BookPage April 2010

discover your next great book www.bookpage.com

april

2010

america’s book review

sue miller

Coping with the aftermath of 9/11

page 12

for love of the game

Remembering baseball’s greats page 22

18 novels { you can’t miss this }

spring

rev

•

insid

e

ne

73

•

ws

Journeys toward hope and healing

ok

ie

finding faith

w bo

page 7

contents april 2010

www.bookpage.com

features 08

jennifer chiaverini

christian living Inspirational reading for Easter

17

olga grushin Second novel is music to readers’ ears

18

historical fiction The past comes to life in compelling new novels

22

batter up A fine lineup of baseball books

26

sue miller

anne lamott A parent’s nightmare

12

interview

A terrorist attack sets the stage for riveting drama in The Lake Shore Limited

Meet the author of the Elm Creek Quilts series

10

07

poetry month

reviews

24 The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald 27 American Taliban by Pearl Abraham

FICTION 05 Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes 05 The Solitude of Prime Numbers

by Paolo Giordano

08 The Other Family by Joanna Trollope 08 31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan 14 Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger 14 17 18

by Lee Smith Men and Dogs by Katie Crouch The Tale of Halcyon Crane by Wendy Webb The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

NONFICTION 04 Unbound by Dean King 04 Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden 06 Mandela’s Way by Richard Stengel 16 A Captain’s Duty by Richard Phillips 16 Claiming Ground by Laura Bell 20 Birdology by Sy Montgomery 20 This Is Not The Story You Think It Is 24

by Laura Munson Appetite for America by Stephen Fried

The season’s best verse

29

PAM MUÑOZ RYAN Magical retelling of a poet’s childhood

29

06

17

18

29

08

30

JAN BRETT Meet the author-illustrator of The Easter Egg

departments 03 03 04 06

buzz girl Bestseller watch the author enablers Well read

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Ian McEwan’s dark comedy

2

09 14 20

whodunit? book clubs Lifestyles america’s book review

Ideas for thrifty living

21 24 25 28

audio cooking romance Children’s books Picture books meet poetry

30

TEEN SCENE

PUBLISHER

NONFICTION EDITOR

PRODUCTION MANAGER

contributor

Michael A. Zibart

Kate Pritchard

Penny Childress

Roger Bishop

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

ASSISTANT WEB editor

PRODUCTION DESIGNER

SUBSCRIBE

Julia Steele

Eliza Borné

Karen Trotter Elley

800.726.4242, ext. 34

EDITOR

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER

advertise

Lynn L. Green

Sukey Howard

Elizabeth Grace Herbert

800.726.4242, ext. 15

WEB EDITOR

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Trisha Ping

Allison Hammond

Alice Fitzgibbon

read all our reviews online at bookpage.com

FICTION EDITOR

ADVERTISING sales manager

ONline services

Abby Plesser

Angela J. Bowman

Scott Grissom

All material © 2010

by ProMotion, inc.

buzz girl off the runway

Our publishing insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

bad mother is back Ayelet Waldman, the self-described “bad mother” (and wife to novelist Michael Chabon) returns to fiction with July’s Red Hook Road, her first novel since 2006’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.

The novel begins with a shocking tragedy—a waldman young couple, on the way to their wedding reception, is killed in a car accident. In the aftermath of their deaths, two families are left to pick up the pieces in a coastal Maine town.

Bad mother or not, Waldman’s got our attention with that premise!

bestseller watch

Release dates for some of the guaranteed blockbusters hitting shelves in April:

6

By Elizabeth Berg

Random House, $25, ISBN 9781400068647 Old friends come together at a 40th high school reunion in Berg’s latest bestseller.

oprah: a biography

By Kitty Kelley

Crown, $30, ISBN 9780307394866 The first comprehensive biography of one of our most influential women.

20

deliver us from evil

By David Baldacci

Grand Central, $27.99 ISBN 9780446564083 Shaw, the mysterious operative from The Whole Truth, is back to track an evil genius in Baldacci’s new blockbuster.

big bucks for bray Libba Bray has signed a contract with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers to write a new YA series for major bucks—$2 million, rumor has it. Publisher Megan Tingley (who also publishes Stephenie Meyer) will be working with Bray on The Diviners, a four-book series set in the 1920s. Bray describes her latest endeavor as “a wild new ride full of dames and dapper dons, jazz babies and Prohibition-defying parties, conspiracy and prophecy—and all manner of things that go bump in the neon-drenched night.”

Bray’s success comes on the heels of winning the Printz Medal for Going Bovine, a picaresque tale of a teenage boy searching for a cure for mad cow disease.

The first in The Diviners series is slated for fall 2012 publication, so stay tuned for more details!

sweet valley adults In February, we told you about the upcoming prequel to the much beloved Baby-Sitters Club series, The Summer Before (out this month). And now, there is more good news for certain readers born in the ’70s and ’80s—Francine Pascal has signed a deal to publish Sweet Valley Confidential in

KATE QUINN

mockingjay it is!

Fans of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy have been eagerly awaiting the title of the third and final book in the blockbuster series.

Well, the wait is over. After much speculation, Scholastic has unveiled the cover and title: Mockingjay goes on sale August 24th.

mixing it up It’s always a treat to hear that David Sedaris has a new project in the works. Even more exciting? Finding out he’s going off the beaten path.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, a collection of fables to be published

by Little, Brown in October, will be illustrated by celebrated picture book author and artist sedaris Ian Falconer.

Though fables might seem an odd choice for an accomplished essayist, we think the form could be the perfect showcase for Sedaris’ humor and imagination. Guess we’ll have to wait until October and see!

another wrinkle?

Calling all Madeleine L’Engle fans!

L’Engle’s granddaughter, Léna Roy, will publish her first YA novel this December with FSG. Called Edges, it is “a story of love and grief, addiction and redemption,” set in Manhattan and the deserts of Utah.

Will literary lightning strike twice?

MISTRESS OF ROME Thea is a slave girl from Judaea, who remakes herself as a polished singer for Rome’s aristocrats.

Unwittingly, she attracts a dangerous admirer in the charismatic Emperor of Rome. In the end, the life of the brilliant and paranoid emperor Domitian lies in the hands of one woman: the Emperor’s mistress.

NEW IN PAPERBACK

BERKLEY A Member of Penguin Group (USA) penguin.com

$15/9780425232477

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

13

the last time i saw you

A few BookPage staffers are diehard “Project Runway” fans, and we were thrilled to learn that Nina Garcia, a judge on the hit Lifetime show, has sold a book to Hyperion’s Voice imprint. Titled Nina Garcia’s Look Book, the style guide will feature advice on what to wear for “every occasion” and include artwork

by Ruben Toledo, who has also illustrated for The New Yorker and garcia Harper’s Bazaar.

The book will be published in August, and it’s not the first for the fashion director of Marie Claire magazine: Garcia has also published The Little Black Book of Style, The One Hundred: A Guide to the Pieces Every Stylish Woman Must Own and The Style Strategy: A LessIs-More Approach to Staying Chic and Shopping Smart. Bravo, Nina!

early 2011 with St. Martin’s Press.

The book will follow Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield—and all their Sweet Valley friends—into their late 20s and early 30s. No word yet if it will be a single book or the start of a series, or if the target audience will be teens or adults.

Of the book, Pascal says, “I’ve had thousands of queries from fans over the years wondering what Jessica and Elizabeth would be like as adults. . . . Well, Sweet Valley Confidential should give them all the answers. And I can guarantee they will be very surprised.

Actually, more like shocked.”

Will Elizabeth get back with boring Todd Wilkins? Are Jessica and Lila Fowler still frenemies? Will the twins still be a “perfect size six”? We’ll have to wait until 2011 to find out.

An exciting debut from a masterful new voice in historical fiction.

3

HISTORY

Untold story of women who marched Review by John T. Slania The ancient Chinese tradition of foot binding involved using cloth to tightly wrap a young girl’s feet so that they would fit into three-inch slippers, because a Chinese woman’s beauty and stature was measured by the tininess of her feet. The practice would crush the bones at the end of a girl’s feet so that her toes could be bent under her heels. But foot binding was permanently outlawed when Communists took control of China, a fact Dean King (Skeletons on the Zahara) mentions in Unbound because it is symbolic of how, in some small ways, Chinese women were liberated by the Communist revolution.

King’s book tells the story of the women who joined the Red Army—an action revolutionary in itself—and participated in a historic military maneuver that would eventually lead to the Communist takeover of China in 1949. The maneuver, known as the “Long March,” began in October 1934 when the Red Army, surrounded by Chinese Nationalist soldiers, staged a daring retreat that would cover more than 4,000 miles and last over a year. Communist leader Mao Zedong and Nationalist General Chiang Kai-shek are the men most often associated with the Long March. But King chooses to focus on the 30 women who took part in Unbound the journey. Among this diverse group was Ma Yixang, 11, a By Dean King peasant girl sold by her family; Wang Xinlan, 10, who came Little, Brown from wealth; Jin “Ah Jin” Weiying, 30, a college-educated $25.99, 432 pages teacher who became active in the Chinese labor move- ISBN 9780316167086 ment; and Zhou “Young Orchid” Shaolan, 17, a nurse who refused to be left behind when the army tried to send her home.

King spent five years traveling the length of the Long March, interviewing those women still alive to tell their tales. Theirs are stories of courage, remarkable not only because of the physical and psychological rigors of their journey, but also because of their determination and leadership in a country not known for granting equal rights to women. China has always been a mysterious and secretive empire, but Unbound peels back the curtain to reveal a story of strength and survival. o John T. Slania teaches journalism at Loyola University in Chicago.

MEMOIR

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Winning (or losing) the genetic lottery

4

Review by Kate Pritchard Although Wendy Burden begins her darkly funny memoir, Dead End Gene Pool, by recounting the lives of her ancestors on her father’s side (she’s the great-times-fourgranddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt), the book’s dedication makes it clear where the heart of her story really lies: “For my mother, goddamn it.”

After Burden’s father killed himself when she was six years old, her mother, Leslie, routinely packed her children off to stay with their grandparents for weekends, summers and whenever she wanted them gone. “Burdenland,” as Leslie contemptuously called it, was as outlandish (and alcohol-soaked) as one expects from the extremely rich, and Burden is especially adept at describing its various settings, from the Fifth Avenue apartment with 14 bathrooms to the private island in Florida. But when Leslie remarried, she began to take a more active role in her children’s upbringing. First in a split-level in Virginia, then in a series of cramped houses in suburban London, they endured not just her terrible cooking and lack of any real maternal compassion, but also her disappointment in them. Burden got the worst of it, constantly fending off reDead End marks about her weight and appearance.

Her mother looms large in these pages, most often dressed Gene Pool in skintight microskirts or see-through crochet dresses, set- By Wendy Burden ting a standard that her daughter could never reach (and Gotham deeply resented). Other family members and housekeeping $26, 288 pages staff—the retired-Nazi chauffeur, the flatulent, absent-mind- ISBN 9781592405268 ed grandmother—also play memorable parts, and Burden Also available on audio herself is a delightfully strange character, especially as a child, when her fascination with all things morbid was at its peak.

(In one episode, she attempts to drive off one of her mother’s suitors by dressing up like Wednesday Addams and trying to cook her pet hamster in a frying pan.)

The narrative loses a bit of steam toward the end, when it seems the best stories have already been told. But the last chapter contains enough revelations and scandal to carry the reader through, and the epilogue supplies Burden with, if not closure, at least some measure of reconciliation—not just with her mother, but with all the ghosts of her history. o

THE AUTHOR ENABLERS Dreaming in Technicolor Dear Author Enablers, I am almost finished writing my first novel, and everyone in my writing group thinks it would make a terrific movie. Can you recommend a literary agent who also specializes in movie deals?

Ready Freddie Fayetteville, Arkansas Whoa . . . we suggest you take this one step at a time. Get your novel in tiptop shape first.

Then do your homework and find the agent who will be the best at championing your book to publishers. Many literary agents do have connections to film agents but many don’t, so if you end up having a choice, this is one of the questions you’ll want to ask when the time comes.

BY SAM BARRY & In the meantime, don’t worry if you find KATHI KAMEN GOLDMARK yourself engaging in “casturbation.” This is what happens when you find yourself fantasizing about which famous actors will play the parts in the film version of your novel. It’s perfectly normal and everyone does it, but we recommend refraining from indulging in public places, or at the dinner table.

Dear Author Enablers, Is there any way to find out if a book has been optioned (or whatever the technical term is) for film or TV production in the U.S. and/or U.K.? I am particularly interested in novels written by Kate Atkinson. Also, what is the best way to find out who is the agent (literary or film) for an author?

Alan Posner Michigan State University We’d usually answer this question by suggesting that you do some homework, starting with finding the author’s website, looking in the acknowledgments of Atkinson’s books for her agent’s name, and then finally contacting the publisher. But you, Alan, are one lucky guy (think of yourself as the random millionth person to drive over a bridge, getting presents and balloons). We are going to do all this for you and explain the process step by step.

Step 1: We Google Kate Atkinson and find her official website. Unlike many author sites, there is no direct contact information for a publisher or agent. There is, however, an online protocol for signing up for regular emails containing news of her whereabouts and forthcoming events, and you could start by joining that list and adding a polite note that you would like to contact the author about film rights.

Step 2: A little more research (Googling “Literary agent for Kate Atkinson”) unearths several different agents’ names associated with Atkinson. The Marsh Agency claims “translation rights only” and Casarotto Ramsay and Associates Ltd. comes up for plays. Our search also leads us to Kim Witherspoon, an agent whose Have a question about name we’ve heard before. We find her website, but are unable to view writing and publishing? the client list, in order to verify that Email it to the Author Enablers at Atkinson is really represented by authorenabler@aol.com. Please this agency. Aargh, this is getting frustrating. We don’t have all day. . . . include your name and hometown.

Step 3: Amazon.com reveals the information that several of Atkinson’s books were published by Little, Brown. Great! We know some people at Little, Brown (part of the Hachette Book Group), but chances are you don’t, and we’re pretending we’re you. So we call the main phone number and ask for the publicity department. (Publicists are professionally trained to get exposure for their authors, so they are more likely to help than, say, editors—who are generally more parental and protective—as well as harder to reach.) A voicemail greeting directs us to email our inquiry to a general publicity address. We leave a voicemail message anyway, asking for Atkinson’s publicity contact, then cruise around the publisher’s website, where we find a fax number for permissions requests.

Although we haven’t actually found the information you need, at least you got the balloons, and we hope we’ve provided a few clues on how to find what you’re looking for. A polite, direct and clear inquiry by email, phone or fax should get you a response, and eventually lead you to the right person. Don’t forget to include your contact information on every communication. o With more than 25 years of experience in publishing, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry have the inside scoop on writing and publishing. Their new book, Write That Book Already!, will be published next month by Adams Media.

FICTION

A haunting vision of the Vietnam War Review by Michael Lee First-time author Karl Marlantes tackles some tough subjects—racism among the troops, for one—in his Vietnam novel, Matterhorn. What makes this novel so irresistible is Marlantes’ skill at peeling away the many layers of truth in combat.

Matterhorn is one of those countless hills in Vietnam that makes young men’s lives so cheap. In this case, it’s the Marines of Bravo Company and the hardened NVA (North Vietnamese Army) soldiers. The story revolves around a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, who must quickly learn the difference between officer candidate school and the reality of life in the bush. Lt. Mellas tries to straddle the line between being “one of the guys” and a platoon commander. This division between the troops and a low-ranking officer like Mellas (who is only a few years older than his men) can become too vague if he is overly friendly. In combat, that can be disastrous.

The delicate balance between life and death resonates throughout Matterhorn, as it does in real combat. What is so fresh and fascinating about this novel is Marlantes’ depiction of the specific activities and conflicting motivations that take place in a war zone. For instance, many of the officers (including Lt. Mellas) want recognition by those in Matterhorn command above them. And how, aside from concrete evi- By Karl Marlantes dence of a clear victory, is this accomplished? With inflated Atlantic Monthly enemy kill counts, something that was commonplace in the $24.95, 592 pages Vietnam War. Marlantes also shows the nature of life in the ISBN 9780802119285 Also available on audio bush for these grunts, the long hours spent contemplating the imminent sudden bursts of horror and loss.

One can only hope that the size of this amazing novel (nearly 600 pages) doesn’t intimidate potential readers, because it is one of those rare books that will never leave their minds. Great novels are underscored by human drama, and Marlantes’ depiction of men under stress—no matter what race or background—is searing and complex.

Matterhorn will not only take its place on the top shelf of war fiction, it’s going to knock a few books off. It’s that good. o Michael Lee was a Marine, wounded during the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh.

FICTION

One isn’t always the loneliest number

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Review by Tony Kuehn A prime number is a number divisible only by one and by itself. As numbers grow larger, the frequency of primes decreases, and these mathematical islands become more and more distant from each other. “Among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special,” writes Paolo Giordano in The Solitude of Prime Numbers. “Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13.” Alice and Mattia, the novel’s two main characters, are the human analogues to twin primes; they fit with no one but each other, and even that connection is tenuous. It’s a high literary concept, but Giordano’s clear understanding of all things mathematical—by day he works as a particle physicist—provides a clarity that can be appreciated by anyone, including those with math phobias.

In concise chapters over a 24-year time span, we learn that Alice is an anorexic with a permanently disabled leg and Mattia is a mathematical savant who is forever scarred, emotionally and physically, by the loss of his twin sister at a young age. The story vacillates between the two narratives, The Solitude of allowing the reader a glimpse into the void that surrounds Prime Numbers the pair, yet also binds them together. Linked by a common tapestry of childhood tragedy and social isolation, Alice and By Paolo Giordano Mattia remain disparate, always separated by a gap that nei- Pamela Dorman Books/ Viking ther of them can ever seem to bridge. $25.95, 288 pages Giordano deftly creates a sense of loneliness and loss ISBN 9780670021482 through the use of simple, beautiful language and power- Also available on audio ful imagery. The brevity of this novel does not diminish its power, while the maturity of the prose and the courage of the storytelling belie the fact that this is Giordano’s first novel. Translated from the Italian, The Solitude of Prime Numbers won the Premio Strega, Italy’s prestigious literary award, and is well-positioned to win more acclaim on the international stage. o Tony Kuehn writes from Nashville.

5

INSPIRATIONAL

Lessons from an exemplary life Review by Alison Hood Self-help books crowd the shelves of America’s bookstores, beckoning consumers with all sorts of hopeful promises—from thinner thighs and bigger bank accounts to spiritual and sexual nirvanas. Though Richard Stengel’s publisher has placed his instructive book, Mandela’s Way, in the self-help genre, it stands head and shoulders above the rest of the assistive literary hoi polloi.

