Review: Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

Set in California, this novel follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes courage and compassion to bring them back together.

Very slowly I'm getting back to reading, and tackling this month's book club read on audiobook seemed like the best way to get it read (my track record this year has been far from stellar). Audiobook proved to be an excellent choice, and Liars and Saints a great book to ease me back into the world of fiction.
It can be difficult to create character voices that are easy to distinguish, and most authors limit themselves to two, maybe three points of view per book for that exact reason. Maile Meloy went all in with her debut novel: she has seven. Moreover, these seven characters grow and change as the story progresses, and their voices change with them, never losing their individuality. That was actually my favorite thing about this book, how well the author wrote her characters and their imperfections, self-doubts, courage and faith. They kept me listening, and that is what ultimately counts as far as characters go.
This book was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2005, and while I can see why it went as far as to be short-listed I also see why it did not win. The plot is to blame, particularly two aspects of it. One came about half-way through and it required me to suspend my disbelief a bit too much. Had it been omitted I wouldn't have minded, in fact, it would have kept me more grounded in the story. The second time the plot development didn't work for me was toward the end of the book, and this time it seemed like a cop-out that forced the story toward resolution. I haven't read very many novels that tell about several generations of a family, so I can't give examples of ones where similar situations would've been handled better, I just know that the way Meloy wrapped up her book didn't work all that well for me. (You have no idea how hard it is to abide by my own no-spoilers policy right now.)
When cover copy tells you that this is a story of a family with a history of deception you begin reading with the expectation of wowza moments. If there are no such moments then what's the point of telling such a story, right? Well, let me tell you, there is a wowza moment alright. When I first realized where the author was going I was sure she wasn't going to actually go there. But she did. All the way. It's quite a shocker, and I can't tell you want it was, but it made me post on FB and Twitter that I was suitably shocked. (Don't you wish right now I didn't have a no-spoilers policy?)
If you are looking for a novel that's a quick read, has rich characters and a plot that at times approaches the twists and turns of a daytime soap opera this book is for you!

Review: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

This is the story of two boys bonded forever in childhood: the stunted Owen Meany, whose life is touched by God, and the orphaned Johnny Wheelwright, whose life is touched by Owen. From the accident that links them to the mystery that follows them – and the martyrdom that parts them – the events of their lives form a tapestry of fate and faith.

One of my resolutions for this year is to not keep reading a book if it's not working for me. I'll give it a 100 pages, 150 tops, and if there are no fireworks it's off with the book's head, figuratively speaking.
A Prayer for Owen Meany was on my book club's reading list, and it seemed everyone loved it, except for me. I gave it 150 pages, but then it had to go. Why, you ask? Because I simply did not care, neither about Johnny, nor about Owen, or about the events that would take place, to which Johnny continuously alluded. I also stopped because if the book is going to go on and on about not much it better not be 600+ pages. Better yet, something should be happening, and it shouldn't take 100+ pages to cover the events described in the jacket copy.
Don't get me wrong, Irving's prose is beautiful, his observations of the human condition are astute and presented in a subtle way. I'm sure he is a great writer, and I still look forward to reading Cider House Rules. Maybe it wasn't the right time for me to read this book, maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind, or maybe it's just that at the end of the day I prefer books where things happen at a reasonably swift pace, and here they simply weren't.

Review: Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

In her essay collection Barbara Kingsolver brings to us an extended love song to the world we still have. Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, genetic engineering, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in both those places.
Sometimes grave, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately persuasive, Small Wonder is an examination of the people we seem to be, and what we might yet make of ourselves.

