Maximum Shelf: The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh

Posted on January 22, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on January 15, 2014.

weight of blood

“That Cheri Stoddard was found at all was the thing that set people on edge, even more so than the condition of her body.” So opens Laura McHugh’s delightfully and darkly disturbing debut novel, The Weight of Blood. The town of Henbane is agitated because it is so good at keepings its secrets–and bodies are so easy to hide in the twisted, wooded Ozark Mountains.

The story begins with the first-person perspective of 18-year-old Lucy Dane. Lucy has it pretty good: she has a reliable best friend, a loving relationship with her father, and neighbors who make up an extended family of sorts. And she’s just begun working in her uncle’s store, where she gets to rub elbows with the sexy Daniel. But Lucy is troubled by the disappearance of her sort-of friend Cheri, a developmentally disabled schoolmate whose freshly dead body was only recently discovered–a year after she went missing. She’s also still troubled by the unexplained disappearance of her mother, Lila, who walked out of the house carrying a handgun and nothing else when Lucy was a year old.

The perspective then shifts to that of Lila herself as a young woman, newcomer to the Danes’ hometown of Henbane. Henbane is almost a character unto itself, insular, suspicious and largely unmarked by passing time. For a fee, residents can avoid a “city burial” (embalmment and the involvement of the authorities) in favor of a private grave-digging service. And the local lawyer will advise you not to trust local police until you find out who’s related to whom. It is anything but a friendly destination for a damaged teenager like Lila, who immediately runs up against the Dane brothers: the older Crete, who runs several businesses including a farm and a store, and his little brother, Carl, who becomes her husband before she turns 19. Superstitions have her labeled a witch before she’s unpacked her few belongings.

Through Lila’s eyes, the reader will find out slightly more about her background than Lucy knows, but Lila works hard to remain a mystery to both the reader and Henbane locals, including Carl. The perspectives continue to alternate. While Lucy keeps the reader up to date on current goings-on, it is through Lila that we begin to learn the ugly secrets that Henbane keeps. Other characters, too, get occasional chapters told from their point of view (in omniscient third person; only Lila and Lucy get first-person treatment), and one of the strengths of The Weight of Blood is that its engaging, complex, fully wrought characters extend beyond its protagonists. Lucy’s best friend, Bess, and Bess’s mother, Gabby (who was, in turn, best friend to Lila); Carl and Crete; the love interest, Daniel; a surrogate grandmother; and a local drug dealer all get sensitive handling and character development. But it is the measured building of tension and the careful doling out of hints of evil that star, as Lucy’s coming-of-age experience brings the classic bildungsroman to meet the gritty thriller.

While helping Daniel clean out an old trailer belonging to her uncle, Lucy discovers a clue: a lost item that she knows used to belong to Cheri, because Lucy gave it to her. Next, Bess overhears a reference that she shouldn’t have. With Daniel’s cautious support, Lucy begins to look into Cheri’s death, and the matter of where she spent that unaccounted-for year. But, of course, in a town this small, where everyone recognizes headlights and knows where a particular truck might be heading, investigations are dangerous. Like her mother before her, Lucy is told outright that it would be risky to go to the police for help. And as she probes the question of Cheri’s fate, and finds it apparently linked to her mother’s, Lucy will be disturbed at how close her inquiries lead her to home.

Carl and Crete, the Dane brothers, are heir not only to the off-the-books grave-digging business, the combined local grocery store and restaurant, and various secrets, but also to mental illness and corruption. As its title suggests, The Weight of Blood is concerned with the strength of our bonds to our family, and the tension between biological ties of blood and the families we choose for ourselves. In a remarkably convincing portrayal of young adulthood, Lucy allows McHugh to explore themes of loyalty: where it’s owed, and to what extremes.

The atmosphere McHugh evokes in this masterful debut is wonderfully spooky, exemplifying Southern noir with a backwoods mountain twist and a matter-of-fact willingness to bury its dead out back and walk away. Taut pacing, lively suspense and atmosphere are the strongest points of a novel that also has an engaging plot and beautifully built, sympathetic characters to its credit. For fans of dark, suspenseful, well-structured thrillers, The Weight of Blood is a delicious and nail-biting treat.