Stengel, the editor of Time magazine, collaborated with the liberator and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela on his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. He spent nearly three years with Mandela, conducting hours of extensive interviews, traveling with him, shadowing his every move. “I kept a diary of my time with him that eventually grew to 120,000 words,” writes Stengel in the book’s introduction. “Much of this book comes from those notes.”

Distilled from those jottings are 15 essential lessons modeled on Stengel’s observations and interpretations of Mandela’s courage and wisdom, exemplary leadership, compassion and love of humanity. From clear words on courage and selfcontrol (“be measured”) to the benefits of presenting a good image, seeing the good in others, keeping your rivals and enemies close (this particular dictum is famously chronicled Mandela’s Way in the recent movie Invictus) and believing in the difference that love can make, the lessons are seamlessly intertwined By Richard Stengel with stories from Mandela’s life. This texture is one of the Crown $23, 256 pages book’s key strengths, but a beautiful grace note is Stengel’s ISBN 9780307460684 undiluted—yet clear-sighted—regard for the complex man Also available on audio who survived an unspeakably difficult 27-year incarceration and who said of his prison experience, “I came out mature.”

Ultimately, the true light of this inspirational book is the utter believability of these lessons. The hotheaded young Mandela, protégé of a tribal king who turned into a fierce freedom fighter, grew gradually into a man who, literally and figuratively, “found his own garden.” Though at age 91 Mandela is in the twilight of his life, he still personifies this grand lesson plan, these 15 deceptively simple steps to empowering self and others. o Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.

“This gripping story… has all the makings of a Hollywood movie.”

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

—History News Network

6

A compelling account of a notorious murder in the “Magic City” of Birmingham, in a gripping story of love, prejudice and violence in the age of Jim Crow.

1

Now AvAilABle wHerever Books Are sold

Well Read Long past saving Much of Ian McEwan’s accomplished fiction hinges on the damage caused by misperceptions: the false accusation at the center of Atonement, the unspoken anxieties that doom the newlyweds in On Chesil Beach. In his engrossing dark comedy, Solar, these destructive misperceptions take the form of a chronic case of selfdelusion on the part of its central character, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a remarkably messy personal life.

When Solar opens in the year 2000, Beard is mired in an obsessive attempt to lure his fifth wife, Patrice, back into his good graces—and his bed. A serial philanderer who freely admits he has engaged in 11 affairs during this five-year marriage, Beard professes his enduring love for his wife, although it seems more a case of sexual desire. In retaliation, Patrice has taken her own lover, a loutish house contractor named Tarpin, who is physically abusive and dangerously possessive.

Beard is so preoccupied by his marital troubles that he

BY ROBERT neglects his professional commitments at the National WEIBEZAHL Centre for Renewable Energy, a government research facility that places great value in having Britain’s renowned Nobel Laureate on its letterhead. In fact, since winning the prize two decades before, Beard has coasted on his early fame and made no significant contribution to his field. He has grown complacent and arrogant with age, his intellectual torpor matched by his increasing physical corpulence.

With typical condescension, Beard offhandedly dismisses the professional overtures of a young associate, Tom Aldous, who believes the Beard-Einstein Conflation can be pushed further, leading to a radical new way of creating energy from water.

Beard refuses even to look at the younger scientist’s calculations. When he later returns early from a week-long trip he has taken to the Arctic in order to witness the effects of global warming firsthand—a mishap-filled adventure that provides some of the best comic fodder in the book—Beard discovers that Aldous has become Patrice’s newest lover. Their confrontation goes terribly wrong, but Beard artfully manipulates a bad situation to his professional and personal advantage.

Fast forward five years, and Beard has risen to new pro-

The arrogant academic in Ian McEwan’s new novel must face the consequences of his choices. fessional heights. Having deigned at last to look at Aldous’ calculations, he discovers the brilliance of the younger Solar man’s ideas. Appropriating them as his own, Beard now By Ian McEwan claims ownership of a trove of valuable patents that might Nan A. Talese/Doubleday form the basis of a new energy source that could save the $26.95, 304 pages world. The aging scientist, now almost 60, is also involved ISBN 9780385533416 in a new love affair, with a 40-year-old woman who loves him unconditionally—a state of affairs that he himself finds somewhat inexplicable.

Melissa wants to have a baby, an untenable situation that Beard laments will bring their affair to an end. Four years later, in 2009, things have not turned out as he envisaged, and Beard has been forced to integrate new, somewhat discomforting matters of the heart into his self-centered existence.

Still, a newfound domesticity does not preclude Beard’s continuing misbehavior and pattern of infidelities. His latest conquest is a middle-aged waitress—outsized in every way—in the small New Mexico town where he will launch his revolutionary solar power system. But Beard’s snowballing self-deceptions are about to catch up with him, as all of the elements of his disorderly life, transgressions past and present, converge in the desert, and conspire to finally knock him off his self-erected throne of entitlement.

There is an implicit irony in Beard’s chosen specialization, an irony underscored by the title of the novel. For just as the sun is central to Earth’s survival—and here provides the solution to its current and future problems—so too does Beard, in his own mind, sit at the center of the only world that matters: his own. He remains unmoved by the unfortunate deaths, broken hearts, ruined careers and destroyed lives that lie in the wake of his life’s path. With his customary clarity of perception and adeptness at the well-constructed plot, Ian McEwan invites us to contemplate a man who could save the world, and yet cannot make right his own life. In our age of self-deceiving celebrities and politicians, it is not so hard to imagine. o

INTERVIEW

Accidents of fate

NOW IN PAPERBACK

Sue Miller’s characters pick up the pieces after 9/11

Miss Julia faces a double dose of trouble

A

Hazel Marie

is pregnant—with twins!— but she’s also just sent her beau packing. When Sam’s house is robbed, Miss Julia has a plan to play Cupid and solve the crime in one fell swoop— and of course she delivers.

“Another funny, charming story with action, intrigue, and a warm look at life in a small-town.”

—Winston-Salem Journal

“A lighthearted pageturner . . . Just grab this and devour it.”

—Charleston City Paper

NEW FROM VIKING:

Miss Julia Renews Her Vows

Penguin Books www.penguin.com www.vpbookclub.com

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Interview by Karen Elley good “what-if” is one of the most powerful tools in a an architect friend, Sam, a man she was once strongly attracted fiction writer’s arsenal, and author Sue Miller has come to. Leslie has invited Sam to see The Lake Shore Limited, a play up with a doozy. What if you’re planning on leaving written by Gus’ girlfriend Billy, intending to set Sam up with her. your lover today, but haven’t told him yet? What if he’s on a Sam has his own backstory, but in the present moment, it is Billy’s plane that’s been hijacked? Add one more what-if—the date is gamine, enigmatic beauty that he is drawn to.

9/11/2001. Then throw in a few what-might-have-beens, and Although she was still living with Gus at the time of his death, you have the rhyme and reason for The Lake Shore Limited, Billy had already left him emotionally and had planned to tell a beautifully crafted novel by a writer him so on that fateful day. Now everydisplaying the full range of her conthing has changed, and Billy has atsiderable talents. tempted, as best she can, to mourn Gus In a recent phone interview from and honor his memory in order to avoid her Boston home on a beautiful but hurting Leslie (who still thinks they were frigid day, Miller recalls that on 9/11, deeply in love) and possibly destroying a she was in Vermont, writing. “We had friendship she values. The play is Billy’s a place there, but we had no television. somewhat unconscious way of coming We listened to the radio all day, and I out of her emotional closet and healing didn’t see any images until several days some of her own wounds, self-inflicted later. I was actually grateful not to have and otherwise. seen those images. So I was, in an odd In her play, a story within a story, the way, removed from the way that most main character learns that there has people experienced the attack because been a terrorist bombing on the Lake of not having that immediate visual Shore Limited train, and that one of the experience.” passengers is his wife—the woman he The fictional what-ifs of her new was planning to leave for his mistress. novel were sparked by a real-life conMeanwhile, in what passes for real life, SUE MILLER nection to the events of that tragic day.

Miller’s characters continue to explore “I had a friend who was staying with the intricate workings of their relationsomeone whose sister was killed on ships.

“I believe that those who 9/11. Due to the circumstances, my Everyone in The Lake Shore Limited friend felt it was necessary to stay lonhas plenty of baggage to sort out, and ger than she would have otherwise, and Miller is a master at volleying back and make art, and those who to enact a role, something my main forth between the past and the present character ends up doing in the novel.” to reveal the rich inner and outer lives see it and participate in it, The experiences of her friend set of her characters. Cutting through the Miller thinking about the way we insist chaos and confusion of daily living, she are changed by it.” on one response from all those who penetrates to the heart of the matter lost someone on 9/11. She pondered with great skill. the varieties of reactions that people The author of nine previous novels, might have had on that day. “Things Miller is keenly aware of the redemptive could have been much more complicated for any number of power of art. “I believe that those who make art, and those who people than what they appeared to be on the surface,” she says. see it and participate in it, are changed by it,” she says. “There have With that dichotomy in mind, she chose to further explore the been times when I’ve read something that triggered an incredible possibilities, although there would be a delay in bringing her emotional response in me—an opportunity to re-experience a ideas to the page. situation, but in a way that articulates it more clearly than I could At the time, she was working on other projects and finishing have myself. I certainly intended that to be the case for some of up The Story of My Father, a memoir about her father’s death, and the characters in the book.” still processing her loss. “With the passage of time, I’ve been able Although some may manage to rise above their challenges, to think fondly, affectionately and with humor about people or there are no heroes in The Lake Shore Limited. “I don’t believe in even animals that I’ve lost, but I can also call up tears very quickly heroes,” Miller says. “People do heroic things unexpectedly, but I if I think in a certain way,” she says. “You gradually learn to live think no one would ever choose them, and probably most people with less pain around the loss; it might ease over time, but I think would wish them away, the very brave things they’ve done. I think there is always grief.” they’re accidents that happen and people find something within Eventually, Miller began to think about the 9/11 story concept. themselves to respond to them.”

“I started to see my way into it, fictionally, well enough that I was When asked what life experiences had most shaped her writintrigued enough to pursue it,” she says. ing, Miller responds with one of her favorite quotes. “There’s this In The Lake Shore Limited, four characters are brought towonderful line from Flannery O’Connor that says, ‘Anyone who gether by a stage play that strikes a little too close to home for survives his infancy has enough material to last a lifetime.’ I do everyone involved. Three years after her younger brother Gus— feel that to some degree.” the dearest person in her life—died in a “I had an interesting growing up, an unusual one in some 9/11 plane crash, Leslie is still trying to ways, and an interesting marital history. I’ve had the wondermake sense of the senseless, including ful experience of being a parent and now a grandmother and her marriage and her relationship with worked for many years of my life with little children and their parents in day care. I’ve heard a lot of stories and imagined a lot of ways of proceeding through life and feeling things,” says Miller, who is currently the Elizabeth Drew Professor of English LanThe Lake Shore Limited guage & Literature at nearby Smith College.

By Sue Miller “But for the most part,” she says, “many of the specifics in my Knopf writing come to me as I’m working on a novel. It’s always part $25.95, 288 pages of the pleasure of having ideas come out of the blue—they seem ISBN 9780307264213 Also available on audio like gifts.”o

7

Trollope’s latest packs a punch Review by Deborah Donovan When Richie Rossiter, an acclaimed songwriter and pianist adored by his avid—if aging—public, dies suddenly in London, he leaves behind not one, but two grieving families. Chrissie, 20 years his junior, whom he never married, bore him three daughters: 20-somethings Tamsin and Dilly, and Amy, 18. Then there’s Margaret, the faithful wife he abandoned 23 years earlier up north in Newcastle when their son Scott was just a teenager.

The stage is thus set for Trollope’s latest spot-on, engaging novel of family dynamics spanning generations. Kept separate both physically and emotionally by Richie for all those years, the two families are forced by his death to relate, at least on some minimal level.

Margaret had a wretched upbringing; her marriage to Richie, a friend since childhood, was the highlight of her life. She managed his concerts and gigs, always the faithful helpmate. Scott was devastated when his father left, and he is stunned to see Chrissie and the three girls at the funeral.

But then Trollope deftly injects a twist into what might have been an overworked “wife replaced by a younger woman” plot—the will. For Richie has left his beloved Steinway and the copyrights to all his compositions to Scott and The Other Family Margaret; the London house (a bit outdated) and savings By Joanna Trollope (much depleted) to Chrissie. Not to mention the inheri- Touchstone tance tax she’s stuck with since she and Richie were never $15, 336 pages legally married.

ISBN 9781439129838 Trollope is known for her well-drawn characters, offering empathetic glimpses into the lives of the English middle class—and her latest is a perfect example. Each of Richie’s daughters reacts in her own way both to his death and to their altered circumstances. Chrissie herself is alternately embarrassed and vengeful over the mess she has inherited. Scott begins to relish the experience of morphing from an only child to a big brother to three women, and Margaret discovers hidden assets she forgot she possessed, along with a desire to redo her former, dull self.

The Other Family will engage readers on many levels—its truths universal, and even its tragic moments delivered with Trollope’s trademark underlying humor. o Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

MEET

Jennifer Chiaverini © STEVE GARFINKEL

FICTION

HISTORICAL MYSTERY

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Murder and intrigue in 1850s New York

8

Review by Arlene McKanic A clever insert came with my copy of Ellen Horan’s novel. It’s a folded piece of blue notepaper, with a written request for legal representation. A respected dentist, Dr. Burdell, has been gruesomely murdered in his Manhattan office. The suspected murderess is his lodger, the widowed Mrs. Emma Cunningham, the lady who penned the note.

From here this thrilling book becomes not only a murder mystery, but a Wharton-esque examination of the mores and customs of antebellum New York society. The press coverage of the crime is lurid, with Emma all but found guilty in the court of public opinion. Emma may be a good woman, but she’s not a particularly nice one (she comes across as a tougher and coarser Lily Bart). And if she is a gold digger, then a gold digger was what a widow with two daughters and dwindling finances had to be in that time and place—since a lady of her social class could not go to work.

Horan is brilliant at showing just how vulnerable such a woman was to male predation.

The other characters are just as memorable. There’s Henry Clinton, the idealistic lawyer who comes to Emma’s defense, and his loving wife, Elisabeth. There’s Sam, Burdell’s African-American coachman, who goes on the run after the 31 Bond Street murder. And there’s Burdell himself, who is, frankly, a mis- By Ellen Horan creant, his real character masked and excused by his social Harper standing. Horan’s portrait of Manhattan is also remarkable; $25.99, 368 pages she reminds us that in 1857 the island was still half wild, the ISBN 9780061773969 vulgar mansions of the newly rich just blocks away from forests, farmland and a river teeming with fish and oyster beds.

Horan wraps up her story with an ending that one doesn’t see coming, but is perfectly, tragically right. Rich with historical detail, 31 Bond Street is one of the best debut novels in a long while. o Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Visit BookPage.com for the story behind the book

Jennifer Chiaverini’s new novel The Aloha Quilt (Simon & Schuster, $24, 336 pages, ISBN 9781416533184) is the latest book in the Elm Creek Quilt series, which has inspired several quilt pattern books and a fabric line. She lives with her husband and two sons in Madison, Wisconsin.

WHODUNIT? Black is back

Mystery of the month

Benjamin Black’s debut novel, Christine Falls, was a BookPage mystery of the month, and its sequel, The Silver Swan, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Black was no one-time sensation. No real surprises there, as Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville, the 2005 winner of the Man Booker Prize for fiction for The Sea. Now Black/Banville is back with the third novel featuring Dublin pathologist Quirke, Elegy for April (Holt, $25, 304 pages, ISBN 9780805090918). Ireland in the 1950s was a buttonedup, deeply conservative place, not the sort of milieu where an outspoken and unconventional female doctor would flourish. So when April disappears under suspicious circumstancBY BRUCE TIERNEY es, her friend Phoebe cannot help but think that she has met with foul play. Phoebe enlists the help of her father, the aforementioned Quirke, in hopes that his extensive network of official contacts can be of some help in tracing the missing April. Quirke would prefer to have no part of this, but he cannot say no to his daughter; the two have a checkered past, and nowadays Quirke works overtime on the relationship to try to keep it on an even keel. To complicate matters, Quirke is on the tail end of a voluntary incarceration to shed himself of his drinking habit, and he is a bit uneasy in his newfound sobriety. Elegy for April works on a number of levels; it is an insightful look into the workings of dysfunctional families, a thoughtful study of the wide-ranging influence of the Catholic Church in midcentury Ireland and an exploration of the tensions of racial prejudice in a society where lines of hatred have been traditionally drawn more along religious lines.

And on top of all that, it is an exceptionally riveting mystery!

It’s tough to select a mystery of the month this time around, I can tell you that.

Just look at the competition: a deeply atmospheric mystery set in 1950s Ireland; a taut police procedural from the Land of the Midnight Sun; a violent and troubling tale of the New Old West. But somebody has to prevail, and this time, it is veteran author Walter Mosley, with his second installment in the Leonid McGill series, Known to Evil (Riverhead, $25.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781594487521). McGill is a complex and exceptionally well-drawn character, cut from very different cloth than Mosley’s previous protagonist, L.A. detective Easy Rawlins. He is something of an unlikely hero, actually: short, stocky and middle-aged, with family problems and a bit of a confrontational attitude (likely a product of his years as a boxer and under-the-radar criminal). Now—or for the time being, at least—he is trying to keep on the right side of the law, although he is having a devil of a time getting certain unsavory folks to believe that. As Known to Evil opens, McGill is summoned to a meeting with New York power broker Alphonse Rinaldo, a man with whom McGill had several dealings before his ascent to the straight and narrow; it is not a meeting McGill wants to take, but one does not say no to Alphonse Rinaldo. The assignment seems simple enough: Make contact with a certain young woman and make sure she is OK. The only problem is that when McGill turns up at her apartment, the cops and the coroner are already there, and a beautiful young woman lies dead on the floor; across the room, there’s another body, this one a man with a butcher knife protruding from his torso. Did Rinaldo know beforehand? Is McGill being set up? And if so, by whom? Good questions, ones McGill will have to answer if he hopes to avoid being implicated in murder most foul. When I reviewed the series debut, The Long Fall (also a mystery of the month), I compared Leonid McGill to Easy Rawlins: “I haven’t chewed on this long enough to say definitively which one I like better.” The jury is still out, but I am leaning more toward McGill with each succeeding installment. o —BRUCE TIERNEY

Searching through a dark past There must be something in the waters of Scandinavia that causes suspense authors to flourish. For a comparatively small and unpopulated part of the world, there is an inordinate number of fine mystery writers: Henning Mankell, Håkan Nesser, Kjell Eriksson, Peter Høeg, Karin Fossum, Arnaldur Indriðason, Asa Larsson, Jo Nesbø—and that’s just scratching the surface.

