The Truth About Alice - Jennifer Mathieu

Jennifer Mathieu is relatively new to the young adult publishing world and in her first novel, she has hit the ball out of the park, as far as I'm concerned. Don't get me wrong. This is a difficult book to read, especially as a mature woman. It's graphic in its portrayal of young people and the culture of high schoolers and their world. I struggle with the level of sexuality, drugs and alcohol use that young people are exposed to, so reading a book as hard-hitting as this is difficult. That being said, it also flew by for me. it's not a long book. Alice's story unfolds fast and furious.

Cascade - Maryanne O'Hara

Maryanne O’Hara is a new author to me. I came across her book titled Cascade during a late winter foraging trip to my little public library. What I found in this book was a story of a marriage of convenience that unravels as a small town grapples with its almost certain demise. The story of the destruction of the town is loosely-based on the Metropolitan Water District’s struggle in the 30’s to deal with Boston’s evermore demanding need for fresh clean public water. The result became a push to acquire lands in the central part of Massachusetts and the flooding of those lands that created the Quabbin Reservoir. 

In O’Hara’s book the Quabbin becomes the Rappahanock and her fictitious town of Cascade is a compilation of several actual towns that were razed to create a massive reservoir for Boston’s need. Set against that backdrop, enter Desdemona Hart, a young artist and the daughter of one of the artistic forces within her hometown of Cascade. Desdemona is the child of actors and has received an arts education that includes being front and center in her father’s Shakespearean theater during her early years and going to college to receive a fine arts degree. She’s painted in Paris, won art awards at her college in Boston, and is producing new art at a pretty steady pace. 

When her father becomes ill and the theater begins to fall into decline because of the Great Depression, Desdemona returns to Cascade to care for him. Finding the finances in horrid shape, she accepts the attentions of the local pharmacist. He’s a nice enough guy, but his dreams and goals are far from what Desdemona has envisioned for herself and her art. Setting her dreams aside for the sake of her father, she agrees to marry Asa Spaulding, move to his comfortable farmhouse on the edge of the village, and settle into the life of a hausfrau. One can only imagine the frustration, right?

When a young Jewish artist, the son of  a local itinerant merchant comes to town, Desdemona makes an innocent connection over one of her canvasses. That relationship will have dramatic consequences for her marriage, her art, and the future of the town. She will find in her relationship with Jacob Solomon a muse and a romantic push to confront the poor marriage she’s made and the sad repression of her own strengths as a woman that needs to control her own destiny. 

This was a great read … it’s about promises we make out of love that come back to haunt, prejudices that can taint our lives, roles in marriages that can stifle one’s true self if they’re allowed to, and strength to work through tough social norms and find one’s true place in the world. 

I look forward to other titles from this author.

Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell

Consider me having joined the legions of fans that have read this book and fallen hard for the two characters that collide in the tumultuous chaos of the school bus and are brought together by the creed that one is a 'bully, a lackey, or one of the nameless rabble'. Band together for survival!

Eleanor is new to the neighborhood. She's just been allowed to return to her family , after being kicked out by her stepfather. Her mother and brothers and sister are cowed by the verbal and physical abuse that her step father metes out. Her family is in crisis and they don't even seem able to help themselves. Eleanor's walking on eggs. To boot, she's the red-headed carrot top with more pounds on her than is stylish for the high school mean girl set. Her wild sense of style comes from a combination of defense mechanism thinking, thrift store chic, and teenage rebellion. She's a great target for all the crap that bullies can hand out.

Park is a 'put your head down and survive' kinda guy. He's the one Korean kid in a sea of heartland white bread highschoolers. He survives the chaos of high school by choosing a small group of friends, keeping a low profile, submersing himself in the punk and alternative music of the 80's and staying close to home. His home, in a hard scrabble neighborhood outside Omaha, is 'an oasis', as his family is intact and relatively happy. His parents love and respect each other. His grandparents live right next door. The family is involved with each other and watches out for each other. Life's not all roses for Park, though. His relationship with his ex-military man Dad is tough. His Dad's expectations of Park sometimes make him feel inferior and he struggles with his own teenage rebellious feelings when his Dad puts down his music, his sense of style, his sensitivity, and his apparent inability to learn to drive using a stick shift.

