Book Reviews

People of the Book: Standing the Test of Time

2008-03-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

A Review by Jia Gayles

Acclaimed author Geraldine Brooks fills in the missing pieces of the Sarajevo Haggadah’s origins in a fictional narrative that explores the indomitable spirit of humankind.

The old adage goes, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Today, the Sarajevo Haggadah, an unusually ornate illuminated Jewish text, is under the protective watch of The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina; yet its real-life journey from 14th century Spain to Sarajevo is veiled in mystery. The haggadah is used in the Passover celebration to describe the book of Exodus and the ritual of the Seder. Medieval Jews were thought to espouse the Third Commandment forbidding the use of, "any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth," to which the Sarajevo Haggadah brazenly contradicts with its gleaming copper and gold inked pages. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March and once a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East, deftly fleshes out the spare details available on the ancient codex’s journey in People of the Book.

Hanna Heath is a renowned book conservationist charged with traveling to embattled mid-1990s Sarajevo to prepare the haggadah for a museum exhibition. Her quick-witted humor and independent spirit are the perfect recipe for an endearing heroine. “Me, I’m a complete pessimist,” she muses, while waiting for her first chance to examine the book under military surveillance. “If there’s a sniper somewhere in the country I’m visiting, I fully expect to be the one in his crosshairs.” While she examines the book, the chief librarian of the museum, Ozren Karaman, hovers nearby. When he extends a dinner invitation, Hanna dismisses her earlier annoyance at having a “baby sitter” because she wants more details on how Ozren risked his life to rescue the haggadah as the city was besieged by heavy shelling. Dinner moves quickly from the restaurant to the bedroom, and the two develop a meaningful, if hasty, love affair. In a case of art mirroring life, two Muslim librarians were declared heroes for endangering their lives to retrieve the sacred text during World War II and the occupation of Sarajevo.

Hanna’s examination of the haggadah reveals several clues: a wine stain, salt crystals, a white hair and the remnants of a butterfly wing. During her quest to reveal the book’s secrets, she asks colleagues to perform tests on the samples. As each clue is solved, at least scientifically through DNA analysis at MIT or favor from Scotland Yard, the next chapter travels back in time to the cities of Venice, Tarragona, Seville and Vienna, giving voice to the individuals who either guarded the book or sought to destroy it during the turbulent Spanish Inquisition or the Nazi regime. Here, Brooks reveals her most treasured skill, breathing life into the distant past by crafting relatable characters for the modern ear. An obnoxious Venetian priest becomes a small parentless child, an astute rabbi wrestles with an unseemly addiction and a syphilitic book binder desperately grasps at the last shreds of his sanity. In a heartbreaking passage, Brooks describes the death of a World War II rebel fighter and his sister who are too sick to keep moving, “Embracing his little sister, he stepped off the bank and onto the ice…They stood there for a moment, as the ice groaned and cracked. Then it gave way.” This riveting image epitomizes the author’s dedication to each character, so lovingly carved out with her pen in life and in death. Brooks’ clear voice and impeccable research also brought the infamous Black Plague to life in Year of Wonders, where she expertly detailed each oozing sore with such delicacy that you were engrossed rather than grossed out.

Also on the menu, is a strained relationship between Hanna and her mother, a neurosurgeon who considers her daughter’s career little more than child’s play as compared to the life-saving work of a doctor. Brooks molds their relationship on an ill-structured house of cards – inevitably it will implode. Through the mother-daughter dynamic, the source of Hanna’s low self-esteem and commitment issues are revealed.

The real haggadah survived centuries of war and displacement. Its keepers outwitted Nazis seeking to eradicate Jewish documents and Spanish inquisitors willing to torture and kill Jews who converted to Catholicism and were found with any physical remnants of their heritage. People of the Book honors their struggle and indomitable spirit. The author is firmly in the driver’s seat of a time machine that propels the plot forward and neatly unfurls it with the gracefulness of a blooming rose.

In the end, Hanna discovers a startling clue that leads to the true haggadah artist, and along the way she learns to believe in her own self-worth and abilities. Geraldine Brooks brings the book full circle and effectively produces a winding narrative that proves, though truth may be stranger than fiction, imagination can produce a pretty amazing story too.

All Saints by Liam Callanan - A Lisa Heidle Review

2008-01-15T07:50:00.000-08:00

All Saints by Liam Callanan

A Review by Lisa Heidle

All Saints by Liam Callanan introduces us to a world that is filled with educators, teen-agers and Catholic saints, each a cautionary tale, showing us what can happen when we do not heed the lessons of our own choices or of those who have lived before.

