|
Recommendations from Caroline Leavitt
|
 Caroline Leavitt is the author of eight novels--most recently Girls in Trouble, a Booksense selection about the aftermath of an open adoption. She is also the book critic for the Boston Globe, People, and Cookie Magazine. Visit her on the web at carolineleavitt.com.
|
|
|
Recommendations from Site Creator Debra Hamel
|
 Debra is the author of Trying Neaira, the true story of an ancient Greek prostitute, Neaira, whose seamy past was put on display during her trial in the fourth century B.C. Debra also runs a book review web site at book-blog.com and a personal blog at the-deblog.com.
|
|
|
Alice Hoffman, Illumination Night
|
buy now at amazon
I'm a huge fan of Hoffman's work because of her startlingly unique voice and her ability to meld the magic with the mundane. All things are possible in her hands! Illumination Night is perhaps my favorite Hoffman novel of all times, one I press on just about everyone I know. Startling, hallucinatory and very, very real, it brings together a group of disparate island people--a wild teenaged girl bent on bedding the husband of the woman next door, a lonely giant of a man who falls in love with her, an elderly woman at the end of life, a boy just starting out, and a wife struggling to break free of her fears. All come together in a way that is both shattering, haunting and so breathtaking you'll be rereading pages long after you've finished the novel.
|
|
|
Nancy Taylor Robson, Course of the Waterman
|
buy now at amazon
Nancy Taylor Robson's debut novel tells the story of seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft, whose family has been fishing on Maryland's Eastern Shore for generations. Like the Kraft men before him, Bailey has river water in his veins, and a peculiar talent for finding fish: the Krafts are river royalty. But supporting a family by fishing is becoming increasingly difficult, and Bailey's father announces that he wants his son to go to college. Responding to this bombshell is only the first challenge Bailey must meet in the course of Robson's book. Bailey is surrounded in the story by a handful of characters who are as vividly imagined as he is: Robson has fleshed out her characters and explored their interlocking relationships more fully than most authors can in twice as many pages. The Course of the Waterman is a must read, for adults and young adults alike.
|
|
|
Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me
|
buy now at amazon
Fate, chance and an almost mythic exploration of family permeate this extraordinary novel about brothers, adoption, grief and guilt. No one writes like Dan Chaon--he somehow gets under the skin and into the DNA of his characters. Here, two half brothers, Troy and Jonah, make a slow journey towards one another in adulthood. Chaon delves into their pasts with a razor-like integrity, moving back and forth through time and through the different points of view. We come to know each of the brothers intimately and ache for them with a palpable intensity as Troy struggles to tend his son, while Jonah works to become an adult. This is what I consider genius writing--and the novel is nothing less than a work of art.
|
|
|
Melanie Rehak, Girl Sleuth
|
buy now at amazon
Melanie Rehak has written a fascinating history of Nancy Drew, the preternaturally competent girl sleuth whose series of mysteries was one of some two dozen published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. The Syndicate's books, including the Hardy Boys mysteries, were the product of collaboration between Edward Stratemeyer, who created the Syndicate in 1905, and his stable of ghostwriters. Stratemeyer created Nancy Drew in 1929 and assigned the job of writing the books to Mildred Wirt, the first of two strong-willed women who would be inextricably linked with the girl detective. After Stratemeyer's death in 1930 the Syndicate was run by his daughter, Harriet. Much of Rehak's book is focused on the contentious relationship between Harriet and Mildred: the Syndicate was jealous of its properties, and Harriet was a fierce guardian of the secrets behind the books' authorship. The uneasy relationship between the two women makes Rehak's book that much more compelling.
|
|
|
Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes
|
buy now at amazon
It begins with a sound: dot, dot, dot--a terrible school shooting where the high school gunman asks two girls hiding in the bathroom, "which one of you should I kill?" Fast forward twenty years where the survivor, Diana, is navigating her uneasy suburban life, complete with philandering husband and smart little girl, but she's plagued with memories of the past and eerie incidents keep intruding into her present day life. Or do they? Kasischke's a poet, and her language is jaw-droppingly beautiful right up to the stunner of an ending.
