Arlene McKanic, Author at BookPage | Discover your next great book!

Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda is killed in the prologue of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s first novel, Dust. From there on, everything falls to pieces.

We’re in 2007 Kenya, though the country has been tormented ever since the Brits decided to graft it onto their Empire. Add to this the Mau Mau uprisings, myriad political assassinations and the mandatory forgetting of the disappearances and torture of thousands of men, women and children. As one of the characters contemplates in this grief-stricken book, the three languages spoken in Kenya are “English, Kiswahili and Silence.”

But instead of concentrating on the woes of a whole country, Owuor turns her attentions to one fractured family and the people who have touched their lives, for good or for ill, over the decades of Kenya’s endless ordeals. Odidi’s mother, Akai, is driven mad by his death and runs off—granted, she’s always been a little mad and we learn why much later. His sister, Ajany, is almost as devastated, and heads for Nairobi to find answers. His father, Nyipir, whose past is excruciatingly bound up with the travails of his country, stays behind to build a cairn for his son. Even as he builds it he’s visited—or haunted—by Isaiah Bolton, the son of his former master, who has come to Kenya to find out what happened to the father he never knew. Add to this assorted government officials, crazy men and vagabonds, all of whom contribute a piece to solving the puzzle of Odidi’s murder.

As we see from the murder in the prologue, Owuor wants to plunge her reader into the action immediately, and her writing style reflects this. She utilizes sentence fragments; dialogue that consists of the speakers barking out one or two words before they reach some kind of conclusion; bare glimpses of deserts, people and wildlife. It’s as if she wants to represent the splintering of Kenya itself. We emerge from her tale a little stunned, like someone coming into daylight from a darkened movie theater. But the somewhat good news is that we are in Kenya, 2007. Can the country knit itself back together? Can Odidi’s family? Dust seems to say that only time will tell.

Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda is killed in the prologue of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s first novel, Dust. From there on, everything falls to pieces.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Dead dog and a man on the run

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

In Richard Powers' latest novel, Orfeo, the last great problem for Peter Els begins when his old, beloved dog kicks the bucket. The poor dog’s death is messy—killed by his ex-wife, in his amateur biology lab. It’s present-day America, and a layperson messing with Petri dishes of weird bacteria is a no-no. Before Els knows it, men in hazmat suits come and confiscate some of his stuff. He goes out for his morning run, and when he comes back folks from what looks like Homeland Security have come to confiscate the rest of it. In response, Els does what he’s been doing most of his life—he runs.

Orfeo takes its title from the Latinized version of Orpheus, a character from ancient Greek mythology who was said to be the greatest musician who ever lived. When his wife died, he went down to Hades to rescue her, but lost her at the last minute when he turned to look at her. In comparison, Peter Els is a man driven and intoxicated by music since childhood. Even his biolab is an attempt to make a primitive, pure music. But he’s hardly the best musician who ever lived; he has exactly one notable creation to his name and disavows it even before it has a chance to premiere. But on his way to his destiny he reconnects with those he’d neglected in his mad pursuit of musical perfection. This includes the woman, another musician, who left him for the greener pastures of Europe when they were young; the big-hearted, quilt-making woman he divorced decades earlier; the snarky, infuriating, charming dancer who was his collaborator on that unfortunate opera and the middle-aged daughter whom he adores but has rarely spent time with.

In Els, Powers gives us a man like so many others: talented but not talented enough, loving but insufficiently so, decent even as his decency goes unrecognized. With prose almost as lyrical as the music that’s always in Els’ head, Powers shows us a man trying to make his peace with people he’d wronged and who had wronged him and with dreams that never quite came true. Orfeo is a haunting book.