Rating: 7 baby possums.

Come back tomorrow for my interview with McHugh!

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill

Posted on January 20, 2014 by pagesofjulia

eating dirtDoubly recommended by the authors of Fire Season and Dirt Work, this one moved to the top of the list.

Eating Dirt is the memoir of a tree planter. Charlotte Gill works seasonally planting trees in the Canadian west. She is employed by a company of tree planters, who contract in turn with big business – mostly logging – to replant sections of clear-cut land, usually. The daily job is to travel out to the plot in question (via beat-up truck, or boat, or by foot), load up one’s bags – a belted & suspendered piece involving two side saddle-bags and one at the rear, at hip height – with seedlings, stomp around on varying surfaces, and use a shovel and one’s hands to repeatedly insert seedlings in soil (clay, gravel, duff). It involves much bending, and the loss of fingernails. They encounter cougars, bears, muck, dirt, rain, bugs, rocks, and unspeakably sore muscles.

Gill has quite a bit in common with Christine Byl of Dirt Work: the dirty, male-dominated outdoor environment, the satisfaction of a job well done in a world populated by trees, twigs, green and brown and wild things. Not to overemphasize these two books’ similarities – because each is unique and lovely on its own and neither is derivative – but they both caused the same combined reaction in me, of yearning jealousy and thankfulness that I don’t do that for a living. What can I say. I love to be outside and wish I spent more days and nights there, but I also fret enough over my bad knees with my office job, and I like taking a shower and feeling clean after being dirty. In fact, the question at the front of my mind as I’ve finished this book is: what did clean mean in those years that make up the majority of human history, in which we didn’t have seemingly endless showers at our command?

Dirtiness aside, Gill writes with humor and wisdom and the kind of occasionally zoomed-out perspective that I like in a nature-based memoir. A little research into the history of earth, trees, and people – and the relationships between them – brings her perspective, that of just one person, into focus within a larger picture. And as a bonus, she’s based in the same general region that my parents recently moved to. We have all been learning about the Pacific Northwest – including the trees of the area – and this book offered some welcome insights to that end.

One of the more surprising subjects of Eating Dirt, for me, was the ambiguous or controversial nature of the work. I read “tree-planting tribe” and expected that it would be all green-ness and good; but as I said in my opening synopsis, Gill’s employers are most often logging companies, banking on the profitability of trees, not their inherent worth as trees themselves.

And we got paid… by the very same business that cut the trees down, which canceled the altruism right out of the equation.

Any good they provide, then, is already offset by those who paid for their planting. It’s not as simple as it seems at first glance, and Gill wastes no time in making that point.

Her voice is gritty, and her perspective not so much unapologetic in general as clear-eyed about its dual nature. She’s funny and clearly likeable – like Byl, someone I’d like to know, although I’d be intimidated by both women’s toughness. I enjoyed what I learned about the world from Gill, but also very much value what she’s encouraged me to think about.

Nature has done its big job. Like a ball thrown up in the air, all has risen, crested, and begun its arc back down into earth. After many years spent outside we come to see this – the parabola – as the contour of life itself. It’s the path the sun takes across the sky. The shape of a story. Ours included. Beginning, middle, and end.

Right up there with some of my favorites of the past few years. Recommended.

Rating: 7 red tree voles.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

did not finish: The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai (audio)

Posted on January 16, 2014 by pagesofjulia

borrowerI made it exactly 25 pages into this one (although via audio, which was about 30 minutes, give or take). I remember hearing about The Borrower ever since it came out in 2011, and it sounded real cute: children’s librarian befriends sweet little boy who might be gay and whose censorious, bigoted, ultra-religious parents are a drag; she ends up either liberating or kidnapping him, depending on your angle, and they have adventures together. Nice story, right? In fact, it opens with a story time reading of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, which drives home the fact that this plot has been done before. And that’s no complaint or criticism. As Makkai notes in the voice of her narrator, “you can always count on a librarian for a derivative prose style.” I can dig that little joke (and also fear it is too true).

