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FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Death of the Author

A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
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FictionFamily Saga

French Braid

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Serena Drew is returning to Baltimore after a daytrip to meet her boyfriend’s family. As she and her boyfriend wait for their train home, she thinks she spots her cousin Nicholas Garrett. Her boyfriend is incredulous; how can she be unsure whether or not the man is her cousin? But Serena doesn’t come from the sort of family in which first cousins recognize each other in the wild.

Anne Tyler is a master of interpersonal drama and intricate depictions of characters’ lives. Her astute observations have earned her a Pulitzer Prize (Breathing Lessons) and two turns as a Pulitzer finalist (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist), among other accolades. In French Braid, her skilled storytelling once again takes center stage as she reveals the minor family dramas that have resulted in Serena’s inability to positively identify her cousin. Chapter by chapter, Tyler follows a different member of the Garrett family, beginning with a family vacation in 1959 and ending in spring 2020.

As Tyler turns her attention to each Garrett, she reveals finely honed character portraits. Daughters Lily and Alice are opposites, and their little brother, David, often goes his own way. Mother Mercy searches for her identity as the kids grow up and leave the house, but father Robin is left confused; he has always been content with his home and family exactly as they were.

Each chapter is as well-crafted as a short story and reveals the heart of its central character. Tyler weaves these individual tales together to build something even greater, and like the braid of the novel’s title, this interpersonal family drama becomes more substantial as its pieces combine.

“That’s how families work, too,” says David, reflecting on the lasting effect of a French braid. “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.” (His wife laughs and asks, “You are finding this out just now?”)

French Braid is a case study of the circumstances and interactions that shape the lives of one family.

Anne Tyler is a master of interpersonal drama, and her skilled storytelling takes center stage in French Braid.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Dorothy Dunnett’s 7th Niccolo novel is first-rate

Review by bookpagedev

Dorothy Dunnett does not rest on her laurels. With Caprice and Rondo, volume seven in her House of Niccolo series, she adds still more mystery and suspense to the labyrinthine plots within plots within counterplots that have marked the career of her 15th-century merchant/adventurer protagonist, Nicholas de Fleury. But first-time readers of Dunnett be forewarned: Although the Niccolo series is ably introduced and partially explicated by Judith Wilt, Caprice and Rondo (Wilt’s introduction notwithstanding) will be heavy going for someone who has not read the earlier novels in the series.

At the end of volume six, To Lie with Lions, Dunnett’s "master dissembler" now in Scotland has finally brought to fruition his most complex project: to wreck financially the country whose gentry terrified and rejected Nicholas’s mother and Nicholas himself (see volume one, Niccolo Rising). It is a vengeance that has turned even his closest companions against him, a dire success that seems to ruin him as well as his adversaries. And, as we learn in this next Niccolo volume, it is not just Nicholas at risk. Everyone around him from long-time friends and associates like Julius of Bologna to Nicholas’s estranged wife Gelis and their son Jodi faces potential disaster.

Now, as Dunnett’s readers have come to expect, the real mysteries and revelations begin, acted out on a playing field that stretches from Scotland to Poland, to Muscovy and beyond. There is, for example, the looming shadow of David de Salmeton (see volume three, Race of Scorpions), the discredited Vatachino agent who is back in favor again this time in Scotland. What are his intentions toward Nicholas and Nicholas’s family?

There is Countess Anna von Hanseyck, the loving and beautiful new wife of Julius. But is she who she says she is? The question endures through understandings and misunderstandings, treachery and trust, and finally achieves an answer, of sorts, only after Nicholas learns more about his own identity. And, of course, there is always the riddle of Nicholas, who began as Claes vander Poele, and is now Nicholas de Fleury, former governor of the Banco di Niccolo, whose soul is endangered because of the schemes his busy brain cannot resist.

One of the charms of Dunnett’s historical novels is the way Dunnett intermingles her own players with characters "recorded in history." Charles, Duke of Bergundy, Anselm Adorne, Conservator of Scots Privileges in Bruges, and Danzig privateer, Pauel Benecke share a fascinating partnership with Dunnett’s own creations: Syrus de Astariis, mercenary commander, Michael Crackbene, shipmaster, Thibault, vicomte de Fleury.

