The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

The Good Thief is a great, shocking adventure that's written like a fairy tale, and is as unsettling as any stories from the brothers Grimm. Hannah Tinti's style is smooth and light, deceptively so: the reader is drawn into her unsettling world and can't stop reading.

Ren is an orphan in Colonial New England. He has, mysteriously, only one hand, as the other has been taken off and the wound stitched carefully. He knows his name by the cloth that was with him when he was pushed through the monks' gate at the monastery, a bit of cloth that had embroidered on it three letters: R E N.

In his twelfth year, a stranger, Benjamin Nab, comes to the monastery looking for his brother, and when he finds Ren, with his one hand, the stranger tells the monks a fantastic story about Indian kidnappings and Ren's doomed mother chopping off his hand to keep him from being taken. The monks send the boy away with Nab, who soon reveals that he is a liar and a grave robber.

The characters and city settings of this fascinating tale are very much, as others have said, in the style of Dickens, as is the moral dilemma of Ren, the good boy who must become a thief to survive.

Ren must also endure many horrors, and meet many wonderful and loathesome characters, from a chimney climbing dwarf to the deaf and loving Mrs. Sand, to the dentists who buy dead people's teeth--what amazing adventures he will have before the satisfying ending.

The Good Thief is a fine and vivid three-hundred page fairy tale that's considered young adult reading--I suppose young people, now used to vampire love and lust, will find grave-robbing light reading. I think it's a great, bloody, robust book for grownups, too.

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Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter, imho, is the science fiction master of big-and-little, and a master of vivid world-building. His characters are mostly interesting, sometimes fascinating, and his plots are wonderful--'Riding...superstrings to the edge of the Universe!' Cities less than a centimeter tall, in the heart of burned-out suns! Life on Titan!

I'm used to grabbing everything he writes (and he writes quickly, good juicy long books that often turn into a series), so when he came out with Stone Spring, Book 1 of 3 about England's Mesolithic Period (~10,000 B.C.), I immediately ordered it from England, since it's not yet available in the U.S.

I should have saved myself the trouble.

The premise of Stone Spring is simple: global warming is melting the northern ice, which results in tsunamis inundating England's old coastlines. A former slave from Jericho (where, according to the Bible, there was a battle that brought Jericho's walls down), who knows how to build bricks, builds a big wall to keep out floodwaters.

End of story. Big deal

I got to page 200 and quit. The plot was snoringly easy to figure out, and I had 300 pages to go. I didn't like any of the characters, who mostly grunted, stank of fish, and raped or got raped. Let them all drown, I thought. Who cares?

I'm not going to buy Books two and three unless the reviews say that Baxter drops aliens out of the sky or sends a giant comet full of viruses down onto his little group of boring savages. Maybe I'll just find another Killer B in the science fiction section...(so far, I include Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Baxter and David Brin...)

Or I'll leap to the C's.

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Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins wrote a book, The Hunger Games, about young people being chosen by lottery to fight each other to the death as a form of entertainment and governmental intimidation. It was fast-paced and surprising, and offered a grim survival plot that was intriguing and simply written, and the book was so popular it even got into book review clubs for little old ladies like me.

Book Two, Catching Fire, featured lots more killing and maiming and the beginnings of revolution.

Mockingjay pulls it all together, and the reader gets more fighting and maiming and bombings, and the revolution.

I found it amazingly dull.

The author was clearly obsessed with her clever heroine, but I could never see Katniss--she was just an avatar in a cool costume, always stalking, loading her bow with explosive arrows, being brave, being smarter and more charismatic than anyone else. Prettier. The best climber. The most spunky.

By the third book I didn't care what she did or how cleverly she did it--I could assume she'd wind up with her star-crossed (and often wounded) lover; that the post-apocalypse world would, due to her brains and battle skills, carry on with fewer people but with the villains dead.

I'll admit it: I skimmed the book's second half. And I read ahead--saw what happened twenty years later.

I'd guessed correctly.

Snore.

I can recommend Hunger Games, Book One, for its pure shock value and intricate plotting. Read Book One, and just know (spoiler) that cleverness wins over evil by page 1000-something.