The narrator, Ms. Emily Hamilton, is a teacher at All Saints Catholic High School in Newport Beach, California, “…and most people, even the students, called the school All Surf, because it was, improbably, located directly on the beach. Directly: outside our windows, there was an expanse of blacktop basketball courts, and beyond the blacktop, sand, and beyond the sand, surf. Look out any warm day, and you’d see them, before, after, and even, rarely, during school: All Saints kids, playing in the sea.”

Emily teaches theology, but seems more interested in her students. She defines each one in relation to herself. “Paul: my quiet, brilliant student with eyes the size of fists and the color of milked coffee. I love coffee(black). I did not love Paul(against the rules).” As the story unfolds, we learn of the tragic loss of a child when she was young that has kept the woman tied to a time that has passed, that she cannot move away from. The reader questions whether it is a maternal drive that has bound Emily Hamilton to the students of All Saints or if she still considers herself one of them.

Through Emily’s telling, shifting between past and present, we see the want of a woman who has reached the point in her life where she is looking back and is unable to find anything tangible to call her own. Sadly, the lack of self that encompasses so many of Emily’s decisions overflows onto those she connects with the most: her students. “And maybe it’s no surprise that in the fiftieth year of my life, thirty-four years after leaving my father’s house, ten years into a career of teaching children who are, on the whole, quite fortunate, I did something I had never, ever done before.

“I kissed a boy.”

All Saints is a world that is alien and familiar, mystical and contemporary. Stories of saints being burned and beheaded interspersed with cell phones and computers, something many novelists shy away from for fear of seeming cliché, Callanan keeps us firmly planted in the now, while our minds are allowed to roam. All Saints encompasses the struggles that we face, irrelevant of age, and the ghosts that plague us all, at each plateau of our lives.

What You Have Left by Will Allison

2007-12-24T18:40:00.001-08:00

What You Have Left by Will Allison

A Review by Lisa Heidle

Will Allison’s first novel, What You Have Left, reminds us that we all have a story, a family story that goes back as far as memory will allow. Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day, Allison uses the story cycle to introduce us to a broken family in South Carolina. With a timeline that jumps between 1971 and 2007, we meet Holly, Cal, Lyle, and Wylie, all struggling with the age-old question of how to give to each other while being true to themselves.

The story cycles around Holly and the men in her life: her grandfather, husband and the memory of her father. “I was sentenced to life on my grandfather’s dairy farm in the summer of 1976,” Holly tells us. After her mother’s sudden death when she was five, her father, lost in his own grief, leaves the little girl with her grandfather and never returns, leaving a hole that she fills with pain, anger and alcohol.

As Holly moves into adulthood, Cal, her beloved grandfather, is faced with the knowledge that he has Alzheimer’s, as did his father, uncle and grandfather. Having witnessed the deterioration first hand, he is determined not to face the same outcome, but his desire to leave life on his own terms conflicts with his intense love and devotion for Holly.

Allison addresses the issue of suicide and euthanasia when the nineteen-year-old Holly promises to help Cal die when the time comes. Cal asks her when that would be. “…all the answers I could think of—when he could no longer remember his own name, no longer dress himself—being so arbitrary as to seem absurd, because how could I ever really know when his life was no longer worth living?”

When Holly’s boyfriend, Lyle, locates Wylie, the father who abandoned her as a child, he concedes to the man’s wishes and keeps his whereabouts a secret. The choice to do so almost severs his and Holly’s budding relationship. Within the shifting narratives, we are given insight into the internal struggles each character battles and are reminded that the truest gift anyone can give is forgiveness.

Allison avoids creating grandiose characters in What You Have Left; there are no wise-sages or over-the-top protagonists. Each character is the person next door, the mechanic, the hired hand. The female characters are underdeveloped and the men seem confounded by the actions of the women in their lives, but the simplicity of the story does not belie the honesty that fills the pages as each character reaches past experience and locates a new, more complete truth.

Jonis Agee Spins The River Wife's Tale

2007-10-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Jonis Agee Spins The River Wife’s Tale

A Review by Jia Gayles

Has a book ever made you forget your life? Did the phone call go unanswered or the email unchecked? Only a master storyteller can spin a tale so intricate that you willingly succumb to its sticky web, and Jonis Agee has accomplished this feat with her first foray into historical fiction – The River Wife. The Nebraska native is the Adele Hall Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and it was her childhood memories of summering near the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri that inspired her to create a vivid three-dimensional world of brazen, complicated, cursed and beautiful women living on the early 19^th century frontier.

