A Complicated Kindness

My Mom's best and oldest friend is part of a book club, and over the last couple of years I have begun looking to her for suggestions. She was the one who introduced me to Water for Elephants and Room, both of which have become favourite reads, so when we were over for Christmas eve dinner, I began perusing her bookshelves for some ideas. One of the first ones that she handed me was A Complicated Kindness, written by the award wining Canadian author Miriam Toews, and this weeks book. Told with exquisite tone, Toews seduces the reader with her tenderness, astute observation and piquant humour. This novel captures the struggles of a family and its individuals in a fresh, wondrous style, in a voice both defiant and vulnerable. Toews offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love. But despite this complexity of family tensions, much of A Complicated Kindness is pleasantly plotless. The looseness of Nomi's worldview, the sometimes blurry nonfocus of it, the unexpected sideways humour, make this book the beautiful and bitter little masterpiece it is. This searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.

"We’re Mennonites. After Dukhobors who show up naked in court we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager. Five hundred years ago in Europe a man named Menno Simons set off to do his own peculiar religious thing and he and his followers were beaten up and killed or forced to conform all over Holland, Poland, and Russia until they, at least some of them, finally landed right here where I sit. Imagine the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking, temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock’n’roll, having sex for fun, swimming, makeup, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o’clock. That was Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno."

In this stunning, insightful, and irreverent coming-of-age novel, Toews balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager, whose family is trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion, and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. A laconic and restless sixteen year old Nomi rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community where nothing happens with mesmerizing authenticity, and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family. "Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing" Nomi explains. As the novel begins, Nomi struggles to cope with the back-to-back departures three years earlier of Tash, her beautiful and mouthy sister who "was so earmarked for damnation it wasn't even funny", and Trudie, her warm and spirited mother. When Tash left town, she tried to persuade Nomi to leave their mixed-up family too. ''Walk away,'' she commanded. ''What have I taught you?'' But Nomi was not, and is not, the type to cut and run. ''You taught me,'' she thinks to herself, ''that some people can leave and some can't and those who can will always be infinitely cooler than those who can't and I'm one of the ones who can't because you're one of the ones who did and there's this old guy in a wool suit sitting in an empty house who has no one but me now thank you very, very, very much.''


Nomi lives with her gentle, uncommunicative father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless and adrift schoolteacher whose love is unconditional but whose parenting skills amount to benign neglect. Father and daughter deal with their losses in very different ways. Ray, a committed elder of the church, seeks to create an artificial sense of order by reorganizing the city dump late at night. Nomi, on the other hand, favours chaos as she plunges into bittersweet memory and grapples with teenage life in a "kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions." Once a "curious, hopeful child" Nomi now relies on biting humor as her life spins out of control—she stops attending school, shaves her head and wanders around in a marijuana-induced haze. Still, she and Ray are linked in a tender, if fragile, partnership as each slips into despair, and live in a limbo of unanswered questions.


There is so much that’s accomplished and fine. The momentum of the narrative, the quality of the storytelling, the startling images, the unsentimental prose, the poignant character interactions, the brilliant rendering of a time and place, the observant, cataloguing eye of the writer, her great grace. But if I had to name Miriam Toews’s crowning achievement, it would be the creation of Nomi Nickel, who deserves to take her place beside Daisy Goodwill Flett, Pi Patel and Hagar Shipley as a brilliantly realized character for whom the reader comes to love.

"This town is so severe. And silent. It makes me crazy, the silence. I wonder if a person can die from it. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. Silentium. People here just can’t wait to die, it seems. It’s the main event. The only reason we’re not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. My guidance counsellor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her. Oh, that’s rich, she said. That’s rich. . ."

Toews embodies Nomi's voice with such an authentic and manic charm that it's hard not to fall in love with her. Her portrayal of teenage angst, Mennonite-style, is hilarious. Nomi’s a natural dissident, with the kind of personality that can’t help but expose hypocrisy and fear – a girl fated to overturn rocks, uncovering hissing toads. While scraping away the appearances in her small town, she offers what she finds in a voice that is wry, vulnerable, sacrilegious and, best of all, devastatingly funny.


In novel full of original characters, Toews has created a feisty but appealing young heroine. As an indictument against religious fundamentalism, A Complicated Kindness is timely. As a commentary on character it is fresh and inventive, and as storytelling it is first rate. Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear-eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both.


A Complicated Kindness works its way up to a powerful ending through the accumulation of anecdote and detail. Toew’s sense of the absurd works brilliantly to expose the hypocrisy of fundamentalist kindness, a love in reality all too conditional. A Complicated Kindness, at its core, is a depiction of the battle between hope and despair. Yet along the way we are treated to an unforgettable summer with a heroine who loses everything but is ultimately able to hold on to life, to a sense of herself, and to maintain her courage and optimism In the face of a world without any guaranteed happy endings.

No Great Mischief

Family is one of the most important things to me, for it is our families that we share and celebrate all of the joys and tragedies life has to offer. So when I found this weeks book I knew I would enjoy it. No Great Mischief, written by Canadian author Alistair MacLead, is an intricate tale of truth about people who care for one another and for the living world around them. This novel is pervaded by humour and colour, intensely vivid, with enduring truths couched in pellucid prose. It speaks of great loves and tragic losses that will move readers in every corner of the world.


No Great Mischief tells the sprawling story of one Scottish clan, the MacDonalds, who come to Cape Breton from Scotland in the 18th century and struggle valiantly to maintain their pride and identity up through the end of the millennium. The narrative is in the hands of a rather staid Ontario orthodontist, Alexander MacDonald, who guides us through his family’s mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in “the land of trees,” where his descendents became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. What emanates is a loving retrieval of a people's native strategy of survival through history and across a changing landscape. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, exile, and of the blood ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came.


From the moment Alexander MacDonald sets out along Highway 3 to visit his alcoholic brother, this sturdily textured debut novel never hesitates or meanders. There are plenty of diverse characters who possess strength and depth, and continue to linger in your mind. The vivid and changing scenes, and gripping incidents are laced with grace and wisdom. Four generations of MacDonalds move through the pages of this book, from the first to arrive in Cape Breton from Scotland to narrator Alexander and his siblings. MacLeod, who has been heralded in his native Canada as a master of the short story, exhibits a remarkable ability to create and handle an intricate plot that goes back and forth between past and present. Though sentimentality plays a considerable part in the unfolding of the drama, MacLeod's clever writing disciplines and subdues it.