Tomorrow I'm donating Mockingjay to the local library to complete their trilogy.

And: I'm starting Stephen Baxter's newest SF trilogy about the earth in 7900 bc in old, old England.

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Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

I picked up Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok at the library and enjoyed very much this carefully crafted short novel about a Chinese girl who must work after school in a sweatshop beside her mother to help bring in money.

Jean Kwok knows her subject, having been such a factory worker herself as a young immigrant in New York City. The author, who went on to attend Harvard and Columbia, has told the story of Kimberly and her mother so poignantly and quietly that I found myself blinking back tears more than once.

At the opening of Girl in Translation, Kimberly is eleven and newly arrived in the city with her widowed mother. Aunt Paula, whose husband owns a sewing factory, has paid for her sister and niece's journey to the West and is happy to exploit the naive newcomers in the sweatshop. She finds them a tenement apartment that has no heat but does have cockroaches and mice, and she takes most of their paycheck for herself. The mother, who is being illegally paid by the piece instead of by the hour, is forced to bring Kimberly to the shop after school each day to help finish more pieces for income.

The public school the girl attends by day is mystifying and sometimes brutal. Her teacher is incompetent and prejudiced, and New York accents are hardly decipherable by a girl whose only English is from textbooks, but Kimberly is brilliant and her aptitude for science and mathematics eventually comes to the attention of the principal.

This is not deep writing, although it is well written and satisfying. The characters are well developed, understandable and likable. How Kimberly manages to triumph over incredible odds--she realizes that she must save her mother and herself using her gift for scholarship--makes for a touching and satisfying story.

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The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

The author of The Blood of Flowers was given an Iranian rug by her father when she was fourteen, and she began imagining what life might have been like for those who made it. The result is a fascinating novel about early 17th century Persia. The book took nine years to write. During that time, the author says in her notes, "I felt like Ali Baba in The Arabian Nights, who utters the magic words 'Open, sesame!' to reveal a cave illuminated by gold and precious gems."

The heroine of the novel is deliberately unnamed to "honor the anonymous artisans of Iran." She is a village girl of fourteen when the story opens, a nimble and creative rug-maker. Her indulgent parents adore her, but when her father suddenly dies, she and her mother are forced to travel to a great city where their only male relative lives, for in this male-dominated society women are possessions, owned and hidden away by men, and women without the protection of men are quickly reduced to begging or prostitution.

The girl's uncle is a wealthy master rug maker who designs rugs for the Shah's court. Soon after his brother's widow and her daughter are taken into his household, he discovers the girl's talent in rug making and design and allows her to learn his secrets.

The world of ancient Persia is beautifully described in this book. I savored the descriptions of the dazzling minarets, the markets where rugs and spices were sold, the lovely clothing worn by women in their secret courtyards.

Because she has no money for a dowry, the girl is forced by her family into a marriage contract still used in modern Iran today, a renewable three-month contract for a fee. Her hopes for a permanent marriage must be given up for money to support her and her mother.

The story of her misfortunes and fortunes is accompanied by lovely, magical tales of old Persia, and is a fascinating and richly detailed novel about an exotic and fascinating world.

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Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block

(First, I must thank Kate, who left on top of her printer a pretty paperback book, with a green-and-pink cover, a book so thin that I took it out to the garden and read it in one hour.)

Weetzie Bat, by Francesca Lia Block, is a brief, luminous fairy tale about love and happiness in Hollywood.

Weetzie Bat is a beach girl, "...skinny...with a bleach blonde flat-top....sugar-frosted eye shadow...." She first has friends, then lovers, then a family, but the author touches on biography only for continuity; instead, she chooses, by bombarding the reader with an array of magical images, to draw the reader into the shimmering Technicolor world that Weetzie inhabits: "...tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets...a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors...tunes on a music box with a little dancing monkey on top...."

The cottage in which Weetzie dwells, with children and puppies and friends, was given to her by a genie who emerged from a gold bottle, and the three wishes seem inevitable and natural in the dream that is Weetzie's life: "There were roses and lemon trees in the garden, and two bedrooms inside the house--one painted rose, the other aqua. The house was filled with plaster Jesus statues, glass butterfly ashtrays, paintings of clowns, and many kinds of coasters."

