Van Booy’s last book, The Illusion of Separateness,  was a good read-well-written with a great “aha” moment;  however, the same can’t be said for his most recent work.  A six year old girl named Harvey is adopted by her Uncle Jason, an ex con with a violent temper, after her parents are both killed in a car accident.  Fast forward twenty years, and Harvey is a successful illustrator living in Paris.  Jason comes to visit the week of Father’s Day, and each day Harvey presents him with a gift that is a symbol of an incident in in their past.

I found the plot, characters and “aha” moment in Father’s Day disappointing.   For me, the story line was not engaging, the characters had no depth,  and the aha moment was predictable.

 

 

In O’Nan’s sixteenth novel, main character, Brand aka Jossi Jorgenson, is a cab driver in Jerusalem shortly after World War II. Born in Riga and the only member of his family to survive the the war, Brand now works for the Jewish underground.  In his old Peugeot, he drives tourists from the old city to The King David Hotel, but also drives the getaway car that bombs British trains and buildings.  He still mourns  his wife, Katya, who died in a concentration camp, yet he has fallen in love with Eva, also a survivor and member of the underground.  Written in terse prose, City of Secrets is a love story, historical fiction , a novel about moral dilemmas and for anyone who has been to Jerusalem, a chance to revisit some of its famous sights.

Neel Mukherjee’s second novel, The Lives of Others, was a great family saga short-listed for The Man Booker Prize.  A Life Apart is actually his debut novel, but it was not published in this country until after The Lives of Others.  One can see signs of the excellent writer Mukherjee will become here.

Ritwik is a gay orphan raised by a brutal mother in Calcutta.  He attends college in England on a scholarship and decides to stay on after graduation even though his student visa has run out and he doesn’t have a green card.  He lives rent free, taking care of an elderly woman and makes his spending money doing odd menial jobs and prostituting.  In his spare time, Ritwik is writing a novel about an English woman living in India in the early 1900’s.

The story within a story is more a diversion than a parallel experience.  One is waiting for both stories to come together and they never do.  There are sections in A Life Apart Continue reading “A Life Apar wat by Neel Mukherjee vividpages” →

In a letter to his son, Coates describes his life growing up in Baltimore, attending Howard University, marrying and fathering a son, and living and writing in New York City.  However, that is only the bare bones of this epistle.  This heart felt work of nonfiction is really the plight of the black man in a white dominated world-the pain, the anger and the injustice.  Coates uses strong, relentless language to express how he feels about our country’s treatment of blacks for over two hundred and fifty years.  As a white privileged female, I felt shame, guilt and hopelessness as I read Between the World and Me, yet I am very glad that I read it.

Charlotte Rogan’s second novel contains two parallel stories.  One is the tale of Maggie Rayburn, an Oklahoma wife and mother, who reads in a confidential report which is not intended for her eyes, that toxic material is leaking out from the munitions plant where she works. The leak has the potential to harm humans, including unborn children.  The second story is Penn Sinclair’s, an army captain in Iraq who, as a result of a poor decision on his part, has caused the deaths of two soldiers in his platoon.  To atone, he tries to spread the word about the disastrous effects of warfare.  Maggie and Penn are different in terms of background and education, but they both believe that truth and justice are important.  Both take risks that take them out of their comfort zones, so that they can pursue causes they truly believe in.

A novel about young three men who leave India in hopes of a better life in England and a woman who tries to help is the focus of this hard-to-put-down read that was short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.  Tochi leaves India for England after he witnesses his family being destroyed, Avtar and Randeep leave hoping to send their destitute families half of their wages, and Narinder agrees to a one year marriage because of guilt and a duty to her religion.  All four of these young people live desperate lives, searching for food, shelter and work while evading the immigration authorities.

It will take a few chapters to fully understand the history and motives of the main characters but stay with it.  The Year of the Runaways is well worth the work.

Desmond’s sociological study of recent evictions in Milwaukee has received much hype and deservedly so.  Evicted is engaging, well-documented and gave me much to think about.  Studying the poor on that city’s north and south side, Desmond shows how easy it is to have a tenant evicted and how eviction can lead to depression, truancy, separation of mothers from their children and many more negative repercussions.  What, for me, made this book so interesting was how Desmond zeroed in on eight individuals and followed them for several years to illustrate what’s wrong with the housing situation for the urban poor in this country.

Noonday completes Pat Barker’s second trilogy.  It takes place, for the most part, in London and begins pre WWI and  concludes in 1940.  It is the best of this trilogy and can easily be read as a stand alone novel.  Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kip Neville are artists who have known each other for over three decades.  Paul and Elinor are married.but Kit has always longed for Elinor.  Much of the drama, which includes the twists and turns in their relationship, occurs during the London blitz of 1940.  Elinor and Neville are ambulance drivers and Paul is on the rescue squad.  Barker also has two secondary stories-Bertha, an obese medium and Kenny, a young boy taken into the English countryside for safety, who returns to London so he can be with his mother.

Pat Barker’s descriptions of the blitz are beautiful, precise and haunting.  One can almost taste and feel plaster falling from the walls and ceilings during several of the bombings and hear and feel the broken glass as windows are shattered.  Noonday is a must read for fans of Pat Barker.

First time novelist, Julia Claiborne Johnson, has written a fun, bittersweet story.  Alice Whitely, who works for a New York publishing house, has been asked to travel across the country to Los Angeles to play nanny to nine year old Frank Banning while his mother, Mimi, completes the novel she has promised Alice’s boss.  Frank is a complicated youngster-very intelligent, very sly and very different.  His knowledge of Hollywood trivia is exceptional yet his social skills with peers are pathetic.  How Alice handles this young dynamo, his aloof and secretive mother as well as other characters, is the plot of the novel.

Be Frank with Me is reminiscent of Where’d You Go, Bernadette.  Both have quirky characters who don’t fit in, don’t want to fit in, and thus must struggle to maintain their integrity.

 

 

Like her first novel, Secret Daughter, The Golden Son is an interesting, easy to read novel with well-written characters.  Patel is the eldest son of an Indian family.  He travels from his small village to Dallas to begin his medical residency.  His life in The United States is a learning experience in many ways.  Anil encounters life and death, tradition vs. freedom and entitlement and prejudice.  Interwoven into Anil’s life is the story of Leena, a childhood friend whose parents have arranged a disastrous marriage for her.  Some of the events that occur are fairly predictable, while others are surprising.

The Golden Son is an enjoyable study of a man torn between the customs of his homeland and the freedom he encounters in America.