us a good cop working in a flawed, even corrupt, system, and offers American readers a view of Italy they’re not likely to get elsewhere. There’s also a wonderful cast of supporting characters, including both Brunetti’s family (his wife Paola is interesting enough to warrant a book or two of her own), as well as his colleagues on the police force, such as the divine Signorina Elettra (who also deserves her own books). Fans of police procedurals will not want to miss getting acquainted with Donna Leon’s mysteries. Incidentally, you don’t need to read these books in any particular order.
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Whales on Stilts
Author: M. T. Anderson
Whales on Stilts by M. T. Anderson is a wonderful choice for nine to twelve year old readers. It tells the story of a mad scientist (half-whale, half-man), who intends to take over the world with the help of his whale cohorts. The only three people who can possibly stop him are 12-year-old Lily Gefelty (a perfectly ordinary kid whose father happens to work for Larry, the mad scientist) and her two best friends, the decidedly unordinary Katie Mulligan, the heroine of her own series of horror novels for kids (all based on her own experiences, of course) and the equally extraordinary Boy Technonaut and retro super-geek, Jasper Dash. (Who could resist a book that begins: “On Career Day Lily visited her dad’s work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation.”?) The three reappear in another thrilling tale, The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen.
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What is the What : the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng
Author: Dave Eggers
In What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, Dave Eggers has written what’s best described as a fictionalized memoir. Based on what must have been hours and days and months of conversations with Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, and written in Deng’s own voice, he describes how, as a youngster of seven in the 1980s, he was swept up in the horrors of the Sudanese Civil War. When an Arab militia destroyed his Dinka village, he joined up with a group of other orphaned children, mostly boys, who attempted to walk to Ethiopia where they believed they would find peace and safety. (Unfortunately, that turned out to be just another unmet hope.) The tragic circumstances these children endured have been told in several works of nonfiction before, but having Deng relate, in an almost matter-of-fact tone, those nightmare-like experiences (where death - by starvation, via murderous adults masquerading as friends, from exhaustion, or being captured and killed by the wild animals who stalk them - is a constant companion) gives it an immediacy and potency that is unique among other accounts. Sadly, even when Deng and his compatriots are finally settled in towns and cities all over the United States, their troubles are not over. Readers of Eggers’s own memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, will find that here he’s subsumed his own strong personality and enormous talent for verbal fireworks into this truly heartbreaking and powerful story. All proceeds from the sale of this book will be divided among various foundations supporting the victims of the Sudanese Civil War.
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World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Author: Max Brooks
What if mankind’s greatest foe turns out to be the living dead? That’s the premise of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a page-turning thriller by Max Brooks. The book is set up as a series of interviews with survivors of the Walking Plague, a potent virus that turns its victims into undead killing machines. Among the interviewees are the Chinese doctor who tried to save some of the first victims; an Israeli intelligent agent; a Tibetan smuggler; a trafficker of human organs whose work inadvertently spread the virus faster throughout the world; several politicians and soldiers; and more or less ordinary people who somehow survived those terrible war years. There are several pointed references throughout the novel to current issues of global politics and the state of the world today, and readers will recognize certain characters who seem to be based on real people, all of which gives the novel an immediacy and a patina of reality that it might not otherwise have.
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You’re Not You
Author: Michelle Wildgen
In You’re Not You, Michelle Wildgen describes a young woman’s coming of age. Bec is drifting through life, barely attending (or attending to) her college classes, sexually involved with (but emotionally distant from) a married professor, when she takes a part time job as a caregiver for thirty-something Kate, whose former life (good marriage, successful advertising executive, fabulous cook, primo decorator) has fallen away as she becomes increasingly debilitated from the progressive ravages of ALS (more popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). As Kate comes more and more to depend on Bec – for dressing, for putting on her makeup, for communication with others – the younger woman discovers that the pale reality of her own shapeless existence is being taken over by Kate’s needs and Kate’s life. Given this set-up, I can perhaps be forgiven for dreading what I imagined was to come: some Gothic pastiche in which a person’s sense of self gradually (and perhaps literally) is lost to the mind and experiences of another person. Bye-bye Bec. But no. Wildgen eschews the cliché, and instead provides us with a psychologically acute and complex tale of a young woman who begins to learns, under emotionally difficult circumstances, who she is and what she wants to be. This is one of those first novels that makes you want to reach out to the writer and say, hurry up and write: I want to read your second novel.
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