Four-and-Five-Star Books 2013 Part Three: Everything Else

Mystery:

An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas: Goodreads synopsis: Adamsberg travels to London, where a routine conference draws him into a disturbing investigation.
Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a three-day conference in London. With him are a young sergeant, Estalère, and Commandant Danglard, who is terrified at the idea of travelling beneath the Channel. It is the break they all need, until a macabre and brutal case comes to the attention of their colleague Radstock from New Scotland Yard.
Just outside the baroque and romantic old Highgate cemetery a pile of shoes is found. Not so strange in itself, but the shoes contain severed feet. As Scotland Yard's investigation begins, Adamsberg and his colleagues return home and are confronted with a massacre in a suburban home. Adamsberg and Danglard are drawn in to a trail of vampires and vampire-hunters that leads them all the way to Serbia, a place where the old certainties no longer apply.

My review from Goodreads: Not my favourite of this series, but then it's January, and nothing is my favourite anything right now. Still very good. Still think that Adamsberg is an absolutely enchanting fictional character who I would have to murder if I knew in real life. Still love the supporting characters, and the lovely, meandering, insightful and disarming writing style.


The Ghost Riders of Ordebec by Fred Vargas: Goodreads synopsis: A # 1 French and Italian bestseller from the three-time winner of the CWA’s International Dagger Award.
More than ten million copies of Fred Vargas’s Commissaire Adamsberg mysteries have been sold worldwide. Now, American readers are getting hooked on the internationally bestselling author’s unsettling blend of crime and the supernatural. As the chief of police in Paris’s seventh arrondissement, Commissaire Adamsberg has no jurisdiction in Ordebec. Yet, he cannot ignore a widow’s plea. Her daughter Lina has seen a vision of the Ghost Riders with four nefarious men. According to the thousand-year-old legend, the vision means that the men will soon die a grisly death. When one of them disappears, Adamsberg races to Ordebec, where he becomes entranced by the gorgeous Lina—and embroiled in the small Normandy town’s ancient feud.

There are only so many times I can rave about this series while still generating new adjectives. If you haven't read her and still refuse to, you're an idiot. Wise up already!

The Prophet by Michael Koryta: Goodreads synopsis: Adam Austin hasn't spoken to his brother in years. When they were teenagers, their sister was abducted and murdered, and their devastated family never recovered. Now Adam keeps to himself, scraping by as a bail bondsman, working so close to the town's criminal fringes that he sometimes seems a part of them. Kent Austin is the beloved coach of the local high school football team, a religious man and hero in the community. After years of near misses, Kent's team has a shot at the state championship, a welcome point of pride in a town that has had its share of hardships. Just before playoffs begin, the town and the team are thrown into shock when horrifically, impossibly, another teenage girl is found murdered. As details emerge that connect the crime to the Austin brothers, the two must confront their buried rage and grief-and unite to stop a killer. Michael Koryta, widely hailed as one of the most exciting young thriller authors at work today, has written his greatest novel ever-an emotionally harrowing, unstoppably suspenseful novel that Donald Ray Pollock has called "one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life.

Friday Night Lights meets Criminal Minds! 

Harry Hole #1 (The Bat) by Jo Nesbo: Goodreads synopsis: Before Harry took on the neo-Nazi gangs of Oslo, before he met Rakel, before The Snowman tried to take everything he held dear, he went to Australia. Harry Hole is sent to Sydney to investigate the murder of Inger Holter, a young Norwegian girl, who was working in a bar. Initially sidelined as an outsider, Harry becomes central to the Australian police investigation when they start to notice a number of unsolved rape and murder cases around the country. The victims were usually young blondes. Inger had a number of admirers, each with his own share of secrets, but there is no obvious suspect, and the pattern of the other crimes seems impossible to crack. Then a circus performer is brutally murdered followed by yet another young woman. Harry is in a race against time to stop highly intelligent killer, who is bent on total destruction.

My review from Goodreads: Say 3.5 stars. The first half seemed sort of disconnected and meandering and I wasn't sure if I was just in a bad mood or if it was a bad translation. Then things really picked up, and got horribly depressing but in an insightful and surprising and legitimate mystery-novel way.

Dead Scared by S.J. Bolton: Goodreads synopsis: When a rash of suicides tears through Cambridge University, DI Mark Joesbury recruits DC Lacey Flint to go undercover as a student to investigate. Although each student’s death appears to be a suicide, the psychological histories, social networks, and online activities of the students involved share remarkable similarities, and the London police are not convinced that the victims acted alone. They believe that someone might be preying on lonely and insecure students and either encouraging them to take their own lives or actually luring them to their deaths. As long as Lacey can play the role of a vulnerable young woman, she may be able to stop these deaths, but is it just a role for her? With her fragile past, is she drawing out the killers, or is she herself being drawn into a deadly game where she’s a perfect victim? 
Dark and compelling, S. J. Bolton’s latest thriller—a follow-up to the acclaimed Now You See Me—is another work of brilliant psychological suspense that plumbs the most sinister depths.

