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by Sheri Bodoh

It turns out a novel about trying to keep a floor clean can be edge-of-your-seat compelling. Who knew? Journalist Will Wiles’ fiction debut, Care of Wooden Floors, takes this unlikely plot and twists it into a tight, lovely, unique work full of heart as well as darkness.

An unnamed narrator agrees to housesit for his old college friend, Oskar, in a dreary, unidentified Eastern European city. He doesn’t know how long the gig will last, and he hopes the stay in Oskar’s meticulously kept environs will get his writing juices flowing. It’s deceptively easy: care for the cats, use a coaster and above all else, don’t damage the floors. But this seemingly painless job goes terribly, terribly wrong.

Terribly, hilariously wrong. A wine stain is only the beginning, and the slapstick moments, tinged with threat, are nimbly choreographed. What’s truly wonderful, though, is the narrator’s imperfection—his vulnerability, humanity. As one mistake leads to another, Oskar’s demanding notes multiply throughout the flat, and our narrator’s struggle to right his growing disaster brings our own faults uncomfortably, somehow pleasingly, right up close. And while the story chronicles one man’s problems, it ably takes a larger view, pitting control against chaos and examining the madness that the quest for perfection can bring.

The book suffers a little from an oddly stunted ending. But the ride is such a tense pleasure, it doesn’t even matter. Wiles is a strong new voice. Enjoy this one with a glass of wine—if you dare.

Fiction

Fiction

For the love of the land

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

Tatjana Soli’s new book is tricky. You think it’s about one thing, but it’s about something else. And then something else yet again. Soli’s debut, The Lotus Eaters, left big shoes to fill—it was the 2011 James Tait Black Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. While The Forgetting Tree may not be quite as well executed, it is still compelling and beautiful: I read it compulsively and ate up Soli’s graceful prose.

Bookworm Claire Nagy knows nothing about agriculture when she arrives at her new husband’s sprawling California citrus ranch. But she falls in love with the land and its work, so much so that neither her young son’s tragic death nor her divorce can bring her to leave, even with the farm in trouble. Ranchers all around her are selling out to developers—the writing is on the wall—and her grown daughters have left, but Claire will not budge. One understands why: Soli’s descriptions of the orchards, the fruit and Claire’s love of the land make one want to go there and stay. Even when she gets breast cancer, Claire refuses to leave, although she needs a caregiver.

In walks the intriguing Minna, who has arrived from Dominica by way of Cannes and Cambridge, claims to be the great-granddaughter of author Jean Rhys, and desperately needs a job. Claire adores Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and is sold. But Minna might be more devil than savior. From here, the novel slowly folds in questions of colonialism and materialism and keeps readers guessing about Minna’s loving care: is it truly loving? As her troubled side emerges, the weakened Claire’s naïve trust in her is terrifying.

Soli has again created characters readers will love and care about. She does so with deceptively simple grace: Their yearnings breeze right into your life. And while the book is more cerebral than visceral, Claire’s future and Minna’s past are questions that keep the pages turning. The Forgetting Tree is a journey worth taking.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

The real housewives of Berlin

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

David R. Gillham is making quite the splash with his gripping portrait of an ordinary World War II hausfrau in extraordinary circumstances: Praise has been lavished on City of Women by historical fiction brethren Alan Furst, Margaret Leroy and Paula McLain, and rights have been sold in multiple countries. Not too shabby for a first-time novelist. And also not surprising. Full of sharp twists, sex, muddy morals and a Berlin that breathes, Gillham’s thriller delivers.

Beautiful, dutiful Sigrid Schröder is an apparently perfect German wife—other than the fact that she’s borne no children for the Fatherland—but she has a secret. Instead of thinking of her husband freezing on the Russian front line while she peels rotting potatoes and puts up with her razor-tongued Party member mother-in-law, she recalls the heat of the lover who recently swept in and out of her life. He was mysterious, but this much she knows: He was a Jew, and she desperately wants him back. Even so, she largely turns a blind eye to the Reich’s cruelties, feeling powerless against its might. But when her rebellious, secretive young neighbor confronts her with a stark choice, Sigrid must decide whether she is brave enough to save the lives of complete strangers.

Gillham has studied the Second World War and women’s roles in it for more than two decades, and it shows. Berlin’s streets circa 1943 come to life—not just the sights, sounds and smells, but also the tension in the air. Who can be trusted?

The author ably depicts the strengths, desires and fears of women in a city both nearly emptied of its men and permeated with betrayal. His vivid characters keep the pages turning while the historical details enlighten and deftly underpin his complex plot. Readers who like their intrigue charged with big issues and warmed by very human needs will enjoy their hours in Sigrid’s shoes.

