Book Review: The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard

The Pink Hotel comes out April 23 from Picador.

            In Anna Stothard’s candidly unflinching, evocative, and razor-sharp debut novel The Pink Hotel, the female protagonist is interested in creation stories and myths.  The Epic of Gilgamesh, Noah’s flood, and the Aztec legend of “Coatlique” fascinate the astute and precocious 17-year-old British girl.  And there’s a reason for her curiosity: her mother, Lily, left when she was only three.  The girl desperately wants to know her own creation story, and her dad has never been forthcoming about the tale.

Stothard does not give her protagonist a name.  Since Stothard tells the tale from the girl’s first-person perspective, perhaps Stothard did not feel the need to name the main character.  It is a rather curious move.  Naming and identity are so closely intertwined; because the narrator has no name, I never connect with her, I do not feel like I ever truly know her.  For me, she is unknown, unknowable, and rather unlikeable.  That is not to say that Stothard does not do a good job of fleshing out this individual—she does.  But not giving the novel’s main personality a name bothered me immensely.

Yet I appreciated the main character’s mindset.  Yearning for one’s mother is a universal concept that everyone can understand.  The Pink Hotel begins when the girl gets news that her mother, who lived in Los Angeles, has been killed in a motorcycle accident.  Stothard’s main character does not think of the consequences; she is 17, after all, and frantic over the prospect that she will never know her mother now that she is dead.

As she explains, “Presumably most people can conjure an image of their mother from childhood, but my memories are either from photographs or they’re physical.  I can’t imagine what she used to look like, but remember fragments of her holding my hand too tight in a supermarket, the texture of her legs when I grabbed them….” So she decides to travel to Los Angeles, where her mother owned “The Pink Hotel” in Venice Beach with her second husband.

For the young girl, her journey is really a pilgrimage.  When she arrives at the hotel for her mother’s wake, she sneaks into her bedroom and steals a red suitcase.  She stuffs it full of her mother’s clothes, letters, and pictures.  The girl flees the hotel after encountering her mother’s current husband.  With a stolen credit card and little money, the main character sets out finding the people her mother knew in hopes of learning more about the woman who left all those years ago.

In an effort to get closer to her mother, the protagonist seems to take on the role of her mother.  “I’m not Lily” she says, while wearing her mother’s “tight black dress and her red stilettos.”  “Are you as good at lying as you are at storytelling” a character asks her.  And she is quite adept at telling falsehoods, but not to the reader, only to others.  You would think this quality would endear her to the reader; alas, it does not.

The Pink Hotel is peopled by a quirky cast of characters.  Some of my absolute favorites are the Armenian women she meets.  “How did you come to America?” the girl asks one of them.  “My twin sister and I,” the woman replies, “weren’t interested in marrying men named Noah, you know?”

Stothard chooses the perfect setting for her characters and for the story.  In fact, it is setting that drives The Pink Hotel and its characters.  The author perfectly captures the essence of Southern California to create an atmospheric tale that would not have worked anywhere else.  With lines like “If the Atlantic was a foaming, snapping Rottweiler, the Pacific was a sleepy gecko in the sunlight,” Stothard grabs you and puts you in the middle of the story.

Sense of place is so important in The Pink Hotel.  In fact, the setting is what saved this story for me when I did not connect to the narrator.  Stothard writes, “Los Angeles isn’t built for the rain, and everyone panics.  The air gets saturated with ambulance sirens as oil rises up through the suddenly soaked tarmac highways, causing crashes.”  “The heatwave had finally ignited, and LA had a halo of fire over it.”

Descriptions such as these make The Pink Hotel compelling and worth reading.

Stothard is a master at using lyrical prose.  But I think The Pink Hotel would make a better movie than it does a book.  Perhaps the actress who played the main character could make her more knowable and more likeable.  A good actress could make moviegoers relate to the narrator and identify more with her, which was sadly missing here.

—-Bookmagnet

The author

Original 2011 cover

German cover

Book Review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur Books; 544 pages; $27.99).

            The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535 BC-475 BC) famously said that you cannot step into the same river twice.  Well, he didn’t know Ursula Beresford Todd, the main character in Kate Atkinson’s bonny, daring, and sublime novel Life After Life.  Time is not circular in Atkinson’s tale; rather, Ursula’s life is like an ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail.  Atkinson continually recreates the character of Ursula; she is like a phoenix that is reborn over and over again.

“Become such as you are, having learned what that is,” Atkinson writes in Life After Life.  On a bitterly cold day in February of 1910, a baby is born in Britain.  The umbilical cord is wrapped around her little neck, and she does not survive.  And then, on a bitterly cold day in February of 1910, a baby is born in Britain.  The umbilical cord is wrapped around her little neck, but the doctor uses scissors (“snip, snip”), and the child lives.  Her name is Ursula (“little bear”), and she just may hold the fate of mankind in her tiny hands.

