Bagged Book Reviews

1st to Die by James Patterson  (8)

Booklist Review: Patterson, best known for his thrillers featuring Alex Cross, is banking on his legions of fans coming on board for this novel, the first in a new crime series. Don’t be surprised if they come in droves. 1st to Die sets up the premise of the series--a group of four successful women coming together to solve murder cases--while offering a heinous killer and a fast-paced mystery. The story opens in San Francisco, with the gruesome murder of a bride and groom on their wedding night. Detective Lindsay Boxer is called to the scene, just after learning she is suffering from a rare and potentially life-threatening blood disease. For help with the case, she calls on her best friend, Claire, a medical examiner, and, reluctantly at first, Cindy, a newspaper reporter who is covering the story. Two more bride-and-groom killings lead them to the doorstep of Nicholas Jenks, a prominent writer who was having an affair with one of the murdered brides. Given Jenks’ prestige, the assistant D.A., Jill Bernhardt, is reluctant to prosecute without substantial evidence. When Cindy gets a hold of a manuscript copy of Jenks’ unpublished first novel, which details murders almost exactly like the bride-and-groom killings, the case starts to come together. Patterson keeps up the suspense until the very last page and will have readers looking forward to the second installment in the series. (Reviewed January 1, 2001) -- Kristine Huntley

An Accidental Woman by Barbara Delinsky  (8)

Rendezvous Review: Heather Malone likes living in Lake Henry, New Hampshire. She likes the town, the people, the sap running in the spring and Micah and the kids. She has enjoyed it for the past fourteen years. Micah Smith and his two children have enjoyed having her with them, too. The town folk know and love the gentle, good natured woman. But when Heather is arrested by the FBI, the town is stunned and shocked. Her friends can't figure out how this could have happened and how much they didn't really know about her. Poppy, Heather's best friend, looks for answers. Griffen Hughes, a writer, whose off track comment to his brother sets this whole process in motion, looks for answers in her past that will set her free to enjoy her future. The town doesn't lose sight with its small town values and belief in the good of people as it holds to the fact that they believe in Heather. They pull together to save what they have built in the last fourteen years. Ms. Delinsky has written magic again. Her story of friendship, community values, and the belief in the power of love keeps the reader wanting more. Reviewed August 2002 by Marchell Barkey

The Art of Keeping Secrets by Patti Callahan Henry  (7)

Publishers Weekly Review: Two years after Annabelle Murphy's husband Knox dies in a plane crash, the wreckage is found--and with him is the body of a woman. In the disappointing latest South Carolina Lowcountry saga from Henry (following Between the Tides), the firm ground under Annabelle's feet suddenly dissolves with questions as to who the woman was, and what her relationship to Knox might have been. Annabelle's teenaged daughter, Keeley, struggles with feelings of anger and betrayal; her college-aged son Jake mans up as best he can. Her close male friend, Shawn, may turn out to be something else entirely. And into all their lives comes Sofie Milstead, a sad young woman who studies dolphins, who avoids most relationships and who knew who the mysterious woman was. Sofie doesn't explain her connection to Knox until late in the story, and a sense of foreboding pervades the entire read. When all is finally explained, the payoff is meager, and a downer. (June Reviewed on: 06/02/2008)

Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg  (5)

BookPage Review: In The Art of Mending, best-selling author Elizabeth Berg presents a fascinating domestic drama that is filled with tension, wisdom and the kind of priceless insight that seems to come from first-hand experience. In her mid-50s, Laura Bartone is a talented quilt maker, contentedly married and a mother of two. The tranquility of her days is disrupted when her sister Caroline, encouraged by a therapist, reveals troubling information about their parents. According to Caroline, she was abused, both physically and verbally, by their mother. But is she telling the truth? Caroline is the family's wayward member, and she has a tendency to over-dramatize events. Yet she is clearly troubled by the past, and her version of what transpired during their childhood transforms Laura's own perceptions of those years. Added to this potent emotional mix is the death of their father from a stroke. How Laura copes with these midlife revelations makes for a smart, sympathetic narrative. Berg, whose novel Open House was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 2000, knows how to write about delicate subjects and construct a poignant plot without succumbing to melodrama. Filled with convincing detail and true-to-life dialogue, her latest is a powerful story about forgiveness, healing and family. A reading group guide is included in the book. (BookPage Reviews 2005 April)

Big Cherry Holler by Adriana Trigiani (8)

Publishers Weekly Review: Trigiani returns to the rural Virginia of her bestselling debut, Big Stone Gap, with a big-hearted novel that alternates dollops of comfort with moments of folksy charm and stark poignancy. Eight years have passed since self-styled town spinster Ave Mari and miner Jack MacChesney wed. During that time, they've had one daughter, Etta, and lost a son, Joe, to leukemia. Ave's handling of Joe's death strains the marriage. When Jack loses his job and starts a construction company, complete with an attractive supplier named Karen who sets her cap for him, things became shakier. Then Ave visits her family in Italy and faces her own temptation, in the form of hunky Pete Rutledge. Suddenly the serenity of the solid MacChesney marriage is threatened on all sides. Will love keep the pair together? And if love isn't enough, what is? Readers may find the answer to this, the novel's central question, to be anticlimactic. Still, Ave is a spunky and likable narrator; the novel is populated with many of the same characters readers found endearing the first time around; and the story of a mother grappling with grief over the loss of a child is genuinely moving. Big Stone Gaptook place in the '80s; now we're up to the '90s. Can "Ave in the Millennium" be far behind? Readers have faced worse fates. Agent, Suzanne Gluck for ICM. (May 22)
— Staff (Reviewed May 14, 2001) (Publishers Weekly, vol 248, issue 20, p52)

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison  (6)

Kirkus review: This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecora. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecoras are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish--for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecora just might have been loved--for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye. (Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1970)
 

Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan  (6)

Publishers Weekly Review:  In its rich character portrayals and sensitivity to the nuances of mother-daughter relationships, Tan's new novel is the real successor to, and equal of, The Joy Luck Club. This luminous and gripping book demonstrates enhanced tenderness and wisdom, however; it carries the texture of real life and reflects the paradoxes historical events can produce. Ruth Young is a 40-ish ghostwriter in San Francisco who periodically goes mute, a metaphorical indication of her inability to express her true feelings to the man she lives with, Art Kamen, a divorced father of two teenage daughters. Ruth's inability to talk is subtly echoed in the story of her mother LuLing's early life in China, which forms the long middle section of the novel. Overbearing, accusatory, darkly pessimistic, LuLing has always been a burdento Ruth. Now, at 77, she has Alzheimer's, but luckily she had recorded in a diary the extraordinary events of her childhood and youth in a small village in China during the years that included the discovery nearby of the bones of Peking Man, the Japanese invasion, the birth of the Republic and the rise of Communism. LuLing was raised by a nursemaid called Precious Auntie, the daughter of a famous bonesetter. Once beautiful, Precious Auntie's face was burned in a suicide attempt, her mouth sealed with scar tissue. When LuLing eventually learns the secrets of Precious Auntie's tragic life, she is engulfed by shame and guilt. These emotions are echoed by Ruth when she reads her own mother's revelations, and she finally understands why LuLing thought herself cursed. Tan conjures both settings with resonant detail, juxtaposing scenes of rural domestic life in a China still ruled by superstition and filial obedience, and of upscale California half a century later. The novel exhibits a poignant clarity as it investigates the dilemma of adult children who must become caretakers of their elderly parents, a situation Tan articulates with integrity and exemplary empathy for both generations. Agent, Sandy Dijkstra. (Feb. 19) Forecast: With a readership already clamoring for the book, and Tan embarking on a 22-city tour, this novel will be a sure hit; its terrific sepia-tinted cover photo of a woman in old China only adds to its allure. Moreover, readers will be intrigued by Tan's hint that this story about family secrets is semi-autobiographical. The dedication reads: "On the last day my mother spent on earth, I learned her real name, as well as that of my grandmother." Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak  (4)

Booklist Review: Gr. 10-12. Death is the narrator of this lengthy, powerful story of a town in Nazi Germany. He is a kindly, caring Death, overwhelmed by the souls he has to collect from people in the gas chambers, from soldiers on the battlefields, and from civilians killed in bombings. Death focuses on a young orphan, Liesl; her loving foster parents; the Jewish fugitive they are hiding; and a wild but gentle teen neighbor, Rudy, who defies the Hitler Youth and convinces Liesl to steal for fun. After Liesl learns to read, she steals books from everywhere. When she reads a book in the bomb shelter, even a Nazi woman is enthralled. Then the book thief writes her own story. Theres too much commentary at the outset, and too much switching from past to present time, but as in Zusaks enthralling I Am the Messenger (2004), the astonishing characters, drawn without sentimentality, will grab readers. More than the overt message about the power of words, it's Liesl's confrontation with horrifying cruelty and her discovery of kindness in unexpected places that tell the heartbreaking truth. -- Hazel Rochman (Reviewed 01-01-2006) (Booklist, vol 102, number 9, p88)

The Bookman’s Promise by John Dunning  (8)

Publishers Weekly Review: In Nero Wolfe Award–winner Dunning's third literate entry in his Cliff Janeway series (after Booked to Die and The Bookman's Wake), 90-ish Josephine Gallant persuades the former Denver cop turned antiquarian bookseller to try to recover a rare collection of the works of Richard Burton, "the explorer, not the actor," that once belonged to her grandfather, a faithful traveling companion of Burton. Eager to fulfill his pledge to Ms. Gallant, who expires soon after their meeting, Janeway begins an investigation that takes him to a seedy used bookshop and other strange haunts in Baltimore, where he runs into a shady writer and a gang of thugs who are obviously looking for the same literary treasures. Midway through the often rambling narrative, a flashback to 1860 steps up the pace when Burton undertakes a possible espionage mission to the South for the British prime minister and encounters Captain Abner Doubleday, who solicits his advice on the defense of Fort Sumter. Two well-intentioned women join Janeway for the final search through historic Charleston, with the inevitable romantic interludes. Too many extraneous characters and some tedious dialogue slow the action, but the book-collecting background is sure to appeal to a wide range of mystery readers. (Mar. 9)
— Staff (Reviewed February 16, 2004) (Publishers Weekly, vol 251, issue 7, p155)

Bridges of Madison County  by Robert James Waller  (6)

Magill Book Review: At the center of this short novel is a love story of classic simplicity and familiarity. Francesca is forty-five, married with two teenaged children; Robert Kincaid is fifty-two, divorced, an artist, a traveling loner, calling himself "the last of the cowboys." Meeting at the right time and place, they cautiously accept their love at first sight, and within the four days they are able to spend together, they fulfill each other spiritually and physically. They then sacrifice their physical intimacy, to preserve her family and, probably, their sanity, never meeting again. But what they have made together lives on, defining and directing their lives.  Set mainly in 1965 near Winterset, Iowa, the birthplace of John Wayne, the novel still is much like a western, with perhaps a touch of irony. The stranger comes to town, bringing with him values the town cannot appreciate but that are fundamental, and he wins the heart of the exotic woman whose true powers are unrealized in town or family. Though Francesca is a well-rounded character, Waller tends to focus more on Kincaid, on assignment from NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC to do a photo story about the covered bridges of Madison County. Kincaid is a mythic figure, the Camel-smoking shaman, peregrine, animal/man, but the gentleman, with his hormones under control, aware of himself as obsolete in a culture that requires conformity and distrusts magic and imagination.  Waller's storytelling is multilayered and sophisticated, helping to make believable a tale in which people often talk as if they had composed their speeches in advance. -- Reviewed by Terry Heller