In Richard Power’s latest novel, Orfeo, the last great problem for Peter Els begins when his old, beloved dog kicks the bucket. The poor dog’s death is messy—killed by his ex-wife, in his amateur biology lab. It’s present-day America, and a layperson messing with Petri dishes of weird bacteria is a no-no. Before Els knows it, men in hazmat suits come and confiscate some of his stuff. He goes out for his morning run, and when he comes back folks from what looks like Homeland Security have come to confiscate the rest of it. In response, Els does what he’s been doing most of his life—he runs.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Gold Star Mother on a mission

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

April Smith, creator of the popular Detective Ana Grey novels, makes a change of pace with A Star for Mrs. Blake. This moving and surprising novel is the account of a Gold Star Mother’s sojourn to the fields of Verdun where her only son was killed, along with so many other young men, during World War I.

The reader would expect such a story to be moving, but what’s surprising is the toughness that Smith gives to her characters, especially Cora Blake, the Gold Star Mother. But why shouldn’t she be tough? When we first meet her, it’s during a freezing cold Depression-era Maine winter. Her parents are dead, her son is dead and she’s raising her motherless nieces. She and the girls are saved from penury when she gets a job in a sardine cannery that she must walk to because there’s no more gas to fuel the bus. Somehow, she’s managed to survive: She even has a suitor. Then, the letter comes, inviting her to visit the grave of her son in France. She decides to look forward to her voyage the way her seafaring parents looked forward to their trips around the world.

Cora’s sojourn puts her in more modest company, however. She becomes part of a group that includes an Irish housekeeper, a Jewish chicken farmer’s wife, a socialite and, almost, an African-American seamstress. The near inclusion of Mrs. Russell is our first reminder that, Depression and fallout from World War I aside, things aren’t quite right in America.

Still, most of the folks Cora meets are delightful company, including her minders, the plucky nurse Lily Barnett and the upstanding, infinitely patient and cheerful Lt. Hammond. Cora also strikes up a friendship with journalist Griffin Reed. Disfigured in the war, he’s a morphine addict who’s being kept by the artist who helped design the mask that conceals his wounds.

But as entertaining as the trip is, Smith, a lucid writer with a detective’s eye for detail, doesn’t let us forget the painful event that launched her heroine’s journey. Reed’s shattered face, rows of gravestones on a field, live ordnance found too near to a picnic area—all remind the reader of the grotesque wastefulness of the war that began a century ago. Through Cora Blake’s story, Smith explores the experience of some of the good, ordinary and resourceful people who were caught up in it.

Fiction

Fiction

Someone Else’s Love Story

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

The folks in Joshilyn Jackson’s sixth novel, Someone Else’s Love Story, are in all kinds of trouble, but they don’t know it right away. The catalyst for self-knowledge turns out to be a botched robbery at the local Circle K—a gas station, for those of you who aren’t in the Atlanta metro area—attempted by a snaggle-toothed little punk who is promptly brained by one of his hostages.

That hostage is William Ashe, and his fellow hostages include a young woman named Shandi Pierce and her 3-year-old son, Natty. Most of the book is narrated by Shandi, the product of a mixed marriage of a fundamentalist Christian mother and Jewish father. Her son is the product of what she wants to believe is an immaculate conception; she didn’t lose her virginity till after Natty was born by C-section, when she begged her longtime best friend, Walcott, to perform the defloration. The trauma of the robbery forces Shandi to realize that her son’s conception could not have been what she thought it was. It also makes her believe she’s in love with William, her savior.

The robbery causes William to realize a few things as well. A scientist who looks rather like a Nordic lumberjack, he’s a touch autistic. The robbery happens on a painful anniversary, and he’s spent a year trying to push the memories of his now-destroyed family out of his head. Like Shandi, William, too, will find his attempts to avoid reality increasingly difficult.

The reader can’t be blamed for at first finding Shandi’s insistence that her lovely, brilliant boy is the product of parthenogenesis somewhat ridiculous. But as Jackson slowly reveals the truth about Shandi, we warm to her—and to weird, heartbroken William, his tough-as-nails best friend Paula, forbearing Walcott and even the dope who held up the Circle K. There are scenes that will make you gasp, pause or even tear up as Jackson’s characters fumble toward imperfect enlightenment. Someone Else’s Love Story will delight and surprise with its unexpected compassion, empathy and humanity.