Block's characters are simple and loving. They worry about the evils in the world, which sometimes drives them to distraction and almost drives them away from the Eden they have made with each other, but somehow love heals everything well enough for a while, even if not enough for "happily ever after."

This amazing book, which feels like a poem, makes the reader's own surroundings, at least for the moment, surreal and beautiful, gifts from a genie's bottle.

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A Cup of Tea by Amy Ephron

A Cup of Tea by Amy Ephron, Ballantine Books, 2005

May This Reviewer suggest peppermint tea? It's supposed to aid in digestion, and this book will make you sick. It made me sick, but I'm rather delicate about appallingly bad grammar and astonishingly inept editing.

I plodded my way through this awful Ballantine book, which is part of HarperCollins (I will never forgive them! I respected them!) for ONE REASON: I was FORCED to read A Cup of Tea for a book club that meets next week.

The best thing about this book was its length: one hundred and forty eight pages was all I could have endured.

Here's a random example of both her writing and of the high-school-level of editing. This is from page 30 and is exactly reproduced:

"Eleanor walked over and bought herself a pretzel. She took a bite, savoring the taste of the salt on the warm dough. Down the street, a young boy hawking newspapers screamed out in an adolescent voice, 'U.S. breaks diplomatic relations with Germany! Uncle Sam supports'-- his voice went up on this--'European allies.' And Eleanor was left to wonder whether he, too, would be sent to war next year. And whether three squares and the regimen wouldn't be good for him or, at least, only as hard as this."

Oh, and on another page, Eleanor (who was very hungry, being poor) was offered a tea cake and the author had her taking "a ravenous bite." How can--am I being picky?--how can one bite be "ravenous?" Maybe two or three bites--let me think:

If I were "ravenous," and were offered a teacake, I suspect I would eat it all at once--just chuck it in and swallow.

But how can a single bite--

I digress.

The plot, which is the only competent component of this "novel," is lifted from a short story that was written, presumably much more cleverly, by Katherine Mansfield back in the twenties.

And here's the plot: a rich woman has just bought on a whim a lovely box and a letter opener. She walks out of the antique shop and sees a lovely, thin woman wearing a gray sweater. She asks the woman, who looks cold, if she's all right, and the woman says, "Could I have money for a cup of tea?" The rich woman impulsively and unwisely takes the poor woman home in her chauffeured car, and the poor woman is immediately attracted to the rich woman's fiance. Oh, dear.

For the reader’s amusement, I'll offer one more gagworthy sample of her prose, which clanks in my head so much that I'm surprised I can write a straight sentence. Here's the rich woman talking about war with her father:

"'Will you think I'm terrible,' asked Rosemary petulantly, 'if I tell you that I'm sick of Archduke Ferdinand?'

"Her father chided her softly. 'Are you going to tell me that you're sick of the Archduchess Sophia, too?' he asked. He was teasing but trying to elicit a more human response, for although history would forget this, the Archduchess was killed alongside her husband and whatever Rosemary's mood, she had always been a defender of women.

"'No,' she answered soberly, 'but their legacy lives after them. I don't want to hear about Bismarck or how they feel in France.'"

Enough--sorry. (And is it so obvious that the author did some Wiki research before penning this prose and didn't want to waste a single juicy tidbit?)

I just did my own Wiki research and found out that Amy Ephron is one of the famous Ephron screenwriters—she worked on A Little Princess, Born on the Fourth of July, and Out of Africa.

I'm stunned. I don't know what to say. That's heavy hitting--Out of Africa. A Little Princess.

No wonder she got in with HarperCollins.

Just go make yourself some tea. Put about six Oreos on a little plate, and eat them ravenously, bite by bite.

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Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I'm in three book clubs in our village of 1500 people, and two of the three are reading Cutting for Stone.

Lucky me, I found the trade paperback for 50 cents in our library sale room, and had a weekend free to read its 658 pages.

