bookpagedev

History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The Associated Press, which prides itself on speedy reporting, appalled the civilized world on September 29, 1999, when it broke a half-century-old story. The news report claimed that U.S. military forces massacred as many as 400 civilians in the early days of the Korean conflict. According to the report, the slaughter denied by the Army and hushed up for years occurred in July 1950 in the South Korean hamlet of No Gun Ri. The story earned the Pulitzer Prize for reporters Sang-Hun Choe, Charles Hanley and Martha Mendoza. In The Bridge at No Gun Ri, these wire-service staffers have added depth and breadth to their initial account. They tell how aging U.S. veterans and surviving Koreans have tried to cope with haunting memories and tragic losses. The result is an even-handed and engrossing account of the carnage and its consequences.

Why the massacre? U.S. troops feared enemy soldiers had donned peasant clothes and joined civilian refugees streaming southward toward American lines. Without a way to identify disguised infiltrators, the U.S. plan to eliminate them became simple: Kill everyone. When a large group of refugees paused to rest near a bridge, American planes strafed them, killing about 100. Hundreds of others, most of them children, women and old men, managed to take cover beneath the bridge. In the next three days, some 300 were shot to death. The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies, recalls a survivor.

The three writers, combing through thousands of documents and conducting hundreds of interviews, established a clear record of the atrocities. Their findings triggered a U.S. investigation leading to an expression of regret from former President Clinton.

The Korean survivors’ emotion-stirring tales show how innocent victims driven by the power of family love managed to persevere despite their irreparably damaged lives. When the book is closed, one question is likely to linger in the reader’s mind: Could I have kept on going as they did?

Ex-newsman Alan Prince served in the Army during the Korean War.

 

The Associated Press, which prides itself on speedy reporting, appalled the civilized world on September 29, 1999, when it broke a half-century-old story. The news report claimed that U.S. military forces massacred as many as 400 civilians in the early days of the Korean conflict.…

Fiction

The cost of betrayal

Review by bookpagedev

In Louis Begley’s latest novel, Shipwreck, an unidentified narrator is approached by a stranger who confides a story. The stranger turns out to be a novelist who, despite prizes and a movie sale, doubts the value of his life’s work. As the author of About Schmidt a novel adapted into an Oscar-winning film Begley tempts readers to seek autobiographical elements in this adventuresome new work.

John North, the middle-aged novelist in Shipwreck, loves his wife Lydia and has always remained faithful to her. But on a visit to Paris, North becomes obsessed with LŽa, a vibrant young reporter who interviews him for Paris Vogue. He assuages his guilt by telling himself that having sex with LŽa will rejuvenate his art. The unnamed narrator functions as devil’s advocate, asking what difference it could possibly make if North has a little fling. In the end, it makes quite a difference.

Begley draws North with care, divulging more and more about his past to make the startling finish to the novel believable. By the final pages you realize why this man can’t stop talking and drinking his ambiguous actions have seared his soul. The narrator never really becomes clear as a separate individual, and it seems unlikely he would willingly listen to the recitation of this whole tale. Perhaps Begley means him as a doppelganger, an alter-ego of the author.

At one point in the book, North cleverly asks the narrator if he has read Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon. The form of Shipwreck’s narration suggests a Conrad novel, as do its questions of morality and its seafaring title. And, like Conrad, Begley is originally from Poland.

Begley’s novel is more sexually explicit, of course, than anything in the work of the 19th century master, but there’s more at stake here than erotic fantasies. This confessional tale isn’t as simple as it seems, and North is never as straightforward as he appears. With his usual deft style, Begley does a masterful job of illuminating the philanderer’s heart of darkness. Anne Morris is an Austin writer.

In Louis Begley's latest novel, Shipwreck, an unidentified narrator is approached by a stranger who confides a story. The stranger turns out to be a novelist who, despite prizes and a movie sale, doubts the value of his life's work. As the author of About…
Children's & YA

Sisters share a memorable vacation

Review by bookpagedev

Summer is the perfect time for enchantment and adventure. First-time author Jeanne Birdsall delivers both with ease in her fanciful new novel, The Penderwicks, in which four very different sisters spend a summer vacation with their faithful dog, Hound, and their botany professor father, who takes his daughters’ adventures in stride and has a penchant for quoting Latin.