Generations after their forebears went into exile, the MacDonalds still face seemingly unmitigated hardships and cruelties of life. But, like all the clansman, they are sustained by a family history that seems to run through their veins. The MacDonalds find strength and support in their shared history, the resurrection of their Gaelic heritage, and their family creed: "take care of your blood". It's through these lovingly recounted stories-wildly comic or heartbreakingly tragic-that we discover the hope against hope upon which every family must sometimes rely.


The novel's title quotes General Wolfe, who had fought against the MacDonalds in an earlier conflict but relied on them to take the Plains of Abraham: 'They are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall.' Wolfe regarded the Highlanders as his secret enemies, and was furious at their insistence on carrying their wounded from the field when ordered to retreat. Here in the public record are themes that the book explores more domestically: a self-sacrificial code of honour, and the betrayal that lies in wait for it.


This is a simply great novel. The simplicity lies in the device of the plot. The greatness lies in its scope, imagination, and execution. MacLead's message beguiles, his prose captivates, and his narrative never loosens a deceptively gentle grip. MacLeod’s descriptions are remarkable, and you will find scenes from this majestic novel burned into your mind forever.

Tinkers

Some weeks I have an idea of a book I want to read, perhaps one that I have been noticing or a recommendation from someone, and sometimes, as is the case with this week, I have no idea what I am going to leave the bookstore with. I'm not sure what drew me to pick up Tinkers, written by Paul Harding, but after reading the summary, I realized that the content of the novel was like nothing that I had read about before, and felt compelled to leave the store, book in tow. Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation to the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. It is spellbinding, written with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense.

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.

As time collapses into memory, George Washington Crosby travels deep into his past where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. George repairs clocks for a living, and as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room, "right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners" he revisits his turbulent childhood as the oldest son of an epileptic smalltime traveling salesman. The descriptions of the father's epilepsy and the cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure are stunning, and the household's sadness permeates the narrative as George returns to more melancholy scenes. In Harding’s skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories, ‘showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.’


A tinker is a mender, and in Harding’s spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics, but the living world was a mystery, as it still is, as it always will be. And so in this rhapsodic novel of impending death, Harding considers humankind’s contrary desires to conquer the “imps of disorder” and to be one with life, fully meshed within the great glimmering web.


Harding’s interest is in the universalities: nature and time and the murky character of memory. The small, important recollections are rendered with an exactitude that is poetic. This is a book so meticulously assembled that vocabulary choices like “craquelure” and “scrieved” – far from seeming pretentious – serve as reminders of how precise and powerful a tool good English can be. The prose are lyrical and specific, making this novel a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the clock has barely a tick or two left and we really can’t go anywhere at all. It is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship.

"Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets. There was also the ring in Howard Crosby's ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy."

Harding's language dazzles whether he's describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. The most memorable parts of this novel may be the depiction of a nineteenth-century landscape complete with mule-drawn carts and “frozen wood so brittle that it rang when you split it.” Tinkers is a finely crafted piece of work by a writer who clearly respects his own trade.

"Now the horologist looks upon an open-faced, fairy-book contraption; gears lean to and fro like a lazy machine in a dream. The universe's time cannot be marked thusly. Such a crooked and flimsy device could only keep the fantastic hours of unruly ghosts." 

At only a very brief 192 pages, it still packs an emotional punch that books of three times its length often lack. It's a novel that you'll want to savor for its stunning yet economical use of language, for its descriptions of nature, of illness and health, and for its profound understanding of humanity's deepest needs and desires for family and home. I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience, yet Harding is in such control of his material that it never devolves into mushiness or becomes maudlin.


Tinkers is a novel rich in close observation, short in dialogue and event. While normally this would be a cloying combination, the sharp richness of Harding’s language and the precision of his descriptions makes the novel both transfixing and compelling. Harding brings a clarity to the work which sets it clearly apart. This is underscored, resoundingly, by the deep emotional effect of the novel’s closing pages, a moment of grace, of synchronicity, of father and son, which will break your heart. Tinkers confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls, and is cumulatively moving because it is woven together into the single quilt of our humanity.

"Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely..." 

The Imperfectionists

"The Internet is to news, what car horns are to music."

This weeks book is one that I have had in the back of my mind for a little while. The first thing that caught my attention was the title, The Imperfectionists. I am someone that always strived for perfection, whether it was school projects, or cooking, I wanted them to fulfill my idea of perfection. But I have come to learn that sometimes it's when we let loose and are completely spontaneous that we have the most memorable experiences. When I saw the title I was curious to read deft stories about delectable, difficult characters, who were living messy, impulsive lives, and witness as they worked through trails and triumphs. This was a rich, thrilling book that is both a love letter to and epitaph for the newspaper world. Rachman’s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular. The Imperfectionists is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.


Printing presses whirr, ashtrays smolder, and the endearing complexity of humanity plays out in Tom Rachman's debut novel, The Imperfectionists. Set against the backdrop of a fictional English-language newspaper based in Rome, it begins as a celebration of the beloved and endangered role of newspapers and the original 24/7 news cycle. Yet Rachman pushes beyond nostalgia by crafting an apologue that better resembles a modern-day Dubliners than a Mad Men exploration of the halcyon past. The chaos of the newsroom becomes a stage for characters unified by a common thread of circumstance, with each chapter presenting an affecting look into the life of a different player. From the comically overmatched greenhorn to the forsaken foreign correspondent, we suffer through the painful heartbreaks of unexpected tragedy and struggle to stifle our laughter in the face of well-intentioned blunders. This cacophony of emotion blends into a single voice, as the depiction of a paper deemed a "daily report on the idiocy and the brilliance of the species" becomes more about the disillusion in everyday life than the dissolution of an industry.


Among the cast is Lloyd Burko, a past-his-prime reporter, married four times, alienated from all his children except one, whom he’s about to betray as a source, only to find. . . . Well, I won’t give that away, but it’s quite something. Then there’s Arthur Gopal, a sad-sack obituary writer devoted to his young daughter, Pickle. He’s sent off to Switzerland to interview a dying feminist intellectual. During a break, he switches on his cellphone to find 26 missed calls. His life is about to change.