When I first opened this book I had mixed feelings about reading it. On one hand there was a lot of anticipation: I've heard so much about Barbara Kingsolver, I've heard her excellent interview on the BBC World Book Club, I've been meaning to read something by her for the longest time and now was my perfect opportunity. On the other hand I heard that environmental and humanitarian issues are a dominant theme in this collection of essays and I don't tend to make that kind of reading part of my entertainment lineup. When I got to the book club meeting and admitted that I haven't read the book the ladies were unanimous: "Just pick the ones that sound good," they said, "you're not going to miss some deep meaning if you do". And so I did.
I read "Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen" and "Letter to my Mother" first, and the latter almost made me cry. Then I read "Lily's Chickens" and "The One-Eyed Monster" and a handful of others. I skipped over the ones where issues were prominent and stuck to the ones that dealt mostly with people on a personal, intimate, level, and I loved them. Kingsolver made me feel as if I knew her through her writing, as if I could relate to this woman whose life is nothing like mine, but who somehow could understand me, and who I could in turn understand. I suppose it's a sign of a masterful writer if a few essays can make the reader feel close to a stranger, if they can show that no matter the place and the circumstances people really are the same everywhere.
Kingsolver's reputation is deserved and I'm glad that I have the Small Wonder essays a chance. She strikes the perfect balance between fearless frankness and not revealing too much, and her writing brings the reader so close it's almost like you're having a conversation with the author and she's telling you about her life and her beliefs. If you haven't read anything by Kingsolver yet I would recommend that you pick up this collection, it's an excellent example of what this author can do.

Review: The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

During a party at the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson has escaped to her childhood tree house and is dreaming of the future. Before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime that challenges everything she knows about her family and especially her mother, Dorothy.
Now, fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress, living in London. She returns to the family farm for Dorothy’s ninetieth birthday and finds herself overwhelmed by questions she has not thought about for decades. From pre-WWII England through the Blitz, to the fifties and beyond, discover the secret history of three strangers from vastly different worlds — Dorothy, Vivien, and Jimmy — who meet by chance in wartime London and whose lives are forever entwined.

I've heard a lot of good things about Kate Morton's books so when I was putting together my reading list for this year I was excited to include The Secret Keeper. I did not regret my choice when I finished reading the book, particularly because Morton is so very good at bringing her characters to life.
Everybody we meet in the course of the novel is flawed or broken in some way: Laurel is wed to her work and a secret that's older than she is, Dorothy's desire for something more and better rules her life, Vivien is a prisoner of her past, Jimmy sacrifices his beliefs for the sake of love... There is a story there for each of these characters and through them Morton weaves a tale of love, family, growing up, hard choices and decisions with far-reaching consequences.
It's fortunate that the characters are strong because the biggest mystery in the book wasn't all that mysterious for me. I guessed what would be the shocker about half way through and kept reading mainly to see whether I was right and to watch the characters get to the end of the story. Morton worked very hard on making the shocker plausible and on keeping the reader in the dark throughout the book, and yet it wasn't seamless (Gillian Flynn managed to keep me guessing much better in Gone Girl). There were key character traits that just didn't work with the ending, and remembering how highlighted they were made the dissonance only more obvious for me.
Despite this shortcoming reading The Secret Keeper was particularly enjoyable because of the writing. The book is full of lines that I wanted to write down and commit to memory, but for the fear of breaking the spell I didn't, and now that the book is back at the library I wish I had. Fortunately there is the Internet, so here are a couple of quotes that I liked so much I went back to reread them once I was done with the chapters where they appear:

"... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances."

and this paragraph I thought was just beautifully written, with a sprinkling of foreshadowing and a generous doze of significance:

"And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen."

I did enjoy this book and if you are a fan of lyrical prose and a character-driven story I think you will as well. For my part, I'll be keeping an eye on Morton's new books. She's liable to produce another beautiful novel (hopefully one with a more graceful surprise of an ending).

Review: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré

When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray - this time to play the part of the dishonored spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.

