Despite the passage of 300 years, things do not seem to have changed much in the land of Don Quixote at least according to author Andromeda Romano-Lax. In her extraordinary, gripping debut novel, The Spanish Bow, impractical idealism appears once again to lose the eternal battle against the evil forces of the world. This time that idealism takes the form of the glorious cello music of Feliu Delargo, Romano-Lax’s omniscient narrator (modeled loosely on Pablo Casals). Delargo is born in 1892 with a lame leg and a heavenly talent that only grows as he journeys haltingly from a Catalan country town to the artistic capitals of the world. Along the way, he encounters all the trappings of 20th-century power, from the feckless Spanish monarchy to the despotic regime of Francisco Franco. Tapping memories of his convoluted relationship with world-class pianist and composer Al-Cerraz, and a shyly undeveloped romance with Aviva, a lovely violinist with a shadowed past, Delargo tells the story of his rise to international fame. In the end, a sacrificial rejection of both music and renown is the only way he can protest the cruelties of the world.

All this sounds very serious, and, in effect, it is. Nevertheless, Romano-Lax, herself an amateur cellist and a journalist, includes some human twists that enliven the plot. Furthermore, she allows Delargo an ironic, sometimes even comic voice here, a personal Punch and Judy show; there, an almost foot-in-mouth vignette of a meeting with (real-life) composer Manuel de Falla. Indeed, encounters with actual world players, like Picasso, Adolf Hitler, Franco, Kurt Weill and others, constitute a special feature of this many-favored book. Another is the author’s obvious love for Spain and its colorful cities, which are unforgettably detailed, as in this passage about Grenada, where Al-Cerraz and Delargo play a concert of Bach and Haydn . . . marble music in a city of carved wood and flowing water. In the end, The Spanish Bow suggests that fighting the manifest evil in the world can be even more damaging than tilting at windmills. And yet, and yet there always remains the message and nobility of opposition in itself.

I hadn’t read too many chapters of Gail Tsukiyama’s beautiful and fascinating novel about a Japanese family before, during and after World War II when I began to wonder how I had missed her five previous novels. Tsukiyama is a lovely storyteller; in The Street of a Thousand Blossoms she handles multiple perspectives with ease, and she quickly makes the reader part of the world she has created.

Hiroshi and Kenji live with their maternal grandparents on the Street of a Thousand Blossoms in Tokyo. Hiroshi was three and Kenji only 18 months old when their parents drowned in a boating accident, a story their grandmother regularly recounts to Hiroshi, her voice rising and falling like waves, lapping slowly to the shore almost in a whisper as she came to the end. Kenji, though, cannot stand to listen. Despite their loss the boys have a happy and secure life. Their grandfather is a dreamer who built a watchtower onto his house to observe the life around us ; he and his wife have a loving marriage. Hiroshi, like his grandfather, is a great fan of sumo wrestling and has the talent to be one.

Kenji, a sensitive boy, finds a feeling of endless possibilities as he observes craftsmen at work, and eventually apprentices with a master Noh mask-maker.

As Hiroshi and Kenji forge ahead in their chosen careers, they give readers glimpses into special areas of Japanese culture. The novel spans 27 years and has an epic feel. There are many individual losses, most of them foreshadowed with a sense of inevitability which makes them no less sad or moving but keeps the reader from feeling pummeled by their number. The only real quibble is that Tsukiyama’s skilled writing leaves the reader wanting more especially when it comes to her depictions of pre-war Japan. Joanne Collings writes from Washington, D.C.

Michael White, a Pushcart nominee for his short fiction, has written four previous novels, each one featuring compelling characters caught in unexpected plot twists spawned by the vagaries of human nature. His latest focuses on Augustus Cain, a veteran of the Mexican-American War who makes a hardscrabble living catching runaway slaves and returning them to their owners a soul catcher in slave terminology. Cain is good at what he does, but doesn’t particularly enjoy it; in fact he’d had his belly full of the whole stinking business. But he is forced to make one last hunt when he loses all his money and his beloved horse in a poker game to Mr. Eberly, a Virginia tobacco farmer who is missing two slaves, Henry and Rosetta, and will write off Cain’s debts upon their return. The scene is thus set for the captivating and enlightening Soul Catcher a pre-Civil War historical saga that quickly becomes a page-turner. Cain, inwardly a sensitive soul who reads Milton in his spare moments, is accompanied on his odyssey by a threesome of misfits: the Strofe brothers, one slow, the other brutish, and Preacher, an independent contractor whom Cain perceives as coarse and foul-mouthed, illiterate as a stump. This disparate group follows the slaves’ path north from Richmond and eventually to John Brown’s settlement in North Elba, New York. They sneak Henry away by eluding Brown and his men, and next it’s on to Boston, where Rosetta has found a safe house, and Cain finally understands why Eberly is so intent on getting his wench back. She’s a beauty, newly pregnant and determined not to return her baby to slavery. Her sad story of Eberly’s sexual abuse of both her and her mother somehow shocks even the worldly Cain; from that point on his journey becomes not just one of monetary necessity, but a problematic moral dilemma.