Read an interview about City of Women.

A thriller full of twists, sex, muddy morals and a Berlin that breathes.

Fiction

Fiction

Hope springs from a childhood imagination

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

An Englishwoman in her 30s moves into an apartment without heat but with plenty of rats and noise. She has spent a decade in prison. Faces from the past resurface. As she puts her world together, we wonder what put her away: Did she really shoot that boy by mistake? Who was she aiming at? British writer I.J. Kay’s masterful debut, Mountains of the Moon, holds so much more than that one mystery. It folds readers into an entire life, and it is gripping, technically stunning and truly original.

Lulu is an abused child. Her mother neglects her and wants to be back on a stage; her stepfather beats them; her older half-brother gets the chance to live with his father and leaves. Lulu copes by pretending she is a Masai warrior, running through the hills of “Africa” with her red cape and makeshift spear. The arrival of Baby Grady gives her something to care for; a surrogate mother at 10, she takes Grady up into the trees she loves, escaping the terror of “Daddy” Bryce. A shocking accident sets her on a new path. Twenty years later, when she makes it to Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains, her dreamed-of “Mountains of the Moon,” she must come to terms with all that has come to pass.

Lulu’s story jumps around in time as it unfolds in determinedly non-chronological order. The result is a dense, challenging novel that is also incredibly rewarding. Seemingly every phrase has a structural purpose and emotional resonance; when one doubles back to check something along the path, a different discovery astonishes. We are two-thirds through when we walk into the relationship that changed young Lulu’s life. In name, this love is wrong, but in Kay’s hands it is beautiful, rendered with pitch-perfect tenderness. It is also a crucial puzzle piece, changing what came before.

Full of hidden gems of connection, the novel begs for multiple readings. One wonders, based on this beyond impressive debut, where I.J. Kay (a pseudonym) will take us next.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Duck-billed Platypus seeks promised land

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

A duck-billed platypus is the unlikely hero of 69-year-old lawyer Howard Anderson’s debut novel, Albert of Adelaide, a pleasing adventure through the outback that tackles big themes while celebrating both friendship and independence.

Anderson, who flew a helicopter in Vietnam and has taken turns as a fisherman in Alaska, steel mill worker, truck driver, scriptwriter and legal counsel for the New Mexico Organized Crime Commission, knows a little about adventure. His tale is infused with this spirit of derring-do. We meet Albert, newly escaped from the Adelaide Zoo and marching through the desert, close to death. He’s in search of the fabled Old Australia, a land of peace and freedom where he can perhaps find others of his kind. He would have perished if he hadn’t stumbled upon Jack, a solitary but welcoming wombat who turns out to be a pyromaniac. It only takes one encounter with “civilization”—a mining town populated by kangaroos, bandicoots and wallabies—for the mild-mannered Albert to become a wanted animal, simply because he is different. On the run, Albert learns how to survive in his new world and, set upon by the inhabitants of “Hell,” discovers a toughness he never quite knew he possessed.

Albert’s charm and the work’s parade of memorable characters—Roger and Alvin, the drunk and vaguely gay bandicoots; Theodore the hissing, murderous possum; TJ the vagabond raccoon from San Francisco; Muldoon, the wrestling Tasmanian devil whose fame has passed him by—make its often dry and passive prose forgivable. Albert’s changing desires—is it the simple river life of his youth he wants?—and his loyalty to his new, first, friends are touching. He grows as he remembers how to use his poisonous leg spurs in defense of his friends and himself. He also weighs questions of good and evil, addiction and his assumptions about other species, even as he is persecuted himself.

Anderson’s shoot-‘em-up romp, though bloody, remains somehow cozy even when it goes dark. Friendship, especially its necessity for survival, never leaves the picture. Anderson has built a desert world that could be scary for a lone zoo platypus—thankfully, he is never quite alone, and his story will leave readers smiling.

Anderson, who flew a helicopter in Vietnam and has taken turns as…

Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction

A timeless love story

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

In a small seaside town in Croatia in 1964, a little boy and little girl meet. They are stunned by the sight of each other; the boy, Luka, faints, and the girl, Dora, wakes him with a kiss. This scenario might touch your heart, but maybe you’ll roll your eyes. I did, especially since Dora is only two. But soon you will be convinced. Arrested. Intoxicated. Natasa Dragnic’s debut, Every Day, Every Hour, is a beautiful, intense little book.