Although several of my favorite players have died before the adventures chronicled in Caprice and Rondo, others have taken their places; and some of the familiar stalwarts seem to have grown in stature.

But the surest sign that the denouement is approaching is the reappearance, in this novel, of Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, the Greek whose broken wooden leg was, perhaps, the catalyst that created the House of Niccolo. At a reading given in fall 1997 in Kansas City, Dunnett let drop a tantalizing comment: "In the eighth [and last] volume of the House of Niccolo, I plan to link Nicholas with my Lymond Series." For those readers who have read and re-read, multiple times, the volumes in both series, it makes for almost unbearable suspense to find out how the two will meet.

Dorothy Dunnett does not rest on her laurels. With Caprice and Rondo, volume seven in her House of Niccolo series, she adds still more mystery and suspense to the labyrinthine plots within plots within counterplots that have marked the career of her 15th-century merchant/adventurer protagonist,…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Lessons in Chemistry

Review by Carole V. Bell

When people reminisce about America’s “good old days,” they’re often envisioning the idyllic post-World War II period of the 1950s: between V-E Day and the beginning of the Vietnam War, a booming time of power and prosperity. Like a woman-centric “Mad Men,” Bonnie Garmus’ devastating and funny debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, blows the lid off that simplistic myth.

Budding research scientist Elizabeth Zott is brilliant, awkward and laser-focused on her studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, but neither her male colleagues nor the other women on campus take her seriously. Between her beauty and her gender, consensus dictates that Elizabeth should be aiming for an “MRS” degree instead of a Ph.D. in chemistry.

Nevertheless, Elizabeth insists on bucking tradition, thwarting rules both written and unwritten, never allowing her progress to be curtailed by other people’s agendas. As the child of high-level grifters (a dangerous doomsday preacher and a tax cheat), Elizabeth learned how to fend for herself early on. But at UCLA, one man’s unchecked violence and abuse of power derail her plans, a devastating yet all-too-familiar turn of events.

Forced out of the Ph.D. track, Elizabeth takes a position at the Hastings Research Institute, a private lab where she meets like-minded genius Calvin Evans. Calvin has never fit in either, but as a man, he has an easier time of it. Elizabeth and Calvin’s prickly, funny and odd love story leaps off the page. The two are truly soul mates, and their happiness should be ordained, but life and this novel are far more complicated than that. Two awkward nonconformists who keep to themselves can generate a surprising amount of rage from those who demand adherence to the status quo.

Lessons in Chemistry audiobook cover
Read our starred review of the audiobook edition of ‘Lessons in Chemistry.’

When the life that Elizabeth has painstakingly forged goes heartbreakingly off-kilter, Lessons in Chemistry becomes a witty and sharp dramedy about resilience and found families. Elizabeth takes a job as the host of a cooking show that’s steeped in science, and though she never planned to be a mother, her child, Madeline, is a joy, and Elizabeth is uniquely brilliant at mothering. Elizabeth and Madeline (and their dog) find support in unlikely places: Harriet the neighbor steps in to help, and TV producer Walter Pine becomes Elizabeth’s best friend.

The scope of what this iconoclastic woman goes through is breathtaking, from personal losses to unrelenting sexism. Along the winding road, she challenges every hierarchy, rule and system she can. She never tries to fit in, but she couldn’t even if she wanted to, and for a person like this, the social strictures of the 1950s and early ’60s hit especially hard. The Madison Avenue of “Mad Men” looks like easy street compared to Garmus’ Southern California.

Not one moment of Elizabeth’s story rings false; every detail is a well-documented component of the time period yet specific to her experience. Readers won’t be able to get enough of Elizabeth and her makeshift family. Lessons in Chemistry is a story to return to again and again.

Bonnie Garmus’ devastating and funny debut novel blows the lid off the simplistic myth of post-World War II American life.
FictionPoetry

Review

Review by bookpagedev

How do I love thee? Of all the writing that I have pursued in my lifetime, there has been nothing more challenging and rewarding than my attempts to capture in words my love for my wife. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many poetic skills I employ, the results always seem to fall short of what I really want to say. I began years ago letting my heart speak to her in poems. They became my gifts to her on Valentine’s Days, birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions. At first she kept my little poems tucked away, taking them out from time to time to read aloud and enjoy all over again. Then one day she told me she felt selfish keeping them all to herself. She picked out a few of her favorites and sent them off to see if others cared. They did. Some of the poems began appearing in magazines and, now, in this book of Love Poems for you.