The New York Times Book Review declared Agee, “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape.” In this novel, our forest guide is Hedie, a young naïve bride settling into life on Jacques’ Landing with her bootlegging husband Clement Ducharme. As her husband trolls the town’s underbelly late into the night, Hedie finds refuge in the forgotten journals of her “river wife” ancestors Annie Lark, Omah, Laura and Maddie.

The massive New Madrid earthquake of 1812 changed the topography of Missouri forever in the formation of new lakes, sandboils and riverbends in the mighty Mississippi. Annie Lark’s story begins trapped underneath a fallen beam in her family’s abandoned cabin. Convinced the Day of Reckoning had come to New Madrid, Annie’s family hurriedly runs from the wrecked town, leaving her to die alone. Jacques Ducharme, a crude French fur trapper, happens upon Annie as he scavenges her cabin. Taken with her, he hazards the unsettled structure and engineers his ox-driven cart to pull her out.

After a few uneventful years of nomadic frontier life (save the errant grizzly bear), the impending arrival of their first child drives Jacques and Annie to settle down along the Mississippi River. Jacques sees an opportunity to garner business from the nearby river traffic and opens an inn. Money awakens insatiable greed in Annie’s husband, which crescendo in one terrible, gruesome night – irrevocably changing their relationship. After that night, Annie is left broken but defiantly seeks out her own interests in science and the arts. She even entertains a passing flirtation with famed ornithologist, John James Audubon. After her untimely death, she remains a ghostly apparition, haunting her descendants and remaining Jacques’ one great love.

Omah follows in Annie’s footsteps, crowned as the new “river wife” after her parents’ death leaves the sixteen-year old freed slave alone in the world. Jacques offers the teenager room, board and protection. Omah realizes the high price for living at Jacques’ Landing when she is recruited to help raid a passing riverboat. Her new career as Jacques partner-in-crime begins. Omah’s platonic relationship with Jacques is borne out of respect and deep loyalty; perhaps the only reason she somewhat escapes the cursed Ducharme legacy.

Maddie Ducharme is spawned from the May-December union of Jacques and his second wife, Laura Shut. Laura is an unabashed goldigger who married the old river pirate for his rumored ill-begotten treasures. Not suited to solitary river life, Laura leaves Jacques’ Landing to quench her wanderlust. But the trip precipitates Laura’s quick end. Maddie Ducharme grows up motherless, and strives unsuccessfully to bring an end to the cursed Ducharme legacy. In an interview with BookPage, Agee shares that the original novel clocked in at 700 pages. Maddie and Laura’s stories are the shortest in the book, making them easily identifiable as the most wounded victim’s on the editor’s chopping block.

Annie Lark, Omah, Laura, Maddie and Hedie are connected by Jacques Ducharme, but he is merely the needle that pierces the dense cloth of their collective experience. The women are front and center of the novel, as Agee pulls back layer after layer revealing the complex juxtaposition of depression, bisexuality, fragility, passion, intelligence and perseverance. Each layer reveals the true essence of real women, and human-kind in general, who are perfect in their imperfections. As the karmic spell continues to play out, a sort of 19^th century version of Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around…Comes Back Around,” each women confronts the effects of loving Jacques Ducharme, a mysterious, ageless man with a dark heart and brilliant mind. But make no mistake; this is no saccharine historical romance with requisite burning loins and fainting heroines.

Jonis Agee has been distinguished with three Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times – Strange Angels, Bend This Heart and Sweet Eyes. She is a Gold Award winner and recipient of the Loft-McNight Award of Distinction and the NEA grant in fiction. Her novel Weight of Dreams received the Nebraska Book Award.

Book of Marie by Terry Kay

2007-09-14T17:58:00.001-07:00

A review of Terry Kay's new novel

by

James Stevens

Terry Kay has crafted a beautiful, realistic look at the people of his native state of Georgia and their reactions to the arrival of integration and the many changes it brought to their lives. The citizens of Overton, GA, a small rural community with a class C high school, are seen as teenagers in the 1950s, and again at their 50th high school reunion.

Marie, an outsider from the North who joins the senior class in 1954, is an outspoken critic of all things Southern, and is shunned by her class members except for Cole, the popular football quarterback and very traditional Southern male. Despite their cultural differences, an unexplained attraction emerges.

After their graduation and separation, their strange friendship is continued and revealed through the letters they exchange as the years pass. The arrival of the 50th Reunion vividly shows the changes that have occurred in Overton because of integration and civil rights, and the direct effect it has had on the lives of the class of 1954.