School could be a refuge for Eleanor, but when she steps on the school bus on the first day back with her family, she's greeted by a teen clic culture that has the potential to push her over the edge. And it's then, that Park, looking sideways, slides his backpack out of the way and mutters for her to 'just sit down'. From then on, the voyage to and from school becomes the petri dish for a growing relationship that is so endearing and addicting to read ...

Rainbow Rowell write in short bullets that alternate back and forth between Eleanor's and Park's point of view. Their feelings unfold in bits and starts until they finally befriend each other over the comic books and music that Park shares with Eleanor. Opening up to each other, each cautiously peels back the protective layers that have insulated them from the rough world of teenage culture. It's a tale of love, sacrifice, survival, and hope.

Yes, the language is a raunchy at times (like it is in real life, sometimes). Yes, there are tough issues (like there are in life for far too many young people). Yes, sex is a huge part of the undercurrent of the story (like it is in the minds and hearts of 99.9 % of the teenage world). And yes, Rainbow Rowell deals with all these elements of teenage life really well.

It's no wonder to me that this book has garnered its share of awards - the 2013 Boston Globe Horn Book Award, the 2014 Michael L. Printz Honor Award for YA Fiction, as well spots on the lists of best books of 2013 and 2014 that  the NYT, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews compile.

Whatever she's doing, she's doing it right. The book's movie rights have been purchased and she will be writing the screenplay for the film adaption, plus she's released her newest novel called Landline, plus she's signed on to produce two graphic novels in the next couple years.

Busy lady !!

What She Left Behind - Ellen Marie Wiseman

What She Left Behind is a heart-wrenching story that takes its roots from the actual incident of historians finding suitcases left behind in an attic space at a decrepit mental institution in New York state.  The Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane was operated from 1869 until 1995 when it was closed. It was a massive complex during its heyday, housing chronically insane and feeble-minded patients. The complex had its own farm, shoe shops, sewing facilities, kitchens, et cetera and was a model for mental health care during the Progressive Era. Of course, the Progressive era also was a time when psychiatric care was all wrapped up in the eugenics movement, the move to intensive drug therapy, extreme forms of brain research, and a host of controversial therapies like electroshock and water therapies. UGH. The Great Depression and changes within mental health and government funding, however, created a warehouse mentality within the care system - a recipe for neglect, abuse, and worse. UGH.

Enter this book. Ellen Marie Wiseman penned a fictional account of one patient who is admitted in the 1920's, after defying her father's strict edicts. Upon refusing to marry the man he has picked for her, young Clara is admitted to a sanatarium near her New York City home. The forced admission is a punishment by her father, an attempt to cow her into submission and away from her 'hysterical' behavior. When the stock market crashes and her father falls on hard economic times, he can no longer pay her fees at the sanatarium. Rather than have her released, he relinquishes her to the state mental health system and she is shuttled off to Willard Asylum. There begins a truly horrific experience - physical abuse, forced medication, isolation and sensory deprivation, a pregnancy (her beloved child with her true love) and birth that ends in having her child removed from her care, and on and on... UGH. How messed up were human rights laws and the mental health system at that time, huh?

A parallel story is also told in this novel. It centers on Izzy, a young woman who has grown up in foster care. She is about to graduate from high school and out of foster care when she is settled with a couple in the Finger Lakes region of New York state. Her foster parents are involved in a historical investigation of Willard Asylum and Izzy accompanies them on forays to examine and catalogue the suitcases found in attic space at Willard Asylum. Izzy stumbles upon Clara's trunk and the journal that is inside it. The plot thickens.

This was a hard book to put down, but I had to at some of the particularly emotional points. The thought of the level of loneliness and fear going through Clara AND Izzy was, at times, overwhelming to me.  I always returned to the book, though, as I needed to know how two systems of government intervention - mental health and foster care- would deal with these two likeable characters.