Charles Ghigna has written a number of highly successful poetry books for children, including Animal Trunk: Silly Poems to Read Aloud (Abrams). He lives in Alabama with his wife and their son.

How do I love thee? Of all the writing that I have pursued in my lifetime, there has been nothing more challenging and rewarding than my attempts to capture in words my love for my wife. No matter how hard I try, no matter how…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Sea of Tranquility

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

The sixth novel from Emily St. John Mandel, author of the award-winning, bestselling Station Eleven, is a time-travel puzzle that connects a disparate band of characters.

Sea of Tranquility opens in 1912, as Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the aimless youngest son of an English earl, makes his way across Canada. Edwin lands in Caiette, a remote settlement in British Columbia, where he experiences something that cannot be easily explained, and encounters a strange man named Roberts who claims to be a priest.

The narrative then leaps to 2020 in New York City, where Mirella Kessler is trying to discern her friend Vincent’s whereabouts. (Readers of Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, will recognize Mirella and Vincent.) Mirella finds herself talking to a stranger, Gaspery Roberts, who seems familiar. Gaspery wants to know about a glitchy moment that Vincent captured on video years ago.

The narrative skips ahead again, to the year 2203, when writer Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour, talking to audiences on Earth about her bestselling pandemic novel. Olive lives with her husband and daughter in Colony Two on the moon. Olive, like Mirella, finds herself talking to a man who calls himself Gaspery Roberts. Gaspery, a magazine reporter, asks about a brief scene in her novel, an odd moment in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.

And then once more, the narrative jumps forward in time, and now Gaspery Roberts begins to tell his own story.

How these four (and a few other) characters are linked, and how one strange moment reverberates through time, are the subjects of this novel. There’s a mournfulness to Sea of Tranquility. Its main characters feel themselves to be exiles, trying to sort out where and how they belong. But the novel is playful, too, taking a metafictional turn: Olive, like her creator, Mandel, has written a bestselling novel about a pandemic, and she’s stuck on an endless book tour, far from her family, as an actual pandemic approaches. And Gaspery is a dryly funny, self-deprecating guide to his era and his unlikely travels through time.

Although readers may question the particulars of the novel’s depiction of the future (wouldn’t the concept of a book tour be impossibly quaint, or even unknown, by 2203?), Mandel’s character development will sweep them along. Turn-of-the-century character Edwin’s sections are particularly well rendered.

Mandel’s prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly, the suspense building not only from the questions about that one strange moment but also from the actions of those investigating it. In the end, the novel’s interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love.

Read more: Through multiple audiobook narrators, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel transforms into a stage play in an interdimensional theater.

The interlocking plot of Emily St. John Mandel’s sixth novel resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story.
FictionPopular Fiction

At Least You Have Your Health

Review by Maya Fleischmann

The doctor is in the house. With her direct and diverting bedside manner, Dr. Madi Sinha (The White Coat Diaries) gets straight to her thought-provoking points on women and work in her second novel, At Least You Have Your Health, a compassionate portrait of a young doctor trying to make a difference in the lives of those around her.

Thirty-six-year-old Maya Rao juggles her roles as a devoted wife, tireless mother of three children and dedicated junior doctor in Philadelphia General Hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department. She endures the hospital administration’s regulations and bureaucracy, an especially difficult task after the rejection of her proposal for a program to help women better understand their bodies. But when the hospital threatens to suspend Maya following a negative interaction with the chief financial officer’s wife, Maya decides to accept an unusual job as a concierge gynecologist at a boutique women’s medical practice. But more money and a flexible schedule with an exclusive clientele may not be the solution to Maya’s desire to truly help others . . . or herself.

A few of the many enjoyable moments of Sinha’s novel include a precocious 4-year-old who uses no euphemisms for body parts, car wash chaos, a crystal monument misplaced in a client’s nether regions and various other medical emergencies. Amid scenes capable of eliciting tears of joy, angst or frustration, Sinha incorporates questions of work-life balance, racial prejudice, gender inequality, cultural differences and female empowerment. She tackles each topic with a blend of sensitivity and straightforwardness that will leave readers entertained and more enlightened about female anatomy and the business side of medicine.