This is one where I prefer her standalones to the series. I had some pretty serious issues with the first book in this one. But I like the author, and these ones still pull me in. 

The 50/50 Killer by Steve Mosby: Goodreads synopsis: Mark Nelson is a young police officer, newly assigned to the team of John Mackey--a highly-decorated and successful detective, and author of a bestselling true crime book based on his years of experience catching killers. Mackey is a legend in the force and it's a huge opportunity for Mark, who has dedicated his life to his job ever since the death of his girlfriend years before. 
When a man is found burned to death in his own home, Mackey's team is thrown into an investigation that grows darker and more complex at every turn. The evidence points to a man known as the Fifty-Fifty Killer. His targets are young couples, who he stalks and subjects to a single night of torture and manipulation, testing and destroying the love between them.
Only one of them ever survives until dawn. Soon afterwards, a young man walks into a police station badly tortured and with his memory in tatters. He knows only that his girlfriend is still being held captive in the woods he's escaped from. But the team know that by fleeing, the man has sealed his girlfriend's fate. If they can't piece together his experience by daybreak then she will die in his place. However, all is not what it seems.

I have to read this again. I remember it was good, a bit twisted, and surprising. Everything was, like, not what it seemed. (Sorry. I'll show myself out). 

Non-fiction:

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant: Goodreads synopsis: After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a “dirt-poor” childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas. Nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, and many have no health care. Credit ratings are low or nonexistent, and alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.
A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant’s report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., “white trashonomics”; the ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’t get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered “magical thinking” of the Christian right. (Bageant’s brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.” 
Deer Hunting with Jesus is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs “the American hologram”—the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.

My review from Goodreads: Incisive. Insightful. Incendiary. Going away to ponder.

My friend Carolyn's review from Goodreads, which is a little less alliterative and actually says stuff: Like Joe Bageant, I come from a partly Scots Irish early-settler North American religious and hunting culture. So a lot of this book was painfully close to reality for me. Published in 2005 during Bush and before Obama, this book explores many aspects of the emergent neoconservative voting bloc. But it is personal rather than sociological, as Bageant is from a long-time Virginia family of dogmatic Protestant preachers, working class stiffs, and notably hunters. He loves his people, but having seen the liberal socialist light, he despairs of the self-defeating anti-union, anti-medicare, xenophobic propaganda they have swallowed like so many catfish in the fishin' hole. I wish he had referenced many of the statistics and factoids he cites, as I was dubious of some of them. Bageant is such a laugh-out-loud witty writer that it is easy to get seduced by his arguments, despite weaknesses in some; for example, at one point he argues for a difference between employed "rednecks" and unemployed "white trash" but then says whether they are employed is immaterial. His central thesis, though, is supported: that there is a class war in the US and that the burgeoning religious, gun-toting, illiterate, chronically ill working class is ignored at the peril of politicians. Until Democrats help these desperate people and start talking directly to them where they live about bread-and-butter issues, they won't get far.

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala: Goodreads synopsis: On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her.

Can I get a blanket pass for any stupid stuff I say in this review? It's so hard to review a book like this without saying stupid stuff, don't you find? First of all, I have an indefensible impulse, when reading grief memoirs, to classify (only in my own mind) whether or not the person is 'doing grief right'. Sometimes this means they're grieving similarly to how I imagine I would; sometimes it means they're grieving BETTER than I imagine I would. And yes, I know that assigning 'rightness' to grief is stupid - it's something that happens almost unconsciously. Anyway, I wholeheartedly (as well as meaninglessly) approved of how Sonali Deraniyagala grieved: belligerently, profanely, madly. I also sometimes wonder (guiltily) whether, in a case like this, when the loss is so towering and extensive, there's a certain freedom to the grieving process - you don't have to keep it together for your remaining family members when there are none left. When Deraniyagala described her almost enchanted life with her husband and children - days shopping at early-morning fish markets, living the best parts of two cultures, idyllic days working and talking with her husband - I was both deeply happy that she had had these experiences and also fleetingly wondered if she had used up too much happiness too early in her life. All this to say, this book made me think and feel more than simple sorrow or pity. It was remarkable. Which is such a strange thing to think about a work that any humane person would wish profoundly had never had cause to be written.

Wise-Minded Parenting: 7 Essentials for Raising Successful Tweens and Teens by Laura S. Kastner and Kristen Russell: Goodreads synopsis: Raising a happy and successful teenager is a challenge for any parent, even the most patient and wisest among us. Parenting adolescents requires all sorts of skills that most of us don’t naturally possess. In this down-to-earth, practical guide, you’ll learn how to tap your “wise mind” to calmly navigate even the stormiest of parenting moments. You'll learn how to preserve your loving relationship while encouraging progress towards the 7 essentials of happy, healthy teens:
Secure attachment to parents Self-control Academic success Social thriving Emotional flourishing Strong character Physical health With humor, wisdom and a deep understanding of the teenaged brain, Dr. Kastner, author of Getting to Calm: Cool-Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens, and Russell provide clear and useful tools for parents, giving them effective new ways to manage their own emotions in the heat of the moment  with their teen while maintaining — and even gaining — closeness.

