A Meticulously Crafted Novel
353645
What a terrific book! I consume novels, and two of my major criteria for judging the quality of a book is whether or not I can remember the plot and the characters six months later.  Trust me, this novel is so consummately crafted that it scores off the charts in both areas.  If you read The Cherry Harvest and enjoy historically-based works of fiction, you're in for a treat.
1861028
This was really an excellent example of what Barker can achieve in an epic-length novel. It combines elements of horror, fantasy and romance in such a powerful and compelling way. The major plot device, a mysterious carpet known as the Fugue, is itself an interesting metaphor, I think, that works on many different levels. An entire, magnificent, hidden world lies trapped away in this seemingly mundane object of craft; a world of fantastic, magical beings known as the Seerkind. The fate of their world, as well as the power that it holds, becomes the motor force for the action that unfolds. Barker generally provides an imaginative bestiary in the majority of his work, but Weaveworld's was exceptionally horrifying and exquisite. Unlike other reviewers, I found the understated ending to be entirely called for: the conflict is over, the Seerkind's world is destroyed, but its trace manifests itself in a final exuberant expression in the human world. The book ends up being something of a parable on the human need for myth, symbol and imagination; though disenchantment seems to drain and devalue these things within our lives, as long as their objects can be imagined, so Barker entreats, they do not need to be lost. I'll add a corollary to that, in praise of Barker's genius here: as long as there are authors and artists with the power to give birth to these sorts of visions, as well as the inclination to create them, human beings need not lose touch with the idea that our lives as individual selves, however complex and individuated they may become, are all born from the murky, rich, beautiful past of symbol, image, and myth.
1160190
This is an unusually assured debut novel; the exact details of the lives of the Shanley family are conveyed with precision, as the novel shows the many different sides of each member of the family as they undergo a crisis. What's really impressive about Pierpont's writing is the subtle way she shows each character's perspective, so that the reader enters the different worlds inhabited by these characters: the narrowly self-centered egotism of Jack, an artist of some success but no great depth; his wife Deb, herself an unfulfilled artist who gave up a career in dance; their son Simon, an adolescent involved in a classic "acting out" of his resentments over family secrets; and Kay, an imaginative child who takes out her feelings in some wonderfully funny "fan fiction" of the TV series SEINFELD. In a way, the Shanleys reminded me of the Glass family in J.D. Salinger's stories, though updated to this age of the internet, e.mails and iPhones. Pierpont understands the ways in which our relationships are changing because our ways of communicating are evolving; she is a chronicler of the further adventures of the artistic milieus that Mary McCarthy charted in  her early novels (THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS and A CHARMED LIFE), but a milieu now cluttered with the the remnants of our oversaturated culture. Her pointed query is: how can an institution such as the family survive in this age of telecommunications, where interactions have become so problematic?
4962771
This is an incredibly satisfying novel.  It provides the reader a glimpse of the quotidian existence of middle class India: its social stratification, priorities and prejudices, and religious stratification.  However, it is also a fantasy and intertwines that culture's distinctive lingering concern about possible immortality and life after death with the relative importance and differing perspectives based on social standing and religious affiliation.
The author creatively weaves the present, recollections of the past, and fantasies about the future throughout the plot.  The lens for the focus on three distinctly different sets of middle class characters is an underclass vagrant named after a God.
Both thought provoking and exotic yet also an effortless read.  I look forward to getting more out of it with each subsequent review.
2822268
Keith Donohue's debut novel is an artful inquiry into identity and relationships, unfurled through a dark fairytale. It delivers the supernatural in such earnest that the reader never doubts its veracity. This dual-narrative follows the life of Aniday, a child snatched by changelings, and Henry Day, the doppelganger who has stolen his identity and his life.

The being that becomes Henry finds his identity assaulted both from within and by those around him. The unwitting adoptive father, vexed by the imposter-son's sudden development of musical talent, compulsively erodes the lie and himself in the process. Both strands of the story explore the relationships between parents and children, but Henry's experiences, first as a son and later as a father, deliver a stark perspective on the divide between fathers and sons.

The author's expansive yet unpretentious command of literature is most evident through Aniday's abductors. Donohue's gang of ageless changelings evoke Barrie's mischievous Lost Boys and Golding's brutal tribe of children uncivilized, but reflect a numb cynicism that can only be earned with age. The well-read Speck channels Dickens' Nancy, sometimes mother and sometimes object of an innocent's desire.