Fiction

Fiction

Wall Street, before the fall

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Sophie Landgraf is not a Master of the Universe. When we first meet her in Laura Hemphill’s Buying In, Sophie emerges from beneath her desk after a nap and goes crawling about the offices of her investment banking firm, snooping in her co-workers’ desk drawers. It’s two in the morning, and Sophie, a lowly, overworked analyst, hasn’t seen her boyfriend for days. Not only that, but she doesn’t even have the comfort of making a lot of money. Her overpriced dump on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan eats up half of her salary. Her goodhearted boyfriend Will is in even worse shape; his parents pay his rent. Both of them might be better off than Sophie’s widowed dad, whose mortgage just went up by $1,000 a month. Vasu, the junior of Sophie’s two bosses, is terrified of being sacked, despite being a good worker. The senior boss, the coldly efficient Ethan, has his own demons. The real kicker: The tale begins in late 2007, not long before the beginning of the Great Recession.

What Sophie, Vasu and Ethan do share is that they’re working—and working and working some more—on the merger of two aluminum companies. For this, and the nebulous promise of a fat bonus, they will toil through the holidays, shrug off as many obligations to friends and family as they can get away with and basically become a band of predators. Vasu, for example, doesn’t dare tell Ethan that he stopped on the way to a diligence meeting in India to perform funeral rites for his mother. He’s pleased to let Ethan believe that his shorn head is a fashion statement. On the other hand, becoming a predator-in-training has an allure for Sophie. Check out how she bigfoots a co-worker, then pops her lips in the ladies’ room mirror after applying a layer of (pilfered) power lipstick. Sophie’s not just leaning in; she’s buying in.

At the end, the reader has a strong suspicion that there could be a sequel to Buying In; we’re not through with these characters yet. It’s a testament to Hemphill’s talent that we want more, a lot more, of them.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

An Old West adventure

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

There are two schools of thought when it comes to just how wild the Wild West was back in the post-Civil War days. Some folks claim it wasn’t as lawless as Sam Peckinpah would have it, while others cling to the notion that it really was as bad as folks said it was. In The Outcasts, Kathleen Kent—known previously for historical novels set in colonial New England—chooses the latter point of view, and then some.

Nate is a young Texas policeman who’s taken the job to get some money for his hardscrabble farm back in Oklahoma, where he lives with his wife and baby girl. He falls in with two veteran rangers, Deerling and Dr. Tom, who are on the hunt for a serial murderer named McGill. Dr. Tom is a bit older than Nate, and a voluble spinner of yarns. Deerling, on the other hand, is old enough to be the father of both men. Taciturn, with one of those adamantine moral codes, he would have been perfectly played by John Wayne.

A parallel story concerns a young woman named Lucinda, whom we first meet escaping a brothel to join up with her lover. He, of course, is the vicious killer the rangers are searching for. Slowly, it dawns on the reader that she’s almost as much of a psychopath as McGill. But the operative word is “almost.” Lucinda is capable of love, even if her love expresses itself in some deeply twisted ways. Will it be her downfall? Will it be McGill’s?

Kent’s minor characters are equally memorable, from the people Lucinda lives among while she pretends to be a schoolmarm, to the young boy who facilitates the last showdown. The dialogue, particularly between the rangers, has an almost Biblical cadence. Kent’s descriptions of landscape, weather and rough justice are stunning. Best of all, she keeps you guessing about the fate of these compelling characters.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

An Icelandic tale of guilt and truth

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Iceland might be a swinging place now, but it wasn’t so in the 1820s. People lived on farmsteads that only survived through endless toil. Everything was filthy; the country was chilly even in summer; and society was ruled by a joyless, punitive piety. The death penalty consisted of being separated from your head via order of His Majesty in Denmark. Such is the setting for Australian writer Hannah Kent’s dark but humane first novel, Burial Rites.

Agnes Magnúsdøttir is a pauper and serving woman who’s been arrested and condemned to death for the murder of her employer and lover, Natan, a man looked upon by the country folk as a shady character—his very name is a play on the name Satan, it’s said. To be fair, he is miserably cruel. He hits Agnes and never considers her as anything more than a comfort woman. He has a baby with another woman and sleeps with the other serving girl. But Agnes, who narrates much of the otherwise third-person narrative, remains in love with Natan. So why would she murder him? And if she didn’t kill him, why doesn’t she proclaim her innocence?

