Book Review: You Before Me by Jojo Moyes

Jojo Moyes' new novel Me Before You should come with a warning: do NOT pick this book up unless you have a box of tissues by your side and several hours to spare. Because once you start reading it, you're not going to want to put it down, and once you do put it down, you're going to be a soggy, wet mess. Believe me, my cat Murray was quite concerned with my state of mind. Then again, anything that interrupts the administering of chin scratches concerns him.

Up until the motorcycle accident that made him a quadriplegic, Will Traynor was both a go-getter and a player--wealthy, handsome, charismatic, and a thill-seeker to boot.  Lou, on the other hand, is from an economically challenged working class family--bright enough to have gained university admittance, but required to join the workforce to help her family pay the rent when her sister gets pregnant and her father gets laid off. When the cafe where she's been working as a waitress for the last several years closes, she desperately accepts a six-month contact taking care of Will. Will and Lou couldn't be more different on the surface, so when they form an uneasy alliance that grows into the truest friendship either has ever known, nobody is more surprised than they are.

The catch, and of course there's a catch, is that Will and his mother are keeping a secret from Lou, and when she discovers what it is, she reacts with her characteristic passion, matched only by her pigheadedness.  But might Will's secret haunt Lou to the point she makes the biggest mistake of her life?

Let me clear: this is not a book with complicated twists and turns that will keep the reader guessing.  If you pick this book up to read, you will have a fair idea of the story-arc before you're even fifty pages into it, as it's the story itself that pulls you in; but the class issues, the family relationships, and the importance of having somebody to believe in you when you no longer believe in yourself give this book a heft that matches its heart.

Chris Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls

While the emotional content of this book is trademark Bohjalian, the writer takes on a new depth and historical perspective in Sandcastle Girls that is not usually present in his more formulaic novels. Unsurprising, since this novel is the first that delves into his own history.

The little I knew about Turkish-Armenian relations came from working at a used bookstore, where a customer of mine bought up everything he could on Armenia. Occasionally he would toss out historical facts but eventually I learned it was a topic he didn't want to fully engage in, so it was fascinating to read this book as a first attempt to fill in some of the historical blanks. 

(Incidentally, this is the third novel of genocide I've read this year: Rwandan, Cambodian, and now this one, which I guess means my taste run to the dark side, at least when it comes to historical fiction. It also happens to be the fourth novel in a row that I've picked up that features a Muslim/Christian conflict, so it's interesting to me to see these unconscious reading patterns of mine.)

The novel has two main time frames. One is a contemporary, middle-aged first person narrator named Laura living in NY who investigates her Armenian roots and reminisces about her childhood. The other is a third person narration that begins in Aleppo, Syria, in 1915, mostly following Laura's paternal grandparents Armen, an Armenian engineer who has survived the Turks' first onslaught against his people, and Elizabeth, a Bostonian blueblood who has traveled to Syria with her father to give aid and succour to the refugees. Occasionally the narration darts over to Nevart, a widowed refugee, and to Hatoun, an orphan who has witnessed such unspeakable atrocities against her family that she has become practically mute herself, as well as other, more minor characters.

War casualties are awful things and this novel's World War I setting proves no exception, but it's particularly difficult to read of the crimes perpetuated by the Ottoman Empire against some of its own civilians, and the twisted logic and false rhetoric they use to justify their actions is simply appalling.

I can't possibly pretend to know or understand the centuries-old history between the Turks and the Armenians, or how the Ottoman Empire selected the Armenians for extermination over all of the other peoples under its sway. But there is a portion of this novel presented as fact, and if it's true, then it's utterly galling, and I will excerpt some of it here:

"If you visit Ankara or Istanbul today, you will find streets and school named after Talat Pasha ["the real visionary" behind the Armenian genocide]....In other words, the nation that found Talat Pasha guilty of attempting to wipe out a race of people later named concourses after him.
   How is that possible? Because, to much of the nation--though, thankfully, not all--that genocide never happened. Even now, labelilng the slaughter of 1915 "genocide" can land a Turkish citizen in jail and get a Turkish Armenian journalist killed (179)."