But things went south quickly after that. Faced with the censorious mother, Lucy (the librarian/narrator) rails that she would never “defy the Constitution” by refusing to check out certain books to a ten-year-old boy at his mother’s request. Now, I sympathize with Lucy’s gut reaction and not with the nasty mother; but I think it’s only respectful to be clear on what the Constitution actually says. The First Amendment protects the right to speech, press and assembly; it most certainly does not protect the right to read anything one likes (unfortunately), and the rights of minors have been curtailed in our courts in favor of their parents’ right to decide for them, with abundant clarity. This use of the “defy the Constitution” argument was outrageous and left me reeling. From a librarian, no less!

Next Lucy notes that

I wasn’t at all concerned about (the boss) enforcing this, or even remembering it a month later. And if she tried to fire me because I’d checked out a book to a patron of the public library, I’d have so much free legal representation within ten minutes that her gin-soaked head would spin.

Well, that’s bold – and naive. If this librarian were fired for checking out a book to a ten-year-old that the child’s mother had expressing forbidden her to check out to him, I think her legal case would be in some doubt; and while it’s conceivable that the ACLU or a similar organization would take the case on, I wouldn’t bet my job on it. I’d put the chances pretty low, in fact. To think that every unjustly-fired, underpaid city employee gets “so much free legal representation within ten minutes” to make heads spin is… idealistic, at best.

And then Lucy snobs out on her profession of librarianship, except oops, it might not be fair to call her a professional because she’s non-degreed and thus in most work environments ineligible to be called a “librarian” at all (this is a subject on which there is some controversy within the field and I don’t want to enter into that now, but I think it does bear on the credibility of this novel): in reference to the cardigan she’s wearing,

I hated that I’d started to look like a librarian. This wasn’t right. In college, I’d smoked things. My first car had angry bumper stickers. I came from a long line of revolutionaries.

Now this made my head spin. Librarians are about as diverse as any other demographic group you’d care to examine, and certainly there are those cardigan-clad shh-ing grannies with buns; but there is also no dearth of tattooed, funny-looking, hipster, punk, revolutionary-as-hell librarians. And you know what? Some of us wear cardigans, too. Despite the disappointingly cartoonish view of librarians represented by these lines, they also made me wonder if Makkai realizes who her audience is for this book: I am assuming that at least in part those attracted by her basic plot would be librarians (I am one), and she just alienated us with her snobby narrator.

So. This review threatens to be as long as the tiny piece of this book that I read; I should stop. I think I’ve effectively communicated that I was disgusted by the 25 pages’ worth that I listened to, and very comfortable turning away towards greener pastures. In fact, I’m now starting a novel by Joe Hill, whose librarian character in NOS4A2 was possibly a little bit of a cariciature in the other direction – with her purple hair and all – but also closer to the librarians I know. So there.

I am not assigning this a number rating after such a brief read but clearly if I did, it would be a low number of my grumbles.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Wizard and Glass by Stephen King (audio)

Posted on January 15, 2014 by pagesofjulia

wizard and glassHow to continue to describe the outrageously imaginative, engrossing masterpiece that is Stephen King’s Dark Tower series? Oh my word.

Wizard and Glass is book 4 and, I think, my favorite so far. We met the gunslinger in book 1; met his three compatriots in book 2; and were reunited with the boy Jake in book 3. As this next installment opens, the ka-tet of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy find themselves in Kansas; but it is a strange, other-worldly Kansas, perhaps parallel to the one we recognize. Along the road, the group stops for the night and Roland tells a story. This telling will fill the vast bulk of the book, so that as in The Wind Through the Keyhole, it’s a story within a story, with the inner one taking top billing.

Roland’s tale is that of his first love, his first adventure and battles as a gunslinger, and the genesis of his quest for the Dark Tower, which is by this point a quest willingly shared by his companions. It’s a great story, what King does best.