Because there are no prisons in their region of Iceland, Agnes is sent to live with the family of a district officer. This isn’t as comfortable as it sounds, for the family at the farm at Kornså are only a tad less poor than other local farmers. The officer’s consumptive wife, Margrét, resents Agnes’ invasion of her home, until her own natural goodness and maternal instincts take over. But the younger daughter loathes Agnes, while the older is strangely drawn to her almost from the beginning. Added to the mix is the callow assistant reverend, nicknamed Tøti, whom Agnes calls upon to be her confessor and who quickly becomes fascinated with her.

Kent has a sturdy grasp of place and history, as well as a talent for creating memorable characters—from Margrét’s family to their eternally pregnant and gossipy neighbor and the uncertain and smitten young priest. And, of course, Agnes. In this day and age, it’s not politically correct to admire a woman who’s in thrall to a brute like Natan, but there’s no doubt of Agnes’ strength of character, her wisdom and practicality (in things other than love) and her essential, vulnerable humanity. Based on a true story, Burial Rites gives us a vivid portrayal of a distant time and land that still somehow feels familiar.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Sisters find truth and horror in the Great War

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

If Thomas Keneally’s expansive and brilliant novel The Daughters of Mars doesn’t remind you of an Australian version of “Downton Abbey,” I don’t know what would. This isn’t to disparage either work—especially not one from the author of Schindler’s List—but the similarities jump out from the opening pages. We have two sisters who don’t get along. We get the soldier with half his face blown off; the manor house converted into a hospital; the Spanish flu sweeping off otherwise young and healthy people; the upstanding bloke thrown in jail for no good reason and the faithful woman who’s willing to do whatever it takes to get him out; the deaths of loved characters that make you gasp for their sheer unfairness.

In The Daughters of Mars, the Durance sisters—chilly Naomi and somewhat more biddable Sally—sign on as army nurses at the beginning of World War I. We follow them on the long boat trip from Australia to the Mediterranean, where they nurse the soldiers coming in from the disaster at Gallipoli and endure the torpedoing of their hospital ship, the Archimedes. The sinking, depicted with hair-raising vividness by Keneally, will impact the sisters, their friends and lovers for the remainder of the war. For one thing, Naomi and Sally (who, it should be said, are not the daughters of an earl but of a dairy farmer from the Australian bush) finally begin to deal with a sad secret they thought they’d left behind in Australia.

Given the devastating nature of what was then known as the “war to end all wars,” Keneally’s touch is surprisingly nimble. He gives us only glimpses of the horror, but that’s sometimes enough. What he’s interested in are the ways the war affects the life choices of those who are caught up in it, and how ordinary folks rarely know they’re living through—or even making—history. The Daughters of Mars is a masterpiece that is sure to rank among Keneally’s best works.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

The secrets we keep

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

At first, this reviewer wanted to warn readers not to be taken in by the light tone of Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret. On second thought, maybe readers should let this rather crafty novelist’s deceptive breeziness and humor sweep them along. It makes the shocks just that much more deliciously nasty, including the gob-smacking twist in the epilogue.

On the surface, the story is about a group of nice, middle-class, mostly Catholic women living in modern-day Australia. There’s Cecilia, the disconcertingly chipper and organized Tupperware salesperson with her mysterious, moody husband John-Paul and their beautiful young daughters. There’s Tess, who embarks on an affair of her own after she discovers her cousin Felicity is sleeping with her husband. And then there’s poor Rachel Crowley, whose daughter Janie was found dead in a park many years ago as a teenager. The case has never been solved, but Rachel’s sure she knows who killed Janie.

A constellation of spouses, children and co-workers surrounds these women, giving the proceedings a cozy normality that we know can’t last. Though men tend to be background figures, the most developed is Connor Whitby, the P.E. teacher at the school attended by Cecilia and Tess’ kids. Handsome and fit, Connor has everyone wondering why he remains unmarried well into his 40s.