The Penderwick sisters include gentle Rosalind, 12, who experiences her first unrequited love; stubborn Skye, 11, who excels at sports and is teaching herself algebra; daydreamer Jane, 10, who is constantly thinking of the next episode in her Sabrina Starr stories; and spirited Batty, 4, who goes nowhere without her butterfly wings. Having lost their mother to a terminal illness just after Batty was born, the sisters have formed a fierce bond.

The setting of their unforgettable summer vacation is a cottage on the Arundel estate. While Mrs. Tifton, the icy owner of the mansion, forbids the uncouth children to play in her sprawling gardens, her son, Jeffrey, immediately befriends the sisters. When they learn that the fatherless and musically talented boy is going to be shipped off to a military school, the Penderwick sisters make it a mission to save Jeffrey from a horrific fate.

If not for a few rare mentions of computers and other modern-day gadgets, readers might think this nostalgic novel takes place decades ago. Whether rescuing escaped rabbits or Batty from a bull’s pen, barging into Mrs. Tifton’s garden competition, searching through attic trunks to find vintage dresses to wear to Jeffrey’s birthday party, eating homemade gingerbread or shooting rubber-tipped arrows at a cutout of Mrs. Tifton’s fiancŽ, the girls’ adventures are always endearing and fun. And in the course of the summer, the sisters come to realize their own talents, challenges and changes.

The first cool nights of fall sadly remind us that summer is over. The conclusion of The Penderwicks leaves you with that same wistful feeling: if only the magic of friends and family could continue a little longer.

Summer is the perfect time for enchantment and adventure. First-time author Jeanne Birdsall delivers both with ease in her fanciful new novel, The Penderwicks, in which four very different sisters spend a summer vacation with their faithful dog, Hound, and their botany professor father, who…
Children's & YA

The sounds of silence

Review by bookpagedev

Fans of The Birchbark House have eagerly awaited the second installment in Louise Erdrich’s cycle of novels about the young Ojibwe girl Omakayas and her life on Lake Superior. Those who read The Game of Silence will discover it has been worth the wait.

On a summer day in 1849, six canoes arrive at Omakayas’ village fleeing the Bwaanags the Dakota and Lakota people who had wiped out their village. Soon they hear that the president of the chimookomanag, or white people, has issued a removal order, requiring the Ojibwe to move west to make room for white settlers.

But the West is the home of the Bwaanag, so they are caught between two packs of wolves. While the children play the game of silence, where the one to remain silent longest wins a prize, adults use the silence to meet and ponder a course of action. Wondering if they have offended the white people, they decide to send runners out in four directions to investigate. In the meantime, village life goes on and is lovingly portrayed in Erdrich’s rich prose, the middle section of the novel an ode to a place and a way of life. Canoe making, ricing, sugaring, hunting, making clothes, storytelling, snowball fights, and sledding are part and parcel of this way of life, but if the telling is Erdrich’s labor of love, it is no idealized version of Native American culture. There’s an annoying little brother, a testy cousin, a well-meaning priest who may be a stealer of souls, and various injuries, near-tragedies and losses. When the travelers return with the news that, indeed, they will have to move west, the home held so dear by Omakayas is to be lost. But as the novel ends with the beginnings of a journey, nine-year-old Omakayas has grown wiser, seeing now that this trek holds danger but also adventure and possibility. If the story has been framed by the ill-fated journey in four directions, so too has it been framed by the game of silence. Only now it is a game of life and death, silence being a necessity to keep them alive as they travel through enemy territories.

Fans of The Birchbark House have eagerly awaited the second installment in Louise Erdrich's cycle of novels about the young Ojibwe girl Omakayas and her life on Lake Superior. Those who read The Game of Silence will discover it has been worth the wait.
Religion & Spirituality

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Prepare to e-mail all your cleverest friends and recommend Trials of the Monkey, Matthew Chapman’s wickedly funny, politically incorrect diatribe on religious superstition and other human follies.