The author also wrote My Own Country in 1996, his nonfiction account of the arrival of AIDS in rural east Tennessee (specifically, the Johnson City area) in the 1980s. As an internal medicine physician, Verghese knows his stuff, and sometimes his knowing so well what can go wrong with the human body made for somewhat queasy reading.

My Own Country, published almost 20 years before Cutting for Stone, is vividly written and at times riveting, but his first novel is incredible, brilliant.

The novel's plot is as intricate as it is mesmerizing: a nun with issues has an affair in Ethiopia with a physician with issues and dies giving birth to conjoined twins who are almost murdered…

Well. The plot alone could win a prize for cleverness, but Verghese, as deftly as the surgeons in his operating theaters sew up their patients, artfully describes the exotic and dangerous world of mid-sixties South Africa, as well as developing a variety of difficult and fascinating characters and carrying them along a fascinating story arc.

Marion, the mirror twin of Shiva and the protagonist of the novel, grows up in the hospital in which he was born and cut away from his brother; his life, surrounded as it is by the milieu of medicine, is always seen within the psychic connection to his twin.

I found Verghese's use of language and his vivid descriptions of Ethiopia to be as compelling as his story arc, with stylish and sophisticated writing and tight, careful plotting. Sometimes the pacing felt uneven to me: early, critical chapters contain several tantalizing, frustrating point-of-view shifts at crisis points that are reviewed from various perspectives in minute detail over the course of a day; in later chapters, there are sudden, startling leaps of years from one page to the next. But this seems a trivial criticism when considering the amazing depth of Verghese's character development, his skillfully detailed understanding of surgery and internal medicine.

This is a book I closed with a sigh--I was tired, sort of grossed out, even overwhelmed. I was, in fact, a tiny bit relieved the journey with Marion--Ethiopian surgeon, son of a nun, Siamese twin--was over.

The Survivor trilogy by Susan Beth Pfeffer

The moon gets hit by an asteroid and then goes into a closer orbit around the earth, and whiny teenagers everywhere are about to find out that life isn’t about finding a prom dress, and that a nice supper might involve a two-year-old can of Popeye spinach and some dog food.

That’s the premise of the trilogy written by Susan Beth Pfeffer for nervous young people.

We meet Whiny Teenager number one, Miranda, in Pfeffer’s first moon book, Life As We Knew It.

Miranda keeps a diary, and she is as shallow as a puddle. I thought after page 100 or so, by which time the moon’s closer orbit had already caused lots of trouble (volcanic ash, earthquakes, etc.), Miranda would quit running off to her bedroom and slamming the door because mean old Mom kept hurting her feelings.

But I hung in there, because I found the plot fascinating: Just what is a girl to do when she runs out of lipstick and she can’t wash her hair because there’s no shampoo or running water?

Miranda takes a very long time to wise up. She worries about her brother Matt being the favorite, even as her friends die or get robbed.

I was happy to see that Pfeffer started off volume two with a new protagonist, Alex, who went through the same moon trauma in a New York City apartment.

Alex was a bit anal and never whined. He was driven to be perfect. He liked knowing rules so he knew where he stood.

With Alex, Pfeffer hits her stride. He learns quickly that to survive in New York City and to provide for his sisters, he’ll have to pull shoes off corpses and barter for boxes of rice. Alex doesn’t loll about in his family sunroom and vent to his diary--he grapples.

Book three, This Life We Live, brings Alex and Miranda together, which is rather clever of Pfeffer, but we’re back to diary-writer Miranda taking over the point-of-view, so Alex becomes more controlling and difficult, pushy and obnoxious as seen through Miranda’s hard-to-please eyes. They inevitably fall in love, being in close proximity for days and weeks and being full of hormones, but first, obligatorily, they have to find each other irritating for many chapters.

There’s very little information about the moon once it does its thing in chapter one of volumes one and two, and I found this frustrating. Clearly, Pfeffer did some research or made some good guesses about the results of a changed moon orbit, but she kept communication with the characters’ outside worlds limited, so that basically they were clueless about what was happening (“Why is it so cold in August? Why is it snowing gray snow?”) and, more baffling, none of the young people particularly wanted to know what was going on around the planet. Some of them even refused to be given information, which might have made it easier for the writer but was frustrating for the reader.