With a cheer-worthy protagonist, At Least You Have Your Health is a delicious dose of heartwarming characters and good humor.

Madi Sinha’s direct and diverting bedside manner gets straight to her thought-provoking points on women and work in her second novel.
FictionWomen's Fiction

Snapshot of a family

Review by bookpagedev

Perhaps it’s best to tell the reader right off the bat that the feisty Viola Price, matriarch of Terry McMillan’s latest novel A Day Late and a Dollar Short, dies halfway through the book. McMillan etches the character so vividly that when she passes away, the reader grieves, and indeed the loss of Viola’s robust, irritated, comical voice leaves an empty spot in the narrative. In terms of the book’s overall appeal, however, it hardly matters.

One of McMillan’s greatest strengths is her spot-on characterization of people and situations you recognize, especially if you’re an African-American woman. Yes, that’s my mother, one mutters, shaking one’s head ruefully. Or that’s my Aunt So and So, or Cousin Ditz, or my best friend or that numbskull I used to date. Once in a while one will be even tempted to admit, yes, that’s me, but don’t tell anybody.

McMillan’s latest novel opens with Viola in the hospital for one of her asthma attacks, contemplating her wayward children. They are the perfectionist Paris, a successful caterer still chafing under the burden of being the oldest child; the prickly Charlotte, who still believes, a la Tommy Smothers, that her mother liked Paris best; Lewis, the loser with the genius level IQ who can’t seem to stay out of trouble even if he tries; and Janelle, the dingbat whose lifelong flightiness is stopped only by an outrageous crime committed against her adolescent daughter. There’s also Viola’s estranged husband, Cecil, jheri-curled and polyester clad, who has taken up with a young welfare mom. As with most of McMillan’s books, the narrative voice is straightforward, with an acerbic humor like a bite into a not quite ripe persimmon. We can tell the players apart immediately; eventually we can recognize children and even fractious spouses and ex-spouses. In McMillan’s capable hands, even peripheral folks like Viola’s kindly next-door neighbor and her strange, waspish sisters are clearly drawn.

In the McMillan tradition the adult men, Lewis, Cecil and the sisters’ husbands and ex-husbands, are not what they ought to be. This isn’t man-bashing on McMillan’s part, but her conveyance of the truth that a lot of men are dogs, or dogs in training, and her ongoing examination of the mystery of why smart women hook up with them. Perhaps another part of McMillan’s popularity stems from the mistaken belief by many of her readers that, with their own nutty families and eye-popping messes, they, too, could have written Waiting to Exhale, or Stella or Mama if they only had the time!

All in all, A Day Late and a Dollar Short is more a snapshot of a critical moment in the ongoing travails of a particular family than a deep, analytical opus. Even momentous events like multiple pregnancies are kept subordinate to the main action of bickering kinfolk dealing with the death of their mother. In the end we regain something of Viola’s voice when the Prices gather after her funeral to read the letters she sent to each of them, and we realize we miss this stubborn, opinionated, funny lady. Not as much as her children, who come late to the realization that they did love one another after all.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

Perhaps it's best to tell the reader right off the bat that the feisty Viola Price, matriarch of Terry McMillan's latest novel A Day Late and a Dollar Short, dies halfway through the book. McMillan etches the character so vividly that when she passes away,…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Finding the right woman is not easy. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, temperaments, and ages. Very few come with warranties or owner’s manuals. Most require shots of various kinds, dental work and their own space in the closet. Some even require varying amounts of cosmetic surgery. Is it any wonder that some men opt for a wide-screen TV instead? It is this search for the right woman that is at the core of the debut novel Girlfriend 44 by a promising new British writer, Mark Barrowcliffe. The two male protagonists in this story Harry, a fattish, middle-aged television researcher who drinks too much, and Gerrard, a thin, middle-aged perfectionist who drinks too little are roommates who are forever commiserating over the lack of acceptable women on the open market. Harry is looking for girlfriend number 44 and Gerrard is looking for perfect girlfriend number three. Meanwhile, all they have is each other.

Enter the ideal specimen, Alice, a woman who is so perfect it is nauseating, and you can perhaps divine where the story is headed. The fact that she likes both men only makes the ultimate stakes higher for each man. Neither wants to lose to a loser.