The product is a play of distant but sympathetic characters searching for themselves, their roots, and their purpose across the span of frequently melancholy, often startling lives. Along the way, the reader finds questions about family, growing up, and a changing world. Donohue fluently manipulates theme, voice, memory, and the perception of time to craft a moving and entertaining myth. Witness the birth of a classic.
1716439
Some books dissolve in memory as soon as they are put down. Not a Joan Leegant book. Like An Hour in Paradise, her glowing collection of short stories, the novel Wherever You Go seems bound to leave something of itself with the reader. Through Leegant's deft structuring of the very different yet interlocking life transitions of three very different individuals, contemporary Israel itself becomes the primary character of this believably plotted and richly textured work. The result is not only a good read but a vividly real sense of the multi-layered complexity, contradictions, failure, and promise that describe not only her people and their relationships but the all-too-humanly dynamic organism that is the nation of Israel. Leegant's perceptiveness is sometimes breathtaking, which is largely why her people--and Israel itself--come to live and breathe on the page. Yes, the novel gets off to a leisurely beginning (perhaps just short of downright slow), but it builds deliberately, and by the halfway point becomes "couldn't put it down" material.  Book clubs are sure to find this a natural, with substance enough for rewarding discussion on any number of topics and levels. It strikes me as coming close to creating as tangibly real a sense of Israel as Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone does of post-war Ethiopia. Definitely a winner.
2674951
Do not expect a mash-up of "A Town Like Alice" and "Bridge on the River Kwai."  This is not a romance novel, nor is it a war novel.  This is a novel exploring purpose, morality, folly and sacrifice, magnified through the lens of World War II and the post-war era.  Flanagan's relentless detail of the inhuman conditions and over-whelming cruelty of a prisoner of war camp in the Burma jungle also illuminates humankindness, creativity and persistence amid cruel certainty.  The characters are finely and distinctly drawn, reflecting what must have been painful research and almost religious development of back-stories by the author.  Equal care is taken with the Japanese and Korean characters, offering some insight into but not apology or excuse for their war-time behaviors.  Dorrigo, our central character, is both hero and anti-hero, and this duality is present as other characters redefine their concepts of good, necessity and honor.  Is Flanagan saying that only through suffering do we determine our essential nature?
1668814
This is far more than an excellent first novel.  For that matter, it would be an equally good tenth or twentieth.  It also is among the first of a genre rarely seen before, in which elements of subterfuge and political-judicial hierarchy are expertly and seamlessly pieced into a story not only whose time has come, it could very credibly have come from current headlines.  Considering Dr. Carpenter's ancestry,  the inevitable consequences of one's actions are shown as the guiding force propelling this totally contemporary story.  Put your own choice of real-life people in place of her characters (I did) and observe how this book travels the narrow lane between the fields of fiction and fact - and why it does so.  It (and if she maintains this style, whatever she may write in the future) has the powerful quality of pure unstoppability.  As you read, the book shines a searchlight on your mind.
1039287
I was initially attracted to this book because it deals with Huntington's Disease, the one that devastated my mother's family. Earlier reviewers have questioned the authenticity of Irina's response to her destiny of early madness, uncontrollably wild flailing, physical devastation over the course of many years and eventual suffocation. If anything, Ms. Dubois played that move too cautiously.

I won't summarize the plot as many others have already done it quite well. I will say that this searingly beautiful first novel captivated me from the outset. Dubois' mesmerizing use of metaphor and ability to tease out nuanced descriptions even a minute movement had me in awe. The pace matches the meditation on life and its purpose.

I found the characters completely believable. Russia is its own character and she deftly conjures the dark tension and fear of a country that has know so much repression. I learned a great deal about the emergence of "modern" Russia from this work. I found the interweaving of history, chess, meditations on death, inspiration, longing and fulfillment to be a clever departure from the ordinary.