And there were questions I simply couldn’t answer, and Pfeffer gave me no help: Where were all these canned goods coming from? Were there new canneries? Nope--no sunshine, what with all those volcanoes erupting and hence, no photosynthesis--and who would go to work at a cannery anyway, when money was useless? So, when the cans ran out or expired, what next in a non-sunshine world? Duh: no book four, fer sure...

(Pfeffer used as a plot point some secret “safe towns,” where apparently every problem was solved--there was plenty of gasoline, trucks pulled in weekly with groceries, there were hospitals and schools!--but only people under 18 could get passes, and the passes were for the rich and powerful only. And surely Pfeffer knows that even the richest and most powerful can’t have green veggies if there aren’t any.)

There are lots of holes in her plot, but I found the story arc tight and interesting, and (even though I knew she would make her whiners grow up) she did adequately demonstrate that appalling circumstances tend to make even shallow people mature--or die off.

One thing I learned about myself from pondering this plot: If the moon changes orbit, I’m going to shoot myself before somebody steals my shoes.

I’m no grappler. Like Miranda, I'd be whining, and writing long, self-pitying diary entries.

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Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

A wench in 1840s America was a "colored woman of any age; a negress or mulatress, especially one in service." Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the powerful story of four wenches, all of them slaves and mistresses of their southern white masters.

It's inevitable that Wench will be compared to the currently popular book club favorite, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, about black maids in Mississippi during the '60s civil rights era: The Help and Wench, although their stories take place about 100 years apart, are both vivid accounts of critical times in the lives of African Americans.

Having carefully read and enjoyed both books, I thought Wench was the more skillfully written of the two, perhaps because at times Stockett, I felt, pushed her plot a bit to make a point, making some scenes rather unbelievable.

Perkins-Valdez chose as her setting a real place, Tawawa House, an Ohio resort that catered to white men who brought their slave mistresses for summer retreats. That Ohio was a free state made the location compelling for the novel's location, and even more compelling was the talk of abolition, and the talk of war...

The book centers on four vividly realized characters: Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet, who have been summer friends for many years; and Mawu, a new arrival who is strong and brave and wanting to run away.

The book jacket says "...they are bearing witness to the end of an era." This book is important reading, and it's as haunting as Gone with the Wind, Roots, and--yes, The Help.

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Skunk Cat received this book from the publisher for review.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

His name was Deogratias, or "thanks be to God" in Latin. The reader meets Deo as he is boarding an airplane that will take him away from the slaughter (where a million people died) in Rwanda and his homeland, Burundi, a genocidal war fought between the Tutsi and the Hutu.

Deo had been a third-year medical student at the top of his class when he escaped Africa and, thanks to the kindness of a wealthy classmate's family, flew to New York City on a business visa (he was told to say he was in America to sell coffee).

He had $200 in his pocket and spoke only French.

A baggage handler at the airport offered Deo space in his apartment, which in fact was only a squatter's room in the worst part of upper New York City.

Deo learned rudimentary English by studying a French-English dictionary. His money gone, he managed to find a job delivering groceries for $15 a day, working for a contemptuous manager who poked him with a long pole to get his attention. When Deo's benefactor, the baggage handler, returned to Africa, Deo began sleeping at night in hidden places in Central Park. He found it peaceful--trees and stars and grass, like Africa.

Not only did Deo experience loneliness and cruelty in America, but he also endured appalling memories of the last months in Burundi. He slept poorly, was always afraid, and saw no hope for a future.

He prayed to God to end his life.

Then Deo met a kind nun who reached out to help him, and within two years, amazingly and miraculously, Deo was enrolled in Columbia University...

How the kindness and support of strangers served as catalysts to transform his bleak future is the central part of Kidder's book.

But this astonishing true story doesn't end with Deo's triumphant entry into an ivy league university: Kidder also follows Deo, now a graduate student in the public health field, on a journey back to his past, where he finds some of his family still living; and he describes Deo's intense efforts to help build medical facilities for his people.