|
|
|
Tom Shachtman, Rumspringa
|
buy now at amazon
When they turn 16, children who have been raised among the Old Order Amish experience a curious coming-of-age ritual, the rumspringa, a period during which they are allowed to experience the conveniences and temptations, previously forbidden them, of mainstream, "English" society. The rumspringa period is intended to help the young Amish to make informed decisions, when the time comes, about whether or not to join the Amish church as adults. In Rumspringa, the product of more than 400 hours of interviews, Tom Shachtman focuses on the period of rumspringa, but in fact his book serves as an introduction to Amish life as a whole. I cannot know how a reader raised in the Amish faith would respond to the book, but Shachtman's study seemed to me a very thoughtful and fair-minded exploration of the society. It is a fascinating book, written in clear, admirably precise prose. |
|
|
Recommendations from Alex Espinoza
|
 Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico, the youngest of eleven children, and grew up in La Puente, a suburb of Los Angeles. After nearly dropping out of high school, he completed an A.A. at a community college before transferring to the University of California-Riverside. He went on to receive his MFA from UC-Irvine. He has worked as a gardener, an egg candler, a teacher, and a salesman and retail manager, selling everything from used appliances to furniture and custom-framed art to rock T-shirts and body jewelry. Still Water Saints is his first novel.
|
|
|
Recommendations from Site Creator Debra Hamel
| |
Debra is the author of Trying Neaira, the true story of an ancient Greek prostitute, Neaira, whose seamy past was put on display during her trial in the fourth century B.C. Debra also runs a book review web site at book-blog.com and a personal blog at the-deblog.com. She is the mother of two preternaturally attractive children who, it has been suggested, just might be demons.
|
|
|
Julia Scheeres, Jesus Land
|
buy now at amazon
A memoir of a white girl who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household (including two adopted African American brothers) in Indiana; eventually, Julia and brother David are shipped off to a Christian "boot camp" in the Dominican Republic. At times harrowing, at others humorous (and filled with '80's pop culture references), this is a poignant and powerful book.
|
|
|
Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Girls of Tender Age
|
buy now at amazon
Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's Girls of Tender Age is a memoir wrapped around a true crime story. She writes about growing up among the "working stiffs" of 1950's Hartford, Connecticut under less than ideal conditions: Smith's mother was distant and negligent, while her father was a sort of saint who devoted his life to caring for the author's autistic older brother at a time when no one understood that condition. Smith's autobiographical chapters--compelling enough without the introduction of further drama--are interspersed with brief sections, sometimes chillingly succinct, on the career of serial rapist and murderer Bob Malm. Eventually, the two threads of Smith's story meet, tragically, when the author is nine years old. Smith's account of Malm's crime and the lasting effect it had on her life is a powerful, impressive piece of nonfiction.
|
|
|
Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me
|
buy now at amazon
A series of seemingly unconnected events--a boy is attacked by a dog, another boy disappears, a pregnant teen prepares to give up her child for adoption--are slowly revealed to be linked to one another in unexpected ways. This marvelously written book examines how our circumstances affect the lives we lead. I'm on my third copy; I keep loaning it out.
|
|
|
David Prerau, Seize the Daylight
|
buy now at amazon
In Seize the Daylight author David Prerau traces the history of Daylight Saving Time from the late 18th century to the modern era. The implementation of DST was neither quick nor straightforward. Transforming the story of its adoption into a readable narrative is a great accomplishment. Prerau's book is packed with information, some of it surprising: I'd had no idea that it was standard as late as the 19th century for communities to determine their time locally, so that time from town to town varied by minutes depending on how communities were situated from one another longitudinally. Prerau sometimes errs on the side of including too many details in his book, but for the most part the story he tells is fascinating. Seize the Daylight is as informative as it is interesting to read, shedding light as it does on a convention that quietly informs our daily lives.