One leaves this book with a goodly amount of righteous rage that people could EVER be treated so poorly in this country, that women were EVER so under the thumb of parents and spouses that they could be packed away into hospitals and asylums without so much as a legal or medical review, that children in the foster care system can be left untreated and passed from one family to the next with shoddy oversight and so-so treatment for traumas that have gotten them into the system in the first place. UGH.

A good read, but an emotional read ... after this one, I need a read that's really light and fluffy.

I'll leave this post with some links ... if you're at all curious about Willard Asylum and the suitcase project ...

Willard Asylum Photos - http://adwheelerphotography.com/2013/03/15/the-asylum-by-the-lake/

Willard Suitcases Project - http://www.willardsuitcases.com/

Delicious! - Ruth Reichl

Let me just say that I love Ruth Reichl. She knows food and she knows New York City. She's not one to languish over her storyline in that she moves things right along, but still holds back certain details that intrigue. It's exactly what she's done with her latest novel. It's obvious from the start that young Billie Breslin has a strange 'something' in her past, but what it is remains a mystery until far into the book. Instead, Billie's  refusal to work in the kitchen after the first few pages of the book tease the reader. Her letters home to her sister reveal a tight family on the west coast, even as she makes her way as a young administrative assistant at Delicious!, a prominent foodie magazine based in NYC. She meets a host of interesting folks as she settles into her job and is introduced to life in the city - everyone from the editor-in-chief with his darling mutt to the cantankerous chef in the magazine's test kitchen. Especially endearing is the lovable Italian family that runs a popular neighborhood cheese shop and hires Billie for a weekend gig at the shop. Then, of course, there's the handsome Complainer who stops into the shop every weekend to mix it up with the shop sales folk. It's a fun blend of people that all come together to tell a story of a magazine that is closed abruptly and the mystery that surrounds its headquarters and a room full of correspondence between James Beard (a past employee of Delicious!) and a young fan during the WWII era.

This is a rich novel, full of small details about foodie trends, past and present. Reichl drops names of famous chefs and restaurants, also current and past. There are scenes where dinners and their menus get top treatment, all while moving the story line along. It's a fun read that will no doubt, inspire a few recipes in tribute to the book! Oh, and the girl gets the guy at  the end ... equally satisfying too when you've been reading chick lit. 

The Fault In Our Stars

From the moment I began reading this novel, I knew why it became so wildly popular with teen readers. John Green has a wonderful way with inner dialogue. He uses it so well in developing the character of Hazel Grace, the book's protagonist. She is sassy and sarcastic, intelligent and full of emotion - wise beyond her years. At the same time, she has all the typical characteristics of a typical teen, right down to her TV watching habits, her dress, her sometimes 'attitude' toward her parents, and her classic teen attitude toward bureaucracy and authority.  Her observations on life and the vagaries of living with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis are at turns funny and wrenching. She bursts off the page of the book and right into the heart of the reader. I mean, really, who wouldn't feel for a young, smart teenager who is waiting for the shoe of Death to drop, but still manages to yank her O2 tank around and build a romance that will last the ages from an encounter at a cancer support group? Pop in some funny and supportive friends and relations, a 'make-a-wish' trip to Amsterdam, and a turn-about ending that yanks out your heart and squishes it flat on the driveway and I'd say you've got an equation for a teen literary phenomenon.

That being said, this book that John Green has written deals with some age-old issues that everyone will grapple with before their time on Earth is done. Wondering if we will ever be truly and deeply loved, whether we will be remembered when we're gone, and just what meaning our life has had will creep into all our brains at some point. Hazel and her friend Gus are forced to deal with these questions sooner than normal. Having teen characters face them with such honesty and angst is what makes this book so powerful. Of course, when a loved one is lost, there is no happy ending, but when deep life issues are confronted and dealt with effectively, there is a satisfaction that comes with the ending of one's life and the moving on that comes afterward by one's loved ones.

