Blog Post
More Armored Bears!
by endless
Hiding in a cupboard in the Master's room at Oxford, Lyra Belacqua sees him try to poison her uncle, an important northern explorer and scientist. Lyra's daemon, Pan - an external animal manifestation of her soul creature, something between a patronus and animal familiar - urges her to leave quietly, but Lyra decides instead to warn her uncle. In doing so, she aligns herself with his quest to understand the northern lights and to build a bridge to another world. Pullman's trilogy takes place in a multiverse that spans something like WWI England, contemporary America, and a separate universe called Cittegaze, with its own rules of soul and substance. The "northern lights" trilogy, made of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, won several prestigious awards and was made into a series of films (see ). Pullman's trilogy has long been a favorite series to recommend to precocious young readers and teens looking to explore new literary worlds, much as Lyra bridges the universes of the books with her daemon in tow. For every young person today who has sorted themselves into Gryffindor, imagined a pet owl or rat, or wishes they could play quidditch, there's a slightly older person who has imagined themselves a daemon that changes animal forms depending on their true internal state, who has re-read Pullman's trilogy or read it aloud to their children and wondered about the fate of the armored polar bears.
We will soon get another installment of the bears, Lyra, and her northern journeys, because Philip Pullman recently announced a new trilogy to be released in fall 2017! "The Dust," the first new book takes place during the same historical timeline as the original trilogy. This is a great opportunity to go back to Pullman, who challenged young readers and older science fiction devotees to think about humanity's role in global destruction, who challenged the religious tenets of many YA series like the The Chronicles of Narnia, and who imagined a multiverse based on a particle physics decades before Steven Hawking. The series rewards re-readers and celebrates the power of children's curiosity.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #629
by muffy
Beijing journalist Lijia Zhang's debut novel Lotus is inspired by her grandmother's deathbed revelation that she was sold into prostitution at an early age.
Set in contemporary Shenzhen, China’s “City of Sins”, Lotus is one of the "ji" (Chinese word for chicken, a derogatory name for prostitutes) working at the Moonflower Massage Parlor. Originally from a impoverished village in northern China, she allows her family to think she waitresses in an upscale restaurant, sending her earnings home to support her family and to send her younger brother to university.
Knowing the shelf life of someone in her situation is finite, Lotus casts her eye among her regulars - Funny Eye, Family Treasure, hoping for a more permanent arrangement. In the meantime, she befriends Hu Binbing, a quiet and reclusive photojournalist who is hoping his documentary project on the lives of the "ji" will bring him the deserved recognition. But once his photographs of Lotus are published in a national magazine, his standing in the Communist party as well as their relationship is threatened.
"'A Newborn Calf Isn't Afraid of Tigers' is a typical chapter title in Lotus... Readers will find the entire text rich in Chinese proverbs, as well as folk wisdom of a more prosaic variety. Characters employ sage sayings in spoken form, as a kind of parlor game, and the author scatters aphorisms liberally throughout the narrative, with an effect that is both charming and thought-provoking....Some first novels, especially those birthed in creative writing classes, go heavy on self-consciously poetic language ...The images Zhang gives us, in contrast, are uncomplicated, concise and touching" (NPR)
"Pretty Woman but without all the glitz" (Library Journal).
Blog Post
Exit West
by Lucy S
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid's new novel, is remarkably germane. The story of Nadia and Saeed, a young couple forced to flee a collapsing city, is on one level a love story, relaying the journey that a couple takes through their relationship, but more than that, it is the narrative of what it means to be a refugee, the toll taken by the severity of the act of leaving one’s country.
Realism in Exit West has a little give to it. Nadia and Saeed leave from an unnamed country in the midst of a civil war, their exit provided through an actual door. These doors of escape can appear anywhere and lead all over. The one though which Nadia and Saeed leave is in a dental office, “the blackness of a door that ha[d once led to a supply cabinet.” The means of flight here might bring to mind other recent books where real-life or historical events are viewed through a slightly skewed reality, such as Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. And like any other channel of departure for a refugee, these doors/portals guarantee no safe exit. One is left to meet whatever is on the other side unknowingly. The use of these doors that can pop up anywhere accentuates the discordant experience that refugees must face, to forsake one world so suddenly and be born again in another “for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
While some of Exit West exists in this semi-realistic sphere, much of it is all too real. Technology and social media play a significant role in keeping people connected. While their city is being destroyed around them, Nadia and Saeed perpetuate their relationship through texts and phone calls. The role of social media is so vital to human connection, both on a personal level and on a global level. Hamid reminds us of the clash of these worlds, the virtual versus the real. “But even now the city’s freewheeling virtual world stood in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people, to those of young men, and especially of young women, and above all children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.” When mobile service vanishes, much human connection is severed.