|
|
|
Leslie Larson, Slipstream
|
buy now at amazon
The lives of five characters--including an Avon saleswoman, a bartender, and a recovering addict--intersect at Los Angeles International Airport. The book drives irrevocably toward a powerful and dangerous conclusion. Part thriller, part noir, all literary--a welcome addition to LA literature.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
|
buy now at amazon
Vida Winter is an enigmatic, bestselling author who has told the story of her life innumerable times over the years but never truthfully--until, her health failing, she determines to confide all in a certain Margaret Lea. Margaret's life is quiet and reclusive, but she has contributed to the world of letters herself, having written a handful of biographical pamphlets. It is one of these which attracts Ms. Winter's interest. Margaret's story in the present frames the tale that Winter tells her, one filled with sadism and incest, haunted lives in a decaying mansion, the truth about its inhabitants hidden from the world. Setterfield has woven an intricate story which, if slow to start, becomes downright gripping by mid-book. One finds in it also the occasional, beautifully-wrought passage. The Thirteenth Tale is a book that will leave its mark on you. |
|
|
|
|
Recommendations from Site Creator Debra Hamel
| |
Debra is the author of Trying Neaira, the true story of an ancient Greek prostitute, Neaira, whose seamy past was put on display during her trial in the fourth century B.C. Debra runs TwitterLit, a site which serves up literary teasers twice daily. She has a book review web site at book-blog.com and a personal blog at the-deblog.com. She is the mother of two preternaturally attractive children who, it has been suggested, just might be demons.
|
|
|
Stephen McCauley, Alternatives to Sex
|
buy now at amazon
Stephen McCauley is playing at the top of his game in his deftly written fifth novel, Alternatives to Sex (no, not drugs but real estate and ironing). Narrator William Collins is a wickedly insightful and delightfully tormented gay real estate broker in Cambridge, MA, who is obsessed with housecleaning, anonymous sex, and the passive-aggressive tenant he can neither evict nor collect rent from. While trying (some might say, not very hard) to kick his bad habits, he sets out to acquire lessons on happiness from the perfect-seeming couple who enter his life, wanting to buy a place in the city. High humor and heartbreak, both in abundance, ensue. |
|
|
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
|
buy now at amazon
Readers may know the plot of Patricia Highsmith's first Tom Ripley book from the 1999 movie starring Matt Damon and Jude Law: Tom befriends and eventually murders Dickie Greenleaf, then impersonates him, in part to gain access to his money. The movie's good, but you owe it to yourself to read the novel. Highsmith has created in Tom Ripley a remarkable character, complex and wholly credible. He is conflicted and dishonest, and by the end of the book he's murdered two people, yet he remains, incredibly, sympathetic. Read The Talented Mr. Ripley, and when you're done, treat yourself to Highsmith's four later Ripley novels. |
|
|
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
|
buy now at amazon
I had the good fortune to review The Last of Her Kind for The New York Times, which propelled me to read Nunez's earlier four novels. What a discovery! The Last of Her Kind -- the story of a complicated friendship that begins in 1968 at Barnard College -- is the most ambitious, but each novel shimmers in its own way. If you're a Bloomsbury fan, don't miss Mitz, the wry and surprisingly moving "biography" of Virginia Woolf's pet marmoset. Closer to home, in The Last of Her Kind, Nunez brings her crystalline intelligence and razor sharp wit to an unsentimental exploration of women's friendship against the backdrop of the idealism and racial politics of the 1960s, a period that Nunez manages to present with fresh eyes. |
|
|
Alexander McCall Smith, Blue Shoes and Happiness
|
buy now at amazon
Blue Shoes and Happiness is the seventh book in Alexander McCall Smith's series featuring Precious Ramotswe, a wise, "traditionally built" woman who has set herself up as a detective with a view to solving life's smaller problems. It is a langorous read, imbued with humanity and homespun morality. McCall Smith offers a gentle look at the human condition in prose that is sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous, and always immensely readable. The book is also a sort of love letter to Botswana, where the author taught law for several years (at the University of Botswana). With four series and nearly twenty novels under his belt--to say nothing of his children's books and short stories and his academic writing, more than fifty books all told--Alexander McCall Smith is an impressively prolific writer. Lucky for us.