Here’s one to add to the list, and somewhere near the top, at that: K.O. Dahl. In his latest novel, The Last Fix (Minotaur, $25.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780312375713), Katrine Bratterud is a rare success story—an ex-addict made good. She is set to matriculate from rehab; she has a good job, a steady boyfriend. She is attractive and well-spoken—and she is about to die a grisly death. If Katrine’s recent history offers a wealth of clues and complications for the Oslo police force, her more distant past is a virtual koldtbord (this is the Norwegian version of “smorgasbord,” to save you running for your Norwegian/English dictionary) of dark secrets, any one of which might well have a bearing on her untimely demise. Dahl has been a best-selling author in Norway since his debut in 1993; The Last Fix should cement his reputation in the Englishspeaking world as well.

NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR

brings readers a novel of mystery, murder and red-hot romance.

Perennial favorite C.J. Box (whose name is even shorter than the already truncated K.O. Dahl’s!) is back with book 10 in the series featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, Nowhere to Run (Putnam, $25.95, 368 pages, ISBN 9780399156458). As the novel opens, Pickett is in the last week of his year-long exile to remote Baggs, Wyoming. His final task before returning home to his wife and family is a foray into the mountains to follow up on some unsubstantiated tales of strange goings-on: car break-ins, looted campsites and, in one dramatic case, a butchered elk. Pickett happens upon an unlicensed fisherman, a rangy mountain man with a seriously bad attitude. What he cannot know is that this chance encounter will unleash mayhem the likes of which he has rarely encountered. Pickett is a one-of-a-kind character, an Old West stand-up guy, and Box’s tales of Pickett’s exploits straddle the line between traditional Western (think Louis L’Amour) and thoroughly modern mystery. C.J. Box has won about every award there is to win: the Edgar, the Macavity, the Anthony, the Gumshoe, the Barry—and with good reason. Like Tony Hillerman before him, he has reinvented a genre and made it his own. o

She cheated death once— can she do it again?

www.MIRABooks.com

www.TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com On sale now!

www.MIRABooks.com

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Trouble in the wilderness

www.TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com

9

New York Times

INTERVIEW

and

Loving a sudden stranger

Bestselling Author

The struggles of parenting a teen in today’s world

USA Today

ANDREW

GROSS

Co-author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers with James Patterson

Now in Paperback!

www.andrewgrossbooks.com www.twitter.com/the_andrewgross www.facebook.com/andrew-gross

The University of

SOUTH CAROLINA Press Uptown/ Downtown in Old Charleston: Sketches and Stories Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

HC $29.95 9781570039096

10

A

© JAMES HALL

New in Hardcover!

Interview by Karen Holt nne Lamott has never been shy about letting readers in story is a wake-up call for parents: “There are so many evils that on her struggles. A partial list of the trials she’s detailed in pull on our children,” Lamott writes in the novel’s opening lines. her writing includes alcoholism, drug abuse, bulimia, the “Even in the mellow town of Lansdale, where it is easy to see only death of loved ones, writer’s block, postpartum exhaustion and beauty and decency, a teenager died nearly every year after a party her furious opposition to the administration of George W. Bush. and kids routinely went from high school to psych wards, halfway Her engrossing new novel, Imperfect Birds, centers on one houses or jail.” of the most harrowing challenges of all—raising a teenager. The The book’s setting is a stand-in for Fairfax, the Marin County third novel in a trilogy that also intown where the author has lived for cludes Rosie and Crooked Little Heart, years (she grew up in nearby Tiburon). the book begins four years after the “We do lose kids pretty routinely to aclatter title ends. Rosie, a precocious cidents and overdoses, way more than adolescent the last time we saw her, is you’d think, and so that really weighs on now a volatile 17-year-old whose bemy mind,” she says. havior thrusts her mother, Elizabeth, While the substance abuse in Iminto a near-constant state of hurt and perfect Birds is scary, nearly as bad are worry. It’s a poignant family story, at Rosie’s constant lies and ever-changing times heartbreaking, but ultimately personality. She’s affectionate one minuplifting. ute, then furious, then scornful, forcing Though Imperfect Birds is fiction her mother onto a harrowing emoand far from autobiographical, like all tional rollercoaster Lamott thinks many of Lamott’s work, it reflects the author’s parents will recognize. real-life experiences. “There are defi“The person you love most in the nitely years that you don’t love when world, the sweet, consistent person that you’re the mother of a teenager, when you love with a lot of love coming back they’re very mouthy and erratic,” the for a lot of years is suddenly a stranger,” author says by phone from her home Lamott says.

Anne lamoTt in California. Her son, Sam—an infant With a narrative that alternates bewhen Lamott introduced him to readtween Rosie’s and Elizabeth’s points of ers in Operating Instructions, her memview, Lamott gives readers a fascinating Lamott taps her real-life oir about becoming a parent for the peek into the inner contradictions drivfirst time as a single 35-year-old—is ing the teenager’s outwardly baffling benow 20, with a son of his own. Though havior—the anger, vulnerabilities and experience as the mother thrilled with how Sam has turned out desires warring against a sincere wish to (more on that later), Lamott refuses to do the right thing. of a teen to create a raw take credit.

Elizabeth battles her own demons— “You just kind of groan with the she has a history of alcoholism and and heartbreaking novel. exhaustion of having made so many depression—and wrestles with how mistakes and just being aware of it honest to be with her husband, James, and what you should have done or about his stepdaughter’s problems. shouldn’t have done,” she says. “But Though Elizabeth deeply loves her Sam always had a very deep sweetness and I was always banking daughter, Rosie can drive her to the edge, as in this passage on that, that this would see us through.” where the teen lashes out at her mother: Which brings us to the paradox at the heart of Lamott’s ap“‘Stop spying on me! You’re the one going crazy—call your peal. Readers look to this author of six nonfiction books, six novshrink.’ And it was the disgusted sneer more than the words that els and numerous columns as a wise, funny and compassionate made Elizabeth erupt. guide to exploring a variety of subjects (her 1994 title, Bird by “‘How dare you! I’m not a liar, or cruel! You’re a spoiled little Bird, is still one of the best books about writing). Devoutly Chrisshit.’ She got to her feet, hating herself and her child. . . . [Elizabeth] tian and ferociously liberal, she’s especially fearless when tacklocked herself in the bathroom and cried silently until she was raw.” ling those most touchy of issues, religion and politics, in books The scene is reminiscent of a column Lamott wrote for Salon such as Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and Plan B: Further in 2006, “My son, the stranger.” In it, she tells of slapping 16-yearThoughts on Faith. But, as she constantly reminds us, she doesn’t old Sam during an argument and then driving around, sobbing have all the answers. She has questions. And fears. And faults. And heavily. The column ends on a hopeful note, though nothing is an endless supply of ways to screw up. Yet somehow it all works resolved. Lamott gives the characters in Imperfect Birds a simiout OK. Sometimes, it works out much, much better than OK. larly upbeat ending, as Elizabeth finds the strength to make the It’s not surprising, then, that Lamott fills her latest novel with excruciating decision that will save her daughter. characters grasping for their own answers. Rosie is smart, beautiAs for Lamott, she gets to savor the fact that Sam is safely past ful, athletic and seriously into drugs. She’s not picky; pretty much his teen years. “He is just the most marvelous, amazing guy in the any intoxicant will do: weed, cocaine, prescription pills—in a world,” she says. She also describes him as “brilliant” and “very pinch, cough syrup. Elizabeth wavers spiritual.” Living in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Amy, and between denial and increasingly destheir baby, Jax, he is studying industrial design at the Academy of perate attempts to rescue her daughter.

Art University. Lamott admits her heart sank when 19-year-old Embedded in the poignant family Sam told her he was becoming a father. But as it turns out, the young family is doing just great.

And Grandma?

“Grandparents really are very happy people,” Lamott says.

Imperfect Birds “You get unbelievable love and wonder for three hours. And then

By Anne Lamott they leave and you can lie back on the couch and read The New Riverhead Yorker. It’s the best of both worlds.” o $25.95, 288 pages Karen Holt writes frequently about books and authors for O, The ISBN 9781594487514 Oprah Magazine, Essence and other publications.

Also available on audio

“ Rubin brings Charleston to life with his insider guide to a secret city too often overlooked in the carriage tours and guidebooks of today. A wonderful, necessary book.”—Pat Conroy

A Southern Sportsman: The Hunting Memoirs of Henry Edwards Davis Edited by Ben McC. Moïse Foreword by Jim Casada

HC $29.95 9781570038631 “ Henry Edwards Davis is one of the most remarkable men you may have never heard of in hunting folklore. . . . Destined to become a classic hunter’s collector item.”—Charleston Mercury

Setting fire to her childhood home isn’t the end…

It’s the beginning.

Angel has nothing left but memories and the hope that someone wants her. Hannah longs to escape her strict upbringing and live her life like others do. Their twisting journeys are about to meet— and nothing will be the same From Rachel Keener the author of The Killing Tree.

—Deborah Johnson, author of The Air Between Us

Available in paperback and as an eBook www.centerstreet.com ®

Center Street Center Street is a division of Hachette Book Group FIELD ART: GETTY IMAGES SKY ART: iSTOCKPHOTO

AUTHOR PHOTO: ANNE GRANT PHOTOGRAPHY

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

“A LUMINOUS WORK OF HOPE AND ULTIMATE REDEMPTION.”

11

CHRISTIAN LIVING

Journeys of faith Finding—and living—a meaningful life

Feature by Howard Shirley ife unfolds in its own pattern, different for each of us and yet remarkably the same. We are born, we grow, we love, we grieve, we grow older and eventually we come to the end of it all. It is a well-worn path.

What is the purpose of this journey? What are we to make of the path and the others on it? Five new books offer different perspectives, and all are worthy guides.

L

God works in mysterious ways A Field Guide to God: A Seeker’s Manual (Guideposts, $21.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780824947927), by Patty Kirk, begins by recounting a period in life when the author ceased to believe in God. Rather than a willful decision, it came to her as a gradual slipping away of her childhood faith—the simple confidence she once had that God was present slowly faded into an overwhelming sense of absence. As a young woman, she concluded that her former faith had been a fantasy, and fell into atheism.

But something would not let her go. A longing, a yearning that she could not explain, drew her to seek again for God, until years later—grown, married and pursuing life as a writer and teacher—she

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Faith in action

12

After years of living a life of plenty in Lexington, Kentucky, Lisa Samson and her 18-year-old daughter, Ty, decided to take a mission trip to Swaziland, in Africa. They believed the trip would be one of faith and outreach, but little did they know the ways in which they would be tested and stretched. In a land where poverty and death are abundant, Lisa and Ty face the AIDS crisis headon, finding strength and hope in God’s unending love and compassion.

Love Mercy (Zondervan, $14.99, 208 pages, ISBN 9780310284772) reads as both a memoir and a spiritual diary, chronicling Lisa and Ty’s journey into both the heart of Africa and also into Christ’s teachings and principles.

It is a story of sorrow, but also one of enlightenment. The truths exposed in this book can be distressing at times, but by battling hardships they might not have been exposed to on North American soil, Lisa and Ty are able to see the world through new eyes—and redefine what it means to “love thy neighbor” on a global scale. This is a must-read for anyone who considers him- or herself a follower of Christ, or who has ever pondered spreading the gospel abroad. This motherdaughter duo reinforces the hope that even in the darkest corners of the Earth, God’s light and love burn bright. o —STEPHENIE HARRISON

discovered God again. This journey, and the subsequent growth in her Christian faith, is woven throughout the book, offering a masterful and beautiful examination of what faith is, who God is and what a life with God can be. Her words are powerful and thoughtful, gentle yet full of conviction, an offering of hope to anyone wondering, “Where has God gone, and why is He absent?”

Through her own experiences wrestling with these questions, Patty Kirk creates a guidebook for faith that can be treasured by both the seeker and the lifelong believer.

A journey of faith is also behind Regina Brett’s God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours (Grand Central, $21.99, 241 pages, ISBN 9780446556521). The book began as list of 50 short “life lessons” for Brett’s column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, written in celebration of turning 50. Each pithy statement related to areas of her own life, from her years as a single mother, to discovering love at 40, to surviving breast cancer at 41. The list went viral, traveling across the world in emails and on websites, with readers everywhere responding to her simple message. Now Brett has expanded upon each of these lessons, drawing stories from her life, her other columns and most of all, her faith, to explain the power and truth behind her list.

The result is both wise and moving, and a remarkable testimony to the power and love of God.

Finding your own path What if the journey of faith actually came with a map? That is the unique premise behind David Murrow’s The Map: The Way of All Great Men (Thomas Nelson, $14.99, 244 pages, ISBN 9780785227625). The book begins like a suspense novel, with Murrow himself in pursuit of an ancient map, supposedly given by Jesus to his disciple Matthew, which now lies hidden within a remote Greek monastery. It’s an ingenious approach, creating both an appealing read and an excellent allegorical illustration for what Murrow unveils as the real map—a visual guide for men seeking to follow Christ’s example. Murrow gleans “The Map” from the book of Matthew, which presents thematically similar events from Christ’s life together, rather than in chronological order. Viewed in this thematic arrangement, Murrow posits, Matthew’s account reveals a life pattern for Christian men—“The Map” of the title. (Murrow hints that another book will cover a similar map for women.) Depicted as a zigzagging path up a mountain, Murrow’s map follows Christ through periods of submission, strength and sacrifice, a pattern that Murrow points to in other great lives of faith. The Map offers a compelling call to the modern church to re-examine what it means to be both a man and a disciple of Christ.

The result is an invigorating spiritual tonic for men who wonder, “What’s next?” in their Christian journey.

For many, this will be a map worth following.

God, love and marriage Men and women journeying together will find an equally compelling guide in Love & War: Finding the Marriage You’ve Dreamed Of (Doubleday, $22.99, 240 pages, ISBN 9780385529808) by John and Stasi Eldredge.

Married for 25 years, the Eldredges return to the idea of life as a story, a theme John has explored in best-selling books such as Wild at Heart and Captivating (also written with Stasi). In this book, the story is marriage, and the tale is one of adventure, danger and, of course, love. Sharing the struggles that have tested their own marriage, John and Stasi tear aside the happily-ever-after images of newlyweds to reveal the difficult, treacherous waters that every marriage must face— “like taking Cinderella and Huck Finn, tossing them in a submarine, and closing the hatch.” But while any such journey will be tempestuous, it also has the power to be something beautiful, a blessing not just to husband and wife, but to all they encounter. Love & War offers advice for recognizing the brokenness each person brings to a marriage and acknowledging that healing comes from God, not each other. In their ups and downs, mistakes and triumphs, the Eldredges demonstrate how they learned to help each other through that healing, and how they’ve worked with God to create a marriage of strength, purpose, passion and joy. The wisdom they share is both soul-stirring and practical, and will be appreciated by any couple seeking to build a life together, whether they’re just starting out or have been in that marriage submarine for quite a while.

Living the Christian message Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (Free Press, $25, 256 pages, ISBN 9781439153024), by Father Gregory Boyle, tells the stories of many faith journeys, some inspiring, some tragic, but all immeasurably powerful. Part memoir, part message, Tattoos on the Heart is the story of Homeboy Industries, Father Boyle’s lifelong mission in the barrios of Los Angeles—gangland central—to stand against gang violence and to help young men and women find hope in a hopeless world. Written with humor, understanding and unmatchable heart, Father Boyle’s tale is a challenge to the reader to cast aside assumptions and see past the coarse exterior of the barrios into the hearts of the children he works with every day—and buries all too often. For Father Boyle, the solution to gang violence is the same solution that heals hurting hearts everywhere—the love of God. As you laugh and cry along with the children of the barrios, you will learn truths about God, forgiveness, redemption and love—and just maybe about yourself as well. Read it, and journey to a place your heart will not return from unchanged. o Howard Shirley is a Christian writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

He can be reached at www.howardshirley.com.

Turbulent Past, Hope for the Future The gripping new book in the Kauffman Amish Bakery Series

by Amy Clipston In A Promise of Hope, an Amish widow with newborn twins discovers her deceased husband had disturbing secrets. As she tries to come to grips with the past, she considers a loveless marriage to ensure stability for her young family‌ with her faith in God hanging in the balance.

Available wherever books are sold.

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

AmyClipston.com

13

SHORT STORIES

Smooth, Southern-flavored tales Review by Rebecca Stropoli In recent years, many in the literary world have declared the short story to be a format that, while not dead, is in decidedly poor health. Though the short story’s popularity may be debatable, there are a number of talented writers making great contributions to the genre—and bringing the too-often overlooked short story to the foreground of the literary community.

Lee Smith is one of those writers, and her new collection, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, is a treat.

The Southern-born Smith has been a lauded force on the literary scene since the early 1970s, with a dozen novels and three previous collections of stories to her name. Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger contains seven new stories blended with seven from older collections; the result is a lyrical, moving mix of tales featuring strong and complex characters, delivered with Smith’s trademark wit and insight.

The standout stories here include one about a teenage girl who, while coping with her father’s breakdown and mother’s denial, begins to speak in tongues; a young, unhappy bride whose passive-aggressive move before a car trip leads to an appalling tragedy; a hapless man whose Mrs. Darcy and wife is being ravaged by cancer; and a corpulent woman the Blue-Eyed who finds real freedom in being caught for her crimes. Stranger Smith’s characters run the gamut—they are young and old, barely literate and highly educated; some tales are By Lee Smith told in the first person while others are in the third-person Algonquin $23.95, 304 pages narrative. The one common thread is Smith’s astute—and ISBN 9781565129153 unmistakable—Southern perspective.

As in any collection, some of Smith’s stories are more compelling than others, but most are filled with humor, pathos and satisfying moments of revelation and clarity. The stories shine as a collection, but standouts like “Toastmaster” and “Stevie and Mama” are especially impressive when considered on an individual basis.

Whether you are a short story devotee or simply a lover of good fiction, you will find much to admire—and savor—in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. o Rebecca Stropoli writes from Brooklyn, New York.

FICTION

Running from her past

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Review by Cory Bordonaro On the heels of her 2008 debut novel, Girls in Trucks, Katie Crouch’s Men and Dogs echoes with the familiar drawl of a discontented and displaced Southerner. The story’s protagonist is middle-aged, Charleston-raised Hannah Legare, who made a move to the West Coast to try and shed the baggage of her father-gonemissing family and the subsequent attempts to sugarcoat the mess. She is, however, continually plagued by the unresolved mysteries of her father’s disappearance and her mother’s quick remarriage to his filthy-rich replacement.