There is an equally popular movie adaptation to the book that I will see at some point, but I find it hard to think that it will equal the book. There were so many well-written passages that were thought-provoking and 'quotable', passages that a reader will find sticking in the back of the mind; for me, it was the following  quote. I have pondered it at different points since reading the book - when I contemplate God, when I see some knock-down beautiful view out there in the world, when I felt the unborn kittens in my cat's belly squirm, when I watched friends marry over the weekend and saw that look pass between them while they danced. Yes, the universe demands to be noticed in so many ways.

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?” 
                                                                                                                               - John Green

Good book. Not surprised that it has stuck so long on the best-seller lists. 

Ordinary Grace - William Kent Krueger

There is an old expression - 'little jugs have big ears'. It's meant to admonish adults about speaking too freely around youngsters. Children listen and hear, watch and see, and yes, they can be surprisingly astute in their assessment of what's going on in their worlds.

This tale that William Kent Krueger has written takes that expression and plays it well. The year is 1961. It's summertime in the small town of New Bremen, Minnesota. Frank Drum, the middle child of the local minister, is set for a summertime of following baseball, playing outside in the woods and along the rail line that runs through New Bremen, swimming in the local quarry, and fishing alongside the Minnesota River. His wanderings will bring him into contact with a cast of characters that display the width and breadth of the human condition - love-starved, loving, misunderstood, twisted, cruel, damaged, wise, innocent, intuitive, bitter, haunted, passionate, and questing. All these characters become embroiled in a patchwork of death and mystery that Frank will witness and ponder for the rest of his life.

In fact, the story is told by Frank at a time much later. He looks back on that summer and unravels the events with a mature sense of God's grace bestowed. No spoilers here ... the only thing I will say is that I loved the relationship that Frank had with his younger brother and the growth and understanding that Frank displays toward Jake. In contemplating that relationship, I came to think that it is Jake who is the central character of the story, the conduit of a display of God's grace that is so humbling and so pure ... that's all I have to say other than I liked this book tremendously.

Wonder - R J Palacio

Every now and then, I still pick up a read that keeps me current with the children's and young adult literature that is coming out. This is one of those books that I would have gladly done in my elementary classroom as a class read-aloud. It's rife with topics and issues for discussion, strong enough with images that kids could 'doodle' their mental images of the characters and the story's events after listening to the short 'bullet chapters'.

When young August Pullman heads out to middle school from his cloistered home schooled past, he just wants to be like every other kid at school - ordinary. August, though, has been born with a severe facial deformity that surgeries and therapy have not 'erased'. Auggie stands out when he would dearly love to blend in  ... therein, lies the roots for this story of growing up and  learning about oneself.

August is such a likable character. Despite his profound facial deformity, he IS just a normal kid. If only others in his world would grasp that fact! Instead, all the pitfalls of negotiating middle school are magnified for him because he can't just 'blend in' while he figures out the 'tween years'. His appearance sets him front and center in his world and getting around that hurdle is his ultimate challenge. In his first year at middle school, he must learn to step away from the sheltering arms of his mom and dad and into a world of kids and adults with varying degrees of kindness, acceptance, pettiness, cruelty, pity, ineptness, social savvy, and on and on. Learning to negotiate his new world, sort through the various personalities, and work on his own self-confidence will make the reader cheer him on and shake their head over August's successes and failures.

The book is narrated by August and various other people in his life ... what develops is a full picture of August's school and family life. It's full of authentic experience, strong feelings and emotions, situations that challenge readers to think about how they act towards others and evaluate their own attitudes about friendship, acceptance of differences between people, respect, self-awareness, family dynamics, and being a mensch in a hard world.