Catch Me If You Can by Stan Redding and Frank Abagnale (7)

Frank W. Abagnale, alias Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams, and Robert Monjo, was one of the most daring con men, forgers, imposters, and escape artists in history.  In his brief but notorious criminal career, Abagnale donned a pilot's uniform and copiloted a Pan Am jet, masqueraded as the supervising resident of a hospital, practiced law without a license, passed himself off as a college sociology professor, and cashed over $2.5 million in forged checks, all before he was twenty-one. Known by the police of twenty-six foreign countries and all fifty states as "The Skywayman," Abagnale lived a sumptuous life on the lam-until the law caught up with him.  Now recognized as the nation's leading authority on financial foul play, Abagnale is a charming rogue whose hilarious, stranger-than-fiction international escapades, and ingenious escapes-including one from an airplane-make Catch Me If You Can an irresistible tale of deceit. Random House 2005
 

Christmas Pearl by Dorthea Benton Frank (11)

Publishers Weekly Review: With her truculent family gathered at her stately Charleston mansion for Christmas, 93-year-old matriarch Theodora is having a hard time tolerating the lot of them. Theodora hankers for her 1920s childhood, when Pearl, the family's stern black maid, enforced strict houshold discipline and took no guff while working hard at Christmas, all the while singing gospel favorites such as "Come en Go wid Me." When Theodora's usual maid is called away, Pearl herself (as a ghost) blows in, ready to set the house in order, She unearths the antique crche and other Christmas heirlooms long buried, and altering the family's general bad temper. Frank (The Land of Mango Sunsets ) includes homegrown recipes that further sweeten this Lowcountry holiday confection. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 September #3 Page 36)
 

The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day  (14)

Booklist Review: The secret lives and loves of circus people and their descendants are revealed in these 11 linked short stories. From 1884 to 1939, the small town of Lima, Indiana, hosts the Great Porter Circus during the winter months. Wallace Porter buys the circus on the eve of his beloved wife’s death, claiming he has “seen the elephant.” He never remarries but has a secret affair with Jennie Dixianna, the erotic acrobat who seduces men and keeps their secrets locked in a cedar box. Bascomb Bowles and his wife, Pearly, recount their sideshow adventures as “pinheads,” and the tales are handed down to their son, Gordon. Gordon becomes an expert on elephants and witnesses a horrific accident involving his favorite elephant and the trainer. Ollie Hofstadter, son of the elephant trainer, leaves a career as a clown after the murder of his best friend. Years later Gordon tells Ollie the true story of his father’s death. A fascinating period in American history inhabited by colorful characters and told in a lively manner.
-- Kaite Mediatore (BookList, 07-01-2004, p1817)

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier  (4)

Booklist Review: The Civil War's last months are the setting for this first novel by Frazier, erstwhile college teacher and author of travel books and stories. Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier, leaves the hospital before his gashed neck heals enough to get him sent back to war. Still weak, he heads for the mountains, where a minister's daughter named Ada is his objective. Inman's return could hardly be timelier for the Charleston-raised Ada: her father has died, and she finds she knows little about operating a farm. Frazier blends the story of Inman's journey with that of Ada's efforts, with the help of a drifter named Ruby, to wring a subsistence living from the neglected land; in the background are the yelping dogs of war (most dramatically, gangs chasing Confederate deserters like Inman), as well as hints of changes the end of war will bring. Cold Mountain, based on a Frazier family story, is a satisfying read, though for some readers elements of the story (e.g., Ada's dependence) are anachronistic. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 1997)) -- Mary Carroll

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maquire  (8)

Booklist Review: Maguire mines our most familiar tales in his new novel, based on Cinderella. Many of the expected elements are here--the shrewish, greedy stepmother and her plain daughters; the abused servant girl, radiantly beautiful beneath the kitchen grime; the ball; the prince; even the slipper. But these predictabilities are cleverly woven into the dark layers of a highly absorbing story. Set in seventeenth-century Holland, the plot begins with teen-age Iris, smart but not beautiful, her sister Ruth, oxlike and slow, and Margarethe, their shrill, opportunistic mother. The three arrive destitute from England and find shelter keeping house for a struggling Flemish painter. Events relocate them to the grander household of a local tulip merchant, where the story's essential remaining players, including the "Cinderling," are added. Maguire's characters don't fall under traditional fairy tale's one-dimensional classifications of "good" and "evil," although at times readers may find them too closely restricted to personality type. Maguire's precise, slightly archaic language, however, sweeps readers through this mysterious and fascinating story. ((Reviewed September 15, 1999)) -- Gillian Engberg

Covington Christmas by Joan Medlicott  (11)

Kirkus Reviews: In the sixth in Medlicott's series about lively senior citizens in Covington, N.C. (At Home in Covington, 2004, etc.), the new pastor overcomes a couple of crises with help from the local ladies. Although they show up when needed, Hannah, Grace and especially Amelia take a less prominent role here than they have previously. Young Pastor Denny Ledbetter has taken over the local congregation to relieve the ailing Pastor Johnson, who for years acted as a father surrogate to the orphaned Denny and paid his way through seminary. While cleaning out the church attic with Grace, Denny discovers proof that 40 years earlier, the church briefly employed an un-ordained minister who performed five marriage ceremonies for which he never filed the proper papers. As a result, five of the community's longest-married couples are not really married in the eyes of God. After some soul-searching, Denny breaks the news to the couples. The Herrills and the Craines, both upstanding members of the community, soon agree that holding a joint wedding ceremony on Christmas Eve would be a lovely way to renew their vows. The other three couples, all from a less genteel part of town, take some convincing, but eventually they too agree to be part of the ceremony-even poor Mary McCorkle, whose marriage has been less than happy. Now a new crisis arises-the sorry disrepair into which the church building has fallen. While the ladies light a fire under the men folk to help Denny refurbish the church, a mysterious visitor from France underwrites a new furnace, but will it be installed in time? Don't worry too much; suspense is not a high priority for Medlicott, who designs her tales for comfort above all else. Undemanding and very tame fare that avoids offending anyone. (Kirkus Reviews 2005 September #2)

Dewey: the Small-town Library Cat who Touched the World by Vicki Myron (5)

Library Journal Review: One freezing night in 1988, an eight-week-old kitten was left in the book drop of the Spencer Public Library in Iowa. Head librarian Myron immediately fell in love with him, as did the rest of the library staff, and this is how Dewey Readmore Books became the Spencer library cat. Dewey grew into a handsome feline, making many friends in his 19 years at the library by sitting in many laps and greeting library visitors at the door with an uncanny knack for knowing just who needed his affection. Dewey's fame grew from town to town, then state to state, and, amazingly, became international. Some of the most moving parts of this memoir express the intense, special bond that Dewey had with Myron, who survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband. Charming and heartwarming. (Library Journal Reviews 2009 September #1 Reviewed on 7/15/08)

The Dream by Harry Bernstein (14)

Publishers Weekly Review: Having mined his English upbringing in The Invisible Wall , Bernstein resumes a nine-decade reckoning in this gently observed memoir of a Jewish immigrant family riven from within. Eager to escape English mill town life, his mother promises her brood a better life in America—a dream providentially fulfilled with steamship tickets. But even after reuniting with family in Chicago, his father's "bloody 'ell" bellows and monstrous rage continue to smite. The author takes in his new surroundings with a keen adolescent eye, observing "back porches all piled on top of one another like egg crates," belying celluloid America—as do his ragamuffin elders, with his grandfather reduced to begging in secret. At school he confounds Midwestern types with his Lancashire accent, comically mistaken for an Egyptian named "Arry." Engulfed in the Roaring '20s, the Bernsteins revel in the luxuries of telephones and parlor rooms, only to feel the wallop of the Depression as the decade wanes. Uprooted to New York, Bernstein ekes out a living and falls quietly, desperately in love, achieving a joyful 67-year marriage. Coming on the heels of his first book, this one will delight readers eager for more of Bernstein's distinctive voice and gift for character. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2008 February #1 Page 45)

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert  (7)

Library Journal Review:  Realizing that her marriage was over and that her life needed serious therapy, she headed to Rome to eat and flirt and enjoy. Satiated on gelato, olive oil, and pasta, she moved on to an ashram in India to practice yoga and meditation before finally traveling to Bali, where she finds new love. Honest, funny, and endearing, Gilbert learns about herself and how she wishes to inhabit the world. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish  (4)

Booklist Review: When eight women in rural Wisconsin take off in the middle of the night for a journey of the heart, it touches women everywhere. The walking women are different ages and of diverse backgrounds, yet their friendship and unwavering mutual support have forged an immutable bond. They start their walk as support for Susan, who is facing an unwanted pregnancy, but all are walking for their own lost loves and lost dreams. As they walk, they talk about their lives, and the pain of the past is shed. The media picks up the news of their perambulation, and soon they become a national sensation that starts other women thinking about their lives, resulting in positive changes all over the country. The women are unaware of their influence, and their small community protects their privacy, so they can proceed without the intrusion of the outside world. A rallying cry for the empowerment of women, Radish’s novel is also a celebration of the strong bond that exists between female friends.
(Reviewed June 1, 2003) -- Patty Engelmann

Emma by Jane Austen  (7)

Magill Book Review: Emma is rich, beautiful, and clever, with time on her hands to devote to remaking the lives of others whom she regards as less fortunate and less clever. When her companion and former governess, Miss Taylor, marries a neighboring widower, Emma finds herself even more restless than usual. She takes under her wing young Harriet Smith, a pretty girl who admires Emma as a paragon of sophistication.  Emma sets her sights on marrying Harriet to a snobbish young rector, Mr. Elton, but he misunderstands her attentions and proposes marriage to her, instead. This defeat does not diminish Emma's matchmaking ambitions, which are given added encouragement when another young man, Frank Churchill, and a young woman, Jane Fairfax, appear in the small community. Emma's friend Mr. Knightly, the brother of her sister's husband scolds her for playing with other people's lives, but she refuses to listen to him.  In the end, the various couples are sorted out, according to social class and emotional inclination, and Emma discovers that she actually loves Mr. Knightly. She was wise enough, finally, to see the errors of her ways, and to reform. No longer will she consider the villagers as puppets for her amusement.  This witty, entertaining novel is also the most profound of Jane Austen's works. Written with complete technical control, it resonates with a deep understanding of human nature. Austen never blinked at the foibles that plague human beings, but she did not despise the men and women of her books because they were imperfect. She had that rare ability to portray the foolishness in a person without a loss of sympathy.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo  (5)