Dora and Luka become inseparable despite their three-year age difference. They spend every minute they can together, often on their special beachside rock while Luka paints the sea. Their first heartache comes when she is six and he is nine: Dora’s family moves away to Paris. Their connection and this separation are life-shaping events, and while they each pursue their passions—Luka’s art, Dora’s acting—the feeling that something is missing is palpable. Their chance reunion comes when Luka exhibits his work in Paris, and the beginning of their love as adults is nothing short of wondrous.

But fate has other ideas: When Luka goes home to see his family, there is his old girlfriend, whose acquaintance he had recently made again, before Paris. She is pregnant.

So begins more than two decades of stubbornly obtained and refused love, yearning and loss. Dora’s star rises in Paris while Luka’s talents languish in a hotel desk job supporting his wife and child. He does not love the wife at all, and his choices and weaknesses are nearly as frustrating for the reader as they are for Dora. But the pair never lose their need for each other. It permeates them, and that’s a potent spell. The tenderness with which Dragnic paints her characters in both happiness and pain leaves one breathless, even in tears. (I cried. A lot.) Her words have a hooking rhythm, and the novel’s structure is like a song, with verses and repeating choruses: events repeat, entire passages resurface with small changes, and it is reassuring, entrancing, even as it makes you ache.

“Who has ever loved as we do?” Luka quotes Pablo Neruda. Indeed. Hopeless romantics will love this book. It deserves a chance from others, too. Pick it up; let it work its magic.

Fiction

Fiction

Losing oneself in the descent

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

Caribou Island author David Vann continues to explore flaws and potential, character tested and revealed, in his latest work, Dirt. The novel, which begins as tense yet funny, ends in nothing short of tragedy—a heartbreaking descent born of wrong choices.

In 1985, 22-year-old Galen lives on a secluded walnut farm in northern California with his mother. The father is missing—Galen never knew him—and Galen has become a figurative husband. They live off a fortune, the extent of which Galen does not know, their days shaped by visits to his dementia-suffering grandmother and drop-ins by his caustic aunt and teenage cousin Jennifer, for whom Galen guiltily pines. The aunt and cousin want the family money, and the relationships are contentious. His mother disclaims her own father’s violent past and the whole clan’s abusive present, while Galen, a New Ager, longs both to embrace the world and to push it away. These simmering resentments and needs boil over during a trip to the family cabin in the mountains.

Ironies abound, and Vann’s sentences and paragraphs are perfectly constructed, drawing you through the text even when everything is standing still. Galen’s life changes over the course of just a few very long days, and the details of these days, the sensitivity to Galen’s every waking moment, are exquisite. This is the kind of book where one stretches out reading the last 40, 30, 10 pages—in this case out of dread, but also love.

Vann’s characterization is complex. Galen is a childish man, weak, full of misplaced strength and endurance wasted on a fruitless quest. From the start, his behavior is strange—but he is charming in his craziness. He is becoming something, delayed; and in his innocence, he has no idea that he could become something terrible. The change is compelling: Even if other readers don’t sympathize with Galen, they will be drawn into his head and these claustrophobic circumstances to see what happens.

This experience is prolonged to the very last page, graceful paragraph, stunning word. Then it reverberates. Vann’s book is art, and not to be missed.

In 1985, 22-year-old Galen lives on…

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

The journey of a Renaissance woman

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

I have to say—reluctantly, like I’m bad-mouthing a friend made of words and paper—that I found the first 30 pages or so of Regina O’Melveny’s debut novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, somewhat clunky. But like a good friend who made an awkward first impression, the book is well worth pursuing past that phase. Stick with it, for it opens up into a vividly imagined and alluring space, becoming a warm, thoughtful and sure-footed companion.

O’Melveny’s heroine, Gabriella Mondini, is a doctor during the Renaissance, a time when attempting to heal the sick could get a woman burned as a witch. Mentored by her physician father, Gabriella nonetheless brings her own keen instincts to the table, and, before her father left home with nary an explanation 10 years before the novel’s start, the pair treated patients together in Venice and were co-authoring an encyclopedic tome of diseases. When his sporadic, increasingly peculiar letters suddenly cease, and a local edict forbids her to practice medicine, 30-year-old Gabriella—who has begun to feel as insignificant as the window through which she stares—comes to an invigorating decision: she will set off across Europe and northern Africa to find her missing father. The trek that follows is life-changing, testing her mettle in the mountains, bringing her more than one chance at love and confronting her with heartbreak, guilt and the muddy question of when a quest becomes obsession.