Reviewed on blog. 

Fantasy:

Fuse by Julianna Baggott: Goodreads synopsis: We want our son returned. This girl is proof that we can save you all. If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages one at a time.
To be a Pure is to be perfect, untouched by Detonations that scarred the earth and sheltered inside the paradise that is the Dome. But Partridge escaped to the outside world, where Wretches struggle to survive amid smoke and ash. Now, at the command of Partridge’s father, the Dome is unleashing nightmare after nightmare upon the Wretches in an effort to get him back.
At Partridge’s side is a small band of those united against the Dome: Lyda, the warrior; Bradwell, the revolutionary; El Capitan, the guard; and Pressia, the young woman whose mysterious past ties her to Partridge in way she never could have imagined. Long ago a plan was hatched that could mean the earth’s ultimate doom. Now only Partridge and Pressia can set things right.
To save millions of innocent lives, Partridge must risk his own by returning to the Dome and facing his most terrifying challenge. And Pressia, armed only with a mysterious Black Box, containing a set of cryptic clues, must travel to the very ends of the earth, to a place where no map can guide her. If they succeed, the world will be saved. But should they fail, humankind will pay a terrible price.

It was quite good. And there's no book three. Which is even better. 

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE. I just looked, and there's a book three. WILL MY TORMENT NEVER CEASE? 

Horror/Re-read:

The Shining by Stephen King: Goodreads synopsis: Danny was only five years old but in the words of old Mr Halloran he was a 'shiner', aglow with psychic voltage. When his father became caretaker of the Overlook Hotel his visions grew frighteningly out of control. 
As winter closed in and blizzards cut them off, the hotel seemed to develop a life of its own. It was meant to be empty, but who was the lady in Room 217, and who were the masked guests going up and down in the elevator? And why did the hedges shaped like animals seem so alive? 
Somewhere, somehow there was an evil force in the hotel - and that too had begun to shine.

Reviewed on blog. Sorta. 

Zombies:

Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory: Goodreads synopsis: In 1968, after the first zombie outbreak, Wanda Mayhall and her three young daughters discover the body of a teenage mother during a snowstorm. Wrapped in the woman’s arms is a baby, stone-cold, not breathing, and without a pulse. But then his eyes open and look up at Wanda — and he begins to move.
The family hides the child — whom they name Stony — rather than turn him over to authorities that would destroy him. Against all scientific reason, the undead boy begins to grow. For years his adoptive mother and sisters manage to keep his existence a secret — until one terrifying night when Stony is forced to run and he learns that he is not the only living dead boy left in the world.

My review from Goodreads: Very thoughtful and thought-provoking. The tone and setting differ quite strongly from the beginning to the end, but the transition is smooth and believable. Some really great, strongly drawn characters and relationships. A really fresh twist on the zombie motif, with a strong 'what makes us human?' thread. 

Whatever these are:

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff: Goodreads synopsis: Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder.
She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons—"Bad Monkeys" for short.
This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail's psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy—or playing a different game altogether. What follows is one of the most clever and gripping novels you'll ever read.
My review from Goodreads: I started reading this, turned off the light, tried to go to sleep, turned the light back on and read the rest of it. It was a hell of a fun ride. You always get something a little different from this author.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett: Goodreads synopsis: According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch(the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.
So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .


My review from Goodreads: People told me I'd either love it or not, and I should put it down if I wasn't laughing out loud by the end of the first page. I was smiling by the end of the first page, so I kept reading. I didn't feel the need to blaze through it, and sometimes I felt slightly lost, and then last night as I was reading the last part, I realized I did love it after all. Sometimes it's funny in a snort-out-loud kind of way, and overall it's funny in a sweet, heartwarming, hopeful kind of way.

The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge: Goodreads synopsis: On an island of sandy beaches, dense jungles, and slumbering volcanoes, colonists seek to apply archaic laws to a new land, bounty hunters stalk the living for the ashes of their funerary pyres, and a smiling tribe is despised by all as traitorous murderers. It is here, in the midst of ancient tensions and new calamity, that two sisters are caught in a deadly web of deceits.
Arilou is proclaimed a beautiful prophetess—one of the island's precious oracles: a Lost. Hathin, her junior, is her nearly invisible attendant. But neither Arilou nor Hathin is exactly what she seems, and they live a lie that is carefully constructed and jealously guarded.
When the sisters are unknowingly drawn into a sinister, island-wide conspiracy, quiet, unobtrusive Hathin must journey beyond all she has ever known of her world—and of herself—in a desperate attempt to save them both. As the stakes mount and falsehoods unravel, she discovers that the only thing more dangerous than the secret she hides is the truth she must uncover.