The semi-scandal surrounding her gay brother, coupled with a lack of closure in her relationships, are just fuel for the fire that burns Hannah’s bridges and drives her further and further away from home. But a life apart from her lessthan-perfect family situation does not provide the answers she seeks. When her livelihood and marriage in San Francisco go south, Hannah falls from grace—literally. A traumatic injury, a failed business and the inconclusiveness of her family’s story line eventually land Hannah—somewhat unwillingly—back on the front stoop of her mother and stepfather’s Southern plantation home. Despite her self- Men and Dogs destructive and escapist behavior, she realizes it is the very By Katie Crouch people and places of her childhood that beckon her to sit Little, Brown and visit with her own ghosts. She may not arrive at the end $23.99, 288 pages 9780316002134 she desires, but Hannah will learn something by revisiting ISBN Also available on audio the place from which she so speedily fled.

Crouch’s writing quite clearly reflects her own history— she is a former Southerner who can’t shed the remnants of a sweet-tea-soaked past—but her perspective is thoughtful and multidimensional. Her protagonist demonstrates a real skepticism for a culture that hides rumors and ruckus behind sweater sets and pearls, while her prose exhibits both an understanding and a distrust of the syrupy-sweet culture in which she herself was steeped. o 14 Cory Bordonaro is a freelance writer, crafter and barista in Birmingham, Alabama.

Book clubs New paperbacks for reading groups Fool

By Christopher Moore Moore’s ingenious send-up of King Lear is sure to delight Shakespeare fans and seduce those readers who—thanks to the tedium of high school English class—may have developed an early aversion to the Bard. The book’s spirited narration is provided by Pocket, King Lear’s fool. An orphan who was raised by nuns, Pocket is a former actor and acrobat with a wide range of skills: He’s an expert at forgery and knife throwing, and he can amuse just about anybody, including Lear’s glum daughter, Cordelia. Pocket’s sidekick, Drool, a slow-witted giant with Harper a heart of gold, plays the innocent fall guy in his mischievous $14.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780060590321 plots. And there are plots aplenty in this playful tale. For the most part, the book adheres to Lear’s original storyline, but it also draws on other plays by Shakespeare, and the result is a saucy, sexy, modern collage of history and humor, poetry and politics. When two of his daughters prove unfaithful to their husbands and brew devious schemes, Lear—lonely and in despair—has only Pocket as his companion. The outcome Moore concocts would surprise Shakespeare himself. The best-selling author of The Stupidest Angel (2004) and You Suck (2007), Moore has a style all his own and an unmatchable comedic instinct. Both work to their fullest advantage in this delicious satire.

The Song Is You

By Arthur Phillips Phillips’ fourth novel is a cleverly plotted tale of two likeminded lovers set in modern-day Manhattan. Middle-aged and successful, Julian Donahue directs glamorous commercials in the Big Apple. He’s the picture of prosperity, but inside he’s reeling from the death of his infant son and the disintegration of his marriage. His antidote to pain is music—hard rock, cool jazz, decorous classical—which he listens to obsessively through headphones, keeping the world at a cozy distance.

When he catches a performance by Irish singer Cait O’Dwyer in a Brooklyn bar, Julian knows he’s in the presence of a kin- Random House dred spirit—another music lover in the process of shedding a $15, 288 pages painful past. Taken with her talent as a songwriter, Julian be- ISBN 9780812977912 comes Cait’s biggest fan, sending her flattering mail and tracking her performances via the Internet, remaining anonymous all the while. Although she has no idea who Julian is, Cait nevertheless becomes enamored of her mysterious admirer. The two dream of meeting but are afraid to do so, preferring the mystery of distance to the reality of intimacy. Phillips’ skills as a novelist are on full display in this poignant, sensitively depicted romance. Allusions to music—to its power and its practitioners (everyone from Billie Holiday to Jane’s Addiction)—fill the novel, adding a whimsical dimension to the proceedings. A reading group guide is included in the book.

Shadow and Light

By Jonathan Rabb The second entry in the trilogy that started with Rosa (2005), Rabb’s newest novel is a stylish mystery set in 1920s Germany. The adventures of police inspector Nikolai Hoffner continue, as he investigates a death at Berlin’s Ufa film studios. The case at hand is the alleged suicide of movie executive Gerhard Thyssen, who was involved with an aspiring actress named Ingrid Volker. Volker has disappeared, but Hoffner links her to a sex club in one of Berlin’s more sordid sectors. During the search for Volker, Hoffner crosses paths with pretty Helen Coyle. An American talent scout, Coyle claims that MGM dispatched her to Berlin to persuade Volker to sign a movie contract. With Coyle along for the Picador $15, 400 pages ride, Hoffner finds himself deep in Berlin’s underground, ISBN 9780312429416 where he discovers a network of drugs, sex and shady business agreements. Meanwhile, he has his own problems to attend to, including a son named Sascha, who has fallen in with Joseph Goebbels’ crowd of right-wing extremists and may be part of a conspiracy involving both the movie business and Berlin’s political power brokers. An old-fashioned hero of the first order, Hoffner is trapped in a city where nothing is what it seems, and the reader can’t help but root for him. Rabb’s atmospheric writing captures the essence of the Weimar Republic, and his knack for noirish plotting brings to mind predecessors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. o —JULIE HALE

“A glorious

once-upon-a-t

BALA NCIN G A C T S for

ime fairy tale come true. . . . I loved eve —A D R I A NA ry moment.”

TRIGIANI

these fo

when m

Do you remembe r the best sum mer of yo ur life?

Summe r

ds, yoga

is just th

e begin “A n ebul ning . . . y time wi lient and wise no th these great ch vel. The pages ar ac flew by — Va ler and I wa ie Fr anke ters ended— s sad but not l, author too of Thin Is the Ne sad to try some w Hap py yoga.”

at Tiffa ny

AM em

MARJ

ur frien

a no vel

oi r

ORIE

“Agnes is a complex cha racter—flaw real, harsh— ed, yet McGilvar y writes wit compellin ha g, acerbic sty le that you lose intere never st. An except ional first that oozes outing grit, suspen se, and talen t.”

—Daily Rec ord

H A RT

A Lost

z f i s o e h m

A+

AUT H INSI OR GHT S, EXT RAS MOR & E

a n

Mario

“An ebullient and wise novel. The pages flew by.”

Wife’s Tale

A NO V

EL

n McG

––Valerie Frankel, author of Thin Is the New Happy

ilvary

“[A] tantalizing novel.”

“A perfect Mother’s Day gift.”

––Booklist

––USA Today

“Pitch-perfe ct dialogue, and [a] keen eye for social detail. ” —Boston Glo be

A+

AUTHOR INSIGHTS , EXTRAS & MORE

A N OVE

L

tho HAM r o f H ann a

MO ND

h’s Dr eam

“Diane Hammond writes with heart, compassion, and humor.”

––Terry Gamble, author of Good Family and The Water Dancers

Visit www.BookClubGirl.com, a blog dedicated to sharing great books, news and tips with book clubs everywhere.

el of t

Vanitha

How to K a novel a Love nSit ong a

c y p r e s s

Racha

h o l l o w

el Her

ron

y a r n

dle Ag

es

Sanka ran

“A po nce an werful nove d supe l abou —Shar rstition. R t the destru eade on Kay ct Penm rs will care ive forces un an, N ew Yo deeply for leashed by rk Tim th es best e courageo us selling author Auda.”

ignora

“The perfe ct book to curl up with, as warm and cozy as your fa vorite sw ea te r.”

—S U S A N WIG G S, New York Times bestsellin g author

he Mid

A+

“A powerful novel ... readers will care deeply.”

AUT INS HOR IG EXT HTS, RAS MOR & E

––Sharon Kay Penman, New York Times bestselling author of Devil’s Brood

“The perfect book to curl up with, as warm and cozy as your favorite sweater.”

––Susan Wiggs, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Hideaway

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

SEE IN STA G RS DIA NE au

A Nov

15

CURRENT EVENTS

A true story of courage

This month’s top publisher picks HC 9781934734162 $24.95 www.cardboardgods.net

Cardboard Gods Josh Wilker A memoir of growing up in an unconventional household smartly told through the author’s baseball card collection. “If you love Dave Eggers or Augusten Burroughs, you just may love Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods, too. I did.” —Wally Lamb Seven Footer Press

PB 9780984083640 $16.95 www.tkthorne.com

Noah’s Wife: 5500 BCE T. K. Thorne Noah’s wife, a beautiful young girl with Asperger Syndrome, shares her epic tale of truth, courage and survival in this unique variation of the Biblical world and its culture.

MEMOIR

Chalet Publishing

PB 9781434376633 $12.99 www.lovingeyesarewatching.com

The Guardians: Loving Eyes are Watching Richard Williams Imagine a world where special dogs lead their masters back to the path of God’s love. The Guardians is such a story; it tells of two shelties who have the ability to speak, but their unusual talent is a closely guarded secret.

AuthorHouse

Here intelligence comes in. Let him who has the mind for it calculate the number of the beast, for it is a man’s number, and his number is 666.

REVELATION 13:18

16

You would have difficulty locating someone who didn’t have at least a basic understanding of what the number 666 means. Countless theologians and scholars have studied the biblical prophesy in depth and have correlated the data to the best of their ability—but you may be surprised to know that it was all based on a flawed assumption. It has recently come to light that a scribe in ancient times made an innocent but profound clerical error: 666 is the wrong number! Because of this very recent discovery, an accurate text about the time of the apocalypse using all of the available data to give us a clear picture of the Antichrist and the end times has never been written. Until now.

Louis Diedricks has spent years cross-referencing the book of Revelation with other apocalyptic references, and it is his learned deduction that the signs of the Apocalypse are practically upon us. With the understanding that the signs of the Apocalypse are metaphors rather than literal descriptions, and with a profound awareness of the technological capabilities of our time and what that might mean within the framework of Scripture, Diedricks guides us step-by-step down the windy road of the end of times prophesy.

Using the correct number—616—and a brilliantly innovative way of interpreting that number, he uses all available data to lead the question of the Antichrist’s identity to its logical conclusion. He is alive, he is among us, and it is time to prepare ourselves for what is coming.

PB 9781603290616 $22 HC 9781603290609 $40

Teaching the Graphic Novel

This book will prove to be an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to understand the difficulties of the very near future and who the players are.

Modern Language Association

US $13.95

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

What if everything you knew about the Antichrist was wrong?

And what if he was alive and amongst us right now?

Edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick “This excellent collection lays out an impressive series of methods and techniques for teaching graphic novels. It comes at just the right moment as the graphic novel has made a place for itself on the contemporary cultural scene.”

—M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College

Review by Brian P. Corrigan On the one-year anniversary of his kidnapping by Somali pirates and a subsequent headline-grabbing rescue, Captain Richard Phillips revisits his harrowing high-seas adventure in a riveting book, A Captain’s Duty.

In early 2009, as he prepared to depart for the African coast helming the cargo ship Maersk Alabama, Captain Phillips—a native of Vermont and lifelong merchant marine—bade an emotional farewell to his wife, Andrea, reassuring her with a promise to return home safely from his time at sea. It was a promise he had made many times before, and had always somehow managed to keep. This time, however, Phillips was quietly, yet all too keenly, aware of the danger awaiting him and his crew in the increasingly pirateinfested waters off the Somali coast.

As the Maersk began its journey, Phillips worked tirelessly to prepare his men for the worst—and when the worst indeed happened, his diligence paid off almost immediately.

Within hours of the heavily armed pirates’ boarding and commandeering of the Maersk, Phillips successfully managed to separate the ship, crew and cargo under his command from their would-be captors, thereby fulfilling his captain’s duty. Unfortunately for Phillips, he accomplished this objective only at the expense of his own freedom. For A Captain’s Duty five long days, he remained at sea as the pirates’ prized By Richard Phillips American hostage, floating with them on a ramshackle life- Hyperion boat in the unrelenting heat of the open ocean. $25.99, 304 pages A Captain’s Duty begins with Phillips’ seemingly routine ISBN 9781401323806 departure on board the Maersk Alabama and ends weeks later with his dramatic rescue and emotional homecoming.

But Phillips does more than simply recount the details of his tense, and often terrifying, week of captivity. Through the numerous flashbacks and historical anecdotes that pepper his narrative, he paints vivid and touching portraits of both the merchant mariner’s life at sea and the family life he leaves behind—a life to which he was ultimately fortunate enough to return, with a renewed appreciation and sense of purpose. o Brian P. Corrigan lives and writes in Florence, Alabama.

PB 9781936198054 $13.95 www.louisdiedricks.com

The Day of the Lord Louis Diedricks An enlightening new perspective on what is described within the Book of Revelation for the tribulation period during the upcoming days of Apocalypse.

Be prepared for a soul shocking experience.

Mill City Press

Building a life in a harsh landscape Review by Linda Stankard It’s the ’70s. Laura Bell graduates from college a pretty and promising young woman, but success nevertheless eludes her. While others eagerly and easily trade in their caps and gowns for careers and cars and families, she feels lost, unsure she knows how to make a grab for life’s proverbial brass ring. Comfortable around horses, drawn to a nomadic life and feeling “alone, unmoored and unworthy,” she believes she can hide her young, uncertain self in the wilderness of Wyoming, out among “the sage and rocks and transient lives of the herders.” She leaves the security of her parental home in Kentucky, takes up residence in a “sheep-wagon parked under the bare-branched cottonwoods of Whistle Creek Ranch,” and hopes for an inviolable escape. But the austere existence of a sheepherder holds surprises. “The isolation,” she writes candidly, “. . . tossed sharp splinters of life straight back up in my face, waking me to the crack of thunder, the smell of rain that hadn’t yet hit the ground.”

Part lyrical remembrance of a deeply intense relationship with nature in a sweepingly majestic landscape, part unswerving self-analysis, Claiming Ground delivers both beauty and unabashed reflection. It follows Bell’s journey down many trails: cattle hand, herder, forest ranger, mas- Claiming Ground seuse. We see her as friend, lover, wife, mother, daughter. By Laura Bell We witness her awkward progress in tendering tenderness; Knopf her anguish in divorce; her devastation in unspeakable loss; $24.95, 256 pages her brave willingness to put her battered heart back out ISBN 9780307272881 there; her honesty. We admire her fortitude in rugged terrain and understand when she gives her all, “believing that a life can be built by hard work and a home created by sheer force.” We cry when she finds out it isn’t so, but take heart because she perseveres. “Time after time, things come together and they fall apart again,” she explains, “like breathing.”

You will find Claiming Ground in the memoir section, but it is not only a looking back; it is a guidepost to the possibilities ahead—the surprises that await us down our own trails. o Linda Stankard claims her ground in New York and Tennessee.

INTERVIEW

Waiting to be transformed Hopeful buyers take their places in an endless queue

Interview by Alden Mudge The Line centers on the lives of four family members, each with different hopes for o follow her highly praised first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov—which tells the story of a Surrealist artist who, in an act of artistic self-betrayal, becomes a the future and different, sometimes conflicting reasons for being in line for tickets. One Soviet art functionary, only to find his world upended years later under glas- of the marvels of the novel is how Grushin, a great descriptive writer and a masterful psychologist, gradually brings these family members—and nost—Olga Grushin set out to write a novel about a Russian the people in line around them—into sharp, resonant relief. émigré living in America who then returns to Russia. But “I thought of each character as being like a mirror, so that after struggling through about 100 pages, Grushin abanyou get different reflections of the characters, in snippets doned the project. from different points of view,” she says. “In the beginning of “Hopefully my second novel jinx was the one that didn’t the book each character is in some ways completely alone, work out,” Grushin quips during a call to her home outside cut off. You get bits of the same story told from different Washington, D.C. Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971 and points of view and it’s a completely different story. But the came to the U.S. to attend Emory University in 1989. Her line is a sort of transformative presence. I didn’t conceive of Alabama-born husband is an attorney, and they have two some pat transformation. I wanted something deeper. The children—a boy and a girl—whose births coincided with the line is this sort of gift, people being transformed by their completion of each of Grushin’s novels. “Are we going to see a common weight, their hopes, their coming together.” third child for the third novel?” Grushin says, laughing. “No, The novel’s success in providing a depth of experience this is not a literary trend.” about such an unlikely, even dreary subject as a ticket line While struggling with her novel in progress, Grushin hapis a testament not only to Grushin’s large talent but to her pened upon “this story of how Igor Stravinsky, who was 80 at sustained control of her art. “I think it was E.L. Doctorow the time, was invited to return to his homeland for the first who said that when he writes a novel he knows the departure time in 50 years. People, when they learned of it, lined up and OLGA GRUSHIN point and the destination point but the rest is like driving at waited to buy tickets literally for a whole year. I was amazed night with your headlights lighting up just a small portion by that story. The line itself became this complex social world of the road,” Grushin says. “For me it’s not at all like that. with its own rules, its own leaders and its own social net“I don’t see myself as either I have to have an outline. I had a little more of a smudged works. As I kept struggling with my novel, I kept returning outline in this case than with my first novel because I wanted to this story again and again. I kept asking myself what kind Russian or American, really. to explore a different way of writing, also quite consciously. of lives these people would have outside the line to make this In the first novel I was maybe a little too logical and rigid in possible. What would make them stand in line for a year to my approach. It was the first book and I was nervous about hear a two-hour concert? I was haunted by this episode. I kept I see myself more as just a letting myself write more freely. With this book the concept thinking about it and I started writing little notes to myself. was more fluid.”

Finally I realized that this was the book that I actually wanted writer of the world.”

Grushin says she now begins her work day writing in a to write.” notebook in a local café; when the piece begins to flow, she Thus Grushin’s extraordinary novel, The Line, was born. returns home, types what she has written into a computer But it is a mistake to think of this as a historical novel in any way, shape or form. Grushin says she spent no more than a day or two reading about and goes on from there. Since she arrived in the U.S. and became serious about pubthe historical episode that so intrigued her. Her invented fa- lishing fiction, Grushin has written in English. “I do strive for a kind of merging of the mous composer, Igor Selinsky, is more an object of hopes Russian and the English in my use of language,” she says. “I do feel it’s important for me and fantasies about life in a better place than a physical pres- to preserve the Russian cadences and feel to my work. On the other hand I live here and ence. Even her vividly rendered setting is as much Kafkaesque I’ve been writing in English for 20 years, which has obviously changed me.

“I grew up reading every conceivable writer. I had this sense of entering this great dreamscape as it is Soviet bloc housing. “I didn’t want to make it too Russian,” she says. “I ocean of literature within which there are maybe little bays—the bay of Russian litwanted to go in a different erature, the sea of American literature—but basically it was this one water. I don’t see The Line direction. I set out to write myself as either Russian or American, really. I see myself more as just a writer of the a more universal tale about world.”

By Olga Grushin In The Line, Olga Grushin shows herself to be one extraordinarily capable swimmer hoping and waiting and Putnam dreaming about changing in the world’s great ocean of literature. o $25.95, 336 pages Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

ISBN 9780399156168 your life.” © PHILIPE MATSAS-OPALE

T

SUPERNATURAL SUSPENSE

Review by Michael Alec Rose There is a genre of fiction that might well be called “tourism horror.”