The years pass, and Ursula grows older.  Here, Atkinson ably illustrates the fragility of life in the early Twentieth Century when reaching adulthood was not guaranteed.  One by one, Ursula is felled by drowning, a fall, and the Spanish flu of 1918.  With words such as “darkness fell”, Atkinson takes Ursula’s young life.  It feels miraculous when Ursula finally enters her 20s and 30s, only to encounter a whole new set of difficulties.  Ursula perishes over and over—murdered by a violent, abusive husband; killed in the London Blitz; dead by suicide as the Russian army enters Berlin.

The author’s plot device, killing a character and then bringing her back to life, initially felt cheap and gimmicky.  Atkinson quickly won me over, though, and in record time.  Reading Life After Life, I experienced such a wide-range of emotions that I wrung my hands and gnashed my teeth.  Each time Ursula died, I grieved for her.  Then, I turned the page to find Ursula very much alive.

It is as if Atkinson has her very own reset button and simply sets things right again.  Atkinson sometimes returns to Ursula’s birth, but not always.  Other times, Atkinson resets the tale to some pivotal moment in Ursula’s past, a specific point in her life, a day that seems no different from any other, yet a day when some kind of momentous choice was made that charted the course of Ursula’s life.

I began to wonder: just what does Atkinson have in mind for Ursula?  Because clearly, why continually resurrect a character if she does not have some kind of higher purpose?  “Practice makes perfect” is an idiom Ursula’s mother repeats throughout the novel.  Ursula champions the phrase: “We can never get it right, but we must try.”  The more Ursula lives her lives, the more she learns from them.  Atkinson uses Ursula as a palimpsest.  Her life is like a piece of parchment whose text is wiped away, but traces still remain.

Ursula experiences déjà vu as she remembers her past lives.  It’s like reincarnation, except that Ursula comes back after death as the same person.  As Atkinson kills and revives Ursula, notions of predestination versus free will come into play.  In Life After Life, choices matter.  Atkinson’s aim is to have Ursula retain some of the knowledge she acquired from her past lives, information that will not only change Ursula’s fate but possibly the futures of those around her and even the fate of the world.

“Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Ursula muses as World War II destroys everything around her, “if just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in…a Quaker household.”

Her friend Ralph counters, Hitler “might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers.  You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him.  Could you do that?  Could you kill a baby?  With a gun?  Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands?  In cold blood.”

“If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought.  Not just Teddy, of course, the rest of the world, too.”  Teddy, Ursula’s beloved baby brother, was an RAF pilot who got shot down by the Germans.

Teddy once asked Ursula, “What if you had the chance to do it again and again, until you finally got it right?  Would you do it?”  And so Ursula’s purpose becomes crystal clear, as does the reason behind Atkinson’s renaissance of her protagonist.

Calling Life After Life a “highbrow Groundhog Day,” as some critics have called it, is grossly oversimplifying a beautiful and rare story.  Atkinson’s tale is not funny nor is it farcical, and Ursula does not relive the same day over and over again.  In Life After Life, Atkinson takes drama to a whole new level.  As Ursula says in the novel, “To have a character that changed and developed as it went along so that you had no idea how it was going to end up, how you were going to end up.”  She may as well be talking about herself and about anyone who reads this noteworthy tale.

Part mystery and part historical fiction, Life After Life will completely immerse you because it is such an intriguing story and because it is so darn well-written.  At turns dark, witty, sharp, clever, and poignant, Life After Life produces an unforgettable, unlikely heroine who proves just what a difference one life can make.  Life After Life left me spent, breathless, and eager to read it all again.

If Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was THE book of 2012, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson will be THE book of 2013.

—Bookmagnet

 

 

Book Review: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler (St. Martin’s Press; 384 pages; $25.99).

If the Roaring Twenties had an anthem, it was “Ain’t We Got Fun,” a zesty, vibrant, and comical lyric perfect for the times.  If the Jazz Age had a signature dance step, it was the Charleston, a provocative and fun dance craze, popularized by carefree flapper girls.  And if the 1920s had an It couple, it was F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, literary darlings.  Yet, this golden couple had something a song and dance did not–a dark side.

Theirs was an incredible yet tumultuous marriage.  “For every biographer or scholar who believes Zelda derailed Scott’s life, there is one who believes Scott ruined Zelda’s.  Further, popular culture has elevated certain aspects of the Fitzgeralds’ lives to myth.”  There are two schools of thought, then, concerning Scott and Zelda.  In her mesmerizing fictional autobiography of Zelda, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler plants herself firmly on Team Zelda and rallies us to do the same.

Z is “not a biography but a novelist’s attempt to imagine what it was like to be Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald,” Fowler writes.  Fowler’s story is really one big flashback as forty-year-old Zelda looks back on her chaotic and astonishing life with Scott from the day she first meets him in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918, to the day he dies on December 21, 1940.   Because she is older and wiser, Zelda’s reminiscences run along the lines of “if only I knew then what I know now.”  Fowler has clearly mastered the art of using subtle foreshadowing in Z, an elegant technique she employs that only enhances Zelda’s perspective and credibility.

Scott and Zelda’s relationship, Fowler maintains, begins like a fairy tale.  They have “something exceptional, something irresistible” to them both.  “For good or ill…those feelings” define everything that Zelda’s life is to become.  They are everything to each other.  With his talent and her beauty, courage, and avant-garde personality, they believe they can do anything and be anyone.