Booklist Review: In a warmhearted novel of sweeping scope, Russo animates the dead-end small town of Empire Falls, Maine, long abandoned by the logging and textile industries that provided its citizens with their livelihood. Miles Roby surveys his hometown with bemused regret from the Empire Grill, owned by a local magnate but run by him ever since he was called home from college to take care of his ailing mother. His daily parade of customers provides him with ample evidence of both the restrictions and forced intimacy of small-town life and has left him with a deep appreciation for irony: his ex-wife’s new paramour, “the Silver Fox,” has suddenly become a loyal customer and is constantly challenging him to an arm-wrestling contest; his father, always a day late and a dollar short, has talked a senile priest into running off to Key West for the winter (where they tie for first place in the local Hemingway look-alike contest); and the diner owner’s daughter, apprised of Miles’ impending divorce, is forever trying to engulf him in a teary embrace. Russo follows up his rollicking academic satire, Straight Man (1997), with a return to the blue-collar milieu featured in his first three novels and once again shows an unerring sense of the rhythms of small-town life, balancing his irreverent, mocking humor with unending empathy for his characters and their foibles.
(Reviewed April 1, 2001) -- Joanne Wilkinson

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley  (5)

Annotation:  A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs (9)

Publishers Weekly Review:  Between running her Manhattan yarn shop, Walker & Daughter, and raising her 12-year-old biracial daughter, Dakota, Georgia Walker has plenty on her plate in Jacobs's debut novel. But when Dakota's father reappears and a former friend contacts Georgia, Georgia's orderly existence begins to unravel. Her support system is her staff and the knitting club that meets at her store every Friday night, though each person has dramas of her own brewing. Jacobs surveys the knitters' histories, and the novel's pace crawls as the novel lurches between past and present, the latter largely occupied by munching on baked goods, sipping coffee and watching the knitters size each other up. Club members' troubles don't intersect so much as build on common themes of domestic woes and betrayal. It takes a while, but when Jacobs, who worked at Redbook and Working Woman, hits her storytelling stride, poignant twists propel the plot and help the pacing find a pleasant rhythm. (Reviewed on: 10/16/2006) (Publishers Weekly Review 2006 October #3 Page 30)
 

Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West  (5)

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ Almost she does persuade me to deeper appreciation of my Quaker heritage, as -- in a story that has much of the quality that made Mama's Bank Account irresistible -- Jessamyn West does some delicious quiet tilting at windmills in a refreshingly human series of episodes rooted in the traditions of her own Indiana Quaker background. It is the story of Jess and Eliza Birdwell, he a nurseryman in Indiana, about the time of the Civil War and after; she a "preacher" in Meeting. Strict to outward conformity, Eliza had her human side, and found ways to compromise, as when she allowed Jess to have an organ -- in the attic; when she went to Court to reclaim her "pacing goose"; when she was secretly delighted at the unsuspected speed of the deceptive little mare. There's wit and humor, pathos and a certain spiritual value, sentiment at its best.

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel  (8)

Publishers Weekly Review:  It's a cliché to say that a good memoir reads like a well-crafted work of fiction, but Kimmel's smooth, impeccably humorous prose evokes her childhood as vividly as any novel. Born in 1965, she grew up in Mooreland, Ind., a place that by some "mysterious and powerful mathematical principle" perpetually retains a population of 300, a place where there's no point learning the street names because it's just as easy to say, "We live at the four-way stop sign." Hers is less a formal autobiography than a collection of vignettes comprising the things a small child would remember: sick birds, a new bike, reading comics at the drugstore, the mean old lady down the street. The truths of childhood are rendered in lush yet simple prose; here's Zippy describing a friend who hates wearing girls' clothes: "Julie in a dress was like the rest of us in quicksand." Over and over, we encounter pearls of third-grade wisdom revealed in a child's assured voice: "There are a finite number of times one can safely climb the same tree in a single day"; or, regarding Jesus, "Everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn't be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn't afraid of blind people." (Mar.) Forecast: Dreamy and comforting, spiced with flashes of wit, this book seems a natural for readers of the Oprah school of women's fiction (e.g., Elizabeth Berg, Janet Fitch). The startling baby photograph on the cover should catch browsers' eyes. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (13)

BookPage Review: Starting in 1946, the letters that make up this cleverly constructed novel provide a vivid snapshot of England after World War II. The book's first entry comes from a young author named Juliet Ashton, who sends a note to her publisher saying that she's tired of writing about the war. But when Dawsey Adams, a farmer in Guernsey, comes across Juliet's name in a book and urges his neighbors to contact her with stories about the German occupation, her attachment to the conflict seems destined to continue. The letters written to Juliet from the warm-hearted, eccentric inhabitants of Guernsey recount various wartime events—some horrific, some humorous—that occurred while the Nazis occupied the English Channel island, including the birth of the unlikely book club known as the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Tackling works by William Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen, the society provided fellowship in a time of incredible adversity. Each letter in the novel is the work of an individual, fully formed character, and each contributes a layer of complexity to the narrative. Mary Ann Shaffer was a bookseller, editor and librarian who died in 2008; her niece, children's book author Annie Barrows, helped her finish the book. Together, they crafted a novel that pays tribute to the healing power of art and the endurance of the human heart. Already a book club favorite in hardcover, it's sure to win many more readers with this new paperback edition. A reading group guide is included in the book. (BookPage Reviews 2009 May)

Hannah's Daughter by Marianne Fredriksson (3)

Despite occasionally overbearing feminism, this Scandinavian story of a century of sweeping changes believably characterizes three generations of a family while keeping the drama intimate enough for readers to empathize. Hanna is born in the late 1800s, when women were still ostracized for bearing children conceived during rape, as she does at age 13--a son, Ragnar. A much older, philosophical miller marries her, and they beget Johanna. Ragnar's business thrives, and the family moves to the city, where Johanna works in a shop. At a socialist rally, she meets Arne, a shipbuilder whom she marries for love not sustenance. Their daughter, Anna, is the one weaving these stories from her ancestors' journals, diaries, and letters, trying to understand her dying mother. Anna is an academic who married a jet-setting journalist after undergoing an abortion. Those decisions dramatize the progression of women's increasingly available opportunities, but the human experience of the grandmother's and mother's epic first-person stories is more interesting than any lessons they imply. --Kevin Grandfield From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. 1994
 

The Help by Katheryn Stockett (4)

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women - mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends - view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't. Blackwell Noth America 2010 

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Booklist Review: If one were to judge from Krauss’ characters, the history of love is a story of loss and survival. Budding writer Leo Gursky flees the Nazis unharmed but arrives in New York too late to marry his sweetheart. Brokenhearted, he becomes a locksmith (the source of lovely metaphors) and puts down his pen for 57 years. Just as he starts to write again, teenage Alma loses her father. She copes with her grief by reading up on how to live in the wild but worries about her bookish, increasingly isolated mother and Messiah-obsessed younger brother. Krauss, as so many have before her, including Steve Stern in The Angel of Forgetfulness [BKL F 1 05], constructs an intriguing books-within-a-book narrative. Leo turns out to be secretly connected to a famous writer. Another Holocaust survivor woos his beloved with an unusual manuscript, and Alma turns sleuth in her quest for the real-life inspiration for her namesake, a character in a novel titled The History of Love. Venturing into Paul Auster territory in her graceful inquiry into the interplay between life and literature, Krauss is winsome, funny, and affecting.

Home to Harmony by Phillip Gulley  (6)

Publishers Weekly Review: Occasionally, a simple book feels like home, and its characters become cherished friends. These vignettes will doubtless become favorites, not only for the quarter of a million people who enjoyed Gulley''s Front Porch Tales, but also for new readers who will respond to the Garrison Keillor- style humor and pathos of fictional Harmony, Ind. The town''s characters include the wise Quaker pastor who narrates the book; a childless couple who spend their life savings (and then some) to wrest their niece from the grip of her alcoholic parents; and the narrow-minded church elder who "knew just enough Scripture to be annoying, but not enough to be transformed." This book is pure joy. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans  (5)

Booklist Review: /*Starred Review*/The advance ballyhoo about this first novel, as well as the huge advance paid to its author, screenwriter Nicholas Evans, is more than enough to make the skeptical reader wince. Hold back those winces if you can, because this is a book of rare power and beauty, a story told simply but elegantly. Teenager Grace Maclean loses a leg in a terrible accident while riding her horse, Pilgrim. Grace and Pilgrim are both emotionally scarred as well as physically devastated by the accident. Realizing that the fates of her daughter and the horse are inextricably linked, Grace's mother, high-powered editor and journalist Annie Graves, launches an all-out campaign to find a "horse whisperer," someone who can cure troubled horses with only a calm voice and a soothing touch. She finds her savior in Tom Booker, a man well known in equestrian circles for his almost mystical skills with horses. Annie packs up Grace and Pilgrim, leaves Grace's father with his law practice in New York, and moves to Montana to try to convince the horse whisperer to help them. Most of the novel describes Tom's work to rebuild all the lives that have been shattered by the accident. Inevitably, love blossoms between the gentle horseman and the uprooted sophisticate, a love with both wonderful and tragic consequences. Expect this outstanding novel to be the talk of the season: it has a 600,000-copy first printing, and Robert Redford has already bought the movie rights for a cool $3 million. The numbers are remarkable, to be sure, but the most remarkable thing about this book is that it actually earns the great popularity it seems destined to enjoy. ((Reviewed August 1995)) -- George Needham

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet  by Jamie Ford (10)

BookPage Review: Jamie Ford’s accomplished first novel focuses on Asian Americans in Seattle. Struggling to regain his equilibrium after the death of his wife from cancer, Henry Lee finds a welcome distraction in his own personal history. When he learns that the possessions of some Japanese immigrants who were imprisoned during World War II have been discovered in the cellar of a Seattle hotel, he is prompted to re-evaluate his life. Reflecting upon his childhood, Henry recalls the challenges of his upbringing in Seattle during the war. As a student at a reputable, predominantly white private school, he is teased mercilessly. While there, Henry falls in love with Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese-American girl who is also a student. After Keiko and her family are interned in a camp, he is forced to acknowledge the reality of anti-Japanese feeling, a sentiment his own Chinese father displays, much to Henry’s horror. Shifting back and forth between past and present, the novel highlights Henry’s strained relationship with his own son, Marty, a college student. The narrative presents his memories and musings in chapters rich with drama and finely choreographed scenes. Ford writes with assurance about the legacies of history and the difficulties of cultural assimilation. His poignant examination of the father-son relationship adds an extra layer of complexity to this mature debut. A reading group guide is included in the book. (BookPage Reviews 2009 November)

How to Be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward  (5)