In such stories, the protagonist travels to a breathtakingly attractive destination, where all hell breaks loose. The masterpieces of the genre are surely Dracula (oh, Transylvania!) and The Shining (talk about a “last resort” hotel). Enter debut novelist Wendy Webb, who gives both Bram Stoker and Stephen King a run for their travel budget, inventing an island in the Great Lakes that can’t be matched for pristine natural beauty, richness of history, touristic amenities . . . and sheer supernatural terror.

One reason why The Tale of Halcyon Crane deserves a place in the canon of tourism horror is its initial twist of the emotional knife: the traumatic discovery that forces our heroine, Hallie James, to make her journey to Great Manitou Island. Ghosts, violent death, witches—none of these terrible presences on the island hold a frightful candle to the psychological devastation at the outset of the novel, when Hallie finds

The Tale of Halcyon Crane

By Wendy Webb Holt $15, 352 pages ISBN 9780805091403 Also available on audio

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

One woman’s long strange trip in search of her true identity

out that she is not the person she thought she was—and neither is her father, nor her mother, nor anything she has ever believed about her family. This internal horror outdistances the merely external threats imposed

by Stoker and King.

The emotional impact of the island’s heart of darkness on Webb’s heroine also stands in complete contrast to the way things usually go in the genre. In Dracula and The Shining (or Heart of Darkness, for that matter), the hero or heroine is possessed by the horror, is undone by it and made monstrous. But in The Tale of Halcyon Crane, Hallie James confronts the horror and takes possession of herself, entering into her authentic identity, with all its difficulties intact.

The novel’s affirmative spirit may not be to the taste of diehard horror fans, but it certainly gives a more generous account of how the spirit of a beautiful place can complexly affect a human being, for both good and ill. Wendy Webb is a professional journalist, first and foremost. Like those journalistic masters Dickens and Twain before her, she knows that to write good travel prose, you must give a vivid account of both the demons you find along the way and the demons you bring along with you.

That way, the reader always feels right at home. o

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s 17 Blair School of Music.

HISTORICAL FICTION

Playing with the past Novelists have their way with history

Feature by Julie Hale t’s like time travel: Reading a work of historical fiction allows us to succumb to the pull of the past, to escape the humdrum here-and-now and visit earlier, exotic eras.

Mixing the inventiveness of fiction with the veracity of solid research, historical novels are delightful hybrids. The narratives here take place in Renaissance Italy, finde-siècle France and 16th-century England; they feature struggling artists and merciless monarchs, dysfunctional families and doubt-wracked lovers; and through a blend of delicious speculation and verifiable information, these novels help us to imagine what might have been.

I

Fresh impressions of a great painter Author of the acclaimed novel Marrying Mozart, Stephanie Cowell returns with another precisely crafted historical piece. Claude and Camille: A Novel of Claude Monet (Crown, $25, 352 pages, ISBN 9780307463210) elegantly explores the relationship between one of Impressionism’s greatest practitioners and the woman who was his muse.

In Paris in the 1860s, Claude Monet—penniless and with no artistic reputation to speak of—struggles to make his name as a painter, surrounded by like-minded colleagues such as Renoir, Degas and Manet. In the well-born, beautiful Camille Doncieux, Monet finds his true inspiration. Witty, spirited and fiercely loyal, Camille leaves behind a comfortable existence in order to marry Monet, becoming his best friend and eventually bearing him two children. Over the years, the couple contend with poverty, the trials of war, a harshly critical art world and a public not quite ready for Monet’s work, but their hardships are lightened by his revelatory experiments with paint and his significant friendships with the Impressionists. Fleshing out the artist’s biographical outline with fresh imagery, well-paced dramatic scenes and carefully calculated dialogue, Cowell presents a vivid portrait of Monet’s remarkable career. She writes with intelligence and reverence for her subject matter, providing a rich exploration of the points at which life and art converged for one of history’s greatest painters.

A chilling chapter from England’s past

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Fact is often stranger than fiction, as Mary Sharratt proves in her carefully researched novel Daughters of the Witching Hill (HMH, $24, 352 pages, ISBN 9780547069678).

With characters and incidents drawn straight from the historical record, Sharratt’s irresistible novel is set in Lancashire, England, in 1612—the year a witch-hunt swept the region.

Bess Southerns, the novel’s central figure, is a poor widow who lives in Pendle Forest. Gripped by visions, she soon gains notoriety as a mystic of sorts. Bess is able to treat the sick using folk magic, and she can also predict the future. She shares her secrets with Alizon, her granddaughter, and with her best friend, Chattox. But when Chattox begins dabbling in more sinister arts, and when a tinker falls ill after quarreling with Alizon, the locals begin to suspect that dark forces are at work among the women. As fear seizes the community, Roger Nowell, a prominent magistrate, pursues Alizon and Bess in hopes of making his name as a witch-hunter. Panic in Lancashire rises to a fever pitch while he tries to capture his quarry. Sharratt fills the book with fascinating accounts of rituals and magic practices, and her gift for the language of

18

the era brings the narrative to life. Striking just the right balance between the demands of fact and the allure of a good story, she has produced a novel that’s both convincing and compelling. Daughters is—literally—a spellbinding book.

The politics of painting Lynn Cullen weaves a glittering tapestry in The Creation of Eve (Putnam, $25.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9780399156106), a novel based on the true story of celebrated Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola. Singled out for her extraordinary gifts, Sofi is invited to study in Michelangelo’s workshop in Rome, an honor unheard of for a woman. But when controversy upsets the careful balance of her life, Sofi leaves Italy for Spain and attaches herself to the retinue of King Felipe II. At court, she becomes a lady-in-waiting and painting teacher to the king’s discontented bride, 14-year-old Elisabeth de Valois. The two young women quickly become allies, sharing secrets and schemes. But Sofi’s presence at court causes ripples she never dreamed of, as she finds herself mixed up in a love affair—an entanglement with the queen, the king and the king’s handsome half brother, Don Juan. Cullen blends themes of art, gender and politics into a provocative novel that feels surprisingly timely. Her Sofi is a lively narrator—a resourceful young woman whose insights and observations engage the reader from the first page. Cullen drew on Spanish court documents, legal records and letters, as well as the paintings of Sofonisba herself, to prepare for the writing of this lavish tale. The result: a narrative with the kind of authenticity that only history can provide.

From drawing room to courtroom Best-selling author Katharine McMahon (The Alchemist’s Daughter; The Rose of Sebastopol) is a former magistrate who worked for 20 years in England’s legal system. Her law expertise is on full display in The Crimson Rooms (Putnam, $25.95, 384 pages, ISBN 9780399156229), a sophisticated thriller set in 1920s England with a plucky up-and-coming attorney as its heroine. Dedicated to her vocation, 30-year-old Evelyn Gifford lives with her mother, aunt and grandmother. The family is still in shock over the loss of Evelyn’s brother, James, who died in the Great War. A new chapter opens in the Giffords’ lives when a nurse and her young son arrive on their doorstep. The nurse insists that James was the boy’s father, and that they conceived the child during wartime in a hospital. The Giffords allow the pair to stay, while Evelyn turns her attention to a new case involving a war veteran accused of murdering his wife. When a dashing (and married) attorney named Nicholas Thorne joins forces with her on the case, Evelyn finds herself falling for him. But she’s disturbed by suspicions about her newly acquired nephew and the woman claiming to be his mother. The mysteries accrete to spine-tingling effect in this smartly constructed tale. McMahon based the character of Evelyn on a real lawyer named Carrie Morrison, a groundbreaking British barrister, and the cases she features in the book were drawn from true events.

The historical foundation gives weight and significance to her briskly paced thriller. o

FICTION

One newspaper’s twilight Review by Harvey Freedenberg With long-established newspapers passing from the scene and many others on life support, it’s the perfect time for a satiric look at the business. International journalist Tom Rachman supplies that and much more in The Imperfectionists, his sly novel-in-stories about the travails of the staff struggling to keep a small English-language paper afloat in Rome while wrestling with their messy personal lives.

Each of Rachman’s stories focuses on a different staffer, and from one to the next he deftly hits all the notes on the emotional scale. Comic highlights include “Bush Slumps to New Low in Polls,” in which Lloyd Burko, the aging and desperate Paris correspondent, fabricates a story about a shift in France’s policy in Gaza to save his job, and “The Sex Lives of Islamic Extremists,” starring Winston Cheung, a feckless one-time primatologist fighting a losing battle for the position of Cairo stringer.

Balancing these wry tales are stories like “World’s Oldest Liar Dies

The Imperfectionists

By Tom Rachman Dial $25, 288 pages ISBN 9780385343664

at 126,” sketching the painful transformation of obituary writer Arthur Gopal after the death of his eight-year-old daughter. In “U.S. General Optimistic on War,” editor-in-chief Kathleen Solson confronts the consequences of her husband’s infidelity, and in “Markets Crash Over Fears of China Slowdown,” hard-charging CFO Abbey Pinnola is forced to share an awkward transatlantic flight with a copydesk editor whose job she eliminated.

Interspersed with the novel’s 11 stories are flashbacks that trace the history of the paper from its creation by a wealthy Atlanta family through its brief flourishing and slow unraveling. When the founder’s grandson arrives in 2004, he’s more devoted to walking his basset hound, Schopenhauer, than he is to visiting the newsroom, where the staff drives corrections editor Herman Cohen to fits of sputtering rage by resorting to the acronym “GWOT” for “Global War on Terror” (entry No. 18,238 in the style guide he dubs, with ill-founded optimism, “The Bible”).

Perhaps the unnamed paper is deserving of the destiny that looms over it in these stories. But by the time its fate has become clear, it’s hard not to greet it with a touch of sympathy engendered by Rachman’s vivid tales. o Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

From NY Times Bestselling Author

BEVERLY LEWIS Journey into the Secret World of the Amish

Will she find hope or heartache at the end of her search?

NEW!

On Sale Date April 6!

The Telling by Beverly Lewis Seasons of Grace #3

Also Available The Secret The Missing

—Booklist

www.bethanyhouse.com A Division of Baker Publishing Group

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

“No one does Amish-based inspirationals better than Lewis.”

19

LIFESTYLES

ANIMALS

Reduce, reuse, recycle Here are three things to buy that will help you either redeem or get rid of a hundred others. This trio of spirited, pragmatic books exemplify the deceptively simple principle that less is more. What’s more (and therefore less!), they offer a sound set of tools to help you take back your living space, whether you’re clearing out your clutter, becoming more thrifty with your resources or reusing what you’ve already got.

62 Projects To Make With a Dead Computer (Workman, $14.95, 252 pages, ISBN 9780761152439) is filled with fun and surprises, and an almost puritanical zeal for the redemption of “lost souls”—otherwise known as discarded electronics. Digital cameras, keyboards, PDAs, MP3 players, earbuds and drives are, to author Randy Sarafan, raw material ripe for creative repurposing. Most of us have at least a few obsolete bits lying

BY JOANNA about—a bundle of mysBRICHETTO tery cords and a cell phone or two—as well as the basic skills to transform them into something else entirely: a mouse pencil-sharpener, a scanner side table, a cable coaster. Some projects call for tricky work involving voltage and solder, but even if you don’t “do” electricity beyond changing a bulb and you can’t begin to pronounce solder (sod’er), many creations can be managed with a glue gun and basic hand tools. The Floppy Disk Wall Frame, for example, is super easy and really quite spectacular. The circuit panel memo board with keyboard key magnets is simple, too, and just as gorgeous. Projects range from fun to practical, with category-defying wonders like the flat-screen ant farm and the iMac terrarium.

Whether weird or wonderful (or both), each aims at nothing less than the intersection of art, technology and ecology.

A penny saved Anxious to distinguish thrifty from cheap, Be Thrifty: How to Live Better with Less (Workman, $14.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780761156093), edited by Pia Catton and Califia Suntree, begins with the lesson that “thrift” and “to thrive” are cognates. Thus, thrift should radiate positive associations, not miserly ones. To be thrifty is to thrive, to flourish. The editors present seven categories in which to flourish: home, garden/pet, food, family, personal care, leisure and financial stability. Each offers more than enough information to tweak or outright overhaul even the most profligate of habits. In the first chapter, we learn to clean and maintain our home and car more greenly, reducing utility and repair bills and generating less waste. Need to know about furnace filters, clogged toilets, tire inflation or gutters? You’ll find the big picture and the little details. The same goes for every other facet of everyday life—even the faucets. This jam-packed omnibus encourages an old-fashioned, no, timeless self-sufficiency, while keeping an eye on how our choices affect not just our ability to thrive, but the planet’s as well.

Clean and clear APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

What’s a Disorganized Person To Do? (Artisan, $16.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9781579653729), by Stacey Platt, answers its titular question with its subtitle: “317 Ideas, Tips, Projects, and Lists to Unclutter Your Home and Streamline Your Life.” As if to underline my own need for such a guide, when I type the word “unclutter,” my word processor underlines it in red: The term is unknown to it and to me. But if all I have to do is consult this fat little book full of numbered, logically sequenced bits of clarity, packed with smart photos and arranged with color-coded tabs printed on the fore-edge, I am set. Clarity is a key term: The author, a successful professional organizer, says “clarity is the foundation for a joyous and accomplished life.” (I’ll have what she’s having, please.) The message couldn’t be clearer: Reducing clutter—not just finding cute ways to store it—sets us free. Even the most overwhelmed among us can jump right in, thanks to quick tips taming every room in the house. Learn what papers to save for taxes and for how long, where to put the newspapers, when to throw away cosmetics, how to organize a closet and why you should defragment your hard drive—plus 312 other things. The format is a pleasure to browse, but it is also wisely designed to answer targeted questions on demand. Pare 20 down, wise up. Less, again, proves to be much more. o Joanna Brichetto writes from Nashville.

The wonders of winged creatures Review by Deanna Larson If an Archaeopteryx of the Late Jurassic Period perched on our rooftops, we’d surely take notice. But rushing around, we often fail to see birds—the only wild animals that we encounter every day, and a link to our prehistoric past—eating berries from backyard bushes, drinking from puddles and raising young in delicate nests of stray hairs and blades of grass. It’s a subject ripe with possibility for noted naturalist and writer Sy Montgomery (The Good Good Pig). Her new book, Birdology, reconnects readers with the “winged aliens” that fill our lives with movement, song and mystery.

Each chapter reveals a fundamental truth about birds, such as Birds are Individuals (Chickens), Birds are Dinosaurs (Cassowary), Birds are Made of Air (Hummingbirds) and Birds Can Talk (Parrots). Montgomery draws a line from her beloved childhood parakeet Jerry to her current barnyard full of gregarious chickens and beyond, focusing on one aspect of these common birds’ anatomy, physiology or behavior—the hawk’s incredible eyesight, the amazing architecture of hummingbird wings—to hint at the larger wonders and mysteries of the approximately 10,000 living bird species. Her reporting takes her to a wildlife rehabilitator in California who spe- Birdology cializes in baby hummingbirds the size of a bumblebee; to By Sy Montgomery Australia to track down the dinosaur-throwback cassowary; Free Press to New England to hunt with birds of prey. She gets a seat at $25, 272 pages the start line at a Boston-area pigeon race, allows a danger- ISBN 9781416569848 ous Harris hawk to perch on her leather-covered hand and dances with a cockatoo. “Although we are separated by 325 million years of evolution,” she writes, “Snowball and I move together, as if in a mirror.”

The often poetic, relaxed elegance of her observations make this adventure into the science and natural history of birds deeply satisfying. Whether keeping watch over a newly relaunched hummingbird until he is “just a silhouette that dissolves into the soft, moonlit night” or putting a hood on a bird, “like extinguishing a candle,” Montgomery’s microscope reveals feathered creatures with intellectual and emotional abilities remarkably like ours, animals that “stir our souls in ways that change our lives.” o Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

MEMOIR

An unlikely tale of love and marriage Review by Amy Scribner Where to start with Laura Munson’s wise, introspective and maddening memoir, in which she recalls the summer of her husband’s discontent? One moment you’re getting lost in her lovely meditations on the Montana life she and her husband have created with their two young children. The next, you’re ready to take an impromptu road trip to shake some sense into her yourself.

When Munson’s husband tells her he doesn’t love her anymore, her response is, “I don’t buy it.” She calmly vows to stand by while he works through whatever demons are causing the crisis. Take a walkabout in Australia, she suggests. Go to helicopter school. Build a “man cave” over the garage to escape to. Just don’t ruin the good thing we’ve built with our family.

As he stumbles through the summer, flitting in and out of their lives while he fishes, drinks and tries to find himself, Munson and her children have what she calls “a season of unlikely happiness.” She takes pleasure in cooking and setting off fireworks with the kids. And she feels like someone has her back: “Real live angels are showing up all around me like my grandparents and my father are piping them This Is Not The through some mystical realm, right into my life. . . . Even the way the grocery store checkout woman winked at me Story You Think It Is the other day felt like she was in on it. It’s like they’re saying: By Laura Munson Follow your instincts. You are going to be okay, no matter Amy Einhorn/Putnam $24.95, 352 pages what.”

Based on an essay she first wrote for the New York Times, ISBN 9780399156656 Also available on audio Munson’s book has some very smart, insightful things to say about marriage, family and her choice to subscribe to what she calls “the end of suffering.” And yet . . . can you really embrace a philosophy that allows a husband to get away with some breathtakingly selfish behavior? Is that enlightened or just naïve? And does it matter if things work out in the end? Whatever your answers, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is will certainly leave you thinking. o Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

THE SPOKEN WORD Murder, medicine and malevolence Michael Palmer has the prescription for medical thrillers down pat. And The Last Surgeon (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 11 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781427208743), Palmer’s 15th in this popular genre, capably narrated by the versatile John Bedford Lloyd, proves that this doctor-turned-writer hasn’t lost his razzle-dazzle, nor his concern with medical/ethical issues. This action-packed, action-paced Palmer production stars Nick Garrity, a talented surgeon who served in Afghanistan and now, living with the disabling effects of PTSD, operates a mobile medical van serving the poor and vets who share his problems, while always searching for the buddy who saved his life when his medical team was attacked.

Taking center stage with him is Jillian,

BY SUKEY HOWARD a smart, beautiful psych nurse who is desperately trying to figure out how and why her younger sister, ostensibly a suicide, really died. Why their paths cross, what they discover and the forces they must overcome, including a slick, sadistic, medically savvy assassin who revels in his work and the high-level, super-secret organization that pays him and picks the victims, all emerge as the bodies pile up and Nick and Jillian scramble for their own lives.

Spring Listening “This monumental book... may restore your faith in the future.”

—Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us

Read by Oliver Wyman

Is there a gene for religion?