The first time I became interested in John le Carré's work was when Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Benedict Cumberbatch was advertised prior to its release. I'm a huge fan of Cumberbatch (or The Batch, as he is affectionately known) whose Sherlock won me over, and curious about the movie I suggested the book for my book club's reading list. Majority asked for a more famous novel by le Carré so here we are.
It is easy to understand why this book has stood the test of time: it is a fast-paced, intelligent, emotionally-engaging thriller with characters who are easy to care about and even the shift of perspective from what I would describe as "inner circle third person" to "outsider third person", which was quite obvious, didn't change that. I think le Carre employed this device to hide certain things from the reader without making Leamas an unreliable narrator. He was counting on the reader to figure out what was really happening as the novel progressed and with the little hints along the way it wasn't that hard. The book could've become boring at that point considering that the action isn't in chases or gun-fights but in a steady execution of the plan, but le Carre had an ace up his sleeve. With the perspective back to "inner circle third person" the reader got to realize along with Leamas that he wasn't as inner circle as he thought he was. A three-level conspiracy, my friends, how delicious is that?! I won't say more for the sake of not spoiling the ending, but you see how this book is never exactly what it seems at first, with characters pursuing secret agendas to the very end.
Written in the middle of the Cold War and being a spy thriller it is no surprise that this book pits characters who are both physically and figuratively on different sides of the Berlin wall against each other. Le Carre talks ideology here and doesn't leave any room for doubt as to which side he is on. I don't know how historically accurate the details are and the year on the calendar didn't allow for ambiguity if one wanted to be published and widely read, but the fact remains. While there aren't any gray areas as far as le Carre's and Leamas' allegiances go there are plenty of them in the rest of the novel. I suppose it is like that in the business of spying where the ends justify whatever means necessary. As Leamas said, the only criteria of success is results, and ethics are sacrificed at every turn.
The most memorable and thought-provoking character for me was Liz, particularly because little about her is straightforward. She is young, naive and idealistic but she is locked in a gray area even more so than the spies who've made it their home. She belongs to the Communist Party yet she dislikes its everyday defining characteristics, she sees a socialist state first-hand yet she doesn't question her beliefs, she rejects the capitalist ideals yet she is devoted to a man who is as ideologically far from her as possible. She gives the depth and the heart to this novel, particularly by showing Leamas the man underneath the mask of the spy and making the reader care for those who at the end of the day are collateral in the game of politics.
This book was published almost 40 years ago and is set even earlier but it doesn't read as dated. In fact, if I didn't know when it was written I would've taken it for a historical spy thriller. Now I'm even more curious about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy because I am confident that le Carre knows what he is doing so expect to see me talking about it here at some point in the future.

Review: The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England – a ‘castle that was to cross the sea’. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly ‘Cat's Table’ with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys become involved in the worlds and stories of the adults around them, tumbling from one adventure and delicious discovery to another, ‘bursting all over the place like freed mercury’. And at night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner – his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.

The most powerful feature of this book for me is how poetic the language is. The lyricism of it, the almost dreamy quality of the narrative make this novel an experience of poetry in prose and the character's voyages throughout the book only become richer for it.
The novel's protagonist, Michael, tells the reader about the trip that changed his life both literally and figuratively when he was only 11 years old, although I didn't get a feeling that it was a journey of self-discovery in any sense. The boy simply experiences the adventures of the voyage and the adult reminisces about them and the events that followed, in a way wrapping things up for the characters, telling the reader where they ended up and how. Curiously enough the adult Michael is a writer, and Ondaatje himself arrived in England from Colombo when he was 11 on a ship called the Oronsay, just like the boy in the novel does. There is some speculation about whether the novel is autobiographical in a lot of ways and although the author hasn't confirmed or denied this I am inclined to believe that it is indeed autobiographical, however fictionalized and dramatized, especially in terms of a child experiencing life without direct adult influence and an adult fully understanding the real impact and meaning of those childhood experiences.
Michael's story is intertwined with stories of other passengers, many of whom aren't who they seem to be at first and whose presence makes for a multi-layered narrative. This reminded me of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who employs a similar story-within-a-story structure, and if you've been following the blog you'll remember that I enjoyed that book a lot. My favorite story-in-a-story was that of Miss Lasqueti, I found it even more touching and fascinating than that of the prisoner. Possibly that's because it is more subtle, there is no life or death drama and secrets in it, yet it got to me and made me think about the events of Miss Lasqueti's life and their undeniable effects.
There is quite a bit of jumping back and forth in time so if you usually have trouble with that - be prepared. It wasn't a problem for me at all, I actually enjoyed it because it gave the story a more mature feeling, clarified in a way why the 11-year-old protagonist didn't seem exactly pre-teen. After all it is an adult looking back through time at the child, reliving the experiences through the memories, offering insight that he wouldn't have had all those years ago.
This was one of the books I listened to as opposed to reading, and although having the author do the narration was very special because I knew that the intonations, pauses and pronunciations were done exactly as intended I think this is a book that should be read, be that on paper or eReader, especially if you are a person whose visual perception is better than audio perception. As I've mentioned before the writing is extremely beautiful and if you look up quotes from this book online you'll see exactly what I mean. I myself will be picking up this book again, this time soaking it all in from the page.

Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway — a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will.

This is a story about a circus, and a man and a woman, and immortality, and consequences, and sense and sensibility, and being a pawn in someone else's games, and magic (of course there is magic), and love, which is a kind of magic. But more than anything it is a story about life, where everything is connected and where everything we do today is a part of where we will end up tomorrow, and where there is only one ending to the game.
This book didn't captivate me immediately but rather grew on me. At first I thought that first and second person narration was getting on my nerves, and that the jumping around in place and time was too hard to follow. Then the former made me feel as if I were part of the story and the latter became almost a game of figuring out when the "you" parts were set. And then it was all clear and when for the very first time I saw the different narrator's stories coming together like branches on a tree all connecting to the trunk a delicious shiver ran through me and I knew that this was going to be just the right kind of book to keep me up at night. Which it most marvelously did.
For some reason before I picked it up I thought that this was a YA novel, which probably has something to do with the cover blurb about young magicians. Yet from the very first pages it was obvious that a YA novel it is not. For starters the main characters aren't all that young, the story is more elaborate than it is in your average YA novel, there are too many variables for the book to be straightforward, and nobody has any doubts as to their own identity (although I questioned the identities of a few characters, and still do), so there is no point in journeys of self-discovery. Finally the very style of writing and the language put it firmly in the adult category, or at least new adult, which has recently emerged.
There aren't any spells and the mechanics of magic aren't revealed enough for people to start putting magical formulas on t-shirts, because after all the spells aren't that important here, there are matters much more pressing than knowing how exactly the heroine makes her dress change color. I did love though that those who are capable of doing magic in this novel are the quiet, bookish types, who will get lost in a library on purpose. I also loved how great a role books played in the story, I think all bibliophiles will get a thrill out of that. And those who belong to any kind of fandom will be delighted to see themselves and their peers in this story. Fandoms are not to be underestimated and Morgenstern takes a close and intimate look at this phenomenon. Something tells me she herself belongs to one.
There are so many things I want to add but they would be so terribly spoilerish that I think I will stop here and will only tell you one last thing: I borrowed this novel from the library because I tend to not re-read books, but as I turned the last page I knew that I had to get a copy for my collection because for me this one is a keeper.

Review: Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

For Flavia, an aspiring 11-year-old chemist with a passion for poison, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. To her the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is jailed for murder. He tells Flavia an astounding story of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, a stolen priceless object, and a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school tower thirty years before. Flavia ties tie two distant deaths together, examines new suspects, and follows the search to the King of England himself.

For a book published in 2009 this novel is remarkably like the cozy mysteries Agatha Christie wrote in tone, voice, and the nature of the crime: a stranger is found dead at an English country estate and an amateur investigates the death leaving the police in the dust. What's different about this book is that the amateur is an 11-year-old prodigy chemist in pigtails.
From the very first page the author grabbed my interest by diving straight into the mystery of the victim in the closet and held me captive till the end by introducing mystery after mystery with one common denominator: they were all not at all what they seemed. A mystery novel is of course all about the mystery and this one kept me wondering for most of the book. I figured out the culprit not too long before Flavia did and so the story remained interesting while the investigation was going on.
A fun twist is that this is a historical novel and to me the author translated the tone of the time and place to the page very well. I enjoyed reading about listening to music on a gramophone, researching information in 20-year-old newspapers and figuring out details about people and places through old-fashioned face-to-face conversation. Things like that transported me to times long past and I relished the experience because of the contrast with our technology-saturated present. There is just something positively quaint about the concept of investigating the case of a body in the cucumber patch.
This novel is full of interesting characters and Flavia, the protagonist, is the most interesting of them all. Half the time she doesn't seem like an 11-year-old at all, what with her independence and prowess in chemistry, and sometimes it seemed too much, but then she'd do something utterly age-appropriate and I would see her as simply an extremely clever child once more. Dogger stole a few scenes but apart from that Flavia is the undeniable star of the show. An interesting twist to the cast is Flavia's mother, who just happens to have been dead for a decade. She is a prime example of a character who is never around but is more influential than most other characters in the story. I must admit, I'm more curious about the enigmatic Harriet than I am about even Dogger, who plays an important part in the investigation.
I am a big fan of mystery, especially the quaint kind, so even the ending being somewhat over the top didn't spoil the experience for me, and learning all sorts of things about chemistry didn't detract from the enjoyment either. All in all this is a delightful novel that continued the pattern of pleasant reading experiences this year and I hope the trend continues.

Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

On Nick and Amy's 5th wedding anniversary the beautiful and intelligent Amy goes missing. There are signs of struggle and Nick is the prime suspect in his wife's disappearance. Before long one thing is perfectly clear: marriage can be a real killer.

Dystopias has been popular lately and by the time I was about two thirds in I decided that Gillian Flynn gave us one too. So what if it's not set in a post-apocalyptic future of an alternate universe and the people aren't genetically modified or lorded over by a small group of despots. This is a dystopia of a modern-day family set in a dying Midwestern town succumbing to the economical depression, and the characters are just like you and me, shopping at big box stores and plotting their spouses' death. Alright, almost like you and me.
This is a deliciously twisted story about two of the most dysfunctional people I've ever heard of, and it made me think about my marriage on a few occasions. "Do we do that?" Or worse "We do do that!" That's how this book is, it's so well-written, so grounded in the reality we know from the cream-of-something casseroles to the energetic true-crime show host who is the spitting image of Nancy Grace, so full of the little details that make the story come alive, that it's easy to believe that what happens to the Dunnes isn't just the stuff of novels, that it's based on me, you, all of us, really.
As I read the book I marveled at Flynn's skill in bringing together two thoroughly unreliable narrators, a mystery, a character study, a look at our society, secrets piled on top of one another, and an ending that left me sitting there with only one thought in my head: "Bloody hell". She pulled this off with voices that rang true despite all the falseness, a world that I know exists, and a pace that never slowed down enough for me to forget to wonder what would happen next, because even when the original mystery was solved I knew that the story was far from over. (I would've known it even if I didn't see how many pages were left in the book.) All this convinced me that at any given moment in the novel I was exactly where Flynn wanted me to be, and that kind of sensation of intention all the way made for a very reassuring experience when on the whole this book was anything but.
It's easy to sing this novel praises (I really do see what all the hype is about) but what really stayed with me was the look at family that's so unflattering and uncomfortable that most don't think about it that way. How much do we really pretend to be better than our true selves when we court? How "sustainable" is the pretense, to use Amy's word? What happens when the illusion's gone and two people end up staring at each other, horrified? And how often are we horrified as opposed to thrilled? So many questions to think about, and I applaud Gillian Flynn for asking them and for packaging them in a novel that's very difficult to put down. If you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for?

P.S. If you don't feel like thinking about serious questions or have already read Gone Girl, or don't have the time to get sucked into it right now here's a great interview with Gillian Flynn. Enjoy!

Review: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself. But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

The Tiger's Wife has been on my radar for a while now due to its notoriety and near-constant presence on the New York Times Best Seller list for months on end. When it eventually came up on the reading list of the book club I joined earlier this year I was glad to finally read it.
One of my favorite things about this book is how realism and fantasy are intertwined almost inseparably, how every plot line is tied inextricably to another and how much it reminded me of the story traditions I grew up with. Obreht is from the Balkans, I am from Ukraine, and while there are obviously differences there are also similarities that ring true, a result of our Slavic roots with a patina of the Ottoman invasion centuries ago, thicker for some, more transparent for others. I could also really see and relate to how she described it in an interview for RFERL:

...there's a concept of "a Balkan story." Even small stories are somehow big, huge. There's a moment in a Balkan story when the line between mythology, legend, and the story become irrelevant. Somehow, that mythology becomes a truth in itself and it becomes a very personal truth. The way in which you receive a story becomes your truth, and then it becomes the truth for the person you're telling the story to. That is very much our way...