Interestingly, Fowler suggests that both Scott and Zelda are playing parts.  “I’m a novelist,” Scott says.  “By definition, I live in a world of make-believe.”  He also tells Zelda they can “make it all up” as they go.  Fowler makes the reader believe that Scott invented a great deal of himself and Zelda.  That certainly explains the myths and legends that surround the couple to this day.

Zelda is Scott’s original flapper girl and also his muse.  Her eccentricity amuses him, or at least to a point.  Scott wants Zelda to be unconventional and reckless in public, yet he wants her to be a traditional wife and mother in private.  For someone who supposedly once jumped into a fountain in Union Square, this was difficult.  In Z, Scott is controlling, jealous, and manipulative.  Everything has to be his way or no way.  He never consults Zelda on any decision and constantly belittles her.  Fowler’s Scott takes his arrogance and selfishness to a whole new level.

Tilde, Zelda’s sister, worries during her sister’s courtship that Scott and Zelda “would wear each other out.”  Tilde’s prediction soon comes true, as Zelda begins to chafe against the bonds of domesticity and motherhood.  Zelda wants to be a writer, a dancer, and a painter; Scott wants her to be a wife and mother and nothing else.  If Scott could have put Zelda in a gilded cage, he would have.  Before long, Scott turns to alcohol; Zelda takes a lover.  When Zelda ends up in an institution, she is diagnosed with schizophrenia.  This is historical fact.  In Z, doctors tell Zelda her “ambition” has unbalanced her.  In other words, she wanted too many things and wanted to be too many things.  Fowler comes up with an alternative diagnosis: bipolar disorder, which makes a lot of sense.

Fowler uses a great deal of creative license in Z, adding nuances and layers to an already  engrossing read.  In one instance, she implies Scott’s association with Ernest Hemingway went beyond friendship, which seemed wild at the time but actually has some basis in reality (or could be yet another myth surrounding the Fitzgeralds).

Loosely based on letters the couple traded and those Scott exchanged with friends and colleagues, Z does not portray Scott in the best light and instead makes the reader identify with Zelda.  And that is Fowler’s intent.  This is Zelda’s story, and we are meant to sympathize and even empathize with her.

Scott and Zelda enjoy a Technicolor life, full of richness and hubbub, which Fowler manages to recreate beautifully and persuasively.   Zelda dazzles, and Fowler captures her essence and the ambiance of the Jazz Age perfectly.  Z is for fans of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, but it’s ten times better.

 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

One of my top 5 favorite books of 2012 comes out today in paperback.  I reviewed it last July, but I feel it’s certainly worth a second look.  I hope you do, too.

 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Random House; 336 pages; $25).

            Can a novel restore our faith in man?  Although The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce is fiction, it can teach us a lot about life.  Harold’s inspirational journey changes his life and those closest to him.  Harold is no superhero; rather, he is an ordinary man who does an extraordinary thing.  We can all learn a lot from him.

Harold Fry is 65 and retired six months ago. He spends most of his time sitting in his chair.  Estranged from his son, Harold has spent a lifetime not questioning and instead being meek and mild.  In other words, Harold is the proper Englishman; he does not believe in rocking the boat.  He and his wife, Maureen, sleep in separate rooms.  Over the years their relationship has deteriorated.

For years, “they had been in a place where language had no significance.  She only had to look at him and she was wrenched to the past.  Small words were exchanged and they were safe.  They hovered over the surface of what could never be said, because that was unfathomable and would never be bridged.”

Then, Harold receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy, an old co-worker from twenty years ago.  “It’s—cancer,” Harold tells Maureen.  “Queenie,” he explains, “is writing to say goodbye.”

The news overcomes him.  Harold writes her a note, but it just seems so darn inadequate.  After a life of inaction, Harold is desperate to do something.  What begins as a quick jaunt to mail Queenie’s letter spirals into an unlikely journey of 87 days and 627 miles from Harold’s home in Kingsbridge to Queenie’s hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Harold’s mindset is simple, really.  He believes that as long as he keeps walking, Queenie “must live.”  Harold calls the hospice and begs one of the nuns to give Queenie a message: “Tell her Harold Fry is on his way.  All she has to do is wait.  Because I am going to save her, you see.  I will keep walking and she must keep living.”

You may laugh at Harold at first.  I know I did.  He sets off with just the clothes on his back and he even wears a tie.  No fancy walking shoes for Harold.  He just wears his trusted old boating shoes.  He has no water bottles or Powerade, no nutrition bars, and no cell phone.  He does not even have that much money.  I did not expect Harold to get very far with no supplies and little money.  I actually kept waiting for someone to murder him.

But, over time, I came to believe in Harold, too.  His journey is difficult, though, as all quests must be.  Maureen fails to understand why Harold is undertaking this pilgrimage and thinks her husband had an affair with Queenie all those years ago.

Joyce throws many obstacles in Harold’s path.  Sometimes it seems as if he will never complete his cross-country trek.  His body fails him; his spirit plummets.  Harold endures awful English weather and a great deal of ridicule.