Through his many brilliantly developed characters Kay also addresses the issues of male aging, and the importance of place and friendship in creating a satisfactory life.

The Book of Marie has captured a sometimes forgotten generation and its role in history.It is a stunning discovery. Terry Kay has crafted a beautiful, realistic look at the people of his native state of Georgia and their reactions to the arrival of integration and the many changes it brought to their lives. The citizens of Overton, GA, a small rural community with a class C high school, are seen as teenagers in the 1950s, and again at their 50th high school reunion.

Marie, an outsider from the North who joins the senior class in 1954, is an outspoken critic of all things Southern, and is shunned by her class members except for Cole, the popular football quarterback and very traditional Southern male. Despite their cultural differences, an unexplained attraction emerges.

After their graduation and separation, their strange friendship is continued and revealed through the letters they exchange as the years pass. The arrival of the 50th Reunion vividly shows the changes that have occurred in Overton because of integration and civil rights, and the direct effect it has had on the lives of the class of 1954.

Through his many brilliantly developed characters Kay also addresses the issues of male aging, and the importance of place and friendship in creating a satisfactory life.

The Book of Marie has captured a sometimes forgotten generation and its role in history.It is a stunning discovery.

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

2007-08-24T11:28:00.001-07:00

A Review By Lisa Heidle

In 1948, fifty-seven years before Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones would resurrect Truman Capote with lisping and drawling syntax for this generation, Other Voices, Other Rooms was published, casting light on one of the 20^th centuries most controversial and engaging writers.

Being a Capote fan, I picked up Other Voices, Other Rooms, a self-admitted semi-autobiographical account of Capote’s childhood, expecting the same quirky, on the fringe characters that grace the majority of the man’s work, and wasn’t disappointed. Joel Knox, a thirteen-year-old boy who has recently lost his mother, is sent to live with the father he’s never known. Once arriving in the small town of Noon City, Capote inundates Joel with a cast of misfits who are as hungry for a new witness to their eccentric behavior as Joel is for a place to belong. He is driven to Skully’s Landing, his father’s home, by Jesus Fever, a hundred year old dwarf, is greeted by Miss Amy, his father’s mentally unstable wife as she beats a bluejay to death with a poker, and befriends the traumatized housekeeper, Zoo, whose only wish in life is to see snow.

The novel was even more compelling due to its autobiographical nature. Capote dances Joel to the edge of each budding relationship, only to pull him back before anything that can’t be undone is acted upon. Each time he narrowly escapes being emotionally marred, I couldn’t help but envision a young Truman, as naïve and hapless as the young Joel, sidestepping the mental and emotional miscreants he had been placed in the care of. When Joel becomes friends with the local wild child Idabel, we assume a sweet romance will develop between the two, but Capote reminds us that no one truly knows the heart of another when we learn Idabel is in love with the Miss Wisteria, a small person from the traveling side-show. After meeting cousin Randolph flitting through the pages in silk pajamas and ringlet curls, I had a better understanding of what Capote meant when he stated after rereading the novel that his “self-deception was unpardonable.”

My image of Capote that has been created over the years, a crudely drawn caricature in an open silk robe, thick, black-framed glasses engulfing a round face, a martini glass in one hand, notebook and pen in the other, has been replaced after reading Other Voices, Other Rooms. An unaffected version, full of curiosity and want, now shadows the man, gifting readers with an insight into the resourceful spirit and fledgling imagination of one of America’s rare, first-rate storytellers.

Stephen L. Carter’s New England White Illuminates

2007-08-14T18:24:00.000-07:00

New England White is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. After I took a wrong turn toward the African-American section and misguidedly thumbed through the ABC’s of Borders’ fiction stacks, I finally made the connection that the newest novel from the widely hailed author of The Emperor of Ocean Park and Yale law scholar, Stephen L. Carter, was located in the Mystery/Thriller section. I could heed my embarrassment in not recognizing the accomplishments of my own fellow member of the “darker nation” (a term frequently used by Carter to delineate African-Americans), and blame it on the fact I was worn-out from a long day at the office. But perhaps it was my own narrow-minded subconscious, blocking the possibility that a successful Black author would be occupying expensive, forward-facing real estate in the curious suspense category. Whatever the case, the 550+ pages to me weighed heavy as a brick in my less-than-muscular arms; but I took up the challenge and settled in for a surprisingly piercing examination of the intersections of race and class in modern America – deceptively presented via an old-fashioned whodunit.