My review from Goodreads: I can't remember why I requested this book from the library (I REALLY need to start keeping track of that) and I was sort of confused and annoyed for the first third of it or so. I tend to read more urban fantasy than sword-and-sorcery stuff, and I couldn't get a firm hold on the worldmaking and the tribes - there were Lost, and there were Lace, but there was a Lace Lost and WHAT? and I still think the title is kind of ill-chosen. But then things sort of snapped into place, and the conspiracy - the feared and misunderstood Lace being scapegoated - and the characters and the story were suddenly very clear and fascinating. There were also good relationships, and good dialogue, and tragedy and heroic sacrifice and triumph of a sort. I'm unsure why this author isn't more well-known.

Books About Teenage Girls Who Wake Up With Amnesia and Wander Around Trying Kind of Ineptly to Figure out What's Going On Which Should be Inexpressibly Annoying and Yet I Found Bizarrely Enjoyable and Compelling:

As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott: Goodreads synopsis: Ava is welcomed home from the hospital by a doting mother, lively friends, and a crush finally beginning to show interest. There's only one problem: Ava can't remember any of them - and can't shake the eerie feeling that she's not who they say she is.
Ava struggles to break through her amnesiac haze as she goes through the motions of high-school life, but the memories that surface take place in a very different world, where Ava and familiar-faced friends are under constant scrutiny and no one can be trusted. Ava doesn't know what to make of these visions, or of the boy who is at the center of them all, until he reappears in her life and offers answers . . . but only in exchange for her trust.

I read this a year or so ago, forgot to record it, remembered it vaguely a few days ago and became obsessed with finding it. Some of the details had become muddled in my mind, but it's actually an ingeniously plotted story and has some keen insights about how expectations placed on people can shape and direct their growth, for better or worse. A clever and noteworthy entry in the dystopic/amnesia/star-crossed lovers/YA category.

Six Months Later by Natalie Richards: Goodreads synopsis: She has everything she's ever wanted. But not her memory...
When Chloe fell asleep in study hall, it was the middle of May. When she wakes up, snow is on the ground and she can't remember the last six months of her life. 
Before, she'd been a mediocre student. Now, she's on track for valedictorian and being recruited by Ivy League schools. Before, she never had a chance with super jock Blake. Now he's her boyfriend. Before, she and Maggie were inseparable. Now her best friend won't speak to her.
What happened to her? Remembering the truth could be more dangerous than she knows..

Almost the last book I read, on my ipad, late at night in bed over the Christmas holidays, so it would have had to be really bad to not make me happy. And it wasn't. There was amnesia, and witty banter, and an appealingly unconventional heroine and an ALMOST-formulaic and yet believable romance, and a mystery I couldn't figure out (although that MIGHT have been all the vodka).

Four and Five Star Books 2013 Part Two: Fiction

Fiction:

Mending the Moon by Susan Palwick: Goodreads synopsis: Melinda Soto, aged sixty-four, vacationing in Mexico, is murdered by a fellow American tourist. 
Back in her hometown of Reno, Nevada, she leaves behind her adopted son, Jeremy, whom she rescued from war-torn Guatamala when he was a toddler—just one of her many causes over the years. And she leaves behind a circle of friends: Veronique, the academic stuck in a teaching job from which she can't retire; Rosemary, who's losing her husband to Alzheimer's and who's trying to lose herself in volunteer work; Henrietta, the priest at Rosemary's and Melinda's church.
Jeremy already had a fraught relationship with his charismatic mother and the people in her orbit. Now her death is tearing him apart, and he can barely stand the rituals of remembrance that ensue among his mother’s friends. Then the police reveal who killed Melinda: a Seattle teenager who flew home to his parents and drowned himself just days later.
It's too much. Jeremy's not the only one who can't deal. Friendships fray. But the unexpected happens: an invitation to them all, from the murderer's mother, to come to Seattle for his memorial. It's ridiculous. And yet, somehow, each of them begins to see in it a chance to heal. Aided, in peculiar ways, by Jeremy's years-long obsession with the comic-book hero Comrade Cosmos, and the immense cult of online commentary it's spawned.
Shot through with feeling and inventiveness, Susan Palwick's Mending the Moon is a novel of the odd paths that lead to home.

Reviewed on blog. (This is one of my favouritest writers ever).

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman: Goodreads synopsis: Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Tom Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English language newspaper as they struggle to keep it—and themselves—afloat.
Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.
As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.
Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

I wish I'd taken better notes while reading this book, because I remember when my friend put it on the book club list I thought it sounded fun and interesting, then I remember reading a few pages and feeling a tremendous disinclination to read further, but I can't for the life of me remember why. I did continue, of course, because I almost always do, and then I quite liked it. My friends who are actually in journalism are divided over whether it really captures print journalism - for me it did, quibbles about absolute verisimilitude aside. I could believe, also, that these were the types of characters who would inhabit this sort of expat, exile even, position. It seemed sort of deceptively light and easy to read, with some heavier undertones, and a couple of the stories were extremely affecting precisely because of that light touch. 