Nicholas Wade, New York Times science writer, among other lofty credentials, has taken on one of the most emotionally charged subjects of our time in The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures (Tantor Media, $34.99, 12.5 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781400113491), read with firm, Cronkite-esque cool by Alan Sklar. Wade is not an in-your-face polemicist, nor is he out to “get” believers or atheists; he doesn’t proffer an opinion about the existence of God. But he is intensely curious about the role of religion in the evolution of human society. And his research has led him to explore the ideas that anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians and the more controversial sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have put forward. As he shares his research, he makes his case for religion as the key factor in early social cohesion, the dynamic through which self-interest was subordinated to the common good—the survival of the group. Thus, families could form groups, and groups could grow into villages, towns, cities, states and way beyond. Wade makes the case for the universality of religion and feels very strongly that we are genetically predisposed toward belief—that we’re as hard-wired to believe in a religion as we are hard-wired for language. More than just food for thought, this is a multi-course meal, seasoned with provocative ideas.

“Scottoline is a star!”

—Time

Read by Jennifer Van Dyck

“A luminous love story that readers won’t soon forget.”

—Emily Giffin, author of Heart of the Matter

Read by Kathleen McInerney

Audio of the month

“Timothy Dalton offers an excellent, fine-tuned narration.”

—AudioFile on Christine Falls, Earphones Award winner

Read by Timothy Dalton

Available wherever books are sold and for download w w w.macmillanaudio.com

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Listening to Simon Jones’ elegant, impeccable rendering of Conspirata (Simon & Schuster Audio, $49.99, 13.5 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780743566773), the second in Robert Harris’ brilliantly conceived Roman trilogy, plunges you into the seething world of power and politics in the late Roman Republic. Beginning when Cicero becomes consul in 63 B.C., the grand position that the famed orator, lawyer and master manipulator had fought so hard to win, the story is told by Tiro, a slave who’s become his devoted secretary and constant aide-de-camp. Once you get to know the players and get the hang of their Latin names, you’ll feel right at home and probably agree that when it comes to politics, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (sorry, I don’t know the Latin equivalent). We have Republicans and Democrats, they had Patricians and Plebeians; they talked about campaign finance reform, shamelessly invoked “the will of the people” and had sex scandals galore. There were shifting allegiances, blatant wheeling and dealing and ruthless backstabbing (knives often included), and they could bribe, bully and betray with the pros. The Cicero who emerges in Tiro’s portrait is that fascinating kind of political patriot who defended his beloved Rome against internal conspiracy and fought to save the ideals of the Republic, but who, on occasion, crossed “the narrow line between dignity and vanity, confidence and illusion, glory and selfdestruction.” Vivid history, vibrant audio. o

21

SPORTS

Rounding the bases New books celebrate baseball’s storied past

Feature by John C. Williams aseball is sick of scandal, and the publishing world seems to know it. This year we have no A-Rod exposé, no Daryl Strawberry confessional, no Pete Rose complaining about his prison without bars. Instead, authors have turned to the stalwarts of baseball history. Several big stars, like Roger Maris (see sidebar), get major biographies. Other titles avoid current headlines to revel in the joy of the game itself. Judging from the books we’ve seen so far, baseball literature is all the better for the shift.

B

Breaking down barriers Exemplary of this year’s glance to the past is Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson (Simon & Schuster, $26, 368 pages, ISBN 9781416547983).

Author Timothy M. Gay, who has previously breathed life into dead-ball star Tris Speaker, looks to an aspect of the game almost unthinkable today: a system in which major league stars not only arranged their own forprofit exhibition tours, but sometimes did so while the World Series was being played. More importantly, these

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Story of a slugger

22

Great baseball biographies are best served by great subjects, but good writing doesn’t hurt either; Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero (Touchstone, $26.99, 432 pages, ISBN 9781416589280) has both.

Maris, who broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961, emerges as a complex, inscrutable individual, and co-authors Tom Clavin and Danny Peary never miss chances to account for the complications in his family life, including his humble origins in Minnesota and North Dakota and the squabbling among his Serbian and Croatian relatives.

Maris was a youthful athlete of uncommon ability, and after turning down a college football scholarship, he signed with the Cleveland Indians and worked his way through their minor league chain. A solid hitter with left-handed power, Maris was also an excellent outfielder with speed and a strong arm, and after joining the New York Yankees in 1960 he became a huge star, winning the American League MVP Award twice. Yet his noted assault on Ruth’s record turned into a PR nightmare, due in part to his own taciturn ways and the obnoxious, at times simply vile cruelties of New York reporters, many of whom wanted more “show-biz” out of him or simply resented that his achievements overshadowed those of Gotham’s Mickey Mantle. Maris the man ultimately comes off as an incredibly misunderstood jock, and his early death at age 51 from lymphoma poignantly caps off a tale that is equal parts professional determination and personal sadness. Yet the testimony gathered here from Maris’ ball-playing colleagues also offers a portrait of a decent and well-respected individual who always played the game to the max. o —MARTIN BRADY

games broke the great taboo. Whites not only competed against blacks, but occasionally played with them on the same team. (Not surprisingly, these barnstormers generally avoided the South.) This setup didn’t mean equality—black players suffered substandard accommodations, and the quality of the teams often depended on how much organizers were able to pay. Nevertheless, the games proved that blacks could take on whites any day, not a mainstream concept at the time. Gay relies mainly on newspaper sources—many of the participants are dead—and his narrative can grow tedious when it resorts to a blow-by-blow of every game on a particular tour. But baseball completists will be thrilled, as will anyone interested in the exploits of the great Satchel Paige, daffy Dizzy Dean, the troubling Bob Feller and a host of Negro League stars born a few decades too early.

The new face of baseball Mark Kurlansky examines a different sort of amateur baseball in The Eastern Stars (Riverhead, $25.95, 288 pages, ISBN 9781594487507).

Kurlansky is best known for his histories Cod and Salt, and he hints at a similar single-commodity approach by showing how the sugar industry helped turn the small Dominican town of San Pedro de Macorís into a baseball factory that has produced 79 major leaguers. For many years, chopping sugarcane by hand was about the only thing the town’s people could do for a living; baseball eventually provided a second option. But the game turned out to be a curse as much as a blessing. After the major leagues opened to Dominican players, big-league dollars became a mirage that lured many. (Though 79 players may seem like a lot from a small town, even more aspired to make it.) If a player was lucky, he might get a decent signing bonus and a trip to the States before being summarily released back to a life of hard work; if he was entrepreneurial, he might become a buscón, a talent scout who takes a fat chunk of his teenage prodigy’s signing bonus.

Hardcore baseball fans should note that the book is not really aimed at them. Though it is peppered with obscure anecdotes of Dominican stars, it also informs us that a grand slam is a homer with the bases loaded; most confounding is its assertion that Detroit Tigers reliever José Valverde won back-to-back National League MVP awards in 2007 and 2008. (He finished 14th in MVP voting in 2007 and 24th in 2008.) These flaws aside, Kurlansky does a wonderful job bringing to life a side of baseball—and indeed, an entire country—that few Americans consider while watching the newest Dominican star dominate the major leagues.

Secrets of the game From the pathos of Dominican baseball we descend into the cesspool of a major league player’s daily life, depicted with verve in The Baseball Codes (Pantheon, $25, 304 pages, ISBN 9780375424694) by Jason Turbow

and Michael Duca. How does a pitcher know when to hit a batter? How does a runner know when it’s acceptable to bulldog the catcher? Should a ballplayer bring his wife to the bar at the team’s hotel? The answers help us understand the unwritten rules of the game, the code that all players are expected to learn and abide by. Turbow has a little problem with his task: One key tenet of the code is that players do not talk to the media about it. But he gets around this by providing ample anecdotal evidence, gathered from game accounts and the words of players who have loosened their tongues over the years. The result is a delightfully profane work that is awfully fun to read. (The reader should be prepared to confront this question: Is there any difference between a chickenshit play, a horseshit play and a bullshit play?) In contrast to common sepia-toned depictions of baseball’s past, this book reminds us that players were mortal way back when: Lou Gehrig, for example, only kept his famous consecutive-game streak alive because Yankees management called a sunny-day rainout when Gehrig was home with the flu. But the code’s popularity has recently waned, a fact Turbow blames on inflated salaries and egos. Could it be that the entire steroid era was enabled by unwritten rules that allow cheating until you’re caught and keep clubhouse happenings in the clubhouse?

A dream lineup Finally, we’re back in the bleachers for Top of the Order (Da Capo, $15.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9780306818554), an anthology of 25 essays, each about a writer’s favorite player. The book is a mixed bag, where success is linked to creativity of subject choice. (Do we really need another paean to Albert Pujols or Lou Gehrig?) One of the best essays is about someone whose stats you won’t find in the major league record book: Yutaka Enatsu, the Japanese pitcher who struck out 401 batters in a single season and who smoked 100 cigarettes every single day.

Robert Whiting’s essay portrays the pitcher as he was, without attempting to make the author part of the story.

Most writers, though, assert a personal connection to the subject. Notable are Matt Taibbi, who pokes the sabermetricians with his love of their great pariah, Jim Rice, and Scott Raab, who tells of his heartbreaking bit role in the suicide attempt of Tony Horton, an Indians first baseman who couldn’t quite cut it in the bigs. Best of all is novelist Christopher Sorrentino’s thoughtful piece on Dave Kingman, the mysterious masher who could do little but belt homers. Sorrentino remembers his father classifying every baseball player as “bush” or “class”— even the 114-win 1998 New York Yankees were “bush.” But Kingman was neither: “Some people and things were just sui generis or ambiguous enough to wind up outside these two categories.”

At their best, these books likewise defy categorization. Readers will find few ham-fisted depictions of heroes and villains here—just a love of the game and the people who play it. o John C. Williams has written for the Oxford American, PopMatters and the Arkansas Times.

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

23

AMERICAN HISTORY

Changing the face of American dining Review by Anne Bartlett We live in a traveling culture heavily defined by McDonald’s, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Starbucks and the like—successfully branded, distinctive national hospitality chains. For that, we can thank (or blame) a workaholic cockney immigrant named Fred Harvey.

Yes, Fred Harvey, not Howard Johnson. Johnson had his own genius, but Harvey was his forebear. Starting in 1876, Harvey created a chain of restaurants, hotels and stores at Santa Fe Railroad stations from Chicago to California that were not only ubiquitous, but really good. At a time when the gunslingers were still shooting it out at the O.K. Corral, Harvey brought high standards, interesting recipes, white tablecloths and well-trained “Harvey Girl” waitresses to what was then the back of beyond.

In Appetite for America, Harvey’s story is both a comprehensive cultural history and a fascinating family saga.

Author Stephen Fried takes us from Harvey’s arrival in the U.S. in 1853 to his descendents’ sale of the by-then declining company to a conglomerate in 1968. He even includes an appendix of Harvey House recipes (of which “Bull Frogs Sauté Provencal” is perhaps the most intriguing).

Appetite for Plagued with terrible health in his later years, Fred Harvey was lucky in his heir. His son, Ford Harvey, not only America greatly expanded the empire, he had a lasting impact on the By Stephen Fried U.S. as an impresario for Southwestern tourism, the devel- Bantam opment of the Native American curio industry and the in- $27, 544 pages vention of the Santa Fe design style. (If you own turquoise ISBN 9780553804379 earrings from Taos, you’re in Ford’s debt.) But, as is so often true, everything fell apart in the third generation; the talented heirs weren’t much interested in the business, and the untalented ones left to mind the store didn’t have the imagination to face up to interstates and airports.

Happily, not all was lost. Several of the high-end hotels developed under Ford Harvey still exist, like the always-booked El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. And for more proof of Harvey’s legacy, be sure to track down MGM’s The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland, and join in the chorus of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” o Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

FICTION

When truth is stranger than fiction

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Review by Amy Scribner It was several years ago when author Lisa Grunwald came across a photo online that stopped her cold. It was a smiling baby boy, one of dozens of “practice babies” supplied by an orphanage to the Cornell University home economics program, starting in 1919.

Fascinated, Grunwald researched further and found that hundreds of such babies had spent their first years on college campuses, raised by a rotating group of female college students.

Henry House, the complex and thoroughly captivating protagonist of Grunwald’s resulting novel, was a practice baby at the fictional Wilton College in 1950s Pennsylvania.

Raised in equal turns by tomboyish Edith, feminine Grace, conflicted Betty and a handful of other practice mothers, Henry never experienced the healthy parental attachment that modern child development research has shown is so crucial in the early years.

The closest he comes is with Martha, the aging and lonely head of the home ec program, who through a twist of fate gets to keep Henry even after he is no longer a practice baby.

But Martha is not the mother Henry so desperately needs— she is secretive and manipulative. Henry escapes through silence, not speaking for years. Eventually, he is shipped off The Irresistible to a boarding school for “mental defectives,” where an art Henry House teacher helps him realize his gift for drawing and the coeds

By Lisa Grunwald help him realize his gift for attracting girls of every kind. But Random House he’s unable to commit—to school or friendship or love. He $25, 432 pages drifts from his birth mother’s New York City apartment to ISBN 9781400063000 California in search of home.

The Irresistible Henry House is a soaring, heartfelt novel that spans three decades and an entire continent. Grunwald, author of several novels including Whatever Makes You Happy, creates a wholly original and all too human character in Henry House. Despite his quirks and shortcomings (or perhaps because of them), Henry is one of the most likeable, relatable characters in recent memory. o 24 Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

COOKING The queen of green instructs Alice Waters, locavore extraordinaire, has been one of the most influential chefs in America for well over three decades. Her mantra—“organic, local and seasonal”— has become the mantra for a generation of cooks (well, maybe we’re into the second generation by now), professional and non, and has changed the way so many of us think about food, its preparation, provenance and possibilities. Last summer, she was an organizer of Slow Food Nation, a gathering that lured thousands of people, all united by “a passion for food and for a sustainable future.” Among the highlights were demonstrations by 30 well-known chefs of the basic techniques universal to all cuisines—techniques that, once learned, can free cooks from an “overdependence on recipes” (Ms. Waters’ many excellent cookbooks excepted, I assume). These basic basics, explained in Waters’ confidence-instilling

BY SYBIL PRATT voice, are all documented in her latest, In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart (Clarkson Potter, $28, 160 pages, ISBN 9780307336804), along with a portrait of each chef, his or her illustrative recipes and a few more of the author’s own. Believing that the most important part of cooking is shopping and provisioning, Waters shows you how to stock an organic pantry with both the perishable and the not-too-perishable. With your pantry full, these techniques mastered and Waters’ creed absorbed, you can easily be a better, greener cook.

Mario goes pro-planet No one has to tell a good Italian cook about simplicity or seasonality; it’s in their DNA, and Mario Batali has made it his mission to spread that Italian culinary credo.

With 14 restaurants, eight cookbooks and TV appearances galore, the exuberant, larger-than-life Molto Mario is the current champion of La Cucina Italiana. Now he’s added a “proplanet resolve” to his message, “greening” his restaurants and reminding us of the social cost of our food decisions. Not pushy and hardly a vegetarian, Mario suggests that meals made up of a few vegetarian antipasti, maybe a sampling of salumi, a salad, pizza or pasta, some good cheese and a delectable dolce are sumptuously simple. In other words, you don’t need a “meat and potatoes” main course. And in Molto Gusto: Easy Italian Cooking (Ecco, $29.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780061924323), Mario offers the Italian classics that have made Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, his Manhattan palazzo of pizza and pasta, so resoundingly successful. Seasonally orchestrated, super-low in animal protein, these are the go-to recipes for creating your own incredibly inviting “pro-planet” meals. Try Spring Peas with Mint, Penne with Walnut Pesto, Pizza with Funghi and Taleggio, Tricolore Salad, Ricotta Gelato—nobody will ask, “where’s the beef?”

Sara’s continuing quest Sara Moulton, a Food Network star, food editor at “Good Morning America” and cookbook author, is a strong believer in the myriad benefits to body and soul of a home-cooked dinner, eaten at the table with family and friends. Sara Moulton’s Everyday Family Dinners (Simon & Schuster, $35, 400 pages, ISBN 9781439102510) is her latest practical paean to these savory, salutary meals. Sara’s goal is to give you wriggle-room strategies that free you from the “straightjacket that stipulates starch/ vegetable/protein at every meal,” and the recipes—200 here—and ideas to make those strategies a reality.

Like most pros, she relishes the local and the seasonal, includes and appreciates vegetarian dishes and, aware of the restraints the current recession has necessitated, has turned to using less expensive, but not less flavorful, ingredients. Among the new, fun strategies are: “Appetizers for Dinner,” perfect for natural grazers (I’m definitely part of that herd), such as Guacamole Eggs or Pork Sliders, Asian Style; “Whole Grain and Hearty” mains, including Polenta Lasagna and Barley Provençale; “Two for One,” recipes that generate fabulous leftovers; plus enough soups, salads, sandwiches, Sunday-Night Comfort Meals and desserts (the Butterscotch Pudding Cake is to die for) to make weeknights treat-nights throughout the year.

Totally sensible and satisfying. o

ROMANCE Home is where the heart is Spring means storms and flowers, a contrast mirrored in this month’s selection of stirring romances. Romantic suspense, small-town drama and dukes both masked and unmasked provide entertainment for rainy days or warming nights.

A woman must confront family secrets, a former crush and murder in Shattered (Putnam, $25.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9780399156274) by Karen Robards. At her job in the district attorney’s office, Lisa Grant discovers a 30-year-old cold-case file that includes a missing family’s photograph—and discovers an eerie resemblance between herself and the pictured mother. As she delves further into the mystery, events turn dangerous, causing Lisa to involve her boss and the object of her teenage affection, Scott Buchanan. Scott doesn’t want to love the girl he always conBY christie ridgway sidered pampered, but he can’t help himself from exploring his fiery attraction to the woman. Maybe they’ll find something lasting, if Lisa can escape whoever seems to be out to kill her.

The Kentucky backdrop adds another level of steam to this already sexy thriller.

Love unmasked Jo Beverley returns readers to Georgian England and the world of her Malloren family and friends in The Secret Duke (Signet, $7.99, 432 pages, ISBN 9780451229533). After being kidnapped, young Bella Barstowe manages to free herself—and is ultimately rescued by the handsome Captain Rose. But, suspecting he’s dangerous as well as dashing, Bella steals his horse and flees for home, where she is made to pay penance for the scandal. Four years later, she lands herself in yet more trouble as she sets out to avenge her mysterious abduction. The daring Captain Rose seems a natural partner for her plan, and she makes contact. Problem is, Captain Rose is really the powerful Duke of Ithorne, who uses his alternate identity as an occasional break from his responsibilities. He’s intrigued by the beauty who bested him years before and sympathetic to her cause, but who will rescue the Duke from falling for the woman who considers him to be a different man? High adventure and appealing characters make this another winner for Beverley.