Dubois has played her game exceedingly well.
1057144
In this immensely engaging novel, author Sara Baker has created a fictional world rich in character and moral complexity.  Although the setting is contemporary, the novel's theme about the human need for connection and forgiveness is timeless.  Set in the small fictional town of Milledge, Georgia, "The Timekeeper's Son" focuses on two families who are unknown to each other at first but whose lives become interconnected as a result of a tragic accident.  Meg and David Masters are a liberal, idealistic couple: he is a lawyer turned community activist, with plans to run for Congress, and she is a second-grade teacher in a Title I school.  Helen and Hal Lovejoy are a more reclusive couple.  He spends his days working alone at his job repairing old clocks, while she, a semi-retired nurse, devotes her time to homemaking and mothering their son Josh, a sensitive high school student and an aspiring filmmaker.  The quiet of the Lovejoys' life and the idealism of the Masters' life are rocked when the car Josh is driving home from a film rehearsal late one night hits David, out for a moonlight jog, sending him into a prolonged coma and changing the course of the characters' lives in ways that will bring anguish but also, ultimately, grace.
  Although the plot is riveting, it is the deft, at times lyrical, writing and the exploration of characters' inner lives that I found most interesting about the book.  Ms. Baker describes so compellingly the dreams, disappointments, and yearnings each character secretly harbors that the reader gains a deep understanding of each.  For example, the reader can feel Helen's excited sensation of her life suddenly expanding when she rediscovers her long-slumbering love of painting, and Meg's painful reminder of her own childlessness when she perceives the deep maternal love Helen has for Josh, and Josh's crushing sense of never doing anything right in his father's eyes.  The following passage, in which Hal laments the decline of the use of analog clocks, reveals both Ms. Baker's lyrical style and her ability to convey the deep satisfactions characters find in their work or their hobbies: "Was there anything more comforting than the ticking of a clock, the slow majestic ringing of the hours?  The sense of order imposed on the day as it unfurled?  Let the rest of the world have their clock radios, their cheap plastic digital watches.  Here in this shop, there would be order, the stately progression of hours marked properly by the singular tickings and strikings, each one as identifiable as birdsong."
  This novel does not have a pat, happy ending.  The characters are left with a big question mark about their futures.  But it is a positive ending because the characters have all been touched by moments of grace and have learned to forgive themselves and others.  They have all moved from a sense of isolation to a sense of connectedness.
3490060
Despite the fact that this novel may likely be tagged as "chick lit," it defies that genre.  Important to mention is that the book's description at the Kindle Store is rather limited and misleading.  The main character, Annie Walsh, is indeed a country-western singer/composer in the throes of a long-standing love affair with her producer/promoter/manager, but the fact that she is a noted musical performer is, overall, de minimus.  Rather, the "heart" of the novel lies in the numerous, largely dysfunctional, family relationships which unfold on an alternating "Then" and "Now" basis.  I gravitate to novels about family relationships, but have never read a book which captures childhood and teenaged relationships so purely and realistically - one cringes, laughs, smirks and cries as Annie's feelings, buried in putatively ancient childhood, are exhumed with the writer's equivalent of surgical precision,remarkably in the construct of a young person's mind.  The prose is masterfully simple yet profoundly moving, almost poetic.  Likely most adult women will be wholly empathetic to and captivated by Annie's struggles, sorrows, doubts and fears, secrets and triumphs.
In due course a compelling murder mystery unfolds and serves as a thread to tie together numerous ancillary but key characters, all of whom are so well drawn and developed as to feel eerily and inordinately "familiar" to the reader.
I came away from this novel feeling oddly comforted - indeed, vindicated - and far less alone with the issues derived from my youth, which "haunt" me and impact upon my behavior even to this day in my 57th year.  Annie Walsh and I could have easily been best friends as kids.
Do something nice for yourself:  buy and savor this treasure of a book, which I will likely read again.
2614449
A beautifully crafted novel, with intelligent use of dialogue, letters and narration. The complex character of Emma requires a persistent endeavor to understand. Others, like her hypochondriac father, are much easier to grasp. As is customary, Austen's small world of tightly guarded social status and the impropriety of crossing social boundaries are brilliantly portrayed and as well, there is Austen's  shrewd but often humorous assessment of the human heart and its need for the security of genuine love. A first for me, I very much enjoyed reading this Austen novel.
3870799
This is a superb novel.  Set in 1948 (Pre-Vatican II for Catholics) it offers an insight into the rigid and inflexible society of the Religious orders of the time. We are introduced to a 10-year old girl who was not brought up in the structure of an elite Catholic boarding schools of the time; we are gripped by her pain resulting from what she understands as an abandonment by her world-famous surgeon, leaving on an extended European lecture tour. The clash between the established system and the girl's pain at her perceived abandonment becomes focused in the relationship with a nun who is her teacher and aspirant toward final vows. The author augments the tension in story-structure by displaying a virtuosity in language that often causes the reader to stop and go back to re-read a particularly beautifully crafted section. The author is not only a fabulous story-teller, she does so with a mastery of metaphors and appropriate phraseology. Once one starts the novel, it becomes increasingly difficult to put down. Zoe Keithley is a literary "Master," worthy of the highest praise.