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry: Goodreads synopsis: Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. Here the consul's debilitating malaise is drinking, and activity that has overshadowed his life. Under the Volcano is set during the most fateful day of the consul's life - the Day of the Dead, 1938. His wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac to rescue him and their failing marriage, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. Yvonne's mission is to save the consul is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half-brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one day unfold against a backdrop unforgettable for its evocation of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical. Under the Volcano remains one of the most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition and one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

Every once in a while I feel the need to dive into a dense, tortuous, practically impenetrable thicket of a classic novel. Sometimes I lie down and this need goes away, and I turn back to sparer, more modern prose. Sometimes I read a classic of my own volition. Sometimes a friend puts Under the Volcano on the book club list, and I spend the entire meeting after reading it going "SHUT UP! That was a FLASHBACK?" and "wait, that happened WHEN?" and "Seriously? That wasn't just an alcoholic delusion, it really happened?" And the friend says things like "yes, but don't worry, I didn't realize it until my third time through. This book was a riotous fever dream. You should really go to Goodreads and read the reviews. Phrases like 'modernist soup of interior monologue', 'lush evocative language in imitation of the riot of exotic vegetation', "in addition to alcoholism, the consul suffers from acedia, spiritual despair", and "bombastic lyricism" capture it better than I can. I found the reading experience quite enjoyable, even though the sentences meandered on forever and I sometimes couldn't figure out who was talking and there seemed to be a boozy film hanging over the entire thing. I was more sympathetic to the booze-addled, self-destructive, weary, sad central figure than some of my friends - I wondered if this was because I haven't had to deal with addiction in any of my real-life friends or family. I found his constant striving to put a few more minutes between now and the next drink, coupled with his tremendous need and frailty and inevitable failure, incredibly moving. I will probably read the book again, although I really should tackle Trollope first. Ha. Trollope. 

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon: Goodreads synopsis: Written with love and expertise by the mother of an autistic teenager, "The Speed of Dark" is a riveting exploration into the mind of an autistic man as he struggles with the question of whether he should risk a medical procedure that could make him "normal."

My review from Goodreads: I couldn't put this down. I have no way of knowing for a fact if this is an accurate portrayal of an autistic person's inner life, but I am utterly convinced anyway. The parts that are ever so slightly clumsy, such as the evil Big Boss Man who borders on caricature, are forgivable to me on the strength of the characters and the plot. This is the very best kind of speculative fiction.

Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz: Goodreads synopsis: Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.
Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods -- and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia.
When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son.
Heralded across Canada for the power and promise of her debut collection, Mother Superior, Nawaz proves with Bone and Bread that she is one of our most talented and unique storytellers.

Reviewed on blog. 

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple: Goodreads synopsis: Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle—and people in general—has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence—creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

My review from Goodreads: It really shows that it's written by a television writer - I could totally picture it unfolding cinematically. Early on, I was a little put out by the fact that I couldn't figure out if characters were supposed to be likable or not, which is different from being put out because a character is NOT likable. Then I liked that, in fact, everyone was kind of a schmuck, with opportunities for redemption - the one slight exception being Elgin, who I didn't find wholly internally consistent. Overall, it was a delicious confection that I devoured in a single late-night gulp.


A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson: Goodreads synopsis: Even though he?s only ten years old, there are lots of things Arthur Williams knows for sure. He knows all about trilobites, and bridge, and that he doesn't want to be Victoria Brown's boyfriend, and that tapping maple trees causes them excruciating pain. He knows his real dad is probably flying a hot-air balloon across the Pacific, or paving a city with moss. And he knows that Simon, the guy who pretends to be his dad, does absolutely nothing interesting.
But when Arthur finds a weather-worn notebook in the woods behind his house, all he has are questions. Why was its author, Phil, so sad, and why does it end on Page 43? Suddenly, there are other questions too: Why do people abandon people? Why do they abandon themselves?
Arthur embarks on a top-secret investigation to find out who Phil is, or was. But getting straight answers from grown-ups is impossible - and before long, the only thing he knows for sure is that everything he thought he knew about life is probably wrong, and that what he has to do is ten times bigger than what he can do.
Told through a trio of voices: the wildly imaginative and perpetually awkward Arthur, Phil?s manic journal, and the forest which watches them both, Ben Stephenson?s debut novel is a heartbreaking story of love, death, and the unspeakable pain of being small.
A Matter of Life and Death Or Something marks the exciting debut of an inventive and gifted storyteller.

Strangely, I remember that I didn't like this QUITE as much as I thought I would. But obviously I still really liked it. 

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver: Goodreads synopsis: The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry. Eva never really wanted to be a mother and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

Reviewed on blog. 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith: Goodreads synopsis: The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.

My review from Goodreads: I feel like I should research this book before I review it, because against years of scholarship I'll probably sound like a dork. But that seems wrong, so I'm not doing it. I was utterly transported. I can't believe I lived this long without reading this book - it was like discovering music, or the taste of peaches. This was the clearest, tenderest rendering of a time and place, and the people in it are both representative of all the people in that time and place and utterly themselves and special and different. (I lent it to my mother after I read it, and I told her that if she didn't like it then I would have to regretfully terminate our relationship). 