The narrative is loosely organized around the yearly re-enactment of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In 1925, biology teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in the public classroom in defiance of Tennessee laws. Chapman has a piquant relationship to his subject: he is the great, great grandson of Charles Darwin, who pioneered evolutionary theory. Chapman’s ostensible mission in this book is to travel to Dayton and report on the re-enactment of the Scopes trial. But this purpose is virtually lost in his wickedly delightful portraits of the people he meets on his journey. Chapman, an Englishman living in New York who writes for the film industry, harbors some predictable stereotypes about the rural southeastern United States. Yet he profiles his victims in such intriguing detail and with such wit that reading his book is a lot like eating chocolate mousse: You know you shouldn’t, but it’s just so delicious. The author doesn’t spare himself the edge of his own razor-sharp insight. Alternating chapters are devoted to exposing the most sordid moments of his childhood. But what does Chapman’s reckless adolescence have to do with the re-enactment of the Scopes trial? This is where you have to read with some subtlety, but the key lies, perhaps, in the following sentence: When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man, he was thinking of his progeny. Evolution doesn’t always go forward, in other words. Just look at me, the author quips. Similarly, Dayton, Tennessee, which in 1925 gloried in debating evolution with full intellectual vigor, has subsequently subsided into religious complacency and complete denial of scientific discovery, Chapman indicates.

Witty, incisive and shockingly irreverent, Chapman’s talents have been largely buried in a pile of unproduced Hollywood scripts. Though he has made millions on his writing, he is virtually unknown to the reading world. With luck, Trials of the Monkey will be the first step in reversing that misfortune.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

 

Prepare to e-mail all your cleverest friends and recommend Trials of the Monkey, Matthew Chapman's wickedly funny, politically incorrect diatribe on religious superstition and other human follies.

The narrative is loosely organized around the yearly re-enactment of the Scopes trial in Dayton,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Singing of Big Sky Country

Review by bookpagedev

A classical voice teacher isolated on the plains during the Depression tries to teach a black rodeo performer with one lung how to sing, drawing the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan. Not the stuff of your average novel, but then Ivan Doig does not write average novels. In Prairie Nocturne, with his usual idiosyncrasy, he brings back several characters from his highly applauded Montana Trilogy in a coda that opens up the 20th century and its achingly modern concerns.

Susan Duff, the endearing singing schoolgirl from Dancing at the Rascal Fair, reappears here as a mature, professionally talented freethinker. She is persuaded by her former lover, Wes, to take Monty of the gorgeous voice under her wing. In the process, she and Wes get back together again, and a whole new relationship develops between teacher and student as well.

Big Sky Country never had a better booster than Doig. Although the action swings to New York City for a while, the Two-Medicine territory he portrays so lovingly is not short-changed. Neither is Doig’s facility with words; his writer’s gait bucks a bit, but he keeps a sure hand on the reins. Although it would add to the reader’s enjoyment and understanding to have read the author’s earlier books, Prairie Nocturne stands amply on its own, dealing with Doig concerns in characteristic Doig fashion. As usual in his books, human beings who just barely fit into the jigsaw puzzles of each other’s worlds form the heart of the story. Even more typical are the unexpected perfect phrasings that litter his prose. One might quibble with certain plot turns, or with his portrayal of a career-conscious singer who relies so heavily on old songs his mother taught him. Still, any author who can remark on “the sort of person who would be fun on a picnic, if it was a short enough picnic,” and “the ancient impatience of water,” and “Montana’s long-legged miles” deserves a wide and loyal readership.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

A classical voice teacher isolated on the plains during the Depression tries to teach a black rodeo performer with one lung how to sing, drawing the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan. Not the stuff of your average novel, but then Ivan Doig does not…
Fiction

The Sad Truth About Happiness

Review by bookpagedev

What is more fleeting, more elusive than happiness? First-time novelist Anne Giardini delivers a powerful story that answers that question as clearly as anyone ever can. Maggie Selgrin is a typical early 30-something living in urban Vancouver. She has a perfectly respectable job, a few good friends and a decent apartment. Yet something is missing (aside from good dating prospects). She can’t quite pinpoint it until her roommate, who designs magazine quizzes for a living, gives Maggie a quiz that indicates she has mere months left to live.

When Maggie realizes that it was her negative answer to the question Are you happy? that dragged down her life expectancy, she decides to take charge and find happiness. If only this were something waiting on the side of the road or conveniently packaged and available on a shelf at the local grocery, she’d be set. But Maggie, who prefers her life straightforward and uncomplicated, thank you very much, finds that happiness is a bit more elusive than she’d hoped.

Along the way, she becomes unwittingly embroiled in a nasty custody dispute between her flaky sister Lucy and the married Italian man who is the father of Lucy’s newborn son. Hoping to protect her sister, Maggie takes the baby and goes on the run. She finds help along the way from several strong women, who both hide Maggie and the baby and help her rethink her own approach to life and to the nature of happiness.