Although often uncomfortable to read, Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains is a superb accounting of a single human life that endures and triumphs in the face of overwhelming trauma.

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Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

I’d forgotten how much I liked Anne Tyler. Having just savored Noah’s Compass, her latest, I can’t wait to get back to the library to see what I’ve missed from this prolific novelist whose writing is clever and witty and sometimes heartbreakingly poignant.

In Noah’s Compass, Tyler’s 18th novel, the premise is deceptively simple:

Liam, a man in late middle age, loses his job, which he never liked much anyway.

He moves into a small apartment, and is rather pleased with his new ascetic life, a slowing-down life with less money and less clutter:

“What reason would he have to move again? No new prospects were likely for him. He had accomplished all the conventional tasks -- grown up, found work, gotten married, had children -- and now he was winding down. This is it, he thought. The very end of the line. . . . He was going to be one of those men who die alone among stacks of yellowed newspapers and the dried-out rinds of sandwiches moldering on plates."

After the movers leave, he arranges his furniture, puts away his dishes, and goes to sleep.

He wakes up in the hospital, his head bandaged and his hand bitten. He has no memory of the intruder who broke into his home and bashed his skull.

Gently, Tyler opens up Liam’s life to the reader, and it’s clear he is a clueless man who doesn’t know how to engage with people. His daughters find him irritating and baffling. His ex-wife has given up on him long ago.

But his trauma has startled him awake and hurled him—and with him, his family—into a late-mid-life crisis.

Noah's Compass is a gently written account of a life, and by the end of Liam’s story, I've grown to care about this hapless man, I wish him well, and I'm sad to say goodbye.

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The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help pulled me in after chapter one, and I kept reading till almost midnight the first day...

The book takes place in the early sixties, at the beginning of the civil rights movement in Jackson, Mississippi, where black maids work for less than minimum wage and aren't allowed to use the family bathrooms.

The author focuses on three memorable women: Minnie, a wonderful cook, often gets fired for "being sassy" to her employers; Aibillen, another maid, is raising her seventeenth white child; and Skeeter is a recent college graduate and Junior League member whose mother is bent on her marrying well.

When the three women take on a clandestine and dangerous project, it changes all their lives.

The author, Kathryn Stockett, a Jackson native who grew up with a maid in her family, has a good ear for the voices of her characters, two of whom speak in the dialect of the time. She is particularly clever at pacing and dialogue, and her plot is beautifully planned and executed. Some of the plot points feel a bit contrived or pushed, and at times a little unbelievable, but the story is powerful and the characters fascinating.

This is a winner for book clubs. It's shocking and funny and hard to put down.

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Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

I liked Audrey Niffenegger's writing style so much that I went right to the library after finishing Her Fearful Symmetry and got The Time Traveler's Wife, her first book.

Symmetry is a ghost story, but first it's literary fiction at its best--a tour de force, I think--but I'm uncertain, really what a tour de force exactly is, although I imagine a fine conductor leading a fine orchestra playing a very creative, nimble work, and that's how I see Niffenegger's writing: nimble, clever (always clever, as are her interesting characters), and creative.

First, she did her homework, seeking out the advice and support of the staff at London's Victorian Highgate Cemetery, and then becoming a tour guide in order to immerse herself in the overgrown, mossy graveyard in which her story takes place.

She developed characters who were uniquely interesting and conflicted and all very likable. She set up a fascinating and surprising plot.

This ghost story has everything--an old Victorian house that backs onto Highgate's west end, mirror twins (they exactly mirror each other, so that one twin's organs are on her right side instead of the left) who inherit a flat in the house, a crossword puzzle maker who also is crippled by his compulsions, and an ingenious ghost...

Her Fearful Symmetry can be read in a day or so, and it will haunt you.

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Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

From the first leg lesion in 1891 to kidney failure in 1970, Moloka'i offers the reader a morbidly fascinating if plodding account of a single wretched life spent in a leprosy colony.