When he tells people his story, many help him on his quest.  Some provide plasters and tape for his feet; some give him food.  Others give him a bed to sleep on.  A few just listen.  Many encourage him to keep going.  Harold tells them about Queenie, and they, in turn, tell Harold their own stories—uplifting anecdotes of sick loved ones or even accounts of their own struggles in life.  Harold internalizes their chronicles; they actually become a part of him.  Funnily enough, Harold, in a nod to Forrest Gump and even Jesus, attracts disciples.  His groupies only end up distracting Harold, though, from his goal.  But only temporarily.

The roadblocks Harold must navigate his way through mirror the obstacles we all must overcome in life.  Like Harold, we must persevere, even when our goals seem impossible.  Harold tells us, “I admit it is an awfully long way to Berwick.  I admit I am wearing the wrong clothes.  And I also admit I have not the training, or the physique, for my walk.”  Harold never gives up, though: “Even when a big part of me is saying I should give up, I can’t.  Even when I don’t want to keep going, I still do it.”  He may falter, he may fall down, but he gets back up again.

Harold keeps his eye on the prize: getting to Queenie.  For Harold, his journey is transformative.  Harold is “beginning again.”  He learns “it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness.”  The world, he realizes, is “made up of people putting one foot in front of the other.”  One of the most profound of Harold’s revelations is this: “everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.”  The Harold at the end of this story is not the same Harold we met in the beginning.

Joyce produces a life-affirming story.  The novel is a tribute to her dad, who died of cancer.  This book has Joyce’s “heart in it,” and it shows.

In these uncertain times, we’re lucky to have Harold, an “Everyman” archetype, whose improbable journey fills us with hope and renews our faith in the human spirit.  Harold and those he meets show there is still goodness in people, even when it seems the world is crazy.  Harold goes on a 21st century pilgrimage and he takes us with him.  You will root for this unlikely hero, and you will take a part of him with you.  I guarantee it.

Rachel Joyce

Book Review: Fellow Mortals by Dennis Mahoney

Fellow Mortals by Dennis Mahoney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 280 pages; $15).

“It had been a warm, blustery day in a spring without rain.  Henry lit a match.  The fire looked clear in the sun and he threw it down, thinking the wind had blown it out and not thinking twice, despite the drought, despite the mulch under the boxwood hedge,” Dennis Mahoney writes in his highly-charged and blistering debut, Fellow Mortals.  Henry’s trifling act of pleasure literally ignites a firestorm in a neighborhood, leaving death and destruction in its wake.

 

Accidents happen to all of us; we are, after all, mere mortals, as Mahoney suggests in his title.  Mahoney, however, is interested less in the act itself than in what happens after.  Fellow Mortals is about how we handle the consequences of our actions.

 

Yet Henry’s mishap does not affect him alone.  Henry is a mail carrier who takes great pride in his job.  He always has a smile and a kind word for everyone, even those who are not so nice.  His route includes Arcadia Street, “one of the smaller streets, a cul-de-sac with sixteen houses, tightly packed Capes with long backyards, the east-side homes bordering the woods and giving the block a special kind of privacy—rural and remote, separate from the town.”  Arcadia Street seems tranquil and idyllic, until the fire that is.

 

Mahoney employs a bit of irony regarding Henry and his cigar.  Henry “wasn’t allowed to smoke on the route.  He wasn’t allowed at all, having promised it to Ava,” his wife.  But Henry cannot resist, despite his heart condition, despite his promise not to smoke. He quickly smokes his cigar and delivers the mail.  Until something stops him in his tracks.

 

A crackle is what Henry first hears before he registers anything is amiss.  When he sees the fire, Henry immediately springs into action to save the people who live nearby.  But he cannot save everyone.  A young wife, Laura Bailey, is trapped inside her house.  Henry is powerless, and so are the firefighters.  “Pain like a hammer claw mounted in his chest, squeezing in deep and prying up his ribs.”  When the firemen bring out Laura, Henry falls to his knees.  Henry blames himself and carries around a great deal of guilt.

 

Many of those affected by the fire on Arcadia Street do not blame Henry, while others do.  All fault aside, the victims’ lives have been dramatically altered.  The fire destroyed the home of Nan and Joan Finn, two elderly sisters, and left them homeless.   The fire made Sam Bailey a widower, leading him to seek refuge in the woods where he carves art in the trees.

 

Using crisp, stark, and striking language, Mahoney explores how culpability and penance can consume a character, especially one enmeshed in a tragic and highly emotional situation.  Henry desperately wants those on Arcadia Street to forgive him.  More than anything else, Henry sets out to atone for the calamity he has caused. He is determined to help the victims, whatever the cost, even if they do not want his help.   This monomaniacal desire directs everything Henry does, from taking in the elderly Finns to befriending Sam to building a tree house for the Carmichael boys, whose mother, a real estate agent, laments over the decrease in neighborhood home values since the fire and hates Henry.