Booklist Review: Fifteen years ago, on the day the three Winters sisters packed their most precious belongings in their mother’s Oldsmobile and planned to run away from home just as soon as school was out, 5-year-old Ellie disappeared. The family never recovered: their abusive father drank himself to death; their unstable mother retreated deeper into her depression; and once-close sisters Caroline and Madeline grew far apart. Now, armed with a grainy People magazine photo of a young woman who might be a 20-year-old version of her beloved youngest sister, Caroline heads out for Montana on a quest to bring her back home. What Caroline, burdened by years of guilt, doubt, and regret, discovers along the way has as much to do with finding herself as it does with tracking down Ellie. Ward’s smart, sharp second novel is a read-in-one-sitting treat, a delightfully satisfying blend of hip humor and poignant longing, and an unsentimental yet inspiring testimony to the power of hope over reason and love over loss.
-- Carol Haggas (BookList, 09-01-2004, p66)

The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein (14)

Publishers Weekly Review: Bernstein writes, "There are few rules or unwritten laws that are not broken when circumstances demand, and few distances that are too great to be traveled," about the figurative divide ("geographically... only a few yards, socially... miles and miles") keeping Jews and Christians apart in the poor Lancashire mill town in England where he was raised. In his affecting debut memoir, the nonagenarian gives voice to a childhood version of himself who witnesses his older sister's love for a Christian boy break down the invisible wall that kept Jewish families from Christians across the street. With little self-conscious authorial intervention, young Harry serves as a wide-eyed guide to a world since dismantled where "snot rags" are handkerchiefs, children enter the workforce at 12 and religion bifurcates everything, including industry. True to a child's experience, it is the details of domestic life that illuminate the tale the tenderness of a mother's sacrifice, the nearly Dickensian angst of a drunken father, the violence of schoolyard anti-Semitism, the "strange odors" of "forbidden foods" in neighbor's homes. Yet when major world events touch the poverty-stricken block (the Russian revolution claims the rabbi's son, neighbors leave for WWI), the individual coming-of-age is intensified without being trivialized, and the conversational account takes on the heft of a historical novel with stirring success. (Publishers Weekly Review 2006 December #2 Page 54)

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (5)

Publishers Weekly Review: Fowler's fifth novel (after PEN/Faulkner award finalist Sister Noon) features her trademark sly wit, quirky characters and digressive storytelling, but with a difference: this one is book club-ready, complete with mock-serious "questions for discussion" posed by the characters themselves. The plot here is deceptively slim: five women and one enigmatic man meet on a monthly basis to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, one at a time. As they debate Marianne's marriage to Brandon and whether or not Charlotte Lucas is gay, they reveal nothing so much as their own "private Austen(s)": to Jocelyn, an unmarried "control freak," the author is the consummate matchmaker; to solitary Prudie, she's the supreme ironist; to the lesbian Allegra, she's the disingenuous defender of the social caste system, etc. The book club's conversation is variously astute, petty, obvious and funny, but no one stays with it: the characters nibble high-calorie desserts, sip margaritas and drift off into personal reveries. Like Austen, Fowler is a subversive wit and a wise observer of human interaction of all stripes ("All parents wanted an impossible life for their children-happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind"). She's also an enthusiastic consumer of popular culture, offsetting the heady literary chat with references to Sex and the City, Linux and "a rug that many of us recognized from the Sundance catalog." Though the 21 pages of quotations from Austen's family, friends and critics seems excessive, the novelty of Fowler's package should attract significant numbers of book club members, not to mention the legions of Janeites craving good company and happy endings. Agent, Wendy Weil. BOMC, Doubleday Book Club, Literary Guild featured alternate. (Publishers Weekly Review 2004 March #4)
 

The Jump-Off Creek by Molly Gloss  (10)

Library Journal Review: Not a standard ``Western,'' but a novel of the West notable for its accurate portrayal of life on a homestead and for the quality of writing that will make readers linger. At the height of the Depression of 1895 Lydia Sanderson, freed by the death of her husband, travels to Oregon where she homesteads on a mountain, living in a wretched hovel on land not fit to grow even a vegetable garden. Her companions are two mules, two goats, and hard work. Lydia's neighbors are few and far but bound together by a common struggle to survive. Their life is one of terse converse, kindness, and quick response to one another's needs. A rare treat of a first novel.-- Sister Avila, Acad. of Holy Angels, Minneapolis

The Ladies Auxiliary by Tova Mirvis  (5)

Library Journal Review: Life in Memphis's Orthodox community is as it always has been, until a free-spirited widow arrives with her young daughter. Now alone in the world, Batsheva is looking for a close-knit community and has heard that Memphis, the hometown of her late husband, is pleasant. Uninhibited and artistic, she raises suspicion immediately among the Orthodox women in the community. A convert to Judaism, Batsheva observes the holidays and rituals with more joy and abandon than some believe appropriate. When she becomes the art teacher at the Jewish school, the teenage girls finally have a sympathetic ear. Unfortunately, their rebelliousness and the decision of the rabbi's son to leave yeshiva have to be blamed on someone. As the outsider, Batsheva becomes a scapegoat for all the ills in the community. A well-wrought tale of fear and intolerance that is universal.--Kimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel  (10)

Booklist Review: Pi Patel, a young man from India, tells how he was shipwrecked and stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. This outlandish story is only the core of a deceptively complex three-part novel about, ultimately, memory as a narrative and about how we choose truths. Unlike other authors who use shifting chronologies and unreliable narrators, Martel frequently achieves something deeper than technical gimmickry. Pi, regardless of what actually happened to him, earns our trust as a narrator and a character, and makes good, in his way, on the promise in the last sentence of part one--that is, just before the tiger saga--“This story has a happy ending.” If Martel’s strange, touching novel seems a fable without quite a moral, or a parable without quite a metaphor, it still succeeds on its own terms. Oh, the promise in the entertaining “Author’s Note” that this is a “story that will make you believe in God” is perhaps excessive, but there is much in it that verifies Martel’s talent and humanist vision.
(Reviewed May 15, 2002) -- Will Hickman

Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish  (9)

BookPage Review:  This beautifully written memoir takes place on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression. Kalish—now a retired English teacher—offers a plainspoken yet poetic account of her upbringing in a large family during this dark chapter in America's past. The family numbers seven, including grandparents and siblings, and in spite of numerous hardships, the clan manages to find moments of joy and occasions for celebration. The book derives its plot, in part, from the routine of farm life. There are animals to tend to, meals to be cooked, clothes to be washed. The domestic scenes are delightfully drawn: Gossip and stories are exchanged in the kitchen, and in the unheated bedrooms the children sleep under piles of quilts. Family expenditures are limited to necessities like kerosene, flour, coffee, sugar and salt. Kalish writes about everyday chores and family life with relish, adding enough humor and vivid imagery to make the reader savor every anecdote. Recreating the Midwest of her past, she writes with flair and an eye for the telling detail. Her recollections of neighbors and kinfolks, a life lived off the land, and a slower approach to daily existence feel at once old-fashioned and fresh. This is a spirited narrative about survival that fans of memoir will welcome.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding  (4)

Kirkus review: /* Starred Review */ A fantasy is a singular- and singularly believable spellbinder, and within the framework of its premises- achieves a tremendous impetus and impact. During an atomic war, a group of boys aged from about six to twelve crash-land on an uninhabited tropical island. There Ralph, a responsible boy, is chosen chief- and a certain routine established; a fire is made and to be kept going as a signal, huts are to be built, and certain of the boys are to hunt wild pig But as the days pass in increasing discomfort, there is increasing dissension between them; the "littluns" are frightened by the untold terrors of the dark, and the fear of breasties and bogeys spreads; the duties are neglected; and the older boys, save Simon and Piggy and Samneric (twins) desert Ralph, appoint a new leader, and run amok hunting savagely. In their primitive regression, they feel they must propitiate the beast and a ritualistic dance precedes the murder of Simon; Piggy, his specs taken, falls to his death; and finally Ralph is left to face the pack when a cruiser lands- to rescue them all.... A first novel, originally conceived and convincingly sustained, this should find an audience as vulnerable as its young derelicts. The publishers parallel this- not without justification- with Richard Hughes' High Wind In Jamaica. (Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1955)
 

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear  (5)

Library Journal Review: /* Starred Review */ From its dedication to the author's paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, who were both injured during World War I, to its powerful conclusion, this is a poignant and compelling story that explores war's lingering and insidious impact on its survivors. The book opens in spring 1929 as Maisie Dobbs opens an office dedicated to "discreet investigations" and traverses back and forth between her present case and the long shadows cast by World War I. What starts out as a plea by an anxious husband for Maisie to discover why his wife regularly lies about her whereabouts turns into a journey of discovery whose answers and indeed whose very questions lie in a quiet rural cemetery where many war dead are buried. In Maisie, Winspear has created a complex new investigator who, tutored by the wise Maurice Blanche, recognizes that in uncovering the actions of the body, she is accepting responsibility for the soul. British-born but now living in America, first novelist Winspear writes in simple, effective prose, capturing the post–World War I era effectively and handling human drama with compassionate sensitivity while skillfully avoiding cloying sentimentality. At the end, the reader is left yearning for more discreet investigations into the nature of what it means to feel truth. Highly recommended.—Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. (Reviewed March 15, 2003) (Library Journal, vol 128, issue 5, p118)

The Many Lives of Secret Sorrows Josephine B. by Saundra Gulland (2)

Library Journal Review: When Marie-Josephe-Rose Tascher was a girl in Martinique, a voodoo priestess predicted that she would be unhappily married, would then be widowed, and would become queen. With the profits from her father's sugar plantation spent largely on his gambling and drinking, the final prediction seems unlikely. An arranged marriage takes Rose to France, where she finds herself woefully uneducated and unprepared for high society. But in 1779 no one is prepared for the bloody upheaval that will convulse France for years. Rose endures her husband's infidelity and abandonment before his execution leaves her a widow. Combining charm, intelligence, empathy, and luck, she copes with poverty and prison, surviving the revolution with her children. Gulland skillfully re-creates the era's turbulence without confusing readers. A chronology and genealogy provide assistance, and Rose is a character worth caring about and remembering. Her marriage to Napoleon ends this first volume in a projected trilogy, leaving readers eager to know the rest of her story. (Library Journal Reviews 1999 July #1)
 

March by Geraldine Brooks  (8)

Publishers Weekly Review: /* Starred Review */ Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March's earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family's genteel poverty. When a Confederate attack on the contraband farm lands March in a Washington hospital, sick with fever and guilt, the first-person narrative switches to Marmee, who describes a different version of the years past and an agonized reaction to the truth she uncovers about her husband's life. Brooks, who based the character of March on Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is always accessible. Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering. Agent, Kris Dahl. 10-city author tour. (Mar. 7) --Staff (Reviewed December 20, 2004) (Publishers Weekly, vol 251, issue 51, p34)

Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (12)