Despite its cosmic social implications, Girlfriend 44 shouldn’t be misjudged; it is a comic look at the expectations men and women have for a process that few people of either sex ever master. Dating is only a microcosm of life itself you’ll do just fine, as long as you never convince yourself that you will somehow come out of the experience alive. Barrowcliffe is an exceptional writer, but the genius of this work is his apparent realization that if he combined every prejudice women have about men and injected them into the genes of Harry and Gerrard, he would have the makings of a bestseller and he is probably correct.

Read it and weep.

Author James L. Dickerson abandoned his search for the right woman with the publication of his book, Women on Top. These days he watches a lot of television.

Finding the right woman is not easy. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, temperaments, and ages. Very few come with warranties or owner's manuals. Most require shots of various kinds, dental work and their own space in the closet. Some even require varying amounts…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

impressive, ambitious and extraordinarily imagined new novel from a Columbia anthropologist and New Yorker writer chronicles the modern history of Burma, from the 1885 British invasion to the political turmoil of present day Myanmar (as Burma is now called). The events are seen primarily through the eyes of Rajkumar Raha, an intrepid 11-year-old Indian orphan who finds himself on the eve of the British invasion stranded in Mandalay. A romantic and ambitious boy, Rajukmar becomes enthralled with the large fort that houses the Burmese royal family, vowing to “find a way in” the Glass Palace, the compound’s inner sanctum, named for its “shining crystal walls and mirrored ceilings.” His chance comes sooner than he imagined. When British troops invade and loot the royal compound, the locals stampede the Glass Palace, searching for treasure. Therein, Rajkumar encounters 10-year-old Dolly, the queen’s favorite and most beautiful maid. Instantly smitten, Rajkumar is crushed when, a day or so later, Dolly departs with the rest of the royal entourage, who have been exiled to India.

The first half of the novel follows Rajkumar, who makes his fortune in the teak industry, and Dolly, who plods through her days in Ratnagiri, the remote Indian town to which the Burmese royal family are exiled. Almost 20 years later, Rajkumar finds Dolly and convinces her to marry him. In the novel’s second half the plot shifts, focusing on Rajkumar and Dolly’s grown children and Uma’s nieces and nephew. Although the various entanglements and dilemmas of this younger generation prove compelling, some of these characters have the feel of props, inserted in order to illustrate some aspect of the horrors of war and colonialism.

This is a small complaint, however, and one that perhaps should not be applied to an epic, episodic novel of this sort. For The Glass Palace resembles less a contemporary American plot-driven novel, than a sprawling work like Dos Passos’ USA or a Greek epic. This is a major accomplishment from an important writer, worth reading if only for a greater understanding of Burmese and Indian history, and for a great thinker’s perspective on the problems of colonialism and post-colonialism.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is the book editor for Shout magazine.

impressive, ambitious and extraordinarily imagined new novel from a Columbia anthropologist and New Yorker writer chronicles the modern history of Burma, from the 1885 British invasion to the political turmoil of present day Myanmar (as Burma is now called). The events are seen primarily through…
FictionPoetry