 

Fellow Mortals is truly a character-driven novel with multiple voices and perspectives.  Mahoney is an exciting and genuine new voice in fiction with a debut that is equal parts astonishing and riveting.  Because all of us are human, we can all relate to Henry.  You may have never done anything of the magnitude as the fire he caused, but perhaps you can put yourself in Henry’s shoes.  His actions are always authentic and convincing.  The same is true for the victims.  Mahoney is never critical of any of those whose lives are overturned by the fire.  In the end, we come to understand each one of them, especially their overheated emotions, just as we identity with Henry.

 

With piercing prose, characters so vivid they light up the page, and a plot so hot it sizzles, Fellow Mortals is an intense and scorching page-turner that is sure to set the book world on fire.  Mahoney reminds us that one dark and random act does not define us.  It is what happens next that matters.  As Alexander Pope famously wrote, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.”

 

 

 

Book Review: Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood

Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood (Europa Editions; 264 pages; $16).

Kate Southwood’s grim, gruesome, raw, and intimate novel Falling to Earth is a story about conflict: man against nature, man against man, and man against himself.  Southwood’s spare and measured prose attests to the fragility of life and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.  However, there is a darker side to this story—one where fear, jealousy, and suspicion wreak havoc on a man and his family.  Falling to Earth is also a timely novel in a year, make that a decade, of extreme weather phenomena.

Southwood sets her tale in Marah, Illinois, in 1925.  Not only does she adequately depict life in a Midwestern small town full of proud, hardscrabble people, but she also brings a real event to vivid and terrifying life: the historic Tri-State tornado that devastated the town of Marah and then tore a destructive swath through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana.  At the time, it was the deadliest tornado in American history, killing 695 people and injuring 2, 027.

The tornado hit on March 18, 1925, and Falling to Earth begins moments before the tornado strikes.  “The cloud is black, shot through with red and orange and purple, a vein of gold at its crest,” Southwood writes.  The tornado is “a mile wide end to end.”  The “people in the town scatter; some find shelter.  The men and women running through the streets are mothers and fathers, desperate to reach their children at the schools.  There is no time; the cloud is rolling over them.”  Many scream, but the wind “screams louder” as the “school, the town hall, the shops at the rail yard fold in on themselves and the people inside.”  Once “the cloud passes, the fires begin, lapping at the broken town.”

This electrifying opening sets the stage for what is to come.  Southwood never lets up but takes readers on a swiftly-paced ride to a shocking conclusion, illustrating the brutal and arbitrary state of nature and, sometimes, of people.

Paul Graves, Southwood’s central character, counts himself and his family lucky.  While his friends and neighbors lose loved ones, businesses, and homes, Paul survives the tornado unscathed.  He and his family are not even injured, and Paul’s home and his business are undamaged.  As the shaken and shattered townspeople of Marah come together to rebuild their lives and their community (without social media to aid them, I might add), they cannot help but look for someone to blame.

The citizens of Marah feel jealous of Paul.  He has everything while their whole world is crumbling.  They have nothing.  Paul experiences overwhelming guilt over his survival, and that sensation only magnifies as his business prospers during the town’s resurgence.   Soon, though, the townspeople come to resent Paul and his good fortune and grow hostile toward him and his family.  The consequences are tragic.

Southwood’s themes are universal ones: love, family, loss, death, mourning, guilt, and distrust.  Falling to Earth is an elegiac tale, yet pockets of hope exist in this story and in Marah, just as they do everywhere, even in times of utter destruction.  Humans have mastered so much in this world of ours, yet we still have not bested nature.  Mother Nature still reigns over us and perhaps always will.

Sometimes our true selves are only revealed in times of crises, and that is certainly the case in Falling to Earth.  Southwood’s characters are in such pain that it moves us and twists our hearts, but in no way does their grief excuse their actions.  Falling to Earth forces us to take a good look at ourselves and how we would react in a similar situation.  When Southwood injects the most human of emotions—jealousy and suspicion—into her story, she makes it all the more gritty, weighty, and real.

Falling to Earth is a powerfully moving and affective debut, and that is why Barnes and Noble chose it as a Discover Great New Writers selection for spring.  Certain passages describing the dead are difficult to read, but a little discomfort is well worth it, for Southwood is a bright new literary talent.

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I am giving away a brand new copy of Falling to Earth.  Giveaway is open to US residents only and ends on Monday, March 11 at 3 pm ET.  Please fill out the brief form below.  Good luck!

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Book Review: The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski (Harper Paperbacks; 400 pages; $14.99).

            Reading The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow, one assumes the novel’s author, Rita Leganski, was born and raised in the South.  Imagine the surprise upon learning Leganski is from Wisconsin.  On frigid and interminable winter nights when she was growing up, Leganski curled up with her favorite authors—tellers of tales from much warmer climes, such as Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams.  Many novelists write what they know, but Leganski composes the stuff of her dreams.  And thank goodness for that.

Wildly inventive, The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow blends historical fiction with fantasy and lyricism to produce an unforgettable and uniquely Southern story.  Like her  beloved Southern dramatists, Leganski sets her story in 1920s-1950s New Orleans,  bringing the city to life while simultaneously lending the yarn a deeply atmospheric quality.  Leganski also has the seemingly effortless skill of narrating her tale from many different perspectives, just as her favored literary figures did.