Publishers Weekly Review: Edwards's assured but schematic debut novel (after her collection, The Secrets of a Fire King) hinges on the birth of fraternal twins, a healthy boy and a girl with Down syndrome, resulting in the father's disavowal of his newborn daughter. A snowstorm immobilizes Lexington, Ky., in 1964, and when young Norah Henry goes into labor, her husband, orthopedic surgeon Dr. David Henry, must deliver their babies himself, aided only by a nurse. Seeing his daughter's handicap, he instructs the nurse, Caroline Gill, to take her to a home and later tells Norah, who was drugged during labor, that their son Paul's twin died at birth. Instead of institutionalizing Phoebe, Caroline absconds with her to Pittsburgh. David's deception becomes the defining moment of the main characters' lives, and Phoebe's absence corrodes her birth family's core over the course of the next 25 years. David's undetected lie warps his marriage; he grapples with guilt; Norah mourns her lost child; and Paul not only deals with his parents' icy relationship but with his own yearnings for his sister as well. Though the impact of Phoebe's loss makes sense, Edwards's redundant handling of the trope robs it of credibility. This neatly structured story is a little too moist with compassion. Agent, Geri Thoma. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2005 May #3)
 

Miss Julia Hits the Road by Ann B. Ross  (6)

Publishers Weekly Review: Fourth in a popular series about a Southern widow with perfect manners and a taste for trouble, Ross's latest will bring a chorus of "Thank you, Lord"s from faithful readers. Newcomers may need a moment to figure out who's who in the cast—for instance, that Little Lloyd is the son of Julia's late husband, Wesley Lloyd Springer, and his "paramour," Hazel Marie, both of whom Julia has embraced as family. Ross's heroine may set a premium on appearances, like any traditional Southern lady, but what she really loves is problem solving and gracefully doing good. This time out, she finds herself championing her longtime housekeeper, Lillian. A greedy landowner is about to raze Lillian's home—in fact, the entire Willow Lane neighborhood, which houses low-income blacks. In order to save them, Julia gambles her own home and flouts her sense of propriety by donning Hazel Marie's leather pants and participating in a high-stakes motorcycle marathon and poker game, along with the Presbyterian minister's previously stodgy wife. And if that sounds improbable, factor in a spring whose water has an awesome effect on garden shrubbery and men's anatomy, furnishing oodles of delicious scandal. Series fans take note: Binkie and Coleman have a baby, and things look mighty promising between Julia and lawyer Sam Murdoch at the end of the book. (Mar. 31)
— Staff (Reviewed March 31, 2003) (Publishers Weekly, vol 250, issue 13, p45)

Moon Women by Pamela Duncan  (7)

Publishers Weekly Review: In the tradition of Fannie Flagg and Rebecca Wells comes a Southern-fried debut from novelist Duncan. Taking place in rural North Carolina (the author's home ground) in the early 1990s, the story spans nine months just long enough for unwed Ashley to carry and deliver her "young'un." After a stint in rehab, the troubled 19-year-old goes home to her mother, 51-year-old Ruth Ann, whose carefully organized life is about to be turned upside down. Between her ne'er-do-well, philandering ex-husband, A.J., who still comes around, her octogenarian mother, Marvelle, for whom she must care, and Ashley's tense return, Ruth Ann has much to worry about. She wants her family to be happy, but at the same time wishes they would give her some space ("Pure and simple, every damn body got on her damn nerves"). This novel is chock-full of stereotypical Southern speech, which some may find quaint or humorous (brung instead of brought, taters instead of potatoes, foller instead of follow), but more refined grammarians may simply be annoyed or even cringe at nondialogue colloquialisms ("It amazed Ashley that him and Ruth Ann got along as well as they did"). Duncan succeeds in defining her characters' differences, but in her effort to make them all "strong," they sometimes just come across as grumpy complainers. The most sympathetic and well-rounded character is Cassandra, Ruth Ann's obese young sister, who dreams of escaping her family, her body and her life as it is. The plot becomes a bit unfocused at times, but Duncan shows promise as a from-the-heart quirky storyteller. (Aug. 7) Forecast: A major advertising campaign and author publicity will help give this first novel a foothold, as will an appealing jacket. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2001 July #2)
 

The Movers by Nancy N. Baxter  (9)

Back of the Book:  The year is 1811…the speaker, Tecumseh, the Shawnee war chief: “Brothers! Governor Harrison is preparing to survey the lands where our fathers hunted to give them to the white settlers.  When he first took these lands in the Ft. Wayne Treaty, we challenged him at Vincennes, telling him to step no farther along this path.  He sent us messages with fair words but did nothing, no more than the child whose grandmother calls him when he does not wish to come in from play.  The hunting land of this great land of lakes has now been swallowed into the craw of the white man and slowly he digests it, leaving us nothing.  The sun will rise one day soon and there will be nothing for us.”  Fox looked at Sac, Piankashaw at Miami, and heads nodded.  Tecumseh continued.  “I see a great battle, fought by all the northern tribes.  And, from the South, the Creeks, the Choctaws, Chicasaws.  All the sons of the Great Father will rise and throw the white man’s yoke off.  Our guns, our drums, our war cries will sound as one voice which must be listened to.  No farther! Keep your promises!  Leave the rest of these lands to us.  The Indian people are strong and deadly and will not be flung aside like children’s toy babies.  It is a lesson they will learn with the blood of their young men.

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane  (4)

Publishers Weekly Review: Lehane ventures beyond his acclaimed private eye series with this emotionally wrenching crime drama about the effects of a savage killing on a tightly knit, blue-collar Boston neighborhood. Written with a sensitivity toward character that exceeds his previous efforts, the story tracks the friendship of three boys from a defining moment in their childhood, when 11-year-old Dave Boyle was abducted off the streets of East Buckingham and sexually molested by two men before managing to escape. Boyle, Jimmy Marcus and Sean Devine grow apart as the years pass, but a quarter century later they are thrust back together when Marcus's 19-year-old daughter, Katie, is murdered in a local park. Marcus, a reformed master thief turned family man, goes through a period of intense grief, followed by a thirst for revenge. Devine, now a homicide cop assigned to the murder, tries to control his old friend while working to make sense of the baffling case, which involves turning over the past as much as it does sifting through new evidence. In time, Devine begins to suspect Boyle, a man of many ghoulish secrets who has led a double life ever since the molestation. Lehane's story slams the reader with uncomfortable images, a beautifully rendered setting and an unnerving finale. With his sixth novel, the author has replaced the graphic descriptions of crime and violence found in his Patrick Kenzie-Angela Gennaro series (Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone) with a more pensive, inward view of life's dark corners. It's a change that garners his themes regret over life choices, the psychological imprints of childhood, personal and professional compromise a richer context and his characters a deeper exploration. Agent, Ann Rittenberg. (Feb. 6) Forecast: Given the excitement in-house at Morrow that this is Lehane's breakthrough book, and the promotion they're placing behind it, it stands an excellent chance of leaping straight onto the bestseller lists. A one-day laydown, $250,000 ad-promo and an 11-city author tour, plus a blurb from Michael Connelly designating Lehane as "the heir apparent," should provide the groundwork for explosive sales. Rights have been sold in the U.K., France and Germany, and there will be a large-print edition as well as an audio from Harper Audio. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2000 December #1)

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (9)

Publishers Weekly Review: Thirteen linked tales from Strout (Abide with Me , etc.) present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection. The opening "Pharmacy" focuses on terse, dry junior high-school teacher Olive Kitteridge and her gregarious pharmacist husband, Henry, both of whom have survived the loss of a psychologically damaged parent, and both of whom suffer painful attractions to co-workers. Their son, Christopher, takes center stage in "A Little Burst," which describes his wedding in humorous, somewhat disturbing detail, and in "Security," where Olive, in her 70s, visits Christopher and his family in New York. Strout's fiction showcases her ability to reveal through familiar details—the mother-of-the-groom's wedding dress, a grandmother's disapproving observations of how her grandchildren are raised—the seeds of tragedy. Themes of suicide, depression, bad communication, aging and love, run through these stories, none more vivid or touching than "Incoming Tide," where Olive chats with former student Kevin Coulson as they watch waitress Patty Howe by the seashore, all three struggling with their own misgivings about life. Like this story, the collection is easy to read and impossible to forget. Its literary craft and emotional power will surprise readers unfamiliar with Strout. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 December #2 Page 31)
 

On Agate Hill by Lee Smith  (13)

Booklist Review: This ever-popular novelist, author of, most recently, The Last Girls(2002), now turns to an increasingly popular genre, historical fiction, and does so with a bang. The time period that Lee knowledgably sets this involving novel within encompasses the years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century; her setting is North Carolina. The novel's conceit is not particularly original--it is purportedly composed of real documents, such as diary entries, letters, and court documents--but Lee nevertheless fashions, in gradual steps through time and from the telling perspectives of different individuals, the riveting character Molly Petree. She is an orphan at war's end, dependent on being taken in by family, but she isn't the type to stay at the mercy of anyone. Her pluck, fortitude, resilience, and wisdom prompt her not only to take things as they come during this disorderly time in the South but also to dictate her own fortune and make a life in which she can find some peace. This novel of treachery and resolution provides an intimate picture of the Reconstruction era, observed through the lens not of politicians and generals but of the common folk upon whose shoulders the actual reconstruction of a ravaged land rested. -- Brad Hooper (Reviewed 07-01-2006) (Booklist, vol 102, number 21, p9)
One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus  (5)
Booklist Review: An American western with a most unusual twist, this is an imaginative fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program intended to instruct "savages" in the ways of civilization and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of these unions. May's personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man's civilization. Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the perceptions and emotions of women. He writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today. This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history. ((Reviewed March 1, 1998)) -- Grace Fill

One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus  (6)

Kirkus review: Long, brisk, charming first novel about an 1875 treaty between Ulysses S. Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, by the sports reporter and author of the memoir A Hunter's Road (1992). Little Wolf comes to Washington and suggests to President Grant that peace between the Whites and Cheyenne could be established if the Cheyenne were given white women as wives, and that the tribe would agree to raise the children from such unions. The thought of miscegenation naturally enough astounds Grant, but he sees a certain wisdom in trading 1,000 white women for 1,000 horses, and he secretly approves the Brides For Indians treaty. He recruits women from jails, penitentiaries, debtors' prisons, and mental institutions--offering full pardons or unconditional release. May Dodd, born to wealth in Chicago in 1850, had left home in her teens and become the mistress of her father's grain-elevator foreman. Her outraged father had her kidnaped, imprisoning her in a monstrous lunatic asylum. When Grant's offer arrives, she leaps at it and soon finds herself traveling west with hundreds of white and black would-be brides. All are indentured to the Cheyenne for two years, must produce children, and then will have the option of leaving. May, who keeps the journal we read, marries Little Wolf and lives in a crowded tipi with his two other wives, their children, and an old crone who enforces the rules. Reading about life among the Cheyenne is spellbinding, especially when the women show up the braves at arm-wrestling, foot-racing, bow-shooting, and gambling. Liquor raises its evil head, as it will, and reduces the braves to savagery. But the women recover, go out on the winter kill with their husbands, and accompany them to a trading post where they drive hard bargains and stop the usual cheating of the braves. Eventually, when the cavalry attacks the Cheyenne, mistakenly thinking they're Crazy Horse's Sioux, May is killed. An impressive historical, terse, convincing, and affecting. (Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1998)
 

The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square by Rosina Lippi (14)