Roland begins by referring to the way he won his guns, and his right to be a gunslinger, in a fight against his teacher, Cort. Roland was 14, and his father was angry, and also worried, and sent Roland away along with his two best friends, Cuthbert and Alain. They travel to the back-country town of Hambry, in the barony of Mejis, where they are given a deceptively simple task that immediately complicates. Roland encounters a young woman named Susan and falls in love; their love is (naturally) thwarted by her unwilling role in the intrigue in which Mejis is entwined. Roland, Cuthbert and Alain, assisted by Susan and a deeply likeable local named Sheemie, will end up doing battle with the forces of “the good man” (who is of course bad) in this outer barony; and Roland’s love is doomed.

This story is endlessly moving, and engrossingly suspenseful. There is something sweepingly large and yet entirely believable about the teenage love story of Roland and Susan; and Cuthbert and Alain, who until now have been referred to only obliquely, become fully-developed great friends to the reader as well as to Roland. The reader is every bit as enthralled as Roland’s contemporary ka-tet (Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy) are; and I loved the slight jolt King inserts when Eddie breaks in to ask how Roland could know the story from all angles: what Susan thought, what the witch did when she was alone… this reminds us just when we’re starting to lose ourselves in Roland’s tale, that we’re actually still on the side of the road in Kansas with the new ka-tet, at the same time.

When Roland finishes talking, the five companions continue on the road towards… the emerald city. Genres, and worlds, mash up again when they come to the emerald castle and encounter the Wizard (of Oz?) – he of the book’s title, and we’ll also see the glass for the first time (which played such a role in Roland’s story). At the finish of the book, relatively little has happened to our main characters; they return to following the path of the Beam in search of the Dark Tower. But the wizard does entreat them to abandon their quest, and each in turn gets to articulate that he or she is by Roland’s side by choice now and from now on. The saga continues.

I am reeling; I never wanted this book to end; I reveled in it and rather tore at my hair when I realized I’m still wait-listed at my local library for the next in the series. (The horror!) My former policy of reading series willy-nilly with no respect for their order is gone; I am a purist. Stephen King has reformed me.

Rating: 9 pulses of pink.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Rosarito Beach by M.A. Lawson

Posted on January 9, 2014 by pagesofjulia

A sexy renegade DEA agent’s past resurfaces at the worst possible moment in a new series from (a barely disguised) Mike Lawson.

rosarito

Mike Lawson, creator of the Joe DeMarco thrillers (House Odds et al.), uses the pen name M. A. Lawson to launch a new series, Rosarito Beach, with a new protagonist: DEA agent Kay Hamilton. Hamilton brings a take-no-prisoners attitude to her investigations, and though it’s clear she makes a better field agent than supervisor, she’s assigned to lead a team in Southern California investigating Caesar Olivera, the boss of a major Mexican drug cartel. After arresting the kingpin’s little brother, Tito, Hamilton’s main concern becomes keeping him locked up. Even after Tito is transferred to the brig of a vast Marine base, however, Caesar’s army threatens.

Hamilton dislikes authority figures, enjoys a drink or four, picks fights with every other law enforcement agency in town and knows exactly how to use her good looks and hot body to her advantage. She follows her own personal code, pleased to be beholden to no one except herself, involved with her career and personal pursuits–mainly her sex life–until a mystery from her distant past resurfaces. This new addition to her short list of concerns reorders Hamilton’s priorities and drives her to actions, and crimes, she never thought possible. The DEA fights to keep Tito locked up, the cartel arms itself for action and Hamilton rejects protocol in an accelerating race toward the end game, which concludes with all the fireworks and upheaval a thriller fan craves.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the January 3, 2014 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 5 stiletto heels.