|
|
|
Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration
|
buy now at amazon
On a recent trip to Berlin I visited the infamous villa at Wannsee, where I found the British version of this book, called The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. The villa, in a posh area of Berlin not destroyed by Allied bombing, was the setting for a meeting in January 1942 where Nazi and Reich leaders decided officially to exterminate Europe's Jews. The minutes of the meeting, known as the Wannsee Protocol, are all that's left of that day, but in 100 pages, British historian Roseman does a superb job of examining what's known about the Nazis' intentions, which, until late 1941, were not as clearly focused on full-scale genocide but on forced emigration and on working captured Jews to death. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, Roseman introduces a great deal of ambiguity into our fixed ideas about how and when the decision to exterminate the Jews came about. (Of course others were killed in the camps, but the Wannsee Protocol focuses exclusively on "the Final Solution of the Jewish question.") |
|
|
Neil Forsyth (with Elliot Castro), Other People's Money
|
buy now at amazon
Aided by a photographic memory and a genius for finance, Elliot Castro supported himself for years by scamming credit card companies. He lived as a fugitive, constantly worrying about suspicious clerks, ready to run at a moment's notice, and mindful always of detail: Which credit cards and whose names was he using in which establishments? Which banks asked which security questions? Elliot lived, ostensibly, very well, spending money obsessively at the finest restaurants and the best hotels, but in the end this proved to be an empty sort of existence, and finally one he couldn't sustain. Other People's Money tells the story of Elliot Castro's childhood and career in crime. Elliot, via Neil Forsyth, offers what seems to be a very honest self-portrait in this book, depicting his failings as both a criminal and a human being. He recognizes, for example, that his bid for acceptance through wealth bought only temporary friends, and that he was frequently viewed as pathetic and vulgar despite his riches. Flawed as he is and now that he's going straight, you can't help feeling a bit sorry for Elliot, and impressed with his honesty in portraying himself like this. You'll leave the book impressed, too, with Forsyth's ability to shape Elliot's story into so compelling a narrative. |
|
|
Recommendations from Gail Gauthier
|
 Gail Gauthier is the author of seven books for children and young adults, including the ALA Notable Book The Hero of Ticonderoga and Happy Kid!. Her most recent book, A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat is for 7- to 9-year-olds and will be followed next year by A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers. She writes about children's books, writing, and the kidlit world at her blog, Original Content. You can also visit her website.
|
|
|
Recommendations from Site Creator Debra Hamel
| |
Debra is the author of Trying Neaira, the true story of an ancient Greek prostitute, Neaira, whose seamy past was put on display during her trial in the fourth century B.C. Debra runs TwitterLit, a site which serves up literary teasers twice daily. She has a book review web site at book-blog.com and a personal blog at the-deblog.com. She is the mother of two preternaturally attractive children who, it has been suggested, just might be demons.
|
|
|
Laura Whitcomb, A Certain Slant of Light
|
buy now at amazon
A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb is an intense, meticulously written ghost story in which the ghosts do not haunt the living but are haunted themselves.
After being dead for many decades, Helen and James, unrelated spirits from different eras, find that they can inhabit the bodies of two troubled adolescents. Helen and James can’t recall much of their former lives, but they both feel great remorse. They’re sure they did something terrible; they just don’t know what it was. Once they have physical form again, these out-of-place souls have to deal with the families of the bodies they now are living in, the guilt they are still carrying and don’t understand, and their desire for each other.
A Certain Slant of Light was published as Young Adult fiction, though its main characters are clearly the adult spirits and not the teenage bodies they inhabit. It’s a book that has great crossover potential for adult readers.
|
|
|
Scott Smith, A Simple Plan
|
buy now at amazon
It's a simple premise. What would happen if three men--two brothers and a friend--should stumble on a bag full of money in the woods? Stolen money, you'd have to assume, millions of dollars in non-sequential, hundred-dollar bills--enough that somebody, somewhere, has to be looking for it. Should they keep the cash? Call the police? Scott Smith immerses his characters in this moral dilemma of a situation and lets us watch as the ostensibly reasonable plan they agree on leads inevitably, inexorably, to a string of tragic consequences.