Publishers Weekly Review: Southern hospitality and sweetly loose-lipped neighbors ooze from the pages of the sparkling latest from Lippi (Homestead ). John Dodge is a traveling man, rescuing small businesses around the country to flip for a profit. When he finds himself in Lamb's Corner, S.C., to take over a stationery store, he is greeted by some kooky Swedes building an automotive plant and an observant young girl who is determined to uncover his past, among others. Dodge, as he calls himself, befriends Julia Darrow, the owner of a fine linens store who is always in her pajamas. Julia is secretive and mysterious, but Dodge cannot ignore his attraction to her. He doesn't plan to stay in Lamb's Corner very long, and it becomes apparent that Julia can't leave. Lippi's characters are heartfelt and pricelessly named (one 10-year-old boy is called "Bean Hurt"). While the novel moves slowly, it's never shy of drama: Lippi makes a great story out of how a hardcore wanderer and an agoraphobic come together. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 November #1 Page 41)

Panther in the Sky by James Alexander Thom  (4)

Publishers Weekly Review: What particularly distinguishes this splendidly vigorous and imaginative recreation of the life of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh (1768-1813) is its bid to capture the spirit of Midwestern Indian culture from within. A bestselling trade paperback author ( Follow the River ; From Sea to Shining Sea ), Thom has steeped himself in Shawnee customs, rituals, mystic rites, techniques of hunting and fighting--and Tecumseh embodies this tradition at its best. Inspired by the example of his father and older brother, both skilled warriors, and a sagacious sister, Tecumseh is fearless and cunning in battle, yet magnanimous and honorable. He alone has the strength of personality to unite the Indian nations in a sporadically successful but ultimately doomed resistance to the ever-encroaching white man. Despite his hatred of whites, Tecumseh can admire such rivals as Daniel Boone and General (later President) Harrison, and even has some white friends, who include a missionary and a British general. It's a story of the tragic clash of cultures, made more ironic by the follies of Tecumseh's younger brother, a fake shaman, and punctuated by exciting battles in which courage and cruelty have equal roles. Above all, it is the tale of a charismatic leader's efforts to defend his people in the face of overwhelming odds. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 1989 February #2)
 

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger  (11)

Booklist Review: What readers will appreciate first in Enger’s marvelous novel is the language. His limpid sentences are composed with the clarity and richness for which poets strive. It takes longer to get caught up in the story, but gradually, as the complex narrative unwinds, readers will find themselves immersed in an exceptionally heartfelt and moving tale about the resilience of family relationships, told in retrospect through the prism of memory. “We all hold history differently inside us,” says narrator Reuben, who was an adolescent in Minnesota in the 1960s, when his brother, Davy, shot and killed two young men who were harassing the family. Rueben’s father--in Rueben’s estimation fully capable of performing miracles even though the outside world believed him to be lost in the clouds--packs Reuben and his sister up and follows the trail Davy has left in his flight from the law. Their journey comprises the action in the novel, but this is not really a book about adventures on the road. Rather, it is a story of relationships in which the exploration of character takes precedence over incident. Enger’s profound understanding of human nature stands behind his compelling prose.  (Reviewed May 15, 2001) -- Brad Hooper

Plainsong by Kent Haruf  (8)

Booklist Review: It's a good thing young Ike and Bobby Guthrie are close, because they're in for a spell of loss and radical change. Victoria Roubideaux, 17, is too, but she has no sibling to stand beside her during bouts of morning sickness, or when her mother throws her out of the house. Haruf, author of The Tie That Binds (1984), alternates between the Guthrie boys' adventures and Vicky's quest to find a safe place for herself and her baby, but the two story lines soon entwine because all lives converge in the small Colorado town of Holt, which he so adroitly portrays. The Guthrie boys are often on their own after their mother leaves, while their nearly overwhelmed father, Tom, a high-school teacher, is distracted by the threats of a violent student. Vicky goes to Maggie Jones, a colleague of Tom's, for help. Unable to provide her with the sanctuary she needs, Maggie delivers Vicky to the elderly McPheron brothers, farmers as tightly connected as Tom's sons. Vicky revolutionizes their staid lives, and they provide her with her first true home, and the resulting familial love seems to set the entire countryside aglow. Haruf's narrative voice is spare and procedural, and his salt-of-the-earth characters are reticent almost to the point of mannerism until it becomes clear that their terseness is the result of profound shyness and an immensity of feeling. Haruf's unforgettable tale is both emotionally complex and elemental, following, as it so gracefully does, the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. ((Reviewed August 1999)) -- Donna Seaman

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver  (6)

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ The first novel in five years from the ever-popular Kingsolver (Pigs in Heaven, 1993, etc.) is a large-scale saga of an American family's enlightening and disillusioning African adventure. It begins with a stunningly written backward look: Orleanna Price's embittered memory of the uncompromising zeal that impelled her husband, Baptist missionary Nathan Price, to take her and their four daughters to the (then) Belgian Congo in 1959, and remain there despite dangerous evidence of the country's instability under Patrice Lumumba's ill-starred independence movement, Belgian and American interference and condescension, and Joseph Mobutu's murderous military dictatorship. The bulk of the story, which is set in the superbly realized native village of Kilanga, is narrated in turn by the four Price girls: Leah, the "smart" twin, whose worshipful respect for her father will undergo a rigorous trial by fire; her "retarded" counterpart Adah, disabled and mute (though in the depths of her mind articulate and playfully intelligent); eldest sister Rachel, a self-important whiner given to hilarious malapropisms ("feminine tuition"; "I prefer to remain anomalous"); and youngest sister Ruth May, whose childish fantasies of union with the surrounding, smothering landscape are cruelly fulfilled. Kingsolver skillfully orchestrates her characters' varied responses to Africa into a consistently absorbing narrative that reaches climax after climax--and that, even after you're sure it must be nearing its end, continues for a wrenching hundred pages or more, spelling out in unforgettable dramatic and lyric terms the fates of the surviving Prices. Little recent fiction has so successfully fused the personal with the political. Better even than Robert Stone in his otherwise brilliant Damascus Gate, Kingsolver convinces us that her characters are, first and foremost, breathing, fallible human beings and only secondarily conduits for her book's vigorously expressed and argued social and political ideas. A triumph.
(Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1998)

Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk  (5)

Booklist Review: Cross combines legend with historical fact in a novel about Joan of Ingelheim, the female pope. Born in 814 to an English missionary father and a Saxon mother, Joan is frustrated by the limitations imposed on her life because she is a girl. Her brother Matthew teaches her to read and write; after his death, Joan has to use wiles and deceit to pursue her love of learning. Later, Joan runs away from home to follow her brother John to the cathedral school in Dorstadt, where she becomes the sole yet tolerated female student. Joan borrows John's clothing and identity and makes her way to the monastery at Fulda, where she becomes known as John Anglicus. At the monastery, Joan becomes a monk and then a priest, and she develops great skill as a healer. She eventually makes her way to Rome, where her gifts as a healer enable her to become the confidante of two popes. In the midst of vicious papal politics, Joan becomes pope herself. A vivid and compelling re-creation of the Dark Ages. ((Reviewed Aug. 1996)) -- Mary Ellen Quinn

The President's House by Margaret Truman (4)

Publishers Weekly Review: Bestselling novelist and first daughter Truman brings readers inside the White House, taking them on a notably reverential tour of its storied history, its well-known architecture and its intricate behind-the-scenes workings. There's a lighthearted jaunt through the White House kitchen, where one strong-willed housemaid kept serving President Truman brussels sprouts, though he hated them. The tour then goes to the White House garden, where Lincoln's gardener offered the first lady tips on hiding her excessive shopping expenses. Much of Truman's narrative is history lite aimed at the Martha Stewart set. Yet it contains just enough interesting anecdotes and stirring pageantry to be of interest to the general reader who's curious about how the White House functions. Truman dishes the gossip, especially about the White House as a social setting. For example, she describes Madame Chiang Kai-shek (wife of the Chinese general) as one of the most insufferable houseguests ever. Truman devotes separate chapters to the household staff, the political staff, the press corps, the security staff, White House weddings, first ladies, first children and even first pets: after the Clinton-era rivalry between Socks the cat and Buddy the dog, Socks ended up with a staffer while Buddy stayed with the Clintons. Despite the breeziness of this account, Truman does a fine job of evoking America's most famous residence as a place with "a unique combination of history, tragedy, comedy, melodrama and the ups and downs of ordinary living." 75 color and b&w photos. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2003 August #1)
 

Princess by Jean Sasson  (5)

Publishers Weekly Review:  In this consistently gripping work, the American-born Sasson ( The Rape of Kuwait ) recounts the life story of a Saudi princess she met while living in Saudi Arabia. The pseudonymous Sultana is a niece of King Faisal. Her father had four wives and a palace for each of them. Her older sister was circumcised before a ``modern'' doctor intervened on behalf of Sultana and her eight other sisters; their father treated all 10 as breeding animals, useless until old enough to be married off and to produce sons for their husbands. One sister, wed to a 62-year-old sexual sadist, attempted suicide. Sultana, the family's rebel, had the luck to marry a man who valued her spirit and intelligence. Yet when, after bearing five children, she could bear no more, he prepared to take another wife; Sultana fought this, as she had fought every other injustice and indignity her culture inflicted on her. In Sasson's telling, Sultana's story is a fast-paced, enthralling drama, rich in detail about the daily lives of the Saudi royals and packed with vivid personal sketches of the ruling clan and sharp opinions about the sexual mores, politics, religion and culture of this still-feudal nation. An appalling glimpse of the conditions endured by even such privileged women as the attractive, well-born Sultana.