Most pivotal in Leganski’s story is the central raconteur and titular character, Bonaventure Arrow.  Bonaventure is mute.  Leganski writes, “Bonaventure Arrow didn’t make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead.  But the child was only listening, placing sound inside quiet and gaining his bearings….”  He “stayed like that, all wide-eyed and hopeful, and continued to keep his silence. “ Bonaventure’s muteness only belies the intensity and commotion inside him.  Throughout Leganski’s fictional work, Bonaventure never says a word; yet, Bonaventure speaks loudly and clearly.  His deafness is “not a handicap at all but a gift—an extraordinary, inexplicable, immeasurable gift that” allows Bonaventure to hear “what no one else” can.

He is a unique little boy who has a very special way of communing with nature.  Through Bonaventure’s acute audible senses, Leganski is able to imbue supernatural elements into her story.  One of the ways in which she accomplishes this is through magical realism.  Bonaventure can hear “as no other human”being can.  By the time he is five, Bonaventure can hear “flowers grow, a thousand shades of blue, and the miniature tempests that rage inside raindrops.”

If those characteristics alone do not make you want to know Bonaventure Arrow, then maybe this will.  Bonaventure also has a kindred spirit, Trinidad Prefontaine, a widowed servant from Pascagoula, Mississippi.  Trinidad plays an important role in the boy’s life and works to ease his burden.  Leganski uses her to help guide Bonaventure on a quest that involves his father’s untimely death.

Because Bonaventure is so extraordinary, he knows things others do not.  He also sees things others do not, like the ghost of his deceased father, William Arrow.  A mysterious man called “The Wanderer” murdered William before Bonaventure was even born.  William’s death almost destroyed Dancy, Bonaventure’s mother, who carries around an enormous amount of guilt years after her husband’s death.  For Bonaventure, his mother’s feelings of culpability are palpable; he can hear her remorse.

In Bonaventure’s world, colors and flowers are not the only inanimate objects with voices.  Long-buried articles from the past call out to the boy, and they demand justice.  Bonaventure is the only one who can right earlier wrongs, for he was “chosen to bring peace.”  “There was guilt to be dealt with,” Leganski explains in her story, “and poor broken hearts, and atonement gone terribly wrong.  And too there were family secrets to be heard; some of them old and all of them harmful.”  Leganski illustrates the power of personification as a box, pieces of glass, clothing, and a note call out to Bonaventure in anguished voices, lending a great deal of mystery to the work.

Setting is also powerful in The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow.  Leganski places her story in New Orleans and in the fictional town of Bayou Cymbaline.  These locales come to vivid life and actually become characters in Leganski’s tale.  The result is a picturesque backdrop, evocative, flavorful, distinctively Southern, and wholly New Orleans.

Leganski’s lucid prose, her crystal clarity, and her magical realism catapult The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow into a category alongside Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.  Mixing historical fiction with fantasy, superstition, magic, and poetic sentiment, Leganski creates an emotional and memorable story.  A gifted storyteller, Leganski has many more stories yet to tell.  She’s off to a boisterous beginning, as there is nothing reserved about Bonaventure Arrow.  This novel is richer than New Orleans chicory coffee and sweeter than a plate of beignets.

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow is the March Book Club Selection for She Reads.  For reviews, discussions, and giveaways, be sure to visit their website.

I am also giving away a brand new copy of the book.  Complete the brief form below.  I will choose a winner using random.org.  Giveaway ends Friday at 3 pm ET.  Good luck!

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Book Review: The Trajectory of Dreams by Nicole Wolverton

The Trajectory of Dreams by Nicole Wolverton (Bitingduck Press; 260 pages; $14.99).

“Four-three-two-one-in.”

If you thought Amy Dunne was psychotic in Gillian Flynn’s bestselling nail-biter Gone Girl, then you haven’t met Lela White, the main character in Nicole Wolverton’s exquisitely twisted debut The Trajectory of Dreams.  I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning because I could not put down Wolverton’s electrifying thriller.  When I finished, I just had to read it again with different and knowing eyes.

Lela, a sleep lab technician in Houston, is a seriously flawed and completely unreliable narrator, which makes her all the more intriguing.  She is also mental, in every sense of the word.  Lela works in the sleep lab by day, side-by-side her annoying co-worker Trina, and endures the somewhat-unwanted advances of Max, the janitor. At night, however, Lela engages in activities of the clandestine variety.

Convinced the fate of the NASA space program is in her hands, Lela breaks into the homes of astronauts to ensure they experience normal sleep patterns.  If she makes a mistake monitoring just one astronaut, then Lela is sure disaster will result.

When Lela was ten, her mother confessed she had caused the space shuttle to explode.  Lela believes only she has the power to keep NASA astronauts safe from harm now.  If and when one of the space travelers fails her test, Lela is prepared to kill him for the greater good.  She is very Machiavellian in her belief that the end justifies the means.