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Getting to the heart of the matter: Sweet reads for Valentine’s Day Chocolate melts, flowers wither, but a book lasts forever in your Valentine’s heart. How can a book express your love? Let me count the ways! February brings a love-themed bounty. Wrap up The Random House Treasury of Favorite Love Poems, and you won’t need a card. Shakespeare, Yeats, Spenser, and Browning pretty much say it all. Categorized by themes like New Love, Lifetime Love, Enduring Love, and Passionate Love, this classic collection is the perfect size to pack into a picnic for two. Writers have compared love to everything from an eiderdown fluff to a universal migraine. Whether you consider relationships a headache or heaven, or you are single, sappy, or cynical, Oxford Love Quotations (Oxford University Press, $7.95, 0198602405) proves somebody has felt the same as you. Here you’ll find more than 2,000 quotes on everything from affairs to virtues, from chastity to seduction. From anonymous sources to famous lovers come lines that have been spoken, sung, or written in the name of love, lust, or loss. Some are fascinating for what they say and who said it, like Brigitte Bardot’s declaration, I leave before being left. I decide. Others leave you humming, like Cole Porter’s I’ve got you under my skin, I’ve got you deep in the heart of me. Perhaps best of all are the many insights from comedians and satirists, like Dorothy Parker, who quips, That woman speaks 18 languages, and can’t say no in any of them. Words of wisdom also abound in William Martin’s The Couple’s Tao Te Ching (Marlowe ∧ Company, $13.95, 1569246505). Basing his work on the ancient writings of Zen master Lao Tzu, Martin presents a spiritual collection of simple yet profound thoughts on loving. They are presented with lovely little brush paintings that stay true to the book’s authentic Asian origins. Martin says he hopes that readers will have an experience that will touch the heart each time they open the book. Your beloved’s life is precious, he writes. A natural wonder, a shining jewel. Don’t tamper with it. It does not need polishing, improving or correcting. Neither do you. Of course, some relationships could use a little polishing, improving, and correcting. An exotic method of relationship repair is found in T. Raphael Simons’s The Feng Shui of Love (Three Rivers Press, $21, 0609804626). Based on the ancient Chinese art of placement, this ethereal manual explains how rearranging your home can help you attract and hold love. The idea is that a comfortable, balanced living space presents the kind of harmony and peace that people want to be around. The design elements that work best for you personally, says Simons, depend on your Chinese astrological sign, your yin-yang style of relating, and your animal sign compatibility. Sound a little out there? The enjoyment and usefulness of The Feng Shui of Love definitely depends upon open-mindedness. But the book also has plenty of common sense suggestions for fixing difficult home designs and making the most of where you live. If consulting the stars in the search for eternal love isn’t lofty enough for you, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach suggests you look to a higher power. His Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments (Doubleday, $21.95, 0385496206) is full of the kind of pithiness and wit that made his book Kosher Sex such a bestseller. This time around, he references everything from Monty Python to Monica Lewinsky to drive home his point that romance is next to godliness. Take two tablets and find your soul mate, he says in his typical double-entendre humor. Boteach finds modern applicability not just in the words of the Ten Commandments, but in the way they are presented. For example, the first commandment starts, I am the Lord, your God. The rabbi’s take on it: Hell of an introduction, isn’t it? If only we could all be so cool and confident on a first date, he suggests, half the awkwardness of dating would be squelched.

Why do we bother anyway? For all the trouble relationships bring, why do we search for that special someone to call a Valentine? In her book Dating (Adams Media, $9.95, 1580621767), Josey Vogels says, Let’s face it, it’d be nice to have someone to feed the pigeons with when the eyesight starts to go. Vogels, a syndicated sex and relationship columnist in Canada, gathered the best anecdotes from her many straight, single, twenty- and thirty-something readers to write what she calls, a survival guide from the frontlines. The result is a funny and honest look at the world of boy-meets-girl, from Dates from Hell to The Science of Attraction. There are tidbits to help both men and women get through the whole soulmate interview process with minimal embarrassment. For instance, Vogels’s first-date conversation no-no’s include exes, bodily functions, and how much you hate your family. She also includes advice from relationship experts and matchmakers along with her own insightful viewpoint. Most importantly, Vogel admits that you can indeed be happily single. Then you can spend Valentine’s Day with the most low-pressure date of all: a good book.

Emily Abedon is a writer in Charleston, South Carolina.

More to Love.

21 Ways to Attract Your Soulmate by Arian Sarris (Llewellyn, $9.95, 1567186114). Learn how to find a life partner that clicks with you instead of clanks.

The Mars Venus Affair: Astrology’s Sexiest Planets by Wendell and Linda Perry (Llewellyn, $17.95, 1567185177). A guide to finding that starry-eyed mate.

The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner (Broadway, paperback $14, 0767904575). Goes well with a heart-shaped box of the real thing.

Get Smart with Your Heart: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Love, Lust, and Lasting Relationships by Suzanne Lopez (Perigee, $13.95, 0399525793). For the gal who knows what she wants (well, sort of), but doesn’t know quite how to get it.

Agape Love: A Tradition Found in Eight World Religions by Sir John Templeton (Templeton Foundation Press, $12.95, 1890151297). Explore the principle of unconditional love.

Love and Romance: A Journal of Reflections by Tara Buckshorn, Glenn S. Klausner, and David H. Raisner (Andrews McMeel, $12.95, 0740700480). A journal, a keepsake, a place for all of your passionate scribblings about your love life.

Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love compiled and edited by Wendy Maltz (New World Library, $14, 1577311221). Essential bedside reading to be sure.

Getting to the heart of the matter: Sweet reads for Valentine's Day Chocolate melts, flowers wither, but a book lasts forever in your Valentine's heart. How can a book express your love? Let me count the ways! February brings a love-themed bounty. Wrap up The…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Australian outlaw takes the stage

Review by bookpagedev

Bit by bit with his books, Australian author Peter Carey has stretched and broadened the narrative life of a country that seems to hum with the energy of its own myths. In expansive historical novels like Oscar and Lucinda and Illywhacker, Australia itself, particularly its past, becomes elastic. Its true stories and tall tales, raw landscape and melting pot of a population are, for the author, flexible. History, in Carey’s hands, has no fixed boundaries.

True History of the Kelly Gang, his splendid new novel, finds the author tinkering again with his country’s past as he explores the life of 19th-century outlaw Ned Kelly, a Robin Hood of sorts who has been lionized by Australian nationalists. A brisk and suspenseful narrative, Kelly Gang is Ned’s account of his own life, a memoir written for his daughter. Through his eyes, the book examines a singularly uncivilized era in Australian history, the late 1800s a time when Irish immigrants suffered at the hands of the British ruling class. Shot through with a keen sensitivity to society’s machinations and teeming with larger-than-life characters, Kelly Gang is a wonderfully Dickensian narrative.

From the start, the odds are against Ned. Born into a poor Irish family in Northeast Victoria, he is lied to and manipulated by the adults in his life, including his mother Ellen, who runs through a series of suitors after Ned’s father dies. Long on avarice, short on loyalty, Ellen remains the center of her son’s affections even after she sells him at the age of 15 to a bushranger named Harry Power. As Harry’s apprentice, the good-hearted Ned is forced into a life of crime, soon ending up in jail. This is the first of many such stays for Ned, who is, time and again, deprived of the right to defend himself and victimized by a legal system that seems to lack one important element: justice.

When, a few years later, he is accused of murder, Ned is forced to take to the bush with his younger brother Dan and a gang of allies. For nearly two years, they elude the law, robbing banks and using some of the money to aid the impoverished inhabitants of the district. Toward the end of his brief life, with the facts about himself buried beneath layers of betrayal, the 26-year-old Ned is determined to set the record straight thus, his version of events, a narrative, written during his time as a fugitive, full of censored swearwords, 19th-century slang and high good humor. Carey, pitch-perfect, works miracles with the rough vernacular of ill-educated Ned. This is beautiful, breathless prose, a torrent of language unchecked by proper punctuation, unbridled by the rules of grammar language as lawless as the land it describes, full of force, thrust and thunder. Of chopping down an ironbark on his homestead, Ned writes, "If you have felled a tree you know that sound it is the hinge of life before the door is slammed."

Broad in scope, full of Byzantine plot twists, Kelly Gang contains multitudes. The book also raises some profound questions: Who, in the end, has the right to write history? In a country where truth and justice are dangerously subjective concepts, can what is true and what is just ever be satisfactorily defined? Ned Kelly, as portrayed by the author, got lost in the margins of these ideas. He died trying to fight his way out of them.

Bit by bit with his books, Australian author Peter Carey has stretched and broadened the narrative life of a country that seems to hum with the energy of its own myths. In expansive historical novels like Oscar and Lucinda and Illywhacker, Australia itself, particularly its…

Fiction

Grisham switches genres with coming-of-age novel

Review by bookpagedev

John Grisham’s engrossing new coming-of-age novel should banish any notion that his talent is limited to writing legal thrillers. Set in the low, cotton-growing flatlands of northeastern Arkansas in 1952, A Painted House chronicles two months in the life of seven-year-old Luke Chandler. Before the season is over, Luke will have seen (and been dazzled by) his first naked girl, peeked through a window at a loud and painful childbirth and witnessed two murders. But he also will have learned about the depth of compassion especially his own.

Unlike many Southern novels, A Painted House is mercifully free of grotesque characters, grown men with baby names, dysfunctional families and racial politics. "There were no ethnic groups," Luke observes at a community baseball game, "no blacks or Jews or Asians, no permanent outsiders of any variety. We were all of Anglo-Irish stock, maybe a strain or two of German blood, and everybody farmed or sold to the farmers. Everybody was a Christian or claimed to be."