Dr. Jack Conroy
592880
There are books for which a review is almost superfluous: you can tell, just from the cover copy and an excerpt, how you're going to feel about them. Marlon James's new novel is such a case. An ambitious, epic, intense exploration of Jamaica's recent history, told in multiple voices and spanning decades and nations? Such a thing appeals or it doesn't, especially after one samples a few of the voices and discovers the dense complexity of James's prose. This is a novel that requires a commitment of time and intellectual energy, but as is so often the case perseverance will be rewarded, with a terribly vivid evocation of place that is also a portrait of how violence perpetuates itself, and how people learn to live with that. There is, perhaps, a fine line between a novel of great scope and a novel that's overstuffed, but in an age where literary ambition too often involves streamlining one's imagination into elegant nothingness, overstuffed may be preferable. This history is not brief, and there are definitely more than seven killings, but that's far from a bad thing.
4548635
It was the writing that first grabbed me, the atmosphere that held me rapt through the first few chapters, and finally the story itself that kept me mesmerized all the way to the end of Little Wolves.  This is an extraordinary novel that is sure to appeal to any reader who enjoys their literary fiction with a bit of a Stephen King edge.  The author does a masterful job of exploring what feels to be a uniquely American tragedy.  A story of hard working people of faith who are confronted with an evil clouded by secrets and buried in tradition.  What erupts in the violent action of one young man shakes an entire town.

This is Clara Warren's story.  A young preacher's wife living in a small Midwestern town and struggling to fit in, she brings with her an unknown past full of regrets and longing.  The author does a wonderful job of tying together Clara's past with the present - it seems natural from the beginning that the violent actions of one young teen should involve her as well.  The narrative drifts easily between the past and the present and reality and fantasy, lending the story a supernatural tone that fits very well with Clara's journey to uncover her past.

This is a novel that works on many levels.  The characters are all beautifully done.  I keenly felt Grizz's pain and confusion at the death of his son and Clara's struggles to retain her sense of self while coping with the many new roles she is facing.  The descriptions of the town and its people were often haunting, lending the book a desolate feeling that further enhanced the story and the suspense.  I especially enjoyed the many ties to classic mythology and felt that this added an unexpected depth both to Clara's character and the events that transpire.

Little Wolves is a memorable and masterfully written novel that I will be recommending often.
3689876
I couldn't put this novel down! Mysko's handling of three separate family story lines is masterful, so that even though you might know the broad strokes of "what" happened, you may not know why or how, and you're riveted to find out. The reader also anticipates when the three aspects intersect, as they do throughout the book. The beach town setting is vivid, and the emotional repercussions of addiction are movingly conveyed, for instance when Camille attends an Al-Anon meeting and is shocked at the cold way in which a father declines to talk to--or "enable" his son. Nothing is simplified in this nuanced novel, and you finish reading it with respect for the complicated humanity of the characters. I loved, for instance, the cross-generational relationship between Owen and Camille, their courtesies for and second thoughts about each other. The book is well-produced, with crisp type, good paper, a beautiful cover--and not a single typo. This is overall a better book than a great many published by Random House or Norton. Its excellence makes me wish editing at larger publishers could rise to this standard--and gives me hope for the small publishers who aren't in it for the money, but rather for the writing.
1737550
I like this book a lot! Artfully plotted, briskly-paced, and painstakingly researched, the story tracks the moral and philosophical growth of a young graduate student who uncovers the criminal past of one of his professors (already known to be a philanderer) and wrestles with what -- if anything -- to do about it. The book works on many levels. Its intricate plot, with its many twists and turns, keeps the reader utterly engaged, while its thematic underpinning demands that that same reader do some soul-searching of his own. Treading the line between being a genuine page-turner and a novel of ideas, Troncoso's novel moves relentlessly towards an explosive climax even as it grapples with a host of controversial issues (including racism, inner-city crime, vigilantism, homophobia, and sexual and identity politics) -- a feat that is a credit to both the craft and the courage of its author. Bound to provoke discussion and debate among its readers, The Nature of Truth is above all a vastly enjoyable read, and I highly recommend it.