Harry Eide, at the opening of this novel, is suffering from Alzheimer’s and has wandered off into the cold Northern Minnesota winter, never to be seen again.  To understand his father better, Harry’s son, Gus, recounts to his father’s mistress the brutal winter that they wandered up north almost dying several times during their circuitous journey.  Both the mistress, Berit, and Gus believe that if they describe the past in enough detail they will understand the present.  However; the Eide family, and especially Harry, carry such a load of secrets that is is unlikely that the entire truth will ever be known.

Geye writes and interesting, highly descriptive, tale, although at times I had trouble grasping the Eide family lineage.  A family tree would have been helpful.

Cathleen Schine has once again written an amusing, yet poignant family tale.  This time it is the story of Joy Bergman, a proud, insightful woman in her 80’s, trying to cope with her husband’s failing health.  She has loving children who want what is best for her, but what they think is best and what Joy thinks is best are often miles apart.

Schine portrays the process of aging with humor, empathy and concern.  Joy and her clan are caring, sensitive individuals who sometimes misinterpret the needs of others.  In other words-they are all quite human.

They May Not Mean to, but They Do is my kind of beach read.

Available on June 7, 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

schi

I just finished this wonderful debut novel, and although it isn’t released until June 7th, I couldn’t wait to write about it.  Gyasi depicts two Ghanaian families, unknowingly related, dating back eight generations.  One family is loaded onto a slave ship and spends the next 150some years in America.  The other remains in Ghana for the most part, sometimes living peacefully with the British and other African tribes, sometimes not.  Each chapter in Homegoing is about a character in one of the families, and Gyasi begins her novel by describing the first ancestor and ends in the year 2000.  Each portrayal is honest, unique, complex and memorable.  This is the kind of book I will want to reread in a few years, so I can savor it again.

 

As fine a novel as Louise Erdrich has ever written, LaRose grabs its readers from page one and never lets go.  Landreaux Iron is hunting deer and accidentally shoots and kills his neighbor’s son, Dusty, who is the youngest child of his wife’s half sister.  According to Ojibwe law, Iron must hand over his youngest child, LaRose, to Dusty’s parents.  Thus begins the saga of the Iron and Ravich families.  Erdrich moves back and forth in time, beginning with the first LaRose five generations back and ending in present day North Dakota.  LaRose has well-drawn characters, and a plot with some realistically written tense moments.  I believe the author ended this novel with the possibility of a sequel.  I sure hope so.

Weird, ominous, uncomfortable and philosophical are just a few of the adjectives to describe DeLillo’s latest novel.  The story begins when Jeffrey Lockhard, the narrator, is traveling to visit his father, Ross, and step mother, Artis, ocalled a remote, desert-like location somewhere in the Mideast.  The building he spends his time at is named The Convergence, and is actually a place where people are frozen and then brought back to life when our world becomes more welcoming.  Artis, who is quite ill, is about to undergo

Russo has done it again-written a laugh-out-loud novel with well drawn characters and a page turner plot. Everybody’s Fool, like Nobody’s Fool, takes place in North Bath, New York with basically the same comedic misfits.  It is not necessary to read Nobody’s before reading Russo’s newest, but I guarantee you will want to read it after meeting Sully, Raymer and a host of others.

For the most part, the book takes place during a forty-eight hour period on a sweltering Memorial Day Weekend in North Bath.  In those two days, a deadly cobra is on the loose, the sheriff has fainted and fallen into a newly dug grave, lightening has struck along with a number of other calamities.  If you’re in the mood to do a lot of smiling, pick up a copy of Everybody’s Fool.

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.