If that is true (and Bohjalian did not footnote it or document it, so I don't know), then it really blows my mind.  It's impossible to imagine the German citizens of today wanting to glorify Adolf Hitler in a parallel manner, renaming any of the schools or thoroughfares for him. How is it possible that the citizens of Turkey are, as a nation, able to do so?

Chris was at the Odyssey last night to do a reading and presentation from The Sandcastle Girls, and he's as fine a speaker as any who have passed through this store.  If you missed it, let us know and we can reserve a signed copy for you!

~Emily

Book Review: Comeback Love

I just love the publication story of  Comeback Love by Peter Golden.  I was talking with John Muse, my sales rep from Simon & Schuster a couple of weeks ago about this book, which he "discovered" as a self-published book from the Book House in Albany. They're a wonderful indie bookstore with their own Espresso Book Machine and they offer publication possibilities for local authors. John was so impressed with the book that he pitched it to his own company, who eventually bought the rights to it, and Washington Square Press published it about one month ago. I love publishing success stories like that, and when I personally know any of the players involved it makes it even better.

Gordon and Glenna had an amazing love affair at the close of the 1960s, but their relationship was no match for Gordon's financial insecurities and Glenna's personal ones.  The political verve that marked those years also marked the beginning of the end of their love, with Vietnam pinning them in on one side and Glenna's illegal abortion activities hemming them in on the other.  Still, Glenna and Gordon never forgot each other, but when decades later Gordon decides to look her up again, the temptation to settle back into the same old patterns is strong.

I thought this was a very readable and pleasant story of first love and love renewed.  I'm almost exactly midway between the ages the characters are at the beginning and at the end of the novel, and it was interesting to me to feel similar levels of sympathy toward the younger and older selves of the couple. I wouldn't exactly say that this book changed my life, but it did encourage my mind to wander paths of nostalgia while I was reading. It even prompted me to dream about my own first love (cheers, M, wherever you are!), which I suppose is a testament the story and the power of memory.

This would make a good book club discussion book, particularly if the readers are closer in age to the older Gordon and Glenna.

~Emily

Book Review: Heading Out to Wonderful

I admit up front that I was not a huge fan of Robert Goolrick's previous novel The Reliable Wife, so I was a little reluctant to pick up his new one called Heading Out to Wonderful.  Luckily I had a little prompting from Craig "Call me Peaches" Popelars at Algonquin, who told me that he thought I'd love it. As usual, he was right. Damn his eyes.

If you read enough books or watch enough movies, after a while you develop certain expectations built into certain plot points. Thus, in chapter one when a mysterious drifter rolls into a small Southern town with nothing but his truck and two suitcases, and when those two suitcases are filled with nothing but cash and a set of the sharpest butcher knives anyone has ever seen, you know that by the last chapter there's no way that everything can end well.  Just a fact of fictional life.

That's essentially what happens in Goolrick's book, but he does stand certain of the reader's expectations on their heads, and that's what makes for an intense but heartfelt read.  You know something bad is going to happen, but it's not precisely clear at first just what path the badness is going to take: will somebody end up butchered & barbecued, a la Fried Green Tomatoes? Will the evil spring from the handsome stranger, or will it be exacted upon him by the small, xenophobic town? Is the handsome stranger's intense relationship with the young boy more insidious than it appears on the surface or is it completely innocent?

Add in a curious five year-old narrator, a small town full of busybodies, a racial divide, old time religion, a near-death resuscitation, and a man who's so rich and so mean, he has to buy himself a pretty young mountain girl for a wife, and you've got the makings of a pretty great story. 