Small-town secrets

Werewolf in London A werewolf duke in Regency times stars in A Certain Wolfish Charm (Sourcebooks, $6.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9781402236945)

by Lydia Dare. Unaccustomed to being questioned, Simon Westfield, the Duke of Blackmoor, is irritated when a beautiful spinster takes him to task for ignoring his young ward. Lily Rutledge has been caring for the boy for six years, but now he’s 12 and changing in ways she cannot comprehend . . . ways that Simon fully understands. Aware now of his duty, he decides to bring the child into his household and raise him to understand his animal nature, without explaining to Lily just what that nature is. But Lily refuses to leave her beloved charge, and while Simon may gnash his teeth at her stubborn manner, he can’t ignore the attraction he feels for her. Their mutual passion ultimately leads them into marriage, yet Lily knows Simon is holding back more than the “I love you” she longs to hear. A spirited woman and a fierce man delightfully clash in this sexy novel about the impossibility of hiding from full moons or full hearts. o Christie Ridgway writes contemporary romance from her home in Southern California.

antastic F ICT ION by abulous AUTHORS Desires of a Perfect Lady

By Victoria Alexander $7.99, 9780061449482 A decade ago, Olivia had expected to marry the Earl of Wyldewood, only to have happiness stolen from her. Now he stands before her, as proud and arrogant and handsome as ever, vowing to rescue her. Well,he’s got some nerve turning up after all these years. Where was he when she needed him?

Fatally Flaky

By Diane Mott Davidson $7.99, 9780061348143 Goldy Schulz is worn out from planning a wedding reception for a bridezilla. But then Doc Finn, a beloved local physician, is killed when his car tumbles into a ravine. Goldy thinks Doc was murdered because of the research he was doing at the local spa. So she goes undercover, but if she doesn’t find the clever killer, it might just be the death of Goldy Schulz.

Book of Souls

By Glenn Cooper $7.99, 9780061721809 Former FBI Special Agent Will Piper solved—and survived—the “Doomsday Killer” case and his reward was a forced early retirement. But the shattering truths he learned about the government’s most covert operations won’t let him rest. Now he’s on the trail of a mysterious book that’s been lost for six centuries. Once Will gets his hands on it, his life will be worth nothing.

The True Love Quilting Club

By Lori Wilde $7.99, 9780061808906 Trixie Lynn Parks shook the dust of Twilight, Texas off her shoes, and vowed to make it big in the city. But after 12 years of shattered dreams, she heads back to Texas and her first love, Sam Cheek. Even though the chemistry sizzles hotter than ever, Trixie Lynn quickly discovers she must choose between the fame and fortune that have finally come her way—or her one true love.

The Last Testament

By Sam Bourne $7.99, 9780061470868 In 2003, an Iraqi boy loots an ancient clay tablet from a long-forgotten vault in the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities. A series of seemingly random revenge killings follows and tensions boil over. Washington calls in star peace-negotiator Maggie Costello. She is plunged into a mystery rooted in the last unsolved riddle of the Bible. The truth could end hostilities—or spark the war to end all wars.

www.harpercollins.com

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Barbara Freethy’s latest Angel’s Bay novel, On Shadow Beach (Pocket, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9781439101575), teems with action, drama and compelling situations. Lauren Jamison returns to the central California coast to assess how her father is coping with Alzheimer’s. The homecoming is more bitter than sweet— her father’s condition has deteriorated, and she’s inundated with memories of her teenage sister, whose unsolved murder broke up the family 13 years before. But there are old friends in Angel’s Bay, too, as well as her former high school sweetheart, who some still suspect may have been her sister’s murderer. Once back in her old house, Lauren is driven to look for answers to unresolved questions: Where is her sister’s diary? Why was Shane Murray, her boyfriend, with her sister on the night of her death? Is her sister’s killer still in Angel’s Bay? As she launches her own investigation, she and Shane rekindle their romance, though there remain things that he won’t tell. Other storylines involving town residents add further poignancy to this fast-paced page-turner that unravels small-town scandals and secrets.

1 F

25

POETRY

Rhyme and reason Poems and poets to savor during National Poetry Month

Feature by Diann Blakely hy do so many inveterate readers shy away from poetry? If you count yourself as a member of this group, here’s your chance to break away from the book-club clusters whose participants have their noses buried in the latest novel or memoir—for it’s National Poetry Month, a time to celebrate a different genre.

W

Works in Progress This year we’re lucky enough to have an entirely fresh and fearless exemplar, the largely unknown Pearl London, who made poetry—or, to be more specific, poets—accessible to her students at the New School in Greenwich Village over the course of 25 years. The invited poets were required to bring not completed works but unfinished drafts, even jottings on envelopes, scribbled phrases or anything else that contributed to “works in progress as process.” The astonishing humility of poets who accepted the increasingly coveted summons included Nobel and U.S. poets laureate, as well as National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners. Equally astonishing is the genesis of Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with America’s Poets (Knopf, $27.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9780307269676): some 100 cassette tapes, a complete catalog and, as editor and transcriber Alexander Neubauer tells us, “file upon file stuffed with copies of the [poets’] manuscripts and drafts” were found in a closet of London’s home after her death in 2003. Winnowing the tapes and papers of 100 poets to the 23 represented in this book was only the beginning of Neubauer’s task; each chapter also includes an introduction that locates the poets’ visits at a specific point in time: “who they were when they arrived at London’s doorstep, what they had written, what was later to come.” If you protest that you don’t live close to a doorstep through which someone like Maxine Kumin or Seamus Heaney is likely to pass, check out the rapidly growing numbers of special events and readings devoted to poetry in your hometown this month. Also take note of Robert

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

A light extinguished too soon

26

The poetry world reeled out of its accustomed orbit last spring when the news traveled that Deborah Digges had committed suicide at the age of 59. Fewer poets have, throughout their careers, been seemingly more life-affirming. We’re lucky to have been left, as part of Digges’ legacy, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart (Knopf, $25, 72 pages, ISBN 9780307268464), a final collection of her work that will be published next month. In beautiful and multilayered poems such as “The Birthing,” we experience, through the poet’s words, not only a calf’s fraught entrance into the world but also one of the means by which humans seek renewal—“[we] made love toward eternity, / without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.” How lucky too that Digges’ work is so readily, personally and manifestly availDEBORAH DIGGES able through audio and video archives—including YouTube, where Digges can be seen and heard reading the aforementioned poem. She also bequeathed to the world two memoirs full of the flora and fauna she loved: Fugitive Spring (1992), focusing on her Missouri childhood, spent largely in the apple orchard outside her house; and The Stardust Lounge (2001), recounting her travels and travails as a mother seeking to give a new life to a troubled son through empathetic immersion in the animal world. For those seeking a personal invitation into Digges’ life, and thus into her poems, these memoirs are doors that will always remain open. o —DIANN BLAKELY

Polito, author of the book’s postscript. As the director of the New School’s Writing Program, Polito was London’s boss as well as a participant in Works in Progress, as the seminar came to be known. Polito’s most recent addition to his string of much-lauded titles, a collection of poems called Hollywood and God, has been featured on the web in a variety of forms, including interviews, personal statements and archived audiovisual material. For a sample, go Googling.

New thinking One of the most amusing chapters in Poetry in Person represents Robert Hass. His newest publication, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (Ecco, $34.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780061923821), has as its anchor “Meditation at Lagunitas,” the poem whose opening lines became, almost overnight, a cultural mantra: “All the new thinking is about thinking / Hence it resembles all the old thinking.” Hass came to London’s class with his thoughts somewhat awry, having mistakenly brought the very first draft of the poem, forgetting its three-line second page and thus having to quote it from memory. In addition to adding to his own canon—see “My Mother’s Nipples” for a jolt—during the past 30-odd years, Hass has worked tirelessly as a translator; and during his tenure in our nation’s capitol, he inaugurated “The Poet’s Choice” series for the Washington Post Book World. Hass’ aesthetic functions like Neubauer’s introductions in Poetry in Person, and perhaps it functions best in triplicate fashion: Whether writing about the maternal body, rendering into the American idiom a piece originally in Polish or turning our attention to a contemporary from our own country, Hass aims, sometimes mercilessly, to give the subject at hand such a real, palpable nature that we sense a new living presence, one demanding our acquaintance, on our doorstep.

A master wordsmith Easily the best-known and most acclaimed poet with a new book available on shelves today is Derek Walcott, one of those Nobel winners Neubauer mentions as a visitor to London’s classroom. Perhaps coincidentally, White Egrets (Farrar, Straus, $24, 96 pages, ISBN 9780374289294) flows—or beats its wings and flies—more naturally out of Midsummer, the 1984 collection upon which Walcott was laboring at the time of his visit to Works in Progress, than any of his books since then. Nature collides with history, history with nature, with humankind and language acting as go-betweens, and no grander verbal or intellectual magnificence has been seen in our time. Not only does White Egrets convey the masterful wordsmith’s ability to combine nearElizabethan diction with Caribbean patois and even American slang (“What? You’re going to be Superman at seventy-seven?”), but the collection also serves as a reminder of his dramatic achievements. Among these is The Haitian Trilogy, which resonates all the more tragically in the aftershocks of that country’s horrific earthquake, the effects of which will be felt for at least as long as the slave rebellion and the savage corruption of the Duvalier regimes.

The human element Andrew Hudgins—who, like Polito and Deborah Digges (see box), represents the younger generation here—has garnered nominations in his prolific career for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (HMH, $25, 240 pages, ISBN 9780547249629) gives ample proof for the critical esteem in which his work is widely held.

Hudgins’ poems are often funny, hinging on a joke or wisecrack or malapropism, but human nature red in tooth and claw has always been his greatest theme, whether writing about the pain, fear and trauma that are an inevitable part of childhood, or the female victims of a serial killer (“It’s raining women here in Cincinnati”), or the three young men murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during Mississippi’s “Freedom Summer,” repeating and repeating their names, “Goodman, Cheney, Schwerner,” in the difficult litany required by the villanelle. o Poet Diann Blakely’s most recent book is Cities of Flesh and the Dead (Elixir Press).

Discover your next great book on BookPage.com

FICTION

Tracing the radical journey of an Islamic convert peared, travel to Pakistan has been halted, and John’s mother is obsessed with John Walker Lindh, the young American found fighting alongside the Taliban. The abrupt shift in the conclusion feels rushed and almost derails the balanced tone and well-considered plot. But a novel like this encourages the reader to pay attention to the world and to ponder complex issues, and for that, despite its flaws, American Taliban should be a must-read for anyone interested in current events. o

American Taliban

By Pearl Abraham Random House $25, 272 pages ISBN 9781400068586

Berkley, $7.99, 9780425233672

Signet Eclipse, $7.99, 9780451229571

Berkley, $9.99, 9780425233771

Berkley, $9.99, 9780425233788

FICTION

FICTION

PARANORMAL

FICTION

Borderline Anna Pigeonandher husbandheadto Texas for a raftingtrip. Whentheraft is lost in the rapids and someone makes the grisly discovery of a pregnant woman caught between twoboulders, Anna learns that nature isn’t the only onewhowantedtoseethewomanand her babydead.

ADarker Place Outspoken Russian writer Alexander Kurbsky wanted to “disappear” into the West. For his escape, he makes elaborate plans with covert experts Charles FergusonandSeanDillon. It’s a real coup for the West, except for onething: Kurbsky is still workingfor theRussians.

Demonkeepers According to Mayan doomsday prophecy, 12/21/12 marks the end of the world in a global cataclysm that can onlybepreventedbytheNightkeepers, magical warriors enlisted to fight the riseof theunderworlddemons. Tofulfill the final prophecy the Nightkeepers must findtheir mates.

Kindred in Death In 2060, Lieutenant Eve Dallas searches thebackstreets of NewYork City for a dastardly and despicable criminal in the newest novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author J. D. Robb.

PARANORMAL Lion’s Heat Bad boy Jonas Wyatt knows it is fate that Rachel becomes his mate—but he can also sense her reluctance.

She has little power over the mating heat of the Breeds. Jonas will stopat nothingtofufill his destiny andclaim her.

Jove, $9.99, 9780515147780

Onyx, $7.99, 9780451412850

Signet , $7.99, 9780451229533

ROMANCE

SUSPENSE

THRILLER

The Secret Duke WhenArabella Barstowe is kidnapped, she believes her life andvirtue are forfeit—until she’s rescuedbythenotorious rogue Captain Rose. Bella never expectstoseehimagain.Butyearslater shelearns thewickedtruthbehindher abductionandseeks out the only man whocanhelpher takerevenge.

Trust Me Luke Dantry works anonymously from his computer, an academic hired by a Washington think tank to bring out Internet extremists who vent online.

It’sanincendiarynetworkofrage-filled, mentally suspect loners he calls the Night Road. But if Luke thought his identitywassafe, hewaswrong.

TheVenetianJudgment CIA cleaner Micah Dalton receives a mysterious jade box containing a stainless steel glasscutter. Someone is sending him a very serious message that will force him back into action against an international foe who’s determined to unleash chaos upon theworld.

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Held captive Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi was in her Tehran apartment one morning in 2009 when four men forced their way inside and began questioning her about the book she was writing on life in Iran. Eventually they brought her to the notorious Evin Prison, where she was kept captive for more than three months, until international pressure led to her release. In Between Two Worlds (Harper, $25.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780061965289), Saberi tells not only her own story, but those of the other women with whom she was imprisoned. More than a simple account of her ordeal, her book illuminates the lives of the resilient people who are struggling for change in this turbulent society. o

Read an interview with Pearl Abraham at BookPage.com

PAPERBACK PICKS

Berkley, $7.99, 9780425233801

Review by Lauren Bufferd What would lead an 18-year-old from an upper-middle-class, secular background to embrace a life of religious orthodoxy and political radicalism? Pearl Abraham’s new novel American Taliban asks just this question.

Though there are obvious parallels to the life of John Walker Lindh, Abraham does more than merely borrow the facts. Her thoughtful approach to the characters and honest appraisal of the events make what could have been merely provocative into a challenging and effective novel.

Supported by open-minded—if indulgent—parents, John Jude Parrish is spending a carefree gap year surfing and skateboarding in the Outer Banks and reading extensively.

His widely cast intellectual net encompasses Dylan, Rumi, the Tao and Walt Whitman, and he is eager to share ideas with new friends in online chat rooms. When a skateboarding accident puts him out of commission, he throws his considerable energies into learning Sufi poetry and decides to pursue an Arabic language program in Brooklyn. There he becomes more interested in Islam, and when a fellow student suggests he go abroad for further study, John travels to Pakistan. The immersion into Muslim culture cements his decision to convert to Islam.

One of John’s inspirations is the great 19thcentury traveler-scholar Richard Burton, and his plan is to create a similarly Romantic expedition for himself. But the 21st century, with the attacks of September 11 a mere month away, proves an inhospitable time for this kind of excursion.

Although each action leads John closer to a treasonous radicalism, the novel clearly illustrates that the individual steps of his spiritual and intellectual journey are perfectly plausible. John’s personal quest forces him to open up to new ideas about religion and sexuality as well as to acknowledge his desire to be part of “a larger undefinable truth” while still retaining his individuality. But even Abraham’s considerable skill as a novelist does not fully illuminate John’s ultimate decision to move from philosopher to extremist.

The final segment of American Taliban takes place in the fall of 2001. John has disap-

27

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Mirror, mirror, on the wall: poetry books for one and all feature by Alice Cary lever and delightful—those are the best words to describe Mirror Mirror (Dutton, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780525479017), a new collection by noted poet Marilyn Singer. In her latest book, Singer has created her own new form of poetry, which she calls a “reverso,” a poem that reads the same backward and forward. “When you read a reverso down, it is one poem,” Singer explains.

“When you read it up, with changes allowed only in punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks, it is a different poem.” She focuses on fairy tales, such as “In the Hood,” which first gives Little Red Riding Hood’s perspective, and then, when read the other way, tells the wolf’s side of the story. “Cinderella’s Double Life” tells her tale before and after the ball, while “Mirror Mirror” is a poem by both Snow White and her Wicked Stepmother.

Josée Masse’s accompanying art continues the double view in striking fashion, by dividing each scene in two.

Older preschoolers will enjoy these poems, as well as elementary students, who are likely to want to write their own reversos.

C

Allan Ahlberg and his late wife Janet are beloved for their Jolly Postman series, and Allan has a new title that will be immediately captivating to young poetry readers: Everybody Was a Baby Once (Candlewick, $15.99, 64 pages, ISBN 9780763646820). The humorous artwork of Bruce Ingman seals the deal, making this a book that will make children laugh out loud. Ingman’s art is simple, yet funny and full of action and expression. The poems include such hilarious selections as “Dirty Bill” (“I’m Dirty Bill from Vinegar Hill, / Never had a bath and never will”).

These short verses are full of old-fashioned fun and reflect the British heritage of their author, but children from around the world will enjoy poems like “Soccer Sonnet,” which includes the line “Little Jack Horner / Scored straight from a corner.”

The fun continues in Name That Dog! Puppy Poems from A to Z (Dial, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780803733220). Peggy Archer has named each poem after a dog, such as a long-haired cocker spaniel named “Elvis,” who “wiggles and jiggles and dances around. He

For the fun of it The theme of different points of view continues in Our Farm: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary (Knopf, $17.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9780375861185). Maya Gottfried wrote these poems in the voices of various animals, such as “It’s Good to Be a Kid,” by baby goats Ari and Alicia. These are humorous, short poems— good for preschoolers and young elementary students.

The farm animals from the sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, come to life with the soft, up-close artwork of artist Robert Rahway Zakanitch. His pleasing style brings to mind the artwork of children’s illustrator Jane Dyer.

swings to the music with a rock ’n’ roll sound.” You’ll also meet “Houdini,” a mini-pinscher who escapes from his collars; “Melody,” a basset hound who sings; and a giant Saint Bernard named “Rex” (first initial: T). Stephanie Buscema’s artwork aptly defines the shining personality of each puppy. Buscema has worked for Marvel Comics, DC Comics and Disney, and her background is reflected in her lively, colorful illustrations, which are vibrant and sure to draw children in. Name That Emma’s Poem: The Voice of the Dog! is a crowd-pleasing canine chorus.

Statue of Liberty (HMH, $16, 32 pages, ISBN 9780547171845, ages 5 Digging deep to 8) is not a book of poetry; instead, Don’t be fooled by the cover of Can You it’s a picture book about one of the Dig It? (Hyperion, $15.99, 32 pages, ISBN most famous poems in America.

