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Friday, March 31, 2023

 Night of the Living Rez 

by Morgan Talty

Tin House


    These are stories of a family living in a Native American village in Maine. They are at times funny, but often heart-wrenching stories of people with too little money and hope but enough love and friendship. They are not in any chronological order which becomes a way of seeing the universal in the specific.

    It's awfully nice when a book you love wins awards (NBCC, among them) as this has. 




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local independent bookstore or bookshop.org

Friday, March 24, 2023

 The Dark Flood

by Deon Meyer

Grove Atlantic


    In South Africa, Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido are somewhat mismatched police detectives, recently removed from an elite unit and sent down to a college town to work a missing persons case. Things get very complicated, suspenseful and violent. There is a fair amount of humor in the detectives' relationship but also quite a lot of blood in the case. 

    The writing is brilliantly descriptive of the place and people which makes it well worth reading but not for the squeamish.




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org







Thursday, March 23, 2023

Properties Of Thirst

by Marianne Wiggins

Simon & Schuster


     This  is the story of a family making a home in California in the middle of the 20th century. More importantly, it is  a story of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. The building of the internment camp, Manzanar, is happening in the same valley that the damaged Rhodes family is trying to save from the devastation caused by the California water wars. 

   I read this several months ago and find myself thinking about it again, for pretty obvious reasons.

   It is  a large book, but well worth the time you'll invest in it.




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org


Sunday, March 19, 2023


 The Dog of the North

by Elizabeth McKenzie

Penguin Press


   This is for anyone who has an eccentric or difficult family member (or several), and makes the poor decision to try to help them out. Penny Rush is at first somewhat relieved to have the distraction from her impending divorce of dealing with her Grandparents and finds herself falling into a quick friendship with her Grandmother's inept accountant, Burt. What happens in the next few days shows the power of Penny's friendship as well as her own emotional turmoil and does it with great dark humor. 

    It would make a lovely and very funny film - Tom Hanks would do Burt well.





If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org

Thursday, March 16, 2023


Foster

Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

Grove Press

    Both of these novels are quietly moving, lyrical and brief almost to the point of poetry. There's not a stray word here. Small Things Like These tells of a man and a family making a kind decision that is beyond the norm for their small town and braver than they acknowledge. Foster has been made into an Irish language film - The Quiet Girl -  that I haven't yet seen. It tells of a young girl staying with relatives while her mother nears her due date and gives birth to another in a not-small family. With her older relatives she discovers a different, calmer way of living - filled with grief and humor and love.

    Keegan has short story collections - Walk the Blue Fields and Antarctica are also available from Grove Press. A friend reports listening to these as audio books with wonderful Irish readers.



             
If you would like to know more about or own these book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org

                           


Saturday, March 4, 2023



 I Have Some Questions for You

by Rebecca Makkai

Viking Press


   Bodie Kane is no longer the young, insecure student at a small boarding school in the wilds of New Hampshire. She returns there as a visiting professor with deep misgivings about her time then and now - teaching a film class to students who want to look into the murder that happened during her senior year. 

   There is the murder, the possibility that the wrong person is in jail, and the question of sexual improprieties between a teacher and his student, or perhaps students. Over all there is the question of memory, and memories - how each individual may be remembering what happened in very different ways. And whether any justice was served.

   Makkai works serious questions of the treatment of women, professionally and sexually, into the novel without losing the intrigue or momentum of the novel. 





If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org




 





 The Motion Picture Teller

by Colin Cotterill

Soho Press/ Penguin Random House Publisher Services


   Ali & Supot are best friends. Supot works for the Royal Thai Mail Service, Ali's Video Rental is where he & Ali spend much of their time watching movies. In their early thirties, there is a "failure to launch" about them both, which they refer to as "waiting for the big something". In the meantime they rent a few videos to local people and add a movie they deem a classic (Seven Samurai, for instance) free of charge in the hopes of creating some more serious film watchers. They spend most evenings in Ali's viewing room in the back of the shop, watching and re-watching classic movies with Thai subtitles. Ali is hoping they will learn languages this way; he is also working on his own film script, with help and criticism from Supot.

   Their lives change when one night a local named Woot brings some videos to sell. Among the professional cassettes is one plain white box with a handwritten label which says Bangkok 2010. Thus begins a journey for both men, as Supot falls madly in love with the beautiful star and Ali reluctantly agrees to help him find out more about the film and the star.

   This is a wonderful thoughtful look at friendship, obsession, maturity and just a bit of mysterious Thai history. 




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org

Friday, March 3, 2023

 Independence

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Wm.Morrow/Harper Collins



   Three sisters in 1947 India are coming of age just as Partition tears their world apart. Each sister's character is very well defined in the days leading up to the chaos and massacres - one a practical but romantic homebody, one a beautiful talented singer and one who wants to follow her father into medicine. Divakaruni interjects brief lyrical pieces that keep us tied to history and does a fine job of showing how each sister changes to face the horrors of their changing world. There is family strife and romance in the novel as it gives a female-centered view of the nightmare of Partition.

   There is also a recent New Yorker article "Blood Lines" by Parul Sehgal (January 2 & 9, 2023) which gives a more in depth look at the literature about this time.




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org



 


Tell Me an Ending

by Jo Harkin
Simon & Schuster

   If you could have a memory (or two) permanently removed, would you want to? Even if you knew that you wouldn't remember doing this or what the memory was? 

   People all around the world are suddenly notified that they have the opportunity to regain  memories that they don't remember having had removed and now they have a brief window in which to decide if they want to have a part of their lives returned.

   We meet several of the people making this choice and come to sympathize with their fears and desires and the immense gravity of the decisions they must make.

   Noor is a psychologist recently hired by a clinic in London where these restorations will take place. The more she learns about the program, the greater her moral ambiguity becomes. She must decide if she wants to work for this company and if she does, if there is any way that she can help these people. 




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org

Thursday, March 2, 2023


The Conjure-Man Dies : A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem

by Rudolph Fisher

Poisoned Pen Press


   This is reportedly the first known mystery novel (published in 1932) by an African American. The setting is an intriguing Harlem peopled with doctors, morticians, gamblers and the man they all are concerned with, N'Gana Frimbo, a self-proclaimed African King and a conjure-man - a teller of futures. 

   Sadly, Fisher died very young and there will not be a series with these great characters who are a large part Sherlock Holmesian, but also Shakespearian. There is much more I would love to read about them.




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org




Drunk on All Your Strange New Words 

by Eddie Robson 
Tordotcom/Macmillan Press 

   Lydia is a human, a translator working with the extra-terrestrial, Fitz, who is a Logi official in the early days of Earth’s first-contact. The difficulties are many, most profoundly that the Logi communicate telepathically in a language that works like tequila on the human brain. A translator can only do so much before becoming reeling drunk; Lydia and Fitz both understand this and Fitz tries to help Lydia maintain decorum. 

   Unfortunately, a murder occurs and Lydia needs to clear her name within a very dicey situation. Robson writes a deft and humorous science fiction/murder mystery with characters you come to care about and technology you can only wish were real.




If you would like to know more about or own this book, please try your local bookstore or bookshop.org

The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe Europa Editions       This is a book of many parts - humorous, (and not so) political critique, wr...