Lela’s well-ordered world soon spins out of control, and so does she.  When she meets Russian cosmonaut Zory Korchagin, the attraction is strong between the two.  Could she kill Zory if he failed her test?  Zory puts Lela at risk, but she cannot resist him.  For Lela, Zory’s magnetic hold over her may very well be explosive.

If that’s not enough to send Lela over the edge, it only gets worse.  Trina moves in with Lela after a storm damages the co-worker’s apartment.  Lela grows increasingly indignant when Trina begins asking questions and snooping around Lela’s home, her sanctuary.

It’s not long before Lela grows more and more paranoid, ultimately leading to a psychotic breakdown.  And what a collapse it is when Lela’s cat communicates with his owner.  The Trajectory of Dreams is intense and fast-paced, especially since Wolverton writes her story using the first-person perspective.  This allows us to get inside Lela’s warped mind and is wholly and tantalizingly discomfiting.  Perhaps most gripping of all is having a front-row seat to watch Lela’s fascinating and final descent into madness.

I know my heart stopped several times while reading The Trajectory of Dreams and feel confident yours will, too.  Incredibly bold and extremely unique, The Trajectory of Dreams lingers well after you read the last page.  I guarantee, just like me, you’ll want to re-read it.

“Four-three-two-one-out.”

Book Review: Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

Wash by Margaret Wrinkle (Atlantic Monthly Press; 384 pages; $25).

            Two singular individuals, Richardson and Wash, bookend Margaret Wrinkle’s wisely assured debut, Wash.  Wrinkle, an Alabama native, uses Richardson and Wash to explore the inherent contradictions of slavery and freedom.  Although Richardson is white and Wash is black, the two men are both bound: Richardson by convention and Wash by the color of his skin.  Wash may be fiction, but Wrinkle writes this tale so credibly and accurately that the Old Southwest, with all its mayhem and turbulence, comes alive in her skilled hands.

Richardson had fought for freedom from tyranny in the Revolutionary War and had served his fledgling country in the War of 1812.  His father was an indentured servant.  During his last stint as a soldier, Richardson was captured by the British and chained as a prisoner of war.  His brief confinement, for him, was akin to being enslaved.  He did not like it very much.

By 1823, Richardson had settled in Tennessee and decided there was no more profit to be made in cotton.  Instead, he believed, the real money was in the procreation of slaves.  The United States government had banned slave importation from Africa in 1808; thus, the buying and selling of “countryborn,” or American-born slaves, was in high demand.

For Richardson, it’s pretty simple, really—he wants to make money.  He comes up with the idea to loan out his slave, Wash, to be a kind of “stud” to his neighbors.   The other masters line up to make appointments with Wash.  Every weekend, Wash visits certain female slaves and lies with them.  A slave midwife, Pallas, accompanies him to record their names and any resulting pregnancies and/or births.

“Wash” is short for Washington, a name Richardson bestowed on him at birth, a very common practice at the time.  As Wrinkle writes, Wash was the “first negro born to” Richardson, and he “wanted a name with some weight to it.”

When Wash does his duty, he travels deep inside himself, a technique he learned from his shamanistic West African mother.  Wash does not enjoy his position, even when it gives him opportunities not given to other slaves.  Wash would rather be with Pallas.

As the years pass, many children are born from Wash and the slave women.  Richardson gets a cut of exactly $200 for each child that is born.  Wash sees the irony.  Richardson gets “more than he bargained for” when Wash’s face and his ways begin “to crop up on most places round here. “  Richardson gave Wash “a big man’s name,” a name that Wash lives up to as he makes his “own country.”

Despite the money Richardson rakes in, he finds it difficult to sleep most nights.  He and other slaveholders like him worry that their slaves, who increasingly outnumber whites, will slaughter them in their beds as they sleep, just as Denmark Vesey planned to do in Charleston in 1822.  This fear was truly palpable for white masters.

Ironically, as whites fought in the revolution, taking up arms against their oppressors, their black slaves emulated their owners’ behavior time and again.  Most often, slaves resisted by running away, refusing to work, breaking tools, poisoning food, stealing animals, and many other minor rebellious acts.

Wrinkle truly shows just how “peculiar” the “peculiar institution” of slavery was in Wash when Richardson visits Wash at night to talk to him in the barn, Wash’s preferred place of rest.

A veteran of two wars, Richardson knows he himself fought for freedom from a tyrannical power.  He understands that holding men in bondage is antithetical to revolutionary ideals, but he is only one person and cannot abolish racial slavery.

Listening to Richardson at night, Wash entertains the thought of killing his master.  But Wash knows such an idea is futile and would mean his own death sentence.  So he listens to Richardson’s rationalizations and confessions, but sometimes Wash retreats deep inside.

Richardson does not like the idea of racial slavery, but he is shrewd enough to know that black servitude is too deeply entrenched socially, politically, culturally, psychologically, and economically.  Both Richardson and Wash are thus bound.

They are not the only ones.  Richardson’s daughter, Livia, highly intelligent, is bound by her gender.  William, Richardson’s son, seems to be the only character strong enough to strain his bonds as he marries a woman who is part African American.