The passage through doors “was both like dying and like being born,” and we understand, when Nadia and Saeed take this passage, how closely Hamid’s magical doors hew to a true refugee experience. Upon approaching her exit, Nadia is “struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way it did not reveal what was on the other side, and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end.”
Eventually, this young couple find themselves in a house of refugees, people from all over the world whose cultures and languages differ greatly but who are thrust together in a common experience. The friction of this situation creates a friction between Nadia and Saeed and highlights the strain that leaving behind the known for the unknown can take. “The only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage.”
Exit West gives a glimpse of what it is to be a refugee and what it is to refuse refugees, the shame that comes from being displaced and the struggle to maintain a feeling of humanity. The novel is only strengthened by the fact that Hamid never gives a name to the country from which Nadia and Saeed escape. He peppers his book with tales, some almost fairy-tale like in quality, of other travelers. On occasion points of departure are named, but not always. Combining this with the unusual form of deliverance for all these refugees underscores the universality of the refugee experience.
In an interview on Literary Hub, Hamid said, “I wanted this to be a novel about refugees that reminded us we’re all refugees. A little namelessness and bending of physics went a long way.”
Exit West is filled with strikingly eloquent passages on religion and prayer, parenthood, love, and of course, the jarring difficulty of becoming a displaced person. To read it is to be submersed in this beauty and brutality all at once.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #628, Pt. 2 "If you are here today...you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it through hell and are still standing? We bear a different name: warriors.” ~ Lori Goodwin
by muffy
Former book editor Jennifer Ryan's charming debut Chilbury Ladies' Choir takes us to a small village in Kent during the spring and summer of 1940.
With the men off to war, the vicar disbanded the church choir until the newly arrived Miss Prim(rose)Trent, a worldly, take-no-prisoner university music professor, challenged the women to form an all-female choir.
Over the course of six months, through letters and journals, we watch as these women continued to cope with the fall-out of war, scrimmage over village affairs, and struggle with matters of life and death, while the choir brought them together, sustained them in their darkest hour, and took them to great heights, far beyond their expectations.
Widowed Mrs. Tilling is resentful having to billet Colonel Mallard in her son David's room, only to find love when she least expects it; Edwina Paltry, a scheming midwife with a sinister plan and a shady past, is determined to cash in on other people's misfortunes, come hell or high water; 19-year-old Venetia Winthrop, wild and impulsive, is courting trouble by seducing a dashing artist who might very well be a spy; a 13-year-old accomplished First Soprano, Kitty Winthrop, plucky and fearless, finds solace in her music while navigating the grown-up world and her first heartbreak. Silvie, a young Czech refugee, taken in by the Winthrops, is anxious about the state of her homeland and the fate of her family.
For fans of Mary Ann Shaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society ; and Home Fires, a PBS period television series based on the book by Julie Summers. Television rights to Chilbury Ladies' Choir have been optioned by Carnival TV, the production company behind PBS' Downton Abbey.
Blog Post
All Our Wrong Todays
by Lucy S
Screenwriter Elan Mastai’s debut novel is a delightful, insightful and wild ride that takes us on a winding path through time, space, and alternate realities, impelled by strong, witty dialogue and a looming sense of “what-if.”
All Our Wrong Todays is difficult to describe. It challenges your mind with a plot that twists through the space-time continuum with rapidity, but I highly recommend that you pick-up this witty, worthwhile book and take this incredible, zigzag of a journey with Mastai’s affable narrator, Tom Barren, as he loops back and forth through time, space and consciousness. Mastai has created in Tom a wonderfully readable narrative voice who keeps his story funny and artful even when describing frightening situations that reveal the darker forces that might be at play inside all of us. When we are introduced to Tom, he is living in a futuristic-like 2016 that could have been imagined in the 1950s and featured in The Jetsons; hover cars, clothes that are a second skin and regenerate every day, perfectly designed, person-specific meals. Everyone in this “future” has everything they could want or need. In a world where “oil was irrelevant, basic resources were plentiful, and everyone had access to all manner of technological enhancements...scientific discovery was the dominant social motivator.” And the scientific discoveries in this book are decidedly big and life-altering, sometimes literally. Tom’s father is hard at work developing the first time-travel machine, and Tom is employed as one of his back-up “chrononauts.” Tom’s failure in his father’s lab sets off a mad-capped series of events that have us boomeranging through various time periods, past and future, and altered versions of Tom himself, and of his friends and family.