Giardini, the daughter of beloved author Carol Shields, is a nimble storyteller who creates a character for the ages in dignified, wise-beyond-her-years Maggie Selgrin. Happiness, as Maggie learns, can best be found when you don’t look too hard for it. Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

What is more fleeting, more elusive than happiness? First-time novelist Anne Giardini delivers a powerful story that answers that question as clearly as anyone ever can. Maggie Selgrin is a typical early 30-something living in urban Vancouver. She has a perfectly respectable job, a few…
FictionShort Stories

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In Wendy Brenner’s home page, courtesy of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s English department, she says her goal as a teacher is to lead students into battle with the inexpressible.’ Brenner’s new collection of stories, Phone Calls from the Dead, perfectly illustrates how she herself has won this battle by consistently using language to go beyond words. The stories in this book express the desperation of protagonists sometimes made mute by their inability to coherently communicate among themselves. By using seemingly inanimate and therefore voiceless 20th century technologies and animals as metaphors reflecting her characters’ inadequacies, longings and failed aspirations, Brenner expresses for them what they cannot express. In this collection, both man and machine are miswired. The father in the title story addresses a conference of the Instrumental Transcommunication Network, relating how his dead son communicated with him through a tape recorder. In another story, a computerized switchboard at a hospital, through a programming error, places calls to those staffing the information desk as if to ask rhetorically by its silence, Is anyone out there listening? And in another, an air conditioning system falls apart section by section, thereby keeping a gorgeous repairman just outside the reach of a temporary worker whose life seems to be falling apart in a similar way. In each story, Brenner expertly interweaves the tragic with the comic. We laugh at these characters, distantly hearing within their voices the cadences of our own, but we flinch, too, because their familiarity sometimes brings us too close to the edge of recognition. We’d like to think we’re not in the same boat or wired to the same network, perhaps but we know we are.

Acclaimed author Padgett Powell has called Brenner’s work disturbed, taut, funny, and wise, and his assessment accurately describes what makes her writing just plain good. Not many can harness the disturbing with the funny, which partially explains why this winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for her first collection of stories, Large Animals in Everyday Life, was named one of 25 fiction writers to watch by Writer’s Digest. But the last word is that, like O’Connor, Brenner imbues her narratives with great meaning as she works to understand, as she puts it, the inexplicable, inevitable, intuitive, devastating, [and] holy. With each story, she figures it out.

Bonnie Arant Ertelt is a writer and editor living in Nashville.

 

In Wendy Brenner's home page, courtesy of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington's English department, she says her goal as a teacher is to lead students into battle with the inexpressible.' Brenner's new collection of stories, Phone Calls from the Dead, perfectly illustrates how…

Taking flight with the Wright brothers

Review by bookpagedev

In 12 seconds on December 17, 1903, two bicycle repairmen sealed their place in history as they solved the mystery of manned flight. Now 100 years later, Wilbur and Orville Wright’s landmark takeoff is back in the spotlight, and the shelves are packed with books on all things Wright.

Standing out from the crowd is Mark Eppler’s The Wright Way: 7 Problem-Solving Principles from the Wright Brothers That Can Make Your Business Soar. The management advice-cum-historical adventure draws business lessons from the brothers who, still working part-time in their bicycle shop, financed their own inventions and conquered the air in just 11 months. BookPage recently spoke to Eppler, a former marketing executive and management instructor, about the Wright brothers’ amazing problem-solving techniques and how they can be applied today.

For brothers, Wilbur and Orville got along amazingly well. What made them such good business partners? The Wright brothers’ partnership, perhaps the most productive two-man collaboration in history, was based on the fair distribution of what I like to call the five equities: trust, effort, honor, profits and power (information). The trust the two shared was powered by an intense belief that integrity and honesty were essential in all relationships. That integrity made sure that the other parts of their working relationship sharing workload, credit (for accomplishments) and information were all kept in balance. Sharing profits was not an issue either. During the entire time they were in business (the partnership ended in 1912 with Wilbur’s untimely death from typhoid fever), they shared a common checking account. Neither questioned the checks the other wrote, both signing them the same way: "Wright Brothers." Wilbur and Orville knew that neither could solve the problem of flight alone, so protecting the relationship was as important as building a flying machine.

Wilbur called Orville a "good scrapper." Why was that important? It’s important to remember that what the Wright brothers were trying to accomplish was incredibly complex. A lot of theory and ideas were being thrashed out, and the brothers needed to be sure they got it right. After all, they were betting their lives on the outcome. Their ability to contest each other’s ideas, often in heated fashion, was a key component in their success. Their sometimes thunderous arguments, while disconcerting to others, were the sound of discovery as far as the brothers were concerned.