I read the novel very quickly and only when it was finished did a thought form in my mind that the book is ultimately about death. This alone didn't faze me, after all I read The Book Thief earlier this year, and it was narrated by Death. What did surprise me though was finding out how young the author is. I could hardly imagine how a woman in her early 20s could have this kind of darkness in her enough to write a book like this. Don't get me wrong, The Tiger's Wife is not depressing by any means (there are a couple novels I read this year alone that were much more depressing), it is rather a matter-of-fact approach that regards death as part of life, sometimes difficult to reconcile oneself with but always present. The subject however is dark nonetheless.
I also very much enjoyed Obreht's writing style. It was proper without being stuffy and easy without being overly conversational. This is a literary novel that avoids boring the reader to tears and instead pulls one along with it through the many subplots until legends unwind into life and people with secrets, fears and hardships. The historical backdrop and very realistic details of family life, which I now know are autobiographical, give richness to these legends, provide a fertile environment for them, ground them and even help develop them better. I didn't know much about the history or culture of the Balkans before reading this book but now I am curious and will most likely look for more books and folklore of the region.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and if you are intimidated by its fame and international acclaim I urge you to disregard those reservations and give it a chance. It is well worth your time. Just don't expect everything to be presented to you neatly tied with a bow on top, you will be expected to make the leaps necessary to gather all the threads together from time to time, and you may even arrive at conclusions that won't match your fellow readers'. This exact thing happened in our book club and made for an interesting discussion.

Review: Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan

In this New York Times bestseller, Morgan leads readers on the spiritual odyssey of an American woman in the Australian outback. Is it a memoir or a work of fiction? It is up to you to decide.

While I was reading the book I really enjoyed it. There was adventure, there was humor, there was reflection and evaluation of one's past, present and future. It was a fun read and a lot of the lessons the protagonist learned along the way resonated with me, such as appreciating the experiences and not things, knowing that if you've helped one person you did well because you can only help one person at a time anyway, having faith in oneself, appreciating and developing one's talents, not taking more from nature than you need and always making sure you don't take everything. The book was written in a compelling way, it was fun and at the same time thought-provoking, and I breezed right through it even though I acknowledge that this is not one of the more skillfully-done book I've read so far. And then I finished reading, sat back as I usually do, and thought about it longer than usual because something was nagging at me. It took me a little while to figure out that I was having trouble with the fact that some of the events didn't really fit in with the whole, some of the actions of the aborigines went against the characterizations the author gave the tribe earlier in the narrative, and even the timeline was often flexible at best. So I decided to look up what the internet had to say about Marlo Morgan and her book.
A brief search later I learned that when this book was originally published in 1991 it was promoted as nonfiction and in the foreword the author says that the story the reader is about to discover is a true account of what happened to her in Australia. Years later however the book was republished as fiction and there are a few websites that post a wide variety of information intended to prove that the account is in fact fictitious. I have read the articles protesting it, as well as the account of the statement Ms. Morgan's made to the representatives of an Australian Aboriginal association acknowledging that her book is a work of fiction, I've even read about Ms. Morgan's Australian employer saying that her entire stay in Australia was spent working in his pharmacy and there was no time that she was absent from the city. Having read all this I find that more than anything this whole situation makes me sad and disappointed. If what Ms. Morgan writes about really happened then why are people so determined to discredit her and her book? And if her story is fiction then why did she make such an effort to make people believe that it's not? Why apologize to the Aboriginal representatives if there's nothing to apologize for? And if there is something to apologize for then why shrug it off and continue as if nothing happened?
Still I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. What if it was just haters doing their thing. Besides, I wanted to believe that the book is a memoir because the idea of a small society living in peace with themselves and the world around them, and not upsetting the natural balance of their environment is reassuring at a time when we keep hearing about climate change, whole species disappearing, pockets of land that has not been touched by humans becoming smaller and smaller. Now, I'm not a person who'll willingly move out of the city and live without electricity and plumbing to reduce my carbon footprint, but I will recycle and conserve water and power whenever I can, and I do believe that our actions affect the planet in a way that's ultimately detrimental to the length of time the human race will be able to enjoy themselves on Earth. After all, if one uses resources faster than they can be replenished sooner or later they will run out, and we have not yet figured out a way to make natural gas and oil or grow trees faster than it happens in nature.
As much as I wanted to believe in the authenticity of the story I couldn't get past aborigines speaking like urban dwellers, I couldn't reconcile the fact that the author seemed to go between needing an interpreter's help during the simplest of conversations and having complex discussions with members of the tribe without the interpreter present. I did not understand why everybody had names that meant something when translated, such as Secret Keeper and Female Healer, and even Ms. Morgan was given a name fashioned in the same way, but the man who served as interpreter was known simply as Ooota? I was also put off by frequent talk about how the author was losing weight on this walkabout, how pounds were literally melting off of her, and yet we have only relatively general depiction of her life with the tribe. I don't know about you, but I would much rather hear more about the daily life of a people so unlike my own than about how much thinner one American has gotten over the course of several months in the outback. There also seemed to be an undercurrent of "if you reject this account as truth then you're with those who say that people living without technology in the bush are lesser beings and that's just wrong", which grated on my nerves with its one-sidedness.
There is quite a bit of what can be referred to as "new age-y" talk about how all humans are linked to each other, how every experience is a lesson to be learned and if we don't learn it then we're presented with the same lesson again, about living in peace and harmony with ourselves, each other and the world around us, etc. In some things the author completely lost me, in others I agreed with her because ultimately there is tremendous personal value in actively pursuing areas in which one is talented, and being aware of our impact on the world has value for all mankind. These are all good messages, I just wish that Ms. Morgan hasn't cheapened them by trying to pass an account which I believe is fiction as something that really happened to her. All that said, I'm glad that I've read this book, if nothing else it made me think about the world and my place in it while I was reading and about people's goals and intentions when I finished it.

Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. Set during World War II in Germany this is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

I wasn't planning on reading this book this year despite its reputation as a very good novel and all the positive reviews. WW2 and its horrors seemed just too close, too terrible to read about when my grandmother, who was a girl of about Liesel's age when it tore through her childhood, still sometimes talks about it. However a friend invited me to her book club and The Book Thief was next up so I picked it up from the library. The first few chapters were a bit difficult to get through (Zusak's writing style is somewhat unusual) but the more I read the more I understood what all the fuss is about. Very soon I felt invested in Liesel's story and wanted to know more about her and the other characters. They've gradually come alive and I found a certain sensitivity and wisdom in the way the author was depicting them and telling the story. I particularly liked Rosa, Liesel's foster mother. She was the one who surprised me on more than one occasion with all the layers to her personality and I applaud the author for creating her just the way she is.
The more I think about this book the more I appreciate its prose where a few spare words hold more meaning than whole paragraphs elsewhere and descriptions are so strange that they make perfect sense and stay with you for days ("frightened pajamas and torn faces" did).
Having Death as the narrator allowed for both the more intimate first person storytelling combined with the omniscient third person point of view that is much less limiting and I feel that this combination served the novel very well. It was startling sometimes how human Death seems, with his fatigue, regret, sarcasm, insights into humanity and the occasional bitterness over the things he's seen. Another device I have grown to enjoy were the regular interruptions to provide explanations, translations (much needed with a book so full of German words), and other such asides, it kept things moving and was a little bit of a distraction in an otherwise very serious novel.
The subject of WW2 isn't an easy one, despite being widely covered. Lives were destroyed, whole countries were devastated and something like that isn't easy to get over. There's a lot of books and TV and radio programs that talk about the genocide, about Hitler and his party, but I haven't seen or heard any that would talk about the regular German citizens who were in the middle of it all, their allegiances, their problems, their relationships with the people in their communities who found themselves ostracized for their heritage. Admittedly, I didn't look, but this book was my first window into the lives of ordinary families who lived during those tumultuous years and had to choose which side they were on. The more I read the more the realization that Nazi Germany and Socialist USSR were very similar despite all their differences. The propaganda, the need to be a member of the Party to be able to lead a life that wasn't artificially complicated for you, the poverty and the division of society were present on both sides of the divide, and as much as the leaders of both countries preached from their podiums that the others were evil incarnate now I think that they were just different sides of the same coin. I'm glad that I read this book, for this if for nothing else.

P.S. There is now a beautiful movie out that's based on this wonderful book, I haven't seen it yet, but judging by the trailer the film-makers have stayed close to the story