The opening paragraphs are some of the best meditations on memory that I have ever read. The book is narrated by Sam, who is an old man looking back on what happened when the drifter came to town and his family took him in:

The thing is, all memory is fiction. You have to remember that. Of course, there are things that actually, certifiably happened, things where you can pinpoint the day, the hour, and the minute. When you think about it, though, those things mostly seem to happen to other people.

This story actually happened, and it happened pretty much the way I'm going to tell it to you.  It's a true story, as much as six decades of remembering and telling can allow it to be true. Time changes things, and you don't always get everything right. You remember a little thing clear as a bell...while other things, big things even, come completely disconnected and no longer have any shape or sound. The little things seem more real than some of the big things....I'm  not young any more, so sometimes I can't tell what things are the things I remember and what things are just things that other people told me They tell me things I did, and a lot of them I don't remember, but most people around here aren't liars, so I just go on and believe them, until it seems that I actually do remember the things they say.

This is not exactly a Southern gothic tale, though  it has elements of that.  Mostly it's the story of quiet people after the war, who are on the cusp of modernity and who know their simple, seemingly charmed way of life won't last forever.  It's the story of otherwise good people who choose to let evil into their hearts, and the blinding love of a small boy for a man he calls Beebo, who instinctively knows something about protection but is too innocent to understand what happens around him. I highly recommend it. I've already passed my reading copy on to my husband and he's barely spoken to me since--that's how involved he is with it. 

~Emily

Odyssey Staff Favorites 2011, part deux

Continuing from yesterday, here are the #1 picks from this year's reading from more Odyssey booksellers!

Sheila Heady picks Listen to This by Alex Ross because it's a great collection of music writing and it will give you endless fun facts to drop into conversations. (She should know--she was a music major at UMass.)

Sarah Etelman selected a book by one of her favorite writers: Save Me by Lisa Scottoline because it's a breath-taking roller coaster ride of emotions and suspense.

 Sara Colglazier favorite was also a staff pick for many other Odyssey booksellers: The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson (it's also author Ann Patchett's favorite book of the year!) for Wilson's wonderful use of language and wacky imagination.

Chrysler Szarlan had a hard time deciding, but in the end there can be only one, and thus Geraldine Brooks receives top honors with Caleb's Crossing, the story of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard in 1665 because it is spectacularly imagined historical fiction.

Stay tuned for more year-end picks by the Odyssey staff!

Caribbean Fiction at its Finest: Three new releases in paperback

It's no secret among the staff that I am a serious Caribbean addict.  From the food to the music to the people to the fiction of the region, I am a devotee.  And that's why I am so pleased to tell y'all about three novels just out in paperback that span the Caribbean in space and time.  [Drumroll, please]

Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea is a beautifully written novel.  Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarite -- known as Tete -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tete finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums she discovers through her fellow slaves.When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it's with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father's plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tete and Valmorain, and of one woman's determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances.

  

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey is a beautifully written, unforgettable novel of a troubled marriage, set against the lush landscape and political turmoil of Trinidad.  Monique Roffey's Orange Prize-shortlisted novel is a gripping portrait of postcolonialism that stands among great works by Caribbean writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Andrea Levy. When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England, George is immediately seduced by the beguiling island, while Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill-at-ease. As they adapt to new circumstances, their marriage endures for better or worse, despite growing political unrest and racial tensions that affect their daily lives. But when George finds a cache of letters that Sabine has hidden from him, the discovery sets off a devastating series of consequences as other secrets begin to emerge.

Told in the irresistibly willful and intimate voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas, Andrea Levy's The Long Song is at once defiant, funny, and shocking. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation in Jamaica, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides to move her into the great house and rename her “Marguerite.” Resourceful and mischievous, July soon becomes indispensable to her mistress. Together they live through the bloody Baptist war, followed by the violent and chaotic end of slavery. Taught to read and write so that she can help her mistress run the business, July remains bound to the plantation despite her “freedom.” It is the arrival of a young English overseer, Robert Goodwin, that will dramatically change life in the great house for both July and her mistress. Prompted and provoked by her son’s persistent questioning, July’s resilience and heartbreak are gradually revealed in this extraordinarily powerful story of slavery, revolution, freedom, and love. This book was a finalist for the 2010 Book Prize.