Gentle Reader, allow me to spare you a day of bleak reading by summarizing the plot:

Little Rachel is a simple child of Hawaii, and her mother and father dote on her, but when she gets a rose-colored sore on her leg she gets shipped off to the Hawaiian leprosy colony in Moloka'i, where she is reared by nervous Catholic nuns who tend to throw up after changing bandages.

Rachel gets to live a long, long life, which means the book has almost 400 pages.

Maybe it didn't help that we're housebound right now--the roads are slick with ice, we only have two hotdogs and ten boxes of diet hot chocolate and one can of tomato soup left in the pantry, because we're wearily dieting this month--but this book made me so depressed that when Kate came down (still in her pajamas at two in the afternoon) to get some hot tea I confessed I felt (illogically) like a member of the Donner Party, and her eyes grew big and she jumped back! And I said, "Oh, I only mean I have cabin fever and I hate winter and there's nothing to eat," and she said, nervously I thought, "Well, there's the cat," and pointed out old Vincent, eating kibble from his little dish...

"I loathe leprosy symptoms! I hate winter!" I said, and thought how I should put on my (ripped) Russian coat and walk out into the ten-degree bleak afternoon, but Rachel and her lesions would just follow me. I can't shake her loose.

I promised a sort-of plot, so here it is, a Cliff's Notes version: Rachel goes to the infamous leper colony in 1891 and remains there until in the early 1950s the sulfa treatment that ultimately contains and weakens what is now known as Hansen's Disease cures her enough to leave at last. She's met and married a nice man who has leprosy of the eye, poor Godforsaken fellow, and they've had a child who got (naturally) taken away from them the day she was born.

Rachel sees the following innovations come to their colony over the years: moving pictures, aeroplanes, gramophones, electricity. She gets to experience World War I, the Depression, Pearl Harbor, the invention of the Hula dance, a great tsunami, and the eventual arrest of her disease via sulfa drugs.

She gets sprung from the island when she's cured in chapter 958, rides in an aeroplane, and finds her daughter.

The End.

Please: spare yourself.

I'm sorry if this review is poorly written. Brennert's dull, lifeless prose style is still clanging in my head.

I'm now going downstairs to make more hot chocolate and get a nice murder mystery to read.

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Lev Grossman’s The Magicians

Instead of Harry Potter living under a staircase, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (Viking Press, 2009) offers the reader a teenager obsessed with a series of children’s books about Fillory, a magical world.

Quentin, seventeen, is almost ready to go off to college. He is brilliant and bored. He’s smarter than his classmates and knows more than his teachers. He reads his Fillory books and does coin tricks.

Instead of a receiving an owl-dropped note from Hogwarts, Quentin finds his way to Brakebills through an enchanted weedy lot in New York City.

At his interview, he asks incredulously, “Don’t you want to see my SAT scores?”

This is, deliberately, a grown-up version of the Harry Potter series. And it is therefore, perhaps inevitably, more sophisticated and cynical.

What, asks the author of the reader, would you really do if you could do anything—manipulate reality, reverse entropy, travel to the moon in a magical bubble?

Quentin, during his undergraduate Brakebills days, meets two graduates, parents of a gifted young witch, who have sunk into ennui—the father spends his days reshaping their house into varieties of historical architecture. Their dullness is instructive, and depressing, to the boy wizard, who hasn’t a clue to what his life’s purpose is. He hasn’t even found his strongest talent, and none of the teachers can help him.

The most interesting, and most charming, part of The Magicians is Quentin’s school experience. Magical spells in Grossman’s view are more complex than in the Hogwart’s world—one must learn multiple languages and variations to cover all situations. And magic is dangerous.

Not only can one destroy oneself, Quentin learns, by overly emotional spell casting (one then turns into pure blue energy, neither dead nor alive), but one can even bring into the world beings from other realms, dangerous and Interested beings.

Quentin, like other gifted students—but not all—at Brakebills, finds his way at last to graduation and faces the possibility of a bored and cynical existence himself. He and his friends, by chance or fate, instead find a way into Fillory, where they discover at last the usefulness of sorcery and the true meaning of magic.

Grossman’s Quentin is not particularly likable, nor are any of the interesting characters in the novel; rather, the reader is asked to travel along as companion and observer.