The text has a gentle feel as it explores parenthood, gender, the consequences of leading and following and the two-sides/same-coin experience of human togetherness and solitude. O’Melveny’s poetry background shines through: walking a populated path on a foggy Holland morning is like being “alone in a pale room of indeterminate dimensions.” Lush scenic detail and the tenderness between Gabriella and her traveling partners—her former nursemaid Olmina, and Olmina’s husband, Lorenzo, who double as surrogate parents—make the journey a pleasure to follow. While her father’s descent into madness illustrates that we never really know the ones closest to us, Gabriella knows that one must comfort even when one cannot cure. This shared humanity at the heart of the novel is its brightest strength.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Two girls face the dark world of adults

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

Screenwriter Amanda Coe’s fiction debut, What They Do in the Dark, is distressing. It is also technically impressive, and while its subject matter—the wreckage resulting when adults fail children—is somber, its character portrayals are soaked in the warmth of honesty. Set in a working-class northern town in 1975 England, the book chronicles a gloomily pivotal spring/summer in the lives of 10-year-old schoolmates Gemma Barlow and Pauline Bright. The girls are not exactly friends, but are drawn together by their fractured souls. Their fates become hauntingly entwined.

Gemma is a good student from a middle-class home, whose perfect Saturdays are brought to a perfect close by watching “It’s Lallie,” the wholesome television vehicle of child star Lallie Paluza, with whom she is obsessed. By contrast, the ironically named Bright household is marked by hopelessness and decay, and abuse and neglect have turned Pauline, already a fearsome bully, into a time bomb of aggression. Their lives intersect when Lallie comes to town, starring in her first feature film as the victim of a pedophile. As the filming progresses, partially at Gemma and Pauline’s school, the girls’ lives change: Gemma’s mother leaves her father, moving her in with a new boyfriend, and Pauline’s wretched home life reaches terrible new lows.

Points-of-view alternate from Gemma and Pauline to Vera, an aging actress with a small part in the film; Frank, Lallie’s put-upon agent; and Quentin, a neurotic young American woman whose new job as a producer brings back childhood demons. Quentin wants to save Lallie from her apparently toxic stage mother and a future as a Hollywood casualty, but Quentin’s addictions (to chemicals and men) leave her ineffective. At the center of it all is the mystery of Lallie, whose life is surely troubled—the question is how darkly so.

A shocking ending breaks the book’s brewing storm but does not bring relief. In Coe’s vivid, well-crafted character details and expert plotting, the seemingly unimportant—but always enjoyable—proves crucial. The book is shot through with ambiguity and character ambivalence, but despite its lack of answers, it reads even better the second time around. A provocative achievement, What They Do in the Dark stays with you after the last page.

creenwriter Amanda Coe’s fiction debut, What They Do in the Dark, is distressing. It is also technically impressive, and while its subject matter—the wreckage resulting when adults fail children—is somber, its character portrayals are soaked in the warmth of honesty.

Fiction

Fiction

An exercise of the senses

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

Richard Mason’s History of a Pleasure Seeker seduces from page one. A lighthearted follow-up to 2009’s Natural Elements and set during the Belle Époque, this lushly told story of a beautiful young man’s attempts to get ahead teases the imagination from its first baiting sentence.

Piet Barol, dark-haired, blue-eyed, lovely-lipped, leaves his meager world of outhouses, cold baths and boredom for a chance at luxury in Amsterdam as live-in tutor to a hotel magnate’s son. Not above using his many charms to get ahead, Piet has a flirtatious interview with the lady of the house and quickly secures his position. From there, he gently jolts the lives of family and servant alike, launching an affair with his new employer’s wife, sharing hot baths with a handsome footman and shaking up the self-assured superiority of the magnate’s nervy daughters.

What follows is a celebration of sensuality remarkable for both its employment of every one of the senses and its relative lack of actual sex. Mason achieves great mileage from the simplest detail. Piet is opportunistic and his interests are prurient, but his wrongdoing is imbued with innocence. The message behind the playfulness is sweet and stirring: Pleasure is a balm for the soul. Piet’s sensibilities, shaped by his late singer mother, affect even his 10-year-old charge, Egbert, an obsessive-compulsive musical genius chained to the rigid fugues of Bach.

The novel isn’t perfect—one significant character’s turnaround feels far too complete and abrupt—but it is fast-moving and never dull. Perhaps most enjoyable is its subtle social combat: Reading between the lines is the norm for these characters, and the arrows Piet shoots leave his prey delightedly breathless while he gets what he wants. Aware of his power, he is nevertheless unaware of the extent of his impact. In the end, the novel’s confidence is as strong as its hero’s. One feels lucky to have brushed against it for a while.