In calling Orville a "good scrapper," Wilbur was paying tribute to Orv’s ability to engage his older brother in head-to-head debate without being intimidated. In my book, I call this activity forging, a process by which ideas are subjected to the "heat" of discussion and the "blows" of contention until a practical solution emerges just as iron is forged in a blacksmith’s shop. The Wright brothers’ "scrapping" was a creative life-force that energized the brothers, driving them forward in their quest to fly. Many companies, in the interest of political correctness and civility, have shifted the emphasis from the pursuit of creativity to the preservation of pleasantness. Everyone’s getting along, but there aren’t many new and innovative ideas being generated.

How did the Wright brothers react after their flight made them famous? The Wright brothers were raised in a home that placed great emphasis on personal character. Milton Wright, a bishop in the United Brethren Church, raised Wilbur and Orville to believe that humility and courtesy were essential in all relationships. As a result, they remained unchanged in virtually every respect by their success, save one. Because of the bitter patent fights and legal battles that followed, the brothers became less trusting of those outside their tight-knit circle of family and friends, and more insulated from the world.

Where do you plan to be on December 17? Freezing in Kitty Hawk! At 10:35 a.m., on the spot where the Wright brothers first conquered the wind 100 years earlier, an attempt will be made to fly an authentic replica of the original Wright Flyer at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. I’ll be there, with a few thousand others, to capture the moment and cheer them on.

In 12 seconds on December 17, 1903, two bicycle repairmen sealed their place in history as they solved the mystery of manned flight. Now 100 years later, Wilbur and Orville Wright's landmark takeoff is back in the spotlight, and the shelves are packed with…

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The Traveler

Review by bookpagedev

Do you ever wonder if we are living in the last great age of freedom? Credit card companies, merchants, utilities, insurers and the government have always collected data on citizens, but the databases weren’t linked. With the explosion of the Internet, surveillance cameras, global positioning satellites and supercomputers, those days are over. John Twelve Hawks’ tautly strung and disquieting page-turner, The Traveler, drops us into a dystopian near future where information technology (which he calls the Grid ) threatens personal freedom though the average citizen doesn’t realize it. A shadowy group called the Tabula has focused for years on integrating all the data and assuming the role of puppet master to the masses. As Tabula plan architect General Nash says, most of us would gladly give up a little privacy in exchange for security. Sound familiar? Certain gifted individuals, called Travelers, have the ability to escape their bodies and travel to other planes; they also tend to introduce new and unsettling ideas into society, making them the Tabula’s natural adversary. Historically, Travelers were protected from the Tabula by a ronin-like group called Harlequins. Two brothers, descended from a Traveler, appear on the scene, as does one of the few remaining Harlequins, and the race is on. If either brother possesses the gift and can be turned to the dark side, the Tabula could achieve their hegemony. The stakes couldn’t be higher should the Tabula accomplish their goal, 1984 would collide with Brave New World in an ugly union. The Traveleris the latest major acquisition for The Da Vinci Code editor Jason Kaufman, and it offers readers the same winning combination of breakneck pacing and paranoia-inducing conspiracy theory. Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym for an author who jealously guards his privacy he uses a satellite phone so his calls can’t be traced and won’t pose for publicity photos. Pitting brother against brother, Tabula against Harlequin and freedom versus security this anonymous writer has concocted a brilliant, if alarming, summer read. Thane Tierney is a record executive in Los Angeles.

Do you ever wonder if we are living in the last great age of freedom? Credit card companies, merchants, utilities, insurers and the government have always collected data on citizens, but the databases weren't linked. With the explosion of the Internet, surveillance cameras, global positioning…

Real estate riches

Review by bookpagedev

Russ Whitney was a high school dropout working in a slaughterhouse when he picked up a $10 real estate how-to book. Now the multimillionaire has written his own real estate how-to guide with Millionaire Real Estate Mentor. Whitney gives a simple overview of how the real estate market works and delves into auctions, wholesale real estate, foreclosure and mobile homes, which he calls “little boxes that spit out cash.” This isn’t a passive program that assures returns in 20 years. Whitney strives to make money fast and he loves the control real estate gives, saying it puts you in the driver’s seat for your future. But he doesn’t advocate going it alone. Nope, every real estate guru needs a “power team” that includes a banker, a mortgage broker, an insurance agent and a few others all people willing to help make you a success because it puts money in their pockets.