Pushing Up Daisies by Rosemary Harris  (2)

Publishers Weekly Review: In Harris's cozy debut, budding landscaper Paula Holliday turns sleuth after the former documentary filmmaker, a New York City transplant to the suburbs, unearths a box containing "a small dead body" in the neglected, overgrown garden of the Springfield, Conn., house of the recently deceased Peacock sisters, Dorothy and Renata. Sgt. Michael O'Malley, who "looked like he knew his way to the donut shop," leads the crime investigation, but Paula does her share of detecting, supported by such friends as Lucy Cavanaugh, a fellow filmmaker, and Wanda "Babe" Chinnery, the proprietor of the local diner where all and sundry come to gossip. Harris does a good job developing her characters, their friendships and romances, though the mystery itself borders on the formulaic. Still, the action builds to a satisfying denouement and gardeners will appreciate the author's insider knowledge. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 December #3 Page 37)

Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble  (5)

Library Journal Review: /* Starred Review */ When five women get together to start a book group, they never envision how their lives will change, become intertwined, and be reflected in their books of choice. Their meetings draw them into a surprising sisterhood as they work through a year of caring for an aging parent, unexpectedly becoming a grandmother, marital infidelity, a marriage gone stale, and infertility. Each chapter opens with the group's reading pick and uses it to frame the chapter, mirroring the plot and character development along a particular theme. Fast paced and funny, this is women's fiction worth staying up past your bedtime for. Noble's portrayal of each character remains steady throughout, and readers will readily relate to these women. Highly recommended for all public libraries.???Amy Brozio-Andrews, Albany P.L., NY --Amy Brozio-Andrews (Reviewed January 15, 2005) (Library Journal, vol 130, issue 1, p99)

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier  (5)

Kirkus review: /* Starred Review */ A brilliant piece of writing, with the atmosphere and suspense and pace that made Jamaica Inn an absorbing and thrilling story -- and it has besides a depth of characterization and soundness of psychological conflict that makes it a finer and more penetrating book. The story is told through the eyes of the unsophisticated and somewhat terrified young second wife of Maxim de Winter, owner of Manderley, a Cornish estate that had won renown under the executive management and fascination of the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca. Bit by bit, the character of Rebecca is built up in the mind of her successor, and the sinister figure of the housekeeper who had adored her, strengthens the conviction that her ghost haunts the place. Then comes disaster, impending tragedy, and in the face of what seems the end of all things, a new Rebecca emerges -- and a new marriage is brought to life. A haunting sense of impending tragedy keeps one breathless to the end. It is fascinating reading. Should be easy to sell -- easy to rent. (Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1938)

Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg  (11)

Booklist Review: Oswald Campbell doesn’t have much to live for, except to cash his paltry pension check, drop in on the occasional AA meeting, and visit the VA hospital. Dreading another winter in Chicago, he takes in stride the news that his emphysema will probably take his life before Christmas. Having no family except an ex-wife, who has since moved on, Oswald follows his doctor’s advice and spends his final months in a more comfortable climate. By chance, he ends up in Lost River, Alabama, a sleepy town with so many single, older women that Frances Cleverdon, a widow, hopes that Oswald will turn out to be someone’s knight in shining armor. Not quite the Romeo they had hoped for, Oswald nonetheless is taken under folks’ wings. Without noticing how it happens, Oswald comes to love Lost River, visiting the town store and the feisty redbird that lives there, waiting out at the dock for the river-faring postman to bring the mail, or accepting myriad dinner invitations from the town’s women. Flagg based Lost River on her own hometown, and though such places may actually exist, there nevertheless is an allegorical feel to this little tale of hope, friendship, and common decency. Intended as a Christmas story, it would be readable year-round.
-- Mary Frances Wilkens (BookList, 10-01-2004, p282)

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant  (8)

Publishers Weekly Review: A minor character from the book of Genesis tells her life story in this vivid evocation of the world of Old Testament women. The only surviving daughter of Jacob and Leah, Dinah occupies a far different world from the flocks and business deals of her brothers. She learns from her Aunt Rachel the mysteries of midwifery and from her other aunts the art of homemaking. Most important, Dinah learns and preserves the stories and traditions of her family, which she shares with the reader in touchingly intimate detail. Familiar passages from the Bible come alive as Dinah fills in what the Bible leaves out concerning Jacob's courtship of Rachel and Leah, her own ill-fated sojourn in the city of Sechem and her half-brother Joseph's rise to fame and fortune in Egypt. After several nonfiction works on Judaism (Living a Jewish Life, etc.), Diamant's fiction debut links the passions of the early Israelites to the ongoing traditions of modern Jews, while the red tent of her title (where women retreat for menstruation, childbirth and illness) becomes a resonant symbol of womanly strength, love and wisdom. Despite a few unprofitable digressions, Diamant succeeds admirably in depicting the lives of women in the age that engendered our civilization and our most enduring values. (Oct.)

Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwart  (10)

Publishers Weekly Review:  Novelist Schwartz (Disturbances in the Field) learned to read at the age of three, encouraged by parents whom she describes as "people of the book." As a seven-year-old, she was reading every book in her Brooklyn home and remembers being captivated by classics from the Little Leather Library such as "The Little Mermaid," from Andersen's fairy tales; Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country; and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In this thought-provoking essay, Schwartz links her sense of self to what she has read over a lifetime. Although she acknowledges that literature has not transformed her life or taught her how to live, reading, to Schwartz, is a pure activity that has made her receptive to the ideas of authors who have enlarged her vision of the world. So intimate is the connection between Schwartz and books that have made an impact upon her emotionally that she cannot bear to see the film version, for example, of A Little Princess, because she does not want to see the author's words transformed visually. Author tour. (May) Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay (8)

Publishers Weekly Review: De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vlodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tzac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vl' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 May #4 Page 38)
 

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd  (5)

Booklist Review: Kidd’s warm debut is set in the sixties, just after the civil rights bill has been passed. Fourteen-year-old Lily Owens is haunted by the accidental death of her mother 10 years earlier, which left her in the care of her brutal, angry father but also Rosaleen, a strong, proud black woman. After Rosaleen is thrown into jail for standing up to a trio of racists, Lily helps her escape from the hospital where she is being kept, and the two flee to Tiburon, a town Lily believes her mother had a connection to. A clue among her mother’s possessions leads Lily to the Boatwright sisters, three black women who keep bees. They give Lily and Rosaleen the haven they need, but Lily remains haunted by her mother’s death and her own involvement in it. Although she fears her father is looking for her, Lily manages to find solace among the strong women who surround her and, eventually, the truth about her mother that she has been seeking. An uplifting story.
(Reviewed December 1, 2001) -- Kristine Huntley

The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller (15)

Publishers Weekly Review: Bestselling author Miller (The Good Mother ; When I Was Gone ) returns with a rich, emotionally urgent novel of two women at opposite stages of life who face parallel dilemmas. Meri, the young, sexy wife of a charismatic professor, occupies one wing of a New England house with her husband. An unexpected pregnancy forces her to reassess her marriage and her childhood of neglect. Delia, her elegant neighbor in the opposite wing, is the long-suffering wife of a notoriously philandering retired senator. The couple have stayed together for his career and still share an occasional, deeply intense tryst. The women's routines continue on either side of the wall that divides their homes, and the two begin to flit back and forth across the porch and into each others physical and psychological spaces. A steady tension builds to a bruising denouement. The clash, predicated on Delia's husband's compulsive behavior and on Meri's lack of boundaries, feels too preordained. But Miller's incisive portrait of the complex inner lives of her characters and her sharp manner of taking them through conflicts make for an intense read. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 November #1 Page 43)

Shadow Baby by Alison McGee (5)

Publishers Weekly Review: Loss, guilt and regret are conquered and transformed in McGhee's graceful second novel (after Rainlight), a poignant tale of family history regained. Events of her past year are narrated by 12 1/2-year-old Clara winter, who spells her surname with a lowercase "w" as "a rejection of winter, an acknowledgment of what winter really is and how it can kill." Though Clara's mother, Tamar, never speaks about the past, refusing even to name the father and grandfather Clara has never met, Clara knows she was born in a blizzard that probably killed her twin sister. Her grandfather, driving her mother to the hospital from their remote North Sterns home in upstate New York, took the wrong road and ran his truck into a ditch. Stranded, Tamar delivered her own babies, and only Clara survived. Obsessed by her mysterious past, Clara tries to create her own world, reading avidly, writing brilliant school reports on imaginary works, creating story lives for real people. When she meets a solitary old man who hangs his beautiful, hand-crafted lanterns in the dark Adirondack woods, she feels she has found a "compadre." Immigrant metalworker Georg Kominsky also knows the power of winter; as a youth, the lantern he left with his younger brother failed to guide the boy through a deadly snowstorm. Clara becomes Georg's apprentice in "the art of possibility," scavenging with him discarded tin cans he transforms into "objects of light." Gradually, gently, Georg points Clara toward the answers she craves, and teaches her to see beauty in the overlooked and forgotten, even in past tragedy. With a mix of deadpan humor and pathos, McGhee perfectly captures the voice of a sensitive, wise child on the cusp of adulthood, at once knowing and naive. Agent, Doug Stewart. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2000 February #2)

Shelter Me by Juliette Fay (2)

Publishers Weekly Review: After Janie LaMarche's husband, Robby, dies in a motorcycle accident, the 38-year-old Pelham, Mass., widow embarks on a year of transformations in Fay's wise and inspirational debut. Going through the bewildering and painful cycle of grief and anger while trying to hold it together for her children—preschooler Dylan and toddler Carly—is no walk in the park. Enter Tug Malinowski, an attractive contractor Robby had hired to build a screened-in porch to surprise Janie. Tug is divorced, childless and attracted to Janie while she's tempted by Fr. Jake Sweeney, who has "a secret life of misery" and fears casting aside his vow of celibacy. Fay's mingling of Janie's pithy journal excerpts with crisp traditional plotting adds a nice depth to Janie's journey to emotional healing. The concerns of single motherhood after sudden tragedy come vividly to life, and as Janie learns to appreciate everyday miracles, readers will be charmed. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2008 October #1 Page 34)
 

Skywriting by Jane Pauley  (7)

Annotation:  The author relates her childhood in Indiana, her early career as a broadcast journalist, her twenty-four years at NBC with "Today" and "Dateline NBC," and her attempts to both rediscover and redefine herself at mid-life.

Starting Over by Sonja Brown  (7)

From Book Jacket:  Antonio was born into poverty-stricken, communist Yugoslavia to an alcoholic father and distant mother.  Antonio practically raised himself and learned early that he had no future in his own country.  Antonio’s dream is to immigrate to America and free himself of the shackles of communist rule and poverty.  Risking his own life to flee across the guarded border into Italy, he begins his new life as a refugee.  Antonio works his way to America with his family in tow.  Once in America, Antonio learns quickly that his climb to the top won’t be an easy one.  This is Antonio’s story – how he makes it to America but hurts and deceives many along the way, including the one person who believes in him the most.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith  (8)

Publishers Weekly Review: /* Starred Review */ Murder and moral obligation mingle in this whimsical new series from the author of the smash hit The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. McCall Smith's new heroine is Scottish-American philosopher Isabel Dalhousie, a single woman of independent means who edits the esteemed Review of Applied Ethics and presides over the titular club. When Isabel witnesses fund manager Mark Fraser fall from a balcony after a performance at an Edinburgh concert hall, she feels obliged to investigate the gentleman's demise. "I was the last person that young man saw," Dalhousie tells her beloved niece, Cat. "The last person. And don't you think that the last person you see on this earth owes you something?" Given her affinity for applied ethics, questions of conscience are a daily concern for Isabel, and the more she thinks about Fraser's fall, the less accidental it seems. Among those who might have pushed him: his shifty roommate, his colleague's scheming spouse and a disgruntled broker with a craving for cash. Fans of Botswanan heroine Precious Ramotswe are sure to embrace Scotsman McCall Smith's plucky new protagonist, who leads a cast of delightfully quirky characters that includes Toby, a dapper bachelor with a dubious understanding of fidelity, and Grace, Dalhousie's morally upright housekeeper, who sizes up society's reprobates in two syllables or less. Scotland's climate may be misty and cool, but McCall Smith's charming prose warms every page of this winning series debut. Agent, Robin Strauss. (Sept. 28)
? Staff (Reviewed August 2, 2004) (Publishers Weekly, vol 251, issue 31, p51