Herman Cohen is the paper’s corrections editor, the grammarian and style cop indispensable to any newspaper. He writes thunderous, generally ignored memos about impermissible acronyms, solecisms and misspellings like “Sadism Hussein.” You feel his pain when Tony Blair is included on the newspaper’s list of “recently deceased Japanese dignitaries.” “He glances at the sorry trio of copy editors before him: Dave Belling, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wears a white ponytail — what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct. What is the value in remonstrating with such a feckless triumvirate?”


Kathleen Solson, the editor in chief, has just discovered that her ne’er-do-well husband is cheating on her. (There are lots of ne’er-do-wells in Rachman’s novel, making one wonder: Is this so very common among newspaper folk?) Kathleen is looking to rekindle an old romance with an Italian, now married and a government press flack: “Here he is, temples graying, eyes bagged, slightly handsome but slightly jowly, wearing the sleepy surrender of the family man.”


The funniest section, which comes off as a cross between Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” and a Hunter S. Thompson “Fear and Loathing” adventure, concerns the paper’s helpless young Cairo stringer, Winston Cheung, whose life is hilariously usurped by a fast-talking, on-the-make war correspondent.


Ruby Zaga, the copy editor, is a paranoid Miss Lonely hearts who always checks into a hotel on New Year’s Eve so she can pretend to be a stranded American business traveler rather than a dateless 40-something with no prospects. She hates her job and is terrified she’s about to be fired. She drunk-dials the Italian flack with whom her boss is trying to reconnect. Bad move, Ruby! But Rachman has a way of getting the reader to root for his losers.


Craig Menzies, the news editor, is informed one day that an e-mail photo of his much younger girlfriend, Annika, naked with another man, has been sent to everyone on the staff. He confronts Annika, who says she feels terrible about it all, but now she (and thus he) faces the prospect of being sued by the man in the picture — for breach of contract because she had promised to buy an apartment with him. Does Italian law actually permit spurned lovers to sue? How do you say in Italian, “Is this a great country, or what?”


One of the strangest but most arresting characters, Ornella de Monterecchi, is the Italian press officer’s mother. A kind of Miss Havisham with obsessive- compulsive disorder, she lives alone amid a mountain of clutter consisting of every issue of the paper from the late 1970s to the present day. These she insists on reading in sequence. The current date might be Feb. 18, 2007, but in her world, it’s April 23, 1994. When she runs into one of the staffers, she complains about his obituary of Richard Nixon, leaving him to scratch his head. Ornella, however, is no mere caricature. There is, as with Miss Havisham, a terrible personal tragedy to explain her bizarre existence.


The most Roald Dahl-esque episode is granted to Abbey Pinnola, the paper’s chief financial officer. Abbey, whose job includes sacking the paper’s employees, finds herself on a plane en route to Atlanta, headquarters of the now troubled Ott Group, seated next to a man she’s just canned. I won’t say more, other than that the end of her story provides that sudden intake of breath reminiscent of Dahl at his sang-froid-est.

"What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales. My past- it doesn't feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There's that  line of Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.' That's quite right. wWe enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories." 

After reading this paragraph something went off in my head like a light bulb. It was probably something that was already there on a subconscious level, or something so obvious that I never really paid it much attention. Great authors need to have such a deep understanding on a wide variety of topics in order to create such diverse characters, plots, and ideas. Not only that, but they need to breathe so much life into them that they seem to be real, and the fact the Rachman can do this with so many characters in one work of literature is truly remarkable.

This book is filled with gorgeous writing, jolts of insight and narrative surprises that feel both unexpected and inevitable. Rachman leaves little doubt that he's writing what he knows well. His novel is sprinkled with hard-won observations such as that “news' is often a polite way of saying 'editor's whim' ” and “journalism is a bunch of dorks pretending to be alpha males.” And yet even someone whose familiarity with newsrooms doesn't extend beyond the work of Clark Kent and Peter Parker will recognize these characters.

Little Bee

"... a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must all see scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived."

I think that I am generally a curious person. I like to know what's going on and why, and I dig for answers when I have questions. While browsing in the bookstore this week, I picked up the book Little Bee, written by Chris Cleave. The summary wasn't so much of a summary, as an enticing invitation to curious people like me. It stated "We don' want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it." How could I not read it? Little Bee is a very special book indeed. With one of the most vividly memorable and provocative character, this novel is profound, deeply moving and yet light in touch, it explores the nature of loss, hope, love and identity with atrocity its backdrop. Cleave unfurls a haunting work of human triumph and the perils of globalization where girls like Little Bee are just silhouettes, expendable products in a world that is shifting and changing.


Some 50 years ago, the region near Nigeria’s Atlantic coast provided the setting for Chinua Achebe’s haunting novel of a world torn asunder by the vicissitudes of Anglo-imperial expansion. To capture the tragedy of colonialism in that account, “Things Fall Apart,” Achebe looked to Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” for inspiration: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”


The drowning of innocence and the anarchic consequences of the global reach are hardly confined to Achebe’s Nigeria of yesteryear or to the colonial underbelly of Britain’s “civilizing” mission. The story of globalization is a centuries-old account of historical interconnections shaped by exploitation, despair and, at times, moral conscience and optimism. Chris Cleave, a columnist for The Guardian, puts a modern-day spin on Achebe’s concerns with his immensely readable and moving second novel.


While the pretext of Little Bee initially seems contrived — two strangers, a British woman and a Nigerian girl, meet on a lonely African beach and become inextricably bound through the horror imprinted on their encounter — its impact is hardly shallow. Rather than focusing on post-colonial guilt or African angst, Cleave uses his emotionally charged narrative to challenge his readers’ conceptions of civility, of ethical choice.


Sarah O’Rourke might appear to be an insipid character, with her career at a British magazine, her Batman-costumed young son, her uninspiring lover and her gentrified Surrey lifestyle. When juxtaposed with the Nigerian refugee called Little Bee — whom we first meet behind the razor wire of a British immigration center — Sarah is unsympathetic, even tiresome. But that impression changes partway through the novel when a flashback to Africa reveals her fortitude. There, it is Sarah, rather than her husband, Andrew, who gallantly comes to Little Bee’s rescue. Sarah must also pick up the pieces after Andrew’s descent from third-world cowardice into first-world madness.