Piet…

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

Tempted by the devil

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

A near-perfect marriage is tested by an indecent proposal in Victoria Christopher Murray’s latest, The Deal, the Dance, and the Devil. Evia and Adam Langston have been in love since they were 12, and their devotion and determination have carried them through a teenage pregnancy and out of stifling poverty to a six-figure income and a 4,000-square-foot home. But while their commitment to each other seems unshakeable, money troubles vex them: Adam lost his job 18 months ago and he and Evia haven’t told the kids. As bill collectors descend, Evia’s seductive boss, Shay-Shaunte, makes a shocking offer: five million dollars for a weekend in Adam’s arms. While Evia balks, Adam is desperate to keep up the façade that he is still employed—and when a promising job offer falls through, the pair wonder how much damage 48 hours could really do to their marriage. The answer, it turns out, is a lot. Murray’s characters are extremely likable and the eponymous deal’s psychological effects on Evia are stirring. Shay-Shaunte gives “evil woman” special meaning—especially in the final chapter, which might try some readers’ patience. But while Murray’s fiction is Christian, it’s not saccharine, and this page-turning take on the Faustian theme should satisfy fans and newcomers alike.

Paranormal Romance, Romance

Romance Paranormal Romance

To love a wild wolf

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

Nalini Singh takes her readers deep into the wolf’s den in her latest Psy/Changeling installment, Kiss of Snow, where the antagonistic, sexually charged relationship between alpha male Hawke and soldier Sienna Lauren has the potential to save the SnowDancer pack—or annihilate it.

Sienna is a rare cardinal X-Psy—a sort of human nuclear reactor—and has learned to control the raging fire in her psyche that could consume her loved ones. But as she grows closer to the dominating, infuriating Hawke—who saved her family years ago from the Psy Council that sought to use Sienna as a weapon—her destructive power grows exponentially and begins to erode her psychic shields.

The frustrated dance between Sienna and the much older Hawke, who has guarded his heart since losing his mate, will have readers fanning themselves, when they’re not biting their nails over the search for the lost X research that could save Sienna’s life. Fans will enjoy this return to the affectionate wolf world and its tender mating bonds, as well as Singh’s talent for turning up the heat and keeping it there.

Sienna is a rare…

Fiction

Fiction

Picoult and the music of life

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

The seemingly unstoppable Jodi Picoult delivers another heart-wrenching page-turner in Sing You Home, a stirring exploration of same-sex couples’ reproductive rights. Fast-paced and three-dimensional, the novel does justice to this pivotal civil rights issue, and Picoult again proves herself the queen of heartfelt social statement.

Forty-year-old music therapist Zoe Baxter and her husband, Max, have tried to have a child for nine years. When their fifth in-vitro fertilization attempt ends in a stillbirth, Max files for divorce, unwilling to try fathering a child again.

Backsliding into alcoholism, Max moves in with his brother, Reid, and sister-in-law, Liddy, who are also struggling with infertility. Confidence at rock bottom, Max comes under the influence of the charismatic, ultraconservative Pastor Clive at Reid’s evangelical church. Meanwhile, Zoe develops a close friendship with high school guidance counselor Vanessa Shaw and, to her own surprise, falls in love with her.

Zoe and Vanessa marry, and when they discuss the possibility of parenting, Zoe remembers that three frozen embryos remain from her last round of IVF with Max. When Zoe asks Max for consent to obtain them, a heated court battle erupts in which Max tries to prevent the “pre-born children” from being brought into Zoe and Vanessa’s “sinful” household. Coached by Pastor Clive and a media-drunk attorney, Max wants Reid and Liddy to be awarded the embryos instead.

Told from the perspectives of Zoe, Max and Vanessa, the story takes beautiful shape as Zoe’s loving but troubled relationship with Max falls apart and her tender one with Vanessa begins. Included with the book, a CD of songs performed by “Zoe” (with lyrics by Picoult) adds further dimension to the novel. The born-again Max sometimes verges on cartoonish, but his complicated relationship with his sister-in-law and his memories of marriage to Zoe pull his character back from the brink. At the same time, Picoult’s deft weaving of past and present gives Zoe and Vanessa engrossing depth from start to finish, and readers will be hard-pressed to put the book down before that finish comes. Thoroughly satisfying, Sing You Home truly sings.

Forty-year-old…

Sheri Bodoh

Oaky wine leads to chaos

For the love of the land

The real housewives of Berlin

Read an interview about City of Women.

Hope springs from a childhood imagination

Duck-billed Platypus seeks promised land

A timeless love story

Losing oneself in the descent

The journey of a Renaissance woman

Two girls face the dark world of adults

An exercise of the senses

Tempted by the devil

To love a wild wolf

Picoult and the music of life

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