For those worried about the potential cash outlay, Whitney insists that “no money down” deals are everywhere and describes six ways to make these happen. His advice is tailored to beginners, and he goes to great lengths to demystify the market.

Russ Whitney was a high school dropout working in a slaughterhouse when he picked up a $10 real estate how-to book. Now the multimillionaire has written his own real estate how-to guide with Millionaire Real Estate Mentor. Whitney gives a simple overview of how…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Double Cross Blind

Review by bookpagedev

Joel Ross’ page-turner of a debut novel, Double Cross Blind, opens in the early months of World War II, when the British intelligence services identified almost all of the Nazi agents operating in the United Kingdom and gave them the option of being executed or becoming double agents. Enough chose the latter that the British were able to deceive the Nazis in ways that significantly enhanced Allied military operations.

Into this world in which nothing is what it seems, Ross inserts several Americans. The protagonist, Tom Wall, has volunteered to serve with the Canadian Army and has been physically and psychologically traumatized by his experiences during the battle for Crete. At the center of that trauma is his belief that his brother, Earl, who is in the American diplomatic service, is a Nazi double agent who caused the death of most of Tom’s squadron on Crete. Further complicating the situation is the fact that Tom had been romantically involved with Harriet, Earl’s eventual wife, before Earl entered the picture. Add in a couple of eccentric Nazis, the unreal chaos of the Nazi Blitz against London and other British cities, and advance intelligence about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the novel becomes a compellingly disorienting mix for the reader as well as for Tom Wall.

Double Cross Blind does exhibit some of the limitations of a first effort. The characters aren’t always quite as interesting as Ross seems to think they are, and the very gradual revelation of what is actually occurring may cause some readers to give up on the story prematurely. Still, Ross (whose editor is former Putnam bigwig Phyllis Grann, who groomed Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook for bestsellerdom) is very good with detail and with choosing descriptive language that often seems perfectly suited to the person, place or situation and is unusually perceptive without being self-indulgently flamboyant. Even the murkiest events are imbued with a vivid immediacy. And that in itself is more than enough to carry the story. Martin Kich teaches English at Wright State University.

Joel Ross' page-turner of a debut novel, Double Cross Blind, opens in the early months of World War II, when the British intelligence services identified almost all of the Nazi agents operating in the United Kingdom and gave them the option of being executed or…
Fiction

The Bitch Posse

Review by bookpagedev

The Bitch Posse begins with some sly but apt Consumer Product Information, which warns the reader about what is to come with an intense sense of immediacy. Fortunately for the reader, first-time novelist Martha O’Connor occasionally relaxes her grip a bit, or the novel’s stunning rawness would be almost too much. O’Connor wrote The Bitch Posse in retaliation against chick lit, which she finds too neat and too unlike her own life. In response, she brings us the horrifying, sad and valiant stories of three best friends. There’s Amy, the cheerleader who quit cheering; Rennie, the brightest of the bright and seemingly utterly in control; and Cherry, obsessed with Princess Diana. We get the points of view of each, both as high-school seniors and as women in their early 30s who are still grappling with their various demons, made all the harder to conquer by a shared violent secret that keeps them apart after it occurs. O’Connor, describing a moment between Amy and her husband, could be talking about any one of the trio: They have a conversation without words and without tears (they’ve been driven so deep they’ll never come out). There is nothing easy about the world O’Connor brings to life with strokes both bold and detailed. Self-mutilation is a theme, but she is very convincing on why anyone would feel the need to do it. And The Bitch Possemakes a strong case for how children, no matter how smart or rational, can be victims of the adults meant to protect them. Amy’s parents are alcoholics occupied with their older mentally handicapped daughter and expect Amy to give them no additional worries. Rennie, who still looks like a child and is intellectually gifted, is involved in an affair with a married teacher; and Cherry, an artist and poet who believes she is not the equal of her friends and doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice her future for theirs, remains under the control of a drug-addicted mother.

Still, O’Connor doesn’t rule out the possibility of hope and redemption and, after what the reader has gone through with these young women, that possibility is very welcome indeed. Joanne Collings writes from Washington, D.C.

The Bitch Posse begins with some sly but apt Consumer Product Information, which warns the reader about what is to come with an intense sense of immediacy. Fortunately for the reader, first-time novelist Martha O'Connor occasionally relaxes her grip a bit, or the novel's stunning…

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features