Ragged Company by Richard Wagamese: Goodreads synopsis: Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world, and once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing “the same story over and over again” in favour of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck. 
A found cigarette package (contents: some unsmoked cigarettes, three $20 bills, and a lottery ticket) changes the fortune of this struggling set. The ragged company discovers they have won $13.5 million, but none of them can claim the money for lack proper identification. Enlisting the help of Granite, their lives, and fortunes, become forever changed.
Ragged Company is a journey into both the future and the past. Richard Wagamese deftly explores the nature of the comforts these friends find in their ideas of “home,” as he reconnects them to their histories.

My review from Goodreads: Really, really good. If I have any complaint, it would be that sometimes it edges slightly over into that territory where being homeless and poor automatically confers an oracular wisdom on you, which strikes me as a dangerous romanticizing of the condition. But on the whole, beautiful story, wonderful characters, each with a clear and unique voice, fantastic writing filled with so much sadness and kindness and the magic of extraordinary connections. (The first few pages undid me completely). 

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: Goodreads synopsis: Award-winning "New York Times"-bestselling author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, The Magician's Assistant) returns with a provocative novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice set in the Amazon rainforest--a gripping adventure story and a profound look at the difficult choices we make in the name of discovery and love.
In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, scientific miracles, and spiritual transformations, State of Wonder presents a world of stunning surprise and danger, rich in emotional resonance and moral complexity.
As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness. Stirring and luminous, State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest's jeweled canopy.

My review from Goodreads: I got halfway through this book and suddenly realized to my chagrin that I wasn't loving it the way I typically love Ann Patchett books. Then I got a little further and suddenly I was in that transported, delirious-with-delight stage again. And because it's an Ann Patchett book I am completely willing to believe that that is the way she meant for me to experience it. (In case it's not clear, there is no doubt that I am Ann Patchett's bitch). 

The Antagonist by Lynn Coady: Goodreads synopsis: Against his will and his nature, the hulking Gordon Rankin ("Rank") is cast as an enforcer, a goon -- by his classmates, his hockey coaches, and especially his own "tiny, angry" father, Gordon Senior.
Rank gamely lives up to his role -- until tragedy strikes, using Rank as its blunt instrument. Escaping the only way he can, Rank disappears. But almost twenty years later he discovers that an old, trusted friend -- the only person to whom he has ever confessed his sins -- has published a novel mirroring Rank's life. The betrayal cuts to the deepest heart of him, and Rank will finally have to confront the tragic true story from which he's spent his whole life running away.
With the deep compassion, deft touch, and irreverent humour that have made her one of Canada's best-loved novelists, Lynn Coady delves deeply into the ways we sanction and stoke male violence, giving us a large-hearted, often hilarious portrait of a man tearing himself apart in order to put himself back together.

My review from Goodreads: A year with a Lynn Coady novel AND a book of short stories - what an embarrassment of riches. Somehow the plot description of this book didn't make me eager to plunge into it. When I finally read it, I wrote on Facebook "every time I start reading a Lynn Coady book I remember how in love I am with reading a Lynn Coady book". Why do I even bother to READ the plot synopsis? Mean Boy was the first of her books that I read, and although I loved all the others, I think this one really took me back to the delirious joy of discovering a Canadian voice that was deceptively light, delightfully skewed, and amazingly similar to my favourites of the ones in my head. 

Four and Five Star Books 2013 Part One: The Short Stories

53 four-and-five star books this year - one for every week plus one, which feels kind of like a win. Oh, except there were 69 last year, which is a higher number AND appealingly dirty. Oh, but 53 the year before that, so symmetry, and also, weirdness. Whatever, none of it is statistically relevant. I usually organize this post into categories to create the fiction that I have some kind of system.

Apparently I like short stories - mostly genre short stories - even more than I thought. When I rate a short story collection I go on overall impression - I don't rate each individual story and then average it out.

Short stories:

M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman: Goodreads synopsis: Stories to delight, enchant, and surprise you.
Bestselling author and master storyteller Neil Gaiman here presents a breathtaking collection of tales that may chill or amuse readers - but always embrace the unexpected. Collection includes:
"The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds," 
"Troll Bridge," 
"Don't Ask Jack," 
"How to Sell the Ponti Bridge," 
"October in the Chair," 
"Chivalry," 
"The Price," 
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties," 
"Sunbird," 
"The Witch's Headstone," 
"Instructions"
I wrote on Goodreads: Turns out I've read most of these already, which is not unfairly surprising or hidden or anything, I just wasn't paying attention. Not opposed to the opportunity to read them again. (This seems to be classed as Young Adult, which seems weird to me. "Troll Bridge" in particular has a bittersweet melancholy that it seems to be would be entirely wasted on young readers. Gaiman is a writer, anyway, who I think should just be given to children in their cradles and read over and over at every new stage of life). 

Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories by Karen Russell: Goodreads synopsis: From the author of the New York Times best seller Swamplandia!—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—a magical new collection of stories that showcases Karen Russell’s gifts at their inimitable best.
A dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest.  A community of girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies, and escape by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s lower torso. When a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow bearing an uncanny resemblance to the missing classmate they used to torment, an ordinary tale of high school bullying becomes a sinister fantasy of guilt and atonement. In a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West, the monster is the human hunger for acquisition, and the victim is all we hold dear. And in the collection’s marvelous title story—an unforgettable parable of addiction and appetite, mortal terror and mortal love—two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood.
Karen Russell is one of today’s most celebrated and vital writers—honored in The New Yorker’s list of the twenty best writers under the age of forty, Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and the National Book Foundation’s five best writers under the age of thirty-five.  Her wondrous new work displays a young writer of superlative originality and invention coming into the full range and scale of her powers.  

I just loved this collection so much. The stories seemed to be both wild and beautiful imaginings AND incisively wise insights about people, life, the universe and everything. I got it from the library and kept it as long as I could without going bankrupt. Then I ordered a copy for my brother-in-law and his wife (my heart-sister), but I accidentally sent the order to myself. So I readdressed the box and sent it to them again, but this book had been backordered, so it came to me afterwards. So I had to keep it. Sometimes I sleep with it under my pillow. (Not really. But I feel like maybe I should). 

The Girl Who Loved Animals and other stories by Bruce McAllister: Goodreads synopsis: Bruce McAllister's long-awaited short fiction collection showcasing the author's five decades of writing, including his first professional sale. Introduction by science fiction great Harry Harrison, afterword by the John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winner Barry N. Malzberg, and wraparound cover art by World Fantasy Award-winner John Picacio. 

I got this collection from the library because Susan Palwick mentioned McAllister's latest book on Facebook. I ordered the novel but haven't read it yet. I didn't take notes, and now I can't remember much detail about the stories; I remember a general impression that this was older science fiction, with a dark and yet oddly hopeful and innocent resonance. Some of them reminded me of Tiptree. 

Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand: Goodreads synopsis: Widely praised and widely read, Elizabeth Hand is regarded as one of America's leading literary fantasists. This new collection (an expansion of the limited-release Bibliomancy, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2005) showcases a wildly inventive author at the height of her powers. Included in this collection are "The Least Trumps," in which a lonely women reaches out to the world through symbols, tattooing, and the Tarot, and "Pavane for a Prince of the Air," where neo-pagan rituals bring a recently departed soul to something very different than eternal rest. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose and rich with the details of traumatic lives that are luminously transformed, Saffron and Brimstone is a worthy addition to an outstanding career.

My review from Goodreads: Beautiful writing. A couple of the stories suffer a bit from privileging the beautiful writing over any kind of satisfying closure (this strange thing happened, this strange thing happened, the end). The concluding story cycle is fascinating and elegant.

The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4, edited by Ellen Datlow: Goodreads synopsis: The first three volumes of The Best Horror of the Year have been widely praised for their quality, variety, and comprehensiveness.

I believe I detailed my love affair with Ellen Datlow anthologies in this post. I always feel a delicous shiver of anticipated on cracking open one of these. 

Sleight of Hand by Peter S. Beagle: Goodreads synopsis: Abundant with tales of quiet heroism, life-changing decisions, and determined searches for deep answers, this extraordinary collection of contemporary fantasy explores the realms between this world and the next. From the top of the Berlin Wall to the depths of the darkest seas, gods and monsters battle their enemies and innermost fears, yet mere mortals make the truly difficult choices. A slightly regretful author and a vengeful-but-dilapidated dragon square off over an abandoned narrative; the children of the Shark God demand painful truths from their chronically absent father; and a bereaved women sacrifices herself to change one terrible moment, effortlessly reversed by a shuffle of the deck. Whether melancholic, comedic, or deeply tragic, each new tale is suffused with misdirection and discovery, expressed in the rich and mesmerizing voice of a masterful storyteller.

This, along with his other collection, We Never Talk About My Brother, which I still have to get back from Collette because I gave it to her just as she became obsessed with her smartphone and stopped reading books, burns brightly in my mind as one of the best short story collections I've ever read. They seem to be about things happening and people existing which are utterly new and surprising and yet so right that you can't believe they weren't always happening and existing. I feel like if I could somehow attach these stories to my very being I would have achieved all the wisdom, compassion, joy and serene acceptance for which I strive every day. 

Hellgoing: Stories by Lynn Coady: Goodreads synopsis: Winner of the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book and for The Globe's Top 10 Books of 2013.
With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Lynn Coady gives us nine unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last.
A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can’t seem to stop bashing herself up in the light of day.
Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet never missing an opportunity to make her characters squirm, fascinated as much by faithlessness as by faith, Lynn Coady is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history.