In New England White, Carter breathes life into previously minor characters, Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, who appeared in his first novel The Emperor of Ocean Park. This upwardly mobile couple is the realization of W.E.B. Dubois’ Talented Tenth concept; both firmly ensconced in the edified black bourgeoisie by virtue of Lemaster’s uncompromising ambition and Julia’s historical familial ties, seemingly without the aid of Carter’s termed “paler nation.” Ironically, however, we learn in the end it is because of an unspeakable confidence with Lemaster’s three White college roommates, two of which have gone on to the Senate and White House; which propels the Carlyle family and the mysterious Emperyals organization to the oft unexplored nether regions of unchecked power. But I am getting ahead of myself…

Barbadian-born, Lemaster, is the president of fictional Kepler University. His family resides in the lily-white community of Tyler’s Landing, whose residents keep a close eye on the rising number of “colored families” (five in a town of 3,000) amongst their ranks. A sharp intellect that is maddeningly insane in his focus on honor and single-minded in his devotion to strict Anglican tradition, Lemaster is a formidable opponent for his time-weathered wife. Julia feels caged by the perfect illusion of family life that she has helped design; and it is Julia who takes on the challenge of pursuing the truth, no matter how unsettling to her family, when the Carlyle’s Cadillac Escalade veers off an icy country road, leading to the grim discovery of Kellen Zant’s body in a nearby ditch.

Zant was a brilliant economics professor who co-authored a famous economic theorem; but more interestingly, he was Julia’s slick, heart-breaker of an ex-lover from more than two-decades before who unfailingly, if not admirably, professed his love throughout the years. The mystery of Zant’s murder grows stranger still when it is reveled that he left clues for Julia’s eyes only cloaked in economic terms, such as, catching the surplus and unloading the inventory, mysterious anagrams scribbled on a flimsy business card and hidden messages in the antiquated mirrors that Julia loves to collect. Though she is an unwitting sleuth, Julia finds herself unable to stop searching for answers because some of her ex-lover’s clues lead back to own brilliant, yet frighteningly disturbed teenage daughter Vanessa.

Vanessa is obsessed with the 30-year old murder of Gina Joule. Her fixation began with a term paper examining the innocence of a young black man, Deshaun; who was accused of the crime and subsequently murdered by racist white cops. The teenager is desperate, almost to the point of ridiculous, to disprove anyone of the notion that Deshaun was innocent. She speaks to the dead girl, to the utter dismay and embarrassment of her parents, and disappears for large chunks of time to find proof of Deshaun’s guilt.

Through interaction with the shady characters Kellen contacted before his death, Julia finds out that the economics professor had information on the Joule murder and Lemaster’s corrupt ties to his White college friends and a mysterious Harlem brotherhood, the Emperyals.

The Emperyals are so secretive, that members do not even claim to be so. Carter paints the organization as a deep-rooted network of the “darker nation,” which exercises its political power through a forced hand. Julia exposes her husband as a member of this elite organization and follows Kellen’s breadcrumb trail right back to her own front door.

“African America” has always made its own rules, created its own private clubs and organizations and, thus; has also generated its own tangled web of class and privilege outside White America’s disinterested gaze. Carter’s attacks on classism in “African America” illuminates a fact of the human condition: we all want to be better than our peers. Smarter, richer, prettier, etcetera, etcetera… Within “African America” the same kinds of conditions exist; which the author deftly explores in Julia’s journey to find Deshaun’s mother. The coiffed college president’s wife leaves the cloistered and picturesque Tyler’s Landing behind to find answers in Elm Harbor’s Nest neighborhood, home of the underprivileged type of folks she rarely, if ever, has contact with in her daily life.

The author also paints a fantastical picture of the Emperyal organizational having a major political influence, which allows Lemaster to have power over his college roommates, now a Senator and President. Carter’s obvious statement on politics is that “the darker nation” will only get the attention of the “paler” one should the latter have evidence to others wrongdoing. This is the author’s testament to the struggle to address race and class on a political canvas that more often than not prefers to let the subject fade into the forgettable background.

The beauty of this mystery was its ability to achieve a major publishing coup with characters from Carter’s beloved, “the darker nation,” at the helm of a bestseller. Though, at times, his prose lies heavy and cloying at the far reaches of your vocabulary (I will admit it – I pulled out my dictionary three times) and there is also the daunting task of dissecting economic theorems; the subject-matter is worthy of the journey. Lemaster and Julia are educated, rich and black; and Stephen Carter’s success sheds a blazing white light on this often overlooked and underappreciated part of American society.