With Soul Catcher, White has penned a historical adventure, a romance, a perceptive commentary on slavery’s ills and a thoughtful character study all wrapped up in this highly recommended novel. Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

The Inuit of Canada’s sub-Artic Hudson Bay are tough people. Throw tragedy after tragedy at them and they endure, if not with a sunny disposition, at least with the feeling that life is a thing to be survived, a constant battle with nature for your very existence. At least that’s the way it seems to be for Victoria, the protagonist of Kevin Patterson’s poignant debut novel (after a memoir and a short story collection), Consumption. After suffering a bout of tuberculosis that takes her away from her family for six years while she recuperates in a sanatorium, she returns to her home of Rankin Inlet, a place she no longer understands. Though the old hunters, including her father, have all come off the land and live in homes now, Victoria still hungers for more knowledge of and connection to the outside world as she knew it when she lived in the south. She marries a Kablunauk (white person) and settles down to raise her family as best she can in a tiny, once-isolated community that is becoming a place where cultures clash. Her son longs to live off the land and hunt with his dogs, while one daughter falls in love with Axl Rose on satellite television and the other folds into herself in ways that are hauntingly familiar to Victoria. A diamond mine mars the tundra and Victoria’s family is beset by hardships that tear it apart. All the while there is no one for Victoria to turn to whether her own people or the whites who have come to the village, including the doctor from New York who delivered all her children for comfort. This is a heart-rending tale of the ways things change from generation to generation in a family and a society. While change sometimes comes at a dizzying pace, there are some things that stay the same, like the enduring strength of people whose ancestors lived on the land and survived unfathomable hardships. Sometimes it seems there is not much difference at all between tough-as-a-glacier Victoria and her ancestors.

Sarah E. White writes from Arkansas.

The story told in Nancy Horan’s anticipated debut, Loving Frank, is familiar to many who have heard of Frank Lloyd Wright: He left his wife, who would not grant him a divorce, for another married woman. After running away together to Europe in 1909, they returned to live in Wisconsin at Taliesin, the house that Frank built for her. Now, after all these years, we have the story from the perspective of that married woman, Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

As with any well-done account of a well-known story, it is hard to tell where the facts leave off and fiction begins. Loving Frank presents a fine picture of the woman who loved Wright the thoughts that Horan puts into Mamah’s head ring true, especially those regarding Frank’s wife. Mamah had no illusions anymore that they could one day sit down and talk. Catherine would go on withholding herself, refusing to compromise, keeping Mamah an illicit’ woman until they were all dust. The price both of them had paid for loving Frank was dear indeed. For readers who don’t have more than a passing interest in subjects such as feminism, Italy or Frank’s architectural philosophies, there may be times when the narrative slows. But Horan, a former journalist who lived for 24 years in Oak Park, Illinois, near many of the architect’s most famous buildings, has a fluid writing style that is likely to carry even the most reluctant reader through her story. She gives us Frank’s ideals of truth and honesty in living, and imagines how they might have been shared by Mamah. Considering the era, it was an immense sacrifice for her to follow the man she loved, especially when his wife would not grant him a divorce.

It is one thing to read of Mamah’s tragic end in a paragraph or two embedded in the many accomplishments of Frank Lloyd Wright. But it is quite another to read about it after feeling you’ve come to know her, and that is the power of this beautiful love story.

Eccentric old maid, one-of-a-kind, an original none of these clichŽs do justice to 50-year-old Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, who has second sight, carves life-sized wooden figures for company and sits astride the U.S.-Canadian border when she eats breakfast. A Jane-of-all-trades, she also teaches, farms, fishes, runs a library and bookstore, and finds herself duty-bound to expose Shakespeare, Pretender of Avon; to revise Henry Thoreau, the Proclaimer of Concord; and to set King James straight about his Bible. ( Horsefeathers appears in the margin of her Old Testament at the stories of Lot’s wife and the flood.) But Miss Jane is no fool. In 1930, she takes on the Vermont Department of Highways over the fate of the Connector, a highway project that would link Vermont and Canada but would destroy the natural beauty of Kingdom Mountain, her beloved family inheritance. Acting as her own lawyer, she shows herself as competent as any of the stodgy old men of the bar before her.

And that’s not all. Early on, she rescues Henry Satterfield, an itinerant bank teller dressed nattily in white with a crimson vest, from an icy death in his yellow biplane. Although his past is cloudy, his future will be bright if he finds the treasure of gold that was stolen from the local bank during the Civil War and hidden somewhere on the mountain. Improbable events ensue.

Howard Frank Mosher is one of those authors who proves that life is far more amusing than one ever expected. Embedded here like cinnamon in sugar toast is a nippy humor that brings a chuckle a page to this account of quests and riddles, insights and discoveries.

The author has written nine other books, one of which, Disappearance, was co-recipient of the New England Book Award for Fiction. Excuse me I’m off to the library to find it.

One-of-a-kind reviewer Maude McDaniel eats her breakfast in Maryland.