Perhaps there’s a reason that most everyone in the book is Catholic, given its themes of sin, both venal and mortal, of guilt and redemption, forgiveness and confession—as well as its images of Easter eggs and hot cross buns and wrongdoings that erupt on Good Friday like the undead. The genius of The Husband’s Secret is that it makes us start to wonder what in our own lives would—or would not—have happened if, say, we had waited just five more minutes before we walked out the door, had not said that hurtful thing, had applied a bit of logic to that situation. The Husband’s Secret is as scary as it is familiar.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Lyrical debut makes familiar characters fresh

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

The first pages of Natalie Brown’s debut novel might bring a reader to groan, “Not another story about a ninny falling for her college professor!” But The Lovebird proves to be more than the story of an ill-fated romance between a timid co-ed with a Strawberry Shortcake suitcase and a predatory teacher. The affair between the diffident Margie Fitzgerald and her Latin professor fades out almost as quickly as it begins. As a parting gift, however, he makes her the head of the fanatical animal rights group he founded and is now washing his hands of.

Feeling useful and included at last, Margie does something stupid and spectacular enough for her to be wanted by the FBI. With the help of one of her animal activist friends, she flees to a Crow reservation in Montana. Specifically, she’s deposited, like one of the stray bunnies she likes to save, at the home of a wise and elderly Crow woman and her family. Yes, yes, haven’t we had enough of authors bringing out old, patient, sagacious Native American women—to the point where we may secretly long for a matriarch who’s mean, irresponsible, potty-mouthed and can’t tell one herb or root from another? But that’s for another novel.

Besides, Brown’s skill pulls us into Granma’s warm, nurturing orbit in spite of ourselves. One reason we love her is the goodness she’s passed on to her son Jim, a chap who’s manly enough to rebuild a car engine and sensitive enough to cry when he shoots a buffalo. Another reason we love Granma is that she’s such a refreshing contrast to the watery Margie. Motherless, raised by a loving but sad and ineffectual father, Margie has been blown hither and yon all of her life like so much of the fluff that blows from the Montana cottonwoods. The rootedness of Granma and her family is what she deeply needs.

Skating so close to cliché and stereotype, then subverting them a little; making you feel for and believe in her characters and care about what happens to them—these are signs of real talent. Natalie Brown is a real talent.

Fiction

Fiction

Disquiet on the home front

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

The only time this reviewer ever screamed back at her television was during an airing of David Rabe’s play Sticks and Bones. The show was about a returning Vietnam vet who’d been blinded in the war. His family was hung up on him sleeping with a prostitute or something else that was so beside the point that it was maddening. Roxana Robinson’s latest, long-awaited novel, Sparta, might make a reader just as mad.

Robinson’s previous novel, Cost, was unflinching in its portrayal of the ruination caused by a young man’s drug addiction. Sparta is nearly as devastating.

The protagonist is Conrad Farrell, a returning Iraq veteran, who’s come home to his loving, liberal, upper-middle-class family in upstate New York. Though none of them are as crazy as the family in Sticks and Bones, they too just don’t get it. Not only that, they don’t want to get it, despite their exhortations to Conrad to tell them “everything.” This is especially true of his mom, Lydia, a therapist. She’s a loving and caring mother—with an infuriating tendency to start coming unhinged anytime Conrad even hints at what really went on over there.

Still, we understand why an otherwise comfortable bunch like the Farrells can’t really cope when the chaos of war is dropped suddenly in their midst. We sympathize with Conrad’s girlfriend, Claire, even as we secretly wish she’d run as far from him as she can, even as we know Conrad desperately needs someone in his corner. But we also know that something very bad is going to happen if she stays.

Robinson’s sympathy for the deeply messed-up Conrad and his fellow vets is as impressive as her knowledge of their circumstances. How could she know what it’s like to be blown up by an IED? How does she know about the macabre jokes soldiers tell to keep themselves sane? In fact, Robinson interviewed several vets to give her book the verisimilitude it needed. Their stories must have been excruciating to hear, but they needed to be heard.