All Our Wrong Todays is positively mind-bending in its whorls through these dimensions, as Tom introduces who he might have been, or still could be, in a parallel universe. Tom asks “What happens if the hard skin of reality punctures? What comes out?” His alter egos, John and Victor, show what might happen by demonstrating the success and failure, and the good and bad, that live inside each of us. Ultimately All Our Wrong Todays is about how we choose to live in the present we are given, and the way we reconcile all the dreams and voices we carry with us.
For fans of The Martian and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #628, Pt.1 "If you are here today... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it through hell and are still standing? We bear a different name: warriors.” ~ Lori Goodwin.
by muffy
Two extraordinary debut novels set during WWII come out on Valentine's Day, and both speak to the capacity of the human spirit to endure in the face of the 20th century’s darkest moment.
We Were the Lucky Ones is based on the true story of the Kurc family of Radom, Poland. In 1939, prosperous and educated, Jewish merchants Sol and Nechuma were trying their best to live normal lives with their family as war was looming, observing religious holidays and doting on their new grandchild. When Germany invaded Poland, Sol and Nechuma decided to stay with daughters Halina and Mila, while their sons Genek and Jakob joined the Polish army.
Middle son Addy, an engineer and budding composer was stuck in France and was eventually conscripted. Over the course of the war, the three generations of Kurcs were flung to distant points on the globe, from the jazz clubs of Paris to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to Kraków’s most brutal prison and the farthest reaches of the Siberian gulag, they were driven by an extraordinary will to survive and to reunite.
Debut novelist Georgia Hunter first learned that her beloved grandfather Eddy (Addy in the novel) came from a family of Holocaust survivors as a result of a high school English project "to dig up pieces of our ancestral pasts" (Author's Note). Through oral history interviews with her grandmother, a memorable Kurc Family reunion on Martha's Vineyard, and a decade of research, thorough and precise in its details, "Hunter sidesteps hollow sentimentality and nihilism, revealing instead the beautiful complexity and ambiguity of life in this extraordinarily moving tale." (Publishers' Weekly)
Read-alikes: City of Women by David Gillham; Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly; and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #627 “There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy... these worlds provide an alternative." ~ Neil Gaiman
by muffy
Set in an alternate modern-day England, Gilded Cage * by (Dr.) Vic(toria) James is first in the Dark Gifts dystopian trilogy. It is one of the LibraryReads February picks, "where enticing drama and social unrest mix with aristocratic scandal and glamorous magic." (Kirkus Reviews)
Thanks to clever Abi(gail), the Hadleys believe they have a better deal than most, as they have arranged to serve their decade of servitude (being commoners without the magically power of the aristocratic rulers) together. They will work as slaves at Kyneston, the country estate of the Jardines, one of the most powerful families in the country.
At the last minute, 16-year-old Luke Hadley is separated from the family and sent to Millmoor, Manchester’s infamous slave town to toil in its horrific factories where he finds friendship among those with a dangerous agenda. Meanwhile, Abi, yearning for love and knowledge, stumbles into the middle of Jardine family intrigues and political scheming that could alter their world forever.
"Debut novelist James does an excellent job of creating a dark contemporary world in which magic is used to prop up a corrupt aristocracy at the expense of ordinary people. Hopefully the details of this realm's powers will be fleshed out in the next volume, which readers will eagerly anticipate after the cliff-hanger ending here. With solid YA crossover potential, this first novel should especially appeal to fans of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy. (Library Journal)
Also for those who enjoyed Red Rising by Pierce Brown, and Uprooted by Naomi Novik.