Any child yearning to find the way through Platform 9 and three-quarters to the Hogwarts Express might feel less inclined to sorcery after reading The Magicians: it’s a chilling look at the real consequences of manipulating nature.

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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

I haven’t even finished this book, but I want to talk about it now.

I just read page 189, and it made me want to stand up in my living room and shout “Yes!” to Vincent the cat who's sleeping on the sofa.

The book’s hero, Arnold Spirit, is getting ready to go into a basketball game where he must guard his former best friend, now an enemy, for the entire night.

“You can do it,” says the coach.

“I can do it,” says Arnold Spirit.

I don’t know if he does or doesn’t win the game, don’t know if his enemy gives him another concussion and sends him back to the hospital in an ambulance, as he did in their last encounter.

But I can say this: Arnold is a warrior, and his words go right into my heart:

“I can do it.”

Born with multiple birth defects, including hydrocephalus that makes Arnold’s head unnaturally large and vulnerable (he gets called “Orbit” and “Pumpkin boy” by bullies), he's fifteen years old and has a stutter, bad eyes, huge feet, zits, and alcoholic parents. Arnold lives every teenager’s nightmare of being different, an outsider. Moreover, his reservation’s a bleak and hopeless place, white kids hate him just because he’s an Indian, and his "Rez" has such a terrible school that the textbooks are thirty years old.

Arnold has three things going for him: he draws cartoons beautifully, and they help him connect with the world when his stuttering speech shuts him out; his parents, flawed and defeated as they are, love and listen to him, and have hope for him if not for themselves; and he’s very smart—the smartest kid in his awful school.

And being a warrior, Arnold takes a kind teacher’s advice and changes schools. “You’ve got to,” says his teacher.

When he tells his family he’s going to attend the new white kids’ school off the Rez , it’s Arnold’s wise grandmother who first calls him a warrior.

“It was the best thing she could have told me,” he says.

Arnold is more alone than most teenagers can imagine: he’s bullied and shunned at his new school and hated by his former best friend; he’s ostracized by even the grownups on the Rez for going to a white school—they call him an “Apple,” meaning red on the outside but white on the inside.

But Arnold has a warrior’s courage, and he goes up to people who have been cruel to him and he says bluntly, “Look, we have things in common. I want to be friends with you.”

The book’s only 230 pages long, but it’s packed with powerful life lessons for any teenager who wants to know how to fit in, how to be accepted in spite of his flaws and weaknesses.

I wish I’d had this book back when I was in ninth grade and hating my ugly hair and my clumsiness in gym class. I wish I’d had this book when I messed up in an art workshop and got taken to task by the scholarship chairman.

But, all these years later, I can still cheer for and learn from Arnold, who has a stutter and bad eyes, and who is showing me how to be a warrior.

Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a National Book Award winner, was published by Little-Brown in 2007.

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The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Maybe I was too cranky and crabby, too full of Halloween Tootsie Roll Pops and raspberry Twizzlers, to begin reading a story about the end of the world and what it's like to live in a cult and be a reluctant beekeeper, but I must honestly report that when I had finished the 420 pages of Margaret Atwood's latest, The Year of the Flood, I felt even crabbier.

The critics all love this book, so I am alone, probably, but I wanted to open a vein when Toby, the rape victim who got rescued by the God's Gardeners cult, decorated her cubicle with a room divider made from plastic twist ties.

At least she didn't have to eat any more hamburgers made out of dead people, being now among vegetarians.

I'm not being fair, because my issues get in the way: For example, when I watched "The Bourne Supremacy" and the hero was being bludgeoned with a gun handle, I kept thinking what a cute apartment he had and what a shame his designer blinds were getting blood-spattered.

In Atwood's bleak new world, there are corrupt police forces, gene-spliced life forms like sheep with human hair, pigs with human brain tissue, and, finally, an engineered virus that pretty much takes out the human population. Atwood switches perspectives from Toby the Beekeeper to Ren the exotic trapeze dancer, who's locked inside a sex club.

The Year of the Flood is creative, beautifully written, and grim. Maybe that's the truth about our human future--no cute houses, ever again.

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