Yet the character and voice of Little Bee reveal Cleave at his finest. As she navigates the dehumanizing indifference of immigration detention with her self-taught Queen’s English, this young refugee tugs at the reader’s conscience. For two years, she has avoided the “ravenous eyes” of the camp’s men with her purposefully mismatched charity-box clothes, unwashed skin and bound breasts. Eventually, she turns up, illegally, at the O’Rourkes’ home in Kingston-upon-Thames. In the weeks that follow, the lives of Little Bee and Sarah will be woven into a web in which disparate worlds can be connected in the unlikeliest fashion.


The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state.


London, with its dizzying abundance and multiculturalism, looks like a parallel universe when compared with the impoverished Nigerian village where Little Bee grew up. Surely the locals would chide, “Little miss been-to is making up her tales again,” were she ever to return to what remains of her birthplace. Yet it’s this same village that instilled in her the skills and values needed to help her navigate toward her own scarred survival.


Like Little Bee, Sarah is a survivor. But the lessons of the past are not enough to steer either woman to safety. Instead, in a world full of turpitude and injustice, it is their bold, impulsive choices that challenge the inevitability of despair, transforming a political novel into an affecting story of human triumph.


In the first few pages I fell in love with Cleaves vast narrative and storytelling abilities. The images that he created for me were so detailed and complete. "So, I am a refugee, and I get lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that flout across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower that half drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright African colors and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?"


This novels greatest strength is the squeamishly raw candor of its protagonist, Little Bee. Every now and then, you come across a character in a book whose personality is so salient, and whose story carries such devastating emotional force, it’s as if she becomes a fixed part of your consciousness. Besides sharp, witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters’ ethical struggles, Little Bee delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilized decency.


Cleave masterfully veers quickly between humor and horror, a very dark, biting humor to be sure, but usually skating along a thin blade of irony, the kind to make you laugh with a little grimace. "I think my ideal man would speak many languages... He could speak with any person, even the soldiers, and if there was violence in their heart he could change it. He would not have to fight, do you see? Maybe he would not be handsome, but would be beautiful when he spoke. He would be very kind, even if you burned his food because you were laughing and talking with your girlfriends instead of watching the cooking. He would just say, Ah, never mind... Forgive me, but your ideal man, he don't sound very rill-istic." "It was a song called We Are The Champions by a British music band called Queen... One time he showed me a picture of the band... One of the musicians in the picture, he had a lot of hair. It was black with tight curls and it sat on the top of his head like a heavy weight and it went right down the back of his neck to his shoulders. I understands fashion in your language, but this hair did not look like fashion... It looked like a punishment."


Again, I am amazed at the connections between books. "He'd been awake all night writing an opinion piece about the middle east, which was a region he had never visited and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was fighting Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and Afghanistan, and my Husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of summer where no one took their costume off." Having read Three Cups of Tea, and Infidel, it's so interesting to see the different views on the same subject, in this case, the war with the Middle East.


Sequined with lustrous turns of phrase, spanning two continents and driven by real-life global concerns, what elevates this novel even further is Cleave’s forceful call for all of us, the floating masses of a globalized, socially isolating modern world, to look after one other.

Room

This week I was the mood for another novel. One of my Moms lifelong friends is part of a book club, and I often hear second hand about some of her favorite reads, including Water for Elephants and The Book of Negroes. One afternoon, my Mom came home telling my about this book her friend was reading called Room. It sounded intriguing, and having enjoyed her previous recommendations I picked it up the next day. Written by Emma Donoghue, Room is inspired by the Josef Fritz case, in which an Austrian man locked his daughter in the basement for 24 years. It is gripping, claustrophobic, and fantastically evocative. As a thriller and love story of sorts, Donoghue's novel is a fantastic story, imaginative, unique and beautifully written, and a stunning achievement.


In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way, he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time.


I was hooked upon reading the first paragraph, 'Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. "Was I minus numbers?"'


Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. As a narrator, five-year-old Jack is tremendously enticing as he faces a whole new world of unfamiliarity and fear. Earnest and bright, he is remarkably adaptable, and provides commentary that is lushly intricate. His mother, kidnapped seven years earlier while walking through her college campus at age 19, has created a world for her son that is rich in play and learning, all the while anticipating the day they might make their “great escape.” This environment has provided Jack with an impressive vocabulary, though his advanced learning is juxtaposed with the natural innocence and bewilderment of a small child. The result is a story told through a child’s eyes, but in language that is endearing rather than tiresome.


The character of Ma, while not the main voice, is nevertheless whole. Donoghue employs Jack’s descriptions of her moods, conversations, and thoughts to paint a picture of a woman struggling to keep it together for the sake of her child, while also fighting to become the person she once was and might be again, if circumstances allow.

For the first couple chapters I found the narrative a little hard to read. With Jack as the narrator, it was a little choppy. But like any character, once I got used to the way he talked, the narration became an important part of creating a memorable and emotionally compelling story. This was an incredible novel, and another look into the intricacies of relationships and survival. Donoghue has produced a novel that is sure to stay in the minds of readers for years to come.

"I was gripped by Room as soon as I discerned its startling premise. It is an almost macabre and completely accomplished novel, one that places Emma Donoghue in the company of writers such as Hilary Mantel and Muriel Spark -- writers who address evil in their works without flinching. Room is, however, leavened by one of the most convincing portrayals of love I have come across in literature or in the world outside it. Room deserves a wide readership. It should inspire a dialogue among its readers about how a life -- how all of our lives -- can be redeemed through the telling of stories, and through ingenuity, loyalty, bravery, hope and love."

Secret Daughter

After my recent move, I made a rare Coscto run to stock up on some of my essentials. Laundry detergent, tea, and hummas, as well as some unnecessary items like cutting boards and popcorn machines. Needing to get a new book, and wanting to save myself a trip, I found myself circling the long and fully stocked book table at Costco. I picked books up, read summaries, continually replacing the ones in my hands with different ones down the line, until I came to this weeks choice, Secret Daughter. First time author, Shilpi Somaya Gowda, brings to life two opposing but heart rending concerns to jump start her novel, infertility for North American women and the disregard for girls in India. This compelling story is an intimate portrait of family, culture, and the importance of understanding your heritage, and it gracefully weaves together the transcending relationships between a mother and her child.