To expand a bit on my review, above: this thriller was suspenseful, had pace and momentum, and kept me interested and engaged. Its fault (and the reason my rating isn’t higher) relates to the caricatures of the characters. Hollywood-style, they were all beautiful, had smokin’-hot bods, and dressed like magazine spreads. Similarly, the hero’s coldly detached interest in sex without strings struck me as unrealistic and a little stereotyped – career-obsessed woman not interested in relationships but able to seduce her way into the most highly-guarded yadda yadda. There was a cartoon element to it, is what I’m saying. On the other hand, though, I stayed up late reading avidly to see what would happen next. So I may have rolled my eyes, but Lawson gets the win in the end.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Writing Is My Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (and a Guide to How You Can Too) by Theo Pauline Nestor

Posted on January 8, 2014 by pagesofjulia

A writer’s journey, written as a guide for aspiring and developing writers.

writingdrink

Theo Pauline Nestor always wanted to be a writer. But she struggled to find confidence and her writing voice for many years, through two kids and several career changes, before publishing How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed, a memoir about her divorce and its aftermath. In Writing Is My Drink, Nestor returns to memoir with tales from her childhood, formative years and journey toward publication, and confessional forays into her parents’ alcoholism and her more embarrassing moments as an aspiring writer. Readers and writers will appreciate nods to Terry Tempest Williams, Natalie Goldberg and Frank McCourt, whom Nestor temporarily confused with her father.

Writing Is My Drink is also part instruction guide. Each chapter finishes with a short “Try This” piece that offers writing exercises, lists to make and concepts to keep in mind. She coaches when to push oneself and when to be forgiving, and shares the sad news that rejection and bad writing are integral parts of publication and good writing. Now an instructor in memoir writing, Nestor is well placed to offer such advice, and despite her convoluted journey–or perhaps because of it–she has a great deal of wisdom to share with her students.

Writing Is My Drink is by turns instructive, funny, poignant and deeply personal. Nestor’s voice is informal and occasionally self-deprecating, but one of the central lessons she has learned and wants to share is that of trusting oneself. Her story will be an inspiration to readers who seek self-expression.

This review originally ran in the December 27, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 stories told sitting on a barstool.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The Murder Code by Steve Mosby

Posted on January 6, 2014 by pagesofjulia

A series of murders force a seasoned detective to reexamine his understanding of evil.

murder code

The Murder Code, British author Steve Mosby’s American debut, opens with the brutal but seemingly straightforward bludgeoning of a young woman on her way home from work. Detective Andrew Hicks immediately looks to her abusive ex, because he knows all murders are committed for reasons–bad reasons maybe, but reasons that make sense at the time to the killer. But when the bodies start piling up–clearly the work of the same hand or, more precisely, the same hammer–Hicks is forced to reconsider his theory. And when he receives a letter from the murderer, Hicks must confront everything he’s understood for years about the reasons people kill each other.

Story lines overlap and tangle tantalizingly in Mosby’s capable hands. The reader glimpses teasing flashes of various characters and their backgrounds before returning to Hicks’s increasingly troubled life. His pregnant wife knows there’s something Hicks isn’t telling her, but doesn’t know what, any more than the reader does. Something disturbing in his past threatens to resurface.

While other sympathetic characters are briefly sketched, Hicks is very much at the heart of this psychological thriller. Mosby expertly spools out and retracts details, keeping the reader breathless with anticipation as the body count rises and Hicks asks himself questions he thought he’d answered long ago. The Murder Code offers not only a surface-level mystery to be solved, but the deeper mystery of how the pieces fit together–and the central question of whether innate evil is real.

This review originally ran in the December 27, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 data points.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Maximum Shelf: The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

Posted on December 26, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on December 18, 2013.

invention of wings
The Invention of Wings opens in 1803, on Sarah Grimké’s 11th birthday. To mark the occasion, her mother gives her an unwanted birthday gift: the awkwardly beribboned 10-year-old Hetty Grimké–Sarah’s very own slave. Sarah is repulsed and tries to free Hetty that very night with a document she draws up herself, but it isn’t that easy for the child of one of Charleston, S.C.’s first families. The two girls grow into womanhood bound together but separated by the chasm of their very different circumstances.

Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees and co-author of Traveling with Pomegranates, chooses to tell this story in first person and to alternate between the voices of Hetty and Sarah–one of many masterful choices that make The Invention of Wings a remarkable read. The name “Hetty” was given by her owners; Hetty is called Handful by her mother, Charlotte, to whom she is devoted. One of the novel’s richest characters, Charlotte tells her daughter only parts of her own past: stories of Handful’s father, who never saw his daughter’s face, and of Charlotte’s own mother, who was brought to Charleston and slavery from Africa when she was a small girl. Charlotte teaches Handful to sew, to make very fine clothes and quilts. This artistry earns them both a relatively privileged place in the household and, importantly, provides a means of recording stories among slaves, for whom literacy was illegal. Charlotte sews her daughter a story quilt, appliqueing squares that tell of her life’s greatest events. This rich storytelling tradition is described in Handful’s passionate voice, which both contrasts with and matches Sarah’s, also passionate, as she experiences limitations of a different sort. An intelligent child encouraged by a father and brother to read books, she harbors dreams of becoming a barrister, which are inevitably dashed against Charleston’s expectations of a young lady. Her inclination to teach slave children to read is likewise reviled, although she succeeds in secret with Handful. Over the years, the two girls share confidences across a wary divide, but guilt and resentment present obstacles to their friendship.

When the girls are still very young, Charlotte extracts a promise from Sarah: that she will free Handful one day. This promise haunts Sarah, who will eventually journey north to escape her stifling family and the peculiar institution she despises. She meets a Quaker man, whose own peculiar religion at first repels her but comes to fascinate and draw her in; this new alliance shapes Sarah’s more independent adult life, and distances her from Handful, who necessarily remains in Charleston. Along with her indubitable younger sister, Nina, Sarah will finally become a renowned (and infamous) activist for abolition and women’s rights. Overcoming a speech impediment that is a literal portrayal of her difficulty articulating her desires, she will slowly, painfully create the independent existence she has always craved. Handful’s fate will, of course, be rather different.

The Invention of Wings is a novel based on fact: the Grimké sisters were real-life abolitionists, and are joined in the historical record by a number of other characters in this novel, including Denmark Vesey, a free black man executed for planning a slave uprising; Lucretia Mott, a Quaker activist for women’s rights and abolition; and Sarah Mapps Douglass, a free black activist and educator. Hetty Grimké, however, left tantalizingly scarce facts: she was given as a gift to Sarah, but disappears shortly thereafter from the historical record. And Charlotte is entirely Kidd’s creation, an intriguing and complex character who tempts the worst of slavery’s brutalities in her search for something better for herself and her family.

Sue Monk Kidd portrays the parallel lives of her two protagonists in sensitive and touching sketches. Readers of her earlier work will recognize strong, sympathetic characters and deft use of nuance. The heart-wrenching nature of Sarah and Handful’s stories lies in the complexity of their relationship: they tend toward friendship, but Sarah’s guilt and Handful’s natural resentment–as when Sarah claims to know how she feels–may prove too wide a gap to bridge. And slave traditions such as the story quilt add a layer of detail informed by Kidd’s extensive research, as well as an emotional depth for Handful and Charlotte.

The Invention of Wings ambitiously tackles a swath of issues, including feminism, abolition, religion, activism and relationships between races and genders. This subject matter might be heavy under another hand, but the historical record of Sarah Grimké’s remarkable life and Kidd’s strengths in narrative and in rendering relationships make for a story that is both thought-provoking and engrossing. Strong female characters, solid roots in history, and the compelling lives of two women the reader deeply cares about make The Invention of Wings a thoughtful, moving tale that ends on a hopeful note.

Rating: 7 squares.

The Invention of Wings was just chosen as Oprah’s new Book Club 2.0 pick. Kidd commented: “I’m thrilled and honored that Oprah Winfrey chose my novel as her new book club selection. After researching and writing The Invention of Wings for the past four years, I can’t tell you how exciting it is to launch the novel with Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.”

Come back tomorrow for my interview with Sue!