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (7)

Fans of Louise Fitzhugh's iconic Harriet the Spy will welcome 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce, the heroine of Canadian journalist Bradley's rollicking debut. In an early 1950s English village, Flavia is preoccupied with retaliating against her lofty older sisters when a rude, redheaded stranger arrives to confront her eccentric father, a philatelic devotee. Equally adept at quoting 18th-century works, listening at keyholes and picking locks, Flavia learns that her father, Colonel de Luce, may be involved in the suicide of his long-ago schoolmaster and the theft of a priceless stamp. The sudden expiration of the stranger in a cucumber bed, wacky village characters with ties to the schoolmaster, and a sharp inspector with doubts about the colonel and his enterprising young detective daughter mean complications for Flavia and enormous fun for the reader. Tantalizing hints about a gardener with a shady past and the mysterious death of Flavia's adventurous mother promise further intrigues ahead. (Publishers Weekly, PW Reviews 2009 February #4)

 Three Junes by Juilia Glass  (7)

Publishers Weekly Review: /* Starred Review */ The artful construction of this seductive novel and the mature, compassionate wisdom permeating it would be impressive for a seasoned writer, but it's all the more remarkable in a debut. This narrative of the McLeod family during three vital summers is rich with implications about the bonds and stresses of kin and friendship, the ache of loneliness and the cautious tendrils of renewal blossoming in unexpected ways. Glass depicts the mysterious twists of fate and cosmic (but unobtrusive) coincidences that bring people together, and the self-doubts and lack of communication that can keep them apart, in three fluidly connected sections in which characters interact over a decade. These people are entirely at home in their beautifully detailed settings—Greece, rural Scotland, Greenwich Village and the Hamptons—and are fully dimensional in their moments of both frailty and grace. Paul McLeod, the reticent Scots widower introduced in the first section, is the father of Fenno, the central character of the middle section, who is a reserved, self-protective gay bookstore owner in Manhattan; both have dealings with the third section's searching young artist, Fern Olitsky, whose guilt in the wake of her husband's death leaves her longing for—and fearful of—beginning anew. Other characters are memorably individualistic: an acerbic music critic dying of AIDS, Fenno's emotionally elusive mother, his sibling twins and their wives, and his insouciant lover among them. In this dazzling portrait of family life, Glass establishes her literary credentials with ingenuity and panache. Agent, Gail Hochman. 7-city author tour. (May 10)
— Staff (Reviewed March 25, 2002) (Publishers Weekly, vol 249, issue 12, p37)

The Three Miss Margarets by Louis Shaffer (7)

Publishers Weekly Review:  Three elderly white Georgia women, all named Margaret, share a deep friendship and a dark secret in this winning debut by actress and television writer Shaffer. For reasons not entirely clear even to her, Laurel Selene McCready has inherited her mother's grudge against "the three Miss Margarets," upstanding icons in rural Charles Valley. Returning home drunk late one night, she spies the three ladies congregating unaccountably in a deserted cabin. The body of Vashti Johnson, a renowned African-American geneticist who had returned to Charles Valley to visit her mother, is soon discovered in the cabin, prompting an investigation by the police, as well as by Laurel Selene and her new boyfriend Josh, a journalist who's writing a book about Vashti. As the three Miss Margarets struggle with how much to reveal about Vashti's life and death, they also reflect on their own longtime intimacy and on the race hatred in their community that led, decades ago, to a series of ghastly crimes. Shaffer's achievement is making each Miss Margaret a complex character with a fiercely guarded interior life. She doesn't belabor the social forces that defined the lives of these doyennes; instead, she gradually reveals Dr. Maggie Harris's lesbian love life, Margaret (Li'l Bit) Hanning's decadelong affair with a redneck gardener and Peggy Garrison's embattled domestic arrangement. Sometimes Shaffer leans too much on heavy-handed foreshadowing, and the secondary characters are thin, especially Laurel Selene and Josh. Yet the three Miss Margarets are wholly imagined, rich creations whose reticence speaks volumes about their time and place. Agent, Eric Simonoff. Author tour. (Apr.) --Staff (Reviewed February 10, 2003) (Publishers Weekly, vol 250, issue 6, p160)

Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger (2)

Publishers Weekly Review: The deftly plotted seventh Cork O'Connor novel represents a return to top form for Anthony-winner Krueger after 2006's disappointing Copper River . Henry Meloux asks Cork, who's now working as a part-time PI in his hometown of Aurora, Minn., to find a son the aged Ojibwe healer has never met from a relationship with a white woman, Maria Lima, "seventy-three winters" earlier. Armed with just two clues, a location in Canada and a gold watch with a picture of Maria, O'Connor soon finds the son, a retired mining entrepreneur, but arranging a meeting between son and father proves to be a challenging and surprisingly dangerous task. The book's middle third focuses on Meloux's past: how he became a guide for white men looking for gold in Canada, how he met and fell in love with one of their daughters, and the events that separated the young lovers. Despite the preponderance of back story, the action builds to a violent and satisfying denouement. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 May #3 Page 38)
 

An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison 

A psychiatry professor, author, and recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards describes her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depressive illness and recounts how it has shaped her life. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.  The personal story of a manic depressive and a world-renowned authority on the subject describes the onset of the illness during her teenage years and her determined journey through the realm of available treatments. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell (3)

Publishers Weekly Review: O'Farrell (After You'd Gone ) delivers an intricate, eloquent novel of family malice, longings and betrayal. Slim, stylish Iris Lockhart runs a dress shop in contemporary Edinburgh when she's not flirting with her stepbrother Alex or rendezvousing with her married attorney lover, Luke. Esme Lennox, meanwhile, is ready to be discharged from the soon-to-be-closed psychiatric hospital where she's been a patient (read: virtual prisoner) for 61 years. Iris becomes aware of Esme's existence when she's informed, to her disbelief, that she has been granted power of attorney over Esme by Kitty Lockhart, Iris's Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother. It turns out Kitty and Esme are sisters, but Kitty kept quiet about Esme after she was hospitalized at age 16. Layer upon layer of Lockhart family secrets are laid bare—the truth behind Esme's institutionalization, why her existence was kept a secret, and a twist involving Iris's parents—as Iris mulls over what to do with her new charge, and Esme and Kitty reconnect. O'Farrell maintains a high level of tension throughout, and the conclusion is devastating. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2007 June #1 Page 25)

Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

Publishers Weekly Review: Delia Hopkins was six years old when her father allowed her to be his assistant in the amateur magic act he performed at the local senior center's annual Christmas pageant. "I learned a lot that night," recalls Delia, who is now 32, at the start of Picoult's absorbing new novel (her 12th, after My Sister's Keeper). "That people don't vanish into thin air...." She has come to know this even better as an adult: she makes her living finding missing people with her own search-and-rescue bloodhound. As she prepares for her wedding, however, Delia has a flash of memory that is so vivid yet so wildly out-of-place among the other memories from her idyllic New Hampshire upbringing that she describes it to a childhood friend, who happens to be a reporter. Soon, her whole world and the world of the widowed father she adores is turned upside down. Her marriage to her toddler's father, a loving but still struggling recovering alcoholic, is put on hold as she is forced to conduct a search-and-rescue mission on her own past and identity. It will cut to the heart of what she holds to be true and good. As in previous novels, Picoult creates compelling, three-dimensional characters who tell a story in alternating voices about what it might mean to be a good parent and a good person, to be true to ourselves and those we love. Picoult weaves together plot and characterization in a landscape that is fleshed out in rich, journalistic detail, so that readers will come away with intriguing questions rather than pat answers. Author tour. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2005 February #1)

White Oleander by Janet Fitch  (5)

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ A first-rate debut about a teenaged girl's arduous six-year journey of self-discovery. Astrid is 12 when her beloved mother, the poet Ingrid Magnussen, murders a former lover and is sent to jail. Her father long gone, Astrid ends up in foster care, moving through dysfunctional households across southern California. Only Claire Richards, actress wife of a wealthy TV producer, seems to offer a real family life as she nurtures Astrid's academic and artistic abilities. But the Richards home has deep emotional fissures, skillfully exploited by Ingrid, who keeps jealous watch over her daughter by letter. Weak, neurotic Claire succumbs, and Astrid's last foster home is a chaotic crash-pad overseen by a Russian immigrant engaged in various semi-legal hustles. Meanwhile, Ingrid has become a feminist cause celebre with naive young disciples and a media-savvy lawyer working to get her a new trial. The embittered Astrid wants no part of this effort, and in jailhouse confrontation challenges Ingrid to prove that she regrets her destructive role and will try to make amends for the hard times she's caused her daughter. Despite melodramatic plot twists, the foster homes provide a nicely eclectic panorama of late 20th-century American life and a revealing stage for Astrid's growth and personal struggles. She's an appealing protagonist, smart and vulnerable, though her formidable mother is even more intriguing, and the author brilliantly delineates the woman's complexity through her letters, which are masterpieces of epistolary voice and character development. Fitch displays remarkable artistic and psychological maturity throughout, skillfully making use of metaphors (like the beautifully poisonous oleander, Ingrid's signature flower) to illuminate her central theme: the longing for order and connection in a world where even the most intimate bonds can be broken in an instant. The author allows her protagonist to achieve adulthood, love, an artistic vocation, and some semblance of inner peace without scanting the scars she will always carry. Vigorous, polished prose, strong storytelling, satisfyingly complex characters, and thoughtfully nuanced perceptions: an impressive debut indeed.
(Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1999)

Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt (10)

Publishers Weekly Review: This much-awaited new biography of the elusive Bard is brilliant in conception, often superb in execution, but sometimes-perhaps inevitably-disappointing in its degree of speculativeness. Bardolators may take this last for granted, but curious lay readers seeking a fully cohesive and convincing life may at times feel the accumulation of "may haves," "might haves" and "could haves" make it difficult to suspend disbelief. Greenblatt's espousing, for instance, of the theory that Shakespeare's "lost" years before arriving in London were spent in Lancashire leads to suppositions that he might have met the Catholic subversive Edmund Campion, and how that might have affected him-and it all rests on one factoid: the bequeathing by a nobleman of some player's items to a William Shakeshafte, who may, plausibly, have been the young Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Norton Shakespeare general editor and New Historicist Greenblatt succeed impressively in locating the man in both his greatest works and the turbulent world in which he lived. With a blend of biography, literary interpretation and history, Greenblatt persuasively analyzes William's father's rise and fall as a public figure in Stratford, which pulled him in both Protestant and Catholic directions and made his eldest son "a master of double consciousness." In a virtuoso display of historical and literary criticism, Greenblatt contrasts Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Elizabeth's unfortunate Sephardic physician-who was executed for conspiracy-and Shakespeare's ambiguous villain Shylock. This wonderful study, built on a lifetime's scholarship and a profound ability to perceive the life within the texts, creates as vivid and full portrait of Shakespeare as we are likely ever to have. 16 pages color illus. not seen by PW. Agent, Jill Kneerim. (Publishers Weekly Reviews 2004 July #3)