Their stories, or at least Conrad’s story, also deserve to be told. Full of the grief and deep compassion that’s becoming Robinson’s trademark, Sparta is a brilliant, necessary work.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

A delectable tale of the families we choose

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Lorca, the excruciatingly vulnerable protagonist of Jessica Soffer’s first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, is, like so many teenage protagonists, burdened with a couple of seriously bad parents. Her mother Nancy, a chef, notices her when she feels like it. When the novel opens, she’s beginning to feel like it less and less. Lorca has been caught cutting herself and is to be packed off to boarding school. Nancy can’t wait, but the thought of being so discarded terrifies Lorca. As for Lorca’s absent father, he obeys and is cowed by his ex-wife.

On the other side of New York City is another lousy mother, Victoria, a woman with a self-obsession that sucks the air out of any room she’s in. (One mark of Soffer’s talent is that she makes the reader stick with Victoria even at her worst.) Victoria wants to believe that her love for her late husband, Joseph, with whom she used to run a restaurant, was so overpowering that there was no room in their marriage for anyone else. This was why she gave up their child at birth. But now Joseph, as subservient to his wife as Lorca’s dad is to his, is dead, and she has no one but her somewhat scattered upstairs neighbor Dottie. To get over her grief, Victoria starts a cooking class in her own kitchen. To finally win her mother’s affections, Lorca decides to learn how to cook a meal Nancy once rhapsodized over. When she sees a flyer announcing Victoria’s cooking school, she thinks it’s a reprieve.

Well, yes and no. Victoria and Lorca take to each other right away, gently circling each other physically and emotionally as they put together meals from Victoria’s native Iraq. The reader roots for Lorca as she begins to emerge from her isolation. She befriends not only Victoria, but also an equally lonely boy named Blot and maybe even Dottie.

Indeed, we root for all of Soffer’s rich and complex characters, with the exception of Nancy, perhaps—Soffer dislikes her too much. Sometimes families just don’t work, the author seems to say. The good news is you can always find another.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

A daughter’s secrets, uncovered online

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Kate Baron’s daughter Amelia is dead. She fell off the roof of her tony private school in Brooklyn. At first the death is ruled a suicide; then Kate gets an anonymous text that claims it wasn’t a suicide at all. Though shocking to the already shattered Kate, she suspected that her daughter—bright, pretty and fairly well behaved—wouldn’t have thrown herself off a roof. What happened?

Kimberly McCreight’s Reconstructing Amelia is a page-turner, but it’s not only the mystery of how Amelia died that keeps readers going. The chapters alternate between Kate’s point of view and Amelia’s, which includes postings from her Facebook page, text messages to and from her friends—including a mysterious boy named Ben—and missives from her school’s nasty online gossip sheet. We find in Amelia a delightful but deeply needy young woman. Indeed, nearly everyone in the book is needy. Kate, whose own neediness led to her unplanned and unwelcome pregnancy with Amelia, needs to get to know the truth about her daughter. The other adults, many of whom betray Amelia in some way, need to keep up appearances or cover their tracks. The other kids, even the posse of mean girls who torment Amelia during the last weeks of her life, need to belong.

Speaking of kids, McCreight is one of those rare writers who gets teenagers with the sort of specificity and accuracy that can put an ex-teenager’s teeth on edge. She makes you remember the good and bad craziness of those years. She makes you ache for the harrowed single mother Kate, and she makes you want to put your arms around Amelia and tell her everything gets better. But then you realize Amelia is gone, and your heart hurts. Reconstructing Amelia will keep you hooked till the last page.

Arlene McKanic

The splintering of a family, and a country

Dead dog and a man on the run

Gold Star Mother on a mission

Someone Else’s Love Story

Wall Street, before the fall

An Old West adventure

An Icelandic tale of guilt and truth

Sisters find truth and horror in the Great War

The secrets we keep

Lyrical debut makes familiar characters fresh

Disquiet on the home front

A delectable tale of the families we choose

A daughter’s secrets, uncovered online

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