R J Palacio has written a terrific book - her first. It sits right up there next to Maniac Magee or Stargirl or Loser. Jerry Spinelli move over. There's a new girl in town! Be kind and show her the ropes ! I think she's got a few more tales to tell.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce

A dysfunctional childhood in an unhappy family creates a troubled man. Recently retired and lost in a troubled marriage, Harold Fry receives a letter from a woman he once worked with. She is residing in a hospice, suffering from cancer and she has written Harold to say goodbye. The specter of the loss of an old work mate spurs Harold to write a letter in return, but on the way to post it, a strange thing happens. Harold is inspired to go see his friend, Queenie. He does it the simplest way he knows how; he sets off on foot. Thus begins the unlikely pilgrimage that will take Harold Fry much farther than his feet could ever carry him. His is a mental, physical, and spiritual pilgrimage that, in its solitude, forces him to trod old paths of memory and confront his 'ghosts in the closet'.

Along the way, Harold meets the most amazing group of people and each spur him to reflect on issues that he has buried deep rather than confront. Some people help and inspire him and some make him retreat and repeat mistakes of his past that, on the second go around, he is able to evaluate with more honesty and self-reflection. Always, this story is written with gentle humor, candor, and yes, some pain for it digs deep into the joys and sorrows of marital relationships, parenting, family dynamics, and society's foibles.

A very good read ...

The Storyteller - Jodi Picoult

I have to be in the mood for a Jodi Picoult book. Don't get me wrong, she's an incredibly talented writer and all, but she's just so damn intense. I can always depend on her to hit a hot button issue, twist it, turn it, play total havoc with it and bring out a kickass story. But, my God! By the time I'm half-way through the book, I'm a nervous fucking wreck (pardon the language).

Take The Holocaust for instance. Take the issue of manipulation. Take vulnerability and weakness after a heart-breaking accident. Take human frailty. Take religion. Take time and forgiveness on an individual and global level. Take looking for love in the wrong place. Take it all. Twist it. Turn it. Play havoc with it with several characters. Yup ... it comes out a kickass story.

Jodi Picoult has an almost formulaic way of putting a story together, In fact, in conversations with friends and fam who read her, that is one of the criticisms.  No one can deny, though,  that her stories are put together well and that she always causes a strong reaction to her plots, her characters, and her endings.

Here, in her latest novel, we find an emotionally and physically damaged young woman who befriends an elderly man at a group she attends for the grieving. He shares a dark secret with her and makes a most unconventional request. What's a girl to do? Therein lies the jumping off spot for the story ... Picoult doesn't stop there, however, She weaves in a parallel story that comes to the reader via the young woman's grandmother. Then, there's a side story brought in by the connection the woman makes when she digs into the past history of her elderly friend ... and there's his story. It all gets twisted, turned ...

'Nuff said.

Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan

Having just come off of reading Matthew Pearl's tome, The Technologists it seemed a perfect segue to move to a novel that is all wrapped up in the latest techno change within the literary world ... digital literature, smart phone apps, Kindles, website proliferation, media mash that can be overwhelming and so plentiful that one can get lost in the pixels and gigabytes. It is a fact that today's world is fast becoming one of two layers - the virtual and the physical. Today's young people have learned to absorb the use of every new bit of hand-held technology to negotiate both planes of existence, but there are still places where the printed page holds sway.

Those places - bookstores, tag sales, estate auctions and the like - are places where great mysteries and treasures sit. They are just waiting for some person's hands to latch on, for some person's eyes and brains to engage, for some person's soul to become a willing participant in the story told, the question posed, the dilemma debated, the life exposed.

Robin Sloan gives us two characters, Chris and Kat, young residents of the techno-culture of San Francisco trying their best to make it through this latest economic downturn. One character is successfully riding the techno tide and the other has struggled to keep head above water in San Francisco's work world. Chris happens into a small 'hole in the wall' bookstore one day that is a cross between black hole and Diagon Alley. Before he knows it, he's the newest night clerk at Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. His enthusiasm for using technology to improve business and his curiosity about the intriguing customers that frequent the store and their interest in what lies in the stacks toward the back of the store meld in a fast paced race to solve an ancient mystery, save his employer's reputation, and maybe 'get the girl' ... read on, friends. This is a really fun book!