On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to Asha. But in a culture that favours sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son. Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to adopt a child after making the wrenching discovery that she will never have one of her own. When she and her husband Krishnan see a photo of baby Asha from a Mumbai orphanage, they are overwhelmed with emotion for her. Somer knows life will change with the adoption, but is convinced that the love they already feel will overcome all obstacles. Interweaving the stories of Kavita, Somer, and the child that binds both of their destinies, Secret Daughter poignantly explores issues of culture and belonging. Moving between two worlds and two families, one struggling to survive in the fetid slums of Mumbai, the other grappling to forge a cohesive family despite their diverging cultural identities, this powerful debut novel explores the emotional terrain of motherhood, loss, identity, and love.


On the surface, this is the story of a child born in terrible circumstances, the twist of fate that changes her life, and her adolescent search for self that creates ripples with the people who surround her. Yet there are many more layers to this novel. There is great complexity in the relationships between parent and child, and husband and wife, making them both realistic and heartbreaking. There are the questions of class, education, gender and culture in our globalized society, so beautifully illustrated through two seemingly opposite families. The characters are imperfect, but they all learn and grow through their experiences.


Gowda does a wonderful job of showing the cultural discrepancies of Indian life, its diametrically polar aspects. Indians live either in dire poverty or with great wealth. The slums are vividly drawn, such that you can almost smell, touch and taste the florid poverty, pulling us deep into a culture that most of us have only glimpsed. There is a much larger population of adult men than women in India and the fact that female children are killed at birth or aborted is shown as a routine event in the lives of the poor. Though India is the seat of great advancements in technology, many people live without electricity or basic utilities. Education is valued highly but the poor have little access to it. Children from poor families either work at home in caretaking roles or are on the streets begging. It is rare that a poor Indian child gets to go to school.


This is an intelligent and vibrant novel. With lyrical prose, and clear, precise details, the Two India's are richly portrayed. The emotion of the characters was palpable and thoughtfully crafted, with every emotional reaction garnered from the reader, and the Indian terms sprinkled throughout the pages gave it a feeling of authenticity, without distracting from the story. Gowda's writing is powerful, her prose poetic, and the end result an emotional read.


I always love when you get a deeper insight into yourself, or even better, someone in your life from reading a book or watching a movie. It seems these little revelations arise when you are least expecting them, and the usually come from an unexpected source. My Mom was adopted, and although I have often heard her wonder aloud where she gets her curly hair, or the same nose that I have inherited, I never really understood what it would be like to not know your birth parents, or the emotions that would arise knowing you were given up for adoption. This novel gave me a small glimpse into that alien world I never never been able to understand before.

The Bishop Man

As I am challenging myself this year to read books of many different topics and ideas, I was drawn to this weeks books, This Bishop's Man, for it reveals a topic I am not altogether familiar with. Written by investigative journalist, Linden MacIntyre, and winner of the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize, this is an unforgettable novel, a searing indictment of the Catholic church, and complex character study of a deeply conflicted man at the precipice of his life. Above all, it's a great read – a page-turner which renders existential questions about personal responsibility into fodder fit for a thriller, and which takes language and form seriously.


Father Duncan MacAskill known to fellow priests as the "Exorcist", plays a special and notorious role as clean-up man for the Bishop of Antigonish, as he has a talent for coolly reassigning deviant priests to protect the church's various infallible positions, while ensuring minimal fuss from victims and their families. It has been a lonely vocation, but MacAskill is generally satisfied that his work is a necessary defense of the church. All this changes however, when lawyers and a policeman snoop too close for the bishop's comfort, and MacAskill is assigned a parish in the remote Cape Breton community of Creignish, his hometown, and told to wait it out. While wrestling with his own demons, MacAskill encounters a troubled young man who appears to be the victim of a notorious priest. Finding it hard to disengage as he becomes obsessed with his own chance connections to the tragedy – his role in exiling the priest, his familial ties to the victim and his affiliations with the church – he is determined to help this man, regardless of the consequences for the church, and his subsequent investigation takes him on a sordid and surprising path. As a native Cape Bretoner himself, MacIntyre brings the region and its residents vividly to life, while the book aches with details that are both rational and emotional.


Returning home is a rich theme for fiction and is always somehow more rich when it concerns places such as Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, where the intricacies of family trees really do matter. MacAskill not only becomes reacquainted with the countryside of his youth, but discovers that he is related to almost everyone there, which makes impartiality towards his parishioners virtually impossible. Throughout the chapters, we learn that MacAskill struggles with many things, including an abusive father, loneliness, his own vicarious liability, and alcoholism. “They say drinking alone is a bad sign. But what if you’re always alone? What if solitude is the norm?” But despite his own celibacy and sobriety issues, MacAskill is the closest thing to a hero within the pages of this novel.

“The future has no substance until it turns the corner into history.”  

The Bishop’s Man is a story told in spirals, as we twist and turn through past and present fluidly, giving us a clearer picture of the events that can become cloudy through space and time. I found this style intriguing, but also confusing at times, as there was nothing as far as change in style or tense to determine exactly what state of time was being narrated. However, by the end of the final pages, all of MacAskill's stories and memories wove to a combined conclusion. I think that overall, the narrative was trying to reproduce someone remembering, and maybe that's why it's not quite in chronological order; certain events stand out more than others or float to the surface faster than others in real memory.


A brave novel, conceived and written with impressive delicacy and understanding. Despite being a work of fiction, The Bishop’s Man has the ring of truth, as MacIntyre writes with great authority. The past few decades have seen a stream of stories about church sex abuse scandals in Canada, the U.S., and Ireland, but instead of writing a novel to showcase those issues, MacIntyre uses those scandals as a springboard to analyze other, perhaps deeper issues. Though the sexual abuse is a central theme, it is not the center of the story, Father MacAskill is. It’s his life we’re looking at, his struggles, his character. The other issues are there, and dealt with with care, but this is not MacIntyre building a prop character in order to sermonize. Father MacAskill, with all of his hope and melancholy, remains ambiguous to us as well as to himself, allowing us to delve into the issues ourselves.


This book does not condemn or blame, it simply acknowledges that ugly things happen and people try to deal with those realities in the best ways they can, not sure if they're right or wrong. Especially when there is no right action. I love that this book just lays it out there so realistically.