To help them harvest their cotton crop, the hard-pressed Chandlers hire a family of "hill people" and a truckload of Mexican migrants. The hill people pitch camp in the front yard of the Chandlers’ weathered and initially unpainted home, while the Mexicans occupy the barn. Just across the river live the numbingly poor sharecroppers, the Latchers. Tumbled together, these factions teach the already somewhat cynical Luke almost more about humanity than he can assimilate.

Grisham makes good use of his own Arkansas childhood in spinning finely nuanced characters (such as Luke’s mother) and pinpointing amusing cultural traits. Here’s how he describes the inability of rural folk to bid each other a quick goodbye: "No one ever got in a hurry when it was time to go. The announcement was made that the hour was late, then repeated, and then someone made the first move to the car or truck amidst the first wave of farewells. Hands were shaken, hugs given, promises exchanged. Progress was made until the group got to the vehicle, at which time the entire procession came to a halt as someone remembered yet another quick story."

With 11 bestselling novels to his credit and more than 60 million copies of his books in print, Grisham takes a change-of-pace risk here. But, by every standard of good storytelling, he triumphs.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.

John Grisham's engrossing new coming-of-age novel should banish any notion that his talent is limited to writing legal thrillers. Set in the low, cotton-growing flatlands of northeastern Arkansas in 1952, A Painted House chronicles two months in the life of seven-year-old Luke Chandler. Before the…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

There is a conspiracy afoot. The publicity material accompanying Joanna Trollope’s splendid new novel, The Best of Friends, tries to present Trollope as merely a woman’s novelist, risking the condescension such categories imply. It describes her books as a “secret pleasure” and a “guilty delight.” Wherein lies the secrecy and guilt is not explained.

Do not be fooled by this marketing ploy. Joanna Trollope’s novels are not feverish little romances. Just remember that years before Trollope was catching on in the U.S. (she is practically a household name in England), all sorts of critics were praising her sensitivity to social nuance and strength of characterization. She is a genuine writer, a worthy descendant of Frances and Anthony.

If you haven’t read a Trollope novel yet, you may have seen one of them adapted on PBS perhaps the popular The Rector’s Wife. If not, The Best of Friends is a wonderful place to start. Like her other contemporary novels, it describes a cross-section of a community, particularly a couple of families and the shifting alliances between them.

Trollope excells at bringing to life several generations and allowing their varied perspectives to illuminate each other. She documents the confusions and frustrations of teenagers with the same precision and empathy that animates her elderly characters. What is most impressive about her writing is that she performs this legerdemain with the lightest touch, as if it were nothing special, as if anyone could do it. And she does so with an ironic, Olympean sense of humor reminiscent of Jane Austen’s.

No doubt it is the easy accessibility and familiar domestic plots that invite comparison to category fiction. But Trollope, while an optimist who writes about people faced with situations that demand their best efforts, eschews easy answers and forced happy endings. There are few villains in her books, although there is no shortage of unpleasantness. Mostly there are confused or embittered people who don’t mean to be behaving as badly as they sometimes do. The Best of Friends is the story of Gina, whose husband suddenly abandons her and their teenage daughter Sophy; of Sophy’s own coming-of-age; of Gina’s longtime friend Laurence, who ultimately falls in love with her; and of Laurence’s wife, Hilary, and their own children. We meet Gina’s mother Vi, who at 80 is cautiously discovering love again in her retirement community, and Hilary and Laurence’s son Gus, who at 14 is hopelessly infatuated with Sophy. Trollope makes these sad, ordinary events seem new and fresh. If you enjoy The Best of Friends, turn to earlier volumes. Especially recommended are The Men and the Girls and A Passionate Man. Like most serious writers, Trollope has chosen to explore the oldest subject the ancient human muddle of desire and yearning for a better life. There are no original stories; only individual visions, fresh candor, and a signature style. Joanna Trollope offers all three.

Reviewed by Michael Sims.

There is a conspiracy afoot. The publicity material accompanying Joanna Trollope's splendid new novel, The Best of Friends, tries to present Trollope as merely a woman's novelist, risking the condescension such categories imply. It describes her books as a "secret pleasure" and a "guilty delight."…

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