9781423122081). With its big purple dinoWriter Linda Glaser has created a saur, this volume looks like it might be yet lovely biography of Emma Lazarus, another dinosaur book. Rest assured that it who in 1883 wrote a poem called is not. Robert Weinstock has done a bril“The New Colossus” that is engraved on a plaque at the base of liant job of both writing and illustrating the Statue of Liberty. Her poem has become immortal, as though this clever book of verse. His wordsmithing the Statue of Liberty itself were speaking, saying: “Give me your is extraordinarily fun, with lines like these: tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

My great aunt was LuAnn Abrue, Glaser’s text is interesting and informative, making history The pal-e-on-tol-o-gist who, come alive in storybook fashion. Claire A. Nivola’s watercolor and Was famed for finding fossil poo, gouache illustrations are rich in color and historical detail, propelLike giant T.rex number two. ling the story forward while showing the lifestyles of the day.

With these poems about dinoLazarus was born in 1849 to a wealthy Jewish family in New saurs, archaeologists, Neanderthals York City. This book explains how she began helping immigrants and more, kids will be smiling, but at Ward’s Island in New York Harbor, and how she began writing adults may chuckle even more. about immigrants for newspapers and in poems. Lazarus wrote Weinstock’s cartoon-style illustra“The New Colossus” when she was 34 years old. She died four tions are eye-catchingly fun. years later of Hodgkin’s Disease, before the Statue of Liberty was Over the years I’ve seen many erected—although she wrote her poem to help raise money for poetry books by Douglas Florian, its pedestal. Emma’s Poem is a superb book for elementary-age and I always find his gift of language children interested in our nation’s history and values. o and sense of nature to be particu—ALICE CARY larly sensitive. That’s certainly the

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

A colossal poem

28

case with Poetrees (Beach Lane, $16.99, 48 pages, ISBN 9781416986720), which is filled with odes to trees. Students will enjoy and learn from Florian’s short poems about trees like banyans, sequoias, Japanese cedars and dragon trees. There’s a glossary in the back, explaining, for instance, that monkey trees are originally from South America, and how they got their name. Florian’s evocative illustrations are made with gouache, colored pencils, watercolors, rubber stamps, oil pastels and collage on primed paper bags. This paper bag background gives the illustrations a unique textured look and added depth.

Nature’s wonders Lee Bennett Hopkins has been creating anthologies of poetry for years, and I particularly like his latest collaboration with Caldecott Award-winning illustrator David Diaz, Sharing the Seasons: A Book of Poems (McElderry, $21.99, 96 pages, ISBN 9781416902102). Diaz’s bold, bright colors and stylized, luminescent mixed media illustrations give this anthology a contemporary, edgy feel.

The poems are arranged by season, with an opening quote introducing each section, such as Longfellow’s “Spring in all the world! /And all things are made new!” Poets include Carl Sandburg, Marilyn Singer, Rebecca Kai Dotlich and more. The poetry is easily accessible, but not always predictable, such as Beverly McLoughland’s fun “Don’t You Dare,” which begins: Stop! cried Robin, Don’t you dare begin it!

Another tweety rhyme With a redbreast in it!

One of my very favorites of this season’s poetry books is the beautifully illustrated and organized Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors (HMH, $17, 40 pages, ISBN 9780618717194). It’s a unique book that includes poetry, biology and ecology lessons, along with spectacular artwork. Author Joyce Sidman notes that 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct, and in this book she pays tribute to a variety of species that continue to thrive, such as bacteria, mollusks, lichen, sharks, beetles, ants, diatoms and humans. Each spread contains a short but comprehensive biological discussion of the species, a gorgeous illustration and a poetic tribute.

Sidman’s poems are fun and innovative. For instance, the text of the shark poem is laid out in the shape of a shark. Some are traditional, while “Tail Tale” is a free verse monologue humorously told by a squirrel. Becky Prange’s illustrations are arresting, informative and gorgeously filled with color. The book’s end­papers are a timeline showing when various forms of life appeared on Earth. Ubiquitous is a brilliant book that mixes art, poetry and science in imaginative ways, and is an excellent choice for home, schools and libraries. o Alice Cary writes from her home in Groton, Massachusetts.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Chilean poet’s childhood inspires a magical re-imagining of his life INTERVIEW By Norah Piehl ost people are satisfied to come back from a vacation with a few souvenirs, perhaps a tan and some fond memories. Award-winning author Pam Muñoz Ryan, on the other hand, returned from a recent trip to Chile with the idea for her next book. “Inspiration for books arrives in different ways,” she says in an interview from her home in Southern California. “In this case, it was like a confluence of rivers.”

In preparation for her trip, Ryan had brushed up on the biography and writings of several Chilean authors, including Pablo Neruda, the beloved poet whose work she had read as early as high school. While in Neruda’s native country, she visited two of his childhood homes and became fascinated by tales of his early life. Then, shortly after her return home, she met author and illustrator Jon Muth, who told her a story about Neruda that became, in many ways, the centerpiece of her beautiful new novel The Dreamer (Scholastic, $17.99, 348 pages, ISBN 9780439269704, ages 9 to 14), which centers on the childhood of the budding poet.

In the story, the painfully shy young Neruda (known PAM MUÑOZ RYAN as Neftalí) finds the courage to exchange small gifts with another young child, a stranger, through a hole in the fence that separates their properties. Neftalí receives a beloved toy sheep, and offers up a remarkable pine cone that had already sparked his own imagination. The encounter, and the human connection and imaginative power it conveys, highlight the themes of Neruda’s early life as well as his later writings.

Stories like these inspired Ryan’s own imagination and sent her to the library, where she read biographies about Neruda and also became reacquainted with his writings.

“Living with the poetry day in and day out,” Ryan says, “I became particularly fascinated with the Book of Questions and I became intrigued with the idea of integrating questions into my own book.”

Ryan’s novel does incorporate many questions—“Is fire born of words? Or are words born of fire?”—that will rouse young readers’ own inquisitive natures. She hopes that these questions will “allow readers’ imaginations to extend the text beyond the page.” As she wrote the novel, she imagined a reader, a daydreamer or “closet poet,” who might be inspired to jot down his or her own verses and images in the margins of her book.

As is fitting for a novel that relies so heavily on visual details and concrete images, The Dreamer is generously, almost magically illustrated by award-winning artist Peter Sís, whose delicate, pointillist drawings help enhance Ryan’s dreamlike, magical realist world. For Ryan, working with Sís was a true collaboration, a dream come true in many ways: “I’ve been a huge fan of his work for many, many years,” she says. “I remember many years ago going to a museum in Chicago and never even imagining that he would illustrate something of mine one day.”

Ryan, who has published numerous picture books, points out that writing an illustrated novel is a fundamentally different process than writing a picture book for younger readers. “A picture book is a marriage of art and words,” she observes. “When you write a picture book, you write with a more limited palette. In the case of the novel, the words were written first and his illustrations just added a whole new dimension.” Each chapter of Ryan’s novel opens with a Sís triptych that illustrates images, objects and moods that will play key roles in the chapter to follow. Larger-scale drawings also vividly illuminate the fanciful wanderings of young Neftalí’s wholly original imagination, accompanied by lyrical passages of text: “I am poetry, lurking in dappled shadow. I am the confusion of root and gnarled branch. I am the symmetry of insect, leaf, and a bird’s outstretched wings,” Ryan writes.

Young readers—and, in many cases, their parents and teachers—who come to Neruda’s work through Ryan’s fictional portrayal may wants to read more of Neruda’s original poetry. Ryan recommends that young readers start with his Odes, especially his “Ode to a Bicycle” and “Ode to a Lizard,” and, of course, with the Book of Questions. Several of Neruda’s own poems, as well as information about collections of his poetry, are gathered at the back of Ryan’s novel.

Poetry, too often, can be seen by middle-grade readers as opaque, abstract, difficult. In The Dreamer, Ryan expertly utilizes Neruda’s own excitement about nature, his enthusiasm for language and his unbounded imagination to inspire young readers’ inner poets.

By giving them her own “book of questions,” Ryan prompts children to consider their own answers, and by doing so, perhaps write the world, as Neruda does, through their own unique perspectives. o Norah Piehl is a writer and editor who lives near Boston.

MEET Jan Brett

© SEAN. B. MASTERSON

M

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

In a career that spans three decades, author and artist Jan Brett has sold more than 35 million books, all of which reflect her love for animals and the natural world. Her latest is The Easter Egg (Putnam, $17.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780399252389), which features a loveable young rabbit in search of the perfect egg for an Easter contest. Brett and her husband, Joseph Hearne, live near Boston.

29

TEEN SCENE With a little help from their friends The burdens of friendship and truth Review by Angela Leeper “TWO WEEKS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE,” promises a flyer at the local grocery store. Change is just what studious Georgia—whose piled-on academic and family responsibilities have resulted in secret panic attacks—needs. She recruits petite, artistic Riley, her best friend since kindergarten, and along with nearly a dozen high school students from their Philadelphia suburb, they travel to the border town of Juárez, Mexico, to give a squatters’ village called Anapra its first bathroom.

Beth Kephart’s lyrical new book, The Heart Is Not a Size (HarperTeen, $16.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780061470486, ages 13 and up), describes the community’s joyous interest in the Americans, their camaraderie and their survival amid poverty, harsh desert conditions and the increasing number of haunting, unsolved muertas—murders of young women and teens. Kephart’s gentle storytelling captures Georgia’s concerns, her “fuzzy collisions of optimism and despair,” as she tries to shoulder the burden of responsibility and confront the truth about Riley’s escalating eating disorder at the expense of their friendship.

Georgia’s secrets are also revealed with the help of fellow group member Drake, a privileged yet compassionate teen who shares her enthusiasm for the poet Jack Gilbert. While it takes the combined efforts of their team to transform the village, she discovers that one person can make a difference when it comes to friendship. Inspired by a trip the author took with family and church members to Anapra, The Heart Is Not a Size will encourage teens to open their hearts (no matter the size) in their relationships and give back to the Earth and its residents. o

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Creatures out of myth

30

Review by Deborah Hopkinson Karen Healey’s debut novel, Guardian of the Dead (Little, Brown, $17.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780316044301, ages 12 and up), takes place at a boarding school in New Zealand, where Ellie Spencer is living away from home for the first time. As the novel begins, she seems concerned with normal teenage pastimes—settling into a new school environment, getting a bit tipsy with her friend Kevin, becoming involved in a play and catching glimpses of handsome day student Mark Nolan, who inspires daydreams as she sits in her Classics class.

The fantasy elements of the story evolve slowly, and Ellie herself is surprised by her increasingly intense interactions with Mark. When she literally runs into him, she experiences a physical shock, realizing that “the perfect planes of his pale face had rearranged themselves into something frightening.”

But as unsettling as her encounters with Mark become, Ellie finds herself turning to him for help when her friend Kevin seems to be in danger from a mysterious woman named Reka. In her efforts to save Kevin, Ellie must learn to trust her own emerging powers as well as the world Mark opens for her—a mythological world populated by mist-dwelling Maori fairy people, known as the patupaiarehe, who need human lives to gain immortality. The incredible battle that follows tests Ellie’s commitment to her friends, her country and her growing love for Mark.

Guardian of the Dead will appeal to readers who are fans of young adult authors such as Holly Black and Libba Bray. And without a doubt, Healey will soon have many fans of her own. o

An unusual love story Review by Dean Schneider “Much depends on a best friend,” Will Grayson says. And when that best friend is Tiny Cooper, friendship is a big deal.

Literally. Tiny is 6'6", so huge that when he sheds a tear, it could drown a kitten. So huge that one of his sobs measures on the Richter scale in Kansas (and he lives in Chicago). Will believes that Tiny may just be “the world’s largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world’s gayest person who is really, really large.” Tiny and Will have been friends since fifth grade, and Will stood up for Tiny when a school-board member argued against gays in the locker room. But recently Will has become too disengaged from life. He lives by two simple rules that have helped him to survive high school: “1. Don’t care too much. 2. Shut up.”

Will Grayson is not gay, but in one of many funny scenes in his first-person narrative, he meets another Will Grayson in a Chicago porn shop who is gay, and who begins a dramatic relationship with Tiny. This Will’s story forms the other half of Will Grayson, Will Grayson (Dutton, $17.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780525421580, ages 14 and up), by John Green and David Levithan, who each wrote one of the Wills.

As it turns out, the original Will still needs Tiny, too. Tiny is the one who does care, who always speaks his mind, who lives in larger-than-life drama and color. And when Tiny puts on a musical, it becomes the vehicle by which each character finds meaning and order in the universe. The musical is Tiny’s gift to the world, and his gift to the original Will Grayson is an appreciation of life and a repudiation of his anti-life rules.

Tiny will long live in readers’ imaginations—provided they have imaginations large enough to contain him. For an older young adult audience, this book about love, friends and what matters in life will be one of the best books of the year. o WEB EXCLUSIVE: Visit BookPage.com for a Q&A with Green and Levithan

A dangerous new world Review by Norah Piehl The power-hungry computer HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey seems like a harmless teddy bear compared to the truly horrific technological threat in Catherine Jinks’ latest novel, Living Hell (HMH, $17, 272 pages, ISBN 9780152061937, ages 12 and up). But as the novel begins, life aboard the space station Plexus is predictable and routine, even dull, and life on Earth is just a distant memory. For 17-year-old Cheney and his friends, born aboard the ship, Plexus is the only world they’ve ever known.

Soon the ship’s trajectory needs to be adjusted to avoid a dangerous band of radiation. But what starts as a fairly routine course adjustment turns into everyone’s worst nightmare, as Plexus gradually morphs from a self-contained, protective ecosystem into something resembling a living, breathing organism, a creature that sees the humans that occupy it as dangerous invaders to be annihilated. Not experienced enough to be a seasoned problem-solving specialist like his parents and their friends, yet not young enough to simply cower in a corner, Cheney must protect the younger kids while trying to figure out how—and why—Plexus seems so fixated on destroying them all.

With cinematic descriptions and nearly nonstop action, Living Hell begs to be adapted for the big screen. In the meantime, the large cast of characters—including the ominous Plexus itself—will play out their parts in readers’ imaginations, even as their adventures illustrate both biological concepts and philosophical concerns. “Life is a force that cannot be tamed,” observes Cheney, and readers will likely spend a long time—after their heart rates have gone back to normal—reflecting on just how true that is. o

Mistakes and consequences Review by Heather Seggel Sixteen-year-old Sydney Biggs is a girl in trouble and then some: not just pregnant, but grounded with good cause. When best bud Natalia “borrows” her mom’s car, it’s just to drive Sydney to inform the father-to-be, Tommy. But the car is reported stolen, and both girls are taken home by the police. It’s the last straw for Sydney’s mother; she turns Syd over to her father’s care for the summer, and he enrolls her in a wilderness camp, which Natalia ends up attending as well.

In Every Little Thing in the World (Atheneum, $16.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9781416980131, ages 14 and up), Nina de Gramont has given terrific authenticity and freshness to a common story and a setting rife with potential clichés. Syd’s parents are both so wrapped up in their own concerns that she needs to rely on friends and fellow campers to help decide what to do. But the summer will strain her friendship with Natalia to the breaking point, as revelations about Natalia’s own home life force her to rethink the meanings of “life” and “choice.”

Sydney is a great narrator, self-aware about her position in the social food chain and frank about her mistakes. (After losing her virginity to a long-term boyfriend with whom she practiced safe sex consistently, she slept with Tommy, as she says, “not because I especially liked him, but because I was flattered by how much he liked me.”) It’s easy to root for her to make a decision that will bring her some peace and self-preservation, and this smart and thought-provoking book doesn’t shy away from the consequences of each choice. o

Celebrate National Library Week April 11–17, 2010

Visit your library today

Honorary Chair

Neil Gaiman Neil Gaiman, the winner of the 2009 Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book, is a bestselling author for readers of all ages, and prolific creator of works of prose, comics, poetry, film, journalism and drama. neilgaiman.com

The Campaign for America’s Libraries

APRIL 2010 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

It is a hub of activity where communities thrive. In tough economic times, libraries give free access to books and computers, homework help, assistance with resumes and job searches, accurate financial information, adult education courses, assistance for new Americans, CDs, DVDs and much more.

www.atyourlibrary.org

31

WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT Dear Editor: I’ve noticed that some people say you’ve got another think coming while others say you’ve got another thing coming. Which is the original expression?

G. F. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania No one knows for sure, but we feel safe in saying that you’ve got another think coming is almost certainly the original wording. The noun think is a much better fit semantically than thing. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1937 as the date of the first appearance of this expression in print, but gives no mention at all of thing being similarly used. Also, the written evidence we’ve collected favors you’ve got another think coming.

So where did thing come from?

It probably originated in speech, when the k in think runs into the c in coming, which leaves something that sounds suspiciously like thing coming (as think coming is not a common phrase in English).

Since thing is a much more familiar noun in this context than think,

it’s easy to see how think became thing in some people’s speech.

CRICKET’S WICKETS Dear Editor: I’ve always been amused by the very British expression sticky wicket. Can you explain it?

C. C. Boulder, Colorado The source of sticky wicket, which we define as “a difficult or delicate problem or situation,” is the popular British game of cricket.

The main action of cricket, which is played with a bat and a ball by two teams of 11 players, is centered on a bowler who throws the ball and two strikers who each defend one of two wickets. These wickets, which each consist of three upright stumps and two crosspieces known as bails, are placed 66 feet apart in the center of the field. The area between the two wickets is also known as the wicket, and it is from this meaning that we get the phrase sticky wicket.

When the game is played, the bowler gets a running start from behind one of the wickets and

throws the ball, usually causing it to bounce once in front of the striker, situated in front of the other wicket. The bowler attempts to put the striker out by knocking a bail off the wicket. A run is scored if the striker hits the ball and is able to change places with the other striker without being put out.

A sticky wicket is a soft, tacky playing surface, usually the result of recent rain. Such a surface affects the way the ball bounces and can make play more difficult.

From the situation of playing on a sticky wicket evolved the more general use first recorded in 1882.

SPENDING FOR SHOW

Dear Editor: Can you tell me about the expression conspicuous consumption? When did it first appear?

Y. R. Abilene, Texas The term conspicuous consumption is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition as “lavish or wasteful spending thought to enhance

social prestige.” This term was the invention of American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, who used it in his 1899 book entitled Theory of the Leisure Class.

According to Veblen, people in all classes of society engage in spending for status and show, but his term is usually applied to extremely flamboyant spending. In Veblen’s time, the wealthy constructed huge, ornate mansions, entertained lavishly and competed in expensive excesses of all kinds. Social reformers often pointed to the Bradley Martin costume ball staged at the Waldorf Hotel for $368,000 as an example of the excesses of the wealthy. The ball was held in February 1897, in the depths of an economic depression, and was attended by guests wearing costumes that cost as much as $10,000. That’s the sort of showy expenditure evoked by Veblen’s phrase, though today the price tags would be much higher.

Please send correspondence regarding Word Nook to:

Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102