Sloan has a sharp savvy wit that gives a good chuckle now and then. He weaves the current names and corporate powerhouses into the story, uses the geography of the Bay Area to bring the setting up before your mind's eye, and has techno-speak down and uses it to create a nerdy jargon that moves the computer-esque element of the story right along. At the heart of the story, though, are the books and the type and the Old Knowledge that is a firm foundation for all that has come from it and the heartfelt sense that the power of the word will carry on ... in all its manifestations.

For a neat interview, see NPR's link here

Hikikomori and the Rental Sister - Jeff Backhaus

I am not a professional book reviewer, but I know a good story when I read one - an honest to goodness story that can reach into your heart and twist at emotions, making you feel completely wrapped in another person's experience. In this book, I have settled into the grief and guilt and fear that its central character wallows in. Thomas has been slammed by a wrenching experience that he cannot get over, come to terms with, move on from ... so what does he do? He turns his back on life, on wife, on career, on friends, on even the most mundane things. Thomas is hikikomori ... a modern day hermit in his small Manhattan apartment ... with his wife right down the hall. What does she do? She becomes increasingly saddened, angry, desperate, resigned, and finally, proactive. She hires a 'rental sister'. The rental sister, Megumi is a young beautiful Japanese immigrant with her own set of issues, but she becomes the link between Thomas, the world, the wife, the grief, the confrontation, and (is it possible ?) the healing.

This a layered novel that jumps between first and third person narrative, telling a story of emotional trauma, isolation, intimacy, and just what one does for love. No words are wasted and the story flows  in bits and starts, like a faucet that comes on and off, off and on, off and on. There are beautiful sparsely worded images that will make you stop and contemplate, get lost in the thought, take time to remove yourself a bit from the book and go into your head. There are softly sensual passages that demand you contemplate intimacy on the physical and psychological planes. There is a baring of  the different characters' souls that makes your heart ache and makes you need to put the book down for a while, for who doesn't grapple with emotional isolation, guilt, second guessing, denial, and escape at different times in one's life?

This is a good little book. No, I'm no professional book reviewer, but I do know a good story when I read one.

 

Image from Backhaus' website

 

For an interesting take on Jeff Backhaus and his approach to his writing craft, check out Largehearted Boy's post on this book here.  Interesting ... and the music is wonderful.

Boys Without Names - Kashmiri Sheth

 

 

The upper level of the building is cramped with bodies and trays of beads, frames, a smelly glue pot, the rolled up tatters of jute bedding and sundry little personal items. Six young boys work feverishly placing small beads onto blunt needles and then sticking them into position on wooden frames. They work quietly, so as not to raise the ire of their Boss, who sits in an easy chair in the room below. The television rumbles sometimes or the Boss can be heard snoring as he naps the day away. The doors are all locked; there are bars on the windows. From the outside the building resembles a ramshackle warehouse. Inside, though it is a prison of work and deprivation.

Thus, is the story of Gopal and his cohorts. How Gopal comes to this bleak sweatshop in an alley in Mumbai and how his cohorts cope with such a brutal life is the story that Kashmiri Sheth tells. It is, at times, heart-breaking and at others, hopeful. It brings the reader in contact with good people and people who are broken and brutal. Gopal is a resourceful and strong protagonist who never loses hope that he will be reunited with his family, who uses his wits and savvy to survive under circumstances that would make many of us despair.

The issue of child labor and sweatshop evils has come more and more into the public eye, over the past few years, as the commercial consumption remains high and the supply of cheap, but well-made goods streams into the country from third world nations. American consumers, being so far removed from the source of products, can easily buy everything from jewelry to hangbags to picture frames to clothing to fireworks to coffee and never connect their consumption patterns with the practice of slave labor ... slave labor. That's what it is ... in bold black and white. Within our own country, there are wide-spread abuses of  workers within the agricultural fields, as everything from tomatoes to oranges to celery is brought to market. A practice that this nation turned its back on so many years ago continues to this day and we consumers unwittingly (or blythely) ignore its continuance in the blind need to consume without investigating the source of our 'stuff'.

Kashmiri Sheth has put faces and names to the nameless workers who labor every day in sweatshops, in writing this powerful novel. While hers is a book written for a young adult audience, there are plenty more out there to read and think about. There are agencies to investigate and support that work toward economic equality, fair labor practices, humane treatment within the work place, and education of workers. I know I will never look at an inexpensive picture frame again without wondering whose young fingers might have created it.

Kashmiri Sheth traveled to India to research her novel and I am very glad that she did. I can only hope that more people read this book and discuss the important topic of economic justice with their friends and families. I would recommend this book as a family read-aloud, a class or church youth group book club read, or as a scout troop read and investigation project. It is a vivid story that has all the brutal components of the issue without such graphic horrors that it would traumatize kids. It would be a real eye-opener for those ten years and older. An important book ...

 

The Art Forger - B. A. Shapiro

Let me first say that this book struck a real chord with me, as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is the first place that my husband took me when he was trying to impress my romantic side. I have a soft spot in my heart for every small nook and cranny of that magnificent building and every piece of art that is perched, mounted, and hanging within its walls. That being said, when I happened on Shapiro's book, The Art Forger I was immediately intrigued.

The Sandcastle Girls - Chris Bohjalian

This latest novel from Chris Bohjalian is a powerful look at an Armenian family's tragic past and the secrets that surface generations later when a young woman delves into her family's geneology and the path that her grandparents took from Turkey and Syria to the United States. In parallel stories, Bojahlian writes of a young woman in modern day discovering her family's past and the ramifications that it has for her and her present day relationships. He slips back to the early 20th century to tell the full story of the family's traumatic evolution. The reader follows the sheltered life of a young Bostonian woman who accompanies her father to Aleppo in 1915 to bring humanitarian aid to the Armenian peoples who were being systematically filtered from Turkish society and forced into the desert to be slaughtered and starved in a mass ethnic cleansing campaign.  Meeting a young Armenian engineer who has been sheltered from death because of his ability to help expand the rail system, she begins a relationship that will take her into the heart of a that dark time in Middle Eastern history - the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

I think it interesting that this is the second book concerning genocide that Bohjalian has written. His searing novel about the last of the Jewish concentration camp internees escaping and trudging their way back toward western Europe during the last grueling days of WWII was chronicled in Skeletons at the Feast . Now, he brings us the Armenian genocide. Dark stories, both, and yet they are important chapters of history that must not be forgotten. Bringing them to life within well-researched novels makes them more accessible to the mainstream and helps readers explore the emotional and human side of the dry statistics and politics of these horrible historical events.

I would place this book in my 2012 top ten, but I must admit that I need to move on to something much lighter, as the emotional catharsis of this novel got to me. Other readers may not find it too searing, but this kind of story, one that explores man's inhumanity to man, just gets under my skin and stays with me for a good while.

At any rate, I recommend The Sandcastle Girls for those who like historical fiction as a way to learn about real events outside of an academic forum. It provides places, dates, and interesting political scenes that a truly interested reader can use as jumping off spots for more research. It's a well-done endeavor by Bohjalian.

 

Finding A Literary Niche ... Belva Plain

Women stay home to raise children all the time. They choose family over career or they put their careers on the back burner while they raise their familes, hoping to pick 'it' back up when they feel their children are on an even keel and they can place their concentration back in the working world outside the home. Belva Plain managed to combine both worlds. She married after having graduated from Barnard College.  During her early married life, she wrote short stories that were published in the likes of Cosmopolitan and other women's magazines. As her children grew older, she found time to begin work on a novel, using her degree in history to weave an historical novel that began during the late 1890's and ended in the 1950's. Once it was published, she was on her way. She had a very devoted fan base that followed her career over the course of thirty years, from the time that that first novel, Evergreen was published in 1978 to her final novel, Heartwood, published (posthumously) in 2011.