* = starred review
Blog Post
The Human Heart of Immigration
by Lucy S
Ignacio is a boy with two mothers and two names. He is “Nacho,” to his birth mother, Soli, and “Iggy” to his foster mother, Kavya. In her touching and timely new novel, Lucky Boy, Shanthi Sekaran tells the story of Ignacio’s two mothers; one, an 18 year-old undocumented immigrant who arrives in this country only to discover she is pregnant, and the other, a young married woman of Indian-American descent, wanting very much, but struggling, to have a child of her own. These parallel plot lines underscore the strong desire that comes with wanting motherhood and the deep sadness that comes with losing it. Sekaran does an admirable job at presenting both viewpoints of this story without legitimizing one over the other. She tells her tale with humor and compassion and we know Ignacio is loved by many, but we are never told which mother is best for him. Ignacio is a “lucky boy” because of all this love, but also a boy in a complicated situation made more tangled by love.
The true-to-life and somewhat flawed characters keep us from aligning too closely with either mother and Sekaran does not try to mollify us by showing one side in a more favorable light. What she does highlight is the deep complexity of immigrant situations and the question of what it means to be an American and to enjoy the privileges that this country has to offer, or suffer from a lack of advantages.
Read-alikes: The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez or The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #626, Debut Mysteries
by muffy
If you are waiting for The Girl Before *, J.P. Delaney's cunning debut, you might give these a try.
Little Deaths * * * by Emma Flint is inspired by a true crime case which occurred in Queens, NY in 1965.
When single-mother Ruth Malone reports her young children missing from a locked room with an open window, suspicion immediately falls on her. A stylish cocktail waitress who works long hours and is separated from her husband, Ruth smokes, drinks, and parties, often with married men and keeps their love letters under her bed.
When the bodies of the children are found, the police investigation focuses solely on her. The lead detective, a strict Catholic who believes women belong in the home, leaps to the obvious conclusion. The only person who becomes convinced that Ruth may not be guilty of the crime is Pete Wonicke, a rookie tabloid reporter determined to make a name for himself.
"This accomplished debut novel will intrigue fans of both true crime and noir fiction. Flint, a technical writer in London, is a welcome addition to the world of literary crime fiction. Readers of Megan Abbott may want to investigate." (Library Journal)
The Dry * (one of January's LibraryReads picks, and winner of the 2015 Victorian Premier Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript) is drawing debut novelist Jane Harper comparisons to Dennis Lehane.
It has been 20 years since he and his father were driven out under a cloud of suspicion, Melbourne-based Federal Agent Aaron Falk returns to his hometown Kiewarra for the funeral of his childhood best friend Luke. Beyond trying to repay the debt he owed Luke, he questions the official narrative that Luke killed his young family and committed suicide on his farm - the desperate act of a man pushed to the brink by financial woes caused by the area's two-year drought.
With the help of recently arrived Sgt. Raco, Falk finds that small towns have big secrets and Luke's death might be connected to Ellie Deacon’s suspicious death by drowning 20 years ago.
"From the ominous opening paragraphs, all the more chilling for their matter-of-factness, Harper, a journalist who writes for Melbourne’s Herald Sun, spins a suspenseful tale of sound and fury as riveting as it is horrific." (Publishers Weekly). Film rights to Reese Witherspoon’s production company.
Read-alike: The Broken Shore by Peter Temple which also offers a portrait of small-town Australia.
* * * = 3 starred reviews
* = starred reviews
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #625, Part 3
by muffy
A Word for Love * is inspired by the author Emily Robbins' year spent as a Fulbright Fellow in Syria, where she studied religion and language with a women’s mosque movement, and lived with the family of a leading intellectual.
Bea, an American student of Arabic is spending an exchange year in an unnamed Middle Eastern Country under dictatorship. Rather than enrolling in an established university program, she studies with a private tutor and immerses herself in the daily life of her host family. Her ultimate goal is to locate “The Astonishing Text,” an ancient manuscript of a famous Arabic love poem that is said to move its readers to tears.
As Bea becomes entwined in her host family’s complicated lives during a time of civil unrest and violence, she is also increasingly being drawn into a contemporary Romeo and Juliet-like romance between their Indonesian housemaid and the handsome policeman guarding their apartment block. Bea’s own story begins to mirror that of “The Astonishing Text” that drew her there in the first place—not in the role of one of the lovers, but as the character who lives to tell the story.
“Robbins’ melodic novel is story of war, family, language, but above all, a paean to unabashed, unbridled love. Told in quiet but elegant prose, each thump of this melodic novel’s heart (and what an enormous, rousing heart it is) attests to the timeless and life-giving power of love." ~ Khaled Hosseini
For readers who enjoyed The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway; The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu; and The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht.
* = starred review