A Simple Plan is a perfect suspense novel. Smith's protagonist, Hank Mitchell, is forever in danger of being found out. The bag of stolen money, stashed precariously under his bed, nearly throbs in the story, Tell-Tale-Heart-like, constantly in our minds as a source of potential trouble for him. Incredibly, Hank remains entirely sympathetic throughout the story. He may do some bad things, but he's still a normal guy caught up in extraordinary circumstances. His responses, if regrettable, make perfect sense given man's natural urge for self-preservation. Readers may insist that they would act otherwise, but Smith makes a good case for the argument that Hank really never has much of a choice. |
|
|
Catherine Fisher, Corbenic
|
buy now at amazon
A few years ago, there was talk in the kidlit community about extending the YA designation to include books written for readers up into their early twenties. Catherine Fisher’s moody Corbenic would certainly appeal to that age group and older. In this contemporary spin on the medieval story of Sir Percival, seventeen-year-old Cal has left school (and his needy mother) and is about to take a job with his uncle. He has been on a Welsh train all day, and, after falling asleep in the night, accidentally gets off at the wrong station. Except for a sign saying “Corbenic,” there is nothing there. After wandering around in the dark, Cal stumbles upon an upscale castle-like inn where he is welcomed with a banquet. He makes a mistake during the meal, though, and the next morning he wakes up to find himself alone in a ruin. Once he’s back on his way, he finds that no one else knows of the inn or the Corbenic train station.
Did any of this really happen? Or is Cal, like the mother he is trying to escape from, mentally ill? Cal is a wonderfully conflicted character, desperate to get away from his mentally unbalanced and alcoholic mother but filled with guilt for wanting to do so. He’s not always attractive, but we can still understand his suffering.
|
|
|
Alan Alda, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
|
buy now at amazon
Alan Alda was moved to write Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself as a means of answering a question that had begun pricking at him. After nearly dying in a Chilean hospital in 2003, Alda began to wonder whether he had lived a meaningful life and to ask himself, more generally, what constitutes a meaningful life. The title of Alda's book alludes to the approach he adopted in trying to come up with an answer to that question. Alda dug up speeches he had delivered on various occasions over the years, talks which he'd attempted to infuse with some wisdom pertinent to the occasion. He structures the book around excerpted passages from these speeches, but his book is by no means wholly or even primarily a collection of excerpts. Rather, Alda uses the excerpts as writing prompts, wrapping stories from his life around them. As we saw in his first book, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, Alda has a smooth storytelling style that transports the reader. Once he begins on a reminiscence--traveling on the Orient Express, meeting his agent, biting his mother's watch--the pages turn themselves.
What, then, makes for a meaningful life? Alda has found his answer, and it's unlikely to surprise readers unless they're living the life of Lindsay Lohan. But arriving at the answer will surely not be the point for most of us. As in life, so with a good book: it's the going, not the getting there that's good.
|
|
|
M. T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation
|
buy now at amazon
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation by M. T. Anderson won the National Book Award this year and was named a Printz Honor Book. It really does deserve all the attention it has received.
Octavian Nothing, the son of an African princess, tells us the story of his childhood and adolescence spent among pre-Revolutionary American Enlightenment philosophers who are giving him a classical education. He is blissfully unaware that he is part of a research project they’re conducting. He is also unaware that he and his beautiful mother are both slaves. When the philosophers’ funding dries up, the truth of his situation is soon brought home to him.
The book is written in the style of an eighteenth century collection of memoirs and letters. The writing is sophisticated, at first even demanding, until readers are quickly pulled into this compelling story about an engaging character. History, philosophy, science, war, culture, psychology—there’s plenty here to hold an adult reader.
|
|
|
Joseph Finder, Power Play
|
buy now at amazon
Jake Landry is a junior executive with Hammond Aerospace, a company riven by corporate infighting since the recent selection of a new CEO intent on cleaning house. He is exceedingly competent, and in fact knows more than anyone else at Hammond about the new wide-bodied jet the company is rolling out. His expertise lands Jake a last-minute summons to the company's annual leadership retreat -- three days off the grid at a remote fishing lodge in British Columbia, team-building with a bunch of alpha male execs. But once they're arrived at the lodge, professional backstabbing takes a back seat to more immediate dangers: a gang of dead-eyed hunters take the group hostage and demand an enormous ransom for their release.
Like Joseph Finder's previous corporate thrillers, Power Play is laced with technical jargon, which lends the story credibility yet somehow doesn't weigh down the pages. Jake turns out to have a complicated past that makes him particularly well suited to dealing with a bunch of heavily-armed baddies. He is arguably a bit cartoonish, but he's sufficiently fleshed-out to carry this adrenaline-rush of a read. Finder has written another smart, edge-of-your-seat piece of fiction that you'll want to read in one sitting. |
|
Elizabeth Benedict is the author of five novels, including the bestseller 