It is by way of these happenings that we are presented with brutally honest characters living lives of deceit and despair. These tragically flawed people are human in their beastliness, conflicted, damaged, and eternally struggling to break the vicious cycle of pain and suffering. This book demonstrates the power of subtlety. Nothing is overt, everything is implicit. It's so much more reflective of life -- how often do we name horrors, but instead we speak in code and leave ugliness unspoken, partly as a way of dealing with it?


“The bay is flat, endless pewter beneath the rising moon.” Amidst the madness and injustice, we pause to take in the haunting and beautiful descriptions of small towns, where you can hear the fiddle and smell the sea salt lifting off the page. MacIntyre has proven to be an adoring poet in his love of the East coast and of the Gaelic and English languages. His words are profound and emotive, and I look forward to picking up his other novels in the hopes of more of the same.

The White Tiger

A couple weeks ago, while picking out Mister Pip from the bestseller shelf, I discovered a few other books of interest, including Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger. The story is a funny and imaginative tour of a side of India not often highlighted in fiction. In refusing to wallow in superficial exoticism or South Asian family tensions, The White Tiger finds its own path to multifaceted success. It echoes masterpieces of resistance and oppression, and contains passages of startling beauty, making it both a riveting existential crime story, and an expose of social injustice.


"Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along". Balram is from the Darkness, a region deep in the heartland, where India's downtrodden and unlucky are destined to rot, where brutal landlords hold sway, children are pulled out of school into indentured servitude, and elections are routinely bought and sold. However, after being hired as a driver for a wealthy landlord, he manages to escape this undesirable place and move to Dali. From behind the wheel of the Honda City car, Balram's new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly, barter for girls, drink cheap liquor, and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink English liquor, and play their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles. He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can perceive.


Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches and the call centers, the prostitutes and the worshipers, the ancient and Internet cultures, the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is almost impossible, the white tiger. "And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem -- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations".


Balram's appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations are laced both with a sardonic wit and a trace of sadness. Despite his scapegrace behavior and racist convictions, he somehow manages to win the reader over.


Adiga's existential and crude prose animates the battle between India's wealthy and poor as Balram suffers degrading treatment at the hands of his employers, or, more appropriately, masters. Balram is a clever and resourceful narrator with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to readers, even as he rails about corruption, allows himself to be defiled by his bosses, spews coarse invective and eventually profits from moral ambiguity and outright criminality. It's the perfect antidote to lyrical India.


The White Tiger is a vivid and penetrating piece of social commentary, attuned to the inequalities that persist despite India’s new prosperity and compromise modern India. It's a coruscating critique of contemporary rural India, but the real power of this book comes from its total lack of sentimentality and the consequent realism it thus manages.


The White Tiger is compelling, angry, and darkly humorous. Told with ambition, scope, and narrative genius, it has a mischief and personality all its own. It is amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, making it an unexpected and compelling journey into a new India.


I will hardly ever say no to reading a new book, however there are few that have made an everlasting impression, forcing me to read them over and over again. I must say, that although I found this book interesting, and am glad to have read it, it is not one that I will hold close to my heart. It kept me engaged throughout the chapters and the progression of the story, but I never felt a real connection to Balram, perhaps because I cannot relate to his life, ambitions, and desires. However, I am still grateful for the opportunity to discover a new character, and the invitation to enter a new and unfamiliar world. Even if I never read this book again, I have grown because of it, and I encourage you to do the same. Maybe not with this book, but challenge yourself to step out of your comfort zone and try new books, for you may be surprised at what you discover, in yourself, and in the world of literature.

Water for Elephants

When I was in elementary school we used to get scholastic book orders. Every few months you would get handed out a little catalog, where you could order a variety of books, then would receive them a couple weeks later. Looking through the colorful pages, staring, dog tagging, and highlighting the books I wanted, then waiting for the glorious day when the books arrived and got to take them home and add them to my book shelf, was one of my favorite things. Throughout the years this excitement for new books has continued, however it left me with a lot of unread pages on my shelves. Throughout the recent weeks I have been trying to not only read new books, but read books that I had bought previously, and never quite got around to.


This week I decided to read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Like Eat Pray Love, I had begun reading this book, made it a couple chapters, but for some reason could not get into it. However, going along with the idea of actually reading all the books I have bought, I decided to give it another try, and am so thrilled that I did. Water for Elephants was beautifully written, illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even "love is a luxury that few can afford".


In chapters that move flawlessly back and forth in time, from the rowdy circus atmosphere to the antiseptic corridors of the assisted living home, the world is viewed through Jacob Jonkowski, a ninety-something-year-old man's perspective, as he rages helplessly against the decrepitude of old age and the secrets of the past. In prose both poignant and infinitely tender, Jacob dwells in both worlds, revealing the wounds of the past and the sorrows of the present.


Stripped of everything after his parents’ untimely death, the twenty-three-year-old Jacob fails to sit for his veterinary exams at Cornell. Grief-stricken and robbed of home and future, he jumps onto a passing train, only to discover in the morning that it belongs to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It's here that Jacob enters an atmospheric, gritty world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town.


When Jacobs veterinary skills are discovered, he is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie, where the animals are mangy, underfed, and abused. He develops a guarded relationship with August, the head trainer, who is obsessively jealous and given to unspeakable cruelties, and his wife Marlena, the star performer and equestrian, with whom Jacob falls in love with. "Caught between his love for Marlena and his need for belonging, Jacob is freed only by a murderous secret that will bring the big top down." Uncle Al, Benzini Brothers circus impresario, is a ruthless businessman who cares little for man or beast, engaged in a quest for fame to rival the great Ringling Brothers circus. With his training in veterinary medicine, Jacob does his best to protect the animals from their harsh existence, especially Rosie the baffling elephant, and new edition to the circus, who he shares a deep kinship with, truly evoking the magic a circus can create.


Among a train filled with a raggedy tribe of miscreants and lost souls, friends and foes, skillfully humanized by Gruen, Jacob, the self-appointed protector of the downtrodden, is the only person who has a handle on a moral compass, and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. The circus, a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder, pain, anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.


The story is related in the somber tones of the Depression, the hardscrabble and often unscrupulous business of a traveling circus and the heartless despots who make their fortunes on the backs of men who must do anything to survive. Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which Jacob and the circus find themselves. One of the many pleasures of this novel is the opportunity to enter a bizarrely coded and private world with its own laws, superstitions and vocabulary. Water for Elephants is a well-researched adventure into the weird and charming universe of the Depression-era circus, where the magic of the story and the writing convince you to suspend your disbelief.


Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime, and many unlikely literary figures have been drawn to their glitzy pageantry, soaring pretensions, and metaphorical potential. Unsurprisingly, writers seem liberated by imagining a spectacle where no comparison ever seems inflated, no development impossible. For better and for worse, Gruen has fallen under the spell. With a showman's expert timing, she saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale.


Black-and-white photographs of real American circus scenes from the first half of the century are interspersed throughout the novel, and they brilliantly evoke the dignified power contained in the quieter moments of this unusual brotherhood. The grainy photos capture the unexpected daintiness of an elephant disembarking from a train, the symmetry of a marching band, a gaggle of plumed showgirls stepping gingerly across a patchy lawn, and the haunting solitude of an impeccably dressed cook, allowing for a very real image to form in your mind.


Water for Elephants was poignant, superbly plotted, and utterly transporting. It is that rare novel with a story so engrossing, one is reluctant to put it down; with characters so engaging, they continue to live long after the last page has been turned; with a world built of wonder, a world so real, one starts to breathe its air. I am hopelessly, unabashedly in love with this book, and my only tip for you is to simply read it. 

Late Nights on Air

Being a Canadian, I have read a deplorable amount of books written by Canadian authors. I seem to have this idea that things coming out of the United States are better some how. Whether it be music, television shows, movies, or books, I assume Americans are better at creating them. So this week I decided to help prove myself wrong, at least when it comes to novels, and read Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay. The Ottawa born author writes about the power and intimacy of radio, and how we can fall in love with certain voices. The story is elegiac, exquisite, and creates enormous spaces with few words, making the reader party to the journey, listening, marveling, breathing, fearing.


In Late Nights on Air, the barren, treeless tundra of the Far North serves as a kind of reckoning ground for a clutch of characters. They're not visionaries, but all seekers in some way. The story is set among a group of people working at a small Yellowknife radio station in 1975. After being fired from his latest television job, a disgraced Harry Boyd returns to his radio roots in the northern Canadian town, as the manager of a station no one listens to, and finds himself at the center of the station's unlikely social scene. New and enigmatic, Dido Paris, both renowned and mocked for her Dutch accent, fled an affair with her husband's father, only to be torn between Harry and another man. The young and fragile Gwen came to learn radio production, but under Harry's tutelage finds herself the guardian of the late-night shift. And lonely but steadying force, Eleanor, wonders if it's time to move south just as she meets an unlikely suitor. Relationships are entered in and out of, while loyalties shift in surprising ways. Each of these characters come with their own unwavering back stories, and point-of-view shifts between them with such fluidity. Similarly the story moves back and forth in time in a way that feels only natural, demonstrating Hay's remarkable skill without actually making us aware of her at all.


As we come to learn about each characters history, and watch as they build and struggle with relationships, we also learn about the struggle in the north. The city is becoming divided over a proposal to build a pipeline that would cut across Native lands, bringing modernization and a flood of workers, equipment and money into sacred territory. This underlying event helps to provide a clear picture of the townspeople motives and morals, bringing some closer together, while others become strangers, as each person fights for what they believe to be right.


Late Nights on Air is as much about the how the characters relate to each other, as to how they relate to their environment. The final third of the book tells of four friends embarking on a six-week canoe trip where the evocation of the tundra - its emptiness, silence, and delicate beauty - is stunning, almost a new species of erotica. Hay beautifully portrays the tender bonds that are forged, and broken in such wild a place. I honestly didn't know how captivated I would become as the characters portaged and canoed for days, sometimes seeing no other living creature but a single ptarmigan or a caribou.


Indeed this is the True North, but not like we might imagine: "It was north of the sixtieth parallel and shared in the romance of the North, emanating not mystery but uniqueness and not right away. It had no breathtaking scenery. No mountains, no glaciers, in the winter not even that much snow." Sound, not sight, becomes the salient sense, which is natural with the radio, and Hay creates this effect beautifully. Admirably too, for it is hard to write sound. And not just those voices in the night, but also snow crunching underfoot, paddles in the water, crackling fires and birdsong. Truly, this is the most audible novel I have ever read.


"On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father's voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he'd made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the rock - houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barbershop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations. All the little and large efforts of settlement intrigued her" This was one paragraph that stood out to me, but Late Nights on Air is filled with phrases and images that will capture your imagination, and take you to another place entirely.


Hay provides crystalline prose, keen details and sharp dialogue that sculpt the isolated, hardy residents of Yellowknife. A character in Elizabeth's book describes good script writing as having "simplicity, directness, and intimacy", and Late Night on Air achieves all three. Whether you love or hate the characters by the end of the book, you know them as well as our own skin. This book with teach you to respect the north; its timeless fragility, and its ability to both save and destroy those who venture there. Psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It's a pleasure from start to finish.


Radio has become a such a common thing in our lives, that we don't even think about the marvel of it. With radio, we are able to share our thoughts, ideas, music, news, and communicate with people all over the world. Just the other night I watched the movie Pirate Radio. Although the vibe of Pirate Radio and Late Nights on Air are very different, they are both perfect examples of how radio can uplift people and truly effect peoples lives. My Tip for this book is listen to the radio. We all have our favorite stations, but try to listen to something new. You will expose yourself to new music, new voices and ideas, and will give yourself with the opportunity to grow as a person, building depth to your knowledge and versatility.

Wicked

While getting ready for a trip to New York City, I began thinking about the books that I would read during my travels. I wanted to read something that would somehow connect with my trip, perhaps a story set in the big apple, or a biography of a native New Yorker. I finally settled on the perfect book as I was deciding on the shows and Broadway productions I was planning to attend. Having heard many great things about the Broadway version of Wicked, and like so many others, only knowing half of the story of the Wicked Witch of the West and her quarrels with Dorothy, I decided that reading the book by Gregory Maguire, and seeing the show would be a divine fit. This book is richly textured, and fantastically real, and after reading it, you will be unable to see the Wizard of Oz in the same way again.