A lot of people on Goodreads were dissatisfied with this. Maybe I'm just Lynn Coady's bitch. I found the stories completely satisfying, each one seeming like a perfect, detailed, radiant moment in a character's life, providing a lifetime's worth of baggage and weight in a few pages. The first story, particularly, unfurled like a vividly coloured map in my mind. Some of the images are still seared into my imagination. It was different from reading one of her novels, but I was equally compelled and enamoured. 

Sympathy for the Devil edited by Tim Pratt: Goodreads synopsis: The Devil is known by many names: Serpent, Tempter, Beast, Adversary, Wanderer, Dragon, Rebel. His traps and machinations are the stuff of legends. His faces are legion. No matter what face the devil wears, Sympathy for the Devil has them all. Edited by Tim Pratt, Sympathy for the Devil collects the best Satanic short stories by Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, Stephen King, Kage Baker, Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Kelly Link, China Mieville, Michael Chabon, and many others, revealing His Grand Infernal Majesty, in all his forms. Thirty-five stories, from classics to the cutting edge, exploring the many sides of Satan, Lucifer, the Lord of the Flies, the Father of Lies, the Prince of the Powers of the Air and Darkness, the First of the Fallen... and a Man of Wealth and Taste. Sit down and spend a little time with the Devil.

I ordered this for five bucks from Indigo during a Black Friday sale. The stories are imaginative, varied, and hugely enjoyable. This device for an anthology worked exceedingly

well.

Tenth of December by George Saunders: Goodreads synopsis: A new story collection, the first in six years, from one of our greatest living writers, MacArthur "genius grant" recipient and New Yorker contributor George Saunders.
George Saunders, one of our most important writers, is back with a masterful, deeply felt collection that takes his literary powers to a new level. In a recent interview, when asked how he saw the role of the writer, Saunders said: "To me, the writer's main job is to make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared-she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves." In Tenth of December, the reader is always right there, and the meanings are beautiful and profound and abundant. The title story is an exquisite, moving account of the intersection, at a frozen lake in the woods, of a young misfit and a middle-aged cancer patient who goes there to commit suicide, only to end up saving the boy's life. "Home" is the often funny, often poignant account of a soldier returning from the war. And "Victory Lap" is a taut, inventive story about the attempted abduction of a teenage girl. In all, Tenth of December is George Saunders at his absolute best, a collection of stories and characters that add up to something deep, irreducible, and uniquely American.

I wrote on Goodreads, "Odd. Funny. Sharp. Sad. Sneaky." I confess that I'm somewhat perplexed by the hype over this book, which has been on several "Best Books of the Year" lists and one "50 Books to Make You a Better Person" post. Not that I didn't love it - I did love it. How do I explain this? The stories are dark, bright, sometimes blackly hilarious, and several veer very close to genre. This is the kind of thing that, in my mind, usually gets books relegated to the 'escapist' category. I applaud the literary establishment for recognizing the brilliance here, but I wish they would extend that courtesy to more less-strictly-classifiable literature. 


Godless but Loyal to Heaven by Richard Van Camp: Some stuff from Indigo since Goodreads had no synopsis: Review: "Powerful! An original voice from the true north strong and free." — Tomson Highway

"Gripping, graphic and insightful, Godless but Loyal to Heaven opens up the human heart and lets the reader watch it pumping. Van Camp slips in and out of characters like a shapeshifter, introducing poetry and the fantastic into a brutal landscape." — Eden Robinson, author of Monkey Beach

"Godless but Loyal to Heaven is a fierce look at all the dehumanized aspects of our world as it is, written courageously, poignantly and beautifully." — Lee Maracle

"Prepare to be shocked and seared, moved at times to tears when you read Van Camp’s work. You’ll be taken on a series of journeys that you will not forget." — Joseph Bruchac, author of Our Stories Remember

"Richard Van Camp successfully melds aborigninal traditions with a fictional contemporary North in his new short story collection." — Winnipeg Free Press

"Hard—nosed but thin—skinned, sturdy yet totally off the wall, Richard Van Camp’s Godless but Loyal to Heaven is such a vibrant story collection that I’m kicking myself for only getting around to it now" — Edmonton Journal

From the Back Cover

In Richard Van Camp’s fictionalized north anything can happen and yet each story is rooted in a vivid contemporary reality. The stories offer a potent mix tape of tropes from science fiction, horror, Western and Aboriginal traditions. The title story pits Torchy against the Smith Squad, fighting for love and family in a bloody, cathartic, and ultimately hopeful narrative. Van Camp’s characters repeatedly confront the bleakness of sexual assault, substance addiction and violence with the joy and humour of inspired storytelling.

I wrote on Goodreads: I got this for Christmas and knew nothing about it. I don't think I have the vocabulary to express how much it moved me. (But I'll try, because I recognize that that is one lazy-ass review. This is a mosaic of stories - loosely interlinked characters and settings. I hate to say "the aboriginal experience", and yet these stories gave me more of a visceral impression of some realities of what I can only think of as The Aboriginal Experience than anything else I have ever read. They are starkly sorrowful, skewed, strange, funny and wonderful.