~Emily Crowe

Middle Grade Books (but adults will like these, too)

A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz

This story doesn’t start with Hansel and Gretel, but it is about them. And, as the narrator will warn you, this is a dark an bloody tale not suited for young children, but closer to the original stories than any silly kiddie movies might be. Gidwitz strings a number of Grimm’s stories together, each featuring Hansel and Gretel. Despite the darkness and the blood, this is a fun book, the narrator’s warnings adding humor to the tale. I love remixed fairy tales, but instead of changing the setting or reversing gender roles (as one usually sees) Gidwitz has found a successful new way to retell the tales.

A fabulous combination of humor and tragedy, A Tale Dark and Grimm is precisely what it says it is. Ages 9 and up.



Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie

When Luka’s father falls into a deep sleep, Luka must venture into the world of magic, and steal the fire of life, in order to save his father. Luka’s adventure takes the form of a video game, complete with saving points, as he travels through a land populated by gods, goddesses, and characters from his father’s stories. A companion book to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Luka is a celebration of story telling, filled with classic characters and fun word-play. Age 9 & up.

Signed copies available!

-Marika

A great new book for classical music and historical fiction lovers alike!

Richard Harvell's The Bells, released this week by Crown Publishing, was one of the more interesting books I read on vacation this summer. Born to a deaf mother amidst the peals of the loudest bells in 18th-century Christendom, Moses Froben is a boy whose extraordinary sense of hearing is matched only by the altitudinous beauty of his soprano voice. Dark events lead him to seek sanctuary at the Abbey of St. Gall, where even darker events lead to the forced castration that will preserve his exquisite voice and rend him asunder from his love. ( Or will it?) All musical roads eventually lead to Vienna, and there he finds solace with friends old and new in this fascinating retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. An impressive debut that will delight historical fiction and classical music fans alike. ~Emily Crowe

Summer Reading

We've set up the school summer reading list book shelf and schools are recommending some wonderful titles. While you may have to read a few of these for school, they're also great for a rainy day or the beach!


Persepolis
By Marjane Satrapi
A memoir in graphic novel form, Satrapi tells of her experiences growing up in Iran. From parents talking politics and torture at the dinner table to friends at school, Persepolis chronicles the daily life of a child trying to understand difficult political circumstances while still trying to be a kid. Emotional and political, yet spotted with moments of humor, Satrapi’s coming of age story is fascinating. Her simple black and white illustrations capture everything from drama to ordinary details and subtle expressions. Age 15 & up.




The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
By Mark Haddon
A book that everyone should read and every school should teach. Curious Incident is narrated by Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year old with Autism. When Christopher discovers the neighbor’s poodle Wellington stabbed with a pitchfork, he resolves to solve the murder. Using mathematics to understand the world around him, Christopher takes a remarkable journey - in many senses of the word. Though a quick read, Christopher’s voice will stay with you even if your copy of the book is immediately passed on. 7th grade & up.



Nation
By Terry Prachett
A giant wave destroys islands, ships, and entire communities, leaving two survivors stranded on an island: the island boy Mau and Daphne, a rich princess from the other side of the globe. Together they must overcome language and culture barriers, uniting a rag-tag group of survivors and unveiling the secret past of the island. This book explores colonialism, religion, belief systems, and cultural differences in an exciting fictional story of survival. Ages 13 & up.



Maximum Ride: the Angel Experiment
By James Patterson
If you want a gripping book you’ll be unable to put down, look no further. Max’s life is a game of cat and mouse– and she’s a mouse, caught in a twisted experiment in which she is hunted by other kids. But Max is no ordinary girl, she has wings and the kids chasing her? Well, they’re half wolf. Get ready for a thrilling ride. 12 & up.





-Marika