Priya and Ashok Shah have worked hard to give their three children a good life. They had just moved into their dream house in an upper middle class neighborhood in southern California. Just weeks after the move, they are at a dinner party when they receive a phone call informing them that their twelve year old son, Ajay, is at the Los Angeles Police Station. That call triggers the beginning of Priya and Ashok’s realization that the American dream is just that-a dream.

Although A Great Country raises some interesting points for discussion, it tries to cover too many issues in too few pages. Also, the main characters are one dimensional and almost stereotypical.

The title refers to the constructing of the Panama Canal, and Christina Henriquez’s newest novel describes a number of characters directly or indirectly involved in it. John Oswald is a scientist and he and his wife, Marian, leave their home in Tennessee so he can try to solve the mosquito/malaria problem. Ada has left her home in Barbados and sneaks aboard a ship bound for Panama. She hopes to make enough money there, so her sister can have a life saving operation. Omar has taken on the dirty, exhausting job as a digger much to his father’s dismay. Valentina’s childhood home will be moved along with the whole neighborhood because a dam must be erected there. She thinks there is a way to prevent this.

There are too many characters with their back stories for a book of this size. Just when I was getting into Ada’s story, her story line would stop and the novel would begin to describe the death of Omar’s mother. Although The Great Divide brought up some interesting dilemmas about the digging of the canal, it required more pages to flesh out the characters and illustrate what is involved in the making of the Panama Canal.

Recently a customer, knowing how much I admire Niall Williams and am drawn to most things Irish, brought me two of his earlier works of nonfiction which he co-wrote with his wife. I was not disappointed. Together the books cover their first three years in Ireland after leaving their lives and their jobs in Manhattan in 1985. Niall and Christine share in the writing, and each describes in their own way the hardships, trials and joys of learning to farm on the rugged land in western Ireland. The authors never sugar coat the obstacles they face-the cold, the rain, their childlessness, but they also share the sense of community, the friendships they make and the satisfaction they felt when they could finally produce what they ate.

These books are probably hard to find, but I promise it will be worth the effort.

Every year on August 16th Ana Magdalena Bach travels to a tropical island from her home. She goes by ferry to put gladiolas on her mother’s grave. She stays in the same hotel for one night and returns home the next day via the ferry. However, this time she takes a lover for the one night she stays on the island. For the following two years she takes two other men as lovers for that one night. The three men are very different but each has an impact on her life when she returns home.

This novella was published ten years after Marquez’s death. He wrote it while suffering dementia,was unhappy with the results, and asked that it never be published. Two of his sons felt it was well worth publishing, and I am grateful. Although not one his best works, Until August still shows glimmers of Marquez’s genius.

Calvin Trillin wears many hats. He has written novels, memoirs, articles and essays. He is a reporter, a liberal, a family man and a gourmand. When he writes he can be funny, nostalgic, sensitive, sarcastic or angry. He can be serious when writing about the civil rights movement and humorous when describing pompous politicians. The Lede is a compilation of some of Trillin’s articles dating from the 1960’s to 2013.

When I saw that Calvin Trillin had another book out(he is 88 years old), it was like welcoming back an old friend. Although I don’t think The Lede is Trillin at his best, I’ll take him anyway I can get him!

Annie Brown is 37 years old with a loving husband and four children. One night while fixing dinner, she has a brain aneurysm and dies. After Annie is a character study of Annie, a fun loving perceptive woman who loved being a wife and a mother. It also describes how her husband, children and best friend react and eventually cope with their loss.

Although After Annie sounds like a terribly depressing read, in Anna Quindlen’s hands it really isn’t. It is a heart warming novel about good people doing the best they can during a trying, traumatic year.

It is the late 1800’s in rural Scotland. Lizzie Craig has lived most of her life toiling on her grandparent’s farm. Lizzie has a gift-she has occasional visions into the future. However, she is frightened and ashamed of this sixth sense. Lizzie is bright and a fine artist but she is naive. When a tailor’s apprentice comes to the farm to lend a hand during harvest time, Lizzie falls in love. Her lack of worldly wisdom gets her in trouble and to solve her predicaments, Lizzie continues to make some poor decisions.

Although what happens to Lizzie Craig is a tale that’s been told again and again, her visions into the future and the characters she encounters make The Road from Belhaven unique, interesting and enjoyable.

When Benjamin Herald visited the suburb he grew up in outside of Pittsburgh, he noticed that it had become poorer, more diversified in terms of the population, the infrastructure was old and in disrepair and the educational system was suffering. He pursued this and began investigating suburbs of Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and Atlanta as well as his own hometown. Herold zeroed in on one family in each of these suburbs to help him and his readers understand the change. 

I read this work of nonfiction because I live in a suburb and one of the suburbs Benjamin Herold describes is 10 miles from my home. At first I kept getting the five families and their suburbs mixed up, but eventually I was able to keep them straight. The author researched each suburb and he describes the fears, goals and daily lives of the families, but I never got a clear understanding of how to solve the suburban dilemma.

When her brother is killed in Viet Nam, twenty year old Frankie McGrath decides to carry on the family tradition and enlists in the army as a nurse. She leaves her upper-middle class California lifestyle for a chaotic, challenging, exhausting, dangerous life. And as difficult as it is in Viet Nam, it is even harder for Frankie when she returns home.

The novel is divided into two parts-before and after Viet Nam. I thought the first part of The Women was good. It vividly described the horrors of that war. However, for me, the second part dragged on, and Frankie seemed to have every negative experience possible for a returning vet. Also, Kristin Hannah frequently describes the clothes,hair styles and songs of that era. I felt it took away from the plot.

Growing up on the same street in New Rochelle, New York, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor had a lot in common and became best friends. They were both bright but Michael was extremely smart. They were both personable, but Michael was very outgoing. They both went to Yale, but Michael graduated in three years and it took Jonathan four. Michael had a charmed life until the year after he graduated when he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The Best Minds is Michael’s story before and after the diagnosis as well as how mental illness is dealt with.

This work of nonfiction is fantastic. It is part memoir, part treatise on schizophrenia, and also part description of the people and organizations who helped Michael and why it wasn’t enough. Rosen has a wry sense of humor usually directed at himself. His figures of speech are creative and usually right on. Best Minds clearly and objectively describes Michael Laudor: an exceptional person with an horrific disease.