Wrinkle provides the reader windows into the lives and workings of a motley crew of people in Wash, making the whole story richer and more satisfying.  Wrinkle provides fascinating insights into her characters and into the Old Southwestern frontier.  Wash is an intriguing character-driven story woven with history and African cultural traditions.  Wrinkle shows slaves and slave owners were constrained, bound together, despite the revolution.  Readers will learn more about the paradox of freedom and slavery in Wash than in any history book because Wrinkle brings it all to life so eloquently and masterfully.

Margaret Wrinkle

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri

Book Review: A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri (Riverhead Books; 432 pages; $26.95).

            In 1981, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi shows her best friend, Ponneh, an issue of Life Magazine dated January 22, 1971.  The young Iranian girls look at the pages, featuring a newly-engaged Tricia Nixon, in awe.  “Ta-ree-sha Nik-soon,” Saba says, is “the daughter of the American Shah.”

As far as the two girls are concerned, Ms. Nixon’s world is straight out of a fairy tale.  “She is a princess.  Shahzadeh Nixon.”  Saba soaks up the four-page magazine spread of the smiling young woman and her beau, Ed Cox.  For Saba, the main character in Dina Nayeri’s breathtakingly beautiful debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, the daughter of the American president is vibrant and mysterious, and she is, above all, American.  Saba is enamored of everything American. And it’s very easy to understand why—post-revolutionary Iran is no place for a girl to grow up in.

Overnight, or at least it seemed so to Saba, the “pro-scarf people” overthrew the “pro-hair government.”  Just like that, the things Saba loves—nail polish, shorts, bare arms in summer, new music—are forbidden. Every part of Saba’s body must be covered.  Nayeri writes, “They [the new government] shut up beautiful things in dark places, so no one can see…What do you do when you want to douse a fire?  You throw a big, heavy cloth over it, deprive it of oxygen.”  That is exactly what the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters do to Iranian women.

But, in the summer of 1981, Saba does not yet care about all that.  Her concern is Mahtab.  Without her twin sister, Saba feels like an important piece of her body and her soul is missing.  What really happened to Mahtab, and to their mother, who disappeared the same day, is a mystery to Saba.

Saba cannot remember much about that day; everything is “muddled memories within memories.”  She recalls feeling dizzy, and her head ached.  It had hurt ever since “that night on the beach,” but she is oblivious as to what occurred or how she injured herself.  Saba is clear about one thing: she thought they were all going to take a plane to America, her mother, her sister, and herself.  Her father was to stay behind for the time being.

That was not to be.  As Nayeri wisely maintains“memory plays such cruel tricks on the mind.”  Saba can only recall seeing a woman dressed similarly to her mother, holding the hand of a little girl who looked just like Mahtab, getting onto an airplane to America.

Just like that, they vanish out of Saba’s life forever.  Nothing can fill the void of her twin, not Ponneh, not her father, and not even Reza, a boy she has a crush on.

Because Iranians believe that “all of life is written in the blood” and that twins must share the same fate, Saba believes that everything she experiences and endures her twin must also face and live through.  Thus, Saba imagines her sister’s life in America.

America, or at least the America that exists in her mind, captivates Saba.  She comes up with elaborate tales in which Mahtab confronts a problem or learns a lesson that Saba has recently tackled.  Since Saba is so obsessed with American television (Family Ties, Growing Pains, The Wonder Years, and The Cosby Show—all family dramas), each episode of Mahtab’s life lasts no longer than 22.5 minutes, the average length of a 30-minute TV show, minus the commercials.  These chapters help Saba feel closer to her sister, who is surely “conquering the world so many scoops of a teaspoon away.”

Since Saba herself cannot attend a prestigious university (she will marry instead), Mahtab gets accepted into the very best American institution of higher learning—Harvard.  Nayeri expertly personifies Harvard University—“Baba” Harvard.  The university becomes Mahtab’s father since Mahtab’s true father is absent.  Baba Harvard is kind, comforting, stern when necessary, and paternalistic.

Saba holds onto the hope that her sister is living the American dream, an Iranian Tricia Nixon, even though those around her insist her sister’s fate lies elsewhere.  Saba knows this, too.  Yet Iranians place a high value on the art of storytelling.  “At the end of every tale, Nayeri explains in her story, “the storyteller is required to do the truth-and-lies poem, the one that rhymes ‘yogurt’ and ‘yogurt soda’ (maast and doogh) with ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ (raast and doroogh).”  Lying “well is crucial” in Iran, but Saba must stop lying to herself if she is to have a life of her own.

This story is very personal for Nayeri.  A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is Nayeri’s own dream of Iran, “created from a distance just as Saba invents a dreamed-up America for her sister.”  Saba “longs to visit the America on television” just as strongly as Nayeri longs “to visit an Iran that has now disappeared.”  A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is Nayeri’s very “own Mahtab dream.”

What a dream Nayeri has invented for us.  A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea effectively transports the reader to post-revolutionary Iran and into this small village.  Nayeri’s passion and elegance are visible throughout her tale as she explores themes such as love, loss, friendship, family, identity, and memory.  Most of all, she illustrates how stories have the power to transform our lives.

Dina Nayeri