Maguire has re-created, and populated Oz with the power of his own imagination. His strange and inventive postmodernist fable uses L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a springboard to create a tense realm inhabited by humans, talking animals, Munchkinlanders, dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz himself, emperor of this dystopian dictatorship. While we were first led to believe that Oz is filled with happiness, joy and color, we learn that it is in fact not a place of fairy-tale, but a dark, oppressive police state full of political machinations. It's a land where Animals, who are sentient and have voices, souls and minds, are persecuted and exiled. It's a place where you are wicked if you are different; if you tell the truth.


Maguire's fantasy world in Wicked is sketched vividly enough to change the way we look at Oz. For starters, the Wicked Witch has a name: Elphaba, and she is not wicked, but insecure and unfortunately green. We are Introduced to the Wicked Witch at the very beginning of her story, her consummation. The free-spirited Elphaba is born to a giddy alcoholic mother, and a hermit-like father who transmits to her his habits of loathing and self-hatred, both parents being challenged in loving rather than taunting her. We come to know about her tumultuous childhood, and her journey to Shiz University, where she is forced by circumstances to become roommates and eventual friends with an unlikely candidate, Glinda, the Good Witch.


Elphaba, unlike the figure of our childhood fantasies, is not a person who dreams of inflicting devilish deeds on the world that refuses to accept her. She is a zealous Munchkinlander who fights for tolerance and who's willing to take the necessary steps to put an end to the tyrannical rule of the Wizard of Oz. She grows up to be an anti-totalitarian agitator, an animal-rights activist, a nun, a nurse, and a lover. Elphaba is smart, sassy, honest, and compelling. She is an intellectual, an activist, and a bit of a revolutionary, who is often misunderstood and not accepted, and who will make you question the nature of morality.


The eminent Dorothy, who we have all grown up to love, appears only near the novel's end, as her house lands on Elphaba's sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, in an accident that sets Elphaba on the trail of the girl from Kansas, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, the Lion, and the infamous red shoes that hold so much sentimentality and and symbolize a lifetime of yearning to be loved as her sister was.


Maguire fills Elphaba's story with liberal amounts of dark humor, sociopolitical satire, honesty, sympathy and earnestness. The detailed and complex religion, culture, and government of Oz are revealed, and help to supplement the narrative beautifully, adding a great deal of depth to the story. Maquire creates real and complex, three dimensional people out of the original characters, while introducing a new cast to help fill in the blanks of Elphaba's past. The combination of puckish humor and bracing pessimism in this fantastical meditation on good and evil, God and free will, shall captivate devotees of fantasy for many years to come.


I have great respect for people who come up with their own original ideas, and bring them to life. I love Maguire's idea of learning about the rather mysterious wicked witch. What really mesmerized me was the way he fit together the story in this novel with the context of the original Oz book, however I found a good portion of the book hard to read. I found that some things were unnecessarily described to no end, while other situations, people, or places were not described at all, making it hard to obtain more than a skeletal idea of what was going on. The beginning and end, however, were enchanting and made the slight struggle worth while.

There are so many details included in the pages of this book, and like I said, some are not described to a point that you become familiar with them, so my tip would be to read this books rather quickly. Try to resist giving into the possible desire to put the book down when the story starts to lag a little in the middle, as you will forget all the details, and the end will not be as impacting. If you can find a period of undistracted time, you will have the reward of reading a story of richly detailed characters, brought together by an intriguing and insightful plot you surely will not soon forget.



As I mentioned at the beginning, I decide to see the broadway production of Wicked. During this lag of the trip I was with my mom, and one of my close friends, and we were wildly anticipating our evening at the theater. After running back to our hotel from Times Square in a mild torrential downpour, we arrived with puddles in our shoes, and pools of water trailing behind us, and slowly came to the heartbreaking realization that our tickets were for the Thursday night of the previous week. After taking a moment to be disappointed, and filled with a melancholy like non other, we raced to the theater to try and find tickets. After almost an hour of roller-coaster emotions, we managed to find three tickets and made our way to the extremely welcoming red velvet seats. Even the fact that we were cold, and still wet, could not take away from the extraordinary show. Although the musical diverted from the book, it follow the basic story and provided me with an even greater understanding of Elphaba. The story was brought to life beautiful by a cast of extremely talented actors and singers, and I am so thrilled I was able to experience that on my trip. If you ever have the chance to see this production, I highly recommend it.

 

Savour The Moment

Last summer, while looking for an easier read to keep me company during the lazy season, I began reading Norah Roberts Bridal Quartet series. Vision in White, and Bed of Roses are delicately feminine, and this weeks book, and third great addition to the series, Savor the Moment, is no exception. This series is definitely an easy read, but Roberts has a talent for bringing the characters and their relationships to life, making their stories personable and very entertaining.

As little girls, MacKensie, Emma, Laurel, and Parker spent hours acting out their perfect make believe "I do" moments, and years later, their childhood fantasies became reality when they started their own all-inclusive wedding planning company. Emma assembles bouquets of delicately stunning flowers, MacKensie captures all the jubilant and emotional moments on film, Laurel bakes delectable and scrumptious desserts, and Parker oversees all the details, bringing them all into a harmonious partnership. The First two books focus on Mackenzie and Emma, while they each discover love and relationships in their own unique way, and as happily ever after continues in Savor the Moment, the attention is on Laurel and her fairytale romance with longtime crush and Parker's older brother, Del.


There is not much surprise, or thought provoking moments incorporated into the series, but Robert's has a way of crafting realistic people, who weave into each others lives so gracefully, that you can't help but want to share in their stories. Each of the characters, whether it's a male or female, has a distinct personality, and specific hobbies and interests that make it easy to find someone to relate to. Myself, being interested in photography, baking, and having a mild case of ADD when it comes to details and organization, found it easy to connect with more than once character at a time, and was left with a longing to know more about them all.


This is the kind of book that I would have loved to have read on a beach, with the sun on my back, cold drink in hand, and the freedom to relax for hours on end. I However, was not on the beach, so I settled for relaxed afternoons on the deck with refreshingly cold iced tea. It was easy to get lost in this book for hours on end, and lose all sense of time, because you didn't ever have to stop and think, or clear your head, in order to download more intricate information. At the same time, Savor the Moment, is an ideal book to pick up for fifteen minutes at a time, in order to relieve yourself from the stresses of the day, and be distracted by another world, if only for a little while.


Savor the Moment could stand completely on its own, but I relished the little things that you pick up from having read the other books in the series first. So that is my tip, read the books in order, for with each one you will receive a deeper understanding of the characters, their histories, and relationships.