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

Posted on December 24, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The Lincoln Lawyer returns to the courtroom to solve a friend’s murder from years past.

gods of guilt

Mickey Haller is back at work in The Gods of Guilt, the fifth Lincoln Lawyer novel from Michael Connelly (also author of the Harry Bosch series). When Andre La Cosse requests Haller’s representation on murder charges, Haller approaches it with weary cynicism about his client’s probable guilt. But then he learns who referred La Cosse to him: the victim, a prostitute Haller represented for years, and whom he thought had left the game. It quickly becomes clear this case is bigger than it looks, involving the DEA and organized crime and stretching back nearly a decade, and that La Cosse may be that rare thing: innocent.

At stake for the Lincoln Lawyer: not only his client’s freedom, but also his relationship with his daughter, who has stopped speaking to him because of the results of an earlier case. The murdered prostitute, an old friend, plays an important role as well; Haller thought he’d saved her, only to find that he may have contributed to her death.

The Gods of Guilt is a gripping courtroom drama with strengths that Connelly’s fans will recognize: fully-wrought, likable characters, absorbing action, sympathetic relationships and the exploration of right and wrong and the gray areas in between. The title refers to Haller’s understanding of jury members: that they are gods sitting in judgment of guilt and innocence. These gods of guilt also sit in judgment of Haller’s own choices, and The Gods of Guilt reflects Connelly’s sensitive handling of morality and consequences.

This review originally ran in the December 17, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 men in hats.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

The Outermost House by Henry Beston

Posted on December 23, 2013 by pagesofjulia

photo (1)This book came to me recommended by Rachel Carson. I’m relatively sure that I came up with this title in my reading of On a Farther Shore, a recent biography of the author of Silent Spring. And by that convoluted path, here we are.

The first thing that struck me about The Outermost House, and certainly the most striking overall, is its similarity to Thoreau’s Walden. I have been describing it as “Walden Pond on Cape Cod.” Henry Beston wrote this book in 1928 about a year he spent, rather by accident, on the island; he had a small, humble cabin constructed on a remote dune for the purpose of visiting more often, and moved in in the fall, thinking he’d be there only a matter of weeks but staying a full year. (My edition also contains a new foreword from 1949.) That Thoreau would be well-known to Beston, his literary descendant of just a few decades in the same region, is clear, even if he weren’t mentioned by name around page 100. The similarities are many (more below), but I don’t mean that to take away from Beston’s work. I think Walden bears some imitation, and Cape Cod is different enough from the Concord locale to justify its own study.

The next thing that struck me is Beston’s comfortable observation that, although “man” has altered & damaged the world mightily, “Nature” is overall impervious, and Cape Cod in specific remains untouched. I congratulate Beston that in 1928 (and ’49) he was able to feel such confidence. Today, sadly, he would not.

Like Thoreau, Beston describes his home in some detail, for its details are hugely relevant to his year on the outer beach. Like Thoreau, he sees his fire as a friend and companion, a major force in withstanding solitude. And like Thoreau, he overstates that solitude, first writing of how very, very alone he was – how very rare was a human face in his year out there in the wild – and in the next breath, shamelessly, noting that he saw his Coast Guard buddies from up the beach almost daily, and walked into town for groceries once or twice a week. Having come to terms with this dissonance in Walden, I just smiled at it. Solitude is clearly relative, and he’s enjoyed far more than I have experimented with.

The Outermost House is perhaps most lyrical and pensive in its contemplation of bird life and waves, and equally thoughtful in its treatment of the Cape Cod locals and the solidarity they feel with wrecked vessels on its shore. He seems to refer to a “god,” although not by name; he is very concerned with “man”‘s relationship to Nature (always the capital N), and how sick we get when we disconnect. These themes are timeless and not dated at all.

For those who enjoyed Walden, this will undoubtedly be a great pleasure. If anything, Beston is less pretentious and self-congratulatory than Thoreau was. His descriptions of the migratory birds of Cape Cod’s seasons are lovely and, I imagine, useful for scientists & natural historians. It’s well-written, short (under 200 pages), and solid.

I will let Beston himself close, with a few of my favorite lines.

Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean – their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals.

…today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.

Rating: 6 tseeps.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »